Disclaimer: I do not own MHA nor am I earning money from writing this. As a rule of thumb, if you recognize something in this fic, I probably do not own it.

"I might be going insane" – Normal speech
'It isn't normal to have voices in your head' – Thoughts, Writing
True – The voices in your head

Chapter 4

Inko Midoriya checked her watch. She had been sitting in the waiting room for just under two and a half hours, which had been spent as productively as one could spend them while sitting in a hospital waiting room. She had eaten some of the breakfast that she had brought with her, leaving the rest of the food for Izuku when he got out of the hospital. The last time she had been in the hospital for an extended period of time was when Izuku was born, and she doubted that the quality of hospital food had drastically improved since then.

She looked up as, for perhaps the tenth time that day, one of the doors that led to the hospital opened and a doctor came out. This time, however, the name that was called was hers, so with grace she stood up, using a minor application of her quirk to place her things in the bag she brought with her, and followed the doctor into the main hospital.

This doctor was the same one that she and Izuku had seen three days ago, Mayeda Shigeo. Over the intervening time, she had several interactions with the man, who was her main source of Information on how Izuku was doing. The two made small talk until they arrived at his office, where another doctor was sitting in one of the guest chairs.

As the door drifted shut behind them, the unnamed man stood up to introduce himself. "Good morning, Mayeda-san, Midoriya-san. I am Hamasaki Daichi and I work in the Faraday Wards, the subsection of the hospital where your son has been staying for the past three days. This morning I went through a psychological evaluation and overall, he seems clear to leave the hospital."

By this point, Inko had placed her bag down and was sitting in the other of the guest chairs. She absently noted that this was the chair Izuku had been sitting in last time, only noticeable by the holes in the fabric of the seat. At the news that Izuku had been given a psychological evaluation, she tensed up, hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. Upon hearing that he was cleared to leave the hospital, she slumped back in her chair worry forgotten in the face of such good news.

Daichi continued. "We just need you to confirm the baseline responses he gave us. Nothing serious, just questions about things like his favorite color, the names of his friends, and activities he enjoys doing. With the exception of his newfound interest in art, we just need to make sure that nothing has changed about him from an informed perspective."

Inko nodded along. The practice made sense – after all, some quirks were capable of affecting people's memories, and she certainly wasn't going to take any risks with Izuku's health. With her consent, the doctor continued.

"So, he says his name is Midoriya Izuku." At Inko's look of confusion, he elaborated. "I know that it seems like the most basic fact, but I assure you that we have to go through every answer he gave us." He looked back down at his ever-present clipboard and kept reading. "Again, he says his name is Midoriya Izuku."

Inko nodded.

"He told me that you, his mom, are named Midoriya Inko and that he doesn't have a dad. Can you tell us anything about this?"

Inko nodded, having told the story what seemed like a thousand times by now. "Izuku's father was a man named Midoriya Hisashi. When he found out that Izuku was going to be a boy and not a girl, he left me because he didn't want a quirkless child. Izuku hasn't ever known him, and I haven't had the heart to break it to Izuku."

Daichi took a metaphorical step back. "My condolences, Midoriya-san. He told us that your quirk, and I quote, 'let you pick things up that were really far away and bring them to you.' Is this accurate?"

Inko agreed with the childish description. "My quirk is called 'Attraction of Small Objects', and I regularly use it around the house. It's a fitting description, even if it isn't much of a quirk."

Not knowing how to tactfully respond, the psychologist moved on. "For friends, he mentioned someone named 'Kacchan'. Her name also came up when we asked him if any quirks had ever been used on him, though he denied that she had ever used her quirk on him as it would be too dangerous. Can you elaborate on this person?"

"Of course, I know her. One of my friends from college has a daughter Izuku's age, her name is Bakugou Katsumi, and they've been friends ever since they met each other. The two of us hang out all the time, and we let the two of them run around and play together. He calls her 'Kacchan' because he couldn't pronounce her name the first time they met, and it stuck."

The doctor nodded along as she spoke about some of the antics the two had gotten up to. "And the mention of her quirk?"

Here Inko was slightly flustered. "I don't actually know that much about the mechanism behind her quirk. I know that it allows her to create small explosions from the palm of their hands. Nothing major, of course, she is only four years old, but they make a small bang and a flash of light. Nothing mental in nature as far as we know."

The psychologist made a hum of agreement, confirming both of their descriptions matched to a certain degree. "Alright. There are a few quick ones here, so just let me know if anything sems different or out of place. His favorite color is green, his favorite food is katsudon, his favorite place outside of home is at a nearby park, he goes to Haruki preschool, and his favorite things to do are read, play with 'Kacchan', and most recently draw. From that list, is anything out of place?"

At this, Inko shook her head. "Outside of the drawing, everything you've said sis entirely correct."

The doctor nodded decisively. As he ran his hand down the side of the paper, making checkmarks as he went, he reached the bottom of the report, where he signed his name before passing the paper to Inko.

"Please sign your name below mine, and then as soon as Mayeda-san can file it this whole scenario will be put in Izuku's file for future reference."

As the two signed the form, Inko asked the question that had been on the back of her mind for the past three days. "So, when can I see Izuku again? Is he being released now?"

Daichi smiled knowingly. "If I know my co-worker, he's bringing Izuku here even as we speak. If I were a betting man, I'd place money on the two of them getting here in the next five minutes."

And sure enough, only three minutes later the door creaked open, with Izuku practically flying through upon seeing his mom sitting there. He was followed through the door by Ryota, who added the file folder that Izuku had dropped to the stack in his arms. Any further discussion was delayed for the next few minutes as Izuku and Inko had their reunion.

While the two were hugging and crying out their emotions from the past three days, Ryota went to a nearby office and took the two visitor chairs from the room so that everyone could have a seat. It ended up being a tighter fit than usual, but eventually all five of them were seated for the final official meeting of Izuku's time in the hospital. Unlike the last meeting he was in with Mayeda Shigeo, however, he paid significantly more attention to what was being said and the response from his quirk.

"So, we meet again today with the additional company of Kano Ryota and Hamasaki Daichi," Shigeo began, "to conclude Izuku's stay in the hospital. After a three-day stay in the Faraday Wards, he has been evaluated a mentally sound and is cleared to return home. Do any of you have anything you want to add to the official record?"

At the resounding silence from the room, broken only by the sounds of Izuku fidgeting with his armrest, Shigeo nodded and stood up. Izuku's eyes followed him as he walked to the file cabinet in the corner of the room, opened the third drawer down, and after a minute spent flipping through files, opened one labelled 'Midoriya Izuku' and slotted the file inside.

"Then the two of you are free to go." said the doctor as he returned to his seat.

As his mother stood up and placed the file folders of Izuku's art in the bag she brought with her, Izuku grabbed her hand and the two of them walked out of the room. Izuku briefly contemplated visiting the other doctors, like he had asked Ryota about, but promptly discarded the idea, wanting to spend as much time with his mom as possible. A quick pair of questions to his power confirmed his actions.

'I will be able to thank Kano-san's co-workers and boss another day.' True.

'I can come back here and visit them if I want to in the future.' True.

With these confirmations, he walked out of the hospital side-by-side with his mom. As he sat in the backseat of the car, his mom handed him the extra food to eat during the drive home. Between bites, he told his mom about the more mundane parts of his hospital experience, saving the revelation of his quirk and the paper in his right pocket until they were at home.

Although Inko was initially tense, carefully driving while paying attention to each word Izuku said, she relaxed the more she heard his voice from the backseat, simultaneously reassuring her that Izuku was there and giving her something to focus on in addition to the anxiety that had built up over the last three days.

When the two of them stepped out of the car and into their house, Izuku headed to the kitchen table, making multiple trips with the individual file folders from his mom's bag. As soon as he had finished with moving all of his artwork, he moved to the living room where his mom had collapsed on the couch and closed her eyes. In the rest of the house, Izuku could hear objects moving around, which would eventually result in more leftovers from the previous three days floating into the room and onto the coffee table. Izuku stood on the other side of the table, sending one final set of confirmations to his quirk.

'Telling mom about my quirk is a good idea.' True.

'Mom will believe me.' True.

'Mom is the only other person that can know about my quirk right now.' True.

Taking a deep breath, Izuku spoke up. "Mom?"

Inko opened her eyes, focusing on Izuku standing at the other side of the table with as serious of an expression as he could make on his face. "Yes, Izuku? Do you have something you want to tell me?"

Izuku decided to be as straightforward as he could. "Can you promise not to tell anybody else what I'm about to tell you? And also please wait until I finish explaining?"

This set of questions set off alarm bells in Inko's head, the same kind of feeling she had had when Izuku told her about the voice in his head the first time. However, despite how much she didn't want to hear any bad news from Izuku, she knew that she had to listen to what he had to say if something bad was going on. She schooled her expression, leaning forwards into a position of attention.

"I promise, Izuku."

Izuku took a deep breath. "I think I have a quirk. I know that it isn't supposed to be possible for some reason, but it's definitely real." Seeing his mother about to interrupt him despite her promise not to, a strange expression on her face, Izuku continued. "Mom, please guess a number, okay?"

Inko decided to play along, thinking of a number. She nodded to signal to him that she was ready.

"The number you were thinking of is thirty-six." Izuku confidently declared. "Do you want to guess another number?"

This sequence repeated itself twice, with Izuku correctly guessing the next two numbers. He then decided to move on. "If I had asked you to think of two more numbers, they would have been a hundred and eighteen and six." Here Izuku took a brief pause to pull his 50 yen coin out of his pocket. The piece of paper came out as well, so he decided to unfold it as well. Handing his mom the coin, he began the next segment of his demonstration.

Inko, who was confused and slightly worried about Izuku's correct guesses of the three random numbers that she had guessed, was wondering whether she would have chosen the two numbers Izuku had predicted if he had kept going, and had come to the unsettling realization that she probably would have.

Izuku derailed this train of thought buy pressing a coin into the palm of his mother's hand. "Can you flip this coin? I have the first twenty coinflip results written down on this paper, and you need to see that they match.

Inko made it thirteen coinflips into the sequence before she stopped. "Izuku, you need to tell me more about what is going on. How are you guessing all this? As much as I hate to say it, there is no possible way for you to have a quirk, and even if you did, there is no record of a quirk that can predict the future with this much accuracy. Please, Izuku, tell me what's happening."

Izuku flipped the paper over. "So you know the voice that was in my head?" At this, Inko immediately tensed up, ready but not willing to take him back to the hospital. "I was talking to it while I was in the hospital, and I found some things out about it. It can only say the words true and false, and it's always right! I asked it a lot of things, and it helped me get better at drawing, ant it told me that it was a quirk!"

Here Izuku's mood abruptly shifted. "It also said that it wasn't a good idea to let anybody but you know about it, and there are so many questions that I have that I just can't answer using it. So can you please not tell anyone and help me with it?"

Inko leaned back into the couch behind her, again closing her eyes. She could see why Izuku was nervous about telling her about the voice in his head, given her reaction the first time, but if Izuku had a quirk, which all signs pointed to, then his quirk was definitely right about how other people would react to him having a quirk.

At this point, they were happily interrupted by the arrival of their early lunch, comprised of food that Izuku would have eaten over the past three days.

"Izuku, let's take a small break and eat some lunch. Let me think about it, and then after lunch we can talk more about your quirk. Is there anything more that you want to tell me before we start eating?"

Izuku thought for a moment. "Oh yeah, there was one last example I had prepared for you." He flipped the paper back over before turning it to face Inko. "Here are tonight's winning lottery numbers."

Inko fainted.

Unaware of the bombshell he had just dropped on his mom, Izuku walked to the other side of the table and picked up a container of food, before turning around to climb onto the couch next to his mom. As he looked towards her, he noticed that she hadn't reacted to anything he said.

Izuku poked her in the side, calling out, "Mom?" to no response. After a few more attempts, Inko awoke, briefly thought about what she had heard before passing out, and then decided to compartmentalize it with the rest of the information she had just learned and think about it after lunch.

Lunch was a quiet affair that morning, with the two of them focused on eating in the presence of the other more than anything else. After the two finished up, they took the containers to the kitchen. As Izuku placed his dish on the counter next to the sink, Inko opened one of the file folders out of curiosity. What she saw shocked her more than the set of drawings Izuku had sent her via the hospital staff. The picture on top was a landscape drawn in pencil, easily recognizable as the local park that she and Mitsuki took Izuku and Katsumi to on weekends.

As she flipped through the drawings, she was struck by the talent her son apparently had for art. He had mentioned his quirk helping him with the art, but she couldn't see how a quirk that only answered true or false could make a four-year-old surpass the ability of most adults in less than three days.

When they sat back down at the coffee table, Inko brought up the question of how hos quirk had possibly helped him get better at art.

"Oh, it's really easy," Izuku began, before launching into a description of the most tedious and overcomplicated process she could imagine. "You just need to spend a lot of time at the beginning. I asked it if the point my pen was hovering over was the correct place to start a line for the final drawing to look like what I wanted to draw. Then I asked if the direction I wanted to draw a line in was correct, and then I found out what type of line it was and how long it was and then I drew it."

Izuku took a breath and kept going. "And then you do the same thing but a thousand more times and then the drawing is finished! Also, after a while it got easier to draw without asking all of those questions and then I started drawing new things. Yesterday I asked if it was helping me get better at art and I found out that it helped me get better at things I did because of its answers."

Izuku, having finished his explanation, gave his trademark grin to his mom, who weakly smiled back.

"I'm beginning to thing that you are the most patient four-year-old ever, young man." Inko replied after a short pause. "I can't think of anyone else I know doing nothing but repeatedly ask that many questions for even a few hours, let alone three days."

She then tried to guide the discussion back to the rules Izuku had come up with for his quirk. As she read through the list, she found that the only real rules were in the first two statements, with the rest of the "rules" being workarounds or methods that Izuku had found to make his quirk work more efficiently or things that Izuku could do to help improve his use of the quirk.

The things that she focused on were the limitation of his ability to ask questions and the lack of knowledge that he had. She felt the beginnings of an idea forming on how to help Izuku with his quirk, and it began the same place her desire to improve her usage of her own quirk – the library.

Inko had a sudden thought that she wanted to confirm. "Izuku, you wrote here that your quirk works in response to things that other people write – does that apply to things that other people say?"

With a second of delay, Izuku replied, "Yes, it says it does."

Inko nodded at the response. That would make everything go much faster. "Alright, can you run this by your quirk? The best place to improve your usage of your quirk is the library."

True.

Izuku relayed the affirmation, and shortly after the two of them were walking the few blocks between their house and the library. Upon entering the building, Inko walked Izuku to an empty study room before turning back to Izuku.

"So," she began, "I think what we should do for today is to use your quirk to find the most beneficial books in the library for your quirk, and then we take them home and relax for the rest of the day. I know you've probably missed playing with Kacchan, and you honestly need to spend some time running around. We have all the time in the world to make the most of your quirk, so there's no need to rush."

Izuku nodded. For the next five minutes, Izuku and his mom came up with a system for finding the most useful books as quickly as possible. Izuku would cycle through the list of sections that the library had, move to the section, and then split the section into halves with conditional statements until the search area had been limited to one shelf. Then, he would go through the shelf until he confirmed that the book he was looking at was one of the most useful books for him. The plan for today was to get four books, so Izuku went to work, running around the library while Inko followed behind.

The first book Izuku picked up was titled "How to Ask the Right Questions", which seemed pretty self-explanatory in how it would help Izuku in the immediate future. The next two books were on the same line of thought, albeit in a more general sense – "Quirk Analysis for Beginners" and "My First Encyclopedia". The fourth book that Izuku was guided to was a fantasy book titled "Path of the Swordsman".

It was surprising to Izuku that this book was selected as the fourth-most useful book in the library for him. It was just so out-of-place with the others, but Izuku trusted his quirk – if it said that this book was one of the most useful in the entire library, then Izuku wouldn't discard it out of hand.

Inko also had her own questions but rationalized that perhaps the most useful book for him would be one that allowed or encouraged him to relax at times.

Because the search for the first four books had gone faster than Inko had expected, she caved in to her son's request to find another book. The fifth and final book that Izuku's quirk led them to was a dictionary, a copy of which they already had at home.

As they walked back to the front of the library, Inko pulled out her library card and thought about the future of her only son. With his quirk, he could become a hero – maybe not a very strong one, but a support hero for someone that could benefit from the knowledge of the future. She was pretty sure that All Might herself had a sidekick at one point that could see glimpses of the future, and imagining Izuku working with Katsumi in the future to achieve the same effect was certainly an appealing thought.

After checking out the four books that they didn't already own, Inko and Izuku walked home. As the pair put everything away, Inko checked the time. It was nearing the end of preschool, which meant that Mitsuki and Katsumi would be over as soon as they could.

Apparently, Katsumi had been asking about Izuku being missing since the first day he was in the hospital, as the two usually played together on the weekends. Upon hearing that Izuku was in the hospital, she had thrown a minor tantrum that resulted in larger explosions than usual. Inko called Izuku to the living room to plan out the immediate future.

"So, Izuku," she began as Izuku took a seat next to her, "we need to sort out our story for Katsumi and her mom. Your quirk told you that it wasn't a good idea to tell anyone other than me about it, right?"

Izuku nodded.

"So, I was thinking that we should tell them the official story from the hospital, without mentioning your quirk. Maybe you could draw them some pictures or you could give them some of the pictures that you already drew to distract them, and otherwise just tell them what happened, okay?"

Izuku nodded along, then slid off of the couch. "Don't worry mom, I already have some pictures of Kacchan, so I'll grab those. Don't worry about the story, I had to come up with one good enough to fool the doctors in the hospital to let me out. But…" Izuku trailed off. "Can you tell me why I'm not supposed to have a quirk? Why my quirk is telling me that I can't tell anyone but you? My quirk is pretty good at helping me figure out everything except for why things happen, and it gets frustrating."

Inko thought of how best to break the news to Izuku. "Izuku, you know a lot of people that have quirks, right? Me, Katsumi, Mitsuki, some of your classmates, and All Might, right? What do all of us have in common?"

Izuku quickly thought about what they all had in common. After a few questions, he eventually came to one that his quirk agreed with.

'All of them are girls.' True.

Izuku's eyes widened. 'This is the answer to mom's question.' True.

'Only girls can have quirks.' False.

Izuku mentally rolled his eyes. 'Only girls are supposed to have quirks.' True.

When Izuku relayed his findings to his mom, she nodded. "For the last 200 years, only women have ever had quirks. I don't know exactly why, but maybe the books we got will help us find out. Izuku, this is why I was surprised about the voice in your head. If you were a girl, then it could have just been a quirk, but I thought it was somebody using a quirk on you. Now that you have a quirk, I don't know what to think. You could be the only boy with a quirk in the world, and that would be a problem."

Izuku nodded eagerly. "Yeah, my quirk agrees with your last sentence. But why is it a problem? I have a quirk! I can become a hero!"

Inko sighed. The current geopolitical situation was extremely chaotic, with entire regions of the world descended into lawlessness and anarchy. Even the more stable regions of the world, including Japan, were still rampant with crime, both from quirkless and quirked individuals. If the fact that a boy had a quirk was revealed, then there would be a massive conflict that would certainly endanger both her and her son.

She didn't want her son to be used as a test subject or experimented on to find out how he had a quirk, especially with some of the rumors she had heard.

"Izuku, you wouldn't understand why if I told you now. It's just… there are people who would do bad things to you if they found out that you had a quirk, and your quirk probably thinks that I'm the only person who won't tell anyone else because I care about you more than anyone else. Just trust me, okay?"

Izuku nodded, and moved over to hug his mom, looking up into her eyes. "Don't worry, mom. I trust you."

Inko hugged her son back. "Thank you, Izuku. Is there anything you want to do between now and when Katsumi comes over?"

Izuku thought for a moment, asking his quirk if there was anything he needed to do in the intervening time. Upon receiving a negative response, he cheerfully told his mom that he was going to draw some pictures until they arrived. Izuku took a sheet of blank paper from the printer that Inko used when she worked from home and began to draw a picture of himself and his mom in the library. This time, however, he was committed to not leaving an inch of white space on the page, shading everything from the ceiling to the books on the shelves.

This naturally took much more time than if Izuku was just drawing outlines with some shadows, like he did for Ryota's boss. Because of this, he was less than half done with his latest artwork by the time he heard familiar explosions from outside. As soon as the door opened, they became markedly louder, followed by a blur of a young girl slamming into Izuku with what was meant to be a hug but ended up as more of a tackle.

"IZUKU!" the girl shouted. "Where were you! Mom and Auntie Inko told me that you were in the hospital! You had better be okay or I'm going to hurt whoever put you in there!"

At this point, she realized that she was still squeezing the air out of Izuku's lungs, and loosened up to let him breathe.

"I'm fine, Kacchan. Mom thought that I was being mind-controlled by somebody else's quirk, but I'm fine. How are you?"

Through his explanation, Katsumi got angrier, contrary to Izuku's hopes. "What do you mean she thought you were being mind-controlled? That's not a good thing, Izuku! Why are you so calm about it!"

Izuku hugged his friend back. Don't worry, Kacchan. I'm fine now, and I had so much time to draw! I got really good at art, come on! Let me show you some of the things that I drew while I was in the hospital! There was this really nice guy who gave me as many pencils and as much paper as I wanted, so I drew so much!"

Izuku wormed his way out of Katsumi's strong grasp, before running to the kitchen where his artwork was still neatly stacked on the counter. Katsumi shook her head, temporarily alone in the room. Izuku was just as clueless and happy-go-lucky as ever, showing no sense of self-preservation as always. Even after something horrible could have happened to him, he was unchanged. It was just another sign that she had to become stronger to keep him safe, to become the strongest hero ever. She couldn't help but think that if she had been stronger, this wouldn't have happened to him.

She was broken from this train of thought but Izuku running back into the room with a folder in his hands. As he opened the folder and spread some of its contents across the floor between the two of them, Katsumi stared. She knew how well Izuku could draw, they had been friends forever. There were several drawings he had made on the fridge at her house, right next to hers.

While she had never been the best artist, the pictures that Izuku was still pulling out of the folder and spreading across the floor were significantly better than anything she could imagine drawing. Something was definitely off here, and she decided to call Izuku's bluff.

"There's no way you drew these, Izuku! I know how well you can draw, and you definitely didn't draw these." She consciously ignored the half-finished drawing that was sitting where Izuku had been when she had entered the room. "I bet you can't draw me this well, right now. While I'm sitting right in front of you."

Izuku wasn't usually the kind of person who took challenges like this, but over the past few days he had developed a sense of pride in his skills with art. Izuku looked Katsumi in the eyes, pulling a bland piece of paper from the stack he had removed from the printer earlier. Dragging his eyes away from his best friend, he picked up his pencil and started drawing.

Over the next four minutes, Katsumi managed to hold in her words as Izuku drew a picture of her, sitting there in front of him. He occasionally looked up for the sake of appearances, but her eyes were glued to the paper where Izuku was laying out the most detailed drawing she had ever seen him make. When he had finished drawing her and started drawing the room behind her, she couldn't help but glance behind herself to make sure that Izuku wasn't just drawing some random objects.

Less than ten minutes after he started, Izuku broke the silence by picking up the piece of paper and handing it to Katsumi with one of his cheerful declarations. "Here you go, Kacchan!"

Numbly, she took the picture. A random thought crossed her mind, that she was angry at him earlier. It quickly left as she shook her head, eager to test the limits of Izuku's new ability.

"Now draw me as a hero, Izuku! Draw me with lots of explosions and fighting villains and blowing things up!" she proclaimed, standing up in a heroic pose before Izuku, holding his most recent drawing in her left hand as she gestured with her right.

Izuku nodded, hoping to get her to calm down before the explosions started inside the house. Unfortunately, he was too late.

"Make sure you're looking, Izuku! I want the explosions to look like this, but bigger!" Izuku's impromptu art session was filled with the bright explosions of Katsumi's quirk as the two played with Izuku's newfound talent and Katsumi's quirk.

In the kitchen, Inko and Mitsuki sat in silence, drinking their afternoon tea. This breaking of this silence by the explosions from the living room prompted Mitsuki to speak, taking a more authoritative tone with her college friend than she usually did.

"Okay, Inko. Now that Izuku-kun is out of the hospital, you need to start giving me details. He's back with you and he's fine, so no more bursting into tears on me, okay?" Here her tone shifted. "I was really worried for you when you came over on Saturday and told us that Izuku was in the hospital, and I haven't heard a word from you since. I want to help you, Inko."

The earnest appeal from her longtime friend and fellow mother broke open the floodgates and Inko told Mitsuki the whole tale, minus the revelation of Izuku's quirk – from the imaginary friend that wasn't an imaginary friend to the Faraday Wards and not being able to be with Izuku for three days to the occasional news from the doctors, culminating in Izuku's discharge that morning. The whole time, Mitsuki nodded along, putting an arm around the emotional mother at times when she seemed on the verge of tears.

"Oh, it's just been a terrible weekend for me, Mitsuki. It's only been bad news from me, but at least I have Izuku back with me." Inko concluded her story. "If Izuku hadn't been passing me messages and drawings through the hospital staff, I don't know what I would have done. Have I showed you the drawings yet?"

Mitsuki shook her head, letting her friend do the talking.

"I suppose that's the one good thing that's come out of this mess. Here are the first set of drawings Izuku sent me, take a look." Inko pulled the papers, visibly bent in the impression of Inko's hands on the edges, from her bag.

As she looked through the drawings, she noticed a marked improvement in the quality of the artwork.

"He's gotten a lot better if he could draw all of these without being able to see them in person." Mitsuki commented, trying to prompt Inko into saying more.

"If you think that's good, just open one of those files on the table. He had nothing to do but draw for three days, and I'm pretty sure he finds his new hobby calming. If only I had something like that…" she trailed off.

Mitsuki, by this point, was halfway through the first file folder of artwork and felt like she had to say something. "Inko, these are really good art. Like, 'sell it for a profit' art. I know that a lot of interest in art died out with the rise of quirks, but people still pay a pretty penny for art that they like. If he wanted to, I know someone who could get your son's art put on exhibition. The fact that he's only four will definitely increase interest, and I don't think he'll have to work a day in his life if he's at all good with paints."

Inko, having only briefly considered this when the doctors had mentioned it, started thinking about it seriously. She knew that if Izuku wanted, he could win every lottery for the foreseeable future as many times as he wanted, but winning the lottery even once drew too much attention. For Izuku's quirk to be as useful as it could be, she reasoned, he needed the resources to carry out the plans his quirk could help him form without public scrutiny revealing his quirk.

While the most pressing resource for him was knowledge, in the future she could definitely see him relying on more material resources, including money, and the types of connections he could make by commissioning art for other people could help him.

The only drawback was that she, and most likely Izuku, didn't want to be hounded by the press, which was likely if he made real amounts of money from selling art. This warranted more thinking, and possibly the use of Izuku's quirk, at a later date. After all, Izuku was her son and his own person, not just a commodity.

As the explosions from the living room increased in volume, Inko sighed. "I'll ask Izuku about it later, and I'll let you know if he agrees. But for now, we should probably calm things down before my living room gets destroyed by our overzealous children.

With that final statement from Inko, the two mothers stood up and schooled their expressions into their practiced good cop/bad cop routine for managing their children before walking towards the source of the noise.