She pulls the phone away from her ear, hits the red button, and sets it down on her desk. She takes one deep, shuddering breath, and then another, tears streaming hot and wet down her cheeks as she bites her lip and stares at her son’s name, displayed on the screen of her phone right above the timestamp reading 12:46.
An almost thirteen-minute conversation. It’s enough to rock her world, to knock her off her feet and leave her stumbling and swaying in a desperate search for stability.
She is not a perfect mother, far from it. She knows this. It’s been months, if not years, since she’s been able to get through a twenty-minute conversation with her son without it devolving into yet another argument. She had resigned herself to standing back, to watching him destroy himself, because she did not know how to help him.
What kind of mother does that? Not even Mitsuki, horribly flawed and terrible mother she is, had stood back and watched as Katsuki destroyed himself. She had fought tooth and nail for her boy, had been there for him as much as she was able to, had pushed him into therapy and dragged him out of self-isolation and had done her best to take care of him. She hadn’t just… given up, resigned herself to watching the news for the breaking story of her son’s early death, not the way Inko had.
But, then again, Inko has always been the kind to give up too easily. She gave up her dreams of research and labs and scientific breakthroughs in favor of taking care of her mother, while her little brother got to chase his dreams of fame and stardom and glory. She gave up school for Hisashi, and gave up without a fight when Hisashi wanted to move on, leaving her with a two-year-old and sending monthly payments in lieu of his presence. She gave up when Izuku was four, she gave up time and time again after that, and she’s just never stopped giving up.
She’s not sure she knows how to do anything but give up.
Izuku, though… Izuku’s not like her. Giving up is never a consideration in his mind. He doesn’t know how to. He’s just proving that once more, hanging onto life despite everything working against him. There’s a hollowness in her chest, yes, and worry sits heavy in her gut, but she knows he’ll be okay. He’s a fighter, he’s persistence and determination given human form. Though he may confess that he can’t see a future for himself, she knows he’ll find one, that he’ll shape it and create it and carve it out of the indefinable mass of time with his own hand.
He’s somewhere he can get help. He’s with people who know how to help him, who know how to help him crawl out of the pit she let him dig for himself.
The truth is, she thinks she’s let him fall. She’s a woman who only knows how to give up, who was given a son who could never give up, and in her imperfections she has failed him so wholly and completely that all he knows to do leads to self-destruction.
So she sits at her desk, and she stares at her phone, and she cries. She gave up too soon, began mourning her son too early, but he’s been alive and in need of help the entire time and she. Gave. Up.
Is this a sin which can be forgiven?
If it were up to her son, she knows he would forgive her in a heartbeat. It probably hasn’t even crossed his mind that she’s failed him (unless it has and he has changed that much in the years they’ve been distant), he might even think that he’s the one failing in this relationship…
(A little voice in her head whispers that both parties are responsible, the blame lies with both of them, but it goes ignored.)
(Both Midoriyas, after all, share the same propensity for self-blame.)
She sits at her desk, and she cries, because she has failed as a mother and as a human being. She has failed the most important person in her life, so deeply and totally that it almost killed him.
She cries, because she knows that she is not the one who can help him now. She does not know how. She wants to, oh, how she wants to, wants to begin, wants to take the first step towards rectifying her failings, but she cannot.
She cries until she can’t anymore. Until she feels empty, drained, she cries, and when she’s done, drying her face with tissues, she stands and pockets her phone and walks to the kitchen. The motions of making tea come automatic to her as she fills the electric kettle and turns it on and grabs her favorite mug out of the cabinet.
There are still a couple of Izuku’s mugs there, too, one of them a worn and faded All Might mug, a leftover from his childhood, and the other one is white with a cheesy cat pun printed on it in English, a gift from Hitoshi that he had left with Inko for the nights he ended up staying with her (back when those nights still happened).
She sees these, and she thought she had run out of tears to cry, but her eyes begin stinging, so she closes the cabinet and sets her mug on the counter and leans against it, burying her face in her hands. The click of the kettle turning off pulls her attention back to the outside world, and she finishes making her tea, and then she carries it to the living room. She sets the mug on the coffee table and sits down.
The apartment is quiet.
It has been, for years.
She sits in the living room, encased in the quiet, and drinks her tea while staring at nothing.
She sits, until her phone vibrates in her pocket, and when she pulls it out, she sees the name of Izuku’s former homeroom teacher displayed on it. There it is. There’s the call he had told her to expect.
For a moment, she toys with the idea of not picking up. Of not having the hear the news of her failure again, from a second source, from someone much more likely to call her out.
And yet… would this not be the first step to atoning for her failure? If she ignores this call, if she hides her head in the sand and does not look, then is she not just making the same mistakes she’s made her entire life?
That’s what makes her mind up. That’s what has her hitting the green button and holding the phone up to her ear, once again.
“Izuku told me to expect a call from you,” she says, and pretends not to hear the man’s sigh.
“So, he did call you,” the man says. “You know, then.”
“Yes,” she replies. She does. “He… almost committed suicide.” And, somehow, speaking the words out loud brings her carefully-constructed emotional stability crashing down again, breaking down the dam and bringing tears out from her eyes again. She’s not sobbing, at least, a small blessing in the middle of an entire shitstorm.
“Yes,” Aizawa confirms. “He did. He’s been staying with me since, and he’s welcome to stay for as long as needed, unless you would rather have him with you.”
“Aizawa.” She sniffles, reaches up, wipes away her own tears. “I… thank you. For helping him. I… I cannot thank you enough.”
“Of course,” he replies. “So. Before I talk to him, tonight or tomorrow, I need to know what you want. He’s your son.”
“He’s twenty-eight years old,” she replies. “I hardly think it matters what I want, anymore.”
She can almost feel Aizawa’s repressed sigh. “He’s twenty-eight years old and in a very precarious position with his mental health,” he corrects her. “Having been there before… this isn’t the sort of thing you can recover from without extensive help. What we need to figure out is the role you are going to play in it.”
“There is no role I can play,” she replies, sniffling. More than anything, she wants to step in, wants to wrap her son up in blankets and bring him home, but doing that will sign his death sentence because there’s no way she can help him. “You know how to help him better than I do.”
“That doesn’t mean there’s no place for you,” Aizawa says. “You are still his mother.”
“I don’t deserve that title,” she replies, and it rings true. She doesn’t. She gave it up when she gave up on him, she thinks.
“And what the hell do you mean by that?”
“I’m not enough for him,” she explains. “He’ll be much better off in your hands. I leave him to you.”
She hangs up. She’s given up once more, once more fallen back upon the only thing she knows how to do.
Aizawa does not call back.