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Todoroki Touya never even thought about becoming a villain.
He's three years old and doesn't quite understand what fear is yet.
Touya doesn't like his father. The man is constantly angry, his words are harsh and his hands rough. Touya's mother protectively cradles her belly whenever his father is near and tucks Fuyumi and Touya into her side, her trembling grip just this side of painful. At this age Touya doesn't understand that his mother fears his father. But he knows father isn't a good man.
Touya is four when he truly learns pain.
He gets his quirk and is excited about it for all of two hour. Then, he learns that it hurts.
His body burns, his blood boils and his father smirks at the sight of blue flames.
As a six year old Touya knows hate. He thinks he hates his father. Maybe almost as much as he fears him. Sometimes Touya has to hide from his mother because he looks so much like father that she can only watch him with haunted eyes. She pulls Natsuo into a protective hold that tears at Touya's heart. In the morning he stands in front of the mirror glaring balefully at red hair and blue eyes and hates himself a little bit as well.
Touya is eight and he can't stop trembling. His skin has become a patchwork of scars and overheated skin. He rocks helplessly back and forth, holding his new baby brother to his chest and sobs. He doesn't know what to do. Doesn't know how to deal with the terror that claws at his chest. Because little Shouto's hair is split evenly down the middle. One side red, one side white and if his quirk works anything like the rest of their family's then it will be exactly what father has been waiting for. So Touya trembles and rocks and cries quietly. In his imagination, the house already echoes with his little brother's cries of pain.
Touya is twelve and learns true failure. His father has never complimented him. Even as he makes Touya light himself up in pain and fire again and again, his words are harsh and cruel.
You are so weak Touya. Stand up, Touya. Again, Touya. How else are you going to learn?
In the last four years, Touya has tried harder than ever. He is used to the taste of ash in his mouth and the smell of his own burning flesh in his nose. But his fire stays ever hot, hot, hot and his body is still build for the cold.
So it's not enough. Of course it isn't. His brother's quirk is called half-hot half-cold and the screams that were once imaginary become reality.
When Touya is fourteen he learns what it means to be numb. He wrestles his crying brother out of his shouting father's arms, ignores his hysteric mother, passes a wide eyes Fuyumi and a trembling Natsuo and tries to keep his brother's skin from falling off the same way his own does.
That day, something breaks. In Touya's mother, in their family, in his baby brother. In Touya himself.
He is so tired. He is angry.
When Todoroki Touya is fifteen, he learns what it means to lose himself. He can feel himself slip away, overwhelmed by fear-helplessness-pain-desperation until all that is left is rage. He remembers flashes of raised voices, flying fists and hitched breaths and comes back to himself to new burns and Fuyumi's quiet murmur. He clutches at his sister, terrified and confused. He bites his lips, shakes his head and steels his shoulders. He looks at his brothers and sister, tells Shouto to smile, makes Natsuo laugh and lets Fuyumi hold him. He tells himself, he is okay.
It happens again. And again. And again.
Todoroki Touya is sixteen years old when he dies. His life was filled with screams of anger and pain, promises whispered and broken by an unstable mother, the burn of his father's flames (and his own) and the helplessness of a child watching his siblings get hurt over and over again. His life ends that way; with screams and pain and in a haze of red and blue flames. Touya feels himself burning from the inside out and he can no longer tell if it's the fire or the all consuming rage. A flaming fist flying towards his face is the last thing Todoroki Touya ever sees.
(Dabi is born, rising from the ashes of a broken existence and burning with a dead child's rage.)
Todoroki Touya knows what a hero is. He never even thought about becoming a villain.