Hatsume Mei is weird. She’s odd and off-beat and intense and comes on way too strong and is too blunt and too enthusiastic and that’s how she likes it. It’s her brand, it’s her, she is unashamedly and unabashedly herself and all her hand-picked clients either love and accept her for it or they’re very, very skilled at shutting up and pretending to be.
Actually, most of her hand-picked clients are as weird as she is. Autism solidarity, and all that. She tries her best to hunt down her fellow neurodivergents and pick them out, offer them her services, because she can get them and they can get her and it’s much easier to get along with someone else who is also autistic and has ADHD (even if they’re not necessarily diagnosed—for some, like Izuku, one of her favorites, well, the closest he’s ever come to a diagnosis is a shit-ton of screening tests).
Speaking of Izuku, she’s actually currently waiting on him to come in! She’s the main tech for his arm, given free rein to tinker on this one specific man’s prosthetic arm, as long as she only makes an arm for him. There were a lot of fancy pieces of paper like NDAs and contracts and things like that signed, and it’s almost disappointing she doesn’t get to work on more of them, but Hero Support Items are Her Thing and Izuku is Her Client (whom she shares with Melissa, wonderful woman that she is) so she gets to play with Izuku’s arm and Izuku’s arm only.
Despite his random unexpected absence from work and his brief radio silence, he’s already texted ahead to let her know that he’s still coming in for today’s appointment.
It all has her intrigued, if she’s being honest with herself, and she does her best to always be honest with herself. Izuku? Taking time off from work? and he’s still capable of coming in for his appointment? Before he’s back at work? Unheard of. Out of character.
Every time he’s been out of work for more than a day, it’s because of a big injury that either has him hospitalized or his manager is forcefully making him recover at home. In those cases, if he’s still hospitalized, they’ll postpone to appointment, or if he’s recovering at home, she’ll just make a house call!
So, maybe she’s hovering next to her Izuku-arm-prosthetic workstation rather than getting progress done on that one project for Stormfly like she had originally thought about doing.
The workstation is basically a long metal table. Her three robot arm babies, who she maybe has named DUM-E, U, and Butterfingers after the early twenty-first century American Iron Man movie trilogy (the only movies out of the entire “Marvel Cinematic Universe” she thinks are worth watching, aside from Black Panther, because of the Science!!! in them), well, anyways, her three robot arm babies are also hovering around the workstation. They’re just simple learning AI-driven hunks of metal, all hydraulics and framework and adorable blundering idiocy, and she loves them. They were a joint project between herself and one of her coder friends who currently lives in Utah because he’s weird and why the hell would he want to live in Utah, there are cooler places, but no. He’s in Utah.
She doesn’t even know where Utah is. Europe? Maybe? Maybe it’s next to France.
Anyways.
The easy-access tools whose home is the top of the workstation table have been arranged and rearranged, sorted and re-sorted, three times in the past half hour. This is unusual because normally, they just hang around in whatever order she sets them down in, not in this weird… tidy row thing they’ve got going on.
Her table is also cleaner than it’s ever been, she thinks. It’s not like she keeps any workstation of hers hazardously messy, but the light reflecting off the surface of it has never been so bright, not since it was brand new and unblemished.
Hm. Maybe this buzzing in her skin is a form of anxiety. She’s experienced it, a few times, a few ways, but by and large, she’s unimpacted by things like that. However, she does know that anxiety can come in many different forms and be caused by many different things, all big and small. It wouldn’t surprise her if that’s what’s happening—in fact, if she stops and takes stock of things…
Yeah, she’s probably anxious! Izuku’s been acting incredibly out-of-character lately, and this is just the cherry on top of all that! The clock is ticking ever forwards, time marching ever on, each second bringing her closer and closer to his appointment time. What will she see when he walks through that door? Will he even be walking?
No! Bad brain! She’s going to think about tinkering and engineering and Melissa! Her partner! Her QPP! Sometimes, she still gets completely awestruck by the concept of holy shit we’re partners!!! They may live an entire ocean away from each other, but the distance means nothing when you have video chatting! And airplanes. And enough money to buy as many airplane tickets as you want.
Okay, Melissa is a safe thought, there’s no lingering anxiety there. They know exactly where they stand with each other, and Melissa texted her half an hour ago about some cool new engineering thing she just learned about.
Now, Mei has thought about moving to I-Island to live with Melissa, and has, in fact, had the possibility of that brought up multiple times by people who should know better. It’ll be safer, they tell her. You’re a famous name in the world of support tech! You’re absolutely tantalizing as a target for villains!
Let them come, is Mei’s response. She may not be a Pro, but she has her babies and she has Izuku on speed-dial. She also has no fewer than thirty-two trackers on her person (the number may be higher—she’s probably forgotten some) so there’s no way they couldn’t hunt her down lickety-split.
Does the thought of I-Island sound tempting?
Absolutely!
Does she actually want to live there?
No!
She has too many projects here, too much going on, moving to I-Island would take her away from her little pet project that is Izuku’s right arm. (Oh, the tech in that thing. She’s trying to negotiate her way into being able to incorporate it into some of her other stuff, and it’s slow going, but she is nothing if not persistent!)
So, no, she can’t just leave Japan, she has too much—
“Mei?”
She whips around, blowtorch already in-hand, raising her arm to blow flames at Izuku, who’s taking a step back and holding up mismatched hands as he ducks his head.
“Sorry! I was knocking, but you weren’t answering!”
“So text me!” she snaps, rolling her eyes and setting the blowtorch down on the workstation.
“I did!” he protests. “But your phone’s all the way over there!”
He’s pointing, and, oh, yep, there it is, over on one of her other workstations. As this is going on, the bots start beeping and rolling over to him. They have personalities, ones that have developed over the years she’s had them, and all three are like particularly friendly cats. Izuku is one of their favorite people, probably because he actually pats them when they roll over. It’s odd, she doesn’t know why they like that, or why they seek it out, because it’s not like they can actually perceive the touch? Or maybe they’ve just learned that touch is a form of affection…
Eh, they’re smart, they probably know that and that’s why they seek it.
“Alright, well, let’s get started,” she says, turning and striding over to him. “You know the drill—how long have you actually been wearing it?”
“Uh,” he starts, and reaches up to rub the back of his neck as his eyes glance away from her, and this sets of warning bells, big, screaming klaxons in her head, because normally he just sighs and says “I haven’t taken it off other than for a few minutes at a time since our last appointment” or shrugs and gives some sort of approximation. The first few times she had to drag the truth out of him, yeah, he was self-conscious like this, but ever since their routine was established, the most she’s gotten from him is all in varying shades of resigned and self-deprecating.
“So, funny story,” he continues, and he doesn’t look at her once, “tonight’s actually the first time I’ve worn it since early Thursday morning?”
Wait, what?
Izuku hasn’t worn his arm in… four and a half days? And he’s not stuck in the hospital? He’s not catastrophically injured? What mirror world has she fallen into?
His chuckle, strained and high-pitched, brings her back to reality. “You don’t have to give me that look...”
“No, no, I’m still processing the fact that, for all intents and purposes, it looks like you willingly chose not to wear your arm for four and a half days. I mean, you’re not in the hospital, you don’t look catastrophically injured, you’re standing normal and walking fine…” She shakes her head and makes a gesture at his whole person. “Who are you, and what did you do with Izuku?”
His grin is more of a grimace. “I’m… I’m really that bad, huh?”
“You’re not bad,” she replies, shaking her head. “Well. No. That’s a lie. You’re bad at some things, like remembering to take care of yourself, or caring enough to take care of yourself, or poker, but you’re not bad.”
“No,” he groans and shakes his head. “I… Okay. I just. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. A lot of self-reflection. And I just… Yeah.”
“Oh. Okay,” she nods. “Makes sense. So. You haven’t worn it in four and a half days—why? Is there a glitch? An issue?”
“Well, uh, no,” he replies, shrugging. “Can we… sit down? You can at least get started while I talk.”
She nods. “Yeah, sure! First off—any issues that stick out to you, any problems, difficulties, anything weird?”
“No.”
She leads the way over to the workstation, and the chairs next to it. She has a stool that rolls around, and then there’s a backed chair with no armrests he sits down in, and sets his metal elbow on the table to his right.
“Alright, start talking, hero boy.” She picks up one of her tools, one of her precision ones, and gets to work investigating the shoulder port and connections there. In a bit, she’ll take his arm off and check over the port itself. She’s no medical doctor, but she knows this better than any doctor ever could.
“Well,” he begins, and pauses. “So. Uh. I was… Okay. I’m going to start from the beginning. Thursday morning, I almost killed myself.”
“I’m glad that you didn’t,” she replies, “but how does that have anything to do with your arm?”
She can almost feel the strength of his eyeroll. “I was getting there. So, uh, I called Shouta, you know, instead of actually committing suicide, and now I’m staying with him, but while he was still… While we were still at my apartment, he told me I should take it off and I just. Never put it back on?”
“He’s a smart man.” Poking around the shoulder socket, she can already see the effects. “Just look at this. The inflammation has gone down significantly, and while this hasn’t been enough time for the anchor points to fully re-heal, you can see they’re already improving—here, let me take a picture for you.”
She reaches over and picks up her phone (wait, wasn’t her phone—oh, the bots must have grabbed it) to take the pictures. He can look over the ones on his front with a mirror or his own eyes, but the ones on his back and the top of his shoulder are harder for him to check, and they’re the worst ones, anyways. A time or two, he came in directly off a fight and they were actively seeping blood.
Picture taken, she hands the phone over to Izuku and gets back to her poking and prodding.
“Those… do look way better,” he agrees, setting her phone in his lap. “I… It kind of surprised me, the… the lack of pain. It surprised me.”
“A lack of pain… surprised you,” she repeats, letting her hands drop onto the table and turning her head to look at him. He doesn’t look back at her, a blush rising to his cheeks and the tips of his ears.
He mutters, and she barely picks it out: “I have chronic pain, Mei.”
“Chronic pain is one thing,” she replies, jabbing his ribcage with the blunt handle end of one of her prodding tools. “A large amount of the pain in your shoulder is self-inflicted. You take it easy for a month, month and a half, let those anchor points heal up again, and then actually self-manage and take care of yourself and you can minimize the pain and maximize functionality and also avoid needing extra surgeries because you’ve torn up the tissue in your shoulder so badly that we need to relocate the anchor points again.”
A pause, where her poking and prodding at the connection points is the only sound, and then he replies.
“Well. Then you’ll be glad to hear I’m going to be taking an indefinite leave of absence from hero work.”
She drops her tools, head whipping around and jaw dropping open as she stares at Izuku. He’s not looking at her, of course, eyes trained on some distant point on the far wall of her shop.
“Okay, you’re really an imposter, right?”
He snorts, a wry, almost self-deprecating sound. “Some days I wonder.”
The tools are on the floor, right under her chair, and she bends over and picks them up, her fingers brushing against the rough concrete floor as she wraps hand around the handles. With them nestled back safely in the palms of her hands, she speaks.
“It’s good that you’re taking a break. You haven’t taken one in a very long time.”
“That’s an incredibly polite way of saying that I’ve been running myself into the ground. Thank you.”
“I am nothing if not incredibly polite,” she responds, and he snorts. A moment later, and he’s laughing, soft and quiet, and a quick glance from the corner of her eyes reveals he’s shaking his head.
“Politeness is the last thing on your mind, ever.”
“I know how to be tactful, though!” She flips her poking tool around and points at him with the handle. “Arm off.”
This part of the process she always lets him lead. She can remember the early days, right after he lost this arm. The end of the war had been terrible, and there had been no victory pose or victor’s walk for their hero, for Izuku, at the end of it. She hadn’t been there on the scene, she hadn’t been one of the first people to find him (that honor belongs to Bakugou, of all people, and Tenya and Ochako and Todoroki), but she remembers hearing about it. Ochako and her jetpack have spent a lot of time in her workshop, over the years, and Ochako had once more found solace with Mei in the aftermath of that.
He had been pinned, Ochako recounted, his right arm trapped and twisted in a cage of metal and concrete.
“We thought he was dead,” she told Mei, who can remember the exact wording, the exact tone of voice to this day. “Maybe—maybe it would have been better, I don’t know, maybe it would have been better if he was, because… the prognosis isn’t good. They had to amputate, and… they’re still worried about brain damage, but… we won’t know about that for sure until he wakes up. But… Mei, I… I mean, if anyone could be a great hero with one arm, it would be Deku, but… brain damage is a whole other issue. When he wakes up… if… if he can’t be a hero… I just…”
And that’s when she broke down crying and became completely incomprehensible for the next ten minutes.
There are scars on his body from that day, more than just the obvious missing limb. Mei’s seen him shirtless, seen the scars leftover from where he had flesh gouged by metal and poles driven into his body. There’s more down his leg, she knows, all up and down his right side, all remnants from that last and terrible battle between Izuku and Shigaraki. There’s a scar on the right side of his head, too, just over his temple and disappearing back into his hair.
It extends all the way back, around the back of his head, ending at the base of his skull.
That one scar almost cost him his career as a hero.
Well, that and the arm, but the arm is a much smaller threat to his career than something like brain damage.
But, anyways, back to the arm. She was there from day one, from the moment he woke up, having been the one to drag her colleagues, the ones developing the tech for the prosthetic and the nerve connections and all that, into helping with Izuku. He was actually their first post-testing-phase subject, because Mei is just that good at sweet-talking people.
Those first days, though, watching him in that hospital bed… Even the first few months. Her colleagues, for all they are brilliant people who have made massive advancements in the medical field… They’re jerks. They’re assholes. They have terrible people skills and spent the whole time running around and treating Izuku like he couldn’t understand a thing they said.
Mei ended up explaining most of it to him, actually, and he understood everything she told him.
While the tech may be theirs, may be their brainchild and baby, that doesn’t give them the right to just.
Ugh.
It still makes her blood boil, thinking about it even seven years later. Just because they developed the tech, just because they were working on his arm and just because it was a custom build (they’re all custom builds, to be honest, but certain… adjustments had to be made for it to handle One For All, even a little bit)…
(Yes, somehow his fucking quirk can power up his fucking arm, and that’s when Melissa got involved, and Mei is grateful for that to this day, but learning the truth about Izuku’s quirk?)
(Ugh.)
Just because it’s their tech doesn’t give them the right to ignore the person it’s attached to.
Anyways, this whole tangent is to illustrate that she takes consent and bodily autonomy and that kind of thing seriously. He gets to take the arm on and off, he gets to control every bit of the process to the extent that he wants to control it. So she sits there politely as he undoes the clasps holding it on, as he undoes the next level of locks and then disconnects it, wincing as the connection to the arm is cut.
(The first time it was disconnected, he yelped, so either it’s gotten less painful or he’s been desensitized. Probably the second option.)
It thunks onto the table, and she leans back in to look over the port itself. Routine, routine, these biweekly checks are all about routine. Connected, then port, then arm.
“So…” she draws the syllable out as she shines a light into the inside of the port. If she was cruel, she could jam something slender into the spot the nerves connect and completely incapacitate him. The amount of trust he shows her in these moments is jaw-dropping.
“So?” he asks, and, oh, she forgot to actually ask her question.
“You said Aizawa was the one to tell you to take the arm off,” she says. “And that he was the one who you called. Everything I know of the man tells me he wouldn’t leave you alone in the aftermath of a suicide attempt, so, asking as a friend, where are you staying? How have you been, since?”
“I’m actually staying with Shouta… also indefinitely. I think if I tried to stay anywhere else, he’d start insisting.”
“Ah, so you’re around people who can bully you into actually taking care of yourself. That’s a relief.”
He huffs. “Yeah. It’s… god, I’m already embarrassed, but… it is also really nice to… you know. Just. Have someone take care of me like that?” He shrugs his left shoulder, which is good, because if he had shrugged his right, too, then she would have ended up jabbing some very sensitive spots.
As it is, she sets her tools down. “Port looks good, nothing out of place or damaged. I get what you mean. Accepting that I would never be functional on my own, without people living with me who could help remind me to take care of myself… that was a hard pill to swallow! I mean, I don’t think that’s your situation, I can’t say for sure, but. I get what you mean.”
“Maybe it is my situation,” he murmurs. She can’t look at him when she’s opening up his arm to look at the innards, but she can imagine the forlorn expression on his face as he says that. “I think trying to live on my own was a mistake.”
“One hell of a long-lasting mistake. You’ve been on your own since… ugh, the year after Hitoshi? Sorry, my memory for things like that is terrible.”
“I know. I spent about six months after that being roommates with Shouto, and then, after he moved in with Kei, about another six months with Tenya. It’s… really stupid, in hindsight, but I actually got in a huge fight with him after he announced he was retiring from hero work, and that’s why I moved out.”
She sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Yeah. That does sound really stupid.”
“Yeah. Been… living on my own since then, and, well, it worked for a while.”
“So… with that timing, you hit Number One while you were still living with Tenya.”
“Yeah.”
“So… Todoroki and Tenya. Not your mom? Would’ve thought she would offer you a room or something, to help you recover. I don’t know. Get back on your feet? Was she not an option? Have you already told me this and I forgot?”
“She was an option, just not my first. We have been fighting for… a very long time.”
She winces. “Oh, yeah, there’s been more than once you come to these appointments and spend the entire time complaining about whatever recent fight you had was about. Does she know about… Thursday?”
“My suicide attempt?” he asks, and at her nod, he continues. “Yeah. I… called her. Shouta talked to her, too, don’t know what she said to him, though. I can’t imagine it was good if I haven’t heard anything about it from either of them. I actually haven’t heard from my mom at all since then, and that was Friday.”
“Yeah, that’s not a good sign.” Not about to navigate the minefield of the Midoriya family issues, she changes the subject. “Now that you’re taking a leave of absence, I’m going to remind you that I have designs for a lightweight build drawn up and ready to go. Do you want me to fabricate it? You know, since you won’t need the power in civilian life, and it would take a lot of strain off your body.”
He sighs. “…Yeah. You’ve only been bugging me about that for… what, three years?”
“Yeah, thereabouts!”
From there, conversation turns to her, and what she’s working on, and they keep topics light until the end of the appointment. He reattaches the arm (also painful, just like disconnecting), while she fetches her car keys from their hook.
Spinning them around her index finger, she turns to face him. “So? Routine dictates I drive you home. Aizawa going to be fine with you giving me directions to his place?”
“Yeah,” he nods. “And… Well, uh, would you mind if we stopped by my apartment for a bit so I can grab some things? When he was picking me up, I wasn’t exactly packing to stay for a long time.”
“That’s fine by me!” she grins and hooks her elbow through his (left) elbow to drag him out of the shop. They pause so she can lock up, and then walk the rest of the way to her car together.
It’s a terrible-looking, beat-up silver SUV whose seats are cluttered with half-made machines and various tools and materials she’s picked up and left in the car. For all it looks like it’s seen better days, it runs like a dream, better than any other car she has ever been in.
They get in, put on their seatbelts, and as soon as she puts her key in the ignition, Izuku grabs the overhead handle.
“You know,” she says as she backs out of her parking spot, “I get the impression you don’t trust my driving.”
“I trust your driving, I just need to hold the ‘oh shit’ handle the whole time. For stability.”
She laughs. “Yeah. Right. Stability.”