Chapter 5: A Child Without Equal

The hero agency Ochaco had ended up choosing to work for after graduating from UA was a compromise between her ambition and good compensation. Agencies that specialize in villain capture pay better, but she decided she would make the best use of her abilities in rescue.

Her salary, even as a rookie, was still more than modest and should have given her the chance to raise her poor standard of living, except she hardly ever spent money on her own needs. Instead, with every paycheck, Ochaco found new ways to spoil her parents.

Living far away, they were blissfully unaware of how much Ochaco deprived herself for them, but Katsuki knew and it drove him crazy. He was plenty cheap himself, only spending on things that he considered important, but Ochaco took that lifestyle to an incredible level.

In the dead of winter, he would find her drowning under multiple layers of clothing inside her tiny apartment, trying to scrimp on electricity by limiting the number of hours she had her heating on.

She ate convenience store food day in and day out, and she refused to replace her goddamn mattress even though it was already so old the springs squeaked loudly with every little movement. She probably would never have thrown it out if Katsuki hadn't taken it upon himself to blow it up for good.

That had gotten her really mad, and in retrospect it wasn't a very nice thing to do, but at least she was forced to finally get a new one.

When Ochaco and Katsuki got married, her extreme frugality was one of the things they had to seriously discuss. He told her flatly that she should not expect him to adopt her ridiculous lifestyle. On the contrary, he expected her to be more reasonable with decisions concerning money.

For one, they would be living somewhere far more central than the sticks she had settled for, and they would definitely be needing a bigger place than the closet she lived in.

Ochaco was willing enough to try things his way in the beginning, but her eyes got progressively rounder and her knees weaker with each apartment they checked, all Katsuki's choices, that rented for over two hundred thousand yen a month. Their combined salaries could handle that much, but it hurt her to think of parting with an amount like that just for a place to live.

In the end, they compromised, deciding on a low-rise apartment building in one of the quieter, less commercialized neighborhoods in the Toshima ward. The building wasn't new but it looked well-maintained. The rent was a hundred forty-nine thousand including the management fee, about the median for a unit of its size in Tokyo and a steal considering its proximity to a train station served by the city's most important line.

The unit itself also left little more to desire for a newlywed couple. It had a bedroom, a kitchen separate from the central living area, a moderately-sized toilet and bath, and an extra room that the landlord had said was meant for storage but looked spacious enough to convert into a compact spare bedroom.

Or, as it turns out now, a nursery for their coming baby.

Ochaco watches from the bottom of the stepladder as Katsuki removes the plain bulb from the ceiling of the new nursery. She takes it from him to free his hand and then proceeds to float the lamp they had picked out the other day so he could fix it in place.

It's one of the only few fixtures for the nursery that Ochaco has so far had a hand in choosing. The crib, the changing table, and the shelf that now adorn the room had all been bought by Katsuki without her knowledge.

One evening, he had randomly brought up the idea of turning their extra room into a nursery. She agreed, they discussed a little about what they would need to buy, and then he dropped the topic, so she figured they would be leaving the shopping for when her due date is closer.

To her surprise though, delivery men turned up at their doorstep only three days later, bearing new furniture that Katsuki had ordered online.

Ochaco had pouted and whined about not having been involved in the decision-making, but Katsuki just snorted. Being the scrooge that she is, she would have just chosen the cheapest option for each item anyway. She puffed her cheeks and stuck her tongue out at him, unable to argue with the truth.

Not one for cutesy motifs, Katsuki had chosen neutral, classic pieces that make the new nursery look rather stylish despite the cramped space. Ochaco finds nothing to complain about, especially since he had even bought them with his own money, as opposed to using funds from their joint account.

When she asked him why, he shrugged and said that the stuff he bought are gifts to his daughter, not a shared household expense. Ochaco grinned at that, poking his cheek and teasing him about being tsundere. He snarled and swatted her hand away in annoyance. He hates that word.

It wouldn't be fair to call it a complete three-sixty, because that would imply that he hadn't been supportive from the start, and he was, but there certainly has been an improvement in Katsuki's general attitude toward the pregnancy ever since they learned the sex of their baby.

Somehow, that seemed to have humanized their child in Katsuki's mind and made the reality of his impending fatherhood more concrete. For the first time, he had looked at the sonogram of her womb like he finally truly understood that he was seeing the beginnings of a real person, one that he had helped create.

And whereas Ochaco used to have the impression that Katsuki had stayed mostly out of a sense of responsibility, he began to become more proactive when it came to matters involving her pregnancy.

But perhaps the most important development of all is that he has stopped looking so miserable whenever Kirishima tweets about his experiences with the Heroes League of America. Katsuki had tried to hide it, but Ochaco could tell how painful it had been for him to give up that program, and for a while she had been eaten up by guilt even though she knew she shouldn't be.

These days though, he doesn't seem so hung up on it anymore. Of course, Katsuki being Katsuki, he still has some choice words to say about Deku whenever the guy pops up in Kirishima's photos, but much to Ochaco's relief, she hears less and less of the bitter envy that he had never really been successful at concealing.

Katsuki finishes fixing the lamp and Ochaco goes to turn on the switch. It's nothing fancy, but it diffuses the light much better than a naked bulb and lends the room a cozier feel.

He descends the stepladder, folds it up, and puts it away, then he disappears into their bedroom to retrieve the rest of the items that they had bought the other day in their last round of baby shopping .

She's almost due now, just a few more weeks to go.

Katsuki returns to the nursery and together, they put up the final touches. They suspend a musical star mobile above the crib, stock the changing table with supplies, and fix a hook by the shelf for the baby sling to hang on.

Then they take a step back, standing side by side at the doorway, to admire their handiwork. Ochaco takes Katsuki's hand and leans her head on his shoulder.

The nursery is ready. They're ready. All that's left is for baby Kimiko to finally come into this world.

Immediately after they found out that their child is going to be a girl, Katsuki and Ochaco had begun seriously considering names.

They went back and forth on several suggestions, made by each other and by extended family, until they finally decided on one that they both agreed would be perfect.

'Kimiko', written to mean 'a child without equal'.

It was a suggestion made by Katsuki's father. A bit old-fashioned and not very unique as far as names go, but it strikes the right chord. It fits.

She's a child so precious that her father had given up an important stepping stone to his ambition. She's a child so loved that her mother would do the same in a heartbeat. Certainly, Masaru had said with one of his gentle smiles, for Katsuki and Ochaco, their daughter is a child without equal.

And she is. She definitely is.

Katsuki and Ochaco had looked at each other then, confirming with a warm gaze and a slight squeeze of their hands that they had found the perfect name for their baby.

Their first daughter is to be known as Kimiko, a child without equal.

Author's Notes:

Whew, this has been hard to write, and for a while I wasn't sure if I should just scrap this chapter altogether. We're in a transitional chapter, just after a conflict has been resolved and a new one has not come up yet, and in my mind I was like, is this chapter needed? Should I just go ahead to the next one?

But in the end I decided to keep it because I wanted to show how Katsuki's motivation changes from a sense of responsibility to actual excitement for their baby in a way that's a little more concrete than what's presented in the previous chapter.

Anyway, as you may have noticed by now, I love giving long-ass notes at the end of each chapter, and for this one I had to do a bit of research so I have lots to share.

1) In Japanese apartment jargon, LDK means 'living, dining, kitchen'. The number that precedes it refers to the number of bedrooms. Katsuki and Ochaco live in a 1LDK. The extra room is not stated in the description because it's just extra space. The average rent for a 1LDK in Tokyo is around 123,000 yen according to an online source.

Katsuki and Ochaco's apartment is based on an actual 1LDK apartment in Komagome that I found listed online. Of course there is nowhere in the fic that this is going to be relevant, but it helps me write when I have real stuff as basis. Now every time I'll write about their home life, I'll go on Google and check if what I'm describing is applicable to Komagome, so in a way my imagination will also be helped along by actual facts.

I chose Komagome because I needed a place that is accessible but not too expensive, and it fits the bill because it's apparently one of the cheaper metropolitan neighborhoods and it's served by the JR Yamanote Line, which connects important urban centers, where I imagine most top hero offices would be. It's also the site of two of Tokyo's most serene gardens, which I think Ochaco would love living close to, seeing as she's not a big city girl and thinks there should be more green spaces in cities. She said as much in an omake.

Finally, in a previous chapter I wrote about a 24-hour grocery in their neighborhood, which I had made up without any research, but then I found out while reading up on Komagome that they do have one of those even though it's apparently a rarity in Japan. I loved that happy coincidence so I took it as a sign that I've found the place I wanted.

2) Salaries are not big for fresh graduates, not even if you're from a good school. From what I read online, young workers get between 200,000 to 250,000 yen per month at the average, not including yearly bonuses. But I imagine pro heroes, especially the ones from UA, would be able to get a bit more. It is, after all, a job equivalent to being somewhat of a celebrity.

3) The name Kimiko. I don't speak Japanese, and I'm not good with comping up with names. I found the name Kimiko and its meaning on a website with baby names. I think 'a child without equal' fits well enough, so I decided to use it.

As always, thank you for reading. Do leave me a word if you can! :)