Chapter 1: Shouto Once Again Fails to Buy that Mini Fridge He Needs
Chapter Text
He’d been putting this off.
Stuffing his dresser drawers with junk food, shoving packs of bottled water and juice inside his closet. Except for the occasional ant trail, it was fine. Unless he was training—and that happened less often now, thank fuck, after Shouto had threatened to purposely fail his high school entrance exams in order to gain a little extra free time at home—he usually managed not to leave his room at all whenever both he and Endeavor were in the house.
Although it was nice going days on end without seeing his father, Shouto was finding the whole process a hassle. He didn’t know much about balancing a diet, but he knew that his body wasn’t going to put up with many more KitKats and dried seaweed packages.
So he tried pre-preparing food. He found that he also did not know much about the speed at which perishables perished. Right now, he was cupping the fruit sandwich he’d made himself two days ago and frowning down at the moldy growth lining its crustless edges.
He needed to buy a mini fridge.
Endeavor hadn’t bothered to thoroughly search Shouto’s room in at least a year, so he could probably slip it in with little problem. He could tuck it in his closet or even in the adjoined bathroom so Endeavor couldn’t see it from his doorway. It might be a bit of a struggle to get it on Endeavor’s credit card bill unnoticed, but he could at least schedule delivery for when Endeavor was out working.
Yes. This should be fine.
He rewrapped the sandwich before throwing it away. Opened his laptop to once again scroll through his options. Shouto knew he’d Googled it at least three times before, but he’d never been able to focus long enough to get to the check out page. He was hungry now, though, and pissed at his sandwich (for molding), himself (for forgetting that mold was a thing that happened), and Endeavor (for having a day off and once again obscuring Shouto’s path to the fucking kitchen). The anger would help him focus.
An email notification popped up on the side of his screen. He ignored it for three seconds—the time it took for the pleasant ping to knock away all motivation he had to finish his task, like a basketball crashing into a shelf full of China.
He clicked on it, skimmed it calmly.
A knock came at his bedroom door, and Shouto’s head jerked up on its own, his heart stuttering.
“It’s me,” Fuyumi called from the other side, her voice muffled.
Shouto released a breath. It was just his older sister. Endeavor wasn’t much for knocking, anyway. “You can come in.”
The door slid open, just enough for his sister’s head to peek through. She smiled. “Hey!”
Shouto narrowed his eyes.
“I made some soup,” she said. “Do you want to come eat?”
“Thanks,” Shouto said, closing out his email, “nope.”
Fuyumi lowered her voice a bit. “He’s not in a bad mood or anything.”
“I’m fine.”
“Shiyo, you need to eat.”
His fingers stilled over the keyboard. He knew she didn’t know any better. He knew she didn’t, and that it was his fault in the first place, because he still hadn’t told her. But every time she said that name, he felt the dark thing in his gut twist around.
He forced the words out. Kept them even, unaffected. “I have food in here. Tell him I’m busy or something.”
“With what?”
Buying a mini-fridge. “UA stuff.”
Fuyumi’s eyes widened. “Did you get the acceptance email?”
“Of course I did.”
Fuyumi let out a soft squeal. She opened the door and came in, barely giving Shouto time to close his laptop before Fuyumi gripped his shoulders and planted a loud chu on his forehead. “Ahh! I’m so proud of you!”
“With who our father is, they would’ve admitted me even if I were Quirkless,” Shouto leaned away. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Shut up. You worked hard to get in that school.” She gave his head a light shove. “Did it say anything about added security for this year? I know everybody’s worried about the villain attacks. I am. I told you about the kid in my class whose house burned down, right?”
Fuyumi was always talking about the kindergarten class she taught. Shouto couldn’t blame her. It was a safe subject in a house where a lot of things weren’t safe. “Yeah.”
“Her dad’s still in the hospital. They wouldn’t have known it was a villain attack if Sakura—Sakura’s my kid—if some man hadn’t carried her out to her front yard and then set the house on fire in front of her.”
“Damn,” he deadpanned. He’d heard this story before. More importantly—was that a package Fuyumi was holding at her side? “Is that mine?”
“Like… I can’t imagine. Knowing your father was burning alive and not being able to do anything about it.”
Sounded festive. “Is that my package?”
She dropped the manila bubble envelope on his knees. “Came for you in the mail.”
He didn’t let his expression change. “Thanks.”
“Buying stuff on Dad’s credit card again?”
“It’s something for school.” Not technically a lie. “Close the door on your way out, please.”
Fuyumi pinched the ends of his long hair. “You’re gonna need a haircut before school starts up. Want me to do it?”
He wished she would hurry up and leave so he could open his package. “I’ll get it done professionally.”
“You’re awful.”
Shouto grunted.
Her voice softened. “I’ll bring leftovers back for you later, okay?”
“Mm.”
When Fuyumi finally left the room, Shouto picked up the package. It was slimmer than he thought it would be, and addressed to Todoroki Shiyo. Ironic. He swallowed his pulse before shooting a small, razor-sharp icicle from his right palm and slicing open the package with a clean swipe.
He smelled it first. The cloth was a bit funky, like stale soap. That was fine—he’d had it commissioned, so it was less likely to have a standard factory smell. It looked good otherwise. Full-length, white, a clean cut—completely opaque, and the second layer of cloth sewn to the outside would let it pass as a simple undershirt. After pulling off his shirt and bra, he worked the chest binder over his head and headed to the mirror in the bathroom. And—
He buried his hands in his hair. They were shaking. A bout of dizziness passed over him. “Fuck,” he said, and his voice cracked. He knew the icicle he’d made was melting on his bed, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the mirror.
Yeah.
Yeah, this was right.
That wasn’t a thought he had often, and he planned to hold on to it.
###
His first day of school began with a clogged drain. He’d cut off about a hand’s length of hair into the sink and then tried to brush his teeth. In hindsight, that was probably not… a good idea.
Eh. He’d deal with it later.
Fuyumi was cutting shapes from construction paper on the dining table when Shouto walked in. She looked up and blanched. “Oh. Holy Jesus. Please tell me you were planning on leaving early.”
“Yes?” he said. He was hoping he wouldn’t see her on his way out. She was going to see him eventually, though, so might as well get it over with now. “Why?”
“I have to fix your hair.”
“My hair’s fine.”
“It’s… really not.” Fuyumi pushed herself up from her floor cushion, fiddling frantically through her scattered school supplies. “Where…? Agh! Where are my scissors! Do you see my scissors?”
Was this necessary? This was school, not a date. “You’re holding them.”
“Oh—good. Sit down, Shichan.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I said sit the hell down.”
He sat down.
Fuyumi groaned as she fluffed his hair with the tips of her fingers. “Did you get gum in your hair or something?”
Or something. “Mm,” he said.
“Mother of… and why are you wearing pants?”
His stomach lurched. At least it wasn’t his father asking. He could deal with Fuyumi. All he had to do was act uninterested and she would eventually abandon the question. Endeavor wasn’t so forgiving. “It’s the uniform.”
“Well, I get that, but isn’t it the boys’ uniform?”
“Don’t know,” he lied.
“Geez… here, hold this placemat over your shoulders to keep the hair off.”
She started snipping. Her fingers were light, fast. Maybe he should’ve asked her in the first place…?
“Eff me,” she muttered. “This is damage control at this point, Shiyo. You look like a boy. I can’t believe you just… oh my God. The morning of.”
Or maybe not.
She did say that he looked like a boy, though, and that was nice. Strange, of course. Like overhearing a compliment you weren’t supposed to. “I look like a boy?”
Fuyumi carefully removed the placemat, folded it up with the red and white hairs so they wouldn’t fall on the floor. “You know where the mirror is.”
He stood and walked over to the half-length mirror beside the door. He looked… like he normally did. Just with shorter hair and a flat chest.
Fuyumi came up from behind him and patted his bicep. “You’re bulkier than most girls. Guess it’s tough to be a hero without guns, though. I can do your makeup if you want.”
“No.” He picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder. Was that answer suspicious? He tacked on, “I don’t want to make you late.”
“Wow. So thoughtful.”
“You’re welcome.” He started to head out.
Fuyumi called after him. “Reflection offered to drive you to school today. Make sure you thank him.”
Reflection was one of his dad’s newer sidekicks who specialized in surveillance. His quirk allowed him to view nearby scenes in any reflective surface. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that make driving a car dangerous, since the side and rearview mirrors would no longer be serving their original purpose? He’d been planning on taking the train, anyway. “I don’t need…”
His voice trailed off. Fuyumi was giving him a look—lips tight, eyes daggers.
He sighed. Fine.
Reflection was waiting for him outside the gate in a black car. Shouto went for the backseat, but then the front passenger door popped open.
Reflection waved at him with a gloved hand, the small round mirrors on his fingertips catching in the sun. He was in civilian clothes otherwise. If he could call them that. A fitted knit tank top—a passable offense, if only they’d been on their way to a gay bar instead of a high school—paired with baggy cargo pants that gave up their valiant effort to stab Shouto’s eyes out halfway down Reflection’s calves.
Shouto climbed in and buckled his seatbelt, setting his bag in his lap. Pop music was playing on the radio. “Thank you for driving me.”
“Not a problem, kiddo.” Reflection put the car in gear and headed out. “Haircut? Looks good on you.”
“Thanks.”
He let himself look around the car. There was an empty child’s car seat in the back and several candy wrappers in the cupholders. An empty Pocky box at his feet. The rearview and side mirrors looked a bit off, and it took him a few moments and a split-second glitch to realize that they weren’t mirrors. They were computer screens displaying what was happening in real time around the car.
Traffic was atrocious. They should’ve left earlier than they did. Now they’d hit rush hour traffic, and Shouto’s seatbelt was beginning to cut into him after the first dozen times of jerky stopping and starting. Reflection’s driving kind of sucked, which at least confirmed for him that Reflection and Fuyumi weren’t hooking up. If Fuyumi were close enough to Reflection to know how he drove, she never would’ve let Shouto in the car with him.
If it wasn’t a favor for his sister, though, why was Reflection bothering to take him to school? To curry favor with Endeavor? Endeavor wouldn’t give a fuck. Maybe Reflection just hadn’t learned that yet.
“Nervous?” Reflection asked.
The question took him by surprise. “Do you mean for school?”
Reflection laughed. “Yeah, of course.”
He couldn’t tell if he was nervous. Wasn’t sure what that felt like. Sure, there was a sense of impending doom, but wasn’t being nervous worrying about what could go wrong? He already knew that everything was going to go wrong, so he had no compulsion to worry. “No, I’m not nervous.”
“Really? I was petrified my first day of high school. I guess you have more reason than I did to be confident, though, huh?”
A loud rumble interrupted the conversation. Shouto looked out his window to see a motorcycle come to a stop beside Reflection’s car. It had two riders, and the second one—a green-haired kid about his age—wasn’t wearing a helmet.
“That’s not safe,” Shouto muttered.
“You say somethin’?” Reflection asked.
“Just…” He looked at the motorcycle’s driver. He was wearing a long leather coat that quivered every now and then as car passed. Black gloves, black visor. Nothing to indicate age or identity, other than vaguely human-shaped. “That boy isn’t wearing a helmet.”
Reflection leaned forward to look past Shouto. The green-haired boy turned his head suddenly, met Shouto’s eyes, and waved, smiling.
Shouto stared.
The motorcycle’s driver rammed his elbow back into the boy’s side, and Shouto heard the boy’s laughter even over the noise of the highway. Then the motorcycle jerked forward, engine revving, weaving through the gaps between cars, until it disappeared.
Shouto leaned back in his seat. That was… weird. Had that kid been waving at him? Shouto didn’t know him.
He looked over at Reflection, but Reflection was staring at his fingertips, his gaze alternating between the mirrors on the tips of his fingers and the bridge up ahead.
“What’s wrong?” Shouto asked.
“Hm? Just doing a bit of surveillance.”
Surveillance? “Of the motorcycle?”
“Uh, yeah.” He gave Shouto a weak smile. “That was kind of weird, don’t you think? I wanted to get the license plate, at least, in case a kid with that description ends up missing.”
A kidnapped child? The kid hadn’t been acting distressed. He admittedly didn’t know much about that stuff, though. Endeavor hadn’t bothered to train him for rescue missions.
Several minutes passed with just the pop music on the radio. Shouto glanced at the mirrors on Reflection’s fingertips, but he only saw his own face. Made sense. Reflection was the only one who could use his quirk for surveillance.
And then Reflection turned off the music. He had a strange look on his face.
“What?” Shouto asked.
“I am so sorry, kiddo,” Reflection said. “Someone’s trying to blow up this bridge.”
Shouto’s heart stilled. “Huh.”
“Hang on.”
Chapter 2: Shouto Exchanges Zodiac Signs with a Kid Villain
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Reflection swerved the car sideways, perpendicular to oncoming traffic. A thought whipped through Shouto’s head, almost too fast for him to register it.
A passenger in a car accident. What a cringey way to die.
But then the oncoming cars screeched to a furious halt, and Jesus there was honking. And yelling. And people getting out of their cars. Reflection was out of the car before Shouto had a chance to unbuckle his seatbelt, waving his Pro Hero badge and shouting, “Everyone, please stay back! This bridge is unsafe!”
Shouto’s mind spun. The best Reflection could do in this situation was evacuate the area, get the people on the bridge out of their cars, maybe locate the bomb. They would need other heroes specialized for this type of crisis to prevent millions of dollars of damage and capture the villains.
Why were villains even attacking this area? Were they targeting a specific person set to cross the bridge? Causing chaos to make a point? This was stupid. If they wanted to kill someone, they should’ve made a more reliable and precise plan away from rush hour traffic.
Shouto got out of the car and looked around. Reflection was talking into a radio and had already managed to herd a large group of people away from the bridge.
Hm. Shouto should probably have been helping evacuate.
He headed toward the bridge. Before he could reach it, he saw the motorcycle again, parked off the side of the road just a few meters from the bridge. The green-haired kid was sitting sideways on it, legs crossed, playing on his phone. Shouto didn’t see the person with the leather jacket anywhere.
“Hey,” Shouto called. The boy looked up, almost like he’d expected Shouto’s approach. He had a face that wasn’t… happy, necessarily, or even innocent, but something clear. Like you could see right through his wide eyes to the giant sky behind him. It was unnerving. “Uh, you—you need to get back from the bridge. There’s a bomb threat around here.”
“That so?” the boy called back.
Was he smiling? Shouto couldn’t tell from here.
Regardless, it was strange that an adult had left a child behind while evacuating. Unless… shit, unless the man who’d been driving was a villain who was forcing this kid to help with the bombing?
He needed to keep this kid in sight until heroes who could address the situation arrived.
“If you’re not scared, I could use some help evacuating the bridge,” Shouto said.
The boy did smile that time. “Aw, you trust me with that?”
What the fuck? “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Sorry!” The boy waved his hands in apology, laughing. “It’s just that I’m busy at the moment. I’d love to hang, though. Maybe another time? Like, after the bridge blows up.”
“I wasn’t inviting you to… hang…” Shouto stared at him for a few seconds, trying to take in as much information as he could for later sorting. “Are you a villain?”
“Huh? I’m a Cancer.” The boy looked down at his phone. “It’s time for the first one.”
“What?”
He heard it before he felt it—a crack like a dead tree finally falling, and then a furious rumble from the ground. A few tiny pieces of concrete snapped at his ankles through his pant legs.
Had the explosion come from the opposite end of the bridge? That wasn’t good, being that Reflection had only begun evacuation on this side. Shouto should’ve been faster, shouldn’t have stopped to talk to this fucking… kid…
Wait. The kid was gone, along with the motorcycle. What in hell…?
Shouto curled his right arm toward himself and shot a streamlined blast of ice toward the ground, hugging the top of the pike as it grew and rose. The ice lifted him a few meters in the air, and he looked out above the cars on the bridge. The bridge didn’t seem harmed. Where had the damage been? Under the bridge, perhaps, on a support beam?
He should probably be working together with Reflection on this until the pros got here, but Shouto didn’t see Reflection anywhere, either.
Shouto dropped to the ground. He angled his right hand back, his left shoulder frontward, and shot forward, heading for the other side of the bridge. He didn’t have spectacular control of aiming his ice, but he had enough to avoid freezing most cars in place as he weaved through them. Halfway across, he spotted the motorcycle again. The green-haired boy was driving it in the same direction as Shouto was headed.
Did that kid even have a license? Maybe he was older than he looked? Still wasn’t wearing a helmet.
Shouto approached the motorcycle before letting his power taper out until his feet touched the ground. He hit the concrete running alongside the motorcycle. “Hey!”
“Hey!” the boy returned, keeping his eyes on the road as he drove. Shouto couldn’t tell if the tone was meant to be mocking. “Why are you running?”
“I’m trying to talk to you. Are you helping somebody blow up the bridge?”
The boy sped up.
Shouto shot several bursts of ice from his hand—not enough to lift him vertically, but enough to temporarily boost his speed. “Who are you?”
The boy glanced over at him, grinning. “You’re fast.”
“Answer me.”
“You gotta tell me more about your quirk sometime, okay? It looks super, uh, super cool!” He shot Shouto a one-handed finger gun before revving the engine and shooting ahead.
Shouto stumbled to a halt, swearing. Following that boy wouldn't be much use. The boy seemed off, yes, but he didn’t seem stupid. If he really was a villain, he’d want to lead Shouto away from wherever the action was. Or into a trap. Depending on their motives, which Shouto didn’t know.
Hero work was annoying.
Then: a second blast.
He should’ve expected it. The green-haired boy had referenced the earlier explosion as being “the first one,” but Shouto had gotten into the habit of only absorbing information in the moment and waiting until he was safe to parse it, and now—God, the sound hit him like the blunt end of an axe against his skull.
It came from beneath him. So they were attacking the support beams. Why not attack them all at once? Why give Shouto time to catch up? Why not just make a bigger fucking bomb? This didn’t make any sense.
People were finally getting out of their cars. Some were standing around confused, while others knocked at car windows and yelled at strangers to get off the bridge. Horns blared. Somewhere, someone was crying. Shouto stood still as citizens rushed past him.
Shouto didn’t know where the bombs were, and he doubted the villains would make themselves easily visible. The drop from the bridge to the road beneath was too far to cushion a fall with a downward ice blast. The best he could do was damage control.
And he’d need to do that soon.
With a groan that rivalled the shrieks of Grendel’s mother, the section in front of him collapsed.
A switch in his brain flipped.
Shouto put his hand forward and blasted his ice as fast and with as much power as he could, effectively creating a smaller bridge of ice across the gap that had collapsed. The entire bridge swayed. Shouto rushed forward to see if he’d accomplished what he meant to.
And—
Yes. His timing had been right, albeit barely. He hadn’t caught any of the falling concrete or vacated cars in his ice, but he could just make out that his ice had snatched up the top half of a tiny Honda that still had a person inside. That person was probably scared out of their mind right now, only half protected by a substance that could melt or crack with another explosion, but as long as the pro heroes arrived soon—
Shouto was yanked backwards and up, knocking the breath out of him.
He flew for a few seconds until he was just… dropped, and he landed hard on his back on the side of the bridge where (presumably) Reflection still was. His vision blurred for a couple seconds, but he thought he saw something long and red hovering above his head.
“Oh hey, man—sorry ’bout the drop.” A rush of wind hit his face. “You good?”
Sitting up, he blinked the carbonation from his vision. A golden-haired man was touching down in front of him, beating his wings once before tucking them in.
Shouto knew him immediately. Hawks. He should’ve recognized his presence from the moment he was jerked into the air. His hand went back to feel for the hole he knew would be in the back of his uniform.
Yeah, he was “good.” He’d been better before Hawks had picked him up. Now he was going to have to order a new shirt and jacket, and he’d probably have bruises all along his back in a few hours. Hopefully his binder wasn’t damaged.
Shouto pressed the heel of his palm into his temple, swallowed his annoyance. “They’re attacking the support beams one at a time. I don’t know why. One of the villains is a kid on a motorcycle—green hair, about fifteen years old and one hundred sixty-five centimeters tall. I didn’t see the other well. A man, I think. Black leather jacket. And there’s a car with a person still inside trapped in my ice, so take care of that before the next explosion.”
Hawks’s mouth worked for a second before he spoke. “You’re Endeavor’s kid.”
Shouto stared at him.
“Shit…” Hawks muttered, his hand going to the back of his neck. In a jerky movement that was obviously an afterthought, he reached out a hand to help Shouto up. “Uh, sorry. Todoroki Shiyo, right? I kind of thought you were a boy from where I was—”
“You do this every time?”
Hawks’s hand stilled. “Huh?”
“That’s why Endeavor is number two instead of you,” Shouto said. “I’m alive. You’re caught up on the situation. Go fix it. You’re making me late for school.”
“Shit. Okay,” Hawks said, dropping his hand. He whipped his wings out. Shouto blinked against the rush of air. “Good luck on your first day, I guess?”
Shouto didn’t respond, and he didn’t bother watching Hawks fly off, either. He got up, brushed the grime from his back and pants, and walked back to find Reflection’s car amongst all the chaos.
Reflection was talking to another costumed pro hero Shouto didn’t recognize—a local hero, probably. When Reflection saw Shouto, his eyes widened, and he rushed over.
“What happened?” Reflection asked. “I looked back and you were gone. And you’re—” He pinched the right side of Shouto’s shirt. Shouto looked down, expecting from Reflection’s reaction to see blood, but it was just damp from where he’d hugged his ice.
And grimy, from his unfortunate interaction with Hawks. He picked off a tiny tuft of red fuzz from his shoulder. “Couldn’t you see me in your mirrors?”
“Can’t chose what scenes I see.” He held up his gloved hands. “My hero suit gives me more mirrors, but I only have ten tiny options here. I couldn’t pick you out. You okay?”
“Could you see the bombs? Or the villains?”
“I just saw one bomb, and that was while I was in the car. I couldn’t see where the person planting it was or who they were, either. I’m pretty useless right now. Are you okay?”
“I gave all the information I had to Hawks. Can we go?”
Reflection narrowed his eyes. “Go?”
“To school.”
“You still wanna…?”
“Before the media and police get here.” This was for Reflection’s own good, too. Those cargo capris did not need to end up on television. “There’s another route, right? I don’t think I should miss my first day.”
Reflection huffed through his nose. “Well, I… I mean, yeah, I guess. Let me see if I can find space to make a U-turn.”
###
Shouto spent several minutes in the one gender-neutral bathroom on the entire campus—a single-stall between a sports closet and a theater classroom—fixing his uniform as best he could. Drying his shirt with a paper towel, shaking flakes of concrete from his shoes. His binder seemed fine, but both his shirt and jacket had noticeable holes just underneath the collar. How had Hawks aimed his feather without also skewering Shouto's neck?
Once he arrived in the classroom, he almost wished he had been late. Homeroom was… loud. Most of the kids were already clustering and talking amongst each other. Did they know each other outside of class already? Or were they just now meeting and already forming alliances? The latter possibility was almost more terrifying.
Shouto found a seat in the back of the classroom behind some kid with a bird head. He realized too late that he recognized the girl sorting through the tabs in her binder at the desk next to him—Momo Yaoyorozu. He’d seen her at some charity events he attended last year. If anyone in the class was going to notice something off about Shouto, it would be her. Not that a simple Google search from anyone in the class couldn’t bring down this whole operation.
“Hey, bro.” It took a second for Shouto to realize the boy leaning with his palms flat on Shouto’s desk was talking to him. Shouto looked up to meet his red eyes. He had a jarring smile—big and shark-toothed. It took Shouto a second to refocus on his voice. “Did you see that huge thing go down on the highway?”
Was it normal for kids his age to approach other students without a third-party introduction? More importantly, had Shouto just been… bro’d? By a stranger? He wasn’t sure he liked that. “What are you talking about?”
“Villain attack.” The boy held up his phone. It was a news article with an unfocused photo of Reflection’s black car, parked diagonally across the highway with the driver’s door swung open. “You were a little later than the rest of us, so I thought maybe you’d gotten caught up in the traffic.”
“Yes,” Shouto said.
“Wait, really? Did you see anything?”
“I saw it,” Shouto said. “I was in that car.”
Shouto was suddenly surrounded by what had to have been a dozen kids wanting details (and one particularly obnoxious blond kid with a black lightning-shaped accent in his hair demanding proof). Shouto was no stranger to having unwanted adults surrounding him, but this… a couple minutes into the questioning, and he could already feel himself beginning to overheat. He scratched his nose and looked around for an exit.
“Classmates!” a loud male voice carried over the other students. “If what this student says is true, then he has been through quite the ordeal this morning! Please give him some space!”
“And shut the fuck up!” the blond boy to his left—one of the few students who hadn’t moved upon Shouto’s confession—said. The muscles in his jaw were twitching. “Damn extras! It ain’t even nine a.m. yet.”
The crowd cleared enough so Shouto could see the first speaker, a boy with glasses and what looked like engine pipes protruding from his legs. Recognition pinged in his brain, but he had to sort through a stack of dusty mental files to pinpoint a name. Engines… Ingenium, the speed hero… so was he an Iida? Maybe a brother or cousin to Ingenium? Great, more people with connections to Shouto and his father.
The shark-toothed boy remained at his desk, his smile turned sheepish. He scratched the back of his head. “Sorry, dude, that… wasn’t super manly on my part. I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Kirishima Eijirou.”
“Todoroki Shouto.” Saying Shouto out loud had the same uncomfortable feeling as suddenly exposing a long-covered wound to cold air. He added, “I’m not here to make friends, though. Sorry.”
Kirishima laughed.
Laughed.
It wasn’t even a mean laugh, just… amused. He gave Shouto’s shoulder a friendly pat. “Good to meet you, Todoroki.”
Shouto was confused. He’d spoken clearly, right? Or was laughing at Shouto’s statement some sort of intimidation tactic he hadn’t encountered before? Maybe he’d actually been laughing at Shouto’s first name. Maybe that whole interaction had been… ah. Of course. If Kirishima had inside information about Shouto’s legal name and sex, it would make sense that he use blackmail on the first day in an attempt to get ahead of the number two hero’s son.
Well. This was going about as expected.
Shouto waited for the final bell to ring, then watched as the yellow lump in the corner of the classroom stirred and began its transformation into something that resembled an upright human being. This was either a villain who had been activated by the final bell, or it was their homeroom teacher. If his second assumption was correct, it was onto the next nightmare scenario.
Roll call.
###
It started out badly.
“Aoyama Yuga?”
“Present.”
“Ashido Mina?”
“Here.”
It wasn’t the names that bothered him. It was that Aizawa Sensei was saying the given name as well as the family name. Shouto hadn’t emailed administration earlier about changing his name in the roll because having his deadname said aloud in class wasn’t actually the worst-case scenario; it was having the school contact his father about it. So Shouto had planned to wing it for the first week or so until he understood his homeroom teacher’s personality enough to know whether they would rat him out to Endeavor.
It wasn’t the ideal plan. And it would be significantly more annoying to complete once the entire class knew he wasn’t a cis boy. As he listened to the list of names lengthen, the dark thing in his stomach rolled over once, twice.
Almost his turn.
Fuck. He should’ve just worn the girls’ uniform, should’ve left his hair long, should’ve told Kirishima his legal name instead of the one he’d chosen for himself over the summer—
Aizawa met his eyes.
Shouto could’ve sworn there was a pause in the roll call. Maybe that time itself had halted. But then Aizawa looked back down at his roll book, bored, and called, “Todoroki?”
Todoroki.
Not Todoroki Shiyo.
He’d forgotten how relief felt until that moment.
“Here,” he said.
From then on, Aizawa switched to surnames, so Shouto couldn’t be sure if Aizawa had seen him and known or if he’d simply grown tired of calling everyone’s full name. Either way, Shouto’s deadname was in Aizawa’s roll book, and Aizawa was bound to notice the discrepancy soon if he hadn’t already.
###
Shouto didn’t do as well as he could have during the quirk aptitude tests. He was dehydrated from using so much ice this morning, and his back and right shoulder were sore from fucking... Hawks. He was trying and failing not to think about what had happened this morning. So he partially relished and partially hated the moments when he had to stand still and wait. No one tried to talk to him, at least, which was nice. They were too busy watching and analyzing their classmates.
Well. He saw Momo glance in his direction a few times, and Kaminari had very graciously mentioned that he had a “giant freakin’ hole in your shirt, dude. Do you want Sero to tape it up for you?” But that was it.
He rubbed his shoulder, squinting against the sun. That villain kid's weird green eyes kept hovering in his thoughts, so ingrained it was almost an afterimage. He wondered if the heroes had captured him.
“Todoroki.” Aizawa was standing beside Shouto before Shouto had a chance to notice him approaching.
Shouto looked up at him. He’d never been great at deciphering expressions, but he guessed that most people probably had a problem understanding Aizawa’s face. What was he over here for? To ask Shouto about his uniform? Reprimand him for his mediocre performance? He just looked… bored. “Sensei,” Shouto said.
“What’s your given name? I need to know for the roll.”
His mind spun. Given name. He ought to ask for clarity: did Aizawa want his legal given name or the name he wanted to go by? But… his legal name should already be on the roll, shouldn’t it? Unless there was some clerical error? In which case, he ought to take advantage and exploit that weakness. He watched Aizawa flip through his roll book and tried to see what was on the pages, but the ink was too small.
His father’s voice in his head. Think fast, Shiyo.
A bad taste simmered in his mouth. He decided. “Shouto.”
Aizawa’s expression didn’t change as he made a few marks in his book. “And your pronouns?”
Shouto’s stomach made a movement he didn’t recognize. “What?”
“Pronouns.”
Was this happening? Fuck. “He.”
“If I end up needing to call home for whatever reason, should I use that or something else?”
Of course that question would be the one to cut off his tongue. He was silent long enough for Aizawa’s heavy-lidded eyes to slide over to him, threatening a question.
Shouto didn’t want a question. He forced the words past his teeth. “Some—something else.”
Did he just stutter? Shouto didn’t stutter. Pathetic.
“Thank you,” Aizawa said, closing his roll book and pushing his pen into the spiral loop. “You should be preparing for the next activity now, Todoroki. You won’t perform well if the muscles in your right side are too cold.”
“Oh,” was all he could say.
Aizawa walked back toward the rest of the group in time to remove his stopwatch from the hands of a very distressed Kaminari, who had shorted out the device in his attempt to measure Iida’s running time more accurately with his own “lightning-fast reflexes, you know, but like oh my god I’m SO sorry, I really thought it was gonna work…”
Notes:
I hadn't planned for Hawks to be in this chapter, but he snuck in. I guess he's just that good at espionage and infiltration. Heh.
Comment! Talk to me!! I have no friendssss ahahahaha
-Max
Chapter 3: Shouto Doesn't Throw Hands, but He Does Throw a Banana
Summary:
Shouto gets some weird messages. Hawks ain't cute.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
When the final bell rang and Shouto exited through the school’s high front gates, he was surprised to see a familiar cube-shaped yellow kei car idling near the road. Fuyumi waved at him, and he jogged over.
“Why are you here?” he asked as he opened the door. “You don’t get off work for another hour.”
“Get in,” she said, “I’ll explain on the way home.”
He got in. His knees knocked against the dash. “I hate this car.”
“‘Thanks for the ride, Fuyumi.’ ‘I appreciate everything you do for me, Fuyumi.’” Fuyumi put the car in drive and merged back onto the road. “Listen, you’ve got some cleaning-up to do for what happened this morning. The police are waiting for you at home.”
“Oh.” Damn it. He’d been hoping all day that Reflection would keep Shouto’s involvement a secret so Shouto wouldn’t have to deal with statements and debriefing. He’d sat through several too many of those types of meeting with Endeavor. “I guess Reflection told you. I don’t even know what happened after I left.”
Fuyumi scoffed. “I can’t believe you actually went to school after that. The police were being really nice about letting you finish your day, though. I guess because of that guy you saved.”
“What guy?”
She gave him a strange look. “Hawks said you saved some dude in a car with your ice.”
“Huh? Oh, that.” So Hawks had actually been listening when Shouto gave him his report. “You talked to Hawks?”
“Yes, and he was extremely hot, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Did you save someone’s life and then just forget about it?”
“Not exactly,” Shouto said. “I left while he was still frozen in mid-air, so I wasn’t sure if he survived until you told me.”
Fuyumi looked horrified.
“Did they catch the villains?” Shouto asked.
She shook her head. “I should let them tell you the rest.”
Shouto took out his English homework and started on it. If he knew anything about the police, it was that they were slow as fuck, and he didn’t want to be up until three a.m. finishing hypothetical English conversations in his workbook.
When they reached home, the number of cars outside the house sent a jolt of alarm through him. “Is the old man home?” Shouto asked Fuyumi.
“Yeah,” she said, parking the car in the only space available out by the street. “They called him home to tell him about what happened.”
Fuck. Fuck. He was going to be mad.
“Oh, hell,” Fuyumi muttered as they got out of the car. She checked her hair in the side mirror. “Hawks is still here. That’s his sports car. I thought he’d be gone.”
Hawks? Yeah, he should have left by now.
“You should change before you go talk to them,” Fuyumi said. “I’ll go serve some snacks to give you time.”
That was a good idea, probably. Endeavor wouldn’t react to his haircut with others around, but he might be shocked into reacting prematurely if he saw the boys’ uniform at the same time.
He heard voices immediately upon entering and only managed to make it into the kitchen before he saw somebody. Luckily, it was only Reflection—he was talkative, but not as much as the other sidekicks. Shouto was pretty sure the majority were hired to make up for his father’s poor communication skills.
Reflection had changed into his hero costume sometime between dropping Shouto off for school and now. Shouto wasn’t sure how it worked—something about spinning mirrors on the inside of the helmet—but the black jumpsuit was at least easier on the eyes than his previous outfit. Reflection’s helmet sat on the kitchen table, observing silently as Reflection filled out paperwork. He wasn’t going about it very neatly—the papers littered nearly the entire surface of the table, and his face was scrunched and pained.
A few of the lines in his forehead relaxed when he saw Shouto. “Hey, kid.”
“Reflection,” Shouto greeted, kicking off his shoes.
“First day okay?”
“Yep.”
“Better grab a snack and hit the shitter before you walk in there,” Reflection said, jerking a thumb toward the living room. “They’ve been grilling me all day.”
The shitter? Shouto had never heard Reflection swear or be otherwise vulgar before. He must’ve been exhausted.
Shouto picked a cluster of grapes from the charcuterie board Fuyumi was preparing with only minimal snarling from his sister. It had been a while since he’d had fresh fruit.
“You want anything from this?” Shouto asked. It wasn’t something he’d normally ask—he left the hosting to Fuyumi—but he felt like he owed Reflection something for getting him through this morning, even if he hadn’t done much but drive.
“Banana?” Reflection asked.
Shouto tore one away from its bunch and threw it overhead at Reflection. Reflection caught it by the stem and flicked it downward, breaking the banana open in one swift motion.
At least Reflection had good reflexes. Shouto had been starting to think that maybe Reflection sucked at… well. Everything. Handling his quirk, driving, dressing himself, probably even parenting given the unexplained empty car seat in the back of his vehicle.
“Very cool,” Fuyumi said flatly. “Shiyo, if you throw food in my kitchen again, I will skin you.”
Shouto headed back to his room. He tossed his phone onto his bed and was unbuttoning his shirt when a messaging app on his phone pinged. He glanced over at it.
New message!
That was strange. He hadn’t used that app for months—not since a villain attack near his neighborhood cut out the data for a couple days. The app used WiFi to send texts. Only Fuyumi and Endeavor had needed Shouto’s temporary number.
He tapped on the message, continuing to unbutton his shirt as the app opened and loaded the message.
Unknown:
Welcome home!
Shouto frowned. There was no reason for Fuyumi to text him after she’d driven him home, and it would be out of character for Endeavor to send a text like that even if he had seen Fuyumi’s car pull in.
His hands slowly came to a halt, lingering on his shirt’s last button.
Welcome home.
An unknown number.
This couldn’t be a coincidence.
He messaged back.
Who is this?
Unknown:
We talked earlier today :)
Something sharp and uncomfortable poked the inside of Shouto’s stomach.
Shouto:
At school?
Unknown:
Try again.
Fuck.
Shouto:
The bridge, then. Green hair/motorcycle.
Unknown:
:DDD
Did you have fun? We did it for u ;)
Shouto had to close his eyes for a few seconds as nausea rolled over him. Why was the green-haired kid messaging him? How did he know Shouto had arrived home—some sort of surveillance quirk, maybe? Something similar to Reflection’s but that worked long-distance? Unless the boy was nearby?
And now this last text.
Had the bridge attack been directed at Shouto?
What did they mean by for him?
A bang on his door sent an icy shiver of adrenaline through him. Endeavor’s voice.
“SHIYO!”
Shouto pulled his shirt and binder off fast, digging through his drawer for his bra and one of the more feminine-cut shirts he’d saved to wear at home. He’d gotten distracted and forgot to listen for Endeavor’s footsteps. “Yeah, I’m coming,” he called back.
“Hurry up!” One more bang, and then Endeavor’s heavy footsteps retreated down the hall.
Remnants of adrenaline trickled down to Shouto’s fingertips, leaving him lightheaded.
His phone pinged again. He startled.
Unknown:
Don’t keep the police waiting too long :)
###
Shouto always felt small around Endeavor, but when the hero was in full costume with his hair gushing heat and popping like a too-hot bonfire, Shouto was tiny.
Shouto was not glad for Hawks’s presence. The man had an eternal stupid grin and, from the looks of it, had already managed to shed an absurd number of fuzzy red feathers on Shouto’s favorite couch. He’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he was interested in the man’s look and behavior, though.
Hawks himself was tiny. Smaller than Shouto, actually, with the crest of his hair barely reaching above the top of Endeavor’s shoulder while they were sitting. His wings, on the other hand… they took up space like two brash thugs on either side of him, filling up a couch that could easily seat five normal-sized humans. His right wing hung lazily over one side of the couch, feathers fluttering from overhead air conditioning, while his left wing knocked against a pissed-off Endeavor. Shouto wondered if the latter part was a conscious choice from Hawks. Wasn’t he afraid of singeing his feathers?
He was also hugging a small Endeavor-themed kids’ backpack. What was that for?
The police—there were three of them—didn’t seem as uptight as Shouto had expected. When he entered the room, they were talking amongst themselves about some sports tournament and praising Fuyumi on a charcuterie board well-done. Fuyumi was beaming.
Reflection sat in a chair he’d pulled from the kitchen with his stack of paperwork on his lap, elbow resting on the chair’s arm. He had his head propped up with his index finger and was staring with dead eyes into some far-off dimension. When he saw Shouto come in, his eyes visibly flickered, and he sat up.
Endeavor, however, furrowed his eyebrows. “Why did you cut your hair?”
“That’s a secret,” he said, as seriously as he could.
Shouto sat between Hawks and Endeavor. Between Endeavor’s heavy breathing and Hawks’s cologne, it wasn’t the best seat in the room by any means, but Endeavor’s low, disapproving grunt (and Hawks having to completely shift his sitting position to pull his left wing in) made it worth it.
His phone pinged in his pocket, and it took everything Shouto had in him not to look at it. The green-haired boy hadn’t needed to explain himself for Shouto to know that last message—don’t keep the police waiting too long—was a threat. If Shouto told the police about their most recent conversation, something bad would happen.
By the time a policewoman swallowed her final piece of cheese and asked, “Shall we start?”, Shouto had decided to heed the warning. He doubted anything beneficial could come from tracing the messages, anyway. The boy had gotten away from Shouto and Hawks, so he wouldn’t be so stupid that a simple trace could bring him down.
Besides, Shouto was curious.
What could this boy possibly have to say to him?
His phone pinged again.
“Shiyo, turn that off,” Endeavor barked.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, shielding the screen from Endeavor with his body as discreetly as he could. He read the messages.
Unknown:
How was your first day at school?
I know UA is supposed to be like, SUPER intense.
“Shiyo,” Endeavor said, more firmly.
Shouto turned his volume off and slipped the phone back in his pocket.
They gave him the debriefing first. Here was what had happened after Shouto left:
The bombs stopped going off.
The heroes cleaned up.
That was it. The loudness of the first bomb had ensured that traffic beneath the bridge slowed before the second bomb went off, so only a few cars were under the bridge to receive damage from falling rubble. Shouto had caught the only inhabited car to fall off the bridge. There was property damage and the villains hadn’t been spotted by anyone but Shouto, but no one died.
“You were probably hurt the most out of anyone,” one of the officers laughed, motioning to the dark bruise forming along the back of Shouto’s arm. “How’d that happen?”
Shouto cast a glance at Hawks, whose grin turned somber so fast Shouto wondered if he’d imagined it in the first place.
“I fell,” Shouto said. “I have some trouble controlling the trajectory of my ice when I put excessive power behind it.”
“Must’ve been a hard fall. That looks like it’s going to hurt for a few weeks.”
Hawks was squirming.
After that, Shouto signed the forms. He spoke into the recorder. He bowed and spit platitudes and did not look at or speak to Endeavor.
He could feel Endeavor’s glare on him through the whole experience, though. Shouto made sure to not fuck anything up.
In the end, the process barely took an hour. Shouto was glad. He was getting tired of the policewoman’s laughter and the irregular twitching in Hawks’s left wing.
Reflection left with little more than a “G’night.” Hawks was slower, and Shouto was able to catch him alone in the kitchen while Fuyumi searched the pantry for more crackers.
“Why are you still here?” he asked Hawks.
“To annoy your dad.” Hawks grinned, popped a grape in his mouth. “Why else?”
Shouto stared at him.
“Ah—well, I brought this, too.” Hawks reached into his backpack and brought out a bundle of cloth. “Your dad didn’t know your size, so I got your sister’s number and asked her. My fault your uniform got all fuc—messed up. So.”
He handed the bundle to Shouto. Shouto took it, unfolded it. A UA shirt and jacket.
“It’s the boys’ uniform,” Hawks said. “Looked like what you were wearing earlier. That okay?”
Shouto didn’t raise his eyes to meet Hawks’s. But he nodded.
“Hey,” Hawks said, and Shouto tensed as Hawks gave the front of Shouto’s shoulder a friendly bump. “Come time for internships, apply for my agency, yeah? You’re kinda slow, but I’m curious to see how you work in the field.”
It passed through Shouto’s mind—briefly—that he could pull out his phone now and show Hawks the messages. He didn’t seem like a stickler for procedure like Reflection did. Maybe they could figure out a plan together.
“Oh—by the way!” Hawks held up his backpack, pinching it on either side like a kid holding up a crayon drawing. The open flap with Endeavor’s chibi-fied face flopped forward. “What do you think of my backpack?”
Shouto had to give himself a moment to gather his words. “You bought that specifically to piss off Endeavor.”
“Yes!” Hawks looked happier than he had a right to. “I did! I’m so glad you understand.”
“What do you have against him?”
“Eh? Nothing. Love the guy.” He swung the backpack over one shoulder—that was all it would fit over unless Hawks broke the straps. “And tell him I said that. He’ll hate it.”
Shouto narrowed his eyes. That sounded like a logical fallacy.
Fuyumi returned from the pantry opening a box of crackers. “Hawks-san, you’re welcome to stay for dinner.”
No. Shouto shot Fuyumi a glare.
Hawks glanced at Shouto, then smiled at Fuyumi. “I gotta head out, baby doll. Thanks for havin’ me. Oi,”—he made a call me motion at Shouto—“internship.”
Shouto stuck his hand in his pocket and gripped his phone as Hawks left. He did not pull it out.
We did it for u ;)
If the green-haired boy wasn’t lying, the explosion on the bridge today had been meant for him, whether to kill him or… something else. The villains apparently already had eyes locked on him—for all Shouto knew, they could be watching him right now. They would know if he told someone.
He’d have to take care of this himself.
Learn more information before acting.
That meant talking to the green-haired boy.
“Jesus Christ,” Fuyumi said, staring hungrily at the space Hawks had vacated. “That boy is smoking.”
“Wha—” The words jerked Shouto back to the present. “No, I think he’s just like that. Pro heroes have to do drug tests at random, so it’d be unwise for him to get high while he’s on duty. Not that I’d put it past him, exactly, but I didn’t smell any—”
Fuyumi threw the box of crackers at him.
Notes:
Things I researched for the chapter:
-kei cars
-how to spell charcuterireierere
-everybody's height (Hawks is 5'4", I fucking love him)
-whether UA has a parking lot (a fruitless search)
Things I did not research:
-wtf happens during a police interview. If I broke your suspension of belief with inaccuracies, slap a band-aid on that mf and call it worldbuilding.
Chapter 4: Shouto Gets a Hug (from a Brick Wall)
Summary:
Whump.
Notes:
TW for physical and verbal abuse (canon-typical) as well as slight gore/blood/burning; slight reference to su*cide
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
On Sunday, Shouto’s alarm went off at five a.m.
He checked the messaging app first, as he’d done every morning for a week now. The green-haired boy hadn’t messaged him back yet, even after Shouto had texted a very agreeable Let’s talk. There were no notifications this morning, either.
Villains and their mind games. Well. He wouldn’t let the waiting get to him. He had other things to do. Homework. Unclogging his sink.
Training.
He got out of bed, brushed his teeth, put on his flame-resistant track suit. He hadn’t trained with his father in weeks, so today was going to be awful.
Shouto entered the training room at five thirty exactly. He noticed with some surprise that Endeavor wasn’t the only one in the room—Reflection was here, too, although Shouto couldn’t see his eyes through the visor on his helmet. Just his smooth-shaven chin and mouth, cut in a straight line.
Endeavor stood from the bench he’d been sitting on. “You’re cutting it close, Shiyo.”
“I’m here,” Shouto said. “On time.”
“Have you stretched?”
He’d made the mistake one too many times of arriving in the training room without preparing. The last time, Endeavor hadn’t waited for Shiyo to stretch, attacking instantly. The fight hadn’t gone well. “Yes.”
“I brought Reflection today,” Endeavor said, motioning to him. Reflection hadn’t moved since Shouto had entered the room, standing with his arms by his side. “His quirk is no good for close-range combat, but he’s mastered hand-to-hand to make up for it. You’ll be sparring both of us today.”
Shouto cast a glance at the baton in Reflection’s left hand. “Do I get a weapon?”
“No. Use your quirks.”
Shouto looked Reflection over. He hadn’t taken any sort of stance yet, so Shouto couldn’t be sure what fighting style he would use. In a life-or-death fight, he could pull a sharp icicle from his palm to use as a knife, but he couldn’t just stab Reflection here. And blunt force—what he assumed Reflection would be using based on his baton—wasn’t an option with brittle ice.
He’d have to trap Reflection with his ice, then.
“Start,” said Endeavor.
Reflection moved before Shouto had a chance to blink. He swiped at Shouto’s legs with his baton. Shouto aimed a blast of ice at the ground to boost his jump, barely dodging the attack in time. The baton whacked harmlessly against the bottom of his shoe.
And then something slammed into the side of his neck.
He tumbled backward, landing on his back and gasping for air. Had that… had that been the baton? But it had been at his feet a split second before.
Shouto blinked at Reflection through his fizzing vision. The baton was in Reflection’s right hand now. He held his left hand out to Shouto.
“Let her get up on her own,” Endeavor said. “That was pathetic, Shiyo.”
Shouto gritted his teeth. He didn’t need Endeavor to tell him that.
He struggled to his feet and put a safe distance between him and Reflection. The entire left side of his face was numb. “Okay.”
Reflection came at him again. Shouto was faster this time, raising his right hand to shoot a wall of ice toward Reflection. He would trap his entire body inside it.
Except that wasn’t what happened.
A wave of intense heat jumped in front of Shouto, evaporating his ice as soon as it left his hand.
What the hell…? Did Reflection have fire abilities now, or—
The baton struck his ribcage, knocking the breath out of him. Shouto sank to his knees.
Endeavor lowered his hand. Even from where he stood in the room, he looked enormous, towering.
Furious.
Shouto gripped his side. He’d had a broken rib before, and this wasn’t it, but god, it still hurt. “Endeavor… did you—?”
“I said you would be sparring both of us,” Endeavor said. “Are you deaf?”
Oh.
He’d meant at the same time.
Of course he had. Shouto couldn’t use his ice abilities effectively with Endeavor’s fire keeping him in check. He couldn’t count on just his combat skills, either, not when Reflection was so skilled. Endeavor was trying to force him to use his flames.
“What’s wrong?” Endeavor said. A statement, not a question. “Get up.”
Reflection spoke for the first time that day. “I don’t think her skills are at the right level for me to spar her right now. Maybe I should come back later in the year.”
“She could defeat you easily with her flames,” Endeavor said.
Shouto glared. “I’m not using them, old man.”
“We’ll continue,” Endeavor said. “Start.”
So it happened again.
And again.
And again.
A baton striking his forearm, his jaw, his side, his leg, each time so hard Shouto thought he’d broken something. He was angry that Reflection was hitting so damn hard for just a practice session, and then he was angry that he was angry, because defeating a sidekick shouldn’t have been so difficult when he was used to sparring against Endeavor. He cried out and swung a punch, hitting air.
A large hand wrapped around his upper arm. It lifted him, his arm screaming in its socket, and then Shouto was flying back until his side slammed into the jagged decorative brick wall behind him. Something cut his leg. He fell.
“Is this the kind of hero you’re going to be?” Endeavor approached him. “A useless one?”
Shouto looked up at him from where he sat on the floor, leg radiating pain, the rest of his body tingling with shock. He took in Endeavor’s growing flames, dancing like whips toward the ceiling, and thought:
He’s about to kill me.
“Get back,” Shouto said. It came out as a hoarse whisper—something was wrong with his voice.
“You’re nothing without your flames. What are you going to do when you encounter someone you can’t trap and run away from? You’d only become a burden to your partners.”
Shouto felt his pulse in his throat. He was going to die. He did not want to die this way. He’d made a plan years ago, and this was not it. This was not it. But his voice came out weak, barely audible even to himself. “Stop.”
“The villains could do anything to you.” Endeavor reached down.
What happened next was less of a choice and more of an involuntary reflex.
Shouto raised his left hand.
He concentrated all the heat he could find in his body.
He fired it straight into Endeavor’s face.
Endeavor stumbled back, his hand going to his eyes. Shouto used that moment to push himself to his feet, his injured leg screaming high and shrill, and dart away.
He slammed the door of the training room behind him in hopes that it would buy him more time to put distance between himself and Endeavor. He didn’t slow down, running past a shocked Fuyumi, out the front door, out the gate, away.
Endeavor was angry.
The thought played in his head over and over, getting bigger each time. Endeavor was angry. What did that mean? That meant more training sessions, that meant more pain, that meant more humiliation and more using the quirk that always made him feel like he’d bathed both his body and soul in ashes and coagulated blood, that meant a higher possibility of dying as a smudge on that brick wall and fuck his leg hurt, why did his leg hurt so much? He turned a corner and slowed to a halt.
The sidewalk in this part of the neighborhood was empty. After sitting down, he examined his left leg. He couldn’t quite tell what was going on against his black tracksuit, so he tried to pull the pants leg up.
Pain shot up his leg like a thick needle.
He took his hands away. Maybe it was better to let his eyes do the work first.
There was blood. Not a lot, but it had soaked through the tracksuit’s synthetic material and crusted his white socks. Further up his calf was something he probably should’ve noticed earlier—a thin sliver of brick jutting out from the fabric, frighteningly perpendicular.
He tugged on it and decided that, yes, the sliver was definitely inside his leg.
Well.
He lay his injured leg out flat and reached for his phone to Google what to do when you had a piece of fucking brick inside your fucking leg, but his hand touched a flat pocket. He hadn’t brought his phone with him to training, so he didn’t have it now.
Wasn’t like his phone would’ve helped him beyond Google, though. His father would be furious if he called an ambulance for something little like this, and it wasn’t like he had any friends he could contact.
It made him feel floaty, looking down and seeing something that wasn’t originally part of his body trying so vehemently to merge with him. He didn’t think he had a weak stomach. He wasn’t nauseous or anything. It was just weird and… uncomfortable, and…
Okay, no, no, he didn’t like this. Bricks did not belong inside legs. It needed to get out. Immediately.
Shouto wrapped his fingers around the visible part of the sliver and pulled. The sound was awful, like an exaggerated kiss, and Shouto yanked his hand away. He covered both of his ears with the heels of his palms and made low noises with his teeth—tch, tch, tch—until he’d mostly forgotten the sound.
Then he adjusted his position so that his raised left shoulder covered his left ear, leaving his right hand where it was. He used his free left hand to continue pulling the sliver out.
Two centimeters. Three. Four. Finally, the end—jagged, bloody.
Oh. And now he was bleeding. Splendid.
“Ah—kid, I wish you hadn’t done that.”
Shouto lowered his hands, looking up to see Reflection rounding the corner, taking off his helmet. Shouto stiffened. Felt his temperature spike dangerously again.
“He’s not following me,” Reflection said. “Let me see your leg, yeah?”
Shouto exhaled. He made an open motion toward his leg. “Come see it if you want. I can’t fucking move.”
Reflection rounded to Shouto’s other side and knelt. He set his helmet on the ground next to him, took the piece of brick from Shouto’s hand. “For future reference, you’re supposed to leave this in until you can get medical help.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind for next week when you and Endeavor come at me with a set of tent stakes.”
Reflection folded up Shouto’s pant leg until the material was bunched up near the wound. He adjusted the bulk so it sat directly on top of the cut, then he pressed his palm hard into the cloth.
Shouto nearly bit his tongue. He tilted his head up and looked at the sky.
“Why are you shaking?” Reflection asked. “Are you scared?”
He hadn’t noticed he was shaking, but now that Reflection pointed it out, his body somehow felt both frozen and uncontrollably fluid right now. He looked at his trembling hands. “I’m cold.”
“Used all your heat in that blast, huh?” His hands shifted. “It was pretty hot. I think you hurt him a little.”
“Good.”
Something flickered in Reflection’s eyes. Was that flickering part of his quirk or just a trick of the light?
“Here,” said Reflection, “you hold the pressure on your leg. I’ll carry you back to your house.”
Panic thumped his chest. “No. No. Don’t do that. He’s—I haven’t run away like that in a long time.”
“So what, you wanna… stay here?”
“Just for an hour or so.” When Reflection’s gaze didn’t waver, Shouto spat, “I’m not asking you to stay with me, asshole. Endeavor only likes you because you can beat me up.”
A vague smile came over Reflection’s face. “That what you think this situation is?”
“Unless you agreed to the training because maiming kids is how you get off, yeah, that’s what I think the fucking situation is.”
“You got a mouth on you,” Reflection said, but there was no bite to the words. “What do you want me to do with this wound, then? Or are you planning on sitting here and bleeding out for an hour?”
Shouto swallowed. “I’ll cauterize it.”
Reflection raised an eyebrow. “That hurts, you know.”
“My body—”
“Your body won’t suffer harm unless the heat you’re exposed to is extreme, or if you’re exposed to it for too long. You’re still going to feel pain when that happens, so your body works against you in cauterizing. Anyway, how were you planning on doing it? You have anything metal with you? You can’t just hold an open flame to it.”
Shouto looked at Reflection’s gloved hands, then at his face. “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Have anything metal.”
Keeping one hand on Shouto’s leg, Reflection pulled out a pocketknife. “You sure about this? Wouldn’t be any trouble for me to drive you to the hospital.”
“It’d be trouble. Just not for you.” He reached for the knife. Reflection raised his eyebrows, but he handed it over.
Shouto opened the knife and pulled enough heat from the rest of his body to start a small flame under the blade. After thirty seconds, the blade still wasn’t glowing red, and Shouto’s shivering had grown more violent.
“Oi,” said Reflection. “It’s not working. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
Shouto hissed through his teeth. He was aching all over, and his throat hurt. “Shut up.”
“Give me that.” Reflection snatched the knife from Shouto’s hand and put the blade between his teeth. Then he picked up his helmet and put it over Shouto’s head. Shouto’s head was too small to see properly through the visor, so his vision went dark.
What…?
He reached to pull it off, but Reflection interrupted. “Leave it on. Play with the mirrors or something.”
Shouto lowered his hands. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing this.” Shouto felt Reflection’s gloved hand on his leg. The material of his pants leg shifting, the sharp sting of his wound being exposed to air. “Don’t bite your tongue off, okay?”
Something warm pressed against his leg. Half a second later, it was searing, and Shouto barely moved his tongue out of the way before his teeth crashed together. His hands went up again. He had to get that helmet off—
He couldn’t.
Reflection’s heavy hand had settled atop it, pressing down.
“Get off,” Shouto rasped. He brought his fist in hard, trying to knock away Reflection’s arm, but Reflection didn’t budge. “How are y—how are you—?”
“I’m fine,” Reflection said, “thanks for asking.”
That was Reflection’s voice, yes, but it was different in a way that sent a streak of terror through Shouto. Shouto used his legs to try to push his body back. Reflection grabbed hold of his leg, so he mostly ended up flailing. “How did—? Reflection doesn’t have a fire quirk. Who the fuck are you?”
“Fucking Christ on a stick, kid, I put that helmet on you so you’d calm down.” Reflection lifted the visor so Shouto could see his face. It was the same as always—limp black hair and an unmarked, clean-shaven face. “Look! It’s me.”
Shouto’s heart raced. He looked down at the cut on his leg. It had been partially cauterized already, but it still had a ways to go. Shouto motioned to the glowing red knife in Reflection’s hand. “Then how’d you do that?”
“I used my lighter?” Reflection searched Shouto’s face, then sighed. “Listen, if you’re not up for this, no one’s going to fault you. I can get you some professional medical attention.”
“No,” Shouto said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Okay, then.” Reflection lowered the visor. “I’m going to finish this. See if you can tell me how those mirrors work by the time I’m done.”
It did help a little, having that distraction. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw light catch on several shiny squares on the inside of the helmet, surrounding his head like a crown. As he focused on them, they started spinning—fast when Shouto looked at them all at once, slower when he focused in on one or two of the squares. Once the squares moved far enough into Shouto’s peripheral vision, they folded in on each other like laid-out playing cards being swiped back into their deck. He was able to make the spinning stop a few times and make it go backward once.
He didn’t forget the pain. It was still very much there, and Shouto struggled not to hyperventilate.
“Figure it out yet?” Reflection asked.
Shouto’s vision fizzed as Reflection pressed the knife against his skin for the fourth time. “It tr… it tracks eye movement.”
“Pretty nifty, huh? I see a different scene on every mirror. Once my eyes look away from a particular mirror, though, the scene on that mirror is subject to change if I don’t look back within three seconds. So I have to keep track of what scenes are on which mirrors.”
Shouto made a noise. It was supposed to be one of acknowledgement, but it happened at the same moment as the hot knife against his skin, so it didn’t quite come out that way.
“I’m done.” Shouto heard the knife clatter against the pavement. Reflection lifted the helmet off Shouto’s head. Smiled. “You good?”
Shouto blinked against the fresh air. He looked around, and it hit him that this whole scene had happened out in the open on a deserted neighborhood sidewalk. That was… pretty weird, wasn’t it? Leaving a contextless puddle of blood out in front of somebody’s house? Should they clean it up?
“Shiyo,” Reflection said. “You good?”
Shouto looked Reflection over. Shouto felt… not quite there. Like he was barely tethered to his body. “Hey, where’s… where’s your lighter?”
“Huh?”
“Your lighter, you said…” Reflection looked alarmed, and Shouto realized why when he looked down to see that his hand had gone out to grip Reflection’s wrist. “Show me. Your lighter, show me.”
Reflection stared.
“Kid,” he said.
Maybe Reflection had set it down on his other side? He just needed to see it, get these thoughts out of his head. Shouto moved forward.
And the tether snapped.
Darkness took over. Shouto had no choice but to let it.
Notes:
Disclaimer: in this au, Shouto's fire quirk works mostly by pulling heat from his body, so he gets cold when he uses it excessively/unsafely. He has a better handle on his ice, but since it works by pulling heat in from the surrounding air, it is possible for him to overheat using his ice. Like the back of a refrigerator :D I know that's opposite how it works in canon, but it makes more sense to me that way.
Curious what y'all think of Reflection?
Chapter 5: Shouto Tests a Hypothesis
Summary:
Natsuo doesn't know how swivel chairs work. Also, an unsettling drive to school.
Notes:
CW: physical abuse, burning (possible self-harm trigger), past trauma mentions, a teensy bit of blood
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“You should’ve called the police.”
“I didn’t know what was happening! I thought she was just throwing one of her tantrums—”
“Don’t call it a fucking tantrum, Fuyumi, you sound like him. She shouldn’t have to use her fire if she doesn’t want to. It’s her body.”
Shouto stirred. Pain shot through his body. The voices coming from beside him were too loud, too angry. He knew one well—Fuyumi. Who was the other? Natsuo? Why was he here?
“Dad said her leg was an accident,” said Fuyumi.
“Yeah? How? Since when is falling so hard into a wall that a piece of it breaks off inside you a part of training?”
“Natsuo—”
“And look at the rest of her, sis. Jesus-fucking-Christ. Who’s this Reflection asshole, anyway? You said he’s been driving Shiyo to school? Y’ever thought about what he might be doing to her on the way there?”
“He’s not like that.”
“What I know is that he cauterized a wound that just as easily could’ve been stitched up at the hospital. Spewing some bullshit about how she didn’t want to go… he’s just covering for Endeavor’s abusive behavior. If I ever meet that fucking—god, fuck! He knows child protective services won’t do anything. She’s going to end up like Touya if this keeps up.”
“Natsuo,” Shouto muttered. His voice was making Shouto’s ears ring.
“That’s not fair,” Fuyumi said. “You haven’t been here.”
Shouto forced his eyes open. He had to blink a few times to clear his vision. He was on the futon in his room with Fuyumi on his left side and Natsuo on his right. Natsuo’s heavy university jacket covered Shouto’s torso.
Natsuo had stolen the swivel chair from Shouto’s desk and was straddling it backwards, looking over Shouto to stare daggers at Fuyumi. “You shouldn’t be here, either. Take her and get out.”
Fuyumi’s face glared a harsh pink, her eyes lined in red. “I keep telling you that both of us can’t live on my salary. She definitely can’t go to UA on it.”
“Make her get a job like a normal teenager! If Shichan still wants to be a fucking hero, there are cheaper hero schools. Probably ones that will let her in on scholarship. You can make it work.”
“No I can’t,” Fuyumi said. She looked like she was about to cry. She was ugly when she cried, and it always made Shouto feel… bad. Uncomfortable, wrong. Shouto wished Natsuo would stop pushing her. “Let me just… I’ll talk to Dad again. He’s probably frustrated about work or some—something.”
“This can’t keep happening, Fuyumi.”
“I know. I know.”
“Have you had her tested yet like I asked you to?” Natsuo asked. “Or at least sent to a therapist? She needs a support system for that sort of thing.”
“Dad said she doesn’t have it,” Fuyumi said.
“Because Dad’s such an expert on autism?”
“You’re only in pre-med, Natsuo, it’s not like you are, either!”
“Yeah, that’s why I said she needs to get fucking tested!”
“Natsuo,” Shouto said, louder. It hurt his voice to speak. “Shut up.”
Natsuo looked down at him. He gave an embarrassed smile. “Sorry. Glad you’re awake. You feeling okay?”
“Why are you here?” Natsuo lived in his university's dorms an hour away.
“Fuyumi got worried and called me. I was up early shopping in the area, so.” He picked up a plastic grocery bag from beside his feet, held it up proudly. “Picked you up some snacks.”
“Oh,” Shouto said. “Thanks.”
“Try to sound more enthusiastic. I paid for these with my own money.”
Shouto rolled onto his side. The motion felt like it shifted every bone in his body into new, more torturous positions. “Can you guys leave me alone for a few hours? I’m tired.”
“You really need to go to the hospital,” Natsuo said. “You might have a concussion.”
Again, he’d had one before, and this wasn’t it. “I didn’t hit my head.”
“Uh—have you seen your face? Something hit your head.”
He touched his jaw where the baton had hit him. It hurt.
Natsuo sighed. “What about your breathing? Anything hurt there?”
His ribs were sore, but it didn’t hurt to breath, so he was probably just badly bruised. Nothing punctured or broken. “No.”
Natsuo glanced up at Fuyumi. “I’m worried about infection in the leg—”
Shouto set his leg on fire.
Natsuo yelped, the swivel chair tipping backward. He barely caught himself on the edge of Shouto’s desk. “Shit!”
“Pretty low infection risk,” Shouto said. “As you can see.”
“Yeah, I can see! Put that out.” Natsuo swore as he disentangled himself from the swivel chair, letting it fall to the ground with a loud clatter as he stood. “Fuckin’ kids these days.”
Shouto let the fire die. “You’re nineteen.”
Natsuo grabbed his jacket off Shouto before stumbling toward the door to Shouto’s bedroom. “Get some rest. I gotta leave in a few hours, so I’ll be back to check on ya before then.”
“You’re not a doctor,” Shouto said.
“And you’re not a hero, so stop getting beat up like one.” He opened the door. “Come on, Fuyumi.”
Shouto knew his siblings were going to talk about him while he was asleep. That was fine.
He just needed to rest. And wait.
###
He must’ve slept through Natsuo’s second visit. When he woke up at noon, no one was in his room, and the light from the small window in Shouto’s room was painfully bright.
He drew the curtains before rummaging through the snacks Natsuo had brought him. He killed time doing homework, lifting weights (sitting down, which still hurt, but not as much as standing), and playing an ad-riddled Candy Crush rip-off he’d downloaded in study hall.
Over the hours, the light from around the edges of the curtains grew dim. Eventually, it neared midnight.
And then Shouto left his room.
He headed to the kitchen, where Fuyumi had left a nightlight on and a wrapped-up tuna sandwich in the fridge. Shouto poured a glass of milk and sipped it while looking through the cabinet drawers.
There it was—a lighter, the one Fuyumi used to light candles. He sat down at the small kitchen table with it, flipping it open and holding the flame to his outer thigh as he ate his sandwich.
He finished the sandwich. Sipped some more milk, watched the flame lick his skin. The heat had grown a little uncomfortable after several minutes of continued exposure, but when he took the flame away, his skin was barely red.
There was no way a lighter could have heated a knife enough to cauterize his wound.
Shouto heard footsteps suddenly, and he let the lighter go out, curling it into his fist on the table. Any luck, and Endeavor wouldn’t come into the kitchen—
“What are you doing up?”
Fuck.
Shouto cradled his cup of milk. “Eating.”
The footsteps passed by him and headed to the refrigerator. Shouto didn’t move his head when he glanced up. Endeavor was wearing only a wrinkled pair of boxers, and the light from the fridge illuminated the steam rising from his hair. He must’ve just gotten out of the shower.
Shouto hated those days when Endeavor’s work schedule ran overtime. It made his movement inside the house less easy to predict.
Endeavor took some sort of prescription cream from the fridge door, leaving the door open as he rubbed the cream over his nose and under his eyes. The skin was flaking like an old sunburn, and Shouto wondered if he’d been the one to do that to him. “You used your fire today,” Endeavor said.
Shouto grunted.
Endeavor put the cream away, looking at Shouto as he closed the fridge door. “What’s in your hand?”
“None of your business,” Shouto said.
“Show me.”
Shouto turned his fist over and opened it.
Endeavor narrowed his eyes when he saw the lighter. “What were you doing with that?”
“Testing to see if it could burn me.”
“It won’t,” said Endeavor. “A lighter doesn’t have enough heat to burn us.”
“Boiling water was able to burn me.”
Endeavor frowned, then reached out and pulled Shouto’s chin up. Shouto kept his eyes cast down and to the side as his father examined the burn scar over his left eye.
He wanted to pull back so badly. To run away. Back to his room, shut the door, lock it.
Endeavor let go, finally. “You were young. I doubt the result would be the same if it happened now.”
“Want to try it?” Shouto asked. “Next training session? You can just throw boiling water on me until I fucking die.”
He felt the slap through his entire head. He’d expected it. He hadn’t been quick enough closing his mouth, though, and now he was tasting blood where his lip had connected with his teeth.
“Watch your mouth,” Endeavor said.
As Endeavor left the room, Shouto let a wry smile take over his face. He took a sip of milk, let its cool blandness mix with the blood. Swallowed.
###
In the morning, Fuyumi arrived at his bedroom door with a makeup kit. “Let me,” she said, face pained.
He let her.
They sat on the floor across from each other. Fuyumi spread her tools and got to work.
It took a while. They were silent most of time.
“You don’t have to go with him to school if you don’t want to,” Fuyumi said when they were finished. “I can ask him to leave.”
Shouto stood and examined his covered bruises in the mirror—Fuyumi had done a good job.
It was true that Shouto didn’t particularly want to see Reflection again. But he had questions that only Reflection could answer. “It’s fine,” he answered.
She packed her tools, wiped some foundation dust from the floor with a tissue. “After today, I won’t let him pick you up again.”
Fine by Shouto. “Okay.”
“Text me when you get to school.”
“Okay.”
Reflection’s black car sat in the same spot it always did. When Shouto climbed in, the faint smell of something burnt wafted toward him.
“Do you smoke?” Shouto asked.
Reflection barely looked at him. “Occasionally.”
They drove the next ten minutes in total silence. Shouto stared out the window.
Then, unprompted—
“You covered them up.”
Shouto tensed. “Yeah.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
That was enough to make Shouto turn to look at Reflection. The man hadn’t flinched, still staring out at the road, hands on the wheel in a standard ten-o’-clock, two-o’-clock position.
Unease rippled through Shouto. Was this some sort of power play? A display of ownership? “Tell me what you mean by that.”
Reflection used his turn signal before changing lanes. The plastic ticking unsettled Shouto more than it comforted him. Since when did Reflection use turn signals?
“You must’ve noticed I was hitting you mostly in visible spots,” Reflection said. His voice was smooth, calm, normal, like he was talking about his grocery list. “You know, face, neck, arm.”
He hadn’t noticed, but it was true. The bruises had been a pain to cover up.
Heart thrumming, Shouto unbuckled his seatbelt. Quietly. Barely a click.
“You can still do it,” said Reflection.
He let his other hand inch toward the door handle. If he could get out of the car without Reflection snagging his arm or leg or something, the rest would be relatively simple. Yes, they were on the highway, and the passenger side of the car faced five lanes of traffic, but he could cut around behind the car and hide in the adjacent shopping center.
Not for long, because Reflection could find him anywhere with his quirk, but Reflection couldn’t do anything too horrible in a crowded shopping center if he wanted to keep his hero license.
He’d have to make a move before they entered the tunnel up ahead.
“Do what?” Shouto asked.
“I can’t guarantee it’ll work, but you’ve at least got a better chance than when Natsuo submitted his reports. Or when I submitted mine. Teachers are required by law to report child abuse. You go in, you show them those bruises and the cauterization, you tell them your old man did that to you.”
Shouto’s hand stilled on the door handle. He flexed his fingers.
“I’ll back you in court if he tries to deny it,” Reflection continued. “But you have to be the one to step up. Protective services are so closely tied to the hero industry that reports against the number two hero are either dismissed as libel or get, y’know, ‘lost’ by people too scared to accuse him of wrongdoing.”
The interior of the car went dark as they passed under the tunnel. Shouto buckled his seatbelt again. Dropped his hands in his lap.
Was this a trap? Something Endeavor had set up to get Shouto to confess to conspiring against Endeavor? No one from Endeavor’s agency had ever tried to help before.
He had questions. Why was Reflection working for Endeavor if he didn’t like the man? For money? But then why was he risking his job to bring Endeavor down?
“Are we related?” Shouto asked.
Reflection looked at him, face blank for a moment before he reeled back in laughter. It wasn’t an evil laugh. It wasn’t a particularly good or reassuring laugh, either, it was just… a laugh. One he hadn’t heard come from Reflection before, he didn’t think, but it was still somehow vaguely familiar, so maybe he had...?
“Sorry,” Reflection said, scratching the back of his head. “I’m just trying to figure out how you… hah! Sorry. How you reached that conclusion.”
“I don’t understand you,” Shouto said. “I think you’re lying to me about several things and I don’t know why.”
Interest sparked in Reflection’s face. “Lying? What about?”
“Your quirk, for one. A standard lighter couldn’t heat metal hot enough to burn me. You have a fire or heat quirk.”
“One could argue that I used my mirrors to increase the temperature,” Reflection said.
Something unpleasant burned low in Shouto’s gut. Was Reflection making fun of him? Reflection tended to be a casual person, and Shouto couldn’t tell if this was Reflection’s normal level of casual, or if he was irritated, or maybe amused? Fuck, Shouto hated these types of interactions.
“I guess you can think I’m your secret evil fire-wielding cousin if you want,” Reflection said. He yawned, then looked at Shouto with a polite smile. Shouto couldn’t tell if it was meant to be sincere. “Doesn’t matter all that much to me. Once this is over with, I’m outta here. So.”
So.
So what did that mean? Once what was over? Why did he have to leave?
The familiar high gates of UA came into view in the distance. This car ride was almost over. If Shouto wanted to ask more questions, he’d have to do it now.
“What if I don’t come forward and tell anybody?” Shouto asked. “Endeavor’s paying my way through school. If I get taken away from him—”
“Do you want to be a hero?”
Shouto looked at the dash in front of him. There were faint footprints—someone had had their shoes up on it recently. “I’m not good at anything else.”
Reflection smiled dryly out at the road. “Yeah, I guess that’s what he told ya.”
They were pulling up close to the school now, and Shouto’s unease clawed up into his throat. They hadn’t had enough time to talk. He hadn’t formulated a plan.
The car came to a halt, and Reflection unlocked the doors.
“This’ll be the last you see of me for a while,” Reflection said. “I gave you some tools, but I can't force you to use 'em. Make your choice. If you do end up needing me, you can contact me through Deku.”
Deku? “I don’t know who that is.”
“You will.” In a motion that made Shouto flinch, Reflection reached out and ruffled Shouto’s hair. The gloves felt strange, plastic-y, against his scalp, and he felt one or two of his hairs catch on the edges of the mirrors on Reflection’s fingertips. “Have a good fuckin’ day at school, kiddo.”
Notes:
Oof. Those were a tough couple chapters. Ready to get back to writing 1-A antics.
Chapter 6: Shouto Helps Bakugou Chill Out (No, Not in a Sexy Way, You Freaks)
Summary:
Ah, yes, practical training: with it comes Best Girl Momo, Gremlin Bakugou, and a nasty boys' locker room.
Notes:
This chapter deviates from canon in that a. since Midoriya isn't in class 1-A, the teams come out different, and b. Shouto's initial costume is less stupid. That second part isn't relevant to the plot, but it's important to me that you know.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Class 1-A was starting practical training today.
Shouto had little to fear in terms of actual training—he already knew he was ahead of most, if not all, his classmates. Bakugou might present a challenge, and—dammit, he met eyes with her again, why did she keep looking at him?—Momo could be interesting. Even wearing a binder, fighting the others would be like swatting away flies.
The exercise itself seemed straightforward enough. It would take place inside a building on Ground Beta, where the students were separated into teams of two and assigned the role of hero or villain. The villain team would win if they successfully guarded the fake “bomb” on the first floor, or if they captured the hero team. The hero team’s objective, alternatively, was to either capture the villains or secure the bomb within a time limit.
No, he wasn’t worried about training.
“Has everybody drawn a letter? Know your teams?” Aizawa called, looking unusually short next to All Might's giant frame. After the class murmured agreement, he said, “Team A and D are first. Go get changed into your hero costumes.”
This was the uncertain part.
Shouto was used to people seeing him unclothed—he’d had enough training with sidekicks at Endeavor’s agency that changing in and out of clothes and showering in front of others wasn’t a big deal. But those had always—well, usually—been women surrounding him, and now he was in the boys’ locker room with boys, all of whom probably had things like penises and…
Well, penises were the main thing.
Also, it smelled bad.
He’d planned as extensively as possible, including scoping out the area days beforehand (the showers had curtains, thank fuck) and buying a waterproof bag to keep his clothes in so he wouldn’t have to step out of the shower naked to access them. However—he was realizing this now—he hadn’t accounted for what the shower would do to the makeup covering his bruises.
He’d worry about that after the training exercise. One thing at a time.
He found a corner and stripped down to his binder and boxers. He’d managed to get his costume halfway on before he heard Kaminari pause his conversation with Kirishima and say, “Dang, Todoroki!”
Shouto didn’t look back, willing his hands to stay steady as he buttoned his pants. “What.”
“I just didn’t expect you to be so frikkin’ ripped, dude. You look like you could pick up a car.”
Oh. Was that all? Shouto slipped the top half of the costume on over his binder, then stuffed his uniform unceremoniously into his bag. “I’ve never picked up a car.”
Kirishima was looking in his direction now, too. “How much do you bench?” he asked.
“Oi,” Bakugou said, popping a warning explosion as he passed Kirishima and Kaminari. “Stop fuckin’ distracting Strawberries-n-Cream. If he comes at me all half-brained like you two, I’ll kill him.”
“Uh—that’s not how conversation works, Bakubro,” Kaminari said. “You should make some friends.”
Bakugou’s explosions and Kaminari’s subsequent squealing was too much. Shouto covered the ear facing the pair as he shoved the bag with his uniform in a locker. His phone tumbled out. As he bent to pick it up, he noticed a notification from the messaging app.
Unknown:
Good luck today!
Stomach twisting with nausea, Shouto quickly cleared the notification and stuffed his phone back in the bag. He closed the locker and headed back out to the training grounds.
Momo was already waiting near the grounds, hands around her waist, looking uncomfortable. Shouto wasn’t sure why. Was she nervous? Cold, maybe. Her hero suit didn’t cover much.
“Todoroki-kun,” she said when she saw him. It was her first time speaking to him at all since the semester started, aside from maybe a mumbled “excuse me” in the halls. “You’re Team A, right? The Hero team?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh, good. I was trying to figure out who my teammate was. We should come up with a plan. Tough luck getting paired against Bakugou and Iida during our first practical training session, huh? They’re both strong.”
He looked her over. “I thought you were strong, too.”
Her face reddened.
What was wrong with her? Was she going to be a liability today? “You are, aren’t you?”
“I guess so,” she said.
“So am I. This should be over quickly.”
Momo nodded. “Should I make anything ahead of time?”
He nodded toward her costume. “A coat.”
###
After a short discussion, Shouto and Momo decided against the coat (too lipid-costly). She would make ice-resistant boots and a body heat detector instead.
After situating themselves on the second floor of the building in which the training would take place, Momo got to work. Shouto watched her absently as she pushed the items from her torso.
She glanced back at him, and her face twitched. “Todoroki. Do you mind?”
He stared at her for a moment before it clicked—I’m a boy—and he looked away. Weird social conventions. It wasn’t like he got anything from seeing her skin. Did other people?
“Okay,” Momo said after pulling her new shoes on. They were spiked on the soles, which should allow her decent grip when walking on ice. She picked up the body heat detector she’d made, and Shouto looked over her shoulder to see several glowing forms on the screen. “They’re still downstairs.”
Shouto’s first instinct was to freeze the entire building.
So he did.
When he looked behind him and saw that Momo’s feet and legs had also been caught in the foot-thick sheet of ice covering every visible surface, he said, “Oh.”
“Todoroki-kun,” Momo said.
He stuck his foot out and warmed a circle around Momo’s feet, turning the ice into sludge. She grabbed onto his arm and stepped out of it, looking like she’d just tasted something bad.
“Please warn me next time,” she said.
“I don’t plan on making ice at that scale again today.” Ugh, that had overheated him. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck with his sleeve, then unzipped his jacket and tied it around his waist. “Where are the heat signatures now?”
Momo looked down at the device. “One of them—I assume Iida?—hasn’t moved from beside the bomb. Bakugou is on the move.”
He’d known his ice probably wouldn’t be able to trap Bakugou on the first try. He had fast reflexes and the ability to boost himself in the air with his explosions. Iida was grounded, and even if Bakugou wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to free Iida from the ice with his explosions without also blasting Iida’s legs off.
“I’ll occupy Bakugou,” Shouto said. “I should be able to keep him in one place even if I can’t trap him. You go secure the bomb.”
“Todoroki-kun, what’s that on your neck?” Momo asked. “Is that a bruise?”
His hand went instinctively to cover it. He was sweating a lot from making all that ice—he must’ve accidentally wiped the makeup off. “It—I was training yesterday.”
“Geez, with what? A baseball bat?”
Shouto looked at her. It was supposed to be a glance—no hidden meaning, no agenda. But he must’ve done something wrong, because as soon as he met her eyes, her face changed from amused skepticism to something serious.
She lowered her voice. “Are you okay?”
Shouto stared at her.
Reflection had told him that he should tell somebody. Shouto didn’t know if he agreed—he could lose a lot by turning his father in. His school, his large house and room, his free time, his privacy, Fuyumi’s trust, his guaranteed future as a Pro Hero. Not to mention what he’d have to go through if his father found out what Shouto had done. He did know that he wanted it to end. Not that he could ever imagine it ending, not really, but…
He also knew that, if he were to tell anyone, it would decidedly not be a classmate who had ties to his family.
Momo looked down at her detector. She barely had time to say, “Oh,” before Bakugou burst in from the staircase at the far end of the room, whacking his head against the top of the doorframe. He was hovering above the ice, hands crackling with explosions.
Bakugou righted himself before aiming his right fist at Shouto and screaming, “DIE!”
He came down and forward. Shouto caught Bakugou’s arm and used Bakugou’s own inertia to slam him into the floor.
Shouto glanced over his shoulder to see if Momo had left yet. She hadn’t. She was frozen, jaw slack.
Bakugou grunted and rolled over. He gave a crazed smile as he pushed himself to his feet, spreading his feet out on the ice so he wouldn’t slip.
“Oi, you Half-n-Half bastard,” Bakugou said. “Heard you got two quirks. Does the second one do anything or does it just make you look stupid?”
Looking at Bakugou, Shouto had an idea. If Bakugou roughed him up enough, no one would question his bruises from yesterday or think they were suspicious. He wouldn’t have to worry about covering them up for the next few weeks.
The only problem was that the ice beneath them was going to make it difficult for Bakugou to fight. Shouto had enough experience keeping his balance on ice, but Bakugou not having footing meant that his swings would come with less power.
Bakugou’s smile twisted into something frustrated. He lifted his right arm, aiming his gauntlet at Shouto. “Fine, you don’t wanna fuckin’ say anything. But I won’t let you get away with holding back while you fight me.” He pulled something on his gauntlet. “DIE, FUCK-ASS!”
Oh. Yes. This should be good enough.
There was just enough of a delay that Shouto had time to adjust his body so that the gauntlet would hit him, but not quite head-on. He wasn’t trying to get killed, and from how he’d seen Bakugou playing with those gauntlets at the end of last week, they could definitely kill someone.
Momo seemed to realize what was happening. She screamed. “BAKUGOU, STOP!”
Too late.
It hit him at a slant. Shouto slammed back against the wall, then slumped to the ground. Bakugou’s gauntlet clattered down beside him.
Shouto looked down, mostly to make sure there wasn’t a giant hole in his torso.
There was not.
But it sure felt like there was.
“Oh sh—crap, please don’t move.” Momo scrambled over to the camera in the corner of the room—it had only barely escaped being buried in Shouto’s ice—and waved frantically. “I’ll make you a stretcher.”
“Get up and fight me, asshole!” Bakugou yelled at Shouto. “I don’t know what that left side of yours does, but I’ll KILL you if you think you don’t need to use—”
Shouto didn’t have to look up or move to send of jet of ice from his heel. Controlling ice with his feet wasn’t going to be as precise as if he did it with his hands. It was just as fast and powerful, though, and Bakugou didn’t have time to finish his sentence before he was almost entirely encased in a jagged wave of ice.
“FffffuuUCK!” Bakugou said. He tried to aim his second gauntlet, but his arm was frozen at an angle that could only fire harmlessly at the wall. “ICYHOT, YOU FUCKIN’ COWARD!”
“Go downstairs,” Shouto told Momo. “You should be able to touch the bomb without interference.”
Momo’s eyes widened. “I’m not leaving you!”
God, it was annoying when people pretended to care about his well-being. It never ended up being for his benefit, and it usually just caused delays. Like with Hawks last week. “I’m fine. It didn’t hit me head-on. Just need a minute to catch my breath.”
“Are you sure? That looked bad.”
“Go. Let me know when you’ve secured it.”
“OI!” Bakugou yelled. “OI! Let me outta this shitty ice, fuck-ass! Hey, you, Big Hair! HEY!”
Momo ignored his yells as she passed and headed down the stairs.
Bakugou returned his attention to Shouto, snarling. “I know you fuckin’ did that on purpose.”
Shouto pushed himself into a more dignified sitting position. Pain creaked through his torso. “Did what?”
“Stepped in front of my gauntlet! I wasn’t gonna hit you, you damn extra, I was just tryin’ to make you fight. You think I’m some sort of murderer? Fuck’s wrong with you? You trying to die?”
Shouto sighed. So Bakugou saw that. He was more perceptive than Shouto had given him credit for. Still, he could let Bakugou think that he’d let himself get hurt in order to catch Bakugou off guard and capture him. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“I can think of fuckin’ four different ways you coulda bea—got the same result without doing something fuckin’ stupid. Something’s wrong with your head.” Shouto could tell he was trying to hide it, but Bakugou’s voice had started to falter from the cold. He switched to yelling. “FUCK! Let me out of here so I can finish KILLING YOU!”
Momo’s voice came over Shouto’s earpiece. “Todoroki-kun, the bomb is secured.”
Shouto pressed the button on his earpiece to reply. “I’m getting rid of the ice, then.”
“You can do that?” Momo asked. “Oh, that’s… helpful. Iida looks very uncomfortable.”
Shouto didn’t doubt it. The ice would’ve gone inside his engines. It was good that his ice had taken down Iida so easily, but now Iida would be on the lookout for that move in the future, so Shouto would have to be more careful when fighting him.
Shouto placed both hands palm-down on the ice. He’d been punished enough times for flooding the training room that he’d put in the work to figure out a way around a wet, messy cleanup. He still had to concentrate—reaching out with both sides of his body and yanking the sharp bits off all the ice molecules in the building wasn’t easy.
In seconds, the ice was steaming.
Momo’s voice wormed in his ear again. “Hey, is this safe? You weren’t using dry ice, right?”
He pressed his shoulder to his ear to reply. “It’s normal ice.”
“I don’t understand. How are you able to speed up the sublimation process?”
“Molecular… stuff. I trained.” His quirk slipped for a second or two, and the ice under his hands turned wet. He swore and froze it again before resuming evaporating the ice. “Stop talking so I can concentrate.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Hey, Half-n-Half,” Bakugou said. The ice holding him still hadn’t sublimated, but the ice above Bakugou’s head had started to melt. Portions of Bakugou’s spiky blond hair had gone dark with water, a tiny stream bravely rolling down his reddened face and tight jaw. “If you’re being slow getting this fucking ice off me on purpose, don’t think I won’t blast your shitty face to Hell.”
“Be quiet,” Shouto said.
“The FUCK did you say to me?!”
The speaker above them crackled. Shouto realized there was a possibility the teachers had been trying to contact them and had been unable to—Shouto’s thick ice had covered the speakers completely. Shouto sped up the sublimation until the speaker was uncovered.
“…hand signal toward the camera if so,” the speaker said. All Might’s voice. “Young Todoroki, can you hear?”
Shouto paused the sublimation. He looked toward the camera and made the sign for didn’t hear, please repeat.
“The fuck are you doing with your hands?” Bakugou demanded.
It was a basic sign language developed especially for Pro Hero stealth missions, but he didn’t feel the need to explain that to Bakugou. He’d learn it in class eventually. Shouto had known it since he was eleven.
After a short pause, All Might’s voice came over the speakers again. “Oh, of course. Young Todoroki, are you injured?”
Finishing here, Shouto signed. Exiting building after cleanup.
“But are you hurt?”
Oh, he was asking asking. Shouto supposed they did need to do that with students to avoid lawsuits. The question had always been rhetorical with his father and his sidekicks—code for “are you unable to keep fighting?”—and the answer was always supposed to be a firm no. He’d learned that the hard way.
He couldn’t tell if All Might was trying to repeat that lesson here? Might as well be safe.
All is well, Shouto signed.
“Young Yaoyorozu is saying otherwise,” All Might said. “Please do not move so as to injure yourself further! I will be up directly.”
“Nice going, fuckwipe,” Bakugou said. “Now All Might has to come rescue you.”
Shouto resumed sublimation. He only had a few centimeters to go now. He probably ought to melt Bakugou’s ice soon so he wouldn’t have permanent cell damage, but he didn’t want another fight before All Might got here.
“What’s up with your face, anyway?” Bakugou asked. Shouto thought he was asking about his scar until he said, “You get dropped on your head as a kid and fuck up your frontal lobe? I ain’t seen you make a single fuckin’ expression since the school year started.”
Patches of bare floor started to show through the ice, so Shouto stopped sublimating. Once the ice was no longer a connected body, he couldn’t do much with it—it’d have to melt and evaporate on its own. Biting back pain both old and new, he pushed himself to his feet.
Momo and Iida appeared at the top of the staircase. Iida rushed toward Shouto, face strained in concern. “Todoroki! Yaoyorozu told me what happened. Should you be moving?”
In response, Shouto moved toward Bakugou. He placed his left hand on the ice and pushed a wave of heat into it. The block of ice exploded into water, the heat flash making it startle a few feet in the air before it crashed back down and soaked Bakugou.
“You—!” Fury ravaged Bakugou’s dripping face as he turned to face Shouto. He pulled back his fist, ready to swing.
Shouto hit him first. A kick, square in the chest—one that sent Bakugou flying back into the wall behind him.
“What’s happening here?”
The voice came from behind and above him. Shouto whirled and ducked simultaneously, arm going up to block the worst of it because he’d never been able to fully dodge a blow from that angle—
It was All Might. Looking down at Shouto from his impossible height, face pinched.
Shouto’s face heated. It was a second before he schooled himself enough to lower his arm, straighten, and send coolness to his face to (hopefully) chase away the red.
“I apologize,” Shouto said. He’d never been this close to All Might before, a man more powerful than his father. A man Shouto did not need to piss off. “I hadn’t—I didn’t mean to attack him.”
“Bullshit,” Bakugou spat. Shouto turned to look at him again. Bakugou was struggling to his feet, his left side weighed down by the one gauntlet still attached. His free hand pressed against his chest where Shouto’s foot had connected. “That wasn’t a fuckin’ lover’s slap, IcyHot.”
All Might looked… conflicted. That was an expression Shouto had never seen on All Might before, so it took him a moment to decipher. “We’ll discuss this later,” All Might said. “I think both of you should go see Recovery Girl. Young Todoroki, can you walk?”
Recovery Girl. That was the nurse here at UA, right? His stomach twisted. He hadn’t had a chance to plan a procedure for getting through a medical check-up without anyone finding out he didn’t have the typical male body. And he had the bruises from yesterday to account for. His plan was backfiring. “Yeah, I can walk,” said Shouto. “I don’t need to see her. I’m fine.”
“You look awful,” Momo said. “And that was a really hard hit. Please don’t be stupid.”
“I’m afraid I will have to insist,” said All Might. “Iida, please accompany them. No fighting on the way. Young Bakugou, are you—”
“I’m fine,” Bakugou snarled, waving off All Might’s proffered hand and getting up on his own. “Fuck off.”
“Bakugou!” Iida sounded horrified. “That is highly inappropriate!”
“Fuck outta my way, Glasses.” Bakugou pushed past Iida and headed down the stairs.
Iida offered an arm to Shouto. Shouto waved him off and started walking on his own.
Outside the building, some of the class was waiting outside the monitoring room, faces tight with… something. Worry? That didn’t seem right, since the fight was over. Maybe they were worried about their own respective training. Aizawa watched from the monitoring room’s open door, but he didn’t say anything.
Kirishima called out to him. “Hey man, you good? That was intense.”
People kept asking him that. If he was injured, if he was okay, if he needed help. It wasn’t something he was used to, and it was getting awkward. “I’m fine.”
“Do you need—”
“No.”
Kaminari drove up with a golf cart. He pulled up in front of Iida and Shouto before stopping. “Aizawa-sensei said you guys could use this to get back to the school. Bakugou already took off.”
Shouto gripped his side. He felt like the air was being ripped from his chest every time he breathed, and his heart wouldn’t stop fluttering. Did he have a punctured lung?
Iida’s firm hand pressed into Shouto’s back. “Todoroki?”
God, now they were touching him?
He looked at Iida, and there must’ve been some emotion on Shouto’s face he’d failed to conceal, because Iida pulled away. He looked startled.
“S-sorry,” said Iida.
Notes:
Me to me: Don't capitalize entire words or use "?!" in your writing, it's not professional. A better writer would be able to communicate emotion without resorting to those cheap tricks.
Bakugou to me: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU YAPPING ABOUT, HAH?!?!?!
Chapter 7: Shouto Emotionally Bonds with a Piece of Gum (Bonus: Fuyumi Says the F-Word)
Summary:
Meltdown time! Recovery Girl and (pissed-off) Dadzawa.
Notes:
CW: panic attack, discussion of injuries and abuse, routine medical exam, mentions of autism-related abuse
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The ride back to the main school building wasn’t silent, exactly, with the grinding of the golf cart’s wheels against the asphalt path. The seat was rattling, too, and getting on Shouto’s last nerve. But Iida didn’t talk, and Shouto was thankful for that.
Something was wrong with Shouto. His heart kept skipping beats and his breath wouldn’t slow down even when he breathed into his cupped hands. He was also nauseous and his chest felt tight, but that was probably a result of getting slammed against the wall for the second time in two days.
His mind was spitting out thoughts and half-thoughts too fast for him to process. Keeping a logical train of thought felt like trying to pick out whole pieces of lettuce from a running blender.
He needed to think of a way to tell someone about his dad.
But he couldn’t.
But he needed to. Endeavor would end up killing him.
But Endeavor would kill Shouto if he did tell someone.
Shouto couldn’t go to the nurse.
She’d know.
But she needed to know—
But she’d know.
And Bakugou was there. He might be in the same room.
Shouto needed to get out of this.
How? Fuck. How? Should he run? Now? Where would he go?
“We’re here,” Iida said.
Oh. Shouto hadn’t noticed the golf cart stopping. Legs unsteady, he stood and disembarked.
“Ah—” Iida started. His eyes ran over the length of Shouto’s body, and he looked very much like he wanted to ask something. He didn’t. “I’ll go get your things from the locker room and bring them up to you.”
“You don’t have to,” Shouto said.
“I feel that it is my duty.”
What the fuck did that mean? “Okay.”
Iida paused. “As class president.”
“Okay,” Shouto said.
If Bakugou weren’t there to hold him accountable, Shouto could’ve just wandered around the school or hid in the bathroom for fifteen minutes before heading back to the training grounds and pretending he’d been to the nurse. If Shouto hadn’t kicked Bakugou clean across the room, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Again with Shouto digging holes for himself.
He headed inside and took the stairs, following the sign for the nurse’s office. Halfway up the stairs, the dark thing in his stomach exploded through his body.
Shouto felt it physically, like he’d been caught in a flare of a dying star—felt the thing reach for his heart, his lungs, his muscles, and squeeze. Felt the flaming claws sink in, drag him to a stop on the stairs, and suddenly he was paralyzed and his knees were knocking sharply against the stairs and his breath was coming, and going, and coming and going, and fuck what had he done to himself? Was he dying right here?
He gripped the stair rail, eyes painfully dry and focused on an old piece of gum plastered to the step just above him.
That was what jogged his memory.
This wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. He’d been here before—chest clenching, hands shaking, staring down pieces of dirt on the floor. But those times, he’d had a reason.
Get up, he told himself. Get the fuck up. Nothing is wrong.
“Oi,” said a voice from the top of the stairs.
Get. The. Fuck. Up.
“Oi,” it said again. “Don’t collapse on the fuckin’ stairs, IcyHot. Nobody wants to clean that puddle up.”
Shouto squeezed his eyes shut. If he received any more outside stimulation on top of what he’d already gotten that day, he might actually lose his goddamn mind.
Bakugou didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “Are you—”
“If you fucking ask me if I’m okay,” Shouto said, the words surprising him as they left his mouth, “I swear to God, I will freeze you to the floor and light your face on fire.”
“Hah?” It annoyed Shouto immensely that Bakugou’s voice was calmer than his own right now. “I wasn’t gonna fucking ask you that, fuckwipe. You think I care if you die on the fucking stairs?”
“Then fucking leave.”
“Fuck you! Don’t tell me what to do! I’ll stay right here and watch you cry if I wanna.”
Shouto wasn’t crying. He almost wished he were. That would at least make some sense. No, he was frozen on the stairs, wheezing, and he desperately wanted to cover his ears and make his tch noises to block out everything around him, but that wasn’t something heroes did. That wasn’t even something normal people did.
“What’s wrong?” A woman’s voice this time, old and creaky.
“Oh. You,” Bakugou said. “Yeah, IcyHot decided to kick the bucket on the stairs. Fuckin’ drama queen.”
So he had an entire audience now. Great.
Get up.
Light, steady footsteps travelled down the stairs toward him. He caught a flash of gray hair and a cane from his peripheral vision—Recovery Girl, he guessed. “Where does it hurt?” she asked.
Trick question?
He pushed past the thought. “Just…” He tapped his chest with his knuckles, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground. He knew his face would start burning if he accidentally met someone’s eyes, and he didn’t have the energy to regulate his temperature right now.
“Trouble breathing?” Recovery Girl asked.
“N—” He didn’t want to have to take off any clothes for a checkup. “Think it’s panic.”
“Say that again, dear?”
He opened his mouth to repeat himself and found that his words had turned to a heavy sludge in his throat. He took a breath, tried a second time. He couldn’t push them up.
Fuck.
This again.
He tapped his chest again a few more times, trying to release at least a little of the nervous energy boiling over inside him. How long was he going to be stuck without his words? He knew from experience that it wasn’t permanent, but it had lasted hours at a time—and occasionally days—when he was younger. He couldn’t afford days when he was attending UA.
He wasn’t supposed to be doing the tapping thing, either. Not when people were looking. Endeavor wasn’t here right now, though, and this old woman seemed too shriveled to twist Shouto’s twitching hand behind his back.
“Never mind,” said Recovery Girl. “Can you climb the stairs?”
That was simpler. He knew how to ignore physical pain. Shouto started up the steps again, letting Recovery Girl lead the way. When he passed Bakugou, he heard, “Y’know it ain’t my fault if you die, Half-n-Half.”
Recovery Girl shot Bakugou a withering look. “Dearie, he’s not dying. He’s overstimulated. You’re not helping. If you’re feeling as fine and dandy as you say, go back to class.”
Bakugou frowned, looking Shouto over like “overstimulation” was something that ought to be manifesting on his skin. Shouto flipped him a subtle middle finger.
Bakugou growled. “You fuckin’—I’ll kill—!”
“Bakugou,” Recovery Girl warned. Bakugou shot Shouto a dirty look before turning and storming down the stairs.
The walls of the nurse’s office were colored a light pink and decorated with what looked like student artwork. Several curtained beds lined the room, all empty.
Recovery Girl twisted a knob on the wall. The overhead lights dimmed. “Have a seat,” she said. “Bakugou told me the gist of what happened, jumbled as it was. I need to make sure your ribcage and lungs are okay first, but you can rest after that.”
Shouto sat on one of the beds. Recovery Girl pulled up a stool across from him.
“Take a deep breath for me,” she said. “Any pain when you inhale?”
He inhaled. It was shaky and sore, but there was no unfamiliar pain there. He shook his head, keeping his eyes on the scenic charcoal drawing above her head.
“Still trouble breathing, though? Tightness in your chest?”
He nodded once.
“Are you wearing anything constricting? Compression shirt, for example.”
His eyes dropped down to meet hers. She’d been nice so far. Maybe he’d press it? Give her a little more to work with, see how she reacted. “Binder,” he said.
Well, he’d managed one word, at least.
Recovery Girl’s face twisted. “Baby. During training?”
Shouto didn’t realize that his heart rate had slowed until it sped up again.
“We’ll need to talk about that later,” she said. “Let’s take your binder off for now, okay? Bet that’ll make it easier to breathe. I need to examine your torso, too.”
Fuyumi hadn’t covered up the bruise on his side. He didn’t remember exactly what it had looked like this morning, but it hadn’t been great. His classmates hadn’t seen it in the locker room because he’d had his binder on. Maybe whatever marks Bakugou’s gauntlet had made would overlap with the older bruise on his side enough to effectively cover it.
Was that what he wanted, though? To have gotten those bruises and that cauterization yesterday for nothing? To ignore Reflection’s attempt to help?
Shouto had never been good at making decisions. According to Endeavor, it was one of the things holding him back, making him slow. But look what happened when he did make split-second decisions—he ended up injured. Having a panic attack in front of a rival.
As Recovery Girl went to her desk to put on gloves and pick up her stethoscope, Shouto unzipped his top and tugged off his binder. He’d show her. Not like he had much of a choice. Maybe she’d notice something was up, maybe she wouldn’t. He’d let fate decide.
When Recovery Girl turned back around and saw Shouto’s bare torso, she said, “Oh, Lord.”
He kept his face flat.
Recovery Girl performed a routine examination—one Shouto had endured after more than a few training-sessions-gone-bad. He did what he was told, answered questions with a nod or a shake of his head, let his mind go blank and float to somewhere else in the room when she pressed against his chest wall and asked where it hurt.
“The not-speaking thing,” she said, “I just need to make sure that’s not a physical issue. Pressure on the esophagus can mean other problems.”
He shook his head.
“Okay.” She hung her stethoscope around her neck and sat back on her stool. “You can put your shirt back on. Leave that binder off. I’ll let you rest for a bit, get your voice back.”
Shouto pulled the top of his outfit back on, zipped it up.
“Oh, here,” Recovery girl said. She dropped something small in his hand. “If you need them.”
Shouto looked down. Earplugs.
He put them in, then pulled the curtains around the bed closed and lay on top of the thin blanket. It was almost immediate relief—the darkness, the quiet, the reduced pressure on his chest.
Recovery Girl’s diminutive form cast a shadow through the curtains, and Shouto pulled the cloth back a few centimeters to see what she was doing. Recovery Girl was at the landline phone near the door. She dialed a number and stepped outside the room, the spiral cord trailing her. She closed the door most of the way. Shouto took out his earplugs.
“Shota, dear,” Recovery Girl said. “Your student is non-speaking in my office after having a panic attack on the stairs. Care to let me in on what happened?”
Recovery Girl was telling Aizawa about his meltdown. Shouto stuffed the earplugs back in and lay down on the pillow, bringing up the sides of it with his hands to cover his ears further. He’d never liked hearing people talk about him, even if it was praise.
Minutes passed. Shouto stared at the ceiling and combed over what had happened during the training. Even with Bakugou’s gauntlet, it had been tame and slow-paced compared to the training he did with his father. It was odd and kind of pathetic that he’d panicked.
What had caused it? Bakugou? He’d hardly been a threat during that fight. Shouto only got hurt because he let Bakugou’s gauntlet hit him. All Might’s presence? All Might didn’t seem to harbor any ill will toward Shouto, though. Maybe leftover stress from this morning’s car ride? Shouto thought he’d already gotten over that.
Shouto’s brain didn’t make any sense.
After about ten minutes, Shouto grew restless. He took the earplugs out and sat up, pulling the bed’s curtain back. Recovery Girl was doing paperwork at her desk. “Can I go back?” he asked.
She looked over her shoulder at him. “I haven’t even healed you yet.”
“Then can you… do that?”
“Are you in much pain?”
“No,” he said. “Only when I move.”
“Then hang on for a bit longer.” Recovery Girl turned back to her paperwork. “Aizawa’s coming up to see you once he finishes with the battle trials. We’re going to have a chat.”
Shouto drew the curtains and lay back down. He was exhausted. Might as well take a nap before shit went down.
###
It was not pleasant to wake up by the sound of a curtain getting yanked open, opening his eyes only to have them immediately lock with his homeroom teacher’s.
Shouto sat up, moving out of Aizawa’s shadow. He squinted against the sudden light. How long had he been asleep? He looked back at Aizawa, and his heart juddered. Aizawa had Shouto’s binder bunched in his fist.
“You can’t train in this,” Aizawa said, dropping it on Shouto’s lap. “Had it crossed my mind you’d be wearing one, I would’ve said something earlier.”
Shouto looked down at the bundle of white. In the back of his mind, he’d known that he would encounter trouble for wearing a binder. He’d just hoped it wouldn’t be so soon. “It didn’t keep me from winning.”
“This isn’t about that.” When Shouto didn’t look up, Aizawa said, “Todoroki, you understand I’m not asking you to throw it away. I’m just talking about training. You can’t wear it during training.”
“But I… won.” Hadn’t he? What was he missing? He didn’t think he’d get in trouble for freezing the entire building; it had worked at least partially, and he’d cleaned up after himself. He hadn’t even obscured the cameras. “Is it because I fought after the exercise ended? Bakugou initiated that.”
“Jesus…” Aizawa gave a heavy sigh. He sat down on the stool across from Shouto’s bed, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. “Let me start over. Binders can constrict your breathing and damage your ribs if you don’t wear them safely. I’m not punishing you for anything. It’s for your well-being. There are other options. You understand what I’m saying?”
Oh. Right, that did make more sense. He hadn’t had to move his body much during this last exercise, but future training would probably require his body’s full attention. He couldn’t afford injuries brought on by something as inconsequential as clothing.
How was he supposed to figure out these “other options” on his own, though? His chest was small enough that not wearing the binder under his hero suit for a few hours each week probably wouldn’t give him away. Still, he wasn’t sure how he could get by changing from a binder to a sports bra in the boys’ locker room. “Yeah.”
“Good.” Aizawa’s eyes dropped to Shouto’s collar. Narrowed. “What’s on your neck?”
Ah, fuck.
Shouto’s hand brushed across his bruise. He was not ready for this.
Recovery Girl came from behind Aizawa and handed Shouto a wet wipe. “Wipe it off,” she said.
He took it. “What off?”
“You’re wearing makeup.”
Shouto hesitated. “I have to go to class after this.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Aizawa said.
Shouto exhaled. Fuyumi wouldn’t be happy to know all her work had been ruined before the school day was half over. He dragged the wipe across his eye, down his cheek, along his neck. Then he balled up the wipe and tossed it across the room into the open wastebasket.
When Shouto looked back at Aizawa, he realized that Aizawa’s eyes had sharpened. A pinprick of nausea poked his stomach. He’d never seen his teacher look awake before. “What are those from,” Aizawa said.
Shouto waited a couple seconds to make sure Aizawa was talking to him. Then he said, “The bruises?”
“Yes.”
“Training.”
Recovery Girl spoke to Aizawa. “I noticed he had some bruises that looked older. I thought you said practical training started today.”
“I did.” Aizawa didn’t take his eyes off Shouto, his voice stiff. “Training with whom?”
“My father.”
“Your father. Endeavor.”
So Aizawa did know. Of course he did. He’d probably recognized Shouto the moment he’d stepped foot in his class.
“Show him your side,” Recovery Girl said.
Shouto looked at her. “Why?”
“Please.”
He pulled his shirt up just enough so Aizawa could see his ribcage.
Aizawa’s mouth twitched. “Your father did that?”
“One of his sidekicks.” He pulled his shirt back down. Shit, was that what he was supposed to say? Reflection had told him to pin the blame on Endeavor, but he hadn’t been specific. Was the story supposed to be that Endeavor had done the attacking himself? “Endeavor was trying to get me to use my flames.”
“Flames? You have a fire quirk?”
“I don’t like to use it.” When Aizawa didn’t look away, Shouto added, “You saw me today. I don’t need it.”
“Anything else?” Aizawa asked.
“What?”
“Anything else you want to show me? Like that bandage you’ve got on under your pants leg?”
Shouto had forgotten about that. He shifted back on the bed, putting his left heel on the mattress so he could hike up his pants leg. Natsuo had covered the site with gauze and a band-aid about the size of his hand, but bruising was still leaking out from under it, purple and ugly.
“Take the bandage off,” Aizawa said.
Shouto peeled the bandage off slowly, then pulled the gauze off. A few tufts of fuzz stuck to his skin, glued down by globs of Neosporin.
Recovery Girl hissed through her teeth.
Aizawa’s eyes flashed a brief, intent-filled red. “Is that a fucking cauterization?”
An alarm went off in the back of Shouto’s mind. Shouto was making Eraserhead angry. He hadn’t meant to do that. He pulled his pants leg down to hide the mark. “I didn’t—sorry. She doesn’t have to heal it.”
Aizawa’s chest heaved. He stood, suddenly, and left the room. The door slammed behind him.
Shouto stared at the closed door. “I did something.”
“He’s not angry at you,” said Recovery Girl. “Honey, you know that what your father is doing is abuse.”
“I know that,” Shouto said. “I’m not stupid.”
Her voice softened. “How often does this happen? Your training?”
“He’s busy, so it’s irregular. Usually twice a week during school and four or five times a week when I’m off. Will I have to repeat all of this for the report?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Then I don’t want to talk about it now.” Shouto’s eyes found a familiar gray gym bag sitting in a chair next to Recovery Girl’s desk. Iida must’ve stopped by while Shouto was asleep. “Is that mine?”
Recovery Girl brought the bag to him. He pulled the drawstrings open and dug through it until he found his phone.
If Shouto was correct, the green-haired villain messaging him was Deku. The “welcome home” message he’d received last week almost made sense with that theory; Reflection was there to see Shouto arrive at home, and if he was in contact with the green-haired boy…
Shit. If Reflection knew the boy, did that mean he’d been in on the bridge attack? Was Reflection a villain?
Shouto pulled out his phone to message the green-haired boy back, but his stomach twisted when he saw his notifications. Fuyumi had been texting him all morning.
Fuyumi:
Shiyo did you get to school ok? You didn’t text me.
Please text me back. Something happened.
Ok listen, in case you’re ignoring me. I went to the hospital today with Sakura and her class to visit her father in the hospital. That’s the girl in my class whose dad almost burned to death in a villain attack three months ago. He just woke up yesterday.
Fuck, okay. I’m sorry. This is terrifying. I didn’t say anything in the hospital. I didn’t know who else to tell.
[Image Attachment]
He tapped on the photo to enlarge it. It was blurry and from a weird angle, but Shouto recognized it as a man in a hospital bed. He was covered in bandages, including parts of his face, but the glint in the man’s eyes wasn’t something even the red blotches on his cheeks and forehead could distract from.
Shouto felt sick.
He texted Fuyumi back.
Reflection?
Fuyumi:
Yes. I’m sure. That’s his face, at least.
Shouto:
?
Fuyumi:
He didn’t recognize me.
Do I call the police? Reflection didn’t try anything on the way to school, did he?
Maybe he should tell her everything. But that would also mean letting her in on the whole plan to take Endeavor down, and she probably wouldn’t be on board with that.
Also, he wasn’t heartless. Fuyumi was stressed enough as it was. Shouto would take care of this on his own.
Shouto:
Call the police. Reflection didn’t do anything odd. But I think he’s gone now.
He switched over to the messaging app and typed out a message under the green-haired boy’s “Good luck today!”
Shouto:
Are you Deku?
Notes:
We're gonna get to Deku soon, I SWEAR.
Chapter 8: Shouto Talks to Deku, a Totally Normal Fucking Person
Summary:
A panel of concerned teachers. Kirishima and (finally!) Deku.
Notes:
CW: discussion of abuse (physical, emotional) and canon character death
Also holy Jesus these chapters just keep getting longer huh
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto understood why Recovery Girl was there. He also understood Principal Nezu and, to a degree, Aizawa’s presence. Why Midnight was called in to help address the situation, Shouto did not know. Did they think he’d be more comfortable talking with a woman? He’d been beat up by plenty of women over the years. Endeavor’s agency hired assholes of any gender.
He’d been up against someone with a fog quirk like hers before. Had to fight holding his breath so his esophagus wouldn’t swell shut. He hadn’t performed very well.
When Recovery Girl handed him a bottle of water, he opened it and downed three-fourths of its contents in one swig.
“How long has this been going on?” Nezu asked.
Nezu and Recovery Girl were sitting on stools across from him, Nezu with a small laptop and Recovery Girl with her clipboard. Aizawa had opted to stand farther away, leaning against Recovery Girl’s desk with his ankles crossed, jaw tight and arms folded. Midnight was sitting beside Shouto for some reason, perfume heady. Shouto had been trying to think of a way to get her hand off his shoulder without outright knocking it off.
Maybe he’d just have to power through it. The sooner this was over with, the faster he could check the phone currently sitting face-down on the cot to see if the green-haired boy had messaged him back.
Deku.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense, and the more it didn’t. Maybe Deku had some sort of quirk that could transfer a person’s image and quirk to another person? Shouto had had his suspicions, but it seemed increasingly likely now that the Reflection Shouto had known wasn’t who he appeared to be. Now that Fuyumi had identified the person with the original face—a civilian father who had been in a housefire started by a villain—he knew for sure that Reflection had been wearing a stolen face. Possibly also using a stolen quirk.
Shouto remembered, suddenly, the empty car seat in the back of Reflection’s car. Had Reflection stolen the injured man’s vehicle? Maybe he’d been the one to start the fire that put the man in the hospital. Maybe Shouto’s suspicion that Reflection had a fire or heat quirk wasn’t so laughable as Reflection had made it out to be.
“Todoroki?” Nezu nudged.
Shouto jerked to attention. Right, they’d asked him a question. What had it been? How long had this been going on? “Are you talking about the training?”
Nezu nodded.
“Since I got my quirk.” Fuyumi had told him that their mom, Rei, had managed to hide Shouto’s quirk for a few months before Endeavor finally saw it, but he didn’t think they needed to know his entire backstory. “I was… three, I think.”
“You’ve been training since you were three?”
“Yes.”
“Were your early training sessions similarly violent?”
It was the first question Shouto wasn’t prepared for, and it had come earlier than he’d anticipated. When he hesitated, he felt Midnight’s hand squeeze his shoulder.
That pissed him off a little. He wasn’t emotionally affected. Of course now that he’d had—what had Recovery Girl called it, a panic attack?—they were going to think that he was prone to emotional breakdowns. And sure, he used to be, but he’d had that all trained out of him years ago. He wasn’t going to cry. He just needed time to word his answer. “They were adjusted for my age. Less sparring and more endurance training. Testing the limits of my quirk.”
Nezu glanced down at his laptop. He was typing something. The keys were so quiet that Shouto hadn’t noticed. “Can you elaborate on that?”
He wasn’t sure what there was to elaborate on that wasn’t obvious. How else would you test the limits of a fire and ice quirk? “A lot of testing how much fire and ice my body could make before it shut down. Adjusting temperature, volume, direction, the such. My oldest brother went through similar training and damaged his body extensively, so Endeavor wanted to make sure that my body was built with enough resistance to both fire and ice to continue as a hero-in-training.”
“Your brother’s body wasn’t?” Recovery Girl asked.
“Touya was born with a fire quirk. A good one. He was actually able to inflict damage on Endeavor in training.” Shouto still couldn’t. Not beyond that sad excuse for a sunburn he’d given Endeavor yesterday. “His body was more suited to an ice quirk, though, so he burned himself every time he used his fire.”
Nezu nodded, looking at his laptop. “Does Touya still live with you?”
“What? No, he’s dead.”
Nezu looked up.
Had that been too vague? Shouto clarified. “Years ago in a forest fire. I barely remember him.”
“Ah.” Nezu looked relieved. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Shouto’s phone buzzed, and he flinched. Looked over at where it still lay face-down on the bed.
Deku?
“You can check it if you need to,” Nezu said.
No. Focus. He couldn’t risk anyone looking over his shoulder. “I don’t,” he said.
“Can you tell us about your most recent training session?”
He did, leaving out Reflection’s name and instead referring to him as “Endeavor’s sidekick.” He didn’t want to bring Reflection into an official report until he’d had a chance to clear things up with him. Or with Deku, since the green-haired boy was apparently his spokesperson.
Recovery Girl’s desk creaked as Aizawa shifted. Shouto had seen the signs in his father before—shifting feet, tightly folded arms, narrowed eyes—and understood them to mean that Aizawa was agitated. The cauterization had seemed to upset him before, so when Shouto retold the story, he dumbed it down as much as he could.
“I noticed your lip is a little swollen,” Recovery Girl said. “Is that from training or something else?”
“Oh.” He ran his tongue over the cut on the inside of his bottom lip, felt the ridge there. “That doesn’t count. I made him angry on purpose.”
“On purpose, dear?”
He knew, sort of, why he’d gone too far last night. Why he’d said that quip about Endeavor throwing boiling water on him as training. He’d known that, at some point, he was going to face punishment for running away during the morning’s training session. Being able to manipulate Endeavor into dealing out that punishment on Shouto’s time instead of his own…
It had been a rush. A small, barely-there one. But when Shouto felt so little daily, those small moments of control—over his body, his quirk, his father—were addicting.
“I don’t have a lot of entertainment,” Shouto said.
Recovery Girl pursed her lips. Shouto wondered if he’d said the wrong thing.
Nezu carried on. “Excluding the training, do you feel safe at home?”
Shouto blanked.
Safe?
“I’m not sure if I…” He blinked, trying to clear the fog in his brain. “I’m having trouble interpreting the question in a way I can answer it. Could you be more specific?”
“Of course. Let me reword. Do you feel as though you’re in danger even when training isn’t going on?”
That made a little more sense, but he still wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. “I don’t have many experiences outside of UA to compare to. I… um, I’ve taken precautions, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“What kind of precautions?”
“I know his schedule and I don’t leave my room when he’s home. I’ve linked the front door sensor to my laptop to alert me when he comes in.”
“You don’t leave your room? What do you do for food and water?”
“I usually keep enough snacks and water in my room so I don’t have to leave it on days when he’s off work. My sister leaves things in the fridge for me, too, so I can just wait until after midnight to eat if I need to.”
“You’re answering all these questions rather calmly,” Nezu said.
Ah—that was what Shouto had been waiting for. That poorly-masked are you sure you’re not lying? He’d gotten it from sidekicks and private tutors when he was younger. “Is that abnormal?”
“Not necessarily,” said Nezu. “I just get the sense that you’re a bit detached from your answers.”
“Maybe,” Shouto said. “I don’t care all that much about what happens to me.”
“Oh? Do you have a different reason for being so forthcoming, then?”
“I don’t like him. He abused my mother until she had a mental break, and my sister is constantly having to tiptoe around him. I don’t think a person like him deserves to have a family, much less be a respected hero. I want to—” Shouto cut himself off. What had he been about to say? That he wanted to see Endeavor fail? Wanted to see him humiliated and afraid and sorry, like Shouto felt all the time? “I don’t want him around.”
Aizawa cleared his throat, and the room turned to him. “Let’s take a break,” he said, and it wasn’t until Aizawa spoke that sentence that Shouto realized he’d started breathing hard again.
Shouto took his almost-empty water bottle and his phone outside the nurse’s office. Once he was standing in the hallway, he checked his notifications. The green-haired boy had messaged him back.
His stomach turned. He opened the app.
Unknown:
That was fast! Reflection said you were kind of dense, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
But yeah, hi! Deku here. Can I call you Shiyo?
Shouto swallowed. He was careful in his response, proofreading it several times before pressing send.
Shouto:
Tell me why there’s a man in the hospital who looks like Reflection.
Deku texted back immediately.
Unknown:
Oh shit did that fucker wake up? No one ever tells me anything :0
Shouto:
He did. Was he not supposed to?
Unknown:
Haha no he was definitely supposed to die. Fuck that guy in the hospital honestly, I felt gross just watching Dabi wear his face around.
Shouto:
Dabi?
Unknown:
Yeah. Dabi=Reflection :)
Dabi. So that was the real name of the man who’d been driving him to school every day. Was it strange that Deku was being so forthcoming with this information? Did Deku think giving it would make Shouto trust him?
Shouto:
You and Dabi were behind the villain attack that put that kindergartener’s father in the hospital? And Dabi stole his identity/quirk so he could work under Endeavor?
Unknown:
Pretty much! :P
Shouto:
Why are you telling me all this? What does Dabi have against Endeavor?
Unknown:
He’ll tell you when you need to know. All you need to know now is that he doesn’t like the guy.
Shouto ran his fingers through his hair, frustrated. Deku was toying with him.
Shouto:
Let me talk to Dabi.
Unknown:
He doesn’t think he should talk to you. I’ve been assigned to communicate with you in his place unless you need him for something related to Endeavor.
Anything I can do to help? :)
Shouto thought.
Shouto:
The UA teachers know.
Unknown:
Good. You deserve to have people fighting for you.
The words jolted him, made him feel like Deku’s strange translucent eyes were there, seeing him, seeing everything. It made him uncomfortable, but at the same time, he didn’t want to disengage.
Shouto:
I don’t know what to do next. I think it’ll be a while before any legal action occurs, if it does at all.
Unknown:
How is it at home?
Shouto:
Normal. Bad.
Unknown:
Do you have friends you can stay with if things get worse?
Shouto:
No.
“Todoroki.”
Shouto looked up to see Aizawa coming out of the nurse’s office. “Sensei.”
He nodded at Shouto’s phone. “Is everything all right there?”
Shouto’s phone buzzed again, twice. He glanced down.
Unknown:
Consider me a friend.
OH! Nearly forgot. I have something I need to give ya .w.
“Um,” Shouto said. He struggled to tear his attention away from the conversation on his phone. “I think… yes. Bit of a family emergency.” He nodded back toward the nurse’s office. “Unrelated.”
Aizawa’s eyes narrowed.
Fuck. “My sister saw… something. We think the sidekick that’s been driving me to school might be a villain. It’s being handled, though.”
“Hm. Is this the same sidekick responsible for that cauterization?”
Shouto exhaled. He didn’t understand why Aizawa was so hung up on the cauterization. “Yes.”
“You didn’t give us their name earlier. Why are you protecting them?”
“I’m not. I just don’t want to complicate things. The police should be launching their own investigation related to a different incident soon, so it won’t matter if he did anything to me.”
“It absolutely does matter,” Aizawa said. “If he thinks he can—”
“I don’t think it would be wise to implicate him as an antagonist,” Shouto said. He was spewing bullshit, but it would be inconvenient to have Pro Heroes nipping at Reflection’s tail while Shouto was trying to communicate with him. Something told him that Reflection—no. Dabi—could help Shouto take down Endeavor in a way that his teachers at UA never could.
The thought sent a shiver of… something down Shouto’s spine. Something he wanted to grab, to hold, to wrangle like a live snake.
Aizawa raised an eyebrow, waiting for Shouto to continue.
He did. “Not if you want Endeavor to face any sort of repercussions. Someone tried that before. A visitor at Endeavor’s agency who saw a training session with a sidekick get out of hand. The case didn’t even make it to court before everything was pinned on her instead of Endeavor.”
“Other people have submitted reports?”
“Yes,” Shouto said. “Maybe Endeavor has people inside Child Protective Services. I don’t know. Nothing ever happens.”
“Something will,” Aizawa said, eyes sharp. “I’ll make sure of that.”
“Okay,” Shouto said.
Aizawa searched Shouto’s face. “You don’t believe me.”
“I said okay.”
Aizawa held Shouto’s gaze for another moment before his eyes dropped some of their edge. He took a step back, reached out for the door to the nurse’s office. “I came out here to ask you if you want to return to class today. Recovery Girl’s quirk uses a person’s own strength to heal them, so you’ll be tired if you decide you want her to heal you. I don’t know how worn out you already are from your attack.”
Shouto felt heat creeping up his neck. He quickly regulated his temperature so Aizawa wouldn’t notice a blush. “I’m fine now. Those—it’s not a regular occurrence. It won’t happen again.”
Aizawa’s hand dropped from the door handle. “Did something specific trigger it? I want to avoid that in the future if I can.”
Shouto thought. It all seemed so dumb now. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me if you think of something. Do you feel safe going home tonight or do you need somewhere else to stay?”
Another question he hadn’t expected. Did he really have the option to just… not go home? That seemed like it would have a lot of repercussions. “I’ll be fine tonight.”
“Does your father check your school email?”
Shouto shook his head.
“Check it tonight, please. I’m sending you some resources.” Aizawa nodded at Shouto’s phone as he opened the door to the nurse’s office. “When you’re done there, come back in so we can finish up. It won’t take much longer.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ll tell Nem—Midnight to get off your bed.” Aizawa peered into the room, sighing. “She means well.”
###
When Shouto walked out of school at the end of the day, it was with a mostly-uncolored face and side. Recovery Girl had sped up the healing process by about a week, so most of his bruising was yellow now instead of blue and purple. The cauterization site hurt significantly less, but it had been itching so much during class that he almost regretted having her heal it.
Pain, he could do. Itching was a hard no. He’d been distracted through his classes and he was distracted now, trying to walk normally without giving into the temptation to stop and just… give his leg a nice whack… and maybe that was what kept him from noticing Deku waiting with a patient smile just outside UA’s front gate.
Shouto nearly crashed into him, stopping barely a meter away from the boy. They stared at each other for a few moments, still as students streamed from the gates on either side of them.
Deku waved.
Shouto looked him over, struck by the immediate wrongness of being so close to a villain, and one he’d been constantly re-imaging in his mind since Shouto last saw him. He was definitely shorter than Shouto remembered. And had Deku’s smile always been that… bright?
Also… Jesus fucking Christ.
Deku’s t-shirt read VILLAIN in obnoxious green lettering.
It took Shouto more than a couple seconds to tear his gaze from the shirt and speak. “You don’t… go here.”
“But you totally do,” Deku said, lowering his hand but not his smile. “I’m gonna walk you to the station, ’kay?”
Shouto stared. “No.”
Deku laughed. “Yeah.”
A familiar voice called from inside the gates. “Hey, Shouto! Wait up a second, bro.”
Shouto turned. Never in his life had he thought he would be glad to see Kirishima approaching him at a light jog, but today was a day for a lot of firsts, apparently.
Kirishima caught up to Shouto, slowed to a halt. “Sorry, the given-name thing sounded better in my head. Is it okay if I call you Shouto? You can call me Eijirou.”
Deku. Was. Right there. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Cool! I just wanted to check if… I mean, the way your team won today was pretty manly, but I’m not gonna lie. That gauntlet looked like it hurt. Did you get healed up okay?”
Stupid question. What had Kirishima planned on doing if Shouto said he hadn’t been healed up? Wasn’t like Kirishima had a healing power. “I did.”
“Okay, good. You didn’t say much walking away and I was worried that—oh, hey.” Kirishima finally noticed Deku. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were already talking to someone. Is this your friend?”
Shouto was fully prepared to say no, definitely not, but Deku stuck out his hand. “Hi! Yeah, I’m Shouto’s friend. Deku. It’s Kirishima, right?”
Shouto didn’t know whether to be more alarmed that Deku had switched to using “Shouto” without missing a beat or the fact that Deku knew who Kirishima was.
Also, he’d been banking on Kirishima scaring Deku away. It looked like the opposite was happening. Fuck.
“Uh, yeah!” Shouto held his breath as Kirishima shook Deku’s hand, smiling. “How’d you know?”
“He talks about you,” Deku said.
Kirishima glanced at Shouto. Shouto had nothing to offer—he had definitely never talked about Kirishima, to Deku or anyone else.
“You placed second in the entrance exam, right? What’s your quirk?” Deku touched Kirishima’s arm, narrowing his eyes as he looked at it. “Wait, no—let me guess. Something skin-related?”
The entrance exam results were supposed to be confidential.
Kirishima’s red eyes widened. “You can tell?”
“Yeah, I mean, you have a couple lines right there that almost look like stretch marks.” Deku pointed them out. Kirishima’s face tinged pink. “Beyond that, I’m not really sure. Unless—well, your knuckles look kinda dry. I’ll hazard a guess. Is it hardening?”
“Woah!” Kirishima said, laughing. “Yeah, it is. You’re, like, really smart.”
Deku waved his hands, and the motion and expression was so realistic that Shouto believed for a moment that Deku was actually embarrassed. “No, I’m really not! I just like quirks.”
“That’s pretty manly that you can pick all that up from just looking, though.”
Deku gave a sheepish smile. “You think?”
Shouto took a step back. This couldn’t be safe. Having Deku this close to UA while the gates were open—even if the alarm would sound were Deku to take a step inside—couldn’t be safe.
“Oh, sorry, Shouto,” Deku said, latching onto Shouto’s sleeve. Shouto stiffened. “You had a long day, huh? We should get going. Really good to meet you, Kirishima.”
“Yeah, you too, man! See you tomorrow, Shouto.”
“Yeah,” Shouto choked out.
They started walking. Deku didn’t let go of Shouto’s sleeve until they couldn’t see UA’s front gate anymore.
“Oh shit,” Deku said in a muffled voice, and Shouto turned to see him with both hands covering his mouth. “I’ve been—I called you the wrong name when I messaged you earlier, didn’t I? I’m so sorry!”
Shouto stared at Deku. Why was he the embarrassed one? “You can just call me Todoroki.”
“We’re friends, though.” He lowered his hands, dragging them down his face. “Like, you call me Deku, right?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever addressed you by name.”
“Oof. So, um, he/him pronouns, right? I probably should’ve figured that out by your uniform when I first saw you, but like… some girls like to wear boys’ clothing? I wear girl clothes sometimes. You probably didn’t want to know that. I don’t know, I kind of think clothes are gender neutral, though. He/him?”
Shouto head swirled with unprocessed words. Was he supposed to be absorbing all the information Deku was giving him right now? “Uh, yeah.”
“Neato. Y’know, let me change your name in my phone while I’m thinking about it.” Deku pulled his phone from his pocket. He had an All Might phone case. “What’s my name in your phone, Shouto?”
“Um.” Shouto hadn’t had a chance to get any questions in yet. And he had them, he just… Deku was frightening in a way he hadn’t encountered before. With his facial expressions and hand gestures and emotive voice that Shouto knew Deku had to be faking, because holy fuck, you couldn’t attempt to burn someone alive and still feel things, but Deku was doing such a good job of blending in. He must have some sort of intelligence quirk that allowed him to analyze the people around him and adjust his behavior accordingly. “‘Unknown.’”
“Really? Gimme your phone.”
Shouto obeyed.
“Nice case,” Deku said as he took it. He tapped the screen on. “Sturdy. What’s your password? Is it your birthday?”
“Yes.”
Deku tapped in a number. The phone opened. Deku played with it for a bit, then handed it back to Shouto with the messaging app open. “Unknown” had been changed to “Ya Boi Deku.”
Shouto didn’t get it, but he put his phone back in his pocket without saying anything. At least they were finally coming up on the subway station. The walk was technically a short one, but it had never felt so long.
“Oh, before I forget.” Deku dug into the pocket of his shorts and brought out a flash drive. Set it in Shouto’s palm. “L’il present. Merry Christmas.”
Shouto turned it around in his hands gently, half expecting it to detonate. “What’s on it?”
“Some recordings. Stuff that might help you out. Dabi and I… I guess you don’t need to know everything, but trust me, there was a bunch of epic spy shit going down while he was with your dad’s agency.” Deku stopped at the top of the subway stairwell. Smiled. “I’ll see you again really soon, okay, Shouto? So don’t die or anything like that.”
Wait. No. Shouto had questions. “Okay.”
He almost expected Deku to disappear into thin air. Or maybe get swept up and off by that mysterious man on the motorcycle from the bridge incident.
Instead, Deku just… walked away. Shouto stood with one foot on the first step of the stairwell and watched Deku until he rounded a corner, out of sight.
Like a normal fucking person.
Fuck.
Notes:
Story time! (TW for discussion of su*cide, medical trauma, and mental hospitals)
A couple years ago I was in the hospital because I scared myself with a few aborted su*cide attempts. It was an underfunded hospital and it sucked ass. Like, the psychiatrist advised I just stop testosterone because that was totally what was giving me the Big Sad, not the fact that I had multiple mental illnesses, was on anxiety medication that didn't work for me, and was dealing with rejection from my family and my best friend of 9 years after coming out as trans. Fuck you, Linda.
Anyway, after explaining my life story to multiple strangers (most of whom probably didn't need to know and just wanted to have a nice "I told a college freshman to chill out and not kill himself today" under their belt), I had to sit in front of this fuckin panel of doctors (like 5 people) and tell them why I wanted to die. I have severe social anxiety and it SUCKED. So that's why you're probably gonna see a lot of the "forced to tell your life story to complete fucking strangers" trope in my fiction. Because *trauma* :D
Note: I'm not cured or anything now, but I'm not su*cidal anymore, so that's nice. I did not stop testosterone. I got top surgery. Life is better sans tits. Fuck you, Linda.
-Max
Chapter 9: Shouto Fails to Appreciate a Perfectly Good Meme
Summary:
Shouto doesn't like charity banquets, especially when there's a chance someone from school will see him in a dress. Special guest: Endeavor's deodorant. Overworked and underappreciated.
Notes:
CW: dysphoria (forced to wear dress for an event), panic attack(s), the usual misgendering but it kinda hits harder, typical emotional abuse from Endeavor, brief mentions of past sexual harassment
Btw, check out some art I did for Chapter 8 (Deku giving Shouto the flash drive) at the link! I'm pretty new to digital art still but I love drawing Deku so here ya go, have a sketch
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Art from last chapter (by me): Deku!
Shouto wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten here. Here being a charity banquet where the room was too chilly and he wasn’t allowed to consume the alcohol. Here being seated at a table sandwiched between a hulking, sweaty Endeavor and an already-tipsy Fuyumi. Here being wearing a floor-length dress and a face of makeup.
When he’d arrived at home earlier in the afternoon, he’d expected to be bombarded by his sister and the police about Reflection for an hour or two before he had time to head to his room and explore the contents of the flash drive Deku had given him. Instead, the afternoon hours had been a whirl of dresses laid out on the living room couches, Endeavor yelling something about not being able to find a tie that matched with his suit, and Fuyumi’s “Shiyo, I told you about this a month ago, yesterday, and this morning,” which was… so much worse than dealing with police, honestly.
If Fuyumi had noticed that his bruises were well on their way to healing when she redid his makeup—certainly she did notice the obvious difference from this morning, unless she was just too stressed about Shouto’s threats to burn his entire wardrobe to pay any attention—she said nothing.
They’d made a deal, finally—one that ended with Shouto picking a dress at random, swearing under his breath as he put it on. He’d hidden the flash drive in his room, reluctantly allowed Fuyumi to confiscate his phone, and rode in the backseat of a company-provided limousine to go to the fucking banquet.
He managed to get through the first fifteen minutes of the banquet by hiding behind his father’s frame, fiddling with his hair clip, and dissociating. Inevitably, though, the venue grew more crowded. Two of the three empty seats at the Todorokis’ table were taken by a Pro Hero couple Shouto had seen somewhere once or twice before. He didn’t go through the trouble of memorizing their names now, either.
“I can’t believe how beautiful and strong your youngest daughter is becoming,” the woman told Endeavor. “You look stunning in that dress, Shiyo.”
Shouto had become very interested in the swan pattern on the tablecloth. Fuyumi kicked his shin, and he looked up. “Thank you.”
“That red eyeshadow is pretty, too. Did you have your makeup done professionally?”
Shouto looked up at the chandelier—made of hand-blown glass from Venice, an event organizer had bragged—dangling high above him. He was about to catapult out of his fucking body.
“I did it,” Fuyumi supplied. “I couldn’t get any lipstick on her, but I’m quite proud of that eyeshadow.”
The woman patted Fuyumi’s hand. “You should be! It looks divine.”
What had Fuyumi promised him in exchange for his presence at this banquet? To talk to Endeavor about reducing his training from twice a week to once a week? And homemade soba whenever he wanted for a month? Yeah, he should’ve negotiated for more, because this was not fucking worth it.
Shouto saw the event organizers making their way around the nearby tables, thanking guests for attending and for their donations to… what was it this time, rehabilitation centers for child villains? (Definitely not a cause Endeavor was passionate about, so it must have been his agency that donated in his place)—cooing over pearls and baby bumps and dolled-up children, offering a tour of the historical building and the gardens outside if they so desired at any time tonight.
Fuyumi elbowed him. “Stop staring.”
Endeavor was occupied fumbling through a conversation with the man from the hero couple about new courses at UA. Apparently, they had a daughter who attended. Shouto took the chance to hiss back to Fuyumi, “I’m suffering.”
“It’s not that bad,” she whispered. “Talk to this nice hero couple! They have a daughter about your age at the same school who’s late because of a dance lesson, but she’ll be here soon. You can talk to her!”
He did not want to talk to a girl his age. Especially not one who went to his school. The chances of someone recognizing him weren’t exactly high, but they were still there. “Why couldn’t I be late because of a dance lesson?”
“You don’t take dance lessons.”
“I doubt she does, either. Probably had detention.”
“Shiyo!”
Shouto heard his confiscated phone go off in Fuyumi’s purse, and his stomach jolted. Was that Deku? He reached over Fuyumi for the purse she’d set in the empty seat, but it was too far away. “Fuyumi, give me my phone from your purse.”
“Absolutely not,” Fuyumi said. “Being on your phone at a banquet is rude. Sit up.”
“This wasn’t part of the deal. Please give me my phone.”
“I will not.”
“You two,” said Endeavor, face stormy. No wonder—he was sweating buckets. “Stop bickering.”
“Old man, you look like someone dumped a gallon of water over you,” Shouto said. “Why don’t you turn your beard off if it’s overheating you so much?”
Fury danced across Endeavor’s face. In this atmosphere, the resulting rush was more pleasant than it was terrifying—Endeavor couldn’t do anything, and it wasn’t like he was good enough with words to form a stinging comeback. “It’s not,” he growled. “I don’t get overheated.”
“Not sure your deodorant would agree.”
“Shut up,” Fuyumi hissed at Shouto. She looked alarmed.
A waiter came around to fill their champagne glasses, so they stopped talking for a moment. The moment the waiter turned his back to attend to another table, Shouto picked up Fuyumi’s newly filled glass, looked her in the eyes, and downed it.
Fuyumi looked devastated.
“Phone,” he said.
“No.”
“You’re not my real mom.”
Fuyumi didn’t have time to answer. The woman hero sitting across from them spoke. “Oh, she’s here!” She stood and waved at someone wandering a few tables away. “Momo, dear!”
Momo?
Shouto lifted in his seat a little so he could see, then immediately dropped back down.
Fuck.
It was definitely that Momo—the one he’d won the battle trial with, the one who’d watched him kick Bakugou across the room. If he’d recognized her parents earlier, maybe he could’ve attempted an escape with a higher probability of success. If the sideways glances she gave him in class were any indicator, she seemed to be the only one out of the class who suspected him. If she saw him in a dress—
Well. He could still try to escape.
Shouto pushed his seat back. “I’m going to the bathr—”
“Nope,” Fuyumi said, yanking his seat back forward with her foot.
Momo was getting dangerously close, her shimmering red dress fluttering at her feet. Would she be taller than Shouto in those heels? That didn’t matter. Shouto hissed at Fuyumi. “I know her.”
“Good! Then you can talk.”
“No—” Oh god, what if she said something? He tried again. “We don’t get along.”
“Don’t be immature. Do you think Dad gets along with anyone here? Just tell her she looks nice.”
Shouto was used to feeling publicly humiliated. He’d sat through angry lectures directed at him in front of crowds of sidekicks or receptionists. He’d listened to grown women compare his body to Endeavor’s while Shouto showered in the agency locker rooms. He knew how to dissociate just enough so he could get through, for example, Recovery Girl taking pictures of his bruises for the report they were compiling before she healed them.
Why was this different?
Because it would take away something he’d found that he actually liked, something he could maybe keep, the one thing that was his?
At least when he met Momo’s eyes, he didn’t have to force the deadness into his expression.
Watching as she realized held that same feeling as watching old Japanese horror movies with Touya and Natsuo, back before Rei got admitted to the hospital. But there was no Touya to tease him about his fear of the clunky effects, no Natsuo to cover his eyes.
Just Momo’s smile melting, eyes flickering in confusion, before the smile came back. Fake, wrong. Undead.
He looked away.
“Momo, I’m not sure if you two have met, but this is Todoroki Shiyo,” said the woman hero. “She’s in the hero course at UA, too.”
“Yes, we h…have,” Momo said, voice faltering. “We’ve met. Hello.”
He copied Fuyumi’s tone of voice as best he could, hoping it would be enough to excuse his lack of eye contact. “You look nice.”
“Thank—thanks,” Momo said. “Um, so do—”
“Can I go now?” he asked Fuyumi, loud enough for the others at the table to hear.
Fuyumi nodded numbly.
He headed for the bathrooms. Then he remembered that those were fucking gendered, too, so he pushed past the greeters at the door, past the clouds of mosquitos around the yellow patio lights, and asked for a taxi.
He knew, even as he climbed into the taxi and gave directions, that this was a bad decision. One he would pay for.
That was fine.
He couldn’t stay here.
As soon as he reached home and closed the front door behind him, he started taking off his dress. Dropped it on the kitchen table. Walked in his underwear to his room, tearing the barrette from his hair, already scrubbing eyeliner away with his palms, eyes tearing involuntarily when he rubbed mascara into his eyes.
Keeping the lights off in his bathroom, Shouto turned on the shower. He climbed in while it was still cold, still in his underwear. He scrubbed his face until it hurt. He didn’t know when he’d started making noises—low tch sounds, whispered swears, a litany of shut up shut up shut up—but now there was fucking soap in his mouth, and fuck, fuck…
He got out of the shower. Toweled off and changed into dry clothes.
Deep breaths, Shouto.
He still had homework to do.
Shouto knew that it was best not to hide from Endeavor when he’d done something stupid, so he took his backpack and laptop to the kitchen table to finish his homework. He didn’t take out the flash drive yet. Whatever was on it, it probably wouldn’t be good if Endeavor walked in and saw.
It was nearly two hours before the front door unlocked. Shouto didn’t move, but he watched the entryway to the kitchen.
Fuyumi came in first. She set her purse heavily on the table, took out Shouto’s phone, and shoved it across the table at him.
“There, asshole,” she said, voice choked.
Her eyes glowered pink and wet. A couple light lines ran through her foundation from her eyes to her chin.
Alarm shot through Shouto, and he jolted up from his seat. “What happened?”
Fuyumi glared at him. “I can’t believe you.”
She moved past Shouto and out of the kitchen. Shouto stayed standing, listening to the sounds of Fuyumi moving through the house until he heard her bedroom door closing.
His stomach sank as he realized, and he felt like the worst, most selfish human being on the planet.
Not what happened. Who.
Shouto had happened.
Shouto’s laptop pinged as it registered Endeavor’s cell phone moving through the front door. He probably would’ve had time to shut his laptop and run to his room if he’d wanted to. And he did want to. But he also knew that he’d perform poorly in school tomorrow if he was waiting for the repercussions he knew would be coming at the end of the day. He should get it over with now.
Endeavor came into the kitchen, the top two buttons of his shirt undone, tie bunched in his fist. He stopped when he saw Shouto.
“Tomorrow,” Endeavor said, “after school. Come straight to the agency. You haven’t shown any improvement in a while, so we’ll be switching to the summer schedule for training.”
So four or five times a week now. More than double what they’d been doing. “Let’s just do it now.”
“I know what you’re doing, Shiyo.”
A wave of nausea passed over him.
Of course. Of course he did.
“Don’t think you can ever surpass me by taking the easy way out,” Endeavor said. “You will not. Much less All Might. I let you attend UA because you seem to think those teachers have something to offer you, but I won’t hesitate to pull you out if they start interfering with our private training.”
That didn’t make it entirely clear if Endeavor knew about the report his teachers were compiling—had they submitted it already?—but there was no way to ask Endeavor about it without giving himself away.
“Do you understand?” Endeavor asked.
Shouto nodded.
“Good. Go to bed.”
He picked up his things and headed back, checking his phone on the way. His hands were shaking.
The notification he’d heard from the banquet had been Deku. It was a doctored gif of All Might smashing an entire train like an aluminum can to save a Shirtless Hawks body pillow from being run over.
Deku’s caption:
Be the All Might to my Hawks body pillow? ;P
###
Shouto was late to school the next day.
He had no reason to be. Physically, he felt normal. Fine, even. Even with last night’s feverish agonizing that something awful had happened between Fuyumi and Endeavor at the banquet (that he’d chosen to leave her helpless at), he’d had his five hours of sleep. But for some reason when his alarm went off in the morning, he’d rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling for a lot longer than he usually did.
When he did get up, he’d moved slowly. Brushed his teeth while sitting on the bathroom floor, then just… held the toothpaste in his mouth, waiting until he had enough mental energy to stand and look at himself in the mirror again. He picked lint off his socks for a couple minutes before tugging them on.
God, his bed had never seemed so inviting.
He managed to avoid Fuyumi on his way out. He’d already missed the train he usually took, so he let himself walk slower, taking a train than ran ten minutes later and took a more roundabout route, shuttling kids who attended the nearby less-prestigious schools. He got a few stares—glares? He couldn’t tell—from kids wearing different uniforms.
When Shouto arrived, the UA gates were closed. He knew the procedure for late students—scan your ID, type in your PIN, and wait for a staff member to come open the gate for you—but the longer he stared at the scanner, the more anxious he felt.
He just… he didn’t want to go in there today. He had to, of course, or administration would call home, but the thought of a teacher storming out to open the gate, pissy over having to stop what they were doing and walk all that way for one student, and then Shouto going on to interrupt Aizawa’s class and get scolded in front of 1-A for his tardiness…
It conjured memories. A red-eyed, glaring Fuyumi. Endeavor lecturing him on his thoughtlessness in front of people he barely knew. Because Shouto was selfish and careless and now lazy, apparently…
He sat down against the wall.
Momo would be inside, too. He couldn’t remember who she hung around with, but she was the type to have friends, right? He’d like to think that she’d already dismissed last night as a fever dream, but who was he kidding? It was possible that the entire class now knew what he was. That he’d be greeted with a slick “Hey, Shiyo,” by Kaminari or Mina or Bakugou upon entering the classroom.
Shouto pulled his knees up to his chest, setting his elbows on them as he covered his ears and closed his eyes. He just… he needed to block things out for a couple minutes. He’d be fine after that. Swipe his ID, draw his expression as flat as the pavement, dissociate as needed. Just a couple minutes.
Someone touched his shoulder.
Shouto yanked his hands from his ears, working quickly to school his expression. How had Endeavor found him here, he was supposed to be at work—
His eyes met Midnight’s.
Not Endeavor’s.
Not Endeavor.
Unused adrenaline fizzled out in his fingertips and in the skin on his throat.
Midnight took her hand away, looking startled. “Didn’t mean to spook you, Jellybean. Everything okay?”
He glanced back at the gate as he pushed himself to his feet. It was still closed. Where had she come from? “Uh, yeah. Just…” His throat ran dry. He looked at the scanner.
Midnight raised her eyebrows. “You’re late?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You know the procedure, right?”
“I know it,” he said.
“Well… I’m late, too. Darn cat got out.” Midnight walked over to the scanner and swiped her ID. Typed in her PIN. “Wanna go in together?”
He couldn’t help feeling relieved. “Okay.”
They waited for a staff member to arrive and open the gate. Shouto picked up his backpack and put it over his shoulder.
“How about I walk you to class?” Midnight asked.
“Okay,” he said. He did not deserve this. “Um… thanks.”
“Sure thing, Baby Bear.”
Cementoss arrived to let them in. Shouto let Midnight do the apologizing, the laughing through her excuses—she talked so easy, so natural. And then she walked with him to homeroom, where she opened the door, gently pushed Shouto in, and mouthed sorry! to Aizawa, like it was her fault Shouto was late.
Aizawa just nodded for Shouto to sit down.
He managed to get to his seat without making eye contact with Momo. Aizawa was at the tail end of a spiel about an upcoming disaster simulation, urging the students to brush up on last week’s disaster relief unit before Friday.
When Aizawa finished talking, he looked at the clock. “Okay, you guys have a few minutes before homeroom is over. I don’t care what you do. Don’t wake me up.”
Classroom chitchat started up immediately. Normally Shouto would just tune it out, but today, the noise made him tense. It came from too many angles, and any one of them could be talking about him, could start talking to him—
“Todoroki?”
Of course. Momo. He looked at her, keeping his face neutral, bored.
“Um.” Momo was already blushing. She pointed to her face. “You have some… glitter.”
He blinked at her. “What?”
“Leftover from—no, it’s over your eye. Uh, here, lean forward and I can get it.”
He shifted. Momo’s thumb brushed over his left eyebrow a couple times. Over his scar.
She came away with a piece of red sparkle on her thumb, showing it to him. “See?”
He stared at it. That would’ve been annoying to explain away if someone else had seen it on his face and asked where it came from. “I didn’t… feel it there,” he said. “I have reduced sensation on the left side of my face.”
“It’s not abnormal to miss some when you wash it off.” Momo wiped her finger on her skirt, glancing around before she leaned in and lowered her voice. “Can we—?”
“Todoroki!”
Kaminari’s voice was loud, jarring. Momo quickly looked away, moving to shuffle through her binder.
“Hey, Todoroki,” Kaminari repeated, leaning back in his seat. “Come with us to the arcade later?”
Shouto had an excuse on the tip of his tongue. Then he remembered that he had training scheduled for after school and that he really, really did not want to go to it.
“Okay,” he said.
Kaminari’s eyes widened. “Wait, really?”
“Yes.” Why was he acting surprised? Unless—shit. “Oh. Were you joking?”
“Huh? No, dude, we’re going. I’m just… you usually say no.”
Kirishima approached from the other side of the room. “What’s going on?”
“Todoroki said he wants to go today,” Kaminari said. He sounded dazed.
“No way!” Kirishima turned to Shouto, giving a shark-toothed grin. “Really? I’m so glad we get to finally hang out, man, I’ve been wanting to ask you about a bunch of stuff since I met you.”
“Ohhhh, Shouto,” Ashido cooed. “You’re so manly.”
Kirishima turned to face her, face tinting red. “I just admire him, okay? Don’t you? He’s super strong!”
Shouto pulled out his phone, tuning them out. He’d gotten his homework done last night—barely—but he hadn’t had a chance to check his school email like Aizawa had told him to. He opened his account to see two emails from Aizawa, sent at 1:17 a.m. last night.
Subject: Resources
Todoroki,
Links.
-Aizawa
Exercise-safe binder
Mental health crisis/suicide hotline (24/7)
(Trans-specific) suicide hotline
Therapists nearby who specialize in lgbtq+/abused youth
Legal services
Medical services
Including my personal phone number and address here for emergencies. Don’t give these out. Buy the goddamn binder and use the fucking hotline if you need it.
And the second email, sent two minutes later:
Subject: Resources
Meant to edit out the swears in that last email before sending. Please ignore. Goodnight.
Shouto looked up carefully. He needn’t have worried—Aizawa was sound asleep, head on his desk. His swamp of black hair had been pushed forward out of his sleeping bag, smothering his face like wet seaweed. Shouto wondered if he could breathe like that.
Notes:
Me irl: "Aizawa is absolutely my favorite character"
Me in my fiction: "Aizawa was fucking hideous and that's the only description you'll ever get out of me >:( "
Chapter 10: Shouto Double-Dips His Nachos (Are Nachos a Thing in Japan? Let's Just Assume They Are. This is a Fanfic, Not an Anthropology Lesson)
Summary:
Shouto heads to an arcade with Kirishima, Ashido, and Kaminari. Dare I say... fluff?
Notes:
CW: nothing too intense this chapter, just some fumbling over wording about trans stuff and the usual Shouto anxiety/sensory overload
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The after-school group for the arcade ended up being a smaller than anticipated: Kirishima, Kaminari, Ashido, and Shouto. Bakugou had declined (thank fuck, Shouto didn’t think he could deal with that much noise today) to study for a test. Sero had detention.
“You don’t need to study, Todoroki?” Ashido asked. After Shouto, she was the first one of the group to gather at the designated meeting spot near the school gate. “I guess you’re already ready for the test, huh.”
He was not, but studying would’ve been futile anyway. He could feel his brain doing that thing where it jumped from topic to topic like a fly trapped in a jar. Accounting for that, he’d already done the calculations. “I plan on studying at lunch tomorrow. Half an hour should be long enough for me to make at least a B.”
“Wow,” Ashido said. “That’s not, like, stressful, or…?”
Shouto hadn’t thought of it in those terms before. “I can’t focus at home.”
“Why not? Is it loud?”
Shouto shifted. This conversation was already going on for a little longer than he’d anticipated. Was the rest of the outing going to be this painful? “Sometimes.”
“Lunch is loud, too, you know.”
Yes. But lunch was safer. His brain wasn’t on high alert, wasn’t listening for footsteps, wasn’t constantly reading the room to know if it was okay to move, okay to think about something other than survival.
Shouto shrugged. “I suppose I’m lazy.”
Ashido laughed, and Shouto felt a little relief. He’d navigated the first conversation without raising suspicion. Maybe he could…
Shouto retraced his thoughts. Raising suspicion? Suspicion about what? Shouto being trans? His classmates had already shown their remarkable obtuseness when it came to that. About the scar on his face? He’d never had a problem telling people who asked. Endeavor was a dick and Shouto was more than okay with completely crushing his fans’ perceptions of their idol. So what was he worried about his classmates finding out?
Once Kirishima and Kaminari joined the group, they set out toward the subway. Shouto wasn’t used to walking in a group, and he found himself having to consciously slow down his gait every few steps. He swallowed his annoyance. This wasn’t worth getting worked up over.
“So, Shouto,” Kirishima said. He was showing his teeth again. “We can call you Shouto, right?”
“Guess so,” Shouto said.
“Nice! Can I ask you some questions?”
“Okay,” Shouto said.
“They’re a little personal, so you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
His stomach dropped. “Okay.”
Kirishima nodded, then leaned in until his shoulder was touching Shouto’s. “Is your hair different textures on either side, and if so, can I please feel it?”
Oh. Was that all? Shouto could tolerate a little touching if it meant less talking. “Sure.”
“It’s different?”
“A little.”
“I can touch it?”
“Yes.”
Shouto came to a stop and waited. The others clustered around him.
“Hey, I’m the one who raised the question at lunch, right?” said Kaminari. “I should get to touch it first.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t ask,” Kirishima said. “I asked.”
“You guys are so gay,” Ashido said. She reached up and buried both her hands in Shouto’s hair, one on each side. The onslaught of skin contact sent an uncomfortable pang of panic through Shouto’s chest. “Look, it’s not that big of a d—holy Moses, Shouto, why is your left side crunchy?”
Kirishima went around behind Shouto. He was less handsy, using just the tips of his fingers. “Huh. But your right side is really soft, Shouto.”
Shouto felt a blush creeping up his neck.
Kaminari just pet each side of Shouto’s head—downward strokes, a bit like petting a skittish dog—switching from left to right to left. “Dude,” he said, laughing.
“I bet you’re using the same products for two different hair types,” Kirishima said. Shouto could feel his breath brushing the back of his neck. “My hair gets really dry if I harden too often. What conditioner do you use?”
“I don’t—I don’t know,” Shouto said.
“Well, that’s your first problem. You gotta pay attention to what you’re doing to your hair, bro.”
Ashido scrunched her fingers, then brought her hands down and gave Shouto’s cheeks a firm couple pats. “Yeah, take care of yourself.”
Kaminari was still petting. He looked more confused than anything. “Is your dad’s hair all dry like that?”
“Don’t know.” Shouto’s voice came out weaker. He was going to get overwhelmed if this continued much longer.
“You don’t know what your dad’s hair feels like?” Kaminari asked, his tone skeptical.
“I bet you could Google the Todoroki family and it’d tell you, even if Shouto doesn’t know,” Ashido said. “Interviews get all up in that celebrity family business.”
A fresh, sharp wave of nausea hit Shouto. There it was again, that panic he kept telling himself he didn’t feel.
They’d see his old name.
They’d figure it out.
They’d...
“He doesn’t talk about that type of thing with anybody,” Shouto said, spitting the words out so fast he almost tripped over them. “You won’t find it on Google.”
“Oh,” Ashido said. She lowered her hands, and Shouto’s skin burned with the sudden loss of contact. Kirishima and Kaminari followed suit. “Well, that sucks.”
They started walking again. It took a while for Shouto’s heart rate to go back down to normal.
What was wrong with him? He didn’t care if they thought ill of him. Did he? Sure, getting misgendered and taunted with his deadname at school would suck, but he had his quirk. He was more powerful than any of them—even Kirishima had said he was strong.
He didn’t need allies. He could threaten. Make them feel fear. It had worked for Endeavor.
Shouto remembered upon entering the arcade that he had not, in fact, ever been to one of these before. He recalled passing by one on the way to see a movie once, remembered being fascinated by the lights and the noises, but that was back when his mother was still living with them. He’d never played anything more complicated than Candy Crush, either. Would that be an issue?
“Something wrong?” Kirishima asked.
Shouto hadn’t realized that he’d stopped in the doorway until he heard Kirishima’s voice. He stepped in, letting the door close behind him. “No. Just…” He surveyed the expanse of the darkened room, struggled for the right words. “Feels like a really weird hug.”
Kaminari quirked an eyebrow. “What does?”
“The combination of lights and sounds.”
Ashido giggled. “You don’t get out much, huh?”
Kaminari turned in a circle, looking up at the dark ceiling. Shouto looked up, too—it was littered with black spray-painted pipes and glow-in-the-dark graffiti. Kaminari stumbled. His hand went out to Kirishima’s arm for support. “He’s kinda not wrong, though. Arcades are trippy.”
Kirishima looked at Shouto. “What do you want to play, bro? Or do you want food first?”
“I think we should play for a while,” Ashido said. “I mean, unless you’re hungry, Shouto.”
Shouto shook his head. He wasn’t focusing very hard on the conversation, admittedly—he felt like he could drown in all this noise. Clattering and beeping and shooting and downward spirals of “game over” music.
“Okay,” said Ashido. “Well, I’ll see you guys in a bit. I gotta kick Denki’s ass at Super Table Flip.”
“Bruh-huh,” Kaminari whined. “You’re, like, unfairly good at flipping tables. I wanna do the drum game.”
Ashido headed off. “I’ll flip your table.”
“What does that mean?” Kaminari chased after her. “Mina, what does that mean?”
Shouto followed Kirishima around for several minutes. Loaded a game card, toggled a few controls, sat in front of a few screens. He didn’t play anything.
Shouto felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned in his seat to see Kirishima standing above him, a generous string of tickets draped across his shoulders like a feather boa.
“You good?” Kirishima asked.
Shouto raised his eyebrows.
“You just looked super spaced out,” Kirishima said. “Is it too loud in here or something? Wanna go to the food court instead? Or I can buy you some earplugs with my tickets. I think they have ’em.”
Shouto inhaled, but any words he had prepared stuck in the back of his throat, gagged by the complexity of the sounds surrounding him.
Fuck.
He knew that he got like this sometimes, but it was usually when people were yelling at him or asking questions that demanded longer answers than he had the energy to give. It had been a while since he’d gone quiet for no reason except that it was loud.
Outside of using his quirk, Shouto really couldn’t do anything, could he?
“Food court?” Kirishima prompted.
Shouto nodded.
They crossed into a space that was less inhabited, the lighting less chaotic. They sat adjacent each other at an empty table, the surface damp from being recently wiped off. Shouto ran his hand across the marbled surface. The knot in his chest unraveled a little.
“I’m gonna go get us some drinks,” Kirishima said. “What do you want?”
Shouto looked at Kirishima. Exhaled.
“Or, uh… here.” Kirishima unfolded a grease-smudged menu to the drinks page and pushed it in front of Shouto. “You can just point.”
Shouto felt his face heat. He tapped the first drink he saw that he recognized—fizzy lemonade.
“Okay,” Kirishima said, standing and tucking his chair back under the table. “Be right back.”
Shouto watched Kirishima as he made his way toward a cashier. His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he pulled it out to check it.
His stomach twisted. Endeavor.
Where are you? I told you to come straight to the agency. I am waiting.
He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to go home. He really, really did not want to go home.
“Bro, they were out of the lemonade, so I got you the fruit punch.” Kirishima set an open cup in front of Shouto, the ice bumping softly against the clear plastic sides.
Shouto put his hand around the cup. “Thanks.”
“Who’s ‘old man’? That your dad texting you?” Kirishima was looking over his shoulder before Shouto had a chance to hide his phone. “Oh shoot, are you in trouble?”
Shouto put his phone back in his pocket. “Usually. S’fine, he can wait a few hours.”
Kirishima sat down, setting his own drink on the table. “Is that why you’re all shook up today? Fighting with your dad?”
He took a sip from his cup, mostly to give himself time to think. The words were coming now, but they were slow. “Sort of. I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of loud, too.”
“Dude, you’re shaking.”
“What?” Shouto looked at the hand holding the drink. He hadn’t noticed the trembling until now. “Shit—sorry. I don’t know why I’m doing that.”
Kirishima’s eyebrows knitted together. “Are you too warm? Wanna take your jacket off?” Kirishima moved to help him, jostling Shouto’s elbow in the process. The bright red juice in Shouto’s cup sloshed up and out, landing squarely—and coldly—on Shouto’s shirt.
“Oh,” Kirishima said, withdrawing, his hands going to his hair. “Uh… crap. I am… so sorry.”
Shouto didn’t laugh, but he couldn’t help a small smile. He might as well just fucking die today, huh?
“Uh,” Kirishima repeated, “I… have an extra t-shirt in my backpack. Really sorry about the uniform, Shouto. Crap. Do you wanna head to the bathroom and try to get that out?”
Shouto set his half-empty cup down and grabbed a few napkins from the dispenser, wiping off his wrist and arm. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I’m really s—”
“It’s fine, Kirishima. I don’t care about the uniform.” His binder underneath was going to be stained, though, and that wasn’t so easily replaceable. He needed to get it clean quickly. “You have the extra shirt?”
“Y-yeah, just…” Kirishima stood, fumbling through his backpack. “C’mon, I’ll help you out with your uniform.”
“I can do it myself,” Shouto said.
“No, let me help.”
Shouto stood. “I don’t need any help. I’ll just send it to the cleaners if I can’t get it out.”
Kirishima gave Shouto pleading eyes. “Bro, please, just let me help. I already feel horrible.”
Shouto’s stomach dropped. He couldn’t say no to that without sounding like a complete asshole. That would’ve been fine a few weeks ago, and he didn’t know why things seemed different now, but…
This would be fine, right? Kirishima had already seen Shouto’s binder. It would just be a quick change from uniform shirt to t-shirt, and he’d wipe the binder down while it was still on his body.
Shouto nodded.
They headed toward the bathrooms—a series of single stalls. They entered one, and Kirishima latched the door behind them. It was strangely quiet.
Kirishima turned the sink on, testing the water’s temperature with a couple fingers. He glanced back at Shouto, who started unbuttoning his shirt.
“Warm water is supposed to work better, right?” Kirishima asked. His voice took up so much space in the echoing bathroom. “I don’t actually know a whole lot about… I mean, you’d think I’d be better figuring out stains based on what we’re studying to be, right?”
“Your hero costume doesn’t use as much cloth as others,” Shouto said.
Kirishima gave a sheepish laugh. “Yeah, true.”
Shouto shrugged off his shirt and gave it to Kirishima, then looked down at his binder to assess the damage. It was stained almost as extensively as the uniform.
Kirishima’s eyes stayed on him. “You’re still wearing that compression shirt? Doesn’t it hurt after a while?”
“It’s fine,” Shouto muttered. He grabbed a paper towel and started rubbing at the stain, pinching the outer layer of his binder away from his chest.
“That’s not gonna get anything,” Kirishima said, pumping soap into his hand. “Take it off and let me soap that up, too.”
Fuck. He wasn’t going to press it, was he? “I can do it from here.”
“It’s just gonna leave a big wet spot on the front of your new shirt, dude. You’ll have to take it off anyway.”
“I can’t.”
Kirishima started scrubbing the front of the uniform. “Bro, it’s not like you sleep in that thing, right? Having it off for a few hours won’t mess you up. Just let me—”
“It’s not a compression shirt,” Shouto said. “It’s a chest binder.”
There. He’d done it. Said something he couldn’t take back. And here they were in a locked bathroom, water still running, the stain on his binder refusing to fade.
After a long moment of silence, he made the mistake of looking up. Kirishima was staring at him, his hands unmoving under the running water.
Shouto suddenly felt disembodied. Like he was watching a poorly-designed character move through a computer screen.
“If you’re going to say something,” Shouto snapped, “say it.”
“S-sorry. Sorry, I don’t…” He glanced down at Shouto’s torso, then quickly back up. His face tinted red. “I don’t really get it. Are you, uh… you’re a… girl?”
“Nope,” Shouto said. He threw away the paper towel he’d been using and grabbed another from the dispenser. It ripped in half. “Fuck. Uh, no. I’m trans.”
Kirishima’s face remained void of understanding.
“Transgender,” Shouto clarified. God, this was painful. “It… please don’t make me explain this. You’ve heard of it, right?”
“Oh,” Kirishima said, slowly, and then, “oh. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I just had it in my head that, uh, you know… I was thinking about it going the other way, and I forgot. You know, man to woman. What’s that called?”
Great. He was clueless. “A trans woman?”
“Exactly.” He accidentally dropped Shouto’s shirt into the sink, soaking the whole thing in a few seconds. He lifted it out quickly. Turned the water off. “I guess it didn’t click that it could go the other way, too. Um, are you… uncomfortable being in a bathroom with…? Should I get Mina?”
It took Shouto a moment to realize Kirishima was talking about this situation and not something hypothetical. “I change in the boys’ locker room.”
“Right.” Kirishima shook his head. “Right, of course. Wait, do the other guys know?”
“No.” Momo, maybe, but none of the guys.
“You don’t want them to?”
“No.”
“I won’t tell anybody.” Kirishima paused. “Sorry I asked you to take your… thing off. What do you call it?”
Shouto flipped the bottom part of his binder up to wipe the dampness from his stomach. “Binder.”
“Binder.” Kirishima rubbed his neck, blushing when his eyes darted down to Shouto’s exposed abdomen. “I promise I’m going to do some research on this later.”
This was… actually not going horribly. Kirishima was stupid, yes, but it didn’t look like him finding out about Shouto was going to be the end of the world. As long as he could keep a secret.
Shouto pulled his binder back down. “Whatever you want. Can I have that other shirt?”
Kirishima dug into his backpack and pulled out a wrinkled white t-shirt. Shouto shook it out. It said MANLY in bright red lettering.
Shouto almost laughed.
“You can keep it,” Kirishima said after Shouto had put it on. “I have a similar one at home. I mean, I know it’s probably not your style, but—”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, no problem.” Kirishima wrung out Shouto’s wet uniform shirt before giving it to Shouto. Shouto put it in his gym bag. “Ready to head back?”
“Sure.”
“Y’okay?”
Somehow, the question didn’t annoy him that time. “Yeah.”
Kirishima smiled.
When they headed back out, Ashido and Kaminari were sitting in the food court with a giant basket of nachos between them. Kaminari waved them over.
“Is that Eijirou’s shirt?” Ashido asked once they were seated. “What’d I miss? You guys were feeling each other up in the bathroom, weren’t you?”
Watching fruit punch come out of Kaminari’s nose was not pleasant. Shouto pushed the napkin dispenser in his direction.
“I spilled Shouto’s drink on him,” Kirishima said, red-faced.
Ashido quirked an eyebrow. “On purpose?”
“Why would he spill a drink on purpose?” Shouto asked.
Ashido looked Shouto over. Sighed. “Sweet summer child. Have some chips, Shouto, you earned them.”
So, more firsts.
And… they weren’t bad firsts.
Visiting an arcade. Coming out (Deku didn’t count). Learning what double-dipping was and that Shouto was, according to Ashido, “not supposed to do that, you grubby heathen.”
Kirishima did end up buying the earplugs from the gift shop with his tickets and giving them to Shouto. If Ashido or Kaminari made any remarks about it, Shouto didn’t hear them.
They headed back to the gaming portion of the arcade. Kirishima showed him how to use his loaded card to play a hunting game, which he promptly lost against Kirishima. They played again. Shouto performed marginally better. Still lost.
He held up the plastic rifle, examining its trigger. It had nearly been worn loose from what looked like years of usage, held together by a swathe of neon duct tape. “I’ve never shot a gun before.”
“And you still haven’t,” Kirishima said. “I’ve been hunting before and it’s nothing like that, trust me.”
It was the type of question he normally kept to himself, and he wasn’t sure why he asked it out loud now. “What’s the point of the simulation, then?”
“Huh? There is no point.” Kirishima clapped Shouto’s shoulder. “That’s what makes it fun, dude.”
No point?
Endeavor would hate that.
Shouto swiped his card. “Let’s do it again.”
Notes:
*AU in which Todoroki receives OFA instead of Midoriya*
All Might: Young Todoroki... Eat This.
Todoroki: k
Todoroki:
Todoroki: Why is it soggy
All Might: ?
Todoroki: This hair you gave me. It's soggy.
Todoroki: Where's the crisp, the crackle, the cronch? It's like you didn't even cook it first. Disgusting.
All Might:
All Might: Young Todo--
Todoroki: 2/10, would not eat here again.
Chapter 11: Shouto, Are You a Lesbian? I Thought You Were Japanese
Summary:
Making Kiri uncomfortable since 1999. Shouto views the contents of the flash drive.
Notes:
TW: (all in reference to past events) physical abuse, violence, minor gore, sexual harassment/pedophilia (not explicit)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto left the arcade at seven p.m. Overall, the experience had been incredibly pointless, a waste of time, and… why was his chest buzzing?
Kirishima lived closest to Shouto’s house and volunteered to walk him home. When Shouto said he was fine, Kirishima insisted, so here they were. At least Kirishima walked faster when he wasn’t with his other friends.
They managed to walk about a block before Kirishima spoke. “I had fun today.”
“Oh,” Shouto said.
“Did you?”
He thought.
Shouto didn’t know how to describe what had happened. He didn’t have fun, usually, not like other people seemed to. He had to worry about sounds and lights and exploding bridges and green-haired villains and Endeavor, who was in his brain even when they were miles away from each other. But there had been about a half-hour pocket where he’d just… forgotten about that stuff.
He’d shot at uncalibrated targets. Played a hypothetical game of basketball. He had won Super Table Flip against Ashido.
Shouto hardly ever felt a sense of accomplishment. His father had worn that out of him, made it meaningless. So when winning an arcade game with no real-life application felt good instead of boring or dirty, he was surprised.
“I think so,” Shouto said.
“That’s good. I wasn’t sure if you were. I can’t really tell what you’re thinking, you know?” Kirishima looked around. “This is a really nice neighborhood. You live here?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, you must have a pretty wealthy family, huh?”
Shouto stared at Kirishima. “Yes, my father makes a lot of money.”
“What’s his job?”
Wait. Did Kirishima not… know? “He’s a… pro hero.”
“Really? Which one?”
Holy shit. He really didn’t. “Endeavor.”
Kirishima whirled toward him. “What? The number-two hero?!”
Shouto raised his eyebrows, turning his gaze forward. “I thought everybody knew.”
“I sure didn’t! What! That’s crazy! But why do you have an ice quirk, then? From you mom’s side? Is your mom a pro hero, too?”
“I—” Too many questions. In response, he held up his left hand, let a cool, apple-sized flame burst from it. “I have both. Ice is from my mom’s side, yes.”
Kirishima’s eyes widened. “You have two quirks?”
“It’s just one, technically.” He let the flame die. “And I don’t use the fire except to regulate my body temperature or sublimate my ice.”
“Why?”
He almost didn’t want to tell Kirishima. He seemed nice. Nicer than most people he’d encountered in his life. Tearing down his image of Endeavor so violently wouldn’t be something Shouto would enjoy.
He’d do it anyway, of course.
“I don’t like using my father’s quirk,” Shouto said. “He’s an asshole who doesn’t deserve to have his legacy passed down.”
“Oh,” Kirishima said. He didn’t speak for a few seconds. “Really?”
“He abused my mom until she had a mental break and poured boiling water on me.” He tapped under his left eye. “I have brain damage from multiple concussions he gave me, too. Can’t concentrate for shit and I have to wear contacts. So I’m not a fan of his, no.”
Kirishima winced. He didn’t look away, though, which surprised Shouto. “Is it… safe now, though? I mean, since you’re going to your house, and… you said he’s mad at you…”
“He’s not home now.” Shouto’s phone hadn’t pinged an alert from the front door yet. Usually if Endeavor wasn’t home by now, he was spending the night at the agency. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t come home in the morning—sometimes he pulled all-nighters at the agency instead of sleeping. It ultimately screwed up Endeavor’s schedule in a way that ended up also screwing with Shouto’s, but at least he probably wouldn’t have to face his father tonight. “I’m avoiding my sister, mostly. Things are… strange now.”
“Oh… Did you have a fight with her?”
“I made her upset.”
“Was it her fault?”
“No.”
“Then maybe you could apologize,” Kirishima said. “That usually gets the awkwardness out of the way faster.”
Shouto didn’t apologize often. He usually just left things alone for a while until the offended party (almost always Fuyumi) approached him again on their own. Kirishima was right that that tactic could take a while.
He nodded. He would try it.
Shouto put on his school jacket as they approach his house, buttoning it over his MANLY shirt. Fuyumi might have questions if she saw it. “This is my house,” he said.
Kirishima halted, standing with his feet apart to look up at it. “Woah. It’s, uh, it’s big.”
Shouto typed in the gate password. Kirishima lingered.
Kirishima hadn’t been planning on coming in, had he? He’d only just come out to Kirishima, and he didn’t want to go through the mess of Kirishima and his sister getting confused over pronouns in front of each other. “I can’t invite you in,” Shouto said. “You should go home.”
“I know,” Kirishima said. “I just… I don’t mean to pry, but does anybody know about what your dad does? Do you need help?”
The light on the gate flashed green. Shouto didn’t open it, his hand frozen still.
Kirishima was asking if he needed help.
This… what, fifteen-year-old kid who got flustered over spilled drinks and exposed abdomens was asking if Shouto needed help?
“People know,” Shouto said. He didn’t mention that people knowing hadn’t kept things from proceeding as normal in the past. Most of Endeavor’s agency knew. He couldn’t be sure that UA, Dabi, and Deku’s involvement would change things at all. Kirishima, however, would certainly not make a difference. “Things are moving. There’s no need for you to get involved.”
Kirishima hesitated, face pinched, before nodding. “Okay. Um… see you at school tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” Shouto said.
He went in, closing the gate behind him. Once he was inside the house, he searched for Fuyumi. She wasn’t hard to find. She was in the kitchen washing dishes.
He stood beside the table and said, “Fuyumi.”
She kept her back turned to him.
“Fuyumi,” he said again.
“If you want soba,” she said, voice cold, “I’m not making any.”
“I’m sorry.”
He saw her shoulders tense. She kept moving, running a plate under the streaming water.
“Last night at the banquet,” he said. “I made things harder for you.”
Fuyumi set the plate in the drying rack. Shut the water off and turned around.
Her eyes were dry, at least. Shouto had been afraid that she’d still be crying, even though he knew that was illogical—Fuyumi was stronger than that.
“Something happened,” she said, “didn’t it? Tell me.”
Shouto hesitated. She could be talking about any number of things, none of which he was prepared to discuss. “Nothing happened. It—I was just being an asshole. You know I get like that.”
“Was it that girl? I know you aren’t the type to get in petty squabbles.”
He hadn’t thought his story though last night, and Fuyumi could tell. “Maybe I am.”
“I know your hate glare, and that wasn’t it. You were both embarrassed about something. She looked shaken even after you left.”
Shouto looked away. Fuyumi wasn’t wrong, and that was the problem. “I don’t know.”
“Are you… are you dating her?”
The question startled him enough to meet Fuyumi’s eyes again. “What?”
“You—” She took a deep breath, exhaled through her mouth. “Are you a lesbian?”
He couldn’t help a sharp laugh of relief. A lesbian. And Fuyumi sounded so serious. No, he wasn’t that. “I’m not dating Yaoyorozu.”
“Is it something like that, though? In that vein?”
He didn’t speak for a few seconds, debating. He decided. “I don’t want to talk about this with you right now.”
Fuyumi quieted. “Shiyo, did I do something? You flinch every time I say your name lately.”
Was he really that readable? “No, I don’t.”
“You just did.”
“No—”
“Stop. Stop. Please, just…” She buried her hands in her hair. “God, I feel like I’m going crazy. I know I’m doing something wrong. I’m hurting you and I don’t know how or why.”
“You’re not doing anything wrong,” Shouto said. He really didn’t know what he was doing here. Comforting people had never been a strong suit. “You—you’re a good sister. It’s not your fault.”
“What’s not my fault?”
Oh. That wording had been a mistake. “Nothing. Nothing’s your fault. I came in here to apologize, not to make… fuck. I’ll leave.” He held up a hand as he turned to leave the kitchen. “Sorry.”
“Hey—Shiyo—!” When Shouto didn’t stop, Fuyumi raised her voice and kept talking. “The police are coming tomorrow morning about Reflection.”
Shouto stopped in the doorway and looked over his shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I have school tomorrow morning.”
“I just found out half an hour ago. Dad texted me. He wants… um, he wants you to train afterwards. Said he apparently couldn’t trust you to come back from school.”
Shouto exhaled. This was what he got for making… well, not friends, more like acquaintances, but the idea was similar. He wondered if tomorrow would get violent. “Fine.”
“Where were you, anyway?”
“The arcade.”
“The… what?”
His phone buzzed as he walked through the house to his room. After he closed his bedroom door, he checked it.
Ya Boi Deku:
Have you looked at the flash drive yet?
Shouto:
No.
Ya Boi Deku:
Might wanna get it to your teachers pretty quick. They’re already encountering resistance with CPS :/
So either there was a leak among the teachers or Dabi/Deku had forced their way into information by use of a quirk or old-fashioned hacking. Either way, Shouto would have to be careful whom he gave this flash drive to. The operation wasn’t as airtight as the teachers had made it seem. If Endeavor somehow found out Shouto hadn’t given up…
Shouto opened his laptop, waiting for it to boot up as he changed out of his binder (keeping the MANLY shirt on—it had a surprisingly nice texture). He searched for the flash drive he’d hidden in the back of his dresser drawer. When he found it, he plugged it into his laptop.
A mix of files, both images and videos, lit up his screen. He put his earbuds in before clicking on the first video.
No sound came through the earbuds, but when the video started playing, Shouto yanked them out anyway, heart pounding. He stared at the image on the screen, still moving. It was an angled, overhead shot of Shouto and Endeavor standing in one of the training rooms at the agency. The footage must’ve been recorded and stored from security cameras. Not a surprise—in the past, Endeavor had made Shouto watch footage of their fights and tell him what he’d done wrong.
Shouto remembered the set of clothes he wore in the video—green Nike shorts and a teal tank top—from years ago. They used to be his favorite, and then they’d been ruined during training. Shorts burned, shirt bloodied. After going through a few more sets of clothes, he’d finally commissioned several sets of his current track suit.
How long ago was this video from? He looked ten or eleven. The file name had included a date, but he hadn’t paid attention to it when he clicked.
Onscreen, the pair started to spar.
Many of Shouto-on-screen’s movements were obviously clumsy—heel catching on the floor as he backed away, ice arching too wide and too low, fire barely reaching a meter in front of him—and Shouto cringed. He’d gotten better with his hand-to-hand combat and ice, but he’d never made much progress with his fire. This video must’ve been from before he stopped using his fire altogether.
How was this going to help his case with CPS? If they saw how bad Shouto used to be at fighting, surely they’d excuse Endeavor’s methods.
Shouto skipped about ten minutes into the video. He was performing even worse now, and Shouto wondered if Deku had maybe just given him these videos as a joke, to humiliate him.
He watched as Endeavor kicked Shouto-on-screen’s feet out from under him. Shouto shot out a pathetic spray of fire from his position on the floor. Endeavor reached through the flames, grabbed Shouto’s arm, and twisted.
Shouto didn’t think Endeavor had meant to break his arm. Endeavor was accustomed to dealing with villains with hardening and strength quirks, and Shouto had been… fragile.
But that was what had happened, intended or not. A break. Despite lack of audio, Shouto could hear--could feel--it again as he watched—the dulled crack, the adrenaline-numbed buzz of pain through his arm, and then—
Broken right arm raised, Shouto-on-screen pushed forward a lopsided meter-tall wall of ice. Endeavor pushed through it like it was paper and yelled something. He kicked Shouto over. Shouto landed badly—on his wrist—and even with the security camera visual, Shouto could see bone poking through his younger self’s forearm.
Endeavor stopped. Finally.
And left the room.
The video dragged on for minutes longer. Shouto-on-screen stood—poked at the bone—approached the door—then backed up and sat down on the floor.
Shouto ran his fingers over the small, faded scar on his arm. He knew how to set a bone now. Back then, he hadn’t, and he hadn’t been sure if walking through the agency with his bone outside his arm would make his father angrier than he already was. So he’d just waited.
It took seven minutes and forty-five seconds for the resident doctor to show up. Endeavor hadn’t been with him.
Shouto clicked out of the video and into another.
And another.
And another.
Some of the injuries he remembered, some he didn’t. He remembered his first concussion and his broken collarbone. The second and third concussions were more of a blur, and it was strange to watch himself laying motionless on the ground with little idea of what the video would bring next. Then it was back to more familiar injuries—a broken rib, a punctured lung (to Endeavor’s credit, he’d been faster getting Shouto help once he saw blood coming out of Shouto’s mouth), hypothermic shivers, a series of burn injuries…
Some videos had little in the way of visual excitement. Just a normal training session, Endeavor leaving the room after having neither inflicted nor sustained any injuries, and Shouto waiting until the door closed before falling into a crouch, his back rising and falling heavily, swaying back on forth on his feet, the heels of his palms rhythmically smacking against his temples.
That was strange to watch. Shouto knew he was crying in the video, but he hadn’t cried in years. Could barely remember what it felt like. He felt a pang of something in his chest.
Jealousy?
He continued with the other video clips. One of them, surprisingly, wasn’t from the training room but from outside the showers.
Nausea crept low in his stomach as he watched. He recognized the sidekick—a woman now in her early thirties with a hypnosis quirk who still worked for Endeavor. Lady Hypna.
Again, no audio. Just Hypna blocking the exit into the common area, stance relaxed, beckoning what must’ve been a fourteen-year-old Shouto toward her. Shouto walking forward, tilting his head up into a kiss, motionless and dead-eyed as Hypna slid her hand up inside Shouto’s sweatshirt.
He still had that sweatshirt.
He still…
Shouto clicked out of the video, closing his laptop and pulling out the flash drive. He’d spent close to two hours watching the videos, and he hadn’t gotten through even half of them.
That was fine. He was finished watching.
###
He didn’t sleep much that night.
It was expected. He knew after closing his laptop that his skin wouldn’t stop trying to crawl away from him for at least another few hours. Putting his binder back on helped. Made him feel more compact, less like he was made of loose parts two shakes from falling apart. He couldn’t sleep in it without risking injury, though.
He took the time to peruse the links Aizawa had emailed him. He spent the most time on the first one, looking at the binder that was apparently safe for exercise. It cost quadruple what his last binder had, but that wouldn’t be a problem. He ordered it with express shipping on Endeavor’s credit card.
When he left his room to meet with the police in the morning, he didn’t time his arrival in the living room quite right. He got there before the police. And after Endeavor.
The man was seething.
“Shiyo! Where were you yesterday?”
Shouto picked up the steaming cup of coffee Fuyumi set down in front of him. He didn’t like hot coffee much, but Endeavor was less likely to hit him if he had it in his hands. Especially right before company. “Mornin’ to you, too, Old Man.”
“Answer me.”
“I made some friends,” he said. Not quite the truth, but it’d piss Endeavor off, so why not? Friends. “We hung out at an arcade for a few hours.”
Endeavor looked, briefly, more confused than angry. “You don’t have friends.”
“Yes, I do. Several of them. First-name basis and everything. Hasn’t anyone ever told you what a likeable kid you raised?”
Endeavor furrowed his brows. He set his own coffee cup heavily on the table. “I don’t believe you.”
Shouto addressed Fuyumi, who was coming back from the kitchen with a large breakfast tray. “You saw someone walking me home yesterday, didn’t you?”
Fuyumi set the tray on the coffee table. Shouto wasn’t sure he could eat, but he had to admit that the smell of a traditional Japanese breakfast was enticing—small squares of grilled fish, steamed rice, miso soup, cucumber salad. He wondered if Fuyumi would rather host for people that weren’t law enforcement or Endeavor’s employees. “That little red-haired boy?” Fuyumi asked. “I saw him. Is he your friend?”
Little? Shouto supposed he was taller than Kirishima, but that didn’t make Kirishima short. Shouto was taller than most of the boys in 1-A. “Yeah, he’s my friend.”
Fuyumi’s eyes darted between Shouto and Endeavor. He knew that look—she was trying to decipher what sort of minefield she’d walked into. “Really? I’m glad you’re making friends.”
Endeavor’s eyes roamed the breakfast tray, showing neither signs of disapproval nor approval. “A boy?”
“A boy,” Shouto said.
“Boys will take advantage.”
“If you say so,” Shouto said. “Not like there’s thirty-year-old women at your agency who do the same thing.”
Endeavor looked up at him, eyes fiery. “How many years has it been, Shiyo? I sent her to another department. What more do you want from me?”
“Nothing,” Shouto said, relenting. He didn’t really want to talk about her, anyway. Didn’t know why he’d brought it up. “Nothing.”
Endeavor huffed. He picked up his coffee cup again, ignoring the handle and holding what must’ve been a scalding side flat against his palm. Fuyumi hovered for a moment before she left, returning to the kitchen.
“You know this,” Endeavor said, “but I’ll repeat it in case you’ve gotten some ideas in your head. You are not to mention your training session with Reflection or the related events to the police. That stays between us.”
Shouto currently had no intention of giving Dabi away, but he had debated whether he should tell the police that “Reflection” had a fire quirk. Just… out of curiosity, to see if that gave them any leads as to Dabi’s identity. But he wouldn’t be able to mention the fire quirk without also mentioning the cauterization, so that was out. It was almost a relief. “I know.”
“And we have training after they leave.”
Fuck, that was right. It probably wouldn’t be pleasant, either. Maybe he could avoid it somehow? Now that there was a possibility Endeavor could be taken down, Shouto didn’t see the point in subjecting himself to more training sessions with Endeavor than he absolutely had to attend. “I know.”
###
Shouto didn’t learn anything helpful from the police. They’d interviewed the burn victim in the hospital yesterday and learned that the man didn’t have much memory of that night, just of some “tiny green-haired kid” gently waking him from his bed to confirm his identity before hitting him very hard in the head.
They’d also learned that the man’s quirk was identical to Reflection’s—probably why the villain had waited until the man was asleep to break in. He also still had his quirk now. This told Shouto that Dabi hadn’t outright stolen the man’s quirk, only borrowed it for an extended period, which…
Didn’t help Shouto figure out much.
Deku had said that the man was supposed to have died, so he didn’t need the original quirk user alive to use the quirk. Was that Deku’s quirk, to borrow other people’s quirks and pass them on? Shouto wondered if Deku’s appearance was his original one, or if maybe Deku was actually some middle-aged creep and there was an identical green-haired kid in a coma right now.
Fuck. This wasn’t helping. He needed to stop thinking.
The police were there until almost four p.m., and Shouto was exhausted by the end of it. He volunteered to show the police out, and Endeavor grunted his permission.
Once the police had driven away, Shouto rounded the side of the house, sitting on a cushioned bench under the curved veranda. He’d stay out here as long as he could. There was a possibility—a very, very small possibility—that Endeavor would forget about Shouto’s training once he was out of sight. He pulled out his phone and opened Candy Crush.
A voice interrupted him.
“OI, ICYHOT!”
Notes:
Kirishima looking at Shouto's house: Woah, it's, uh, it's big.
Deku (60 miles away, currently stabbing somebody); suddenly stops and drops his knife, eyes rolling back in his head to expose the whites, floats six feet in the air while twitching uncontrollably, emitting an ominous aura, speaking in a guttural, demonic voice that strikes fear in the hearts of everyone present: tHaT's WhAt ShE sAiD
#
I'm so fckn READY for the next chapter my dudes
Chapter 12: Shouto Throws Hands
Summary:
Bakugou wants a fight. Now.
Notes:
TW: misgendering/deadnaming in front of others, violence (a fight), a little blood, references to physical abuse and autism-related abuse, references to su*cide
Yes I AM posting two chapters on the same day ;)))))
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto felt ice seeping into his blood, and not the kind his quirk could control. He glanced up without lifting his head.
Bakugou was at the front gate, backpack swinging on one shoulder, slapping his uniform jacket against the tall iron bars.
Why the ever-living fuck was he here?
Was avoiding Bakugou worth going inside the house?
“I KNOW YOU FUCKIN’ SEE ME, COWARD! YOU OWE ME A FIGHT! LET ME THE FUCK IN SO I CAN BEAT YOU UP!”
Jesus Christ, he was loud. Endeavor would hear if Bakugou kept this up much longer.
Was Shouto okay to go tell Bakugou to leave? He wasn’t wearing a binder, and the straps of his dark sports bra were visible under his white t-shirt.
“IF YOU AREN’T OPENING THIS GODDAMN GATE IN TEN SECONDS, IMMA BLAST IT THE FUCK OPEN, ICYHOT!”
Fuck… okay. Shouto stood and headed toward Bakugou, tugging his t-shirt outward as he walked so it would be baggy near his chest. He reached the gate. “What?”
“Don’t fuckin’ ‘what’ me!” Bakugou reached through the bars to grab Shouto’s shirt, but Shouto stepped back just in time. Bakugou’s hand swiped uselessly through the air. “Did you miss school today on purpose? Hah? You were supposed to spar against me today, but I had to beat up Pikachu instead.”
“I had something to do. How did you find where I live?”
“Just looked for the biggest, stupidest-looking house on the block.” Bakugou’s eyes flitted across Shouto’s face. His nose crinkled. “The fuck happened to your face? You look like someone dunked your head in a blender.”
Shouto had forgotten about his face. His bruises were lighter, but they were still there. The police hadn’t said anything. Bakugou hadn't said anything yesterday at school, either, which didn't surprise Shouto. The boy hardly looked his way unless they were fighting.
“My dad beats me up for fun,” Shouto said. “He’s home now. He’s pretty mad about my skipping training yesterday, too. You still want to come in?”
Bakugou’s face twitched. He kicked the fence. “Don’t joke about that shit. Let me in.”
“I’m not letting you in. I’m tired.”
“You’re fuckin’ scared, is what you are.”
“There’s no reason for me to fight you right n—”
A door slammed. Shouto’s breath hitched. He looked over his shoulder to see Endeavor walking out on the patio and looking around, searching.
“SHIYOOO!” Endeavor called.
Fuck…
“So the flame bastard is home,” Bakugou said. “Oi, Half-n-Half, introduce us so I can challenge him to a fight. One-on-one. I’ll fuck him up.”
“Shut up,” Shouto hissed. He typed in the code to the gate, cringing when the light at the top of the gate blinked green. The light must’ve caught Endeavor’s eyes because his head turned in Shouto’s direction. Shouto slipped outside the gate as quickly as possible.
Not quick enough—he didn’t miss the way his father’s eyes narrowed. “SHIYO!”
“Who the fuck is Shiyo?” Bakugou asked. “You have a dog or somethin’?”
“Shut up and go,” Shouto said.
Bakugou stumbled as Shouto brushed past him. “Wha—so you gonna fight me, or—”
“Fucking go.” Shouto grabbed Bakugou’s arm and yanked him forward as he ran, dragging him until Bakugou finally got the idea and fell in step.
Shouto knew the sound of his own running. Knew the light pattern of his feet, the huff of his lungs. It was a new and strange thing to have another person running away beside him with their own sounds, heavier than his own. Sounds that weren’t yet trained to not be sounds.
Bakugou reached out for the back of Shouto’s t-shirt once they reached the end of the street, dragging him to a stop. “Hey! Where the fuck are we headed? Why are you running like that?”
“You’re fucking stupid,” Shouto said.
He turned the corner onto the next street. This area had more empty houses than not—upper-middle class homes that nobody could afford, according to Natsuo. However poorly it reflected on the economy, it was convenient for when a classmate showed up at your house wanting you to kick their ass.
Shouto stopped and turned to face Bakugou. “I’ll fight you if it means you’ll leave.”
“Hah?” Bakugou looked around. They were standing in the middle of the street. “Here?”
“What?” He spat Bakugou’s words back at him. “Scared?”
Bakugou snarled. “Of course I’m not. I’ll fight you any—”
Shouto slammed his foot into Bakugou’s side.
Bakugou gave a short yell—not much more than air being forced from his lungs. He jumped back, staying still just long enough for fury to take over his face, and then he tossed his backpack and jacket to the side and rushed forward.
Shouto would give him this: Bakugou was not timid. There was no hesitance in his moves, no evidence of a doubt ever crossing his mind as he attacked. Not even a minute had passed before Bakugou slammed Shouto to the ground. “DIE!” Bakugou screamed.
“I’ve been trying for years.” Shouto landed a more-than-solid punch across Bakugou’s jaw, snapping his head to the side. “Do me a favor, yeah? I want to see if you can.”
A drip of blood ran from Bakugou’s nose, splashing just under Shouto’s left eye. His scarred area had reduced sensation, but he could feel the warmth when the blood trickled off the damaged tissue and down his cheek.
Bakugou wouldn’t stop moving. Aiming for Shouto’s face, his neck, his sternum. Shouto blocked most of the hits, but he couldn’t quite get Bakugou’s knee off his stomach. He was pinned down.
And Bakugou was loud.
“I could kill you,” Bakugou said, “if I actually fucking tried. I’m barely doing shit here, what’s wrong with you? You’d better not be holding back, asshole!”
“You’re not special,” Shouto said.
“Hah?!”
“You could kill me, my dad could kill me, I could kill me. Why are you mad I’m not scared of you?” He punched Bakugou straight in the face, earning another spray of blood from Bakugou’s nose. “Get off me. You win.”
Bakugou dug his knee into Shouto’s gut. “You’re not even trying!”
“I said you win.”
“No I don’t!” He lifted his knee off Shouto, straddled him, grabbed his collar and yanked him into a sitting position. “Get UP! FIGHT ME!”
“I’m done,” Shouto said. “I’m tired.”
Bakugou punched him. Shouto didn’t make any move to stop him. Didn’t even break eye contact through the movement.
Bakugou hesitated, then drew his fist back again. Something flickered in his eyes. It wasn’t something immediately visible like with Reflection or Aizawa, but it was there nonetheless. “You’re not gonna stop me? Just gonna let me kick your ass? Hah?”
“Just…” Shouto looked off behind Bakugou at the line of identical houses. Three stories, green lawns, stretching on until it looped back on itself and stretched on some more. It was easier to let his eyes unfocus during times like these. Just… let himself float up, out of his body. “…don’t break anything.”
Shouto’s collar dug into the back of his neck. When nothing happened, he let his gaze drift back to Bakugou’s. It had turned into something unreadable.
Well, maybe it was readable to a normal person. But Shouto had no fucking idea what it meant.
“You’re stretching my shirt,” Shouto said.
To Shouto’s relief, Bakugou’s expression turned to something more familiar—a scowl. His eyes flitted down to where his hand gripped Shouto’s collar. And—
Oh.
Oh no.
Neither of them moved for a few seconds. Then Bakugou let go of Shouto’s collar like it was hot. His face reddened. “The fuck are you wearing, Half-n-Half?”
Bakugou had seen his bra.
This was bad. Shouto should not have let this happen. He felt his own face heating, and he didn’t trust himself with his ice quirk right now to cool himself down. He might end up freezing Bakugou, too. “Get off.”
Bakugou’s face twisted. “Wait, are you Shiyo?”
And suddenly they were fighting again, Shouto’s knee in Bakugou’s crotch, Bakugou’s elbow jabbing Shouto’s trachea. Rolling over, shoving Bakugou’s head back against the concrete, sharp pebbles digging into Shouto’s other palm, sticking in his skin when he raised it to strike. From Bakugou: block, a twist, a hold, and panic coursing through Shouto.
Trapped.
No. Not by this underachieving wet wipe. Shouto bent his head to where Bakugou’s hand had grabbed his arm and—
Bakugou made a noise Shouto had never heard from him before. He let go of Shouto’s arm, pushed him away, and scrambled back. “What the fuck…?!”
He'd left Shouto splayed on the ground, so Shouto moved into a sitting position.
Bakugou cradled his hand to his chest. A few tiny points were already welling with blood. “Did you just fucking bite me?”
Shouto licked his lips. He tasted blood and spat on the ground.
Bakugou opened his mouth again, but he didn’t say anything, his eyes moving up above Shouto’s head. Shouto knew that look—he’d seen it on Endeavor’s sidekicks before—but Shouto barely had time to move into a crouch before he was being lifted by the back of his shirt. The material dug sharply into his neck and armpits.
He knew better than to struggle. Shouto made himself go limp, his face go flat. He’d get a chance to breathe later.
“Shiyo!” Endeavor said, his voice booming, painful near Shouto’s ear. “I don’t have time to keep running after you. Who’s this boy?”
Shouto wasn’t sure he could’ve answered even if his air supply wasn’t cut off.
Bakugou was still for a moment, staring at Endeavor with a slack jaw, before he got to his feet. He let his hands drop to his side, the hand Shouto had bitten dripping blood from its middle finger. “Oi, oi, old man.” His voice low, growling. “We weren’t done fighting.”
Shouto couldn’t see Endeavor’s face, but he could feel the heat from his glare. “You think you can give her a challenge? Do you know who she is?”
“Better than you do, asshole.” Bakugou swiped a palmful of sweat from his cheek and neck, then darted forward. “Ice up, Half-n-Half.”
Shouto understood. He coated his back and neck near where Endeavor gripped him with a thin layer of ice. When Bakugou slapped his hand on Endeavor’s wrist and fired off an explosion, Shouto’s ears rang, but his neck wasn’t burned.
Endeavor dropped him.
Shouto landed on his feet. Bakugou scooped his backpack and jacket up in one arm, firing one more explosion in Endeavor’s face before he whacked Shouto hard on the back and made a sign—one of the Pro Hero signs Shouto hadn’t thought Bakugou knew—hand sharp and forceful.
Retreat.
And they did.
###
Shouto didn’t ask any questions until they reached the subway. “I don’t have my wallet.”
“Shut up,” Bakugou said.
“Bakugou, I can’t ride the train if I don’t have money.”
“Shut up.”
Bakugou loaded enough money on a new card for a couple train rides. He shoved it in Shouto’s direction without looking at him.
They got on the train.
The two of them got some looks. Shouto saw both of them standing side-by-side in the dark train windows—Bakugou with his bleeding hand and nose, Shouto with splatters of Bakugou’s blood across his face and yellow bruises along his face and neck. His shirt collar had been stretched out, too.
Fucking Endeavor. This was one of the shirts Shouto liked. It had a nice texture.
“Where are we going?” Shouto asked.
“You’re going to Heaven if you don’t shut up.”
They passed another stop. “This won’t be walking distance from my house.”
“Yeah, that’s the fuckin’ idea.”
“I don’t want to fight anymore, Bakugou. I followed you because Endeavor was less likely to pursue if I had a classmate with me. That’s all.”
Bakugou stared hard out the window.
When they reached the stop, Bakugou headed off without warning. Shouto followed. The walk was about ten minutes, and then they entered a suburb.
Shouto looked around. This didn’t look like a good place to fight. Were they going to a house?
They stopped in front of a gate. Bakugou typed a number into the security pad, and the gate unlatched.
Bakugou’s house?
“C’mon, moron,” Bakugou said, holding the gate open. Shouto hadn’t realized that he’d gone still outside the gate.
They walked past the potted flowers and windchime on the patio, and Bakugou slammed opened the door. “I’M HOME!”
Shouto flinched. He never entered his own house that loudly.
Bakugou closed the door after Shouto stepped in. Pointed at Shouto’s feet. “Take off your fuckin’ shoes, you animal.”
“I was going to,” Shouto said.
“Shut up.”
Bakugou led Shouto through the house. Shouto looked around. The house was… honestly pretty normal. He didn’t know what he’d expected. A bomb shelter, maybe?
“Don’t touch anything,” Bakugou growled.
“I know,” said Shouto.
A woman called from the kitchen. “Katsuki, do you have someone with you?”
Bakugou tossed his jacket on the couch. “Yeah, ‘n he’s stayin’ the night.”
He. Bakugou was still saying he. Shouto felt… good hearing it, which was strange, because he hadn’t thought he would care very much what Bakugou called him.
But… staying the night? Why?
A blonde woman—the spitting image of Bakugou—looked out from the kitchen. “Do his pare—oh fucking hell, Katsuki, what did I tell you about getting in fights? Do you two beat some poor kid up?”
“Hell no, I beat him up,” Bakugou said, jerking a thumb toward Shouto.
“Looks more like he did the beating. Is that a bite mark on your hand?”
“Mind your goddamn business, old hag!”
Shouto didn’t understand this fighting. The language was rough, yes, but somehow it didn’t seem very dangerous. Didn’t feel like it could evolve into a black eye or a busted lip.
The woman—Bakugou’s mother, Shouto assumed—turned her attention to Shouto. “What’s your name?”
“Todoroki Shouto,” he answered.
“Oh, Shouto. I should’ve recognized you with how much he talks about you. I’m Mitsuki. I’m sorry my son has been annoying you so much.”
“MA!” Bakugou said.
Mitsuki ignored Bakugou. “Do your parents know you’re with Katsuki right now, Shouto?”
“His dad sure fuckin’ does,” Bakugou said under his breath.
“I’ll call my sister later,” Shouto told her. “I apologize for the intrusion.”
Mitsuki gave Bakugou a smug look Shouto didn’t understand. “He’s so polite, Katsuki.”
Bakugou scowled.
Shouto spoke before Bakugou could. “Could I clean up in your restroom? Bakugou bled on my face.”
Mitsuki looked amused. She pointed. “Right down that hall. Katsuki, go grab him one of your shirts to change into.”
“Hah? Why?”
“Because he smells like sweat and soot. So do you.”
Shouto found the bathroom. His bruises looked uglier, yellower in the bathroom light. He also looked tired. Shouto let the water from the sink grow warm before he splashed it on his face.
Could he really stay the night here? He certainly didn’t want to go back home, but he might be making things worse in the long run. There was really no way to tell whether his father would cool down or simmer in his absence.
Possibly more importantly—what did Bakugou want from him? He must be keeping Shouto close for some reason.
“Oi.” Shouto wiped his face on his shirt before he looked up at Bakugou in the bathroom doorway, one arm up against the doorframe and the other holding a dark bundle. “Shirt.”
“Thanks,” Shouto said. He pulled his shirt off.
Something whacked his side. Shouto looked down to see the clean shirt at his feet. “Wait for me to leave, you fuckin’ weirdo.”
Shouto put his dirty shirt on the sink and picked up the new one. “Why?”
“’Cause it’s fuckin’…” He moved to close the door, his motion slowing when his eyes trailed down to Shouto’s abdomen. “…it’s weird.”
“I change in the same locker room as you do. If anything about this,”—Shouto motioned to the large yellow and brown mass crawling across his side— “turns you on, you’re the abnormal one, not me.”
Bakugou scowled and looked away, but he didn’t leave. He leaned against the doorframe as Shouto finished putting on the new shirt and rinsing spots of blood he’d missed from his neck and ears.
“Did I do that?” Bakugou asked.
Shouto rinsed out his mouth, spat in the sink. “Do what?”
Bakugou’s face was neutral, bored, not looking at him. “The bruise. That’s from my gauntlet, right?”
Disgust tinged in Shouto’s gut. Was this boy proud of putting bruises on his classmates? “Most of it’s from training with my father and his sidekick.”
“So he really does beat you up for fun, huh? You just stand there and take it, I bet.”
Shouto dried his face on a towel, properly this time. “Think what you want.”
“Why don’t you just fuckin’ deck ’im? I made him drop you with an explosion, so even you could probably—”
“You didn’t.”
“Hah?”
“You didn’t make him do anything. He needs special permission to use force against minors, and wealthy suburban areas usually have private security cameras. If someone sent in footage, he could lose his hero license. I can guarantee that explosion didn’t hurt him.”
Bakugou narrowed his eyes. He came into the bathroom, shoving Shouto aside to run water over his injured hand. He pumped soap furiously. “Fuckin’… bite him then. You ain’t above that.”
“I did that a couple years ago,” Shouto said. “He broke my jaw.”
Bakugou’s mouth twitched. He shook his hands, spraying water on the mirror and the front of both their shirts.
He turned and left the bathroom. Shouto trailed him, unsure where else to go. “I’m gonna do my fuckin’ homework,” Bakugou said. “You’d better not bother me.”
They went upstairs, Bakugou’s feet loud and aggressive on the stairs. Bakugou’s room was at the top. It was smaller than Shouto’s bedroom, but well-designed and cleaner. No empty food packages littering the desktop; just an orange study lamp, sports magazines, a cup of writing utensils, and—surprisingly—an All Might figurine.
“You like All Might?” Shouto asked.
“Shut up!” Bakugou slammed the door closed. “Everybody does. That’s limited edition, so don’t fuckin’ touch.”
Shouto was confused. “You told him to fuck off after the battle trial.”
“You fuck off. Sit the hell down.”
Shouto sat on the bed.
“Not there, asshole, you’re fuckin’ gross right now.”
Shouto sat on the floor.
Bakugou unzipped his backpack and dumped everything out on the ground. He picked out a notebook and a workbook and sat down at his desk. “Listen, IcyHot. Don’t talk, don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t bother me or I’ll kill you.”
“I’m going to breathe.”
“Fuck off and die.”
Shouto pulled out his phone. It was dead. "Do you have a charg--"
"Shut UP!"
Well.
Shouto had some experience sitting still doing nothing for extended periods of time. He didn’t like it, but Endeavor had noticed Shouto squirming a lot when he was five or six years old and trained him by making him sit in a chair without any stimulation for a couple hours at a time.
Now, Shouto tucked his hands under his legs and stared at the opposite wall, his back against the steel bed frame.
He was itching within minutes. Not a physical itch, but energy licking with the roughness of a goat’s tongue at the underside of his skin, prodding him to move, look around, make a noise. He looked at the back of Bakugou’s head, the individual blond hairs bouncing as Bakugou wrote. The movement wasn’t not soothing.
Shouto watched it for a while, let his mind wander. Thought about how Fuyumi was probably cleaning up scraps of construction paper at her job right now. Wondered if Natsuo would do his homework right after class or if he waited until the last minute.
He ran over what homework he’d have to get done before tomorrow. Was he supposed to wake up early tomorrow to go get his backpack from home? He might not be able to avoid his father if he arrived earlier than six a.m., since that was when Endeavor left for work on Thursdays. But Shouto was already behind a day in schoolwork, so it wouldn’t look good if he didn’t at least have his homework from Monday done…
Ah, fuck. His breath was speeding up.
Shouto looked away from Bakugou and back at the wall, trying to un-spiral his thoughts. But they kept winding tighter, faster, farther downward.
What if this kept happening? This missing school, these random attacks he had. Would UA kick him out? What would Shouto do then? What would Endeavor do? Would Fuyumi become a target if Endeavor gave up on Shouto becoming a hero?
Shouto sent some coolness to his face to keep himself from overheating. He pulled his knees up to his chest, joining his hands underneath them. He rested his forehead between his knees and stared hard at the ground.
Something hit his shoulder. Shouto startled, looking up. The magazine that had hit him fell to his side. Bakugou had turned in his chair to face Shouto. “You can’t even fuckin’ sit still without hyperventilating? What’s wrong with you?”
How had he…? “I was being quiet.”
“You’re loud as shit. I can’t concentrate with you in here.”
“You shouldn’t have brought me home with you, then.”
“Don’t tell me what I should do!” Bakugou chunked another rolled-up magazine at him. It hit Shouto’s arm with a slap that Shouto barely felt. “What’re you so worked up over, anyway? Hah? You think my house ain’t safe or somethin’?”
Shouto looked away. “I was thinking.”
“So fuckin’ stop.”
“Are you going to tell people I’m a girl?”
Bakugou was silent. After a few moments passed, Shouto risked a glance, and Bakugou’s parted lips twitched before he scoffed. “I mean—you aren’t, are you?”
“I don’t want to be,” Shouto said. “I don’t feel like one.”
“Be fuckin’ weird if you were one,” muttered Bakugou. The overhead air conditioning turned on, blowing the pages of one the magazines open. Bakugou kicked it closed. “Guess something got mixed up when you were born? Which is fucking… weird, it’s fucking weird, but you’re pretty much a certified freak already, so I’m not gonna question it too much. I don’t go around talking about other people’s… y’know, junk.”
Shouto took a minute to process the words. Then he said, “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, you fuckin’ half-melted icicle dildo. Read a damn magazine and stop bothering me with stupid questions.” Face flushed, Bakugou turned back to his homework.
Notes:
Bakugou: You're a fucking freak and only a small portion of that is because you're trans
Us: *hesitant and confused "aww" noises*
#
Also, never fear, I know it doesn't make sense that Bakugou just *found* Shouto's house. It'll be explained in the next chapter.
Chapter 13: Shouto Has Like 40 Fast Food Apps Downloaded (And That's Canon)
Summary:
More quality time with Bakugou. Oh boy.
A shorter chapter this time (I wrote this on zero sleep through the power of Sour Patch Kids and microwaved taquitos, forgive me).
Notes:
CW: talk of spousal abuse/murder, sexual assault mention
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto had made it through one and a half magazines (and was subsequently wiser in the ways of “Caring for Your Indoor Succulents” and “When Those Sweat Stains Just Won’t Come Out”) when Bakugou said, “Oh.”
“What,” Shouto said.
“I forgot.” Bakugou picked a folder and a couple slim workbooks from the pile he’d emptied on the floor from his backpack and tossed them onto Shouto’s lap. “I was s’posed to give you your makeup work.”
Shouto opened the folder and flipped through its contents. His nausea subsided a little. Still, he was surprised that anyone had trusted Bakugou of all people to deliver his homework. “Aizawa told you where I live?”
“Hah? No, Shitty Hair was supposed to take you your stuff after school, but he threw up from sparring Round Face during practical training.”
“So you… volunteered?”
“Yeah, ’cause I wanted to fuck you up.”
So Bakugou had gotten Shouto’s address from Kirishima. “Kirishima was okay with you hypothetically fucking me up?”
Bakugou mumbled something.
“Huh?”
“Said I left that part out. And don’t you fuckin’ tell ’im, either, unless you want us both to get suspended.”
There was a knock on the door. Mitsuki’s voice. “Hey, brat and brat’s lovely friend, dinner’s ready.”
“He ain’t my friend!” Bakugou called back. He slammed his textbook closed. “C’mon, Half-n-Half.”
When Shouto went downstairs, curling his toes to squeeze the sleep static from them, he paused on the bottom step. A man was setting the Western-style dining table with bowls. He looked meek enough—Shouto could likely beat him in a fight.
He felt a kick on the back of his knee. “Quit blockin’ the stairs. That’s just my dad. You scared of everything now?”
Shouto moved off the bottom step. “I was just looking.”
“It’s a dinner table, not a battle trial.” He shoved Shouto’s head forward as he walked past him. “Don’t be fucking weird.”
Don’t be weird. That was… a loaded command.
Bakugou’s dad, thankfully, had a quieter voice than Bakugou and Mitsuki. Had there been another loud voice at the table, Shouto would have been utterly unable to enjoy his sukiyaki. Which would’ve been a shame. Bakugou Masaru was a good cook.
After a few minutes of Bakugou and Mitsuki berating each other about the etiquette of doing homework with a guest present (featuring Bakugou’s “He should consider himself LUCKY to be a guest here”), Mitsuki turned her attention to Shouto. “Did you get a chance to call your sister?”
“My phone’s dead,” Shouto said. “Bakugou wouldn’t give me a charger.”
“Hah?!” Bakugou yelled. “You didn’t ASK, fuckwipe!”
Shouto shoveled a slice of beef into his mouth. “I tried.”
“Don’t fucking talk with your mouth full!”
At Mitsuki’s request, Bakugou left the table to retrieve a phone charger. Shouto pulled his dead phone from his pocket and set it on the table.
“Are your mom and dad going to be okay with you staying over?” Mitsuki asked Shouto. “I don’t want to deal with any angry parents tomorrow.”
“They won’t bother you,” Shouto said. Not like his mom was around to be bothered. The thought of calling her in the hospital after ten years of radio silence to ask if he could stay at a classmate’s house was amusing. “It’s fine.”
Mitsuki raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like you’re not planning on telling them.”
“My father’s mad at me right now.”
“It’s probably not a good idea to use somebody else’s house to avoid consequences.”
“Probably not. Endeavor’s mad is generally more intense than other people’s mad, though.”
“Oh, does he get loud?”
Shouto took a sip of milk. Tapped his cheek where his bruise from his last training session began.
He felt something hard hit the back of his head, heard a clatter as something dropped to the floor.
“I told you not to be fuckin’ weird!” Bakugou yelled.
What was it with Bakugou throwing things at him? Shouto picked up the charger that had dropped to the floor and plugged it into a port in the wall behind him. He caught a glimpse of Bakugou’s red-tinged face from the corner of his eye.
“Were you not going to tell them?” Shouto asked. “What’s the point of me being here, then? Are we having a fucking sleepover?”
“Don’t swear in front of my fucking parents, asshole! I was gonna tell ’em, just not at dinner.”
Oh, so the aversion of talking about anything important at family meals wasn’t just a Fuyumi thing? Shouto didn’t understand it. “Do you really plan on being a Pro Hero? If talking about child abuse makes you lose your appetite, you’re going to starve to death before you turn thirty. And I’m not even talking about rescuing kids from it, I mean your coworkers doing it.”
Bakugou held up a crackling palm. “Take that back, fucker.”
Shouto sat back down, picked up his chopsticks. “Why? Half of the top hundred heroes know what Endeavor does and they don’t do shit. Give me a list and I’ll point out the ones who’ve been there in person.”
“Fuck you,” Bakugou said. “I ain’t denying Endeavor’s a piece of shit, but don’t push your issues on the rest of the Pro Heroes. That’s the kind of shit villains pull.”
“Oi,” Mitsuki said. “Katsuki.”
Yeah, he’d heard that before. Talking shit about Pro Heroes was villainous, trying to reveal Endeavor’s true nature to the world was villainous. If villainous meant anti-Pro Hero, then yeah, maybe it was. “I told you I don’t want to fight again. It’s annoying having to hold back.”
“So you WERE holding back!” Bakugou’s palms popped louder. “You fucking LIAR!”
“Of course I was holding back,” Shouto said. He ate a piece of cabbage. “Are you honestly so arrogant you think you could beat someone who trains against the number two hero every week?”
“I will kick your balls STRAIGHT UP into your FUCKING BODY—”
“Well, you can try.”
“Oi!” Mitsuki’s chair screeched as she stood. “You two, shut it! What’s going on here?”
Bakugou pointed at Shouto with a steaming hand. “He wouldn’t let me beat his abusive dad up.”
“Yes, I apologize for being a reasonable human being who doesn’t think a first-year could take on Endeavor and make it out alive.” At Mitsuki and Masaru’s stunned expressions, Shouto said, “Oh, you don’t—you don’t have to do anything about Endeavor, it’s fine. I told the nurse at UA about it and they’re compiling a report.”
“Just the nurse?” Mitsuki asked, her voice gone softer. “Is she the only one who knows?”
“No, Aizawa and Nezu do. Midnight, too. I don’t know why she was there.”
Bakugou scoffed. “And Endeavor still hasn’t been arrested? What a fucking joke—”
“It hasn’t even been a week,” Shouto said, poking his sukiyaki around in the bowl. Oh—there was another slice of beef. Nice. “You should finish eating before your food gets cold.”
“Don’t think you get to tell me what to do, fuck-ass.” Bakugou sat down. He picked up his chopsticks and jabbed at his food, eyebrows furrowed. His jaw muscles bulged angrily as he chewed.
Mitsuki and Masaru shared a look. Shouto couldn’t quite peg the expression—not annoyed, quite, the lips were too tight for that. It put a knot in his stomach. Was that expression about him? He didn’t like not knowing.
The rest of the meal was silent. Shouto was fine with it. He’d been in other situations where the silence was more lethal, where the quiet drove a speeding car without its seatbelt on. This was nothing.
Shouto finished his meal before any of the others. He used the time to text Fuyumi.
Staying with a friend tonight.
Fuyumi:
??
You okay? What happened?
Shouto:
Everything is fine.
Fuyumi:
Who’s the friend?
Shouto:
You don’t know him.
Fuyumi:
“Him”? Is this a good idea?
Shouto:
Jesus, Fuyumi. I can take care of myself. He’s probably gay anyway.
“HEY,” Bakugou said, scowling as he looked over Shouto’s shoulder.
Masaru sighed. “Why don’t you guys go hang out in the living room for a bit? Your mom and I are going to talk.”
Bakugou and Shouto’s bowls shook as Bakugou pushed away from the table and stormed out. Shouto gathered his phone and the charger before following. In the living room, Bakugou turned on the television and started setting up a gaming system Shouto didn’t recognize.
Bakugou sat on the other side of the couch and started playing what looked like a war game, volume turned up high.
He didn’t offer a controller to Shouto. Shouto didn’t ask.
Minutes passed before Bakugou spoke, and when he did, Shouto wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.
“Who?”
Shouto looked at him. “What?”
“In the top one hundred.”
Oh. “Why do you want to know?”
Bakugou kept his eyes on the tv. “Just fucking tell me.”
“Um…” He ran over the list of heroes who had agreed to spar with Shouto in exchange for a public tag-team with Endeavor—something that would help them rise in the ranks as heroes. “I fought Mirko at the beginning of last summer. Lost very badly. And the Lurkers—that’s Mt. Lady, Kamui Woods, and Edgeshot—”
“I know who the fucking Lurkers are.”
“—They agreed to spar me, but then Kamui Woods rose enough in popularity that they didn’t need my father’s help anymore. Uh, I don’t know if Lady Hypna is in the top hundred anymore. Not sure what the fuck is going on with Hawks. And there was—”
“Hold on, what did Lady Hypna do? I thought she was cool.”
“You do know that she’s intimately connected with Endeavor’s agency.”
“Yeah, but did she do anything specifically, or do you just hate her because she works with your dad?”
Shouto gave a startled laugh. “She used her quirk to sexually assault me when I was fourteen. Yes, she did something specifically.”
Bakugou’s lips smacked as he opened his mouth. But he just made a noise and said, “You’re fucked up.”
“I know.” Shouto scratched his nose. Exhaled. “Bakugou.”
“What?”
“Your parents aren’t going to do anything stupid, are they?”
“No, my parents don’t do stupid shit.”
“Okay.” Shouto glanced at the stairs. “I should go do my homework.”
“Whatever.”
Shouto headed upstairs. He spread his homework out on the floor.
It was, for some reason, easier to concentrate here than it was at home. He did find himself looking up to peruse the room every once in a while—there was an odd collection of journals lined up on the bottom of Bakugou’s shelf—but for the most part, he flew through the work.
After about an hour, Bakugou’s heavy footsteps came up the stairs. Bakugou entered his room wordlessly and sat at his desk to work on more homework. He ignored Shouto for a good half hour before he grumbled, “Shower,” and left the room.
Shouto worked on his history homework and waited. When Bakugou returned with a towel around his waist, he said another two words: “You. Shower.”
Shouto obeyed. It was nice, honestly, to finally get the remaining specks of blood and dirt off him. Bakugou hadn’t left a toothbrush out for him—the bristles of his own toothbrush propped in its holder looked viciously abused, Jesus Christ—so Shouto used some toothpaste and his finger to get the taste of sukiyaki off his tongue. When he was rinsing, he tasted a hint of Bakugou’s blood, so he repeated the process.
Shouto put his clothes back on and headed back to Bakugou’s room. The lights were already out—he had to stop in the doorway for his eyes to adjust. There was a small futon on the floor next to the bookshelf. Shouto’s previously spread-out homework had been gathered into a small pile on the desk. Bakugou was already in bed, facing away from the door.
“Sure took your sweet time,” Bakugou said.
Shouto dropped his hand from the doorframe. “Were you waiting for me?”
“No. Go the fuck to sleep. School tomorrow.”
Shouto made sure his phone was plugged in before he climbed onto the futon. It was 8:43 p.m.
He was going to be staring at the ceiling for a while.
###
12:31 a.m.
That was what his phone had said the last time it lit up with a notification from the Freshness Burger app. He hadn’t dared touch his phone after that. Bakugou would probably be the type to wake up from the light and get mad about it, and Shouto was not in the mood for more yelling.
Bakugou’s bed made a noise. Shouto was careful to stay still.
“Half-n-Half,” Bakugou said. “You awake?”
Shouto stared at the opposite wall. Whatever Bakugou wanted, it could wait until morning. Shouto didn’t want to talk right now.
“Oi.”
Shouto didn’t respond.
Bakugou’s bed squeaked again. Shouto thought that was going to be the end of it, but then Bakugou… kept talking. Voice low—something that wouldn’t have woken Shouto if he’d been asleep. “There was this… kid in middle school I used to beat up. Quirkless loser. Wanted to be a fucking Pro Hero. I was just tryin’ to kick some sense into him before he got himself killed. Y’know.”
Bakugou huffed through his nose—Shouto couldn’t tell if it was a laugh or not.
“He stopped showing up to school a month into the beginning of last school year,” Bakugou continued. “Came out a while later that his dad fuckin’ killed his mom and that fucking… Izuku went missing. Pros apparently found some clues that he’d gone and offed himself somewhere. Never found a body. Or the fucking dad.”
Shouto breathed quietly into his pillow. He stared at the spines of the notebooks eye-level to him on the bottom of Bakugou’s bookshelf, numbered 1 to 12.
This was… bad, right? Listening to someone when they thought they were talking to an unhearing room?
“That’s what’s wrong with your face, I guess,” Bakugou said. “Izuku’s face got like that near the end. Nothin’ there. I didn’t remember until Endeavor picked you up, and you kinda… fuck. Just hung there. That scared the shit outta me. Thought for a second maybe I’d missed something and Izuku was still alive and was in front of me, I’d just overlooked him like I always did, like, maybe he was alive this whole fuckin’ time being abused by his dad and I’d just overlooked it again, just…”
Bakugou’s voice drained off. The silence stretched long, swollen with things unsaid.
Minutes passed before Bakugou spoke again, his voice barely a mutter.
“S’not gonna happen a second time. I won’t fucking let it.”
After that, there was silence.
Shouto did not sleep.
Notes:
Bakugou: Oi asshole you awake?
Shouto, internally: Any Question Can Be Rhetorical If You Just Ignore It
Chapter 14: Shouto Gives a Girl an Apple
Summary:
A trip home. A conversation with Momo.
Notes:
CW: brief physical abuse, homophobia, misgendering/deadnaming
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
At some point, Shouto must’ve drifted off, because Bakugou’s loud-as-fuck alarm jolted him awake. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling as Bakugou fumbled for his phone, willing his heart rate to go down.
“Time?” Shouto asked once the alarm had stopped.
Bakugou looked down at him and scowled. He looked frightening first thing in the morning—eyes puffy, hair smooshed to one side of his head, the cheek he’d had against his pillow red with sweat. Bruises had formed on his nose and at the corner of his left eyebrow. “Look at your own damn phone.”
He did. It was five a.m. “Do we need to be up this early?”
“You gotta go get your shit from your house, right? That adds forty-five minutes to our route, easy. More if I have to explode fuckin’ Endeavor once I get there.”
Our route? “I can go by myself.”
“You think I trust you to go to school afterward? We have practical training again today, and I ain’t fightin’ fucking Tape Boy.” Bakugou threw back his blanket, reaching for the uniform shirt draped over his chair. “Get up. Do somethin’ with your hair. You look like you were tryin’ to feed yourself to a goat.”
Shouto didn’t have a uniform to change into, so he stayed in his clothes from yesterday as he pseudo-brushed his teeth (using his finger again), washed his face, and smoothed his hair.
When Bakugou came in the bathroom and put a too-large glob of toothpaste on his worn-down toothbrush, Shouto remembered something he’d meant to ask last night. “Bakugou. When did you learn sign?”
Bakugou squinted at him in the mirror, mouth already foaming over and dripping into the sink. The teeth marks on his hand were still visible, though they didn’t look deep enough to warrant concern. “Hah?”
“Pro Hero sign. You used it yesterday.”
“The fuckin’ Internet exists, IcyHot. I looked it up after the battle trial.”
Right.
They went downstairs. Shouto didn’t normally eat more than a protein bar for breakfast—Fuyumi was busy in the mornings and didn’t always have time to cook—but Mitsuki had made omelets and natto, and who was Shouto to refuse a meal that wasn’t covered in plastic wrap?
Shouto and Bakugou were putting their shoes on in the entryway when Mitsuki poked her head in. “You guys gonna be okay? No fights?”
“Endeavor will probably have left for work by the time we get to my house,” Shouto said.
“You’re always welcome here,” Mitsuki said. “If things get too bad with your dad, whatever. And if Katsuki tries to pick a fight with you again outside of school, just smack him. As hard as you can. You have my permission.”
“MA,” Bakugou said.
Mitsuki blew a kiss and retreated.
The commute to Shouto’s house was filled with tired silence. He caught Bakugou looking at him a couple times on the subway, but Bakugou looked away as soon as their eyes met.
“What’s your problem?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou growled back. “What’s your problem?”
When they reached Shouto’s house, Shouto’s stomach sank. Endeavor’s silver sports car was still outside. “Fuck.”
“What?” Bakugou asked.
“He’s still home.”
Bakugou’s shoulders tensed. “Thought you said—”
“Yeah, he’s usually gone by now, but sometimes his schedule differs depending on if he has an interview or some shit like that.” Shouto typed the PIN into the pad at the gate. “Stay outside.”
“No fuckin’ way. I’m going in, too.”
“Why?”
Bakugou glared.
“I’m not letting you destroy my house.” The light at the top of the gate blinked green. Shouto opened it. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Fuckin’ better be, asshole. Don’t make me wait.”
Shouto entered the house as quietly as he could. Fuyumi was sorting papers at the table near the kitchen, and she looked up when Shouto entered.
“Hey,” Shouto said quietly.
“Hey.” She kept her volume low, too. “He’s in the shower. Has a meeting today, I think.”
“I’ll be fast.”
“Okay. Oh—package.” She handed him a thick envelope from the table. Shouto recognized the label from the company he’d bought his Aizawa-recommended binder from. “Is that your friend I saw outside?”
Shouto tried to remember if he’d referred to Bakugou as a friend when he’d texted Fuyumi last night. “Yeah.”
She glanced out the window. “He looks pissed.”
“He’s always pissed.”
“Well, invite him over sometime so I can meet him.”
Shouto grunted. That wasn’t going to happen.
He headed back to his room. He opened the package first. The new binder seemed a bit sturdier than his old one. They hadn’t had a fireproof option ready for order, but it wasn’t like he used his left side enough for it to matter.
Shouto put it on. It was a comfortable fit. He tested its selling feature, the part that made it so expensive—a small button sewn subtly into the fabric on the left side at the small of his back. When pressed, it tightened the material around his torso to bind his chest. Pressed again, it would loosen, providing support similar to a sports bra. The mechanism was silent.
He was satisfied. A little bit impressed, too. Aizawa knew his shit.
Shouto put on his uniform and gathered his books into his bag. He headed back out into the living room.
And froze.
He’d taken too long. Endeavor was on his phone in the middle of the room, buttoning up a red dress shirt with his free hand. His eyes narrowed when he saw Shouto.
“I’m going to call you back,” he said into the phone.
Shouto was already talking while Endeavor hung up. “I know I shouldn’t have done that yesterday. I can do training this afternoon or tomorrow. I’m sor—”
Endeavor stepped forward and slapped him.
Shouto reeled from the force, adrenaline going haywire as he stumbled back. His bag slapped against his leg.
“Who was that insolent boy?” Endeavor asked. “Are you friends with him?”
“No,” Shouto said.
“Speak up, girl.”
“No.” His mouth felt numb. “No, I’m not.”
“Did you at least beat him?”
Beat him? “We s—we stopped fighting.”
“Are you stuttering again?”
“No.” Fuck. Shouto was getting careless. “We stopped fighting.”
Endeavor’s eyes moved down. “Why are you wearing the boys’ uniform?”
Shouto’s heart felt like it was going to beat out of his chest. His words stuck in his throat, turned to thick sludge. He glanced at the entrance to the living room—Fuyumi had appeared, silent, her fist pressed to her mouth.
Endeavor roared, his flames surging. “LOOK AT ME.”
Shouto forced himself to look back at Endeavor. His face throbbed. “I-it’s easier.”
“It’s disgraceful. I don’t want people thinking you’re some queer. You can’t get away with that unless you’re a successful Pro Hero first. Get yourself a proper uniform.” Endeavor turned away and started buttoning his shirt again. “I’m busy tonight. We’ll train tomorrow after school.”
Shouto had lived with Endeavor long enough to know that was a dismissal. Instead of heading straight outside, he returned to his room, hands shaking as he looked for the flash drive he’d hidden in his drawer—the one Deku had given him, loaded with incriminating evidence.
“Shiyo?” Fuyumi was standing at his open door, face pinched.
He pushed past her and headed outside.
There would be a red mark on his face when he joined Bakugou. Shouto could stave off blushes, but he didn’t have enough finesse with his quirk to chase away the rush of blood caused by an impact. It would be gone before he reached school, of course—it always was.
Shouto avoided eye contact with Bakugou as he closed the gate behind him. He stuffed the flash drive in his pocket. “C’mon.”
Bakugou lingered. Shouto glanced back at him as he walked. Bakugou was looking at Shouto’s house, his expression turned to something hard.
“You can’t do anything, Bakugou,” Shouto said quietly. “Come on.”
Bakugou tore his gaze away from the house. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked on ahead of Shouto.
###
Finding an opening to give Aizawa the flash drive proved more difficult than anticipated. When Aizawa wasn’t surrounded by students, he was talking to them one-on-one. Shouto thought he’d found an opening at lunch, but then Present Mic entered the cafeteria and flung an arm around Aizawa. Shouto left them alone.
“Todoroki-kun.”
Shouto turned toward the familiar voice, his grip on the flash drive in his pocket going slack. Momo was holding a sleek gray lunchbox. Shouto wondered if she’d made it with her quirk. “Yaoyorozu?”
“Please eat lunch outside with me today.”
“Oh my god—” Kaminari’s voice. Hands grabbed onto Shouto’s shoulders from behind, Kaminari’s voice too loud in his ear. “—are you two dating? Two weeks into the semester? You got game, dude!”
Momo held up her free hand, giving a weak smile. “Nothing like that, Kaminari.”
Shouto shrugged out of Kaminari’s grip. No point putting this inevitable conversation off further. She’d been not-so-subtly sneaking glances at him ever since she’d seen him in a dress at the banquet. “Where?”
“I’ll wait for you outside the door.”
“Fine.”
Shouto grabbed an apple from the cafeteria line and headed to the courtyard.
Momo looked at the apple in Shouto’s hand as he closed the door behind him. “Is that all you’re eating?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You’ll be hungry later.”
“Doubt it.” He’d only grabbed this apple for appearances. His appetite was nonexistent.
Momo led Shouto to a deserted shady area. She rolled up her sleeve and produced a thin blanket from her arm, which she handed to Shouto. “Spread this?”
Shouto complied. Momo sat down on one corner and, after waiting for Shouto to sit at the other, starting unpacking her large lunch. It looked homemade, the deep tub of sushi complemented with a tall thermos and three cartons of orange juice. Shouto wondered if she ate that much at all her meals. “Do you always eat outside?”
“Mostly,” she said. “My lunch takes up a lot of room, and I don’t want to inconvenience anyone. Where do you eat?”
“Inside. With Kirishima and his friends.”
“Really? Are you friends with all of them?”
He mostly just sat with them because there was space. He didn’t talk unless someone asked him a direct question. Which they didn’t do often, thankfully. “I don’t know.”
Momo unscrewed the lid to her thermos, allowing a cloud of savory-smelling steam to emerge. Something tomatoey.
Shouto turned his apple around in his palm. If Momo wasn’t going to start this off, he might as well. “Have you told anyone yet?”
Momo’s eyebrows shot up as she raised her head. “A-about the banquet?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
She stared at him. “Sorry?”
“For you to not tell anybody.”
Momo looked down. She frowned.
“It surprised me,” she said. “I recognized you on the first day of class, but I thought… maybe you had a sister? And then you were so strong during the aptitude tests and the battle trial, I just… it seemed like you really knew who you were.”
Shouto’s hand grew sweaty around the apple. He had no idea where she was going with this. “You placed first in the aptitude test, though.”
“Yes. My performance was largely quirk-driven, though. I was able to make my own support items.” Momo dug a pair of reusable chopsticks from her lunch bag. She picked up a slice of sushi. “Forgive my frankness. I’m… I know how difficult it is to convince yourself and others that you can be a capable woman hero without male intervention. And I know that Endeavor isn’t known for being the most progressive Pro Hero in existence. I’m concerned that you’re experiencing some sort of sexism-driven abuse.”
Shouto tried to wrap his brain around the words. “What?”
“Is your father forcing you to act like a boy at school? I know he has several female sidekicks, but his rate for hiring women is lower than average, so if he doesn’t think that you can be a strong female hero… You’re obviously very strong, Todoroki-kun. Stronger than any of the boys in our class. With your quirk and maybe physically, too. I hope you don’t think—”
“No,” said Shouto.
Momo lowered her chopsticks. Waiting.
The situation was almost funny. Momo thought he was being forced to act like a boy? “That’s not the situation. I am a boy.”
Momo blinked. “My mother introduced you as Shiyo.”
He tried not to cringe at the name. “I’m… that at home. I’m Shouto here. My family doesn’t know.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not a girl. I’m a trans boy.”
Momo placed the slice of sushi back in its container. She sighed. “I’m sorry. I… misjudged what was going on.”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“Did I offend you?”
“I don’t care.”
Momo was silent for a while. Shouto sat still and watched her eat. The furious steaming from the thermos quieted to a gentle rolling, then to barely visible whisps.
Momo watched him back. It was less conscious, uncomfortable eye contact than it was mutual observation.
Once she’d finished her sushi and two of her orange juice cartons, Momo spoke again. “Is it difficult?”
“Is what difficult?”
“Being someone at home and someone else at school.”
“It’s fine,” Shouto said. “I’m used to hiding.”
Absently, Momo reached out. Her finger brushed the scar on Shouto’s face. She withdrew quickly, and Shouto was afraid for a second that he’d burned her.
But that was illogical. He had full control of his temperature right now, and while he didn’t always notice his right side malfunctioning, he always knew when his left side did. It felt less natural.
“Sorry,” Momo said, her cheeks tinging pink. “I—sorry. Just… I’m afraid for you. Are you okay?”
He’d given his answer hundreds of times. Fine. He was fine.
“No,” he said. “But there’s nothing you can do to help, so don’t worry about it. Are you going to tell anyone about the banquet?”
She shook her head.
“Okay.” Shouto stood. “I’m going back inside. I have something to do before lunch is over. Do you want this apple?”
“Um—”
He dropped the apple into her hands and left.
###
When he reentered the cafeteria, he found Aizawa standing by himself at the doorway. Aizawa looked at him as he walked in, gaze vacant and tired.
“Sensei,” Shouto said.
Aizawa nodded at him. “Todoroki.”
As discreetly as he could, he pushed the flash drive into Aizawa’s hand. Aizawa’s eyes narrowed as he took it.
“Please be careful who you show that to,” Shouto said. “I think he knows what you’re doing.”
Aizawa dropped the flash drive into his pocket. He gave a small nod as he looked away, face immediately vacant once again.
It was Shouto’s first indication that his homeroom teacher’s bored expression might serve a purpose similar to his own practiced poker face. It unnerved him.
Notes:
Can you tell that I ship Shouto with like half the characters in this story :') I JUST WANT HIM TO FEEL LOVED OK??
BTW thank y'all so much for all the thoughtful comments. They make me so happy :3
Chapter 15: Shouto Meets the League and Just Fucking Obliterates Them. Accidentally.
Summary:
Accidental coffee shop AU with Shouto and the League of Villains? No, you didn't ask.
Notes:
CW: talking about Toga's quirk, in case it makes you queasy. Pedophilia mention. Mentions of drug abuse. Implied transphobia.
I only sort of proofread this chapter, so forgive any typos/inconsistencies. Am tired.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Friday morning, Shouto left the house earlier than usual to avoid crossing paths with Endeavor, who had an interview at 9 a.m. and would probably be stomping around the house between the hours of six and seven looking for his perpetually misplaced formalwear. Today was going to be a long day--they had some big disaster relief training planned at school today, and he had training with Endeavor afterward--so Shouto decided to stop for coffee before he headed to school.
That was his first mistake.
Shouto usually stuck to chain stores—they had menus he could peruse online so he didn’t have to worry about deciding what he wanted on the spot—but this particular independent coffee shop was small and nearly always quiet, and the workers there didn’t push too hard for small talk.
He was surprised when he walked in and more than one table was filled, but he kept his attention on his phone as he waited behind the one person in line. Then he ordered his usual strawberry crème frappe and stood to the side, waiting.
The voices at one of the nearby tables had picked up, loud enough for Shouto to hear. “Don’t sell yourself short, hon, I think it was pretty smart of you to assign all those small fry where you did. Is he engaging?”
“He’s biting like a starved fish,” said another… disconcertingly familiar voice. And a giggle—one Shouto definitely recognized. “Ope! There goes another one.”
Shouto didn’t have to search long for the source of the voices. He saw the green hair first, and it put a twist in his stomach. Deku looked… spiffy today, a portion of his bangs pinned back neatly with a black barrette. A black-sequined vest hugged the forest-green dress shirt underneath it, and a bright red bow tie completed the ensemble. Deku huddled over an iPad, eyes bright. He held it out to the bulky woman sitting beside him, who hummed with a smile and patted his hand.
The others at the table weren’t less notable. One of them—a being whose face was less a face than an undulating black void with two glowing yellow eyes—was dressed similarly well, sitting with his hands folded behind a cup of black coffee. On the opposite side of the table sat two men. One was hunched over, absently scratching his elbow, his lowered face hidden by frizzy white—no, blue-tinted—hair. In sharp contrast, the other man sat sprawled, one arm draped over the back of the blue-haired man’s chair, the other loosely gripping a larger version of the same strawberry crème frappe Shouto had ordered.
This last man struck Shouto as the strangest.
While he sat in his chair like it was his living room couch, he looked like he ought to be in a hospital bed. Large portions of skin—his arms, his entire neck, his lower jaw, even half-ovals beneath his icy blue eyes—were a deeply-scarred dark purple. Was that… burned skin? Skin grafts? Shouto couldn’t tell. Only that it connected to the man’s healthy skin with what looked like ring piercings.
Shouto squinted. No. Not piercings.
Staples.
The realization sent a pain response down Shouto’s spine. It was almost more uncomfortable than the realization that he recognized the fitted knit tank top the man was wearing.
Shouto tuned back into the group’s conversation when the scarred man started talking. The man’s voice wasn’t an exact replica of Reflection’s, but Shouto recognized the way he dragged his vowels low, like the sharp tip of a shovel carving a trail through the dirt. “Nah, I was definitely high the entire time. You expect me to walk into that cunt’s agency without having a fucking cocktail shot of drugs in my system?”
Deku spoke. “Did you just mix it all into your blood smoothie each morning, or…?”
“Blood smoothie?” the woman questioned.
“Yeah, Dabi had to drink a little vial of that paedo’s blood every morning with a quirk enhancer so his disguise and mirror quirk would work.” Deku paused long enough to hide a sprouting grin behind his hand. He snorted. “Totally threw up the first time he tried to get it down, so he started mixing it into a f—fucking fruit smoothie.”
The woman whacked her large hand against the table as she laughed. “Oh! God. I can see you using cocaine as the base powder—”
“Oh and you know it’s going in that I hate Mondays tumbler he stole from one of his exes,” Deku said. “Garnished with a marijuana leaf, a drizzle of Absinthe, and a dusting of Ativan—”
“You guys tryna fuckin’ kill me?” the scarred man asked, a lazy smirk on his face.
“Strawberry crème frappe for Shouto,” the barista called.
Fuck.
Deku and the scarred man’s heads whipped up first, the rest of the group (with the exception of the blue-haired man, who stayed hunched over) looking up a few seconds later.
“Oh shit,” said the bulky woman, her hand going to her side. Shouto flinched at the motion, raising his right hand. He could probably freeze the whole table if he moved fast, avoid a massacre—
“Nah, it’s fine,” said the scarred man, waving a dismissive hand. His mouth stretched in a smile, tugging at the staples near the corners of his lips. “Shouto, relax. You know me.”
Shouto lowered his hand, keeping the coolness gathered under his skin on-call. Reflection, right. So this scarred, stapled man was Dabi. This was the true appearance of the man who’d driven him to school for a week, who’d utterly destroyed him in the training room, who’d cauterized his wound, who’d gathered evidence for Shouto to use against Endeavor.
Knowing that was supposed to make him… relax?
It was also strange hearing the person who was supposed to be Reflection calling him Shouto. Not a bad strange, really, just… Reflection had started out in that part of his life, the part with Endeavor and all the expectations that came from him, and if Dabi wasn’t part of that but also wasn’t part of his school life, then where did Dabi fit in?
Deku waved at him. “Hey, come sit! You got a while before school starts, right?”
He said it like an invitation, but Shouto couldn’t help processing it as a command. Shouto looked at Dabi, who raised his eyebrows and motioned to the empty chair beside him.
Shouto picked up his frappe. He settled halfway into the chair beside Dabi and across from the… void man, who hadn’t spoken or moved during the entire exchange except to continue flickering vaguely upwards.
Dabi bumped the side of his frappe against Shouto’s. A faint whiff of weed drifted toward Shouto. “Didn’t peg you for someone who likes sugar.”
“Ha! You guys got the same drink?” Deku said. “That’s cute.”
Shouto felt the fingers of his right hand frost over. He pulled back some of the cold. “Endeavor doesn’t like me having much sugar.”
“Ugh. Let’s not talk about that bastard before breakfast,” said the woman. She held her coffee cup up in Shouto’s direction. “I’m Big Sis Magne, she/her. Fuck Endeavor, yeah?”
Dabi tapped his plastic cup against Magne’s. “Fuck Endeavor.”
Deku joined with his latte. “Fuck Endeavor.”
Shouto could feel various eyes from around the coffee shop on him. He didn’t blame them—a student in a UA uniform must look odd surrounded by a heavily scarred man, a well-dressed void, an unkempt man who wouldn’t look up, and a masculine woman. People who slid into the villain stereotype like a foot slid into a shoe.
He huffed a not-quite laugh from his nose and raised his cup. “Fuck Endeavor.”
“Hell yeah,” Magne said. She and Deku high-fived, his hand tiny against hers. “I told you I could get him to say it.”
“I never doubted you!” Deku said. He returned his attention to Shouto, smiling. “I guess we should introduce you to the other two. Or do you guys want to introduce yourselves?”
The blue-haired man made some cross between a hiss and a grunt. He didn’t look up, and he spoke just loudly enough for Shouto to hear him, voice raspy like he’d recently woken up from an unsatisfying nap. “You should be doing your fucking job right now. I don’t get how you can be so casual.”
The void man spoke for the first time, his voice startlingly clear and low. “The young master isn’t wrong, Deku-san. Please pay attention to your work.” His gloved hand enveloped the coffee cup in front of him. To Shouto—“I am Kurogiri.”
Shouto barely gave the name space to stick in his mind. He was focusing on Kurogiri’s words—young master. So this blue-haired person was their leader?
And what was it they were working on? Did it have to do with Deku’s iPad and the “small fry” he was apparently assigning places? Did Deku have some sort of place of authority within the villain hierarchy that allowed him to tell other villains where to go?
“I don’t know why you’re all giving him your fucking names,” the blue-haired man muttered.
“One ought to be polite,” said Kurogiri.
“It’s fine if you don’t tell me,” Shouto said carefully. “I don’t really care.”
The man’s head snapped up at that, thin red eyes meeting Shouto’s.
“Shigaraki Tomura,” he rasped. “Don’t forget it.”
Shouto looked him over. He realized with some surprise that the man was hardly a man at all, his face still young despite the red blotches and scarring. From chronic dry skin? He seemed to have some sort of skin condition.
Shouto took a sip from his drink as he met Shigaraki’s eyes again, the straw dragging on an air pocket and turning the sip exponentially louder than he’d anticipated.
He startled as the table—well, Dabi, Deku, and Magne—burst into laughter. Deku gasped to Magne and Dabi, “Did you—? Did you see him just—!”
“He just—” Magne squinted suspiciously, mimed putting a straw between her lips, and burst out laughing again.
Shigaraki had gone red-faced. He glared at Shouto as he stood, his chair screeching back.
Alarm pinged in Shouto’s chest. He put his drink down. “Did I do something?” he asked, unsure who to address. He picked Dabi. “I don’t understand. What did I do?”
“Nothin’, kid.” Dabi’s wide grin said otherwise as he grabbed Shigaraki’s elbow and tugged him down. “Shiggy, chill. Kid’s shit at social cues. He didn’t mean anything bad. Probably.”
Shigaraki sank back in his chair with a hiss, keeping his venomous gaze fixed on Shouto. “Watch yourself, hero.”
Anxiety bit at the inside of Shouto’s stomach. He was overcome with the urge to leave. He moved to stand, but he’d barely flinched before Dabi laid his arm across the back of Shouto’s chair, resting his pale fingers lightly on Shouto’s opposite shoulder.
Shouto was careful not to move, keeping his breaths light. For most of the time they’d known each other, Reflection had avoided touching him. What had changed? Was this a threat? Shouto had apparently slighted Shigaraki by taking a drink, which made Shouto wary of all the other (potentially dangerous) social cues he might be missing.
“Oh, by the way,” Deku said to Shouto, “have you heard anything about that paedo in the hospital?”
“The one you tried to burn alive?” Shouto said. Paedo—was Deku just name-calling or was the kindergartener’s father really a sexual predator? “No, I haven’t heard anything.”
“Well, let me know if you do. Hospitals tend to be stingy with patient information, so it’s better to outsource.” Deku took a sip of his latte. “I’mma finish him off. Hey, Dabi, what if we adopt his daughter? I always thought it’d be super cute for all of us to raise a little kid. You know, like a community effort?”
“Eh,” said Dabi. His fingers tapped a light, random rhythm on Shouto’s shoulder. He nodded at Shigaraki. “We already have one toddler.”
Shigaraki shot out of his chair. He cast a harsh glare in Dabi’s direction before he stormed out of the building, the group’s laughter following him.
“Oh, boy,” Deku said, grinning after him. “He’s gonna disintegrate somebody, isn’t he?”
“You shouldn’t provoke him so much.” Kurogiri stood, smoothing his vest. “I’ll go talk him down. Please make wiser choices in the future, Dabi.”
Dabi gave a loose two-fingered salute. “Sure thing, Mom.”
Shouto watched him leave. Shouto should be leaving, too, really. Were they keeping him here for a reason? Something was bound to happen with so many villains gathered in the same building.
“So how’s school, Shouto?” Dabi asked, tapping his shoulder.
Focus. If he let his attention drift, he could get killed. “S’fine,” he said.
“Deku tells me you have at least one friend. Some pretty boy with a hardening quirk?” Shouto must’ve let something slip through his expression, because Dabi laughed. “I’m not spying on your friends, kid. Deku just won’t shut the fuck up, ever, so I end up absorbing information whether I want to or not.”
Shouto looked at Deku, who blushed and looked down at his iPad.
“You look like you got questions,” Dabi said.
Shouto didn’t like how easily Dabi was reading him. “Yes.”
Dabi quirked an eyebrow.
“Did you steal his car?” Shouto asked. At Dabi’s blank look, he continued, “When you were Reflection, you had a car that used live video instead of mirrors. And had a child’s car seat in the back.”
“Oh… yeah, yeah I did.” Dabi leaned back in his seat, took a loud sip from his frappe. “Not at first. Had to go back after I realized it wasn’t safe to drive in a normal car with his quirk.”
“After he backed into a fire hydrant,” Deku corrected.
“Do you have a license?” Shouto asked Dabi.
Dabi looked at him. “Mm?”
“I wasn’t sure if you were driving like that because you weren’t familiar with the car.”
“Driving like what?”
“Really badly.” He paused. “Unless that and your clothes were part of your disguise.”
“My… clothes?”
“The cargo pants.” Shouto nodded. “With that shirt. That’s not something a normal person would wear, so I thought maybe you were putting on a persona? That and the four-chord pop music you had on while you were driving.”
Dabi took his arm away from Shouto. Ran his tongue along his bottom lip.
Shouto realized too late. “Unless those are just… your clothes and music.”
Deku didn’t look up from his iPad. “Dabi, I thought you said his fire quirk wasn’t as powerful as yours.”
“S’not,” Dabi said, still eyeing Shouto.
“But he just fucking roasted you.”
Shouto’s attention was drawn to the two baristas behind the counter. They were looking at the group of villains and talking in hushed voices to each other. They seemed nervous. Shouto didn’t think they could hear what the villain group was talking about with all the noisy machinery behind the counter, so he wondered if it was just their appearances—Dabi and Magne in particular—that had them on edge.
The thought didn’t appeal to him. While Shouto’s scars weren’t as frightening on Shouto as Dabi’s were on him, Shouto still had them. And if he was right, he and Magne had something in common, too. He didn’t understand why people reacted so animatedly (for better or worse) toward trans feminine people and then turned around and forgot that trans masculine people existed, but…
The conversation at the table had since moved on. Shouto tuned back in as Magne hovered over Deku’s iPad. “You could send this guy another street over so All Might will be more likely to see him. But I’d space that one out a bit so he doesn’t try to capture them both with one blow. The goal’s to draw this out as long as possible, right?”
Deku nodded, then hesitated. “Well, I’m not sure if his time limit is fixed or if the extent to which he uses his quirk exacerbates the… uh, deflation. If it’s the latter, it’d be better to group them.”
“Hm,” Magne said, narrowing her eyes. “Dabi, opinion?”
Dabi waved a dismissive hand. He was staring above their heads at an abstract painting on the wall—the kind you could buy for 3,000 yen at a department store. “Not my mission. I'm just here for coffee.”
“What are you doing?” Shouto asked Deku.
Deku looked up. “It’s a game. Wanna play?”
“No.” He paused. “Can I ask more questions?”
“Of course.”
“Why did you bomb that bridge?”
Deku’s face scrunched. He set his iPad on the table. A street map was opened on the screen, littered with small red dots. “Shit, that feels like it was half a month ago.”
“It… it was. Two weeks.”
“There were a few reasons.” Deku looked at Dabi. “I can tell him, right?”
Dabi flicked the end of his plastic straw with his thumb. He was still looking at the painting, his brilliant blue eyes glazed over.
“Dabi,” Deku said.
Dabi blinked, adjusting in his seat. “I don’t give a fuck. Your dad pulled most of the strings on that one, anyway.”
Deku’s dad? Shouto knew, logically, that Deku was around his age, and that meant that he probably still had a caretaker. But… a dad? A villain dad? Was that better or worse than having a Pro Hero for a father?
Deku focused on Shouto again, holding up a finger. “One reason was to convince Fuyumi-san that it was reasonable and not creepy at all for one of Endeavor’s sidekicks to drive her younger sibling to school every day. If someone you care about almost gets blown up on the way to school, you’re gonna be more concerned about basic safety than about the possibility that the Pro Hero who’s supposed to be protecting your little brother is actually planning on kidnapping and feeding him to the two-inch-tall carnivorous pet bunnies he keeps in the pockets of his cargo pants. Right?”
Shouto glanced at Dabi’s legs. He was wearing black cuffed jeans now instead of cargo pants, but—
“Dabi also wanted to know how you performed in the field,” Deku continued. “And the subsequent paperwork gave him an opportunity to talk with Fuyumi.”
Shouto didn’t like how often Fuyumi’s name was coming up in this conversation. He addressed Dabi. “Why did you want to talk to Fuyumi?”
“Mm?” Dabi slid his gaze toward Shouto. “Just—y’know. Info.”
He filed that away for later. He’d have to ask Fuyumi what she and Reflection talked about.
“There’s a third reason, but it’s a bit more complicated and doesn’t have to do with you or Endeavor, so you probably don’t care.” Deku picked up his iPad again, smiling. “Other questions? I love questions.”
“Um—” He wanted to ask Deku what the fuck was wrong with him, but that might not go over well. He was still waiting for the boy’s act to break. Waiting until Shouto did or said something at an angle that made Deku’s kind smile snap in half like a rubber band. Even if it hadn’t happened yet—even if Deku seemed to like him for some unfathomable reason—Shouto needed to be careful. “Who was the person driving the motorcycle for you before the bombing?”
“Huh? Oh, that was just Dabi’s clone. He exploded, so don’t worry about him.”
“Okay.” Now there were clones? Just how big was their network? “What’s your quirk?”
Deku gave an abrupt, nervous laugh. “Hey, uh. At least take me to dinner first.”
So he’d hit a wall. Was it worth trying to find his way around it with other questions? Should they be less or more pointed? It seemed like Deku was always dumping buckets’ worth of jigsaw puzzle pieces at Shouto’s feet and gloating over how Shouto had no idea how to begin sorting through the information.
What could he do with the information that Deku had a father? That their team had someone with a cloning quirk? Fucking nothing, and Deku was likely smart enough to have figured that out ahead of time. Maybe the police could do something with the information, but…
Deku was helping him. Dabi was helping him.
The police had never done that.
No one had ever done that.
“Excuse me?” The voice didn’t belong to anyone from their table, and Shouto looked up to see one of the baristas standing in front of him, her hands folded in front of her stomach. “I-I’m going to have to ask you guys to leave. You’re disturbing the other customers.”
Dabi hummed. He’d folded in on himself gradually after Shouto had sat beside him, but Shouto noticed the way he readjusted now. Elbow over the back of his chair, legs spreading, arm lazing across the table to spin his empty plastic cup—taking up as much space as possible. “Who’s complainin’?”
“I haven’t seen anyone complain,” said Magne. She looked at Deku. “Have you?”
“Nope,” said Deku.
The barista’s face flushed. She glanced at Shouto.
Shouto stared back. Did she expect him to help her?
“I’m sorry,” she said, very pointedly talking to not Shouto. “I’m going to have to call the cops if you don’t leave.”
Dabi gave a low whistle. “That’s a long sentence for someone with flammable eyelashes, Babycakes.”
“Ex—excuse me?”
“Ya heard me.”
Shouto pulled his wallet from his pocket. He took out two 10,000-yen bills and handed them to the barista.
She looked at him, wide-eyed, lips pursed.
“Leave us the fuck alone?” he said. “Thanks.”
The barista blinked. She took the money and retreated behind the counter.
“Woah,” Magne said as soon as the barista was out of earshot. “Well—thanks? I think?”
Shouto shrugged as he picked up his drink and took a sip. “Not my money.”
“I, um.” Deku looked down at his iPad, then up at Shouto. He blushed. “That was hot.”
“What?”
“I-I said what a thot. Jesus. Fucking bigots. Can I buy you another drink, Shouto? Or like a muffin or something?”
“No.” Shouto stood and pushed his chair in. He was vibrating with nervous energy, and he wasn’t confident that he could stay in this shop for much longer without doing or saying something incredibly stupid. “I need to leave. I have school.”
“Oh! Right, you do,” said Deku. “See you there, then.”
Shouto stilled. See you there? “What do you mean?”
“Huh?”
Shouto hesitated. “You said—”
“He’s just messing with you,” said Dabi. He saw Dabi’s leg move sharply under the table, and Deku gave a small yelp. “Go to school, kid. I’ll see you around.”
Shouto nodded. He threw away the remainder of his frappe before he left the store. Shigaraki and Kurogiri didn’t seem to be anywhere around, but then again, Shouto didn’t look very hard. He started toward the subway station.
See you there.
What the fuck were they planning?
Notes:
*after Shouto leaves*
Magne: *produces her giant magnet weapon from out of nowhere, BONKs Deku on the head* go to horny jail
Chapter 16: Shouto is Disappointed but Not Surprised
Summary:
USJ. Bakugou and Shouto vs. Deku. It goes wonderfully.
Notes:
CW: canon-typical violence, slight gore, probably lots of inaccurate medical stuff because I didn't feel like doing even more research hrng
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto had known it was coming. After running into the villains at the coffee shop, after seeing Deku messing with a map on his iPad and lying about what it was, after a black pit formed in his stomach and stayed with him all through homeroom, how could he not?
He’d just been… distracted.
Which wasn’t an excuse, of course it wasn’t, but what was he supposed to do when Aizawa stopped him on his way in and asked him to stay after school? Not think about it? As much as he’d tried not to, he’d gotten his hopes up that something would come of him telling his teachers about his father’s abuse. Deku had told him earlier via the message app that they’d hit a wall with CPS—had that changed? Were things progressing? He’d wondered if they’d bother letting him know once they decided to give up.
That was what Shouto was thinking about as he changed into his hero costume. That was what he was thinking about when the class piled into a bus to head to some far-off corner of campus none of them had ever visited. That was what he was thinking about as Kaminari, Sero, and Mina got into a heated discussion over whether the Pro Hero Thirteen was a man or a woman.
(When asked, Aizawa replied, “They’re a void.”)
And that was what Shouto was thinking about all the way up until a portal opened in the Central Plaza of the Unforeseen Simulation Joint.
A familiar pair of smudged yellow eyes hovered over the undulating black circle, unblinking, ever-watchful as dozens of villains filtered through.
Kurogiri.
At U.A.
Inside U.A.
And Shouto wasn’t surprised, not really, but also… he’d been hoping for an easy practical training today. Pull some mannequins out from a landslide, perform CPR on fake drowned people.
Goddammit.
Shouto didn’t pay attention to the motion around him. Kirishima asking frantic questions, Aizawa and Thirteen yelling orders at his classmates and at each other. Shouto just stood still and watched the villains. He looked around for Deku, Magne, and Dabi, but he didn’t see them. He did see a man with familiar blue-tinted hair, though his face was blocked from view by… a severed hand?
“Where’s All Might?” Shigaraki asked no one, looking around. He scratched his neck, his head tilting to one side. The severed hand on his face wasn’t alone—it found company in at least a dozen hands wrapped around Shigaraki’s neck, down and under his arms, tugging him in a dozen different directions. Shigaraki raised his voice. “All Might was supposed to be here. Where’s All Might?”
Something tall and beastly stepped out of the portal. Shouto had met many mutant types in his life, but he couldn’t imagine that this was human—eyes lazy and bugging, brain exposed, unclothed with a sleek black exterior. It looked like a science experiment.
Shigaraki didn’t acknowledge the creature as it came to a halt behind him. He just scratched his neck harder, feverishly. Shouto could see tracks of blood forming.
“Wonder if he’ll show up if we kill some kids,” Shigaraki said.
Maybe Shouto should just… freeze all the villains right now? They probably had measures against that since Deku was on their team and knew about Shouto’s quirk, but it was worth a shot. Shouto raised his right hand.
And was immediately swallowed by darkness.
###
Not half a second later, his knees hit hard rock. Shouto scrambled for proprioception. He looked above him to see a rapidly shrinking black portal. By the time Shouto blinked, it had closed.
So he’d been warped. To where?
He couldn’t see the sky, just semi-opaque panels far above him. So he was still inside the USJ. Just in a different section. He took in the giant hill of loosely-packed rock and dirt in front of him and tried to remember the speech Thirteen had given just a few minutes ago.
Something white peeked out from the rocks a few meters away. Shouto walked forward and tugged on it, revealing a mannequin’s arm.
So this was the landslide zone. It was rather expansive, and with all the boulders and mounds of broken slate, it was anyone’s guess as to whether he’d been warped here alone.
A voice sang from the top of the mound. “Heyooo! Shouto!”
Shouto looked up.
He recognized the waving villain with a jolt—not by his face or hair, which were covered except for the eyes with a black baclava, but by the forest-green dress shirt, black sequined vest, and bright red bow tie.
Deku.
Deku was here.
Of course Deku was here.
Then Deku moved, riding a large piece of slate like a fucking surfboard down the hill toward Shouto. A troupe of broken rocks followed in his wake, forcing Shouto to stumble back so he wouldn’t be crushed in the onslaught. Deku jumped off his piece of slate just before he reached the bottom, feet touching down on solid ground.
It wasn’t a feat Shouto could have accomplished. And Deku had made it look… easy. It took Shouto a moment to find his voice. “Are you trying to kill All Might?”
“Like, me, personally?” Deku asked, pressing a hand to his chest. “Or do you mean the League of Villains? Because Shiggy is totally trying to kill All Might. It’s a whole thing for him.”
The League of Villains. So they had a name.
“Anyway, I’m either supposed to beat the living shit out of you or zip-tie you so you can’t assist in the un-killing of All Might.” Deku pulled a handful of colorful zip ties from his pocket. He tugged his baclava up to his hairline, revealing a sweaty but bright face. A lock of green hair flopped down over one eye. “What’s your opinion on All Might? I think he’s super cool. I mean, that’s an understatement. You’ll know once you get to know me better. I’ve seen all his documentaries, listened to all the interviews, bought all the—”
Shouto shoved his foot forward, sending a shock of ice up toward Deku. Deku sidestepped it.
Deku should not have been able to sidestep that.
It was one of Shouto’s better moves, working from the floor up to catch his sparring partner by surprise. He’d pretty much perfected it, maxing out his speed and precision. It had worked on several Pro Heroes.
“—merch,” Deku finished weakly, looking disappointed. He was dwarfed by the tall block of ice beside him, but the fact that it was beside him instead of encasing him made Deku all the more terrifying. “Are we gonna fight?”
Shouto flexed his right hand at his side, frost crackling along his knuckles. “I don’t want my classmates or teachers to get hurt,” he said, and he realized as he said it that it was true.
“Understandable! Come at me, bro.” He stuffed the zip ties back in his pocket and opened his arms wide in invitation—it was unclear as to whether the motion was an invitation for a punch or for a hug—only to lower them a couple seconds later. “Oh, but I do need to let you know that you’re not going to win this fight. Just as, like, a disclaimer. Sorry.”
He’d fought a lot of fights like that. Won very, very few of them.
If Shouto didn’t let those strange green eyes scare him, maybe this could be one of the few.
He sent another wave of ice, this time from the right, sweeping left in a sharp arc. But when his ice reached its destination, Deku wasn’t there anymore.
He was in Shouto’s face, jabbing a knee into Shouto’s stomach.
Shouto stumbled back, struggling to catch his breath. He’d barely straightened up when Deku was there again, throwing a punch so strong it jabbed straight past Shouto’s parry. He felt the hit from his chest wall all the way to his spine.
“Y’know, your fire would be good defense for a time like this,” Deku said, his voice smooth as he aimed a kick for Shouto’s legs.
Shouto jumped to dodge it. Deku used the moment of imbalance to knock Shouto off his feet with a punch to the jaw.
Shouto hit the ground hard, chin smarting.
Fuck. Fuck. Reflection had used a similar move back when he and Shouto had sparred. Dabi and Deku probably practiced together or some shit. Shouto scrambled to get up, but Deku jabbed the heel of his boot into the soft of Shouto’s stomach, knocking him back to the ground.
“Hey, Shouto,” Deku said, “when’s your next training session with your dad?”
Shouto racked his brain. “U-um. Today. After school.”
“Hm.” Deku looked off in the distance, face pinched in thought. When Shouto raised his right hand, Deku dropped down on top of Shouto, straddling him. He grabbed Shouto’s forearm and twisted.
Shouto gasped at the pain that shot through his elbow. He lost his grip on his ice, the cold he’d called to his hands slipping back into the atmosphere.
“What if I shot you in the leg?” Deku asked. “He wouldn’t make you train then, probably.”
Only now was Shouto aware of the bulge at Deku’s side. A holster, half hidden by his sequined vest.
They were nearly impossible to obtain in Japan, but the evidence was there. Deku was carrying a gun.
“Don’t do that,” Shouto said, panic rocketing through him. “Do not do that.”
“It doesn’t hurt that much. Plus you’ll be off your feet for a few weeks. That might even be enough time to take Endeavor down.” Deku’s eyes went to Shouto’s twisted arm. Deku made a noise to the effect of a squeak before releasing it. “Shit, sorry! Forgot I was still doing that.”
A familiar—loud—voice interrupted. “Oi, Shitty Sparkle Vest Villain! DIE!”
Something in Deku’s eyes changed—a brief flash of intent, one that quickly faded and was replaced by a smile. “Kacchan.” Deku pulled down his mask. “I was wondering where he got dropped.”
Bakugou came barreling down one of the smaller hills, only half-running—the moving rock did most of the work. His descent was a lot less graceful than Deku’s had been. “Get off him! I’ll fucking KILL Y—”
Deku stood at the exact moment Bakugou’s hand approached his face, catching his right hook, hurtling him over his head, and slamming him into the ground.
Bakugou grunted as he hit. Silt flew. A plastic crack—Bakugou’s gauntlet?
Shouto tried to stretch out his hand to send another wave of ice in Deku’s direction—maybe he’d be easier to take down with Bakugou fighting, too?—but his elbow wouldn’t move. He looked down at it. It looked… strange. Dislocated, maybe? He’d dislocated his shoulders before, but never an elbow.
Fuck, it hurt. Something was wrong with it.
“Always with the right hook,” Deku muttered. He stepped off Shouto before kicking Bakugou hard in the ribs, flipping him onto his back. He dug his boot into Bakugou’s sternum. “Your attacks would be more effective if you didn’t yell beforehand, but I guess telling you that is kinda like telling a dog not to bark at a mail truck, huh?”
Bakugou paused when Deku spoke. Just for a second or two, blinking angrily like he was trying to remember something. Then fury overtook the confusion, and Bakugou aimed an explosion for Deku’s leg.
Deku sidestepped it. He brought his foot down on Bakugou’s wrist. There was a loud crack—the type Shouto was familiar with. The crack of bone.
“Gnh—” The noise was strangled in Bakugou’s throat. He sat up halfway, then flopped back down in pain. “FUCK—”
“Sorry!” Deku said. “You were about to explode my leg. Speaking of which.”
Deku pulled out his gun and fired two quick rounds—one into Bakugou’s leg, one into Shouto’s. Shouto was vaguely aware of Bakugou’s loud swearing as pain rocketed up his own leg, flooding out all other thoughts.
“Sorry again,” said Deku. “You guys can’t follow me. I didn’t think you’d listen if I just told you.”
“Well, no fucking shit!” Bakugou yelled. He grabbed for Deku’s leg with his uninjured hand, hand grasping air. “Show me your face, you shitty villain! Fucking coward!”
Deku pressed his earpiece as he walked away. “Kurogiri, bring me back, please? I finished earlier than I expected.”
Shouto struggled to his feet, keeping his weight on his uninjured leg as best he could. His elbow wouldn’t bend, but if he used his shoulder, he could still more or less aim his right hand—
Deku turned and fired a shot. Shouto felt a light stinging in his fingers and pulled his hand back toward him to examine it. The tips of his middle and index fingers were bleeding—barely more than a papercut.
Had Deku done that on purpose? Aimed the bullet at the very tips of his fingers?
“Shouto,” Deku said, all hints of his bright smile gone from his voice, “I won’t kill you, but I can hurt you really bad. Please don’t make me.”
“Ice the fucker,” Bakugou growled.
Shouto lowered his hand, cradling it to his chest to keep from jostling his dislocated elbow. Deku nodded, holstered his pistol, and walked through a portal that had just opened in front of him.
In two seconds, he was gone.
“Oi!” Bakugou said. “Why the fuck didn’t you—”
“I wouldn’t have won that fight,” Shouto said. “Even in my best condition. I’ve sparred enough people to know.”
“What if he goes off and kills some of our classmates?”
“He won’t,” said Shouto.
“How the fuck can you know that? And why’d he call you Shouto? You saw his face, right? You know that fucker?”
Shouto blinked. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from where Deku had disappeared.
Deku had almost succeeding in convincing Shouto that he cared about Shouto’s wellbeing. That he wanted Shouto to like him as a person. Was all of that acting? Or was Deku fighting for something even more important to him than Shouto’s approval?
Shouto couldn’t imagine that Deku’s goals aligned perfectly with Shigaraki’s. Deku had a fucking All Might phone case, after all. What was Deku getting out of this?
“Oi,” said Bakugou.
“N-no. I don’t know him,” said Shouto. He looked down at Bakugou, who’d rolled onto his side, his crushed wrist laid flat against the sand. Shouto couldn’t tell how much his leg was bleeding since the sand was soaking everything up.
Bakugou’s eyes were red, two shiny trails on his cheeks. Shouto wondered if he was aware of it.
“Fuck are you lookin’ at?” Bakugou barked.
“You’re crying,” Shouto said.
Bakugou gave a wet, gross sniff. “It fucking hurts, asshole. Can’t help it. It’s—they’re an involuntary reflex to pain.”
Wasn’t that what all tears were? “I can ice your wound.”
“Then do it.”
Shouto knelt beside Bakugou. “My elbow’s dislocated. I need your help to reset it before I can do anything.”
Bakugou looked at it, his nose scrunching. “I don’t… know how to do that. Might make it worse.”
“It’s fine.” The twitching, throbbing pain in his arm rivaled the bullet wound. His hand was going numb. “Can you try?”
“Only got one good hand.”
“I’ll help.”
Bakugou looked profoundly uncomfortable as he sat up and wrapped his sweaty palm around Shouto’s forearm. “So I… twist toward me?”
“Yeah. I’m holding it still beneath the joint.”
Bakugou adjusted his grip. “You gonna count down, or…?”
“What for?” Shouto asked. “Just do it now.”
Bakugou nodded. Flexed his fingers. Then he twisted.
The intense flash of discomfort made Shouto’s vision go dark. But the pain faded quickly after that. Shouto stretched his arm outward carefully, flexing his fingers as feeling returned to his arm.
“That was freaky as fuck,” Bakugou said, lowering his hand. He dropped onto his back, chest heaving. “Don’t ever fucking make me do that again.”
Shouto tore Bakugou’s pant leg open enough so he could access the wound. It was dark and nasty, but he’d seen worse. He plugged the wound with ice—temperature lower than usual to keep it from melting—letting it overlap onto the uninjured skin to secure it in place. He did the same with his own wound.
“Any idea where the hell we are?” Bakugou asked. “We gotta get back to the Central Plaza. I have an idea for how to take down that misty fucker. These villains ain’t getting anywhere without him.”
Kurogiri? “You won’t be able to get close enough to him to attack the plates around his true body. What’s your plan?”
“I’m gonna attack the plates around his true—” Bakugou cut himself off as Shouto’s words caught up to him. He twisted his mouth in a frustrated scowl. “You do it, then! Freeze ’im in place and I’ll go explode him.”
Shouto pushed himself to his feet. It hurt. He felt unsteady. “He’ll just warp out of my ice. I don’t think we have anyone besides Aizawa who can prevent him from warping.”
“Aizawa’s probably busy with that hand-covered creep and his posse,” said Bakugou. “I’ll just have to knock Misty the fuck out so he can’t use his quirk.”
Shouto doubted Bakugou would be able to fight an adult villain successfully, but he doubted even more that he’d be able to convince Bakugou not to fight. “Can you even walk?”
“You’re standing, aren’t you?”
“I’m accustomed.”
“Fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Bakugou sat up, then struggled to stand. As soon as he put weight on his injured leg, he gave a sharp curse and dropped to his hands and knees, dry heaving into the silt.
Shouto watched Bakugou’s blond hair spikes bob as he spat out bile, spit stringing from his lips. He felt strangely removed from the situation, oddly objective, like he’d watched this scene twenty times before. He searched his brain for a collection of words that a normal person might say in this situation. He found Are you okay? and quickly rejected it.
“Should I carry you?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou wiped his mouth on his sleeve before raising his head, eyes burning with loathing. “Fuck you.”
Fair. He should’ve expected that.
Shouto took a few steps away, then turned and looked back at Bakugou. “Bakugou.”
“What?”
“I’m going to leave you here. Do you want me to make you some water before I go?”
“The fuck you’re leaving me here.” Bakugou tried to get to his feet a second time. The process looked torturous, but he made it, slouching forward like he was carrying a weight from his neck. “Stop… fuckin’ looking down on me. I can deal with as much pain as you can.”
There was no reason Bakugou should be able to deal with as much pain as Shouto could. What, did Bakugou think Shouto was proud of his pain threshold? “I’m not going to slow down.”
“Good. I’ll kill you if you do.”
They started across the landslide terrain, weaving through boulders twice Shouto’s height and sidestepping half-buried mannequins. Each step hurt, threatening to jog his memory of that morning with Endeavor when Shouto had gotten a piece of brick stuck in his leg. Shouto tried to focus on the pavilion in the distance.
Bakugou started falling behind before they were out of the landslide zone. Shouto pretended not to notice at first, but when he heard Bakugou trip and let out a string of curses, he looked back.
Bakugou was gathering himself from a jutting pile of slate. He swore under his breath and angrily kicked at it as he stood. The pile shifted beneath him, and he fell again.
“What are you doing?” Shouto asked. “You’re wasting time.”
Bakugou’s chest heaved once. Twice.
Then he slammed his fist into the ground, punctuating the motion with an explosion that kicked up dirt and silt. His voice went high. Cracked. “Fuck!”
Bakugou doubled into himself. He clutched his arms against his chest like he was protecting something. Shoulders quaking, breaths uneven.
Shouto was uncomfortable.
“I’ll… go on ahead,” Shouto said. “You can stay here.”
“How are you…” Bakugou’s voice crawled low like a poisoned wasp, like one well-aimed smack could crush it into paste. “How? Why can’t I ever keep up with you? You don’t even care about becoming a Hero.”
Shouto didn’t know what to say. Was he supposed to deny the claim, say that he did care about becoming a Hero? Shouto wasn’t stupid—he knew that something about his approach to heroism was different from his classmates. They had reasons for wanting to be a Hero. Shouto’s passion for heroics was similar to his passion for drinking water; he did it so he wouldn’t die.
“What kind of fuckin’ hero—can’t even keep his fuckin’ classmates from fuckin’ dying, just…” Bakugou’s voice grew muddled with emotion and accelerated breathing as he continued, until Shouto couldn’t be sure if Bakugou was just talking to himself. “S’not natural. Y’shouldn’t be like that. You’re fifteen, you shouldn’t be like that. If I weren’t so fuckin’ weak—if I weren’t—I could’ve done somethin’ about Endeavor. Then you wouldn’t be so used to this shit. And I could fucking crush you.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shouto asked. “You’ve known me for two weeks. I didn’t develop my pain tolerance in two weeks.”
“Not fucking—not just you,” said Bakugou. “You’re not the fucking first.”
That Quirkless middle school classmate Bakugou had talked about when he thought Shouto was asleep. What was his name? Izuku? Not that it mattered.
“Right,” Shouto said. “I’m not sure what you need now, and I doubt you’re going to tell me, so I’m just going to leave you here. Have a… nice panic attack.”
“Fuck you,” said Bakugou. “If your puny ass can fight with a bullet wound, I can fight with a bullet wound.”
Puny? “I’m taller than you.”
“Shut up,” said Bakugou. “Be my cane.”
Shouto wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “What?”
Bakugou looked up. His face was red. “I said be my fucking cane, you stale fuck wipe! I’m not gonna let you fuckin’ carry me, but I gotta get to the Central Plaza so I can fight.”
Shouto climbed over the slate pile, careful not to slip on it himself. He awkwardly held out an arm to Bakugou. Bakugou scowled as he grabbed onto it and pulled himself up. He felt Bakugou’s breath on his neck as the boy adjusted, wrapping his arm around Shouto’s neck and roughly grabbing a handful of Shouto’s shirt to keep his grip.
Shouto’s skin itched. This was a lot of touching. It wasn’t feathery, at least—Shouto couldn’t stand light touches. They made him want to rip his own skin off. “Am I supposed to also wrap my arm around you?”
“Do whatever you want,” Bakugou said.
Shouto inhaled. He was surprised. “You smell like burnt sugar.”
“Fucking move, Half-n-Half!”
Notes:
This update is later than usual but that's because I'm on new medication that gives me enough motivation to work on my original fiction and my art (yay!).
I have one novel that's already gone through several rounds of edits and needs one more rewrite before I start querying agents again. I got paid $500 by a magazine for the short story version a few years ago, back when I was young and full of hope. It's about a girl with a phobia of the sky. I actually had the agent who represented Dork Diaries and Savvy ask for the full manuscript before sending me a very thoughtful personalized rejection letter (rare for big-name agents) saying my mc was "vibrant/jumped off the page" but that the plot needed work (very fixable!). Idk I barely have any writer friends so I'm sharing here.
The other novel is about a boy who volunteers to be a test subject for a machine that allows you to rearrange the synapses in your own brain via simulation. Shit goes sideways. Everyone is queer. It's 90,000 words into the first draft. The mc is currently in France holding a wad of cash and trying to escape getting charged for murder. Help.
Chapter 17: Shouto Decorates a Christmas Tree
Summary:
USJ continues. Shit goes down. Shit goes up. Shit goes down again. Fun times.
Notes:
CW: violence, gore, body horror (non-human), the typical mentions of past trauma, brief non-consensual touching (not sexual)
I did a l'il sketch of Deku's villain costume. Included the link at the top of the chapter. I also post a lot of MHA doodles on my Instagram, @max_says_no.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Deku's villain costume:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/421931058848324815/
After the fifth time Bakugou’s broken gauntlet banged against Shouto’s leg, he told Bakugou to take it off.
“Fuck you,” said Bakugou. “I need it to take those fuckers down.”
“It’s broken. It’s just as likely to malfunction and blow your arm off.”
“Fuck you,” Bakugou said again, but he used his good hand to take the broken gauntlet off. It dropped to the ground with a clatter.
Following the increasing height of the dome and the outlines of the other zones in the distance, Shouto and Bakugou made their way toward the central plaza. They walked for ten or fifteen minutes—out of the uneven landslide territory and into a giant group of trees that was a little too well-kept to be a forest—before Shouto noticed movement behind a cluster of rocks, probably from the mountain zone. He pushed Bakugou off him, holding out his right hand in front of him. “Who’s there?”
Momo, Kaminari, and the girl with earphone jacks for ears—he’d never interacted with her before and couldn’t remember her name—stepped out from behind the rocks. Momo looked notably thinner than she’d been on the bus, and Kaminari… well. Shouto had sparred with him a couple times before, and he knew that dazed, drooling look. He’d overused his quirk. Currently, he was draped over the shoulder of the earphone jack girl, petting her hair with a single lazy hand.
“Todoroki,” Momo said. “Bakugou. Are you two hurt?”
“What’s it look like, Ponytail?” Bakugou said, holding up his busted wrist. It was already swelling. “Fucker had a gun, too.”
The earphone jack girl looked down at Bakugou’s leg. Her eyes widened. “You got shot? Like, with a bullet?”
“Pew pew,” said Kaminari.
“Yeah, with a bullet. What else is he gonna shoot us with?” Bakugou touched his side and winced. Shouto wondered if Deku had maybe cracked one of Bakugou’s ribs—that kick hadn’t been friendly. “Did you extras get rid of whatever villain you had to fight?”
Momo and the earphone jack girl looked at each other. “I think so,” Momo said. “I made an insulator sheet to cover Jirou and me, and Denki electrocuted the villains.”
Jirou. That was her name. But—villains? “You fought more than one villain?”
“Yeah, like a dozen,” said Jirou. “How many did you guys have?”
“One,” said Bakugou. “And he sounded like a fucking kid, too. You saw his face, Half-n-Half, was he a kid?”
“Our age,” said Shouto.
“Holy crap,” Jirou said.
“He must’ve been very strong,” said Momo. “How long did it take you to incapacitate him?”
Shouto shook his head. “We didn’t. He finished with us and left.”
“What was his quirk?” asked Jirou.
“He didn’t use one. Do you know anything about the situation at the central plaza?”
Momo nodded. “We headed back there first, but once we… um. It’s better to show you.”
Momo led them around the other side of the rock. Shouto’s stomach jerked.
Aizawa was lying on the ground, unconscious. And he looked… damaged. The skin on his elbow shaved away, his face so covered in blood it was impossible to tell where the cuts were.
“Fuck,” Bakugou muttered.
Shouto echoed the sentiment. He also felt the immediate, overwhelming urge to kill someone.
“Is he alive?” Shouto asked.
“Yeah,” said Jirou. “I don’t… know if he would’ve been, if we hadn’t gotten him out of there. That guy with the hands all over him has some sort of destructive quirk that activates when he touches things.” She motioned to Aizawa’s elbow. “Or people.”
“Any good news?” asked Bakugou.
Momo spoke. “Uraraka told me that she and Shouji were able to hold the warping villain back long enough for Iida to escape. All Might came. He’s fighting the noumu in the central plaza right now.”
“What the fuck’s a noumu?” Bakugou asked.
“That’s what the… hand villain called the creature with the beak. It seems that it’s trained or… programmed to only take orders from him. I don’t think it’s human.”
Shouto heard a twig snap near them. Heart pounding, he looked up to see a tall, bulky man with a skull mask approaching.
“Who are you?” Shouto asked.
He heard Momo’s breath hitch. The man laughed. “You kids didn’t think a little trick like that would take out everybody, didja?”
“Villain,” Kaminari said, pointing, voice pitched high. “Villain. Villain.”
“Yeah, villain!” said the man in a mocking baby voice. “How about you kids surrender and I won’t kill—”
That was enough. Shouto sent out a wave of ice. The man wasn’t as fast as Deku, and the ice encased him entirely.
“Shigaraki,” said Shouto, lowering his hand. He only realized he’d said it out loud when the group looked at him. He clarified, twisting the truth a little. “That’s what the villain we fought said their leader’s name was. The villain with the hands all over him. Shigaraki.”
Momo nodded. Her voice came out shaky. “Anyway, I… I feel a bit blasphemous saying this, but I’m not sure if All Might can take this noumu by himself. He looked worn-out when he came in, and from what we gathered by the fight and what Shigaraki was saying, the noumu has multiple quirks. Super strength, shock absorption, and regeneration, at least.”
“Fuckin’ regeneration?” Bakugou said.
“All Might shoved it through one of the warper’s closing portals at one point,” said Jirou. “Cut its arm off. And it… grew back. All Might’s punches don’t seem to do anything to it, either.”
Shouto racked his memory. At some point, he’d sparred against heroes with each of those quirks. Not together, of course.
He’d fought the hero with the regeneration quirk when he was ten. The hero had given Shouto a sword and invited Shouto to try to kill him. Shouto wasn’t used to fighting with swords and hadn’t done much damage, but he hadn’t stopped thinking about the fight for months afterward, trying to think of a way to defeat an opponent with regeneration.
“I might have an idea to defeat the noumu,” Shouto said. “Bakugou, I’ll need you.”
“Of course you fuckin’ will,” said Bakugou.
Kaminari’s eyes lazed over to Shouto. He gave an exaggerated grimace when he saw Shouto’s leg. “Ouch. Pew-pew getcha?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “It’s fine.”
“Shit—I didn’t realize you were wounded, too,” said Momo. “You shouldn’t be acting right now.”
“We could all die if All Might can’t defeat the noumu,” said Shouto. “I won’t do anything drastic if I don’t think I can follow through. Momo, you know CPR, right?”
Momo blinked. Nodded.
“Stay here with the other two. Make sure Aizawa doesn’t stop breathing. Where’s Thirteen?”
“Fighting in the central plaza still,” said Jirou. “I don’t think they’re doing too well.”
“What about Uraraka and Shouji?”
“They’re trying to round up the other students.”
Shouto wasn’t… not impressed with his classmates. Most of them hadn’t had training for crisis situations before U.A., but they weren’t panicking. They were getting shit done. It was possible that Shouto and Bakugou were performing the worst out of all their classmates so far. “Okay.” He held out an arm to Bakugou. “Let’s go.”
Bakugou slapped it away, glancing back at their classmates. “Don’t need that shit.”
“Hey, uh—” Jirou raised her voice. “Not to ruin the party, but that villain’s going to die if we leave him like that.”
Shouto sighed. He walked back and pressed the fingers of his left hand to the ice, melting it until the front of the man’s masked face was exposed.
“There,” Shouto said. “Now he’ll die slower.”
No one spoke to stop him as he and Bakugou started off for the central plaza.
###
Once they reached the outskirts of the forest, they stopped.
Shouto surveyed the scene. Mostly, it was as his classmates had described—All Might fighting the noumu, the noumu not budging an inch.
“Is… is All Might steaming?” Bakugou whispered.
Shouto squinted. He needed to get a new contact prescription.
He could see the other villains, standing on and around the pavilion in the very center of the dome. Shigaraki was standing on the pavilion, arms folded, expression unreadable beneath the severed hand serving as his mask. Kurogiri’s vague form hovered above Thirteen’s crumpled body.
Deku sat a few paces away from the rest of the group, legs dangling off the platform. He’d folded the bottom part of his mask up and was eating something out of a small plastic bag as he watched the battle.
“It’s that fucking kid,” Bakugou said, eyes narrowing. “What the fuck—? Is he eating gummy worms? I’m gonna fucking kill that brat. Tear his fucking arms off his goddamn—"
“Bakugou,” Shouto said, “how high could you lift me in the air with your quirk?”
Bakugou cut himself off. Then—“What the fuck.”
“I want to get on top of the noumu. Close to its mouth. Can you drop me there?”
“Uh.” Bakugou squinted at the noumu. “Fuck. I don’t know. I’ve never carried anything heavier than a backpack while I was in the air. You can’t get up there with your ice?”
“I could, but I need to drop straight down on it for the attack I have planned. My ice wouldn’t provide that angle.”
“I don’t have one of my gauntlets and my fuckin’ wrist is busted,” Bakugou said, “so I’m not gonna be able to maneuver as accurately.”
“I can provide thrust to get us in the air. It’s your right wrist that’s broken, right? That’s my ice side. I should be able to correct for trajectorial error.”
“Fine. You know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah,” Shouto said.
“Get on my back.”
Shouto climbed onto Bakugou’s back, wrapping his left arm around Bakugou’s neck and his legs around Bakugou’s waist. Bakugou grunted when Shouto shifted his weight off the ground. This probably wasn’t great for Bakugou’s injured leg. Or for his ribs.
“Start running,” Shouto said.
Bakugou started an awkward sprint toward the noumu. A few steps in, Shouto stretched out his right hand and shot a steady, forceful stream of ice from it. The recoil made his arm feel like it was wrestling a rogue jackhammer, but it did serve to increase Bakugou’s speed as his palms started popping.
The first explosion sent them barely a foot into the air, the second explosion a meter. By the third, they were soaring. Shouto cut off the steady stream of ice and focused on sending out short bursts to correct for the weaker, poorly targeted explosions coming from Bakugou’s right hand. In between ear-throbbing explosions, he could just barely hear his ice spearing the dirt far beneath them.
He didn’t bother looking down, of course. The noumu was getting close. It was focused on All Might and, if Momo’s intel was correct, wouldn’t act offensively toward Shouto unless given a direct order to, and maybe also if Shouto was actively getting in the way of its goal. Currently, Shouto wasn’t in its way, and their fast approach wouldn’t give Shigaraki enough time to verbalize an order to the noumu.
Shouto shifted halfway off Bakugou’s back as they neared their target. They were a little lower than he’d planned, but that was fine. If he could—just drop down correctly, at the right angle, get the right grip—
Bakugou let off a final explosion, and Shouto let go.
He dropped fast. The tip of his shoe caught on the lower part of the creature’s giant beak, wrenching its mouth open. Shouto just barely caught the top half of the noumu’s beak, preventing himself from plummeting to the ground. He hooked the fingers of both hands under the top set of teeth—this thing had teeth?—and wrenched its mouth open. Shouto could’ve fit his entire forearm vertically between the top and bottom sets of teeth.
He didn’t give the creature time to struggle. He wrapped his free leg—the one not holding the noumu’s bottom jaw open—around the noumu’s neck, securing the top jaw (beak? Fuck, this thing was weird) open with his left hand and shoulder. He caught an accidental whiff of the thing’s breath. It smelled like stale blood.
Memories flooded his brain. Seven years old, barricaded behind his own closet door, passing the time by scraping dried blood from his knees. Ten years old, on hour two of sparring with his father, swallowing globs of blood from an hour-old nosebleed his father hadn’t allowed him to address—
No. Not now.
Ignoring the way the noumu’s teeth dug into his hand and shoulder, he stuck his right arm into the noumu’s mouth. Squeezed his leg to tighten his grip around the noumu’s neck. This was going to take a lot of physical tenacity if Shouto didn’t want to be ripped off the noumu by his own quirk.
Shouto sent a spike of ice down the noumu’s throat.
He didn’t stop there. He held on tight, fighting the way the ice wanted to push Shouto up instead of making its way down. The ice forced past bone and muscle and tendon in grinding jerks he felt through his whole body. Then he saw the end of the thick spike spear out from the noumu’s left inner thigh and drill deep into the dirt, lifting the noumu’s feet from the ground.
He’d impaled the noumu all the way through with his ice. Enough to kill any normal person.
This noumu was not a normal person.
So Shouto didn’t stop.
He sent the ice grinding through the noumu’s body in a million different directions, plummeting the temperature low, low, lower. He sent the spikes out through the creature’s stomach, out its back, out its spine, its legs, its arms, its eyes, its brain.
He kept going. Until the noumu’s frozen fingers tore off from its hands, each impaled by its own spike like hot dogs over a fire. Until the noumu was a mess of frozen, bloody, barely-recognizable chunks of flesh all dangling a meter or more off the ground.
Like a Christmas tree, Shouto thought. With ice for a tree and frozen flesh for ornaments. Not that the Todoroki house had had a Christmas tree for a while, but Shouto remembered his mother fussing over one years ago.
When there was no longer a discernable neck for Shouto to hold onto, Shouto released his awkward death grip on the beak. It was the only part of the body left that was recognizable as noumu, poking from the top of the ice tree like a bloody star. Shouto detached it from the remains of the face with about the same amount of strength as it took to open a stubborn jar.
He tossed the beak and its accompanying teeth to the ground, where it broke into its separate halves. The top half skittered across the frozen ground. It stopped at All Might’s feet.
Shouto tried to discern All Might’s expression for a few seconds before he gave up. If anything good had come from Shouto’s training sessions with his father, it was that Shouto knew his body, and right now, he was overheated and likely about to pass out from quirk overuse. He needed to get off the scene quickly before he became a liability.
He dropped to the ground, bending his knees when he hit so the fall wouldn’t hurt him. It jarred his injured leg, but it wasn’t excruciating. He straightened, looked up at All Might.
“The cells are deeply frozen,” Shouto said. “That should slow regeneration, if it’s still a problem at this point. I won’t be in commission for much longer, so please tell me now if you need something else from me.”
All Might’s eyes travelled down Shouto’s body. It was Shouto’s cue to look down at himself—he wasn’t missing an arm or something, right? He didn’t remember anything getting bitten or blown off, but his entire body was vibrating with the aftershocks of that grinding sensation, so he wouldn’t be too surprised if he hadn’t felt—
No. Physically—besides the wound in his leg—he was whole. But he was also wholly drenched in blood and bits of gore. He picked off a tiny shard of white bone stuck to the front of his shirt.
Looking back at All Might, Shouto realized that he hadn’t entirely escaped the deluge himself. His shoes and the bottoms of his pant legs were splattered with blood.
“Ah,” Shouto said. Was that why All Might wasn’t saying anything? Was he mad about his ruined costume? “Sorry. I’ll pay for that.”
Shouto heard Deku’s voice from across the plaza. “Well, Dabi owes me five thousand yen.”
“Shut up!” Shigaraki yelled. “Shut the fuck up! You were supposed to have incapacitated both of them!”
“Villains,” All Might said, “if you surrender now, there doesn’t have to be anymore violence. Reinforcements are on the way. Your operation is over.”
“I did,” said Deku, ignoring All Might. “And then two incapacitated students took out your noumu. I told you it wasn’t ready.”
“Young master.” Kurogiri’s voice. “All Might is correct. We should leave while we can.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do!” said Shigaraki. “I’m the leader. Not you! And not fucking Deku!”
Shouto turned to look at where the voices were coming from. He stumbled halfway into the turn, tripping and landing on his hands and knees. Nausea pushed upward toward his esophagus.
Why wasn’t All Might moving to apprehend the villains? Could he not move? Was this the time limit Deku had spoken about at the coffee shop this morning?
“This is your fault,” Shigaraki yelled, and Shouto wasn’t sure if he was yelling at Deku or at Shouto. “You were supposed to make sure All Might was at his weakest and that the two strongest students—”
“Hey, fuck you, I did my job,” Deku said, pulling his mask back down over his mouth. “Anyway, what point are you making by taking out All Might at a tiny fraction of his usual strength? You gonna rule Japan with a single weak-ass noumu? Please. I could’ve taken that thing out. Plus, I could knock over your ideology with a fucking feather. You need to start listening to my advice. Sensei told me not to let you win until you’re ready to.” Deku hopped off the plaza, rolling up his bag of gummy worms and shoving it in his pocket. He started toward Shouto and All Might.
“Oi.” Bakugou’s voice came from behind Shouto. Shouto looked over his shoulder to see Bakugou struggling to stand. He had a new bloody scrape across his face—he’d probably landed wrong. “Don’t come any closer, bitch.”
Deku kept walking. “It’s okay,” he told Bakugou. “You did your best. You can rest now.”
Bakugou charged, a wrenched scream coming from his mouth. All Might stretched an arm out to catch him, and Bakugou ran into it with a grunt.
“Let me go!” Bakugou screamed, scratching and pushing at All Might’s thick, unmoving arm. “I’m gonna kill—! LET ME GO!”
Deku made an amused noise. Then he knelt beside Shouto, pulling a white handkerchief from his vest pocket. Deku tilted Shouto’s chin up gently.
Shouto didn’t move as soft cotton wiped blood from his forehead, nose, and cheeks. He knew that any sudden movements would make him pass out, and he couldn’t afford that. Not in the middle of a battle.
But… if this was a battle, why was the enemy stroking his hair? Holding the side of his face, cloth gentle against his skin?
No one had touched him like this in years.
“HEY!” Bakugou screeched from behind Shouto. “DON’T FUCKING TOUCH HIM, YOU SHITTY VILLAIN! OI!!”
“You did so good,” Deku murmured to Shouto. “Just let them take care of you now, okay? Text me when you feel better. Dabi and I aren’t gonna let anything bad happen to you.”
“Fucking brat!” Shigaraki called. “Get away from that hero scum. He doesn’t give a fuck about you. Stop ruining my mission for somebody who doesn’t care if you’re dead or alive!”
Shouto choked out the first string of words his muddled brain would let him shove together. He kept them low enough that All Might and Bakugou wouldn’t be able to hear. “You let them hurt us. My teacher. He was—he was helping me with Endeavor.”
“He still will,” said Deku, pushing Shouto’s hair back from his forehead. Deku’s voice pinched with concern. “I’m sorry if it sets you back a few days. Really. This is just… I have things going on, too. Maybe I can tell you about them sometime. Please don’t be mad. We’re friends.”
“No,” said Shouto. “No, we’re not.”
A series of gunshots rang out. Shouto’s first thought was that Deku had shot him, but no—Deku hadn’t moved, and the echoing was wrong. He looked up to see Shigaraki jerking back, blood spraying from his chest.
“Oops,” said Deku, standing. “Time to go. Kurogiri?”
A portal appeared behind Deku. As Deku stepped back into it, he blew All Might—or maybe Bakugou?—a kiss. Soon only his hand was visible, extending from the swirling darkness like an invitation.
Then it was just his fingertips.
Then nothing.
Notes:
I forgot how MUCH happened during the USJ arc. Thank fuck for the MHA wiki. Totally skipped over some details--I didn't want to use more than a couple chapters on the main events of USJ.
Did y'all notice that Shouto accidentally called Momo by her first name out loud like he does in his head? Too bad Kaminari was too drool-y to call him out on it. *Sad whey*
Chapter 18: Shouto Gets High and Has Unprotected Hand Holding
Summary:
Short snippets in the hospital. Emotions. Our boys are high on painkillers. Probably more medically inaccurate stuff. Don't take medical advice from my stories :))))
Notes:
CW: hospital setting, dissociation/masking, dysphoria-inducing situation, short discussion of self-harm
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He drifted in and out of consciousness during the ambulance drive to the hospital. In his sleeping moments, he dreamed of bloody ice and splintered bone. When he jolted awake, he did so because of the zero-gravity sensation gripping his stomach. Like he was falling. Like he couldn’t stop falling. He flailed, fighting for proprioception in the moments before he remembered where he was. This happened a few times before the paramedic gave him a muscle relaxer.
He tried to give the paramedics instructions when he was awake. “Heat exhaustion,” he said. “Probably dehydration. Quirk suppressants slow down my body’s ability to correct for temperature, so don’t give me those. And a bullet wound in my right leg. Just a normal handgun, I think, nothing in the bullets.”
“Hey, take a breather,” said a paramedic. “We’re trained for this. Can you tell us how you’re feeling pain-wise? Scale of one to ten, one being—”
“Seven.”
“Are you sure you’re not underrating it? A seven would mean that you can still function with effort. And since you’ve been periodically losing consciousness, that would move it up t—”
“I know what a seven means. I’ve functioned under worse conditions. I’m losing consciousness because of quirk-induced heat exhaustion and dehydration, not from pain.”
“O…kay. Can I get your legal guardian’s contact information?”
“No, fuck you,” Shouto said, before passing out again.
###
Blink once, he was being rolled down a hospital hall.
Blink twice, he was in a hospital room with bright lights, a needle pushing into his arm.
Blink three times, two male nurses were supporting his back as they tried to work his blood-drenched shirt off. His shoes and pants were already off, smearing the insides of a clear plastic bag with blood.
It looked like they’d already taken care of his leg. It was heavily bandaged. Yellow surgical iodine stained his skin above and below the bandages, brash and permanent compared to the flaking blood caught in the hairs of the opposite leg and along his forearms.
“Oh, he’s awake,” said a nurse.
“Yeah, give me a second,” Shouto muttered. He peeled his shirt off, his fingers weak and fumbling. They must’ve given him pain medication along with the muscle relaxers. His entire body felt like jelly. He motioned to his binder, which was less white now than it was covered in mismatching splotches of red, ugly circles grown dark around their edges where the blood had stopped spreading and started coagulating. “Need this off, too?”
“Yes, we’re going to try to get all that blood off you,” said one of the nurses.
“Okay.” He managed to reach behind him and press the button to loosen the front of his binder. “I have tits. Just to warn you.”
The nurses looked at each other. “Sorry, we wrote male on your file. Is that not right?”
“Write what you want,” Shouto said, struggling with his binder.
“We need to know biological sex to make sure we don’t give an incorrect dosage of anything. And some medications interact with hormones in different—”
“S’fine. Female. I’m not on hormones or anything. Help me get this fucking binder off.”
They did. They let him keep his socks and underwear, but he was naked from the waist up as they wiped him off with disposable cloths. He leaned forward, arms clutched against his stomach, and let himself dissociate as medical personnel entered and exited the curtained-off section as freely as if his room were a store in a strip mall.
This was not his body. These people were not touching him. He was outside of it all, watching, filtering the voices and lights and touches into an already-stuffed compartment that would knock at the back of his brain until he hyperventilated, but that was fine, as long as it didn’t happen now.
Someone held the curtain open long enough for Shouto to lock eyes with Bakugou as he passed by on a gurney with an oxygen mask attached to his face. Bakugou’s eyes narrowed.
Shouto stared.
He knew Bakugou was seeing an expression that was flat and dead. Flat and dead was what happened to Shouto’s face when he left his body. For an intense second, though, he wanted to let himself back inside his body long enough to communicate something. Not necessarily a cry for help, or even an offer to give it, just… something to say, yes. I see you.
But then the curtain closed again. Shouto watched the space where Bakugou had been, felt the void in his stomach swaying to the rhythm of the thin curtain separating Shouto from the rest of the world.
“Todoroki.”
Shouto jerked to attention. There was a doctor in front of him now—when had she arrived? And when had he put on a hospital gown? “Yeah.”
Her face pinched. “That’s the third time I’ve said your name.”
It took him a second to parse the sentence. “Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s fine. You’ve been through a lot. I came to ask if you have any questions before we do the x-ray for your elbow.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Did anybody die?”
“Pardon?”
“Anybody in my class. Or my teachers. Did any of them die?”
“Nobody’s died,” said the doctor. “There were some serious injuries that we’re still watching. Your homeroom teacher hasn’t woken up yet. At best, he’s going to lose an eye. Thirteen lost a lot of body mass, and we’re doing all we can, but we don’t know how their body will react to being destroyed by their own quirk. The girl with the frog quirk—I’m trying to remember her name—”
“Asui,” Shouto said. He was surprised that he remembered it.
“Asui, yes. She has two broken legs, but she’ll recover. The others are just suffering from minor lacerations, bruising, and quirk overuse.”
“What about Bakugou?”
“He’s being prepped for surgery now. He broke two ribs and then displaced them during a hard fall.”
A hard fall. So when Bakugou had taken Shouto up above the noumu and then crash landed. That was Shouto’s fault. Maybe all of this was Shouto’s fault. “What’s the mortality rate for that?”
“Not high. About five percent.”
The words came out before he had time to decide if he meant them. “I want to talk to him.”
“I’m sorry. They’ve already started anesthesia. Rest for now and you can talk to him after his surgery.” The doctor pointed out a plastic hospital bag on the table beside Shouto’s bed, labeled Todoroki S. in messy green sharpie. “I don’t know if anyone showed you. Midnight stopped by with the belongings that everyone left in the locker room.”
Shouto waited until the doctor had left to dig out his phone. He had a few texts from about an hour ago waiting for him.
Fuyumi:
Principal Nezu called and told me what happened. I’m on my way with Dad.
Natsuo:
I STG IF YOU DON’T STOP GETTING HURT. I can’t make it down, but I sent End*avor a very pointed and slightly threatening text, so don’t worry about him. He won’t be gracing you with his presence today.
Fuyumi:
Edit: I’m on my way by myself.
Shouto also opened the messaging app Deku used to contact him. There hadn’t been any activity there since last night, when Deku had sent Shouto a string of memes. Shouto hadn’t replied.
He replied now.
Shouto:
Hi.
There was a long pause. Three dots that kept appearing, disappearing.
Ya Boi Deku:
Hi
Shouto:
Bakugou is in surgery for two displaced ribs.
Ya Boi Deku:
I didn’t mean to hurt him that bad.
Shouto:
You didn’t. You broke the ribs. My fault they got displaced.
He could have died.
Ya Boi Deku:
I don’t want that.
Shouto:
What are you trying to prove? That you could kill me if you wanted to? I didn’t ever think you couldn’t.
Ya Boi Deku:
No
Shouto. You don’t understand
Shouto:
Explain.
For the first time, Deku was the one who didn’t respond.
###
Fuyumi visited Shouto in his room. She sat in a chair with a plastic cushion and asked how he was feeling.
“Fine,” he said. “They gave me drugs. So.”
She looked at the bloody clothes in the plastic bag and asked, “What happened?”
“Villains,” he said. “Not my blood.”
Fuyumi looked at Shouto for a long time. Then she said, quietly, “Did you…?”
“It wasn’t a person.”
Fuyumi’s fingers loosened their death grip on her purse strap. “Oh.”
“Good to know you think I’d do that, though.”
Fuyumi’s eyes widened. She looked away.
Twenty minutes passed in silence.
Visitor hours ended. Fuyumi pressed her hand into the blanket where it covered Shouto’s ankle, the pressure just barely registering in his skin. Then she left.
###
After Recovery Girl came, delivered the first round of healing to the students and teachers of class 1-A, and left, Shouto and Bakugou were wheeled into the same room.
It had been a while since Shouto had been allowed such heavy painkillers, and his senses were… not at their best. It was strange to feel all his aches and throbbing and sharp twinges melt into a heady mush. Strange to watch his classmate’s spiky blond hair trembling under the air conditioning, his body more still than Shouto had ever seen it.
He wondered if Endeavor would let him take the pain pills they’d prescribed him. Granted, being loopy with Endeavor in the house probably wasn’t safe, but this was… wonderful. Holy fuck. He couldn’t feel anything.
After ten minutes of watching Bakugou just… not move, Shouto scooted to the edge of his bed and reached out as far as he could toward Bakugou. His fingers just barely brushed Bakugou’s arm.
“Hey,” Shouto said, swatting at Bakugou again a few more times. He was careful not to jostle his own elbow—they’d slapped a brace on it and warned him not to strain it for a while. “Hey. Are you dead?”
Bakugou’s eyes didn’t open, but his face scrunched into something uglier than a scowl. He grunted.
“I was thinking,” Shouto said, “you know, I was supposed to train after school today. My father’s going to think I got shot on purpose. That’s kind of fucked up, right? I guess I did try to break my leg once, but I don’t know if Endeavor knows about that.”
Bakugou’s first word came out weighed down, heavily slurred. “Hah?”
“Just… you know, big rock, sit with your leg out, bam.”
Bakugou groaned. “Shut up, IcyHot. You’re so fucking edgy.”
Well. It hadn’t worked, anyway. Just bruised.
Come to think of it… Aizawa had asked to see him after school today, too. That was also off the table now. It was Shouto’s fault that his teachers and classmates were injured, for not telling anybody about what he’d seen and heard at the coffee shop with the villains this morning. Not that he was trying to think about that, but…
Shouto ran his middle finger down Bakugou’s arm. Bakugou shivered, his fingers twitching like he was trying to slap Shouto’s hand away. “Fuck… stop it,” he mumbled. “S’wrong with you?”
“Hold my hand,” Shouto said. “I keep looking over and thinking you’re dead. Hold my hand.”
Bakugou’s scowl deepened. His head tilted a few degrees to the side. “’M not your girlfriend.”
“I don’t want a girlfriend.” He flicked ice crystals from his fingertips onto Bakugou’s arm, hoping to wake him up. “Bakugou.”
Bakugou’s bed squeaked as he shifted. “Wha… you gay or some shit?”
“I don’t want a boyfriend, either. Hold my fucking hand so I know you’re not dead. Bitch.”
Bakugou didn’t move. Shouto leaned forward enough to hook his fingers into the crook of Bakugou’s elbow and pull Bakugou’s arm off the bed. He used the opportunity to snatch up Bakugou’s palm. It was too warm. Sweaty.
“Your hand’s fuckin’… freezing,” Bakugou mumbled. His fingers twitched. “So am I dead?”
“No,” Shouto said.
Bakugou’s Adam’s apple bobbed. His lips smacked as they parted, his eyes still closed. “Kinda… thought I was. For a second. Y’know.”
“Sorry,” Shouto said. “I shouldn’t have… s’my fault.”
“Shut up,” said Bakugou. “Don’t say that. Gets in your fucking brain.”
A laugh bubbled from Shouto’s mouth. “You have a brain?”
“Ngh—” Bakugou’s eyes fluttered open, focusing half-lidded on Shouto’s face. “Shut the fuck up, freak.”
“You started it.”
“I didn’t agree to talking while we do this.”
“Mm,” Shouto said. “Talking’s bad?”
“It’s fucking gay.”
“Oh,” Shouto said. “Didn’t know.”
Bakugou’s heavy-lidded eyes burned. “Well, now you do.”
Bakugou closed his eyes again. Shouto threaded his fingers through Bakugou’s so they’d stay together without having to strain any muscles. He kept his thumb over Bakugou’s wrist, near his pulse.
Seconds passed. Minutes. Bakugou’s breathing evened out, the white hospital blanket over him rising and falling in tandem with Bakugou’s chest.
Right now, Shouto missed Fuyumi. He missed his mother. He missed when Fuyumi wasn’t scared of him, when she hugged him and it was okay. He missed being able to cry when he was lonely. Or when he realized that he couldn’t remember the texture of his mother’s hair.
Shouto kept his eyes open for as long as he could, sweat pooling in the crevices of his hand, watching the yellow hospital light from the hallway drain the poetry from the thin tear tracks on Bakugou’s face.
Notes:
This was supposed to be a lighthearted chapter. Oops.
Missing my mom as I wrote this, I guess. She's not dead, she's just a bitch who couldn't answer me when I asked her if she'd rather me be dead than trans. I don't talk to her much for my own health. But she gives really nice hugs and just ugh I miss her sometimes.
I plan on having some more shit go down pretty soon. Needed a chapter to organize emotions and re-center.
THANK Y'ALL for your comments!! Imma catch up on replying to them soon I swear
Chapter 19: Shouto Lets Kirishima Wash His Hair, Which Might be Cute if He Weren't Using Hand Soap
Summary:
The Bakusquad visits our boys in the hospital.
Notes:
CW: hospital setting, gore cleanup. Nothing heavy.
I rewrote this chapter like fourteen times holy jesus
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Pfft—do you have your Snapchat open yet?”
“Gimme a sec, Mina. Reception in here is crap.”
“Blasty’s gonna be so mad.”
“Do you think Shouto’s gonna be mad? I kinda don’t want to piss him off after what Jirou said about—”
“Nah, I doubt he’ll be worse than Bakugou. Jeez, Denki, do you have your phone on airplane mode or something?”
The use of Shouto’s name made him stir. A sharp pain stabbed through his neck and shoulder, and he winced.
“I swear it’s just the reception.”
“Use your normal camera, then. Before they wake up.”
Where was he? He tried to figure it out using clues from his body and environment. Pain, mostly concentrated in his leg and neck, but also aches and twinges all through his body. His body in a position not quite right for sleeping. The air dry and warm. Voices.
Had he gotten knocked out in the training room again?
But—he’d just been at school, right?
Just been…
Where had he been? He remembered flashes. Spikes of ice, skewered flesh. Whose flesh? And he’d seen Fuyumi recently—shit, did that mean—? Had he skewered her—?
Shouto reached for his quirk as he jolted awake. He felt the moment he grabbed it wrong, like grabbing a sword by the blade instead of the hilt. He dropped it as soon as he felt the grimy heat of his flames abrading his face, but the damage was done.
His sheets were on fire.
He yanked his right hand toward him to correct the problem, but it met with resistance. He looked over to see that his right hand had frozen to… Bakugou’s left hand? When had that happened?
“Fuckin’…” Bakugou muttered. Then, “ICYHOT!”
“Shut up. I know.” Shouto reached over and sent a pulse of heat through the frost gluing their hands together. Water dripping off his hand, he froze the burning portion of his sheet with a thin layer of frost.
With little more than a disappointed huff of smoke, the fire died.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” Bakugou yelled, sitting up and shaking water off his hand like it was burning him. “FUCK’S WRONG WITH YOU?”
Shouto inspected his hospital gown, the ice coating his bedsheet cracking as he shifted. His sleeve had burnt a little, but the gown was still intact. “Accident. Sorry. Stop yelling.”
“You froze our FUCKING HANDS TOGETHER, YOU GLASS OF FUCKING EXPIRED SKIM MILK—”
“I KNOW, Bakugou!” He was surprised to hear his own voice raise. Then again, he never felt at home in his body after he’d used his fire, so anything that came out of his mouth right now would sound strange. “It was a fucking accident. I got scared.”
“HAH? You’re in the fucking hospital, moron, there’s nothin’ to be scared—”
“Yeah. I know. I fucking know. I didn’t wake up right and thought I killed my sister for a second.”
“Your sister’s at home right now busy wishing her little brother were less of a nervous bunny rabbit’s shitstain. Get your shit together. You’re lucky the fucking fire alarm didn’t go off.”
Shouto stared at Bakugou. Remembered yesterday, remembered calling his sister out for guessing that he’d killed someone. Remembered the very real possibility that Fuyumi was at home wishing things about him. Wishing he were things he’d never be able to be.
“Oi.” Bakugou wiped the sweat from his neck and jaw with the collar of his gown. Even his sideburns were wet with it. “You listenin’ to me? Quit fuckin’ dissociating every time I talk to you! Fuck am I doing wrong here? Hah? What the hell do you want from me?”
“S-should we leave, or…?”
The sound of Kaminari’s voice made both boys startle and look toward the source. Shouto had dismissed Kaminari and Ashido’s voices as something from a dream, but no, here they fucking were, dressed in civilian clothes, and… fuck, they’d seen everything, hadn’t they?
“Did you take a fucking—” Bakugou tried to scramble to his feet, but pain flashed across his face as soon as he twisted his torso. He resigned himself to yelling. “Who the FUCK let you two in here? DUNCE FACE! GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING PHONE!”
“I didn’t take a picture!” Kaminari said, holding up his phone to display the Snapchat app, still loading. “See?! No picture!”
Bakugou’s mouth twitched. “You go around spreadin’ rumors that ain’t fuckin’ true, I’ll hunt you down and beat the living shit out of you.”
“I won’t tell anyone you guys were holding hands! I swear!”
Bakugou’s face reddened. “You better be real fuckin’ grateful I can’t get up right now.”
“Holy crap, Shouto, are you okay?” Ashido asked, hands on her face. “I didn’t even know you could make fire, what the heck?”
Nausea coiled in Shouto’s stomach. He glanced across the room at the bathroom, trying to judge if he could make the distance by himself.
The door opened, and Kirishima came in. Shouto almost didn’t recognize him with his red hair down and tied back. He had some bandages on his arms and legs but didn’t looked otherwise harmed. “Hey, Shouto! Bakugou! Sorry I’m late. Stopped by the bathroom.”
“Hah?” Bakugou said. Then, “Shitty Hair? That you? Why isn’t your hair shitty? Go fix it.”
Kaminari tilted his head at Kirishima. “Did you tie your hair up, bro? Like, just now?”
“Huh? Oh—yeah,” Kirishima said. “Felt kind of embarrassed doing a hospital visit looking like I only got three hours of sleep last night, y’know? Even if that’s what happened.”
“We’re just visiting a couple dudes,” said Kaminari. “Nothing to dress up for.”
“You’re just sayin’ that ’cause you look like roadkill.” Bakugou leaned back against the wall behind him, wrangling his blanket until it was settled across his shoulders. “Where’ve you extras been, anyway? You shouldn’t look so fuckin’ tired if you didn’t get injured yesterday.”
Ashido sighed. “A lot of us were giving police statements. And then the teachers wanted to talk to us and our parents separately in case they had questions or issues with us continuing our schooling at U.A. Denki and I did ours last night with most of the class, but Eijirou was in the hospital a little longer than us, so he’s doing his interview this morning. Me 'n Denki are going with him for moral support.”
Police statement. Interview. As long as they didn’t have an officer with a lie-detecting quirk, Shouto should be able to play dumb and get through it. He’d slept instead of coming up with a plan. In hindsight, probably not the best decision.
Bakugou narrowed his eyes at their visitors. “But you’re here.”
“We wanted to check up on you guys. And update you on the happenings, I guess.” Kirishima walked into the space between Shouto and Bakugou’s beds. His eyes widened when he saw Shouto’s bed. “Oh, woah. What happened?”
“Shouto spontaneously combusted!” said Ashido. “Also, Shouto and Bakugou might be a thing now? I feel like we missed a lot.”
“We’re not a fuckin’ THING,” Bakugou spat. “I’m not gay. Shut the fuck up and get out.”
“But we came all this waaaay,” Ashido whined. “At least let us sign your cast!”
Shouto swung his legs over the side of the bed. He tested his weight—
“Hell no! I was sleeping like a fucking baby and you damn wannabees woke me up, so if anything—OI!” Bakugou’s glare caught on Shouto. “Icyhot, what the fuck?”
Kirishima’s attention turned to Shouto. “Woah, hey.” He reached out toward Shouto’s arm. “Where are you going?”
“Bathroom,” Shouto muttered. “Nauseous.”
“You hurt your leg, right?” Kirishima motioned to the bandages. “Let me help you.”
Kaminari motioned to a set of crutches at the end of Bakugou’s bed. “You could use these cru—”
“MINE,” barked Bakugou. “Don’t touch.”
“No worries, dude,” said Kirishima. “I’ll help him out.”
It took some maneuvering to get it right—despite having gone through a round of healing already, he was hurting in a lot more places now than he remembered hurting yesterday. Like his stomach and jaw, where Deku had punched him. He had to keep his weight off the leg Deku had shot, too.
Kirishima put his arm around Shouto’s back, his steadiness reminding Shouto of just how weak he was right now, his hand shaking even as he used it to grip the back of Kirishima’s t-shirt.
“Good?” Kirishima asked, and Shouto swallowed the acid in his throat before he nodded.
If Shouto had had anything in his stomach, they wouldn’t have made it to the bathroom--a tiny room with a toilet and a sink, no shower--in time. Shouto couldn’t clearly remember the last time he’d eaten, though. He remembered a juice pack around the time they gave him pain meds yesterday.
Shouto turned on the sink so he couldn’t hear himself dry heaving. He gritted his teeth and tried to limit the jerky movements of his torso as his diaphragm clenched, forcing burning bile halfway up his throat.
When he straightened a little, he was surprised to still see Kirishima in his peripheral vision. “Kirishima, you don’t need to stay here.”
“I just wanna make sure you don’t pass out, bro. You don’t… look super.”
Shouto raised his eyes to the mirror. He let out a startled laugh—Kirishima wasn’t lying. He had a black eye, and his right cheekbone was bruising a deep purple. Other than that, he looked paler than he normally did. The nurses had done a good job getting the blood off the visible parts of his body, but he knew the red portion of his hair better than they did, and… there was still some gunk there. They’d largely avoided the scar over his left eye, too, and he noticed some dried flakes of blood lingering in its ridges.
Shouto rinsed out his mouth and spat. Wiped down his face and scar as best he could with only water and his hands. Then, leaning over the sink, he caught the running water in his cupped hands and sifted it through his hair. It didn’t take long for the water to turn a light red.
“Is that dye?” Kirishima asked. “Wait, do you dye your hair?”
“Blood,” Shouto said. “Not dye.”
“Did you cut your head?”
“Not my blood.” Some of the water ran into his mouth. Shouto wasn’t sure if he was imagining the taste of blood, but he spat the water out and rinsed his mouth again just in case. “Stop asking me questions. I can’t concentrate.”
“Want some help? I have a comb.”
Shouto blinked away the water in his eyes as he glanced up, looking in the mirror at Kirishima behind him. Was he joking? He was digging through his pockets, so probably not. “You don’t… have to.”
“I want to, if you’ll let me.”
Shouto would be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he’d expected a hug from Fuyumi yesterday. Hadn’t realized that he’d been expecting it until it hadn’t happened, and then… well, maybe it was kind of pathetic, but when had he ever been allowed a sense of dignity?
He’d read the articles. He knew that going for a long time without human touch was bad for his health. And apparently the high-on-pain-meds version of him had settled on Bakugou to fill that need, so Shouto's touch deficiency was probably pretty bad. Shouto didn’t care a whole lot about his physical health, but he didn’t like having the thoughts that came after months of isolation. Thoughts that told him to do things that were bad for him because they were bad for him. “Okay,” Shouto said.
“Cool. Lean against the sink and put your head down there.”
Shouto obeyed. He closed his eyes as Kirishima worked warm water into his hair. The rush of endorphins was... dizzying. He felt guilty letting himself feel them.
Not guilty enough to forgo memorizing the touch as best he could, of course. He wasn't likely to come in contact with another human in this way for months. Maybe more. He wasn't sure if Fuyumi not touching him was going to become a permanent thing.
“Okay, this is gonna be so bad for your hair,” said Kirishima, “but I’m gonna use hand soap on the left side. You’re gonna want to condition when you get home. Or honestly just shampoo the whole thing again. You’ll probably take a shower anyway. I guess.”
Shouto opened his eyes briefly, his gaze landing on Kirishima’s feet. “Are you wearing crocs,” he muttered.
“Yeah, bro!” The soap bottle clacked as Kirishima pumped it into his hand. He started working the soap into Shouto’s hair, the tips of his fingers making circles into Shouto’s scalp. “These are my ‘cheer up!’ crocs.”
He closed his eyes again. Partially so water wouldn’t get in his eyes, but also so he wouldn’t have to look at that green and purple tie-dye design any longer. “Well, they’re having the opposite effect on me.”
Kirishima’s hands stilled. “Was that a joke?”
“Mm,” Shouto said.
The hands left his head. A moment later, he heard Kirishima’s voice at the bathroom doorway. “Guys. Shouto made a joke.”
“I don’t believe you!” Shouto could hear Mina’s voice even over the running water next to his ear. “What was it?”
“About my shoes. I said they were my cheer-up crocs and he said they were making him sad.”
“Wait,” said Kaminari. “Wait, that’s funny.”
“Right? So I win the bet.”
Bet?
Oh. They had inside jokes about him already. Shouto had some experience with being the butt of those—limited, since he hadn’t had much contact with children his age growing up, but enough to recognize it when it happened. And it wasn’t like children were the only ones who did it.
He leaned his forehead against the cold porcelain, water dripping down the bridge of his nose. His face burned.
“That’s fucking cheating,” yelled Bakugou. “Those shoes are already a joke. IcyHot just stated a fact.”
Bakugou was in on it?
“Eijirou won, Blasty, give up and Venmo him five hundred yen like the rest of the losers,” said Mina.
Bakugou made a mocking noise. “Hey, look at me, I’m Shitty Hair, I wear dumb shitty clothes and win stupid bets because people feel comfortable being vulnerable around me.”
A pause in the conversation. Then Kirishima asked, “Was that a compliment?”
“Hah?! What about that sounded like a fuckin’ compliment to you?”
Kirishima laughed. A moment later, Shouto felt Kirishima’s fingers in his hair again. He stiffened.
“Sorry ’bout that,” said Kirishima, voice light. “We kind of had a bet going to see who you’d make a joke in front of first. Wanna get ice cream or something with my winnings?”
And… that was strange. No one had ever explained their inside jokes to him. Unless this was also part of the joke and he wasn’t actually inviting Shouto out for ice cream? He’d be noncommittal just in case. “We can talk about it later.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Now’s not a great time.” Kirishima tugged the comb through a particularly stubborn chunk of hair. The water in the sink blushed red. “Shouto, what is all this?”
There was a knock on the doorframe. Kaminari’s voice. “Kiri, bro. Me ’n Mina are gonna hit the cafeteria. You coming?”
“You and Mina can go ahead,” said Kirishima. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Cool,” said Kaminari, slapping the doorframe. “Shouto, dude, I hope you feel better.”
“Feel better, Shouto!” Ashido called. “You can’t see me, but I’m blowing you kisses. Mwah!”
Kirishima continued working the knots and dried blood from Shouto’s hair as the door opened and slammed closed.
Shouto heard Bakugou’s bed creak. Bakugou swearing.
“You good in there, bro?” Kirishima called.
There was no response. A few moments later, though, Bakugou appeared in the bathroom doorway, supported by a set of crutches. The cast on his wrist sported two new signatures in blue and green sharpie.
“Should you be up?” Kirishima asked.
“That old school nurse hag healed me up pretty good last night,” said Bakugou. “’Sides, if IcyHot’s walking, no reason I should be stuck in a fucking wheelchair. I don’t plan on getting weak right before the sports festival. What’re you doin’ to his head? Oi, IcyHot, that noumu give you lice or somethin’?”
“Or something,” said Shouto.
Kirishima cleared his throat. “I heard you guys fought some big-time villains and then brought down the noumu.”
Bakugou grunted. “Where’d you get warped to? The movies?”
“I went to the ruins zone.”
“With who?”
“I was by myself,” said Kirishima. His fingers tugged at a knot. “I mean, not by myself by myself since there were villains there, but you know.”
Bakugou’s eyebrows furrowed. “You win?”
“I don’t know. Not really. I guess I held out until the portals reappeared to warp the villains out, but I wasn’t able to win and go help my friends like you two did.”
Bakugou gave a half-frustrated, half-amused snort. He smacked the end of one of his crutches against the doorframe. “You see us like this and conclude we won? Thought you were smarter than that, Shitty Hair.”
“Wait, you didn’t—?” Kirishima’s hands stuttered, his fingers coming to a standstill at the base of Shouto’s hairline. “But you guys got away and froze the noumu, right?”
“Froze the—yeah, I guess that’s one way to say it. They not showin’ the footage to the students or media?”
“I didn’t see anything. Haven’t heard anything in the group chats, either. You two were the only students in the central plaza when the fight between All Might and the noumu went down.” Kirishima started rinsing the soap out of Shouto’s hair, cupping his hand at the base of Shouto’s neck to keep water from running down into his gown. “Should I have seen it?”
“If you want to see Strawberries-n-Cream jump off my back midair with all the finesse of a baby falling into a toilet.”
“I had to jump off at that angle so my foot would catch on its beak,” Shouto said. He spat out the water that ran into his mouth, then reached up to turn off the water. He squeezed his hair, some of the water splashing back onto the front of his gown. “I achieved that. You landed like a piece of fucking furniture.”
“The only reason I fell like that was because you didn’t warn me,” Bakugou said. “I thought you were gonna… I don’t know, fucking freeze it? Flashfire it? Should’ve told me you were planning on stickin’ your hand down its fuckin’ throat and exploding it.”
“Wait,” said Kirishima. “You… what?”
“Yeah, he just fuckin’—” Bakugou raised a crutch, punching it down toward the floor in demonstration. “—rammed his goddamn arm down inside its mouth and spit-roasted it with a giant ice spike. And then—” Bakugou swung his crutch outward, whacking the doorframe. “Y’know. Little pieces of noumu everywhere. IcyHot here looked like a fuckin’ tortilla chip covered in salsa.”
“Holy crap,” said Kirishima. “So that stuff in your hair is… uh. Okay, I… um… crap. What about before that? How’d you get away from the villains you got assigned to?”
“Villain,” Shouto corrected. “One.”
“One?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. He must’ve been really strong, then. Or she?”
“He was.” Shouto swiped the water from his face. “Bakugou, give me that towel beside you.”
Bakugou used the end of his crutch to snag the towel. He jabbed it into Shouto’s chest. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
Shouto took the towel, knocking the crutch away. “I made a mess,” he told Kirishima. “That’s probably why they haven’t released the video. I got noumu blood on All Might’s shoes and pants.”
“Didn’t you tell ’im—” Bakugou snorted. “Fucking moron. You fucking said you’d pay for it.”
Shouto wiped his face dry. “I thought that was what he was mad about.”
“You—HA! You’re a fucking idiot. I hope I get to break your nose once we’re out of here.”
Shouto huffed through his nose—a not-quite laugh. “Endeavor beat you to it a couple years ago. Sorry.”
“I’ll break his nose, too. Fuck Endeavor. I’ll punt you both into the fucking sun.”
Shouto made the mistake of glancing at Kirishima.
He looked horrified.
“Are you guys, like… okay?” Kirishima asked.
“Yes,” said Shouto. He started drying his hair. “They gave us pain medication.”
“No, I mean, that all sounds pretty traumatic. I mean, I’m shaky, but… holy crap. Sorry that happened. You should probably… you know, talk to a professional about it at some point? We’re all worried about what happened with you guys.”
Worried. His classmates, about him and Bakugou, the two least likeable humans in class 1-A. The notion was ridiculous.
Still, Kirishima was… a nice guy, even if he didn’t recognize a dead end when he saw one. Shouto felt bad watching him spend so much affection on people who didn’t know how to cherish it. What was the saying—throwing pearls before swine? “It wasn’t really anything special. And I won.”
“Yeah, keep talkin’ like you didn’t get your ass handed to you on the way.” Bakugou swung his crutch out at Shouto, chasing him away from the sink. Bakugou didn’t test the temperature of the water before dunking his entire head under the faucet. “I had to yank his fuckin’ elbow back in its socket. God—fuck! IcyHot! Did you use up all the fucking hot water?”
Shouto tossed the wet towel in the corner of the bathroom. “Yes, Bakugou, I used all the hot water in the entire hospital in the ten minutes I’ve been in here.”
Bakugou scrubbed furiously at his hair. “Fuck you, you would, you fucking spoiled rich kid.” He switched to scrubbing his face. “Kirishima!”
Kirishima jolted to attention. “Yes!”
“What’s going on with Thirteen and Aizawa? They still alive ’n shit?”
“Thirteen’s not awake yet,” said Kirishima. “Their condition’s stable, though. Aizawa’s already up and helping with the interviews.”
Shouto hadn’t expected Aizawa to already be back in action. Maybe he was more tenacious than Shouto originally thought. “The doctor I talked to last night said he was going to lose an eye,” Shouto said.
“I mean, you can’t really tell what’s going on there from seeing him. He looks like a mummy with all those bandages.” Kirishima’s phone vibrated, and he pulled it halfway from his pocket to check it. He grimaced. “I gotta go, dudes. Denki left his wallet at home and he’s freaking out because he told Mina he’d pay for her lunch.”
“Fuckin’ hell,” Bakugou muttered.
Kirishima helped Shouto back to his bed. The burnt/frozen sheet had been removed and was sitting in a pile on the floor.
Had Ashido and Kaminari done that? For him?
Guilt panged in Shouto’s chest. He was tricking his classmates somehow. Manipulating them into believing that Shouto deserved their kindness.
Kirishima lowered Shouto back onto the mattress. “Need anything before I leave, Shouto?”
“No,” said Shouto. He added: “Thanks. Eijirou.”
“Sure thing, bro,” Kirishima said. He gave Shouto’s shoulder a couple firm pats before he left the room.
Shouto lay down. He wasn’t nauseous anymore, but now he felt dizzy.
“Hey,” Bakugou called from the bathroom.
“What,” said Shouto.
“Why the fuck were we…? Y’know.”
“Uh?” Shouto asked.
“When we woke up.”
“Oh. Holding hands?”
“That,” said Bakugou.
Shouto held his hand above his head, watching the way the light reflected off his fingernails. There were so many tiny white dents there, and he didn’t remember getting any of them. “I don’t know. I was high.”
“Me, too. So on the off chance that I… initiated it, I wanted to make it clear that that was a fluke and it’s never gonna fucking happen again.”
“Okay,” Shouto said.
“I don’t like boys.”
“Okay.”
“We ain’t friends, either.”
“Okay.”
Bakugou came out of the bathroom on his crutches and returned to his bed. It was painful watching him get back in it, his movements slow and small. He laid on his back with his head at the foot of the bed and his socked feet propped on his pillow. Fingers of his uninjured hand tucked underneath his head, the single elbow sticking out like the surviving wing of a wrecked fighter jet.
“I bet you could kill your dad,” Bakugou said.
Shouto blinked. “What?”
“If you really tried.” Bakugou rubbed the palm of his hand against his nose, staring up at the ceiling. “Snuck up on ’im and shit.”
Shouto considered. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You speared the noumu.”
He wasn’t sure where Bakugou was going with this, so he asked for clarification. “You think I should kill my father?”
“Hah? No, dumbass, that’d make you a villain. I’m just sayin’. I think you could.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then shut up and die.”
Shouto picked up his phone from where it lay face-down on the small bedside table between their beds. He had a notification from the messaging app.
One (1) Multimedia Message from Ya Boi Deku
Ah, shit. Deku had left Shouto’s text demanding an explanation of the events at the USJ on read last night, and he’d been half hoping that that was how Shouto’s involvement with the League of Villains would end. Looked like it wasn’t going to be that easy.
But… he was also a little relieved. That Deku hadn’t abandoned Shouto the moment Shouto turned difficult. Though he wouldn’t know if that was for better or for worse until he saw the text.
“Oi,” Bakugou said.
Shouto tapped to open the messaging app, waiting for it to load. “Mm?”
“Did you know him?”
“Who?”
“Y’know,” said Bakugou. “Sparkle Vest.”
Shit. Bakugou hadn’t seen the notification while Shouto was in the bathroom, right? Shouto’s phone had been face-down and Ashido and Kaminari were in the room with Bakugou at the time, so Bakugou wouldn’t have had much of a chance to snoop. “I told you I didn’t.”
“That was before Hand Fuck implied that Sparkle Vest was ruining the mission for you. Did you forget the part where he wiped blood off your face like he was your fucking girlfriend?”
“I don’t know why he did that,” Shouto said, which was true.
“What was he saying to you? I couldn’t hear.”
“Just…” Shouto lowered his still-loading phone, placing it screen-down on his chest. He could barely remember. “That I did a good job. Um. That he was sorry, I think.”
“Fuckin’ weirdo. Sorry for what?”
“I don’t know,” Shouto lied. “Attacking us, I guess.”
“What did he look like?”
Shouto didn’t like how interested Bakugou was becoming in this. “Kind of plain. No distinguishing marks, really.”
“What color were his eyes? I never got close enough to see.”
Green. Green green green. “I don’t remember.”
“What about his hair?”
“I didn’t see his hair.”
“Was it green?” Bakugou asked.
The question caught Shouto off guard. And put a somewhat horrifying thought in his brain.
Deku had said something about Bakugou’s right hooks while they were fighting. Shouto had assumed he’d picked that up either through hacked surveillance footage or through whatever quirk he had, but what if Bakugou also knew Deku outside of school?
Shouto twisted to face Bakugou. Too quickly—his phone slid off his chest and clattered to the floor between their beds.
The loaded messaging app stared up at them. With it, Deku’s name and latest message, text large enough that Shouto could see it from his bed. His eyes caught the first couple sentences of the last text.
Ya Boi Deku:
Let’s meet? Just us two.
For a split second, Shouto and Bakugou’s eyes met. Shouto’s stomach dropped at the realization: Bakugou had seen the message.
Bakugou had seen the message.
Shit.
Notes:
Did you catch the self-insert? It's true, I was the sink.
Chapter 20: Shouto Eats a Twinkie
Summary:
The consequences of Bakugou seeing *that* text. Lunch & shit-talking with Natsuo.
Notes:
CW: mention of corrective rape/sexual assault, mention of suicide, discussion of murder, brief necrophilia joke
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Bakugou’s hand darted for the phone on the floor.
The phone with the messaging app open.
The phone with Deku’s latest message currently displayed on its screen.
Shouto’s panic instinct kicked in half a second too late, and the ice he shot at Bakugou’s hand missed, instead catching on Bakugou’s blanket and dragging it off the mattress.
Shouto stumbled out of bed. “Give that—!”
Bakugou twisted just enough that he could kick Shouto square in the chest. The kick didn’t contain nearly the entirety of Bakugou’s power, but Shouto was already unsteady, and the force sent him tumbling over the other side of his own bed. His shoulder and the back of his head hit the hard floor.
“Get the fuck back,” said Bakugou. “What the fuck is this? Hah? I heard Shigaraki call that kid villain Deku. This the same Deku? You’re talking to him?!”
“No, I—fuck!” Shouto struggled to right himself. “Bakugou—”
“‘Let’s meet? Just us two,’” Bakugou read aloud. “‘Dabi wanted me to ask you some stuff anyway. Hope you feel better soon.’”
“It’s not—”
“What the fuck, IcyHot?”
Shouto managed to pull himself back onto his bed. “Give me my phone back and I’ll explain.”
Bakugou leveled him with a look he’d never seen from Bakugou before. Something… wary?
“Are you a villain?” Bakugou asked.
What the fuck? “No. No.”
Bakugou glowered at him for a moment. Then he looked back down at the phone. Started scrolling up.
“That’s a private conversation,” Shouto said.
He kept scrolling.
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. His heart was pounding. “Stop.”
“Why is a villain sending you memes?” Bakugou asked. “You—you’re friends with this guy, aren’t you?”
“He’s not my friend.”
“He literally texted ‘Consider me a friend.’ Right here. In bold fuckin’ letters.”
“Not like I said it back,” said Shouto.
Bakugou looked up at Shouto with his eyes but not his head. “This ain’t looking good, IcyHot.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with the USJ,” Shouto said. He spoke quickly. “Deku is helping me with Endeavor. He and Da—one of my father’s former sidekicks are helping me gather enough evidence against him that CPS will take U.A.’s report about me seriously.”
“Did you know he was a villain?”
“Yes.”
Bakugou raised his head. “You fucking knew—”
“I only knew about the things he did to gain access to Endeavor’s agency.”
Bakugou looked back down. He kept scrolling.
“Will you stop?” Shouto said, a little louder than he meant to.
Bakugou ignored him. “So you’ve met up with him before?”
“A few times,” Shouto said. “Not by choice. Give my phone back.”
“Was he wearing his mask then?”
“No.”
“So tell me what the fuck he looks like.”
“Jesus—” Shouto tore his fingers through his damp hair, locked his hands together at the back of his head. “He… Normal? I don’t fucking know. Green eyes, green hair, freckles. Why, do you think you’ve seen him before?”
“Give me a second,” Bakugou muttered, reaching for his own phone on the table beside him. It was an awkward maneuver with his cast. He scrolled through his phone for a couple minutes before he held the cracked screen out for Shouto to see. “That him?”
Bakugou had pulled up a picture from his phone gallery. It was a yearbook photo of a young boy—twelve or thirteen, probably—in a middle school uniform. Eager eyes, boisterous hair. Both green. He wore a bright smile that was disconcertingly familiar.
Definitely Deku.
But the caption underneath read Midoriya Izuku.
Izuku.
Izuku, like the dead boy Bakugou had bullied in middle school?
Pieces began clicking into place. Bakugou, with the strange set of journals on the bottom shelf in his room. Deku, with his villain father. Izuku, the missing-presumed-dead-by-suicide boy with the father who had killed Izuku’s mother.
The father that… Deku was still in contact with?
Shouto nodded. “That’s Deku.”
Bakugou released a quick breath. He pulled his phone back toward himself, looking down at the photo for a few seconds before he closed his eyes and whispered, “Fuck.”
“You know him,” said Shouto.
“I… I don’t know. Illusion and body-changing quirks aren’t that rare.” Bakugou threw Shouto’s phone back to him. It hit his chest and fell into his lap. “Tell me about the former sidekick. Who’s he? What’s his quirk?”
Shouto wasn't sure if he should tell Bakugou that he'd heard him talking about Izuku. Back when Shouto was supposed to be asleep and Bakugou thought he was talking to himself. “His name’s Dabi. He has a fire quirk—”
“Breathing fire?” Bakugou asked. His eyes flashed with intent.
“I… don’t know,” said Shouto.
“How old is he? What’s he look like?”
“Like… mid-twenties? Spiky black hair, heavily scarred, dresses like a homeless gay man. Why?”
Bakugou exhaled. “Never mind. What else?”
“He also has a quirk that lets him physically become someone else—and use their quirk—when he drinks their blood. But it only works with a quirk enhancing drug, I think. I’m not sure exactly how it operates. I don’t understand how Dabi got two quirks, either. The way they were talking, it seemed that Dabi was experiencing the drawbacks of the shapeshifting quirk for the first time. Like he’d only recently developed that quirk. Maybe it’s not a quirk? Could be some radical new drug that uses DNA to copy—”
“Jesus fuck, IcyHot, shut the fuck up. You sound like Iz—like—fuck, never mind.” Bakugou slouched against the wall his bed was pushed against, crossing his legs in a 4 formation. “Does the person whose blood it is have to be alive for it to work?”
If the person whose blood it was had to be alive for the quirk to work, then Deku wouldn’t have tried to kill that kindergartener’s father. He could’ve just knocked the man and taken his blood, or maybe kidnap him. “I don’t think it matters. Why?”
Bakugou ignored his question. “Here’s the fucking deal. You take me with you to this… meeting thing between you and him, and I won’t tell the teachers you’re a fucking traitor. Yet.”
Take Bakugou… with him? To see Deku? He did not see that ending well in any timeline, even if Deku wasn't stealing Izuku's identity and was actually Izuku. Especially if Deku was actually Izuku. Who knew how Deku might lash out upon being cornered by a former abuser? “That’s not a good idea.”
“Why fucking not?”
“Were you not at the USJ? You realize that he took you out with one move, right? He knew my weaknesses, too. I feel like I’m walking a very thin line of trust with him. I don’t want to know what happens if I break that trust.”
Bakugou paused, eyes flitting to the side. “So we’ll meet him in a public space where he can’t do anything stupid.”
“No?” Being in public hadn’t stopped Deku from blowing up that bridge. “What if he does something that endangers—”
“I think I know him,” Bakugou snapped. “He knows me, at least, with how fast he took me out. And if he’s not who I think he is, then he doesn’t deserve trust. Or deserve to live.”
“So—what, you’re going to kill him if he ends up being somebody else?”
Bakugou’s face twitched. “I’ll at least beat the living shit out of him.”
“How are you going to do that? Poke him with your broken ribs?”
“Fuck you! I didn’t know what I was walking into yesterday. Now I do. If you try to stop me, I’ll beat you up.”
“Because that worked out so well the last time you tried,” said Shouto.
“That was your fault, Half-n-Half Bastard!”
A hesitant knock on the door startled them out of their conversation. A male voice. “Shichan?”
Shouto turned to see Natsuo standing at the room’s entrance, looking lost.
“Who the fuck are you?” Bakugou asked.
Natsuo quirked an eyebrow. “Who the fuck are you?”
Shouto interrupted before Bakugou could say anything damning. He hoped Bakugou wasn’t stupid enough to refer to Shouto using he/him pronouns in front of Natsuo, but he wouldn’t put it past him. He addressed Natsuo. “Why are you here?”
“Picking you up,” said Natsuo, dropping his hand from the doorframe. “You didn’t get my text?”
Shouto looked down at his phone. The notification was there—a simple Fuyumi can’t get off work, so I’m heading over to pick you up in an hour. He’d just overlooked and forgot to open it after he saw Deku’s message. Fucking ADHD.
But—Natsuo? Not Fuyumi?
Was she really so appalled by Shouto that she’d called Natsuo to take her place?
Shouto felt sick.
“I brought you a change of clothes.” Natsuo walked forward and set a satchel on Shouto’s bed. He tilted his head as he looked Shouto over. “Wow. Yumi wasn’t kidding. You look like shit. Why the fuck is your gown burnt? And ice on… wait, were you two fighting?”
“Oi,” Bakugou said. “You one of Endeavor’s sidekicks or somethin’?”
Natsuo looked at Bakugou, his eyes narrowing slightly. “I’m her brother. Why?”
Bakugou looked conflicted, but he eventually relaxed back against the wall. “Was gonna kick your ass if you were a sidekick.”
Shouto opened the satchel and rummaged through it. Clothes from his own closet, thankfully. Just a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, so Natsuo must’ve been the one who picked them—Fuyumi would’ve thought to include a bra.
Natsuo gave an amused huff. “Not an Endeavor fan?”
“Fuck no,” said Bakugou.
“But he’s such a fun and approachable person.”
Bakugou furrowed his brows. “What’s your quirk?”
“Disappointing my father,” said Natsuo.
“Hah?”
“Quirkless, buddy.” Natsuo looked around. “Shiyo, did they not bring you crutches or anything? You supposed to whittle your own from the bedposts? Jesus fuck. I’ll be right back.”
Natsuo left the room, closing the door behind him. Shouto took his clothes out of the satchel. He turned his back to Bakugou before he pulled off his gown—he wasn’t wearing a bra, and he wasn’t sure if Bakugou would make a fuss over Shouto being naked from the waist up.
“S’weird as fuck,” Bakugou muttered.
Shouto pulled his shirt over his head. “What?”
“Him callin’ you that name. And ‘she.’ That don’t weird you out?”
Shouto had expected Bakugou’s “weird as fuck” comment to be about his body. When it wasn’t, it took him a moment to formulate an answer that wasn’t defensive or deflective. “Yeah. It does.”
“Tell ’im you’re a boy.”
Shouto slipped off the bed to pull on his shorts. It was difficult when he could only put weight on one leg. “He might tell my sister.”
“So fuckin’ tell your sister! I don’t get why you keep pretending to be a girl at home when you’re obviously not one—”
“Bakugou, the only thing keeping me from fucking killing myself is my sister, and I don’t intend on losing her over a name and pronouns.” He kicked his shoes on. “Wouldn’t be good if it got out to the public or to Endeavor’s agency, either. I’m not in the mood for corrective rape.”
“That’s where your brain goes?”
“You get groped enough times in the locker room, yeah, your brain starts going there.”
“Tch.” Bakugou picked up his phone from the mattress. “Oi. What’s your number?”
“My phone number? Why?”
“Because we’re not done talking about Deku, fuckass.”
Shouto shook his head. “That’s not something we need to discuss over text. Talk to me at school.”
“I don’t wanna talk to you at school. People are gonna think we’re fuckin’ dating or somethin’ if we talk at school.”
“You’re fragile,” said Shouto. “Just yell everything at me. That’s what you usually do.”
Natsuo reentered the room, toting a pair of crutches. Bakugou watched silently as Natsuo adjusted the crutches to Shouto’s height. Shouto took them under his arms, testing them. It wasn’t his first time on crutches, but that didn’t make them feel any less foreign.
“You look stupid,” said Bakugou.
Shouto adjusted his stance so he could hold out his hand. “Give me your phone.”
“What? No. Fuckin’ gross. You probably still have noumu guts under your fingernails.”
“Do you want my number or not?”
“Just say it to me, asshole!”
“I don’t like reciting things. Give me your phone.”
“Fuck you!”
“Holy—” Natsuo plucked Bakugou’s phone from his hand, leaving Bakugou empty-handed and open-mouthed. “I can’t believe I’m enabling this.”
Shouto looked over Natsuo’s shoulder, realizing with a tiny pang of guilt that Natsuo was typing Shouto’s number into Bakugou’s phone. Without reference. He had it memorized? Natsuo hardly ever contacted Shouto, and Shouto texted back even less. Shouto didn’t even know the first digit of Natsuo’s phone number.
Natsuo started typing in the characters for Shiyo, then erased it and handed the phone back to Bakugou with the contact name box left blank. “There. Are we all Happy Heroes now?”
Bakugou snatched his phone back from Natsuo. He looked down at the screen and grunted. “You better not ignore me when I text you, IcyHot.”
Shouto rounded the bed as Natsuo collected the empty satchel from the bed. “Okay,” Shouto said.
“Oi! I’m fuckin’ serious. I’ll drag you out of your stupid bloated house and beat the living shi—”
“Will you stop fucking yelling for two fucking seconds?” Shouto said, glancing back over his shoulder at Bakugou. “I’ll answer your fucking texts. Do not come to my house again. I’ll set your face on fire this time.”
“Not if I explode your overcooked face first.”
Shouto struggled to open the door. “Fucking try it.”
Natsuo held the door open for Shouto, giving Shouto a strange look as he passed through.
They made it to the elevator without speaking. Once the elevator doors closed, Natsuo asked, “Who…?”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto.
“Fuyumi said you spent the night with some blond guy a few days ago. That’s not…?”
“Yeah.”
Natsuo looked at the elevator buttons. “You two friends, or…?”
“No.”
“Dating?”
“No.”
“You said he’s been to the house?”
“Not in it,” said Shouto. “We just fought outside.”
“Fought? Over what?”
Shouto hesitated. “Over the asphalt.”
“No—” Natsuo bit his bottom lip like he was struggling not to laugh. “Sorry. I wasn’t clear. What subject were you fighting over?”
Oh. “Nothing, really. We fought and then went to his house and did homework.”
Natsuo quirked an eyebrow. “You’re getting in fistfights outside of school?”
“Just one,” said Shouto.
Natsuo huffed a baffled laugh, looking away. “Touya used to do that, too.”
Shouto wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “What?”
“Nothing.”
The elevator came to a halt, and they headed out of the hospital. Natsuo tipped the valet who’d brought his car around, then tossed Shouto’s crutches in the backseat on top of a messy assortment of old textbooks with their covers torn off, loose crumpled medical diagrams, and granola bar wrappers.
“You want the radio on?” Natsuo asked as they drove out of the parking lot.
Shouto shook his head, looking out the window at the busy traffic. The quiet was giving room to his anxiety—loops of what if—but right now, that was preferrable to ten more minutes of white noise. He’d had enough stimulation at the hospital to last him a month.
“Hungry?” Natsuo asked. “I can stop somewhere and get takeout.”
“Don’t think I can eat.” Shouto rested his temple against the cool glass of the window. Natsuo was a careful driver, so at least he could relax about that aspect. “You can stop if you want.”
“You anxious about the interview or something?”
“I don’t know,” Shouto said. “Nauseous. Do painkillers make you nauseous?”
“Depends on the type.”
“Oh. I don’t know, then.”
Natsuo glanced over at him. “When’d you last eat? Do you remember?”
Shouto shook his head.
“I can get you something soft. Or do you have something you usually eat? A go-to food?”
“Soba,” Shouto said. “Cold. And milk.”
“Think you can do that now?”
“Maybe.” Shouto paused. Was he asking too much? Fuyumi hadn’t picked him up for a reason, right? He was being too difficult, demanding too much from her. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to,” said Natsuo.
They stopped by a small restaurant/convenience store junction. Natsuo left Shouto in the car and went inside.
Shouto checked the messaging app while Natsuo was gone, reading over Deku’s latest text.
Ya Boi Deku:
Let’s meet? Just us two. Dabi wanted me to ask you some stuff anyway. Hope you feel better soon :)
Bakugou had read that part aloud. He hadn’t mention the moving sticker Deku had added below the message—a teddy bear wearing a medical hat and hugging a heart.
Natsuo emerged a few minutes later with a couple cardboard containers and a plastic bag. Shouto put his phone away. They ate together in the parked car, the AC doing little to dispel the humidity inside the car.
He noticed Natsuo looking at him a few minutes in and wondered if he should say something. Not like he wasn’t used to people staring—he had a huge fucking scar on his face—but he hadn’t expected that from Natsuo. “Do I look that bad?” he asked.
Natsuo looked startled. “Huh? Oh—sorry. I was just thinking. We haven’t had a lot of meals together, have we?”
Shouto pushed the straw through his milk carton. “I guess.”
“Kinda fucked up. This is pretty much the first time you’ve been outside of Endeavor’s direct sphere of influence, right? And you end up in the hospital two weeks in.”
Shouto took a sip of milk. He wasn’t sure how to respond to that, or even if he was supposed to.
“You can tell me what happened,” Natsuo said. “If you want.”
Shouto gave a one-shouldered shrug.
“Just… fuck,” said Natsuo. “I hate the idea of high schools geared toward creating Heroes. Of-fucking-course they’ll be targeted by villains. Like… if you’ve gotta teach that shit, save it for college, when students are old enough to make informed decisions for themselves.”
“Not U.A.’s fault,” Shouto said. My fault, he thought.
“Not directly, but they actively contribute to an inherently flawed system. Just…” Natsuo leaned his head back against the headrest, chin tilted up and Adam’s apple poking out, staring at the car’s roof. “I’m not a huge fan of Hero culture. Can you tell?”
“I know you hate Endeavor,” said Shouto.
Natsuo barked a laugh. “God, Shiyo, if I weren’t… if I had any sort of useful quirk, I might actually kill that man.”
It wasn’t something Shouto had ever heard from Natsuo before. Then again, it wasn’t something Natsuo could’ve said in front of Fuyumi, and it was very rare that Natsuo and Shouto spent time together alone.
“I don’t think you’d need a quirk to do that,” Shouto said.
Natsuo looked at him.
“Um.” Shouto lowered his chopsticks. “Bakugou and I fought a villain yesterday who didn’t use a quirk—someone our age. He used his physical strength and speed. And a gun. He could’ve killed us if he wanted to. So I don’t think you need a quirk to do things like that.”
“Ah,” said Natsuo. “Putting aside the clusterfuck that is child villains, what I’m hearing is that I should consider a career change?”
It took Shouto a minute to process what Natsuo was suggesting, but when he got it, the implications forced a laugh out of him. “You—oh. Endeavor. That would piss him off.”
Natsuo looked surprised for a second, but then he grinned. “That’s the idea.”
“Should I tell him a Quirkless child kicked my ass?”
“Y’know, as someone who cares about your well-being, I feel like I should say no, but—”
“He’d be so mad.”
“He fuckin’ would.” Natsuo shoveled a few noodles in his mouth and spoke through it, words muffled. “So you gonna support me on my road to villainy? Write recommendation letters to the villain bigwigs for me, tell ’em how evil I am?”
“Of course.”
Natsuo raised an eyebrow. “I can’t tell if you’re joking.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” said Shouto.
Natsuo shrugged. He rummaged through the plastic bag from the convenience store and pulled out a Twinkie. “You want part of this?”
Shouto leaned over to read the packaging. “I’ve never had one of those.”
“Really? I guess that doesn’t surprise me. I gave you some of those Tokyo Bananas the last time I visited, right?”
Shouto nodded.
“You liked those?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“Okay. So imagine those, but… more mediocre and with enough preservatives to last through an apocalypse. Also, every bite you take removes two days from your life span.”
“I’ll take it.”
Natsuo opened the package and handed one of the yellow cakes to Shouto. Shouto’s phone buzzed. He bit into the Twinkie as he checked it.
Unknown:
Oi what’re you telling the police n shit
Bakugou. Shouto changed the name in his phone before texting back.
Shouto:
What happened at the USJ. Nothing outside of that.
Bakugou:
K
Listen though. You tell them about your prior connections now, you can play it off n say you didn’t know they were villains. You don’t tell them now, you won’t be able to change your mind later without getting in a shitload of trouble
“That blond kid texting you already?” Natsuo asked.
Shouto grunted.
Shouto:
I know that.
Bakugou:
You know what you’re getting yourself into?
“He’s kind of obsessed with you, isn’t he?” Natsuo said.
Shouto raised his eyebrows as he typed back an answer to Bakugou. He bit the end off his Twinkie. “I guess.”
Shouto:
I know that this is the closest I’ve gotten so far to legal action actually being taken against my father and that Deku helped me with that. I assume you want to talk to him before he becomes a wanted criminal?
Bakugou:
Fucking obviously
You’re not withholding any info that’d help police track down Shigaraki, right?
Shouto:
I don’t think anything I know could be used to track down the League. Deku is careful.
Bakugou:
Set the meeting for the week before the sports festival
We’ll be healed by then & it gives me time to think of a plan
Shouto:
Ok.
He hesitated, then added another text.
Shouto:
My brother thinks you’re obsessed with me.
Shouto’s phone blew up with texts.
Bakugou:
FUCKING
IT’S YOUR FUCKING FAULT FUCKWIPE
I WOULDN’T HAVE TO TEXT YOU IF YOU WEREN’T COHORTING WITH DUCKING VILLAINS
*fucking
Oh so now you’re not gonna fucking answer?? I’ll fucking kiss you IcyHot
fUCH. *KILO
*DUCK
*FUCK
*KILL. KILL I MEANT FUCKING KILL AND FUCK
Shouto finished his Twinkie, finger hovering over the keyboard. He glanced over at Natsuo, who had finished his meal and was packing up his trash.
Shouto:
In that order? You’re into some weird shit.
Bakugou:
YOU KNOW WHAT FUCK YOU AND FUCK THOSE EXTRAS FOR NOT BELIEVING ME WHEN I SAID YOU WERE A SARCASTIC LITTLE FUCKED UP SHIT
“What’re you smiling about?” Natsuo asked.
“Huh?” Shouto looked up. “Nothing. I made Bakugou mad.”
Natsuo tilted his head. “You’re friends with him.”
“No.”
“You totally are!”
“Bakugou said we weren’t friends.”
“Boys like him don’t always say what they’re feeling.”
Shouto… knew that, he supposed. But if he and Bakugou had friendly relationship, did that mean Shouto was friends with Deku, too? Deku didn’t yell at Shouto, at least. Did that make him a better or worse friend than Bakugou? None of this made any sense.
Natsuo crumpled the Twinkie wrapper. “Speaking of boys, why were you rooming with him? Kind of strange that they put you in a room with a guy.”
Shouto’s gut twisted. Maybe he’d come out to Natsuo sometime, but he had way too much going on today to think about that now. “I guess because we were the only students who stayed in the hospital overnight. And we… fought villains together. And stuff.”
“You’re okay with, like, changing clothes in front of him?”
“What?” Oh, right. Natsuo had left the room while Shouto was in his gown and come back when he was in his civilian clothes, so of course he’d drawn that—correct—conclusion. Maybe Shouto should’ve thought that through a little better. “It’s fine. I don’t like boys or anything, so it’s not awkward.”
“Ah. Gotcha. Girls more your thing?”
Shouto searched Natsuo’s face for context. Girls? No, Shouto didn’t actively pursue sexual relationships with girls, either. Was that what Natsuo was asking?
“Oh—you don’t have to tell me now,” said Natsuo. “Sorry. When you’re ready.”
Shouto kept staring. What the fuck was he talking about?
“Um. Anyway.” Natsuo tossed his trash in the backseat. “I guess you want to get home so you can clean up for your police interview. And your meeting with the U.A. staff later.”
Right, that. “Do you know if Fuyumi’s going with me to that?”
“Endeavor is. Wanted to hear how you… performed or something. Usual bullshit. Sorry I couldn’t stop him this time.”
Shouto looked down at his half-eaten soba. There was anxiety about what Endeavor would say about Shouto being bested by Deku, of course, but… there was also the possibility that Endeavor would praise Shouto for killing the noumu. For doing something All Might—the one Hero Endeavor had never been able to best—couldn’t.
Shouto realized that he was looking forward to hearing those words from Endeavor’s mouth.
That I’m proud of you.
And he hated himself for it.
“What’d you threaten him with?” Shouto asked. “The first time, I mean. To keep him from coming to the hospital.”
Natsuo put his hand on Shouto’s shoulder as he backed out of his parking space, looking back to make sure he didn’t hit anyone. He gave a wry grin. “You ain’t the only one with secrets, Shichan.”
Notes:
My ABSOLUTE favorite type of character to write is nerdy jock older brother, so of course I'm having a heyday with Natsuo. Hope y'all like my interpretation of his character.
Also--I got a scifi short story accepted to a literary magazine yesterday (Otherwise Engaged Literature and Arts Journal)!! To be published in July. The transgender communist biobots win this round, boys.
My Insta is @max_says_no if y'all wanna keep up with my writing and see all my half-assed MHA sketches and uh, shirtless selfies.
Chapter 21: Shouto Rallies the Lesbians. Let's Go Lesbians, Let's Go!
Summary:
After the USJ incident, Shouto and Endeavor head to U.A. to meet with faculty. Kirishima and his parents, hell yeah! Also, it seems like Endeavor and Aizawa know each other? Yikes.
The next chapter is already written and will be published a few minutes after this one goes up!
Notes:
TW: references to past abuse (manipulation), abusive intimidation tactics, deadnaming, building panic attack, minor self-harm (biting)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Are you moving slow on purpose?”
Shouto had actually, genuinely not been moving slowly on purpose, though he was tempted now that Endeavor had brought it up. Shouto was still getting used to the crutches, and he had to be careful on the cobbled path up to U.A.’s entrance. Not very disability-friendly, he realized, but then again, what sort of Hero school admitted students with disabilities? Shouto was going to be a burden on everyone around him for at least the next week. “No.”
“You were slow going to your police interview this morning, too.”
Irritation scratched at his throat. “I’m on crutches, old man. I can ditch them if you’re cool with me permanently fucking up my leg and making history as the first Pro Hero to ride a wheelchair into battle.”
Endeavor peered down at him, the flames around his eyes swelling upward. “I don’t want any lip from you in there. You speak when spoken to. You’re not too old to be punished.”
Punished. Sure, Endeavor used training to instill discipline in Shouto, but explicit punishment was something else. Could be anything else, really. The ambiguity of the word was what made it menacing.
Endeavor knew what Shouto valued and what he hated. He’d learned early that corporal punishment didn’t work on Shouto. When Shouto was younger, time-outs had been infinitely torturous. As Shouto grew older, Endeavor attacked different things—Shouto’s privacy, maybe, or his comfort items or special interests.
Shouto was more careful now, of course. He didn’t read fiction or watch tv shows to keep from forming attachments. He kept his room impersonal so Endeavor would be less likely to guess its importance to Shouto. He rotated his clothing so Endeavor wouldn’t notice a favorite shirt or pair of sweatpants.
He didn’t doubt that he’d missed something. Formed some attachment even Shouto hadn’t quite noticed yet. Something Endeavor could still weaponize against him.
So punishment was best avoided.
“Understand?” Endeavor prompted.
Shouto nodded.
“Speak up.”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
The word was difficult to dredge up. He really, really hoped he didn’t become nonspeaking today. Based on past experiences, the situation was just right for that to happen. Physical helplessness. Questions with high stakes. Endeavor invading an environment that had previously belonged solely to Shouto—an environment that Shouto had little control over—and the vulnerability that came with that happening.
This could be what Endeavor weaponized as a punishment, Shouto realized. He could take Shouto out of U.A.
Dread snaked inside Shouto’s stomach at the thought of returning to a life lived almost completely at home. Private tutors and personal trainers hand-picked by Endeavor. He shouldn’t have told Endeavor that he was making friends.
Today was Saturday, so campus was less busy, but there were still stares from General Education students who came to campus for optional classes or study sessions. No one stopped Endeavor to greet him or otherwise, though one student did hold the door open for Shouto, giving him a once-over.
Pity? Curiosity? Shouto couldn’t tell.
When they came to the stairs, they split wordlessly, Shouto heading toward the elevator and Endeavor continuing up the stairs. Endeavor—more specifically, the on-fire version of Endeavor, which was Endeavor ninety percent of the time—was prohibited by law from taking the elevator in most buildings as a caution against fire. Shouto had no objections. He certainly wasn’t itching to ride in an elevator with Endeavor.
Shouto was intercepted before he got to the elevator. Kirishima had just stepped off the opposite staircase with two middle-aged women. He gave a shark-toothed grin and waved enthusiastically when he saw Shouto, breaking away from the women and jogging toward Shouto. “Hey, man! You headed up for your meeting? We just got finished. Nothing to worry about, really. You okay? I saw your dad on the stairs. I can follow you up if you want? Get the doors ’n stuff for ya.”
Shouto wasn’t sure what part of… that he was supposed to respond to. “I’m… it’s okay.”
“You sure? Wouldn’t be any trouble.”
He looked over Kirishima’s shoulder at the elevator. He didn’t need to keep Endeavor waiting. “It’s fine.”
“Cool shirt.” Kirishima nodded down Shouto’s graphic t-shirt. “That’s a good show. Red’s Ocean. So manly! I liked the nuanced portrayal of pirates from the First Quirk generation. And there’s actually some pretty good disabled and neurodivergent representation. You like the show?”
Something rose in Shouto’s chest. Kirishima knew about…?
No. No. Not here. Not now. He’d gotten over Red’s Ocean years ago, and he was not about to subject an innocent classmate to an information dump. Shouto didn’t do those anymore. People hated them. “Used to,” Shouto said.
“I just wore my uniform,” Kirishima said. Like he wasn’t standing right in front of Shouto with his lopsided red tie. “I kind of thought we had to, since it’s school grounds? But maybe not, since we’re not here for class.”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “My father came with me today, so I couldn’t wear my uniform.”
Kirishima tilted his head. “Huh? Why?”
“He doesn’t know I still wear the boys’ uniform. He told me to stop.”
Kirishima looked confused. “What else would you wear?”
“The…” Was he for real? “The girls’?”
Kirishima was silent for a second. Then, “Oh. I keep forgetting you’re… oh, okay. So you… man, I didn’t even think you might not be out to your family.” He gave an embarrassed smile. “You’re so confident ’n stuff. I thought it was, like… a done deal, like you’ve been Shouto since you were three or something.”
No, he’d been traumatized since he was three. The name Shouto had been attached to him for all of two weeks. “No.”
“Dude, I wish I knew more about you. You really don’t talk much.”
The two women came up behind Kirishima. One of the women—a Black woman with long red twists and eyes with vertical slits in place of round pupils—smacked the other woman’s arm. “Look, that’s Ei’s friend he’s always talking about.”
The other woman smiled, waving at Shouto. Her teeth were sharp like Kirishima’s—was she Kirishima’s mother?
“Oh—these are my moms,” said Kirishima. To the women, he said, “You guys remember me talking about Shouto.”
Moms. Plural. That… that sounded kind of nice. It was strange that Kirishima hadn’t mentioned them before, though. Did Kirishima’s other friends know?
The shark-toothed woman raised her hands to sign, motions wide and bouncing: “I thought you’d be ten feet tall by how he talks about you. It’s nice to meet you.”
The woman with the reptilian eyes spoke. “She says—"
“I know.” Shouto didn’t understand why she’d think he would be ten feet tall—Endeavor wasn’t even that tall—but he signed back a quick and sharp, “You as well.”
“You know sign?” Kirishima asked.
“I know Pro Hero sign,” said Shouto. “It’s just a condensed and militarized version of normal Japanese sign. I can mostly understand normal Japanese sign through extrapolation.”
“That’s so manly, dude!”
“We tried to get him to stop equating manly with good,” signed the shark-toothed woman, smiling. “You see how that went. If a couple lesbians can’t beat it out of him, I doubt anyone can. But I am impressed that you’re bilingual at such a young age.”
“It’s…” Shouto’s voice drained off. He wasn’t well-versed in responding to praise, and he didn’t trust himself not to mess something up. He really needed to get on the elevator, anyway. Endeavor wouldn’t be happy if he had to wait for Shouto. “Um. I should—”
“Ei says you and Bakugou probably saved a lot of lives yesterday,” said the woman with the reptilian eyes. “That must’ve taken a lot of courage.”
Shouto searched her face. Was that a question he was supposed to confirm or deny? He knew that he had a tendency to accidentally answer rhetorical questions, but he’d also earned a few dirty looks when he ignored questions he’d wrongly assumed were rhetorical. These types of conversations always felt like traps.
“N-no, it—it w—” Fuck, he was stuttering again. The reptilian-eyed woman was about Lady Hypna’s height and build and was looking at Shouto with a similar fond look—was that why he couldn’t talk? In any case, he needed to get over his stuttering before he did it in front of Endeavor during the interview. He tried to push his next sentence out without stopping to analyze it every few words. “I thought if somebody was going to die, probably better me than someone who actually wants to be a Hero.”
The woman looked surprised. “You… don’t want to be a Hero?”
Oh.
Fuck. He did not mean to say that. He did not mean to say that.
Endeavor’s voice cut off whatever Shouto had been about to say, echoing down the stairs. “SHIYO!”
Kirishima gave a small start, looking up at the staircase. He couldn’t have seen Endeavor from where he stood since the staircase was bisected by the elevator, but it wasn’t like Endeavor’s voice was unrecognizable. “Is that…?”
Panic spiked in Shouto’s chest. He quickly forced any expression out of his face. “I have to go,” he told Kirishima.
Kirishima’s face pinched. “Um. I can go with—”
“Rather you didn’t.” Shouto moved past Kirishima and his moms to press the button on the elevator. He was thankful that he didn’t have to wait for it to come down, the doors opening immediately. He stepped in. “We can talk on Monday. If you still want to then.”
“Uh, yeah,” said Kirishima. “See you then. I guess.”
“Nice to meet you,” called the reptilian-eyed woman.
Shouto gave a nod over his shoulder, not meeting her eyes. He pressed the button for the second floor, holding his breath until the doors closed.
When they did, his breath snapped out of him like a rubber band breaking. A choked noise escaped from his mouth.
Kirishima had heard his deadname. Why did that make him feel so fucking shitty?
And then Shouto had basically told Kirishima to fuck off. Rather you didn’t. Why had he said that? God, why was Shouto so bad at being a decent human being?
Shouto tried to reel in his thoughts before they spun too deep. A one-floor elevator ride wasn’t enough time to have a panic attack. Instead, he brought his left hand up and bit into the meat of his palm, let the sting absorb some of the frantic energy vibrating all through his body.
The elevator jolted to a stop. Shouto placed his hand back on his crutch, glanced at himself in the reflective surface of the elevator walls. He didn’t look… calm, exactly, but at least there was no discernable emotion in his face or posture. Maybe he looked a little dead, but what was he supposed to do about that? Fucking smile?
He’d had enough of people telling him to smile. Grown men and women telling him he looked more attractive and approachable that way. Shouto’s expression was one of the few things he could control about his own body, and no way in hell was he going to give them the satisfaction of an approachable Shouto.
Maybe that was also why he couldn’t keep friends.
Well. He’d never expected to keep his bodily autonomy for free. Everything cost something.
“Where were you?” Endeavor asked when the elevator doors opened.
“Someone stopped me,” said Shouto, stepping out. The air outside the elevator was immediately warmer, heated by Endeavor’s presence.
Endeavor cast a narrow-eyed side glance at Shouto as they started walking. “One of your friends?”
Shouto kept his eyes forward. “Just a classmate.”
They were greeted by Principal Nezu as they approached his office. “Endeavor-san, good morning. Todoroki-kun. I’m sorry we have to meet under these circumstances.”
Endeavor barely acknowledged Nezu with a nod as he pushed past him into his office. Nezu filed in behind him, holding the door open for Shouto with a polite smile.
Inside Nezu’s office, Shouto recognized All Might first. It was hard not to, with his hulking form dwarfing the man sitting alongside him behind Nezu’s broad desk. Shouto assumed the smaller man was Aizawa—he recognized the unkempt long black hair, but the man had bandages covering nearly the entirety of his face. A folded wheelchair sat next to the desk, neglected.
“All Might,” Endeavor said, voice dipping low into what was almost a growl.
“Endeavor, my old friend! How are you?” All Might’s voice was too loud, too jovial. “Young Todoroki, good morning. Are you… feeling any better?”
Shouto directed his gaze to an empty corner of the room. He gave a short nod.
Endeavor gave Shouto’s shoulder a tap—not a hard one, but enough to startle a flinch out of Shouto. “Can’t you make eye contact?” Endeavor said.
Shouto pulled his gaze back to All Might, drawing the heat away from his face before it could color his skin. He kept his gaze pointed at All Might’s chest and hoped Endeavor wouldn’t notice the difference.
Endeavor addressed Aizawa. “Who are you?”
“I’m Todoroki’s homeroom teacher.” Aizawa’s arms were folded, and he tapped a rhythm onto his elbow. “I probably shouldn’t be surprised you don’t recognize me. I suppose I look and sound a bit different from the last time we saw each other.”
Endeavor narrowed his eyes.
“It’ll come to you,” said Aizawa.
“What’re you teaching her?” Endeavor asked, more of an accusation than a question.
Aizawa hummed, shifting lazily in his chair. “What you can’t.”
“Seems to me like you can’t even keep villains out of school grounds.”
Principal Nezu interjected. “The school as a collective takes responsibility for what took place yesterday. The entire incident should not have happened, and we will be taking steps to ensure nothing like that happens again.” Nezu looked at Shouto. “Your safety is of utmost importance to us, Todoroki-kun.”
How the hell was Nezu able to maintain eye contact and a straight face while saying that? Safety. What a fucking joke. They were both standing right next to Endeavor.
Shouto nodded his understanding, but he didn’t look at Nezu as he did it. Wasn’t going to give him that sign of trust.
Nezu still hadn’t done shit to deserve it.
“I heard there was footage of the fight on the central plaza,” said Endeavor. “Why hasn’t it been released?”
“The footage is sensitive in nature,” said Nezu. “Releasing it could further endanger our students and staff.”
He was probably referencing All Might’s time limit. Even if the main plaza footage hadn’t captured audio, releasing video of All Might just standing there while a villain walked up to Shouto would raise questions.
Also: All Might, like Endeavor, was always on the offensive. Rarely did either of them encounter a villain strong enough that they had to completely switch to defense. Even without the last couple minutes of video, audiences might panic at seeing the noumu—a creature that had forced All Might toward defense and kept him there until Shouto stepped in.
If Shouto knew anything about Hero culture, it was that Heroes prized a sense of safety above all else. Even if it wasn’t practical. Even if it meant telling a dying child that yes, of course they were going to live. Even if it meant hiding the existence of a creature with greater strength and endurance than All Might.
“Did Shiyo do something to tarnish the school’s reputation?” Endeavor leveled a look at Shouto. “What did you do?”
Shouto’s throat went dry.
“Your child isn’t at fault,” said Nezu.
Endeavor’s voice was too loud in the small room. Shouto doubted he was imagining the temperature increase. “Shiyo was involved in the fight, wasn’t she? I’d like to see the footage.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible. I’ll be happy to address any other concerns.”
“I came here to watch the footage,” said Endeavor. His flames flared as he widened his stance. “You understand who I am? I’m not some citizen with a loose tongue. How can I train Shiyo if I don’t have a good idea of the areas she needs to improve—”
Endeavor’s flames went out.
It wasn’t Shouto’s first time seeing Endeavor without his flames, but it was the first time he’d seen Endeavor flameless in this context. Not caught out in a heavy downpour without an umbrella. Not when he’d just stepped out of the shower or when he was asleep in a recliner. But in a professional context, in public. His mustache and beard just a mustache and beard. The aging lines around his eyes no longer masked by flame.
He almost looked like a regular person.
Aizawa’s hair floated above his head like seaweed in a gentle current. He’d pulled the bandages hooding his right eye away to reveal a glowing glare, the white of his eye webbed with angry red lines.
Something flashed in Endeavor’s eyes as well—recognition? “Eraserhead,” he growled.
“Electric bill’s high enough as it is,” said Aizawa, voice even. “No need to overwork the AC.”
Shouto laughed.
It wasn’t loud—more of a startled release of breath than anything—but he recognized his mistake as soon as Endeavor looked at him. Shouto took an instinctive step back, one of his crutches whacking against the base of a lamp as it struggled to catch up with Shouto’s feet.
“We can discuss this further in our conference room, Endeavor,” said Principal Nezu. He walked past Endeavor—how did he walk so confidently when he barely came above Endeavor’s knee?—and waved Endeavor toward the door. “If you’ll come with me.”
Endeavor snapped his fingers at Shouto, pointing toward his side. “Shiyo.”
“Todoroki-kun is staying here,” said Aizawa. “We have some things to discuss.”
Endeavor narrowed his eyes. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Stepped out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The pens in the pawprint cupholder on Nezu’s desk rattled.
Aizawa’s hair dropped. He ran his fingers back through the black tendrils, groaning. “Jesus…”
Unused adrenaline fizzled out in Shouto’s fingers. He flexed them as he exhaled, feeling the ice that had crusted between the fingers of his right hand crackling and dropping to the carpet in tiny shards.
“That man does not seem to care for me,” All Might muttered, his gaze drifting back to Shouto. “…‘She’?”
Shouto stared back at him, struggling to regulate his body temperature without accidently generating more ice (or fire, god forbid). He was not coming out as trans to the number one Hero today. All Might could stay confused.
“He’s going to need you to push that chair out, All Might,” said Aizawa.
“Oh—of course,” All Might said, standing. Shouto tensed as his bulk rounded the table. God, he was… tall. Taller than Endeavor. He had to concentrate harder than usual whenever All Might was around, continuously reminding himself that All Might had never done anything to hurt him. That, as far as Shouto knew, All Might was a good Hero.
If those existed.
All Might pulled out the chair and returned to his seat. Stiff, Shouto sat. He held his crutches between his legs.
Aizawa spoke. He kept his volume low, not quite loud enough to fill the room. “Todoroki, All Might and I wanted to talk to you about what happened on the central plaza yesterday.”
Shouto kept his eyes on the desk. Kept his breaths shallow.
“Todoroki,” Aizawa prompted.
Shouto nodded. As long as he didn’t have to give any lengthy answers, he should be able to keep from going mute or hyperventilating.
“Do you need a minute?” Aizawa asked.
Shouto let his eyes dart up to All Might—just long enough to make sure the man hadn’t moved—before he dropped them again. “No.”
Aizawa was silent.
Nausea rose in Shouto’s stomach. Had he said something wrong? He forced himself to meet Aizawa’s eyes. Well—eye. “You can continue. I’m okay.”
“All Might, leave us alone for a few minutes,” said Aizawa.
Shouto’s heart rate spiked. What—? He thought he was being respectful. What did he do wrong? He gripped the metal bars of his crutches as All Might left the room, closing the door behind him.
Notes:
I went home for my brother's high school graduation. Did not shave my facial hair. Saw some family I haven't seen in two or three years. It's incredibly weird being deadnamed and "she"d when you have a beard. Also my little brother is going to seminary? Which I guess good for him but I was really looking forward to being able to say "fuck" and make gay jokes in front of him. Eh. My older brother did "Max" me a few times, though, so that was nice. I mean, it's been my legal name for two fucking years. But it was still nice. Hrng.
Good news, though: I recently realized/remembered that the Japanese school year starts in April (I forgot, sue me), so I have the option to work some Pride Week (end of April through beginning of May in Tokyo) antics into the fic!! The possibilities!!!
Chapter 22: Shouto, Eat Your Veggies! Featuring All Might: Steamed AND Roasted
Summary:
Aizawa discusses the contents of the USB drive with Shouto. All Might joins for USJ talk. Things escalate.
Notes:
Lot going on in this one, bro. It won't be the darkest chapter in the fic, but it's starting to get into the nitty gritty. Take care of yourself.
TW: talk about r*pe, inc*st (theoretical), school shooting/bombing (theoretical), suicidal speech/joke, discussion of murder (theoretical), panic attack (PTSD-driven)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
After All Might left the room, Aizawa shuffled through some papers for a few seconds before he got up.
He rounded the desk toward Shouto.
Suddenly all Shouto could hear was his heartbeat: drum-shatteringly loud in his ears, pulse pounding against the inside of his forehead.
He’d fucked up.
He’d almost trusted this man, and now—
He’d fucked up.
His body acted without his permission. Pushing back against his chair in a pathetic attempt to stand, chair legs hissing against the carpet as they slid back two inches before catching. His crutches clattered to the ground. He called a jagged garden of ice to the skin across his knuckles and the back of his hand, so he could at least do some damage if he swung, maybe enough so he could escape before—
“Todoroki.” Aizawa held a hand out—palm angled down, like someone might use to calm a wild animal—as he retreated back behind his desk. “I was going for the thermostat. Sorry. I should’ve warned you.”
Shouto stared at Aizawa until the words sank in. He kept his right arm raised defensively in front of him. Tried to keep his voice demanding so it wouldn’t shake. “Why’d you make All Might leave?”
“It looked like he was making you nervous.” Aizawa sat down. Slowly. “Should I call him back?”
“You…” Shouto waited until the fog in his brain dissipated.
He’d really just… done that.
In front of his homeroom teacher.
“Shit.” He lowered his arm, heart still pounding. Started to get up from his seat, then plopped back down again. Shame bit at the skin on his face. “Shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” said Aizawa. “I’m not angry. Take a breath.”
Shouto leaned forward, elbows on his knees, cupping his shaking hands over his mouth and nose and breathing in recycled air. He stared hard at the carpet as his vision blurred, his breaths coming faster.
Not angry?
But he had to be. It was Shouto’s fault he’d been injured. And if Aizawa knew that—
He didn’t, Shouto remembered.
He didn’t know.
Shouto had kept it out of his police report. Denied knowing any of the villains, even Deku. Especially Deku.
Aizawa didn’t know that Shouto could’ve warned the teachers about the attack and didn’t. So he had no reason to be angry at Shouto.
“You want some water?” Shouto heard the mini fridge in the corner of the room opening, closing. “Here. It’s on the desk when you want it.”
It took a good thirty seconds for Shouto to force his breathing back into something normal. When he was sure that moving his body wouldn’t immediately send him spiraling again, he straightened. Reached for the water and twisted the bottle open, willing his hands to be steady enough not to spill it.
“Is that a bite mark on your hand?” Aizawa asked.
Ah, fuck. He knew he’d forgotten something. He switched the water to his right hand, placing his left hand palm-down on his lap. Didn’t meet Aizawa’s gaze.
“Sorry I didn’t have time to fill All Might in on the pronoun situation. We’ve been around other parents and students all day. I don’t think he’ll make a big deal of it, but if he starts acting obtuse, just… let me know. I’ll talk to him.” Aizawa sighed. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to educate him on something he should already know. Old people can be a pain in the ass.”
A smile threatened to pull on Shouto’s mouth. Referring to All Might as obtuse and a pain in the ass felt taboo. Even Endeavor hailed All Might as flawless.
“Tell me when you’re ready to start,” said Aizawa.
Shouto drained half the water bottle. Screwed the top back on. He reached for his words and found them—reluctant and heavy, but they were there. “Are you going to tell Endeavor?”
“About what?”
“Um. That I… you know, the attacks.”
“Panic attacks?”
Shouto nodded.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” said Aizawa. “Unless you think it’ll help.”
“No,” Shouto said, looking up at him. “No, it… no.”
Aizawa nodded. “I met with Nezu and a few of the other teachers after I looked at the USB you gave me. Until we’re able to get you out of that house, we’re going to be very careful with what we tell Endeavor. We’ll run everything by you before Endeavor hears about it. If there’s an emergency, we’ll call your sister or your brother. If you fail an exam and don’t want Endeavor to know, we won’t tell him. I will not be changing your actual grade, but I’ll lie on your report card if I need to. If you need me to make up a reason why you can’t go home, I’ll do that.”
Shouto was silent, going over the words in his head for any traces of sarcasm or insincerity. Finally, he asked, “How much did you watch?”
“All of it.”
“All…?”
“Yes.”
Shouto’s face burned. He hadn’t even watched all of it. How many hours would that have taken? Five? Six?
He moved his gaze past Aizawa, focusing instead on the neat bookshelf against the back wall. He ran his cool knuckles across his hot cheek.
“I do have one immediate concern,” Aizawa said. “This will be uncomfortable, and I apologize. That woman. Was that Lady Hypna?”
Shouto’s stomach jolted with mortification. Shouto had known that scene was on tape. Known it was on the USB. Had he been hoping Aizawa wouldn’t see it? He’d given it to Aizawa, willingly, so now he was obligated to answer Aizawa’s questions. Well. Not like he wasn’t used to having his dignity ripped from him. “Yes.”
“The security camera only caught part,” said Aizawa. “She took you in the locker room. Did she rape you?”
Shouto blinked the carbonation from his vision. Kept his gaze fixed on the bookshelf, kept his face dead, dead, dead.
Still, it took him a few long seconds to remember how to speak. “Yeah,” he said.
Aizawa swore under his breath. “Did you tell anyone?”
“Yes,” Shouto said.
“But she still works at Endeavor’s agency. Do you see her much?”
“Rarely. He… moved her after it happened,” said Shouto. “To another department.”
“Wait—Endeavor knows?”
“Yes.”
“And he just moved her to… fuck. Fucking… Jesus, kid, your dad is a piece of shit.”
Shouto moved his gaze to a poster on the wall detailing the procedure in case of an attack by a troubled student with an emitter quirk. The title read “In Case of School Shooter,” which Shouto assumed was leftover terminology from Western Pre-Quirk society. The only traditional guns Shouto had seen in his life had been in museums. And the one Deku had shot him with, he remembered. If you wanted to hunt even small game—like Kirishima did—you had to go offshore to the designated islands. And good-fucking-luck if you wanted to bring a gun back to the mainland without immediately getting slapped with ten years in prison.
His mind wandered to Deku again. Izuku, if Bakugou was right. Had he had anyone he could go to about his abusive father? Maybe villainy was what happened when no one was there to watch six hours’ worth of security footage for you.
It wasn’t a far-fetched idea.
“I’m sorry I have to ask,” Aizawa said. “Has Endeavor ever done anything like that to you?”
Shouto slowly let his gaze drift back to Aizawa. He’d been dissociating, and it took a second to understand what Aizawa was asking. “N-no. I don’t know what all he did to my mother. But he—um. Not to me.”
“What about to your siblings?”
Oh. God. He didn’t want to think about that. He doubted Endeavor had ever tried anything—Shouto had never seen him show interest in anything that didn’t somehow contribute to his career—but he couldn’t speak for any of the people who had surrounded Shouto and his siblings as children. He liked to think that the neglect Fuyumi and Natsuo had faced after Rei was admitted to the hospital had been just that—neglect, and only neglect. Not adults taking advantage of a girl with a harmless snow quirk and a boy without any quirk at all. At least Shouto could defend himself to some extent.
“No, I don’t think so,” Shouto said.
“Okay.” Aizawa looked at the clock on the wall and hissed through his teeth. “Should’ve asked Nezu for more time. I wanted to talk to you before the weekend, but… mm.” Aizawa dropped his head into his palm as he thumbed through a stack of paper littered with post-it notes and scrawling, unreadable handwriting. Aizawa’s handwriting. “Wish I could make this process faster, kid. I think you’re right that your dad has people at CPS. They didn’t even want to put your information in the system.”
Shouto’s heart sank. He’d known on some level that this was going to be how the conversation ended. With a sorry I can’t do more, but that’s the system. That was how it always ended.
He’d just… hoped U.A. might hold out a little longer. Hoped Aizawa would hold out longer.
“I had to go to the physical building this morning and yell at some people for a couple hours,” said Aizawa. He gave a short, dry laugh, motioning toward himself. “Though it was probably more my looking half-dead that got their attention. You’re in there now, thank fuck, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be an easy ride.”
Shouto blinked. “You… went there?”
“I have some experience dealing with laws and regulations that are designed to fuck certain people over. You’re going to get some rejections that look like hard lines, but regulations are made by people. People aren’t hard lines. Sometimes you can push the lines one way or another with enough effort.” Aizawa stopped flipping through the stack of paper, dropping his hand down on top of it. Shouto caught a glimpse of the title, handwritten off to the side like an afterthought: Todoroki Shouto Case. “We’re going to get you out of there. If the legal way doesn’t work, we’ll figure out something else.”
Shouto looked away. Guilt gnawed at his intestines.
This man was losing sleep because of him.
Should he tell Aizawa to call it off? Tell him that Shouto could take care of the rest by himself? He wasn’t sure he was prepared to have such an incredible debt hanging over him for the rest of his career. Did Aizawa already have something in mind that he wanted from Shouto, or was he leaving his options open? Shouto didn’t want to go from being under the control of one man to being under the control of another.
He decided to change the subject instead. He needed more time to think. “Did you want to talk to me about the USJ?”
“I did,” said Aizawa. “All Might wanted to join us for that conversation, though.”
Oh. All Might. Yay. “Okay.”
“Before I call him back in, though. I wanted to ask if there was anything else I could do to help while we’re waiting on CPS.”
Shouto thought. He wasn’t sure how much help Aizawa would be, but… “There are a few specific attacks I’m bad at countering. It’d be nice to have a safer environment to practice in.”
Aizawa’s bandages shifted in a way that might’ve been a quirk of an eyebrow. “You want more training?”
“I want to feel more prepared for my training sessions with my father.”
Aizawa tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair. “Tuesdays and Thursdays. I train a student from General Studies who wants to enter the Hero course. You can join us.”
General Studies? Shouto was already ahead of everyone in the Hero course. “Won’t the difference in skill be… a lot?”
“Maybe. He’ll take precedence since he’s working on a deadline.”
“That’s fine.” He’d just work on homework while the other kid was flailing around, or whatever General Studies kids did in place of sparring.
Aizawa nodded. “One more question. How did you get ahold of all that security footage? Did you hack into the system at Endeavor’s agency?”
He almost laughed. Did Aizawa really think he was smart enough to know how to do that? “Uh, no. Someone… someone got it for me.”
“Hm. Someone you can put me in touch with?”
“No.” Although the idea of Aizawa and Dabi working together was, admittedly, amusing. “He’s not… he’s not reachable anymore.”
“I’m going to hazard a guess,” said Aizawa. “Was it the sidekick who ended up being a villain?”
Shouto licked his lips.
Aizawa gave him a long look. “Be careful, please, Todoroki. Just because someone wants to hurt your father doesn’t mean they have your best interests in mind.”
“I know,” said Shouto.
And he did know. The villains likely didn’t give a shit about him, but if they wanted to take down Endeavor, then…
Well. He wasn’t going to say they were on the same side. Of course they weren’t. But at the same time, they kind of… were? They were at least on adjacent sides of the same fucking dodecahedron.
Aizawa pulled out his cell phone. Held it a couple inches away from his ear until All Might’s “Hello?” boomed from the speaker.
“Yeah, you can come back in,” said Aizawa. He hung up and addressed Shouto. “You’re going to be okay with him in here?”
“Yeah,” Shouto said. Not like he had a choice, right?
“He doesn’t know about the situation with your father. Do you want him to?”
That sounded like a gamble with shitty odds. All Might reminded Shouto of Endeavor in so many ways, and he’d referred to Endeavor as his “old friend.” If All Might decided to defend Endeavor, nothing Aizawa or anyone else did would matter. All Might was a god. “Not especially.”
“We won’t tell him, then.” Aizawa was silent for a moment before he grunted and started digging through his pockets. He produced the flash drive and leaned over the desk to hand it to Shouto. “I should give you that back in case something happens to me. I have a few copies saved.”
Shouto took the flash drive and tucked it in his pocket.
All Might entered the room—silently, Shouto noted, without his typical I am here!—and rounded the desk to his seat. Shouto wasn’t sure if he was imagining the strain in All Might’s smile.
“I’ll start with this,” said Aizawa. “I watched the footage from the fight in the central plaza. With you and the noumu.”
“Okay,” Shouto said. He let his gaze flicker to All Might. He didn’t fully understand All Might’s expression, but he knew that it wasn’t a Thank You for Saving My Life expression. “I don’t understand. I did something wrong?”
“You don’t know?” Aizawa asked.
“I stopped it. The noumu.”
“You killed it, Todoroki. What if it had been human?”
Shouto’s heart jolted. “Was it?”
“We’re… not quite sure,” said All Might. “The lab results came back muddled. Human DNA, yes, but from multiple humans. Shigaraki did say that it was lab-created, so—”
“Though that’s classified information,” Aizawa interrupted, voice raised.
Shouto blinked. “So I… killed people? More than one?”
“No,” said Aizawa. “That’s not what All Might was saying.”
All Might cleared his throat. “Well—”
“You did not kill anyone,” said Aizawa. “If the noumu used to be human, it wasn’t when you took it down. Those people were likely killed by Shigaraki and his followers long before the noumu was made. My point is that you can’t rely on instinct alone to tell you whether to kill or to capture. Killing should never be your first resort. If the noumu had ended up being a living human who was under a brainwashing quirk, we’d be having this meeting at the police station with you in handcuffs.”
All Might spoke. “That’s not to say you didn’t break the law at all yesterday, Young Todoroki. While I commend your valor and selflessness, it’s still a crime to interrupt a Pro Hero carrying out their duties. Never mind that you could’ve seriously injured or killed yourself and Young Bakugou with that attack.”
Anger built in Shouto’s chest. What, so they were afraid of getting sued? “So I was just supposed to let that thing kill you and all my classmates.”
“No, you were supposed to trust the Pros to take care of it,” said Aizawa. “What you did was reckless and borderline suicidal.”
“I didn’t die,” Shouto said.
“You could have,” said Aizawa.
Shouto let his words bite. “I didn’t, though, so it doesn’t matter if I could have.”
“It absolutely does matter,” said Aizawa. “I’m sure you know that you’re already more powerful than many adult Pro Heroes. I acknowledge that. But you are fifteen. You’re a first-year student. It is not your responsibility to step up when a licensed Pro Hero seems to be failing.”
Shouto looked at the floor and let the anger and frustration roll over him in forceful waves. Why were they mad at him? He’d done something heroic, something blatantly anti-villain, had possibly saved All Might’s life, and they were scolding him.
“We’re concerned for your safety,” said All Might. “You understand that?”
Shouto kept his eyes on the floor. In his peripheral vision, he could see ice crackling along the knuckles of his right hand, so cold it steamed as soon as it hit the air.
“Todoroki,” Aizawa said, voice urgent.
“I don’t know what everyone wants from me.” Shouto kept his voice even. He hoped it was calm, too, but his pulse was thrumming so hard in his head that he couldn’t hear himself properly. He looked up. “Using my quirk is the only thing I’m good at. You see that, right? I can’t do the things the other students can. I can’t communicate or watch out for other people or plan ahead or make decisions or form sound judgements, whether in the field or… otherwise. So I have to use my quirk so I won’t be useless.”
Shouto did not expect silence in response, but that was what he got.
“Okay,” Aizawa said finally. “I don’t know where the fuck to start with that.”
All Might butt in with an awkward half-laugh. “Ah, I would like to… that is—what we discussed as teachers, I mean. I believe you could benefit from counseling, Young Todoroki.”
Shouto stared.
It wasn’t that he thought it was a stupid idea. It was just that… what the fuck was he supposed to do with a therapist? He wasn’t sure how much trauma healing could happen when he was still fucking experiencing the trauma.
All Might was sitting here being awkward for his sake, though, so he might as well play along. “Would I need parental consent?” Shouto asked.
“Ah—” All Might looked at Aizawa.
“Yes,” said Aizawa. “It’s law.”
Well. That was a short improv skit. “That’s not happening, then. My siblings have been trying to get me therapy and medication for years. Endeavor won’t consent.”
All Might’s brow furrowed. “Surely after yesterday’s events—”
“All Might,” said Shouto, “have you ever looked me in the eye? Specifically the left one? I don’t think it’s a secret that yesterday wasn’t my first trauma. What happened at the USJ won’t change my father’s mind.”
All Might looked away, face tight. Contemplative.
“I have no interest in bombing the school, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Shouto. “I know yesterday was bloody, but I don’t have a propensity for violence or death. I just couldn’t think of a different way to stop a creature with a regeneration quirk. I’m not a sociopath.”
“Oh,” said All Might, “no, that—that’s not what—”
“It’s fine. You’re not the first.” Shouto looked at Aizawa. “What is my father being told about what happened?”
“A watered-down version,” said Aizawa. “That you assisted All Might in capturing the noumu.”
“Capturing? I thought you said—”
“It’s dead, yes. But if we let the public know that, we also wouldn’t be able to let All Might take credit for what happened without U.A. needing to fire him for misconduct in the line of duty.”
They were planning on letting All Might take credit for taking down the noumu. Shouto didn’t particularly care, but he wondered how Bakugou would feel about it. “Will Bakugou and I be facing legal consequences?”
“I have friends inside the police department,” said All Might. “We’re working with them to keep your and Young Bakugou’s names off the paperwork. We do want you to understand that the proper course of action yesterday would have been to remain out of sight and wait for professional backup to arrive, but as it is—”
“If you had the choice,” Aizawa finished, “you would probably do the same thing again, wouldn’t you?”
Shouto didn’t have to think about it. “Yes.”
“Even with the knowledge that Pro Heroes were on their way?” All Might asked.
“Yes,” Shouto said. “I have no reason to trust that the Pro Heroes U.A. employs would’ve performed better than I did. I trust my ice. I trust… I trust Bakugou, to an extent. He’s unpleasant, but he’s been more dependable in two weeks than Pro Heroes have my whole life.”
“My boy, we have some of the finest and most reliable Pro Heroes protecting you here at U.A. I assure you that you can trust us to keep you safe.”
Shouto huffed a laugh. “Okay.”
All Might tilted his head. “Young Todoroki.”
“I said okay.”
“Todoroki,” said Aizawa, “I understand that Pro Heroes and Pro Hero society have failed you horrifically. I understand that I’ll have to work hard to earn your trust, and I’m prepared to do that. On the other hand, I can’t have you endangering yourself or my other students. We’re going to need you to work with us.”
Shouto rubbed the corner of his eyebrow, nodding. He was ready for this conversation to be over.
“You probably have questions for us as well,” said All Might. “About what happened at the USJ. Is there… anything we can answer?”
That question sounded like it had a double meaning. “If you’re concerned I’m going to tell someone about your time limit, I won’t,” said Shouto.
All Might’s eyebrows shot up. “You…? How do you know about that?”
Oh. Did they think he hadn’t figured it out? He’d heard the words “time limit” when he ran into the League at the coffee shop, but Shigaraki, Deku, and All Might had dropped enough hints after Shouto exploded the noumu that any average person would’ve drawn that conclusion. Had Bakugou picked up on it? He hadn’t said anything in the hospital.
“You didn’t move to capture the villains after I took down the noumu,” Shouto said. “And Shigaraki said something about it being Deku’s job to weaken you before the fight. I’m assuming he did something like assign low-level villains for you to fight on your way to the school yesterday morning.”
Shouto had rehearsed this. It wasn’t that he cared about All Might’s wellbeing. He just… didn’t want All Might to die. Because then Endeavor would be the number one Hero, and that would make escaping him so much harder.
Regardless, he was starting to regret his decision now. All Might was looking at him like those flat, one-episode characters often looked at the main character in those Genius Sleuth shows.
Shouto was not a genius sleuth.
Judging from All Might’s reaction, Shouto wasn’t a genius at cover stories, either.
Aizawa turned to All Might. “That what happened?”
“I suppose so,” said All Might, weakly. “I… yes, I suppose that’s exactly what happened. I did think it was strange that so many petty crimes were taking place on my route.”
“Apparently not enough for you to suspect a trap,” Aizawa muttered.
“What happens?” Shouto asked. “When you reach your limit. Do you lose access to your quirk?”
“Ah…” All Might glanced at Aizawa, who shrugged. “You do understand that this needs to remain strictly confidential, Young Todoroki?”
“Yes.” Shouto paused, and it clicked what All Might was about to do. “Oh—I didn’t mean that you have to show me. I don’t really care what… oh, okay.”
All Might was already steaming.
In a matter of seconds, Shouto understood what Deku had meant by All Might’s “deflation.” It looked like someone had sucked all his muscle out through a straw. His clothes seemed embarrassed to be on him, drooping in places they weren’t designed to, swallowing the man inside them. And… Shouto didn’t usually put stock in the idea of souls, but he kind of had to in that moment, because it looked like All Might’s had departed him.
Shouto didn’t laugh.
But god, it was hard not to.
Symbol of Peace.
This man? If Shouto wanted to kill All Might right now, he could. It would hardly take planning. A spike of ice into his left eye or through the soft under his chin. Shouto probably wouldn’t even need to use his quirk. Could just reach out and snap the man’s neck. Up and around.
The realization sent a rush through him. Left a strange taste on his tongue.
“Years ago, I had a fight with a powerful villain that damaged my internal organs and left me weakened.” All Might’s voice sounded different in this form. Same pitch, same tone, it just resonated differently. Fell limply to the floor instead of booming off the walls. “I can only maintain the form you’re used to seeing for a few hours each day now. I was nearing the end of my allotment for the day when Young Iida alerted me to the situation at the USJ. I regret that I wasn’t in my best shape to protect my students yesterday.”
Shouto had suspected that All Might’s invincibility as a pillar of justice was a sham, but he hadn’t thought he’d see behind the façade so soon, and so easily.
He kept his face even, of course.
“That’s probably not good,” said Shouto, “if a villain saw you like that. Did someone see you like that?”
“Not that I can…” All Might paused. Looked up at the spinning ceiling fan. “Well, a couple months ago. There was a little boy who saw me transform by accident after I saved him from the hands of a slime-type villain, but I can’t suspect him. He was such an… avid fan. And he was Quirkless, anyway. So I don’t think—”
“Did you not read my and Bakugou’s police reports?” Shouto asked. “We fought a boy our age who didn’t use a quirk. Deku, remember? You think someone can’t turn into a violent extremist if they’re Quirkless?”
All Might blinked. His skin had taken on a sallow tint. “Young Todo—”
“Have you read any statistics ever? A third of Quirkless people attempt suicide before the age of eighteen. Of course a Quirkless kid isn’t going to be sympathetic toward the people who drive that type of society forward. That boy probably had eyes on you for months ahead of time and hired the slime villain as a paid actor so he could get close to you. If a Quirkless kid told you he was a fan, he was fucking lying.”
All Might’s face pinched. “Surely you’re not saying that Quirkless children are destined for villainy by virtue of—”
“I’m not blaming Deku here. I’m saying that your worldview is shit and needs to change to account for reality if you don’t want to end up dead by the hands of a Quirkless fifteen-year-old.”
“Todoroki,” said Aizawa. “Take a breather, kid.”
Shouto leaned back in his chair. His heart was thrumming.
Had he really just lectured All Might?
It wasn’t something he would’ve been able to do when All Might was in his muscle form. Shouto had seen the weakness in All Might’s current form and gotten drunk on it.
Not the smartest thing he’d ever done. All Might was still socially and politically powerful. Even if he couldn’t regain his muscle form and was like this 24/7, he could still destroy Shouto in so many ways. One-on-one fights weren’t the only way you could ruin someone’s life.
Shouto looked away. “I didn’t mean to say all that.”
“Quite… quite all right, my boy,” said All Might. He paused to regain his muscle form, his voice once again booming. “You’ve been through more than you should have since yesterday. While I ultimately can’t celebrate what you did on the central plaza, I understand that it took a great deal of courage and strength. You show many qualities of a true Hero. I will take what you’ve said into consideration.”
His actions yesterday had taken strength, yes. But courage?
Kirishima’s mother had mentioned courage, too. Logically, Shouto understood the concept—feeling fear and pushing past it. Was that what he’d done at the USJ? He remembered thinking, I may die doing this, and then still doing it. Was that courage, or was he just so used to having that thought that it no longer activated a physiological response beyond his usual anxiety?
“Are we done?” Shouto asked.
Aizawa nodded, looked at the clock. “Your father’s probably finished by now, too, if you want to wait for him in the lobby.”
Shouto reached for his crutches on the ground. All Might put his hand on the arms of his chair like he was about to stand to help Shouto. Shouto sped up his actions enough that he was standing on his crutches before All Might was fully out of his chair.
All Might sat back down, looking crestfallen. The expression didn’t stay on his face long, disappearing into his smile as he said, “Young Todoroki.”
Shouto started toward the door. “Huh.”
“Tell me. What sort of Hero are you aiming to be?”
The question startled a laugh out of Shouto. “What sort?”
“Yes.”
“The dead sort, hopefully.” Shouto opened the door and stepped out. He tossed his next words over his shoulder, not bothering to look back. “Enjoy your weekend.”
Notes:
Hell's Kitchen, Episode 2, guest starring Todoroki Shouto:
Contestant (nervous): So what are your thoughts?
Shouto: Well... not great, Shelby. I have to say, I expected better from someone who calls herself a professional. Your food is barely edible. Spongey, tough, room temperature. I'm getting hints of... sweat??
Contestant (growing more nervous): Why are there cameras?
Shouto (taking another bite): Your prices are outrageous, too, Shelby. I can't believe I used my father's credit card for something that tastes fucking STOREBOUGHT. Did you even make this yourself, Shelby? How long has this been sitting up in one of your dusty cabinets? Unacceptable. Why does this fucking restaurant make you pay by the hour, anyway? What kind of fucked up pricing system is that?
Contestant: Shouto, I'm a therapist.
Shouto (finishing up, moving on to sample the next item): Don't make excuses for your shitty cooking, Shelby. If you can't handle a cooking business along with your day job--
Contestant: Shouto, you're in therapy. Right now. We are in therapy. I am your therapist. My name is Hannah.
Shouto: FUCK! This one's stale, too?! Shelby! Get me another.
Contestant: I'm out of stress balls, Shouto.
Shouto: fucking unbeLIEVABLE--
Chapter 23: Shouto Sparks Kaminari's Queer Awakening
Summary:
Back to school. Aizawa wants our boy to get a hobby.
BTW: I posted 2 chapters at the same time last week, so make sure you didn't accidentally skip over one of them!
Notes:
TW: suicidal ideation, discussion (not in-depth) of self-harm/suicide
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He was having those thoughts again. The ones that added a third option to nearly every decision he made, making completing tasks exponentially more exhausting.
Should he do his homework, take a zero, or kill himself? Should he go to school, stay home, or kill himself? Should he put on his shoes now, keep standing in the kitchen entryway staring at his shoes, or kill himself?
For now, the thoughts were passive. Just a fantasy his mind would dip toward whenever his brain wasn’t actively focusing on something else. It wasn’t unfamiliar, and he had experience keeping himself distracted with mind-numbing nature documentaries and the cello covers of top hits—things that occupied his mind, but nothing that would take emotional energy to consume. Certainly nothing he could get invested in.
He had to be careful when it came to this sort of thing. Float just right so he wouldn’t spiral. Keep the thoughts an arm’s length away, pretend they belonged to someone else. If he brought the thoughts in closer to inspect them, he wouldn’t want to push them away again.
The passive thoughts were comforting, if tiring. The active thoughts hurt. He didn’t want to go there again.
“Shichan?”
Shouto startled at Fuyumi’s voice. They’d barely spoken all weekend. Even the drive to U.A. for his second round of healing with Recovery Girl on Sunday had been silent. It did look like Fuyumi had washed and bleached his shoes, though, which… made him feel kind of shitty. He hadn’t thought to do it himself, and he knew Fuyumi got queasy around blood. She was always skipping over the violent scenes in movies.
Shouto adjusted his crutches. He didn’t turn to look at her as he slipped on his shoes. “Sorry. I’m going.”
“You okay?”
“Um.” Shouto ran his hand back through his hair and was reminded why he didn’t do that more often—there was barely enough traction on his right side to keep his hair between his fingers, and his ring and pinky fingers caught painfully on some invisible red tangles on his left side. “I was thinking. About meds. Do you think I…? Like for depression or anxiety or ADHD or… stuff.”
Fuyumi licked her lips, expression pinched. “I can… talk to him again if you want. You can’t get anything legally without parental consent.”
Shouto nodded, looking away. He picked up his bag.
“Is it… is it really bad?” Fuyumi asked.
“Just—” He hadn’t prepared for this conversation as well as he should’ve. “Yeah. Kind of.”
“I thought you were making friends at school.”
“I am. I am. It…” He felt, suddenly, that he had talked about this enough. Talking about his feelings with Fuyumi was draining, and he couldn’t afford any more energy loss if he wanted to make it through the school day. “Nothing I haven’t handled before, I guess. I was just wondering.”
“Do you want me to talk to Dad?”
Shouto was on decent terms with Endeavor right now. He wasn't sure he wanted to ruin that. There had never been an I’m proud of you after the USJ meeting at the school, where Endeavor had been told that Shouto had simply helped All Might capture the noumu. But on the way out of the school, there had been a nod.
A fucking nod.
It had made him feel all kinds of shitty when relief filled his body. He didn’t want to crave his father’s approval. Still, he’d held onto the rare sense of safety throughout the weekend. Slept in. Played the saved Snapchat clips Deku sent him aloud in his room instead of how he usually did, with one earbud in, one out.
That was yet another weekend development. After setting a meeting date with Deku, Deku had gone right back to sending Shouto memes. And, notably, photos and videos.
Of the League.
Always Deku behind the camera, always vague, untraceable locations. There was a photo of a ratty pair of shoes captioned “Shiggy’s shoelaces. They died so young. RIP (Rest In Particles).” A clip of Kurogiri angrily listing the dangers of underage drinking in between Deku’s litany of slurred, “Uh huh. Uh huh”s.
Perhaps most notably: the video captioned “HE WILL PAY FOR HIS CRIMES,” featuring a behind-camera Deku lobbing a giant bag of peanut M&Ms at the back of… was that Shigaraki’s head? He’d gotten shot at the USJ, right? Did the League have a healer?—and then letting out a high-pitched screech as Shigaraki started to rise from his barstool, the video blurring.
Magne appeared frequently, usually with a friendly wave and a “Hi, Shouto!” Dabi was in a few of them, but never the subject, and never for more than a couple seconds at a time. Any time the camera swung toward him, Dabi pushed it away or snapped a “Stop it.”
Shouto hadn’t responded to any of the messages. What the fuck was he supposed to say? Thanks for the memes, I’m not sure if they make me want to kill myself less or more, why are you acting like we’re friends?
Shouto blinked. He needed to get his head out of his ass. “It’s fine,” he told Fuyumi. “I’ll… I’ll get some air today. Probably just the weekend making me feel bad.”
Fuyumi lingered.
“You’re driving me today, right?” Shouto asked.
“Oh—yeah,” said Fuyumi. “Sorry, I forgot. I’ll pull the car up.”
On the way to school, Shouto worked on the homework he’d neglected over the weekend. Fuyumi glanced over at him as she drove, but she didn’t say anything.
Halfway through his English assignment, he remembered something he’d been meaning to ask her. “Fuyumi, what did Reflection talk to you about?”
“Reflection?” Fuyumi asked. “Why?”
“Just wondering.” Dabi had brushed off Shouto’s question when he asked why he’d wanted to talk to Fuyumi. “Did he ask anything weird?”
“Not… not really,” said Fuyumi. “We just chatted. I told him some work stories. He was… he was a good listener, really. He put his number in my phone.”
That must’ve been how Deku knew about the messaging app and how he’d gotten Shouto’s number. Dabi had snooped. “You didn’t hook up with him, did you?”
“Oh—god, no,” said Fuyumi, blushing. “I was… concerned he might’ve been coming onto me, just because of how nice he was being about driving you to school and asking me how my day was, and… I started to tell him that he wasn’t my type, and then he blurted out that he was gay.”
“Oh,” said Shouto.
“Why, did he say something strange to you?”
“He…” Shouto considered. He probably should warn her, right? In case Aizawa’s efforts actually got somewhere. He’d be careful to leave out anything she didn’t need to know, twist the truth a little to fit his narrative. “You can’t tell Endeavor.”
Fuyumi looked at him, eyes wide. “What? What happened?”
“He told me I should tell the teachers at U.A. that Endeavor is abusive,” said Shouto.
“W-what?”
“He gave me a USB with security footage of our training sessions to use as evidence.” Deku had done that, technically, but Fuyumi didn’t need to know about Deku. “I gave it to my homeroom teacher. Principal Nezu and some of the other staff know about Endeavor now. They’re trying to push my case through to CPS. I thought I should tell you in case something happens.”
Fuyumi looked back at the road, face tight. She bit her bottom lip.
“Are you mad?” Shouto asked.
“No,” said Fuyumi. “I… I’m just… if it does go through, I’m just thinking about… about everything going public, and… um. What would happen to all of us. If we could stay together as a family with all that stress and change. But you deserve to feel safe, so if you want… if that’s what you want. I’ll try to support you.”
“We’d still be together,” said Shouto. “Even if we end up needing to move out. I could get a job like Natsuo said. Go to a regular high school.”
“Mm,” said Fuyumi.
Shouto tried to parse the meaning of that noise. “You don’t think I could handle it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
The rest of the ride was silent. Shouto tried to refocus on his homework.
###
Homeroom was unusually quiet. Shouto appreciated it at first—it allowed him to get some more homework done—but after a while, the silence began to unnerve him.
Was this a bad silence? Was something wrong? Was he doing something wrong? He hated not being able to tell.
Ten minutes before homeroom was scheduled to start, Bakugou’s desk was still empty. Shouto took out his phone and texted him.
Shouto:
Are you coming to school today?
Bakugou:
Old hag wanted me to stay home til my next round of healing. Why
Shouto:
No one in homeroom is talking and I don’t know why.
Bakugou:
Probably bc everyone’s fucking traumatized from the USJ? you moron
Btw did you set a date to meet with Sparkle Vest?
Shouto:
Next week, the Wednesday before the sports festival. Ramen shop just outside of the shopping district.
“Todoroki-kun?”
Shouto looked up to see Uraraka—the girl with an anti-gravity quirk who’d helped stall Kurogiri long enough for Iida to go get help—standing beside his desk, wringing her hands in front of her stomach.
“Um,” she said. “I know it’s supposed to be on the down-low, but I heard what you did at the USJ and just wanted to say that I think you were brave. I mean, I think we all think that. I wouldn’t have been able to do that. Especially with a bullet wound. You’d probably need a strong stomach for that, too, and I have my… nausea problems. I’m rambling. Would you like to join our study group?”
Shouto hesitated. That last sentence didn’t fit with the rest of her spiel. “What study group?”
“With me, Tsu, and Iida. Yaoyorozu’s there sometimes, too.”
Shouto glanced in Asui’s direction. She was in a wheelchair with both legs in casts. Asui stared directly back at Shouto, and Shouto couldn’t tell if she was smiling or if that was just the way her mouth was.
“I just noticed that you’re… alone a lot?” Uraraka continued. “And thought maybe you’d like to not be. I thought about inviting you to eat lunch with us, but you eat lunch with Kirishima and them, right? Our table’s a little quieter, but Kirishima’s really nice, so… anyway. We’re usually in the library after school. If you want to join.” She flashed a double thumbs-up as she retreated to her seat. Shouto heard her whisper to Asui, “I nailed that, right?”
###
People usually left Shouto alone at lunch. He’d milked his knowledge of social cues dry to perfect his don’t bother me look: homework out to the side of his lunch, knees angled toward the center of the aisle instead of toward Kirishima and his friends, earbuds in (though he never played anything through them; it didn’t feel safe not having full awareness of his surroundings).
So he was surprised when Kaminari addressed him in the middle of lunch.
“Bro, are you okay?” Kaminari asked. “You look kinda depressed.”
“Thanks,” Shouto said. “It’s the depression.”
Ashido, Kirishima, and Sero looked up at that. Shouto wondered if maybe it was a bad idea to quote a meme he’d gotten from a fifteen-year-old arsonist to an audience of Hero hopefuls.
Shouto tried again. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about me.”
“I mean, we’re at least a little bit worried,” said Ashido. “Me ’n Sero got warped to an area with no Villains at the USJ, and I’m still having nightmares. But didn’t you, like… wrestle the noumu or something?”
“I exploded it,” said Shouto.
Ashido blinked. “Huh?”
“Dude,” said Kaminari, speaking through a mouthful of rice. “You’re a freakin’ badass.”
Sero raised his chopsticks in agreement. “I’m terrified of you, bro.”
“If you were a girl, I’d totally have a crush on you,” said Kaminari. He struggled to poke a plastic straw through the hole in his carton of chocolate milk. When the straw bent and splintered, Kaminari tossed the straw aside and raised the carton above his head to squirt the chocolate milk through the tiny hole directly into his mouth. “Like an intimidation crush. That’s a thing, right? When you get a crush for somebody because they scare you. Kiri, is that a thing?”
Kirishima looked confused. “I think so.”
“Denki, that’s kind of gay, bro,” said Sero.
Kaminari tossed his hand, the gesture slinging chocolate milk onto Sero’s jacket. “Bro, I said if he was a girl. How is that gay?”
“I’m worried, too, man,” Kirishima said to Shouto. “You said something to me and my m—parents on Saturday about not wanting to be a Hero. Are you having second thoughts about your career choice after what happened?”
A laugh burst from Shouto’s mouth before he could stop it. “Choice? Is that—that’s what you think this is for me? I thought everybody knew and just wasn’t talking about it.”
Ashido narrowed her eyes. “Talking about what?”
“That I was literally fucking born and bred to be my father’s legacy and surpass All Might.”
The table was silent for a long, stretching moment.
“Uh,” said Sero.
“Do you, uh… plan on doing that?” Ashido asked.
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “My sister doesn’t think I could handle civilian life or a normal job.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kirishima. “You have good grades, right? You could do whatever you want.”
Shouto looked down at his unfinished biology homework. What was he supposed to say to that?
Kirishima, how am I supposed to get through job interviews when I go mute at the most inconvenient times?
Kirishima, how am I supposed to stay on top of a 9 to 5 office job when I can’t even get out of bed?
Kirishima, how am I supposed to do anything that requires the ability to not hyperventilate when someone gets up from their chair too fast? Or when the lighting is too chaotic? Or when someone coughs at the same time someone else laughs?
Kirishima, I can ignore pain. I can kill things. That’s all.
Shouto wrote frontal cortex into a blank on his homework and said, “Yeah, I guess.”
###
When Aizawa asked to talk to Shouto after school, Shouto anticipated a lecture about his behavior in front of All Might during the USJ meeting. He did not expect Aizawa to peer at him between his bandages and say,
“I want you to join a club.”
Shouto hesitated. “What?”
“I know it’s not required for students in the Hero course, but you need to find something to do that isn’t Hero training.” Someone had already pulled up a chair behind Aizawa’s desk, and Aizawa motioned toward it. “Sit.”
Shouto obeyed, leaning his crutches against the wall. He sat beside Aizawa and looked over the sheet Aizawa had placed in front of him. Blinked down at it, brain buzzing, words jumbling together.
“There are a lot of options,” Aizawa said. “Anything jump out at you?”
Everything was jumping out at him. The whole sheet felt like a threat. “No.”
“Let’s narrow it down.” Aizawa set a pen on top of the sheet. “Cross out the martial arts clubs. And anything else explicitly Hero-oriented.”
Shouto picked up the pen. He’d read through half the list and descriptions before he realized that he hadn’t absorbed any of it, so he jumped back to the top.
The same thing happened again.
Shouto swore under his breath, digging the nails of his left hand into his thigh. Martial arts. Martial arts. It wasn’t like he could just look for those words—he had to read the club titles and understand the words enough to know whether they fit in that category. It might help if he could read it out loud, but he couldn’t do that with Aizawa here.
“What is it?” Aizawa asked.
Shouto brought his hand up to pinch the corner of his eyebrow, staring at the sheet, willing the words to mean something. “I’m… um. Can I try this at home and bring it back?”
“I’d let you, but today’s the last day to sign up for clubs,” said Aizawa. “Why?”
“Um.” Shit. How fucking pitiful would it be if he had a panic attack right now, just because he couldn’t read a school clubs flyer? He clicked the pen. “Just give me a minute. I’ll get… um. Sorry. I’ll get it in a minute.”
Aizawa sighed. “Give me the paper.”
Shouto clenched the pen. “No, I can—I can read it, I know what it says, I just need some time to—”
“This isn’t a reading comprehension quiz, Todoroki. We’re picking out a club. Give me the paper and I’ll cross out the martial arts clubs.”
Shouto chased the heat from his face with his quirk as he slid the paper back to Aizawa, but he couldn’t slow his heartbeat on his own accord. He was glad, not for the first time, that he wasn’t a crier.
Aizawa used a thick black marker to cross out titles as he went down the list. He didn’t look up as he spoke. “We should probably talk about that. Do you have dyslexia?”
Shouto flicked away a frost crystal forming on the bridge of his nose. “No.”
“What is it, then? Focus issues?”
“Yes.”
“Has that always been a problem?”
“Not always,” said Shouto. “After my concussions.”
“How many of those did you have?”
“Um. Three, I think.”
Aizawa paused, looking up. “Focus can’t be your only issue, then. Do you have memory loss? Headaches, mood swings?”
Shouto went silent.
He had told people before about his health issues, mostly to shock them into leaving him alone. Even a particularly friendly person would usually back off after a “my father gave me brain damage.” So he’d never really had to think about the consequences of someone learning too much.
Why did this conversation feel like it was going to have consequences?
Why did it feel like so many of his conversations lately were having consequences?
People weren’t leaving him alone anymore.
“I’m asking so I can help,” said Aizawa.
“Um.” This wouldn’t be so hard, right? He’d told people before. “My eyes are fucked up. No notable memory loss, but my working memory is bad. Sleep problems. My sister thinks I have flat affect.”
“You don’t have flat affect,” said Aizawa. He looked back down at the flyer and continued marking. “Blunted, maybe, but you do have facial expressions and body language. Have you ever looked into an autism diagnosis?”
“My brother thinks I have it.”
“I think you might, too. What about mood?”
Shouto paused. “Mood?”
“Sometimes people with concussions develop depression and anxiety. Get easily irritated, more aggressive. Are you dealing with any of that?”
Shouto was thankful Aizawa was, at least, not looking him in the eye when he asked these questions. “I don’t think I’m more aggressive.”
“Well, you likely have some form of anxiety disorder, with your panic attacks. We’re probably going to need to get you on some medication after your case goes through. What about depression?” When Shouto didn’t speak, Aizawa continued, “I’m not unfamiliar, kid. I’ve had a depression diagnosis since middle school. You don’t want to let that shit go unaddressed for too long.”
“I know,” said Shouto.
“You’re not feeling suicidal, are you?”
He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. It felt vulnerable, unsafe. Too many things Aizawa could tell Endeavor. Endeavor wouldn’t want Aizawa to know any of this. He’d be furious.
Anyway, what could Aizawa do? Shouto could receive short-term emergency treatment without parental consent, but that was it. What the hell could two or three days of inpatient treatment do against years of feeling like shit all the time?
“No,” Shouto said.
Aizawa raised his head. “Todoroki, that was a very long pause.”
“It’s not bad,” said Shouto. “It used to be bad. A year ago, maybe. That’s what I was thinking about. But it’s manageable now.”
“Did something happen a year ago?”
Shouto considered. “Nothing happened. Nothing specific. Just a bunch of little stuff.”
“Did you ever try to hurt yourself?”
Shouto stared at the surface of the desk. Scuffed. It might look better with some polish, but he doubted Aizawa would bother.
There was a photo there, too, in a plain black frame Shouto had never noticed before—Aizawa in hiking gear atop a mountain, looking tired and disappointed beside a blond man with a familiar wide grin. Shouto squinted. Present Mic? He hadn’t expected those two to hang out outside of school. Not willingly, at least. Were they friends?
“Todoroki.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Shouto.
“You need to tell someone if it gets bad again.”
“I know.”
Aizawa absently rapped his pen against the desk. “You do your homework in class and at lunch a lot. If you can’t focus at home by yourself, you need to try a study group. Do you have friends you can study with?”
Did he? Would Bakugou or Kirishima think it was strange if Shouto asked to study together? “Uraraka invited me to her study group.”
“Join that.” Aizawa pushed the flyer back toward Shouto, keeping it closer this time so he could point as he spoke. “I marked out Kendo, Judo, Karate, First Aid, and Mountain Rescue. The others are separated into groups. Sports, Community Service, Subject Area, Hobby. I left sports on there in case you don’t see anything else you like, but I want you to look at the other categories first.”
Shouto was confused. “I’m good at sports, though.”
“Do you enjoy them?”
“What do you mean?”
Aizawa released a huff of breath. He gave Shouto a blank piece of paper and a pen. “Okay, here’s the deal. I’m going to go through this list aloud, and you’re going to write down every club you think would be advantageous toward your career as a Hero.”
Easy enough. “Okay.”
They spent a few minutes going through the list. When Aizawa reached the end of it, Shouto had a list of about fifteen clubs. Most of them were sports and community service clubs, but he’d also included the Physics club (Endeavor had hired quirk physicists to help Shouto maximize his quirk potential when he was younger), several language clubs, Quirk Theory club, and a couple clubs with tactical games that were proven to help improve problem-solving skills.
Aizawa took the list and looked over it. “Good,” he said.
Then he took the school clubs flyer and started marking out the clubs Shouto had written down.
“Wait,” Shouto said. “Wait. What are you—? I thought those were the clubs you wanted me to choose from.”
Aizawa gave a frightening smile—not a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, but one that did and was worse for it. “A logical ruse. You really think I’d let you pick a club your dad would approve of?”
Shouto looked over the flyer, and… damn, it was kind of satisfying to see all the clubs Endeavor might’ve been okay with trapped under thick black lines. A corner of his mouth twitched upward.
He was going to do something so fucking useless.
And not just as a one-time thing, like the arcade. It would be several times per week.
For hours.
He hunched over the paper, his uninjured leg jogging under the desk. “Endeavor’s going to hate this.”
“Mm. Are you okay with that?”
“Fuck yeah,” said Shouto.
Notes:
Me: *puts Shouto on crutches*
Me: Cool, now to insert some fun dynamic scenes I've been saving up!
Shouto: Bro I can't *do* any of that shit. I'm on crutches.
Me: *surprised pikachu face*
Chapter 24: Shouto Pushes Bakugou Down the Stairs and Celebrates with Soba
Summary:
A visit to the housebound Bakugou. Shenanigans. A phone call.
Notes:
CW: possible dysphoria-inducing language, minor panic attack, reference to autism-related abuse
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto was off his crutches a couple days earlier than he’d expected. He was glad to be rid of the annoyance, but his speedy recovery also meant that he’d have to start training with Endeavor again soon. So when he received a text from Bakugou Wednesday just after the final bell—
OI ASSHAT I FORGOT MY BIOLOGY TEXTBOOK AT SCHOOL AND YOU OWE ME ONE FOR THAT TIME I BROUGHT YOU YOUR SHIT SO FUCKING BRING IT TO ME, HERE’S MY FUCKING ADDRESS DON’T BE LATE
—he was, just a little bit, glad.
Less time sitting in his bedroom, heart stuttering at every creak in the house.
Shouto sent Fuyumi a text letting her know he’d be home late before taking the subway to Bakugou’s house. Mitsuki greeted him at the door before promptly yelling into the house, “BAKUGOU KATSUKI, GET DOWN HERE AND SAY HI TO YOUR FRIEND!”
A muffled “HE AIN’T MY FUCKIN’ FRIEND” came from upstairs.
“I’ll go up,” said Shouto. “Thanks.”
Mitsuki patted his shoulder.
Shouto headed upstairs. He knocked on Bakugou’s closed bedroom door. “Bakugou. You’re not jerking off in there, are you?”
“FUCK OFF,” Bakugou yelled.
“Do you want your fucking textbook or not?”
There was some shuffling before the door opened. It might’ve been the first time Shouto had seen him in casual day clothes, and he was a little surprised to see baggy designer pants and a layered top—flannel over a shirt with a skull design—instead of… Well, what had he expected? Gym shorts and a sweat-stained t-shirt, maybe.
Bakugou’s wrist cast was gone, replaced by a brace. He was also standing by himself. “Are you off crutches?” Shouto asked.
“What’s it fucking look like?” Bakugou said. “Old nurse lady said I can’t fight for another week, though.”
“Because you displaced your ribs?”
“No, because it’d mess my hair up and—yes, because I displaced my ribs, you fucking dumbass.”
Shouto took Bakugou’s textbook out of his shoulder bag. He handed it to Bakugou and turned to start down the stairs.
“Oi,” said Bakugou. “Where the fuck are you goin’, IcyHot?”
“Home,” said Shouto.
“You can’t fuckin’—OI!”
Shouto stopped and turned to face Bakugou. “What?”
Bakugou’s cheeks flushed a light red. “Look, I’m gonna get in trouble with my mom if you just up and fuckin’ leave right after you got here. She’ll think I was bein’ rude or some shit.”
“Weren’t you?”
“S’not the point, fuckass. You gotta stay.”
Shouto sighed. “How long?”
“I don’t care. Half an hour or somethin’.” Bakugou threw his door open before retreating into his bedroom. “You know the fuckin’ drill. Shut up and don’t distract me. No hyperventilating.”
Shouto dropped his bag on the floor and sat beside it. “You know the hyperventilating is involuntary, right?”
Bakugou grabbed his own bag from his desk. “I’ll voluntarily throw you out the goddamn window.”
The bed squeaked angrily when Bakugou sat on it. As Bakugou spread his textbooks and folders out across the comforter, Shouto pulled off his tie, undid the first button of his shirt. He reached toward the small of his back and pressed the button to relax the front of his binder.
Shouto looked up to see Bakugou staring at him. “What?” Shouto said.
“That hurts, right?” Bakugou said.
“Looking at you?” Shouto asked. “Yes.”
“I mean that thing for your tits, fuckface.”
“My binder.”
“I didn’t fuckin’ ask you what it was called, I asked if it hurts.”
Shouto stretched his side, pulling his left elbow over and behind his head. “Yeah, if I move wrong. Or wear it too long. It’s usually just an ache.”
“An ache like what?”
“I don’t know. Like a period but in your ribs.” He stretched the other way. “I guess that description isn’t helpful to you, but it’s the most universal thing I could think of.”
Bakugou looked down at his textbooks. Narrowed his eyes. Looked at Shouto again. “You get periods?”
“Yes?” said Shouto. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Bakugou blinked. His face scrunched. “Thought those stopped when you got on hormones or whatever.”
Had Bakugou been doing research? “I’m not on hormones.”
“Hah?”
“You need parental consent for that.”
Bakugou eyed him suspiciously. “You ain’t on hormones?”
Shouto dropped his arms. “No.”
“Then why’re you built like a brick house fucked another brick house and then shat out a brick house baby?”
“I train.” Shouto stood, then dropped to touch his toes. The backs of his legs burned pleasantly.
Bakugou didn’t seem satisfied. “So you ain’t even been through puberty yet.”
“I’ve been through a puberty,” said Shouto. He straightened. “Not the one I wanted. But a puberty did occur.”
Bakugou’s gaze dipped. “Your tits are tiny, though.”
“And you have the same cup size as Mount Lady. Do you want my old binder?”
Bakugou snatched a pillow from his bed and swung it so hard that it knocked Shouto’s breath out of him.
Shouto caught it, tore it from his hands, and swung it back.
The blow knocked Bakugou off his bed.
Shouto rounded the bed, holding the pillow in both hands. “Did I hurt you?”
Bakugou groaned, eyes squeezed shut. He pressed his hand to his side. “Fuckin’ hell, IcyHot.”
Mitsuki’s voice called up the stairs. “You boys okay up there?”
“IcyHot just tried to fuckin’ MURDER ME,” Bakugou yelled back.
“Your corpse better not have any more displaced ribs,” called Mitsuki.
Bakugou sat up with a grunt. He reached up and grabbed the blanket on his bed like he was going to use it to pull himself up, but he didn’t. He just sat there, back turned toward Shouto.
Shouto wasn’t sure if he’d done something wrong. “Um. Do you want your pillow back?”
“Has Sparkle Vest been messaging you?” Bakugou asked.
Shouto put the pillow on the bed. Was that the reason Bakugou had wanted him to stay? To ask about Deku? “Yeah.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Just… memes, videos. I don’t answer him.”
“Videos?” Bakugou pulled himself up. “Of himself?”
“Sometimes.”
“Let me see.”
Shouto didn’t feel great about handing his phone to Bakugou, but he also felt a little bad about knocking Bakugou to the ground when he wasn’t fully healed yet. He pulled up the messaging app and handed his phone to Bakugou.
Bakugou scrolled. Shouto watched over his shoulder as he clicked on the latest video Deku had sent. It opened with a shaky visual of a large storefront.
Deku’s voice, high with excitement. “Okay, Shouto, they opened up a big Disney store not long ago, and this is literally the fourth time this month I’ve visited? Like, holy fuck I love this place. They usually have cosplayers inside, and I totally am not about to spend my entire paycheck on photo op fees.”
“That’s a lie, Shouto.” Magne’s voice, offscreen. “He is one hundred percent about to do that.”
“Obviously. Also!” The camera twisted toward Magne, who was dressed as a character Shouto didn’t recognize, her reddish hair parted in two braids. She was still wearing her sunglasses. “Do a twirl, Sis.”
Magne twirled, her deep green dress fluttering. “I made it myself.”
“She did! Fucked up the pattern on the skirt, but it’s very pretty otherwise!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Magne said, laughing.
Bakugou narrowed his eyes at the screen. “Who’s that bitch?” he asked.
“Big Sis Magne,” said Shouto.
“The fuck’s her deal?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “She’s nice.”
Bakugou frowned. He started fumbling with the volume.
Onscreen, the camera entered the store. Deku lowered his voice a little. “I wonder if Shouto’s ever seen Frozen?”
“I think everybody has,” said Magne.
“Yeah, but consider this: Endeavor’s a slut.”
“That’s offensive to sluts,” said Magne.
“As a self-identified slut, I’m entitled to use the word as I please.” For the first time, Deku tilted the camera toward his own face. The sheer collar of a blue dress was visible in the frame. He was also wearing winged eyeliner and glittery teal eyeshadow. “The fun thing about coming here is that my relative androgyny confuses the staff enough for both the male and female cosplayers to flirt with me, which my bisexual ass finds absolutely delightful.”
“He starts vibrating,” said Magne.
Deku snickered before continuing. “There’s a fine line between what society finds cute and what it finds creepy, and a fifteen-year-old boy in an Elsa cosplay might be pushing it. But Disney has been a hyperfixation of mine for a hot minute, so like, fuck society and gender roles, right? I look fine as hell right now. I plan on riding that fine line like it’s good dick.”
Bakugou dropped the phone.
Shouto caught it before it could hit the ground. He stopped the video. “What is it?” he asked Bakugou.
Bakugou blinked. He sat on his bed, dropping his hands between his legs.
“What?” Shouto repeated.
“That can’t be him,” said Bakugou.
“Maybe it’s not him.”
Bakugou looked up at Shouto. “You gotta move up the date.”
“I already set it. You’re still not healed, anyway.”
Bakugou looked away, scowling. “That ain’t Izuku. That’s some shithead with a body-changing quirk.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “Maybe.”
“Izuku couldn’t even look people in the fuckin’ eye.”
“Maybe he was faking being weak in middle school to deflect suspicion,” said Shouto. “He could’ve just been letting you beat him up.”
“Why the fuck would anybody… uh. Wait.” Bakugou’s eyes sliced toward Shouto. “I didn’t fuckin’ tell you about me ’n Izuku.”
“What?” Shouto racked his brain. “You did. Back when I stayed the night.”
“Hah? No, I—” Realization flashed across his face and, half a second later, red-faced fury. He jolted to his feet. “I thought you were fuckin’ ASLEEP, ASSHOLE!”
“I have insomnia.”
“So why didn’t you fucking ANSWER ME? HAH?”
“I didn’t want to talk to you.”
Bakugou’s face burned cherry red. “YOU WHAT?!”
“I didn’t want…” Shouto’s voice trailed off as he searched Bakugou’s face. He couldn’t curb a grin. “Why are you embarrassed?”
“I’m NOT! Shut the fuck up!”
Shouto ran through a mental list of reason why Bakugou might be embarrassed. He stopped on the most likely possibility. Shouto didn’t get it, but— “Did you have a crush on him?”
And—oh, fuck.
Those words were a mistake.
Shouto ducked under an explosion that left his ears ringing. He wrestled with the doorknob for a couple seconds too long before he finally made it out of Bakugou’s bedroom.
Bakugou followed, hitting Shouto with a full-body tackle that slammed him into the wall close to the stairwell. A little too close—Bakugou lost his footing, yelping as he started to fall.
Shouto reached out to catch him, which might have worked if Bakugou hadn’t grabbed onto Shouto’s shirt and dragged Shouto down with him. They landed hard, sprawled out on the top few steps, limbs tangled together.
Shouto took one look at Bakugou’s face—red and startled, hanging upside-down just a few inches from his own face—and started laughing.
Annoyance flickered across Bakugou’s face. “OI!”
“You look so—” Shouto laughed through the words. “—so fucking stupid, Jesus fuck.”
“YOU look stupid!” Bakugou yelled. Shouto couldn’t tell if his face was red from anger or from gravity sending his blood to his head. He tried to shove Shouto away, the motion only succeeding in sending Bakugou slipping down another couple steps. He caught himself, fumbling. “FUCK YOU!”
Shouto grinned as he propped himself up on his elbows. “Don’t rip your designer pants.”
“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU! HALF-N-HALF BASTARD!”
Mitsuki appeared at the bottom of the staircase. She looked up at them. Folded her arms.
Bakugou started, “He—”
“You know, I kinda don’t wanna know,” said Mitsuki.
###
Shouto didn’t stay longer than he needed to. He listened to Mitsuki lecture about the importance of taking care of their bodies so soon after injuries. Ate a snack while Bakugou glared at him. Grabbed his shit and left.
When Shouto reached home, he checked his phone to make sure Endeavor wasn’t in the house before entering. As he took off his shoes at the door, he heard Fuyumi shuffling around in the kitchen. A familiar smell wafted toward him.
Oh, hell yes.
“Fuyumi,” he called as he headed to the kitchen, “are you making soba? Do you need help, or…?”
He stopped in the doorway of the kitchen. Fuyumi was holding her phone out in front of her as she stirred a pot. Did she have somebody on speaker?
“You’re on the phone,” Shouto said when Fuyumi looked up. “I didn’t know.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” said Fuyumi. “Did you have fun at your friend’s? Is he feeling better?”
“I—” Was Fuyumi not on a call? Maybe she’d just been looking at a recipe. She was usually a stickler for phone etiquette. “I guess? He was feeling well enough to try to explode my face when I made a gay joke.”
“What? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, he fell down the stairs before he could do anything. He’s kind of an idiot.”
A woman’s gentle laughter came from the speaker on Fuyumi’s phone. Shouto tensed.
He knew that laughter. Distantly, like he’d heard it in a movie years ago, but he knew it.
“Who…?” Shouto started.
“It’s just Mom,” said Fuyumi. “Mom, Shiyo’s home a little early. How about I call you again tomorrow?”
Shouto’s heartbeat picked up. Mom.
Rei.
“Sure thing, Honey Bunches,” Rei said, and in that moment, it was like she was in the kitchen with them, like she’d never left. “Hi, Shiyo! Congrats on your acceptance to U.A., baby, Momma’s really proud.”
Shouto let the silence stretch for longer than he should’ve.
“H-hi,” he said, and then he left the kitchen.
He started to head to his bedroom, but his bedroom would feel quieter than death with how his head was buzzing right now. So he went to the living room and crumpled into the couch underneath the noisy overhead air conditioning. But that wasn’t quite right, still, so he curled into the cushions, legs pulled up to his chest, hands covering his ears.
He hadn’t been ready. Maybe if he’d known. But he hadn’t been ready.
Not even a minute had passed when he felt a hand on his arm. Reluctantly, he pulled his hands from his ears and turned his head just enough that his face wasn’t smooshed into the couch. “What,” he muttered.
“Are you okay?” Fuyumi asked.
“Yeah.” He itched to cover his ears again. It was stupid and looked ridiculous, he knew that, but god, he had to retroactively shut out those words somehow.
Hi, Shiyo!
Shiyo. Shiyo Shiyo Shiyo.
Momma’s really proud.
She wouldn’t be. If Fuyumi and Natsuo ever told her anything. He hadn’t done shit to earn her pride, and the words bounced in his head like a mocking screensaver.
Momma’s really proud.
Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up.
He didn’t realize that he’d covered his ears again until Fuyumi tapped his wrist. “Hey.”
“Wasn’t ready,” said Shouto, speaking more to the couch cushions than to his sister. “I’m fine. Just wasn’t ready. Give me a minute.”
“I’m sorry,” said Fuyumi. “I should’ve taken it off speaker when I heard you come in.”
“Fuyumi, give me a minute,” Shouto repeated. He pressed his palms so hard into his ears it hurt, curling up tight into the corner of the couch, forehead pushing into the cold leather. He’d never liked the texture. Felt sticky, clingy. “Sounds are all wrong. Go away.”
He could still hear her through his closed ears. “What do you mean?”
He’d spent all his words. That Hi had been the most expensive word he’d bought in a while. He pressed his hands into his ears harder.
“Shiyo.” Fuyumi rested her hand on his arm. “You’re going to hurt yourse—”
“No,” Shouto hissed, jerking away from the touch. His skin itched where she’d touched him like a bug was crawling on him, and he clawed at it to make the sensation go away. Nausea snaked through his gut.
Fuyumi left the room. Shouto heard a closet door opening, and a moment later, something heavy and soft was settling across his shoulders.
“Just make sure it’s put up before Dad gets home,” said Fuyumi. “He doesn’t like you using it.”
His weighted blanket. He’d ordered it for himself a couple years ago and had it confiscated shortly thereafter when Shouto said something sarcastic to Endeavor in front of a couple sidekicks. Shouto heaved the top of the blanket over his head, encasing himself in darkness.
“I know you’re angry at her for what happened,” said Fuyumi, “but she’d love to talk to you. She misses you.”
Not angry. Not angry. Not at Rei. But he couldn’t tell Fuyumi that. He knew that Fuyumi felt guilty when Shouto was scared, but god, he was scared all the time. It was a different type of assholery to let her know that, to make her feel bad as often as Shouto felt bad.
So when Fuyumi assumed things like Shouto holding onto a decade-long grudge, Shouto rarely corrected her.
He’d stay the asshole.
“Just think about it,” said Fuyumi. “Please?”
He didn’t answer. Fuyumi sighed, her footsteps retreating into the kitchen.
Notes:
Why include a boring TERF (trans-exclusive radical feminist) in your fic when you have a perfectly good TIEH (trans-inclusive explosive homophobe)?
Chapter 25: Shouto Listens to Kaminari and Sero Sing "The Bro Duet"
Summary:
Bakugou's back, and he brings good tidings of "no homo"!
Enter Shinsou. A bitch is tired.
Notes:
CW: some minor references to suicide/self-harm, minor sexual references
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto made it out of Thursday morning’s training session with Endeavor with just a twisted ankle. It hadn’t even been Endeavor’s fault—Shouto had just forgotten the footing for a particular move and fallen the wrong way. Endeavor had muttered something about “those idiots at U.A.” not teaching him well enough, then let Shouto get ready for school.
Shouto wasn’t going to say that school was worse, but Kaminari and Sero had arrived early today and were having a loud conversation over a shared pack of Skittles. Shouto rested his chin on his arms and tried not to listen.
It was difficult.
“Dude,” said Kaminari, “do you ever just get a random boner when you think about guys?”
“Huh?” Sero was sitting atop the desk in front of Kaminari. “No, dude, I like girls.”
“Yeah, me too, dude, which is why it’s super weird, right?” Kaminari dumped an ungodly number of Skittles into his mouth, speaking through the half-mashed pebbles. “I guess it’s one of those things you grow out of, huh?”
Sero took the bag of Skittles from Kaminari, shaking the candy into his hand before he funneled it into his mouth. “Dunno, bro.”
“You don’t think we have a bunch of hot guys in our class?”
“I don’t really pay attention to the boys, bro,” said Sero.
“Seriously? Not even Shouto? Or Iida? Shouto’s got that mysterious bad boy thing going on, but Iida’s freakin’ ripped, dude. Bakugou and Kirishima are pretty good-looking, too! I mean, objectively. I’m not gay or anything.”
“Bro,” said Sero, pointing to himself, “do you think I’m hot?”
“No, bro,” Kaminari said. “You’re my bro, dude. I think you’re beautiful.”
“Bro,” said Sero.
“I’d make love with you anytime. No homo.”
“Bro,” said Sero. “Thanks, man. That means a lot. No homo.”
Shouto accidentally locked eyes with Momo. She made a face that was very, very tired.
When Bakugou entered, Kaminari and Sero nearly tackled him. Would have if Bakugou hadn’t fired off a couple explosions and yelled, “BACK OFF, YOU DAMN EXTRAS!”
“Bakubroooo,” Kaminari whined. “It’s been, like, a year, dude! Let me hug you!”
“Ain’t even been a fuckin’ week,” Bakugou grumbled. He plopped down in his seat.
Kaminari turned to Shouto. “Shouto, come say hi to Bakugou!”
“Why?” asked Shouto. “I saw him yesterday.”
The fake-French boy at the front of the classroom—fuck was his name, Aoyama?—put his hand to his mouth in a poor attempt to mask a smile. “Mon dieu. You two are close.”
Bakugou shot a glare in Aoyama’s direction. “Say that again, Sparkle Tits.”
“I’m just speculating, mon ami.”
Bakugou pushed himself up from his chair, face red. “Fuck you try’na say?!”
“Jesus fuck, Bakugou,” said Shouto. “Sit the fuck down and shut up. No one cares if you’re gay.”
Bakugou whirled toward Shouto. “You were the one who grabbed my h—you f—you fucking Half-n-Half Bastard! I’ll throw you down the fucking stairs!”
Shouto snorted. “Yeah, because that worked out so well for you yesterday.”
“Shut the FUCK—”
“Oh my god!” Mina’s voice. She’d just wandered into the classroom and was standing with her hands on her face, grinning. “Are we finally talking about the hand-holding? Because I was totally going to bring it up in front of everybody today.”
“NO, WE’RE FUCKIN’ NOT!” barked Bakugou.
“Bakugou, if you have a crush on me, you should just say so,” said Shouto. “I’ve been waiting for a chance to tell you you’re fucking hideous.”
Turned out that a classroom was not the most optimal place for Bakugou to transform into a raving human explosion.
But when Shouto looked down from where he crouched on top of his desk, pinning Bakugou’s exploding fists together above his head, he saw Momo burying her face in her hands, her shoulders quaking with laughter. And it felt—just a little bit—worth it.
###
After school, Shouto headed out to the training grounds behind the school. Aizawa had given him a location and a name:
Shinsou Hitoshi.
Shouto’s first impression of Shinsou Hitoshi was that he was tired. Shouto did not consider this conclusion far-fetched, since the boy was quite literally asleep the first time he saw him.
It was honestly a little impressive, the way he’d managed to stay upright with only his backpack supporting him on a backless bench, his head nodded forward, purple hair shoving off and away from his forehead like it didn’t especially want to be there. Shouto wondered if perhaps the boy had a quirk similar to Uraraka’s with how so many parts of his body seemed to be adamantly defying gravity.
After what must have been a minute of standing in front of the boy, Shinsou jerked awake. His backpack flopped to the ground. Shinsou didn’t flinch—just looked up and narrowed his sleep-dark eyes at Shouto. “Who’re you?”
“I think I’m supposed to fight you,” Shouto said. “Or after you, or something. Shinsou?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Todoroki Shouto.”
“Todoroki.” Shinsou rolled his head around, popping his neck. “You Endeavor’s kid?”
Oh. One of those introductions. “Yeah.”
“Huh. Any idea why Aizawa’s letting some rich kid who can afford his own goddamn private tutoring join my lessons with him?”
It took him a moment to process the words. To understand that… oh, Shouto was the intruding rich kid. “I do, but I can’t tell if you actually want me to tell you or if that was a rhetorical question.”
Shinsou stared at him.
“Okay,” Shouto said. “I’m… going to go change.”
When Shouto came back from the locker room in his gym uniform, Aizawa had taken Shinsou’s place on the bench. Shinsou was stretching on the grass.
“Todoroki,” Aizawa said. Kaminari had been raving all day about how Aizawa’s new addition—a black eyepatch over his right eye—made him look like a pirate, but Shouto just thought it made him look more tired. He certainly didn’t look awake and perky right now. Maybe he should’ve kept the bandages on a few more days. “Shinsou wants to spar you.”
Shouto locked eyes with Shinsou and said, “Why.”
“I don’t want someone sitting there judging me without having fought me,” said Shinsou. He pulled his foot up behind him, stretching his leg. “And you’re experienced, right? I need to know how far I have to go before I’m caught up to the Hero course.”
“I’m above the level of an average Hero course student,” said Shouto.
Shinsou raised an eyebrow as he dropped his foot. “Real fucking sure of yourself, huh?”
“Yes. This won’t be helpful for either of us.”
“Todoroki,” said Aizawa, rubbing his temple. “Just do it, please. I don’t want to be here three hours.”
Shouto stood and walked in front of Shinsou. Stood with his arms limp at his side. “Okay. Attack me.”
Shinsou only hesitated for a second before he darted forward. It took three seconds for Shouto to knock Shinsou on his back. Usually, he’d pin his opponent to the ground, but there wasn’t much point when his opponent was like… that.
To Shinsou’s credit, he got back up quickly. Attacked again.
Shouto knocked him down.
The third time Shinsou hit the ground, Aizawa called the fight. “Shinsou, you’re done.”
Shinsou got back up, brushing dirt off his pants. He leveled a glare at Shouto. “I can keep going.”
“You’re not going to win,” said Shouto.
“You don’t know that.”
“Todoroki’s right,” said Aizawa. “He’s been training for over a decade longer than you have. It’s not useful for you to measure your own skill against his.”
Shinsou hesitated. “But if the other people in the Hero course—”
“Most are closer to your skill level than Todoroki’s.” Aizawa stood. “Todoroki, have a seat.”
Shouto sat and worked on homework while Aizawa sparred with Shinsou. He did look up more often than he should’ve. Not because Shinsou’s fighting style was anything remarkable—it wasn’t—but because it was strange to watch a Pro Hero adjusting his fighting style to match someone as inexperienced as Shinsou.
Stopping to go over a mistake.
Pausing when Shinsou needed a moment to catch his breath.
Few of the Pro Heroes Shouto fought had taught. They’d just sparred. Let Shouto flounder.
After half an hour, Shinsou’s purple hair was dripping with sweat. He pulled his collar up to wipe his face, chest heaving.
“All right,” Aizawa said, tossing Shinsou a water bottle. “Good work. You’re finished.”
Shinsou dropped his collar, his gym shirt falling back down in sweaty folds. “No, I can—”
“Nope. Go home or have a seat. Todoroki, you’re up.”
Shouto stood and got into place. Shinsou’s shoulder knocked against his as they walked past each other. Shinsou was a little taller than him, Shouto realized with a sliver of surprise. Maybe only by a centimeter or so, but he’d assumed that Shinsou would be the shorter one.
He was slightly more surprised that Shinsou didn’t immediately leave. He sat on the bench, unscrewing his water bottle as he watched Shouto.
“You hold back during practical training,” said Aizawa. “I need to know where you’re at before I help you with anything specific.”
“Okay.” Shouto moved in.
The match went on for about five minutes before Aizawa tripped Shouto up enough for him to land on his forearms.
He stayed there for a few seconds, panting into the grass. It wasn’t something he would’ve let himself do in his training with Endeavor or his sidekicks—they wouldn’t hesitate to attack while he was on the ground—but he stayed there now, and no foot came down on his back or slammed into his side.
He could hear Aizawa panting, too. The sound of a water bottle opening. “Shit, kid. I’m too old for this.”
Shouto rolled onto his back. Squinted up at the cloudless sky.
“You’re favoring your right side,” Aizawa said. “Is that habit or are you hurt?”
“Twisted my ankle this morning,” said Shouto.
“In training?”
“Yeah. It was my fault. It’s not bad.”
Aizawa stretched a hand out to him. It took a moment for Shouto to realize that he was offering to help Shouto up. He took it, though he had to work for a grip—Aizawa’s hand was slippery with sweat.
Shinsou stared at Shouto as he stood, paused in the middle of opening a granola bar. “Do you not sweat?” he asked.
“Not much,” said Shouto. “Not unless I put out too much ice.”
“You get hot when you put out ice?”
“It takes energy.”
Shinsou took a bite of his granola bar, his eyes burning into Shouto’s. “So you’re like the back of a refrigerator.”
Shouto narrowed his eyes. He’d never heard it described that way, but…
“Show me what you’re struggling with,” Aizawa said, tossing his water bottle to the side. “You said there were some specific moves you can’t counter? Try them on me.”
Shouto tried, first, the move both Reflection and Deku had taken him down with. Aizawa dodged it, but he raised an eyebrow. “Where’d you get that?”
“Uh.” He wasn’t sure if it was safe to say Deku’s name around Shinsou. The name hadn’t even been released to his other classmates—he and Bakugou were the only students who knew it. Which was good, because Kirishima knew Deku as the boy who’d shown up to walk Shouto home from school. “The… villain I fought at the USJ. And my father’s sidekick used it, too. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.”
“Not quite, but I know the move you’re referencing. You’ll have to get your reaction time down before you can dodge or execute the move yourself.”
Because Shouto was slow, of course he was slow. “Oh.”
“But I can show you how to block it. Try it on me again.”
They went on like that for about fifteen minutes before Aizawa’s hand went to his back. He winced.
Shouto dropped his hands. “Should we stop?”
“Let’s,” said Aizawa. He rolled his shoulders, his back popping. “Ah—fuck, ow. Was that helpful, Todoroki?”
“Yes,” said Shouto, because it had been.
“Good. See you back here on Tuesday, then.” He grunted as he bent to pick up his water bottle. “Good job, you two. You work hard.”
Shinsou stood, gathering his backpack. “Don’t break your spine too soon, Pops.”
“That’s the… fuck—” Aizawa straightened. “—plan.”
The two boys headed for the locker rooms. Shouto had to struggle to keep up with Shinsou. When he filed into the building behind him, Shouto said, “You walk fast.”
“Yeah,” said Shinsou. “Because I’m gay.”
What? “I don’t think that—”
“Gay people walk fast.”
“They—?” Shouto was confused. “No?”
“Yes. It’s science. Shut up.”
Shouto shut up. He went to the opposite corner of the large room to change into a t-shirt and shorts he’d brought from home. When he was finished, he glanced over his shoulder toward Shinsou.
Shouto caught a glimpse of a familiar garment hugging Shinsou’s torso as he buttoned up his uniform shirt.
Oh.
He knew that tightness, that waist-high seam, and honestly it may have been the same brand—
“Fuck are you looking at?” Shinsou asked.
Shouto met his eyes. “Are you trans?”
Shinsou tensed, something immediately defensive flashing in his eyes. “What’re you asking for?”
Shouto hesitated, his mouth fighting for words that wouldn’t come. He decided to just pull down one of his shirt sleeves, hooking his thumb under the strap of his binder and tugging it upward for Shinsou to see.
“Oh,” Shinsou said, blinking. “Uh… shit.”
They stared at each other in silence for a long time.
Shouto had never met another trans boy before, not that he knew of. Definitely never a trans boy his age. And now there was one right there, and Shouto was feeling this strange pull to…
To what?
Keep him there in the locker room to stare at? Follow him around like a puppy? Talk to him? Surely not. Shinsou didn’t seem to like him, and Shouto didn’t have any reason to like Shinsou, either.
Yet here they both were, unmoving, silence stretching long like taffy.
His mouth formed the words without his permission. “Do you want to—”
“We’re not friends,” Shinsou blurted. “This doesn’t make us friends.”
Shouto snapped his mouth shut. What had he been about to say? “No, of course not.”
“Does Aizawa-sensei know? About you?”
“Yes,” Shouto said. “You?”
“Yeah. Motherfucker must’ve paired us on purpose.”
“He didn’t invite me, though,” Shouto said. “I asked him.”
“Why? You hardly need more training.”
“I do if I want to stop breaking bones when I spar against Endeavor.”
Shinsou pursed his lips, his eyes running down Shouto’s body. “Endeavor abuses you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well… congrats on your trauma, I guess.” Shinsou finished buttoning up his uniform shirt. “Hardly surprising, though. Nobody believes me when I talk about all the asshole vibes he excretes.”
Me, either, Shouto wanted to say, so badly it hurt. Me either me either me either—
“Stop staring at me,” Shinsou snapped.
Shouto turned back to his locker. He started tapping his chest with his free hand—out of Shinsou’s field of vision—as he finished packing his bag up.
He had questions.
How had Shinsou picked his first name? He had a relatively deep voice—was he taking testosterone? If so, where had he gotten it? Did that mean he was out to his family? Was he as new to this as Shouto was, or had he been presenting as a boy for years?
Shouto heard the locker room door open and close. He turned and surveyed the empty room—Shinsou was gone.
He wanted to fucking kick himself.
###
He expected to see Shinsou the next Tuesday. Around campus, maybe. He did not expect to see him standing on a desk messing with the projector when Shouto walked into his first club meeting on Friday.
Shinsou nearly fell off the desk when he saw Shouto. “What are you doing here?”
“Video club,” said Shouto. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m the fucking video club president.” Shinsou jumped off the desk, swearing when his knee hit the corner of an adjacent desk. “Did Aizawa-sensei put you up to this? I thought Hero course students didn’t have to do clubs.”
Shouto backed up as Shinsou brushed past him toward the teacher’s desk. “He said I needed something to do.”
“So he sent you to video club?”
“No. I chose this club.”
Shinsou plopped down in the teacher’s chair. He grabbed the edge of the desk and rolled himself toward the computer. “Why? You like movies and shit?”
Why was his tone like… that? “I guess.”
Shinsou didn’t say anything else as he started working on the computer. Shouto sat down in the back of the classroom. As people Shouto didn’t recognize filtered into the room—all Gen Ed students, probably—he tried to temper the buzzing in his chest.
Shinsou was in the same club as him.
Shinsou, who was like him.
Shinsou, who… did not like him.
Fuck.
“Ayoooo! Bro! You’re in here, too?!”
Ah. He knew that voice. Shouto looked up to see a familiar shark-toothed smile.
Kirishima settled his hands on Shouto’s desk. “I didn’t think you’d be interested in clubs, dude! Aren’t you super busy with training and stuff?”
“Aizawa apparently told him he needed to get a life,” Shinsou said. He looked over at them. “Wait—Kirishima, gross. You’re friends with that prick?”
“Yeah, man, Shouto’s my bro.”
Shinsou looked back at the computer. He pulled a slideshow up on the projector. The first slide was green kanji on a pale yellow background: the words CLIPS AND SHIT written slightly off-center in some god-awful looping font. “That’s disgusting. Your friends are all terrible people.”
“But you’re my friend, too, Shinsou.”
“Case in point.”
“Did you do that on purpose?” Shouto asked.
Shinsou quirked an eyebrow. “Do what?”
Shouto pointed at the slide show.
Shinsou smirked. Leaned back in his seat, folding his arms. “Why? Don’t you like it?”
“I went nearly all day without experiencing suicidal thoughts,” said Shouto. “That slide design brought them back.”
“Oh, my bad.” Shinsou reached toward the computer. He changed the font to Comic Sans. “Is that better?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Shouto. “The thoughts are homicidal now.”
Kirishima blinked at the slide show. “I don’t get it. What’s wrong with it?”
“Precisely nothing, Tie-Dye Crocs-kun,” said Shinsou. “It’s a fucking masterpiece. Todoroki doesn’t know art when he sees it. Here.” He added a nausea-inducing smiley face border to the slide.
“Fucking—” Shouto got out of his seat and walked over behind the teacher’s desk. “Change it.”
Shinsou looked up at him. Grinned. Shouto wasn’t sure how Shinsou’s eyes looked even more dead when he smiled. “No.”
Shouto reached for the mouse, stopping when Shinsou held his arm up to block him. “Change it.”
“My club, my slideshow. If you don’t like it, the door’s behind you.”
“YO!” A loud voice made both Shouto and Shinsou startle and look toward the classroom’s entrance. “WHAT’S POPPIN’, MY LOOOOVELY HUMANS!”
Oh. Present Mic was this club’s advisor.
Shouto didn’t have anything against the man. He was just… loud.
“Todoroki doesn’t like my slideshow, Sensei,” said Shinsou. “What do you think?”
Present Mic looked at it, then gave a double thumbs-up and a bright smile. “Nauseating!”
“Thank you. I aim to please. Take several seats, Todoroki, you’ve been overruled.”
Reluctantly, Shouto returned to his seat. Still looking confused, Kirishima gave Shouto’s wrist a comforting pat.
There were about ten people sitting scattered amongst the desks when Shinsou finally closed the classroom door, turned off the lights, and got in front of the class. He leaned over the lectern, the outline of his hair ghostly in the projector light behind him. “I know we did introductions and elections last week, but we have some… ugh.” He looked at Shouto. “New faces. Pretty much what we do is watch shit and then talk about it. If you couldn’t tell by the choice of advisor, nearly everything we watch is going to be gay as fuck.”
“Woo!” said Kirishima, too loud. “Gay rights!”
Present Mic waved out at the group sitting at the desks, smiling. “You’re always so considerate, Shinsou! You know how easily I burn in the sun. Thank you for that shade.”
“My pleasure,” said Shinsou. He clicked to the next slide, and Shouto gave a flinch that was probably visible.
God, it was awful. A visual fever dream. The only text on the slide was a link, but it was barely visible amongst the collage of brightly-colored Neko stickers, poorly-cropped stock photos of people dabbing, and radially-blurred pictures of various pasta types. And was that a catgirl in the upper left corner?
Shinsou smiled directly at Shouto and said, “Let’s get started.”
###
Shouto didn’t talk much during the meeting.
But he did listen.
When Shinsou played a clip from Red’s Ocean and prompted the group to discuss the queer undertones in the two main characters’ relationship, Shouto had to bite down on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from vibrating out of his skin.
“Hey!” Kirishima said to Shouto in the middle of the discussion. “I just realized one of the main character’s names is Shouto!”
He bit down harder. “Mm-hm.”
“Your name is Shouto.”
“Mm-hm,” said Shouto.
Kirishima lowered his voice. “You like the show, right? Did you…?”
Did he name himself after that character? “Mm-hm.”
“Dude!” Kirishima’s face lit up with another revelation. “Shinsou! The other guy’s name is Hitoshi!”
“Uh,” said Shinsou.
“Your name is Hitoshi.”
“I don’t like where this is going,” said Shinsou.
Shouto asked Shinsou, “Did you…?”
“Yeah,” said Shinsou. “Did…?”
“Yes.”
Shouto and Shinsou stared at each other.
They had named themselves after characters from the same fucking show.
“God fucking damn it,” said Shinsou.
Shouto lowered his forehead so that it was resting on the surface of his desk. He let out a soft, high noise that continued for a little longer than it should have.
“Dude, you good?” Kirishima asked.
“Mm-hm,” said Shouto.
###
When the club meeting was over, Present Mic asked Shouto to deliver a DVD player they hadn’t needed to use back to Aizawa. Shouto obliged.
Energy leftover from the meeting hummed along his nerves as he walked. It was a familiar energy, and a good one, but one he had to be careful about feeling. Because it had made him let his guard down in the past, given Endeavor things he could use against Shouto.
For now, though, he was at school. Letting that energy buzz just under his skin didn’t feel as dangerous as it usually did.
The door to Aizawa’s classroom was cracked open as Shouto neared it. He heard Aizawa’s voice and slowed—he must’ve been talking on the phone.
“No, I—listen, I talked to someone named Okimoto the last time I called. She was helpful. Is she working toda—what do you mean, she quit? Did she quit or did you fucking fire her after she agreed to put the Todoroki file in the system?”
Shouto stopped. The DVD player weighed heavy in his hands.
“My swearing isn’t the problem, ma’am,” Aizawa continued. “The fucking problem is that a child’s life is in danger, and CPS has played an active hand in keeping him in that situation. Now will you please—? Thank you. Yes, that’s the legal name. Ye—because that’s what he goes by. Yes, he.”
There was a long pause. Shouto kept his breathing shallow, hoped Aizawa couldn’t hear his racing heart.
Finally, Aizawa spoke again. “Your office received the footage I sent, didn’t they? Yes? So why hasn’t anything happened?” Another pause. “Okay, first, I just said that he doesn’t go by that name, so I’m not sure why I’m still hearing it coming out of your mouth. Second, how in the entire fuck can you watch more than five minutes of that footage and still tell me you ‘didn’t find any real cause for concern’? Do you fucking sleep at night?” Pause. “Hello?”
Shouto recognized Midnight’s voice. “Did they—?”
“She fucking hung up,” said Aizawa. Voice quiet, brimming with something viscous, hot, boiling.
“Is there anybody else you can call?”
“I—Nemuri, I’ve called in all the favors I could think of. I’ve yelled at everybody I can possibly yell at. That was the last person on my list. I’ve exhausted every legal route available.” There was a short silence. Then a loud clattering noise and a, “FUCKING—DAMN IT. I can’t—” His voice broke. “FUCK. If I could get my hands around Endeavor’s neck—god, I would fucking choke the life out of him—”
“Shota,” said Midnight, voice low, soothing. “Babe.”
“I thought—”
“I know. I know. You did what you could.”
“I promised Shouto,” said Aizawa. “I can’t bring him back in here and tell him I can’t do anything. I can’t do that. What if he hurts himself?”
“None of this is your fault,” said Midnight. “You did so much. You haven’t been taking care of yourself, babe.”
“He doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t—”
“No, he doesn’t. But you can’t help anyone like this. Go home.”
“What… what the fuck am I supposed to tell him?”
Midnight sighed. “Give yourself some time, Shota. You can talk to him after the sports festival.”
“Fucking…”
“I know,” said Midnight. “I know. I’m so sorry.”
Shouto crouched, placing the DVD player silently on the ground just outside the door. Then he stood and started walking back the way he came from. He had training scheduled for after school today, so he didn’t have time to stand around.
Endeavor was waiting.
Notes:
My obsessive thoughts: *motions to ~300 nice comments on my fic* This is brilliant! *motions to the ~3 negative comments* But I like THIS.
Chapter 26: Shouto Sustains a Small Hand Injury and Doesn't Even Look Cool Doing It
Summary:
Sad boy hour.
If you're sensitive to mental illness talk, make sure you check the trigger warnings for this chapter! Take care of yourself.
Notes:
TW: burn wound aftercare, su*cidal thoughts and ideation, implied aborted su*cide attempt, self-harm (hitting), implications of self-harm using household cleaning supplies/prescription drug abuse, mention of r*pe
(most hard-hitting su*cide talk is in the second section ["He'd forgotten" to "Might as well get some homework done"], so skip that part if you need to)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto made sure his tongue wasn’t between his teeth before he poured the antiseptic.
The burn was just a patch on the back of his hand. Skin still intact, but red, swollen, and bumpy, with a few smaller patches boasting a strange glossy sheen. Endeavor had cornered him again in the training room. Gotten him to use his fire again. Because apparently Shouto was predictable now?
The antiseptic bubbled over the blistered skin. Shouto hissed. Kicked the heel of his foot against the opposite ankle as he waited for the pain to subside.
Touya’s body hadn’t been suited for his fire quirk. Was this what he’d had to deal with every time he trained?
Since Endeavor had been so close, Shouto had focused on temperature rather than volume. He’d rocketed the temperature up so high the flames had flickered a pale yellow—not nearly as hot as Touya’s blue flames, but still a couple hundred degrees higher than Endeavor’s consistent red.
Yellow flames.
The development might’ve been more exciting if yellow didn’t wildly clash with his aesthetic.
He'd put a burn on Endeavor’s arm, though. Light, first-degree. Endeavor had, surprisingly, called the fight. Left with a “Go dress your wound, To—Shiyo.”
The slip-up was weird, but fuck, his hand hurt, so he hadn’t asked questions.
Right hand shaking, he capped the antiseptic and picked up the aloe. He shook it out in a glob, and it landed lopsided atop the burn. He didn’t have the mental strength to spread it—what if the little glossy parts of his skin started moving around?—so just touched his right thumb to his left thumb, encasing his hand in a block of ice. Maybe not the most effective way of dealing with a wound, but the numbing effect was nice.
He took a couple of the pain pills he’d rationed (and hidden) after the USJ incident and his stay in the hospital. Pressed his forehead into the mirror as he gangled over the sink, watching with heavy-lidded eyes as the block of ice encasing his left hand slowly melted, the occasional drops quickly coming together to form a thin stream that wobbled toward the drain.
The pain meds kicked in fast. He’d taken too many, probably. The room had stopped seeming real a few minutes ago.
He was tired. His left hand was cold.
Probably because he had a block of ice around it? Fucking moron.
But he didn’t move to sublimate it.
Instead, Shouto blinked lazily at his reflection. A scar. Two eyes that didn’t belong to the same person. He tapped the mirror, and the person inside it startled.
Who the fuck is that, Shouto wondered.
###
He’d forgotten.
How fast the thoughts could turn active.
(How long had he been in this bathroom? The block of ice was almost fully melted now, so he refroze it.)
How all it took was a failed test, a dirty look, an unexpected rape scene in a movie—
Or an overheard conversation—
To turn casual Google searches for painkiller overdose symptoms into How many pills do I have, right now, and how many more would I need?
(He’d already taken two. Felt nice. Should he have taken them all?)
To turn I wonder what it would feel like if I drank drain cleaner into picking up the bottle of drain cleaner in his bathroom and opening it to see how much was left.
Shouto put the toilet seat down and sat. Swirled the half-empty bottle of drain cleaner around in his uninjured hand, weighing it, reading the ingredients—ingredients, was that word only for consumable items? Well, same difference in this case—until his eyes unfocused.
He didn’t feel good indulging the thoughts. But he didn’t feel good in general.
Aizawa had given up on him.
Aizawa.
Shouto groaned. Banged the back of his head against the wall. The mini-fridge he’d hidden just beneath the sink gave an annoyed gurgle.
“Yeah, sorry, shut up,” Shouto told it. “It’s my skull and I’ll crack it if I want to.”
It wasn’t Aizawa’s fault that he’d failed with CPS. Shouto knew that. He’d done a lot. It was just that a lot was never going to be enough, not where Shouto was involved, because holy fuck Shouto was high-maintenance, wasn’t he?
Wasn’t he.
He was. Not on purpose—at least, not always on purpose. But he made people’s lives so much harder. He doubted that would change once he became a Pro Hero. He would always be messing something up somehow, always inconveniencing or downright hurting people, always feeling shitty about it. Always.
Pain still radiating in the back of his skull, he brought the cleaner up to his nose and sniffed it.
Pungent. Heady, too, somehow…
It wasn’t like he had a choice about becoming a Pro Hero, not if he kept living with Endeavor. Likely wouldn’t have that choice even if he, by some miracle, got away from Endeavor.
Because what other career options did he have? He hadn’t had a normal childhood development. Didn’t have the software to enter a non-Hero workforce.
Hero work was all he’d ever be good for.
So he’d grow up, choose a Hero name and costume, wear both for so long that he’d become them. He’d enter that world of flashing lights and jumpscares and straying hands. He’d always be barely holding back a panic attack, always be afraid, until he was at the very top like his father had planned.
At that point, he’d hold enough of the world in his hand to instill fear in everyone who wasn’t Shouto.
By the time he was the number one Hero, he likely would’ve learned how to stop feeling things. Learned how to let feelings bounce off him like rubber balls instead of sticking and layering and weighing like they did now.
God, that would be horrible. To feel everything he’d needed to do to get on top:
The crunch of bone as he crushed a villain’s spine—
The slam of a door as a runaway he’d located was thrown back into an abusive foster home—
The sweaty cling of the microphone in his hand as he lauded the accomplishments of a Hero who’d died in the line of duty, delivering condolences to the wife (whose multiple reports of spousal rape by the late Hero were still being processed)—
The glide of an expensive pen as he signed a check to the Child Villain Rehabilitation Program, wiping a smudge of ink from his hand with a crumpled article about the Rehabilitation Program’s 20% suicide rate—
Hm.
Other Heroes, usually the ones who fought for their position in the top one hundred, could rationalize it. Shouto had never been good at rationalizing. He would feel that shit entirely, wholly.
Endeavor was a different sort of Hero altogether. He didn’t rationalize. He just stacked the bodies and climbed on top of them.
Shouto coughed. Coughed again, harder. Drew in a breath that wouldn’t—quite—
Fear jolted through his gut.
He quickly capped the drain cleaner bottle. Set it on the ground by the toilet brush. When the rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath didn’t go away, he turned on the bathroom fan and closed the door as he retreated into his bedroom. Water trailed after him, dripping from the ice encasing his left hand.
He stood there for a few seconds, hand loosely gripping the bathroom door handle, chest heaving.
So the fear response was still working.
Didn’t necessarily mean he wanted to continue existing. It just meant that he—his body, more specifically—didn’t want to physically and irreparably harm itself.
It was a natural response. Good for evolution. It was why people didn’t bite their own fingers off more often. It was why people had been surprised when Shouto hadn’t hesitated to attack the noumu.
Shouto had been trained to ignore that fear response whenever it wasn’t helpful. He wasn’t sure if the fact that the fear was affecting him now meant that the fear response was being helpful. Maybe he was just making excuses?
Shouto laid down on his futon, shoving his face into the pillows. He let his injured hand hang off the side of the mattress, still dripping.
Ugh.
He was feeling so guilty already, and for what? Existing? He’d never be able to make it as a Hero if he carried these gut-gouging feelings with him all the time. Maybe Endeavor was strong enough to carry his guilt with him as he climbed to the top. Maybe he didn’t carry guilt at all.
Shouto would carry the guilt, and he wasn’t strong like his father. He would have to give up chunks of himself the higher he went.
Wasn’t like he hadn’t already started doing that. A few years ago, he’d still had a personality. Still had a smile. Still had a favorite tv show. Still knew how to cry. Things he’d since given up to make room for discipline and training.
As long as Shouto didn’t die before adulthood, he would get to the top. That had never been the variable. There was a place set for him there—a throne made of corpses.
He would sit on it.
He would look down at the pile of broken bodies beneath him, surveying.
He couldn’t envision himself smiling. Not like his father might if he’d ever made it there.
Shouto doubted his own face would remember how to move at all.
So, yeah—
Drinking drain cleaner did sound inviting.
Stop all that shit from ever happening.
Right here.
Right now.
But the moment had passed. It didn’t look like Shouto was going to kill himself today.
Shouto rolled onto his back.
Rubbed the crusts from the corners of his eyes.
Yawned.
Might as well get some homework done.
###
The beginning of the next week was… tense.
The burn on his hand fit neatly beneath a skin-colored bandage, so at least no one asked him about that. But Bakugou kept glancing at him, flinching every time Shouto moved or got out of his seat. Like he was waiting for Shouto to make a run for it, like he was ready to dart out and catch him with an Oh no you don’t.
And for good reason. Wednesday was the meeting with Deku. Friday was the sports festival. Shouto would’ve loved to have run away and live with the wolves for a week.
On Monday, Aizawa asked Shouto to stay after homeroom. He did. He would try his best not to let his disappointment show on his face when Aizawa told him about his failure with CPS, and he thought he’d drawn his face quite smooth when he walked to stand in front of Aizawa’s desk.
“Todoroki,” said Aizawa. “Question for you.”
He hadn’t expected this to start with a question. It usually began with a roundabout apology. “Okay.”
“Have you been thinking about your name for the sports festival?”
His… name?
It hit him in a wave of crushing anxiety, almost knocking him over.
His name.
He’d have to pick one to go up on the scoreboards at the sports festival. If he picked Todoroki Shiyo, his classmates would find out he wasn’t a cis boy, and it could ruin his chances of being stealth in the future. If he picked Todoroki Shouto, his family would know, and possibly the entirety of Japan if a reporter did a little Googling.
“Oh,” Shouto said. "Shit."
“No—chill, kid, I already worked it out,” said Aizawa. “We’re only using surnames for the first years. You’ll just be Todoroki.”
Was… was that okay? Shouto had watched the sports festival every year—he thought it was kind of boring, but his father had insisted—and they’d always listed both surname and given name.
They’d changed it? For him?
Aizawa continued. “Mic and I will be emceeing, and we’ll try our best to omit gendered language when we’re commenting on you. All Might will be handing out awards, but he won’t be wearing a mic during that part. I can’t speak for any reporters, though, so you should be careful if you choose to do an interview afterward.”
Shouto threaded his hands behind his neck. “Yeah, I—yes. I didn’t even… yes. Thank you.”
Aizawa gave a small, baffled smile. “I was worried you’d been obsessing over it. I would’ve. Did it not even cross your mind?”
“I—maybe it did and I forgot it?” Shouto dropped his hands to his side. “I tend to rely on my relative anxiety level to help me remember upcoming events, and it’s… I’ve had other things come up, so it’s all… you know. I can’t differentiate.”
Aizawa raised an eyebrow.
“Is that… that’s all?” Shouto asked.
Aizawa grunted his affirmation. Then said, “Oh. I’m going to need Shinsou to myself this Tuesday and Thursday to help prepare him for the sports festival. We can pick up regular training again after the sports festival.”
That was fine. Shouto was busy, too.
###
When Shouto woke up Wednesday morning, his usual sense of dread was already on its fifth cup of coffee.
Bakugou elbowed him in the hall at school. “We’re still…?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
The meeting with Deku was today.
“Meet me outside the gate after school,” said Bakugou. “We gotta get there early.”
“Why?” Shouto asked.
“I ain’t lettin’ that fucker catch me by surprise.”
The day passed excruciatingly slow. Bakugou was unusually closed-mouthed. Even at lunch, he just sat across from Shouto and shuffled his orange peelings around with his chopsticks.
“Dude, Bakugou,” Kirishima asked, “you good? You ’n Shouto? You guys’ve been kinda quiet today. You two have a fight or somethin’?”
“Oo, drama,” said Mina.
“Fuck off,” Bakugou muttered. “I’m just fuckin’… thinkin’ about shit.”
Kirishima started, “You can talk it over with us if you—”
“No,” Bakugou barked.
Kirishima held up his hands in a placating gesture before turning back to his conversation with Kaminari.
They were discussing extension cords.
###
After school.
Bakugou was already outside the gate when Shouto arrived. The walk to the subway station was a quiet one.
Once they got on the train, Shouto said, “He might see you coming.”
Bakugou cut his eyes toward Shouto. They were sharp, honed, and Shouto regretted speaking. “Hah?”
“Just… with the quirks the League has. He might see you coming. I’m just saying to be prepared for him to be the more prepared one.”
Bakugou grunted. Looked away.
They found the ramen shop, but they didn’t go in. They were nearly an hour early. Wordlessly, they surveyed—walked around and behind the building (several empty alleys), noted security cameras (not many working ones—Deku may have chosen this restaurant for that reason). Then they walked back in front of the shop and sat on the bench outside. The area was sparsely populated. Shouto wasn't sure if that would work for them or against them during this encounter.
Bakugou fidgeted. Thumb tapping across the knuckles of his opposite hand like he was counting his fingers.
When there were fifteen minutes left until the meeting time, Shouto finally asked. “Is there a plan?”
“Yeah,” said Bakugou. “You do what I fucking tell you to.”
Well.
Finally, five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin:
Deku rounded the corner. He was writing in a pocket-sized composition book as he walked, glancing up every now and then to make sure he wasn’t running into anyone. He wore shorts and a t-shirt that read SWEATER. A green sequined headband blended in with the curls it held back.
Shouto turned to Bakugou to alert him to Deku’s presence, but Bakugou already had his eyes fixed on Deku. Eyes focused and burning with intent, back rigid.
Bakugou stood, hands in fists at his sides.
Shouto stood beside Bakugou. “That him?”
A muscle in Bakugou’s jaw twitched. “’Bout to find out.”
Deku looked up. He met Shouto’s eyes first. Then his gaze moved to the side, toward Bakugou.
Face blank, Deku closed his notebook. Tucked it in his breast pocket alongside his pencil.
Then he turned and ran.
Notes:
My sci-fi short story "Unblinking" is published!! You can now read it on my Instagram, @max_says_no
Chapter 27: Shouto Sets Some Boundaries. Like... Literal, Physical Boundaries, Made of Ice. He Does Not Suddenly Get His Shit Together, Unfortunately.
Summary:
Last chapter, Shouto took Bakugou with him to his meeting with Deku. When Deku arrived, he went all, "Fuck this shit I'm out," and now it looks like Shouto has to chase him? Ugh. Cardio.
Notes:
TW: f-slur, minor violence, reference to non-canon death, su/cide mention, sexual reference
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Bakugou smacked Shouto’s arm and pointed. “You—’round the back. Cut him off.”
Shouto didn’t especially want a chase today—especially against Deku—but he knew better than to question orders during a time-sensitive operation. He sprinted in the direction Bakugou had indicated, boosting his speed with bursts of ice. It might draw attention, but he didn’t trust Deku not to outrun him and Bakugou if they didn’t use their quirks to increase their own speeds. He heard Bakugou’s explosions disappearing in the opposite direction, so he must’ve had the same thought.
Shouto arrived around the back of the building just in time to see Deku sprint past him and into a second alley. Shouto stopped, slamming his right foot down in front of him.
Ice rocketed from the toe of his shoe. Deku easily sidestepped it, but Deku wasn’t his target.
The ice rose in a wall in front of Deku, climbing up four times Deku’s height, a foot thick, stretching between both buildings to block off that section of the alley.
Deku skidded to a stop, his hand going out to keep himself from running into the ice wall. He turned, eyes darting between his two exits—one blocked by a stationary Shouto, the other inhabited by Bakugou, who was rapidly approaching from a meter in the air, palms popping.
Deku chose Shouto.
“No,” Shouto said in response. He didn’t even have to move to raise a similar wall of ice behind him.
Deku came to a stop once more. His eyes wild, panicked. “Please. Shouto. Please.”
The moment was enough for Bakugou to crash-land on top of Deku, knocking both of them to the ground. Bakugou straddled Deku, pinning one wrist down with his hand and the other with his foot, using his free hand to press down on Deku’s forehead. The tips of Bakugou’s fingers dug into Deku’s hairline, tugging a few sprigs of hair free from the sequined headband.
Bakugou didn’t look furious. Not quite. It was more than simple fury. The anger in his body was visible in every angle, every muscle, every popping vein. The way his chest heaved sent a streak of fear through Shouto.
“Who,” Bakugou said, eyes even with Deku’s, “the FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”
Deku’s mouth worked for a second before anything came out. “S—I’m sor—”
“What’d you do with him? HAH? You bleed him dry and then dump his body in a river somewhere? You keeping him half-alive somewhere just so you can wear his fuckin’ body outside every day?”
“N—” Deku’s eyes teared up. He was breathing fast, his chest heaving. His voice came out in a shaky whisper. “Please stop. Please stop. I didn’t—”
“He didn’t deserve that, you piece of absolute FUCKING shit. Did you think you picked a body no one would miss?” Bakugou pushed back harder on Deku’s forehead, forcing Deku to tilt his chin up. “I was looking for him. Still fucking am. Read every one of his shitnerd journals twenty fuckin’ times trying to find some kinda fuckin’ hint.”
“I—Ka—” Deku hiccupped, a tear squeezing from his right eye and rolling back toward his temple. “Please—”
“And you wanna waltz into his dream school barely a fucking year after he went missing and attack three of his favorite Heroes, and… what, expect me not to recognize his fucking voice just because you threw in some swears and insults? And what’s up with that fucking villain name? HAH? You better get out of his body right the FUCK now, or I’m gonna rip your fucking heart out through your nose, you fucking—”
“KACCHAN,” Deku said, his voice cracking. “Stop. Fuck. It’s me. It—it’s me, I’m Izuku.”
Izuku.
And he did look more like an Izuku than a Deku right then—small, shivering, eyes blown wide with fear.
For the first time, Bakugou hesitated. His fingers dug further into Deku’s hairline. “Izuku wouldn’t do what you did. He couldn’t be a villain.”
Deku’s chest heaved. He kept his wide eyes fixed on Bakugou’s, lips parted, his breaths bordering on gasps.
“Well?” Bakugou pressed.
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. “Get off him. You’re going to make him have a panic attack.”
Bakugou looked up at Shouto, expression brimming with anger and… confusion? “Hah?”
Shouto stepped forward. He grabbed the back of Bakugou’s collar and heaved him up and back. Bakugou stumbled before he righted himself. He took a couple steps backward, blinking.
“Fuck do I keep doin’ wrong?” Bakugou looked to Shouto. His expression held a strange tension that didn’t belong on a face like his. “Something’s wrong with him. What the fuck am I s’posed to—?”
“I’m okay!” Deku waved a dismissive hand as he sat up. He swiped at his eyes and nose, a choked noise slipping from his throat. “That—u-um. You startled me, Kacchan.”
“I shouldn’t have brought him,” said Shouto. “I’m sorry. He saw one of the messages you sent me.”
Deku pulled off his cattywampus headband. He set to fixing the sequins Bakugou had messed up, not bothering to wipe the tear trails from his face.
For a few long seconds, there was silence.
“Kacchan,” said Deku, finally, not looking up from his headband. His voice had regained a sliver of its usual brightness even through the wetness of tears. “You have my journals?”
Bakugou stared down at Deku.
“I went back for them a few months ago and couldn’t find them.” Deku flipped another sequin back into place. “I thought somebody threw them away. Can I have them back?”
Bakugou’s lips parted.
Deku looked up. “You don’t want them, right?”
“Izuku?” Bakugou asked.
Deku sniffed. Blinked, waiting.
“Izuku,” said Bakugou. “You’re… s’posed to be dead.”
“I guess.” Deku tilted his head, the tear trails on his cheeks catching sunlight. Then his face split with a sudden, jarringly bright smile. “You’d like that, huh?”
“What the f—you—no,” said Bakugou. “What the fuck? I never wanted you dead.”
“Really?”
“No!”
Deku slipped his headband back on. Stood and approached Bakugou.
Bakugou’s right foot slid back a few centimeters, then stopped. Shouto wasn’t great with body language, but he knew that tic by heart.
Bakugou wanted to run.
When Deku raised his hand, Bakugou flinched. But Deku didn’t strike. Just patted the top of Bakugou’s head, the blond spikes poking between his fingers. Petted it back a bit, away from Bakugou’s forehead.
Bakugou was still enough that Shouto could see the folds in Bakugou’s uniform shirt shifting with his breathing.
Bakugou spoke. Tone careful and even, like it was carrying a measuring cup full of milk across the kitchen. “Listen. Shitnerd.”
Deku’s smile had faded to something pensive, sympathetic. “It’s okay, Kacchan.”
“No it’s not,” Bakugou said. “No it’s not. They did something to you.”
Deku gave an absent, “Mm?”
“To mess you up. Break you. That Hand Fucker—what’d he do to you?”
Deku giggled, still petting. Eyes still red, still threatening tears. “Hand Fucker,” he repeated, and he threw his head back, laughing.
Bakugou’s face twitched. “Oi!”
“It’s okay,” said Deku. His laughter trickled. “I’m fine.”
“Then why the fuck are you crying?”
Deku patted Bakugou’s cheek. “You scare me, Kacchan.”
“Hah?! You put me in the fucking hospital! Fuck do you mean, I scare you?”
“You do, you do.” Deku exhaled deeply, smiling up at Bakugou. “Oh, you’re going to get me in so much trouble, aren’t you? You always did. At least you still smell nice.”
“What do you mean?” Bakugou asked.
“Like candy. Wait. Did you change your shampoo?” Deku pulled Bakugou’s head down, hovering over his hair for a second before he placed a quick, tiny kiss at the top of his forehead. “I like it.”
Bakugou’s palms lit up. He shoved himself away from Deku, stumbling backward, face burning red. “I meant about you getting in trouble, you f—fucking assfuck.”
“You stopped saying fag?” Deku dropped his hands. Grinned. “Is that growth or did Shouto finally trigger your gay awakening? I don’t blame you. He’s hot.”
Bakugou’s fists trembled at his sides. “Stop changing the fucking SUBJECT!”
“I agreed to talk to Shouto, not you.” Deku pulled his shirt collar up to wipe his eyes. He addressed Shouto. “So Kacchan saw one of my texts to you?”
Shouto nodded.
“Figured. He was probably all like—” Deku raised his hands over his head, fingers clawed like a looming grizzly. Dropped his voice in a—surprisingly accurate—Bakugou imitation. “—‘Grr, if you don’t let me go with you to see Deku, I’ll rip your eyes out, you fucking recalled refrigerator.’ Did he call you a recalled refrigerator? That seems like it’d be on-brand.”
“He said he’d tell the teachers at U.A. that I’m a villain if I didn’t bring him,” said Shouto.
“Blackmail?” Deku pressed his hands into his cheeks as he turned back to Bakugou. “Aw, Kacchan. That’s so cute! You have evolved. I was wondering when you’d figure out that you can’t use threats of violence against people who are stronger than you.”
A muscle in Bakugou’s jaw bulged. Shouto thought for a second that he was going to attack Deku, but then he shoved his hands in his pockets, looking away.
“That shit I did back in middle school,” said Bakugou. “I don’t know if you were just fuckin’… pretending you couldn’t fight back or whatever, but I still shouldn’t have done it. Kickin’ you around ’n shit. You didn’t deserve that.”
Deku dropped his hands to his side. He picked up a rock from the ground, turning it in his hands as he walked past Shouto toward the wall of ice Shouto had erected behind him.
He started chiseling a smiley face into it.
Pain flashed over Bakugou’s face. “Izuku.”
“I saw someone with a bubble quirk on the way here,” said Deku, speaking to the wall of ice. “Can you imagine breathing out bubbles every time you exhale?”
“I can still help you.” Bakugou’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Me ’n my parents. You know they’d fuckin’ do anything for you. Whatever your shitty dad’s making you do, you don’t have to—”
“That’d get annoying so fast,” Deku continued. He glanced at Shouto, smiling as he carved angry eyebrows above the smiley face. “Like, sitting through a funeral? Bubbles. Kissing your girlfriend? Bubbles. What happens when you get a cold?”
Shouto guessed. “Bubbles?”
“Don’t FUCKING encourage him, IcyHot!” Bakugou yelled. “De—Izuku! Fucking LOOK AT ME, damn it. I’m fucking TALKING TO YOU, SHITNERD!”
“So loud, Kacchan.” Deku dropped the rock and leaned in toward the ice. “He’s always wanting attention. Isn’t he? So needy. How cold do you make your ice, Shouto? Dare me to lick it.”
“Do not,” said Shouto. He touched both hands to the ice wall behind him and began sublimating it. Cool steam huffed between his fingers. “Please talk to Bakugou so he’ll shut up.”
“Talk to Bakugou.” Deku turned toward Bakugou, arms folded. “What do you want me to say? ‘Of course I forgive you, Kacchan’? ‘Please acknowledge my unrequited love, Kacchan’? If you’re looking for masturbatory material, you can type gay porn into your browser like the rest of us.”
Bakugou’s lips twitched. “I want you to come with me to the police station so you can point them toward the fuckers who’re forcing you to do shit you don’t wanna.”
“I’d just end up pointing at you.” Deku laughed, dipped into a deep voice to mimic a narrator. “Then we handed Kacchan over to the police.”
“Izu—”
“Kacchan, I don’t wanna go to the police station. I came here for ramen and cute boys, and I’m nearly out of cute boys. Because you’re being real un-cute right now.”
Bakugou gave an aggressive series of blinks.
Shouto sighed, pushed a wave of heat through the meter of ice that was left. It splashed to the ground, boiling and hissing against the concrete for a few seconds before it calmed, steaming.
He might’ve made that too hot. Was Shouto losing focus? He couldn’t afford that, not around the bomb that was Bakugou and Deku in the same alley.
Sidestepping the steaming puddle to avoid melting the bottoms of his shoes, Shouto moved on to the second ice wall.
“I’m hungry,” said Deku. He walked over to Shouto, talking over his shoulder to Bakugou. “Are you going to eat ramen with me and Shouto or are you going home? I have an errand to run after this, so I need to move this along.”
Bakugou found his voice. “I ain’t—I ain’t fuckin’ leaving until you come with me, Izuku. I’m not… can’t fuckin’ do that again.”
Deku raised his eyebrows. “Who can’t do it again? I could write suicide notes all day. Why can’t you just be thankful I didn’t implicate you?”
“Hah?”
“You did tell me to kill myself. A lot. One sentence and I would’ve tainted your name for the rest of your career. You got into U.A.? You’re fucking welcome.” Deku swiped at his nose, sniffing. “Now either be civil or leave me alone, please?”
Shouto turned around in time to see Bakugou charge. Shouto swore, sent a thin wave of ice out from his right foot to stick Bakugou’s shoes to the ground. Bakugou pitched forward from the loss of balance, barely catching himself.
“OI!” Bakugou yelled. At Shouto this time. “Whose fuckin’ side are you on, you Half-n-Half Bastard?!”
“Ramen shop,” said Shouto. He was more careful when he sent heat through the remnants of the second ice wall. It melted into slush. “I’m hungry, too.”
Bakugou yanked his right shoe from the thin layer of ice that had captured it. Then his left. He stomped a couple smaller pieces of ice off.
When Bakugou started walking, it was toward the ramen shop. Deku flashed Shouto a thumbs-up and followed.
They entered the ramen shop. It was, thankfully, not busy. Clean. Soft instrumental music played overhead. When the shopkeeper behind the counter looked up, she flashed a smile of recognition. “Deku-kun! So good to see you again!”
“Fujimori-san!” Deku was—instantly—cheerful. “Hello, hello! How’s Tanpopo? Is she better?”
“You know, she is. She had to have part of her tail amputated—”
“Oh, no,” Deku said, face pinching.
“—but her leg cast is off, and she’s healing well. I’m so grateful you were there when you were.” The woman bowed.
Deku waved his hands, gave a nervous laugh. “No, uh, my pleasure! I’m glad I was there, too. Can’t believe someone would just—”
“Hit and run.” The shopkeeper straightened. “Ugh. I know. I bet you would’ve given that person a good talking-to if you’d seen them.”
“I would’ve!”
“Well, come by our home anytime. I’m sure the kids would love to see you again.” She stepped behind the counter. “What can I get for you and your friends? On the house.”
“We ain’t his f—” Bakugou’s voice cut off with a hissed curse. Shouto glanced over at Bakugou’s tightened jaw, then down at Bakugou’s feet. The heel of Deku’s bright red sneaker had compacted the toe of one of Bakugou’s shoes.
“Thank you so much! You’re so kind.” Deku casually shifted his weight back into Bakugou, earning himself a strangled noise of pain. Deku flicked Bakugou’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Kacchan, they have a really good spicy miso ramen. I think it permanently damaged some of my taste buds. You want that one?”
Bakugou grunted.
“Cool.” He shifted off Bakugou’s toe, and Bakugou’s shoulders relaxed. “So that one, and… Can you see the menu, Shouto?”
Shouto squinted at the overhead menu. He really needed a new contact prescription. Had Deku noticed? “Sort of.”
“Mind if I order for you? I’ve had pretty much the whole menu.”
“That’s fine.” It was fine. Right? This whole thing was just for show. Deku had to have some motive other than feeding the people who’d trapped him and made him cry. At least Deku wasn’t stepping on his toe.
“Soba for Shouto, then,” said Deku. “Cold.”
Oh.
Deku didn’t have to step on Shouto’s toe to assert control. Just had to remind Shouto that he knew things, how… how the fuck did he know things…?
“I guess I’ll do that, too,” said Deku. Then—“Oh. Can’t believe I almost forgot. Can I get a kid’s size of the tonkotsu, Fujimori-san? And one of those coffee jellies? I’ll pay for those.”
“Of course,” said the woman, tapping something into her register. “You feeding a younger sibling back home?”
Deku pulled out his wallet—All Might colors, Jesus Christ—and pulled out a few crumpled bills to hand to the shop keeper. “I’m babysitting later.”
The register chimed, spit out a receipt. “Goodness, Deku-kun. You stay busy.”
“Bread’s not gonna get itself,” Deku said.
She laughed. “S’pose not. Just take care of yourself, all right? Be a little selfish sometimes.”
Deku smiled. When the shopkeeper turned her back to grab three empty cups, Deku slipped a 5,000-yen note into the tip box.
Shouto narrowed his eyes. Did Deku have money or did he not? 5,000 yen was enough to pay for all three of their meals. Why had he accepted the shopkeeper’s offer if he was just going to tip the difference? What kind of fucking game—
“Shou?” Deku’s voice jerked Shouto from his daze. He was looking at Shouto, head tilted. “You good? You didn’t wear yourself out with all that ice, did you? Or was it the sublimation. Does sublimation take more energy? I feel like it would, since you have to work on a molecular level and you use water vapor to make your ice instead of carbon dioxide to make dry ice, which would sublimate a lot easier, and it's honestly a bit confusing from a physics perspective, but I saw a baby with six arms on the way here, so what do I know.” He finished with a huff, nose scrunching. “I forgot what I asked you.”
“I’m okay,” said Shouto.
“Oh, good. You looked kinda spaced-out. For you—” He handed Shouto an empty cup first, then Bakugou, who was a bit more wary to grab it. “—and for you.”
They got their drinks. Shouto noticed Bakugou’s hand shaking as he held his cup under the coke dispenser. Shouto raised his hand in an offer to do it for him, but Bakugou swatted Shouto’s hand away without looking at him.
Bakugou probably wasn’t used to keeping a neutral face in tense situations. It looked like he was trying, but every now and then his lips or jaw gave a telling spasm.
Deku tugged Shouto’s sleeve. “Shouto, let’s sit by the window. I like watching people.”
Bakugou hesitated by the drink machine.
“You, too, dumbass.” Deku grabbed Bakugou’s wrist. Bakugou stumbled forward. “I’m not gonna make you stand.”
Bakugou and Shouto sat across from each other at a booth near the tinted glass storefront. Deku plopped down in the booth beside Shouto, sliding until his hip bumped Shouto’s.
“So you guys excited for the sports festival?” Deku asked. “Nervous? I’d throw up.”
Bakugou’s cup dented under his fingers, white crescents forming in the transparent plastic. “Izuku.”
“You’re gonna give the commencement speech, right, Kacchan? Since you got first on the entrance exam.” Deku leaned his head against Shouto’s shoulder. Soft curls brushed Shouto’s neck and ear, and he fought off a shiver at the strange sensation. “What do you think he’s gonna say, Shouto? Probably just something dumb like ‘I’m gonna win.’ Do you think you’re gonna win, Kacchan?”
A deep-seated discomfort took over Bakugou’s face. He glanced at Shouto, then back to Deku. “Yeah, I fuckin’ do.”
Deku laughed. “I admire your fake confidence.”
“I’m not weak,” snapped Bakugou.
“Not me you gotta convince.” Deku raised his head from Shouto’s shoulder to take a sip from his strawberry lemonade. “Oh, I guess I was supposed to explain about the USJ? Not sure I still wanna do that with Kacchan here. Hero complex and all. Hrng. And he’s probably gonna want to know how I turned to the dark side or whatever. How much does he already know, Shouto?”
“Mostly everything,” said Shouto.
“He knows I bombed a bridge and set a pedophile’s house on fire?”
“He… does now,” said Shouto.
Bakugou’s jaw tightened.
Deku grimaced. “Uhhh. Let me think. Like, twenty seconds. Don’t talk.” Deku folded his hands in front of him and scrunched his eyes closed, leaning his forehead against his hands like he was praying. And maybe he was—Shouto could see his mouth moving, silent but for the slip of an occasional s or t sound.
Bakugou made a scoffing noise and opened his mouth. When Shouto shot him a death glare, he closed it again. Bakugou lowered his head, banged it lightly against the tabletop. Let it sit there.
“Okay,” Deku said suddenly, lowering his hands. Bakugou raised his head, blinking. “I’m gonna tell you some stuff on the condition that you don’t go to the police with it. Because it probably wouldn’t harm the League, but it might get me in trouble.”
“I’m going to the fuckin’ police,” Bakugou said.
“Whatever, Kacchan. Shouto?”
“S’fine,” said Shouto. Of course he wasn’t going to tell the police. Especially not now, when Deku and Dabi’s freedom might be the only variable working in his favor to get rid of Endeavor. He wasn’t sure what get rid of meant exactly, not when it came to the League of Villains, but he wasn’t going to burn his only bridge by breaking up the League. “I won’t tell the police. Ka—Bakugou won’t, either.”
Bakugou glared. “How do you think you’re gonna manage that, Half-n-Half?”
How else? “By force.”
“Yeah? You’ll have to do more than kick my ribs in. You ready to bury my fuckin’ body?”
“Geez, Kacchan, chill,” said Deku.
Bakugou looked at Deku. It took him a moment to speak. “Did you just fuckin’ tell me to—”
“Look, if you still want to go to the police when we’re done talking, I guess you can. I’ll even follow you there.” Deku leaned over the table and pinched Bakugou’s straw. He took a loud sip of Bakugou’s coke. “But you gotta listen.”
Snarling, Bakugou snatched the straw away from Deku. He tossed it across the table, and it fell off the end.
For a split second, Deku looked startled. But then he perked up with, “You want another straw? I can get you another one.”
“No,” Bakugou snapped.
Deku sat back down with a bounce. “But you’re gonna listen, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll fuckin’—yeah,” Bakugou said. “But after that. You’re gonna—”
“Sure thing, Kacchan.” Deku’s legs jogged underneath the table. He looked up at the ceiling. “Uh… where to start. I guess… oh.” His legs stilled, and then his head snapped back down, expressionless. “I killed my mom.”
The words did not surprise Shouto. It was a variation from the story that had apparently been published—that Izuku’s father had killed Izuku’s mom—but then again, the story also said Izuku had offed himself.
Bakugou, though.
He’d gone still.
The shopkeeper called from behind her counter. “Deku?”
“Oop!” Deku shot to his feet. “Food’s ready! That was fast. Kacchan, last call for a straw replacement via moi. After that, you’re on your own.”
Bakugou didn’t respond.
“Suit yourself.” Deku smiled, gave the table a couple taps. “Be right back, my dudes. Don’t run away. I love you.”
As Deku walked away, Bakugou slowly turned his gaze to Shouto. Lips parted, eyes sharp with alarm, but staring at some invisible target in another dimension instead of at Shouto.
“What the fuck,” Bakugou whispered.
Notes:
Welp sorry for that 2-week gap after a cliffhanger XD I got caught up in classes. Also I do not write chronologically, so sometimes that fucks up my updating schedule. Also I'm on new anxiety meds and they are nooooot working. Also I've been eating my sleeping pills off the floor for the past month because I spilled them and didn't have the energy to pick them up? Also my ED is acting up bc of the new meds? Also I'm late on my T shot bc I ran out of syringes? Also it's 5 am and I haven't gone to bed yet? Oh my god my life is a mess.
BUT I quit my shitty job. I have somehow not fallen behind in summer classes yet. I went outside to just chill today. That's kinda big bc I have pretty serious agoraphobia and have trouble even leaving my bedroom without a panic attack. And here's a chapter! So I guess I'm a little proud of myself.
Follow me on Insta! @max_says_no
Chapter 28: Shouto and Deku Discuss Murder Methods While Bakugou Screams Internally
Summary:
Shouto, Deku, and Bakugou. Eating ramen, having the time of their lives.
A shorter chapter as I focus on (struggle with) the following chapter
Notes:
CW: Discussion of non-canonical character death (murder), discussion of past suicide attempt and child abuse/manipulation, sexual jokes
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Deku returned carrying four takeout containers, utensils, and a small cup of coffee jelly. His chin pressed into the top container to keep the stack from toppling, the coffee jelly knocking against his cheek. “I am too small,” he said.
Shouto hesitated. “Do you need help?”
Deku gave a sheepish smile. “Please.”
Shouto stood and took the containers from Deku, spreading them out on the table. Deku hummed as he tapped the lid of each box twice, reading the scribbled notes.
He pushed one to Bakugou. “You’re gonna love that, Kacchan. I used to think about bringing you here back in middle school, you know? Kinda funny you’re here now. Shopkeeper doesn’t recognize me from then, but I came here a lot with my mom.”
Bakugou looked up. “Auntie Inko.”
Deku sat down beside Shouto. “Yep, that’s my mom.”
“No, fuck, I mean…” Bakugou licked his lips. Looked out the window, then back at Deku. “You?”
“Huh?”
Shouto opened his takeout box. “You said you killed your mom and Bakugou is confused because the news story said your father did it.”
“Oh.” Deku tapped Shouto’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Thank you, fellow ADHD-er. Forgot I said that. Couldn’t figure out why he was looking at me weird.”
Shouto tore open the plastic wrapper around his chopsticks.
“Did she fuckin’… do something?” Bakugou asked. “I thought she was… y’know.”
Deku struggled to open his own chopsticks. “Was what?”
“A good person.”
“She was,” said Deku. His chopsticks package wouldn’t open, so he flipped it and tried opening it from the bottom. “She was in a lot of pain, though. Sensei held her over me a lot, would mess her up if I didn’t act right or do well in training.”
“‘Sensei’?” Bakugou asked. “That your fuckin’…?”
“S’my dad, yeah. It got pretty bad. Especially that last year before I stopped going to school. He had me doing a bunch of shit I wasn’t too keen on. He said if I killed myself, things would get a lot worse for my mom. I didn’t want that to happen, but I was really… fuck.” Shouto thought for a second that the swear was Deku getting emotional over his narrative, but then Deku looked down at his mauled chopsticks package, crestfallen. “I can’t open this.”
Shouto carefully took the package from Deku. He held his right thumb to the plastic and pushed a thumbtack-sized spear of ice through it, pulling up to tear open the package. Then he handed it back to Deku.
“You’re magical,” said Deku, taking the chopsticks out. “Like a secret bag of knives. I mean, that’s an inelegant description, but secret bags of knives are really… mm. Damn it, I can’t decide if I want to say really cool or really metal, because both of those are excellent puns.”
Shouto stirred his soba, glancing at Bakugou. “Probably just finish your story so Bakugou doesn’t explode.”
“Ha! I don’t know if that pun was intentional, but you are lovely either way.” Deku turned his attention to his own soba. “But yeah, I couldn’t kill myself until I did something about my mom. Better she go in her sleep than however Sensei would’ve done it. So I injected her. With, um. Uh. I don’t remember the name. Some heart drug?”
Shouto shoveled a bundle of noodles into his mouth. He’d done his research on the subject. Years ago, when things had been worse, when he’d been weighing his options. “Digitoxin?”
Deku narrowed his eyes, absently poking his soba with his chopsticks. “Uh-uh.”
“Lidocaine?”
“No, it’s two words.”
“Potassium chloride?”
“That’s it.”
“How did you get that?” Shouto asked.
“Sensei keeps a bunch of weird shit around,” Deku said. “How’s your soba?”
Shouto nodded.
“Oh, good,” said Deku. He ate some of his own soba. “I always get nervous when people eat food I recommend. Like, I know my tastes in food aren’t a direct reflection of my character, but I feel like people think that.”
“I don’t think that,” said Shouto.
“Well, that’s because you’re an absolute icon.”
“Then what happened?” Bakugou asked. His voice had an edge. “After you did that.”
Deku paused, soba halfway to his mouth. “I wrote my suicide note and jumped off the bridge next to the river. Hit a bunch of rocks, broke my skull and back and punctured my lung, the works. Kinda painful. I was conscious for, like, a minute. Two stars, do not recommend.”
“Why didn’t you use the potassium chloride for yourself?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou’s head whipped toward Shouto. “What the fuck, IcyHot?”
“I’m scared of needles.” Deku slurped a few noodles. He jabbed his chopsticks into the air in front of him like a teacher tapping a blackboard, speaking through his mouthful. “No, you know what? One star, because I didn’t even fucking die. Remember to cut your chip out before you kill yourself so your dad doesn’t find you and un-kill you, kids.”
“Chip,” Bakugou said, blinking. “What fucking… chip.”
Deku tilted his chin up and to the side, rubbing a couple fingers over a faint white scar. “Not sure exactly where it is. Pretty deep, I think. Somewhere around my carotid artery. Fifty-fifty chance I’d accidentally bleed myself to death digging around for it.”
Shouto settled his chopsticks across the corner of his takeout box.
It made him feel kind of shitty for complaining about Endeavor to Deku. Sure, Endeavor had controlled him, isolated him, and humiliated him.
But a chip.
Shouto would’ve jumped off a bridge, too.
“You actually tried,” said Bakugou.
Deku lowered his hand. “Was my note not convincing enough for you, Kacchan? Too angsty? Not enough angst? Feedback welcome.”
Bakugou stared.
“Oh my god, I’ve always wanted to ask—” Deku grinned. “Did I have a funeral? Kacchan. Did you go to it?”
“Yeah,” Bakugou muttered.
“That is literally—that is so embarrassing, holy shit.” Deku covered his mouth with both hands. Snorted. “I mean, for you. I’m essentially dead, so what do I care? I bet they had a joint funeral for me and my mom, though.”
Bakugou looked away, face flushing. “Separate.”
“What? Why? That’s not cost-effective at all. I didn’t have any friends of my own, so it’d literally just be the same people, if anyone showed up at all. Did they?” He pulled his hands away from his face briefly, then slammed them back. “No, don’t tell me. Doesn’t matter now. Still. Dabi’s gonna die when I tell him you went.”
“S’not fucking funny,” Bakugou said. He didn’t meet Deku’s eyes. “Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“You serious?” Deku looked at Shouto. “Is he serious?”
“I think so,” said Shouto.
“Oh my god, he’s serious. Kacchan. Kacchan. I bet you still think Sensei’s quirk is fire-breathing, too, don’t you?”
Bakugou slid his gaze back to Deku.
“He does.” Deku put his hand on Shouto’s arm, pushing lightly and grinning. “Shouto! How the fuck did he get into U.A.? He is so fucking stupid. Kacchan!”
Bakugou’s face burned red as Deku laughed.
“Okay. Give me a minute. Hoo.” Deku inhaled, exhaled, his face smoothing over. “Kacchan, have you met Endeavor?”
“Yeah,” said Bakugou.
“You get why Shouto can’t go to the police about him, right?”
“Yeah,” said Bakugou. “He’s fuckin’… powerful.”
“Uh-huh. So imagine Endeavor, but immortal and with ten to twenty more quirks at any given time.”
Bakugou hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“Sensei’s quirk is stealing quirks. Breathing fire is one of his quirks. He can also transfer them.” Deku nodded at Shouto. “Hence, Dabi’s body-changing quirk. I’m not proud of how I helped Sensei come into possession of that one, but eh. What’s done is done.”
Stealing and transferring quirks. It didn’t sound plausible, but Shouto had seen the results himself. Dabi did have two quirks. That wasn’t something that happened naturally.
“What are his other quirks?” Shouto asked.
Deku tapped his finger to his lips. “Can’t tell you that, Shou. Sorry.”
“Anti-aging?” Shouto guessed. “Or regeneration.”
“He’s a few hundred years old and looks forty,” said Deku. “I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.”
Shouto looked down at his soba. He’d lost his appetite. “I exploded a noumu that had regeneration.”
“You did. I was very proud.” Deku patted Shouto’s wrist. “But you cannot explode my dad.”
“Healing quirk?” Bakugou asked. “Because you didn’t… when you jumped.”
“Good guess,” said Deku, “but he wasn’t actually the one who made me not-dead. I was beyond what a normal healing quirk could’ve fixed, anyway. Brain damage and all that jazz.”
“Then how—?”
“Sensei’s got yakuza connections. They have somebody who can take people apart and put ’em back together. Quite nifty. Be a bitch to get tortured with that quirk, though.” Deku addressed Shouto. “Anybody named Chisaki Kai ever comes to your door and asks for some hand sanitizer, you give him the damn hand sanitizer, okay?”
Shouto nodded, filing the name away. In case.
Deku looked at Bakugou’s unopened takeout container. Sighed. “You’re not eating.”
Bakugou tossed his head, making a noise of disbelief. “Yeah, all this suicide and child abuse talk is real fuckin’ appetizing.”
“I did warn you,” said Shouto. “You lose your appetite every time you think about child abuse, you’re never going to eat again.”
Bakugou’s glare burned. “You know, fuck you, IcyHot, you ain’t eating, either.”
“I ate some,” said Shouto.
“What? Five fuckin’ noodles?”
“Bitch.” Shouto tilted his takeout container so Bakugou could see inside. “Look.”
“Yeah, I’m lookin’, and all I’m seeing is a pretentious pasty ugly-ass pussy shitstain who’s too scared to tell his whore dad to fuck off. Go titfuck a fire hydrant, hah?”
“I will,” said Shouto, setting his takeout container down. “Let me borrow your cleavage?”
“Want my dick next, since you’re missin’ one of those, too?”
“No,” said Shouto. “I like having genitalia I can see.”
Bakugou scoffed. “I’d say bite me, but I’m still healing from last time, you fucking rabid dog.”
“Woah,” said Deku. “I’m missing context.”
“You don’t fuckin’ need it,” Bakugou snapped.
Deku’s eyes flickered between Bakugou and Shouto.
“Wait,” Deku said. “Are you guys friends?”
“Hell no,” said Bakugou.
Deku blinked. “So you fucked?”
“Shut the fuck up, De—” Bakugou reddened. “Izuku. I’d rather fuck a sugar-free candy cane.”
“You can call me Deku.”
“No,” said Bakugou.
“Suit yourself.” Deku pulled out his phone, tapped the screen. He grimaced. “I did not budget my time well. I have an errand I need to run.”
“Like fuck you do,” said Bakugou. “You’re coming with me and IcyHot.”
Deku looked up, raising his eyebrows. “You still want me to? You realize I’m a villain, right?”
“You ain’t a fuckin’… you ain’t. That’s just shit that happened to you.”
Deku put his phone back in his pocket. “Think so?”
“You don’t gotta have a whole damn plan to get out of the League, Izuku. That’s what fucking Heroes are for. You turn yourself in, tell ’em what went on—”
“It’s not so bad anymore,” said Deku. “After the whole bridge thing, Sensei cut me a deal. My mom’s dead, so he doesn’t have much to threaten me with. We work on more of a rewards system now. I have a lot more independence than I used to. As long as I’m available when he needs to rent me out, I can take on whatever project I want.”
Bakugou narrowed his eyes. “Rent you out? Fuck’s that mean?”
“Oh. Um…” Deku slowly closed his empty takeout box. “I’m basically the League’s cash cow. If someone comes to the League wanting assistance for a project, I’m usually the one who provides that help. In exchange for allegiance or favors to the League.”
“So you’re a fuckin’ slave,” said Bakugou.
“Nah, more like an indentured servant. My contract terminates once I meet its conditions.”
“What conditions?”
“Can’t tell you that.” Deku drummed his fingers on the table. “It’s not always bad work, Kacchan. Shigaraki’s a bitch to work with, and I didn’t especially want to help with the whole USJ thing, but Dabi’s currently renting me to help take down Endeavor. That’s pretty neat, right?”
“You’re gonna get killed,” said Bakugou.
Deku gave a noncommittal hum. He looked toward an empty corner of the restaurant, eyes unfocusing.
“You want out, right?” Bakugou said. “I know your otaku ass doesn’t want All Might dead.”
Deku didn’t respond.
Bakugou glanced behind him toward the empty space Deku was looking at. He looked back at Deku, concern creeping over his face. “Izuku.”
“Mm,” said Deku.
“Oi.”
Deku pulled his blank gaze back toward Bakugou. It took a moment for expression to shape his face again.
“Kacchan,” he said, like he was surprised to see Bakugou sitting there.
“What?” said Bakugou.
Deku blinked. Shook his head.
“What?”
“I need to go,” said Deku. He stacked the kid’s-size tonkotsu and coffee jelly on top of his empty takeout box and stood, not meeting Shouto’s or Bakugou’s eyes. “I’m sorry I shot you both. It won’t happen again.”
“Oi.” Bakugou caught Deku’s wrist. “The fuck do you think you’re goin’, Shitnerd?”
Deku stilled, his eyes going to the hand on his wrist. Something unbridled and dangerous ran over his expression—a widening of his green eyes, a twitch in his jaw.
Then, just as quickly, his expression smoothed over.
“I do have to run this errand,” he said. “Do you want to come with me? We can go to the police after that.”
Bakugou hesitated. “Is it gonna take long?”
“Not very.”
No way this was going to end well. Deku was planning something. “Bakugou, just let him go.”
Bakugou glared. “Go home if you ain’t coming, fuckass.”
Shouto would’ve liked to have gone home. But he also wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to forgive himself if he went to school on Thursday and Bakugou wasn’t there.
Fucking Bakugou.
“I’m going,” said Shouto.
They set out. Bakugou was about to throw his ramen in the garbage when Shouto stopped him, a hand on his arm.
Don’t, he mouthed, and Bakugou scoffed but held onto it.
Notes:
Do I ship TodoBaku, TodoDeku, or BakuDeku?
Yes.
Polyamory is magical, huh? Like a secret bag of knives.
Chapter 29: Shouto Adds Yet Another Entry to His Trauma Scrapbook
Summary:
The Angst™ Squad babysits. All is not well.
Notes:
TW (includes spoilers): referenced pedophilia, referenced child abuse, burns, minor character death, minor body horror (eye injury), murder, strangulation, violence, blood, internalized ableism, discussion of trauma and its psychological consequences, dissociation, building panic attack
This chapter is twice as long as they usually are, but it's one big arching scene so I didn't wanna split it up.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
[My little brother said "Overhaul in Overalls" and I had to draw it IMMEDIATELY]
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/421931058848982557/
They took the subway. Deku, for his part, looked content. Earbuds in, humming, watching passengers with great interest as they entered and exited the car. Every now and then, his hand would go to his shirt pocket, hovering just above the small notebook there for a second before he dropped his hand to his side.
Bakugou, though.
Shouto was getting second-hand anxiety just from watching him. His burning red eyes followed every twitch of Deku’s fingers. He tensed every time the doors opened, his hand sneaking out to just barely pinch the tail of Deku’s shirt.
Probably too light of a touch for Deku to feel. Definitely not something that would stop Deku from running if he wanted to. Shouto considered telling Bakugou that.
But then Deku pulled out his earbuds, and Bakugou yanked his hand back. Shoved it in his pocket.
“Next stop is us, my dudes,” said Deku.
They entered a residential district that was mostly apartment complexes and convenience stores. When they reached a smaller apartment building—hidden behind a cluster of nicer buildings, painfully plain-looking, and probably largely unoccupied judging by how few cars were parked next to it—they stopped. Deku pulled a keycard from his wallet and swiped it at the gate, opening it.
There was a woman smoking at the entrance to the building. Lanky, late twenties, in jeans and a t-shirt that were both too big on her. Her mess of blonde hair had been imprisoned in an unkempt bun. She raised an eyebrow at Deku as he passed through.
“S’cuse us,” said Deku, giving her a polite smile.
“Everything good?” she asked.
“Yep, you?”
“Mm,” she said, looking away. She smirked, shook her head.
Once they were inside the building, Bakugou asked, “Fuck’s her problem?”
“Who knows,” said Deku.
They headed up a flight of stairs and stopped at the first door. Deku knocked—a tap, a pause, two more taps—before he swiped the keycard to unlock the door.
Deku pushed it open slowly. Called, voice soft. “Sakura? Coming in. I have food and friends.”
Sakura. The name felt important, but Shouto couldn’t remember why. It was a common name, though, and it was just as likely that Shouto had heard the name in passing or on television and noted it for some completely irrelevant reason. He did that a lot.
A small girl with unruly black hair—chopped at various lengths around her neck and ears, like she’d given herself the haircut—peeked around the corner. She didn’t smile when she saw Deku, but she did give an enthusiastic wave. Started bouncing on her toes.
That was something Shouto had done when he was younger. The bouncing, the waving. Endeavor trained him early to suppress it.
“Well, hi!” said Deku, laughing. “Look at you!”
Sakura reached up, making grabby hands at him. Deku stacked the tonkotsu and coffee jelly atop the takeout container in Bakugou’s hands before hoisting her up.
“You’re lucky I’m strong,” said Deku. “You’re really big for a five-year-old. You hungry? Didn’t get lonely all by yourself here, did you?”
Sakura stared at Shouto over Deku’s shoulder. She patted the back of Deku’s head, pointed at Shouto.
Deku turned. “That’s Shouto.”
She put her hand over one of her eyes, pointed at Shouto again.
“She’s wondering what happened to your eye,” said Deku.
Shouto didn’t have much experience with small children. Was he supposed to tell her the truth? Would that scare her? Shouto had been her age when it happened.
“Um,” he said. “Hot water.”
She seemed satisfied. She patted the back of Deku’s head again, and he put her down. She grabbed the food from Bakugou’s hands and ran away into the main room with it.
Bakugou looked confused. “Who the fuck’s that?”
“I check in on her while her dad’s at work,” said Deku.
“She don’t talk?”
“Not much. She’s been through a lot.” Deku took off his shoes, placed them neatly near the entrance. “You guys come in. I usually hang out with her for a little while.”
Sakura was already eating when the three of them entered the main room, her tonkotsu open atop a plastic storage box filled with kitchen utensils and appliances. Most of the room was occupied by storage boxes, digging rectangles into the dingy gray carpet.
“They just move or somethin’?” Bakugou asked. “Looks like a fuckin’ warehouse.”
“Yeah, they did,” said Deku. He sat down across from Sakura. “How is it? Do you like that kind, or should I get something else next time?”
Sakura kept eating. After a few moments, though, she held her hand up next to her ear and made a series of starburst motions—hand curling into a fist, then fingers flicking out like she was mimicking an explosion. She didn’t smile or look up.
“Good! I’m glad,” said Deku.
Shouto was confused. “That’s not JSL.”
“It’s her happy stim,” said Deku.
Bakugou shoved a box of magazines out of the way with his foot. “Fuck’s a stim?”
“Typically an autism thing. Something repetitive you do to help balance sensory input and output.”
Bakugou looked at Deku, then at Shouto. “You do that.”
“What?” said Shouto. “No.”
“Yeah, you do. Every fuckin’ time I look at you in class. Always tapping somethin’.”
“Why are you looking at me in class?” Shouto asked.
“Can’t help it. Your half-n-half face is so fucking stupid.”
Jesus. “It doesn’t make any noise. I’m careful.”
“You don’t gotta make noise to piss me off.” Bakugou sat on the floor between Deku and Sakura, dropping his takeout box atop the plastic storage container and crossing his legs. He leaned forward, settled his elbows on his thighs. Cut his eyes toward Deku. “Izuku.”
Deku looked at Bakugou. “Mm?”
Bakugou paused, like he hadn’t expected Deku to answer him. Then he said, “Let me see your damn notebook.”
Deku put his hand over his breast pocket, scooting a few inches away. “Kacchan, I like this one.”
“I’m not gonna fuckin’ explode it, Shitnerd. Let me see it.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I wanna fuckin’… I wanna look at it, just let me see it. Ain’t that complicated. Fuck.”
Deku raised an eyebrow. “You wanna read it?”
Bakugou’s eyes darted away briefly, but then he looked back at Deku and said, “Already read all your other shitnerd journals.”
“Oh, yeah,” Deku said. He pulled the notebook out of his pocket and handed it to Bakugou. “Um. You have a few pages in that one. Just to warn you.”
Bakugou flipped the notebook open. “I do?”
“Yeah, just some notes I wrote after the USJ. Critiques ’n stuff.”
“I can read ’em?”
“I guess,” said Deku. “They’re near the middle. Don’t get mad, though.”
Bakugou flipped through the notebook, then started reading. As he read, his brow got progressively more furrowed.
“You don’t like the gauntlets?” he asked.
Deku grimaced. “I just think they could be more streamlined—”
“Hold the fuck up, they were your idea.”
“And I’m flattered, but I sketched that design when I was twelve, Kacchan. They break easily, and I might’ve hurt your wrist irreparably if I’d stepped on the gauntlet instead of directly on your arm. They’re lined with metal on the inside, right?”
“Yeah,” said Bakugou.
“That’s fine, but there needs to be insulation between it and your skin. Compactible foam that the metal can’t pierce through easily. If there’s an accident, I don’t want your hand getting crushed and trapped inside. And you need a shock-absorbing layer on the outside to prevent the inner workings from being damaged. It’ll make for faster repair. You should also be able to fit in one of those emitter-quirk support devices—I don’t remember the brand name, but I think the Yamagata agency makes them—to help pinpoint your explosions. Just make sure they make it with a heat-resistant material. For the winter—”
Deku cut himself off. He glanced at the door, then back at Bakugou. He blinked, his lips parting, a whisper of alarm in his eyes.
“Oi,” said Bakugou. “Why’d you stop?”
“Sorry,” said Deku. “I l—I lost my train of thought. What were we talking about?”
Bakugou stared at Deku.
“Kacchan?”
“My gauntlets,” said Bakugou, voice flat. “You were telling me how to improve them.”
Deku’s face cleared. “Yeah, I think they can be streamlined. Can I see my notebook back? I’ll write everything down so you can take the notes with you.”
“You can just give them to me the next time we see each other.”
Deku was silent for a moment. Then he smiled and took his small pencil from his breast pocket. “I’ll do them now.”
Bakugou gave the notebook back to Deku. He looked up at Shouto. “IcyHot, fuck you doin’?”
“I’m just… I’m standing,” said Shouto.
“Sit the fuck down, creep.” Bakugou popped open his takeout box, tilting his head to peek inside. “Ain’t gotta hover over everybody like some damn angel of death.”
Shouto sat. Sakura stared at him. Face neutral, observant. Then she picked up a noodle with her chopsticks and held it up to him.
It took Shouto a moment to realize she was offering it to him. “Um,” he said. “I already ate.”
She signed with her free hand, “It tastes good.”
Shouto wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that, so he shifted toward Sakura and let her poke the noodle into his mouth.
Sakura lowered her chopsticks, watching him. She set her chopsticks atop the makeshift table and signed, “Does it hurt?”
The… ramen noodle? He signed back, asking for clarification. “Does what hurt?”
She put her hand over her eye. Pointed to his.
Oh. His scar again. “Not anymore,” he signed.
She signed, “Let me touch it.”
Shouto hesitated.
No one had ever asked to touch it before, not really. There had been doctors who touched it with gloves. There had been a few people who touched it without asking permission. And—well, there had been Momo. But that had barely been a brush.
Sakura waited, hands in her lap.
“Okay,” Shouto signed.
Sakura stood and walked closer. She cupped his face with her left hand, tilting his head up so she could see. Her fingers ran over his scar. Pushed his hair up to look under his bangs. He could feel the pressure of her fingers, but that was it. When the pressure moved down toward his eyes, he closed them.
The pressure disappeared. Shouto opened his eyes.
Sakura put her arm forward and pointed at a couple small circular burn marks, each about the size of the end of a cigarette.
His stomach twisted when he realized. He looked at Deku, who had paused his writing to watch the interaction. Deku stared back at him, expression blank.
Oh—right.
He already knew.
Of course he did.
Shouto turned back to Sakura and gave her a nod. Sakura dropped her arm and sat down. Picked up her chopsticks and started eating again. Deku resumed writing.
“Are we just not gonna…” Bakugou’s eyes darted between the three of them, searching. “We ain’t gonna talk about that? What the fuck just happened?”
“She asked to touch my scar,” said Shouto.
Bakugou opened his chopsticks package. “You let her?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto. “Why? Is that strange?”
Sakura reached for the coffee jelly. She struggled to open it, and when she couldn’t, she handed it to Shouto.
Bakugou ate some of his ramen, eyes narrowed. He waited until he’d swallowed to speak. “Not—I just thought it was, like, a whole… thing for you.”
“What do you mean?” Shouto opened the package and handed it back to Sakura. “I don’t care. Everybody already knows what it’s from.”
Bakugou blinked. “Hah? No…? What the fuck? Nobody knows what it’s from.”
“What?”
“There’s literally a fucking group chat dedicated to guessing what it’s from. Blows up my goddamn phone all night.”
Shouto was confused. “But I told Kirishima.”
Bakugou gathered another bundle of ramen with his chopsticks. “Well, he ain’t told nobody else, then, ’cause we’re all fuckin’ clueless.”
“I like Kirishima,” Deku hummed, almost to himself. “He’s cute.”
“Why didn’t you ask?” Shouto asked Bakugou. “I would’ve told you.”
Bakugou’s face reddened, ramen halfway to his mouth. “I was try’na… be fuckin’ considerate. Thought you didn’t wanna talk about it. Like it was a big secret or somethin’.”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto, pointing, “it’s on my fucking face.”
Sakura clapped her hands.
Deku looked up. “Are we being too loud, Sakura?”
Sakura waved her hands in front of her face. Bounced. “Candy,” she signed.
“Ohhh, you want the vending machine,” said Deku. “I said I’d bring some small bills so you could get something this time, didn’t I?”
She made starburst motions next to her head.
“I gotcha, sister.” Deku took out his wallet and gave Sakura a few hundred yen. “Put a shoe in the door so you can get back in, okay?”
Sakura took the money and ran out, stopping the door with Deku’s red sneaker.
Shouto waited a few moments before turning to Deku. He motioned to his arm. “She has—”
“I’m fixing it," Deku said.
Shouto dropped his arm. Several seconds passed before he noticed Bakugou staring at him, chopsticks still suspended.
“What?” Shouto asked.
“You gonna tell me?” Bakugou asked. An accusation.
“Tell you?”
“Your scar, dumbass.”
“Oh,” said Shouto. “My mom. Tea kettle. Psychotic break. She saw the red hair and thought I was Endeavor.”
Bakugou narrowed his eyes. “You have a mom?”
“Yeah, I… most people do, Bakugou.”
“No—fuck, I mean now.”
Oh. “Yeah, technically. She’s been in a psychiatric hospital for a decade. Fuyumi and Natsuo visit her.”
“You don’t?” Bakugou lowered his chopsticks. “What, you still mad at her?”
“Of course I’m not still mad,” said Shouto. “It wasn’t even her fault. I just don’t… I’m waiting.”
“Hm?” said Deku. He tore a couple pages from his notebook, folded them, and leaned over to tuck them into the pocket on the inside of Bakugou's uniform jacket. “What are you waiting for?”
“For—you’ve met me,” said Shouto. “I can’t fucking… talk. It’s almost physical sometimes, like I can’t pull the words up. I don’t understand when I’m supposed to start and stop talking in conversations. I can’t tell when someone’s being sarcastic or asking a rhetorical question or if they’re annoyed that I’m talking or if I’m accidentally insulting them, and then I get paranoid and start stuttering. I know I’m not pleasant to talk to. I just don’t get… I don’t get how everybody else just knows that shit.”
Deku tilted his head.
Shouto hesitated. He wasn’t used to speaking in such long intervals. He ought to wrap this up. “And I need to learn how to… faces, facial expressions. I don’t do them right. I want to figure all that stuff out first so I don’t panic or freeze up when I see her. I don’t want her to be… I don’t want her to think I’m fragile or broken. Like with my brain not working right. So I need to fix that so she’s not disappointed.”
“Shouto,” said Deku, slowly. “I don’t think that’s… the kind of thing you can fix.”
Shouto waited for Deku to laugh, to say he was joking, that of course Shouto would get better because Shouto was strong and determined, and maybe it’d be tough, but things would improve with time and hard work because that was what things did.
When Deku didn’t say any of that, Shouto asked, “W-what?”
Deku opened his mouth, but a commotion from outside the apartment cut him off. It sounded like a herd of silent drunk people stumbling up the stairs.
“What—” Bakugou looked over his shoulder, dropping his chopsticks into his ramen. “That ain’t the kid, right? Somebody here?”
“Ah,” Deku said. He pushed himself to his feet, reached into his pocket. He pulled out a short coil of wire with a wooden handle attached to each end—something like a homemade cheese cutter. “Here we go. You guys just sit tight, okay?”
Shouto’s heart dropped into his gut.
“Izuku,” said Bakugou. “Izuku, what’s going—”
The sound of a door slamming open reverberated through the apartment. Shouto jolted to his feet, with Bakugou quickly following.
Two people stumbled into the apartment. Shouto was surprised to recognize both of them.
The first, the tall blonde woman they’d passed outside, had the second in a firm headlock, her hand over his mouth, her messy bun flopping and losing hair with each jostling movement. The second: a man in slacks and a half-untucked button-down, eyes glinting like a mirror hit with a flashlight, wild with panic—
Reflection?
But as the woman forced the man to his knees, her arm shifted to reveal a burn scar along the man’s neck. Shouto realized—no. Not Reflection. But the man Reflection had stolen his face and quirk from.
That was where he’d heard the name Sakura. From Fuyumi talking about the kid in her class, the one who’d been carried from her house by villains before they burned it down with her father inside. The father that Deku had been talking about finishing off when they were at the coffee shop—
Oh.
Oh, no.
Not in front of Bakugou—
“Hiya,” said Deku to not-Reflection. “Remember me? Hope you don’t mind a bit of an audience.”
“Deku,” the woman growled as she forced the man to his knees, “hurry it up, yeah?”
“Izuku,” said Bakugou.
Deku closed the door and locked it. The woman stepped on the back of the man’s legs to keep him from getting up, crouching to yank the man’s jaw up, baring his throat. The man gave a muffled scream.
“Me ’n Dabi tested your mirror quirk,” said Deku, walking back toward the man. “I like it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s kinda… buggy? Like, if you have enough mirrors and enough time, you can pretty much see anything within a radius of about five kilometers. That’s a decent range along an x- and y-axis. Unfortunately, your z-axis range is tiny. You can’t see more than a meter above or below you. Meaning that you wouldn’t realize I was in your second-floor apartment until you were halfway up the stairs. You gotta think shit through a little better, my dude.”
“IZUKU,” said Bakugou.
The woman groaned. “God, why’d you have to fuckin’ bring them? Can’t ever keep shit simple, can ya.”
“Like you’re not the biggest fucking drama queen on the block.” Deku tapped the coil of wire between the man’s eyes. “You know what Kacchan told me? He said he went to my funeral.”
The woman’s eyes darted to Bakugou. She snorted.
“Right?” said Deku. He put his thumb over the man’s left eye. Started pressing in. “He was getting all worked up in the ramen shop because I wouldn’t go to the police with him. So I was like, oh my god, do I have to show you what I do for a living?”
A strangled sound of pain came from not-Reflection’s throat.
“For a living?” the woman asked. “You gettin’ paid for this one? Thought we were doin’ community service.”
“Yeah, we are, because fuck pedophiles.” Blood started trickling from the man’s left eye. “But I mean, like, in general.”
Bakugou started forward. “Izuku, what the FUCK ARE YOU—”
Shouto’s hand darted out on its own, grabbing Bakugou’s arm and yanking him back. Bakugou looked back at him. Shouto’s gut jolted.
He looked terrified. Red eyes blown wide, chest heaving.
“IcyHot,” said Bakugou. “They’re gonna—”
“I know,” said Shouto.
“IcyHot, Izuku—”
“I know,” said Shouto. “Leave it. It’s okay.”
“Let me go.” Bakugou tugged against Shouto’s grip, and when Shouto didn’t let go, his palms lit up. He fired off an explosion just an inch away from Shouto’s face. Shouto felt the heat flare against his eyes and nose—something that would’ve burned him if he didn’t have heat resistance. “Motherfucker, let me GO!”
Deku glanced over his shoulder at Shouto. Kept pressing his thumb into the man’s eye socket, even as the blood trickle down the man’s cheek widened to a rivulet, and God, Deku almost looked bored.
Panic crept up Shouto’s back. Too fast, too sudden. He didn’t know what the fuck he was supposed to be doing right now. But he knew that he was not going to let Bakugou get between Deku and his work, because Bakugou would get hurt.
Bakugou didn’t know better. He didn’t know when to just let things happen. When to just let yourself drift up and out of your body, to watch from afar, to let it pass.
If Bakugou kept fighting like this, kept trying to change things, something bad would happen.
You didn’t get to change things like this.
You didn’t even get to try.
Not without getting hurt.
When Bakugou swung at him with another explosion, Shouto tackled him to the ground. Lay across his back with his arms pinning Bakugou’s arms to his side, pressing Bakugou down with as much weight as he could, breathing in the musk of his deodorant as Bakugou screamed, “LET ME GO! LET ME THE FUCK GO! IZUKU!”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto. He pulled his left leg up to take the place of his left hand, which he used to wrestle Bakugou’s head to the ground. Pushed Bakugou’s cheek into the carpet, hoping that would shut him up somehow. “Shh. Bakugou. Bakugou. It’s okay.”
“Hey, bestie,” said Deku, motioning toward his mouth, “could you…? This building isn’t very busy, but just in case.”
“Yeah,” Shouto said. He reached under Bakugou’s neck, feeling for his jaw, and shoved his mouth closed. Held it there, his thumb digging into the soft flesh under Bakugou’s chin and his index finger hooking over the bridge of Bakugou’s nose, and he could feel the heat of Bakugou’s labored exhalations and the vibrations of his muffled voice in a way that he knew he wouldn’t ever stop feeling, not really, and he thought—
What the fuck am I doing.
“You’re the best,” said Deku, turning back to the man. He moved behind the man’s back, working in close proximity to the blonde woman, motions fluid—looping the wire once around not-Reflection’s neck, twisting the loop closed once in the back, bracing his elbows on the man’s back to yank his arms in opposite directions—
Shouto moved fast. Swapped his right arm for his right leg so that he was straddling Bakugou’s back rather than being splayed across him. Shouto used his chin and chest to push Bakugou’s face into the carpet, circled his right arm up and over Bakugou’s head, blocking Bakugou’s vision.
He wished he could block Bakugou’s hearing, too, because the sounds the scene produced were…
Mundane.
The man’s feet weakly thumping the floor as he tried—and failed miserably—to throw the woman off him. The pops of the tiny air pockets that somehow managed to make it past the wire barrier, a strangely unremarkable sound—they might’ve been mistaken for someone smacking their lips.
At least something like a bone breaking or a gunshot weren’t sounds you heard often. But light thumping, faint smacking—those were sounds you would hear nearly every day for the rest of your life.
And you would remember.
Maybe not consciously, not after a few years, but the neural pathways in your brain would always remember. Your body would remember. A jolt of nausea, a quickening pulse. Sitting alone in the mall as you waited for your sister to finish buying a new pair of work shoes, overstimulated, and then someone wearing a yellow sweater would glance at you from a certain angle—And you would freeze and everything but yourself would shift to the left a couple inches, and god why was Fuyumi taking so long, and every bright color would growl and swipe sharp claws at your brain for the rest of the day and you wouldn’t even know why—
Ah.
He was dissociating, wasn’t he?
How long had he been in this position? Bakugou was still struggling, still trying to push his voice out from between Shouto’s fingers.
The man—not-Reflection—was still being murdered.
“Kid,” said the woman. “You gotta move the wire for it to cut.”
“Do you want blood all over your clothes?” Deku asked. He grunted as he adjusted his stance, dug his elbows into the man’s shoulders for better leverage. “Because I don’t want blood all over my clothes. I like this shirt.”
Something felt different than it had a few seconds ago. Something about Shouto’s positioning or Bakugou’s body. Or maybe Shouto’s body? It was bad and uncomfortable, but he couldn’t concentrate long enough to figure out what was wrong.
Not-Reflection’s face had gone an awful bluish color and had swollen. The blonde woman’s slender hand cupped his chin like a frame, tilted his head up. He had tears coming out of one eye and blood out of the other.
“It’s a fuckin’ stupid shirt,” said the woman.
Deku hummed. “Like you can talk, Cargo Pants-san.”
Shouto realized. “Dabi.”
The woman looked up, nodded at Shouto. “Hey, kid. How’s the, uh, the trauma going?”
“It’s… it’s going,” said Shouto.
Not-Reflection stopped moving.
Deku held the wire in place for a few more seconds, waiting, until Dabi told Deku, “Okay, y’should be good. Pull his collar up behind the wire before you loosen it so the blood doesn’t hit me. Swear to god, if I have to taste another drop of this shitbag’s blood.”
“I can’t hold the collar without giving up my grip, Dabi.”
“Fuckin’—” Dabi grabbed the back of the man’s collar with his teeth and yanked up. A chunk of blonde hair fell from Dabi’s messy bun. He grunted, “K.”
Deku let his arms relax, untwisted the wire, let the wire loop go slack. There was a short spray of blood in all directions—weak, like it was an afterthought—and then the blood flow slowed to a speed Shouto couldn’t detect with his current contact prescription.
Deku took the garrote off. Dabi dropped the corpse with all the grace of someone dropping a sandbag, and the man tilted forward, his head hitting the carpeted floor with a too-loud thump.
Shouto, finally, felt Bakugou go still underneath him.
Dabi scraped a small blood splatter from his eyelid, wiped it on the carpet. “Fuck, I’m gonna be glad to get outta this fuckin’ body. Tits are great for the first hour. After that, shit’s kinda weird.” Dabi pushed himself to his feet. “Shou, you get me, yeah?”
Shouto wasn’t sure if he was supposed to respond, so he didn’t.
Dabi didn’t seem to care. He laced his fingers together and stretched his arms over his head, groaning. His image shimmered—a split-second glitch that felt like it came more from Shouto’s brain than from Dabi’s body—and Dabi’s voice dropped a couple octaves mid-groan. Dabi was several centimeters shorter now, and he almost fit his clothes. His deep burn scars were back.
Shouto suddenly became aware that he was still holding Bakugou down. He uncovered Bakugou’s mouth and, when Bakugou didn’t immediately start yelling, got off his back and stood up.
Bakugou was still for a few seconds before he moved into a sitting position. He stared at the body in front of him. His hand ghosted over his face, tracing the red welts where Shouto’s fingers had been.
Alarm jolted Shouto. Had he burned Bakugou’s face? How?
Dabi’s gaze went to Bakugou, and a grin split his face. He dropped his arms. “Oh, ha. Deku, your bitch looks like he’s gonna puke.”
Deku carried his garrote to the sink, turned on the faucet with his elbow. He had to lean to reach it. “Probably from looking at you.”
“Shut up, Infant.” Dabi nudged the dead man’s head with the tip of his shoe to tilt his face toward him. He frowned. “Can’t believe I wore that pervy face forty hours a week for three months, Jesus fuck.”
Deku ran his garrote under the stream of water, used a hand towel to wipe it off. Pumped some soap into his hand, smearing blood on the dispenser. “I can’t believe you held down a full-time job for that long.”
“You wanna keep your face?” Dabi reached into the man’s back pocket and pulled out a wallet, stayed crouching as he rifled through it. “Okay, sorry, I’m takin’ the cash. Service charge. You can have the sushi coupon.”
Deku started lathering up his hands. “Fair enough.”
“Couple credit cards here, too,” said Dabi. “Buy Sakura some shit, yeah? And not just junk from the fuckin’ Disney store.”
Deku laughed. “I’m gonna buy her so much junk from the Disney store. You can’t stop me.”
“Whatever.” Dabi stood, tossed the wallet on the counter next to the sink. “I’ll let Big Sis know you’re done. She’s got Sakura playing Uno by the vending machines.”
“Oh god. You let Magne bring Uno?”
“She likes the game.”
“Yeah, a little too much. She’s gonna obliterate Sakura.” Deku glanced over his shoulder. “Hey—thanks, Dabi. I owe you one.”
“I plan on cashin’ in, kiddo, so don’t thank me.” Dabi’s gaze dropped to Bakugou again as he headed for the door. He smirked. “Baby’s First Trauma, huh?”
Bakugou looked up at Dabi with an expression that was empty of anything except vague confusion. His hands lay limp in his lap. He was, perhaps most strangely, silent.
Dabi gave a snort of disbelief. “Deku, you’re an ass.”
Deku looked at his fingernails, used his teeth to scrape under one of them. Spat into the sink. “For his own good. Getting killed isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you if you fuck with the League.”
“Okay, Edgelord.”
“It’s true.”
“I guess.” Dabi gave a two-fingered wave to Shouto as he headed for the door. “See y’around, Shou. I’m out. Stop hangin’ with Deku, he’s a bad fuckin’ influence.”
“Hey,” barked Deku.
Dabi laughed. Left the apartment, door closing behind him.
The apartment went quiet. Might’ve been completely quiet if not for the sound of running water.
Deku spoke, finally. He didn’t turn to face them. “You still want to go to the police? I’d have to clean up here first.”
Bakugou said nothing.
Deku turned the water off, dried his hands on a towel. He walked past Shouto and Bakugou into the bedroom, where he yanked the blanket off the bed. He brought it back into the main room and spread it on the floor with a flourish. Then he carefully removed Sakura and Bakugou’s leftover ramen from atop Sakura’s makeshift dinner table and opened the storage box’s lid. Dug around a bit, pulled out a bundle of rope.
Silently, he stepped over the body, dropped to one knee. Deku used the gained leverage to flip the body over once, twice, three times—blood stringing from the eye socket and catching on the carpet—until the body was face-down on top of the blanket. Deku pulled the edge of the blanket up and tucked it around and under the corpse.
“This is what I call a Pedo Taquito,” said Deku.
“What the fuck,” Bakugou whispered. His first words since Shouto had covered his mouth.
“I’m kidding. I made that up just now.” Deku tucked the blanket under the corpse’s legs. “Oh—you guys don’t worry about being implicated or anything. I’ll wipe everything down, dump this guy somewhere. Might just stick ’im in the bathtub, honestly. Mostly so he’s not in the way while I go through all his shit. And I took care of the security cameras before we came. Lousy Internet firewall. I’ll probably send an email with some upgrade suggestions once I’m done.”
Shouto felt something wet roll down the inside of his arm. He looked down.
What the fuck. Was he sweating? Shouto didn’t sweat.
Shouto forced himself back into his body. He realized with a small jolt of alarm that his body temperature had rocketed—past anything that could be healthy. He grappled for a hold on his right side, felt his quirk slipping from his grasp like sweat-slick hands on a pull-up bar, and he felt the crackle of frost along his neck and side.
No. What was wrong with him? He needed to fix the inside of his body. Was something wrong with his quirk? And his chest was tight, why was his chest tight—
Deku tucked an end of the rope under the corpse’s legs, yanked it across the other side and pulled it toward himself again. “You’re not saying anything, Shou. You okay?”
“I’m okay,” said Shouto. “Did—do you want me to do anything?”
Deku tied off the rope. “Hm?”
What the fuck was Shouto asking? Deku had just murdered somebody in front of him. Murdered. “To help.”
Deku glanced up at Shouto with a gentle smile. “No, that’s okay, Shouto. Sorry you had to see that. I guess just make sure Kacchan gets home safe?”
“Okay,” Shouto heard himself say.
“And stay his friend, please.” Deku’s gaze dropped to Bakugou, his smile faltering. “I worry.”
Shouto crouched in an effort to coax Bakugou to his feet. When his left hand touched Bakugou’s arm, Bakugou hissed and jerked his arm away.
“Shit,” Shouto muttered. His temperature was still running high. “Sorry, I—my quirk. Can you get up?”
Bakugou met Shouto’s eyes, and vague understanding passed over his face. He stood. Blinking, unsteady.
Deku returned to his work. Back angled toward them, shoulders tense.
Bakugou spoke. “Izuku.”
Deku didn’t look up. “Get out, Kacchan. You have a home and parents who want you to be okay. Go to them.”
Bakugou’s chest deflated. His words came out weak. “Izuku. You can’t just—”
“I said GET THE FUCK OUT!”
Shouto startled.
He had known the outburst was coming—they always did, people always got angry when Shouto stayed too long or said too much—but hearing the words and seeing Deku’s small, heaving back still dropped a cannon ball of primal fear deep into his gut.
He grabbed Bakugou’s arm with his right hand and yanked him toward the door. Barely remembered his shoes—he shoved them on so haphazardly that his shoes cannibalized their tongues, his feet jamming them up where his toes were supposed to go. Bakugou made no move to put on his own shoes, so Shouto snatched them up. He yanked a barefoot Bakugou out of the apartment, accidentally kicking one of Deku’s red sneakers outside the door in the process.
Shouto was already jumping over the spilled briefcase on the stairs when the apartment door clicked closed. When he looked beside him and didn’t see Bakugou, he had to run back up the stairs to grab him. Bakugou had picked up Deku’s red shoe and was staring down at it with narrowed eyes.
Shouto tugged it from his hands and let it drop to the ground.
“Go,” Shouto said, snatching a handful of Bakugou’s jacket and yanking him toward the stairs. He felt the U.A. logo patch melting in his palm. “You wanna get killed? Go.”
They left the apartment building, walking fast. It took a while for Bakugou to start walking on his own, following Shouto as they made their way through the maze of apartment complexes toward the street. It took even longer for Bakugou to speak. They were passing through a small gap between two buildings when it happened.
“IcyHot,” Bakugou said. “You—you fucking—”
“I know,” said Shouto.
“You—”
Bakugou reached out and grabbed the front of Shouto’s shirt. Brought Shouto to a halt. Rage tore its talons deep into Bakugou’s expression, punctuated by the series of red burns travelling from the bridge of his nose to the underside of his chin.
It wasn’t a familiar rage. Wasn’t the same thing Shouto had seen from him at the battle trial. Wasn’t even the same thing Shouto had seen earlier today when Bakugou had pinned Deku to the ground and threatened him with death.
This was a rage at something intangible. At something that was so, so much larger than himself, at an idea, a memory, a concept, at a chimera of something both so terribly vague and so horribly specific that he wouldn’t know how to fight it even if it did manifest physically.
Shouto had seen that look in the mirror.
He didn’t know how much he’d dreaded seeing it in Bakugou’s eyes until it was there.
Bakugou’s mouth worked for a moment, and then it said, “Izuku.”
“I know,” said Shouto. He barely recognized his own voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“IcyHot. Izuku.”
“I’m sorry. Bakugou, I’m sorry.”
A frustrated noise tore through Bakugou’s throat. Bakugou crouched, not letting go of Shouto’s shirt, pulling Shouto down with him.
Crumpling.
“Did I…?” Bakugou looked up at Shouto, some emotion Shouto couldn’t fully interpret carving his face like a knife. “Did I do that to him? Did I make him that way?”
“I d—I don’t know,” said Shouto.
Bakugou’s eyes widened. “IcyHot.”
“Bakugou, I don’t think so. But I don’t know.”
“Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me you don’t know. Don’t fuckin’ tell me—”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” God, Shouto was so ill-equipped to handle this situation. A Pro Hero would have something on hand to say. Maybe it wouldn’t be true, but at least the words would be there. “I’m sorry, I… Tell me what to say. Just—if you—if—I’ll say it.”
Bakugou’s face contorted. He dropped from a crouch to his knees. Lowered his head and yanked Shouto forward by the front of his shirt, the top of Bakugou’s head bumping against Shouto’s collarbones.
Shouto stilled.
He couldn’t lower his chin with Bakugou’s head right under it, but he could see Bakugou’s shoulders shaking in his peripheral vision. Shouto kept his eyes forward, staring at the wall in front of him. Kept his arms limp by his side.
What was he supposed to do? Touch him somehow? Shouto didn’t give good hugs. Shouto didn’t give hugs at all. Nobody wanted to touch Shouto.
Bakugou shouldn’t have been touching Shouto right now, anyway. Shouto might burn him again. There was no reason to risk that. It wouldn’t help Bakugou. Did he think it would? He needed to get off.
“Bakugou,” said Shouto.
Bakugou grinded his head hard into Shouto’s chest. The material around Shouto’s chest and back constricted as Bakugou’s grip on his shirt tightened. Tightened more, nearly suffocating.
And Bakugou made a sound so animalistic, so wracked with raw, festering grief, that Shouto felt like his own lungs were being shredded.
Oh.
Shouto set Bakugou's shoes on the asphalt. He raised his cooler right hand, wrapped it around Bakugou’s wrist. Didn’t pull Bakugou’s hand away from his shirt, didn’t move his own hand. Just held tight.
Listening to Bakugou’s wet, jagged breaths, Shouto remembered the thing he’d wanted to say back at the hospital. The phrase that had since grown a body, only to break it:
I see you.
God.
Shouto hadn’t realized then how much more pain there was to discover.
“I can’t do this.” Bakugou’s voice, recognizable only because Shouto could feel his breath on his knuckles. “Not again. I just got him back. I just got—” His voice broke off, snapped into a wet cough.
Shouto looked down, his chin dipping into Bakugou’s hair.
“I worked so fucking hard,” said Bakugou. “Shouto. Shouto, you see it. Right? I’m not like that anymore. I could’ve helped with—I’m not like that. I fucking changed. Fuck am I doin’ wrong? Why doesn’t he want me?”
Why doesn’t he want me.
He’d asked himself the same question so many times. Why doesn’t Fuyumi want me. Why doesn’t my mom want me. What am I doing wrong—?
Shouto watched the material of Bakugou’s shirt rise and fall, shivering, dipping between his shoulder blades.
Fuck if Shouto knew. Shouto was fucking useless. The best he could do was hold Bakugou’s wrist and try not to flinch when something wet hit his knuckle and rolled down the back of his hand.
“Let’s go home,” Shouto said.
Notes:
-i aM GOING TO RESPOND TO YOUR COMMENTS I SWEAR just give me like 5-10 business days, I have executive dysfunction :D but I appreciate all of them so fucking much and I honestly have no idea how y'all have stuck with me for 100,000 words. Jesus Christ. WE'RE NOT EVEN TO THE SPORTS FESTIVAL.
-Told myself no OCs. Then I was like "oh I need to borrow a non-Eri tiny human for like half a chapter, nbd." Then I realized. I would die for Sakura.
-I know Toga's quirk is supposed to leave her naked when she changes back but I did/do not want to deal with naked Dabi. Sue me. Actually pls don't, I'm poor.
-Bakugou hurt me this chapter. Shouto and Deku hurt me this chapter. You know who did not hurt me? Femme Fatale Dabi. NOTHING but love and adoration.
Chapter 30: Shouto and Bakugou Bully a Middle Schooler
Summary:
Drunk Shouto.
Notes:
CW: underage drinking, reference to aborted suicide attempt, brief reference to past sexual abuse
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
At some point on the way home—whether on the street, in the station, or on the subway—Bakugou grabbed onto the back of Shouto’s jacket. Shouto hadn't noticed until they were standing beside each other on the subway. Bakugou had been doing relatively well since his… whatever that had been. With the crying. His eyes were barely red now. Vacant, yes, but you could only tell he’d been crying if you looked directly at him.
Shouto asked, “Do the burns hurt?”
Bakugou grunted.
“I can cool them down. Do you want me to?”
Bakugou was silent for a moment, then turned his face a few degrees toward Shouto and mumbled, “K.”
Shouto held his right hand close to Bakugou’s cheek and, carefully, lowered the temperature of the water vapor above and on Bakugou’s skin. Just enough to chill the air and let a few frost crystals dot his jaw.
When Shouto was done, he dropped his hand. “I didn’t mean to burn you. I couldn’t—I didn’t notice my quirk messing up.”
“Whatever,” Bakugou said. “You still runnin’ hot?”
“I don’t think so.”
Bakugou touched the backs of a couple fingers to Shouto’s cheek. They felt cold, and Bakugou jerked his hand away. “Yeah, you are. Fuck’s wrong with you? You gonna have a panic attack?”
“I can usually keep an attack unnoticeable until I’m not in public,” said Shouto. “It’s just hard to… My homeostasis. It stops being easy to maintain. I generally tip toward being too cold, though, so I don’t know why I’m—”
“Take off your damn jacket.”
Oh. Right. He pulled it off, gave it to Bakugou to hold as he untucked his shirt. He was soaked in sweat.
“You’re fucking disgusting,” said Bakugou. “Your body’s probably shutting down from sheer embarrassment. You binding?”
“Yeah.”
“What else you got on, a fucking Santa suit?” Bakugou leaned back and reached behind Shouto, and Shouto felt the back of his shirt shifting up. “Where’s the fuckin’… thing to loosen it? I don’t see anything.”
Shouto knocked Bakugou’s hand away. People were looking. “Don’t.”
Bakugou narrowed his eyes. “You’re gonna pass out, fuckass. Ain’t nobody gonna think nothin’.”
“It’s more noticeable in the uniform shirts,” said Shouto. He pulled the back of his shirt down. “Just let… It’s fine. I’ll cool down on my own.”
Probably.
His adrenaline was still rushing, still confusing his perception of whatever the fuck was going on inside his body, but he knew the symptoms of heat exhaustion. And he was getting them. Mouth and throat that felt like a desert, a creeping headache. The world around him seemed slightly… not real. As if the screaming toddler and the businesswoman and the empty water bottle rolling around beneath the seats were just projections on a green screen.
Bakugou looked away. A couple seconds passed, and then he returned his eyes to Shouto. “Oi. Where the fuck are we goin’?”
Oh. He’d forgotten about that, too. “I was just gonna… take you to your house and then go back to mine.”
“You gotta stay. We gotta tell my parents when they get home.”
Shouto’s heart stuttered. “We—no. No.”
Bakugou stared. “Yeah? What, were you just planning on taking a fuckin’ nap when you got to your house?”
“I was going to contact a taxi service and ask them to bring me my schoolbag from the public lockers we left them in before we went to meet Deku.”
“You—oh. Fuck. I forgot about—fuck.”
“Yeah,” said Shouto. Oh, and there was the nausea. Wonderful. “Brilliant idea you had there.”
“I wasn’t gonna call a taxi service to drive a couple damn textbooks to my house like some pasty rich kid.”
“Well, now you’re going to have a taxi drive your textbooks to your house like some pasty rich kid who’s also irresponsible.” Shouto was glad Bakugou was back to his regular speech patterns. Even if they were obnoxious. A silent Bakugou was… disconcerting. “You can’t tell your parents.”
Bakugou glowered. “I’m gonna tell my fucking parents, Half-n-Half. They can help.”
No, they couldn’t. Even if they wanted to, even if they took the issue to the police. How was Shouto supposed to communicate that to Bakugou, who didn’t know just how fucking useless Hero society was when it came to problems like this? How they just made things exponentially worse?
Maybe if Shouto had time to convince him. Shouto’s persuasive skills were… lacking, but he could try.
“Come to my house,” said Shouto. “I at least want to talk to you first.”
“No. I don’t wanna fuckin’—”
“Bakugou, please.”
Bakugou huffed. “I’m not s’posed to go to your place when your dad’s home. He gonna be there?”
“He—yes. Later. You won’t have to talk to him.”
“I don’t like lyin’ to my parents, IcyHot.”
“I don’t like anything right now,” said Shouto. “You have to come. Just for—oh.” Shouto put his right hand out to grip Bakugou’s arm.
Bakugou looked at him, alarm flashing over his face. “What?”
“Dizzy,” said Shouto. “I can’t… I don’t know why I can’t get a grip on my right side.”
“You just—” Bakugou pointed at his cheek. “How’d you ice me up, then?”
“It—it’s different. Inside and…” Ugh. His words were getting heavy. Not in the about-to-go-mute way, just… dragging, sluggish. “Inside and outside stuff. Outside stuff is where I focused all my training, so it’s easier.”
“You gonna pass out?” Bakugou asked.
“Uh…” He evaluated his body for information and came up short. He wasn’t completely… tethered right now. “Fifty-fifty chance.”
“Fuckin’… fine. Fine. I’ll go with you to your damn house. But I ain’t stayin’ the night.”
Oh. Was getting dizzy all he needed to do? “Thanks.”
“Fuck off.” Bakugou addressed a kid in a ketchup-stained middle-school uniform who was in the seat directly in front of him. “Oi, Ketchup, this fuckin’ wimp’s havin’ a heat stroke, and I ain’t gonna carry him when he passes out. Gimme your seat.”
“Heat exhaustion,” said Shouto. “It’s different.”
“Shut the fuck up.” To the kid: “Up, brat.”
The kid vacated the seat, and Shouto sat. He kept his left arm in close so he wouldn’t burn the person beside him.
Bakugou glared at Shouto until they reached their stop.
When Shouto stood to exit the train, it felt like the world was tilting on its axis. He blinked, a sliver of panic shooting through him. He didn’t like this. “Bakugou.”
Bakugou grabbed Shouto’s arm above his elbow and pulled him off the train. He didn’t let go as they went up the stairs.
“Worse?” Bakugou asked.
“Yeah,” said Shouto. His brain felt muddled, and his heart had started pounding.
“Convenience store up here,” said Bakugou. “Get you a damn water.”
Oh. Liquid sounded nice. “Sports drink,” he said. “The, um. The—the salt stuff, they have that.”
“Fuck you talkin’ about? Electrolytes?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Shouto. “You… you’re smart. You can remember shit. I can’t remember shit. I’m like a squirrel monkey. They have poor memory. Did you know that?”
“Shut the fuck up, IcyHot.” He dragged Shouto to a bench outside of the convenience store. “Don’t wander off or I’ll kill you.”
“You don’t have to wait for me to wander off to kill me. Do it now.”
“I will,” said Bakugou.
But he left Shouto and went inside the store. Shouto looked down at his hands, flexed his fingers. He tried to count his knuckles, but he kept losing his train of thought and having to start over.
“Here, fuckass.” Bakugou emerged with a bottle of electrolyte water, which he dropped in Shouto’s lap. “Hurry up. Ain’t got all damn day.”
Shouto picked it up and turned it around in his hands. His left hand started to melt the label, so he switched the bottle to his right. “Why’d you get this off-brand shit? Pocari's better.”
“You’re welcome, asshole.”
Shouto held it up. “Can you open it? I don’t want to melt the cap.”
“I don’t want to melt the cap,” Bakugou said, voice mocking. He opened the bottle and handed it back. “Don’t spill it, you fucking toddler.”
Shouto drank half the bottle in one go. When he lowered it, the rim had melted.
“What the fuck,” said Bakugou, looking at the bottle.
Shouto picked plastic off his lip. “Lean down here and I’ll give you a kiss,” he said.
Bakugou kicked Shouto’s foot. “Don’t say shit like that. C’mon. Drink the rest while we’re walkin’.”
Shouto couldn’t hold Bakugou’s arm and his drink at the same time—not if he didn’t want to melt one of them—so he settled for walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Bakugou. Well—Shouto’s shoulder was a little higher. Did that matter? Probably not, but Shouto’s brain was chasing any tangent it could.
Shoulder to shoulder. Shoulder and Shouto. Those words kind of sounded the same. That was interesting. Should he tell Bakugou? He should tell Bakugou.
“Fuck you standin’ so close for?” Bakugou muttered.
“In case I forget how to walk,” said Shouto. “I’m using you for reference. Hey. You know what’s great…? Is… beanbags. Sensory heaven. That’s how I want to be buried. Lay me down in a bed of beanbags.”
Bakugou looked at him. “You havin’ a fuckin’ stroke?”
“I hope so.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
The walk wasn’t far, and they reached Shouto’s house without him passing out. To Shouto’s relief, he didn’t see Fuyumi’s or Endeavor’s cars. Fuyumi probably wouldn’t react well to seeing Shouto and Bakugou in the shape they were. And if Endeavor recognized Bakugou from the time Bakugou had tried to explode his hand…
Bakugou flipped open the cover to the security code system. “What’s the code?”
“42069,” said Shouto.
Bakugou cut his eyes over to Shouto. “Are you fucking serious.”
“My brother set it a decade ago and Endeavor couldn’t figure out how to change it.”
“Natsuo?”
“No, a different brother.”
“You got another damn sibling?” Bakugou asked. “Did your dad fuck a printing machine?”
“Well, he’s dead now,” said Shouto. “Can you type the fucking code in?”
Bakugou narrowed his eyes, but he typed the code in, and they went inside. Shouto tried to unlock the front door, hand fumbling. He couldn’t fit the… key inside the fucking…
“Fuckin’—” Bakugou took the key from Shouto and unlocked the door. Shouto disarmed the security system, kicked off his shoes, turned on the lights.
“Nobody’s home yet,” said Shouto. “You want a drink?”
“Nah,” said Bakugou, looking around. “Fuck, this… it’s like being inside a damn bloated whale.”
Shouto threw his empty water bottle away before opening Fuyumi’s wine cabinet. He found a liter of vodka, opened it, and drank straight from the bottle.
“Oi,” said Bakugou.
Shouto lowered the bottle. God, that tasted bad. He turned to Bakugou, blinking back tears from the sting in his throat. Bakugou was giving him a strange look.
“What?” Shouto said. “You want some?”
“Thought you meant a normal drink,” said Bakugou.
“Vodka’s pretty standard. Tastes like gasoline. You like flammable shit, right?” He took a deep breath and raised the bottle for another gulp.
“Oi,” said Bakugou. “You ain’t—you’re underage. And don’t alcohol make heat exhaustion worse?”
“We’re good,” said Shouto. He screwed the cap back on and put the bottle back. “We’re good, we’re good. Okay. My room. Back here. Sorry if I turn into an asshole. Well—more of an asshole. God, I’m fuckin’… dizzy.”
Bakugou followed Shouto as he led the way. “You gotta take a cold shower or somethin’.”
“Mm. Yeah, I’ll…” His vision jerked suddenly, like someone had jostled a tv screen. He put a hand out to the wall and kept walking. “Heat exhaustion is not great. Fucking… bullshit, honestly.”
“You shouldn’t have had that alcohol,” said Bakugou. “You’re already acting fuckin’ weird.”
“I’m overheated, Bakugou, my brain is melting, and I need to stop thinking for a few minutes. You had your breakdown, let me have mine. Where’s my fucking room, fucking—okay, okay.” He stumbled.
Bakugou grabbed his shirt, steadying him. “Fuckin’ hell. C’mon. This room?”
“Yeah.”
They entered. Bakugou kicked a shirt out of the way. “Looks like a depressed Spartan lives here. You got somethin’ against cleaning your room? Or fucking color?”
“I w—I wanted something to reflect my personality,” said Shouto. “The, um. The—the empty seaweed packages are part of the… you know, the décor.”
“It’s making my head hurt. At least throw your damn trash away. Roaches don’t give a shit who your dad is.”
“That’s my—my favorite thing about roaches,” said Shouto.
Shouto put his hand on the doorframe to his bathroom as Bakugou went ahead to turn on the shower, tested the water.
“There,” Bakugou said. “That’s fucking freezing. Sit on the ground instead of the stool so you don’t bust your damn head open if you pass out.”
When Shouto pulled his hand away from the doorframe, his fingers had liquefied paint on them. He grinned and held his hand up to show Bakugou.
“If you don’t get in the fucking shower,” Bakugou said. He started to leave the bathroom, then paused. “Why the fuck do you have a mini fridge in here?”
“Mostly so Endeavor won’t see it and confiscate it the next time I fuck up,” said Shouto. “And sometimes I get hungry in the middle of my panic attacks.”
Bakugou scoffed and left the bathroom, leaving the door open.
“Hey, fuck you,” Shouto called. “That was a joke. I did a joke. It was funny. Laugh.”
“Fuck you,” Bakugou responded. “I’m gonna go find a compress for these burns. If I don’t get lost in this damn house.”
“There’s some prescription numbing cream in my dresser drawer,” said Shouto. He’d picked a nearly empty tube from the trash at a doctor’s office and had been saving it in case something worse than a piece of brick in a leg happened. “Not much, but it’s strong. Use it if the aloe vera doesn’t help enough. Petroleum jelly, disinfectant, and aloe vera in the kitchen, third drawer down on the far right. Bandages if you see any broken skin. Don’t put anything adhesive over the burns themselves.”
“Wow, I didn’t know you had a fucking medical degree. Which website did you graduate from?”
“Experience.org,” said Shouto. “Ice packs in the freezer. Take your soul out of there while you’re at it.”
Shouto heard his bedroom door slam shut.
Shouto turned the bathroom light off before taking off his clothes—except his boxers, because fuck knew he was already dissociating enough—and sitting down under the spray of water. He crossed his legs, leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The water hissed when it hit his back. Shouto could see the glow of the steam by the light coming from his bedroom.
This was the part he'd been dreading. Being alone. With his brain, which was thinking things.
Deku's GET THE FUCK OUT!
There'd been emotion there.
And that had been more horrifying than watching Deku strangle someone with a wire. Because it could mean that Deku was, to some degree, processing what he was doing. What was happening to him. Feeling things about it.
Maybe that was good for Bakugou, because it slightly raised his chances of getting through to Deku.
But it was very, very, very bad for Deku. If things like what he'd done today stuck to him, if he thought about them at night, if he kept cramming trauma after trauma into his brain and kept them there.
He hoped he was wrong about Deku. Hoped Deku had forgotten how to feel things, that all his displayed emotions were manufactured manually and churned out as he saw fit in order to achieve his goals.
Because the other option made Shouto feel sick.
“Oi,” Bakugou called. He was back from the kitchen. “You turn the light off?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“Why?”
“It’s calmer,” said Shouto. “And it’s nice that I don’t have to look at myself.”
“Whatever,” said Bakugou.
Shouto closed his eyes. He sat there for a few minutes, and when he felt the alcohol starting to affect him, he lay down in a fetal position, resting his head on his cooler right arm. His throat felt tight.
“You alive in there?” Bakugou asked from the bedroom. “Been fifteen minutes.”
Shouto blinked at the tile in front of him. Shiny. He tapped it, hummed.
“IcyHot,” Bakugou said.
“Come in here,” said Shouto.
“No. Gross,” said Bakugou. “Why?”
“Wanna see you.”
“You can see me when you get out, you fuckin’ weirdo. I don’t wanna look at your junk.”
“I’m wearing boxers,” said Shouto.
“I don’t wanna see your tits, either.”
“That m-makes two of us. Bakugou.” Shouto slapped the tile with his outstretched arm. It was wet and loud. “Bakugou, come here. Bakugou. Bakugou.”
“Fuckin’ hell—” Bakugou appeared in the doorway, a cloth-covered ice pack pressed against his cheek. “What?”
Shouto flexed the fingers of his outstretched hand. “I just w—I ju—I wanted to see you. Make sure you didn’t hurt yourself.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I do. I don’t want you to. I knew something was—it was—something was going to happen. I should’ve made you—y—I should’ve. I’m sorry. You don’t know the things to look for. When someone’s dangerous. I knew he was gonna do something.”
Bakugou glared down at Shouto. “Why’d you come with me, then?”
“I thought maybe he was going to hurt you really bad or kill you. I didn’t—di—didn’t want—I didn’t…” He lost his train of thought. So he reached up a little, just with the end of his arm, not bothering to lift his head off the ground. “Bakugou, sit down.”
“This is fuckin’ weird,” said Bakugou, but went to a corner of the room where the spray of water couldn’t reach him and sat. “Y’happy?”
“I’m never happy.” Shouto waved his outstretched hand. “Hold. Hold it.”
“Hah?”
“My hand.”
“Wha—no,” said Bakugou. “You turn gay when you’re drunk or somethin’? Fuck’s wrong with you? Was that you who asked to hold hands at the hospital?”
Shouto tilted his head back to meet Bakugou’s eyes. One obscured by the darkness in the bathroom, the other visible by the light from the bedroom.
Shouto grinned. “I think so.”
“Motherfuck—I thought I—god fucking damn it.” Bakugou lowered the ice pack and dropped his head back against the wall behind him, just a little too hard. “You gay?”
“No fucking clue,” said Shouto. He waved his hand again. “Please. Bakugou. Nobody wants to touch me. I’m… fucking… I can’t ever breathe.”
Bakugou looked down his nose at him, raised an eyebrow. “Your sister don’t hug you?”
“She used to. I think she’s scared of me. Do your parents hug you?”
Bakugou directed his gaze to the ceiling. “Yeah, I guess.”
“How often?”
“Most days.”
Shouto let his arm go limp. He closed his eyes. Most days. “That sounds nice.”
Bakugou was silent.
“I’m glad you have that. It’s hard t—it—to have—t—fuck, I can’t talk.” Shouto tapped the tile with the fingers of his outstretched hand. “You should learn sign so I can talk to you better. Bakugou. I wanna talk to you about stuff. I w—Bakugou, are we friends?”
“If anyone needs to go to jail for underage drinking,” said Bakugou, “it’s you.”
Shouto laughed. Purple squiggles swam in the darkness behind his eyelids. He kept tapping the floor. “Bakugou. You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” said Bakugou.
“Do you feel better?”
“Some.”
“I wish I could cry,” said Shouto. “I used to, when I was little. Every day. Then I tried to kill myself and I kind of forgot how. I miss it.”
Bakugou was quiet for a few seconds. Then his voice, too casual. “You tried to kill yourself?”
“I tr—I tried to try to. I got scared halfway through and stopped.”
“Did you… fuckin’ tell anybody?”
Shouto opened his eyes to blink at the steaming pool of water in front of him. Was his body temperature still running high?
“IcyHot.”
“No,” said Shouto. “It was after the whole Lady Hypna thing, and I didn’t… Fuyumi worked really hard to try to help me. I didn’t want to stress her out. Thinking I was suicidal or some shit like that.”
“You… were.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t want her to think that. And things got a little better after that. I convinced Endeavor to let me go to U.A. and I chose my name and stuff. Oh, you know, my name—it’s from Red’s Ocean. I don’t think I ever told you that. Shinsou picked a name from the same show. I th—thought that was funny.”
“Who the fuck’s Shinsou?” Bakugou asked.
“Some… guy. Gen Ed. He needs to sleep. I w—I wanna talk to him. I never met another trans boy.”
“There’s another one of you?” Bakugou said.
Shouto grunted. “No, he’s not a Todoroki. He’s a Shinsou. He hates me. I don’t know why. Does everybody hate me? I can’t tell. Bakugou.”
“What?”
“Do you like soba?”
“If I hold your hand,” asked Bakugou, “will you shut the fuck up?”
Shouto tilted his head to look back at Bakugou. He stretched his fingers out. “Yesss. Fuck yes. Honestly, just fucking crush my hand. Break all the bones. I will be extremely silent.”
“God, you’re so fucking weird.” Bakugou reached out, then hesitated. “You ain’t givin’ me your hellfire hand, are you?”
“This one is cold,” said Shouto. “It is very, very cold.”
Bakugou took it. His hand warm. “S’not that cold.”
“It can get cold. I can make it… very cold.”
“Yeah, I know. Shut up.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
There was silence. For a moment. Two.
Then: “Oi.”
“Hi,” said Shouto.
“I’m fucking pissed at you. You know that, right?”
Oh. “Yeah, I guess.”
“I mean that. That was an asshole move. You holdin’ me down.”
“I know,” said Shouto. “It felt shitty. But he would’ve hurt you. He didn’t—”
“Okay, shut up.” Bakugou’s voice was sharp. “I don’t wanna talk about it now. I just wanted to make sure you know I fucking hate you.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“I ain’t sayin’ I want you to die. I’m just sayin’ we ain’t on good terms. At all. I wanna punch your stupid face in.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “It’s fine if you want me to die. You’re not gonna let go of my hand, though, right?”
“I’m… I got your damn hand, IcyHot.”
“Thanks,” said Shouto. “Love you.”
“I’ll kill you.”
Notes:
(TW: pet death/abuse)
Me: lol it's funny when Shouto doesn't know what's normal and what's abuse. I'm so glad I figured out my shit ages ago and don't have that problem :D I wonder why I even project on him?
My therapist literally this week: hey so Max you know that it was not normal for your dad to repeatedly & unpredictably kill your pets and then make fun of you for being sad about it, right?
Me:
Me: sorry what now
Me: wait so when my dad killed my pet chicken and didn't tell me until we were about to eat her
Me: wait and what about when he said he'd shoot my dog if I didn't start cleaning up after him better
Me: wait and then when I woke up to gunshots and didn't even get out of bed bc I didn't want to know which one of my adopted strays he'd just killed
Me: wait and when I went to school not knowing if my pets would still be alive when I got home & sometimes they weren't & if I displayed any more emotion than an "aw man :/ ok" I'd get made fun of
Me: WAIT IS THAT WHY PEOPLE GET REALLY EMOTIONAL WHEN THEIR PETS DIE?? OMG I THOUGHT I WAS A PSYCHOPATH
Therapist: ok so we're gonna come back to that :))) now let's talk about how you were isolated from your peers and sometimes your own family growing up
Me:
Therapist: *pulls out a tea kettle* also what's your opinion on these bad boys
Chapter 31: Shouto and the Human Slap Bracelet
Summary:
Shouto wakes up with Fuyumi in his face. Kaminari and Sero have more Bro™ Time.
Notes:
CW: prescription drug abuse, reference to past sexual assault and aftermath, suicidal thoughts, accidental coming-out, reference to past suicide attempt, sexual reference, gender dysphoria-inducing situation, meltdown/panic attack, self-harm (hitting), violent intrusive thoughts, obsessive compulsions, discussion of triggers as a concept, situation that might trigger claustrophobia
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“IcyHot, wake the FUCK UP.” Something swatted Shouto’s head. “Your damn sister thinks I killed you or somethin’—”
“Shiyo. Shiyo.”
The moment Shouto opened his eyes, a headache split his skull. He winced. “Fuck—ow.”
Fuyumi’s blurry face hovered over him. “What? What is it?”
“Hungover,” he said. He looked up at the showerhead. Someone had turned the water off. “Sorry. Drank your vodka. Where—Bakugou?”
A large towel hit his back. “Cover up. Tired of lookin’ at you.”
Shouto pulled the towel around his shoulders. His brain was still fuzzy, it was just less of a pleasant distraction now and more like looking through a dirty windshield. “H—how long’s it been?”
“Too fuckin’ long,” said Bakugou. “You ain’t melting anymore, at least.”
“Someone tell me what the hell’s going on,” said Fuyumi.
“I g—I got overheated,” said Shouto. He blinked, eyes burning. Probably should’ve taken his contacts out before he fell asleep. “Me and Ba—Bakugou, c’mere. I can’t see you.”
Bakugou came around beside him, crouched. He looked annoyed.
“Thank you,” said Shouto. He shifted his towel, reached out as far as he could to flick Bakugou’s knee with the tips of his fingers. “I’m sorry I burned your face.”
“I know,” said Bakugou, curtly.
“Me and Bakugou—” He realized. “Bakugou, did we decide what to tell people?”
“Figure it out yourself.” Bakugou stood. “I’m gonna wait in the damn hall. Tell your sister I didn’t fucking touch you.”
“You did,” said Shouto. “You held my hand.”
“Yeah, ’cause you wouldn’t shut the fuck up. My fuckin’ back hurts now.” To Fuyumi, pointing at Shouto— “I didn’t fucking touch hi—the Half-n-Half Bastard. Fuck you, IcyHot, your face looks like somebody photoshopped a dead fish on top of a poorly cropped stock photo of the Japanese flag.”
“Fuck you,” said Shouto. “Your hair looks like mayonnaise with daddy issues.”
“I got a fucking arsenal about your hair, Half-n-Half, don’t get me fuckin’—”
“Please leave,” Fuyumi told Bakugou. Her voice was not kind. “Thank you.”
Bakugou left. Shouto heard the bedroom door slam shut.
“Shiyo,” said Fuyumi. “What the hell.”
Shouto searched her face. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but he knew it wasn’t a happy expression. She also had a few thin patches of snow on the shoulders of her sweater, which wasn’t something he’d seen since… fuck, how long had it been? Since the Lady Hypna incident?
“Are you mad?” he asked. “I’m sorry about t—th—vodka.”
She ignored the question. “What happened? Something happened.”
Shouto was tired. He flopped onto his side, pressing his cheek into the cool wet tile. He watched the bathroom lights’ reflections shiver in the thin layer of water as he spoke. “We just. Me and him. I mean Bakugou. We had a shitty day. I’m not gonna tell you about it. But it was shitty. I got too hot. Bakugou told me to take a cold shower.”
“With… him in here?”
“I told him to come in here. I think. It’s okay. Fuyumi.” He patted her knee, leaving a wet spot where his hand touched. “I didn’t want him to be by himself. He was sad earlier.”
Fuyumi stared down at him. “Shiyo, you can’t… undress around boys while you’re drunk. And then fall asleep. That’s dangerous. You know that, right?”
Shouto closed his eyes. He was still tired, brain still foggy with sleep. “It’s okay. I trust him.”
“You…? What do you mean? You don’t… trust people.”
Why was she talking like that? “I want—I want to.”
“Will you get off the floor, please?”
“No. I like it. I’m going to die here.”
Fuyumi exhaled. “At least sit up. You got your towel all wet.”
Shouto groaned as he sat up, eyes still closed. “Fu-yu-mi. Why’d you turn the light on? I don’t like it.”
He heard Fuyumi’s footsteps move behind him. “I need it to see.”
“I don’t like it,” said Shouto. “It’s trying to eat my eyes. And you’re making me look at myself. I don’t like having a body. Corporeal forms are fucking ridiculous. Why wasn’t I bo—I was—wasn’t? Why wasn’t I born a gaseous cloud? This is t—the worst timeline. I wanna die.”
“Don’t say that. Stand up.”
“I don’t want to.”
Fuyumi’s voice turned sharp. “Shiyo.”
Shouto opened his eyes and stood, stumbling when his balance eluded him. Fuyumi switched his half-soaked towel out with a dry one.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Fuyumi’s gaze dipped. “Whose underwear are you…? Never mind. I’ll get you some of yours. Where’s your underwear drawer?”
Did she not believe him? He was sorry. “I’m—Fuyumi—”
“You know, I’ll find it,” she said, walking past him into his bedroom. She started opening dresser drawers.
In a burst of god-awful clarity, he remembered. And he was, suddenly, very awake.
“Fuyumi—” He stepped forward to stop her. Tried to—he crashed into the sink. “Hey, I can dress—Fu—I can dress myself. Fuyumi. Don’t—”
She reached the underwear drawer.
He watched her face shift from vague annoyance to… something else. Lips parting. She dug around a bit.
“Shiyo,” she said finally. “These are yours?”
Shouto didn’t say anything. His pulse crashed in his ears.
Fuyumi looked at him. “Shiyo.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You…” She looked back in the drawer, then up at Shouto again. “You know these are boys’ underwear. Right?”
He tried to think of an answer. Something normal, acceptable.
But his brain felt like a mud pit.
His breathing was speeding up.
So he just stood there, clenching the ends of his towel close to his chest.
Fuyumi tilted her head, something pained pinching her face. “Do we need to talk?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Shiyo.”
“Not now,” he said. “Please. I can’t talk about this now. I feel like shit and I hate everything and I keep thinking about fucking… eyes. After the sports festival, maybe.”
Fuyumi looked at him for a long time. Then she walked toward him, gently pushed his wet hair off his face and held it there, her cool palm on his forehead.
“Please be careful,” she said, voice almost a whisper. “Please.”
He nodded.
“Things happen to those types of people, Shiyo. Not good things.”
“I know,” he said.
She lowered her hand. Backed away. “I’ll let you get dressed.”
“Fuyumi,” said Shouto. “I’m sorry.”
Fuyumi gave a small nod.
Then she left, closing the door behind her.
The adrenaline in Shouto’s body drained from him all at once, leaving him exhausted.
Fuck.
Fuck. Fuck.
He hadn’t realized that he’d been hoping to keep his secret indefinitely. Not until the question was there. Like a fucking gun in his face.
Of course living two lives wasn’t sustainable.
Of course he was going to have to choose at some point.
He’d hoped he would have longer before he had to decide. Longer to pretend he’d had a seamless transition, to pretend all his classmates and teachers knew and accepted him unconditionally.
Well. Wasn’t much else he could do now except put some damn clothes on.
Shouto’s hands were chilled and clammy, and it took more effort than usual to navigate his dresser drawers and closet. He kept scanning his rack of clothes, forgetting what he was looking for, and having to start over.
Shirt. Shirt shirt shirt shirt shirt.
He found, finally, his Red’s Ocean t-shirt. The pair of shorts he found were pink, a bit lacking in material, and had a small cutesy decorative star pattern, but Shouto didn’t have the energy to search for something else. Bakugou would live, probably.
He leaned against the wall as he pulled his clothes on, and then he dropped into his swivel chair, drained.
Someone banged on the door. Adrenaline once again rushed through Shouto’s body, and he jolted to his feet.
“Oi!” Another bang. “IcyHot! You dead in there?”
Oh.
Bakugou, not Endeavor.
Shouto sat in his swivel chair again, backwards this time, hugging the back of it and pressing his forehead into the headrest. He squeezed his eyes closed. Breathe. Breathe.
Shouto heard the door open. He didn’t look up.
“Tch,” said Bakugou. “Fuck you d—Oi. What’s with the thot shorts?”
Shouto’s voice came out weaker than he meant for it to. “Don’t bang on the door.”
“Hah? Well, you weren’t fuckin’ answering—”
“Endeavor does that,” said Shouto. The buzz of adrenaline pricked his fingers. “Don’t do that.”
Bakugou closed the door—not a slam. A few seconds later, he heard the umph of Bakugou dropping onto his mattress.
Shouto said into the headrest, “I think Fuyumi knows.”
“Wha—about Izuku?”
“No. No, the other thing. Me being Shouto.”
“What the fuck are you talk—” He cut himself off. “Oh.”
Shouto—with some difficulty—got off his chair and went into the bathroom. He found his pain medication on the shelf behind his mirror and shook two into his hand. His hands trembled as he swallowed the pills with water from the sink.
Bakugou looked at him from where he lay on Shouto’s futon. “What’re you takin’?”
“Just some… something for the headache,” said Shouto.
“Oi,” said Bakugou, sitting up. “What the fuck is that?”
Shouto screwed the top back on. “I said it’s something for the headache, fuck off.”
Bakugou didn’t say anything else, but Shouto felt his eyes following him as he put the bottle away and made his way back to his chair, steadying himself on his desk before he sat. He shoved his laptop to the side, knocking a couple pens and a plastic spoon to the ground. Normally, that motion would’ve sent a host of wrappers and crumbs tumbling, but his desk seemed… less cluttered?
Shouto looked around his bedroom.
“Did you clean my room?” he asked Bakugou.
Bakugou laid back on Shouto’s bed, on his back with his arms spread out in a crucifix shape, one leg still dropping off, heel knocking the floor. “Fuck else was I supposed to do? I don’t know how you live with yourself.”
“We pay people to do that,” said Shouto.
Bakugou snorted. “Not enough, apparently.”
Shouto swiveled away from Bakugou. He put his feet up on the edge of his desk, knees bent, slumping down in his seat. It wasn’t comfortable, but he didn’t have the energy to adjust.
He blinked up at the ceiling. His mind was clearing fast now that the fog of sleep had worn off, and it was making him anxious. He hoped the pain pills would kick in soon. Fuyumi wasn’t going to let him sneak more alcohol.
“Sorry,” Shouto said. “For the drunk thing.”
Bakugou grunted.
“I don’t think I remember all of it,” said Shouto. “Did I say anything weird?”
Bakugou was silent for a few seconds. “I didn’t think drunk people stuttered that much,” he said.
“Oh. No, that’s… that’s just me. I have trouble organizing my thoughts while I’m talking. I have a list of phrases I practiced enough that I don’t stumble when I say them. But for other stuff, I have to organize and memorize what I’m going to say before I say it. So I don’t lose my train of thought or forget what I said at the beginning of the sentence. Being under the influence of alcohol or mind-altering drugs makes me forget to… do that.”
“Did you have that memorized?” Bakugou asked. “What you just said.”
“Not… word-for-word,” said Shouto. “But I had a collection of ideas prepared for if somebody asked me why I talk like I do. Avoiding complex sentences helps it stay cohesive.”
“Did you have that memorized?”
“Y-yeah.”
“Fuckin’ hell,” said Bakugou. “That why you never say nothin’?”
Shouto exhaled. “Usually by the time I’m ready to talk, the conversation has moved on.”
“Endeavor teach you to do that?”
“No,” said Shouto. “He just got mad when I stuttered. So I figured out a system. Usually keeps me from going mute. Not always.”
“You go mute?”
“Sometimes.”
“Like on the stairs after the battle trial.”
“Yeah.”
“That sounds fuckin’ exhausting,” said Bakugou. “You ain’t worn out all the damn time?”
Yes.
All the fucking time.
“I do what I need to,” Shouto said.
Bakugou sniffed.
Then, “Oi, y’know—You’re like fuckin’ oobleck.”
Fuckin’ what? Shouto dropped his feet from the desk, turned so he could see Bakugou. “I don’t know what that is.”
“You know—” Bakugou waved a hand toward the ceiling in a vague gesture. “That slime shit you make in middle school. Water and cornstarch. It’s liquid when you pour it, but it turns solid when an outside force acts on it. You can fuckin’ walk on it if you got a big enough tub. It’s… fuck, can’t remember the damn name. Somethin’-somethin’ fluid.”
Oh. Shouto hadn’t done many hands-on activities as a child, but he had studied what Bakugou was talking about. “Non-Newtonian.”
“Fuck. Yeah. Non-Newtonian fluid.”
Shouto had never been good with metaphors. “I don’t get it.”
“Like… fuck.” Bakugou dropped his arm. He didn’t look at Shouto. “You were tellin’ me about your scar earlier, right? And how you’ll talk about it to anybody who asks.”
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“And you told me a bunch of shit most people would consider personal. Like about your dad being a piece of shit and about Lady Hypna.”
“I guess,” said Shouto. “I don’t care who knows about all that.”
“So you’re a fuckin’ open book, huh?”
“I’m a Todoroki,” said Shouto.
Bakugou ignored him. “So how come you don’t talk about how that shit affects you? Anytime someone tries to get up under that, you’re just like—” He made a motion like he was slapping down on something solid, his hand stopping abruptly. “Wham! Fuckin’ Suddenly Solid.”
Oh.
Shouto couldn’t negate the point.
Because that was what he did.
Tell her about the brain damage so she wouldn’t ask if he was tired. Tell him about the scar so he wouldn’t ask if Shouto was afraid. Tell them about the abuse, the years and years of pain, so they would think he’d already processed it all, that he’d figured things out, that he was okay now.
Shouto scrambled for an explanation, something that might pass as an exception. “I was telling you about my mom and my thing about the… stuttering and stuff.”
“Yeah, ’cause you consider that shit a medical problem.” Bakugou dropped his hand. “You didn’t say if you miss your mom. Or if you’re scared she won’t like you.”
Fuck. “Because you don’t—people don’t care about that. People get annoyed if you talk about that kind of stuff.”
“What people?”
“Just… people,” said Shouto. “Everybody.”
“So you were annoyed when I was talking to you right after the thing with Izuku?”
“I—no. No,” said Shouto. “That’s different. You were in pain.”
“You ain’t?”
Shouto stared at Bakugou. He had to force the words to process, and when they did, Shouto laughed.
Shouto didn’t hear his own laugh often, and he didn’t recognize it now. First, an incredulous huff of breath. Then, as he thought more about the connotation and the implications, the laugh grew from a trickle to a rivulet, oh and now he was thinking about the blood coming out of not-Reflection’s eye and, huh, looked like things getting bigger or louder was going to be a trigger for him now, and fuck that was way too general for it to be comfortable, and why was it so funny—
“Bakugou, I’m gone,” said Shouto. He swiveled back toward his desk, his laughter running off in little huffs. “Deku and I. We’re gone. That’s what he was trying to show you. Even if you could kill his father, you couldn’t rescue him.”
“Don’t fuckin’ say that.”
“You can’t do shit, anyway.” Shouto folded his arms on his desk, lay his forehead atop them and stared at a Kit-Kat wrapper on the floor. “Heroes don’t do shit.”
“Heroes ain’t done shit for you,” said Bakugou. “Yet. You just gotta figure out a way to get evidence to ’em. Go through the right channels and shit.”
Shouto, very briefly, considered killing Bakugou. Pinning him against the wall by his throat, making Bakugou look Shouto in the eyes until his own fluttered closed.
Instead, he said, “You have to go.”
“Hah?”
“You have to leave.” Shouto raised his head, leaned back in his seat. He didn’t face Bakugou. “I’m sorry. I know you helped me get here.”
“Fuck you mean, I gotta…?”
“I don’t have the patience or the crayons to explain shit to you right now.” His words were getting strained, forced. He shut his eyes, dug his fingernails into the underside of his knee. “I’ll have your textbooks sent to your house. You shouldn’t tell your mom what happened, but I can’t stop you. Do what you want. Drink some water when you get home. Juice is good if you can’t eat anything. If you start feeling dysphoric or dissociating, go on a run. Or take a cold shower. And come to school tomorrow, because you’ll feel shitty if you don’t.”
“IcyHot, what the fuck do—”
“Bakugou, I’m having intrusive thoughts about killing you right now. I’m scared. Please go. Please go.”
“O-okay,” said Bakugou. “Shit. I’m goin’.”
Shouto kept his eyes closed. He held his breath until he heard his bedroom door close, and then he stood and dragged his desk in front of the door to barricade it.
He needed to be someplace dark, quiet, cramped. Someplace that would make him feel as small as possible, as cut-off from the world as possible, as non-existent as possible.
Shouto went into his closet and closed the door. He settled down between a couple tall storage boxes, pulled his knees up to his chest. Jerked a couple sweaters from the hangers above him, settled them across his shoulders. He wanted to be crushed right now, but this small amount of pressure would have to do.
When he finally stilled, it was so quiet that his ears whined, high and stifling.
Too much. Still too much. He picked at the hem of his shorts. His thoughts felt nebulous, barely tangible. Not a pleasant, drug-induced haze, but something confusing and dysphoric and lost. When Shouto tried to pull his thoughts together, it felt like he was trying to grab dandelion seeds from the air.
That didn’t mean his brain was quiet.
It just meant that the yelling was coming from a million different angles. From everywhere.
Why hadn’t he tried to stop Deku, why hadn’t he been more careful about Bakugou because now Bakugou was like Shouto and Shouto didn’t want that, fuck, fuck, and honestly why hadn’t he drank that drain cleaner while he had it open, and why hadn’t he just stayed a girl so Fuyumi wouldn’t be so upset and scared and disappointed and holy fuck how was he so selfish, and why hadn’t he finished killing himself when he tried it last year, when he was shaking like he was now, when nothing made sense and everything was loud, loud, loud—
Shouto closed his eyes tight, smacked the heel of his palm against his temple. Then he did it again. And again.
Stop. He couldn’t afford this weakness. Stop. Couldn’t afford to have it, definitely couldn’t afford to show it. Stop. What if it happened on live television during the sports festival in a couple days? Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Eventually, inevitably, his heart rate slowed. Not through any effort of his own—he knew that from experience—but because his body could only sustain that level of adrenaline for so long.
Shouto opened his eyes, chest heaving, and stared into the heavy darkness. Dim light from the crack under the closet door pawed curiously at his feet.
He pulled his feet in closer.
###
Shouto had had mornings with worse headaches, with much worse levels of physical pain. But Thursday morning, when his alarm went off and he worked his eyes open, the thought crossed his mind that he’d rather shoot himself than go to school.
Unfortunately, he was on iffy terms with the one person he knew who owned a firearm, so he got up, got ready, and headed out.
At UA, Shouto noticed Uraraka, Asui, Jirou, Ashido, and Aoyama huddling just outside the classroom door. Just a trickle of anxiety at first—
Aoyama noticed Shouto first, gave a V-shaped smile and a fluttery wave. “Bonjour! It’s the man of the hour, ladies.”
—And then panic, like the anxiety funnel had broken and dumped the entirety of its contents atop him.
They were waiting for Shouto. Why were they waiting for him? Was Aoyama’s “man” supposed to be mocking? They knew something. Something about yesterday? About Deku?
Shouto slowed to a halt a little ways away.
Not that he could tell with Asui’s perpetual maybe-a-smile-maybe-not, but as for the others… Why did they look smug?
“Shoutooooo,” said Ashido, and Shouto had little time to prepare before she ran up and jumped onto him, her legs snagging his waist like a slap bracelet. She held onto both sides of his head to secure her place as he stumbled back a step. “We have a question!”
Shouto held his arms out from his sides a little so he wouldn’t have to touch her bare legs. “Please get down.”
“Did you burn Bakugou’s face?”
Shit. Had Bakugou not gone to Recovery Girl about that? Or maybe she didn’t arrive until later in the day. Shouto had assumed Bakugou would take care of it before he came to class, so he hadn’t prepared a cover story.
“Yes,” he said.
Aoyama screeched. “Mon dieu! One word in and there’s already a discrepancy between the stories.”
Shouto tried to see past Ashido’s torso, but he was finding it difficult to move. “What stories?”
“How?” Ashido asked, tilting Shouto’s face so he was forced to meet her large black eyes. “My beautiful, crunchy-haired child. How?”
Shouto blinked up at her. “With my… hand.”
“No, I mean, what were you doing when it happened.”
Shouto considered. What would Bakugou say they’d been doing?
“Fighting,” he said. “I got overheated and accidentally burned him.”
“Really? That’s a weird position to be in during a fight. And how come I’ve never seen you get that overheated in a fight before? I mean, I’ve never even seen you break a sweat. Is your temperature linked to your emotions?”
“Somewhat,” he said. “More heavily linked to adrenaline release.”
Shouto heard a couple people snicker, and his stomach dropped. He pulled the heat from his face. What were they laughing about?
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Asui spoke. “Did you have sex with Bakugou?”
“Tsu!” said Uraraka. “You can’t just ask that!”
A sliver of relief. Was that all? “No,” he said.
Ashido squinted at him.
“You can think I did if you want,” said Shouto. “I don’t care.”
“Most guys would defend against that,” said Ashido.
“Why?”
“Well, I mean…”
“Because she called you gay,” said Asui.
Shouto was starting to wonder why he hadn’t befriended Asui in place of Kaminari, Sero, and Ashido. “I don’t care if you think I’m gay,” said Shouto.
Ashido tilted her head. “Really?”
“I genuinely could not give fewer fucks,” said Shouto. “I assumed everyone already thought I was gay.”
“Oh,” said Aoyama. “An exciting new development.”
Ashido was starting to get heavy. She also smelled like cupcake-scented hand sanitizer, which Shouto had mixed feelings about. “I don’t understand why that’s exciting. Do people think I’m straight?”
A few startled laughs came from the group—Shouto couldn’t see who from. Ashido leaned forward, wrapping her arms around his head and nearly smothering him against her chest. “Not for a minute, babe. You’re too cute to be straight.”
Shouto struggled to put distance between Ashido and his head. He didn’t have anything against Ashido’s chest, but suffocation was not his preferred method of death. He’d seen enough of that yesterday. “Please get down.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Ashido, like she’d forgotten where she was. She dropped to the ground, fixing her skirt before she reached up to smooth Shouto’s hair. “So are you and Blasty, like… dating?”
Shouto kept his face dead. “He wishes.”
Jirou snorted so hard that she doubled over, wheezing. Uraraka placed a concerned hand on her back.
Shouto turned to Aoyama, who was blocking the doorway. “Can I go inside the classroom now?”
“Well, that depends,” said Aoyama, striking a hand-on-hip pose. “Can I have your number?”
“No.”
Jirou wheezed harder. Shouto glanced back in time to see her raise her hand to point at Aoyama, and then she dropped to a crouch, hands on her head, gasping with laughter.
Shouto looked at Asui for an interpretation of the scene. Asui shrugged.
“She’s fine,” said Uraraka, patting Jirou’s back. “Just, um… give her a minute.”
Shouto turned back to Aoyama, who looked stunned and, perhaps consequently, hadn’t moved. Would it be rude to shove him to the side? Probably. Maybe, like… a gentle shove?
But Fuyumi had said no shoving.
Fine.
Shouto reached under Aoyama’s arms, picked him up, and set him off to the side. Then he opened the door and went inside.
Aoyama’s voice followed him. “Ladies, did you see that? You saw that, didn’t you? I’m never bathing again.”
“Kero,” said Asui. “You’re getting too invested in the European role, Yuuchan.”
Bakugou was sitting at his desk, face almost as red as his burn marks, surrounded by Kaminari, Sero, and Kirishima.
Kaminari turned when he heard the door opening. “Yo, what’d Shouto say hap—Dude, Shouto! How’d you get past the barricade?”
Barricade? Oh, he was talking about the group outside. “By force.”
“You used force on girls?” Sero asked.
“Mostly on Aoyama,” said Shouto. Not that he wouldn’t have done the same thing if it had been one of the girls standing in his way. He understood, vaguely, the concept of chivalry toward women, but it seemed strange and nonsensical. They’d all be fighting each other tomorrow, anyway.
“Holy crap, is Aoyama dead?” Kaminari grabbed Sero by the front of his jacket and pulled him toward the door. “Bro, you gotta sing ‘Stayin’ Alive’ while I do CPR, bro. I can’t do mouth-to-mouth and sing at the same time. I mean, I probably could, but I only know the chorus.”
“Dude, I only know it in Spanish,” said Sero. “Is that okay?”
“I don’t know, bro. Don’t you think that’ll be too sexy? I don’t wanna make things weird.”
“Yeah, bro, but I don’t wanna embarrass myself trying to sing the Japanese or English version. I should do my best, right? Plus Ultra. For Aoyama.”
“Bro,” said Kaminari. “Bro, you’re so right. We don’t want Aoyama’s last performance to be mirror Mordor—Rio dork—media crack—democratic crematorium—”
“Mediocre, dude.”
“Yeah, bro. Plus-Ultra-Sexy.” Kaminari grabbed Sero’s hand, raised their joined hands high. He lowered his voice to a growl that Shouto could only assume was meant to imitate an ancient Nordic battle cry. “For Aoyama!”
“For Aoyama!”
They charged out of the room, roaring. The door slammed behind them. Moments later, Shouto heard off-key Spanish singing, shortly thereafter accompanied by Aoyama’s soprano screeching.
Kirishima put his hand over his heart. “They grow up so fast, don’t they?”
Shouto took advantage of the distraction to address Bakugou. “Is Recovery Girl not here?”
“She wouldn’t fuckin’… heal me,” muttered Bakugou.
“Why?”
“Don’t fuckin’ matter. Piss off, I don’t wanna see your damn face.”
Kirishima dropped his hand. “C’mon, bro, don’t be like that.”
Bakugou’s eyes darted away, like they were searching for something to land on. His voice didn’t have its usual bite. “Damn extras have been on my case all fuckin’ morning. Shut the fuck up about my face. They’re just fuckin’ first-degree burns.”
“I think it looks manly,” said Kirishima. “Like war paint or something.”
Shouto expected a sharp Shut the fuck up, Shitty Hair, but it didn’t come. Bakugou just folded his arms atop his desk and dropped his forehead down on them.
Guilt panged in Shouto’s gut. Bakugou probably hadn’t slept much last night. Maybe he should’ve swallowed his discomfort and let Bakugou stay the night. Not that Shouto would’ve been much comfort, but Shouto used to sleep in the same room as Fuyumi when he was young. Occasionally, Fuyumi wasn’t home, so Shouto slept in Touya’s room. He didn’t remember much about his experience with Touya, but Shouto didn’t think it had mattered too much who was in the room with him as long as it was somebody.
Shouto went to his seat. He pulled out his phone and texted Bakugou.
Why wouldn’t Recovery Girl heal you?
Bakugou’s phone buzzed. It took him a bit to reach into his pocket and look at it under his desk. Shouto heard him make a scoffing noise, but he received a text in return.
Bakugou:
Told her I got the burn when I was beating you up
Shouto:
Genius. I’ll go with you and explain that the burn was my fault. Do you want to go now?
Bakugou:
Fuck off
Ain’t going anywhere with you. I’ll let it heal on its own.
Shouto:
It’ll still be there during the sports festival.
Bakugou:
Yeah I know how healing works, you fucking obsolete shaved ice machine
Shouto:
I take it you didn’t tell your parents about yesterday.
Bakugou:
Stop fucking texting me
Shouto put his phone away. He heard it buzz and wondered why Bakugou had told him to stop texting and then proceeded to send another—
Oh.
It wasn’t Bakugou. It was Deku.
Nausea floated in Shouto’s stomach. He opened the message.
Ya Boi Deku:
How’s Kacchan?
Shouto debated whether he should reply. He didn’t really want to talk to Deku now, not so soon after what happened yesterday, but he also didn’t want Deku to think he was cutting off communication with him.
Shouto:
Right now? Pissed.
Ya Boi Deku:
Oh you answered! :3
Like normal pissed or weird pissed?
Shouto:
Weird pissed.
Ya Boi Deku:
:/
Did you stay with him last night?
Shouto:
He was at my house for a bit and then went home.
Ya Boi Deku:
Oh I was hoping maybe you stayed with him.
Did you have a fight or something?
Shouto:
I think so. At least a difference in philosophy. I sent him home so I wouldn’t snap at him.
I’m sorry I brought him.
Ya Boi Deku:
I get it, it’s fine. He can be an ass. What about you, are you ok?
Shouto:
I’m fine. Normal.
I don’t think you’re okay, though.
Ya Boi Deku:
Lmfaoooo I mean obviously I’m fucked up but might as well make the most of things, ya know?
Shouto:
I don’t mean like that.
I was under the impression that you didn’t experience emotions anymore, or that you at least had them severely blunted. But after yesterday, I’m concerned that’s not the case.
Ya Boi Deku:
Ok wait
Just to clarify. You’re concerned that I DO experience emotions?
Shouto:
Yes.
Ya Boi Deku:
I get why you’d think I don’t, but what made you change your mind? Because I cried when I saw Kacchan?
Shouto:
No. When you yelled.
Deku’s next text was slow in arriving.
Ya Boi Deku:
I yelled?
Shouto:
Right before we left the apartment.
When Deku didn’t respond, Shouto sent another text.
Shouto:
You don’t remember?
Ya Boi Deku:
I don’t. I’m sorry.
What did I say?
Shouto:
Just for us to get out.
Ya Boi Deku:
That must’ve been scary. Yelling probably triggers a trauma response for you. I’m sorry I did that.
Shouto:
Do you remember the rest of what happened?
Ya Boi Deku:
I remember killing the guy. Cleanups are usually where it gets hazy.
Shouto:
Do you have dissociative identity disorder?
Ya Boi Deku:
I don’t think so.
Things just get complicated in my head. You probably know about that.
Shouto:
Yeah.
Ya Boi Deku:
I don’t really act that fake, do I?
I spent a lot of time studying expressions and conversations and I thought I was doing it right
Shouto:
I don’t think other people question it.
Ya Boi Deku:
But it looks off to you?
Shouto:
Yes.
Ya Boi Deku:
Well shit.
Shouto:
I think maybe our brains work similarly. How much did you have to study human interaction?
Ya Boi Deku:
An embarrassing amount. You can ask Kacchan. I was super awkward growing up. Had no idea wtf was going on or how to act in public.
Shouto:
I still don’t. How do I study?
Ya Boi Deku:
Please don’t.
I meant what I said about that not being the kind of thing you fix. It’s not designed to be fixed. It’s like trying to play a PC game on your phone.
Shouto:
I don’t understand that simile.
Ya Boi Deku:
I mean it’s difficult and exhausting and it gets more frustrating the longer you try to do it. Not less.
“Todoroki, off your phone.”
Shouto looked up, startled. He hadn’t realized that Aizawa had walked in and was doing role call. He typed out a quick Talk later before putting his phone away.
His head spun.
It’s not designed to be fixed.
What, so he was going to be like this his whole life? Confused, afraid, stumbling through conversations, accidentally offending people he didn’t mean to offend, consciously and carefully picking his way through every facial expression and change of tone and hidden meaning, scaring off potential friends with his resting I-would-rather-be-dead-and-rotting-than-be-here-with-you face?
Well shit, indeed.
Notes:
I have an excuse for being so ridiculously late replying to comments, and the excuse is that I am a bad person :D but some of the comments y'all left for the last couple chapters got me very close to crying happy tears so thank you.
Also ridiculously frustrated rn bc I paid for an (online) ADHD assessment and the feedback I got was along the lines of "your many ADHD-like symptoms that you've experienced since early childhood are actually just a result of other mental disorders, bad sleep, your shitty personality, the two times you smoked weed, and hella trauma" and like I'm not saying they're w r o n g I'm just saying that I would really really really really like to be able to learn literally anything in class and complete more than one task per year. Also wh. Why do they need to know how often you watch p*rn for an adhd assessment. Why.
Chapter 32: Shouto is Very Asexual (and Possibly Kinky but We're Not Gonna Talk About That Right Now)
Summary:
The entirety of my username is "Everyone thinks I'm gay, but I'm actually just sad." This chapter is the embodiment of that.
Heavier su/cidal ideation this chapter, so take care.
Notes:
CW: suicidal ideation/planning (srsly these thought processes are deep inside Shouto's current Bad-Brain-Chemicals POV, so don't think I'm spewing objective truths here), discussion of past suicide attempt, brief mention of kink, prescription drug abuse, physical child abuse/violence, witnessed panic attack, discussion of intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, discussion of transphobia/homophobia, references to violence & death in past chapters, threatened violence and abusive power dynamics
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
It wasn’t, by any means, the first day to pass in a haze.
That didn’t keep Shouto from thinking about making it his last one.
He wasn’t sure at which point he’d crossed the line from idealizing—keeping the concept as a safety net, a comfort, a knife in a bedside drawer, something that would be there if things got out of control and couldn’t be fixed—to actively considering it. This morning in homeroom? Last night when he made Fuyumi look scared? When Shouto had seen himself in Bakugou’s vacant terror, or when Shouto had heard himself in Deku’s yell?
Or earlier? With the drain cleaner. Or at the hospital. Or when Fuyumi stopped touching him.
Regardless of when it had started, he was having those thoughts again. When he sat at his desk under the air conditioning vent, when he washed his hands after a biology lab. The chill of it, the damp, the memory of something tugging at his consciousness.
It had seemed romantic then, to the extent that Shouto understood romance. But once he’d dipped just a bit too far, once the fear had rocketed through him, once he’d tried to climb back into consciousness and it gripped him with claws that hurt to tear free from—
Shouto didn’t know much about romance.
But he knew that suicide and romance had never slept in the same bed.
Killing himself would not be a comfort. It wouldn’t feel like destiny, and it wouldn’t give him a sense of control. He’d be sad and alone and afraid, and then he’d be dead. Learning that had scared him away.
But he’d sat with that information for a year now.
That didn’t make it any less frightening, but it did make it more normal. A fear that hid in the ranks of his general anxiety. And yeah, maybe that raised the average of his everyday nervousness and made it harder to fall asleep, but at least maybe now he could trick himself into following through. Like he’d done with the noumu at the USJ.
At lunch, Shouto sat across from Bakugou and stabbed a steamed carrot into mush with a chopstick.
Would they postpone the first-years’ sports festival if he killed himself when he got home today? Cancel it, even? Ugh. He didn’t want to be inconveniencing his classmates even after he was dead. Kirishima seemed really excited about the festival. He was talking animatedly now, hands waving, teeth bright and sharp.
Shouto hoped Kirishima would choose a different career path before he graduated high school. He was a good person, and it seemed like he might push back when he encountered some systematic injustice. Kirishima’s hardening was good for defense, but he wasn’t so unbreakable that the cogs of the Hero industry couldn’t crush him.
It would be like stepping on a beetle.
“Bro?”
Shouto startled. Oh. Kirishima was talking to him. Shouto sat up. “What?”
“I asked if you were good.”
“Um,” said Shouto. “Probably more true neutral.”
Kirishima’s face went blank. “Huh?”
“He’s asking if you’re okay, fuckass,” muttered Bakugou, not looking up. He was busy skewering his green peas through with a chopstick. “True neutral. Fuckin’ dork.”
“Yeah,” said Kirishima. “You were kinda staring at me, Shouto.”
Shit. “Didn’t realize. Sorry.”
“I mean, it’s fine, I was just—”
“Oh my gawd,” Ashido interrupted, too loud. “Do you have a crush on Ei, Shouto?”
Kirishima blushed, shifting in his seat.
A crush? How was that relevant? “I don’t think so,” said Shouto. “Why?”
“Because you were staring at him!”
“I stare at a lot of people,” said Shouto.
“Oh, yeah? Like who?”
“Oi, Pepto Bismol,” said Bakugou, still not raising his head. “Shut the fuck up.”
Shouto thought. “Asui.”
Ashido pursed her lips, tilted her head. “Really? Asui?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “I can’t figure out if she’s smiling or if that’s just her face. And Tokoyami, because he has a group of feathers on his right side that twitches when there’s a sound, and I want to know if something else makes his left side twitch. Jirou, because it’s therapeutic when she twirls her ear jacks around her finger and then lets them go so they twist out. Yaoyorozu, because she’s pretty. Shouji—”
“Dude, hold up,” said Kaminari. “So you do like Yaoyorozu?”
Shouto let the sentence sit for a few seconds as he searched for the most likely connotation. He didn’t come up with anything definite. “I’m not sure what you’re asking. I don’t hate her.”
“Like do you have a crush on her?” said Sero.
“I… admire her,” said Shouto. Why was everyone so obsessed with crushes? Shouto barely understood the term. He’d work around it, try to answer their questions without revealing that he had no fucking clue what a crush was supposed to feel like. “She has strong work ethic and leadership skills. She’s intelligent and knows how to weaponize her intelligence to benefit her in a fight.”
Kaminari spoke. “And you think she’s pretty?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “She’s nice to look at. Like a painting.”
“Dude!” said Kaminari. “You like her. You should totally ask her out!”
“On a date?”
“Yeah, bro.”
Shouto considered. Then said, “Why?”
“You serious?” asked Sero.
“Yes. I don’t understand why I need to ask someone on a date just because I like how they look. Do you not think she’s pretty?”
“I mean—yeah,” said Sero. “She is.”
“Freakin’ gorgeous,” said Kaminari.
“Ditto,” said Ashido.
Shouto stared at them. “Then why aren’t any of you asking her on a date?”
Sero and Kaminari looked at each other. Kaminari snorted.
“Bro,” said Kaminari. “We don’t have a chance with Yaoyorozu. You do.”
Shouto skimmed back through the romance movies he’d watched with Fuyumi, and—no, that still didn’t make sense. Weren’t high-level love interests supposed to be charismatic, smooth-talking, thoughtful? He was none of those things. “Because I’m… rich?”
“Aw, Shouto,” said Ashido.
“Dude, no,” said Kaminari. “Because you’re hot.”
What? Why was having a temperature quirk a desirable trait in a partner? To keep them warm in the winter? That was what clothes were for. And Shouto couldn’t manipulate his temperature while he was asleep, so it wasn’t like he could serve as a personal heater in that respect. Also, heated blankets existed, and Momo likely could make them with her creation quirk.
Unless Kaminari was referring to temperature play as a kink practice? That didn’t seem very generalizable, though.
Kaminari looked to Kirishima. “Did I break him?”
“I think maybe I’m not understanding,” said Shouto. “I can’t think of any reasons why a temperature-manipulating quirk would be good for a relationship.”
Ashido leaned over and squeezed him in a side-hug. “I love you so much, you adorable idiot.”
“Fucking moron,” muttered Bakugou. “The other hot.”
The other…?
Oh.
He’d never understood that concept, either. Apparently hot was different than aesthetically pleasing, encompassing characteristics other than physical appearance. He’d never been able to pin down exactly which characteristics, though.
“I don’t think so,” Shouto told Kaminari. “Are you sure?”
“Trust me, I know,” said Kaminari.
“I don’t think so,” said Shouto.
“You are, dude!”
“Why?”
“’Cause… ’cause you’re, like, aloof and stuff.” Kaminari turned to Kirishima. “Is that the right word?”
“I think so,” said Kirishima.
“Because I’m… unfriendly?” asked Shouto. That really didn’t make sense.
“The connotation’s a little different,” said Kirishima. “Aloof is like… remote, above it all. Mysterious, kind of.”
Bakugou kicked Shouto under the table. “It means you’re a prick.”
“Shut the fuck up, Bakugou,” said Shouto.
Finally, Bakugou raised his head.
“Oh, shit,” muttered Sero.
But Bakugou didn’t move, didn’t raise a popping hand. Just said, “You just get fuckin’… worse the more people get to know you.” And looked back down. “Asshole.”
Which was true. Shouto would admit that much.
But he didn’t like the way it had been delivered. Tone even, unemotional. It was disconcerting.
So Shouto told Bakugou, “That’s not what you said last night.”
And that was how Shouto and Bakugou ended up in Principal Nezu’s office.
###
“Nice job,” said Shouto.
Bakugou turned his head to glare at Shouto. The motion revealed the ice pack Bakugou was holding to the left side of his face, and Shouto snorted.
“What?” Bakugou snapped.
He and Bakugou were sitting in separate chairs beside each other in Nezu’s otherwise empty office. Cementoss—the teacher watching over the cafeteria that day—had used his quirk to separate the two and then ordered them here. Nezu’s secretary had fetched Bakugou’s ice pack. At the moment, they were waiting for Nezu.
“Sorry,” said Shouto. “You just look really fucking stupid.”
“Fuck you gonna do when they give us in-school suspension for fighting and we miss the sports festival? Hah?”
“Nezu won’t do that,” said Shouto. “I’m going to win, and you have to give your fucking… speech thing.”
“Fuck you mean, you’re gonna win? Real fuckin’ sure of yourself, hah?”
A corner of Shouto’s mouth tugged up. “That’s what Shinsou said.”
“Well, he’s right, whoever the fuck he is. You’re a fuckin’ stuck-up prick.”
“I’m an aloof prick.”
Bakugou kicked Shouto’s chair, jarring Shouto. “You’re gonna get a big fuckin’ head about that now, ain’t you?”
Shouto hummed. “It’s not really information I can use.”
“Why the fuck did you have to say that shit?” Bakugou asked. His voice lowered. “You’re okay with people thinkin’…?”
“I don’t care,” said Shouto. “I don’t know why you do so much. It’s fucking weird that you’re okay with trans people but not gay people.”
Bakugou’s eyes darted to the side, then back to Shouto. “Hah? I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to when you react like you do.”
Bakugou’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not a fucking homophobe.”
“What’d you do if someone you knew started dating someone of the same gender? Like me or Kirishima or Ashido?”
“Wouldn’t fuckin’… care,” said Bakugou.
“Yeah? What if they brought their partner around and started introducing them as such?”
Bakugou’s mouth twitched.
“What if I came out as trans?” Shouto asked. “Started telling people, maybe people who weren’t as okay with it as Deku? Or if I’d started transitioning halfway into the schoolyear instead of before it started?”
Bakugou lowered his ice pack, dropping it in his lap. He looked away, lips smacking.
“I think it’s fucking hilarious when you get mad,” said Shouto, “but you have a lot of people watching when you do shit like that. Some of them are making a note that you’re not a safe person to be themselves around. Maybe other people are going to think you’re a safe person to be homophobic around.”
“I get it,” Bakugou said, voice curt.
“Are you going to fucking do something about it?”
“Yeah, I… yeah. Shut the fuck up.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“I still don’t get why you said what you did.”
“You were acting sad,” said Shouto. “I didn’t like that.”
Bakugou cut his eyes toward Shouto. “You didn’t like that? Sorry, does it fucking bother you that I need a little more than vodka and a cold shower to get over watching my childhood friend fucking kill somebody?”
“You didn’t watch him.” Shouto tapped his own chest. “I watched him. And I didn’t mean that I don’t like you looking sad. I mean I don’t like you being sad. I’m your friend. I want you to be okay.”
Bakugou muttered, “Not your fuckin’—”
“I don’t care if you consider me your mortal fucking enemy. I want you to be okay, and I’m going to fucking tell you that because I don’t fucking know if I’m still going to be ali—if—” Shouto cut himself off, rerouted. “I know it’s easier for you to be angry than to be sad. I think… probably you need to be sad sometimes. But I don’t want you to get stuck there, because it’s hard to get—um. Get out again. Once you get used to it.”
“Tch,” said Bakugou. “So what, it’s better to be fuckin’ mad all the time?”
“I don’t know. I was just trying to make you stop thinking about it.”
Bakugou looked forward. He scratched the corner of his eyebrow.
“Oi,” said Bakugou. “Fuck was that about last night?”
Last night? “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“The… that last part. You makin’ me leave.”
Something heavy and uncomfortable settled in Shouto’s stomach. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t doing well last night. Mentally. I was having intrusive thoughts.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s… um.” Shouto had never talked about this to anyone. Didn’t especially want to talk to Bakugou about it. There was some shit that felt safer to keep close to his chest. But Bakugou had been at the brunt of it last night, and it wasn’t fair for Shouto to deny him an explanation. “Thoughts I have that I don’t want to have, and usually I can’t make it stop.”
“About fuckin’… killing people?”
“No. No,” said Shouto. He didn’t want Bakugou to think he was a fucking latent serial killer. “I mean—yes, but only sometimes. I don’t act on most of them, but I get paranoid that I’m going to, especially when I’m not… not thinking straight.”
Bakugou lowered his hand, turning his head a few degrees to look at Shouto. “What—fuck you mean, on most of them? Fuck did you do?”
“Not like that.” Why was Shouto so bad at this? “Not to anybody else. I never—I never hurt anybody else, I’m not like that.”
“Then what?”
“Just—” He was losing his words, and it sent a streak of panic through him. He hadn’t gotten like this in front of Bakugou in a while. It wouldn’t look good if he went mute now. “Just stuff to prepare for if—you know. For if the thought happened. Like if I’m getting ready for bed and start thinking that maybe I’ll sleepwalk and try to go kill Fuyumi, I’ll stay awake until she goes to work.”
“Hah?” said Bakugou. “You sleepwalk?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Then why the fuck would you think that shit?”
“I don’t,” said Shouto. “I know it’s illogical. But the part of my brain that knows that doesn’t—doesn’t—it doesn’t connect right with the part that’s scared, so I have to do that stuff to keep me from panicking. I know, logically, I probably won’t lose control of my body and kill somebody while I’m asleep or because of an emotional fluctuation. But I get—I keep—I get scared that I’m going to completely lose control of my brain. Because I don’t know it well, and it’s always doing new stuff I don’t like, and I think maybe it’s not far-fetched that I could snap and kill somebody I care about.”
“Okay,” said Bakugou. His gaze wandered the room for a few seconds before it drifted back to Shouto. “Well, first of all, you better hope there’s no psych eval before the Hero permit exam.”
“I know.”
“Secondly, I know I said ‘first of all,’ but that’s all I got. You’re fucked up.”
“Thanks,” said Shouto. “I feel a lot better now.”
Bakugou kicked Shouto’s chair again. “Go to therapy, you damn freak.”
“No, you,” said Shouto.
They fell into silence for a bit. Bakugou glanced back at the door, scowling.
“What’d you tell your mom?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou shot him a look. “None of your fuckin’ business.”
“That’s fine. As long as you don’t mind me accidentally telling her a conflicting story the next time I’m at your house.”
Bakugou made a frustrated noise. “Just said that we were sparring and you burned me by accident.”
“Did she believe you?”
“No.”
“What’d she think it was from?”
Bakugou glared.
“Okay, so,” said Shouto, “unless you’re fine with your mom thinking you’re an active member of the gay kink scene, we should probably say that we were fighting. Concerning a subject, not just physically fighting.”
Bakugou grunted. “Fighting over what?”
“I don’t know. The sports festival or something.”
“You wouldn’t get overheated fighting about the fucking sports festival.”
“Your mom doesn’t know that,” said Shouto.
“She knows everything. Maybe, like… over a girl or somethin’.”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. “Even Kaminari wouldn’t believe that.”
“I’m straight, asshole.”
“Yeah? Name one woman.”
Bakugou blinked. “Fuckin’… Mother Teresa.”
“A dead nun,” said Shouto. “She is definitely in the top ten picks for heterosexual men. My mistake. You obviously know what you’re doing.”
Bakugou’s cheeks flushed red. “Look, I’ll just fuckin’ tell the old hag it was somethin’ private and that we got it sorted out. Probably better if I don’t lie too much, anyway. That witch can tell when I’m lying.”
“Your mom isn’t a witch. You’re bad at lying.”
“And you ain’t?”
“I could probably do it if someone told me what to say,” said Shouto. “I don’t know what to do with my face or voice, but I never do, so it cancels out.”
The office door opened. Aizawa walked in, closed the door behind him. Silently, he grabbed a chair from along the wall and pulled it up in front of them. Sat.
Aizawa gave them a long look.
Bakugou spoke first. “Nezu ain’t coming?”
“Told him I’d take care of it,” said Aizawa.
Oh.
That couldn’t mean good things.
“Tell me what happened,” said Aizawa.
Shouto said, “I told a gay joke and Bakugou—”
“I don’t give a shit about the cafeteria,” said Aizawa. “What happened yesterday? You two have been distracted all day. And don’t fuck around with me. I’m using my lunch break for this.”
Shouto hurried to speak before Bakugou could open his mouth and mess things up. “We had a fight.”
“Mm-hm. What about?”
“I’m not going to talk about it,” said Shouto. “It’s resolved now.”
Aizawa motioned to Bakugou’s face—to the burns, and to the bruise that had recently joined the ensemble. “That’s resolved?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
Aizawa looked at Bakugou, eyebrow quirked.
Bakugou mumbled, “S’what happened.”
“What?”
“I s—I said that’s what fuckin’ happened.”
Aizawa stared at them.
It was anxiety-provoking. Not Aizawa’s stare so much as wondering how long Bakugou could go without blurting out something stupid and damning.
But no one spoke.
“All right,” Aizawa said finally, and the bubble of anxiety in Shouto’s chest lost a little of its pressure. “You’re both lying, but maybe it’s something I’d be happier not knowing.”
Shouto blinked. He understood how Aizawa had known that Bakugou was lying. But Shouto could stop his blushes, could keep his eyes forward, voice even, face dead. So how…? Maybe Aizawa had just assumed Shouto’s guilt by association.
“You’re both getting two days’ in-school suspension for fighting in the cafeteria,” said Aizawa. “The Monday and Tuesday after the sports festival. You’ll be cleaning the locker rooms.”
Oh. Well, Monday and Tuesday were ages away. And that was bonus motivation to kill himself after the sports festival, because the locker rooms were fucking disgusting.
Shouto and Bakugou stayed sitting as Aizawa stood, put his chair back against the wall, and headed toward the door.
Then Aizawa paused, hand on the doorknob. “Just… please, for the love of God, keep PDA off campus. That’s not something I want to think about at night.”
Aizawa left the room.
Bakugou looked at Shouto, face blank.
Then his eyes widened.
“Wait,” said Bakugou. “Wait—shit—”
“Might as well embrace it at this point,” said Shouto. “What are we naming our first child? I was thinking Melvin. And I want all the drapes in our house to be neon leopard print.”
Bakugou heaved himself halfway out of his chair, his ice pack dropping to the carpet. Then he stopped abruptly. His hands gripped the armrests. He dropped back down into his seat, spoke through his teeth. “You wanna die?”
“Stop asking me that if you’re not planning on following through.” Shouto stood, flicked the side of Bakugou’s head with the back of his fingers. “Have fun cleaning those locker rooms by yourself. I’m going to off myself over the weekend.”
Bakugou swatted Shouto’s hand, eyes darting down and away. “Shut the fuck up.”
Shouto dropped his hand. He searched Bakugou’s face. Bakugou was blinking a little too much, his chest moving up and down a little too fast.
Shouto nearly asked if Bakugou was okay. He caught himself. The only reason people asked that question was to hear you say yes. To assuage their guilt at doing nothing.
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. “Are you panicking?”
“N—fuck would I panic for?” Bakugou leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees and wring his hands together. “That shit don’t happen to me. Chest is just kinda tight. Just need a fuckin’… need a second. Go back to the fuckin’ cafeteria, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Shouto wanted to leave. He didn’t like being in rooms with emotional people. They were unpredictable, and there was never a completely safe way to react.
But he didn’t move.
“What?” Bakugou snapped. He didn’t look up, pinching the end of his nose and giving a quick, sharp sniff. “I said you could go. So go.”
Shouto sat down again. He reached over the small gap between their seats and nudged the back of his hand against Bakugou’s bicep.
Bakugou didn’t react. But Shouto could hear Bakugou’s breaths now, shorter and more labored than they should’ve been. His hands were trembling, too, though it looked like he was trying to still them by clasping them together.
“It’ll stop,” said Shouto. “Give it a few minutes.”
“I don’t—” Bakugou’s shoulders hunched. One of his hands darted up to swipe at his eyes, brush over his mouth. His fingers lingered there. Fear crept into his voice. “I don’t know what’s—”
“It’s a stress reaction.” Shouto was back to hating himself all over again. Once the first panic attack had happened, you were statistically more likely to have another one. And another one. And another one. “It’s just adrenaline.”
Bakugou sat back in his seat, face flushed, lips parted, chest heaving. When he looked at Shouto, his eyes were wide and watery, and there was that sharp, burning pang of guilt.
Shouto’s fault.
Bakugou said, almost a hiccup, “I can’t—” He grabbed just below the collar of his shirt, gave a weak tug. “IcyH—”
“It’ll stop,” said Shouto.
Bakugou leaned forward again. Hands capping his knees, lips parted, blinking at the ground. His chest heaved.
“Fuck,” Bakugou muttered between breaths. “Fuck.”
Shouto kept the back of his hand pressed against Bakugou’s arm. There were methods to stop a panic attack, probably, for when you knew your brain was overreacting and everything was going to work out. But nothing ever did work out, and Shouto didn’t know what to do.
Bakugou’s breathing, finally, began to slow. When Bakugou leaned back in his seat, it was with his eyes closed, fingers cupped over his nose and mouth. His hands were shaking.
“I think Nezu keeps water in his fridge,” said Shouto. “Do you want some?”
Bakugou nodded.
Shouto got up and took a water bottle from the fridge, twisting the cap off before tapping Bakugou’s wrist. Bakugou lowered his hands, blinking. Shouto pressed the bottle into his palm. Made sure his fingers were wrapped around it before he let go.
Bakugou got the water to his mouth mostly without spilling it. He drank, set the bottle on the ground between his feet.
“Shit,” said Bakugou, not meeting Shouto’s eyes. He sounded hoarse. “So that’s that.”
“I’m sorry,” said Shouto. “I thought that—maybe if you—”
“Just get—go back to the goddamn cafeteria, Todoroki. Stop trying to get in my head. You can’t see what’s going on there. Sick of you actin’ like you know.”
Todoroki.
Shouto remembered Bakugou telling him that they weren’t on good terms, but hearing his family name made it real.
“Okay,” said Shouto. “I didn’t mean… I’m just going by my own experience.”
Bakugou’s voice was caustic. “Not everybody’s like you.”
Right.
Bakugou wasn’t like Shouto because Bakugou wouldn’t give up.
Deku wasn’t like Shouto because Deku could be saved.
Well. He hoped Bakugou was right.
That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?
Shouto tossed the plastic water bottle cap into Bakugou’s lap and left the room.
###
When Endeavor banged on Shouto’s bedroom door that night, Shouto was scrolling through a German baby names website with very little memory of how or why he’d ended up there. Which, fine, whatever. He’d finished off the last of his pain pills half an hour ago and had been feeling pretty good.
Shouto closed his laptop and went to answer the door. Talking to Endeavor while high should be… fun.
Endeavor didn’t bother with a greeting. “Are you going to use your fire at the sports festival tomorrow?”
“No,” said Shouto. “I won’t need it.”
“Use it,” said Endeavor. “At least once. I don’t care how. People need to make the connection.”
The connection between Shouto and Endeavor. Right. “What if I don’t?”
“Then I’m taking you out of UA,” said Endeavor. “Don’t think about throwing the competition, either.”
“What if I do?” He wasn’t so much being sassy as he was weighing his options.
“If you use your fire and still don’t make first, you’re out of UA. It shouldn’t be hard for you. You’ll win unless you’re deliberately trying not to.”
“What if I don’t use my fire and I lose?” Shouto asked. “It’s not like you let me have any interests or hobbies. If you take me out of UA, there’s not much else to threaten me with.”
Endeavor’s face hardened. “You don’t need all your fingers to become a Pro Hero.”
“Oh, physical violence,” said Shouto. “Original. Do I get a prosthetic so I can shoot lasers out of my finger?”
Endeavor gave him a long look.
“Are you drunk?” he asked.
Shouto leaned against the doorframe. “You’d think that you could tell the difference between being drunk and being high after sending as many teens to those—” Air quotes. “—villain rehabilitation centers as you have. Didn’t you have an addict son once? Am I imagining shit? I thought I used to have another broth—”
Endeavor grabbed the front of Shouto’s shirt and flung him back into his room. Shouto tripped over his desk chair, felt something sharp scrape across the back of his neck and head. The corner of his desk—?
He landed on his side, his breath knocked out of him.
“Watch yourself,” said Endeavor. “Don’t let me catch you high again.”
Shouto sat up. He felt something wet trickle down his back.
“I’m doing all of this for your own good, Shiyo. I don’t want you to go down the same path as Touya did. You understand?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“I don’t think you do.”
“I understand,” said Shouto.
Endeavor narrowed his eyes. Shouto was, for a moment, terrified that Endeavor would walk toward him, that he’d—that—
“Get some sleep,” said Endeavor. “You need to be well-rested for tomorrow.”
“I know.”
Endeavor shut the door.
Heavy footsteps retreating.
Shouto touched the back of his neck, brought his hand back around front to look. It was bloody.
He snickered and lay back down on the floor.
No fucking way was he going to spend his last high tending to a cut.
Notes:
Oh boy. Been feeling gross. Not Shouto-level gross, but gross. There've been a couple times this month that I haven't left my bedroom for 2 days in a row. Barricading my door, panic attacks when I hear footsteps, all the fun stuff. My roommate is a lovely lovely human and has yet to snap at me for avoiding her or hoarding dishes in my room. Day-drinker solidarity, I guess.
I have a lot of the next chapters drafted already, so hopefully they'll roll out a little faster. No promises. My brain is a 1998 computer with water damage. But things are gonna Happen and I am so so ready to share all the fuckupedness that is Sports Festival Shouto.
And thank y'all for your comments???? I have no spoons with which to respond (I used every single one to eat ice cream straight from the carton and they are sitting in the sink unwashed) but I am very very happy that the story is connecting for some people. I mean, I'm concerned and I'm sorry that you relate to any of this, but also thanks for telling me :)
Ok I'm gonna go eat beans and drink alcohol now 👍
Chapter 33: Shouto and Momo Get Married or Something, IDK
Summary:
For someone with an explosion quirk, Bakugou is pretty good at giving the cold shoulder. Turns out he's also got something on his mind.
Shinsou gets mouthy. Queen Momo keeps dropping her goddamn crown. 6k words of Shouto having no fucking clue what's going on.
Notes:
CW (minor spoilers): References to suicide, contemplating suicide, abusive/controlling threats regarding family members, brief body horror, abuse survivor mindset, dissociation and amnesia, typical references to past abuse, sexual jokes, misogyny trauma survivor mindset, disrespecting physical limits, panic, mind control/helplessness, PTSD r*pe flashback (not explicit but some suggestive material)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The morning of the sports festival, Shouto left the house while it was still dark. He didn’t want to see Fuyumi. It’d just make him feel bad.
He took the long route, looking into the glass windows of the coffee shop where he’d met the League at the day of the USJ incident. He half expected to see them sitting there now.
He didn’t.
He wasn’t sure why that made him feel worse.
Shouto headed toward the stadium. The security there was lax this early in the morning, and the man stationed there tried to make conversation. “Thought that other kid was crazy for getting here so early. Guess you U.A. kids are just like that, huh?”
Shouto didn’t ask who the other kid was. He already knew.
He found Bakugou slumped in one of the plastic seats bolted to the bleachers in the student section. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t open them until Shouto walked past, making the bleachers creak.
“Shit,” muttered Bakugou, sitting up. He looked tired in the still-dimmed yellow stadium lights. “Fuckin’… what’re you here so early for?”
Shouto ignored the question. “Do you want to stretch?”
“Already did. Try’na get some goddamn sleep.”
“Okay.” Shouto started down the bleachers again. “I’ll stretch in the locker room.”
Bakugou slumped back down. Once Shouto had walked past him, though, Bakugou called out again.
“Oi. Fuck happened to your neck?”
Shouto glanced back at Bakugou. Briefly, and then he kept walking.
Not worth it.
###
Natsuo texted Shouto before the commencement.
Hey rooting for you today!! Watching with my gf in the dorms. I’ll see you at the house later. Break a leg!
Not literally tho. For the love of God.
And Fuyumi:
Good luck, Shichan! Hugs and kisses! <3
And Endeavor.
You’ll be entering the public eye today, Shiyo. I was told you’ve been talking to Eraserhead. I know you’re frustrated with your current schedule, but you need to start thinking about your family. Don’t let anything private leak to the press. That attention is only going to hurt your siblings.
Shouto gave a dry smile as he reread the last text. Endeavor had been brainstorming since last night, huh? It had been a while since Endeavor had threatened consequences for Fuyumi and Natsuo if Shouto disobeyed.
He didn’t respond to any of the texts.
He’d expected to feel nauseous, maybe jittery. That was certainly how the others seemed. Ashido was bouncing in her seat, and Kaminari looked like he was going to vomit.
Shouto felt… not hollow, that wasn’t the word. It was a type of empty, but that didn’t mean it didn’t weigh him down. Because it did. It was heavy.
It was, perhaps, the only thing keeping him in his seat. Shouto felt so detached from the noise and movement around him that he wasn’t entirely convinced he still had a corporeal form.
He watched Bakugou when he could. He seemed restless, shifting in his seat, snapping at anyone who tried to sit near him. Shouto sat a couple rows above him, and he was still the closest in proximity to Bakugou. Every so often, Bakugou would scan the stadium. Shouto wondered if he was searching for someone.
Shouto decided to risk being ordered to move. “Bakugou,” he said, and when Bakugou didn’t look back— “Bakugou.”
Bakugou didn’t bother turning to look up at him. “Fuck you want?”
“Are your parents coming?”
“You fuckin’ kidding?” Bakugou said. “You could buy a car with the money it takes to buy a ticket.”
“I don’t think so,” said Shouto. “It wouldn’t be a very good car.”
“It’d drive.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“Nobody,” said Bakugou. “Mind your damn business.”
###
Iida might have given a (stiff) pep talk before the sports festival began. Or maybe it was All Might, or Aizawa, or all of them. Shouto didn’t remember.
He was already dissociating.
Shouto didn’t snap back into the present until Midnight had finished giving what Shouto assumed was Bakugou’s introduction as the holder of first place of the entrance exam and as the commencement speaker. Someone’s shoulder smacked Shouto’s as they walked by—
Bakugou.
Bakugou didn’t look back as he walked past Shouto and up onto the platform. Bakugou snatched the microphone from Midnight and held it, white-knuckled and narrow-eyed as he searched the stadium.
Midnight started to reach out to tap Bakugou’s shoulder, but then Bakugou raised the microphone too close to his mouth and said into the hungry silence:
“Izuku.”
Shit. Shit. What was Bakugou doing?
Shouto took a step forward, then stopped himself.
What could he do? Drag Bakugou off stage? That would raise suspicion.
“You damn nerd,” Bakugou continued. “I know you’re watchin’ this. Probably already writing everything I’m doin’ wrong in one of your stupid fuckin’ Hero analysis journals with your dumb little pompom sparkle princess gel pens.”
A murmur went up in the crowd. Shouto saw Midnight’s mouth move—Bakugou—but Bakugou yanked his shoulder away from her and kept talking.
“You better have a whole damn set of gel pens ready, Shitnerd,” said Bakugou. “I’m a shitty person. You know that. I’m shitty to my parents and my teachers and my classmates. I was shitty to you. If I knew what was happening to you a few years ago—I don’t know what I would’ve done. To be fuckin’ honest. I hope I would’ve helped. I hope I wouldn’t have realized that I wasn’t actually the worst part of your life and then—then tried to fix it by treating you even shittier than those other fuckers did. Maybe that’s why you didn’t tell me. Because you thought…”
Bakugou’s eyes slid toward the group of first-years gathered below him. He locked eyes with Shouto with a glare that threatened to burn through Shouto’s skull.
Shouto kept his gaze. He understood then that Bakugou's speech was not a confession.
It was an oath.
Finally, Bakugou looked back up. “I’m not gonna say you were wrong to leave when you did. You were in a lot of pain. Partially ’cause of me. But you are wrong if you think I’m not gonna do everything in my power to make it up to you. I’m gonna do right by you. Not for my damn hero complex. Because it’s what you deserve. So if you thought I was just gonna forget about you, you can shove that idea up your ass.”
Shouto heard a muffled sound come from beside him. He looked to see Ashido with one hand over her mouth, the other gripping Kirishima’s shirt sleeve.
Kirishima didn’t seem to notice. His attention was on the stage—lips parted, eyes wide—
Alarm? Shouto couldn’t tell.
“Watch me,” said Bakugou. “I got strong for you, and I don’t plan on wasting that. Even if shit’s not the same as it was before you jumped off that fuckin’ bridge. Got it? Don’t you fucking dare take your eyes off me.”
Bakugou lowered the microphone, the folds in his shirt rising and falling as his chest heaved.
Silence ate the air.
“Oh—” The microphone caught the tail end of the sound as Bakugou brought it back up. “Also, fuck you, Shitnerd. I am gonna win.”
Bakugou gave the microphone back to Midnight before descending the stage. He shoved his way through the crowd of first-years, through the loud chorus of Are you okays, through the Who’s Izuku?s, and past the occasional shouted What the fuck, man?!
Shouto watched Kaminari approach Bakugou, but Bakugou elbowed him away and went to stand at the back of the group, several meters away from everyone else. Arms folded, glaring, daring someone to approach. No one did.
It took nearly five minutes for Midnight to calm the stadium down.
###
Blink once: Shouto was standing at the starting line of the first event—an obstacle course.
Blink twice: Shouto was standing alone at its end, looking back at the path of destruction in his wake and trying to remember how he’d gotten here. He stepped out of the way as Bakugou came flying—literally—over the finish line, crashing into the ground on his side and skidding into it, stirring up a cloud of dust.
“Fuck,” Bakugou groaned. “You just fuckin’… coulda fuckin’ blown yourself up, you shitty overhyped strawberry frappe, runnin’ straight into the fuckin’ minefield—”
“The what?” asked Shouto.
###
Blink three times, and Shouto was looking up at a scoreboard with rankings.
Most names had numbers in the tens and hundreds beside them. TODOROKI had 10,000,000 written beside it.
What the fuck? Did he do something wrong? He tried to remember what he’d done in the obstacle course and recalled only flashes—something big crashing, loud and punctuated noises, his own footsteps. That last bit was strange. He shouldn’t have been able to hear his footsteps with all that noise. He must’ve been very ahead for a while. Alone.
Well. That wasn’t unusual.
Midnight gave an explanation and instructions. Shouto listened. He processed none of it.
Everyone was looking at him.
Midnight dismissed the group to… do something. People started walking around, tapping others on the shoulder, talking. Shouto stared up at the scoreboard and, when he finally accepted that it wasn’t going to yield any answers, he looked around for Bakugou. He found him across the field talking to Kirishima. Shouto tilted his head up, trying to meet Bakugou’s eyes.
Bakugou very pointedly did not look at him, shifting so that his back was toward Shouto.
A bubble of panic rose in Shouto’s chest.
“Todoroki-kun.”
Shouto turned. Momo.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Shouto fought for words. She could help, maybe. Or—that hadn’t been a trick question, had it? Shouto didn’t remember what had happened during the obstacle course, so he had very little context to draw from. He didn’t think Momo would be mean intentionally, but sometimes people weren’t even trying to be mean. There were just hidden messages, and then when Shouto answered wrong, people thought he was being mean, which he wasn’t, really, he just—
“Did you get hurt?” Momo asked.
“Um.” Shouto glanced up at the scoreboard to check if anything had changed. It hadn’t. “I don’t—did—Did I do something wrong during the obstacle course?”
Her eyebrows scrunched. “What do you mean? You won.”
“I kn—I know.” He inhaled, looked around. Shit. He wished Bakugou weren’t mad at him. Shouto should’ve just apologized for holding Bakugou down during the murder Wednesday. He shouldn’t have said those things about Deku being past saving. It was true, and Bakugou needed to know, but Shouto could’ve waited until the subject wasn’t so fresh in Bakugou’s mind. “Sorry. I don’t remember.”
“Remember what?” Momo asked.
He kept looking around, searching for some hint as to what he was supposed to be doing. “The obstacle course.”
“The… the obstacle course? The whole event?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “I—um. I forget things sometimes. I couldn’t… what Midnight said. I couldn’t process it. I’m not sure what’s happening.”
Momo’s hand lightly tapped his wrist. Shouto looked at her. He recognized her expression—he’d seen it on Fuyumi too many times. When Shouto fucked up, when he got hurt, when he said something biting or dismissive.
“Sorry.” Shouto blinked. His eyes stung. “I know I’m—just—Could you tell me what I did wrong? How do I fix it?”
Momo’s voice was quiet. “Do you need to sit out?”
“I can’t,” said Shouto.
“It’s just a sports festival. There’ll be more. I’m sure you’ll still get plenty of internship offers just based on your performance in the obstacle course.”
Shouto looked up into the stands. He could make Endeavor out from here—hulking frame, cloaked in flame.
He looked back at Momo. “I can’t.”
Momo’s lips parted. She asked, “Endeavor?”
Shouto nodded.
“Did he threaten you?”
Shouto looked away. Looked back at her.
Endeavor knew that Shouto had been talking to Aizawa. Fuyumi and Natsuo’s wellbeing would be in danger if the press found out about what went on between Endeavor and Shouto. Talking to people about his father’s abuse was starting to get dangerous.
So he stayed silent.
After a few long seconds, Momo put her hand on his arm.
“It’s a cavalry battle,” she said. “We have to form teams of four—that’s what's happening right now. One person in the group will wear a headband with the sum of each group’s assigned points. The objective is to steal enough headbands from other teams so that you have above a certain number of points when time is called. Is that clear so far?”
This was a group event? Shouto hated those. Dealing with his brain, body, and quirk was already too many moving parts. “Yes.”
“Okay. People were assigned points based on how they placed in the obstacle course. You placed first, so you were assigned ten million points to make this event more difficult for you.”
Oh. “More people will be targeting me.”
“Yes,” said Momo.
“People won’t want to be on my team.”
“Right,” said Momo.
“Okay,” Shouto said. He let the information sit for a moment, and when it didn’t get any better, he said, “I don’t like this.”
“I don’t have a team yet,” said Momo. “We’ve worked together before, so it should be easier to come up with a plan. Let’s just find a couple more people.”
She tugged on Shouto’s arm. It took him a moment to realize he was supposed to follow her.
“Who do you think would be good with us?” she asked.
Bakugou was out of the question. “Iida for speed. Kaminari for close-range combat. I’ll wear the headband. You can make yourself a—” Shouto saw a mess of purple hair across the field and stopped walking. “Shinsou.”
“What’s a shinsou?” Momo asked. “Is that a weapon?”
“No, I just saw…” Shinsou had made it into the second round of the sports festival? He was horrible at combat, so Shouto doubted he excelled athletically in many other ways. Did he have some powerful quirk? If so, why hadn’t he been placed in the Hero course? “Just someone I didn’t expect to be here.”
“Oh. Are they a problem?”
“I don’t know his quirk,” said Shouto. “I don’t… I don’t know, I don’t think he’s a threat. It’s okay.”
Momo motioned ahead. “There’s Iida. And Kam—crap, I think they’re talking to Tokoyami.” Momo and Shouto went toward them. Momo called, “Iida—?”
“Yaoyorozu-kun!” Iida responded, too loudly. “I apologize! We’ve already formed a team.”
Tokoyami gave a shallow bow in apology. A pink-haired girl Shouto didn’t recognize grinned and gave Shouto an aggressive wave. Shouto wasn’t sure how to respond.
Momo turned to Shouto. “How about Uraraka and Asui?”
“Why?” Shouto asked.
“Uraraka can get us airborne, and Asui can use her tongue to maneuver us. I think having the air as an option will be important since our primary goal should be to evade the other teams until time is called. As long as we keep your headband, we won’t need to steal anyone else’s. You can focus on mid-range defense, and I’ll take care of close-range.” She paused. “Um. If that makes sense? I’m just brainstorming.”
“I’m used to seizing the offense,” said Shouto.
Momo nodded. “Right, right. No, that makes sense. I’m sure we can find some other people more suited to that route.”
Shouto hesitated. He wasn’t sure why Momo was backtracking. “Do you not like your plan?”
“Oh, um—” Momo blushed. “I was just thinking that you probably know more about how to win than I do. So we can totally go for offense if you think it’ll be better.”
“I’m not smart,” said Shouto. “You are. Right?”
Momo looked away.
Shouto was confused. “Aren’t you? Your tactical plans during practical training are always very good. Am I missing something?”
Momo rubbed a spot under her jaw. “Um. No, I guess not.”
“You think defense is better?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s find Uraraka and Asui.”
###
Things were getting loud, and Shouto didn’t like it.
With two minutes left until the game began, Asui took her position in the front, linking hands with Momo and Uraraka behind her. Shouto climbed up, placing his feet where their hands connected and crouching into Asui’s back.
“Ouch,” hissed Uraraka.
Shouto kept one hand on Asui’s shoulder, used the other to tap his chest. All this non-combative touching was throwing him off. He couldn’t think very well.
“Uraraka, tell Asui to lower us if we get too high for the shoes to be effective,” he said. Momo had made herself and the other two girls shock-absorbing boots in case they needed to free-fall at some point.
“Gotcha,” said Uraraka.
“Call me Tsu,” said Asui.
“Okay,” said Shouto. He wasn’t sure why she was worried about names now, but whatever. Tsu was shorter to say, anyway. “Momo, did you decide between the bo staff or the shield?”
Momo hesitated. “The, um. Shield. I think you’ll be enough offensive power. I’ll protect us from the back.”
“If I… if something goes wrong with me, you take up the offensive, and defense will go to Uraraka.”
“Okay,” said Momo.
The group fell into silence as the countdown hit the one-minute mark.
Uraraka spoke. “I, um. Didn’t know you guys were on a first-name basis.”
“What?” asked Shouto.
“You called her Momo.”
Shouto glanced back at Momo. She didn’t meet his eyes, face flushed.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. That’s what you are in my head. Have I done that before?”
“At the USJ,” said Momo.
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
“It’s okay,” Momo said.
Present Mic’s voice came over the intercom, way too loud. “AAAAAND START!!!”
And suddenly everyone was charging at them.
Shouto’s heart rate slowed just a bit. This… this was more familiar. No sentences to parse, no motives to decipher, no expressions to dissect. Just pure antagonism: palpable, overwhelming. A clear message: We want to hurt you, and if you don’t fight back, we will.
Still, it was strange to see Bakugou’s face with a crazed grin, teeth glinting white, charging straight toward him. Not because he hadn’t seen that before, but because it made him realize that Bakugou might be getting some satisfaction out of this.
That he was having fun.
Shouto wished he could let Bakugou win. Bakugou had worked hard to get to this level of skill, and winning would mean something to him. But Bakugou knew Shouto well enough to recognize when Shouto was holding back, and he’d be furious if he won because Shouto had messed up rather than because of his own efforts. It crossed Shouto’s mind that maybe he should’ve killed himself last night instead of waiting, so someone else could take Shouto’s spot on the podium and feel the sense of accomplishment that Shouto never would.
Well. If Shouto’s team didn’t get moving soon, maybe he’d lose honestly.
Uraraka touched her hand to Shouto’s leg, and Shouto’s stomach flipped as gravity slipped out from under him. He grabbed onto Asui’s shirt to keep from floating too far away as Uraraka got the rest of the group off the ground.
For the first several minutes? Smooth fucking sailing.
The aggressive pink-haired girl who’d joined Iida’s team had what looked like… rocket boosters? They didn’t seem to do much navigation-wise; Iida’s team had probably expected Tokoyami’s Dark Shadow quirk to do the heavy lifting there. And maybe it would’ve, if Momo hadn’t outfitted Uraraka with a tactical flashlight so bright that Dark Shadow shriveled into a whisp the size of a child’s hand.
“Hey, no fair!” yelled Kaminari. “Come at me, bro, I’ll zap you! Once I can see again.”
“Tsu, don’t touch the ground at the same time Kaminari does,” said Shouto. “Momo, underneath you. Tape from Bakugou’s team. Don’t waste your shield. Cut it.”
Sero’s tape snatched Momo’s ankle. It managed to yank Shouto’s group down about a meter before Momo produced a short, simple switchblade from her palm and sliced the tape away. She tossed the knife down after the falling tape.
Asui shot her tongue to the ground and yanked them to a spot away from Iida’s team and Bakugou’s—still grounded—team.
“Why did you do that?” Shouto asked Momo.
Momo said, “What…? You told me to cut the tape.”
“Not that. Throwing the knife away.”
“Why?” Momo asked. “Do I need it for something?”
“In case you—”
Shouto cut himself off, mentally skimmed over his list of reasons. At the top:
In case she needed to stab somebody who got too close.
In case Asui’s tongue somehow got involuntarily anchored to the ground and they needed to cut it off to free themselves.
Shouto thought, fucking hell.
This. Was. A. Game.
Maybe losing would have real, tangible consequences for Shouto, but even Bakugou wasn’t treating this as a life-or-death situation. Shouto needed to be careful not to dissociate so he didn’t accidentally kill someone.
“You’re right,” Shouto told Momo. “Sorry.”
Shouto recognized the sound of Bakugou’s explosions ascending from their left. Had Shouto been alone, he could’ve taken Bakugou out with a well-aimed blast of ice, but Uraraka was in the way. Shouto’s ice blast barely clipped Bakugou’s foot before it fell harmlessly to the ground. Bakugou’s explosions thrusted him directly above Shouto.
Smart. Shouto couldn’t shoot ice directly above himself without risking it falling back down on Shouto and his group.
“Uraraka, drop,” said Shouto.
Uraraka said, “You could use your fire to keep Bakugou from—”
“Drop,” said Shouto.
They free-fell. Shouto wasn’t wearing shock-absorbing shoes, so he shot ice from his right hand to propel himself left. As he fell, he aimed his right hand down. Fast and forceful, like he’d practiced hundreds of times, like he’d broken several bones in the process of perfecting—
A cone of ice, one Shouto built from the ground up. He landed just shy of its tip, wrapped his left arm around the ice to keep from falling, and sent a short burst of heat through his left foot to melt the ice and give him a foothold.
Then he raised his right hand toward Bakugou. Bakugou veered toward Shouto’s left, but Shouto had anticipated that move—Bakugou was trying to take advantage of Shouto’s effectively useless left side—and he adjusted his ice blast accordingly.
Bakugou had been able to carry Shouto’s body weight in the air at the USJ, so Shouto encased Bakugou’s torso and legs with ice weighing twice that amount. Bakugou would fall, but he should be able to slow his own descent just enough that the fall didn’t kill him. Look at Shouto, being all considerate.
And Bakugou did fall, swearing the entire way.
Was it bad that Shouto was just a little bit proud of himself for not killing Bakugou? That was probably bad.
Shouto yelled at his team, “UP!”
Iida’s team swerved toward Shouto, Dark Shadow growing, swooping in—
Shouto aimed his right hand for the pink-haired girl’s rocket boosters—
Something solid, wet, alive, constricted around his stomach, yanked him into the air. Shouto’s ice blast fell short.
He landed lopsided back in the arms of his team. Asui’s tongue unfurled from Shouto’s waist, zipping back to her mouth like a yo-yo up a string. Uraraka grunted as Shouto adjusted.
Shouto was irritated. Why had Asui brought him back to the team? He had the situation under control. “I was going to freeze their rocket boosters,” he said.
“I saw,” said Asui. “You see how high up they are. Kero? They would’ve been hurt if they fell.”
Goddammit. Fighting with the intention of not hurting his rival took a lot more brainpower than he was used to using. Wasn’t like Pro Heroes ever took those sorts of precautions with Shouto.
“We have to ground them,” said Shouto. “I can keep them there with my ice once they’re down, I think. If we ground the teams capable of flight and watch for long-range quirks like Sero’s, we should be able to win.”
“Can you break just one of her boosters?” Momo asked.
“If we get closer,” said Shouto. “My ice won’t be accurate from this distance.”
“Then—” Momo pulled some sort of cuff from her arm. “That’s a replica of the Yamagata agency’s PinPoint device. It goes around your wrist—”
“I know,” said Shouto, taking it.
Those devices were fairly complex, weren’t they? More complicated than a body heat detector. Momo had to replicate the device on an atomic level, so making it would require an involved knowledge of not only the parts and their placement, but also of the parts’ atomic makeup.
She was smart. Even if Shouto had been attracted to her romantically, she could do so much better than him. Maybe Kaminari and the others hadn’t realized that because they didn’t know how intelligent Momo was.
Or because they didn’t know how intelligent Shouto wasn’t.
Endeavor didn’t like Shouto relying on support items, but he’d experimented with them while sparring with a few of Endeavor’s sidekicks, and he knew how they worked. He clapped the device around his arm, twisted it to tighten around his wrist.
When he aimed and called ice to his hand, he recognized the strange pressure, like an invisible latex glove that was a couple sizes too small. The PinPoint worked by emitting weak quirk suppression technology—a watered-down version of quirk suppression cuffs—in a halo around the hand and wrist. The emitted quirk—ice, fire, explosions, acid, wind, whatever—was forced to discharge through a smaller opening, thereby streamlining the force. Like holding part of a finger over the nozzle of a garden hose.
Not that Shouto had ever touched a garden hose.
He took out one of the pink-haired girl’s rocket boosters. Iida’s group tipped off-balance, toppled to the ground in a wobbly, jerking pattern not unlike that of a rapidly deflating balloon.
Kaminari yelped, “BRUH!”
Shouto barely processed it. His team was the only airborne team at the moment, and he needed to keep it that way. He couldn’t just freeze the ground—his classmates had already been victim to that attack too many times to fall for it again now.
He had to encase them in ice. Without killing them.
Shouto took off the PinPoint cuff and held it out to Momo. “Another,” he said. “Smaller. Sphere-shaped. Three-centimeter diameter. Velcro strap.”
Momo pulled the start of a strap from her thigh—yanked it, almost, the usual surrounding golden sparks bursting forth like a tipped-over bottle of glitter—and then a smooth metal orb, followed by a corresponding strap on the orb’s opposite side. She held it out to Shouto.
Shouto took the metal ball, set it in his right palm, and fastened the strap tightly around the back of his hand.
“What are you doing?” Uraraka asked.
“Dome,” said Shouto.
He shifted his weight so he could stretch his arm out and down toward the ground, accidentally jamming his heel into Uraraka’s stomach in the process. She grunted.
Shouto said, “Your foot’s in the way.”
Uraraka moved her foot. Shouto gripped Asui’s arm with his left hand, stretched out the fingers of his right, and let his mind drift off.
He'd learned that he couldn’t really leave his brain on when he did things like this. It would try to stop him.
So he simply watched as he froze over the field. Shouto had limited ability to manipulate the shape and direction of his ice, so that was where the PinPoint device—well, Momo’s modified reverse-PinPoint device—played in, forcing Shouto’s ice to umbrella out rather than shoot straight down. The result was a sort of giant upside-down ice dome over nearly the entirety of the field. A dome that trapped the other teams inside like beetles under a cereal bowl.
Shouto dropped back into the arms of his team, chest heaving, entire body shaking. Fuck. He’d known that making a dome that large was pushing his limits, but he hadn’t meant to overexert himself that much. Why couldn’t he pay attention today?
“Ow,” said Asui. “Todoroki—ow.”
Shouto looked down at where his steaming left hand was still gripping Asui’s arm. He let go. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Uraraka, maybe you should—”
“Yeah,” said Uraraka. She touched her hand to his leg, returning him to zero gravity, and Momo and Uraraka kept him in place by grabbing handfuls of his pant leg and shirt. “Geez. You’re burning up, Todoroki.”
Shouto searched the ground. His vision was blurry. “Did… um. Did I get ev—everybody?”
“I… think so?” said Momo. “It’s kind of difficult to see around the dome. Should we check?”
Shouto looked at the timer on the scoreboard. He could see it, but the numbers wouldn’t process. “How much time do we have left?”
“Just over three minutes.”
“Let’s… let’s…” Shouto pulled up his collar to wipe the sweat off his face. His ribs were hurting, too, he realized. Had he remembered to loosen his binder before the obstacle course? Or had he loosened it and then retightened it at some point? “C-can we just stay here? I don’t want to fight anymore.”
“Um,” said Momo. “Are you… asking me?”
Shouto pressed his hand into the space just below his sternum. He found the seam of his binder, pinched it along with his gym shirt and tugged it outward a little to relieve some of the pressure. Would it be too risky to press the button to loosen his binder? Uraraka would probably notice a difference, being this close.
He blinked to clear his vision.
What if he slipped up during the one-on-one matches and got himself killed? That would be kind of funny.
“Todoroki-kun?” said Uraraka. “Are you okay?”
Shouto didn’t look at her, kept pinching his binder away from his chest. “You’re nice.”
“W-what?”
“You’re nice,” he repeated. “I’m sorry I’m a dick.”
“Oh,” said Uraraka.
A familiar voice echoed up from the ground. “Hey, Todoroki!”
Was that… Shinsou?
Wait, had his dome missed Shinsou’s team?
Shouto searched until he found the mess of purple hair, standing on the ground in front of Ojirou, Aoyama, and some other kid Shouto didn’t recognize. It didn’t look like any of them had a headband. Which didn’t surprise Shouto. That team-up seemed like a bottom-of-the-barrel grouping. Momo held up her reflective shield—presumably to fend off any laser attacks from Aoyama—but between Uraraka’s antigravity and Shouto’s ice, Shouto didn’t see any way Shinsou’s team could so much as make contact with Shouto’s team.
So when Shouto squinted just enough to make out the lazy smirk on Shinsou’s face, anxiety twisted Shouto’s gut.
Shinsou called up at him, “Did Daddy come to watch you today?”
Shouto narrowed his eyes. Why would Shinsou ask that now? It wasn’t relevant to the event.
“What about your mom?” Shinsou asked. “Is she here? Or does she have the TV on in the background at home while she makes another one of you with the mailman?”
Shouto heard Ojirou give Shinsou an unsure, “Hey, man, that’s…”
Shouto wasn’t entirely sure what was happening. Shinsou’s taunts weren’t well-researched. The Todorokis used a P.O. Box.
Was he trying to get Shouto to come back down to the ground to engage?
“Just ignore him, Todoroki-kun,” said Uraraka.
Shouto told her, “I’m trying to figure out what he’s doing.”
“He’s trying to make you mad,” said Asui.
“I—I know,” said Shouto. “But I don’t know why.”
Uraraka asked, “What’s his quirk?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto.
“Whatcha talking about up there?” Shinsou yelled. “Are we telling secrets? I’ll go first. I… hate you. Also, I fucked your boyfriend.”
Aoyama raised his hand. “Could we pause the countdown, s’il vous plaît? I would like to hear more.”
Mic called over the intercom. “EIGHTY SECONDS!”
“You know, I think we’re gonna make it,” said Uraraka. “Todoroki-kun, how long is that ice dome going to hold?”
“A while, I think,” said Shouto. “It’s over a meter thick. Bakugou may be able to blast his way out, but it’ll be too cold inside for him to sweat much, so I doubt he could break through in the space of one minute. Anyway, he’s smart enough to know that he should use the remaining time to take headbands from the other trapped teams instead of trying to escape.”
Shinsou yelled up at Todoroki again. “So do you ever, like, use your quirk as a dildo?”
“Je-sus,” Uraraka muttered. “He doesn’t have to be so vulgar!”
Shinsou yelled, “Do you walk around with that silver spoon you were born with shoved up your ass? Or do you use it to spoon-feed Daddy so he won’t try to melt your face again?”
“Todoroki-kun,” said Momo, “would you like me to make a grenade launcher?”
“No, it’s fine,” said Shouto. “I don’t care.”
“SIXTY SECONDS!” said Mic.
There was a pause. The field was quiet.
Shinsou said, “Hey. Todoroki. Did you hear they’re making a third season of Red’s Ocean?”
Shouto looked down at Shinsou.
Shouto said, “What?”
And then: a feeling Shouto recognized.
One he thought he’d forgotten.
Skeletal hands, thin as wire, scraping through his brain, snagging neural pathways and shifting them; gentle, always gentle, but never yielding.
Like Lady Hypna’s quirk.
For a second—just one—there was blinding, white-hot terror.
Then Shouto forgot it.
He forgot everything.
###
When Shouto’s mind returned to him, he was eye-level with the dirt.
Which was strange, because hadn’t he just been on the locker room floor?
Shouto jerked upright, calling ice to his hand so fast it stung. Where… Had Lady Hypna put him somewhere? His brain didn’t feel like it usually did after she stopped controlling him, heightened with some contextless, out-of-place emotion like admiration, longing, or loneliness. He was just… confused. Afraid.
What had she done?
What had she done?
Her voice. “Hey, Jellybean, that was a bit of a fall. Are you hurt? Want me to—”
Shouto shot a thin, sharp length of ice from his palm, gripped it in front of him like a tent stake. He could barely hear his voice through the rush of his pulse.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Woah,” said Hypna. “Put that down, baby.”
“What did you do to me?” Shouto tried to stand, but his proprioception was all wrong, and his entire body was shaking. A sharp pain wrenched through his ankle. He dropped back onto his side, rushed to sit up again. “Get back. Get back. What did you do?”
Hypna said, “Um. Shota? What do you want me to do here?”
A man’s voice. “Mic… yeah. Yeah. Make sure they have the cameras turned away.”
Who was that man? All Shouto was seeing was color. Shapes he didn’t recognize. What cameras were they talking about? Why were there cameras?
“Do you know where you are?” Hypna asked Shouto.
“Stop it,” said Shouto.
“It’s okay.” She took a step forward. “Do you know who I am?”
“I’ll kill you,” said Shouto. He wasn’t sure how well he could follow through with that threat with how badly his hands were shaking. “Don’t think I won’t. Don’t fucking touch me.”
“Midnight, don’t,” said the man. “He’s not thinking. We need to get him to the nurse. Just use your quirk.”
Panic rocketed through Shouto.
Her quirk.
No.
No.
He dropped the icicle and raised his hand to shove forward a wall of ice. It wouldn’t stop her from controlling him, but he had to do something—
He reached for his quirk and found nothing.
“What are you doing,” said Shouto. He kept his hand in front of him, kept reaching for his quirk, kept finding nothing. He smelled something sickly sweet. “What are you doing. Please stop. Please stop.”
“Baby, we’re not going to hurt you,” said Hypna. “Calm down.”
A boy’s voice to the left. “Did—? Is he okay? I didn’t mean to—”
“Shinsou,” said the man. “Not now, please.”
Why were there so many people? Shouto tried to stand up again, but a wave of intense exhaustion made him stumble, drop to his knees.
She had him.
Again.
He knew it wouldn’t help once she had control of his mind, but he curled into himself anyway, hands tucked close to his chest, head bowed, eyes squeezed closed, teeth grit.
“I’ll kill you,” he said through his teeth. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I… I’ll… kill…”
He fell into darkness.
Notes:
Momo: Todoroki-kun! I made us a friendship defense plan!
Shouto: I’m not really a defense plan person.
Momo: …Oh… It’s okay, you don’t have to use it. I just—
Shouto: *clutches friendship defense plan, hissing* No. Back off. I’m going to use it forever.
###
I've actually had most of this chapter written for a while. There were just, like, five paragraphs that I was procrastinating on. Action scenes can get kinda tedious because of all the choreography.
Thanks for the well-wishes regarding mental health. I'm feeling better now :) Not sure how long it'll last since the meds I'm on now are the Good Shit you can't use for more than a month or so, but I deep-cleaned my room and the kitchen and got through my first week of fall semester. Socialized a teeny tiny bit. Got furious at some cops for making my roommate apologize to the guy they pepper sprayed after he got road rage and followed them all the way to our house. Bought some cool rocks. Bought some cool knife earrings. Panicked because I didn't have enough money to pay for my lab work. Bought some more cool rocks. I bought so many rocks. I don't know how else to obtain dopamine. Please stop me. This was supposed to be a Nice Things list. I promise I'm feeling better.
Chapter 34: Shouto Has a Headache and That Headache's Name Is Hawks
Summary:
You didn't think I was gonna let the sports festival arc pass without a little Deku action, did you?
Notes:
CW: su/cidal ideation, (vague) references to past sexual abuse, references to physical abuse, mention of pedophilia, abuse victim mindset, discussion of murder, minor sexual reference
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
When Shouto awoke, he did not know where he was, and he did not care.
Maybe he was dead. That would be nice.
Unlikely, though.
Nothing was ever that easy.
Eventually, without his permission, his brain began to process his environment. A bed. White sheets. His left pant leg was rolled up, his left ankle spotted with yellow-brown bruising. He also had a vague headache. The curtain surrounding the bed was parted, and he looked through it to see Aizawa hovering over Recovery Girl as she sat at a makeshift plastic desk. Aizawa kept his hands tucked in his pockets as he spoke to her in a low voice.
Nurse’s station. Right.
Shouto sat up, making the bed creak. Aizawa looked over. “Ah,” he said.
Recovery Girl stood, grabbing her cane before making her way toward him. “Hi, dear,” she said. “Do you remember what happened?”
He rubbed at the corner of his eye. His throat felt like sandpaper. “Um. The… um. We were… the cavalry battle. I don’t remember finishing it.”
“You didn’t,” said Aizawa, taking his hands out of his pockets. “Shinsou used his brainwashing quirk on you.”
Brainwashing…?
Oh.
Oh.
Shit.
“I didn’t…” He paused to gather his thoughts. “I didn’t hurt him. Did I? I didn’t mean—I might’ve dissociated, I don’t remember if I—”
“You didn’t hurt anybody,” said Aizawa. “He got you to throw down your headband. Uraraka deactivated her gravity quirk to try to get it back without realizing that you didn’t have control over your body, and you broke your ankle in the fall.”
That explained the bruising. Recovery Girl must’ve sped up his ankle’s healing process by a few weeks. “And I lost consciousness?”
“No,” said Aizawa. “Midnight used her quirk on you.”
What? Why? “Did I do something bad?”
“Nothing that was your fault. The class is eating lunch together if you’re well enough to join—”
“Please tell me what I did,” said Shouto.
Aizawa huffed, his gaze darting away. He looked at Recovery Girl, who nodded and hobbled away toward her desk again.
“Midnight came to check on you,” said Aizawa, still not quite looking at Shouto. “You threatened to kill her if she got any closer.”
The memory returned, a whisp of a dream.
“I think I thought she was… someone else,” said Shouto.
Aizawa dipped his head once in acknowledgement.
“Is she mad?” Shouto asked.
“No,” said Aizawa. “No, she… It’s not uncommon for Pro Heroes to deal with those types of situations. Not saying they’re all trained to deal with it properly, but…”
“Did everybody see?” Shouto asked. “What I—with Midnight.”
Aizawa shook his head. “I’m not sure. I haven’t seen the footage they’re airing. I’m sorry. Most of the students were still under the ice dome when it happened, though.”
Oh—fuck, his ice dome. “Did they get everybody out? Do I need to fix it?”
“Everyone’s fine. We took care of it.”
Shouto lay back down.
He’d lost the sports festival. To Shinsou. Hadn’t even made it to the one-on-one matches.
And Shouto hadn’t used his fire at all.
Endeavor had threatened to take Shouto out of UA and cut off one of his fingers if that happened.
“The one-on-one matches start in a little under an hour,” said Aizawa. “Recovery Girl and I want you to sit them out. You could mess your ankle up worse. And I don’t think that mentally—”
“What?” said Shouto. One-on-one matches? “I thought… Didn’t I make us lose?”
“Both Shinsou’s hand and Asui’s tongue were on the headband when time was called,” said Aizawa. “The faculty had to take a vote, but we decided to split the points. Since it was the ten million points headband, both teams qualified for the next event. Bakugou’s and Iida’s teams also gathered enough headbands to qualify.”
Shouto stared up at the ceiling. That was fucking convenient, wasn’t it? Maybe he should’ve been relieved.
Mostly, he was just tired.
If he’d lost the competition at the cavalry battle, at least he would know what was coming. There were firm consequences. They would happen, and then they would be over. But now he had to be anxious and conflicted all over again.
With each level he progressed, he felt less like himself and more like an extension of Endeavor. Not even an extension, really, more like… a support item. A manufactured product.
“Shinsou wanted to apologize,” Aizawa said. “He wasn’t sure if you’d want to see him. I told him I’d let you know.”
Sometimes manufactured products exploded and took half their owner’s arm with them. Wouldn’t that be fun? If Shouto just… exploded.
“Todoroki.”
“I heard you,” said Shouto.
“People under the influence of his quirk usually don’t experience any side effects other than confusion and temporary memory loss,” said Aizawa. “He wouldn’t have used it on you if he’d known your history with mind control quirks. Part of the fault is mine for not anticipating that exchange. He also wanted me to let you know that he hasn’t used his quirk outside of training and consensual interactions for a couple years now.”
Shouto tilted his head to look at Aizawa. “I thought he hated me.”
“I can’t speak to how he feels about you personally,” said Aizawa. “He doesn’t want to hurt anyone with his quirk.”
Shouto looked back at the ceiling. He didn’t want to think about this anymore.
“I have to compete in the one-on-ones,” said Shouto.
“Todoroki, I’ll speak with your father if you need me to. You could put yourself or others in danger by disrespecting your limits.”
“You don’t understand,” said Shouto. “He won’t accept that excuse.”
“I’ll accept responsibility for making the choice. He can’t expect you to continue competing after all that. I doubt it’ll make much of an impact on your internship offers, anyway.”
Shouto kept quiet.
He’d just… just have to let it happen. Like he always did.
It would be over soon.
Aizawa said, “Todoroki.”
Shouto kept his voice flat. “Okay.”
“Did he threaten you with something?”
Shouto blinked slowly at the ceiling. He wished he didn’t have to open his eyes again.
“Todoroki,” Aizawa repeated.
“I can’t talk about it,” said Shouto.
“Why not?”
“He knows I told you things. I can’t talk about it anymore.”
“What’s going to happen if you talk about it?”
Shouto rolled onto his side, back facing Aizawa. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining the scent of blood in the stark-white pillow.
“I’m not going to do something that will make things worse for you,” said Aizawa. “What’s going to happen if I keep you out of the competition? Something worse than a broken ankle?”
Shouto stared at the sheets in front of him.
Aizawa sighed. “Kid, you gotta talk to me.”
“Do what you want,” said Shouto. “I’ll compete. I’ll sit on the sidelines and let Endeavor cut my finger off later. I’ll sing the national anthem backwards and blow a kiss to All Might while I do a backflip off the scoreboard. I don’t give a shit.”
A beat. Then he heard Recovery Girl mutter from across the room, “Dear Lord.”
“Okay,” said Aizawa. “I’ll let you decide for yourself if you need to compete, then. Are you joining the class for lunch?”
Shouto looked over his shoulder at Aizawa. Shook his head.
“Yes, you are.” Aizawa made a sharp let’s go motion. “Join the class. You’re part of it.”
Was he.
Shouto collected his phone from the bedside and followed Aizawa out of the room. His ankle twinged, but it wasn’t bad. Even if it were, he’d fought with broken bones before. So.
Class 1-A was eating lunch in an enclosed lounge just above and behind their stadium seats. The closer they got to the lounge, the louder the noise got. Someone talking. Concentrated bouts of laughter. Hopefully Shouto could just find a corner and play some Candy Crush rip-off on his phone.
When he and Aizawa entered the room, though, those hopes gave way to a streak of nausea-inducing adrenaline.
Deku.
Not aiming a gun at anyone or rolling up any corpses. But sitting cross-legged atop one of the large wooden tables, surrounded by the class on all sides. He was wearing a BE GAY DO CRIME t-shirt, its sleeves tied up by thin green ribbons to form a makeshift tank top.
“Oh my god, do me, do me,” Ashido said, half-standing, half-sitting on the bench, waving her hand at Deku. “Am I gay?”
“Mm…” Deku tilted his head, his curls flopping over his blue barrette. “You’re definitely not straight, Mina. You’re gonna wanna look into the aromantic spectrum.”
“Neat!” said Ashido. “I have no idea what that is! What about Eijirou?”
“Oh, my favorite rock boy. Want me to guess yours, Kiri?”
Kirishima blushed. “Uh, sure.”
“You are so fucking gay. Oh my god. Like, top-ten-gayest-humans-to-ever-gay gay. Also, I’m in love with you.”
The table burst into laughter. Kirishima hid his face in his hands, groaning.
“Uh, excuse me,” said Aizawa, raising his voice over the din. “Who’re you?”
Deku looked up. When he saw Aizawa and Shouto, his face broke into a wide grin. He waved. “Shouto! That’s my bestie, you guys. Also, Eraserhead, hello, big fan, I love you and I have all your merch.”
“I don’t have merch.”
“You didn’t,” said Deku. “Then I made an Etsy account.”
Aizawa’s unpatched eye narrowed. “You can’t be in here. This room is reserved for 1-A.”
“Sensei, please let him stay,” said Ashido. “He’s literally my favorite person right now. Look at him, he’s adorable!”
Deku dipped his head in humble acknowledgement. “A blessing and a curse.”
“He should be in 1-A,” said Sero. “I vote he gets to be in 1-A.”
“You only say that because he called you Spider-Man,” said Aoyama. “Still… I concur.”
“Because he called you sparkly?” Sero asked.
“Absolutely, mon ami. Flattery works wonders.”
Deku patted the top of Aoyama’s head. “You are sparkly!”
“Mon dieu.” Aoyama pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. “He persists.”
Shouto found his voice. “How—why are you here?”
Deku made a heart shape with his hands. “To support my boys. Speaking of which, have you seen Kacchan around?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Who’s Kacchan?” asked Kaminari, too loudly.
“He’s my other bestie. We go way back.” Deku reached out, making grabby hands toward Shouto. “Shou, c’mere, c’mere. Come sit. I missed you.”
Shouto felt lightheaded. He didn’t mind Deku’s presence in and of itself, but Deku was not supposed to be here. Not in the same room with all his classmates. Seeing Deku at the USJ had been strange, but this… this was like Shouto had been dropped into an alternate reality.
“I saw you Wednesday,” Shouto said to Deku.
“But not yesterday or today,” said Deku. “Come on. Let me love you.”
Aizawa eyed Shouto. “This is your friend?”
What was he supposed to say? No, this is the villain who shot me at the USJ. Also, he murdered somebody in front of me a couple days ago. “Yes.”
Deku’s eyes moved to a spot behind Shouto. He waved. “Kacchan! I was starting to think you wouldn’t be up at all.”
Shouto turned to look. Bakugou had frozen, lips parted. One hand gripping the handle of an orange lunchbox, white-knuckled, the other hand still on the door.
“Wait,” said Kaminari, “Bakugou is Kacchan?”
Bakugou’s eyes flickered to Aizawa and Shouto, then back to Deku. “What the f… Fuck you doin’ here?” His voice was careful, unsure. “You ain’t s’posed… Get the fuck out.”
“Hey, bro, don’t be like that,” said Kirishima. “Deku’s cool.”
“Deku?” asked Aizawa.
Shit.
Aizawa knew that name, and it wasn’t as someone who sent Shouto memes and wore stupid t-shirts.
Deku held a peace sign next to his face and smiled like he was posing for a selfie. “That’s me!”
Aizawa looked at Bakugou, who hadn’t looked away from Deku. Aizawa turned his gaze to Shouto. He made a subtle Pro Hero sign at his side, a small motion that deviated from typical JSL and wouldn’t be recognized unless the person had studied Pro Hero signs:
Danger?
Shouto signed back in JSL, low and halfway behind his back— “It’s okay.”
Not because it was. Probably it wasn’t. But Shouto wasn’t entirely sure Aizawa would be able to capture Deku if he tried. Especially if he wanted to avoid collateral damage.
Deku wouldn’t be here if he weren’t confident he could make it out. Hopefully Aizawa was smart enough to realize that.
Aizawa looked back at Deku. “You going to cause trouble?”
“I would never,” said Deku.
Aizawa pressed his lips together. He looked at Shouto, at Bakugou, back to Deku.
“Make sure you’re gone before lunch is up,” said Aizawa.
“You’re actually the best.” Deku gave a thumbs-up. “Thanks, Sensei.”
“Don’t think I’m not watching.”
Deku smiled. “Wouldn’t expect anything less.”
Aizawa went to sit at another table. He didn’t look away from Deku as he walked, his jaw tight, the fingers of one hand hovering vaguely around a loop on his capture scarf. If Deku noticed the extra attention, he didn’t show it.
“Ka-chaaan,” Deku said, drawing the second syllable out. “Stop looking like that. Come sit.”
“No,” Bakugou snapped.
“C’mon. Or I’ll tell everybody about that time we you-know-what.”
“Fuck off.”
Deku addressed the class. “So we were eight, and I was in his bedroom—”
“I’m SITTIN’, FUCK,” yelled Bakugou. Face flushed, Bakugou let the door slam shut. He grabbed Shouto’s arm above the elbow and yanked him forward. Momo and Uraraka moved to the side to make room for them.
“Thank you,” Deku said when they were sitting. He petted Bakugou’s hair. “Your speech was very sweet.”
Bakugou knocked Deku’s hand away, avoiding his eyes. “Fuck you.”
Kirishima spoke. “It was, dude. I thought it was a nice tribute. But I don’t think you’re a bad pers—”
“I don’t wanna fuckin’ hear it, Kirishima,” said Bakugou.
“Bro, we’re not gonna make fun of you,” said Sero. “You can talk about it if you want.”
Bakugou scowled as he unpacked his lunch. “Already said all I’m gonna fuckin’ say. You wanna hear it again, watch the damn recording.”
“I’m gonna watch it,” said Deku. Then, “Oh my god. Jirou, right? Your haircut is calling out to me, can I guess?”
Jirou blinked, raised her eyebrows. “Uh, sure.”
“You’re pansexual. I will not accept criticism. Who’s next? I’m on a roll. Iida?”
“Deku-kun, I really must insist you step down from the table,” said Iida, who was standing behind the group. His hand gave an anxious chop. “Your position is neither sanitary nor—”
“Biromantic asexual,” said Deku. “Uraraka!”
“Yes?” Uraraka squeaked.
Bakugou’s elbow jabbed Shouto’s side, and Shouto looked over at him. It didn’t look like he’d been trying to get Shouto’s attention—he was just struggling with the zipper on his lunchbox.
“Bisexual,” Deku told Uraraka. “Also, you’re very cute. Tsu—”
As Deku talked with the class, Shouto felt a soft tap on his right arm. He looked at Momo.
“Hey,” she whispered. Her face had that Fuyumi-like tightness again. “Um. Are you okay?”
Momo was closer to him now than she’d ever been in a non-combative situation. Discomfort settled deep in his gut, and he moved his gaze from her eyes to somewhere around her right shoulder. “Just my ankle,” he told her. “It’s fine now.”
“No, I meant the… with Shinsou and Midnight.”
Shouto noticed that Uraraka was looking at him, too, lips pursed, brow furrowed with concern.
Right. Of fucking course they’d both seen that. Shinsou’s team and Asui probably saw it, too.
“I’m sorry if I made you afraid,” Shouto told them. “I didn’t… mean to do that. Shinsou’s quirk messed with my head.”
“We talked to him afterward,” said Uraraka. “He said his quirk had never had that effect before. I don’t know if I believe that jerk, but—”
“It was my fault,” said Shouto. “I’m sorry I dropped the headband.”
“I'm sorry I dropped you,” said Uraraka. “But the headband thing all worked out, so no worries there. That’s what teammates are for, right?”
Shouto wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic, so he kept his eyes diverted and gave a short nod.
Uraraka kept talking. “It’s just you were acting really… you know, after you fell. Did something happen with you and Midnight? Before?”
He didn’t like these questions. “No.”
“Was it something we did?” Momo asked.
“No,” said Shouto. Fuck. He used to be able to talk about this shit so easily. What happened? “I have… the… I was just remembering something.”
“Remembering something?”
“Yeah, the…” He searched Momo’s face. She had to know what he was talking about. Right? “You grew up with Pro Heroes. You know the shit they… just—things that happen around them. It’s not uncommon.”
Momo stared at him.
“Todoroki-kun,” she said, “that’s not okay.”
Shouto pulled his gaze back down to her right shoulder.
He didn’t like feeling like this. Small.
Momo said, “You know that, right?”
“I know,” he said.
He turned away from her.
Deku was still assessing the group. “Kaminari! My dude. Also bi.”
“My dude!” said Kaminari. “So is that gay or straight?”
“You’re oblivious and I love you. Sero… I am so sorry.”
Sero looked alarmed. “What?”
“You’re heterosexual.” Deku gave Sero’s shoulder a pat. “But take heart, my friend, you may have some gender stuff going on.”
“What about Bakugou?” asked Kaminari.
Bakugou sent Kaminari a glare as he tore the plastic wrap from his sandwich.
“Oh, bless you, you’re a brave soul. I’m not even gonna touch that one.” Deku turned and smiled at Bakugou before cupping his hands around his mouth and whisper-shouting at the rest of the class: “Gay.”
Laughter. Bakugou’s palm came up, already popping.
Deku caught his wrist before his hand could make contact, yanked him up so that his ear was even with Deku’s mouth. Shouto couldn’t hear the whispered words, but he saw Deku’s mouth move—
You’re not strong enough, Kacchan. Stop.
Bakugou’s explosions died.
And then Deku pulled back, smiling, and said to a wide-eyed Bakugou, “Kacchan! No violence, babe. I’m teasing you.”
So that was why Deku was here. To tell Bakugou that he needed to lay off. That Bakugou couldn’t be his savior, that Deku didn’t expect—or want—him to be.
Whether Bakugou would listen to Deku was another matter. Right now, he looked like he’d just been pulled from a nightmare—the blood gone from his face, lips parted, blinking like he’d woken up in an unfamiliar environment.
Shouto’s peripheral vision detected movement, and he looked just in time to watch Aizawa’s hair drop back down to his shoulders, the red glow in his eye dissipating. He retreated from his half-standing position back onto the bench, though one of his hands remained on his capture scarf.
Deku let go of Bakugou’s arm. When Deku looked to Shouto, his expression was much kinder. “You’re not gonna eat, Shou?”
Lunch hadn’t seemed important this morning. Seemed even less important now. “It’s okay,” said Shouto.
“I can go grab you something from the stands.”
The thought of Deku leaving and then Shouto having to wait for him to come back was excruciating. He couldn’t deal with that level of tension right now. “No.”
“Dude, you should eat,” said Kirishima. “You want my chips?”
“You can have my applesauce,” said Kaminari. “I hate applesauce.”
Shouto wasn’t sure who to respond to. “It—no,” he said. “No.”
“You feeling okay?” Deku asked. He leaned forward, pushed Shouto’s hair back from his forehead. “You’re cold. Can I give you a warm-up hug? Kacchan, scoot over.”
Bakugou picked a piece of crust from his bread. He muttered something before moving to the side, and Deku slipped down between them. He wrapped his arms around Shouto’s waist from behind, hooked his chin over Shouto’s shoulder.
“Who was that kid?” Deku’s voice was a murmur, low and close to his ear. “Purple hair. Shinsou, right? Do I need to fuck them up?”
Fuck, who all had seen Shouto’s freak-out with Midnight? Had the cameras captured it? Had Endeavor seen—? Wouldn’t surprise Shouto, with his luck. “No.”
“Your pulse is really fast.”
Shouto wasn’t sure how he felt about Deku being close enough to feel his heartbeat. If he asked Deku to crush his ribs so he wouldn’t have to compete, would Deku do it?
“You okay?” Deku asked.
“Um.” Shouto tried to gather his thoughts. “Yeah.”
“Don’t be nervous. You’re gonna do great.”
Shouto’s throat went dry.
Across the room, the door opened, and Present Mic came in. The muscles in his face were more strained than Shouto was used to seeing them. Mic looked to Aizawa first, who gave a short nod and put his phone in his pocket.
Had Aizawa texted Mic and asked him to come? Shouto hoped they weren’t planning on doing anything stupid. Like trying to trap Deku.
Deku raised his head from Shouto’s shoulder, though he didn’t let go of Shouto’s waist. “Holy shit,” he said. “I’m actually going to have a heart attack with all these Pro Heroes just walking around. I feel like I’m vibrating. Am I vibrating?”
“There are a lot of Pro Heroes here today, aren’t there?” said Kirishima. “It’s kind of wild. All top three Heroes are here.”
Jirou asked, “Hawks is here?”
“I overheard somebody from 1-B talking about it,” said Kirishima. He opened his bag of chips. “Not sure if it’s true. He usually doesn’t come to this type of thing, right? I wonder if he wants to find an intern.”
“I hope he picks me,” said Kaminari, speaking through the chicken nuggets in his mouth. “I like his face.”
“Bro, that’s kinda gay,” said Sero.
Kaminari stopped chewing. “Wait, really? Sorry, I meant his ass.”
Present Mic was standing close to Aizawa now, looking in Deku’s direction. Aizawa said something Shouto couldn’t hear to Mic, and Mic nodded.
Kirishima addressed Deku. “Are you a Present Mic fan?”
“You kidding?” said Deku. “Been my celebrity crush since I was, like, four.”
“You want an autograph or something?” Jirou asked. She raised her hand to wave at Mic. “Present Mic, sensei?”
Mic’s eyes briefly met Shouto’s before they turned to Jirou. “What’s up, little listener?”
Jirou poked one of her earjacks in Deku’s direction. “Fanboy.”
“Sorry,” said Deku, removing a hand from Shouto’s waist to wave. The other hand remained where it was, bunching the front of Shouto’s gym shirt. “Hi. I’ve listened to your podcast series, like, fourteen times.”
“Deku knows a lot about quirks and Heroes,” said Kaminari. “He’s like Wikipedia, or something.”
Mic looked at Deku. It took him a moment to smile. “That right? What got you interested in that?”
“I mean, nothing specific. Mostly just my long and tragic backstory.” Deku took the small notebook and a lime green gel pen from his shirt pocket. “Can I get your autograph?”
“You—you betcha, little guy. More than happy,” said Mic. He took the notebook and pen. “You go to school here, Deku?”
“Fuck, I wish,” said Deku. “Dream school, hundred percent.”
Mic clicked the pen. His hands were remarkably steady. “Did you take the entrance exam?”
Jesus. Could Mic be any more obvious about trying to get information from Deku?
“Nah,” said Deku. “Got kinda caught up in work.”
Mic signed the notebook, his eyes moving away from Deku and down to the paper for the better part of half a second. “That’ll get ya, won’t it? What do you do?”
“I mean, I’ll do pretty much anything for a large enough quantity of Skittles. Ohmigod thank you so much, you’re amazing.” Deku took the notebook back, looked at the signature, held it up for Shouto to see. Did Deku realize he was starting to bounce in his seat? “Shou, I know this doesn’t impress you, but I’m showing it to you anyway because I’m excited.”
Did Deku need Mic’s signature for a quirk or something? Shouto had heard of quirks that could gather information about someone through their handwriting. Or was this some sort of powerplay? Shouto didn’t get it. But he nodded, and that seemed to satisfy Deku.
Deku spoke to Present Mic again. “Okay, this might be stupid, and it’s entirely possible that I missed something, but can I ask a question about your quirk?”
“Absolutely,” said Mic.
“What do you do when you’re up against someone with a matter or spatial manipulation quirk? Like Thirteen? Because they could create a vacuum that would make it impossible for your sound waves to travel, right? And a very talented warper might be able to funnel your voice elsewhere, especially when you’re using a PinPoint device for your soundwaves. I read a study a few months ago about a particle emitter support item created for a Russian Hero with a light manipulation quirk so she could… well, you probably don’t wanna hear all the physics stuff, but I was wondering if you use something like that to create a dense medium through which sound waves can travel faster, or travel at all in the first place?”
Mic’s eyebrows shot up. He adjusted his sunglasses.
“I just don’t, ah, don’t go on those missions,” said Mic.
“Oh, okay,” said Deku. “So something about your quirk is incompatible with the technology, I guess.”
“Not… necessarily? I just hadn’t heard of that study.”
“Really? It was all over the Ru—oh, I guess you don’t speak Russian. Shit. That—sorry, I forget things. Okay. Well, it was called—”
“Oi, you fuckin’ dork,” said Bakugou. He didn’t look at Deku as he spoke, still picking the crust off his sandwich. “Write it on a Valentine, it’ll last longer.”
“Oh, you’re right,” said Deku. He flipped to a new page in his notebook, clicked his pen, and started writing. “Did you talk to anybody about your gauntlets yet, Kacchan?”
Bakugou’s adam’s apple bobbed, his eyes narrowing at his sandwich. “Hah? No.”
“Okay, because I woke up at like four a.m. last night with some better design ideas. I’ll text them to Shouto later.”
“Just give me your fuckin’ number,” said Bakugou.
Deku gave the side of Bakugou’s head an awkward pat with the palm of his hand. He didn’t look up from his notebook to do it, so his hand ended up halfway in Bakugou’s face. “No. You can never know my dark secrets, Kacchan.”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Bakugou, bite finally slipping out alongside the stretched-thin tension in his voice. Deku grinned.
Kirishima watched them, lips half-pursed. “So you… Deku, you came up with the idea for Bakugou’s gauntlets?”
“Yeah, a while back,” said Deku.
“So, you’re like… smart, right? Do you have an intelligence quirk?”
“You know who’s smart,” said Deku, tearing the page out of his notebook and handing it to Present Mic, “is Yaoyorozu. Did you guys watch her make that Yamagata support device and then modify it in the space of, like, two minutes? Tony Stark could never.”
Momo’s head jerked up, and she lowered her chopsticks. “Oh. That’s just… rote memorization.”
Deku motioned to Momo as he looked around at the class. “Y’all got some work to do. Hype this queen up. I’m gonna need at least a fan club by the end of next week, preferably paired with a dubiously-sourced Reddit group.”
Ashido’s hand shot up. “I wanna be club treasurer. Wait, are we going with Yaoyorozu being a queen or a goddess? Because if we’re going with goddess, I wanna be chaplain.”
“Woah, Mina,” said Sero. “That was, like… a poem.”
“Take me to church,” said Aoyama.
Deku was avoiding the intelligence quirk question. And he was avoiding it effectively, using 1-A’s collective five-second attention span against them. Was there a reason he didn’t want Shouto’s classmates to know he was Quirkless? Sure, it would be useful information in a fight against him, but also… Present Mic was currently reading over the blueprints Deku had given him. For a device that could likely be used against Kurogiri.
If Shouto was judging the expression on Mic’s face correctly, Shouto wasn’t the only one who was confused.
“You here with anyone today, buddy?” Mic asked Deku. “Family, or…?”
Or the League.
Deku gave a thumbs-up. “I do have an adult chaperone. Sorta.”
Dabi? Would Dabi come to something like this? Shouto used to get bored watching the sports festival at home, so he couldn’t imagine someone with Dabi’s skill level being interested in watching a bunch of barely-trained kids flounder.
A flash of red passed by the open door, and something deep in Shouto’s gut lurched. Endeavor? He wouldn’t… with all his classmates here. Would he? Fuck. Would he?
“Speak of the devil.” Deku rested his forearm over Shouto’s shoulder, raised his voice to call toward the door. “Yo, Bird Man! In here.”
The red reappeared. Shouto’s nausea quieted for a moment, only to twist in confusion the next second.
Hawks?
He was holding a cup with the UA logo and a half-chewed plastic straw jutting from the lid. Civilian clothes—gym shorts with an Endeavor merch shirt.
Hawks’s eyes met Shouto’s briefly. It took a moment for Hawks’s focus to move to Deku, for his signature dumbass grin to form. “Deku, hey. I was looking for ya. Had me kinda worried with you disappearing like that. What’re you doing up here?”
Deku nodded toward Shouto. “Hanging with my dudes.”
Hawks stepped into the doorway, his right wing twitching out and brushing the doorframe. His voice stayed light. “You two know each other?”
“Absolutely,” said Deku. “This is my bestie.”
So Hawks knew Deku? Great. Was Hawks attempting some sort of League infiltration? That seemed in-character for him. Fucking egotistical dickhead. Deku would never fall for that.
“Wait, wait, Deku,” said Kaminari. “Hawks is your chaperone?”
“Please,” Deku said, “did you think I bought a ticket with my babysitting money? You could buy a car with how much those tickets cost.”
Shouto glanced at Bakugou. He’d stopped mid-chew, jaw lopsided and fingers nearly poking holes through his sandwich, to send Hawks a look of… something. Accusation? It wasn’t a kind look. Not that Bakugou had any of those.
Still, it surprised Shouto a little—didn’t Bakugou like Heroes? Shouto had never said anything outright incriminating about Hawks to Bakugou. Hawks was suspicious as hell—he was a top-ranking Hero with a hazy past, of course he was suspicious—but Shouto didn’t have any solid proof as to his guilt. Which made Hawks even more annoying.
“I hate your shirt,” Shouto told Hawks.
“Shoutooooo,” said Ashido, his name devolving into a whine. “I know you get to pop champagne bottles with celebrities, like, every day, but we don’t.”
“Check your prophecy, bro,” said Kaminari.
“Privilege,” Sero corrected.
Kaminari nodded. “Privilege your prophecy.”
Hawks’s eyes flickered between Shouto and his classmates. Then he folded his arms, leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, and grinned. “Yeah, Shouto, be nice to me. I have delicate feelings.”
It took Shouto a second to realize why his name sounded strange coming from Hawks’s mouth.
Hawks knew him as Shiyo.
Well, today was just fucking brilliant.
Deku’s voice again, close to Shouto’s ear. “You know, I should probably go before one of your teachers has a heart attack.”
Shouto looked at Aizawa. He’d stood sometime in between when Shouto had last looked at him and now, his hair just barely floating off his shoulders, jaw set, his eye a dull, barely-there red. Shouto recognized what he was doing—Shouto did it himself a lot, keeping his quirk ready just under the surface—but Aizawa looked more intimidating now than Shouto probably ever had in his life. And Present Mic hadn’t said anything since Hawks entered, which was unnerving in and of itself.
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“All right.” Deku tucked his notebook and pen back in his shirt pocket, then bumped his head gently against Shouto’s. “See you later, then.”
Bakugou caught Deku’s shirttail as Deku stood. His kept his voice low. “Oi. Give me your fucking number.”
Deku peeled Bakugou’s fingers from his shirt. Held Bakugou’s hand firmly for a second before he let go.
“No,” Deku said.
Bakugou lowered his hand.
As Deku got up, Present Mic asked, “Leaving already, little guy?”
“Yessir. Kirishima, you got my Line ID, right? Send me some pictures of your dog.”
“Yeah, man, will do,” said Kirishima.
“And don’t give my ID to Kacchan. He thinks everybody wakes up at six in the morning and gets mad when you don’t message him back until ten.”
Kirishima laughed. “Okay.”
“I love you, Deku!” said Ashido.
“I love you, too!” Deku waved. “You guys take care of yourself, okay? Drink water ’n stuff. Self-care is important. You’re all wonderful people and you deserve good things, so treat yourself like it.”
There was a chorus of goodbyes, flurries of waving. Shouto struggled not to dissociate.
But then Deku tapped Hawks on the arm, and they were gone.
Shouto heard Present Mic exhale.
Uraraka leaned forward to look at Shouto. “Your friend’s really cool, Todoroki-kun. I didn’t know you had a… friend.” She winced. “That sounded mean, I’m sorry.”
Shouto wasn’t sure why he was dizzy. He was sitting down.
“We have room for him to be in 1-A, right?” said Kaminari. “We only have, like, eighteen people.”
“He’d have to pass the entrance exam first,” said Iida.
“Yeah, but he—” Kaminari cut himself off, his face suddenly scrunching. “Wait. What’s his quirk?”
There was a moment of silence.
Kirishima said, “I don’t think he said it.”
“’Cause it’s none of your fuckin’ business,” said Bakugou.
“You two,” said Aizawa, voice sharp. When Shouto looked up, Aizawa jerked his head toward the door. Shouto wasn’t sure what he was asking, but then Bakugou got up, and—
Oh. Aizawa wanted to talk.
Well. Shouto deserved that.
Bakugou had left behind his lunchbox, so Shouto picked it up and carried it out with him.
Mic intercepted Aizawa near the door, hand on his arm. Whispered, "Do you need me to--"
"Stay here," Aizawa told him. "In case."
Mic nodded. He waited for Aizawa, Bakugou, and Shouto to leave the room, and then he closed the door behind them.
Walking quickly, Aizawa led Shouto and Bakugou down the hall and into the speaker’s box. It was more cramped in here than Shouto had imagined it would be, with what Shouto assumed was sound equipment stacked along the walls and under the tables. It made the room small, made each breath he took too loud. He could hear Bakugou breathing beside him, too.
Aizawa turned off a couple screens and switches before he faced Shouto and Bakugou. He pinched his black hair back from his forehead.
“Okay,” said Aizawa, “what the fuck.”
Shouto held Bakugou’s lunchbox with both hands. Weird texture, kind of slippery. He didn’t like it.
Bakugou broke the silence. “Look, they’re—they’re makin’ him do stuff he don’t wanna. The Villains. It ain’t Deku’s fault.”
“Oh my fucking god,” said Shouto, looking up from the lunchbox. Did Bakugou seriously still think that? “Bakugou, he doesn’t want you to help him.”
“Shut the fuck up, IcyHot.” Bakugou sent him a glare before addressing Aizawa again. “His dad’s the head of the League. He—Deku’s not right in the head anymore. They messed him up. He used to wanna be a Hero.”
Aizawa’s unpatched eye glinted red. “How long have you two known about this? Did you know who he was when he attacked at the USJ?”
“I recognized his voice, but I wasn’t sure until Wednesday,” said Bakugou. “IcyHot knew.”
Aizawa’s gaze pinned Shouto down. “You lied to the police.”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“And to me.”
On a better day, Shouto might’ve felt bad about it. Right now, he just felt… cold. “Yes.”
“Did you know the attack on USJ was going to happen?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Is Deku really your friend?”
Shouto considered. Then he said, “He’s helping me.”
“With… Endeavor, I assume.”
“Yes.”
“What about Hawks?” Aizawa dropped his hand. His hair fell back into place. “What’s he got to do with this?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “If I had to guess, the Hero Commission is trying to infiltrate the League using Hawks.”
Aizawa raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d rule out Hawks being a Villain so quickly.”
“I think probably he’s a piece of shit,” said Shouto.
“But not a Villain?”
“I don’t know why you think Heroes are less shitty than Villains,” Shouto said. “Anyway, I can’t picture Hawks having an ideology he’d be willing to sacrifice his place in the Hero rankings for.”
Aizawa made a short, dry noise of disbelief. He shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “Okay. Forget Hawks. What happened on Wednesday? Something happened.”
Shouto looked at Bakugou. And it was so ridiculous, just the whole fucking situation, that Shouto laughed.
Aizawa’s mouth twisted into a frown. “What?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto. “Something happened. Bakugou and I met with Deku, and Bakugou wouldn’t fucking let up about taking Deku to the police station. Kept going on and on. I don’t even blame Deku.”
“You held me down!” Bakugou yelled. “You fucking sadist motherfuck—”
“So you wouldn’t get FUCKING KILLED.”
Bakugou gave a small start, his face going slack. He blinked. His expression hardened again quickly, but he didn’t say anything.
Shouto’s head pounded. Was that the first time he’d ever raised his voice at Bakugou? Shouto should’ve cussed him out sooner. Fucking idiot. “You would’ve kept pushing until he turned around and gutted you. Don’t think he wouldn’t have. If you’re feeling so fucking guilty, do what he asked you to and leave him alone. He doesn’t want you.”
“Todoroki,” Aizawa said.
Aizawa’s voice was sharp enough to shoot a sliver of alarm down Shouto’s spine. Shouto forced his expression to smooth over, go dead.
Don’t stutter.
Don’t freeze up.
“Deku killed somebody on Wednesday,” Shouto explained. “Bakugou tried to interfere, and I stopped him. He would’ve been hurt.”
“Izuku wouldn’t pull some shit like—he wouldn’t hurt me,” said Bakugou.
Shouto looked at Bakugou. “You were there when he told us he killed his mother, weren’t you? If you can kill your mother, you can kill your middle school bully.”
“Hold on. Hold on,” said Aizawa, raising a hand. “You—Izuku? Is this the same kid you addressed in your speech?”
Bakugou blinked. Then his eyes cut away and he said, “Shit. Didn’t mean to say his—fuck. Yeah.”
Aizawa’s gaze flickered to Shouto. Brow furrowed, lips parted. He looked back at Bakugou. “You implied that he was dead,” he said.
“No, I didn’t,” said Bakugou. “I said he jumped off a fuckin’ bridge. Because he did.”
“And he… Wednesday. You two watched…?”
Shouto nodded.
Aizawa looked at the sky. Exhaled.
“Fuck,” Aizawa murmured.
Bakugou’s eyes met Shouto’s. Bakugou’s mouth twitched, and he looked away.
“I really, really wish I’d had prior knowledge about this whole situation.” Aizawa looked back down at them. “Who… was it? The person who died on Wednesday.”
“Pedophile with a five-year-old daughter,” said Shouto. “Deku told me a few weeks ago that he was planning on killing him.”
Aizawa’s gaze burned into him. “And you didn’t tell anyone.”
“Why?” asked Shouto. “To save his life? It was shitty of Deku to kill him in front of Bakugou, but that man didn’t deserve to live.”
“Fuckin’… hell, IcyHot,” said Bakugou.
“Todoroki.” Aizawa kept his voice low, careful. “I’m not going to say that I disagree with you, but we have laws and a judicial system for a reason. That’s a dangerous worldview for a future Pro Hero to have.”
Anger rose in Shouto’s chest. Hot, foul-tasting, boiling-bile anger. “Okay, you know—fuck Pro Heroes. All they do is reinforce the worst parts of society. Bakugou, I’m sorry you got traumatized, but fuck you for how you treated Deku in middle school, and fuck you for refusing to give him space when he’s asking for it, and fuck you for thinking you’re somehow strong enough to swoop in and save him from something he’s been fighting his whole life, like it’s his fault he hasn’t escaped yet because he’s just not trying hard enough.”
It took Bakugou a second to speak. “Listen, fuckass—”
“You listen. I’m tired of listening. All I ever fucking do is listen.” Shouto motioned between them, Bakugou’s lunchbox swinging in his hand. “We’re shitty people, okay? Even if we end up making it as Pro Heroes, we’re never gonna save anyone in a way that matters. At least Deku is strong enough to help people. You want to take that power away from him because you don’t like seeing proof that he’s stronger than you.”
“Are you fucking stupid?” Bakugou said. “I wanna take it away because it’s hurting him.”
“He’s already hurt. He’s healing the best he knows how. That’s better than the rest of us are doing.” Shouto slammed Bakugou’s lunchbox into his chest. “I’ll see you on the field. If you need to cry, do it before you face me.”
Bakugou stumbled back. “You—”
“I don’t have the energy for your bullshit. I’m fucking done. Aizawa—” Shouto looked up at his teacher, and for a moment, he lost his words.
This man.
With his eye patch and his tired red glare and his capture scarf that, now that Shouto was looking at it, was absolutely covered in cat hair of assorted colors.
He’d tried so hard.
“I wasted a lot of your time,” Shouto told him. “Sorry.”
Shouto didn’t wait for a reaction. He left.
Notes:
Why did I elect to take both a poetry and a fiction class this semester? I mean, I know why, but why? I get way too emotionally involved when I'm writing critiques. I have no more critique left in me. Every time I read a piece about romance I just go "pfff well THAT'S fake, nobody gets crushes or has sex irl, what a loser, write about pet gerbils with diarrhea like an ADULT" and then I have to slap myself
Chapter 35: Shouto Loses 1/8th of His Brain Cells When He Hears All Might Say "Cellular Number"
Summary:
Sports festival one-on-one matches. Shouto roasting his classmates, and not even in the fun way. (Almost 7k words because I don't know how to stfu.)
Lowkey forgot "Young Todoroki" is a gendered phrase in Japanese. For our fanfictional purposes, it's not :)
Notes:
CW (minor spoilers): burning/charring, minor body horror (fingernail/hand ouchie), accidental outing, gaslighting from abuser, intimidation, minor sexism, suicidal ideation (a lot), dissociation, sensory overload, panic attack(s) and resulting select mutism, suicide jokes; REFERENCES TO: substance abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, violence/blood, murder
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The section of bleachers reserved for 1-A was empty, at least—everyone was still at lunch.
Shouto sat in one of the plastic chairs bolted to the metal bench. Out on the field, groundskeepers were raking dry dirt over the field with a large rolling machine to smooth it out for the one-on-one matches. His giant ice dome from the cavalry battle had since been deconstructed, but apparently not before a quarter of it had melted into the ground.
Why didn’t they just get someone with an earth-manipulation quirk to do that work? Security concerns? They were already doing a shitty job of that, with Deku being here. Might as well open the whole fucking stadium up to the public.
He slouched into his seat. His shirt clung to him in strange places when he shifted—was he sweating again? Shouto tugged his shirt down from his armpits, lowered his body temperature.
He’d really just… yelled at Bakugou. And Aizawa. Objectively, a stupid thing to do. Shouto didn’t regret it right now, but he knew from experience that if he sat with the memory long enough, it would eat at him. It’d play on a loop in his brain for as long as it took to milk out every ounce of self-hatred that he possibly could.
So he tried to hold onto the anger for now. It wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be. Because he was angry.
Wasn’t sure at whom. But he was.
There was a rustling to his side. In Shouto’s peripheral vision, Hawks sat down a couple seats away, wings jutting awkwardly over the backs of the chairs.
Goddammit.
Shouto didn’t look at Hawks. For a few long seconds, neither of them spoke.
Hawks broke the silence. “So. Shouto, huh?”
If anything qualified as a panic-inducing phrase, that was it. Hawks and Endeavor were maybe not on good terms, but terms existed. Hawks could tell Endeavor that Shouto was… well, Shouto. Very well might tell him.
Right now, though, Shouto did not give a fuck.
“I guess,” said Shouto.
“Not gonna lie. Kinda thought you were a lesbian.”
“That’s funny.” Shouto kept his voice flat. “I thought you were one, too.”
Hawks gave a startled laugh. “Yeah, it—okay. Look, I’m not a bigot or anything.”
What did he want, a fucking You tried! sticker? “Glad to play a role in your self-actualization.”
“Was that why you were acting like you don’t like me?” Hawks asked. “Because I was calling you—”
“No. I was acting like I don’t like you because I don’t like you.”
“Wow,” said Hawks. “Wanna let me in on why?”
“Because of that. You pretending you don’t know why.”
“Assume I’m oblivious.”
“I know you’re not,” said Shouto. “And I know you think I am.”
“I don’t—”
“Yes, you do. I don’t care that you think that, because everyone does. But you need to understand that I’m not naïve. I’ve been at the brunt of the Hero industry my whole life. I know how it works, I know how the people inside it work, and I know that you see shit and then act like you’re ignorant in case you need to deny culpability later. So fucking drop the act. It’s annoying.”
Hawks exhaled. He pulled one of his feet up to prop his heel on the edge of his seat.
“How do you know Deku?” Hawks asked.
Shouto gave Hawks a sideways glance. “How do you know Deku?”
Hawks looked at Shouto for a moment, his eyes searching. Then his eyebrows arched, and he turned his attention toward the field.
“That’s fair,” Hawks said.
The door at the top of the bleachers opened, and some of the students started making their way down to the student section.
Hawks cleared his throat. “Just… you know he wants to kill your dad, right?”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” said Shouto.
A beat.
“All—all right.” Hawks raised his hand to point in the opposite direction. “Well, I’m… gonna go. I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah, okay.” Shouto looked at Hawks and smiled. “Don’t come to my funeral. Send Fuyumi a Snidel gift card, though, she likes that place.”
Hawks gave Shouto a strange look as he stood. He fluffed his wings out once—hitting Shouto’s left hand with a gentle whip of air—then tucked his wings in and walked away.
###
Shouto didn’t look at his classmates as they started filling in the seats around him. Momo had to tap his shoulder to get him to look up long enough to take one of the paper brackets she was handing out. Shouto glanced over his bracket just long enough to make sure the name beside his wasn’t Bakugou’s or Shinsou’s, and then he returned to watching the groundskeepers on the field.
He couldn’t help processing a few of his classmates’ conversations, though, especially when his or Bakugou’s names came up. A few rows in front of Shouto, Sero gave a loud groan.
“What?” said Kirishima. “Who’d you… ooohh. Tough luck, man.”
Kaminari wrapped an arm around Sero. “It was good to know you, Sero Hanta. We had some great times together. You were the love of my life, bro.”
“Bro,” said Sero.
“Dude, I’m sorry,” said Ashido, “but the only way you’re winning that is if Shouto just flat-out dies. I’m talking a sniper from the stands or something.”
“Would that even work?” asked Kaminari. “He’d probably see the bullet coming and catch it and just, like, throw it back so hard it killed the sniper.”
So Shouto was up against Sero the first round? Riveting. And did they not know Shouto had bad eyes? No way he’d be able to spot a sniper in the stands. Though he kind of wished he could see one right now. Because then he’d at least have something to look forward to.
Ha. Suicide joke. That one would’ve been funny to piss off Bakugou with.
Bakugou, who… was sitting five rows in front of him, hunched over his bracket and speaking to no one.
Shouto slumped into his seat. He tried not to watch the back of Bakugou’s head. Still, it was a relief to hear Bakugou’s voice a few minutes later when he called out to Uraraka— “Oi! Round Face! Who the fuck’s Ochaco?”
Uraraka said, half-choked, “That’s me.”
“Hah?!”
She sounded on the verge of tears. “I-I said that’s me!”
“Why the fuck am I fighting you? What do you even do?”
Uraraka covered her face, her voice muffled as she spoke through her hands. “I don’t know!”
“You don’t know what you do?!” yelled Bakugou. “You better not half-ass this!”
Iida paused as he walked by Bakugou, a short stack of extra brackets in his hands. He’d just come back from giving class 1-B—as well as Shinsou and that pink-haired girl with the rocket boosters, Shouto assumed—their brackets. “Bakugou-kun!” Iida said. “That’s unchivalrous!”
Bakugou made a scoffing noise. “Fuck outta here. Ain’t you got some dishes to alphabetize?”
“Shouldn’t you be more courteous when you’re matched against a woman?”
“What kinda fantasy world are you livin’ in, Four Eyes?” Bakugou said. “I’ll kick her tiny ass just like I’ll kick yours.”
“He’s got a point, man,” Kirishima told Iida. “It wouldn’t be super respectful not to give your all in a fight because of your opponent’s gender.”
Iida looked stunned. He turned back to Uraraka and ducked swiftly into a deep bow. “Please forgive me!”
Uraraka hiccupped from behind her hands. “I have no idea what any of you just said.”
Shouto’s phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket.
Endeavor:
Come to section 3 so I can speak with you.
How about he didn’t do that? Shouto left Endeavor’s message on read and put his phone on the bench.
It buzzed again.
Now. Or I’m coming to you.
“Fuck,” Shouto muttered. It wasn’t something he’d normally say out loud, and Aoyama in the row in front of him turned in his seat to give Shouto a strange look. Shouto didn’t care. He got up and headed down the bleachers.
“Todoroki-kun!” Iida called as he passed. “Where are you going?”
“To talk to my father,” said Shouto.
“But the one-on-ones are about to begin! Aizawa-sensei wanted us to pay attention to each other’s matches. I understand you may feel you don’t stand to learn anything from watching, but still, it’s disrespectful to—”
“You know what would be disrespectful,” said Shouto— “is if I just sat here and let my father storm in and start yelling at me while everyone’s trying to watch the one-on-ones. Stop assuming I only care about myself. I’m trying not to ruin everyone’s day with my shit. Okay? Thanks.”
He started back down the bleachers again. Heard Ashido behind him mutter, “Damn, homeboy went off.”
Shouto kept walking.
When he reached the bottom level of the bleachers, though, a hand caught his arm. Shouto looked back to see Bakugou.
“What do you want?” Shouto snapped.
Bakugou’s eyes darted away briefly. “Look, I’m gonna—”
“No, you’re not,” said Shouto. “Go sit down.”
“Fuckin’… get Aizawa, then.”
“I said go sit down.”
“You can’t just go see your fuckin’ dad on your own like some damn—”
Shouto sent a burst of heat down his arm.
It took less than a second for Bakugou’s eyes to shoot open wide, for him to yank his hand away. “God—shit.”
Keeping his eyes locked with Bakugou’s, Shouto patted out a small flame that had ruptured along the hem of his shirt sleeve. Then he left.
Endeavor was waiting just outside his private viewing box, leaned against the door with his arms folded across his chest, brows furrowed against the sun. He was in his Hero outfit with his flames, of course, but they were more flickers than whips right now. The chest of Endeavor’s costume was dark with sweat.
“No air conditioning in your box?” Shouto asked.
Endeavor’s head turned to him. He was silent for a moment before he said, “The view is better from outside.”
“If you turn your flames off, probably you won’t sweat like you’re your own personal sprinkler system,” said Shouto. “I know the science is difficult to grasp, but… fire is hot.”
Endeavor frowned. He unfolded his arms, opened the door to his box. “Come inside.”
“I don’t want to,” said Shouto.
A muscle in Endeavor’s jaw twitched as he glanced around at the surrounding crowd. A few people in the adjacent bleacher section were looking at them.
“Inside,” said Endeavor. “Too many people out here.”
That was exactly why Shouto wanted to stay outside. Endeavor couldn’t hurt him or make any serious threats while there was a chance that someone may pass by. “I want to stay outside.”
Endeavor’s flames gave a sharp whip, like a sudden wind had just hit them. “Shiyo.”
Which would’ve been the end of it, usually. But Shouto kept Endeavor’s gaze. “I’m not going inside with you,” he said. “You’re going to do something stupid and then I won’t be able to compete.”
Endeavor’s eyes cut away. He gave an exasperated huff. “Always have to dramatize everything, don’t you? I’ve never hurt you like that.”
Shouto stared at him.
What?
“Anyway—” Endeavor closed the door again. “—I don’t know why you haven’t used your fire yet. What’s your opponent’s quirk for the first—”
“Are you fucking serious?” Shouto asked.
Endeavor looked down at him, eyes narrowing.
“Who the fuck has been paying my medical bills this whole time?” Shouto said. “Santa? Fucking All Might? You don’t remember when the doctor told you I could die if I get another concussion?”
“Those were accidents,” said Endeavor. “Your classmates haven’t ever sprained an ankle in a training session? Pro Heroes get hurt all the time—do you see them reporting the Hero Commission for abuse?”
“That’s not the same,” said Shouto.
“Tell me how it’s not the same.”
“It’s—it’s not the…”
Shouto’s voice trailed off.
It wasn’t the same. He knew it wasn’t the same. But he didn’t know how to articulate that. Especially not in one non-stuttered sentence.
Endeavor rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What was that at the end of the cavalry battle?”
Shouto’s anger had worn off a little. Not in a good way—it was like coming down from a high and realizing everything still hurt. His words felt like rocks in his lungs. His throat was dry and sore.
He told Endeavor, “I dropped the headband.”
“I saw. Why?”
“Quirk from the other team,” said Shouto. “Brainwashing.”
One of Endeavor’s eyebrows shot up. He dropped his hand.
“Brainwashing,” Endeavor said.
“Yes.”
“Did you know about it?”
“No.”
“Who is this student? How does his quirk activate?”
He didn’t want to tell Endeavor how Shinsou’s quirk worked. He didn’t want Endeavor to know about Shinsou at all. He kept his expression dead. “I don’t know who he is.”
“What happened afterward with Midnight? The cameras were mostly blocked, but I saw commotion on the field.”
Shouto couldn’t think of any way to twist the story that wouldn’t anger Endeavor. So he said, “Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me. Why did Midnight have to use her quirk?”
Shouto said nothing.
The only truthful way to answer that question was to insinuate that Endeavor was at least partially to blame. Because Endeavor had employed Lady Hypna, had helped her rise in the Hero rankings, was still keeping her employed.
“Can’t you talk?” Endeavor said. “Tell me what you did.”
What he did. “I thought she was someone else.”
“What do you mean? She was right in front of you.”
“I mean I thought she was someone else,” said Shouto. “Are we done? Did you want to threaten to cut off my finger again, or can I go back to my class?”
“You need to calm down,” said Endeavor. “You’re never going to achieve anything being this hysterical. God, you take after your mother too m—”
“Endeavor, old friend!” A familiar booming voice from behind Shouto startled him. “I’m glad I caught you.”
Shouto looked over his shoulder. Fucking… All Might. Shouto was bad at picking up on social cues, but holy fuck… could All Might not tell that Endeavor was pissed off right now?
“All Might,” said Endeavor, his voice guarded.
“Ah! Young Todoroki,” said All Might. “The one-on-ones have started. I believe Aizawa-sensei wanted the class together?”
“I know,” said Shouto. “I was just going ba—”
Endeavor’s hand settled on his shoulder. The sensation was awful, like someone had dropped a giant, warm, heavy slug just next to his neck. He wanted to scrape it off.
He didn’t.
“Do you want something?” Endeavor asked All Might.
“Well—I’ve been meaning to invite you to tea,” All Might said. “It’s been a while since we’ve chatted. How’s your wife?”
Something giddy and strange rose in Shouto’s chest. He barely swallowed it back. If All Might followed that up with What about Touya? then Shouto was either going to burst out laughing or kick someone very hard in the stomach and/or groin.
Endeavor’s grip tightened on Shouto’s shoulder. “She’s fine.”
“Glad to hear it.” All Might looked down at Shouto. “That ice dome was quite the feat, Young Todoroki. I’m impressed by your improvement with groupwork since the first week’s battle trial. I missed the tail end of the cavalry battle, unfortunately, but I heard it was an exciting couple minutes!”
Shouto’s “improvement with groupwork” was probably less of Shouto building tactical skills and more of Shouto standing around and debating if he should get the cherry blossom mochi at lunch again (despite its disappointingly low sugar content) while his teammates floundered. When his teammates started getting overwhelmed—if Shouto hadn’t zoned out completely by then—he would step in.
“I guess,” said Shouto.
All Might addressed Endeavor again. “I’d be interested to learn how a father is able to train a boy with so much ambition. And a strong sense of justice, at that.” He winked at Shouto like Shouto was supposed to know what the fuck he meant. “You must be very proud of your son.”
Oh.
Well.
Shouto hadn’t expected All Might to exceed the awfulness of asking a question about Touya, but… there it was. Not everyone could fit that much inanity and an (unintentional? How did All Might manage to make that worse than an intentional act of transphobia?) outing into a single sentence.
Shouto felt a corner of his mouth twitching up.
Jesus fuck. Shouto was a little bit impressed.
Endeavor repeated, his grip burning into Shouto’s shoulder— “My son.”
All Might must’ve heard “my son?” and not “my son?”, because he, unfortunately, kept speaking. “Of course! Even inexperienced as I am as a teacher, I can acknowledge that we’re fortunate to have him. Well—I’d best be getting back so I won’t miss my students’ matches, but you have my cellular number, don’t you?”
“I’m leaving,” said Shouto, ducking to twist out of Endeavor’s grip before walking—quickly—away.
Endeavor didn’t call after him.
Shouto started to head back toward the student section, taking the long way through the less-occupied hallways behind the bleachers. He eventually slowed to a stop—without noticing at first, until he started wondering why his surroundings remained stationary.
What the fuck was he doing.
The one-on-ones didn’t matter. The sports festival didn’t matter, keeping all his goddamn fingers didn’t matter. Deku could’ve killed everyone in 1-A just now, and Shouto was worried about Endeavor being mad. What sort of bubble was Shouto living in, where things like children’s athletic competitions and his fucking gender were more important than his classmates’ lives?
If he didn’t want his own involvement with League members to affect his classmates, he needed to cut off the link between himself and 1-A. Even Bakugou.
Especially Bakugou.
Fuck.
Something really shitty was going to have to happen, wasn’t it?
Shouto didn’t remember the entirety of the walk back to the student section, but then he was back, and he wasn’t ready to be back, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, save walking away again. He felt several pairs of eyes on him as he found an empty row of seats and sat down. He did his best to keep his posture normal, eyes forward, and expression dead. Wasn’t sure if it was working.
From the aisle beside Shouto came a series of metal-against-metal clunks, accompanied by the deep wobbling squeaks from the joints below the bleachers. The clunks halted. “Todoroki-kun.”
Shouto forced himself to look in the voice’s direction. Iida stood at the end of the row of bleachers, dressed—except for his helmet—in the unwieldy metal armor of his Hero costume. He must’ve changed while Shouto was away.
Iida looked down at Shouto with his gloved hands folded into each other in front of his chest.
“Ah—” Iida started. He tried again. “I apologize for what I said. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
Oh. Shouto had already forgotten about that. “Okay,” he said.
Iida didn’t leave, though.
“What?” Shouto asked.
“Your… hands are shaking,” said Iida. “Are you well?”
“No,” said Shouto. “Something bad just happened. Please leave me alone.”
Iida’s lips parted. A moment passed before he asked Shouto, “Is there…? Some way I can help…?”
“You can’t do anything,” Shouto told him. “It’s okay. Thank you. Please leave.”
Iida hesitated.
“Well, I’m—mm—here,” said Iida, and then he clunked back down the steps.
Shouto realized, suddenly, that he probably needed to check when he was scheduled to fight. He pulled the bracket from his pocket. The first fight was Shinsou and Kaminari, and the second was Kirishima and a name Shouto didn’t recognize. He looked out at the field—Kirishima was there now, sparring a silver-haired boy that looked like he also had a hardening quirk.
So the Shinsou vs. Kaminari fight was over. Shouto looked behind him to where Ashido was sitting a couple rows up.
“Ashido,” he said, and waited until she looked at him. “Can you tell me what I missed?”
“Uh… not much, honestly,” said Ashido. “Denki’s recovering.”
Shit. Shinsou’s brainwashing. Aizawa had said that Shinsou’s quirk usually didn’t have any serious effects on its recipients, but… “Is he okay?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, he’s fine. Apparently that Shinsou guy said ‘well hey, handsome’ when Denki walked on the field, and Denki, like, short-circuited. Jirou’s feeding him cotton candy in one of the dressing rooms. Hey—aren’t you and Sero up next? Because he already left. You should probably get down there, too. Want me to hold your phone?” Ashido motioned to the seat beside her, which cradled several cell phones. “I’m keeping Sero’s and Denki’s and Eijirou’s, too. I’m the phone mama.”
It was his turn to fight already? He’d been hoping he would have more time to… not be fighting. He tried his best to keep his hand steady as he gave his phone to Ashido.
“There’s a shortcut if you go up the stairs, kinda next to the sound box,” said Ashido, pointing. “I lowkey got lost earlier, so I’m an expert on the entire building now.”
Shouto took the stairs. As he approached the soundbox, though, he began to regret his decision—the door was propped open by Aizawa’s shoulder. He had his back to Shouto, thankfully, and was talking to someone inside as he fanned his neck and face with a plastic folder.
“They cannot fight each other again,” said Aizawa. “I don’t care if we have to call a tie this year. This is a high school athletic competition, not the fucking hunger games.”
Present Mic’s voice. “They’ve already got their brackets, Shota. I don’t know what we can do. Nezu’s not letting up about switching the bracket order. Unless Hitoshi drops out—”
“I’m not going to tell him to do that. I don’t want him to do that. That’s not fair to him.”
“No, I agree,” said Mic. “He worked hard, and he deserves to be on the field.”
“Todoroki should not be competing. At all. Bakugou either, probably, but definitely not Todoroki. Because what the fuck.”
A cheering came up from the crowd.
“Oop—back to work,” Mic said. A second later, his voice boomed over the speaker, holding none of its earlier tension. “WOAH! And that’s that, folks! After what may be the longest fight in the history of the UA sports festival—twenty-two minutes and forty seconds—it looks like my favorite red-haired rock boy is our winner! Hope you brought some lotion, Kirishima, because your skin’s probably drier than Ben Shapiro’s wife right now!”
Aizawa went into the soundbox again, the door closing after him. His voice came over the speaker, but it sounded like he was speaking from the other side of the room. “Nobody’s going to understand that reference, Mic.”
“I see Midnight laughing down there! Midnight, are you laughing? Midnight’s laughing! I think. All righty, listeners—give us five minutes to smooth out all that dust our little fighters kicked up, and we’re back on with Sero versus Todoroki!”
Shouto headed down the stairs.
When he reached the lower level, he found an attendant waiting near the entrance to the field. She gave Shouto some brief instructions, and he nodded like he’d understood them.
A group of people in the bleachers above him were stomping in a rhythm and chanting something Shouto couldn’t make out. He really, really wanted to press his hands over his ears and squeeze his eyes closed, but the attendant was looking at him, so he didn’t.
Present Mic’s voice came over the speaker again. Shouto processed the cadence—energized, ready, and all the other things Shouto was not—but not the words.
His thoughts kept snagging on Endeavor. Heartrate speeding up, tripping over itself.
Things were not going to be okay.
At all.
“Kid,” said the attendant. “Kid. You going out there or not?”
###
It sounded like he was underwater.
His lungs felt like someone was holding him there—disembodied iron fingers tangling his hair, pushing his head beneath the surface, unflinching as they waited for Shouto to drown.
There were so many people.
Did all of them want to hurt him?
Sero was across the field from him. Sero. Sero Sero Sero. Shouto tried to make the name mean something. A classmate. What did that mean? Fuck. Fuck, there were a lot of people. Shouto could never fight this many people.
His quirk bit. Hot and cold at the same time. It felt bad. Thousands of fire ant stings coming from underneath his skin. He didn’t like it. It was bad. It felt bad. It was bad.
The countdown started. The audience joined Present Mic in counting. It was loud. Shouto couldn’t find his breath.
He could see Endeavor, though.
Big flaming fuck standing outside the private, air-conditioned viewing box that wasn’t good enough for him. Something hot and sharp throbbed in Shouto’s chest, intensifying the sting under his skin.
Endeavor was going to try to hurt Fuyumi or Natsuo now, wasn’t he? Because Shouto had gone behind his back, changed an aspect of his public image that he hadn’t received permission to change.
Mic and the crowd chanted, “THREE!”
If Shouto were strong enough…
“TWO!”
God.
“ONE!”
He would kill Endeavor. Right here, right now. Wouldn’t care if he tore his own body apart in the process.
“START!” Mic said.
Shouto didn’t move. Didn’t so much as flick his wrist. But a violent shiver ran through his body—an arc of hot pain, like someone had flicked a match toward his gasoline-soaked skin—and ice shot out from the toe of his right shoe. It cut through the dirt like a shark’s fin through water.
Maybe the ice had gained sentience, or maybe the instructions had been preprogrammed. Whatever the case, it didn’t ask Shouto’s permission to change directions. It exploded in mass and then shot up, up, until Shouto was sure that he’d just killed himself and everyone else in the stadium—
And then Shouto grabbed ahold of his quirk and wrenched it away from his skin, and the ice stopped.
Shit.
What had he just done?
His ice jutted up through the top of the stadium, several stories above the stadium’s uppermost level. It didn’t look like it had gone into any seating areas, though a few frozen spikes had made it past the railing, invading the space a couple meters above audience member’s heads.
Was Sero—?
No, Sero was okay. He’d been caught in the ice, but only up to his chest. There was no blood.
If Shouto had let his quirk run amok for another five seconds, though.
Over the speaker, Mic said, “Hang on, folks, we’re radioing security to make sure everybody’s okay. If you’re in sections six and seven, we’re gonna ask you to evacuate to the food court until we get everything cleared away.”
Shouto should probably start sublimating. He couldn’t feel his legs as he walked forward—just the jolting in his hips and spine whenever he took a step.
“Dude,” said Sero. Ice crystals clung to the ends of his black hair. “What the hell?”
Shouto didn’t meet Sero’s eyes. He put both hands on the ice an arm’s length away from Sero and started sublimating it.
After about a minute had passed, Sero said, “Hey, man, this is… really cold. Can you maybe hurry up?”
Irritation pricked at the back of Shouto’s neck.
Sublimation was difficult to hurry up, because he had to balance his left and right sides carefully. It wasn’t an ability he’d inherited. He’d researched until his head hurt, spoken with impatient quirk physicists who snapped passive-aggressive quips when he didn’t understand something, practiced until he was dizzy and shaking and nauseous with burned knuckles and palms that stayed numb for days—
He pushed a wave of heat into the ice.
It took two seconds for the ice immediately surrounding Sero to turn to liquid and drop to the ground. Sero made a hissing noise and stepped out of the newly-created cavern quickly, tugging the front of his soaked shirt away from his chest and muttering, “Shit—shit—”
Shouto watched him, his hands still on the ice. Sero met his eyes. A strange look came over his face—something confused, guarded, like in those Pro Hero movies when the Hero’s “Quirkless” best friend was revealed to be a villain with a body-changing quirk.
Sero took a few steps back—still facing Shouto—before he turned and walked off the field.
Shouto returned his attention to the ice. Rising fog from his feet caught his eye, and he looked down. The ice he’d melted to free Sero was a steaming puddle. He stretched his hand over it to test the temperature.
Hot.
Shouto looked over his shoulder to search for Sero, but he was already gone.
Shouto released a shaky breath. Shit. He hadn’t meant to burn Sero.
Had he?
###
Shouto didn’t go back to the student section in the bleachers. He found an empty dressing room, downed two bottles of water, and sat in the dark with his arms and head rested on the cold plastic table.
He tried not to think. But he didn’t have anything good to think about, and he was too tired to focus on keeping his mind blank.
He was going to have a panic attack, and it was going to be very, very bad, and he couldn’t afford to be in the middle of a breakdown when he fought Shinsou, because what if Shouto slipped up and killed him?
So Shouto imagined an end.
He could do it. Today, after he got home, before too many dominoes had fallen. He could. Right? Yes, he could.
It felt nice to think about.
He wouldn’t ever have to find out if Bakugou would never want to look at him again, or if Aizawa thought Shouto was destined for villainy and not worth his time, or if Kirishima and Ashido and Kaminari decided Sero’s well-being was more important than Shouto’s friendship, or if none of that mattered because Endeavor intended to pull him out of UA, or if Fuyumi’s love was conditional, or if his mother was ashamed of him, or if he’d grow up to be the type of person he hated the most, or if—
A knock on the open door. “Todoroki?”
The voice was familiar, but the word was strange. When he looked up, he saw why. Ashido.
She always called him Shouto.
He couldn’t see her face very well in the darkness, but her posture was strange—tense in the shoulders, arms hanging straight down. She was holding something. When she walked forward and held it out to him, Shouto saw that it was his phone.
“I think you should… text your brother back,” she said.
Shouto took his phone. Natsuo had been texting him periodically over the last half hour.
Natsuo:
Shiyo u ok?
I was gonna ask you later but did something really bad happen this week? Fuyumi says you’ve been acting like you did after Hypna last year. w/ the substance abuse & reckless behavior.
Not judging.
Just. Touya got into some bad shit before he died & I don’t want to watch all that happen again to my sister.
Ok well text me back when you can. Please don’t keep fighting if it’s going to hurt you. Your limits aren’t going to disappear just because everybody ignores them.
A deep-seated nausea bubbled up from the pit of his stomach like boiling tar.
Ashido had seen all of that.
All of that.
“D-did you…?” Ashido stopped. Started again. “Right now. Are you on something? Like, a… drug. Or something.”
Shouto had never heard Ashido’s voice surrounded by such deep silence. Silence was Shouto’s home, not Ashido’s, and he didn’t like meeting her here. This home wasn’t a place that could be made less horrible with a breakfast plate or a mini fridge.
Still looking down at his phone, Shouto shifted. His elbow knocked over one of the empty water bottles, and it made a hollow thumping noise. He set it upright again. Placed his phone screen-down on the table.
His hand was shaking.
“Why’d you do that to Sero?” Ashido asked.
Shouto dragged his thumb over the knuckles on his left hand.
Because. Because.
Fuck. He wanted to tell her. She was here. He wanted to tell her. He had fifteen years’ worth of explanations tangled in his throat.
“I have time to talk,” said Ashido. “You’re my friend, so if you have anything to say, I’ll listen to it.”
Fifteen years.
The silence bit like acid.
Ashido finally spoke. “I mean, I can’t really… I can’t do anything if you’re not gonna talk to me.”
Shouto tried. Nobody ever thought he tried, but he did. He tried now, and there was nothing.
“I guess you want me to leave you alone, huh?” said Ashido. “Probably why you’re down here by yourself with the lights off and all that. My bad. Um—” She backed toward the door. “Sorry I bothered you.”
He didn’t want her to leave.
But he couldn’t say that, so he stared down at the dark outlines of his hands.
“Just… I hope you can get some help,” said Ashido. In his peripheral vision, Shouto saw her put her hand on the door. “I don’t think you’re okay right now.”
She closed the door, softly, extinguishing what little light the dressing room had been pilfering from the hallway. Shouto looked straight down at his hands, and he saw nothing.
###
Twenty minutes later, Shouto was back on the field.
Shinsou wasn’t looking at him.
During the countdown, Shinsou hovered back near the edge of the circle. Not a good choice strategically, since Shouto was planning on winning by throwing him out of bounds. If Shouto didn’t want to drag this fight out—and he didn’t—disabling Shinsou wasn’t the best option. It had been aggravating to fight Shinsou during their private training session with Aizawa. He’d kept getting back up after Shouto knocked him down. Shouto didn’t want to give Shinsou a concussion or internal bleeding. Or burns from boiling water.
It was possible that Shinsou would get some internship offers based on his perseverance alone. Pro Heroes liked that sort of thing—easy PR. Big-name Hero agencies taking on relatively talentless kids as interns because they “had guts” or “dreamed big” or “worked hard.” Those kids usually didn’t end up making it as Heroes, but apparently the public ate the stories like candy. Shouto had overheard enough conversations between Pro Heroes and Commission employees to know that traffic on Hero school application webpages spiked every time one of those stories circulated.
Hopefully Shinsou wasn’t naïve enough to fall for that.
Present Mic started the countdown, and Shouto adjusted his stance. Should be a quick fight.
When Mic’s “START!” came over the speaker, though, Shinsou acted faster than Shouto had expected him to. Shinsou took one step—
Backward.
Shinsou had put himself out of bounds.
“Sorry,” said Shinsou.
Then he walked off the field.
Shouto advanced to the next round. Shinsou did not.
###
Back in the dressing room, Shouto received a text from Aizawa.
Iida had to leave because of a family emergency. You’ll be sitting out this round and taking on the winner of the Bakugou vs. Tokoyami match.
So, Bakugou.
If Shouto was going to use his fire at all—if he was going to follow Endeavor's orders—it would have to be during this fight.
Shouto switched on the tv on the wall, turned the sound off, and watched the match. He didn’t pay attention to the fighting, to the strings of explosions, or to Dark Shadow’s choreography.
He watched Bakugou’s hair. Watched it bob or give a sideways retort at each jerky motion Bakugou made. Blur of pale yellow.
###
Shouto knew, logically, that the reason he would win this fight was because he had years’ worth more training than Bakugou did. But Bakugou had worked so hard to get where he was—fuck, all of class 1-A had—while Shouto had barely gotten sore during practical training.
“Hey, Fuckass,” Bakugou called. “I know that dead fish look on your face. You slack off thinkin’ this’ll be an easy fight for ya, I’ll wipe the fuckin’ floor with your corpse. I don’t give a shit if you don’t wanna be here, you are here, so face me like a goddamn man.”
Shouto let his eyes roam the stands as Mic read out Shouto’s and Bakugou’s stats and repeated the rules of the game. He didn’t see Endeavor standing outside his box.
Shouto still hadn’t decided how he was going to use his fire. Hadn’t planned for this fight at all, really.
“Oi,” said Bakugou. “You hear me?”
Movement in the stands—a flash of red. He didn’t have to squint to make out the hulk that was Endeavor. He’d moved in, standing up close to the railing, glaring down at Shouto.
“Okie dokie,” said Present Mic over the speakers, “forty seconds, you two, so get where you need to be!”
In the stands, Shouto watched Endeavor raise his hands to cup his mouth.
Was Endeavor planning on shouting out?
A bellowing, SHIYOOO! USE YOUR LEFT SIDE!
No.
Shouto wasn’t going to let that happen.
Shouto raised his hand, pointing straight at Endeavor in the stands. And for the first time in his life, Shouto yelled first.
One word, wrenched deep from his chest— “ENDEAVOR!”
Endeavor stared back, lowering his hands. The audience hushed.
Shouto hadn’t planned past that. But the heat in his chest burned and burned, and he knew in an instant how he was going to use his fire.
First—the motion abrupt, unapologetic—
He flipped his hand.
Raised his middle finger.
A flame unfurled.
It flickered a dull red at first, but as Shouto’s head pounded with adrenaline—as it shrieked with something cold and hungry—the color changed. Past cherry red. Past orange. And past yellow, which was the hottest his flames had ever been before now.
This was white fire. Blooming around and up his middle finger like a sublimating lily.
He almost smiled.
Here it was. Endeavor’s fire, on national television.
That was what Endeavor had wanted, right?
You’re welcome, Dad.
Stimuli attacked Shouto from all angles. The crowd, roaring—nothing happy, nothing jeering, just roaring, like a caged lion had been released into the wild. The smell of burning flesh. The faint crackling as his fingernail split back from his skin, curling backward into itself. Char thickening.
Somewhere in the mix, probably, there was pain.
It didn’t matter.
He would win the sports festival, and he would do it without using his father’s quirk. If Shouto’s last act was forcing Endeavor to recognize his offspring’s power, Endeavor would know that his approval meant nothing to Shouto.
Shouto’s body belonged to himself.
Himself.
If he had to destroy his own body—burn it, freeze it, kill it—to protect his ownership, so be it.
Shouto wasn’t sure how much time had passed when his white fire ran out of flesh to burn and started falling back down in temperature. Shouto dropped his hand to his side, letting the fire go out. He faced Bakugou again, adjusted his stance.
“What a… powerful display of familial bonds!” Mic bellowed over the speaker. “Hope you didn’t hurt yourself with that party trick, Todoroki! I’ve never seen those white flames before. What about you, Eraser?”
Aizawa grunted. “Never seen the flames at all.”
“Well, that’s true,” said Mic. “Twenty seconds to start, Bakugou and Todoroki.”
Shouto met Bakugou’s eyes. Shouto had expected his expression to be determined, maybe, or even smug, but it looked more like the face he’d worn while he watched Deku prepare to murder a man. Lips parted, eyes wide.
“What—IcyHot,” said Bakugou. His eyes went to Shouto’s left hand. “You—what the fuck? Why’d you fuckin’…? Do you not feel that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Shouto.
“You can’t—your hand. What the fuck.”
Shouto made sure his shoulder was turned toward the main camera before he brought up the charred finger and tried to tug off the melted nail. He didn’t need it snagging on anything. When it didn’t work, Shouto just twisted the tip of his middle finger, right above the first joint.
The tip of his finger came off. The stub didn’t bleed.
“Ten seconds!” called Mic.
Shouto tossed the small lump of burned flesh to the ground as he turned to face Bakugou.
Fucking Bakugou.
With his terrified eyes. The blond hair that bobbed when he moved. Bakugou, whose tragic past was made up entirely of other people’s tragic pasts.
Shouto’s chest ached. He thought—Feel better, Bakugou, please.
After this.
After Shouto.
He deserved time to heal.
“You can’t fight like that,” said Bakugou. “Look, we’ll fuckin’… we’ll do this another time. We don’t gotta finish this today, we can—”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. “I love you. But don’t fucking try to tell me how I can fight. You don’t know shit about how I fight.”
Bakugou stared, slack jawed.
Silent.
Then, Mic’s voice, thundering from the speakers—
“AAAAAAND START!”
Notes:
-I PROMISE things are going to get better. I mean, not in the next chapter. At all. But! after we get through it! there is gonna be so much fluff that you will BARF.
-God I love Iida. All his exclamation points and clunking. I am definitely gonna abuse my writing privileges with his character in the near future, and that's a threat.
-Fun little life hack: if you shake your head after staying awake long enough, it sounds like you're being abducted by a UFO.
Chapter 36: I, the Author, Feel Like I Should Use This Title Space as a Preliminary Apology
Summary:
The Shouto vs. Bakugou match at the sports festival. Other things also happen D:
I've been sitting on this chapter for like 4 months, y'all.
Notes:
****TW!!!**** (contains spoilers): violence/minor blood, suicidal ideation, suicide attempt (by quirk), hypothermia, alcohol abuse, suicide attempt preparation and aftermath, cardiac arrest, guilt; references to: murder, domestic abuse (spousal and child), burns
****(more spoilers) If you need to skip the actual attempt scene, it starts with, "On the train, an empty water bottle rolled around under the seats," and ends with, "But it isn't./He doesn't like this." After that line (for the rest of the chapter) is the immediate aftermath, which some people may also need to skip. I'll include a general summary of those scenes in the chapter notes at the end in case you're worried about missing plot details.
****Intentionally triggering yourself is a form of self-harm--please don't read something that you know is going to mess with your health!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
****WARNING**** If you have triggers related to su/cidal ideation & attempts, please check the notes!!
Shouto waited for Bakugou to attack. That was how it always went—Bakugou attacked first, and Shouto defended.
But Bakugou didn’t move.
Shuffling over the speaker. Mic’s voice, quieter. “Is this thing…?”
“No, it’s definitely working,” said Aizawa. “I just lost thirty percent of my hearing.”
Shouto addressed Bakugou. “Are you going to move, or do I need to start this?”
Bakugou blinked. He started, “You can’t—”
“Fine,” said Shouto. He shot a line of ice from his right foot.
To Bakugou’s credit, he reacted quickly, boosting himself into the air with a couple explosions. He touched down again briefly before launching himself toward Shouto, already flying.
Bakugou had gotten better since school started. He didn’t start with his standard right hook—he grabbed Shouto’s left elbow and heaved him up about a meter in the air, using his right hand’s explosions to propel him.
He was planning on literally throwing Shouto out of bounds. Had grabbed his left arm—Shouto’s fire side—so Shouto couldn’t freeze him as quickly.
Not an awful idea.
But Shouto had trained much, much longer.
Shouto shot a forceful spear of ice deep into the dirt beneath him. He shoved ice fast from his hand, building an arching pillar of ice from the ground up, until his entire right arm was effectively anchored to the center of the field.
Bakugou grunted at the sudden tension. He lost his grip on Shouto’s elbow and crashed into the ground, swearing and using a series of small explosions to prevent his inertia from making him slide out of bounds.
Shouto melted the portion of ice encasing his arm—quicker than sublimation—and dropped to the ground beside Bakugou.
Bakugou struggled to his feet, hand on his right shoulder. “You’re fuckin’ crazy, Todoroki.”
Todoroki again. Not IcyHot, not Half-n-Half Bastard, not Strawberries-n-Cream or Fuckass or Dead-fish-photoshopped-on-top-of-a-poorly-cropped-Japanese-flag or any other insult Bakugou had thrown at him.
Todoroki.
The name sounded like a bad dream.
“You think,” said Shouto, and he pushed a wave of ice from his palm.
It might have looked like a pixelated animation of a liquid wave from a distance—the way it crackled over itself, the way it slammed into Bakugou like a train and shunted him toward the boundary line. In the last moment, though, Bakugou heaved himself over the crest. His landing back on the ground looked crooked and uncomfortable, but he stayed on his feet.
Shouto gave a humorless laugh. “So this is where I make my Powerful Villain speech saying how impressed I am by your improvement, I guess.”
“Shut th—shut the fuck up,” said Bakugou. His chest heaved. It took a couple seconds, but then Bakugou charged forward, his right palm giving a few preparatory pops.
Shouto swung his arm—about the same range of motion it might take to swat away an insect. The arc of ice caught Bakugou in his midsection, slamming him back into the sloping wall that Shouto’s ice wave had formed.
Bakugou slid to the ground. He shoved the block of ice off his legs. Coughed.
Shouto took a few steps forward. “Are you done?”
Bakugou’s voice came out a rasp. “Fuck you.”
“I don’t want to puncture your lung or anything.”
Bakugou’s glare burned. “Fuck you.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
He reached down and hoisted Bakugou up by the front of his shirt, dragged him away from the wall of ice. Bakugou’s hand came at his face, but before it could make contact, Shouto directed a punch into the area just below Bakugou’s sternum.
Bakugou gave a forceful huff, yanking his arm in and hunching into his chest. His other hand grabbed a handful of cloth at Shouto’s side—to hold Shouto there so Bakugou could punch him, Shouto assumed, but Bakugou just… stood there, head bowed, shoulders rising and falling with his heavy breathing.
“Do you want me to stop?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou said nothing. A bead of sweat slipped from behind his ear, cupped his jaw.
“You’re not fighting badly,” said Shouto. “There are fights you can’t ever win no matter how smart or hard you fight. That’s just how things work.”
Another several seconds passed. Then Bakugou moved—sudden, jerky—
Shouto caught Bakugou’s fist before it could hit his face. He pulled the heat out of the air surrounding Bakugou’s hand. Under Shouto’s fingers, Bakugou’s skin went cold, clammy.
That would lock the muscles in Bakugou’s hand up for a while.
He searched Bakugou’s face. Thin, spidery veins of blood had bloomed from his mouth, following the invisible lines in his lips. And—there was that look again. The one Sero had given him after Shouto burned him, that look of realizing that the person in front of him was not someone he knew.
Well. It had been inevitable, hadn’t it? That un-knowing. Bakugou had held out longer than most.
“It’s okay,” Shouto told him. “I won’t hurt you anymore after this.”
Bakugou’s mouth moved. “Wha—”
In rapid succession, Shouto kicked the side of Bakugou’s left kneecap, directed a chopping blow just underneath his right armpit, and hit the side of Bakugou’s neck with the side of his hand. Those moves all caused a significant amount of pain—Shouto had been on the receiving side many times—and they would render Bakugou temporarily unable to walk, punch, or even breathe.
The only noise Bakugou made was a small huff. His head ducked again, and he pulled his forearm up to block his face, hand shaking.
A defensive position.
Bakugou never did those.
Shouto twisted his fist into the front of Bakugou’s shirt. He pulled Bakugou toward the field’s boundary, Bakugou’s feet stumbling over Shouto’s and dragging the ground, his one functioning hand grappling for a hold on Shouto’s shirt.
At the boundary, Shouto paused. He tilted his head down a little, touched his forehead to Bakugou’s.
“It’s okay,” Shouto said. “You did your best. You can rest now.”
The words felt less original than they should’ve. Shouto remembered, suddenly, where he’d first heard them—from Deku at the USJ.
It’s okay.
Shouto dropped Bakugou out of bounds.
Bakugou didn’t move to cushion his fall. He lay there on his side for a second, and then he rolled onto his back, blinking painfully up at the sky. The blood on his lips had smeared across his cheek. The burns on Bakugou’s face from Wednesday looked dull and unimportant in comparison.
Shouto didn’t move from his spot just inside the boundary. He felt like he needed to remember that face. Needed to memorize it.
Bakugou turned his head and spat blood on the ground. “Get away from me. Fucking freak.”
But if… if Bakugou understood. Then maybe. If he just understood. “Bakugou—”
“Get the FUCK away from me.”
Bakugou never would get it, of course. Wouldn’t get any of it.
Shouto took a few steps back. Then he looked straight up at the cameras.
All across the nation, people were watching him. People had been watching him his whole life.
But now, he knew—people were seeing him.
He also knew that, right now, millions of heads were turning away from televisions. Millions of hands were reaching for remotes. To turn down the volume, turn off the screen.
Shouto kept staring. Burning a message into the airwaves.
Don’t look away.
I dare you.
###
The creaking wooden boards of the podium. Highest up—first place. Left hand tucked into a fist so they couldn’t see his finger. On one side, Tokoyami wasn’t looking at him. On the other side, Bakugou wasn’t looking at him.
All Might did look at him. But it was like he was seeing all the way through Shouto to the stands behind, with nothing catching on the way through. Smile. (No.) My boy— (No.)
Heavy around his neck. What was this medal even made of? First place. Where was Endeavor? Endeavor was everywhere. Was he seeing the medal? Here it was. Here. Here it was. Did he see it? Shouto couldn’t breathe. Here. Take it off. (No.)
First place. This was too high. Ground too far away. Dizzy.
Bakugou was quiet. Say something. (No.) Bakugou, look at me. (No.) Bakugou wasn’t looking at him. But they’d seen each other, right? Known each other? (Maybe.) So why wasn’t he looking at Shouto? (You know why.) Him, too? (Of course.)
All Might stepping off the podium. Boards creaking under his weight. Heavy. First place. Something was going to collapse.
But Shouto could fix it. Right?
(No.)
Why?
(It’s not designed to be fixed.)
###
After the awards ceremony, Shouto slipped the medal into his pocket and went to the locker room to grab his things. He walked in on Sero changing out of a sweat-dark UA t-shirt. Sero had a few light red marks across his back, mostly clustered near his neck.
Shouto had burned him. And not even during the fight.
Sero glanced back at Shouto as Shouto walked past him, but Sero didn’t say anything. Shouto opened his locker and took out his windbreaker and the small roll of bandages he kept in the bag’s inside pocket.
“Sero,” said Shouto.
Shuffling. A zipper. Sero didn’t respond.
“I hurt you,” said Shouto. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Shouto heard Sero’s locker close.
“It… y’know, all part of the game,” said Sero, voice flat.
“No,” said Shouto. He stayed facing his locker, winding the bandage around his left middle finger. The bandage wouldn’t serve much purpose health-wise, but it’d keep people from staring on the train. Probably. “That was a power play. I was being shitty and abusive. You didn’t deserve that.”
Sero was silent.
Shouto tucked the bandage in and slipped on his windbreaker. “I’m not going to say I’m sorry. You shouldn’t feel pressured to forgive me. I just needed to make sure you knew that I fucked up. Not you.”
“Y-yeah,” said Sero. “I just don’t… I don’t get why you felt like you needed to do all of that. I mean, I’m not a threat to you, dude, never have been. I have freakin’… tape arms.”
“My brain doesn’t work right anymore,” said Shouto. “I h—I had a lot of things happen to me, and it messed me up. I’m not good at sorting out what things are threats and what things aren’t. Usually I can…”
He stopped. Usually he could what? He’d never been able to completely control his reactions. He just avoided situations that would trigger them.
Shouto didn’t bother trying to finish his sentence. He put his bag over his shoulder, tugged the windbreaker’s hood over his hair, and started for the door. He did pause when he walked past Sero, turning a little to meet his eyes. “Hey, um… could—could you tell them I said thanks? Just your… your friends. If I don’t come back to school.”
Sero’s eyebrows drew together a little. “Why wouldn’t you come back to school? They’re not gonna expel you for accidentally burning me.”
Shouto watched Sero. And he thought,
Wouldn’t it be funny.
Wouldn’t it be funny if I told him.
But then Sero’s gaze darted away and his left foot scooted back a little, and Shouto realized he was making Sero uncomfortable.
“You’re right,” Shouto said. “They can’t really do shit to me, huh? With me being Endeavor’s kid. I could probably kill someone and they’d still let me attend.”
Sero didn’t meet his eyes. “I—I guess.”
Shouto reached out and pressed the back of his hand lightly against Sero’s arm. Sero tensed, but Shouto kept his hand there until Sero met his gaze again.
Shouto gave a small smile.
“You did good, Sero,” he said. “You’ll be okay. Take care of yourself. Yes?”
Sero stared at him, lips parted.
Then he blinked, inhaled. “Uh—yeah. Yeah.”
Shouto dropped his hand and headed for the door. He pulled the strings in his hood a little tighter before leaving.
When he was a little ways down the hall, he heard Aizawa’s voice behind him, far away and out-of-sight: “Has anyone seen Todoroki? Kirishima, have you…? Bakugou? Do you know where—”
Shouto didn’t stick around to hear their responses.
He was able to leave the stadium before the rush. The reporters hovering around their respective news vans outside didn’t even look at him as he passed.
He did hear a couple of them speak, though—
“Fucking hell, did you see…? What the hell is Endeavor doing to that boy?”
“No fuckin’ clue,” said another. “You know how teenagers are, though.”
“Word. But I also know how Pro Heroes are.”
“Whatever it is, ain’t nobody gonna do shit about it.”
“Ha. I hear that.”
###
On the train, an empty water bottle rolled around under the seats. Shouto wondered if it was the same one from Wednesday, when he and Bakugou were riding home together after the murder.
He’d read somewhere, once, that risk of death by suicide was higher for people with occupations that required them to temper their body’s instinct to scream. Sex workers. Soldiers. Athletes. First-responders. Pro Heroes. People who felt pain or trauma and trained themselves to get over it, get over it.
Shouto had been training.
Holy fuck, had Shouto been training.
The water bottle rolled out from under the seats toward Shouto. It knocked against his right foot and stopped.
###
Nobody was home when Shouto arrived. He made sure, peeking into Fuyumi’s room and double-checking his laptop for any front-door alerts from Endeavor’s phone. Afterward, he found Fuyumi’s half empty bottle of vodka in the wine cabinet and poured what amounted to a few shots into a cup. He held his nose and downed it, doing his best to ignore the awful burning aftertaste.
Okay. Okay. That would make things easier.
Shouto tossed the empty cup in the sink. Then he paused. He took the cup from the sink, put it in the dishwasher, and started a load.
Might as well be useful.
Shouto spent a few minutes cleaning his bedroom as he waited for the alcohol to take effect. He threw away used plastic wrap and empty food cartons, made his bed, unmade his bed and folded up the sheets and blanket in a neat pile atop his swivel chair. His backpack went on a hook beside his closet door--the hook Fuyumi had installed a couple years ago specifically for that purpose, though this was the first time Shouto had ever used it. He took his windbreaker off to put it away, only remembering the medal in its pocket when he felt its weight. He took his medal out of his pocket and dropped it atop the bare mattress.
The vodka started poking holes in his brain finally. Blood vessels dilating. The illusion of warmth.
Okay.
He stood in the middle of his room for too long, debating whether to leave his bedroom door open or closed. Open could lead to him being interrupted. Closed might keep his family out for too long. He didn’t want Fuyumi walking in on a two-day-old scene. That would be. Fuck.
Maybe he shouldn’t…?
It was easy enough to push that last thought out of his head with the alcohol spurring him on. Why not now? He’d been going back and forth on it since he was ten. If Fuyumi didn’t find him now, she would later. Or someone else would.
People died. Their bodies were found. That was how the world worked.
He was just looking for excuses.
He compromised, left the door cracked.
Shouto turned the shower on, twisting the knob to its coldest setting. Then, without undressing, he sat down underneath the spray.
Okay.
He remembered this.
The soggy socks, the sting of the chill, the wet smacks of water against his soaked clothing. From this past Wednesday with Bakugou, yes, but also from the last time he’d tried this a year ago.
Shouto lay down on his side, arm outstretched, cheek resting against his shoulder. He stared at the tile for a while. Closed his eyes.
Maybe: someone still there in the corner.
Maybe watching to make sure Shouto didn’t pass out and drown in a centimeter of water.
Maybe a warm, sweaty hand tucked into a cold and clammy one. Maybe that sticky feeling of two awkward bodies, and that drunken haze, and that not-quite-knowing, not-quite-caring whose fingers were whose. Maybe the suction that held two wet palms together.
But the image hurt more than it helped, so Shouto let it go.
Then he started lowering his body temperature.
###
It was easy enough to hold his quirk like that, taking about the same amount of effort as keeping a rubber band stretched between his thumb and index finger. He didn’t know if his temperature would stay fixed once he fell asleep—he couldn’t use his quirk while he was unconscious, so his body would try to regulate his temperature in the same way it would for someone without a temperature quirk—but it seemed likely that the combination of the ice-cold water and the alcohol would be enough to keep most of his quirk’s effects from fading.
Drowsiness pulled at the back of Shouto’s head. He rolled onto his back, the half-frozen puddle beneath him crunching as he moved.
He blinked up at the showerhead, listening to the soft crackle of frost tiptoeing across the floor, crawling up the bathroom walls.
Ach. This was starting to hurt a little.
A year ago, this had been the point where he’d gotten scared. He’d sat up and fumbled to turn the water off with shaking hands. He hadn’t been sure then if his quirk could kill him. He wasn’t sure now. But he wasn’t shivering like last time, at least—he’d done his research, learned that alcohol suppressed that body function.
He pulled his body temperature down a couple more degrees.
Okay.
So. Shouto being gone would mean that class 1-A had an odd number. Maybe that’d make Shinsou’s transition into the Hero course easier? Or Aizawa could even move Deku in.
Shouto laughed aloud, the sound loud and strange against the bathroom walls. Deku as a Hero. Who knew? Shit happened, it was possible.
Fuyumi. Would she be fine?
She’d be free to leave Endeavor, certainly. Finally.
Okay.
That was good. She didn’t deserve to be trapped like that.
A sound broke through his swimming thoughts, and it took him a few seconds to register it as his phone ringing in his bedroom. Where had he set his phone? He didn’t remember. Should he get up and go find it?
He tried to move his arm. His fingers twitched.
Oh.
Oh, he couldn’t move.
Okay.
Alarm pinged in his brain, but it was so distant he barely registered it, couldn’t separate it from the sound of his ringtone. Shouto closed his eyes and waited for the sound to go away.
It stretched on for what felt like hours. He was in a different dimension by the time it stopped.
Shouto exhaled, breathing frost onto his lips.
###
Where is this?
Someplace warm.
Things are okay here, so it doesn’t really matter.
Mom’s here. Hand on his forehead, fingers through his hair.
###
Fuyumi. Her voice coming from the kitchen, loud for the sake of being loud, asking Mom why chickens can’t just lay two separate eggs—one for the yolk and one for the white—because that would be so much easier for everybody involved—
###
Natsuo. Pretending not to see Shouto curled under a blanket on the living room couch, flopping down on top of him, marveling aloud that he hadn’t realized the Todorokis owned a talking blanket and wondering if he can make it say I love you, Natsuo! instead of GET OFFA ME, NATSUO!
###
Touya. He’s showing Shouto how to play some M-rated Hero game, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside Shouto, making a half-disgruntled, half-amused noised every time Shouto accidentally kills off Touya’s in-game character. There’s a makeshift ashtray—the lid to one of Fuyumi’s candles turned upside-down—positioned off to the side.
Just weed, says Touya, but don’t tell Hardass-san, yeah? He’ll snap my neck. Oh, hey—you try’na fuck up my ranking on purpose? Quit stabbing your own teammates.
Red-hair-spotted-white, face hazy, features shifting. But his laugh. Always his laugh. Shouto remembers that. Though he’s not sure why he categorizes it as remembering, because Touya is right here. Right here.
###
Someone’s talking.
The voice doesn’t fit well into his vision—too loud, too panicked—so he ignores it.
Tries to.
Images shiver. Mom’s hand turns sweaty. Touya smells like something burnt.
Pressure.
Something hurts.
Everything hurts.
And the vision shatters—a TV screen busted by a steel bat.
Terror floods in through the broken glass.
###
Those memories.
None of that ever happened, did it?
###
He doesn’t know where he is.
It’s dark.
Cold.
Okay.
Okay. Okay. Okay.
But it isn’t.
###
He doesn’t like this.
###
“Natsuo, it—n-no, I can’t—I can’t tell yet. Yeah, I took them off. I can’t figure out this—this shirt thing she’s got on? I don’t know. I don’t know. Holy fuck, her… hand… Are you almost here? Please tell me you’re almost here.”
Shouto understood the words individually, but his comprehension of them as a whole was faltering. He still couldn’t move. Which was fine, whatever, but he wished he knew what was going on.
“Oh my god, I can’t tell if she’s breathing. I should’ve—do I do CPR? I didn’t even think about that, I—oh my god, I don’t know if I remember how to do it, Natsuo.”
Shouto’s eyes fluttered open. His vision was blurry, his eyelids heavy. He saw a blur of white hair to his right. His lips formed the word, but no sound came out—
Mom?
His vision went black again.
“Fuck, fuck, okay, her eyes just sort of opened. Shiyo? Shiyo!” Shouto was vaguely aware of something touching his face. He didn’t feel completely tethered to his body right now, so he couldn’t be sure. “Please wake up. Hey. Hey. Shichan. Fuck, I can’t do this again, please, please…”
Shouto redirected all his energy into pulling himself back into his body. Mom sounded sad. Worried. Was Dad being shitty again? Shouto needed to figure out what was wrong. Maybe he could fix it.
Slowly, torturously, he opened his eyes.
The visual dissonance was jarring. Because… that wasn’t Mom, that was…
Fuck. Who was it?
A name. He knew this woman with red-spotted hair. Who was she? She was crying. Snowflakes flurried around her, their movements jerky, fitful. That meant bad things. What had happened?
He tried to ask. “W-wh—"
His mouth wouldn’t work.
“Shichan,” the woman said, her voice trembling, face ugly with terror. “I’m s—I’m so sorry. Can you move?”
Name. Name. Name. He almost had it, he really did, it just…
“Shiyo, can you hear me? Can you understand me?”
They were… related. She was not his mother. His sister, then? Come to think of it, where was Mom? She’d been so upset over the tea kettle incident, and then she’d been gone, and Dad wasn’t saying anything.
This was tiring. He let his eyes slip closed.
###
He was moving.
It wasn’t comfortable. He hit his arm against something solid, heard a man swear softly.
“She’s not shivering.”
“Is that bad?” asked the woman.
Someone was holding him, Shouto realized. An arm under his legs, an arm behind his back. A warm chest against him. It smelled like men’s body spray.
“I think so,” said the man’s voice. “Has she gotten into your alcohol before?”
“U-um. A couple days ago. I don’t keep it locked up, so…”
“Alcohol speeds up hypothermia,” the man said. “Vasodilation and all that. Shit. We need to get her to a hospital. Can you bring the car up?”
“Natsuo—”
“What? You’re not really gonna try to convince me she doesn’t need a doctor right now.”
“No no, just—they might not let her out again. Especially if Dad gets involved.” Her voice went quiet. “Like Mom.”
“We’ll get her out.”
“Natsuo, if Dad finds out—if he—”
“What’s he gonna do, kill her?” He exhaled. “Sorry. Just—”
“I’ll get the car.”
“Thank you.”
The grip around Shouto’s back tightened as the jostling increased. His back touched something soft. A mattress?
Then something rough was dragging across his skin, his arms and legs. The feeling jarred enough consciousness back into him for him to open his eyes.
“Shiyo? Hey. Shiyo? You with me?”
Shouto blinked. The world around him undulated. Heaved and rippled like reality itself was drunk.
Natsuo, his brain supplied. The voice belonged to Natsuo.
“I’m just toweling you off right now,” Natsuo said, the cheeriness in his voice pulled string-thin. Something metal clattered loudly to the floor, and Natsuo swore. “Fucking... medal... all right. You're all right. We’re gonna get you to the hospital so they can warm you up, okay? It’d… be great if you could wake up enough to help me get this damn thing off you.” Shouto was tugged upright. “What the fuck is this thing?”
Shouto worked to process the words. Worked harder to speak. He could barely feel his tongue. “Button.”
“Huh?”
“On t-th—” He reached for the button to loosen his binder. Moving his arm even a few inches was way harder than it should’ve been. He strongly doubted he’d be able to bend his wrist and fingers enough to find and press the button.
“Just tell me,” Natsuo said. “A button?”
“M’ back. Left. Button.”
Natsuo’s hand fumbled along Shouto’s back until it found the button and pressed it. The front of his binder relaxed.
“Woah,” said Natsuo. “High-tech. Can you put your arms up so I can pull it off? I won’t look.”
Like Shouto fucking cared. The problem here was figuring out how to make his arms do what he wanted them to.
This situation didn’t make any sense. Why was Natsuo here in the first place? What was wrong with Shouto?
“C-can’t… move,” Shouto slurred. “Why—why’m I…?”
“It’s okay,” said Natsuo. He draped the towel around Shouto’s shoulders. “You’re okay. Just keep this towel around you and we’ll let them take your shirt thing off at the hospital.”
“Binder,” Shouto muttered.
Natsuo slid one arm under Shouto’s legs and another behind his back, grunting as he picked Shouto up again. “Hm?”
Shouto closed his eyes, leaning into the warmth of Natsuo’s workout shirt. “S’called a binder. Makes y-your ch—your chest flat. ’M a boy at school.”
The sound of a door squeaking open. Footsteps, and gentle rocking in time with them.
“Natsuo.” Shouto muttered the name into the darkness behind his eyelids. “Natsuo.”
“Yeah?”
“Y-you. Here? Home.”
“Yep,” Natsuo said.
“F— long? For long? How long?”
“How… how long do you want me here?” asked Natsuo.
Shouto considered. “I want… I… a month.”
“A month?”
“Or,” said Shouto, “or. Or. Two? Or—you can be here.”
“What do you mean?”
His thoughts weren’t translating well. Maybe if he pushed enough of them out, Natsuo would understand. “I mean—I’m—you can be here. If you want. You can—you can be here.” He rapped his knuckles on Natsuo’s chest like it was a door. “Don’t ha—half—have to stay if ’m noy—anning—wha’s…? Don’t ’member the word. Annoy—Natsuo.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re smart.”
Natsuo arm under Shouto’s legs shifted. The smooth hiss of a door sliding open. “You are, too.”
“N—”
Shouto blacked out. When he woke up a moment later, he smelled the vanilla cinnamon air freshener of Fuyumi’s tiny kei car, felt the uncomfortable seat beneath him. He peeled his eyes open, squinting and trying to get a sense of proprioception.
He was sitting sideways with one shoulder pressed into the backrest, one leg dropping off the seat to the floor. Natsuo had his arm wrapped around Shouto, pressing his body heat into him. Fuyumi was holding his limp hand as she drove. Shouto couldn’t feel it.
A trickle of icy water trailed into his eye. He shut his eyes against it. Dropped his head against Natsuo’s warm shoulder.
He didn’t understand where they were going or why Natsuo and Fuyumi weren’t talking like they normally did when Natsuo visited, but… this felt kind of nice. Being between them. Even if he was too cold to feel most of it.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d sustained human contact for this long.
“Hey,” said Natsuo. Shouto felt fingers on his forehead, scraping his wet hair from his eyes. “Hey. You awake? Say something for me?”
“Fuyumi,” Shouto murmured, eyes still closed.
Increased pressure around his hand. “I’m here.”
“Y’nev—you never hug me anymore. You…” He struggled for words. This was different from the usual sludge in his throat. Now, the words hovered just beyond his reach, darting away like frightened minnows as he approached them, and he had to focus to trap them in a sentence. “…scared? Of me?”
“Baby—” Her voice cracked. “No. No. I’m so sorry. I thought you didn’t like it.”
“Sh-shoulda stayed,” he said. “The… the… banquet. Got scared. Thought she w-was gonna tell everybody, and then I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t—she was gonna say something about the dress—”
“It’s okay. That was a long time ago.”
He opened his eyes. His vision was blurry. He tried to turn toward her. “No, y-you—I want you to get it. Fuyumi. About the dress.”
“Shiyo, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
“I don’t want you to be scared. I don’t w—I don’t like that. I’m—I’m—I’m sorry I make you feel bad, Fuyumi. I’m really sorry. I’m sorry. I want you to stop f… for y-you to… I want to stop making you feel bad. I don’t know how to fix it.” His throat felt like it was closing. “I’m sorry.”
Fuyumi’s hand left Shouto’s hand to press his head into her neck. She pressed a kiss onto his forehead. Inhaled, wet and shaky.
Oh. No, no, no. Was she crying? He hadn’t meant to do that. “Yumi,” he said. “Wh—what’d I do? I won’t do it again.”
“Shh,” said Fuyumi. “Shh. Baby.”
“I—” Shouto looked from Fuyumi to Natsuo. “Na—Fuyu—Is she crying? Did I do—do th…?”
Natsuo’s own eyes were wet, expression crammed full of an emotion Shouto didn’t understand. “Hey,” said Natsuo.
“What’d I do?” Shouto asked. The panic was choking him. He looked up at Natsuo, searching his face for something. Shouto looked at Fuyumi again, and fuck, she was crying.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
He whipped his head back to Natsuo. “Tell me wh—Natsu—Natsuo, tell me what I did. I need— I can’t fix it if I don’t know.”
“It’s not your fault,” said Natsuo.
“I don’t—” Shouto did choke that time. He felt his chest heaving, heart beating loud and angry in his ears. They weren’t telling him something. “I don’t like this. Natsuo. I’m scared. Natsuo. Natsuo.”
“I’m here,” said Natsuo.
“Did I hurt some—? Did I kill somebody?”
“No,” said Natsuo. “No.”
Shouto looked back at Fuyumi, at her blinking rapidly at the road, at her biting her lips in a failed attempt to keep them from trembling, at her wet cheeks. And Shouto felt his own eyes fill with tears.
“I’m sor—Fuyum—” Shouto turned to Natsuo. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see, his vision clouded and watery. “Please let me fix it. Please. Natsuo, please. I don’t understand. Tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do.”
“Just breathe. Hey.” Natsuo caught Shouto’s face before he could look at Fuyumi again, forced Shouto to meet his eyes. He kept his voice low, stern. “Take a breath. This is not your fault.”
“S’always my—”
“It’s not your fault,” said Natsuo. His expression pinched, and he pulled away a little. Turned his head away from Shouto, squeezed his eyes shut, pressed the heel of his palm over his right eye. Natsuo mouthed a word—fuck. He swiped at his eyes and blinked his expression back into something less terrified before facing Shouto again. “I’m—I’m sorry anybody let you think that. We’re gonna find you some help. Okay?”
Fuyumi spoke, voice unstable. “Natsuo, you— Can you call ahead to the hospital?”
Natsuo put his arm around Shouto again, his tight grip pressing Shouto’s elbow into his ribcage, and fumbled one-handed with his phone. Shouto started to put his head on Natsuo’s shoulder, but his heart did a strange flip, and he straightened. His chest felt… tight.
“Shiyo?” said Fuyumi. “Does something hurt?”
“N… no,” said Shouto. “Feels weird.”
“What does?”
“’M… chest. Wh—” Shouto tried to make sense of the surroundings outside Fuyumi’s car. He didn’t recognize anything. Just movement. His face felt wet and sticky. Was he crying? That didn’t make sense. Why was Natsuo here? “Are we… we going some—? Somewhere?”
“Natsuo,” said Fuyumi. “She said her chest feels weird.”
Natsuo paused talking on the phone to ask Shouto, “Are you using your quirk?”
He evaluated his body. The parts he could feel didn’t feel like they belonged to him. “Don’t—don’t know.”
“Try not to. Okay? Changing temperature too fast could mess with your heart.”
Shouto dropped his head onto Natsuo’s shoulder. He wasn’t sure why Natsuo was worried about his heart. Wasn’t sure it mattered enough for Shouto to spend energy wondering about. “Gonna sleep,” he said.
“Please don’t,” said Natsuo.
Shouto licked his lips. He was thirsty. “Mm—tired.”
“I know, but we need you awake so you can tell us if something starts feeling off.” He spoke into the phone again. “So the west entrance—? We’re just a couple minutes away now, I think. Okay, thank— Yes, it’s Todoroki. Yes, that Todoroki.”
Shouto brought his left hand up to swipe a trail of water from his nose. It hurt to bend his elbow. There was a wet bandage wound around his middle finger, with first- and second-degree burns blooming across the neighboring knuckles. His middle finger also looked… shorter?
“Is it hurting?” Fuyumi asked, voice soft.
He turned his hand around in front of his face. “S—it—is it s’posed to?”
“I—hm.” She gave a sharp, baffled laugh. “I imagine so.”
Shouto’s chest tightened again, and with it, an arc of pain. He lowered his hand and shifted in his seat, trying to blink the static from his vision. His pulse felt… fast. He wasn’t panicking, was he? Fuyumi and Natsuo were here. There was no reason to panic.
“Shiyo?” said Fuyumi. “Shiyo, what’s wrong?”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto. He still didn’t understand why she was acting so strange. “Y—you don’t have to be sad, or—It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
“Hey,” said Natsuo. He was off the phone now. “Is it your chest that’s hurting? Shichan. Hey.”
Shouto tugged at his binder. It was loose now, so why did it feel so tight? And fuck, it hurt. “S’okay. Natsu—did—Natsuo.”
“I’m here.”
“’Kay.” He remembered something. “Shi—Shinsou said Red’s Ocean is getting a third season. Did you? Did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” said Natsuo.
“D’you w—” He paused until the pain in his chest passed its peak. “—want to… to watch it with me?”
“Y-yeah,” said Natsuo. “Yeah, that’d be fun.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “I love you. Yumi, I lo—”
His chest seized. He jerked up. For just a second, his vision cleared, and he could see out the window.
There was a motorcycle. It wasn’t Deku’s—his had been darker, smaller—and the person on it wasn’t Deku. But for a moment, Shouto was watching Deku clinging to Dabi’s clone in front of him. Watching Deku turn his head to smile and wave at Shouto, watching Deku laugh as Dabi’s clone jabbed his elbow into his side, watching both of them speed off between the cars on their way to do something as ridiculous as it was dangerous.
The vision left as quickly as it had come. It dropped away alongside Fuyumi and Natsuo, alongside the uncomfortable seats and the vanilla cinnamon air freshener, and alongside even Shouto’s own body, until there was nothing left.
Well. Not nothing. There was silence.
But silence wasn’t new.
Notes:
Summary of attempt/aftermath scenes for those who skipped:
-Shouto attempts suicide by hypothermia, using water and alcohol to intensify his quirk's effect.
-Fuyumi finds Shouto and calls Natsuo to come help. They carry him to Fuyumi's car and head to the hospital.
-Shouto (who is drunk and just out of it in general) accidentally outs himself to Natsuo, who doesn't respond. On the way to the hospital, Shouto says some things that make Fuyumi and Natsuo realize how bad Shouto has been feeling.
-Shouto experiences a complication of hypothermia while still in the car, and he loses consciousness.
###
A lil fluffy story to balance out the chapter:
I was the brother of honor in my best friend's wedding (I've known her 13 years) this weekend :) I hadn't seen her parents and our mutual friends since graduating high school (and transitioning), so I was a little terrified. (Also: agoraphobia. It BAD.)
But honestly the worst thing that happened was her dad stopping in front of me and saying, "Well, Max [dramatic Dad™ pause], you'll always be [deadname] to me, but you look handsome." Which is more than I ever got from my own parents, so I'll take it.
Her mom and the two old friends from high school (this is the high school that still threatens expulsion for gay students and allies) didn't slip up ONCE. No weird questions, no passive-aggressive remarks. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But then I was eating s'mores and giving my best friend the longest hug I've had in like 3 years--I thought she'd stopped hugging me--and driving home through poorly-lit Mississippi county roads while wearing my oversized Brother of Honor flannel, and nothing bad ever happened except that I spent all my data for the month playing Twenty-One Pilots on a loop for 6 hours.
Conditional love is not the default. Y'all take care of yourselves :)
Chapter 37: Shouto and Natsuo Discuss The Count of Monte Cristo, Which I Included Because It's a Revenge Narrative so It Fits the Theme but Mostly Because It's My Favorite Book and It Deserves More Attention
Summary:
✨Hospital time! (again)✨ Natsuo's threatening to beat the boys off Shouto with a stick. By "boys," I mean Endeavor. And by "stick," I mean a steel pipe.
Notes:
CW (minor spoilers): suicidal ideation, hospital setting (needles, IVs, the Fun Stuff™), feeling physically trapped, panic; REFERENCES TO: blood, suicide, psychiatric hospital, heart arrhythmia & defibrillation, burns, the stuff that happened last chapter
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
When Shouto opened his eyes to stare at the tile ceiling, his mind was completely blank. It was a nice moment.
It ended quickly, of course.
“Hey—? You up?”
Natsuo’s voice. It took a truckload of willpower to pull his gaze to the side. Natsuo was sitting slanted in a chair, like he’d just pushed himself up from a slouching position. He stuck a folded piece of paper between the pages of the novel he’d been reading and set it in the chair beside him. The harsh lights made his hair look frizzier than normal, the circles under his eyes a little darker.
“Hi,” said Natsuo.
Shouto looked down at himself. He was covered in several layers of heavy, dense blankets except for one arm, which was connected to an IV. Another IV, larger and branching off into multiple lines, had been stuck in his neck and taped down—he could see its small bulge under his skin.
Hospital?
Wasn’t the first time he’d woken up here with no memory of how or why, but it had been a while since that last happened. What had Endeavor done this time?
Shouto motioned to the IV beside him. It took him a second—his entire left hand was numb, so he wasn’t sure at first if it was his hand moving or someone else’s. The hand was also bandaged, most heavily around his middle finger. His tongue felt heavy. “What—what’s that?”
Natsuo’s eyes followed his hand. “The IV?”
“Hm.”
“I think that’s glucose.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. He shifted, felt the needles move a bit under his skin. “That… it’s for me?”
Natsuo’s eyebrow quirked up—just a little, and then his expression went back to something more abstractly pleasant. “Yep,” he said. “All yours.”
Shouto made a move to sit up, only to be restrained by the tangle of cords and tubes attached to him. There was a nasal tube wrapped under his nose and behind his ears that he only noticed when it pulled against his skin.
“Oh—hey,” said Natsuo. “Maybe don’t do that?”
Shouto forced himself to exhale. He didn’t like the way the upper half of the bed angled up not quite forty-five degrees, but he laid back anyway.
“Thanks,” said Natsuo.
Shouto moved his eyes to the book Natsuo had put in the seat beside him. He didn’t try to move his arm again— feeling the needles shift beneath his skin made him want to rip them out. “What’s that?”
“W-what, my book?”
“Yeah.”
“Um, it…” Natsuo fumbled to pick up the book and show the nondescript cover to Shouto. “It’s The Count of Monte Cristo.”
“It’s big,” said Shouto.
“Yeah, it’s pretty long.”
Shouto had trouble reading books. Nothing ever processed right. “Do—do you like it?”
“Yep,” said Natsuo. “I mean, it’s not my first time reading it. I like pre-Quirked books. They tend to be more creative, I think. Less of the Deus Ex Machina trope you’re always getting with someone’s secret quirk saving the day or whatever. Especially when the character was coded as Quirkless for the whole first part of the… um. Anyway—is your chest still hurting? Anything feel funny?”
Why would his chest be hurting? He just wished his mouth would cooperate with his brain. “I don’t like—I don’t—things in my skin, I don’t like it.”
“The needles?”
“The… feels bad,” said Shouto. “Can they take them out?”
Natsuo pulled his mouth into an apologetic grimace, shook his head. “They’re gonna have to stay in a little bit longer, buddy. You were more alcohol than water for a while there.”
“Okay.” Shouto paused. “I don’t like them.”
“I know. Sorry.”
Shouto looked at the ceiling. He tried to think of something else to think about, but god—there were so many little tubes, and heavy blankets, and the warm air blowing up his nose, and he didn’t like it. It felt like he needed to fight these machines to get his body back. He liked having his body to himself, and nobody else could have it, nobody else— Why was that thought stirring up so much dysphoria? He didn’t like this. He didn’t like this—
The EKG’s beeping was speeding up. It took Shouto a moment to make the connection between the sound and his own pulse.
Shit. He didn’t even have his heart to himself in this room.
“You okay?” Natsuo asked. “Something hurting?”
“No,” said Shouto. He kept his face dead.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s okay.”
“Do you remember why you’re here?” Natsuo asked.
Shouto said, “No.”
“Do…? You want me to tell you?”
Out-of-order memories trickled in like thick syrup rolling down a weak incline. Starting the dishwasher. Touching Sero’s arm. Wet socks. Searching through the overhead cabinet. Something heavy in his pocket.
“I just want the needles out,” said Shouto.
“Is that what’s making your pulse faster?”
“I th—I think.”
Natsuo took off his jacket, folding it lengthwise as he stood. He draped it gently over Shouto’s right side, covering most of the entry points for the needles. “All right,” he said, “we’re just gonna… pretend those aren’t there. What about these blankets? You want ’em off?”
He did, and he didn’t. The pressure was good. But they also felt like they were trapping him. Fuck. “It’s okay,” he said.
“I’ll take them off if you want them off,” said Natsuo. “Adjust them, whatever. I don’t mind. Gives me something to do. What do you want?”
Shouto hesitated. Probably better to just go ahead and ask for it, what with the EKG being a fucking snitch. “Can you take them off and put them back on?”
“Uh… yeah,” said Natsuo. “Yeah, I can. Any particular way?”
He just needed to see that they could come off. So his brain would stop trying to convince him he was trapped. “No.”
Natsuo lifted the blankets off Shouto. Shouto looked down at a bruise on his ankle, and a memory startled back into his mind.
Recovery Girl. Makeshift nurse’s office. Sports festival.
“We good?” Natsuo asked. “You look confused.”
Pulling his hood over his hair. Rising steam. Water soaking through his gym uniform.
“I’m—no. I was just thinking,” said Shouto. “You can put them back on.”
Natsuo obeyed. The pressure of the blankets settled back into his legs.
Leaving his door open. Cold water. Fuyumi’s vodka. Cold hands. Visible breath. Cold.
Shouto let his head fall back against the pillow. Natsuo sat again, though he stayed on the edge of his seat and didn’t pick his book up.
“Natsuo,” said Shouto.
“Yeah?”
Shouto hesitated. He couldn’t remember exactly why he’d said Natsuo’s name, so he pointed—as best he could without shifting the needles again—toward the boxlike machine beside him. “What’s that?”
“That’s a blood rewarmer,” said Natsuo.
“Wh—what’s it do?”
“It’s… um, it’s taking your blood out and warming it up. And then putting it back in.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “Can you… you make it stop doing that?”
“Nope,” said Natsuo.
“Okay.” Shouto wished the lights in here weren’t so bright. “Natsuo.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Who found me?”
Natsuo stayed silent for a moment. Then he said, “Fuyumi.”
Fuyumi. He’d hoped it wouldn’t be her. And he hadn’t even died, so now he was going to have to watch her feel bad.
Shouto glanced at the empty seat beside Natsuo. She wasn’t here. Did that mean something bad?
Natsuo saw him looking. “She’ll be back soon,” he said. “She went to talk to Mom.”
Was this that hospital? “Why?”
“She’s letting Mom know what happened.”
Alarm shot through Shouto like a bullet. No. That was the opposite of what needed to happen. Rei wasn’t supposed to know those sorts of things about Shouto. She wasn’t supposed to have to think about that kind of thing. She wasn’t supposed to feel bad. Shouto had put too much work into making sure she thought he’d grown up petty and selfish, that he wasn’t worth feeling bad for.
If he was dead, at least she wouldn’t feel obliged to keep worrying about him and trying to win his forgiveness. Shouto wouldn’t have to think about her again, either.
But he wasn’t dead.
Rei was a nice person, so thinking about someone attempting suicide would probably make her feel bad. And Shouto would continue feeling bad, because he always felt bad, about everything. So now, instead of neither of them feeling bad, they were both going to feel bad.
“Why does she need to know?” Shouto asked. “She does—she doesn’t need to know. Fuyumi doesn’t need to tell— Why does she need to know?”
“Fuyumi thought it was best to warn her, considering you’ll be spending some time in the same wing.”
Shouto returned his eyes to the ceiling. He kept his expression blank, bored. But the EKG was speeding up again, and fuck, the rapid beeping was not helping his anxiety.
In his peripheral vision, Natsuo stood again. “Hey,” Natsuo said, voice gentle. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Shouto felt his face heating. When he tried to call coolness to it to chase away the blush, nothing answered.
Fuck, where was his quirk? Did they have him on suppressants? Endeavor wouldn’t like that. Suppressants carried a small risk—one or two percent—of permanently weakening someone’s quirk, so Endeavor had never let him take them.
The railing along his bedside squeaked as Natsuo leaned against it. A second later, Natsuo’s hand touched his forehead. His thumb pulled across Shouto’s hairline, moving his hair out of his eyes.
“You’re okay,” said Natsuo. “Take a breath. You don’t have to have everything figured out right now.”
He wished he could believe that. “Sh—she mad?” Shouto asked. “Or you? Is that why—?”
“No—no, no, we’re not mad at you. And we’re not putting you away anywhere. You can’t get the care you need right now from home. You need to be somewhere safe for a little while, with people who know what they’re doing. And hey, listen—” Natsuo gave the top of Shouto's head a light couple taps. “It’s for a little while. Okay? They won’t keep you over two weeks. You can call us whenever you need to, and we’ll visit.”
Shouto wetted his lips. He tried for his quirk again to try to cool down his face before Natsuo noticed. He couldn’t find it.
“You feeling okay?” Natsuo asked. “Your face is all flushed.”
Shit. “Quirk,” said Shouto.
“What?”
“The… I don’t have it.”
“Yeah, they shot you up with suppressants. Are you feeling okay, though?”
Natsuo wasn’t understanding. “No, I w—I was saying the reason. It’s because I don’t have my quirk. I can’t stop blushes.”
“Wha—wait.” The pressure on Shouto’s forehead disappeared. “That’s a thing? Using your quirk to stop blushes?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“What, so like… you stop all of them?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus fuck. I thought you just didn’t experience those… um… emotions. Anymore.” Natsuo’s voice got weaker near the end of the sentence. He scratched his head, eyes cutting away. “Sorry.”
Shouto didn’t know if he was supposed to respond to that. So he didn’t.
Natsuo pulled his chair up closer to the bed. Something metal clinked on the floor, and Shouto looked to see a steel pipe nearly the length of his arm roll out from under it. It came to a stop at the foot of the bed.
Was that… Natsuo’s?
Natsuo settled one arm on the bed’s railing, propping his chin on his fist. He put the other hand through the railing and placed it on Shouto’s arm just below his elbow. “Do you remember anything?” Natsuo asked. “The car ride, or… before that.”
Shouto scanned his memory. The last thing he remembered was staring up at the showerhead. He shook his head.
Natsuo patted Shouto’s arm. Then he looked off toward the corner of the room, brow just barely furrowed.
Had Shouto done something strange during the car ride? Or said something incriminating? Shouto asked, “Why? What happened?”
It took a moment for Natsuo’s eyes to tug back to Shouto. “Oh, it… just… hm. You went into cardiac arrest. While we were still in the car. So I was trying to do CPR in that tiny-ass car while Fuyumi was freaking out,” said Natsuo, “and then they had to use a defibrillator out in the parking lot like some… fucking… you know what I’m talking about?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Like in a medical drama. Except it was quieter. And you didn’t… move much.”
Shouto let himself be silent for a moment while he processed that chunk of information. Then he asked, “I had a heart attack?”
“It’s a little different,” said Natsuo. “Heart attacks are caused by blockages or blood clots. You were having ventricular fibrillation. So your heart was just sort of quivering instead of being useful.”
So he’d gotten pretty close to dying, then?
And then fallen short and made everything worse. Of course.
Shouto huffed a laugh.
“Somethin’ funny?” Natsuo asked.
“Just… the ‘quivering instead of being useful,’” said Shouto. “Because I thought—I was thinking that I do that, too.”
Natsuo only stared at him, his knuckles digging into his cheek, his face just barely pinched. Pained.
Shouto didn’t like that face. Not on Natsuo.
“Natsuo,” said Shouto.
Natsuo’s voice came out flat. “I thought you were dead.”
Shouto watched Natsuo’s face.
“When they were defibrillating you outside the hospital,” said Natsuo, “I thought—I just kept—I didn’t want you to die like that. On the asphalt with a bunch of strangers swarming around you. I kept thinking that. And I had to… I had to hold Fuyumi back so she wouldn’t get in the way, but if you had—”
Natsuo’s voice cut off. His eyes dropped down and away from Shouto, and the fist he was resting his cheek on shifted to cover part of his mouth.
Natsuo blinked a few times, eyes rimmed red—and then he shifted, angling his broad shoulders away from Shouto. His hand covered the half of his face closest to Shouto, pinky dragging across his closed eyelid. He inhaled deeply through his nose. Exhaled, unsteady.
Oh.
That was what Fuyumi sounded like right before she started to cry.
“Sorry,” said Natsuo. It was choked, forced. “Sorry. I thought I was through with the… I wasn’t gonna do this in front of you.”
Shouto had never seen Natsuo cry before. It put a twist of nausea in his stomach.
“I thought probably it would just be done,” Shouto said. “Before anybody got home. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to make anybody stressed.”
Natsuo was silent for a moment, keeping the back of his shoulder to Shouto. Then he shook his head and said, voice breathy— “That’s not what I wanted to hear you say.”
Shouto felt floaty. Not in a dreamy way, but like his nausea had escaped the confines of his stomach and taken over his entire body. “Don’t be mad,” he said.
“I’m not. I’m not mad.” The hand around Shouto’s arm slipped away. Natsuo fell back into his chair, dropping his hands in his lap and blinking. His eyes were watery. “I’m just weirded out that you think I’m annoyed you didn’t die faster.”
“No, I don’t think—I don’t—I wasn’t saying that,” said Shouto. “You’re nice. Probably you don’t think things like that. I just didn’t want to make things harder for you and Fuyumi. Because it’d be easier for you if it was already over before you got there.”
Natsuo licked his lips. Reached up, brushed a knuckle against his jaw, dropped his hand again.
“Okay,” he said finally. “But. You know that us finding you already gone would’ve been so much worse. Right?”
“You don’t have to say that,” said Shouto.
Natsuo’s face twitched like someone had just jabbed a needle into him. “What the fuck, I’m not—I’m not just saying that.”
Natsuo had gotten worked up about Shouto before, but he’d never gotten worked up at Shouto. Shouto didn’t like it. “It’s okay.”
“No. No. No, no. Today was scary as shit, but Fuyumi and I would do it fifty times over before we’d rather walk in on you already gone.”
Shouto wished this conversation would end.
“Do you not believe that?” Natsuo asked.
Shouto needed to change the subject. “You and Fuyumi weren’t supposed to be home for another two hours.”
Natsuo rubbed the corner of his eye. “Fuyumi got a text," he told Shouto. "Said you were acting strange and that she might want to check on you.”
“From…” He racked his brain. Who would bother to send a text like that? “Aizawa?”
Natsuo dropped his hand, blinking like he had something in his eye. “From Hawks.”
What the fuck. “Hawks—?”
“Yeah,” said Natsuo.
“—texted Fuyumi about me.”
“Yeah.”
Shouto looked at the ceiling.
Hawks?
He snorted.
“What?” asked Natsuo.
Shouto didn’t remember all of the sports festival—barely half of it, honestly—but he remembered his conversation with Hawks. He shook his head. “At the… he asked why I was acting like I don’t like him.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said it was because I didn’t like him.”
“Oh my god,” said Natsuo. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“You know Yumi has a colossal crush on that idiot, right?”
“She shouldn’t,” said Shouto. “He’s annoying.”
Natsuo tilted his head to look up at the ceiling, narrowing his eyes. “He is kinda hot, though. Like, lowkey.”
“I guess. If you get turned on by pigeons.” Shouto nodded at the steel pipe on the ground. “What’s that?”
Natsuo glanced down. “Oh. That’s my Endeavor Stick.”
“What’s it do?”
“Gives the hospital staff good reason not to tell Endeavor what room you’re in. If they want to avoid witnessing aggravated assault with a deadly weapon against a Pro Hero, I mean.”
Had Natsuo said those words to actual hospital staff? Endeavor wasn’t here, so he must have. Huh. That was interesting. “How did you get it?”
“With my secret quirk, obviously.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “Is your secret quirk stealing things from construction sites?”
“They, uh, had some plumbing work going on downstairs.”
“Wow,” said Shouto. “Your Villain career is progressing nicely.”
“Why, thank you. How’s your journey to the dark side going?”
Shouto thought. He said, “I’m going to be a cyborg.”
“All the coolest Villains are.”
Shouto moved his left hand a little. Still couldn’t feel it. “I told Endeavor I wanted to shoot lasers out of my hand, but then I started thinking that maybe I could just get a hollow prosthetic finger. To keep Tic-Tacs in.”
Natsuo gave a snort so sudden and loud that he clapped both hands over his mouth. He looked toward the door, eyes wide, and then he gave a quiet wheeze. “Christ,” he said.
It surprised Shouto a bit. “What?”
Natsuo wiped the moisture from his eyes with the side of his hand, grinning. He gave a wet-sounding laugh. “Sounds like something Touya would’ve said. You both—I don’t know. Chaotic. Got me crying and laughing in the space of two minutes.”
Touya. He’d been fifteen, too, hadn’t he? Maybe Endeavor should’ve kept training him instead of giving up and moving on. At least Touya had been better at seeing things through to the end.
Shouto shifted. The cloth of the hospital gown whispered against his bare chest underneath, and he realized—was he not wearing his binder?
He ran his hand across his neckline, feeling for it. He’d… had it on. Right? He hadn’t taken it off.
“They had to cut it off,” said Natsuo.
Shouto looked at him.
“For the defibrillator,” said Natsuo. “Sorry. I got the—the brand and the sizing from the label, though, so I went ahead and ordered a replacement. Should be here in a couple days.”
Wait.
Natsuo had…?
Wait, but—the website for that brand was blatantly queer, so Natsuo had to have seen—
He had to know, right?
Natsuo glanced at the panicking EKG. “Oh,” he said. “I was actually trying not to make you… fuck, sorry. Is it… like, it’s okay I did that, right? I’m not super familiar with the etiquette there.”
Things were moving too fast. Shouto hadn’t prepared for this.
Shouto asked, “Fuyumi.”
“I didn’t tell her.”
Okay. Okay. But—shit, Shouto had told Fuyumi that he’d talk to her about it after the sports festival, hadn’t he? Back on Wednesday when she opened his underwear drawer.
Fuyumi’s words: Things happen to those types of people, Shiyo. Not good things.
Those types of people.
Shouto watched Natsuo’s face and tried to force his heart rate down. It wasn’t working.
What had Shouto told him?
“I can—” Natsuo stopped, restarted. “If you want. I can forget I heard anything. But… I get that that kind of thing can wear at you. I don’t want you to think you can’t… I mean, people change. If someone loves you, they’ll change with you. Doesn’t have to be horrible.” He gave a small, lopsided smile. “Y’know?”
Shouto looked away.
Natsuo’s voice softened. “I don’t want to lose another sibling to something completely fucking preventable. If I can do anything better this time around than I did the first time, I want to.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“Okay,” said Natsuo.
The door to the room opened. Shouto looked to see Fuyumi stopped in the doorway, her hair in a hastily tied ponytail.
Fuyumi looked between Shouto and Natsuo, and her fingers went to brush her bottom lip. “I thought—you said she wouldn’t wake up before I got back.”
“I was wrong,” said Natsuo. He nudged the steel pipe under the bed with his foot. “My bad.”
Fuyumi closed the door behind her and circled around the bed. She set her purse on the empty chair next to Natsuo’s book. “Can you move okay?” she asked Shouto.
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“Then scooch over,” said Fuyumi.
“What?”
She flicked her fingers. “Scooch.”
Shouto heaved himself a little to the side, careful not to shift the needles. Fuyumi lifted the blankets and climbed in beside him, snuggling in close. One arm under his back, one over his stomach, squeezing him around the middle.
Shouto felt stiff. “What are you doing?”
“It’s a hug.” Fuyumi made a series of exaggerated chu noises as she tapped light kisses onto his temple. “I loveyouloveyouloveyou sooo much. Mwah.”
He tilted his head away from her. “Fuyumi.”
“Nope. No ma’am. You’re not opting out of this one.” She nuzzled her nose against his cheek, her hair tickling his collarbones. He could smell her shampoo. “Light of my life, absolute treasure, you gorgeous, smart, strong—”
“Yumi,” he said. Once again he tried to pull the heat from his face, and once again, he couldn’t.
Natsuo stood and leaned over the railing, drumming his hands on Fuyumi’s shoulder. “Hey, Yumi. Did you know that people with temperature quirks have the ability to stop their blushes?”
Fuyumi said, “Hm?”
“Natsuo,” Shouto warned.
Natsuo grinned and continued, “—and that, when put on quirk suppressants, they lose that ability?”
Fuyumi pulled back a little to look at Shouto’s face. “Oh my god,” she said, biting her lips when a smile threatened her face. “You—I haven’t seen you blush in years.”
“I don’t like my face doing it,” said Shouto. “It’s uncomfortable. Probably stop talking about it now, please.”
“No, I don’t think I will,” said Natsuo. Fuyumi yelped as Natsuo jammed his hands under her and shoved her in closer to Shouto so he could squeeze in behind her, the mattress tilting dangerously into Natsuo’s weight. He settled his elbow atop Fuyumi’s head, propping his chin on his palm as he looked over her to Shouto. “How red do you think we can make it, Yumi?”
“Ouch,” said Fuyumi. “Natsu. Your elbow.”
Natsuo ignored her. “You know who my favorite person is?” he asked Shouto.
“You’re going to break the bed,” Shouto told him.
“It’s you. You are my favorite person.”
“No, I’m not. Shut up. Get off the bed.”
Fuyumi didn’t take her arms from around Shouto as she shook her head to rid it of Natsuo’s elbow. “Shichan. You know when you eat soba, you do it so fast that you look like a little chipmunk? It just makes me so happy. Watching you do that. Whenever I have a tough day at work, I think—well, I’ll just make Shiyo some soba tonight, and then I’ll feel better. I never told you about it because I was scared you’d start eating it in your room.”
“Oh—Yumi, I know what you’re talking about,” said Natsuo. “We got soba in my car after the USJ thing. I thought my steering wheel was gonna get inhaled for a second there. Honestly would be the cutest thing ever if it weren’t so intimidating.”
“Oh my fucking god,” Shouto muttered.
Fuyumi smooshed her cheek into his. “You’re also a very good listener. Every day I wonder—is today the day Shichan finally tells me to shut up?—but you never do. You can’t remember to leave the key out for housekeeping, but you remember all of my boring work stories, and that’s so important to me.”
Natsuo reached over Fuyumi’s head to dishevel Shouto’s hair, his fingers warm. “That’s pretty impressive, because Yumi never shuts up.”
Was it possible for Shouto’s face to feel hotter than it did when he overheated on Wednesday? “Okay. Well. You can both shut up now.”
“Absolutely not.” Fuyumi gave him a gentle squeeze. “You don’t have to say anything. But I am staying right here for as long as they’ll let me, and Natsuo and I are going to tell you all the wonderful things we love about you until our throats are too sore to talk anymore. Okie dokie?”
“Your…” Shouto’s voice drifted off. He laid there for a moment, and everything was so strangely, perplexingly, dangerously, wonderfully warm that Shouto’s voice almost melted away from him before he could generate a protest. He tried again. “Your arm’s going to fall asleep.”
“I don’t fucking care,” said Fuyumi.
Notes:
So my poetry professor (Beth Ann Fennelly, former Mississippi poet laureate--go watch her Ted Talk, you'll learn some shit) called me into her office today and asked me to be in a panel on writing about asexuality for the 2022 Glitterary Festival, which is a literary festival all about queer narratives. AHHHHHH.
Also: weird little plug here. I can't make phone calls, and I'm willing to bet that a bunch of you nerds can't, either. THERE IS A SERVICE FOR THAT. Jeff Makes Calls on Facebook is a small business that will make your calls for you. Usually $5/call. She didn't ask me to promote her page or anything. I was just incredibly delighted to find it and wanted to pass it on.
Chapter 38: Shouto Gets High (Again) and Begins to Worry that His Hand Is Lonely
Summary:
Kyle from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power works at an inpatient facility in Japan because I said so.
Notes:
CW: inpatient facility/psychiatric hospital setting (written by someone who's spent time in one), minor transphobia, dissociation, microaggressions in healthcare; REFERENCES TO: suicide, OCD rituals, needles (brief), violence/minor body horror
Disclaimer: this is mostly based on the time I spent in a small adult inpatient facility in the southern US maybe 3 years ago. So it's very very likely that some technical things are gonna be inaccurate (and I might tweak a few things on purpose to push the plot along). But I hope I'm getting the vibe right & I promise I will not resort to "haha mental hospital=crazy" humor.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Do you wanna keep my jacket?”
They’d put Shouto on some medication that was supposed to ease the physical symptoms of anxiety—racing heart, shaking, sweating, so on. It was heavy as shit, and it was working.
He was still having the anxious thoughts, but it was like he was observing rather than experiencing them. It was almost entertaining: prodding around in his brain for his most horrible thoughts, thinking them, and then having absolutely no physical reaction. Like throwing rocks at a giant anthill while standing at a safe distance.
Also, this waiting room was freezing.
“Hey,” said Natsuo.
Oh, had Natsuo been talking to him? “Huh,” said Shouto.
“I asked if you want to keep my jacket. It can get chilly in there.”
“I don’t get cold,” said Shouto.
“You’re literally shivering right now.”
Was he? That probably shouldn’t be surprising, considering he was on quirk suppressants and wearing a set of paper-thin disposable hospital scrubs.
Natsuo shrugged off his jacket and dropped it on Shouto’s shoulders. Then he grabbed Shouto and pulled him against his side, giving the upper part of his arm a couple firm up-and-down rubs. It occurred to Shouto that the touch might’ve alarmed him on a normal day, but right now, he didn’t give a shit. Ignoring the hard plastic chair arm digging into his ribs, he leaned into Natsuo’s side. It was warm.
Shouto could feel the vibrations of Natsuo’s voice when he spoke. “What’re you thinking about?” Natsuo asked.
When was Fuyumi going to get back? He’d already forgotten where she’d gone. “Everything.”
Natsuo huffed a laugh. “Everything?”
“S’fine,” said Shouto. His tongue felt heavy. “Doesn’t hurt or anything. Just watching.”
“Watching what?”
“The things I’m thinking.”
“Ah,” said Natsuo. “You’re tripping balls, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Shouto. “I’m just thinking things.”
“Right,” said Natsuo.
“Like I’m keeping somebody else’s thoughts in my brain,” said Shouto. “Why can’t somebody else keep my thoughts in their brain? I get too many thoughts. Always feels like my head’s going to explode. My head… is… a bag of chips in an airplane.”
“Huh. Never heard that metaphor before.”
“Boom.”
“That is indeed the sound an explosion makes,” said Natsuo.
“I know,” said Shouto. “That’s why I said it.”
“That checks out.”
“And I can’t feel my hand,” said Shouto. “My left one.”
“Probably for the best, in all honesty. You’re missin’ part of it.”
“I don’t like it.” Shouto held up his bandaged hand to show Natsuo. “I want to know if it’s hurting or not.”
“You can take my semi-professional word for it,” said Natsuo, “—it is hurting.”
“I don’t like that,” said Shouto.
“Well… I don’t like that it’s hurting, either, but—”
“I don’t like it,” said Shouto. “It’s not fair that it’s hurting by itself.”
Natsuo hesitated. “It—what?”
“It’s lonely.”
“It’s lonely?”
“Yeah, it’s lonely.” Shouto turned his hand around to look at his palm. “They should un-numb it so I can feel it and it doesn’t have to hurt by itself.”
“I mean, yeah, that’s definitely… a thought you just had.” Natsuo leaned forward to look at Shouto’s face. “You look confused again. You got a question?”
Yeah. Why the fuck were they sitting in an empty waiting room? “It’s okay,” said Shouto.
“You keep saying that, and it keeps not being okay. You can ask.”
Fuck it. “I forgot where Fuyumi went.”
“She’s filling out your admission forms and checking you in.” Natsuo’s eyes roamed his face. “You, uh, you do you know where you are, right?”
“I’m right here,” said Shouto.
Natsuo’s eyebrows shot up, and he leaned back in his chair. “Well, you’re not… wrong.”
The door to the room opened, and Fuyumi walked in holding a small stack of papers. A woman in a blue hospital uniform kept the door open with her shoulder.
Natsuo patted Shouto’s back. “All right, my dude, you’re up.”
They stood. Shouto addressed Fuyumi as she walked up to him. “You were gone for forever. Hours and hours.”
“Twenty minutes,” said Fuyumi. She smiled and touched his elbow before speaking to the hospital technician holding the door open. “Are visiting hours the same as for long-term patients?”
The tech shook her head. “They’re more restricted. Mondays and Thursdays, noon to three p.m.”
“Mm,” said Fuyumi. That was her disapproving mm. “That… are there exceptions?”
“Only in an emergency. And those are rare.”
Fuyumi squeezed Shouto's shoulders, looked him in the eyes. “Monday,” she said. “I will see you Monday. That’s just tonight, and then Saturday and Sunday, and then it’s Monday.”
Was she okay? It sounded a bit like she was talking to herself. “I know the order of days in a week, Fuyumi.”
“I know, I know. Big hug.” She squeezed him in an embrace. Rocked gently side to side. “I love you very much. You behave.”
Shouto felt like he was going to fall asleep while Fuyumi was hugging him and rocking. God, he was tired. “I’m gonna set everything on fire,” Shouto murmured.
Fuyumi whispered back, “No, you are not.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “Then I’ll only set everything on fire a little bit.”
“No fire.”
“Just… a little teeny tiny bit.”
“No,” she said. “Listen, I want you to talk to people, okay? These are people your age. Make some friends.”
No way was he going to do that. “Okay.”
“Cooperate with the adults and be polite. They’re trying to help. Be as honest as you can.”
As honest as he could? Did that include talking about Endeavor? “Okay.”
Fuyumi pulled back, still holding his shoulders. “I gave them your clothes, your contacts… um, what else… they won’t let you use your own soap or shampoo… oh, I added your blanket from home and a—”
“Yumi,” said Natsuo. He put his hand on Shouto’s shoulder before jerking his head toward the open door and the woman holding it. “They’re waiting.”
Fuyumi gave Shouto one more hug before fully pulling away. “Monday,” she told Shouto.
“I know,” said Shouto.
Shouto followed the hospital technician through the door. It closed a lot louder than it had opened, the automatic lock giving a loud, jarring click that echoed down the cold hallway.
Monday. Monday Monday Monday.
He’d already forgotten what was supposed to happen then.
###
And… more waiting.
Which, fine, whatever. It gave him ample time to sit and stare at walls. That was all he really wanted to do right now.
Smooth walls. Big walls. Colored a shade that looked like the painters hadn’t brought enough Sunshine Yellow and decided to dilute what they had so they could still paint the entire psychiatric wing without having to make another trip. Did Shouto like the color yellow? He didn’t think he did, but he couldn’t remember.
He started to regret focusing too much on the walls, though. Because suddenly he was in the middle of his intake interview, and he couldn’t think of anything but yellow.
“Sorry,” he told the woman who was conducting the interview. She’d been nice to him so far, and he was trying to be polite. Fuyumi had told him to be polite. “Say it again?”
“How long have you been experiencing those thoughts?”
He tried to remember the last question she’d asked him, for context. He couldn’t. “What thoughts?”
She looked up from her computer. “Suicidal thoughts.”
Oh. “On and off,” he said. “For a while.”
“For how long?”
He pulled Natsuo’s jacket tighter around him. He wished they’d let him change into his own clothes first. The texture of his hospital-issued shirt and pants was starting to bother him. “F—um. For… five. Or six. Years.”
The woman’s face scrunched a little. She typed something into her computer, nails clicking on the keyboard. “That’s a while.”
Outside the window behind the woman and her desk, it was dark. What time was it? Late. He hoped Fuyumi and Natsuo hadn’t planned anything for early tomorrow morning. They’d be tired. “I guess.”
“And you’re… remind me, sixteen? Seventeen?”
“Fifteen.”
“Gracious,” she muttered. “Well, I’m sorry you’ve been feeling so poorly. We’re about halfway through the intake form. You need water or anything? I know this can feel like a lot.”
He needed sleep. “I’m okay.”
“We’ll move on, then. Are you still having thoughts of harming yourself?”
Shouto searched his brain. He couldn’t pick out any distinct thoughts or feelings. Well—besides being tired and wanting to be alone. “Vague… ones.”
“So nothing immediate?”
“I guess not.”
“What about thoughts of harming others?”
Shouto knew a question like that had been coming, but he hadn’t been sure how it would be worded. Are you going to snap some kid’s neck while you’re in here? or Are you planning on murdering your father?
“It’s one of the standard questions,” said the woman. “Not directed at you specifically. Everybody who comes through here gets asked.”
He wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or not. “I’m not—not right now. I won’t hurt anybody here.”
“We’re just asking so we know how to help you, hun. What about in the recent past?”
He didn’t want to talk about this. He felt his words dropping down deep in his chest, and he couldn’t build enough adrenaline to force them up, or to even care that he couldn’t push them up. So he stared at the desk and was silent.
Beside the pencil holder, a plastic white Lucky Cat—beckoner of happiness, Shouto knew, because Fuyumi had taken Shouto shopping with her to find one for Rei—waved its hand. Clicking.
“Do you want to talk about why that question is hard for you?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you need me to be more specific?”
“Yes.”
“Say the past month. You can just tell me yes or no, and we’ll go from there.”
Past month? He’d thought she might’ve been asking about the last few hours. “I’ve had them.”
“How often would you say those thoughts happen?”
“I-in the past month?”
“Yes,” she said.
What was the normal answer supposed to be? Should he downplay it? Average it out? “I think once or twice a day.”
“A day?”
Was that still too much? He’d toned it down from per hour. “Yes.”
“Do those thoughts feel like something you’d want to act on, or do they feel like thoughts you don’t want to have?”
“Mostly that I don’t want to have,” he said.
“So are there some you do want to act on?”
That question didn’t feel safe. But they couldn’t put him in prison for thinking something, could they? “Not many.”
“But some?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto.
“Toward what sorts of people?”
“No one who couldn’t hurt me a lot worse,” he said.
“Are we talking authority figures?”
“Yes.”
“People you see every day?”
“Some.”
“Could you talk me through your thought process there?” she asked. “Whatever’s going through your mind when you start to have those more intentional thoughts.”
She was asking him to organize and verbalize those thoughts? He didn’t understand them himself. Was he supposed to tell her how he wanted to hurt people? He didn’t want to do that. “I don’t… know what you want to know,” he said.
“Things like the emotions and thoughts you experience when you see those people, what those thoughts of wanting to harm them are in response to, how urgent the thoughts feel, what keeps you from acting on those thoughts.”
Okay. Emotions. No problem. Wasn’t like he’d been avoiding talking about those for the past ten years or anything. “Just… that… the way they use their power is hurting people. Whether they’re doing it on purpose or just through carelessness. I want them to care that other people feel afraid.”
“By making them feel afraid themselves?”
What?
Shouto turned the thought around in his mind. Making Endeavor feel afraid. Making Lady Hypna feel afraid. Making All Might feel afraid, even—
Oh.
Maybe he did want that.
Shouto didn’t watch movies often, but he’d watched enough Hero movies to be familiar with the whole if you resort to their methods, you’re just as bad as them spiel. Which might’ve been applicable to two toddlers pulling each other’s hair for a turn on a playground swing. But… fucking hell, if someone with a strong enough stomach had the opportunity to make a child abuser bite off and eat their own fingers, why wouldn’t they?
Shouto wasn’t trying to convince himself that he was a good person. He knew he wasn’t. But he didn’t think that wanting shitty people to be afraid was the thing that made him awful.
He didn’t realize he’d gone silent again until the interviewer’s voice startled him. “Let me approach that a different way. How do you feel when you remember that you’re unable to hurt those people?”
Shouto blinked hard. His eyes were getting dry—he really needed to take his contacts out. “Am I supposed to feel a certain way?”
“Not necessarily. Some people might say frustrated or hopeless. Does that sound familiar?”
Was there ever a time when he didn’t feel frustrated or hopeless? “I guess.”
The interviewer adjusted her glasses. “I should probably disclose that I watched the sports festival with my son earlier today.”
Right. Now that he’d been on national television, people were going to know who he was. And his public debut had been… well, it’d been shit, frankly. “Okay.”
“I was wondering if anyone close to you has ever expressed concern about your anger management.”
Endeavor. But that was it. And it wasn’t concern as much as it was annoyance that Shouto was displaying emotion. “Not really,” said Shouto.
She peered at him over the frames of her glasses. “Not your teachers, friends, siblings…?”
Why was she pressing this? Had he looked outwardly angry during the sports festival? That was just how he fought. The whole encasing-Sero-in-an-iceberg thing hadn’t been something Shouto would usually do in a fight, but the rest of it hadn’t been too unusual. It wasn’t like Shouto had held Bakugou down and punched his nose into his brain. Which he definitely could’ve done. “No.”
The woman waited a few seconds, and then she typed something into her computer.
“Okie doke,” she said. “And… let’s see, we’ve already gone through the basics of your attempt—you’ll talk more about that with your assigned therapist later. So I’ll go ahead and send this information to the front desk so they can make your schedule, and then they’ll take you to your room.”
“Thanks,” said Shouto, because Fuyumi had told him to be polite.
Another tech led him from the interview room to pick up his schedule and his belongings—they’d been transferred from Fuyumi’s bumble bee-patterned suitcase to a transparent plastic bag, except for the blanket and the (unreasonably large) pillow Fuyumi had brought—and then the tech moved him to another hallway to wait again.
He dropped his things in the seat next to him. Maybe he should’ve been paying attention to the layout of the hospital, but he didn’t think about it until he was sitting.
None of this felt real. Like he was in a non-lucid dream, being dragged along by arbitrary events, a passive observer.
He wasn’t really in a psychiatric hospital. Right? So he tried to kill himself. Any normal person in his situation would’ve done the same. Right? But he wasn’t really here. Anyway, what could these people possibly do for him in a week? Give him more anxiety meds? Well… that might be nice, actually. Give his heart a break for a few days.
Still. How many stories had he heard where getting admitted to a psychiatric hospital was the beginning of a Villain arc?
Fortunately, it didn’t take long for a hospital worker to come down the hall toward him. It did take a moment for her smile to appear. “Hey… doll,” she said. “I’m your nurse for tonight. Give me just a minute, okay? I’ll be right back.”
Why did she come down this way if she was just going to leave again? Maybe it was one of those things you could only understand when you weren’t heavily drugged and half-asleep. “Okay.”
The woman disappeared back around the corner. Shouto could just barely make out her lowered voice. “Hey—Akemi. Is, uh, is Todoroki rooming on the boys’ or the girls’ side?”
Ah. Shit. Dorms. He hadn’t considered the possibility that he might not have a room to himself.
Another woman’s voice: “The girls’, right? The file says ‘Shiyo.’”
“Yeah, I know, but the intake form says ‘Shouto.’”
Right--he'd told the interviewer that his name was Shouto. Should he not have done that?
The two women kept talking. “Oh. Well. Shit. Can you… you know, tell?”
Shouto pulled Natsuo’s jacket tighter around his shoulders.
“I genuinely cannot,” said the nurse. “Could you call up Tono-san?”
“He just went home for the night.”
“Ugh… this is exactly why I hate working night shift. Do you think it’s a clerical error, or… you know, the other thing?”
A different woman’s face—paired with a flash of her green technician uniform—appeared at the end of the hall. As soon as Shouto met her eyes, the face disappeared again.
“Okay,” said the tech, “I was gonna just call it and put Todoroki in the girls’ dorm since it’s only the one form that says ‘Shouto,’ but…”
“I told you,” said the nurse.
Shouto felt his face heating. He tried to pull the heat away and couldn’t.
He knew he’d been moving along suspiciously smooth at UA, but he hadn’t expected to not have his quirk to protect him when the other shoe finally dropped. As long as Shouto didn’t look embarrassed, he could pretend not to be. But with his face burning like this…
This was going to be a long, long week, wasn’t it?
The two women kept talking. “Okay, but to which way?” the tech asked.
“I think… toward male?”
“Can a person born a girl even have that sort of muscle mass, though?”
“Could we call the guardian?” asked the nurse.
“You wanna call Endeavor and ask him what gender his kid is?”
“We can get Kyle to do it,” said the nurse. “He’s American. He probably doesn’t know who Endeavor is.”
“Ruriko… that’s evil.”
“I don’t even know the policy for that type of thing. Are we supposed to go by birth sex?” The nurse paused. “I mean, I don’t want to be insensitive, but if someone sues…”
“Could sue the other way, too. Imagine Endeavor suing the hospital, holy shit. We’d have to shut down.”
“But doesn’t his… wife…?”
There was a moment of silence.
“Could we ask—”
“I am not gonna ask that lovely woman about the one child I’ve never seen visit her in the four years I’ve been working here,” said the nurse. “I’ll just ask the kid. If there’s a problem in the morning, we’ll blame it on Kyle.”
The nurse came back around the corner.
“So quick question,” she said. “What—”
“Boys’,” said Shouto. And because Fuyumi had told him to be polite—only because Fuyumi had told him to be polite— “Thanks.”
###
The dorm room was small. It also looked like someone had already occupied the bed closest to the door—a black blanket had been haphazardly spread over the mattress, with a rumpled collection of jeans, socks, underwear, and dark graphic t-shirts layered on top. A toothbrush lay on the bedside table, sporting a set of criminally abused bristles. For a split second, Shouto found himself wondering how Bakugou’s toothbrush had ended up here.
Ah. Shit. He didn’t want to think about Bakugou right now.
The nurse started giving him instructions. He only half-listened, wishing she would hurry up and leave so he could sleep. When he heard something about no-rinse bathing wipes, though, he interrupted with— “Sorry?”
“We can’t let you use the shower,” she said. “You might be able to shower later in the week when we have someone available to supervise you, but we’re short-staffed as it is. You’re allowed to wash your hair in the sink.”
Shouto felt his face heating again, and he turned away to place his things on the unoccupied bed. Did he really feel embarrassed this frequently? He thought he’d gotten over that years ago. “I’m on quirk suppressants. So I wouldn't be able to... try that again.”
“It’s just a precaution. Suppressants don’t work the same on everybody, so we can’t be one hundred percent sure you don’t still have at least some access to your quirk. Your roommate can’t use the shower either, so the water will be turned off.”
Wonderful. That… wow. Well, if they were okay with being in Shouto’s presence for an extended amount of time while his newly-Quirkless body tested out its newly-uninhibited sweat glands, that was their problem.
“Did you have a chance to look over your schedule?” the nurse asked.
Not yet. “It's fine.”
“Anything else you need before I go?”
“No.”
“You’re surprisingly low-maintenance,” said the nurse. “Well—if you need anything or anyone during the night, just come to the front desk and we’ll get you set up. Let us know in the morning if you see any issues on your schedule.”
Low maintenance? Hadn’t her questions been largely rhetorical? Did patients usually ask for things? “Okay.”
She left, finally. Shouto took his contacts out by the sink in the bathroom. When he had one of the contacts out, he caught his half-blurred reflection in the tiny mirror bolted so far back on the wall that you’d have to climb on top of the sink to touch the glass. And—wow. He looked like shit. Red-rimmed eyes, washed-out skin, the left side of his hair dry and frizzy.
Shouto left his contacts by the sink and sat on his small mattress. He didn’t mind that it was hard—his mattress at home was, too—but he couldn’t remember ever having slept in a bed that was this high up off the ground. What if he fell off?
Shouto lay down. He didn’t realize how much tension he’d been holding in his back until the pain started draining into the mattress.
A boy’s voice came from the doorway. “Oh—thank Satan. Thought I’d be rooming with a straight boy for a second there.”
Shouto startled, sitting up again. He couldn’t make out the face of the boy in the doorway very well, but he could see the black hair, the glint of some sort of nose jewelry, and a black (band? There was lettering) t-shirt. The boy was peeling away the silver wrapping around his granola bar using the most inefficient method Shouto had ever seen: stripping the wrapper away in ribbons, like a peel from a banana.
The boy grinned, took a bite from his granola bar. “I’m messin’ with ya, dude.”
Shouto asked, “Who’re you?”
“Who’re you?” said the boy, quickly followed by, “I’m just kidding, I know who you are. I’m Ando. Yo—” He did a finger-gun at Shouto, then flipped it into the middle finger gesture. “Fuck your dad, man.”
“Oh,” said Shouto.
Ando let the door close behind him, tapping the back of his heel against the door twice before walking farther into the room. He spoke through a half-full mouth. “I smuggled a couple granola bars during the last meal. Want one?”
“That’s okay,” said Shouto.
“You eat recently?”
Had the nurses given him anything? He couldn’t remember. “A few hours ago, maybe.”
Ando pulled a second granola bar from his pocket and tossed it to Shouto. Shouto caught it, looked it over.
“There aren’t any raisins, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Ando.
That… was what he’d been worried about. Raisin texture was almost as bad as biting into an overripe grape. “I couldn’t see the packaging,” Shouto explained.
“Bad eyes? Same.” Ando flopped down on the empty bed. “So how’s UA? You like it, or is it fucked?”
“It’s fine,” said Shouto.
“You guys have All Might as a teacher now, right? How’s that going? You like him?”
Jesus fuck, how many questions was this kid planning on asking? “No.”
Ando's eyebrows shot up along with an open-mouthed smirk. “No shit? Is he full of himself or something?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “He’s loud.”
“Word. Lowkey thought you’d be a little louder with all the volume you fit into that ‘Endeavor’ yell. That’s cool, though, I respect it. Live your truth. Hey—you know Kirishima, right?”
“Yeah,” Shouto said.
“You guys friends?”
Probably not after the Sero incident at the sports festival. “I think so.”
Ando ate the rest of his granola bar in two bites, dropped the empty package on the shared bedside table. “That’s neat. We were friends in middle school. Good guy. I was a little disappointed when he picked up the whole ‘manly’ thing—thus abandoning me to complete my emo phase alone—but he’s an entire himbo now, so maybe it was for the good of the universe.” Ando sighed. “I’m gay and it’s my whole personality.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“My ideal man is Kronk from The Emperor’s New Groove, and I’m not proud of that, but I’m learning to love myself despite my flaws.” Ando grinned. “I’m just kidding, I fucking hate myself. So what are your favorite coping mechanisms?”
Shouto had no idea how to answer that.
Ando’s gaze moved down, and he sat up. “Holy fuck, dude, did you burn your finger off?”
Shouto was glad for a less open-ended question. “Part of it.”
“Woah. That’s intense.”
“I guess,” said Shouto.
“That why you’re here?”
“No.”
“Wow. You got a lot going on, huh? You wanna talk about it?”
“No,” said Shouto. “I’m tired.”
“Damn, I bet you are.” Ando grabbed the toothbrush sitting on the bedside table before he flopped onto his back and rolled to the other side of his bed. “All right, homie, I’m gonna go scrub my teeth until I’m satisfied I haven’t inadvertently triggered the gas leak that explodes my entire family. Might be a while, so I’ll catch you in the morning. Don’t kill me in my sleep.”
What…? Did people really think he would do that? Shouto started, “I’m not—”
“Unless you want to. That’s totally valid. Just wake me up first so I can prepare my soul for Valhalla. And you gotta sing ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ over my corpse, but like, really emotionally. I need to feel that G-note all the way in the afterworld. Hey—” Ando stuck his toothbrush in the corner of his mouth, waving a couple fingers toward Shouto as he retreated backwards to the bathroom. “Let me know if you need anything, okay? Even just to sit up with you. I know first nights can be spooky. And not even in an aesthetically pleasing way.”
Shouto was still processing the sentence about the gas leak. He nodded anyway.
“Neato,” said Ando.
He went into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. Shouto heard water running.
Shouto changed into a pair of gym shorts and his (had Fuyumi brought him this one on purpose? What a fucking angel) Red’s Ocean t-shirt. He opened the granola bar and stuck it between his teeth as he shoved his disposable hospital scrubs in the small wastebasket. Chewing slowly, he unfolded his schedule. It started with tomorrow:
Temperature/blood pressure check and bloodwork. (Why the fuck did he have to wake up at five in the morning to have his blood drawn? The needle would still be just as needle-y at nine a.m.)
Morning group and goal-setting.
Breakfast.
First consultation with psychiatrist.
Break.
Group activity. (Already two groups before lunch? Jesus fuck. He’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to talk to many people.)
Lunch. And then—
He stopped chewing. Agitation pricked at the base of his jaw.
Fucking hell.
You could spend years turning all your anger inward, never so much as raising your voice at anyone. But burn your finger to the bone while flipping your father off in front of the entirety of Japan once, and suddenly you were getting placed in an anger management group.
*****AUTHOR NOTE*****
Hiya! So I had a couple original works (a flash fiction and a short poem) published in my university magazine this week. Including the links here if you're interested!
Poem:
https://landsharkreview.wordpress.com/2021/12/02/on-coming-out-to-my-mother/
Flash Fiction:
https://landsharkreview.wordpress.com/2021/12/02/bug-on-the-inside/
Additionally: I wrote this lyric essay (a weird poem/essay/memoir combo; in this case, my story of coming out as trans written in the form of a course evaluation) right after graduating high school & it got published 2 years later in Outcast Magazine's 2020 Pride Issue. Somehow, I'm still proud of it. And they made it look so nice on the website!
And feel free to follow my Insta account, @max_says_no. I'm honestly on Facebook more because I'm secretly your 90-year-old great-grandfather, but I haven't had the courage to make my FB public because that's where I trash-talk my parents :D I also have a Twitter, @hyperfixeaten, on which I have posted... nothing yet but I'm gearing up some quality shitposts. Social media presence is actually a big thing that literary agents look at, so it's definitely helpful for whenever I start sending out queries for my original work again!
Notes:
Good things in my life rn bc I have no one else to talk to:
-I gave a reading alongside my poetry class & it went very well! My mom traveled an hour to see me & texted me later that she was proud, which I suppose is an improvement from the time she refused to accept recent photos of me.
-I MADE A NEW FRIEND (for the first time in a couple years! yes I really am that socially anxious, thanks for asking)
-My best friend from high school is going to have a baby but *I* recently refilled a snow globe, so who's the real adult here😎 jk I refilled it with water and the rest of it was glycerin so now the floaty sparkles won't go up all the way :( head empty
Chapter 39: Shouto Is Informed of His Role in Ando's Mission to Turn Earth into a Mobius Strip
Summary:
It's Shouto's first morning in the hospital, and he's already drawing a little more attention than he'd like.
Have a couple character introductions while you're at it--my treat ;)
Notes:
CW: references to suicide, psychiatric hospital setting, needles/needle phobia, trauma/(c)PTSD reaction, reference to specific event of emotional abuse of a child, anxiety attack, short description of body horror/injury, minor self-harm (biting)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
When someone knocked on the door early in the morning, Shouto startled awake.
Shit—he wasn’t late for a training session, was he? The last time that happened, Endeavor had pulled him straight from his bedroom to the training room, and he hadn’t gone easy on the half-asleep Shouto. After finishing his tutoring that day, Shouto had opened his bedroom door to the smell of burnt plastic. Endeavor hadn’t bothered to take Shouto’s favorite shirt off its hanger before burning them both into a puddle of melted plastic and a scattering of ashes—
But… no. This wasn’t home.
Psychiatric hospital, he remembered.
He cupped his hands over his mouth, trying to calm himself before he started hyperventilating. Not Endeavor knocking on the door, he told himself. It’s somebody else. Not Endeavor.
In the other bed, Ando groaned and propped himself on his elbow with all the energy of a slug high on weed. “God has abandoned his creation,” he muttered, and then he looked at Shouto and asked, voice croaky— “Yo, you good?”
Shouto pulled his hands from his mouth. “Sorry. The… knocking.”
A nurse came in—Shouto couldn’t read her nametag without his contacts, but she wasn’t the same one from last night. The light from the hallway hurt Shouto’s eyes. “Good morning!” she said. “How did you two sleep?”
Ando flopped onto his stomach, head tilted just enough that he was only mostly speaking into his pillow. “Solid… three outta five,” he mumbled.
The nurse looked at Shouto. “Todoroki?”
“Normal,” said Shouto.
Ando’s pillow muffled his voice. “Quit lying. You were rolling around all night.”
“I’m not lying.” Shouto’s heart was still racing. He hoped he wouldn’t have to talk much more, because his sentences sometimes got tangled when he was in fight-or-flight mode. “That’s normal for me.”
Ando loosely tossed his hand toward Shouto as he addressed the nurse. “Get this superstar some fucking melatonin.”
“We’ll talk about it later today,” said the nurse. “Todoroki, you’re up for labs in fifteen minutes.”
Joy. Shouto swung his legs out of bed. The floor was cold. He tried to raise his temperature and couldn’t. Right—the quirk suppressants.
“So I get to sleep?” Ando asked.
“For a little while,” said the nurse.
“God does exist,” said Ando. He started to pull his blanket up but paused midway. “Oh—hey, d’you mind not knocking next time? Kinda spooks me. You can just come in and tap my shoulder or something.”
Shouto was confused. He’d been the one spooked by the knocking. Ando had been fine.
“Sure,” the nurse told Ando. “I’ll make a note in your file.”
“You’re an angel,” said Ando, and he yanked his blanket up over his head.
Once the nurse had left, Shouto went into the bathroom. He tested the shower just in case the water had magically returned since last night, but the showerhead just gave a disapproving sputter. So he did as best he could with the no-rinse bathing wipes.
But—fuck, they were cold. Not just the wipes, but the soles of the plastic shower shoes Fuyumi had packed for him, the air from the overhead vent on his bare shoulders, and his hair (wet from washing it in the sink) dropping chilled trails of water down the back of his neck—why was everything so cold?
Was this how people without temperature quirks lived every day? The high global depression rates suddenly made more sense.
Ando’s slurred voice called from outside the bathroom, most likely still in bed. “Y’alive in there?”
Shouto started drying himself off. He needed to hurry and put his clothes on in case Ando decided to waltz into the bathroom while Shouto was still naked. “Yes,” he answered. “Why?”
“Jus’ making sure.”
As far as roommates went, Ando seemed to be a decent one, if a bit talkative. He’d given Shouto a granola bar last night. That was nice. And he'd been here before, so maybe he was someone Shouto could rely on to answer his questions, maybe use him as a placeholder at meals so strangers didn't try to sit and talk to him--
No. No. Shouto wasn’t looking to make any connections here, whether friends or enemies. Attention brought questions, brought trick questions, trapped him in anxiety-inducing guessing games regarding body language, tone of voice, and sarcasm.
If he wanted to survive a week in which his only moments of privacy occurred in a bathroom with a rubber flap in place of a lock, he needed to keep a low profile. Not makes waves. If he didn’t bother anyone, no one would bother him. In and out. Fourteen days at most. Then he could go back to UA and pretend none of this had happened.
Maybe.
Probably not, in all honesty. There would definitely be consequences for Shouto’s flaming-middle-finger stunt. But he didn’t want to think about that now.
When Shouto finished in the bathroom, he grabbed Natsuo’s jacket—he still didn’t have his binder, so he needed something to cover his chest—and headed toward the lobby. A tech at the front desk pointed him toward a line of chairs along the wall and told him to wait until the nurse was ready for him.
He sat. The lighting in the lobby felt all wrong—yellowish, harsh—but at least it was quiet. His mind wandered to Rei. Had she watched the sports festival? Fuyumi had talked to Rei ahead of time, but what specific details was Rei told about his attempt?
Shouto exhaled. He wouldn’t ever be able to have a face-to-face conversation with Rei after all this, would he?
Eventually, a girl emerged from the nurse’s office with a square of gauze taped to the inside of her elbow. She stopped when she saw Shouto. “H-hey,” said the girl. “You’re Todoroki, right?”
Did she also recognize him from the sports festival? “Yes.”
“Oh,” she said in a tone Shouto couldn’t decipher. Her eyes dipped to his bandaged hand. “Wow.”
A nurse opened the door the girl had just exited. “Todoroki? Ready for you.”
Shouto went into the nurse’s office, removing Natsuo's jacket before he sat. The nurse didn’t say anything as she tucked a thermometer under his tongue and took his blood pressure. It was only when she started wrapping a tourniquet above his elbow and swabbing his arm with an alcohol pad that his heartrate skyrocketed.
Right—needles.
He didn’t like those.
“Make a fist for me,” said the nurse.
Shouto obeyed as well as he could with his bandaged hand. The nurse felt around the underside of his arm for a bit, and then she put the needle in. He felt it shift as she adjusted it, and nausea twisted his stomach.
He wanted it out.
Now.
But he couldn’t tell her that.
He averted his eyes and raised his free hand toward his mouth, pinching the skin next to the knuckle of his index finger between his teeth. He kept his expression dead in case she happened to look up at his face.
“You okay, baby?” the nurse asked. “Dizzy?”
Shit. He muttered his answer, afraid that speaking too loudly would move the needle again. “S’okay.”
The nurse switched out the first filled vial for a second empty one. She pushed the needle in a little deeper. Shouto clenched his jaw and tasted blood.
The nurse raised her head. Her expression snapped into something else—accusation? Concern? “Hey, what are you doing?”
He pulled his hand away from his mouth and looked at it. He’d bitten through his skin. Shouto swiped his lips with the heel of his palm, and his palm came away with traces of blood. He pressed his thumb over the small cut on the side of his index finger, but not before a couple drops of blood had trailed into his palm and down the underside of his arm toward his elbow.
“Oh—” the nurse said.
“Sorry,” said Shouto. His hand was shaking, and he could barely hear his voice over his pulse. “Sorry. I’m okay.”
“Uh—I don’t think so,” said the nurse.
“I’ll stop,” he said. He couldn’t breathe. “I’m sorry.”
“Is it the needle?”
That felt like a trick question somehow. He knew it probably wasn’t, but it felt like one, and he couldn’t make himself answer her.
“We’re about done,” she said. “Here, give me your other hand.”
Shouto wasn’t sure why she wanted his bloody hand, but he held it out to her. She reached out, gripped it, and—
No, that was it. She just gripped it.
She was holding his hand.
He didn’t like the clingy texture of her latex glove, but the unfamiliarity of a stranger holding his hand during a medical procedure did draw his attention away from the needle.
“Few more seconds,” she said. “All right… two… one… taking it out now.”
She let go of his hand and took the needle out, quick and smooth, replacing it with a thick square of gauze and a bandage wrap. She put a band-aid over the small cut on his index finger and wiped the blood from his palm and arm with an alcohol pad. When she was done, Shouto pulled both arms in close to his torso. Exhaled.
The nurse threw away the alcohol pad and band-aid wrapper. “You should’ve told me you have a needle phobia. We have protocol for that sort of thing.”
Was it a needle phobia? He didn’t care about the pain, he just didn’t like foreign objects trying to merge with his body. Needles, pieces of brick, anything. Regardless, he’d annoyed the nurse. “I didn’t think I would—I’m sorry. Wasn’t trying to dramatize anything.”
“Hm?” The nurse dropped the used needle in a syringe disposal box. “I’m not mad, honey. I could’ve done some things beforehand to make it easier on you, that’s all. Don’t help anybody if you pass out while I’m drawing blood. Everybody has their thing, no matter how strong they are. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
Shouto started to stand, but the nurse motioned for him to stay where he was.
“I’ll get you some juice,” she said.
Shouto leaned forward to peek out the cracked door. A couple people were sitting in the chairs outside. “People are waiting.”
She opened the mini fridge behind the desk. “They’ll live.”
He settled back in his chair, stiff. Not even six in the morning, and he was already being an inconvenience.
###
The nurse directed him to the meds station, where he was given more quirk suppressants and a slightly lower dose of the fast-acting—and heavy—anxiety medication he’d taken in the emergency room yesterday. He took it with the watery, orange-flavored drink the nurse had given him.
He wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about more suppressants, but he didn’t mind the anxiety meds. They made him stop thinking to a certain degree. He probably was going to need that today.
Shouto went into the common room sank reluctantly into a scuffed metal chair around a long, mostly deserted table. He pulled Natsuo’s too-big jacket tighter across his shoulders. A few people were hanging around the couches and chairs on the other side of the low-ceilinged room. Adults, it looked like. He wondered if they were long-term or short-term patients.
Over the next half hour, patients shuffled into the room in various states of sleepiness and disarray. A blonde girl in an oversized pastel teddy bear sweatshirt sat right beside Shouto.
She grinned when she saw Shouto looking—her eyes heavy-lidded and canines just a little too sharp. “Hey, bucko. Whatcha in for?”
Bucko? And was that an appropriate question to ask another patient? Shouto wasn’t well-versed in psychiatric hospital etiquette, but that seemed invasive. “Just… shit,” he said.
“Shit-on-the-floor-and-hit-the-door shit or, like, stuff shit? Please tell me it’s the first one.”
“No,” said Shouto. He was beginning to feel the effects of the anxiety meds, but he wished he could feel them faster. “Stuff shit.”
“Oooohhh. Mysterious.” She leaned forward, elbows on the white plastic table, sweatshirt bunching around her elbows. “You can whisper it to me.”
“No,” said Shouto.
The girl hummed, fell back into her seat. Her chair gave a short screech on the tile.
“Do you know how to tie up long hair?” she asked.
Was she not going to leave him alone? He didn’t need to piss anyone off when he didn’t have access to his quirk, but he was going to have to tell her to fuck off if this lasted much longer. “I guess.”
“Do mine.” She pulled a few hairbands off her wrist and flicked them across the table at Shouto. Her teeth glinted. “I like buns.”
He didn’t especially want to touch her hair. It looked like it hadn't been brushed in a week. “I don’t do buns well.”
“Me neither,” she said. “I won’t judge. C’mon.”
Fuck.
Shouto picked up a couple hairbands as the girl moved her chair closer. He studied her tangled blonde hair and tried to figure out how he was going to do this without upsetting her.
“Um,” he said. “How…?”
“One on each side,” she said.
Two buns? He’d barely been able to do one for himself back when he had long hair. “You should have someone else do this. It’ll look bad if I do it.”
“I really really really don’t care.” She leaned her head back over her chair, tilted slightly to the side so she could keep grinning at him. “I promise.”
Well, it’d been worth a shot.
Parting her hair down the back of her head was difficult enough, with her tangles that didn’t want to separate and Shouto’s bandaged left middle finger. He wasn’t sure whether he should prioritize gentleness or speed, either. But probably she would’ve done it herself if she cared about speed, so he forced himself to slow down and untangle some of the worst knots.
The girl spoke. “So you’re that cutie from tv, right?”
Was that why she’d sat by him? “The… sports festival?”
“Yeah, with the flaming finger.”
“I guess,” said Shouto.
“Is that why you’re here? You flipped daddy off?”
“Not really,” said Shouto. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Okie dokey,” she said. “Are you a boy or a girl?”
Shouto felt his face growing warm. He reached for his quirk to chase the heat away, but there was nothing there.
Goddammit.
The girl looked back at him, the motion tugging her hair from Shouto’s hands. “Both? Neither? I know some Boths and Neithers.”
“Think what you want,” said Shouto.
Her voice turned singsong. “You’re blush-ing.”
“I’m ha—I’m having issues with my quirk,” he said. “My body isn’t used to automatically regulating its temperature while I’m awake.”
“How ’bout I just call you Candy Cane-kun? No no no—Candy Cane-chan.”
“My name’s Todoroki,” he said.
She faced away from him again. “I’m gonna call you Candy Cane.” She tilted her head left, then right, in time with the words. “Candy… Cane.”
Well. He’d heard worse.
He finished the buns and then pulled away, squinting. They looked… not great. People needed to stop asking him to do stuff that wasn’t Hero work. He was shit at everything else.
“They’re bad,” he told her.
She turned her chair back toward the table before reaching up to pat her buns. Her mouth formed an o shape. “They’re even!”
“At what cost,” Shouto said.
He was surprised to hear something come from his mouth that he hadn’t rehearsed. Even more surprised when the girl laughed, the sounds short and sharp like pinpricks. She reached forward, gave a quick tug to his jacket sleeve just above his elbow. “You’re funny.”
“Not usually,” said Shouto. “I’m high.”
“Oh, fun. Legal high or illegal high?”
“Legal.”
“Dang. Nobody ever thinks to hide drugs in their socks.” She tapped her temple. “Tip for next time. Gets boring as heck in here.”
A tech entered the room. She looked at Shouto and the girl, and her mouth twisted. “Toga. C’mon, girlfriend. Quit harassing the new people.”
The girl—Toga—framed her face with the backs of her hands, grinning. “You love me, Marcy.”
“You don’t need to come to the table every morning.”
“I forgot,” said Toga.
“Quit lying. You’ve been here how long now? Six months? You ain’t tired of hearing the same spiel every day?”
Six months? So Toga was one of the long-term patients. He hadn’t listened very hard to all the logistics of the building yesterday, but her presence probably meant this room was one where a wide range of patients could mingle.
He’d need to stay out of this room, then. Maybe he could avoid seeing Rei. Meals might be more difficult depending on when and where certain patients ate. Long-term patients likely had more freedom when it came to that sort of thing.
“Never ever,” Toga told the tech. “Your voice is so sexy.”
The tech rolled her eyes. “Girl, get outta here. Leftover donuts in the cafeteria. Go grab you one.”
“Oo,” said Toga, standing. She gave Shouto a fluttery wave as she headed out of the room. “Bye-bye, Candy Cane. Talk later!”
Yeah, not if he could fucking help it.
Now that Toga was gone, though, it didn’t take long to notice that other people were staring at him. He was used to stares, but he’d never had to worry before that they might mean something other than analysis of his worth as a potential Hero, and perhaps curiosity about his hair or scar. No one sat next to him, at least—they all seemed to congregate on the opposite side of the table. Shouto wondered if he was sitting in the wrong spot.
He was almost grateful when Ando finally came into the room, squinting and half-scowling against the light. Shouto could see him better with his contacts in, but he doubted Ando looked the same now as he did last night—his hair was a mess, and a couple red lines marked his cheek where his face had been against his pillow. He plopped down in the seat Toga had vacated, promptly folding his arms on the table and dropping his forehead onto them. The inside of his left elbow sported the same gauze and bandage that Shouto’s did.
“Ah, man,” Ando mumbled into his arms. “Ev’ry time I’m… forget they make us get up this… goddamn early. Gotta stop getting myself into this mess. You a morning person?”
Ando had at least five tiny holes from removed piercings in his ear, Shouto noticed. He wondered if Ando had even more tiny holes on his face. Why hadn’t the hospital staff made him remove his nose jewelry, too? And… morning person? Shouto had never heard that expression. “I don’t know what that means.”
Ando snorted. “Mood. I’ve met a few, an’ lemme tell you—demons. And I don’t mean the cool demons that steal your body and use it to take over the planet. I mean the kind that tickle your babies and give you psoriasis. I don’t know why people are racist or homophobic when we could be oppressing morning people.”
That still didn’t give Shouto any information as to what a morning person was. He hoped he wasn’t one of them.
"Mm--" Ando shifted suddenly, pushing a small collection of hairbands out from under his arm. "Who left these?"
Toga must've forgotten to pick them up. "I don't know," said Shouto.
A girl plopped down on Ando’s left side, positioned so Shouto couldn’t really see her. “Ando! Heard someone say you were here. Have another breakdown?”
Ando finally raised his head, blinking. “Ugh. Girl, you know it.”
“Bummer.” The girl leaned forward a little. “Oh—didn’t see someone sitting there. Who’s your friend?”
Ando leaned back so the girl and Shouto could see each other. “That’s my roommate. His name is Todoroki. He likes granola bars, rolling around in bed all night, and not saying words.”
The girl’s lips parted. It was a moment before she spoke. “So, like… um… Endeavor’s kid?”
Annoyance nibbled at the base of his throat—Endeavor’s kid—but he stayed silent and gave a small nod.
“Woah,” she said. “Um. I watched the sports festival.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“You were kind of scary.”
How the fuck was he supposed to respond to that? “I guess.”
“Were you trying to be?”
A technician standing behind Shouto clapped her hands, startling him. “Y’all sit down so we can get started,” she said, and then she turned to a second tech. “Trying to think of an icebreaker we haven’t done in the past week. We did pets, hobbies, favorite color—”
“Haven’t done quirks in a while,” said the second tech.
“Good enough,” said the first. She went to sit at the opposite end of the table and waited for everyone to quiet down before she spoke again. “All right, here’s the Talk for the new folks. We’re going around the table, and we’re each gonna give our name, our goal for today—that can be anything from doing your laundry to taking your medication—and an answer to the icebreaker question. Today, that’s a short—let me emphasize, short—explanation of your quirk. Does anyone want to start us—”
“Can we not?” said Shouto.
He was surprised to hear his own voice. Because Shouto didn’t talk in groups, didn’t talk to people his age, especially didn’t interrupt authority figures. And now everyone was looking at him, and—
And Shouto was still talking.
“I know not many people under forty are Quirkless,” he said, “but Quirkless youth have higher rates of mental illness and suicide attempts, so they’re more likely to concentrate in here than elsewhere. We’re already in a vulnerable environment. Immediately establishing a hierarchy upon arrival is a bad way to start things off in a place they were told would be safe.”
There was a short silence, and then a boy a few seats down snickered. “Dude, if you’re Quirkless, just say you’re Quirkless. No need to get all social justice-y.”
“Oh my god, shut up,” the girl to Ando’s left hissed, not quietly enough to keep Shouto from hearing. “Do you not watch the news?”
“Huh?” said the boy.
The tech’s voice edged toward annoyance. Her face had gone a little red. “Favorite TV show, then. Todoroki, do you want to start us off?”
Todoroki. He wondered if she’d said that name on purpose, just to out him. Anyone who casually followed the top ten heroes—except for Kirishima, who apparently had trouble connecting the dots when it came to that sort of thing—could link the surname Todoroki to Endeavor.
If the tech had meant to stump him, though, she’d asked the wrong question. “Red’s Ocean,” Shouto said.
“And your goal?”
“To take a shower.”
“Talk to your nurse about that,” said the tech. “Okay, going clockwise. Next?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Ando. “I’m Ando, they/them pronouns, I also like Red’s Ocean—Todoroki, we are going to discuss this in depth later—and my goal is to make some friends today.”
Ando liked Red’s Ocean? And wanted to talk about it?
Also—they/them pronouns?
“Geez, Ando,” said someone else. “Didn’t you already make, like, five friends since you got here yesterday afternoon? You trying to form a harem?”
“I’ve recently confirmed the existence of God,” said Ando, “so I’m recruiting the best-fit soldiers to help me kill him to steal his status and power. I’m planning on eliminating the sun entirely and turning Earth inside-out, or possibly into a Mobius strip—”
“MOVING ON,” said the tech. “There are a lot of us to get through before breakfast. Save the chit-chat for later. Next?”
Shouto didn't speak again. He did pick up Toga's hairbands and tuck them in his pocket.
###
With the exception of a middle-schooler’s devastation upon learning that snacks would not be available 24/7, morning group ended without casualty. Shouto’s mind had been wandering too much to pay attention to the additional instructions, but he’d probably be fine if he was careful to copy what everyone else was doing for the rest of the day.
Shouto hung back for a bit so he wouldn’t get caught in the rush out the door for breakfast. He settled his forearms on the back of his chair and leaned, surveying the room as he waited. Several more adult patients had drifted into the room since group started—some reading, some working on a puzzle, some watching a subtitled baseball game on the overhead tv.
His gaze snagged on a woman using blunted plastic crochet hooks to make… something. It was green, but her long white hair hid its shape. Her pants and shirt reminded Shouto of Fuyumi’s outfits—subdued colors and a simple shape.
He knew in the first second he saw her, but it wasn’t until she looked up and met his eyes that the realization finally dropped into his stomach like a rock.
Rei.
His mother.
He’d seen Fuyumi’s photos of her in recent years, of course, but he’d still suspected that he wouldn’t recognize her if they were to meet in person. He did recognize her, though, and she looked exactly as he’d imagined. Which was… uncanny. Was wrong.
The ground beneath him seemed unstable, as if he’d suddenly been dropped in some nightmare alternate universe. One that operated on jump scares, maybe. He felt like he should be waiting for a chasm to open and swallow Rei whole--or for her to aim a gun at his head and pull the trigger--or for her to burst into a flutter of dead moths the moment he touched her--
But Rei only gave a small smile and a tiny wave—one too modest for anyone except Shouto to notice.
That was it.
No screeching noumu falling through the ceiling. No Villain twisting his elbow out of socket before shooting him in the leg. Not even a spiky-haired, angry classmate yelling and demanding a fight.
Just a small movement in a chilly, low-ceilinged room. Just two people with a few meters between them.
Somehow, it was so much worse.
Ando’s voice came from the doorway. “Yo, roomie! You gotta show up for breakfast, dude. They’ll hunt you down.”
Quickly, Shouto shoved his chair in. He made sure not to look back at Rei as he followed Ando out the door.
He hadn’t been ready to see her. Probably never would’ve been, honestly, but if it had to happen regardless, this was the worst time anyone could’ve ever picked.
He looked like shit. He felt like shit. He’d landed himself in a fucking psychiatric hospital after beating the shit out of his best friend and burning off part of his own finger on national television. And, of course, he’d tried—failed, because that was all he ever did—to off himself.
Real grounds for motherly pride right there.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“You cool?” Ando asked. “You’re looking kind of pale.”
Shouto’s organs felt like they were worming around in his abdomen, trying to find the darkest corner of his body in which to hide. Like—even though they’d never seen it before—they’d been convinced that light was a horrible, terrifying, dangerous thing—
They’d be right about the danger, at least. Because Shouto’s inner organs being exposed to light would mean that he’d been cut wide open, and how would he ever pull himself together again with no one there to help—?
God, he couldn’t even keep a coherent line of thought.
“Hey,” said Ando. “Todoroki.”
Shouto’s vision had gone fuzzy. He blinked hard.
“It’s fine,” he told Ando. “Everything’s fine.”
Notes:
I know this chapter took a while. I cannot focus for shit. It's pretty offensive that I got the "bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy" part of Tigger's personality but not the "fun fun fun fun fun" part.
***Shinsou waiter AU***
Shinsou, day 4 of no sleep: "Hi Shinsou, I'll be your table today. My name's order. Can I time you waiter, or do you take a little more need?"
Kaminari, the customer, who stumbled into the restaurant after short-circuiting during a battle: "Uhhhh yeah can I tender the whiskey chicken with a glass of mustard--hold the glass--and some dry water?"
Shinsou: "No, yeah problem." *squirts an entire bottle of mustard directly onto the table* "I'll be right back with your chicken water."
Kaminari: "Thanks, Mom. Merry Easter." *drops his face directly into the mustard and falls asleep*
Follow me (Max!) on social media!
-Instagram: @max_says_no
-Twitter: @hyperfixeaten
Chapter 40: Shouto Eats Drugs for Breakfast to Prepare for a Visit from His Favorite Person in the Whole Wide World
Summary:
Where is Ando hiding all these granola bars?
I've been rearranging and editing this chapter for so long that it's all but ceased to exist. 7k-word chapter for your patience.
Notes:
TW: psychiatric hospital setting, overstimulation and panic, heavy medication, suicidal ideation and suicide jokes, possible eating disorder, compulsive rituals, bias/bigotry in the medical field, having sensory needs dismissed, misgendering (not purposeful) in a medical setting; DISCUSSION OF: animal dissection, depression, anxiety, suicide and planning, guns/poison/murder (slight), psychiatric medication side effects, manic episodes, previously-mentioned threats from Endeavor, the burnt finger thing and some slight body horror, Furbies D:
First things first: WE HAVE FANART!! Linking their Tumblr just below, so go take a look and pay a compliment or five! I gave up being aromantic just so I could fall in love with these. I'll also be posting individual drawings to the corresponding chapters when I get the chance. Thank you again, gog!!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
OR: gogumasworld on Tumblr
The moment Shouto entered the cafeteria, he knew it was going to be overstimulating. The splash of someone spilling orange juice on the floor, a technician repeating “two sides, one main—I said one main, Tatsuko—” and dozens of conversations among the patients. In the line ahead of Shouto, Ando was talking to a girl in pajama pants.
“Bad manic episode,” the girl was saying. “I may or may not have pushed a shopping cart full of Furbies down an escalator.”
Ando shook their head as they picked up several square Styrofoam plates and passed them to the surrounding people. They gave one to Shouto, as well. “You gotta stop trying to get yourself haunted,” Ando told the girl. “Push a cart full of box fans down the escalator instead. Box fans are too disillusioned with reality to do any serious haunting.”
“But the haunting is the point,” said the girl. “New friends! Y’know? We could go on adventures and shit.”
“Friend. Pal. Love of My Life. You do not want to go on adventures with Furbies.” Ando turned, put their hand on Shouto’s shoulder. “Back me up here, dude. I’m trying to save a life.”
Shouto glanced between them. “I don’t understand.”
“Furbies are filled with malice,” said Ando, “and my dumbass friend here—”
“Furbies. Are. Friends,” said the girl.
“Furbies want to eat your soul. Todoroki, opinion?”
The Styrofoam plate in Shouto’s hand gave a small pop as Shouto’s thumbnail poked through its side. He wasn’t sure what a Furby was. A nickname for some sort of small living animal? God, he didn’t have the brain space to think about this shit. He’d just seen his mother for the first time in ten years, and he’d been keeping his elbows in tight close to his ribcage so maybe his arms and hands would stop shaking. So far, it wasn’t working.
“I don’t know,” Shouto said, but his voice was too quiet in the loud room, and Ando and the girl had already moved on to picking up their plastic-wrapped rice bowls and talking about the reunion tour of some band Shouto had never heard of.
Shouto put his Styrofoam plate down, grabbed a carton of milk, and exited the tight line as quickly as he could, accidentally jostling a couple elbows on his way out. He held the small carton with both hands against his chest and stood close to the wall, waiting for his brain to catch up to his surroundings.
Everyone else seemed fine. Good, even. How were all these other kids already making friends and forming cliques? He doubted most of them had met before arriving here. Why couldn’t Shouto do that? Why was it bothering him now when it never had before? And why did Shouto’s brain always have to feel like a metal rake was scraping over it whenever he was in this type of environment? It was just sound. Just light and colors and movement.
He needed to get out of the cafeteria. Spend some time alone in his dorm room with the lights off. He’d be okay after that, probably.
The same tech who’d led morning group was standing beside the door with her arms folded, chin tilted up to survey the entirety of the lunchroom. It took her a few seconds to notice Shouto after he’d walked up to her.
Shouto asked, “Can I leave?”
The tech raised an eyebrow. She said nothing.
Had the tech not understood? “For—to go to my room,” Shouto clarified.
“You serious?”
Shouto hesitated. What was bad about what he’d asked?
“You heard what I said literally right before we came in, didn’t you?” she said. “No one leaves until breakfast is over. You can’t assume you have special privileges here, too.”
Oh.
Well, that wasn’t an unfamiliar reaction. He remembered it mostly from the people Endeavor hired to spar Shouto—Don’t assume I’ll go easy on you just because you’re Endeavor’s kid—but also sometimes from when Shouto wanted something from an authority figure. Like when one of his tutors was grading a project they’d refused to explain the directions for more than twice.
A few months ago, the tech’s words wouldn’t have surprised Shouto.
He'd let his guard down since then.
Shouto went back to his seat. He tried to sit still, but everything had suddenly gotten louder, more chaotic. Even the glossy cardboard of the milk carton tore too loudly when he opened it. It didn’t taste like the milk at home or at school.
God, he didn’t belong here. What was he doing? He hunched over the milk carton, passed his fingers over his ear. It’d be embarrassing if he had to close his ears in front of everyone, but he might not have a choice if this went on much longer.
The plastic table vibrated, and Shouto startled upright. Ando had set their tray down.
“Saw you talking to the tech,” Ando said. They sat in the chair opposite Shouto, unwrapped their straw and stabbed it through their orange juice carton. “Everything okay there? You look kinda shaken up.”
Shouto wished Ando wouldn’t talk to him right now. His breathing and heart rate weren’t as under control as he would’ve liked. “You don’t have to sit here.”
Ando lowered the straw from their mouth. “Oh—sorry, pal. You wanna be alone?”
Goddammit, Shouto was trying to be considerate here. “I didn’t mean that I want—I was just telling you. Because you have friends. So you can sit with them.”
“I am sitting with friends,” said Ando.
Shouto searched Ando’s face. He didn’t get it.
Eventually, Ando gave an unsure grin. Huffed a laugh. “You’re the friend, Todoroki.”
“Oh,” said Shouto.
“And I’m sitting with you.”
“Yes.”
“…So I’m already sitting with friends.”
Shouto pressed the heel of his palm into his cheek as he nodded. He wasn’t sure if he was correctly judging how warm his face was, but it wasn’t pleasant. Prickly. He tried to catch his breath, maybe force some of the racket in here to turn into white noise.
“Hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable last night.” Ando tapped the rim of their rice bowl twice and mouthed something to themself before lifting the rice to their mouth. “I can be a lot. Say some shit I don’t think through all the way. Like obviously I don’t dislike cishet people, but I can see how people might believe that from how—”
Something clanged in the kitchen, hidden from view by a simple partition. Shouto breathed through the shot of adrenaline as he registered a couple excited—angry?—voices surrounding it. The atmosphere in here was horriblycharged, full of static electricity, but nobody else in the room looked concerned. Slowly, Ando’s voice came back to Shouto’s attention.
“—think I’m trying to hit on them when I’m all like, yay gay, which, I mean, not an uncommon concern, and I don’t want to weird anybody out. So I usually try to let straight guys know up-front that I’m not trying to hook up or perv or anything, just… y’know, in case you were nervous about that. Anyway, let me, um, let me know if I need to back off.”
Shouto didn’t want to deal any further with the odd-tasting milk he’d picked up. He needed something to do with his hands right now, though, so he folded the milk carton’s opening closed. Open again. Closed.
Ando tapped their chopsticks on the rice bowl again—two quiet ting tings—before picking up more rice. Their hand stopped halfway to their mouth. “Dude, hey. What’s wrong?”
What was Ando, a fucking psychic? “I said I’m okay.”
“You’re shaking.”
“It’s just loud in here,” said Shouto.
Ando gently stabbed their chopsticks into their rice. “Were you trying to leave earlier?”
He didn’t know why he cared if Ando thought he was an entitled brat. There was no reason why Shouto would need to prove his character to someone he’d only know for maybe a week. “She was mad at me, I think.”
Ando’s brow furrowed. “The tech at the door? Why?”
“Because I didn’t hear the—” Someone at the next table over laughed too loudly, and Shouto’s line of thought scattered like a school of fish. It took a moment for him to finish his sentence. “—she, um… I was trying to leave and she thought I was being… I just didn’t remember her saying that, because I can’t remember… things…”
“All right, I gotcha.” Ando stood and started off across the room. They spoke to a tech—not the same one as before—and alarm didn’t register in Shouto’s gut until the tech looked up at Shouto and made her way toward him.
Ando seemed like they might be prone to overestimating what any one person was willing to do for another without getting annoyed. Was Shouto going to be in trouble for complaining now?
The tech reached the table and spoke to Shouto. “Are you not feeling well?”
“It’s okay,” Shouto said quickly. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” said Ando. “He needs to get out of the cafeteria.”
The tech jerked her head toward the door. “Let’s go,” she told Shouto.
Shouto didn’t move, his heart pounding. He just needed a minute to think. For everybody to leave him alone so he could sit in silence and think.
Ando turned to the tech. “Can I go with him? That might help.”
The tech nodded.
Ando leaned forward and pressed their hand into Shouto’s shoulder. “C’mon. I’ll be there, too.”
Shouto forced himself to stand and walk with them to the door. He felt some of the other patients’ eyes following him. Fuck, this was pitiful. He would’ve been able to hold in a panic attack just fine. He’d done it dozens—probably hundreds—of times before.
The woman leading them from the cafeteria addressed the tech who’d been guarding the door. Her voice was sharp. “I’m going to need to talk to you later.”
The tech guarding the door looked at Shouto and frowned. But then the door closed after them, cutting off and muffling the cafeteria noise. Ando quietly kicked the door twice with the back of their heel before joining Shouto and the nurse heading down the hall.
What was it with Ando’s tics? Kicking a door every time it closed, tapping their chopsticks on the side of the bowl before every bite, brushing their teeth for an ungodly amount of time? Did it have something to do with why Ando also wasn’t allowed to use the shower in their dorm room?
Not that Shouto would ever ask. Ando had been nice so far, and sometimes Shouto’s questions frustrated or offended people.
Ando sat in the lobby with Shouto while the tech went to notify a nurse.
“You can go back to the cafeteria,” said Shouto.
“Probably should,” Ando said, but they just tucked their hands between their legs, stayed in their seat. Released a breath. “Can I ask a question? You don’t have to answer.”
Oh. Ando was going to ask the invasive question. Shouto didn’t have much experience answering personal questions when he didn’t want to weird the other person out enough to scare them away. “Mm,” said Shouto.
“Did you not get freaked out at the sports festival?” Ando asked. “That was pretty fucking loud and chaotic, right? So you’d think that… I mean, I’d be scared as shit, just being in front of that many people.”
“I’m mostly used to it,” said Shouto.
Ando raised their eyebrows. “Really? You get in front of crowds a lot?”
“I meant I’m used to being scared.”
Ando was quiet for a moment. Then they shook a granola bar out of their sleeve and handed it to Shouto.
“I think you’re cool,” said Ando. “You definitely have some shit going on in your life that I don’t know about, but in here, we got your back.”
The granola bar sat awkward in his hand, the wrapper warm from Ando’s body heat. “‘We’?”
“You told off a tech for being quirkist in front of a full room this morning.” Ando knocked their hand lightly against Shouto’s arm as they stood. They gave a small smile. “There are gonna be a few people who appreciated that.”
Ando left. Shouto parsed their words for meaning. He couldn’t come up with anything definite.
What, was Ando Quirkless? Plenty of people weren’t raging quirkists. And it wasn’t like Shouto had eradicated quirkism from the face of the Earth, or even from one room in a hospital. There were better reasons to pledge undying loyalty to someone. Probably. Shouto couldn’t think of any better reasons right now.
The nurse finally arrived, looking out-of-breath. It was the same nurse who’d drawn his blood this morning—the nice one, with the orange-flavored drinks in her mini fridge. When she saw Shouto, she raised an eyebrow, clucked her tongue. “Back for more?”
“Sorry,” he said.
After going into her office for a few yes/no questions, the nurse gave him more of the same medication he’d had earlier in a tiny paper cup.
“I’m sure you remember from last night,” she said, “but this might make you tired and cloud up your thoughts a bit. Wish we could go with something gentler, but with your anxiety levels… whew. I’m going to give you a low dose of beta blockers, too, to help with that shaking.”
Shouto clasped his hands together in his lap. It felt like lying to let her think his anxiety was that bad. He’d felt worse before. This was just overstimulation and bad luck. Still, he wasn’t going to say anything that would sway her away from loading him up with the meds he needed to stop thinking.
“What’s next on your schedule?” she asked as she looked through his file on the computer. “Psychiatrist? Oh, that’s good. They got you in early. Usually have to wait a day or two for that, just because we get so many kids coming through here. Eat that granola bar while you’re in here so those meds don’t make you nauseous.”
“I can’t go back to my room?” Shouto asked.
“No food in the dorms. You can go in the common room if you like. We only allow the long-term patients who pass certain safety requirements inside, and we have a couple supervisors present at all times, so no one’s going to bother you.”
Theoretically, the common room did sound better. He didn’t like being the only one eating in a room with two people—it reminded him of the times Endeavor had monitored his meals when he was younger. How he’d watched Shouto struggle through fish that was too soft in his mouth, or made a disapproving noise when Shouto started unmixing his mixed vegetables—the types of things that made him hyperaware of how his body moved and of where he was in relation to others.
But Rei might still be in the common room. So Shouto stayed seated and unwrapped his granola bar.
The nurse spoke without looking away from her computer. “Your mother’s a sweet woman, you know. Misses you a whole lot.”
Shouto broke off a piece with his hand and put it in his mouth. It tasted strange, like he was eating all the individual ingredients rather than the granola bar as a whole.
“It might do you good to talk to her,” said the nurse.
The granola scratched his dry throat. “I don’t think so.”
“She’s made a lot of progress since being here. She’s really a very good per—”
“I know,” said Shouto. “I know that. I don’t need you to tell me who my mother is.”
“Okay, honey,” said the nurse.
Shouto ate another piece of the granola bar. He’d chewed and swallowed before he realized that he’d just said something rude.
“Sorry,” he said.
“None of my business,” said the nurse. “I’ll call and see if the doctor’s ready for you.”
###
The doctor’s office was cold. The heavy anxiety meds were nearly in full-force now—he wondered if the cold and the meds were related.
The doctor was a mutant type, with an extra set of arms below the first. They seemed to come in handy when she needed to open and flip through a manilla folder while holding her reading glasses and clicking through something on her computer. “So I’m hearing that you’re having a little bit of a tough time adjusting here?”
Oh—come in handy. That was a pun. Should he point that out? Probably not, since it had happened in his brain, and she couldn’t see inside there. Probably. Right? God, he couldn’t think. “I’m not trying to be difficult,” he told her.
The doctor nodded without looking away from her computer, where she was double-clicking every few seconds. “How are the facilities?”
“Okay.”
“Comfortable enough?”
Was she trying to trick him into complaining so she’d have a reason to write his mental health issues off as him being dramatic for attention? “Yes.”
“And your roommate, what about her?”
Her…? Oh, the doctor was probably looking at a file with his deadname on it. Discomfort wormed through his stomach. “They’re fine,” he said.
“Good to hear.” She finally raised her head. “I have a few medications I’d like to try out based on what I know about you, but I want to hear from you first. What’s your biggest concern right now?”
That Endeavor would hurt Fuyumi and Natsuo while Shouto was gone. That Bakugou would get himself killed trying to rescue Deku. But he had a feeling that wasn’t what the doctor wanted to hear. “About… what?”
“Mental health-wise. What’s bothering you the most? Anxiety, anger management, depression, insomnia…?”
There was that “anger management” again. Did he have anger management problems? He’d snapped at the nurse. He remembered, vaguely, yelling at Aizawa and Bakugou. It’d been something about Deku. Should he not have yelled? Was that something a normal person would’ve been able to keep pushed down? He’d just been so fucking tired.
“Todoroki?” said the doctor. “Did you hear me?”
He’d already forgotten that she’d asked him a question. He tried, desperately, to compress his clouds of thought into something concrete. What was bothering him the most?
“I can’t think very well right now,” he said.
Her face pinched. “Do you need me to repeat the question?”
He blinked against the bout of dizziness that hit him. “No. I was trying to remember what I’m supposed to say.”
“There’s no wrong answer,” she said.
Where’d she get that idea? There was a wrong answer to everything. Shouto knew because he was always the one picking it. “Endeavor said I’m not supposed to talk about some things.”
“Why’s that?” The doctor slipped her reading glasses on and looked down at the folder. “Privacy concerns?”
“He gets… annoyed. Having to sort things out with the Commission and Child Protective Services after people find out things.”
The doctor looked up.
Shouto kept explaining. “He said if I let information leak to the media, he’ll hurt my brother and sister. And he’d have plenty of time to do it in between the leak and whenever he’d theoretically face legal consequences. Which will be never, because the Hero industry is conveniently merged with the judicial system.”
There’d be a sham trial, and then the Commission would dismiss all the evidence as a Villain attack on Pro Heroes. Shouto had seen it done before, and not just with insignificant crimes committed by insignificant Heroes.
What had they been talking about just now? Oh—she’d asked what was bothering him the most. “My roommate said something about medication for my insomnia,” he said.
The doctor lowered her folder, lips parted.
Was she confused? Shouto mixed his words up without noticing sometimes. Especially with these heavy-ass meds clouding his brain. He tried to clarify. “Sleep medication doesn’t usually interfere with quirk usage, right? Probably Endeavor would let me take that.”
“Uh,” said the doctor.
###
The doctor ended up prescribing him a couple medications to take tonight and one to start in the morning. Things to help with mood stabilization, mostly, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Shouto. His lowest moods and his highest moods would still average out to depression. That was how mood stabilizers worked, right? The doctor had seemed distracted during the latter part of their interview, so maybe she wasn’t making her best decisions right now, either.
Whatever the case, she’d prescribed medications that needed to be taken with quirk suppressants for a while to lower the chance of a dangerous interaction. Even after weaning off the suppressants, the chance that his quirk would be affected remained. Not to mention those more universal possible side effects like lightheadedness, blurred vision, fatigue…
Best not to worry about it too much. Endeavor would make him stop any meds that threatened his performance, anyway.
He left the doctor’s office with a vague, uneasy sense that he’d told the doctor too much. He couldn’t remember what all he’d said, though, so there wasn’t a lot of material for any thought spirals to spiral into.
He asked a tech if he could head back to his dorm room for the break. They’d said sure, if he didn’t mind having time added to his inpatient care stay for asocial behavior. Bullshit policy. He would go into the common room, but if he saw Rei in there, he’d head straight back to his dorm room. Take the loss. They’d have to let him out of the hospital at some point regardless of how “asocial” he acted.
Shouto was mostly expecting Rei to be in the common room, so when he looked around and didn’t see her, he felt a bit lost. He didn’t know anyone in here. There were coloring sheets and crayons on a table, but he didn’t have any clue what to do with a crayon. A couple tins of dominos, too, but he knew even less about those than he did about art.
Puzzles were something he could do by himself, though. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done a puzzle, but Fuyumi put them together sometimes. Shouto grabbed a beaten-up Ziploc bag with a mix of puzzle pieces, found a tiny square table against the wall, and dumped the pieces out. It took him a long time to find the first matching piece, and it didn’t get easier after that.
Why did Fuyumi like these fucking things? All these tiny contextless pieces. Did she enjoy mental anguish?
Someone turned the volume on the TV up. Shouto raised his head, annoyed, but then he heard a familiar voice coming from the sound system. Nausea tinged in his gut.
“—no, dude, he’s not scared of anything. He jumped off a roof once in practical training. I mean, he caught himself with his ice, but it was, like, three stories. Jirou started crying.”
Onscreen was footage from the sports festival yesterday, with Kaminari and Jirou on camera in their gym uniforms as the festival attendees filed out of the stadium. A few attendees waved at the camera as they passed.
“That was you,” said Jirou.
Kaminari paused, eyebrows knit, then said, “Oh, yeah, my bad. That was me.”
“I mean, he’s probably scared of something,” said Jirou. “Most people are. Bugs or whatever, I don’t know.”
“Nope,” said Kaminari, “I saw Shouto pick up a spider with his bare hands once to put it outside.”
The reporter spoke. “He put the spider outside instead of killing it?”
“Yeah,” said Kaminari, “but I think it was just because Bakugou had already pulled off his shoe to kill it and Shouto wanted to piss him off. I don’t think he has a soft spot for animals or anything.” Kaminari waved his cotton candy stick at Jirou. “Remember when we were doing cat dissections, and everybody was asking him to drain the cat juice from the cat bags?”
“Bakugou drained his own cat juice,” said Jirou.
“Yeah, but he was holding his breath,” said Kaminari. He mimed tilting something upside down. “Shouto just… boosh!”
It finally hit Shouto why listening to Jirou and Kaminari talk was making him nauseous. They were saying Shouto. And he.
He wasn’t sure that publicizing his name and pronouns mattered now that Endeavor knew. Endeavor didn’t always watch the news, anyway. Fuyumi might see it, but she didn’t know he went by Shouto, so maybe she wouldn’t make the connection.
The reporter spoke. “So Bakugou and Todoroki are rivals both on and off the field?”
Todoroki. Well, there went that. Shouto saw a couple people turn to look at him in his peripheral vision, but he kept his eyes on the TV.
“Sorta, I guess,” said Kaminari. “Shouto just kinda chills, and Bakugou gets mad and yells a lot.”
“Would you say they’re enemies?” asked the reporter.
“No way,” said Kaminari. “Bakugou’s the only one in the whole class who has Shouto’s phone number.”
“So they’re friends?”
Kaminari looked to Jirou, who wrapped one of her earjacks around her finger and shrugged.
“You all performed very well today,” said the reporter, “but it seems like there’s a concerningly wide gap between Todoroki’s skill level and the rest of the first-years’. I was curious about his relationship with the other members of class 1-A.”
Jirou gave a vague, uncomfortable wave. “I mean… you usually kind of have to strain to hear him, right? He doesn’t really try to talk or interact with other people.”
“Is he aggressive toward his classmates?”
“Wh—? Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve never seen him get mad at anything before. Or, like… show… emotion.”
“Considering his actions on the field, that’s hard for me to wrap my mind around. If he typically keeps to himself, what do you think provoked his strange behavior today?”
“[COMPUTERIZED CENSORING TONE] if I know, dude,” said Jirou.
The screen cut to footage of the stadium field—a wide shot of Shouto and Bakugou, and then a closeup of Shouto. Jaw set, hair messy and sweaty from a full day of both quirk and physical exertion, arm aimed toward the stands, voice echoing in the silent stadium— “Endeavor!”
Then the abrupt flip of his hand and the unfurling of a white flame.
And—bless this nosy fucking news station—Endeavor’s face. There was an evolution from confused (eyebrows drawn, lips parted) to stunned (a slight widening of the eyes) to furious (an eruption of flames that largely hid his features). He stood there in the aisle for a moment with the crowd roaring around him. Then he whipped around and stormed down the stairs into the belly of the stadium.
Shouto hummed a quiet laugh. He didn’t regret flipping Endeavor off, but god, were the consequences going to be shitty.
He was also pretty sure everyone in the room was looking at him now, which was… more mortifying than Shouto would’ve thought. It might’ve been different if they were watching the news in a neutral setting, like a coffee shop. At least then he could pretend that his actions had been rational and premeditated rather than driven by unchecked emotion and recklessness.
He was glad that his medication was keeping him from processing his embarrassment into anything more than sleepiness.
“Todoroki?”
Shouto looked up to see a tech holding a clipboard. She looked flustered. “You have a… visitor,” she said. “Is it okay if he meets you in here?”
He… what? Wasn’t it Saturday? Shouto hadn’t forgotten a couple days and it was currently visiting hours on Monday, had he? That didn’t seem right. “Okay,” said Shouto.
As soon as the tech left, a thought popped into Shouto’s mind that sent panic streaking past even the barrier of his medication. What if the visitor wasn’t Natsuo, but Endeavor? And Shouto had just let him walk in here—
But the bright red that rounded the corner wasn’t Endeavor. Shouto’s pulse slowed a little, but in the same moment, irritation built under his skin.
This idiot. Wearing his god-awful Hero getup into a fucking psychiatric hospital… Yeah, that was on-brand.
Hawks carried two cups of coffee, one of which looked like a strawberry frappe. Shouto leaned his head against the wall, staring at Hawks as he made his way across the room.
Hawks grinned when he got close. “Hey.”
“Who died?” Shouto asked.
“No one that I know of,” said Hawks.
“You’re not allowed to be in here unless it’s an emergency.”
Hawks tilted his head in an admissive nod. “…would you believe me if I said I sweet-talked the receptionist?”
“I’d believe that the receptionist saw your eyebrows and assumed they were the emergency.”
Hawks gave an awkward cough-laugh. He shifted the coffees to one arm so he could push his protective goggles up into his blond hair. “I brought coffee.”
“And I have eyes. Is it poisoned?”
“What—?” Hawks lowered his hand. “No, why—? No.”
“Try harder,” said Shouto. He rapped the tabletop in time with the syllables— “Ar-se-nic. It’s not even difficult to procure. You owe me for snitching.”
Hawks set the strawberry frappe in front of Shouto, took a straw from a pocket inside his suede jacket and dropped it in front of him. He kicked out the chair opposite Shouto and sat down. Took a sip from his own coffee. “So,” said Hawks. “I was gonna start off by asking if you were feeling better, but I guess that answers that.”
Shouto lifted his head from the wall and tore the paper wrap from his straw. Accepting a frappe from Hawks wouldn’t be the most dignified thing he’d ever done, but he’d be mad at himself later when he was craving something sweeter than a chocolate chip granola bar.
“Damn,” said Hawks, giving a slight motion toward Shouto’s hand. “Didn’t realize you burnt part of a finger off. You already have damaged nerve endings in that hand?”
Shouto stuck his straw into his frappe. “No.”
“Huh. So you felt all that?”
“Yes.”
Hawks tapped the side of his coffee cup with a couple fingers. He looked around the room.
“How are things in here?” he asked. “Always kinda wondered how these places ran.”
Shouto nodded. “Things are great. I’m discovering many exciting new ways to disappoint people.”
“Well—” Hawks paused. “Sorry. Okay? I’m probably not doing this right. I can bullshit my way through most situations, but heart-to-hearts with depressed teens aren’t my forte.”
“I’m in a similar situation,” said Shouto.
“Yeah?”
“Yes, I’m not good at talking to chickens. Why are you here? Rushing to get your internship offer in?”
Hawks raised his eyebrows.
Shouto kept Hawks’s gaze as he took a sip of his frappe. Then he snorted. Leaned the side of his head against the wall again. “You’re fucking with me, right?”
“No…?” said Hawks. “I mean, I wasn’t gonna bring it up within the first minute, but… you won the sports festival. Shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“You don’t even take on interns.”
“I do now.”
“Am I on the Villain watchlist or something?” Shouto asked. “Commission asked you to keep an eye on me for when I turn evil?”
“There’s no Villain watchlist,” said Hawks.
“There is a Villain watchlist,” said Shouto.
“Okay, there’s a Villain watchlist, but you’re not on it. I just think I could teach you some shit. Maybe get us both some PR while we’re at it.”
“It won’t be the good kind,” said Shouto.
Hawks pushed a few puzzle pieces out of the way, set his coffee on the table. “Why not? You’re progressive or whatever, right?”
“You want me for diversity?” Shouto asked. “Been hiring too many nice people lately? Wanted to add a suicidal asshole or two to the mix? Very progressive. Deku’s Quirkless and bisexual. And he kicked my ass. Why don’t you take him on as an intern?”
Hawks picked up one of the puzzle pieces. Turned it around, eyes narrowing.
Shouto sat up. “Don’t fuck up my puzzle.”
“I’m not going to fuck up your puzzle,” said Hawks. “What even is it?”
“I don’t know. It came in a Ziploc bag labeled ‘Rubber Bands.’”
Hawks tilted his head to look at the pieces Shouto had already fit together. “I don’t think it’s a rubber band puzzle.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Shouto. “I’ve been working on it for half an hour.”
Hawks looked up with an incredulous smirk. “Really? And that’s all you got?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “My working memory is damaged, so it’s hard to keep track of where I sort things. And my eyes are shit.”
Hawks’s smile dropped, his eyes cutting to the side. He smacked his lips. “My bad.”
“You can sort the mustard yellow pieces,” said Shouto. “I don’t like them.”
Hawks obeyed. They worked for a few minutes, silent. Hawks was faster than Shouto, putting together in five minutes what would’ve taken Shouto fifteen.
Did Hawks’s speed also apply to brainpower? Probably more likely that Hawks was average in that department, and that Shouto was just… really shit.
Hawks broke the silence. “You see Deku much?”
Ah. Was that the real reason Hawks was here? To gather information on the League, assess how much of a danger Shouto was? Shouto wondered if he’d already told the Commission—Endeavor, even—that Shouto was friends with a League member.
“Not much,” said Shouto. “He walked me to the subway station once. We had coffee before the USJ thing. Watched him kill somebody on Wednesday. He sends me memes. That’s pretty much it.”
Hawks connected two border pieces.
“I couldn’t tell you anything the Commission doesn’t already know,” said Shouto. “Unless they want to know Deku’s favorite Disney movies. And I’m a shitty actor. So it’d be better to leave me out of whatever League infiltration operation you have going on. It won’t work, anyway.”
“Why’s that?” Hawks asked.
“Because Deku’s not fucking stupid.”
“Hm,” said Hawks. “Kinda thought you’d assume I was in the League.”
Shouto shook his head. “You’re not the type.”
“Well… thanks?”
“Not a compliment.” Shouto pushed a yellow puzzle piece to Hawks’s side. “You should ask Bakugou to intern with you. I don’t know if he’d accept, but I think he would like that you asked.”
Hawks took the yellow piece, connected it. “Who’s that? The explosion kid?”
“Yes.”
“His skill level is half yours.”
“I know. But I’m probably going to be dead before I turn twenty, so I think your expertise would be better spent on a different student.”
“Wow,” Hawks said. “Okay, what if I said you could bring a friend or two?”
Shouto paused to take a drink of his coffee. It was actually a very good frappe, and he was pissed about it. “It’d be tough to pick from all zero of them.”
“You’re not friends with Bakugou?”
“We had a disagreement,” said Shouto. “He wants me to get my shit sorted out before I talk to him again. But that’s never going to happen.”
“I mean, it could,” said Hawks. “Things aren’t always shit.”
“Yes, they are.” Shouto pushed a section of loose puzzle pieces over to Hawks. “Do the navy pieces, too. I don’t like them.”
Hawks started sorting the pieces. “Why don’t you like ’em?”
“They’re bad,” said Shouto. “Shitty feeling.”
“Huh?”
“The color feeling,” said Shouto.
Hawks quirked an eyebrow, his confused grin returning. “Color feeling?”
“Yes, how it—how it—” What was Hawks not getting? Was Shouto saying something wrong? “The color, how it feels.”
“So how does it feel?”
“The navy or the yellow?”
“I dunno,” said Hawks. “Both. Are they different?”
“Yes. The navy feels like sitting still for too long. Or dried-out ink pens. The yellow is like dropping something small in a crowded shopping area. Is it not like that for you?”
“I mean, they’re just kinda… colors,” said Hawks.
“What?”
“Like they—they don’t have a personality or anything. They’re just there.”
Shouto searched Hawks’s face. Was he joking? “Do you have trouble remembering what colors things are?”
“Not that I’ve noticed,” said Hawks.
“How did you learn colors?”
“Just kinda… learned them.”
“They’re not connected to anything?”
“Nope.”
“You don’t get nauseous when you see certain colors or color combinations?”
“Nope,” said Hawks.
What the fuck. “What about for numbers?”
“Huh?” said Hawks. “What about for numbers?”
“They don’t—?” Shouto’s heart had started racing again. He paused to collect himself. “They don’t feel like—like people? Or—?”
Hawks rested his chin atop his fist. Bit his bottom lip, raised his eyebrows.
Shouto didn’t like this. “Stop it.”
“Do people get numbers?” Hawks’s voice edged toward teasing. “Do I have a number?”
Seventeen. Nineteen, maybe, if he ever dropped the idiotic smile and trimmed his fucking eyebrows. “You’re a two.”
“A two?”
“Out of ten.”
Hawks let out a somewhat off-brand snort. He pinched the bridge of his nose, gave a crooked grin. “Not a one, at least. Am I growing on you?”
“The two is for the frappe,” said Shouto. “It’s a good frappe.”
“Ah,” said Hawks.
“But it’s creepy that you asked Fuyumi what I like.”
“Hm? Oh, no, I…” Hawks made a vague motion. “Your—Touya used to like those. Is all. Thought you might.”
The words sent a spike of something strange down his spine. “You knew Touya?”
“Went to a Hero training program with him,” said Hawks. “You didn’t know?”
Shouto poked his straw around in his frappe.
He didn’t know much about Touya at all.
“He made the same joke,” said Hawks, returning to the puzzle. “About Fuyumi and the gift card.”
On record, the forest fire that had killed Touya was an accident. Shouto had believed that when he was younger. But as he grew and began to experiment with the temperature of his own fire, he realized the unlikeliness that a forest fire of such incredibly high temperatures was a result of Touya’s carelessness. You had to focus to keep a fire burning that hot for that long. Had to be deliberate.
Had to have an anger so strong it wouldn’t fit inside your body.
“Did you ever send it to her?” Shouto asked.
Hawks hummed a laugh. “No.”
“Were you at the funeral?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you not to go?” Shouto asked.
“No, he… no. Things felt weird. I don’t know. You freaked me out on Friday, though.”
“I wanted you to leave me alone.”
Hawks nodded. “No, I gathered. Touya did the same thing. I mean, sort of. I can’t really picture you asking the cute girl in class if she wanted to watch you torch a ladybug.”
“I drain the cat juice.”
“The what?”
“The cat juice.”
Hawks stared at Shouto for a moment before he said, “…Okay. Well, if you don’t wanna intern with me, who’re you going to intern with?”
He didn’t want to think that far ahead. It was exhausting. “Haven’t seen the list yet.”
“Are there any Heroes you actually like?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Eraserhead is okay.”
Hawks waited. Then, “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“What about vigilantes? Touya liked vigilantes.”
“I’m not Touya,” said Shouto.
“I know, I was just—” Hawks released a breath. Then he looked down at the puzzle, and his eyes narrowed. “Dude, I think this is rubber bands.”
Shouto said, “What?”
“Check it.” Hawks traced half of a yellowish loop that had formed among the pieces they’d connected. “That’s a fucking rubber band.”
Shouto tilted his head, squinted. It was. “What the fuck.”
“You’re putting together a rubber band puzzle.”
“I’m putting together—” Shouto stopped abruptly. Then he laughed, a quiet wheeze of breath, and put his forehead down against the tabletop. Hugged himself, dug his fingers into his arms, and listened as his laugh devolved into a groan.
Fucking hell. Was any of this real?
“You good?” asked Hawks.
Shouto schooled his expression, raised his head. He was tired of thinking about what was going to go down after he left the hospital. “Are you going to make me talk to people?”
Hawks quirked an eyebrow. “For the internship?”
“I’m not good at talking,” said Shouto. “I don’t like it. It makes me tired.”
“I mean, I guess you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “I’ll intern with you, then.”
“Word?”
“I can’t help you with League infiltration, though.”
“Never said I was infiltrating the League.”
“I can’t help you with it,” said Shouto. “Don’t try to watch my movement with a tracker on my phone. You’ll be very bored. I don’t go anywhere. I don’t care if you try to look through my texts. I guess there’s evidence that Deku killed someone. But the Commission probably knows that bringing Deku in would just stir up shit with his father, and I don’t think they’re ready for that.”
“Noted,” said Hawks.
“Don’t try to bring Bakugou into it, either. He’s fragile.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“Deku has a gun,” said Shouto. “He cares about Bakugou. I don’t think your quirk can stop bullets. Do you?”
Hawks raised his hands, yielding. “Hey, you like your friends. You don’t trust me. I get it.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “Thanks for the frappe. And for doing the bad parts of the puzzle. You don’t have to stay anymore.”
“I can stay if you want. Finish the puzzle.”
“No,” said Shouto.
“No?”
“You don’t like being here. It’s okay.” Shouto didn’t have to work to keep his face expressionless as he looked up at Hawks and waved. “Bye.”
Hawks stood, nudged his chair in with his foot as he picked up his coffee.
“All right, then,” said Hawks. “Have a nice week.”
“Don’t come back unless it’s to kill me.”
“Okay, pal,” said Hawks.
“Arsenic.”
“I’ll put it on my shopping list.”
Shouto waited until Hawks was halfway across the room to slouch back in his seat, raise his voice, and call, “I’m your biggest fan.”
Hawks looked over his shoulder. Shouto used his uninjured hand to flip him off.
Hawks gave a baffled laugh. Raised his own middle finger beside his head and kept walking.
After Hawks had gone, Shouto returned to his puzzle. He worked on it for as long as he could stand the feeling of so many eyes on him, and then he swept the whole thing back into the plastic bag. The bag went back on the table, the empty frappe cup went in the garbage bin, and Shouto went back to his room.
He remembered Toga’s hairbands that he’d picked up this morning. He took them from his pocket, set them on the bedside table. A couple of them had long strands of blonde hair looped tightly around them, garrote-style, in a way that made clear that the hair wasn’t going to extricate itself from this mess unless someone took scissors to the hairband itself.
Probably he should get those back to Toga at some point. She likely didn’t give a shit about her lost hairbands, but it felt weird to steal her hair. Unkempt and damaged hair, yes, but still hers.
He wondered if anyone had picked up the burnt tip of his finger from the stadium field. Unlikely. It almost felt nice to think about, though—someone keeping that bit of charred bone in their pocket, waiting for Shouto to return so they could give it back to him. Because his body was still his body, even the parts he’d forgotten how to feel.
Notes:
If you live in the US, collect art, and feel like sending some support my way, I have an Etsy shop now! It only has a few listings atm, but I'm planning on adding more sooner than later. Free shipping on all orders, and use the code HYPER10 for a 10% discount. The shop's name is HyperfixEaten (link above).
I didn't expect this arc to be so difficult to organize >.< probably should've anticipated that, honestly. Time is fake inside hospitals.
Chapter 41: Shouto’s a Player, but He Only Plays Pretend
Summary:
Apparently Shouto has a fan club now… and a few haters. Anger management group gets heated. Shouto learns something alarming from Toga.
Notes:
TW: psychiatric hospital setting, dissociation, sex jokes, transphobia, intentional misgendering, unintentional deadnaming & outing; REFERENCES TO: past violence, suicide attempt, sexual harassment, physical abuse
Thank y’all for being patient while I finished up the semester!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto had stayed in his dorm room too long and had to be fetched by a tech for group. He’d entered the art therapy room at the tail end of the instructions. It was a big room with a low ceiling, and it looked a bit like the photos Fuyumi had shown Shouto of her kindergarten class—simple but colorful dioramas dropping from the ceiling, art of several different mediums taped on the walls.
As far as he could judge with his extremely limited artistic knowledge, a lot of the art wasn’t bad. A portion of it was even good, which made him perhaps more uncomfortable than it should’ve. When was the last time Shouto had even picked up a crayon? Hadn’t he already been humiliated enough today?
People had turned to look at him as he entered, but then Ando gave an exaggerated wave and pointed to an empty seat beside them. Saved you a spot, Ando mouthed.
Shouto was starting to wonder what the fuck was wrong with Ando. It wasn’t like Shouto had a better place to be, though, so now he was sitting at the table with a blank sheet of paper the size of his torso in front of him.
The length of the table was cluttered with what looked like magazine clippings—objects, logos, celebrities, etcetera. A puzzle of some sort? Some of the other kids were already going at it with their glue sticks, arranging images in various spots on their blank sheet, flapping their hands when static electricity made the clippings stick to their arm hair.
“Dude—people are saying Hawks came to see you during break,” Ando said. “Did he really?”
He hoped Ando would be the only one to ask that question. He didn’t feel like talking to anybody else today. “I guess.”
“That’s wild. Are you guys friends?”
“No,” said Shouto. “He was my brother’s friend.”
“Was? So they’re not friends anymore?”
“Considering my brother’s dead, no,” said Shouto. “Hawks is trying to make himself feel better by harassing me or whatever. Fucking annoying. What are we doing?”
“We’re, um… collage,” Ando said. They already had a few large images plastered to the center of their sheet—a crocodile, an electric guitar, and an advertisement for a Grow Your Own Geode kit. “So just, like… y’know.” They took a hand-sized clipping of a monster truck, swiped an X of glue across its glossy backing, and slapped it on their paper. “Boop-boop.”
Y’know and Boop-boop weren’t as clear of instructions as Shouto would’ve liked. He stayed still, hands hovering near his chest. He felt like he’d mess something up if he moved wrong.
The girl sitting on Shouto’s other side—older than Shouto, hot pink frohawk, black hoodie-sans-hoodie-strings—leaned forward. “Never done a collage before?”
Shouto hesitated. Collages weren’t one of the many necessary building blocks for child development he’d skipped over, were they? He’d never had enough contact with the outside world to know what parts of his childhood were normal and which weren’t. Like, apparently doing hands-on science experiments was something middle school kids did, and Shouto never would’ve known about that if Bakugou hadn’t brought up the thing about the non-Newtonian fluid.
What had Bakugou called it? Oobleck? Shouto wondered what it felt like.
“Should I have?” Shouto asked the girl.
“I guess not,” said the girl. “Just pick shit you like. Or that you think fits your personality.”
Okay. Sure. He could… do that. Right?Shouto searched the vast expanse of white paper in front of him, then looked back at the girl.
She gave a little smile. She was sporting iridescent fang implants, Shouto noticed—that was something he’d only ever seen in the large fashion advertisements downtown, usually coupled with a disapproving huff from his father. “Yeah, just glue it on there,” she said.
His face threatened to burn. He hadn’t meant to look like he needed her approval to start. “Glue it where?”
Ando’s elbow knocked against Shouto’s arm. “You pick where, Rockstar.”
Shouto slid a small collection of magazine clippings toward himself. He laid them all out neatly: a celebrity he didn’t recognize, a pair of red tennis shoes, a giraffe, the Prada logo, two more celebrities he didn’t recognize. At least, he assumed they were celebrities.
He knew he’d barely started, but the activity was already starting to aggravate him. Shouto didn’t have a personality strong enough to make art from. It’d been nearly a decade since he made art of something that wasn’t a labeled diagram of a plant cell.
He tried to remember something concrete from back before he’d made the conscious decision to stop getting attached to things Endeavor would inevitably take away. But he’d been hiding his interests and personality for years before that, and sometimes you hid things for so long that you forgot where you hid them.
A few minutes of Shouto pointlessly shuffling through magazine clippings passed before Ando spoke again. “You… need help, or…?”
“I can’t do this,” said Shouto. “I can’t think of anything.”
“No hobbies?” asked Ando.
“I can’t have—” Can’t have hobbies? That wasn’t entirely accurate. Nobody was forcing him to have the personality of a frozen hamburger patty. “I don’t do much other than train.”
Ando’s brow furrowed. “What about in your free time?”
He didn’t consider his free time as free time so much as it was a space in time where his thoughts worked hard to catch up with his wrecked parasympathetic system. “Sometimes I have panic attacks.”
Ando made a motion like they were clutching at their heart. “That’s not a hobby.”
The frohawk girl to Shouto’s left asked, “Hey—you said you like Red’s Ocean, right?”
Shouto didn’t especially like that she both knew his name and what he’d said during morning group. He hadn’t even registered her presence until she addressed him. “Why?”
The girl gave a thumbs-up to someone sitting on the far side of the oval-shaped table. There was some rustling among a couple patients, and then they passed a slip of paper along until it reached Shouto. It was the pirate ship from the second season of Red’s Ocean.
A younger girl with a hospital thermal blanket around her shoulders gave him a shy smile and small wave.
“That’s the good ship, too,” said Ando, leaning forward to look at the clipping. “The Red’s Ocean season two set was literally so gorgeous. I keep rewatching certain episodes just for the stairwell scenes. Imagine getting a private tour of the set— I would cry.”
Shouto turned the slip of paper over in his hands. No note on the back or anything. “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
Maybe his brain was just muddled after his encounter with the doctor and then Hawks. It was stupid for Shouto to be worrying about whatever pranks some kids might be playing on him, because he’d still have a physical advantage over most of them even without his quirk. They couldn’t go any further than laughing at him.
He uncapped the glue stick and pasted the Red’s Ocean ship in the bottom corner of his paper. Despite all the space, it looked cramped.
Ando leaned forward to look at Shouto’s paper. “You know you get to fill the whole thing out, right?”
“I’m trying,” said Shouto.
Ando held up a cutout of a bowl of ice cream. “You like eating sweet shit? I’m realizing as I speak that that was not a well-thought-out question, taking—” They motioned at Shouto’s body. “—everything into consideration, but I’m going to wait until you say no to put this down.”
“I like it,” said Shouto.
“Really? Okay, well.” Ando applied glue and pressed the clipping down in the center of Shouto’s paper. “Look at that. A man of many interests.”
“It’s just two,” said Shouto.
“…and counting.”
“I already counted.” Shouto pointed. “One, two.”
A boy sitting across the table spoke. “D’you have a favorite color?”
This was going to be a slow death. Shouto started, “I don’t—”
“Lemme guess,” said Ando. “It’s a cool color. Like blue.”
He didn’t have a favorite color. He might’ve at some point, but that would’ve been years ago. “No, I don’t—”
“Green?” they said. “Forest green. Or emerald green. I’m a little colorblind and can’t tell the difference, but they both sound nice. Something dark green. Final answer. Did I guess right?”
Might as well let Ando have this one. “Sure.”
“Sweet.” Ando raised their voice to speak over the room. “Dark green, everybody.”
Several people around the table started sorting through clippings and sliding greenish bits of paper toward him. Others looked confused but contributed anyway.
Shouto was probably the most confused out of everyone. Why were people helping him? It seemed almost preplanned, but that didn’t make sense. Ando couldn’t have known that Shouto would be in the same group as them or what they’d all be doing in art therapy. Shouto struggled to focus his eyes as he sorted through all the pieces he was receiving.
Ando leaned in close to Shouto, lowered their voice. “Take a breath, dude. There are a lot of Quirkless people in here, and we’re just trying to make things a little easier for you like you did for us. That’s all.”
Shouto kept sorting, kept his voice flat. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I know a lot of these guys from Quirkless meets outside the hospital. They’re cool.”
An ad for a lime margarita mix peeked from the bottom of the pile. Shouto pulled it out. Chilled and Refreshing, it read. When he looked up, the girl with the thermal blanket gave him a small, guilty smile.
Fuyumi would probably have a fit if she saw alcohol on Shouto’s montage. Bakugou might think the “chilled and refreshing” part was funny, though. Not that either of them would ever see it.
“What’s you guys’ next group?” asked the girl with the fang implants. “I’m in goal-setting.”
Shouto drew a square of glue on the back of the clipping and stuck it to his paper. Goal-setting… he wondered how difficult it’d be to bullshit his way through that group. They likely wouldn’t be happy if he started making a step-by-step plan for avoiding his mother. Or for taking down the number two Hero.
“I’m in goal-setting, too,” Ando said. “Might switch in a day or two, though. Wanted to start off with something lighter.”
“I only asked for goal-setting because someone told me they get out earlier than the other groups,” said the girl. “Todoroki, what’s your group?”
Shouto didn’t look up. “Anger management.”
“Oh.” The girl paused. Then, “You picked that?”
“No.” Shouto raised his head. “Are they supposed to let you pick?”
“I think most people get to choose. Unless they have a court order or whatever? I don’t know what all goes on there.”
Ando interrupted. “Or if they were admitted for a suicide attempt. Those have to go to suicide counseling.”
“They didn’t let you pick yours?” the girl asked Shouto. “Did you…? Like, did someone press charges?”
“N-no—” Why hadn’t the woman who’d done his intake interview put him in suicide counseling? Had someone pressed charges? Bakugou’s parents, maybe? But someone would’ve told Shouto if that happened, right? Then again, people didn’t tell him a lot of things. “Would a court order for anger management counseling override the requirement for suicide counseling?”
“If it does, it shouldn’t,” said the girl.
Ando popped open a glue stick with their teeth. “Yeah, that’d be kind of fucked.”
“Why is it fucked?” Shouto asked.
“Because you’re potentially putting someone’s ability to fit into society above their life. You can’t work on your anger management if you’re dead.” Ando spat out the glue lid and turned their attention to Shouto. “Should you be in suicide counseling?”
Nausea jolted through Shouto’s stomach. It was one thing to joke about his trauma, or to talk about it in order to shatter someone’s idealistic view of Pro Heroes, or to tell someone so they would leave him alone—that was fine. It was fine with a doctor or the principal of UA or a social worker who he knew wouldn’t think about him again once they’d filed the report. It was fine when he had the excuse of drunkenness for rambling.
This just felt uncomfortable.
Ando spoke again. “This is your first time in a hospital like this, right?”
Shouto nodded.
“It’s my fourth,” said Ando. “The staff can be disappointingly human at times, but trust me, no one’s here to scout for weakness. If you’re in the wrong group, you deserve to have that fixed.”
Shouto was baffled. Amazed, almost, and he didn’t realize how hard he was staring at Ando until their expression shifted toward discomfort.
“What?” they asked.
“You’re really nice,” said Shouto. “I think probably I could hurt someone pretty bad if they were mean to you.”
Ando fell into a slouch in their chair, pressing a hand to their chest and giving a winded laugh. “Oh—god, Todoroki, I thought you finally got tired of me and were about to punch my fucking teeth out. Thank—thank you. You don’t need to do that.”
“I could,” said Shouto.
“I know, I know. You scare the living shit out of me.” Ando patted Shouto’s forearm. “Christ. Feel how fast my pulse is now. Right here.”
Hesitantly, Shouto put his fingers to the part of Ando’s neck they’d indicated. It was indeed fast.
Ando laughed, still breathless. “Yeah?”
Shouto had no idea how he was supposed to react, so he just gave a stiff nod and lowered his hand.
Ando sat up, straightened their black t-shirt, and settled their elbows on the table. “Do you want to go talk to somebody about groups now? I can come with.”
With Ando’s heart rate like it was? “No. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Sounds good.” Ando motioned toward the pile of donated magazine clippings in front of Shouto, which had grown even more since they’d been talking. “You’re gonna need some time to sort through all that, anyway.”
###
The technician who’d helped him at breakfast helped him again at lunch, setting him up in one of the empty rooms with a landline where patients made calls home. It was so quiet that his ears rang. He toyed with the idea of calling Fuyumi while he was in here, but he didn’t know what he’d talk to her about.
Like, hi Fuyumi, has Rei called you wondering why her youngest daughter is being called a boy’s name on the news? Or hi Fuyumi, has Endeavor broken any of your and Natsuo’s bones yet, or is he waiting until I get back to do that?
So he finished his lunch and headed to his last group of the day.
Shouto’s anger management group consisted of seven kids (including himself) and a therapist, which was simultaneously too large and too small for comfort. Seven kids meant he wouldn’t have to talk to a large audience. Seven kids also meant he probably wouldn’t be able to escape talking.
There was a snack table, though, which was nice. He started to reach for the individually wrapped white chocolate chip matcha cookie, but the boy leaning against the snack table with a small pack of seaweed seemed to pointedly ignore Shouto and wouldn’t move.
Shouto grabbed a more accessible pack of dried banana chips and sat down on a cushion between two girls. The kid leaning against the snack table kept shifting his weight and making the table squeak, so Shouto pulled the flimsy hood of Natsuo’s jacket over his head as a placebic barrier to the grating sound. He’d barely opened the pack before he heard the girls on either side of him start giggling.
Shouto raised his head, looked at both girls. He couldn’t tell what they were thinking by their expressions. “Do you not want me here?” he asked.
“What?” the girl on his left squeaked. “No, no, no, you’re fine.”
“You have to tell me if you want me to move,” he said. “I’m not good at interpreting tone and nonverbal cues.”
The other girl touched his knee. “You can stay right here. We don’t mind at all.”
Shouto searched her face. Fifty-fifty chance that had been sarcastic, but Shouto had given her the chance to be direct. If she wanted him to move, she should’ve said so.
“Okay,” he said, turning back to his banana chips. The girls started giggling again.
Irritation pricked at the back of his neck. He was sitting, he was eating banana chips. What, did psychiatric wards have a distinct set of social mores now? If so, how the ever-living fuck did they expect him to have already learned them? It hadn’t even been two days.
A boy’s voice came from behind him. “Hey, man, you took my spot.”
“Noooo,” said the girl on Shouto’s left. “You go sit over there. We’re keeping Todoroki.”
Shouto twisted to look at the boy behind him. He asked, “Do we have assigned seats?”
The boy’s eyes widened when he saw Shouto’s face. His mouth worked for a second before he got out, “Uh, no. My bad. I’ll sit somewhere else.”
“I can get up,” said Shouto.
“No, for real, it’s okay,” said the boy, too fast. “Sorry.”
The boy went to sit on the cushion farthest from Shouto. Shouto was confused. He was going to wear himself out trying to figure out what he’d done wrong, though, so he just returned to his banana chips. The people in this room didn’t seem as dangerous as Shigaraki or Deku. Probably wasn’t life-threatening to accidentally offend a few normal kids with anger management issues. Probably.
“So,” said the girl on his right. “What brought you here?”
Why did she want to know that? “A kei car,” said Shouto.
They started giggling again.
Shouto realized too late. He felt heat rising to his face. He really wished he had his quirk right now. “Oh, you meant… sorry.”
He was almost glad when the therapist entered the room. She brought her small manual wheelchair up to a space in the cushion circle.
“Hey, friends,” the therapist said as the last couple kids took their seats. “Sorry about the awkward height difference today—I couldn’t find anybody to help me bring in chairs for you guys, and my back’s still a bit iffy from when I tried to do it myself last week. Let’s make sure everyone’s here and in the right spot real quick. We go by our given names in this group, okay? I’m Mari.” She referenced the folded sheet of paper in her hand. “Kimi, are you here?”
“I’m here,” said the girl on his left.
Shit.
Shit.
He’d gotten too comfortable not having his given name called.
“Hairo?”
“Here.”
Should he stop her? But he didn’t have anything planned to say for this situation, and what if he just made things worse by making a big deal out of it—? But they’d been calling him he, they thought he was a boy, things had been fine—
“Shiyo?”
Shouto’s words stuck in his throat.
Mari looked at the girl on Shouto’s right. “Is that—?”
“I’m Yui,” said the girl.
“Well, I have Yui on my roll, but—”
Shouto forced himself to dissociate as they discussed. He only had to do it long enough that he could speak, and then he’d try to reconnect. The mix of adrenaline and nausea and intense dysphoria he got after coming back down from a dissociative episode was always shitty, but his only other option was to go mute, maybe have a panic attack.
This was not real.
He was not real.
They were all actors in a shitty play, and after it was done, he would go home to a mom and a dad in a quiet house with a koi pond in the backyard, and they would tell him that he’d never have to do anything uncomfortable or painful or embarrassing ever again, not if he didn’t want to, and of course he wouldn’t want to, because in this world, his brain wouldn’t be trying to self-destruct every chance it got.
He said, “Shouto.”
Mari looked to him. “Sorry?”
“My name’s Shouto.”
Mari looked back down at her paper, brow furrowing. “I don’t see… Todoroki?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if there’s someone with the same surname,” said Mari. She pulled out her cell phone. “Give me just one second, I’m going to check and make sure we have the right schedule for y—”
“No,” said Shouto. His pulse thrummed. “I don’t mean that’s not me. I mean I don’t go by that.”
“Hm?” Mari looked up at him, face void of understanding.
Shouto stared back at her, forcing his face to be equally blank. He was not going to say I’m trans and that’s my deadname in front of all these people he didn’t know.
The girl on Shouto’s right, Yui, said, “What?”
Finally, Mari’s eyes widened. “Oh—oh. I’m—I am so sorry. What did you say your… Shouto, right?”
“Yes,” he said.
Mari looked flustered. “They’re not always so… so progressive about those things in these types of establishments. They might be able to fix that for you at the front desk, or at least make a notation on your… file…” Mari’s eyes met Shouto’s, and her voice drained off. Clearing her throat, she reached under her wheelchair to retrieve a bulky pouch. “Well. I brought some fidget toys with me, so let’s get those passed around before we start. Feel free to borrow a couple. Don’t break them, please, I’m not made of money.”
Shouto had heard of fidget toys—they were involved in a lot of the jokes Bakugou’s friends made—but he’d never held one in his hand. The one Shouto picked from Mari’s pouch was a cube the size of his fist covered in colorful switches and gears.
Shouto flipped one of the switches. Nothing happened. He flipped it over to examine the bottom and see if it was broken, but that side had an unlabeled dial on it. Nothing happened when he turned the dial, either, just a series of silent clicks that he felt in his fingertips.
Was the fidget toy already broken? Hopefully he wouldn’t get blamed for that.
“Let’s talk first about the reasons we’re here,” said Mari. “I can’t make you participate, but I do strongly encourage it. We’re here to get better, right?”
A few murmurs of agreement. Shouto flipped the switch again.
“Anyone want to start us off?” Mari asked.
The two interlocking gears on the block felt stuck. Shouto tried forcing one to move, but there was a tiny splintering noise from inside the toy, so he stopped. He wished they would label which parts were for decoration and which weren’t.
“Okay, I’ll share,” said Mari. “I’m diagnosed with bipolar two. I was hospitalized here about ten years ago during a bad manic episode. I was undiagnosed then and had anger issues that got me in trouble with the police a few times. In high school, I broke a classmate’s finger because he wouldn’t stop pushing my chair around.”
Several group members’ eyes flicked toward Shouto’s injured hand. He lowered his fidget cube toward his lap so his finger would be less visible.
Mari kept speaking. “I understand how vulnerable of a place this is and how scary it all seems. I think we can help each other out, but we do have to open up and try not to get defensive. Some of us have been dismissed or hurt in the past when we shared the feelings behind our anger, and that’s not easy to get past, I know that. If it helps, remember that you’re all here short-term, so after a few days, it’s likely none of you will ever see each other again.”
“Pretty sure we’ll all see Todoroki again,” said Kimi.
There were a couple snickers. Shouto looked up briefly, then returned to his toy.
Yeah. Great way to start off his career as a public figure.
“Do you want to go next, Kimi?” asked Mari.
“Uh… sure,” said Kimi. “I felt like my antipsychotic medication wasn’t working, so I made the absolutely fantastic decision to stop it without telling my doctor. Things kinda went downhill. I guess I freaked out my parents with all my yelling ’n stuff. So I’m here to be under supervision until I’m more stable.”
“Can you tell us why you didn’t let your doctor know that you weren’t satisfied with your medication?”
“Oh, I did,” she said. “He just wasn’t listening to me. He said it was getting worse because I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Like, yeah, I’m not getting enough sleep because my medication’s not working. I think he thought I was just looking for excuses to complain.”
“I can see why you’d be frustrated,” said Mari. “I’ve experienced some of that myself. Women and girls can have a tough time being taken seriously by medical professionals.”
“Oh my god, thank you,” said Kimi. “That’s what I was trying to tell my parents. They weren’t listening, either.”
“We’ll come back later to brainstorm some solutions, Kimi. Thanks for sharing. Let’s go to your right. Shouto, are you ready?”
Shit. He’d been hoping they’d go the other way. He wasn’t sure how much information he was supposed to give.
He focused on his toy. “Tried to kill myself.”
“Recently?” Mari asked.
“Yesterday.”
“Why did they put you in anger management, then?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
The boy who had refused to move out of Shouto’s way at the snack table earlier spoke so suddenly that Shouto looked up. “Two hints for you,” he said. He held his hand up for Shouto to see, counting on his fingers. “Sports and festival.”
Fucking hell. “I flipped my father off. I didn’t pull a gun on him or anything.”
“He’s probably talking about when you shot an iceberg out the stadium and then beat that blond explosion kid within an inch of his life,” said Yui.
“I wa—I wasn’t angry at Sero or Bakugou,” Shouto said. “They’re my friends.”
“Damn,” said the boy, “really? Hate to see what you do to your enemies, then, holy shit.”
“Hold on,” said Mari. “What are you two talking about?”
The boy spoke before Shouto had a chance. “Did you not watch the UA sports festival?”
Shouto squeezed the toy in his hands. The heat in his face was growing worse.
“No, I don’t follow Pro Hero culture,” Mari said. “Why?”
“Besides the whole thing where Todoroki almost—”
“Use given names in here, remember.”
He afforded Shouto a skeptical glance. “Yeah, uh, besides the whole thing where what’s-her-name nearly slaughtered half the stadium?” The boy motioned toward Shouto, like his presence in the room was enough of an explanation. “I mean—”
“Obviously Shouto wasn’t feeling good if he—you’re a he, right?” Kimi interrupted. She didn’t wait for Shouto to confirm before continuing. “—if he tried to kill himself afterward. You’re just being an asshole.”
“My brother was in the stands,” said the boy. “I had to call home and check if he was okay. How the hell am I the asshole? I’ve never beat my friend to a bloody pulp because I wanted to win a sports tournament.”
“That’s because you don’t have any friends,” said Kimi.
As Mari clapped her hands and tried to restore order to the group, Shouto let his mind wander. He twisted a dial on his toy. Focused on the silent clicks. No one had ever misgendered him on purpose before. Was this a milestone of transness? If it was, it shouldn’t be. It felt shitty. His dysphoria over his body wasn’t usually more than a whisper whenever he was in public, but right now it felt like it was gnawing away the connection between his muscular and nervous systems.
Was it possible to be aware of every single part of his body at once? Everything was so busy—his left ankle pressing against the cold tile, the slight resistance from his jacket hood every time he turned his head, that tiny pop in his wrist whenever he rotated it from an injury that hadn’t healed correctly, the ropes of tension in the back of his neck. Additionally, it seemed like the nerve blocker in his injured hand had started wearing off—he was getting small but sharp pinpricks of pain up and down the center of his palm—
Kimi tapped Shouto’s shoulder, and he startled.
“You all right, Shouto?” Mari asked.
“Sorry,” said Shouto. “Yes.”
“Did you want to talk more about what led up to your attempt?”
Not really, but it didn’t sound like he had a choice. He refocused on his fidget toy. “Not—nothing very specific. I wanted to do it for a long time. Then I did it.”
“Could you talk some about the days or weeks before it happened?”
Jesus fuck, she was persistent. “I started at UA.”
“How’s that been going?”
“Um. Good.”
“I saw you guys had a villain attack not too long ago,” said Mari. “Were you involved in that?”
“I was there.”
Kimi asked, “Did you see the fight between All Might and the noumu?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“That must’ve been epic,” said Kimi. “Wait, were you one of the kids who got hurt?”
“Not very badly.”
“I heard someone was shot and got their ribs crushed.”
“Displaced,” Shouto corrected. “That was Bakugou. Both of us got shot.”
“It sounds like you were hurt pretty badly,” said Mari. “I imagine that was traumatizing.”
He tugged the edges of Natsuo’s jacket together, further covering his chest. “Maybe. I don’t remember if I felt anything when I did it.”
“When you did what?”
Shit, his sentences were getting mixed up. “The noumu. They put out—there was—they put out a different story.” He was not supposed to be talking about this. Why was he still talking? “Bakugou and I. He helped. Um. I killed it.”
Mari said, “You killed it?”
“It hurt my homeroom teacher,” said Shouto. “It might’ve hurt my classmates. All Might couldn’t capture it alive.”
“Why didn’t you wait for the Pro Heroes?” Mari asked.
“Because they’re shit.”
There was a moment of silence.
“It sounds like maybe this event left you feeling disillusioned,” said Mari.
Shouto considered, then shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I already thought they were shit.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because they’re… shit,” said Shouto. “I don’t know what you want me to say. They’re bad people. They want me to be one of them because I’m good at winning fights. I think probably I’m already a bad person. I don’t know how to stop making things worse.”
“I have a suggestion,” said Yui. “Maybe don’t light yourself on fire on live television while flipping off the number two Hero?”
More snickering. Shouto tried to pull the heat from his face. He couldn’t, so he just kept his focus on his hands. Dial. Twist. Click.
“No,” he said. “I’m glad I did that.”
“Why?” Kimi asked. “Didn’t it hurt? Like, a lot?”
“Does it matter?” Shouto’s heart rate had shot up sometime in the last minute. He couldn’t tell if he was anxious or if he was getting angry for real. It wouldn’t make sense that he’d lash out physically at these strangers, but after the sports festival, he didn’t trust his body not to act on intrusive thoughts. He set the fidget cube on the ground and pushed his hands under his thighs, sitting on them. Just in case. “I’m done talking.”
###
Shouto had hoped to leave quietly once group was over, but it didn’t look like that was going to be the case. As he was leaving the room, Kimi called after him. “Sit by me at lunch, okay, hottie?”
Followed by Yui’s voice, quiet but not quiet enough—“You know that’s a girl, right?”
“So?” said Kimi. “I’m bi.”
Discomfort wormed its way through Shouto’s stomach. He’d been hit on in the past, mostly by people older than him, and it had never felt like a compliment as much at it felt like a power move. He didn’t notice the boy—the one who didn’t like Shouto—waiting outside the room until he smacked Shouto’s arm.
“Hey,” said the boy, expression still hardened. It was the kid who’d been so aggressive toward him in group. “You’re seriously fucked up. I mean, you suck major ass. But I feel bad about calling you ‘she.’ So.”
It took Shouto a moment to realize that the boy was trying to apologize. It surprised him. “It… yeah. It’s fine. I’m sorry about your brother.”
The boy gave Shouto a long look.
“Y’know,” the boy said, “I was wrong. What the hell are you doing in an anger management group? You just sat there and took it when I was talking shit about you. Pissed me off that you didn’t even try to defend yourself. It’s like you don’t know how to be angry in the first place. Bet yesterday was the first time you ever raised your voice at your dad, wasn’t it?”
“I’m… I mostly control my anger,” said Shouto.
“No, you don’t. You just don’t have enough self-respect to get mad at the people who don’t treat you right. Get your shit together before you end up taking out all that bottled-up crap on innocent people again.”
Shouto nodded. The boy smacked his lips like he was going to say something else. But he just walked away, leaving Shouto alone in the hall.
Like you don’t know how to be angry.
That couldn’t be right. Shouto was angry at Endeavor—many people had even suggested that his level of anger was unreasonable. It was true that he didn’t express his anger as much as he did three or four years ago, but that was because…
Well, he wasn’t sure why, actually.
Maybe he had lost a bit of respect for himself.
Shouto went back to his room. Ando wasn’t there, but Toga’s hairbands still were. He considered whether he’d rather have another encounter with her or sit in here alone with his anxiety, and then he picked up the hairbands and headed toward the common room.
Toga was sitting at a round table by herself with a coloring sheet. One of the buns Shouto had fixed in her hair this morning was two sudden movements away from falling apart completely. Shouto approached her from behind, then stopped.
This really wasn’t worth the trouble, was it? He’d been hyped up on drugs this morning and filled with goodwill, or something else equally nauseating. He should really just throw the hairbands in the garbage. They were kind of nasty, anyway.
Toga spoke before Shouto could finish deciding. “Heyyy, Candy Cane. You ever gonna stop checking me out from behind? Not that I mind.”
Shouto looked over Toga’s shoulder. She was working on a coloring sheet of a little girl at a festival. She colored the negative spaces exclusively—the spaces above the booths and between the juggler’s plastic balls, the white paper that represented nothing—filling them with swooping, mismatching squiggles and spirals, like a colorblind elementary school student trying to copy Van Gough’s Starry Night. It looked kind of… well, it looked horrible.
“I just came to give you this,” he said.
“Oo, is it your phone number?” Toga turned toward him with her sharp-tooth smile, but her mouth quickly turned into a surprised o. “My thingies!”
But she didn’t take them from his outstretched hand. Maybe he should’ve just dropped them in front of Toga and left. “Can you… take them?” he asked.
She made pouty lips, tilted her head and pointed toward her loose bun. “It fell out.”
“What were you expecting to happen?” He tried to reach past her to drop the hairbands beside her coloring sheet. “I’m putting—”
Toga grabbed his wrist. She had a surprisingly strong grip.
Shouto was alarmed. “What?”
“Do my hair,” she said.
“I don’t want to,” said Shouto. “Let go.”
“Why don’t you want to?”
“Let me go.”
Her chipped fingernails bit into his skin. “I’ll let you go if you tell me why you don’t want to do my hair.”
“Because I don’t—” What else was there to tell her? He didn’t want to do her hair, and he didn’t like her touching him. “I can’t do anything with it when it’s that’s tangled.”
Toga shifted and pulled something from her pocket—a palm-sized pink comb, the kind someone might use to brush a doll’s hair. It was missing several teeth.
Okay. Well, she obviously wasn’t using that for its intended purpose. “Why do you have that?” he asked.
“Mostly to chew on,” she said. “I like the sound it makes on my teeth. But now you can use it for my hair.”
He was ninety percent sure he could take her if she attacked him for not obeying. But she seemed like the type who wouldn’t go down until she’d gouged an eye or bitten his nose off, and he wasn’t keen on losing any more body parts in the near future. He dropped her hairbands on the table and took the comb, and she let go of his arm.
“I winnn,” Toga sang as Shouto began taking down her buns. “Sooo… Do you still have your quirks, or did they snatch ’em at the door?”
“Quirk,” he corrected. “Just one. And I’m taking suppressants.”
“Boo. I wanted a heated back massage. Maybe later?”
He tossed the untangled hairbands on the table next to the rest. Started picking out the worst of the tangles with the comb. It reminded him of those days after training sessions when Shouto had come home with his long hair so dry and knotted that he couldn’t make himself touch it. “No.”
Toga raised her arms over her head, stretching. “I used to have the best quirk ever,” she said. “But now I don’t.”
Shouto slowed his combing. “You lost your quirk?”
“My boyfriend’s dad stole it from me.” She turned her head to give him a toothy grin of delight. “Is that fucked or what?”
If she was telling the truth, then yes, that was fucked.
Especially if Toga’s boyfriend was someone that Shouto already knew.
“What was your quirk?” he asked.
“Suckin’ bloods and fuckin’ studs,” Toga said, then gave her pinprick laugh. “I made that up. My boyfriend thought it was funny. Anyway, it was a good quirk. Really good for sexy time—that’s what I’m most mad about. Do you know how fun it is to have a long dong? You can just kinda hold that sucker and go—” She made a circle with her fingers, then twirled her hand around like a cowboy with a lasso. “—woo, woo, woo—”
“Body changing quirk?” he asked. “Through drinking the person’s blood whose DNA you copy?”
She reached back with one finger, presumably to bop his nose, but she missed and flicked his eyebrow instead. “You’re cute and smart.”
It suddenly felt very wrong to be touching her, even if it was only to comb her hair. He couldn’t help but think that he’d wronged her just by being in proximity to the people who’d hurt her and taken her quirk.
“Nobody else believes me,” said Toga, “but you’re fuckin’ crazy, so I know you do, Cutie.” She frowned at his motionless hands. “Are you not gonna finish?”
Reluctantly, he started combing again. He heard some hair rip and cringed. “Your… boyfriend, have you seen him since you came here?”
Toga sighed. “No. He’s probably just embarrassed because of what he did. He gets shy like that sometimes—it’s adorable.”
“Because of what he did? What’d he do?”
She tilted her head. “Well, he took me to where he lives and drugged my vodka so his dad could take my quirk. I think they teleported me close to this hospital after that. They have a teleport-y guy. My boyfriend gave me a little forehead kiss, and then he went inside and apparently told the staff that he found a girl outside eating a bird.”
“Were… you eating a bird?”
“Ew! No. I’m not gross, Candy Cane. I was just drinking the blood.”
Shouto felt uneasy. He’d known that he couldn’t trust Deku, but since their conversation the day after the murder, he’d been avoiding thinking about what other ethical boundaries Deku had crossed. Did Deku just want Shouto around so his father could take Shouto’s quirk? He expected to feel frightened by the thought, but he mostly just felt disappointed.
He and Deku had had something, right? Even if it wasn’t a friendship, they’d at least talked to each other. Deku had been the second person (after Aizawa) to express support for his trans identity. And he knew about most of what Shouto was dealing with; that was really, really rare. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing someone could fake, no matter how good of an actor—or how heartless—they might be.
“What about your parents?” Shouto asked.
Toga ignored him. “I’d forgive him if he just came to see me. I’d pet his hair and give him a big smooch and tell him it’s okay. It’s probably good for me to be here, anyway. I’ve been taking medicine and doing therapy. I don’t need to bite people as often now.”
Well, wasn’t that nice.
When he finished combing, it looked like half of her hair was floating from static electricity. He tried to smooth it, and the electric crackle confirmed his suspicions. Shouto didn’t bother trying to make the buns even this time—he just wanted to be done. He swept everything into a simple ponytail and left it at that.
“Thank you, Candy Cane,” said Toga, voice saccharine.
“Don’t mention it,” said Shouto.
“Aw. You’re sweet.”
“No, I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t fucking talk to me again.”
Toga just cackled.
Notes:
*Building catches fire: Non-Newtonian edition*
-Rushing straight into the fire to rescue the inhabitants: Kirishima, Iida
-Rushing straight into the fire and emerging ten minutes later with their Pokémon cards and a very feral raccoon: Deku
-Actually takes the time to form a rescue plan; unfortunately, the “rescue” plan involves tossing building inhabitants out of their 2nd-story windows and yelling “WALK IT OFF” down at them: Bakugou
-Has yet to notice that their hair is on fire: Present Mic
-Makes the mistake of informing above character that their hair is on fire: All Might
-Efficiently evacuating everyone: Aizawa, Ando, Natsuo
-Currently pouring gasoline on the fire because they accidentally picked up the wrong container and had to commit because they didn’t want to admit their mistake: Shigaraki, Kaminari
-Still inside the building, determined to take their time finishing their lunch: Shinsou
-Calling the fire department: Fuyumi, Asui
-Calling the news station: Aoyama
-Using the event to spice up their Snapchat story: Ashido, Deku
-Handing out medical supplies and/or administering care: Natsuo, Momo
-Handing out apple juice and comforting head pats: Kurogiri
-Playing a heated game of Uno with the fire: Magne
-The reason why the fire started: Dabi
-Sitting on the sidelines wearing neon green plastic sunglasses and an open Hawaiian shirt, absently propping their elbow on the shoulder of a stranger who’s too terrified to move, and periodically pausing their drunken listing of the top ten fires they’ve ever seen to take a loud sip of their spiked slurpee: Dabi
-Asks for a list of the building inhabitants’ names & contributions to society before deciding whether to help: Shouto###
Hey friends! I had a short story published in Mistake House Magazine a few days ago, so I’ve linked it above! I had 4 other pieces—2 poems, 1 fiction, 1 creative nonfiction—accepted for publication in the coming months(!!), so I’ll be providing links for those as they come out. If y’all were wondering what tf I was doing for almost 3 months, that’s what. (Along with finals😩)
I also did a small illustration of a scene with 5-yr-old Shouto “helping” his brother Touya beat a level on a video game, linked above:)
Chapter 42: Shouto Says Four Words to His Mom. Technically Six if You Count the Stuttering
Summary:
*cocks Nerf gun* ok who gave Rei a headache
I tried my best at medical accuracy here (srsly, I was texting my doctor father & reading studies on digoxin/lidocaine interactions & looking at very gross pictures of bolsters and skin grafts for hours), but there will undoubtedly still be some medical inaccuracies here.
So here's what I need y'all to do: pretend I'm right about everything & give me a small congratulatory pat on the head, for being so indisputably correct. maybe also a lil pack of Sour Patch Kids or smthn. thank u
Notes:
CW: psychiatric hospital setting, serious burn injury & healing (a lil bit nasty), physical pain, unintentional outing; REFERENCES TO: physical abuse, past injuries, medical neglect, psychotic break, canon spousal abuse & tea kettle incident, dissociation, prescription drug abuse, murder (past event)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
That night, Shouto awoke to an intense pulsing pain radiating from his hand and jabbing up into his wrist and forearm.
He sat up. When he tried to flex his fingers, the pain flared, and it felt like a metal vise was crushing his palm. A noise of pain caught in his throat.
“Y’okay?” Ando asked.
Shouto was surprised to see Ando watching him. He forced himself to breathe, to keep his hand still until the wave of crushing pain ebbed. “You’re st—you’re still awake?”
“Yeah, you know. Gotta get that overthinking done at some point, right?”
Shouto was in too much pain to answer. He got out of bed and went into the restroom. Turned on the light.
He’d half expected to see blood seeping out from the bandages, but his hand looked the same as it had this morning. The pain was likely from the nerve block finally wearing off completely. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, so he grabbed a handful of the back of his shirt and tugged it off over his head. His gray sports bra was also dark with sweat—and smelled like it—but he couldn’t think of any way to get it off without at least jostling his injured hand.
This wasn’t the first burn he’d dealt with by any means, but it was the first burn he’d lost a body part to, and it fucking hurt. Maybe he should change the bandages? That hadn’t been done yet.
Was it supposed to be done yet, though? Shouto had dealt with so many different injuries that he couldn’t remember exactly how long bandages for burn wounds were supposed to stay on. He didn’t have a change of bandages, either… Maybe he could just clean the wound with water and put the bandages back on? He didn’t have access to any type of sanitizing agent, but alcohol and hydrogen peroxide weren’t good for burns, anyway.
It took a minute to figure out how to start unwrapping the bandages. Underneath the top layer was a stained lower layer that clung to the rough burns beneath. It was yellowish and sticky—he couldn’t tell if it was a protective layer of petroleum jelly or the result of infection.
The burns started as first-degree; just some redness on the meat of his palm and at the ends of his fingers. They quickly morphed into blistering second-degree burns across the backs of his fingers and a small portion at the top of his palm. He’d seen second-degree burns on himself multiple times before, obviously. The leathery white pockets just beneath his skin never got less gut-wrenching to see.
Even once he’d finished unwrapping the bandaging, he couldn’t see his middle finger—a bolster had been stitched in place. Without the extra bandaging, his middle finger was even shorter. He’d assumed they’d made a cut just below the joint closest to the tip of his finger, but now it looked more like they’d made the cut below the second joint. Had he really burned through that much of his finger? It was true that he hadn’t bled when he twisted off the tip, but still…
Jesus, he wished he could remember what they’d told him in the ER. They must’ve done an artificial skin graft. Or an allograft, with skin from a… cadaver…
He turned on the cold water and stuck the exposed part of his hand under it. The pressure was harder than he realized, though, so the first second was more agony than relief. He fumbled to adjust the water, hissing a curse through his teeth.
Ando’s voice came from the main room. “Todoroki? Something wrong?”
Shouto had learned early how to deal with pain, and he remembered the first time he did it successfully. It was after he’d learned about how pain was a result of specific nerves detecting tissue damage and then transmitting that information up the spinal cord to the brain. So he’d thought, It’s just a message—it’s just my brain’s way of processing information—it’s not real, over and over until he was able to mentally separate himself from the pain. Granted, sometimes the thought popped into his brain and kept him from enjoying pleasant sensations like soft shirts or the taste of ice cream, but it had proved useful in blocking out the pain of overworked muscles or the sting of frostbite.
But this burn wasn’t one simple pain signal that he could reason away. It was nausea and suffocation and a deep, deep sense of unease—that something horrible had happened, that something worse was coming, and that he had no control over any of it.
He’d had this exact feeling before, he realized. When he was five, when his mother was still living at home. He’d never been able to remember what she’d been talking about on the phone with her own mother as she boiled water for tea, but her words came to him now, her emotion-choked voice clear in his mind:
Mom… no, no, I know that. I know it’s not right. But I can’t do it anymore. The children, they—they’re like him more and more every day. And Shiyo, her left side. Sometimes I look at her and hate what I see. I… can’t raise her anymore.
The rest of the memory remained hazy—how he’d walked into the kitchen at just the wrong moment, how she’d (according to what Rei had told her lawyers) seen Shouto’s red hair and thought he was Endeavor. Boiling water wouldn’t have harmed Endeavor any more than a face-full of lukewarm water would’ve, so Rei must’ve felt at least some small rush of wonder and power when she was able to grab what she thought was Endeavor’s hair, yank his head back so he was meeting her gaze, and actually, truly hurt him.
At age five, Shouto’s body was still adjusting to accommodate his quirk. His heat resistance had developed enough to prevent blindness in his left eye, but beyond that…
It had hurt.
It had hurt like this.
Shouto’s chest tightened. Was he going to have to deal with this pain all night? He was going to have a full-blown breakdown if he went another night without sleep.
“Hey…” Ando’s knock on the door—cut diagonally so a nurse could see in if they needed to, with a flimsy rubber flap in place of a lock—nudged it open. “Sorry I keep bothering you, I just get kinda paranoid about stuff happening to my friends when I’m not paying attention. And you’re really quiet. Do you need—? Uh.”
Shouto turned to see Ando staring at his chest. They lifted their eyes quickly, face flushing red as they fumbled to close the door again.
“Shit,” they said. “Sorry. Fuck. I’ll just—” Ando’s eyes went to the running sink, and they stopped trying to close the door. “—oh my god, your hand. Todoroki. Does that hurt?”
Shouto didn’t particularly care that Ando had seen his bra—it didn’t seem like a huge concern when it felt like he was burning alive—but it was a bit awkward that someone outside of ER personnel or Pro Hero circles was seeing his injury. His voice came out breathy. “Yeah. Nerve… nerve block wore off. I think.”
“Just now?”
“Started around noon, but it wasn’t…” It was taking too much energy to follow through with his sentences. He was developing a skull-squeezing headache, and his eyes stung. “…wasn’t… um…”
“Wasn’t as bad then?”
“Yeah. Yes.”
“But you can feel all of that now?” Ando asked.
The words reminded Shouto of Hawks’s So you felt all that? earlier today. “Yes.”
“The nurses didn’t give you any pain meds?”
Shouto tried to wade through his muddled thoughts. He still couldn’t breathe. “They… supposed to?”
“Yeah, they’re definitely supposed to. Look, I’ll get you a shirt, and we can go talk to somebody.”
“No—Ando, no, if—” Shouto grabbed for Ando’s shoulder. He missed, but Ando stopped anyway. “You don’t know about this, about the—the Pro Hero stuff. Because they only give you limited—if—if it gets even worse later and you ask again, they think you’re lying to take advantage of the pills, and they won’t give it to you.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Look at your hand. You’d have to be a sadist to refuse someone medication for that. If you need more pills later, they’ll give you more pills.” Ando went back into the main room and returned a moment later with Natsuo’s jacket. They turned the sink off, held the jacket open. “Put it on. C’mon.”
Carefully, Shouto put his injured hand through one sleeve, then worked the other side on. He struggled to connect the zipper with one hand, so Ando gingerly turned him around and zipped the jacket up, keeping their eyes averted from Shouto’s chest.
“I don’t care if you look,” said Shouto.
“Well, it… I didn’t know if you did,” Ando said.
They went to the nurse’s station in the lobby. A nurse working behind her desk saw them approach. “Ando, baby, what are you doing up? You need somethin’?”
“Yes, Todoroki—” Shouto didn’t realize that he’d come to a halt a few steps behind Ando until Ando put a hand on his back and physically pushed him forward. “—Todoroki needs some pain medication.”
The nurse gave Shouto a strange look. “We have a couple people waiting already. I can put you on the list to—”
“Now, if you can,” said Ando. “It’s not something small like a headache. The nerve block on his hand wore off.”
The nurse’s gaze went to Shouto’s left hand, which he was holding up in front of his sternum. Her eyes widened. She stood. “Follow me.”
The nurse led them to an area of the hospital they hadn’t gone before, crossing over into the adult patients’ section. She motioned to what looked like a small waiting room, the tinted glass door ajar.
“Wait in there,” she said. “I won’t be two minutes.”
Ando went in before Shouto, holding the door open. The lights in the room were dimmed—barely bright enough to read the covers of the fashion magazines on the end tables. Another patient was sitting at the far end of the line of chairs, but Shouto barely registered their presence at all as he sat. “I could’ve waited,” he told Ando. “I’ve waited before.”
Ando looked baffled. “Dude, for what? Did you lose another finger at some point?”
“For other stuff.” Shouto weakly pointed out a white line on his arm. “Bone poked through my skin there. I had to wait to get treatment for that.”
Ando winced. “Yeah, that’s… not normal.”
“It… it is normal. Pro Heroes have to wait.”
“You’re not a Pro Hero, though,” said Ando. “You can’t even legally drink. You’re a minor. A kid. A bambino. An entire child. You get me? I say this with all the love in my heart: you are itty-bitty.”
A soft voice from the other side of the room interrupted. “Is everything okay?”
Shouto’s body recognized the voice before he did, discomfort digging claws into his gut. He’d seen her for just a moment yesterday morning, and he’d heard her speak when Fuyumi had her on speakerphone not long ago, but it had been nearly a decade since he’d heard his mother’s voice in person.
How the hell hadn’t he paid enough attention to notice the other person in the room was Rei? Sure, he was tired, and his hand hurt like a bitch, but exhaustion and pain were things he’d trained himself to look past. Maybe he’d started letting his guard down around Ando.
He started to face her, but he stopped himself halfway. She was sitting to his right, and his facial scar was over his left eye, so if he didn’t look at her straight-on, she wouldn’t see his—
Wait. Why was he getting all self-conscious about his scar now? He’d stopped caring about that years ago.
He really should say something. Really, really should.
“Yes,” he told her.
What was Rei doing up this late, anyway? He couldn’t remember if she was the type of person to stay up late; it had never even occurred to him that he should wonder about it. Was she also physically hurt? Shouto wasn’t butting in front of her in line for the nurse, was he?
His delivery of the word yes had been flawless (the uncomfortably long pause preceding the word didn’t count as part of the delivery, he decided), so he chose to press his luck and try to advance the conversation. “Are you…?”
Shame overtook him in the middle of his question, and his voice trailed off. He should’ve asked that years ago— Are you okay. It felt so useless now.
Rei raised her eyebrows. “Mm?”
This was a different context, though. That made it okay, right? He was asking after her physical wellbeing, not her mental. It was just a formality. He could at least commit to one sentence. “Are you okay?”
Fuck. That had come out even weaker on the second try.
“Just a little headache,” said Rei. The quiet in her voice sounded more deliberate than Shouto’s, like she was trying not to wake a sleeping child. Her eyes flitted to Shouto’s newly-unbandaged hand. Something changed in her face, but it was little more than a twitch before her expression smoothed over again. “Could they not treat your hand during the day?”
There was a pinprick of panic. That was a question that would require an answer longer than one simple sentence. Would it be okay if he lied, just to shorten the amount of time he’d need to talk? Or would it take too much time to think of a lie? He wasn’t going nonverbal altogether, was he? This wasn’t at all how their first conversation was supposed to go.
He felt Ando’s hand settle on his shoulder. “Guess someone forgot to write a note about pain management somewhere along the line,” they said. “Nerve block wore off while he was sleeping, and he didn’t have shi—didn’t have anything to fall back on.”
Shouto would’ve appreciated Ando speaking up in any other situation—the less he had to talk, the better.
But this was Shouto’s mother, to whom he very much was not out as trans yet, and Ando had just referred to Shouto as he.
Fuck.
The situation wasn’t Ando’s fault—they had no way of knowing who Rei was—but the damage was done. Shouto broke eye contact with Rei before he had a chance to see her reaction. It was hard enough to keep sitting here with her in the room; he definitely wasn’t in any shape to help her process her confusion. Or her disappointment.
It took Rei a second to respond. “That sounds very painful,” she said. “I’m sorry that’s happening.”
Shouto kept his eyes fixed on the carpeted floor. The tension in his neck made the muscles there feel as though they were about to snap, like an overextended rubber band.
The door to the waiting room opened. A tech peeked in. “Todoroki, they’re ready for… ah. Two of you?” The tech’s eyes flickered between Shouto and Rei. “She only gave me the family name.”
Well, now Ando was going to have questions.
Shouto glanced at Rei. She made a small shooing motion at him. “Go, go,” she said.
His legs felt like a couple jelly pouches, but he stood. Ando asked, “You want me to stay?”
And let his roommate and his mother strike up a conversation? He couldn’t have dreamed up that situation in a literal nightmare. “No,” he said. He didn’t let himself make eye contact with either of them before following the tech.
The medical offices on the adults’ side of the hospital seemed more extensive and better-equipped than the ones on the children’s side, if the winding hallways and unfamiliar medical-machine-thingies were any indication. The tech showed him to a room with a couple nurses in it. Shouto knocked lightly before pushing the door farther open.
“Oh—Todoroki,” said one of the nurses. “Come on in and I’ll get you—ouch.” Her eyes landed on Shouto’s hand, and she winced. “You… unwrapped it.”
The other nurse exited the room, and Shouto sat. “I wasn’t sure if I did something to mess it up.”
“How’s the pain?” she asked. “Scale of one to—”
“Seven,” he said. He rubbed the water from his eyes with his good hand. Had he been trembling since he woke up, or was that a new thing? “Eight, maybe? I don’t know. Feels like it looks.”
“I have my partner bringing some fast-acting pain meds right now. Can you handle it for about fifteen minutes? I can inject a local numbing agent if you need something that’ll work in four or five minutes, but I’m worried about how it’ll react with that digoxin you’re taking for your heart.”
Fifteen minutes… it seemed like an eternity, but he’d waited longer before. And—wait, was he taking medication for his heart now? He wondered if it was just a precaution or if he’d permanently fucked his body up with his special hypothermia-alcohol combo. He’d have to ask Natsuo later.
“I can wait,” he said.
“You’re taking quirk suppressants too, right?”
“Yes.”
The nurse got an icepack from the fridge behind her desk, wrapped it a handkerchief, and handed it to him. Pressing it against his hand had about the same effect as spitting on a wildfire.
“Most of my adult patients wouldn’t be half as calm as you are right now,” said the nurse. She opened a cabinet labeled first aid and pulled out a roll of bandages and saline cleaning cloths. “You sure you’re not going to pass out on me?”
“Probably I won’t.” Shouto let her take his hand and clean the burns with the cleaning cloth. The saline was shockingly chilly, and he accidentally blurted, “Fuck, that’s cold.”
The nurse hummed in acknowledgement. “When did this start hurting?”
Shouto forced himself to exhale. It was shaky. “Noon.”
“Why on earth didn’t they treat you sooner?”
Shouto thought he might end up biting through his tongue if he tried to speak, so he gave a one-shouldered shrug.
“And it didn’t occur to you to ask for help when it first started hurting?” asked the nurse.
Shouto swallowed hard. His throat had gone dry at some point in the last few minutes. “I… did it to myself. So. I didn’t… I thought maybe I wasn’t supposed to ask.”
“Babycakes, you’re in a psychiatric hospital,” said the nurse. “It’s not like self-inflicted injuries are rare. It’s highly unethical for medical professionals to refuse someone care because of how their injury was obtained, anyway.”
Shouto’s “oh” came out high and faint.
The nurse eyed him as she unpackaged a roll of bandages. “You haven’t had someone withhold treatment from you before, have you?”
Medical professionals? He couldn’t say. It was more a matter of whether his father let him see a doctor or take medication. Besides concealing Shouto’s injuries that couldn’t be dismissed as accidents and refusing Shouto access to medications that might trigger an addiction or affect his physical/quirk performance, Endeavor also didn’t like to aid with minor injuries caused by Shouto’s carelessness or stubbornness during training. Shouto dealt with anything from a knee scrape to second-degree burns by himself.
Logically, he knew it wasn’t good that Endeavor didn’t let him have full access to medical services. Still… some of Endeavor’s reasoning made sense. If Shouto was the one miscalculating the risks, he should be the one to deal with the consequences.
The nurse gently patted his back. “Still with me?”
Shouto had forgotten what her initial question was. He licked his lips, nodded.
The nurse’s partner came back to drop off a pill in a small paper cup with some water. The nurse took them and gave them to Shouto.
“Now, this is an opioid,” she said. “I’m giving it to you because it’s an emergency, but you should expect to be switched to something with less addictive potential as soon as possible because of your history.”
“My history?”
“With opioid abuse.”
Had Fuyumi told them that? All he’d really done was save his prescribed painkillers and ration them for shitty days. Wasn’t worth arguing with the nurse over, though. He took the pill and drank all the water in the cup as she finished wrapping his hand.
“I’ll send a note over to the children’s side so they won’t forget to check up on you again,” said the nurse. “I’m sorry you had to deal with that pain all day. Tell them to get their files sorted and shit together for me, m’kay? And let your nurse know sooner rather than later if something feels off.”
Shouto returned to the dorm. Ando was in bed with the lights off, so Shouto silently changed into a non-sweaty shirt, climbed into his own bed, and pulled the covers up. He’d have to wait until the pain had calmed down before he even started thinking about rest, but he was tired as shit, so hopefully it wouldn’t be too difficult to fall back asleep.
Well… that was also putting unrealistic expectations on his ability to stop thinking about what had just happened with Rei.
She knew.
He needed some sort of damage control plan now, right? Or was he supposed to just avoid her entirely for the rest of his stay? Whatever happened, his plan for a satisfactory reunion with her had started spinning out of control the moment he flipped off Endeavor at the sports festival.
After several minutes of silence, Ando spoke. “Todoroki.”
The voice startled him. He grunted in response.
“Did you know that woman?”
Ando was talking about Rei. “Somewhat,” said Shouto.
“Is she related to you?”
“She’s my mother.”
“Your mother.”
“Mm.”
“She’s a patient?”
Shouto opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling. “She lives here. In the hospital.”
“Oh.” Ando paused. “I didn’t… out you to her, did I? If I’d known she was your mom—”
“You didn’t,” said Shouto.
“So you already talked to her about it?”
“I… no,” Shouto said, “but at least some news stations are calling me ‘Shouto’ and ‘he,’ so probably she was already suspicious.”
“Oh my god. I did out you to your mom.”
Annoyance tickled the back of Shouto’s neck. “I said you didn’t.”
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever done,” said Ando. “Holy shit. I’m so sorry. I actually want to die right now.”
That was the worst thing they’d ever done? “It’s not a big deal.”
“Are you not stressed the fuck out? I’d be having a breakdown if someone did that to me. And with all you have going on! Like with your hand, and new medications, and your mom, and the media, and your being here? I don’t get how you can stay calm and hold it all togeth—”
“Of course I’m stressed the fuck out,” said Shouto. “Ando. Jesus. Did you think I tried to kill myself just because I was having a less-than-optimal day? My father said he’d cut off my finger if I didn’t use my fire and win the sports festival, and he threatened to hurt my siblings if the media found out about it. I watched someone get murdered last week—I don’t think that even makes the list of the top five worst things that’ve happened to me. You accidentally outing me isn’t going to affect anything in the long run, so you can forget about it. Go to sleep. Everything’s okay.”
Shouto rolled over with his back facing Ando. Gradually, his heartbeat slowed, and he started realizing what he’d just said.
Shit…
“I shouldn’t have said all that,” said Shouto.
Ando sniffed.
“It’s a habit for me when I get overwhelmed. I say strange things to make people leave me alone. Sorry.”
Ando’s voice was hesitant. “So it’s… not true? What all you just told me?”
“Hm?” He didn’t understand what Ando was asking at first. “No, it’s true. I apologized because probably you didn’t want to know any of it.”
Silence.
Shouto rolled over to face Ando. He could barely see their face in the dark. “You know you can’t tell anyone what I said.”
“Yeah, I… yeah. Sorry.” The words were quick and startled. A bit like Kaminari sounded when one of the teachers called him out for sleeping or making (surprisingly good) origami in class. “I’m not really… I’m gonna mess this up if I try to respond now. Can we pick this conversation up tomorrow?”
“There’s nothing left to talk about,” Shouto said. “I don’t want your help with my mother or my personal life. There’s no reason I told you anything, except that I’m not thinking clearly.”
“I understand,” said Ando. “I’m just… just confused how you ended that paragraph with ‘Everything’s okay.’”
Shouto exhaled, rolled onto his back again. “Don’t you have your own problems to worry about? Why are you so focused on mine?”
“Because it…” Ando’s voice drained off. They restarted. “I mean, my issues aren’t too bad. Compared to yours.”
“You’re in the hospital,” said Shouto, “so probably they’re at least kind of bad. I don’t know how you talk so much and still haven’t mentioned why you’re here.”
“Seriously, it’s not all that impressive of a reason,” said Ando. “Is your hand feeling better?”
It did seem like the medicine was starting to help. Less my-hand-is-literally-on-fire, more my-hand-is-superglued-to-a-hot-stove. “A little.”
“Let’s get some sleep, then. We’re up again early tomorrow. Fucking blood pressure checks.”
Despite how much Shouto would’ve liked to sleep, he spent a lot of the night recounting his encounter with Rei, second by second, until he hated everything he’d done and said.
And he still had questions he didn’t know the answer to. Why had he tried to hide his scar from her? She knew it was there. She’d seen it in photos and yesterday when Shouto was leaving morning group. And she’d obviously been there when it was created.
He borrowed from his memories of her when he was six. One of the last phrases he remembered her speaking—Sometimes I look at her and I hate what I see.
Oh. He hadn’t been trying to hide his scar from her after all. He’d been trying to hide his entire left side.
Notes:
I didn't realize that this hospital stuff was gonna be such a big arc. I hope the length isn't wearing y'all out as much as it is me. I have some spicy stuff planned (already written, actually) for the next couple arcs & I'm impATIENT
Chapter 43: Shouto Provides Fan Service for the Trans Readers
Summary:
I'm too drunk to write a summary. Some Ando moments, some social worker moments, some Rei moments. Amen.
Notes:
TW: transphobia, psychiatric hospital setting, threats of violence, coming out; REFERENCES TO: murder, suicide, eye injury
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
It wasn’t a blood pressure check that Shouto woke up for the next morning. He was told that he’d been scheduled to “talk to someone” and that he should wait in the doctor’s office.
He didn’t know for sure who “someone” was, but he had a suspicion.
The doctor mostly ignored him as they waited, occupying herself with her computer. Shouto didn’t notice the silence until the doctor cleared her throat. “How was your sleep last night?”
Was this small talk, or was she asking in order to note it in his file? “Okay,” he told her.
“Better?”
“I think.”
“I’m glad,” she said.
She didn’t seem to note his response anywhere, so it must’ve been small talk. But Shouto did have a real question. “Why am I here?”
“Well…” She paused, tilted her head a little. “Yesterday, you said a few things about your home life that concerned me. I wanted to follow up on that, just to make sure you’re in a space where you feel safe. I asked a friend to come in and help out. She’ll want to ask you a few questions privately—it shouldn’t take long.”
A friend?
Oh—she meant a social worker. So Shouto’s suspicion had been correct.
Shit.
He tried his best to push the panic down as he struggled to remember what had happened in the doctor’s office yesterday. Did Shouto tell the doctor about Endeavor? He wanted to ask what all he’d said, but even revealing that he couldn’t remember something that had happened just yesterday could alert her to a whole other realm of trauma. If this turned into a whole thing and Endeavor learned that Shouto was snitching even while he was hospitalized, things would get particularly nasty after Shouto returned home.
No—before he returned home, most likely. Endeavor was already angry about the sports festival, and having to deal with child protective services would piss him off even more. Shouto wasn’t there to catch the brunt of his father’s anger, so it’d be his siblings paying the price. He’d seen Natsuo with a broken wrist and Fuyumi with a singed ear and hair when they were young, and he didn’t want to see it again.
He couldn’t let this report make it back to the CPS office.
“I can’t talk to her,” he said.
“You don’t need to be uncomfortable. She’s a very nice per—”
“I don’t mean that.” He was getting anxious and restless in his chair, so he stood. “I’ve—I’ve already talked to lots of social workers. Endeav—my father won’t like it if I talk to another one.”
The doctor shifted her weight in her chair. “You don’t see how that’s a red flag?”
“It doesn’t matter to them. I’ve done this before. It’s not worth pissing him off.”
“They won’t tell your father, Shiyo.”
Goddammit, he wished she wouldn’t use that name. After yesterday’s disaster with the anger management class, he never wanted to hear Shiyo again. “Someone at protective services will.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Yes. That’s how this works.”
“I know this is scary, Shiyo, but I don’t think you quite understand the process here.”
Anger flared in his chest. “I’m scared because I understand. Why aren’t you listening?”
The doctor inched her rolling chair back from her desk. “You need to take a deep breath and calm down. Have a seat.”
“I am calm. I’m always calm. I just want you to listen.”
“Shiyo, please, if you’ll just—”
“I don’t know why you keep calling me that,” he said. “‘Todoroki’ was fine.”
The doctor’s eyes dropped to her desk. Shouto had seen a lot of eyes that wouldn’t meet his gaze, but it usually came from those sidekicks and low-ranked Heroes who’d recently realized that saving Shouto would require much more effort than they were willing to give. It didn’t make much sense in this context. Sometimes Shouto didn’t meet Endeavor’s gaze in order to prevent conflict, but it wasn’t like Shouto posed any danger to—
Wait.
Did she see him as dangerous?
She had full access to his file, which meant she’d seen that thoughts of harming others? box checked, had read any notes his intake interviewer wrote beneath it. If she’d watched the sports festival, she’d also watched Shouto nearly kill half the festival-goers with his ice and then beat the shit out of Bakugou during their overwhelmingly one-sided match.
Shouto knew he was unpleasant to be around, but when exactly had he become intimidating? Was it the at the sports festival? Earlier, during practical training? Or when his facial scar had faded enough that it stopped looking like theater makeup and started looking like an integral part of his face? Did he seem more threatening as a boy? As a celebrity’s son? As someone with mental illness? As a trans person? Did the doctor even know he was queer?
Jesus, he should stop thinking about this before he started comparing his effect on other people to Endeavor’s effect on him. That thought spiral would not take him anywhere pleasant. Anyway, he needed to apologize to the doctor before she added more time to his stay in the hospital. “Probably I said that wrong.”
“No, I—I apologize,” said the doctor. “I was being too familiar.”
Shouto hadn’t been trying to get an apology out of her, but… whatever. As long as she saw the argument as resolved. And stopped fucking deadnaming him.
She seemed to relax when he sat. He didn’t try to speak again. He’d just have to convince the social worker not to file his case himself.
Eventually, a tech led Shouto deeper into the building, past the employee breakroom and a small cluster of offices. The social worker—a woman around Fuyumi’s age sporting a cute bob haircut and flats with no arch support—met him outside a small room.
She smiled at him, gave a small bow. Shouto didn’t reciprocate.
The two of them went into the room. It was empty except for a stiff-looking couch, a plastic chair, and an empty water dispenser. The social worker asked, “Door open or closed?”
Shouto sat on the edge of the couch, and the stale crunch of the foam inside the seat cushion made him cringe. He normally would’ve asked her to leave the door open—he didn’t like being alone in a room with an adult. Women older than him made him especially uneasy. But they were going to need privacy for this. “Closed.”
The social worker shut the door and sat in the plastic chair. She flipped to a clean page in her notebook as she made polite introductions, explained privacy rights, and gave a basic rundown of the investigation process. Shouto had heard it all a dozen times before. He only listened closely enough to know when she was finished, entertaining himself by counting the sheets of paper she flipped over the top of the clipboard. He lost track after the first two.
“—so I was hoping you’d elaborate on what you went over with your doctor yesterday,” she continued. “Is that all right?”
No, it was not. How could he get her to leave him alone? “I was on a lot of medicine yesterday. It was very… a lot. It was strong. I don’t remember what I told the doctor, but probably I was making shit up.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You don’t remember what you talked about yesterday? Because of the medication? That sounds like a side effect you need to report.”
He was having to backtrack already? Shouto had never been a good liar, but he’d gained some unearned confidence in his deceptive skills lately. This might not end like he wanted it to. “I had a few concussions that damaged my memory.”
“Concussions from what?”
“Tr—training. But it’s not… related, so—”
“Could you talk a bit more about your training?”
He knew from past experience that, outside of Pro Hero circles, he couldn’t talk about his training without at least raising eyebrows. His convince-the-social-worker-he’d-been-exaggerating-about-Endeavor plan wasn’t going to work out.
His heartrate sped up. Jesus… he was going to regret this.
“Are you new?” he asked.
The woman blinked. “Excuse me?”
“How long have you been working for CPS?”
“Well—a couple months now,” she said.
So she was probably someone who genuinely believed she could help. He used to like those types, but in recent years, they’d just gotten annoying. It wasn’t exactly a great feeling to continually be reminded that he knew more about the system than they did. “Did you look at my file before you came here?” he asked.
Her eyebrows pinched together. “I wasn’t aware you already had one.”
“I probably don’t,” said Shouto. “I could fill out the paperwork with my eyes closed, but nothing ever happens. My father and the Commission practically own the place. You could get fired if you push my case too much. You can’t file this.”
“Todoroki-kun, I’m sorry, but it’s legally my responsibility to—”
“I’m scared he’s going to kill one of my siblings,” said Shouto. “My oldest brother is already dead, so I know he can get away with it. I can’t protect my family while I’m in here. I probably can get you money if you want it. You can tell them I was having a psychotic episode and spewing bullshit or something. Please don’t file it. Please.”
The woman looked at him for a moment, and then she returned her attention to the file. She ran her finger along the top of the clipboard, giving the papers a slanted crease.
Finally, she said— “This could cost me my job.”
Shouto wetted his lips. His throat and mouth had gone dust-dry. “I can usually spend up to 400,000 yen in a month without Endeavor noticing. I’ll pay it for as long as I can. It’s not a whole salary, but it—you won’t lose your job for ignoring me. People do it all the time.”
The woman turned a page in her folder, shifted in her seat.
Shouto swallowed what little saliva he could find in his mouth. “Direct deposit if you want. Or preloaded cards so they won’t be able to track it to you.”
She narrowed her eyes at the file in front of her.
God, he hoped she wasn’t some sort of self-righteous social worker with a savior complex. “Let me write down my email,” he said. “Just send me your information and how you want it delivered.”
The social worker flipped to a blank piece of paper and handed the folder to Shouto along with a pen. The email address he wrote the first time was illegible—characters cramped together, tripping over each other—so he scratched it out and rewrote it.
Other than that time he’d paid a barista to leave him and the League alone at the coffee shop, he’d never bribed anyone. Certainly not to this scale. It felt gross. But he’d witnessed it being done enough times that he at least he didn’t have to entirely make up his own script on the spot.
The social worker didn’t meet his eyes when she took the folder and pen back. She folded the paper with his email quickly and messily, stuffed it in her shallow pants pocket.
She left quickly after that, leaving the door open.
Shouto waited until he was sure that his expression was schooled to get up and make his way out of the office area by himself. He almost ran into the doctor on his way out.
The doctor started, “Did you—”
“Everything’s sorted,” said Shouto.
###
Breakfast had already started when Shouto entered the cafeteria. Despite his nausea, he was actually hungry this morning. Probably because he’d been eating so lightly in the days prior.
Shouto searched for Ando as he got his breakfast. They were already seated in their and Shouto’s usual spot. For the first time since Shouto had met them, Ando looked… out of place.
Why weren’t they sitting with their other friends? It looked unnatural for Ando to be alone.
He headed toward Ando, cutting through a narrow aisle between tables. Halfway through, there was a flash of movement near the floor, and he stopped just in time to avoid tripping over someone’s foot. The milk carton on his tray wobbled.
Shouto looked up at the foot’s owner—a boy whose smirk faltered when Shouto met his eyes. He didn’t move his foot, though.
“Do you want something?” Shouto asked.
Someone from the same table gave a low uneasy laugh and a muttered, “Told you that wouldn’t work, bro…”
“We were just talking,” the boy told Shouto. “Had a question we thought you might could answer.”
Shouto looked around the table. He recognized one of the kids from his anger management group yesterday—Shouto didn’t remember much about him except that he’d been there.
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“Why isn’t the sports festival separated by gender?”
This felt like a conversational trap, but he wasn’t sure how. “Because it’s mostly quirk-based.”
“Wasn’t it separated up until a few years ago?”
Had it been? Endeavor had only made Shouto watch the third-year sports festivals, which were too small and specialized to warrant separate categories based on something as trivial as gender. “I don’t know.”
“Is it true that they have transgender teachers there?” the boy asked. “I didn’t know it was legal for them to work with children.”
Ah.
There it was.
Shouto spared a glance at the boy from his anger management group, who looked a little more scared now than he had a few seconds ago. He must’ve told some people about the incident with Shouto’s deadname on the roll in group.
Shit… how many people? If Natsuo’s estimate had been correct, Shouto still had a while to go before he got out of the hospital.
“I don’t know,” Shouto said again. He nodded toward the ground as he started forward. “Move your foot, please.”
“Yo—yo, hold on.” The boy stuck his leg out farther, blocking Shouto’s path. “I wanna know how all this works. Does UA have, like, minority scholarships for people who can’t figure out their gender? Or for Quirkless people? I guess Ando over there ticks all the box—”
“I asked you to move your foot,” said Shouto. “Is there a reason why it’s still there?”
The boy stopped speaking, confusion creeping into his expression. His mouth worked for a second before he started, “I was just—”
“Move your fucking foot before I break it.”
The boy moved his foot.
“Thank you,” said Shouto.
He continued past them, finally finding his place across from Ando. They gave a small start when Shouto pulled out his chair. “Oh—geez, I didn’t realize you were—fuck.”
Shouto sat. “Sorry I scared you.”
“It’s all good, I’m just… jumpy this morning. I didn’t think you were coming to breakfast.”
“You should’ve sat with your other friends, then.” Shouto opened his milk carton. He was surprised at how steady his hands were. “I’m used to eating by myself. It doesn’t bother me.”
Ando gave an absent nod. Their chopsticks hovered above their food for a few moments before they muttered a curse and stood. They adjusted their chair to angle it slightly toward the aisle, then sat down again carefully so that the chair didn’t move from its set position.
“Sorry,” Ando mumbled. “Mornings.”
Shouto wasn’t sure what chair positions had to do with mornings, but he didn’t question it.
Ando flicked the side of their juice carton twice with the back of their finger before picking up their chopsticks again. “You were gone for a while. Getting your hand looked at again?”
“No.” Shouto stabbed his scrambled eggs. The only cooked egg he’d ever liked was Fuyumi’s, and he wasn’t about to start trusting someone else’s egg-cooking now. He released a heavy breath through his nose. “Had to talk to a social worker.”
“Gotcha,” said Ando. “Were they weird about it, or…?”
“She was normal.” Shouto didn’t know why he was okay with telling Ando this. Maybe because Ando had already given Shouto way too much information about themself. “I’m just tired of fucking social workers.”
“Then stop fucking social workers.”
Shouto looked up. He didn’t understand.
“Sorry,” said Ando, taking a loud sip of their orange juice. “I’ll be serious. So what went down?”
Shouto narrowed his eyes, focused back on his breakfast. Should he try the apple slices? He didn’t like it when they had that soft, damp layer on the outside from being cut too soon before consumption. Could he slice it off with the plastic knife? If he had his quirk, he might’ve been able to shave it with a thin blade-like protrusion of ice from his thumb. “Have you ever bribed anyone?”
“Uh… I guess I bought my little brother a pack of Skittles once so he wouldn’t tell our parents I cut up one of their throw blankets and used it for an art project, but he told them anyway, so it was honestly just a waste of a hundred yen. Other than that, can’t say I have.” Ando paused. Set down their drink. “My dude. Did you just…?”
Shouto bit into an apple slice. It was a little soft, but he forced himself to chew it. “I don’t know why I told you that.”
“Holy shit,” said Ando, leaning forward and lowering their voice. “With money? Like, a lot?”
“I think so.”
“What for?”
“I said some things to the doctor yesterday that I wasn’t supposed to,” said Shouto. “I don’t remember what all I told her, but I didn’t want the social worker to file a report on it. In case it was incriminating against Endeavor.”
Ando went quiet for a bit. They leaned back, picked up their juice again. “I don’t wanna get all up in your business, but… you’ve talked to other people about what’s happening with your dad, right? Like, adult people.”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “And please don’t give me suggestions as to who else I could talk to. I’ve tried all of them.”
“Understood. And I didn’t mean to—not trying to undermine your intelligence, you know, it’s just that some people get isolated and don’t realize that what’s going on isn’t normal.”
He thought he’d had a good handle on what was normal and what wasn’t before school started. Had done his share of web-surfing, observation of other families, and eavesdropping gossip about the Todoroki family to know that his homelife wasn’t normal. But most things he’d had to realize gradually: that kids usually weren’t terrified of their parents, that socialization wasn’t supposed to feel like a trap, that taking a break to do something “fun” wasn’t meant to be a source of shame.
“The… other thing you told me about last night,” said Ando, “is that being taken care of?”
The murder. That was definitely something he shouldn’t have told Ando about. He wasn’t sure what was going on with the murder investigation—if there even was a murder investigation, considering he’d already been forced to tell Aizawa that Deku was the guilty party—but he nodded anyway.
“You can talk about it if you want.”
Shouto put the rest of the apple slice in his mouth and chewed slowly. He ran through the sequence of events from the day of the murder—him and Bakugou cornering Deku in an alley, eating at the restaurant together, meeting the five-year-old Sakura, pushing Bakugou’s face into the carpet as Dabi and Deku garroted Sakura’s father to death. An image of the man’s half-crushed eye appeared in his mind, and suddenly the apple in his mouth felt like something half-alive, something sickeningly soft. He spat it into a napkin and used his milk to wash the taste from his mouth.
“Thank you,” Shouto said. “I’m good.”
Ando took a sip of their juice. “Sorry it happened.”
“It’s fine,” said Shouto. “He deserved it, anyway.”
Ando choked. It took them a little while to recover from the coughing, and their eyes were watering by the end of it. A couple patients turned to look.
“Okay?” Shouto asked.
“Yep,” Ando said, and coughed again. “Yeah, I’m… yep. Doin’ great. Um. So did you figure out what you’re going to do about your mom?”
“Let’s actually talk about something else,” said Shouto.
Ando raised their eyebrows. “What about?”
“Anything,” said Shouto. “Food brands you like. Or global warming. Or nothing. I don’t care. Literally any subject that doesn’t involve me.”
“O-oh.” Ando rubbed a spot behind their ear, gave an unwieldy laugh. “Yeah, I… sorry. I get too invested sometimes.”
They stayed silent for the rest of breakfast. Shouto almost wished they were still talking, though—he was sure that people were looking at him, making fun of him. How had he forgotten why he used to hate being around people his age so quickly?
Shouto tugged the front of Natsuo’s jacket forward. He wished Natsuo would hurry up with his new binder.
###
It was fairly easy to get himself pulled from the anger management group—apparently Mari, the anger management group leader, had put a word in for him.
He got a few strange looks during the suicide counseling group, but no one tried to speak to him. The only person he recognized was the middle-school girl who’d passed him the Chilled & Refreshing margarita mix advertisement clipping for the collage he’d made in art therapy. She was still wearing the thermal hospital blanket around her shoulders.
He was right that the discussion would provide no new solutions—it was the same “keep a journal,” “go outside,” “call a friend,” “talk to an adult” shit he’d read over and over again on the Internet. Those suggestions were probably helpful for some people, but they only served to annoy Shouto. Some temporary serotonin wasn’t going to disappear Endeavor or solve transphobia or erase all the trauma Hero Culture had caused him.
There was a lot of “you’re not useless or a burden” and “you CAN contribute to society” rhetoric, too, which Shouto assumed was aimed at the Quirkless kids. The group leader showed a list of local support groups on her slide show that confirmed his suspicions—nearly half of them were for Quirkless people. Lots of city-funded therapy groups available for Quirkless people out there, it seemed. Not as many city-funded groups dedicated to providing financial, medical, and legal protection to Quirkless people, or for educating quirked people beyond the medical aspects of Quirklessness and encouraging acceptance.
You’re not useless.
Not a burden.
You CAN contribute to society.
He knew the ideas were supposed to be comforting, but they struck him at an uncomfortable angle. Shouto was, if not a burden, at least a constant inconvenience, and that wasn’t something he was interested in disputing. He didn’t have to think hard to summon a flood of examples. Aizawa had spent sleepless nights trying to help him. Midnight had covered for him when he was late to school and locked outside the gate. Fuyumi cooked and adjusted meals for his texture-sensitive palate and made sure he ate. Endeavor certainly made sure Shouto knew all the things he was sacrificing to clear time for their training sessions.
Shouto was difficult to take care of. He wouldn’t contribute much to anyone in the state he was in right now. He couldn’t. The other kids in this room probably couldn’t, either. They might be high maintenance forever. How was telling depressed kids they needed to stay alive to pay back their societal debt in the future supposed to be helpful?
Not that he knew what to replace it with. “It’s okay to be useless” was pretty bleak, too.
The last ten minutes of the group were dedicated to privately filling out a worksheet titled “Looking into the Future: Things I’m Excited About!” The room went quiet as people wrote.
Shouto stared at his sheet for a while, then picked up his provided two-inch pencil and wrote “passing away” on the first line. The middle school girl beside him made a noise like a lawnmower struggling to start up.
Was that supposed to be a laugh?
As an experiment, he wrote “no one reading over my shoulder” on the second line. That time, the girl laughed aloud.
“Let’s stay focused, please,” said the group leader.
On the third line of his paper, Shouto drew a crocodile. It had been a long time since he’d doodled anything other than simple geometric patterns, and it showed.
The girl leaned in and whispered, “Is that a plesiosaur?”
He shrugged.
A few moments passed, and then something brushed his forearm. The girl was trying to slide her worksheet to Shouto. She’d written something in the margin:
Can I sit w/ u at meals while ur here
Ppl being mean after they found out Im Quirkless. I think theyll leave me alone if they see me w/ u
I wont talk or anything
What, like people left Shouto alone? It was true that he had more freedom to talk back to normal kids and adults than when surrounded with rich Pro Heroes and their heirs, but…
Well, he couldn’t think of a but. He’d threatened to break someone’s foot this morning and hadn’t been reprimanded. Touya had committed plenty of prison-worthy crimes, but he hadn’t served time for any of them. Shouto couldn’t deny that having a powerful and wealthy father had benefits. Shouto’s ability to actually carry out the threats he made probably wasn’t hurting his position in this hospital’s hierarchy, either.
Hierarchy. That was kind of a fucked way to think about things. Why did a hospital need to have a hierarchy among patients? Had Shouto always thought like that?
Shouto scribbled in the margins of the girl’s worksheet: ok.
###
During the last break of the day, Shouto ignored the puzzles and instead picked up a coloring sheet and a handful of crayons. He didn’t see that the coloring sheet was a Christmas tree until he sat, and he had to run the numbers in his head to make sure it was still April.
He’d just finished up the tree trunk when he heard a soft cough from the table behind him. It startled him—not just because he hadn’t sensed anyone sitting down there, but because it sounded remarkably like Fuyumi’s cough.
It didn’t make sense for Fuyumi to be here, though. Visiting hours weren’t until later, and Fuyumi knew better than to try to surprise Shouto. It was probably just some random—
“I wanted to check how you’re doing,” said a woman’s voice. “How’s your hand?”
The voice sent a jolt of electricity through his body, dysphoric and dizzying. He did know that voice.
Rei.
His fingers stilled on their own, but he didn’t turn to look at her.
“You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to,” said Rei. “I know it’s not your choice to be here. I just… didn’t want you to think I didn’t want to interact with you. I’m here. Even if you just want to sit together. I love you so much, okay?”
Shouto bit the inside of his cheek. Gripped his crayon.
He wanted her to leave, now.
But when he heard her chair shuffle back, his stomach sank. Letting her leave felt like dropping an anchor to a shore he didn’t want to dock at.
So he turned in his chair and said, “Y-you—”
Rei stopped, looked at him.
Shouto’s heart thrummed, erratic. Fuck, he couldn’t even look her in the eye—his gaze pulled itself somewhere around the large-leafed plant in the corner of the room, with Rei standing in his peripheral vision.
He wasn’t ready. Wasn’t ready wasn’t ready wasn’t ready.
“You can…” His throat felt scratchy, as if he hadn’t used his voice in years. “If you want. You can stay.”
Rei motioned toward the chair across from him. “Can I sit here?”
He nodded.
Rei sat across from him. Shouto kept his head down, kept coloring.
“Do you want to talk?” Rei asked.
Shouto wasn’t sure how to answer. Did he want to exchange information with her? Yes, probably. Did he want to talk? Absolutely not.
Rei folded her hands on top of the table. “Is it okay if I talk?”
Shouto was always making other people do all the work, wasn’t he? It was always Fuyumi checking to see if he’d eaten, always Natsuo picking him up from the hospital, always his teachers and classmates asking if he was okay, always Rei trying to reach out to him, never the other way around.
Shouto was really, really shitty at taking first steps. The first steps he did take—like assuming responsibility for Bakugou’s safety—turned out badly. So he never acted. Just reacted.
But he was making things more difficult for people he cared about.
He needed to try harder. Somehow.
How?
“I watched the sports festival,” said Rei. “Fuyumi said you were strong, but I didn’t realize how much.”
Shouto forced himself to breathe. He’d known that she would watch the sports festival, but still… she’d watched the sports festival? Watched him nearly kill multiple classmates, watched him burn part of his own finger off?
—which she was probably thinking about now, because he’d forgotten to hide his injured hand under the table. Shit.
“Do you like it there?” Rei asked. “At UA.”
He needed to say something. “I think so.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “Fuyumi and Natsuo say you’re making friends.”
Regardless of whether or not it was true he could make friends, he sure as hell couldn’t keep friends. “I don’t know.”
“Do you want to tell me about them?”
She was good at this. Friends were a safe topic because he wouldn’t have to talk about himself. And yet… Shouto’s tongue still felt tangled. He wasn’t a good liar, and it would feel like lying to tell her about people who weren’t his friends anymore.
Shouto kept his eyes on his coloring sheet as he said, “No.”
Rei was quiet for a bit before she said, “What about your homeroom teacher? I heard you like him.”
That was a little easier. “He has a long scarf. With cat hair.”
“Cat hair?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “On the scarf. The whites of his eyes are red a lot, so everybody thinks he’s always tired. But I think probably he’s allergic to cats.”
Rei laughed. The noise was strange to Shouto, though he wasn’t sure why. Did he not have any memories of his mother laughing? He wasn’t sure which part of what he’d said was funny, either. Unease scratched at the underside of his skin.
“Are you uncomfortable?” Rei asked.
Shouto glanced up at her, not quite meeting her eyes. He didn’t raise his head. “The… chair’s fine.”
Rei gave a small smile. “I meant with the situation, love.”
Shouto started to return his attention to his coloring sheet, but Rei’s folded hands on the table caught his eye. She wore no wedding ring, but her short fingernails sported a light shade of blue nail polish. It looked nice.
Rei’s voice was gentle. “Do you want me to leave?”
He squeezed the crayon. “I don’t know what they told you. About me.”
“They… told me you made an attempt,” said Rei.
“I don’t mean that,” said Shouto. He didn’t like hearing her say that. Had he thought they’d just be able to ignore the subject while he was here? “I don’t know who you think I am now.”
“I don’t expect you to not have changed in ten years,” said Rei.
Right. He was supposed to have grown as a person, matured mentally. Those were the changes Rei expected.
“I knew what happened as soon as I saw Fuyumi’s name on the caller ID,” said Rei. “I saw your white fire. And how you moved—like you didn’t care if you finished the day in one piece or not.”
Shouto started coloring again.
“I don’t know as much about you as I want to,” said Rei, “but I know you’re hurting now, and that some of that pain is my fault. I’ve been… I know there’s nothing I can say to change what I did to you. And then leaving you to grow up on your own, and to have to deal with… all that, just… You have every right to be angry. I’ve been wanting to apologize to you for so long. I’m sorry.”
Shouto licked his lips. He colored an ornament bright red, pressing the crayon down hard so none of the white paper would show through. His mouth felt like a desert.
“Not your fault,” he said. He paused to swallow. “I don’t think that. I never—I never thought that.”
Rei tilted her head. “Was Endeavor not letting you come see me, then?”
Shouto’s crayon snapped in his fist. He set the two halves down and dropped his hands under the table. “No, it wasn’t… that. I wasn’t ready.”
“That’s what Fuyumi told me you were saying,” said Rei. “Is it upsetting for you to see me?”
“No.”
“It’s okay if it is.”
“No, it—no,” he said. “You don’t understand.”
“I’d like to.”
Shouto didn’t like how fast his heart was beating right now.
“I didn’t like the sports festival,” he said. “Hurting my classmates. Things in my brain don’t always connect the way they do for other people, but I didn’t mean to… I didn’t want to do that. I’m not like Endeavor.”
Rei’s voice sounded pained. “Baby, I know.”
“I keep letting him do whatever the fuck he wants with me, though. I can’t think anymore.” Was it okay to swear around Rei? Well, too late now. “It’s like I was born with parts missing and Endeavor knew how to take advantage of that, so now I can’t function without him. Everyone says you’re doing better, and I’m glad, but I’m not better. Everything feels bad all the time. You—you stayed in that shitty situation for years to make sure I was okay, so I wanted to be okay before I saw you.”
Rei put her hand forward as if to put hers on top of Shouto’s, but Shouto kept his hands under the table, and Rei’s hand stayed cupped over nothing.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” said Shouto. “I’m not—I’m not trying to be angsty, or—I don’t think I’m exaggerating. Probably Natsuo and Fuyumi don’t tell you everything.”
“I can tell when they water down the stories they tell me,” she said. “Fuyumi’s been stumbling over her stories about you more than usual. Things have been bad, haven’t they?”
Shouto shrugged. The motion didn’t feel as nonchalant as it should’ve. “It’s just me fucking up and dealing with the consequences.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“You couldn’t have fixed anything.”
“But I would’ve been there.” Rei paused long enough to let silence take hold of the space between them. Then, “Baby, I haven’t been able to see your face properly since you got here. Can you look at me?”
Shit, he’d been trying to avoid that. He used to practice expressions in the mirror for whenever he saw his mother again—even watched reunion videos for the sole purpose of studying faces—but every expression he put on his own face looked forced and took a massive amount of energy to produce in public. He’d stopped trusting his own face years ago. He wasn’t going to change that today. So when he raised his head, it was with the only expression he’d mastered: complete vacancy.
Rei leaned forward slightly, looking raptured. Her hand rose to ghost Shouto’s left cheek. Light pressure traveled along the edge of his scar, and Shouto wasn’t sure what to do except sit there and hold his breath.
“Oh—” she said finally, pulling her hand back like it had touched something hot. “I… should’ve asked first. I’m sorry. Um… Fuyumi said you wouldn’t let her get a picture of your new haircut? It looks good on you.”
Shouto wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Dabi was the only person who’d ever said anything positive about his short hair, and that was when he was using his Reflection disguise, so Shouto couldn’t even be sure whether the compliment had just been part of Dabi’s Pro Hero persona. His haircut and his boy’s school uniform and his plain Hero costume and his t-shirt-and-shorts civilian clothes were never meant to impress anybody. But he didn’t know how to begin telling Rei that.
“Fuyumi didn’t like it,” Shouto said.
“Well. You know she gets nervous about things changing too quickly. She probably just thought it made you look more boyish than she’s used to.”
Discomfort wormed through Shouto’s stomach. He gave a stiff shrug.
Rei tilted her head, ducking it like she was trying to see his eyes from underneath a veil. “But that was probably the goal, hm?”
Shouto’s breath vanished.
He’d never given much thought to what Rei would think about his transition, because he’d expected this meeting wouldn’t take place for a long time, if ever. He didn’t think he could handle going back to presenting as a girl now, but… maybe if he’d never indulged those thoughts in the first place. There were plenty of thoughts he pushed down every day—thoughts about Lady Hypna, thoughts of the times he made Fuyumi cry, thoughts about dying. But of course he’d chosen the route that would be the hardest on his family.
Rei’s voice was soft. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I’ve just been listening to the news and hearing people talk. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
He barely recognized his own voice over his pulse. It sounded smaller than he was used to. “I wasn’t trying to make things difficult.”
“I know. Not many people think about their identity so young.”
He nodded, keeping his eyes down. That sounded similar to what he expected Fuyumi to say—that fifteen years was too young for him to decide whether to transition. He didn’t really have a rebuttal, either. Who was he to say he wouldn’t want to be a girl again in a couple years? He didn’t foresee that happening, but he also hadn’t foreseen himself in a psychiatric hospital, and here he was.
Rei spoke again. “When you were younger, I used to catch you sitting or lying down in strange places all over the house and lawn. Under the kotatsu, in the flowerbeds, in the theater with the lights off.”
Did the Todorokis have a home theater? He vaguely remembered one, but he hadn’t been in the west wing of the house in years.
“I’d ask you what you were doing,” Rei continued, “and you told me, ‘Thinking.’ Never elaborated. You were always doing that.”
“That’s creepy,” said Shouto. “You should have given me to a different family.”
Rei laughed. “That was just how you worked. Maybe you don’t climb inside kitchen cabinets like you used to, but… you still think a lot, don’t you?”
Sure, but none of his thinking was remotely productive. “I guess.”
“You understand your body and mind better than anybody else ever could. I trust you to know who you are, and I trust you to give whoever that is permission to exist. And… I’d love to meet that person. When they’re ready, of course.”
She would… love to meet…?
Was she being serious? He’d been losing sleep these past few days over what Rei might say about his transition, and she was just okay with it? That was what she was saying, right?
What the fuck.
So this meant that he could just… tell her.
Right?
Shit. This conversation was supposed to be easier. Like putting two puzzle pieces together, not like ripping off a band-aid that he’d accidentally melted to his skin. Unfortunately, he was a lot better at melting band-aids than he was at completing puzzles.
“I tried to make it similar,” he said. “My name. Because you… gave me the first one.”
“I heard the new name on the news,” said Rei. “It suits you.”
Shouto’s heart jumped. “It does?”
“I think so.”
“Really?”
The corners of her eyes crinkled. “What, do you not think so?”
“No, it’s not—it—” He hadn’t expected to get this far so soon with this conversation. This was uncharted territory. “I didn’t think you’d like that I changed it.”
“Names are meant to assign you a space to belong,” said Rei. “If a name starts feeling like a prison, you should rehome yourself. Do you like being called Shouto?”
A heady wave of dizziness hit him when she said the name, and it… didn’t feel bad. He nodded.
“If it makes you happy,” she said, “then I’m so honored to call you that.”
Shouto’s vision had started to blur. He blinked several times.
“Okay?” said Rei.
Shouto didn’t trust himself to speak. He swiped at his nose and nodded.
A technician Shouto didn’t recognize—probably someone based in the adults’ section, based on the slightly different uniform—approached to tap Rei on the shoulder. “Who’s this, Rei?” she asked.
Ah—right. It was probably a rule that the adults weren’t supposed to interact with the kids in the common room. Shouto pushed his chair back, preparing to get up and leave.
But Rei grabbed his hand across the table. She smiled at him, then looked to the tech.
“This is my son,” she said.
The Blue Route Poetry (pages 14 & 32, poetry by Max Hunt)
Notes:
I had a couple poems published with The Blue Route magazine! Check them out if you like Southern Gothic shit. I've included the link above. They're about when my family smuggled my grandmother's corpse across state lines & the time I saw a chicken eat a hummingbird alive.
Chapter 44: Shouto Is Done Hugging Now, Let Him Go Please
Summary:
A much-needed conversation with Rei.
Shouto's siblings visit him in the hospital.
Notes:
CW: psychiatric hospital setting, unwanted advances, transphobic microaggressions
REFERENCES TO: suicide, murder, threats of domestic violence, spousal abuse, child neglect
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Even with Shouto’s shitty deduction skills, he could tell that Rei was both well-known and well-liked among the hospital staff. After Rei asked the technician who’d approached them if she could take him back to her room on the adult’s side of the hospital, it had only taken a couple minutes to get approval. When Endeavor had commented on how much Shouto took after his mother, he definitely hadn’t factored in social skills.
“You’re all right with this?” Rei asked for the third time. “You don’t have to force yourself. If you don’t feel like talking anymore, or if there’s a group you don’t want to miss—”
“It’s fine,” said Shouto. In what world would there be a group he didn’t want to miss?
Also—and he only noticed this when they were walking side-by-side down the hallway—why hadn’t anyone told Shouto that his mother was shorter than him? Admittedly, Shouto had been tiny the last time he saw her, and he trusted Bakugou to control his temper more than he trusted his own memory, but... she had to have shrunk. At least a little.
Rei’s room was half the size of Shouto’s bedroom, but it looked more like a home than Shouto’s bedroom ever had. She’d filled it with photos, trinkets, novels and poetry books, crayon drawings… wait, were those children’s drawings? Where was she getting those?
“Oh—I talk to some of the younger kids who come through here,” Rei explained, like she’d heard his unspoken question. “Sometimes they give me their artwork before they leave. It’s very nice of them, I think.”
Guilt panged in Shouto’s chest. Was that a role he should’ve been filling as her child? “Did I ever give you…?”
“You did.” Rei pointed out a crude colored-pencil drawing she’d framed— framed— above her bed. It included six vaguely-humanoid figures of various skin colors: green, purple, red, pink, gray, orange.
Wait… six? Had he included Endeavor ? Gross.
He stopped in the middle of the room to take everything in. The Lucky Cat he’d sort-of-not-really helped Fuyumi buy sat poised in the windowsill, its hand bobbing and clicking. The door of her minifridge was covered in photos of her children, each held up by one of the cutesy folklore-creature magnets Fuyumi had bought for Rei’s birthday a couple years ago. There were professional photos of each of them as babies, though most photos were candid or at least spur-of-the-moment, taken from cell phones or a nanny’s single-use camera.
There were photos of Touya, too, ones Shouto had never seen before—Touya smashing his face into the cake at his twelfth birthday party (with Natsuo caught mid-warrior yell), Touya spraying Fuyumi full-blast with a garden hose, and even one with Touya playing some video game while toddler-Shouto slobbered over a disconnected controller.
“Have you never seen those before, Shouto?” Rei asked. “The ones of Touya?”
He shook his head.
Rei straightened a photo that had been knocked slightly askew. “I thought Fuyumi had digital copies. She never showed them to you?”
Fuyumi didn’t talk about Touya much. To Shouto, at least. He’d overheard her talking about Touya with Natsuo several times. “I didn’t ask.”
“Mm. I suppose you don’t remember many things about him.”
He remembered Touya’s laugh. At least, he thought he did. But saying that out loud would make him sound sentimental, so he just shook his head again.
Rei faced him, one hand propped on the minifridge. “I wonder sometimes if you two would’ve gotten along as you grew. You were clingy around him as a toddler, which—hm! Touya did not appreciate that. He was always calling for me to come get you out of his room. I did catch him telling you scary yakuza stories a few times. He claimed it was to scare you off, but...” She gave a barely-there laugh. Her expression was more distant now than it’d been a few moments ago. “I just wish I’d understood things then like I do now. With his differences, and... this illness, you know, it comes from my side of the family, and he and... you...”
Rei’s voice dropped off. Her eyes drifted just shy of Shouto’s face, like she was watching something behind him. He resisted the urge to turn and look.
Was this where Shouto was supposed to respond? He certainly didn’t have anything to add—he didn’t know shit about his oldest brother.
Rei’s eyes snapped back to meet Shouto’s. She smiled. “I’m rambling.”
He hoped he didn’t sound as uncomfortable as he felt. “It’s okay.”
“Can I hug you?”
A small adrenaline rush jarred his stomach. She wanted to... hug...?
Well, that was probably a normal thing for moms to do. But Shouto was severely out of practice when it came to returning hugs. What if he tried reciprocating and messed it up? Would she be upset if he just stood motionless like he usually did? Maybe he’d recognize something in her hug that let him hug her back with no trouble.
“You’re allowed to say no,” said Rei. “I know you don’t like being touched.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Sometimes he didn’t like it, but that was mostly when he was already overwhelmed from something else. “It’s okay,” he said again.
She hugged him. Immobilizing his arms against his sides, her chin over his shoulder. Her hair brushed his cheek, and it smelled like a memory that belonged to someone else, like a family he’d never gone home to. Her hug felt like heavy silk settling across his shoulders. He stood very still, afraid to move in case something shifted and slipped off.
He’d wanted so much for her hug to feel like home. But he didn’t recognize these sensations at all.
Something in his chest crumpled.
Had he remembered everything wrong? Made up memories of false emotions for himself? Or had he changed so much that the neural pathways that used to let him associate physical connection with emotional connection no longer existed?
After a while, Rei shifted, and Shouto prepared to step back. But her grip tightened instead of loosened, and her hand pressed against the back of his head. He felt rather than heard her breath hitching.
“Oh…” Rei’s whisper carried emotion so heavy that it nearly crushed her voice. Quiet sobs racked her body. Shouto felt the vibrations like they were happening in his own torso. “My baby… baby…”
The air in the room suddenly felt as breathable as cold honey. His chest ached with a feeling he recognized but couldn’t quite place—suffocation, but opposite. Like someone kept pumping air into his lungs without allowing him to exhale.
“You don’t know…” One of Rei’s hands stayed cradling the back of his skull, and the other shifted around his back like it was searching for a spot it recognized. She gave a shaky exhale. “You don’t know how hard it was to stop myself that first morning when I saw you at group. I wanted to grab you and squeeze all the hurt out. You never should’ve had to get this strong, baby, I’m—I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”
Her last sentence struck him at an odd angle. He’d only ever been complimented on his strength or criticized for his lack of it. No one had ever told him that he shouldn’t have it in the first place. Even Fuyumi hadn’t understood that his physical strength and abilities weren’t points of pride for him.
You never should’ve had to get this strong.
He lifted his arms and—carefully—returned the hug. Rei didn’t feel as fragile as he’d expected. Other than that, there wasn’t much to note. There was no familial spark, no safe mom feeling, nothing to note she wasn’t a complete stranger. There was that strange suffocation-but-opposite feeling, there was an ache that commandeered his whole body, and there was a slight trembling that he wasn’t sure was coming from Rei or from himself…
Wait. He did recognize this feeling, sort of. He’d felt it back on Wednesday—god, that felt like forever ago—when Bakugou had broken down after the murder.
This wasn’t a loving mother-child hug—it was shared trauma. Shared grief, even. It was the connection of two people who’d experienced the same losses: lost time, lost opportunities, lost relationships, lost identities…
Lost ? No, that wasn’t quite right.
Those things had been stolen. And what had Shouto gained in their place? Greater-than-average strength? Survival skills? Emotional numbness? A high tolerance for pain?
He’d never asked for any of that.
Shouto’s eyes stung. What, was he supposed to be grateful? Why was he expected to use the skills Endeavor had forced him to learn to save other people? Why couldn’t Shouto be selfish for once? Why wasn’t he allowed to just sit there and rest while someone else did the fighting for him?
Didn’t he deserve a chance to be weak, too?
Rei started to rock gently back and forth with him trapped inside her arms, her breaths still uneven. “Please don’t ever try that again,” said Rei. “I couldn’t… after Touya, if that happened again… dear lord. You scared the living shit out of your momma.”
So she did swear. “Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” Rei pulled away, just enough so she could hold both sides of his face and look him in the eye. She smiled, her eyes rimmed with red and cheeks glistening wet. “You have people who love you even when you can’t love yourself, you know? And I’m… just… ah!” She sniffed, patted his cheek. “I’m all over the place, I’m sorry. Goodness. Just… you’re here . I wish this had happened so much sooner.”
Shouto wasn’t sure where to look now that he was directly in front of Rei. He brought his hands up close to his chest. “I was going to come,” he said. The excuse felt stupid the moment it left his mouth, but he kept going. “I almost came last year. But then there was Lady Hypna, and I had trouble even leaving my room for a while after that. So.”
“Lady Hypna?” Rei asked. “Did something happen with her last year?”
Oh. So no one had told Rei about the assault.
Shouto’s heart sank deep into his stomach.
Rei had never been brought up in conversation surrounding the aftermath, so Shouto had just assumed Fuyumi or Natsuo had informed her. He understood why they hadn’t said anything—who would want to be the one to ruin Rei’s mental health all over again?—but it made him uneasy.
What else about Shouto had they kept secret from her? And how much of his trauma was he supposed to censor to avoid upsetting her?
“No,” he said. “I mean, it—not really.”
Rei hesitated before letting him go. She walked over, opened her minifridge, and handed Shouto a small carton of strawberry milk. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It’s not that important.” Shouto plucked the straw from its plastic and poked it into the carton. It was one of the very few milk brands he trusted—Fuyumi bought the strawberry flavor for him whenever she remembered. “You like this brand, too?”
“Well, I’m… lactose intolerant, actually,” said Rei. “I like to keep those on hand in case I have a visitor.”
A visitor? He couldn’t imagine that Rei had many salespeople showing up outside her door. And she just happened to have Shouto’s favorite drink on hand? Strawberry milk wasn’t the most sophisticated beverage someone might offer to a visitor, anyway, so why would—
Oh.
Oh .
Shit. How long had Rei been preparing for Shouto to visit?
Rei sat on the bed beside him, giving him enough space that another person could sit between them. She gave him a little time to drink his milk before asking, “Are you still angry at your father? Even after having time to reflect?”
Rei seemed like such a gentle person. He wished he were better at lying. “Yes.”
“I’m glad.”
“W—?” He lowered the milk carton and looked at her. “What?”
“I’m glad you’re angry. That means you know you deserve better. It took me decades to realize that for myself, but... you already have a big part of yourself figured out so young.” She gave his forearm a gentle squeeze. “You don’t need to apologize for respecting yourself.”
Shouto licked his lips as he looked away. Took a sip of milk. His lungs felt like they were going to burst.
“Do you not...?” She leaned forward so she could see his face. “You look like you don’t believe me.”
This was his blank face—it didn’t look like anything at all. Wasn’t supposed to, anyway.
“I’m glad to have you as a son, Shouto,” she said. “I’m proud of you. I hope you can believe that, at least.”
The knot in Shouto’s throat threatened to block his voice entirely. He swiped his hand across his mouth.
Shouto.
Son.
Proud of you .
Fuck, this… fuck, okay, he couldn’t do this any longer. Shouto didn’t know what was happening, and he didn’t like situations where he didn’t know what was happening. He tugged at the collar of his shirt and tried to rub some of his nervous energy into the ribbed material. It wasn’t working.
“Are you okay?” Rei asked.
Shouto tried to swallow. He choked a little on his spit. “I think—I need to leave now, I think.”
“O-oh.” She took her hand from his arm. “I’m sorry.”
Why was she sorry ? She’d tried very hard to keep him comfortable while they were talking. He stood, hoping it looked more casual than it felt.
Rei shifted to the edge of her mattress. “Shouto, did...? I didn’t upset you, did I?”
“I don’t... think so,” he said. Was he vibrating? Kind of felt like it. He moved toward the door. “Sorry. I’m... probably I can... later?”
Rei’s lips formed an o . But she nodded. “Of course. Take your time.”
Shouto left her room and headed quickly back toward the children’s side of the hospital. When Shouto reached his dorm room and opened the door, he called quietly— “Ando?”
No answer.
Shouto entered and closed the door softly behind him. He checked to make sure the bathroom was empty before going into the main room. Took Natsuo’s jacket off. Dropped it on the bed. Stood in the space between his and Ando’s beds, unsure what to do now.
Christ. It had been a few years since the last time. How was he supposed to do this, again...?
He was just supposed to feel it, right?
Let the energy go where it wanted to?
He drew his arms in close to his chest first. Covered his mouth with his fists as he rocked forward onto the balls of his feet, bouncing to test the feeling. For a few seconds after that, he stilled, and he waited. When nothing bad happened, he flicked his hands in front of him like he might if he were shaking water from them. And when the hand motions threatened to expand into the surrounding space, he let them.
“Fuck,” he said, because he couldn’t think of any other word to say. Giving a breathy laugh, he tore his hands up through his hair. Flapped them in front of him again. “Sh-shit. Fuck .”
Right now, the energy in his body felt less like a noose around his lungs and more like something that was supposed to be there. Like a power. He’d forgotten that it could be like that.
Shouto flopped on his bed and rolled over a couple times, his blanket tangling around him. Things were not okay right now—he knew that. Things were not okay at home, things were not okay at school, things were not okay with Deku or with Bakugou or with Fuyumi or especially with Endeavor.
With Rei, though... things were at least a little okay.
So if he wanted to flap his arms and do a tiny happy-scream into his pillow while no one was around to judge him, then he was going to fucking do it.
###
Shouto didn’t see Ando anywhere at the evening meal, but he sat at their regular spot anyway. Not long after, the girl with the thermal blanket across her shoulders—the Quirkless person from his suicide counseling group—approached.
“It’s still okay for me to sit here, right?” she asked.
He’d already forgotten that she’d asked to sit with him at meals so people wouldn’t bother her. He nodded, and she sat across him in Ando’s usual seat.
“Thanks,” she said. Shouto grunted in response.
She’d promised not to talk, and she didn’t. They’d just settled into a nice silence when movement beside their table caught Shouto’s eye.
“Is Ando gone already?” someone asked.
Shouto looked up. It was that girl from his anger management group, the one who’d called him hottie —shit, what was her name? Kimi. Some boy Shouto didn’t recognize stood beside her with his thumbs in his pockets. He looked like he’d walked straight off the cover of a magazine marketed toward pre-teen girls.
Was Ando gone already? He hoped not. Switching roommates in the middle of his stay here would be a hassle. Anyway, wouldn’t Ando say goodbye to Shouto first...?
Maybe not. Shouto had told Ando some disturbing things about himself last night. Wouldn’t really be unnatural for them to avoid Shouto until their departure. He vaguely remembered a kid doing that to him when he was younger—Rei had taken him and Fuyumi to visit one of her friends’ homes, and the friend’s young daughter tried to play house with him. Shouto didn’t remember what he’d said or did to upset her, but he did remember her shutting herself in her bedroom until Shouto and his family left...
Wait.
That was a memory Shouto had completely forgotten about until just now. First the memory of Rei’s conversation with her mother, and now this...
How many repressed memories did he have of that time in his life? He hadn’t even realized the one with Rei’s friend was missing until it returned. Had seeing Rei shook some things loose—?
But this wasn’t the time to think about all that. He needed to get his thoughts in line so he didn’t start zoning out in front of people again. “I haven’t seen Ando,” he told Kimi.
“Really?” said Kimi. Shouto couldn’t tell by her voice if his answer interested or bored her. “Is it cool if we sit here, then?”
Shouto glanced at the girl with the thermal blanket. She’d stopped mid-chew to look up at the two older kids. “There are only two seats,” Shouto said.
“We can pull a couple up.”
Shouto wasn’t sure how to tell them to fuck off without outright saying “fuck off,” and he didn’t especially want to piss off someone he’d met in an anger management group, so soon Kimi and the boy were sitting on either side of him. They squeezed their plates and drinks into the little free space the table still had.
He bit his lips, released a measured breath through his nose.
“Mari said you got transferred out of anger management,” Kimi said, putting her elbows on the table and resting her chin atop her folded hands. “I was disappointed. Group was more interesting with you in it.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be in that group,” said Shouto, voice flat. He looked at the boy. “I don’t know you.”
“I just got here this morning,” the boy said. “I heard some people talking. Did you really tell off some technician for making people say what their quirk is?”
Were people still going on about that? He’d been high . He just as well could’ve told off some poor kid for wearing a shirt that clashed with their socks. “Nobody had said their quirk yet.”
“Do you have a Quirkless friend or something?” the boy asked.
Shouto opened his vanilla pudding cup. Did Deku count as a friend? Well, that didn’t really matter in this situation. “Maybe.”
The boy tugged at one of his bluish-black curls. “Family member?”
Shouto wasn’t supposed to talk about Natsuo’s Quirklessness. When Shouto was little, someone from Endeavor’s agency had told him that it was a necessary precaution since a Villain might want to hurt or kidnap Natsuo. Not that it’d be a very effective act of Villainy—Endeavor might even thank them for the favor. Looking back, the rule might’ve only been established so Natsuo’s perceived “weakness” didn’t make Endeavor’s image suffer.
Shouto still didn’t tell people he didn’t trust about Natsuo, though, because there were assholes out there with a penchant for hate crime-ing Quirkless people. “I can’t disclose that.”
“I also heard you threatened Inoue this morning for shit-talking Ando and being quirkist and transphobic,” said Kimi. “You’re really into that social justice stuff, huh? That’s cool.”
Shouto stirred his pudding. “I don’t know an Inoue.”
“People were saying you threatened to break his foot...?”
Oh— that guy. He’d been so occupied with Rei that he’d forgotten about the incident at breakfast. “He wouldn’t move it. I don’t know why you wouldn’t move your foot the first time someone asked you to.”
The boy gently bumped Shouto’s bicep with the back of his hand. “You’re so cool. Taking no shit, demanding respect—I like that.”
“I was actually thinking about you last night, Shouto,” said Kimi. She leaned forward a little. “I have a trans cousin. She’s legit just like the girls. My friends love her. She goes shopping with us and everything. So I kinda know about you and your whole deal.”
“You’re seriously so brave,” said the boy.
The spot where the boy’s hand had touched Shouto’s arm tingled like a bug walking across his skin. He ate a spoonful of pudding and tried to ignore it.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” asked Kimi.
Shouto said, “No.”
“Boyfriend?” asked the boy.
Shouto glanced at the girl with the thermal blanket. She was nibbling a fig bar with her arms held in an uncomfortable-looking position, pulled in close to her torso to keep from touching Kimi or the boy. They hadn’t even acknowledged her presence, and while Shouto was more than fine with people doing that to himself, it pissed him off seeing it happen to another person. He wasn’t sure why.
“I don’t,” he answered.
Kimi tilted her head. “Aw. Why not?” Shouto opened his mouth to answer, but Kimi didn’t seem to notice and kept talking. “It’s not because of your scar, is it? Because I think that could work for you, you know, for someone who’s into that.”
“Exactly,” said the boy. “Some people are into the, uh... trans thing, too. Adds some spice. I think it’s kinda hot, anyway.”
Shouto couldn’t quite pin down why this interaction was inspiring so much dysphoria. These were kids his age, not the older teens and adults who’d made him uncomfortable with their advances in the past. They weren’t saying anything explicitly transphobic, either. He knew there was some truth to Endeavor’s constant badgering about Shouto being more sensitive than other people, but he didn’t like being reminded of it.
He tried to focus on his pudding. “I don’t want to date,” he said.
Kimi clicked her tongue. “What, your dad doesn’t like you dating?”
“I don’t want to,” he repeated.
“Yeah, ya doooo.” She leaned forward, stopping him from bringing his spoon to his mouth by pushing down on his wrist with a couple fingers. “You should try new things. I bet you’d like it if you tri—”
“I said no,” said Shouto. His voice had grown an edge, and he didn’t bother sanding it down into something more polite. Like, what was she going to do? Tattle on him to Fuyumi? “Did you not understand the first time? I’m not attracted to you. I don’t want to date you.”
The boy lowered his hand from where he’d been tugging at his curls. He looked confused.
But it took Kimi a moment longer to react. She withdrew to her seat, crossed her arms beneath her chest as her cheeks flushed red. Shouto caught a glimpse of her quirk for a couple seconds—blunt white protrusions that ran across her fingers like brass knuckles.
A quirk that let her reshape the bones in her hands, maybe? But the protrusions had melted back underneath her skin by the time Shouto wondered if he ought to prepare for a punch. Maybe she was on a weak dose of quirk suppressants so she couldn’t manifest her quirk long enough to seriously hurt anybody...?
“Fine,” said Kimi. “I was trying to be nice to you since everybody else here thinks you’re weird, but whatever. What do you want?”
Deku would have a heyday trying to figure out Kimi’s quirk, at least. Maybe Shouto could tell him about it later. “I want to get out of this fucking hospital,” he said. “And I want to finish my lunch with my friend. Alone.”
Kimi twisted her lips. She gathered her plate, sent a look to her friend across the table. They both stood, chairs scraping the ground.
“I respect trans people with all their gender and pronouns and shit,” she said, “but you’re not helping the stereotypes by being rude.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“You should really work on that.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “Bye.”
Once Kimi and the other boy were gone, Shouto was able to finish his pudding. Kimi’s you’re not helping the stereotypes had made him feel a little shitty—like he’d preemptively disappointed all the friends he hadn’t even made yet—but that didn't even make sense.
The girl with the thermal blanket spoke, her voice quiet. “People try to bother you, too?”
Shouto set the empty pudding pack upside-down on his Styrofoam plate, laid his opened but unused disposable chopsticks parallel across his plate. “I should’ve told them to go away before they sat down.”
“At least they left you alone when you tell them to.”
“They don’t always.” Shouto grabbed a granola bar Kimi had left on the table and slid it up his loose jacket sleeve. He stood. “Sorry. I’m going to go figure out where Ando is.”
“Oh.” She lowered her fig bar. “Then... see you at group later?”
“Here all week. Unfortunately.” He started away.
“Todoroki-kun,” said the girl, and Shouto paused to look back at her. She gave a small smile. “I think you’re cool.”
Shouto had little experience dealing with children younger than him, and even less experience dealing with compliments. He just gave a stiff nod and walked away.
After Shouto’s near-meltdown Saturday morning at breakfast, the staff were letting Shouto out of the cafeteria whenever he needed out, so no one stopped him when he left. Shouto headed to his dorm. He found Ando lying on their side in bed. They raised their head when Shouto entered, looking surprised to see him.
Shouto stopped. He was relieved that Ando hadn’t left the hospital yet, but he also hadn’t thought of what he was going to say if he did find Ando here.
“You okay?” Ando asked.
“Yes.” Shouto paused. “I was going to ask you that.”
“Oh—uh, yeah, I’m fine, I...” They gave a sheepish smile. “Tired, I guess. Nurses said I could rest for a bit. You have group next, right? I didn’t check the schedule—is it art again? Wait, no, there's no group after... or is...? Never mind. I guess you have to see the nurses about your hand at some point, too. Did you already do that today?”
Shouto stood still. He wished he’d rehearsed this ahead of time.
Ando’s expression crept toward unease. “What?”
“Do you...?” Shouto swallowed, tried again. “Do you need help? Or...?”
Ando’s eyebrows shot up. “Mm? No, no, I’m—” They waved their hand. “I’m good, I promise. I’ll be up soon.”
Shouto hesitated. Then he walked forward and set the granola bar from his pocket on the edge of Ando’s bed.
Ando looked at the granola bar. Looked up at him.
“I...” Shouto’s voice drained off without his permission. He’d been hoping to say something like I hope you feel better or I’m here if you need me, but the moment he’d opened his mouth, the words started to feel like some goopy schoolgirl love confession—the kind Shouto always begged Fuyumi to fast-forward through in films. He redirected. “...found it. In my... shirt sleeve.”
Ando blinked. “What?”
Shouto left the room before his face had the chance to turn red.
###
Sunday turned into Monday, and Monday was visiting hours.
He’d only taken a few steps into the cafeteria when Fuyumi assaulted him with a hug. Natsuo didn’t wait until Fuyumi had finished before tackling Shouto from behind, leaving him squished between his two older siblings.
Fuyumi gave a quiet squeal as she squeezed him. “Mm- mm ! How’re you feeling? Are you eating okay? Why didn’t you call me?!”
“Was I supposed to?” asked Shouto.
“Yes! I told you before you checked into the… well, never mind. You probably don’t remember. But you have to call me every day from now on, okay?”
Shouto was glad to see that his siblings seemed unharmed, but he still wished they would let him out of the hug. This was too much tactile input. “Every day is too many days.”
“Do it for my sake,” Natsuo told Shouto. “Yumi’s annoying the shit outta me with her paranoia.”
Shouto raised his arms, holding his loose fists beside his head. “I’m done hugging now,” he said. “Let me go, please.”
They moved to a two-seater table near the wall, and Natsuo had to pull his chair up from another table. Shouto wondered if Natsuo felt as awkward as Shouto did—they didn’t know each other very well, and somehow this setting felt even more vulnerable than the ER had.
“Never been to this side of the wing before,” said Natsuo, glancing around. “Seems… very slightly more colorful than the adult side.”
“I hate the walls,” said Shouto. “They’re like if yellow had moderate to severe back pain.”
Fuyumi set her purse atop the table—to the side, so nothing was between her and Shouto. She started speaking even before she finished sitting down. “Shichan, did they put you on any medications? They said we might have to wait for a while if we wanted to talk to a nurse, and I didn’t want to waste any of our visiting time with you, so…”
Still “Shichan.” Natsuo had said he wouldn’t reveal anything to Fuyumi without Shouto’s permission, but he was still disappointed. Surely she had to have heard something on the news to make her suspicious. Kaminari and Jirou had referred to him as "he" and "Shouto" in their interview, at least. “They gave me medicine,” he said.
“What kind?”
He couldn’t remember any names. “A few medications for sleep and some other things.”
“What ‘things’?”
He didn’t want to bombard Fuyumi with terms that would freak her out. “Just stuff.”
Fuyumi tilted her head, lips drawn thin.
“I don’t remember the medication names,” he said, which was true.
“It’s helping?” she asked.
It had only been a few days. “The anxiety one helps. But they said it’s not good for long term.”
“Short term kinda takes priority right now,” Natsuo said. “Need to get your head above water first.”
He wanted to ask his siblings if they knew Hawks had come to visit him (surely they wouldn’t have agreed to that, right?), but considering the things Hawks had come wanting to talk about, it might be best to keep his visit a secret. He didn’t want to unintentionally tug on a thread to a plot that wasn’t safe to unravel. Probably Fuyumi wouldn’t enjoy hearing that Shouto had been hanging out with Villains who very well might be planning on killing Endeavor.
He also wanted to know what all had gone down since Aizawa learned about Deku and the murder at the sports festival Friday. Had Aizawa passed the information to the police? And speaking of the police— had Bakugou’s parents pressed charges against Shouto? God, he hoped Fuyumi wasn’t having to deal with the legal consequences of Shouto’s mistakes alongside all the other stuff.
Something tapped his elbow. Natsuo’s voice. “Hey, you spacin’ out?”
Shouto snapped back to attention. This medication was fucking him up. “Sorry.”
Natsuo leaned back in his chair again. “We were asking if you’re okay with being treated at this hospital.”
At this hospital? Had Shouto had a choice in that matter?
“I hope you’re not mad,” Fuyumi said. “I really didn’t want to push you into a situation where you might have to see Mom—and I wasn’t sure exactly how separate they keep the adults and kids—but I wanted you to be somewhere close to home in case there was an emergency. And this hospital is the best-funded in the area. I was scared you might get mistreated at some other facility. But if you’re uncomfortable, I can arrange for them to transfer—”
“I already talked to Rei.”
Fuyumi’s face went slack. “What?”
“I talked to her.”
“No, I heard you, just… crap, Shiyo, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
Well, he was sitting here in front of them, wasn’t he? At least mostly not dead. “I’m okay.”
“I didn’t think it would happen so soon,” she said. “Was it… was it bad?”
“It was fine,” he said. “She—”
He cut himself off. He couldn’t say anything about Rei calling him “Shouto” with Fuyumi here. Goddammit, he wished he could just tell Fuyumi.
“ — she’s nice,” Shouto finished.
Fuyumi stared at him with her eyebrows raised. When Shouto didn’t say anything, she asked, “Are you going to elaborate?”
“I wasn’t planning to,” said Shouto.
A technician came up to their table, addressing Fuyumi before she had a chance to respond to Shouto. “Todoroki-san, a nurse is available to speak with you now.”
“Oh—ah—” Fuyumi glanced back at Shouto. “I’m sorry. Can it wait until after visitation?”
“We have a nurse who’s free to speak with you now,” said the tech. “We’re short-staffed today, so I can’t guarantee there’ll be anyone available for you to speak with until tomorrow or Wednesday.”
Fuyumi fiddled with her small, neutral-toned wristwatch’s strap, giving a dissatisfied hum. After a few seconds of hesitation, she picked up her purse and stood. She leaned over the table to hug Shouto. “I miss you at home,” she said. “Do your best here so I can have you back as soon as possible, okay?”
How could she miss him? If it were possible, Shouto would pay good money to spend even just a couple hours away from himself. “Okay.”
“I love you. Call me. Mwah.” She held his head and pecked his forehead with a kiss, then hurried to follow the nurse out the room.
Natsuo waited until the door had closed behind Fuyumi to turn back to Shouto. “You got room in that jacket, right?”
Shouto was confused. “What do you mean?”
Natsuo glanced around, then unzipped his jacket and put a small white bundle of cloth on the table in front of Shouto. “I unwrapped it from the plastic so it wouldn’t make that crinkling sound on the way in. Probably could’ve just sent it through processing normally, but Fuyumi was with me. Also—” He pulled out a half-squashed Twinkie and plopped it atop the bundle. “—that.”
Right—the new binder Natsuo had promised to bring. Shouto took it and put it inside his own jacket. Well, technically this was still Natsuo’s jacket, but Shouto was wearing it right now, and he had no plans to give it back until he was out of this tundra of a hospital.
“I don’t know if we’re allowed to have food in here right now," said Shouto.
“I mean… I can take it back.”
“It’s okay.” Shouto opened the package and took a bite. It took a not-insignificant amount of willpower not to close his eyes and groan. God, he’d missed the taste of tooth-rotting sugar and preservatives. “They can’t give me detention here.”
A grin tugged at Natsuo’s mouth. “Are you already getting detention at school?”
“I was supposed to clean the bathrooms with Bakugou on Monday.”
“With Bakugou? You two get in a fight or something?”
“Nothing big. He tried to punch me in the cafeteria for making a joke.”
Natsuo’s eyebrows shot up. “Why’d they give you detention?”
“I busted his lip.”
“Ah,” said Natsuo. “You’d think he’d stop trying to pick fights with you after a certain point.”
Shouto took another bite. “Probably he won’t anymore. After the sports festival.”
"Mm.”
They went quiet. Natsuo looked down at the table.
Why did Shouto always have to dig conversations into pits? He needed to figure out how to conquer that habit, but he’d been doing it for so long on purpose that he wasn’t sure what a normal conversation was supposed to look like.
“Is Bakugou okay?" Shouto asked. “Do you know?”
Natsuo nodded his head to the side. “Honestly, I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the news lately. I’m trying to keep Fuyumi away from it since she’s already so stressed. Alongside you being in here, apparently the dad of some girl in her kindergarten class got murdered in a Villain attack and the kid went missing, so Yumi’s kinda... y’know.”
Shouto hadn’t thought much about where Sakura would go after Deku killed her father. Was she still with Deku? Deku didn’t seem like he was in a position to be taking care of a child, what with all the murdering and mental instability, but she was probably happier with him than she’d been with her father.
“Not that that’s something you need to worry about,” said Natsuo. “Sorry.”
“What about the police? Did they tell you about—? Um.” Shouto knew he didn’t have any special talent for lying; apparently the same was true of his ability to subtly gather information. “Did you or Fuyumi or Endeavor have to talk to them? And what’s Endeavor doing? Has he done anything to you or Fuyumi?”
“Endeavor? He actually took off pretty soon after the sports festival. ‘Hero conference’ or some shit. I’m pretty sure he’s just stewing in some hotel room by himself to avoid all the media attention after you flipped him off on national television.”
Shouto couldn’t remember a single time in his life when Endeavor hadn’t met the idea of a conference or meet-and-greet event without complete scorn, so Natsuo was probably right. There was no telling what Endeavor might do when he returned, but at least he wasn’t home to hurt Fuyumi or Natsuo. Physically.
There were other ways he could make their lives miserable.
Natsuo continued. “About the police... I wasn’t sure if I should tell you while you’re still recovering, but I guess I’d want to know.” Natsuo exhaled. “They came by on Saturday while Yumi was at work. They wouldn’t give me details since I’m not your guardian, but they said they wanted to talk to you about a crime you witnessed on Wednesday.” Natsuo’s expression tightened. “Oh. I don’t like that face you’re making.”
The energy in Shouto’s chest twisted into deep unease. So Aizawa had at least partially reported the crime Shouto and Bakugou had witnessed. Was Deku in trouble now? Was Shouto ?
“Did something shitty happen Wednesday?” Natsuo asked. “I’m hoping the ‘crime’ was just, like… someone shoplifting, but… knowing you. And Fuyumi told me that you were having trouble when you came home Wednesday. Did the crime have to do with that Bakugou guy?”
Should he tell Natsuo about the murder? He wasn’t usually open with his siblings about his traumas unless he had to be, but he and Natsuo had bonded , right...?
No, no. Even if Natsuo’s concern was born from something other than guilt about Shouto’s attempt, Shouto didn’t want him getting involved. Natsuo was studying to become a doctor, not a Hero. Universities were even more strict about Villain involvement than they were about drugs. One wrong step for Natsuo could mean the loss of his career.
“Bakugou was there,” said Shouto, “but that’s all. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“I take it you didn’t tell Fuyumi anything, either?”
Shouto shook his head.
“You wanna talk about it now?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Later, then?”
If it’d get them off this subject. “Maybe.”
Natsuo pinched the tip of his nose. Sniffed. “I should probably let you know that you have a lot of missed calls and messages on your phone.”
Shouto’s heart jolted. What had Natsuo seen? What if there’d been something incriminating from Deku, or even from Hawks or Bakugou? Well— Hawks probably wasn’t careless enough to send sensitive information over text, but Bakugou might be. “Did you look at them?”
“No. I didn’t know if you wanted me seeing them. I can check them if you’re worried.”
“No, you—no.” Shouto might’ve said that too quickly. “I’ll take care of it later.”
“Okay. And I was wondering—” Natsuo cut himself off. “Sorry. I feel like I’m harassing you with questions. Was there something you wanted to talk about?”
He kind of wanted to tell Natsuo about his visit with Rei, but he felt his energy dropping by the second. Starting a story in this state usually meant losing track of the plot by the middle of it. Shouto ate the final bite of his Twinkie and licked a smear of cream from his thumb. “Not really.”
Natsuo settled his elbows on the table. “I’m not overwhelming you, am I?”
“I’m okay.”
“Good. Because I wanted to ask—are you going by something different now? Or do you want to? Regarding name and pronouns.”
It was strange hearing Natsuo talk about this stuff so openly. Fuyumi had struggled to even ask if Shouto was a lesbian.
“He/him?” Natsuo asked. “Or they?”
“He,” said Shouto. He crunched the empty Twinkie wrapper in his fist. “I didn’t know if you heard anyone talking about me on the news. Or what they were calling me.”
Natsuo tilted his head. “It’s... I’ve only read some headlines and seen news clips in passing. I heard you being referenced as he on some tv program and saw daughter used in a headline. So I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with the media.”
Well, that was anxiety-inducing. Whoever heard the discrepancy would know something was going on. That meant more attention on him—likely a lot of negative attention.
“Did you already hear my name?” Shouto asked.
“The snippets from the channels I watched used ‘Todoroki,’ so no, I did not.” Natsuo paused. “Can I guess?”
“My name?”
“Yep.”
It was a weird request, but Shouto had no reason to object to it. He nodded.
“Hm…” Natsuo exaggeratedly stroked his chin and narrowed his eyes, a barely-there smile hovering on his face. “This is an educated guess: Hitoshi?”
One of the main characters on Red’s Ocean . That was an educated guess, and something happy bubbled in Shouto's chest. Natsuo knew about the thing he liked. “No.”
“Damn,” said Natsuo. “Definitely thought I had that.”
Shouto said quickly, “It was close.”
“Close? Okay…” Natsuo scrunched his face. “Gimme a second. I’m trying to remember the other guy’s name. What was it, Shiro… Satoshi…?”
Shouto bit his lips. Tapped his index finger against his collarbone.
“I’m fuckin’ with you,” Natsuo said, knocking his foot against Shouto’s leg under the table. “So you went with Shouto?”
Shouto nodded.
“That’s cool. I don’t know if you remember, but you went through a short phase when you made me and Fuyumi call you Shouto. I think you were... five? Six...?” Natsuo tapped the skin under his own left eye. “Sometime before that happened.”
“I don’t remember much from that time,” said Shouto.
“Yeah. Wish I could say the same.” Natsuo dropped back in his chair. He kept one arm stretched out on the table, his hand curled into a loose fist as his thumb flicked his index finger. The motion reminded Shouto of someone trying to make an empty lighter work. “Hey, um... are your classmates being mean? To you?”
The sudden change of subject threw Shouto off track. “Prob—probably they’re just normal.”
“That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence, my dude. How are they with you being trans?”
That question had a multi-part answer. Shouto wasn’t sure he had the mental energy to sort that many words.
“I was bullied pretty badly in middle and high school,” said Natsuo. “Especially after Mom left for the hospital and teachers knew no one would get them in trouble for overlooking it.”
“I would’ve beat them up for you,” said Shouto.
Natsuo smiled. “The teachers or the students?”
“Both.”
“I know you would’ve,” he said. “I’m just saying that if something like that’s happening to you at school, you can talk to me about it. We’ll figure something out.”
Goddammit, Natsuo was too nice. It made Shouto feel guilty for lying to him. All this talk of going back to UA was fine, but if Endeavor unenrolled him, it’d all be for nothing.
A technician called over the chatter. “Five more minutes.”
“Shit,” Natsuo muttered. He pulled his hands into his lap and leaned toward Shouto, lowering his voice. “One more thing. You’re a smart kid—you probably have some evidence of Endeavor’s abuse on hand, right?”
Shouto inhaled. But nothing came out of his mouth.
He couldn’t just talk about this with Natsuo. Could he? It had always been more of a don’t-ask-don't-tell situation between the two of them.
“You don’t have to tell me now,” said Natsuo. “I just wanted to let you know that Yumi and I talked. If you want to go forward with releasing evidence, I have something now that I didn’t have a couple years ago. Been working on it a while, actually. It’ll at least get us to a trial with a jury. Me ’n Yumi are willing to testify if you decide—”
“I don’t think so.”
Natsuo raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t given you the whole pitch yet.”
“Do you remember the Thunderhand Case?” Shouto asked. “A few years ago—he was at the lower end of the top one hundred Heroes, I think. Convicted of spousal abuse. They had video evidence and witnesses.”
“I remember,” said Natsuo. “They took away his Hero license.”
“No. They suspended him. Two months, paid leave. I saw him at a Hero gala last winter.”
Natsuo rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Right... Jesus, sorry. Thunder hand . I was thinking about a similar case with a Pro Hero from Okayama. Thundercloud or some shit. It's always the Heroes naming themselves after natural disasters.” He sighed. “Obviously, leaking evidence is a last-resort plan, but I kinda think we’re past that point.”
“It’s not a last - resort plan,” said Shouto. “It’s a no -resort plan. If you went to the plan and tried to resort there, probably you would get mauled to death by bears, and then brought back to life and mauled all over again, or something. The evidence doesn’t just condemn Endeavor. It implicates nearly half of the top 100 Heroes.”
“Is that not... good?”
“Natsuo, you don’t—the Commission will fucking kill you before they let that go to trial.”
Natsuo sighed. “I had this conversation planned, y’know. I was gonna reveal my secret trump card, and you were gonna be like, ‘Wow, Natsuo, this is so much cooler than a secret quirk,’ and then we’d make some sort of brothers handshake—”
“ Natsuo. I'm not exaggerating. And it’s not just the Commission, it—it’s—” Agh. This was what happened when he tried to speak before rehearsing the conversation. This anxiety medication really was making him sloppy. “Bad things will happen with Endeavor, too.”
“Bad things between you and Endeavor?” Natsuo asked.
“Yes. But bad things between him and other people, too.”
“What ‘other people’?”
Shouto took a moment to gather his thoughts and push them down, out of reach of his lungs. He was talking too much. This wasn’t Natsuo’s fight. Natsuo had managed to get out, and Shouto wasn’t going to drag him back down.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Shouto said.
Natsuo hesitated. “We can flesh this plan out, Shouto. We’ll get you somewhere safe before we make any big moves—somewhere he can’t find you. If he’s using me and Fuyumi to threaten you, I hope you know that we’re both willing to—”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Okay.” Natsuo sat back in his chair, putting some space between him and Shouto. “Sorry, I’m... I thought having a plan of action would make you feel better. Genuinely wasn’t trying to stress you out.”
Shouto nodded. He felt the folded binder inside his jacket start to slip out, so he adjusted it. Folded his arms low across his stomach, tucked his elbows in close to his sides.
“Natsuo,” he said.
“Still here, bud.”
“Was it really bad for you?” Shouto asked. “Growing up?”
Natsuo sucked one cheek in, looking up at the ceiling. He released his cheek with a pop of his lips. “I wouldn‘t say it was great . Didn’t look much like your or Touya’s situation, though. It was more, um...”
“Neglect?” Shouto guessed.
“Yeah. Like I had to keep track of my own school admission forms, get the agency secretary to sign off on field trips for me, that kind of shit. Yumi tried to help where she could, but she was... you know. Occupied.” Natsuo paused. “ Not that all that’s... I mean, it ain’t a big deal compared to what you’ve been dealing with.”
Fuyumi had been occupied with raising Shouto. He’d never considered that Natsuo might’ve needed their older sister more than he did. It was a miracle that more people didn’t resent Shouto, really.
“Is...? Did you—do you feel better?” Shouto asked. “After you left. Did it still feel bad?”
For a second, Natsuo looked confused. “Do you mean the... like, effects of trauma, or...?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it—” Natsuo stuck the tip of his tongue between his teeth. He stared at Shouto for a moment, and then he suddenly shifted to correct his slouch. His voice came out a little too loud. “I mean, I don’t think it has to be something you deal with for decades. You start feeling better once you’re out of the situation.”
“You feel better now?” Shouto asked. “Being out of it?”
“Yeah. Yeah, hundred percent. And we’ll get you out, too.”
Shouto wasn’t sure if Natsuo was watering down his experience with trauma, but he was sure that he didn’t want to fuck up Natsuo and Fuyumi’s lives for a plan that wasn’t likely to work. No matter how independent his siblings seemed right now, they still relied on Endeavor’s money and influence to survive.
I’m glad you’re angry, Rei had said.
And that boy at lunch: You’re so cool. Taking no shit, demanding respect—I like that.
Natsuo’s idea to leak the evidence—the videos of Shouto fighting Endeavor and other Heroes—wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. Shouto had thought about doing it himself several times, if only to disappoint a few Endeavor fans (not that Shouto had any social media accounts to upload the video to). He’d keep the flash drive with the videos handy, but he didn’t see much use for it in the near future.
No legal approach could ever fix a problem when the problem was the legal system itself. No average citizen could step in without defying that same legal system. No Hero could save him as long as they retained that title.
Maybe Deku did want to take advantage of Shouto like he’d taken advantage of Toga. Maybe Dabi didn’t actually give a shit about Shouto’s well-being. But they shared the same goal—to take down Endeavor—and the League of Villains wasn’t bound by the same rules as the rest of Japan.
Contact a group of organized criminals and assassins for support probably wasn’t the message the hospital staff wanted him to take away, but hey...
Mental health first, right?
Notes:
I keep almost falling asleep while trying to think of a joke for the end notes. Alas.
Follow me at:
Twitter: @hyperfixeaten
Insta: @max_says_no
Chapter 45: Shouto, in a Strange Twist of Events, is Somehow Not the One Who Needs a Hug the Most in This Chapter
Summary:
Shouto finds out what's wrong with Ando. The end of the hospital arc.
Notes:
TW: self-harm and mild blood (teeth), descriptions of OCD-like behavior, gore (? nasty-looking skin graft healing); REFERENCES TO: suicidal ideation, researching for suicide
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Over the next few days, the weirdest fucking thing happened in the hospital:
Things started to calm down.
It unnerved him—how the shaking in his hands turned nearly imperceptible, how the noise in the common room didn’t sound quite as aggressive as it had in the days before. Strangers looked at him still, perhaps whispered about him, but most didn’t talk to him.
Were they scared of him? Or were they avoiding him out of distaste? Either way, it meant less engagement. Less drama.
The ones who did dare to engage were introduced to him by the younger Quirkless girl who’d more or less usurped Ando’s spot at their two-seater lunch table. He’d failed to commit any of their names or ages to memory, but he did know that they were all Quirkless.
They were, for the most part, quiet. As much as Shouto was glad for the peace, he was still confused by their presence. The first girl had asked to sit with him because she was being bullied, but now there were enough Quirkless kids that they’d had to relocate to their own table (with Shouto in tow). Shouto wasn’t worth much in a protective sense when they had sheer numbers to protect them.
So why hadn’t they abandoned him yet?
As for Ando... they were eating meals elsewhere now, apparently, like Shouto had done for that day when the cafeteria overwhelmed his senses. Shouto still saw them at night and sometimes during breaks. They seemed normal, if a little quieter. Which was fine with Shouto.
When Shouto entered his dorm room that night, Ando was lying in bed with their shirt off, flipping through what looked like a magazine for non-quirked sports like baseball and football. Shouto realized this was the first time he’d seen Ando with their shirt off, which was a little strange considering they hadn’t seemed to care when Shouto changed in front of them. It also struck him that Shouto hadn’t seen anyone with Ando’s body type—that is, neither slim nor muscular—undressed up close in a while. UA had a type, apparently.
Regardless, it was a bit disconcerting to walk into a room with a silent Ando. Shouto was surprised to hear himself talk first. “You like sports?” he asked, referencing the magazine.
“Mm?” Ando looked at him, shifting into a more upright position in their bed. They suddenly looked uncomfortable. “Not really. I mean, they’re fine. My mom’s really into all that—used to leave me at home to watch games with Kirishima’s parents. I mostly just look at the magazines for the hot guys.”
“Can I see?”
Ando’s eyebrows shot up. “Uh, sure, if you wanna.”
Shouto sat on the edge of Ando’s bed and looked over their shoulder at the magazine. There were definitely… men. Some were conventionally attractive, but so were the men in stock photos. Could people really feel sexual attraction toward a stranger in a magazine? That seemed like a stretch.
“You don’t look impressed,” said Ando, giving a half-hearted laugh.
Shouto hooked his hand on the back of his neck as he scanned the open magazine pages again, just in case there was something he missed that would trigger a sexual awakening. He motioned toward the magazine. “Do a lot of people think those men are attractive?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Ando. “Why?”
Shouto dropped his hand into his lap. First when he couldn’t remember his favorite color, then when he found out from Hawks that other people didn’t process colors and numbers in the same way he did, then his trans identity being singled out during group, and now this—a reminder that he didn’t know what it meant to feel something as basic and human as sexual attraction.
He hadn’t felt this other since before he started at UA. He’d known that he had trouble keeping friends for longer than a month, but he’d always thought that was because of his personality deficit and shitty communication skills. Not because he was so fundamentally different from every other human he knew.
It was fucking lonely.
“I think I’m not attracted to boys,” said Shouto.
“Oh,” said Ando. “Well… you like who you like. Girls are attractive, too. I mean... I assume they are, to some people. Like you.”
Shouto went over to his own bed and lay down on his back. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the water stain on a ceiling tile above him.
“I drew a penis-giraffe hybrid on my goal-mapping worksheet in group and had my crayon privileges revoked,” said Ando. “How’d your day go?”
Maybe he should ask Ando for advice about the mealtime situation. “A bunch of Quirkless people are sitting with me in the cafeteria now.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know why. I don’t think they need protection or anything.”
“It’s because they like you, man.”
“No, it’s not,” said Shouto.
“Why not? Lots of people think you’re cool.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Well, I can’t help you if you think that. Was your group helpful at all?”
“No,” said Shouto. “I think they’re repeating themselves at this point.”
Ando reached for the shirt they’d tossed over the shared bedside table. “Yeah, that happens in a short-term inpatient facility. The stay’s more about the community for a lot of the kids.” They slipped an arm into their shirt. “I say that like this is just some shitty summer camp with a kid who keeps shitting in the showers.”
“You know I don’t care if you have your shirt off,” said Shouto.
Ando didn’t respond. Just pulled the shirt over their head, tugged it down, and picked up their magazine again.
Shouto lay down on his own bed. He felt the most restless he’d felt in months, and it took him a bit to figure out why. He hadn’t had any physical exercise since the sports festival. He tried to ignore the itch for a while—he wasn’t sure how unusual it was for someone to do push-ups in a psychiatric hospital—but after about ten minutes of listening to Ando flipping through their sports magazine, Shouto finally caved. “Ando.”
“Yeah?”
“I need to work out now.”
“You need to?”
“I’m jittery.”
“Don’t mind me, then,” said Ando. “Do what you need to. You don’t mind if I platonically appreciate your back muscles while you’re at it, right?”
Shouto quickly got out of bed and changed into a snugger shirt, one better fit for physical activity. “I don’t care what you look at.”
“Well, I was joking,” said Ando, “but now that I have permission, I’m definitely going to watch.”
Shouto got on the floor to do push-ups. He only remembered that his left hand was injured when he put pressure on it. He swore as he yanked it up.
“Ouch,” said Ando. Shouto heard a page flipping. “Guess you won’t be doing push-ups for a while.”
He was going to have to figure out other ways to keep his left side fit while his hand healed. For now, he put his left hand behind his back and continued push-ups using just his right hand.
“Damn, son.” Ando huffed a laugh. “Go easy on the flexing, huh?”
Shouto grunted. “I don’t know what that means.”
“You sure don’t.” Ando went quiet for a while except for the occasional scraping of a magazine page turning. Once Shouto had passed thirty push-ups, they spoke again. “Oh—guess what I’m doing in the morning?”
“What,” said Shouto.
“I’m taking a shower.”
Shouto slumped to the ground completely, dropping his temple into the crook of his arm. This medication was sapping all his energy. “They… turning our water back on?”
“At least briefly. They didn’t tell me anything about you.”
“Do you have to have a supervisor?”
“No,” they said. “I can pretty much start up again whenever since I chose to forfeit showering on my own.”
Shouto had gone through periods of not showering, but he at least liked having the option. As strange as it felt being alone with his naked body, it was worse to smell his own body odor and be reminded that no matter how he built or dressed his body, there were still parts of it he couldn’t fully control. “Why would you forfeit showering?”
“Oh, it’s just that I… my... compulsions.” Ando thumbed up a page, preparing to turn it. “I mean, I’m sure you’ve noticed at least a couple of them by now. There are so many I have to do in the shower that it kinda sends me down a spiral for the rest of the day. I thought giving up showering for a few days might help me unwind a bit, get my thoughts back on track.”
“Did it work?”
Ando’s fingers froze mid-page turn. They were silent for a few seconds, and then they turned back to the previous page.
“Ando?”
Ando looked at him, gave a smile. “I’m just rambling to myself, my dude. You don‘t gotta listen.”
Shouto sat up. “Are people giving you shit?”
“No, no. No. I’m all good. So don’t, uh, go breaking anyone’s foot.”
Oh yeah. Shouto had threatened to do that to some kid not too long ago, hadn’t he? “Did you hear about that?”
“I think everybody did.”
Was that why no one had tried bothering him in the past few days? Well, maybe it was for the best.
“If you were doing it for me, you didn’t need to,” said Ando. “I’m used to that kind of thing.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Shouto told them. “You don’t deserve it.”
“You ever wonder if you’re projecting?”
“What do you mean?”
Ando wetted their lips, shook their head. “I don’t know, I’m tired. I think I’ll go ahead and go to sleep.”
Shouto nodded. “I’ll be quiet.”
“Yeah, you... usually are.” Ando blew air through their mouth as they turned their back to Shouto. “Wish I could figure out how to do that.”
Shouto headed to the restroom to brush his teeth. As he was rinsing, he spotted a small dot of red hidden on the side of the faucet.
Was that blood?
He checked his nose, then his hand. Nothing was bleeding. It was possible that he’d missed something over the last few days and accidentally bled on the counter, but then why was it only that tiny dot? Was it Ando’s blood?
Well. Maybe they were susceptible to nosebleeds.
###
The nurses forgot to give him pain medication for his hand again.
He went to see the nurse on duty on his own this time. He didn’t recognize the nurse, but she seemed to recognize him and was nervous about it. She gave him the pain medication and called the burn center, asking them to send over an employee for a checkup.
While Shouto waited for the burn center employee to arrive, the nurse sat in front of him and started unwinding the bandages on his hand. “We’re really so sorry about all the trouble, Todoroki-kun. You were supposed to take pain meds this morning and at bedtime. The files from the ER must’ve not been transferred correctly. I think there was a… a discrepancy between a couple forms, so some might’ve been thrown out.”
From when Shouto had accidentally given his name as Todoroki Shouto to the lady who’d conducted his entrance interview? “Someone could’ve just asked me about it.”
She looked up. “It was a… bit of a delicate matter…”
“Not really.” Shouto dropped his head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling, mostly just so he wouldn’t have to see his hand. He didn’t have the energy to make his voice anything but deadpan. “No one was being delicate when they cut my shirt open in the hospital parking lot. Questions don’t kill people. Hesitation does, I think. If the paramedics stopped defibrillating because they didn’t know what my chest binder was, I’d be dead now. Which was my goal, but probably there are people like me who still do want to live.”
There was silence from the nurse’s end. She got up and threw the bandages in a biohazard trash can.
Shit… he’d kind of gone off on her, hadn’t he? He hadn’t realized that he’d need to manually filter what he said while he was on this heavy anxiety medication. He was so used to relying on anxiety to keep him from saying impulsive things. He made a note to be more careful while he was on these medications.
Shouto wasn’t great at reading moods in certain environments, but even he could tell that the burn employee who arrived was way too upbeat. He dropped his white box of tools on the nurse’s desk with a loud clatter, popped the lid open. “Let’s finally check out what’s under that bolster, eh? Looks like your stitches have mostly dissolved.”
Shouto didn’t realize how much he didn’t want to see what was under the bolster until the burn center employee started carefully peeling it off. It was yellowed underneath and gnarled, the skin pinching where the stitches had started to fall out. The graft site didn’t look infected, but shit, it didn’t look good. The skin that wasn’t grafted was either red and inflamed or whitish and preparing to slough off. He’d never seen one of his body parts look so much like it didn’t belong to him.
“Should they have cut the whole finger off?” he asked the burn center employee.
The man shook his head. “Nah, bud, this is healing normally.”
“What type of graft is that?”
“Artificial,” said the man. “We’re real proud of our lab-grown, actually, since it’s a pretty recent developme—”
“Not an allograft?”
The man looked a little annoyed at being interrupted. “No, we only use donor skin on large burns.”
So he wasn’t wearing a dead person’s skin on his finger, at least. Though that might’ve been preferable to how his hand looked right now.
It didn’t really hit him that he’d permanently lost a part of his finger until he saw it uncovered. It would perhaps be an even more conspicuous scar than the one on his face.
Hadn’t Touya gotten some pretty deep burn scars before he died? His oldest brother had always seemed so far out of his reach, but now Shouto found himself wondering exactly how alike he and Touya had been.
“Alrighty,” said the man once he was finished clearing away the dried blood and sanitizing the wound, “S’pose I’ll go ahead and wrap this up agai—”
“Yes,” Shouto blurted. “Do that, please.”
###
Shouto saw his mother again a few more times. Several times he’d raised his hand—subtly—to wave at her as he walked past. Now, in the common room during break, she had her reading glasses on to help him with a puzzle (“Cats w/ Top Hats,” as the label on the plastic bag said, though Shouto was almost certainly sure that the cats in question were actually baby goats). She’d brought two cartons of strawberry milk with her. Shouto was almost finished with the second one already.
“I’m a little surprised you didn’t get my severe lactose intolerance,” said Rei. “Especially after Fuyumi and Natsuo got off scot-free. Lucky little shits. Don’t tell them I called them that.”
Shouto bit back a smile. He hadn’t adjusted his mental image of Rei to include swearing yet, and it caught him off guard whenever it happened. “Touya didn’t get it, either?”
“No, he did. Not that you’d have known it from his eating habits. I told him once to make sure he used the soy milk for his tea—he grabbed a liter of the normal milk, drank straight from the carton. Downed nearly all of it in one go. He made sure he was meeting my eyes the entire time, too.”
Shouto had pointedly drank at Endeavor more than once. Why would anyone do it at Rei, though?
“I don’t want you to think ill of your brother,” said Rei, like she’d heard what he was thinking. “I wasn’t the best mother I could’ve been by any means. And Touya was a lot of... moving parts.”
He didn’t know what she meant by a lot of moving parts, but he nodded anyway.
Rei connected a set of edge pieces to the main body of the puzzle. “How are the therapy sessions going, Shouto?”
She technically didn’t need to use his name when she was talking directly to him, but she kept peppering it in here and there. It embarrassed him, but... not in the same way things usually embarrassed him. Not in a way that made him want to disappear. “They’re okay, I think.”
“You think?”
“It’s mostly superficial things.” Which was fine by him—he didn’t especially want to go over his entire trauma history with someone he’d only see a few times. Seemed kind of pointless. “Study tips for ADHD. And stuff.”
Rei looked up with her eyebrows raised. “You have ADHD?”
Jesus... his siblings hadn’t even told Rei about his ADHD diagnosis? At what point did these gaps in information stop flattering him and start turning him into a completely different person?
Rei’s expression tightened. “I didn’t think that ran in the family. I didn’t even realize... I’m very sorry if missed the signs when you were growing up, I just didn’t... see...”
“It’s not genetic,” said Shouto. “I got it a few years after you left, after some concussions from training. Fucked up my vision and memory, too, I think. It was just brain damage. So it didn’t have anything to do with you.”
Shouto had expected Rei to look relieved, but her expression only tightened more. He wondered if she hadn’t known about the brain damage, either. But he didn’t ask.
They worked on the puzzle in silence for several minutes before Rei spoke again. “Have they told you when you’re leaving the hospital?”
“Friday,” he said.
“Tomorrow? In the morning, or...?”
He nodded.
“I thought you might be here a little longer.” She was quiet for a moment before she cleared her throat and spoke again. “Well, that’s... I’m glad. I’m sure you’re eager to get back to your own bed. You’re always... welcome to come see me. Of course.”
Maybe she wanted for Shouto to say he’d come visit her. Pinky promise it. He probably should’ve been saying something along those lines right now.
But he didn’t know if he’d be around to visit her in the future—not even because of suicide or death of any manner, he just didn’t know what collaborating with League members to take down Endeavor would mean for him. If he and the Villains managed to take Endeavor out of the picture for good, Shouto wouldn’t have to visit her in the hospital at all.
She’d be back home.
Shouto wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to call that house home—or to call any place home, considering he wasn’t even at home in his own body—but Rei at least deserved a place to belong. She’d already lived in this liminal space for nearly a decade.
“What’s wrong?”
Shouto’s head jerked up at Rei’s voice. He hadn’t spaced out too hard, had he? “Nothing. What do you mean?”
“You...” She tilted her head. “I’m not sure. You get a strange look in your eyes when I’m talking to you sometimes.”
He couldn’t be that transparent, could he? Maybe Rei had a gift similar to Deku’s uncanny observational skills, except that she specialized in body language and expressions. Didn’t Rei’s skill have a name? Emotional intelligence? He only remembered the term because a private tutor once told him that he lacked it. “That’s—I just do that,” he said. “Um. Randomly.”
“Is something going on that you want to tell me about?”
“No,” said Shouto, because there wasn't.
“So something you don’t want to tell me about?”
How the fuck did she do that?
Rei started, “I don’t mean to—”
“Some things are secret,” Shouto blurted. “I don’t think I can...”
“Of course. Of course. That’s—”
“At least not now. Because things are still—”
“Right,” said Rei. “You don’t have to—”
“I just mean that I want to figure out things for myself first.”
...Which was a little bit of a lie. He wasn’t going to figure out his trauma any more than he already had. It happened and it was bad—what was there left to figure out? As for everything with the League of Villains...if Shouto had his way, he’d never have to talk to her about that. If Shouto was going to go through a whole-ass Villain arc, he was at least going to make sure that Rei stayed none the wiser.
Rei waited for a moment. When Shouto didn’t try to speak again, she went ahead. “You don’t have any obligation to tell me things you don’t want to. I do hope you’ll talk to someone, though. It’s not healthy to keep so many heavy secrets to yourself. You...” She glanced around the room. “...probably know that by now. You have people to talk to about it?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“People who are friends?”
Sudden unease pinched Shouto’s gut. Friends. He thought about what Deku had done to Toga, about what Shouto himself had done to Bakugou, about how maybe neither he nor Deku were fit to be friends with anybody.
Which sounded melodramatic even in his head, but honestly—if someone told Shouto that a potential friend of his was going to treat him the way Shouto treated Bakugou before and during the sports festival, he’d make sure to stay the fuck away from that person.
“Shouto?” said Rei.
He pushed his chair back a little. “I think I need... before my next group. I wanted to spend—I need some time. I think. By myself.”
Rei’s chest deflated a little. “Oh.”
He got up, fumbling. He’d left their last meeting like this, too—abruptly, no explanation. No real one, anyway. “I’m not good at this,” he told her.
“At what?”
She knew what. She’d witnessed him trying to hold a conversation, hadn’t she? He pushed his chair in with his foot, and it squawked painfully against the tile. “I think maybe I won’t get much better at it. I can’t really... cry, or understand what I’m feeling sometimes, if it’s bad feelings or if it’s... less bad, or if I’m not having any feelings at all. I’m not good at talking about it. But thank you for... for not...”
He wanted to thank her for not treating him like most other adults in his life had, for sitting there while he worked through his half-baked sentences instead of getting frustrated, but maybe it was best he not bring up bad experiences from his past again. Rei didn’t seem to enjoy hearing about those.
The tightness in Rei’s face softened. “You’ll take care of yourself, won’t you?”
Shouto dropped his eyes to the ground. There was a crushed crayon near his foot. Had he been the one to step on it, or had someone else? “I don’t know.”
“Are you sure you’re okay to leave, then?”
“I’m not going to die yet,” said Shouto. “I have things to do.”
“‘Things’?”
“I need to take care of some people.”
“Your siblings?” she asked.
Huh? Oh, yeah, them too. He’d been thinking more in terms of taking care of Endeavor. Maybe he should leave dark double meanings to the professional Villains for now—delivery didn’t mean much when the words were coming from an anxiety-riddled fifteen-year-old. “Just... other people.”
“That’s a start.”
Yeah, guess it was.
But a start of what?
###
On his last night before leaving, Shouto didn’t bother staying in the common room until lights-out. They couldn’t threaten to keep him longer now that all the arrangements had been made. At least, he hoped they couldn’t.
So Shouto returned to his dorm room early. Might as well get some sleep.
In his dorm room, though, Ando was lying upside-down on their side in their bed, head tucked into the crook of their arm so Shouto couldn’t see their face. Their breaths seemed jerky, like each one was painful.
Terror shot up Shouto’s spine. Had someone managed to make it past Shouto to hurt Ando? Had Ando hurt themself? Either way, Shouto would be partially responsible, and he didn’t think he could stand to have anyone else’s blood on his—
Ando jolted upright before Shouto could even finish his thought. They were biting the wrong end of a toothbrush, and it stuck out of their mouth in the same way a bird’s feathers flared when it got spooked.
And... their face was wet.
Shouto wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that Ando wasn’t suffering from a stab wound or to be horrified by this recent development.
“Oh—hey, hey.” Ando hurried to wipe their face with the collar of their shirt. “Shit. Sorry. ’Bout the crying. I know it’s kinda awkward to… walk in on.”
Shouto remained standing where he was. He hadn’t caused this, had he? Was he supposed to leave or stay in the room? Should he ask?
Ando got up and walked past Shouto to the sink, letting the bathroom door stay open. They started washing their face. Ran a little water through their hair, squeezed their reddened eyes shut as it dripped on their face. They rinsed out their mouth and spat, too, and Shouto didn’t think he imagined the red tint of Ando’s spit. Ando repeated the action, and the spit was definitely red that time.
Shouto didn’t realize how long he’d been standing there watching until Ando squinted at the mirror and asked— “Do you need in here or something?”
“N-no,” said Shouto. “I was… I don’t know if you want me to go away.”
Ando patted their face dry with a towel, muffling their voice. “It’s your room, too.”
Shouto hesitated. He didn’t want to keep pestering Ando until they lashed out, but Shouto did need more clarification. “You have to tell me,” he said. “I’m not good at guessing what people want.”
“You can…” Ando turned away from Shouto before lowering the towel. “You can stay. Please. Feels like I’m losing my goddamn mind.”
Shouto went back to sit on his own bed. He kept his hands folded between his legs like a schoolboy waiting outside the principal’s office. When Ando didn’t return for another couple minutes, Shouto let himself climb all the way on his bed. He pulled his legs close to his chest, locked his hands together in front of them.
God, this was awkward. He hoped Ando didn’t expect him to say anything comforting when they came out of the restroom.
Finally, Ando emerged. Their face was dry except for the damp hair at their hairline. They didn’t look at Shouto, just wordlessly got in bed and under their covers.
“Sorry,” they said.
Shouto wanted to say that it was okay, but the words stuck in his throat. He wished he’d brought something to do or look at, like the magazines Ando had brought with them. He doubted he’d be able to fall asleep with Ando being like... that.
What was it like, to be someone who could cry? That sounded nice. Not crying in front of other people, because that would be fucking shitty and embarrassing, but...
“You can talk,” said Shouto.
Ando glanced at him. “What?”
Ach. He was going against his better judgements; you weren’t supposed to disturb someone experiencing heightened emotions. You were supposed to leave them alone so they wouldn’t lash out at you.
“You can talk about it,” Shouto told Ando. “If you want.”
Ando rolled onto their back, folded their arms across their chest. “That’s nice of you,” said Ando. “I really wasn’t... I didn’t intend for you to walk in on that. I was just freaking out about my... um, my toothbrush. My teeth.”
“You were bleeding,” said Shouto. “From your mouth.”
“Yeah, my gums are bleeding a little bit all the time. Stings to talk on most days.” Ando flapped a dismissive hand through the air once. “Kinda funny with how much I talk, huh? Gotta wonder why I don’t just keep my mouth closed.”
“It’s from brushing your teeth?” Shouto asked.
“Yeah, it... yeah.”
“Do you really do it for half an hour every day?”
“Did I tell you that?” Ando asked. “Twice daily, actually.”
“Oh.” Shouto hesitated before asking another question. “You have a thing about teeth?”
“Dude, no, look—here's the thing.” Ando chopped a hand in Shouto’s direction. “I wouldn’t actually give a shit if my teeth rotted out of my skull. I almost wish they would, except that it probably wouldn’t even affect my routine. I’d just brush all the meat off my gums. It just feels like... whenever I don’t do a ritual, everything in the universe is off balance, and it won’t balance out again until either I do the ritual or something really bad happens.”
Shouto didn’t know the exact feeling, but he understood the paranoia behind it. That time on the Wednesday of the murder that he’d blockaded his door to keep himself from hurting Bakugou, those nights he’d stayed up late to make sure he didn’t accidentally kill Fuyumi in his sleep.
Ando kept speaking. “It just… it gets fucking exhausting, man. Getting ready for school every day feels like walking through a landmine. It’s been really bad over the last month, like… I don’t know, taking an hour to figure out how to get out of bed in a way that feels safe. And—I don’t even know if this is a real term—thought rituals? Like I can’t let myself think certain thoughts or words or I’ll have to stop what I’m doing and perform some sort of ritual to counteract it so nothing bad will happen.” Ando shook their hands in the air above their head. “The thing is, I know it’s not logical. I know it’s fucking up my relationships and my grades and my eating schedule and literally everything. But just knowing that isn’t gonna immediately rearrange all my neural pathways.”
Shouto understood that feeling all too well. “Did you try to kill yourself?”
"No. Well—I didn't go far enough to get me placed in the suicide counseling group, anyway. I started doing research for it, though. Got on some dark websites, freaked myself out, went and talked to my parents about how I was feeling. Voilà—” They motioned out toward the room. “—hospital.”
Ando had talked to their parents about possibly feeling suicidal? Shouto had only barely tried talking to Fuyumi, and the idea of bringing Endeavor into the ordeal… well, that was laughable.
“Also, I’m like... really, unreasonably worried about my septum piercing getting infected,” said Ando. “I keep getting piercings right before my breakdowns. That probably means something, right? Like an omen?”
Shouto shrugged.
Ando sighed. “Wish I’d thought to bring my saline solution. My family lives an hour away from here, so I don’t wanna ask my mom or dad to bring it.”
“I can get my sister to bring some,” said Shouto.
“Oh. Uh—” Ando looked at him, their jaw loose. “That’s really nice, dude, but I’d feel bad.”
“Do the nurses not have saline solution?”
“Well, they said they’d bring me some when I asked back on Saturday.” Ando flashed a thumbs-up. “And then they never did.”
Shouto pulled off his socks and got under his blanket. He wasn’t used to hearing other people talk openly about their mental health issues. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be embarrassed. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal for people outside of Pro Hero circles—?
No, that still didn’t make sense. Wasn’t like he saw anyone talking about it in movies and shit. Admittedly, the only movies he really watched were with Fuyumi...
“You haven’t talked much,” said Ando. “You’re leaving in the morning. You probably won’t ever see me again. If there’s anything you wanna get off your chest and not have to face consequences for, now’s your chance.”
God, but there were way too many things he needed to get off his chest. That he wasn’t actually okay after watching a murder last Wednesday, that he was afraid of going crazy and hurting someone he cared about, that he had no idea what was going to happen to him and his siblings after he left the hospital…
“Are you thinking or is this an ‘I’m done talking’ silence?” asked Ando.
“I feel like shit,” said Shouto.
Ando coughed. “Right, sorry. I’ll let you sleep.”
“No, that’s the thing I’m telling you,” said Shouto. “I feel like shit.”
Ando hesitated. “Was I… not supposed to already know that?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “I usually don’t tell anybody.”
“That you feel like shit?”
“Yes.”
“Gotcha,” said Ando. “Well. I’m glad you told me.”
###
In the morning, Shouto felt Ando watching him as he packed. He hoped it wasn’t because he was fumbling around with the activity like he’d never packed a full bag for himself in his life, which... might’ve been true, considering he’d always had either a maid or his sister do it for him. Not that he’d gone many places in his lifetime that required more than a couple days' worth of supplies.
“You seem kinda nervous,” said Ando.
“You’re watching me,” Shouto said.
“Oh, c’mon. I make you nervous?”
“Well—”
“You nervous to go back home? Or to school?”
Shouto dropped a pair of shorts in his duffel bag without folding them. “I don’t know if I’ll get to go back to school.”
“What do you mean? Like, expulsion?”
“No, I can’t see UA expelling me for anything I’ve done,” said Shouto. “Wouldn’t be good for their reputation to expel Endeavor’s kid. I just meant Endeavor, with him being an ass.”
Ando narrowed their eyes. “But he’s supportive of you wanting to be a Hero, isn’t he?”
“I had to fight to go to UA. Endeavor wanted to keep me at home with private tutors. I disrespected him on national television, so it’s likely that he’ll take me out.”
“Private tutors?” Ando asked. “That sounds fancy. What, did it suck or something?”
“I frustrated my tutors. They all thought I was fucking stupid. Maybe they think that at UA too, but at least they don’t say it.”
“Geez. Sorry. Makes sense that you’d be nervous about that, I guess.”
“I’m not nervous about that,” said Shouto. “I’m nervous because you’re watching me.”
Ando huffed a laugh. “I’m just... like, I’m looking at you and thinking, wow, I know a cool famous person.”
Shouto started to take off Natsuo’s jacket to shove in the duffel bag, then decided to keep it on. He pulled it back over his shoulders. “I’m not famous,” he told Ando.
“After the whole middle-finger thing at the sports festival? I’d bet a couple thousand yen that you already have a cult following.”
“I don’t think so,” said Shouto.
“No?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“All right,” said Ando, and they picked up a magazine to read in place of watching Shouto pack.
###
Shouto sat in the waiting area outside the nurse’s office with his duffel bag while the technicians got his forms ready. As he understood it, he was getting a fuck ton of prescriptions and even more recommendations for therapists in his area. He still felt as jittery as he had this morning, so maybe it hadn’t been Ando watching him that’d made him nervous. He’d been here in the hospital for what felt like forever. And now he was just supposed to go back to his responsibilities like nothing had happened?
Well—not nothing. There was going to be some form of punishment from Endeavor waiting for him.
A few people stopped to say goodbye to him—the girl with the thermal blanket, the anger management group leader Mari, some older kid who’d sat with him at lunch. Shouto wasn’t sure why he’d been expecting Toga to pass through, but she didn’t. Was she going to be okay here? Was he supposed to care about her being okay, or was that strange?
“Couple more minutes,” said a tech, passing by him into the hall.
He wished he had his phone to distract him from the wait. Then again… shit. How many messages was he going to have to catch up on?
Ando’s voice came from beside Shouto—jerky, hesitant. “Uh. Hey. Todoroki.”
Shouto looked up.
Ando fished a crumpled piece of paper from their pocket. It looked like it’d been torn off a larger sheet, and Shouto could see traces of crayon writing between the creases. Ando tried to smooth it against their thigh. “Sorry, this might be out-of-pocket, but—well, literally, it’s coming out of my pocket, but I meant that—I have my number here if you want it. Again, not coming on to you, it’s more like—if you wanted to hang out sometime? Or just talk, like, as friends. Or text. No pressure, of course, because I know some people don’t want to talk to people they were in the hospital with. Understandable. I won’t bother you past this. But here’s my number, so...” They folded the paper and handed it to Shouto. It was warm from the friction of Ando rubbing it flat. “Call me, maybe.”
Shouto took the paper. He unfolded it for some reason—as if he’d remember literally any of those clumsy, blocky crayon numbers later—and then he folded it back and put it in the pocket of Natsuo’s jacket.
“That was a joke,” said Ando.
Shouto raised his head, confused. “What part?”
“The last sentence, it... ‘Call Me Maybe'?”
Shouto stared.
Ando looked desperate. “Carly Rae Jepsen?”
“Is he someone in a movie?”
“My god,” said Ando. “Look, I’ll just... yeah. I’m just gonna—Bye.” They reached out to give Shouto’s shoulder an awkward pat. “Have a nice life.”
“Todoroki?” called a tech. “Your ride’s here.”
Shouto struggled for well-wishing words to return to Ando. But he couldn’t find any, so he just gave a small smile.
Ando looked startled.
“Todoroki?” the tech said again.
Shouto picked up his duffel bag and followed the tech into the waiting room. Natsuo stood when Shouto entered. He was holding a stack of what must’ve been Shouto’s release papers. The tech disappeared back into the hallway, leaving Shouto and Natsuo alone.
Natsuo smiled. “Glad to be out?”
In response, Shouto asked, “Did you bring the saline I called you about?”
“Gave it to the receptionist already.”
“Okay.” Shouto looked around. “Is this a different waiting room from when I first got here?”
“It’s the same one,” Natsuo said. “Does it look different?”
“I don’t know. All I remember from the first time is the door closing really loud.”
Natsuo tilted his head in a sideways nod as they headed toward the exit. “To be fair, you were high as fuck.”
“’Bout to be again,” said Shouto. “Said they didn’t want me to panic while changing environments, so I took a shit ton of anxiety meds about ten minutes ago.”
“Oh. Joy.”
They made it to the car. Shouto rolled his window down halfway as Natsuo maneuvered out of the large hospital parking lot. It had been a full week since he’d been outside, and he’d missed breathing air that didn’t taste like it had gone stale a decade ago.
“I brought your phone,” said Natsuo, nodding to the backseat where they’d placed the rest of Shouto’s belongings. “Do you want it now?”
He was almost scared to get his phone back.
Scared there would be a hundred messages asking where the hell he was and wondering why he wasn’t responding.
Scared there wouldn’t be any.
“I’ll wait,” he said. At least until the anxiety meds kicked in.
Natsuo nodded, adjusted his hands on the wheel. “Who was the saline for?”
“My friend,” Shouto said.
“You made a friend? Who?”
“A person in the hospital.”
“Well, yeah, I assumed that they were in the hospital. I meant, like…” Natsuo hesitated, then released a breath. “Never mind. Glad you made a friend. Did you decide what to do about the police situation? Like, if you’re going to do the interview.”
Shouto shrugged, watching a mother holding her toddler daughter’s hand as she tottered along the sidewalk outside the hospital. He hadn’t dedicated much time to thinking about whether he should do the interview. What good had the police ever done him or Deku? “Don’t think I’d be much use. Probably Bakugou already told them everything they need to know.”
“Bakugou?” Natsuo asked. “He was there?”
“Mm.”
“Did he do the crime?”
Shouto laughed. “No, he… no. He’s impulsive and doesn’t understand how to regulate his emotions, but he’s not rebellious.”
“Really? Sounds like it’d be tough for you two to be friends.”
It was tough for Shouto to be friends with anybody. “I guess we’re not anymore.”
“After the…?”
“After the sports festival, yeah.”
They merged onto the highway. When the wind started popping from the pressure, Shouto rolled his window up. The car went quiet.
A few minutes had passed when Natsuo spoke again. “I wasn’t sure if I should ask, but… there’s been a lot of weird stuff happening around here lately. Y’know, that bridge bombing, the thing with Yumi’s student and her dad, the Villain attack at your school, the Hero Killer and all that.”
Hero Killer? Was that a person? A big-name Villain? Shouto had never heard of them before. “I guess.”
“Do you know anything about all that? More than other people know?”
Shouto’s heart stuttered. He jerked his head toward Natsuo, who was keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road.
How…? What did Natsuo know? Was he really that perceptive?
Natsuo afforded a second-long glance at Shouto before returning his focus to the road. He gave a brief, breathy laugh. “Sorry, I’m just… I’m just being paranoid. Keep thinking about Touya. I never really figured out what went wrong there, or if I did something to make him feel like he… needed to… I don’t know. I guess all this has got me searching for potential threats at ridiculous angles.”
Natsuo’s hypervigilance could make problems for Shouto down the road, or at least complicate things. “I think you don’t need to do that. I’m going to handle things.”
“Yeah, that’s… what I’m afraid of, buddy.”
Shouto wasn’t entirely sure what Natsuo meant, but the heavy medications he’d taken before leaving the hospital had started working, so he didn’t dwell on it. He slouched into his seat and leaned his head against the shoulder strap of his seatbelt. Closed his eyes.
For now—rest.
Notes:
Wow, this chapter took a long time to put together. Haha. My bad.
Please check out my flash creative nonfiction (linked at the end of this chapter) published by CRAFT. I'm very proud of this piece! Even got paid real human money for it (with which I immediately bought a box of cool rocks from Bulgaria, as any normal human person would). It's about my time spent at a psychiatric hospital, so you can see where I got some of the inspiration for this fic from.
-Max
Follow me on Insta: @max_says_no
Follow me on Twitter: @hyperfixeaten
Chapter 46: Shouto Rendezvous with a Miserably Sober Villain
Summary:
Home at last! Shouto says some things that Deeply Concern Natsuo, has a long-awaited conversation with Fuyumi, and goes on a secret jog at 1 in the morning.
Notes:
CW (***MINOR SPOILERS***): sexual references, difficult coming-out; DISCUSSION OF: suicide attempts, murder, some violence/gore (the same stuff from the murder scene: eye injury, strangulation; also, some creative imagery provided by a Villain)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He must’ve fallen asleep on the way home. When he came to, it was because Natsuo was tapping his shoulder. “We’re home,” said Natsuo.
Shouto looked out the window. It was strange to see his house again—the last time he’d seen it was coming home from the sports festival. He hadn’t expected to leave his house alive that day. Yet here he was.
He sighed. All that drama, and for what?
Natsuo unbuckled Shouto’s seatbelt before opening the driver’s door and getting out of the car. “Don’t act so disappointed. Yumi told me she’s making soba tonight. That’s probably better than whatever you had at the hospital, right?”
True. Shouto grabbed his duffel bag from the backseat and disembarked through the driver’s side. When his feet hit the ground, he was surprised to learn that his sense of balance had abandoned him. He stumbled to the side.
Natsuo put out an arm to catch him. “Damn, are you that tired? Or is it the meds?”
“Ngk,” said Shouto.
Natsuo took Shouto’s things in one arm and helped him to the door with the other. When they got inside, Shouto pushed himself off Natsuo and started to head to his room.
“Yo,” said Natsuo, dropping Shouto’s duffel bag on the dining room table, “uh, where you headed?”
“My room,” said Shouto.
“No, you’re not,” said Natsuo. “You gotta stay out here, pal.”
Shouto stopped, turned to face Natsuo. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Why do you think I’m here, Shiyo? To watch tennis on a bigger television?” Natsuo opened the refrigerator to put the leftovers in. Then his head jerked up. “Damn it—Shouto, sorry.”
It was dizzying to hear his name inside his house—a heady rush of adrenaline. He tried to ignore it. Natsuo was trying to be casual about the whole name and pronoun change, so the least Shouto could do was try to mirror that. Casual. This was fine.
Unfortunately, the disappointment of losing his privacy didn’t cancel out the buzz of energy, but added to it, creating a nauseous mixture. Like mixing beef into ice cream. God, he needed something to do with his hands.
“I want to take a shower,” said Shouto. “The one time they let me take a shower at the hospital, they didn’t let me shower for longer than five fucking minutes.”
“They’re not going to here, either.” Natsuo closed the refrigerator door. “I’ll wait outside your bathroom if you want to take one.”
“Oh my god,” said Shouto. “I’m not—fuck. Fine. Are you going to let me take a nap?”
“Sure thing. On the couch.”
Shouto stared at Natsuo. When Natsuo didn’t relent, Shouto looked away, his breath snapping out of his chest. “God, I want to fucking die.”
“Aaaand that’s why you’re sleeping on the couch.” Natsuo patted Shouto’s shoulder as he walked past him. “Is your weighted blanket on your bed? I’ll grab it.”
“It’s in the hall closet,” said Shouto.
“What, are you not using it anymore? Fuyumi said you liked it.”
“Endeavor took it away.”
Natsuo looked back at him. “He—you serious? That’s a pretty ballsy move for an eyeball-bearing man who lives in close proximity to a drawer full of spoons.”
The words triggered a memory—Dabi in the coffee shop, commenting on the barista’s “flammable eyelashes.” And, in turn, Deku—and Deku’s thumb pushing into that man’s eye—
He did not want to think about that.
Natsuo raised an eyebrow. “What, too far?”
“Just… eyes,” said Shouto. He walked to the fridge and opened it. Might as well get a snack if he wasn’t going to be allowed back in his room. “Maybe don’t talk about them for a while.”
“Oh. Sorry. Make you squeamish?”
“I saw somebody’s eye get poked out last week. God, Fuyumi gets a lot of organic shit.” Shouto picked up a pack of yoghurt-covered blueberries and turned, holding it up. “Have you tried…? Do these have an internally consistent texture?”
Natsuo blinked at him, lips parting. Said, “You what?”
“The texture. Within the package. I’m just asking because I don’t like it when some are soft and some aren’t.”
Natsuo shook his head. “No, the—the thing you saw. Was that an accident?”
Shouto grabbed a juice pack to go with the blueberries before closing the fridge. Natsuo wasn’t usually pushy about Shouto’s life away from home, so Shouto hadn’t expected a follow-up question. “No. It wasn’t an Endeavor thing, though.”
“What happened to the person?”
“He died. Not from the eye thing.” Shouto turned. Gave a sharp laugh at Natsuo’s face. “Natsuo, it’s fine. I already told my teacher, so there’s nothing left to sort out.”
“Shouto,” said Natsuo. “You watched somebody get killed last week?”
Aizawa had acted shocked, too. Shouto knew watching someone die was supposed to be bad, but… it wasn’t really bad, right? It seemed more medium-bad. “It’s okay.”
“It literally is not,” said Natsuo.
“It wasn’t bad. Other than the eye.” Shouto opened the blueberry package. “There wasn’t very much blood.”
Natsuo’s hand searched the air for a moment before it found the back of a chair. “So… what, a gun, or…?”
“No, it…” He inspected a blueberry before putting it in his mouth. Kind of waxy. “I can’t remember the name. The—it looks like a cheese cutter. The wire thing?”
“A… garrote?”
“Yeah. Just kind of…” He made a looping motion with his hands—careful not to spill the blueberries—and then yanked them back in imitation of what Deku had done. “…like that. And held him there for a little bit until he died.”
Natsuo sat. Settled his folded hands atop the table.
Shouto wasn’t sure what else Natsuo wanted from him. “Do you want blueberries?”
“No, I… no. When did that…? When was this?”
Shouto ate another couple blueberries. Waxy, yes, but quite homogenous. Nice. “A couple days before the sports festival.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“I just did.”
“I mean what… I mean the context. Didn’t something happen with you and that blond—what’s that fucker’s name. Bakugou? Last Wednesday. Was that the same day?”
“Bakugou and I saw it,” said Shouto. “But he didn’t see the whole thing. I had to hold him down so he wouldn’t do anything stupid and get himself killed. That’s why he’s mad at me now. But I didn’t want him to die.” An uneasiness passed over Shouto, and he paused. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be telling you all this.”
“Why?”
“I don’t remember. Just a bad feeling.”
“Is someone threatening you?” Natsuo asked.
Shouto thought. “No, I don’t think so. Besides Endeavor.”
“What’s Endeavor doing?”
“Just… stuff, I don’t know. The normal Endeavor things that Endeavor does.”
Natsuo shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “Does Fuyumi know?”
“No.” Shouto poked the straw into the juice pack. “Don’t tell her.”
“Shouto, that… you gotta tell people about shit like that. She wouldn’t be mad.”
“I know. But she gets anxious. I already gutted her teen years and early adulthood. She doesn’t deserve all my shit.”
Natsuo was silent for a moment. “Have you told her you feel like that?”
“What, like a burden? Why? So she can wear herself out trying to prove I’m not?” Shouto took a sip from his juice pack. Walked past Natsuo into the living room. “I know she’s been avoiding me. That’s fine. I’m an asshole, I’m scary, whatever. She shouldn’t have to force herself to be around me. I’m not going to guilt her into it if I can help it.”
“That’s not—that’s not true,” said Natsuo. “She’s not—”
“Natsuo, save it. It’s fine.” Shouto flopped down on the couch. He tried to find a position where the leather wasn’t touching too much bare skin. It kept sticking to him. “I hate this couch.”
“Get up,” said Natsuo. He came into the living room. “I’ll put a blanket down. Hall closet, right?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
Natsuo disappeared into the hall. Moments later, Shouto heard a doorknob rattling and a muttered, “Goddammit.”
“What?” Shouto called.
“It’s locked.”
Endeavor must’ve found out about the last time Shouto used the weighted blanket, back when he’d been freaking out over hearing Rei’s voice on the phone. Shouto must’ve put it back on the wrong shelf. Folded it differently or something. The housekeeper came once a week—Endeavor must’ve asked them to install a lock.
Fucking prick.
Still holding his juice pack, Shouto got up and went into the hall. He tested the doorknob for himself. Then to Natsuo— “Step back.”
Natsuo obeyed. “You gonna pick the lock or something?”
“Or something.” Shouto took a step backward, then raised his foot and rammed it into the door just shy of the doorknob. The doorframe splintered, and the door slammed back into the shelf behind it with a loud whack.
“Oh,” said Natsuo. “You—Okay.”
Shouto tried to pull the door back out—it was supposed to open outward—but the door had bent, too, and its new shape refused to pass through the doorframe. He took a sip from his juice pack before handing it to Natsuo.
Natsuo took it. Shouto pushed the door back in and squeezed inside the closet.
“Uh, you—you need light?” asked Natsuo from outside.
“No, I’m good.” Shouto felt around until he found the blankets he wanted. “You think he keeps his lesbian furry porn in here?”
“Wow,” said Natsuo. “You sure your quirk isn’t making people’s ears bleed?”
Shouto couldn’t fit back through the door with blankets in hand, so he reached around and poked the first blanket through the crack. He heard a splinter of wood break from the doorframe and fall to the floor. “Natsuo.”
“I got ’em,” said Natsuo.
The first blanket disappeared. Shouto shoved the second—heavier—one through, then squeezed back out.
Natsuo gave him a strange look. “You kick doors in often?”
Shouto took back his juice pack. “I wanted the blanket.”
They went back to the living room, where Natsuo helped Shouto put the thinner blanket over the leather couch. Shouto finished his juice pack as Natsuo sat down on the adjacent recliner. Then Shouto heaved the weighted blanket over his head and curled up beneath it.
“You’re gonna suffocate under that,” said Natsuo.
Shouto’s voice was too loud in the tiny cavern surrounding him. “I hope so.”
Even under the blanket, Shouto could hear Natsuo sigh. “You want the tv on?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Shouto said. He could sleep through the apocalypse right now.
###
Shouto awoke to the sound of Fuyumi moving around in the kitchen. He sat up, the leather of the couch creaking beneath him.
Footsteps came from the kitchen, and Fuyumi appeared in the living room entryway. “Shichan…? You are up. Did I wake you?”
Had she heard the couch squeaking from the kitchen? You had to be listening hard to hear that. “Yes.”
“Oh… I was trying not to. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Natsuo’s making up an online exam at the public library,” she said. “I put your soba in the fridge. Do you want it now?”
“No. That’s okay.”
Fuyumi came into the living room. She sat beside Shouto on the couch and hugged him from the side. The embrace grew tighter gradually, like Fuyumi was slowly remembering what it meant to give him a casual hug.
She spoke over his shoulder. “I kept going back to your room,” she said. “To call you for dinner. And you kept not being there.”
“I was at the hospital,” he said, stupidly.
“Yeah. I’m…” He felt her chest shudder as she exhaled. “I’m glad you were somewhere. At least. I’m glad you… you’re home. Even if you did kick in the door of our hallway closet.”
Shouto looked in the direction indicated. All he could see from this angle were a few splinters of wood on the floor. Did he do that? Well, he’d done worse.
Fuyumi let him go. “Red’s Ocean?” she asked.
Shouto looked at the tv screen. Red’s Ocean was playing on mute with the subtitles on. Natsuo must’ve turned it on while he was asleep.
“I’m glad you’re watching it again,” she said. “It was so fun seeing you get all excited. I wasn’t sure if you’d lost interest.”
“I didn’t,” said Shouto.
“Are you feeling better?”
He didn’t feel much like talking right now. “I think a little.”
“Still bad, though?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “Some.”
She squeezed him. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He was quiet as he considered.
“Shiyo?”
“It’s okay,” he said.
“We were going to talk after the sports festival,” she said. “I’d still like to do that if you’re feeling up to it.”
He was not feeling up to it. He didn’t think he’d ever feel up to it.
“I know I haven’t… in the past, you know,” said Fuyumi. “I haven’t always listened. I was trying to figure out why you didn’t come to me for help, and then I remembered that… about all those times you tried telling me something was wrong. And all the signs. With you freaking out at the banquet and the… God, the whole USJ Villain attack and you acting like you’d just brushed the whole thing off. I don’t know what I was thinking, that something like that wouldn’t bother you—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Shouto. He’d been hoping the conversation wouldn’t turn this direction.
“—and that time you mentioned wanting medication. And the Wednesday before the sports festival when you were drunk—you lay down on the bathroom floor and literally told me you were going to die there.”
Had he said that? He couldn’t remember. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” she said. “I should’ve listened. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it—”
“You have trauma, too,” said Shouto. “It’s shitty that I got dumped on you when you were just a kid. You didn’t ask for that.”
Fuyumi spoke quickly. “I never minded taking care of you, Shichan—you know that. I love you. I’m—”
“Probably you were focused on survival for a long time,” he said. “I made it harder for you. I remember sometimes you tried to hide me in the closet. And you kept—you kept saying to wait. To just wait and keep quiet, and it would go away. You said that over and over.”
Fuyumi’s sigh brushed Shouto’s cheek.
“And it didn’t,” she said.
“It never did,” said Shouto. “It’s never going to. But I think maybe you’re still thinking that waiting and keeping quiet is going to solve everything.”
Fuyumi hesitated. “You kept… scaring me. With you doing things like running off during training and leaving during the middle of the banquet and… wearing the boys’ uniform and bringing friends home, things like that. Because I knew Dad was going to get mad about it, and that would undo any of the progress we made toward getting you safe.”
“We weren’t making any progress.”
“I know. I know. I just thought…”
Fuyumi’s voice drained off. They watched the show for a few minutes. When she spoke again, it was quiet.
“What were you going to talk to me about after the sports festival?” she asked.
“I think you know,” said Shouto.
She hesitated. Exhaled. “I… think I do, too.”
Slowly, Fuyumi shifted away from Shouto. Pulled her arms back toward herself and set her hands in her lap.
“When?” she asked.
“For a while,” said Shouto. “Since I was eight or nine. I only started to understand it a year ago.”
She kept her eyes on the tv.
Shouto’s stomach twisted. He really, really hadn’t wanted this to go badly. “I… ignored it for as long as I could.”
Fuyumi licked her lips.
Shouto’s voice came out small. “I’m sorry.”
She made a quiet noise like a muted throat-clearing. “So your friends at school, they… call you something else?”
Had she not heard the name Shouto on the news? Or was she just afraid to say it? “Yes.”
“So they all… they all…?”
“I’m a boy there.”
Fuyumi gave a small, contained nod as she turned her head slightly away from him. She gave his wrist a light squeeze and stood. “I’m—um—I’ll be right back.”
She walked into the kitchen. The metallic drum of water against the steel sink was usually followed shortly by the clatter of dishes, but now, the water kept drumming without interference.
What was she doing?
Shouto waited for a while, and when she didn’t come back, he went to the kitchen. He stopped in the entryway. Fuyumi was leaning over the sink, elbows turned white where they precariously supported her body weight. She had one hand pressed tightly over her mouth. Her eyes were squeezed closed.
Shouto’s heart dropped deep, deep into his gut.
“Fuyumi,” he said.
Her chest deflated as she exhaled through her nose. She didn’t move otherwise.
A knot formed in his throat. He said, a little louder— “Fuyumi.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She dragged her hand down, briefly cupping her chin before she let her hand drop. She stayed hunched over the sink, blinking at the faucet. When she spoke again, her voice was unsteady and strange, like she was some stranger trying to do a Fuyumi impression. “I know it… it’s not your fault. But I start thinking about Touya isolating himself from us, and—and how that progressed, and what happened to him. It scares me so much.”
Shouto’s chest tightened painfully. This conversation felt wrong. Disorienting. “I’m… not dead. Or dying. It’s not a disease.”
“Just… with all you have going on, I was… I was hoping it wouldn’t be… wouldn’t be that.” She bit her lips, face tightening like she was trying to trap some other emotion under it. “I mean, I… knew it was. But I was… shit, Shichan.” She finally looked at him, the tension in her face melting into desperation. “You know how horrible society is toward people like that, don’t you?”
The knot in his throat was nearly suffocating. He only nodded.
“I’m not saying you can’t… do that. Or be that. I’m just… I’m thinking about what could happen if Dad finds out, and the media being invasive, and all the bad people out there who might…” A tear slipped down her cheek. She swiped it away with a quick, jerky motion. “Sorry. I’m sorry. This isn’t fair to you.”
Helplessness weighed heavy in Shouto’s chest. If the thing that was making Fuyumi cry were standing between them right now, he would’ve ripped its throat out with his bare hands.
But that thing was Shouto.
And all Shouto could do was stand with his hands limp by his side.
Fuyumi sniffed and swiped at her nose, and then she straightened. She spoke quietly. “Are you planning on… um, physically transitioning? Hormones, and…”
Shouto tried to swallow and couldn’t. His mouth was too dry, his throat too achy. “I w—I want to. At least top surgery.”
“What’s that?”
Right. She wouldn’t know. “To make my chest flat.”
Fuyumi rubbed her thumb along her eyebrow. “I noticed you were binding them. They… they make you feel bad?”
Shouto needed something to drink. He grabbed a vitamin water from the fridge. He gave Fuyumi a wide berth as he walked past her to sit down at the table.
“We never really talked about the assault,” Fuyumi said, dropping her hand. “With Lady Hypna. Should we talk about that?”
Shouto opened the bottle, the plastic clicks of the breaking seal deafeningly loud.
She was trying. He knew that. He ought to at least cooperate, meet her halfway. But he could feel his words sinking deeper into his stomach by the second, further and further from his reach. It was a struggle to pull them up. “I’m not going to try to convince you I’m not like this because of trauma,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m… I don’t know. I don’t think it matters why. I’m tired of feeling like shit all the time.”
Fuyumi pulled a chair out and sat beside Shouto, close enough that Shouto could smell her shampoo. “You know I love you, right?”
He rolled the plastic cap of the vitamin water on the table back and forth between his thumb and middle finger. His throat ached.
“Hey.” Her hand stilled his. “I know you don’t care about my opinion, but it’s important to me that you know that.”
The words struck him like a spear. I know you don’t care.
Suddenly, everything was too much. He pressed his forehead into the cool tabletop, trying to ground himself. Shouto hugged his arms tight against his chest and breathed too fast. Too fast. Something heavy and painful squeezed, crushed, like he’d been yanked from his raft straight down into the pressurized depths of the ocean, and he bit down hard on a sob. A small part of the sound made it through his teeth, like a hiccup.
No, he thought, mortification following the pain in his chest as a strong undercurrent. Not this. Not in front of Fuyumi. But he couldn’t stop it. His vision blurred.
“Shiyo,” Fuyumi said, sounding alarmed. Her hand touched his back, light and cautious. “Shiyo?”
“I care,” he said, pressing his palms into his eyes. Was he crying? “Why do you think I don’t care? I care—Fuyumi. What the fuck? I care what you think about me so fucking much. I don’t give a fuck what Endeavor thinks. Even Natsuo and Rei—their opinions don’t matter as much. I want you to be proud of me. You.”
“Shi—”
“But I don’t want to have to pretend to be somebody I’m not so you can be proud. I’m not trying to isolate myself like T—like Touya was. I want you to see me. And I think that—I think that’s going to cause some problems, with me being such a shitty fucking person. I wish I weren’t like this. I ignored it for as long as I could. I wouldn’t be doing this if I hadn’t… hadn’t already passed my breaking point. I know you think I’m just doing it to antagonize you. I’m not. I’m not. I held out for a really long time until I wanted to die.” He wiped at his eyes, alarmed when his hands came away shaking and wet. “Shit. Shit. Sorry. I didn’t think I could still cry.”
Fuyumi cupped Shouto’s cheek, pulling his face toward her, concern etched deep in her expression. “Shi—hey,” she said, voice on the cusp of breaking. “Hey—hey. Please don’t ever think I’m ashamed of you. I am so, so proud of you.”
“No, you’re not.” His voice kept getting caught in his throat, choking him. “You’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No. Why? No.”
“Yes,” she said.
Shouto grabbed Fuyumi’s wrist, holding her hand there against his face. He leaned forward, his forehead bumping her shoulder. His chest felt like his ribs had caved in. When he spoke, he barely recognized his voice, wet, sopping with some emotion he hadn’t heard his voice wear in at least a decade. “Don’t leave. Fuyumi.”
“I—I’m here,” she said.
“Nobody ever—everybody always gives up or goes away, nobody—”
“I know. I know.”
“Please.”
“I’m here.” She placed a tentative hand on the back of his head. “It’s okay. You’re—we’re okay.”
Shouto grit his teeth in an effort to choke back the tears, but all he managed to do was choke. He thought he was hyperventilating, too, but he couldn’t tell for sure. It had been so long since he’d cried that he couldn’t remember what it was supposed to feel like.
Fuyumi stood, pulling Shouto up with her. She held him close, squeezing him and gently rocking side to side.
“We’ll figure this out,” she said. “I promise.”
“I already figured it out,” he said. “That’s the whole—t-the whole thing, that I already figured everything out on my own, and I want… I need you to trust me, just this once, that I know what I need to do to keep myself alive.”
Fuyumi hesitated, her grip on him tightening. “I do trust you. Or I… I mean, I will. I’ll try to. Um. Give me some… some time to process this, okay?”
He’d already spent so much time trying to understand and come to terms with himself. And she wanted more time?
Well, maybe that was normal. He’d gotten lucky with Natsuo and Rei; he couldn’t expect their reactions to match Fuyumi’s. Maybe it was easiest to accept change when it came from someone you couldn’t fool yourself into thinking you were close with. Fuyumi had been taking care of him since he was six, Natsuo and Rei hadn’t, and that was that.
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know much about this kind of thing.”
The pressure of her hug slowed his breathing a little. “I can send you some links. For articles and things.”
“Yes, thank... thank you.”
When the hug became too much sensory input, Shouto subtly shifted his weight back. Fuyumi let him go. He couldn’t remember what he looked like after crying—if he could even call this after crying yet, with his chest still hitching every few breaths—but he hoped it wasn’t too bad. He wiped his eyes and nose on the inside of his shirt collar. “Sorry,” he said, so breathily that it was nearly a whisper. “Fucking... shit. I don’t know why I’m—why I’m still—I’m not trying to be manipulative or anything.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” said Fuyumi. “It’s normal to—I mean, I think that crying is—when I was your age—”
“Yumi, I don’t need you as a parent right now,” said Shouto.
Fuyumi’s hands hovered in the air in front of her stomach, twitching like they were aching to hold something that no longer existed. “Then as what?”
“Just as a sister is fine.”
She dropped her hands. Her eyes roamed behind Shouto and in the direction of the living room, like she was looking for inspiration.
“Do you want to watch Red’s Ocean after I finish the cleaning up the kitchen?” she finally asked. “Together?”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“Not that… you don’t need to entertain me if you’re not feeling well.”
“I know,” he said. “I want to watch it with you.”
She smiled, and Shouto felt his heart wrench. Because all he could see behind that smile was fear.
###
He must’ve fallen asleep at some point during the show because it was dark when he woke up. Natsuo was asleep in an armchair beside the couch, and Fuyumi had made such a deep nest of blankets and pillows for herself on the opposite couch that Shouto could barely see her white hair peeking out.
Were they both asleep? It looked like Fuyumi was, but Shouto hadn’t spent enough time with Natsuo as a child to know what he sounded like when he was sleeping. And why were they both sleeping in the living room? It only took one person to keep watch over him. Seemed a bit overkill.
What time was it, anyway? He wondered if he could sneak in a fifteen-minute shower while they were asleep.
Careful not to make any sound, he got up and went to his room. The floor had been cleaned and the bed made since he last stepped foot in here. His duffel bag sat emptied atop his bed—the clothes had been moved to the laundry basket, and the toiletries (he assumed) back into the bathroom. He smiled a little at that—it was such a Fuyumi thing to do. Or it used to be, anyway. She’d tidied up his room after arguments almost religiously throughout their childhoods, though he’d never understood the importance until she stopped doing it. Her own little I am here.
He noticed, too, a few textbooks he didn’t remember bringing home sitting on his desk next to a small collection of worksheets. Make-up work? He wondered who’d brought it by.
He’d already taken his shirt off to shower when he saw his phone light up across the room—someone had plugged it in and set it on his bed.
Oh. God. His phone. Which was connected to the outside world and to other people, who had demands and expectations for him…
He had to take a deep breath as he picked it up. Nausea twisted his stomach.
And—
Not a hundred messages like he’d feared. Not zero, like he’d feared more.
Twenty-five.
Okay. That… that wasn’t so bad. Right? He scrolled his way through the notifications, starting with the Friday of the sports festival.
Aizawa:
(Friday)
We need to talk. Call me as soon as you can.
Unknown:
(Friday)
Hey dude, it’s Eijirou. Got your number from Bakugou. Hope I’m not bothering you. Sero told me you said some weird stuff to him in the locker room after the awards ceremony. Are you ok? I’m here if you need to talk.
Bakugou:
(Friday)
Oi fuckface. You said some shit I need to kill you for. Are you gonna come to my place tomorrow or do I gotta drag you outta your shitty house
You better not fucking ignore me.
(Saturday)
Oi.
(Sunday)
OI.
(Monday)
IcyHot where tf are you. If you’re skipping because of a damn finger I’ll fucking kill you
Aizawa:
(Tuesday)
I’d very much appreciate an update as to what’s going on. Your sister called the school and left a voicemail saying you’d be out for a while, but she was vague about why, and she isn’t answering her phone. I’m concerned. Please return my email.
Shouto wasn’t surprised that Fuyumi hadn’t given the school specifics. She was used to damage control, to making sure that their private life was kept out of the public eye. He was a little surprised that Bakugou had texted him. Hadn’t he already established that he no longer wanted anything to do with Shouto? What else was there to discuss?
He kept scrolling.
Bakugou:
(Tuesday)
Hey wtf. I need to talk to you about Deku. At least give me his contact info if you’re gonna be a stubborn lazy ass.
(Wednesday)
?!?!???? DID YOU FUCKING DIE?!
(Thursday)
You missed a test, dumbass. I’m bringing you your shit. You owe me an explanation.
Your damn snow bunny brother had to come to the gate to get your shit bc YOU AIN’T FUCKING HERE. And he was being real weird about letting me in or saying where you were. “I’ll let him tell you when he gets back” yeah ok Mr Fucking Cryptic how about you EAT MY ASS
When tf did your brother start calling you he?
Bakugou had stopped by his house? That could’ve ended badly if Endeavor had been home.
Aizawa:
(Thursday)
Todoroki, I don’t need an explanation. I just need to know you’re okay. Contact one of your classmates if you’re not comfortable speaking with me.
Bakugou:
(Friday)
IT HAS BEEN AN ENTIRE. FUCKING. WEEK. Had a reporter stop me on the way to school and ask if I knew where you were. Told her to fuck off. Shitty hair and dunce face had people asking them the same thing. I’m tired of seeing your pasty face everywhere.
In case you get a big head about your social media following and all those fan pages popping up. I just wanna say. You’re still ugly as fuck and your face is the stupidest thing I’ve ever
Shouto didn’t have the mental capacity to even finish reading that text. More recently, there’d been additional texts from both Aizawa and Bakugou, along with a few messages from unknown numbers that had local area codes. His email inbox also looked full. He couldn’t bring himself to read any of them. If people were going to demand answers from him, they’d need to wait until… until…
Well, they’d need to wait. He’d decide later on when the until should be.
He ought to check in with Deku while he was alone with his phone, at least. Shouto opened the messaging app they usually spoke on. A few messages from Ya Boi Deku awaited him:
Everything ok bestie? I lost track of u after the awards ceremony :(
Ok it’s been a bit since I last messaged u & I totally get it if this is ur normal [ghost emoji]-ing. But I messaged Kirishima and he said u weren’t showing up to school so I’m kinda worried. I’m sorry if I was too much at the sports festival. Txt me back plsssss
There were a few more days of silence. Then a sudden shift from Deku’s usual textspeak and liberal emoji use:
If you’re interested in moving forward with helping us, Dabi will go by this location [link] every day at 1am until Saturday. He won’t wait, so be there on time. If you don’t show up, we’ll take it that you’re not interested. I won’t bother you anymore.
Saturday. Today was… Friday, right? It had been when he fell asleep, at least. What time was it? He looked at his phone clock—12:35 a.m.
Shit. Today was tomorrow.
That meant that his last chance to meet with Dabi was in twenty-five minutes.
Shit.
Could he ask to reschedule? Was rescheduling a thing that Villains did? Shouto tapped on the location link—if the place was too far away, it might already be too late.
But… no. It was at the end of his street. He could make it there in a fifteen-minute jog. He’d have to sneak out carefully, though. The situation would be tough to explain to his siblings if they caught him.
Shouto pulled on his jogging jacket, slipped on his shoes at the entrance. He deadened the sound of the deadbolt unlocking with his palm and slipped quietly out of the house, closing the door softly behind him.
Nobody was at the street sign when he reached it, but he hadn’t expected there to be. He sat on the curb and waited for a couple minutes before he heard a deep voice he didn’t recognize. “Hey, kid.”
Shouto looked to the voice’s source. It was a teen boy he didn’t recognize, tall with long hair tied back in a ponytail. He held what looked like a canned margarita.
It took Shouto a second— “Dabi?”
“Kinda surprised to see ya here. Deku said you weren’t responding.” The teen boy’s image shivered and reformed, leaving Dabi in its wake. He caught the ponytail holder before it fell, tucked it in his pocket. “Somethin’ happen?”
“I didn’t have my phone with me,” said Shouto.
Dabi didn’t meet Shouto’s gaze as he sat on the curb beside him. The glow of the streetlights made the burn scars under his eyes look especially deep. “For a week?”
“Yes.”
Dabi took a long drink from his margarita, tilting the can ninety degrees perpendicular to the sky. He crushed the empty can between his hands and dropped it in the storm drain between them.
“Forgot that blood alcohol levels reset when I switch bodies,” Dabi explained. “Had a damn nice buzz going there, too. S’what I keep sayin’ to all the nut jobs like Shigaraki who think quirks are bestowed on certain people for some divine reason—quirks are just faulty fuckin’ evolution, that’s it. Just a bunch of babirusa growin’ our tusks so long that they loop back and pierce our damn skulls.”
“I don’t know about babirusa,” said Shouto.
Dabi glanced at him. He looked away quickly. “I watched the sport festival,” he said. “You looked fuckin’ dead inside.”
“I guess,” said Shouto.
“You go home and try to off yourself or somethin’?”
Shouto exhaled silently. He redirected his eyes forward, kept his face expressionless.
Dabi huffed a laugh. “I’ll give it to ya—you look way better than I did after my attempt. I think I was… yeah, I was fifteen, too. Golden age, huh?”
Dabi had tried to kill himself? Guess that wasn’t too much of a surprise. “Are you glad you didn’t die?”
“Sometimes. When I have a good milkshake. Or during a good fuck. Like, a really good fuck. There are a lot of mediocre ones.”
“Oh,” said Shouto.
“U.A. makin’ any progress with CPS?”
“No,” said Shouto. “Aizawa’s putting in a lot of effort, but CPS isn’t budging. I think Endeavor has too many people there.”
Dabi grunted. “Aizawa’s your homeroom teacher, right? Eraserhead?”
“Yeah.”
“You trust ’im?”
“I think so.” Shouto paused. “He erased Endeavor’s quirk.”
Dabi’s head whipped toward him, an incredulous grin tugging at the staple at the corner of his mouth. “He what? Fuckin’ details, kid.”
Happily. “We had parent-teacher meetings after the whole USJ thing. Endeavor started getting pissy when they wouldn’t let him watch the footage, and—”
“He erased his quirk?”
“He told Endeavor that he was running up the electric bill.”
Dabi threw his head back, eyes scrunching closed as he laughed. “Fuck. I woulda killed to have seen that. Mighta pissed myself.”
Shouto couldn’t curb a grin. Seeing Dabi laugh was… nice. It felt familiar for a reason Shouto was only now beginning to understand.
When Dabi calmed down, he knocked his hand against Shouto’s shoulder. “Well, can’t say we didn’t try the legal route. I knew it wouldn’t work, if we’re bein’ honest, but I wasn’t sure I could get you on board if we didn’t try the legal way first.”
Shouto hesitated. “What’s the… non-legal way?”
“Killing Endeavor,” said Dabi. “You in?”
Shouto looked down at his hands.
He’d known—even if it was just subconsciously—that this was where they’d end up. That this was what they’d been building up to. From watching his performance and reflexes during the bridge bombing, to seeing how he'd hold up against a Noumu at the USJ, to desensitizing him to people dying in front of him, to testing if he would react calmly to seeing the murderer sitting in the midst of his classmates a couple days later—
This had all been a big, fucked-up test, hadn’t it?
And he’d passed it with flying colors.
Dabi threaded his fingers together and stretched his arms over his head, groaning. “I plan on killing him whether or not you help. But havin’ you would speed up the process.”
“Can I think about it?” Shouto asked.
“Think about what? You showed up because you want him gone, didn’t ya?” Dabi dropped his hands into his lap. “Is it the patricide holding you back or somethin’ else?”
“I… it’s stupid,” said Shouto. “Fuyumi.”
“Her? She’ll be better off without the old man.”
“Not that. I still… I don’t know. She put a lot of effort into making sure I didn’t grow up like...” Like Touya, he knew, though she’d never said it outright. “…like someone who doesn’t experience emotions the same as everybody else. I don’t want to disappoint her even more than I already have.”
“Why the fuck would she be disappointed by who you are now?” Dabi asked. “You won the fuckin’ sports festival. You’re pretty damn smart and do well in school despite having literal fuckin’ brain damage. You lived with Endeavor for fifteen years and didn’t turn into a giant unwashed dick. You’ve done some pretty nasty shit to keep your friends from getting hurt. If I were your sibling, I’d be fuckin’ proud of my little brother, I’m just sayin’.”
Shouto blinked at the sidewalk. His breath hitched, and for a moment, he thought he might start crying.
Dabi’s eyes darted to him again, and he snickered. “God, you are gonna grow up with one hell of a praise kink.”
Shouto squeezed his eyes shut, trying to catch his breath. “Sorry. Um. Why are you helping me?”
“Wasn’t originally part of the plan. Thought you’d be an indoctrinated little suck-up by the time I got to ya. But the first time I met you as Reflection, when you looked straight through me with those dead eyes… I thought, ‘Oh, this kid’s bitter. I can work with this.’ And then I had to listen to Endeavor complain about how you were wasting your potential while keeping a straight face. For months. Guess I got attached. You little fuckin’ shit.”
“I’ll help,” said Shouto. “With Endeavor. I’ll do it.”
Dabi draped a heavy arm around Shouto’s shoulders. The texture of the deep scars on Dabi’s arm felt strange against the back of his neck. “You ain’t just saying that because I didn’t call you a dumb fuck, right?” Dabi asked.
“No.” Shouto opened his eyes. “No, I want this. I have a question, though.”
“Shoot.”
“You could’ve just killed him while you were a sidekick. Poisoned him, stabbed him, whatever. You were close enough. Why didn’t you?”
“Ah, kid,” said Dabi, voice laced with… something. Deep, sad, feeling. Empathy? He squeezed the back of Shouto’s neck, the tips of his fingers digging into Shouto’s flesh. Almost affectionate. “I don’t want to kill him.”
“You don’t?”
“I want to destroy him. Rip him apart until there’s nothing left. Put his head on a pike for all the other Pro Heroes to see, paint his corpse with every single fucked-up thing he’s ever done. I want the Heroes to be too terrified to leave their mansions in broad fuckin’ daylight, because if they take one wrong step, we’re coming for them next, and all of Japan will be spitting on their graves.”
There was that rush again. The dizzying adrenaline that usually fizzled out in his fingertips in a matter of seconds. Except that now it was circulating, learning his body, multiplying, layering on top of itself, at home, until it was nearly all he could feel.
Heroes, afraid of having their evils revealed to the public?
Heroes, afraid of abusing their position of power lest they lose it?
Heroes, afraid of being hurt by the same people they’d carelessly—and often purposely—harmed so much over the years?
They should be.
They should be.
“Sound good?” Dabi asked.
Shouto met Dabi’s eyes. They were still strikingly blue even in the unflattering streetlight, and for a second, Shouto was five years old again and begging an impatient Touya to let him join in on whatever combat video game he was playing at the moment. A strange, heady pain panged in his chest. “Oh,” he said.
“What?” Dabi asked.
“Nothing, I just… looked at you.”
“You just looked at…?” Dabi gave a baffled snort. He straightened, putting a hand on the ground like he was about to stand. “Really know how to compliment a fella, don’t ya.”
“Not like that. I realized something.”
Dabi froze in the middle of standing, one hand still on the ground. His brow furrowed. “Realized what?”
At some point, Shouto’s heart had started beating faster. He only noticed it now as he brought his hand to his chest.
No, he thought. Touya was dead, and if Shouto learned anything from the old horror movies he watched with Fuyumi, it was that performing necromancy in the dead of night never ended well.
If Touya wanted to be dead, then who was Shouto to deny him that privilege?
“Nothing,” Shouto said finally. “Sorry. I’m on a lot of… medication and stuff. It’s fucking me up.”
Dabi’s concern melted from his face. He returned to a sitting position. “You’re gonna remember the shit we talk about, right? I’m gonna be pissed if you wake up later and can’t even remember where you were at one in the morning.”
“I’ll remember,” said Shouto.
Dabi studied Shouto for a long moment, eyes slightly narrowed. Nothing seemed to alert further suspicion, though, because he relaxed into his usual slouch and started talking.
“First things first, then,” said Dabi. “What are your chances of getting your hands on All Might’s quirk?”
Notes:
Nooo don't go to the Villain side, your so sexy aha
I had a memoir on mental illness, cavemen, and caticorn mythology accepted to december magazine & I'm just aaaAAA because that's a pretty big print literary mag. I was happy-stimming outside my therapist's office just a little lol
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Insta: @max_says_no
Twitter: @hyperfixeatenThanks for reading!!
Chapter 47: Shouto and Deku Watch Disney Movies and Cry, as 15-Year-Old Boys Do
Summary:
Sibling bonding! Shouto learns about Natsuo's secret job. Deku pays a visit.
10,500 word chapter because I couldn't figure out how to split it up. Enjoy.
Notes:
CW: minor injuries, grief; DISCUSSION OF: murder, homophobia, financial abuse, verbal abuse, suicide, previous sexual assault, drugging
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Even after walking home from the talk with Dabi, even after sitting at the dining table with his black jogging jacket still on and eating most of the bowl of leftover soba Fuyumi had saved for him, and even after watching the solar-powered lucky cat sit unmoving in the kitchen window for a good fifteen minutes, Shouto’s heartbeat wouldn’t slow down.
There was a plan, Dabi had said, though he hadn’t told Shouto much of it. The gist of it was that All Might’s quirk was apparently transferrable—Dabi didn’t say how he knew—and that he’d be looking for a successor soon if he wasn’t already. Someone to pass his quirk to.
“How’s your relationship with that giant fuck, anyway?” Dabi had asked him.
“I think not great,” Shouto said. “I went off on him during the parent-teacher meetings after the USJ incident.”
“Christ on a stick, kid, you sure your pants are big enough for those balls?”
“He thought Deku would be harmless because he’s Quirkless. Nearly got my homeroom teacher and classmates killed because he underestimated him.”
Dabi had quirked an eyebrow. “You care about your classmates? Y’know they’re all Heroes-in-training.”
“I don’t… want them to die.”
Dabi had grunted, but he didn’t comment on the subject past that. “Well, All Might seems dumb enough. You’re already top of your class, so it’s not a question of skill. Just do something selfless and stupid where he can see it. Get Deku’s help and fake-rescue someone, maybe. He can set a building or two on fire for ya. If you don’t wanna do that, find some other way to suck up. So long as you get the quirk.”
“Who am I getting it for?” Shouto had asked. “Is it for you?”
“Nah. Deku’s old man said I’d likely fall apart if I tried to squeeze any more quirks in this body.” He’d moved one of his hands into the light, where Shouto could see that the seam connecting healthy skin to scarred skin was oozing blood. “You’ll keep the quirk for as long as we need it. Then it goes to the League. That’s part of the deal I made in exchange for Deku’s help.”
Now, at the dining table, Shouto sat slumped in his chair. His whole body was buzzing with nervous energy.
Dabi was Touya. Right? Dabi had to be Touya. The eyes, the laugh, the fire quirk, the affinity for strawberry crème frappes, the deep burn scars, the bloodlust toward Endeavor.
But… what the hell had Touya been doing this whole time? And could he even be thought of as Touya anymore?
“Hey,” said a voice.
Shouto startled, nearly knocking his bowl to the floor. He jerked his head toward the source, vision fizzing alongside the adrenaline rush.
“Woah,” said Natsuo. He was holding his phone, the flashlight app turned on and aimed toward the floor. He’d been passing Shouto on his way to the fridge. “You okay there?”
Shouto forced himself to exhale. He was home—no Dabi, no Deku, no Endeavor. Not now, at least. “Sorry.”
“You been up for a while?”
“Not very long,” Shouto lied.
“Yumi’s still out cold. I don’t think she slept much last week.” Natsuo rummaged through the fridge. “Oh—forgot I bought this canned coffee. Want one?”
“No.”
Natsuo closed the fridge door. He looked Shouto over as he popped the tab on his coffee. “Anxiety bad right now?”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto. “You just scared me.”
“I can give you your anxiety medication, you know.”
“Oh.”
“You want it?”
Shouto nodded.
Natsuo left the room. He returned a couple minutes later and dropped a single pill in Shouto’s palm. Shouto swallowed it dry.
“You feeling any side effects from the new meds?” Natsuo asked. “Or withdrawal symptoms from the quirk suppressants?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto.
“Headaches, dizziness, high heart rate, brain zaps, blurred vision…?”
“Brain zaps?”
“A sensory disturbance in your brain. Feels like a tiny electric shock.”
That didn’t sound pleasant. “I think I’m just tired.”
“Cold, too?”
“What?”
“You have your jacket on.”
Shouto glanced down at his jogging jacket—he’d forgotten to take it off after his meeting with Dabi. “I like the pressure.”
“Do you have your quirk back yet?”
Shouto tried to call ice to his hand, but nothing happened. He shook his head.
“Well, I’m kinda chilly,” said Natsuo. “I’ll put some tea on.”
Natsuo sipped his coffee as he filled the kettle with water. He put the kettle over heat, then sat down at the table. They sat in silence for a while as Shouto finished off his soba.
Finally, Natsuo spoke. “Fuyumi said you two had a conversation.”
Ah… shit. With all the murder talk, he’d almost managed to forget that he came out to Fuyumi a few hours ago. “I guess.”
Natsuo spared a quick glance toward the living room, where Fuyumi was still asleep. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll live.”
“That bad?”
“Said I’ll live.”
Natsuo scratched his cheek. “This might be… outta left field, but. You know I’m bisexual.”
Shouto searched Natsuo’s face. He’d never given Natsuo’s love life even half a thought, so he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be surprised. “Does Fuyumi know?”
“I—sort of? She caught me kissing my high school boyfriend back when I was… I think sixteen. Maybe seventeen? It was super awkward, and we never talked about it. I think she didn’t want another… um, with…”
Natsuo’s gray eyes grew distant, staring straight through Shouto to something behind him. After a few seconds, he blinked, his eyes snapping into focus again.
“I guess he wouldn’t care if you knew,” Natsuo said. “Touya wasn’t straight. He’d bring home a different girl or guy every weekend while Endeavor was working, to make out with in his room or cuddle on the couch. He just… he liked people, you know. Gender didn’t matter. Drove Fuyumi crazy—she was always nervous he was going to slip up and bring someone around when Endeavor was home.”
“Did he?” Shouto asked.
“A few times. Not sure if he did it on purpose. I think that was at least part of the reason why Endeavor sent him away to that training camp in the months before he died, though.” Natsuo paused. “I didn’t mean for that to get morbid. Sorry. I just brought it up so you’d know you aren’t the only queer Todoroki kid. Actually—shit. That means Fuyumi is the only cishet Todoroki sibling. That’s… huh.”
The more Shouto learned about Touya, the more he realized he didn’t know about his oldest brother. Dabi—while disguised as Reflection—had told Fuyumi he was gay, so Shouto had just assumed that was the case with Touya. Admittedly, Reflection/Dabi had only told Fuyumi he was gay when she started to wonder if he was hitting on her, and clearing the air in that respect was more than enough reason to fib about his sexuality.
Shouto had been wondering for a while why Dabi had wanted to infiltrate their home and interact with Fuyumi. He’d guessed that Dabi had been trying to work information about Endeavor and his agency out of her.
But maybe it’d been less of Dabi trying to find a weak point and more of Touya just wanting to talk to his little sister.
Natsuo spoke again. “Did you tell Fuyumi about what happened last Wednesday, too?”
“Last Wednesday?” Shouto asked.
Natsuo raised his eyebrows.
Shit. Had Shouto told Natsuo about the murder while he was high off meds? He had, hadn’t he? That was inconvenient. “She doesn’t need to know,” said Shouto.
“I disagree.”
“I don’t want to tell her.”
“I can tell her for you if you—”
“No.”
“I just don’t think it’s healthy to keep that a secret,” said Natsuo.
“It’s not really a secret. You know about it.”
Natsuo took a long drink of coffee. He set the can on the table like an alcoholic on his fourth shot. “Shouto. I love you so much. But if you ever look at me and wonder what I’m thinking, the answer is gonna be ‘What the fuck.’ Always. Whenever I’m with you. It’s ‘What the fuck.’”
Shouto got up and took his empty bowl to the sink. He stood there for a moment. He didn’t really want to sit down and start talking about the murder again, but it wasn’t like he could go hole up in his room. Natsuo wouldn’t let him.
“You should invite a friend over,” Natsuo said.
Shouto turned. “What?”
“Endeavor’s out of town, and Fuyumi wants to keep you out of school for another week or so until your meds stabilize. So why don’t you have a friend come over?”
“Because I don’t have one,” said Shouto.
Natsuo let out a breath. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I have trouble making friends,” said Shouto.
“I mean logically. You’re thoughtful and funny. You should have friends.”
Shouto stayed standing, arms wrapped around his stomach. “I think I used to. At school.”
“Did something happen?”
“I fucked it up.”
“So apologize,” said Natsuo. “Talk things over. I’ve fucked things up more times than I can count—it’s inevitable. You gotta keep the communication channels open if you want to keep a friendship.”
“I don’t think your ‘fucking things up’ and my ‘fucking things up’ are the same,” Shouto said.
“Maybe not. Won’t know if it’s fixable unless you try, though.”
The kettle whistled. Natsuo started to get up, but Shouto waved for him to sit down and took the kettle off the stove himself. He didn’t realize until he set it down that his hand was hurting. He looked at his palm, and it was a bright red. “Oh,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” asked Natsuo.
“I thought my heat resistance was a mutation,” said Shouto.
“What do you mean?”
Shouto held up his burned hand for Natsuo to see.
Natsuo grimaced. He stood and walked over. “Jesus…” he said, turning Shouto’s wrist to look at his palm. “You don’t have great luck when it comes to kettles, do you?”
“It’s fine.” Shouto reached for the kettle again.
Natsuo grabbed Shouto under his arms and hauled him backward, away from the stove.
Shouto stumbled. “Wha—?”
“Where in the hell did you get your sense of self-preservation? Wish.com?” Natsuo flicked Shouto’s forehead. “Don’t touch shit if it burns you.”
“It doesn’t hurt that bad,” said Shouto.
“Has it maybe occurred to you that making tea shouldn’t hurt at all? Fucking… Christ… run that under cold water for a few minutes. I’ll take care of the tea.”
Shouto obeyed. It wasn’t long before slow, shuffling footsteps came from the living room. Fuyumi appeared in the kitchen entryway, rubbing the creases of her eyes. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” said Natsuo. “Shouto burned his hand on the kettle and then promptly tried to burn it again.”
Fuyumi looked confused. Shouto thought she was going to ask who the hell Shouto was, but she just looked at him and said, “I thought your heat resistance was a mutation.”
“Apparently not,” Shouto said. “Not completely, at least.”
She came forward and looked at his hand. Sighed. “I’ll get the petroleum jelly. You’re not allowed to use the stove until your quirk comes back, okay?”
“Oh no,” Shouto deadpanned. “But how will I cook my babies.”
“Shu—shut up,” said Fuyumi, snorting. “Why are you like this?”
###
The first few days of captivity were mostly just Shouto on his laptop, scrounging up articles on transitioning, trans kids, and Japanese trans services for Fuyumi to read. He texted links to her as he found them, and Fuyumi would respond to some of them with a quick Love you or a heart emoji from wherever she was in the house at the moment.
It was the weekend, so she was fluttering about the house, cleaning things that housekeeping would’ve taken care of, popping into the living room at least every twenty minutes to check on him and Natsuo. Natsuo had brought a few board and card games with him. Somehow Shouto was shit at all of them.
“How about a game that’s not win-or-lose?” Natsuo suggested. “We could do a get-to-know-each-other game.”
Shouto was lying curled up on the couch, the side of his face stuck to the leather seat cushion. “What do you do for that?”
“Pretty much just ask each other questions.”
“Oh.” Shouto tried to think of a question. “Have you… uh… you ever killed a man?”
Natsuo made a noise. “Je-sus, dude. Start us off with something heavier, why don’t ya?” He gave Shouto’s ankle a light slap as he stood. “You don’t have to make up your own questions. I bought a deck of cards with questions a few days ago.”
Natsuo went to his bedroom and returned with a pack of cards. Shouto moved to one side of the couch so Natsuo could sit on the other end. Their legs overlapped in the middle.
“You’re too tall,” said Shouto. “Stop it.”
“My height is my best asset.” Natsuo set the stack of cards on the couch cushion between them. “You wanna go first?”
“I don’t know how to do it.”
Natsuo picked up a card and flipped it over. “This is an easy one. Popcorn or M&M’s?”
Shouto rubbed the side of his face that had been against the couch. It was sticky with sweat. “For what?”
“What do you mean, for what? For eating.”
“For me eating?”
“Yeah, for you eating,” said Natsuo.
“I just ate,” said Shouto. “I don’t want either.”
“No… no. Shouto.” Natsuo lowered the card. “Have you really never played anything like this? Icebreakers, never-have-I-ever…?”
Shouto shook his head.
“Wow.” Natsuo gave a blunted laugh. “Um. Well, just pick your favorite food.”
“Cold soba.”
“That wasn’t one of the…” Natsuo sighed. He put the card face-down beside him. “You know what? I’ll take it. Cold soba. Your turn.”
Shouto hesitated. Was Natsuo annoyed? “Sorry I’m not doing it right.”
“Wh—oh, that’s not your fault, buddy.”
“You sounded mad.”
“Not at you.” Natsuo put his elbow over the top of the couch, rested his cheek against his fist. “Hit me with a question, sir.”
Shouto picked a card from the stack: What’s your best scar story?
Yikes. He didn’t want to ask Natsuo about any scars he had. This probably wasn’t meant to be a trauma-sharing game. What did the card mean by best scar story, anyway? Shouto didn’t have any scars he’d particularly enjoyed obtaining. “Can I pick a different one?” he asked Natsuo.
“Hm?” said Natsuo. “Thought I took out all the... Can I see?”
Shouto handed the card over.
Natsuo looked it over. “Ah. I guess I do have one scar I like. Here.” He turned his head to show Shouto a thin white line on the side of his neck. “Touya ran into me with his bike once, and I fell and cut myself on a rock. He kept begging me not to tell Mom—said I could run him over with the bike if I wanted to—but I ended up having to get stitches. So.”
“That’s a good memory?”
“It’s proof that he existed, at least. Feels like nobody talks about him anymore, so it’s nice to carry around a little piece of our history.” Natsuo pinched his nose, gave a breathy laugh. “God, what a fucking bastard. I miss him.”
Shouto wondered if Natsuo would believe him if he said that Touya was still alive. Wondered how devastated he’d be to learn that his childhood best friend was a Villain and a murderer now.
###
After a few days had passed, Fuyumi and Natsuo let him return to his bedroom for the night. Shouto took the chance to get on his laptop and try to set up some form of account that could funnel money from Endeavor’s account to the account of the social worker he’d bribed in the hospital. After an hour of Googling and accidentally downloading multiple viruses, he gave up and closed his laptop.
He’d need someone else’s help to follow through on his bribe. Maybe Deku knew how to deal with computer stuff—he’d hacked the security cameras in the apartment where he killed Sakura’s father, after all. Shouto might contact him and ask for help.
As much as Shouto had been looking forward to returning to his bedroom, once he lay down to rest, he couldn’t slow his heartrate enough to even think about sleep.
How was he supposed to get on All Might’s good side enough for him to consider passing his quirk on to Shouto? How long would that take? What if Endeavor took him out of UA before that could happen?
Shouto also still hadn’t contacted his teachers about his absence, though he’d lied to Fuyumi and told her that he had. Hadn’t read his emails or texts. Hadn’t started his makeup work. The tasks seemed insurmountable. Like if he started them, everything would come avalanching down on top of him.
Shit. If he’d known that the recovery would be so stressful, he wouldn’t have tried to kill himself in the first place. Or he would’ve tried harder. Either way, he didn’t like the position he was in right now.
He rolled around for a while before he finally left his bedroom and went into the living room.
The overhead light was off, but Natsuo’s laptop screen illuminated the space enough for Shouto to see Natsuo occupying the entire length of the couch: head propped on one headrest, bare feet propped on the other, wearing expensive-looking headphones and playing—working?—on the laptop sitting on his stomach. YouTube, judging by the format, though Shouto couldn’t see well enough to be sure.
Shouto started forward, then stopped. Had Natsuo let Shouto go back to his room because he wanted the living room to himself? Shouto didn’t want to annoy him with his presence.
But then Natsuo shifted enough that he saw Shouto. He gave a small start, quickly shutting his laptop and pulling his headphones down around his neck. “Shit—you’re quiet. You okay?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“Need somethin’?”
“No,” said Shouto.
Natsuo watched him for a few seconds, biting the tip of his tongue between his teeth. Then he sat up, angled his laptop away from Shouto, and opened it again.
He should go back to his room now, probably. Really should. It likely wasn’t a pleasant experience to have someone you barely knew staring at you in the dark.
“Can I sit in here?” Shouto asked.
“Uh…” Natsuo quickly did something on his laptop before speaking again. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”
Was Natsuo doing something on his laptop he didn’t want Shouto to see? “You can say no if you’re busy.”
Natsuo lifted one hand to adjust the headphones around his neck, but he didn’t put them back on. “Nah, I’m… I just kinda gotta meet a deadline.”
“For school?”
“You can sit in here,” said Natsuo. “I don’t mind.”
Shouto sat on the opposite end of the couch. He sat normally for maybe thirty seconds before the urge to make himself smaller grew too big. Dropping down on his side, he shoved his head, shoulders, and back as tightly against the back and arm of the couch as he could. Then he curled into himself.
“You sure make a lotta commotion getting settled,” said Natsuo.
Oh. “Sorry.”
Natsuo’s hand grabbed Shouto’s ankle, shook it gently. “I’m just sayin’ things, dude. Doesn’t bother me.”
The disappointment that twisted in Shouto’s gut when Natsuo took his hand away was quickly followed by a tinge of shame. Shouto used to go months without any affectionate touching, and now he was… was he being clingy? He just wanted Natsuo to pay attention to him.
Shouto’s voice didn’t come out as casual as he would’ve liked. “What class are you doing things for? On your laptop.”
“It’s not really for a class,” said Natsuo. “More like a work thing.”
Shouto pressed the flat of his foot against Natsuo’s leg. “You have a job?”
Natsuo kept his eyes on his laptop. “Should I not?”
“Fuyumi didn’t tell me you had one.”
“Yumi doesn’t know.”
That was strange. Fuyumi usually knew things. Shouto asked, “Is it a secret job?”
Natsuo gave a small, distracted smile as he worked. “You think I have a secret job?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t think I’m as cool as you think I am.” Natsuo’s hand hovered over the touchpad for a moment, and then he looked at Shouto. “You wanna see?”
Shouto sat up and scooted over next to Natsuo. He was on some video editing software now, inserting bits of audio along an animatic. Shouto couldn’t tell what was going on in the video just by the animation stills. “Did you draw that?” he asked.
“Hm? Oh—no, no. I have a few partners who help me out. Do you watch YouTube much?”
“Mostly just for school things,” said Shouto. He motioned to a thumbnail he recognized. “I had to watch that for Midnight’s biology class the first week of school.”
Natsuo circled the thumbnail with his cursor. “The one about the higher death rates for mutant-types in hospitals? What’d you think?”
He thought. “I remember some.”
“Some things from the video?”
“I usually can’t remember much from videos,” said Shouto. “And I liked that it had subtitles. Sometimes I don’t like turning the sound on for videos.”
“Oh, okay,” Natsuo said, laughing. “I was gonna be a little offended if you didn’t recognize my voice.”
It took Shouto a few seconds to understand. “You made that video?”
“Yep,” said Natsuo.
Shouto pointed. “That one?”
“Uh-huh.”
He pointed to a different thumbnail. “Did you make that one, too?”
“I did.”
Shouto moved his hand again. “What about that one?”
“That’s a trailer for Boss Baby.”
Shouto lowered his hand. “Are you famous?”
“I mean… it’s all anonymous,” said Natsuo. “Sometimes I talk about being the Quirkless son of a Pro Hero, tell some stories from my childhood. Since I had to sign that NDA for Endeavor to let me go to university, I can’t give out any identifying information.”
“What’s your channel called?”
“It’s called QuirklessWonder.”
“Do a lot of people watch it?” Shouto asked. “Does Endeavor know?”
“Quite a few people,” said Natsuo. “Endeavor doesn’t know about the channel specifically, but he knows that I have a way to get information out to a lot of people at once.”
“Is that what you use to threaten him with?” Shouto asked. “Like when you kept him from coming to the hospital after the USJ thing?”
“Yep. It’s a bit of a stalemate, considering he’d cut me off from family resources and stop paying for my education if I reveal anything incriminating about the family. And breaking the NDA would mean he could sue me, which… would be kind of funny, getting sued by Endeavor, but also financially devastating, y’know?” Natsuo released a breath. “I mean, I’m—what I said at the psychiatric hospital, I meant that. If you need a platform to release evidence onto, I’ve got that. And I won’t hesitate to use it. But I want that to be your choice.”
Shouto was silent for a while. Then he said, “Natsuo.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re really cool.”
Natsuo laughed. “Well… thanks.”
“Can I watch you work?”
“You can if you want,” said Natsuo. “The editing process is pretty boring, though.”
“That’s fine.”
Shouto let himself lean in just enough that his arm was against Natsuo’s. He stayed like that for a few moments before Natsuo moved, startling Shouto. But then Natsuo put his arm around Shouto’s shoulders and pulled him in a little.
“This okay?” Natsuo asked.
Shouto nodded numbly.
“Tell me if it gets to be too much.”
If it did get to be too much, Shouto wasn’t aware of it. The pressure of Natsuo’s arm and the warmth of his flannel shirt put Shouto to sleep within minutes.
###
On Thursday, they had a problem. Natsuo needed to take an exam on campus, and Fuyumi needed to go to work.
“I’ll be fine by myself,” said Shouto.
Natsuo and Fuyumi kept discussing. “Maybe I can take her to work?” Fuyumi said. “I’ll have to call and see if they’ll let her—”
“Him,” Natsuo corrected.
Fuyumi paused, then finished her sentence. “—if they’ll let him stay in the breakroom.”
“I’ll be fine by myself,” Shouto repeated.
“Or I can take him on campus,” said Natsuo. “It’s a bit of a commute, but we could—”
“Well, that’s a whole new environment for him. That might be a bit much for him to handle. He’s been to the elementary school before.”
“Still, he’ll have to wait seven or eight hours for you versus a couple hours for me, so I think that—”
“Natsuo,” said Shouto. “Fuyumi. Will you shut the fuck up, please? I’m fine by myself at home.”
His siblings looked at him.
“I’m feeling better,” Shouto said, which wasn’t entirely a lie. “You don’t have to baby me. I won’t break the lock on the alcohol cabinet or anything.”
Fuyumi hesitated. “Will you text me?”
“Yes,” said Shouto, “I’ll text you if I need anyth—”
“Every hour.”
Jesus fuck. “Every two hours.”
“Every hour or you’re coming with me.”
Shouto heaved a sigh. “Fine.”
For the first few hours after his siblings left, Shouto was fine. He rewatched a nature documentary he’d already seen, ran on the treadmill, and thought about doing homework (he didn’t)—all the things he normally did when he was home alone.
So he was surprised when he started feeling lonely.
He’d gotten too used to having both his siblings around this past week. Playing games with Natsuo, watching Red’s Ocean with Fuyumi, falling asleep on the couch knowing that both of them were in the room with him. He missed the skin contact, the feeling of the couch cushions shifting whenever Natsuo moved, the quiet shuffle of Fuyumi turning a page in her romance novel.
He thought about calling one of them, but they were busy, and… well, what was there to talk about? Shouto was shit at conversations. He just wanted to exist in the same room as somebody else.
Shouto pulled out his phone and pulled up the messaging app.
He was about to make a bad decision.
Shouto:
Hi.
The response came quickly.
Ya Boi Deku:
Hi. Dabi told me what happened. You need to talk?
Shouto:
Yes. But not about that.
Ya Boi Deku:
So what about?
Shouto:
Can you come over?
Ya Boi Deku:
??
To your house???
Like right now or?
Shouto:
Whenever my family isn’t home. Now is good.
Ya Boi Deku:
Well allrighty :)
I had a job in the area, so I can be over in ten
Shouto:
Do you need my address?
Ya Boi Deku:
I’m kinda offended you think I don’t know your address
Thx tho!
Nine minutes later, Shouto’s phone buzzed.
Ya Boi Deku:
Coming in!
Your gate password is fucking golden, btw
Of course Deku knew the code for the gate. Shouto wondered if he’d learned it from Dabi, who’d been the one to set it a decade ago.
Shouto went to the door to meet Deku. It was more than a little strange to see a Villain on his veranda wearing bright neon green Nike shorts and an even brighter smile.
“My dude!” said Deku, raising his arms. “Your favorite criminal appears, proffering a long, squeezy hug. Accept or decline?”
Shouto stepped out onto the veranda and—probably against his better judgement—said, “Okay.”
Deku looked surprised, dropping his arms. “Wait, really?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto. “Why? Were you joking?”
“Uh… no, I just didn’t think you’d… I did not come mentally prepared for this.”
“You don’t have to,” said Shouto.
“You fucking kidding?” Deku stepped forward and wrapped Shouto in a hug that surpassed Fuyumi’s in strength but was much… fuck, not softer, that wasn’t the word. But it was less this is a hug that exists for the purpose of making you feel better and more just… two bodies pressing in tight, close.
Which, strangely, did not feel like a bad thing.
Shouto was sure he’d been hugged by others in his lifetime, but he only really remembered the feel of Fuyumi’s hug. The others all blended into a composite picture of something cold, short, polite. He hadn’t realized there were distinct kinds of hugs, not until this.
Shouto didn’t know how to hug back—highly doubted he had any type of hugging style worth utilizing—so he just reached up with one arm and loosely rested his hand on Deku’s shoulder. Not even across Deku’s back, just under his left arm and over his left shoulder.
Deku’s voice was a little too close to his ear. “You’re very nice to hug. Like a buff peppermint stick.”
“Oh,” said Shouto.
Deku gave Shouto a final squeeze before pulling away. “Do I get to see inside your house or are we just chilling in front of the door? I mean, I’m good either way, but I do kind of want to see your room. For research purposes.”
“You don’t want to see it,” said Shouto. He let Deku into the house. “Bakugou said it looked like a depressed Spartan’s room.”
Deku’s eyebrows shot up as he followed Shouto inside. “Kacchan’s been in your room?”
“Just once,” said Shouto. “After the thing with Sakura’s dad.”
Deku tugged his left shoe off, placed it neatly along the wall. His socks had—what Shouto recognized from Deku’s memes—a Lilo and Stitch pattern. “Is he doing okay? Kacchan.”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “We haven’t talked.”
“Are you two still fighting?”
“I fucked up really bad at the sports festival,” Shouto said. “I haven’t read all the texts he sent me when I was in the hospital, but I think we’re not friends anymore.”
Deku hopped on one foot as he struggled to pull his right shoe off. “Because you beat the shit out of him, or…?”
“That’s part of it.”
Deku looked up. “It’s not because of me, is it? I was hoping that you two might stay friends. Because he gets… he… not that it’s your responsibility, just…” His shoe finally came off. He set it down beside the left shoe, straightened. “Hey, sorry to ask, but do you have any snacks? I kind of forgot to eat today, and I don’t want to pass out on ya. That happens a little too easily for me.”
Shouto was relieved Deku had asked. Other than Bakugou—which had been a complete disaster—Shouto had never hosted before and wasn’t sure at what point he was supposed to offer what things. “Fuyumi usually keeps fruit in the fridge. Pantry’s at the other end of the kitchen if you don’t see anything you want.”
“Oh my god, do you even know how long it’s been since I’ve had a piece of fruit? Shit’s expensive.” Deku went to the fridge and opened it. “Holy fuckaroni, you guys are well-stocked. Can I have this milk tea? And look at these sexy, sexy strawberries. I’mma steal some. You got a plate?”
Right. A plate. Jesus fuck, Shouto was bad at this hosting thing. He found a plate for Deku, and Deku put a milk tea and a handful of strawberries on it. He popped a strawberry in his mouth, spoke through it—
“So where are we headed?”
Shouto glanced over his shoulder. He wished he’d paid more attention to Fuyumi when she had guests. “I don’t have people over often,” said Shouto. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.”
“Strawberry?” Deku offered, and when Shouto shook his head, he put it in his own mouth. “Well, what do you do in your free time?”
Work out. Stare at the ceiling. Dissociate. “What… what do you do?”
“Play video games and cry,” said Deku, “sometimes at the same time. I also consume a lot of documentaries and podcasts and free language lessons on YouTube. Sometimes I memorize people’s birthdays and star signs. You’re a Capricorn. Magne is an Aries. Dabi won’t tell me his birthday, so I don’t know his sign. Kacchan is—”
“January eighteenth,” said Shouto.
Deku’s eyebrows shot up. “What? No, Kacchan’s birthday is April twentieth.”
“I mean Dabi. I think it’s January eighteenth.”
Deku was silent for a moment.
Then he smiled. “So he’s a Capricorn, too.”
“Does that mean something?” Shouto asked.
“If you want it to. Hey—you know what would be so fun? We should watch Frozen. You haven’t seen it, right?”
“I don’t watch new things much,” said Shouto.
“Word. I like my comfort shows. I do think you’ll like Frozen, though, unless there’s something else you wanna watch?”
“No. That’s fine.” Shouto suddenly remembered: “I think we have a home theater.”
Deku quirked an eyebrow. “You think?”
“I don’t go in that part of the house much.” The theater was close to Endeavor’s bedroom, so it had been years since anyone had made use of it. “I think it’s still usable. We can… use it. If you want.”
“That’d honestly be the most lit thing I’ve done all month,” said Deku. He followed Shouto as he started walking. “Home theater. Oh my god. Why don’t you use it much?”
“It’s loud,” said Shouto.
“And you don’t like loud things?”
“It’s not about me.” Shouto turned on a hallway light. It smelled like hardwood floor polish down this hall—a scent that was usually worn away in other parts of the house from cooking smells and foot traffic by the next day. “Endeavor doesn’t like noise.”
“Well, fuck him,” Deku said. “That sounds like it would limit a lot of your activity around the house.”
“I guess. I used to play guitar and piano.”
“You… sorry, what?”
Shouto opened the door to the theater. He blinked against the gust of musty air that hit him, then felt along the wall for the light switch until he found and flipped it.
Deku surveyed the room, half a strawberry suspended midway to his mouth. A thin line of strawberry juice had trailed down his wrist. “Woah. This is really nice, Shouto. Bet you could fit all of 1-A in here. Oh my god—you have to throw a party at your house at some point. I wanna plan the whole thing.” He motioned outward like he was imagining a headline. “I’m gonna write ‘fireworks show’ on the invitation, but it’s actually just going to be me annoying Kacchan until he explodes.”
Shouto went down the carpeted stairs into the shallow pit in front of the large screen. The remote sat on the arm of one of the sofas. Shouto tried it.
The batteries were dead. Of course.
“I got it,” said Deku. He stuck the half-eaten strawberry in his mouth so that his lips were tucked behind the green strawberry leaflets, and then he put a hand on the railing and leapt over it. The strawberries and milk tea on his plate wobbled but didn’t drop. He walked forward, found the power button near the bottom of the TV screen, and turned it on.
“There are stairs,” said Shouto.
“Yeah,” said Deku, “but I wanted to look cool.”
“I’m the only other person here,” Shouto said. “You don’t have to do any of that stuff.”
Deku straightened, grinning. “Yeah, just call out my giant crush on you like that, huh?”
“I mean that stuff, too.”
Deku hesitated. “What?”
“You said it makes you tired,” said Shouto. “I don’t want your being here to make you tired. I don’t need you to use energy for me. I just wanted to sit with you.”
Deku’s grin dropped off.
For a moment, his expression was blank. The kind of blank Shouto had never seen on anyone but Deku—complete absence, like his consciousness had suddenly been sucked out of his body.
Then Deku blinked.
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Deku said.
You won’t, probably would’ve been the correct answer. But Shouto was a bad liar. “It’s okay if you do.”
Deku stared at him. His expression said nothing.
“I’m going to get batteries for the remote,” said Shouto.
Shouto left Deku in the theater. He found the batteries in the kitchen. He paused in front of the pantry, considered, and then grabbed a couple chocolate taiyaki pastries.
When he got back to the theater, Deku was curled into a corner of the sofa, head resting against the arm.
“Do you like taiyaki?” Shouto asked.
Deku didn’t respond.
“Deku,” said Shouto.
Deku’s head lifted. He looked at Shouto. “Mm?”
Shouto held up a taiyaki pack.
“Oh,” said Deku. “Yeah. You—yeah. Yeah.”
Shouto tossed one pack to Deku and held the other pack between his teeth as he replaced the batteries in the remote. When he finished, he sat on the opposite end of the sofa, gave the remote to Deku, and tore open his taiyaki pack.
Deku kept his head against the arm of the couch as he searched Frozen, biting into his taiyaki with a crunch. “You mind if I put on subtitles?” he asked. “Makes it easier to catch up when I forget to listen.”
Shouto usually watched with subtitles, too. “Okay.”
“Thanks.”
Shouto watched Deku as he pulled the movie up and switched the subtitles to ON. Well… now was as good of a time as any to bring it up. Shouto didn’t really want to be thinking about it all through the movie, anyway. “Deku.”
Deku took another bite of his taiyaki, eyes on the screen. “Mm?”
“I met Toga.”
Deku choked. The remaining taiyaki dropped to the carpet as he shoved himself into a sitting position, coughing hard into the crook of his arm.
“Are you okay?” Shouto asked.
Deku gave a quick nod, eyes squeezed closed, and kept coughing. It went on for a while before it slowed and then stopped. Deku wiped his eyes with the back of his thumb.
“Fuck,” said Deku, voice hoarse. “Sorry. Had a near-death experience there. Uh… Toga?”
“Your ex-girlfriend,” Shouto said. “She started talking about how she lost her quirk.”
“She—um. What did she tell…?”
“That you drugged her so your father could steal her quirk. And then you dumped her in front of the hospital.”
“Wow.” Deku scratched behind his ear, his eyes darting to the door. He looked supremely uncomfortable. “That’s, um… that’s… embarrassing. The thing is, with—shit. Y’know, with my father, he—shit, okay, you weren’t actually supposed to know about Toga.”
“I gathered that,” said Shouto.
“It wasn’t all an act. I was in love with her for a little while. But I can’t—when my father tells me to do something, I have to do it. I would’ve had to kill her if I didn’t put her some place she couldn’t leave, and I really didn’t want to have to—”
“I’m not angry,” said Shouto. “I know it’s not your fault. I just wanted to ask if you have plans to do something like that to me.”
Deku waved his hands in front of him. Some of the color had drained from his face, and for the first time, Shouto noticed the half-circles under Deku’s eyes. “No, no. No. I’m not—Shouto, no. I’m just helping Dabi out right now. That’s all.”
“I’d rather you just tell me,” said Shouto. “Does your father want my quirk?”
“He—he doesn’t need your quirk. There are plenty of people with a fire or ice quirk that he could steal from more easily.”
Did that mean Deku’s father could make Shouto’s rare quirk simply by combining two common ones? It had taken Endeavor four kids and the help of multiple geneticists to finally produce that. “What if your father told you to hurt me?”
Deku shifted away from Shouto, pulled his elbows in close to his torso. Not hugging himself, exactly… more like he had some wound there that he was trying not to reopen.
“I don’t want to lie to you,” said Deku.
“So you would do it?”
“I don’t know. I think I might.”
Strangely, the affirmation carried a gentle wave of relief with it. For better or worse, Deku trusted Shouto enough to tell him the truth. “What about Bakugou? Would you hurt him?”
Deku shook his head. “Kacchan’s different.”
“Because you’ve known him longer?”
“Because—” Deku cut himself off and went quiet for a moment. Then, “Shouto, you can’t tell him any of this. Please. He wasn’t ever supposed to find out what I do. If he realizes I’m not in control of the situation like I said I was and tries to help—”
“I won’t tell,” said Shouto.
“Sensei always said he’d hurt Kacchan and his family if I tried to get them or anyone else involved. That’s why I never asked anyone for help, not because of whatever he was doing to my mom.” Deku paused, winced. “Kacchan doesn’t know that I didn’t… you know how Deku can be interpreted as ‘useless’? That was Kacchan’s nickname for me when we were little. Sensei heard him call me that once and thought it was funny, so that’s… Sensei calls me that now.”
Jesus fuck. “So the name ‘Deku’ wasn’t a choice for you?”
“It’s a reminder. I have to be useful to Sensei or he’ll hurt Kacchan. Kill him, maybe. And I know Kacchan’s a fucking asshole, I know that, but I—I…”
“You still love him,” said Shouto.
“I do,” said Deku. “Not just romantically—I’ll be okay if he never likes me back. It’s deeper than that. I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself if he got hurt because of me. I’m sorry I don’t feel the… exact same about you, it’s just—”
“I understand,” Shouto said. “I don’t want Bakugou to get hurt, either.”
Deku nodded, rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not that I don’t care about you. I really do. I think you’re really kind and brave and… well, you’re really attractive, and I know that’s not a personality trait, but it’s true. You’re hot as shit. If you ever feel like kissing somebody, my lips are right here,”—he pointed— “on my face, 24/7.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “Um. I wanted to ask a favor, too.”
“Shoot.”
“So I bribed someone—”
Deku laughed, loud and startled. Then he schooled his face and said, “Sorry. Continue.”
“—and I need to transfer a pretty large sum of money into their account every month. Do you know how to do that without setting off any alarms?”
“Hm,” said Deku. “Lemme check with Big Sis Magne first—she has more experience with money shit than I do—but it shouldn’t be a problem. Send me your info later and I’ll get it done.”
Well, that was easy. “Thank you. I can pay you.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s my pleasure. Wanna watch the movie?”
Shouto nodded.
They started watching. Shouto understood why Deku had picked this movie for them to watch—the main character had an ice power that was similar to Shouto’s quirk. Sad that both of her parents died, of course, but Shouto was more focused on how Elsa was using her quirk. Shouto couldn’t make snow and certainly didn’t have the range and control Elsa had over her ice, but it was still interesting to—
Shouto heard Deku’s breath hitch. He looked over, and his heart tripped over itself.
Deku was crying. Eyes wide and staring straight forward, blinking rapidly, arms wrapped around his stomach as he gently rocked back and forth. His whole body was shaking.
Shouto kept his voice low, careful. “Deku?”
“S—s—I’m—I’m s—fuck, shit,” Deku spat. He wiped his face furiously. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think I would—I was just thinking about my—I usually skip the backstory part, but I thought I’d watched it enough times that I’d be fine today, and I wanted you to see it, but then you caught me by surprise talking about Toga, and the movie’s got the thing with the parents dying, so I started thinking about what happened with my mom, and… about… oh my god, Shouto. Oh my god. I’m so sorry.”
Shouto paused the movie. The silence was filled with the sound of Deku’s labored breathing. He’d hunched into himself, covering his face with both hands.
Shouto had no idea what to do.
“I didn’t mean to make this about me,” Deku said, voice muffled. “I know you f-feel like shit, too. I just… had a job earlier today where I had to… do something I really didn’t wanna do, and it fucking sucked. I was so relieved when you invited me over. Wasn’t planning on turning into a complete mess.”
“Do you need anything?” Shouto asked.
Deku dragged his hands down his face. His eyes were red, wet. “I don’t fucking know.”
What did Deku like besides Disney, memes, cosplay, and strawberries? He liked hugs, right? “I can move closer if you want.”
Deku was quiet.
Maybe Shouto had miscalculated. “I don’t have to.”
“No,” said Deku. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, sniffed. “I think I’d like that. But don’t do it if you don’t want to.”
Shouto wasn’t quite sure how he was supposed to initiate this—it would likely be awkward as fuck—but he tried his best. He moved closer until his thigh touched Deku’s, and then he put an arm around Deku’s waist. He smelled a little like bleach, for reasons Shouto didn’t want to think about.
Deku exhaled, and Shouto felt the tense muscles in Deku’s back relax a bit. Slowly, Deku rested his head on Shouto’s shoulder. His soft curls brushed Shouto’s cheek, and Shouto had to concentrate hard to suppress a shiver.
It had always been difficult for Shouto to think of Deku as entirely human. Maybe it was the eyes that had started Shouto on that way of thinking—Deku’s eyes were often just unfocused enough that they gave the impression that Shouto was staring straight through him, unable to catch any sense of what Deku was really thinking. But there’d also been Deku’s uncanny gift of observation, his disproportionately upbeat attitude, his ability to seamlessly switch from a sadistic personality to an altruistic one…
Here, though, leaning against Shouto’s side, Deku just felt… small. Warm. Almost fragile.
He felt like a fifteen-year-old boy.
“Thank you,” murmured Deku. “This may not mean much coming from someone who jumped off a fucking bridge, but I’m… I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead, too,” said Shouto.
Deku giggled. “Such a romantic. We might as well just get married now, huh?”
Shouto knew Deku couldn’t see it, but he smiled anyway.
They started watching the movie again. Halfway through, Shouto felt Deku go limp against him. He held his hand under Deku’s nose to confirm he was still breathing, and only then did he realize that Deku had just fallen asleep on him.
Deku.
Asleep.
On Shouto.
This might not have been the weirdest thing Shouto had ever experienced, but it was definitely up there.
No one had ever taught him the rules of what he was supposed to do in this situation, so he just remained as still as possible through the rest of the movie. Even when the credits were rolling, he didn’t budge.
A voice came from outside the room. “Shi—? Shouchan?”
Shit. Shit. Was Fuyumi home? She wasn’t supposed to be back for another couple hours. She definitely wasn’t supposed to ever come in contact with Deku.
There was a knock on the door, and then a band of light from the door opening grew across the carpet. Shouto looked over his shoulder.
Fuyumi stood in the doorway, one hand on the door. Her tone was less accusatory and more confused. “What are you doing in here?”
“I was watching a movie,” said Shouto, like the credits weren’t rolling on the screen right in front of them. “Why are you home?”
“I finished up parent-teacher conferences early.” Fuyumi took a step into the room, then stopped. “Do you… have someone with you?”
“He fell asleep,” said Shouto. He jostled Deku. “Deku, wake up.”
Deku jolted upright, blinking hard. He’d somehow earned a cowlick in the half-hour he’d been asleep. “Wha—? Where is he?”
He must’ve caught Deku in the middle of a dream. “My sister’s home.”
“Sister?” Deku’s eyes went to the door. It took a moment for the confusion to dissolve. He smiled, gave an energetic wave. “Hi, Oneesan.”
“Hi…?” said Fuyumi.
Shouto probably needed to step in and smooth this over. “He’s my friend,” he told Fuyumi. “I asked him to come over.”
Fuyumi hesitated. “Well, is everything…? Is everything okay, or…?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“Everything’s great,” Deku said. “We just watched Frozen and I ate some strawberries. Well, Shouto watched Frozen. I fell asleep. I think I got chocolate on your carpet.”
“Oh,” said Fuyumi. “It’s—it’s no problem. I’ll tell housekeeping about it later. Do you two want to come hang out in the living room?”
He recognized that this-sounds-like-a-question-but-it’s-a-command tone. Fuyumi wanted to supervise. That shouldn’t surprise him, considering the reaction she’d had to finding Bakugou in the bathroom with him a couple weeks ago.
They went into the living room and sat on the couch. “Deku, right?” Fuyumi asked. “Do you like mochi?”
Deku smiled. “Love it.”
It only took Fuyumi a couple minutes in the kitchen to prepare. She came back into the living room and set the platter on the coffee table, but her hands didn’t move away from it. She was looking at Deku, eyebrows drawn. “Why do I feel like I recognize you?” she asked. “Were you on tv for the sports festival?”
Deku’s smile froze. “Uh… no, I don’t go to UA.”
Well, shit. This wasn’t good. What if she recognized him from the news story where he and his mother were dead?
“Really?” Fuyumi’s gaze darted between Shouto and Deku. “How did you meet, then?”
Shouto hadn’t realized that he’d been banking on her not asking that question until she asked it. Fuyumi knew he hardly ever went anywhere that wasn’t school or home. She also knew his history of friend-making, and it wasn’t great.
“We have a mutual friend,” said Deku. “I don’t know if you… know…” He looked at Shouto.
Careful not to let his expression give anything away, Shouto signed, “She doesn’t like Bakugou.”
“…Kirishima?” Deku finished. “He introduced me to Shouto at the sports festival.”
“No, I don’t know Kirishima,” said Fuyumi. She was looking at Shouto, probably suspicious of whatever he’d signed to Deku. She straightened. “Well, I’ll leave you two alone.”
“Oh, wait,” Deku said, getting up on his knees on the couch so he could talk to Fuyumi as she headed for the kitchen. “Sorry if this is weird, but can I ask you some questions about your quirk? I’m really interested.”
Fuyumi came to a halt. She touched her hand to her chest. “My quirk? It’s nothing—I mean, it’s not anything special like Shouto’s.”
“Snow, right? Have you ever, like, attack-blizzarded someone? Is it directional? Does the moisture come from inside or outside your body? Because I was thinking about range and what the limitations might be there, and—” Deku put his hands to his face like he was only now realizing he had one. Then he waved his hands in a never mind gesture. “Sorry. Sorry. Special interest. I get too excited.”
The surprise in Fuyumi’s face melted into something more understanding. “I don’t mind. I’m just not… not used to people being interested in my quirk. I can sit down with you and answer your questions if you’d like.”
“Wh—really?” Deku pulled a mini notebook from his pocket, flipping to a new page. “Like right now?”
“If Shouto doesn’t mind.”
Deku looked at Shouto, who shrugged. What was he supposed to say? That he didn’t want his murderer friend talking to his relatively defenseless sister?
Fuyumi sat on one of the recliners. Deku and Shouto sat back-to-back on the sofa while Deku interviewed her. Shouto zoned out for most of it, listening only to the way Deku’s voice rose and fell in time with his excitement. It was small comfort that he could confirm Deku hadn’t risen to attack by the warm pressure against his back, but it was comfort nonetheless. He was reminded of how Bakugou had pinched the tail of Deku’s shirt on the train, and he understood the motive behind it a little better. The illusion of control was better than nothing.
Suddenly, though, Fuyumi said something that caught Shouto’s attention—
“Oh,” said Fuyumi. “I know where I remember you from, Deku.”
Shouto’s heart stilled. He didn’t dare turn his head to look at Fuyumi.
There was no hint of fear in Deku’s cheerful voice. “Do you?”
“Your mother used to volunteer at the elementary school I work at, I think. Midoriya Inko?”
“Yes,” said Deku. “That’s… yes, that was her.”
“One of the sweetest women I’ve ever met,” said Fuyumi. “I was just a teacher’s assistant at that point. You probably don’t remember, but you helped me cut up some printouts. We talked a little bit about Pro Heroes and… I think about All Might? You were very into All Might. How is your mom, anyway?”
Shouto pinched the skin between his thumb and index finger hard. Jesus, Fuyumi…
He felt Deku shift against his back. “She’s doing good. Mostly working from home these days.”
Doing good? She was doing dead. He finally allowed himself to turn and look at Fuyumi, keeping one shoulder pressed against Deku’s back.
Fuyumi took a sip of her tea, smiled. “Tell your mom I said hi, okay?”
“Yeah, definitely,” said Deku. He leaned to grab a green mochi. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear from you.”
Fuyumi opened her mouth, then closed it and tilted her head. “Do you have something on your shirt?”
Deku looked down at his chest, chewing. “Hm?”
“Near your collar, there’s a little spot…” She reached forward, tugged lightly at the shoulder of Deku’s shirt. There was a small red spot there—Shouto hadn’t seen it, either. “Did you have a nosebleed earlier?”
Shouto felt like he was going to throw up his entire stomach.
That blood was definitely not from a nosebleed. It probably wasn’t even Deku’s blood.
“Oh—yeah, I did,” said Deku. He popped the rest of the mochi in his mouth. “Had one this morning. I get those, unfortunately.”
“Ach. I used to have to take care of those all the time with Natsuo—that’s our brother, if you didn’t know. I have a stain-remover pen if you’d like to borrow it.”
“That’s okay,” said Deku.
“Are you sure? Wouldn’t be a problem.”
Deku smiled. “I’m sure. Thank you.”
Deku’s phone hummed in his pocket, playing a soundbite of All Might’s I am here! to indicate a text. Deku took his phone out and looked at it. His smile faltered.
“Ah, that’s my dad,” he said, standing. He spoke fast. “I gotta head out. Fuyumi-san, it was really, really great to meet you—Shouto, I’ll see you soon, okay?” He leaned forward and planted a quick, tiny kiss on top of Shouto’s head. “Take care of yourself. Bye.”
“I’ll see you out,” said Fuyumi, rising.
Shouto stayed seated as Fuyumi walked Deku to the door. His head was swimming.
Bakugou had been right, hadn’t he? Deku did want out of the situation with his father. The realization put an ache in his chest.
Could Shouto help him? It didn’t seem possible. He still didn’t understand the situation entirely. A few weeks ago, Deku had said that he’d cut a deal with his father after his mother’s death, and Shouto didn’t know what that deal was. He wondered if he should ask.
Shouto heard the front door open and close. When Fuyumi returned, she plopped down beside Shouto with a whumph. “Soooo,” she said.
Ah, shit. That was her teasing voice. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard it. “What?”
“He was a very nice boy.” Fuyumi bumped her shoulder against his. “Very sincere. Any particular reason why you didn’t want me home while he was over?”
Well, he hadn’t particularly enjoyed having his sister and a murderer in the same room. Just because he enjoyed Deku’s company a little bit didn’t mean he trusted Deku around his family. “No. Nobody was home and I wanted to sit with someone.”
Fuyumi’s face lost some of its mirth. “You know you can call me when you need to. I have a teacher’s assistant who can cover for me.”
“I know,” said Shouto. “Sorry. I thought he’d be gone before you got back.”
“You don’t need to be sorry. I do like a little bit of a warning before guests come over, but I was happy to meet your friend. He seemed quite smitten by you.”
“I think he’s like that with everybody,” said Shouto.
“Really? Looked to me like he has a little crush.”
“Oh,” Shouto said. “Well, he did say that.”
“Say what? That he has a crush on you?”
“Yes.”
She elbowed him. “See?! I knew it. Well?”
“Well?”
“What’d you tell him? Do you like him back?”
Wait—was he supposed to have said something back? He thought they’d been getting on pretty well without continuing that thread of conversation. Anyway, Shouto couldn’t always tell when Deku was saying something as part of a persona versus when he really meant it. “I didn’t… tell him anything. I don’t know if I even like boys.”
Fuyumi tilted her head, her voice taking on a careful tone. “You like… girls, then?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “I’m not—I don’t know if I’ve ever had a crush before. Sometimes I think people look nice, or I like being around them, but I don’t know if—I don’t know what a crush is supposed to feel like.”
“Mm…” Fuyumi shifted to face him, leaning her shoulder against the backrest. “Well, you might feel flustered around them and want to impress them. You want to be around them as much as you can. And you notice little things about them, like the shade of their eyes or how they walk.”
Why would anyone want to be around someone who flustered them all the time? Being embarrassed wasn’t a pleasant experience. As for impressing people… Shouto hadn’t tried to do that for years. He wasn’t proud of the things he was good at. And Shouto noticed little things about lots of people. What their footsteps sounded like, what subjects they didn’t like to talk about, their tells of being in a bad mood, how grating their laugh was. But that was mostly so he could strategically avoid certain people.
Though… now that he was thinking about it, he did sometimes notice things that weren’t immediately related to his survival or comfort. Bakugou’s spiky hair bobbed when he walked. Deku’s eyes were strange. Momo looked nice like a painting. Kaminari took a full three minutes to tie his shoes in the locker room every day. Shouto didn’t think any of that meant something, though.
“Do you ever feel like that?” Fuyumi prompted.
“I don’t think so,” said Shouto.
“Never?”
Shouto felt uncomfortable. “Maybe I… maybe I did and I don’t remember it. I don’t know. Is that…? I mean, do most people…?”
“Oh, I’m—” Fuyumi shook her head, waved a dismissive hand. “—I’m sure it’s just fine. You’re, um… you haven’t met a lot of people your age yet, and you’re focused on other things right now. You’re only fifteen. Plenty of people don’t get crushes until they’re older.”
“When did you get your first crush?” Shouto asked.
“That’s not… that’s not too important, but… seven. That doesn’t mean that you—”
“You think it’s weird,” Shouto said.
Fuyumi nodded her head to one side, lips pressed together. “Now, I didn’t say that.”
“Is it, though?”
“Well, it—no, it’s not,” she said firmly. “But I was wondering if… maybe trauma has… something to do with it? Maybe not. Just… that would make sense. But I’m sure you’ll get a crush at some point. It’ll be okay.”
“You blame a lot of things on Lady Hypna,” said Shouto.
“Don’t you? She’s a horrible woman.”
Shouto felt vulnerable suddenly, like he’d revealed too much too quickly, mixed too many parts of his life together. He pulled his knees up to his chest, folding himself as if to trap the nausea in his stomach.
“Are you okay?” Fuyumi asked.
Shouto exhaled. “Anxious.”
“It’s not me, is it?”
“Meds wearing off,” he said. “I’m usually anxious. It just surprises me when it… when it comes back.”
Her face pinched. “You’re usually anxious?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I thought you knew.”
“I knew you get anxious around other people.” She paused, then stood. “I’ll get your meds.”
“I took them a couple hours ago,” he said.
“Really? They’re supposed to last four hours… well, crap. We’ll have to bring that up at your next—shit, I forgot I need to make a doctor’s appointment for you. I knew I was forgetting something… there’s always something…”
“Don’t bother,” said Shouto. “Endeavor won’t let me keep taking medication if it fucks with my ability to fight.”
Fuyumi folded her arms. Gave him a look.
“I’m being realistic,” he said.
“I don’t like seeing you like this,” said Fuyumi.
“I don’t like being like this. Just—” He cut himself off. There was no reason he should be taking out his frustration on his sister. She was doing her best considering the circumstances. And she didn’t know that his stomachache came from knowing that his sister had just been having a pleasant conversation with a fucking murderer—
Okay. He needed to calm down. Deku wasn’t evil. He was a kid like Shouto. Most likely he wasn’t going to break into Shouto’s house at night and kill Fuyumi. This was just his anxiety talking.
Huh. Maybe he did learn something from those group sessions at the hospital.
“Sorry,” he told Fuyumi. “I’ll take the meds.”
She started out of the room.
Shouto remembered something and called out to her. “Fuyumi.”
She turned.
“Thank you for calling me Shouto,” he said. “It… made me happy.”
Fuyumi gave a gentle smile—one that reminded him of Rei. “I am trying,” she said.
“Do you know I love you?”
“I know,” said Fuyumi. “My funny little gremlin. I know.”
Notes:
When I first decided that I wanted Natsuo to be a successful YouTuber (a LONG time ago), I got super excited because I was gonna watch a bunch of his videos as research. And then I realized. The videos do not exist. Because the channel does not exist. Because Natsuo does not exist. It was one of the more devastating moments in my life.
THANK YOU ALL for your comments. They really make my heart indescribably happy, even if I don't have the spoons to reply to all of them.
If all goes as planned, next chapter is Bakugou! Finally.
Chapter 48: Shouto Eats a Twinkie: Part Two
Summary:
Midnight drops by for a visit. The long-awaited Bakugou/Shouto reunion!
Notes:
CW: prescription meds abuse (sorta), trauma survivor mindset, intimidation; DISCUSSION OF: suicide attempts, suicide, physical abuse, murder, self-harm (not explicit)
I drew a picture of Ando and while I'm not completely satisfied with it (it's hard for me to draw faces without a reference!), I'm still linking it in the chapter. Check it out for the MCR t-shirt if nothing else XD
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Ando drawing!! by me :)
https://twitter.com/hyperfixeaten/status/1584240274121052160
Shouto was scheduled to increase the dose of two of his medications on Friday, so he was already a little loopy when Natsuo announced that he needed to run to the store to grab some ingredients for dinner before Fuyumi got home.
“You gonna be okay by yourself?” asked Natsuo. “I won’t be an hour.”
“I was okay yesterday,” Shouto said.
“You got lonely and invited a stranger over.”
Shouto would probably be regretting inviting Deku over for a while, wouldn’t he? “He wasn’t a stranger.”
“Still,” said Natsuo. “You can come with me if you don’t want to be by yourself.”
“I don’t like grocery stores.” The bright lights, the clattering carts, the music, the smells, the beeping at the registers—like, just pick one. All of it together was too much. “I’ll be fine here.”
Natsuo raised his eyebrows, but he tucked his wallet in his back pocket and started toward the door. Then he halted, looked over his shoulder. “Just so you know, if I come back and you’re dead, I’m gonna be fucking pissed.”
“I won’t die,” said Shouto.
“Thank you. Oh, and—” Natsuo left for the back rooms and came back with a pill, which he dropped on the coffee table in front of Shouto. “One of your anxiety pills. Take it if you need it. Emergency only, got it?”
After Natsuo left, Shouto didn’t wait long to take the pill. He hadn’t had much of a high since leaving the hospital, and both Natsuo and Fuyumi were out of the house right now, so why not.
He rewatched a couple episodes of a 90’s comedy anime Natsuo had introduced him to, then turned the volume on low and switched to a random tv station. Just as he was about to drift into sleep, the gate alarm chimed.
Shouto didn’t especially want to talk to a stranger right now, but sometimes it would be a delivery or a friend of Fuyumi’s waiting outside, and she’d get frustrated when Shouto ignored them. So he peeled himself from the dent he’d made in the couch, stumbled to the side a couple steps—that anxiety medication had a kick, woah—wrapped his blanket around his shoulders, and went to the gate answering machine. He tapped accept on the touchpad and said, “Hello?”
There was a pause. Then a woman’s voice— “Jellybean? Is that you?”
Ah, shit.
Midnight?
He’d only just managed to slow down intrusive memories from the sports festival, and now he was thinking about them all over again. He’d made a fucking ice knife to threaten Midnight with. That didn’t seem like something you could just pretend never happened.
Could he just… not answer her? Go back to the couch and keep watching tv? That was an option, right?
Midnight’s voice came over the speaker again. “I just—we’re all really worried about you. Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“Okay,” said Midnight. She didn’t sound sure. “I… brought your textbooks and some make-up work. You have someone else in the house looking after you right now?”
Fuyumi had told him that he wasn’t supposed to give out family information to strangers, especially the information that he was home alone. It made him an easy target. He compromised, twisted the truth a bit. “My brother’s on his way home.”
“Okie dokie—no problem,” said Midnight. “I can just leave your things at the gate here. Email Aizawa back if you can, okay? You spooked us all, disappearing like that.”
She wasn’t asking to come in?
Shouto wasn’t sure why he felt disappointed. He didn’t want to talk to her. Didn’t want her in his space, seeing where he lived, gaining a clearer context in which she could imagine all the shit that had gone down inside this house. Not to mention the havoc wreaked on his parasympathetic system every time he was alone with a Pro Hero, especially when that Hero happened to be an older woman.
But… God, UA was starting to feel like it had never really happened.
Shouto didn’t like that.
“Still there?” Midnight asked.
“You can come in.” What the fuck was he saying? “If you want.”
A brief silence from Midnight’s side. When she spoke, her voice lacked its usual smooth charm. “Well—well, I don’t… I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, babycakes. I’m just glad you’re okay. I’m fine dropping your things off and leaving.”
Shouto pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders.
“Is that okay?” Midnight prompted. “Is there something you need from me?”
“Can—can you come in?” Shouto asked. “Please.”
“Oh,” said Midnight. Her voice changed tone—was she surprised? “Sure I can. Do you want to contact your brother and get his okay first?”
That was probably wise. “Give me a minute.”
“Sure.”
Shouto clicked off the speaker and, fumbling through his drug-blurred vision, managed to pull up Natsuo’s contact information on his cell phone. Natsuo answered after the first ring. “Hey.”
“Hi,” said Shouto. “Midnight’s here.”
“What?”
“Midnight,” Shouto repeated. “From my school.”
“What, like, inside?” Natsuo asked.
“Not yet.”
“Do you need me to tell her to go away? I can come home now.”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto. “I think she’s okay, probably. I asked her to come in.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“You asked?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto. “Is that weird?”
Natsuo paused long enough for Shouto to hear the overhead store music. Then, “I guess not. Just… fuck, okay. I’ll check out and take a cab home. Fifteen minutes, tops.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“You don’t have to let her in if you don’t want to. You can tell her I said no.”
“I know,” said Shouto.
He hung up and pressed the button to unlock the gate. Shouto stood by the door for a few seconds, and then he yielded to the small, unsettled feeling in his stomach and went to the kitchen. He dug around the back of the spare silverware drawer, found the small folding knife he’d hidden there a couple years ago, and dropped it in his pocket.
Good to be safe. Especially when he was vulnerable like this, with his quirk only just beginning to work again and him being at least somewhat higher than fuck. Natsuo liked safety, right?
There was a gentle double-rap on the door, and Shouto opened it. It was strange to see Midnight in clothing that wasn’t her Hero costume or the low-necked, curve-hugging business casual she wore on occasion. Today, she wore a loose-fitting gray t-shirt with what must’ve been a decade-old UA logo design—the letters blockier, bumbling—and jogging pants, of all things. She’d also pulled her black hair into a ponytail and put on a pair of standard square-framed glasses.
“Well, hi!” Midnight said, smiling. She was holding a small backpack in one hand. She raised her free hand to her cheek. “Ahh! I’m so glad I get to see you. What’ve you been up to?”
Shouto stepped back to let her in. His blanket swiped the wall—he’d forgotten he was still clutching it around his shoulders. If Fuyumi had been here, she’d be staring him down right now for his hosting faux pas. “Sleeping,” he told Midnight.
She slipped off her tennis shoes, not bothering to untie the frayed laces. “Hope I didn’t wake you up.”
“No.”
Midnight’s eyes moved to Shouto’s chest, and her smile faltered. Shouto wondered at first if she’d noticed he wasn’t wearing a binder, but he had his blanket covering his chest, so…
Oh.
She was looking at his hands.
Had Shouto let Endeavor’s finger-cutting-off threat slip to her or Aizawa during the sports festival? He couldn’t remember. He did have the thick bandage around his middle finger. Did she think Endeavor had done that to him?
“It’s from the sports festival,” Shouto said.
Midnight’s eyes returned to his face. “Hm?”
“My hand,” said Shouto. “You were looking at it.”
Midnight looked startled. “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“I’m just telling you,” said Shouto. “It makes me tired trying to figure out what people want me to say. I’m already tired from medication. I thought probably you were wondering, so I told you. I’m not allowed to use the stove, so I can’t make tea. You look sweaty. Do you want something cold?”
It took Midnight a moment to answer. “That’d be lovely. Thank you.”
“Okay. I think we have—” He opened the fridge to search for the small bottles of milk tea Fuyumi liked to give to guests. He didn’t see any. “I think I gave the last one to Deku. But we have melon soda and Calpis and Pocari and aloe juice. I don’t like the aloe juice, but Fuyumi keeps buying it.”
“It’s more of an acquired taste,” said Midnight. “I’ll take some of that Calpis, though.”
Shouto gave her a bottle. Then he said, “I want to sit on the couch.”
“Let’s do that, then,” said Midnight. “Do you want me to go over your homework with you?”
And have a panic attack in front of Midnight? No, thanks. “Can we just sit?”
Midnight smiled. She set the backpack on the kitchen table. “Sure thing, Jellybean.”
They went into the living room. Shouto dropped back down into the spot he’d recently vacated. It was still warm. He pressed his face halfway into the couch, pulled his legs in, and yanked his blanket around him.
“Well, look at you,” said Midnight, sitting in an adjacent armchair. “You look like a little burrito, all wrapped up.”
Shouto watched her open her Calpis. When she looked back at him and smiled, Shouto felt the folding knife in his pocket dig into his thigh. He shifted, directing his eyes at the anime playing quietly on the tv.
“Are you mad?” Shouto asked.
“About what?” Midnight said.
“Aizawa said you weren’t mad about it,” said Shouto. “But I think maybe he knows I don’t like it when people get mad. I didn’t know if he was just saying that so I wouldn’t feel bad.”
“I’m not mad, sweetheart. That wasn’t your fault.”
The low noise from the tv was starting to bother him. Shouto dug the tv remote out from under the throw pillow at the head of the couch, switched the sound off, and turned subtitles on.
“I was thinking about it a lot,” he said. “I said mean things to other people, too.”
“You had a tough week,” Midnight said. “Everybody has times when they accidentally take their stress out on people they don’t mean to.”
Sure. But most people didn’t threaten to kill their teacher.
“Are you coming back to school?” Midnight asked. “Sero said you told him something about you maybe not coming back to UA.”
He had said that, hadn’t he? Had also forgotten about it until just now. He hoped he wasn’t forgetting anything else important. “I thought I’d be dead before Monday.”
“What do you mean?”
Shouto tugged his blanket up to his chin. He debated changing the channel, but the remote was on the coffee table now, and he didn’t want to move.
Midnight asked, “You said you saw Deku again?”
Had he said that? “Yeah.”
“He came here? You invited him?”
“We watched Frozen,” said Shouto. “That’s his favorite movie. I liked it.”
“You liked the movie? Or Deku being there?”
“I liked the movie,” said Shouto. “I liked Deku, too. He’s nice.”
“I saw the notes he made for improvements to Mic’s support gear. He seems very smart.”
Shouto closed his eyes. He was getting tired again.
“Shouto,” said Midnight, softly.
Shouto kept silent, watching the backs of his eyelids. This was... nice. Being in the same room as somebody else. Nobody really needed to be talking.
“We sent people to the apartment he took you and Bakugou to,” Midnight said. “I saw some photos.”
They could just sit. Or lie there. In the same room. It was okay.
“It must’ve been really horrible to watch that happen,” said Midnight. “I’m sorry if I’m not understanding something. Does being in the same house as him not make you afraid?”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto.
“Baby, I don’t know that it is.”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto. “Deku feels things like I feel things. I feel more like a person when he’s there. And I want him to feel better, too. I think probably he feels really bad all the time.”
Midnight’s voice stayed gentle. “You know it’s not your responsibility to make him feel better.”
“I don’t want him to feel bad,” said Shouto. “He’s nice. He tries to help people. He was feeling really shitty, but he still came to sit with me.”
“You don’t owe him anything, Shouto.”
“But I don’t want him to feel bad. He came to sit with me after I tried to kill myself. I don’t think he had anybody to sit with him after his attempt. He shouldn’t have to feel bad. I don’t like that he feels like that. He—”
“Okay,” said Midnight.
“—I don’t want him to feel bad.”
“Okay.”
The knife started digging into his thigh again. He rolled onto his stomach.
“Is Bakugou still going to school?” Shouto asked.
“He is,” said Midnight.
“He’s still going?”
“Mm-hm. He’s there every day.”
Good. That was good. “He has feelings a lot. I was scared he was going to get stuck in them.”
“You should contact him,” said Midnight.
Should he? He didn’t want to think about Bakugou.
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” said Shouto. “I’m tired.”
“Do you want me to leave so you can rest?” Midnight asked.
“No.”
“You want me to just sit here, then?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “Is that okay?”
“Fine by me.”
Shouto let himself drift off a little. He thought about Midnight’s sweet-smelling fog quirk, and how easy it would be for her to use it on him right now. He was already tired and drugged, so he likely wouldn’t notice that extra quirk-induced drowsiness before he fell unconscious. He ought to stay awake, alert, just in case.
But fuck, he was exhausted. And maybe it’d be a horrible decision, but wouldn’t it feel so nice to just trust an adult? No difficult choices to make, no responsibilities he wasn’t ready for, no need to assess every situation for potential danger and escape routes. He’d been raised by a fellow child for much of his life. What would it have been like, living with someone who would’ve raised and protected him not because they had to, but because they wanted to? Someone who actually had the resources and know-how to provide what he’d needed growing up?
Wasn’t he still growing up? Weren’t Natsuo and Fuyumi?
Didn’t they still need an adult who knew how to help them through it?
Shouto wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he fully jolted back into consciousness, courtesy of the front door opening and closing. He rolled onto his back. “Natsuo,” he called.
Natsuo’s voice came from the kitchen. “Give me like two seconds, dude. You holding up?”
“I’m lying down,” said Shouto.
The smack of the fridge door opening. “Well, keep talking so I can follow your voice. I’m not sure how I’m going to find you in the vast expanse of that couch you haven’t left all week.”
“I’m not dead.” Shouto’s mouth felt like it was holding a couple marshmallows inside, without any of the pleasant taste. Were his words slurring? “I told you I wouldn’t die while you were at the store, and then I didn’t.”
“I am so proud.” Natsuo appeared at the entrance to the living room, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe. He waved at Midnight. “Hello, Esteemed Guest. I’m glad to see that Shouto’s keeping you thoroughly entertained with the top of his head.”
Shouto pointed out, “I got her a drink.”
“I see that,” said Natsuo. “Fuyumi is quaking.”
Midnight laughed. “It’s good to meet you, Natsuo. We were just… sitting.”
“That’s how he gets ya,” said Natsuo. “Slippery slope, really. He has you sit, and then next thing you know… you’re… uh, you’re sitting.”
Shouto wrestled his hand from the confines of the blanket and waved it over his head like a flag. “Natsuo.”
Natsuo quirked an eyebrow. “I have an exam to study for.”
“I’ll help you study,” Shouto said.
“For an Advanced Anatomy exam?”
“Yeah, for… yeah.”
Natsuo pulled an ottoman up to the head of the couch and sat. He smacked Shouto’s hand between his hands like it was a gnat he was trying to kill.
“No,” said Shouto. “Natsuo.”
“No? Am I doing it wrong?”
“That’s not how you do it.”
“How do you know?” said Natsuo. “Maybe that’s how they do it on Mars. You go to a cutesy couples’ night at the Martian theater and as soon as the movie starts, you just hear this series of—” He smacked Shouto’s hand again.
Shouto grinned. “Stop. Stop it. Natsuo.”
Natsuo looked over his shoulder at Midnight. “He’s on, like, six medications right now. Loopy as fuck.”
Why wasn’t Natsuo holding his hand? Shouto flexed his fingers. “Nat-su-o.”
“All right, I’m doing it.” Natsuo held Shouto’s hand. “We good?”
Yes, that was good. He pulled his blanket up over his head. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. You said you were gonna tutor me. Ask me an anatomy question.”
Shouto’s voice was loud in his ears under the blanket. “What—what—what’s a leg?”
“Wow. Well, you’re fired.”
Shouto laughed, squirmed under the blanket. He couldn’t ever seem to get comfortable. But that was fine. Because… because Natsuo was here, and Midnight… Midnight had taken the blame for him that time he was late to school, which had been very nice for her to do, and also she was friends with Aizawa, who probably owned two or three cats based on the variety of cat hair on his capture scarf. Midnight had said something about owning a cat, too. Shouto had never pet a cat before. He’d seen them on streets in lower-income neighborhoods, but they reminded him a bit too much of himself, with how they darted back into their hiding places the moment he approached them…
Wait, what had he been thinking about? He kept having thoughts and then losing them to a different train of thought. He tried to tune back into the conversation—Natsuo and Midnight were talking to each other.
“I’m still living in the dorms right now,” Natsuo was saying. “My girlfriend and I are looking for an apartment, though.”
“Oho—” Midnight’s voice inched toward teasing. “Is it getting serious?”
Natsuo gave a sheepish laugh. “I’m considering proposing to her soon, actually. Maybe get married in the next year or two.”
“That’s so exciting!” she said. “Good for you! Are you planning on moving closer to home?”
Natsuo hesitated for a moment too long. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I mean, I hope I get to see Shouto more often, but there’s… you know, there’s no guarantee that he and Fuyumi will still be living in this house next year. Shit happens. So we’re just… y’know, spending what quality time we can together now.”
Shouto pulled the blanket down below his eyes. “Before Endeavor gets back.”
Natsuo raised his eyebrows, ticked his head to the side. “Before… well, yeah.”
“When does that happen?” Midnight asked.
“A little over a week, I think,” said Natsuo.
“But maybe he’ll get assassinated on the way home,” said Shouto.
Natsuo coughed and kept talking to Midnight. “Shouto should be back in school before then. Probably early next—”
“Natsuo, I’m—I’m—I’m defecting. Did I tell you that?” Shouto pulled his hand away from Natsuo’s long enough to make a finger gun at the ceiling, jerk his hand, and whisper, “Boom.”
Natsuo grabbed his hand again, giving a short, nervous laugh. He leaned down to speak quietly into Shouto’s ear. “Hey, buddy, let’s chill with the jokes while we have a Hero over, okay?”
Shouto was confused. “But I’m not joki—”
“I put a ten-pack of Twinkies in the kitchen.”
Shouto pulled his blanket down a little more. “Really?”
“Yeah. Go grab one or two.”
Shouto got up. He only remembered the knife in his pocket when it slipped out. Shouto caught it before it hit the floor, dropped it in his pocket again. Neither Midnight nor Natsuo seemed to have noticed, so Shouto went into the kitchen.
It took him a minute of sifting through groceries to find the Twinkies. A wave of fatigue hit him, so he sat on the kitchen floor before opening the box. He could hear Midnight and Natsuo speaking quietly in the living room, but he didn’t bother listening. He worked through a couple packs of Twinkies before he opened the messaging app on his phone and sent a message to Deku.
Hi
Deku responded almost immediately.
Hi! Everything ok?
Shouto:
Hi
Deku:
Hi?
Shouto:
Midnighthts in my livig room
Deku:
I know you’re not living your dream but you’re living mine lol
Why’s she visiting?
Shouto swiped at something tickling his face with his phone. It was a smear of cream filling. He ate it off his phone case before continuing.
Shouto:
She bruought my schiool stuff t me
Shes’ has a cat, she told that me earlie.r
and.
Natsu got me twinkies
Deku:
I’m really happy u texted me but like. how many medications are u on at the moment?
Shouto:
Yes
Shouto decided he was done texting. He slipped his phone in his pocket, grabbed as many Twinkies as he could hold in each hand, and unsteadily made his way back into the living room. He stumbled into the ottoman Natsuo was sitting on, and then he dumped all the Twinkies in his brother’s lap and used Natsuo’s shoulders and knees to keep his balance as he returned to his couch and blanket.
“Uh… what’re all these for?” Natsuo asked, looking down at his lap.
Shouto dropped his chin on the arm of the couch. “For—for you. And. And Midnight.”
“I see,” said Natsuo. He gathered the Twinkies as best he could and dropped them on the coffee table, where they scattered like the world’s most sluggish dice. “I’m… just gonna set these here for now. You feelin’ all right?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto. “Really good.”
“Not like you’re gonna be sick or pass out or anything?”
“No. Everything is super—su—superbulousness.”
“Well, I ought to be going, anyway,” Midnight said, standing. “It was good to meet you, Natsuo. And thank you for letting me sit with you, Shouto. I’m happy you’re okay.”
“I’m fantastic,” said Shouto.
Midnight smiled. “I’ll let Aizawa know. I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear it.”
Shouto stretched a hand toward her, using just his fingers to wave her over as he forced himself into what was, more or less, a sitting position. Midnight looked confused, glancing toward Natsuo.
Natsuo sighed. “Shou, you gotta talk.”
Shouto squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. “Y’know… y’know what I’m saying.”
“I genuinely do not.”
Fucking Natsuo. Making him talk. “Just—just—look.” He wrapped his arms around himself. “Like this.”
“What, a hug?”
There was a word for it? What a wonderful world. “That, yeah.”
“From… me?” Midnight asked.
“Yeah. From—yeah.” Was that an impolite thing to ask of someone? He couldn’t remember. “Please.”
Midnight looked to Natsuo again. “Is, um, is that okay?”
“I mean…” Natsuo folded his arms. Twisted his mouth as he looked Shouto over. “…I guess?”
Midnight still looked baffled as she walked toward Shouto and crouched in front of him. He hugged her before she even had a chance to reach out, squeezing around her shoulders, and it hit him that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d initiated a hug. She smelled like deodorant—not something he’d expect from a woman who’d built her Pro Hero image almost entirely on sex appeal, but he didn’t hate the smell.
He became suddenly aware that he wasn’t sure how much time had passed since the hug started, so he let her go. “Okay,” he said, waving. “Bye.”
Midnight smiled again.
Natsuo stood and walked her out. Shouto heard the door open and shut before he looked at the coffee table and realized Midnight had left her Calpis. She’d been jogging, so maybe she’d want it so she could stay hydrated. He got up and headed for the door, passing Natsuo on his way.
“Shouto?” Natsuo said. “Where are you going?”
Shouto ignored him, heading past the kitchen toward the front door. He shifted the curtain and peeked outside through the window first to check if she’d gone yet.
But Midnight hadn’t even left the doorstep. She took her phone from her pocket, scrolled through what looked like her contacts list, and stared at the screen for a few seconds, her thumb hovering. But then she clicked the screen off and put her phone back in her pocket. She gripped the doorframe with one hand and covered her mouth with the other. Clasped the bottom half of her face tight, her eyes watery and brow furrowed like something was weighing it down—horror, or terror, or a deep sadness, or all of those things at once.
She blinked hard a few times before squeezing her eyes closed in a way that contorted her whole face. Her square glasses slipped down her nose as she doubled over. Her chest hiccupped once—twice—
And then she took her hand away from her mouth. Straightened. Swiped at her eyes with her thumb, pushed up her glasses, blinked a few times. She set off, jogging again before she even reached the gate.
Shouto backed away from the window.
What the fuck…?
“Hey, Shou…? There you are. Hi.” Natsuo appeared in the entryway. He held out his hand, flexed his fingers. “I’m gonna need that knife in your pocket, my guy.”
Shouto put a hand to his thigh, where he could feel the knife through the material. “How…?”
“Midnight told me it looked like you were hiding something there.”
Shouto dropped the knife in Natsuo’s hand. He felt stupid.
Natsuo put it in his own pocket. “Why’d you let her in if you didn’t feel safe?”
“I did feel safe,” said Shouto.
“You put a knife in your pocket.”
“For… Plus Ultra safe.”
Natsuo sighed. “Any other weapons you’re hiding around the house?”
Well, the term weapons ought to have been open for interpretation. For example, there were a couple heavy glass trophies on display in the hall that had potential.
He wanted to ask Natsuo why Midnight had looked like she was crying on the doorstep, especially when she’d been acting so pleasant inside. Was it the hug? Or had he said something earlier to upset her? He was always saying things that upset people…
“Shouto,” said Natsuo.
Shouto looked up at him. “What?”
Natsuo hesitated. “Just… never mind. Let’s get you back to the couch where I can watch you.” He took the Calpis from Shouto’s hands and set it on the kitchen counter before wrapping an arm around Shouto’s shoulders to guide him back to the living room. “Should not have left you alone with an extra anxiety pill, Jesus fuck.”
###
Monday, and Fuyumi was tugging Shouto outside and pushing him into her kei car. No makeup work done, no emails checked, no catching up on or replying to unread texts, and no teachers updated about the situation (except Midnight and whomever she’d told). But Fuyumi didn’t know that, so they were on the way to UA for Shouto’s first day back to school.
“You’re going to call me if you need me, right?” Fuyumi asked.
Shouto was almost too distracted by the wriggling knot in his stomach to hear the question, but he caught the tail end of her sentence and answered, “Sure.”
“I’m being serious. If it starts feeling like too much, I’ll come pick you up.”
He nodded, looking out the passenger window.
Fuyumi nudged his arm. “What’re you so nervous about?”
“I’m not nervous,” said Shouto.
“Is it about classes? Or your friends? They ought to be happy to see you, don’t you think?”
He sort of missed the days when Fuyumi had shied away from follow-up questions. Lying had been easier then. Seriously… happy to see him? Bakugou’s last words to him had been, Get away from me. Fucking freak.
And it wasn’t like he’d been exceedingly kind to his other classmates. He’d burned Sero. Ignored Ashido’s attempts to reach out. Went off on Iida. Basically forced Shinsou out of the competition because of Shouto’s breakdown after Shinsou used his quirk on him.
Speaking of which—he was unsure about his status among the people who’d seen that. Who all had been close enough to hear him? Definitely his team—Asui, Uraraka, and Momo—and at least part of Shinsou’s team, including Aoyama, Ojirou, and some kid Shouto hadn’t recognized. That was more than enough people to spread the news of Shouto’s death threats to Midnight around the school. Not to mention all the shit he’d put Aizawa, Present Mic, and Recovery Girl through…
Okay, so maybe he was a little nervous. There were so many ways today could go that he was finding it difficult to visualize a worst-case scenario.
They arrived at UA, and Fuyumi dropped him off outside the gate. It was early, and the sound of his lone footsteps in the empty hallway made him feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Shouto might actually be the first person in the classroom. If Iida was already there (as he usually was when Shouto arrived), it might be a little awkward, but hopefully they’d be able to simply ignore each other.
When he entered the classroom, Iida’s seat was empty.
Bakugou’s was not.
Shouto barely looked at him, heading toward his desk at the back of the classroom. He kicked his bag under his chair, sat, and dropped his head on his folded arms atop the desk.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bakugou turn in his seat to look at Shouto. Shouto didn’t return the look, instead staring at an old club poster across the room.
“That’s it?” Bakugou said. His voice was strange in the empty room—loud, but only relatively. “You’re just gonna sit there.”
What was he supposed to be doing, an interpretive dance? He shut his eyes.
“Oi.”
“Leave me alone,” said Shouto. “I’m tired.”
“Where were you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Shouto.
Shouto heard Bakugou’s desk squeak. A moment later, something jolted his own desk, and Bakugou was jerking him up by the front of his shirt, the motion so abrupt that it was dizzying.
Did Bakugou want a fight this early in the morning? Shouto hadn’t even said anything to provoke him. “Baku—”
“Where the FUCK WERE YOU?”
Shouto searched Bakugou’s face as the words rang in his ears. Bakugou’s voice was too close, too loud, crowding out any room for thinking. And something in his expression was… wrong.
Shouto’s voice came out weak. “What?”
“Did you not get my fucking texts?”
Shouto tried to remember what all Bakugou had texted him. He still hadn’t read the last several texts Bakugou had sent. He knew ignoring texts was impolite, but nothing about their relationship had ever been polite. Shouto was missing something here. “There—was there something important?”
A sharp, dry laugh tripped from Bakugou’s mouth. “You serious?”
“I…? Sorry if my not being here messed up teams for practical training or… whatever. I don’t know why you’re angry.”
Bakugou’s gaze dropped to Shouto’s bandaged left hand. A strange look came over his face, and he gave Shouto a halfhearted push backward—one that didn’t even make Shouto stumble.
Shouto noticed for the first time how tired Bakugou looked. Washed-out complexion, dulled hair, the red of his irises bleeding into the whites of his eyes. Shouto felt a pang of alarm.
“I thought your dad messed you up for pullin’ that shit at the sports festival.” Bakugou’s voice came out lifeless. “Or you offed yourself or somethin’.”
Really? That was the kind of stuff Fuyumi worried about. Nobody else ever gave Shouto’s life outside of Hero work a second thought, not unless they stood something to gain. Like Hawks alerting Fuyumi after the sports festival. Did this mean Bakugou had changed his mind about wanting Shouto’s help?
“I thought you didn’t need me,” Shouto told him. “With helping Deku escape the League. You said you were going to do it no matter what.”
Bakugou narrowed his eyes. “Fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“Because you— Because why would…? You were acting like you never wanted to talk to me again. And I already told you that I can’t help you get what you want.”
“Did you not hear what I just said?” Bakugou asked.
“I heard you, I just don’t understand why you assumed I changed my mind about leaving him alone.”
A volatile mix of confusion and anger flared in Bakugou’s eyes. “I thought you were dead.”
“What, do you need my signature on a permission slip to go ahead with the Deku thing?” Shouto asked. “You could’ve just asked somebody else to—”
“I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT THE FUCKING DEKU THING, SHOUTO.”
Ice shot through Shouto’s arteries—not the physical kind, but the kind that made him go rigid, that told him to yank all emotion from his expression, to deaden his eyes.
“Okay,” said Shouto. He kept his voice quiet. “I should’ve texted you back. Sorry.”
A flash of fury crossed Bakugou’s face, and Shouto thought for a moment that Bakugou was going to physically lash out. He didn’t register that he’d yanked his arm up to block the blow until Bakugou’s eyes darted down to it.
Bakugou made a scoffing noise, looking off to the side. “’M not gonna… fuck.” Bakugou muttered the last swear. He swatted Shouto’s arm away from his chest, not meeting his eyes. “I didn’t come over here for an apology, asshole. Don’t patronize me. You really think I’m that fuckin’ self-centered?”
Shouto tried to steady his heartbeat. “I don’t know what you want.”
“I wa—” Bakugou’s adam’s apple bobbed. “—want you to fuckin’ tell me where you were.”
Shouto had an excuse prepared. One he’d practiced, even. He’d had some latent heart problems pop up after all the physical exertion from the sports festival and had taken time off to recover. That was something a normal person would do, and any normal person ought to believe the excuse.
When Bakugou met his eyes again, though, the lie stuck in his throat.
Not Bakugou.
Bakugou wouldn’t believe it.
“What’d Endeavor do?” Bakugou asked. “He pull some shit?”
Forcing the word up took a couple tries. “No.”
“Did you do somethin’ stupid?”
Shouto kept his lips parted just in case he was able to force something out.
He couldn’t.
The silence stretched.
“Oi,” said Bakugou, voice quieter. “What’d you do? What—fuck did you do?”
Shouto’s breath caught in his lungs. Pulse thrumming.
“You didn’t fuckin’…? Y’know, hurt yourself, or…” Bakugou’s voice drained off. It was unsettling to watch Bakugou search his face, brow furrowed, blinking like it hurt to look at Shouto. Then Bakugou inhaled, sudden and short. “Didn’t try to… y’know. Did you?”
It should’ve been easy to say. Just a simple no. He technically didn’t even need to speak. He could just shake his head.
But he couldn’t move.
Bakugou’s eyes darted up and down Shouto’s body like he was looking for something. Then he grabbed Shouto’s arm and pushed Shouto’s sleeve up to look at his wrist.
Shouto yanked his arm away. “Stop it.”
“What’d you do?!” Bakugou asked, his voice unsteady. “You didn’t—IcyHot, c’mon. You didn’t—”
“Why don’t you mind your fucking business?” Shouto said. “What are you trying to—? It happened, I fucked it up, I’m back now. What do you want from me?”
Bakugou took a step back from Shouto. He looked away, blinking. Gave the end of his nose a quick, anxious pinch. His hand was shaking.
Shouto said, “Bakugou.”
“I—” Bakugou shook his head. “I. Hah. I fuckin’… did it again, didn’t I?”
Did… what?
“IcyHot, we were gonna fix it,” said Bakugou. “We were gonna talk about it ’n shit, so why the fu—look, people have fights, friends have fucking fights, that’s what they fucking do, and I didn’t—fuckin’ hell, you make some joke about offing yourself over the weekend and then just fucking disappear. I thought I fucking killed you, like—”
Bakugou looked over his shoulder as if he’d heard a noise behind him. His right foot shifted back. His gaze kept travelling, landing anywhere and everywhere that wasn’t Shouto. He swiped at the end of his nose again, licked his lips. Gave a sharp sniff.
Shouto knew that body language. Had seen it on Bakugou before, back when they first trapped Deku in an alley.
Bakugou wanted to run.
“—like Izuku,” Bakugou finished, finally. Weakly. “He… I keep—look, I was just focused on trying to help him, I didn’t mean t—I mean, I ain’t—I didn’t want—You know that, right? You—”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto.
“It ain’t,” Bakugou snapped, not looking at him.
“I had some other stuff going on,” said Shouto. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Shut up. Shut up.” Bakugou’s feet shifted again. He glanced back at the door. His expression tightened like someone had shined a flashlight straight into his face, and he pressed the heel of his palm into one of his eyes. Under his breath— “Fuck.”
Shouto felt… strange. Bad? He couldn’t tell. This was definitely awkward. Bakugou obviously didn’t want to be in the room with him right now, but he was standing in between Shouto and the door, and it didn’t look like he was going to move unless Shouto prompted him. So Shouto said, carefully, “Bakugou.”
Bakugou shook his head—quick, conservative—and didn’t look at him.
What the fuck. Shouto reached out and tugged Bakugou’s sleeve. “Bakugou. You have to move if you want me to—”
Bakugou grabbed the lapel on Shouto’s jacket. Shouto stilled.
His jacket tightened around his middle as Bakugou tugged him a little to the right, a little closer to him. He kept Shouto there for a few seconds. Jaw tight, blinking too fast, eyes fixed on something outside the window that Shouto couldn’t see.
Bakugou’s next movement was so jerky and impulsive that Shouto thought for a second Bakugou had decided to punch him after all. Bakugou didn’t so much wrap his arms around Shouto as he bound Shouto with them, his clutched fists pinching the skin over Shouto’s shoulder blades even through his jacket, shirt, binder—nearly crushing his ribs, like Shouto was a mesh bag filled with sand and Bakugou was trying to keep it all from spilling.
Shouto’s breath was crushed out of him.
Bakugou’s whole body shook. His chin dug into Shouto’s shoulder—hard, almost painful. Against Shouto’s neck: the beginnings of some invisible stubble. Bakugou released a forceful, stuttering exhale, hot on Shouto’s skin.
“You fucking try that shit again,” Bakugou whispered, “I’m gonna—”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“—swear to god, I’ll fuckin’—”
“Okay. Okay.”
“—and it’s gonna fuckin’ hurt when I do it. More than whatever you did. You fucking asshole.”
Shouto let himself take a small breath. He raised his left hand, just at the elbow, and put his hand lightly at the small of Bakugou’s back.
“Okay,” said Shouto. His chest felt impossibly heavy. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think that… you… I’m sorry.”
Bakugou’s grip on Shouto’s jacket tightened. He stayed like that for another eternity—ten seconds, probably—and then he pulled away like Shouto had suddenly started boiling. Bakugou yanked the collar of his shirt up. Wiped his face with it, angrily.
“Are you crying?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou scowled under his shirt collar. “Sit the fuck down.”
“What?”
“In your goddamn seat.” Bakugou went back to his desk, grabbed his books, and slammed them down on the desk beside Shouto’s. The desk screeched as Bakugou heaved it so that it was within less than an arm’s length of Shouto’s desk. “Watch you the whole damn month if I gotta. You better not do shit today unless I say you can.”
Shouto sat at his desk. “You don’t need to watch me. Natsuo’s staying at home to do that.”
“Why am I s’posed to trust your brother?” Bakugou sat. “He looks like an overgrown snow bunny.”
“That’s Momo’s seat,” said Shouto.
“Who the fuck is Momo? Put your damn hand up on the desk.”
Shouto wasn’t sure what was happening, but he obeyed. Bakugou reached over and hooked three fingers under Shouto’s jacket sleeve cuff, gripped it. Bakugou had done something similar with Deku—pinched the hem of his shirt on the train.
“I’m not going to run away,” said Shouto.
“I know you ain’t,” said Bakugou, “’cause I ain’t fuckin’ letting go.”
Notes:
These keep getting worse, I'm so sorry:
Hell’s Kitchen, Episode 3, starring Todoroki Shouto (we regret to inform you that Gordon Ramsay tragically passed away in a Totally Unrelated freak accident involving an ice spear through his heart, leaving Shouto completely in charge of the show):
Shouto: Uraraka Ochaco, my old friend! So nice to have a familiar face on my show. Thank you for inviting me to your lovely… um… spare microwave shed?
Uraraka: This is my kitchen.
Shouto: (pushing up his reading glasses with no lenses, writing in a notebook clearly labeled LIST OF PLACES I NEVER WANT TO VISIT AGAIN) Fascinating. So I hear you’ve recently taken up cooking?
Uraraka: I mean, I guess so. I live by myself and I’m poor, so it’s necessary.
Shouto: (nodding while writing in another, separate notebook clearly labeled LIST OF THE POORS I SECRETLY LAUGH AT IN MY FREE TIME) So what do you have for me today? Oh, I see you already have it laid out! Fantastic!
Uraraka: Actually, I haven’t—
Shouto: (takes a bite, chews thoughtfully) Hmm… haven’t tasted anything quite like this before… I’d say it’s got a bit of an oaky aftertaste, which I don’t hate…
Uraraka: Todoroki-kun—
Shouto: (takes another bite) A well-constructed dish, really. Quite polished. A bit chewy, but that extra time spent chewing just allows that tangy flavor to settle in… reminiscent of a steak cooked rare…
Uraraka: (getting emotional) Oh my god…
Shouto: —Actually, that might just be my mouth bleeding. (Opens mouth to let a bucketful of red liquid splash on the floor) Yep. Thath’s blood.
Uraraka: (crying) Todoroki-kun, please stop eating my kitchen table.
Todoroki: (turning to face the camera, mouth still dripping blood, giving a double-thumbs-up while smiling widely to reveal he’s missing several teeth) Finally, thome good fucking food. Truly a fantathtic afther-school thnack.###
For those of you who don't follow my Twitter/Insta, I placed first in creative nonfiction at the University of Mississippi for my short memoir "Reasons Why I Believe Doctor Who Is Real" (which will also be published in the school lit mag soon). I've advanced to regionals at the Southern Literary Festival :D
If you'd like to stay up-to-date with my writing/drawing/curiosity collection/dumbass jokes, I can be found here:
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Chapter 49: Shouto is Not as Good at Lying as He Would Like to Think
Summary:
Important conversations with Aizawa and Bakugou. Pretty much just Shouto struggling hard to accept that people give a shit about him.
Notes:
TW: sensory overload, meltdown, dry-heaving, brief internalized homophobia; DISCUSSION OF: eye injury, suicidal thoughts, suicide, weight loss, abuse (physical & emotional), murder
Chapter Text
Sitting in his desk with Bakugou pinching his sleeve cuff to keep him from escaping was a tad awkward, but it wasn’t long before another voice came from the classroom doorway. “Oh—”
Shouto looked up, and his gut dropped a little. It was Ashido. Her hands formed fists on either side of her face.
“You’re back,” Ashido said, breathless.
Shouto had memorized what he wanted to say to her. But then the air conditioning was kicking on—fuck, it was right above him, how had he never noticed that before? —and Bakugou’s fingers were hooked into his sleeve cuff, and Ashido was staring at him, and everything felt just shy of tipping over, like Shouto speaking right now could be the thing that collapsed this whole precarious business of returning to UA.
So he just stared at her.
She ran forward—her hip smacking one of the desks askew—and threw her arms around his shoulders, squeezing him. Shouto felt his heart speed up.
She was mad at him. Right? This didn’t make sense.
But… fuck, he hadn’t realized it was possible to miss the smell of cupcake-scented hand sanitizer. He raised his hand to hug her back, but she pulled away before he could touch her. He dropped his hand before she could see that he’d moved at all.
“Where were you?!” she asked. “Oh my god! Are you okay?”
Based on how it had gone with Bakugou, it didn’t look like Shouto would be handing out any eloquent lies today. “I’m okay.”
“You scared the crap out of everybody! We thought you got shipped off to Russia or something.”
His heart shouldn’t have been beating this fast just from talking to Ashido. “I was having health problems.”
“What kind of health problems keep you from sending a text to let us know you’re okay?” Ashido’s eyes drifted down. “Why’s your hand all bandaged?”
Bakugou’s voice came out as a growl. “Common condition called None of Your Fuckin’ Business.”
“Aww, Bakubabe…”
“Fuck off, Raccoon Eyes.”
“Have you looked in a mirror recently? I’m not the raccoon here.” Ashido snatched Shouto’s injured hand from Bakugou’s hold to look at it. Her joking expression quickly dropped, eyes shooting open wide, and her grip on Shouto’s wrist loosened. “O-oh.”
Shouto didn’t like that he was always the one putting unpleasant expressions on Ashido’s face. He kept his voice quiet. “It’s okay.”
Ashido raised her eyes to meet Shouto’s, her lips parted. “Um,” she said. “So I don’t wanna scare you or anything, but your finger is kinda… like… not there.”
Shouto wanted to pull his hand away, but he wasn’t sure if that would make things worse. “Just part of it.”
“Ohhhh my god,” Ashido said, her voice half whisper and half groan. She didn’t let go of Shouto’s hand even as she grabbed the edge of the desk and lowered one knee to the floor. Her thumbs moved around Shouto’s palm like she was searching for something beneath his skin. “What the frick? Oh my god. Were you in a car accident or something?”
“That’s just from the sports festival,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“My fire. Just before my last match. I burned it.”
She turned his hand around to look at the back of it. “And it… got infected after, or…?”
“No,” he said. “I burned it off.”
Ashido stared up at him, wide-eyed and gape-jawed.
Kaminari came into the room. “Mina, why didn’t you respond to my meme in the groupch—? Yo!” Kaminari threw his arms up in a V, giving an open-mouthed grin. “See?! I told you he could escape the top-secret Russian boarding school. Hey, Shouto, did you see me on TV? Me ’n Jirou were talking about you.”
Mina’s grip on Shouto’s wrist tightened again as she raised his hand for Kaminari to see.
“Woah!” Kaminari said, arms dropping alongside his jaw. “Bro! Your finger’s gone!”
“Fuckin’ superb observational skills, Dunce Face,” muttered Bakugou.
Kaminari rushed forward, crouching to get a better look at Shouto’s hand. “What happened?”
“It got burned off,” said Ashido.
“Holy crap, dude,” said Kaminari. “Did that hurt?”
Shouto gave an uncomfortable shrug.
As more of his classmates filtered in, more of them surrounded him. Uraraka gave him a cheerful “Welcome back!” and then a horrified look once she saw his hand. Asui gave him her maybe-a-smile-maybe-not and an awkward wave. Kirishima nearly tackled him with a hug (Jesus fuck, that was the third hug today already) before seeing his finger and backing off with a “Woah—woah, dude, sorry. What in the—? What happened? You okay?”
Shouto gave a distracted nod. Kaminari and Aoyama were already in the process of demanding answers to a large number questions—many of them invasive, some of which Shouto couldn’t process, none of which he knew how to answer—
“How’d you beat up Bakugou with a missing finger? Did you use special ninja-breathing techniques to block the pain?”
“Is it true that you were in Russia? And if so, why not visit the superior France instead?”
“Bro, can you like, wipe with that hand?”
“CelePretty said you ran off with a girl you met at the sports festival. Mon dieu… I simply can’t comprehend why you’d do that, especially when I was right there. Did you at least break her heart irreparably?”
“OI!” Bakugou yelled, swinging a popping hand dangerously close to Kaminari and Aoyama’s faces. “BACK OFF, FUCKNUTS! What are you, the fuckin’ police? Go sit your asses down and read your damn gossip magazines if you’re so fuckin’ horny for drama. Fuckin’ HELL.”
“I did read them!” said Aoyama. “And they were all talking about Todoroki!”
Bakugou raised his eyebrows at Aoyama, holding up his still-sparking hand. “You wanna die?”
Aoyama raised his hands in submission and backed up a few steps.
Gossip magazines were talking about Shouto? That didn’t sound good. What other platforms were talking about him? Was it all bad? The reporters in the news clip of Kaminari and Jirou’s interview—the one Shouto had watched in the hospital—had seemed determined to get a negative response out of his classmates.
Shit. All this attention was making his heart speed up, and not in a good way.
Shouto didn’t realize that he’d been dreading seeing Sero again—Sero, who he’d accidentally dumped boiling-hot water on during the one-on-one matches—until he walked into the classroom. Normally, Sero was one of the most eager to join classroom swarms like this. Today, he only met Shouto’s eyes for a second or two. There was a subtle and uninterpretable change in his face.
Then he dropped his bag beside his desk and sat down. He didn’t look back at Shouto.
Something weighed heavy in Shouto’s gut. He hadn’t gotten close to Sero at all before the sports festival—he’d seen no need to try—but it still hurt. To be reminded that to many people, Shouto was just some indecipherable, ego-inflated asshole who refused to put forth the effort needed to exist in harmony with society.
Of course, it wasn’t Sero’s fault that Shouto couldn’t keep friends. Sero was just putting forward boundaries, and one of those boundaries happened to be that he wasn’t going to interact with someone who’d put second-degree burns on his back for no reason. Which was fair. Healthy, even. Really, it was totally and inarguably a good thing that Sero didn’t want to talk to him. Shouto had absolutely no problems with Sero’s decision. Not one. Zero problems.
He just wished the knot in his stomach believed that, too.
Iida’s seat was still empty. Shouto looked at the clock—five minutes before class started. Shouto had never seen Iida be less than fifteen minutes early to class. That was strange.
Bakugou’s fingers snapped in front of his face. “Oi, IcyHot. You still here?”
Shouto startled and looked at Bakugou. “What?”
“Aww, he wasn’t even listening,” said Kaminari.
Shouto felt lost. “Listening to what?”
“We were talking about your social media,” Mina said.
“My social…? No, I don’t have that,” he said. “What do you mean?”
Mina opened her mouth to answer, but a deep voice from the doorway interrupted her. It sounded surprised. “Todoroki.”
Shouto looked up to see Aizawa standing just inside the room, holding his yellow sleeping bag under one arm and his attendance book under the other.
The first thing Shouto noticed was that the eyepatch Aizawa had been wearing was gone.
So was his right eye.
It had been replaced with an eye prosthetic—just a cloudy white, no iris or pupil. He also had a few scars surrounding the eye, most noticeably one that cradled the eye-bag on the right.
As for his expression—Aizawa’s eyebrows were drawn and lips parted as he stared at Shouto, like he was remembering something disturbing. A beat after meeting Shouto’s eyes, his expression morphed into something less concerned, more like the bored face he usually wore at school.
But then Aizawa gave a small smile. “It’s good to have you back.”
Shouto hesitated before nodding.
“All of you,” Aizawa said, motioning to the rest of the class as best he could with all he was carrying, “back to your seats. Bakugou, give Yaoyorozu her seat back.”
Bakugou tugged Shouto’s hand away from Ashido’s grasp, gripping his wrist. “Ponytail can sit her ass up in my seat. This is my desk now.”
“Bakugou.”
“I ain’t getting up without a fight,” said Bakugou.
Momo was standing patiently where her desk had been just a few minutes earlier, holding her bookbag in her arms. She met Shouto’s eyes and gave a hesitant smile.
Aizawa gave a deep sigh. He motioned to Bakugou’s empty seat. “Yaoyorozu, if you don’t mind. Bakugou—one day. That’s all.”
“Why?” Bakugou demanded.
“Because I know you two will distract each other.”
The class tittered. Shouto wasn’t sure what was funny, so he looked to Bakugou—his cheeks and the tips of his ears had gone pinkish. Bakugou kept his gaze fixed pointedly forward as his hand moved from around Shouto’s wrist back to its position under his sleeve cuff.
Though Aizawa usually started class just after the bell, he waited a couple minutes this time. Once Iida finally came in, short of breath with unflatteringly windswept hair, fumbling loudly into his seat without once glancing at Shouto, Aizawa began homeroom. He started with information about the upcoming internships—
“Most of you have already responded to your offers or submitted your applications—remember the deadline for responding to offers is this Saturday. I think the only people in 1-A who haven’t are…” He skimmed a sheet of paper. “Yep. Todoroki, Bakugou, and Iida. Todoroki, did you get your list of offers?”
He hadn’t checked his school email in a hot minute, so he wasn’t sure. “Hawks already came to see me about it,” he said. “Do I still need to do the paperwork?”
Kaminari turned in his seat. “Dude! Hawks came to—? Like, approached you first?”
“I thought you didn’t like the guy,” said Jirou.
Shouto shrugged, stiff and uncomfortable. “Have to intern with somebody.”
Kaminari gave a low whistle. “I can’t believe he went all the way to Russia to see you.”
Aizawa cleared his throat. “You do still need to fill out the paperwork and officially accept the offer for school records and tax purposes. I didn’t see his name on your list of offers, though. Is his agency even registered with the high school internship program?”
“I don’t know,” Shouto said. He wouldn’t put it past Hawks to completely forget about all the technical aspects of interning. “I’ll text him later.”
“You have his number?!” Kaminari nearly shouted. “Bro, can I have it?”
“No, you may not,” said Aizawa. “Bakugou, any hang-ups about your internship that we need to address now?”
Bakugou’s voice came out a mumble. “No. Just still fuckin’… deciding.”
“Iida, what about you?”
Iida didn’t respond, busy flipping through the pages of his textbook.
Aizawa repeated himself. “Iida.”
Iida’s head jerked up. “Oh—ah—my apologies, Sensei, I was just—”
“I was asking if you need any help with the internship acceptance process.”
Iida shook his head. “Thank you, I’m—I just have to print out the paperwork. And fill it out. And learn how a fax machine works so I can fax the paperwork to Manual’s agency. And finish all my make-up work from last week before Wednesday and finish everything for this week before Friday and schedule my visits to the hospital to allow me the most optimal—ah—ah, no, I don’t believe I require any assistance. With the internship. It is fine. Thank you.”
The hospital? Was Iida recovering from some injury? And—Manual’s agency? That Pro Hero was little more than a security guard for a few streets every night. Surely Iida had gotten better offers. Even though he hadn’t finished the sports festival, he was brother to the Pro Hero Ingenium. His family had connections.
Well. Wasn’t any of Shouto’s business. Iida probably had his reasons.
Aizawa kept talking about the internships. When homeroom was over, Aizawa fell back into his chair, flipping a pen between his fingers. He waited until most of the class was out of the room to say, “Todoroki.” When Shouto turned around, he jerked his head toward his desk. “Need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
Yeah, he should’ve seen that coming. He walked toward Aizawa, expecting Bakugou to let go of his sleeve cuff. He didn’t. Shouto tried to shake him off. “Bakugou. Go to class.”
“Said I wasn’t gonna let you outta my fuckin’ sight,” said Bakugou.
“Bakugou,” said Aizawa.
“I ain’t leavin’. You can talk to both of us.”
Aizawa let out a heavy sigh. “I’ll let you wait outside the classroom. And I’ll call ahead to your next teacher concerning your tardiness.”
“No! I said I ain’t—”
“Bakugou,” Shouto said, finally wrenching his arm away. “What the fuck do you think I’m going to do? Attempt suicide by jumping out a ground floor window? Go to class or wait outside.”
Bakugou huffed, but he left the room. The door slammed behind him.
Aizawa hooked his foot around the loose seat against the wall and pulled it in front of him. “Can you sit?”
Shouto sat.
Aizawa released a heavy breath and leaned back, hands folded in front of his chest. He smacked his lips like he was about to speak. But he said nothing. Just stared at Shouto, face tight, lips parted.
It wasn’t comfortable. Was Shouto supposed to speak first? What did Aizawa want him to say? Did he want an apology? Shouto hadn’t been respectful at all during the sports festival.
Shouto’s words spilled out. “I was going to email you back. It just kept—I kept not doing it, and it—I couldn’t remember exactly what I said to you at the sports festival, so I was trying to remember what I said before I talked to you again, but I couldn’t, and then it was—”
“Kid,” said Aizawa, the word making up the better part of an exhale. He shook his head. “I fucked up. Royally. So did UA. There are some things I didn’t realize until afterward, but I had more than enough information to make better decisions than I did. I don’t know how to start apologizing for that, except... just... I’m sorry. I really, really am.”
Shouto felt frozen.
Aizawa wasn’t making an I’m sorry you feel that way apology, or even an I’m sorry I couldn’t help you one. He was apologizing for doing something wrong.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Aizawa asked.
Shouto’s voice came out too quiet. “No.”
“You don’t understand?”
“You did everything you could. I know you... you couldn’t get the case to go through. I overheard you talking on the phone the day before the sports festival. But I already knew it wouldn’t go through, so that wasn’t...” Shouto took a breath. “It was cruel of me to let you think that maybe you could do something. I only asked you to help me in the first place because I wanted to test you, because nobody... nobody ever cares as much as they think they do. But—but you did your best.”
“No, I didn’t,” said Aizawa. “I may not have had control over what happened with your case, but I should’ve made Principal Nezu cancel the sports festival once I knew a student was being threatened over it.”
At the sports festival, Shouto had heard Aizawa tell Present Mic that Nezu was refusing to even switch the brackets so that Shouto wouldn’t have to face Shinsou again. What would Aizawa had to have done to make Nezu cancel the festival altogether? Threaten resignation? Would that have even worked? “Endeavor would’ve known something was off,” Shouto said. “He would’ve known I told you something.”
“I shouldn’t have let you go home at all,” said Aizawa. “You don’t know how much I regret letting you out of my sight after the awards ceremony. I knew you weren’t okay. I shouldn’t have let you go home the moment you brought me that flash drive with the videos.”
“You—you couldn’t have kept me,” said Shouto. “Legally—”
“We’re not talking legality right now. I should not have let you go home.”
“That’s kidnapping.”
“I know.”
Shouto hesitated. “It wasn’t just the sports festival. Or the murder on Wednesday, or—or even the videos. I was already thinking that I wanted to... that... that I wanted to do that. If it wasn’t then, it would’ve been later. You couldn’t have stopped it.”
“Shouto—” Aizawa held his gaze. “I could’ve fucking tried.”
Something jerked in Shouto’s chest—a hitch in his breath, a hiccup of emotion. He lowered his gaze.
“I’m sorry,” said Aizawa.
Shouto swallowed hard. Nodded.
There was a click as Aizawa set his pen on his desk. He leaned to the right so he could dig something out of his left pocket. “I know your father’s out of town right now. There are some things Recovery Girl and I want to discuss with you and one or both of your siblings, and it can’t be talked about inside school walls. Can you organize a meeting with all of us soon?” He handed Shouto a crumpled slip of paper. “There’s my schedule. And do not tell anyone about this. Even Bakugou. Understand?”
He had no idea what Aizawa might be planning or what Recovery Girl had to do with it all, but he could keep a secret, which was the part Aizawa seemed most concerned about. So he nodded.
Aizawa dismissed Shouto, and Shouto stuck the slip of paper in his pocket. He closed the classroom door behind him.
“What was that all about?”
Shouto startled at the voice. “Jesus—Bakugou.”
“Where’d you think I’d be, dumbass? What’d he talk to you about?”
“Just… internship shit.” Shouto started walking, Bakugou following close beside him. Shouto waited a bit to ask, “Are you really going to follow me all day?”
“Uh-huh.”
###
And he did. Through their first few classes and into the cafeteria for lunch, where Bakugou held his sleeve cuff like Shouto was a child prone to wandering.
The lunch line was crowded today, and Shouto didn’t want to deal with all that commotion for a meal he wasn’t hungry enough to eat. While Bakugou pointed out the food he wanted to Lunch Rush’s assistant, Shouto escaped back into the seated portion of the cafeteria. Ashido, Sero, Kirishima, and Kaminari were already at the table with their homemade lunches. Come to think of it—didn’t Bakugou usually make his own lunches? Maybe he hadn’t been feeling well this morning.
Jesus, it was so loud in here. He hoped his classmates wouldn’t try to talk to him too much. Sero was laughing and talking, but when he noticed Shouto approaching, he fell quiet and focused on his sandwich.
“Hi, Sh— Uh, hi!” Ashido said when he sat beside her. “You’re not eating? And where’s Bakugou?”
It was uncanny how friendly Ashido was being today. Shouto had been shitty to her and her friends at the sports festival. And she’d read the texts Natsuo had sent him about Touya and the drugs and his deadname, which he still needed to confront her about…
Maybe her strange behavior was one of those passive-aggressive things? Either way, not much Shouto could do about it now except not bother her unnecessarily. That was usually the thing that triggered people’s outbursts, and he didn’t want Ashido to yell at him. “I left him in line,” he told Ashido.
“Wow, Master of Stealth right there,” she said.
“Not really. I just left him.”
Kaminari paused the merciless deconstruction of an empty juice carton to say to Shouto, “Dude, I’ve been wanting to ask since this morning—what were you even doing for two weeks?”
Shouto had forgotten how restless and awkward he felt whenever he was at lunch with no food in front of him. Even if he wasn’t hungry, he liked having something inanimate to focus his attention on while the others talked. “Not much,” he said.
“Where were you?” Kirishima asked. “I tried to text you, but you didn’t answer. Deku even messaged me asking if I knew where you were.”
“I texted you, too,” said Ashido. “Like five times. What’s up with that?”
It didn’t look like Shouto was going to get his wish for a quiet lunch period. “I didn’t have my phone with me,” he said, which was only half of a lie.
“Why not?” Kaminari asked. “Did the Russians take your phone?”
“N-no, they—” Shouto gave a sharp exhale. He’d barely sat down, and he was already getting bombarded with questions. He should’ve prepared better for this. “I was in the hospital.”
Ashido nearly shouted, “Wha—the hospital?! Why?”
Was this going to be a whole thing? Shouto never asked for elaborate information about someone’s personal life. Why did other people feel the need to? Or was this their way of trying to be nice? In the past he’d had people fake interest or concern to be nice, and then they’d get annoyed when Shouto kept talking.
“Did you get hurt really bad at the festival?” Ashido asked. “I mean, besides your ankle and your—wait, did you take almost two weeks off for your finger? Was it that bad?”
Was it getting louder in the cafeteria? It felt louder. “Wasn’t that.”
“So what was it?”
“You don’t have to ask,” said Shouto. “It’s fine.”
“I feel like you broke at least half the bones in your hand just from punching Bakugou,” said Kaminari. “That was freakin’ insane.”
Did he mean that the situation at the sports festival was insane? Or was Kaminari referring to Shouto as a person? “I didn’t break anything. My, um. My heart—”
“Are you still hurt?” Kirishima asked. “Because Aizawa-sensei said training today was gonna be harder than usual. You shouldn’t fight if you’re hurt.”
In the kitchen, something gave a loud clatter that made Shouto’s heart rate jump. The yellowish tint of the overhead lights, too, was brash and noisy. It was getting difficult to concentrate in here. “I’m not hurt.”
“I bet you pulled a hamstring or something, right?” asked Kaminari. “Or like, your spleen exploded. Had to be something super-duper bad to keep you out for two weeks.”
“I wish we could’ve visited you!” said Ashido. “I could’ve brought you flowers or a cactus or something.”
He wished they’d all stop acting so friendly. It was making him nervous—he had to be missing something here, right? An inside joke, a subtle attempt to make him uncomfortable enough that he no longer felt welcome around them?
Everything was overwhelming right now, and he didn’t like it. “I was fine by myself.”
“I’d get soooo depressed not being able to see my friends for two weeks,” said Ashido. “Why didn’t you call us?”
Annoyance gummed up his throat. Why did they have to keep prying? They were feeling okay, and they were safe, and that was what mattered. Not what happened to Shouto whenever he was out of view. In the context of the real world, that had never mattered. “I don’t know. It’s fine.”
“For real, dude,” said Kirishima, “we can help you out when you need us. Was there a reason you weren’t comfortable contacting anybody?”
Ashido leaned in too close. “Also—why wouldn’t they let you have your phone in the hospital? That doesn’t even make sense.”
Shouto’s heart pounded in his ears. This was too much.
Too fast.
Everything needed to stop. Now.
“You didn’t contact Aizawa, either,” she said. “That was weird. We were all scared something really bad happened. And you were saying cryptic weird crap to Sero about you maybe not coming back to school. You don’t have a terminal disease, right? Because—”
“I said it’s fine,” he snapped.
The table went quiet.
Fuck. Fuck. Why had he said that so loud?
He needed to apologize, make things right.
Or—he needed to scare them off, make them leave him alone.
He knew how to do the latter, at least. Tell them too much. Tell them things about himself that they didn’t want to know. Make them afraid to talk to him ever again. He opened his mouth to speak, but his words refused to surface.
He couldn’t tell them what had happened.
Maybe it was inevitable that they’d find out everything Shouto was hiding, that they’d replace him with someone more thoughtful and stable. But right now, it felt like his friends abandoning him would be the worst thing that had ever happened.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”
Ashido spoke softly, her face tight. “We’re just trying to help.”
He averted his eyes and nodded quickly, rapped his knuckles against his temple a few times as subtly as he could. This was the most he’d ever been overstimulated in the school cafeteria. It felt like sharp forks prodding his brain.
Kirishima furrowed his brow. “Did we say something wrong?”
Shouto shook his head. “You didn’t do anything. A lot of—a lot—a lot of really bad things happened. The week of the sports festival. And you’re all trying to make me talk about it, but I don’t even want to think about it, and everything is… everything…”
He stopped talking. They were all looking at him weird—even Sero, his chopsticks suspended halfway to his open mouth.
Even among all the noise in the cafeteria, the quiet hung heavy.
Then a voice from across the room— “HALF-N-HALF!”
Bakugou had broken away from the lunch crowd and was storming toward him, an empty lunch tray at his side. Bakugou slammed the tray down on the table. Shouto flinched.
“Hey, fuckface,” said Bakugou, “you stupid or some shit? I told you not to move, and what do you do the first goddamn time I turn around?!”
Shouto fixed his eyes to the table. He was two seconds away from pressing both hands tight over his ears. He imagined squeezing his eyes closed, curling into himself, and hyperventilating like someone had just kicked him square in the stomach.
“Oi,” said Bakugou.
“You’re not my fucking mom,” Shouto told him.
“You better thank your lucky fuckin’ stars I ain’t your mom, ’cause I wouldn’t wait a decade to break out of the looney bin and beat your damn—”
Shouto heard his chair screeching before he realized that he’d shot out of his seat. A dozen courses of action rocketed through his brain, and half of them were some form of punch Bakugou.
Instead, he gave a shaky exhale.
And he turned and walked out of the cafeteria.
Somewhere in the back of his brain, he registered his classmates calling out to him. He didn’t stop. He headed for the doors and went out into the schoolyard.
Lots of students were eating outside today—the weather was nice in a way that pissed Shouto off. If he was going to storm out of the building, the sky ought to at least have the decency to be dark and cloudy. Raining, even. But it was sunny and breezy and fucking fuck, why did Shouto always have to be the odd one out, the person ruining the mood, the “which” on a “Which One Doesn’t Belong?” children’s worksheet?
He found an empty wrap-around tree bench in the far corner of the schoolyard, knocked away the stray twigs and moldering leaves with a sweep of his arm, and sat. It didn’t take long for his panic to catch up to him. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and stared hard at the ground beneath his shoes—ah, he was supposed to have stopped by the shoe lockers and changed those before going outside, wasn’t he? Strange, those thoughts that pushed their way to the forefront while he was heaving strings of bile into the dirt.
Shouto spat on the ground, breathing hard. His whole body felt unsteady in the same way it always did during a bad dissociative episode, like he’d been tossed into a parallel universe where none of the atoms vibrated in quite the same way. Which didn’t make sense because he wasn’t even dissociating right now, he was just… he was just existing. Sitting on a slightly damp wooden bench, watching his saliva refuse to mix with the dirt it had landed on. He smeared it with his shoe, turning the mixture into mud.
When had the world become so strange to him that the distinction between dissociation and simple existence started disappearing altogether?
He stayed in the same position for a while, barely moving except to breathe and blink. It wasn’t so much a conscious choice as it was an attempt to keep himself from tipping over into something he wouldn’t be able to resurface from. He didn’t realize how long he’d been sitting stock-still until something jolted the bench, and he startled into a more upright position.
Bakugou stood above him, bottom jaw askew with his tongue stuck between his upper and lower canines, holding a full lunch tray under his left arm. His foot was jammed against one of the bench’s legs.
Shouto wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He tried to put a bite in his voice, but it mostly just sounded rough and exhausted. His throat was still sore from the bile. “What? You think up another mom joke?”
Bakugou put the tray on the bench and sat, leaving a couple feet of space between them. He took a small plate of tamagoyaki, a pair of disposable chopsticks, and a juice box from the tray and put them in the space between him and Shouto.
Shouto swallowed. His throat burned. “What’s that?”
Bakugou picked up an apple from the tray, took a generous bite, and spoke through it. “Food.”
Was this supposed to be his way of apologizing? It just felt like him trying to exert control over Shouto’s body. “I’m not hungry.”
“You look like shit,” said Bakugou, not looking at him. “You lost weight since the last time I saw you.”
Shouto licked his lips and tasted acid. “You can’t tell that.”
“Yeah, I can.”
“No, you—”
“The underside of your chin didn’t used to curve that sharp.”
Shouto shifted. Then, reluctantly, he put the plate of tamagoyaki on his lap and picked up the juice box. His hands were shaking.
Bakugou cleared his throat. “Did you, uh. You talk to Izuku?”
Shouto tried to poke his straw through the top of his juice box. His hand tremor made it impossible. “I saw him.”
“When?”
“Couple days ago.”
“Where?”
“My house,” said Shouto.
“He came to your house?”
“Yes.” Shouto traded the juice for the chopsticks, putting the unopened drink on the seat of the bench between him and Bakugou. He’d deal with that stubborn motherfucker later. “We watched a movie.”
Bakugou furrowed his brow. “What else?”
“We just watched a movie.”
Bakugou took a bite of his apple, looking at the ground between his feet as he chewed. Kicked at a tuft of grass.
Shouto shook the chopsticks from their paper package. “He cried.”
Bakugou looked at him.
“During the movie,” said Shouto.
“What movie?”
“Frozen.”
Bakugou smirked. “Fuckin’ Frozen?”
“At the beginning.” Shouto snapped the chopsticks apart. “When the parents died.”
Bakugou’s smirk dropped off.
Shouto struggled to pick up a piece of tamagoyaki with unsteady hands. “I think… probably he’s good at suppressing his feelings. But it makes him very tired. When you get too many feelings piled up and you’re too tired, little things can trigger you.”
Bakugou’s lips smacked. He leaned forward, propping his forearms on his legs and letting the half-eaten apple hang between his knees.
“I never thought he wasn’t feeling all of that,” said Bakugou. “Maybe you did, but I didn’t. You didn’t know him before. He felt everything, all the goddamn time.”
“I felt everything, too,” said Shouto. “I do. Still.”
Bakugou squinted out at the trees across campus, drawing his mouth into a line.
Shouto took a bite of the tamagoyaki. He was glad Lunch Rush’s cooking was consistent, because he didn’t currently have the mental energy he’d need to eat something with an unfamiliar taste and texture.
“Did I break anything?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou cut his eyes toward Shouto. “Hah?”
“During our match.”
“My… goddamn clavicle,” said Bakugou.
Guilt panged in Shouto’s gut. “Is it healed now?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Shouto paused to gather his words. “I was really mean to you. At the sports festival. I’m sorry.”
Bakugou looked away. Swiped at his nose.
“That was like fightin’ a pigeon for you,” said Bakugou. “You weren’t even tryin’. Only using half your quirk, and still standing there waiting for me.”
Shouto tried to pick up another slice of tamagoyaki. It pinched in half and dropped from his chopsticks.
“Why didn’t you just take me out in the first ten seconds like you took out Despacito?” Bakugou asked.
Did Sero have a new moniker now? Strange the things you could miss in just a couple weeks. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t fuckin’ lie to me, IcyHot.”
Shouto put his chopsticks down. He could feel his words growing heavy. It’d be so easy to let them stay there. Spit out a rehearsed I don’t know, Bakugou and move on.
“Oi.”
“Give me a minute,” said Shouto. “I’m going to get stuck if I try to tell you now.”
“Fine,” said Bakugou.
Shouto leaned back against the tree. He let his eyes wander just over the top of the tree line on the other side of the field. He tried to wrestle his thoughts into something coherent. When he finally found a sentence, it was a shitty one, so he tried to find a gentler way around it.
He couldn’t.
“I can’t think of a way to tell you,” he told Bakugou.
“Why?”
“I can’t.”
“You think I’ll get mad or somethin’?”
Shouto was quiet for a moment as he thought. The tree bark dug into the back of his scalp.
“Yes,” decided Shouto.
“I won’t get mad.”
“Yes, you will.”
“I’ll get mad if you don’t fuckin’ tell me.”
Shouto wetted his lips. “I wanted you to give up.”
“Well yeah, I kinda figured that, you frosty fuckstick,” said Bakugou. “I’m askin’ why.”
“Because you’re—because you always—” Pressure built in Shouto’s torso. Squeezing his lungs, crushing his ribs from the inside out. “You think you can do anything if you work hard enough.”
“And… what, you think optimism is evil or some shit?”
“No,” said Shouto. “No. I think your worldview makes you think that people have bad lives because they don’t try hard enough to fix them. Or because they give up too easily. But I’m—I’m trying. When I say something can’t be done, I don’t mean that it’ll take work to do. I mean that I’ve tried it and tried it and tried it, for years, and horrible things happened because I tried it, but I kept trying, and I never gave up, ever, until I was so tired that I wanted to die—”
“You coulda told somebody.”
“I did. I fucking did. And all anybody ever did to help was to tell me to hold on a little longer or try a little harder. Maybe they’d do the same useless things they always do, because they never believe me when I tell them it won’t work.” He couldn’t breathe. “And then—obviously—it doesn’t work, and they give up and leave. I’m so fucking tired of everybody thinking I’m not trying. Because I did try. I tried really, really hard, Bakugou.”
“IcyHot—”
“I’m not finished.” Shouto’s head pounded, eyes burned. “I wanted you to understand how fucking scary and exhausting it is for me. Because how I yelled at you and what I did to you at the sports festival has been happening three fucking times a week for me since I was three, and Pro Heroes don’t stand around and wait for you to get back up, and I sleep in the same house as the scariest one of them. You get that?”
Bakugou stared.
“I shouldn’t have hurt you.” A needle of anxiety slipped through Shouto’s stomach—sharp enough for him to notice, but not enough for him to shut up. “Or yelled at you. I don’t think you’re a bad person. I’m sorry. I was—I was lonely and scared and tired, I was t—I was tired, I’m—”
“Okay,” said Bakugou. “Just—just chill out, you’re gonna—”
“—I’m really sorry.”
“It’s… whatever, just…” Bakugou reached out. His hand had just barely brushed Shouto’s shoulder when he pulled it back toward his chest, like he’d been caught touching something he wasn’t supposed to. He looked confused—lips parted, brow furrowed. “…take a breath, IcyHot, fuckin’ hell.”
An ache gnawed Shouto’s throat, nearly suffocating. His vision was watery. He pressed his palm over one eye, pushed the wet from his cheek with the heel of his palm.
Wait. Wet?
He pulled his hand down. It glistened with water. The needle of anxiety turned into a sword, slicing him wide open, and he choked on his breath.
Was he crying?
Again?
He wasn’t supposed to do that. Crying made bad things happen, made you vulnerable to outside attacks, especially if you did it where other people could see.
Why couldn’t Shouto learn to shut up when he needed to? Shut up, shut up, never show any parts of himself to anyone unless it was to make them go away. That was how he’d always survived.
Bakugou’s words were hesitant, muttered. “Fuck’s… fuck’s wrong with you?”
Shouto’s throat was almost too tight to speak. “I don’t know.”
“Why’re your hands fuckin’… shaking like that? You scared or some shit?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto.
“Fuck you mean? Are you or ain’t you?”
Shouto squeezed his eyes closed, pulled his fingers down through his hair. His breathing was speeding up.
Ah, shit. Shit. He hadn’t wanted to cry in front of Bakugou. This was embarrassing.
He heard Bakugou shift beside him—the sound of bark chaffing cloth. Shouto thought he’d gotten up to leave, but then he heard something quietly pop, felt something nudge his wrist. He opened his eyes. Bakugou was holding out his sports drink, the cap already removed.
“Pocari,” Bakugou said, weakly.
Shouto didn’t realize until he tried to take the bottle how badly his hands were shaking. Bakugou made a displeased noise, then shifted closer so he could help guide the drink to Shouto’s mouth.
When Shouto was finished, he let Bakugou take the bottle back. He wiped his face with his sleeve and tried to steady his breathing. “Sorry, I’m… on a lot of different medications right now. Probably I shouldn’t have come back to school yet. Can’t reg—” His breath hiccupped. “—regulate my emotions for shit.”
“Meds?” Bakugou asked. “How bad did you fuck yourself up?”
“P-pretty bad. I, um…” Shouto gave a strangled laugh, wiped away a leftover smear of water on his cheek. “…wasn’t fast enough trying to kill myself, apparently. Only went into cardiac arrest once we were in the hospital parking lot.”
“Fuckin’… hell. IcyHot.”
“It didn’t mess me up physically,” Shouto said. “No permanent damage, aside from the finger. The—the meds are for other things.”
“What’d you do to give yourself a damn heart attack?”
“Atrial fibrillation,” Shouto corrected, swiping at his runny nose. He kept forgetting how gross crying was. “You know, my… my older brother. The dead one, not Natsuo. It’s funny—he killed himself by burning to death.”
“How the fuck is that funny?”
“Because I tried to freeze myself to death.”
“You can do that?”
“Apparently not,” Shouto said, motioning toward his not-dead body. His hands were still shaking. “I can’t even… fuck. Sorry. I guess I should’ve given you Deku’s contact information ahead of time, or… I don’t know. I just wanted out.”
Bakugou smacked his lips like he was about to speak. He didn’t.
“Did you talk to the police after the sports festival?” Shouto asked.
“Mostly to our teachers,” he said. “Nezu called in some people from the Hero Commission. They told me to keep Izuku and his dad’s involvement out of my report to the police.”
“Because they already knew about Deku and his father,” said Shouto. “They likely know more than either of us do. Probably they’ve been sitting with the information for years now. They want you to keep quiet about Deku’s father because they know they don’t have anyone strong enough to beat him.”
“Bullshit. They don’t want me blabbing to everybody about Izuku’s dad because it’d put Izuku in danger.”
“Is that what they told you?”
“All Might could beat Izuku’s dad,” said Bakugou. “Fuckin’ easy.”
All Might couldn’t even beat a noumu at the USJ without Shouto’s help. “You think.”
“Even if he couldn’t, they’d send someone to save Izuku right away.”
“So who’ve they sent?”
Bakugou mumbled something.
“What?”
“Said they… I don’t know.”
“They didn’t send anybody, Bakugou,” said Shouto. “They’re not going to.”
Bakugou was silent.
“I think the only way you’ll understand why I don’t trust Pro Heroes to help me and Deku,” said Shouto, “is if they end up doing the same things to you as they did to me. I don’t want that to happen to you, ever.”
“I ain’t just gonna sit here on my ass and do nothing,” said Bakugou.
“I know,” said Shouto. “Me neither.”
“I don’t give a shit if I have to face Izuku’s fuckin’ dad all by my damn self, I’m gonna—” Bakugou cut himself off. Looked at Shouto. “Hah?”
“Me neither,” Shouto repeated. “I changed my mind. You were right—Deku does want out. I want to help him. But I think we’ll have to do it without the help of Pro Heroes.”
Bakugou leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, wringing his hands. “What about you and Endeavor? You got a plan for that?”
“I might,” said Shouto.
“Fuck’s that s’posed to mean?”
Shouto ignored the question. He strongly doubted Bakugou would approve of him teaming up with the League. “Do your parents know what happened? Deku and the murder, I mean.”
“They know me ’n you saw somebody get killed on Wednesday,” Bakugou said. “The… details got changed up some to keep Izuku out of it. The police told my parents it was a random mugging-gone-wrong that we happened to get caught up in.”
“You didn’t tell your parents about Deku? Did the Commission say you couldn’t?”
“Not really. They asked me if I wanted my parents to know about him, but that’d mean they’d have to know everything, all the shit that he did to Auntie Inko and to… whoever else, and I don’t want…” Bakugou’s voice drained off. He released a shaky breath. “I shoulda told ’em. I don’t know why I didn’t. Just… if the old Izuku is gone completely, I want there to be at least a couple people who remember him for who he was.”
Shouto nodded, rubbing away some of the wetness on his cheeks. It was a little bit of a relief that Bakugou’s parents still didn’t know, especially after what Deku had told him about his father threatening to hurt Bakugou and his family if they got in the way of Deku’s work. “I don’t think it’s good to get them involved. I think you shouldn’t get involved either.”
“Well, I’m gonna.”
“I know.” He was getting a headache. Just—all these moving parts, and—and he was supposed to give All Might’s quirk to Deku’s father after they used it to kill Endeavor, right? Wouldn’t that make helping Deku escape even more difficult? Anyway, Shouto still had to somehow earn All Might’s trust and admiration enough for All Might to give him the quirk in the first place, and that might take months—years, maybe. Even if Shouto managed to get the quirk, even if he miraculously became strong enough to kill Endeavor and Deku’s father… would Deku survive for that long? Would Shouto? He squeezed both sides of his head between his hands. “Fuck. I hate this.”
The bell indicating the end of lunch rang. Shouto stayed seated as the rest of the students outside packed their leftovers and filed toward the doors. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to breathe if he reentered the building now—he could barely take a full breath in the open air without it hitching. He pulled his hands forward to cover his eyes from the sunlight.
He spoke to Bakugou, who hadn’t yet moved. “Just, um. Sorry. For crying.” He cleared his throat, dragged his fingers over his eyelids. His voice still had hints of wetness. “Go to class. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Already said I was gonna watch you, dipshit.”
“Bakugou, I can’t—can’t fucking go inside right now. I don’t want to have a panic attack in the middle of class.”
“Your ears filled with shit? I said I was gonna watch you, not drag you around school like a damn dog.”
Shouto lowered his hands from his face. “You…? You’re staying? Here?”
“Obviou—” Bakugou swung his hand out, motioning toward the now-empty schoolyard. “Where the hell else would I—? Just hurry up.”
Shouto laughed as he leaned back against the tree. The air in his lungs hiccupped, and a strange emotion crowded his chest—knowing that someone had seen the worst of him, that for some reason they were still here, they were still here, they were still here, god, how was Bakugou still here—?
“Fuckin’ hell,” Bakugou said, “what’d I do this time?”
Shouto shook his head—probably too hard, but he had no idea what words could possibly fit this feeling. His left hand fumbled toward Bakugou, and Shouto was unsure what it was looking for until it found Bakugou’s fingers and folded around them.
Bakugou recoiled, his hand yanking in toward his own chest like it’d been burned, torso pulling away. Bakugou stared at him with alarm, lips parted, blinking rapidly.
“Oh,” Shouto realized, heart sinking into his gut. And he’d reached out with his scarred, partially-missing hand, too… stupid, stupid. “Sor—sorry. I wasn’t trying to—I just do that with my siblings sometimes, and I thought that…” His words congealed in his throat.
Bakugou stared at him for another few moments before the alarm drained from his expression. He exhaled all at once, scanning the empty schoolyard with a tight face. Shifting his weight, looking supremely uncomfortable. His voice came out a mutter. “Thought somebody might’ve still been… shit, IcyHot.”
“I’m sorry,” Shouto said.
“It’s just… those other times we did it, you were… real fucked up.”
“Yeah.”
“And there wasn’t nobody around to…” Bakugou’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He rubbed furiously at the back of his head. “Fuck. I know you don’t mean nothin’ by it, but I don’t think you understand that other people are gonna… think that…”
“It doesn’t have to be romantic,” said Shouto.
“Yeah, but other people don’t fuckin’ see it that way, so it don’t matter what it really is. I can’t have people thinkin’ I’m… y’know. Fruity or whatever.”
“I don’t know why that scares you so much,” said Shouto.
Bakugou wiped his palms on his pants. His face contorted briefly, like he was wincing at something painful. Then he sank into a deep slouch, pinching the material around his knees.
He looked small.
Shouto’s chest panged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t… that’s none of my business. I’m just bad at words, and I wanted you to know that… you know, that I—”
“I get it,” said Bakugou. “And just… fuckin’ hell, Half-n-Half, at least let that thing heal a little before you go shovin’ it at other people. It’s more ‘freak medical case study’ than hand at this point.”
Shouto huffed a laugh. He folded his arms and leaned back, slumping to match Bakugou’s shitty posture.
I get it, Bakugou had said.
For once, it had almost sounded like he did.
Chapter 50: Shouto Doesn't Know What a Baby Is
Summary:
Happy 50th chapter! Shouto meets Bakugou's emotional support cat.
Notes:
CW: REFERENCES TO murder, abuse, animal abuse/death, suicide attempt, suicide methods
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto didn’t get a chance to apologize to Ashido—or any of Bakugou’s other friends—about the situation at lunch that day. He might’ve had an opening to talk to them during practical training, but Aizawa made him sit out and watch from the sidelines since his quirk hadn’t yet fully recovered from a week on suppressants.
Bakugou was more bumbling in his actions than usual during training. Still, Kirishima shouted an encouragement about Bakugou getting “back in [his] groove,” to which Bakugou responded with a prompt “SHUT THE FUCK UP, SHITTY HAIR” and a glance in Shouto’s direction. There were lots of glances in Shouto’s direction, actually, and not just from Bakugou. It felt like the whole class was expecting him to do something wild and unpredictable.
So he was glad when the school day ended. Now he could go home and have any queued-up panic attacks in the peace and quiet of his bedroom.
But Bakugou caught his sleeve while they were at the shoe lockers. He jerked his thumb toward the door. “You’re comin’ home with me, Half-n-Half.”
“No?” said Shouto.
“Yeah,” said Bakugou.
“I can’t,” he said. “My brother’s expecting me at home.”
“You think I give a shit? What’re you gonna do at home anyway, hah? You got a scheduled panic attack you need to get to?”
Shouto tried to think of something that a person who didn’t have that exact plan would say. He found nothing.
They headed out, and Shouto followed Bakugou to the subway. While they were climbing down the stairs to the subway, Shouto asked if Iida had somehow been injured at the sports festival.
“Fuck if I know,” said Bakugou, his voice echoing in the stairwell. “I don’t keep tabs on that fuckin’ nerd. Why do you care?”
“He said he had to visit the hospital again. I didn’t know if he was hurt.”
“You don’t know about—? Tch. How big is that damn rock you’re living under, anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ingenium got attacked by Stain. He’s been in the hospital in critical condition. Probably gonna end up paralyzed from the waist down.”
Ingenium was Iida’s older brother and a Pro Hero with a speed quirk. Shouto had seen him around at a couple charity events. But who was the other person? “Stain?”
“The vigilante,” Bakugou said. And when Shouto didn’t respond, “Y’know, the Hero Killer? Blood quirk? Stupid shredded red scarf? He was on the news weeks before the sports festival, IcyHot.”
“Oh,” said Shouto. Natsuo had mentioned the Hero Killer on the way home from the hospital. “I’ve heard of him. What does he do?”
Bakugou’s voice was deadpan. “Kills Heroes.”
Well, he’d gathered that . “Why?”
“Some shit about purging people who are Heroes for the money or fame, which is apparently every Hero except All Might.”
Why was All Might the exception? He was the face of the whole Hero industry. Stain was probably just using it as an excuse to not have to fight the most powerful Hero ever recorded.
Bakugou swiped his subway card. “How much makeup work did you finish while you were out?”
“None of it,” Shouto admitted.
Bakugou’s head whirled, revealing perhaps the most judgmental face he’d ever made. “You—?! I brought you your damn books out of the goodness of my FUCKING heart and you used NONE OF THEM?!”
“I was sad,” said Shouto.
“You’re fuckin’ gonna be when you see how much work you have to do before you’re caught up. Fuckin’ hell. Didn’t watch the news, didn’t do homework, didn’t text back—did you do anything while you were gone?”
“I don’t know why you get mad about that stuff,” said Shouto. They stopped on the platform to wait for the train, and Shouto pressed his fingertips into his elbow. “It doesn’t affect you.”
“Yeah, it fuckin’ does, because I’m gonna have to waste my time teaching your dumb ass all the material now.”
“What? I don’t expect you to do that.”
“Ain’t gonna learn it on your own, are you? I don’t want you crawling back to me during finals week with failing grades in all your classes.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Shouto said. “I’m hard to teach, anyway. I learn things too slow.”
Bakugou’s brow furrowed. “Hah? Who said that?”
“My private tutors.”
“Were they as fuckin’ useless as everyone else you grew up around?”
Shouto shrugged. But it did feel a little nice, hearing his former tutors accused of being useless when they’d made him feel that way for years.
They rode the subway for a couple stops and then walked to Bakugou’s house. Shouto grew more nervous the closer they got.
Were Bakugou’s parents going to be mad at Shouto? He hadn’t seen them since he brought Bakugou a textbook he’d forgotten at school; in that time, he’d managed to land Bakugou in a situation where he witnessed a murder, burn a handprint shape onto Bakugou’s face, introduce Bakugou to the wonderful world of panic attacks, and break Bakugou’s collarbone while humiliating him on national TV. If Bakugou had done all that to Shouto, he couldn’t imagine Fuyumi and Natsuo being too keen on having Bakugou in their home.
If Shouto got yelled at and kicked out by Bakugou’s parents, he deserved it. They seemed like nice people, but being yelled at by nice people was always ten times worse. He debated if he should ask Bakugou what to expect, but he hadn’t figured out a way to word the question by the time they reached his house.
They entered, and Bakugou slammed the door closed behind him as they kicked off their shoes. “By the way,” he said to Shouto, “you’re stayin’ the night.”
“No, thank you,” said Shouto. “I have to go home.”
“Wasn’t a damn question, assfuck.”
Mitsuki’s voice came from upstairs. “KATSUKI? YOU GET THE DRY CLEANING?”
“I’ll get it tomorrow,” Bakugou called back.
“WHAT?”
“SAID I’LL GET IT TOMORROW, OLD HAG.”
“THAT’S WHAT YOU SAID YESTERDAY!” Mitsuki’s footsteps came down the stairs. “Your room’s a wreck. I got your dirty laundry, but you’re gonna have to help out with all those dishes and the…”
Mitsuki reached the bottom of the stairs, laundry basket on her hip. Her eyes met Shouto’s, and her voice trailed off. She set the laundry basket on the ground.
“Shouto,” she said.
Shouto hadn’t prepared a greeting, so he just gave a small, stiff wave.
Mitsuki’s hand covered her mouth. She asked from behind it, “You’re okay?”
Shouto nodded.
Mitsuki walked forward. Shouto felt his quirk rising to the surface, and he pushed it back down. He had to focus hard on regulating his internal temperature as she grabbed his face with both hands, planted a kiss on his forehead, and wrapped him in a tight—not as tight as Bakugou’s from this morning, thank fuck—hug.
“Ma,” said Bakugou.
“Baby,” Mitsuki told Shouto, “you scared the shit out of us.”
Shouto left his arms at his side. She kind of smelled like Bakugou. Maybe they used the same shampoo or something?
“ Ma ,” said Bakugou. “Cut it out. We got shit to do.”
“Nuh-uh. You don’t get to act like the world’s ending for two weeks and expect me not to get emotionally invested.” She pulled back, and Shouto’s skin ached with the loss of contact for half a second before her hands returned to frame his cheeks. She called over her shoulder, “MASARU!”
“Fuckin’ hell,” muttered Bakugou. “You ain’t gotta call the whole damn—!”
The glass door leading to the backyard slid open, and Bakugou’s father looked in, wearing a wide-brimmed sunhat, gardening gloves, and grass-stained plastic goggles. Still framing Shouto’s face with her hands, Mitsuki stepped aside so Masaru could see Shouto. “Look what the Cat-suki dragged in!”
Masaru’s mouth formed an O. Then he smiled and gave a thumbs-up. “Y’okay, son?”
It took a second for Shouto to realize Masaru was talking to him. He wasn’t sure if it was okay to speak or nod while Mitsuki’s hands were on his face, so he gave a thumbs-up in return.
“Good, good,” said Masaru.
“You know what this means?” said Mitsuki.
Masaru adjusted his goggles. “I don’t… have to pay for grief counseling?”
“You gotta make your soba! ’Cause you remember Katsuki said Shouto liked—”
“MA,” said Bakugou. He swatted Mitsuki’s hands away from Shouto, face flushing red. “Why d’you always gotta… fuckin’…? He’s just stayin’ the night, ain’t a big deal.”
Why had Bakugou been talking about the food Shouto liked to his parents? “I’m not staying the night.”
Bakugou shot him a sharp look. “Yeah, you are.”
“Natsuo won’t let me.”
“Call that damn mountain of a snow bunny up,” said Bakugou. “Right now. I’ll tell ’im to go fuck himself.”
“I like my brother,” said Shouto. “You can’t tell him to go fuck himself. I’m not even supposed to be here.”
Bakugou scoffed. “What, so Natsuo’s gonna help you do your homework?”
“He could. He’s studying to be a doctor. He’s smarter than you.”
Bakugou glared.
Mitsuki asked Shouto, “Why aren’t you supposed to be here?”
“Natsuo is supposed to watch me,” said Shouto.
“Watch you… do what?”
“Just watch me,” said Shouto.
Mitsuki raised an eyebrow. Looked to Bakugou.
“Keep ’im from doing somethin’ stupid,” said Bakugou.
The glass door closed softly behind Masaru. Masaru took off his gloves as he headed into the kitchen, humming.
Mitsuki glanced at her husband, then focused back on Shouto. She smiled— just a smile as far as Shouto could tell, nothing mean or smug—and put one hand on top of Bakugou’s head and the other on top of Shouto’s.
“We can call your brother in a bit,” she said. “You two shitlings better hit up the pantry before you hit the floor. Look like you’re two steps away from death, both of you.”
Bakugou knocked his mother’s hand off his head and went into the kitchen. Shouto started to follow, but Mitsuki stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
Mitsuki spoke low enough that Bakugou wouldn’t be able to hear her. “I doubt Katsuki’s ever going to thank you for it, but he told me you held him back and covered his eyes during the murder a couple weeks ago,” she said.
It took Shouto a couple terrifying seconds to remember that Bakugou had told his mother a condensed, twisted version of the truth. She still didn’t know that Shouto was well-acquainted with the murderers. He gave a numb nod.
“That was a very kind thing to do.” Mitsuki squeezed his shoulder. “I’m thankful you were with him when it happened. I think we both know that gremlin would’ve done something to get himself hurt.”
Kind? Shouto was so accustomed to thinking of his actions during the murder as a necessary evil that he had to restructure his thoughts to accommodate the comment. Kind .
Guilt rose in his stomach like nausea.
“I’m so sorry you had to see that, though,” Mitsuki continued. “People can be fucked up. How are you handling…? Well, no, I won’t ask you stupid questions. I’m sure you got your share of lecturing from your sister about not asking for help straightaway.”
His sister didn’t even know about it. “Yes.”
“Good. You and Katsuki talked about what went down at that shitstorm of a sports festival, correct?”
She didn’t sound angry, but if Shouto had ever learned anything, it was that people didn’t always present their feelings straightforwardly. He ought to be careful around her and Masaru still. “Y-yes.”
“And everything’s okay? No more fighting or bone-breaking or finger-burning, right? We got all that out of our system?”
He lowered his gaze and nodded.
“IcyHot, you get fuckin’ lost?” Bakugou reappeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked at Shouto and Mitsuki still standing together and yelled, “MA!”
She held her hands up in exaggerated surrender and stepped away. “I’m done, I’m done,” she said.
Shouto followed Bakugou into the kitchen. There was movement near the foot of the dining table, and Shouto looked to see a tiny black creature padding toward them.
Shouto stopped walking. He grabbed Bakugou’s arm and pointed. “What’s that?”
“What do you think it is, genius?” Bakugou tugged his arm from Shouto’s grasp. “You scared of cats or somethin’?”
Shouto had seen cats in person before, but never one so small . “Is it supposed to be here?”
“She’s my pet.”
“It’s inside your house.”
Bakugou gave Shouto a strange look. “Yeah, ’cause she’s my fuckin’ pet .”
So people really did keep cats inside their houses? Shouto hadn’t been sure if that was just a movie thing, like gazing out your window at the snow while sitting in a window seat with a cup of cocoa.
The cat stopped underneath a chair and let out the softest, highest meow he’d ever heard.
“Why is it like that?” Shouto asked.
“Hah?” said Bakugou. “Like what ? You’re one to judge, you fuckin’ weirdo.”
“No, I—” Shouto tilted his head, squinting. “It’s really small.”
“You fuckin’ serious?”
Shouto looked at Bakugou.
“She’s a goddamn kitten ,” said Bakugou. He crouched and scooped up the kitten with one hand. Stood, cradling it to his chest. “You ain’t ever seen a kitten before?”
Oh. A baby cat. That made sense. “Why do you have it? Was it here before?”
“Old man brought her home a few days ago.”
“Why?”
Bakugou’s face flushed. “Why’re you askin’ so many goddamn questions? Don’t matter why .”
Shouto kept sneaking glances at the cat as he grabbed a pack of strawberry Pocky sticks from the pantry. He suddenly remembered an image he thought he’d forgotten: touching five fingers to the wiry fur of an aging, half-blind cat, drawing the heat out of it until its muscles locked up.
It had been the humane way to practice the technique he would eventually use to freeze up Bakugou’s hand at the sports festival—testing his quirk on elderly, unwanted cats from shelters. Otherwise, he would’ve had to test it on humans, and what if he accidentally stopped someone’s heart in the way he’d accidentally stopped the hearts of several cats already?
That was what Endeavor had said, anyway.
That was one of several things Shouto never wanted Bakugou to know about. There were plenty of times when he hadn’t said no to Endeavor, which didn’t seem like something that Bakugou could understand or forgive. Shouto wasn’t sure he deserved forgiveness for it. Most other people would’ve fought against doing what he’d done.
Bakugou would have fought.
Something whacked his arm, making him startle. “Fuck’s wrong with you?” Bakugou asked. “Did you hear me?”
Had Bakugou been talking? Shouto shook his head.
“Get your ass over to the table so we can call your brother,” said Bakugou.
Bakugou was still holding the cat in one hand as they sat and called Natsuo on speaker. Shouto wondered if it would get scared if he tried to touch it. Probably. He’d heard that cats and dogs could sense which people weren’t safe to be around. As the phone rang, he asked, “Did you name it?”
Bakugou didn’t look at him. “Trebuchet.”
“What?”
“Her name’s Trebuchet.”
“Why?”
“Because fuck you, that’s why.”
“That doesn’t make se—”
Natsuo answered, cutting him off. “You’re half an hour late, my dude.”
Shouto turned his attention to the phone. “I’m at Bakugou’s house.”
“Okay. Well. I asked you to come straight home after school.”
“I know,” said Shouto.
“So… why is that not a thing that happened?”
“Because I went to Bakugou’s house.”
Mitsuki’s voice came from the kitchen. “Katsuki? You two already on the phone?”
Bakugou ignored her, his elbow jostling Shouto’s arm as he leaned in toward the phone. “He’s stayin’ the night.”
“No, he’s not,” said Natsuo. “I don’t know you.”
“Said he’s stayin’ the fuckin’ night, you damn snow bunny. You got a problem with it, come fight me in person. I’ll kick your ass.”
“Watch it, kid,” said Natsuo. “I’m not gonna threaten a minor, but you’re suspicious as hell.”
“ You’re suspicious as hell,” said Bakugou. “What’s up with those weird-ass hair tufts you have goin’ on? Are they antennas for the Public Security Intelligence Agency?”
“Bold of you to assume I’m not an anarchist,” said Natsuo.
“Ha! Bet you are, you fuckin’—”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. “Stop bullying my brother or I’ll put that handprint back on your face.”
Bakugou clicked his tongue, leaning back in his chair. “He has it comin’ anyway. Wouldn’t let me through the fuckin’ gate.”
“You could’ve just gone in,” Shouto said. He opened his Pocky box. “You know the code.”
“Shouto, please stop encouraging people to break into your house,” said Natsuo. “Did I hear an adult? Because I’m talking to two toddlers right now.”
Mitsuki came from the kitchen. She pushed Bakugou to the side so she could lean forward between him and Shouto, closer to the phone. “Hi, Natsuo, I’m the gremlin’s momma. We’ll send Shouto home if you need him there—”
“The hell we will,” muttered Bakugou.
“—but he does have a lot of homework and classwork he needs to catch up on, and Katsuki’s not a horrible tutor when he tries.”
“They have a cat,” Shouto told Natsuo. He broke a Pocky stick into thirds and put all three pieces in his mouth at once. “It’s little. Small cat.”
Bakugou kicked him under the table. “Do you not know what a fucking baby is?”
Static on the phone as Natsuo sighed. “How about you pet the… small cat and then come home.”
“No,” said Shouto. “They have soba, too.”
“Oh my fucking god,” said Natsuo.
Mitsuki spoke again. “We’ll keep a sharp eye on him, Natsuo. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Right, no, that’s fine,” said Natsuo, “it’s just that we had an agreement about the stipulations he’d need to meet to be able to taper off the quirk suppressants and start school again.”
Shouto glanced at Bakugou, who cut his eyes toward Shouto and mouthed, Fuck you lookin’ at?
Shouto returned to the conversation. “Fuyumi would let me stay.”
“She literally would not,” said Natsuo.
Worth a shot. “You know who also doesn’t like it when I spend time with friends?”
There was a moment of silence.
Then Natsuo said, “Okay, that’s a low blow.”
“Did it work?”
“I mean, it mostly evoked a deep sense of trauma-related dysphoria, but…” His voice trailed off. He cleared his throat. “Um. Parental figure. I don’t know your name, I’m sorry.”
“Mitsuki,” said Mitsuki. “Hi.”
“He’s got some rules. He’s not supposed to take showers longer than five minutes.”
Shouto dropped back in his chair, groaning. “ Natsuo .”
“Look, dude, you did this to yourself. I’ll stop talking now if you decide you’re going to come home.”
“I’m not going to fucking off myself while I’m at my friend’s house.”
Natsuo kept talking. “Mitsuki, you’re going to want to keep your medication out of reach and watch your alcohol. I’m not quite as concerned with the other things, but you know, the obvious. Knives and belts, drain cleaner—”
“I gotcha,” said Mitsuki.
“—and the violent video games and movies, if you could steer him away from those. He needs to come back by the house before school tomorrow for meds.”
It had been years since Shouto had felt this… what was it? Mortified . He wasn’t sure when he’d started letting himself care what Bakugou knew about his personal life, but apparently he did care now, because Shouto’s face was burning and everything felt shitty. He started, “Swear to god, I’m going to fucking—”
He cut himself off.
Natsuo asked, “You’re gonna what now?”
“Nothing,” said Shouto.
“That’s right. This better be the most boring night of your life.”
“Already the most boring night of my life,” said Bakugou, “havin’ to listen to your damn voice.”
“Kid, go do your homework.”
They hung up. As they gathered their things to head upstairs, Mitsuki told Bakugou, “Make sure you share Trebby with Shouto.”
Bakugou groaned. “I ain’t five , ma.”
They went upstairs to Bakugou’s room. The mess there was jarring—school supplies littering the carpet, mugs and cups congregated on the desk and windowsill, drawers left open with underwear and socks stuffed haphazardly inside. It was as if Shouto had lived in Bakugou’s room for a couple weeks.
“Don’t fuckin’ tell anybody you saw my room like this,” Bakugou said. He dropped his backpack on his unmade bed, set the kitten beside it on the mattress, and pulled out his swivel chair without looking at Shouto. "Got it?”
What was wrong with Bakugou to make him let his room get like this? Was he depressed? How bad had it gotten while Shouto was out?
“Oi.”
“Yeah,” said Shouto. “Are... you okay?”
Bakugou’s head whipped around, his body rigid and defensive, his expression like he was daring Shouto to repeat an insult. “Hah?!”
He didn’t know why he bothered. “Nothing.”
“Get out your damn worksheets so I can tell you what to do for ’em.”
Shouto stood by the desk and tried very hard to absorb what Bakugou showed him. Bakugou paused halfway through to ask, “You gonna remember all this shit?”
“I think so,” said Shouto.
“No you ain’t. Write it down.”
Shouto obeyed.
Once Bakugou was through talking and Shouto was nearly finished writing, Bakugou cleared his throat.“How’d you do it?”
Shouto said, “Do what?”
Bakugou slid his eyes over toward Shouto.
Oh. “Why?”
“I wanna know,” said Bakugou.
Shouto looked back down at his homework. “Just... froze myself, I don’t know.”
He could still feel Bakugou staring at him. He finally looked up, stared back.
Bakugou didn’t back down. “How?”
“How what?”
“You have ice resistance, right?” Bakugou asked. It was almost an accusation. “How’d you fuckin’ do that?”
“I just did,” said Shouto.
“How?”
“Jesus fuck, Bakugou, can’t you—” Shouto dropped his pen on the table. “I don’t like talking about this stuff with you.”
“Fuck you mean? You didn’t used to care.”
“I know, just… I already had to explain it forty fucking times at the hospital. I’m tired of thinking about it.”
Bakugou’s brow furrowed. “You were in the hospital?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“The whole two weeks?”
“One week,” said Shouto. “Then I was recovering at home. Where did you think I went?”
Bakugou’s eyes cut to the side. Then he looked back at Shouto. “Wait, fuck, so a hospital? Or a hospital hospital?”
“You just said hospital three times.”
“You know what I fuckin’ mean. Like a mental hospital.”
Was he going to be weird about this? “Yeah.”
Bakugou paused. He still looked confused. “But ain’t that where they put—? Y’know.”
“Faulty air conditioning units? Yes.”
“ Oi ,” said Bakugou. “Stop fuckin’ around. I know you know what I’m talkin’ about. You ain’t crazy or nothin’, so why’d they have to keep you there?”
Shouto stared at Bakugou. He inhaled, and when he couldn’t think of anything remotely coherent to say, he wet his lips, holding the breath in his chest.
The silence stretched.
Bakugou’s eyes darted away once. When they tugged back to Shouto’s face, Bakugou’s expression started inching away from confused and toward uncomfortable. He turned his torso slightly away from Shouto and said, almost under his breath, “Fuck you lookin’ at me like that…?”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto, finally, half laughing. “ What? ”
Bakugou quirked an eyebrow.
“Weren’t you the one telling me I wouldn’t pass a psych eval?” said Shouto. “I’m just… trying to understand the… mental gymnastics you’re—fuck. What? ”
“Look, ’cause—” Bakugou’s eye twitched from a half-grimace. “You don’t fuckin’… you’re quiet, you don’t do nothin’. Ain’t like you hear voices or somethin’ weird like that.”
“You know I’ve hallucinated before.”
Bakugou’s brow furrowed. “When?”
“After one of my concussions. Lasted a couple weeks.”
“But you knew it wasn’t real.”
“Mostly,” said Shouto. “Why, are you changing the definition of crazy now? Because I have issues with processing reality, too. Have you rewatched the sports festival footage yet?”
“Hah?” said Bakugou. “No. Ain’t had time.”
“So you didn’t see the part after the cavalry battle where Midnight had to use her quirk on me because I was having a flashback and threatening to kill her.”
“You…” Bakugou’s voice drained off. He was silent for a moment, his eyes travelling the length of Shouto’s body like he had an explanation on it somewhere. His lips barely moved when he asked, “You get flashbacks?”
“I do now, apparently.”
Bakugou leaned back in his chair. He stared up at the ceiling.
“You usually don’t fucking bother anybody,” said Bakugou, “is what I’m sayin’.”
“Right. So I’m healthy as long as I’m not an inconvenience.”
Bakugou let out a long breath through his nose. Then he leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table, squeezed his eyes shut, pressed the heel of his palm into his forehead, and muttered, “Fuck.”
“I don’t need you to tell me I’m not crazy,” said Shouto. “You know I’m mentally ill. Right?”
Bakugou didn’t respond.
“Bakugou.”
“Yeah, I… yeah,” said Bakugou. He didn’t look up. “I guess.”
“I have depression and anxiety and probably some other things. It’s very bad. I feel like shit every day. I don’t bother people because whenever I make someone else’s life harder, I want to hurt myself. You get that?”
Bakugou grunted.
Shouto prompted, “Yes?”
“Yeah, I get it,” said Bakugou.
Shouto sat on the carpet, his back against the bed. They worked in silence for a few minutes.
“You wanna hold the cat?” Bakugou asked.
“No,” said Shouto.
Bakugou caught the kitten before it could tumble off the bed. “Too good for my cat now?”
“I don’t want to hurt it.”
“You couldn’t if you wanted to,” said Bakugou. “She belongs to me, so she’s tough.”
What was he supposed to do with a kitten? “My… I’m still adjusting to not taking quirk suppressants anymore, so I don’t know if my quirk will—”
“Don’t suppressants make you less likely to malfunction?” Bakugou smirked. “You’re fuckin’ scared, ain’t you?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Fuckin’ weird that you’re okay with getting all up inside dead cats during dissection but you’re afraid to touch a live one. You even know how flammable formaldehyde is?”
“I’m not scared,” said Shouto. “I don’t understand why you want me to hold the cat.”
“I don’t want you to hold her, just thought you might...” Bakugou’s smirk dropped. He bent over to drop the kitten on the carpet between his legs. “Fuck it. Never mind.”
Shouto hesitated. “Are you mad?”
“Hah? No, why the fuck would I be...? Just do your damn homework.”
It took an hour and a half for Bakugou to finish his homework. He forced Shouto to keep working while he played a game on his laptop. The kitten padded around Shouto as he worked, a couple times getting so close to him that he had to subtly shoo it away. Eventually, Mitsuki knocked on the door to call them down for soba.
When it got to bedtime—well, Bakugou’s bedtime, which was much earlier than Shouto’s—the floor mattress Shouto had previously slept on hadn’t been set out yet. Shouto asked about it.
“You’re sleepin’ in the bed,” Bakugou answered.
“Why?” Shouto asked.
“So I’ll know if you try to escape while I’m asleep.”
Escape? “I usually move around a lot.”
“Then don’t do that,” said Bakugou. “Just go the fuck to sleep.”
“I have insomnia.”
“You have a face that needs to shut the fuck up, is what you have.” Bakugou heaved himself into bed, picked up a pillow and slammed it into Shouto’s chest. “Don’t drool on that. I’ll stuff the whole thing down your throat.”
Shouto climbed into Bakugou’s bed. He hadn’t slept in a bed with someone else for years. No—not years. Fuyumi had slept in his bed with him for a week after Lady Hypna.
Ugh. That memory did not have any happy associations. Hopefully he wouldn’t be thinking about it all night now.
After they had settled in and all had gone quiet, Shouto lowered the brightness on his phone. He opened the app he texted Deku over.
Shouto:
Bakugou has a kitten now.
Deku:
He has a WHAT
PICTURE?!?!!!
Shouto:
Maybe I can get one in the morning. Are things going ok?
Deku:
Can’t complain :) I’ve been busy—on a job rn, actually. Trying to recruit Stain lol. How was your day at school?
It was strange that Deku knew Shouto had gone back to school today, but Shouto was more concerned about the other part of the text. Stain? The Hero Killer who’d injured Iida’s brother?
Shouto:
The Hero Killer doesn’t seem like someone you’d like very much.
Deku:
Lmao yeah I’m kinda pissed about Ingenium, but Dabi and some of the other League members are horny for him. He might be interested in helping with your dad, too
How are you doing, though? Feeling any better?
Shouto thought about it for a few minutes before responding.
Shouto:
I think I’m making things worse at school.
Deku:
How so?
Shouto:
I panicked at lunch today. I don’t know why. Everyone was being nice to me.
Deku:
It happens.
Shouto:
It shouldn’t.
I’ve thinking a lot about what you said. How whatever’s wrong with me isn’t designed to be fixed. I was hoping it wasn’t true, but I think it is.
Deku:
What?
Wait do you mean when I was talking about how neurodivergence is innate and can’t be changed?
Oh my g
Did you think I was saying that there was something wrong with you? & that you were hopeless?
You DID think that
Shouto no no NONONONO
I’M SO SORRY
THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT HOLY SHIT
Shouto:
?
Deku:
THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING DIFFERENT
You think and react to things differently because that’s WHO YOU ARE
You DON’T NEED TO CHANGE. You just have to figure out how to best navigate the world using the tools you have. And communicate with your friends when something’s wrong.
Shouto:
They won’t understand. I don’t even fully understand how I work.
Deku:
Tell them what you do know. If they’re good friends, they’ll want what’s best for you :)
Shouto shut off his phone and rolled onto his back. Bakugou looked fast asleep already, his back rising and falling under the blanket.
How was he supposed to take Deku’s suggestion? Was he allowed to talk about things like his propensity for panic? Endeavor had always framed that as a weakness that needed to be hidden.
Shouto lay awake for about an hour before he remembered that he’d left his contacts in. He nudged the blanket down and swung his legs out of bed. Carefully, trying not to wake Bakugou.
But Shouto felt a hand snatch the back of his shirt. Bakugou’s growling, sleep-heavy voice. “Fuck you goin’?”
“Bathroom,” said Shouto.
Bakugou grunted and dropped his hand. Shouto thought he was going back to sleep, but before he’d reached the bedroom door, he heard a rustling. He looked over his shoulder—Bakugou was getting out of bed.
“What are you doing?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou stumbled a little, steadying himself on the nightstand. The digital clock atop the stand clattered to the ground. “’M goin’.”
What? “Bakugou, I’m just headed to the bathroom for a couple minutes. Go back to sleep.”
Bakugou made his way to the door, grabbing onto Shouto’s shoulder as he opened the door. Bakugou’s face scrunched against the hallway light, his skin looking diluted and his eyes watering.
“ Bakugou ,” said Shouto. “I don’t need you to chaperone me to the bathroom.”
Bakugou leaned one shoulder against the doorway, arms hanging at his sides. He squinted so hard that his eyes were almost closed. “Hurryup,” he slurred.
“You didn’t need to get out of bed.”
“Jus’… fuckin’…” Bakugou gave a limp motion toward the bathroom.
Shouto went into the bathroom, flicked the light on, closed the door. He’d been planning on using this time to try to ground himself, wake up enough to reason away his deep-seated nausea. But talking to Bakugou had woken him up, and he didn’t have anything to do in here anymore besides take his contacts out. He did that, and then he washed his face, drank some water from the sink, and opened the bathroom door again. He flicked the light off after him.
Bakugou hadn’t moved except to fold his arms and lean his head against the doorframe. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t open them as Shouto approached.
Shouto stood in front of Bakugou for a moment. Then he tapped Bakugou’s elbow and said, quietly, “Bakugou.”
Bakugou straightened, grunting. He followed Shouto into the bedroom, and they got back into bed. Shouto lay on his side this time, his back to Bakugou. It took Bakugou a little longer to get situated, with the bed springs creaking and the occasional small tug on the blanket.
Eventually, Bakugou was still for an interval of longer than five seconds. Shouto thought maybe he’d finally gone back to sleep.
But then something nudged Shouto’s upper back.
Shouto looked over his shoulder. Bakugou was facing him, eyes closed. One of his arms was curled in close to his chest, but the other stretched passively toward Shouto, his knuckles brushing Shouto’s back.
“Do you want something?” Shouto asked.
One of Bakugou’s eyes—the one not squashed into his pillow—opened halfway. It closed again quickly, and Bakugou hummed a short, “Mm.”
“What?”
Bakugou’s outstretched hand moved from Shouto’s back to his shoulder, pulling on it weakly.
Shouto rolled onto his back. “What?” he said again.
Bakugou’s hand fumbled under the covers, knocking against Shouto’s arm until it found his elbow. Bakugou’s fingers wrapped around his arm just below his elbow.
Bakugou adjusted once more, tugging the blanket over his own shoulder, pulling his knees up. One of them pressed lightly against Shouto’s thigh. Bakugou gave a deep exhale—one that Shouto felt on his collarbones—and then he was still.
Well. Now Shouto was wide -fucking-awake.
He wasn’t sure why this felt so strange. Bakugou had been grabbing at him all day—yanking him by his jacket lapel, hooking his fingers under Shouto’s sleeve cuffs, that bone-crushing hug when Shouto first walked into class. This was just one sleepy hand around his arm, one knee touching his thigh.
Was Bakugou even awake enough to realize he was doing it? Was it okay to let him keep doing it?
Shouto kept his eyes open, watched Bakugou’s face. Something in his chest ached.
He wanted to…
Something.
Reach forward, touch something. His hair, maybe? Or his shoulder. Or to slip a hand around Bakugou’s waist, close that distance, settle his chin atop Bakugou’s head, feel the rhythm of Bakugou’s chest rising and falling against his own chest—
The thoughts pinged alarm. A second later, guilt followed.
He needed to stop thinking like that. It would weird Bakugou out, probably, if he knew that Shouto thought those sorts of things about him. If Shouto was touch-starved, that was his problem, not Bakugou’s.
He forced himself to close his eyes. Underneath the bed, he could hear the kitten moving around, fumbling its way through the dark.
Notes:
Shouto: I think... I want a hug from my friend? Maybe a brief cuddle??
Shouto:
Shouto: oh my god I’m a P E R VThanks for being patient with me as I finished up midterms and worked on my original novel :) I've got a couple memoirs and one fiction piece coming out soon (along with some MHA art), so be sure to follow my socials!
Insta: @max_says_no
Twitter: @hyperfixeaten
Chapter 51: Shouto Teaches a Queer Studies Class and It Sucks
Summary:
Another day at school. Apologies, explanations, Iida, a broken printer.
Notes:
CW (minor spoilers): kinda outdated explanation of transness, coming out, deadnaming, anxiety attack; DISCUSSION OF: suicide, drug abuse, hate crimes
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He awoke in the morning to Bakugou’s elbow in his side. Bakugou had tried to roll over, apparently, and encountered the unfortunate mass that was Shouto.
“Ugh,” said Bakugou, pushing himself toward his side of the bed again. He took more than half the blanket with him, tugging it off Shouto. “Fuck you still here for?”
Fuck, the morning air was cold. Shouto started bringing his body temperature up. His voice came out groggy. “Wh—? Was I s’posed to leave in the middle of the night?”
“Shuddup.” Bakugou looked toward the nightstand, then down at the ground. He leaned over the side of the bed to pick something up from the floor. “Oi—you knock my damn alarm clock over last night?”
“You did that,” said Shouto.
“Hah?”
“I said you did that.”
“No, I didn’t. Ain’t knocked that over in the seven years I’ve had it.”
Did he not remember getting up in the middle of the night to accompany Shouto to the bathroom? “I didn’t do it.”
“Damn cat probably pulled on the cord or somethin’.” Bakugou set the clock back on the nightstand, adjusted its position. “Fuckin’… 6 o’clock already, fuckin’ hell. Shitty alarm didn’t go off. Get up, we gotta stop by your house and the store before school.”
“The store?”
“My water bottle broke during practical training yesterday.”
“You shouldn’t bring it on the training grounds,” said Shouto.
“Maybe you’re okay with passin’ out from dehydration during a battle, but I ain’t.” Bakugou shoved Shouto toward the edge of the bed with his foot. “Get the hell up.”
###
They rushed to get ready and eat breakfast, and then it was a kiss on both their foreheads from Bakugou’s mother (was that normal? Bakugou had seemed embarrassed), and they were out the door.
At Shouto’s house, Bakugou waited in the kitchen while Shouto put in fresh contacts. When he returned to the kitchen to get his medication from Fuyumi, his pills were on the counter, and Fuyumi was washing rice while she and Bakugou very pointedly ignored each other.
“No sleepovers today,” Fuyumi said when they were on their way out, eyeing Bakugou. “I mean it, both of you.”
Bakugou groaned. “Heard you the first time, old hag.”
“ Old —!”
They stopped by the store after that. Since Shouto didn’t like going inside stores, he waited on a bench outside. A few minutes had gone by when a news van drove past, stopped, and backed up. He didn’t think much of it until the window rolled down.
“Todoroki-kun! Oh, what a wonderful coincidence. I’m so glad I was able to catch you.” A woman in a pantsuit opened the van’s passenger door, quickly followed by a small ensemble from the back of the van. “Do you have a moment?”
Shouto stood, more out of his desire to run away than respect. He’d watched his father give countless interviews, but the microphone was hardly ever in Shouto’s face. Because Shouto so lacked the charisma he needed to win hearts by his words and mannerisms, Endeavor had advised him to stave off interviews as long as possible. That was one point on which he and Endeavor shared the same opinion. “I’m not—I’m waiting on my friend, I don’t—”
“That’s perfect! I just have a few questions.” She smoothed her skirt and took a microphone from an assistant before continuing, “I see you’re on your way to school. Can you tell us why you were so absent from the public eye for two weeks after the sports festival?”
Shouto glanced back at the store entrance, which remained Bakugou-less. Fuyumi wouldn’t want him to be rude and tell reporters to fuck off, but he still wished Bakugou would hurry up. How long could he keep them entertained with the types of vague answers Endeavor expected him to give? He looked down at the microphone in front of his chin. “Just—just health problems. Everything’s fine now. So.”
“Injury-related health problems? I see your left hand’s bandaged. Is that a result of the infamous ‘Fire Finger’ you gave your father Endeavor at the sports festival?”
He tried to keep all emotion from his face, but... it had a name now? Endeavor would be watching whatever interviews came out, making sure Shouto didn’t tarnish Endeavor’s reputation further than he already had. Fire finger... Endeavor was going to love that. “That’s not why I wasn’t at school.”
“Why, then?”
“Health problems.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“No.”
“I... see.” The reporter paused. “Let’s switch gears a bit. I have to address another point of confusion for news stations and the public. Can you tell us your given name?”
Shouto felt like he was being suffocated. Given name? He knew she was asking whether his name was Shouto or Shiyo, but the wording made it sound like she was seeking the name his parents had given him. “My name is Shouto.”
“Most sources outside of sports festival interviews list your name as Shiyo.”
Shouto’s stomach turned, but he kept his voice even. “Okay.”
“Do you know why that is?”
Shouto hadn’t heard the footsteps, but suddenly Bakugou was yanking the microphone toward him, dragging the reporter’s hand with it. “Ain’t his fault the dumb fuckers keep getting it wrong. You damn reporters think you can just go ’round rubbing your unwashed asses on every flat surface. I’ll beat the shit out of—”
“Bakugou.” Shouto pried Bakugou’s fingers from the microphone. He told the reporter, “Goodbye now.”
She looked confused. “I’m sorry?”
“That’s okay.” Shouto tapped Bakugou’s back. “I’m ready to leave.”
The reporter took a step forward. “Just one more thing—could you show the camera your injured finger for me?”
“You can see mine,” said Bakugou, raising his middle finger. “Fuckwipes.”
Bakugou handed Shouto a Pocari as they walked away. Shouto took it. His hands were shaking.
“Can't you even tell people to fuck off when you need to?” Bakugou asked. “Do I gotta do that for you, too?”
Shouto gave a stiff shrug.
“It’s only gonna get worse from here.”
“I know,” said Shouto.
“You gonna toughen up, then?”
Shouto paused in the middle of opening his Pocari. His own measure of toughness had always just been a scale of how much discomfort and pain he could handle. Bakugou’s definition—the capacity to tell people to fuck off—was relatively foreign.
“IcyHot.”
Shouto screwed the top back on his drink. “Makes me feel like shit.”
“Hah?”
“Telling people to fuck off.”
“So get over it.”
Shouto exhaled. Flicked his free hand in front of him a few times, trying to shake away the jittery feeling in his body. “I still have to do what Endeavor wants me to.”
“Thought you were over that shit. With you flipping him off on national fuckin’ television.”
“I thought I was going to die afterward,” said Shouto. “I didn’t need to think about consequences.”
Bakugou didn’t respond.
As they neared the school, Shouto grew contemplative. He needed to apologize to Bakugou’s friends today, didn’t he? That was going to suck. More importantly, though, he still needed to talk to Ashido. She’d seen those texts Natsuo had sent him at the sports festival. He had no idea what she’d been telling people about him, or what she herself believed.
Shouto and Bakugou took their shoes off in the shoe lockers. Ashido was talking and laughing with Jirou on the other side of the room. He’d pretty much already planned the conversation with her, he just had to actually have it now.
Ugh. Easier said than done.
Bakugou nudged Shouto’s arm. “You already spacin’ out? Ain’t even in class yet.”
“Um. No, I just...” Shouto struggled to get his feet in his indoor shoes without looking away from Ashido. He finally gave up and looked down to address the problem. “You go ahead to class.”
“Why?”
“I have to talk to somebody." When Bakugou didn’t move, he added, “Alone.”
Bakugou grunted. “Hurry it up,” he said, and headed toward the classroom.
Shouto had to wait a couple more minutes for Jirou to leave. Even then, he only approached Ashido once she’d finished switching shoes.
“Oh! Todoroki,” she said. It had taken her a bit to register his presence—Shouto was never sure when it was appropriate to interrupt someone’s daily activities, so he often just stood in their proximity until he was noticed. “Good morning!”
“Can I talk to you?” he asked.
She closed her locker, looked at him. “You? Talking? To me ?”
“Please.”
“Wow, I feel special.” Her voice stayed perky. “D’you wanna go to the music room? It’s usually empty in the morning.”
Was she fine with being alone with him? “Okay.”
The walk was silent. Ashido didn’t speak until they entered the music room. “Ew, it smells like sweat. I don’t know how Jirou practices in here. That’s her guitar, see? I asked her if she’d show me how to play it, but it made my fingers hurt a lot when I tried it, so... Geez, where are all the chairs? I bet the theater club took them for improv night. Have you ever been to one of those? I’m thinking about joining the theater club next semester. Okay, you grab that stool, I’ll use this... bucket. Why is there a bucket? Whatever.”
As they got situated, the adrenaline that had driven him to ask Ashido to talk wore off. He desperately wanted to leave.
He needed to do this, though. He had to.
“What’s up?” Ashido said, rocking forward to plant her elbows on her knees. “You look nervous. You don’t gotta be nervous, it’s just me. Oo, how about this—wanna hear a secret?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Sometimes I chew gum off the bottoms of desks.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “That—okay. Please don’t tell me anything about yourself ever again.”
Ashido laughed. “Now you go.”
Shouto’s eyes drifted to a musical scales poster behind Ashido. He forced them back to her, fighting to stay inside his body.
“I wasn’t on anything,” said Shouto. “At the sports festival. Pills or anything.”
Ashido didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, “Well, it really wasn’t… I probably shouldn’t have asked you that. That was kind of mean for me to say.”
“No,” said Shouto. “I hurt your friend.”
“Sero said you apologized. In a pretty weird way, but you did. And you’re my friend, too.”
Shouto raise his hand to tap on his chest, but he caught himself halfway and dropped his hand back in his lap.
“You know that,” said Ashido, “right?”
He’d hoped it would be easier to talk after he got the first sentence out, but it didn’t look like it was going to work that way. He had to force the words out. “It was just pain pills and alcohol. And only ever at home.”
“Did you take them together?”
“Sometimes.”
“I think—I think that can kill you,” said Ashido.
“I know,” said Shouto.
“And you still did it?”
He hadn’t expected this portion of the conversation to stretch longer than two or three sentences. “It doesn’t really matter.”
“I mean, it… kind of… does,” she said.
“No,” said Shouto. “I don’t want you to have to think about that. I just wanted you to know I wasn’t being careless with my… my classmates’ safety on purpose. It happened because I wasn’t thinking very well. My memory kept cutting in and out, and I wasn’t—I—sometimes I wasn’t fully aware of where I was or what was happening. My brain does that sometimes. Not that—I’m not using it as an excuse, I know it was bad for me to do all the things I did, like hurting Sero and Bakugou and being mean to you and Iida, I’m just—”
He was startled to feel Ashido’s cool hands cup each cheek and give a gentle squeeze. “Deep breath, bestie,” she said. “Deeeeep breath.”
He tried. He hadn’t realized that he’d been on the verge of a panic attack until he purposely tried to slow down his heartrate. It took a while to get it back down to a manageable level.
“Sorry,” he said.
She took her hands away, settled them back in her lap. Waiting.
Shouto swallowed in an attempt to wet his dust-dry throat. “I wasn’t ignoring you. At the sports festival, when you came into the waiting room.”
“Okay,” said Ashido, “so, like… what were you doing, then?”
“I can’t talk sometimes,” he said. “It’s—when things start—when people ask me things. It’s hard to answer.”
Ashido’s bucket screeched as she shifted. “I mean… you don’t have to be nervous about that kind of thing around me. I’m not gonna blow up on you or anything.”
“I kn—I know. It’s not that. At least not entirely. Something in my brain shuts off, and I can’t access the… um… whatever it is in your brain that lets you talk. I can’t say anything even if I try to.”
Ashido hesitated. “So it’s a disorder, or…? Like a medical thing?”
He wasn’t sure if he felt better or worse hearing Ashido say that. “Something like that.”
“Oh, wow. So is that why you don’t talk a lot?”
He nodded.
“I guess that makes sense,” said Ashido. “I thought you were, like… uncomfortable around us, or we annoyed you or something.”
“You don’t annoy me,” said Shouto. “I like listening to all of you talk. I think… I think you’re all interesting, and I learn a lot of things by listening to you.”
She pressed her hands over her heart. “Aww. That’s really sweet, actually. But what the heck are you learning? Pokémon evolutions? Because we don’t ever talk about smart stuff.”
“More like how to talk to other people my age. I still don’t think I’m doing it right, but I’m—I—people are still talking to me and being nice even when I’m being an asshole. I didn’t know it was possible for me to have… people who…” Fuck, he always did this. Started tripping over his words, not quite making sense. It didn’t matter how hard Endeavor had tried to train it out of him. “I mean people who are— aren’t. Aren’t not… nice. Are nice…? People who are nice to me.”
She twisted her head to the side a little, looking at him with incredulity. “Do… you mean, like… friends? You’ve never had friends before?”
He inhaled to speak but ended up just holding his breath. His face heated, and he struggled to adjust his temperature before Ashido noticed the blush. He’d experienced greater humiliation than this many times before, but his experience at UA so far had been the longest Shouto was able to convince a group of people that he could function on his own, that he wasn’t desperate, obnoxious, or pathetic.
Was he an asshole for letting people believe the illusion? To what extent did they deserve to know who Shouto was?
He changed the subject. “Did you tell anybody about the texts you saw?”
Ashido lifted herself off the bucket a little while grabbing its sides, like she was trying very hard to keep herself from blasting off straight up through the ceiling. “Y’know, it was… really, really hard not to, so I need you to be at least a little impressed here: no, I didn’t tell anybody.”
Shouto watched her squirm for a couple seconds. Then he said, “I think you have questions.”
“Ohmigod,” she said, breathy. “ So many. Do I get to ask them? Please? Is that horrible for me to want to ask things?”
“You can… ask,” he said.
“Oh, good." She plopped back down on the bucket. “Hrng. So who’s—? If it’s a bad question, tell me it’s a bad question. Who’s Touya?”
That one wasn’t too hard. “My oldest brother. He killed himself.”
Ashido’s face went slack.
It was strange telling someone that without having the specific agenda of shocking them enough to leave him alone. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say. “It was a long time ago.”
Ashido blinked. “What, so like…? Your other brother said in the text that Touya—did he die from an overdose?”
“He burned down a forest with himself in it.”
Ashido’s eyes widened. “Wait, he— what ? Are you serious?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “Fucking drama queen.”
Ashido snorted, then clapped her hand over her mouth. “Crap, sorry. You didn’t hear that. Um. Well—sorry. That that happened.”
“It’s fine,” said Shouto. “What else did you want to ask?”
Ashido opened her mouth, closed it. Opened it again. “So do you… like, I tried to Google you, but I couldn’t remember the name your brother said in the text, and the only articles I could find were about you in the sports festival, which used your normal name, so I was all confused, like…” Ashido hesitated. Then she leaned forward and spoke in a hushed voice. “…do you want to be a girl?”
Shouto coughed on a laugh. “No. I—no. I don’t.”
“Oh...” Ashido straightened. A few moments passed before she said, “I don’t get it.”
“It’s the other way.”
“The other—?”
“Trans boy.”
“So a… boy who transited—”
“Transitioned.”
“—who transitioned to a gi—”
“No.”
“No?”
“That’s still a trans girl.”
“Okay, okay.” Ashido waved her hands, closed her eyes like she was concentrating. “I’m gonna get it this time. A boy… who transgendered… no, no, who transitioned… but then… actually… didn’t…?”
Jesus fucking Christ. Shouto reached into his schoolbag and pulled out a highlighter. “Ashido, look at me.”
Ashido opened her eyes.
“Hold out your hands,” he said.
She did. With his highlighter, Shouto wrote boy on one hand and girl on the other. This was going to be a rudimentary (and perhaps outdated) lesson, but he had neither the time nor patience to explain the complexity of the gender spectrum to her. She could Google that on her own time.
Ashido giggled. “That tickles.”
Shouto dropped the highlighter back in his bag. “Okay. Trans girl. Show me which one it starts with and where it ends up.”
She looked down at her hands. Slowly, she lifted the boy hand. “Starts with boy…”
“Yes.”
She moved the boy hand so it was underneath the girl hand. “Ends with girl.”
“Okay. Now do the opposite.”
Ashido moved her hands back to their original positions. She held up her girl hand first this time. “Starts with…?” She looked at Shouto, eyebrows raised.
“Starts with girl,” Shouto confirmed.
“Aaaaand…” Ashido slid the girl hand beneath the boy hand this time. “…ends with boy.”
Finally . “Yes.”
“So trans boy means girl to boy.”
“Yes.”
Ashido stared at him for a while. Then her expression turned into a confused mix of delight and bewilderment, and she said (entirely too loud)— “Wait, you used to be a GIRL?!”
The wording of the question made him cringe, but he’d done this to himself with that dogshit thirty-second lesson he’d just given. “Sort of.”
“Wait—wait wait wait wait wait.” She waved her hands frantically in front of herself. “You’re not lying to me, are you?”
“Why would I lie about that?”
“No, okay, but then how—” The bucket she was sitting on gave a screech as she stood, reached forward and firmly grabbed his biceps. “You’re strong as hell . How’d you do that?!”
“I’m… just… like that?”
“What! Oh my god!” She stood, threw her open palms down toward him like she was either about to present him to someone or snatch him up. She repeated the motion again with more emphasis, then said, “You’re so cool!”
A sharp, baffled laugh erupted from Shouto’s chest. Whatever reaction he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. “What?”
“You’re like a spy!”
“I’m not trying to trick anyone,” he said.
“Like somebody with a body-changing quirk!”
“I didn’t change bodies.”
“Like a transformer!”
“That… that’s fine, actually.”
Pulling the bucket in closer, Ashido sat, her legs knocking against Shouto’s. She leaned in, put her hands on his knees. He could nearly hear her vibrating with energy. “How do you know , though? I mean, how do you figure that out?”
Shouto exhaled, rubbed his palms on his pants. “I’m not good at explaining.”
Ashido searched his face, too close for comfort. “I have lots and lots and lots of questions. Why’d you tell me right before we have to go to class? I wanna know all the things! This is horrible. Are you even gonna let me tell anybody?”
“Please don’t,” he said.
Tilting her head back, she let out a strangled groan. “That’s gonna be torturous . Are you sure I can’t? What about just the guys at our lunch table? Or what about my parents, can I tell them? Or my cousin? What if I only tell my cousin and then tell her not to tell anybody? Would that be okay?”
Why did the universe have to pick her to find out his secret? Why couldn’t it have been that mutant kid two rows over who only ever talked to bugs and squirrels? Maybe Shouto should’ve made friends with him instead. “Can you at least wait until I get my quirk back completely?” he asked her. “Another few days?”
“Why until then?”
“So I’ll be able to defend myself better if something happens.”
“If…?” Understanding came over her face slowly, sobering her expression. “Would people really…?”
He gave a shallow shrug.
“Wait, so this is like a… serious thing.”
“Kind of,” he said.
“Oh.” She tugged at her axolotl earring, mouth twisting. “Okay. I won’t tell anybody. Because you’re my friend.”
“Thank you.”
The five-minute bell rang. Ashido kept talking as they stood and moved toward the door. “You’re gonna tell me your whole life story later, right? All the juicy and dramatic bits? I wanna know what Todoroki family drama looks like.”
He felt the same discomfort he’d felt at the hospital, that dread of people knowing while continuing to exist around him. She definitely wouldn’t think he was “cool” anymore if she knew the reasoning behind why he was the way he was. Was that something he cared about now? What a dumb thing to care about. “No, I don’t want to tell you anything else.”
“That implies that there is something else, though.”
“There—obviously there are other things,” he said. “I’m saying that I’m not going to tell you them.”
Ashido gave a loud groan. She put her hand on the door, then turned to face Shouto again. “Where were you, anyway? I mean, for real? Those two weeks you were gone?”
I got help , he wanted to say. Like you told me to.
But Ashido was staring at him now with her lips parted a little, like he was still some strange and dangerous zoo attraction even after all the vulnerability he’d just shared with her, and suddenly everything felt ridiculous and hopeless.
What was he to her? An exotic pet, a tamed giant? Was that all their relationship would ever be? Why couldn’t he ever have normal friendships? He just wanted...
Well, he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted. Maybe some sort of friendship where they wore normal clothes and just walked around the city together for a while. Sat on the edge of an outdoor fountain with shopping bags crowding their feet. Played on their phones while watching a boring movie together.
Nobody crying, nobody recently traumatized, nobody afraid of the consequences, nobody ashamed that they weren’t being useful. That might be nice.
"Never mind,” said Ashido. “You can... I guess you can just tell me when you’re ready.”
“Sorry,” said Shouto.
“It’s okay.”
In the hall, they ran into Bakugou. Bakugou’s eyes narrowed as he addressed Shouto. “Fuck you doin’ in the music room? I was looking for you. You’re almost late to class.”
Ashido grabbed the front of Bakugou’s jacket with both hands. She looked up at him with her face scrunched and lips pressed together tightly, like she was trying very hard not to say something. Then she made a guttural, strangled sound, let him go with a frustrated flourish, and walked away with her hands still in the air.
Bakugou looked at her, then back at Shouto, his face stuck in a confused scowl. “What the fuck?”
“I asked her not to tell anybody I’m trans,” said Shouto.
“You—?” The furrow between Bakugou’s eyebrows deepened. He closed the distance between him and Shouto and lowered his voice. “She knows ?”
Shouto shrugged. “She does now.”
“Why’d you fuckin’ tell her?”
“She saw my deadname,” said Shouto. “Why does it matter?”
Bakugou folded his arms and waited for someone to pass in the hall before asking, “Who else knows?”
“Why?”
“Just tell me.”
“Kirishima and Mo—and Yaoyorozu,” he said.
“Hah? Why’d you tell them ?”
“Am I not allowed to tell people?” asked Shouto.
“You shouldn’t,” said Bakugou.
“Why not?”
“’Cause people will fuckin’ think—” Bakugou paused, glancing around the hall before refocusing on Shouto. “It’s not somethin’ people should know. That’s private shit.”
Shouto let his voice stay deadpan. “Is it?”
“Ain’t the whole fuckin’ goal to make people think you’re… fuck, what’s the word. Not-trans.”
“Cis?”
“Yeah.”
Maybe Bakugou really had been researching. “The goal is for me to be more comfortable in my body,” Shouto said. “As long as people aren’t misgendering me on purpose, I don’t need everybody to think I’m cis. Do you need that?”
Bakugou’s mouth twitched. He said nothing.
“I don’t think being trans is a really horrible thing,” said Shouto. “Do you think so?”
Bakugou scratched the back of his head, looking annoyed. “No.”
“So you shouldn’t be ashamed if people know that I am. You’re allowed to be ashamed of me for a bunch of other reasons, but not because I’m trans.”
“You’re a fuckin’ tool,” said Bakugou.
“I know. Be ashamed of me for that instead.”
Bakugou gave a surprised snort. He composed himself quickly, swiping at his nose. “Still think it’s a bad idea. To tell people. Izuku, before he… I mean, he got bullied a lot. For wearing girly hair clips ’n shit. I used to take ’em out, throw ’em away, but it didn’t really matter if he was wearing them that day once he’d worn them once. That was all they—all we needed to keep fucking him up. Just that one slip.”
“I’m used to being bullied,” said Shouto. “I can deal with it if it happens.”
“You being used to it don’t mean shit. Izuku was used to it. You both soak criticism up like a damn sponge. It’s fuckin’ obnoxious. Quit lying to yourself thinkin’ you can handle shit you can’t. And quit giving people ammunition they can use against you. Just don’t be so fuckin’ weird, it ain’t hard.”
“It’s not weird to be trans.”
“Didn’t fuckin’ say it was, you fuckin’ weirdo. I’m talking about all the other weird-ass shit you do. Like why do you rotate between the same five things for lunch every day? It ain’t natural. Your teeth are gonna fall out if you don’t eat a piece of fresh fruit more than once a year.”
“The texture of fresh fruit is different for every piece,” said Shouto. “I hate it.”
“Scurvy makes scar tissue fall apart—fuck you gonna do about that? Hah? The whole left side of your face is gonna fall off.”
“I don’t give a shit. I’m not eating a mushy pear.”
“Dumb fuck,” said Bakugou. “Get your damn priorities straight before you die.”
“No.”
“If you don’t eat a fucking apple by the end of this week—”
“What?” Shouto said. “What are you going to do?”
“Don’t try me,” said Bakugou.
“Go eat your fruit mush,” said Shouto.
“I’ll fuck you up.”
“ Do it , apple bitch.”
Someone cleared their throat from behind Shouto. “I don’t know what the hell you two are arguing about,” said Aizawa, “but class starts in twenty seconds, and I will count you both tardy if you’re not in your seats.”
###
The conversation at the lunch table didn’t die immediately when Shouto sat down, but it did dwindle into silence pretty quickly. It seemed like Sero, Kaminari, and Kirishima were avoiding his gaze. Bakugou, too, he supposed, but that was because he was paying close attention to the orange he was peeling.
Shouto sat with his hands in his lap for a good couple minutes, trying to build up courage. Finally, he said to the stifling silence, “I’m sorry about yesterday.”
The group looked at him. Bakugou kept peeling his orange.
Shouto felt like he should clear his throat, but that might make it seem like he had more to say than he did, so he didn’t. “I wasn’t feeling good. Probably I shouldn’t have come back to school yet.”
“Are you... feeling better now?” Kirishima asked.
“I think so.”
“Oh, thank god,” said Kaminari. “I thought today was gonna be awkward again and we wouldn’t get to tell you about your social media.”
They’d said something about social media yesterday morning, too. “I don’t have social media.”
Kaminari smirked and put his elbow over the back of his chair. “You didn’t have social media.”
“Did you seriously not check your texts while you were out?” asked Mina. “Like, at all?”
Shouto took out his phone and looked through his texts until he found an unknown number which had texted him a while ago.
Unknown:
(Monday)
Hiiii friend, its Mina :D You dont already have social media right? Me and Denki need your permission to start a social media page for you. For meme purposes. Also, congrats on winning!!
(Tuesday)
OK IM SORRY BUt youre taking too long to respond and Im impatient, you have social media now.
Heres the link to your new account, plus username/password so you can post. Your pfp is a close-up of the flaming finger. I am so sorry.
I mean Im not cuz its freaking hilarious, but I am.
BTW are you sick or something? Practical training was all wonky today without you being there. Blasty didn’t know who to go after lol
He tapped on the link Ashido had sent. His profile picture was, indeed, a closeup of his flaming middle finger.
His bio read,
Placeholder bio for when (if) Shouto gets his sh*t together and takes over posting! Account currently managed by his DANK classmates, Mina and Denki :)))))) P.S.—Shouto, the handle is 100% Aoyama’s doing. So pls ice him and not us :P
Shouto looked at the handle.
@daddy_issues
Fucking hell.
What was he even supposed to do with a social media account? He was pretty sure Fuyumi and Natsuo had profiles, but they also had lives. They had friends and went places and did fun things. The most fun and quirky thing Shouto had ever done was to set the ceiling on fire in the process of accidentally microwaving a metal spoon.
There were a few items already uploaded—one of Ashido and Kaminari posing together after the sports festival, a short video of Shouto sleeping in homeroom while Bakugou made explosions out-of-frame, and a blurry photo—dated from yesterday—of him and Bakugou walking together in the hall. The last photo was captioned GUESS WHO’S BACK!!!
Kaminari’s voice was hesitant. “So... what do you think?”
Shouto scrolled back to the first photo, read the bio again. “Why did you make this?” he asked.
“People were freaking out on social media about you,” said Ashido.
Kaminari nodded. “So we decided to caramelize.”
“Capitalize, bro,” Sero muttered, not looking up from his salad.
Shouto felt queasy. Sero was obviously uncomfortable being at the same table as him. Maybe Shouto should’ve eaten outside today, too.
“Are you gonna take over the account?” Ashido asked. “Midnight says that social media is a big part of becoming a top Hero these days. You have a fanbase, so you should take advantage of it.”
“A fanbase?”
“Yeah, like, look at how many followers you already have.”
Shouto looked. “Is... seven thousand a lot?”
“For an account that you haven’t even interacted with yet?” said Ashido. “Heck yeah.”
He was skeptical. He doubted that the majority of those people followed him because they liked him—they probably just liked seeing the drama he tended to stir up. Anyways, what could he even post, with how Endeavor’s employees tattled on everything he did to his father? Even having an account under the name Shouto would piss Endeavor off. “I don’t think I can... I don’t know what I would do with this.”
“You could post training videos,” Kirishima suggested.
“Or you could go through your DMs and answer some of the questions on video,” said Ashido. “There are a lot of questions.”
Shouto put his phone away. This whole thing felt like a complicated social trap. “Bakugou, do you have—?”
“Fuck no,” said Bakugou. “I don’t do all that gay—all that girly shit. If some fuckwit wants to know what I’m doin’, they can ask me to my fuckin’ face.”
“Fellas,” said Ashido, “is it gay to be perceived by other—”
“I said girly , Pepto Bismol.”
Shouto might’ve let out an amused huff at Bakugou’s piss-poor attempt at gay allyship if he hadn’t been so distracted. Could he use social media to his advantage? Was that possible? If both he and Natsuo could get information out to a lot of people at the same time...
Well, he didn’t need to get ahead of himself. Even if he didn’t care about pissing off Endeavor, his goal was no longer as small as taking his father down. He needed to get on All Might’s good side in order to get his quirk, and that meant no anti-Hero posting. Still, a platform could be useful further on. Maybe he could work on growing it.
He’d ask Deku about it later.
###
After school, Shouto was walking with Bakugou down the hall to the shoe lockers. As they passed by the library, Shouto heard a familiar voice come from inside it, rife with frustration. “Maybe this…? No… no, I don’t want it to do that —goodness. What? What is this—? No! Is this broken? Did I break it?”
Shouto paused and took a few steps backward to peek into the library. Iida was hunched over the printer, brow deeply furrowed, pressing one of the buttons over and over again, lifting the top of the printer to look inside it, and going back to pressing the button again, muttering under his breath all the while.
“Oi,” called Bakugou, already halfway down the hall.
Shouto motioned toward the library. “I’m going in for a minute.”
“Hah? Why?”
“Just wait for me outside.”
“IcyHot—! Dammit, why’re you always—”
Shouto went into the library. As he approached Iida, he realized that his classmate was sweating, the back of his hairline damp.
“What are you doing?” Shouto asked.
Iida whirled on him. He looked startled. “Oh! Todoroki-kun—well, I’m trying to fax these documents to Manual’s agency.”
“Can’t the librarian help you?”
“She’s gone to a meeting, unfortunately. I’m unsure when she’ll be back. Or if she will. Do you—ah—need the printer?”
Shouto stepped forward to take the documents from the tray. Iida had put them in upside-down, for one. Shouto placed them correctly before crouching to set the printer up. The touch screen was frozen.
“I think you fucked it up,” said Shouto.
“I see.” Iida’s voice was stretched string-thin with tension. “That’s… certainly unfortunate.”
Iida hadn’t even bothered to correct Shouto’s swearing--he was usually a stickler about that with his classmates. Was he really that stressed? “Do you have a faxing app on your phone?”
“An—an app?” asked Iida. “For faxing? I do not.”
“Okay.” Shouto took the documents to the nearest table, spread them out, and opened the faxing app on his own phone. He heard Iida approach him carefully from behind as he scanned each of the papers and compiled them into a document. “Give me the fax number,” he said.
Wordlessly, Iida handed him a post-it note with a neatly-written string of numbers. Shouto typed it into his phone and sent the documents. A few moments later, he received a notification that they’d successfully reached their destination.
“It’s done,” said Shouto.
“I’m—I’m sorry?”
Shouto showed Iida the confirmation screen. “They sent.”
Iida looked at the phone screen like he was trying to decipher a foreign text. Then he looked at Shouto and asked, “How did you learn how to do that?”
“I needed to fax some forms a few years ago and didn’t want to ask Endeavor’s secretary to do it for me.” She’d always looked annoyed anytime Shouto asked for something, so he avoided her whenever he could. “There are apps for most things, so I figured it out.”
“Oh,” said Iida. He sounded surprised. “Well—that—thank you. Very much. I apologize for messing up the printer. I’m sure I could help you find another somewhere around the school.”
“I didn’t need to print anything.” Shouto collected the papers back into a pile. “I said something mean to you at the sports festival, I think. I shouldn’t have done that. Probably I made a bad day worse.”
“No, I’m… I apologize for assuming things,” said Iida. “I should have let you go where you needed to go. You told me that… something bad happened? Was that ever resolved?”
Had he said that? He had a vague memory of it. Maybe the “something bad” Iida referred to was All Might accidentally outing Shouto to his father. “No. But it’s fine. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“Was it related to why you weren’t in class for two weeks?” he asked. “I don’t mean to pry, but… several of your classmates seemed very concerned. I understand that you never contacted the school to explain your absence.”
“I was in the hospital,” said Shouto. Why was he telling Iida this? They weren’t close. It was none of Iida’s business. “For a week. And then I didn’t know how I was supposed to explain things to Aizawa, so I… didn’t.”
Iida’s eyes roamed Shouto’s body like he was looking for a cast or some other sign of major injury. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were having health problems. Will they interfere with practical training?”
“I don’t think so.” Shouto paused. “I was in a psychiatric hospital.”
Iida’s eyes widened slightly. He coughed. “I see.”
“I was just…” He was digging himself into a hole again. Fuck. “Some personal issues. I was having… I had a bad flashback to an assault on the field, and even before that, it—I don’t know. Things were very bad.” He needed to stop talking now. “Do you need anything else faxed?”
Iida hesitated, his mouth open to speak before he closed it and shook his head.
“Okay.” Shouto adjusted his bag on his shoulder. “Um. Probably don’t tell anyone I told you that. Sorry. I talk too much sometimes.”
Iida looked confused. “Too much…? Todoroki-kun, I must apologize for disagreeing, but I only barely know what your voice sounds like. I believe this is the most we’ve spoken since we met.”
It took Shouto a minute to collect his words. “I have… I have trouble communicating. When I try to say a lot of things. Things get mixed up and sometimes I can’t—depending on the situation. I say too much. Or I stop being able to talk at all. So.” He was panicking. What would someone who wasn’t Shouto say in this situation? He desperately needed to say a normal person thing right now. “I’m sorry about your brother. I have a dead one.”
Iida stared at him.
“That probably didn’t help,” Shouto realized. He took a few steps back. “I’m going to leave now.”
He rushed out of the library. Bakugou was waiting for him in the hall, arms crossed.
“Fuck took you so long?” Bakugou asked.
“I was talking to Iida,” said Shouto. They started walking again. “I think probably I made things worse.”
“Yeah, you’re pretty fuckin’ talented at that.” Bakugou knocked his knuckles just below Shouto’s collarbone. “I’m grabbing food before I go home. You comin’ or not?”
"Fuyumi wants me home," he reminded Bakugou.
"I need to talk to you about Izuku."
"Don't worry about him," said Shouto. "I'm going to set up a meeting with all of us."
"For when?"
"Soon."
"Are you sure? Ain't shit happened yet with him. I'm not gonna wait much longer."
It was so easy to just wait when Endeavor was out of town, but Shouto knew that Bakugou was right. If they were going to act, it needed to happen during Shouto's downtime. He stopped walking, pulled out his phone.
"What're you doing?" Bakugou asked.
Shouto wrote out the message and hit send. Then he showed it to Bakugou.
Meeting soon with me, you, and B?
Deku's response came less than a minute later.
Sure. Tomorrow at 4pm, here: [link]
"Tomorrow?" asked Bakugou.
Shouto raised his eyebrows. "Is that a problem?"
"No, just... no, that's good. Shit." Bakugou ran a hand through his hair. "It's just that he used to... y'know, need a week or so to plan that kind of... Never mind."
"So yes?"
"Yeah," said Bakugou. "Tomorrow."
Memoir: Reasons Why I Believe Doctor Who is Real
Drawing of Dabi in hot pink shorts (canon to Non-Newtonian lol)
Notes:
I've included a couple links at the end: one to a memoir I wrote that was recently published (about losing a close friend after coming out as trans), and another to a drawing I did of Non-Newtonian Dabi. Very, very slowly getting the hang of digital drawing.
Thanks for bearing with me through this slow plot and slow writing :,) Hopefully the payoff will be worth it.
-Max :)
Chapter 52: Shouto Has Never Seen a Penguin
Summary:
Our three boys are back together again, guest starring Sakura (now more Evil)!
Notes:
CW: discussion of murder/autism-related abuse (light)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The next day after school, Shouto and Bakugou met up to go meet Deku. They discussed what they wanted to say for about fifteen minutes, and then they followed the link Deku had sent to a small outdoor food court.
Shouto saw Deku and came to a stop. He was sitting at one of the outdoor tables set up inside the circle of vendors. He looked tense, shoulders bunched in close to his neck, small even next to the little red-headed girl sitting beside him. She was busy with a coloring book and crayons, and Deku was rolling a red crayon between his thumb and index finger.
Sakura? He hadn’t thought Deku was planning on keeping her for so long. Didn’t he have anyone to pass her off to?
Wait, no. Sakura had black hair, not red.
Bakugou squeezed Shouto’s arm just above his elbow. “See ’im anywhere?”
“By the vendors,” Shouto answered. “On the right. Purple shirt. He has a kid with him, I think.”
“Hah?” Bakugou craned his head. “Is that that kid from…? Y’know, Sakura?”
Shouto shook his head. “I don’t think so. Sakura had black hair.”
“Hair dye exists, fuckbucket. Her face’s been all over the news, so he probably dyed it to—”
“He’s trying to hide her.” Shouto hesitated. “Or raise her? Can he do that?”
“Who knows,” said Bakugou. “No clue what the hell’s going on with that dork. Izuku say anything about bringin’ her?”
“I thought he was coming alone. But he might’ve brought her along to keep anyone from doing anything rash.”
“Rash?”
“Something that could hurt her in the process. Pro Heroes and police are less likely to raid the area if there’s a chance he could take a child as a hostage. Hopefully you’d be less likely to start a physical altercation with a five-year-old present. Wouldn’t put it past you, though.”
Bakugou gave an annoyed hiss. “Fuckin’ hell… nerd looks like he’s about to start hyperventilating. C’mon.”
They started toward Deku. The two of them had barely made it inside the circle of vendors when Deku’s head whipped around. When he saw them, the apprehension in his face dissolved so quickly that Shouto wasn’t sure it had been there in the first place. Deku gave a bright smile and energetic wave.
“He pick some psychic quirk up off the street?” Bakugou muttered. “Swear he didn’t used to be so creepy.”
“He’s not that creepy,” said Shouto.
“You grew up around a bunch of Grade-A creeps, dumbass. Your creep threshold is so high that you need a damn elevator to reach it.”
Deku stood to meet them as they approached, arms opening. His t-shirt sported a bisexual flag overlaid by the words ALL BI MYSELF. “Hi! My boys, my dudes! Hug?”
Shouto accepted the offer. Deku squeezed him, his hand sliding down Shouto’s back a little.
“I’m not carrying a weapon,” said Shouto.
“A-and I’m not giving you a pat-down, you sexy cynical bastard.” Deku pulled away. “I hope you guys don’t mind that I already ordered our food.”
Deku had stuttered. Had Shouto caught him off guard? He’d meant his statement as a reassurance. “That’s okay.”
“Just ’cause it’s so busy today, and it takes a while for them to make the… Kacchan, you look miffed. Are you mad I didn’t offer you a hug? I know how much you love making me feel stupid for displaying affection and vulnerability.”
Bakugou stared back at Deku with the first half of a scowl—upper lip just slightly raised, tongue stuck between his upper and lower sets of teeth. He looked more confused than angry.
Deku laughed. “I’m just fucking with you. You know I love y’all. Sit down before someone tries to steal our table again—Sakura keeps having to shoo the thieves away.”
At her name, Sakura looked up. She waved at Shouto, eyes as wide and unsmiling as they’d been the day Deku and Dabi killed her father. She looked… better, though. Face a little rounder, a little more colored. That could just be a result of the outdoor lighting and new hair color, though. She was also wearing an emerald dress that looked like something out of twelfth-century Europe.
“You see my dress?” she signed to Shouto. “You see it?”
Shouto nodded as he sat across from her. Sakura seemed satisfied and returned to her coloring book.
“Magne made it for her,” Deku explained, sliding onto the bench beside her. “Sakura’s been obsessed with Brave for a hot minute now.”
“I don’t know what that is,” said Shouto.
“We can watch it on our next date. Kacchan, care to join?”
If Bakugou heard Deku, he didn’t show it. He hadn’t moved from his position. He shifted his weight to his other foot, shoving his hands in his pockets and furrowing his brow at some kid walking by with his mom.
Deku leaned in toward Shouto and whispered, “Why isn’t he saying anything?”
“I told him to stop saying shitty things,” said Shouto.
“Okay—but he didn’t listen , right?”
“He said he was going to work on it.”
“He said that?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“Those words?”
“I think so.”
“That’s fucked.” Deku gave an uneasy grin. Then he said, louder, “Kacchan, you’re making me uncomfy. Say something homophobic.”
Bakugou didn’t look at him. He sounded distracted. “Shut up.”
“Eh… doesn’t really count as homophobia, but—”
“I’ll put your damn head through a wall. Shitty nerd.”
“That’s slightly better,” said Deku. “Feel free to join us after you finish brooding over Gotham. It’s gonna take a while for our food to come out, anyway.”
Bakugou muttered something, and then he walked toward them and sat beside Shouto. He didn’t meet their eyes—planting an elbow on the table and his jaw on his knuckles, keeping his eyes toward the street.
“I thought you did good at the sports festival,” Deku told Bakugou.
“Shut up,” said Bakugou.
“I’m not being sarcastic,” said Deku. “You did good. Shouto, you thought he did good, right?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
Bakugou cut his eyes toward Shouto. “You fuckin’…? You almost killed me.”
“There’s no reason you should’ve been able to beat me,” said Shouto. “Or beat Deku. You’re as good as you can be without destroying your health.”
“And you did some smart things,” Deku said. “In the cavalry battle—getting above Shouto so he couldn’t use his ice without it falling down on his own team. That was smart. And your first move during you guys’ match, with the grabbing him by his left arm.”
Bakugou made a scoffing noise, looked away again. “Neither of those worked, Shitnerd.”
“Just because it didn’t work doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good attack,” said Deku.
“If it was a good attack, I would’ve won with it.”
“You need to stop thinking like that,” said Deku. “You can use all your strength and resources and intelligence—play all your cards right—and there are still going to be fights you lose. That’s just how things work.”
“S’bullshit,” Bakugou muttered.
Deku didn’t say anything. He smiled at the worker who brought their drinks.
Bakugou roused from his sulky position to give Todoroki’s drink an incredulous look. “IcyHot, what the fuck is that? Liquified sugar?”
Shouto took a sip. Honestly, it might’ve been. Tasted good, though. “Probably there are other things in it.”
Bakugou took Shouto’s drink from his hand and took a sip. He gave an exaggerated scowl as he pulled away. “Holy… fuck . They scrape this out of a unicorn’s colon? How are you still alive with all the trash you put in your body? Eat a damn vegetable sometime.”
“Give my drink back,” said Shouto.
Bakugou took a final sip, making a face as he slid it back across the table.
Deku took a drink from his boba. “So you guys didn’t, like, organize an ambush for me, right? Because I have some laundry I need to pick up later.”
“No ambush,” said Shouto. “Bakugou and I talked. I don’t think you like your job now. You’re helping me, so if there’s something I can do to help you, I want to do it.”
Deku chewed on a tapioca pearl. His face stayed blank.
“I don’t mean help figuring a way out,” said Shouto. “You’re smarter and have more experience than me, so I couldn’t contribute anything. I mean if you need money or resources. For example, if you get to the point where you want to take your chip out, I know someone who could help you do that safely. If you need to travel somewhere, legally or illegally, I’ll pay any expenses. I’ll rent you a private jet if you need it. If you just need a body to run an errand, I’m available.”
Bakugou shot Shouto a glare.
“ We’re available,” Shouto corrected. “Don’t send Bakugou on any errands that require him to lie or act normally under pressure, though. He’s shit at that. Probably he could pick up your laundry for you.”
“ Oi. ” Bakugou kicked Shouto under the table. “But—yeah, Shitnerd, whatever. If you need it.”
Deku lowered his gaze, licked his lips. He took another drink.
“Well?” said Bakugou, not patiently.
“Um.” Deku cleared his throat. “Yeah, I don’t think... I mean, thanks. But. I don’t see that working out. So.”
There was a silence.
Then Bakugou said, “Are you fuckin’ serious?”
“I d—I do appreciate it,” said Deku. Shouto recognized the way Deku’s fingers fiddled with the base of his cup, the way his words sounded like he was having to prop each one up with stilts. He was struggling to get his words out. “I’m happy you’re both thinking of me. But even if I wanted to leave, it’s just not possible, and it’s not safe for—it’s not—” He shifted his attention to Shouto and switched to sign language. “What’d you tell him?”
“Nothing,” Shouto signed back. “I just thought it would be safer if you agreed to involve him in an organized way. It’s better than him storming the Villains’ hideout completely unprepared. Which he might.”
“He wouldn’t—he’s not that stupid.”
“He is that stupid.”
“Okay, maybe he is that stupid, but my father will hurt both of us if he finds out that I asked Kacchan for—”
“OI,” Bakugou said aloud, smacking his palm on the table. “I fuckin’ see you two motioning at me and signing ‘stupid.’ What the hell are you gossipin’ about?”
Shouto looked at Bakugou, surprised.
“Yeah, that’s right, fuckers,” said Bakugou. “I’ve been fuckin’ studying. How’re you gonna do all your secret talk now, hah?”
Shouto and Deku looked at each other. Deku asked him, “Parlez-vous français?”
Bakugou shot out of his seat. “OI!”
“Okay, sorry, sorry,” said Deku, motioning for Bakugou to sit back down. “We won’t do it anymore. You’re gonna scare Sakura.”
Bakugou huffed and sat down. Sakura kept coloring, unbothered.
“You gotta tell me,” said Bakugou. “Fuckin’ sick of you two goin’ behind my back because you think I can’t handle—fuckin’ hell. Just because I didn’t have complete shitbags for parents growing up doesn’t mean I ain’t been though some shit. I kept my fuckin’ calm through that Villain attack at the USJ.”
Deku tilted his head. “Well... calm is a strong word...”
“I helped kill the damn noumu, didn’t I? And I didn’t lose my cool during the one-on-one matches.”
“You lost it a little bit,” said Shouto.
“Only ’cause you ripped your finger off , you fucking maniac.”
“I didn’t rip it off,” Shouto said. “I twisted it and it just sort of came off on its own, since it cooked all the way through.”
Bakugou covered his mouth and turned away from Shouto, making a small gagging noise in his throat. He mumbled a swear behind his hand, and then he coughed and spit on the ground. An old woman passing by gave them a dirty look.
“Kacchan, that’s not polite,” said Deku.
Bakugou wiped his mouth on his collar, his face flushed red. He looked pissed.
“Look,” said Deku, “I’ll think about what you’re both offering. And I’ll get back to you if I decide I want help. Is that good?”
“ No ,” said Bakugou. “I’m done waiting for you to decide . However stupid you think I am, I ain’t stupid enough to believe that you’re okay living like this. So quit lyin’ to me and either tell me how to help or tell me why you think I can’t.”
Deku shook his head. “I already told you why you can’t help. You’re not strong enough, and I’m satisfied with the contract I have with my father.”
“What contract is so fuckin’ great that you’d throw away all your dreams for it? Off people for it? What’d he promise you?”
Deku looked down at the table. He was quiet.
“Izuku.”
“A quirk,” said Deku. “If I keep working for him and help him take down All Might, he’ll give me a quirk when I turn eighteen.”
“A quirk,” repeated Bakugou, voice flat.
“Yes.”
Shouto hadn’t expected that answer, either. He’d taken Deku as the kind of person who owned his quirklessness, like Natsuo and Ando. He seemed proud of being queer, at least. Was that not similar? Maybe not.
“A quirk ,” Bakugou said again. “That’s it?”
Deku’s head jerked up. “What do you mean, that’s it? You grew up with me, didn’t you? You know how badly I wanted one. Anyway, that’s not all —I inherit control over the League when Sensei dies. Shigaraki will be my second-in-command. And—” His voice grew more unstable the longer he talked, making up for its faltering with increased volume. “—and I might even get Sensei’s quirk before he dies. Then I can do anything I want. Who wouldn’t want that?”
“You ,” said Bakugou. “ You wouldn’t want that.”
“You can’t know that!”
“And yet I fuckin’ do. Is your old man even guaranteed to die of old age in your lifetime?”
Deku blinked. “I—probably not, but—”
“There’s somethin’ else, ain’t there?”
“No,” said Deku. He looked like he was about to cry.
Deku was avoiding telling Bakugou that his father had threatened death for Bakugou and his family if Deku ever tried to seek help. Deku... he really was kind, wasn’t he? Not just for staying with his father all these years to protect Bakugou, but for lying to Bakugou to spare him the guilt of knowing he was one of the reasons Deku couldn’t leave.
It made Shouto’s chest ache.
“What’s he threatening you with?” Bakugou demanded.
“ Nothing .”
“I don’t believe that for a fucking—”
“Server’s coming,” Shouto warned, and Bakugou shut up.
Deku made quick swipes at his eyes and schooled his face as the worker laid out their food in front of them. Sakura made starburst motions next to her ears as Deku slid a small dish of panda-themed dango on a skewer in front of her. Shouto was surprised to receive two skewers of the exact same thing.
“What the fuck,” said Bakugou, looking at Shouto’s food. “Shitnerd, you better not have got me some fuckin’ kiddy—”
Bakugou received a bowl of deep-fried fish cakes in a sauce. He looked at it with narrowed eyes.
“Kamaboko,” Deku explained. “Spicy sauce.”
“Yeah, I can see what it is.” He pulled the bowl toward himself. “Is the only thing you know about me that I like spicy food?”
“Is that not your only non-aggressive personality trait?” Deku said, stirring his own ramen.
“Tch. You better be fuckin’ grateful I’m too hungry to fight you right now.”
“Oh no... I’m so scared... whatever will I do...”
“Shut it, nerd.”
Shouto picked up a skewer of his dango. Was he allowed to eat this? Fuyumi had tried making similar things in the past for her class, teddy-bear-shaped rice balls and the such, but she’d only started doing that once Shouto was too old for it. And before then, the Todorokis’ private chef had been much more focused on nutrition than on any form of entertainment.
Sakura waved to get his attention, then signed, “Same food.”
Shouto nodded.
She picked up her plate, hopped down from the bench, and circled around the table to Shouto. After putting her plate beside Shouto’s, she started climbing onto his lap — her tiny hands gripping handfuls of his shirt, her sharp elbows and knees flying everywhere, her skirt twisting around her legs. She was struggling and Shouto had no idea what to do. He just sat there.
“Sakura,” said Deku, giving a tired laugh. “What are you doing?”
Sakura didn’t respond. She kept climbing until her body was draped like a wet towel over Shouto’s legs, and then she was finally able to work her way into a sitting position. By the time it was over, Shouto felt like he’d gotten briefly caught up in an ancient execution-by-stoning.
Bakugou had remained silent through the entire process. He broke the silence with, “Fuckin’ hell. That was the most awkward thing I’ve ever watched.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” said Shouto. He stayed still as Sakura picked up both of Shouto’s dango skewers in one hand and took a bite from each of them.
Deku sighed. “Sakura, those are Shouto’s.”
She picked up the single skewer from her own plate and handed it back to Shouto. He took it.
“Why do you still have her, anyway?” Bakugou asked Deku. “You can’t be raising her with Villains.”
“I’m not,” said Deku. “Well—I mean, it’s just me and Dabi. And Big Sis Magne sometimes.”
“ Dabi? That shapeshifting motherfucker? What, do you live with him?”
“We stay in the same apartment sometimes. Did you come to help me or to criticize my friends?”
Shouto took a bite of the dango Sakura had handed him. It had a mild flavor. “This is good,” he said.
“Maybe helping includes criticizing your murderer friends,” Bakugou told Deku. “You ain’t like those freaks.”
“Yes?” said Deku. “I am? You were there at Sakura’s apartment the Wednesday before the sports festival, right? That was you? You saw the things that happened?”
Shouto held his skewer up. “The texture is very consistent.”
Bakugou continued arguing. “That’s why I—look, assfuck, maybe I don’t know everything that went on with you and your parents, and I get that you didn’t tell me back then because I was an asshole, but I know you enough .”
“Why don’t you trust me to know what I need to do?”
“I like that they’re pandas,” said Shouto.
“I fuckin’—!” Bakugou released a sharp, exasperated huff. “Because you’ve been manipulated your whole goddamn life! Half-n-Half told me to trust you to know how to best get yourself out, and I’ll try, but you gotta at least admit that there’s a huge fuckin’ problem. You ain’t happy like this.”
“Kacchan,” said Deku, “when the hell have you ever cared that I’m happy? You just wanna stop feeling guilty.”
Bakugou threw his hands up. “Well just don’t fuckin’ listen to anything I say, then.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“You gotta listen to IcyHot, though.”
Deku looked at Shouto. Shouto had to finish chewing before he could turn to Bakugou and ask, “What do you want me to say?”
“That he ain’t happy.”
“You ain’t happy,” Shouto told Deku.
Bakugou groaned. “Don’t say ain’t.”
“You’re not happy,” Shouto corrected. “I don’t like that. I think you don’t like that. We should fix it.”
Deku sighed. “Do you have any suggestions, then? Because I can’t think of anybody who’d be willing to take my chip out who also wouldn’t tell anybody about it.”
“I do have a suggestion,” said Shouto. “I think maybe we can use the same plan for your father as we’re using for mine.”
Deku raised his eyebrows. A moment passed before he said, “That... that’s going to make you dead.”
“ What’s gonna make him dead?” Bakugou asked. “IcyHot, is this the plan you were being all fuckin’ cryptic about the other day? What the hell is it?”
“Should we tell him?” Shouto asked Deku.
Deku rubbed his temple with the heel of his palm, looking tired. “That’s not a good idea.”
“He’s not going to shut up about it.”
“Damn right I won’t,” said Bakugou.
Deku dragged his hands down his face. “Fuck me, you’re annoying,” he told Bakugou. Then he tossed his hands up in surrender. “Sure. I guess. It’s always nice having someone on hand who might report us to the authorities and who the League can torture for information. God, I never should’ve showed up at the USJ. Okay, Kacchan, here’s the deal: All Might has a transferrable quirk, and he’s looking for someone to give it to, and we’re going to make sure that person is Shouto. Shouto and Dabi and I are gonna do our thing taking down Endeavor, with Shouto using All Might’s quirk to do it. Then All Might’s quirk goes to my dad, who will use it for fuck-knows-what. Probably killing All Might or something, I don’t know.”
Bakugou stared.
Deku continued explaining. “So what Shouto’s suggesting we do is break our contract with the League by not giving them All Might’s quirk once we’re done taking down Endeavor. Instead, we’ll have Shouto use the quirk to also take down my father. Did I get that right, Shouto?”
He wondered if Bakugou understood that Deku’s take down was synonymous with kill . “Yep.”
“Awesome sauce.” Deku addressed Bakugou again. “Any questions?”
“Yeah,” said Bakugou. “What the fuck?”
Deku looked back at Shouto. “Shouto, as much as it pains me, I gotta agree with Kacchan on this one. Sensei’s had centuries to hone his skill with his quirk. You haven’t had two decades with yours yet, and you’ll have had even less experience with All Might’s quirk when you use it. You might be able to take your father with me and Dabi on your side, but remember that Sensei has multiple quirks and the whole League. That includes Shigaraki, who can kill you just by touching.”
“Sounds festive,” said Shouto.
“It is... not festive.”
“All Might’s quirk is transferrable?” Bakugou asked.
“Oh my god,” said Deku. “Did you hear anything else I said?”
“Listen, fucker—”
“You two should eat,” Shouto said. He was on his last dango ball. “I’m going to buy more of these, I think. Do they have other designs?”
Deku’s expression softened. “Penguins, I think.”
“I like penguins,” said Shouto. “There’s a documentary I watch a lot. With penguins. I’ve never seen one in real life, though. How do I get Sakura off me?”
“I’m not moving,” Sakura signed, still eating Shouto’s dango.
Deku gave a gentle smile and stood. “I’ll get you some dango penguins. I’ll be back in a minute.”
After Deku left, Shouto noticed Bakugou giving him a strange look. “What?” Shouto said.
“You ain’t never been to a zoo?” Bakugou asked.
“No,” said Shouto. “Why?”
“You know there’s one in the city. Probably a twenty-minute drive from your house. Nobody ever took you?”
“I didn’t do that kind of thing. I just learned about animals and things from books. Videos too, I guess. More time efficient.”
Bakugou grunted. He planted his elbows on the table and looked away.
“Is that strange?” Shouto asked.
Bakugou shrugged.
Shouto heard giggling from behind them. He looked over his shoulder to see what was going on—there was a group of three high school girls sitting at a nearby table, looking at him and Bakugou. One had her phone out and aimed in their direction. Quickly, Shouto pulled Sakura closer to his torso and turned his body, hiding her from the camera. She squawked.
“What is it?” Bakugou asked, already halfway out of his seat. He saw the girls and barked, “OI!”
“Don’t draw attention,” said Shouto. “Deku’s here.”
“Fuckin’—how long have they been takin’ pictures?”
“I don’t know.”
Bakugou climbed over the bench and started toward the girls. “Who the fuck taught you it was okay to take photos of strangers in public? Hah?”
One of the girls spoke up. She sounded a little frightened. “We—we just thought you and Todoroki and that little girl looked cute together.”
“You ain’t s’posed to take pictures of little kids on the fucking street, either.” Bakugou put one hand on his hip and motioned with the other. “Oi, don’t try to put that away. Take out your damn phone and delete those photos.”
“Can’t we at least take a photo with Shouto?” asked another girl.
“Fuck no. Oi—I ain’t stupid, Eyeliner, I see that picture. Yeah, the one beside the selfie of you and your tiny rat dog. Delete it.”
The girl scrunched her face. “You were a lot cuter before you started talking.”
“Sounds like a you problem, fuckface.”
Shouto looked around for Deku and found him frozen halfway between the vendor and their table, holding a skewer of dango. He looked alarmed. Shouto jerked his head in the direction of the road, and Deku nodded. He cut between a couple vendors, disappearing behind them.
While Bakugou kept the girls at the other table occupied, Shouto helped Sakura off his lap, grabbed Deku and Bakugou’s uneaten food along with Sakura’s coloring book and crayons, and guided Sakura to meet Deku behind the vendors. Deku traded the dango for Sakura’s drawing materials and his and Bakugou’s bowls, and the three of them waited silently until Bakugou finally joined them.
“Did they take any photos with me in them?” Deku asked Bakugou.
Bakugou shook his head. “Didn’t look like it.”
“What about Sakura?”
“No clear ones.” He took his kamaboko from Deku. “Fuckin’ obnoxious. You’re too goddamn recognizable, IcyHot. Do somethin’ about your dumb hair.”
“Thanks for taking care of that, Kacchan,” said Deku.
For a second, Bakugou’s face went slack as he looked down at Deku. Then he seemed to compose himself and said, “Tch, well. Pick a better place to meet next time.”
“Can we just sit somewhere and eat?” Shouto asked. “I don’t want to argue anymore.”
They eventually found a bench in a less-populated part of the shopping center and sat. It was a tight fit, with Deku and Sakura squeezed into the middle. They ate in silence for a few minutes. Sakura started rocking between Shouto and Deku, bumping her shoulders against each of their arms alternately as she chewed.
Shouto used to do that as a little kid, that rocking. He’d gotten in trouble for it. It didn’t make any sense now that he thought about it—Sakura's rocking wasn’t hurting or disturbing anyone.
“IcyHot,” said Bakugou, “you ain’t gonna explode or some shit if you get All Might’s quirk, are you?”
Shouto looked at Deku, who shrugged and said, “Probably not.”
“I don’t know how the fuck you plan on charming All Might into giving it to you, but if you do get it somehow...”
Deku laughed. “He’s gonna be overpowered as fuck.”
“Fuckin’ hell,” Bakugou said. “Like some stupid-ass isekai protagonist. Still gonna beat the shit outta you if you get a big head about it. You better not turn evil, either.”
“Why would I turn evil?” Shouto asked.
Deku waved his chopsticks in the air. “It’s true that power corrupts. I mean, look at me. I have zero power quirk-wise, and I’ve never done anything wrong in my life.”
Bakugou snorted. Deku kept his head down as he ate, but Shouto caught the small, satisfied smile on his face.
Sakura patted Deku’s leg and signed, “I’m evil.”
“You’re not evil,” said Deku. “You’re the best, most good girl I know.”
“I’m evil ,” Sakura signed, more vehemently.
It was nice to see them all enjoying themselves, but Shouto’s stomach turned a little. It did feel like he was turning into a different person the further along they got into the plan. Was that good or bad that he was becoming more confident in his anger? Did it even matter who he became, so long as the plan went smoothly?
“Okay, fine,” Deku told Sakura. “You’re the best evil girl I know.”
Well. He’d worry about all that later. When the time came.
Notes:
I just got my contributor copies from december mag this morning, and they're gorgeous!! Link above if you'd like to read my memoir! (CW for aborted suicide attempt & transphobia)
Chapter 53: Shouto Finally Changes His Phone Wallpaper (My Wallpaper Is Crowley from Good Omens Aiming a Spray Bottle Full of Holy Water Like a Gun and Screaming "I Won't Hesitate, Bitch!")
Summary:
Video club antics. Bullying Hawks. Meeting between Aizawa, Recovery Girl, and the Todoroki siblings. The start of the internship.
Notes:
TW: sexual references, accidental outing, medical abuse (is that the right term? denying someone medical care), systemic discrimination against gay couples, DISCUSSION OF: suicide, child sexual assault & child predator, emotional and physical (paralysis) manipulation, serious burn injury, homophobia, traumatizing pranks, threats and emotional abuse, the finger-cutting-off threat
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
By Friday, Shouto was feeling…
Lighter?
The buzz of energy in his chest scared him a little bit. It wasn’t the type of energy he got whenever he was excited, it was more like… a drive to do something. To engage with somebody or to focus on an activity. Motivation?
Were his anti-depressants actually working?
Was that a thing that could happen? Like, he knew that anti-depressants often did work, but that was for other people. Shouto was supposed to be unfixable. Beyond anything doctors could help. Shit, if the medicine was helping, did that mean therapy might benefit him, too?
Well, he didn’t need to get ahead of himself. The meds had side effects—Shouto’s reactions in practical training today had been slower, and using his ice exhausted him more than it had in years. It hadn’t made much of a difference when fighting against his classmates since he was so far ahead of them, but Endeavor was returning next week, and he would notice. Most likely, Shouto would have to stop the meds.
He was feeling good now, though. Not like he could conquer the world or build a rocket ship. But he probably could’ve finished, like, a biology worksheet. Maybe even correctly.
He’d ride this high for a little bit, at least.
When he walked into club at the end of the day, Shinsou was there alone, dismounting from a student’s desk after having turned the overhead projector on.
Shouto asked, “Is there no remote for that?”
Shinsou’s head jerked up at the same time his foot slipped. Shouto didn’t stop to calculate the probability of Shinsou cracking his skull on the corner of another desk before he sent a slope of ice out from his foot to catch him. Shinsou grunted, grappled for a hold on the desk so he could right himself.
“Fuck,” Shinsou hissed, finally kicking the desk away with a screech. He shoved himself off the slope of ice, wiping his damp hands on his pants without looking at Shouto. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry,” said Shouto.
Shinsou walked behind Present Mic’s desk. Shouto thought he was going to start messing with the computer, but he just sat down in Mic’s chair and stared at the chibi-All Might screensaver icon bouncing around on the whiteboard.
Shouto sat cross-legged beside the ice block and started sublimating it.
Shinsou spoke. “Thought you left the club.”
Steam rose from Shouto’s hands. “I wasn’t at school the last couple Fridays,” he said.
“You didn’t come to the training sessions on Tuesday and Thursday, either.”
“I wasn’t at school the last couple Tuesdays and Thursdays. And Aizawa told me to catch up on schoolwork instead of training this week.”
“Is he making you attend club?” Shinsou asked. “You don’t have to come. I can just tell him you were here.”
Shouto stared at the shrinking block of ice in front of him as he tried to think of a response.
“I won’t try to screw you over or anything,” said Shinsou. “You can have Thursdays with Aizawa by yourself if you want. I have some projects coming up, anyway.”
Shouto asked, “Did I do something?”
“Huh?”
“Or say something. To you. Aizawa said I threatened to kill Midnight. I don’t remember very well. Did I say something mean to you during the obstacle course? I don’t remember that, either.”
Shinsou looked at him. “What? No, you… no.”
So… what, had he scared Shinsou with his outburst after the cavalry battle? Like he’d scared Sero during the one-on-ones and in the locker room afterward?
Shouto hadn’t wanted that.
Maybe if he could explain.
He finished sublimating the ice, stood. “I was assaulted by somebody with a mind control quirk last year,” said Shouto. “That’s why I did that after you used your quirk on me. You triggered a trauma response.”
Shinsou’s eyes scanned Shouto’s face. Searching.
“I—that’s my quirk. I can’t help what—” Shinsou’s voice got progressively quieter. “That was the only thing I could fight with. I wasn’t going to beat you any other way. I couldn’t warn you, or you’d know how to avoid it. My quirk was all I had.”
Oh.
Was Shinsou like Shouto when it came to interpreting tone? It wasn’t far-fetched. They were alike in other ways.
“I’m not mad,” said Shouto. “I’m explaining.”
“It only works when you directly respond to something I say,” said Shinsou. “I can’t just do it at any given moment. I don’t use it on anybody outside of training, ever.”
Why was Shinsou telling him all this? “Okay.”
“I wouldn’t have used it if I’d known you—”
“Okay,” said Shouto. “I said it’s okay. I’m not a fucking saint. My quirk hurts people a lot. I hurt people a lot without using my quirk. Most forms of power abuse don’t involve brainwashing quirks. I think you shouldn’t use it on me again, though.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“My brain doesn’t work right all the time,” said Shouto. “I don’t want to accidentally hurt you. I think maybe I want to be your friend. I don’t know why you don’t like me. I want you to tell me so I can fix it.”
Shinsou blinked. Then he made a baffled scoffing sound and slumped back into the chair.
“Were you really absent?” Shinsou asked. “The whole two weeks?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“What for?”
“Stuff,” said Shouto. “Why don’t you like me?”
“Stuff.” Shinsou paused, gaze flitting down. “People are saying you burned your finger off.”
“Are they.”
“Did you?”
Shouto held his hand up.
Shinsou’s face contorted. “Oh, you fucked up a whole section of your hand. Fuck, that’s gross. Are you really that bad at controlling the fire side of your quirk?”
“I can control it fine,” said Shouto. “My body just can’t handle when I raise my fire above certain temperatures.”
“Heh. Handle—”
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Shinsou. “So you, like… did that on purpose.”
“More or less.”
Shinsou sprawled back in Mic’s chair, each arm dangling over its respective armrest in a position that did not look particularly comfortable. “You got those spicy brain juices, huh.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Shinsou tapped his temple. “Mental illness, dumbass.”
“Oh,” said Shouto. “I have that.”
“Uh-huh. Seriously, though, put that thing away. It’s grossing me out.”
Shouto lowered his hand. He remembered something he’d been wanting to ask Shinsou. “Did you get internship offers?”
“Some,” said Shinsou. “What’s it to you?”
“Did you accept anything?”
“Not yet. Figured I’d take the rest of the day to stew about it.”
Okay. That was good. “Let me see your list.”
“No,” said Shinsou. “Why? It’s my fucking choice.”
“I know the really bad ones,” said Shouto. “Sometimes they give offers to lower-level students who don’t have many connections. For bad reasons.”
“Wow,” said Shinsou. “Making me feel really fucking good about myself.”
“I’ll find you an internship myself if you don’t have any safe ones,” said Shouto. “Just let me see it.”
Shinsou gave a baffled shake of his head as he leaned to the side to pull a folded and crumpled sheet of paper from his back pocket. He handed it to Shouto.
Shouto unfolded it. It wasn’t a very long list—about ten people.
Lady Hypna was on it.
“What?” said Shinsou.
“Did Aizawa give you this list?” Shouto asked.
“No,” said Shinsou. “Cementoss gave it to me. Why?”
“Aizawa would’ve taken some of these names off first.” Shouto read over the list again. “Do you want to know the ones that accept bribes or just the pedophiles?”
“What the fuck,” said Shinsou.
Shouto looked up at him.
Shinsou stared back. “You fucking serious?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“I mean… yeah, all of it, I guess.”
“Give me a pen.”
Shinsou handed Shouto an All Might bobble-head pen from Mic’s penholder. Shouto uncapped it and set the paper on a student desk.
“No, let me see,” said Shinsou.
Shouto transferred the paper back to Mic’s desk. Shinsou leaned forward, watching over Shouto’s arm.
Shouto crossed out Lady Hypna’s name first.
“Shit—dude, c’mon,” said Shinsou. “I don’t like all her politics, but she’s the only Hero with a quirk like mine, and she’s queer. Please tell me she’s from the bribe category.”
“No,” said Shouto.
Shinsou’s face fell.
“Don’t get close to her,” said Shouto. “Ever. All she needs is a clear line of sight to her target to activate her quirk. If you see her, ask somebody around you to make sure you don’t follow her. Her quirk is really powerful, but she can only manipulate one person at a time, so she’s always trying to get people alone.”
Shinsou shook his head. “But she can’t… she can’t do much if you don’t think she’s attractive or whatever, right? Because her quirk amplifies existing emotions and desires.”
“She has minor paralysis abilities.”
“But she can’t make you follow her with that.”
“She’ll find something,” said Shouto. “Like admiration.”
“Well, I don’t admire her anymore.”
“Loneliness,” said Shouto. “Feelings of abandonment. Doesn’t matter how repressed.”
“Just at me next time.”
“I don’t know what that means either.”
Shinsou bumped the back of his head against the chair’s headrest. “Goddammit. I don’t believe in respectability politics, but you know we’ll never hear the end of it if the truth gets out about her.”
Shouto asked, “‘We’?”
“Queer Heroes trying to make it in the industry. And Heroes with quirks like hers and mine. Hard enough as it without those types of news stories trying to correlate Villainy with queerness or mind-control quirks.”
“I don’t… think that’s the main issue,” said Shouto.
“You can care about more than one thing at once. You’re not gonna get what I mean about the quirkism, either, because you have the fucking definition of a Heroic quirk. Obviously, it’s still top priority to make that information public for everybody’s safety. I’m just saying, it’s frustrating that…” Shinsou’s voice drained off. He turned his head to look at Shouto, his tongue poking at the corner of his mouth. “I’m fucking stupid. She’s the one who assaulted you, isn’t she?”
Shouto felt uncomfortable. He shrugged.
“Shit. Well.” Shinsou buried a hand in his hair, smacked his lips. “I’m an ass.”
Shouto’s phone buzzed in his pocket—a call. He didn’t get those much, so he pulled his phone out. He saw the caller ID and let out a huff of air, half annoyed and half amused.
Bakugou.
He answered the phone. “What do you want?”
“Where the fuck are you?” asked Bakugou. It sounded like he was walking.
“None of your business,” said Shouto.
“I leave you alone for two minutes—”
“I’m at club, you fucking baby,” said Shouto. “Go home. I’ll see you Monday.”
“I’ll blast your face off. Video club, right? Where is that, Midnight’s classroom?”
“Present Mic’s,” said Shouto, “but you don’t—”
“I’m comin’ there. Stay put.”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto.
“What? You got somethin’ to hide? You jerkin’ off in the closet or somethin’?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Then I don’t see the damn problem.” Bakugou hung up.
Shouto lowered his phone, staring down at Bakugou’s contact information.
“What?” said Shinsou.
“Bakugou’s been following me around all week,” said Shouto.
Shinsou raised an eyebrow.
“He thinks I’m going to off myself,” said Shouto.
“Are you?”
“I’m—not today. I can tell him to leave.”
Bakugou’s voice came from the doorway. “Try it, fuckass.”
Shouto turned to look at him. He was carrying his backpack in one hand and his phone in the other. “This isn’t your club,” Shouto told him.
“It is today.” Bakugou slammed his backpack down on a desk, gestured at Shinsou. “Who’s that asshole?”
“That’s Shinsou,” said Shouto. “Go away.”
“That Shinsou?” Bakugou asked. “Tch. Looks like a fuckin’ eggplant.”
“Oh—Bakugou,” Shinsou said to Shouto, too loudly. “You meant that guy who told the whole country he was gonna win the sports festival before promptly getting the shit beat out of him. That Bakugou.”
Bakugou raised a palm. “You wanna die?”
“In general, yes,” said Shinsou. “What do you mean, that Shinsou? Why am I coming up in your conversations?”
“You’re… not,” said Shouto. “I never told him about you.”
“Fuck you mean? You’re fuckin’ obsessed with this extra,” said Bakugou. “Thought you were gonna cry ’cause he didn’t wanna be your damn friend. Whinin’ about how you used names from the same show or somethin’, I don’t know.”
Shinsou narrowed his eyes at Shouto. “Did you fucking out me to this stalagmited tub of VapoRub?”
“No,” said Shouto. “I didn’t—Bakugou, when did I tell you that?”
Bakugou dropped into a chair, spread his legs out into the aisle. “You were drunk.”
“Wow,” said Shinsou. “Pillar of the community right there. You gonna be weird, Bakugou?”
Bakugou said, “Hah?”
“This is the gay club,” said Shinsou. “We talk about gay stuff.”
Bakugou looked at Shouto, then back at Shinsou. “Hah?”
“Leave if you want,” said Shouto.
Shinsou put his feet up on Mic’s desk. “Begone, hetero.”
“I didn’t say he was straight,” said Shouto.
“Well, obviously he’s gay. I was insulting him.”
“Fuck off,” said Bakugou. “Fuck you standin’ over there for, IcyHot?”
“I’m telling Shinsou the Heroes he can’t intern with.” Shouto crossed out a couple other names. Remembered— “Did you pick somebody yet, Bakugou?”
“Not—ain’t had time,” Bakugou said. “Thinkin’ Best Jeanist.”
Best Jeanist? Not Hawks? Hawks hadn’t gone back on his word, had he? “Who else offered an internship?”
Bakugou made a scoffing noise. “What, I’m supposed to name all four hundred?”
Four hundred? Shouto had barely reached seventy. He wondered which of the numerous atrocities he’d committed during the sports festival accounted for the difference. “Only the important ones.”
“They were all just some fuckin’… extras,” said Bakugou. “What, is Best Jeanist shit or somethin’?”
“I haven’t interacted with him much.” The one time they’d spoken three or four years ago, Shouto had accidentally let slip that he didn’t know the difference between shampoo and conditioner, and Best Jeanist had spent ten minutes setting him straight. “Show me your list.”
“No,” said Bakugou. “Fuck off.”
“Where is it? Show it to me.”
“No.”
“Show it to me or I’ll tell Aoyama we’re dating.”
Bakugou’s face twitched. He took a stapled packet from his backpack and flung it on the floor in front of Shouto. Shouto picked it up, staying in a crouch as he looked it over.
Hawks was there, at the very top.
Shouto looked up. “Why didn’t you pick Hawks? He ranks higher than Best Jeanist.”
Bakugou ran his tongue over his upper canine. “’Cause I didn’t wanna. Don’t know why you did. Thought you hated the guy. He was wearin’ a damn Endeavor t-shirt at the sports festival.”
Was that why Bakugou had been glaring at Hawks when he dropped by 1-A’s lunchroom during the festival? That was almost sweet, in a concerning, Bakugou kind of way. “I think he’s annoying.”
“Then why are you interning with him?”
“Because he came to ask me in person and I wanted him to go away.” Shouto stood, tossed Bakugou’s packet onto his lap. “You have to come with me.”
Bakugou slouched into his chair, folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t gotta do shit.”
“Yes, you do,” said Shouto.
“Why?”
“Because I’ll be bored.” Shouto looked back down at Shinsou’s list. “These are shit.”
“Thanks,” said Shinsou. “That’s my goal, to get shit internships and become a shit Hero.”
“Do you want to intern with Hawks?”
Shinsou raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t get an offer from him, dumbass.”
“I can ask him if he’ll take you on.”
Shinsou scoffed. “You can ask him? What, you got Hawks on speed dial?”
Shouto had, in fact, gotten Hawks’s number from Fuyumi. He took out his phone and called the number on speaker.
To his surprise, Hawks answered.
“Oh my god,” said Hawks. “I can’t believe I’m getting a call from a celebrity.”
“Shut up,” said Shouto. “Can I bring another person?”
“You mean besides—?”
“Yeah,” he said, cutting Hawks off in the middle of his sentence. Shouto didn’t want Bakugou to know that he was the reason Bakugou had gotten the offer—no way would Bakugou accept what he’d likely see as a hand-out.
Hawks chuckled. “Damn, made another friend already?”
“Just say yes or no.”
“Who’s the friend?”
“Shinsou Hitoshi from General Education. He advanced to the second round of one-on-ones at the sports festival. Fighting skills are shit.”
“Wow,” said Hawks. “You’re really upselling this dude.”
Shinsou shot Shouto a look of exasperation and disbelief.
Shouto ignored it and kept talking to Hawks. “He has a powerful quirk. And I want to bring him. Yes or no?”
“Yeah, shit’s cool, I guess.”
Good. “We need the paperwork. It’s due tomorrow. Your agency hasn’t sent it over yet.”
“Oh, that. Can’t you guys just show up?”
Shouto had to fight back a sigh. “It’s for liability purposes. So you don’t face legal action if I accidentally kill someone.”
“Right, right. Yeah, I’ll have my legal team draft something and send it over.” Hawks’s voice turned faint, like he’d taken the phone from his ear. “Poptart, hand me a pen?”
A woman’s voice, farther away: “All you have are fuckin’ highlighters.”
“That’s fine. Thanks.” Hawks’s voice returned to the phone. “Sorry. So does that—”
“Do you have a girlfriend now?” Shouto asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
Her voice sounded familiar. Maybe she was another celebrity. “You call her ‘Poptart’?”
“Yeah?”
Shouto looked at Bakugou, who was already smirking. They started snort-laughing at the same time.
“It’s cute,” said Hawks, his voice rising to speak over the laughter. “Do you not have a romantic bone in your body?”
“I only have regular bones,” said Shouto.
“Am I on speaker? Are you bullying me on speaker? Who else is there?”
“Just Shinsou and Bakugou.”
“I was about to ask,” said Hawks. “Bakugou, are you coming, too?”
Bakugou was still struggling to collect himself. He pinched his nose. “Why should I?”
“Geez, you UA kids are ruthless. I don’t know. It’ll be fun?”
“I ain’t doin’ an internship to have fun, I’m doin’ it to fuckin’ learn. You gonna teach me shit or not?”
“If you can keep up,” said Hawks.
“Fuckin’ obviously I can keep up.”
“Then yes?”
“Yeah, send me the damn paperwork,” said Bakguou. “You better not fuck this up, though.”
Hawks sighed. “Shinsou, are you any nicer than these two?”
Shinsou cleared his throat. “Uh… not really, no.”
“Damn,” said Hawks. “See you guys Monday, I guess. Wear good running shoes.”
Shouto hung up, stuck his phone in his pocket. “Fuyumi’s not going to be happy that Hawks got a girlfriend. Maybe she’ll stop trying to invite him over for dinner now.”
“Your sister’s attracted to that?” asked Bakugou.
“It’s painful to watch. One time she—”
“Hey,” said Shinsou.
Shouto looked at him.
Shinsou had a bewildered expression. “You actually called him.”
Why was he surprised? Endeavor was the number two Hero. Obviously, he’d have connections. “Yeah.”
Shinsou’s wide eyes narrowed, his mouth forming a line. “This isn’t, like… an elaborate prank, is it? Like that wasn’t actually Hawks, and I’m going to show up on Monday at the agency and you two will act like you have no idea why I’m there?”
Had someone done something like that to Shinsou before? He almost wanted to ask who it was so he could find them and have a talk. With his fists.
“Are you fuckin’ stupid?” Bakugou asked Shinsou. “You think IcyHot has the ability to think that far ahead? You watched him burn his finger to a crust flipping off his old man, didn’t you? He’d jump off a damn cliff and not think about the consequences until he was halfway down.”
“That’s not true,” said Shouto. “I plan a lot of things.”
“You couldn’t even plan out your biology lab. You had to look at Ponytail’s frog to figure out where everything went because you completely gutted yours in the first two minutes.”
“Because I got distracted by Tsu’s crying and read the wrong page of—fuck it, never mind.” He returned to Shinsou. “No, I don’t play pranks. I had enough of them played on me when I was younger. You have permission to brainwash me again if you find out I am playing one.”
“Okay, well, I wouldn’t brainwash someone to get back at them, but…” Shinsou’s voice drained off. He adjusted in Mic’s chair, looking uncomfortable. “You’re a privileged little fuck, you know that?”
“I’m not that little,” said Shouto, “but yeah.”
“Were you really whining about wanting to be my friend while you were drunk? That’s pitiful. Can’t you make friends without calling in favors from celebrities?”
“Yeah. Bakugou’s my friend.”
“Bakugou’s probably a privileged little fuck, too,” said Shinsou.
“If that’s what you wanna call me being naturally better than everybody in this school,” Bakugou said. He looked back at the door, then at the clock on the wall. “Is IcyHot the only person in your dumb little club? Starts at 4pm, right?”
“There are plenty other people,” said Shouto. He did hope Kirishima showed up, because Shouto needed to tell him something.
They waited a few more minutes. Kirishima arrived late, looking surprised—and a little shaken—to see Bakugou. “Bro? Is that you?”
“Ain’t your fuckin’ grandma,” said Bakugou.
“Dude, I thought you let up on following Shouto around like a bodyguard.”
Bakugou scowled. “I thought you let up on bein’ a nosy fuckin’—”
“Never mind, man, my bad. Carry on.” Kirishima stopped just before he sat down and said with a little too much enthusiasm, “We should make the desks a circle this time!”
Shinsou got up and made his way to the back of the classroom. “We can’t watch videos that way, Kirishima.”
“Who says we have to watch videos?”
“Well, it’s… video club. So.” Shinsou closed the classroom door.
Shouto was confused. “We’re not waiting for anyone else?”
“That… we’re pretty much it,” said Shinsou. “People started dropping out after the sports festival.”
“Why? Was something else going on?”
Shinsou hesitated, then gave a breathy laugh and shook his head. “Nah, that’s just what happens. No biggie. I kinda expected it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My quirk, dumbass. People saw me use it on you.”
Shouto’s heart sank. He knew what it was like to lose friends over something he couldn’t control, and he didn’t want to see his friends going through the same—
“Well, that’s fuckin’ stupid,” said Bakugou. “What, are they scared? You look like you have the same threat level as a throw pillow. They probably left ’cause your club was so boring.”
Shinsou looked annoyed. “Where’s your club, then?”
“Clubs are for losers who can’t make friends on their own. I don’t need that shit.”
“You will once you lose all your friends because of your god-awful personality. I can’t believe I have to do an internship with you.”
“Likewise,” said Bakugou. “Drop out.”
“You drop out.”
Kirishima and Shouto rearranged a few chairs into a semi-circle while Bakugou and Shinsou were arguing. When the two of them showed no signs of letting up, Shouto went ahead and searched for a Red’s Ocean compilation video. He hit play, then went back to his seat to watch it on the projector with Kirishima.
“You must be feeling good today,” Kirishima said to Shouto. “Last time you came to club, you just sat there the whole time.”
Shouto folded his arms on the desk and set his chin atop them. “I’m on some new psychotropic medications.”
“What’s that?”
“For mental health.”
“Ohh, okay,” said Kirishima. “My mom takes something for anxiety.”
Shouto didn’t ask which mom he was talking about. Shouto had never heard Kirishima outright lie to his friends and say that he lived with his mother and father, but he’d also never heard Kirishima refer to his “moms.” It was always “my parents” or an unspecific “my mom.” He wasn’t sure if Kirishima did that on purpose, but if Kirishima didn’t want Bakugou to know, Shouto wasn’t going to ruin that for him.
Shouto wondered if he would tell anyone had he grown up with gay parents. It seemed like that would be a pain to hide. Still, Shouto had been raised in an environment in which the identity of his father and the tragedy of his mother were common knowledge, so it was hard to know what he might do in Kirishima’s situation.
Damn, though… if Rei had run off with her four kids to marry another woman while Shouto was still a baby, he’d probably be way less fucked up. Maybe Touya would even still be with them.
Bakugou finally paused his arguing with Shinsou to ask, “What’s that shit on the screen?”
“Red’s Ocean, bro,” said Kirishima. “It’s Shouto’s favorite show.”
Bakugou turned his attention to Shouto, eyebrows drawn. “You watch shows? I thought you just watched the same 10-hour video of paint drying over and over again.”
He did watch time-lapsed compilations of grass growing sometimes to calm down, but Bakugou probably didn’t need to know that. “I like this show.”
Bakugou huffed a laugh. “How many times have you watched it? Like ten?”
Shouto hesitated.
“Fuckin’ hell,” said Bakugou, his smirk slipping off. “More?”
“I memorized all of the dialogue in the first season a couple years ago,” said Shouto. “I started memorizing the second season, but then I stopped watching it.”
“Memorized? That’s why you can’t remember shit now, dumbass. Fillin’ up your head with a bunch’a useless—”
“Why’d you stop watching?” Shinsou asked.
“Endeavor wanted me to train more,” said Shouto.
Which was true, but not the entire truth. He’d stopped watching of his own volition, afraid that Endeavor would notice his interest and use it against him. He’d been taking things away from himself to keep Endeavor from taking them years before he burned off his own finger.
He spoke again before Shinsou could respond. “I actually—I have a personalized poster signed by the cast. My sister got it for me for my thirteenth birthday.”
Shinsou threw a hand up. “Of course you have a personalized poster signed by the cast. Did they invite you to a pool party, too?”
“No. Why would they do that?”
“You own a whole-ass poster?” said Bakugou. “You’re tellin’ me that you own things that could go on your walls, and you actively choose to keep them solitary confinement blank?”
Shouto ignored him to keep speaking with Shinsou. “Probably I can show you. If you want to see it. You can—you can come to my house if Endeavor isn’t home.”
Shinsou raised his eyebrows.
Shouto wasn’t used to casually inviting people over. Had he done that right? He glanced at Bakugou for guidance, but Bakugou chose that moment to drop his head on the desk and close his eyes. He could be pretty useless sometimes. “Just if you want to.”
“You know you’re not gonna impress me,” Shinsou told him.
Kirishima leaned closer, one hand on Shouto’s desk. “Bro, can I come over? You can impress me all you want.”
“Gay,” said Shinsou.
Fuyumi would probably love Kirishima. He wasn’t half as smart as Deku, but he was pleasant to talk to. That he didn’t have an after-school job as a hitman was a nice bonus. “You can come.”
Kirishima did a fist-pump. “Yeah! Nice.”
Bakugou’s face scrunched, eyes staying closed. “Shut up and watch your dumb show, I’m tryin’ to sleep.”
Shinsou sat on Kirishima’s other side, putting his hands behind his neck and his feet in the seat of a different chair. It made concentrating on the video difficult, just the fact that Shinsou was there, and so was Kirishima, and so was Shouto’s best friend (could he call Bakugou that? Was that okay?), and they were all voluntarily hanging out in the same room together, talking and spending time with each other… just like a real friend group, like something he’d never been a part of until now.
On an impulse, Shouto opened the camera app on his phone. He made sure the sound was off before switching to selfie mode, subtly angling the phone so that everyone except himself was in it, including Bakugou in the close background with his face smushed against his arm.
After a thought, Shouto leaned in to include himself in the photo. He gave a small smile, took the picture, and settled back in his seat to look at the result. It wasn’t going to win any photography awards by a long shot—Bakugou had been caught mid-yawn—but all four of them were there.
He set it as his phone wallpaper, then spent a few moments adjusting it and moving around the apps he’d so carefully positioned when he first bought the phone so nobody’s face was covered. He clicked the phone screen off, then on again. Off, then on again, just to watch the photo pop up. It was the first time in several years that he wasn’t opening his phone to a default blue screen.
Shouto didn’t want to be a Hero—he knew that. But the people at UA were starting to mean something to him. The heavy weight in his chest forced him to acknowledge something he’d been considering all week: if Endeavor took him out of this school, Shouto might never experience a moment like this again.
Out of the corner of his eye, Shouto saw movement. “Fuck you smilin’ at, IcyHot?”
Shouto gave a small start, quickly turning off his phone screen. He hadn’t realized Bakugou had raised his head from the desk and was watching him. “Nothing.”
Shinsou looked his way. “C’mon, who died?”
“Oi, Eggplant.” Bakugou threw a stray mechanical pencil at Shinsou, making him swear and yank his arms forward. “Go bully someone your own skill level. Plenty of loud five-year-old kids waving sticks around if you know where to look.”
“I was—I was just thinking,” said Shouto. “About being here. I don’t know.”
There was a moment of silence as everyone in the room stared at him. Shinsou and Bakugou looked borderline disgusted. But Kirishima’s mouth spread into a giant, excessively enthusiastic shark-toothed smile, like someone had dropped him into a pit of puppies. “I’m glad you’re here, too!!”
“Fuckin’ hell,” muttered Bakugou, getting out of his chair. He snatched up his backpack and kicked a desk out of the way so he could pass by. “I can’t stand this anymore. Half-n-Half, you’re on your own. Don’t trip and fall in front of the subway before Monday.”
Shouto twisted in his chair to wave goodbye. “I love you. Have a good weekend.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, I hope your weekend’s fucking terrible.” Face flushed, Bakugou stepped out of the classroom. He swung the door like he was about to slam it—but then he swore quietly, catching the door just before it hit the doorframe. “Asshole,” he said, and closed the door normally.
The remaining three of the group stayed for another half hour, a good portion of which Shinsou used to force Shouto to watch videos detailing all the plot holes from seasons one and two of Red’s Ocean. Still, Shouto was glad that Shinsou was back to himself.
After club ended and the group had vacated the classroom, Shouto rushed to catch up with Kirishima in the hallway. He called Kirishima’s name.
Kirishima stopped and turned. He looked surprised that Shouto was talking to him. “Yeah, bro?”
“I met your friend Ando,” said Shouto.
Something in Kirishima’s expression shifted. He glanced back at Shinsou disappearing around the corner before lowering his voice. “Really? How did you… how is he, is he…? I mean, where did you…?”
Ando must’ve never had the chance to come out to Kirishima. Not as nonbinary, at least. “You should call.”
“Do you think so?”
“I do.”
One of Kirishima’s sharp teeth caught on his bottom lip. He chewed on it contemplatively for a few seconds before saying, “I haven’t seen talked to him since middle school. Would it be, like, intrusive for me to do that? I don’t know if—”
“Ando needs you,” Shouto said. “Call.”
Kirishima shut his mouth. Nodded.
###
Shouto had set the meeting Aizawa requested with him and his siblings to take place on Saturday. They’d decided to meet at the Todorokis’ home for the most privacy, though Shouto regretted it a little when Fuyumi kept interrupting his nature documentary to ask questions related to his teachers’ visit.
“Is Recovery Girl old old?” Fuyumi asked. “Can she still chew things? Should I make soup?”
“She’ll be fine,” said Shouto. “Go away.”
“What about your homeroom teacher? Does he have any allergies?”
“Why would I know that?”
Natsuo spoke up from where he was studying at the kitchen table. “What are we gonna be talking about, anyway?”
“I’m not sure,” said Shouto. “Aizawa just said he couldn’t talk about it on school grounds and for me not to tell anyone.”
“Something illegal?” Natsuo asked.
He doubted it. Even if Aizawa was the only Hero Shouto really liked, he was still a Hero. Whenever the law and a Hero’s own sense of morality conflicted, Heroes had to put the law first. It was part of the job description—doing otherwise could make you lose your license. “You don’t have to stay for the meeting if you don’t want to. There’s no real reason you need to be here.”
“I’d like to be more involved in your life than I have been,” said Natsuo. “Plus, it’s been really fascinating meeting the small handful of people you don’t loathe.”
Shouto looked over his shoulder at Natsuo. “I don’t hate everybody. I just don’t like Heroes.”
“Do you know anyone outside me and Yumi who isn’t a Hero and doesn’t want to become one?”
He opened his mouth to say Deku—someone whose existence Natsuo became aware of after Fuyumi walked in on them watching Frozen together—but he stopped himself. He wasn’t one hundred percent sure that Deku didn’t want to be a Hero. It didn’t seem likely, but Bakugou had said that Deku used to consider Heroism his ideal future. And it wasn’t like he could list all the Villains he knew to Natsuo without consequence.
Natsuo smirked as he typed something into his laptop. “Can’t think of anyone, can you?”
“I met people at the hospital,” Shouto said. “Probably they don’t all want to be Heroes.”
“I don’t know if the hospital counts, buddy.”
“It counts. It should. I made friends. People talked to me.”
“Did you talk to them back?” Natsuo asked.
“Ye—I—um, yeah.”
Natsuo looked up. “Did you really?”
“Sometimes. I got someone’s number.”
“Woah mama,” said Natsuo. “Are you actually gonna contact them?”
Shouto didn’t even know where the slip of paper Ando had written their number on was. Had Shouto put it in the pocket of Natsuo’s jacket? It’d likely already been destroyed in the wash. Probably for the best—Kirishima’s presence in Ando’s life would be much better for Ando’s mental health than Shouto’s would. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Aw, c’mon.”
Fuyumi peeked in from the kitchen, holding a mixing bowl. “You should invite that Deku boy over again. He was cute.”
Natsuo’s lips rounded, face teasing. “Is he cute, Shou?”
“Absolutely adorable,” said Fuyumi. “I just wanted to squeeze his little face.”
“Did you guys kiss?” Natsuo asked him.
“No,” said Shouto. “Stop asking me stuff.”
“I still think you and that Bakugou guy are kinda sus.”
Fuyumi groaned. “Oh my god, Natsuo, please don’t say ‘sus.’ I had to ban that word from my kindergarten class a few years ago.”
“My bad, sus,” said Natsuo. “I mean, sis. Do you need help in there, by the way?”
“No… no, I have everything set out the way I want it. You won’t know what to do.”
“I could crack an egg or something.”
She retreated back into the kitchen. “You’ll mess it up.”
“Fine.” Natsuo slumped forward over his keyboard in an exaggerated show of laziness. “I’ll just sit here with my weaponized incompetence and contribute to the patriarch—the, um…”
Natsuo’s voice drained off as he read something on his laptop. He straightened, all the mirth gone from his face, as his hand went to the touchpad. His eyebrows knit together as he scrolled. Lips parted.
“What’s wrong?” Shouto asked.
Natsuo kept scrolling.
“Natsuo?”
“Oh. Um…” Natsuo minimized the window he’d been working in. “Just got a… weird email.”
“About what?”
Natsuo looked at him and smiled. “Just some school stuff, buddy. Nothin’ you need to worry about.”
That put a sliver of anxiety in Shouto’s chest. Still, he couldn’t assume that every interruption to Natsuo and Fuyumi’s lives was his own fault. Well… technically, he could assume that, and he usually did, but he probably ought not to.
So he didn’t press it.
###
Aizawa and Recovery Girl arrived in the evening.
Shouto stood behind his siblings as the adults introduced each other. Aizawa was in his plain black Hero costume—big surprise there—but Recovery Girl had switched her normal school nurse/Hero outfit for a flowy blouse, sensible slacks, and a plain wooden cane. She looked like your average old lady.
Fuyumi seemed to be floundering more than usual, repeatedly tucking her hair behind her ear as she stumbled through her answers to Recovery Girl’s questions about the traditional architecture and the Japanese plum trees in the front yard, so Natsuo helped fix everyone’s tea.
For a few minutes, Shouto and Aizawa were the only ones sitting at the table as the others talked or worked elsewhere. Shouto picked a floating strand of cat hair from the air.
“Make-up work done?” Aizawa grunted.
Shouto flicked the hair to the ground. “Some of it.”
“Getting help?”
“Bakugou helped a little.”
“Still haven’t joined that study group with your classmates, I take it.”
Shouto rubbed his cheek. “Things are different, I think. After the sports festival. I can’t tell if I make them uncomfortable.”
“They asked you to join, didn’t they?” said Aizawa. “Join. Let them get to know you. You’re not horrible.”
Shouto hummed. “I’m sort of horrible.”
“You’re not.”
“At least partially,” said Shouto. “Somewhat horrible. A little horrible. A small amount of horrible. A tiny teensy bit, even.”
Aizawa raised an eyebrow.
Jesus, these meds really had Shouto just saying things. If a miracle happened and Endeavor didn’t make Shouto stop taking his anxiety medication, Shouto was going to have to figure out a way to keep himself from saying whatever random thoughts came into his head. Usually anxiety provided that filter for him. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
Shouto was glad when everybody got settled with their drinks. He’d been given a glass of strawberry milk instead of tea like everyone else, which seemed insulting somehow. Not that strawberry milk wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but still.
After taking a sip of tea, Aizawa set his cup down. “I’ll get to the point. Endeavor’s returning this coming week, is that correct?”
Fuyumi nodded.
“You’re concerned?” he asked.
She was quiet, her gaze dropping down and to the side.
Natsuo answered for her. “Yes, sir. We are.”
“I am, too. I, ah…” Aizawa adjusted his sitting position, wincing a little. Shouto wondered if his back was hurting. “I recognize that it’s not standard practice for a near-stranger to get involved in family affairs like this, but as his teacher and as someone he reached out to, I can’t let things go unaddressed. Especially not when Endeavor’s making threats.”
“Threats?” Fuyumi asked. “To you? Or the school? I didn’t realize—”
“No, to Shouto. He told me at the sports festival that Endeavor would cut his finger off if he didn’t participate in the competition.”
Shouto’s heart jumped. He could feel the way his siblings whipped their heads to look at him, but he kept his eyes fixed on his strawberry milk, counting the bubbles lining the inside of the glass.
“Shouchan?” said Fuyumi, her voice gone soft with horror. “Is that—? Did he say that?”
Shouto wrapped his arms around his middle, wishing he could make himself smaller. It was fine for Aizawa to know, but he didn’t like his siblings finding out about these types of things. They had lives and problems, too. They didn’t need to know every single bad thing that happened to Shouto. He refrained from sending Aizawa a dirty look in favor of struggling through an explanation. “It wasn’t—I wasn’t ever in danger. He just said he’d do it if I both didn’t win the sports festival and didn’t use my fire at all. But I won and used my fire, so it’s okay.”
“You only used your fire to flip him off,” said Natsuo. “Is that, like… is that enough? Jesus. Why don’t you tell us this stuff?”
“I said it’s okay. He won’t do it.”
“How do you know?” Aizawa asked.
“Besides the fact that I went ahead and did it for him?” Shouto held his left hand up, displaying the gap where his middle finger used to be. “He used to be less picky with punishments, but he had to change his tactics as I got older and stopped being so scared of physical pain. He’s not going to waste time and effort doing something he knows won’t bother me.”
Aizawa furrowed his brow. “So you think he’ll do something non-physical?”
“He’s not that creative,” Shouto said. He was, in actuality, very worried about what Endeavor might do to Natsuo or Fuyumi, but there wasn’t anything they could do to protect themselves even if Shouto warned them. “He’ll probably just make me train harder for a couple weeks.”
Aizawa gave him a long look. When Shouto didn’t say anything, he addressed Fuyumi and Natsuo again. “Shouto has my number in case you decide he needs to be relocated away from home. UA will—well. I will do my best to help however I can. I’m sorry it’s been so impossible to get anything done about the situation on the legal front.”
“Thank you,” said Fuyumi. Shouto could tell that she was embarrassed—her sentences were stilted, and she was wringing her hands underneath the table. “Shouto says you put in a lot of effort trying to get his case to child protective services, so thank you for… for that.”
Aizawa grunted.
Fuyumi kept talking, her tone growing more desperate as she went. “I probably could’ve tried harder with them, but they were just so dismissive and awful that I started to wonder if them actually processing our case would just make things worse. If they’d let us still live together, or if they’d have someone take care of him who doesn’t know anything about how he… thinks and… does things. You know. I should’ve done more, though, and I’m sorry I haven’t been any help. I just haven’t been my best. I don’t want anyone to think I don’t care about him.”
“Darlin’,” said Recovery Girl, “you’re only a few years out of your teens yourself. We’re not here to judge your parenting. We can tell you care.”
Fuyumi bit her lips and looked away.
Shouto got a little nervous. “Are you going to cry?”
“W-what?” said Fuyumi. “No, of course I’m— Why would I—?”
“Don’t say nice things to her,” he told Recovery Girl. “She cries easily. Yumi, your parenting is medium-good at best.”
Aizawa addressed Shouto before Fuyumi had a chance to react. “I understand you’re on a few medications right now. You were lagging during practical training this week. Was it because of the medications?”
Aizawa had noticed that? “I think so.”
“Are they helping otherwise?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“Then you ought to stay on them,” said Aizawa.
“Endeavor won’t let me,” Shouto said. “He’ll notice the difference in speed during training and make me stop them.”
“I thought that might be the case.” Aizawa put down his drink and folded his hands atop the table, leaning forward with his shoulders slightly hunched. Shouto couldn’t tell if it was a deliberate I’m about to tell you something top-secret pose or if he was just trying to find a position where his back didn’t hurt. Knowing Aizawa, probably the latter. “Fuyumi, Natsuo—I assume you two want him to stay on his medications.”
“Yes,” said Natsuo, and Fuyumi added, “Of course.”
“All right—good. That’s the main reason I asked for this meeting with you three.” He turned to Recovery Girl and nodded once. “If you will.”
Recovery Girl took a slow sip of her drink, holding the cup with both hands. She lowered it calmly. “Well. You all know that I certainly can’t prescribe anything without parental consent. I’d lose my Hero license and my nursing license.”
“R-right,” said Fuyumi. “Of course. We wouldn’t ask that of you.”
“Wasn’t finished,” said Recovery Girl. She took another slow sip before continuing. “I have a younger sister. She was a rebellious little shit—pardon my French—from middle school up until she graduated college, and then she virtually disappeared from the face of the earth. We heard from her by mail once or twice a year at most—saying she’d gotten her medical degree, wishing me a happy birthday, sending a contextless envelope of cash to our parents around Christmas, things like that. Sometimes went a few years at a time without hearing from her at all.
“About five years ago, I got a phone call from her, and she finally told me what was going on. She works as a doctor for people who can’t see a normal doctor for whatever reason. People wanted by the police, runaways, kids with abusive caretakers… whoever, just as long as they can keep their mouth shut and pay up front in cash. Incrediblyillegal, and I don’t condone what she’s doing at all. But. I did manage to get in contact with her after the chat I had with Aizawa, and she’s willing to see Shouto.”
Silence. Shouto looked at Fuyumi to see her staring, wide-eyed with parted lips.
If Recovery Girl took note of the reaction, she didn’t seem discouraged by it in the least. “It’ll cost you a pretty penny, but I didn’t think that’d be a huge concern. She’ll be able to prescribe Shouto his medication behind Endeavor’s back until this whole mess is over. Shouto, baby, you’ll still have to figure out what to tell your father about the side effects if you keep taking your meds in secret. Did you get put on quirk suppressants while you were in the hospital, by chance?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “For a week.”
“Suppressants can sometimes cause permanent damage to quirks. It’s rare, but it happens. Especially if you were on them for more than a couple days. You might be able to blame some of the side effects of your medication on the suppressants you took in the hospital.”
“That’s smart,” said Natsuo. “Well. I’m in. I see zero possible downsides to this plan.”
“Zero?” said Fuyumi. “Natsuo, really.”
“Okay, I see several possible downsides. But he does need meds.”
Fuyumi stuck the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Glanced at Shouto, then back to Natsuo and the two strangers sitting across from her. She gave a low, dissatisfied hum.
“You don’t need to decide today,” said Recovery Girl. She took a card with handwritten information on it from her tiny handbag. “I’ll leave her email address here with the code word she gave me. She only takes clients who’ve been referred by people she trusts, so make sure you include it.”
“I… see,” Fuyumi said. She cleared her throat in the short, hesitant way she did whenever she was trying to collect herself. “Um. Tha—thank you. I’ll—we’ll consider it. And we’ll keep your visit here confidential, of course.”
“Right, then,” said Aizawa, starting to stand, “we’ll be going.”
Fuyumi perked up like someone had flipped a switch on her. “Oh—you’ll both stay for dinner, won’t you?”
Aizawa pressed his lips together as he rolled his shoulders back, straightening his spine. “We won’t bother you.”
“It’s not a bother at all! It’ll only take a few minutes to finish preparing. I have smoked salmon with bourbon marinade—”
“Thank you, but I need to get back home. It’s my turn to cook tonight.”
Fuyumi raised her eyebrows. “Are you married?”
“I am.”
He… what? Really? What kind of person would Aizawa marry? The best Shouto could imagine was someone quiet and unintrusive who would leave Aizawa to his sleeping and homework grading.
“I wasn’t aware,” said Fuyumi, shooting Shouto a look. “There’s really no need for you to cook tonight when we already have so much food here. I could fix her a plate and send it home with you.”
“Him,” said Aizawa.
“Sorry?”
“It’s a man. I do appreciate your offer, but we actually have someone else staying with us for the time being, so I’d still need to cook.”
Fuyumi’s lips formed an o. It took her a few seconds to smile. “Then I… I can fix enough for two more people. Absolutely no problem.”
Aizawa sighed. “I really should be go—”
“You have to stay,” Shouto interrupted. “She’ll cry if you don’t stay.”
Fuyumi gave him an appalled look. “I will not. They’re free to go whenever they want to.”
“I guess. But you’ll still shut yourself in your room and cry about it.”
“That’s not—!” Her face flushed as she looked back at their guests. “I’m so sorry. Please don’t listen to him. Of course you can leave if you need to. I’m not—he’s exaggerating. Natsuo, tell them it’s not true.”
Natsuo scratched his head, grimaced. “Ehh… I mean…”
“You’re awful,” said Fuyumi. Her face was bright red. “Both of you. Horrible.”
Recovery Girl, who was still sitting calmly, patted Aizawa’s leg. “Shota, dear, let’s stay for a bit. I haven’t had a good home-cooked meal since my arthritis started acting up in my hands.”
Aizawa looked disgruntled, but he sat back down with only a small pained grunt. Fuyumi clasped her hands in front of her, her chest deflating in what Shouto could only assume was relief. “I won’t be ten minutes, I promise.”
“I’ll help in the kitchen,” Natsuo said, getting up.
Shouto started to stand, too. “I can—”
“Not you,” said Fuyumi. “I still don’t trust you around hot things.”
“I have my quirk back, though.”
“Don’t care. You stay in here.”
Shouto settled back onto his floor cushion as Fuyumi and Natsuo disappeared into the kitchen. Probably better this way, honestly—aside from the times he’d hand-boiled water in a mug in his bedroom to pour into his cup ramen, Shouto didn’t know shit about cooking.
Aizawa pulled out his phone and started texting someone. His husband? Shouto wondered if they loved each other. They had to, right? It was hard to imagine a same-sex marriage being a marriage of convenience. Almost by definition, that type of relationship was inconvenient—the Japanese government didn’t recognize it as real marriage. The closest a gay couple could get to legal marriage was obtaining a (largely symbolic) same-sex partnership certificate, and even that wasn’t provided in every prefecture.
Who was Aizawa’s husband, anyway? Someone Shouto had met? And who was the other person living with them right now? It didn’t matter, and normally he wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but learning that Aizawa was queer made Shouto want to know other things about him. It was almost that same feeling he’d gotten when he met Shinsou, that excitement mixed with a tornado of questions— When did Aizawa realize he was queer? How did his family react? Was it a secret that he was married to a man? Did he not own a single lint roller? Did he like all that cat hair on his capture scarf?
Aizawa raised his head to intercept Shouto’s stare, one eyebrow quirked. “Is there something you want to ask me?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded.
Aizawa’s brow furrowed, but he returned his attention to his phone.
Shouto sat on his hands, but he couldn’t help squirming as he watched Aizawa. The energy in his body was eating at his lungs and making it hard to draw in a full, steady breath.
This time, Aizawa raised just his eyes. “Kid.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Spit it out,” said Aizawa. “You look like you’re about to explode.”
He kept silent for a moment, trying to think of a question that wouldn’t make Aizawa think Shouto had an unhealthy obsession with him. Aizawa’s private life was none of his business. “How… um, how do you know my father?”
Aizawa’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s your question?”
“It—um. I was just thinking about it. Because you saw him during the post-USJ interviews, and he knew you.”
Aizawa hummed. “Well, I interned with his agency when I was still in high school.”
What? “Endeavor doesn’t take interns.”
“His publicists made him take them for a couple years when his popularity ratings were really low—if nothing else, interns are good for the agency’s image. I strongly doubt he picked me himself, just because of how he is when it comes to quirks. You would’ve been just one or two years old at the time, I think.”
“Is there a reason he doesn’t like you?”
Aizawa clicked his tongue. “There was an incident during my internship. I was with Endeavor when he was chasing down someone who’d escaped the police while they were arresting her for something drug related. Endeavor kept using his fire even after she’d been incapacitated, and she was pretty obviously defenseless against it, so I told him to stop. He didn’t. So I erased his quirk.”
Yeah, that was in-character for Endeavor. “Did he get really mad?”
“He did. Hated not being the one in control, I think. Threw me around a bit… scared the shit out of me if I’m being honest.”
“He threw you around more than a bit,” said Recovery Girl. “You looked like you’d gotten caught in an avalanche by the time you got to me.”
“Hm.” Aizawa nodded his head to the side in subtle agreement. “I was able to keep his quirk erased until the police arrived, at least.”
Okay. Well. That story did absolutely nothing to temper Shouto’s enthusiasm. He felt the excitement so viscerally that he had to do a couple small bounces to stay inside his skin. “You’re really cool.”
Aizawa’s eyebrows shot up again.
Shouto continued. “Because you—because you’re really kind to people, and you care about them. You were the first person I ever came out to, and you didn’t make me feel bad about it. You’re not mean to me when I act strange or don’t understand things. You stood up to Endeavor more than once, and I… wish I could do that. And I just found out you’re queer, like me. Oh—and I like that your Hero costume isn’t flashy. Because flashy Hero costumes make me feel weird. Why do you need to dress all flashy when you’re just going out to chase people down and beat them up? You don’t. That’s a shorts and t-shirt activity. Also, I think you’re allergic to cats. Seriously. Please take your scarf to the dry cleaners.”
Aizawa leaned his chin against his knuckles, elbow on the table. “You don’t talk this much at school.”
It took a moment to process the words, but when they processed, heat started collecting in Shouto’s face. He suddenly felt uncomfortably vulnerable. He didn’t think he’d said anything too personal, but he’d let himself slip back into the rambling, energy-charged speech pattern responsible for getting him in trouble so often as a young child. Embarrassment gnawing at his insides, he folded his arms in front of his stomach.
“I think a good portion of what you said is just basic human decency,” Aizawa told him. “You should be used to people not making you feel bad about being yourself. You should be around people who value your opinion enough to wait for you to put it into words.”
Shouto wrapped his hand around his now-sweaty glass of strawberry milk. He swirled it a little. The milk inside formed a tiny pink whirlpool, but the bubbles lining the glass stayed decisively in place.
“Thank you, though. For talking to me, if not for the compliment.” Aizawa gave a small smile. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
###
No matter how hard Shouto tried to stretch out his Sunday, Monday still came quickly. He’d been dreading it not only because Endeavor was probably coming home today, but also because Monday marked the start of his week-long internship. Besides not wanting to spend the whole day with Hawks, the internship also meant a change in routine, and those made him anxious.
He walked into the living room that morning and found Fuyumi sitting cross-legged on the couch with a steaming mug of coffee, watching the news. He leaned over the back of the couch and grabbed the sides of his sister’s head. “Can I stay home today?”
“What? Stop doing that, it spooks me. Can’t ever hear your footsteps.” Fuyumi pushed his hands away. “Are you sick?”
“Sick of Hawks.”
“Good grief. Your internship’s for a grade, and all you have to do is show up.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to,” he said.
“Would you rather be here when Dad gets home?”
Shouto groaned and went back to his room to get ready.
He took the subway and used the GPS on his phone to find Hawks’s agency. The building took up much less ground space than Endeavor’s agency but was significantly taller. Great place to jump off of if you wanted a quick, guaranteed death. The top few floors probably required special access, though—about a decade ago, there’d been a trend of Quirkless people committing suicide by jumping off Pro Hero agencies, so a law had been passed requiring agencies to either remove windows or to restrict access to floors above a certain height.
Suicide rates hadn’t gone down, of course, but at least Pro Heroes no longer had to deal with rumors involving haunted or cursed agency buildings.
Shouto found Bakugou pacing in his Hero costume outside the agency doors, one arm carrying his gauntlets while the other hand was stuffed in his pocket. He stopped pacing when he saw Shouto.
“Did you get your gauntlets updated with Deku’s suggestions?” Shouto asked. “They look a little less bulky.”
“Yeah,” said Bakugou. He looked proud of himself as he dumped one of the gauntlets in Shouto’s arms. “They’re lighter, too.”
Shouto wasn’t intimately familiar with the weight of Bakugou’s gauntlets, but it didn’t seem like one of this weight would blow a hole through Shouto’s chest like the older version nearly had. “Can you still launch these?”
“No, Izuku said it’d be better if I got rid of that function and found a different long-range attack.”
“Like sweat grenades?”
Bakugou seemed thoughtful for a second before he looked to the side and muttered, “That’s a fuckin’ good idea.”
“I was joking, but okay. Do you want to wait for Shinsou before we go inside?”
“Fuck no,” said Bakugou. “I wouldn’t wait for that weak-ass wannabe if someone told me to while holding a gun to my head.”
“Let’s wait.”
Bakugou grumbled and plopped down on a bench, legs spread wide and gauntlets rolling until they hit the railing on the other side with a plastic clack. Shouto had to pick one up and hold it in his lap so he’d have a place to sit.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Several people did a double-take upon passing them, with one child across the street even pointing at Shouto before her father dragged her away.
“I don’t get what you like so damn much about Red’s Ocean,” said Bakugou. “The Shouto character is a fuckin’ pansy. Couldn’t even figure out how to use the cannons.”
Shouto jerked his head in Bakugou’s direction, excitement rising in his chest. “What?”
“I said he’s fuckin’ useless. How long had he been on that ship, two months? And he still didn’t know jack shit? I’d kick his ass if he tried that with—”
“You watched it?” Shouto asked. “Did you watch it?”
“Just the first episode, fuck. Calm down.”
“You have to keep watching. He gets stronger. And you didn’t even get to Hitoshi yet. Or the pirates. The whole show’s about pirates, so you have to get to the pirates.”
Shinsou’s voice came from a little ways down the sidewalk. “What are you guys talking about?”
Shouto stood, placing the gauntlet in his lap back on the bench. “I was telling him that you can’t stop watching after the first episode of Red’s Ocean,” said Shouto. “You have to get to the pirates.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Shinsou, stopping in front of Bakugou. “You have to get to the pirates first. The whole show’s about the pirates.”
“Forget I said anything.” Bakugou stood, collected his gauntlets, and started for the entrance. “I’m goin’ inside.”
Inside, the man at the receptionist’s desk gave them visitor’s passes and an access key card for the elevator before pointing them to a room on the fourth floor. They took the elevator, and Shouto knocked on the door labeled PRIVATE: PLEASE KNOCK AND WAIT FOR ANSWER BEFORE ENTERING. They waited.
“Why’s this place so big?” Shinsou asked. “Hawks doesn’t even have sidekicks.”
“He’s got his managing team and personal assistants,” said Shouto, “plus the people who handle social media and PR, his marketing people, his stylists, the people who design the merch, the legal team, the financial team, the security team, the cafeteria workers, the people who take distress calls, the people who tell Hawks directions through his earpiece when there’s an emergency, the tour guides and activity leaders for the elementary and middle school classes that take field trips here… not to mention that he lives on the top floor and probably has accommodations on other floors like a large private gym or a—”
“I get it already,” said Shinsou. “You know a lot about Hero agencies because your dad owns the second-biggest one in the country after All Might. Not everyone grew up like that, you know.”
“That’s… yes? I know? That’s why I’m telling you what an agency consists of. I wouldn’t tell you if you already knew what… it…”
Shouto’s voice drained off on its own. The door had opened, and it wasn’t Hawks in the doorway. It was a tall woman with her blonde hair in a poorly done knot atop her head. Her hair triggered a memory that hit him so hard he almost reeled—an upstairs apartment, a man being wrestled to the floor, that same blonde hair coming more undone from its unsecured bun with each jostling movement.
Dabi?
Well, not Dabi Dabi, but the woman who Dabi had looked like the day he and Deku killed Sakura’s father. Maybe it wasn’t Dabi at all, but the actual woman whose blood Dabi had drank so he could wear her body. It would be a wild coincidence, though not impossible.
But then the woman leaned against the doorframe and gave Shouto a lazy grin, and Shouto knew it was him. Even on a stranger’s face, that wasn’t a smile you could mistake for someone else’s.
“Oi, Birdy.” Dabi didn’t bother turning his head as he called back into the room. “Your Heroes are here.”
Hawks’s voice came from inside the room. “They can come in. Thanks, Pop Tart.”
Dabi’s smiling eyes stayed fixed on Shouto, his gaze as steady and crushing as a pair of hands tightening around a throat. Slowly, he backed away to let them in.
"Anytime," he said.
SUPER adorable fanart by @ghostyyyy_XD (Pinterest). Thank you!!!! <3
Deku (giving Shouto USB drive, Ch 8):
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/903956956438143697/
Ando:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/903956956438378352/
Some of my own gremlin Shouto fanart:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CtLrF19OgHm/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Y'all, finding a digital art style when you're used to traditional realism is so hard :') Every single art piece looks different. The piece I'm working on now looks completely different from the above sketch. I love learning, though! (cries)
Notes:
Shouto: I love you.
Bakugou: Fuck you. I hate you. Let me alter my deeply-ingrained behavioral patterns and stop myself from slamming this door because I know you don't like sudden loud noises. Bitch.Wow that took forever to update. I haven't even been doing anything this summer except rotting away. I did get to go on a writers' retreat for a week (pics on my Insta @max_says_no), where I worked on my contemporary YA novel. Swam for the first time ever with my shirt off, which was cool.
Ahh it's after 3:30am o no. goodnight
Chapter 54: Shouto Gets Repeatedly Smacked with a Wet Digimon
Summary:
First day of the internship with Hawks! Oh my god, Dabi is here. Oh my god, he's wearing a bra.
This chapter is dedicated to my bestest friend Ginny for several reasons:
1. I love her a lot
2. She is very cool and kind and is the basis of a lot of my knowledge of platonic intimacy, which sometimes informs how the characters in this fic interact
3. As an apology for that one time when she was snooping on my laptop and happened upon a drawing of a couple unclad women with very generous bosoms. I don't think either of us is ever going to recover from that.
Notes:
CW (*SPOILERS!*): transphobia, misgendering, outdated trans terminology, trapped in collapsed building, emotional/physical abuse, homelessness; DISCUSSION OF: vomit, chasers, intrusive thoughts, trans genitalia, armed robbery, death, drug abuse
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Hawks was sitting at his desk when Shouto, Bakugou, and Shinsou entered the office. The room was surprisingly unsurprising—a few trophies and catalogues on the shelf, informational posters hung alongside uninteresting abstract art, a black minifridge decorated with the types of mass-produced magnets a Hero agency might give out for free at recruitment events, and a desk that wasn’t quite clean but wasn’t quite cluttered, with a small Newton’s cradle sitting neglected and motionless behind a pile of folders. There were no family photos, no cutesy trinkets, no tacky I Survived High School! coffee mug, no evidence of a past that stretched beyond the Hero certification hanging framed on the wall behind the desk.
It probably would’ve registered as more disconcerting than it did if Shouto hadn’t been distracted by the presence of a Villain who was very, very much not supposed to be here.
“Hey, guys.” Hawks pushed his swivel chair back, smiling as he stood. He motioned to Dabi—or at least to the blonde woman Dabi had shapeshifted into. “This is my girlfriend Komi.”
Shouto felt his shirt tighten around his midsection. He looked to his side to see Bakugou standing with his shoulder touching Shouto’s, face slack with what Shouto knew to be fear. At what point had Bakugou grabbed the back of his shirt?
More importantly, what the hell was Dabi doing posing as Hawk’s girlfriend? Did Hawks know who “Komi” really was? Did Hawks know that Shouto and Bakugou knew who she was? Did Hawks not know at all?—and if that was the case, what was Dabi’s long game? Was it part of his plan to take down the Hero Commission? To take down Hawks specifically? If so, Dabi was making considerably more progress than Shouto was, already having infiltrated Hawk’s personal—perhaps very personal—circle.
Shinsou was the only one to address “Komi.” “Hey,” he said. “You’re real.”
Dabi hummed in response, though his eyes and I-know-something-you-don’t smile seemed to be focused on the two non-Shinsou students. “As far as you know.”
Hawks spoke before Shouto or Bakugou could. “Shinsou, my legal guys wanted a couple more signatures from you before we start the internship.”
“I thought I sent everything,” said Shinsou.
“Yeah, we got it all. I think they just hit some snags when they were looking into your quirk history and wanted to set up a few parameters.”
Shouto hadn’t noticed the eager tension in Shinsou’s body until it was gone, his whole body deflating a little. Shinsou nodded.
“I’ll show you to the office downstairs,” Hawks said, giving Shinsou’s shoulder a single friendly pat before heading to the door. “Probably won’t take over three minutes. You two—” He addressed Shouto and Bakugou. “—hang tight.”
Hawks and Shinsou left, the door closing behind them.
Shouto had been expecting something to happen once they left the room—for Dabi to pull out a gun, start a fire, something—but Dabi just plopped down sideways in an armchair, draped his legs over the armrest, and pulled out his phone. Ignoring them.
Bakugou’s voice was not loud. The words were spoken in a way that sounded incomplete without the added volume, like the fear had made Bakugou forget what his voice usually sounded like. “Why are you here?”
“Business, Boom Boy,” said Dabi. He didn’t look up from his phone. “Quit clenchin’. I ain’t gonna kill anybody while you’re here.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Bakugou’s voice shook. “Why do you gotta pull all this weird shit? You’re fucking sick. Leave us alone.”
Dabi raised his eyebrows at his phone. “You leave me to my business. I’ll leave ya to yours. How ’bout that.”
“I’m—we’re supposed to be here. Me and IcyHot. You ain’t.”
When Dabi looked up, he looked at Shouto, not Bakugou. “You really friends with this annoyin’ shit?”
Shouto wasn’t sure to what degree he was supposed to defend Bakugou. “He’s not… always annoying.”
“Y’ain’t just keeping him around ’cause ya don’t have any other friends?”
“You should’ve had Deku tell me you were going to be here,” Shouto said. “You startled me, too. I don’t like surprises.”
Dabi huffed through his nose. “Startin’ to think that you’re only interesting when you’re pissed off.” And to Bakugou— “Look, Kachow-chan, I’m usually too busy to go around traumatizing kids without getting paid for it. Cool your giant tits. Just tryna find some information that could help Shouto out.”
Bakugou seemed to be trying very hard to keep his voice demanding. “Hawks could—he would help if he knew. You don’t need to get involved. Literally we could just fuckin’ tell him and he’d—”
“He knows,” said Shouto. “Hawks was close with my oldest brother before he offed himself. We’ve talked about Endeavor before, too. He’s not going to help. He’s either got some sort of weird uncritical devotion to my father or to the Hero Commission.”
“Both,” said Dabi. “He has wet dreams about marrying Endeavor and having a dozen little Commission drone babies with ’im. Horny as fuck for the old man’s—”
“No,” said Shouto, raising his voice a little. “No. Thank you. No. Please don’t give me any new intrusive thoughts. I have enough.”
“Get fucked up like me and ya start actin’ on ’em. Somethin’ to look forward to.” Dabi jerked his head in the direction of the mini fridge across the room before returning his attention to his phone. “Get yourself a drink or somethin’ so Birdbrain thinks I give a shit.”
Shouto walked over and opened the fridge. Judging from the selection, it didn’t look like Hawks took guests in his penthouse often—it was all sports drinks and what looked like leftover takeout from some fried chicken restaurant Shouto didn’t recognize. He looked over his shoulder. “Bakugou, do you want any—?”
“No,” Bakugou snapped. “Fuck off.”
Shouto grabbed a Calpis, closed the fridge, and sat in the chair behind Hawks’s desk. Bakugou glared at him from his position by the door. Shouto ignored him. “Dabi.”
“What,” said Dabi.
“You don’t actually think Hawks is attractive, do you?”
Dabi gathered his blonde hair in one hand and fluffed it out. “He has the constitution of a half-dead baby bird floating down a flooded sewage pipe.”
“So no?”
“So yes. Fuckin’ love pathetic men. Number three on my list of favorite types of people to fuck. Women with dicks, men with cunts, and pitiful little cis men who think they’re straight.”
Bakugou scowled. “Are you a fucking chaser?”
“I’m an appreciator,” said Dabi. “What, are ya gonna cancel me for having good tastes? Go get your asshole canceled by some girl dick and come back with a better opinion.”
“I wouldn’t call Hawks ‘good tastes,’” Shouto said.
Dabi waved a dismissive hand. “Ain’t like I’d wanna fuck him in this body, anyway.”
Shouto opened his drink. He probably should’ve been keeping his hands free so he could readily use them if needed—if Shouto knew anything about family, it was that being blood relations wasn’t some magical barrier that kept one person from hurting another. And if Shouto’s short spar with Dabi’s Reflection disguise was any indication of his combat abilities, Shouto wouldn’t stand a chance against him in a real fight.
“Is it dysphoric?” Shouto asked. “I always wondered about cis people with body-changing quirks. If it feels weird.”
“Yeah, it’s fucked,” said Dabi.
It wasn’t that Shouto thought Dabi was a decent person, either—it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to learn that Dabi had killed innocent people. And it wasn’t that Shouto wasn’t wary of Dabi, because he definitely was. There was an anxious squeeze in his chest every time he thought about the man. Maybe being around Dabi just felt so much like spending time with his future self that Shouto couldn’t help acting familiar with him.
“In a different way than being Reflection was fucked?” asked Shouto.
“That was fucked because I didn’t know where that cocksucker’s hands had been. I got hips now. Fuck are you even s’posed to do with those?” Dabi twisted in his chair and yanked his shirt up to show Shouto his gray sports bra. “And look at this. Look at this shit. What the fuck do I need these for?”
“You can hide things in the bra,” said Shouto.
Dabi stuck his hand down his bra and felt around. “Huh. I guess there’s room.”
Shouto took a drink, screwed the lid back on. “Switchblade or something.”
“Yeah, that’d fit.”
“Will you put your fuckin’ clothes back on,” Bakugou hissed.
The door opened, and Dabi pulled his shirt back down. Hawks and Shinsou appeared in the doorway. “You guys ready?” asked Hawks.
Bakugou looked relieved.
They left the building. When they were walking on the sidewalk, Bakugou leaned over to whisper to Shouto. “Why the fuck were you talkin’ to him like that?”
“Like what?” asked Shouto.
“Like you’re best fuckin’ buds. He’s a disgusting person. And he don’t give a shit about you. You know that, right?”
Shouto shrugged. “I like talking to him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “He’s nice to me.”
“He told you that you’re only interesting when you’re pissed off.”
“He’s not wrong.”
Bakugou groaned.
“How do you even know what a chaser is?” asked Shouto. “That’s not common knowledge.”
“Hah? Yeah, it is.”
“I don’t think so. I only learned what it was a few months ago.”
“That’s ’cause you don’t know shit.”
Shouto looked at him. “Are you doing research? About trans things?”
Bakugou looked away. “No.”
“I feel like you are.”
“Well, I ain’t. I just know shit.”
“Do you know what ‘stealth’ means?” asked Shouto.
“Yeah.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“What’s it mean, then?”
“People don’t know you’re trans.”
Shouto leaned forward. “Shinsou. Ask Bakugou a question about something trans.”
Shinsou’s eyebrows shot up. “Why?”
“Just do it.”
“Uh… okay, how long do you have to take hormones for before you’re finished?”
“It’s lifelong, assfuck,” said Bakugou. “You never finish.”
“That’s what she said.”
“Hah?”
“You’re doing research,” said Shouto. “Shinsou, he’s doing research.”
“I ain’t,” said Bakugou.
Shinsou grinned. “Name four different ways testosterone can be administered.”
“I ain’t answering any more questions.”
“Tell me what bottom growth is.”
“No. You’re fuckin’ disgusting.”
Shinsou snorted, looked at Shouto. “He definitely knows.”
“Why are you researching bottom growth?” Shouto asked Bakugou.
Bakugou’s face had started flushing pink. “I said I ain’t.”
“I bet he even looked up diagrams,” said Shinsou. “What’d you think, Bakugou? Pretty cool, right? Mine’s the size of a baseball bat, actually.”
“That ain’t a thing,” said Bakugou.
“Yes, it is. You just have to inject the testosterone directly into your dick. I also grew five pairs of balls.”
Hawks looked over his shoulder at them. “What the hell are you guys talking about?”
“Nothin’,” said Bakugou. “So do you just walk around all day, or do you actually do shit?”
“About half and half,” Hawks said. “The goal is to have nothing to do, y’know. That means there’s no crime.”
“Tch. That’s a dumb goal.”
Hawks’s only answer was to stop walking. He was quiet for a moment, seemingly listening to something, and then he touched a finger to his earpiece and said, “Yeah, I got it.”
“What?” Bakugou demanded.
“Shoplifter,” said Hawks. He intertwined his fingers and stretched his arms over his head, his shoulders popping. “I usually let them redirect those calls to the low-tier Heroes, but might be nice to start off with something lighter. Get you guys familiar with the procedure.”
“I already know the damn procedure,” said Bakugou. “Get me a Villain to beat up.”
“Repeat shoplifters are technically classified as—”
“An actual Villain. I don’t plan on spendin’ my adult life makin’ jobless losers write apology letters to convenience store owners.”
Hawks sighed and pressed his finger to his earpiece. “Hey, Mizuki. You got anything level three or higher for me?”
In Shouto’s peripheral vision: a flash of movement. He looked in time to see a figure with a heavy backpack dart across the street and into an alleyway between a mochi shop and a laundromat. Shouto glanced back at Hawks—he was looking, too, face as casual and unconcerned as if he’d just witnessed the slide change on a PowerPoint presentation at some Hero Commission finance meeting.
Shouto hated Hawks a little then. He wasn’t sure why, exactly, except that he’d wanted Hawks to react somehow. But Hawks had just stood there and watched with the same expression he would use to look at paperwork.
Hawks lowered his hand from his earpiece. “Armed robbery at a gas station a few streets down,” he said.
“Fuck yeah,” said Bakugou.
Hawks flapped his wings until he hovered a few meters off the ground. “Todoroki and Shinsou, you guys go after the shoplifter. Blasty, think you can keep up?”
In answer, Bakugou launched himself into the air with a series of explosions and disappeared with Hawks.
So Shouto and Shinsou were left with a shoplifter? This was not how Shouto wanted to be spending his time. Still, he set off in a sprint in the direction the man had gone, boosting his speed with bursts of ice. He didn’t bother looking back to see if Shinsou was keeping up.
He turned into the alley the man had taken, saw something on the ground, and slowed. The man must have dropped something—a small plastic container. Shouto stopped, bent down.
Shinsou came huffing up behind him. “Wha… what is it?”
Shouto picked it up and showed it to Shinsou.
Shinsou came to a halt. His eyes went to the container, then to Shouto. A look of distaste came over his face.
“I’ll… take care of it,” said Shouto.
He started off again, the container in hand. He was running for a couple minutes before he saw the man, who was about to duck into another shop. But then his head whipped around, and he met Shouto’s eyes.
He was young, Shouto realized—couldn’t have been older than Natsuo. He looked frightened, too, eyes wide and skittish. He abandoned the store and started running again.
Shouto caught up with him easily. He cut around in front, forcing the man to a stop. Shouto reached out and grabbed his arm before he could turn and run the other way.
The man’s words were rushed, desperate. “Look, I didn’t take anything important, I just…”
His voice drained off as he looked down at the container Shouto was holding out to him—baby formula.
The man’s brow furrowed, eyes darting from the formula to Shouto’s face. Slowly, he reached out and took the container.
Shouto let go of the man’s arm. “This is a bad time to shoplift,” he said. “Lots of Heroes out. Four to six a.m., there’s less violent crime, so the Commission schedules fewer Heroes. You’re less likely to get caught then.”
The man put the baby formula back in his bag. He looked suspicious. “You’re that Todoroki kid from the sports festival, aren’t you? Endeavor’s daughter?”
“Son.”
“Son,” the man corrected. “Sorry. You gonna get in trouble for this?”
“I’ll be fine. Give me your phone.”
“My… what?”
“Phone. And pull up your notes app.” Shouto took out his own phone and found the photo of the resources they’d shared with patients in the psychiatric hospital. When the man handed over his phone, Shouto started transferring the information. “Are you Quirkless?”
“Why?”
Shouto didn’t look up. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
“The city has a few resources for Quirkless people that don’t get well-publicized. Where do you live? Around here?”
The man nodded.
Shouto scanned the list. “A lot of these places aren’t close. Do you have a car?”
“No.”
“Money you can use for transportation?”
“Wouldn’t be shoplifting if I did.”
Shouto finished transferring the information and handed the man’s phone back. On his own phone, he refilled his rechargeable subway card, and then he took the card from his wallet and held it out. “That’s 50,000 yen for the subway. You can use it at the station convenience stores, too.”
The man blinked. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.” When the man didn’t move, Shouto said, “Please take it. I have to get back to my partner.”
The man shook his head in disbelief, but he took the card. “Well, th—thanks. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t like Pro Heroes that much, but—”
“No ‘but.’ Pro Heroes are fucking assholes. There’s no need for this to fundamentally change your worldview.” Shouto started walking back in the direction he’d come from. “Just be more careful the next time you break the law.”
Shouto got back to where Shinsou was waiting. Shinsou raised his eyebrows.
“Lost him,” said Shouto.
“And the baby formula?”
Shouto shrugged. “Lost it, too.”
Shinsou shifted his weight. “The whole internship’s not gonna be like this, is it? I’m not doing all this training so I can arrest teen dads.”
“What’d you think it’d be like?” Shouto asked. He pulled out his phone to send Bakugou a text requesting their location. “If you’re not in the top hundred Pro Heroes, arresting shoplifters is pretty standard Hero work. Unless you work exclusively in Rescue, which our quirks aren’t suited to, anyway.”
“I don’t get why you’re preaching at me about Hero duties,” said Shinsou. “I’m not the one who let that guy go.”
“I lost him.”
“We both know you didn’t fucking lose him.”
Shouto’s phone pinged with a location link from Bakugou. “Let’s go,” he said.
Hawks and Bakugou were already at the location—in front of some offices in the business district—when Shouto and Shinsou arrived. A small crowd had already gathered on the sidewalk around Hawks, who was signing a couple autographs while Bakugou stood frowning with his arms folded tightly across his chest.
“How was the armed robbery?” Shouto asked Bakugou.
“Fuckin’ sucked,” said Bakugou. “Birdbrain had already disarmed and handcuffed her by the time I got there. I didn’t get to see shit.”
“You’re gonna have to get faster if you wanna see me in action, boy-o,” said Hawks as he finished up an autograph. He capped the pen and handed it back to the fan, who bowed and thanked him before going on her way. “I can’t carry you on my back, you know. Todoroki, did you catch that guy?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Ha,” Bakugou said. “Where’s all your Born-and-Bred-to-Surpass-All-Might angst now? You can’t even surpass some rando running with groceries on the sidewalk.”
Hawks laughed. “No biggie. Stores have insurance. You’ll get the next one.”
You’ll get the next one. Like they were playing some Whac-A-Mole game, like they were waiting for someone to pop out from one of the many holes in society so they could wield their mallet and smash them down.
He couldn’t say any of that out loud, because he knew what the response would be—Well, someone’s gotta do it. Someone’s gotta keep stores from getting robbed. Someone’s gotta stop the people who hold weapons in innocent people’s faces and demand money.
Which, sure, whatever. But why were these people stealing groceries? Why were they so desperate for money?
If nobody was willing to take apart the machine and fix the mechanics, eventually somebody was going to get fed up.
Eventually—maybe sooner rather than later—somebody was going to pull the plug.
###
There were actually very few Heroes who worked solely in Rescue. Most, like Gang Orca and Thirteen, remained on call for criminal activity. All were still authorized to use force against Villains, even if they lacked the training that standard Pro Heroes received. As a result, a disproportionate number of Villain casualties occurred at the hands of undertrained Rescue Heroes. Plus, Heroes in Rescue had more liability protections than the average Hero. If they hurt somebody on the job, they were less likely to face workplace or legal repercussions. So Shouto was not much fonder of Rescue work than he was of standard Hero work.
Still, after watching Hawks sign a couple dozen autographs and flirt with every woman between the ages of twenty and sixty—doling out compliments and pickup lines with a sultry vocal cadence not unsimilar to the sound of a child slowly squeezing a rubber chicken to flatness—Shouto was almost glad for the apartment fire.
“Wanna take this one, Todoroki?” Hawks asked as they approached the scene. “Seems up your alley. The building’s empty, they just need to put the fire out.”
Shouto looked up at the flaming building. Three stories… yeah, he could do that. “Sure,” he said, and he started toward the building.
Bakugou caught his sleeve. “Oi. Your clothes ain’t still flammable, are they?”
“They’re fireproof,” said Shouto. “Aizawa made me get them fixed.”
“‘Fixed’ or remade? Did you test ’em? Because if all they did is soak your clothes in some fuckin’ flame retardant chemicals—”
“It’s okay,” Shouto told him. “I have my phone. I’ll call you if I end up naked.”
“Gay,” said Shinsou.
Bakugou looked like he didn’t know which one of them to smack. “I’m talkin’ about burns. Fuckin’—” He let go of Shouto’s sleeve. Waved him away. “Hurry up.”
“Take this,” said Hawks, digging in his pocket and pulling out a small device. He dropped it in Shouto’s palm. “Earpiece. It’s already on and tuned in.”
Shouto put the earpiece in, then headed toward the crowd gathered in front of the building. An unpleasant thought occurred to him, and he pulled up the messaging app on his phone as he walked.
Shouto:
Did you just set fire to a building near Hawks’s agency?
Ya Boy Deku:
Some things are accidents.
Shouto:
Was this?
Ya Boy Deku:
:)
Check apt. 231. Rest of the building is clear. I’ll watch from the cameras for anything that pops up, so keep your notifications on.
Well. He’d ponder the ethical and moral concerns of destroying dozens of people’s home and belongings for the greater good of taking down Pro Hero society later. Shouto turned on notifications for the messaging app, put his phone away, and pushed through the crowd. The front door was propped open, so he headed into the building.
The first floor was very… on fire. Not much more to note. It certainly wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before—he’d been through this exact simulation a dozen times in his early training, ages six to seven, with Endeavor setting controlled fires in condemned buildings and sending Shouto through them to retrieve some object or another. It’d mainly been an exercise in building Shouto’s heat resistance, which Endeavor had recognized as subpar after Rei was able to burn Shouto’s face with boiling water.
He swiped his hand through the flames eating at the reception desk. It wasn’t even that hot. This would be easy enough.
Shouto walked through the flames into the center of the room, and then he did the same thing he’d done during the first battle trial at UA—
Froze the whole building, putting a thick layer of ice over every floor, wall, and ceiling.
Almost instantly, the building went deathly quiet.
It took a few moments for the crackling and groaning to start. Nothing alarming, probably. As ghostly as it sounded, he was familiar with the sound ice made as it absorbed the heat from fire-warmed surfaces.
The creaking was a little concerning—that was coming from the building itself, and buildings didn’t usually sound like that. But the island of Japan was located in a nice, comfy, oh-so-welcoming position along the Pacific Ring of Fire, which meant frequent seismic activity, which meant strict building codes, which meant that the building probably wouldn’t collapse on him any time soon.
Probably.
He stepped out of the indention and headed up the stairs, careful to keep his footing flat and his center of gravity over his feet. The bottoms of his shoes had ice traction, but he’d slipped on ice too many times to completely hand his trust over to a modified article of clothing.
Upstairs, he waded through the lingering smoke in search for apartment number 231. When he found it, the door was closed and locked. It didn’t look like the fire had had enough time to do significant damage this far down the hall, so that was good.
He took a step back, raised his foot, and slammed it into the door next to the doorknob. It didn’t give the first time, so he melted the ice around the bottom of the door and tried again. The wood around the doorknob splintered.
A tiny-sounding voice called from inside the room. “Hello?”
Shouto froze, leg still halfway raised.
Was that a fucking kid? Deku had left a fucking kid inside a burning building? He was putting too much trust in Shouto’s abilities.
“Hello?” the kid called again. Their voice wobbled. “Are you a robber? Did you put the ice everywhere?”
Shouto put his leg down. “There was a fire. I need to take you out of the building. Are you stuck in the ice?”
No answer.
“Hello?” said Shouto.
“I think you’re a robber,” said the kid. “You can’t come rob me. I only have—I don’t even have enough erasers. I only have one now because my friend at school stealed my other two. So I don’t even have anything ever. Go away.”
“I’m not—” Was he really going to have to say this? “I’m a Pro Hero.”
“No, you’re not. I know all the Pro Heroes. I know All Might and Mount Lady.”
Even if the building collapsing wasn’t a huge concern, he needed to hurry up and get the kid out of here before all the smoke damaged their lungs. Like his father, Shouto was more or less immune to the irritant chemicals released into the air during large destructive fires, but they could cause immediate and long-term health problems for someone who wasn’t. “Are you the only one in your apartment?” he asked.
“No!” The kid’s voice rose. “You caught Agumon in the ice! He’s trapped all the way under!”
Agumon? Was that a person? Why hadn’t the kid said that first?
Shouto slammed the door once more with his foot. It broke near the handle, swinging open. Shouto stepped inside to see a little girl standing on the couch, staring at the ice coating the floor. The TV was playing some animated kids’ show he didn’t recognize. “Where is he?” asked Shouto.
The little girl pointed.
Shouto sent heat through his foot in the direction she’d indicated, melting the ice. There was nothing on the floor except a couple socks and an ugly yellow dinosaur plush toy, both soaked through.
“Agumon!” said the girl, jumping down into the shallow cavern and splashing through the water until she reached the yellow plush. She picked it up. “He’s wet!”
Agumon was a toy? Fucking hell, he thought he’d killed somebody. Shouto held out a hand to help her out of the indent in the ice. “It’ll dry. Let’s go.”
She cringed away, clutching the plush to her chest. Her response was quite a lot louder and shriller than was strictly necessary— “NO!”
Jesus fucking Christ. “Why not?”
“You’re scary!”
“Why am I scary?”
“Your face!” She pointed. “You have a big red mark on your face! You look like a Villain!”
“It’s just a scar,” said Shouto. “It’s not anything evil. Someone spilled hot water on me when I was little.”
Her arm dropped. “Why’d they do that?”
“It was an accident.”
“Can I touch it?”
The last thing he wanted right now was wet, clammy fingers rubbing all over his face. “No.”
Her face scrunched. “You’re mean.”
“Because I won’t let you touch me?”
“Yeah.”
“You told me I look like a Villain,” said Shouto. “You don’t think that’s mean?”
“You’re a robber. Being a robber is really mean. You can’t have Agumon. You can’t have my eraser, either. Dumbface.”
Shouto’s phone chimed. He pulled it out and watched as a series of messages from Deku filled the screen:
Ok so some not-great news
Just found some records indicating that the building you’re in may have been illegally renovated a couple years ago by the landlord and probably doesn’t comply with current building codes in Japan
Sorry, I should’ve done more research ahead of time. Anyway get outta that motherfucker before it collapses lol
I say lol but like fr
That shit’s not stable :(
Well, shit. And he’d just added the extra weight of all that ice…
Shouto shoved his phone back in his pocket. “Let’s go. Now.”
“I don’t want—”
“Now,” said Shouto. “The building’s going to collapse. Do you want to be inside for that?”
The girl hesitated. “I think you’re a robber.”
Shouto released a snap of breath. He stepped into the indent, hoisted the girl up by her armpits, and carried her through the door.
She started thrashing, smacking her plush toy against the side of his head. “PUT ME DOWN!” she screeched. Her foot connected violently with Shouto’s crotch. “Kidnapper Ball Kick! HYAH!”
Shouto nearly slipped on the ice. He adjusted his hold so he was carrying her under one arm, and then he headed for the stairs.
He tried, as best he could, to ignore the girl’s screaming and the wet toy smacking his leg as he looked around for signs of the building deteriorating. There had been definite shifts since the first time he walked down the hall—diagonal cracks in windows, gaps between the walls and ceiling that leaked water, a subtle downward slope in the floor the closer he got to the stairwell. New popping and cracking sounds joined the creaking and groaning.
Not good signs.
He made it to the stairs. The wooden steps had separated in a few spots, so he grabbed the rail as he started down. Some of the boards were loose, springy. Ice shattered in bursts under his feet as the boards buckled.
Above him, the ceiling creaked.
“Be quiet,” he told the screaming girl. “Please be quiet. I’m trying to hear things.”
She didn’t stop screaming. But the noise had gotten so loud that he could hear it over her. The ceiling directly above them gave a loud groan.
Splintered.
Something fell and landed with a loud crash on the stairs behind him. He heard it rumbling down the staircase toward them, heard more splintering coming from above, and he didn’t need to look behind or above him to know—
They weren’t going to make it.
Shouto hoisted the girl up on his hip. “Hold tight,” he said—
—and he leapt over the railing.
They fell. He bent his knees to absorb what shock he could upon impact, but the squirming mass under his arm meant that he didn’t land quite as planned. They skidded, away from the exit, and he had to blast a wall of ice from his foot to bring them to a jolting stop.
Quickly, Shouto snatched the girl up, pulled her as close to his chest as possible. He aimed his right hand up toward the ceiling.
It was a delicate maneuver—controlling the velocity, direction, and volume of his ice to let gravity take hold at just the right moment, so that the spray of ice didn’t shoot up through the ceiling or fall back on them, but rather umbrellaed down over them. It formed a small protective dome. Not quite large enough to stand up or lie down in, but hopefully enough.
Not two seconds later, the building collapsed.
It was loud. God, it was loud. The explosions of glass and ice, the snapping of wood, the scraping and screeching metal. The tremors shook the ground. He felt for the girl’s head in the pitch-blackness and pressed it sideways against his torso, covering her exposed ear with his hand.
“You’re okay,” he said. He couldn’t hear his own voice over the chaos, but maybe the girl could at least feel the vibrations of it in his chest. Something for her to focus on. “You’re safe. You’re okay.”
The collapse lasted for what felt like hours. But then, finally, it started to settle. To quiet. For a few seconds, the girl was silent, clutching at his chest, the water from her plush soaking into his shirt.
Then she started to wail.
Oh, for fuck’s sake...
Shouto’s earpiece hissed. Hawks’s voice. “Todoroki, radio in.”
If this kid didn’t shut up, Shouto was going to fucking lose it. “Hey,” Shouto said to her.
She kept screaming.
The earpiece again. “Todoroki? Everything okay?”
Shouto called a small flame to his left hand for light. “Hey. Can you… oh my god. Hey.”
The earpiece kept hissing. “Todoroki.”
With his free hand, Shouto pressed on the earpiece to talk. “First floor lobby. I have a kid with me. The rest of the building was clear.”
There was a relieved exhale over the radio. “Any injuries?”
“I don’t think so.” He patted the girl’s arm, probably a little harder than strictly necessary. “Hey.”
She looked at him, still squeezing her ugly yellow dinosaur. Her screaming tapered off into loud sniveling.
“I know you’re scared,” he said. “But I would appreciate it if you would lower your voice. Just a little bit. Please.”
“W—we’re gonna dieee,” she wailed.
“We’re not going to die,” said Shouto.
“I want OUT!”
Oh—god. That last word had been ear-piercing. “I know. I’m sorry. We’ll—”
She stood and banged her fists on the ice structure. The ice hummed with the vibrations. “I WANT OUT! I WANT OUT!”
“All Might is working nearby,” said Hawks. “I’ll call him over. Just hang tight.”
Shouto took his hand off the earpiece and returned his attention to the girl. “We’ll be out soon. You’re safe in here.”
She whirled on him, tears streaming down her face. “You’re lying!”
“This is a safe structure,” said Shouto. “I worked with scientists to figure out what shape, size, and thickness would be the strongest in this situation. I practiced making it a bunch of times. You’re not going to get hurt.”
“Are we going to freeze to death?” she asked.
“It’s not cold enough for that.”
“Are we going to run out of air to death?”
“No,” he said. “We have a few hours’ worth of air. They’ll get us out before then. I’m going to let this flame go out, okay? It’s not healthy to be in an enclosed space with a fire.”
Her eyes widened. “No! It’ll be dark!”
“I’ll… turn my phone light on.” They really, really needed a first-year class at UA about how to comfort victims. Maybe it was intuitive for other people, but Shouto was struggling. “Do you want to hold my hand?”
She looked down at his left hand. Her tear-streaked face scrunched. “It looks gross.”
“You can hold my other hand.”
She hesitated, then sat beside him and took his right hand. Shouto let the flame go out and turned on his phone flashlight.
It was quiet for a few moments. The sound of metal creaking came muffled from above them.
“I’m still scared,” the girl whispered.
“Do you want to talk?”
“Okay.”
He tried to think of something that a child might like to talk about. “Do you like dinosaurs?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I like Par—Paramsaur—Paraphsololophus.”
Shouto had watched enough documentaries to know what she was getting at. “Parasaurolophus? The duck-billed one.”
“Yeah! He can scream out of his skull.”
“So can you. Very loudly.”
The girl giggled. “I like Minmi, too. They’re really cute. I wanna ride one with a saddle. And I can feed her konpeito.”
“Is that what they eat?” Shouto asked. “Candy?”
“That’s what I eat. I eat lots of candy. But I’ll share it with my dinosaurs.”
“That’s not healthy.”
She groaned. “That’s what all grown-ups say. I don’t get it. They say—they say, ‘You can’t just eat konpeito for supper, your tummy will get sick.’ But my tummy never gets sick ever. Only when I eat fish. My tummy feels sad when I eat fish. It’s like, blegh. But not when I eat konpeito.”
“It’s good candy,” said Shouto. “I like it.”
“Do you like a lot of candy?”
“I do.”
“Do you eat it? Do you get to eat it all the time?”
“Not all the time,” said Shouto. “My father doesn’t let me eat many sweet things. But I like them.”
“He sounds mean. Minmi would let us eat candy.”
“Would she?”
“Yeah,” said the girl. “All of the candy. Konpeito, KitKats, Hi-Chew, gummy strips, Pocky…”
Shouto was happy to let her ramble on about dinosaurs, candy, and whatever else she liked as he listened for any dangerous-sounding creaking coming from above. Occasionally, he let go of her hand to refreeze the dome, making sure to raise his hand’s temperature back to a non-freezing temperature before taking her hand again.
He also checked his phone. Deku had messaged again.
Ya Boy Deku:
HOLY SHIT DID U GET OUT??? I DIDN’T SEE U COME OUT OF THE BUILDING
SHOUTO PLS ANSWER ME
SHOUTO
SHOUTO DID I JUST FUCKING KILL U
Shouto:
I’m fine. Waiting with the kid for backup.
Ya Boy Deku:
[gif of a woman fainting onto a couch]
I am so fucking sorry. I had like three heart attacks just now.
Shouto:
No real danger. I trained for this scenario.
Are you ok?
Ya Boy Deku:
Oh I’m fine, I was just using hyperbole haha
Shouto:
Not that. I meant that it’s not like you to miss something in your research. You’re always several steps ahead of everybody and everything. Is something going on?
Ya Boy Deku:
Bestie idk where u got that opinion of me bc I am 27 wet and cold naked mole rats clinging desperately to each other inside a thrift store trench coat
Idk I’m just tired from work and it’s making me slip up. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
Shouto’s stomach twisted. In an ideal world, he could advise Deku to take a break from his work, to take some time for himself to recover mentally. But that might not be an option for Deku.
Eventually, more purposeful-sounding crashes started coming from outside. The noise grew closer and closer until, finally, All Might’s voice came from outside the dome. “Todoroki, my boy?”
Shouto stood and melted an arch-shaped door into the side of the dome. Sunlight and warm, smoke-filled air swept in. The dome stood in the midst of tall piles of burnt rubble and twisted steel, blocking the three of them from the view of any spectators who may have been waiting on the street.
All Might’s giant form crouched to peer in. “Everything all right?”
Shouto gave a stone-faced thumbs-up.
The girl was significantly more excited. She waved her plush toy. “All Might!”
“Young lady!” All Might boomed, smiling. He picked her up as she ran toward him. “Were you brave with Young Todoroki here?”
“We talked about dinosaurs!”
“Did you, now! Let’s go find your parents, shall we?” All Might stepped aside to let Shouto out. He clapped Shouto’s shoulder. “Fantastic job, my boy. You saved a life. You should be very proud of yourself. Why don’t we go face everyone together?”
Face everyone together? He’d rather stab himself in the eye. “That—that’s okay. I’m going to find Hawks.”
All Might’s brow furrowed a little. “Are you certain? I’m sure this girl’s parents would love to express their gratitude.”
“You can take credit,” said Shouto. He started away, nearly tripping over a busted window frame on the ground. “All I did was sit inside an ice bubble, anyway.”
“There’s no need to be modest. You deserve any recognition you get.”
“S’fine. I don’t need it.” He didn’t look back at All Might as he walked away, too focused on not stepping on any stray nails or glass. Last thing he needed was stitches in his foot. “Thanks for the, um, the rescue.”
“Todoroki-kun,” All Might said, with enough authority that Shouto looked back over his shoulder. His face was pinched. “Are you all right? Truly?”
Shouto stared at him. It was impressive, really, how All Might could pretend so realistically to care about Shouto’s well-being. How he could pretend to care about everybody he rescued. He did it so well.
Whatever. Shouto could pretend, too.
Especially if it meant making All Might eventually trust him enough to give him One for All.
He mustered all the energy he had left in his body and gave a small smile. “I’m good. Nothing I haven’t trained for.”
All Might looked surprised, and for a second, Shouto worried that the smile might’ve been too much. But then All Might returned it, bigger and better. “I suppose your father does know what he’s doing. Well, enjoy the rest of your internship, my boy.”
Rage boiled in Shouto’s chest. He kept smiling. “I will.”
Once he’d exited the rubble, Shouto saw the group waiting for him. Hawks spotted him first, grinning when their eyes met. “Ah, he’s alive!”
Shouto shrugged.
“Christ,” said Shinsou, the word making up the tail end of a heavy exhale. “Thought you fucking died when that building collapsed. That would’ve been a fucked way to start an internship.”
Bakugou gave Shouto’s arm a hard smack. “Answer your goddamn radio faster next time, asshole.”
Hawks put his phone away. “You hurt anywhere?”
Instead of answering, Shouto sat down on the curb, pulling his legs in and wrapping his arms around them. He sat in silence for a few seconds, and then he smacked his forehead hard against his knees.
“What is it?” Hawks asked.
“Almost strangled a fucking kid,” Shouto groaned. He raised his head. “Jesus fucking Christ. Are they all that loud?”
Hawks laughed. “Well, they’re kids. They tell you when they’re scared.”
“I didn’t tell people,” said Shouto. “Not like that. I was scared all the time as a kid, and I never screamed. That was fucking awful.”
“Just to clarify,” said Hawks, “the awful part of that experience was the kid being loud?”
“Yes.”
“Not the part where you were trapped in a collapsed building and possibly about to be crushed to death.”
“Correct.”
“Cool,” said Hawks. “Just making sure I had that right. You guys want some lunch?”
“I want someone to mash my brain into paste with a mortar and pestle,” said Shouto.
“Ramen?” Hawks suggested. “Teishoku? Great dumpling place around the corner.”
“And then spoon it into a soup can, seal it up, and sell it to a Bangladeshi goat farmer.”
“I could go for some KFC myself.”
“Who will then feed it to a goat—”
“But I get that once or twice a week anyway, so you guys can pick.”
“—and throw the goat off a fucking cliff.”
“Todoroki?” said Hawks. “You done, pal?”
“In a sense.” Shouto held both hands out. “Help me up.”
###
The rest of the day went by slowly. Or quickly, depending on how you looked at it—Hawks took care of everything so fast that Shouto, Bakugou, and Shinsou only made it to the crime scenes in time to witness clean-up.
“Well, that was fuckin’ dumb,” Bakugou said at the end of the day, when the three of them were gathering their belongings from Hawks’s agency. “I didn’t learn shit.”
“I learned how far projectile vomiting can go,” said Shinsou. “That was impressive. Do you think that was a quirk?”
“Just heroin,” said Shouto. “I don’t think vomit quirks exist.”
“Why not? Bakugou’s got a nasty-ass sweat quirk.”
Bakugou struggled to open the door with one large gauntlet tucked under each arm. “You wish you had my quirk.”
“Obviously there are quirks where things are spewed from the mouth,” Shouto said. “I just don’t think there have been any quirks reported that have to do with the force and velocity at which someone can spew normal vomit.”
“‘Reported’ being the key word,” said Shinsou. “Plenty of people self-report their kids as Quirkless when they actually just have shitty quirks.”
“I don’t think a vomit quirk is bad enough that the kid’s parents would risk up to two years in prison for misreporting.”
Bakugou finally managed to twist the knob. “You losers better have finished this conversation before I get here tomorrow.”
“Are you leaving?” Shouto asked. “I can walk you to the station.”
He shouldered the door open. “I ain’t your little girlfriend. I can walk myself.”
Shouto turned to Shinsou. “Where do you live?”
“None of your business,” said Shinsou. “I’m not going home tonight, anyway. I have to do community service at an animal shelter.”
What was Shinsou doing community service for? Did UA require that for Gen Ed students? Maybe Shinsou was in some sort of honors society. “You have to do community service all night?”
“Obviously not. Kirishima’s mom runs the shelter, so I’m staying at his house tonight.”
Shouto wondered which of Kirishima’s moms Shinsou was referring to. He was also, strangely, a little jealous—why did Shinsou get to spend the night at Kirishima’s house before Shouto did? “Do you know JSL?” he asked Shinsou.
Shinsou opened Hawks’s minifridge and took out a bottled water. “Japanese Sign Language? Just the basics. Why?”
“Because Kirishima’s mom uses it.”
Shinsou tucked the water bottle in his backpack. He glanced at Bakugou—who was struggling to pull on his backpack without letting go of his gauntlets or the door—before signing, “I meant the other mom.”
“Oh,” said Shouto.
“Have fun scoopin’ dog shit, Eyebags,” said Bakugou. His gauntlets clattered as he shuffled sideways out of Hawks’s office. “You fuckin’ loser. I’m out.”
Shouto walked to the station alone. When he tried to buy another rechargeable subway card, his debit card declined.
He tried his credit card. That declined, too.
Shouto swore under his breath and stepped out of line to let the next person access the machine. His card had worked fine at lunch—maybe buying food in location he usually didn’t visit had triggered a security alert on his account. He dug through his backpack until he found some change and got back in line.
When he reached home, Endeavor’s red Lexus was parked outside. He paused outside the gate, let the nausea wash over him, and then slowly typed in the gate code.
He’d been dreading this since he woke up in the hospital after his attempt.
Maybe it’d be something that’d just happen and be done. A slap. A particularly bad training session. A removed finger, if Endeavor wanted to follow through on his threat from the sports festival. Those things wouldn’t be so bad. It would happen, it would hurt, it would be over.
But he wasn’t sure he could be so optimistic.
Endeavor might hurt his siblings. Might’ve done it already. He didn’t know what situation he was going to walk into, and that was the worst part.
He entered the house quietly. Fuyumi was cleaning the kitchen. It didn’t need cleaning—she’d cleaned it a couple days ago as part of her obsessive (and unnecessary, considering they hired people to do it) deep-cleaning of the house. She looked up when she saw Shouto, her shoulders tense.
He whispered to her as he took off his shoes. “Is Natsuo here?”
“Endeavor sent him away,” Fuyumi whispered back. “I’m sorry.”
“Did they fight?”
“A little bit.”
He didn’t have the courage to ask if Natsuo had gotten hurt. “Where…?”
“Living room.”
Maybe Endeavor wouldn’t notice him if he just passed behind him quietly on his way to his room. He left the kitchen and started, silently, through the living room.
Endeavor was watching the news up on the large-screen television. When Shouto saw the news story he was watching, his breath left him.
Onscreen, All Might was talking to a crowd in front of what Shouto recognized as the rubble from today’s apartment fire. Shouto’s social media profile picture—the one with the flaming middle finger from the sports festival—was positioned on the opposite side of the screen. Captioning the news story:
Following “Flaming Finger” incident, Todoroki Shouto continues to explode in popularity after refusing public recognition for saving girl from fire
All Might must’ve ignored Shouto’s request that he take credit for the rescue and instead let reporters know about Shouto’s role in it.
That motherfucker.
“Shiyo.” Endeavor’s voice.
Fuck. Shouto kept walking. “Old Man.”
“Come here. I need to talk to you.”
Shouto stopped in the doorway to the hall. Turned to face Endeavor.
Endeavor motioned to the TV screen. “What is this?”
Should he run now? Endeavor was still sitting. He could take advantage of that. “It’s a television,” said Shouto.
“You know what I mean. That’s not your name.”
Shouto’s words turned to sludge in his throat. He was going to choke.
“Shiyo,” said Endeavor. “Explain this. Now.”
Sure.
No problem.
Out of his body, a casual observer.
Endeavor over there, Shouto’s body standing opposite. Actors in front of a green screen. Shouto sitting on the sidelines with his legs crossed at the knee, holding the script, making sure everything went smoothly. As long as the words came out now, the thoughts could be added in later.
“It’s my name,” said the Shouto actor. “I go by that.”
“You go by that,” said Endeavor.
Calm. Clear voice. Steady. “Yes.”
“That’s a boy’s name.”
“Yes.”
Endeavor narrowed his eyes. It was a moment before he spoke. “Are you telling people you’re a boy?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“Why?”
“Because I am.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“I am,” said Shouto.
Endeavor gave him a long, searing look.
“You can’t do this,” said Endeavor. “I don’t care if you’re gay as long as you keep it to yourself. But you can’t do this.”
“I’m already doing it.”
“You’re going to fix this,” said Endeavor. “Transsexuals don’t succeed in Hero society. There has never been one in the top hundred. And there never will be in your lifetime.”
“Tiger from the Wild—”
“Tiger is part of a four-person search and rescue team that collectively places thirty-second. That barely even qualifies as mediocre. Was that the best counterexample you could think of? Who do you have next on your list? Your homeroom teacher, who’s never ranked high enough to be able to look up and see the bottom of the top hundred list?”
What the hell did Aizawa have to do with transgender Heroes? He was cis, right? “He’s an underground Hero. He can’t accept a ranking.”
“Your teacher stays underground because ‘he’”—air quotes—“could be defeated by an informed Villain with a pocketful of sand. Is that what you want for yourself?”
“I don’t want any of this fucking Hero bullshit for myself.”
“You’re going to tell the school and reporters that they have it wrong and you’re a girl. You’re going to start acting and dressing like one again.”
“No,” said Shouto.
The furrow in Endeavor’s brow deepened. “Don’t think I won’t take you out of UA.”
“I don’t care. I’m not letting you take this away from me.”
“I will take more away from you than that.”
“Do it.”
Endeavor stood and walked toward him. He grabbed Shouto above his elbow and pulled him in the direction of the kitchen. Shouto’s backpack swung, and his phone fell out of the side pocket, clattered to the ground.
Fuyumi looked up from where she was scrubbing the sink. Her eyes widened. “Dad?”
Endeavor ignored her. He pulled Shouto through the kitchen, toward the entryway. He opened the door and kicked Shouto’s shoes onto the patio before flinging Shouto out after them. Shouto stumbled.
“Fix this,” said Endeavor. “Then come back.”
He shut the door. The lock clicked.
Inside, Shouto could hear Fuyumi’s panicked voice, could hear Endeavor say something curt and final back at her.
Which was usually where Fuyumi shut up. But now she didn’t, and the front door rattled and Shouto could hear, “Don’t do this, Dad, please don’t do this, she can’t help—”
A thump.
Fuyumi went silent.
Shouto put on his shoes, tied the laces. He stood. Adjusted his backpack on his shoulder.
He started walking.
Notes:
Idk I just thought it'd be funny if the character who shapeshifts into a woman was the most confidently cis character in the fic.
Sorry this chapter took so long to come out! I spent a lot of last semester getting my grad school application together... and I got in!! I've gotten 2 acceptances and 1 waitlist so far for an MFA in Fiction, and I'm still waiting to hear back from 5 other schools.
I also got an ADHD diagnosis (FINALLY) and have an autism assessment in less than 12 hours. Hoping it'll be less horrible than the last time I tried. I'm about to email the dr a 7-page list of symptoms :)
If y'all start arguing about chasers in the comments, I'm going to explode the Eiffel Tower.
Chapter 55: Shouto Gets Lit with the Dune Worms
Summary:
What are the chances that a Pro Hero would catch a couple teens smoking weed? Idk, but they're pretty high.
Notes:
CW: transphobia, homophobia, underage marijuana use, sensory overload/meltdown, homelessness, physical abuse; DISCUSSION OF: murder, suicide, prescription drug abuse
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Shouto held his backpack to his chest with both arms while he was on the subway. He forgot that he was supposed to hold onto something until the train started to move. He stumbled, then froze his right shoe to the floor. A few people may have stared. After riding a few stops without doing more than blinking, maybe someone asked if he needed help getting unstuck.
Or maybe he imagined that.
Maybe nobody paid attention to him at all.
After the third or fourth stop, he decided that he’d gone far enough. He kicked his foot forward to crack the ice, then walked out unevenly, one shoe damp and trailing water.
Where was he? The shoe advertisement poster looked familiar. He read the sign with the city name on the wall, but he’d made it upstairs and was walking on the street before he realized that he hadn’t processed it.
Still, he kept walking.
He walked for a long time.
And then he was in a park, and the sky was that particular shade of dull dark blue that only happened during dusks with no moon, and he was tired. When had it gotten so dark? Hadn’t it been afternoon only a few minutes ago?
He wanted to keep walking because the walking kept his brain from working. But if he stayed out here much longer, he wouldn’t be able to see the path in front of him, and he was suddenly aware of how sore his legs were.
Shouto sat down on a bench. This was fine. This… he’d just stay here for a while.
He closed his eyes and kept his breathing shallow. He didn’t know what would happen if he drew too much oxygen into his brain all at once, but he knew it would be something bad.
Minutes passed. He didn’t know how long. He only knew that when he finally opened his eyes again, the sky was black, the park surrounding him visible only by the weak yellow light from looming streetlamps. The overgrown bushes lining the paths had turned into long, black lumpy creatures, like giant worms that had emerged from the ground while Shouto wasn’t paying attention. It was surreal, like he’d been dropped into an alternate universe while he was sleeping—one where everything was strange and dangerous and frightening. His heartbeat sped up.
It wasn’t safe out here.
A deep voice—gravelly and not yet settled in its pitch, like it belonged to a teenager—interrupted his thoughts. “You lookin’ for a plug?”
Shouto looked in the voice’s direction to see an older teen—seventeen or eighteen—walking toward him, thumbs tucked into the straps of his ratty backpack.
A plug? Like, for drugs? Drugs of any kind sounded excellent right now, actually. “I don’t have money,” said Shouto.
“You don’t have money?” said the teen. His hair shined in the streetlight. Hair product or hair grease, Shouto couldn’t tell. “Aren’t you Endeavor’s son?”
Was he getting robbed right now? He didn’t have the energy for that. “Just got kicked out.”
“For real?”
“Yeah.”
“Sucks,” said the teen. “You got anything of value on you at all? I’ll trade you.”
Shouto searched through his backpack. A roll of bandages, a dull pair of scissors, shoestrings… He pulled out his wallet and rifled through it. The debit and credit cards were useless. Endeavor must’ve been planning to throw him out, Shouto realized—must’ve deactivated the cards ahead of time so Shouto wouldn’t be able to pay for a hotel room or food. Fucking asshole. “I have a… fucking… Freshness Burger gift card.”
“How much?”
He turned the card around in his hands. Where had he even gotten this? “I don’t know.”
The teen sighed and sat on the bench beside him. He took the gift card. “My crush thought the memes I sent her about you were funny, so I guess I owe you for that. We can share a joint.”
“Thanks.”
The teen took out his materials and started rolling a joint. “You smoked before?”
“No,” said Shouto.
“Really? Seems like half my buyers are UA or Shiketsu kids. Stressful-ass Hero schools. You’ve done shit other than weed, right? Vaping or nic gum?”
“Opioids.”
“That tracks.” The teen finished rolling the joint and started looking through his pack. “Well, shit. Think I forgot my lighter.”
Shouto called a small flame to the tip of his pinky finger and held it out.
“Oh yeah,” said the teen. He lit the blunt and smoked it, coughing out a foul-smelling cloud of vapor. “Y’know, my friends are gonna think I’m lying when I tell them I got a light from Endeavor’s son. Shit’s crazy.”
Shouto didn’t especially appreciate being referred to as Endeavor’s son, but he didn’t say anything. At least it wasn’t Endeavor’s daughter.
The teen handed him the blunt. “What’d you get kicked out for? It’s been a while since the Flaming Finger thing. Your hand’s super fucked up, by the way—didn’t realize you burned your finger off.”
Shouto took a hit. It was hot in his throat, but he’d inhaled enough smoke in his lifetime to not succumb to a coughing fit when he exhaled. He blinked, his eyes watering.
“He find your stash?” asked the teen.
Shouto passed the blunt back. “No.”
“You don’t talk much.”
“It’s not something I want to talk about.”
“Fair enough.”
They kept smoking. It didn’t take long for Shouto to start feeling the effects—streetlamps that grew brighter, yellower, burning his eyes and making his head hurt. The worm-like bushes seemed more alive, somehow. Like they were watching him. Waiting for the moment he let his guard down.
“Hitting for you?” asked the teen. “I’m not feeling shit yet.”
He felt strange hearing the terminology spoken so casually to him. Hitting. Was this who he was now? Was this what it’d been like for Touya? Maybe not. Touya had done harder stuff than weed, and he’d started earlier than Shouto. Maybe it’d come more naturally to him, the whole experience and surrounding culture. Maybe he’d felt like he belonged there. To Shouto, this interaction felt like as much of a performance as every other interaction did.
He didn’t belong at home. Didn’t belong on the streets. Where did he belong?
“It’s… hitting,” said Shouto.
“They give me weak shit sometimes,” the teen grumbled. He took another hit before passing the blunt. “You gay? Your dad’s kinda weird about the gays, right? That why you got kicked out?”
Was this safe to talk about with a stranger? The teen didn’t look very strong, but quirks were unpredictable. There were quirks that could kill you with a touch. It was a one-in-a-thousand occurrence, but they were out there. Shigaraki was proof of that. “He hires a few gay people.”
“Does he? I guess he’s got Lady Hypna. Who else is gay?”
“Some… receptionist, I think,” said Shouto. “Maybe a call center guy, too. I don’t know. I try not to talk to them.”
“What, you don’t like gays?”
Shouto smoked. It seared his throat, and he swallowed hard. Was he doing this wrong? “Not that. Endeavor just only hires people who suck.”
“Lady Hypna sucks?”
“Like a fucking vacuum cleaner.”
The teen snorted. The reaction didn’t produce any feeling of satisfaction—that wasn’t a joke he normally would’ve made. Just part of the performance. Part of the act designed to keep this random stranger who had greasy hair and smelled like sour water and said things like the gays from leaving Shouto alone with his thoughts.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” said the teen, like Shouto had prompted him with a question. “I have a few gay friends. They’re pretty cool. They agree with me, like, it’s totally fine as long as you don’t push it all up in other people’s faces. Like some of ’em do, y’know.”
“Push what all up in other people’s faces?” asked Shouto.
“Y’know, just like, the gayness.”
“Oh,” said Shouto. “You think they should stay closeted?”
The teen gave him a weird look. “Well, no, just… It’s fine if they tell me. I don’t give a shit. I just don’t want to look at someone and that be the first thing I know about them.”
“Why not?”
The teen shrugged, breathed out a cloud of smoke. “I just don’t think it should be the biggest part of someone’s personality. Isn’t that important.”
Shouto hugged his backpack to his stomach. He wished he were sitting here with Deku instead of this guy.
Also—was it really not that important? People did get kicked out of their homes for being gay. Got bullied and beat up for it. Made sense that they might want to skip the song-and-dance of finding queer-friendly aquaintances by warding off closeted homophobes with a little in-your-face-ness.
“I know someone like that,” said Shouto. “First thing you know when you look at him.”
The teen hummed. “Kinda obnoxious, right?”
“I think it’s smart. How he does it.”
“What do you mean?”
“People assume he’s weak,” Shouto said. “Then he kicks their ass.”
“You for real?”
“He kicked my ass. Put me on crutches for a bit.”
“Goddamn,” said the teen. “He seems like a pill.”
“He’s one of my best friends.”
The teen huffed a laugh. “You got a weird-ass life, dude. You really not gonna tell me why you got kicked out? I’m interested now.”
“Probably you’ll hear about it eventually.”
“Media’s all over your ass, huh? Saw some gossip magazines talking about how you’re secretly a girl.”
Shouto shrugged. “Whatever makes people buy the magazine.”
“Man, it’s all about money these days. Money and attention. Obviously it’s just a media ploy for you, but like, people really are out there doing that shit. Girls pretending to be boys and boys pretending to be girls. Fucking wild.”
Shouto took the blunt and let it burn his throat again. He hoped the gift card he’d given the teen didn’t have more than thirty yen on it. “Mm,” he said. “Weird shit.”
“You can tell, though. I always can.”
“Oh, definitely. Super easy.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” said the teen, like he was relieved that someone finally agreed with him. “If you’re not sure, you just gotta look at the hands.”
Shouto looked at his own hands. “Yeah, the… hands. That must be what makes me one hundred percent male. Nine and one-fourth fingers. Girls usually have ten. I wonder if that’s what transphobes are referencing when they talk about the raging epidemic of transgender minors getting surgeries off-hand.”
“Huh?”
A man’s voice called from behind them. “Todoroki.”
Shouto looked over his shoulder. He saw the cat first, dark and small with bright green eyes, and was half convinced the cat was the being communicating with him before he realized that it was connected to a human. Nestled into the round collar of his bulky jacket, actually.
Sans cat, Shouto knew that silhouette. Tired and tousled long dark hair. The outline of a single iris glowing red even in the far-off streetlight.
Shouto handed over what little was left of the blunt. “Go,” he muttered. “Go. That’s a Pro Hero.”
“Shit,” said the teen. He put the blunt out on the bench and dropped it in his backpack before standing. “You gonna be okay?”
“Probably not. Fuck off.”
The teen hurried away. Aizawa approached, gaze following the boy’s retreating figure. Then he looked at Shouto, brow furrowed. “You know police do rounds here.”
Shouto zipped up his backpack. “I’ll leave.”
“You could get arrested for marijuana use, Todoroki. And expelled from UA. It’s unhealthy at your age, especially with your preexisting mental health issues. You know better.”
Why was he getting lectured? Weed was the least of his problems right now. “I needed something.”
“Not that. No one your age needs that.”
Shouto looked away, squinting. The streetlights in the distance seemed so much brighter now, gnawing at his senses. So why was everything still so dark?
“Why are you all the way out here, anyway? You don’t live anywhere near here.” When Shouto didn’t respond, Aizawa sighed and started walking. “Come on. I’ll walk you to the train station.”
Ah. There it was—the choice presented to him, the oxygen finally making it to his brain. Shit. Shit shit shit. His heart rate sped up.
He had to make some sort of decision now, right? Either go home or say something to Aizawa. Who might just make him go home anyway. And if not, what was he going to do? Be homeless? Get kicked out of the park by the police? What did the police do with missing children? Was he a missing child?
He needed to do something, but he couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
When Shouto didn’t follow, Aizawa stopped. He turned around. “Todoroki.”
“I c—” His voice caught on something. God, his throat was sore. “—can’t go home.”
“What?”
“I can’t go home.”
The cat in Aizawa’s scarf butted Aizawa’s face with a curious mrr?
“Why?” Aizawa asked.
Shouto’s heart rate shot up exponentially at the question. A wave of dizziness hit him hard, violently, and he almost retched. Shouto cupped his hands around his mouth and nose and stared straight forward, trying to find a focal point in the darkness. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t see shit past the glowering yellow lights.
“Todoroki,” Aizawa said.
Shouto twisted so Aizawa couldn’t see his face. This was… humiliating as fuck, honestly. What would happen if he freaked out like this in front of a Villain some day?
Well. That was assuming his father would keep paying for his schooling. Fuck… this could actually be bad. Like, really bad.
“I’ll figure it out,” he said. It was a struggle to raise his voice above a mumble. Why was it so hard to talk when he panicked? “S’fine.”
The bench creaked. Shouto stiffened.
Aizawa spoke from beside him this time. “Why can’t you go home?”
Shouto lowered his hands just enough so Aizawa could hear him. “I can, technically, I… I have to do something first.”
“Do what?”
“I don’t know if I…” He felt like if he had to string anymore words together, his brain would shrivel. He shook his head.
Aizawa waited a few seconds. He cleared his throat. “You’re shaking. Are you cold?”
He dropped his hands into his lap. He would’ve kept them hidden if he’d known they were shaking. “I don’t know.”
Shouto heard a zipping sound. He turned in time to get a face full of coat that smelled strongly of cat. It was heavy and baggy draped over his shoulders. And warm. The cat stayed on Aizawa’s shoulder.
His heart rate slowed just a little.
“If it’s going to take some time for you to talk, I’d like to move elsewhere,” Aizawa said. “It’s cold as balls out. I’d take you to a shop, but everything around here is closed. My apartment is pretty close if you don’t mind that.”
Shouto licked his lips. His mouth had never felt drier.
“You can’t stay here. It’s either your home or mine, unless you have another family member or friend to stay with.”
Natsuo was living in a dorm an hour away. Maybe Bakugou…? But Shouto didn’t have his phone. Was out of money for the train. And he’d gone in the opposite direction of Bakugou’s house. Stupid…
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“Okay what? Coming with me?”
He nodded.
Aizawa’s hand landed briefly on his shoulder before he stood. He waited for Shouto to stand this time, taking the backpack from his hands to carry it alongside the cat, before taking off.
Aizawa pulled out his phone and opened the texting app. The green light lit up the lower half of his face, accentuating the dark circles under his eyes. “My partner’s home, too, just to warn you.”
He’d forgotten about Aizawa’s husband. Come to think of it, Shouto barely knew anything about Aizawa’s personal life. He didn’t think the rest of 1-A did, either. Maybe that was part of being an underground hero.
Not that it mattered, really. But thinking about Aizawa was at least getting his mind off… all that other shit.
They rode the elevator up three floors inside the apartment, the jerk of the cables making the backpack in Aizawa’s hand swing gently. The cat butted its head against Aizawa’s cheek, and Aizawa sneezed.
They left the elevator. The apartments used old-fashioned locks, and when Aizawa stopped at a door near the end of the hallway, he pulled out a physical key to open the door.
The inside of the apartment was… he wouldn’t go as far as normal. He could see three cats (not counting the one on Aizawa’s shoulder) from the doorway, and that probably wasn’t super normal. But it was definitely well lived in. An oven with one of its coils detached and sitting on the counter beside it, a microwave with an oil-smudged number pad. The kitchen table had several empty cans of cat food atop it, the flakes that the spoon had neglected already dried out and sticking to the insides of the cans. Aizawa set Shouto’s backpack on the table.
A man’s voice came from the bedroom. “Shota? You find her, babe? I am so sorry I let her run out the door like that. Little bitch snuck up on me.”
Aizawa sighed as he kicked off his shoes. He motioned for Shouto to do the same. “You should read your texts when you get them.”
“Did you text? I was in the shower.” The bedroom door opened. A man with wet blond hair falling almost to his elbows stood in the doorway with only a towel around his waist. When he saw Shouto, his hands went immediately to cover his nipples. “Pardon me! Oh, is that Todoroki Shouto? Boy howdy, kiddo, you smell like you’ve been partaking.”
Who was this guy? His voice seemed eerily familiar, but…
Oh.
With the way the lights were burning his retinas, he had to squint to see it, but the man had a blond mustache sprouting above his lip. He had his hair down now and wasn’t wearing his glasses or… well, much of anything else, so Shouto hadn’t recognized him at first.
Was this who Aizawa was married to?
“Jesus,” Aizawa muttered. The cat on his shoulder leapt off and pattered over to rub against the other man’s leg. “Go put some clothes on.”
Present Mic made a tsk sound. He scooped up the cat with one hand and kissed its head a couple times. “Did you miss me while you were out exploring?” he asked the cat, his voice taking on a strange baby-talk quality. The cat yowled in protest. “Daw. Don’t talk to me like that. You did miss me. Mwah. Yes, you did.”
“Hizashi,” Aizawa said. “Clothes. Please.”
“Sure thing.” He put the cat back on the floor, and it darted away. “I’ll be out in a jiffy to make some tea for you guys—”
“I’ll do that. Just give us some time.”
Mic’s gaze hovered between the two of them. After a couple seconds, he gave a nod and retreated back into the bedroom, closing the door.
Aizawa grabbed a kettle from one of the overhead cabinets. A slender gray cat jumped onto the counter and sat in front of him. “You’re not allergic to cats, are you?”
“I don’t think so,” Shouto said.
“Go sit on the couch and warm up, then.” Aizawa scooped up the cat and gently tossed it onto the floor. It walked away, unbothered. “The cats are friendly. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Dazed, Shouto went into the living room. The couch looked a little too broken in, covered in cat hair and threadbare in a few notable spots, but it was ridiculously comfortable. Good texture—welcoming, not stiff and sticky like the leather couch at home. He felt guilty just sitting on it. A large orange cat approached his feet, sniffed his socks, and licked his toe once before sauntering away.
Shouto let himself look around. Some of the details in the room clashed horribly—a studio-worthy recording set shoved into the corner of the room beside a cat scratch pole, eye drops on the same shelf as a trophy. There were also several small Pride flags sticking out from a mug on the shelf beside the television.
“Tea’s on.” Aizawa entered the room. He had to remove a couple cats from the loveseat adjacent to the couch Shouto was on so he could sit down. He held a cat out to Shouto, its long legs dangling from both sides of Aizawa’s large hand. “Want one?”
Shouto shook his head.
Aizawa set the cat on the floor and sat down. “Ready to talk to me, then?”
No. “Guess so.”
Aizawa was silent. Probably waiting for Shouto to start, he realized, but Shouto didn’t know how to do that.
“I’ll ask, then,” Aizawa finally said. “What is it that you’re supposed to do before you go home?”
Shouto opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
He was tapping his chest, he realized. He tried to still his hand, but god, that awful energy built up so fast, so he started tapping again.
“Sorry,” said Shouto. “I don’t think I’m thinking right. I don’t know if I make sense. Sometimes I don’t.”
“I’ll stop you if I don’t understand something,” said Aizawa. “We have time.”
Was there double meaning behind those words? Usually when people said take your time to Shouto, they were being sarcastic. Shouto’s heartrate sped up.
“My father,” Shouto pushed out. His brain felt two words away from short-circuiting. “He—on the news, he saw me. My name. He told me to fix it.”
“Fix what?”
“That—that I told people that—” His breaths came and went faster. He tapped his chest harder. Calm down. Calm down. “He locked me out. I think he hit my sister.”
Aizawa’s face stayed neutral. “He locked you out of your house?”
“Yes,” said Shouto. “I’m not… I don’t want to.”
“Don’t want to what?”
Shouto’s gut was screaming. He wanted to hit something, hit something hard, but also to close his ears tight, tight, tight and hide somewhere small and dark and make no sound. But he could do neither of those things right now, and fuck, fuck, he hated this feeling.
“I’m not a girl,” said Shouto.
“I know,” said Aizawa.
“I can’t do that again.” He couldn’t breathe. He rocked forward a little, reached behind his head to tug on the hair there. “I can’t—I can’t—I wanted—if—he wants me to tell people I’m not.”
“That you’re not a boy?” Aizawa asked.
“I can’t do that.” The energy in Shouto’s body felt like it was going to rip him in half. Almost felt like he was already ripped in half, or quarters or eighths, with pieces of his body scattered across the room, repelled from each other like magnets of the same polarity. He hugged his arms to his chest. “Fuyumi. He could kill her. He might. He knows I love her. I don’t—I can’t. I know it’s selfish. But I can’t. I can’t.”
“Okay,” said Aizawa.
He needed to move. Ground himself somehow. He raised his fist to his temple, leaned forward with his elbows on his legs, tapped the heel of his palm against his head a few times. And once harder, enough to startle a two-second stampede of static into Shouto’s vision.
“Todoroki,” said Aizawa. “Can you tell me what you need?”
Shouto signed the word, quick and sharp and without looking up. “Lights.”
Aizawa’s chair squeaked. A moment later, the lights dimmed.
“I’m going to find something else you can stim with,” said Aizawa. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Hang on for just a minute.”
Shouto pulled Aizawa’s coat tighter around his shoulders. He moved his hand to tap against the back of his neck—not hard enough to bruise, but enough to make it sore. I don’t want you to hurt yourself, Aizawa had said. What was Shouto, a fucking five-year-old? Why couldn’t he hold his stims back anymore?
God, this was humiliating.
Aizawa returned quickly. He placed a set of magnets and some sort of orb on the coffee table. “I like the magnets,” said Aizawa. “Mic likes the… Orb. Use whatever.”
“I’m sorry,” said Shouto. “I’m not—I can usually—”
“I know. I’m not angry.” Aizawa sat back down. “Surprised you lasted as long as you did, honestly.”
Shouto picked up the Orb. It was heavier than he thought it would be, and when he squeezed it, something soft and malleable on the inside moved around.
It did help some.
Shouto pushed himself back into the couch, crossed his legs, heaved Aizawa’s heavy coat over his head. He kept the Orb in his lap, squeezing his energy into it. It took a couple minutes of silence for Shouto’s breaths to slow, for that awful buzz to recede from his throat and mouth back down to his stomach.
“You can sign if you’d rather,” said Aizawa. “My JSL grammar is… wanting, but I know enough signs to understand.”
Shouto squeezed all the particles in the Orb to one side. He said nothing.
“What have you got with you right now?” asked Aizawa.
Shouto kept his eyes fixed on the Orb. He shifted it to his left hand so he could sign with his right. “Not much.”
“Phone? Money?”
“No,” he signed.
“How’d you pay for train fare?”
Reluctantly, he set the Orb in his lap so he could sign with both hands. He switched to a more pidgin style of sign language—JSL signs used in Japanese word order—so his sentences would be easier for Aizawa to understand. “I don’t remember. I think I had some loose change in my backpack.”
Aizawa signed back, “Are you fine with staying the night here, or is there somewhere else you want to be?”
The question made things suddenly, horribly clear.
Shouto did not have a home.
Shouto’s hands fiddled for a few seconds before he could figure out what to do with them. “No, there… there’s nowhere else.”
“We’ll get you set up, then,” Aizawa signed. “Do you want to call your sister?”
He did. But if Endeavor was watching the family’s phones, Shouto might not be able to reach her. “I think my brother.”
Aizawa pulled out his cell phone and handed it to Shouto with Natsuo’s contact pulled up. A timer in the kitchen went off. Aizawa stood. He said aloud, “I’ll give you some time while I make the tea.”
Shouto sat with the phone in his lap for a bit, trying to think of a script. He couldn’t pull together enough thoughts to think past the first sentence, so he just called the number. He’d wing it. If he went mute, he went mute.
It took a few rings for Natsuo to answer. “Hello?”
“Natsuo,” said Shouto. “Um. It’s Shouto.”
A short silence. Then, “H-hey. Shouto. I didn’t recognize the number. You okay?”
“Something happened,” said Shouto. “I don’t think Endeavor will let me talk to Fuyumi if I call home. Can you call her and see if she’s okay?”
“What happened?”
“Um.” Shouto took a breath. “Endeavor. Locked me out of the house. Yumi usually calls you when stuff happens, right?”
“Yeah,” said Natsuo. “I haven’t heard from her. How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know. Several hours.”
“Shit—yeah, I’ll call her. You okay?”
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“I’ll call you back in a minute.”
Natsuo hung up. Shouto waited, staring at the phone. When it finally rang, he startled.
“She’s not answering,” Natsuo told him. His voice was tense. “Do you think I should go check on her in person?”
Fuck. “I… I think that might make things worse. If you did go.”
“Did he already hurt her?”
“I heard him hit her,” said Shouto. “I don’t know how bad it was.”
“What about you?”
“I’m okay. Nothing physical.”
“Where are you?” asked Natsuo. “Are you safe? Whose phone are you calling from?”
“I’m at Aizawa’s apartment.”
Natsuo exhaled. “Okay. God, I… okay, that’s good. You did good, Shouto. What happened with Endeavor? Why are you locked out?”
Shouto started messing with the Orb again. He hadn’t done good. He very, very much had not done good. “Endeavor found out. About me. The name change.”
“Fucking… fuck,” said Natsuo. “And he just… what, he just kicked you out? To teach you a lesson or some shit?”
Shouto squeezed the Orb tight, the tips of his fingers disappearing into it. “No, I’m supposed to fix it. Before I go back.”
“What if you don’t?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “I guess he stops paying for UA. Other than that, he didn’t clarify.”
“It’s hard to believe he’d disown you after spending so much time training you,” Natsuo said. “He probably expects you to cave.”
Probably. Shouto had always caved before. “I don’t think I… I don’t think I can do what he wants this time.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
“But he’s just going to threaten something else if I hold out,” said Shouto. “Probably something about you or Fuyumi. She needs to get out of that house.”
“I know,” said Natsuo. “Do you have any sort of plan?”
“Not yet. Can I… can I stay with you?” He felt shitty asking it. “At your dorm? They allow that for a few nights, right?”
Natsuo hesitated. “Um.”
Shouto’s stomach twisted. Was he asking too much? “I mean, I don’t—if I’ll be in the way—”
“No, no, it’s not that. I’m just… I’m not actually staying in the dorms anymore. I’m crashing at a friend’s house right now.”
He felt his breath leave him. He knew that tone of voice. He’d heard it from Fuyumi before—that something bad has happened, and it is definitely your fault, but I’m trying to convince you that it’s not tone. That “weird email” about “school stuff” that Natsuo had received and refused to explain… was that what this was about?
“Why?” Shouto asked.
“Endeavor kinda… sorta cut me off,” said Natsuo. “Finance-wise. I had to withdraw from the university before the drop date so they don’t charge me for the whole semester, and they don’t let you live on campus if you’re not officially attending.”
Shouto heard nothing after withdraw from the university. He sunk into the couch.
University was Natsuo’s whole world. It was how he’d finally put physical distance between himself and Endeavor. It was how he’d been trying to build his future independent of their father. And Endeavor—Shouto—had just taken that all away.
“Still there?” asked Natsuo.
Shouto forced the words out. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks, buddy. I’ll be okay. Wasn’t entirely unanticipated. We don’t have to talk about that right now. Do you have—”
“No,” said Shouto. “Natsuo. I’m sorry.”
There was a silence.
Then, “Wait, I thought—I thought it was a me thing. Is it a you thing?”
“I’m sorry,” said Shouto. He brought his hand up, clawed his nails into the skin of his cheek. “I’m so sorry. Natsuo. I thought—he said something about it before the sports festival. I thought maybe he wouldn’t bother with punishing you because I was going to be dead anyway. So it’d be okay if I flipped him off. But then I wasn’t dead.”
“Shouto, it’s—”
“And I wasn’t thinking afterward because I accidentally told a doctor at the hospital about Endeavor, and I bribed the social worker not to tell anybody, but I don’t know if she did or not. And my social media—I didn’t make Bakugou’s friends take that down because they seemed really excited about it and I want them to like me, but Endeavor told me not to talk to anybody because it’d hurt you and Fuyumi. But I was talking to people. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’m not lying,” said Shouto. He dragged his nails down his cheek, raked them hard through the skin of his neck. “That’s what happened. That’s why—”
“I’m not saying you’re lying. I’m not saying that ain’t what happened. I’m saying it’s not your fault. Okay? You should be talking to people. I’m proud of you for talking to people.”
The skin beneath his nails stung. He pressed his forehead into the back of the couch.
“Are you okay?” asked Natsuo.
Shouto’s voice came out a shuddering whisper. “I’m going to kill him, Natsuo.”
A pause. “Buddy.”
“I have to do some things first. But I’m— It’s going to fix things. It’ll make things better.”
“Not for you,” said Natsuo. “Not if you try that.”
“I’m not just going to try. I’m going to do it. It’s going to happen. Then things will be okay. You want it, too.”
“Shouto, listen—”
“You said you did,” said Shouto. “You don’t remember? You told me in the car when you picked me up from the hospital after the USJ attack. You said you might try to kill him if you weren’t Quirkless. Were you joking?”
Natsuo was silent.
Shouto felt someone pull his hand away from his neck. He looked up to see Aizawa, his face grim. “Give me the phone,” he said.
Shouto obeyed.
Keeping his grip on Shouto’s wrist, Aizawa sat beside him. He spoke into the phone. “Natsuo, it’s Aizawa. Let me call you back in a few minutes.”
Aizawa hung up and put the phone on the coffee table. He stared at Shouto with a hardened expression for a while longer than Shouto would’ve preferred. He’d never been unsettled by Aizawa’s all-white false eye before, but right now, it seemed like it was speaking directly to him—
You did this.
You.
“Were you serious?” Aizawa asked. “What you just told your brother?”
He should say no. That he was just high right now, wasn’t thinking clearly, that of course he didn’t have it in him to ever take the life of another human being.
“I’m scared,” said Shouto.
Aizawa sighed. He let go of Shouto’s hand, and Shouto let it drop into his lap. “I don’t think that weed is doing you any favors.”
“No, I mean—”
“I know,” said Aizawa. “I know it’s all the time. But you’re safe right now. You’re doing what you can right now. You’re not going to save the world by hurting yourself.”
Shouto lowered his eyes. The fingernails of the hand that had scratched his neck were bloody.
Aizawa went into the kitchen and returned carrying a tray. Shouto was a bit surprised to see that Aizawa even owned a tea tray—he didn’t seem like the type to entertain guests. Then again, Present Mic also lived here.
Aizawa set the tray on the long coffee table in front of Shouto. It had three cups on it. “Take a break,” he said, picking up one of the cups. “TV remote’s in the drawer there. I’m taking this back to Mic.”
Aizawa went back into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. Shouto had no desire to watch television of any sort, so he focused on trying to ignore the low voices coming from the bedroom. He heard Mic say “that motherfucker—that’s his fucking kid—” before he was finally unable to keep pretending they were discussing the weather or something similarly boring.
They were talking about him. They were trying to figure out what to do with him.
He found the remote and turned on the TV.
Eventually, the coat still draped over his head grew heavy. He balled it up and used it as a pillow as he lay down across the couch, now nearly eye-to-eye with the sea of cat hair woven into the fabric. A slim gray cat jumped onto the couch and curled up near Shouto’s feet. Shouto pulled his legs up to avoid contact.
He stared at the teacups in front of him until his eyes closed on their own.
###
It was Mic that woke him this time, his voice the softest Shouto had ever heard it. “Heya. Little buddy.”
They’d turned off the lights except for a lamp in the corner of the room. The cat was gone. Shouto blinked up at Mic, trying to clear his vision. His long hair was dry now, tied up in a messy bun. He was wearing a pink tank top and Midnight-themed pajama pants.
“Guest bed’s more comfy,” Mic said. “Let’s get you set up there, hm?”
Shouto followed Mic into the guest bedroom. It looked recently occupied—a scratched-up All Might poster taped above the bed, a cheap model of the ship from Red’s Ocean, a short stack of health and fitness magazines on the floor. Aizawa was moving a couple dumbbells and an exercise mat into the closet. He’d changed into a plain white t-shirt and gym shorts, which was somehow more jarring than Mic’s current outfit.
“I changed the sheets,” Aizawa said. “There’s an extra blanket in the closet if you need it.”
Shouto’s arms hung uselessly at his sides. He felt like he should be apologizing.
“We’ll find you a set of clean clothes to sleep in,” Mic said.
“I’m fine,” said Shouto.
Aizawa shot him a look. “Take your binder off, at least. You’ll damage your ribs sleeping in it.”
Shouto felt his face heat. He looked away.
“Are you planning on going to your internship tomorrow?” Aizawa asked.
He’d been trying not to think about it. “I guess.”
“Take the day off to get things sorted out with your siblings if you need to.” Aizawa grabbed a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt from the closet and dropped them on the bed. “I can give you a make-up assignment.”
It was tempting to take the day off. But Bakugou would wonder what was going on if Shouto wasn’t there, and Shouto didn’t want to have to deal with his questions on top of everything else. Plus… well, Shouto was trying to get stronger. Faster. As much as Hawks annoyed him, he did have the speed and know-how that Shouto would need to kill Endeavor. “No. I’ll go.”
“Take a shower at some point, then. You need to get that weed smell off you before you go anywhere. Leave your Hero costume on the table in the hall and I’ll wash it in the morning.” Aizawa closed the closet door. “Bathroom’s just to the left down the hall. I set out a new toothbrush.”
“Thanks,” Shouto whispered. He swallowed, tried to speak louder. “I’m sorry. For this. I’ll have things sorted out before tomorrow night.”
“We’ll talk later,” Aizawa said in a tone of voice that Shouto guessed was meant to end the conversation.
Aizawa left the room. Mic hovered like he was unsure of something, lanky arms folded across his chest. He said finally, “You ain’t disturbing anybody, Shouto. Just wanted to make sure you knew that.”
Turning his back to Mic, Shouto walked over to the bed. Aizawa had put his backpack down there. Shouto unzipped it, mostly to look like he had something to do.
“Doesn’t always feel great figuring out who you are,” Mic continued. “You had to sort that out earlier than most people. If nobody else is, I’m proud of ya for holding onto that. So we’re here for you if you need us.”
It hurt more than it should’ve—Mic’s I’m proud of ya. It hurt like scraping the scab off an unhealed wound.
Mic was not the person he wanted to hear those words from.
Shouto knew that there was nothing to be proud of here. He’d made poor decisions. Chosen his own comfort over his siblings’ futures. The idea of switching back to his old name and pronouns made him nauseous now, but maybe if he’d never given in in the first place, maybe if he’d kept those thoughts buried, then maybe he’d be on a better path today, maybe his sister could say that she was…
He closed his eyes.
She wouldn’t mean it.
“Well.” He heard Mic pat the doorframe. “G’night, kiddo.”
Shouto didn’t cry even after Mic left him alone in the room. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to. He did, desperately—felt the humiliation and grief clawing at his throat, making his head throb. He hunched over the bed, elbows digging pits into the comforter, the sharp wooden platform biting into the dip beneath his kneecaps.
He tried. Thought of his father’s face, his sister’s distance. Made a list of the friends at school most likely to turn on him once they found out everything he was. Wondered what it would be like for everybody else if he wasn’t here anymore. The pain of the thoughts was addicting enough, and it certainly had the potential to snowball into tears.
Nothing came.
Nothing.
Fuck.
He did remember to take his binder off. That, at least, eased the ache in his ribs.
Notes:
I took my friend Ginny to meet my family a couple days ago, and we did some unprotected hand holding as we took a walk outside. My mom saw us, cornered us, and asked if we'd fucked in the bushes. So we left to go buy some rocks :)
On another note: I got my autism diagnosis!!! In celebration, I got drunk and shaved my arms.
Chapter 56: Shouto Gets Commissioned to Make a Frozen-Themed Monster Truck Ice Castle
Summary:
Some people are nice, some people are mean, and some people just really want an ice castle to put their monster trucks in.
Featuring: Present Mic, Shinsou and the Orb (married), Bakugou, Fuyumi, Mitsuki, and some really weird first-graders.
Notes:
CW: transphobia/deadnaming, homelessness, emotional abuse; DISCUSSION OF: drugs/drug abuse, past sexual assault, murder, abortion rights (just mentioned)
This chapter (specifically the Mitsuki section) is dedicated to the grizzled, swears-like-a-sailor, red-headed, Mississippian, middle-aged lesbian nurse who--in the horrible year after I came out to my parents--administered my t-shots for free, overpaid me to pet-sit for her and her wife, and brought clothes to the ER when I was hospitalized for suicidal ideation. I sent her a card for Mother's Day that year.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The next morning, Shouto woke up to faint pop music and a full bladder.
He sat up, letting the strange blanket pool around his lap, blinking against the gentle overhead air conditioning. The room looked different in the weak morning light, and it took a full ten seconds for his memory of last night to return—he was in the guest bedroom at Aizawa and Present Mic’s apartment. After being kicked out of his own house and having a full-blown meltdown in his teachers’ living room.
Shouto’s tongue smacked against the roof of his mouth, dry and cottony. He grimaced. Nothing could perfectly replicate the sour taste of regret and mortification in the morning, but the day-old marijuana smoke coating his tongue got pretty close.
He got up and went to take a shower and brush his teeth. True to his word, Aizawa had left a new toothbrush on the sink. His Hero costume had also been washed and folded. After cleaning up, he put his costume on and walked to the kitchen.
“Morning,” Mic said when Shouto walked in. Mic was sitting at the table and drinking from a mug decorated with a pixelated rendering of a t-rex and the words, in English, TRANS RIGHTS OR I BITES. He was still in his pajamas, but he’d pulled his hair back into a ponytail. “Get much sleep? Heard you rolling around quite a bit last night.”
The Orb was on the kitchen table. Shouto picked it up. “Insomnia.”
“Happens to the best of us, doesn’t it? Aizawa had to run to the school for an errand. Sit down and I’ll make you some breakfast.” Mic stood and turned down the volume on the radio. “You drink coffee?”
Shouto sat, staring at the mug Mic had left on the table. I BITES. Shouto didn’t think that was proper English grammar, but Mic was an English teacher, so he probably knew that already. “Not the hot kind.”
Mic opened the fridge. “We have juice and milk, too.”
Shouto leaned forward, squinting to see what they had in their fridge. Fuyumi had told him it was rude to be picky at someone else’s house, but drinking a strange-tasting brand of milk could dampen his appetite for the whole day.
Seeing him, Mic swung the fridge door open a little wider. “Tropicana orange juice and Meiji organic milk.”
“The… milk,” said Shouto. “Please.”
Mic poured a glass of milk and set it in front of Shouto. Shouto thanked him quietly. Mic hummed acknowledgement and started to work.
Shouto had half a mind to lay down his head right there on the table and just listen to the movement. The pop of the oven knobs as Mic adjusted the temperature, the rustling of the wax paper covering a stick of butter, the squeak of the refrigerator door, the clink of a spoon against the sink. It had calmed him to listen to Fuyumi cook when they were home alone together, maybe because he knew that cooking calmed Fuyumi.
He squeezed the Orb and wondered what his sister was doing right now. Getting dressed for work? Packing her lunch? Putting makeup on over whatever bruise Endeavor had given her yesterday? He hoped she wasn’t badly hurt.
Mic interrupted his thoughts. “Looking at that mug? I got that for Aizawa for his birthday.”
He’d stopped thinking about the mug a minute ago, but now that Mic brought it up, it was bothering him again. “The… subject-verb agreement doesn’t look right.”
“Oo, nice catch! It’s an English meme, so the subject-verb agreement is a bit off to make it rhyme.”
Shouto blinked. His head felt fuzzy. “Does that make it funny?”
“Well, it’s supposed to.”
“I don’t get it.”
Mic sighed. “Yeah, neither did he.”
Shouto expected Mic to bring up what had happened last night—that was what small talk was for, wasn’t it? A cushion before criticism?—but Mic fell silent and cooked quietly. It went on for so long that Shouto started wondering if Mic was angry at him for some reason. Maybe he didn’t like Shouto watching him while he cooked. Should he have waited in the living room instead?
But then Mic spoke again. “How are you and the cats getting on?”
“Getting on what?” Shouto asked.
“Getting along.”
That still didn’t make much sense. Was he supposed to be doing icebreaker activities with Aizawa’s cats? What would that even look like? “They’re fine.”
“You’re free to pet them,” said Mic. “Do you like cats? You seem like a cat person.”
What was that supposed to mean? “Bakugou has a cat.”
“Does he really?”
“Baby cat,” said Shouto. “He named it Trebuchet.”
Mic laughed. “Hell of a name for a kitten. What breed is he? She?”
“It’s black. I don’t know the breeds.”
“I’m not great with breeds, either. Aizawa can rattle them off like a Wikipedia page.”
Shouto startled when he felt something brush his left leg. He looked under the table to see an orange cat rubbing against him. He shifted his leg away, but the cat followed, so he pulled both feet up onto his chair. The cat gave an offended meow.
“I can put her in the other room,” said Mic.
Oh, Mic was watching. That was embarrassing. “It’s okay.”
“Cats make you nervous?”
“No,” Shouto said.
“It’s okay if they do. They’re not for everybody.”
“I like them,” said Shouto. He kept his heels planted firmly on the edge of his seat. “I like watching them.”
“But not touching?”
“I like watching them,” he said again.
The front door opened. Shouto put his feet down and looked up, expecting to see Aizawa.
He saw Shinsou.
Shinsou dropped his duffel bag. “Why the fuck are you here and who said you could violate my Orb?”
“Why are you here?” Shouto asked.
“Motherfucker, I live here.”
“You… what?”
“Hitoshi, the door,” said Mic. “Don’t want Misha to get out again. Thought you were going straight from Kirishima’s to the internship?”
Shinsou shut the door. “Forgot my meds here. Don’t you have a big-ass house to eat breakfast in, Todoroki?”
“Not anymore,” said Shouto.
“Huh?”
“I’m disowned until further notice.”
“Wow,” said Shinsou. “You’re just a bundle of trauma, aren’t you? Congrats.”
“Thanks. Always wanted to be homeless.”
Shinsou snorted. He picked up his duffel bag and headed toward the back of the apartment. “I’m gonna go take my meds. Stop fingering my Orb.”
Shouto waited until Shinsou was out of sight to ask Mic, “Why does Shinsou live here?”
“We’re fostering him for the time being,” said Mic.
Shinsou was a foster child? Shouto had assumed he came from a supportive family. Seemed like it would be difficult to keep up a steady hormone schedule while jumping from home to home. There were already so few medical clinics in Japan that catered to trans youth.
Shinsou reemerged wearing his Hero costume. He snatched the Orb from Shouto’s hands before dropping into a chair.
“You missed Daddy, didn’t you?” Shinsou cooed to the Orb. “Did that bad man hurt you? It’s okay, he’s never going to touch you again.”
Shouto released a breath. “Is there a reason you hate me?”
“Maybe,” said Shinsou.
“Is it because I’m rich?”
“Partially.”
“The most valuable thing I own right now is a roll of gauze,” said Shouto. “Can you stop hating me?”
Shinsou pressed his fingers into the Orb. “Why do you care if I hate you?”
“I want to talk to you,” said Shouto. “I think you want to talk to me.”
Shinsou looked up at Shouto. His mouth twisted.
“You’re on thin fucking ice,” Shinsou finally said. “The moment your net worth goes over three thousand yen, you’re out.”
“The UA uniform costs more than that,” said Shouto.
“Watch it, rich kid. I have some ground rules for this not-enemy-ship.”
“Okay,” Shouto said.
“Don’t touch the Orb.”
Shouto waited. When Shinsou didn’t say anything else, he asked, “Is that—”
“Yeah, that’s all,” said Shinsou. “No Orb-touching. The Orb is mine. We’re in love and the wedding is in August. You’re not invited.”
“I like the Orb,” said Shouto.
“But do you love her?”
“‘Her’?” asked Shouto.
“Yeah. What about it?”
“I thought you were gay.”
“Pronouns aren’t equivalent to gender,” said Shinsou. “What are you, conservative? You hate equal rights? You hate abortion, too? You want all women to die?”
“I love abortion and women,” Shouto said. “I think we should do more abortion and more women.”
“You think we should do more women? Womanizer much?”
This was the most confusing conversation he’d ever had the misfortune of participating in. “Not… us specifically. Probably I don’t like women.”
“Misogynist. Figures.”
“Hitoshi,” said Mic. “Let’s lay off a little, buddy. He had a rough night.”
After breakfast, Shouto gathered his things and headed out. He was surprised to see Shinsou waiting for him by the elevator.
“Not taking the stairs?” asked Shinsou. “That’s not very grind-set of you.”
Shouto pressed the button to go down. His legs were still sore from all his walking yesterday.
They got in the elevator. Shinsou waited until the doors closed to say, “My room smells like weed.”
“Sorry,” said Shouto. “Can you not tell Bakugou about it? Please.”
“Does he care? Didn’t you get drunk together once?”
“No, we—that was just me. Bakugou just sat there and made sure I didn’t drown in the shower.”
“You have a problem.”
Shouto shrugged. The elevator stopped with a shuddering jolt, and they exited.
They walked in silence for a while. Shouto really wanted to talk to him, but he couldn’t think of any happy-medium questions on the conversational spectrum between What’s your favorite number? and Do you also harbor a deep, festering hatred toward the systems that separate Heroes and Villains into separate, immutable categories, allowing no room for nuance or upward mobility?
Something Fuyumi would ask, maybe? What kinds of questions did Fuyumi ask? Is your job going well? No, Shinsou didn’t have a job. How is your wife doing? Shinsou also didn’t have a wife. I saw on the news that it’s going to rain later today. That wasn’t even a question.
Shinsou was the one who ended up breaking the silence. “I won’t tell Bakugou about the weed if you don’t tell everybody about my living situation.”
“Okay,” said Shouto. Say something. “It’s nice. I think.”
“What’s nice? Weed?”
“That… you can live with them. It seems nice there.”
Strangely, Shinsou said nothing.
Had Shouto said something offensive? He tried to correct himself. “Maybe it’s not. I don’t know.”
“No, it’s fine,” said Shinsou. “It’s… I mean, there are worse places to end up in the latter stages of CVRP.”
It was Shouto’s turn to be silent.
Shinsou looked at him. “You don’t know that acronym, do you.”
“I do,” said Shouto.
“Then what is it?”
“I’m thinking. I’m remembering.”
Shinsou gave a derisive huff and looked away. “You don’t know it.”
“I do know it,” Shouto said. “I just have too many acronyms in my head. CVRP. It tastes bad.”
“It’s not a food.”
“No, I mean the acronym gives me a bad taste. I’ve seen it on forms.”
“Doesn’t your sister cook for you? Quit eating your dad’s paperwork.”
“I’m not eating—” He remembered. “Child Villain Rehabilitation Program.”
Shinsou kept his gaze forward. “There you go.”
“See. I told you.” He tapped Shinsou’s arm, then immediately wished he hadn’t. What if Shinsou didn’t like touch? “I do know it. I know things. I know things about it.”
“Well, I fucking hope you do,” said Shinsou, “since your dad’s agency funds the fuck out of them.”
Ah.
There it was.
“Is that why you don’t like me?” asked Shouto. “Actually?”
“Yup,” said Shinsou.
“Oh. Okay.” Shouto paused. “I thought maybe you… I didn’t know if it was something about me. If I accidentally said something mean.”
“You do act pretty arrogant about your fighting skills.”
“It’s not something I’m proud of,” said Shouto. “It’s something I had to get good at to survive. I didn’t realize that… I guess other people do stake their identity on their fighting skills. Bakugou does. But I didn’t think that you did.”
“Why? Because I fucking suck at it?”
“Because you have other things to be proud of about yourself. You’re cool.”
Shinsou snorted. “I’m cool?”
“Yes. I think so. I like to be around you. I like to talk to you. I think probably you could be proud of being someone like that.”
For a moment, Shinsou was quiet. Then— “So when I told you about the Child Villain Rehabilitation Program just now. You did hear that.”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“And you had no follow-up questions. No thoughts or concerns. That information went into your ears and you thought, wow, this has zero implications.”
“Did you want me to ask questions?”
Shinsou hooked his thumb under his backpack strap. “Just—most people are a lot less casual about it. Asking if I fucking murdered somebody with my quirk or whatever.”
“I wouldn’t care if you did,” said Shouto.
“I didn’t.”
“But if you did.”
Shinsou looked at him. Looked away. “Okay. Do you—?” Looked back at him again. “Okay, no, that’s actually fucked up. If someone told you they killed someone. You really wouldn’t give a shit?”
Shouto shrugged. “I have a friend who’s killed other people. Doesn’t make him a bad person.”
“A friend?”
“Yes.”
A beat. Then, “Our age?”
“Yes.”
“People.” Shinsou had the expression of someone who’d just been unwillingly shown someone else’s bad case of toenail fungus. “People, plural. Plural people.”
He wasn’t sure why Shinsou was surprised. “Have you not talked to kids who’ve killed people? At the rehabilitation center?”
“I mean, yeah, through quirk accidents. I didn’t get friendly with kids who did it on purpose. Never met anyone who did it more than once. Are you friends with a fucking serial killer?”
“He doesn’t like doing it,” said Shouto.
Shinsou’s eyebrows shot up. “He’s still doing it? As a regular thing?”
Shouto hesitated.
“What the fuck,” said Shinsou.
“He’s nice,” said Shouto. “He’s really nice.”
“Yeah, I bet. Psychopaths can act pretty fucking charming.”
“He’s not like that. It would be fine if he were, I think. But he’s not.”
“It—” Shinsou laughed through the words. Not a good laugh. “It’d be fine?”
“They don’t choose it,” said Shouto. “It’s genetic pre-disposure and trauma. It’s an empathy disorder. They don’t control that.”
“They can control their fucking actions.”
“He can’t. My friend can’t. He has people who—he can’t control it. He’s not a bad person.”
Shinsou rubbed his nose. “Does Aizawa know?”
“He knows.”
“Why the fuck aren’t you expelled yet?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “Probably he thinks I’d off myself if I got expelled.”
“Would you?”
“I don’t know.”
Shinsou dropped his hand. Shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever told someone outside of rehab about CVRP and had them respond with something more fucked.”
“Sorry,” said Shouto. “Probably I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Yeah. Probably not. Why’d you think it was okay to tell me that?”
Well, this felt shitty. “I don’t know.”
“Because I owe you for getting me the internship with Hawks?”
“What? No. I just think—”
“You don’t think,” Shinsou said. “I’m still technically in CVRP. They’re only letting me finish it outside of the physical rehabilitation center because I’m living with Pro Heroes and doing community service. My grades and extracurriculars and free time are heavily monitored. Maybe you can have fun with your weed and alcohol and psychopath friends without facing consequences, but if I so much as stay out past curfew without permission, my whole fucking career is gone. So thanks for the internship, but don’t try to get me involved in your shit. I don’t want to even hear about it.”
They fell into an uncomfortable silence. They’d boarded the subway—with Shinsou wordlessly passing his subway card back for Shouto to use after going through the turnstile—before Shinsou glanced at him and sighed.
“It’s not personal,” Shinsou said. His voice stayed low on the quiet train. “I just have to look out for myself right now.”
“I know,” said Shouto.
“This is the best quality of life I’ve had since my quirk manifested. I had to work hard to get here. I can’t lose it again.”
“I understand.”
“We can still talk,” Shinsou said. “Just not about that stuff.”
“Okay.”
Shinsou glanced at him again. Look away, giving an amused huff through his nose. “You’re pissed off.”
He was hurt, maybe, but what right did he have to feel that way? Shinsou hadn’t said anything wrong—it wasirresponsible for Shouto to tell outsiders about Deku. “I’m not.”
“’Cause I told you to shut up? What, never had anyone tell you to shut up before?”
He couldn’t tell if Shinsou was joking. “I’m not pissed off.”
Shinsou didn’t press it.
Bakugou was waiting on the bench outside Hawks’s agency. He called to Shouto as he and Shinsou approached. “Oi, Fuckface. Why didn’t you answer my text last night?”
“I broke my phone,” said Shouto.
“How?”
He was glad to see Bakugou—it was comforting to know that Endeavor hadn’t yet managed to restrict Shouto’s access to his school friends—but Shouto was not in the mood for questions. “Was it important?”
“Hah?”
“Your text.”
Bakugou glanced at Shinsou. “Nah,” he said.
“You can tell me now.”
Bakugou stood and collected his gauntlets from the bench. He started toward the agency entrance.
Was he angry? Goddammit, was everybody angry at Shouto? “Bakugou.”
“S’fine,” said Bakugou. “Wasn’t important.”
###
The second day of the internship looked a lot like yesterday afternoon had—a lot of trying to keep up with Hawks, a lot of failing to do so. Shouto zoned out for most of it. None of it seemed important, or even real.
This whole kicked-out-of-the-house thing probably wasn’t even about his being trans. Not entirely, at least. Endeavor wasn’t an ally in any sense of the word, but it also wasn’t like his opinions on queer people were tied to any sort of religious or moral conviction. This was about Shouto having an identity—any identity—independent of Endeavor.
This was about control.
How was Shouto supposed to fight that?
“Oi,” said Bakugou. “What’s wrong with you?”
He looked at Bakugou. It took a moment for him to connect the question with the context in which it had been asked—Shouto was sitting across from Bakugou in a restaurant booth while Hawks and Shinsou were waiting at the counter for the group’s lunch. Shouto hadn’t said anything in the several minutes they’d been sitting there. “Nothing,” he told Bakugou.
Bakugou’s eyes narrowed. “You ain’t payin’ attention to shit.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You ain’t. You’re not talkin’, either.”
“I’m talking,” said Shouto. “As much as I usually do.”
“What happened? Somethin’ happen last night? This morning?”
“No.”
Bakugou gave Shouto a long look, his tongue poking at one of his upper canines—not an I don’t believe you look as much as an I’m waiting look.
“I didn’t sleep well,” Shouto provided, and which was true.
The staring continued.
“That’s all,” Shouto said, which was… not quite as true.
Bakugou reached across the table and flipped Shouto’s collar down. “So scratches on your neck are a symptom of insomnia now, hah?”
Shouto swatted Bakugou’s hand away, tugged his collar back up. His face heated. “Stop it.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
Bakugou withdrew, but his expression didn’t change. “I ain’t lied to you a quarter as much as you keep lyin’ to me. Whatever. Just save all the big reveals for the next time you get drunk or have a panic attack in front of me, I guess.”
Why was Bakugou angry? If their positions had been switched, Shouto would’ve let the topic go after the initial “Nothing” response. “I don’t have to tell you everything. I’m not lying just by not telling you something.”
“Yeah, if the thing you ain’t sayin’ is what you had for dinner last night. Not if you’re keeping shit secret so the other person will think something about you that ain’t true.”
Oh, so now keeping things to himself was manipulative? “You can think what you want. I’m not forcing you to think anything.”
“You got a fucked-up idea of what friendship should look like,” Bakugou said. “Normal friends tell each other shit. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
Shouto stabbed his straw into his drink. “We’re not normal friends.”
“Fuck’s that s’posed to mean?”
“We don’t tell each other some things. I don’t tell you some things and you don’t tell me some things. It’s fine.”
“I tell you all kinds of shit,” said Bakugou. “What ain’t I tellin’ you?”
“Things. About you.”
“What things?”
“Things,” said Shouto. “I don’t think you want me to say it.”
Briefly, Bakugou’s eyes darted toward Hawks and Shinsou at the counter. He shifted in his seat.
“You’re figuring things out,” Shouto said. “It’s fine. I’m figuring things out, too. We don’t have to talk about everything.”
“Shut up,” said Bakugou.
“Oh, I’d love to. But are you sure you’ll be okay if I stop talking? You’re not going to die if I don’t tell you about my latest bowel movement or my experience with corneal hypoxia?”
“Shut up,” Bakugou said again. He paused. “What’d you get corneal hypoxia for?”
“Left my contacts in for three days.”
“What the fuck? Why?”
Shouto shrugged. “I don’t like touching my eyes.”
“You’re gonna go blind if you don’t take care of your eyes.”
“Maybe I want to be blind. Then I won’t have to look at you.”
Bakugou glared.
“I’m kidding,” said Shouto. “I like looking at you.”
Bakugou tried to kick him under the table, but he missed and kicked the wooden platform under the seat with a startling thump. He swore, loudly, and the family sitting it the booth behind Shouto turned to look.
“Sorry,” Shouto told the family before turning back to Bakugou. Bakugou looked pained, probably from jamming his toes, but it made Shouto feel bad anyway. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”
Bakugou gave a heavy, angry-sounding exhale. He leaned back in his seat, folded his arms, and stuck out his lower jaw, keeping his head turned to the side and his gaze very purposefully fixed on not-Shouto.
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. “Don’t be mad. Please.”
“I’m thinkin’,” Bakugou muttered.
“That you’re mad at me?”
Bakugou grunted.
Shouto leaned a little to the side to try to see Bakugou’s face. “That… you love me so much and want to kiss me on the mouth?”
Bakugou’s jaw twitched. He said nothing.
“No?”
“I’m gonna be thinkin’ about it,” said Bakugou. “Until you tell me. I’m just gonna be thinkin’. You’re gonna make your dumb jokes and then you’ll go home and maybe you’ll be fine, but I’ll still be thinkin’.”
“You don’t have to think about it,” Shouto said.
“Yeah, I do, ’cause shit happens if I don’t. People going missin’ and tryna off themselves.”
“Correlation isn’t causation,” said Shouto. “It won’t help to think about it.”
“That don’t—you ain’t listenin’. I’m sayin’ that I gotta think about it. That’s just what…” Bakugou’s eyes flitted around the room. He scratched his head, face scrunching like he was looking into a bright light. “I gotta. S’what I’m sayin’.”
It reminded Shouto of what Ando had described in the hospital as their “thought rituals,” and Shouto was not pleased by the idea that Bakugou might be experiencing anything remotely similar. He especially didn’t like the idea that he was the one making Bakugou feel worse. Maybe if he could tell Bakugou just enough of the truth to calm him down…
“I tried weed,” said Shouto.
Bakugou’s eyes snapped back to him. “What?”
“Weed. It wasn’t good. I had a panic attack.”
Bakugou stared at him. “Who the fuck is giving you weed?”
“Some guy,” said Shouto.
“A Villain? Dabi? Did Izuku give it to you?”
“No. I didn’t know him.”
Bakugou searched his face for a few seconds. Then he shook his head in amazement. “Do you not give a shit about your brain development? Your concussions juiced your brain and now you got Dumb Fuck Disorder, is that what happened?”
“There are nicer ways to talk about ADHD.”
“I’ll beat you up. Did no one ever tell you not to take drugs from strangers? Why didn’t you call me?”
Shouto was confused. “To get weed?”
“No, dumbass, for—’cause obviously you were feelin’ like shit if you went out lookin’ for it. You’re s’posed to call me when you feel like shit.”
“I am?” said Shouto. “When was that established?”
“It’s implied.”
“No, it’s not. Was I here for that character arc? Did you have a character arc without me?”
“I’m tellin’ you now,” said Bakugou. “I’d rather you annoy me for a few minutes than have to go shopping for clothes to wear to your funeral.”
Shouto sighed. “Weed doesn’t kill you, Bakugou.”
“I know how it goes. First it’s weed, then it’s crack cocaine—”
“It’s really not.”
“—then you’re dead in a fuckin’ ditch.” Bakugou tossed his arm over the back of his seat. “That’s how it is.”
“You don’t know anything about drugs,” said Shouto.
“You don’t know anything about anything. You don’t know shit. Shut up.”
“I will.”
“Shut the fuck up. Are you gonna call me if it happens again?”
Shouto took a sip of his drink. He knew Bakugou was trying to be considerate, but Shouto just really, really did not want to think right now. He wanted to go home and fall asleep to a nature documentary and not wake up for a very long time. But he couldn’t do that, so here was the next best thing: drinking his sugary soda and mindlessly saying shit to piss off his best friend.
“I told you,” Shouto said, chewing on his straw. “My phone is broken.”
###
Hawks had a meeting scheduled for later in the afternoon, so the internship finished up an hour early. Shouto borrowed money for a train ticket from Shinsou and headed toward the opposite end of the city. If he was going to talk to Fuyumi, he’d have to visit her at the elementary school.
Fuyumi’s school seemed smaller and squatter than it had the last time he’d visited a couple years ago. After pressing the intercom button at the gate, he looked around. He recognized her kei car in the parking lot, quite at home with the other small and inexpensive vehicles parked around it, and it made him wonder if the reason she’d bought it was to fit in with her coworkers.
Natsuo’s safe space had been the university. Fuyumi’s was the elementary school. She’d built such a careful, peaceful life for herself in this space. If Shouto kept rebelling against Endeavor, would he end up ruining things for Fuyumi like he had for Natsuo?
The com fizzed. A woman’s voice: “Hello?”
God, he needed to snap out of it. “Hi. I need to see Todoroki Fuyumi.”
“Friend or relation?”
“Relation. Brother.”
The voice sounded confused. “Natsuo?”
They probably all knew who Natsuo was here—he ate lunch with her at the school when he could. Shouto’s voice wasn’t nearly as deep as Natsuo’s, though. “No. Shouto.”
There was some shuffling on the other side. It took a minute for the voice to come back to the phone. “Sorry. Todoroki…?”
“Shouto,” he repeated. “Todoroki Shouto.”
“…Right. If you’ll stop by the desk for a visitor badge, please.”
The gate unlocked. Shouto had to slide it open himself, which was a bit of an ordeal—it was heavy and rusted in place. He ended up opening it just enough so he could squeeze through.
The middle-aged lady at the front desk looked him over as he changed from his outdoor shoes to indoor ones. The way her expression turned wary made him wonder if he should’ve changed out of his Hero costume before coming here, but he couldn’t imagine why it would be a problem. Didn’t little kids love Heroes? Maybe the receptionist was worried that it would cause a commotion.
The receptionist didn’t greet him, so Shouto spoke first. “Do I need to check in?”
Wordlessly, she set a clipboard in front of him. Shouto filled it out with his name and time of arrival and gave it back to her.
She took it without looking at him. “Do you have an ID?”
An ID? Did they require that for minors? He rifled through his wallet until he found his UA ID, which had been issued before the start of the school year. It was lucky that he even had it on him—most students didn’t carry it with them, and he only had it because he kept forgetting to take it out of his wallet. He handed it to the receptionist. She looked at it, then at the clipboard, then at the ID again.
“Is the ID okay?” asked Shouto.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “The names have to match in our system.”
Shouto felt his face heating. He’d forgotten about the name discrepancy. “You want the… on the sign-in sheet—”
“Legal name, please.”
He took the clipboard, crossed out his name, and wrote Todoroki Shiyo on the next line down. He wondered what “system” she was referring to—the receptionist didn’t seem to be doing any work on the old computer in front of her—but he didn’t question it.
Finally, the receptionist handed his ID back with a name tag sticker that read Ten Minute Visitor Pass. She’d written Todoroki Shiyo on it in marker. “If you’ll bring that by the front desk before you leave, please.”
Shouto held the sticker for a moment, frozen. He grabbed a pen from the mug on her desk, scribbled out Shiyo as best he could, and wrote Shouto underneath it. Then he applied the sticker to his shirt and started toward Fuyumi’s classroom.
He almost ran into a someone who was passing by the classroom door as he entered. Shouto recognized her from pictures as his sister’s teaching assistant—a petite woman about a year Fuyumi’s junior who dressed like she’d searched “fun kindergarten teacher outfits” on Google and bought the top results en masse. “Sorry,” he said. “Is Fuyumi here?”
She looked up at him, eyes wide. “Oh,” she said. Her eyes went to his nametag, and she fiddled with the plastic folders she was holding. “Oh. Um—she ran to the bathroom.”
Why did she look nervous? “I’ll wait.”
The woman opened her mouth like she was about to protest, but then she closed it again and hurried off to tend to a young child who was waving their hand in the air.
“Are you Fuyumi-san’s sister?” a small boy with marker on his face yelled from across the room. “You look like a boy. Are you a boy?”
Shouto tried not to meet any of their eyes, looking above them at all the artwork on the walls. He was already starting to miss Sakura’s silence. “Yes.”
“My cousin said she googled you and you were a girl, but if you weren’t a girl then she was going to marry you.”
Jesus Christ. “Okay.”
“Are you going to marry her now?”
“No.”
“What happened to your face?” asked a girl. “Did you burn your face on the stove? I burned my finger on the stove once. I got an All Might band-aid. It was stuck on my finger for so long that the band-aid goo started leaking out, and then I got a rash. My mom said she was gonna sue All Might, but guess what? She was just joking.”
A second boy said, “My dad says you should be able to afford better scar treatment. He says there are lasers that can zap your skin off and put on better skin. Do you not have any lasers at your house?”
Shouto glanced at the assistant, but she stayed hunched over the child she was helping. “I don’t,” Shouto said.
The second boy nodded solemnly. “You should put lasers on your face. It would look better.”
The first boy yelled, “You should make lasers come out of your eyes!”
“She actually sued the band-aid company,” the girl continued. “But she lost and now my dad is divorcing her.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“He said she’s a crazy bitch and he hopes she gets caught doing meth so she loses custody of me.” Her eyes moved down. “Are you missing a finger? Once a horse bit my finger. My mom said she was gonna sue the farm, but guess what?”
“What,” said Shouto, flatly.
“They were a limited liability company and had legal protection in the case of negative externalities,” said the girl, and burst into a fit of giggles.
Shouto felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Fuyumi. Her face held none of the composure—forced or otherwise—that it usually did. She was wearing makeup, the foundation heavier in some places than others. She’d done a good job with it, but makeup couldn’t hide the red in her eyes, and he could still see hints of something blue and purple covering several inches of her left cheek and jaw. She looked like she was about to cry.
Anger flared hot in his torso, and he thought, I am going to kill him. I am going to kill him.
Fuyumi grabbed his arms like she was trying to keep him from falling over. Her whisper was urgent. “Are you okay?”
It took some strength to swallow the anger and keep his voice low. “I’m okay. What about you?”
“Just… my jaw’s a bit wonky, but that doesn’t matter.” She sounded out-of-breath. “I’m so sorry, I—Endeavor took my phone away so I couldn’t call anybody or get any calls. He wouldn’t let me leave the house to look for you, and Natsuo couldn’t get ahold of me until I got here this morning. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Endeavor, she’d said. Not Dad. That was a new development.
“Yumi-saaaaaan,” a boy called. “Is that your sister? I want her to make me an ice castle like Elsa.”
Fuyumi’s grip on his arms loosened. “This is my brother,” she said. She paused—like the defensiveness in her own voice had surprised her—before continuing in a less aggressive tone. “You can call him Shouto-san.”
“Can Shouto-san make me an ice castle like Elsa? And I want an ice garage for my monster trucks. Can he make ice monster trucks?”
“Not right now,” said Fuyumi. “You guys sit tight while I—”
“Fuyumi,” said the assistant. She walked toward them, looking at Shouto without smiling before addressing Fuyumi. “Do you, um, want to take your sister to the breakroom to talk? I can watch the kids.”
“Thank you,” Fuyumi said, in the least thankful way possible. The patience in her voice was stretched hair-thin. “My brother and I can just talk over here, if you’ll keep the kids occupied.”
The teaching assistant chewed her lips, looked over her shoulder at the children. Then she leaned in toward Fuyumi and lowered her voice. “I’m just worried about… her being in the same room as—”
“The kids are perfectly safe with him in the same room,” Fuyumi snapped.
The assistant looked startled at Fuyumi’s raised voice. It took her a second to get started again. “W-well, I’m sure, but she—”
“He.”
“Yumi,” Shouto muttered. Many of the kids had quieted their own conversations and were looking on, interested.
The assistant tried again. “It’s just that if the parents hear… you know. It’ll make trouble.”
“Let it make trouble,” said Fuyumi. “I don’t care. I’ll give them a talking-to. If they want to be bigots with their heads stuck up their own—”
“Yumi,” said Shouto. He kept his voice low and calm. “We can go to the breakroom. I don’t mind.”
She looked at him. It was the first time in a while that he’d seen anger in her expression. “I mind! People treating you like you’re less than a person. It’s been happening all your life. I’m sick and tired of it.”
“It’s okay. We can just—”
“It’s not okay. It’s not.” She poked at his chest where his nametag was. “Look at that! Do they write everybody else’s name wrong on purpose, too? Did they tell Natsuo that he only gets ten minutes to talk to his sister? Do they give Endeavor disgusted looks behind his back and chase him out of rooms with children in them? What have you done that he hasn’t? Who have you been to deserve all that? Who have you been that’s less than human?”
Shouto took a breath to answer, but something in his chest constricted.
He stared at her, and he ached.
Finally, Fuyumi looked away, shook her head. “I’m just…”
“Let’s go to the breakroom,” said Shouto.
She exhaled, her face pinching. She nodded.
The breakroom was small, little more than a storage room with a refrigerator and table. Fuyumi pushed aside a crate full of crepe paper streamers so that she and Shouto could see each other when they sat down.
Fuyumi rubbed her fingers into the inner corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” she said. “I’m just so fucking mad right now. Swear I could tear the next person who looks at you wrong limb-from-limb. God. I’m so sorry, Shouchan, I’m really…” She lowered her hands and grabbed a booklet of construction paper from the table to fan herself. Even the flicks of her wrist were sharp, the paper snapping back and forth from the wind resistance. “Natsuo said you stayed the night at Aizawa’s?”
He nodded.
“He took care of you? He fed you and let you sleep and made sure that you weren’t panicking?”
“He was nice,” said Shouto.
She nodded. “How were his husband and his…? The third person Aizawa was talking about. Their roommate or kid or… Did either of them bother you? Are they safe to be around?”
“Foster child,” he said. “They didn’t bother me. I know them both already.”
Fuyumi’s eyebrows shot up. “Who are they?”
“Present Mic and a boy from Gen Ed named Shinsou.”
“Present Mic? He’s Aizawa’s husband?”
“Yeah, it… yeah,” he said. “I don’t know. I mean—yes, he is, but—”
“That’s wild.” She shook her head, huffed. “Oh my god. He’s not too loud for you to be around, is he?”
He shrugged. “He’s fine.”
“You trust him?”
“I guess so.”
“Because he’s trustworthy or just because he’s Aizawa’s husband?”
He shrugged again. “He’s not mean to me. And he made me breakfast.”
Fuyumi gave a tired laugh. “All right. And who’s Shinsou? You said you already know him?”
Shouto nodded. “We’re doing the internship together. He’s my friend, I think.”
She looked skeptical. “You think?”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto. “I think it is. He used to not like me because he hates Endeavor and rich people, but we both like Red’s Ocean a lot.”
Fuyumi sighed. “That’s… not a reason to trust someone. What’s his quirk?”
“Brainwashing.”
She stopped fanning. “Shouto.”
He probably should’ve made something up instead of telling the truth. “It’s okay. He won’t—”
“Shouto. Brainwashing.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” said Shouto. “He lives there. I can’t exactly kick him out. Anyway, he already used it on me, and it wasn’t—”
“He what?”
“Just—” He was not explaining this well. “Not randomly. At the sports festival.”
“The same sports festival that you went home and tried to kill yourself after? That sports festival? That’s when he used his quirk on you?”
Shouto groaned and slouched into his chair. “Yumi…”
“Don’t Yumi me. Is that what happened at the end of the cavalry battle? When you fell and broke your ankle and there was a commotion on the field? Was that because he brainwashed you?”
“Y-yeah. But—”
“What happened? Did you have a panic attack?”
He was digging himself into a hole here. So he stayed silent in favor of slumping deeper into his chair.
Fuyumi tilted her head. “Was it worse than that?”
“I had a flashback to Lady Hypna,” he said. “It wasn’t—”
She cut him off with a loud groan. “Shouto.”
“Yumi,” he shot back. He kept slumping. “It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know. He felt really fucking bad about it afterward. People are mean to him because of his quirk. He has to keep it secret because people get scared of him. He can’t help his quirk any more than Natsuo can help being Quirkless. I don’t think he’s a bad person.”
Fuyumi was quiet for a few moments. Then she sighed. “You’re too kind for your own good sometimes. You know that?”
“That’s bullshit,” said Shouto. “I only want to be his friend because he likes Red’s Ocean.”
“That cannot be true.”
“He’s trans, too.”
“Is he?”
“His first name is Hitoshi. After the Red’s Ocean character.”
“Oh my god,” she said.
“So we’re basically the same person.”
“I guess so,” said Fuyumi. “Well, I… I don’t know. I really hope you’re right about him. But be careful. Okay?”
He grunted and slumped.
“Hey. Please listen to me.”
“I’m always careful,” he said.
“But… very careful. Even with people who are nice to you.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m careful.”
She didn’t look satisfied, but she nodded. “I wish I’d thought to bring your phone with me to work. I just got so anxious not knowing where you’d gone last night, or if you were okay, or… Shouto, I have no idea what you’re doing to that poor chair, but you are not sitting in it. Please get off the floor.”
With a grunt, Shouto pushed himself off the floor and returned to the chair. “Will Endeavor know if you bring stuff to me? Is he not letting you?”
“I don’t know. He reminded me this morning that he can track my car and my phone. Maybe if you can…? Well, I was going to suggest you stop by the house when he’s not home, but there are cameras outside the house, and I think he was planning on getting the locks changed today…” She rubbed her temple, looking exhausted. “Maybe I’m overthinking. He just has so many people working for him that I can’t ever know exactly how much control he has over… you know, I can’t ever be sure what he’ll do if…”
“Maybe you shouldn’t go home,” said Shouto.
Fuyumi shook her head. “We’ve been over this. I don’t have enough money saved to support both of us.”
“So just support yourself,” said Shouto. “I can take care of myself.”
“No.”
“I could—”
“I said no.” Fuyumi dropped the booklet of construction paper on the table. “You’re fifteen. You need somebody to take care of you and provide for you. I can do the first, but right now, Endeavor’s the only one who can do the second. And he’s going to have to take you back at some point, so it wouldn’t be wise for me to burn that bridge. I need to be at home when you come back.”
He didn’t want her to be right. But he knew as well as she did that he would have no idea how to navigate life without his sister. And both of them would be fucked without Endeavor’s money.
Fuyumi stood. “Natsuo can probably bring you some clothes and things. I don’t know about your meds—maybe you and Natsuo can go see the doctor Recovery Girl told us about.”
“We’ll figure it out,” said Shouto.
Together, they walked back toward Fuyumi’s classroom. Fuyumi opened the classroom door, then paused. “Are you going back to Aizawa’s now?”
He accidentally made eye contact with Fuyumi’s assistant. He looked away quickly. “Yeah.”
“I should write him and Present Mic a thank-you note,” she said. “I just—ach, I don’t think I have any blank thank-you cards here, and I don’t even know what I’d write… You behave while you’re there, okay? Be nice, clean up after yourself, don’t hog the bathroom—”
“—don’t be picky, say thank you, put my dishes in the dishwasher,” Shouto finished. “I know.”
“One more.”
“One…?” He thought. “Oh. The… spoons…?”
“No metal spoons—”
“No metal spoons in the microwave,” he said.
She gave him a light hug. “There you go.”
He was fine until he left the building. And then there was an unexpected, acute pang in his chest, so strong that he had to stop for a moment to catch his breath.
He did not want to leave Fuyumi.
He should’ve hugged her back. Why didn’t he do that more often? And why didn’t he tell her that he loved her, that he appreciated her more than he knew how to express?
Maybe he could’ve convinced her that they didn’t need Endeavor or his money to live. He and Fuyumi and Natsuo and Rei could all go live together somewhere. A different country. They could leave Heroes and Villains behind, forget about Endeavor and everything else, and heal.
What was wrong with Shouto, that he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around that possibility? Was it a desire for vengeance? A savior complex? A reluctance to enter a life that he was unfamiliar with, even if that life might be better? All he could think about was how god-awful it would be to leave Bakugou and Deku behind and never see them again.
Strange, wasn’t it? Laugh and cry with someone a few times, and suddenly the most horrible life you could imagine for yourself is one without them in it.
###
When Shouto got back to Aizawa and Mic’s apartment, the first thing he heard was Red’s Ocean playing quietly on the TV. He went into the living room to see Shinsou stretched out on the couch with two cats on his chest and lap, one hand buried in the large bag of wasabi-flavored potato chips at his side.
“Are Aizawa and Present Mic here?” asked Shouto.
“Mic’s off doing podcast shit,” said Shinsou. He made no move to sit up. “Aizawa’s sleeping, so shut up.”
Shouto hesitated. He doubted Shinsou wanted him hanging out in his bedroom, but he wasn’t sure where else to go—it was a small apartment. “Can I sit in here?”
Shinsou motioned to the armchair. Shouto walked over and sat perched on its edge, his backpack in his lap.
Shinsou gave him a strange look. “What’re you sitting like that for?”
“In case Aizawa comes in,” said Shouto. “I’m in his chair.”
“You’re always gonna be in somebody’s chair when you’re couch surfing. Sit normal before your back starts hurting.”
Shouto complied. It felt strange, trying to relax in someone else’s house, and at the same time not knowing if he was supposed to. Should he be doing homework? All his books were either at school or at his house. A chore of some sort? He didn’t know if Aizawa and Mic wanted him snooping around and messing with their things.
“This episode sucks,” Shinsou said through a mouthful of chips. “The main characters don’t even kiss.”
What? Shouto loved this episode. “I think it’s nice that they hug. A kiss would cheapen it.”
“It would fucking not. They’d better kiss in season three or I’m gonna riot.”
“I think they’re best friends,” said Shouto.
“Real fans want them to fuck sloppy-style on screen.” Shinsou gave a loud crunch. “Y’know, you suck at being gay.”
“I don’t think I’m gay.”
“What are you, then? Ace?”
“I don’t know what that is,” said Shouto.
“Look it up.”
“I don’t have my phone. Can you tell me?”
“I got no intention of helping you figure out your sexuality. Do that on your own time.”
“Oh.”
They watched the rest of the episode in silence. The next episode started.
A banging on the front door—hard, purposeful, gut-wrenchingly familiar—made Shouto’s pulse skitter. He stood.
“Goddamn,” said Shinsou, sitting up. The cat on his chest jumped to the floor. “Who called the cops? Did you kill somebody?”
Shouto felt dizzy. How, he wondered, but he didn’t say it out loud. That wasn’t a useful question right now. “Is there a fire escape?”
Shinsou sucked the chip dust from his fingers. “What?”
“That’s Endeavor. Is there a fire escape?”
Shinsou lowered his hand.
Shouto put on his backpack. “In your room? Your bedroom is against the outer wall, right?”
The knock came again, an adrenaline injection straight into his heart. A dozen possibilities and questions and courses of action rocketed through his brain.
Endeavor wasn’t the type to change his mind so quickly. The whole point of this punishment was to make Shouto suffer. So he likely wasn’t here to take Shouto back home, but to cause trouble for Aizawa and Present Mic because they’d taken him in.
But how did he know that Shouto was here? Had he intercepted a voicemail or text message between Natsuo and Fuyumi? Did he have ties to the school Fuyumi worked at?
That fucking teacher’s assistant—she’d overheard Fuyumi and Shouto talking about where he was staying. It’d been her, hadn’t it?
Aizawa came out of the bedroom, hair disheveled, rushing to finish pulling on a white t-shirt. He went to the front door to look through the peephole, and then he looked at Shouto.
Guilt burned in Shouto’s stomach. Maybe he should stay here and protect Shinsou and Aizawa—? But no, Shouto wasn’t strong enough for that. He’d just get in the way.
Shouto started, “I have to—”
“I want you to go straight to the Bakugous’ house,” said Aizawa. His voice was calm and quiet but firm. “Do you understand? Straight there.”
Shouto nodded.
“Okay. Shinsou, you stay in your room until I come get you.”
Wordlessly, Shinsou stood and guided Shouto back to his bedroom. He got his wallet from his dresser to give Shouto his subway pass, and then he opened the bedroom window.
“I’m sorry,” Shouto told him. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Eh. Not the first time I’ve had to use a fire escape for non-fire-related reasons.” Shinsou popped the latch to deploy the fire escape ladder. “Enjoy your trip.”
Shouto climbed out the window. The metal ladder rattled a bit too loud for comfort—god, his whole body was shaking. “Thanks.”
“Fuck off. Don’t get murdered before you get to the subway.”
The moment Shouto touched the ground, he took off in a sprint. Behind and above him, he heard Shinsou collapse the ladder against the wall, heard the soft bumf of the bedroom window closing. He didn’t let himself look back.
###
Shouto made the trip to Bakugou’s house alone. Wasn’t sure how—his throat felt entirely closed, and it was difficult to breathe. His head was pounding. Every step was a jolt through his ribcage.
It felt like shit, knowing he had to intrude on someone else’s peaceful family if he didn’t want to be homeless, knowing that this was his second try—second try in only two days!—because he hadn’t been careful enough the first time. He was tempted to just take the loss and sleep on a fucking park bench somewhere, but it wasn’t safe to sleep unprotected, and he knew he’d starve without money.
Bakugou had never asked for this kind of help from Shouto. Bakugou had never come to him needing money or food or shelter. What did that mean for the give-and-take ratio of their friendship? Did it even count as friendship if it was so one-sided?
And now—and now Bakugou was going to find out that he’d lied about needing help, and he would know what it was that Shouto was ashamed of—and wasn’t that the worst thing that could happen to someone like Shouto? —being known…
God, and now he was waxing poetic like some angst-ridden twelve-year-old, as if there were anything to know about him in the first place. His whole personality was sad and scared, and the only thing Bakugou hadn’t yet learned about him was how deep it went.
This was fucking humiliating.
He paused for a long time at the Bakugous’ gate, debating, before he finally made himself press the buzzer. When no one answered, Shouto was almost relieved.
But then Mitsuki opened the door to the house and waved at him. “Gate’s unlocked, hun, just reach over and unlatch it. I don’t have my shoes on right now.”
Shouto unlatched the gate and went in. Mitsuki held the door open for him, smiling, one hand on her hip.
He’d been so painfully dry-eyed last night. Why did seeing Bakugou’s mom standing there in the doorway make him want to cry now?
“The brat ain’t home,” Mitsuki said as Shouto approached. “Been spendin’ a lot of time at the gym lately—you high school boys and your muscle fever. Should be back in another hour or so, though, if you wanna wait.”
Shouto nodded and followed her inside. It was strange to enter Bakugou’s house quietly, without the usual bustle of Bakugou kicking off his shoes and yelling that he was home. Strange to enter it at all, really—it was like he’d run through a portal, jumped from a warzone to some faraway quiet valley in the space of two seconds. There was calm instrumental music playing from somewhere in the house, and it did not match the tempo of his heartrate at all.
“It’s just me in the house,” said Mitsuki. “I’ve been in the kitchen sending work emails. Are you hungry?”
Shouto liked Mitsuki well enough, but he’d been hoping that Bakugou or at least Masaru would be home, too. Shouto still didn’t like being alone with older women, regardless of whose mother they were. “I had lunch.”
“It’s after dinner now. Masaru made some damn good hōtō that I can warm up.” Mitsuki patted his back. Shouto tried not to stiffen. “Why don’t you come sit at the table with me in the kitchen?”
Shouto followed Mitsuki into the kitchen and sat as she took a pot from the fridge. He put his hands under his thighs to keep from tapping them against anything.
Mitsuki spoke as she worked, her back to him. “You boys just gonna hang out tonight? No homework, right?”
He needed to tell her. “I guess.”
“That internship’s wearing Katsuki out. It’s a wonder he has any energy for the gym.” She glanced back at him. “You look pretty worn out yourself. Gettin’ enough sleep?”
Shouto’s throat ached. He wetted his lips. “I w—I was actually wondering if I could stay the night.”
“Of course you can.” Mitsuki spooned some of the hōtō into a smaller bowl and stuck it in the microwave. “We’ve been trying to clean out the guest room so you can have your own bed when you want to stay over. It’s just been a whole project because of all the junk we got stored in there—Katsuki’s drum set and my antique sewing machine and Masaru’s plants. He puts his flowers in there to save them from the frost every year and keeps forgetting to put them back outside in the spring. Mulch all over the damn carpet. Swear that man’s got a touch of ADHD.”
Shouto’s chest tightened painfully. He shifted, tugged the bunched material of his shorts down. Pressure was starting to build behind his eyes, and it pressed a dull, throbbing ache throughout his whole skull.
“Were you and Katsuki sharing a bed the last time you were here?” Mitsuki asked. “If you don’t mind me askin’?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“So you weren’t sleeping on that damn futon on the floor, at least.” Mitsuki leaned against the fridge, her back to Shouto, watching the bowl rotate the microwave. “I know that’s what you sleep on at home, which is fine. Plenty of people say futons are better for your spine. I just think raised beds are more comfortable, and your auntie wants you to be comfortable while you’re here.”
Shouto rubbed his cold knuckles across his cheek. Blinked his burning eyes. Anything to distract himself.
It wasn’t working.
It was almost completely silent, like it always was for him, like he’d learned to be in the days before he stopped crying altogether. Lips he bit to keep from trembling, breaths that hitched in his chest instead of his throat, eyes open wide to keep tears from obscuring his vision. Not that that last part ever really worked.
Your auntie, she’d called herself. But she didn’t know. She had no fucking clue just how much he wanted… He wanted…
“Oh—I bought some more of those strawberry Pocky you like,” Mitsuki said, finally turning to face him. “They were on sale, so I figured, y’know, what the hell. You can take some home if…” Her voice drained off. She stopped leaning against the fridge. “Baby, are you okay?”
Shouto looked away.
Mitsuki rounded the table and pulled out the chair next to him to sit. “What’s wrong?”
He stared down at her knees. He needed to tell her. He had to tell her. But his chest was tight and his heart was still running, running, and he didn’t know how.
“Did something happen?” she asked. Her voice was quiet but urgent. “Shouto? What happened?”
His tongue clicked. His mouth felt bone-dry. “Just. Um.” He pulled his backpack closer to his torso, but he wasn’t sure how well it would hide his accelerated breathing. “Endeavor came home yesterday. We had a fight. He locked me out.”
“Oh,” Mitsuki breathed. “Baby…”
Shouto forced himself to continue. He hated how his voice sounded, high and weak and wet. “I spent the night with Aizawa, but Endeavor came looking for me. I left out the fire escape and came here. I don’t think he knows Bakugou and I are still friends after how bad I hurt him at the sports festival, so I don’t think he’ll… follow me here. I hope he won’t. I’m sorry if…” He choked on the wetness in his voice. Shook his head. God, he was pathetic. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t know where else to go.”
“I’m glad you came here. You can absolutely stay as long as you need. We’ll figure this out.”
He blinked a little too hard, and he felt a cold tickle on his cheek. Alarmed, he swiped the tear away. Unwanted images flashed through his mind—Lady Hypna sitting across from him with her hands settled calmly in her lap, forcing him to cry, forcing him to need her comfort—
Mitsuki leaned forward like she was about to hug him. He tensed. Said, “Um.”
She stopped. “No?”
He struggled for words, panic building in his chest. It was a long moment before he could force anything out, and when he did, everything came out at once. “I’m sorry, I’m—you’re being really nice to me. There was just somebody who used to make me—she wanted me to cry for her, so I don’t like crying in front of—I don’t like being alone with older women and then they try to touch me. I don’t—I’m not saying I think you’d—it’s not you. It just makes me think about it.”
Mitsuki settled back in her chair. She sighed. “Fuck, hun. I could strangle those adults you hang around.”
Shouto kept his eyes lowered.
“I’m a survivor, too,” she said. “I know I’ve given you some mama bear hugs and kisses, ’cause god knows how damn touch-starved you teen boys are, but I ain’t ever gonna force you. You’re safe here. And that means it’s safe to tell me no. Okay?”
He bit his lips.
Safe.
He wanted to believe it.
“Can you tell me what you and your dad were fighting about?” asked Mitsuki.
He’d already gone through this once with Aizawa, so it should be easier the second time. “I don’t know if you’ve seen all the… articles and news stories and gossip magazines that came out after the sports festival.”
“Oh. Pff.” She rolled her eyes, waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t pay attention to that garbage. Buncha overgrown preteens sitting at a fancy table in a glorified club room and giggling about how much drama they’re gonna stir up. I did see a few headlines, though. Fucking ridiculous what they’ll come up with about literal children. Why do you ask?”
He hadn’t expected her to go on that spiel, and it took him a second to gather his thoughts again. “Because I—because they outed me to my father. That’s what we were fighting about.”
Mitsuki’s eyebrows shot up. “Outed you?”
He nodded.
She hesitated, her brow furrowing. Her voice got softer. “As… gay?”
What? “No.”
“So as what?”
“Trans.”
Her chin tilted back.
Shouto’s stomach twisted. “I thought you knew.”
“I… did not,” said Mitsuki. “Was I supposed to?”
“I thought Bakugou would’ve told you.”
“Katsuki didn’t tell me shit.”
They stared at each other.
“I don’t have a problem with it,” said Mitsuki, like she’d suddenly remembered that she needed to say it. “I’m just surprised that Katsuki’s okay with… he is okay with it, isn’t he? He doesn’t give you a hard time?”
“No, he—he’s fine.”
“And you do mean… trans boy. Right? Not trans girl.”
He nodded.
Mitsuki leaned back in her seat. “Well. Goddamn. Didn’t even cross my mind that that might be the case. Masaru and I have a trans woman as a coworker, so we do know a little bit about it. Your dad kicked you out over it?”
He explained Endeavor’s conditions and reasoning to her. Again, she rolled her eyes.
“That’s just bullshit,” she said. “Like his image is so damn perfect. Being gay or trans ain’t gonna keep you from being a decent Pro Hero. I tell Katsuki all the time—as long as you’re out there doin’ your best, what other people think doesn’t matter. Ranking doesn’t matter. Not that that brat ever listens to what I say.”
“Ranking is all that matters to Endeavor,” said Shouto. “I don’t give a shit about it. I don’t care if I never hit top hundred.”
“You will. You’re way too talented to not hit top hundred.”
“I know, but it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t even care about being a Hero, or… it’s just the only thing I’m good at.”
Mitsuki got up and went to the microwave. Shouto hadn’t heard it beep, but it must have, because the humming had stopped. “Oh, I doubt that. Katsuki thinks you’re sharp as a tack.”
Sharp as a…? Oh, she meant smart. “He doesn’t think that.”
“He does. I promise you. You’re all Masaru and I ever hear about when we ask how his day went. Some wild plan you had in practical training, or something really specific you knew about explosion physics, or how he’s gotta learn Pro Hero sign and JSL now because you know it, or that he’s gotta send the idea you had for his sweat grenades to the UA support department.” She opened the microwave and used a hand towel to take out the bowl. “He was… Did he tell you about Izuku? Everything that went down with that?”
He knew a little more about Izuku than he wanted to. “Yes.”
“He was a wreck after that happened. Just… withdrew into himself, stayed in his room or worked out all the time, refused to hang out with his family or his school friends. Snapped at anyone who looked at him. We took him to a therapist once, but he wouldn’t talk.” Mitsuki stirred the hōtō, tasted it. “That first time you came over… Lord, Shouto, you have no idea how happy I was to see him bring someone home, even if you did put a bite mark on him.”
“Sorry,” Shouto mumbled.
She set the bowl down in front of him and sat across the table. “He started acting more like himself after that. Talking more, walking around the house, getting out of the house, getting excited about things again. We were able to have some talks that we’d been needing to have for a while. You make him want to be better. In lots of ways, not just Hero shit. And you made him happier, which is all I really want for him. You bring a lot to people’s lives just by existing.” She paused. “Where was I going with this?”
Shouto gave an uncomfortable shrug.
“I guess I’m just sayin’ that we’re happy to have you here. No matter what you end up doing with your future. Feels like we owe you a lot.” She slapped her hand on the table. “And Endeavor’s a fucking idiot for not understanding how wonderful you are. That’s what I’m sayin’.”
A small smile tugged at Shouto’s mouth. He scrubbed away the tears still welling in his eyes.
Why was she so nice to him? He didn’t deserve that.
“Okay, I’ll let you eat.” Mitsuki got up and started gathering her things from the table. “I’ll be in the living room if you need me—I need to call Aizawa and let him know you’re okay. When you’re done, go upstairs and lie down for a bit. Looks like you ain’t slept in four days.”
The hōtō was good in a way that convenience store food couldn’t be, and it warmed part of him that he hadn’t realized was cold. Tasted like someone had made it, spent time with it. When he was done, he put the bowl in the sink and went upstairs to Bakugou’s bedroom.
It was empty, of course, but it felt emptier without Bakugou in it. He sat on the bed. The creaking of the mattress was loud in the quiet room. Across from him, Bakugou’s school jacket draped over his desk chair.
Shouto hesitated. Then he stood, grabbed the jacket, and lay down on the bed with it clutched against his chest.
Notes:
EDITED END NOTE: A kind reader has informed me that AO3 is not fond of certain kinds of links, so I've included said link in my Instagram bio & as a pinned post on Twitter/X (linked above). This fic will always remain free and accessible, but if you've ever wished you could support me in a more concrete way, check it out!
Chapter 57: Shouto and the Mystery of the Microorganism Composter
Summary:
Autism and Dad-ism: The Ultimate Combo!
Hope you enjoy reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it! Masaru is quickly becoming a favorite of mine.
Notes:
CW: transphobia, ableism, shame over internal thoughts, a bit of sex talk; DISCUSSION OF: self-harm, fetishization of queer people, dysphoria, abuse, suicide, coming out, animal abuse, murder
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
He woke up to the sound of quiet shuffling—a chair squeaking, a page turning. He listened for a couple minutes with his eyes closed, and then he opened his eyes and rolled over. Bakugou was reading a book at his desk.
“What’re you reading?” Shouto asked. His voice was gravelly with sleep.
Bakugou didn’t look up. “Book.”
“What kind of book?”
“Book.” Bakugou bookmarked his place and stuck the book in his desk drawer without letting Shouto see the cover. “Why were you sleepin’ on my jacket?”
Shouto looked at the jacket on his pillow. It was still bunched in his fist in one spot. “Oh, I… sorry. The smell was calming.” When Bakugou didn’t say anything, Shouto looked up. He had a grossed-out look on his face. “What?”
“The smell?” said Bakugou.
“Yes?”
“That’s fuckin’ creepy.”
“No, it’s not,” said Shouto. “It just reminded me of you, that’s all. You’re acting like I was jerking off to it.”
“I don’t know what nasty shit you were doin’ up here while I was gone. Fuck are you smellin’ my sweat for?”
“Not your sweat.” Shouto sat up. “It’s the detergent or something.”
“I wore that. It’s my damn sweat.”
“I know what your sweat smells like. That’s not your sweat.”
“You fuckin’ listening to yourself?” said Bakugou. “Why do you know what my sweat smells like?”
“Bakugou. Everybody knows what your sweat smells like. It’s your fucking quirk.” Shouto threw the jacket at Bakugou. It smacked him in the face. “I didn’t come here to perv on you. Don’t flatter yourself.”
Bakugou got up and went to drop his jacket in the laundry basket next to his closet, muttering something about Shouto’s “face grease” messing up the material.
Shouto arranged Bakugou’s pillows into roughly their original positions. “Have you been back for long?”
“Couple hours.” Bakugou faced him, folded his arms. “You shoulda told me. You shoulda come here first.”
Shouto leaned back against the headboard, looking at the ceiling. “I didn’t want you to know. It’s embarrassing.”
“Like you weren’t already the world’s most embarrassing person,” said Bakugou. “What’s worse about this than you tryna off yourself? Or spending a week in the loony bin?”
“It’s different.”
“How? You didn’t even fuckin’ do anything.”
“I don’t like depending on other people for basic needs,” said Shouto. “I don’t like barging into someone else’s house and forcing their mom to deal with a crying teenager. It feels like shit.”
“What feels like shit,” said Bakugou, “is when I find out you assumed that me and my family would rather you be sleepin’ on some goddamn park bench just because we like having all the hot water to ourselves. Is that what you’d do to me? You think about me like that?” His voice dropped into a dopey, mocking tone. “‘Oh, Bakugou’s house just burned down, sucks for him, but I’m not gonna let ’im in my house because I don’t wanna share my Pokémon-themed cup ramen with anybody.’ You think like that?”
Shouto was quiet. He rubbed his finger along a seam in the blanket.
Bakugou persisted. “Well?”
“No,” said Shouto. “I wouldn’t think that about you.”
“So why the fuck would I think like that about you?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “I just don’t like being indebted to people.”
Bakugou folded his arms. “Yeah. Okay. So you’d only help me if I could pay you back somehow.”
“No.”
Bakugou’s tongue prodded the inside of his cheek, his expression otherwise dead. “But you think I think like that.”
“I don’t—” Shouto rubbed the blanket seam harder. “I only know how I think. I don’t know how normal people think.”
“I ain’t normal. Not your fucked version of normal. You’re constantly lying to me, and you’re never thinkin’ about how I feel about shit, and it’s fucking up this goddamn friendship. You gotta do better.”
Shouto wiped his cheek with his free hand, pushed coolness into his skin. He was getting too warm.
“You’re gonna wear a hole in my damn blanket,” said Bakugou. “What’s wrong with you?”
He lifted his hand from the blanket. “Sorry.”
“I’m askin’, dumbass. You panicking?”
Was he that obvious? “My heart just beats fast sometimes.”
“You lyin’ to me again?”
“No, I’m…” He paused to reconsider. “I don’t know.”
Bakugou sat on the bed, flicked his hand. “Move over.”
Shouto shifted to the other side of the bed, and Bakugou climbed on beside him. They didn’t touch—Shouto kept his arms wrapped tightly around his stomach, kept his torso angled slightly away.
“I’m sorry,” said Shouto. “I didn’t want to make you feel bad. I’m not used to telling people things.”
“You’re gonna have to get used to it if you want this to work.”
“I do.”
“Okay,” Bakugou said. “Then talk.”
Oh. He hadn’t expected that. “About what?”
“Anything. Whatever. I don’t give a shit what you talk about. But you gotta start.”
He tried to think of the things Bakugou didn’t know about him. There were some things that Shouto was aware were secrets—secrets he consciously thought about, secrets he mulled over, secrets that he swallowed whenever he was with his friends. Secrets like I tried to kill myself not long ago, like I just got kicked out of my house.
Other secrets, he knew, were less accessible. They sat deep in his gut, or they spread themselves out among his nervous system like deeply-rooted invasive vines, and he wouldn’t even know that a secret was there until he tried to open up or reach out and sensed that something was choking him. That something—an amalgamation of somethings,really, experiences and feelings and thought processes that were nearly impossible to quantify or verbalize as a whole—had been choking him for a long time.
“Those scratches on your neck,” said Bakugou, “did you have a fight with your old man? Or was it really from a panic attack?”
Shouto felt his words sink low into his stomach. He wished he could say yes, Endeavor had done it, because that was easier. He didn’t want to discuss self-harm with Bakugou. That was something private, taboo, an indulgence of the strange and unnatural neural pathways in his brain.
The bed creaked as Bakugou leaned forward, trying to catch Shouto’s gaze. “I ain’t mad at you,” said Bakugou. “Whatever it was. I’m just askin’.”
Shouto’s heart beat faster. Shame crowded his lungs. “Panic.”
“From the weed you did?”
“From—” He swallowed. “Partially. I don’t know.”
“You do shit like that a lot? To yourself?”
“It’s…” His voice died. He was silent for a long time, desperately trying to follow the spiral of his thoughts, trying to reach in and pluck out something that might make sense. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. “Just… things are too much sometimes. It makes me feel stuck in my body.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like it…” He pulled his knees in closer to his chest, pressed his elbows into his sides. “Usually I can think of my body as separate from me. But sometimes all the… things of… everything, the sounds and lights and touches and emotions, they get into my body and worm around. I feel all of it. It forces me to remember that I’m connected to my body. So then all of the other bad feelings that I was keeping locked inside my body can finally go up to my brain, and I get all the built-up dysphoric feelings at once, and it makes me want to tear my body off. I want to rip it up so I can step out of it and go somewhere else. But I can’t, so I just end up with scratches on my neck.”
For a moment, Bakugou was quiet.
Then— “Goddamn.”
“Yeah,” said Shouto. “It… do you ever…? I guess you don’t ever feel like that.”
“No, not really,” said Bakugou. “Fuckin’… is it like that for all trans people? With their bodies?”
Shouto shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not.”
“You get dysphoria ’n shit, though.”
“Yeah, it…” He rubbed his face. “I don’t know what it’s about. I know some of it’s about gender, because I feel a little better when people don’t call me ‘she.’ But I don’t always know why I have to shower with the lights off. Or why I don’t like looking in the mirror. If it’s because of trauma or my scar or something else.”
“Your scar?”
Shouto tapped under his left eye. “This one.”
“Yeah, I fuckin’ know which scar, I just… thought it didn’t bother you.” Bakugou paused. “It ain’t that ugly.”
Shouto huffed a laugh. “You’re used to it.”
“I’m just sayin’. You got a fuck ton of rabid fans online who don’t think it’s ugly.”
“They fetishize it,” said Shouto. “That’s not better. They do it with my being trans, too.”
“How do you know that? You hangin’ out on that dumbass social media account that Pink Bitch and Dunce Face made for you?”
“No. I’ve met people. A girl and a boy in the hospital were trying to hit on me because they thought it was hot that—” Shouto motioned vaguely toward himself, then dropped his hand into his lap. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t planning on complaining.”
“You’re just talkin’,” said Bakugou. “You’re allowed to fuckin’ talk.”
Shouto looked at Bakugou—his clean white socks, his knit brow, his hand resting on the mattress between him and Shouto. And he imagined—briefly, but so vividly that he could almost feel the sensations, that the anticipatory dopamine rushed through his body—reaching out to touch that hand. Imagined running his fingers over the knuckles and veins. Imagined bringing it to his face, placing a light kiss on the palm—
Oh. Oh, okay. No. That was not a thought he should be having about his friend in the middle of a serious conversation. He had way too much experience with creeps for the idea of becoming one to not wholly, entirely horrify him. Hopefully it was just his brain doing strange things to cope with the stress of the afternoon—something that would wear off.
“What is it?” asked Bakugou.
Anxiety jolted Shouto’s stomach. Did Bakugou know what Shouto had been thinking? Surely not. “I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“I don’t know.” He wrung his hands together in his lap, so hard it almost hurt. “I’m… you’re my friend.”
“So?”
Shouto nodded. Took a breath. Then he leaned over and squeezed Bakugou’s torso in a two-second attempt at a hug.
Bakugou gave an annoyed hum and held his arms out like someone had just poured a bucket of water over his head. “Fuck’s sake, IcyHot.”
“I’m glad,” said Shouto. “I like being friends with you. I’m glad.”
Bakugou fell back onto his pillow and tucked his hands behind his neck. He huffed a laugh—probably meant to be derisive, though it came out sounding more like resignation. “Sometimes I wish everything weren’t so fuckin’ awkward with you. You don’t have your phone or some shit to keep you occupied?”
“No.”
“Nothin’?”
Shouto shook his head.
“Go get a book off the shelf or somethin’.”
Shouto was glad for an excuse to get off the bed. He perused Bakugou’s shelf, hoping it looked like he was actually reading and considering the titles rather than just seeing random collections of colors and words that meant nothing. Maybe something with pictures? Did Bakugou have anything with pictures, or was that too childish for his tastes?
He must’ve taken too long, because Bakugou spoke. “You ain’t gonna find any books called How to Piss Off Your Dad Even More, IcyHot.”
Shouto knelt to look at the lower shelves. There was a book on Pro Hero Sign that looked pretty new. “Do you actually read these?”
“Obviously. What, do you have a bunch of books sittin’ around your house that nobody touches?”
“We have six or seven whole rooms in the house that nobody touches.”
Bakugou’s tongue clicked. “You should read. Might help your shitty vocabulary.”
“I used to read a lot of nonfiction.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Concussions,” said Shouto. He took a random book off the shelf and flipped through it. It definitely… well, it definitely had words in it. “Fucked up my concentration and ability to process written words. I can’t ever get past the first couple pages without my brain feeling like it’s on fire.”
“You could try audiobooks.”
Shouto shook his head. “I try not to play many things with audio. Doesn’t feel safe not being able to hear what’s going on in the rest of the house.”
“So listen to some while you’re here.”
“But then I won’t be able to hear you.”
“You don’t need to hear me,” said Bakugou.
“I want to, though.”
For a moment, Bakugou was quiet. Then he said, “Pick a book and I’ll read it to you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Shouto considered asking if they could read Deku’s analysis journals together, but that seemed like an invasion of Bakugou’s privacy. Instead, he found a book on Japanese bird wildlife. Oh, this one did have pictures. He faced Bakugou. “No, but really?”
Bakugou’s eyes dropped to Shouto’s hands. He scoffed. “You gotta pick the most boring book on the shelf?”
“I can pick a different one.”
“Bring it here.”
Shouto sat on the opposite side of the bed and gave the book to Bakugou.
Bakugou gave him a strange look. “What’re you sittin’ so far away for?”
“Do you not want me to?” asked Shouto.
“I ain’t tryna yell across the room at you about some goddamn Japanese bush warblers.”
Shouto moved closer until their shoulders were touching.
Bakugou cleared his throat—an unnecessarily loud hacking noise—and started reading. “Japanese fuckin’ bush warbler. A small, plain brown warbler of dense undergrowth. Note the narrow dark line through the eye, specifically because it looks like some dumbass middle-school emo’s smeared eyeliner—”
“It does not say that,” said Shouto.
“—and the narrow white line above the eye. Occurs in dense shrubland, bamboo thickets, forest edges, and your mom’s bedroom. Usually secretive and hard to see well, like IcyHot when he—”
“I love you.”
Bakugou looked at him.
“You can keep reading,” said Shouto. “I just wanted to say it before I forgot.”
After a moment of hesitance, Bakugou returned his attention to the book. He scanned it for a few seconds, brow furrowing. He shook his head.
Shouto looked over Bakugou’s shoulder. “Did you lose your place?”
Bakugou made a displeased noise. “Freaks me out, you sayin’ shit like that.”
“About you losing your…?” No, probably not that. “When I say I love you? I’m not coming on to you.”
“No, ’cause—” Bakugou’s nose scrunched. “’Cause you only say that shit before somethin’ bad happens. You said it at the sports festival right before our match, and then you went home and tried to off yourself.”
Had he said it then? Shouto’s memory of the match was fuzzy. “I said it other times, I think.”
“During club last Friday. You said it because you knew your dad was coming home, and you didn’t know if you were gonna see me again.”
“That’s not why I said it,” said Shouto.
“You planning somethin’ stupid?”
“No,” said Shouto. “I’m—no, I’ve just been thinking that I should tell people that I love them more often.”
“Why? You got somethin’ big comin’ up?”
“No. Nothing immediate.”
Bakugou raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing bad is going to happen,” said Shouto. “It… I’ll show you.”
“Tch,” said Bakugou.
“This’ll be the best week of our lives. I’m not even going to have a panic attack. I’m—we’re—I’m going to—” He was struggling to think of what best week of our lives could possibly consist of outside of not having a panic attack. “I’ll pet your cat.”
Bakugou snorted. “Sure you will.”
“I will. And we’ll… eat snacks. And watch things. And play video games.”
“You don’t know how to play video games.”
“I used to watch Touya play them. I like watching it. So you can play while I watch. And we can… um… we can do activities.”
Bakugou broke into a grin. “Activities?”
“Just—Bakugou, I don’t know what friends do. You had more friends than I did. What did you used to do with Deku?”
“Beat ’im up,” said Bakugou.
“Before that.”
Bakugou shrugged. “Watch All Might videos, I guess. Play in the mud. Smear lipstick on each other’s foreheads. Little kid shit. That was a long time ago.”
“That sounds like fun.”
“Nah, it…” Bakugou’s voice drained off. He rubbed his neck. “Yeah, I guess it was. For me. Don’t see how Izuku coulda enjoyed any of it, with all the shit he was havin’ to keep secret.”
“Probably he did enjoy it,” said Shouto. “Probably you were the best part of his life back then. Like you are for me now.”
Bakugou grunted. “I keep lookin’ back and thinkin’ about how fuckin’ dumb I was, not picking up on what was happening. And now, the… behavioral patterns with all you got goin’ on, and me tryna read into shit you do and say and figure out what means what, ’cause nobody ever just fuckin’ tells me that they need help until it’s too late.”
Shouto was starting to understand how badly his plan to keep Bakugou from worrying by keeping things secret had backfired. Maybe it would’ve worked for a normal person, for someone who didn’t feel like they held the sole responsibility for keeping their death-happy friends alive. But not for Bakugou. Shouto knew he couldn’t take away Bakugou’s anxiety completely, but maybe he could give him a break.
“Nothing bad will happen before the end of this week,” said Shouto. “I promise. So you don’t have to worry about anything until Sunday.”
Bakugou gave him a strange look. “Fuck are you planning for Sunday? Government takedown?”
“No, I’m—no. I’m just giving you a specific—” He was not wording this correctly. “I don’t want you to be anxious.”
“I don’t have some anxiety disorder,” said Bakugou. “I’m fine.”
“I’m not saying anxiety disorder, I’m saying anxious. Because you are anxious, and probably I contribute to that. So I’m promising to not do anything else that’ll make you anxious this week. No jumping off bridges or walking into collapsing buildings. And I’ll tell you if a problem comes up.”
Bakugou poked his tongue into his cheek. “Until the end of this week.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” said Bakugou. “But you better not mess it up.”
###
When Shouto woke up in the morning, he was alone in Bakugou’s bed, and the light coming in through the window was overwhelmingly bright. He looked at the digital clock on the nightstand—10:25 a.m.
What the fuck?
There was a piece of notebook paper on Bakugou’s side of the bed. Shouto had to go to the bathroom and put his contacts in before he could read it.
Oi. Parents n your snow bunny brother agreed you should skip the internship today for safety reasons. My dad’s staying home to make sure you don’t burn down the house. Go downstairs n eat something. Finish your fuckin makeup work (laptop pass PLUSULTRA) and don’t try to fuckin lie to me when I get home “oh I finished it all last week” BULLSHIT, do your goddamn work. Don’t snoop through my shit.
There was a harsh scribble immediately preceding the signature, “—B.” Shouto wondered what Bakugou had started to write there.
And what did he mean by “safety reasons”? To keep Endeavor from finding Shouto? Endeavor already knew that he was interning with Hawks, and he doubted that Endeavor would want to stop him from learning from the number three Pro Hero, even if he did want to make Shouto’s life outside of the internship miserable. Or was it to keep Endeavor from finding out where Shouto was staying? He and Bakugou could’ve taken different physical routes to the internship if that was a concern.
Most likely, Natsuo and Bakugou’s parents were suspicious of Shouto’s ability to do Hero work safely and efficiently after such a stressful past couple days. Which, considering his record of reckless and self-destructive behavior… touché.
He got on Bakugou’s laptop and fucked around for a bit—did a little homework, watched a few penguin videos, did a little more homework, watched a lot more penguin videos. When he did a quick skim of recommended videos to see how badly he’d fucked up Bakugou’s YouTube algorithm, he noticed a short news story titled FIRST TODOROKI SHOUTO INTERVIEW: INTERRUPTED BY ANGRY CLASSMATE??
What the fuck? When had that…? Oh, that time when a reporter had accosted him when he was waiting for Bakugou outside the convenience store. Had they publicized that? They were reaching by calling that an “interview.” Pretty much all she’d managed to get out of him was that he’d missed school because of health problems. And his verbal confirmation that he went by Shouto…
Shit. That wasn’t exactly him coming out as trans, but for anyone who hadn’t been aware of the Shouto/Shiyo name discrepancy before, this video would be devastatingly informative. How many people had seen this?
He clicked on the news clip—keeping it muted, as he almost always did when he watched videos by himself—and scrolled down. There were a little over five hundred comments.
Okay. Not as bad as it could be. He should probably close the tab now and stop thinking about it. Definitely shouldn’t read the comments. It wasn’t like he cared what anyone thought about him. He especially wasn’t curious about the general public’s opinion on his transition. Could not give a single fuck. In fact, there was nothing in the entire world that he wanted to know less about than—
—and now he was reading the comments.
“I’m sorry?” “That’s okay” I can’t tell if he’s a master of throwing shade or just stupid
Karma finally coming back to bite Endeavor in the ass in the form of a “gender diverse” kid lmfao
Y’all better leave this strange child and his angry boyfriend alone XD They look like they’d show up at your house and beat up your kids
Isn’t the blond one the same guy Todoroki beat up at the sports festival? Are they friends??? That seems like a toxic relationship :( I hope UA isn’t just watching Todoroki abuse him
Yeah, real classy for a couple future Heroes. [eyeroll emoji] Violent, self destructive AND disrespectful of elders.
Todoroki has had one too many concussions
Why couldn’t he/she answer the Shouto/Shiyo question? Shame the younger generation gets so caught up in this gender confusion that they can’t even answer a simple question about their name. Obviously a talented young lady (?), but she needs therapy and discipline if she wants to live up to the Todoroki name.
JSFLIFSJIEKL SHOUTO MARRY ME
Why is this yaoi in my YouTube recommended?
Goddamn what’d they put in that blond guy’s water? Got me feeling a certain kind of way >:3
I want both of them to do things to me…
All right. Yep. Enough internet for today.
Shouto closed the laptop, took a quick shower, and headed for the pantry downstairs.
The house had been so quiet that he’d forgotten Masaru was home. He was sitting at the kitchen table, tinkering with a wastebasket-sized machine that he’d partially dismantled. He looked up when Shouto entered. “Howdy, son,” he said.
He was never sure what to think of Masaru—he was a quiet man who mostly stayed out of sight when Shouto was over. Bakugou didn’t talk about him much, so Shouto didn’t know the things he wasn’t supposed to do or say around him. He’d just have to try to keep out of Masaru’s way during his stay here. “Hi.”
“Sleep well?”
Shouto was prepared to answer with his standard fine, but… goddamn, he actually had slept well for once. He felt more well-rested than he had in months. “Yes.”
“Good, good. Well, we’re happy to have you here, you know, and…” He started to stand up, knocking over a couple pieces of the contraption in the process. “We’ve got some food in the fridge that I can warm up—”
“I can just check the pantry,” said Shouto. He remembered to add— “If that’s okay.”
“Oh… of course. No problem. Help yourself.” He sat back down. “Need the table? Sorry, I’ve got it a bit tied up here, with the… well, I’ve been trying to figure out this… ‘microorganism composter’ for a couple hours. Probably done more harm than good. Not too good with these newfangled electronics we’ve got, you know, they, ah…” He gave an uncomfortable laugh as he picked up his screwdriver. “Bit confusing for an old man like me.”
“What are the microorganisms?” asked Shouto.
“Mm… fancy word for the natural decomposition process, I s’pose.”
“Does it need to be electronic?” asked Shouto. “For it to decompose?”
Masaru raised his eyebrows as he worked. “You know, son, I ask myself the very same question. But it was a gift from my mother-in-law, so I oughta at least try to…” Another piece dropped off the compost bin, and he looked up at Shouto with a defeated smile. “I think your generation’s better at this sort of thing than mine.”
Shouto went into the pantry. It wasn’t as well-stocked as Fuyumi’s was, and a lot of the snacks there were foreign to him, but he found a couple small items that he thought he’d be able to stomach.
“Eat in here if you like,” Masaru told Shouto as he came out of the pantry. “I don’t mind the company.”
Don’t mind the company as in he wanted the company, or as in he could tolerate it if he were forced to? Anyway, Shouto didn’t like feeling watched while he was eating. He’d had enough of that with Endeavor and their former cook’s strictly-enforced meal planning. “It’s okay. I can go back upstairs.”
“Oh. Well… don’t be a stranger, and, ah…” Masaru leaned to the side and fished a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket. “I wrote down the passwords for all the, ah, what’re they calling ’em these days… the ‘streaming services.’ The internet and such.” He handed the paper to Shouto. “Feel free to use the tv—I don’t mind a little noise. Thermostat’s in the living room.”
He was getting access to the thermostat? Was that not a privilege reserved for the homeowner alone? Shouto wasn’t sure he even knew how to operate a thermostat—he’d relied on a constant stream of small internal temperature adjustments to keep himself comfortable for most of his life. It was true that he woke up in a pool of sweat most mornings, but he’d always blamed that on his inability to keep his quirk active while he was asleep.
He thanked Masaru and went back upstairs. Trebby had crept into Bakugou’s room while Shouto was away and was swiping at the wheels on Bakugou’s desk chair. Shouto sat on the bed and rewatched an episode of Red’s Ocean on Bakugou’s laptop as he ate, swiping away the crumbs that fell on the keyboard. His mind wandered.
He should probably figure out what to do about the current impasse with Endeavor. Could Shouto utilize this temporary separation as part of the plan to take Endeavor down? He didn’t have All Might’s quirk yet, so outright murder wasn’t an option, but was there something he could do to take a bit of power out of Endeavor’s hands? He didn’t have his phone, so he couldn’t contact Deku to ask for advice. Anyway, with how busy and stressed Deku seemed to be right now, it might not be the best choice to rely on him for help. Plus, Shouto had promised Bakugou that he wouldn’t do anything reckless before the end of the week.
But none of that meant Shouto couldn’t spend his down time strategizing. And if there was anything that Shouto had learned from watching his UA classmates flail around while fighting against him, it was how to strategize against a much stronger opponent. He needed to focus on his strengths, on the resources available to him right now.
So what had he gained by getting kicked out of his house? Physical distance, certainly, though there was still the problem of Fuyumi being subject to Endeavor’s punishments. And how might Natsuo factor in? He’d been cut off financially, which meant that Endeavor no longer had that specific bit of leverage to keep Natsuo from weaponizing his large online platform.
And—he remembered suddenly—Shouto had his own social media platform now. It wasn’t nearly as big as Natsuo’s, but he could try to grow it. Endeavor’s social media team was almost definitely watching Shouto’s social media to make sure he didn’t post anything incriminating. Not ideal, but it also meant that he could send a message to both the public and Endeavor at the same time.
What if he publicly came out as trans?
Doing that would remove the option of quietly (mis)informing the various news outlets that Shouto was still Shiyo. It would tell Endeavor that Shouto wasn’t going down so easily this time. More interestingly, it meant that Endeavor would either have to publicly accept Shouto’s transition or risk publicly severing his connection to the only Todoroki with a chance of surpassing All Might as the number one Hero.
God, a public transition would suck for Shouto, though. He’d never lived in a world where he could walk into a room without the people inside already having preconceived notions of him, and confirming his queerness would only make that worse.
Why couldn’t this be easier? Why was he being forced to choose between returning to the closet entirely and coming out to the entirety of Japan? Why couldn’t things just—
An email notification popped up on the laptop screen, interrupting his thoughts. The subject read ICYHOT OPEN THIS NOW.
Shouto paused the Red’s Ocean episode and opened it.
I’m picking up some shit after the internship. Do you need one of those fucking soft bristle toothbrushes for your weak ass teeth? Also did you eat yet today
He typed out a reply:
My teeth are as strong as the sun. You know this from past encounters with my teeth. I use soft bristles because they make less sound. And yes, I’m eating now.
Bakugou’s reply:
K. Don’t off yourself before I get home
Shouto didn’t realize he’d been smiling until he closed the tab. It was nice, being at a level a friendship where they could message each other about unimportant things like toothbrushes. He remembered Bakugou saying yesterday that he’d tried texting Shouto something that “wasn’t important,” and it made Shouto eager to get his phone back so he could see what it was.
There was a scuttling noise near the door, and Shouto looked up in time to see a flash of the cat’s tail as it darted from the room.
Shit—he should’ve closed the door to keep it from getting out. Was it going to try to go downstairs by itself? That wasn’t safe, was it? Shouto got up, but by the time he’d reached the stairs, the cat was already at the bottom. It didn’t even glance back at him before slipping into a nearby bedroom.
That was the spare bedroom, wasn’t it? Where the Bakugous stored their junk and potted plants? It might not be safe for Trebby to go in there, considering there were several types of plants that were toxic to cats. He was not about to put himself in the position where he’d have to tell Bakugou that his cat died, so he went downstairs and followed the cat into the room.
The room was cluttered, and it was hard to see the floor in places. As he looked around, he got distracted by all the items—old arithmetic workbooks on the bed, a box of cloth scraps on the floor, an acoustic guitar with a snapped string that he crouched to touch. Who did the guitar belong to?
The floor creaked in the hallway. Shouto startled and looked over his shoulder. It was Masaru, standing in the doorway with his arms across his chest.
Shouto rose from his crouch. Masaru hadn’t given him explicit permission to enter this room—was Shouto going to get in trouble? “Sorry, I was—the cat went in here. I wanted to find it.”
Masaru came into the room and looked around. Then he got down on his knees, reached one hand into the small space underneath a cabinet, and pulled out a mewling, wriggling Trebby.
Shouto was surprised. “It can fit there?”
“Cats can fit into all sorts of tiny spaces. Got flexible collarbones and a backbone like a worm.” Masaru scratched the cat’s head, tilted his head to speak to it. “Don’t you, Trebby? Little worm spine.”
Shouto realized that he’d been expecting Masaru to do something bad to the cat. Toss it over the backyard fence, or at least across the room. Logically, it didn’t make sense that he would—he’d been the one to bring it home. Still, when Masaru spoke to Trebby, some of the tension drained from Shouto’s shoulders.
Masaru motioned toward where Shouto had been crouching. “That’s Katsuki’s old guitar you were looking at. Tried to get him to start playin’ when he was… what, eight years old? He fell and broke his leg during judo practice. We didn’t have those wonder nurses like the folks up at UA do, so he had to sit out for a while. Me ’n his ma bought him a second-hand guitar to keep him from tearin’ up the house while he waited. He ‘got bored’ of it pretty quick, though.” Masaru gave a quiet laugh, rubbed his knuckle up the underside of the cat’s chin. It purred. “I think he was just frustrated when his friend Izuku came over and picked it up quicker than he did. You play?”
At this point in his life, the idea seemed ludicrous. Shouto, playing guitar. But… “I took lessons when I was younger.”
“That so? You still have a guitar?”
“No.”
There were a few light thumps on the window behind Shouto, and he turned to look. It had started raining.
“Ope,” said Masaru, pulling his hat back over his head. “Darn. Weather this morning said I’d have another hour. Really should stop puttin’ so much faith in those quirked meteorologists. Ain’t their fault, it’s just tough to fine-tune data-gathering quirks to match the professional standards of the Pre-Quirked Era… You mind watching Trebby while I put my tools in the shed?” He held the cat out to Shouto, muttering so that it was unclear whether he was talking to Shouto or to himself: “Nest of baby doves in the garden I don’t want her snacking on.”
Shouto started to hold out his hands. He had no idea how to hold a kitten—Masaru had been holding it in one hand like a large yam, but Shouto wasn’t sure his hands were big enough for that. How had Bakugou held it? He couldn’t remember.
Where did people even learn these things? Did they just know? What if he held it wrong and accidentally killed it? Masaru would probably hate him for that. And Bakugou, too. They would think he did it on purpose.
“Like this, son,” said Masaru, motioning to where Shouto should put his hand. “Just support her chest and—”
“I was thinking actually if we could put it on the bed,” Shouto said quickly, pulling his hands back toward his chest. He could feel his heart beating fast against his fingers. “The cat. And I could watch it from there and make sure it doesn’t fall off. If that’s okay.”
Masaru’s mouth rounded into an o, but he nodded and put the cat on the bed. “You can stick her in Katsuki’s room if she gets to be too much,” he said. “Thank ya kindly.”
Shouto stayed in the spare room for a while after he heard the back door open and shut. He watched Masaru through the foggy window, jogging back and forth from the garden to the small shed in the rain. Shouto had never been at someone else’s house while they were doing chores—the few dinner parties he’d attended with his family had all been at homes that could afford at least part-time housekeeping staff.
Had Masaru just given him the cat to keep him from getting in the way? Or was Shouto actually being helpful by watching it? Was he supposed to be helpful? Regardless, standing around was making him restless and anxious.
Shouto waited until Trebby wandered onto a throw blanket to snatch up the four corners and carefully lift the bundle. He carried it upstairs, one painstakingly slow step at a time, to shut Trebby in Bakugou’s room.
He returned downstairs and opened the backdoor. It was raining harder now. He called over roar of the rain: “Bakugou-san. Do you want me to help?”
Masaru squinted at him from the shed’s doorway, hand shielding his eyes. “Wouldn’t mind it,” he yelled back. “Katsuki’s got a pair of orange rubber boots by the door you can use.”
The boots were a little big, but Shouto slipped them on and jogged outside. Masaru had changed locations already and was motioning him toward the other side of the garden.
“Wrap that hose up?” he shouted.
Shouto headed over to the faucet coming off the house and struggled to unscrew it. Did his own yard have a faucet like this? He hadn’t explored it enough to know. The plants and trees stayed green, but he’d never considered how. The gardener came once per week to… do gardening things. That was all Shouto knew about the matter.
It took a few tries, but he managed to wrap the hose into a loop using his shoulder, cringing at the slimy, gritty mud between his fingers and on his neck. He carried it to the shed, where Masaru took it from him and hung it on a hook. “Is that all?” asked Shouto.
Masaru stood in the doorway and surveyed the yard. “Mm… yessir, I’d say we ’bout got everything cleaned up.”
The use of we was generous—all Shouto had done was wrap up a hose—but it did feel nice to hear. To feel like he’d done something useful.
Masaru looked at him for a moment before he said, “You want to take a look at the dove nest?”
It hadn’t even occurred to him that that might be an option. Of course he wanted to look at the dove nest.
Masaru led him over to a line of tall flowering bushes near the wooden fence. He unzipped his rain jacket and held the side of it over the bush—a protective wing against the rain—as he pushed a few sections of leaves aside. Underneath: a woven collection of twigs and grass, and two tiny, fuzzy birds that gulped at the air above them.
“Oh,” Shouto said softly.
Masaru’s voice was low, gentle. “Ain’t somethin’ you see every day, hm?”
He’d never seen a nest up-close that hadn’t already been deserted. “Are…? They’re okay?”
“Mm?”
“They’re not abandoned?”
“Ah—that’s what I’ve got my plum tree for.” Masaru let the leaves above the nest settle back into place before he pointed out a couple birds fluttering in the branches above them. “Female on the left. Well—the right now. Left again. She’s the browner one. They give their babies some space once they’re grown enough, but they like to keep watch from nearby.”
Shouto squinted to see them through the rain. “The male and the female? They take care of the babies together?”
“Sure enough.”
“When the babies are just eggs, too?”
“Especially then.” Masaru put his hands on his hips. Shouto had always thought that Bakugou had inherited that pose from his mother, but maybe not. “The father sits on the eggs during the day, and the mother does it at night.”
“Oh.” Shouto paused, watching the birds in the tree. “Penguins do that, too.”
“Do they, now?”
“Something like it. A lot of them. The parents share the duties. But they have pebble nests. And it’s a high-stress environment because of all the predators, so the parents have to microsleep.”
“Microsleep?” said Masaru. “Tell me what that is.”
“They sleep for intervals of a few seconds at a time. The chinstrap penguins do.”
Masaru chuckled. “Sounds like what Mitsuki and I used to do back when Katsuki was a baby. Just the chinstraps do that?”
“We still have to do more research on other penguin species. But other kinds of birds sleep weird, too. Frigatebirds can sleep with one half of their brain at a time while they’re flying.”
“Ain’t that somethin’,” Masaru murmured. His eyes followed the birds in the plum tree. “Lord. Ain’t that somethin’.”
They went back inside. Shouto was muddy and soaked, so he left Bakugou’s rubber boots by the door and went upstairs to take a shower.
As he showered, something tingled pleasantly in his chest. That had been nice. Looking at birds, talking. That had been a nice conversation. And it was nice to have done something with his hands that wasn’t Hero work. To have gotten a little bit dirty in the process.
He was still thinking about it as he turned off the shower and started toweling off. He turned their short conversation around in his head, made a mental list of animal facts that he might be able to use in future conversations. Maybe Masaru would let him help with gardening later. He wouldn’t be good at it, but he could probably dig a hole or two without messing anything up. Would it be presumptuous for Shouto to ask if he could help?
Someone knocked on the door, startling him. “Hello?” said Shouto.
Bakugou’s voice. “You decent?”
Oh, Bakugou was home already? “No.”
Bakugou came in anyway, holding a packaged toothbrush in one hand and, in the other, the orange boots Shouto had muddied in the garden. He looked at Shouto and scrunched his face.
Shouto kept toweling off. “I did say no.”
Bakugou walked past him to set the toothbrush on the sink and turn on the shower, leaving the bathroom door halfway open. He started rinsing the boots off. “Shitty manners to fuck up someone’s shoes and not wash ’em.”
Shouto hung the towel up and pulled on his boxers. “Probably it’s also shitty manners to walk in on your guest naked.”
“Like you give a shit.”
True enough. Shouto pulled on a clean t-shirt he’d filched from Bakugou’s closet. “Do you want me to wash the boots?”
“I got it. Go do your homework or whatever.”
“Let me help.”
Bakugou glanced back at him. He smacked his lips, held one of the boots out. Shouto took it and started rinsing it off under the showerhead beside Bakugou.
“Your father showed me the baby birds in the garden,” said Shouto.
Bakugou scraped a clump of mud off his boot with his thumbnail. Grunted.
“I was thinking… if we ever had baby birds at my house. Do you think the gardener would’ve gotten rid of them?”
“How should I know?” said Bakugou. “That’s rich people shit.”
Shouto turned the boot to wash off the other side, watching brown water swirl the drain. “I don’t see many birds at all in our neighborhood.”
“Not many trees there.”
“Is that why?”
Bakugou shrugged.
It went quiet for a while. Shouto thought he’d finished washing his boot, but then he looked over and saw Bakugou washing the treads clean. Shouto copied him.
“I like it here,” said Shouto.
The drain gave a loud gurgle.
“I like your parents,” Shouto said. “And your cat. And your dad’s garden. It’s nice.”
Bakugou made a noise that sounded like a cross between contempt and confusion. “You like my parents?”
Was that weird to say? “I just mean that they… both… like each other.”
Bakugou quirked an eyebrow. “Why the fuck do you think people get married in the first place?”
“I don’t know. To have someone it’s socially acceptable have sex and children with, maybe.”
“You’re gross.”
“I’m just guessing. Maybe because they have traits that complement each other? Like one person who’s good at cooking and one who’s good with money. Or because of convenience or financial necessity or social status.” It was nice to think that people could fall in love, but it just didn’t seem statistically reasonable. He could understand one person becoming obsessed with another, but for the second person to return those obsessive feelings? That had to be as rare as it was unsustainable. “I don’t know why your parents got married, but they’re at least friends with each other. And they like you, and I think you like them. And you don’t get scared around them.”
“Yeah, well, that...” Bakugou turned the water off. “You could go to most any house and they’d be like that. You only like it here ’cause you don’t know what’s normal.”
“I don’t think that’s why,” said Shouto. “I like you, too.”
Bakugou shook the water from his boot. Then he took the boot Shouto was holding and shook that out, too. He set the boots down by the wall.
“I’m gonna go read,” said Bakugou. He handed Shouto the new toothbrush. “Here. Your breath smells like ass.”
Shouto brushed his teeth before following Bakugou into his bedroom. He settled on the bed with the ornithology book while Bakugou read at his desk from the book he kept in his desk drawer.
About ten minutes passed. Shouto was looking at a photo of king eider when Bakugou broke the silence with, “What did you mean by that?”
Shouto looked up. Bakugou’s head was turned away from him. “By what?”
Bakugou was quiet.
“Nothin’,” he finally said. “Never mind.”
###
A couple hours later, Mitsuki came home from work and yelled up the stairs: “BOYS! Come help unload the groceries!”
They took the groceries from the trunk of Mitsuki’s car and, after nudging aside the mechanical mess that Masaru had made of the compost bin earlier today, set them on the kitchen table. Mitsuki started unpacking. She’d bought a lot of prepackaged food—granola, cereal, nori, yogurt drinks, dried mango chips, etcetera. There were plenty of non-food items, too. Brand-name soap, face wash, deodorant, shampoo, and conditioner, all unscented; toothpaste, mouthwash, contact lens solution, men’s underwear, a couple sports bras, seamless socks, sweatpants, and several other items. Bakugou picked up a pack of tampons and started reading the instructions on the back, brow furrowed.
“Shouto, most of this is yours,” said Mitsuki. “I got Katsuki’s size in clothes, but I need you to tell me if something doesn’t fit. Katsuki, put those down. Those aren’t for you.”
Bakugou put the tampons back on the table. He gathered a few of the food items and took them to the pantry, grumbling.
The sheer number of items on the table was overwhelming. Shouto felt guilty just looking. “Probably one of my siblings could’ve brought things for me. Are they—? Did you talk to them about it?”
“Couldn’t get ahold of your sister at the school,” said Mitsuki. “I did talk to Natsuo over the phone last night, but I didn’t see any reason why he should make a ninety-minute trip when we’ve got stores right here. Masaru and I are still gonna make meals, of course, but Natsuo told me that you have trouble with food textures, so don’t be shy if you need to eat from the pantry instead of the table. I won’t be offended. And you can snack whenever you’re hungry. What kinds of clothes do you like to wear? I usually only see you in your school uniform.”
His head was spinning. Clothes… right, he wore those. “Just, um. Usually just shorts and a t-shirt.”
Bakugou came back from the pantry. He’d opened the pack of dried mango chips and was eating, the crunching unreasonably loud. “You need to get some damn men’s clothes.”
“We can do that for you,” said Mitsuki.
Shouto felt uncomfortable. This was too much. “I don’t need that.”
“Yeah, you do,” said Bakugou. He stuffed three or four chips into his mouth at once before handing the bag to Shouto. “You gonna do your interviews in your tacky-ass Red’s Ocean t-shirt?”
“I—”
“Don’t answer that. Ma, where’s the fuckin’ catalogue?”
“On my desk, hun,” she said.
Shouto watched Bakugou leave the kitchen. He turned to Mitsuki. “Catalogue?”
“You know Masaru and I work in the fashion industry, don’t you?” she said. “We’ll get you to pick some outfits you like, and I can have ’em tailored for you.”
Shouto just stared at her.
What the fuck.
Bakugou brought back a spiral-bound book and put it on the table. “Look through that,” he said.
Shouto stayed standing.
This felt like a trap. Like they were testing whether he knew the proper etiquette surrounding someone doing you a huge favor, like they were waiting for the gotcha moment when he assumed they meant something sincerely when they were actually using sarcasm or hyperbole. It had happened before.
“Fuck’s wrong with you?” said Bakugou. “Sit your ass down.”
He just needed to make sure. “You’re not joking?”
“Does it look like I’m fuckin’ joking?”
Shouto pinched the skin at the crease of his elbow. He looked from Bakugou to Mitsuki, then back to Bakugou.
Bakugou sighed. He pulled a chair back, grabbed Shouto by the front of his shirt, and forced him to sit. “Ain’t no goddamn reason for anybody to ever act as suspicious as you do,” he said.
“Katsuki, be nice,” said Mitsuki.
“Why? He’s being fuckin’ stupid.” He smacked the back of Shouto’s head. “Quit being fuckin’ stupid.”
“You brat,” said Mitsuki, giving the back of Bakugou’s head its own light smack. She reached over Shouto’s shoulder and flipped the book open, setting a pen atop the open pages. “Pick whatever you want, Shouto. I get everything at a discount.”
Mitsuki left the room. Bakugou sat beside Shouto, resting his elbow on Shouto’s shoulder as Shouto flipped through the book. It took a few seconds for his head to clear enough for him to start processing the images.
His interest in fashion had dropped off years ago after Endeavor started weaponizing it against him, taking away or destroying Shouto’s favorite clothes as punishment when he did something wrong. Looking through this catalogue, though, he could feel that interest sparking again, could feel himself thinking—well, what if? He’d have to be careful when and where he let it show, of course, but…
What if he let himself be interested in things again?
He’d retained enough knowledge about fashion to know that these clothes were good. Very good, even. He paused on an outfit that he liked.
Bakugou made a displeased noise. “Don’t pick that one.”
“Why?” asked Shouto.
“My parents designed it together. Won an award for it and everything. It’s like their second fuckin’ child. They won’t shut the fuck up about it if they see you wearin’ it.”
Shouto circled it anyway. “I like it.”
Bakugou slumped in his chair and gave a loud groan.
Mitsuki spoke from the other room. “Bakugou Katsuki, I just know you’re not in there criticizing your guest’s taste in fashion.”
Bakugou called back. “He’s tryna pick the ugly son of a bitch you and Dad birthed.”
“You?”
“MA.”
Mitsuki cackled.
I want to stay here, Shouto thought. And then he felt guilty for thinking it, because he was supposed to want to get out of their hair as quickly as possible. But he didn’t. He wanted to keep inconveniencing them with his presence. He wanted to stay for as long as possible.
More than that, he wanted to learn how to be a part of it all. How to tease each other like they did. How to yell up the stairs. How to walk around the house with an open bag of chips. How to deconstruct a compost bin on the kitchen table (and leave it there for a while). How to adjust the thermostat. How to hold the cat. How to let the microwave beep. How to sleep in. How to go into the garden and look at the baby birds. How to play guitar, badly and loudly. How to fill his closet with clothes he liked.
No worrying about alerting Endeavor to his presence, no wondering if he had enough time to relax before Endeavor got home, no thinking about whether he was unintentionally giving Endeavor information to weaponize or whether his hands were free to defend himself. Just existing.
He wanted it so badly that it hurt.
###
From what Shouto could tell, he was doing a pretty good job at keeping his promise to Bakugou. It was Thursday morning already, and he only had to avoid doing anything reckless until Saturday had passed.
Bakugou and Shouto left for the internship at the same time, but they took different routes just to be safe. Endeavor probably wouldn’t suspect that Shouto was living with Bakugou just from their common internship—Endeavor worked with people he disliked all the time—but if someone saw them walking together outside of the internship and posted it online, Endeavor would likely put two and two together.
So Shouto reached Hawks’s agency before Bakugou did. Which was fine. Or it would’ve been, if Shouto hadn’t been brought to an abrupt stop by the sight of Deku conversing with Shinsou on the bench in front of the building.
“No, here’s what I’m saying,” Deku was telling Shinsou. “Your quirk is activated when someone responds to you. They have to recognize that you’re communicating with them, and then they have to communicate back. It can’t just be you saying, ‘I like Red’s Ocean’ and them saying, ‘Ouch, I stubbed my fucking toe.’ And it can’t just be you both grunting within earshot of each other. Right?”
“I guess,” said Shinsou, brow furrowed. “Yeah.”
“It has to be a deliberate linguistic response to whatever you said. There’s a part of their brain that has to activate—Broca’s area in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere, which processes language—and it has to recognize that you’re communicating with them and then formulate an answer. Are you following?”
“Yeah.”
“So here’s the thing—and I say this with respect for your lived experience and the knowledge that you know your quirk better than I do—I recognize that you learned some Japanese Sign Language so you could communicate with people without them having to worry that you were going to activate your quirk. But sign language is processed in the same part of the brain as spoken language is. The same mental processes happen when someone is responding in JSL as when they’re responding in Japanese, or Russian, or any other spoken language. So, theoretically…?”
“I… should be able to brainwash someone who responds to me in JSL?”
“Exactly,” said Deku, poking Shinsou’s chest. “I’d highly encourage you to experiment with it. Because finding that you have a language-based quirk rather than a voice-based one could open up a whole slew of opportunities for you.”
“Huh,” Shinsou said. He gave a slow nod. “That… yeah, that’s actually really helpful. Thanks. You said you work with Hawks, right?”
A nonchalant shrug. “We’re buddies.”
“Do you have an intelligence quirk?”
Deku laughed. “Nah, it’s the autism.”
“Fuck,” said Shinsou, grinning as he tossed his head back, like someone who’d just lost a friendly game of cards. “You got the good shit. Mine just makes me queer and mean.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’re mean,” said Deku. “You are very queer, though. It’s an excellent vibe for you. I’m into it.”
“Are you?”
Shouto should probably step in before they started exchanging Line IDs. “Deku,” he called.
Shinsou looked a bit annoyed at the interruption, but Deku shot up off the bench before he’d even had a chance to see Shouto. “Oh! Shouto,” said Deku, doing a light jog over to him. He lowered his voice so Shinsou couldn’t hear. “I was waiting for you.”
He really, really hoped this did not lead to something that would require Shouto breaking his promise to Bakugou. “Something wrong?”
“Well, you—” He held out his hands in a hear me out gesture. “Not to be creepy. Sorry. But you weren’t answering your phone, so I checked the cameras near your house, and I wasn’t seeing you leave or enter your house for a couple days. But you were still showing up to the internship. Well—not yesterday. Anyway. I was like, okay, so I know that Endeavor is back home—did Shouto get kicked out his house? Did he run away? Why isn’t he answering my texts? Is he hurt? And I didn’t want to ask around in case it was, like, a secret thing. So I showed up here today to see if I could catch you. And I did. Here you are.” He smiled, though it was a little bit crazed, a little bit exhausted. “So what’s going on?”
If it had been anyone other than Deku… dear god. “I did get kicked out. I’m staying with Bakugou.”
“With Kacchan,” said Deku, squeezing his eyes closed and raising his hands to his cheeks. “Right! Right, no, that makes sense. Fuck me, I can’t believe I didn’t think to check the cameras there.”
“Have you… slept?” asked Shouto.
“I have experienced sleep in my lifetime, yes.” Deku blinked a few times, lowered his hands. “How are you doing? Can I help in any way?”
“I’ll be fine,” said Shouto. “It’s temporary. Nothing I can’t work through on my own.”
“Shouto, please let me help. I feel really bad about not checking up on you until now.”
Why? It wasn’t Deku’s fault that they hadn’t been in contact. “I don’t know if there’s anything you can do right now. Probably I can let you know if anything comes up.”
Deku’s chest deflated. He looked away, rubbing his cheek.
Goddammit. He was going to regret this. “I could… use a hug.”
Deku’s face lit up. “Really?”
“Yes.”
Deku didn’t hesitate. He gripped Shouto around the waist and squeezed him. When Shouto returned the hug, he could feel Deku trembling—subtle enough that Deku might’ve not been aware of it himself. It happened to Shouto sometimes, when he was very stressed and very tired and maybe hadn’t eaten in a while, and he didn’t always realize it was happening until someone else pointed it out.
He tilted his head down to speak into Deku’s ear. “Have you eaten today?”
“Hm?” said Deku. His grip on Shouto loosened. “Uh… budget’s a bit tight right now, actually. I’ll probably steal some ramen from Dabi this afternoon.”
Shouto pulled away and took out his wallet. He gave Deku the three thousand yen that Mitsuki had given him to buy lunch. “There are restaurants across the street. Go eat breakfast.”
Deku held the money like Shouto had just placed a dead slug in his palm. “Oh,” he said. “I… Shouto, I wasn’t asking for money.”
“I know. I’m giving it to you.”
“I can’t…” Deku let his polite protest drain off prematurely, like he was afraid Shouto might actually take the money back. He clutched the bills to his chest. “You don’t need it?”
He’d just ask Bakugou for lunch money when the time came. Bakugou’s family wasn’t the type of rich that could comfortably host a fifteen-person dinner party in their bedroom closet, but they could afford to buy Deku a meal. “I’m fine. Go eat something.”
Deku gave a distracted nod as he looked at the restaurants across the street. He looked back at Shouto like he was trying to remember something, then said, “Oh,” and gave Shouto another quick hug.
Shouto felt something slip into his back pocket.
“Text me when you get the chance,” Deku said as he pulled away. “Love you, bestie.”
“You, too,” said Shouto. He was surprised at the ease with which he said it. “Please take a nap.”
“I probably won’t.” Deku waved a good-natured goodbye to Shinsou before heading across the street toward the restaurants.
Once Deku was gone, Shouto approached Shinsou. He still had his eyes fixed on the restaurant Deku had gone into, and he startled a little when he noticed Shouto standing over him. “What?”
“Are you okay?” asked Shouto.
“Yeah?” said Shinsou. “Why not?”
Shouto looked across the street. He was half expecting an explosion to erupt from the restaurant, and he wasn’t sure what it said about himself that the image came paired with some measure of fondness for the theoretical perpetrator.
“What’d you give him money for?” asked Shinsou.
“For food,” said Shouto. “He was shaking.”
“Seemed perfectly fine to me. What the hell. You know him?”
“He’s a friend,” Shouto said. And to get away from this conversation— “Do you want to go inside?”
“You’re being weird. Where do you know him from?”
Shouto’s tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth. He looked down the sidewalk and wished very hard that Bakugou would appear right about now.
“He’s not the friend you told me about, is he?” asked Shinsou, his tone only half-teasing. “The one who offs people for fun?”
Shouto’s mouth was dry. “Not for fun.”
“Jesus fucking—that’s not him.” Shinsou paused. “Is it?”
Shouto kept avoiding eye contact as he gave an uncomfortable shrug.
“Are you serious?” asked Shinsou. “No, that’s not him. You’re fucking with me. Really?”
“I told you he was nice,” said Shouto.
“Not that nice.” Shinsou released a breath, wiped his palms on his pants. “I almost gave him my fucking number.”
“Sorry,” said Shouto.
“He’s not going to stalk and kill me now, is he?”
He was almost one hundred percent sure that Deku had no desire to harm Shinsou. He was only about ninety percent sure that Deku’s father had not ordered him to do so. “I’ll talk to him. But I wouldn’t worry about it. Probably he just wanted to talk to you about your quirk. Genuinely. He really likes Heroes and quirks.”
“Isn’t he a Villain?”
Shouto met Shinsou’s eyes. “Weren’t you?”
Hurt flashed across Shinsou’s face. It morphed quickly into a glare. “Just in a legal sense. I got out of it.”
“And he’s trying,” said Shouto. “People’s journeys are different, but we all live on this shitty piece of rock, and a lot of us want the same thing. I wish you wouldn’t assume he’s a bad person with bad intentions based on his past and his living situation. You don’t like people doing that to you.”
“I never murdered anybody.”
“But if you did. Imagine if you had to live with that. And then imagine how good of a person you’d have to be to see Shinsou Hitoshi sitting on a bench outside Hawks’s agency, and to think, I am going to take time out of my day to be kind to this asshole even though I’m feeling like absolute dogshit. That’s what Deku does. So don’t judge him.”
Shinsou raised an eyebrow.
Shouto was still running high on adrenaline, and Shinsou’s look frustrated him. “What?”
“You really trust him not to hurt you?”
“I… no,” Shouto admitted. “But it wouldn’t be his fault if he did.”
“You have the most fucked-up thought processes.” Shinsou scratched his scalp. “Fucking Christ. Okay, I know it seems like I’m judging and insulting your friend. I get it. He’s nice, and not a lot of people are nice to you. I know I’m not. But I don’t want to be the one to find your dead body in the trunk of a car. Like, that… I don’t know if you’re in love with him or just have some weird codependence, but whatever it is, it’s really fucking unhealthy.”
“He’s not a bad person,” said Shouto.
“That’s not my point. I mean, it is, but there’s also the fact that someone doesn’t have to be a bad person to be bad for you.”
“He’s not. He’s not bad for me.”
“You just said that you wouldn’t be mad if he offed you.”
“Because it wouldn’t be his fault.”
Shinsou stared like Shouto was trying to sell him a suitcase full of rabid bats. “Okay, well, you’re not gonna see me at your funeral.”
“I won’t see anyone at my funeral,” said Shouto. “I’ll be dead.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“You’re being mean about my friend. He’s a good person. He’s really important to me.”
“I can see that,” Shinsou said. “Jesus.”
They fell into silence. Shouto was still for a while, waiting for the adrenaline to fizzle out in his fingertips, and then he sat beside Shinsou on the bench.
“I’m sorry,” said Shouto. “I’m trying to listen to you more. Just… a lot of people are really mean to Deku already. I don’t want to make things worse for him.”
“I get that,” Shinsou told him. “But you have to look out for yourself sometimes.”
“I don’t want to stop being friends with him.”
“Then don’t. But be careful around him.”
Shouto shook his head. “I’m tired of being careful. All the time, I’m careful. I just want to trust somebody.”
“Even if it kills you?”
“Yes.”
Shinsou sighed. “Your choice, I guess.”
Another silence. It stretched longer this time.
Shouto almost asked what had gone down with Endeavor a couple days ago after Shouto left Aizawa and Mic’s apartment—if Endeavor had yelled, had intimidated, had threatened. If Shinsou had heard or seen any of it and been afraid.
Heavier, though, was Shouto’s desire to not know any of that, to pretend that Shinsou had not seen into that part of his life, to let that bit of forced knowing remain unspoken.
Maybe, after going through that together, he and Shinsou understood each other better now.
Maybe they wouldn’t be fighting so much if they did not.
That was what knowing was, he’d learned—a cycle of connections and disconnections, each new bit of understanding deeper and heavier and more meaningful than the last. It was not a comfortable process. He didn’t like the conflict, didn’t like the vulnerability that came afterward, didn’t like that pushing through the post-conflict silence was so critical to reaching the next point in the cycle. But getting stuck in the silence was even worse.
Talk, Bakugou had told him.
About what?
Anything. Whatever. But you gotta start.
“I’d go to yours,” Shouto said.
Shinsou cut his eyes toward him. “My what?”
“Your funeral. Even if you died doing something stupid. I would go.”
Shinsou smirked a little, looked away. “Eh,” he said, not entirely dismissively. “That’s more than most people would do.”
Later, after Bakugou had arrived and they’d set out with Hawks for the day, Shouto lagged behind the group. He pulled out the folded slip of paper that Deku had tucked into his back pocket and read it.
Meeting with Stain in Hosu this Saturday at midnight. Address below. See you there.
Notes:
Honestly, the real mystery here is what book Bakugou's been reading throughout this chapter. Put your worst guesses in the comments.
A kind reader has informed me that AO3 is not fond of certain kinds of links, so I've relocated the link from last chapter in my Instagram bio & as a pinned post on Twitter/X (linked above). This fic will always remain free and accessible, but if you've ever wished you could support me in a more concrete way (god knows my psychiatrist appointments cost an arm and a leg), check it out!
Chapter 58: Shouto Likes Stealing and You Should, Too
Summary:
Natsuo visits. Plans are made.
Quick little chapter (4k words) as I get ready for a reading tomorrow! I'll have the next (longer) chapter out soon.
Notes:
CW: financial abuse, references to child abuse and murder
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Thursday night, after taking a shower to wash off the day’s misadventures, Shouto came downstairs to hear a familiar voice coming from the kitchen. He looked questioningly at Bakugou playing games on the living room TV, who said in answer, “It’s Snow Bunny.”
Shouto went into the kitchen. Natsuo was sitting at the table beside Mitsuki. He had his laptop out and was quietly explaining something to her.
“Hey,” said Shouto.
Natsuo and Mitsuki looked up. “Oh, hey, bud,” said Natsuo, closing his laptop. “How’s it goin’?”
He was disappointed to not see Fuyumi, too. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Yeah, I’m in town to talk to Yumi.” Natsuo got up and rounded the table to give Shouto a hug. “Thought I’d stop by and see how your internship’s been going. Been busy?”
Shouto did not have the patience for hugs and small talk right now. He pulled out of the embrace after a couple seconds. “What’d Fuyumi say? You went to her school?”
“Well, I—yeah, I did. She wasn’t there.”
“You didn’t see her?”
Natsuo put his hand on Shouto’s shoulder and turned to Mitsuki. “Is there somewhere Shouto and I can talk?”
“Of course,” said Mitsuki. “There’s a bench in the garden. Weather’s nice enough.”
Shouto and Natsuo went into the backyard. The metal bench was damp from the rain yesterday, so Shouto took off his jacket and used it to wipe the bench.
“You have zero respect for your clothes,” said Natsuo. “Is that even your jacket? Whose jacket is that?”
“Bakugou’s,” Shouto said.
“You guys sharing clothes now? Seems serious.”
They sat. The bench was cold, unwelcoming.
“You didn’t see Fuyumi,” said Shouto.
Natsuo exhaled, his hands squeezing his kneecaps. “I asked for her at the elementary school. They told me she didn’t work there anymore.”
Oh no. “Did they fire her?”
“I don’t know. I should’ve asked, I just… the tone they used when they told me that, y’know, it felt like I shouldn’t linger. I don’t think it matters exactly what went down, anyway, if she quit or… She’s not there anymore. That’s all I know.”
Shouto felt the loss of it like a weight on his chest. Teaching was what got Fuyumi out of bed in the morning. Teaching was where Fuyumi made all her friends. It was the one thing she had independent of Endeavor. Fuyumi loved that job. Fuyumi loved that job.
“You okay?” asked Natsuo.
He was so angry that he wanted to cry. “I’m frustrated.”
“D’you wanna talk about it?”
“It’s just a feeling,” said Shouto. “There’s nothing I can talk about.”
“I think maybe you should try. Our last phone call had me worried about you.”
Shouto looked at Natsuo, and it wasn’t until he saw Natsuo’s expression that the memory returned. Back at Aizawa’s house, high on weed that had come from some random teenager’s ratty backpack, telling Natsuo through the phone how he couldn’t wait to kill Endeavor.
Well. That was awkward.
“I wasn’t sober,” said Shouto. “When I was talking to you.”
“I know. That’s why I’m asking you about it now.”
Shouto looked away. He didn’t want to lie to Natsuo. He knew he ought to lie, for the safety of everyone involved, but he didn’t want to.
“I just don’t want you to end up doing something that hurts the situation more than it helps,” Natsuo said. “Do you understand what I mean?”
“I’m tired,” said Shouto.
“I know, bud.”
“I want it to be done.”
“I know.”
“I’m not strong enough now,” said Shouto. “I know that. I won’t do anything stupid.”
Natsuo’s voice stayed neutral. Careful. “Do you think you will be strong enough?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I don’t know exactly,” said Shouto. “Soon.”
“In the next few years?”
“Yes,” said Shouto.
“Sooner?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Are you going to try then?”
“Yes.”
For a long moment, Natsuo was quiet.
Then he said: “Can you promise me something?”
Shouto hummed.
“I want you to be sure,” said Natsuo. “When you try it. I want you to be one hundred percent sure that it’ll work and that you’ll get away safely. And you can’t try it before you reach that point.”
That would be difficult. But the difficulty was the point, he supposed. Natsuo was doing all he could to decrease the chances that Shouto would follow through with killing Endeavor.
It made Shouto feel a little guilty. Deku had already set up a meeting on Saturday—two days from now—for Shouto to meet Stain, the literal Hero Killer. Shouto was actively planning to kill his father. Did Natsuo understand how serious Shouto was about this?
“Shouto,” said Natsuo.
“Yes,” said Shouto. “I promise.”
“Thank you. Have you given any more thought to how I can help with my YouTube channel?”
Shouto sighed. Now that he, Natsuo, and Fuyumi had lost everything important to them, what was the use in delaying further? As soon as they could get Fuyumi out of the house, as soon as they were all safe from Endeavor, they could start what should be the easy process of ruining Endeavor’s—and many other Heroes’—reputation.
But the idea of doing so gave him less pleasure than he’d expected. Endeavor’s abuse becoming public would make Shouto’s friends at UA see him differently. Which, okay, when compared to the damage that the reveals would deal to Hero culture, the judgement of a few kids didn’t seem like a reason for postponing their attack.
But the thought of letting people like Ashido, Kirishima, and yes, even Bakugou see those old videos of Shouto’s fights that Dabi had stolen from Endeavor’s agency—it felt like a horribly mean thing to do. Like telling someone to close their eyes before placing a mangled dead spider in their hands. They would open their eyes and realize what it was that they’d been touching.
God, why couldn’t things be easier? He was having such a nice time at Bakugou’s house. Why couldn’t it stay like this forever?
Then he remembered his promise to Bakugou—that they would get through this week without anything bad happening. And he felt relieved, because that gave him an excuse to tell Natsuo not yet.
“There’s a flash drive in my desk drawer at the house,” said Shouto. “If you can get that, you can use it to get ready.”
Natsuo raised his eyebrows. “Just get ready? Not—?”
“I need a few more days.”
Natsuo nodded, looked away. “I guess we should find a place for Fuyumi to stay. Ideally, for all three of us. Endeavor’s going to get serious about getting you back home soon. He has to have given up on you surrendering by now. I think your internship might be the only thing keeping him from just grabbing you off the street and hauling you off.”
“And his ego,” Shouto added.
“And his ego.” Natsuo rolled his neck back, making it pop. He winced. “Can I get your opinion on an ethical quandary?”
Shouto laughed. Then he realized that Natsuo wasn’t joking. “What is it?”
“Say someone runs a charity. Nonprofit. The money goes directly to families who really, really need it. And then suddenly the person who runs the charity is someone whose family really needs money. Is it ethical for that person to take money from the charity they run?”
Shouto thought. “The person who runs the charity—their family really needs money?”
“Yes.”
“But the other people really, really need money.”
Natsuo gave a dissatisfied grunt. “Okay. I’m hearing it.”
“Hearing what?” Shouto asked. “I didn’t answer your question. Which family is better at stealing? The one who knows how to steal without getting caught should get less money. Why are you asking me, anyway? Do you run a charity?”
“Yeah. It’s mostly money that I earn from my channel, plus some donations. I’ve never taken anything from it.”
“Do what you want,” said Shouto. “But you don’t have to take any money from it if it makes you feel bad. I can figure things out for us.”
Natsuo grimaced. “No—no, I didn’t wanna push things off on you. I can— I have some gaming equipment that I can sell, and I’m sure Yumi has some stuff, if we can get it out of the house. I’m guessing that Endeavor is going to do the same thing with her finances as he did with yours, so—”
“I got it, Natsuo. I’ll take care of it. It’ll be easy for me. It won’t even be a problem.”
It surprised Shouto how easily the lie slipped from his tongue. There’d even been some emotion in the words, and he was sure that it wasn’t the same emotion he was feeling. It had sounded earnest, reassuring.
Had it been like this for Deku? A slow separation between the outside and the inside? Was that who Shouto wanted to be?
###
Natsuo stayed for dinner. Shouto spent the meal feeling stretched between the small talk and what wasn’t being said.
Was Fuyumi okay? What was Natsuo going to do now that he wasn’t going to school? How long until Endeavor showed up at Bakugou’s house or at UA, demanding that Shouto come home?
A couple times, Shouto caught Bakugou looking at him. He hoped his expression didn’t give away too much. At the same time, he knew Bakugou knew him well enough to tell that something was off.
After dinner, Natsuo helped clear the table off. Shouto marveled at how smoothly he did it, how he didn’t have to ask where the spoons went in the dishwasher and whether they were supposed to go right side up or upside down. It made him realize how awkward he must look when he tried to help with chores, with all his starting and stopping and not knowing how or when to ask whatever unwieldily-worded questions he had.
“You’re welcome to stay the night,” Mitsuki said to Natsuo. “Masaru and I have to go out for drinks with a client tonight, but the boys will be here.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’d better get going. Thank you, though.” Natsuo clapped Bakugou on the shoulder as he passed. “You stayin’ outta trouble, big guy?”
“I don’t get in trouble,” said Bakugou. “I’m perfect.”
“You are perfect,” said Shouto.
“Shut the fuck—” Bakugou cut himself off with a snort as he disappeared into the living room.
Shouto caught up to Natsuo at the front door and spoke to him quietly. “Do you think you could get me a phone?” he asked. “There are some people I might need to contact.”
“You can’t borrow Bakugou’s?” asked Natsuo.
“Not… for this.” He was worried that Deku would try to contact him before their meetup on Saturday. There wouldn’t be a way to get his new number to Deku, but Shouto knew if he searched Eraserhead merch on Etsy, Deku’s merch would be the only result. Hopefully, Shouto could message Deku through the Etsy app. “It doesn’t have to be expensive or have unlimited data. Or new. Just something with a screen.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Natsuo.
Once Natsuo left, Shouto went into the living room and sat on the couch beside Bakugou. Bakugou was playing a fantasy combat-based game on the TV with a wireless controller. Neither of them spoke until Mitsuki and Masaru had left the house for their client visit at the bar.
Bakugou was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the TV. “You ever play before?”
It took Shouto a moment to realize Bakugou was referring to gaming. “No. Well—when I was little, maybe.”
“What’d you play?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I even did play. I might’ve made the memory up.”
“You do that?” Bakugou asked.
“I don’t know. I just know that it happens to some people. I don’t remember a lot from when Touya was alive, anyway.”
Bakugou opened a drawer in the coffee table and tossed a spare controller onto Shouto’s lap. “Guess I gotta show your stupid ass what these controls do.”
“I’ll be bad at it,” said Shouto. Bakugou didn’t respond.
Bakugou went over what Shouto assumed were the basics of gaming. It was all foreign to Shouto, so he couldn’t be sure. Regardless, he was glad for the distraction—he had to focus hard if he wanted to commit any of this to memory, and the effort worked against the raging whirlpool of unprocessed thoughts and sensations in his brain, slowing it.
They started the game. Shouto struggled to control the movement of his character, repeatedly running into walls and trees and falling off cliffs. Bakugou made it look so easy.
Bakugou shifted, his left knee knocking against Bakugou’s right. “You’re shit at this.”
“I said I was.” Shouto put his controller on the coffee table. “When are your parents coming home?”
Bakugou glanced at Shouto. His eyes darted to Shouto’s chin before he looked away. “Not for a few hours.”
“Okay. Can I lie down?”
“Hah?” Bakugou changed the game to single player. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Move over.”
“No,” Bakugou said. He’d paused the game and was fiddling with his character customization.
“I can’t lie down if you’re in the middle of the couch.”
“There’s a goddamn recliner right there.”
“I don’t want to sit in the goddamn recliner,” said Shouto.
“Then go fuck yourself. I ain’t movin’.”
Shouto lay down on top of Bakugou, his stomach over Bakugou’s legs. It was almost comfortable. He put his cheek on his folded arms so he could watch the TV as Bakugou gamed. A few seconds later, he felt Bakugou’s arms and hands rest on his back. He could feel the muscles twitching in Bakugou’s wrists as he manipulated his controller.
It was nice, the pressure of it. He thought that he could close his eyes and fall asleep here if he wanted to.
Bakugou switched to single player. The TV made a trilling sound as he hit PLAY. “What’d Snow Bunny talk to you about?” Bakugou asked.
“Just… murder ’n stuff,” said Shouto.
“Well, don’t tell me then, asshole.” Bakugou took his character through a marketplace, stopping briefly to flip over a table full of earthenware. “Not like I’m sharing my house with you or anything.”
“I don’t think I’ll be here much longer,” Shouto said.
Bakugou turned the volume on the TV up. Then he walked his character over to a butcher’s stall and flipped their table. It didn’t seem to have any effect on the game except to make the villagers stomp their feet and shake their fists.
Shouto shifted onto his side so he could crane his neck to see Bakugou’s face. “Are you mad?”
“No,” said Bakugou.
“Do you want me to get off you?”
“Do what you want.”
Shouto rolled onto his back, staying draped over Bakugou’s legs. “Someday I’m going to die in your arms and you’ll wish that you’d given me a forehead kiss when you had a chance.”
“All right,” said Bakugou. He stood, and Shouto slipped off his lap and hit the floor with an oomph that made the kitten abandon its post under the coffee table and skitter across the room. When Shouto sat up, Bakugou had disappeared.
“Bakugou,” Shouto called, sitting cross-legged on the floor. When there was no answer, he called again. “Bakugou! I have a question. Bakugou, come here.”
Bakugou appeared in the kitchen doorway. “What?”
“Am I too clingy?”
“I’m gonna put your head through a wall,” said Bakugou. He went back into the kitchen.
Shouto climbed back on the couch. After what felt like a very long time, Bakugou emerged from the kitchen. He tossed a cold bottle of strawberry milk tea in Shouto’s lap and sat down with his own sports drink. Bakugou had sat closer to Shouto than he usually did—their arms and thighs touching—and Shouto wondered if Bakugou would scoot away to compensate for his mistake. He didn’t. Just picked up his controller and started the game again.
Shouto spoke again. “I was thinking something—I’m really lucky to know you. Like I think… I think it’s very good. It’s been very good. For me. I don’t know about you.” He touched Bakugou’s jaw. “Does facial hair get itchy?”
Bakugou glanced at him, shifting his legs. “If you go too long.”
Shouto rubbed his thumb under Bakugou’s chin. My friend, Shouto wanted to say, because he felt it in his chest, that jittery, crowding, balloon-about-to-burst feeling—My best friend. I love you. “Go too long with what?”
“Without…” Bakugou’s legs shifted again. His foot tapped the floor a couple times. “…uh, without shaving.”
“I wish I had hair on my face to shave.” He picked up the drink in his lap and opened it. “Probably it’d look stupid if I ever let it grow out. With the red and white. But I think it’d be nice to have the option. Are you going to unfriend me if I get on testosterone and start looking like Endeavor?”
Scratching under his chin where Shouto had touched, Bakugou snorted. “You ain’t got the bone structure for that.”
“Oh, okay.” Shouto took a sip of his drink. “I think I don’t know what I look like.”
“You look fine,” said Bakugou. He kept his eyes on the TV. “You look normal.”
“You don’t look normal, I think.”
“Hah?”
“I was watching you at the sports festival before our fight,” said Shouto. “On the screen. Did I tell you that?”
Bakugou paused his game and turned his body toward Shouto. He didn’t say anything. It took Shouto a few seconds to realize that he’d stopped his game to listen.
“Oh,” said Shouto, suddenly embarrassed that he’d spoken at all. “No, that was—I wasn’t going to say anything important.”
“What were you gonna say?”
“Nothing. I just remember watching you.” He gave a small smile, just to show Bakugou that everything was okay. “It’s one of my favorite things.”
For a few moments, Bakugou’s expression stayed frozen. Then he made a noise in the back of his throat and slid down in his seat. “IcyHot. Fuckin’ hell.”
“What?”
“What’re you fuckin’ with me for?”
Shouto hesitated, trying to parse the sentence. “What do you mean?”
“Always tryna get a rise outta me. Mocking me. I don’t know what you gotta do that shit for when it’s just us two.”
What was he talking about? Mocking him? “I’m… not making fun of you. Why do you think—? What would I even be mocking you about?”
“Izuku’s been tellin’ you shit,” said Bakugou. “Ain’t he? He told you some shit and now you think you can—now you ’n him—oh, you’re both so fuckin’ secure about it all, ain’t you, and now you two are tryna work it outta me so you can laugh about it behind my back.”
“Bakugou. Laugh about what?”
Bakugou’s gaze skimmed over Shouto—his eyes, the bottom half of his face, his collarbones.
“We don’t laugh at you,” said Shouto. He tried to remember if there was anything incriminating in his text conversations with Deku that Bakugou didn’t know about yet. “You can look through our messages. Do you want to? I don’t have my phone right now. But when I get it back.”
“I ain’t gonna read through your fuckin’ texts.” Bakugou started to get up. “Forget it. You don’t know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“I would. If you told me.”
Bakugou didn’t look at him. “You want a drink?”
“You already got me a drink.”
Bakugou went into the kitchen. He stayed in there for a couple minutes longer than was strictly necessary to get a drink, and anxiety started gnawing at Shouto’s gut. Images of Fuyumi after he’d come out to her as trans, her hunched over the sink and trying not to cry…
What had Shouto said wrong? He’d been saying nice things. He’d been smiling. Did Bakugou think he was being sarcastic? And what did Deku have to do with any of this?
Finally, Bakugou came out of the kitchen. He dropped a small pack of pretzels in Shouto’s lap. “Old man keeps movin’ stuff around in the pantry,” said Bakugou. “Can’t ever find shit when I need it.”
Shouto picked up the pack and turned it around in his hands. “You don’t have to pretend you’re going to get something every time you need to get away from me. You can just tell me to go away. I know I’m around a lot more now than you’re used to.”
Bakugou sat and opened his sports drink. “You don’t think I’d tell you if I wanted you to fuck off?”
That was a good point. “I guess.”
“Fuck you look so stressed out for?”
“I don’t. I’m not. Are you mad at me?”
Bakugou tilted his head back to down half his drink in one go.
“I’m sorry,” said Shouto.
Still drinking, Bakugou looked at him, one eyebrow quirked.
“I made you uncomfortable,” he said. “I don’t want that. I don’t want to make you feel like that.”
Bakugou lowered his drink, capped it. “Dunno what the fuck you think I’m mad about. We were playin’ a video game.”
Shouto looked at the controllers sitting motionless on the couch. “We weren’t—”
“We were just playin’ a fuckin’ game,” said Bakugou. “We were just gaming.”
“Gaming,” Shouto repeated, stupidly.
“Yeah.”
It did feel like a game then—one that Shouto only understood enough to know that Bakugou was pretending. He saw now with startling clarity how much pretending there was. The way Bakugou spread his knees when he sat, the way he carried himself and set his jaw, even his speech patterns—it all seemed like part of a drag routine, a performance of exaggerated masculinity.
Was Bakugou not tired of pretending?
Was he not exhausted?
Shouto pushed himself into the corner of the couch, pulled his knees up to his chest. He watched Bakugou as he reentered the game—the bunching of his eyebrows during more the intense fights, the way his chin tilted up slightly when he got through it—and he realized that, even after Bakugou had distanced himself, Shouto still wanted to reach out, to touch.
Could Bakugou tell? Could he feel Shouto’s eyes on him, and did it feel as shitty for him as it had for Shouto a year ago, back when he could feel Lady Hypna’s eyes on him even when he couldn’t see her?
Surely not.
Surely not.
Even so, he forced himself to focus on the television rather than on Bakugou. The game music played an uneasy tune as Bakugou’s character waded through a shadowy marsh.
“You really ain’t ever been to the zoo?” asked Bakugou.
The question was so sudden and strange that Shouto hesitated to answer it. They hadn’t talked about that since the last time they met up with Deku. “No.”
“No petting zoo or nothin’.”
“No.”
“Don’t know what your old man does with all that money,” Bakugou said. “You’d think he’d invest a little into trying to make you not hate him. Rent an alpaca for your birthday or some shit.”
“I think he tried that kind of thing for Touya,” said Shouto. “Or at least let my mom buy things for him. Touya still hated everybody. Except Natsuo, I guess. Maybe Fuyumi. I don’t know much about him and Fuyumi.”
“He hated you, too?”
“I replaced him as the heir to Endeavor’s legacy,” said Shouto.
“Well, yeah, but weren’t you still in diapers for half the time he was around? How do you know he hated you?”
“He tried to attack me when I was a baby. While Rei was holding me.”
Bakugou glanced at him. “Rei?”
“My mom.”
Bakugou stuck his tongue in his cheek, staring.
“I don’t blame him for it,” said Shouto. He found himself quoting Rei— “He had a lot going on.”
“So do you,” Bakugou said. “And you don’t try to murder kids.”
“Maybe I would’ve. If I were raised like him. If I had a brain like him.”
“It ain’t all nurture and nature, IcyHot,” said Bakugou. “You make choices.”
Shouto wasn’t sure he agreed. Sure, he’d made decisions, but hadn’t the specific formula of fucked-up-edness of his childhood and brain chemistry always informed those decisions? Maybe it seemed different to people who could think more logically. Or maybe it seemed different when your average “choice” was whether you’d rather study for a quiz or not, instead of whether you’d rather obey your father or get your finger cut off.
“You wanna go?” Bakugou asked.
“Go?” asked Shouto. “Like… fight? It’s dark outside.”
“To the zoo, dumbass.”
“Oh. Someday,” said Shouto. “Maybe.”
“What about Friday?”
“Tomorrow? We have the internship.”
“After that,” said Bakugou.
Shouto considered. “I think I don’t want to go by myself.”
“Well, yeah, I’m fuckin’—I’m goin’ with you,” said Bakugou. “Obviously.”
Shouto sat up. “Really?”
Bakugou shrugged. “If you wanna.”
“Yeah—yes.” This was new. He’d been invited to the arcade with Kirishima, Ashido, and Kaminari, but that had been something that would’ve gone on just fine if he’d declined the invitation. This was just the two of them. Bakugou and Shouto. Going somewhere just for the sake of going somewhere, not as a part of some huge scheme involving the fate of Hero society and the League of Villains. “I want to. Yes. They have penguins?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to see. We can see them?”
“Fuck do you think zoos are for? You go ’n look at shit.”
“But penguins,” said Shouto. “Penguins specifically.”
Bakugou huffed an amazed laugh. “I said they got ’em.”
Shouto fell back against the couch. Energy hummed along his muscles, pleasant and powerful, and he thought Bakugou is a person I like and Penguins are a thing I like and I am going to be with both of them together at the very same time, and the energy flowed into his hands, so he flapped them in front of his chest, rocking his torso forward and back again, and it felt good.
Bakugou was looking at him.
“Sorry,” said Shouto. He shook his hands once more before tucking them under his thighs. The shame was there, like it always was, but he had a hard time feeling it deeply enough to make him go still entirely. “Sorry. I’m not supposed to do that.”
“Thought you only did that when you were upset.”
“I thought so, too,” said Shouto. “But I think that maybe I just haven’t… been happy.”
“No shit.” Bakugou gave Shouto’s controller back to him. “C’mon. Let’s try again.”
Some links to my latest work, both art & poetry! You can also just go to my Instagram (@max_says_no) and scroll.
Link: drawing of Shouto (it took forever & I'm very proud of it lol)
Link: "The Morning After the Rapture, as the Only Person Left on Earth" (poem)
Link: "Cornering the Market: Mississippi 2017" (poem)
Link: "A Box of Autism under the Christmas Tree" (teeny tiny poem)
Notes:
Thanks for sticking with me as I work on my creative writing MFA and my thesis! It's an original novel about a trans boy from Mississippi who is trying to come to terms with his autism... while acting as the first test subject for a new type of therapy that allows him to change the way his brain works. It also involves a talking dog, a lesbian mad scientist, and the corpse of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Follow me on Insta/Threads @max_says_no to stay up-to-date with my work/publications! I also post pictures of cats and rocks.
Chapter 59: Shouto Resurrects Steve Irwin
Summary:
A reveal from Hawks that is not nearly as important or shocking as he would like to think. Shouto doesn't give a shit. But you know what he DOES give a shit about?? PENGUINS.
Also, Bakugou does something truly disturbing to a candy apple.
Notes:
*** minor spoilers!!*** CW: getting outed, emotional manipulation.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
On Friday, right before Shouto and Bakugou were about to leave Hawks’s agency for the day, Hawks stopped Shouto with a hand on his arm. “Hey, pal, can we chat?”
Shouto kept putting his backpack on. He did not want to “chat” with Hawks. “I don’t have time for that. I’m doing something with Bakugou today.”
“You’ll wanna hear this. I promise.”
Shouto watched the elevator doors close, separating him from Shinsou and Bakugou. Reluctantly, Shouto returned to Hawks’s office and sat.
Hawks sat behind his desk and folded his hands atop its surface. His jaw looked tight, and it made Shouto’s stomach turn. Had someone he knew gotten hurt? Fuyumi?
“Okay,” said Hawks, exhaling. “This is a bit awkward for me to be telling you.”
Was Shouto getting fired from the internship? But this was their last day here. Blacklisted from Hero work, maybe? That wasn’t so bad.
In a sudden, jolty movement, Hawks rolled his chair back, reaching for the fridge. “You want a drink?”
“No,” said Shouto.
Hawks got a couple waters from the fridge and set one in front of Shouto. He opened his own and took a drink. Lowered it, wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I think Touya is alive.”
The surprise didn’t come from the statement itself, nor did it come from learning that Hawks knew that Touya was alive. None of that was mind-blowing information. The surprise was that Hawks was sharing private intel with Shouto.
What was Hawks’s angle here? Was he trying to gauge how much Shouto knew? Was he planning on offering information about Touya in exchange for whatever information Shouto had about Deku? How far along was Hawks in his investigation of the League, anyway? It didn’t seem like he’d made the three-way connection between his “girlfriend” Komi, Dabi, and Touya yet.
Shouto kept his face expressionless. Dabi had put a lot of work into ridding himself of his connection to the Todoroki family, and Shouto wasn’t about to ruin that for him. Besides, revealing Dabi’s past identity to Hawks could put Dabi in danger. And maybe Shouto, too, depending on how pissed Dabi would be about the breach of trust. As it was, Dabi didn’t even know that Shouto knew he was Touya.
“Why do you think that?” Shouto asked.
Hawks put his water down. “You used to think that I was trying to infiltrate the League of Villains.”
“I still think that. Are you not?”
“It’s not the whole truth,” said Hawks. “You remember that bridge bombing that happened on your first day of school? I went after the kid who did it, like you told me to. Found him waiting for me just outside the crime scene. Sitting on his motorcycle and eating a pack of Pocky.”
The bridge bombing again. Had that been its true purpose? To get Hawks alone so Deku could talk to him?
How much planning would Deku have to have done to achieve that? Mapping out Hawks’s ever-changing patrol routes. Making sure the scale of the crime was big enough to warrant Hawks’s attention. Having Dabi there, disguised as Reflection, so he could radio Hawks for help. Getting Shouto on the scene so he could, one, take care of the larger threat of the bridge collapsing in order to free Hawks to chase the perpetrator, and two, get a good enough look at Deku to give his description to Hawks…
Damn. No wonder Deku’s father wanted to keep Deku for the League.
“What’d Deku tell you?” asked Shouto. “When you caught up with him?”
Hawks’s eyebrows raised like he was about to question Shouto’s quick identification of the unnamed perpetrator. He didn’t. “That he had some information about what happened to Touya. And that he’d tell me more if I gave him access to poke around a bit.”
So they’d made a deal. “The Hero Commission is okay with Deku ‘poking around’?”
“After I had that conversation with Deku, I told the Commission that I wanted to try to infiltrate the League. Told ’em I had to let Deku hang around for a bit so I could gain his trust.” Hawks paused, tapping the side of his water bottle. “There’s some stuff the Commission doesn’t know.”
“Stuff like you giving Deku the blueprints he needed to arrange the attack at the USJ, I guess.”
Hawks shrugged. “To be fair, he didn’t tell me what he was planning.”
“What’d you get out of it?”
Hawks reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a thumb-sized plastic bag. Shouto had to squint to see its contents: three single strands of white hair.
Proof that Touya was alive? If so, Deku was being stingy with it. He could’ve at least handed over Dabi’s blood—something to prove that Touya was still living. Three strands of hair… Deku could’ve found them in Touya’s closet or under a cabinet in Endeavor’s agency.
It seemed like Deku wanted to keep Hawks on the cusp between belief and despair. He wanted to make Hawks feel strung along and isolated and a little bit crazy, to keep teasing more favors out of Hawks bit by bit. Hawks was sharp, but even he might get reckless after a few months of that subtle torture.
“I had it tested,” said Hawks. “We never got Touya in the system, but we have you and your dad, so they tested it against the two of you. It’s a genetic match.”
Shouto considered introducing the possibility that it was Natsuo’s or Fuyumi’s hair, but why bother? Deku had the Hawks situation under control. Let Hawks introduce the doubts into his own mind, or let Deku do it with his masterful manipulation. Shouto didn’t want to be involved at all.
“Why are you telling me all this?” asked Shouto. “I could fuck up your whole life if I told the Commission what you’re doing.”
“Well, it’s your brother, right?” Hawks put the bag back in his desk drawer. “Not mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just thought you should know. Didn’t feel right to keep it secret.”
Shouto wanted to punch Hawks. He was giving Shouto ammo that could be used to destroy his career because he felt guilty? Bullshit. “What do you want from me?”
Hawks blinked. “Want from you?”
“There’s no reason for you to tell me that unless you want something. What do you want?”
Slowly, Hawks leaned back in his seat. “That’s what you want to know? You don’t care about the possibility of your brother being alive?”
“Touya died,” said Shouto. “But if he is out there fucking around and setting things on fire, that’s his business. If he wanted to come back, he would have by now. I’m not interested in ruining his death for him.”
“Ruining his—? He could be in deep shit.”
“Maybe that’s where he belongs.”
Hawks stared at him for a good five seconds. Then he picked up his water and screwed the cap back on. “You know something? When I first met you, I didn’t think you were like Touya at all. But you’ve got his taste for destruction.”
“And you don’t?” Shouto stood and put his backpack on. “You can’t send me to arrest a single father who’s shoplifting baby formula and then tell me that you don’t have a taste for destruction. You can’t keep child abuse a secret and then tell me that you don’t have a taste for destruction. You know that as well as I do. You’re just saying shit to manipulate an emotional reaction out of me so I’ll give you information. It’s not happening. I already know that you don’t give a shit about me or Touya.”
“That’s not true.”
I’ve said enough, Shouto thought. He started for the door.
Behind him, Hawks’s chair chaffed the floor. There was a hint of distress in his voice. “Todoroki.”
“Give it up,” said Shouto. “Touya is dead. I don’t want to make a deal with you.”
“That’s not what—” Hawks’s rolling chair clattered. “Todoroki, wait.”
“Calm down.” Shouto opened the office door. “I won’t tell the Commission about you. Do you want me to leave the door open or closed?”
Hawks gave no reply.
Shouto looked over his shoulder. Hawks was standing with a hand on his desk, looking ready to leap over the desk. Shouto refused to let himself be frightened, even though he knew Hawks could easily kill him.
Shouto asked again: “Open or closed?”
“You’re gonna regret this,” said Hawks. He sat down, slowly. “In a couple years, you’re going to think about this conversation and wish you’d helped me find him.”
“Closed, then,” said Shouto. He shut the door behind him.
###
Mitsuki had brought home the designer clothes she’d promised Shouto, and the four of them—Mitsuki, Masaru, Bakugou, and Shouto—spent an agonizing hour and a half together speeding through minor adjustments. Bakugou should not have been put in charge of pinning the garments, but he was, and he only made Shouto bleed once.
Shouto had worn designer clothes many times before, and from more esteemed designers than the Bakugous. Often, he’d even liked the clothes. But he always felt that what he wore was separate from who he was. When people had complimented his appearance, it was like he was being complimented on someone else’s painting. The closest he’d ever come to not feeling like a total stranger in his body was when he wore loose t-shirts and gym shorts. He’d assumed that that feeling of neutrality—that simple absence of negative feelings—was as good as it was going to get.
He was very happy to be proven wrong.
Once Mitsuki had made the few small adjustments needed, he’d gone upstairs to look at himself in the full-length mirror on Bakugou’s closet door. I look like a boy, he’d thought. He’d glanced at Bakugou, who was standing in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest, and then he’d looked at the mirror again.
“I told you,” said Bakugou. “It makes a difference. You gotta get the right cut ’n shit.”
Shouto nodded. “I look really good.”
“All right. Well. I ain’t sayin’—”
“I kind of look like you.” He stuck his hands in his hair to make it stand up. “See? I look exactly like you.”
Bakugou snorted. “You fuckin’ wish.”
“I do. You’re so beautiful.”
“Yeah, I know.” Bakugou started back down the stairs. “Put on a hat so you’ll be less likely to get recognized. I don’t plan on takin’ any little pictures for some twelve-year-old’s Instagram.”
Shouto followed Bakugou from his room. “I don’t wear hats. I can’t think when my hair gets squeezed.”
“You’re like if somebody put a sickly aristocratic Victorian child into a mecha suit,” said Bakugou. He waved for Shouto to follow him down the stairs. “C’mon. You’ll just have to stand in profile the whole time so people only see one solid hair color when they look at you.”
###
Masaru drove them—humming along to his 80s rock CD the whole time—and dropped them off near the zoo entrance.
“You remember what your ma said,” Masaru told his son. When Bakugou ignored him, he said, “Katsuki.”
“I got it, old man,” said Bakugou.
“What’d she say?” Shouto asked Bakugou.
“Nothin’.” He waited for Shouto to disembark, then slammed the door. A couple walking toward the entrance looked back at them. “Just not to draw too much attention.”
Shouto hesitated. Bakugou was loud without even trying—that was just how he moved through the world. He was the opposite of Deku in that way. Maybe Bakugou and Shouto did need something to keep attention away from them. “We could get some sunglasses in the gift shop. Do they—? Maybe they don’t have that.”
“They don’t,” said Bakugou. “They just sell smaller versions of all the animals. I got a mini elephant the last time I was here and rode it through the zoo.”
“Really?”
“No, dumbass. They might have the sunglasses, but I ain’t getting’ you any of that overpriced shit.” Bakugou let the teenager at the entrance scan his phone to pay. “People go bankrupt in gift shops.”
The teenage employee was looking at them, and it made Shouto uneasy. He took Bakugou’s arm and pulled him toward the gift shop. “I’ll pay you back.”
“You fuckin’ won’t. I buy you so much shit, it’s like throwin’ money in a black hole.”
But they went into the gift shop. It smelled like cheap incense and made Shouto’s eyes tear up a little.
“Two minutes,” said Bakugou. “Meet me by the coolers.”
“What coolers?”
“The—” Bakugou had already started walking away, and he had to walk back toward Shouto again to continue talking. “By the concessions. The Dippin Dots coolers.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s fuckin’ ice cream,” said Bakugou. “You ain’t never seen Dippin Dots before?”
Fuyumi didn’t buy many sweet things, and the sweets Shouto bought online had to be nonperishable to survive shipping. “I might’ve seen them advertised. I don’t know.”
Bakugou shook his head, looking amazed. “Never mind. I’ll just find you.”
He and Bakugou separated to search the shop. Shouto found sunglasses, but they were the novelty kind, with plastic rims in the shape of various animal ears. Shouto picked a pair with giraffe horns and pink lenses. He put them on and looked in the small provided mirror. They at least covered his facial scar more than a normal pair of sunglasses would.
Keeping the glasses on, Shouto wandered through the shop. He rustled the wall of keychains, shook the snow globes, felt the soft bellies of the penguin plushies. He normally felt extremely out of place in spaces like this, but it felt different with the glasses on, with the environment rose-tinted. Like the glasses were an access badge: you are welcome here, temporarily. And he intended to enjoy himself, temporarily.
He was crouching and rooting around in a box of zoo socks when he heard a voice that struck him as familiar. He stayed crouched for a few moments, trying to identify who was talking while staying out of sight.
Then he heard a laugh, and he stopped feeling afraid. He still wasn’t sure to whom the initial voice belonged, but that laugh was Kirishima’s, and anyone who knew Kirishima couldn’t be that bad.
Bakugou’s voice came from above. “Fuck are you wearing?”
Shouto looked up. Bakugou was wearing a safari hat, its price tag still dangling from the rim. He was also holding an apple on a skewer, partially eaten. “They sell apples here?” Shouto asked.
“Candy apples. Concession stand. I scraped the chocolate into the trash.”
Diabolical. “I think Kirishima is here,” Shouto said.
“Him?” Bakugou look around the shop, brow furrowed. “Well, I’m not leavin’. I paid for this shit. He’s gonna have to be the one to go.”
“I don’t care if he’s here. He can join us.”
Bakugou scoffed. “Yeah, he better not.”
“Why not?”
Bakugou pulled his gaze back to Shouto, looking a little taken aback. “You serious?”
“Usually,” said Shouto. He pushed the box of socks back into place, straightened it, and stood. “I thought you were friends with him. Aren’t you?”
Bakugou frowned, but he didn’t say anything. Shouto walked around the shop—Bakugou trailing him reluctantly—until he found the shock of red hair that he’d been looking for.
Kirishima wasn’t alone. He was holding up a small shark costume, intended for a chihuahua-sized animal, and asking his shopping partner, “What do you think?”
“It’s cute!” said Ando. “I think you may need to go up a few sizes, though.”
Ando—Shouto’s roommate from the psychiatric hospital. The sight of Ando and Kirishima together was so strange that Shouto forgot, for a moment, that he had been the person to encourage Kirishima to give Ando a call.
Ando looked Shouto’s direction, but it was a moment before their face showed any recognition. “Oh my god,” they said, waving. “Todoroki! I almost didn’t recognize you with the glasses.”
Kirishima turned. He smiled when he saw Shouto and Bakugou, though it wasn’t the enthusiastic welcome that Shouto had come to expect from Kirishima. “Oh—h-hey!” said Kirishima. “You guys are…? Hi!”
“I’m in disguise,” said Shouto.
“And you’re working it wonderfully,” said Ando, resting their elbow on Kirishima’s shoulder. Kirishima seemed to tense at the action. “I almost thought you were a real… giraffe. Yikes, sorry, I got scared in the middle of my sentence that I was about to say something transphobic, and I see now that my hesitation was the true microaggression all along. You look good, is what I mean.”
Beside him, Bakugou took a vicious bite out of his apple, spoke with his mouth full. “Fuck you doin’ here, Shitty Hair?”
“Looking at some animals, bro,” said Kirishima. He held the mini shark costume to his chest like he’d been caught naked. “What about you? You guys?”
“Don’t worry ’bout it.” Bakugou took some time to chew and swallow. Then, to Ando— “Who the fuck are you?”
“Who the fuck are you?” Ando replied; and when Bakugou took his hand off of Shouto’s shoulder, they quickly added— “I’m just kidding, man, I know who you are. Bakugou, right? I’m Ando. Nice job at the sports festival, all things considered. That Todoroki guy is terrifying.”
Shouto addressed Bakugou: “Ando’s my friend.”
“Tch,” said Bakugou, keeping his eyes on Ando. “Like a Deku kinda friend?”
It took Shouto a moment to understand Bakugou’s question. Did he want to know if Ando was Quirkless like Deku? No, probably not. He wanted to know if Ando was a Villain like Deku. “Like a normal kind of friend,” Shouto said. “Stop being annoying.”
“How else am I s’posed to know—? Everyone I meet through you is either the worst person I’ve ever met or someone you would die for.”
“I would die for Ando,” said Shouto.
“You’d die for half a box of strawberry mochi. Shut the fuck up.”
“You guys wanna walk around with us for a bit?” Ando asked. “Ei and I just got here, so we haven’t seen much yet. I hear a lot about you guys. It’d be cool to hang out.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“Oi,” Bakugou said through his mouthful, kicking Shouto’s ankle. “I didn’t agree to shit.”
Shouto looked at him. “I like Kirishima,” he said. “Ando is nice, too.”
“You’ll just follow around anyone who’s nice to you, hah?” said Bakugou. “Gonna get yourself fuckin’ kidnapped.”
Ando pointed over their shoulder. “I’m gonna go get Ei and me a drink while you guys fight it out. Babe, what do you want?”
It took Kirishima a second to respond. “Uh—lemonade, if they have it. Thanks.”
Ando raised their chin a little, questioning. “You feeling all right?”
Kirishima gave a close-lipped smile and a short nod.
Kirishima watched Ando leave. He kept his body angled away from Shouto and Bakugou even after Ando was out of sight. His arms remained folded below his chest, one hand pinching the elbow of the other, his eyes roaming somewhere around the registers.
Babe, Ando had said. Were they and Kirishima dating? That was new information. Maybe too new, considering Bakugou hadn’t previously known that Kirishima liked boys.
For all of ten seconds, it was silent. And then there was the crackling of Bakugou biting into his apple.
“IcyHot ain’t ever been to a zoo before,” said Bakugou.
Kirishima pulled his gaze to Bakugou. He blinked. “What?”
“Said IcyHot ain’t ever been to a fuckin’ zoo before.” Bakugou motioned outward with his half-eaten apple. “Thought he was gonna steal my goddamn cat. S’why we’re here.”
Kirishima hesitated. “You have a cat?”
“It’s a small cat,” said Shouto. He indicated with his hands. “Little cat.”
“Kitten,” said Bakugou, emphasizing the syllables. He looked down toward Kirishima’s feet, and his scowl deepened. “Fuckin’… fuck, Shitty Hair. They get worse every time I see ’em. Your boyfriend didn’t break up with you when he saw those crocs?”
Kirishima glanced down at his feet—crocs with chibi porcupine charms—and his face flushed red. “Oh. Uh, no.”
“He shoulda. Your fashion sense is a fuckin’ affront to nature.” He knocked the back of his hand against Shouto’s arm. “IcyHot, I’m gonna go get another one of these damn apples.”
Shouto said, “Get me one.”
“No,” said Bakugou. “Oi—Shitty Hair. Chill the fuck out before you have an aneurysm, hah?”
Kirishima’s chest heaved once, deflated—with it, a breathless laugh. “Y-yeah. My bad.”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. “Get me one. With the caramel.”
“No,” said Bakugou. “Fuckin’ leech. Go suck the shit outta someone else’s digestive tract.”
“That’s tapeworms,” Shouto said. “Tapeworms suck shit. Leeches suck blood.”
“You’re suckin’ my damn patience,” said Bakugou, and he headed off toward the food stands.
When Bakugou was out of sight, Shouto looked back at Kirishima. He was looking at the ground with his hand cupped over his mouth.
“Holy… crap,” Kirishima muttered, voice muffled behind his hand. “That was… I thought was gonna be really bad. Crap, that was scary.”
“He won’t tell anyone about Ando.” Shouto paused. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“I mean… kinda?” Kirishima looked off toward the concession stands. “I just don’t wanna—I don’t know, he—I kinda thought Bakugou didn’t… like gay people.”
“I talked to him about it,” said Shouto. “He said he would stop.”
“Stop?”
“Stop acting homophobic.”
Kirishima stared. His eyes flitted toward where Bakugou had gone before returning to Shouto.
“You talked to Bakugou,” he said. “About him acting homophobic.”
“Yeah,” said Shouto.
“You did.”
“Yeah.”
Kirishima blinked. “And he… said that?”
“Yeah.”
“Those words?”
“Yeah.”
Kirishima was silent for a moment. Then his eyes widened.
“Wait,” said Kirishima, “does he know about… y’know, you?”
“Being trans?” Shouto asked.
Kirishima nodded.
“You can say it,” said Shouto. “It’s not a bad word.”
“Right,” said Kirishima. “Right, I… sorry, I wasn’t sure. So—?”
“Bakugou knows,” said Shouto.
Kirishima hesitated. “Really? He’s, um, he’s fine with it?”
“I guess.”
“Wow,” said Kirishima. “So is…? Ando’s nonbinary.”
“I know.”
“Is Bakugou gonna be…? Y’know, because some people who are okay with, like, with you aren’t gonna be okay with—”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “Talk to him about it. Explain it if you need to. It won’t kill him.”
“Okay,” said Kirishima. He sounded uneasy. “Just—”
“Bakugou’s your friend,” Shouto said. “I doubt he wants to ruin that, either.”
Kirishima wetted his lips. Then he gave a small smile and nodded.
Bakugou returned with a second apple and a small package of something. He smacked the side of Shouto’s arm with it—wet and cold. “Forgot to look at the fucking flavor before I bought this,” he said. “I don’t like the strawberry Dippin Dots. Tastes like a damn cavity. You like sugary shit, right?”
Shouto took the package and turned it around in his hands. He could feel the tiny spheres rolling around inside. “How do you eat it?”
“Just fuckin’… eat it, I don’t know. Fuckin’ hell. There’s a spoon inside.”
Shouto opened the package and ate a spoonful. It was sweet, and cold, and it all tasted quite uniform. He liked it.
Ando returned with a canned coffee and a cup of lemonade, the latter of which they handed to Kirishima. “I’m so fucking excited for this,” said Ando. Shouto couldn’t tell who they were addressing. “They’ve got little bear figurines wearing yukatas in the gift shop, and I started thinking, god, I love bears. In more ways than one. It’s on my bucket list to hibernate all winter with a bear. I think that’d fix me, actually.”
“Oi, Gerard Way,” said Bakugou, “you ever shut up?”
“No.” Ando popped open their coffee. “Shouto, my dude, what do you want to see?”
Shouto put another spoonful of Dippin Dots in his mouth. They’d melted a little, and he could taste the strawberry better. “Penguins.”
“Penguins look so stupid,” said Ando. “You could open up that little cranium and there’d be nothing there but love and blubber. The ideal life form, honestly. Did you know they have gay penguins in Australia?”
“All penguins are gay,” said Shouto.
“You’re right. Pardon me.”
They walked past the concession stands. “Penguins first?” Ando offered.
“No,” said Shouto. “Thank you.”
“Saving the best for last?” asked Kirishima.
Bakugou answered for Shouto. “He needs time to process that he’s at the zoo first. He remembers jack shit about the stuff he sees while he’s processing something new. I keep having to replay the beginnings of YouTube videos ’cause he forgets the introduction by the end. But that’s just what happens when you get accidentally dropped on your head as a child.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” said Shouto. “I want to go to the aviary first.”
“Sucks to suck,” Bakugou said. “We’re gonna see the lions first.”
Ando offered a compromise: “Ei, why don’t you and Bakugou go see the lions? I wanna catch up with Todoroki. We’ll regroup once we’re done with the aviary.”
“I don’t like that plan,” said Bakugou.
“No offense, dude, but you seem like the kind of guy who doesn’t like a lot of things,” Ando said. They started guiding Shouto toward the aviary. “I’m exercising my executive power. See you guys in ten!”
Neither Kirishima nor Bakugou seemed elated with the idea of separation, but Ando dragged Shouto away before they could protest any further. Once they were out of earshot, Ando said to Shouto, “Yeesh. Sorry to kidnap you, but those two needed to talk.”
Was that what Ando’s intention had been? It hadn’t occurred to Shouto that they might have an ulterior motive. “How do you know that?” Shouto asked.
“Just seemed so tense. I figured, y’know, best to give them some space right off the bat so it doesn’t ruin the whole trip. Do you know what they’re fighting about?”
It occurred to Shouto that he registered almost every social situation he entered as tense, so much so that he couldn’t reliably identify when the tension was palpable to others. To Shouto, the ability to correctly read a room seemed like a quirk of its own. Though maybe that wasn’t the best metaphor to use in the presence of a Quirkless individual. “I don’t know if they’re fighting,” said Shouto. “Bakugou just thought that Kirishima was straight.”
“Oh shit,” said Ando. “Shit. Actually? I thought Ei was out to his school friends. Is this the second time I’ve unintentionally outed a queer UA student? What am I, a convenient plot device?”
“Probably you’re just a bad person.”
Ando grabbed their head with both hands. “Oh my god.”
Shouto started to panic a little. “I’m sorry. That was a joke.”
“No, I got that actually,” said Ando, lowering their hands. “I was continuing the bit.”
Oh. That was generous of them. People usually only made jokes out of the things Shouto said in earnest.
“I think you just associate with a lot of queer people,” Shouto told Ando. “It seems like most queer people are out to some people and closeted with other people.”
Ando sighed. “Yeah, that makes sense. I guess you never really stop coming out.”
They entered the aviary. High above them was a net to keep the birds from escaping. Shouto identified the first bird he saw as a shoebill, and it was so beautiful he wanted to cry. He wished he had his phone so he could take pictures.
“Man, I’m so glad to see you again,” said Ando. “Though it’s like… it’s different outside of the hospital. Oh—goddamn. What is that? That’s the ugliest bird I’ve ever seen.”
It was different outside the hospital. Shouto’s time in the psychiatric ward now seemed like a strange dream—not because the experience had felt unreal, but because it had seemed to operate on dream rules. In a dream, you could meet someone and live a whole life with them, could love them and bare your soul to them; and then you’d wake up and never think about them again. That was how he’d imagined it would be with Ando. But here they were.
As they walked through the aviary, Ando kept talking. “It’s like, okay, you’re actually kind of culturally significant. I see your face on gossip mags when I’m standing in line at the grocery store. Not that I didn’t think you weren’t culturally significant before. But it’s like—it’s like, that’s the guy who sent me saline solution when I was nervous about my piercing getting infected.”
He’d forgotten about that. “You don’t know if that was me.”
“Well, it wasn’t anybody else. And Eijirou said that you told him to call me, so you can’t fool me into thinking you’re not considerate.”
Shouto gave a stiff shrug. “I just thought that he’d do a better job of being a good friend for you.”
“Oh, no, he’s terrible at that,” said Ando. “I don’t know what he’s talking about half the time. I’ll be like, what the hell is a sprinter-position dumbbell Bulgarian split squat? Then he starts explaining it, and I’m like, dude, that was not an invitation to keep talking about the sprinter-position dumbbell Bulgarian split squat. He makes a really fun boyfriend, though. I’m trying not to mess it up.”
“I think you’ll be okay,” said Shouto.
“Jesus, I hope so. He’s so well-adjusted and mentally healthy that it blows my fucking mind. He’ll make a mistake and just go, oops, guess I’ll learn from that and do better in the future. No ruminating on it for hours, no compulsive research marathons, no major damage to his self-image. How do you even…?” Ando shook their head, huffing a laugh. “Like, fuck, man, I would if I could. Anyway. How’ve you been?”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“Better?”
“I think so.” Shouto paused to think. Not being on his meds this week was affecting him. He could feel the brain fog and the depression and the anxiety fighting to come back, scraping something raw in the back of his mind. But he wasn’t letting himself feel those feelings until the week was over. He’d promised Bakugou that things would be okay, at least until Saturday night. “Yes. I think so. A lot has happened.”
“Good things?”
“Mostly bad,” said Shouto. “But there are some good things. Today is a good thing.”
“That’s good to hear.”
They continued through the aviary. Shouto found the silence comfortable, but he started to wonder if there was something he’d neglected to do or say that made Ando stop talking. Even the most talkative people grew quiet in Shouto’s presence—that was a skill he’d valued when he was younger, but now, it was getting in the way of his relationships.
Shouto tried, “I’m sorry I didn’t text you.”
“What?” asked Ando.
“I said I’m—”
“Oh, yeah, no worries,” said Ando. “I didn’t really expect you to. I mean, you’ve got a life, you’ve got friends and family. And fans. And I’m, like, some out-of-shape Quirkless rando you met at the hospital.”
Out of shape—what a strange term. What shape were they outside of? Maybe it was one of those things that Shouto would never be able to fully understand, like he would never understand what it meant to grow up poor. “You’re my friend,” Shouto said.
“Well, thanks.”
“You’re my friend,” Shouto said again. He wasn’t sure how else to say it. “It’s because I sometimes… it takes so much energy. It takes so much energy. And then I get so tired and stressed that I have to stop it, and you can’t keep it going after you stop it.”
“You have to stop what? The friendship?”
“Yes. I have to stop it early because—before I get tired and wreck things.”
“That sounds lonely,” said Ando.
Shouto shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“But you’ve got… I mean, I don’t wanna assume the relationship, but you’re hanging out with that Bakugou guy today. So is that working out at least?”
Shouto took a moment to think. Then he said, “Bakugou’s unusual. He’s very strong.”
“Yeah, I saw the muscles.”
“Not like that. I mean that he can… be around me. For longer than a few hours at a time. I think that takes strength.”
“Hm,” said Ando. “Are you sure?”
The question took him aback. Was Shouto sure that it took strength to be his friend? That had never been something he’d doubted. Of course he was sure. Of course the only people who could ever really know him would be those who could shoulder the burden.
“I just think, like, I’ve never thought it was a challenge to be around you,” Ando continued. “That seems like kind of a weird way to think about things.”
Shouto felt the irritation that always came when someone questioned his ability to interpret the world. Ando hadn’t lived through all the failed friendships that Shouto had. They didn’t know how hard Shouto had worked to create his own rules to live by, when everybody else seemed to just know what they were supposed to do and say. Shouto’s understanding of the world had been carefully built, destructed, and rebuilt over the years. It was what had kept him relatively safe up until now.
“Sorry, I hope that didn’t sound judgy,” said Ando. “I’m just thinking about… like, I was there at what I assume was one of the lowest points of your life, and you still managed to be kind to people. I don’t think your friends are unusual for liking you.”
“You haven’t known me for long,” said Shouto.
“True,” said Ando, “but you have to take into consideration that I talked to your mom after you left the hospital, and now she loves me like one of her own children, so we’re basically siblings.” Shouto looked at Ando, who held up their hands as a plea to innocence. “In my defense, you left me alone with her with full knowledge of how much I yap.”
Shouto wasn’t sure if he was supposed to feel violated. Rei was her own person, but she was also a trove of knowledge—specifically of his childhood. “What’d she say?” he asked.
“Y’know, she doesn’t talk a whole lot, but I did get a couple weird childhood anecdotes out of her. Apparently you used to cry every time you were offered a banana?”
Shouto bit back a sigh of relief. She could’ve told them much worse. Maybe that was part of what it meant to be socially adept—knowing how to tactically distribute information in a way that neither revealed too much nor raised suspicion that something was being hidden.
Eventually, Ando received a text from Kirishima with a meeting place, where they could trade partners and go their separate ways. Shouto and Ando exited the aviary headed in that direction. They arrived first and had to wait a couple minutes for Kirishima and Bakugou.
“You and Bakugou,” said Ando as they waited. “What’s going on there?”
“What do you mean?” asked Shouto.
“Like, this is my and Ei’s second date. What is it for you two?”
Date… right, people did that. “It’s not a date, I think,” said Shouto.
“You’re not sure?”
The thing he wasn’t sure about was whether he wanted to admit to Ando that he didn’t quite know what qualified as a date. Did there have to be shared romantic feelings behind it? But sometimes people went on blind dates with a partner they didn’t even know. Was it about the end goal of getting into a romantic and/or sexual relationship? But it seemed like every week he was seeing a different “Win a Date with So-and-So Celebrity” contest, and no one expected those dates to evolve into relationships, right?
The dating world was a fascinating social concept—one that Shouto felt indefinitely locked out of. That was not a role he could inhabit. It was not meant for him to understand. As for the terminology, he supposed that the important thing was that Bakugou would not want to call their outing a date. And so it was not.
“We’re going out and doing things together,” said Shouto.
“But he’s not straight, right? I saw his Hero costume somewhere on social media, and it’s camp as hell. Also, I thought you guys were on bad terms…? Or is that just a tabloid thing? Am I getting my news from unreliable sources? You did beat the shit out of him during the sports festival.”
“We’re friends,” said Shouto.
“Friends are good,” said Ando. “Friends are excellent. Is that how Bakugou feels about it, too?”
“What do you mean?”
Ando leaned forward in a futile attempt to catch Shouto’s gaze. “Kinda seems like he’s into you.”
Shouto gave a short laugh. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You sure? He keeps looking at you.”
Did he? Shouto hadn’t noticed. “He worries about things, I think. A little like you. Probably thinks I’m going to try to throw myself in the lion pit while he’s not watching.”
“Ah,” said Ando, “well. Don’t do that. But it is nice to have a friend who worries about you sometimes.”
“It is,” said Shouto.
When Bakugou and Kirishima finally came into view, Bakugou was impatiently explaining the design plans for his sweat grenades to Kirishima. Kirishima, as usual, was confused.
“What do you not get?” Bakugou asked Kirishima, his hands swinging to punctuate his words. Shouto could hear them from across the courtyard. “What do you not get?”
And Kirishima: “I told you! How does the sweat get inside the grenades? Like how do you—”
“I fucking collect it.”
“How? Do you sweat directly into the into the grenade? I don’t think you can do that in the middle of battle. That’d take forever.”
“That’s why I do it BEFORE—”
“But why can’t you use regular grenades, then?”
“Because it’s not the FUCKING SAME.” Bakugou counted off on his fingers. “Regular grenades are illegal. They’re not on theme. They’re more damaging to buildings and bystanders. They’re—”
“Dude, is your theme sweat? I thought it was, like… orange. Is your sweat orange?”
Shouto waved the two of them down before Bakugou had the chance to fly into a rage. They separated into their original pairs, said their goodbyes, and headed in opposite directions.
“Fuckin’ asshole,” said Bakugou. “I don’t know what I’m tutoring him for. He has the cognitive power of a single cornflake.”
“It was ‘half a cornflake’ a couple weeks ago,” Shouto said. “Did he get smarter?”
“Only with his fucking attitude.” Bakugou clicked his tongue. “So what’d you think?”
Shouto mentally reviewed his journey through the aviary. It was often hard for him to nail down his feelings about things that had just happened, so he’d learned to give specifics instead. “There were a lot of waterbirds. Four egrets. The cardinals seemed sad.”
“I was talkin’ about the Dippin Dots.”
Shouto looked down at the empty container in his hand. He’d forgotten he was holding it. “I don’t think you’d have liked them.”
“Well, obv—yeah, I know that. I mean what you thought about them.”
Why did Bakugou care about that? “The strawberry was good,” said Shouto. “But I was saying I don’t think you’d like them because there’s so much sugar. I don’t know why you bought it if you knew you wouldn’t like it.”
“Already told you I read the label wrong, dipshit.”
“Are the others not sugary?” asked Shouto. “Why would the strawberry be more sugary than the others? Don’t they have birthday cake and chocolate and cotton candy flavors? I think the strawberry would have less sugar than those. What flavor did you think you were buying?”
“Quit fuckin’ worrying about it. Goddamn. Outta the pot and into the fire between you and Shitty Hair.”
“What’d you talk to Kirishima about?” Shouto asked. “Besides your costume?”
“Nothing,” said Bakugou.
“Nothing?”
Bakugou glanced at Shouto. “Not much. Some school shit. Internship ’n such.”
“Okay. So nothing about him and Ando or anything.”
Bakugou took a slow, deep breath, then let it all out in a huff. “Fuck was I s’posed to do?”
“No, you did okay,” said Shouto. “I was just asking in case you wanted to talk about it.”
Bakugou glanced at him again, though his gaze lingered longer. He looked away. Then he whipped his head toward Shouto again. “Just—fuck, did you know?”
“I didn’t know they were dating,” said Shouto.
“No, I meant did you know that Kirishima’s—that he’s fine with doing that.”
Shouto laughed. “Are you trying to say gay?”
“Not exactly. I’m…” He paused for a long time, brows furrowed and lips parted. Thinking. Finally, he shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m tryin’ to say. Just the way he does it. I didn’t know you could do it like that.”
“What do you mean?”
Bakugou threw up a hand. “I don’t know. I don’t fuckin’ know. Quit askin’.”
“Okay.”
Bakugou was silent for all of two seconds. Then he stopped walking and grabbed Shouto by the shoulder, forcing eye contact. “You know what I’m talkin’ about, though?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I don’t,” said Shouto. “Are we still talking about Kirishima?”
“Like you’re the opposite of him. You ’n Izuku both. You have completely different personas for different situations. I thought it’d be like that for people who are in the closet. Like when they come out, it all gets released at once and then the person’s different.”
Bakugou sounded genuinely troubled by this, so Shouto tried not to laugh. “What do you mean by ‘it’? ‘It all gets released’?”
“I don’t know, like the…” Bakugou looked at the ground and gestured like he was trying to bring something out of his chest. “Like the hidden stuff. The id. The traits they’ve been keeping secret.”
“You were expecting Kirishima to do a magical girl transformation?”
“No. Fuck you.” But his last word devolved into a snort. “No, I was just thinkin’ that I’d have to get to know him all over again. But we kept talkin’, and he was still, uh…” His voice trailed off. He rubbed the skin behind his jaw and breathed through his teeth.
“You have time,” said Shouto. “You can think of a nice word to say about Kirishima.”
“No, I was tryin’ to find to find a word that’s meaner than ‘stupid’.” Bakugou swatted Shouto’s arm. “You’re fuckin’ distracting.”
Shouto laughed. “I’m not even—I’m not doing anything.”
“You don’t have to. It’s like walkin’ beside a bunch of geese.”
They walked past a penguin statue that was made entirely of Legos, and Shouto stopped. “Look at this,” he said. The statue was on a little mound of earth that was covered in weathered wood chips. The wood chips made the mound slippery, but he made it up and stood on the metal pedestal alongside the statue, careful not to touch the statue itself. “It’s double its real-life size. It’s like the colossus penguin.”
Bakugou squinted up at him. “The what?”
“Tallest penguin. Two meters, toe to beak.” He indicated the height with his hand. “Could stay underwater for up to forty minutes.”
“Extinct?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said Bakugou. “I already got too many birds on my fight list. Now get down from there. I ain’t gonna be the one dishing out money to the zoo when you start breakin’ shit.”
“I am being so careful,” said Shouto. “Can you take a picture?”
“What? Of you?”
“Please. With the statue.”
Bakugou sighed and pulled his phone from his pocket. Shouto smiled with his teeth, and Bakugou took the picture.
Shouto jumped down from the pedestal. “Did I do it right?”
“Do what?” Bakugou asked.
“The picture,” Shouto said. He didn’t have much practice smiling for cameras. “Is it okay?”
“Of course it is. I fucking rock at taking pictures.”
“Do you want me to take one of you?” Shouto asked.
“Nah,” said Bakugou. He started to walk, nodding toward a sign that said Penguin Encounter 4-4:10pm. “Let’s get your damn birds over with.”
Shouto followed beside Bakugou. “What’s a Penguin Encounter?”
“I don’t know. Why would I know that?”
“What time is it now?”
“We got time,” said Bakugou.
Shouto realized that he was walking so close to Bakugou that he’d become a tripping hazard. He moved away a few inches. “Can you check? I don’t have my phone.”
“We got time, IcyHot.”
“Maybe we should hurry.”
Bakugou smacked Shouto’s side with the back of his hand. “Focus on not fallin’ over your goddamn feet. I planned. We got time.”
He’d planned? For penguins? He’d done penguin planning?
“You’re my favorite,” Shouto said.
Bakugou stuck his hands in his pockets. “I ought to be. All the shit I do for you.”
“You’re like my fairy godmother.”
“Fuck off.”
“You look nice in your safari hat,” said Shouto. He felt like he couldn’t stop talking. He wanted to talk to Bakugou forever. “It’s like you’re Steve Irwin. He does nature documentaries. Or he used to. I don’t know what he does now.”
Bakugou took the hat off and stuffed it in his back pocket. They started up the concrete stairs leading to a sparsely populated atrium. “Maybe you shoulda made Steve Irwin take you to the zoo.”
“No, that’s okay.” Shouto walked slowly, grabbing Bakugou’s arm to guide him through the stands as he scanned the raised rocky enclosure for any signs of life. “Are we not going to the back?”
“You got shit eyes,” said Bakugou. “We’re in the front.”
They sat on the cold and damp plastic chairs that were bolted to the bleachers. The seats reminded Shouto of the sports festival, and he was glad that Bakugou was sitting beside him now, even if he was slouching in his chair with his elbow on the back of Shouto’s seat. Shouto wished that he could exist casually in the way that Bakugou could. It seemed like there was always a clothing tag or noisy air conditioning or an old injury there to bother him. Always something.
“Thank you for bringing me,” said Shouto. “I’m glad we’re here.”
Bakugou had started messing with his phone. “You already said that.”
“Well, I’m—I was just telling you again. Because I’m enjoying being here.”
“All you’ve seen so far is the damn birds.”
“There was a grass lizard in the parking lot.”
Bakugou glanced at him and then looked down, snorting. “I can’t take you seriously in those fucking giraffe glasses,” he said.
“I like how they feel,” said Shouto. “Are they ruining my outfit?”
Bakugou took a picture of Shouto and showed it to him. They looked at the picture, and then at each other, and they started laughing.
“That’s so bad,” said Shouto, folding forward from laughter. “That’s so bad. Bakugou.”
He felt Bakugou’s hand on his back. “Oi. Look.”
A zookeeper with a mic on her lapel had mounted one of the large rocks in the exhibit, wearing rubber boots and holding a large red pail. The penguins were waddling—just like in the documentaries!—chasing after the zookeeper with her bucket of fish. But the happiness, the awe, felt like it had gotten stuck halfway down his throat.
“Are we ready for some penguins?” called the zookeeper. A few whoops came from the audience.
Shouto felt an undercurrent of energy rising in his body, and it took him a second to realize that it was fear. Which didn’t make sense. What was there to be afraid of? This was something good. A good thing was happening to him right now. But knowing that only made him feel sicker.
Was he allowed to have this experience?
Wouldn’t there be some consequence for it? Something bad to even out—or exceed—the good? Not even necessarily in a karmic way, but in the way that bad things tended to happen when Shouto wasn’t spending every ounce of energy he had on staying focused, on making his face and body do exactly what he needed them to do.
The feeling was overwhelming, and almost before he was aware of it, his body was reacting—squirming down in his seat a bit and trying to find somewhere else to land his gaze. He ended up looking at Bakugou’s knees.
Bakugou’s hand finished its journey across Shouto’s back and grabbed his shoulder. Bakugou pulled Shouto into his side and muttered into his ear, “IcyHot, if you make me watch these dork-ass penguins all by myself, I swear to fuckin’ god, I’ll donate you to the zoo so they can turn you into penguin food.”
“I’m not fish,” Shouto muttered back.
“Bitch, what?”
The zookeeper called for more. “I said, are we ready for some penguins?”
Bakugou gave a load-bearing sigh. Then he cupped his hand around his mouth and yelled, “FUCK YEAH.”
The exclamation surprised Shouto. Bakugou wasn’t the type to show enthusiasm for anything except sports and Heroes. It apparently surprised the surrounding audience, too—Shouto heard a couple bursts of giggles from farther up in the stands.
Shouto rocked sideways in his seat—knowing he was entering Bakugou’s personal space, and doing it anyway, because it felt good there. Plus, it felt easier to look when he was leaning into Bakugou, as if seeing the zoo from Bakugou’s point of view made it safer. So he looked, and he saw the penguins, and he rocked so hard into Bakugou that Bakugou had to put out a hand to stop from toppling sideways.
The zookeeper started talking about the daily routines of the penguins. Shouto felt like he was watching something secret and sacred, something that would get him killed if he so much as spoke a word about it.
Shouto moved away from Bakugou, felt his own warm cheeks with both hands. Then, realizing that he missed the touch, he grabbed Bakugou’s arm and draped it over his shoulders like a yoke on a donkey. Yes. This would help hold him in place.
Bakugou tried to remove his arm, but Shouto was holding on to Bakugou’s wrist, so Bakugou gave up and instead spoke into his ear. “What’s wrong?”
“This isn’t…” Shouto wasn’t sure how to verbalize it. He felt the familiar texture of Bakugou’s shirt against his arm, and he wanted to sink into it. He was just saying words now, just pushing the air in his mouth into various shapes. “I don’t think it’s allowed. Allowed for me. I’m supposed to not be here.”
“Why not?” asked Bakugou. “I ain’t tellin’ anybody.”
The penguin encounter lasted no longer than ten minutes. As soon as the zookeeper started taking questions from the kids in the crowd, Shouto took off his glasses and set them on the bench beside him. Then he grabbed Bakugou’s hand with both of his. “I just want to say something,” Shouto said.
Bakugou looked confused. “Okay?”
“I love you so much. I think you are so… good.”
“All right,” said Bakugou.
“You are too good. Sometimes I think that you’re so good that someone bad will pick you and squash you.”
“What the fuck,” said Bakugou.
“I just wanted to tell you,” said Shouto. He put the giraffe glasses back on. “Can we go through the aviary now?”
“Hah? You were just there.”
“I wanted to do it again. With you there. Please.”
“You’re a freak,” said Bakugou as he stood. “All right. C’mon.”
Notes:
The next chapter will be up in like 3 to 17 minutes. Gimme a second, my pretzels are getting cold.
Chapter 60: Shouto Definitely Should've Seen This Coming. Unfortunately, He's Not All That Smart
Summary:
Shouto and Bakugou are back home after the zoo. Idk how y'all are gonna feel about this one. I rewrote it an ungodly number of times.
Notes:
CW: ***SPOILERS*************triggered by touch, emotional flashback to SA, reflection on trauma & asexuality, internalized aphobia
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“What if I worked at a zoo,” said Shouto. “And I worked with penguins. And I got to see penguins every day.”
Between Shouto’s desire to linger at each exhibit and Bakugou’s determination to show Shouto every animal on his “fight list” (which included kangaroos and emus but not ostriches, out of respect for their audacity), it had taken them three hours to get through the zoo. They were walking to the subway now. The sun had just started setting.
Bakugou was walking with his hands in his pockets. He answered Shouto with, “Yeah, I guess.”
“Or I could go to Antarctica. I could see penguins there. I wouldn’t even be cold. I could just walk around in a t-shirt and shorts and look at penguins. They don’t let you touch or feed them. That’s not allowed. And you have to keep a minimum distance of five meters for wildlife preservation. But you can look. Did you see the pamphlet I picked up?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I never even thought about other jobs before. I mean, maybe when I was little. I don’t remember. Do you think I’d be good at a job like that?”
“Get your biology grade up,” said Bakugou. “You ain’t doin’ shit with that C you got.”
“Why do penguins have to be science? Penguins should be art.”
Bakugou laughed. “You better be real glad they ain’t, Picasso. I’ve seen your stick people.”
They got on the subway and sat down next to each other. Shouto’s body buzzed with leftover excitement. It was pleasant in a way he wanted to savor. So he let it flow a little freer than he usually did, let himself rock back and forth in his seat. Bakugou’s hand touched Shouto’s knee, and Shouto went still for a moment before he realized that the touch wasn’t meant to restrain. He wasn’t even looking at Shouto.
He hoped Bakugou was okay. He wasn’t usually this quiet. Shouto did his best to mirror Bakugou’s mood by staying silent and refocusing his energy into his fingers. Still, the energy was hard to keep there, hard to keep limited to fiddling with the hem of his shirt.
When they got back to Bakugou’s house, they went straight upstairs. As soon as they entered Bakugou’s bedroom, Shouto pulled off his shirt and pressed the button to loosen his binder. He exhaled as the pain in his ribs eased. “God, I cannot fucking wait until I get top surgery.”
Bakugou closed the door. “Don’t you gotta be on hormones for a while before that?”
“They like you to be, I think. For best results.” Shouto grabbed the hem of his binder and pulled it up over his head. “D’you have a shirt I can borrow?”
“You ever gonna stop getting naked in front of me every goddamn chance you get?”
Shouto grunted as he struggled to finish pulling off the binder. He’d gotten the angle wrong when he first pulled up, and that tended to throw off the entire process. “Shirt?”
Shouto heard Bakugou open and close a drawer. After a moment, Bakugou sighed. “Fuckin’—” Shouto felt Bakugou lend a couple hard tugs to Shouto’s binder, finally pulling it all the way off him. He handed it over along with a soft workout t-shirt. “There.”
“Thanks.” Shouto tossed the binder over by the rest of his stuff and slipped the shirt on. “Do you have homework?”
“No,” said Bakugou. “Do you?”
“Not that I want to work on. Do you want to watch something?”
Bakugou narrowed his eyes. “Hah?”
“Like a…” Was that a strange thing to ask? Deku had suggested it, but Deku wasn’t exactly the standard for normal. “Like a movie or something. Whatever you want.”
Bakugou frowned, glanced at the door. “Guess we could go downstairs ’n watch some… shit.”
“We can stay up here. Watch on your laptop.”
Bakugou looked his desk, then at his bed. His face scrunched a little, like he’d just imagined something distasteful.
“Jesus, we don’t have to,” said Shouto. “I was just—”
“S’fine,” Bakugou said. He grabbed his laptop from his desk and tossed it on the mattress. “You can pick.”
Shouto climbed on the bed. “Are you sure?”
“I’ll probably fall asleep anyway.” He sat beside Shouto and opened the laptop. “Put on one of your penguin documentaries or whatever the fuck you watch.”
“Will you stay awake if we watch Red’s Ocean?”
Bakugou groaned.
“Please,” said Shouto. “I want to watch it with you. We can start where you left off.”
“If it gets boring—”
“It won’t.”
“I’m just sayin’. No promises.”
They started with the second episode, where Bakugou had stopped when he tried to watch it on his own. During the theme, Bakugou’s elbow nudged his arm. “What is it?” Bakugou asked.
“What’s what?” asked Shouto.
“What’s wrong?”
“What are you talking about?”
Bakugou motioned. “You’re tappin’ your chest.”
Oh, he hadn’t realized. He put his hand down. “I’m fine. Just got excited.”
An incredulous smile grew on Bakugou’s face. “Ain’t you already watched this a couple hundred times? You might be as bad as Izuku was with those fuckin’ Golden Age All Might video clips.”
“Well, I’m—I meant about watching it with you,” said Shouto. “For why I got excited. Also, are you…? Are you going to be really super annoyed if I pause it sometimes to tell you things about the actors and historical background and cinematography and stuff?”
Bakugou stared at him, lips parted. Then he gave his head a quick shake and refocused on the laptop screen. “Uh… yeah, do whatever. I don’t care.”
He’d expected an emphatic rejection. “Are you being sarcastic?”
“No. Do what you want.”
Shouto leaned forward, trying to get a better look at Bakugou’s face. “You’re not mad?”
“Why the fuck would I be mad?”
“I don’t know,” said Shouto. “People used to ask me about things I liked and then got annoyed when I talked about it too much.”
“That’s their fault for askin’ you a question without being prepared for a weird fuckin’ answer. I don’t ask if I can use your pencil without fully expecting you to say some shit like ‘Sure, do you want the pencil that killed my secret eleventh sibling or the one I used to dig my way out of a Russian prison?’”
Shouto laughed. “Yeah, that… it’s a habit. I said stuff like that to scare people away from trying to be my friend.”
Bakugou huffed, shook his head. “You wanted to be my friend so fuckin’ bad.”
“Because you just make fun of everybody to their face,” said Shouto. “You don’t talk about them behind their back. And you were nice to me.”
Bakugou looked at him, eyebrows shooting up. “I was nice to you?”
“Yes. Sometimes.”
“Your standards are so goddamn low that someone would have to dig into the Earth’s mantle get under ’em.”
“You’re higher than my standards,” said Shouto. “Not when you brush your teeth. That’s unsettling to watch. But all the other times.” The last note of the Red’s Ocean theme played, and Shouto grabbed Bakugou’s hand. “Shut up. Sorry. Shut up. You have to be quiet for the second episode so I can pay attention. But you can hold my hand. Shut the fuck up.”
Bakugou snorted, but he stayed quiet as the episode started. His hand stayed still—not squeezing, but not moving away.
During a commercial break, Shouto put the laptop on his lap and moved closer to Bakugou. After a moment, Bakugou mirrored the action, so the sides of their bodies were flush against each other. The proximity felt nice. Shouto moved the laptop so it was sitting atop both their laps.
It was like last night again, with Bakugou’s nearness existing alongside his rigidity. It reminded Shouto of how he himself reacted to hugs—action-figure stiff, afraid to move in case something went wrong.
“You okay?” Shouto asked.
Shouto felt Bakugou exhale. Was he trying to relax? What was making him anxious? Shouto squeezed Bakugou’s hand, and when he didn’t respond, Shouto grabbed Bakugou’s wrist and shook his hand in the air. Bakugou looked at him questioningly..
“Are you anxious?” Shouto asked. He accidentally made Bakugou’s hand whack his face. “Sorry. Stop hitting yourself. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Bakugou.
Shouto wrapped his arms around Bakugou and squeezed him. His shirt was warm with his body heat. “Are you tired of me?” Shouto asked. He wanted to make Bakugou laugh.
“Just about,” muttered Bakugou. He was leaning away from Shouto—no, more like folding in the direction that Shouto was pushing his weight—and he was grinning a little.
Shouto put his chin on Bakugou’s shoulder. He let it rest there for a moment, feeling his breathing sync with Bakugou’s, before he pulled away. “What do you think?” asked Shouto. “Should we kiss it out?”
Shouto expected an elbow in the side, a derisive snort, maybe a Shut the fuck up.
That was not what happened.
What happened was this:
Bakugou looked at him, lips parted.
His gaze dipped a couple inches.
Then he leaned forward and kissed Shouto.
Shouto felt it more in the rest of his body than on his lips—the sour burst of adrenaline, the discomfort of metaphysical static electricity transferring from one soft surface to another, the constriction of the diaphragm, the heart-clenching oh.
Bakugou’s lips moved in a way Shouto didn’t understand. Fingers brushed the back of his neck, shifted gently up into his hairline—nothing that could’ve been even remotely labeled as holding his head in place. Just a touch, and barely that.
The hand moved forward, fingers dragging lightly along the side of Shouto’s neck until they lifted entirely. There was the quiet, wet tsk of their lips separating, and then he could see Bakugou’s face again—still close enough that Shouto could feel Bakugou’s breath on his chin.
It took a moment for Bakugou’s eyes to lift from Shouto’s mouth. Another moment for his gaze to finish searching, for the drunkenness to drain from his expression, for his face to blanche and his eyes to widen in what Shouto recognized as terror.
Bakugou’s lips barely moved when he spoke. “You were joking.”
Shouto hesitated. He gave a small, stiff nod.
Bakugou stared at him for another several seconds. Then he pulled back. As he looked away, he whispered, only the consonants audible— “Shit.”
Shouto touched his chin, his lips. The skin along his cheeks and arms was still tingling with adrenaline.
“I don’t—” Bakugou’s eyes flitted to the door. He shifted like he was about to get up, but then he stopped. Touched his face. His eyes darted around the room, panicked. “Fuck. Fuck.”
“It’s okay,” said Shouto. The words were hard to get out—his chest felt tight, like something had just hit him very hard in the chest.
Bakugou shook his head, his eyes still going anywhere and everywhere but Shouto. His hand moved along the mattress like he was looking for something. “No, that wasn’t—I don’t know why I fuckin’—god, fuck this shit. I ain’t even like that, I don’t—”
“It’s okay.”
Bakugou swung his legs out of bed. “Fuck this. Fuck this.”
Shouto reached out and grabbed the back of Bakugou’s shirt. “Bakugou. Where are you going?”
He pulled away. “I’m—”
“You don’t have anywhere to go. Neither do I. You’re just going to end up coming back here.”
“Will you shut the fuck—” His voice rose, then broke. He wiped his hands on his gym shorts, dug his fingers into the area beneath his knees. His breaths were quickly turning audible. “I don’t know why I did that. I just fucked everything up.”
Anxiety swarmed Shouto’s chest. What did Bakugou mean? Fucked everything up? “I’m—I won’t tell anybody,” said Shouto. “Is that what you—? What do you mean?”
“You don’t even got anywhere else to go if you don’t wanna be around me. You’re stuck here. And you got—fuckin’ hell, I’m an asshole. You got assaulted not that long ago, and I just—” He raked a hand through his hair and then down around his neck, leaving diagonal white streaks where his nails scraped his skin. His shoulders rose and fell in time with his heavy breaths. “I just—”
“Bakugou, I’m okay.” He wasn’t sure if it was true, but he could sort himself out later. He moved—quickly—to Bakugou’s side, and when Bakugou angled his torso away, Shouto touched Bakugou’s shoulder. “You don’t need to be upset, or—it’s okay.”
Bakugou refused to look at him. “No, ’cause I’m sayin’—you don’t fuckin’ get it, I’m sayin’ I ain’t like that, I can’t be like that, I can’t—”
“Why? Why can’t you?”
“’Cause I ain’t like you. You and Izuku and—and Kirishima and people like that, you—I don’t fuckin’ get it, how you can just—you got people laughin’ at you behind your back. I don’t tell you, but I hear it, I see it. People sayin’ you’re fuckin’ crazy, you got mental and sexual confusion and perversion issues, how maybe you’re strong physically but that that don’t make up for being weak in the head, that there ain’t nothin’ that makes up for the kind of weakness you got. You could beat ’em to a bloody pulp and they’d still call you weak, ’cause once they know that shit about you, they got you. They won. And I ain’t like you, I can’t just—” Bakugou pressed the heels of his palms into his temples, his chest heaving. “It gets in my fuckin’ head—”
“I know.”
“I’m already the weakest out of me and you and Izuku. I can’t afford to have a goddamn homosexual label hangin’ over my head. I ain’t even—!” He made a strangled noise, threw his head back to look up at the ceiling. “I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me. It ain’t even like I’m just thinkin’ about dicks and abs and all the shit gay guys are s’posed to think about all the time. I thought it—I thought it was just somethin’ weird with Izuku. I did the same fuckin’ shit with him when we were eight.”
“You kissed him?”
Bakugou’s lips smacked. He looked at Shouto—just with his eyes, without turning his head. Waiting for a judgment.
Shouto realized: Deku had started mentioning a kiss back at the sports festival when he was trying to coerce Bakugou into sitting down with his classmates at lunch. So we were eight, and I was in his bedroom…
Bakugou returned his eyes to the ceiling. “I’d already started treating him like shit at that point. He still worshipped the ground I walked on for some reason. Fucked up that I let it happen.”
“You were a kid,” said Shouto. “You were little.”
“No, I shoulda known better.” Bakugou shook his head. “I thought—after he disappeared—I thought that was it. That he’d just had some sort of special ability to fuck with my head, and that it was over, and that I wouldn’t have to think about it again except to feel like shit about it. But then—” He dragged his hand down his face. Shook his head again. “What’s your whole fucking deal, anyway?”
Shouto hesitated. “Are…? What are you asking?”
“Just—” Bakugou paused, interrupted by his own heavy breathing. He tugged at the front of his shirt and leaned forward, elbows on his thighs. He closed his eyes, and his face scrunched. Mouthed, fuck. “Give—give a minute, I think I’m—god, why am I even telling you all this shit, you’re gonna think I’m—” His voice caught on something, and he tugged harder on the front of his shirt. “Should be able to figure this out on my own. You’re the one who ought to be—I don’t know why I keep—”
Shouto put his hand on the small of Bakugou’s back. Bakugou fell silent as he heaved breaths, hunched over so Shouto couldn’t see his face. But he knew what it looked like even without seeing it: flushed face, an open mouth, and wide eyes that looked at the carpet without seeing it.
Shouto felt sick.
Eventually, Bakugou’s breathing started to slow. He sat up, the whites of his eyes turned pinkish.
Then he got up and left the room.
“Bakugou,” Shouto said.
Across the hall, the bathroom door slammed shut. He heard the shower turn on.
Ah. Goddammit. Shouto really did not want to be alone with his thoughts right now. He got under the blanket and pulled it tight around him.
He hadn’t hated the kiss. He didn’t think he had. But if the kisses in the romance movies he’d watched with Fuyumi—swelling music, swinging camera lenses, fireworks in the background—were any indication, how Shouto had felt during this kiss was not how he was supposed to feel. You were supposed to get caught up in feelings, in love or lust or whatever it was. It was supposed to be the next big step in building intimacy.
Why hadn’t it felt like that for him? Cuddling just now had felt intimate. Washing Bakugou’s rain boots together had felt intimate. Kissing had felt… not that. It was just kind of… wet and… there. A strange sensory exchange.
Eventually, the shower shut off. It took a good five minutes after that for Bakugou to come back to the room. He avoided eye contact with Shouto as he crawled under the covers and turned his back to Shouto. Shouto waited until he’d gotten settled to tap his shoulder.
“What,” Bakugou mumbled.
“Are you okay?”
Bakugou grumbled something.
“I can’t hear you,” said Shouto.
Bakugou turned his head a little. “M’fine. Go to sleep.”
“It’s seven p.m.”
Bakugou rolled onto his stomach and buried his face in his pillow.
As much as Shouto was inclined to let it go, he knew that the following days would be awkward if they didn’t talk now. He sat up. “Can we talk?”
Nothing.
Shouto released a slow breath. “You know I care about you a lot.”
Bakugou didn’t look at him.
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. “You know that, right?”
Bakugou grunted.
“I just… I think I have something wrong with me,” said Shouto. “I don’t think I can fall in love. Not like you can. I’ve tried, and it doesn’t happen for me. I wish it did. But I don’t think it ever will.”
Bakugou lifted his head from the pillow a little. “Never fucking said I was in love with you.”
“Okay,” said Shouto.
“Don’t just assume that shit. I ain’t—”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m just telling you that it’s—whatever it is, it’s okay. I know I tease you about it a lot, but it’s not a thing to be ashamed of. I’m sorry if I made you feel like it was. I won’t make fun of you anymore.”
Bakugou put his head back down on the pillow. He said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Shouto said. “Probably that doesn’t make you feel better. You have to tell me what to—I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to hurt you worse.”
Bakugou raised his head, blinking angrily. “Fucker.”
“What?”
“I said fucker.” Bakugou pushed himself up on his elbow. “I’m hurting you.”
Shouto said again— “What?”
“I’m the one who dragged us out to that apartment where Deku killed that guy,” said Bakugou. “You had to watch that happen while you were tryin’ to keep me from seein’ it. You had to live with that.”
Pressure built behind Shouto’s eyes. He said, “I don’t blame you for that.”
Bakugou poked his own chest, almost banging it. “Well, I do. I do.” He spat the words. “And then I was fuckin’—I told you at the sports festival that you were a freak, I told you to get away from me, and then you went home and tried to kill yourself. You can’t tell me you still would’ve done that if I hadn’t said that to you. You cannot fucking tell me that. And you know what, I don’t give a shit if you don’t love me back. I hope you don’t. Because I don’t fuckin’ deserve that.”
Something in Shouto’s chest hurt. He stared at Bakugou, and he thought, you don’t even know, you don’t even fucking know, until tears blurred his vision.
Bakugou’s expression sobered. He sat up. “Oi.”
“You don’t understand,” said Shouto. “I want to want it. I want to make you happy. Just—something’s wrong with—I’d do anything for you. If you want, I can try to—I can say the words. I can do the things. I’ll do whatever you want. I don’t know if I can feel what you want me to, but I can pretend until—I can—”
“IcyHot,” Bakugou said, sitting up. He reached for Shouto’s arm.
And there was a memory, reaching Shouto’s nervous system before his brain could even register that something was wrong. He flinched back first, felt the harsh wave of emotion second—and then he recognized the touch as Bakugou’s.
Bakugou had the same look Aizawa had had on that day when he and Shouto were alone in his office, when Aizawa got up to turn on the air conditioning and Shouto panicked. Bakugou must’ve seen a tiny, cropped version of the same trauma replaying in Shouto’s face, because he dropped his hand.
“God,” said Bakugou. He almost sounded awed. “You’re… fucked up.”
Shouto’s emotions were still running high. He knew that Lady Hypna was not controlling them now, but… wasn’t she? Wasn’t it her fault that Shouto couldn’t love the way he wanted to, the way he was supposed to?
That had been Fuyumi’s theory, anyway—that he was like this because of Hypna. Sometimes he hoped it was true, because it meant that the way he loved might someday heal and become normal.
But he knew that Hypna was not the reason that he loved the way he did. He’d been like this his whole life, even before the assault. It just was. It always would be.
“I’m sorry,” said Shouto.
“I ain’t mad,” Bakugou said. “Fuckin’… weirded out by what you just said, though. What’re you cryin’ for?”
“You’re hurting. It makes me hurt.”
Bakugou looked away, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Fuckin’ hell,” he muttered. “Just… you know I ain’t gonna make you do shit you don’t wanna. I ain’t like that.”
“I don’t mind.” There was a deficiency here, and it was because of Shouto. He wanted to compensate for it. Shouto already had too many deficiencies, and that wasn’t fair to Bakugou. Shouto needed to compensate for it. “If it makes you feel better.”
“You should mind. It should make you fuckin’ furious if someone tries to use you like that. I don’t give a shit how sad or pitiful or teenage-horny they are. It ain’t your goddamn responsibility to make them feel better by making yourself miserable. I like…” Bakugou nodded his head to the side like he was waiting out a twinge of pain, or maybe just cringing through something massively uncomfortable. “I like being around you because you stand up to people. Like tellin’ your dad to fuck off. So it ain’t gonna make me happy for you to just do whatever I want you to.”
Shouto wiped his nose.
“Oi. You hearin’ me?”
Shouto nodded.
Bakugou continued. “You gotta tell me to fuck off if you want me to. I’m tryin’ to get better at interacting with you ’cause I know you got triggers ’n shit, but I can’t read your damn mind.”
“I don’t want you to do that,” said Shouto. “I don’t want you to stop being my friend.”
“Tell me,” said Bakugou. “Right now. Just say ‘fuck off.’”
Shouto swallowed. “Fuck off.”
“Cut out that mumblin’ shit. Look at me and say it.”
Shouto forced himself to meet Bakugou’s eyes. “Fuck off.”
“Okay,” said Bakugou. “We still friends?”
Shouto studied Bakugou’s face, trying to find the answer hidden there. Bakugou only raised his eyebrows.
“Yes…?” said Shouto.
“Yes. Was that so fuckin’ hard?”
“It was fine,” said Shouto.
“You gonna be able to say it again if you need to?”
“I think so.” Shouto hesitated. “I’m sorry. I think the… I think the kiss did trigger me a little.”
“Yeah, no shit.” The bed shuddered as Bakugou adjusted his position so that he was sitting side-by-side to Shouto again. “I’m sorry.”
It was strange to hear Bakugou say those words in that order. “It’s okay.”
“I really thought you wanted to. I really fuckin’ did. But I ain’t ever been friends with someone like you. I thought I knew how you worked, because you ’n Izuku, you’re similar in some ways. In your brains. I thought you worked the same way as him. And you were kinda actin’ like he would last night and today.”
“Last night?” asked Shouto.
Bakugou gave him a look.
Shouto racked his brain. Last night… oh, last night, when they were on the couch together? “When you got mad at me?”
“Hah?” said Bakugou.
“Last night when you were gaming. You got mad at me and I didn’t know why.”
Bakugou’s expression shifted toward confusion. “Were you not doin’ that on purpose?”
“Doing what?”
“Fuckin’—” He waved his hands. “Y’know.”
“No?”
Bakugou motioned with his hands some more, and when Shouto didn’t respond affirmatively, he said in a defeated tone, “—flirting.”
Shouto let out a startled laugh. He leaned one shoulder against the headboard, shook his head. “Bakugou.”
“Fuck you. You don’t get to—you can’t—” Bakugou pointed a finger at Shouto, as if it could finish talking for him. It took a second for Bakugou to restart. “There’s no way you didn’t know what you were doin’. No fuckin’ way. You ain’t that stupid.”
“Bakugou,” said Shouto. He gently took Bakugou’s hand between both of his. “I am that stupid.”
Bakugou dropped his head against the headboard and groaned.
“I’m sorry,” Shouto said again. He wasn’t sure what Bakugou wanted. “Do you…? Would you feel more comfortable if we told people we were dating?”
“Told fuckin’ who?” said Bakugou. “My parents? Those losers at school? I ain’t tellin’ them shit. And you just said that you don’t fuckin’ want it.”
“I want to be close to you. I don’t care what we call it.”
Bakugou’s face scrunched as he looked up at the ceiling. It took him a long moment to speak. “I don’t think we’re normal friends. Just… right now, even without the… I don’t think it’s normal.”
“In a bad way?”
“I don’t know. It’s just… in-between. Or somethin’. Not even in-between, really, it’s just… outside of everything that…” He sucked his teeth. “I don’t know.”
“It’s different.”
Bakugou looked at Shouto, blinking like he was waiting for Shouto’s words to finish translating. Then he lowered his head into his hands and gave a muffled, “What the fuck.”
“What?” Shouto asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve been putting off thinking about this for a fuckin’ decade. I don’t fucking know.” He rubbed his face, scrubbed his palms over his eyes. “Just give me a goddamn minute.”
Shouto put an arm tentatively around Bakugou’s shoulders. Carefully and almost spasmodically, like someone lowering themself into a tub of ice water, Bakugou accepted the invitation to lean toward Shouto. It took a few seconds for his back to connect with Shouto’s chest, shoulder blades stiff and awkward, and a few more for the tension to bleed out.
“It gets in my head, too,” Shouto said. “The things people say about me. I’m not immune.”
Bakugou still seemed caught up in the process of figuring out how to sit in relation to Shouto. He slid down a few inches so that the back of his head rested against Shouto’s shoulder. He made a face—something displeased or uncomfortable, the nuances of which were lost on Shouto—but he didn’t move from the position. Just gave an unsteady exhale.
“Do you—” Bakugou paused, then started over. “Does it always feel like this?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re doin’ something shameful.”
Shouto thought about how he’d felt the first time he went into public with short hair and boys’ clothes—how frightening it had been, how terrified he’d been by the possibility of someone calling him out, how ashamed he’d been of not being like the other students. And he thought about how things had changed since then. He was comfortable being called Shouto now. Maybe the shame wasn’t gone, but with every day that passed, it felt a little bit smaller.
“I think… not always,” said Shouto. “I think this has to count for something.”
Notes:
I'm gonna be real: I tried gay kissing (for research purposes) & Did Not Like It. I was being GENEROUS with this chapter. I could've had Shouto go "bleh bleh ewwwww bleh bleh bleh yucky yuck! MAN MOUTH!!!" He coulda said those exact words and then BARFED. I'm putting my reputation as a kiss-hater on the line for y'all fr
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