He leaves the collar on when he takes Mika to the no-kill shelter he usually goes to for this. They'll call the number on the tags, do their homework, and find out that the cat's owner has passed away. She's a cute cat even with her left eye missing. She's friendly and loving, white with gray-and-orange patchwork fur, and a trilling purr. She has a good chance of being adopted, and then she'll never have to go hungry by herself again.
(He gives the woman behind the counter his cell phone number, just in case.)
The whole incident makes him late getting home, but not late enough to miss dinner. Mom is still busy in the kitchen, so Izuku parks himself in front of the TV and turns it on. The volume is as high as they dare to keep it without disturbing the neighbors. It always is; it drowns out the strange whispering in the pipes, the odd door that slams on its own, and the myriad noises that could be written off as "the house settling" if they weren't so frequent. Izuku flips the channels listlessly, until coming to rest on the one he's looking for.
A jingle of faux-ethereal music signals the end of a commercial break, accompanied by a round of applause from the studio audience as the host of the show strides out on stage. His outfit is nothing short of gawdy, a spangled silver waistcoat over a pressed white shirt and bright blue slacks. Rounding off the ensemble is a bolo tie – a bolo tie, for heaven's sake – with a decorative half-moon clasp. The announcer introduces the flashy host with a moniker that makes Izuku cringe with secondhand embarrassment and purge it immediately from his memory.
There's a lot of sound effects, wild gesticulations and grandiose announcements in an amplified voice that drags out every vowel. Audience members approach the stage for the chance to be on TV for fifteen minutes, and the garishly-dressed show host proceeds to exorcise demons from one, make contact with another's deceased husband, and cure another of their recurring nightmares. At one point he swoons, staggering with the "effort" of using his "quirk". One audience participant is reduced to tears when the host holds an emotional one-sided conversation with her twin sister who died as a child.
The stage is empty but for the host and the crying woman. He's talking to thin air. He's been talking to thin air for as long as Izuku has been watching.
"I don't understand how you can watch things like this." His mother pauses at the doorway and steps in to stand right behind where Izuku is sitting. She leans on the back of the couch and sighs, shaking her head in disapproval. "Who greenlit this show, I wonder?"
"Why do you think people do this?" Izuku asks. He's not really expecting an answer, or looking for one. "Just… make up stuff like this and pass it off as real?"
His mother sighs again. "I think, maybe it's because… even in a world like ours, there are still impossible things. Or, things that everyone thinks is impossible." She drops a kiss on the top of his head. "Even if they may be wrong. And as long as there are impossible things, there will be people who want those things to be real." She snorts a little, then. "And as long as people want something, there will be others who use that want to make easy money."
"But it's not impossible," Izuku says quietly. His throat feels tight. "In the world we live in, we can't even know what impossible is." He waves a hand vaguely at the screen. "It's just because of stuff like this that everyone thinks it's a big joke."
He's still staring at the screen, watching the gawdy spectacle of a show, but he can feel his mother's eyes on him. He knows she worries.
"I know, Izuku," she says at length. "And of course it's not impossible – you're proof of that, aren't you? And one day… one day people will know that. I may not know much about ghosts, but if anyone can find a way, it's you." Another kiss, and Izuku manages a smile. "Thank your lucky stars you got your mother's brains. Don't worry about conmen like that. Your quirk is your own and nobody else's."
"It'd be nice if it was any good for hero work," Izuku mutters. "And even if it was, I'm still quirkless on paper, so no school's gonna want me-"
"Hey." Mom touches the side of his face gently. He looks up at her automatically, and his heart sinks a little at the pity on her face. "I'm sorry, Izuku. I know it isn't what you wanted. But you know, you don't have to be a pro hero to help people. You help people that heroes don't even know need help." She smiles again. "And I think that's really cool, don't you?"
Izuku changes the channel. When he doesn't reply, his mother finally leaves the room. His hand is a fist, almost painfully tight around his pencil as he tries to turn back to his homework. In spite of Mom's encouragement, the show has left him with a gross feeling in the pit of his stomach. It really isn't fair. It's like crying wolf, only everyone else has done the crying, and now that there really is a wolf on his hands, he's at a loss for what to do with it.
Hoping to lift his mood again, Izuku turns to the news to see if he can catch any superhero reports. There's not much – at some point during the afternoon, Kamui Woods stopped a corner store holdup, but beyond that it's been a quiet day. Izuku's interest wanes, and he finally turns his attention to school assignments while the news reports drone on in the background.
He's nearly done with his math homework for the day when the reporter's voice fizzles out. At first he doesn't notice, but then the static blares, and his pencil jerks and scores a dark line on his paper. Grumbling to himself, he shoots the TV a scowl. The screen blinks black, then static. The whiteness falters and shorts out, and for a split second it looks like the picture might be coming back. Or... a picture, anyway. It doesn't look much like the news. It looks like a video of an empty room, but it blinks out too rapidly for Izuku to tell for sure. As he watches, the image breaks up and gives way to static once more.
"Oh dear," Mom mutters as she passes through the room again. She picks up the remote and tries to change the channel, to no avail, before handing it to Izuku. "You know, this is the third time this week."
The static gives a violent jerk. As Izuku watches, a pale hand emerges from the screen, clawlike and grasping at empty air. The hand reaches down to the floor, nails scraping for purchase, and a head comes out next. Black hair, tangled and stringy, spills from the white static, followed by shoulders, another groping hand, and finally the pale apparition claws its way out of the screen and onto the living room floor.
"Well, let me know if anything changes," Mom sighs. "Dinner's almost ready."
"Okay," Izuku says. The corpselike figure drags itself across the carpet, face shrouded in dark hair. Izuku finishes the last math problem. His mother leaves the room.
The apparition grabs his ankle.
"I'm pretty sure that's bad for the TV," Izuku says, twitching his foot. Her hand feels cold, even through his sock.
The noise she makes in response sounds nothing like any noise that a little girl of eight or nine ought to make, but it does sound strikingly similar to the TV static. As if to prove him wrong, the screen blinks again, and the news is back.
"TV's okay, Mom!" he calls toward the kitchen.
"Oh, good! You two play nice, now!"
The couch cushion doesn't dip when the pale ghost sits beside him, but her dark, damp hair does get in the way when she leans over to look at his homework. Izuku scoots over, positioning himself so that he has room to work and she has a better view of it. "It's pretty boring, Rei," he says, a little apologetically. "Just math."
More ghostly rattling. Izuku has never heard her speak for as long as he's known her, and she's almost as old a friend as Bakugou was. That's all right, though. She doesn't need to talk to make him feel less lonely.