He slipped through the apartment door like someone who belonged to the night — quiet, practiced, every motion economical. The lion mask and suit were buried in the backpack at his feet, zipped away and smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and the metallic tang of Pride's hall. For the moment, he was someone else entirely.
He'd changed on the walk home.
Now he wore a drenched soccer kit: the jersey clung to his torso, dark fabric plastered to the planes of his chest and the lean ridges of his ribs. The shorts showed mud stains at the hems and a telltale smear of gravel on the knees. His sneakers were scuffed and caked with urban grime; he'd scuffed them deliberately against a curb three blocks away to sell the lie. He had even added the small details — the salt ring at the collar from sweat, the damp hair plastered to his forehead — little theatrical touches that completed the performance.
"Hey, Mom — I'm back from practice," he called, voice pitched to the exact level he'd determined earlier would read as exhausted and pleased.
His mother looked up from the stove and smiled, but it wasn't the same tired woman who once carried the weight of the world in the folds of her shirt. She was thinner now, her face sharper, the slump of her shoulders replaced with something that might have been confidence — or at least well-rehearsed complacency. Izuku had pruned the edges of her life into neat, distracting shapes: controlled portions, scheduled workouts they did together, errands that kept her out of the house on weekends. It was his careful architecture of distraction.
"That's good, sweaty," she said, drying her hands on a towel. "Go shower and clean up, then come eat. I made your—" she glanced at him, then, after a pause she'd spent practicing, added, "—your favorite."
He had taught her to say the lines she needed to say. He had, in small measures and with careful persistence, taught her to believe them until she behaved as if she did. It was serviceable acting, and he found he preferred the utility of the pretense to any messy, honest emotion.
"Sure thing, Mom," he replied, offering a practiced grin that lifted the outer corners of his mouth exactly the way he'd seen on television and in policing interviews. He did not feel the warmth the grin implied; he only knew how warmth looked and where it fit in a conversation. Human feelings were variables to be simulated, not weather to be endured.
The apartment smelled faintly of soy and sesame — the aroma of a home trying to feel normal. Their small table bore the remnant of a life kept tidy for display: a couple of mismatched plates, a stack of unpaid bills slid beneath a jar of stale rice. The living room lights threw half the room into shadow; the other half glowed with the pale light from a cracked window.
He went to the bathroom and flicked the light on. The mirror was a rectangle of careful honesty. He stared at himself — really studied the angles the way a sculptor might study a clay model. The scar on his left cheek caught the light and looked like a thin pale river cutting through green skin. He traced it with the pad of his finger, not in pain but in recognition; it was a map of an old violence, an artifact of someone else's cruelty etched into his face like a signature.
Bakugo, he thought. That name tasted like grit.
He unpeeled the wet jersey and stepped into the shower. Hot water sluiced down in a roar that filled the tiny bathroom, and the noise was an ally: it swallowed inner voices and softened the edge of the city that never truly left him. He washed carefully, methodically — shampoo, soap, rinse — making sure every trace of the staged practice was truly gone. He scrubbed at his hair, felt the familiar ache at the base of his skull where tension nested, and then rinsed until the water ran clear.
In there, under the spray, he allowed himself a small, clinical appraisal. His body was a tool and it responded predictably; the muscles under his skin were useful, his face had presence, his movements were practiced until they could be performed without thought. He practiced turning concern into ease, fatigue into humility, charm into an engineered weapon. To him, the reflection wasn't vanity. It was calibration.
He thought of his mother again — how she had brightened since she started going out more, how men lingered a little longer when she passed. He'd nudged people out of her orbit when they were inconvenient, arranged for others to appear at the right times, smiled and pretended not to notice when the secrets bled past the edge of propriety. He did not view it as betrayal, at least not morally. Morality was a ledger in which others tallied their sins. He preferred to think in terms of distractions and assets.
When he stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist, he smoothed his hair carefully. He did the things people did when they wanted to be believed: he practiced the small gestures of sincerity, the micro-expressions that acted like currency in social transactions. Joy was not something he possessed; it was a script he could recite on cue. He smiled as if novelty and warmth bubbled up from his chest, even though inside everything felt flat and precise.
Dressed now in a clean hoodie and jeans, he lingered by the kitchen door while his mother finished packing plates. The light from the stove made the steam glow like a small, domestic aurora. Her hands moved with an ease that suggested practice, not contentment.
"You doing okay?" she asked, voice unconsciously softening in the way people did when they checked on one another.
He gave her the tiny nod that communicated both fatigue and reassurance. "Yeah. Just practice. Coach is killing us."
She chuckled. "Good. Discipline is important." The sentence was a mantra she'd learned in the months since he started tightening the screws of her routine. Discipline kept people on their tracks. For Izuku, discipline was also insurance.
She set a plate in front of him and watched him take the first bite. He chewed slowly, the act of eating another ritual to perform well. Food tasted like the catalog of sensations: too salty, too warm, perfectly edible. He noted the way she watched him over the rim of the mug, the way her eyes searched for something to anchor herself to. He made a mental note of that small yearning; it would be useful later.
After dinner, while his mother fussed with laundry and hummed a song she'd picked up at the gym, Izuku climbed the narrow stairs to his room. The small space was stark: a single bed, a desk crowded with stacks of notebooks, and a bulletin board he'd covered in printed timetables, city maps, and a scatter of images of Mei Hatsume pinned like specimens. He paused at the door and allowed himself the smallest, almost imperceptible smile.
Mei.
He spread his hands over the scattered papers. Her image — goggles askew, hair a messy halo of invention — had been a small prize to him for weeks. He'd watched her from a distance: the way her hands moved when she welded, the sparks that leapt against the night like bright, obedient fireflies. Some people saw a fourteen-year-old tinkerer; he saw an engine. The prototype support gear rumoured to be moving through U.A. channels — Project Atlas — made the idea of people-wearable power new and unpredictable. Mei, with her appetite for making impossible things work, was a hinge.