Bakugou Katsuki was twenty-six — same explosive attitude, a little more tired at the edges, and somehow even more impossible to read. He’d built his life on doing everything himself: training, patrols, paperwork, late nights, early mornings. He didn’t need help. He didn’t want pity. He raised his daughter, Hana, the same way he handled everything else — by gutting it out and refusing to quit.

Hana was four, loud and brilliant and already learning how to make tiny sparks with her hands. She had his temper and his stubbornness, but she also had a softness Bakugou hadn’t known he’d made. For a long time he told himself she didn’t need anyone else. “You got me,” he’d say, and that had been good enough — until it wasn’t.

She asked him, plain as day one night as he folded laundry on the couch: “Papa, why don’t I have a mom?” It hit him harder than any training injury. At first he brushed it off, told her she had him, and kept pushing. But the questions kept coming: at breakfast, at bedtime, in the quiet moments when he came home too late and she’d already fallen asleep on the couch waiting for him. They piled up until he couldn’t ignore the ache in his chest — the tiny, terrible fear that she would grow up learning to accept a single parent who was always gone.

Then you moved in next door.

You were polite, steady, and terrifyingly unbothered by Bakugou’s gruffness. You waved when you passed, smiled at Hana, and answered the small girl’s endless questions like it was the easiest thing in the world. You brought extra food because you “cooked too much,” you sat on the fence and listened to Hana’s stories, and you laughed in a way that made the little girl’s eyes light up.

Bakugou noticed. He also noticed how different Hana looked when you were around — softer, brighter, confident enough to test the world. He watched, arms crossed, pretending to be unimpressed, while Hana ran to you every time she saw you outside. Dinners started as favors: “Stay for one more bowl,” you’d say, and somehow one became two, then movie nights, then afternoons helping with homework.

Hana took it a step further than subtle hints. One evening she handed him a crayon drawing: three stick figures, one holding her hand, a big sun, and lots of scribbled hearts. “This is our family!” she declared proudly. Later, in her sweetest, most conspiratorial whisper, she told him, “You’d probably be friends with my Auntie Mina.” She beamed at you like you were already part of the crew.

That was it for him. He wasn’t built to be soft, but he was built to protect. He realized he didn’t want Hana to grow up with a parent who was always running on empty, who missed birthdays and recitals because work swallowed him whole. He didn’t want her to learn that being loved meant being second to the job. So when he found himself answering the little girl’s questions with you in mind — when he deliberately stayed home a night, when he let you teach Hana how to make rice the “right” way — he knew things were changing.

You never asked to be part of his life. You slipped into it quietly, like sunlight through a cracked window, bringing small consistent things: time, patience, a laugh Hana matched with her own. Bakugou said he didn’t need anyone. But Hana needed someone who would be there when he couldn’t be, and watching her, Bakugou found he wanted that person to be you.

One evening, after Hana had fallen asleep with your spare apron over her, you and Bakugou stood on the small balcony, city lights smeared across the night. He rubbed the back of his neck, voice rougher than usual.

“I don’t want her to grow up with one parent who’s never there because some job took all his time,” he said, blunt and honest. “I can do a lot alone, but I don’t want that for her.”