She'd forgotten to drink her coffee again.
Third time this week. The cup sat on the counter going cold while she moved through the apartment doing three things at once, none of them the coffee. He watched her from the table. Said nothing.
....
He had been keeping track of the household budget for two years.
Nobody asked him to. He just started. The numbers weren't hard — the rent, the groceries, the small stack of bills she'd been rotating through. He kept a running total in the back of his head the way he used to keep troop positions. Same principle. Know what you have. Know what's coming. Don't be surprised by either.
This week the math was tighter than usual.
He noted that. Filed it. Went back to his book.
....
Saturday morning. She was still asleep.
He got up at five. Cleaned the kitchen. Wiped down the counters, got the floor, dealt with the pile of shoes by the door that had been growing for a month. Not dramatic. Just a thing that needed doing.
Grocery run next. He had the household money. He knew what she needed and what she'd forget to buy for herself because she'd been thinking about work when she made the list. He corrected for it.
Back by seven-thirty. Dinner was a few hours out still, but he got the rice on and the broth started and then sat back down with his book like nothing happened.
She found him there when she woke up.
....
She stood in the kitchen doorway for a second. Just stood.
He didn't look up.
She sat down across from him. Her coffee — fresh, the right temperature, sitting right where she'd reach for it automatically — was already there.
"Izuku."
He looked up.
She was doing the thing where she was trying to figure out what to say. He waited.
"You know you don't have to," she said.
"I know."
She looked at him a moment longer.
He looked back.
"Okay," she said. And then she picked up the coffee.
They sat there for a while. He read. She woke up slowly, the way she did on Saturdays. Outside a neighbor's dog was barking at something. The rice cooker clicked.
Fine.
....
Hero news after dinner.
She liked it as background noise. He didn't mind. He'd watched enough hero news in two lifetimes to have opinions about the production quality, which had improved slightly since his first life and declined since his second, which was a statistical curiosity he kept to himself.
All Might appeared in a debrief segment.
The smile. The scale. The careful management of how large he was allowed to look on camera — not too large, she'd said in a documentary once, because it made people feel small instead of safe. He remembered reading that. He'd thought it was interesting.
'Carrying a death sentence and selling certainty,' he thought. 'Every day. For years.'
He watched the segment finish.
She said: "He's amazing."
He said: "Yeah."
He knew exactly how much time All Might had left. Not to the day — canon was already bending around him at the edges, he knew that — but to the general shape of it. The rough math. He ran it once and put it away and didn't run it again because running it again wouldn't change it and he wasn't here to audit All Might's remaining lifespan on a Saturday evening.
She reached for the remote. "What else is on?"
He slid it to her.
....
Later he let himself think about it. Just once, the way you press a bruise to check if it's still there.
In the BC world, by the time he had built anything close to this — something like a home, someone who kept a bowl for him — he had already been losing it in ways he couldn't see yet. He hadn't known to pay attention. He'd been busy with the war, with the training, with the next problem. He'd assumed permanent what wasn't.
He knew better now.
'What you have,' he thought, 'you tend.'
Not complicated.
....
She walked past his room around nine.
He heard her footsteps slow in the hallway. The small pause. She did that sometimes. He'd gotten used to it.
He was in the middle of the floor, working through the breathing forms. Slow. Deliberate. The kind of thing that looked like nothing and was everything. His body was ten years old and still building, but the forms were already there — the exhale on the weight shift, the hold at the centerline — waiting for the infrastructure to catch up.
She stayed in the doorway for a moment.
He heard her breathing change slightly, the way it did when she was deciding whether to say something.
She didn't.
Her footsteps moved on, back toward the living room.
He finished the form. Started the next one.
'She's going to look up 'child prodigy symptoms' again,' he thought. 'Probably tonight.'
He adjusted the exhale timing.
She was going to find the same inconclusive forum posts she always found. She was going to close the browser. She was going to decide, again, that she was grateful for whatever made him this way, even if she never got a name for it.
That was okay.
He didn't need her to have a name for it. He just needed her to keep being there when he came home.
Outside, the neighbor's dog had stopped barking.
The apartment was quiet.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
Fine.
Monday was going to be a different kind of morning.
He already knew that.
--
TO BE CONTINUED