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Izuku doesn’t look up when the bell on the door chimes because he’s leaning over the counter trying to read Shouto’s homework upside down. By the time the customer’s reached the counter, Izuku’s only gotten halfway through the second question, but he pulls himself away to greet them.
It’s because he didn’t look up at the first place that the shock of recognition slaps him full across the face as he finds himself across a register from none other than Detective Tsukauchi Naomasa, accompanied by someone else he doesn’t know. “Oh,” he says, more an exhale of surprise than anything with substance, and then he makes a mighty effort to pull himself together, and he throws on on his customer-service voice to say, “Hi! Welcome to Green House Café. What can I get started for you?”
Shouto noticed what was happening at some point around “Oh,” and he peers at Tsukauchi and guest from his seat at the counter as Izuku takes their orders—black drip coffee and a scone for the detective, mint tea for his friend. As Izuku turns to get the items, Shouto slips out of his seat, ducks under the counter, and disappears into the back, leaving his homework sprawled out across the counter.
“Was that Todoroki Shouto?” the guy with Tsukauchi asks. He’s blond and skeletal. Izuku vaguely recognizes him as someone who’s been in before, and he doesn’t think he works for the police—he’s studied up on all members of the police in the nearby area just in case he needs the information. It’s strange, actually, that Izuku has no idea who he is. Izuku is, at his deepest core, a little bit of a stalker. He thought he already knew of all of Tsukauchi’s friends.
“Yes,” Izuku says, pouring the tea. Then, maybe unnecessarily, he adds, “He’s my friend.”
“I see,” the skeletal man says, and he adds nothing else.
Izuku’s mind is whirring too fast. He has to remind himself repeatedly that detectives need coffee too, and this is probably nothing more than Tsukauchi stopping in at a new café with a secret friend. Him being here doesn’t mean he knows something. There’s no reason for him to be suspicious, Shouto present or not. He hasn’t even asked any questions.
“I’ve never been in before,” Tsukauchi says finally. He gestures to the skeletal man. “Toshinori invited me. It’s a nice place.”
“Thank you,” Izuku says, and passes the coffee, scone, and tea across the counter. “My mom owns it.”
He wonders if that was too much information to share, but if Tsukauchi is here to investigate them, he can just look up the business to find out the owner. Izuku just needs to stick to publicly available information.
And there’s no harm in agreeing it’s a nice coffee shop. Izuku might be biased because he works here and it’s a family business, but he thinks even if that wasn’t true, he’d still love it. It’s all in the name—the coffee shop doubles as a house plant store, and every open space not occupied by tables, chairs, or pastries, is covered in greenery. People tend to come in for coffee and leave with their arms full of succulents.
It’s a nice place to hang out, too. Shouto comes here after school almost every day to do his homework, and he’s not the only one. The shop is all wood floors and natural lighting. Izuku’s only real complaint is that it’s not big enough to hold all the customers that come in. It can be hard to find a seat.
Unfortunately, Tsukauchi and friend(?) Toshinori do find a seat, near the windows but facing the counter. Izuku tries not to anxiously watch them. He’s itching to go into the back and find his mom, but there’s no need—after only another minute, Shouto returns, Inko in tow, and goes back to his homework.
Inko’s eyes zero in on Tsukauchi and friend(?) Toshinori straight away, but unlike Izuku, she doesn’t let her gaze catch too long and she doesn’t let an ounce of recognition slip into her expression. If Tsukauchi is paying attention—and Izuku now has no doubt he is—Inko hasn’t given anything away.
Once she’s done a sweep, she puts her hands on Izuku’s shoulders, forcing him to look at her. She takes an exaggerated deep breath and he follows it, dropping his shoulders on the exhale. “Okay?” she says.
“Okay,” he answers. And then, because he can’t help himself, he adds, “Maybe.”
She makes a face at him, pursing her lips and scrunching her nose, and he lets out a laugh, pulling away.
“I know, I know,” he says. “I’m calm.”
He leans over the counter again and returns to Shouto’s homework. He determines the answer to the question he was on is correct and moves onto the next one.
He’s more than a little relieved when his mom stays in the front for the duration of Tsukauchi’s stay. He leaves not long before close, friend(?) Toshinori in tow, and it’s all Izuku can do to keep himself from immediately launching into an analysis of why they might have been there. He waits until they shepherd the customers out at closing time, waits until they’ve cleaned and checked for bugs around everything Tsukauchi touched, waits until Shouto’s packing up his books, and then he says, “Okay, that was weird, right?”
“He knows,” Shouto agrees.
Inko shoots both of them stern looks. “He came for coffee and then he left. I don’t see what’s weird about that.”
“He’s a detective!” Izuku protests. “In our evil coffee shop!”
“Detectives need coffee, too.” She’s trying to sound calm and reasonable, but there’s nothing to be calm or reasonable about in this situation. There’s only room for panic, in Izuku’s opinion, and that’s what he’s been working himself into all afternoon.
“Not evil-coffee-shop coffee,” Shouto says. Izuku has never been more grateful for his presence after close.
“Right?” Izuku waves at where he’d been sitting. “And he stayed for so long! He was watching us! He knows.”
“He doesn’t know. And stop referring to it as an evil coffee shop,” Inko says. “We do nothing evil.”
“We’ve murdered several people,” Izuku reminds her, trying not to sound frantic and ending up sounding extremely frantic, “including a pro hero and multiple members of the HPSC.”
Inko thinks about this, brows furrowing as if she hadn’t considered before that such an action might be a little bit evil. Eventually she says, “But they deserved it.”
“True,” says Shouto, whose father had regrettably been murdered by this very coffee shop. If he minded, it hasn’t shown.
Inko ruffles Shouto’s hair up fondly and bends down to go through the remaining pastries.
Izuku remembers a day when he was young and wanted to be a hero. He also remembers the day he found out the family-business coffee shop his mother owned was actually a front for what she called vigilantism and Izuku called illegal and often immoral action. He also remembers the day he decided he didn’t mind so much. It was the day he’d met Hawks, who is the reason Izuku’s mom has murdered several HPSC people.
Since then, he’s replaced his heroic dreams with dreams of a slightly different form, which include working at an evil coffee shop and murdering people through said evil coffee shop until the day he dies. Murder, he has decided, is sometimes justifiable.
That doesn’t mean the coffee shop isn’t still evil, though. It certainly doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be concerned about the presence of Tsukauchi Naomasa and some random other guy inside it.
His mother insists, though, that it’s fine, and Shouto has to go home eventually so Izuku loses his main support in the argument. At night, the shadier side of the coffee shop opens up (yes, there’s an even shadier side than the murdering front side), and Shouto can’t be around that whether or not he’s sympathetic to the cause. Izuku also has been resolutely kept out of whatever business happens there at night, and he’s sent upstairs to bed by his mother as she prepares to do the hand off to the guy who runs the café at night, Shigaraki Tomura.
Izuku is not, of course, skilled at following instructions. He doesn’t go to sleep. He digs into the audio files of the afternoon from the bugs he has placed in the coffee shop, maybe illegally. He will now eavesdrop on Tsukauchi’s conversation with friend(?) Toshinori. He plugs in his headphones and starts it up like a podcast as he gets out a notebook.
It is, of course, through this audio experience that Izuku comes to find out that not only is Toshinori Tsukauchi’s close friend, but he is also All Might.
All Might!
Izuku nearly passes away at the realization, firstly because, employee of an evil café or not, Izuku has never gotten over his obsession with All Might. Yes, they would likely be sworn enemies if they were to come eye to eye. No, this does not mean Izuku is any less obsessed with him.
Secondly, Izuku nearly passes away because Tsukauchi investigating the evil coffee shop is one thing, but All Might investigating the evil coffee shop is an entirely different and much scarier thing. At the end of the day, Tsukauchi is just a detective. But All Might is All Might. If anyone is going to root up the truth of the several murders the evil coffee shop has committed, it’s him.
There isn’t much Izuku can do about this information in the depths of night, though, so although he sits awake for hours making contingency plan after contingency plan, behavior which his mother would disapprove of, eventually he has to set it aside. It’s out of his control. He just has to hope All Might and Tsukauchi know nothing.
It’s to Izuku’s great horror, therefore, when the very next day Toshinori (All Might!) appears at the café again, this time alone. Shouto’s still at school and Izuku, who has forgone high school in favor of evil coffee shop, is manning the front by himself. Toshinori orders a mint tea and somehow, almost magically, finds another seat facing the counter. Izuku frantically texts Shouto under the register, and then his mother. He hasn’t found the words to tell her this guy is All Might yet.
Inko comes out of the back not long after and reminds Izuku to stay calm. “He’s just a customer,” she tells him.
“You’re not even a little worried?” Izuku hisses.
Her eyes flicker to the side to look at Toshinori. “I’ll tell you when to be worried,” she says. “You just focus on business. Okay?”
So she is worried. Strangely enough, Izuku feels a little more relaxed now that he knows this—his mom is paying attention, all-calm facade or not. Izuku trusts his mom. Anyone who can murder the Number Two hero in public and get away with it, he thinks, is worthy of a little trust.
The murdering process itself is very simple. The café itself, Izuku likes to think, works a little like a venus fly trap: it’s pretty and friend-shaped. All it takes is a little nudging to get a person inside, to get a person in contact with his mother without doing anything suspicious. From there, it’s easy. Izuku has watched his mom pull it off multiple times—she just uses her quirk to tug a little bit at the intricate bits of a person’s heart. The effect isn’t immediate, but it wears down a person, and the next strenuous thing to happen does them in. Every time, it presents as a heart attack.
Shouto, who Izuku thinks is altogether too blasé about this whole thing, says it’s just like Death Note.
Sometimes, when Inko’s really mad, she’ll give her target a drink as well with the highest possible caffeine level to give them heart palpitations. Izuku himself has done this only once, to Endeavor, who he’d been mad at for multiple reasons but most urgently because at the time Endeavor had just blown a villain through the front windows of Izuku’s favorite hero merch store, causing the store to close temporarily for renovations. Who even does that? Diabolical. So Izuku speed-ran his death and somehow did not lose his friendship with Shouto in the process.
“He’s kind of good looking,” Inko observes, breaking Izuku out of his head.
Izuku frowns at her, not sure what she’s referring to. He follows her gaze to Toshinori, who in this form looks like he’s been put through a wash-dry cycle and come out worse for it. “Um,” he says.
“No?” she asks.
“Um, if that’s what you’re into.”
“Hmm.” She busies herself with reorganizing the pastries. “Maybe it is.”
Izuku is awoken at an unholy hour by the fire alarm going off.
This is not an uncommon event in the café and adjoining upstairs apartment. He groans and throws his pillow over his head, smashing it down. This does little to drown out the noise, and eventually he gets up, hands pressed into his ears, and takes the stairs down to the kitchen.
Nothing is actually on fire this time, thankfully, and his mom is calmly using a fork to sift through a smoking pile of…something on the island. Izuku navigates past Hatsume, the source of the issue, to the window, which he opens. Then he climbs up on a stool to turn off the fire alarm. Disabling fire alarms, for the record, is also illegal. He adds a mark to his mental evil-actions tally.
With the fire alarm quieted, Hatsume is now audible. “My baby,” she groans.
“I think we’ve discussed exploding pastries in the kitchen,” Inko says.
“It didn’t explode,” Hatsume protests. “It caught on fire. There’s a big difference.”
Izuku leans over the island to look at the smoldering bits of some baking concoction gone wrong. It is indecipherable. “What were you trying to make?”
“Soufflé,” she says miserably. “Ugh, my baby. My baby.”
“You set a soufflé on fire?” Izuku asks, horrified, stunned. To do such a thing unintentionally shouldn’t be possible. “How?”
She sniffs. “I was experimenting with alternatives to the oven. That alternative exploded, and set the soufflé on fire.”
“Maybe we should stop experimenting with alternatives to the oven,” Inko suggests.
“What!” Hatsume wraps her arms protectively around the still-smoking soufflé-and-oven-alternative bits. “How could you say that around my baby?”
Izuku’s mother swears to him that Hatsume is a prodigy in the kitchen and has underappreciated talents. He’ll readily admit that when she’s on task, her pastries are the best of the best. There’s no saying exactly what she does to make them so good, but they have a delicate richness, a seeping flavor. She’s a god in the kitchen—that’s why Inko hired her.
She also at times gets distracted and explodes soufflés.
Hatsume was hired a few years ago, after Izuku’s mom murdered her dad. Izuku’s not 100 percent sure what Hatsume’s dad did to deserve this, although he thinks it has something to do with business-related corruption, but one day Hatsume’s dad was alive, the next he was dead, and the day after that Hatsume had a job.
Comparatively decent father or not, Hatsume, like Shouto, seems unconcerned about his absence from her life, and Izuku suspects sometimes that she put out a hit on her own father in the first place.
“It’s like erasing a note that was written very lightly,” Hatsume told Izuku once. “It doesn’t make much difference.”
Izuku hasn’t seen his dad in years and years after the divorce, and he thinks he sort of understands that. He supposes in the grand scheme of things, their dads might be quite similar. Only his dad hasn’t done anything worthy of getting himself murdered by his mom. Yet.
Izuku glances at the time, trying to decide if it’s worth trying to go back to sleep again or not. It’s 4am, which is a normal time for Hatsume to be in the kitchen, but not a great time for Izuku to be upright. He’ll have to try to sleep again.
He takes a step to venture upstairs again, making a mental note to turn the fire alarm back on when he wakes up for real, only to stop short at a loud crash out back. He turns slowly as the back door slams open and a loud, booming voice shouts, “I AM HERE.”
He’s dreaming. No, this is all a dream. Hatsume has not actually exploded a soufflé in the kitchen. All Might has not actually arrived to investigate this.
“Oh, my,” Inko says as All Might ducks into the kitchen.
Hatsume latches onto Izuku’s elbow, squeezing so tight it hurts a little. He’s not dreaming. “Don’t freak out,” Hatsume says, “but I think that’s All Might.”
“There’s no emergency,” Inko tells All Might although she herself looks a little faint. “It was a false alarm.”
All Might squints at the burning mess on the island. “Ah,” he says.
“My baby,” Hatsume informs him, “caught on fire. But luckily our kitchen is well-equipped with fire safety implements.”
“Metaphorical baby,” Izuku says quickly. He’s imagined himself meeting All Might like this more times than he can count, and he can’t say it’s ever looked quite like this. It feels so unreal he’s come out the other side of shock and excitement and panic to a state of perfect calm.
“I will remove the hazard!” All Might says, and he sweeps the smoldering materials into a dustpan. He stands almost awkwardly with the smoking dustpan for a moment, looking at Inko with his mouth ajar like he wants to say something but can’t find the words. Inko meets his gaze, wide-eyed. The room is perfectly silent for a long horrible moment.
Izuku says, “Can I have an autograph?” Because at his core, Izuku is a huge undying fan of All Might, regardless of whether Izuku works at an evil coffee shop, and regardless of if All Might is investigating said evil coffee shop.
Hatsume snorts.
All Might graciously signs a cake tin for him, a cake tin which will never again be put to use because Izuku is going to hoard it like no one’s ever seen before. He may build an altar up around it. He is a totally sane and calm human being. It is four in the morning.
“Well,” All Might says once that’s taken care of. “Good night. Or—or morning. Farewell.”
“Bye,” Inko says faintly.
All Might slips outside again and with a whoosh, jumps off into the night.
“Goodness,” Inko says the moment he’s gone. She slumps against the counter and fans herself with her hand. “He really is tall.”
It’s so early. All Might was just in Izuku’s kitchen. Izuku needs to sleep. He shakes Hatsume off and heads for the stairs, cake tin securely in his arms. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Night!” Hatsume says cheerfully.
Toshinori doesn’t show up at the coffee shop that day, but over the coming weeks, he appears almost every day. Without fail, with almost mystical accuracy, he always finds a seat facing the counter. Izuku or Shouto loops Inko in whenever he arrives, and she always comes to the front to back Izuku up.
Izuku, being Izuku, worries himself sick over this.
“He must know,” Izuku tells Shouto one night after close. “He’s just trying to catch us in the act. Then he’ll arrest us all and throw us in jail and the coffee shop will close and life will lose all meaning.”
“You could kill him,” Shouto says, because once again, he is much too calm about this whole evil coffee shop thing.
“Shouto,” Izuku groans. “You should not be encouraging me to kill All Might.”
“Friends support their friends,” Shouto says, in a tone like he’s read a manual on this topic and is just repeating back the information he’s found.
Izuku opens his mouth to protest, finds himself wordless, and closes his mouth again. “I guess,” he says.
Between Shouto and Izuku, there are no secrets, and as such Izuku has managed to loop him in on the fact that Toshinori is All Might. He has still not worked up the guts to let his mom in on this revelation, however.
“But I’m not killing him,” Izuku says. “I can’t kill All Might.”
“You killed Endeavor.” Shouto slurps the tea he’s been given.
“My mom killed Endeavor,” Izuku corrects. “I just sped up the process a bit. Also, that’s not even remotely comparable. I had an unending grudge against Endeavor. I’m All Might’s biggest fan.”
Shouto shrugs.
Dismissal or not, Izuku does think about it, as he’s laying awake in bed at night freaking out over All Might investigating their evil coffee shop. It would solve the problem. He could get his mom to tug at Toshinori’s heart. He could slip something into Toshinori’s tea. He could ask Hatsume to whip something up for him. He could sneak down to the café during the sketchy night hours and ask Shigaraki to get him.
The longer it goes on, the longer Toshinori appears and sits and watches and sips his tea, the calmer Inko gets about the whole thing and the more paranoid Izuku gets.
“He’s just having his tea,” Inko tells him. “He’s just a customer.”
“He’s a spy,” Izuku says. “He’s reporting back to Detective Tsukauchi. He’s—”
But he never gets to the part where Toshinori is All Might. He doesn’t want to freak his mom out too much. He just wants Toshinori to stop coming to the coffee shop so he can have back his inner peace.
It’s after months of this that whatever inner tether Izuku has stopping him from being evil to All Might snaps. It’s late at night, which is the worst time to make decisions but coincidentally the time that Izuku makes the most of them, and he’s got his laptop balanced on his knees in bed. He has a plan. It involves liberal amounts of blackmail.
He gives himself a week to do the requisite digging. It isn’t without a grain of sadness for his childhood idealization of All Might that he does this—after everything with Endeavor, Izuku has learned that even the greatest heroes have their skeletons in the closet, and he’d hoped to leave himself in the dark about whatever All Might’s hiding. He fully expects to find some horrible secret that’s been buried, something that reveals the true evil of All Might.
To his surprise and guilty relief, there’s nothing. All Might’s record is squeaky clean. He’s a good hero. He’s the best hero, as Izuku has always instinctively known.
However.
While Izuku finds no dirty secrets, he does find hints of something weird about his quirk. It’s around this point that Izuku does something his mother wouldn’t approve of and hacks All for One, who apparently has not learned about the importance of avoiding sketchy emailed links.
This is probably the most fruitful thing Izuku could have done. By the end of the week, he’s got an overstuffed binder of blackmail notes on All Might and his super cool very interesting transferable stockpiler quirk One for All, a binder which of course he will never actually use, but Toshinori won’t know that.
The next time Toshinori comes in, Izuku takes his order, watches him sit in a chair facing the counter—maybe his original quirk is always finding an open seat in coffee shops—and turns to Shouto. “Can you pretend to be me for a second?” he asks.
“Sure,” Shouto says without looking up from his homework.
Izuku waits. Shouto doesn’t move. Izuku says, “I mean, can you take over the register?”
“Oh.” Shouto slips off the counter stool he’s made his own. He ducks under the counter and takes Izuku’s place at the register. Shouto has been offered a job here multiple times by Izuku’s mom, but he’s never taken her up on it. He tells Izuku he likes the vibes of the coffee shop and enjoys that he has no responsibility to it. But, in times of great need, he will step up to the task.
Personally, Izuku thinks that Shouto is not at all qualified to run the register as an employee and that he would do a terrible job. But he thought the same thing about Hatsume in the kitchen, and now their pastries have won multiple awards and draw in people from all over, so maybe his mom just has good hiring instincts.
Izuku dives under the counter and produces his Blackmail Binder. It’s the biggest binder he could buy, and it’s overflowing with papers. He used up an entire pack of lead filling it. He gathers it in his arms, takes up Toshinori’s tea, and slips under the counter. Setting the mug of tea on the table before Toshinori, he drops his binder and sits at the open seat.
“Hello,” Izuku says. He takes a deep breath to keep himself under control. The last thing he needs is to melt into a puddle of fanboy nervousness.
“Hello,” Toshinori answers, curious.
Evil coffee shop employee or not, Izuku has never actually blackmailed someone and he’s not sure where to start. Toshinori looks surprised but not upset by the company and Izuku almost feels bad for what he’s about to do.
“I know you’re All Might” is what he starts with, in a low voice because he’s not completely awful. His timing is bad—Toshinori’s just taken a sip of his tea, and he does a spit take, spewing it everywhere. Izuku, luckily, is just out of the splash zone and comes out of this completely dry.
“Young man,” Toshinori starts, presumably to protest, but Izuku knows now, for a fact, and there’s no point going down that road. He raises his eyebrows. Toshinori sputters off into nothing.
“I’m wondering what your intentions are here,” Izuku says. “Our tea isn’t that good.”
It is pretty good, admittedly. They grow a lot of the herbs themselves.
Toshinori flounders for a moment, starting to speak and then cutting himself off multiple times. Izuku feels a little bad. He hasn’t even gotten to the Blackmail Binder yet.
Finally, Toshinori sighs and falls still. He says, in a defeated tone, “You’re right that I have an ulterior motive in coming here.”
Izuku knew it. He knew it! His mother tried to tell him, again and again, that no, Toshinori didn’t know about the murders and the sketchiness, and now here it is: real proof that Toshinori totally knows about the murders and the sketchiness. Izuku’s not one for I told you sos, but he told her so. He tries not to look smug.
“To tell you the truth,” Toshinori says, fiddling with his paper napkin, “I’ve been coming here because I’ve been wanting…”
Izuku waits, breath baited. He clenches his hands around the edges of his Blackmail Binder. This is it.
Toshinori sighs again. “I’ve been wanting to ask out your mother,” he says, “and I haven’t been able to work up the nerve.”
Izuku’s mouth drops open. He stares, unabashedly, at Toshinori, waiting for the joke to manifest, waiting for Toshinori to say, Just kidding, I think you’re evil.
Toshinori does not say this. He continues twisting the corner of the napkin.
“I know,” he says when Izuku hasn’t managed to find any response. “It’s pathetic.”
“It’s not pathetic,” Izuku protests immediately. “It’s…it’s….” His mind is doing way too many things at once. “But the detective…. Tsukauchi?”
“Oh.” Toshinori flushes. “I thought I’d be able to ask her out if I had back up. Unfortunately I could not.”
Izuku looks to Shouto with an expression that he hopes screams SOS. He needs help. Now. Shouto meets his eyes and disappears into the back.
“My mom?” Izuku says, trying to make sense of this one fact.
“I wasn’t sure if she’s available,” Toshinori says miserably, “and I haven’t been able to get past the idea that she’ll probably say no…”
“She’d say yes,” Izuku says, because for some reason this is now a conversation he’s having. “She’d…. I thought you were…. You should….”
He doesn’t know what he wants.
The one thing is All Might wants to date his mother. All Might. Izuku’s mother. When Izuku was very small and needed a hero, he imagined such a thing happening with childish wishfulness. But Izuku’s too old for that now. He understood that it would never happen.
And now.
It’s happening.
The other thing is All Might wants to date his mother. All Might. A hero. Izuku’s mother. Who runs an evil coffee shop. It’s a recipe for disaster. It’s a horrible idea. Izuku needs to keep it from becoming true at all costs.
These are the two considerations that are warring inside him now, as he sits speechless across from All Might in his mother’s evil coffee shop. This is what he’s dealing with.
Inko comes out from the back, Shouto trailing after her, and meets Izuku’s eyes. She sees the binder under his hands and something in her expression shifts, a sort of seriousness taking over. This is the mom who’s going to protect her son at all costs. Izuku stands up to get her to meet his eyes. “It’s not what it looks like,” he says.
Several other people in the café twist to see what’s going on. Inko waves them off as she comes over, frowning.
“Mom,” Izuku says. He’s not sure where to go from here. He makes a weak flapping motion with his arm at Toshinori, packs up his binder, and scampers away. He blows past Shouto, face burning, and goes into the back and up the stairs. He shoves the Blackmail Binder deep under his bed and takes a moment, crouched on the floor, his head in his hands, to contemplate the events that got him here.
He has regrets.
When he’s ready, he straightens himself up and walks back down the stairs and into the front with what he hopes is dignity. Shouto is taking an order. Izuku starts up the espresso machine and does not look at his mother, who’s taken his seat and is flirting (flirting!) with All Might (All Might!).
“What’s happening?” Shouto asks when he’s done with the customer.
“My life is falling apart before my eyes,” Izuku says.
Shouto pats him on the shoulder. “Sorry.”
He ducks under the counter and goes back to his homework.
There’s only so much pretending an espresso machine is super interesting that Izuku can do. He looks up and winces when he sees his mother writing something on Toshinori’s napkin. Her number, probably. Izuku cannot believe this is happening.
After that’s done, Inko comes back behind the counter, a little pleased smile on her face. Izuku tries to manage his expression. “He’s very sweet,” Inko tells him as Toshinori gets up to go.
“Mom,” Izuku says, sounding strangled. “Mom, he’s All Might.”
Inko nods. “Yes, he mentioned.”
“He….” Izuku has to clutch at the counter to keep himself upright. “Mom, you can’t date him.”
Her gaze softens. “Oh, Izuku. I know this is going to be hard for you. You’ve never had to experience—”
“No, no, no, that’s not it.” Izuku presses all of his fingers into his forehead. He’s losing his mind. “You can’t date him,” he says, lowering his voice, “because you run an evil coffee shop.”
Inko frowns. She thinks about it. She says, “I don’t see why that would be a problem.”
“Agreed,” Shouto puts in.
Well, that’s that, then. Izuku’s done all the arguing he can on this subject. The clear issues with his mother dating All Might have just been drowned out by the sheer awesomeness of his mother dating All Might.
“Okay,” Izuku says. “Okay, never mind then.”
“Do you need to sit down?” Shouto asks him, gesturing at the empty seat next to him.
Izuku goes to it and slumps down. Inko, thankfully, takes over the register. “We can never kill anyone again,” Izuku mumbles.
“Too bad,” Shouto says. “Can you help me answer this one?”
Izuku looks over his shoulder at his homework. “Sure.” He reads through the question. And life goes on.
It’s almost incredible how easily “All Might is going to start dating his mother” becomes normal. It slips in, becomes a part of the integral workings of Izuku’s life, without further event, as if it was always there. Acceptance takes him quickly.
“At least he doesn’t know the coffee shop is evil,” Izuku reasons several days later, when the dating has become official.
“Yet,” Shouto says.
Izuku shushes him. On this matter and this matter only, Izuku is choosing blissful ignorance. All Might is dating his mother. And there is no evil coffee shop.