Work Text:
Hatsume Mei is good at a lot of things, but sleeping is not one of them.
Izuku learns this intimately when he starts meeting her regularly to work on his support items. The first few meetings have definitely been daunting--explosions and many accidents that earned the two of them odd looks from Uraraka forever-- but eventually, he knows enough about her to know that she’s an unparalleled and dedicated genius… with about a good hundred hours of sleep debt on her ledger.
His classmates and her classmates and even her mentor Powerloader-sensei do not seem to want to do anything about this. When he asked why not, they said that big brains are wired differently. It’s similar to how Yaoyorozu-san can’t help but be perfect. In Hatsume’s case, she can’t help but not sleep. It’s part of her genius.
He doesn’t think any of that that sounds right. All he knows is, every time he sees her she has more eyebags and coffee stains on her tank top that are at least three days old. When her briefing about his new items sound less like briefings and more like manic ramblings, he wonders where he should draw the line.
Since no-one else will do it for her, Izuku takes the time to gently remind her to sleep. Hatsume, predictably, ignores him completely. He expected this, but let no-one tell him that he isn’t stupidly persistent about anything. (Just ask Kacchan).
He tried a lot of things other than stammering “please get some sleep Hatsume-san I’m worried you might die ”. Scaring her with experiments about rats dying from lack of sleep didn’t work. Getting Powerloader-sensei to stop her didn’t work--he’s been trying for the past year and if you figure out how to do it Midoriya-kun tell me I’m all ears . Getting Midnight-sensei to use her quirk didn’t work, because of course they’ve tried that before and Hatsume figured out that air-filters and being a girl counteract her quirk really well. Izuku’s attempts become more desperate as time passes.
One time he brought Shinsou-kun with him to the lab. He hastily explains the situation to the taller guy, who just kinda listens to him the entire time and stares at him funny when Izuku presents him with an ice-cream sandwich at the end of the spiel.
“Dude, you didn’t have to bribe me. I’ve been thinkin’ of doing the same thing anyways. I mean, I thought I was bad with sleep, but--”
Nevertheless, Shinsou takes the Cookie Cat ice cream and follows him into the lab.
Too bad that their attempt took all of ten seconds to fail. Hatsume looks up at them, manic and excited about the last project she’s working on, looking mildly surprised at Shinsou whom she didn’t expect to be there.
“Yo,” Shinsou says with a wave.
Hatsume says nothing, but turns to Izuku with a questioning glance.
It takes a long awkward stretch of silence and a lot of stammering on Izuku’s part before Shinsou huffs and says, “Sorry man, I tried. I’ll come back during my appointment, Hatsume,” and leaves the two of them in the suddenly quiet lab.
Izuku sighs in defeat, Hatsume just stares at the door and then at Izuku. “Do I know that guy, Midoriya-kun?”
He gives her a pleading look. He didn’t expect her to remember names--the space in the hard-drive of her brain has only a small portion of it dedicated to remembering names and faces, or at least that’s how she had explained it to him when Iida threw a fit over being called Billboard for the umpteenth time. Still,
“Y… you could have asked him…?” Or at least, gave even a little teeny tiny grunt that could have passed as a verbal response? Anything that could have allowed Shinsou to use Brainwash. It didn’t even have to be anything intelligible.
Hatsume tilts her head in curiosity. “I don’t want to talk to him.”
“Why not?”
She shrugs. “‘Cause I want to talk to you?”
He sighs. “You could have talked to both of us, Hatsume-san.”
“No. Nobody else. Just Midoriya.”
She grins, and he instantly turns into a tomato.
He hates how pubertal he is around her--how it’s suddenly hard to look her in the eye, to breathe normally, to look at the point of contact of their hands when she takes him somewhere else in the lab to tell him about the new lightweight fabric she can use over his arms to prevent injury. It takes him a deep breath and a lot of focus to be able to maintain eye contact with her and to really understand what she’s saying.
Izuku doesn’t remember how it started, but all those accidental touches (explosion-touches included) are suddenly not accidental anymore. He wonders if she realizes that she holds onto his arm, his wrist, his shoulders, his hands a lot when she’s entirely focused on the technology she wants to show him. The first few times have been a challenge to not recoil from her touches due to his debilitating shyness, but he likes to think that he’s far from that kid who almost died talking to a girl on the phone.
Wow, that’s really embarrassing to admit, even to himself.
Anyways, he digresses--he had considered that this is a purposeful scheme, or an unconscious act on her part so he would stop bothering her about her lack of sleep. “Hatsume-san, this is great and I appreciate everything you do for me, but--”
“You should! You’re a big project of mine, Midoriya-kun. You better make good use of all the things I made for you~”
Izuku tries to calm her down by holding on to her shaking wrists. “I will, definitely… but you better take good care of yourself, so--”
“No sleep now!” Hatsume says, and she’s out of his grip in an instant and burying herself in her work. Izuku can only sigh. Once her eyes look like that there’s little anyone on earth can do to stop it, short of a meteorite falling over their heads and killing them all.
(Wait, she might have actually invented something to counteract that.)
Izuku knows what to do in this situation, however--make himself comfortable in the lab at a far corner, send a message to Uraraka, Iida, or Todoroki that he’ll be late, get his homework done, maybe get his notebooks updated while he’s at it. It’ll take anytime between the next few seconds or a few hours before the inevitable happens, and lately he’s taken it upon himself to be there when it does.
Today, it happens after two hours five minutes three seconds--shorter than the average time it takes before the sound of metal filling metal clangs loudly through the lab.
Izuku rushes to where she is--forehead over the table and screwdriver loosely cradled in her gloved hand. Her face is just beginning to relax with sleep, but even then he can tell how frustrated she was over how sleepy she must have been before this.
She’ll be okay, Izuku tells himself when he makes sure that she still has a pulse and her breathing is still regular. He hoists her in his arms princess-style, quietly tip-toeing over the mess of metal and wire on the floor to take her into the call room, where Powerloader-sensei is packing up for the night.
By this time the teacher is already used to this scenario. He watches as quietly as he can as Izuku places her on the couch, covers her in a blanket, carefully pulls the goggles off her head and pushes the strands of hair away from her face. He observes her quietly for a beat or two until Powerloader signals for him to follow him out of the room and closes the lights for her.
Powerloader gets right to it. “Thanks for taking care of Hatsume-kun. You don’t have to go this far, though.”
Izuku smiles at him bashfully. “It’s fine, sensei. It’s the least I can do since she works so hard… she’s really helped me out a lot.”
“Yeah, heard it’s been a while since your bones exploded during training. Hatsume must be a bigger genius than I thought.”
The student blushes furiously at that. “ I’ll do my best to let her sleep on schedule. I think I’m sort of breaking through to her bit by bit.”
Powerloader laughs. “I’m definitely seeing some good changes. She’s sleeping every other day since you started hanging around her. So, keep up the good work, I guess.”
“All right, sensei, will do--”
The look in his teacher’s eyes is suddenly grave. “If you ask her out though, you better ask permission from me properly. She’s a dumb kid, but she’s my dumb kid, and I’m not just gonna let any random kid take her out--”
“Whhhh--” Izuku chokes on the sudden dark aura around him. “S--sensei, I swear it’s n-nothing like that, I’m just a friend, a concerned citizen, a r-random guy--no, I mean, I--”
He hears Hatsume moan a complaint in her sleep, and that gets him to clamp his mouth shut. Just in time to see Powerloader-sensei snickering mischievously at his expense.
“ Sensei --”
“Kid, you are too easy to tease, you know that, right?” Powerloader says with a vigorous slap to the shoulders as they leave. “She’s not my dumb kid, she can do what she likes. But who knows what goes on in that brain of hers so good luck figuring that out.”
With those parting words, Powerloader leaves Izuku alone with that particular unsolvable problem.
Hatsume is… quite a puzzle, he admits, not a simple a character as he had assumed before. She doesn’t remember names but remembers his; she talks mostly about her babies but asks about how his hero classes went; she has no interest other than her inventions but has no qualms touching him and pulling him close to share her interests with him.
If he didn’t know better, she’s, um, actually interested in him, but far be it for Izuku to be presumptuous. As Powerloader-sensei helpfully supplied, who knows what goes on in the mind of a genius. A chronically sleep-deprived one, at that.
With his luck, it’ll be awhile before he figures it out. Hopefully it happens before graduation. Given that they’re second years now and constantly getting better and better learning about themselves, maybe he can at least get some smidgen of clarity on this weird set-up of theirs.
Provided that she gets better quality sleep in the following years, that is.
*
So. He doesn’t get a clear-cut answer by graduation.
He’s still very much… with Hatsume. He sees her on most days in the lab and tucks her into bed every time she collapses. He takes it upon himself to bring her food that isn’t chips or coffee. Sometimes they get an actual conversation going through text. There were a couple of times where he was able to sweet-talk her into eating with him at Lunch Rush with his friends. Granted she ended up tormenting Iida with another new baby and caused havoc in the cafeteria, but it’s a breakthrough as far as everyone else in UA is concerned.
Then again, he isn’t sure what the heck to call the thing between them. Uraraka thinks that they’re dating, Asui thinks that they aren’t. Iida insists on seeing an actual written contract with the devil before he acknowledges that they have a relationship. Todoroki only stares at him when asked. Aoyama twinkles knowingly, as he always does, but ultimately asks Izuku:
“Well, what do you want to call it, mon ami? ”
If he knew, he wouldn’t be stammering at everyone asking for their help, would he?
Aoyama laughs at his irate response. “You’ve truly changed, Deku-kun. Anyways, let me put it this way. What do you want?”
Izuku sighs. Over their entire stay in UA, all the adventures, laughter and tears, near-death experiences and other similar disasters, Izuku has learned a lot of things about himself. And one of them, he’s sure:
“I want her. With me,” he replies quietly.
Aoyama flutters his eyelashes in agreement.
He’s known for a while that he had fallen for Hatsume. His heart decided to do this through the usual methods--late nights, skinships, deep conversations, one too many explosions that probably shook his brain into badly-needed clarity. He enjoys being with her and misses her when she isn’t there. He’s proud of the things she’s able to do and of the things he’s able to do thanks to her.
He likes holding her, likes carrying her, likes making sure that she’s sleeping soundly as she ought to. He likes her a lot. Like, a lot a lot.
“That’s so cute, Deku~ my heart!” Aoyama gushes. “Then, isn’t that enough to know what to do next?”
Izuku runs his fingers through the thickness of his perm in confusion. “I… I don’t know if she feels the same way.”
Because he doesn’t know if she even knows what she does to him. She’s always sleep-deprived, always focused on something else. When she comes to him, he wonders if it’s reciprocation or if she considers her only slightly above a baby with actual names.
Aoyama hums. “That is a problem. I thought you’d have figured it out by now. You do spend a lot of time with her.”
“I thought the same.” But it’s graduation, and there isn’t a label to what they are. He didn’t ever expect to be that type of guy worried about labels but he supposes there are first times to everything. “She isn’t exactly the type who’d be interested in a conversation like that, anyways.”
The other boy shrugs. “You’ve got to attempt it once, mon ami. At least it’ll be clear what you must do, depending on her answer.”
She’s on the other end of the stadium next to her classmates in 3H. One of her seatmates is wiping a bit of grease from her cheek as discreetly as she can. He swears that Hatsume doesn’t even notice--up until this moment, her fingers are twitching with another new idea forming in her head.
“You’re right,” Izuku concedes finally.
It won’t be an easy conversation, definitely. He wonders if it’s even going to be a conversation. But Aoyama is right
*
He thinks he has half an answer a few years later.
He’s a pro now, like he’s always dreamed of. The past three years have been a blessing. He’s on the top 10 tied with Kacchan and Todoroki. He isn’t dead yet, which is good, and his bones haven’t exploded at all, which is unheard of . He’s one of the fortunate few who’s moderately successful in starting an agency of their own right after graduation. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of near-misses with his life, but it’s all worth it. There’s meaning to his life when he risks it for the sake of others. He is doing exactly what he needs to be doing, he’s never been more sure.
The certainty is a little shaky, once he gets home. “I’m home,” he calls out to the quiet mess of his apartment.
“Grgh,” someone slurs somewhere in the living room. There’s a mannequin, a costume, tools scattered all over--a familiar shade of pink, clad in black, in the middle of the mess.
Bleary target-eyes searches for him, acknowledges his existence, and gets back to work.
There’s a perfectly good reason why Hatsume Mei is essentially living in his apartment for the past half year or so, but it’s up to anyone to believe him if he mentions that no, they’re not married and no, he isn’t even sure if they’re dating or if they ever will. Because, considering their odd past and the two years of absolutely no contact where Izuku nursed his broken heart--are they even a couple?
Anyways, the reason why she’s there is simple--the state-run lab she works in is two stations away from her house, and two blocks away from Izuku’s. It wasn’t long before she figured out how much easier it was to stay at his place rather than hers, and it wasn’t long before he gave in and gave her a key to his place.
He figured it’s safer this way--if she fell asleep on the train and ended up getting lost in the city it’d weigh in on his conscience all the same. Plus, this way he can continue taking care of her as he had the past years.
Uraraka has told him that he’s whipped, but it’s fine. He can rest easy knowing that Hatsume is sleeping within his vicinity and not in a ditch somewhere. Hatsume has gotten better in feeding and cleaning herself too, so even if he ended up missing for days on a mission without a clear guarantee of survival, at least he knows that she has.
It takes some effort with his sore muscles and new cuts and bruises to get his workboots off, but he manages. “Hatsume-san, have you had dinner yet?” he asks.
“Dinner? Don’t you mean lunch?”
Okay, so sometimes she fluctuates. “No, dinner. It’s ten in the evening.”
“Oh. No wonder it’s dark. I thought we were under attack,” she says idly, not looking up from her latest project.
Of course an attack by a hypothetical villain that can summon eternal night doesn’t distract her from her latest invention.
“I figured you wouldn’t notice. Here, I got us some food.” Izuku takes his bag of convenience store goods with him and carefully sits himself on the living room floor near her.
“I’ll eat later.”
He shakes his head. “No. You should eat now.”
Some time ago, he figured out that being firm about certain things will get her to look up from her work, provided that she’s far from a given deadline. Like she does now. With a little huff she sits up and stretches her arms above her head, letting out a few satisfying cracking noises.
“Okay. Eat now. What’s for dinner?”
With a relieved smile he brings out her share of katsudon, electrolyte drink, and limited edition All Might popsicle from the bag. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to make it to the grocery store for a better meal, but this’ll have to do for now.”
Hatsume blinks. “That’s fine. Food is food,” she says, opening the popsicle first.
“Yeah, but I mean, this isn’t good for the long term… we gotta try eating healthier too.”
“If you say so,” she says. Frowning, she narrows her eyes at Izuku. “Say. What happened to you?”
She must have been talking about the plaster on his face. Or the big bruise at his shoulder. Or the cut at his lip. He shrugs. “Ah, this? Don’t worry about it.”
“Villain? Rescue?”
“Rescue,” he answers in between chews. “There’ve been a string of bombings targeting places where pro-heroes lived. We managed to get everyone out before the building crumbled. We got lucky this time!”
It was close though, he thinks quietly with worry. The terrorists have been getting more and more aggressive. Another good thing to Hatsume living with him in this apartment is that he’s sure that she wouldn’t be attacked here. She’d be much safer living with him.
Hatsume considers this briefly. “I should do something about that!”
Izuku laughs. “No, you really don’t...”
“Those injuries could be avoided if I made you--”
“--I’m serious Hatsume--”
Too late. Perhaps the only bad thing about Hatsume living with him was that she picked up his bad habit of murmuring when she’s deep in thought. She swallows the last bit of ice cream down with a grimace and turns away for a sheet of paper and a pencil. She’s already sketching a detailed blueprint before Izuku can stop her.
He sighs. This is why he tries his best not to get any visible injuries when he sees her. How many dinners get cut short like this?
Well, there’s no stopping a genius when she’s on a roll. Best he can do in this situation is to remind her to eat her dinner before midnight.
*
Some time later, he comes home after three days.
He messaged her on day one that he probably isn’t going to get home for the next 24 hours. The Endeavor agency asked for his help in tailing these guys in Fukuoka, while other agencies were closing in on other locations. He learned that Bakugou and Kendo had a serious injury that kept them from actively participating in the coordinated attacks on this terrorist group, and that just fired up the rest of them to do well. Apart from Yaoyorozu’s team succeeding in their operation in Yokohama, he has no idea about how the other teams did. He hopes that everyone is alright.
In any case, he had the privilege of working with Todoroki and the others in the Endeavor agency in his mission. Three whole days of hiding out on the location where an exchange of quirk-enhancing drugs is to take place. The villains took healthy doses of Trigger during the fight and gave them a hard time subduing them. But years of working with Todoroki in and out of the field made for a stellar tag team, and it was only a matter of time before they got everyone.
In the end, they find out that these guys were just mid-level thugs who refused to tell them where the leaders of their group are hiding. There’s going to be more information once Tsukauchi are done with them, but this tells them some things:
“The next mission probably won’t take us just three days,” Todoroki says on the way home.
Izuku nods. “Yeah. And it probably won’t be as clean a mission as this one.”
Silence falls between them--not an unusual thing in itself, but it’s obvious that their minds are going in different places, in the same direction.
“Next time, it can take us a week. Or a month. Or more.”
Todoroki hums. Izuku knows he’s thinking of the same thing: that it’s very possible that one of these days, they leave home and never come back.
And leave someone behind, all alone.
They spend the rest of the ride in that suffocating silence.
One way or another, the two of them make it to Tokyo and go their separate ways to get to their respective apartments. Izuku makes it at the front door, feeling tired but oddly nervous as he considers how to make his entrance.
The only person he’s ever lived with was Mom, and during the short period when he had to subject her to the possibility of not coming home in one piece at UA, he feels a certain sense of foreboding when his hand rests on the door knob. He knows that he has to see how much he’d hurt her unintentionally because he screwed up. He knows that she cries so much because she loved him, but it’s a really painful thing to see.
That said, it’s been a while since he’s lived with someone. He doesn’t expect Hatsume to cry uncontrollably like the Midoriyas are able to do expertly. Rather, the problem is he doesn’t know what to expect at all.
He doesn’t even know if he should expect anything from her. He loves her, but he isn’t sure how to feel if she doesn’t--
Hold up.
I love her?
The thought fills his empty mind when the door is already halfway open. His senses are in disarray when he flounders at the step, wondering how much he should think about it when he should be doing his usual thing of shimmying out of his boots, putting the groceries away, preparing their dinner--
“Midoriya-kun?”
He doesn’t even notice the movement inside his apartment until he looks up and sees an amazing sight--the lights are on, there’s less of a mess than usual, and Hatsume Mei at the center of his vision, coming close to him.
She stops at a distance, peering at him carefully, as if suddenly unsure what to do with his presence. “You’re home,” she says, stunned.
“Yeah. I’m back.” He tries to smile. “Sorry I wasn’t able to say anything. It wasn’t safe to use our phones, and…”
The smell of fried food and rice and his complaining stomach stops him in his tracks. “Hatsume-san, is that… food?”
She blinks. “Yes, it is.”
He looks at her incredulously. “You… cooked food?”
“No,” she moves aside, oddly hesitant when she raises her arm up to show him the kitchen. “That baby did. I couldn’t cook even if I tried. I tried anyways. It’s easier to make a robot… to make algorithms to make katsudon, so--”
“Katsudon?”
She nods. Again, hesitant. Almost sheepish. “You like it. Katsudon, I mean. So, I designed this baby to make you katsudon when you get home.”
Izuku blinks. “So… you made Katsudon for the past three days?”
Hatsume looks away, puffing her cheeks. “No… the robot did. I can tell you that it’s more than enough time to perfect the recipe in the way you like it. I… I know I didn’t tell you anything, but I felt like I needed to do it? If you ask me why...”
She sighs and rubs her eyes. The wobble in her place tells him that she hasn’t slept. Again. He’d tell her off for bringing her work home from the lab again, but there’s no sign of it on the living room floor or anywhere he can see, so he wonders why she isn’t catching up on her sleep as she should.
“It’s… weird,” she says, once she regains her bearings, “I’m okay by myself, but it’s different since I didn’t know when you were coming back. I know you were going to, eventually, since I dressed you head to toe in all the babies I can think of to keep you alive, but it’s hard to know if I did well enough when… when you’re not here.”
Izuku is speechless for once. It isn’t everyday that anyone has the privilege to see Hatsume Mei embarrassed about anything.
And it isn’t everyday that he has the opportunity to take her in his arms, and to hold her close to him. To really feel that she’s there with him.
He does now, in a different way than before. Her pulse, usually slow in the dredges of sleep, rises with his touch. She still has the faint smell of motor oil over her along with the smell of a kitchen, which he doesn’t mind at all--she smells like home to him.
“Midoriya?” She’s frozen in place, unsure of what to do next.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, but doesn’t let go. “Are you uncomfortable? I’ll stop if…”
He feels her shake her head. “No, not uncomfortable. I think it’s nice.”
“Nice?”
“Yes,” she says. When she embraces him back, he feels his own heart rate go up. “I missed you. I think that’s what I wanted to say.”
He sighs and buries his face in her hair. “Me too.”
The katsudon isn’t the same as his mother’s recipe. Hatsume tells him that it’s possible to make it the way his mother did, but he assures her that this katsudon is special in its own way. He’s never felt as full as he did that night.
And, when he gets to bed with her curling up next to him, he doesn’t think he’ll feel as rested as he will in the morning. He hopes she feels the same way.
Something in the way she reaches out for his hand in her sleep tells him that she does.