Chapter Text
Katsuki doesn’t cry when he’s born. The nurses, when they overcome their initial shock, jostle Mitsuki, breathlessly telling her what a resilient boy he is, how strong he’s going to be when he’s older. Mitsuki watches those red eyes, so similar to her own and yet so different. Katsuki watches back with a keen intelligence that a newborn baby has no business possessing. Nurses bustle in the background, gently patting her on the back, putting away dirty sheets and tools. He’s absolutely gorgeous, eyes a piercing crimson and blond hair matted against his tiny crown. He stares at her long after he’s taken from her arms and placed in a basin to be cleaned off, and then into a cot. Mitsuki lets herself sink into her hospital bed, and she smiles. Her beautiful boy is perfect, the nurses are delighted, Masaru is weeping at her side, and she’s so proud. She’s still smiling when she finally slips into an exhausted slumber, and his gaze lingers on her turned back long after the lights are dimmed.
He doesn’t cry the next day, or the day after that. Mitsuki is vaguely unsettled at first, but ultimately decides it’s a blessing—Katsuki is her first, and she’s heard enough horror stories to know that a baby’s crying will grow to be a nightmare. So she lets herself be relieved, grateful that her son is so low-maintenance, so sweet, and decides to enjoy the silence while it lasts. And it does last. It lasts and lasts, and lasts some more. They’re taking Katsuki home in the car, finally discharged from the hospital three days down the line, and he hasn’t cried once. He watches her, eyes steady and unwavering and inexplicably dissecting in a way that makes her look away instinctively, before she mentally slaps herself for it. That’s her baby boy. She turns and smiles at him gently. He stares back. The ride is long.
When three weeks have passed and Katsuki still doesn’t cry, the relief turns to concern. No parenting manual prepared her for this: this placid, imperturbable infant. He doesn’t even cry when he’s hungry, or when he’s uncomfortable. She tosses and turns, wondering if he’s sick, or if something has gone astray. The nurses had been concerned at first, only easing up when his lungs checked out fine in the scans—now, the possibility of something having gone undetected at the hospital plagues her. Masaru, however, assures her that he’s just clever for his age. Of course he’s clever, Mitsuki knew he would be. He’s hers. But when she takes Katsuki to a play group and sees all the other babies sobbing, hands clenching in their mothers’ shirts like the babies in the Pinterest photos that she’d fawned over in the early stages of her pregnancy, she feels amiss, for the briefest of moments. Then he stays nestled primly in her arms, watching the other wailing infants unblinkingly as he fiddles with a button on Mitsuki’s shirt, and frazzled mothers watch in jealousy, at her baby boy sitting pretty and still in her grasp, and ask her how she does it. Mitsuki doesn’t answer, doesn’t know how, but somewhere inside her, she feels that same pride she’d felt when the nurses had crowded her the back the day Katsuki was born. Her boy might be a little off, a little too smart, but he’s hers. And she’s damn lucky to have him.
At two and half months, Katsuki has started to babble. He gurgles happily, stubby fingers reaching for any and everything in his grip. He still doesn’t cry. He’s crawling by six months, and by seven he’s forming words. The sounds are unfamiliar on his tiny tongue, falling out roughly like mismatched puzzle pieces. Mitsuki is yet to see a single tear fall. Inko brings her boy around now, and they start to hold playdates. Katsuki is only three months older than Izuku, but the green-haired infant is nothing like her son. He cries constantly, little face screwing up at the slightest inconvenience, at nothing. He’s absolutely lovely, pudgy little fingers clinging to Katsuki’s shirt as he wails. Katsuki doesn’t push him off, but there’s an adorably petulant curl to his lips at the younger boy’s loud cries. Mitsuki and Inko take so many photos.
Katsuki is eight months old when Mitsuki finds the knife in his cot. She thinks she’s hallucinating, at first, when she goes to check on her son and finds him curled around the santoku knife from her kitchen, sleeping soundly. His soft, tender skin is close, too close to the blade, and she feels her heart stop. Already ready to give Masaru the verbal beatdown of his life when he gets home from work, she reaches into his bed to shakily extract the tool, only to halt in her tracks when Katsuki’s eyes snap open and latch onto hers. His small fingers reach to cling to the knife, tightly in the way that babies do, and she flinches violently as the edge cuts through soft skin and blood begins to well up at his fingers. But he doesn’t cry, doesn’t let go. His eyes stayed fixed on hers. Swallowing thickly, she reaches down again to retrieve the knife, but pulls back instantly when his grip tightens around it, earning another droplet of blood.
“Give it to mommy, darling,” she whispers, hands trembling in fear. He watches her, grip unfaltering on the blade. “Katsuki, give it to me. Please?”
He babbles something back in his weird baby speak, which has now developed into something that is somehow more coherent, clear, yet no more understandable.
“Sweetheart, give it to me,” she says again, failing to keep the desperation out of her voice. He chatters something back again, and without looking away from him she reaches her other hand to take her phone and call Masaru. He rushes home, and ten minutes later he stands with her and looks down at Katsuki in worry. Mitsuki is almost hysterical at this point, at the sight of the blood that is beginning to stain his baby blue blankets, and Masaru is just as lost as she is. Katsuki watches them both warily, still gripping the knife tightly enough that Mitsuki won’t look away from it. It takes forty minutes for them to back off and him to relax enough to fall back asleep, and Masaru finally takes the knife from his grip smoothly. Katsuki wakes up again as it happens, face scrunching so much in fury that Mitsuki thinks he might actually cry for the first time. But he doesn’t. Instead he frowns, brow furrowed, and lets Mitsuki shakily wrap his hand with a bandage. That evening, she moves the knife block to a high cabinet. It takes a stool for her to get to the knives now, which is a bitch when she’s cooking, but every time she considers moving it back she’s reminded of tender skin wrapped around metal, blood seeping into cotton, and suddenly the stool doesn’t seem so awful.
It’s when Inko’s visiting that it’s pointed out.
“He’s talking,” Mitsuki says. “It’s just not… words. He’s not speaking Japanese, he’s still speaking some weird baby language. I catch hints of Japanese here and there and that’s it.”
Inko sips at her coffee, and watches the blond boy from where he sits with Izuku in front of the television. She swallows slowly, before saying, “Well, you know, Mitsuki… I didn’t know if I was just being silly, but… Doesn’t it sound kind of like English? When he talks sometimes?”
She says it hesitantly, but the thoughtfulness of her tone betrays the amount of time she has spent thinking about this. Mitsuki hums around a forkful of cake.
“But I never taught him English. Hell, I don’t even speak it myself. There’s no way he could have learned it from me.”
Inko nods, still watching the two boys absently.
“I guess you’re right. Well, he’s definitely smarter than any other baby I’ve seen, so he’ll get to talking soon. Don’t worry, Mitsuki.”
And that’s that. Until two weeks later, when they’re at the grocery store and Mitsuki turns away for two goddamn seconds only to look back and find Katsuki babbling away to some stranger. They seem to be holding an actual conversation of sorts, more fluent than any of the disjointed and short ones Mitsuki has held with him. The stranger perks up when he notices her watching, and beams. “Your son is very clever! He speaks very articulately for someone his age, and speaking English at that!”
Mitsuki stares at him, and then turns to stare at her son. Katsuki blinks back guilelessly, still grinning from his previous chatter as he fiddles with the zipper of her handbag.
“Excuse me,” she says, and then picks up Katsuki and fucking books it out of the store, abandoning her basket of groceries completely. When Masaru gets home, she glares at him tearfully.
“No more television for Katsuki,” she announces.
He blinks at her in confusion. “I never put it on for him,” he says.
“Well I sure didn’t! So why the fuck else is my Japanese son speaking fluent English while he can’t speak more than two words of Japanese at a time?”
Masaru’s brow furrows, and he crouches down to look at their son.
“Katsuki, darling,” he says gently, before adding in English, “What’s your name?”
Katsuki, to Mitsuki and Masaru’s utter shock, chirps back a happy, “Katchuki!” as he bounces from his spot on the couch.
Masaru smiles at him, and swallows before speaking again. “And how are you?”
Katsuki beams at him, reaching up to fist a hand in his father’s business shirt.
“Goo’! ‘M goo’!”
Masaru shares a look with Mitsuki, and she slowly moves to put the television remote in a higher cabinet. They don’t talk about it again.
By the time Katsuki reaches his second birthday, he’s speaking Japanese properly. He holds conversation with Mitsuki and Masaru and Inko like any other baby, and the English is forgotten. Izuku is only three months younger, but he still struggles with consonants, and takes to calling the other boy ‘Kacchan’. It’s adorable, but for Mitsuki it’s just another reminder of how different the two really are.
Katsuki is quiet, only really speaking when he’s spoken to and still managing to find his ways to her knife sets one way or another. It really freaks Mitsuki out at first, but she soon learns from experience that it's safer to leave him be, as counterintuitive as it seems: he's not really in any danger of hurting himself unless they try to take the knives away. He forms weird fixations like this over the months, and she does her very best to ignore it.
When he’s three years old, he sees a ballet dancer on the television and is instantly enraptured. It’s the first time he’s ever been this interested in a television program that isn’t All Might-related. He watches the entire twenty minute show, and at the end he turns to her with shining eyes and points at the screen. “I wanna do that,” he announces. Mitsuki beams at him, ecstatic to hear that her son is interested in something that doesn’t actively endanger him—something normal—and enrolls him eagerly before he inevitably begins to shun all things delicate, as boys tend to do.
The master at their local ballet studio, Saki, is surprised and somewhat hesitant given his age, but her delight at having a male student outweighs this. She finally agrees to take him in after seeing the way he gazes at her stretching students in open captivation. Izuku soon asks to join after noticing his Kacchan doing so, but quits after one class when he finds his attention span isn’t really fit for ballet the way Katsuki’s is. Katsuki, on the other hand, flourishes. He’s a natural at it, taking to the art so rapidly that within the first month, he's dancing circles around the older girls in his class. Saki grows to adore him, beaming when he saunters into her lessons every week with hungry eyes. He forms somewhat of a soft spot for her, too, in the form of an awkward, shy little smile so lovely that Mitsuki can’t even bring herself to be jealous.
Katsuki can read fluently by the time he’s four, already narrating Izuku’s storybooks to him confidently and basking in the green-haired boy’s awe. His quirk manifests around this time, too. He comes home from the park with red, raw palms adorned with painful blisters. His eyes are glassy with tears but he doesn’t let them fall, scrunching his face up to blink them away. Mitsuki bandages his palms and takes him to a quirk doctor, and after this day, he spends all his time reading. He reads science books, math books, whatever books he can get his hands on. He doesn’t understand half of the words, but he pores over the pages anyway like he’s possessed. Any time he’s not at ballet classes or school, he’s reading. Mitsuki lets him, hopeful that this will translate into a good habit for his academics in school, and it does. His teachers gush about him; his confidence, his natural leadership skills, his studious nature even at this age, his control over his quirk. Mitsuki has never been prouder.
A few months after this, Inko breaks the news that Izuku is quirkless. Mitsuki braces herself for a conversation with Katsuki, feeling her heart break for her best friend and her son. But she doesn’t get a chance to have this talk with him, because the next day she is called into the principal’s office and told her son had started a fight at school. She doesn’t ask him anything, doesn’t speak until they’re sitting in the car. He’s sullen, arms crossed and glaring at the dashboard of the car. Mitsuki glances at him.
“Did you really hit that boy, Katsuki?” she asks finally. He nods unhesitatingly, still glaring at the dashboard. This isn’t him—this isn’t Katsuki. She knows he wouldn’t do anything like this.
“Why did you do that?”
At this, he turns his angry red eyes on her, and scowls. “They called Izuku names,” he mutters remorselessly. “They made him cry.”
Mitsuki’s brow furrows, but she can’t bring herself to be mad when she sees that familiar glint in his eyes, that same protective glint she had seen in herself when Inko used to get shoved around in high school.
“What did they say to him?” she asks carefully. His fingers curl around the edge of his seat tightly.
“Said he was useless,” he grits out. “Said he’s no good ‘cause he’s got no quirk.” His hands start to shake, The familiar smokiness that precedes his explosions beginning to drift through the air. She rolls down a window calmly, before leaning forward to gaze at him intently.
“And what do you think about that?” she asks.
His fiery red eyes return to meet hers. “I think they’re stupid,” he spits. “Izuku is Izuku, a quirk doesn’t mean shit.”
And Mitsuki knows she should be telling him off, honestly, what mother lets their four-year-old swear? But she can’t help the beam that overtakes her face, as she wonders once again how she was blessed enough to have a son like Katsuki. He’s only four, and already so good. She reaches over to pull him into her arms, and he falls into them with little resistance. “I love you so much, sweetheart,” she says into his hair. “You’re my angel.”
He squirms out of her grasp to stare at her uncertainly. “You’re not mad?” he asks. She shakes her head, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “No, not for this. But next time I’d like you to tell a teacher instead of hitting.”
He pouts, and burrows back under her armpit.
“I told sensei yesterday. She didn’t do anything. She laughs at their jokes, too. Makes ‘zuku sad.”
He falls silent for a moment, before glancing up at her. “Mama?” he calls quietly, vulnerable in a manner rare enough that Mitsuki almost startles.
“Hm?”
“I wanna be a hero when I grow up.”
She laughs, finding herself completely unsurprised.
“I knew you were gonna get there at some point,” she says, and he blinks at her.
“You gotta buy me knives, then, mama. For hero stuff.”
She jerks away instantly, giving him a frustrated look.
“What is it with the knives, Katsuki?” she asks in exasperation. He grins at her.
“They’re fun.”
“What about ballet?”
“That’s fun, too.”
“What, you wanna do ballet and play with knives?”
“Yup.”
She sighs, before ruffling his hair.
“If I get you some proper, safe ones and sign you up for training, do you promise to stop sneaking the kitchen knives under your pillow?” she asks in resignation. He nods eagerly, and she sighs in defeat. It’s unsafe, and pretty much poster potential for bad parenting, but there was nothing in the countless parenting books Mitsuki read which even remotely prepared her for Katsuki.
"Alright," she says finally, pressing a kiss to his temple. "Alright, baby."