Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Out of however many inane holidays exist in this era of Quirks and Heroes, Amnesty Week has to be the stupidest.

All Might doesn’t even have a holiday. Yet. But the twelve buffoons two hundred years ago that managed to get themselves sentenced to death row over a crime they didn’t commit (because all of them were too busy either flirting with the detectives or threatening them with grievous bodily harm to actually get their side of the story straight) and then organized a prison riot that ended with one of them declared prison warden and pardoning the remaining eleven dumbasses, those people get to have their own holiday. And it’s a week off school. In September, no less, so the weather isn’t even nice yet, just wet and hot and miserable.

Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. Know what else is ridiculous? These fucking stairs.

Shoto stares down at the steps for longer than he’d admit under threat of death. They’re just the front steps to Heights Alliance, but with how his body twinges and aches every time he so much as breathes, they might as well be the Everest.

He doesn’t… need to go up the stairs. There’s a ramp, like, a meter away that would probably be easier on his knees. CRPD compliant, 1:16 slope ratio and all. UA is the most prestigious Hero school in the country.

Still.

It’s a matter of pride, maybe—Shoto’s always had a problem with that. If he takes the ramp, it means that he needs it; because his body, weak and useless and not used to the pain even though it’s been so long, was Endeavor’s to hurt for the week, and Shoto is still that dumb ten-year-old that kept asking for a break because he couldn’t handle a broken humerus. But he’s not. He’s not. And to prove it, he just has to go up the damn stairs.

He’s not even hurt, not anymore. It’s just that Dr Fukushima’s stupid fucking Quirk is about as uncomfortable as the man’s morals, and the more it has to work, the worse the aftermath of the healing is. Like a hangover, but you don’t even get to be drunk beforehand. Between Dr Fukushima, who’s permanently on standby, and the chauffeur that keeps making thinly veiled passes at him every time Shoto gets in the passenger seat, the Todoroki family single-handedly keeps every creep in Japan employed.

So. The stairs. Shoto stares a little harder. It’s getting kind of uncomfortable, just standing there under the scorching midday sun, head hanging low. The duffel in his hand feels like it weighs two times as much as he does.

It’s the pain or the cowardice.

All the talk about Shoto’s stoicism and inhuman pain tolerance is just that: talk. Shoto is human, in the broadest sense of the word. He gets scared and needs sleep, and he doesn’t like being in pain. Inside, his classmates are already unpacking their bags and eating lunch, which he knows because they won’t shut up about it in the class group chat. Shoto is from a different world than them, he knows. But also… they’re just inside, through the tall white doors.

Shoto sighs. He takes step after aching step up the stairs, knees twinging with every movement. When he reaches the top, it doesn’t even feel like he’s proved anything.

The scanner next to the door beeps and flashes green when Shoto presses his student ID to the reader. Heights Alliance is just as he left it a week ago, and the crisp, slightly scented air that greets him when he steps inside the common room has all the tension leaking from Shoto’s shoulders. Very few things in his life are safe, but the dorms? They’ve been his first haven.

“Dude!” someone shouts as Shoto pockets his ID. Half the class is lazing around in the common room, draped over couches, armchairs and loveseats. Denki waves clumsily from his spot on the rug, too close to the TV. “Shoto! Welcome back!”

Hitoshi snaps something about disturbing the sanctity of midday naps—Izuku is curled up on the couch next to him, sound asleep. Shoto smiles faintly. There are waves and scattered, quiet hellos as he drops his duffel on the floor next to an armchair. He’ll come back for it later. Some news broadcast chatters on about gas prices.

Tadaima, Shoto doesn’t say.

“Is there actually lunch in here or was that a logical ruse,” he asks flatly, instead. 

“Stop getting so close to the screen,” Hanta scolds, dragging a whining Denki back by the ear. “You’re ruining your eyes!”

Momo tucks her feet underneath her on the couch and smiles at him. “There’s pizza in the kitchen.”

Bless.

Shoto diverts course. Sure enough, boxes upon boxes of every kind of pizza imaginable litter every flat space available. One Aizawa-sensei litters the kitchen island. Shoto ignores the way his knees are telling him to sit the fuck down and leans over the granite to ransack the pepperoni box.

Aizawa hardly looks up from his coffee cup and the papers he’s browsing through, just nods vaguely at Shoto. He’d sit next to Sensei, but honestly, if he sits down now he won’t get back up again. He’ll settle for resting some of his weight on his elbows on the counter, and crash when he gets to his room later.

Shoto counts calories absently in his head, chewing on his pizza and on the knowledge that Aizawa… well, knows. Knows what? Knows. About Endeavor or about Mom, about the times Shoto drifts in homeroom because all he can focus on is the gnawing of his stomach—about something. Aizawa knows about something, and Shoto can’t figure out what it is.

Todoroki, stay behind after class.

Todoroki, if there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to come to me.

Todoroki, stand down. Are you injured?

Kindly, Shoto needs him to fuck off. Nothing good will come from Aizawa meddling in things that don’t concern him. Besides, Shoto’s not in any danger that he can’t handle himself.

(“You do this to yourself, Shoto.”)

Yes. He can handle himself.

“Good week?” Aizawa says at last, not looking up, and Shoto chokes a little.

“What was that?”

“How was your break?” Sensei rephrases.

That’s almost insulting. Small talk? From Aizawa? Shoto isn’t stupid. 

“Fine,” he says, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Same as it always is.”

Aizawa hums. He shuffles the papers and starts going to town with a red pen. Jesus fucking Christ, is that essay Shoto’s? He hopes not. Sensei scribbles something else down.

“Am I the last one back?” Shoto asks.

“Ah, no,” Sensei says. His coffee doesn’t even look like it’s hot anymore. “I’m still waiting on Hagakure and Tokoyami.”

It’s Shoto’s turn to hum noncommittally. He keeps chewing. Reaches over and bleeds warmth into Sensei’s mug when the man’s head is turned. It’s not until Shoto’s closed the pizza box and wandered over to the sink to wash his hands that Aizawa speaks again. Honestly, Shoto should’ve stopped getting startled every time the man opens his mouth by now.

“Are your knees bothering you?”

Why, oh, why does the universe want to see Shoto dead? He turns to face Aizawa and leans back against the sink, arms crossed.

“No.”

Sensei raises an eyebrow. “And are you lying to me?”

Well, yes. The urge to look away is strong, but Shoto resists. He stares at Aizawa’s scarred cheek instead, and hopes the man can’t tell that Shoto isn’t looking him in the eye.

“No,” Shoto sniffs petulantly.

Aizawa gives up on subtlety.

“Everything okay at home?”

“Everything is fine,” Shoto says, and they both know he’s lying. 

The thing about Aizawa-sensei is that he’s the first Hero Shoto ever met who deserved the title. Someone who the next generations are lucky to have in their corner. Between Hero work and teaching, he’s got his hands full, and yet Shoto has never seen him slacking in either. He holds their focus in class and pays attention to every single one of them, individually, helps them out with everything they need—whether that be academic or personal or combat-wise, and even extracurriculars. He never makes them feel like they’re wasting his time. Aizawa helps because he wants to.

The problem is that he’s good, and Shoto has already seen what Endeavor can do to good people. If Aizawa knew about what goes on behind closed doors in the Todoroki household, he’d try to do something about it, and maybe he’d get somewhat far. A case could be started—for child abuse or neglect, for the purchase of a person, for the Quirk marriage. With Aizawa’s name and connections, something could be done, certainly. Something could be done. Yes.

But not enough.

Whatever power Aizawa holds within the police force or the HPSC, Endeavor has multiplied by ten. No court would convict him. No civilian would believe the accusations. He owns the agency he works at. The power to damage reputations, to force legal action against his enemies, to blacklist people from entire industries—Endeavor has it and is happy to use it.

If Aizawa ruined his career as a Pro and as a teacher in an attempt to help someone who’s already doomed… Shoto would never forgive himself for letting it happen. Aizawa doesn’t deserve it. He can have his suspicions, his theories, but as long as Shoto doesn’t give him anything to work with, he can keep his conscience clean and know that he hasn’t ruined his teacher’s life. Shoto is an expert at lying through his teeth.

Endeavor is a forest fire that’s already been set. Who could even begin to douse it?

Even so…

Shoto hesitates.

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

It’s the first thing he’s said so far that’s true.

Aizawa puts his pen down and tries to hold his gaze. “Don’t I?”

Shoto does look away this time, out to the common room, where his classmates are melted into couches and rugs. No, Sensei doesn’t need to worry about him. But honestly… maybe he should anyway. Things have been… That is, ever since Endeavor became Number One, he’s been…

Shoto was not a loved child. Not really. With Mom gone, Touya dead, and Fuyumi not allowed to see him, Shoto’s childhood was just lonely. Natsuo didn’t even like him. But as much as Endeavor didn’t love Shoto, he loved the idea of Shoto. Endeavor loved his legacy, his reputation, his status as a top Hero. He loved the future that Shoto represented.

Shoto was not a loved child, but he was a useful one. And now? Now Shoto is worse than useless. He is dead weight dragging the Number One Hero down. There is one obvious way to solve this.

Would Endeavor kill him? Maybe. Not before, certainly. But now that Shoto has no purpose, maybe. Someone should probably care about that. Shoto… does not. Will not. He’s so tired of caring about whether he lives or dies.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” he says again, pushing off of the sink and uncrossing his arms.

Aizawa clearly doesn’t believe him; he’s too smart to be lied to like this. But that’s okay.

“Tell me if that changes,” Sensei says, yielding, and picks his red pen back up.

Shoto means to go up to his room, he really does. This conversation has gone on too long and is making him question things that are better off buried in the depths of his brain until they eventually kill him. Plus, he needs to unpack. But—the TV in the common room is fully visible from the kitchen. When Shoto hears his last name, he can’t help but be intrigued.

He leaves Aizawa behind and wanders over to the common room to stand behind the couch. On the TV, a news anchor is babbling on about—something to do with Endeavor?

“—has left us with many questions and no answers. Can our Number One Hero be trusted, now that we’ve seen his true colors?”

Jesus Christ. What now, did he hit another villain a little too hard? The media does this same song and dance every few weeks. At least the timing is good—Shoto won’t be back to the estate for a while. Endeavor always gets so pissy when he gets criticized publicly like this. Shoto has just been spared from another broken nose.

Izuku stirs on the couch, a mumbled, unintelligible question tumbling out of him, and raises his head, eyes half-lidded. Wild bedhead. Cute, Shoto thinks.

“We’ll let you decide for yourselves. I warn you beforehand,” the news anchor says, “the following video contains sensitive images of graphic violence, and might be disturbing for some viewers.”

“That’s… foreboding,” says Eijiro.

Mina turns to him. “You know what that word means?”

Shoto tilts his head. It’s been a while since Endeavor’s fights have gotten marked as ‘disturbing’ by the midday news. ‘Worrying’, sure, but ‘disturbing’ is a little much. Maybe—

The footage is not of one of Endeavor’s fights.

“Dude, is that literally just your bedroom?” Denki asks, grimacing.

The world ends.

These long breaks are so annoying.

September is dreary, miserable—the sun and rain cling to summer, and the last time it snowed seems like it was a lifetime ago. It’s always jarring, coming home from home. So stupid, too; the way he feels like his room here is emptier than his room at the dorms, even though both of them have the amount of decor you’d expect from a depressed spartan.

Shoto knows he’s gotten softer, and he’s not exactly happy about it—if only because it’s all well and good while he’s at UA, but as soon as he has to go back to Endeavor, a single well-placed punch or insult has him shutting down. It’s only Tuesday today, and Endeavor is due back home any time now. He could stay overseas on his stupid mission forever, for all Shoto cares, but Shoto has never been that lucky. His best bet is trying to finish up all of the take-home work they got for the week while he still has a few precious moments of calm, and he’s made decent progress on most of his homework. When Endeavor gets back, Shoto will be too tired, too sore, too on edge to bother with all the art movements from the 19th century, so he might as well get all his shit done now. He’s gotten so—something. He can’t even think with Endeavor in the house.

Which brings him here. Sitting at his desk, hunched over a Japanese History worksheet with his head leaned on one hand and muttering to himself.

“Oh, come to UA,” he says mutinously. “The homework is just… one metric fuck-ton. And we won’t even—”

The door slamming open breaks him out of his reverie. Shoto goes completely still, which is maybe his version of a normal person’s startled shout. But upon seeing who it is, he just huffs and goes back to his homework.

“Christ, Yumi,” he grumbles, scribbling something down. “Ever heard of knocking?”

One second passes without an answer. Two.

Shoto’s pencil falters on the page, and he looks up again to see Fuyumi, and she’s—

She’s…

Well.

He doesn’t usually see Fuyumi when she freaks out. She’s good at putting on a strong face for him, and Shoto would tell her that he doesn’t need her to, but he—does. He hadn’t realized until recently just how much of his composure hinges on Fuyumi’s. When the most optimistic member of their fucked up family feels that things have gone to shit, it’s time to get scared.

Like. You know. Now. Because Fuyumi’s at his door, eyes hollow and terrified, sweat beading, uncharacteristically, at her temples, and—

And.

She’s looking at him like that. Like he—

“What the fuck did you do?”

Her voice trembles. A crash comes from downstairs. Oh.

“Is that…?”

“He got home like two seconds ago and he’s trashing the place, screaming about how you think he’s an idiot and—” Another crash. The loud rush of air being replaced with fire. Fuyumi’s eyes are wide, crazed. “What did you do—?”

Homework abandoned, he digs his futon out of his closet and lays it out, ignoring how Fuyumi steps into the room and closes the door behind her. He won’t be in any state to do this when he comes back, and he’d rather not sleep on the floor.

“You have to leave.”

“Shoto, what?”

He throws his phone inside a desk drawer, locks it.

“Go to Natsu’s and lie low, just until this is all over—”

“Why would I—?!”

“Don’t come back until I tell you it’s safe—”

“I’m not leaving—”

Shoto turns to face her.

“Touya’s alive. He’s Dabi.”

Silence descends upon them like a swarm of gnats. There’s something to be said, Shoto thinks, about how the Todoroki name hangs over them like a well-placed axe. How even when they don’t want to hurt each other, he still finds himself with a knife in her gut.

Though it comes from her, Fuyumi’s entire body shivers with the rush of cold air that floods the room. Shoto’s own Quirk has to scramble to catch up and adjust. He can see it on her face, the instinctual denial, the frantic thoughts—that he must be lying, or going crazy, that he stopped taking his meds, that he’s being deceived.

He can see, also, the moment when she realizes that none of that is true. Shoto is, arguably, the single most sane and grounded person in this family—through no fault of his own. Just because it’s not safe for him to be anything else. He takes his meds dutifully, though he complains about it just as often, and he is not stupid enough to fall for that kind of hoax.

And why, ever, would he lie about something like this?

“What?” Fuyumi says faintly.

Shoto wedges the knife deeper.

“I’ve known for about a month now. I didn’t—tell anyone. At all. If Endeavor’s just found out, and found out that I know, then—”

God, Shoto’s such a coward. He doesn’t even want to say it.

“I’m sorry,” he says to her, even though he isn’t, really. He’d do it again. He just wishes it didn’t have to be like this.

There is no version of tonight that doesn’t end with the house gone up in flames. There will be a fight, and it will be ugly, and there won’t be anything Fuyumi can do. After normal training sessions, sometimes she can help him, skilled hands flitting over bandages and salve. Most days, Shoto doesn’t exit the dojo too beaten up. Not anymore. He’ll have some mild burns here and there, bruises, cuts from where skin scraped against ice, but nothing major.

When Shoto makes a mistake of this magnitude, however, he pays in blood.

There’s no point to Fuyumi being here. Shoto will be punished no matter what she says or does, and will probably be injured enough by the end of it that basic first aid will be rendered obsolete. Which is, of course, when Dr Fukushima will pay a visit to the Todoroki estate. His Quirk is uncomfortable and wholly unnatural, but it heals up even the worst of burns.

Fuyumi—knows this. She drags her hands over her face and then hooks her thumbs between her teeth, biting down harshly in a nervous gesture that Shoto finds himself replicating all too often.

“I could stay,” Fuyumi says, twisting her fingers in front of her now, but it’s feeble.

“Fuyumi. I’m not saying it just to be a dick, I’m—I…” He huffs, frustrated. Tired. “You know how he gets. If he bashes your head in on a fucking wall, what am I supposed to do?”

It’s a low blow, and he knows it. He hates to do this, he really does—but Endeavor is going to lose his fucking mind, and Fuyumi can’t be here for that.

Shoto is so selfish. If something happened to Fuyumi…

His door locks from the outside. They step out into the hallway warily, watching their steps and sticking close to the walls. The door shuts with a quiet click, and then he can’t stall any longer.

“Call me as soon as you can,” Fuyumi says lowly.

Tell me it’s fine, Shoto thinks. Tell me everything’s going to be okay, that you’ll take me away and we’ll all be safe.

“I will,” he says. Mom used to say that they would run away someday, all five of them. Shoto can’t remember when he stopped believing her.

“I’ll—I’ll head to Natsu’s, stay the night. And then—”

She stops. Purses her lips. The house is silent.

“Yumi,” Shoto says quietly. “When you said you’d find a place… were you lying so I’d feel better?”

About a week ago, now, maybe more; feels like a lifetime. Despite everything, Fuyumi’s lips twitch into a smile.

“No,” she says. “I haven’t signed, yet, but. It’s a nice little apartment. Closer to UA, so I thought… maybe, if we can swing it…”

He swallows. They won’t be able to. He hopes she knows that. It’s almost cruel, to hold that in front of him like this. He won’t ever be able to reach it. He dismisses the wounded animal howling in his head.

“That’s nice. Maybe.”

Fuyumi steps closer. Shoto, annoyed at the instinctual urge to step back, bites at his lip. He’s unsure what to do with his hands.

“Stay safe,” Fuyumi says. He nods absently, looking away, but she places a hand on his unscarred cheek and makes him face her. “ No. No, don’t just nod and then do whatever you want, listen to me, Shoto. Stay safe.”

Something unspeakable passes between them.

“I will,” Shoto says again.

“I love you,” says Fuyumi. She says it like it’s true. He closes his eyes.

“I know.”

He’s taller than Fuyumi by quite a few centimeters, now. She has to tug his head down to press a kiss to his hairline. Her hands linger on his face, though she doesn’t touch the scar.

Then she’s gone.

He hears her footsteps fade away and doesn’t open his eyes to see how she leaves him. Shoto is an expert at that. He counts to twenty and then steels himself. Breathes deep. Walks down the stairs and heads, open-eyed, into his death.

Chapter Text

Every step is another word in his death sentence.

The list of his crimes is lengthy and damning. That he was too foolish to avoid setting these events in motion, or else is too weak to stop what he already knows is coming. That he was arrogant in thinking he could make things work, for once. That he was childish. That he was born.

It doesn’t matter anymore.

Shoto pauses at the bottom of the stairs. Fuyumi is gone now. The only person in this house left for Endeavor to hurt is him. He tells himself, firmly, that this is a good thing.

The living room is smouldering. Shoto presses his right hand to the blackened arm of a couch and lets a thin layer of ice engulf the room. The smoke in the air stills.

Well. At least it’s not… as on fire. Anymore. It does look, appropriately, like it was recently ablaze, but—well. Shoto will worry about that once the fighting is done.

“Good grief,” he mutters to himself. As if on cue, a resounding crash comes from the training room.

He’d hoped…

He shouldn’t’ve. He doesn’t know why he keeps thinking… Maybe because for a short time, after becoming Number One, Endeavor had just… stopped paying attention to him. He’d had his little tantrum on the day of, but shortly afterwards was so swamped with paperwork and double-triple-quadruple shifts that he didn’t have the time for Shoto, and Shoto, well, he kind of thought—hoped, more like—that now that Endeavor finally had what he wanted, he’d…

It was stupid. Childish.

Shoto ghosts a hand over the wall as he nears the training room. His steps stutter—the door is open, and the heat coming from inside is hellish. After the blizzard Fuyumi had set off in his room, his Quirk flares up again in the opposite direction, exasperated and exhausted with him. If it could, Shoto imagines that it would drag him by the ear out of this house and into a police station.

As it is, he walks into the training room with no more hesitation. The air shivers with heat that Shoto barely feels, and there’s Endeavor, hunched over a familiar picture frame. He doesn’t turn to face Shoto, but they both know that he knows Shoto is there. His breathing is heavy, and Hellflame, livid, snarls and thrashes against the wood and tatami. Machines are knocked over and smoking, walls charred. Funnily enough, the only thing not on fire is Endeavor, but everywhere else is… Some flames reach the high ceiling.

It smells like smoke and burnt straw. Doesn’t it always?

Endeavor unfolds like a beast, like a dragon. He’s so tall… Shoto had a growth spurt in his last year of middle school, but Endeavor still towers over him. Tall and packed with muscle and—Touya’s portrait clatters to the floor.

“Do you take me for a fool, boy?”

His voice is low and dangerous, but though anyone else’s would be raspy from all the smoke, Endeavor’s—isn’t.

It’s almost funny. Isn’t he just invincible?

Shoto swallows. Stay alive, was that what Fuyumi said?

“No, sir.”

Endeavor half turns. Over his shoulder, he raises a single eyebrow.

“You’ve remembered your manners.”

Shoto says nothing.

They play this game, sometimes. When Shoto fucks up really bad. Once at a gala, stuffed into a perfectly fitted suit that tugged all over, he primly told the son of some politician exactly where he could shove his comments on Shoto’s scar. If there’s one thing that Endeavor values, it’s his reputation. Number Two or Number One, it doesn’t matter; he needs people to think he’s the strongest. Unbothered by the words of any nobodies. Which is why Shoto, who is merely an extension of the Todoroki name, cannot afford to be ruffled.

There’s nothing quite like being eleven, face pressed firmly against the tatami, tasting your own blood and the enamel of a broken tooth, to realize how badly you’ve fucked up.

So they play pretend.

Endeavor, the long-suffering father, the Hero, firm and steadfast as a rock. A man with his son’s best interests in mind, who, in the face of Shoto’s unreasonable behavior, remains a firm and heavy guiding hand.

Shoto, the misbehaving child, stubborn in his ways but cowed, for once.

It’s nothing but a farce, but it serves its purpose—namely, assuring Endeavor that Shoto still knows his place. That he can fume and snap and snarl, but the end of the day will find him walking into the training room obediently, ice and fire crawling on his hands. It’s a, You get away with so much, Shoto. An, I give you everything, and you want more?

Shoto bows to his father. The submission, in turn, serves him. See? it says. I know how to behave. And then when Endeavor breaks skin, breaks teeth, bends limbs and joints to his will, they can pretend that it’s because he loves Shoto. That’s just how it goes. So there is a precedent for this. Shoto knows what he needs to do, and he knows what will happen. Just… he’s never fucked up this bad before. And, well…

Endeavor is Number One now, and there’s not much use for Shoto, anymore.

He doesn’t straighten, even as Endeavor takes step after slow, heavy step towards him. He only gets up when the heat in the room goes from dizzying to suffocating. This, too, is familiar. Endeavor strikes, and Shoto dodges. Endeavor calls to fire, and Shoto calls to ice. This is how it’s always been.

“I’m sure you thought it clever,” Endeavor says lightly. Shoto, on overdrive, stays light on his feet and ready to dodge again. “Did you think I would never find out?” He sounds genuinely curious.

“I don’t know what I thought,” Shoto says truthfully.

He leans away, but the burst of fire clips him on the shoulder. He steps back, but Endeavor is faster. It’s not a punch. The heel of his palm lands on Shoto’s nose, and he feels when the bone gives with a sickening crunching noise. Blindly, he grabs Endeavor’s arm and drops the temperature—can’t even enjoy the muffled grunt of pain Endeavor gives when the muscle contracts.

He grabs at his face and his nose is pouring blood, fuck, what—

Shoto swallows copper and trips over his own feet moving out of the way of his father’s right hook.

Don’t throw up. Oh my fucking god, do not throw up.

The more they move, the smaller the room gets. Shoto hasn’t used any fire yet, but Endeavor has more than enough for the both of them. Every time his Quirk flares, another section of tatami catches. For it to stay burning instead of fizzling out once the fuel has been consumed, he has to be keeping it—

Endeavor is—

“You’ve wasted my time and you’ve lied to me, Shoto,” Endeavor hisses. “Apologize.”

“I’m sorry,” he tries, garbled by the blood he’s still swallowing.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Shoto dodges another burst of fire.

They move around each other in a well-practiced dance. It’s getting hard to see with all the smoke clouding the room, but Shoto is used to fighting blind. He throws up an ice wall that Endeavor melts in an instant, but it buys him enough time to duck low and aim to break his father’s stance. Hellflame sputters, recovers quickly, and then a flash fire engulfs the room—only enough to stun, really, but the heat is—is—

“If you thought you were saving him,” Endeavor snarls, “you know nothing of the world. Your brother was doomed from the start, boy. It doesn’t matter how long you train it—a mutt is always a mutt.”

And Shoto is on the floor, face down, too warm. Pinned under his father. This is where they always end up. The wristhold—hurts, it always does, but the body is temporary and—and every sensation is felt in the brain, really. Shoto breathes. Chokes. The splintered bone in his nose grinds against cartilage and muscle. Pain is just information, that’s all. An evolutionary tool to help you understand why you shouldn’t touch a hot stove, or talk back to your father. Once the noxious stimulus is removed, the body feels no further threat to its continued survival, and the pain—stops. So it’s not real.

It doesn’t matter how many times he tells himself this. Of pain, all you can think is that it hurts.

“I’ll ask you this,” his father says conversationally. “What are some things that are earned?”

His hands on Shoto’s right wrist and shoulder are overheated. Shoto tries to raise his head but fuck, Endeavor’s just too strong, too fucking heavy. In the end, Shoto gives up like he always does. He pants into the tatami.

“Sleep,” he says breathlessly. “Food. Water. Ngh. Rest.”

“What else?”

Heat. Heat.

“I don’t—I don’t know. Fuck, I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

“Respect, Shoto. Respect is earned. Do you think I’ve earned it?”

I’m going to fucking kill you, Shoto thinks. You deserve to rot in hell. That’s what you’ve earned.

Shoto is weak.

“Yes—Yes, sir.”

“Then why don’t you ever seem to show it to me?”

Shoto drags the temperature of his right side down by a truly unadvisable number of degrees. His head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, so much so that he barely registers Endeavor’s weight lurching off of him. His muscles scream with relief and new pain.

He turns over onto his back. The room is still on fire, and the effort of conjuring even the idea of ice is almost unfathomable, but Endeavor won’t be stunned for long and—

What has to be done has to be done. It will wait for no one.

Shoto staggers to his knees and holds his arms in front of him.

Temperature is a funny thing. Quirks, even more so. Thermal energy will always bleed from hot to cold, and cold is just the absence of heat. His left and right sides are one and the same—he understands that now. It’s one Quirk. A perfect one.

The power comes from his core, and the ice crawls through his veins over to his left side—tentatively, as if it doesn’t know if it’s allowed. The temperature drops. His temperature drops, on his entire body, and then—there it is. Anything that can be given can be taken away. When the heat recedes, the ice floods under his skin.

Shoto is his father’s masterpiece.

The fire eating at the floor and walls dims, stutters, flares… goes out. Shoto’s breath is loud in the sudden emptiness of the dojo, puffing out in front of him in little white clouds. It’s cold. He’s so cold. Like never before. The freezing air fills the room—and what flame could survive here? Endeavor stares, face slack, unmoving. Shoto—has gained some time, but… he knows he hasn’t won. He needs to run. He needs to…

Endeavor is on his feet, walking slowly towards him, and Shoto can’t keep this up forever. His arms are shaking with the effort of holding themselves up, and Endeavor—

“That strength, boy… that power… I gave it to you. I made you into everything you are today. Never forget that.”

Shoto drops.

He falls backwards on his ass just as the fire breathes anew, surrounding them, closing in. Hellflame crawls up Endeavor’s body, settles on his shoulders, over his head like a flaming halo. Red fire turns orange and orange fire turns white, and then the white fire suffocating the room starts to tinge blue at the edges.

Anger bleeds into fear.

“You’re gonna kill me!” Shoto screeches. “You’re gonna fucking kill me, stop! Stop—!”

He scrambles back, hands scraping against the tatami. He doesn’t think he’s ever been this scared. Endeavor advances steadily. Looks like a demon. Fire enshrouds him.

“Dad, please,” Shoto breathes out. His heart is trying to beat out of his chest. “Dad. Dad.”

His voice is high and thready, terrified. He’s never broken down, never begged like this. Never had reason to. He doesn’t want to die. What will it do to Mom, to lose her oldest and youngest to the same monster? Endeavor inches closer and he smells like smoke and burnt plastic. He makes no expression. He says nothing. Shoto’s vision goes grey at the edges, then blacks out.

He’s on his stomach again, cheek to the floor, Endeavor’s knee on his back, his hand on the back of Shoto’s neck.

Ten years he’s been bleeding on this dojo’s floor, but he’s never felt death breathing down his neck quite like this. Sure, there have been times—Endeavor’s hand around his throat, Endeavor’s fire engulfing the room, Endeavor’s fist in his gut—where Shoto has thought, shit, I’m gonna die. But those have all been heat-of-the-moment, Shoto’s tendency of exaggeration and self-pity coalescing into a temporary weakness. Later, he wraps bandages too tight and scoffs at himself.

This is… not that.

It feels like his vision sharpens. One last moment of clarity. Through his one good eye he can see, as if through a magnifying glass, the spot where the wall meets the floor, tatami melting into plywood. There’s a small stain there, probably blood. With the way Shoto’s head is turned, it kind of looks like a star.

Endeavor is going to kill me.

(Later, he’ll hate himself so acutely it’ll leave him breathless. Convinced these are his last moments, Shoto doesn’t think of Mom, who loves him more than life itself. He doesn’t think of Touya, who protected him, or Fuyumi, who raised him, or Natsuo, who keeps him sane these days. Shoto doesn’t think of Izuku, of Momo, of Hanta, of Eijiro or Katsuki or Denki or Tsu or Hitoshi, or any of the people who, more than just classmates, have been his first friends. He doesn’t think of Aizawa-sensei, his first real teacher, who wrote his number on a piece of paper and closed Shoto’s fist around it, who said any day, any time, if you call, I’ll pick up, who keeps asking and asking and asking, if Shoto’s safe, if he’s okay, if he wants to talk.

In the end, Shoto is the same kind of coward he always has been.)

Maybe… Maybe now he can finally rest.

Shoto closes his eyes.

They always end up doing more stalling than actual studying, but Shoto doesn’t mind all that much. Whenever Izuku asks, he says yes.

Sometimes Izuku knocks on Shoto’s door bearing pillows and a truly impressive amount of All Might blankets, and they pile them up and make a little nest on the tatami. That way they can pretend that they’re pressed close to each other because there’s little space, and not as an excuse to cuddle. Well, Shoto pretends. Izuku mostly just says, You’re so warm, Shoto-kun! It’s cozy! And Shoto, who usually prefers to play a game called Let’s See How Cold The Human Body Can Get Without Inducing Hypothermia, doesn’t tell him that, whenever he’s around, Shoto’s taken to becoming little more than a space heater in hopes that Izuku will stay close and look at him like that. Like he’s doing something good. Like he’s being good.

Yeah. Shoto tries not to think about it too hard.

Half the time, they end up in Izuku’s room instead, the ever-present eyes of Poster All Might, Figurine All Might, and Framed Picture All Might—among many others—staring at them while they giggle at their own jokes like children and do everything apart from the homework they were supposed to complete.

And Izuku likes to talk. They laze around in his room while he chats Shoto’s ear off and he’s pretty, pretty, pretty. Smart and powerful, passionate, so kind it makes Shoto’s head spin. Shoto lays back on Izuku’s bed and watches him ramble on, telling stories and recounting fights with full-body gestures. He doesn’t allow himself many indulgences, but—

It’s Izuku. What else is there to say?

Today, he opens the door of Shoto’s balcony so they can catch the last of the sunset, All Might blankets and Hero-themed plushies scattered across the floor—as is their completed homework—and two cups of tea on Shoto’s desk that have long-since gone cold. Shoto sits cross-legged in the mess, and tries to commit him to memory.

“I’m proud of us!” Izuku asserts, tying a cord around the curtains so that they’ll stay. He turns to Shoto and smiles. “We got all our stuff done!”

“For once,” Shoto agrees. Now they have the rest of the evening to do whatever.

Izuku drops to the floor next to him in a heap of limbs. Shoto, unsure if it’s fine to touch, bites at his knuckles instead. It’s a bad habit he’s never managed to kick, and his teeth dig deep as he watches Izuku flop onto his back. His curls are askew, shirt rumpled from moving around.

“You wanna watch a movie?”

“No,” Shoto says, because he can think of something better. “You were telling me about Rust…?”

Izuku perks up. “Oh, yeah! I really think she might jump a few spots by the next ranking, that team-up with Present Mic was—”

He pauses. Shoto, who was trying to count his freckles, startles a bit. Izuku is biting at his lip, hesitant and… embarrassed, maybe.

“You don’t have to, um,” he starts, and then seems to lose his train of thought. “We can talk about something else! I’ve been rambling all afternoon,” he laughs lightly.

“I don’t mind,” Shoto tells him honestly. “I like hearing you talk.”

“Ah!” Izuku chirps. He laughs again, shaking his head briefly as if trying to get water off his hair. He does that when he’s happy. “That’s—That’s really sweet.”

Shoto keeps his temperature carefully even (and warm). He doesn’t think sweet is the right word for it. He likes hearing Izuku talk, so he wants Izuku to ramble to him. He’s fond of Izuku’s Hero analysis, which is spot-on a vast majority of the time, and his long tangents on support items, and the way his curls bounce when he throws his hands up and goes, It’s so odd, Shoto-kun! I wonder what happened there…

Shoto likes it, so he wants to see it. He wants Izuku to want him to see it. Like, rambling to himself in his room and then remembering that he can go talk Shoto’s ear off, instead. He wants Izuku to come in without knocking, already four hundred words into his essay.

Izuku studies him carefully, eyes bright and calculating. Shoto’s heartbeat gives a little jolt.

“What?” he asks, not really nervous, but—something.

“Nothing. You’re very kind, Shoto-kun,” Izuku says simply. 

“Oh, not at all,” Shoto says, instant and instinctual. After a beat, he realizes that might’ve been disrespectful. “Sorry. Just… I’m way more selfish than you think. It doesn’t bother me.”

Izuku frowns.

“Selfish…” he repeats. “Why do you say that?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Shoto maintains, and Izuku purses his lips but, uncharacteristically, doesn’t push.

He fiddles with his hands and thinks, instead. Shoto can tell because he makes the same face he does in third-period math. So he lets Izuku organize his thoughts and looks out the window instead, where navy has already started to bleed into the orange-pink of the sunset, dim spots of light scattered in the darkest parts. Here in the city, it’s impossible to get a good view of the stars, but Shoto remembers Mom telling him about a time her uncle took her out in his little fishing boat in the early hours of the late night.

“There were so many,” she was fond of recalling, “I thought the sky was going to fall right on top of me.”

Shoto’s always wanted to see the stars like that. To feel like he’s not the only small one. But what Shoto wants doesn’t really matter, at least not for now.

Maybe, when he’s older, when he gets Mom released from the hospital and Natsuo’s done with university, and Fuyumi finally, finally moves out, Shoto can make a trip out to the mountains. It’s fine if he never gets out from under Endeavor completely, and he doesn’t think he will, but if he can get everyone else safe, then he can probably… get some more freedom, or…

“Amnesty Week is, um, soon,” Izuku says carefully. Shoto drags his eyes back to him. “Are you…?”

Oh. So that’s what this is about. Izuku doesn’t look at him, eyes fixed firmly on the ceiling. Amnesty Week isn’t for another month or so.

“I have to.”

A long few seconds pass in silence.

“You’ll get hurt.”

“It’s fine.”

“I don’t think it is,” Izuku insists.

“He already called the school,” Shoto tells him. Even if UA was planning to keep the students in the dorms for the week-long break, Endeavor would’ve gotten special permission to take Shoto out for training.

“How do you know?”

“He called me, too.”

It wasn’t a fun phone call. Endeavor’s been… Really, ever since he got the official Number One title, it’s almost like…

Shoto loathes to say it, but—it scares him a bit. He’s never been disposable in Endeavor’s eyes before; that was reserved for his siblings and his mother, the former deemed failures and the latter a thing that had already served its purpose. Shoto is—fucked in the head, that he still wants to be useful to Endeavor, but… being the masterpiece awarded him with a level of protection that no one else in the family had. He always knew Endeavor wouldn’t risk going too far and damaging him permanently. During particularly harsh training sessions, this was often what kept him going—that it would end eventually, and Shoto would heal. That if he got too hurt, Endeavor would summon Dr Fukushima, and he would never let Shoto die.

Shoto would never burn like Touya did. And maybe it’s selfish of him, or cowardly, or—he doesn’t know, but he wants to keep that safety. Having Endeavor as Number One is… It’s good for Japan, and Shoto knows this. Endeavor has the highest number of resolved cases in recent history. But it renders Shoto useless, and Shoto—

He doesn’t want to find out what’ll happen when Endeavor finally realizes this.

“I can’t… I can’t keep doing nothing about this.” Izuku still won’t look at him. Shoto shifts. His right leg is falling asleep. “We… I can come up with a plan, to—to help you. We can figure something out.”

“And do what?” Shoto asks mildly. “Tell a teacher? How’d that work out for you?”

Izuku finally turns his head to look at him. He looks—hurt. Shoto shouldn’t’ve said that.

“That’s not fair, Shoto-kun,” Izuku says firmly, “it’s not the same thing.”

It is the same thing, if only technically. Shoto purses his lips.

“There’s nothing that can be done, not before, and especially not now. It’s okay,” he tries clumsily, unused to being on the other side of the comforting words.

“When you came back to the dorms last week, there was a handprint on your neck.”

Shoto sighs. He didn’t think anyone noticed. It was faint, almost healed. Maybe the concealer smudged at some point.

“Izuku, it’s not like that.”

Izuku sits up, facing him. It feels a little absurd to do this on top of the All Might blankets. It feels unnecessary to do this at all.

“Strangulation is a major risk factor for attempted ho—”

“Okay, hold on, that was a one-time thing, it’d—literally never happened before.”

“But if he’s done it now, he’ll probably do it again, you know this.”

“No he won’t—”

“One day he’s going to hurt you—hurt you bad, Shoto-kun, something you can’t come back from, and then what am I supposed to—?”

“Izuku.”

They fall into silence. Shoto breathes heavy, like he’d been sprinting and not just having an argument. Shoto has arguments all the time, it’s his favorite thing to do with Endeavor, but this is—it’s different. He doesn’t want to argue with Izuku, he doesn’t…

Shoto stretches his legs out in front of him, hitting his thigh with the heel of his hand to get rid of the pins and needles. The pain helps him focus. He keeps Izuku in his periphery as tries to find something to say. Izuku’s eyes are teary, and he’s biting his lip, and, in the end, he’s the one who breaks the silence.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I shouldn’t’ve said it like that.”

“It’s not…” Shoto trails off.

He wants to say that it’s fine, that it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t, but he can’t find his words, somehow. There’s a lump in his throat. He can’t remember the last time he cried.

“I don’t mean to make you feel bad. But you’ve been—oh, I don’t know, Shoto-kun, distant, maybe?” Izuku’s eyes are wide and earnest. The tears spill over, and he wipes them away. “You can tell me if something’s wrong, you know. Or, if not me, then—anyone else. Yaomomo, or Shinsou-kun—hell, even Kacchan!” He worries at his bottom lip in a way that makes Shoto’s chest cave in. “I just don’t want you to feel like… I don’t know. Am I making sense? You can talk to us. We wanna make sure you’re okay.”

Shoto gathers himself, biting at his knuckles. He crosses his legs again and hunches in on himself, hoping that’ll be enough to get his hands to stop shaking. When it isn’t, he tucks them under his ankles instead.

Despite everything, he can’t help but laugh a little. “You looked up the strangulation stats?”

It’s not funny, it’s not. It’s actually—a little terrifying. That it happened, that Izuku knew, that he’s right and it’ll probably happen again. But Shoto can’t deny that there’s something sweet (in such a fucked up way) about Izuku being so worried about him that he starts looking up domestic violence statistics.

Oh god, this is just… fucked up. This entire situation is just so fucked up.

“I’m mostly blind, on this side,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the useless left eye. “When you suffer, um, significant vision loss later on in life, as opposed to having been born with it, the chances of your Quirk backfiring on you increase by forty-two percent. Transformation Quirks are more likely to start malfunctioning, emitter types less so, but still. The stronger the Quirk, the worse it’ll hurt you.”

He pauses, trying to think of how to—say what he means. He wants to say what he means.

“You looked up the stats?” Izuku echoes quietly in the brief lull.

“Yes,” Shoto answers. “I wanted to know if it was just me.”

It was a long time after the incident. He’d been thinking, and wondering, and—he needed to know if he really was as weak as Endeavor always said. Turns out early childhood trauma can affect your Quirk. Who knew.

“Oh,” Izuku mutters.

“I’d never had control issues before—you know.”

“How… How’d you get better?”

Shoto pinches the skin of his knuckles between his teeth. Lets go. He has to stop doing that. He tucks his hands under his legs again and looks Izuku in the eye.

“I had to. He wasn’t going to wait for me to heal, so I had to take control of my Quirk so that I could fight back. What has to be done just… has to be done. So I practiced, and I learned. I protected myself.”

Izuku’s smile is sad and understanding. 

“That’s a very roundabout way of telling me to trust you can take care of yourself,” he says lightly. 

“When in Rome,” Shoto reasons, and Izuku barks out a laugh. 

“Stop, that’s so mean,” he protests, shaking his head.

Shoto would move mountains for him. But not ask for help.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” he says. “We probably won’t even train, he’s going to be overseas almost the whole week.” More like two days, but still. “I’m safe. Nothing’s going to happen. I have it under control.”

Maybe, if he says it enough times, it’ll be true.

Moonlight floods the room and lights Izuku’s face. His bottom lip is bitten red, cheeks still shiny from tears. Shoto—kind of hates himself.

“Okay,” Izuku says. “I trust you. I’m sorry I—” He gestures vaguely. 

“I’m not mad. You don’t have to apologize.”

“I’m not apologizing because I think you’re mad, I—Shoto-kun, you…” Izuku reaches forward to land a hand on Shoto’s knee. “You’re very dear to me,” he says earnestly. “You know that, right?”

God knows why. But—

“Yes. Yes. I know.”

Izuku smiles at him. “That’s good. I just… I really worry. I know you can take care of yourself, obviously, but you—you shouldn’t have to. That’s what I meant.”

Shoto has no answer for that. 

“I’m sorry I brought up the—other stuff.”

“No, I get it,” Izuku assures. He flashes another quick smile. “No harm done.”

When his hand pulls away, it leaves Shoto cold.

(Shouldn’t have to. Untrue. It’s what Shoto was born for.)

“We should’ve just watched Totoro,” Izuku laughs.

Shoto finally gets his hands out from under his legs and reaches for his laptop. “We can still watch Totoro.”

So they rearrange themselves and end up shoulder to shoulder, on their stomachs with a blanket pulled over their heads and the laptop in front of them. Shoto presses play. And when Izuku inevitably falls asleep half an hour in, Shoto pushes a wave of warmth through the bedding, pillows his head on his arms, and drifts off to the sound of hushed voices.

It’ll be fine. He can handle it. And if it turns out that be can’t… Well. He’ll burn that bridge when he gets to it.

Shoto doesn’t pass out, but even when Endeavor’s weight eases off of him, he doesn’t open his eyes.

Even when he hears him step away. Even when the tears start spilling out and he starts making quick, quiet little gasps for air. Even when Endeavor comes back and Shoto’s entire body goes rigid, though all he does is make a soft, frightened noise, like a child. Endeavor says nothing, but he doesn’t need to. They both know.

I could kill you, Shoto. I choose not to.

Which is the end of that. Shoto already knew that, but evidently Endeavor saw it fitting to remind him. Snot and drool and blood puddle under his face and he just can’t stop fucking crying. He’s still so scared.

“You do this to yourself, Shoto,” Endeavor sighs from somewhere above him.

Shoto knows.

He’s not dead. It’s hard to remember that, but it’s true. He’s still—He still…

Endeavor’s voice is smooth and steady, as if nothing has happened.

“Stand up.”

Shoto’s mind has gone blank and sluggish. Slowly, blindly, he drags the heavy, aching body along. Presses hands to the tatami and pushes it up. He makes it to his knees. Stays there. Breathes through his mouth and disregards the stickiness on his face.

Endeavor spares him the indignity of saying it twice.

A scoff echoes in the room. Then Endeavor walks out of the dojo without a word.

Shoto stays still for a second that lasts either an hour or a decade. He wipes at his mouth, trying to move the body so that he can land back in it and feel slightly more real. It wasn’t even a particularly long training session, was it? Just brutal. A lot of them are. Shoto opens his eyes and blinks the remaining tears away. Get on, get up, no time to dawdle.

He sniffles and immediately remembers why that’s a bad idea. It feels… A broken nose shouldn’t hurt this much. Or be still bleeding. His hands hover uselessly over his face, but ultimately drop back to his sides.

Okay. Itemized list of things he needs to do is as follows: number one, get up off the floor. Number two, make it to his room. Number three, call Fuyumi. It’s gotta be around midnight now, and Dr Fukushima will likely stop by in the morning, so Shoto doesn’t have to worry about anything else just yet.

He gets to his feet shakily, distantly concerned that he’ll fall and hit his head on the wall. The world swims in and out of focus.

This is called an adrenaline crash, a voice in his head says condescendingly. After idiots with a victim complex work themselves up for nothing thinking that they’re going to die, this tends to happen.  

Helpful.

Well… no matter. Now he needs to get to his room. Natsuo and Fuyumi are probably waiting for him to call, and he can’t very well sleep on the training room floor. Besides, if Endeavor came back and found him still here…

He thinks on it more as he hobbles out the room and towards the stairs. Usually, fear like that is just Shoto being dramatic. Today was different. It felt like being in a locked room with a wild animal, with something that couldn’t be reasoned with or fought off, and he doesn’t understand why. In terms of injuries, it wasn’t even one of the worst training sessions—Shoto is barely hurt. Well, his nose might be… something. It’s definitely broken; probably something more, as well. He resists the urge to prod at it as he stands at the foot of the stairs.

Shoto breathes through his mouth and blinks sluggishly at the first step. Up the stairs. Does he have to? 

Yes. It’s fine. It won’t hurt that much. His knees are… But there’s no use thinking about it. Up the stairs. Right. 

He goes up the first half by completely removing himself from the body, eyes set stubbornly forward and trembling hand gripping the railing. The pain is not his, and neither is the fear that clings, hot and sticky, to the back of his shirt. The body breathes hard out the mouth and shakes and he feels none of it. On the landing, he stumbles a little, left eye cloudy as always and right eye suddenly just as blurry. The body moves forward anyway. Slowly, carefully, he reaches the top of the stairs. Only, when he goes to take another step, to move to his room, he stumbles again—

His balance is shot and he tumbles down the stairs.

The shock and instinctual fear at falling pushes him back into the body. The pain holds him down and keeps him there. His head glances off of a step, and—Fuck, his nose—Fuck, his shoulder. It’s out. That’s definitely dislocated.

Shoto lies on his back on the landing for a minute or ten, breathing heavily and trying not to howl like a dying animal. His head hurts. His shoulder hurts. His nose hurts. If Endeavor had actually killed him, maybe he wouldn’t be in so much pain.

This is so ridiculous. This is…

Everything hurts. There’s an aching in his knees that isn’t… When did he hurt his knees? Was it in the training room? It might be an old pain that’s just resurfacing. Did he fall on his knees just now, when he fell down the stairs? He can’t remember. It was literal seconds ago, why can’t he remember?

Shoto allows himself a few small noises of pain. He read once when he was younger that yelling and cursing can help relieve pain. He doesn’t think he could yell anything right now if he tried, let alone coherent words, but maybe this will help. Even if it might just be a placebo effect. That would be fine. Idly, he thinks Endeavor might’ve heard him fall, or heard him complaining. That would also be fine. If he came and finished the job. Shoto would let him.

Okay, up. No time to be here. It’s late, and Dr Fukushima will be here in the morning, and Shoto needs to sleep, so—he’ll get up.

He pushes himself up to a sitting position first, one-handed, because his right shoulder is—Okay, alright, so now just…

He stands up. Goes up the stairs again. Shuts his stupid fucking door that doesn’t lock from the inside and grabs his phone from the locked drawer it was in, because he’s not getting back up tonight. He collapses to his knees on his futon. Sits.

Okay. Shoulder first. Shoto leans back against the wall, the useless right arm hanging limp at his side. He huffs out a breath out his mouth. Fumbles with his phone, can’t help but notice the time and—

God, that’s insane. That so much damage can be done in so little time. It’s been less than an hour.

gonna call, he texts Natsuo.

His hands shake. He dials the number instead of going to his contacts, to give himself some time to practice saying Natsuo’s name to himself until his voice is somewhat steady. He can’t let his words run out, not right now. Shoto puts his phone on speaker, sets it down next to him, and hooks the collar of his shirt between his teeth. Grabs his right arm. The phone rings once, twice. And then:

“Hey, bug,” comes Natsuo’s voice. Like a snowfall after humid, suffocating heat.

“Nii-san, count me down,” Shoto rasps, slurred around his makeshift gag, before he can say anything else.

“Okay,” Natsuo agrees easily. “Ready?” No. “Three, two, one.”

The shoulder pops back in place. Shoto makes a noise like he just got sucker-punched. He spits out the fabric, which is now wet with drool and sticks uncomfortably to his chest.

“You good?” says Natsuo.

“Fine.”

Ideally, the right arm would need to go in a sling. Instead, Shoto slides down the wall and shuffles until he’s lying on his back on his futon. Blearily, he nudges the phone with his left hand so that it’s on his pillow, next to his head. He pushes ice through the aching muscles of his right shoulder, trying not to think of how that cold felt flooding his left side.

“Everything stable on your end?”

“Yes,” Shoto says, and hopes the shitty sound quality hides the fact that he’s breathing through his mouth. “Did Fuyumi…?”

“I sent her to the konbini downstairs so I could get you alone for a sec.”

Oh. That makes sense. When Shoto gets hurt badly, Fuyumi freaks out, and when Fuyumi freaks out, Shoto freaks out. For some reason, when Shoto freaks out, Natsuo freaks out, which brings them full circle.

Shoto shifts, which jostles his—everything, and he can’t help the small noise of displeasure.

“Hey, kiddo,” Natsuo says urgently. “Lay it on me, c’mon. Chop chop.”

“Ugh.” Now he has to think about his injuries? “I don’t know. Nothing that’s gonna kill me overnight.”

“Shoto.”

Shoto sighs.

“My knees are fucked up. My shoulder hurts, but I’m icing it. Um. Concussion, maybe? Mild at worst. I fell down the…” He shouldn’t tell Natsuo this. “Um. You know.”

He can tell Natsuo doesn’t like the sound of that.

“... You fell down the stairs?”

“No,” Shoto lies.

A pause.

“Was your shoulder out? Did you have me count you down to set it?” Natsuo asks, wisely picking his battles.

“Mm.”

“Okay. How bad are the burns?” 

“I don’t believe in fire.”

“You need to clean those in the next ten minutes. Rest a second, but don’t fall asleep. We need to make sure nothing’s gonna get infected.”

Sure, he should. Dr Fukushima’s Quirk would just push any kind of infection into his bloodstream, no matter how small. But Shoto is not getting back up, not tonight. And it has just occurred to him that…

“Did Fuyumi tell you?”

Natsuo’s sigh crackles over the line. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” Shoto says, because he can’t think of anything else.

“Don’t be.”

“I know he was your… something… I’m really sorry, Natsu, I didn’t…”

He didn’t notice this before, but his nose is still letting out a small, steady trickle of blood. It shouldn’t still be doing that. Shoto presses his left hand to his upper lip and it comes back sticky and red. He wipes it on his pants. Swallows.

Dr Fukushima will be here soon. It doesn’t matter. Should Shoto…?

He doesn’t want to say this. But honestly, he also feels like maybe he should, before Fuyumi gets back. He doesn’t think he’s capable of getting up again, but he—he’s not sure what…

“Natsu-nii. He broke my nose like half an hour ago and it’s—still bleeding.”

“Shoto, for god’s sake, why didn’t you lead with that?”

“Forgot.”

“This is—generally the point where you should head to the ER,” Natsuo says, strained. “Fuck. Is it hard to breathe?”

It’s hard to—everything. His silence is enough of an answer.

“Bug, I’m sorry, I… I’m worried about that bleeding, and I’m worried about that hit you took to the head. I don’t know that you should just tough it out till Dr Fukushima gets there.”

“All I ever do is tough it out,” Shoto says, and it sounds more bitter than he meant for it to. He can feel the blood dripping down his cheek and staining his pillow. He needs to start buying hydrogen peroxide in bulk.

“I’m sorry,” Natsuo says again. He blows out a breath. “Wow, this sucks.” You’re telling me. “I think—”

There’s a door opening and closing on the other end of the line.

“Is that Shoto?” Fuyumi’s voice. And then, closer, “Hey, Shochan. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Shoto says. “Stable for now, I think.”

“He’s hurt pretty bad,” Natsuo says. Shoto can hear his frown through the phone. “More than—than—”

“Bug,” Fuyumi says, cutting him off. “What happened after I left?”

Here, Shoto hesitates. What did happen after she left? He went into the training room, and Endeavor was there, and…

“I don’t know,” Shoto mumbles. “We fought, I guess… It felt different. Thought he was gonna kill me.” He frowns slightly, unsatisfied with the explanation. “It was different. He was different, I… It’s getting worse,” he admits, voice shaking. “Now that he’s Number One, it’s worse. I don’t even think it’s about training anymore, he’s just so fucking mad all the time…”

He wants to turn onto his side and curl into himself, but that would just hurt. He wants to take it back. But the tears roll down his temples and mix with the blood on his pillow and he—he just doesn’t know what to do. Suddenly, he’s not sure at all what he should do.

“He’s going to kill me,” Shoto whispers into the dark. “I know he wants to. I’m rea—I’m really scared.”

He feels younger than fifteen. He feels like he’s still in the dojo, trying to push himself up on trembling arms. He doesn’t want to die.

“I should…” Fuyumi starts. Her voice is distant, like she’s away from the phone and not talking to Shoto at all.

“What—What,” Natsuo snaps.

“He needs me to go back—”

“He needs a fucking hospital, Fuyumi.”

A pause.

“You know we can’t do that.”

“Something needs to happen! Waiting it out was fine back when Endeavor was Number Two, but I’m not compromising on his fucking life, do you even hear yourself—?”

“Do you think I tell you the things I tell you for fun, Natsuo? Do you think I’m enjoying myself? Who the fuck would believe us, do you even know how much sway public opinion has on—”

“And I’m sure this will all matter when Endeavor kills him, I’m sure it—”

“You weren’t the one who kept calling the cops again and again only to be told that nothing could be done—”

“Don’t you dare bring up Touya right now. I don’t care what happened when we were kids, we just need to try something else—”

“And when it doesn’t work and Dad finds out, who do you think will take the fall, again—” 

“You’re not even listening—!”

Shoto reaches for the phone with his left hand and hangs up on them. He sets it down on his chest.

The ceiling is the same shade of white it’s always been. The futon feels just like it always does. He breathes carefully, in and out through his mouth. Shouldn’t’ve said that. It’s true, but he shouldn’t’ve said it.

“God, Touya,” he breathes out, almost without realizing it. “You were right. You were so right. There’s no getting out.”

Six years out from under their father’s thumb and it means nothing. Now a murderer, a wanted fugitive, the reason behind Shoto’s nightmares of being so close, but not close enough—to win, to save. Inside is hell, but outside is just more of the same.

Shoto just stays there, on his back and crying silently, for a minute or two. It all just seems so hopeless. He can’t summon the energy for anything more than tired contemplation.

His phone vibrates. Shoto almost doesn’t answer. But that would be cruel. 

“Are you guys done?”

“Sorry, bug.” It’s Fuyumi. Her voice is frayed still, but not as rattled. “We can talk about it later, when you’re feeling better.”

They won’t, because there’s nothing to talk about, but she can think that if she wants.

“Doesn’t matter,” Shoto says. “I shouldn’t’ve said anything.”

On the other end of the line, Fuyumi sucks in a sharp breath. “Baby…”

“It’s true,” he insists wearily. “You know it is. There’s nothing that can be done now that he’s Number One.”

“Even if he might kill you?” Natsuo argues.

“I shouldn’t have said that. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m worried about you.” Fuyumi this time. “I’m worried about—about what he might do to you.”

What he’s already done to you, she doesn’t say. Fuyumi believed their father could change, once. He thinks, in a way, maybe she still does. Selfishly, Shoto is glad she’s stopped saying it. There’s a long silence.

“I’m sorry,” Shoto says at last. She shouldn’t have to be worried about him.

Natsuo scoffs loudly. Embarrassment and frustration and anger swirl in Shoto’s chest, but before he can snap something that he’ll regret when he no longer has a concussion, Natsuo speaks.

“Everyone in this fucking family’s always apologizing for things that aren’t—And the one person whose fault it is never—He never—Wish I could fucking—”

“Natsu,” Fuyumi snaps. “Shut up.”

Natsuo shuts up.

“I’m tired,” Shoto says. “Dr Fukushima’s coming in the morning. I’m gonna…”

Fuyumi makes a noise of alarm. “Shochan, don’t—”

“Bug, don’t go to sleep.”

Shoto kind of wants to cry. Again. But it’s late, and he’s tired, and there’s no use in crying now, anyway.

“Don’t hang up on me,” he mumbles, and closes his eyes.

“Shoto—”

It’s so late, and he’s so tired. 

Let someone else take care of things, for a change.

Chapter Text

It doesn’t register immediately. That it’s him, that he’s right there on the screen, bleeding and scrambling back on the tatami, eyes blown with panic, saying Dad, Dad please—

And then it does. And Shoto just… blinks, and breathes.

In the video, Endeavor grabs him by the hair and pushes him to the floor. Shoto doesn’t remember this. His face is drenched in blood, and there’s some impressive bruising under his eye and on his nose. He’s covered in burns. Endeavor’s hand steams on the back of his neck, so much bigger than him that it’s almost funny. Endeavor tightens his grip and Shoto closes his eyes.

That’s not what happened.

The clip ends and the news anchor is back, saying some bullshit about crime rates and—and… The common room buzzes with a weird static, everyone frozen in place. Shoto blinks, and he breathes. Someone is crying, but it’s not Izuku. Izuku has dry eyes fixed on the screen and Hitoshi, next to him, is slack-jawed and horrified, breathing fast, and then the news anchor starts to list off all the injuries Shoto sustained on camera, fucking apparently, and—

“Shut it off!” Momo snaps.

This seems to work well enough to break the spell. Denki, closest, forgoes the remote and reaches for the buttons on the back of the TV to turn it off, but he’s so startled that sparks of electricity fly out of his fingers, and he fries the screen.

Shoto blinks. He breathes.

You do this to yourself, Shoto.

Yes. Yes, he does.

He thinks maybe he should be more concerned than he is. There’s not much going through his head, other than a steady stream of, Ummmmmmm…

This is… Wow, this is really…

“Didn’t even blur it,” Shoto mutters at last. “That can’t be legal.”

“It’s real?” says Hanta, and Shoto keeps staring ahead with no small amount of effort.

Shouldn’t’ve said anything. Shouldn’t’ve gone home last week. Shouldn’t’ve fought back, shouldn’t’ve called Fuyumi and Natsuo, shouldn’t’ve thought too hard about Dabi’s blue flames and blue eyes and the way he seemed to know things he shouldn’t. Was it worth it? To know, or to try and do something about it? 

Once a mutt, always a mutt. No?

No.

Was it worth it? For the Todoroki family’s dirty laundry aired on national news channels, for his classmates staring at the black screen with tears in their eyes, staring at him with frowns and wet cheeks as if any of it fucking matters. Was it worth it, to try to help a man already too far gone?

Maybe. Shoto’s arms are crossed in front of his chest and his face is as impassive as always. Wasn’t sorry when he apologized to Fuyumi, a week ago, and isn’t sorry now, but if things could’ve been different… If things could be different, still…

(Too far gone. Ridiculous. No such thing.)

There’s no denying footage, though, is the thing. He was bleeding on the screen seconds ago, begging in a way his friends know he would die before submitting to—except when it actually came down to it, Shoto did it. He pleaded and cried and he wasn’t even in any real danger in the end. But that’s his usual strategy—deny, deflect, deescalate. Nothing is happening, and even if it were, it doesn’t matter, and even if it mattered, they have bigger things to worry about. Shoto clears his throat.

“It’s not—” He falters. “Um.”

Now that he’s opened his mouth, he wishes he hadn’t. All his surety crumbles into nothing.

Everyone is looking at him.

“It’s not as big a deal as you think it is,” he finishes weakly.

“Shoto, what the fuck,” says Hitoshi, hoarsely, eyes red and mouth agape in this horrified kind of way that he never is, and—

Shoto looks away. Back to the dark screen that started all this. What to do, what to do. He’s lost the upper hand here, and there’s no getting it back, not now, but he can come up with something. Preferably before Aizawa-sensei gets over his shock and comes over to set a hand on Shoto’s shoulder, because surely he’s seen already, it was on the news, and—and has everyone seen this shit? Shoto needs to do damage control, or call Endeavor to beg and grovel again, or kill himself, or…

Shoto’s half-blurred gaze settles on Izuku without any input from his brain. Izuku is already looking at him, for once not shedding a single tear. Just looking like he’s been betrayed on every front, which he has, because Shoto is a liar of the most despicable kind—which is fine, it’s fine, it’s necessary, but a liar does not a good friend make. So.

Aizawa’s footsteps make themselves known, slow and measured. Izuku’s voice comes out warped, off and distorted as if from underwater.

“That was last week?”

“Okay, listen,” Shoto starts, and then runs out of steam.

Izuku stares at him, wide-eyed and hurt. “You said…”

Shoto knows what he said.

Izuku’s breath leaves him in something that’s not quite a sob. His eyes are welling up. Shoto feels his chest cave in—understands, finally, why Mom never said anything—does what he should’ve done a decade ago, and runs.

It seems appropriate that the first time he sees his oldest brother in six years would be in a dingy alley off the street of Shoto’s favorite konbini.

Insolent seems like too light a word to describe Touya. It was fine when he was dead. Sad, sure. But Shoto had bigger problems and no time to cry silently into his pillow, or stay up all night in the hopes that the right pair of blue eyes would peek in from behind his ajar door, or hold a too-cold hand to his neck and wonder if he’d get to see his brother if he just had the guts to—

It was fine. When he was dead, things were sad but uncomplicated. Now, it’s…

Shoto waves goodbye to Haruka and tries not to cringe as the bell atop the glass door announces his exit. It’s not dark out yet, but it will be soon, and he has a ten o’clock curfew—which he’s always thought was incredibly loose for Japan’s biggest trouble magnets. He’s uncomfortably aware of the pack of Mild Sevens tucked in his back pocket. Ironically, tough the point of smoking is to relax, the more he walks with this shit in his pocket, the faster his heart beats.

Ridiculous—Ridiculous. Shoto cuts his losses and ducks into a narrow alley. You have to fix the problem with the problem. Make the problem work for you. That’s how you win. His hands aren’t even shaking when he pulls out the crumpled box. He holds the cig between his lips and pockets the rest again, and he feels better even like this, with the cigarette still unlit but the promise of relief close enough to taste. The lighter is a flash of metal and the flame a flash of light, and then cool, blissful smoke is flooding Shoto’s lungs.

Ah. Yeah. That’s better. Haruka, the owner of the dingy little place that Shoto’s just run away from, is what Mina would aptly call ‘a real one’. Morally bankrupt? Maybe. But sometimes a guy needs a goddamn cig. Haruka doesn’t care about three things: that Shoto’s father could wipe her store off the map as if it had never been there at all, and he might feel inclined to if he ever found out where his golden boy gets his lung cancer; that Shoto’s half-and-half gimmick makes him so easily recognizable it’s almost funny, and thus he’s more prone to getting caught exiting her place with the damning pack of Marlboros or Mild Sevens or Fortunas; and that Shoto doesn’t look a day over fifteen, because he isn’t—he knows, actually, thanks to Natsuo’s obnoxious appraisals (and the way Fuyumi presses her fist to her lips and tries and fails not to laugh every time) that he looks even younger than that, under the right light.

He has cash, tough, and wants a quick fix, so he says, “Whatever you have,” when Haruka asks what he wants—like it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t, because he’ll smoke anything—and Haruka tosses him the first pack she sees. The menthols are nicer sometimes. Mostly, it doesn’t really matter.

It’s not an addiction. It’s not even a habit.

The thing about smoking—or, really, the thing about Shoto smoking, is that having a fire Quirk, or even half of one, means having certain mutations to help you accommodate it. Just as Brainwash means Hitoshi can run on two hours of sleep for nearly four days, and Creation makes Momo’s skin easier to break. Half-Cold Half-Hot is a capricious thing, but when compared to, say, Touya, or even Izuku, Shoto has it good. His skin doesn’t burn as easily. His temperature is always regulated. His lungs are bigger than really they should be. Smoke inhalation doesn’t get to him as quickly as it does to other people.

No one bothered to tell him, so he didn’t know that when he first started smoking. Just wanted any kind of brief relief he could get his hands on. The risk of whoever sold to him turning around and snitching to Endeavor later was… worth it, though maybe his assessment was a little biased. But later, sitting on the roof of Endeavor’s agency and waiting for someone to realize he’d snuck up there, googling lung cancer statistics helped him pass the time and not reach for a cig while in Endeavor’s literal workplace. The actual cancer part, Google said, came from the combustion of the tobacco and not the nicotine—which didn’t sound right to Shoto, but what did he know—and so people with fire Quirks often have mutations that delay the harmful effects of smoking, if only for a short while. So it’s whatever. The nicotine is quicker than breathing exercises and better than burning his room to the ground whenever he’s upset.

Though smoking is… He knows he shouldn’t. He tries not to do it too often. But Amnesty Week is in a little less than a month, and with every day that passes, Shoto feels more and more like he’s going crazy. It’s just a week. Endeavor won’t even be there for the first two or three days. He doesn’t get why he’s suddenly so anxious—it’s getting so bad that he can’t even focus in class. Aizawa hasn’t said anything yet, but Shoto knows he notices the blank notebooks at the end of the period, the deader-than-normal expression, the shaking that he just can’t seem to get rid of.

Shoto’s first cigarette has burned itself to nothing, and he still feels insane. The butt is tossed to the floor and meets a quick death under his heel; what’s another one in this mess of broken bottles and sketchy metal. He doesn’t bother pulling the pack out of his pocket again, just fiddles with the cardboard until he’s pulled out another cig, and lights that one with little fanfare. With the flicker of an orange flame comes a pair of blue eyes that make Shoto’s breath go still in his lungs and his entire body freeze. Then he looks closer at the person peeking out from behind the grimy wall, and—It’s not Endeavor.

Paranoid fuck, hisses a voice in Shoto’s head, which he ignores. The flame is snuffed out and the night rushes to fill its empty space. It’s late. Shoto should go back home already. The only noise is fire, consuming.

The person at the mouth of the alley disappears from view, then peeks back again. This repeats with varying intervals of time in-between until Shoto gets sick of it.

“Motherf—Can I help you?” he snaps.

Dabi steps out from behind the wall and into the alley.

Great. Great, great. If Aizawa finds out about this, Shoto will never hear the end of it. He should’ve just kept his mouth shut and let the guy do whatever weird-ass spy routine he had going on. He should’ve followed his older brother in the same way he always did and killed himself.

“Aren’t you a little too young for that?”

The voice is raspier than he remembers. Quieter, too, than the one that replays in Shoto’s nightmares. Deeper than it usually is in his dreams. It’s not the same timbre that read from a single, faded storybook at every bedtime he could, and told him birds were all secretly snakes, and scolded him for making Endeavor mad on purpose but then turned around to do the same. Shoto breathes in nicotine.

“Can you please fuck off?” he asks honestly. “We can do this some other day.”

Dabi continues as if he hadn’t said anything. He leans against the grimy wall opposite Shoto, arms crossed, and narrows his eyes. God, he looks so ridiculous in that fucking overcoat. But it must hurt. All of it—All of him. It has to hurt.

“Does UA know? Regulations are too fuckin’ lax these days.”

Shoto blinks, and Dabi blinks back. The cigarette burns between his lips when he inhales. Shoto never wins these silences.

“Does Endeavor know?”

“We take smoke breaks together,” Shoto says flatly. He shuts his eyes and slumps against the wall, hand hanging limply at his side, smoke drifting up.

Dabi scoffs. “The Number One and his fucking show pony, eh?”

“If you’re looking for a fight,” Shoto mumbles, “I’m really not in the mood. My head hurts.”

“Withdrawal does that. Shouldn’t junkies know that?”

“’M not a fuckin’ junkie.”

He’s tired, that’s what he is. And his heart feels like it’s being carved out of his body. And his brother is right in front of him and, somehow, still dead.

“You’re going into withdrawal in front of me. While smoking.”

“Not what’s happening.”

“Uh huh.”

God, does he ever shut up? Shoto peeks his good eye open and takes another drag.

“You look like shit.”

“You take one too many hits to the head lately?” Dabi sneers. The grafts on his face pull up in a way that must be painful. “Daddy hitting too hard these days—?”

(—going to hurt you, hurt you bad—)

Rage rushes through him like a flash fire.

“Cut it out, Touya.”

Ah, shit. Shoto’s never been good at keeping anything from him.

He tosses the second cigarette butt to the floor and puts it out. Neither of them says anything. This family is such a fucking mess. Shoto hesitates. Pulls out another cig. He has to click the lighter half a dozen times before the flame catches.

It’s fine.

“You know,” Touya says. His lip curls in disgust. Then— “You knew this whole time?”

Shoto sighs. Takes a long, slow drag of his cigarette.

“You think I’m stupid.” He breathes the words out along with the smoke. What the hell did Touya even think was going to happen after he stood in front of Shoto with the same eye Shoto sees in the mirror every morning. The same fire he dreams about. “If you wanted to die and stay dead, you should’ve done a better job at it.”

How come everyone is always dragging Shoto into their messes? Either kill yourself or don’t. This is just—

This is just so—

Whatever. They’re in the mud now, might as well wade through it.

Shoto hasn’t actually known the entire time. He only just realized recently, and felt incredibly stupid once he did, because—of course. Of course it’s Touya. Who the hell else could it be? Arrogant and selfish, vindictive, destructive, and—the only one of them strong enough to leave for good. He sighs again, and the smoke cleans out his lungs.

“That Hero school is rotting your fucking brains,” Touya says, shifting on his feet.

Yeah. Maybe. It certainly feels like it.

Shoto bites the inside of his cheek. “So cynical.”

“You can’t believe you’re actually making a difference. You of all people should know there are no real Heroes.” Touya pauses. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

“What are you doing?” Shoto shoots back.

“More than you.”

“Well,” Shoto starts, “I got into UA… and you joined a terrorist organization. So I think our goals are… misaligned.”

“We’re not terrorists,” Touya says, and he sounds oddly incensed, though he hasn’t moved. “We’re working for the greater good.”

Shoto grinds his boot into the dirt for the third time today.

“You kidnapped a high-schooler.”

Touya sniffs. “Yeah. For the greater fucking good.”

Jesus fucking Christ. Shoto digs around in his pocket one last time.

“You piss me off,” he says blandly around his fourth cig, which is absurd even for him, but the situation merits it. He clicks the lighter once, twice, three times—nothing, it sparks lamely and then cools. With a huff, he pockets it again and lights a flame on the tip of his index finger. “You piss me the fuck off, Touya. In a way that, frankly, not even Endeavor manages.”

“How quaint,” Touya sneers.

“It’s true.”

Shoto watches the smoke rise.

You think you’re so fucking special, he wants to snap. You think you’re the only one Daddy couldn’t fucking stand.

Which would be a cruel thing to say, he knows that. Shoto suffers in that training room, of course he does, but—and this is so fucked up—at least Endeavor looks at him. He remembers, back in his first year of middle school, his last-ditch attempt at telling someone what went on in the Todoroki household. After the dust of Shoto’s weakness had settled, Endeavor had just scoffed. Didn’t talk to him for a week. Not a word. Shoto didn’t breathe out once the entire time. By the end of it, he showed up to the training room on his own, without being dragged, for the first time in years.

When Endeavor met him there, he was smiling. It drives you crazy, being in that house. It really does. Endeavor…

It’s bad. Shoto knows. He gets it. It’s a lot of pressure, so much so that sometimes you can feel yourself cracking, and the anger consumes you, and—Shoto gets that too. He gets so angry sometimes it scares him. Ultraviolence calls to him. If he’d been in Touya’s shoes, he probably would’ve run away too.

He wasn’t in Touya’s shoes, though. And his big brother left him behind.

“You could join us, you know,” Touya says quietly. He’s not even looking at Shoto, just off to the side. As if none of this matters, and Shoto guesses—to Touya—it doesn’t. “Instead of hiding behind Endeavor and thinking only of yourself.”

He’s past the point of naïve idealism. Touya, it seems, hasn’t grown out of it.

“You left a family behind. Do you remember that?” Shoto says, clearly and steadily. “I know this is a hard concept for you to understand, Touya, but sometimes people are depending on you to keep them safe, and you do what you fucking have to.”

Silence.

“I,” Shoto says, “do what I fucking have to. I go to his dumb fucking Hero school. I go to his stupid fucking fundraisers and the galas and the fucking business dinners, and when he drags me into that dojo to beat the shit out of me I take it, Touya, I complain but I fucking do it, because Fuyumi never moved out and it’s because of me. Because who’s paying for Natsuo’s med degree, you fucking asshole? Who do you think has POA over Mom?! You—”

Deep breaths, deep fucking breaths. Shoto swallows.

“You can call me selfish,” he says simply. “I wish, every damn day, that I could run away and change my name and—and… But I can’t. And I am many things, Touya… A coward? Not once in my fucking life.”

Shoto stubs his last cigarette on the wall. He throws it to the sidewalk and grinds it to dust beneath his heel. Touya says nothing. He doesn’t move.

When Shoto was six, after Mom was sent away, Touya would stand between him and Endeavor whenever he could. He’d light himself up and Blueflame would smell like charcoal and burnt flesh. Endeavor would always get him out of the way eventually, of course, but Shoto never said anything to Touya about how much those little breaks meant. A chance to catch his breath, yes, but also—his brother, who cared about him enough to fight a losing battle. Who loved him, once. And he loved Touya too.

The problem, really, is that he still does.

After he left, Shoto became his own saboteur, and the smell of burnt skin became a permanent fixture in the house. He talked back, he goaded Endeavor into going too far, and then he curled into himself, breathing heavy, on the floor of the training room, until Dr Fukushima’s Quirk had him gagging and shivering on his futon. It was only a few years ago that Shoto switched tactics.

It was—hard. He’s not one to roll over and take it, it’s not in his nature. He got his father’s stubbornness. Took him years and too many broken bones to learn when to shut the fuck up and swallow his pride. It’s always more bitter coming back up.

But he did it because he had to. What has to be done won’t wait for you.

Shoto imagines, almost feverish with rage, taking Touya to visit his own grave. Telling him, This is where I mourned you. I used to sneak out and fall asleep against your tombstone. Used to beg you to come back and take me with you. Used to come on the anniversary. Imagine slamming my head on the edge of the stone and bleeding and bleeding and bleeding until your empty casket was soaked, so that the gap between your birth and mine could be bridged by our deaths. Do you even care?

“Fuyumi missed you, by the way,” he says finally. “Natsuo too. You broke Mom’s heart. And in, in case no one’s—told you, recently? You’re a dick, Touya. And you could stand to call more.”

Touya still says nothing, just stares straight ahead like Shoto is of no importance. So, well.

Shoto doesn’t bother taking one last look at his brother. He turns to the street and walks away.

The run up the stairs is what leaves him winded, and not anything else.

He shuts his door but doesn’t lock it. No one’s going to like what happens if Shoto locks that door. Besides, he has five minutes tops before Aizawa comes knocking. The blinds are closed, the room dark.

Shoto tucks himself under his desk, pushing the trashcan under it to one side and hunching over his phone. He opens Google. Endeavor, he types into the search bar, and of course the first result is a link to the video on fucking Twitter, of all places.

The video is an hour. And twenty minutes.

He drags the slider back and forth and oh god it’s everything. That first conversation with Fuyumi, her hand on his cheek, and taking the stairs two at a time. Bowing his head at Endeavor’s turned back. Dodging the fire, but not the man, and getting pinned down and getting hit. Getting hit. Getting hit. Begging. His father’s knee digging into his back, a heated hand on the back of his neck.

Shoto stops to dry heave into the trashcan.

Soundlessly, he sees himself, the useless, failing body, trying to get up, kneeling on the tatami. Endeavor walking out without a word. There for everyone to see is Shoto when he falls down the stairs, like a fucking idiot, then when he spends more time than he should laying there crying, and then trying not to cry with the collar of his shirt between his teeth. His call to Fuyumi and Natsuo is there in its entirety. His shoulder sickeningly out of place, and then not. His blood dripping onto the pillow. The footage only stops after Shoto has fallen into shallow, fitful sleep, disregarding Natsuo’s frantic voice.

A low, urgent knock on his door startles him, and he hits his head on the bottom of the desk. It’s Aizawa, it’s probably just Aizawa. Shoto goes perfectly still and tries not to hold his breath. He hears the door being pushed open after a moment, then soft footsteps searching the room. When Aizawa’s slippers stop in front of the desk, Shoto’s breath hitches. That gives him away.

Aizawa kneels in front of him but keeps his distance.

“Hey—Hey, kid,” he says softly, but Shoto’s heartbeat rises through this throat like bile anyway. “Can I have the phone?”

The—?

Oh. Endeavor’s voice is tinny through the phone’s speakers, but Shoto hears it loud and clear when he says some things are earned, Shoto, and Shoto begs, and Endeavor says respect, and Shoto says please, please, you’re going to kill me, except that’s not how it happened. That’s not how it happened. The distinct sound of fire coming to life fills every empty space in Shoto’s head, and his body tosses the phone away without asking his brain, scrambling back even though there is nowhere to run to.

He doesn’t see what Aizawa does with it, and he isn’t particularly concerned with that. But it’s dark, and he’s—confused, a little bit, all of a sudden unsure what’s happening, or—

“What fucking day is it,” he croaks urgently. His head feels splintered.

Aizawa recites the date and time. Shoto bites at his knuckles.

Aizawa breathes in beats of four and counts aloud. Shoto follows.

He has this feeling that everything is ruined. He gets the sense that nothing will ever be okay again. But he gets his breathing under control, and once he does, tucks his knees into his chest and wraps his arms around them. Slumps into himself.

“Sorry,” he says quietly.

“Don’t be,” is Aizawa’s immediate response. He opens his mouth to say something else, but Shoto beats him to it.

“I know you need to—I know we have to talk about it. But I can’t—I’m… Can we…?”

Aizawa always knows what Shoto means, though, even when he’s being nonsensical.

“I can give you a few minutes,” he suggests. “Get you some water, come back up.”

And Shoto thought that was what he wanted. Instead, he gets hit with a wave of self-hatred so intense it’s frightening. 

“If you let me lock that door I’m going to hurt myself. I’m going to—”

He falters. His brain cycles through a closed feedback loop of, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself. Aizawa abandons, visibly, the idea of leaving the room, and inches a bit closer, hands half outstretched as if dealing with a frightened animal.

“I wa—I want to—”

He doesn’t even know what the hell he’s trying to say. I want to finish the job Mom started and melt the other side of my face. I want to cut my stomach open till my guts fall out. I want to fucking kill myself.

Shoto gasps in a breath. Another. He clamps both hands over his mouth and tries to be fucking quiet, be quiet, shut up—

It’s fine. Shoto can do it. Used to go weeks without talking. Months, once.

So stupid. How back in that dojo he didn’t want to die, but now he needs to.

He can’t die, though. He doesn’t get to. Why does he never fucking get to? There’s always someone who needs him, needs his Quirk, needs his compliance, needs his enduring. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t fucking want this.

(Want, want, want—What does it matter what you fucking want. Get up. Stop crying)

“Kid, can I come closer?”

His stomach turns inside out. He shakes his head furiously, and watches through blurry eyes as Aizawa stays right where he is.

“Don’t,” he blurts, just to be sure.

“Okay,” Sensei says calmly.

“Do—Don’t.”

“That’s okay, I won’t come any closer.”

Shoto shudders. He breathes in deep and tries to pull himself together, but the words spill out of him.

“He has POA over my mom,” he gasps. “Her—Her medical stuff, her bank account, everything, and he pays fo-for Natsu’s university—”

“Breathe, Todoroki,” Aizawa says firmly, and Shoto wants to hit him. “I’ll take care of it. Breathe with me.”

“Fuyumi’s fucking car insurance,” Shoto chokes out, “is in his goddamn name!”

And then there’s no going back.

He can’t remember the last time he cried like this; heaving, gutting sobs that shake his entire body. His head hurts, and he can’t breathe through his nose, and he might be drooling into the hand that’s pressed to his mouth. Everything is just… so fucked.

Between sobs, it slips out. He hiccups, and sniffs, and chokes out— “I want my mom.”

And it’s—

He didn’t realize until he said it. How true it is. Which just makes him cry harder. Blindly, he reaches for Aizawa, and that seems to be all the permission the man was waiting for.

Aizawa helps him climb out from under the desk. Or, really, Aizawa kind of moves Shoto’s limp, sobbing body while Shoto shakes and cries and tries not to throw up. Sensei settles on the floor with him, throws an arm around his shoulders and holds him to his chest—and Shoto, who thinks maybe his soul has been whittled down to nothing, just chipped away and away until there’s only bone-deep exhaustion left, just sags in Aizawa’s hold and fists the front of his shirt like a child. He certainly feels like one. He feels like the world has ended.

Aizawa rocks them both a bit, murmuring reassurances that get lost under Shoto’s sniffling—though it’s nice to hear Sensei’s voice. Nice that one of them, at least, is a real, solid person, because Shoto isn’t sure he’s even human anymore. He keeps trying to bite at his hands to make them more real, but Aizawa keeps gently tugging them out of his mouth.

When his breath stops hitching every half a second, Shoto swallows and pulls back a bit. He’s not sure how to move to look up at Sensei without making him let go, and if Sensei lets go, Shoto thinks he might actually have a psychotic break of some sort, but—he didn’t need to worry. Aizawa just shifts a little, and his arm stays firmly around Shoto’s shoulders.

“I have it. I had it. It was fine.” He blinks slowly and doesn’t bother wiping the tears that spill out. “It was fine, I could’ve held out. I’ve been holding out.”

Aizawa-sensei is frowning.

“How long?” he asks.

Shoto malfunctions. “Huh?”

“How long?”

He wonders what Aizawa wants him to say. It was all fine until I came around. He met her in a flower shop, they were in love. The power drove him mad, that’s all. He was good to us once. Touya’s death was an accident. Mine won’t be.  

Does he have to lie to Aizawa, still?

How long?

It’s such a weird fucking… disconnect. Yes, Endeavor is an abuser. No, Shoto is not being abused. The events just don’t click together, there’s a gap between what must be true and what his brain can handle being true. Nothing is happening. Nothing has ever happened that Shoto couldn’t handle.

How long?

Forever. Since forever.

He starts crying again. It’s just silent tears now, wiped roughly away and immediately replaced.

“Shit,” Aizawa mutters, and tugs him close again. “You’re okay, you’re okay, c’mon. We’ll talk about it later, just breathe. It’s fine to cry.”

It’s not, but Shoto doesn’t say anything. They’re already here. He goes limp and lets Aizawa hold his weight up. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do.

“It, it—matters to me. How people—That people know.” It’s a little easier to say things like this, with his face hidden. Aizawa hums noncommittally. “It didn’t use to. But I-I… I’ve put in,” he says bitterly, “so much fucking work—and now it’s worthless. Did it all for nothing.”

He doesn’t want to start actually crying again. Pushes the cold knuckles of his right hand into his irritated eyes.

“It’s unfair,” Aizawa agrees. “You shouldn’t’ve been put in that position in the first place, and this is… this is an incredibly big invasion of privacy.”

“It’s not fair,” Shoto echoes. He sniffles.

“It’s not,” Aizawa repeats firmly.

“What… What am I supposed to do? What do I do now?”

Shoto knows he sounds like a lost child. He very much feels like one. Aizawa tightens his hold a little, and Shoto slumps into him.

“You let me sort this out. I’ll take care of it, okay? I’ll make sure your family’s safe, and you too.”

Privately, Shoto thinks they can get that first part done and call it a day. But if Aizawa says he’ll get it done…

“Trust you,” Shoto mumbles.

He has to, at some point. Aizawa has more than earned it.

There’s a sharp intake of breath above him. When Aizawa speaks, it’s a bit halting, tough Shoto’s not sure why.

“I’m glad, kid. I won’t let you down.”

Shoto yawns. He’s not worried about that.

Chapter Text

No one says the words ‘suicide watch’, but Shoto is definitely on suicide watch. Really, what this means is that Aizawa gets a day off teaching but not babysitting, and they spend the day playing Go Fish.

Well, Shoto spends the day playing Go Fish. Aizawa has been writing email after email that he doesn’t let Shoto read, and keeps half an eye on his laptop at all times. Somehow, he keeps winning.

“A phone call would be easier,” Shoto says after his seventh loss.

It’s almost time for classes to let out. Sunlight filters in through the tall windows, bright and peppy even faced with the unnatural silence of the common room. Aizawa, sat across from Shoto and slouching over the coffee table, hums noncommittally. His laptop’s fan whirs on. His black-rimmed glasses reflect the screen, but even if Shoto had two working eyes, he’s not sure he’d be able to read whatever exasperated email Sensei is surely sending out. They’ve both been on the floor since around eight in the morning, which can’t be good for their backs—Shoto because the amount of spinal fractures he’s had is three too many, and Aizawa because he’s old.

“Someone else is handling the phone calls,” Sensei says, hands flying over his keyboard. He glances at the cards spread on the table. “Is it my turn?”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Shoto says instead of answering, and rearranges the cards in his hand.

“That’s good,” Aizawa says, unfazed. He pauses in his typing and picks his cards up. “Got any aces?”

How does he even know?!

Shoto reluctantly hands them over.

Recovery Girl was here at some point, he thinks. Was shining a flashlight into his eyes and feeling around his joints. He doesn’t really remember, he—

He lost the entirety of Sunday night and afternoon. This morning isn’t all there either. Whatever was done to the body while he was away did not, at least, leave any marks, but it’s still not ideal that Shoto has no idea what it was. He doesn’t usually dissociate this heavily at UA. Special circumstances? Or the beginning of the end? Aizawa was there when Shoto returned to the body, kneeling in front of him and speaking—of nothing at all, really. Just nonsense that Shoto could cling onto while he registered the couch underneath him, the frigid air, the hands in his.

By the time he was aware enough to ask about it, everyone else had left for class. Shoto’s glad that, at least, he hasn’t had to face his friends quite yet. At most, maybe the body talked to them while Shoto was out. There’s never any telling what it’ll say when Shoto isn’t there to supervise.

Presumably, Aizawa has his phone. Shoto hasn’t asked. Presumably, people are talking. Shoto…

He’s on the verge of something. He’s been on the verge of something for… a while, now, and the frightening thing is that even while on the edge of the precipice, peering down, he can’t tell what he’ll fall into. If he’ll survive it. If everyone else will. He’s been so good at keeping himself in check, even when it sucked—especially when it sucked. When it hurt. When it burned. All for nothing.

“Got any twos?”

“Go fish,” Aizawa says without looking. He frowns at his screen.

“I’m starting to think,” Shoto complains, digging a card from the stack, “that you’re not taking this game very seriously.”

“How come I keep winning, then.”

“Fuckin’—it’s all rigged.”

He doesn’t even have a pair.

Aizawa tilts the laptop away and takes his glasses off to press a hand over his eyes. He seems—tired. More than usual, that is. Shoto has done a number on… on everything.

“What if I promise that I won’t off myself while you take a nap,” Shoto says.

Aizawa replaces his glasses and says, “Got any sevens?”

Shoto does. He doesn’t like this game.

It’s hard to focus. He started to wonder about half an hour ago what Mom might be doing. If she’s seen the video. Surely not, right? When his heart starts tasting like blood in his throat, Shoto stops thinking about it. Running is what he does best, really, and it’s funny. He’s always been a coward.

The scanner on the front door beeps faintly. Shoto goes still. He digs his nails into his palms in a half-hearted attempt to stay, but it’s a losing battle. His vision has already started to go fuzzy at the edges.

“Shoto-kun!” comes Izuku’s voice, winded and a little wobbly. He must’ve ran all the way here.

Shut it all down, says a voice in his head, and Shoto does.

He hears Aizawa’s voice distantly as he stares down at his mismatched cards on the coffee table. He should be paying attention. At the very least, Izuku deserves an explanation.

A lot of people deserve a lot of things from Shoto. Absently, he wonders why he can never get any of them right.

When he wakes up, he’s suffocating.

The taste of blood is familiar, and the feeling of inhaling liquid distinct. Shoto coughs and splutters on his futon, instinctively trying to sit up, but there’s something not right in his shoulder, and he only manages to make a lurching movement, half upright before he’s falling backwards again.

He wants to draw on his usual detachment and finds that he can’t. Finds that he is still afraid of death. That the axe that hangs over him does so by a very thin thread. The thing about fear—real, all-consuming fear—is that it renders you useless. A calmer Shoto would simply turn his head to the side, or shift so that he was in a more upright position, or open his mouth to try and force air through another way.

Shoto breathes in blood and feels it settle heavy in his lungs. He coughs again, left hand shaking, hovering uselessly over his face, too afraid to touch, right hand unable to do much more than twitch and tremble. Writhing in blind panic, throat aching, he barely notices when his door is thrown open, but then—

“My, my,” Dr Fukushima says lightly. Slow, muffled footsteps near the futon.

Shoto’s body goes limp on its own. A rough hand grabs his chin and turns his head to the side, pushing his face into the pillow. But it clears his airway. Blood from the mess on his pillowcase gets into his right eye, and Shoto twitches but doesn’t struggle. His hair must be a mess. The blood has congealed and gone sticky—and it’s everywhere, heavy on Shoto’s skin as he stares at where the floor and wall meet.

The tears are involuntary. They clean the blood out.

“What’ve you gotten yourself into now?” Fukushima chides, letting go of him.

Shoto coughs weakly. His shoulder aches, there’s something—something wrong with it, it’s not supposed to—And his face, fuck, he shouldn’t be—

“F-fuck y—” Shoto tries. He chokes on it. Wheezes.

Behind him, Fukushima tuts. “Don’t be rude.”

God. Okay.

How come Shoto always ends up here?

He swallows carefully, throat sore, and then opens his mouth to breathe in and out. When he manages to turn his head, Fukushima is kneeling next to the futon and laying out his supplies. The Bunsen burner, the round bottom flask, the dreaded syringe, the tongs. Shoto blinks sluggishly. The lab equipment isn’t what’s unnerving anymore; the thing that truly drives animalistic fear into his chest is the unassuming drinking glass Fukushima places on the floor.

Satisfied with his spread, Fukushima turns his heavy gaze on Shoto. His dark eyes shine with unmasked glee—Fukushima loves these visits. Says his Quirk loves to heal, says it gives him life. Shoto believes him. Believes his doctor’s coat and unassuming clothing, with his respectable haircut, his wide briefcase. His research has been invaluable in pediatrics, his methods somewhat secretive, sure, but no one can deny his results are effective. He’s an upstanding citizen. Who would look twice at his practice? Who would ask too many questions? Look at what he’s done, look at who he’s saved.

Fukushima takes hold of Shoto’s right arm, tugging a whine from his throat. A sharp reminder from the voice in his head: quiet. Shoto bites his left hand instead of his tongue, eyes scrunching shut.

“Ease up, Shoto,” Fukushima says when he notices. Shoto doesn’t.

His ragged breathing is louder than his whining was, but the feel of his canines digging into skin is familiar and comforting. The meat of his thumb smarts. It almost distracts him from his sleeve pushed up from his bicep, sending a current of pain up his shoulder, and the rubber pinching his skin, the cold rubbing alcohol, the pinch of the needle.

Fukushima does not need the body. He speaks to the blood.

Shoto frees his hand from between his teeth, eyes slipping open. There’s no way to prevent or even delay what’s coming, but he doesn’t—he doesn’t want to, and last night has left him raw as an open wound, as a fresh burn. Fukushima, satisfied, unties the rubber around Shoto’s upper arm and busies himself with the flask and the Bunsen burner. The open flame flickers blue.

It doesn’t even smell like anything, really. It’s not like Fukushima is boiling it—the flask is swiftly handled on and off the fire. It’s just something about oxygen, and coagulation… Shoto wasn’t paying attention when it was explained, years ago.

Fukushima pours the contents of the flask into the drinking glass. Shoto shivers.

“Will you cooperate, Shoto?” Fukushima asks.

His tongue feels like lead in his mouth. “I don’t—I don’t…”

What choice does he have? But it’s—

“Shoto.”

He’s choking on what little breath he can get, left hand fisted in the bedsheets—but that’s the only part of his body that still has the strength to move. Fukushima’s mouth is pursed; he’s white-knuckling the glass. A couple long seconds pass in silence.

Fukushima sighs, all the tension leaking from his shoulders. He aims a short, indulging smile at Shoto, and Shoto’s heart dissolves into nothing, the silt of it sticking to the back of his ribs.

The glass is set back on the tatami.

No. It’s—

“We can do this the hard way,” Fukushima says idly, digging through his briefcase. Shoto closes his eyes so as to not see the new syringe. He still hears the wrapper tearing. “Never say I didn’t give you a chance to keep your pride.”

Ah, pride. Shoto’s pride. Where’s that at, nowadays?

What’s it done for him?

He shouldn’t’ve closed his eyes. The hand that finds its way back to his chin makes him startle. The full syringe drips, drips, drips, adding to the mess on the sheets.

“Nn—” he manages.

But he is weak and injured, and Fukushima holds him down easily. Shoto’s mouth is pried open like he’s a dog refusing medication, the syringe forced between his teeth. The rejection is instinctual, visceral, but he can’t muster the energy for anything more than squirming.

Fukushima pushes down the plunger, and Shoto’s own blood fills his mouth.

It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting.

Like nothing else. Viscous, bitter. These visits are the times when Shoto is most aware—acutely aware, intimately aware—of what he is. For a moment, he considers letting it choke him. Wonders if that would count as dying by his own hand. How close to the trigger do your fingers have to be for people to say you pulled it?

Fukushima’s free hand soothes over his throat. Shoto swallows.

The effect is almost immediate. Fukushima’s Quirk is miraculous. Bone and tissue regenerate with unnatural speed while Shoto gags and gasps for air. Bile rises and he swallows that too. The syringe is pulled out of his mouth; Fukushima’s hands leave. Shoto sits up and scrambles back. His back presses to the wall.

Not a person. Hasn’t ever been, really.

“I’m—Wait,” he stammers, as Fukushima fills the syringe again. It feels weird to breathe unobstructed. His knees still ache. “I feel—Wait, please. I feel fine. It—It worked, it already worked.”

Fukushima pauses his ministrations and turns his head to look at Shoto, considering. Shoto shudders. Please. God, fuck. Please.

The Quirk hasn’t finished. His shoulder is much better, his nose no longer broken, but he still hurts everywhere, and he’s infinitely tired. Blood sticks to Shoto’s gums. He hopes Fukushima leaves. He wants Fukushima to leave.

For once, luck works with him. Wordlessly, Fukushima packs up his supplies. In the wide briefcase they go, blood and all—except for the half-empty glass, which remains next to Shoto’s futon, the full-again syringe still inside it. It’s quick work. 

When he’s done, Fukushima doesn’t stand. He stays kneeling there on the tatami, just staring.

“You’re a marvel of genetics, Shoto,” Fukushima says, apropos of nothing, into the heavy silence. Shoto doesn’t respond. “Not that you show any appreciation for it. You know, some of my colleagues are—Ah, but, no, you mustn’t concern yourself with that, not yet…”

Shoto breathes through his nose.

“All in due time,” Fukushima says under his breath. He holds Shoto’s gaze. “Yes, yes. All in due time.”

Shoto says nothing. After one more fond smile, Fukushima stands and leaves, closing the door behind him.

Falling back into the body.

Or maybe the right word would be crashing. That’s what it feels like. Shoto is slumped over the coffee table, head laying on his crossed arms, facing the window.

The sun is high in the sky. How much more time has he lost?

“... Worried…” Aizawa is saying, hushed, from somewhere behind him.

Someone else’s voice says something. Smooth and deep. Taut. Familiar. Aizawa’s voice cuts in and out.

“—Just dissociating at the drop of a—”

“Yeah, no, he does that—” says the second voice.

“—If you or your sister—”

“—No, we don’t—No, I get it—Thanks for—”

“—He sometimes—”

“—Yeah, it’s hell to get him to—When he’s upset it’s—”

Shoto stirs, and they both go silent.

Someone walks over and sinks to one knee in front of him. A hand is laid on his head. It pushes back his fringe and settles on his forehead, thumb moving soothingly back and forth. The motion is familiar. But this hand is much warmer. Shoto watches in vague disinterest as Natsuo tugs lightly on his lower eyelid to get a look at his pupil.

“’M not concussed,” Shoto mumbles.

Natsuo, seemingly satisfied, lets go of him. Shoto wishes he wouldn’t.

“Hey, bug,” says Natsuo. His smile seems off. “It’s Tuesday. How’s your shoulder?”

It’s Tuesday? Shoto grunts.

“Awesome,” says Natsuo. “Listen, I went to see Mom—”

At this, Shoto sits up. “Did she—Did—?”

“No,” Natsuo says firmly. “She knows what happened, but she hasn’t seen the footage. No one’s gonna show it to her.”

Somehow, that doesn’t make him feel much better. Shoto looks back; Aizawa is pacing the kitchen, speaking into his phone in hushed tones. Natsuo taps him on the cheek, and Shoto turns back to him.

“I was going through your room.”

Fucking hell.

“Nosy,” Shoto complains.

Natsuo tsks. “I needed the log, and you never said where you put it.”

“It was right there.”

“Yeah, right there under the goddamn floorboards—are you even allowed to do that?”

Shoto never asked. “What’s it to you.”

Natsuo tugs his hand out of his mouth. Shoto didn’t realize he’d been biting his knuckles. The sunlight streaming in through the windows is bright and warm.

“Bug,” Natsuo says seriously. “You been smoking again?”

Shoto almost wants to ask about his Mild Sevens. It’d be useless, though. No way Natsuo didn’t take them.

“Mm-mm.”

Natsuo’s biting the inside of his cheek. “You sure?”

“Long time.”

“Yeah?”

Shoto hesitates. But Natsuo should know, right?

“Since I talked to Touya.”

For a single moment, Natsuo looks, more than sad, completely devastated. A faint sense of alarm rings in Shoto’s head. Has something else happened? Why does Natsuo look like that?

But then Natsuo straightens out his expression, as if nothing has happened.

“Okay,” he says quietly.

“It’s true,” Shoto insists. He doesn’t think Natsuo thinks he’s lying, necessarily. But he needs to be sure.

“I believe you, bug,” Natsuo says. Switches gears. “Y’hungry?”

Shoto makes a face.

Natsuo tilts his head towards the kitchen. “I brought soba.”

In theory, that sounds good. Shoto hadn’t realized until Natsuo said something how hungry he is. His stomach aches and cramps. When was the last time he ate? It makes sense, though—the body doesn’t really like to eat without Shoto.

Still, he hesitates, suddenly a little concerned that, if he doesn’t want to eat, Natsuo or Aizawa would—And he doesn’t think they’d do it, he really doesn’t, they’re not like that, but… he’s not sure if…

Natsuo doesn’t say anything, just watches him patiently. Shoto wishes Natsuo would take his hand even if it’s not just to stop him from biting it, or put his hand in his hair again. He wishes Natsuo would say he forgives him.

“Okay,” he says.

They head to the kitchen.

Aizawa’s gotten off the phone already, and is sitting at the kitchen island, same as he was when Shoto walked into Heights Alliance what feels like a lifetime ago. When Shoto nears, Natsuo close behind, Aizawa pushes a round tupper his way. Shoto takes it and the offered chopsticks with quiet thanks.

“Did Airi make me soba?” he asks as he takes the lid off. He doesn’t sit.

“Rude,” Natsuo says, leaning on the counter with one hand, next to Aizawa. “What if I made you soba?”

“You don’t make it right.”

Natsuo makes an affronted noise, and Shoto ignores him. The cold soba looks really good. Natsuo’s girlfriend is a great cook, and, for whatever reason, seems to like Shoto well enough.

Shoto eats with Dr Fukushima’s hand around his throat, and barely tastes anything. Natsuo and Aizawa are talking, Shoto hears them, but the sound of their conversation jumbles between Shoto’s good ear and his left, the sound of chewing, and the routine swallowing. He only gets through half the bowl before a sharp stab of nausea warns him of what will happen if he takes another bite. He doesn’t push the plate away, but when Natsuo glances his way and sees Shoto fiddling with his chopsticks instead of eating, he takes it all from Shoto’s hands.

Shoto takes advantage of the fact that Natsuo’s back is turned as he tries to make space in the fridge, and faces Aizawa.

“What’s the general public saying?”

Natsuo drops the tupper, swears, and picks it back up. Aizawa barely blinks.

“Mostly, they’re calling for Endeavor’s head.”

Shoto pauses. Natsuo shuts the fridge door. They stare at each other for a second, Natsuo’s arms crossed tightly in that way he does when he’s about to say something Shoto won’t want to hear, and Shoto gets a bad feeling about the way this conversation is going to go.

“A lot of people think it’s fake,” Natsuo says. Going by Aizawa’s pinched expression, he’s not thrilled that Shoto’s being told. “But, uh, mostly the response has been… not—sympathetic towards him.”

He pulls something up on his phone, sets it on the counter and slides it towards Shoto. A screenshot of a headline. ‘Todoroki Hero Student Brutalized by Own Father: Villainous Side to the Flame Hero Endeavor’. Shoto stares as if the words could morph themselves into something more coherent.

“‘Brutalized’,” he mouths to himself. He looks up at Natsuo. “That’s… real fucking dramatic.”

Natsuo drags a hand over his face and looks upwards as if asking for patience from the heavens.

“Don’t even, bug, I don’t wanna fight you on this.”

“Awful lot of vitriol for a man that won’t even get charged with anything,” Shoto says, pushing Natsuo’s phone back towards him.

He waits for Natsuo to agree, maybe complain about how unfair it all is. Waits for Aizawa to apologize, to say that it’s unfortunate, but nothing can be done. Instead, Natsuo and Aizawa share a glance.

The ridiculousness of it drags a smile out of him.

“Natsu, c’mon, you can’t seriously think that anything’s going to happen to him. You…” The smile is wiped off his face. “Oh my god, you do think that. Seriously?”

“There are forces at play that you’re not aware of, Todoroki,” Aizawa says firmly. “Let the adults handle it.”

Shoto stares in disbelief. “He’s nineteen.”

“He,” Natsuo says, clearly trying not to be exasperated, “is right here, and doesn’t live in that house anymore.”

“You’re a bitch, Natsuo,” Shoto tells him sincerely.

Natsuo knocks once on the counter instead of slamming his hand on it. “Thanks.”

“The HPSC is trying to cover everything up, but it won’t be of any use,” Aizawa says. “Public outrage has been caused already, and the case has been taken from them—”

“Case?” Shoto echoes. “What case? The HPSC handles stuff like this internally. What fucking case?”

“The criminal case,” Natsuo says. “For the attempted—homicide, and every other fucking thing that—”

“There’s nothing set in stone yet,” Aizawa interjects, “but there will most likely be a trial.”

Shoto’s breath stills in his chest.

This is where they were headed all along?

“No. I won’t,” he starts, half hysterical. Natsuo goes to speak, but he cuts him off. “I won’t, Natsuo, you can’t make—You can’t—Please don’t make me, please, Natsu, I—”

Natsuo’s eyes are wide, hands half-reaching for Shoto. “Bug—”

“I can’t testify, he’ll kill me, don’t you—”

“Sho, no one’s gonna—”

“Don’t you get it, don’t you get it? Natsu, he’s gonna kill me, he’s gonna, I can’t—”

Natsuo rounds the counter. His hands land on either side of Shoto’s neck, thumbs pressing into his cheeks, holding him steady. Shoto shuts up. They look each other in the eye.

“No one is going to make you testify.”

Shoto’s breath hitches. “But…”

“I won’t let them,” Natsuo insists.

A second passes in silence. Maybe ten. An exhale.

“Okay,” Shoto whispers.

Another pause. Then Natsuo seems to make a decision, tucks Shoto into his chest and holds him close.

Feels like the first full breath in months. Like a winter dawn. You think there’ll never be another sunrise again, and yet, somehow…

Shoto tucks his hands into his own chest, hunching to make himself smaller. Natsuo got their father’s frame and their mother’s blood, and he holds Shoto together while Shoto just—takes a second. Just to breathe. He almost doesn’t register Aizawa’s footsteps receding. It’s okay, right? He’s been fighting for forever. Can he drop it, just for a bit? And then he’ll pick it back up when they need him to?

They stay like that for a while. Natsuo doesn’t seem in a hurry to break the silence, and Shoto doesn’t think he could speak first if he wanted to. They stay like that, and Natsuo’s cheek presses to the top of Shoto’s head, and his hand cups the back of Shoto’s head.

“I took your cigs,” Natsuo says into his hair. 

Shoto sighs. “I figured.”

Natsuo’s fingers tread carefully through the red side, getting rid of the tangles. Everything’s gone to shit, but—this is good. This is really nice. He’s got his good ear pressed to Natsuo’s chest. Wonders if there’s something that sounds like that inside him, too.

“We gotta get you clean, bug,” Natsuo says quietly.

Yeah. Shoto knows. If they want to—to do something about Endeavor, to actually make him face some sort of consequence, then they need to have the public firmly on their side. A nicotine addiction is the quickest way to throw everyone’s effort down the drain.

And, also—

(Fuyumi’s desperate voice saying Touya what did you take, what the fuck did you take, and Touya’s blown out pupils settling on the ceiling before he was able to choke out, I think I’m too high.

Did Touya get clean after he ran away? That would be kinda funny. If Touya stopped as Shoto started. If whatever dirty, abandoned place where Touya must’ve slept those first few months kept him clean, and the spotless floors of the Todoroki estate just dragged Shoto further into filth.)

Also. It’s been long enough, Shoto thinks.

It’s been more than long enough. Of all of it.

“Who do I even belong to, right now?” Shoto mumbles.

“Complicated,” Natsuo says. “You’re in a kind of limbo, in a way. But basically, for the time being, you’re a ward of the school.”

“Oh. That’s…” Be nice, be nice, be nice— “Fun.”

“It’s… not ideal,” Natsuo allows, grimace audible. “But it’s just a temporary solution.”

Shoto doesn’t ask what the permanent solution will be. Honestly, he’s a little scared of the answer.

He closes his eyes and lets Natsuo hold him, swaying them both from side to side the way Fuyumi learned from Touya, and Touya learned from Mom.

It’s fine to put it down. Just for a bit. The voice in his head that would disagree is, for once, suspiciously absent.

Shoto wonders if, in his dreams, they burn together.

“You could’ve died,” Touya would say. Snarl, maybe. Growl like a feral animal, like the villain Endeavor always knew he could be. “This world of Heroes doesn’t care about you. You could’ve died, and this is how they repay you. That’s what you’re dedicating your life to? They’ll chew you up and spit you out, they’ll feed you to the pigs.”

They are the pigs, Shoto would think but not say. Isn’t it like a sibling—to know you’re right and deny you the satisfaction of saying it?

Instead, he would shrink further into himself and try to remember he’s alive.

It’s all just a little bit funny. How Endeavor gets into your head. How the Todoroki name is a state of being, an entire sentence. He’s never going to get rid of this. It makes his chest ache.

Maybe he’s been curled up like this too long. Maybe if he stays a little bit more, his arms’ll warp his ribs right into his lungs, and he can die quietly, peacefully. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be a courtesy he’d be undeserving of?

He doesn’t so much leave the body as much as he, sometime early in the afternoon, is poured out of it like rotting milk from a pitcher. Izuku’s scarred hand grips the glass handle and he peers inside, grimacing.

It’s too late, Shoto wants to say. I’ve already gone bad.

He can’t remember his vocal cords fast enough.

Time passes like this.

Natsuo leaves. Aizawa returns. Shoto sits on the floor in front of the coffee table and bites his knuckles.

When it’s time for class to let out, Shoto doesn’t retreat to his room. He takes up a new project of sorting all the cards in a deck in order of least to most likely to be someone’s third guess in Go Fish. Aizawa is somewhere in the kitchen, diligently watching over the plain toast that Shoto, though the very idea of anything in his stomach made his chest tighten, agreed to try to eat. The dreaded beep of the front door’s scanner echoes in the empty common room.

They come in all together, his classmates, someone—mostly Tenya—always holds the door open so the other nineteen can go through. Eighteen, today. It’s a mess of, “I literally told you that chem exam was gonna murder us,” and “The next time fucking Tanaka has some shit to say, I swear to god—” and, “Were you dropped on your head as a baby?! No you can’t put metal in the fucking microwave!” and “What if they’ve been here all the time and they’re just invisible? The universe is so big, bro, there’s no way they don’t exist,” and Shoto has missed them so, so much.

He places the ace of hearts on top of the ace of spades. Should the sevens go before or after…? Hitoshi drops all of his weight on Shoto’s back.

“Fucking hell,” Shoto grunts, trying to shake off what is surely a punishment from heaven, or a lesson meant to teach him patience. “I liked you better when you were a twig.”

They roll around on the floor a bit.

“I’m going to get into a fistfight,” Hitoshi declares. He’s ended up on his back on Shoto’s back. Shoto accepts his fate.

“I hope you lose,” he says earnestly.

Predictably, Hitoshi pokes him in the side.

Either Hitoshi’s threatened them all, or Shoto’s closed eyes and the way he’s smushed his face into his crossed arms have deterred anyone else from approaching. Shoto, though he’s been thinking about his friends, missing them like a limb, is glad he doesn’t have to talk to all of them at once, or even anyone at all, yet.

No one comes to offer sympathy. He appreciates that they’re all pretending they didn’t see him get his shit rocked on national television. Aizawa doesn’t even question the human blanket situation they’ve got going on when he comes to place Shoto’s lame toast on the coffee table.

So the night passes without incident. Hitoshi sticks close to him, going through the day’s math exercises there on the coffee table and generally making himself a nuisance. Occasionally, Izuku’s voice floats over from the kitchen, laughing lightly or mumbling away. Shoto eats his toast. When the clock hits a truly unreasonable time to be awake, and Hitoshi starts shuffling his feet towards the elevator, pointedly looking between it and Shoto, Shoto tells him to go ahead and heads to one of the dining tables, where Aizawa is dutifully… still writing emails.

Begging Aizawa to just let him go to class lest he actually, genuinely lose his mind in here? Not his proudest moment, Shoto can admit that. But it does work.

He’s surprised that it does, honestly, to which Aizawa just frowns and says, “What you want does matter, you know.”

So that’s—whatever. Literally whatever.

He goes into Hitoshi’s room without knocking. Hitoshi, face down on top of the comforter without even bothering to take off his tie, is swiftly subjected to the sweetest of revenges.

“I think you got my fucking spleen,” he complains, when they’re both in their pajamas, on their backs next to each other, listening to the A/C whir overhead.

“I hope they have to take it out and put it in a jar,” Shoto mumbles, half-asleep.

Hitoshi makes a doubtful noise. “I think that’s the pancreas.”

It’s the appendix.

“Who’re you fistfighting?”

“Fucking… Tanaka,” Hitoshi seethes.

Shoto falls asleep before he can ask what that guy did now.

The morning finds him in a uniform he didn’t remember being this stiff. The cacophony of the breakfast table dims when he comes down dressed for the day, but it quickly picks back up, and Hitoshi doesn’t even have to threaten anyone with disembowelment. Shoto’s lucked out. With his friends, with UA. Hasn’t he?

People talk, but people always talk. On their way out of Heights Alliance, though Hitoshi tries to distract him, Shoto sees the glances, the people outright staring, and he hears his name more than once from people who shut up as soon as they see him. The first half of the day passes like this, not unlike how it was when he first entered UA—back when the most interesting thing about the school was that a Hero’s son was enrolling, and not that villains had attacked for the thousandth time.

Do they know? What do they know? What have they seen? Whose side are they on? Do they think him weak? Do they blame him for another lost Number One? Do they think, maybe, even deep down, that he deserved it?

All the wrong questions. The right one is far simpler than that:

What are you going to do about it?

Shoto was fourteen when he got accepted into UA. His place there was never put into question. It was never, if you get into UA, Shoto, it was when, and Endeavor made it clear that if Shoto sabotaged his entrance exam, he would come to regret it.

Does Shoto want to be a Hero? Good question. He tries not to think about it. It’s where he’ll end up regardless, so. No point in contemplating anything else—you work with what you’ve got. Any embers of wanting to quit were swiftly stamped out at the USJ. When Shigaraki’s hands made quick work of the concrete beneath him, Shoto felt, for the first time since the villains had attacked, a spark of fear.

Situation assessment: the man in front of you wants to kill you. He is stronger than you, more powerful. He can kill you with just five fingers, and he wants to. You are a stepping stone for his success. He will try to make you die, and you will try to survive. These are the only two possible outcomes.

Are you in over your head?

Which is something Shoto asks himself a lot. Cafeteria, tatami, Ground Beta, Mic-sensei’s classroom. Can you handle this?

So stupid. The answer is always the same.

Hero work is what Shoto was born, bred, and raised to do. He’s not good at anything else. So back then, he huffed out frost and readjusted his outlook: it didn’t matter what the villain’s Quirk was, if he was stronger than Shoto or had a petty vendetta. It didn’t matter if his grudge against All Might was incredibly telling of the meat grinder of an industry that awaits Shoto after graduation.

Shoto was made to fight. A weapon, a soldier, a machine. So he fought.

Are you in over your head?

Of course not. This is his purpose.

Shoto does not duck his head. He does not flinch when he hears the whispers. He does not take the long way to homeroom to avoid the prying stares and he does not run out of the cafeteria when the wave of noise hits him. Whatever these people know or think they know does not matter. Shoto has things to do.

In the cafeteria, Hitoshi quickly pulls on his noise-cancelling headphones—the noise doesn’t agree with him on the best of days, and today, it’s like people forgot about the concept of inside voices. Has it been like that since Monday? He almost feels bad for throwing half his lunch in the garbage, but the level of noise is actually nauseating.

Twenty minutes to the bell, Hitoshi starts glancing nervously between his watch and the door. Shoto flicks him on the forehead.

“Go,” he signs, rolling his eyes, when Hitoshi turns around to tell him to fuck off. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

Hitoshi makes a face.

“Go,” Shoto signs again.

“Do me the biggest favor in the world and find Midoriya,” Hitoshi signs back, and hightails it to Aizawa’s classroom without even making Shoto swear—which is how Shoto knows he was inching dangerously into migraine territory.

Shoto will do no such thing. But Hitoshi can think he will if he wants.

He makes it maybe two minutes before the noise gets to him too. It’s not defeat to grab his messenger bag in one hand and Hitoshi’s forgotten—and stupidly overstuffed—backpack in the other, it’s a technical retreat, so get that fucking right. The halls are nearly empty, which is why it’s such a surprise when Shoto bumps into someone so strongly they both end up off balance.

His hands are both full, so he doesn’t punch the guy on pure instinct, and then, upon realizing it’s fucking Tanaka, he tightens his grip on both bags so as to not punch him on purpose. This guy just does not know when to quit. First it was the weird-ass comments about Izuku’s Quirk status, and now this.

What… is ‘this’?

Tanaka is taller than him by maybe a centimeter or two. He gets straight to business, and that, at least, Shoto can appreciate.

“Oh, I was wondering when I’d see you,” he says, grinning. “Nice of you to finally show up to look at the world you’re ruining.”

Awesome. So.

“Right,” Shoto says. He’s carrying two bags. Is this necessary. “You’re in the middle of the hallway.”

“Sorry about that,” Tanaka laughs. “I just wanted to know if, you know, by the time we graduate, you’re planning to learn to take a hit. Save the rest of us some grief.”

Oh, is this guy in the Hero course? He’s not wearing his jacket, so it’s hard to tell. He might be a second-year. The few people scattered around the hallway start to mutter and whisper, and Shoto… doesn’t care enough to be having this conversation.

“Okay,” he says, and turns to walk around Tanaka.

The guy blocks his path. Jesus, what now.

“I just think it’s unfair. That’s our Number One Hero that you put out of commission, you know.”

“Right. This is a school,” Shoto informs him patiently, “and I have class.”

A spark of irritation twitches in Tanaka’s face.

“What’s it like, pretending to be the victim so that people will feel bad for you?”

“I don’t know,” Shoto says, and the stillness in the air is getting to him too, “what’s it like to be so fucking stupid that you can’t tell when people don’t wanna be talking to you?”

In hindsight, of course the guy was gonna punch him in the face. He didn’t actually want to speak to Shoto, he was just looking for an excuse to get into a fight with him. Endeavor fanboys are a wretched mirror of the man himself. Still, it catches Shoto off guard—it’s been a while since he’s gotten socked in the jaw like this…

At least it’s not his nose.

The bags tumble to the floor. Sorry, Hitoshi. Shoto and Tanaka go at it like it’s elementary school, dirty and uncaring of what proper technique you’re supposed to have when rocking someone’s shit.

Tanaka gets behind him—he’s taller, certainly packing more muscle, and Shoto is a mid- and long-range fighter. Sometimes people get confused when it comes to combat, misled by the carefully choreographed fights on movies and TV. A real fight is… not like that. Not really. You hit, and you get hit. You can try and read your opponent all you want, but there’s no method to avoid every punch, every kick, every sweep. Eventually, you get hit.

That’s all.

You get hit.

“Oh my fucking god,” someone gasps out.

Tanaka’s arm presses into Shoto’s windpipe. Shoto throws his weight forward, and they both tumble to the floor.

“Someone get between them!”

“Are you crazy?! No way!”

“They’re gonna kill each other, oh my god, get a teacher—”

There are—better places to do this than a school hallway. So many of them. If Tanaka was truly set on fighting him, they could’ve reserved a gym and Shoto could’ve handed him his ass. As it is, they scuffle on the floor like a pair of disgruntled cats.

Heroic to go for the throat in the first minute of the fight? Maybe not. Shoto gets his hands around Tanaka’s neck anyway. Something about the guy’s Quirk is strength related, though, so it doesn’t last long. Something in his nose is, once again, put terribly out of place. If nothing else, Tanaka has a strong right arm. Shoto returns the favor. He returns the favor so strongly, actually, that Tanaka is stunned for a second and Shoto gladly gets on top of him again.

Aizawa’s voice stops him with his fist reared back.

“That’s enough!”

Oh Christ, great. The cherry on top of this shit show of a day.

The second of hesitation costs him. Tanaka flips them over once more. His fist connects. Shoto grabs onto his arm and bites down hard. Aizawa-sensei’s footsteps are swift and furious.

In a fraction of a second, Aizawa’s capture scarf has them both separated and restrained.

“What,” he grits out through his teeth, “the hell is going on here? Shouldn’t you all be at lunch?”

They really should. Shoto doesn’t get a chance to answer, though, because there’s Denki, of all people, sprinting towards them from the other end of the hallway. He stops in front of them, panting, one hand on his knee and the other held up to tell them to wait. Tanaka stares. Aizawa stares. Shoto stares harder.

“Oh my god,” Denki gasps, straightening. “Jesus. Aizawa-sensei, there’s no way Shoto started it. That guy”—he points at Tanaka, which is unnecessary—“is just a dick!”

Aizawa seems to be shocked straight out of scolding them, just to scold Denki.

“School property, Kaminari, language—”

“It’s true, sir!” a second-year hastens to add. How many bystanders did their little scuffle have, exactly? “Tanaka just jumped him out of nowhere!”

Tanaka wipes at his bleeding nose. Shoto hopes it fucking hurts.

“He was saying these awful things…” a girl from the support course says timidly.

Can they go home. Can they all pack it up and never come back to this school?

“The bell’s about to ring,” Sensei says at last. “You two, with me,” he aims at Shoto and Tanaka, releasing his capture scarf. “Try and start another fight, see how that goes. Off with the rest of you, you have class.”

Denki hesitates as everyone else hurries to leave, but when Shoto mouths a thanks at him, he throws a double thumbs up, and takes off with both of the bags Shoto had been carrying.

Aizawa leads Shoto and Tanaka through the UA hallways. They move forward, and Shoto thinks, and considers, and, well—

He really has to kick this habit of leaning on the walls on execution day. It’ll never end in any way other than with his brains splattered on the floor.

Chapter Text

Disorienting is a word for it, sure, but only one of many.

Frightening. Heavy, too. The habitual confirmation that very little belongs to Shoto. That’s what he remembers when he comes back. The body is sitting. Hands rest on thighs. There’s a niggling itch running down lip and chin. Slowly, numbly, Shoto looks down at his uniform.

Ah. Well. It’s just blood, dripping down to stain a rumpled white shirt. What a strange sense of déjà vu. More red on white. The thing about blood is that it never really washes out. His nose…

How much time has he lost, and what… Why is he…?

“Todoroki?”

He needs to—get back. It’s not safe to be so far away when there’s someone so near. Shoto tightens fists and blinks repeatedly, trying to clear the film from his vision. Two rows of desks, a stack of papers, an open window. The teacher’s room is unusually empty. Birdsong filters in with the sunlight. Dust particles float lazily. Late afternoon? Not that much time can have passed.

Right?

He’s going to stain the couch. Shoto leans forward and pinches his nose, breathing silently through his mouth.

“Gimme a moment,” he mumbles nasally.

Aizawa, standing slightly awkwardly at his desk, doesn’t approach. Won’t touch him?

“Take your time,” he says.

And it’s funny because Shoto’s always doing this, really. Just wait, or get off of me, or I can’t keep going, please, just let me—

Like he deserves it, or something, which he doesn’t, and it’s fine and he’ll keep doing it, because—as humiliating as it is—this is what must be done to keep himself alive, but it’s…

He needs to live for Mom, and for Fuyumi, and for Natsuo. For Touya too, now. It’s just hard to remember that, sometimes.

The teachers’ room is cozy. Aizawa’s couch is an old, worn thing tucked into a corner of the room, where a yellow sleeping bag can usually be found napping. Shoto, more than once, has camped out here after class, in a corner with his nose buried in English or chemistry homework—ignoring the bustle of people preparing to leave until Aizawa finally raised his head up from his ever-present stack of papers-to-grade and walked him to Heights Alliance. Gen Ed thinks Aizawa’s a stoic, which is hilarious. Aizawa wears cat slippers and scolds them for improper handling of the stove.

Shoto raises his head, cautiously letting go of his nose. The bleeding’s stopped. Aizawa still keeps his chair between him and Shoto, hands holding his biceps tightly as if keeping himself from something. Shoto has always been childish, he knows that, but what’s with this recent trend of wanting—

Just, all the time. He didn’t use to be like this.

It’s not like it’s a big deal. But when the video dropped and Shoto was hiding under his desk and hyperventilating, Aizawa came and sat with him on the floor and held him close. It’d be selfish to—to ask for that now, of course. Just… Is Shoto really that… something? That Sensei won’t even get close?

“Hey, kid. That looks like it hurts,” Aizawa says softly, nodding his chin at—Shoto assumes—his nose. “Will you let me take a look at it?”

Oh. What? “Let—Mm?”

“I can go get Recovery Girl, if you’d prefer.”

“N—Uh.” He prods lightly at the skin around his nose, ignoring the way Aizawa’s expression tightens. “What—What do you want me to say? I’ll say it.”

Aizawa frowns. “It’s not about what I want. You get the choice.”

Why, though, he wonders. Shoto sucks ass at choosing.

“I don’t… You can—You can do it.”

Would it be weird if he said please can I have a hug. Would Aizawa lean away in disgust? Shoto’s all bloody. Would that matter? He wipes under his nose with the backs of his hands and it hurts when he touches it.

Slowly, Aizawa nears. Pulls the chair out from his desk and sits down in front of him. He’s holding a first aid kit he must’ve grabbed when Shoto blinked. When Aizawa reaches for him, Shoto, inexplicably, leans back. The body moves alone, which is—irritating.

Aizawa’s hand drops to his lap. Shoto breathes through his mouth.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and lets Aizawa poke at his face.

All the muscles in his face move fine, and, aside from the initial flinch at the first shine of the flashlight in his eye, there’s no sign of a concussion. As for his nose…

“Not bleeding anymore…” Sensei says, mostly to himself, inspecting what feels like some truly impressive bruising. “Well, kid, it doesn’t seem broken. You should be fine icing this until we get you to Recovery Girl.”

He doesn’t see why Aizawa is making such a big deal out of it. Shoto has been hit much harder than this. Sensei pulls away. Shoto cautiously twitches his nose. It hurts the same as it did ten seconds ago.

“You’re pretty bloody, though,” Sensei says. He’s pulling out the sterile wipes. “If you want, you can—”

“You do it,” Shoto interrupts, tucking his hands under his thighs and hunching into himself.

He’s probably staining his uniform pants. Whatever. Better his pants than Aizawa’s couch; it’s an ugly thing, the color a kind of depressed shade of dark blue, but Yamada-sensei loves to tell the story of how Aizawa made him haul it a dozen blocks to UA, and he does it with baffling fondness. Something damp touches his cheek, under his eye, and it’s not on his nose at all, but there’s a hand near his face and—

His nose—isn’t broken. It’s not broken. Just a little bruised, maybe, but it feels—it really feels like…

The body goes very still, in that way it does when it can’t make up its mind. If it wants to run, if it wants to hide, if it’ll stand up and face something, anything, for once. Oftentimes, it just ends up freezing like this.

“Sto-stop,” he says, mostly out of habit. But Aizawa actually does, leaning back with the wipe still in hand.

This shuts Shoto up for a second. Why would he do that? Shoto’s just being a wimp.

“You can keep—I didn’t mean—” Except that he did mean it. He just didn’t think that Aizawa would…

What the fuck are you even saying right now. Like, actually. Are you a fucking idiot? What are you saying?

“… It’s fine,” he says in the end, staring hard at the floor.

Generally, when someone says ‘stop’, you stop. Shoto knows this. He’s not stupid. It’s just that in his case, usually Shoto says ‘stop’, and Fuyumi says ‘shh, it’s okay, I’m almost done’, because they don’t really have the time to indulge Shoto’s weakness, or Fukushima says ‘quiet, Shoto’ because he doesn’t care about Shoto’s weakness.

God, he just—forgets. That things are so weird here, that UA is another planet.

Aizawa’s voice comes after a short pause, gentle but firm.

“Todoroki, look at me.” 

Shoto stares at Aizawa’s cheek.

“We’re not in any rush. When you tell me to stop, I’ll stop. And then we can keep going when you’re ready. Got that?”

Shoto nods jerkily. And suddenly, nonsensically, he wants to cry. He’s so tired. His hands twitch underneath him, but he keeps them trapped. He wants—He wants—

“I’m sorry I got into a fight,” he says quietly. Aizawa sighs.

“You didn’t get into a fight, kid, you defended yourself. No need to apologize.”

Who the hell told him that?

“I’m sorry I made you stay here, then. When you—I know you have classes.” The words tumble out of him unbidden. Once he’s started, he can’t shut up. “And I’m sorry you ha-have to deal with the whole—thing, with, um, with Endeavor. I shouldn’t’ve fought him like that, I shouldn’t’ve talked back. Was never gonna win. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I knew who Dabi was, I-I was thinking about it, and then I kept putting it off, and I didn’t know what to do, and I’m really sorry, I—”

Aizawa’s hand lands on his knee. Shoto shuts up. He stares hard at the place where skin meets fabric. Faintly, the thought pops up: You should kill yourself. Not out of any sort of distress. Is that going to be his new go-to reaction any time he’s drawn a blank?

Another planet. Another universe. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

“We,” Aizawa says, while Shoto is busy staring, “are going to have a long, long conversation about what secrets are worth keeping… Eventually. You’re not in trouble, and you don’t need to worry about it now. Okay?”

No, not okay. Shoto should be bleeding right now. Kneeling. Begging.

“You sh-sho—you should be angrier,” Shoto tells him, because he has a bad habit of working against his own best interests. He might be shaking.

Sensei hums. “How do you figure?”

“Because. Because,” Shoto insists. He has—arguments. Logic. He’s not stupid, he knows why he comes to the conclusions he comes to. But Aizawa’s hand is still warm on Shoto’s right knee, and Shoto is distracted and wants, he just wants.

“You’re a good kid,” Aizawa says, and Shoto fights the urge to perk up like a dog. “You did your best, I know you did, and you held out for a long time. Now let me take care of everything else.”

Has Shoto gotten worse at keeping secrets? Is that it? Izuku saw the bruise on his neck, way back when. And Hitoshi looks at him like how Shoto used to look at him. Katsuki keeps bringing chicken soup, which Shoto doesn’t even like, but feels bad for refusing every time. Katsuki says that Shoto ‘looks two seconds away from keeling over, the dumb motherfucker’, and is ‘too stupid to know when to fucking quit’. Shoto doesn’t disagree, exactly, but he could do with less chicken soup.

Has he gotten careless? Let people see things they have no business doing anything about? If Aizawa knew, he’d try to help. With everything. That’s why Shoto said nothing. So now that it’s been taken out of his hands, what is he supposed to do?

And if he’s the one who handed it over on a silver platter—stupid, stupid—then how is he supposed to face the people he was supposed to protect?

Shoto stares at Aizawa’s hand on his knee.

“If there’s something else,” Sensei stresses, “you can tell me, Todoroki. I’m going to help you.”

The sunk cost fallacy is not a how-to. Just because Shoto has fucked things up beyond repair doesn’t mean he has to keep going. Rock bottom is not supposed to come with a free shovel.

At the same time, though, hasn’t he lost any kind of plausible deniability he could’ve had? If not all of it, then most. Endeavor’s surely already given up on solving this quietly, already called every lawyer he has on payroll. And those lawyers have surely already called every poor sap that has had the misfortune of working under Endeavor. Yamauchi-san must be involved, surely, trying and failing to put out the ongoing PR fire. Tasha from HR, who never really seemed to be done figuring out Japanese, Burnin’, who had to fetch him from the roof more than once, fucking… Fukushima… who…

God. Fuck.

Fuck.

“There’s so—There’s something happening with my Quirk,” Shoto admits, hushed, and doesn’t dare look up. “For—For a while… two months, maybe three. It’s been different.”

“You’ve been using your fire less,” Aizawa agrees.

“It’s been different,” Shoto says again. Harder to control? Not really. Different. “People always talk about it like it’s two Quirks, but it’s not. Half-Cold Half-Hot, and the ice comes first, but where the ice goes the fire follows. Always. Even when I wasn’t using the left side, I could feel it every time I used my ice—it—it wanted to follow, I could tell. It really is one Quirk. Just… a perfect one, wholly balanced. And it just—”

His voice dies out. How to say this… It’s been weird. It’s been…

Like it’s in him. Moving. Kind of. Like it’s weaving itself into sinew and—and that’s new, because it used to be inextricable from it. From him. Now it just writhes there.

Aizawa’s fingers drum lightly on his knee.

“You are not, unprovoked, a violent person towards your classmates,” Sensei says. “But I’ve been watching you fight for months, kid, and I’ve spent that entire time trying to draw you away from Quirked combat. You’re good at it, sure, one of my best, but you rely on it too much— which is why,” Aizawa insists, speaking right over Shoto’s half-hearted protest, “I was so surprised to hear that you didn’t seem to use your Quirk once, even when Tanaka was overpowering you.”

Right. Not for lack of—Shoto’s not a fucking saint, okay? He can admit to being a little trigger-happy with his Quirk. He doesn’t lack finesse, and he’s not stupid. But it’s… a strong reflex.

The sunk cost fallacy might as well be Shoto’s life philosophy.

“I can… The ice,” he says haltingly, “it can go through my left side. Like my entire body is… And it makes it stronger. I didn’t really… do much with it, last week. But it’s possible.”

And if the ice can go through the left side, it’s only logical that the fire…

Nonsensically, he’s worried he’ll get stuck. That the fire will consume him whole and alive. No more ice. No more Shoto. Just Hellflame and its legacy. Endeavor and his fucked up little pet project. And it’s dumb because wasn’t that what Shoto wanted? Wasn’t that the goal of keeping his head down and sucking it up?

“Okay,” says Sensei. Shoto risks glancing up and Aizawa purses his lips, sighs briefly, so he looks back down. And then, again, “Okay. We’ll handle it.”

Shoto almost wants to take it all back. Instead, he lets Aizawa clean his face up and ignores the way his entire body shakes. It’s almost inconsequential. Just because it’s hard to care about anything, nowadays. Hard to—

Hard to do anything at all. Really. That’s what it is.

And, just. Just…

Sensei leans back in his chair, putting space between him and Shoto, and Shoto tries and fails not to mourn the loss.

“Do you think he would’ve?” he blurts, unprompted.

There’s a brief silence.

“Do I think who would’ve what?” Aizawa asks gently.

But the look on his face suggests he already knows, so Shoto doesn’t elaborate.

“I’ve seen him that angry before,” he confesses instead. He’s been thinking about this, and it’s true. An angry man made an angry son. “But never like that. Touya always had this way of pushing his buttons… I don’t know. Never knew when to shut up. Well. Neither do I, I guess.”

Touya pushed buttons in Shoto, as well. Buttons that Shoto didn’t even know existed. Standing in front of his brother, a month and some change ago, he wanted to punch his fucking teeth in. The thing is, though, that Shoto does not have the guts to look anyone in the eye. Or, for that matter, to let anyone look in his.

Aizawa looks at him intently. Outside, birds chirp. His hands, under his thighs, are falling asleep.

“Endeavor is Number One now. Doesn’t need me anymore,” Shoto explains, hollow. Tries to not let his voice break, but— “He doesn’t even want me.”

He blinks hard at Aizawa’s suddenly blurry outline. He breathes slow and steady through his mouth. If it means something at all, how quickly he could be discarded as if he never was worth anything, it has to mean something about him. What he can give, or how long he can persevere, or how long he can stall. And if even one of these things is not up to standard, the house of cards just crumbles into nothing.

Who can he trust? Despite what it may seem, many people. But who can he trust completely? Whose abilities can he rely on, and who can he be sure will get the job done? Maybe more than trust, it’s…

Time grows liquidy and malleable. Through the thick fog that settles, familiarly, over him, Shoto shifts. Aizawa speaks, though it’s little more than a low, distant rumble. Shoto chews on his knuckles. Aizawa pulls his hand out of his mouth. Aizawa’s voice is the only unbroken tether in miles. In years. It’s not enough.

Shoto comes into the body; he leaves it. Hands are moved from under it, placed on soft, worn fabric. Hands are held by something warmer, colder. Eyes blink, a mouth speaks. How much of him has to be in the action for the action to be his? How much does he have to ruin to prove it’s him, his father’s son, his mother’s child? They ruined him so he could keep ruining everything else.

When the dizzy spell lifts for long enough for him to claw his way back into the body, Aizawa is sitting next to him on the couch, carefully massaging warmth back into Shoto’s numb hands. He’s speaking in a low, reassuring tone, and every word that leaves his chapped lips does so visibly in a cloud of cold air. Shoto doesn’t feel the cold, but shivers anyway.

“You’re okay,” Sensei says, and ducks his head to try and catch Shoto’s eye. “Hey, kid. Feeling any better?”

Hard to say. Not really. He nods. Aizawa nods back.

Shoto pulls his stiff hands out of Aizawa’s warmer ones. Should he be causing this much trouble, still? Surely not. But when he goes to stand, his knees give out, and he falls back onto the couch.

“Whoa—Hey,” says Aizawa, sternly, bracing him with a firm grip on his bicep.

Shoto stares at him dumbly for a couple seconds.

“Oh,” he says finally.

Unsteady. That’s another word for it. For him. Aizawa just frowns.

“Give yourself a second,” he says, and Shoto blinks at him. “Just catch your breath.”

Shoto slumps against the back of the couch. Aizawa shifts away a little, not shivering yet, but something close to it. They’ve been doing this strange back-and-forth for a while now, and Shoto is less sure of where he stands. Because sometimes Aizawa pulls back, or turns away from him, or stands too far; but sometimes Aizawa reaches for him like—like Mom used to. So which is it?

Though he knows—or, he thinks he does. Shoto breathes slow and steady through his nose. It’s not broken. A little bruised, maybe. It doesn’t hurt that much. Not many people can do as much harm as Endeavor.

… Who can do as much harm as Endeavor?

He wants to say, again, that he’s sorry for getting into a fight. If there’s anyone who would deserve that kind of apology, it’s Aizawa. Shoto closes his eyes, drops his head fully on the back of the couch, and places his closed fists on his thighs. Half-Cold, Half-Hot pokes him curiously. Sometimes he feels bad for how much he’s neglected his left side over the years—it doesn’t even offer itself up, merely watches as the ice comes front and center and ready to act. It’s hard to refuse the side of him that creates instead of consuming. He lets his right side feel around the room; its two rows of desks and computers, its neatly placed office chairs, the frigid air Aizawa is breathing in. It hesitates only briefly, and, when Shoto nudges it gently, spreads out like a blanket over the teachers’ room and touches every trace of frost it can find. It stares at him, waiting, and Shoto, cautiously, hedges, Can you… bring it back to me?  

For a second, his right side doesn’t respond. Then—

Bliss. The ice returns to him and all is well. At least for a moment. Between giving and taking away, or creating and destroying, there doesn’t seem to be as much difference as he once thought.

Shoto opens his eyes. Aizawa is staring intently, a deep frown on his face. Clearly, he’s noticed the change in temperature. Again, Shoto wants to apologize, but those words get stuck somewhere between his chest and his throat; instead, he looks away towards the ceiling, and what comes out is, “Sensei, did you watch the video?”

If he notices the rasp and waver in Shoto’s voice, Aizawa says nothing of it. In fact, he doesn’t even blink.

“Not in its entirety,” he says. Pauses. “Kid, I need to talk to you about something. Will you look at me?”

No, he wants to say. What could Aizawa possibly have to tell him that would be effective only if Shoto were looking? Other than ‘I’m so incredibly disappointed in you and I never want to see you again’? Which would be hard, because he’s Shoto’s homeroom teacher. So Shoto would probably have to switch schools. He’d get shipped off to Shiketsu, or some shit, and then everyone there would know it was all Shoto’s fault.

He straightens, instead, as is polite, and half-turns towards Aizawa. Sensei looks tired. And he always does, but these last few days, he seems like he’s carrying an impossible weight. It just—worries, maybe. A little. Aizawa doesn’t seem nearly as invincible as he should. As he used to. But then again… neither does Endeavor.

“There is a meeting tomorrow,” Sensei starts, “with the judge who is handling your case. Over guardianship.”

He pauses, trying to gauge Shoto’s response, but all Shoto can say is, “Oh.”

“Your sister will be there,” says Aizawa. “This will be a preliminary meeting more than anything, but it will establish the bases of how guardianship will be assigned—”

“Of me?” Shoto interrupts, and then mumbles, “Sorry.”

But all Aizawa does is nod. “Of you, kid.”

“But the—But. You don’t need to—You—It’s my mom who you… who needs to get out.” He feels a little like he’s drifting away again. “It’s Mom who—She’s not crazy. He said she was, but, but she’s not.”

“I didn’t say she was,” Aizawa says patiently. Shoto’s nails dig into his palms. “What your father did was wrong, and we’re working to rectify it. But you are no less important than your mother, you are my student, and you are my first priority.”

Shoto says nothing. It’s hard to think.

He doesn’t get it. Sensei still doesn’t get it. This is what Shoto was born for. He’s not so incompetent that he can’t even protect the people he needs to protect. All he has to do is stand there and look stupid and say nothing. How can Aizawa not understand?

“Todoroki, let’s call a spade a spade,” Sensei says after a few seconds of silence. “Your father is abusing you. He can’t be allowed to keep custody—”

It sounds so final. Everything does, these days. 

“No,” Shoto says instinctively. “No, it—it’s not like that.”

Aizawa pauses. “What is it like?”

And Shoto, really, has no answer for that.

It’s punishment. It’s discipline. It’s just training. It will make him stronger. It will make Endeavor stronger. Those two things are the same. Shoto needs it. Right? Endeavor says it’s necessary, so it doesn’t matter what the truth is, if Endeavor wants it done, it gets done, there’s no way out. There will never be a way out.

So stupid. He knows it’s bad. It’s wrong, what Endeavor does. Shoto knows.

“So who… What’re the—Who’s gonna…?”

Sensei shifts somewhat uncomfortably.

“Your sister will be at the meeting,” he says again. “As will I, and Principal Nedzu. Our fallback plan is for you to remain a ward of the school. Living arrangements would be sorted out for school breaks, where you would most likely spend them with your sister or your brother. But the ideal would be for someone specific to look after you, not UA.”

“Fuyumi?” Shoto guesses. He worries at his lip. He doesn’t particularly find the thought of continuing to ruin his sister’s life ‘the ideal’. But what does he know. And— “What about Mom? Who’s gonna—Or, are they gonna let her out of the hospital?”

“I’m not sure,” says Aizawa, carefully. “As far as I know, it hasn’t been decided yet.”

And how unfair is it? That Mom has all her wits about her, and still no way to prove that she isn’t who Endeavor made her into. Still she doesn’t get to decide.

“I wouldn’t be telling you this now,” Sensei says, “I know you’re tired. But this is all sort of last minute. Tsukauchi needs me to get this part sorted out so we can go ahead with the proceedings. Does that make sense?” Shoto nods mindlessly. “Okay. Kid, there is another choice for your placement. And before I tell you what it is, I want you to understand that you’re allowed to say no. Can you repeat that back to me?”

Shoto startles a bit. Why…? Sure.

“I’m allowed to… say no,” he echoes dutifully, though he doubts it’s true. Some tension seems to leave Aizawa’s shoulders.

“I want to petition for guardianship of you.”

Oh.

What?

“Ultimately, it all comes down to what the court decides,” Sensei continues. “But the court is supposed top keep your preference in mind—”

“So—” Shoto starts. And then runs out of places to go.

Aizawa just waits him out patiently.

Shoto clears his dry throat. “So. So I would stay with you?”

“Yes,” Aizawa confirms. “With me, and Hizashi and Hitoshi.”

“But… Dorms?” Shoto says dumbly.

“During the school year, you’d stay in the dorms,” Sensei says. “During breaks, we’d still be your legal guardians—me and Hizashi—but you would be able to spend some of them with your siblings.”

His brain feels like it’s been turned to mush. “With Natsu?”

“Yes, with Natsuo, or with Fuyumi, or with us. You’d get to choose.”

“But you’d be… Legally, it would be you.”

“That’s right.”

“And for, um, for, like, in the hospital, for parental consent, or… for, like, if I can see my siblings. That would be—You would decide that.”

“We would be the ones asked in the case of needing parental consent. But kid, legally, we could not keep you from seeing your siblings. We would actually be responsible for making sure you’re able to, since you’re still a minor.”

Shoto swallows hard.

Is that true? That can’t be true.

Right?

“There’s a lot that will be in your hands” Sensei says. “I don’t compromise on life-or-death situations, not with any of you kids, nor on anything with risk of major harm—physical or otherwise. I’m responsible for you, so I make those decisions. Anything else, we can talk about it.”

With the burden of caring for Shoto out of the way, Fuyumi could help Mom. With Mom stable, Fuyumi could actually live her own life, for once. Natsuo might have to drop out of med school, at least for a while, but there’s not much that can be done about that. As for Touya—

Well. As for Touya…

For the first time, he looks Aizawa in the eye.

“I have to say now?”

“I don’t want to rush you. It’s a big change, and you deserve to have a say in what happens. But the meeting is tomorrow. Eight AM”

What a fucking deadline.

“Okay,” Shoto says. Hesitates. “Can I think about it until tomorrow?”

Aizawa’s face softens.

“Yeah. That’s fine, kid. I’ll come talk to you before I leave, okay?”

So much for sleeping in. Outside, the afternoon has already started to melt into evening. The birds give way to crickets, and dusk falls gently over campus. Shoto stands slowly, Aizawa right behind him. When he reaches the door, he bows to Sensei.

Aizawa purses his lips briefly. “Want me to walk you back?”

Shoto can’t think of anything he’d like less.

“No, I—No. Thanks. No thank you.”

Sensei doesn’t seem convinced, but he doesn’t push.

“Alright,” he says. “You have my number. Call if you need anything.”

Right.

Aizawa settles on his desk, digging his laptop out from his bag and settling in to—probably send more emails. Shoto lingers.

“Sensei, I—”

Aizawa raises his head to look at him, and Shoto cuts himself off. Why is it so hard to say it to his face? Sensei, who asks and asks and keeps asking. Who seems hellbent on fighting this losing battle. Guardianship of Shoto, really? You don’t take things from Endeavor; Endeavor is the one who discards that which… which isn’t relevant or… useful. Anymore.

Shoto shifts on his feet in the doorway. Slowly, Aizawa turns his head to the side, pointedly away.

A silence. A deep breath.

“Thank you,” Shoto says at last, through the lump in his throat. “For everything.”

“Anytime, kid. Okay? Anything at all,” Sensei says. With a kind of sincerity that frightens.

Mina is waiting for him just outside the building.

“Hey, hot stuff!” she yells when she sees him, waving an arm high in the air as if he could possibly miss her.

The evening has gone from pink to navy to pitch black, and the night sky winks at him when he tilts his head up, briefly, to ask the universe for patience.

“Hello,” Shoto says as he nears. “Why are you chaperoning me?”

She deflates a little. “Straight to the point, huh? I’m not.”

Mina smells like burnt sugar and artificial strawberry. They begin the trek to Heights Alliance in a tacit agreement, him eager to take off the bloody uniform shirt and her, he’s sure, eager to escape the warm, humid night for the comfort of A/C.

“Did they send you to get me because they need a fire extinguisher?” he guesses, only half joking.

She huffs, and goes a little fuchsia. “Can’t a girl walk a good friend home?”

It drags a small smile out of him.

“Sure. I didn’t mean to imply any ulterior motives,” he says apologetically.

“Well,” she allows, raising her chin in faux superiority, “forgiven. But don’t let it happen again.”

“Of course.”

As they turn a corner and the dorms come into sight, Mina grows fidgety. More than usual. Maybe they did burn something in there and need him to ice it. Or maybe it’s about the fight. He doesn’t do that much anymore—rise to bait when he knows better—more tired than angry these days, he guesses. He hopes she doesn’t ask about the blood on his shirt.

“Your sister’s here,” she says at last, which does catch him off guard.

“Fuyumi?” he says. Even though he doesn’t have any other sisters.

Mina hums. 

“She went up to your room.” Ah, drat. “You never told us she was… like that,” she says, light and breathy.

Right. Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.

Why Fuyumi is here is—obvious, of course. To them. To Shoto, not so much. They’re not really the kind of family that… That is—unless Endeavor sent her. It doesn’t make much sense for her to be here at all. Natsuo already came, saw that Shoto is alive and unharmed. Fuyumi should be lying low. Waiting for Shoto to tell her when it’s safe to come back. Though it never will be, again.

Why Fuyumi is here, he doesn’t understand. But whatever.

Mina stops him at the foot of the front steps of Heights Alliance. Her hand is warm on his wrist. Alive. He stares down at it, then at her. The way that firm touch presses into his pulse point makes it ricochet back into him. He’s not sure that he likes it. He’s not sure that he agrees with the presence of something beating life back into him, despite—

Despite.

“Do—We should… I’m sure you’re eager to get out of the heat,” he offers, unsure.

Mina laughs lightly. “Eh, not really. You’re a great walking buddy.”

It’s only as he’s frowning, trying to decipher what she could mean, that he takes notice of the waves of cool air coming off of his right side. Seriously, where’s his head at, today? Mina’s hand drops from his wrist when he gives a slight tug.

“Right.”

Shoto resigns himself to a conversation. How many of those does he need to have in one day? But Mina doesn’t seem to be mad at him. She shifts on her feet and, after a few long seconds, says, “They really didn’t send me. I volunteered.”

Hm. Not any better. And he doesn’t want to be rude to Mina. But what the hell is he supposed to say to that?                          

“Volunteered for what?” he settles on. Though he doesn’t really want to ask.

“To apologize.” He frowns as she says it, but she continues before he can protest. “We were trying to give you space, but, um,” Mina says, rocking back and forth on her heels, “I think we did it a bit too well. We’re sorry.”

He thinks back to breakfast. To last night, hiding his face in his crossed arms with Hitoshi on top of him like the world’s weirdest weighted blanket. No one has come to talk to him about the video. But no one has come to talk to him, really… at all. He didn’t feel like they were ignoring him—if anything, was grateful that there had been no need to explain the most humiliating night of his life to some of the only people whose opinion of him matters.

Still, in hindsight, he guesses it might sting a little. That when he ran away like a child, unable to bear the noise of the cafeteria, no one followed. That Denki arrived, presumably having heard through the grapevine about the fight, only after Shoto had gotten decked in the face. It’s not like it isn’t his own fault, though. He knows he—

Deny, deflect, deescalate.

Deny, deny, deny.

No one can get too close. He lies to all of them.

“I don’t…” He shakes his head. Swallows the lump in his throat. “You don’t have to apologize. I probably would’ve… I probably wouldn’t’ve…”

She bites her lip. “We know it’s—hard, for you.”

Isn’t that something.

Mina pops her knuckles one by one, restless. They know it’s hard for him. What is? Behaving? Sure thing. What, talking to people? Being—Being a person, or…?

That’s fair, he supposes. He’s not good at that, either..

“I don’t mean it in a bad way,” Mina says. And he believes her, but maybe she should.

When too much time has passed with only the sound of the wind and the moon, she adds, “Only, we’re your friends, and we wish you’d let us help you sometimes. But… it’s just how you are.”

“Yeah, well.” Isn’t today just full of introspection. “I’m trying to be—less. Of that.”

“Of—”

“I’m going to be better,” Shoto repeats.

“I…” Mina frowns. “I mean, I don’t really think it’s…”

And it’s okay if she doesn’t. People can think whatever they want about Shoto. But he knows. And he—he’s going to fix it.

He’s trying to be better.

“Did you, um.” He struggles to remember what it was that she was complaining about on Sunday when they came back from break. A paper… a study? “Um. The dolphins…?”

“Oh!” says Mina. She smiles, and doesn’t call him out on the blatant change of topic. “Yeah, I—I emailed the lead researcher and she said she’d send me the PDF. Isn’t that so cool?”

“That is cool.”

He doesn’t have his ID with him, so Mina scans hers at the door. The cloying smell of too much caramel hits like a ton of bricks. He makes a beeline for the stairs; it’s not a good idea to risk someone getting in the elevator with him. Still, he has to bite his top lip to stifle a laugh at Katsuki in the kitchen, yelling at Hanta that he’s messing up the buttercream, while Eiji cackles in the background. God knows what those three are doing in the kitchen.

“Um, good luck!” someone calls after him as he goes.

Shoto pauses at the bottom of the stairs. He looks back at the common room.

It’s Momo, crocheting on the couch, her feet tucked under her and a steaming cup on the tea table in front of her. She smiles hesitantly at him.

Shoto nods jerkily. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Fuyumi is waiting for him in his dorm room, which means all hope is lost.

She’s probably come straight from work; definitely looks the part. Her skirt reaches under her knee and sways to and fro as she pushes the toe of her loafer into an uneven part in his flooring. Did Natsuo lift it up like that? Honestly.

“Hi, bug,” she says absently, getting violent with the floor now.

“Hi,” Shoto drawls, slowly.

He closes the door behind him, but she barely notices.

“That brother of yours, I swear to god,” Fuyumi mutters.

Hm. She finishes wrestling the tatami into submission and blows out cold air in that way she does when she’s feeling overheated. It’s not the floor that Fuyumi’s mad at. She finally turns to look at him.

They stare at each other for a couple seconds. Her with a frown half-tugging at her brow, taking in his bloody white shirt and the ugly bruise under his right eye. Him with a face even a mother couldn’t love, bland and blank and—

Brother and sister. Sister and liar.

“I got into a fight,” he explains, breaking the awkward silence.

But Fuyumi just smiles faintly. “I know,” she says. She must see something in his face, because she lets out a small laugh. “I had to stop at reception on the way here. Your principal offered me tea, it was good. He’s a really nice—um… guy.”

“Nosy,” Shoto chides flatly, frowning. Fuyumi tsks at him.

She doesn’t ask who started it, though, if she did, for once Shoto would be able to say it wasn’t him. Aizawa said I’m not violent unprovoked, he wants to say. Though he and Fuyumi both know it’s not true.

She smiles stiltedly at him. Fuyumi is always nervous. Is the one to look over all their shoulders. Fuyumi is no one would believe us. Fuyumi is shut the fuck up.

So Shoto wonders.

“Natsu said you were keeping a log,” she says. Not like an accusation, but not much of a question either.

“I was,” he confirms.

What else is there to say. It was burn after bruise after broken bone, clinical and bare-bones, a little black journal of numbers and letters and occasional explanations. Not like he kept a diary. Natsuo knew. Natsuo was told. She wasn’t.

That’s really all there is to it.

Fuyumi seems to think the same. She purses her lips and says nothing more about it. Pivots, instead, to simpler topics, as Todorokis are wont to do.

“He also said you hadn’t… He said, since you talked to Touya…?”

Only about a month ago. Which, of course, feels like a lifetime now. Shoto looks away.

“I… It just seemed so ridiculous,” he says truthfully.

He knows she laughs more than he hears her laugh. The world muffles; his ears are cotton-stuffed.

“You two were always so alike,” Fuyumi says wistfully.

“You think?” he mutters.

When he turns back to her, her smile has frozen in place. If nothing else, they both lied to her all the time. Except Touya had a reason and a right to, and Shoto is just a coward. Fuyumi shrugs. She wipes nonexistent dust from the back of his desk chair.

Why are you here, he wants to say. Though maybe with a bit more clarity than before. Fuyumi doesn’t like not being told things. Always looking over all their shoulders. It follows that she’d want to know what she’s looking out for.

“Something,” she says, “has been happening with Dr Fukushima. What?”

Shoto swallows and shakes his head. “Ask me something else.”

She nods. Expected that from him.

“Okay. Bug,” Fuyumi says, softly, on an exhale. “What do you remember? From last week?”

Busted.

Gust of wind on the house of cards. Shoto purses his lips. It doesn’t even matter. You know, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. Just—

“I have—I don’t think I’m… remembering it right.”

Endeavor’s knee on Shoto’s neck, a flaming hand on his shoulder. None of it happened. The way he went limp like that. Shoto wouldn’t do that.

Nothing can be done. You know nothing can be done.

Is that what she said? Is that what she said? What happened that night? What happened the next morning? The Quirk is so stupid, it’s so stupid. Witchcraft in a doctor’s coat. Blood leaving the body, re-entering it. Might as well be a crow’s feather and an incantation. But if blood isn’t life, what is?

If memory can’t be trusted, what can?

“Do you still think that?” he asks. “That there’s—no point.”

Fuyumi shakes her head minutely. “That’s not what I meant. Bug, I—”

“But you—” That’s what she said. Right? Because… “You never said—to anyone. And I know that, um, that there’s—I know. But. You never said—”

“Because I knew! I knew what was going to happen if I did, and it was—hard, raising you, Shoto,” Fuyumi says. Her shoulders hunch up to her ears, helpless. Defensive? “It was hard, and I was a kid, and Dad, he just—I was always so scared of him—”

“I’m scared of him too,” Shoto interrupts, almost without meaning to. But it’s true.

They both go quiet. Fuyumi’s got this horrible look on her face, aghast. Shoto’s always the one putting it there. He looks away.

“Natsuo says people are mad at him.”

She sniffles. Laughs briefly.

“Well,” she says. “He… um. Yamauchi-san has been working hard. Reminds me of, um, of that time with the mess at the gala. You were so rowdy as a kid…”

Rowdy. Now he’s violent.

“So don’t you… Don’t you think we have a chance, this time?”

He’s timid and hesitant and ashamed of it even as he thinks to himself, indignantly, that he has all the right in the world to be all of those things. Fuyumi scrubs her eyes, displacing her glasses, and then stays there with her cool hands pressed to her face for a long moment. She breathes sharply and drops her hands. Her glasses fall back into place.

“I don’t think you remember,” she says, “because you were little, and there’s a lot from back then that you don’t remember. But there was a time period when—for, for a week or so, I think—when Touya just, um, just kept calling the cops? Um, to the house. Like, daily. Sometimes twice. Sometimes they’d come, sometimes they’d… And this was maybe… a week after Mom was hospitalized? And the last time was—Dad found him on the phone. Um. And he just, like, dragged you into the room, and—obviously the bandages hadn’t come off yet. And he just started, um. Like, pushing on—on the…?” Fuyumi stops to wipe away her tears. Shoto has no recollection of this. She sniffs. “And you—you were really little and you just, um, you didn’t know what was going on, and just—Yeah. Touya went fucking insane. I thought he and Dad were going to kill each other.”

Shoto pauses. He looks at his sister’s red-rimmed eyes, her shaking hands she twists in front of her. Her teacher’s clothes and her rectangular glasses.

“Is that what you thought?” he asks quietly.

She breathes.

“I thought Dad was going to kill him,” Fuyumi amends after a beat.

And then he did. Took a while. But Endeavor did.

“Natsu wasn’t there. He just—Touya told him what happened, afterwards. But I-I was. I was there, I heard you screaming.”

Shoto opens his mouth as if to say something. Closes it when he realizes he has nothing to say. What can he say? This family has been rotten from the beginning, all the way up. There’s no escape.

Well… There’s only one.

“Bug,” Fuyumi says quietly. It makes his chest ache. “It wasn’t always bad, with him. But when he got like that—When he gets like that… When you yell at him, and you—you do all these things and he just gets this look on his face…”

She purses her lips and shakes her head. “I’m trying to keep you safe,” she says helplessly. “Haven’t done a very good job of it so far, but I… Sho, there’s things happening that you don’t know about. Cops coming to my school, stopping Natsu at his, it’s, it’s insane. What these people are trying to do… It might work, I’m not saying it won’t… But if it doesn’t, and afterwards Dad wants to know who you talked to and what you told them—”

Plausible deniability. Which he can’t have if he testifies. Can’t have if he speaks to a reporter or the police, or… Shoto crosses his arms in front of his chest.

“Outside of… what he deserves,” Fuyumi says, “for what he’s done—and we both know he’s never gonna get it, but I’m… You have your whole life ahead of you, bug. You deserve a chance to live it. That’s all. I’m trying to make sure you get that.”

Playing both sides, in a way. Because Fuyumi is always nervous. The one to look over all their shoulders. That’s how she’s kept them alive, how she’s taught them to keep themselves alive. Fuyumi is lie low; is shut the fuck up. How many times has that protected him? Countless. You have to know when to stand your ground… and when to bow.

She leans forward. Even though they’re the only ones in the room, Fuyumi’s whispering. Shoto swallows.

“There are things,” she says, “that I need to know. I need to know, Shoto, your Quirk. What the fuck is going on?”

He shrugs helplessly, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

“It’s Fukushima?” she insists.

“He—I don’t know, Fuyumi, fuck. I don’t know, maybe?”

“It’s been different.”

“Not harder to control, not really…”

“But different, it’s different.”

Undeniably so. And she…

“You think it’s Endeavor,” he guesses.

It’s Fuyumi’s turn to shrug.

“I’m—I’m… trying to figure it out.”

Shoto nods. It’s not… incredibly farfetched, as far as theories go. Or, it wouldn’t be, except Endeavor is Number One now. Still, maybe…

God, he doesn’t know. Maybe.

“Yumi, have you… Have you guys talked to Mom?”

She seems surprised that he asks. Why?

“Yeah,” she answers, uneasy. “I was there this morning.”

He waits for her to elaborate. She doesn’t. Shoto stares at her, dumbfounded.

“How’s she doing?”

Fuyumi sighs. “She’s okay. Misses you lots.”

Oh. Oh, okay, he gets it. Well, that kind of stings.

“You think it’s better if I don’t visit.”

Her eyes catch on his bloody shirt. She purses her lips and doesn’t answer.

“It’s fine,” he says dully. “I don’t think they’d let me go, anyway.”

Fuyumi accepts this gladly, though she wants him to think otherwise. 

“One last thing,” she says. “Have you… been in contact with Touya?”

Shoto startles. “What? No. Wh—Have you?”

She winces. “Are you sure?”

“Am I sure?” he repeats incredulously. “Fuyumi, have you talked to him?”

“I just…” she starts. “I don’t know, I, I got a text. A time and place.”

Shoto’s heart stops beating. “You’re fucking joking.”

“It’s an unknown number—”

“It’s Touya.”

“It’s—”

“Fuyumi.”

“It could be anyone.”

“Oh my god. Stop. Shut up. Don’t say anything. Did you answer?”

“Watch it,” says Fuyumi, which isn’t an answer.

This fucking family.

Shoto scrubs a hand across his face. What a mess, what a fucking mess.

“When?”

Even as he asks, he knows he’s not going to get an answer. Fuyumi just shakes her head.

“I just wanted to know if you’d gotten anything like that,” she says.

He doesn’t think so, but then again, he’s barely looked at his phone in weeks. The past couple of days it’s been more in Aizawa-sensei’s and Hitoshi’s hands than it has been in Shoto’s.

“That’s that, then,” she says, and walks past him like he’s not even there.

Shoto frowns. “You’re leaving?”

“I’m—”

“No, hold on, hold on—”

“Bug, I think—”

Pivot. Pivot.

“Nee-san.” Fuyumi stops in front of the closed door. “I have to see him.”

Fuyumi faces him. Lets out a faint laugh. “Absolutely not.”

“Yumi—”

“Don’t know what kind of sister you think I am,” she mutters heatedly. “No. No way in hell.”

Something in how she says it grinds on Shoto’s nerves. “You don’t get to do this, he’s my brother—!”

“Yes, my brother too,” Fuyumi snaps finally, straightening. “My brother too, Sho, before he was yours, before you were even born, and if he’s stopped caring about us then that’s not Touya anymore.”

The room chills in the silence that follows. He’s not sure which one of them is doing it.

Fuyumi gives in first.

“I don’t like fighting with you,” she says quietly.

That pushes him over the edge. He ducks his head into his chest to hide the way his face crumbles, clenching his jaw so tightly his teeth start to ache. For a few short seconds, while he tries to compose himself, Fuyumi says nothing. He’s so sick of crying.

“There’s a lot that went wrong, even before you were born,” she says then. “And there’s a lot of people that you need to hear this from, not just me, but… I’m so sorry, bug.”

His heart stills in his chest.

“I am,” Fuyumi continues. “There’s so much I should’ve… I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault.”

“Don’t—Don’t do that,” he snaps. “Don’t apologize to me, I don’t—” He chokes on his tongue like a child on a tantrum. The tears burn then overflow. All he can seem to find is a weary kind of helplessness; and the rage that is now more a part of him than anything else could hope to be. “I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want you to do that.”

She doesn’t fight him on it.

“You been eating, bug?” says Fuyumi. He has, so he nods. She doesn’t have to know that it’s been just plain toast and cold soba that he never finishes. “I almost forgot…”

Fuyumi starts digging through her bag until she finds a small, square tupper she offers to him wordlessly. It’s glass, so he can see the plain white rice inside. Shoto wipes his face roughly with his hands.

God. He hates that he’s about to ask this.

“Where—What was—Where did you. Um.”

But Fuyumi, of course, is an expert in Shoto’s idiosyncrasies. She pushes the Tupper into his chest, and he holds it with both hands, muttering his thanks.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “It’s not from a restaurant, or anything. You, ah.” And here she looks a little uncertain, tucking a nonexistent stray hair behind her ear. “I, um. I made it before I left.”

Oh. Left?

Shoto blinks a few times too many.

“You…”

“It was time,” Fuyumi says hastily. “I figured—you know. It really—”

She heaves a big sigh. Raises her chin and looks at him, really looks at him. They’re so close. Shoto wants…

Fuyumi’s hand is warm on his face. He closes his eyes.

“I’m gonna figure this out. I promise.”

Her other hand comes up, and then she’s holding him, really holding him, touching his scar for the first time in years, and Shoto is so goddamn tired of crying.

Fuyumi is shorter than him, has been for a while now. He has to lean down to press his forehead to her shoulder and let her wrap her arms around it.

“Whatcha doing, bug? Hm? What’s up with you?” she asks into his hair.

“Just trying to fix it,” he whispers. “I’m trying to fix it—”

“Sho…”

“I am,” he rushes to insist. “You don’t believe me, but I am, I am, and I… I don’t think this is something we come back from.”

He feels more than hears Fuyumi sigh. Hesitates. Thinks Mom was right about that child, in the end. Shoto can’t stand to look at him either.