curses, like chickens

Hi. :)
So… Kae slid into my DMs in November with this brutal idea, we started spitballing it together, and I lost my tiny little mind. We realized we could turn it into our EnHoEn Big Bang project since we were both totally obsessed with it already, and the result is in front of you. ♥
The concept was all her, many – if not the majority – of the scenes spun out from her ideas, she provided a nonstop stream of beautiful art, and she also bailed me out with the title. tl;dr all hail Kae's undisputed GENIUS. None of this would exist without her, and there is twice as much of this universe in casual RP in our DMs, omg. ♥♥♥
Anyway. Mistakes were made by me. I wrote the first 38K of this in ten days. The rest took a LOT longer, though.
A few additional acknowledgments: if you're squinting at this going "Influence of Pete's art???", the answer is always yes, because Pete's art lives rent-free in my brain at all times. And shout-out to my man Hozier for a whole album full of vibes, but especially I, Carrion (Icarian).
As far as context:
This is set about 7 years after canon, and manga spoilers abound. Hawks gets to keep his wings. Enji has been retired for about a year. Eiji is three and a half, Naru is a little over four months, and it has been WAY longer than I want to talk about since I had a younger sibling at either of those ages, so go easy on me. X'D
As far as content:
Please be prepared to go deep into the traumatized adult and traumatized child stuff, as well as the cycle of violence conversation. I do pull punches, because I believe that fiction should be more fair than reality, but this one's very heavy in some spots and ridiculous in others, much like real life. I tried to do my homework as much as possible, but this was one of those fics that made me realize how much I don't know, so please be gentle if I fucked up. :')
Also, heads up it's explicitly EnHoEn. This chapter contains the M-rated sex scene, and amounts to 24K of the 218K total (abandon hope etc.). The rest is on its way as soon as I can get it edited! This chapter has several different POVs – we'll get Fuyumi too next time, and then it narrows to Hawks and Enji for a bit, and then the rest is Natsuo. (So much Natsuo. 118K of Natsuo. He's got a journey to make.)
Welcome aboard. ♥

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.
– Proverb

Fuyumi is the one who tells him that Natsuo doesn’t want him at the funeral.

Enji only met Hayami at the wedding. Rei talked Natsuo into inviting him. He’d spent the duration of the evening trying to stay out of the way.

It had worked—Natsuo had forgotten he was there. Natsuo had been so happy that Enji had barely recognized him. In the pictures, he looks like a stranger.

Natsuo hadn’t sent a messenger with the news after that—he’d called, in the middle of the day. Enji might have been the first in the family to hear. He hasn’t asked.

Hayami’s pregnant. I know you’re—better. Pretending to be nicer. Whatever you want to call it. But I don’t want you anywhere near our kid. Ever.

Enji had made himself respect it.

Enji had done what he was told, followed the rules, put his head down, put his feelings aside. Like always. The same way he’d gotten himself into all of this.

Natsuo hadn’t even called him about the second child—another boy. Rei had told him. Naru, she’d said, and then she’d paused, and he’d known the sound of a wince in her voice so well that it had made him feel even more exhausted. I’m sorry. He asked me not to tell you. But I guess it’s too late now.

He’s used to that.

The older boy is Eiji, an homage to Hayami’s late father’s name. Was that a battle to the bitter end, or did Natsuo pretend it didn’t matter, and he didn’t care?

Now they’re all that Natsuo has left.

And his first priority is still keeping Enji out.

Hawks wraps both arms and both narrow wings around him from behind, enveloping him where he sits at the kitchen table with his phone in his hands. Hawks’s face presses to his hair. Hawks’s breath ghosts warmly, gently down the back of his neck. He must have dropped everything and flown directly from the agency when Enji texted him.

Pathetic—to have reduced him to that. To this. To a security blanket for a grown fucking man. To the last windbreak for a fading fire.

“It’s okay to be mad,” Hawks says.

“I’m not,” Enji says. “It’s his prerogative.”

Feathers shuffle, tiny barbs whispering over Enji’s sleeves.

“It’s okay to be hurt,” Hawks says.

Enji lays his phone down on the table and puts his face into his hands. The right is always cold.

“I don’t hold it against him,” he says.

“It’s your family, too,” Hawks says.

It’s not. He sacrificed that when he sacrificed them. He has no right to ask any of them for anything. What they give freely, he can accept, but what he wants—

Is what tore them all to pieces, the first time.

What got them here.

“No one’s hurting more than he is,” Enji says. He can hear it, still—the echo of the silence. The way the rest of your life looks like a barren steel corridor, utterly empty as far as you can see.

And you keep walking. You don’t know what else to do. You don’t know who else to try to be.

“It’s his choice to make,” Enji says. One word at a time. “They’ll tell me if I can help.”

Hawks kisses the top of his head—the crown, they say.

Funny.

“You know I’m with you,” Hawks says. “Even when you’re stupid.”

Enji knows.

“Generous,” he manages. He has to make this seem like less than it is. Hawks has enough to carry. He’s already working himself ragged while Enji lingers in the corners of this house like a lost moth, beating tiny wings against the walls.

Hawks kisses his ear this time, fingertips winding down through his beard to trail back and forth along his jaw. “You know, I think the stupid runs in the family.”

“Watch it,” Enji says.

Two weeks later, at eleven in the morning, Fuyumi calls.

His first thought is the same one as always:

Someone’s dead.

Someone else.

Shouto, Rei—Natsuo himself. The weight of it overwhelmed him. No one’s ever ready. The world ripped his heart to pieces one last time, and his feet slipped in the mess of ragged remnants on the floor.

The words Fuyumi sobs into Enji’s ear don’t make sense.

Why would Hawks be there?

Child endangerment.

His neighbor called.

They forced the door.

The kids, the kids are—

Social services wants—

You.

He’s sitting in the garden, staring at the dirt-encrusted glove he peeled off of his right hand to hold the phone. He left a smear across the screen when he swiped with the fingers of the left to take the call.

“What?” he says.

“They want you to take the kids,” she says.

His breath feels like a burden. “No.”

“Dad—” Her voice breaks. His heart does. The same old fucking story. It’s never earned him anything. “It’s—Shouto can’t. My apartment’s so small, and my job—and—and Mom has the incident on her record.”

“That shouldn’t count,” Enji says.

“It doesn’t matter if it should,” Fuyumi says, desperately. “She said she’ll take it to court, but—you’ve got the house, and you’re retired, and—Dad, they need an answer now, or they’re just gonna—they’ll dump them in some office, or some facility, or—”

He curls his left hand into his hair and tightens his fingers until his knuckles ache, until he can focus on it, until he can try to think through the howling vacuum of the instinctive fear. She needs him.

Stop. Breathe. Triage.

The nightmare is already on them—already here.

She needs his help.

She needs a solution.

She needs Endeavor, whether or not he’s officially gone.

He breathes, deeper. Closes his eyes. Sets his jaw. Lets the flame seethe out of his throat, uncoil around his eyes.

He could give Rei the run of the house, if she’s up to it—stay in a hotel until she sorts it out with the courts. Fuyumi could come and take them whenever she has time. He doesn’t actually have to get anywhere near them.

Natsuo will never forgive him either way.

Picking up the subtlest shift of priorities is one of the things that made him so damn good at his job that he never trusted himself to be good at anything else.

This isn’t about him, yet. This isn’t about Natsuo anymore.

This is a rescue.

He knows how to handle that.

“Send them over,” he says.

The infant sleeping in the carrier looks so utterly indistinguishable from Natsuo that Enji’s mind whites out—fittingly, maybe. Pale hair, pale eyelashes, tiny little fingers curled to fists.

Eiji is three and a half. He’s big for his age—taller than Shouto and Touya were. Natsuo was tall, too. Eiji has Rei’s smooth, silvery hair, but his eyes are more green than gray—deep, like a forest.

He’s settled in the arm and clinging to the wrinkled shirt of the woman who introduces herself as Ayuko Jimi. Gingerly, she sets the baby carrier down on the doorstep so that she can reach into a pocket for her business card, the bulging backpack slung over her shoulder tipping back and forth as her body tilts. Eiji watches Enji, eyes wide and wet, shaking with the aftershocks of what must have been sobbing fit to rend the whole damn world. He’d likely still be crying if he hadn’t run out of breath.

Enji sympathizes.

Ayuko rattles off a list of things that sound rehearsed—Enji tries to grip himself, tries to focus, tries to catalogue and notate and prioritize. Extenuating circumstances. Court-ordered therapy. Appeals. Custody arrangements. Temporary. Temporary.

“We really appreciate your help, Mr. Todoroki,” she says.

She doesn’t know.

She doesn’t know anything about him.

Enji makes himself nod.

Ayuko tries to set Eiji down on his feet, and he wails, flailing for a better hold on her, his eyes filling up again.

“I want Mommy,” he chokes out, stumbling as Ayuko deposits him on the doorstep. “Where’s Mommy? I don’t—I don’t wanna—”

Enji kneels down. He keeps his hands low. He holds himself together.

“I’m sorry, Eiji,” he says. “It’s important that you and Naru stay here for a little while. There’s a pond in the garden. Do you like frogs?”

The tears glimmer in Eiji’s eyelashes, new ones swelling at the corners of his eyes and rolling down the wet channels on his cheeks. His mouth twists up, and the force of new sobs starts to rack his tiny shoulders again. “I w-want Mommy, I want—”

“I know,” Enji says, softly. He remembers—some part of him does. Some part of him always will. “Are you hungry? What’s your favorite thing to eat? Auntie Fuyumi can come over soon. Do you want to see Auntie Fuyumi?”

Eiji’s little knees give out. He collapses on the doormat and cries with all the shattered strength that his tiny body has left. “No, I want Mommy—”

“I know,” Enji says, keeping his voice low, smothering the impatience, tamping down the panic.

Naru’s eyelids part at the noise. Dark gray eyes. He couldn’t look more like Natsuo.

His tiny face contorts, and he shifts his arms and legs restlessly underneath a fleece blanket with a pattern of yellow ducklings. His mouth screws up as the ruckus of his brother’s distress washes over him and soaks in.

Fuck.

Enji remembers this part.

“Eiji,” he says, as gently as he can bear. The noise is awful. Horrendous. It sets his teeth on edge. “Come inside. It’s warmer in here. I’ll get you something to eat.”

Ayuko’s phone rings, and she straightens as she pulls it out of her pocket. She grimaces at the screen. Eiji keeps weeping like the world is ending.

His has.

“I’m sorry,” Ayuko says. “I really have to go. Your son—”

Enji wants to be angry.

Enji wants to be furious that Natsuo didn’t learn—didn’t stand taller than he could, feet planted on the towering foundation of his mistakes.

Enji wants to seethe at the mere thought that Natsuo failed the same fucking way that he did, after all this trying. After all this time.

But it’s his fault.

Of course it’s his fault.

He made them this way—all of them.

He carved this course from the beginning.

He consigned them all to this.

Natsuo couldn’t ever have hoped to overcome what Enji burned into his blood. The grief beat him. The hopelessness won. No one ever taught him how to swim. Enji didn’t even teach him how to fight.

Ayuko is saying something about ‘the process’—about the way the misery will have to be transcribed onto yet more paperwork, crammed into form fields, sanitized and stripped down, meaninglessly circumscribed by stupid legal words.

Enji takes the handle of the baby carrier in his right hand and stands. It feels like it weighs nearly nothing. He leans down. He reaches out to Eiji with the left.

“Come on inside,” he says, and the little green eyes follow him, but Eiji doesn’t budge. Smart. Cautious. Mistrustful. His father’s son. Enji’s doing. “Your brother will get cold.”

Wrong tactic.

“No!” Eiji howls, kicking out aimlessly. It was Natsuo’s first word. Enji should have known.

He should have known a lot of things he didn’t.

He should have done more. He should have been more. He could have prevented this.

It’s his to carry in all the ways that count.

Ayuko looks wearily down at the writhing toddler on Enji’s front step and sighs. She shoves her phone back into her pocket, passes Enji the backpack, hooks one hand under each of Eiji’s arms, lifts him up, and holds him out, his legs dangling. Enji moves in, leans lower, wraps the thrashing child into his left arm.

It’s just like an emergency. It’s just like another job. He just has to minimize the damage until reinforcements arrive.

He doesn’t have a choice.

Eiji’s tiny body is so tired that the fight goes out of him before Enji has even manhandled—childhandled—him into the living room. He collapses against the side of Enji’s chest. The tears keep dripping, and his nose runs, but the shaky breaths hitching in and out of him are the only sound he makes.

Naru is still fussing—but quietly, at least for now. Enji lays the carrier gently on the floor near the couch and sets Eiji down on the carpet. He tries to keep his shoulders low as he crosses over to find the remote for the television. They’re so fucking small.

Eiji hikes in a deeper breath, hiccups, and coughs wetly. “Wh… why’s your arm like that?”

“I got hurt,” Enji says. He mutes the sound before the screen has finished lighting up. There have to be channels for children somewhere, given the obscene price he pays for cable. “A long time ago.”

Eiji pulls his knees up to his chest. Enji didn’t even think to take off his tiny shoes. “What happened to your face?”

At least tactless defiance is better than tears.

“That was from getting hurt, too,” Enji says. He fumbles his way to a promising channel. Something obnoxiously colorful and utterly incomprehensible fills the screen. Eiji’s eyes latch onto it immediately. Enji restores the sound right in time for some bizarre plinking piano music, which he supposes is preferable to squeaky character voices.

Naru makes a burbling noise with a hint of something discontented. By the time Enji crouches in front of the carrier, he has produced a truly impressive quantity of saliva bubbles, swinging his tiny fists, and his face is scrunching up again.

What are you supposed to say? It’s not like he’ll understand. He can’t be reasoned with.

Enji gathers him up out of the carrier, meticulously re-wrapping the blanket around him. Fuyumi will know what laundry detergent Natsuo uses. Enji bundles the delicate warm body into the crook of his left arm and takes up pacing slowly back and forth. He bounces his arm carefully. Naru watches him solemnly for the length of a few more whimpers before settling again, tucking the thumb and first finger of his right hand into his mouth. Surely he’s getting dehydrated from generating so much spit.

Enji breathes out.

He lifts the carrier up onto the couch and tucks Naru back into it, careful of the heavy little head. He got rid of everything—the toys, the supplies, the bassinets and pacifiers. All of it. Clutter. Crap. He’d needed to keep moving. He’d cut it all away. A man with no history could focus on the future—drive towards the goal. He’d made himself believe it.

Eiji sits completely still, fixated on the television screen. Shouto used to sit like that—huddled, but with the slump of the exhaustion so obvious in every single line.

Fuyumi will be here soon. She went to the hospital to make sure Natsuo’s in one piece, to sign the admittance forms, to find out when they’ll release him. It’s not that far. It won’t be long.

Pathetic.

Sitting here, with his skin crawling, with his heart trying to claw out of his ribcage, waiting for her to save him.

Enji still always leaves his phone ringer on. He’s not sure he wants the old habits to die. He doesn’t know who he would be without them.

The beeping draws his gaze away from the back of Eiji’s head. When he’s turned away like that, and Enji can’t see his eyes—

The caller ID says Natsuo.

Enji smooths out the duckling blanket, adjusting it around Naru’s feet. He breathes out. He picks up the phone. He breathes in. He summons his voice.

“Are you—”

Searingly cold and razor-edged. “Do you have them?”

Eiji’s head lifts. He turns. His eyes fix on Enji’s phone.

Enji swallows. “Natsuo—”

“Do you fucking have them or not?”

Eiji’s tiny face crumples. He curls in on himself.

Enji can’t do this.

He can’t.

He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t have it in him. Some fucking hero, after all these years—

“Hey!” Natsuo’s voice sounds more familiar when he’s shouting. “I asked you—”

It’s the snarl of a wounded creature—battered to the brink of death, seizing on to something, anything—spitting out the blood, surviving on the spite. The smoke in his lungs is all that he has left to breathe.

All Enji can hear is the pain.

Natsuo is too blind with rage in this moment to know that he understands.

“They’re here,” Enji says. “Natsuo—”

“Where’s Mom? Give them to Mom. Give them to her now, you fucking bastard—”

Eiji’s eyes fill with new tears. He folds himself smaller. He doesn’t stop staring at the phone. “Natsuo,” Enji says, warningly, “he can hear y—”

“I don’t care! Where’s Mom?” A hiss through his teeth, his voice going ragged—where is he? Where did they— “If you fucking touch them, I will kill you, do you understand me?” The tears roll soundlessly down Eiji’s blotchy, reddened cheeks. His tiny mouth trembles. “I will fucking kill you, I don’t care—”

Enji can’t feel his fingers. It takes three tries to hang up the phone.

He silences it.

The screen lights up again as soon as he’s flipped the switch. It vibrates in his hand.

He sets it to Do not disturb instead. He lays it facedown on the couch. He climbs down onto the floor and sits cross-legged to make himself as small as he can.

Eiji rubs his dripping eyes against his little forearm, scrubbing too hard. Children are so clumsy—unpracticed. They don’t know how to hold themselves. They hardly know how to move.

Eiji’s voice is so quiet and so splintered that Enji has to lean towards him. “Wh-why is Daddy so mean? He got so mean.”

“He’s very sad,” Enji says. Choke it down. Push through it. “And he’s very scared. He’s scared he won’t be able to take care of you.”

“I don’t want him to,” Eiji says, with the unrepentant ferocity Enji doesn’t want to remember—the streak of him, the gathering filaments of his iron will.

All it’s ever been is a weapon.

All it’s ever made is this.

“He’s scary,” Eiji says, shoulders quaking again. “I don’t want him. I want Mommy. I wanna go home. I wanna—”

Enji crawls forward, right hand sliding on the carpet, and settles closer. “I’m sorry, Eiji. Your auntie—”

“I don’t want her,” Eiji says, the next herculean breath splitting into another sob. He swipes at his face with the heels of his hands. “I don’t want her, I want Mommy, why—why do I have to—”

Enji touches his silver cornsilk hair. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not fair—”

“I know.”

“I want—”

Enji tries to stroke his hair back, tries to peel the wet strands out of the streaks on his cheek, smeared around his tired eyes; out of the sweat gluing it to his temples from the exertion of enduring all this agony.

Eiji ducks away from him this time, sobbing harder. “Go away! I don’t want you!”

Enji doesn’t have any right.

He doesn’t have any fucking right to sit here, frozen, feeling like this—letting the roar of it subsume him, letting every inch of himself ache. He has no right to hurt. Not in the face of this. Not when he did this. Pathetic. Weak. Miserable old fucking monster, finally burning in the hell he built with his own hands—it’s poetic justice, long overdue. He deserves this. He deserves worse. How dare he sit here and let it get to him, let it scald him under the skin, let it stab him again and again and again with every heartbeat.

He deserves this.

He—

The door slams open, slams shut, and he stumbles to his feet somehow, not sure he’s breathing. Eiji buries his face in his knees, dredging up the energy for another bout of tears, and Naru starts to whine. What in the hell could even—

Hawks’s wings fill the doorway. His eyes are wild—wide and too-bright. Desperate.

“Enji,” he says.

His eyes flick down.

He takes in the rest of it.

Eiji abruptly stops sobbing in favor of staring up at the flood of red feathers in disbelief.

“Oh,” Hawks says.

Enji finds a breath somewhere.

“Oh, shit,” Hawks says.

Enji wants to say If he repeats that later, they are all going to murder me in cold blood.

Nothing comes out.

Naru makes a louder noise, closer to a wail, tiny fists swinging back and forth again. Enji scoops him up and holds him carefully upright this time, resting the heavy head on his shoulder, tucking the blanket in around him.

Hawks’s eyes flick over everything for a fraction of a second.

Then he drops himself down on the carpet in front of Eiji, wings flung out and fluttering. He holds out his right hand and trots out the sunshine grin.

“Hi!” he says, as if Eiji’s face isn’t slack with shock and streaked with hours of tears. “I’m Hawks! What’s your name?”

“I’mEijiTodorokiI’mthree,” Eiji whispers. He stares at Hawks’s glove. “You’re—you’re—I saw you on TV. Mommy said—she said you’re so cool. Daddy said you’re a showoff.”

Hawks wrenches the wince back into a smile in record time. “I guess they’re both kinda right.”

★

For the first time in his life, Keigo doesn’t trust Enji’s list.

Not because he thinks it’s duplicitous—Enji’s not even capable—or even because he thinks Enji didn’t give it everything he had, like he always does.

Precisely because he thinks Enji gave it everything he had, actually.

Enji has nothing left to give. Enji is barely holding it together. The thinning threads of his composure have left him hanging off a cliff, and that’s not a position particularly conducive to the kind of logical contingency planning that’s normally his specialty.

Keigo is never going to tell him about it. About this morning. No details. Ever.

It could have been worse—Natsuo’s place could have been worse. It could have looked more like Keigo’s parents’ had. He took a call, once, a couple years back, where he had to duck out into an alley and throw up into a dumpster before he could finish the job.

Natsuo’s kids had been fed, relatively recently. That goes a long way. The place was a mess, but it wasn’t a glaring health and safety hazard yet. It could have been a lot worse.

Natsuo had looked like a corpse—eyes too bright, crazy-bright, so sunken they were gleaming from the dark. Looked like he hadn’t been sleeping, hadn’t eaten in ages—probably that was why he’d forgotten about them so many times. Time wasn’t passing for him. None of it seemed real. None of it seemed like it mattered. If the world could come and sweep away the love of his life in the blink of an eye, what the fuck was the point?

Keigo gets it. He knows how thin the line is.

But you don’t do that to kids—don’t leave them like that. Don’t abandon them.

Neglect. What a shitty word for ripping away the foundations of a child’s life. What a mincing, clinical little euphemism for You have destroyed their ability to ever rely on another human being again.

Kids are sponges. Fast learners. At this age, all the stimuli unfolding around them sink in deep. They sense more than they see, and they see more than anybody seems to understand.

Depression—sure. Okay. Natsuo feels like he’s the one who died. Fine. Forgivable.

But he had a choice.

He’s surrounded by people who love him—who want to help. Who want to save him. No matter what it takes.

All he had to do was admit that he’d started to lose control. All he had to do was own up to the inadequacy of his current mental state and reach out. All he had to do was ask.

Fucking asshole.

It’s not that easy. Keigo knows it’s not that easy. It tricks you. It lies. It promises you that tomorrow will be different—convinces you that you’ll be fine if you just slide through one more day. Today’s a waste. Tomorrow will be different. The balance will shift—the weight of the shame and the disgust at yourself will ease up any minute now, and then you’ll get your hands around it. You just have to be kind to yourself for one more minute, just have to mumble one more excuse. You’ve earned a little kindness. God knows you have fucking suffered. God knows you’re trying. All you have to do is try a little harder. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow will be enough. Maybe tomorrow, you’ll be enough.

Keigo makes himself stop.

Literally, too.

On the top of a telephone pole.

Somebody gasps and points and raises their phone to take a picture. He twists relative to the sun, to make sure he’s too backlit for them to see that he can’t force a smile.

He has to focus. He has to compartmentalize. This shit isn’t about him—about where he came from or what he lost. He has two very simple intertwined objectives: make sure these kids are taken care of now; and haul Enji back from the edge of an emotional breakdown every time he veers close to those cliffs.

Keigo is going to turn this car around.

The lead-up doesn’t matter right now, except insofar as it makes Enji’s grip on himself more tenuous.

Enji will do it—keep it all in, keep it all together, smother himself and offer the stranded little boys that fell into his lap the gentlest facsimile of Enji Todoroki that anyone on Earth has ever seen. He’ll do it for them. He’ll find a way. He’ll stretch what’s left of himself into sufficiency.

Keigo doesn’t know yet how much that’s going to cost.

But that’s a distraction from the Objectives. The Objectives are sacrosanct. The Objectives are his only priority. They have to be. Focus. Fixate. Eyes on the prize. Everything else is noise.

Ten minutes later, his toes touch down on the doorstep. These jerks have the audacity to own a cute little welcome mat with a border of puzzle pieces. Who does that?

Happy people, maybe.

Whatever. Get your shit together, Hawks. Objectives.

Funny, too, because objective is what he needs to be about it.

And he can’t.

He rings the bell.

He checked the Network while he was in the air. People are getting better about marking their statuses as a matter of necessity—there are still so few of them to go around that it’s critical to be able to find out who’s available to cover or come with reinforcements at the drop of a hat.

The feathers detect shuffling from down the hall, and a pause—checking a camera, hopefully. There’s another pause, which the feathers dutifully interpret as slightly disbelieving.

Then more shuffling.

Then Rock Lock opens the door and stares at him.

“Hi, Ken,” Keigo says, grinning broadly. “I need to borrow your wife.”

Silence is a beautiful thing—magical, multifaceted. In this one alone, Keigo can see an otherwise nice and relatively normal man making his peace with the fact that he’s about to have to try to murder Japan’s number one hero on his own doorstep.

Keigo lets himself enjoy it for a second—just a couple of heartbeats. He’s had a shitty morning.

Then he beams brighter and waves his hands.

“Not for anything weird!” he says. “Okay, totally for something weird. But not sex-weird. Your face, man. I need her help.”

Rock Lock glowers at him—which, you know, fair—for a long moment before he breathes in deeply. Concession. Got ’im.

He half-turns towards the house and calls, “Honey?”

A little boy who looks about eight or nine, with the most beautiful big brown eyes that Keigo has ever seen, peeks out of a doorway. The eyes go very, very wide when he sees the wings.

Such it is that Keigo ends up going shopping for baby shit with the entire Lock family, all of whom are pretty heroic when you get right down to it.

Ken rolls his eyes and looks the other way when Keigo feather-lifts Ken II, Return of the Ken—Keigo thinks that’s much more fun than “Junior”—into the overflowing shopping cart and pushes him at ramming speed down a couple of aisles. At least there aren’t too many press vultures loitering around a department store in the middle of the day on a Sunday, although honestly Keigo thinks he’d enjoy seeing how the hell they tried to explain this. A tabloid cover that could fill the Alien Baby?? space would beautifully complete his soap opera trope collage.

Akemi has the prettiest laugh in the whole world, so Keigo gives her a turn in the shopping cart drag race hotseat, too. Ken claims that he doesn’t want to try, but by God does Keigo know a dignified liar when he sees one.

Ken lets Keigo hug him after the fact, though. Ken does not smell anywhere near as good as Akemi, but he does squeeze back a little bit.

“Owe you one,” Keigo says.

Ken says “Shut up.”

“Bad news,” Keigo says. “I don’t know how.”

“Don’t be a stranger,” Akemi says. “You can drop them off with us, if you need to.” She puts her arm around Ken II’s shoulders. He’s grinning. “After everything this one put us through, we’re pretty pro. Don’t hesitate to give us a call any time.”

Keigo salutes and makes the goodbyes pretty quick after that, because otherwise he’s going to get very un-Objective. And maybe cry a little bit.

“These are wrong,” Enji mutters.

Keigo’s heart leaps a little. One of the feathers that has been gently rocking Naru’s carrier slips and tickles his ickle feetsies instead. He blows another mighty spit bubble without even waking up.

Enji’s voice kind of always has that effect on Keigo, obviously, because Enji’s voice is his sanctuary and his soul and his home and his heart; the hallmark of belonging and becoming and also getting his back blown out. All his favorite things.

But it’s a bit different when Enji has been nearly silent for the better part of the hour since Keigo straggled through the door trailing shopping bags, because he’s been conserving emotional battery power so desperately that his speech centers have shut down.

Eiji’s eyes flick over towards them. His face was an order of magnitude cleaner by the time Keigo made the valiant return from Errand Hell—it must’ve taken Enji ages to scrub all of the snot and salt off of his cheeks gently enough not to provoke more of them—but he still looks so miserable that it makes Keigo’s heart hurt. Fuyumi always made it sound like he was a little firecracker.

The hilariously overpriced object advertised as a “play gym”—Ken II picked out one that was themed around race cars, even though the only gym Keigo’s ever seen that had engines in it was at Iidaten—came with one flimsy page of IKEA-worthy instructions. Enji is turning the page back and forth and frowning at it prodigiously.

“Wrong how?” Keigo asks, keeping his voice low. It still sounds scratchy. Gross.

“I don’t think it will actually work if I follow the steps in this order,” Enji says.

“Then ignore them,” Keigo says.

Enji’s beautiful forehead furrows deeper. This is just what he fucking needs right now—for the infallible rules to turn traitor and jeopardize the safety and the promised Hours of Educational Entertainment!!!! of his little saliva-factory grandbaby. One more existential crisis for the road. “But what if—”

A car door shuts. Footsteps on the walkway. Keigo breathes out.

Enji hears it a second later, and his head snaps up. Eiji tenses at the tension gathering in Enji’s shoulders.

Christ. Chain reaction. What a mess.

“It’s Fuyumi,” Keigo says. He reaches out slow and rubs his hand at Enji’s bicep. “Breathe, babe. Keep breathing.”

“Don’t have much choice,” Enji mutters. He starts getting to his feet. His spine cracks. His knees crack. Keigo’s heart cracks. Godfuckingdamnitalltohell. “Eiji, your auntie—”

The hunger hits Keigo like a freight train the second that the door opens, and he smells the food. Well, well, well: if it isn’t good, old Survival Mode narrowing his focus by force.

“It’s me,” Fuyumi calls, and the keys don’t jingle quite loud enough to drown out the tears hovering at the edge of her voice. “I brought… I… Where are—”

“In here,” Enji says, taking one step towards the doorway and then hesitating, looking back at Eiji.

Cutest fucking kid in the world, honestly. Only way he could be cuter would be if he was a redhead. It’s probably a good thing. He’s already devastating. The way he’d stared at Keigo—and stared, and stared, and then carefully threaded his arms into the tiny Shouto-branded hoodie and whispered “Thank you” like it was a secret—had felt like getting hit in the stomach with a spiked mace.

Eiji tightens his grip on the extremely squishy Fat Gum plush that he’s been clinging to for the past hour.

Heavy, rustling plastic bags land on the kitchen counter, and then Fuyumi steps into the living room.

She looks like shit.

Her lip trembles as her eyes flick over all of it—to Enji first, unmissably massive in the middle of the room, his whole body tilted towards the corner of the couch, where Eiji is curled up under the softest blanket in the damn house. Then to Naru, snoozing in the carrier, still expelling spit at a record-breaking rate. And then to Keigo, stranded on the floor in a field of half-assembled toys, with a wall of diaper boxes and formula and whatever other crap piled up behind him.

He did learn today that Enji can perfectly modulate the temperature of a bottle by wrapping his hand around it—down to the exact degree. That level of precision is staggeringly hot.

Fuyumi’s knees give out.

She catches herself on her hands, which is good, because Keigo feels so strung out right now that the feathers don’t react fast enough to help.

He bites back the knee-jerk Are you okay?, which is, even by his rigorous standards for dumbassery, too goddamn stupid a question to speak.

“Oh, my God,” Fuyumi says, faintly. “Oh. Sorry. Okay.”

Enji still moves so fast in spite of his size that Keigo sometimes gets jealous. He’s kneeling next to her before Keigo can even unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Her entire shoulder disappears underneath his hand. “You—”

She flings her arms around his neck and buries her face in his sweater before he can get another syllable out. He looks startled for a second before his eyes tighten, and he wraps his left arm around her. He’s even more painstakingly careful as he adds the right.

“Thought I was gonna have to go get stuff, too,” she mumbles. “Thanks. Thank you. I’m—I finally got a hold of the boys’ agency. All three of them are out on some raid or mission or something—no outside contact for five more days.” Keigo understands that better than anyone, but it seems impossible, somehow, that all of this has happened, and Shouto doesn’t even know. “Mom’s still trying to get a hold of somebody at the courts to make an appointment,” Fuyumi says. She takes a shaky breath. “Then she’s gonna go see him.”

Tentatively, Enji runs his left hand down over her hair. “You’re keeping this together.”

“I’m not,” she says. “I’m just—it’s fine.”

Keigo looks over at the miserable little lump of adorableness on the couch so that he won’t nervous-laugh. It is a whole metric fuckton of things, but ‘fine’ sure ain’t one.

Fuyumi peels herself out of Enji’s embrace, which is unenviable in the extreme. She forces a smile, wet-eyed, in Eiji’s direction, letting Enji help her back up to her feet.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she says. “I like your jacket. Did your grandpa get you something to eat?”

“Hi, Auntie,” Eiji says. His little voice sounds sticky.

His eyes cloud up, and then they slide over to Enji. Everything goes very quiet, and his eyes go very big.

“He…” Eiji’s face crumples all over again. Enji doesn’t even breathe. “Are you… you’re Grampa?”

Fuyumi isn’t breathing either. The silence swells like a blister.

Then Naru snores loudly.

Masterclass Todoroki Brand moment-ruining, literally in his sleep. This kid’s going places.

Fuyumi collapses on the couch next to Eiji. “That’s right, hon.”

Eiji wriggles closer to her and fits himself under her arm. He points. “That’s Hawks.”

“Yeah, it is,” Fuyumi says. “You didn’t think you were gonna get to meet Hawks today, did you?”

“No,” Eiji says. His eyes start filling up. Fuck. Mayday. “Auntie, I wanna go home.”

“I’m sorry, hon,” she says, choking up.

Ah, hell. Keigo’s skin is crawling. Everyone in this entire family is going to be one ill-timed comment away from bursting into tears for days, if not weeks. It’s not that he blames them, or anything, but—

But it’s so fucking uncomfortable. If that makes him callous, fine. Then he is. Because that’s the truth. It’s awful. He’s going to be trapped in this emotional pressure cooker with all of this suffering for the foreseeable future, except when he takes breaks to go rack up more PTSD points at work.

It’s okay. It’s okay. Objectives. He can handle it. He’s got this. No big.

Fuyumi strokes Eiji’s hair while Enji sits down on the floor again, lowering himself onto his right arm first—which means the left doesn’t feel steady enough to make up for the weakness of his knees.

“You and Naru are going to need to stay with Grampa for a little while,” Fuyumi is saying, damply. “Just a little while, okay? And me and Gramma and Shouto will come and see you, and hopefully soon you can stay with Gramma sometimes, too. And you’ll still get to go to school and see your friends.”

Keigo can see it in Eiji’s face—the resignation. Not acceptance so much as surrender.

Adults tell you what’s going to happen to you, and then they make it true. There’s nothing you can do about it. No matter how you fight it, you won’t win.

Fuyumi tips a glance at Enji. “It’s good—they think it’s good for him to have something normal. I called the head of his preschool. They’re going to let you drive right up if you want. But you might need to be ready to pick him up early tomorrow, if he doesn’t make it through a whole day.”

“That’s fine,” Enji says, quietly.

It’s not fine. None of this is fine.

Keigo picks up the instructions for the not-a-gym. Apparently plastic suspension system for hanging shit over your baby’s head so it can reach for stuff and make noises while you try to remember what used to constitute your adult life was too long to fit on the box.

Nobody has come right out and specified how long this is going to last—how long it’s going to take Natsuo to battle his way to providing legal proof that he can and should be able and allowed to supervise his own children. How long it’s going to be before Rei can keep them at her place, if they’ll let her. How long Enji is expected to act as a full-time sproglet-wrangler with absolutely no advance warning.

Keigo has heard that the phrase sleep like a baby is highly deceptive, because babies, in fact, prefer to sleep in fits and snatches and scream like ambulance sirens in between to make sure that everyone else in the household follows suit.

So that’s something to look forward to.

★

“Quick question,” is the first thing out of Hawks’s mouth the next morning. “How long do they do the enforced household-wide sleep boycott thing?”

Enji’s head is already throbbing. Eiji cried for the better part of an hour last night—new bed, new room, new rules, new world. Enji sat very still and kept a hand on his back until he wore himself out, crushing his little face into the wet pillow. Every time his eyes are closed, he’s Natsuo, for one moment, for two. Whiplash.

Naru was not as merciful.

Naru had napped intermittently through most of the afternoon, and had no longer been interested in cooperating come bedtime.

Enji weighs too much to get up without disturbing Hawks again and again. And again. And again.

“Fuyumi slept most of the way through the night by two months,” Enji tells him, because it’s the truth. “The boys were all closer to five. Part of it is probably the change in environment, and he can sense the stress. Shouldn’t be too much longer now either way.”

Easy for him to say.

“Checks out,” Hawks says, muffled by the pillow. “Remember me fondly when I die.”

“Not funny,” Enji says, and he drags himself over to the very ugly space-age-looking charging station, where he successfully attaches his arm on the third try. Unsurprisingly, the knot in his shoulder from putting it on and taking it off some six or seven times over the course of the night protests with sufficient force to send a stab of lightning down his spine.

He grits his teeth and stumbles out of the room to check on Naru before he starts breakfast.

It’s not the worst start to a week that he’s ever had, but it might still make the list.

Eiji lingers near the side of the doorway to the kitchen, gripping the bottom hem of his little Shouto-themed hoodie and staring at it upside-down.

Enji wants to tell him that it looks good on him, but the words won’t come. It’s not a lie, precisely. It’s just that it isn’t—right. Something about it prickles with broken edges, and the words won’t budge.

“There he is!” Hawks says. “Cool guys wear Shouto merch. That’s an official endorsement.”

Eiji says, quietly, “Daddy doesn’t like hero stuff.”

Hawks says, “Let’s get some breakfast in you, bub,” lifts him into the infernal booster seat that had pinched every single one of Enji’s remaining fingertips during assembly, and then says, fake-idly, “Do you like hero stuff?”

Eiji fumbles to pull his hood up and then fiddles with the zipper, looking down again at the stylized copy of Shouto’s suit design.

“I dunno,” he says.

He’s still wearing the jacket, though, by the time Enji drives out to the school, with Naru bundled into the cage-like carseat in the back, to pick him up—early, just as Fuyumi predicted.

Everyone just calls him Mr. Todoroki now. That should feel good. It should feel like a relief. It should be enough. If a few years of inactivity has erased the trail he burned across the sky, he should be happy. It’s a good thing that they don’t need Endeavor anymore. It’s a good thing that he’s antiquated—that he’s useless.

Eiji is clutching a coloring book to his chest. His face is streaked with tears again, lip wobbling with the threat of more. He’s trying to hold himself together as Enji strides up the narrow pathway to meet him and the nice-looking young woman—by her voice, the same administrator who called—standing beside him, periodically leaning down to pat his shoulder as Enji comes close.

Enji kneels down, gently setting the carrier on the pavement. Naru babbles, waves his fists, resettles.

“Are you ready to go?” Enji asks, as if there’s much of any choice.

Eiji nods, face pinching harder. Enji uncurls his arm to hold his left hand out—or the first two fingers, at least, which Eiji should be able to get his hand around—only to have a concentrated missile of warm child hurl itself at his chest, one arm hooking over his shoulder as the other keeps the coloring book pressed in between them.

Natsuo’s voice hisses in the back of his mind. Don’t touch them, don’t fucking touch them, don’t you fucking dare—

Enji wraps his arm around Eiji very carefully to support his weight, and pushes himself up to his feet. He picks up the carrier again. His metal fingers clack against the plastic.

He thanks the woman for her help, and she inclines her head, smiles, tells him it was no trouble.

Enji has had brief, small windows into many, many lives.

He’s never seen one with no trouble before.

Maybe he should see about a new prosthetic—one that splits his existing arm into two, to offer him another hand. He has to set Naru’s carrier down again to open the car doors, and then ease Eiji down into his car seat, glancing back every few seconds to keep an eye on the carrier while he buckles Eiji in.

The silence feels too heavy.

It’s possible Eiji thinks he’s done something wrong—Enji would have, even at that age. You’re not supposed to leave something you’ve committed to. If they have to pull you out of class and call your grandfather to come fetch you, you have clearly failed in convincing your teacher that you’re responsible and capable.

He’s not sure a three-year-old mind would pursue the same sequence of logic, but he’s not so entirely out of touch with other people’s emotions that he can’t register a child’s disappointment.

“What were you coloring?” he asks, keeping his voice low, trying to soften it.

Eiji watches him warily for a moment—but a briefer one than he would have yesterday, if Enji’s counting right.

He mumbles something so far under his breath that it’s indistinguishable, hugging the book closer to his chest. Did Hawks get crayons? It wasn’t on Enji’s list, but most of what they dumped out all over the living room floor hadn’t been. Enji can’t remember. Shit.

“Would you like to finish when we get—” He catches himself just in time. “—back?”

Eiji nods, avoiding his eyes, tiny shoulders folded in.

Don’t fucking touch them, don’t you fucking touch them—

Enji double-checks that the seat is secured correctly. Hawks and his crew of conscripted assistants found one that’s well-constructed, made from solid plastic and intelligently engineered, but Enji has seen these things shatter in car accidents. There’s only ever so much that you can do—only so much you can control. He has to focus on what he has ahead of him. Keep moving.

He makes sure the little belts are firmly fixed over Eiji’s chest, and that Eiji’s hands are still tucked close around the coloring book. He shuts the door.

As Enji fits Naru’s carrier back into the other car seat, latching it to the base, Naru warbles loudly and then expels a prolific amount of drool. It takes Enji several seconds to sort through the wads of wet tissues in his pockets and find one that isn’t already soaked. His hand is bigger than Naru’s head. Trying to swipe all the saliva off of his chin without hurting him feels like defusing a bomb.

He realized during the especially surreal experience of bathtime last night that most of Naru’s pallor comes from the fact that his skin is blanketed in an incredibly fine layer of white fur, so faint and silky that Enji couldn’t even see it until the water soaked in. His tiny ears are detectably wider and flatter at the tops.

There’s a case to be made here for Enji keeping his reading glasses on more often. If there’s something wrong, he needs to know immediately. No excuses. No delays.

He glances back at both of them in the rearview mirror before he starts the car. Eiji is staring out the window, fingertips picking at the top corner of the pages of the coloring book. He looks like he’s a thousand miles away.

In the kitchen, Enji settles Naru in the brand-new high chair, which he knows will not stay clean for long. He lifts Eiji up into the booster seat. Neither one of them weighs anything. Eiji swings his feet in the open air.

Enji unpacks a set of large plastic building blocks, setting several of them onto the tray of the high chair. Naru immediately selects one and crams the corner into his mouth, but they’re far too large for him to swallow. Enji lays the rest in Eiji’s reach, in the hopes that he will be somewhat more architecturally inclined.

Naru swaps out the chewing block of choice. A string of saliva trails from the first one and splatters on the tray.

Eiji blurts out, “Naru, you’re so gross.”

Enji—

Smiles.

It feels so wrong that it almost hurts, after that first second, but it’s too late to change it.

“He’s doing the best he can,” he says.

Rei told him that they’re keeping Natsuo under observation at the hospital for a week and a half. They’ve taken away his phone. The social workers will come with questions Enji can’t answer, in the next few days. If Natsuo is showing marked signs of improvement within the first ten days, they’ll let him go home, and he’ll be allowed to call the children at the end of the weekend. Rei said they’ll make him start classes, one on childcare and one as part of the court-ordered therapy. After the several weeks of those, they’ll decide if it’s safe to let him go back to work.

Enji doesn’t know who ‘they’ are anymore.

Fuyumi told him soboro don with peas is Eiji’s favorite. She texted him her seasoning ratios. At least he won’t have to worry about leftovers with a second chicken fiend in the house.

He turns to glance at Eiji and Naru so many times that it puts a crick in his neck. It’s a miracle he doesn’t burn anything.

He does overdo the eggs a bit.

Eiji frowns at the new training chopsticks for a few seconds before the desire to shovel food into his mouth overcomes his resistance to the change. He’s good with them already.

Or he’s still very hungry.

He’s cleaned his bowl well before Naru has drained the latest bottle. Hawks did buy crayons—a pack so large it has no fewer than six different shades of blue. Eiji spends several moments just staring at it, eyes panning back and forth across all of the colors. The coloring book is themed around farm animals. Maybe there are so many different types of blue out in the countryside that Eiji will need them all.

There’s a yellow-gold crayon that reminds Enji of Hawks’s eyes. Eiji uses it to grind streaks of color out across a chicken.

When Naru has inhaled enough formula to fell a lesser infant, Enji paces back and forth across the kitchen with him, gently patting right between his shoulder-blades. He burps a little, burbles a lot, and continues undaunted in his quest to drown the entire world in drool. Enji makes a mental note to ask Rei if Natsuo and Hayami talked to a pediatrician about that. It’s much more excessive than he remembers.

It might be harmless. It might not.

Eiji drags a brighter yellow crayon back and forth over the leaves of a tree, streaks passing well outside the lines. Enji’s fingers itch with the desire to push a green crayon towards him instead. Maybe Eiji is staging this particular piece in autumn, and wants it to be a ginkgo.

Eiji stops with half the lines unfilled.

He lays the crayon down, pinned against the table underneath his palm. His expression crumples again.

“Grampa?” he says, uncertainly, eyes darting to Enji and then away. “Is Mommy dead?”

God.

God.

Enji makes himself draw a breath and let it out slowly.

“Yes,” he says.

Eiji’s eyes well. “Forever?”

Enji sits down in the empty chair beside him. Naru’s wet fist curls into his shirt.

“Yes,” he says again.

Eiji picks up the crayon. He puts it down again. He pushes it away.

“Why?” he asks, mouth quavering.

“I don’t know,” Enji says, quietly. “No one knows.”

A suppressed sob far too big for Eiji’s frame shivers through him again. He sniffles. It sends the waiting tears rolling down his face, and he starts scrubbing at them with his half-curled fingers. “It’s not f-f-fair.”

“No,” Enji says, with the remnants of his voice. “It’s not.”

Eiji gulps in another breath.

Then he clambers out of the booster seat and climbs into Enji’s lap so that he can bury his face in Enji’s shirt and cling on with both hands.

Enji only has the metal arm left for him. He hopes that’s better than nothing. He runs just his fingertips up and down Eiji’s back, feather-lightly, watching the way the fabric of the little Shouto jacket wrinkles, trying desperately not to press too much.

“I’m sorry, Eiji,” he says. The measly little words are all he has to offer. They’re all there is. “I wish it wasn’t so hard.”

Eiji’s next sob sounds like it was beaten out of him.

Enji knows that for a fact. He remembers the sound.

He stills his hand against Eiji’s back. He can’t risk it. He can’t.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and it’s not enough.

Eiji quiets when he runs out of energy. He stays for what feels like a long time, curled up against Enji’s chest, pale blond head resting next to Naru’s feet, before he cites “Potty” as a reason for climbing down Enji’s leg and toddling off across the living room. He hesitates in the far doorway for a second before he remembers where the bathroom is.

It’s still too early for his nap, which is deeply unfortunate, because Enji intends to turn that into a shared siesta, and he needs it.

He deposits Naru underneath the arcing arms of the strange plastic racecar altar that he and Hawks laboriously installed yesterday, and then brings the crayons and the coloring book. He keeps an ear out for Eiji, but it isn’t long before the little shuffling footsteps return. Eiji flops down on his stomach on the carpet and nudges crayons back and forth on the page like the task is indescribably burdensome, but he has no choice.

Enji sits on the floor close by with his laptop, knowing full well that his back will punish him later.

He still does a fair amount of consulting these days—minor contributions, mostly, but he knows this damn business better than anyone else. That’s the silver lining of the smoke.

He offers financial auditing for a number of agencies, but none of those are time-sensitive, so he flags the emails one by one and sets them aside in his mind. Several clients have discovered that having him sift through their sidekick and intern applications to match quirks and personalities with their existing personnel is, in fact, invaluable, regardless of his going rate. He doesn’t want to hold up the background checks, so he marks those to deal with today.

He also tends to get requests for looking into complicated cases, digging through the body of evidence for missed connections and picking through the public record for unconsidered explanations. Those are always urgent, and monopolize his full attention, so he’s relieved not to find any in his inbox as of yet.

Hawks always jokes that Enji does it for the money—to avoid looking like an extremely atypical trophy boyfriend—but they both know the truth.

He can’t work like he used to, but he has to stay busy.

If he lets the silences of idleness start to swallow him, he’ll tear himself apart.

It’s really not—bad. Working like this, with Eiji and Naru close by. Keeping his ears piqued for any audible indications of moderate distress, while the three of them otherwise just… coexist. There’s a fragile sort of peace about it.

Eiji’s supposed to go down for a nap around one, but Enji imagines they could get away with starting earlier for a longer one today. He’s contemplating how to suggest it when his phone vibrates with one text message, and then an immediate follow-up.

Hey babe <3

How’s the brood??

Enji frowns at his screen before remembering he shouldn’t do that—that he should keep as much disapproval as possible off of his face in front of Eiji.

Don’t call them that.

Hawks is, as ever, unrepentant.

BABE come on that was funny on like three separate levels and you know it

Answer the question

Enji keeps his expression neutral.

They’re doing about as well as could be expected. How are you?

Hawks sends him the pleading-eyes emoji.

Unfortunately, he writes back, busy as all fuckin get out and I think I need to pick up night shift. Are you going to be okay?

Before Enji can answer, Hawks sends several more messages:

I’ll have time to send food

I could hire you a private chef

Ok actually I don’t think I have time to hire a private chef but I could bribe Fuyumi for now and figure it out tomorrow probably

Enji breathes out slowly.

We’ll manage, he writes. It’s fine. You know I understand.

Do not, under any circumstances, hire me a private chef.

He’s supposed to ‘verbalize’. He’s supposed to parcel up his feelings and hold them out even at the risk of ridicule. He’s supposed to trust that people won’t always hurt him when he’s weak.

He lays his fingertips against the screen again, picking out the keys.

Be careful. Come home safe.

Hawks sends the kissing emoji complete with a little heart.

I love you, Hawks writes back, instantly—no hesitation, no second thought.

No fear.

Enji grimaces before he catches himself again. Don’t just say that.

Hawks sends him a smug-looking emoji this time.

Tough shit, I’m number one now and I can say anything I want.

I love you I love you I love you

So much

And the ice mice.

Tell them I love them too.

There is a ninety-nine point eight percent chance of a onesie blazoned with the words ICE MICE (MODEL 2/2) in Enji’s future. He wonders if Eiji will wear the matching (MODEL 1/2) T-shirt if he knows that it’s Hawks’s doing.

There are too many extraordinary things about Hawks to begin to number, but Enji has always thought that this one is the most remarkable by far.

The world has offered him less love than nearly anyone that Enji has ever met, but he gives it away so freely—like it costs him nothing. Like he’ll never regret it, and he’ll never run out.

Enji doesn’t know how to verbalize that. He can’t imagine where he could begin.

Hawks doesn’t give him time to start figuring it out.

The next message that appears on his screen contains a photo, presumably taken by one of his long-suffering sidekicks, in which Hawks is beaming at the camera, holding his hands in the shape of a heart with his wings folded to match.

Enji holds the phone out to Eiji to show it to him. “Hawks says hello.”

Eiji leans in close and looks at it very seriously for a long time.

“He’s nice,” Eiji says. He blinks up at Enji. “He’s the number one hero. Did you know that? He’s the best.”

“Yes,” Enji says. “He is.”

★

Shouto has seen a lot of unspeakable things, in this job. He’s lived a lot of nightmares. He’s survived a lot of horrible shit.

Even so—it’s hard to imagine too many things more horrible than getting called to a disaster scene to pull bodies out of the rubble, only to realize that one of them is the person you love most in the world.

Shouto doesn’t know any of the details. No one will talk about it. He doesn’t know if Hayami was already dead when Natsu found her, or if he thought he had a chance to try to save her.

He keeps dreaming about it. Sometimes he dreams that he’s Natsuo, and he’s digging and digging and digging forever, chips of concrete chewing up his hands. Sometimes he finds her, and there’s so much blood he can’t keep up, can’t wipe it off of her face fast enough. Sometimes her corpse is so battered he barely knows her. Sometimes he strokes her ears and her cheeks and begs her to wake up, and the sky reflected in her eyes is flame-blue as he waits and waits and waits for her to start blinking.

Sometimes he dreams that he’s himself. Sometimes he can’t make it there fast enough to catch the cut-rate piece of shit that brought the apartment building down on top of the outdoor market. Sometimes he makes it in time, but he still can’t stop it. He’s not strong enough.

It should make him sad. It should make him feel hopeless.

It makes him angry.

And how much he hates that makes him angrier.

He has to be careful. It’s a tightrope wire. Falling to one side will land him in a pile of children’s corpses. If he falls off the other, he’ll turn into his father.

One foot in front of the other. No time for panic. He has more than his father ever did, is more than his father ever did—and he has two best friends balancing him, holding him steady, reeling him in and calling him out as a fucking moron when he acts like one.

Katsuki and Izuku won’t let him fall.

Fuyumi’s call came through moments after he’d set foot on the far side of the airport gate. They’d both grabbed onto him—seized one arm each, pried all his bags away from him, and propelled him over to the seating area to push him down into a chair, based on nothing more than his expression. They’d made a two-man, baggage-supplemented wall around him, feet planted wide, to prevent anyone from snapping a photo of whatever mix of disbelief and horror and devastation had possessed him—the sick feeling seeping frigidly through every vein in his body, creeping down the course of every nerve—as she’d rattled off the impossible misery that he’d missed, her voice still shaking.

He’d had fifteen unread text messages, mostly from Mom, on what must have been the first day.

He’d had one from Natsuo.

I need your help. You have to help me. You have to get them back.

There was so much to do wrapping up the case that he’d let himself drown in it on purpose—let it consume every spare moment of that night and the next day after, to minimize the time for thinking. He started learning how to repress the worst of things like this when he was about Eiji’s age. It hasn’t failed him.

But now he can’t run from it anymore.

He’s expended all his reasons not to come.

He tries to work more during the cab ride to the estate, tries to review emails on his phone, turns to the attention-grabbing flickers of the social media screens when he gets desperate. Even those aren’t enough.

“He’s good with them,” Fuyumi had said, hesitantly, on the phone. She’d made it sound surprised. “I know it’s—a lot to ask. I know. But please just give him a chance.”

It hurts that she would lie to him, after everything. In the middle of this.

But he knows she’s doing the same thing she always does: carrying more than her share, keeping tabs on everyone at once, bearing parts of the weight of everyone else’s pieces of the problem instead of focusing on her own. Maybe she really believes it. Maybe she has to, to get by.

Mom said, “It’s not about any of us, Shouto. It’s about those kids.”

He’s good at rescues.

The cab stops at the front of the property, the car door opening right at the end of the walkway. The gate is open. Shouto steps out. He makes his feet take him up to the door. He still has keys, somewhere. He didn’t look for them. He raises his hand to knock.

The door swings open, red feathers flittering, filtering the lights.

“Heyo!” Hawks says. “Come on in! Are you hungry? Wait ’til you see the kid’s jacket. He lives in that thing. I’m gonna get a matching one. We’re gonna be so cool.”

Shouto comes in.

He is hungry, up until he steps into the living room and sees Eiji—Natsuo’s firstborn, his pride, his joy, his greatest gift, his second chance at a family—sitting on Shouto’s father’s thigh, gazing down in wonderment at the pages of some colorful children’s book.

His father glances up, eyes still unyielding lightning-blue over the rim of his spindly little glasses.

And then Eiji looks over. He’s wearing a zip-up hoodie modeled after Shouto’s suit. The merch always looks so much less scuffed and dirty than the real thing.

“Shouto,” his father says.

“Hi, Uncle Shouto!” Eiji says. The smile is small, but it’s—genuine. What in the hell—

“Hey, Eiji,” Shouto says. There are toys all over the floor—not scattered, precisely, but spread far enough that the child-related chaos has clearly won out.

“You wanna hear the story?” Eiji asks. He tries to scoot further into the crook of Shouto’s father’s left elbow. “There’s room if you want.”

Shouto grips the part of himself that shudders violently. He shakes it. This is a rescue. This is about securing the scene. “No, thank you. I can listen from here.”

He sits down on the floor next to Naru, who is gleefully slobbering all over a plush version of a black-and-white racing flag, which is attached to the frame of his play gym thing by a thick ribbon. That can’t taste good. He doesn’t seem to mind.

“Hi, Naru,” Shouto says, as softly as he can. He wipes his hand one more time on the leg of his suit and then extends his finger to poke at Naru’s little fist.

The tiny fingers curl around his and close tight. Shouto shakes his hand back and forth.

“Hey, Naru!” Hawks calls, voice moving away down the hallway in the back. “Can you say ‘Shouto’?”

“Ahhhh,” Naru says, giving Shouto a very wet, very gummy little grin as he extracts his finger. “Ahgoo.”

“Close enough,” Hawks says, distantly. There’s a tiny red feather tucked in between the buttons on the front of Naru’s footie pajamas.

Shouto doesn’t look up in time—his father has already ducked towards the book again, expression gone flat. Eiji smooths the page out, and Shouto’s father lifts it.

“‘The little bear said to the little wolf, ‘But what if I don’t want to eat the rabbit? What if I only want to eat the berries?’”

That can’t be his voice.

That isn’t his voice.

That’s not—

“What do you think is going to happen?” his father says to Eiji, very quietly. “Do you think he’ll eat the rabbit after all?”

Eiji’s eyes widen in horror. “No, Grampa! He can’t! They’re friends!”

“That’s what I think, too,” Shouto’s father says, in the voice that isn’t his, with the face that isn’t his, in a house where children smile. “Let’s find out.”

Shouto watches Naru reaching for the little plastic racecar dangling from a plastic chain. The pudgy fingers open and close, swing away, curl and uncurl and curl again.

This is fake. Or—put on. It’s a performance. His father is playacting because Shouto’s here, because there are witnesses. Because the social workers will interview everyone, later—because people will ask.

It feels like Shouto’s stomach acid is sizzling, like it’s gathering into tidal waves, like it’s rolling up against his insides, climbing towards his throat.

This can’t be real.

His father can’t be, can’t have been, capable of this.

Because if he was—

If this was always in him, somewhere—

If this was ever in him—

If he could have been like this, but all he ever gave to Shouto was so much fucking pain—

That’s not fair.

That’s not fair, it’s not—

He could have been someone else.

It could have been so easy.

They could have been—

The breaths start to stick. Shouto gets up. He swallows, ignores the weight of his father’s eyes on him, turns around and walks away.

Out into the hall, where the air feels looser, lighter, less like it’s strangling him from the inside.

He makes himself keep breathing, makes himself keep moving, walks back and forth through the longest corridor past the training room where it was always the worst. Where he was always a sword to be sharpened, and never a child.

The man in that room looks like he loves that little boy.

That can’t be real.

It feels like Shouto’s ribcage is imploding. Between this and an elbow to the solar plexus, he’d take his chances with the hit.

Fuyumi always says their father used to be different, when she was young. Fuyumi says things weren’t as bad, even after, for as long as Touya was alive—like it’s Touya’s fault. Like it’s anyone else’s.

How different could he possibly have been?

People change. Shouto knows that he’s proof of that himself.

But people don’t become somebody else.

His heart is beating too hard. His chest aches. His hands are shaking.

He curls them into fists to steady them. At least he learned that much, in this fucking place.

He walks back down the hall again, faster, thinking maybe he’ll just—leave. He can leave. He can leave, now, any time he wants. He’s free. He doesn’t have to be here. He doesn’t have to stay.

He breathes, deeper, lower, fuller, funneling the oxygen to his head.

He can leave. Having the choice is… something. A way to brace himself. It helps.

He exhales.

He doesn’t even have to watch where he’s going. His feet carry him to the door that leads to the back garden, and he lets himself out onto the engawa.

It’s easier to breathe out here. The night air is cooler, crisper, sweeter. The dimness dulls the intensity of feeling, and the crickets and the fountain and the rustling leaves start to quiet all the noise inside his head.

Until he notices Hawks sitting on the edge, half-sprawled with one arm behind himself, the other hand tossing two white pills into the air so that he can catch them in his mouth and smoothly swallow.

Shouto read up on some of the recent incidents while they were on their way back from the airport, because he needed something to occupy his mind. Izuku and Katsuki sat on either side of him, on the car ride back, both of them leaning in against his shoulders like they were pinning him in place.

True to form, Hawks hasn’t slowed down.

He neatly booked as many resolutions this week as he did the week before.

All while doing… this. All while holding this house together when it’s exploding with impossibilities.

Hawks tips his head, turning just far enough to let Shouto see the thin, ironic smile.

“Don’t judge me,” he says.

Shouto’s feet carry him again—take him to the edge and position themselves just past the fall of the feathers. “Caffeine?”

Hawks’s laugh creaks like a trapdoor. The hair on the back of Shouto’s neck stands up.

“Hey,” Hawks says. “Better than heroin, right?”

“High standards,” Shouto says.

Hawks lets his head fall into his hands and scrubs them up and down over his face hard enough that it pulls at the scar.

“Doesn’t do a damn thing anyway,” he says, and there’s an unsettling, unsteady half-laugh underneath it. “I’m so tired. I’m so fucking tired.”

Shouto’s ribcage feels small. “I know,” he says.

Hawks looks up over his parted fingers. His eyes fix on Shouto. Too sharp. “Don’t tell him. Don’t. If he even—if he gets the slightest idea, he’ll start hiding. And it’ll kill him.”

“I know,” Shouto says.

He looks at Hawks’s scar.

He always thought it was strange—the way all three of them have them on the left side. His was for a reason, but Hawks’s and his father’s could just as easily have been the other side.

But they weren’t.

They line up.

“If you get to the point of endangering people,” Shouto says, “I’m going to sell you out.”

“Fuck you,” Hawks says, with another shiver of the fractured laughter. “I love this family.”

“I know,” Shouto says. Sometimes he thinks he knows too much. Sometimes he wishes—

Well.

The wishing doesn’t help. The wishing makes it worse. He knows what he knows. He has what he has. It is what it is.

He sits down next to Hawks, a little closer than he needs to, on Hawks’s right. He raises the heat of his skin a little bit. “You’re a special kind of idiot for that, by the way.”

“Always wanted to be special,” Hawks says, smile thinner than razor-wire, and sharper by far. “That’s how we get into this shit.” He pauses. He elbows Shouto—gently, gently, even now. “Some of us, anyway.”

Shouto looks at him for a long second.

He doesn’t have to be here.

He didn’t have to stay.

They’re not his flesh and blood—and even if they were, no power on the planet can tie Hawks down. Nobody can keep him somewhere that he doesn’t want to be caged.

He chose this.

He chose to help—at the cost of every scrap of spare time and every fragment of sleep.

He deliberately put Shouto’s fucked-up family before himself.

“Thank you,” Shouto says.

Hawks’s face disappears behind his hands again, but at least he’s worked his way up to melodramatic groans. “Don’t.”

“Fight me,” Shouto says, because it’s what Katsuki would say, and he needs to be a little bit of someone else right now, to see this clearly.

Hawks looks out over the dark shapes of the yard. Shouto used to hide out here, sometimes, when he wasn’t much older than Eiji. He was good at it—never got caught. Fuyumi was passing by, once, and he hissed at her to get her attention, and she was so scared and startled that she cried. Then she started bringing him snacks.

“I know it’s kinda fucked up,” Hawks says.

Oh, good. Another one of these conversations.

“You’re going to have to be a little more specific,” Shouto says.

Hawks grins, wearily. “Tou-fuckin’-ché. I meant…” He leans back on his hands, staring at the sky, feathers whispering across the boards beneath them. “I only ever got the best of him. And you only ever got the worst.”

Fuyumi really seems to believe it. Mom really seems to believe it. That might be the part that spears the deepest.

Nobody saved her. Nobody saved him. And he’s just supposed to leave these terrified kids—Natsuo’s kids, his nephews, whatever that word’s supposed to mean—with the smoke-wreathed demon who rested the weight of their entire family’s future on his shoulders before he’d learned to read?

It feels like they’ve forgotten.

It feels like they’ve abandoned him—the child he used to be. The one that needed them the most.

It makes his guts roil when he lets himself think about it. He likes Hawks—more than that, he trusts him. Hawks is smart and unsentimental. Hawks has a will like a whetstone and a score to settle with the whole world. Hawks keeps his promises. He plays the game out there, but behind closed doors he’s weirdly gentle and strangely generous. He cares. He found them all, here, smeared with the soot of everything that Shouto’s father failed to build, and sat down with them. Wrapped his wings around them all. Hawks—the man who moves too fast—hit the brakes. He stopped.

Because he saw something worth saving.

He doesn’t owe them anything. Not now. He’s paid back the purported debt to Endeavor a hundred thousand times.

Not to Endeavor, anymore.

Endeavor is dead.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s where the faith comes from.

Shouto doesn’t trust his father.

But maybe he can make himself trust everyone who does.

At least long enough to get through this. Long enough to give it a chance.

“From what I hear,” Shouto says, slowly, “it’s about time that you got the best of something.”

Hawks smiles. He ruffles his hand back through his hair. “Right back at you, I guess.”

Shouto watches the moonlight spark on the water trickling through the fountain.

“What’s it like?” he says. “Being number one.”

“It sucks,” Hawks says, immediately. “You need to start being crap. Seriously. Practice. It’s not too late for you to develop a streak of mediocrity a mile wide. I’m gonna blow it as soon as I get a chance and then dishonorably retire when I turn twenty-seven. Make a skeevy OnlyFans for pocket money. Sugar baby it up.”

“Bullshit,” Shouto says, but it had the intended effect, because he can’t help smiling—just a little. Just enough to release some of the tension that was cycling through him.

Hawks smirks sideways, tapping a finger against his temple. “Special kind of stupid. What can I say?”

★

Enji cobbles together something mostly sane and relatively stable.

They survive the first week.

The second comes… easier.

Enji wins all the debates about bedtime (the same time, every night, no exceptions). Enji also wins the debate about teeth-brushing (necessary, twice a day, no exceptions; less-“yucky” flavors of toothpaste are negotiable if they help enforce the habit). Hawks and Eiji win the debate about strawberry milk (not an abomination, and Uncle Shouto likes it—that one is not entirely fair).

Hawks loses the debate about dragging Naru’s crib into their bedroom so that Enji won’t have have to go as far when the squalling starts (Hawks needs every sliver of sleep that he can scrounge up in between the interruptions).

Enji loses the debate about setting up a cot and sleeping in Naru’s room to solve the problem (a flash of the animal-eyed ferocity he hasn’t seen in a long time, and a toneless iteration of the words “Absolutely fucking not”).

There is no debate about the higher-stakes consulting jobs—Enji can feel that he’s not sharp enough to do them justice in the pockets of half-attentive time that he has left. He grits his teeth and starts rejecting the requests. It’s only temporary. They’ll figure something out. They’ll find someone else.

There is also no debate about diapers—Hawks silently watches him do it half a dozen times, and then wordlessly starts contributing what would be his ‘share’ if any of this was his responsibility to start with.

Enji loses that debate, too. He hasn’t even made any headway into his opening remarks before Hawks’s eyes narrow, and he mutters “Don’t waste either of our time, babe,” in the way that makes it clear he means it.

One of these days, when there’s more time, Enji might get some stickers made for him that say Tough shit, I’m number one in silver text on an iridescent rainbow background. Enji has to brace himself for the fact that everything in the house will end up wallpapered with them before he commits.

In the meantime, he has his hands full juggling all of… this.

Which is temporary.

He wins the debate about routine, albeit at the cost of having Hawks laugh directly in his face about the fact that the two most rigid schedule-seekers in the world are the three-year-old Todoroki and the fifty-year-old one. Hawks is very fortunate that his laugh is so disarmingly beautiful even when it’s slightly mean-spirited. Enji hasn’t found a way to ‘verbalize’ that either.

Eiji’s preschool starts at eight. Getting out the door has become an ordeal—less for its inherent challenges than for the fact that Enji cannot, will not, raise his voice to vent frustration. The single most paramount priority is that Eiji doesn’t feel like a burden, no matter how excruciatingly annoying it is when he inexplicably doesn’t want to wear his shoes.

While Eiji is off learning his colors or shapes or evil earworm songs or whatever it is on any given day, Enji deposits Naru in the child carrier that barely straps across his chest even after modifications. Naru slimes his chest, and the carrier, and usually Enji’s laptop. Enji talks to him while working through the easier cases or making an attempt to clean up some portion of the brightly-colored cataclysm that has overtaken the house. It’s probably best that Naru doesn’t realize that their conversations are a contest, because Enji always wins.

Guh-guh-guh.

Gearshift? That one’s complicated. Well-chosen. What I’ve been able to put together is fairly limited, and it’s to Midoriya’s advantage to keep most of his subsidiary quirks under wraps. It appears to be another case of a fundamentally simple principle ripe to be expanded to a vast number of situations—so it’s good, in that way, that it ended up in Midoriya’s hands, given his boundless creativity. It’s also difficult to tell how powerful it was in its original form, as one of the earliest quirks that we know of—the records from that era are understandably an abject disaster, but it seems it was initially significantly smaller in scope. All of the lost information from that time—

Hub-bub-bub.

Let’s see. Hypespeed? I wish Twist had stayed at the agency longer, although seeing that name in print was… come on. “Twist and Shout”? Really? What the hell kind of a hero na—never mind. In any case—with all of the reconstruction projects, I couldn’t find enough time to watch her train, and the secondhand data wasn’t good enough. There was clearly a formula for the precise mechanism by which she was converting rotational energy into force, augmented by her quirk factor, as well as all of the environmental variables that came into play. It would have been helpful for her to be able to nail it down so that she could focus on targeting different components. But I understand she’s doing very well at Iidaten. Burnin said she got married.

Baaaaah—

Well, now you just sound like a sheep.

When the ongoing background task of extremely accelerated mental and physical growth in real time overwhelms Naru’s energy levels, Enji bestows him in the crib and takes the baby monitor back to the training room to work out, and to work out some of the… everything. Likely it would be more effective if he didn’t have to pause every few minutes to listen closely at the speaker on the monitor and shove his glasses on so that he can peer at the tiny screen.

There is far too much damn laundry, a staggering amount of it streaked silver with baby spit.

Enji can’t even say that he didn’t expect retirement to be like this, because he never planned on stopping. He never dared to dream that he might give it up.

Eiji’s preschool finishes at eleven. Enji picks him up, lets Naru slime him in greeting, and asks him what he learned about on the car ride back to the house. Enji reconfigures leftovers into lunch. Naru drains a bottle. Enji packs them both securely into the jogging stroller, and they run the two miles to the market. Eiji holds his arms up on every downward incline and begs to go faster. Enji consults him on what he wants for dinner, compares the slightly outlandish requests with the depthless font of child-friendly meal suggestions that Fuyumi pours into his text log nightly, and then fills the bag on the back of the stroller.

Today a woman who can’t be more than thirty stops him in the street, coos at Eiji, openly stares at Enji’s left hand, and starts trying to chat him up, so obviously that even his touted ‘obliviousness to normal human contact’ can’t prevent him from recognizing her intentions.

She has no idea who he is.

It seems impossible that time could move that fast. The stream has swallowed him. It’s like he never was.

That’s fine. That’s good. Endeavor was always supposed to flare so bright he blinded the world, then burn out and die. Enji always knew he couldn’t sustain it. Enji always knew it was a game. Games end. Someone wins. Everybody moves on.

They run back home. Eiji practices counting on the way, stretching his arms high to hold his fingers up above the shade so that Enji can see. Naru slimes his blanket and then usually falls asleep.

Coming back into the warm house after a stint in the brisk air outside sets Eiji to drowsing right in time for his nap at one. He’s started whining about how far it is to his bedroom so that Enji will let him stay in the living room and sleep on the couch—curled up next to Enji’s thigh, both fists tucked up against his cheek, breathing through his mouth, pressed in close to take advantage of the only thing that Hellflame is still good for.

Enji shouldn’t let him get away with it. In addition to rewarding the bad behavior, it can’t be helping with the abandonment issues that Eiji must be developing at a dizzying rate. Enji should be firm but gentle, bundle him up and carry him back to his bed every time he tries to cheat the system, explain to him repeatedly that it’s for his own long-term good.

But it’s not just these wide, pleading eyes. Not just this little mouth turned down into a pout, trembling with the tide of emotions that its owner doesn’t have the higher faculties to process yet. Not just these tiny hands reaching out, palms upraised and empty. Not just this child desperate to feel loved.

Enji caves every fucking time.

He knows it won’t fix anything. He can help it—he could, if he put his foot down and gathered his resolve. He could make himself do it right in spite of the pull of yesterday, and the siren song of the regret.

Apologies don’t count—actions do. He can’t go back. This changes nothing. Pretending otherwise to soothe himself is the coward’s way out.

But Eiji has been through enough. Eiji has lost enough.

It’s just a little comfort. It’s just a small concession.

It’s temporary.

On Saturday, Hawks kisses Enji’s ear and his cheek and his jaw and the scar and then searches through the beard to find his mouth before ghosting out of bed—far too early, even before Naru has decided to greet the morning with shrill rejection.

Hawks always remembers.

The flighty façade annoyed Enji from the first damn minute. He has since more or less made his peace with its necessity for the public’s benefit—so that they don’t realize just how viciously intelligent and carnivorously capable their golden boy is underneath—but Hawks has hardly ever even bothered to pretend that it applies to Enji. Hawks doesn’t hide how much attention he pays to the minutiae of Enji’s life.

It’s humbling how many types of love there are.

It’s horrifying how many there seem to be available for him.

After breakfast, Enji reads another insipid little book to both of them. Naru slimes it. Enji would do the same, were the social mores involved slightly more elastic. He could write a better vaguely educational narrative than this. Perhaps he will.

For now, though, he keeps reading slowly and enunciating clearly. Fuyumi mentioned that Hayami was already starting to teach Eiji how to read, and from the way his eyes track the characters, and his lips move silently as he practices mimicking the sounds, it must have been going extraordinarily well.

On the Naru front, Hawks came home two nights ago with a newly-purchased crackpot contraption that involves a seat suspended from a wide round frame, such that the tiny occupant can bob up and down by pushing their toes against the floor. It was labeled as an ‘activity jumper’. Enji is slowly coming to terms with the fact that his award-winning marketing department had nothing on the buzzword-riddled bullshit being churned out by the childcare industry.

Enji brings the latest overhyped object out into the garden. It’s possible that it will inspire Naru with an enduring interest in the concept of gravity and relative velocities, which will guide him towards an illustrious future career in physics. In the nearer term, it will probably help him with his balance, especially since he almost certainly has a tail coming in.

Eiji runs around the garden for a while, spending several minutes searching for frogs before he comes over and sits down to help—“help”—Enji dig holes for the irises that they picked out at one of the market stalls yesterday.

Eiji’s attention span is probably typical, but it feels like the blink of an eye. “Is this good, Grampa?”

Maybe someday that word will stop feeling like an arrow right between the ribs, laced with traces of every single failure.

Enji inspects the work of the tiny, tiny hands with their tiny, tiny shovel.

The plants won’t care. The plants will not be particular about even edges or consistent depth. Enji himself is not going in a hole just yet. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Even if it did—Eiji’s feelings are a higher priority than the future of the flowerbed.

“That’s very good,” Enji says. Calm. Steady. Set the example. “Thank you.”

Eiji smiles.

He doesn’t look like Natsuo when he does that.

He looks like Touya.

His eyes drift down past the place where Enji’s right sleeve is rolled up. The metal gleams in the sunlight between the end of his sleeve and the place that the wrist disappears into the glove.

“Grampa,” Eiji says. “Does it hurt?”

Curiosity is good—up to a point. Encourage the observational skills.

Enji peels the glove off and flexes the metal fingers. Eiji’s wide eyes follow the way they move. “No. My shoulder hurts sometimes—” All the time. “—because my body still remembers the weight of my regular arm and doesn’t always correct for it properly. But it doesn’t feel like anything at all. That can actually be very difficult, because I don’t know how much pressure I’m exerting. When you touch something, it feels like it touches you back, and your mind is smart enough to calculate how best to respond without you even noticing. With this hand, I just have to guess.”

Eiji’s mouth is open.

Curiosity is good, up to a point.

“Wow,” Eiji says. Maybe Naru will be a physicist, and Eiji will go into robotics. He gnaws on his lip, eyes flicking up to Enji’s. “Can I…”

Enji holds it out to him, carefully relaxing the fingers. “Yes. Just be careful of the knuckles. Sometimes they pinch.”

He wishes he could feel Eiji’s tiny fingertips ranging over the silver plates and the black rubber pads. This version is lighter. It didn’t have to be fireproof.

“I told Isamu at school,” Eiji says, gaze glued to the seams between the plates as he tugs his fingernail along the length of one. “I told him Grampa’s got a gundam arm, but he said I was lying.”

Enji doesn’t let himself sigh.

Eiji looks up, his whole little face possessed by the power of a single expression again. He feels everything so much. “What happened?”

It was inevitable that he would eventually ask. He’s too damn clever not to want to know.

Enji wonders if anyone has ever cursed a single family in so many disparate ways.

“Hawks and your Uncle Shouto and I were all involved in a very dangerous fight,” he says. “It was very important. All of us ended up hurt very badly, but we made it through.”

Eiji stares down at the half-curled steel fingers. He can barely wrap his hand around the full circumference of Enji’s thumb. Then he blinks up at Enji again, and you can see the little gears turning.

“You fought with Hawks?” he says. “And Uncle Shouto? But they’re heroes, Grampa.”

Because of him.

Both of them, because of him.

Every scar might as well bear his fingerprints.

Shouto’s bruises did.

“Yes,” Enji says. “They are.”

Eiji frowns up at him, thoughtfully, and then down at the metal fingers again. Enji keeps them very loose, very still. It makes sense, really, that the universe would take away the hand he used to hurt—replace it with something he can’t touch with, as soon as he’d learned how to feel.

Eiji will piece it together. It’s only a matter of time.

“Let’s put the flowers in,” Enji says. “I read that we need to make a little hill for them, in the bottom of the hole, and spread their roots.”

Eiji starts trying to shove the glove back onto Enji’s hand without even being asked. “And then they’ll grow?”

Enji shifts his wrist very, very carefully to guide his fingers in. “I hope so.”

Eiji has been asleep against Enji’s hip, thumb tucked into his mouth, for almost an hour when Enji’s phone alerts him that there’s weight in the mailbox at the gate.

It isn’t so much that he wants to get it as it is that he needs to stretch—in addition to which the representative of the Steelfist Agency that he’s dealing with is annoying the shit out of him by repeatedly refusing to read his emails all the way through, so a breath of fresh air is advisable either way.

He slides his left hand under Eiji’s head to ease it down onto the cushion of the couch as he shifts away to stand. Eiji makes a soft noise but doesn’t even stir. Enji looks in on Naru, whose day’s labors have also exhausted him to the point of placidity for now, and then heads directly outside. Trusting that it wouldn’t take long could well guarantee the universe throwing him a bastard of a curveball.

As he’s gathering the assorted unimportant nonsense from the box, a slender envelope slips free and flutters down to the pavement. It lands face up.

The return address is the (facility, institution, glorified prison) place they’re keeping Touya.

Enji’s fingers feel numb. He drops the rest of the mail back in the box.

He bends down. He picks up the envelope. He tears it open.

Inside he finds just one sheet of flimsy paper, poorly folded.

Two for four’s not too bad, right?

Here’s hoping little Shouto doesn’t crack.

Enji burns it where he stands and grinds the ash beneath his heel.

His heart is beating normally again, at least, by the time Fuyumi lets herself in a quarter of an hour later. She brought more books—from Natsuo’s apartment, presumably. Enji is either going to have to start storing board books in his office, or build some shelves.

She smiles at the way Eiji has curled up next to Enji like a cat, but then her eyes tighten when she gets a closer look at him, which means he fucked that up, too.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, half-voiced.

He shakes his head.

She pauses, winces, sighs, takes her glasses off, and rubs her eyes. The smile comes back, but ruefully. “Sorry. Stupid question.”

Ill-considered but well-intentioned. Not the same thing as stupid.

“Staying in, or going out?” Enji asks.

He knows the answer from the way her eyes drift. None of them ever want to spend time here. He doesn’t blame them. The walls are heavy with it.

“I’ve heard good things about that park across town,” Fuyumi says. “Eiji used to really like taking the subway.”

Eiji is interested in everything—fascinated by the infinite facets of the world.

That, too, reminds Enji of Touya, a little.

Mostly it reminds him of himself.

“Just be careful,” he says.

She gives him a wry look. He’s not sure if that’s You’re the one about to get behind the wheel of a car and drive towards an hour of enforced emotional awareness or Hayami was the most careful person that I’ve ever met.

“I know, Dad,” she says.

He started seeing Takiya after the war.

Seeing. Idiotic word, all things considered, but it comes closer to encompassing the broad spectrum of types of visits than any of his other choices.

Takiya is extremely smart, extremely organized, and relentlessly logical. It’s a good fit. Sometimes it’s too good. Sometimes Enji thinks Takiya likes him too much, sympathizes too much, takes it easy on him.

When he’d finally hedged his way into admitting just how drained he was—finally wrapped some meager words around the way it was feeding the panic so much that his vision swam even when he sunk to wearing the stupid glasses; around the way the pain of pouring fire through the prosthetic arm was unlike anything he’d ever felt; around the way it was shredding him to know that Hawks, who gave him everything, was getting less and less of him with every passing day—

Takiya had blinked, tilted his head, tapped his pen, and said “Why don’t you retire?”

The relief contained in nothing but the abstract thought had burst in Enji’s chest like a flashbomb.

And then the guilt had hit him like a freight train.

Takiya was the one who had told him to ask Hawks out to dinner.

Takiya was the one who had told him to ask Hawks to move in.

Takiya was the one who had told him to ask to be invited to Natsuo’s wedding. To ask to be allowed back into the edges of Rei’s life, when she wanted. To ask Shouto for his address. To ask for help. To ask for anything.

Enji tries not to trust him blindly, but the world is dark, and it’s the first time he’s had an ally that he didn’t meet on a battlefield.

It’s a dramatically different perspective.

And that’s precisely what he needs right now.

They send him up, one minute before the hour like always. He opens the door to the office, steps in, and closes it carefully behind him.

Takiya, whose rock-solid unflappability is one of the things Enji appreciates most about him, takes one look at him, stands up, and blurts out “Holy hell.”

Not the most promising start they’ve ever had to a session.

But also not the worst.

“Sit down,” Takiya says, beckoning him in like he’s liable to bolt. He did consider it. Briefly. “Talk to me. We’ll get through it.”

At least Takiya has spent the past five years collecting context.

He knows about Natsuo. He knows about Hayami. He knows that Enji learned the name of his firstborn grandchild secondhand.

Enji sits.

Enji tells him about the call. About the kids. About the curse.

“Let’s start from the bottom,” Takiya says. “This is very hard for you.”

Enji sets his jaw, breathes slow. “I’m not the one who’s adversely affected.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Takiya says, “although I don’t think that’s entirely true. What I mean is—this… echoes.” He gestures in a vague circle with the pen. “It calls back. To what you did to Natsuo and Fuyumi before. Do you feel responsible for this?”

Cutting to the chase. Carving to the bone. Enji likes that about him. Mostly.

They only have an hour for this.

“Yes,” Enji says, and the word alone is a wealth of diamond knives. “In the bigger scheme of it—yes. This is what I taught him. This is all he ever learned how to do. And… more directly. I knew he would be hurting so badly it would blind him. But I didn’t…”

“Reach out?” Takiya says. “When he’d made it extremely clear to you from the beginning that he didn’t want you there?”

Enji bites back What he wanted shouldn’t have mattered and chews on it for a few seconds.

It tastes like shit.

“Do you think he would have let you?” Takiya says, more quietly. “Do you think he would have listened?”

Natsuo is like him—stubborn as hell, independent to a fault. Incapable of asking for help. Incapable of disentangling weakness and failure. Viciously protective of the boundaries he’s managed to make, because he’s always had so little to lean on, and so much to lose.

Any attempt Enji had made would have poured a dose of the boiling rage reserved for him into an already overflowing crucible. Natsuo would have run further. He would have hidden deeper. It would have made it worse.

“No,” Enji says, slowly. “But I should have tried.”

Takiya taps the end of his pen against the blank page of his notepad. “Because there’s any chance you could have gotten through to him and stopped this?” he says. “Or because knowing that you’d done ‘everything you could’ would help assuage your guilt?”

Enji’s heart is beating hard enough to shake the rest of him.

He breathes.

“That’s a leading question,” he says.

Takiya smiles thinly. “It’s a good thing we’re not in court.”

Enji lays his left hand down on the edge of the couch, pressing his fingertips into the seam. The threads intersect and interlock like the stitches in his skin that held him together far too many times—for far too long.

“It’s still my fault,” he says.

“He’s an adult,” Takiya says.

Heat flares in Enji’s ribcage—one searing twirl. “He’s my son.”

Takiya watches him for a long second, then taps the pen again.

“Let’s come back to that,” he says. “Tell me about the kids.”

Enji clamps his hand around the flame and crushes it out.

Breathe.

Step back.

De-center himself.

“They’re so—small,” he says. It wasn’t how he meant to start, but now he’s stuck with it. “Naru’s too young to know what’s going on, but Eiji’s extremely perceptive. Smart. And so…” There’s no word for it—no right word. There’s nothing in his vocabulary that can encircle or encapsulate the way Eiji looks at the whole world like he’s wearily, warily, resignedly sizing up its teeth. “Sad. He’s already been through so much. And I think he’s figured out that he’s never going back. He knows it’s never going to be okay again.”

Takiya’s pen stays still in the air. “How about you?”

Enji eyes him. “‘How about me’ what?”

“How do you feel about it?” Takiya says. “About them?”

They’re so small.

They’re so fragile, and his hands have only ever been at home channeling obliterative force. They’re delicate, and loud, and hopelessly naïve, and so, so small—

“Terrified,” Enji says.

Oh.

Fuck.

God.

All right. He can—well. He’s stuck with that, too.

Easy, easy—

Takiya’s on his side. Takiya is being paid to be on his side. Money may not buy love, but an hourly rate can net you sympathy.

“All I know how to do,” Enji says, feeling like he’s stepping out onto a frozen lake, and he can hear the surface creaking, “is—damage them. Hurt them. It’s been… Touya was thirty years ago.” His heart climbs his throat and sinks its claws in deep, and everything starts—spilling. “And that was back when I was trying to be—look what I did to him, let alone to Shouto, and then compare where Natsuo—”

“Enji.”

The fire has always had a will of its own. Today it has a voice. “What kind of fucking monster—”

“Enji,” Takiya says. “That’s not helpful. You know it’s not.”

Breathebreathebreathe.

The bastard’s right.

He’s panicking.

Enji leans forward, lowers his head, squeezes his eyes shut, rubs his hand deliberately over his forehead and down his face. Slow. Think.

“I know,” he forces out. “I’m…”

“You’re safe,” Takiya says, quietly. “It’s safe here.”

There are words somewhere that are close enough. If he can find them, Takiya can help him.

Enji breathes in, and out, and in again.

“I’m so afraid of backsliding,” he says, to his hand, to his knees, to the carpet. “Forgetting. They deserve better. They need better. They shouldn’t be anywhere near me.”

“They need someone who can take care of them,” Takiya says. “Natsuo can’t right now. But you can.”

Enji feels his body tensing—sudden enough that it twinges in his spine. “That’s not—”

“You love them,” Takiya says.

Enji watches the floor go in and out of focus.

“Your love has been destructive in the past,” Takiya says. “But this isn’t the past, Enji. Look at Hawks. Look at Fuyumi. Look at what you’ve built.”

“I can’t do it,” Enji says, and as the words burn past his lips he knows they’re true. “I don’t have it in me.”

“You do,” Takiya says. “Because you already are. You’re already doing it.” The cushion of his chair whispers as he leans forward, but Enji can’t move—can’t look up, can’t watch him, can’t escape. “It’s different this time. You’re different. And you’re not alone.”

Enji presses his knuckles in underneath his browbone, against the unyielding track of thickened tissue trailing down.

There’s something to that.

It’s not that simple—nothing ever is—but Takiya’s not wrong, either. Not quite.

But Enji can’t, and won’t, ask Hawks to hold him up. Hawks was exhausted before the momentum of this slammed into their notably un-ordinary lives and swept them both away. Running the top-ranked agency would be far more than a full-time job even if he wasn’t still single-handedly compensating for the leanness of his org chart with sheer speed. Managing Enji’s emotions on the side—

Enji has already taken far, far too much.

But the kids need Hawks, too.

Enji on his own is too hard—too harsh. Even at his gentlest, he’s gravely serious and distressingly adult.

Enji can keep them alive, if he keeps himself on the world’s shortest leash. He can make them safe.

Hawks makes them laugh.

Hawks makes them happy.

But Enji can’t do this to him. Enji can’t drain him when he’s already wringing himself dry of every last damn drop just trying to wade through the hell of the job, the life, the press, the pressure—

Takiya lays the pen down on top of the empty page. “Can I see them?”

Enji grips his right hand with his left. He can’t actually want to… “What?”

“Do you have a picture?” Takiya says.

Enji pauses. Blinks.

He never thinks to take them—never halts in the midst of a moment and deems it worthy of immortalization. Photos are for crime scenes, for tabloids. He knows where he’s been and what he’s done. He was there.

But Hawks takes a different approach.

Hawks has sent him a dozen videos over the past two impossible weeks.

Enji draws his phone out and taps over to one in a text message that isn’t bracketed by any particularly embarrassing comments from Hawks about the glory of Enji’s ass and/or the state of his emotions, and hands Takiya the phone.

Enji hasn’t watched any of the videos. He hasn’t really had time, and even if he had, he’s seen enough damn footage of himself over the years. He knows what he looks like.

Or he thought he did.

Maybe it’s just that he’s only seen Endeavor for a long, long time.

Nothing more than the sound of Hawks’s laughter from behind the camera makes him want to let his guard down. “Aww, yeah, buddy! You eat that block! Show it who’s boss!”

Takiya tilts the phone towards Enji as the camera shifts from Naru, assiduously sliming the block in question, to Enji’s arched eyebrow above the damn glasses. “If you’d like to try one, he might be willing to share.”

He can see his own eyes softening as Hawks laughs again. It’s uncanny.

Then the version of him on the screen looks sharply back down to Eiji, settled on his knee and tugging at his shirt. “Grampa, it’s your turn!”

They’d been playing a game—or perhaps undertaking an exercise, given the lack of any sort of strategic element whatsoever—that involved stacking animal-shaped wooden blocks on top of each other. “Yes, you’re right. Thank you.” Balancing them had been challenging for Eiji, on account of how tiny his hands were; and for Enji, for the opposite reason. The version of Enji on the screen delicately picks up one that he recalls and holds it out towards Eiji. “Do you know what this is?”

Eiji bares his teeth and curls his fingers like claws. “S’a tiger, Grampa! Rarrr!”

The Enji in the video focuses intently on the precarious stack of animals he’s arranged so far. “It is an unusually small and unstable tiger.”

Even the speaker’s echo of Hawks’s snickering makes him want to glower. “Uh oh! Are we having twouble with the widdle kiddie game?”

“Turn that off,” the Enji on the screen says, without looking up. He doesn’t even sound particularly irritated about it. “I’ve had enough indignities photodocumented over the years.”

Leaned against Enji’s arm, looking calm and comfortable, thumb tucked into his mouth and eyes on the progress of the highly uncooperative tiger, Eiji murmurs, “Indinnities” just before the recording stops.

It is indescribably strange to see and hear and distantly remember the conversation of a stranger wearing his face.

“You’re thinking,” Takiya says, handing back his phone.

One can hardly avoid it.

At least Takiya always waits for him to gather those thoughts and choose the words to put towards them—initially, that is. The drilling tends to start right after, a rapid-fire inquisition that doesn’t leave Enji time to soften his statements, cloak his intentions, or hedge his bets. His only defense is hurling back the answers. His only defense is releasing the truth.

“I think that’s deceptive,” Enji says, slowly. “The way that video makes things look—the way it makes me look. It’s a lie.”

Takiya taps his pen on the empty page. “Did you feel like you were lying at the time?”

Enji eyes him. “No.”

“Then why—”

“Because that’s not me,” Enji says.

Takiya’s pen pauses. “Then who is it?”

Enji glares at him.

To his well-established credit, Takiya doesn’t flinch. “If it wasn’t you,” he says, “who were you pretending to be?”

Frustration is always what eats through Enji first—the hottest, highest, fastest-burning fire.

It’s stupid. Isn’t it? It’s stupid—it’s pathetic—to sit here, back bowed, hands folded, rummaging through his stunted psyche for fragments of sentences to try to circumscribe his feelings.

Who fucking cares? What fucking difference does it make? Will the sun fail to rise tomorrow if he doesn’t dredge up some kind of pithy revelation about all the ways he’s been inadequate, and how it all trails back to the moment that his father’s death cut a channel of fear so deep that he’s been drowning since before he knew not everyone is battling down a bonfire with every stolen breath?

“It’s not pretense,” he bites out. He has to finish this. Takiya’s on his side—even when Enji’s instincts read him as the enemy. Especially then. “It’s—redirection.” That’s not right either. “Restraint. It’s—modulating every… none of it is me. It’s put on.”

Takiya’s eyes are sharp, but the tilt of his head looks thoughtful. “A restrained version of yourself is still you.”

Enji works his jaw, moving his phone to his left hand so that he won’t crack the screen with the right.

“Try this,” Takiya says. “Ten years ago, if you’d seen a child Eiji’s age, alone on the street and crying his heart out, what would you have done?”

Enji eyes him. That’s an old instinct, too—trying to figure out the game.

Takiya’s game is attempting to drag him towards something called ‘improvement’ in order to get paid. Fairly straightforward, all told.

“I would have picked him up,” Enji says, slowly, “and tried to find his parents. If he’d had any identifying items on him, I would have tried to take him home, or to a school. Failing that, I would have brought him to the police station.”

Takiya taps his pen on the page. Enji wants to grab it out of his hand and snap it in half and hurl the shards of plastic at the wall.

Fuck.

Easy. Easy. It’s because he doesn’t know where this is heading. Uncertainty unsettles him. Not having command of the conversation makes him feel vulnerable—threatened. Scared.

And fear has always, always made him angry.

If he converts the fear to rage, the heat propels him forward. If he burns it as fuel, he can warm himself. If he stays too hot to touch, they won’t reach him. They can’t hurt him. He’s safe.

He has to back away from it—has to dial it down, slowly. Has to draw himself away.

Hawks would say Cool it. Hawks would think that’s very funny.

“You would have helped him,” Takiya says. “That wouldn’t have done anything for your stats, or your status. But you would have stayed with him for as long as it took. You would have saved him.”

Enji stares at him.

“That’s what you’ve always done,” Takiya says. “That’s what it’s always been. The perspective changed—the goals changed. All that grief and desperation twisted them into a vengeance quest, but the fundamental desire was still there. It was always there.” The pen starts tapping faster. “You wanted to be strong enough to save people. You wanted to help them. You wanted to protect them. That’s who you are.”

Who he is—

He’s a fraud.

He’s a fake.

Smoke and mirrors, spitting sparks and arrogance—

“It’s still you if you change the way you talk when you’re around them,” Takiya says. “It’s still you if you’re extremely conscious of the way you act, because you don’t want to repeat the mistakes you made with your kids. Those are choices, Enji. Not lies.”

Enji sits back, folds his arms, looks at the abominable imitation Impressionist monstrosity on the wall by the window instead of at Takiya’s expectant eyes, and makes himself turn it over, and over, and inside-out.

“Hawks doesn’t have to think about it,” Enji says. “He doesn’t do it as a series of choices. He’s just like that. He just lets it out.”

Takiya twirls the pen. “So what?”

Enji returns to staring at him.

“Really,” Takiya says, raising his eyebrows, as if this wasn’t insulting enough. “What difference does it make? If Naru cries, and you choose to pick him up, where Hawks would have done it without thinking—what difference does it make? He’s still up. He’s still going to stop crying. Why does it matter how you get there?”

Enji is so focused on quelling the steam at the dismissal of something that took from him to speak that he misses grabbing the words that crawled up behind them and waited underneath his tongue. “Because I’ll slip.”

Takiya pauses.

“I’m not good at this,” Enji says. “And you and I both know damn well how bad I am at not being good at things.”

Takiya almost smiles. Bastard.

“How long,” Enji grinds out, “do you really think that I can keep this up?”

Takiya considers that.

He clears his throat and taps the pen.

“That’s fair,” he says. “And it’s perceptive. We know that that’s most often what you’re afraid of, under the details—losing control.”

Enji grits his teeth.

“Then let’s think of it this way,” Takiya says. “Right now, you are in control. You have a handle on it so far. And you’re making choices. And you’re doing very well. But that doesn’t exist in a vacuum. By deliberately making those decisions, you’re practicing. You’re teaching yourself to default to those choices. And the more you do that, the easier it’s going to get, and the more intuitive it’s going to feel. Using your quirk the way you do didn’t feel natural at first, did it? Neither did using the prosthetic. Enji, no one on Earth would be stupid enough to argue with your results. You are extremely good at putting in the work. Why would this be different?”

Enji looks at him.

He blinks back.

Enji folds his arms tighter, tighter, making himself focus on the tension, on the pull, on the muscle—not on the desire to push back, draw away, protect himself. Hide his heart.

“You,” he says, “want me to train myself to be nice to my grandkids.”

This time, Takiya does smile.

“No,” he says. “I want you to stop only measuring how far you are from other people, and start also measuring how far you’ve come.”

Enji looks at him.

Takiya looks levelly back, still smiling.

“Come on,” he says. “Just try.”

As Enji approaches the front door, he sees that there’s a tiny red down feather pressed up against the other side of the frosted—reinforced and frosted—glass above the doorframe.

The alarm is off because Hawks is home.

Fuyumi’s car is still conspicuously absent, though.

Enji lets himself in and does up the locks behind him. He doesn’t look at the little pile of mail. He stops in the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water, gritting his teeth and switching hands when the metal fingers clink against it because they’re not quite steady.

The fact that there hasn’t been a nickname yelled in his direction makes it likely that Hawks is asleep.

That’s what he assumes, at least, up until he gently deposits the glass in the sink basin and steps into the living room, planning to pass out on the couch so that he won’t shake the bed.

Before he can even sit down, the little feather from the door flits over and tickles at his cheek.

“Hey,” Hawks calls from the bedroom. “In here.”

His voice has pulled Enji back from a great many things.

Now it’s pulling him forward.

He tries to catch the feather between the fingers of his right hand as he walks. He’s tired, and it’s playful, and he still can’t quite convince the fingertips to follow the exhortations of his mind with the kind of precision that he wants. The kind he needs. The kind he would have needed, if he had tried to stay out there and keep saving lives.

Instead of… this.

Then again—

Then again: better to quietly subside than to fail, and fail, and fail again. Better to be sequestered here by choice than to hurl himself again and again at a wall he could no longer climb. Better to remove the expectation of his own competence when the time and the age and the injuries had stripped away his life’s one accomplishment, and his world’s one foundation.

He couldn’t do it anymore.

He couldn’t rely on himself.

Everything he had to give was not enough.

The last fight about it was the only time he’s ever seen Hawks cry.

“You’re killing yourself,” he’d said, jaggedly, feathers flicking back and forth like they could stop Enji from seeing the way his hands shook, too. “It’s too much, Enji. Nobody could do this, it’s not your fault—you’re grinding yourself down to nothing. Is that what I get? Is that it?”

He’d choked on his breath, strode over, shoved Enji in the chest with both hands, dragged in a wet inhale, stormed away again—into the corner of the room, pulling at his hair, jittery and uncoordinated, shockingly graceless.

Out of control.

He’d half-turned, gritted his teeth, grinned humorlessly over his shoulder— “It is, right? That’s it. You go out in a last-ditch fucking blaze of glory, and here’s me left over, getting to watch you fucking bleed out because you refused to let me have less of you than they used to get—”

He’d moved again, all at once—reached the wall and slammed his curled fist against it, hard enough to dent the paint.

He’d left his fist pressed to the plaster and leaned in towards it, shoulders sinking. He’d rested his forehead beside it, closing his eyes, sucking in one shallow breath after another.

“They don’t care, Enji,” he’d said, voice wavering. “They don’t care if you’re hurting. They don’t care how much you’ve given for longer than anybody else. They don’t care if you die. They don’t care if you leave all of us behind. They don’t care about you.”

He’d turned just far enough to look over his lowered shoulder again, wings draggling to the floor. His eyes had been wild-bright—cornered animal desperate. Gleaming wet and impossibly afraid.

Enji had never seen Hawks afraid of anything.

Except this.

“I do,” Hawks had said, keeping his voice low. It had trembled anyway, possibly just to spite him. “I want you to fucking live, Enji. Even if it’s half of you. A quarter. Even if you’re a shadow of Endeavor—I don’t give a fuck, I want you. I want you to stay.”

Enji had stood very still, feeling like the world was all ice—the least forgiving form of water, unmoving, unbending, pressing in around him everywhere to dig the paradoxical burn into his skin.

“I have never asked you for anything,” Hawks had snarled at him, pupils down to slits, magnified by the shine, far too visible even from halfway across the room. “I’ve never asked anyone for anything. Don’t fucking destroy yourself for them. If you ever—if you—” Another breath had hissed in and out of him, too fast. His eyes had gleamed. “Don’t do it, Enji. Don’t leave me for fucking nothing.”

The tears had welled, and he’d jackknifed out of the room, shielding his face with his hands and scrubbing furiously at his eyes, shouting from the hall, the words fracturing on their way out.

“I want you to stay with me, you stupid fuck, because I love you, and I’ve never had—God, you’re so f-fucking—”

Selfish.

Piling another person’s love for him onto the pyre to keep the flame alive.

A door had slammed.

It had taken Enji the better part of thirty seconds to make himself move. Everything was numb. His head was pounding fit to shatter itself.

He’d looked towards the bedroom, first, but that door had still been open. He’d tried to rewind, tried to fumble for a telling detail, tried to put his finger on something solid. He’d come up empty-handed. Clumsy. Clumsy and imprecise, sloppy and weak.

A half-stifled hitching breath from the hall closet had unceremoniously bailed him out.

They’d sat there under the winter coats, clinging to each other in silence, until Hawks’s stomach had started growling.

“Shut up, traitor,” he’d said, wearily. The wings had curled closer around Enji—slightly too tight. It was a small space. He’d elbowed Enji, not especially gently. “Don’t you dare move. I’m not finished with you yet.”

Enji had had just one hand for him—for the world’s strangest guardian angel. For his lifeline. Just one hand to run up his curving, compressing, tired spine. Just one hand to scratch through his hair above the greedy tendrils of the pearly scars. Just one hand to cup his jaw and stroke his face, to hold it steady while Enji leaned against him. Leaned on him. Made him carry this much more.

“I’ll quit,” Enji had said.

Hawks had choked on a damp laugh, burying his face in Enji’s neck. “Fuck you. After all that.”

Enji had gripped him tighter, hanging on. “After all that.”

He regrets it, many days. Most of them. Too many.

But he’s taught himself how to live with it.

And the trade-off is not trivial.

Hawks loves the sun, and it loves him back. He always opens the shades all over the house in the afternoons—on the days he makes it home while there’s still light, in any case—and lies around in sunbeams like a cat. He looks like a painting. Stripes of gold and brighter gold, blood-red feathers fanned around the edges. Against the white sheets of the bed, he’s so unthinkably beautiful that it feels like a revelation every time.

He’s already smiling when Enji steps into the doorway.

“Hi, there, hot stuff,” he says. He pats the mattress beside him, eyelids low. “How’d it go?”

Enji eases himself down onto the bed. At a maximum, it’ll be an hour before Fuyumi brings the children back—hardly long enough to fuss around with removing the arm and changing out of his clothes when he’s so exhausted that he’s hard-pressed to care.

Apparently Hawks either felt differently, or there was so much blood and dust on today’s costume that he stripped it off in the genkan before slam-dunking it into the laundry basket, because he’s down to his underwear—and mouth-wateringly delectable for it, but that’s always the case.

“How do you think it went?” Enji says.

Hawks swirls his finger around in the sheets, grinning shamelessly as Enji settles on his back. “Well, given the notable fact that you’re not on fire, I’m gonna go with C. About as well as it could have, all things considered, as a direct result of the fact that you’ve been putting so much effort into getting better at expressing yourself, and it’s working. Final answer.”

Enji folds his hands on his chest, watching Hawks’s eyes flick over him. They’re so fascinating all on their own that it takes him a few seconds to pull his gaze away—to track along the side of Hawks’s face, down his jaw, his neck, his arm, his side, looking for scrapes and gashes. Nothing was immediately evident from the doorway, but Enji’s eyes aren’t what they used t—

Hawks shifts, scooting over to nudge against Enji’s hip, then pushes at his shoulder. Enji obediently shifts over onto his side even though it leaves him resting on the metal arm, which is not especially ideal. Hawks nestles in against his back, arm immediately hooking over his waist.

“Mmm,” Hawks breathes between his shoulder blades.

Enji lays his hand over Hawks’s where it comes to rest in the center of his chest. “Nothing major today?”

“Only my major need for a nap with my smokin’-hot hunk of ass boyfriend,” Hawks says. Enji does not sigh. It could be much worse. He’s learned to stockpile his exasperation.

Enji squeezes Hawks’s hand once and then lays his arm down on the mattress, closing his eyes. He finds a way to redistribute his weight that doesn’t press on the prosthetic too much. He lets his breath out slow. He can pick apart some of the things Takiya said later tonight, or tomorrow, or—

“Mmm,” Hawks says again, with a significantly stronger intention. His hand spreads itself more definitively on Enji’s chest, and his hips roll against Enji’s ass. “Babe.”

“I thought you wanted a nap,” Enji says.

“I did,” Hawks says, hiking his leg up over Enji’s thigh and grinding harder, which—

Well. It’s not Enji’s fault that Keigo Takami is unequivocally the most beautiful man alive.

“Can you blame me?” Hawks says. “Can’t believe they let you go around looking like that. Public indecency.”

Enji lets himself smile as he grabs Hawks’s hanging arm, pulling just hard enough to hoist Hawks up and over him as he twists to lie on his back again—smoothly slinging Hawks on top of him.

“So arrest me,” he says.

Hawks’s eyes dilate from the swift movement sparking up adrenaline. He grins, irreverent and irreplaceable, utterly untamed.

Enji’s heart always throbs for him. It was something of a foregone conclusion that Enji’s cock almost invariably does the same.

“Smartassery,” Hawks says, deft fingers finding the buttons of Enji’s shirt, “is another highlight from the list of your crimes—too many and too terrible to list, so let’s just skip to the part—”

Enji grabs a fistful of his hair and pulls him in to kiss him, long and slow and deep and thorough. Hawks moans into his mouth, the little demon—clever hands continuing their progress. Never still.

Enji bites his lip and tugs his hair, but inevitable is inevitable, and Hawks is every force of nature rolled up into one. He makes short work of Enji’s shirt, starting to kiss and nip his way down well before he’s finished with the buttons. He does pause, as the halves of Enji’s vanquished shirt slither aside, to sit back and rock his ass against Enji’s dick, as if either of them needed the reminder.

He strokes both hands down Enji’s chest, then leans down to lick Enji’s stomach, then looks up, dragging his fingertips back and forth over Enji’s ribs.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” Enji says. “Pleasure to meet you.”

Hawks’s nose wrinkles, and his mouth twists: a valiant and narrowly successful effort not to laugh.

“You’re retired, babe,” he says, leaning down and flicking the tip of his tongue against Enji’s right nipple, which just so happens to be unfair. “You could let yourself go a little bit. That might actually be good for you, come to think of it.”

Enji grits his teeth to cage the groan. “I have,” he says. Even setting aside the question of how many times Hawks has licked various parts of his body in recent weeks, the golden-headed demon perched atop him now is the single most incisively observant person he’s ever met. Enji is still experimenting to try to find an equilibrium—or he was, before he was granted the title of Grampa without warning, and the bottom dropped out of the world for the millionth time in his life—but the muscle definition he used to have has more or less disintegrated. He’s still not entirely sure who he is without differentiated abs. “Hawks—”

“No,” Hawks says, infernal mouth still dragging absolution out of Enji’s skin as he draws it slowly down again, and his fingertips dapple down to Enji’s hips. “This is important. You know I would still love you more than my own life if you had more than ten percent body fat, right?”

Desperate times.

“I know I still love you when you’re blueballing me,” Enji says, as tonelessly as possible.

Hawks loses to the laugh this time.

“Given what I’ve already done to my joints,” Enji says, “letting my weight fluctuate too much isn’t a good idea.”

“‘Too much’?” Hawks says, eyes wide, voice rising. “I’m going to make you eat so much ice cream. All our sex is going to be food sex from this day forward. You’re not going to be able to hear chocolate syrup without popping a boner. You—I am so serious, Enji, get ready to never be able to eat lava cake in public ever again.”

Enji reaches up, warming up the left hand, cautious with the right.

He closes one around each of Hawks’s hipbones.

He shifts Hawks’s body back until their erections rub together hard, separated only by Hawks’s flimsy boxers and Enji’s slacks.

“Hm,” Hawks says, breathlessly, eyes going glossy and then searingly hot. “Okay. Point taken.”

That turns out to be something of a deceptive phrase: getting to the point takes a geologic age, because Hawks keeps stopping to trace and stroke and caress and lick and nibble and then breathe on the wet trail his tongue leaves behind, as if Enji’s skin wasn’t doing half the work of evaporation for him.

“If you’re planning to keep this up,” Enji says, making an effort to sound innocent, “I think Naru could give you some pointers on—”

Hawks makes a strangled noise, but at least that prompts him to make a fierce and concerted attack on Enji’s pants.

Which goes well right up until he’s hurled Enji’s slacks to the floor, belt buckle jingling in the air and then clanking down on the tatami, only to ignore the way that Enji taps a toe meaningfully at his hip.

Enji bites back something along the lines of Do I have to do everything in this house myself, which might be a touch too pointed, even for Hawks’s awful sense of humor. He sits up as well as he can around the incubus resettling in his lap to reach for his sock.

Hawks bats his hand away.

He blinks.

“Leave it,” Hawks says, beaming as Enji slowly lies back down, watching him. “It’s adorable when you keep your little socks on.”

“You are,” Enji says, too suffused with the warmth to care how lovingly it comes out, “so weird.”

Hawks grins viciously. “Okay, boomer.”

Enji laughs.

He always instinctively hides it with his hand on the rare occasion that some insuppressible burst of glee breaks through.

Hawks always pries his hand away.

True to form, Hawks peels it back, kissing the palm insistently until Enji tries to twist away, then kissing all around the outline of his lips before actually meeting his mouth.

Time has always blurred around Hawks—always slowed for him, always whisked past him but parted for him, eddying in his wake. It’s made him older than he should be, and it’s torn the softness out of his face but not the mischief from his eyes. He could never get enough of it despite the way he bent it effortlessly to his will. He could never move fast enough to outpace the fear of disappearing, someday—of dying without making a dent. Of leaving behind a world that still kept churning out more children like him, with feathered swords and feathered shields and sly little smiles the cameras loved past reason, and gilded cages closing in around their hearts.

He still makes the hours indistinct—still wraps the minutes around him like a fur cloak, twirling until the seconds spin, and heaven knows where you’ll be when the hurricane subsides.

So Enji can’t tell how long it is that Hawks really spends revering practically every last damn centimeter of him with the tips of his fingers and his tongue, with his palms spread open and his silken hair skimming over Enji’s skin, following all the softest forays with a hint of teeth.

It feels like half a heartbeat, and like forever.

Then Hawks pauses, arms folded over his hips, pointedly ignoring the way Enji’s cock presses very meaningfully up against the undersides of his forearms.

He meets Enji’s eyes for a long, long second more, with all the mirth and mischief torn away.

He’s still so young—and he’s never been.

He stretches up, scars dimpling under Enji’s fingertips as his lithe body passes under Enji’s hand, and ducks in close to kiss Enji’s neck.

More specifically, Enji’s carotid artery.

It’s his favorite way to say I’m glad that you’re alive.

Enji tries to catch him to pull him into a proper kiss, befitting two more or less upstanding citizens who just stripped each other mostly naked in the middle of the afternoon, but Hawks dodges, and the hint of laughter’s back.

Enji doesn’t begrudge it.

Especially not when Hawks finally, finally fucks him to within what feels like an inch of his life.

Three-quarters of an inch of it, possibly. He knows the span of a hairsbreadth better than most, and it is a very, very close thing.

Hawks always laughs through orgasm, so damn beautifully that Enji has learned to coordinate the timing so that he doesn’t close his eyes and miss it.

It leaves him breathless, sprawled over Enji’s chest, a slightly woozy-looking feather already pushing a wad of tissues at the mess pooled on Enji’s stomach. There isn’t time to wash the sheets. Enji will throw another blanket on top of the bed and worry about the rest tomorrow.

Enji strokes his left hand down Hawks’s back, slowly—dragging all five fingertips down over the sharp angles of his shoulder-blades, tracing the track of his spine, circling the bases of the wings, grazing down the familiar ropes and ridges of the scars.

He doesn’t know what time it is, but he can’t imagine they have any left to lose. He wraps both hands around Hawks’s neat, sharp, endlessly appetizing waist and lifts him off, depositing him just far enough over on the bed for Enji to wedge both elbows underneath himself and start to leverage himself up.

Hawks stretches like a cat, which gives Enji an excellent view of the whole incomparable shape of him.

And of the handprint burned into Hawks’s right ass cheek from trying to haul him in deeper and deeper and harder and more.

Enji sits up swiftly, twisting Hawks around to get a better look, aided for once by the characteristic boneless post-coital sprawl.

It’s not severe—nothing like the moderate disaster of their first time—but it still makes his guts drop out of him, clench up, and turn cold.

“Shit,” he says, fingertips hovering over the stark red outline. “I’m sorry.”

Hawks stretches extravagantly, arching his back, grin sparking bright. “I’m not. Just as good as getting a ‘Property of Enji Todoroki’ tattoo, and much easier to keep out of the press.”

Enji strokes around the edges, gently, gently. “I need to be more careful.”

Hawks grabs his wrist, lifts his hand, and grazes his mouth over the knuckles. His eyes lock Enji’s.

“Not with me,” he says.

Enji looks at him.

Hawks blinks back.

Then Hawks licks the length of his index finger.

It takes all that remains of Enji’s whittled-down willpower not to yank his hand away.

“Naru is going to file for copyright infringement,” he says instead, managing to keep the distaste contained in a small shudder. “That’s one of his ultimate moves.”

Hawks’s laugh soothes the stirring agitation in his soul. “Send him to my lawyers.”

“You still don’t have any lawyers,” Enji says. “Which I will be working on when all of this is…”

It isn’t ever going to be over, is it?

It isn’t temporary.

Not anymore.

“Settled,” he says.

Hawks has always seen through him—from the very beginning.

But his predator eyes are dangerously soft, and his smile is far too kind, and he doesn’t ever pull away.

Enji kisses the burn mark, kisses his hipbone, kisses the crease of his thigh and then the back of his knee—which makes him writhe and laugh again, helplessly, because of the way the beard tickles at the sensitive skin.

“Like that, huh?” Hawks says, delightedly. He contorts himself out of Enji’s grip and then leans in, too quick to dodge, and nudges his nose against the bridge of Enji’s. Then he stretches both arms over his head again, and the wings out wide.

Enji wants to bite down on his bicep.

It’s definitely time to clean up and—

“Three minutes,” Hawks says, setting his arms on the bed behind him and twisting his shoulders. “Three and a half, tops. Then it’s your turn. Round two.”

Enji picks up the mass of sticky tissues recently abandoned by the feather when Hawks lost interest, and puts them to better use. “Round two is a shower before the kids get home.”

He said that without thinking—home.

It’s not their home. And it shouldn’t be. It’s safer for everyone if he doesn’t even think it.

“Boring,” Hawks says, but it doesn’t dull the grin.

Enji stands and holds both hands out to him.

Hawks doesn’t even hesitate before latching on—but then he doesn’t get up. He just sits there, gazing up at Enji, gently pulling back.

“We’re down to, like, ninety seconds on that recharge,” he says. “I bet we can wrap it up quick. No offense.”

Instead of dignifying that with an answer, Enji tugs harder on his hands.

“It’s to your benefit,” he says.

“Oh, yeah?” Hawks says, grin sharp but so delighted as he hauls back harder, and Enji’s heels almost leave the floor. “Please, explain to me how stopping the sex is more to my benefit than continuing the sex, which I am enjoying more than I have ever enjoyed anything in my entire life except all of our other sex.”

Enji’s heart leans towards him, but he draws the rest of himself away.

He plants his feet on the tatami.

He feints for the wings, lets Hawks twist away on instinct, and hooks an arm around the perfect little dip of his waist, turning into the shifting angle of Hawks’s torso—using Hawks’s own momentum to help throw him over Enji’s shoulder.

“Noooooooo,” Hawks says, but the flailing is harmless, and he’s laughing too hard to even try to sell it. “Enjiiiiiiii—”

“It’s to your benefit,” Enji says, hiking him up higher before starting to carry him steadily down the hall, “because if something goes wrong, and they come home early, and Fuyumi finds us covered in cum and lube, I’m going to kill us both.”

Hawks laughs so hard he wheezes. Enji knees the bathroom door open and deposits him in the shower, and his hands find Enji’s arms—first, for an appreciative exploratory stroke; then reaching for the latch on the prosthetic, every bit as lovingly. “Babe, I hate to break it to you, but I’ve been living with you for four years. I’m pretty sure she’s figured out by now that we’re fucking.”

“Suspecting something,” Enji says, as Hawks sets the metal arm gently on the countertop and then hooks both hands around his waist instead, “and confronting incontrovertible evidence of it are two entirely different things.” He peels his socks off, turns the water on, and pushes Hawks in under the stream, earning a low whine at the way it’s still cold.

Then he steps in and raises the heat of his skin until the droplets sizzle when they hit him, leaning in to press Hawks back against the tiles.

“Which you well know,” he says, kissing Hawks’s throat, with teeth behind it—hard enough to bruise, precisely low enough to lie behind the ornament on the high neck of his costume shirt, which will rub against the tender place every time Hawks swallows for several days. “Brat.”

Hawks’s breath stutters out of him, and his arms snake around Enji’s neck, pulling him closer—close enough that Hawks barely has to arch his back to roll his hips against Enji’s thigh.

At least Fuyumi won’t see anything she’d prefer not to if they end up staying in the shower for a very, very long time.

One good thing about the world is that it is, in principle as in practice, truly unlimited.

Enji will never run out of opportunities to make stupid mistakes.

That night, Hawks starfishes directly on top of him three seconds after climbing into bed. His arm blocks Enji’s view of the baby monitor, but Enji’s brain has attuned itself so closely to the sound of Naru shifting in his tiny blankets that it shouldn’t matter much.

Enji ruffles the soft, soft gold hair tickling at his throat. The weight of the day drags at his wherewithal, and the words escape their confines.

“Are you choosing to be nice to me?” he asks.

Hawks laughs in what Enji knows, far too well, is sheer delight.

“What the hell does that mean?” he asks. “I’m not nice to you. I steal your shampoo and eat all your food and tell you exactly when you’re being dumb of ass. And now I’m corrupting your bloodline to try to turn them into evil hawkmice minions as an exciting plot twist in my usual nefarious plan.”

Enji assesses that spread of evidence.

“Hold on,” Hawks says, pushing himself up on his elbows, which digs the points of them into Enji’s collarbone. “Where did this come from? Do I need to have a little late-night ‘Yeah, that is a knife; no, I’m not happy to see you’ chat with Takiya again?”

“No,” Enji says, wrapping his hand around the back of Hawks’s head and pulling him back down. “You need to go to sleep.”

“Spoilsport,” Hawks mumbles.

Enji presses his mouth to the perfect golden hair—which does, as it happens, still smell like shamelessly pilfered shampoo. “You’re exhausted. You can threaten innocent people with knives tomorrow.”

Hawks laughs softly, and it’s funny, and bewildering—how it hurts just as much, in a different way, to have your heart too full as to have it ripped open and left empty.

“You promise?” Hawks says.

Enji strokes his hand through Hawks’s hair again, slower this time. “Yes.”

Notes:

Hey btw
LOOK AT OUR MOUSEBABIES ;A;
Much more of Kae's wonderful art to come. ♥

Chapter 2 Notes:

This time:
- TODOROKI WOMEN, AMIRITE OR AMIRITE
- Natsuo continues to have a bad time
- Sickfic, baby edition
It's 23K altogether, with the POV change a bit less than halfway through, if you need to pace yourself! ♥

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

It couldn’t last.

Maybe it’s not even his fault, in a way. She knows he’s trying. But there’s only so much you can do. There’s only so much you can give. There’s only so much you can change.

Even from the end of the driveway, she can hear wailing coming from inside the house.

Her entire body goes cold. It’s worse than using her quirk—deeper, sharper, from the inside out. It wraps its fingers around her heart, and it has claws.

Everything seemed fine yesterday.

She makes herself walk faster—makes herself clutch the bags tighter, makes herself jog up to the door, makes herself fumble the house keys out of her pocket and cram them in the lock with her hands shaking, with her bones shaking, with her mind whiting out in the blizzard of it. Cold, cold, cold.

Maybe she can still stop this. She’s stronger than she was. He’s better than he was. Maybe she can stand up to him, maybe he’ll listen, maybe it’s not too late. Maybe—

She pries the door open.

The howling—

Sounds like—

Hawks?

She leans on the door handle.

Eiji starts giggling so hard he can barely breathe.

“C’mon!” he says. “Hawks, I’ll save you!”

“Nooooooo,” Hawks wails again. “It’s too late for me! I’m doomed!”

“Fuyumi?” Dad calls.

She unclenches her fingers.

She closes the door.

She clears her throat as much as she can with so much of her heart still stuck in it.

“Hey,” she manages.

She almost falls kicking off her shoes. She breathes deep.

She squares her shoulders, holds her head high, and goes to put the groceries away first.

There are two farm-themed coloring book pages posted up on the front of the fridge, pinned by plain black magnets that look like they came off of an office whiteboard—which they probably did. There are also two freehand crayon drawings, one of which is a vaguely distinguishable seascape with three scribbled off-white ovals and one peach-colored oval positioned on the beach. Dad’s new, shakier handwriting labeled them Naru, Eiji, Mommy, and Daddy, and in the bottom-left corner he added yesterday’s date.

The other drawing is a startlingly dense conglomeration of interlocking geometric shapes, repeating patterns, and abstract designs with sharp corners, all of which are neatly filled in with colors that clash terribly. Hawks signed it at the bottom—the same overstated flourish of a signature that goes for insane amounts on eBay, especially on the early collectible cards from before he cut his hair and got the scar.

Dad dated that one, too.

Fuyumi opens the refrigerator door.

The entire middle shelf is just bottles—rows of them, filled precisely to the topmost measuring line, evenly spaced and individually marked with the exact times they were placed there.

She just puts the groceries on the counter. They’ll need to unpack them soon anyway.

Besides, she really wants to know what the heck is going on around here.

The answer becomes apparent as soon as she moves far enough to see through the living room doorway:

Hawks, the Wing Hero, the war hero, the Billboard’s bane and the press’s poisoned darling, Japan’s undisputed number one, is bound up in the confines of one of their duvets and rolling around on the carpet.

Eiji is trying to extract him—laughing so hard from so deep in his belly all the while that he wheezes—and Hawks is deliberately twisting back and forth at exactly the right moment to thwart him every time.

Dad is sitting cross-legged on the floor, back leaned against the couch, reading from a sheaf of stapled papers. Naru is settled in between his knees, gnawing tenaciously at a plush cube with green polka dots.

As she steps in, Dad looks up at her over the thin silver rim of the glasses he hates. Amusement—that’s what that is, in his eyes. It has to be.

“Hawks said he was jealous that Naru gets to be bundled up in a blanket all the time,” Dad says, calmly. “I’m trying to be supportive.”

“I’m trapped in the burrito of dooooooom,” Hawks wails, noticeably less calmly. He’s still rocking back and forth in a way that would look haphazard if it wasn’t for how cleanly he always avoids landing on Eiji’s reaching hands. “Help meeeeeee—”

“Auntie, help!” Eiji calls, desperately trying to sound serious. “He’s stuck! What’re we gonna do if there’s a villain, Auntie?”

After the week she’s had, Fuyumi isn’t sure she’s up to grappling with that philosophical question or with an unusually controversial blanket burrito, but as Eiji assails her with the puppy eyes, Hawks shoots her a very subtle wink.

Eugh. It is so messed up to be a little bit attracted to her dad’s long-term live-in boyfriend.

Oh, well. Half the country is.

She makes a show of rolling up the sleeves of her sweater and striding over. “Okay, Eiji. We can do it. Let’s both grab on, and then we’ll count to three and pull together. How’s that?” He nods gamely, so she crouches down and seizes onto the edge of the duvet. “Ready?”

Eiji positions his tiny fingers near to hers, curling them in as far as they’ll go. “Ready!”

Hawks doesn’t let up with the overstated howling for help. A part of Fuyumi—something low and deep in the back of her mind, cut in too deep to wear away—recognizes how strange it is that her father isn’t furious about the noise.

“One,” she says. “Two. Three—c’mon, Eiji!”

Eiji hauls on the blanket with all of his strength, so she keeps most of her attention on him in case the heave tips him over, and she might need to catch him—

But of course—of course—this is Hawks they’re dealing with.

No one on the planet has a better understanding of balance and momentum.

It all happens so fast that she can’t differentiate many of the individual movements—Hawks launches himself up out of the blanket, unwinding it from around himself so quickly that it flutters halfway to the ceiling with him, bound to gravity only by their hands on the hem. The vertical force stabilizes Eiji easily and keeps him upright.

But naturally Hawks isn’t satisfied with just escaping the blanket: he has to twirl three times in the air, feathers scraping the ceiling, and then alight on the tips of his toes with his arms raised in cinematic triumph, perfectly spotlit by one of the ceiling lights.

He has eyes only for Eiji’s delight.

But something reminds Fuyumi to turn and glance at Dad.

He looked up from the papers in his hand for at least long enough to watch the conclusion of that bit of pageantry over the rim of his glasses.

He’s smiling.

It’s wry and indulgent in nearly equal parts—there’s a familiarity to the fondness, a depth and a calmness. The painstakingly obvious affection looks uncharacteristically comfortable on his face.

She couldn’t quite believe it, the first time she saw them like this. It seemed like an off-color joke, at first—like Hawks’s idea of a long-game prank, and he’d somehow blackmailed Dad to get him in on it.

But there was something in the way they moved around each other. There was something in the silence—a million unuttered words, a peerless trust, a perfect understanding. She wasn’t even sure they noticed. It was effortless.

The one thing she knew for sure about the life that Dad had led, out there, up there, was that he’d never had anything effortless before. He’d never gotten anything without a fight.

She’d gone back, sifting through the YouTube compilations and the news articles, looking for the moment that things had shifted, but it had been there from the start. They’d moved like that—like two parts of one mind—in that very first horrible fight.

And Dad had leaned on him—on Hawks. Right there, in front of the whole damn world, without so much as a protest or a moment’s hesitation. Dad had never leaned on anyone.

She’d kept digging. She’d watched what footage she could find from the war, even though it brought the nightmares back for a while.

She hadn’t really been surprised to see it getting stronger.

This is the way Dad always looks at Hawks when Hawks can’t see it—like he’s a dream so sweet it’s bound to dissipate.

There’s a way Hawks looks at him, too, sometimes—like he’s everything.

Right now, though, Hawks mostly just looks smug.

Eiji is jumping up and down, tripping over the words tumbling out of his mouth as he tries to describe how cool that was. Hawks scoops him up in both hands, flips him over, and recruits a couple of feathers to help hold him up with his arms out, face down towards the floor like he’s flying.

Fuyumi ducks down as Hawks zooms Eiji over her head, complete with an overstated airplane sound effect. As Hawks starts running him around the room, adding dips and dives and more engine noises, and Eiji giggles uncontrollably, Fuyumi scuttles out of the way and goes to sit next to Dad.

He’s warm. As always.

Naru blinks up at her and smiles, mouth gleaming with yet more spit, and claps his hands.

She claps, too, since that seems like the most appropriate response. At least someone in this house other than Hawks is getting applause for a change.

Dad sets the papers aside and wriggles his left-hand fingers in front of Naru, which earns some contemplative babbling and then several grasping misses before Naru successfully grabs on. His hand looks even tinier wrapped around Dad’s giant index finger. A silvered old scar slices across the middle knuckle. Fuyumi has no idea what it’s from.

As a kid, she’d tried to keep track, for a while—tried to log which major injuries came from which villains, which fights, which sleepless nights waiting for him to come home, only mostly sure she wanted him to.

She hadn’t even been able to keep up with the hospital stays, let alone the nicks and gashes. She can only remember the big ones, now, and the unusual ones—the bullet through his shoulder when she was sixteen. The explosion that put him in a seven-hour coma the day she was supposed to graduate from high school. The silver spear quirk that nicked his femoral artery two years later—the last one she’d left work for. The scar. The arm.

“Are you planning to make the call from your phone?” Dad asks, quietly. Somehow it’s still not hard to hear him, even with the interference of imaginary airplanes.

“Yeah,” she says. “I figure that’s… easiest.”

They both know what she really means—that seeing Dad’s name on the caller ID would make Natsuo’s blood pressure spike before they even started.

Dad looks at her, and then his eyes flick back to Hawks, who has deposited Eiji on top of his shoulders now, apparently so that he gets a turn to fling his arms out and be the plane.

“I’ll stay out of the way,” Dad says. “Do you think…”

Natsuo didn’t dislike Hawks, before—or not any more than he dislikes all pros on principle, except obviously Shouto.

But now—

After the way the incident played out, and now that Hawks is clearly an active participant in all of this, positioned firmly at their father’s back—

“Yeah,” Fuyumi says. “I think—it’ll—go better if he doesn’t see you guys.” It sounds awful like that. She feels herself wincing hard. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Dad says, voice still low. “You know him best. We’ll follow your lead.”

He pauses again. Hawks is lowering Eiji back back down onto his feet, complete with an explosion noise when his toes touch down on the carpet.

Dad works his jaw for a long moment before glancing at her again. “Did you go see him?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Thursday. Right after he got back from the hospital.”

Dad watches her. He’s always watching.

She used to think he was criticizing in his mind and only barely holding back—and maybe he was, before.

But then he started saying things, after he does it.

He started asking if her glasses made her head hurt, and she wanted to try contacts. He started asking if she wanted a new sweater now that this one had a snag. He started asking if she was segregating the mushrooms in her bowl because she didn’t want to eat them, or because she’d saved the best for last. He started asking if she had a favorite lotion for when her hands were chapped from writing on the chalkboard. He started asking if she needed more supportive shoes, better rain boots, a warmer coat.

Dad looks down at Naru. Even knowing, it still feels like a relief to have his attention fixing somewhere else.

“How is he doing?” Dad asks, quietly.

Natsu is…

Better. A little.

Better than he was.

She’d headed over to his place after school on Thursday to help him clean up, since there’ll be an assessment visit soon from some social worker in some office who sees him as a check-box—who probably has a dozen broken lives to rate on a numerical scale by five o’clock.

Just the fact that Natsu had actually been responding to her texts already seemed like progress, but by the time she’d gotten there, he’d already made a good start on the apartment. He’d come to the door to let her in. The windows were open. No grease-stained takeout trash on the floor, no dishes in the sink.

He still looked like a corpse—like a ghost. Like he was carrying himself around empty.

But he was dressed, and his eyes focused on hers this time. He hadn’t been able to do that back at the hospital. He’d been too far gone.

“Hey,” he’d said. “You want tea?”

She’d said “Sure, thanks,” more to give him something to do with his hands than anything else.

He was trying.

He was trying so hard.

He’d scrubbed the bathroom while she’d thrown all the kids’ sheets and blankets in the laundry. She’d vacuumed, and he’d picked up and put away the scattered toys.

Or he’d started to.

He’d sat down on the floor with a little plush monkey hanging from his hand. Then he’d drawn his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, buried his face, and cried.

She’d stopped the vacuum and settled down next to him. She’d put both arms around his shoulders and rocked him gently back and forth the same way she used to, after Touya died.

After they thought that Touya died.

It’s a lot harder these days. Natsu is a lot bigger. And the world is.

“Are they with Mom?” he’d choked out.

No point lying when he’d know, soon, anyway.

“She’s still trying to get the records cleared,” she’d said. “She stops by a lot. I do, too. And Shouto.”

Natsu had gone still. His skin had started to feel cold—frost on his hands, creeping up the back of his neck.

“Stop,” she’d said, as sharply as she dared. “Listen to me. He isn’t hurting them. You think Hawks would let him? You think I would?”

He’d hissed a breath in through his teeth. “You can’t always be there to make s—”

“He’s better,” she’d said. “And he’s not stupid. You know he’s not. He knows he ruined things, with us. There’s no way he’d make the same mistakes again.”

“He thinks Shouto’s perfect,” Natsu had said, voice so low and deadened that it sounded just like— “He doesn’t think they were mistakes. His whole fucking plan actually worked.”

Natsu was wrong.

She knew he was wrong.

But there was a part of her that couldn’t help wondering—

It didn’t matter.

It wouldn’t help.

“Natsu,” she’d said. “He’s got social workers crawling all over the house on the rare occasions one of us isn’t there. Even if he did want to be hard on them, he’s not stupid.”

Natsu had choked out half of a horrifying little laugh. “‘Hard on them’. Okay. Jesus fucking Christ, Sis. He got to you. He got to you good.”

She’d held on to him even though a part of her had wanted to recoil.

That had sounded a little bit like Touya—the dagger-pointed words, the boil of rage, the intonations. The poison.

She’d pushed her glasses up with the back of her wrist. She’d hugged him harder.

“You’re going to have to trust me,” she’d said. “You don’t have a choice.”

He’d hidden his face again, the shiver of a stifled sob racking his shoulders underneath her arm.

“They’re my kids,” he’d said. “They’re my fucking kids, Sis. You have to help me. You have to help me get them back.” He’d swallowed, hard. “Before he hurts them. You know he will.”

She’d run her hand up and down his back.

He’d gotten taller than her so fast, when they were young—taller than both of them. Touya had hated that. Touya had been so jealous that he’d seethed with it, but Natsuo had just kept following him around like a dutiful puppy no matter how many times he’d lashed out. They’d been almost inseparable—peas in a pod, chasing each other back and forth across the garden, yelling fake hero catchphrases at the tops of their lungs. Natsuo had been faster, but Touya had been so much more agile that he’d always won.

Natsu’s breath had hitched again. She’d taken one of her own.

“He’s not Endeavor anymore,” she’d said.

Natsu’s head had lifted just far enough for him to stare at her—wide, reddened, empty eyes.

Not entirely empty.

Burning.

“Because he took off the fucking costume?” he’d said, voice rising again. “Are you fucking kidding me? He wasn’t possessed. It was him. It was all him. He did those things. You can’t pretend he didn’t. Just look at Shouto. Any time you fucking like.”

“You can’t pretend you haven’t seen it,” she’d said, curling her fingers into his shirt as her heart started to go haywire, beating way too light and way too fast, flitting in the back of her throat like an injured bird with feeble wings. “I’m not saying ‘Forget what happened’.”

“What he did,” Natsu had said.

She’d clenched her teeth, and then her fist, holding onto him as much as holding him. “I’m not saying ‘Forgive him’, either. I’m not. I’m saying that he’s different enough that they’re not in any danger.” She’d made herself do it—dig it in and twist the knife. “Definitely not in more than they were here.”

His eyes went wide—went huge, then hollow, then haunted.

He’d barely gotten the words out, but barely was enough.

“I can’t believe you’re taking his side.”

It wasn’t his fault.

She had to believe that it wasn’t, had to believe that Natsu was just hurting so badly that he couldn’t help it. She had to believe that the agony of what he was going through—the merciless carnage of the grief still trapped inside him, tearing down everything it touched—made him feel so insubstantial that he didn’t care what he wounded when he slung out his fists, because hitting something proved that he was there.

“Natsu,” she’d said, through the tears climbing up her throat, wreathing her heart in little icy spires, “I’m on their side. They need you. They need all of us.”

He’d hidden his face in his arms again, breaths sharp and shallow.

“I can—Sunday night, I get to talk to them. Right?”

She’d leaned her head against his. “Yeah.”

He’d nudged her, gently. Almost an apology, in his book. “You’re gonna be there?”

She’d nudged back, gentler still. “Of course I am.”

Of course she is.

Every time something crumbles in this family, she’s here. Every time something shatters. Every time someone has to pick up the pieces and try to make them fit.

Of course she is.

Dad is watching her.

She shakes off the dragging thoughts, pushes her glasses up, and folds her arms.

“He’s okay,” she says, since it seems like the kindest version of the truth. “Considering. He cleaned up a little. He’s taking care of himself. He talked to me.”

Dad is quiet for a second, looking down at Naru’s tiny hand curled barely halfway around his index finger.

Then he looks up at her, searching her face.

“Do you think he’s up for this?” he asks.

It was the desperation that scared her the most.

She remembers Dad looking like that, after Touya died—like if he didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, didn’t rest, didn’t take up space, didn’t ask for anything, maybe the world would give him back the one thing he wanted the most.

She remembers when Dad had realized that it was hopeless.

And the anger had flooded up from underneath.

“Honestly,” she says, “no. I don’t. I don’t think he’s ready yet.” She shoves her glasses up on top of her head so she can rub her eyes, then settles them again. “But sometimes he surprises me. I hope this is one of those times.” She looks at Dad, with the low thrum of the guilt coursing through her guts, unrolling all at once. “He’s amazing. You know he’s amazing, right?”

His eyes on hers don’t waver. “I know.”

“Okay,” she says, feeling trapped in the inadequacy of the word, but she can’t think of any other way to say it. Natsu is amazing. He’s incredible. He has so much love in him, so much kindness, so much good.

He’s just in so much pain that it’s destroying him.

Maybe she doesn’t have to explain.

She makes herself hold her breath so that she can let it out slowly, counting the seconds, and then she pulls out her phone to check the time.

They still have half an hour left to go.

She looks over to Eiji, who is dodging around Hawks’s legs, ducking and weaving in between them like he’s playing tag with no one. Little feathers keep tickling at his shoulders, but they pause when she clears her throat and smiles.

“Hey, Eiji,” she says. “Are you almost ready to talk to Daddy?”

Eiji’s eyes widen, and he stops short, fisting one hand in Hawks’s jeans. He cranes his neck, looking in the direction of the door. “Where? Where’s Daddy?”

“We’re going to talk to him on the phone,” Fuyumi says, keeping her voice level as his face immediately falls. “With video, too. So you can see him, and he can see you.”

Eiji curls his fingers tighter into Hawks’s jeans. “He’s not coming.”

The way her heart aches for him— “Not just yet, sweetheart. But really soon.”

He leans his head against Hawks’s knee and nods resignedly. The adults are in control. What they tell him doesn’t make sense, but he has to abide by it anyway.

That makes her heart ache, too.

She wishes, every day, that she could have had a normal family—a normal life. That they could have just gone about their business, cared about each other, carried each other through an ordinary serving of thick and thin.

But she doesn’t have that.

She has this.

And by God, she’s going to fight for it, every time she has to.

Dad pulls a tissue out of his shirt pocket and gently wipes some of the ubiquitous drool off of Naru’s face. “Are you hungry, Eiji? We can have dinner right after.”

Eiji shakes his head. Hawks bends down to stroke his hair back gently.

“You sure?” Hawks asks. “I can eat your share if you’re sure. Super yummy. Just let Grampa know if you change your mind. Otherwise I’ll eat it all. Num-num-num.”

“S’too much,” Eiji mumbles. “Even for you.”

Hawks ruffles his hair. “Challenge accepted, kiddo.”

Dad sits very still for a long second, meeting Eiji’s eyes.

Then he shifts Naru over onto his right thigh, metal hand exceedingly delicate, and holds out his left arm.

Eiji runs for him, gathering enough speed to crash into his chest.

Dad wraps the arm around him tightly.

“What’s wrong?” Dad asks him, uncannily softly. “It’s okay if you don’t know.”

Eiji mumbles something Fuyumi can’t make out, further complicated by the garbled indistinction of toddler speech.

“You can show him your drawings,” Dad says. “Or your Shouto jacket. Even though he doesn’t like heroes, I think he’d like that. You can tell him about what you’ve been doing at school, and how high you can count, and the books we’ve been reading. He’ll be happy to hear about all of those things. He’ll just be happy to see you.”

Eiji mumbles something else and then slides down Dad’s side, curling up on the floor against his hip with both arms still stretched as far as they can reach around him—which isn’t very far.

Naru whines, and Dad’s shoulders abruptly shift into a tightness that telegraphs… panic. That’s what that has to be.

The metal of his hand gleams as he adjusts it, but he can’t move much, because Naru’s balance is so wobbly on his own, and he’s leaned back against Dad’s forearm—

Before Fuyumi can even extend a hand, Hawks is scooping Naru up off of Dad’s knee, bundling him close, and then spinning effortlessly on one heel.

“Are you hangry?” he asks, itching under Naru’s chin with his fingertip, which doesn’t quite quell the fussing. “Are you so perilously ravenous that you’re simply incoherent with inexpressible rage at the entire universe? Hardest of sames, my dude.”

“It is about time to feed him,” Dad says.

Hawks hugs Naru to his chest, gently patting his back, and sweeps over towards the kitchen. “Nobody understaaaaaaaands us, Naru. That’s right. Wehhhh.”

Dad meets Fuyumi’s quizzical expression with a look that clearly means Ignore him. He settles his left hand on Eiji’s back—which covers it completely—and gingerly picks up his papers again in the right.

Fuyumi doesn’t even have time to breathe out before Hawks returns with one of the bottles from the fridge.

And tosses it directly at Dad’s head. “Hook me up, babe.”

Dad catches it left-handed without even looking up, twisting his wrist around to rotate it upright. A tiny, tiny trail of steam curls up from the back of his hand, and then he tosses the bottle back and gently spreads his palm over Eiji’s shoulders again.

Feathers grab the bottle out of the air and convey it to Hawks’s free hand. “Much obliged. Are you much obliged?” That part was directed at Naru, accompanied by a grin that makes Hawks’s magazine covers look subdued. “You’re much cute, I’ll tell you that.” When Hawks offers the bottle to him, Naru clutches it in both tiny hands, drinking greedily, and Hawks sashays back and forth, rocking him, a little feather propping up the end of the bottle. “Whoa, check that velocity! I’m going to bequeath my catchphrase to you, my guy. You are the baby that moves too fast.”

Dad still doesn’t even look up from the papers. “Don’t shake him.”

“Excuse me,” Hawks says. “This is swaying. It is artistic. Do we need to increase your prescr—”

Naru chokes.

All the feathers flare, jutting outward like a wall of red knives—and then Naru coughs, whimpers, wails, coughs again, and vomits formula all over Hawks’s shirt.

There isn’t time to blink, let alone to wince.

Fuyumi gets one glimpse of Hawks’s face gone bizarrely pale, and then of his torso convulsing.

Then a cascade of feathers is shoving Naru and the bottle into her arms, and Hawks darts out of the room so fast he barely casts a shadow.

Dad is on his feet before she can blink again. Eiji stares in open-mouthed disbelief in the direction of the hallway, and Dad disappears around the doorframe into the hall.

Naru starts crying—weakly, but with some avid wriggling, and Fuyumi lifts him up against her shoulder and strokes his back. “Oh, I know. I know. It’s okay. It’s okay, sweetheart.”

She can just hear snatches from the bathroom—what sounds more like dry-heaving than anything else, and then a voice barely recognizable as her father’s.

“What happened? Are you—”

“Fuck me.”

“Hawks—”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

“No, it’s—I just had this—like, compulsion—”

“What?”

“I think it’s a—bird thing? You know how they… y’know. How they feed their young?”

There is a long pause.

“You could have said something,” Dad says.

Hawks gasps in a deep breath and uses it for a fractured laugh. “Babe, I didn’t—you think I’ve ever had a baby puke on me before?”

It’s silent again for a long second except for Naru’s fussing, and then—

“You scared the hell out of me,” Dad says, quietly.

“Aww, Enji—”

“Don’t you ‘Enji’ me.”

“Enjiiiiiii—”

“Idiot. Give me your shirt.”

“Bit forward of you, Mr. ‘I Don’t Want My Daughter to Know I Gag f—’”

“Hawks.”

Hawks hasn’t yet stopped laughing uproariously when Dad strides back through the living room with Hawks’s shirt balled-up in his hands, the tiniest curl of steam still uncoiling off of the top of his ear, his mouth set like he just bit into an unripe lemon.

But he doesn’t look—angry.

Not quite.

It’s not the same.

His huge shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath as he pauses next to Fuyumi, sinking down onto one knee to touch Eiji’s shoulder gently, and then to peer down at Naru. “Is he okay?”

“Just a little startled,” she says—which probably applies to all of them, come to think of it.

He nods, studiously watches Naru’s little face scrunching and unscrunching for another second, and then stands again and moves on through the kitchen to the far hall. She hears the door to the laundry room creak, but she can’t make out the inevitable fwump from here.

Then Dad heads back, strides right back through the living room, and detours to murmur something to Hawks that she can’t hear either, after which some drawers open and shut in one of the bedrooms.

The clean onesie Dad returns with looks so, so tiny in his hands.

Naru starts a high wail when Dad lifts him out of her hands and away from the bottle, but Dad’s expression doesn’t even change.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, bouncing Naru lightly before swiftly undoing the snaps of the onesie spattered with wet whitish goop. “I’ve got you. You’re going to feel better with some clean clothes, don’t you think?” Naru soothes so fast that it can’t be anything other than… him. Dad. The warmth of his hand, the sound of his voice. “There you go.”

She wants to be able to say she remembers that—this. This part of him. This version.

But she’s not sure. It’s all so old—so hazy, layers and layers of time wrapped around it, gauzy nostalgia and burial shrouds both blurring the details.

There are also a lot of things, she knows, that her head and her heart decided together to shove into a corner, cover in cobwebs, and forget.

The vague impression of familiarness stirring in the back of her mind might just be a fantasy she made up for herself. It might just be a dream. She didn’t know him. She didn’t have him. Not this Enji Todoroki. Not in any of the ways that count.

But she has him now.

That’s the compromise Natsu can’t bring himself to reach.

There’s no point throwing away tomorrow to spite yesterday. Yesterday is gone.

Hawks reemerges into the living room in a dark blue hoodie with the outline of Dad’s old flame mask in orange. It looks like it might glow in the dark.

He proceeds directly over to Naru, who is making peace with the new outfit now that he has the bottle back.

“Nice try, adorable creature,” Hawks says, wagging a finger in Naru’s face and then tapping his nose with it, to some babbling and several failed attempts to grab his hand. “I’m not swallowing any rocks for you today. Even if you ask nicely. Which you didn’t.”

Eiji blinks up at him. “Rocks? You wanna eat rocks?” He turns a pleading look on Dad. “Grampa, I don’t wanna eat rocks.”

“You don’t have to,” Dad says, eyeing Hawks in a heavily meaningful way. “Hawks is a little like Naru. He puts all kinds of inadvisable things in his mouth.”

Hawks makes eye contact.

Dad blinks slowly, face completely still.

Hawks busts up laughing.

Fuyumi looks down at Naru, and then up at the walls, and then around herself at the child-centric mess of what used to be a fastidiously orderly room.

Enji Todoroki really did just make an oral sex joke in front of a toddler.

But Eiji just starts telling Hawks about the cool rocks they have in the playground area at his preschool, and Naru just keeps chugging formula, so she slowly breathes out.

With precisely five minutes left before they’re supposed to call Natsuo, Dad shepherds all of them into place with an efficiency that makes it clear he’s been thinking it over for days. He pries one of the cushions off of the couch, positioning it in front of the blank wall in the corner, beyond the television—a background that could be found in any house on Earth. Fuyumi bought him a metal stand for holding recipe books a while ago, which apparently can also double as a phone rest in situations like this. He wipes the last few glimmering smudges of drool off of Naru’s face with the soft cuff of his sweater sleeve, carefully straightens Eiji’s Shouto jacket, and then steps back to assess the final picture.

He hesitates.

Fuyumi’s stomach clenches up. He’s doing so much better, but tigers can’t change all their stripes. Nothing’s ever good enough. Nothing—

He leans in so close and so quickly that she steels herself.

The fingers of his left hand whisper over her forehead, brushing her bangs to the side, sweeping them clear of her glasses.

He steps back again.

He hesitates again.

He takes out his phone and lifts it up. “Is it…”

Fuyumi hugs Eiji gently with the arm she has around him. “Smile, sweetheart. Your grampa’s getting a picture.”

A tiny red feather swoops in and tickles Naru’s faintly fuzzy ear, which makes him giggle right on cue.

Fuyumi hopes Dad crops the stand and the cushion out of the frame. She’ll remember the occasion anyway, but maybe Eiji won’t.

Eiji holds up a peace sign, which he must have picked up from Hawks already, right before Dad taps his thumb against the screen. Fuyumi catches a glimpse of Hawks grinning wryly before he darts over to lean on Dad’s arm instead, examining the screen and playing at the usual nosiness.

“Adorbs,” he says.

Dad makes a noise of profound disgust in the back of his throat, which of course only widens Hawks’s grin.

“We’ll be right over here,” Dad says, steering Hawks over to the far end of the couch—the part that still has its cushion—and shoving him down to sit. They’re close enough that Eiji can still see them, but just far enough that they shouldn’t be a distraction. Eiji probably won’t be inclined to look over unless they move.

So that Natsuo won’t know they’re there.

So he won’t get distracted by his own… what? Hangups? That’s a lousy word for it. Trauma, maybe. That one’s so overused that it feels like it’s been stretched to the point of meaninglessness.

Natsu’s battling enough demons right now without having to reckon with seeing Dad, too. That’s the bottom line.

Fuyumi just hopes—

That she’s wrong.

She hopes he can do it.

She hopes he can hold himself together.

She can only help him so much. He has to want it. He has to try.

Dad and Hawks are both watching, so attentive that it makes her skin crawl.

This is all they know how to do, isn’t it?

This is what they’re trained for.

They spend their whole lives waiting for worst-case scenarios.

Eiji starts trying to teach Naru to play a pattycake game with a corresponding rhyme, his efforts greatly complicated by Naru’s lack of both verbal comprehension and hand-eye coordination. Eiji doesn’t seem too bothered by having a suboptimal partner, though, and resorts to holding Naru’s wrist in one hand so that he can clap his other hand against Naru’s palm, slowing the slightly off-key singing to a crawl to match.

Fuyumi can barely remember when Natsu was that small. There are wisps of it—fuzzy images, faint snatches of feeling more than anything distinct. She vaguely remembers getting woken up by the nurse in the middle of the night when they rushed Mom to the hospital—remembers how much pain it looked like she was in. She remembers that Dad wasn’t there. She remembers Mom holding the blanket-wrapped bundle out to show her. She remembers thinking he was so pink, like a little pig, and his mouth was too wide like a frog’s, and his eyes hardly even seemed to work.

She remembers that Touya had tried to pinch him. He’d said he wanted to see if Natsuo was awake. She’d shoved him away.

Natsu has always needed her, whether he knew it or not. Maybe he’s never needed her more than now.

She reaches out, wakes up her phone, and taps over to dial his number with her heart climbing up her throat. She hits the button to start a video call while the line is ringing.

Connecting.

The screen switches from stark black to a blurry wash of colors, and then it sharpens into—

Natsuo.

Staring at his screen like a starved man pressed up against the window of a bakery. His eyes are hollow, and haunted, and so hungry.

Eiji gasps. “Daddy!”

Natuso’s eyes well. “H-hey, bud. Hey.”

“Hi, Daddy!” Eiji says, ecstatic still. He grabs Naru’s chubby little wrist and makes Naru wave. “Say hi!”

“Hi,” Fuyumi says, waving too. It seems like a good idea. “How—are you?”

Natsuo drags in a shaky breath and manages a shrug.

Then his eyes move immediately back to Eiji.

It’s not just affection. He’s searching. He’s looking, and he’s waiting.

His eyes track up over the wall behind them. Thank goodness Dad thought to—

Eiji’s mouth falls open into a startled little O. “You’re at home, Daddy.” Then it snaps shut and twists. “But—they said—the lady said we couldn’t go home. How come you can go home, but we can’t? I wanna go home, Daddy.”

Natsuo looks like he’s been struck.

“Sorry, hon,” Fuyumi says, as quickly as she can, patting his arm gently. “You can’t yet. Daddy is there to try to make sure it’s ready for you as soon as you can, okay?”

Natsu rallies.

He breathes deep, leans forward—

And then his eyes narrow.

“Eiji,” he says, voice clipped down to harshness by the urgency of it. “Show me your hands.”

Eiji blinks at him, then down at his open palms, which he started to raise instinctively. Hesitantly, he holds them out towards the screen.

“And the backs,” Natsuo says.

Eiji twists his wrists to turn his hands over, but his lip is wobbling. “Why? I didn’t do anything. Daddy—”

“Did he hurt you?” Natsuo asks, sharply.

Fuyumi can’t help it.

Her eyes flick over.

Dad has his left hand pressed over his mouth. He’s staring determinedly at the wall. Hawks has one hand wrapped around Dad’s knee and the other curled into a tight fist in his lap.

Eiji squirms. “Who hurt who?”

Natsu grits his teeth. “Just answer the question, bud. Did he hurt y—”

“They’re fine, Natsu,” Fuyumi says, hoping her eyes convey the firmness she can’t afford to let into her voice. “They’re fine. Okay? I promise. I swear. Just—don’t waste this. Please don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, scrubbing his hand up over his face and pushing it through his hair. “I’m sorry, bud. I’m just worried about you. I wish I could be there.”

“Me, too, Daddy,” Eiji says, reaching out towards the screen. Fuyumi gently steers his hand sideways, clear of the buttons, so that he doesn’t accidentally end the call. “I miss you.”

Natsu’s eyes fill instantly, and the tears choke his voice. “I miss you, too, bud. And Naru. So much.”

“Why can’t you come here, Daddy?” Eiji says.

Oh, God.

“It’s nice,” Eiji says, oblivious to the way Natsuo’s eyes are icing over, the way his face shifts—everything sinking deep into the old poison all at once. “It’s so big! And Grampa’s got a garden, and we planted i… irises together, me and Grampa, Naru didn’t ’cause he’s too small, but he was there—”

“Sis,” Natsu says, voice so sharp and cold she has to clench her jaw to keep herself from flinching. “Is he there?”

She looks him in the eyes as best she can across the distance of the cameras, the screens, the barren tract of grief sprawled out between them. Stranding him.

“Talk to your son,” she says. “He hasn’t seen you in two weeks.”

Eiji fidgets, nestling closer and pulling at her sleeve. “Don’t—don’t be mad, Auntie. It’s okay. Daddy—”

“Did he tell you to say that?” Natsuo asks, tightly. “Eiji, look at me. Did your—your grandfather. Did he tell you what to say?”

Naru claps his hands together, cooing, and reaches towards the phone. Fuyumi’s hand is shaking as she carefully draws him back towards her.

Eiji curls up against her other side, voice catching. “Why are you mad? I didn’t do anything. I—I just—Daddy, I wanna go—” His voice breaks, and the tears start spilling. “—h-h-home—”

Natsuo cringes, but she can see it in his eyes that he’s walled off. He’s already gone. “Soon, bud. I promise. Is he—what’s he doing to you? Is he even feeding you? Show me your arms, too, Eiji. Shouto used to—”

“This isn’t Shouto,” Fuyumi says, fighting through the clutch of a sob scraping its way up her throat. “Natsu, please just—focus. Just talk to him. This isn’t—”

“This is more important!” Natsuo snarls back, and Eiji whimpers, recoiling against her, burying his face in her sweater. “Hey! Eiji, look at me—I need to see your arms, okay? I need to know. I need—”

Eiji shakes his head violently, then raises it just enough to howl through the tears. “Go away!”

“Eiji—”

“You’re so mean!” Eiji cries at him. “Mommy was never mean! I don’t want you!”

Natsuo’s face shifts again.

To anguish, for a split-second.

And then to anger.

It feels like there’s an earthquake in her skeleton, the epicenter right between her ribs.

“I’m not mean,” Natsuo says, sounding so vicious that she shifts back on instinct. “This is—what’s wrong with you? Why is everyone acting so damn jumpy? Don’t I have a right to know if he’s abusing my fucking kids like he abused his o—”

She slaps at the screen, and her trembling thumb finds the button to end the call.

She tries to wrangle in a deep breath, which sticks halfway down, and moves to wrap her arm tighter around Eiji.

He’s stock-still one second.

And then he’s off like a shot, the weak sobs shattering open into a racking hysteria that makes him stumble as his tiny feet carry him across the floor, dodging back and forth around the scattered toys, to disappear into the hall. A door slams, and then there’s a creak—his bedframe, maybe—and then he takes up howling out the tears like the world is ending.

Dad is up and ghosting out of the room after him before she’s finally succeeded in drawing the breath.

Naru reaches for her phone again, then satisfies himself with curling both wet hands in her sweater and pulling at it.

Hawks stays very, very still on the couch, clenched fists resting on his knees, wings folded tight behind him, watching the doorway to the hall.

A door opens, quietly.

“Do you want to be alone?” Dad asks, so softly that it’s only the resonating timbre of his voice that makes it audible at all.

Eiji answers with something unintelligible, bubbling with more tears.

“That’s okay,” Dad says. “If you change your mind, we’re going to be right outside. It’s okay if you change your mind. No one is mad at you.”

Fuyumi only realizes how hard she’s shaking because Hawks’s hand settles suddenly on her shoulder, and it hurts.

It’s a good thing that she’s still too shocked to startle. She didn’t even see him move.

“Okay,” Dad says again, after a bit more garbled toddler speech and abject weeping. “That’s okay. What you feel is okay. We still love you.”

This can’t be actually happening, can it?

This can’t be her life.

This is a weird dream. This is a movie. It’s too absurd. It’s too pointed. It can’t be real.

“Your auntie and I are going to make dinner soon,” he says. “If you don’t want any yet, we’ll save some for you. Take your time.”

He closes the door quietly. Measured footsteps bring him back into the living room. He pauses when he sees Hawks seated next to her, hand resting on her shoulder, a curved feather flicking back and forth to preoccupy Naru.

Dad hesitates. Then he goes and sits down on the couch, folding his hands between his knees, clutching at the right one with the left.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She gets the next couple breaths down a little easier. “It’s not you.”

“That’s kind of you,” he says, faintly dryly, “but it is. I laid all the foundations and set the example.” He rubs his hands slowly over his knees, sighs, and stands again. “Is he—”

Her phone vibrates—once, and then again, and again, and again, hard enough that it almost tips off of the stand.

Sis call me back

Fuyumi please

I’m fine I’m sorry I fucked up I know I fucked up

I just want to see them sis come on please

She passes Naru carefully to Hawks, picks up her phone in both hands, swipes to clear away the notifications, and turns off the screen.

“I’ll talk to him,” she says. “Later. Let’s just—let him be for now.”

It shouldn’t be her job, should it?

But it has been, since the beginning.

She’s the only one they all love enough to listen to—at least sometimes. She’s the only one who’s held her ground, dead center in the midst of this wildly wheeling family, reaching out and clinging on so tight that none of them ever quite just spin away.

She’s kept it all together, more or less. What of it’s left.

This is a mess, and it hurts, and the prospect of what will happen to the kids still terrifies her, but it’s not worse than it was. It’s not worse than things were when Dad was just his job—an insatiable fireball always seething, always spitting flame, scalding anything that came too close. Holding onto him in spite of it burned so deep she sometimes thinks her bones are black with the ash.

But she did it.

And look at what she bought. What she earned. How far he’s come. How much he’s made.

She gets up, and Hawks does, too, his free hand lingering close to her elbow even though he’s the one who just hopped upright with a thirteen-pound squirming weight in his other arm. She straightens her sweater. It’s got baby spit on it. And she’s got a lot of fight left in her, for the source of all that drool.

These kids are going to be ten times happier than she ever was if it’s the last damn thing she does.

“Some of it’s you,” she says. “But some of it’s him, Dad. He’s still responsible for his choices. He’s responsible for his kids. Blaming all of that on you is the easy way out. I’m not going to let him.” She breathes. She straightens her shoulders. She smiles at him. “Let’s see if we can make something so good for dinner that it’ll coax Eiji out of his room. What do you say?”

The brokenhearted way he smiles back says an awful lot.

With substantial moral support and a lot of soft-voiced encouragement—as well as the shining example of Hawks tearing through portions at high speed—Eiji manages to eat enough that she’s not worried about him. Besides, she can tell Dad’s counting how many times the little chopsticks carry bites to his mouth. Dad is probably already planning tomorrow’s meals specifically to backstop today nutritionally.

She holds it together. She always does.

Until she gets to the door and puts her shoes on, bracing herself to leave, at which point Dad steps down into the genkan.

“Fuyumi,” he says.

The tone alone makes her throat tighten and her heart race. Something serious. Something big. Something—

He wraps his arms around her—the left first, huge and warm; the right so, so careful.

“Thank you,” he says, quietly. “For trying. And for all of it.” He hesitates, the way he always does. “I… know. I can see what you’ve done. I know that everything I have, I owe to your patience and your resilience. I realize that. A day doesn’t go by that I’m not grateful for it—for you. You’ve supported all of us—carried us, often—for a long, long time. You’re extremely special. We’re impossibly lucky to have you. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone so giving.” He sighs, softly. “I just wish we didn’t always take so much.”

Damn it.

She curls her hands into the back of his sweater. He lets her cry into the front of it for what feels like a long time.

When she’s exorcized enough of the bone-crushing weight of it to be down to the sniffling and shaking part, he actually strokes her hair. It should be weird, maybe. It just feels nice. It feels comforting. And a little—a lot—overdue, but God, at least he’s trying. At least he’s here. At least he’s helping. At least she has that much this time.

“Sorry,” she manages when she finally pulls away from the fireplace warmth. She pushes her glasses up on top of her head and wipes at her face with her sleeves. If the mascara stains her sweater, so be it. “I’m a mess.”

He hesitates again, and then he reaches out and tucks her hair back behind her ear where her glasses arm displaced it.

“You’re beautiful,” he says. He watches her—intense, so intense, but if you wait—if you just wait long enough—

No judgment. Just watching. Just trying to understand. Just wanting to know.

“Would you text me when you get home?” he says.

She smiles. She must look like crap, but they’ve had worse. “Sure, Dad.”

“Be careful,” he says. “Drive safe.”

She grabs his left hand to squeeze his fingers before she turns, and opens up the door, and steps out into the night.

★

A rustle, a whimper, and the start of a wail—turned tinny by the speaker on the monitor—haul Enji out of the grasping fingers of a dream.

It’s similar every time. That madman Ending is stabbing a spear made of road lines through Natsuo’s stomach, again and again and again—except that sometimes it’s Natsuo, and sometimes it’s Eiji, back and forth as Enji blinks, as he tries to move, as his body won’t answer, as the dead metal hanging from his right shoulder weighs him down. Natsuo screams at him, high and desperate, voice cracking—Show me your hands! Show me your hands! Show me—

By and large, Naru’s been sleeping better, but Enji is guiltily grateful for the pre-dawn interruption this time. He just hopes it won’t hurt Hawks too much.

Too much more, that is.

Too much worse.

Naru, in a feat of infant generosity, soothes almost as soon as Enji eases him up out of the crib, left hand under his neck, right under his hips. He’s drowsing again, without a single clamor to be fed, before Enji has even paced all the way to the door.

None of this is, obviously, too good to be true, but anything easy is worthy of suspicion.

Still—Enji is not too proud to ride the wave of the blessing for as long as it lasts. Not anymore.

He settles Naru and tiptoes back to his—their—bedroom. The instant he lies down again, Hawks wriggles over and curls up against his back, arm slung over his waist.

Enji strokes his fingertips along the back of Hawks’s wrist. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Hawks mutters. “How dare you nurture the helpless ankle-biter extending your genetic lineage. Unconscionable.”

Enji tugs very gently on his hand. “You know damn well I meant ruining your last half-hour.”

“That’s what I said,” Hawks says. He nuzzles his face in between Enji’s shoulder blades, sighing out a soft breath. “Whatever. Maybe I just won’t get up. Ever. Or at least until noon.” He nestles in closer. “Fuck ’em.”

Enji settles his arm so that it encircles Hawks’s dangling hand. “That’s an especially pithy soundbite from the number one hero.”

“If any of them had shared a bed with you, they’d understand,” Hawks says, but Enji can hear the sleepy grin—all sardonic delight. “Besides—it’s really for them. Gotta stock up on enough snuggle endorphins now to last me through the day, or I’ll be more of a disaster than usual. It’s a matter of life and death. Probably.”

“Another choice pullquote,” Enji says.

Hawks stretches up to kiss the back of his neck. Still tingles, after all this time. “Have you considered shutting up and enjoying the moment? Chilling for five whole seconds? Leaving well enough alone?”

“Have you met me?” Enji asks.

Hawks’s laugh is better than whatever the fuck ‘snuggle endorphins’ are supposed to be anyway.

Monday starts to slither past him. It all feels—not normal, not quite, but… managed. Manageable. If he can wrap it around a routine, he can guide its trajectory. If the indelible copies of Natsuo’s face weren’t proof enough, the comfort these two seem to take in regularity would make it indisputable that they have his blood in them.

Just a little, he hopes. Not too much.

Natsuo has too much. It’s too hot. Too strong.

Rei calls just after he drops Eiji off at preschool. Evidently Fuyumi brought her up to date, and Rei went to Natsuo’s apartment last night. She doesn’t say To keep Fuyumi away from him for a little while, just in case he’s holding her responsible. She doesn’t have to.

She says he’s doing better. She says he feels awful about all of it. She says he begged for pictures of the kids, begged her to advocate for him, begged her to believe him.

Enji bites his tongue, hard. He hasn’t let himself think about any of it too much.

Natsuo has every right to be afraid of what he might do.

But he hasn’t done it.

Natsuo is alienating Eiji over a specter that Enji has spent five long years fighting to purge from this place.

He’s losing his sons to Endeavor, just like Enji lost his.

History should be kinder, and more creative. The repetition simmers, and it aches.

The good news, Rei says, is that she now has it in writing from the courts that they’re going to strike the mark from her record, and the official change is just a matter of waiting for all the paperwork to go through. In the meantime, she has permission in her pocket to take the kids off of Enji’s hands here and there, to give him a break.

He wonders if Natsuo begged her for that, too.

He wonders if Natsuo begged her to steal them in the night.

He wonders what Natsuo has begged Shouto for.

He tells her the truth: that they’re doing about as well as can be expected, but he’s sure the kids would want to see her, and that another consistent source of support can only do them good.

She’s quiet for a moment.

“Are you?” she says. “Doing well. Or are you hanging on?”

“I think they’re starting to feel safe here,” he says.

“You are,” she says, “particularly clumsily avoiding the question.”

She irks him on purpose these days. She thinks it’s funny. The worst part is that, in a sickening sort of way, she might be right.

“The question isn’t important,” he says, carefully tipping a few more blocks closer to where Naru lies sprawled out on his stomach on the floor, banging specimens together and gumming at the choicest ones. “I need them to be… okay.”

That wasn’t—

He shouldn’t have framed it as—

“We all do,” he tacks on. “It’s—”

“It’s not a second chance, Enji,” she says, softly.

“That’s what I mean,” he says. “It’s not about me. It’s about them. It doesn’t matter how I feel. I’ll do whatever I have to.”

She’s quiet.

And then she says “I believe you.” She breathes so deeply that it shivers down the line. “And I’m with you. We all are. You need to let us help.”

He sets his jaw until the stupid impulse to argue burns away. “I—know. Yes.”

“Okay, then,” she says, a little too brightly. “I can come by and pick them up for a while tomorrow afternoon after Eiji’s nap. How’s that?”

“Fine,” he says. It’ll be good for them. They’ll probably welcome the reprieve from his silences and his bluntness. It’ll make them happy. “I’ll see you then.”

“Great,” she says. “Goodbye, En—”

The word leaps out of him as he tries to convince his fingers to hang up the phone. “Natsuo.”

She pauses for a moment longer than he thought she would. “What about him?”

“Past this,” Enji says. “Other than the situation with the kids. How—is he?”

She’s quiet again.

“About how you’d expect,” she says. “We didn’t… none of us ever had the tools or the space to learn how to grieve, did we? He never got to learn.”

It’s going to kill him.

If no one intervenes, it’s going to tear him to pieces no matter how many programs he participates in, no matter how many forms he submits to regain custody, no matter how hard he tries.

That’s a war fought every minute, every hour—every waking morning, every heartbeat—and he’s weaponless.

Enji can’t win it for him.

And Enji has to fight this battle first.

One thing at a time.

“He’s not ready to talk to you,” Rei says, slowly. “Not yet.”

Enji breathes deep. “I understand.”

It’s a nice enough day, and Naru seems to enjoy grabbing for the garden tools—which Enji’s significantly superior arm length can hold well out of reach, of course—and drooling on the dirt from where he’s strapped to Enji’s chest. Enji can only imagine it’s good for the plants.

When he dozes off, Enji takes him in and lays down in the crib, carrying the monitor back to the kitchen, pausing every time he finishes a bottle or a dish to check the screen and listen at the speaker. It’s a good rhythm. Steady. The half-dozen new coloring books he bought online for Eiji arrived this morning, as did the “adult coloring book” he’d thrown in for Hawks. He’ll get laughed at. It will get used.

It’s enough.

He’s doing enough.

He—

Drops a bowl into the sink basin when his phone rings, because his right hand just opens, fingers flung wide as if by an electric shock.

He bites back the curse, swallows it down, checks the monitor even though the sound won’t have traveled far enough to trouble Naru’s sleep, and fumbles his phone out one-handed instead of trying to peel the rubber glove off of the metal.

He stares at the name on the screen for a few moments of disbelief before he swipes his thumb across to answer.

“If this is another butt dial,” he says, “I’m blocking your number.”

“That was once,” Toshinori says.

Everything feels—too small.

The room, his clothes, the glove—he can’t even feel the glove, but it’s too small, too tight, the air is insufficient. He’s suffocating. He’s—

In the back of his mind, he can hear Takiya saying Don’t poison yourself. Step back. Accept the possibility of positives.

In the back of his mind, he can hear Hawks saying Fuck that guy. He’s just jealous of the fact that you’re still an insanely hot piece of ass instead of a weirdo emaciated string bean when you’re not cheating with your quirk.

“What do you want?” Enji says.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Toshinori says, and Enji can practically see the stretching curve of the skeleton grin. “I’m not allowed to call just to chat with an old, beloved colleague?”

He’s not that old. And ‘beloved’ isn’t even funny.

All Might didn’t accomplish what he did by accident. He always played nice—he always chose charity—but he didn’t pull punches. He didn’t build an agency and a tower, an unmatched career and an insurmountable reputation, by helping old ladies and kissing babies in the street.

Toshinori has principles. Enji respects that.

But he is also, necessarily, a strategist. Everyone who succeeds in this business is gunning for objectives and running a game. Toshinori cloaks his ambition with sentimentality and ostentatious self-sacrifice.

Which Enji does not respect.

“What do you want?” Enji says again.

Toshinori sighs. Enji’s blood boils.

Don’t poison yourself. Don’t do their work for them. The best revenge is staying above it.

“Yeesh,” Toshinori says. “I forgot how direct you are.”

“No, you didn’t,” Enji says.

That earns him a slightly weary laugh. “Case in point, huh? All right. Pleasantries aside—I’ve been talking to Tsukauchi.”

Enji gives him one whole second.

Toshinori just waits.

“About?” Enji says.

“Sorry!” Toshinori says, with a hint of the bombastic voice. He’s not. Enji reassures himself with the familiar thought that this is probably half of why Nighteye splintered off, whatever official story he circulated instead. “I’m used to… well.”

Sycophants. Yes-men. Hero worship, in the most literal sense. Imbeciles who soak up the melodrama and nod until they strain their necks.

“To be honest,” Toshinori says, at last, sounding thoughtful and slightly chagrined, “that’s a lot of why I’m calling. We’re thinking about… we’re working on… a new oversight entity. Not a Commission! Partly government-funded, partly private sector, with complete transparency, operationally visible to the public at all times. The system is dysfunctional right now—unbalanced. I know you’ve seen it. So many of the heroes we have left are getting stretched to breaking, but the ones in underpopulated areas are sitting on their hands.”

Enji closes his eyes, rubs his forehead with the back of his right forearm, and regrets it. “Get to the point.”

“That is the point,” Toshinori says. “Those of us who have seen what it takes to herd the cats—and what kinds of support the cats need, trustworthy enough that they don’t bite the hand trying to feed them—are uniquely qualified to create an infrastructure that would streamline all of the pain points.”

What a thrilling selection of buzzwords.

Enji knew before he made the idiot come out with the sales pitch.

Enji knew as soon as he saw the name and picked up the phone.

“And you want me to manage your administration,” he says.

“Well,” Toshinori says, with an audible wince, “if you want to put it that way—”

“I do,” Enji says. “That’s why I said it.”

“—then—yes.” Toshinori coughs. “Yes. That’s what we want.” He clears his throat loudly, the volume of his voice increasing rapidly. “So! Are you interested?”

Enji can’t grab a hold of it fast enough—can’t stop the sparks and flashes bursting in his mind.

It would be difficult—challenging. Working with Toshinori would drive him up the wall, but the rewards—

He could do it part-time.

He could do it in his sleep.

He could fit it in around the edges—work it into the existing pockets in their schedule, slide it snugly in the gaps.

He could hold himself back. He could learn to do only what’s asked of him, only what’s required. He could keep himself uncommitted. It could just be a job—a sequence of tasks. Not a calling. Not a compulsion. Not an undertaking, an enterprise.

He could—

Run.

Leave them.

Bury himself in it, shore himself up, pretend the distraction made him well-rounded, made him less restless instead of desperate.

He has never been able to divide himself. He has never been able to be more than one man at a time—one life. One purpose.

He has always had to choose.

He knows why he’s tempted.

It would make a difference.

It would be a way to do something of undoubtable significance.

It would give him one last chance to matter.

He knows, now.

He learned.

He had to have it beaten through him, burned in, carved to the bone and cut off, but he learned. He won’t forget.

And he won’t stop trying.

He steps back far enough to look through the doorway at the catastrophe of brightly-colored plastic strewn across his living room. He never spent much time there, before. Living room always sounded ironic. It was more like a hallway.

He breathes out.

“I’m tied up right now,” he says. “Call me again in a few weeks if you’re still looking.”

Toshinori sounds startled. “Endeavor—”

Endeavor is dead.

“I have to go,” Enji says.

“But—”

Perhaps it’s a poor reflection on him, all things considered, that hanging up on All Might is still so satisfying.

Naru is up and at it—taking it to mean dribbling saliva on everything in sight, in range, and in existence—with plenty of time for Enji to make an attempt at cleaning up the living room, and then the kitchen, before they’ll need to leave to pick up Eiji.

On the one hand, turning Naru outward in the carrier gives him much more in the way of visual stimuli, and is also likely better for honing his increasingly consistent control of his head and neck.

On the other hand, he keeps leaving new trails of saliva on everything Enji is trying to clean.

He asked Fuyumi about it the first week. She said she’d asked Hayami the same thing, early on, and been told that it runs in that side of the family. As infants, they all just… drooled a lot. Eiji hadn’t. Hayami had speculated that maybe it’s somehow genetically clustered with the phenotype of the fur.

A part of Enji wishes that he’d had the chance to know her.

Another part—a cold part, riven through with guilt like lines of magma underneath the ice—is glad he didn’t. That part is grateful—relieved—that he didn’t have to lose her, on top of all the rest of this.

He remembers thinking, at the wedding, that she must have been remarkable. He remembers thinking that only the bravest or the most unhinged would ever willingly marry into this family, seeing where it’s gone, knowing what it is. He remembers thinking that that had to be part of the reason that Natsuo had kept her away from him for all this time—out of a terror that Enji would scare her more than she loved him.

He remembers realizing that he had been watching her and Natsuo the whole night, and he’d never seen her stop smiling.

He wonders if Naru will look more like her, as the baby fat slowly falls away.

He wipes up the spit.

Pa-pa-pa—

Permeation? I’m still watching Lemillion. The level of finesse and specificity, especially given his age, is deeply remarkable. I wonder if he could use it almost like Traject—like a slingshot. Let things collide with him while he’s phasing out, and then phase back in and repel them. Or would they get stuck? Perhaps it’s better not to test that.

Pa-pa-pa—

Mm… Pliabody, I suppose? Very versatile. But to be perfectly honest with you, it gives me the creeps. Something about the… endlessness. And the bending. Joints don’t do that. It must function at a cellular level, don’t you think? There must be some sort of mutated protein somewhere—or several of them—to let so many different types of tissue stretch so far in perfect unison, at a single impetus. Interesting to think about. Still disturbing, though.

Pa-pa-pa—

Naru, I’m running out of quirks.

Hawks straggles home just in time for dinner, which Enji would not have taken as a coincidence even if his hair wasn’t so windswept from flying at high speed.

He started doing it when Enji started cooking—and didn’t stop on the occasions that Enji burned things, or overseasoned them, or made dubiously-edible mush of the vegetables. He didn’t even take a break after the memorable evening upon which Enji had had to pry a bowl out of his hand when he cut into visibly undercooked chicken and just kept going.

The fact that it made him keep coming back was what made Enji keep trying. In retrospect, Enji probably should have registered, then, that they’d already reached the middle stages of symbiosis, and before much longer it would be too late to peel themselves apart from one another if they wanted to.

He’s never wanted to.

He still can’t get his head around it.

The world is better when Hawks is nearby. It’s worse when he’s not.

It’s still better with him here even when—once dinner is finished with minimal casualties—Enji leaves him alone with the kids for five minutes to go consolidate all of the laundry into one basket, and returns to find the living room bustling with inexplicability.

Hawks is lying on his back on the floor, wings splayed out on either side, with one hand flattened under Eiji’s collarbones and the other under his stomach—slowly and laboriously pretending to bench-press him.

Eiji is giggling so hard he can barely breathe.

Enji has no choice: “What in the world—”

“We’re multitasking!” Hawks says. “Now I can skip the gym! Arghhhh—”

Feathers stabilize Eiji’s sides as Hawks lowers him, feigning enormous strain, dipping him low enough that Eiji can push off of the carpet to ‘help’ raise himself back up into the air.

Controlled chaos: a theme Enji has become far too familiar with, when it comes to Hawks.

But the Eiji that stood on the doorstep two weeks ago, staring up at Enji in mistrustful disbelief, looked like he would never laugh like this again.

Hawks has that effect on a lot of people.

“Be careful,” Enji says, veering around them to check on Naru. He’s under the plastic dome of playthings this evening, chewing avidly on one of the soft blocks. With the aid of the miserable glasses, Enji has recently seen just a trace of white on his bottom gums while brushing them very gently to get him acclimated to it and to the taste of baby toothpaste. He should ask Fuyumi if Hayami ever mentioned anything unique about the teeth in her family that he needs to know.

In the meantime, Enji starts the laundry. Again. Sisyphean, to say the least.

When he comes back, Hawks is up on his feet, and has graduated to using Eiji for bicep curls. Eiji continues to giggle uncontrollably as Hawks huffs and growls dramatically, feathers hovering close as he rolls Eiji up over his forearms and then lets him hang.

“Hawks,” Enji says. “My grandson is not exercise equipment.”

“Shows what you know,” Hawks says brightly. “He can be anything he wants if he believes in himself.”

“And works hard,” Enji says.

Hawks nods, sagely. “And works hard.”

Eiji pauses in giggling just long enough to volunteer “I wanna be a shark!”

“That’s going to take a bit more work,” Enji says. He corrals some of the blocks that Naru scattered a frankly impressive distance from where they started out, shepherding them back into a pile that Hawks will be less likely to step on if he has to barrel through here at some ungodly hour of the morning. “But don’t give up. This family laughs in the face of impossibility.”

“Uh,” Hawks says, grinning with more than a touch of the smirk.

“Fine,” Enji says. “This family scowls in the face of impossibility, and then develops complicated plans to make impossibility regret ever having reared its head.”

“That’s more like it,” Hawks says. He’s so invested in the banter that he’s forgotten to pretend that Eiji is heavy, and is just swinging him easily up and down. “Harder to fit on one of those shield things, though.”

“Sharks are cool!” Eiji says.

“You’re already cool,” Enji says. He has an ocean documentary somewhere. He can’t remember if it’s child-friendly or not. “Maybe we should start with learning about them instead.”

“What about an orca?” Eiji asks. “I could be Gang Orca! Raaaaagh—”

This time, Hawks has to stop lifting him to laugh. “I’m so gonna tell him that’s his new catchphrase now. Hang on, hang on—Eiji, I need you to do that in a video for me—”

He sets Eiji down and jumps back, whipping out his phone, smile just a touch too bright.

He’s radiating light and laughter and overstated extroversion in the way he does when he’s streaming energy out of himself to try to keep himself warm—to try to keep himself going. When he’s running the engine as hot as it will go, nonstop, in a desperate attempt to keep it from stalling.

He can’t do this forever.

Enji has only seen him like this once—just after the war, when the rebuilding was endless, the restoration was grueling, they were all still limping around trailing bandages, and the government couldn’t even tell which way was up, let alone offer them any scaffolding or systemic support.

Hawks had tried to carry more than his share. It had looked a lot like this.

Enji was there when he crashed.

Enji can’t let him do that to himself again.

“Okay,” Hawks says. “One more time. Just like before.”

With his arms newly freed, Eiji can raise them both and add curled fingers imitating clawed hands to his impression.

“I’m Gang Orca!” he shouts with even more enthusiasm, aiming it directly at the phone. “Raaaaagh!”

This time, he sticks his tongue out as far as it will go to mimic the tie, narrows his eyes, and staggers around waving the ‘claws’.

Hawks laughs so hard that the video must shake enough to be utterly unwatchable.

Enji thinks he’ll send it to Fuyumi anyway.

On Tuesday morning, Enji knocks quietly, opens the door, and directs his blurry-eyed stumble into Eiji’s room just before seven. He crosses the room, sits cautiously on the edge of the bed, and lays his hand on the little lump of Eiji’s shoulder underneath the blankets.

“Time to get up, Eiji,” he says, as softly as he can. “Let’s get breakfast.”

Eiji whimpers, his whole body curling up, and then starts swiping at his face with his arm.

Enji leans over him, squinting against the dim light and the dragging weight of the sacrificed sleep.

Eiji’s nose is dripping. His eyes are puffy, his cheeks are blotchy, and the rest of his face looks pink.

Enji does not own a thermometer.

Eiji smears more snot across his reddened cheeks, making a faint sort of sobbing noise this time, and coughs—wet and open-mouthed.

“On second thought,” Enji says, running his hand lightly up and down over the tiny, shaking shoulder, “you’re staying home from school today.”

“Dun wanna,” Eiji mumbles, drawing a deep, shivering breath. “I wanna go. Wanna see Isamu. He’s my friend.”

“I know,” Enji says. “But you’re sick. You don’t want to get him sick, do you?”

Eiji scrubs at his face with both forearms, heedless and clumsy, and Enji tries to catch one wrist gently to hold it clear. “I dun wanna be s-sick—”

“I’m sorry,” Enji says. Hawks is right: he should get it on a shirt and save them all some time. “Hold on—”

Hawks laughed at him for planting caches of extra-soft tissues and baby wipes in every corner of the house. If there were time to spare, Enji would ask him who’s laughing now.

No one, obviously, but it’s the principle of the thing.

He tries to chase the discontented squirming and the back-and-forth twisting of Eiji’s face, serenaded all the while by increasingly distressed noises and more racking coughs.

Holding children down doesn’t work. Not in the long term. Not worth it. He has to be patient. He has to stay calm.

“Grampa, no,” Eiji says, tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. His nose runs faster and more vigorously. Delightful. “No, I wanna—don’t—”

Clearing a small portion of the crusted-over miscellaneous fluids that have accumulated overnight will just have to be good enough. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

Eiji curls up around himself again, groping for enough of a grip on the comforter to pull it over his head.

Enji lays his hand on the shape of the shoulder again. “Go back to sleep. I’ll come check on you in just a minute. I’ll be right in the kitchen. Just call for me.”

Eiji’s whole little body quakes with another cough. “Grampa, it hurts.”

“Try to sleep,” Enji says. He squeezes Eiji’s shoulder as gently as he can. “I’ll come right back. I’m just going to make sure Naru’s okay.”

Eiji makes a faint miserable noise that sounds more or less permissive.

Enji moves fast.

Hawks’s eyes flick up from teasing Naru with some feathers the instant that Enji steps into the doorway. “Didn’t sound good.”

Enji crosses to the cabinet, picks a protein bar, crosses back to Hawks, grabs his coat collar to hold him in place, and crams it into his pocket for him to find later when he realizes that he’s forgotten to eat. “He’s sick.”

Hawks winces. The bright gold eyes follow Enji as he moves over to fulfill his drool-wiping duty.

“I can stick around,” Hawks says slowly. “Help out.”

“You have a meeting,” Enji says, evenly, “with the Minster of Defense.”

“Which I can reschedule at a moment’s notice,” Hawks says, calmly and the slightest touch smugly, “because I’m the number one goddamn motherfucking hero, as I know you didn’t forget.”

Enji eyes him, then glances at Naru—who fortunately still seems blissfully unaffected by the vulgar vagaries of Hawks’s vocabulary—before taking up eyeing him again.

“I can handle it,” he says. “Rei was going to come by to pick them up for a while this afternoon anyway, remember? I’ll ask her if she can be here earlier.”

Enji holds his ground as Hawks watches him for a long, long second, eyes crystal-cold and calculating.

Then he’s the fluffy-feathered songbird again, heaving an overstated sigh that ruffles up his wings, the tip of a feather tickling Naru’s ear.

“All right,” he says. He starts out of the kitchen. “Let me go give the poor little invalid a big, sloppy kiss goodbye so I can make sure to transmit toddler germs to the Minister of Defense.”

“Are you planning to give the minister a big, sloppy kiss, too?” Enji asks.

Hawks grins over his shoulder, wolfishly. “Jealous?”

Enji suspects that the kiss he gets when Hawks grabs his shirtfront in the genkan is better than what any of the ministers might receive.

Hawks’s eyes fix him again for one last moment.

“Don’t overdo it,” he says. “You hear me?”

Enji taps a fingertip underneath his chin. “You hear yourself?”

Hawks smiles.

“Be careful,” Enji says.

Hawks smiles wider, and the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Always,” he says.

Then the door swings, and the light sears, and the feathers rattle, and the skyline swallows him.

Enji buckles Naru to his torso again and cobbles together some okayu. He brings it over and sits gingerly down on the edge of Eiji’s bed.

“Can you try to have some breakfast?” he says. “It’ll help you feel better faster.”

Eiji gives him a bleary look of profound doubt but wedges his arm underneath himself all the same. “’Kay,” he says, tiny voice gone scratchy. He pauses to rub his throat. “Hurts, Grampa.”

“I’m sorry,” Enji says. Children’s voices are so—similar. The cadence, the register, the way they choose their words. He’s lucky. He’s lucky Eiji doesn’t look like Shouto did. He’s lucky he still knows what Shouto looks like now. “Try just a bite or two.”

With no small effort, Eiji pushes himself up and leans against Enji’s side. He feels slightly warmer than usual—enough that he registers as warm. It’s not to a degree that’s alarming yet, but it’s noteworthy.

Eiji’s tiny hands hardly look strong enough to support himself, let alone dishware. His eyes are red from the weak crying, and there’s still snot smeared all over his face. The resignation to his misery—how is a three-year-old supposed to intuit the concept of a virus, and its impermanence?—makes Enji’s heart hurt for him.

But he’s a Todoroki, of course. He drags himself further upright and clings to Enji’s shirt, unhappily chokes down a deep breath, coughs wetly, and reaches for the bowl.

Naru reaches for it, too, which might end very poorly.

It’s precisely as Enji had feared: this is substantially more difficult when Eiji requires closer supervision than usual, and both of them need his full attention at once.

“Hold on,” he says. He scoops Naru out of the little carrier and sets him down gently on his stomach on the floor. Naru bats his fists against the tatami and makes a faint noise of approbation. That should preoccupy him for a little while.

With help, curled up against Enji’s side, snuffling and coughing pitifully all the while, Eiji manages to eat about half of the porridge before the whimpering coalesces into forlorn weeping, and he starts shaking his head and rubbing at his throat. Enji sets the bowl on the nightstand and tucks Eiji gently back into bed. The crying barely even shakes his shoulders, and hardly produces any sound. It does, however, spill significantly more phlegm all over the sheets, in spite of Enji’s best efforts to mop it up gently before it spreads.

It’s no wonder people call them bundles of joy.

The unexpected diversion has pushed them slightly past the ordinarily scheduled time for Naru to be fed and set down for a nap, but Enji is no stranger to playing catchup. As soon as Naru’s eyelids slide shut, Enji pulls his phone out of his pocket, tucks the baby monitor into its place instead, and starts scrolling swiftly through his contacts. If this was a rescue or a hostage extraction or a skirmish with an unfamiliar opponent, he would have to do the same, wouldn’t he? He would leverage his resources. He would assess, and triage, and gather information, and determine the potential need for reinforcements.

He isn’t qualified to make executive decisions on this topic. It’s too damned important to search up on the internet, extrapolating a battle plan from the results. He needs an expert. He needs someone who knows.

It’s not about him.

He presses his thumb to the button and raises the phone to his ear.

Rei picks up on the second ring. “Enji? Is everything okay?”

“It’s Eiji,” he says.

The silence on the line is too heavy—too thick. Too meaningful.

Of course it is.

Fuck.

“It’s nothing major,” he says, sounding humiliatingly hasty as the panic sinks its teeth into his spine. Better than nothing. Better than leaving her to wonder any longer. Better than letting her suffer. “Just—he’s not feeling well.”

She breathes out.

“Right,” she says. “I’d forgotten that you don’t deign to get sick.” She pauses. There’s a bizarre amusement to her voice now. “Doesn’t Hawks?”

“Only very rarely,” Enji says. “Even pathogens can’t catch him.”

“Sounds about right,” she says. “How bad is it?”

“It doesn’t seem severe,” he says, cautiously. “But there is… a lot… of mucus.”

There’s another pause.

And then she laughs.

“Not the mucus,” she says. “Hold tight. I’ll go pick up some things and then head over. Put some sandbags around the foundations of the house. Should I bring a life preserver?”

“Very funny,” he says, fighting to keep his voice light.

“I thought so,” she says, blithely, so it must have worked. “Can you swim through it for about an hour?”

“Yes,” he says.

She pauses again, and this one is different.

“Poor thing,” she says, and his head whirls for a second before he realizes that she’s talking about Eiji. “All the stress must have done a number on his immune system. Cuddle him for me until I get there.”

Of course. Enji Todoroki is world-famous for his cuddliness. “Is there anything else I can do for him in the meantime?”

“Tea,” she says. “Put a little honey in it if you have some. Make sure he’s hydrated, on account of all the mucus.”

He deserves this.

He hesitates, but he can’t afford to make any mistakes. “Should I keep him away from Naru?”

“It’s probably too late now,” she says. It’s good of her not to ridicule him. “They’re contagious well before they start showing symptoms. Naru might catch it, and he might not.” He can hear the faint smile in her voice. “Fun, right?”

“You know how I love uncertainty,” he mutters. “Are you going to stay for lunch?”

Yet another pause.

“Are you inviting me?” she asks.

Damn. He did it out of order.

“Poorly,” he says, “but yes. I understand if you don’t—”

“I have been curious to try your cooking after everything Fuyumi’s said,” she says. Great. Phenomenal, in fact. “Hopefully you can mostly keep the flood of mucus out of it. I’ll see you soon?”

That settles it: he’s fucked. Rei will tell Fuyumi, Fuyumi will tell Hawks, and Enji will never hear the end of ‘mucus’ for as long as he lives.

He finds himself dreading the prospect less than he would have expected.

“Yes,” he says. “Be careful on the road.”

He bought a second baby monitor, identical to the one that Hawks and Ken’s family selected. The intention was to have a backup model of a critical piece of equipment readily available in case the original malfunctioned, but now it means that he can set up a second system in Eiji’s room.

He hadn’t even mentioned it to Hawks, who would have lovingly called him paranoid regardless of how many times he’s insisted that paranoia and preparedness are not the same.

Hawks can kiss his ass at the next convenient opportunity.

For now, Enji arranges the dual tiny video and audio feeds close enough to the sink to watch, but too far to splash, as he wades through washing the self-replenishing stack of baby bottles.

There’s still no word yet from Rei by the time he’s finally overcome that obstacle, and he’s starting to feel agitated. Eiji hasn’t done much more than stir a few times and offer up a few crackly sniffles, but Enji can’t shake the creep of dread—the conviction that he’s wasting time. That the waiting will make it worse, and there won’t be any going back.

Sometimes Hawks takes a break from calling him paranoid to call him an obsessive worrywart. Hawks has started saying Not everything that ends is the end of the world, which is insultingly reductive at its core and slightly condescending but—strangely—a little reassuring all the same.

Enji brings the pair of monitors over to the gym, turns them both up to maximum volume, sets a timer on his phone for twenty minutes, briefly warms up, and then beats the everloving shit out of the punching bag.

As is usually true, it helps with the helplessness. It quiets the clamor of questioning voices in the back of his mind, at least for a while.

Thirty spare seconds after the alarm, Rei texts On my way over from the pharmacy now, should be about 15 mins.

Leaving the monitors in the kitchen, Enji peeks directly in on Eiji and then Naru, just to be sure. Eiji is snoring quietly. Neither of them so much as fidgets at the whisper of him opening the door.

He ducks in and out of a very swift shower, which seems like an appropriate courtesy, pockets Naru’s monitor receiver again, and then puts some water on in case Rei wants tea. There used to be a shiracha she swore by, a long, long time ago. Hopefully one of the dozen blends that Fuyumi has given Enji in little tins and packets and sachets and boxes over the years will be close enough.

Rei arrives early.

She must have driven fast.

She knocks instead of ringing the bell. She’d politely declined his offer of a set of keys the first time she came by to take the kids for a while last week. She’d packed them up into the stroller and walked them around the neighborhood for the better part of an hour, just to give him and Hawks a chance to breathe out. Enji had tried to start cleaning up, but Hawks had dragged him bodily into the bedroom, flung him down onto the bed, splayed out on top of him, and promptly fallen asleep. A few minutes of stroking the feathers had slowed the churning of Enji’s mind enough for him to do the same.

He lets her in.

Her eyes flick over his damp hair. He evaporated the worst of it, but he hadn’t focused on it very well, and he doesn’t use any more heat than he has to around the children.

She has an enormous, overfull-to-bursting plastic bag hanging from one hand.

She lifts it for emphasis as she nudges her shoes off and tucks her feet into the waiting slippers instead. “Let’s see what we can do.”

She sets it down on the kitchen table, which is less clean than it’s been in… ever. There’s no point scrubbing it after every meal when Naru will baptize it with more saliva as soon as he can reach.

From the bag, Rei unloads a veritable arsenal that appears to include at least half of the contents of the pharmacy aisle for cold and flu remedies. If the brightly-colored characters plastered across all the boxes have antiviral properties, Eiji will bounce back before dinnertime.

Enji bites his tongue. Then his lip. Then the inside of his cheek. She knows what she’s doing.

She picks out one bottle first, wrestles a plastic safety seal off, calmly hands him the trash, and sweeps through the living room towards the hall.

Eiji’s eyes open a sliver as she steps into his room first, Enji following.

“Gramma?” he murmurs, hoarsely.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says, pausing to step over, stroke his hair, and then lay the back of her hand against his forehead. “I’m so sorry, hon.”

He tries to swallow and cringes. “S—s’okay, Gramma.”

She snatches a tissue from the box Enji set on the nightstand, folds it, and presses it up under his nose. “Blow, sweetheart.”

Eiji makes an effort, although the next faint sob—presumably at the pressure that directed breathing puts on his head—undermines him before he’s managed much.

Still: it’s a logical solution, in addition to being significantly more efficient than Enji’s strategy of just wiping endlessly at the perpetual drip.

Rei has barely tossed the soggy tissue into the trash can before she claps the prize bottle down on Eiji’s nightstand and starts pouring into the little plastic cup that was fixed over the cap.

Enji’s bluntness overwhelms his better judgment. It’s too important to be tactful about. “Is it safe to give him all of that?”

“They’re all child-specific formulations,” she says, raising the little cup up to the light, squinting at the lines on the side as she finishes pouring. “A heavy dose of acetaminophen just this once isn’t going to permanently damage his liver, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He clamps his mouth shut. She knows better than he does, and also knows him too well.

The hard glance in his direction as she lowers the cup confirms the latter all too easily.

“They’re tougher than they look at this age,” she says. “You know that.”

The bandages on Shouto’s forearms and fingers feel very far away.

No amount of time or distance will ever change the fact that he’s the one who put them there.

He remembers.

He remembers being so ferociously convinced, so clutched by the petrifying terror of failing again. He remembers believing with everything in him—all the acrid smoke and ravening flame, the unfillable hunger, the festering desperation—that this was it. This was the only option, the only possible future, the only remedy to a wasted life of insufficient effort. Shouto had to be stronger than him. It had to start then. It was their only chance. The tears would stop, eventually. He’d learn. He’d fight back, and be better for it. Someday he’d understand.

The fact that it seems so insane now—so staggeringly inhuman, the old pragmatic drive and towering ambition stretched to tatters to rationalize a callous cruelty he would have sneered at in others—still unsettles him.

He’d kept ahead of it, for a long time. He’d kept his head down. He’d refused to let himself see it as anything other than an evil so necessary that he never had a choice. As a long-term plan, a long game he couldn’t afford to lose. A strategy that would pay off, someday, somehow, so generously that they’d have to admit he’d been right all along. It would justify itself, in retrospect. It would make itself worth it. It would make itself right.

Eiji is bigger than Shouto was, at this age.

And he’s so small.

Enji can’t let it turn to quicksand. He can’t let it drag him backwards when so many people need him here.

This is different.

And it’s not about him.

Rei has turned back to Eiji. “This might taste really yucky,” she says, wrinkling her nose at him, “but it should help you start feeling a little better right away, okay?”

Eiji sniffles, watery eyes drifting between her and the cup. “’Kay.”

“Here,” Enji says, settling carefully on the bed beside him again to help him sit up. “Easy. There you go.”

Enji can smell the whiff of something like alcohol off of the cup even from here. He bites his tongue. She knows what she’s doing.

She helps Eiji sip it.

His face contorts, and his cheeks balloon for a second, and Enji’s shoulders tighten in anticipation of watching wine-colored cough syrup fountain all over his clothes, the bed, and the floor, but then Eiji chokes it down.

“Gross,” he gasps out.

Enji rubs his back, very gently. “It’ll help. Just be a little patient.”

Eiji scrubs at his eyes, smearing new tears from the coughing into the recent snot. Truly charming.

Enji needs to try to consider it from his perspective—from Eiji’s tiny glimpse of the universe. He’s small and miserable, and his body just started to betray him apropos of absolutely nothing. He doesn’t understand germ theory. He doesn’t know how the immune system works. He certainly doesn’t have the emotional capacity to spare for the societal perception that smudging phlegm all over his own face is disgusting.

Enji went and dug up one of his softest handkerchiefs after the shower. Nudging Eiji’s hands aside and wiping his face with that, instead of the umpteenth paper tissue, proves marginally more successful.

Just goes to show the value of a change in tools and tactics towards an intractable objective.

Eiji reluctantly gulps down some lukewarm water before dragging his blankets towards him so that he can curl up closer to Enji’s thigh. He breathes through his mouth with enough force and difficulty that Enji can feel it and hear it.

Then Enji’s pocket starts fussing.

He and Rei both stare at it for a second. The disruption rouses a discontented noise from Eiji that verges on a growl. Static spits from Enji’s pocket, and then Naru’s protests grow a little more pronounced.

“Hm,” Rei says. “Smart. How can your pockets even hold that?”

Hawks would say You know what they say about a man with big pockets, complete with a broad, cheesy wink, but Enji, of course, just sighs, rubs Eiji’s shoulder, and stands. Maybe he should put the monitors on carabiners and hang them from his belt loops instead.

“I’ll get it,” he says.

Eiji makes another noise—much more plaintive—as Enji moves for the door, but Rei has already filled his spot on the bed. Her soft shushing noises barely stir the thick air of the room.

Naru is whining because he’s had an extremely productive nap on top of likely being hungry again. Enji wipes drool, changes him, wipes drool again, and swaps the little pajamas out for brand-new clothes. More laundry, but it must feel nice. Enji scoops up his babbling charge and starts working on a mental inventory of the bottles in the fridge again as he steps out into the hall, gently twirling his metal index finger so that Naru can grab for it and try to draw it into what Hawks sometimes lovingly calls the Maw of Endless Spit.

Rei meets him in the hallway, already holding both arms out for Naru. “Eiji wants you.”

So much of Enji’s focus is devoted to shifting the tiny body cautiously into her care, mindful of his right arm, that his mouth reverts to autopilot: “Are you sure?”

Rei arches a pale eyebrow at him, half-smiling, and easily tucks Naru in against her chest. “Unless you’re hiding a secret second Grampa somewhere around here, yes.”

It’s just because he’s warm.

“Oh, wait,” she says. “First, I got you a present.”

He stares at her.

“It won’t take long,” she says. “Come on.”

Eiji isn’t audibly sobbing, so Enji bites his tongue again and trails her back to the kitchen, where she triumphantly extracts a box displaying what appears to be an infrared thermometer shaped somewhat like a barcode scanner at a retail store. It’s gray with purple accents and a bright green digital screen on the back, in case your primary concern is assessing the temperature of your family members, food, or pets in style, rather than with accuracy.

“Full disclosure,” Rei says, holding the device just out of Naru’s reach as she points it into the air and examines it. “It’s more of a present for Eiji, but he’s not going to appreciate it, and it’ll presumably stay here, so it’s all a bit of a wash.”

Enji’s overtaxed brain helpfully supplies Wash’s latest intolerable commercial jingle, with some of the lyrics topically altered. The best detergent you’ve ever bought! Cuts right through drool and milk and snot!

Apparently Hawks isn’t the only one who’s dangerously tired.

“I thought it would be more comfortable for him,” Rei is saying. “He’s miserable enough without us sticking pointy metal under his tongue. And this way we can keep checking even when he’s not awake.”

Logical enough—as long as it’s as efficacious as the standard kind. “All right.”

She unfolds the instructions, skims them far too fast to have apprehended much of anything of use, and then starts fiddling with the buttons, deftly bouncing Naru all the while. “Plus it’s kind of cool. Don’t you think?”

Enji bites his tongue. She’s helping. It doesn’t matter if cool is very, very far from their primary motivation when Eiji—

Rei points the squared-off end of the device directly at Enji’s forehead and pulls the trigger.

He looks at her.

She looks down at the readout.

“That was silly,” she says. “You’re obviously not a good person to use as a control.” She holds it out to him, subtly tipping her head back. “Here, you try.”

He takes the object. The plastic feels cheap and flimsy. It almost disappears into his hand. “But you run cold.”

“At least we’ll have a range,” she says. “C’mon. It’s fun.”

She just smiles at the look he gives her this time.

He shouldn’t take that for granted.

He shouldn’t ever take that for granted.

The fact that she’s here at all is a testament to how much stronger she is than he ever could have been.

He picks up the instructions. He’s supposed to ensure that it’s switched to the ‘body’ setting, hold it three to five centimeters from her forehead, depress the trigger for one full second before releasing, then wait to make sure the number stabilizes on the display.

He does.

She runs cold.

But if it will spare Eiji getting jabbed under the tongue or in the armpit or in any other orifices where he’d prefer not to be stabbed, it seems like a viable compromise.

There’s also the fact that Hawks will take great joy in abusing the privilege afforded by this device to have a feather check the temperature of Enji’s balls several times a day when he least expects it. There will be a chart. Something to… look… forward… to.

In the meantime, it occurs to Enji that they do have one other data source, albeit with some idiosyncrasies of his own:

He reaches over and points the thermometer-gun at Naru.

He consults the panel.

“I think it works,” he says.

“Look at us,” Rei says. “A couple of old fogeys successfully adapting to some new technology.” She smiles again at the way he shudders. “Here,” she says, nudging a jar of honey and a box of lemon-flavored tea towards him next. “Has he come around on sour yet? Honey in water is fine, too.”

If they poured the tea on chicken, Enji is confident Eiji would devour it in a heartbeat, but on its own, he’s not entirely sure. He takes two mugs down from the cabinet, fills them both with filtered water, and heats them one at a time with his left hand.

“Good idea,” Rei says. He glances at her, but she’s already tapping the tip of Naru’s pink nose with her finger. “Isn’t it? It’s a good idea.”

“Guh,” Naru says, authoritatively. He waves both fists for emphasis.

Enji accepts the box of tea from Rei and wrestles a bag out. The rubber on his fingertips doesn’t get much traction on plastic, and he doesn’t think he could manipulate metal fingernails even if he had any. He takes the bag out of the water a little early on purpose, in case a milder citrus flavor will be more appealing to Eiji’s three-year-old palate, and then mixes honey into both mugs. He carries one in each hand to keep the warm liquids well away from Naru, and Rei brings the ‘present’. Perhaps they make a strange procession, but Enji doesn’t imagine that Eiji will care.

He’s more confident still about the prospect when he shoulders through the door that Rei left slightly ajar, and Eiji welcomes them with a few wet coughs.

“We brought you something to drink, Eiji,” he says, as softly as he can. “It should feel good on your throat.”

Eiji’s eyelashes spark with some of the tears smudged around his eyes as he looks up blearily from the little nest of blankets tangled around him. Enji sets both mugs down on the nightstand next to the bottle of medicine—which they need to take back out with them this time. The odds of Eiji voluntarily consuming any more of it when it tasted so noxious are vanishingly low, but any risk is unacceptable.

For now, though, very gently helping Eiji lever himself upright far enough to drink is Enji’s first priority. Eiji’s arms barely support him as he tries to push himself up. He looks so miserable that there aren’t words: his eyes are leaking tears, his nose is dripping, his round cheeks are suffused with blotchy dark pink, and the resignation in his expression is indescribable.

Enji helps him hold the cup of tea. “Take a small sip first, in case it’s too hot.”

It shouldn’t be, but he can never be sure. He can never be sure of anything. That’s the price of being alive—every last damn second of it is a gamble.

Eiji wraps both hands around the mug, which is a positive sign, since it would surely be too warm for him to hold comfortably if the contents weren’t drinkable. He sips, loudly—a familiar slurping sound that still sets off annoyance signals in Enji’s head. Children do a lot of things with an unreasonable amount of noise, but he’s had to come to terms with the fact that it’s just the newness of every single action. It’s inexperience. It’s not that they’re trying doggedly to make themselves heard, make themselves noticed, make themselves unmissable.

Not this time, at least.

He can control this. He can contain this. He can be patient. He can be understanding. He can let it go. He can let it not matter, not register, not get to him. It’s just noise. Eiji is doing the best he can with his tiny, clumsy hands and his tiny, clumsy mouth and his whirring little mind. He’s trying very, very hard to learn how to be bigger. He’s trying to grow.

Enji needs to help him.

Eiji looks down at the mug, thoughtfulness blurred by the effects of the illness. At least he didn’t gag.

He takes another sip, and then another. Enji is careful to support the bottom of the mug with both gentleness and flexibility, adapting to the erratic way he moves it.

They can do this together. They can do all of this together.

They’re getting there.

Eiji finishes most of the tea before another heavy breath moves through him like a gale-force wind pulling a willow, and he pushes the cup at Enji, shifts away, and curls up in the bed again, weakly pulling at the blankets. Enji sets the mug down to help him.

Rei steps forward as he settles, Naru tucked against her and sucking pensively on his bent fingers. She leans down and points the thermometer at Eiji’s forehead. She presses the trigger button. Then she steps back.

Enji read that they shouldn’t bundle Eiji up too tight, if he has a fever—one light blanket, most of the advice said, but he looks so cold, and so uncomfortable, and he keeps tugging the soft duvet in and rubbing it at his cheek. Enji dabs tears and snot off of all of the evident parts of his face. His eyes slide shut.

“Enji,” Rei says, deadly quiet.

He shifts to keep his fingertips lingering on Eiji’s shoulder as he stands.

She turns the back of the thermometer towards him.

The readout doesn’t waver.

108.2 F / 42.3 C

“At his age,” she says, almost under her breath, “with a fever that high, he should be delirious. He should be going into shock.”

Eiji feels warm under Enji’s hand. Shivers rack his tiny frame at intervals.

“Grampa,” he whimpers out again. “My throat h-hurts.”

If his body didn’t have an extraordinary heat tolerance built in, they’d be at the hospital by now.

Enji knows what that means—what that has to mean.

He leans down and strokes Eiji’s sweaty hair back.

“I’ll get you something else to drink,” he says. The water will be lukewarm at best by now, and sneaking more calories into him sounds like a better plan in any case. “Lie still. Gramma will watch you.”

“No,” Eiji chokes out, voice catching again. “Don’t leave, Grampa—”

There was a rescue, two years back. A girl about Eiji’s age had had her leg broken when the daycare building collapsed—collateral damage from an assault on the government building down the block. Enji hadn’t wanted to drag her around through the rubble and risk walking into something worse, but she’d screamed bloody murder every time he’d tried to leave her sight to check on something else.

“All right,” he says. “Let’s go together.”

He gathers Eiji up into his left arm, tucking the blanket in around him, guiding the little head to rest on his shoulder. Eiji pops his thumb into his mouth and curls in close. Enji steadies him for a second with the right hand—carefully, carefully—and then turns towards the door.

Rei is smiling.

To call it bittersweet would be a crime of understatement.

She trails him into the kitchen, taking down a new cup when he moves for the fridge—juice warmed up, this time, he thinks. Hopefully the sugar will coat Eiji’s throat better than the tea. Eiji keeps whimpering quietly, stifling weak half-sobs and rubbing his face against Enji’s shoulder.

He still feels warm.

To Enji, most people usually don’t.

He pours into the cup that Rei sets down, then catches her eye as he passes Eiji carefully into his right arm, freeing his left hand to wrap around the cup.

“Try his temperature again,” he says.

She slips Naru into his high chair, taps her fingertip against his nose and puffs her cheeks out at him to make him smile, and then aims the thermometer at Eiji again.

They both lean in towards the display. He can feel the coolness radiating off of her skin.

107.7 F / 42.1 C

It’s possible the fever’s breaking.

It’s possible Eiji’s temperature is just fluctuating.

It’s possible the device read him as warmer when he was bundled up among the blankets.

If the lattermost was true, though, Enji’s body heat must be every bit as insulating as they are, so he doubts that was the confounding variable, but whatever the reason—

Whatever the specifics, Eiji’s tiny frame is easily handling an incredible severity of heat. There’s only one plausible reason it wouldn’t be killing him.

Rei breathes out first.

Then she pulls a shaky breath back in.

“Don’t tell Natsuo,” she says. “Just don’t.”

He doesn’t want to take his eyes of Eiji, but he can’t help glancing at her. “He needs—”

“Time,” she says, looking back, and her eyes aren’t ice—they’re steel. “We can’t know for sure. Not just from that. And if you tell him, and we’re wrong—”

She looks down at Eiji for a long, long moment, then tugs the blanket gently closer to his chin.

“You’ll break his heart for nothing,” she says.

Enji is sure.

But she’s right.

Natsuo will find out in due time—if they’re all uncharacteristically fortunate, at a time when he’s better prepared to cope with it than he is right now.

It’s not a lie. It’s a single piece of speculation strategically withheld.

…it’s still a lie.

Enji sits down at the table, holding Eiji close, helping him drink as much of the juice as he can muster the strength to raise his head for. Rei pulls one of Naru’s bottles from the fridge, babbling back at everything he says.

This is more than a truce—better than one.

This is a miracle of perfectly-aligned priorities outweighing what Enji did before.

Nothing is undone.

Nothing is forgotten.

But they can hold on to each other. They can drag this forward. They can do it better this time.

Eiji’s whole body tenses, and Enji knows to expect a sneeze.

What he doesn’t anticipate is Eiji politely attempting to direct it into his little sleeve, missing, and spraying tiny snot droplets all over the side of Enji’s neck.

Eiji manages a weak sound before his head droops back onto Enji’s shoulder. “’M sorry, Grampa.”

“It’s fine,” Enji says. It’s not. But Eiji didn’t do it on purpose. Children at this age hardly do anything deliberate. They’re just acting, reacting. They’re just trying to learn.

He should have—learned. Much sooner.

“I see what you mean,” Rei says, thoughtfully, shaking him out of the stiff cage of the regret.

He picks up the cup of juice in his left hand and warms it again. “About what?”

She smiles at him—wearily, but holding on.

“The mucus,” she says.

The mucus.

He should have known she’d come around.

Eiji’s temperature keeps dropping, and his awareness keeps improving.

The ricochets take it out of him, though.

They take it out of all of them.

Rei finds a tea in the vast stash that Fuyumi has imparted over the years—organized by caffeine content, first, and then alphabetically—that she likes the look of. Enji puts the water on. Rei deposits Naru under the auspices of the play gym and then settles delicately on the couch. Enji brings her tea.

She sits primly with both slender slippered feet pressed together on the floor, holding her cup in both hands, sipping demurely, for the better part of a minute.

Then she sighs, collapses back onto the couch, and kicks her heels up on the nearest ottoman.

She considers the television over the rim of the cup. “Good Lord,” she says. “Look at the size of that thing. How many channels do you get?”

Enji digs the remote out from where Eiji always somehow manages to lose it between the cushion and the couch arm when he gets absorbed in whatever’s on the screen.

He hands it to her.

She sips her tea and takes it.

“Thank you,” she says.

Maybe the real sign that you’re old isn’t your age, or the kids’ ages, or the grays or the glasses or the aches.

Maybe it’s getting deeply invested in gardening shows.

Enji assumes that doing it with your ex-wife is optional, but he’s starting to come to terms with the fact that he knows even less about what life is than he always thought.

Eiji dozes in Enji’s arm, his thumb tucked into his mouth. He doesn’t feel particularly warm anymore, although he is still oozing from the sinuses, albeit at a noticeably slower rate.

Enji had tucked away all the good things—the memories that weren’t awful. The times that weren’t bad. His stupid, stubborn brain has always been so all-or-nothing, so relentlessly dichotomous, that recognizing the horrors that he’d wrought had washed them back across the whole of his history. If all of it had led to abject failure, then clearly—

But it’s not that simple.

Nothing is.

They’d had fun, in the early days, watching the news and the specials and passing judgment on the other pros. Enji had ruthlessly criticized technique, but Rei’s style had been much more personal. I can’t believe they let him leave the agency wearing that thing. He looks like one of those poisonous frogs in the Amazon. If I was a villain, I’d turn tail and run. Who knows what a man dressed like that is capable of? I wouldn’t want to find out.

She’d once patted Enji’s arm and calmly suggested that the horn-like styling of All Might’s bangs was probably compensating for something.

She’d been on his side, in the beginning. They’d looked after each other as well as they’d known how.

And then he had slowly, gradually, indefatigably alienated her.

And then he had ground her down to nearly nothing.

Someone new rose from the ashes. But he can see flashes, now, of the girl she was before, under the mantle of grace and hard-earned dignity that she wears about her now. He crushed her, but he didn’t kill the spark.

“Unbelievable,” she mutters, chewing on her thumbnail, eyes on the screen. “This I-D-I-O-T is going to drown those. When do I get a TV show? I’d plant circles around this rube.”

He clears his throat behind his left hand. “I’d watch it. Your show.”

She smiles. “Thank you.”

Naru burbles from the floor in a way that sounds moderately affirmative. “Sounds like he would, too.”

“That’s a pretty impressive demographic spread,” she says. “I’m off to a good start.”

Enji’s phone vibrates on the couch arm.

Hawks.

Hi sexy hi hihi how’s he doing?

Enji feels something loosen slightly in his shoulders just hearing Hawks’s voice in his head.

It’s humiliating.

He wouldn’t trade it back for anything.

Much better, he sends. We think his fever broke. It’s a little hard to tell. I’ll fill you in later.

Ah. Shit.

One of the many things that can be said about Hawks is that he never misses an opportunity.

I’d love for you to FILL ME IN LATER if you know what I mean but also that’s great!!!! Poor little sprog. Give him kissies from me. And from the Minister of Defense.

He will know exactly what expression Enji is making. I’ll pass that along. I take it the meeting went well?

Hawks sends him disproportionately amused emojis. You know me, babe, I’ve never met a high-ranking government official I couldn’t bewilder the shit out of. Did Rei come by to tag-team the nose-wiping?

He has such a way with words.

What type and quality of way is up for some debate.

Yes, Enji writes. She’s still here. Eiji’s napping. We’re watching TV.

There’s a pause.

Then Hawks writes back I do not believe you.

Enji can’t quite bring himself to write back Tough shit with a three-year-old breathing softly against the side of his thigh.

Then he has a better idea.

“Will you do me a favor?” he asks, tapping over to the camera.

He doesn’t blame Rei for eyeing him. “What?”

“I need to prove something to Hawks,” he says.

He reverses the camera, raises his phone high, frames them on the couch with Eiji curled up between them, and holds his right hand up in a peace sign like both Hawks and Shouto are so inexplicably fond of.

Rei raises one of her own, starting to laugh just as he hits the shutter button.

“Wait,” she says. “Don’t send that yet. I have an idea.”

Shortly, Enji sends Hawks that photo, accompanied by a close-up of Rei positioning Naru’s hand to hold his first two tiny fingers up, too.

He’s about to get up to go pour Eiji some more juice when his phone starts buzzing.

ENJI

FUCK

ENJI

I WAS LAUGHING SO HARD I ALMOST RAN INTO A WALL IN FRONT OF A BUNCH OF CIVILIANS

I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY, YOU CRAZY KIDS

Enji shows it to Rei.

She smiles, arches an eyebrow, and settles down again, crossing her ankles on the ottoman.

“Tell him not to text while flying,” she says. “And call him an I-D-I-O-T.”

Hard to argue with that.

By the time Hawks gets home, Eiji has graduated to dozing sitting up, leaned against Enji’s chest and dripping snot much slower now. Dinner is long since cleared except the substantial container that Enji saved for Hawks in the fridge, with microwave instructions taped to the top in case he’d been working past bedtime—Rei added IDIOT and a little heart to those, too.

Hawks hasn’t seen them yet, though, because he moved directly into the living room as soon as he’d kicked off his boots.

“Hey, beautiful,” he says to Rei, which would be more alarming if he didn’t follow swiftly with a “Hello, love of my life” to Enji. He doesn’t wait for either of them to react before crouching down to get to Eiji’s hazy eye level. “Hey, there, champ,” he says. “You still going toe-to-toe with that nasty ol’ bug? My money’s on you, kid.”

Eiji looks mortified for a long second, then starts patting at his head and throat. “It’s bugs? I got bugs?”

Hawks grins.

He still looks so tired that it makes Enji’s chest hurt. That’s deeper than bone-deep. It’s lower than the bottom of the barrel. That’s scraping up what’s left and stretching it.

Something’s got to give.

“Sometimes people call viruses ‘bugs’,” Enji says, smoothing Eiji’s pajama shirt down his back. “I’d assume because they’re very small and creep around and cause trouble.”

“I like bugs,” Eiji murmurs, leaning his head down again. “Only not this bug.”

Hawks smiles.

The fact that he doesn’t have an absurd response already tipping off of his tongue speaks volumes.

So does the raw scrape on his cheek and the bloody rent in his left sleeve.

He sees the angle of Enji’s gaze and smiles wider, shrugging. “It’s all good.”

“Not yet, it’s not,” Rei says, standing and brushing out her skirt. “Come on. Let’s get some food in you. Real food. I’ve seen that C-R-A-P you keep in the cupboards.”

“Mayday,” Hawks says, trailing her. “Enji, we’ve been caught. Our halcyon bachelor days are over. This is the end of midnight pizza and cheap beer and bingeing Yakuza 2 until three in the morning.”

“Very sad,” Enji says.

Eiji shifts against him. “Wha’s Yakuza?”

Enji smooths his hair down. “I’ll… tell you later.”

Ten to fifteen years from now definitely qualifies as ‘later’. It is therefore not a lie.

Apparently unsatisfied with feeding Enji’s fecklessly health-unconscious boyfriend for him, Rei also stays to help get the boys to bed, including coaxing Eiji into a dose of some equally ‘grossgrossgross’ nighttime medicine. The bathroom cabinet is going to look like an entire child-centered pharmacy.

Enji walks her out to her car. The softness of the darkness makes it feel like the least-wrong time he’s likely to get.

“Natsuo is supposed to come see them in a few weeks,” he says.

She twirls her keyring around her finger, lips pressed into a line. “I know.”

Enji moves the words around. Maybe this is how Naru feels choosing blocks—rearranging them until he finds one that seems suitable to put into his mouth.

“We could do it at your place instead,” he says.

She looks at him.

“That’s a kind thought,” she says.

He resists the urge to fold his arms. “But?”

“But,” she says, evenly, “you’re a part of their lives now. He needs to find a way to cope with it, sooner or later. He needs to make his peace with the fact that you’re not…”

He doesn’t let himself wince at the hundred-thousand ways that that sentence could end.

“…the same,” she says, half-smiling. “And you’re not a threat to them. You’re… good with them, actually. Very good.”

He eyes her.

She reaches forward and pats his arm, one pale eyebrow rising. “I’m serious. Lighten up, Enji. And look around you. I know it doesn’t come easy. But you’re strong-arming your way through it like you always do, and it’s working. You’re giving them the stability and consistency and care that they need right now, so well that they’re doing far better than I think any of us would have dared to hope for.” The smile softens a little. “And they can tell that you love them. They know.”

It’s strange and unnerving to call it by its name.

He doesn’t think of himself as being capable of that—of any of this.

But you prove by doing.

And God, has he tried.

Maybe it is simple, this time. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that he’s fought every step of the way to give them everything he should have found within himself the first time.

The understanding he should have given to Touya. The gentleness he should have given to Shouto. The nurturing he should have given to Fuyumi. The affection he should have given to Natsuo.

Instead they had to build and seek and unbury those things themselves.

Rei smiles at him, faintly. “Just… don’t get too hung up. Okay? Don’t let your head get you turned around. Your heart’s better than you think it is. Keep following it. Trust yourself. Just this once.”

She’ll know that the dubious look isn’t personal. They used to talk a lot, at the beginning. She did her best to help.

She hasn’t given up.

He takes a breath. He curls his hands, one at a time, watching the light from the gate lamp gleam on the contours of the right.

“I’ll try,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “Let me know how Eiji’s doing tomorrow. I can come back by if you need help.”

The phrase alone still makes his skin crawl, but it’s worth it. They’re worth it. He can’t fuck it up this time.

“I will,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, it’s a huge sacrifice,” she says. “Getting to spend time with my cute grandkids and see some of my favorite flowers in sparkling HD.” Apparently he’s also going to buy her a new television once all of this calms down. In the meantime, she waves, beeps the locks, and climbs into the car. “Get some rest.”

“You, too,” he says, gently shutting the door behind her. “Be careful.”

Three tiny feathers—extraordinarily soft, downy ones, hardly larger than the pad of his thumb, and similar in shape—swarm him when he steps back through the door. They pat and press at his face in a way that’s probably meant to be reassuring, so he lets them.

They settle down and nestle in against his neck as he reorganizes the bottles in the fridge and the small amount of leftovers from dinner. He washes the dishes, and today’s bottles. He measures formula out into a pot, mixes enough for any overnight hunger pangs as well as most of tomorrow, splits it out evenly, and marks the labels. He wipes down the kitchen table, which was… overdue.

He breathes out.

He steps back out into the living room. Hawks is collapsed facedown on the couch with a baby-sized blanket draped over just his ass.

The wings are a third the size they were this morning. The scrape on his cheek has started scabbing over, but there’s visible grit in it. He left his dusty gloves in the genkan and washed his hands twice before he touched the kids, but Enji put his glasses on for marking the bottles. He can see the traces of blood crusted under Hawks’s nails now.

Hawks cracks a gold eye open and smiles at him, wearily.

“Have I mentioned Rei is hot?” he says. “If you and she are ever, like, working something out, or you just feel adventurous, and you want to try a threeso—”

“Up,” Enji says.

“Yeah,” Hawks says. “It would be.”

Enji goes over and holds both hands out to him. “Shower.”

“Ah,” Hawks says. “One-Word Enji. I should’ve figured. You’ve had a whole-ass day, too, huh?”

The distractions haven’t worked in a long time. Enji doesn’t miss the way Hawks tries to bite back a grimace as he shifts to take Enji’s hands.

“Is it gonna be a sexy shower, at least?” Hawks asks. “I live in hope.”

And in light, and in love, and in so many things he shares without thinking, without qualification, without asking for anything in return.

“No,” Enji says.

Hawks makes a deliberately indiscernible whining noise in the back of his throat, letting Enji finagle him upright. Feathers flick the blanket into a little heap on the couch behind him. He took his coat off, which makes it easier to see the stained gauze wrapped around the gash on his arm. Enji’s about to find out whether it got stitches or not.

But not before Hawks flings his arms around Enji’s waist and buries his face in Enji’s chest, holding on so tight that it makes Enji’s next breath more challenging.

“Just a second,” Hawks says, faintly. “Just—just gimme—”

Enji breathes more carefully and wraps both arms around him, as firmly as he dares. He rests his cheek on top of Hawks’s head. His hair smells like smoke and sky.

“No rush,” Enji says, quietly.

“Funny,” Hawks mutters.

“Let me rephrase that,” Enji says, still quietly. “If you move before you feel better, I will kick your ass.”

Hawks laughs weakly. “I love you. I love you so fucking much. And these little weirdos. And your hot ex-wife. And Fuyumi. And Shouto. And this house. And what we’ve got.”

Hawks spent the first twenty-two years of his life meticulously ensuring that he had nothing and no one to lose. He was only accountable to the Commission, and only responsible for himself—bureaucratic attachments, but no emotional ones. No consequences. No fear.

Enji fucked that up for him, too.

Every time you dance with death, you think about the people that you’d leave behind.

Hawks has spent the past two and a half weeks watching what happens. What it does, what it means, how it bleeds.

If he could afford to take a break, he would—he knows he’s not as sharp when he’s this tired. Enji caught him answering emails on his phone last night at two when Naru started fussing.

But they’re the same, in the worst ways. Nothing Enji can say will talk him out of trying to shove his way through it—trying to have his cake and eat it too and suck the frosting off his fingers and lick his plate. He clawed his way to the top. He won’t let it go. He can’t let anything go—can’t drop a single one of the hundred balls he’s trying desperately to juggle, winking all the while.

Enji shifts, ducks, and hooks the right arm underneath Hawks’s knees to scoop him up.

Hawks doesn’t even pretend to fight it.

“Ah,” he says instead, resting his head against Enji’s chest. “I told you, right? About that one dream like this? Where you were wearing a yukata, and the room started to catch fire, so you used it to put out the flames, and—”

“Keep your voice down,” Enji says, carrying him into the hallway.

“Point is,” Hawks says, blessedly in a whisper, “this is a sexy shower. You really know how to make a guy feel special.”

“It’s not,” Enji says. He sits Hawks down on the edge of the bathroom counter by the sink. Hawks is much harder to fit there than Naru. Enji turns the water on. “It’s a sexy birdbath.”

When he glances over again, Hawks is gazing at him with the tiny smile that makes his guts constrict every time. He doesn’t deserve that. He’s never deserved that. He never will.

“You gonna join me?” Hawks asks.

“No,” Enji says.

Hawks’s face falls into overstated dismay. “But—”

Enji flicks a splash of water at him. “I need both hands to wash your hair.”

Hawks blinks, first through the spray and then more thoughtfully.

“I can work with that,” he says.

Generously, Hawks lets Enji fret in the darkness of the bedroom for what must be a full quarter of an hour before reaching over and patting his cheek.

Hawks is always extremely docile for a little while after he’s had his scalp scrubbed and his feathers stroked. Enji tried to be especially thorough. It seems to have worked, if the boneless sprawl he took up on the bed is any indication.

“You are doing the world’s worst job of sleeping,” Hawks says, fingertips soft and insistent where they graze against Enji’s cheekbone. “Failing grade.”

“Shut up,” Enji mutters.

Hawks pats harder. “The kid’s gonna be fine.”

Enji writhes away. “You don’t know that. If Naru catches it, or it comes back—or if it develops into pneumonia—”

“If you start Googling worst-case scenarios for a kid getting a cold,” Hawks says, a feather taking up the patting instead, “I am going to smash your brand-new laptop into smithereens.”

Enji bats the feather away. “You’re going to have to fight me for it. His physiology—”

“Enji,” Hawks says, with more than a hint of a sigh. “I used to eat stuff I found in the woods.”

Enji frowns towards the vague winged shape carved out in the dark. “What? Why?”

The silence makes his chest feel so, so empty.

He always forgets.

It’s a luxury.

“The point,” Hawks says, slightly delicately, “is that he’s going to be fine. A couple good trial runs of his immune system will serve him well later on. All we can do is keep an eye on him—and you’re obnoxiously observant. If it gets worse, you’ll know, and we can take him to the hospital so they can beat the shit out of it with the fancy drugs.”

Enji lets the images unreel in his mind for a few seconds, which is a mistake. “I really don’t want to have to add hospital trauma to all of this.”

“Kids are springy,” Hawks says.

Enji raises his eyebrow. It’s dark in here, but Hawks will know.

“Elastic,” Hawks says. “Uh… rebound… y. Some word on that general theme. You know what I mean. He had two doting grandparents fawning over him all day, and he’s got some variation on your immune system, which literally incinerates invaders. By little kid standards, he’s invincible right now.”

The feather settled on Enji’s pillow next to him. It grazes his temple as he rubs at his eyes with the back of his wrist. “I hope you’re right.”

“That’s the ticket,” Hawks says. “Just stay optimistic.” He pauses. “Really, though. He’ll sense it if you’re freaking out.”

“I’m not ‘freaking out’,” Enji mutters. “I’m—”

“Rationally concerned,” Hawks says, and the rustle of the sheets confirms that he raised both hands for air quotes. “Which is fine. Just… slow your roll.”

“Right back at you,” Enji says.

Hawks laughs softly, but Enji’s serious.

That’s the other half of this—the cycling of thoughts that Hawks would call brooding, complete with a broad wink to drive home the pun.

The other half of it is Hawks himself.

But if he’s pressed, he’ll deny his own distress, downplay his exhaustion, comment brightly about not enough blood in his caffeine system and blithely try to carry on. Hawks hides in the light.

The gash on his arm should have gotten stitches. Enji did the best he could with butterfly bandages and tried to wrap it up well enough to get him through tomorrow. He was holding the wings close, holding his head low, keeping his arms wrapped around his knees—folding himself up. Conserving energy. Making himself a smaller target on instinct, even while Enji’s hands stroked over him as softly as possible, as gently, as warmly.

There has to be something else.

There has to be more that Enji can do.

This isn’t enough.

Hawks is expending himself. He’s emptying himself out as he gives himself away.

It’s useless to say this came at the wrong time. There’s no such thing as a right time, and life has a talent for twisting the knife.

This is what they got. This is what Enji has to work with.

He’ll think of something. He has to think of something. He’s still damn good at thinking, even as a sequestered shadow of himself.

Hawks needs him. This is the brink of burnout.

One last chance to save someone.

One last try.

Enji reaches across the bed, slides his left arm under Hawks’s waist, and drags him over. Hawks laughs again, quietly, pretending to writhe to fight it while actually shifting his weight in just the right way to make it easier to move him.

Enji settles on his side and draws Hawks in against his chest, arm wrapped around him again. His body heat tends to make Hawks fall asleep faster, and Hawks claims that the quality of the sleep is better, too. Enji’s not entirely sure if he should believe that, but he’ll take what he can get at this point.

“Mm,” Hawks says, a little bit slower and less distinctly. That’s progress. “Cozy.”

Enji has nothing left to lose, here. Nothing to risk. Hawks won’t hurt him. Hawks has never once hurt him on purpose.

God knows he’s earned it. God knows he’s been stubborn and difficult and reticent and cold. God knows Hawks would have been within his rights.

Enji strokes his fingers through the feathers again, gently, and then rubs his fingertips around the tight muscles in Hawks’s shoulders that surround the bases of them, one at a time. When Hawks has made several incoherent noises of approbation on each side, he reaches up and starts running his hand through Hawks’s damp hair, tracking his fingernails along the scalp again, massaging it gently everywhere he goes.

“Gee fuckin’ whiz, babe,” Hawks mumbles. “What did I do to deserve the royal treatment, here?”

Enji tells him the truth: “Exist.”

Hawks laughs softly. “You. Guess I should keep doing that, then.”

“Please,” Enji says, meaning that too.

It doesn’t take long for Hawks to start dozing. Enji knows the cadence of his heartbeat and his breath when he sleeps. Enji knows the quick, skipping rate that signals waking, and the flitter of agitation, and the rhythm of nightmares.

He knows the pace of good dreams, too. Less often. But there are more of them, now, than there used to be.

It’s a strange gift—the whole of a human being. The secrets, and the silences, and the slow revelation of so many open wounds. The chances stacked on chances to salve them or to cut them deeper or to let them lie.

He should have learned that a long time ago, too.

But Hawks is remarkably patient, for someone who moves so fast.

Enji can’t fix this. He can’t change the job. He can’t change the fact that Hawks will do it, devote himself, destroy himself, no matter how bad it gets. That’s the nature of it. That’s who they’ve both always been. That’s why Hawks has always seen him clearly. That’s the person that he fell in love with in the first place.

He doesn’t want Hawks to change.

He wants Hawks to survive.

He wants Hawks to have more nights like this. More gentleness. He’s paid his dues a thousand times over, with interest. And then some.

Enji wants Hawks to be happy.

To be safe.

To be loved.

It’s going to be a long war.

He intends to win.

It feels like Enji just closed his eyes after the last excursion to Naru’s room when Hawks’s phone beeps.

It’s not even that he recognizes the tone so much as feels it—in his bones, in his blood, in the instantaneous wash of adrenaline.

The bedclothes barely shift. The air rushes, Hawks’s side of the mattress decompressing at the removal of his weight. There’s one long rustle. And then Hawks is leaning across from the far side of the bed to reach Enji, already dressed, wings tilted back towards the window.

“Gotta go,” Hawks whispers, mouth finding Enji’s, fumbling and urgent in the dark. “I love you. Be back soon.”

Enji tries to reach after him one-handed, but he’s halfway to the window—halfway gone—before it even registers that the warmth of his mouth has retreated.

“Be careful,” Enji says.

“My middle name,” Hawks says, and then the window rattles, open and shut.

Even squinting out at the sky, Enji can’t see so much as a trace of him.

Enji lies back down. He settles on his side and looks at the unblinking LED on the baby monitor, staring back at him like a glowing red eye.

Notes:

MORE BEAUTIFUL ART FROM KAE ;A;

And as if that wasn't enough, she also did this design so that I could make my own merch dreams come true. ;___; ♥

Chapter 3 Notes:

Thank you all for bearing with me while I fought Discord tooth and nail to host the images in the ending note for last chapter… and lost. ;__; But they're back now! Hopefully for good. :')
Anyway, I OC'd myself into a corner with Hawks's sidekicks – I gave them lore and personalities in a fic last year that I haven't finished yet (hopefully soon!!!), and then fell in love with them so much that they have just… infiltrated every fic since. So here are my beloveds, Yuki (bird mask) and Ryo (suit situation), again. X'D
Other features of this chapter:
- Shouto can't stop landing loud boys who adore him, it's not his fault
- the E-rated sex scene \o/
- 22K altogether, all Hawks POV!

Chapter Text

Basic physics has been the bane of Keigo’s existence for pretty much his entire life.

His primary grievance today is that when you hit something, it necessarily hits back. This applies to walls, windowpanes, and—just for instance, as a hypothetical example—the huge steel arms of cranes that a guy just swung around directly into the path of your trajectory with his hyped-up magnetic quirk right as you were about to nab him.

The quirk also tore Keigo’s earrings out. Which also hurt like a bitch.

Just another glamorous day in the life of the fabulous, feted number one.

As he limps up to the front doors of the agency—he would much prefer to dip directly back into his office from the air like a boss, but the lead police officer is new, and she keeps haranguing him with obvious questions, and it’s frowned upon in this wretched society to fly away from people in the middle of a sentence, and he has to care about stuff like that now in the interests of setting a less-shitty example—he does a double-take that’s going to look real stupid if anybody caught it on camera.

Just this once, that’s the least of his concerns.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asks.

Enji blinks at him, more stony than innocent but a bit of both. “We were in the neighborhood.”

Bullshit. It’s an hour and a half past pickup time, Eiji’s preschool is on the other side of town, and Keigo knows for a fact that Enji still has the police scanner hooked up in his car.

Fittingly enough, Keigo shouldn’t encourage this kind of bad behavior.

He is really, really fucking tired, and having the one person in the world that he’s allowed to be weak with—the only person who fully understands—turn up right when when he needs to keep himself together is more dangerous than he can describe.

But it’s too late.

Enji is smoothly shifting Naru to his right arm, reaching in, and catching Keigo’s jaw with the fingers of his left hand, holding him tight enough that he can’t squirm away as Enji starts examining the exciting new damage to his earlobes.

“Did they rip through?” Keigo asks, feeling like a ghost—like most of him is fading out to static except the part that’s pinned to the world by the warmth of Enji’s hand. “Couldn’t tell.”

“No,” Enji says. “Not all the way. I thought it was coming from your ear canal.”

Keigo can feel the police officer’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his neck.

Every part of him except the back of his neck has judiciously determined that it doesn’t give a fuck.

“Hi, Hawks!” Eiji says, gaping up at him, fist clenched tight in the fabric of Enji’s pants leg as usual, since he’ll need to grow another foot before he can hope to reach Enji’s hand unaided. “Are you okay?”

Just under a week after the fever incident, their resident spitfire sproglet is back and better than ever. Keigo, in a feat of near-infinite generosity, has barely rubbed it in at all.

Enji releases him, gently—so that Keigo can crouch down to give Eiji a high-five and then scoop him up, concrete dust notwithstanding. Eiji frowns initially at the streaks of half-dried blood running down Keigo’s neck but quickly gets distracted playing with the fur on his coat. “Always!” Keigo says. “How was school?”

Time to get this show on the road. Keigo shoves the lobby doors open with a feather and tips his head at the officer to usher her in. Enji holds the door for her even though the feathers have obviously got it. Naru contributes a heartfelt “Buuuuuuuuuh” and tries to slime the handle as they pass.

“Good,” Eiji is saying, in that hilarious measured, patient voice particular to preoccupied toddlers. “We were learning about animals. But Grampa already taught me all the animals. Grampa already taught me everything.”

“Certainly not everything,” Enji says.

Keigo bounces the little body in his arms as they reach the elevator bank, and Enji repositions Naru carefully in his left arm, pressing the call button with one of the metal fingers. Naru attempts to chew on his sexy bicep. Keigo’s jealous.

The officer is staring openly now, in something like shock, looking kind of like her ovaries just exploded—which, you know, fair. Keigo’s brain still regularly goes offline when he watches the world’s premiere beefcake being so sweet and tender with the cutest babies in all of Japan, and he’s had almost a month to get used to it.

“You’re pretty lucky,” Keigo says to Eiji. “Your grampa’s real smart.”

Enji rolls his beautiful eyes. The elevator dings as the car arrives.

Eiji stretches to look over Keigo’s shoulder at the shiny lobby as they pile into the magic metal box. “Is this where you work?”

“Sure is!” Keigo says. “You like it?”

Eiji nods very seriously. “It’s big and real cool.”

Keigo opens his mouth. Keigo almost says You should’ve seen your grampa’s place in the good old days.

He shuts his mouth again.

He looks at Enji, who is intently watching the screen above the button panel that tallies the floors in order to avoid looking at the cop—who is clearly one scrap of gap moe bullshit away from drooling on him fit to compete with the master.

Truthfully, Keigo has no damn clue why Enji has decided to dedicate the afternoon to following him around at work—at naptime, no less. Is nothing sacred anymore?

His initial guess was that Enji wanted to verify that Keigo’s okay, or was planning to expedite the trip to the hospital by cramming Keigo in between the car seats instead of calling an ambulance, but Enji has now certified firsthand that Keigo has scraped through. Maybe it’s just a field trip?

Maybe Enji didn’t mean for this to happen—for it to drag on past the initial check-up check-in.

Maybe Enji misses everything so much that he doesn’t want to leave.

He had to quit while he was ahead—he had to. The migraines and the back pain alone were grinding him down to raw nerves, none of which played well with the ones connected to his arm.

It was like Shouto said—endangering people.

Endangering himself.

He couldn’t do it to his own standards anymore, but he kept pushing with everything he had. He kept convincing himself it was a stage, a phase, a setback—that the world hadn’t won. Hadn’t finally bled him just a drop too dry to make it work.

He would have died trying.

That’s the only thing that matters—the only thing that ever will.

Enji is alive.

He’s alive.

The reason that he’s here doesn’t really make a difference, anyway. Keigo just likes looking at him, feeling his heat, hearing his heartbeat. The kids are going to distract the shit out of the whole office, which will make it all the easier to slip the paperwork into Ryo’s pile while no one is looking and go pour another cup of coffee to wash down a couple more caffeine pills from the desk drawer stash. Keigo’s only officially on until six. Might even get home in time for dinner and the latest installment of the bedtime story, if he wraps up quick.

He’ll drop the cop with the crew. Yuki’s great with cops because he’s disarmingly earnest, which always tricks them into thinking that he’s also stupid. He’ll get everything they need out of her and then send her on her merry way back to the beat inside of five minutes, tops.

Ryo is watching Keigo closely as the whole cavalcade comes through the door. “Is the crane okay?”

“Guess,” Keigo says. “Eiji, this is my mean sidekick.”

“Nice to meet you, Eiji,” Ryo says calmly as Eiji hesitates. “My boss is a compulsive liar, as you probably know.”

Yuki is staring over Keigo’s shoulder. “Endeavor?”

Eiji goes very still, and then he twists in Keigo’s arm, turning to look in the direction of Yuki’s gaze.

“Hi,” Enji says, in the flat, low Don’t Test Me voice that used to make shoplifters pee themselves on a daily basis.

Eiji starts looking back and forth, but Enji pulls Keigo away from the bewildered cop, past the tables and the couch, and over into his little personal office off to the side, where he nudges the door shut with his shoulder.

Which is awkward.

Because Keigo’s office is an admission-free disorganization shitshow of such epic proportions that Enji is probably going to break out in hives.

Keigo moves some paperwork off of the seat of his desk chair, plops Eiji down in its place, and spins him around to get him smiling again.

Enji clears his throat. “Where are the forms from today’s—”

“Hold that thought,” Keigo says, grabbing Naru away from him. He sits the slime monster down next to Eiji—who immediately wraps both arms around him, saliva gobs be damned—and then elbows Enji gently out of the way so that he can frame the shot better with his phone. He lines it up and snaps a characteristically artistic portrait of the two of them seated regally in his desk chair, just before the Great Slimening begins anew. Fuyumi’s gonna lose her shit. “Okay, sorry. What were you gonna say?”

“The paperwork,” Enji says, fixing Keigo with his eyes instead of watching Eiji make a valiant effort to stem the unconquerable flow of spit with his little sleeve. “From just now. Where is it?”

Keigo pauses, grabs a hold of his brain, shakes it, slams it down in the center of his mind, and lies on top of it to try to keep it still. It’s worse when he’s tired—the topic-jumping, the sharp turns and leaps of logic and parkour flips from thought to thought to thought. It’s like a dog off-leash or a train off-track. It’s like everything in him moves in a million directions all at once just trying to keep up.

Enji’s waiting for him.

Enji doesn’t look annoyed. He doesn’t even look impatient.

He looks… worried? Maybe.

Fuck. Back to the grab-shake-slam-squishing thing.

Okay. Right.

Keigo pats his coat from top to bottom until a pocket offers structural resistance. He extracts the folded sheets and brandishes them in no small amount of triumph. There’s a protein bar in that pocket, too, which he forgot about. Again.

Enji plucks the papers out of his hand and unfolds them. The glasses whip out. He starts reading. Eiji says “Naru, you’re gross,” which they should get emblazoned on a family crest pronto. The central animal would obviously be a snow-mouse rampant.

But Keigo has a bigger problem at the moment.

“Hey,” he says, very quietly. “Not that I don’t want to see you every waking minute of every single day, but—this is off-pattern.” Patterns make routines. Routines give control. Control means safety. “Is everything okay?”

Enji’s eyes rising to him are so intense that he almost shivers, even after all this time. “You tell me. That shouldn’t have caught you.”

The reprimand makes something in Keigo’s chest shrivel up. Never enough. Never, ever enough.

He must have instinctively set his mouth to suppress the face that the feeling pushed him to make—Enji’s expression shifts, and then he grasps the papers in his right hand so that the fingertips of the left can graze gently over Keigo’s cheek.

“You’re tired,” Enji says, so softly that it eases all the coiling things at once. Heat’ll do that. “You’re running yourself ragged.”

Keigo forces a smile. “That’s showbiz, baby.”

“Showbiz is going to take an enforced break,” Enji says, using the proximity to grab onto Keigo’s shoulder before he can dodge, then using the leverage to march him over to the couch. “Lie down.”

Keigo makes a big show of dragging his feet. “Enji—”

“Hawks.” He can hear Enji modulating his voice—keeping out the iron in front of the kids. “This is not a discussion.”

Keigo looks up at him.

The mouth is mad.

The eyes are pleading.

Damn it.

Keigo makes an even bigger show of sighing as he drops down on the couch and folds the whittled-down wings behind him. “This is a one-time thing, okay? Don’t get used to me doing what I’m told, big guy.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Enji says, crossing to the desk chair and back again, then depositing Naru next to Keigo. “Naptime, Naru.”

Keigo can’t help cuddling up. “New venue, same plan, my guy.”

“Guh,” Naru says, agreeably enough. He bats a wet hand at Keigo’s coat.

Enji returns to the desk and picks Eiji up—because he’s way too damn big to share the chair—and then settles Eiji on his life-savingly-thick thigh instead. He spreads the paperwork out. He selects a pen from the mug full of writing utensils that has not quite disappeared underneath the horrific administrative chaos, and does not comment on the fact that both the pen and the mug are Endeavor-themed.

“What are you doing, Grampa?” Eiji whispers, extremely loudly, because he’s three.

“Helping,” Enji says.

Embarrassing. Just his voice is soothing.

“Can I help, too? I wanna help, Grampa.”

“Yes, you can,” Enji says. “Let’s be a little quiet, so Hawks can sleep.”

“’M not gonna sleep, babe,” Keigo mutters.

“Baaaah,” Naru says. “Bah-bah-bah—”

“He agrees with me,” Keigo says. This is his own fault: he should never have gotten a comfy couch for the office. Playing with fire, as they say. “Official translation. I’m fluent in pre-verbal.”

“Then just rest,” Enji says, stolidly. “Try staying still for five minutes at a stretch—for the novelty, if nothing else.”

“‘Novelty’, he says,” Keigo says to an increasingly sleepy-looking Naru, tapping his teensy pink nose. It’s looking mousier all the time. If he gets little tiny whiskers, Keigo is going to die. “Nah-nah-nah-novelty, he says. I’ve stayed still before! Plenty of times.”

“Prove it,” Enji says.

“Fine,” Keigo says. He’s going to win this one—hundred percent. He curls a few feathers around Naru’s shoulder and pudgy little side, just to prevent any possibility of rolling off the edge of the couch in the throes of a particularly thrilling dream about sliming blocks, and then settles in next to him. “Here’s me, staying still.” He’s so deeply assured of victory that he shoots a glance over at Enji and then pointedly closes his eyes. “You owe me extra kisses when I prove you wrong.”

“Do I,” Enji says.

Naru’s grossly-cute, milky baby breath ghosts warmly across his chest, and Enji murmurs something to Eiji that he can’t quite hear, and the heating vent in the ceiling rattles rhythmically, and Yuki laughs in the other room, and the air hums quietly with nothing going wrong.

Keigo is totally going to win extra kisses.

He’s already won at life, right?

Easy.

When he wakes up, what feels like at least two blurry, muddled, grainy-eyed hours later, part of Naru’s blanket is pulled over his arm, and Enji’s coat is draped over the rest of him.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Maybe it fits. Maybe it makes sense—finally getting everything you ever wanted means living in unrelenting terror of what you have to lose.

And then when you do—

He can still feel the cold, when he casts back. The ice. He can taste the mist in the air. He’s never going to forget the look in Natsuo’s eyes.

In the meantime, though, there’s a wet spot spreading underneath his forearm.

He shifts. Naru whimpers. Sure enough, there’s a shiny little pool on the couch cushion. Aces.

“Nice,” Keigo says, blearily. “Thank you. Your feedback on the upholstery is duly noted.”

“Aaaaghm,” Naru mumbles back.

“Well-said,” Keigo says. He sits up slowly. His ears aren’t ringing overmuch, and his head doesn’t ache too bad, which marks two major strokes of luck.

His back and side feel like absolute hell, though—bruised from hip to armpit, probably. You’d almost think he’d experienced an abrupt and extremely impactful collision with a solid object made of steel, or something. Fancy that.

He gathers Naru up into his arms as gently as he can, cringing a little as he realizes how much dust and crumbling crusted blood there is on his coat. He shucks it off one arm at a time. His shirt is a little bit better, if only because the coat took the brunt of today’s beating.

Naru dutifully decorates it with slime as Keigo gets to his feet and tries to stretch without exacerbating the widespread agony.

How long was he passed out for? Naru’s naps aren’t usually more than about an hour and a half, but his brain’s so foggy he can’t quite pinpoint it. At a glance, the position of the sun hasn’t shifted enough for it to be much more than the two he estimated, but it also feels like he barely closed his eyes.

Enji clearly made use of the time, though.

Keigo’s desk looks fucking incredible—one might even say orderly. The drawers of the filing cabinet in the corner actually close, for the first time in recent memory. Keigo would be willing to bet that zero crumbs would fall out of his keyboard if he turned it upside down and shook. All the writing utensils are in the mug, and the stapler and the tape dispenser are lined up neatly parallel to each other just beside it. His half-finished post-it packs of varying sizes have become a cute little tower. All of the most recent file folders are neatly stacked and straightened, and the other miscellaneous rulers and erasers and crap have presumably been tucked away into the topmost desk drawers. Enji loves drawers.

There is one thing about Keigo’s desk that doesn’t look sparkly and inspiring:

His laptop has conspicuously disappeared.

That mystery works out to be a bit of a dud, though, since stepping outside with a somnolently “Wub-wub-wub”-ing Naru cradled to his chest solves it instantly.

Keigo’s laptop has stolen the most coveted seat in the world.

Enji is sitting on one of the main office’s couches with it settled on his thighs. It looks dinky as fuck there. Eiji is crashed out on the couch next to him, curled up near his hip, absolutely swimming in the smallest size they have of the cool black hoodies with the red feather border around the neckline, the pocket, and the cuffs of the sleeves.

“Yuki logged me in,” Enji says by way of greeting.

Keigo shoots Yuki a look. Yuki half-smiles and whole-shrugs.

Yuki confirmed as one of the bros of all time. He could have just told Enji that Keigo’s password is Assdeavor<3333 instead of logging in himself. Keigo’s going to buy him a lifetime supply of that shitty ghost-pepper ramen that he claims to like.

In the meantime, what Keigo can see of his screen looks an awful lot like…

“Hold on one goddamn motherfucking second,” he says.

Eiji is still slumbering blissfully: cuss word amnesty.

Right on cue, Eiji stirs and raises his head, blinking owlishly. Enji shoots Keigo the darkest look that Homo sapiens has conjured in three hundred-thousand years of evolution.

Keigo smiles prettily back and flits over to peek past Enji’s shoulder.

It is as he feared/hoped/couldn’t quite bring himself to believe when he has just woken up, and has not refilled the coffee tank just yet.

“Are you balancing my books?” he asks, unable to keep the towering disbelief out of his voice.

“I do math,” Enji says, “not miracles.”

“You are a miracle,” Keigo says.

Enji somehow manages a darker look than the darkest look in human history. Which really kind of proves Keigo’s point.

“Owe you one,” Keigo says. “Owe you several.”

Enji raises his right eyebrow.

Keigo shifts Naru to one arm, jerks his chin towards Eiji, and then mimes sucking dick.

Enji lifts his left hand from the keyboard to apply it to his forehead instead.

“Thank you,” he says, “for that tactful illustrative visual.”

Keigo beams.

Ryo sighs like he’s going for the world record.

“Dang,” Keigo says. “Now I want a popsicle.”

Eiji perks up. “There’s popsicles? Grampa, can I have a popsicle?”

Enji’s face is even more of a masterpiece than normal, and that’s really saying something.

Keigo lets himself revel in Enji’s expression of narrowly-suppressed infuriation for a second before he props Naru up in his elbow with some feathers to free both hands for his phone.

“That settles it,” he says. “I’m ordering in popsicles. What’s your favorite flavor, Eiji?”

Eiji’s eyes light up. “CherrypleasethankyouHawks!”

Like the world’s sexiest popsicle himself, Enji is visibly melting.

So are every single one of Keigo’s employees, as they should. He’s putting his food-order-app skills to a test worthy of their prowess. The least his peons could do is fawn over his unofficial toddler-in-law.

Keigo will not be calling them his grandkids, because that shit is just too weird, although semantically he has to admit that he’s probably fucked.

“Anybody else?” he says in the meantime. This place he drummed up looks promising on the cherry popsicle front. “Going once—”

“Orange,” Ryo says. “Please.”

“You’re just trying to gross me out,” Keigo says.

“Yeah,” Ryo says. “Totally. I’m just that committed to the bit.”

“I admire that about you,” Keigo says. “C’mon, y’all, free popsicles.”

“Lime?” Jun says.

“Congratulations,” Keigo says, slapping it into his increasingly cursed cart. “Somehow that’s even worse than orange.”

“Why do you hate citrus?” Emi asks. “Just for that, I want yuzu.”

Impressive, really, that he’s managed to hire an entire team full of trolls.

“Just for that,” he says, “I’m never speaking to you again. Yuki?”

Yuki just smiles and shrugs, because he is the only person on payroll with a soul. “Anything is fine. What are you getting?”

Keigo puts three strawberry ones in the cart for him and turns to Eiji. “What do you think I should get?”

Eiji gazes at him wide-eyed. “What’s your favorite?”

Keigo can’t help smiling back at him. He’s just so darn cute. “Well, if I had to pick—”

“Blue raspberry,” Enji says. “Which not only does not exist, but doesn’t even make sense as a flavor.”

“Heathen,” Keigo says, lovingly. “What do you want?”

“Water,” Enji says.

They’ve got moonlight cookies as an add-on. Enji is secretly weak for those and invariably tries to pretend he’s not.

Keigo throws in four packs.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s do this sh—thing!” He waves his hands almost hard enough to throw his phone as Enji levels the glare—which he might maybe, possibly, slightly, almost deserve, just this once. “Thing, Enji! I said ‘thing’!”

The faint curl of steam that rolls off of the sigh makes it totally worth it.

The inaugural Hawks Agency Popsicle Party is a rousing success—but not an arousing success, because Keigo is unimpeachably restrained about his phallic object consumption in front of the children. No one pats him on the back or offers him the Boyfriend of the Year award he’s earned, but he knows. The accolades in his own mind are worth more, some days.

Eiji notices Enji conspicuously not consuming a phallic frozen treat. “You sure you don’t want one, Grampa?” he asks, mouth already soaking in the red food coloring. He offers his out. “You can share mine!”

Flawless. No notes.

Enji resisted the moonlight cookies, but Keigo ain’t number one for nothing.

“Thank you,” Enji is saying, giving Eiji a flash of the tiny smile he saves for the little guys. “You enjoy it. I’m—”

“Oh, hey!” Yuki says, digging through the styrofoam box they were delivered in. “There’s a kuromitzu flavor, too? I didn’t know they had that.”

Enji turns a look on Keigo.

Keigo smiles sweetly back.

Boyfriend of the Century, more like.

Like all good things—including, but not limited to, popsicles, blow jobs, naps, and really satisfying spit bubbles—the unexpected visit from some choice Todorokis must come to an end.

By four or so, Eiji is all tuckered out from the tour of the agency, Enji is all tuckered out from organizing several of Keigo’s biggest administrative cataclysms by force, and Naru is all tuckered out from sliming so many brand-new, never-before-seen objects, surfaces, people, and pieces of furniture.

Keigo helps pack them up, which somehow always manages to be an ordeal with a pair of sproglets no matter how little they originally carried in with them. It takes three attempts and a dozen safety pins from the communal Weird Crap Drawer to roll up the sleeves and waist of Eiji’s new sweatshirt far enough that he can more or less walk in it.

Keigo is ready to rest on his laurels when he’s finally wrangled it into submission, and plants his hands on his hips accordingly—which hurts. On account of the all-over bruising. Ah. Hell.

Before he can pity himself too much, though, Enji catches him again—hand so, so warm against his jaw, thumb skimming feather-lightly over the damage to his right ear.

Enji pulls him in and kisses the top of his head.

Right there.

Openly.

In front of everyone. In front of the whole damn agency. Kissing him.

“Text me when you leave,” Enji says. “Be careful.”

“I will,” Keigo says, instead of Anything. Anything, for you.

Eiji tries to keep one arm around Enji’s neck and reach far enough to hug Keigo with the other, which is challenging for him even with Keigo already drawn in close.

“Get the bad guys!” he says. “Pow!”

Keigo ruffles his hair gently. “Pow! I’ll try, kiddo. Take care of your grampa for me, okay?”

Having both of them smile at him at once feels kind of like slamming into the crane again, honestly.

Promises are just words.

But he tries.

He fucking tries.

He ends up straggling home later than he wanted to, but that’s pretty par for the course.

He doesn’t like this course too much these days. The over-curated grass is dying, the sand traps have turned into sucking bogs, all the water features are full of alligators, the geese are aggressive, and people are so ready to run you down with a golf cart that it’s not even funny. And then they invariably put it in reverse to run back over you again.

But it’s worth it. It’s worth it. Life is so good—so good, so beautiful, so kind. Keigo has to remember. He has to hold on. He has to focus on the way it warms his hands and fills his heart.

He has everything he ever wanted except for the time to enjoy it.

Nine-hundred-ninety-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine out of a million ain’t bad.

Shit.

The fact that he has a home to trudge back up to—the fact that there is a huge, warm, safe house he gets to consider his own, where there’s always room for him, always love for him; the fact that there’s a place that he can call a sanctuary where he’s welcome and wanted and whole—is more than he ever let himself dream of in much detail. He didn’t want to be disappointed. He didn’t think it was possible.

He made it.

He did it.

That’s enough.

That’s so much more than enough.

The scent of the food wafts halfway down the walkway, and his mouth is watering before he even unlocks the door.

“Holy moly,” he says as he kicks his boots off, peels his coat off, brushes at the dust on his shirt, and shakes some out of his hair. “Smells like paradise in here.”

“Hawks!” Eiji’s tiny voice calls. “Hi! Thank you for the popsicle!”

Ah, God. This kid—this little guy, this funny little just-bigger-than-baby-shaped container of burgeoning thoughts and overwhelming feelings, who has already endured so much hurt but just keeps beaming out gratitude for what he’s got—

Keigo would get him six cherry popsicles a day every day for the rest of his life if there was any chance in hell that Enji wouldn’t freak the fuck out about the sugar.

Speaking of the most spectacular man in the world, Enji has replaced Keigo’s slippers with new ones again even though the old ones weren’t especially flat. Keigo pads down the hall and peeks around the doorway into the kitchen, making his eyes as wide as they can go. “Whaaaaaaaat’s going on in here?”

Eiji catches sight of him and giggles. Naru sees him next, coos incoherently, and makes grabby hands at him, and the pudgy little fingers might as well be opening and closing around his heart.

Enji, toiling away at the stovetop, glances over one perfect shoulder and half-smiles. So that’s all three of them trying to kill him tonight.

“Come here,” Enji says.

Keigo would follow him to the depths of hell without a map, without a question, without a second thought. The kitchen counter isn’t much to ask.

Keigo did miscalculate slightly: Enji is wearing the T-shirt Keigo got him after the inevitable Ghibli binge—of Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle, which plasters a grumpy little fire sprite directly across his tits.

And Enji is making chicken katsu.

Enji uses his metal fingers to rip off a little piece, grabbing Keigo’s shoulder with the left to pin him in place.

“Taste,” he says, as if Keigo wouldn’t have tried to bite through the steel to get it out of his fingers in another second.

Keigo tries to make sex eyes while opening his mouth for Enji’s fingers, but then the flavorgasm hits him with so much merciless force that he completely forgets to be an asshole.

“So good,” he manages to mumble with his mouth full.

Enji just nods once, like making phenomenal food that your idiot boyfriend loves from scratch and starting dinner late for him just because he was stupid enough to crash into a crane today is ordinary.

Maybe Keigo will just lie down on the floor and die. Quit while he’s ahead for once. Go out with a whimper and a contented little sigh.

On second thought, he should save that until after he’s stuffed his goddamn face.

“Eiji helped,” Enji says, snatching another perfect portion out of the pan.

“Yeah!” Eiji cries from where he’s working on some more crayon masterpieces at the table. “I mixed up all the panko and the flour and the eggs! It was so gooey!”

The really fucked-up thing is that Keigo never considered himself… what’s the appropriate expression? Reproductively-oriented? Family-friendly? Conception-happy?

Normally, he likes kids pretty well, because they’re just miniaturized, extremely inexperienced humans who haven’t learned how to be nasty yet, so you can trust them not to be awful on purpose.

But normally the best part of dealing with a kid is giving it back to the person it belongs to.

It is starting to feel dangerously like these two belong to him.

To him, and to Enji, and to the laughter and the little smiles.

He steps around behind Enji, wraps both arms around the world’s most beautiful waist, rests his cheek between the world’s most beautiful shoulder blades, and closes his eyes, soaking up the warmth.

Yeah.

He’s home.

It is a bit unfortunate that home involves so much cleaning.

They clean the dishes. They clean the children. They tidy the living room. They wipe down as much of the kitchen as they can bear when Naru is just going to slime it all again tomorrow. Fuyumi said something once about a maid in the olden days. At the time, it sounded like insane rich people bullshit, but now it sounds like it’s going to make the top spot on Keigo’s Christmas list.

The sheets smell nice. Enji must have done yet more laundry. Maybe Keigo will put a housecleaner on the top of his Christmas list, too.

Enji doesn’t appear to be enjoying the subtle spring-fresh fragrance of the bedclothes, though, given that he’s glaring at the ceiling as if it’s personally offended him.

Well—this is Enji. Maybe it has.

But it’s more likely that he’s agonizing over something. He’s a little bit too good at a lot of things, among which agonizing is prominent in spite of ferocious competition.

“Enji,” Keigo says, sweetly. “My dearest. My darling. My shining North star. The love of my life, the light of my life, the yakitori two-for-one special of my life.”

Enji eyes him sideways without even rolling over. “What?”

And people say romance is dead.

“Please tell me what you’re thinking,” Keigo says, “instead of ruminating so loud that it sounds like a landslide.”

Enji shifts. He’s finally coming around to finding it reassuring instead of creepy when Keigo reads his mind.

To be fair, it probably would be creepy if Keigo was actually telepathic as well as highly specifically telekinetic, but it’s not a psychic thing. It’s an Enji thing. It’s about soaking up every single clue and following even the spindliest little thread back to where it must have started in the churning, humming, oiled machinery of his beautiful brain.

“Fine,” Enji says, quietly. “I want to take over some of your paperwork.”

Keigo has been so jaded since he was about seven that he’s pretty difficult to surprise.

And it’s not that he’s—shocked, really. He could see it. He could see not just how well and easily Enji managed so much of the minutiae in a handful of hours, but how comfortable it felt for him to be back in the saddle, even if the horse was his on loan from someone else.

But that’s not the whole story, either, is it?

He could see more than that. He could see a whole damn lot. He usually does.

“Hey,” he says into the stretching silence. “Be honest with me.”

“I will,” Enji says.

He means it.

But he learned how to sugar-coat—just a little—in the years between Yo, number one and Hi, babe.

“A hundred percent honest,” Keigo says. “Brutally.”

Enji sighs. “Now who’s ruminating?”

“Asshole,” Keigo says, lovingly. “Okay. For real.” He breathes deep and rolls over onto his elbow so he can watch Enji’s face as much as the dim moonlight will allow. “Are you offering because you feel guilty about how much work I’m doing—and/or how much you’re not—and you feel obligated to make my life easier by lightening the load?” Swallow. Breathe again. Voice light. Words level. “Or are you offering because you enjoy it, and you want to?”

Enji stays quiet for three breaths each. His are slower. One of the fun weird parts of Keigo’s brain always wants to curl up inside his lungs.

Conceptually. Obviously.

Enji sighs again. He’s really giving those conceptually-beautiful lungs a workout tonight.

“Both,” he says, grudgingly.

If he resents it, he means it. If he resists it, it’s the truth.

“Fifty-fifty?” Keigo asks.

Enji makes a vaguely discontented growl noise in the back of his throat that is way too sexy for this time of night. “Fifty-two, forty-eight.”

Good odds.

Keigo drops back down onto the pillow and smiles at him.

“You’re going to have to let me pay you,” he says.

“No,” Enji says.

“Yes,” Keigo says.

“It’s already a conflict of interest,” Enji says, frowning at the defenseless ceiling. “Don’t make it nepotism too.”

“It’s the only way I’m ever going to get you to accurately report your hours,” Keigo says, “and you know it.” He kicks this conundrum a little, trying to knock it outside the box. “What if I paid you in blow jobs all the time?”

Enji snorts. “I think ‘nepotism’ to ‘sugar daddy’ is at best a lateral move.”

Keigo reaches out and grasps his right shoulder urgently. “Wait—you mean you’re not my sugar daddy? That’s not what this is? Enji—oh, my God. There’s been a terrible mistake. I have to leave.”

Enji doesn’t laugh often. Keigo has worn him down—he smiles a hell of a lot more than he used to, and he’s less quick and furtive and guilty about it these days than he’s ever been. He jokes openly now, tossing out shit he only would have muttered halfway under his breath a couple years back, broadening the list of material he’ll poke fun at day by day. He’s slowly, slowly warmed to the notion that Keigo genuinely thinks he’s funny as all fucking hell, and releasing that—indulging it, expanding it, exposing it—makes both of them happier. It’s a good thing. There’s so much good in him, and here he doesn’t have to hesitate to let it out.

But he still doesn’t laugh much. Maybe he wasn’t programmed for it in the first place. Maybe that habit of suppression is just lodged too deep to shake. Keigo might get it, someday—get to it. Pry it loose. In the meantime, though, Keigo mostly just laughs enough for both of them, and lately Eiji helps.

Enji’s laughing now, though.

Deep and low and heart-bustingly sincere, from the base of his lungs, from the bottom of his chest.

“Ah, yes,” he says, with the last few ripples of it still ricocheting through his voice, and it’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful, it’s just— “I knew it. I knew you were a gold-digger the entire time. What tipped me off was the fact that you stuck around the house for four years and then started changing my grandson’s diapers without being asked.”

“Damn it,” Keigo says, grinning helplessly at him. “Caught baby-poop-handed. I should’ve been more careful.”

Enji rolls over far enough to reach out with the left arm and grab his hand.

Keigo knits their fingers together. Enji squeezes.

“How about this?” Keigo says. “I’ll put you on payroll as a consultant or whatever. Pay you our standard rate. And you can fling it all into a bank account specifically for the ice mice, so they have some extra cash in their back pocket if they ever need it.”

Enji stops breathing for a second.

Then he rolls further, shaking their hands apart so he can support himself enough to pin Keigo to the bed and kiss him so hard it steals his breath, and then bruises his mouth.

So good, so good, so—

“Deal,” Enji murmurs against his lips.

The next day, while he’s on a lunch break—at two in the afternoon, but it still counts—his phone pings with a text.

Shouto sent him a link to a Twitter post—and a screenshot of it, so that he won’t have to futz around with swapping apps to get the gist of it.

He opens it, though.

Because he needs to zoom in.

Someone posted a slightly out-of-focus cell phone picture from yesterday, from what must have been across the street from the agency. Naru is just a little bundle of pale-headed adorableness pressed up against Enji’s chest, but whatever stalker snagged this managed to catch the exact moment that Keigo was lifting Eiji into the air, with all of his bitty baby limbs splayed out. Eiji’s back is turned towards the camera enough to obscure his face—thank goodness for minuscule favors or whatever—but the delight on Keigo’s expression, in spite of the blood splattered down his neck, is utterly unmistakable.

It kind of hurts, actually.

He looks so fucking happy to see the kid he’s holding up in both arms. In the crap-quality photo, at least, the intensity of his joy completely obscures the exhaustion that he knows was dragging at his brain and his bones. Anybody might think Eiji was the best thing that ever happened to him.

In truth of fact, of course, the broad shoulders turned towards him in the photo bear that particular mantle, but since the ice mice came part and parcel with him, Keigo figures it should count as a loophole.

Maybe things would have been different if anybody had ever looked at him like that, when he was four—or five, or eight, or ten, or seventeen.

But if things had been different, he might not have ended up here. Things might not be the way they are. He wouldn’t be who he is.

And he’s a lucky fucking bastard, lately.

Not least because it took the carrion birds the better part of a day to sink their talons into a moment he never meant to let them catch.

At least they picked this one, though, and not the part where Enji reached out and touched his face.

This one’s innocuous. This one’s just two guys being dudes, and one of them happens to have easily explicable, ostensibly uncontroversial grandchildren in tow.

Keigo packs the screenshot into an email and forwards it to Emi so she can write some preemptive PR circles around it, in case it blows up instead of blowing over. You never know what the major networks will pick up on these days. There are sure as hell enough real problems to report on, but everybody’s so tired of the status quo that scrounging for personal dirt tends to net more clicks and sell more ads.

And if whoever photodocumented this moment also grabbed a shot of Enji caressing Keigo’s cheek, and they’re just saving that one to post after they’ve garnered an uptick in followers with this little opening number, he’s in deep shit.

He makes himself breathe out and unclench his fingers from around the phone. It hasn’t happened yet. It might not ever. It won’t help him to stress about it when there’s nothing he can do either way.

He wishes he still didn’t give a shit.

He wishes there was still nothing they could do to him.

He wishes he was still untouchable.

None of it mattered, at the start. His reputation was chaotic on purpose. He wasn’t accountable to anyone except the Commission, who were deliberately leveraging the loose cannon vibes to make it easier to slip him into places like the League. He had nothing and no one to lose.

He’s not juggling bowling pins anymore. They’re knives, and they’re on fire.

He can’t afford to slip.

He can’t ever afford to slip.

Shouto and his spunky little pals think they’re ready for prime time, which is exactly what proves that they’re not. They think it’s good at the top. They think you’re powerful, and power makes you safe.

They all should have paid more attention to Enji.

It’s a sickness. It’s like greed. It feeds itself, and eats itself, and drains itself—it bleeds itself dry, day in, day out, every midnight, every dawn. You can’t be strong enough to carry it. No one can. The closer you get, the harder they try to tear you down.

They would come after Shouto’s little crew. Those three are clever little shits, and they look out for each other—which is a whole lot more than Keigo started with, but it’s not enough.

There’s never enough.

They’re too good. They’re too sweet, underneath the determination and the diligence. They’re too soft.

Enji survived because he’d burned himself down to just the iron—just the structure and the strictures, garlanded with stubbornness, unyielding progress, and unrelenting competence. One foot in front of the other. One battle at a time. No room for doubt. No room for anything but desperation. No looking back.

Keigo is surviving because he learned how to turn off his humanity.

Maybe some of the heteromorph-hating crackpots are right. Maybe it’s easier if you’ve got a little bit of the wildness in you. Maybe it’s easier if there’s a part of your brain that doesn’t want to be rational—doesn’t want to play the game.

Keigo’s a hunter. He’s good at it. Sometimes you have to wall off the part of yourself that gives a shit—sometimes you have to bury yourself alive. Sometimes you have to gnaw off a limb to slip the trap and limp on to whatever’s waiting next.

It’s harder, now, than it used to be.

It’s harder to keep the doors shut.

It’s harder to keep the ghosts out.

It’s harder to keep going when he knows where this could lead.

But he doesn’t have a choice.

If he steps back—if he stumbles—if he leaves a single opening—people are going to die, and Shouto and Deku and Dynamight are going to leap headfirst into the void.

And it’ll kill them.

They’re too young. They’re too new. They’re too optimistic.

They believe—they think that they can beat the system. They don’t realize yet that the whole machine is evil. They don’t understand that it’s chewed through a thousand stalwart hopefuls just as strong as them. They don’t know the shape of its teeth.

If Keigo has anything to say about it, they never will.

He saves the picture to his camera roll. He might delete it again before he goes home. Enji will blame himself for destabilizing the foundation of Hawks’s reputation or some nonsense if he sees it, and he’ll fret himself silly about the same thing that Keigo’s nibbling holes in his lip about—outing Hawks as queer-as-in-fuck-you when Keigo might still need to play things close to the chest for a long, long time.

All part of the plan, he writes back to Shouto. “Number One hero sweetly, kindly, charitably helps the prior holder of the title dote on his goddang adorable grandchildren” is an awesome headline. Family people normally don’t like me because I’m annoying and irresponsible. My stats are gonna SKYROCKET.

Shouto sends back an ambivalent emoji, which is pretty much just Shouto’s entire personality nutshelled in a single text.

You’re not actually very annoying, he writes. Although Katsuki has a very well-developed theory that you are a masochist.

Keigo grins at his screen. Blastybutt should think twice about throwing stones when he’s got TWO disaster boyfriends, doncha think?

Shouto’s response is a positively delicious, although not entirely unexpected, little gift.

Katsuki says we are not a polycule (sp?) and we are not his boyfriends. Izuku says I am not a disaster (although interestingly did not deny that he is).

Keigo manages to resist the urge to kick his feet in glee, à la Eiji at the kitchen table. What he said about you is cute. And wrong.

Shouto writes back I agree.

Hey you wanna come over for dinner tonight? Keigo writes. You can bring your polycule (sp).

Shouto leaves him on read for thirty uninterrupted seconds before typing Why?

Keigo’s never met a problem he couldn’t make worse.

To eat, he writes back. I know you have eaten before, in the past. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

He can clearly envision the almost-a-scowl Shouto is directing at his screen, holding the phone too close to his face and typing with his index fingers instead of his thumbs.

I was asking more about why the polycule (sp) but you make a good point. What’s for dinner?

There’s a brief pause, and then Shouto adds another text before Keigo has figured out how he wants to spell the evil cackle.

Katsuki said “Absolutely the fuck not” but then he asked what we should bring.

Got ’em.

Oh.

Hold on.

Keigo taps over into his all-time favorite text log and dispatches some brilliance:

Babe I fucked up (I’m ok)

Given how much time and effort it requires for Enji to wrangle out his phone and swap child-carrying arms in order to manipulate it, the pause is infinitesimal.

What happened?

Keigo weighs the options, but the options are thin on the ground, and accordingly weigh very little. I invited Shouto over for dinner.

He can imagine the way Enji approaches the text box like it’s a feral animal he’s been feeding. How does that constitute fucking up?

Well, Keigo writes, I also invited his boyfriends (pluralization not a typo).

Nice pause this time. Good, solid, intentional one.

His what? Enji writes.

Nailed it.

The bad news is that inviting a passel of twenty-something boys to dinner with only a handful of hours of warning probably puts Keigo’s Boyfriend of the Century award at risk.

The good news is that Enji Todoroki still knows his way around a battle plan, and that’s hot as fuck.

Keigo blasts through the door at precisely the time Enji specified—which took some clever flying to accomplish, because the lady ahead of him at the grocery store was a million years old with a stack of expired coupons to rival the pile of paperwork on Keigo’s desk, which set him way behind—and whisks into the kitchen to deposit the bags. Naru and Eiji, high-chaired and boostered at the table, both gasp and clap in delight at his dramatic arrival. As they should.

“Hey, babes!” Keigo says to all present company. “It’s go time,” he adds to the first and foremost recipient of the all-important title of babe. “Where do you need me?”

“Everywhere,” Enji says. He slings another cutting board out across the counter, drops recently-rinsed green onions on it— “Dice everything to my left, thin slices of everything to the right. Get me the non-stick saucepan. When are they coming?”

“I have no idea,” Keigo says.

Enji gives him a look.

Feathers give Enji the saucepan, and start making extremely short work of all of the vegetables.

Keigo smiles up at him. “Challenge accepted, I presume?”

Enji returns his attention to the soba like Keigo won’t see the faint curve overtaking his mouth. “Shut up.”

The symphony concludes in perfect time. Keigo wants to see Enji in a proper tuxedo. With tails. And little ivory buttons straining to contain him. And his hair slicked back. And—

The longer feathers shiver.

“Aha,” he says, just as Enji is taking down a stack of bowls. “Incoming.”

Enji mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “God help us,” but there isn’t even time to appreciate it, because Keigo is sending a feather for the door.

It can hear by their footsteps that they changed to plainclothes. It can hear by their voices that they’re as charming as ever.

“I’m not good with kids,” Bakugou mutters from near the end of the walkway, barely audible at that distance.

“You’re not good with anyone,” Midoriya says.

Bakugou snarls without much venom. “I’m good with your mom.”

“Actually,” Midoriya says, warmly, “you are. She keeps talking about that time I was out of town, and you kept bringing her food when she was sick.”

“So she wouldn’t die,” Bakugou says.

“Which she didn’t!”

“Guys,” Shouto says.

They quiet instantly.

“Guess who’s here!” Keigo says, gently tickling Eiji’s ear with another feather.

Eiji writhes away, giggling, and then tries to grab it. “Who?”

“Guess!” Keigo says as he undoes the locks before any of the three of them can knock.

Eiji makes a face.

Keigo considers that for a second.

Eiji has every right not to like surprises.

“It’s Uncle Shouto!” Keigo says. “And he brought some friends!”

Eiji blinks, not looking terribly reassured as he turns towards the doorway.

“Move,” Bakugou says.

“I am moving,” Midoriya says.

“Move productively,” Bakugou says.

“That doesn’t even mean anything!” Midoriya says.

“Please calm down,” Shouto says, voice low, and they just—do. Just like that.

That’s about the extent of the chitchat before they come parading into the kitchen.

Eiji starts to smile when he sees Shouto at the head of the procession, and then his jaw drops.

“Hey, Eiji,” Shouto says, warmly. The deep breath is so careful that even the feathers barely catch it. “Hawks. Dad.”

“Hi!” Midoriya cuts in, beaming at Eiji and waving vigorously with the hand not burdened with a bag. “You must be Eiji! I’m Izuku. It’s so nice to meet you!”

Eiji stares at him open-mouthed for a long second.

“But,” he says, slowly. “But—you’re Deku.” His little face crumples. “Right?”

Midoriya grin-winces. He should really copyright that. “Well—yeah. I guess you’re right.”

Bakugou stalks across the kitchen to thrust his bag at Enji. “Thanks for having us. Brought melon. You need help?”

Enji takes it. “Thank you—I think we’re—”

“And strawberry milk,” Shouto says, tossing his bag to Bakugou, who hisses through his teeth as he moves to catch it, because all the individual boxes start to move separately inside the plastic while it’s in the air. “Is that still your favorite, Eiji?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says.

Midoriya scampers over to hold his bag out to Enji, bowing as he does. “We brought some desserts, too! I hope that’s okay.”

Enji blinks. “Of course. Thank you. That wasn’t nece—”

Keigo slings an arm around Naru’s shoulders. “Look at this house full of heroes!” Keigo says. “Your big brother, and your grampa, and… a bunch of other guys.”

Enji sets his jaw in the way that means he’s trying not to roll his eyes in front of other people.

“Shouto,” he says, somehow slightly too loud and detectably halting at the same time, as always. “It’s—hot soba. Eiji won’t eat it cold. But I could make you—”

“That’s fine,” Shouto says, still looking at him like he doesn’t quite add up, and the exam timer is running down. “Thank you.” He pauses, eyes drifting down to the pot on the stove. “It smells really good.”

Enji struggles not to look pleased enough to invite any of them to rain on his parade, which—like most mixed emotions—ends up making him look vaguely annoyed instead.

But Keigo figures Shouto probably understands.

Dinner is surprisingly nice, all things considered. Enji apologizes for them not being able to use the dining table—the explanation, which is that Naru “doesn’t like it,” makes Shouto’s expression pinch for a second that Keigo knows Enji doesn’t miss—but Keigo has always preferred the cramped, casual vibe of the kitchen better anyway. It’s pretty obvious that everybody else tacitly agrees.

The troublemaker trio—although an attentive listener might begin to realize that Bakugou never starts it, and toes the line so fastidiously that it actually makes Keigo worry about him more—regales Eiji with child-friendly villain stories and hopefully-embellished recounts of their exploits at school. They throw in one from during the internship at Enji’s agency. Keigo doesn’t think anybody else notices the way Enji’s fingers tighten on his chopsticks.

Eiji tells stumbling little half-backwards kid stories about some of his preschool greatest hits, and all three of the country’s most ferocious up-and-coming pros lean in and nod intently, hanging off of his every word.

Keigo thinks he’s holding it together pretty well, all things considered, but Enji’s left hand curls around his knee under the table and squeezes gently.

He’s losing his touch.

He has to get his shit together. There’s a decent chance it’s just Enji—just Enji reading his cues like neon lights, Enji knowing him so well that he can see the secrets in shifts that no one else knows how to interpret—but Keigo can’t afford to risk it. He can’t afford the vulnerability. He can’t get weak. Not now. There’s far too fucking much at stake.

He can’t relax. He can’t let his guard down. He can’t let them see so much as a wisp of what’s beneath. A single chink in his armor will give them the leverage to rip him to shreds.

He has to be Hawks.

He has to be too fast to track, too high to catch.

He has to be strong enough to hold this up.

He has to stay on top.

Midoriya expressed a particularly vested interest in seeing the collection of interesting rocks and leaves that Eiji has started hoarding in his bedroom, so it’s him that Eiji latches on to and drags off down the hall as soon as everyone has more or less finished eating. Shouto scoops Naru up, dregs of his bottle and all, and Bakugou is immediately on his feet taking dishes to the sink. Shouto carries Naru out to the living room, and Enji tips his head slightly after him—a plea, more than a request, for Keigo to follow him and find out how he’s doing.

Interrogation tactics just never go out of style.

Shouto has already settled down on the couch. Naru has already drained the bottle. They’re both staring at the TV, which has helpfully provided yet another incomprehensible show for babies, which is much more bright colors and soothing music than substance. Keigo’s guess is that Shouto went to turn on the news and then forgot all about it, which… relatable.

Keigo drops onto the cushion next to him and spirits the empty bottle away with a feather. In the kitchen, Enji grabs it as soon as it comes within range, then strokes his fingertip lightly along the barbs in appreciation of the delivery.

Before Keigo can start probing for intel, a familiar commotion comes rampaging back through the living room as Eiji pulls Midoriya along by his hand.

“Eiji’s going to show me the garden!” Midoriya announces, much louder and more enthusiastically than Keigo would consider necessary or advisable. “It sounds like Gra—Ende—Mr. Todoroki worked really hard on it!”

“Yeah!” Eiji says, hauling him onward, down the far hall towards the back door. “And Hawks! And me! We planted flowers, I’ll show you, it’s too soon for them to’ve growed much, ’cause flowers gotta grow really slow so they’re strong, but they’re gonna be so pretty, and Grampa’s got so many other plants that they’re never gonna be lonely, and—”

Naru attempts to chew on Shouto’s left shoulder, which does not deter Shouto from watching the TV with a subtly quizzical expression. Keigo gives it half an hour before he figures out that you can’t apply adult logic to children’s shows, or they crumple like wet newspaper under the crushing force of vague expectations of coherency.

Keigo’s weirdly used to this shit, though, and it’s not that much dumber than celebrity news, and much less likely to smear mud on somebody he knows.

He’s pretty preoccupied eavesdropping with the feather he tucked into the back of Enji’s belt anyway.

Most of the conversation in the kitchen has been the kind of comfortably awkward “Pass that over” shit you expect with two people who fundamentally understand each other far too well, but both hate needless small talk more than anything on Earth. It’s sort of cute.

Then Enji hesitates for a moment too long, and then he says, slowly, “Boyfriends? Plural?”

Bakugou snorts. “I dunno. They’re both on pretty thin ice. There’s a good chance of boyfriends: zero if they don’t watch it.”

Shouto notices the shift in Keigo’s attention and elbows him gently. “Listening?”

That jabs Keigo’s heart with a million toothpicks. It always does when Shouto says things that sound like Enji, and vice versa.

“Yup,” he says.

Shouto’s head tilts, and his eyes slide partway shut. He’ll only be able to make out a murmur of voices, but that’s probably enough.

“No outrage,” he says.

“Nope,” Keigo says.

Shouto resettles Naru in his lap and looks down into his squishy little face.

“What do you think of that?” Shouto asks.

Naru blinks up at him, open-mouthed, for three seconds before producing an incandescent gummy smile.

“Ah-bloo,” he says.

“Me, too,” Shouto says, very seriously.

Enji and Bakugou are now talking about recipes and opening and closing lots of cabinets without slamming a single one.

Is it this house? Does it just tame people? Does it somehow domesticate the fuck out of them while their backs are turned?

From what Keigo can tell—from what he can read in their eyes, and their shoulders, and the things they don’t quite say—it was the opposite, before. This place was a prison, for all of them. It was hell.

He glances at Shouto. It is Keigo’s business now. That’s the weirdest part. He’s as deep in this shit as any of them.

And he’s going to drag them all out if it kills him.

“You seen him yet?” he asks.

Shouto lets Naru grasp on to one of his index fingers with each tiny hand, then tips them up and down. Naru coos about it.

“No,” Shouto says, quietly. “I texted him to ask if he wanted me to go over there. I offered to bring him something. He never answered. I think…” He moves his fingers more rapidly, twiddling them back and forth until Naru giggles. He smiles back reflexively, but it doesn’t touch his eyes. “I think maybe he thinks I would have handled it better than he did, or something. I think he’s come back enough now to be… angry. At himself. And ashamed. And I think that’s going to make it worse. Turning it inward always does.”

Keigo knows. He’s seen the blood. He’s felt it.

“How are you holding up?” he asks.

“I’m dealing with it,” Shouto says, which is so damn Todoroki Typical that Keigo wants to laugh, and also wants to strangle him. “What about you?”

“Me?” Keigo says. “I’m fabulous. Splendiferous. Never better. Footloose and fancy-free.”

Shouto looks at him for a second with an unamused, indulgent resignation that reminds him way too much of someone.

“It’s interesting,” Shouto says, “that sometimes you’re a really bad liar.”

“Yeah,” Keigo says. “When it’s to people I love.”

Shouto’s eyes widen just a touch, and then he glances down at Naru—who is currently trying to fit their joined hands into his mouth but struggling with the logistics. Shouto’s scarred left hand is a little bigger than he bargained for.

Shouto takes a deep breath and lets it out slow.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says.

Keigo prods his shoulder with a feather in an appreciative sort of way. “That makes two of us.”

Naru gives up on eating his uncle and reaches out for the feather, which probably does look like an easier chew-toy target. “Baaaaah-bub.”

Shouto smiles, swinging Naru’s arm back and forth again. “I believe that means ‘That makes three of us’.”

Keigo grazes the feather against Naru’s gooey fingertips, which makes him giggle again. “I think you might be right.”

Shouto sends a tiny, tiny, slender spire of ice spiraling up after the feather, and Naru’s eyes go huge. Shouto dissolves it out of the air when the little hand reaches for that next.

“I changed the name of our group text to ‘Polycule (sp.)’,” he says. “Katsuki tried to explode my phone.”

“I love that for you,” Keigo says.

Speaking of the devil’s most misunderstood accidental representative, Bakugou chooses that moment to come storming into the living room, take one glare at Keigo sitting next to the more temperature-controlled of his boyfriends, and eloquently say, “Move.”

Keigo smiles beatifically at him, as befits someone who has already won this game so unequivocally that there’s no reason to tally the points, and scoots over. He leaves room for Enji—who’s lingering in the doorway like an uncertain, outsized ghost, as he always tends to do when Shouto is around.

“Watch out for the drool,” Keigo says. “He’s prolific. We’re very proud.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Shouto says, completely calmly. “Katsuki is very adept at navigating unusual amounts of bodily fluids.”

Keigo chokes on a hysterical laugh. Enji chokes on what sounds much more like shock, and Bakugou chokes on something that’s probably much closer to speechless rage.

Shouto smiles and taps Naru’s cheeks, which dimple under the gentle pressure of his fingertips.

Bakugou finishes seething in record time, so maybe the double-boyfriend life really suits him. Enji creeps over and fits himself into the small space remaining next to Keigo on the couch.

“Is this a quirk thing?” Bakugou asks, leaning in to examine the flow of spit. “Does it dissolve stuff?”

“It’s a hybrid thing,” Enji says, “as far as we can tell.”

Bakugou winds his arm easily between Shouto’s and itches a fingertip under Naru’s chubby baby double-chin. “Yeah? Is it mousy drool? Is that your problem?”

“Goo,” Naru says, seriously.

“Bakugou,” Shouto replies, every bit as seriously, waving his fingers again and pulling Naru’s arms with them. “Bakugou. Bah-bah—oh, that’s an idea. I think I’m going to change your name to ‘Bah-Bah-Bakugou’ in my phone.”

Naru giggles even harder as Bakugou takes up seething again.

“I think I’m going to break your arms off and stick them somewhere I won’t specify in front of a kid,” Bakugou mutters. “Where’s Idiot Number Two?”

“Outside,” Shouto says. “I’m honored to be the first place idiot. That means a lot. I know the competition is intense.”

Keigo can feel the cautious contentment radiating off of Enji as he watches Shouto relax like this.

Naru releases one of Shouto’s hands and grabs onto Bakugou’s instead. Bakugou’s face lights up.

Just like Keigo was thinking—naïve.

Naru reels him in and slimes the absolute shit out of his hand so fast that Bakugou doesn’t even have time to stop smiling before he’s drenched.

He stares at his gleaming hand for a long second.

Then he swivels around, climbs up onto one knee, and leans over the back of the couch, holding his hand clear of the cushions, and shouts down the hallway. “Hey, Deku! Get over here! I’ve got a present for you!”

The back door opens and then closes, tiny footsteps ushered over the threshold by the larger ones, and then Midoriya comes right up to the back of the couch, smiling the whole way.

Keigo honestly thinks that should qualify him for the coveted First Idiot spot, no questions asked, but he bites his tongue. Just this once.

Mostly because he doesn’t want to risk ruining the payoff.

Bakugou blinks up at Midoriya.

And then wipes his drool-slathered hand slowly, deliberately, and meticulously on Midoriya’s shirt—front, back, wrist, and then a last dab of the fingertips.

“You’re welcome,” he says.

Midoriya stares down at the silvered streaks all over his probably limited-edition All Might T-shirt for a second before looking up.

“You’re so generous, Kacchan,” he says, the tonelessness of the deadpan so drastically at-odds with his habitual exuberance that it’s even funnier than it should be.

Then, of course, his face promptly starts to glow again.

“Naru, did you do this all by yourself?” he asks. “It’s so much! You did a great job!”

Eiji bounds over, climbs up onto the couch next to Shouto, and pats Naru’s back. “Did you hear that? Deku said you’re a real good drooler!”

There is definitely something about this house.

Keigo gets another call on Wednesday, around two in the morning. Which still feels like Tuesday. But it’s not.

Important to distinguish these things.

It’s a long chase and then a short fight—at least there’s that—and then a really long slog through the bureaucracy. He’s not going to get Ryo out of bed for shit like this.

The asshat of the evening—morning—horrible o’clock homestretch—led him on a merry jaunt around the city and then through a bunch of abandoned warehouses. Cute little ventriloquism quirk that let her chuck soundwaves anywhere she wanted, which kept him on his toes and let her slip through his fingers so many times that he’s pretty fucking embarrassed, honestly. At least hardly anybody except her was awake to see it.

The adrenaline propels him through a couple things in the office that he’d been meaning to get to, weird as it is to watch the sun rising in silence on his own. He stops an adorably inept attempt at a convenience store robbery on his way out. And prevents a sleepy schoolkid from getting hit by a motorcyclist going way too fast. And literally gets a cat down out of a tree.

It tries to claw the shit out of him, but little does it know that he’s very accustomed to reluctant gratitude with a long-term payoff.

When he stumbles in through the door a little before nine and tries to remember how one removes boots without just amputating at the ankle, Enji has recently gotten back from dropping Eiji off at preschool.

By the time Keigo drags his weary—but successfully de-booted, and still-footed—body into the kitchen, Enji already has a bowl of oyakodon and a steaming cup of houjicha tea waiting, to help him wind down enough to go to sleep.

Keigo is never going to give this up. Not ever. Not for the fucking world. This is the one thing he’d let it burn for. This is the best thing he’s ever had. He never even imagined—

“Eat,” Enji says. “You look like you’re about to drop.”

“Feel like it,” Keigo manages.

Naru, settled in his high chair at the table, seems to be having a much better morning, based on the indefatigable smile and the omnipresent shine of drool on his lip. He reaches out, fingers grasping at the air. “Bah-bah-dah.”

Keigo waits for him to curl his fingers and gives him a fist bump. “Instant classic. Pithy, yet thought-provoking. You’re a marvel, kid.”

Naru coos and then reaches towards Enji, who’s obsessing over scrubbing every single last inch of the most recent bottle, as always. “Pa-pa-pa—”

A little lightbulb pings, fizzles, and blinks on in Keigo’s brain.

“Hang on,” he says. “Is he trying to say ‘Grampa’?”

Enji freezes like he’s doing an impression of the Shouto Right Side Special in charades.

“That can’t—” He clears his throat, sets down the bottle, flexes his left hand. “He’s not old enough to be doing that on purpose. It has to be—it’s a coincidence.” The hand curls into a fist and tightens until the knuckles bleach. “He can’t talk yet, in any meaningful way. He won’t have the capacity to make that kind of connection for several more months. He—”

Keigo hits the gas, zips across the kitchen to Enji, and grabs onto his left hand before he can strain his joints any worse. “Breathe. It’s okay. You’re right. He’s just babbling.” He starts prying Enji’s fingers open. They give easier these days than they used to. “It’s cute, right? He probably heard Eiji say it and just wants to be a big kid.” He reaches out with his freer hand and gently pokes Naru’s eternally tempting squishy cheek. “Slow your roll, my dude. Being big is so overrated, you have no idea.”

The gears aren’t turning in Enji’s head: they’re spinning like circular saws.

“We can fix this,” he says, voice going flat as he focuses in. There’s a merciless sharpness to it, when he’s thinking fast. He’s sounded so soft for weeks that it makes Keigo’s heart leap. Hello. There he is—the white-burning core of him, the ferocious intellect, the undauntable drive. Fuck. Hot. “We can stop it. The possibility—the risk—” He slips his hand out of Keigo’s and pulls out his phone. “Rei sent me some pictures from the wedding. I know I have a few of him.”

Keigo is, of course, fast.

Part of it is the distance. He can separate himself from moments, a lot of the time. He can hold himself high up, hover in the air above, and see where people started, and where they’re headed, and map out the route of least resistance that will take them where they’re going.

Enji is going to find pictures of Natsuo from the wedding—every single one of which will also include Hayami. In all of them, Natsuo will have his arms around her, his eyes on her, the adoration radiating out of him so thick it will stream off of the screen.

Enji will be stricken for a few seconds, and then judiciously determine that zooming in to just Natsuo will feel morbid, but showing Naru photos of his dead mom won’t be worth the potential payoff of helping him conflate Da-da with his father’s image.

The plan is still good.

The fact that Enji has a plan is even better.

This is a resource issue.

Keigo’s good at solving those.

He sits back down at the table, grabs up his phone, jumps into his texts, and finds Fuyumi near the top.

Girl help I need a picture of your brother

He must have caught her during a break or something, because he’s only had a chance to shovel two bites of his neglected breakfast into his mouth before she answers.

Which one??

Oh, right. This is one of the downsides to having an ambush family that roped him in sideways, without giving him time to develop any relevant instincts or learn the terminology.

He writes back The dumb one.

Immediately marked as read, then a second of silence, and then an unintentional act of comedy warfare:

…??? Are you trying to make a point or something?

That is… so funny. So funny. It is truly tragic that there isn’t time to enjoy it the way it deserves. If only Keigo could turn this into a proper bit and keep going with insults that apply to all of them.

Sorry!! he writes instead. I need Natsuo. A nice picture pls??? Where he’s smiling

There’s another pause. You’d think he was negotiating a hostage release here or something. Actually, those are usually easier.

Ok, Fuyumi writes. But what do you need it for?

This bunch of masochists.

Just trust me, he says.

She writes back I do trust you.

He was all geared up to say something sassy—it’s the default mode, after all—so the way that that whacks the wind right out of his sails hurts even more than it ought to.

Then she adds If you photoshop something mean, I’m going to be SO mad at you.

He gazes lovingly at his phone for a second before he spits some truth.

You are one of like three people on earth whose trust I would not betray after an invitation like that.

She sends him an eyeroll emoji, and then a heart.

And then a picture of Natsuo grinning up at the camera with a fresh, pink, newly-minted Naru cradled in his arms.

Keigo thinks…

He thinks he gets it, now.

He thinks that if someone took this away from him, he’d go fucking feral. He’d crack right down the center and split into a million jagged edges. He’d break.

The more you gain, the weaker you get.

Losing Enji would be the end of him.

The end of Keigo, anyway.

Hawks would scrape through it. Hawks would survive.

Hawks always does.

Hawks would be better off, with no feelings left—no attachments, no obligations, no home to speak of, no fleecy little ribbons of warmth and love and firelight wrapped around his wrists, his throat, his ribs. Hawks would be better off with a score to settle and nothing to lose. Hawks would be better off as a white-hot streak of reckless, fearless, concentrated power searing across the sky.

When he thinks about it, Keigo hopes he dies first—before Enji. He hopes it’s quick.

Lots of things to try not to think about, these days.

Thank you, he taps into the text log. I love you. Have a good day. No nefarious photoshopping. Scout’s honor.

She likes it.

He saves the picture and transfers it right to Enji’s phone.

Enji startles at the notification noise, raises an eyebrow at him for a second, and then immediately shifts gears to implement the unexpected advantage.

Keigo shovels some more beautiful breakfast into his mouth as Enji leans in towards Naru’s high chair and looks his four-month-old progeny’s progeny in the huge gray eyes.

“Okay,” Enji says, the determination rolling off of him in waves so strong they rival the heat. “Naru, this is important. Please pay attention.”

Naru blinks at him.

Then Naru gives him a nice, vacant toothless smile.

Enji holds the phone out, right in front of him, and taps the screen with his metal fingertip, forearms resting on the edge of the high chair tray. “This is Daddy. You know Daddy.”

Naru chortles to himself and promptly reaches out to smear a slimy hand across the screen.

Enji withdraws it only enough to wipe the spit away with his sleeve before extending it again. Keigo sends a feather for a paper towel and brings it back for him.

“Thank you,” Enji says. “Daddy, Naru. Your Daddy. Da-da. You remember.”

“Mmmmm,” Naru says, but more in a spit-bubble-production way than in a particularly thoughtful one. “Gah-bah-guuuuhg.”

“I love him,” Keigo says, meaning it. “He’s doing sentences. It’s still alien baby language, but that was clearly a complete thought.”

“He’s not an alien,” Enji mutters. He clears more gloop from the phone screen and extends his arm a little further, holding Natsuo’s picture closer to Naru’s face. “Daddy. Da-da.”

Naru kicks blithely and pats the screen a few times.

Then he looks up past it at Enji and smiles like the sun coming out.

Keigo sympathizes.

Enji sighs. “We’ll… work on it.” He starts to withdraw the phone and then hesitates. “Good job, Naru.” He reaches out and strokes the soft cloud of pale hair. “Good try.”

Naru claps his hands together—squelch—and beams.

Keigo gets about five hours of naptime (exhausted grownup edition) before the next call. When he staggers through the living room, still trying to figure out how the fly of his pants works, Eiji and Enji are sitting on the floor with one of those easy-reader books. Not-quite-four is apparently not too young to learn how to read if you’re a Todoroki, and the things that you don’t know yet simply must be destroyed.

Fuyumi also said something about Hayami working on a postgraduate degree in child psychology and starting to teach Eiji the basics of literacy on her off-time, but Keigo’s version is more fun.

Eiji flings both arms in the air upon seeing Keigo even though Japan’s arguably-finest can’t navigate clothes right now. It’s weirdly comforting.

“Hawks!” Eiji says. “Hi!”

“Hey, kiddo,” Keigo says. Buttons were invented by sadists. Everything should be velcro. World peace would surely follow. He crouches down to give Eiji a double high-five, then crab-walks the half-step required to kiss Enji’s beautiful forehead while he’s there. The latter earns him a wry almost-smiling expression. That’ll sustain him for a couple more hours. “Gotta run! But I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says. “Get the bad guys!”

Keigo misses the days when he thought it was that easy, too.

He crab-walks towards the kitchen just to make Eiji giggle, then stands up—his back and side have not recovered from the crane incident—and salutes.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he says. “Either of you.”

Enji’s arched eyebrow says everything.

But he adds the “Be careful” anyway.

Keigo kisses the tip of the cleanest feather and then flicks it across the room to touch it to Enji’s cheek. “You, too.”

As he taps into his messages to text Enji that he’s finally on his way back, the damning clock at the top of his phone tells him that the kids will be in bed before he makes it home.

Expecting it and finding out for sure make for two different kinds of tired. Generous of the world to grant him both.

The house smells fantastic when he drags himself in, though. Momentarily, he discovers the reason—Enji didn’t heat up leftovers for him. Enji saved a portion of everything while he was prepping, and then cooked it all from scratch when he got Keigo’s text.

Keigo collapses into the chair and tries to figure out if he can articulate his feelings without dissolving into a blubbering mess. There’s enough blubbering in this house these days. He can already see some shiny recent snot on Enji’s sleeve.

Enji smacks a box of strawberry milk down next to his bowl before settling down across from him.

Okay. Wolfing it down in the safety of silence it is.

Enji will understand.

Keigo feels a hell of a lot more human after he’s crammed calories into his body at high speed, with the warmth of Enji’s body heat rippling its way over to him regardless of the table in the way. This is what he’s protecting. He can do it. He has to. He will.

Enji kindly waits until he’s shoved the empty bowl away—and then sat very still for two or three minutes to make an attempt at digesting—before sliding a piece of paper across the table to him.

Keigo could read it, obviously.

But reading Enji his rights is so much more fun.

He blinks at it like he’s never seen a piece of paper before and is, furthermore, personally offended that such disgraceful dishonor could ever be imposed upon the noble tree.

“What is this?” he asks.

Enji is so cute. He doesn’t realize what a dangerous game he’s playing these days. The fact that he doesn’t even react anymore to Keigo’s usual level of bullshit has necessitated an arms race in which Keigo is constantly forced to increase the bullshittiness quotient to progressively crazier standards in order to try to get a rise out of him.

“This is an unsigned agreement,” Enji says, in the exact same voice he uses to explain to Eiji that wearing shoes to school is regrettable but necessary. “I’d like to invest half of your savings in a long-term CD, and the other half into a mutual fund—” He reaches out to tap the third paragraph with the back end of his pen. “—but I want you to have the full rationale in writing, and in order for everything to stay above-board and contractually transparent, I can’t ever act on your behalf without a signed—”

Keigo blinks at him again, bigger-eyed and slower. “I have savings?”

Enji sits back, giving him a Look that he has well and truly earned.

Because Keigo loves Enji more than the moon and the stars and the sky and feathers and flight and air and life itself, he takes a closer look at the page even though he’s trusted the man across the table from him with a hell of a lot more than the financial future of a stupid hero agency.

Enji has, of course, not just composed a succinct but straightforward summary of the proposal, a description of potential drawbacks, and a crisp and comprehensible table organizing the projected interest income over the next five years: he has also updated the address on the letterhead and somehow resolved the intractable and extraordinarily annoying text-wrapping problem they were having with the logo.

“Cool,” Keigo says, meaning it. “What if I invest in a yacht?”

A flicker of a smile glints in Enji’s eyes. He taps the pen on the table, very slowly.

“Oh, sorry,” Keigo says. “We. What if we invest in an agency yacht?”

“As your de facto financial advisor,” Enji says, levelly, “that would not be my first recommendation.”

Keigo keeps reading. One of the big wins of learning how to split his attention into a thousand individual pieces at the tender age of five is that he can follow text and be a dickhead at the same time. “Hang on—isn’t this too much? In the bank, I mean. At the end of last month—”

“Your insurance provider has been charging you a processing fee that’s normally waived for agencies as entities that serve the public,” Enji says. He holds the pen out. “I made them aware of their mistake and suggested that they return the difference in a timely fashion.”

Keigo takes the pen.

He tucks it in between his teeth.

“Pretend this is a rose,” he says, admittedly somewhat indistinctly. “I love you. Have I mentioned today that I love you?”

Enji’s mouth curves. “It’s implied in subsection C.”

“I’m going to name the yacht after you,” Keigo says. He’s getting spit on the pen. Naru’s going to sue, and Enji will probably help him. “‘Enji’s Fine-ancial Ass’. Great boat name.”

“I am not endorsing that in any official capacity,” Enji says, jaw set tight so that he doesn’t laugh.

“Come on,” Keigo says, skimming through the rest. Subsection C is a conflict of interest disclosure clause releasing him from liability for any mistakes that Enji makes, as if that’s even possible. “Just imagine Eiji in tiny loafers and a tiny sports coat and a little captain’s hat.”

Enji’s mouth curves further this time. “Play fair.”

Enji added a neat square space for the agency hanko next to the signature line, because of course he did.

It’s funny, too—there’s a sense of trust in that. Enji knows that Keigo will slap that bad boy on it tomorrow in the office, entirely because Keigo knows that it’ll make Enji happy to have the stamp.

“No chance in hell,” Keigo says in the meantime, signing too big on purpose so that it swirls way over the line. Enji’s fingers twitch. “And you know it.” He spreads his fingertips on the paper, licks the pen unambiguously all the way up the shaft, and then offers it back. “Didn’t they used to seal contracts with a kiss?”

“As your de facto HR advisor,” Enji says, evenly, “that would not be my first recommenda—”

It is all too easy for Keigo to use the feathers to boost himself up and over the table so that he can crush his mouth up against Enji’s and breathe in the steam.

It tastes amused.

Number one this, record-breaker that, sexiest man of the blah-blah-blah. Fuck all that. The greatest accomplishment of Keigo’s life is the ever-growing list of smiles that he’s coaxed out of Enji Todoroki.

It really is, though, thinking about it. All the other accolades belong to Hawks.

This one is his.

Sometimes it’s enormously to his advantage that Enji is never, ever satisfied with good or great or more than enough.

Now turns out to be one of those times.

Enji grabs Keigo out of the air, manhandles him under the left arm, and carries him all the way to the bedroom—pretending to be utterly unmoved by Keigo flailing the whole way, although it obviously doesn’t escape Keigo’s notice that his wings never once collide with a doorway, and the ostensibly rough treatment somehow never bumps his bruises from the crane.

Enji tosses him down on the bed, and the gleeful adrenaline of it feels like champagne bubbles bursting in his stomach, like Pop Rocks on the back of his tongue and soda syrup dripping down his throat.

Keigo scrambles for the pillows on his hands and knees, but Enji’s left hand grasps the back of his shirt and easily hauls him back. Enji reaches across himself to open the drawer of Keigo’s nightstand with the right hand, and just the sound of the bottle of lube clacking against the sides of the drawer and the metal of his fingers makes Keigo’s guts ignite. Enji drops the bottle on the bed, still dragging Keigo closer by his damn clothes, and closes the right hand tightly around the bases of both wings.

Keigo writhes with all the strength left in him.

Enji doesn’t budge.

Enji’s left hand clasps itself firmly over his mouth for a second, as if he needed the reminder—the resident little angels are sleeping peacefully very, very nearby. Keigo has to be quiet.

That’s even hotter. And even worse.

Enji’s left hand ranges slowly down over his back as he twists and fidgets and wriggles uselessly against the grip of the right, which still traps his wings. He fantasizes sometimes about how hard Enji could smack his ass with that hand, but the lightly-toasted red handprints that he savors tend to activate the guilt complex as it is. Maybe they can work up to it.

In the meantime, he is not fucking complaining.

He is, instead, ascending to another plane of existence, upon which everything is beautiful and nothing hurts except in the way that he wants.

Because Enji Todoroki is yanking his pants down, forcefully enough that he hears something rip, while pinning his shoulders to the mattress with that cold metal hand. The fact that he’s already hard as fuck definitely doesn’t help with the pants.

He has to be quiet. And playing the familiar pretending-to-try-to-escape game has landed him with his face shoved down into the sheets and his ass in the air, colder by the second as Enji drags his boxers down much, much, much more slowly.

Enji’s searingly warm palm smooths up over his ass from the back of his thigh all the way to his tailbone, and his whole body fucking shakes.

No screaming. No squirming. No way to release any of it, divert any of it, dispel a single molecule of the brain-addling rush.

He just has to take it.

Has to feel it.

All of it.

God, God—

His heart pounds so hard he can feel it pulsing in every last square centimeter of his skin.

He buries his face in the mattress and gnaws on his lip, choking down the sounds he wants to make. The strangled fractions of them that slither free—whimpers and whines and half-swallowed moans that catch behind his teeth and rattle him down to his curling toes—make Enji’s breath ghost over his back faster and hotter and wetter. The steam climbs his shoulder-blades and grazes the back of his neck, caresses the full breadth of all the scars—

He keeps his voice low, keeps his head down, tries to push back against Enji’s simmeringly warm left palm. “Pleasepleasepleaseplease—”

Enji gives the back of his thigh a warning tap, voice rumbling so low it resonates in Keigo’s fucking bones. “Quiet.”

He lets the keening noise building in his throat come out only half-stifled. “Enji—”

That gets him a sharp, searingly hot slap directly across the ass, and a hiss of steam up his spine. “Shut up.”

The laugh tangles up with a gasp and sticks in his throat, but before he can try to set it free, the sound of the cap on the lube bottle popping open makes every single fucking feather tingle at once.

The lube always warms up quick on Enji’s fingers for obvious reasons, but he takes advantage of the first few seconds to drag a cold, slick line down the cleft of Keigo’s ass, hauling on the wings to hold him up when he tries to arch his back. Something completely fucking incoherent makes its way out of Keigo’s mouth, but apparently it’s muffled enough to pass muster.

Enji finger-fucks him fast and deep—the way he always begs for and almost never gets, because foreplay or whatever. The heat of Enji’s huge, beautiful fingers is mind-meltingly incredible, gut-boilingly intense—they punch his breath out of him in hitching gasps and groans, and no amount of twisting or bucking or writhing unseats either of those heavy hands. All he can do is curl his fists into the sheets and let it drown him, bury him, obliterate him, the tidal wave of transcendence slamming into every nerve again and again and again and again.

He gets desperately close embarrassingly quick, but Enji won’t hold it against him. For one thing, Enji is too busy holding him down.

He never stopped to wonder, in the old days, the early days, what it might actually be like to stay with someone long-term. There wasn’t anyone who interested him enough to make him think about it, up until the wisps of wild daydreaming coalesced into an impossible, unbelievable, terrifyingly tangible shape.

Enji knows him, now.

Enji knows what he wants. Knows what he likes. Knows how to make him howl his lungs out, knows how to make him shudder, how to make him screech, how to leave him a trembling wreck, how to stoke him up to such heights of euphoria that he walks on air for days.

Enji is doing the trembling wreck thing right now.

Enji is hollowing him out and breaking him down to extract the venom from him before it spreads.

Enji is cramming him full of so much brain-splintering goodness and bone-shaking pleasure that there won’t be any room left in him for the poison of the day, of the week—for the thoughts, for the life he leads outside this bed, this room, these walls.

Thin walls.

Enji leans in over him, all that firm and scathingly hot gorgeousness pressing in against his back, the hard metal hand still clenched around his wings so tight that the feathers sizzle like spires of static. The only thing they can fixate on is Enji’s steam-wet breath, the thudding of his heartbeat, the creak of the steel in his arm—

Enji’s staggeringly hot fingers ram Keigo’s prostate again, and he chokes on his his next breath so hard it wrenches out a wail.

“Quiet,” Enji hisses, but instead of stopping, he pushes harder, further, more— “Are you—”

Keigo nods feverishly into the crumpled sheets, traps the whine in his throat—lets the heat of Enji’s breath and body shiver through him, shake him like a ragdoll, burn him down to ash.

Enji’s left hand drives deeper.

The metal hand releases Keigo’s wings and curls itself tightly around his right wrist.

Enji pries Keigo’s hand out of the sheets, jerks his arm down, and wraps his own fingers around his straining, leaking cock.

He doesn’t want to know what kind of noise he makes.

Everything goes pearl-white, blindingly bright—too much to bear, for a second; too much to stand—too much glory to contain inside a single human being, too much delicious gratification to hold inside his fragile skin without just shattering, too much, too much—

But the warm body folding in around his even as he gasps for air feels so—

Right—

That he clings on.

And comes down.

And comes back.

And slowly remembers how to breathe.

Enji is methodically stroking his sweaty hair out of his face. When Keigo’s eyes finally concede to focus on him, Enji raises an eyebrow, which means Are you okay?

Keigo is much better than okay, and also much worse, and also much less. He’s been scoured out. He feels like the simplest, starkest, cleanest version of himself.

Other than the pants around his ankles and the cum on his stomach, but. Y’know. In principle.

“Guh,” he says, which he thinks is about the closest he’ll be able to get for another ninety seconds.

Enji hears it for what it is. Enji usually does.

The slight tension leaves his shoulders, and his eyebrow stays arched.

“You sound like Naru,” Enji says.

Keigo is already wheezing out a laugh as he shoves Enji weakly in the chest. “Fuck off.”

“Fine,” Enji says, gathering him up into both arms again. “We can fuck off together. To the shower.”

“Sexy shower,” Keigo mutters. It’ll be a miracle if he stays awake long enough to brush his teeth.

Enji nudges the door open, keeping his voice low. “Haven’t you had enough?”

Keigo leans his head against the perfect, perfect tits and breathes out slow. “Never.”

The sleep helps.

The fact that the next day is much more normal, and moves at a pace that does not feel especially electrifyingly frenetic, helps too.

Keigo finds his feet and spreads his wings and holds his head high. He’s never had much choice.

And it’s easier, with someone standing behind you—with a warm hand spread across your back.

He makes it home at such a shockingly decent hour that Enji hasn’t even started dinner yet, and is instead still sitting on the living room carpet with the sprogs, idly trading wet blocks with Naru as he alternates between consulting crap and obsessive childcare research.

Keigo cuts behind the couch to eliminate two and a half steps from his journey to the cozy hoodies stashed in the bedroom.

And he turns as he goes.

It’s not that he’s looking at Enji’s screen in a meaningful way—it’s not mistrustful. It’s just… a bunch of other things. It’s the old information-gathering compulsion masked in noisy nosiness, compounded by the fact that he just genuinely wants to find out every single thing there is to know about Enji Todoroki. If he could listen in on thoughts—

Well. Maybe that one wouldn’t be so good.

But it’s just a habit to glance at his laptop screen while walking by. It’s not intended to be invasive.

And today it’s weirdly sort of surprising anyway.

“Whoa,” Keigo says without thinking as the bright colors enrapture the last few fragments of self-control still occupying his brain. “What’s that?”

Enji doesn’t bat a beautiful eyelash, let alone criticize him for snooping.

Instead, he beckons. “See for yourself.”

Keigo does not have to be told twice.

He plops down next to the love of his life, his reason for being, his personal furnace, and considers the contents of the screen.

It appears to be the homepage for some kind of children’s museum located on the other side of town, complete with extensive learning exhibits and art projects and puppet shows and stuff, and even more extensive playgrounds.

“I think you’re going to have to pry Eiji back out of there with a crowbar,” Keigo says.

Eiji’s head snaps up. “Hafta what me?”

“He was speaking figuratively,” Enji says, in the special gentle voice he uses for them that turns several of Keigo’s internal organs into putty. “Don’t worry.”

Alas, Eiji is a Todoroki. Worrying is twined deep into his DNA.

For now, though, he nods hesitantly and returns his attention to the all-important task of constructing a little square building out of Legos. It doesn’t appear to have any doors or windows, but Keigo doesn’t know how well suggestions about architectural choices and code regulations will be received this close to bedtime, so he keeps his mouth shut for a change.

“I was thinking of going Saturday morning,” Enji says, attention back on the screen. “Maybe stay for lunch, depending on how the energy and crankiness levels are progressing, and then come back for N-A-P-T-I-M-E.”

Keigo leans against his shoulder. The homepage image fades from a picture of an utterly delighted child at the top of a long slide to an utterly delighted child watching a rubber ball roll down pieces of a ramp arranged on a foam wall. The second kid has highly evident shark teeth and deep black eyes, with a scattering of little scales on his forehead.

“An ingenious plan for peace and unity,” Keigo says, “as always.”

Enji shifts. “Only if it works. Do you have Saturday off?”

Enji said something about Takiya being out of town this week for some sort of shrink conference—which, incidentally, sounds like absolute hell. Do they all go around analyzing each other like some kind of psychiatric battle royale?

Hardly bears thinking about.

It does neatly free up Enji’s Saturday afternoon, though.

Except—

Keigo glances up at him. “Wait—you want me to come?”

Enji’s brow furrows, which always squishes the scar slightly. “Of course I want you to come.” He pauses. “Unless you’d prefer n—”

“I’ll get Saturday,” Keigo blurts out. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Enji eyes him. “Alternatively—I know this is a wild logical leap, but bear with me—you could take a day off and rest.”

“Fact of the matter is,” Keigo says, settling in against his shoulder again, “I’m a greedy you-know-what.” The magic of euphemism: Enji can fill in his favorite. “I wanna have it all. Maybe I’ll just participate in N-A-P-T-I-M-E when we get back. In solidarity, you understand.”

“Generous of you,” Enji says.

Keigo rests his head on Enji’s shoulder and beams. “It’s what I do.”

Keigo gets Saturday.

He doesn’t even have to use force.

Once they’ve finally succeeded in dragging the whole caravan out the door about as early as is possible when you’re operating on toddler time, they paint what Keigo would delicately describe as an adorable fucking picture and no mistake.

He slapped on his slick black beanie with the flame kanji logo embroidered in silver on the folded brim, and he has the wings crammed under one of his nicer bomber jackets. Enji is wearing a leather jacket, which he knows damn well makes him look fuckable as hell: every time he puts it on, it’s a form of revenge for Keigo eventually convincing him that owning more than two pieces of outerwear was not a crime. The tables have well and truly tabled.

The kids are significantly cuter than buttons, and Keigo has seen some pretty cute buttons in his day. Eiji has taken to wearing little toddler-sized turtlenecks—Keigo can’t imagine where he got that idea—and can’t be parted from his Shouto jacket by any power known to humankind. Naru has tiny navy blue corduroy pants and a tiny pale blue sweater with a cutesy gray mouse’s face on the front. It’s gonna look even better covered in drool.

They look like a family.

Well—they look like a functional, quasi-traditional, happy family. Is the thing.

On the rare occasions that he stopped to let himself think about it—let himself fruitlessly envision some idealistic, idyllic, cliché-as-hell little future—Keigo had always thought that it would hurt. He thought that he’d be bitter. He’d thought that it would scrape its teeth over all the old scars and cut them open.

But it doesn’t.

He just feels… warm. Feels good. Feels like a couple million fucking yen and counting.

Parking is a pain in the ass, but this place looked worth it, and Keigo doesn’t begrudge the time they spend walking in the brisk air, Enji cradling Naru carefully in his right arm so that he and Keigo can each take one of Eiji’s hands and swing him back and forth in between them every time he deliberately falls back behind them and then runs forward and jumps into the air.

Especially after the photo the other day, there’s already Secret Hawks Lovechild discourse strewn across the internet—which is twice as funny because both the kids are such obvious carbon copies of Natsuo, and Natsuo is such an obvious monochrome remix of Enji.

But at this point, they might as well make it worse.

The girl who sells them tickets gives Keigo the I swear I know you from somewhere side-eye, but they escape through the entrance doors without incident.

And then a giant, multilayered world of kid-sized science and art and fun stuff awaits.

Eiji just turns around in a slow circle with his mouth open, trying to take in all the colors and the hallways and tunnels and funky-shaped corridors leading off to other things he can discover. Keigo’s pretty much in the same boat, although he does manage to keep his mouth shut, shockingly enough.

None too surprisingly, Eiji gives in first to the allure of the enormous playground sprawling out ahead of them—a tantalizing behemoth with doorways and windows and metal ladders and enclosed bridges, which rises two and a half stories high and spans more than half of the atrium they’re standing in.

He takes two steps towards it, hesitates, and looks hopefully up at Enji. “Can I, Grampa?”

“Yes,” Enji says. “Just be carefu—”

Eiji is off like a shot.

Keigo sends a subtle, slender feather streaking after him, tucking it under the hood of his jacket as he clambers up and starts exploring. It’s only a matter of about a minute before he meets some more kids, and they immediately start babbling at each other, then go tearing off along one of the bridges together. His feet stay steady, and his balance holds—for now, anyway. Keigo keeps the feather close.

Before long, he’s parted ways with the first cohort, then met another little girl who chatters at him in English, seeming completely undeterred by the fact that he doesn’t understand. He follows her around several corners, up some stairs, and over to a balcony that overlooks the entrance.

Keigo took a step nearer to Enji on instinct as he focused in on the feather—because Enji would protect him if anything came for him while his attention was divided. Because Enji is always looking out for him. Because Enji always has his back.

This close, he can hear the combination of relief and affection in Enji’s exhale as Eiji leans against the balcony railing, beaming down at them and waving wildly.

Keigo grins so hard it hurts his face as they wave back.

When Eiji has pelted around pretty much every part of the structure, he comes bounding back, recounting his exploits in considerable detail, and then grabs Keigo’s hand and leads the way down one of the corridors that looked most interesting from above. They stop to check out a display exhibit where you can haul on a rope to try to raise the same weights with the aid of progressively more pulleys. Keigo starts snickering and holds his arms out for Naru. Enji rolls his eyes, but Keigo knows that look, and loves it more than just about anything.

“Grampa!” Eiji gasps at the effortlessness with which Enji raises the weight in the first and least helpful section, which Eiji couldn’t even budge. “You’re so strong!”

“It’s just practice,” Enji says, which is understating matters somewhat, but in a toddler-appropriate way. “It’s interesting, isn’t it? The way that changing the direction of the force helps so much to move the weight?”

Eiji bounces on the balls of his feet, eyes bright. “Yeah!”

Enji smiles. Naru slimes Keigo’s collar. Eiji whirls in a circle again, eyes wide with the effort of trying to take it all in.

“What do you want to do next?” Enji asks.

Eiji swallows, stares, and whispers “Everything.”

Todorokis, man.

Eiji lives up to the hype and fulfills the fear immediately in the next room, which is themed around travel and transportation and global community or something. One of the features is a giant globe, which has an old-school telephone receiver connected to the base, and provides little star-shaped push buttons set into dozens of different countries, so that you can listen to someone greeting you in that place’s native language. Eiji meticulously presses every single one of them, solemnly and intently holding the phone up to his ear the whole way. It takes, like, ten solid minutes to go through them all.

Next is a little water feature thing with plexiglass walls that simulates how maritime locks work to raise and lower boats, with a looped movie running on the wall above showing an overhead view of the real thing. Eiji takes that job extremely seriously, too. Naru keeps reaching for the water, which has got to be a bacterial paradise, which is presumably why Enji moves a little bit ahead to distract him with some more screens mounted in the wall, where you can swap out a bunch of different types of traditional dress on virtual paper dolls. Naru puts the models through their paces by slamming as many of the buttons as Enji will let him reach and reaping the brightly-colored benefits.

Eiji also gets very invested in the tiny wind tunnel with its very tiny airplane, complete with child-friendly diagrams explaining lift. Keigo shows him how to mimic takeoff with your palm out flat. Eiji listens closely, letting Keigo guide his hand, and then his eyes go wide.

“Is that how you fly?” he asks.

“Not exactly,” Keigo says. “It’s a little different when your wings move, and I don’t have an engine. But it’s still the same old physics, so some of it is the same. Maybe they’ll have an exhibit about birds, and we can find out, huh?”

“I hope so,” Eiji murmurs, and Keigo catches Enji smiling at them in the soft, completely unguarded way that he never does.

Fuck.

The next room has a ton of musical instruments, most of them attached to the walls and modified to be significantly more durable than their regular real-life counterparts. There are pretty, stylized illustrations behind them showing how they’re played, with plaques specifying when they were invented, and kid-level explanations of how the sounds are created and transmitted. Intelligently, they haven’t provided any wind instruments, but the rest are, to put it delicately, cool as hell.

Eiji is as considered as ever, moving thoughtfully from one instrument to the next, carefully examining each artwork before he even touches the displays. At this rate, Keigo thinks there’s a high chance that Enji’s going to cry before the day is out.

First, though, it looks like he’ll get to watch Eiji making up a clumsy, wonderful little skipping scramble dance—in order to try to follow the moving light prompts of the oversized piano keys laid out on the floor. There’s a big circular dial on the wall that you can turn to different songs, so Keigo flicks it to a slower one to try to take it easy on the poor thing.

Only it turns out that this setting requires two people, because some of the keys that you’re supposed to jump on simultaneously are way too far apart for baby legs to reach.

“We got this!” Keigo calls, propelling himself with just a little bit of feather help to land on the opposite end of the keyboard. “You take that side!”

“Okay!” Eiji yells back, only to immediately stumble and tip, arms windmilling—

But Keigo catches his hand, obviously, and rights him, obviously, and then twirls him around before setting him right back down on the next key that lights up.

Eiji starts giggling so uncontrollably that Keigo keeps hold of his hand, stretching out to reach his own keys when he has to, as Eiji bounces around after his. There’s a screen mounted on the wall giving them sparkly shooting stars and congratulatory messages when they time their steps right, so it’s basically DDR Junior, but Eiji is loving it, so Keigo’s down. When Eiji catches his breath enough to start getting the hang of the rhythm, Keigo turns it up to a slightly quicker tempo again, and Eiji turns into a little jumping bean.

When they finish out the fastest song, Eiji is panting from the exertion but glowing with the triumph, and he throws both hands in the air and then throws them around Keigo’s knees to hug him. “We did it!”

Okay. Maybe it was premature to expect Enji to be the one weeping over this little fucking angel today.

“We sure did!” Keigo says, forcing his voice to stay steady as he ruffles Eiji’s hair and then holds both hands out for high-fives.

It’s only when they’ve smacked palms that he notices that Enji has been filming the whole damn thing on his phone.

He sticks his tongue out at the camera. Enji blinks back innocently, then sticks his tongue out at Naru.

“Paaaaaah,” Naru says, patting Enji’s cheek.

Fair point.

Enji gets his comeuppance in the next room, though—set up in front of a huge window is a perpetual motion machine that takes an inestimable number of colorful plastic balls on the adventure of a lifetime, carrying and slinging and dropping and shooting them around a series of silver tracks so complicated that it looks like an entire amusement park.

Enji walks right up to it wordlessly, and his eyes start flicking back and forth. Naru reaches out, and Enji leans down so that he can press his hand to the plexiglass. When he pats at it and then withdraws his hand to reinsert his fingers into his mouth for safekeeping, he leaves a trail of drool behind, which does not exactly come as a surprise.

Enji’s eyes don’t even stray from the interior as he pulls out a paper tissue and meticulously wipes the goop away.

“C’mon,” Keigo says, tugging on Eiji’s hand, not bothering to try to tamp down the grin. “They’re gonna be there for a while.”

He slips a small feather into Enji’s pocket before they go, though. Just in case.

He and Eiji galumph around as much of the place as they can get to before the pressing need for a lunchtime vittles overcomes their enthusiasm. The anatomy section is particularly cool, with lots of funky fake organs and a bunch of transparent plastic windows with different systems marked out on one side, so that kids can stand behind them and look in the mirror and see approximately where their bones would be. There are even some tactful footnotes about quirk biology and embracing difference and all that.

Which feels especially pertinent when they step into a very awesome dimly-lit side room with a live heat capture—which is being projected onto a screen so that they can see their own outlines, marked out in neon colors based on relative temperatures, in real time.

Enji was right about Eiji. His core is way warmer than Keigo’s, even in spite of all the feathers crammed up against Keigo’s back.

To which effect—

He glances back, makes sure the doorway’s still empty, and stretches out the wings.

They ripple on the readout like mist—faint and ghostly and weirdly beautiful against the brighter colors of the rest of him.

“So cool!” Eiji says, and then he’s jumping up and down and waving his arms to watch the heat map image do the same, which turns into another funny little kid-dance, shaking himself around and bouncing back and forth.

Keigo knows the cautionary tale of “Safety Dance”. He’s not gonna let this kid jam alone.

The giggles alone would be worth it even if it wasn’t so much fun.

They regroup with Enji and Naru for lunch—which is slightly overpriced, but not nearly as bad as it could be. Keigo would say it’s a little chilly to be sitting outside, but he’s got down insulation shoved into the back of his jacket again, and two of the other occupants of their picnic table are walking, talking heat lamps, so they’ll probably be fine.

Keigo makes himself eat slowly—makes himself resist the impulse to shovel food in and gulp it down before anybody can take it away. He’s noticed Eiji eating faster, lately, for no apparent reason except possibly imitation.

He knows this is part of what keeps Enji up at night a lot of the time. And he gets it. There are a lot of things he doesn’t want to impart to these two, either. The survival instincts should die with him. He doesn’t want them to learn those. He never wants them to need them.

He sets his chopsticks down to force a breather and drums his palms on the tabletop instead.

“This place,” he says, “absolutely rocks. I wanna live here. Can we move in?”

Enji barely manages to suppress the smile. “Wait until you find out that they have museums for adults.”

Keigo makes a particularly good face at him. “Ha. Ha. I’ve been to tons of those, for stupid socialite stuff and awards and whatever. They just have art that’s weird and these teeny-tiny plaques you have to lean over and squint at to read so you can pretend you understand the weird art.” He flings his arms out around them. “This place has giant bubble wands.”

Enji was gearing up for a reply.

He pauses.

He bounces Naru gently on his knee.

He and Naru exchange glances. Naru gazes solemnly up at him—which is always justified—and then equally solemnly places one wet hand on his cheek. Imparted drool gleams in the sexy beard.

Keigo would have gone about it the same way, honestly.

Before he can find out if Enji will let him, the love of his life looks up at him with enormous gravitas.

“Where?” Enji says. “Where are the bubbles?”

Keigo and Eiji lead the way to bubble paradise.

Naru loves the fuck out of them.

Keigo spends fifteen solid minutes—with intermittent assistance from Eiji—on the arduous trial-and-error process of finally making a bubble big enough to wrap over Enji and Naru together for a split second before it pops and sprays soap shrapnel all over the place.

Enji instinctively shielded Naru’s face with his hand, but—by the open-mouthed awestruck expression—Naru didn’t miss the show.

And Enji… laughs.

Again.

God. God.

Life is good.

The shrill noise that emanates from Keigo’s pocket moments later—before Eiji has even finished running in a circle around him, waving a bubble wand like a conductor as he goes—almost sounds a little bit reluctant.

But that won’t change what it means.

Enji knows it, too. Enji looks over at him, and it’s so many different I’m sorrys at once that Keigo can’t even pull them apart from each other.

There’s nothing to be sorry for.

There’s nothing to regret.

He always gets more than he expected, these days.

He whips his jacket off and crams the collar into Enji’s hand, pushing himself up on his toes in the same motion to kiss Enji’s cheek right at the edge of the scar. He whispers the “Love you” as loud as he dares.

The feathers, unmuffled, perking up and piquing, alert him to the fact that some parent nearby has already started murmuring.

Fuck it. Life is also short. Every day is a day he could die, and he’s not going to do it wishing he’d done less, said less, loved less. He’s just not.

He leans down and plants a kiss on the back of Naru’s gooey little hand, then one on top of Eiji’s head.

“Be good,” he says.

Enji meets his eyes as he straightens up.

“Be careful,” Enji says.

Keigo knows what it means. He’s always known.

He smiles.

Then he takes off, and the air opens up its arms.

At least it’s not too long, this time. And nobody dies.

The worst part is honestly that he almost loses the beanie in the fight. He loves this thing, and—for obvious reasons—they don’t make them anymore.

He suspects Enji might have turned one up out of thin air for him, if it had come to that, but it’s better that it didn’t.

His shirt’s a little shredded, and he’s at the stage of exhaustion where his vision keeps unfocusing if he doesn’t concentrate, but as soon as he calls out a greeting from the genkan, Eiji runs over to tell him about the dinosaur skeleton they had at the museum, and Enji orders food in for once, which frees his arms up from cooking and makes them available for wrapping around Keigo on the couch while they stare up at another incomprehensible kids’ show and wait for the delivery.

“How’s it coming?” Keigo asks. “With our yacht?”

Enji slow-blinks. “Swimmingly.”

Keigo deserved that. It pries a grin up out of him. “Can’t wait.”

After dinner is always good. After dinner Keigo likes. He feels less enervated by a significant margin when he has some food in him. He has to take one more phone call from Enji’s home office to iron out some details from earlier, but then the evening is his to spend sprawled on the couch, if he wants to.

Which he does.

As he starts through the living room in pursuit of more serviceable raiment for this auspicious purpose, Enji is frowning at his laptop screen, all glasses and gorgeousness, from his new favorite place on the floor in front of the couch. It must be killing his back.

More importantly at the moment, though, Enji looks concerned, verging on distressed—albeit in a hot way. As with everything.

He either feels Keigo’s eyes on him or puts the longstanding unsung psychic powers to use and glances up.

The way he always looks over the top of his glasses is just—

God. The world is full of wonders, if you wait it out.

“What do you think of Spryte?” Enji asks.

Keigo shrugs. The guy’s got a decent handle on his quirk, whether or not having giant elastic fairy wings that you can repurpose into shields and weapons and whatever is kind of stealing Keigo’s thunder. He’s disproportionately arrogant about his prospects despite being relatively new to the scene.

But Enji’s obviously not asking about him because he’s a competitor—Enji must be asking about him because he’s a client.

Honesty is the best policy, blah blah.

“He’s an idi—” Keigo remembers, in the nick of time, that we spell out inappropriate words in this house these days. He’s counting down the hours until Eiji memorizes them and starts spelling insults in other toddlers’ faces because he’s figured out that they mean something bad. “He is… not an especially intellectually advanced individual.”

Enji’s eyes hang on his for another second before they drop to the screen again, and Enji nods. “Thank you.”

Before Keigo can humbly request spillage of the relevant tea, Enji is pulling out his phone, dialing, and holding it up to his ear. Even if the feathers couldn’t hear it ringing—and ringing—and ringing—Keigo would have been able to extrapolate as much from the way that Enji’s frown gradually deepens.

The line clicks.

“It’s Spryte! I’m a busy man; make it quick.”

Enji’s expression of profound distaste speaks delightful volumes, but he keeps his voice distinctly professional.

“This is Todoroki,” he says.

It’s strange to hear it, even though it’s true.

It’s not Endeavor. Not anymore.

“It’s Saturday, at—” Enji glances at the corner of his laptop screen. “—seven fifteen. I need to talk to you about your balance sheet. Call me as soon as you can.”

He hangs up.

Keigo would specify that business Enji is still so hot, but all of the Enjis are hot. It is a fundamental truth of the universe. Life cut Keigo a break with this one—a real break. No catch, no qualifiers, no surprise subscription fee. No bullshit. No take-backs. No lies.

And the fact that Enji seems to think that all of the hims are hot—with the possible exception of the closely-guarded set of Keigos that are small and sort of crumbly and don’t know how to hold their shape, which aren’t especially hot but activate a ferocious protective affection that’s knee-weakening in its own right—is mind-blowing. Earth-shattering. Life-sustaining.

Also, it’s just fucking fun. Enji has wrapped both arms around him at his absolute least and his absolute worst. Enji doesn’t even bat an eyelash at the weird shit anymore. Keigo strongly suspects that he secretly enjoys being messed with.

In fact, he probably needs some messing-with right now, to help take his mind off of Spryte. Heroism is a twenty-four-hour job.

“Please excuse me,” Keigo says, as sleazily as possible, trailing his fingertips over the breadth of Enji’s shoulders and then following up with a wink. “I’m going to go slip into something a little more comfortable.”

Enji gives him the blank stare. “A hoodie and sweats?”

“Well, yeah,” Keigo says.

Enji cracks a smile.

When Keigo reemerges decked in Cozy For One: Full Comfling, Eiji has curled up on the floor next to Enji, scribbling away at a coloring book page. Keigo would bet all the farms that Eiji has meticulously colorized that this is his version of doing paperwork to keep Enji company while he’s knee-deep in consulting shit.

Eiji glances up, though, when Keigo walks in, and starts squinting at the front of his hoodie—which is an old limited-edition one from right between the debut of Endeavor’s new suit and the imposition of the scar. You can’t actually tell, since the image of him has the mask in the way, but collectors know what’s what.

“What hero is that?” Eiji asks. “You have lots of orange stuff, but that’s not Dynamight.”

“Nope!” Keigo says. He drops to his knees, grabs the bottom hem, and stretches it out—gently. This sucker is irreplaceable in every possible way. “This is Endeavor.”

He can feel that Enji is watching him carefully, but he pretends not to notice.

They talked about it.

Enji is getting so damn good at talking about things before the things in question fester and sublimate and spit acid and make him withdrawn and tetchy and resentful. Keigo wants to buy Takiya expansive fruit baskets almost as often as he wants to gank the guy.

Anyway, it wasn’t even just that they talked about it: Enji brought it up.

And what Enji said is that Endeavor is not a secret.

Endeavor is not forbidden, or verboten, or mummified underneath a gag order.

It’s not so much that Enji doesn’t want Eiji to know—it’s that he doesn’t want Eiji to think of him as a hero. He wants this one thing in Eiji’s life to seem normal.

He wants to be Grampa.

Not some has-been burnout ex-pro who had to bow out when he started falling to pieces.

Keigo had slapped a hand over Enji’s mouth after that part—maybe a little too hard—and said several important things in a very stern voice, and they’d come to an agreement that they could live with their differing opinions on that particular question. Again.

Bottom line, though—

The bottom line is that Keigo gets to tell his favorite kid about his favorite topic.

Eiji crawls closer and tilts his head back and forth, examining every inch of the sweatshirt design wide-eyed. A true connoisseur. Keigo is keeping him forever. Sorry, not sorry, Natsuo.

“Is he new?” Eiji asks.

Keigo is the most merciful man alive.

He does not say He’s old. But I am so, so into that.

Saint behavior.

“Nah,” he manages instead. “He was the number one right before me! And he was keeping up with All Might for years and years before that. You know All Might?”

Eiji hesitates and then nods slowly.

There’s something bizarrely reassuring about that. Eras and trials and horrors come and go, but life just goes on. People forget. The sun keeps rising, the world keeps turning, and the people holding it up gradually change. Acceptance might be as close as they’ll ever get to peace. Everything is always moving, and it’s always the same.

“He was way better than All Might,” Keigo says, shamelessly, and not just because he wants dick. “All Might just gamed the stats.”

Enji clears his throat in a way that does not especially strongly imply a promise of dick donation.

“Anyway,” Keigo says, brightening his voice, “he’s been my favorite since I was your age.”

Eiji’s eyes somehow go even wider, and his mouth falls open. “You were my age?” he asks, awestruck. “When? How?”

Ouch.

Keigo tries very hard to grin. “Dang, kid, just how old do you think I am?”

“Old,” Eiji says, seriously, staring up at him. “Older than Daddy.”

The worst part is that he’s… right. Isn’t he?

Oh. Oh, boy. Hard nope. Don’t like that.

“Okay,” Keigo croaks out. “Moving right along. Endeavor. Endeavor was the best.”

Enji’s eyes are tired, and a little sad. Keigo doesn’t have to look to know it. It’s almost always true.

Eiji reaches out and touches his fingertip gently to some of the outlined yellow flames. “In Japan?”

“In the whole world,” Keigo says. “If you ask me, anyway. He paved the way—for me, and for practically everybody else. He changed the way people think about quirks. He changed the way people think about heroes, and the way they operate, and the way they get treated. I honestly don’t think anybody would’ve accepted so many heteromorphs in the top ten—let alone the top five, let alone the top spot—if he hadn’t carved out his place like he did. He saved me so many times I can’t even count that high. He changed the whole world.”

Eiji’s eyes haven’t left the sweater for a second. “How come he’s not on TV? Mommy likes—”

He stops. He looks stricken.

Keigo’s heart breaks for him. To have a mom you love, a mom who’s awesome, and then to have to lose her—

“Mommy—was—she—” Eiji’s little mouth works for a second. “She liked watching heroes on TV. But I never saw him. He’s on fire?”

“Yeah!” Keigo says. “Literally as well as figuratively.”

He bites back the hot piece of ass joke. Truly, he should be canonized.

“Like Uncle Shouto,” Eiji says, thoughtfully. “Right?”

Keigo also bites back the wince. He doesn’t look at Enji. “Pretty close.”

Eiji looks up from the sweatshirt, so it’s a good thing Keigo got the better of the wince, in the end. “Is it because the fire’s too hot, and he’d melt the cameras? So they can’t put him on TV?”

Scientific thinking. At least the enormous swell of pride should distract Enji from the existential crisis for a second or two.

Keigo flops down and sits cross-legged so that his feet won’t fall asleep from parking his ass on his own ankles for too long. “That’s a really good idea. But he always had better control of the heat than that. He used to be on TV a lot! You know how All Might got hurt real bad and had to stop even though he was still number one?”

Eiji blinks. “He… did?”

Okay. Bullet dodged. Keigo was starting to be afraid he was going to back himself into a corner—one where Eiji unwittingly demonstrated that All Might’s legacy has embedded itself so deeply in the public consciousness that a three-year-old still knows his story despite never even having heard Enji’s hero name.

“Yeah,” Keigo says. “He had a big, big fight with a super, super gnarly bad guy, and… it didn’t go so well. I mean, he won. Barely. With some help.”

Eiji’s eyes are very wide. “Oh. Is he okay?”

Christ alive, is that a complicated question. “He’s… around. The point is—he had to quit being a hero before he wanted to, because he got beat up so bad making sure that everybody else was okay.”

Eiji’s genuine distress makes Keigo’s heart hurt again. This kid barely remembered who All Might was, a second ago, and now he’s all worried about the guy. “Oh.”

Keigo takes as deep a breath as he thinks he can get away with. “That’s what happened to Endeavor, too,” he says, keeping his voice low and level. “He got hurt really bad saving me and a whole lot of other people. And he tried to keep going for a long time, but it was—it was really hard. It was harder than anybody could’ve gotten through, I think.”

Eiji now looks very worried about Endeavor, too. Good. “What happened to him? After it got too hard?”

Keigo disregards the intensity of Enji’s eyes on him. It’s probably… partly good. A little bit good. Enji will hear the love in Keigo’s voice, whether or not the subject matter still rankles a little bit. “He retired. Like a lot of heroes do.”

Eiji mouths the word, so Keigo knows what’s coming. “What’s ‘retired’? Is it extra tired? I bet he was extra tired after saving everybody, right?”

“Pretty close again,” Keigo says. “‘Retired’ means somebody officially stopped doing the job that they had before, and they’re not working all day long anymore.” He knows Hayami’s parents aren’t around—he wouldn’t be sitting where he is if they were—and he doubts Eiji had any particularly soul-searching conversations with the elderly woman living next door to Natsuo’s place who made the call, so there’s no one to reference. “Usually people do it when they’re a little older, but a lot of heroes just work so hard that they need a break.”

Eiji nods slowly, processing that. He looks at Endeavor’s face on the sweatshirt, and then up at Keigo’s. “You work really hard.”

This goddamn kid.

“I’m tryin’,” Keigo says, maybe a little bit weakly. “I’ve still got a couple good years left in me. Maybe I’ll retire after that.”

Eiji considers the sweatshirt again, his gaze tracking meticulously up over the contours of the mask of flame.

It’s staggeringly cute and fascinatingly weird to see a tiny little mind sharpening itself in real time—to constantly catch flickers of the way that Enji thinks, the way he analyzes evidence, the way he turns things over, the way he problem-solves—in the wide green eyes of a child.

Endeavor’s never really going to go away.

Eiji considers the shape on the sweatshirt for several more seconds before he looks up. “After heroes retire,” he says, “then what do they do?”

Keigo makes eye contact with Enji over the top of his little head.

“They live,” he says.

It’s not—

Well.

It is as bad as he expected.

But not in the way that he expected it.

Ain’t life a mean little motherfucker?

Eiji was right. Enji just looks tired—exhausted. And a little sad.

He closes his laptop, sets it aside, and gently touches the top of Eiji’s head as he shifts past him, sinking onto one knee to lean in towards Keigo’s ear.

Keigo is about to get bitched out in front of a toddler. Enji’s going to tell him how uncalled-for that was, hiss at him that he somehow managed to violate all the boundaries even though they discussed this in painstaking detail, snarl at him that he betrayed the spirit of his promise even if he followed the letter of the—

Enji kisses his ear, very softly, and rests his temple against Keigo’s for the length of half a dozen heartbeats.

Then he gets up and ghosts off into the hall—into Naru’s room, the feathers dutifully report, to change the tiny sheet in the crib and swap out all the blankets for freshly-folded ones. The spit-spewer himself contentedly continues nomming on one of the plush pieces of the play gym.

Can you wash those things? Keigo doesn’t figure that Febreeze would do it.

Eiji’s eyes track Enji’s departure, too, and then he considers Endeavor again.

“He’s pretty cool,” he says.

Keigo smiles. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Chapter 4 Notes:

A possibly over-cautious content warning just in case: there's some persistent anxiety from Enji in this chapter about children getting gravely injured, so those kinds of images come up in his thoughts several times in some detail.
So yeah! 30K of Enji grappling with that and a whole lot of other things. :')
Also, for the record, y'all are so amazing. Thank you so much for reading this one! ♥

Chapter Text

Benefit of the doubt.

Pull back, breathe out, focus on the facts. Don’t assume intentions. Don’t assign blame.

Spryte’s personal cell might not forward to the office phone. He might not have an office phone—landlines have gone out of style, and he seems the type to care. He might have had to go dark temporarily for something delicate or underground. He might be in the hospital as a result of a situation requiring similar confidentiality, which would explain why Enji hasn’t seen anything in the news.

Enji leaves another voicemail on Sunday, follows up with an email, and sends a follow-up to that on Monday morning. There are innocuous reasons. He shouldn’t jump to conclusions. He should keep the jumping to a minimum in general: his knees aren’t what they used to be.

The phone rings early that afternoon—a few minutes after Enji put Naru down for a nap. Eiji recently finished lunch and is perched in his booster seat at the kitchen table, coloring quietly while Enji cleans up.

Enji set the phone down near the drying rack. A glance at the screen confirms that the number looks familiar. He wipes his left hand dry and peels the rubber glove off of the right. It’ll save time if he has to go reference the spreadsheets on his laptop soon.

He swipes and raises the phone to his ear. “Todoroki.”

“Endeavor! It’s Spryte!”

At least that confirms that he’s alive, and more or less well, based on the volume and enthusiasm.

But Enji knows not to assume. “Is everything all right?”

There’s a pause—and then an overblown boisterous laugh that sets his teeth on edge. “Never better! Why?”

Easy. Slow down. Hawks played this game, too, at the start—feigning indolence and insolence and indifference to deflect attention from how damn good he was.

Well. Maybe the insolence wasn’t feigned.

He didn’t have much else to take joy in.

He didn’t have much of anything at all.

“It’s been thirty-seven hours,” Enji says, measuring out the syllables, laying out the words, “since I first called you.”

There’s another pause, and then the laugh is so loud that he holds the phone away from his ear.

Breathe. Breathe. It’s a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t know him. Everyone clashes with his personality the first time—and most do every other time after that, too. The vast majority of pros can’t take things as seriously as he does. They wouldn’t survive. They have to find an outlet. They have to carve out a release valve.

“The legends are true,” Spryte is saying, a mirth that sounds mocking still bubbling underneath his voice.

“What—” Through the haze, through the heat, Enji remembers Eiji sitting four feet away and bites back the hell. “—is that supposed to mean?”

“I was having a little something called a ‘weekend’,” Spryte says, the smirk behind the sentence painfully audible. “Ever heard of it?”

Enji has heard a lot of things.

Enji has heard the faint noise of miserable resignation that pries its way out of Hawks when his phone rings at three in the morning, and he drags himself out of bed to go clean up another crisis so that upstarts like this can party like poorly-raised teenagers and scoff at their responsibilities while they pose for ads and pander and—

He doesn’t know that for sure.

He doesn’t know Spryte at all.

Draw back. Breathe deep. Try again.

“It’s important,” Enji says.

“It’s just money,” Spryte says.

Enji’s blood boils, and his heart slams hard against the back of his sternum once, twice, and then—

Twists.

In a way—

He’s right.

Isn’t he?

If everything matters all the time, you can never stop.

You can never rest.

You can never quit.

It’s impossible to find enough fuel within yourself to maintain the momentum and carry the weight.

You tear yourself to pieces, scorch yourself past recognition, and then you start to burn everything else. Anything that you can reach. Anything that you can push against to propel yourself one inch higher, one inch further, one more step.

“It is just money,” Enji says, forcing his mouth around the strange shapes of the words. “But it could be your agency’s reputation, too. Your finance analyst is embezzling.”

A silence.

Enji adjusts his grip on the phone, rests the heel of his right hand on the counter. Maybe he’s finally gotten through t—

“No way,” Spryte says, laughing again.

The roaring void of the rage—dormant, papered over, pushed down and smothered deep in Enji’s chest—starts shuddering.

“I audited your expenses,” he says, hearing the edge on each word sharpening the next. “What’s withdrawn almost never matches up with the amounts in the actual receipts.”

“Shit happens,” Spryte says, blithely, and heat flares in Enji’s lungs, in his blood, sizzling into his stomach acid, licking up his ribs. “There must be some mistake.”

“There isn’t,” Enji grinds out. Breathe. Breathe. “Some of the documentation is outright doctored, and not especially well. Purchasing, payroll, rent—whoever is in charge of your finances is skimming off of all of it.”

“That’s not possible,” Spryte says, and the breezy dismissiveness stokes the fire to roaring— “You’re being paranoid.”

“I am not,” Enji manages through the seethe of the smoke. “Do you think I would make an accusation like this if I hadn’t triple-checked the numbers? You’re being conned. Your finance analyst—”

“Is one of my best friends from school,” Spryte says, sounding positively tickled by Enji’s frustration—like it lives up to the stories about Endeavor’s fruitless fury. Like he’s just here for the show. “And soon to be my brother-in-law! Maybe the discrepancies you’re seeing are from all the times the agency bought us happy hour drinks to celebrate. That’s not a crime, is it?”

Given the government subsidies from taxpayer funding, arguably yes, but—

“I’m not talking about a couple of drinks,” Enji forces out through his teeth, feeling the steam hissing on the ends of the words, clouding his brain, blurring his vision. “In the past year alone, you have had six million yen disappear between your books and your backup. That’s easily half of a sidekick’s salary, and the amount isn’t even the point. You have a—”

“You’re wrong,” Spryte says, and the simple calmness of it solidifies into a single steely point and falls in Enji’s chest like an axe blade. Like a scythe.

It splits the crack in his composure wide open.

“You hired me,” Enji snarls, “to give you my professional expertise. Your personal feelings about the rat in your org chart who is scamming you—as well as every single person who puts their faith in your agency—do not change the fact that I am provably, objectively correct.”

It takes him several seconds to realize why the silence around him feels so wrong.

He remembers.

He turns.

Eiji has gone utterly still, fingers still curled around a red crayon, eyes wide, face ashen.

“I’ll call you back,” Enji says, hearing his voice ring like an iron rod in the quiet. He hangs up before Spryte can even draw a breath to respond.

Eiji doesn’t move.

Enji pulls himself together. He lowers his shoulders. He relaxes his face.

Fuck.

He destroyed it.

He destroyed the fragile, gentle trust he built with this terrified child.

He threw it away for nothing—for some fucking fool he’s never even met.

This is what he always does.

This is all he knows how to do.

It’s too late, it’s always too late, it’s—

Eiji sniffles. His eyes gleam, and then they flick away, and he fumbles to grasp the crayon. His tiny little hand shakes.

It’s not about Enji.

The hurt is not about Enji, not about what drove him, not about the particulars of how he failed, and where, and why.

This is about the child whose shoulders tighten visibly as he creeps up towards the table and sits down.

He has to try.

“I’m sorry, Eiji,” he says, softly. “I shouldn’t have gotten upset. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Eiji’s mouth trembles.

Enji has never done this to him before.

Enji isn’t safe, either.

Nowhere is safe.

“Why?” Eiji says, shakily. “Why are you mad, Grampa?”

Because this nitwit insulted my intelligence, devalued my experience, and wasted my time.

Those words are meaningless nonsense to a three-year-old.

Maybe they should be nonsense to him, too.

Easy does it. Crisis management. Everybody slips, sometimes—everybody fucks up. Everybody loses control.

What you do next matters.

It has to matter.

Enji folds his hands in front of himself, knitting the fingers together, making his frame look smaller.

“I felt like he wasn’t listening to me,” he says, keeping his voice level. “That made me very frustrated. But I shouldn’t have raised my voice. I should have done something different.”

Given up.

Walked away.

There are a lot of fights in the world that aren’t worth winning.

“I’m sorry, Eiji,” he says again, for all the good it does without the proof behind it. He has to do more—give more. Offer something. He breathes deep, reaches deep— “I used to… I used to be mad all the time. I hurt a lot of people because of it—your uncle Shouto and your grandma worst of all, but Auntie Fuyumi and your dad, too. I don’t want to be like that anymore. I don’t want to hurt people. And I’ve been trying hard not to, but sometimes I mess up.”

He hesitates. Eiji’s eyes are wide, still, but unrevealing. His mouth is crimped up tight.

“I messed up today,” Enji says. “And I’m sorry. I’ll do the best I can not to do that ever again. But you don’t have to forgive me. It’s okay if you don’t.”

Eiji stares, tiny hands curled into fists now, pressed to each other and clutched against his chest. He blinks. He looks down, at the half-finished coloring page on the table, forehead wrinkling up with concentration, and then looks up at Enji again.

“I forgive you,” he whispers. “It’s okay, Grampa.”

Enji tries not to let the way that that just shredded through him show too much. “You don’t have to say that. And you don’t have to decide right now.”

He swallows. He digs. He finds it in himself.

“I’ll still love you if you don’t forgive me,” he says. “I’ll always love you. No matter what.”

Eiji turns that over for a second before he nods silently—and then reaches up with both arms extended.

Enji hugs the warm little body to his as tightly as he dares. Eiji’s tiny hands fist in his shirt, head rested against his shoulder. His shaky breathing slowly evens out.

A long moment after that, he shifts back, and Enji lets go. He picks up his crayon.

“Grampa,” he says, looking at it very seriously, “I think maybe you shouldn’t call that guy again.”

Enji feels almost as shaken as Eiji must.

Enji feels like he dodged a bullet.

“I think maybe you’re right,” he says.

He finishes the dishes. He makes an effort at cleaning the counters, the sink, the refrigerator shelves, the cabinet doors decorated with drips of soap and sauce and formula like splatters of multicolored candle wax. Naru fusses on the monitor; Enji scoops him out of the crib and walks him around the house before settling him down under the play gym. He and Eiji sit and watch an educational program that is very, very repetitively coaxing Eiji closer to learning how to read. Eiji watches intently, thumb in his mouth, leaning against Enji’s side.

It’s just because he’s warm.

Surely it’s just…

He gets a text from Spryte asking if their conversation is over or not.

He dismisses the notification and sets his phone on the couch arm facedown.

Just as the program is finishing up, complete with the tinkling music that accompanies the credits, Enji’s phone trills again—this time, though, with the alarm reminding him of the next item on their thrilling agenda.

He turns to Eiji.

“Would you like to help water the plants?” he asks.

Eiji looks at him, for slightly longer then he’s used to. Broken trust. All the same old shards.

But then Eiji half-smiles and nods. “Okay, Grampa.” He scoots forward towards the edge of the couch cushion.

Before he can scramble down, Enji lifts him, cautious of the metal hand, and gently sets him down on the floor. “Let’s take Naru outside with us so we can keep an eye on him.”

“Yeah!” Eiji says. “He loves plants!”

Enji doesn’t think there’s any conclusive evidence to support that theory, but he can’t disprove it either.

Whatever Naru’s specific feelings are on the flora in the garden, he does seem to be enjoying having his jumping rig outside in the sunshine. Enji eyes the angle of the sun. The Vitamin D is probably crucial for him, but his skin is functionally brand-new—extremely vulnerable. Enji sets a mental timer to move him into the shade in eight minutes, if they stay out here that long; and to go fetch his little sunhat if it takes any longer than that.

Eiji’s contributions to the watering primarily include lingering near Enji’s elbow as he fills the watering can, observing closely for a grand total of approximately ninety seconds as Enji crouches down to prod the soil of a few of the plants before allocating their water, and then taking off at a run with his arms flung out to the sides, crying “I’m Hawks! I’m Hawks! Fwoosh!” as he gallops in circles around the pond.

Enji pauses, takes out his phone, and starts a video. “You’re who?”

“Hawks! Waaaaaah, dive, dive, dive, zoom!”

This particular not-especially-aerial maneuver takes him in a tight spiral around Naru, who claps, smacks the rim of the jumper, and beams toothlessly at him, babbling back. Eiji stops long enough to grab onto his hands and bounce next to him for a few seconds before launching himself off towards the far end of the garden again, this time throwing one hand out ahead of him at a time and jumping as far as he can. “Now I’m Deku!”

The countdown in Enji’s head doesn’t pause for pro heroes, whatever their size, so he pockets his phone and picks up the can again. “You’re doing very well with Blackwhip.”

“Whoosh—what’s the other one, Grampa? He’s got so many!”

“One for All?” Enji says. The camellias are, as always, extremely thirsty. “Or do you mean the smaller ones? Like Float?”

“I like—I like the exciting ones! Float is cool.” He comes tearing around the cluster of succulents Enji assembled on a small hill near the pond. “But it’s cooler just to have a bunch! You think I’ll get two quirks, Grampa? Like Uncle Shouto? How do I get two?”

Enji can’t help that he cringes. He can’t help that he stops, sets the watering can down on the nearest paving stone next to where he’s kneeling, and narrowly resists the urge to hold his left hand over his heart.

Hawks would know how to divert this.

Hawks would say—

“You won’t need two,” Enji tries. “You’re so smart that people will think that that’s a second quirk already.”

Eiji veers around him and goes pelting off towards the fence again. “Nyeeeeer—I’m Uncle Shouto now! He’s so cool. Did you see, on TV, Grampa—the other day, when he made that whole wall of fire and stopped the bad guys?”

“I did,” Enji says. It was extraordinary work: an impeccable combination of power and finesse.

“I can’t believe he’s Daddy’s brother!” Eiji says, flinging up imaginary ice protrusions next, based on the sound effects he adds for them. They could be flame, though. His onomatopoeias are a bit indistinct. “That’s like—that’s like if Naru was a pro hero! Or me!”

Perish the thought. Drown it in the bathtub. Burn it at the stake. Bury it here, in the garden, so deep that no one will ever even think to claw all the way down. Let it feed the flowers. Let something grow.

At least Eiji’s excitement doesn’t own him. At least it doesn’t sharpen at the edges into a need—a ravening hunger for more, for everything. At least it’s still a child’s delight, and not ambition.

Eiji laughs like Natsuo, not like Touya.

“There are a lot of other important jobs,” Enji says. The peonies don’t need too much. He has to concentrate enough not to sabotage a year’s worth of work in a single afternoon. He also has to keep an eye on the little figure bounding along the pathways, battling imaginary villains; and another on the even littler one bouncing nearby, reaching towards everything in turn. “Your father’s job is extremely important. And your Auntie Fuyumi is a teacher.”

“I know!” Eiji says. He stops, clenching both fists at his sides, and then swings them as he jumps as high as he can across the gap between two of the stones of the pathway. His tiny sneakers smack down on the shale. “She’s cool, too! She told me once a week, she gets a buncha stools and chalk in all different colors, and she lets her students draw on the chalkboard as much as they want!”

“She’s very thoughtful,” Enji says. Might as well describe water as wet. “I think her class probably likes her very much. Do you want to draw later?”

“Yeah!” Eiji calls, back to the far end of the yard. Did they give him sugar at school? They’re not supposed to, but sometimes the other kids sneak things in, or— “Now I’m Hawks again!” Enji could have guessed as much, from the arms flung out as wings and the devil-may-care grin. “Did you see him on TV, Grampa?” Yesterday was a closer scrape in a rescue than Enji would have liked. He waited up past midnight, after. The cleanup had pushed Hawks’s conference call with the local government back until around eight, and then another villain interrupted that. Hawks had straggled home and collapsed facedown onto the bed and said nothing for so long that Enji had barely dared to breathe, barely dared to touch him. “I can’t believe he lives here! He’s so cool!”

Enji crouches down to check the soil at the roots of the boxwood. “He is.”

“Whooooom, I’m the fastest guy ever! Number one! Fierce Wings, let’s go! C’mon, Naru!”

The tiny feet in the tiny shoes patter steadily, albeit unevenly, right up until they—

Don’t.

Enji looks up at the precise instant that Eiji’s toe catches in the gap between two of the broad, flat paving stones.

He doesn’t think.

The flame erupts at his back, from his palm, from the soles of his feet, in the same instant he unbends his knees, angling himself forward, tilting his body towards the target—the objective.

He blasts across the open expanse of the garden in a fraction of a second.

He has never had Hawks’s knack for spitting in the face of gravity, but today—

Eiji’s tiny hands hit the paving stone, and Enji can just see the heels of them sliding—can’t quite make out the individual grains of dirt shifting and spraying as they scrape forward when his weight falls on them.

His elbows buckle.

Enji knows what it looks like when a child’s skull collides with a solid surface at high speed.

Both of Enji’s forearms snap out underneath Eiji’s torso to catch him just as his head swings downward with his momentum.

Enji scoops him up.

Eiji gasps in one ragged breath, staring in shock at the swathe of angry red lines illuminating each of his palms—blood rushing to the site of the impact, and then beading in the innumerable tiny scratches that have scraped rawness from the surface of his fragile skin.

His eyes well.

His mouth screws up.

Blood starts to pool in the broken skin, and he starts howling.

But he’s—fine.

He’s fine.

He didn’t smash the front of his forehead open on the paving stone, didn’t slam into the edge and break his nose, didn’t tip and land on top of a sharp corner hard enough to puncture straight through his temple and spill his burgeoning intellect all over the fucking dirt, didn’t—

Die.

Distantly, Enji can hear Naru taking up a sympathetic whine, more inquisitive than accusatory. It’s hard to focus on anything except the hitching rhythm of Eiji’s chest dragging in another breath to wail with, and another, and another, louder by the second.

Enji wraps him into both arms and folds him in close—so close, the tiny little face burying itself in his shoulder, tears already seeping into his shirt. Eiji holds his bleeding palms out like a desperate act of supplication, but all Enji can bring his left hand to do is stroke helplessly at the shaking back, the extended arms, the cornsilk-soft pale hair.

“I’m sorry,” Enji says, faintly. “You’re okay. You’re okay. I’m sorry.”

Eiji chokes out something that sounds like ‘Grampa’ before shifting far enough to sob into the side of Enji’s neck instead. Hugging him tighter is a slight strategic miscalculation: it puts the source of the ambulance-worthy wailing directly next to Enji’s ear.

To hell with it. His hearing was probably going to go next after his eyesight anyway.

“Come on,” he says, as gently as he can. More—pressure? He rubs his hand very gently at Eiji’s shoulders, and earns a more concerted sort of back-and-forth smudging of Eiji’s face against his shirt collar. “Let’s get you cleaned up. You’re okay.”

Eiji’s tiny frame shudders against his chest. “H-h-hurts, Grampa—”

“I know,” Enji says. Life does. This is what the world will always be.

Maybe.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Maybe not for them.

Maybe someone can be waiting—someone who would burn the whole garden to the ground to keep them from striking it too swiftly.

Maybe their world can be kinder than the one he couldn’t win against.

That’s what he was fighting for, wasn’t it? That was what he wanted. That was why he tried.

Eiji’s tiny hands tremble wildly, smudging blood on Enji’s shirt. He needs to—move. Change the scenery, change the tone. Take action. Take control.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, patting Eiji’s back gently one more time before shifting him over into the right arm. Ravaged palms or no, he’s the more durable of the two. Enji crosses to Naru, kneels, and gathers him up into the left arm. “It’ll feel better once we clean it out. I promise. I know it hurts.”

He manages the door with his elbow and then his shoulder. Naru is producing faint, air-gulping little preliminary sobs, presumably just as a way of mirroring Eiji’s distress, since there doesn’t seem to be anything else wrong with him, and he hasn’t stopped drooling.

Spectacular.

Enji very, very cautiously wrangles them both through the doorway by sidestepping through it, and then heads directly for the bathroom. He weighs the options for where to position Naru and then gently deposits him into the little cushioned plastic seat in the bathtub. Naru looks slightly confused about the breach of protocol, but at least Enji can keep an eye on both of them at once this way.

He has to pry Eiji off of his neck to sit him carefully down on the countertop next to the sink. Eiji is still crying—fortunately with somewhat less enthusiasm, given the enclosed space—and his palms are still bleeding sluggishly. Enji slips his glasses on and then takes one wrist in each hand, as gingerly as possible with the right, to hold them up to the light.

“I think you got half the garden in here,” he says.

Eiji is evidently still in too much pain to appreciate hyperbole. “Hurts, Grampa—”

“I know,” Enji says. “I’m sorry. It’s going to hurt more in a minute, because we need to clean the dirt out so that it can heal. You see?” He points to one of the grittiest parts. Rei is going to kill him if Fuyumi doesn’t do it first. They trusted him with this. “We’re going to wash your hands with soap, which will sting a little. And then we’re going to clean them with something called hydrogen peroxide—which is going to sting quite a lot, but it’ll make sure they’re all cleaned out and ready to start getting better. Okay?”

By his expression, Eiji knows he doesn’t have much choice. A tear drips off of his chin. Enji gathers the cuff of his sleeve around his left hand and carefully wipes a few others and some of the snot away.

Eiji sniffles wetly.

Then he nods.

“Okay,” Enji says. He turns the faucet on, tests the temperature, modulates it, tests again—warm but not hot. “Let’s rinse first.”

He keeps his right arm looped loosely around Eiji’s waist to stabilize him on the counter as he leans in, heedless of petty adult concerns like friction and body weight and momentum. A spared glance from the corner of the eye confirms that Naru has managed to draw one leg up to his mouth, the better to attempt to chew on his own toes. Enji doesn’t particularly love the prospect of the footie pajamas polluting his saliva, but given how many parts of this house he’s already licked or gummed or sucked on, it’s not going to kill him.

Eiji cautiously dips his hands under the stream of water and then immediately whips them back, whimpering. His voice cracks anew. “Grampa—”

This is what it’s supposed to be like.

Isn’t it?

It’s supposed to drive through your heart like a jagged spear when they’re in pain.

It’s not supposed to feel like progress. It’s not supposed to be a challenge or a milestone or a point of leverage. It’s not supposed to be You’re stronger than that. You can take it. I know you can.

You’re supposed to want to protect them now—not later. Not from some hazy, horrific theoretical future that they can’t even understand.

Everything is—

Tilting.

Enji wants to walk out of the room. He wants to call Takiya. What is this? It’s not just different—this is a world apart. This is backwards—inside-out. He feels nauseous. Unsteady. Not entirely real.

He can’t walk out.

He can’t go anywhere.

They need him.

Eiji needs him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. It’s the only thing he’s ever had to offer to them. “I know it hurts. Just try for a few seconds. I’ll help you.”

Eiji nods weakly. Slowly, hesitantly, he offers out his trembling little hands.

Enji tries to be efficient, but the soap alone starts Eiji wailing again, and he writhes, and pulls back, and chokes on fractured, half-swallowed sobs. It takes more than a few seconds to scrub out the worst of the grit.

The peroxide is worse.

The peroxide makes him give up fighting.

He collapses in the ring of Enji’s arms around him, dropping his head onto the countertop, and doesn’t bother swallowing the sobs anymore.

Naru starts up an answering wail again.

Enji’s head is ringing. The sound makes his bones feel cold and clenched, too small and too tight, at the best of times. In a narrow little room like this, with the echoes pounding back at him—

They need him.

They need the best of him.

Crisis. Triage. Stop the bleeding. Splint the damage. Move.

He lets the peroxide bubble in the wounds, releasing Eiji’s wrists. He was careful—just kept the fingers of the right in a loose circle, completely rigid, never tightening his grip—but it was still a trap. He was still a cage.

He runs his left hand gently over Eiji’s hair, smudges tears away with the pad of his thumb. “I’m sorry. I know it hurts. But it would hurt so much more if we didn’t clean it now.”

Eiji’s next breath shudders in and out of him. His shaking fingers start to curl. He’s dully, wearily watching the fizzing on his palms subside.

“Mommy did that once,” he gets out. He’s almost incomprehensible when he’s this upset—the syllables slump together. “The—bubbles. Once. When I fell.”

Enji gathers him up into the left arm, forcing the right to collect the items they need to finish this out—the paltry few that aren’t torture, for a three-year-old. “It stings. Very badly. But it helps.”

Eiji sniffles, nearly limp in Enji’s arm. Enji cradles him carefully for a moment before sitting him down on the edge of the bathtub, where it’s easier to keep an eye on Naru.

“Can you hold them out for me one more time?” Enji asks, as if he has any fucking right when everything he’s done has sent agony cascading down Eiji’s brand-new, polished little nerves. “Please.”

Eiji extends both arms, upraised palms still sluggishly bleeding.

Sometimes that’s what life is.

Sometimes you pick yourself up and offer yourself right back to the pain.

Enji concentrates on dabbing the baramycin as lightly and gently as humanly possible—trying not to make direct contact with Eiji’s skin, trying to avoid applying any pressure whatsoever. He spreads as much of it as he dares, wipes his greasy fingertips on his jeans, and then zeroes in on the waxy paper wrappings around the bandages.

He’s always struggled to get traction on surfaces like this with the prosthetic fingers, and the small-motor precision required to peel two paper-thin layers apart from each other, breaking an adhesive seal—

It’s for Eiji.

He’s going to do it.

Surrender is not an option.

He originally bought the Hawks-branded band-aids as a joke. They were one-upping each other with stupid merch finds just to create something other than work to talk about. The bandages themselves aren’t especially tacky—they’re white all the way across, with a relatively elegant red feather design arcing across the length from end to end.

Enji had made them substantially funnier by buying out the entire stock at three separate pharmacies and upending an immense bag of little cardboard boxes over Hawks’s head where he was sitting on the couch.

That was three years ago now—Eiji would have been Naru’s age.

They go through a lot of bandages in this house. They’ve still barely dented the cache.

When Enji fits them on—carefully, carefully, angling the gauze pads precisely over the worst of the wounds—Eiji looks down at them for a few seconds, wriggling his fingers.

“How does that feel?” Enji asks.

“Okay,” Eiji murmurs, which is better than he expected.

Then Eiji leans against him again, exhausted from the whole mess of it.

Enji sympathizes.

He strokes Eiji’s hair back. “I’m sorry I made it worse.”

“S’okay,” Eiji whispers. “I forgive you, Grampa.”

Ah.

Hell.

Hawks bangs his way in a few hours later and, as always, misses nothing, regardless of the circles underneath his eyes.

“Whoa!” he says, dropping to his knees to examine Eiji’s hands the moment that he’s breezed into the living room. “What happened, kiddo?”

It makes Enji’s heart swell to the point of pain that Hawks cares so fucking much about these lost, scared, motherless children—riven by the wounds Enji carved into his own family long before they were ever born—that the first thing he does when he enters the room is to catalogue their condition; and that the second is to express concern for them when he finds something amiss.

Eiji looks up at him, gravely. “I fell. In the garden. Grampa was super fast and caught me, but I hurt my hands a whole lot.”

Hawks winces. “Dang! Those look so ouchy! Falling is the worst.”

Eiji pauses. “I dunno if it’s the worst. But I was real scared. And it hurt.”

Hawks smiles. “But Grampa caught you.”

Eiji smiles back. “Yeah!”

Enji looks down at his laptop screen to iron out a few more little poorly-notated presents that the Hawks Agency’s financial records have left for him, but he knows Hawks caught him watching.

“Hang on,” Hawks says next, snapping his phone out. “Is it okay if I take a picture of your hands, Eiji? I wanna show this to the marketing guy who told me these bandaids would suck.”

“They don’t suck,” Eiji says, seriously, wiggling his fingers in front of Hawks’s phone. “They stick.”

Hawks grins fit to crack his face. “And there’s our new slogan. Is there anything you can’t do, kid?”

Eiji lifts his hands a little closer to the camera as Hawks re-angles the phone. “Lots,” he says. “I can’t fly. I wanna fly, like you.”

Hawks turns a look very slowly and very significantly in Enji’s direction.

“Not until he’s at least eight,” Enji says, “and not without Natsuo’s permission.”

Hawks pulls a face. “So… never. Got it.”

Enji saves his recent progress, shuts his laptop, and slides it under the couch, which has become an indefensible habit lately. He’s not even sure if it will work as a child-deterrent, since he hasn’t left either of them alone long enough to crawl over and reach for it in the first place.

He stands, rolls his shoulders, stretches the right. Hawks will keep Eiji and Naru equal parts entertained and supervised while he handles dinner.

Fuyumi texted earlier, to ask how things were. He sent her pictures from the museum over the weekend, and managed to neglect to mention Eiji falling for nearly five minutes before the guilt overwhelmed him, and he confessed.

Dad, she wrote. Kids fall all the time. Like, ALL the time. Did he even scrape his face? He’s going to be totally over it tomorrow and have forgotten that it ever happened by the end of the week.

Enji hopes so—fervently, desperately, with his teeth clenched and his heart cinching up the back of his throat.

Natsuo is allowed to visit on Saturday night.

Enji asked her how he is. How he’s doing. If she’s seen him.

He’s trying, she wrote.

Enji makes himself breathe out.

“We’ll see,” he says.

After dinner, he and Hawks sit together on the floor, leaned against the couch, with their respective laptops out. Eiji is sprawled out on his front on the floor next to Enji, knees bent, sockfeet tapping back against the couch behind him as he tries to sound his way through an entry-level early reading book. He’s too shy to ask for help directly—Enji has swallowed so many apologies on this particular subject in the past week that his esophagus burns—but he does tend to glance up uncertainly when he gets stuck, and then Enji can lean in and gently direct him.

Enji looked up all the developmental milestones. Eiji really shouldn’t be so close to puzzling out the prospect of literacy, at this age, no matter how much Hayami worked at giving him a head-start.

He’s too smart for his own good.

And too ambitious.

Hawks, meanwhile, is designing new custom T-shirts for Naru and Eiji, which respectively say Spit Spigot and Mucus Machine. They’re a very striking shade of turquoise.

Enji nudges him, gently, with the right elbow. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Hawks mutters, tapping the arrow keys to align the text. He has somehow found an icon of a faucet to put on Naru’s, and a glob of unidentifiable dreck to add to Eiji’s. “I strongly believe that my unparalleled aesthetic genius should be shared with the world.”

“Charitable of you,” Enji says. “Although I meant for the fact that you’re acting in defiance of evolution by devoting yourself to children who aren’t even remotely related to you.”

Hawks snaps off a grin and a wink. “Every act can be in defiance of evolution when you’re God’s mistake.”

Enji nudges him much harder.

“Come on,” Hawks says, smiling ruefully. “My skeleton isn’t even designed for wings. I know you know that, ’cause you didn’t hide the bird books fast enough when I moved in.”

Enji just meets his eyes levelly until he remembers the pertinent detail that at least his wings don’t cook him alive inside of his own skin, and then cook the skin for good measure.

“I resent that pointed look,” Hawks says, primly. “I said what I said.”

Enji resists the powerful urge to lean forward and kiss the tip of his nose when he least expects it. He has a cute nose.

Hawks wrinkles it, trying not to smile. Either he can tell what Enji’s thinking, or he’s enjoying the attention so much that he doesn’t really care what’s motivating it right now.

He shuffles, resettling his wings against the couch, and leans against Enji’s shoulder.

Which, not unnaturally, draws his eyes down to Enji’s laptop screen.

“Enji,” he says, tonelessly. “Baby. Beautiful.”

Enji nudges him with the shoulder this time. “Do not sweet-talk me.”

“Enji,” Hawks says, “baby, the most ruggedly-handsome and mouthwateringly ripped man in the entire universe, let alone the world, let alone Japan, over whom I swoon abjectly on an hourly basis—”

Enji closes his eyes. “Hawks.”

“What are you looking at, here?” Hawks says, sounding slightly desperate. “Hardware store websites scare me now.”

Enji works his jaw, but the truth is inevitable. Most things are. “I’m going to redo the garden.”

There is a long silence.

By Hawks’s standards, anyway.

“You’re gonna what?” Hawks says.

“The paths are a tripping hazard,” Enji says. He has to nudge up his glasses. Humiliating. “I’m going to redo it.”

“You just finished the garden,” Hawks says.

Enji puts some tanbark into his cart. “Clearly not very well.”

He braces himself for a follow-on to what Fuyumi said, or one of the terrible offhanded comments about the things Hawks survived as a child. He waits for some well-intentioned remark that kids have to find out how much falling hurts, so that they learn that you can endure it—some clever variation on the adage about how if the world makes your palms bleed in the garden nine times, you get up and put cool bandaids on them ten.

They’re tougher than they look, at this age. You know that.

Instead, though, Hawks stays quiet.

When Enji chances a look, he’s smiling wryly, eyebrow arched.

“Man,” Hawks says. “Can you imagine having a grampa who would tear down his pet project and rebuild it just because you scraped your hands?”

Enji does a quick square-footage calculation and adds more tanbark. A hell of a lot more. “No.”

“Me neither,” Hawks says, warmly, leaning his head on Enji’s shoulder. “And I’m so fucking happy that he can.”

There is another long silence.

Eiji’s head snaps up right on cue.

“So what?” he asks.

Hawks drops his face into his hands. “I’m fired. Evict me. Kick me to the curb.”

“That was a word he shouldn’t have used,” Enji says, as delicately as possible, to Eiji’s wide eyes. “It’s not a very nice word, but grownups use it with each other sometimes.”

“Oh,” Eiji says. “I know lots of those.”

It figures.

He drops right back down and gets engrossed in his book again, though, so they seem to have sidestepped the worst of it.

Hawks nestles in closer to Enji’s shoulder and then thrusts both hands out, wrists together, like he’s begging for handcuffs. Enji is a bit too familiar with the gesture.

“I should,” Hawks says, “at least be fined.”

A swear jar is not a bad idea, come to think of it—if only because it would probably be very, very funny more than once.

“You can start with some community service,” Enji says, swapping over to his spreadsheet that diagrams the yard to scale. “Send a feather out back and double-check my measurement for the circumference of the pond.”

A primary zips out, and Hawks leans in to look at Enji’s handiwork.

“This is art,” he says.

“No,” Enji says, “it’s Excel.”

Hawks bats his eyelashes. “You excel.”

Enji sighs.

Hawks grins.

Eiji looks up meaningfully again, and Enji leans down to help him.

The next day is much the same, as weekdays are now. They used to be monotonous, though. Now they’re something of a scramble. Enji has almost as many timed reminders set up to beep at him as he used to at the damn agency.

It’s mystifying, how quickly the time slips by him. Mathematically speaking, it makes sense—the proportion of each individual moment against the span of his life dwindles more and more as the days go on. The older he gets, the less a single second means. The more of them there are, the harder they are to grasp.

The days must be endless, for Eiji.

Enji blinks, and they disappear.

But they’re—

Good, mostly.

Better than he expected.

He hesitates to think that he’s getting the hang of it. Any time he dares to hope as much, the universe hangs him with it.

But it’s getting easier. He’s more confident in his ability to shepherd them safely through their tiny little lives, not least because nearly everything that can go wrong already has, and so far they’ve survived.

He’s still working on training Naru to respond to Natsuo’s picture on a daily basis when Eiji is at school. Slightly fewer and somewhat briefer naps, lately, mean that Naru also gets to accompany him outside as he strategizes about how to re-pave the garden paths. He should put a railing on the engawa, as blasphemous as that might be. And on the steps down from the side door. And a fence around the pond.

Is that too much? Overprotective to the point it’s overbearing? He can understand that children need to fall, sometimes, to come to terms with the notion of cause and effect. But the potential consequences of something going wrong—really wrong—are unthinkable. The difference between idyllism and crushing tragedy could be a single faulty step. Children can drown in two inches of water.

And in this family, you can drown at the top of the Billboard Chart, with all the cameras pointed towards you, breathing nothing but the air.

It makes his spine prickle and his skin crawl, but he can’t change it: better that they resent him later for hovering than that he misses any way he could protect them.

None of them could bear to lose anyone else.

So he won’t let them.

Hawks comes home utterly unscathed, the following night, which is the sort of blessing that Enji should really make a dedicated shrine trip for.

He doesn’t know if Eiji has visited one before—he doesn’t know if Hayami was religious at all. Likely not, or not particularly, given that the wedding was mostly secular, although there were enough touches of tradition that he can’t rule it out.

It would make for a pleasant afternoon trip, in any case. There are a number of very nice ones close enough to walk to, and one with an expansive garden. It’s easy to imagine Eiji exploring. And it might… help. An offering might give him a way to send a message to his mother. He never had the chance to say goodbye.

For now, though, Enji’s lucky charm is breezing through the house snatching up the littlest children available and rubbing his nose against theirs until they chortle.

“Hi, you,” he says as Naru pats at him. “You been doing good? Givin’ those blocks what for and drenching them with the slime?”

“He’s got teeth!” Eiji says. “You can see ’em! You think they’re gonna be big? Mommy’s teeth were big. They were so pretty.”

Hawks’s face tightens fractionally enough that Eiji might not notice. Then he starts making a show of trying to peer into Naru’s mouth, which gets more dramatic as it goes along. It begins with just holding him high overhead and squinting at him as he giggles—but then Hawks, of course, because he’s Hawks, escalates it to the brink of absurdity. He swings Naru up one way and then the other, tickling under his chin all the while, then twirls him around and tosses him into the air, feathers swirling around him, as Hawks makes increasingly ridiculous open-mouthed faces to try to get Naru to mirror them. The little pageant culminates with dipping Naru down almost to the floor, so swiftly that the giggling redoubles, and then Hawks’s emphatic airplane sound effects don’t quite blot out—

A squeak.

High and shrill and brief but unmistakable, further emphasized by the way Naru waves his curled fists and keeps giggling avidly, whole body shaking with the unremitting infant joy.

Hawks snaps back upright, gazing down at the gleefully wriggling bundle in his arms.

There’s something—off.

Something wrong.

Hawks’s pupils swell to huge proportions, and he goes completely still.

“Hawks,” Enji says, slowly.

Hawks looks down at Naru, who keeps whapping the wet fists at his chest, undaunted by the strange tension and the stranger silence, by the way Hawks is staring down at him like—

“I can’t help it, Enji,” he says, slowly. “He’s a prey animal. I have no choice but to—” He ducks in, and Enji starts to reach out— “Eat him!”

Eiji gasps out loud, but it’s too late—Hawks’s pursed mouth hits Naru’s cheek.

And blows a raspberry.

The giggling grows deafening inside of an instant.

“Om nom nom nom!” Hawks says, for what he probably thinks is good measure. He lifts Naru in both hands, opening his round little stomach for similar treatment, and the giggling turns to squeak-dotted shrieks.

Enji settles again, leaning back against the couch. Eiji alternates between trying to pull Naru away to ‘save’ him, and asking if he’s a prey animal, too, in a way that strongly implies a different objective.

Hawks, equitable as always, passes Naru over to Enji with some feathers so that he can give Eiji a tummy raspberry, too.

Enji looks at the tiny, giggling baby in his too-big, brutal hands. Naru coos, blows a spit bubble, and claps his wet palms together.

“Pa-pa-pa—”

Enji holds out the index finger of his right hand. Naru grabs on, pulls it over, and gums at it, giant eyes still fixed on him.

The world has never made much sense. He supposes he shouldn’t have expected it to start now.

It feels like just a little past midnight. Enji’s hand is halfway to the off switch on the baby monitor before his eyes open.

His hand hovers in the air for a few seconds while he stares at the blurry—but unmoving—image of Naru on the screen, and then his ears catch up.

The crying is quieter than Naru’s normal full-bellied wail. That sound is an invariable and deeply desperate bid for attention, like the night is endless, and no one will ever come.

This sound is slightly muffled, and it’s coming from the opposite direction.

Eiji’s room.

Enji slides off of the side of the bed and braces his hand carefully on the edge of the mattress, levering himself up. Hawks mutters something incomprehensible—he often blends words together when he isn’t fully awake, like his brain is splicing multiple sentences and then releasing them all at once.

Enji slips out, pads the five steps down the hall past the bathroom, and gently knocks on Eiji’s door.

The sobbing stops.

Enji opens the door and peers in.

Eiji is—

Not bleeding. At least not that he can see. Not visibly injured, not cradling an arm or clutching an ear or holding his abdomen because his appendix has self-destructed in the middle of the night.

He is, however, huddled in a cape he’s drawn together from his blankets, with tears gleaming all over his cheeks, trembling slightly from the strain of it.

Or from the fear that brought it on.

Enji breathes out.

He tries to smile, tries to lower his shoulders, tries to make himself look gentle. It’s a kind lie.

He steps in, and Eiji scrubs at his face with both sleeves, hitching in shaky breaths.

“Did you have a nightmare?” Enji asks.

Eiji’s bottom lip trembles enough that Enji can see it clearly in the glow from the nightlight even without glasses.

The nightlight is shaped like a flame, with relatively subtle Endeavor theming. Enji does not remember authorizing anything like that, but Hawks has been avoiding offering a direct answer to the familiar “Is this more bootleg shit you dug up online to try to win the bad merch game?” question.

Eiji looks down and fusses with the blanket for a few seconds, and then he nods.

Enji crosses slowly over to the foot of the bed and sits down.

Eiji’s eyes start flicking to the place his sleeve hangs empty after his arm ends.

“Are you okay?” Enji asks, quietly. Another nod, and another glance. “Do you want to talk about what it was?”

Eiji looks down at the blankets again, sniffles, and shakes his head.

He’s so small.

Enji has to reach across himself to hold his arm out.

Eiji scrambles up out of the blankets and dives into it, burying his face in Enji’s chest.

Enji wraps as much of the arm around him as possible while maintaining the angle to stroke gently at his back.

“It was s-scary,” Eiji whispers, voice breaking with a fresh wave of tears. “It was—it was—”

“It’s okay,” Enji says, as softly as he can. “None of it was real. It’s like your brain making a TV show—it looks scary, but none of those things really happened.”

Eiji draws a shuddering breath. Maybe it’s time to be brave for him—to be weak in full view. To be small with him, so that he knows he’s not alone.

The words don’t come easy, but Enji forces them out. “I have a lot of nightmares.”

Eiji’s fingers curl a little tighter in his old shirt. “You—how come, Grampa? You—you’re so—big. And strong.”

It’s a good thing Hawks didn’t hear that. It’d be ‘Heyo, big-and-strong guy’ for weeks.

“I think everyone has nightmares sometimes,” Enji says. “No matter how big or strong they are. And they always feel real—even after you wake up, sometimes. It’s okay to be scared.”

Eiji makes an unhappy noise. “I don’t wanna be scared.”

“I know,” Enji says, hugging him closer. “I don’t want you to be either.”

Eiji sniffles again. “Your arm is all gone.”

“Just about,” Enji says. It tends to unsettle people when he moves what’s left.

Eiji twists enough to press his cheek to Enji’s chest, looking at the draping end of the T-shirt sleeve. “Is that what you have nightmares about?”

Enji takes as deep a breath as he dares. “Sometimes.”

Eiji sniffles. “I dreamed—I dreamed Daddy went away. He—he left me at school and never came back, not ever, and I went on the playground, but I couldn’t get back in, and it was so cold, and I cried, Grampa, but nobody… And there was this hole, in the ground—it was bigger and bigger and bigger, and if you fell you’d fall and fall and fall forever, and I was—I was—”

Enji has to fight to overcome the urge to cling to him. It would hurt him. Too much pressure. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Nobody’s going to leave you anywhere. We’re always going to come get you.”

New warm tears wet his shirt again. “You promise, Grampa?”

“Yes,” Enji says, softly.

Eiji swallows, sobs, coughs, and sniffles loudly again.

“There were snakes, too,” he says. “Big snakes. With big teeth. On the playground. I kept trying to climb.”

Don’t they all.

“I won’t let any snakes bother you, either,” Enji says. “That’s a promise, too.”

It won’t become a lie if he doesn’t let it. It won’t become a lie if he gives it everything he’s got.

“Okay,” Eiji whispers, tiny arms trying to reach around him. Eiji’s shoulders shake with a long exhale, and his voice starts to wobble again. “Grampa, what—what if all I ever—what if I just get nightmares forever?”

Enji hugs him a little closer and tries to think—back, and forward, and outward. To what Rei used to do, to what he should do, to what it might mean.

“Do you want to come sleep with us tonight?” Enji says, whether or not there aren’t nearly enough hours left in it. “We can’t stop you from having any more nightmares. But we can be there when you wake up.”

Eiji’s next sob rattles both of them, which answers the question succinctly.

Hawks’s head pops up as Enji lets himself back in. The feathers flicker.

“S’at Eiji?” he mumbles. “Hey, kiddo.”

“We had a nightmare,” Enji says. Easing him down is harder with just the one arm, but Hawks is already wriggling over and reaching up to help by the time they make it to the bed.

“Oh, no,” Hawks says. “You okay?”

Eiji’s answer melts into a sheepish muddle of overtired toddler speech.

Enji sits down, lies down, and settles carefully—on his side, where he can extend his arm and find Eiji easily.

Or he would be able to, if Hawks wasn’t already crowding in and bringing Eiji with him, bookending the fragile little body right between their two.

“Got good news for you,” Hawks whispers. “Your grampa’s really good at getting rid of nightmares. I don’t even have them anymore.”

Enji wishes that were true.

But from here, he can lay his arm over both of them, letting it dip just a little into the gap to impart some warmth to Eiji while Hawks bears most of the weight.

“Okay,” Eiji murmurs. “I’ll try to get rid of yours, too, Grampa.”

Enji’s throat sticks hard enough and sharp enough and hot enough that he has to clear it. “Thank you.”

A soft protective wing spreads across him, spanning over Eiji in the middle. “You’re in good hands, kid.”

“Okay,” Eiji mumbles again. “G’night, Grampa. G’night, Hawks.”

“Sleep better,” Hawks says softly.

Enji leans down and kisses the top of the tiny little head. It feels—less strange than he expected. It feels nice. “Goodnight, Eiji.”

He’s out like a light before Enji’s heart has even slowed down.

On Friday, Eiji takes an interest in public transportation—at least in the abstract, insofar as he devotes his full attention and the entirety of his post-nap afternoon to fitting together a series of pieces of fake terrain, indented with parallel lines to serve as tracks. One he’s built them out into an environment of considerable size, blanketing most of the living room floor in a new and heretofore uncelebrated type of plastic detritus, he carefully sets the associated little train engine on top and presses the button with his thumb.

Nothing happens.

Enji goes and finds some batteries, and a screwdriver, and then a smaller screwdriver when the first one turns out to be useless. He’s seen bank vaults that were easier to access.

In the end, though, the way Eiji’s eyes light up when his second attempt at starting the train summons a faint mechanical growl and sends the engine chugging dutifully around the circumference of his creation makes the tribulations, tritely enough, completely worthwhile.

The movement of the engine draws Enji’s attention to some of the pieces still lying in the box. Further examination confirms that one of them is a rather cleverly-designed switch, so that you can adjust a lever and direct your engine down an alternate track, and there are several intersecting track pieces to facilitate multiple avenues.

“Did you not want to use these?” Enji asks.

Eiji hesitates, expression going unusually cagey before he looks away and admits in a low mutter, “I dunno what they do, Grampa.”

Enji makes himself breathe out before he answers—makes himself reorganize the words, reconfigure the thought, excise any trace of judgment. “That’s all right. Do you want to find out, or do you like the train track the way it is now?”

Eiji watches the train for a few more seconds, then sneaks a glance at him. “You can show me, Grampa?”

“If you’d like,” Enji says.

Eiji thinks it through, looks at his existing handiwork, and then scoots over to peer at the unused piece in Enji’s hand. “Okay.”

Together, they manage to complicate the track immensely, which inspires Eiji to include a loop that encircles the base of the play gym—from the shadow of which Naru watches them with interest, offering the occasional encouraging burble.

After about an hour of crawling around trying to follow the little train or lying on the carpet peering through the tunnels as it approaches, Eiji’s attention starts to drift, and they get to play the toddler variant of Twenty Questions: What would you like to do next?

Eiji decides on practicing counting—Enji double-checks, and triple-checks, but he sticks to his guns—so they take a quick break to feed Naru together and then settle down.

Enji doesn’t want to push him—he knows damn well where that leads—but at what point is it kinder to start holding them back? At what stage are you supposed to be able to see their limits better than they can? How do you get them to understand?

He’s afraid of it—of saying No. Of saying Stop. He’s never known the difference between enough ambition and too much. His failure to distinguish the two is what killed Touya. That’s how all of this started. He can’t fuck it up again.

He can’t.

He’s leaping heedlessly to conclusions—courting worst-case scenarios that don’t even exist. He has to step back, has to slow down, has to separate the past from the present, thread by thread.

Eiji just wants to learn. Enji isn’t the sole arbiter of his future. Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has been done that can’t be undone. Knowing what he’s wary of is half of winning.

It’s all right.

Much as he still finds the jumping cage puzzling in concept, he has to admit that it has its uses—first and foremost, keeping Naru in even plainer sight, letting him bob aimlessly and slime the plastic objects on the rim to his tiny heart’s content, while Enji addresses the occasional brain-stimulating rhetorical question towards him from where he and Eiji have settled down on the floor.

Enji lays out a small handful of shiny little plastic flowers. They were supposed to be tokens for some game Eiji didn’t care for, but they make decent counting markers. “How many is this?”

Eiji sets his tiny mouth and starts sliding them across the carpet one by one to move them into a separate pile. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”

“Keep going,” Enji says.

“I am,” Eiji says, and Enji has to bite back the smile. Hawks does work too fast. Eiji powers his way past ten with no difficulty, and then reaches the more challenging teens. “Eleven. Twelve. And then—and thirteen. And fourteen. And…” He hesitates, concentrates, rallies. Watching the progression feels quite like being stabbed. “Fifteen! I know fifteen, Grampa. Then sixteen. And…” His brow furrows, and he prods at the final one with a fingertip for a second. “Seventeen. Right?”

He looks up, eyes wide—hungry for the approbation.

“That’s right,” Enji says, holding his voice as steady as he can. “That’s very good.”

The front door opens, smoothly enough that today must not have been too bad. Hawks’s boots collide with the wall, and then a cabinet swings open and shut. The air rushes. “What’s shakin’, babes?”

Enji collects another handful of flowers and files the metal note to skim the news for earthquakes and vibration quirks. “Nothi—”

“Oh!” Hawks says from the doorway, beaming despite a substantial coating of dust. Enji pulls the note, adds check for signs of concussion, and re-files it closer to the front. “You are!”

Beaming toothlessly, Naru extracts his hand from his mouth, trailing a long string of gleaming spit that bows in the center and then snaps. Enji wearily pens the obligatory additional mental note to wipe the damn jumper down again.

Hawks makes a big, showy point of blasting across the room, ruffling the pages of the paperwork that Enji left pinned under his laptop in case of precisely such a contingency. Feathers flicker, the air roils, and Hawks pretends to slam down on his heels directly in front of Naru, without actually putting any weight on the floor at all.

Naru squeals, gaping in open-mouthed delight, and slaps his wet hands on the plastic rim.

“Don’t encourage him,” Enji mutters, but Naru doesn’t pay him any heed.

Eiji looks just as enchanted. It’s already too late: Hawks’s charisma has claimed two more victims.

Hawks twists to grin back at his latest devotee as a feather chucks Eiji gently under the chin. “Hey, little guy! School okay?” At the solemn nod, he slants a glance at Enji. “You taking good care of your grampa?”

Eiji looks at Enji too.

Enji looks back at him—this tiny twice-altered copy of his own genes, his own world, his own lifeblood. The little pudgy fingers tighten around one of the plastic flowers as the anxiety of uncertainty takes root.

He wants to be good. He needs to be good.

Enji understands that much.

“Yes,” Enji says. “You are.”

Eiji smiles.

“Baller,” Hawks says. At the glare, he just grins wider, feathers flitting around Naru’s gleaming hands to make him stretch and reach and coo. “Hey. You’re lucky it wasn’t—” He painstakingly mouths the word badass.

It’s really rather unconscionable that Enji loves him so damn much.

“What about you, my man?” Hawks says, holding both palms out to Naru for high-fives. The sliming commences in earnest. The noise of Naru’s hands meeting his sounds like a soaked towel slopping to the bathroom floor. “My stars, Naru, you have graced me with some top-notch goo tonight. I’ll treasure this forever. If your grampa’s really good, I’ll share some with him. On his face.” Eiji giggles. Naru crows something unintelligible in response, and Hawks leans in to pretend to listen. “In his ear, you say?”

“Go take a shower,” Enji says. It does not come out sounding imperious. “You’re shedding.”

“Shedding joy and glad tidings,” Hawks says, spinning on his heel. “Thanks for noticing.” At Enji’s arched eyebrow, he pumps both fists in the air. “Guess who’s got two thumbs and the next two entire goshdarn days off?”

Enji’s heart twists.

With the way he’s been working, he should spend the duration of a free weekend passed out facedown on the bed, drowsing blissfully but for the occasional interlude for Enji to provide food or a long, long massage.

But tomorrow, Natsuo will be allowed to visit for the first time.

Tomorrow, Enji’s going to need him.

Naru bangs his hands against the plastic again, babbling enthusiastically to underscore the mirrored celebration, and Eiji throws his hands in the air to join in as Hawks triumphantly points both thumbs at himself.

Enji will—find time. Make some. Scrounge some up. Let him rest as long as it’s possible. Give him everything that’s left.

“It’s like you knew!” Hawks is saying to Naru. “Or maybe you’re just a party baby. Are you a party baby?”

Naru bounces avidly in the suspended seat, reaching for the feathers, pushing his tiny toes off of the floor.

“That’s the ticket!” Hawks says. “In that moment, I swear we were all party babies.”

Enji says “What are you talking about?” more for his own satisfaction than because he has any expectation of an answer.

Hawks has already started gyrating aimlessly, jumping up and down, flailing his arms out heedlessly and swinging his hips as Naru bounces with him.

Eiji doesn’t seem to know what to make of it.

Enji does know the way that relief, in Hawks, floods the bank and crests right back up into feverish elation.

That doesn’t mean that Enji has to be nice.

“You look like one of those inflatable tube people at car dealerships,” he says.

Hawks throws him an extremely broad wink without even slowing down. “But in a sexy way.”

“Not so much,” Enji says.

It’s a bit of a lie, given that Enji has seen him make flying into a window look strangely cute, but the dismissal sets the corners of Hawks’s eyes to crinkling instantly.

“Come on. Live a little. A dose of silly dance might just cure what ails you.” Enji highly doubts it, but Hawks is already holding his hands out to his other wide-eyed fanboy. “Eiji! My pal! My guy! You’ll silly dance with me, won’t you? You’re a great silly dancer.”

Eiji is already scrambling up off of the floor, drawn right in to the warmth of him—moth to flame.

“C’mon, Naru!” he says, fearlessly grabbing his brother’s tiny hands, swinging them out of any sort of rhythm as he jumps up and down. “You gotta get more silly!”

The grin that Hawks turns on Enji is devastatingly smug.

“Be careful,” Enji says. “Be gentle on his arms.”

Eiji releases Naru’s hands—the better to fling both arms around him and bounce up and down in off-sync sequence with him several times. “C’mon, Grampa!”

You can’t make up for lost time. What’s done is done, and what’s gone is gone.

And any day—any instant—could be the last one you’re granted, or the last that you recognize. The universe could tip out from underneath you at any moment, and the whole damn world could fall away.

This is temporary, because everything is temporary. Life is temporary. You can’t take any of it back, and you can’t take any of it with you.

Enji would be stupid not to make the most of this while he has it. While he can.

And—hell.

It would take a stronger man than he is to resist the little beaming grin and Eiji’s outstretched hands.

Enji’s heart hurts.

And his knees do, for whatever that’s worth.

He pushes himself upright off of the metal arm and crosses over, and Eiji’s smile widens as he moves.

Enji scoops him up off of the floor with a hand under each of his arms, carrying through the momentum to toss him—gently, carefully, calculatedly—into the air overhead.

The whoop of sheer joy dissolves into uncontrollable giggles as Enji catches him—carefully, so carefully, painstakingly cautious of the metal hand—and gathers him into both arms and spins on one heel before leveling a look at Hawks. “You don’t even have any music.”

Hawks’s smile could power a city, let alone save a soul. “You and your Rules.”

Eiji throws his arms around Enji’s neck, or at least as much of it as he can reach. “Again, Grampa! Please?”

Hawks grins broader and sharper.

“I got this,” Hawks says, whipping out his phone. Bits of dust are still actively flaking off of his clothes.

When his phone dutifully connects to the speaker system they hardly ever make any use of, the brassiness that pours out is surprisingly familiar.

Enji raises an eyebrow at him. “Do you even know how old this song is?”

“I like old stuff,” Hawks says, smirking shamelessly. “I heard it in a horror movie I was watching at three in the morning when I was thirteen and imprinted on it.” He holds both hands out, grin spreading like a sunrise, as ever. “C’mon! Nobody’s gonna judge you. We won’t tell.”

“You,” Enji says, stepping close enough to be caught, “are something else.”

Hawks seizes his elbows with both hands, twisting with just enough force to coax him into turning again, and again— “Your number one something. Your favorite.”

Enji shifts Eiji into his left arm, bouncing him on purpose to coax out another giggle, and then hooks the right around Hawks’s waist. “Obviously.”

The Hawks who graces billboards and the covers of every other magazine—who brightens up the front page of the newspaper several times a week, whose exploits regularly spawn inexplicable social media spirals (“Hawks’s dainty ankles & why they should be ILLEGAL!!!”)—would wink and grin and draw a finger gun, the better to blow imaginary smoke from his fingertip when he was finished pointing.

The Hawks, though, who has made this house livable and this life bearable—with such persistence and panache that Enji hates the way the bed looks without him in it—gazes up at him for a long second before the smile cracks through. It starts as a glimmer in his eyes like starlight before it sears through the rest of his face, illuminating him like a beacon from within.

“Flatterer,” he says, voice low and ringing with the heat of it.

Enji uses the leverage of the arm at his waist to swing them both around, and then around again—Eiji laughs brightly, and one of Hawks’s hands finds its way up to the neck of his neck, the other stabilizing Eiji in his arm.

Enji isn’t much for music, but there’s something to be said for being old-fashioned, if it grants him the call of the brazen trumpets and the coaxing of the French horns. All that brass and gold would look pathetically faded next to Hawks’s eyes, but that’s someone else’s problem. Every problem is someone else’s just now—just for tonight.

Hawks starts laughing, too, when Enji rocks them back and forth, swings his hips, dips both Hawks and Eiji low enough that feathers brush the carpet. Naru babbles insistently, bouncing in the jumper, waving his hands towards them with such gleeful determination that Enji edges closer so that he won’t feel left out.

“Look at you,” Hawks says, arms tightening around him. “You’ve been holding out on me this whole time.”

“I have not,” Enji says.

“Have so,” Hawks says, purring it like an inappropriate compliment, and feathers pluck Eiji gently out of his arm and deposit the warm weight on top of Enji’s shoulders instead—Eiji easily kicking one leg out on either side of his neck, giggling anew. The feathers brace his back so firmly that he doesn’t have to cling on to Enji’s ears to balance himself, which is a courteous touch.

And it does free both arms for his golden boy, to twine their fingers on the left and grasp onto his hip with the right in a way less related to proper form then to the irresistible compulsion to touch him any time he comes in reach.

“Tell me you can swing-dance,” Hawks says, trying to smirk—and failing, because the giddy joy keeps breaking through.

“No,” Enji says.

Hawks pulls on his hands one at a time, bobbing his shoulders for him, twisting him with the beat. “Uh… waltz?”

“Good try,” Enji says.

Hawks tries to lift Enji’s hand above their heads to twirl him, which requires boosting himself ten inches off the ground with the feathers.

“Lucky for us,” he says, “this is silly dance, and the rules are that there are no rules.”

Lucky doesn’t begin to cover it.

His indefatigable shifting—a movement like a breath of wind and an ocean wave, like the churn of a vivid sunset burgeoning into life—resolves into a clumsy improvised impression of a box-step, which carries them back and forth across the carpet, dodging toys and crayons and paper files as they go.

Hawks laughing, Eiji laughing, Naru calling and cooing from by the wall, the unabashed vibrance of the music washing over them, carrying them out to sea—there is dust cascading down Enji’s sweater, patches of it visible on the carpet and clustering in the seams of his right arm.

It feels like his heart is going to burst.

As always, what Hawks lacks in technique, he overcompensates for with enthusiasm. It’s an off-kilter, well-intentioned mess—neither of them leading or following so much as reflexively reading each other’s momentum, swanning haphazardly around the whole of the living room, spinning and sashaying and missing their footing as often as not. It’s an undignified disaster. It’s so perfect that Enji can’t stop smiling.

Which hurts, actually, after a while.

They stumble their way back over towards Naru, Hawks’s breath coming short from laughing so much while hauling them all around the room, embodying the rhythm and the warmth alike from head to toe, and he drops his head against Enji’s chest.

Enji wraps both arms around him as tight as he dares.

A tiny hand pats his ear. “That was fun, Grampa!”

His cheeks ache. “It was.”

Hawks snickers, squeezing gently. “Aha. I knew you’d come around on silly dance.”

Enji breathes into the dusty—but still tantalizingly soft—gold hair, curling the fingers of his left hand into the back of Hawks’s filthy coat. “You left me no choice.”

“Beautiful,” Hawks says. “I get to check off ‘coercion’ on my Relationship Bingo card.”

Enji has several things he means to say in answer to that, but before he can open his mouth, a very wet little hand seizes onto his slacks, suddenly enough that he startles.

“Oh!” Hawks says. “You want in, party baby? Of course you do!”

A few feathers nudge Naru’s fingers to coax him into releasing Enji, at the same moment that several of the others circle around his body, lifting him up out of the jumper and depositing him squarely in the crook of Hawks’s right arm. Another handful swoop up for Eiji, slinging him down for Enji to catch.

“Here we go,” Hawks says, grasping onto Enji again, yanking them together with the giggling shapes of both the children in between. “Group hug. This is the sh—the—stuff. The endorphin factory. The best thing ever. The point.”

Enji can’t argue.

He’s right.

It’s terrifying, but he’s right.

The weight of the silence must say it loudly, because Hawks glances up, a knowing gleam in the gold eyes, and smiles again.

“Hawks,” Eiji cuts in, half-spoken, half in a scandalized gasp. “You’re all bloody!”

That’s… far more plausible than Enji would like.

Hawks blinks, surprised at first, and then looking slightly guilty with a side of chagrin. “Am not.”

“Yuh-huh!” Eiji says, pulling his coat aside. “Right here!”

The prodding finger just underneath his ribs earns a flinch and a wince.

“Okay,” Hawks says, grimacing. “Maybe a little.”

Good damn thing they have so many band-aids left.

Fortunately, for once, the source of the bloodstain is a shallow cut that just bled freely, mostly blending in to the black of Hawks’s shirt, concealed beneath the coat. It’s probably yet another sign that his blood pressure has crept up to distressing heights, but at least he isn’t in immediate danger. Eiji insists on helping to plaster Hawks with his own ridiculous branded bandages, which Enji hopes is a good thing—at the very least, the whole situation should serve as proof that Enji didn’t single Eiji out for the hydrogen peroxide torture when he scraped his hands.

Hawks makes a big damn deal about it even though Enji knows he could have endured the entire experience without so much as batting an eyelash. His compartmentalization skills make Enji look disorderly in comparison, which is really saying something.

And then he notices during dinner that Hawks is eating in what looks, compared to his regular habit, like slow-motion.

Enji has never once seen Hawks reject food for taste, and if he thought there was something actually amiss with it, he wouldn’t let Eiji keep eating.

Enji catches his eye and raises an eyebrow to try to ask what’s wrong, but the faint shake of the head that he gets in return is a Never mind.

Enji minds.

But it can wait.

Lord knows they have enough shit to carry without him blowing something small out of proportion. He needs to let it go, for now if not forever. He has to trust in Hawks’s judgment of its importance. He has to believe that if it matters, Hawks will let him in.

There’s time for a movie before bed—Fuyumi has had several recommendations, but lately Enji has had to resort to finding lists online and curating them by cross-checking reviews. He tries to be careful about limiting Eiji’s screen time, but sitting down some nights and watching films all together—or, in Naru’s case, as much of them as he can tolerate before he returns to his grueling schedule of smearing drool all over blocks or napping on Enji’s shoulder—has a meditative quality to it. It’s something, Enji thinks, about the shared experience of a diversion that they’re all invested in.

Hawks has started weighing in with titles for the list lately. His selections tend to be more fanciful—escapist. Enji would do much more than look the other way to keep him drawn in like this, with Enji’s arm around him, his head resting against Enji’s shoulder and his heart beating slow.

Bathtime and getting ready for bed have become ritualistic enough that they generally go off without a hitch. Enji doesn’t have to watch closely anymore when Eiji climbs up to the height of the stepstool, braces one hand on the bathroom counter, and leans towards the mirror to brush his teeth. Enji suggested that he divide his mouth up into sections and focus on one at a time, for ten seconds each, counting down as he goes. He’s doing a spectacular job.

Hawks never misses the bedtime story when he makes it home in time. After they’ve wrapped up this evening’s installment, and Eiji is drifting off to adventurous dreams, the adults slink back into the living room, collapse on the couch, and turn on the news with the sound low. There’s nothing about Hawks’s day broadcasting at the moment, which means the fight that gave him that cut can’t have been too bad. They’d reserve a scrolling banner in a noxious shade of yellow for him if it was.

Nothing about Shouto or the boys, either—Enji allows himself a silent sigh of relief. He can’t keep tabs the way he used to. Maybe it’s mostly for the better, but he can’t quite convince himself that he’d rather be blindsided by the inevitable than constantly on high alert.

When the night has worn down far enough to qualify as bedtime for grownups, too, Hawks stands up from the couch, saunters over to the laundry room, peels his shirt and pants off, looks blankly at the way they continue to scatter particulate matter all over the floor even as he drops them into the designated hero clothes laundry basket, stands there in his socks and underwear for a few seconds, and then blinks up at Enji in feigned bewilderment. “How come it’s so dusty in here?”

Enji scoops him up and slings him over the left shoulder, careful to position the new injury where it won’t bear any of his weight. Hawks repeatedly tries to squirm just right to push his ass against Enji’s cheek in a meaningful way, and Enji keeps re-wrangling a restrictive grip around the backs of his thighs to hold him still while carrying him back across the house for a very, very overdue shower.

It is not a particularly sexy shower. Scrubbing all the crap out of Hawks’s hair takes an extremely long time, especially with just one hand tonight, to spare the metal joints another soaking. Hawks basks in it like a contented cat all the same, nudging up into the touch with his eyes mostly shut, which Enji supposes is a silver lining to be grateful for.

He perks up after Enji towels his hair off, which is also a disproportionate challenge one-handed. Enji misses leverage. He misses specificity. He misses control.

He misses the world that left him behind.

But Hawks was right—he saw it for what it was, saw through to the core of it, saw the essence instead of the effluence. Saw the dwindling kindling, not the smoke.

Enji would have died, sooner or later, if he’d stayed. If he’d been lucky, it would have been before he slipped—before he missed a cue, dropped a ball, fumbled an opportunity so ineptly that he took civilians with him. He would have obliterated his reputation and undermined the agency, and if he had survived, it would have been an existence so intolerable that he wouldn’t have lasted very long.

Hawks convinced him to quit while he was still a hair ahead, instead of going down in flames—instead of destroying the only thing he’d ever done with his miserable life.

He has to focus on what he can do. On what’s still available. There are a million ways to save someone, and most of them don’t involve flame beneath your feet.

Incredible, really—that he can still be ungrateful, with all of this. That he has the audacity to wallow in regret.

Look ahead. Move forward. Build with what you have at hand.

Hawks makes some extraordinarily pornographic noises when Enji massages his neck and his shoulders. Evidently one hand is enough for this—based on the intensity of the enthusiasm, it seems somewhat doubtful that he would be able to handle this if Enji could offer him two.

“I’m gonna hire you,” Hawks mumbles in between vociferous groans. Enji guides them down the hall to the bedroom so that at least Hawks will be able to muffle them in the pillow if he starts feeling merciful.

“You already did,” Enji says, keeping his voice low.

“Gonna re-hire you,” Hawks says, dutifully collapsing on the bed as Enji positions the baby monitor and adjusts the volume. “On my yacht. As my personal massage artist.”

“You can’t afford me,” Enji says.

As Hawks laughs, he fits the prosthetic arm onto the dock and waits the half-second for the low hum of electricity to start passing through it before he steps away.

He sits down next to Hawks on the bed, pushing the evening’s particularly soft T-shirt up first to check on the bandages. One sliver of the cut started bleeding again in the shower, but Hawks, unsurprisingly, insisted that it was fine.

Equally unsurprisingly, he smiles around the corner of the pillow. “They don’t suck: they stick.”

Enji smoothes his shirt down and digs a knuckle in at the base of a beleaguered shoulder-blade again. “You should pay Eiji royalties for that.”

“I can’t afford him, either,” Hawks says. Enji’s bent index finger finds the knot again, and Hawks twists underneath his hand. “Ah, fuck—”

“Keep your voice down,” Enji says, trying to file the edge off of his. That was his own fault.

“I remember,” Hawks says, clenching his fingers into the duvet and making a valiant effort to stay still. “Trust me—I remember real well.”

Enji works his thumb into another problem area alongside Hawks’s spine, just below the base of his skull. “Maybe if you’re very good—”

“Ah, damn,” Hawks says, the laughter already trickling into his voice. “Well, that’s out.”

Enji rubs at the equally intractable tension on the other side. “Maybe if you’re moderately good—”

The laugh shivers through Hawks’s entire skeleton, enlivening every weary muscle, rolling like an ocean wave. “Now we’re talkin’.”

Rei sent some books for the kids, and one for him—complete with a note that read It’s a good thing I’ve seen so many home improvement shows, or I would be concerned that this enormous television would collapse the wall. Thank you, unless the house comes down around it soon. The flowers do look very nice in HD.

The book for him is a compilation of interesting or unlikely-sounding facts, each followed by an explanation of how that particular unexpected feature of the world came to be the case. It’s divided into sections based on the overarching topic, and he’s made it nearly through the one on strange historical coincidences.

His strategy lately has been to spread a book out on his lap and hold it open from the bottom of the page by splaying his hand across it. Turning pages can still be something of an ordeal—he tries to coax them up with his fingertips, letting the page curl up underneath his palm before he flicks it over, but sometimes they stick together, or he can’t get the traction, or the paper starts to crease.

At least he can do it, when he wants to. E-readers are all good and well, but this was a gift, and there’s something reassuring about the texture of the paper and the faint scent of the ink. He’s not too proud to take any solace he can get, these days.

He finishes out the section in fairly good time, and he knows they’ll need all the rest they can get for tomorrow, so he makes a mental note of the page number and closes it.

Hawks—who has been scrolling silently for most of the time, faint colors flickering over his face from the glow of the screen—reaches over to show him a photo Shouto posted on his private account. Most of his high school class is there, Tenya Iida and Midoriya most prominent in the center of the image, Tenya pointing imperiously at a large and somewhat sloppy drawing propped up on an easel, clearly arguing with someone. Midoriya appears to be arguing with someone else in the opposite direction, brandishing a white brochure with tiny text. Bakugou is sitting cross-legged on the floor next to him, paging furiously through what might be a dictionary. Uraraka has made a frighteningly large collection of pencils float in mid-air near the left edge of the frame, Yaoyorozu is engaged in a deep discussion with Asui that involves gesturing towards the easel also, and Dark Shadow is balancing a pencil on the end of his nose while Tokoyami feigns interest. Sato is practicing drawing a very impressive cake in the foreground, Kouda is leaning over his shoulder as if to suggest something, and Shouji has turned all of his limbs into hands to brandish pencils in order to doodle with all of them at once. A bit of blond fluff and a suspended sweater sleeve at the other edge of the image imply Ojiro and Hagakure off to that side. Closer in, Sero and Jirou are both giving Iida emphatic thumbs-downs, and Kaminari has turned towards Shouto’s camera with a slightly crazed delighted grin to counter with a thumbs-up. Ashido has ceremoniously placed the top half of a game box on her head like a highly impractical hat—it reads Pictionary.

Shouto has captioned it reunion game night lol.

“Serious question,” Enji says, slowly. Hawks might make fun of him for it, but Hawks makes fun of him for just about everything anyway. “Is he enjoying himself, or not?”

“Definitely,” Hawks says, and the warmth in his voice is—staggering, really. He’s always talked about Shouto with a special sort of fondness, but it has noticeably intensified over the past few weeks. He’s currently using the same profoundly affectionate intonations that he does for Eiji and Naru. “It’s the all-lowercase ‘lol’, see? Shouto doesn’t tack on tone indicators very often, and he isn’t the type of person to use ‘lol’ ironically, so for him it’s to express the fact that he was smiling when he posted it, and he couldn’t think of another way to convey how happy he was.”

Enji considers that while he looks closer at the picture. He thinks he can just see the tips of Shouto’s slippered toes at the bottom of the frame. Yaoyorozu has cut her hair much shorter since the last time he saw her. Tenya’s drawing is a vaguely rectangular object with circular detailing, which looks like something in between a city bus and Wash, or possibly a combination of the two.

Midoriya’s scarf slipped down enough to show the rim of a hickey on his throat.

“Whereas you,” Enji says, “use ‘lol’ ironically all the time.”

“Except when I don’t,” Hawks says, delightedly, “because I’m a psychopath who stirs up chaos to entertain myself.”

Enji hands his phone back, eyeing him. “You’re not a psychopath.”

Hawks grins. “I am a little bit.”

Enji eyes him harder. “No, you’re not.”

Hawks moves to take the phone—and then instead wraps both hands around Enji’s wrist, pulling him in to kiss the corner of his mouth just where the scar cuts through.

“What was that for?” Enji manages as Hawks releases Enji’s arm and returns his attention to his phone screen.

“It was for everything,” Hawks says, which is dizzyingly, disproportionately sweet. “Extreme duh,” he adds, which is less so.

“I don’t think that’s going to catch on,” Enji says, projecting much more confidence in the statement than he actually has.

As ever, Hawks grins, undaunted and indomitable. “Not with that attitude.”

Enji gives him a look, taking care to keep it skeptical instead of challenging. The instant it becomes a challenge, Hawks will appear on every talk show known to humankind, chirping Extreme duh into the cameras until it starts creeping into the national lexicon whether anyone likes it or not.

In the meantime, Enji shifts over to lay the book on the nightstand, then reaches past his phone for his glasses case.

His phone makes a chiming noise that he hasn’t heard in a long time. What in the—

He snatches it up from the nightstand.

He looks at the screen.

Then he looks over at Hawks.

“You just invited me to a meeting,” he says, “titled ‘Fuck me, babe’.”

Hawks smiles at him, ninety percent adoring and ten percent insufferably smug. “Starting in eight minutes. Do you want an agenda? I’m hoping we can skip the icebreaker.”

Enji looks him in the eyes and presses his thumb to the button that reads Decline.

“Damn,” Hawks chokes out around how hard he’s trying not to laugh. “Not even going to suggest a new meeting time? That’s it. I’m filing for divorce. And I’m taking the kids.”

“I will not be helping you with that paperwork,” Enji says. “Have fun.”

“Hang on,” Hawks says, typing furiously on his phone.

Even knowing precisely what’s coming, it takes every scrap remaining of Enji’s depleted willpower to swallow down the laugh.

Hawks has invited him to a new meeting titled Get married so we can get divorced. He scheduled it for Saturday at noon, right before the local office closes.

“Leaves us time to take the kids for ice cream!” he says. “Or is next week better for you?”

Something settles in Enji’s brain with a subtle but definitive little clink.

He looks at the screen for another second, and then he looks across the bed at the unspeakably beautiful bane of his existence—his odd, unstoppable, impossible, undeserved and undeniable saving grace.

“Hawks,” Enji says. “Did you just propose to me with a calendar invite?”

Hawks opens his mouth.

Hawks closes it again.

Hawks looks down at his phone.

Hawks looks up at Enji.

Hawks blinks twice.

“Well,” he says. “Uh. Technically. Yes.”

Enji waits, but nothing else seems to be forthcoming.

He returns his attention to his phone.

He never really had a choice. He never really stood a chance.

There are some battles that aren’t worth winning, and there are some you want to lose.

He taps the button that reads Accept.

Hawks’s phone pings.

Hawks stares at the screen for a second, then throws the phone at him.

Enji attempts to duck, but it still bounces off of his shoulder and then ricochets against the wall.

“Oh, fuck off,” Hawks says, sounding unusually strangled as he buries his face in his newly-liberated hands.

“You started it,” Enji says.

“I did n—okay—well—”

Instead of attempting to defend that untenable position, Hawks wisely changes course, and somewhat less wisely scrambles over and starts kissing insistently at every part of Enji’s face that he can reach.

“Are you sure?” he says.

Enji has to try twice to get his hand around the back of Hawks’s neck firmly enough to pull him in and catch his mouth. That done, he draws Hawks back again, just far enough to look him in the eyes. “Yes.”

Hawks’s smile is lopsided, and his eyes are a little too bright. His voice sticks, just slightly—a trace of wet weight dragging back. “I mean—I blindsided both of us. It’s okay if—you don’t have t—”

“I’m sure,” Enji says. He tugs very gently on Hawks’s hair. “Are you? You’re the thirty-year-old magazine model with an unprecedented pro career who’s slumming it with a civilian.”

Hawks wheezes more than he laughs, but it’s quite a lot of each. “Shut up, you absolute asshole, I—”

Enji pulls him back in to kiss him. “You shut up.”

Hawks wrinkles his nose. “You first.”

Enji twines his fingers deeper into the silky gold hair and gently tugs again. “You started it.”

“And you went along with it,” Hawks says, a grin chasing its way around his mouth as his eyes slide partway shut at Enji’s ministrations. “Isn’t that worse?”

“That’s your fault, too,” Enji says. “You know I’d follow you anywhere.”

Hawks scoots back, grabs Enji’s hand, and pulls until Enji sits fully upright.

Then Enji promptly has a lap full of the nation’s number one, and a pair of wings wrapped tightly around both of them.

He hooks his arm around Hawks’s waist as Hawks buries his face in the side of Enji’s neck. He can feel the little smile curving against his skin.

“I don’t want to be anywhere but here,” Hawks says.

Enji reaches higher, shuffling his fingers gently through the feathers for a few seconds before he strokes them through Hawks’s hair again.

“I don’t either,” he says.

Hawks’s eyelashes flicker once over Enji’s skin as he closes his eyes, and then Hawks’s breathing steadies. Enji runs his fingertips gently up and down the ridges of his tortured spine. Anything he can do—anything he can give—to lighten all that it holds up, everything Hawks carries—

“I do wish we had popsicles, though,” Hawks says.

Enji knuckles at the substantial knot beneath Hawks’s right shoulder-blade again.

“Well,” he says. “That wouldn’t hurt.”

There’s a subtle and still somewhat mysterious balance for how long to let Eiji sleep in on weekends. He’s constantly pushing the limits of his little brain and body—which is something Enji thinks he needs to consult the Board of Baby Directors, namely Rei and Fuyumi, about—so surely he’s benefiting from the rest. But schedules are still paramount, and waking him at a relatively consistent time ensures that he’s tired enough to go to bed without a fight.

Enji supposes that’s the theory, anyway. Eiji has whined several times, and cried once when he’d been enjoying the bedtime story too much and didn’t want to have to stop, but he’s never thrown a fit about it. Shouto used to resist a lot of things, but going to sleep was never one of them—in retrospect, probably less out of obedience than because it was the only time he could get solitude and safety in this house. Touya had argued with everything at this age, but Enji had explained to him that he needed rest to fortify his body for the next day, so that he could work harder and reach further. He’d treated it like a personal mission after that. Fuyumi had used to bargain, and sometimes tried to charm her way out of it.

Enji doesn’t remember what Natsuo did. Maybe that says it all.

He’s still not sure he’s doing the right thing—here, in this moment; here, in this house; here, in this life.

He supposes he’s never been sure. And it’s never really mattered. He still has to try.

He knocks gently on Eiji’s door and then peeks in. Eiji rolls over, mumbling something, and pulls the blanket over his head.

Enji catches himself smiling.

“Good morning,” he says. “Let’s get some breakfast. Today is special, remember?”

Eiji rolls back, shoving his elbow underneath himself so he can sit up and search Enji’s face. “Today’s—is Daddy coming today?”

Enji irons out the surge of trepidation. Eiji cannot know that he’s nervous. “That’s right.”

Eiji clenches both hands in the duvet, grin tentative. “He’s really coming? For real?”

“Yes,” Enji says. “Really. Are you ready for b—”

Eiji scrambles out of the bed, crashes into Enji’s shin and hugs it, and then gallops off to the bathroom, the door of which he slams in his excitement.

The anxiety is clawing a hole in the pit of Enji’s stomach. Natsuo has to come through. He has to.

He stills himself. He leans against the doorframe. He makes himself breathe deeply, slowly, evenly; makes himself think. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Natsuo has been working, too, all this time—he’s too smart not to know he fucked it up three weeks ago when they had him on the phone. Fuyumi cares too much to let him get away with it, even if he is drowning so much that he’s failed to figure it out on his own.

The worst thing that can happen is that Natsuo repeats the unfortunate performance from the call, but in-person this time, and Fuyumi has to bail them all out again. Enji doesn’t want to put her in that position, obviously, but if that does unfold, they’ll make it. They’ll all survive.

He gathers himself up and crosses past the bathroom, and their bedroom—complete with the tantalizing stirrings of the sleepy Hawks still tangled up in the blankets of the bed—to Naru’s room.

As soon as Naru’s eyes are open, he reaches up with both tiny arms, waving them in Enji’s direction, and releases what Enji can only interpret as the excited squeak. One hand returns to his mouth as soon as Enji’s fingers wrap around his side and curl beneath the back of his head, and then he makes a faint discontented noise likely related to the collision of nascent teeth and nibbled hand.

“Good morning,” Enji says. “How did you sleep?”

“Aggle-bah,” Naru says, definitively.

Enji nods, taking him over to the changing table. “We sincerely appreciate the effort you’ve put into staying asleep for longer lately. Hawks has been able to cut back more than a hundred milligrams of caffeine most days.”

“Mahhh,” Naru says.

“Excellent point,” Enji says. Miraculously, the diaper situation isn’t dire. “Maybe now that I have access to his finances, I can see how much coffee he’s buying for the agency office, and extrapolate how much he drinks that I don’t know about.”

He changes Naru’s tiny pajamas out for tiny daytime clothes, including a sweater with a stylized polar bear face on it. He finds that a bit twee given that Naru doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to care if his clothing looks cute or not, but he’s aware that his opinion on that subject is in the vanishing minority.

He hears a touch of commotion from the bedroom—which then moves into the hallway and veers towards the kitchen.

“’Mornin’, sunshine!” Hawks says.

It’s so easy to envision Hawks grabbing onto Eiji’s tiny hand to steady him that Enji’s heart clenches around the mental image alone.

“G’morn’nHawkshullo!”

“Oh, my God, kid. You’re so cute I could eat you.”

“Nooooo.”

“I won’t!” Hawks is saying. “I promise. No matter how hungry I get. Hey, can you do me a favor?”

Eiji doesn’t even hesitate. “Okay!”

Enji follows at a distance with Naru, not least because he has so few things to be curious about these days.

He can hear the grimace in Hawks’s voice. “We gotta work on your answer to that question. But meanwhile—could you pinch me?”

“Pinch you? Why?”

“’Cause I want to be sure I’m not dreaming!”

Eiji speaks with the measured authority of a child repeating information that he unquestioningly trusts. “Grampa says you know you’re not dreaming if you can put both hands on top of your head and turn around in a circle, and everything’s the same.”

“Your grampa knows a lot of stuff,” Hawks says. He and Eiji just reached the kitchen. Enji slows down on purpose to give them time to finish this out. Hawks must know he’s here in any case. “C’mon! Just a little pinch.”

“Okay…”

A pause.

“Aw, kid,” Hawks says. “You can go way harder. I barely felt that.”

Eiji’s answer is ringingly sincere: “But I don’t wanna hurt you.”

Enji steps into the kitchen to slide Naru into his high chair, and Hawks’s expression is precisely what he expected.

“Who’s hungry?” Enji asks, not that there’s any doubt.

Eiji’s hand shoots up into the air. “Me!”

“Good,” Enji says.

Hawks eyes Enji in a way that looks slightly disbelieving, which presumably has very little to do with the prospect of food.

Enji steps over, slips a hand around the back of his neck, and kisses him bruisingly soundly on the mouth before stepping back again.

He puts a pan on the stove.

He turns just in time to see Hawks slowly licking his upper lip.

“Okay,” Hawks says. “That’s better than a pinch.”

Enji turns around again to hide the smile.

Eiji blows through breakfast with the unparalleled enthusiasm of a motivated toddler. When he’s cleaned his bowl, he looks up, mouth still full—starts to speak, pauses, swallows, and tries again.

“When’s Daddy coming?” he asks.

Enji’s heart makes a serious effort to rip itself to shreds. This will go better than the call. It has to go better than the call.

“Your grandma said he’ll come just before dinnertime,” he says. “Is that okay?”

Eiji wraps both hands around his chopsticks and nods intently, eyes wide but gone distant—imagining everything he’ll say, possibly. He must have stored up an arsenal of things he wants to share with Natsuo after so much time away.

“Your Auntie Fuyumi will be here, too,” Enji says. “She’s going to come by after lunch to play with you while I’m gone this afternoon.”

“Okay,” Eiji says, putting his chopsticks down. He scrapes his chair back by pushing on the table.

Enji jumps up and darts around to catch him up in both hands, lifting him out of the booster seat and then gently setting his little feet on the floor. He’s going to fall one of these days, if he squirms his way out of the chair too many times—split his head open, break something, worse. The world is far too big for him, and so fucking unkind.

“What do you want for dinner?” Enji asks.

“Aji fry!” Eiji says, immediately, clapping his tiny hands over a minuscule part of Enji’s knuckles until he’s settled his weight, and Enji lets go. “Fish is Daddy’s favorite.”

Enji hadn’t known that either.

Enji and Eiji spend most of the morning working on reading, and Hawks spends most of the morning lying on the floor, curled up around Enji’s back with both arms around his waist and his face nuzzled into Enji’s thigh. Enji can’t imagine that it’s comfortable, but he doesn’t seem to want to move, and with any luck he’s dozing enough that it will help repay the sleep debt in some measure.

Enji doesn’t really dare to hazard that either of them has much luck, but he has to hold himself to a higher standard of positivity. Everyone in this room needs him looking up—looking forward.

Enji recruits everybody but Naru to clean up a little before lunch, since otherwise Fuyumi will feel obligated to try to handle it herself, and she’s already doing them a favor—all of them, really, but Enji most of all.

She arrives a few minutes early. Is it wrong to read into that—to hope that it’s possible a part of her wanted to come?

She brought a set of dinosaur-themed cookie cutters as a gift, which Hawks is just as thrilled about as Eiji is. They eagerly start planning the icing colors they’ll use to decorate, and the epic prehistoric battles they’ll arrange, and how they’ll free-cut a cookie volcano and some ferns and a meteor. Enji thinks the meteor is a bit morbid, but he keeps his mouth shut.

He has to go anyway.

Hawks wraps the wings around him to double the intensity of the hug in the genkan as he puts on his shoes. He can just see Fuyumi smiling past the fall of the feathers.

“Behave yourself,” he mutters into Hawks’s ear as he strokes the silken hair back gently with his left hand. “Call me if anything comes up.”

“You’re supposed to keep your phone off,” Hawks says, lovingly.

“I’m supposed to do a lot of things,” Enji says. He kisses Hawks’s forehead and steps back, then turns to Fuyumi and tries not to let the inherent awkwardness of it send hot blood seething up into his cheeks. He’s allowed to be weak in front of her. He’s allowed to be the full scope and spectrum of himself. “I’ll go to the store on my way back,” he says. “Do you have an aji fry recipe you particularly like?”

“I’ll text it to you,” she says, smiling still. “It’s pretty standard. Drive safe, Dad.”

He doesn’t really have to say I’ll try.

“Thank you again for being so flexible with the reschedule,” Takiya says, ushering him in.

It wasn’t like there was any choice. “How was the conference?”

“Very interesting,” Takiya says, which is, of course, not the same thing as Good. “Although the best part was my daughter’s scavenger hunt to collect all of the free stuff she could get her hands on.” He holds a pen up proudly. Enji can’t read the engraved print on the side from here, but it looks like some sort of name and logo. “One of no fewer than twenty-six high-quality mass-manufactured writing utensils that she acquired over the course of three days, and generously donated to the office. And I wouldn’t even have expected anyone to be handing out athletic towels as swag at an event like this, but she charmed that booth into giving her three. Very successful weekend for everyone.”

With that out of the way, Takiya leans forward.

Here they go.

“So,” Takiya says. “How have you been?”

At least Enji has always been extremely apt at briefings—at organizing and articulating all of the most critical information as efficiently as possible, and delivering it quickly and coherently. This is just like that. This is just like kicking off a meeting at the agency. This is ordinary. It’s fine.

And Takiya keeps up, keeps nodding, jots a few things down without a single interjection.

Enji reaches the end of the script. He twists his hands around each other. It’s interesting to watch the way the flesh of his left hand gives while the right remains unyielding.

“You’re doing well,” Takiya says. “So well. I mean it, Enji. Take a deep breath. I wouldn’t bullshit you about that.”

He wouldn’t.

“You’re stabler today,” Takiya says, which is slightly amusing in a dark sort of way, given that Enji set the bar for that one somewhere far beneath the floor during their session just after the kids landed in his lap. “Although it looks like there’s something you’re thinking about. What’s next?”

Enji squeezes his hands against each other. The left hurts. The right feels nothing.

“Tonight is Natsuo’s first visit,” he says.

Takiya gives him a moment to elaborate.

He doesn’t.

He continues looking at his hands.

“That’s stressful,” Takiya says, slowly. Enji does not say No shit. “What do you want to say to him?”

Enji glances up. Takiya’s eyes are the same as always—calm, clear, unaccusatory.

“I’m not going to get anywhere near him,” Enji says. “It’s bad enough that it’ll be in my house.”

Takiya winces. “You’ve… let’s look at this objectively.”

Takiya’s intensive efforts to understand the way his mind works—to meet him where he is, and disentangle him from the nets and ropes of his failures and insecurities in a way that uses his own inclinations to part the fibers—is one of the most compelling reasons to put up with this process, and subject himself to this pain.

It’s like getting stitches—or a dose of hydrogen peroxide. It hurts far more at the start, but it heals better. It’s worth front-loading the beating. It’s worth the work to stumble through.

And Takiya has proven that he’s willing to do his part.

“You took them in,” Takiya says. “Your mindset was that you had no choice—that letting them end up with a social worker or looking for some loophole weren’t viable options. But in truth of fact, they were. You did have a choice, and this is the choice you made. Logically speaking, is that fair?”

Enji watches him. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Takiya says. “Now: everyone in your family except Natsuo has seen you with them, and witnessed how well you’re doing with them. I’d be willing to bet all of them reported back to him on that, and they were honest about it.”

Enji thinks of what Hawks told him, after Shouto’s visit—the unread messages, the unanswered offers. “My understanding is that he hasn’t talked to Shouto.”

Takiya raises an eyebrow. “Two out of three, then. Two out of the three people he trusts most in the world.”

Enji sets his jaw.

“And he saw,” Takiya says, “with his own eyes during that video call, that they’re all right. That you haven’t hurt them. He’s seen that what they’re telling him is true. You—and Hawks, too, to a great extent—have dropped everything in your life on a moment’s notice to make them your first priority. You’re doing his job while he’s unable to. And you’re doing it extremely well.”

Enji thinks of the haunted resignation in Eiji’s eyes when he hung up the phone with Spryte.

He thinks of the red-feather-blazoned bandages, and the silence of all the things he still hasn’t figured out how the hell to say.

He thinks of how Naru has a special, specific, deeper, fuller, whole-body giggle that he saves for Hawks.

Enji isn’t doing it extremely well.

He isn’t even doing it particularly proficiently.

But he is doing it.

The basic point is sound. They know they’re safe and cared for. They know they’re wanted. Their needs are met—they’ll never go hungry, they’ll never have to cry through the night alone. Not as long as there’s breath in his body and a spark through his nerves.

“You are making sacrifices as a consequence of his actions,” Takiya says. “He owes you gratitude.”

The words tear out of Enji’s chest without his permission, let alone his blessing. “He doesn’t owe me anything.”

Takiya pinches the bridge of his nose, waving his other hand and the pen with it, the notepad still balanced evenly on his knee. “Let me phrase that differently. He needs to appreciate the fact that you turned the house—and yourself—into a place for them. However much he hates it, you’ve made sure they feel safe there. You are well within your rights to require him to respect that. You’re within your rights to try to speak to him, Enji. Is avoiding him forever really any better than a fight?”

“Yes,” Enji says, hearing the truth unrolling underneath the word as it leaves his tongue. “At this point, yes. It’s not about my rights, or what I’m owed. They’ve been through enough. I just want Natsuo to get through it without getting hung up on me, so that he can focus on them. If we can all manage that much, then I can worry about talking to him later.”

Takiya tips his head slightly, contemplative as always.

“All right,” he says. “We can shelve that for now. But—here. Thought experiment. What would you say to him, if you had a better opportunity?”

Enji looks at the distressingly dull painting on the wall. They must deliberately reject any decorations that could provide even the slightest distraction. It’s a trap.

And it’s unfortunate that Enji is very, very good at thinking.

“I’d say ‘I’m sorry’,” he says, tracking his gaze slowly up over a blurry brownish wash of mountain towards a blurry tan wash of desert. “About all of it. About her. That I didn’t earn enough of his trust in time to meet her.” Maybe that’s the easy part. Maybe there is no easy part at all. “I’d tell him that I know. That I remember. That I know he tried. That he isn’t weak for failing in the face of it. That it isn’t over.”

Takiya shifts slightly in his chair. “I think he might like to hear that.”

Enji glances at him. “You don’t know Natsuo.”

Takiya smiles. “But I know you.”

Enji folds his arms, knowing full well that the barrier is inadequate—that it always has been. “His heart is in the right place. It’s his prerogative to lock me out of it.”

“Not anymore,” Takiya says.

Enji eyes him. “Saying that isn’t going to make it true. What’s happened in the interim doesn’t change what I did before, and I can’t stop him from holding that against me. I don’t want to stop him. And I think he’s right. I think—”

He’s nearly as good at damming himself as he is at damning himself, but you can only hold so much. You can only hold so much back.

At some point, the accumulation overflows.

The words start spilling, and he can’t pull them back.

“I think Fuyumi is too forgiving,” he says. “Too giving in general. She wants to believe we’re all better than we are—especially me, obviously, but all of us. She wants to believe we could have been something wonderful enough to deserve her, and we just missed our chance. I think she’s still holding out a sliver of hope that she’ll just wake up one day, and all of it will have been a misunderstanding, and we were really fine all along. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am. I think it’s going to break her heart someday when she has to come to terms with how fucked up we all are, and how much we’ve all taken advantage of her kindness over the years. How we’ve all walked on her in return for her unfailing faith.”

“Do you really believe that?” Takiya says, softly. “That she doesn’t even know what she’s in the middle of? That she doesn’t see you for who you are, as well as who you have been?”

Enji looks at the shitty painting again, curling and uncurling the fingers of his left hand around the metal rim of his right arm where it connects to his bicep. The skin gives. The metal doesn’t. He wonders sometimes which part he is, now. He knows which one it’s safer to be.

“I don’t know,” he says, which feels like coughing up blood, and nearly tastes like it. “She’s smarter than that. She’s—honest. With me, with herself. But then I can’t—it doesn’t make sense for her to be the way she is, if there’s not some sort of…” This one tastes so sour he can’t bear to keep it in his mouth. “…delusion. Why the hell would she want us—me—the way we are? It’s a mess. There’s nothing to like about it. I destroyed it all. I could understand if she was keeping her distance and just trying to patch things up with the others, but—”

“It’s hers,” Takiya says. “It’s her family, and you’re her father. It—and you—don’t have to be perfect to be worth having.” He smiles. “Or to be worth saving.”

Enji eyes him. “I think ‘imperfect’ is disingenuous in its generosity, considering the state of us.”

Takiya tips his head in the other direction. “Shouto has come back, too, hasn’t he? And given you chances? Tried to meet you halfway?”

Enji eyes him harder. “Shouto did much more than half of the work. Especially early on.”

Takiya takes a deep breath, which is a bad sign. It means he knows he’s hit a brick wall, and he’s regrouping.

Takiya is very good at regrouping, very good at adapting to obstacles, and very good at tailoring alternative tactics on the fly.

He would have made a brilliant pro, if he’d had a different quirk.

But if he’d had a different quirk, he would have become a different person.

“Let’s slow down,” he says. “You’re putting words in your kids’ mouths. You know they care about you. And you respect Fuyumi for much more than just her forgiveness. You’re looking for an excuse to degrade yourself and diminish your progress. Where is this coming from?”

Enji’s heart slams against the inside of his sternum. His blood pressure is probably a fucking disaster, which fits well with the rest of him.

Self-deprecation doesn’t solve anything. Tearing himself down leaves him nothing to build on. Hawks once threatened to pay someone to cross-stitch those on throw pillows for him.

Enji sits back and forces himself to unfold his arms, to unclench his jaw, to focus and examine—to think without judgment. To sift through the evidence and draw as unbiased a conclusion as he can.

It’s obvious, isn’t it?

It’s always the same thing—always the same rotted root, even if the twisted leaves turn different shapes.

“I’m scared,” he says. He hates this painting. He’s memorized it a hundred times. It’s just far enough from the couch to make it slightly difficult to discern the details without his glasses, as if he needed the reminder of everything he’s thrown away. “About the visit. About having to face Natsuo when we both know I failed him one more time.”

In the haze of his peripheral vision, he sees Takiya leaning forward.

“How?” he says. “How have you failed him now? You didn’t have anything to do with this until you started helping to pick up the pieces.”

Enji curls his fingers very slowly into the corner of the couch cushion, trying not to squeeze. “This is the culmination of everything else—everything I taught him, by example and by deprivation. He doesn’t know how to deal with grief. He doesn’t know how to ask for help. He doesn’t know how to give up, or how to let go, or how to accept the way the world is. He doesn’t know how to put the ones who depend on him ahead of himself. He doesn’t know how to be anything other than a purpose, a position—and when that identity is threatened, he has nowhere to run.”

“He’s a grown man, Enji,” Takiya says. “It is important for you to recognize everything you did, then, and the ways it affected him over time, but you didn’t do this. You didn’t kill his wife. You didn’t tie his hands.”

Enji’s heart beats in his throat, in his ears, in his one pathetic set of fingertips.

“He made his choices,” Takiya says. “And he’s responsible for them, just as you’re responsible for yours. It can’t—and it doesn’t—all come back to you. If Fuyumi or Shouto was in his situation, they would both have made different decisions—don’t you think? You set their lives in motion, but you didn’t set them in stone. This isn’t your fault.”

He’s wrong.

People don’t tend to react well when you say that in so many words.

Especially not when they’re trying to be kind.

Enji doesn’t need Takiya’s kindness.

He needs the truth.

Natsuo is bound to him in a different way than Shouto is, than Touya was. Shouto he dragged behind him; Touya hauled him forward by the burning hand.

But Natsuo—

They’re too close. They’re too similar. In the ways that matter most, they’re too alike.

Natsuo will never forgive him.

And Natsuo will never forgive himself.

This is the curse that Enji passed to him.

“You know you’re moving in the right direction,” Takiya says, keeping his voice low—soothing, unchallenging, nonconfrontational. “You need to trust yourself.”

Rei said it, too.

They certainly can both be wrong, but what if—

“Think about it,” Takiya says. “When you leave, sit in the car with it for a few minutes. Kick it around.”

Enji can do that much. He can make that promise.

Just not for very long, if he intends to get home and make the most important aji fry of his life.

“All right,” he says. “I will.”

It’s marginally easier after that—Takiya asks about the kids, and Enji shows him pictures from the museum, and from the park, and from the living room that they’ve transformed around them.

He caught Hawks in several of them on purpose, and several more by accident. In one of those, Hawks is gazing at him so rapturously—or raptor-ously, perhaps—that Takiya gives him a significant look.

He’s not sure exactly what the significance is—Never forget that you’re loved beyond measure by someone that you love almost more than you can stand, possibly. Or maybe just a very belated I told you so.

Hawks sent him a video just this morning of Eiji fastidiously helping to water the plants. It isn’t much more than a handful of seconds—just long enough for Eiji to call out, “Like this, Grampa? Like this?”, and for Enji to lean over him and assess the dampened soil, then gently touch his head and say “Just like that. That’s perfect.”

He’d still been looking at the dirt, not at the way that Eiji was smiling like the sun had come out at his express request.

Enji owes it to both of them—to Takiya, for getting him this far, and to Eiji, for taking up the family tradition of laboriously teaching him things he should have known.

And he owes it to himself.

He tells Takiya about the situation with Spryte, about the phone call, about how he tried to settle things with Eiji afterwards.

He tells Takiya, hesitantly, about how much it hurt to have hurt him.

About how horrifying it is that that, too, feels like a step in the right direction, twenty-five years too late.

Takiya stays still, not writing, and very subtly starts to smile.

“But it’s not,” he says. “It’s not too late for him. And it’s not too late for you.”

Maybe.

Maybe he’ll find out sooner than he likes.

The hour slithers away from him, as they strangely so often do. He feels so drained he can’t believe his head isn’t ringing.

“Well,” Takiya says, with the bright sardonic wryness that reminds Enji of Hawks, “we’ve got ten minutes and a scrap of sanity left. Anything else you can think of that we should talk through?”

A part of him wants to leave it out, but he knows better. He is better. He will be. One day at a time.

“Hawks proposed last night,” he says. “Somewhat accidentally.”

Takiya’s jaw drops.

Enji thinks perhaps he should get some sort of special commendation for repeatedly startling one of the most equable human beings alive.

“What does that mean?” Takiya manages after a few seconds of stunned silence. “‘Accidentally’?”

“It was one of his jokes that wasn’t really a joke,” Enji says, holding himself steady by force of will, “so I took him up on it.”

Takiya smiles. That’s something. “How do you feel about the prospect of getting married again?”

Careful. Breathe in, and out, and in again.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Enji says. “If something were to happen to me, he’d be able to manage all my assets, and it would be much easier for him to help make sure the kids are looked after, if things haven’t… if they’re still—in flux.”

And if something happens to him, Enji can’t say—won’t say, can’t risk speaking into being, no matter how remote the chances and how disgustingly superstitious it sounds—and he’s laid up in a hospital bed, battered and bleeding, clinging to life by his fingernails and teeth, Enji will be able to go directly to him, even if no one would respect a surge of flame for the purposes of intimidation anymore.

“That’s reassuring,” Takiya says, but the smile looks slightly strained now. That’s also something—just not anything especially good. “And very pragmatic. But I didn’t ask what you think, Enji. I asked how you feel.”

Enji drags himself back from the urge to argue—from the instinct to curl up and snarl and protect the feeble wisps he’s intentionally trying not to wrap his hands around.

He has to be better than that, too.

He braces himself, reaches in, lets them flicker around his fingers. Tries to gauge their shapes. “I think I’m… Well. I don’t think I’ve processed it yet.” Grasping at them is like trying to catch one of Hawks’s feathers when he’s being particularly playful. “I think I’m… happy. Mostly. I don’t think it’ll change much materially, given our living situation, and I haven’t doubted the strength of what we have in a very long time, but… there’s something… affirming… about it all the same.”

Takiya smiles again—sadly this time.

That’s one of the worst ones.

“And?” he says, gently.

“And I’m scared,” Enji says. The words feel like woodchips, taste like ash, sting like acid. “I’m scared it’ll hurt him—his career, his position. I don’t care what damn number he is, but he does, and I know he’s holding onto it for the right reasons. His legal name is public knowledge now, whether or not it’s commonly used. Even if we kept it quiet, there are spotlights on him at all times. I’d… it would be…” He swallows. It sticks. It burns. He has to say it, has to exorcize it, has to spit this out even if it sizzles through the floor. “It would hurt both of us if he ended up second-guessing it under the weight of all that pressure. I know he won’t change his mind. But you can resent having done something that you wanted. You can hate having done something that you loved. And he’s already… It’s already so fucking hard. I want to make it easier—make it better for him. Not worse.”

That’s the job. That’s the life. That’s how this works.

You move mountains, and they throw stones.

“All of that is logical,” Takiya says evenly. “And thoughtful—you’re thinking about how it will affect him.” He pauses. “You’re thinking a lot. And you know what I’m going to say about that.”

Enji resists the impulse to tap his fingertips on the arm of the couch. “That I’ve reached the critical threshold beyond which speculation becomes meaningless, so it’s time to ask him for his perspective on those concerns—which may be different from what I expect in any case—instead of continuing to catastrophize.”

Takiya smiles broadly and spreads his hands.

Enji frowns at him, but without much fervor.

He doesn’t have much of any fervor left, after the past hour, even if he wanted it.

Takiya pauses again. That might be some sort of record, too.

He leans forward a fraction. He speaks slowly.

“You said ‘happy’, just now,” he says. “A moment ago.” His eyes are unrelenting. “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you describe yourself with that word before.”

Enji looks at his hands, and then at the couch, and then at the awful painting again. It’s pathetic to have to avoid eye contact while he works up the guts to draw the words up out of himself. There’s so damn little left in the well, and the bucket keeps banging hollowly against the sides as he tries to haul it high enough to pour from.

“It’s never fit,” he says. “Not because… Hawks has always… You know how long he’s been my lifeline.” It’s precisely why he doesn’t think the speculations are far-fetched. Hawks has stood by him regardless of the consequences a thousand times before. Hawks would treat this the same way. He’d go in with high hopes and impeccable intentions. Enji thinks he sincerely believes it won’t be any different.

But it will.

It would.

“He’s always made me happy,” Enji says. None of the words are right. “Happier. But it really was making—it was an action. A push. He had to work for it. And… this is…” He breathes. Shifts. Swallows. Frowns at the couch cushion, and then the floor. “This isn’t an action. This is an acceptance. For both of us. And…” He gives in. He grasps the fingers of the right hand with the fingers of the left and twists to try to relieve some of the tension. “Having the kids has—helped. It’s given me a purpose. And… something of a clean slate. They think I’m enough just…” He extracts his hands from each other to gesture at himself. Plainclothes. Unilluminated. “And… Hawks does. Hawks thinks I’m enough to choose to commit to, in spite of all of his life’s incredibly ill-fated commitments.”

Takiya is, of course, waiting when he looks up.

“What do you think?” Takiya says. “Can you believe that you’re enough, just like this?”

Enji breathes. In slow, out slow, bracing himself, finding his feet. The world is smaller. It isn’t as heavy as it used to be.

“I can try,” he says.

“You do this on purpose, don’t you?” Takiya says, smiling, when Enji gathers himself up and starts for the door. “Just to make sure I earn my fee.”

Enji stares at him.

The smile falls into a grimace. “That was a joke.”

“I do make you earn it, though,” Enji says.

That brings the smile back, which is a curious thing—not a phenomenon Enji has all that much experience with. Not a reaction he’s normally responsible for. “And rightly so. Take care, Enji. Good luck tonight. You know you can call me any time if you need to.”

Enji knows.

And Takiya knows he won’t.

But it’s a generous thing to say all the same.

“Thank you,” Enji says, and gently shuts the door.

They have a water cooler with paper cups in the lobby, but Enji always brings a bottle from home. For one thing, he doesn’t like to use their resources; and for another, his mouth tends to go dry from the combination of speaking so much and dredging so deeply in the middle of a session, not near the beginning or the end.

He drives to the store, parks as far as he can from the entrance, and sits in the car, watching the rain splatter on the windshield as he drains the bottle one sip at a time. The adrenaline is ebbing back out of him. He should have brought something to eat, too. He’ll have to buy something—jumpstart his blood sugar before his energy bottoms out completely.

He used to have so much more to give. He used to be able to grind through, to go so much further on so much less. He used to be able to stretch himself far enough to make a difference, far enough to make the city safer and the world a little bit less cold.

Endeavor was the best of him—the most of him.

He spent it all.

He has to keep his head together, has to fortify himself, has to square his shoulders and cope with this. Natsuo is coming whether he’s prepared for it or not. Natsuo won’t give a shit if he’s feeling strung-out and shaky from the effort of extracting and exposing so much of himself over the course of an hour. He can’t leave Fuyumi and Rei and Hawks to carry this. It’s his. No matter what else is true, he has to take responsibility for it. He has to lift as much of its weight as he can.

He tucks the empty water bottle into the cupholder, which requires relocating no fewer than three old tissues glued together by hardened spit.

He has to remember what he’s doing this for—the reason, the point. It’s worth it. Anything he has to offer up is worth it. Anything he has to give.

He can do it.

For them, he can.

Nonperishables first, so that the items that ought to be refrigerated spend less time languishing in his cart.

Naru’s nascent tail is getting too distinct to work around. It’s fortunate that they have a live-in expert on cutting holes into standard clothing for non-standard appendages, but they’ve reached something of a turning point.

Enji is annoyed to find that the diapers for heteromorph children are separated—located further down the aisle, past all of the sizes and brands for more statistically average babies—and then incensed to discover that the selection is poor, with a price markup that is in no way justified by the lower market demand. The ones designed with a dip in the back to accommodate tailbone protrusions cost thirty percent more than the same manufacturer’s regular offerings, despite the fundamental fact that they require less material to make.

The money isn’t an object for Enji, of course, but the principle of the thing—

And for a family that was struggling financially, this would be demoralizing at best, with the potential to be devastating. No one gets to decide what their quirk is, or where it will take them. Enji knows that better than just about anyone, mostly for the worse.

Maybe once he finishes out a few consulting agreements—or drops them, perish the thought—he might have time to investigate the legislation on that topic, and see if there’s some bureaucratic lever he could lean on to try to change it.

Maybe has always been a dangerous word, for him.

Maybe has always meant Find it in yourself to find a way, no matter what it takes.

Would his old reputation even help, these days, or would he have to start from scratch?

It doesn’t matter now. He needs to focus. He needs to sort quickly through the hour with Takiya—isolate which parts of it he should set aside for later, and which he has to reassess immediately so that he can make use of them when he makes it home.

He lets his feet convey him through the store. He has the layout mapped out in his memory so distinctly that he doesn’t have to think about that, at least: an item on his list becomes an objective, and his body takes him to the place where he can meet it.

He still thinks he’s right—that staying out of Natsuo’s sight is the safer choice, and the smarter one. His presence would resurface more specific memories than the house alone, which clearly already triggers protective panic in Natsuo’s mind.

But maybe Enji can talk to him, after. Maybe he’ll stay long enough to put Eiji to bed, and they can step outside where Enji won’t be anywhere near them—won’t pose any potential threat.

“I’m so sorry,” a young woman says, shaking him out of the thought as he considers the selection of panko. There are just too many damn brands. “Would you mind—” She makes a chagrined gesture up at the boxes of dashi mix on the topmost shelf. She barely comes up to his ribcage. “I just need one, if it’s not—”

He hardly even has to raise his arm. Instinctively he used the right. He has to concentrate on modulating his grip, which makes him forget to prepare to say anything as he lowers it carefully and offers it out to her.

She smiles. “Thank you!”

“Sure,” he mutters, which is probably too little too late, but as he tries to turn away—

“Wait,” she says, slowly. “Are you…”

He glances at her sideways. He tries not to move.

She pauses, looking him up and down, hesitates—

Her cheeks color, and she waves both hands sheepishly and steps away.

“Sorry,” she says. “Never mind.”

Never mind.

“Look at you go, Dad!” Fuyumi says as he slices the fish.

He’s intimately familiar by now with the way that forced cheer resonates in her voice, but it’s better than none at all.

“It’s just the practice,” he says. He can’t afford to talk much while he has a bladed object in his right hand. It feels like he’s scrabbling for the last scraps of his self-control even in the silence—like the threads are slipping through his fingers, and every breath blows them further away.

Fuyumi smiles at him, and it’s genuine even though the sadness doesn’t leave her eyes. She nudges her shoulder gently against his left arm. “Well, yeah. But that’s the point. You remember how you were the first time?”

Unfortunately: “Yes.”

Her smile widens, and she gestures to his handiwork again. “And now you’re practically a pro!”

It’s not her fault that that’s a poor choice of words.

It’s not her fault that he planned this so myopically, knowing he would expend so much of his energy with Takiya and then have to come back and—

Hawks’s voice rings out from the living room. “Take the compliment, babe!”

Enji glowers towards the doorway and then makes himself set his shoulders and keep working. “Thank you.”

Fuyumi’s smile doesn’t falter, although it has tipped a little mischievous. “You’re welcome.”

At least Hawks has stopped adding the rest of the sentence—or else I’ll pin you to the bed and repeat it in your face until you beg for mercy—in front of other people to force him to cave.

Rei arrives just in time for dinner.

The sound of keys in the lock made Enji’s shoulders tense. Natsuo left his keys behind years ago, but they might have reached the house at the same time; they might have come up the walkway together; they might have—

“Hello!” Rei calls from the genkan, and Eiji takes Fuyumi’s hand and runs over to greet her.

All of the pleasantries muddle together well before any of them make it to Enji’s ears. When she steps into the doorway to the kitchen, she looks at him, with significance.

“The traffic was worse than I expected,” she says.

It’s not an excuse for herself: it’s an expression of the fact that she’s thinking the same thing he is.

She’s worried that the reason Natsuo isn’t here yet is because he isn’t planning to come at all.

It’s a plea to hold out hope for him a little longer.

He has to come.

Doesn’t he?

He has to know that the psychiatrists breathing down his neck won’t hand him more opportunities to prove himself if he doesn’t make use of the ones they’ve already given.

The food will get cold if they wait any longer, and Eiji has enough trouble processing strong emotions when he has been fed, so they sit down. Fuyumi talks about her class, Rei talks about her new job doing marketing for a local retail chain, Eiji talks about school and the things he’s been learning to read about and how you can just see the edges of Naru’s teeth coming in.

Natsuo will come.

Enji knows that, when the questions came, all of them lied—outright or by omission—about what happened with the phone call. The doctor working on the case that day had been foolish enough to conduct all of the follow-ups over the phone. Enji had kept his voice clipped, upfront, making himself sound too busy to elaborate. He seemed upset, but it was obvious he really wanted to see them. He felt guilty about leaving them with me.

An unqualified crime of understatement. A new low, for him, in some ways; a new high, in others.

Natsuo has to have seen it for what it is—the fact that they all love him enough to cover for him, to buy him another chance.

He has to.

Fuyumi and Rei keep saying that he’s “better”—that he’s sharper, more present, more aware. Ayuko, from the impossible start of that first day, calls in occasionally too, and sends others to report back. One of the course instructors told Enji that Natsuo was late to the first class, but he’s been punctual ever since. She said he shows up looking put-together and presentable, now, clean-shaven and wearing neat, unwrinkled clothes. She said he’s always finishing a coffee on his way in, always says hello, always takes notes. She said he looks tired, keeps to himself, stares out the window when there’s downtime, but he’s always respectful and attentive until the hour’s over, and he slips back out the door.

He’s trying.

He’s trying.

Or he’s trying to get away.

You display the hallmarks of normalcy and execute the indicators of self-control so that no one asks about the thing that’s killing you.

Natsuo has to know how much tonight matters—not to the courts, not for the evaluations, but to Eiji. He has to know how gut-wrenchingly earnestly Eiji wants to see him. How much everyone here has missed him. How much all of them want to help, if he’ll just let them get close enough.

Enji eats a little, knowing he’ll be worse if he goes into this unfortified, and pushes the rest aimlessly around his bowl. It’s humiliating, but only Hawks will notice. He’s too fucking nauseous to risk eating more.

He knows.

He knows what the spear of self-righteous fury that might have pierced straight through Natsuo’s chest would feel like.

Life is not a spectrum, in the haze of that terror, in the impenetrable night of that desperation, in the quicksand of that grief.

Life is black and white, and all that lies around you is darkness. Either you have won, or you have failed, and when it’s the latter, there’s no point to any of it anymore. You’re alone. You’re alone with your own pathetic, intractable, unsalvageable inadequacy.

Natsuo is buried deep beneath the pain, drowning well below the level where the light filters down. He hasn’t seen the surface in so long that he no longer believes that it exists.

If there’s nothing to reach for, there’s no reason to move. If there’s no purpose, there’s no point.

Rei and Fuyumi are feigning calm for Eiji’s sake much more effectively than Enji is. It isn’t a surprise, but it is a bit of a disappointment. He should be capable of more. He must not even be faking neutrality particularly well—Hawks starts rubbing his knee beneath the table, making gentle little circles.

Everyone finishes dinner, or at least stops trying to pretend they’re eating. Eiji’s concept of the passage of time is still so indistinct that he doesn’t seem to have registered the fact that it’s been nearly an entire hour since Natsuo was supposed to arrive, but he’s started to pick up on the adults’ agitation.

Enji clears the dishes, aided by several unusually soft and slow-moving feathers, which gather things near-silently and pass them into his hands. Rei wipes some drool off of Naru’s face and makes a doomed effort to clear some of it from his bib. Eiji valiantly tries to help her. Fuyumi steps away from the table and takes out her phone.

Enji supposes he doesn’t need to act like he isn’t listening when she knows full well that all of them are eavesdropping. But is it kinder to hide it? It’s a waste of effort to feign ignorance, but people seem to do it more often than not—does pretending send the message that you’re not trying to pry?

Fuyumi raises the phone to her ear as the line rings.

And rings.

Rei’s soft comments to Naru don’t obscure it in the slightest. Fuyumi chews on the corner of a fingernail, looking at the wall.

Then she lowers the phone, looking at the screen, and touches the red button.

She sighs soundlessly. “Went to voicemail,” she says.

“Text him,” Hawks says, immediate and calm. “If it gets marked as read, he’s probably fine, and he’s just choosing not to answer.”

Fuyumi stares at him in faint disbelief for a second, but then she lowers her head, nodding as she does, and types something swiftly.

Enji stacks the dishes in the sink, as quietly as possible.

Fuyumi sits down again. Eiji searches her face, then looks down at her phone clenched in her hands, and then looks around the room at the rest of them.

His expression starts to crumple, and Enji’s heart goes with it.

“What’s wrong?” Eiji says, starting to pick at the scabs on the heels of his hands. “What’s—what’s going on? Is Daddy—where’s Daddy? Is he okay?”

Rei reaches out and catches his hands, gently prying them away from each other. “Everything’s fine, hon. We’re just trying to find out why he’s running late.”

Enji bites his tongue. Maybe it’s better to lie. Maybe it’s better to keep Eiji hopeful until they know for sure. Maybe it’s better to maintain his misplaced faith in their supposed omniscience.

Naru smacks both hands down on the high chair tray hard enough that the plastic shudders. A feather sweeps up over his head, coaxing his hands and eyes up after it, and earning an emphatic “Bahhhhhh.”

Enji wipes the tray down. Another feather sets a few of Naru’s favorite blocks in front of him. Eiji keeps looking slowly back and forth between all of their faces, his tiny fingers clenched tight around Rei’s.

Fuyumi draws a sharp breath. “He read it.”

“Good,” Hawks says, voice low and smooth and soothing—hero voice. Deescalating. “That’s good. That means he’s okay.”

It means he’s alive.

Probably.

“Give him a minute and see if he replies,” Hawks says, smiling at Fuyumi to reinforce the reassurance, but it doesn’t brighten his eyes. “Maybe he was in the shower or something, right?”

Fuyumi tries to smile back before she turns her attention back down to the screen. “Yeah.”

It’s only another minute or two before the current of uncertainty buzzing in the air makes Eiji restless. Enji can’t blame him.

Rei and Fuyumi take him and Naru to the living room, Rei promising to read Eiji a story—she brought new books. Hawks steps up next to Enji by the sink, lingering as close as he can without impeding the dish-washing. Enji passes them to him one at a time, and he dries them and puts them away.

“You know,” Hawks says, very quietly, in the fake-idle voice he uses to share most of the secrets, “I was ten years old before I saw a wine glass in real life. I thought they were just on TV. Like—they needed to show you what the person was drinking, so they’d made up a special new glass for it. I didn’t really understand what wine was, either.”

Enji tries to imagine—tries to place himself in the battered shoes of the exploited child who transformed himself into the most beautiful human being Enji has ever been lucky enough to know, better than he’s ever known anyone.

But still not quite as well as he should.

“What happened when you were ten?” he asks.

“They let me out of the training box to hit a small-time villain in a little town so far out that no news outlet would ever report it,” Hawks says, “and they made sure everybody kept their mouths shut. But I nailed it. They were fucking thrilled. Everybody got so drunk that somebody let me have two sake shots, and I threw up.”

Enji’s instinct is to wonder why he went for a second one when the first must have been intolerable to a ten-year-old’s palate, but it’s obvious, of course—Hawks doesn’t know how to back down. Hawks can’t say no to anything that might push him further, lift him higher, make him more. Make him feel like enough.

Enji sets the next dish down and catches Hawks’s hand gently in his left, pinning Hawks’s eyes with his.

Hawks could have avoided that. Even here, his reflexes are insurmountable, when he applies them—when he doesn’t fight them down. He’s an escape artist first and foremost. He’s a sprinter, not a brawler. He’s a survivor with a thousand faces, and a thousand ways to hide.

He stays still. And his eyes stay calm.

“I need you to be honest with me,” Enji says, keeping his voice low. “Is an official marriage certificate in the public record going to make it harder for you to hold on to number one?”

Hawks blinks.

His eyes are sedate for another second—cool amber, unmoved.

Then they warm, and the corners crinkle, and the pupils swell, and he smiles.

“I can handle it,” he says.

Enji watches him. “I don’t want you to ‘handle it’. I want you to be happy.”

Hawks ducks his head, the loose waves of his bangs bouncing down to help conceal his eyes, but the smile doesn’t falter. “I wanted you to be happy first. I have dibs.”

Enji presses the words out through the resistance in his throat—through the tightening cold coil of the fear.

If he says it aloud, it can be destroyed. It can be torn out from him and taken away. It can be used, stretched, wrecked, ruined—like the rest of him. Like everything he’s ever tried to love.

“I am,” Enji says, fighting through it. One syllable at a time. “Exactly the way we are. Nothing needs to change.”

The wings fold around him first, hauling him in—almost hard enough to send him stumbling—and then Hawks’s arms wrap around his waist, just a touch too tight.

“Should I send Takiya chocolates or flowers?” Hawks murmurs into his collarbone.

“We should send him an invite,” Enji says. “If you’re sure.”

Hawks laughs softly, and Enji ruffles his left hand up through the silken hair tickling at his cheek, and it still seems impossible that—

“Hey, Dad?” Fuyumi calls, voice quavering. “How… how long should I wait, do you think?”

Hawks was already starting to release him the instant that the first word reached Enji’s ears. They part like water, and Hawks trails him into the living room, keeping close.

Enji doesn’t say Still nothing?, which is obvious.

Fuyumi’s eyes are wet. She’s barely holding it together, and Enji can’t tell whether Rei’s arm around her shoulders is making it better or worse.

Eiji, in his grandmother’s lap, has curled up like the first day—like the little boy on the doorstep who had lost everything he’d ever known, everything that had made up the foundations of his universe. The little boy who had lost hope that he’d ever be loved again.

Enji knows what needs to be done.

Enji knew when five o’clock came and went.

“That’s long enough,” he says. Slow breath. Speak it into being. “I’m going to go see him.”

Rei looks up, and he can see the realization settling in her eyes—she and Fuyumi and Shouto have said and done everything they can.

It hasn’t worked.

It hasn’t moved him—not far enough.

They need a different tactic, and they have nothing left to lose.

Fuyumi glances back and forth between them, then focuses on Enji first. “I don’t think he’s going to… deal with that very well.”

Enji keeps his eyes on her.

The strained smile that colors Hawks’s voice makes him want to glance over, but he doesn’t. “I hate to say it, darling, but he’s already not dealing with this very well.”

“I might be able to shake him out of the pattern,” Enji says, quietly, when she winces. “That’s all I’m going to try for.”

Fuyumi has more love to offer than any of the rest of them. She still cared about Enji at his lowest, his coldest, his cruelest. She looked for gemstones at rock bottom.

But she shelters them because of it. A home is what she’s always wanted. So she keeps them safe.

She doesn’t push them to be better, because she’s still capable of loving them at their worst.

But Takiya was right.

Enji’s daughter knows who she is. She knows her family. She knows her strengths—and she knows where they end.

She sighs, softly, and reaches over to stroke Eiji’s hair. He doesn’t look up.

“Yeah,” she says. “Okay. Let me…”

Enji’s phone chimes with a text message a moment later. He pulls it out and verifies that the preview is precisely what he expects—an address.

Rei hasn’t stopped watching him.

“Show him pictures,” she says, eyes clouded but cool. “Remind him.”

Enji nods. It’s a good idea.

“Call me if it gets tricky,” she says. She rubs Eiji’s shoulder, and he curls closer to her. “I’ll put this one on the line.”

New tactics.

Nothing left to lose.

“I will,” Enji says.

Hawks walks him to the genkan. Enji thinks that’s the end of it, but instead of leaning in for a parting kiss and a word of irreverent encouragement, Hawks opens the door, holds it for him, and then follows him down the walkway.

The rain from earlier persisted, but lightly, in a faint cool mist. Tiny droplets bead on Hawks’s feathers, dappling the wings with tiny diamonds, clinging to the unruly fall of his hair.

When they reach the car, Hawks shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans and looks up at the sky.

“Be careful,” he says.

Enji grazes his fingertips slowly up Hawks’s chest, the habitual hoodie soft beneath them, until he reaches the pliant warmth of Hawks’s neck, and then his jaw, and then his ear. The gashes where that villain tore his earrings out haven’t fully healed. He hasn’t risked putting any studs in them since.

“I’ll try,” Enji says.

Hawks smiles, adoringly.

And then rolls his eyes.

“Extreme duh,” he says.

Enji strokes one fingertip around the shell of his ear. “Shut up.”

Hawks smiles wider. “Make me.”

Enji kisses him, and then kisses him again, but that’s about all he can spare. It’s well past time.

Hawks is still waiting by the gate, hands in his pockets, when Enji reaches the curve in the road.

It’s a decent neighborhood, within walking distance of both Eiji’s preschool and the insurance office where Hayami had worked part-time around the children and her degree. Natsuo could have taken the subway to the hospital that his team used to operate out of. Enji doesn’t know if that’s still their primary dispatch location, though. It feels like Enji doesn’t know anything about him at all.

But Enji knows who he is.

And Enji knows the hurt.

Fuyumi included the suite number when she texted him the address. The doors aren’t labeled especially logically, so it takes Enji a few extra minutes of striding back and forth and checking around corners, assessing where the numbering changes, before he finds 106.

He feels numb, more than anything. The wall is up. The dam is working.

Perhaps that was a blessing of sorts, in that it let him focus during the drive over, but it isn’t going to help him for much longer. He can’t bludgeon his way through this. He can’t burn a path.

He knocks on the door, firmly and loudly, with his left hand.

Then he regrets that. It might sound like the police. That could be disorienting, or it might remind Natsuo of the start of one of the many worst days of his life.

The silence stretches long enough that Enji forces himself to breathe out, then raises his hand again.

Just before he draws his fist back—

“Sis?”

Natsuo’s voice sounds faint, and more reluctant than anything else. It sounds like he’s further away than it’s possible to be, in an apartment that small.

“It’s me,” Enji says.

The silence rings this time.

That’s fine. He obviously didn’t expect a welcoming committee.

“Please talk to me,” Enji says. “The kids—”

Swift, uneven footsteps, nearly running, and then the door swings open—it wasn’t even locked—and Natsuo snarls at him, eyes too bright. “My kids.”

He looks—

Small.

He’s lost weight. It sharpens the shape of his face too much, makes his wild eyes look too big, too wide, too desperate. His hair’s long at the back, slightly ragged around his neck, wilted and greasy—probably three or four days since he washed it. The stubble is teetering on the brink of a patchy beard. He’s wearing what looks like his pajamas and a threadbare hoodie with a time-worn, splitting screen print of Aggretsuko on the front.

Enji’s guess must have been close to the truth. He must shower and shave right before the classes, must clean up and drag himself out the door, putting on appearances to keep them off his back.

“Yes,” Enji says. He lowers his left hand, keeps both of them loose and low at his sides—fingers open, shoulders down. “Your kids.”

The rage radiating off of every centimeter of Natsuo’s skin feels like aerosolized poison. The way it batters at him makes him want to answer the intensity—to match it, to fight it, to rise to it.

This isn’t about him.

This isn’t about what he wants.

It certainly isn’t about his fucking pride.

“Eiji wants to see you,” Enji says, keeping his voice subdued.

“Bullshit,” Natsuo fires back, fingers curled around the doorframe. “You want to rub it in my face that I can’t bring them home.”

He’s saying that because he’s scared of the part of it that’s true.

He’s saying that because ten years ago, it would have been plausible.

Distantly, past the wall, past the dam, past the self-preservation, Enji feels his heart trying to tear its way out of his chest.

“I asked the social worker if Rei could bring them here,” Enji says. “If they could visit you instead of the other way around. But they wouldn’t authorize it.”

Natsuo’s eyes are filed steel.

“Bullshit you did,” he says. “You wouldn’t—”

Enji meets Natsuo’s gaze levelly and crushes the tension out of his voice. Calm. Controlled. Matter-of-fact. “Why would I come all this way just to lie to you?”

Natsuo glares at him, breath coming too fast, eyes flicking over his face.

No amount of resentment can erase the fact that Enji is pragmatic, first and foremost.

And no swell of boiling hatred can drown the pragmatism that he bequeathed to Natsuo, too.

Natsuo’s eyes narrow to cold gray slits, and he sets his jaw, but Enji can see the logic taking hold and sinking in its teeth.

Natsuo bites the words out bitterly: “Then what the hell do you want?”

“I just want to talk,” Enji says again, holding himself steady. “And to see you.”

Maybe Natsuo hears it. Maybe he doesn’t.

I want to help.

Please.

“You’ve talked,” Natsuo says, flatly. “And you’ve seen me. Hi.”

The surge of anger is so distant—buried underneath so many other more important things—that it feels like it belongs to someone else.

This, too, is Enji’s own fault. He’s the one who passed the furious stubbornness on to all of them. He’s the one who taught them all to isolate themselves, to refuse to accept kindness, to die trying before they admit defeat.

This is the curse.

He’ll never break it.

But this could be his chance to crack it open just wide enough to try to pull Natsuo back out.

This is a rescue.

Enji draws his phone out of his pocket. He’s still keeping his shoulders low, his head down, his body language as unassuming as possible. He simply takes up too much space to ever be unimposing, but it makes a difference, and Natsuo is so close to his height that it makes it fractionally easier.

He taps into his photos. He selects one. He taps again to hide the roll of thumbnails underneath, and then he turns the phone around and holds the screen out to Natsuo.

A few nights ago, Eiji took it upon himself to try to teach Naru how to color with crayons, undeterred by Naru’s lack of either small motor skills or any developmental inclination towards artistic pursuit. Eiji spent the better part of twenty minutes curled up on the floor, with Naru sitting between his crossed legs, Eiji’s left arm wrapped around him to steady him and Eiji’s right hand fixed around Naru’s to make him hold the crayon of choice.

Hawks, in a feat of social-media-honed photographic sorcery, effortlessly caught a moment where Naru was looking down at the coloring book page, seeming particularly delighted with their ‘progress’, and Eiji was grinning at him, sunspot-bright, the blue crayon clasped in their joined hands just visible at the corner of the frame.

Natsuo’s hands start to rise towards Enji’s phone. Then they start to tremble. Then they drop.

He steps back.

And then back again.

And again, and again—and then he turns and stumbles towards the opening on the rightward wall that must lead towards the kitchen, folding his arms and then rubbing his hands up and down over his biceps, like they’re the only thing holding him down to the planet. Like they’re the only thing holding him together.

Enji steps in, carefully, and shuts the door behind him.

He waits.

The faucet runs.

Enji pockets his phone and takes off his shoes.

The genkan is just a recessed segment of the floor, barely big enough to stand in around the shoes left behind. There are still two pairs of little sneakers that must be Eiji’s, and one tiny pair that look like Naru’s size. Work shoes and casual ones for Natsuo, and another pair of each that must have belonged to Hayami.

There’s several days’ worth of dust on the blinds on the living room window. The kids’ toys are piled up in brightly-colored baskets in the corner. There’s a laptop sitting on one of the couch cushions, opened to a blank desktop screen. Enji can’t see what programs are open from here. It’s plugged in, with a crumpled blanket next to it. The little table in front of the television plays host to a half-dozen stacks of sheets of paper, some of them tucked neatly into red folders. Somehow it seems perverse that the state-mandated classes would give Natsuo homework on top of the rest of it, but Enji can’t imagine what else all that would be.

What has he been doing this whole time? How does he pass the endless empty hours on his own? At least Enji had the job. At least he had Endeavor to run to, to disappear in. At least he had a place to hide.

Enji walks slowly, keeping his footsteps distinct enough to be detectable, but measured and light. Just walking. Not an advance.

He stops in the wide-open double-sized doorway that leads to the kitchen, staying close to the frame. Natsuo poured himself a glass of water from the tap, which he’s clenching in both hands more than he’s sipping from it.

“Say whatever you’re going to fucking say,” he says, grip tightening. “And then get out.”

This is it, then.

At least Enji practiced.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Natsuo’s lip curls. “You and your fucking sorries.” His knuckles whiten as he grips the glass. “Sorry I ruined your life. Sorry I ground you down to nothing as a kid ’cause I couldn’t take on some guy who didn’t even want to be my rival in the first place. Sorry your brother’s dead. Sorry I stuck you in a fucking asylum to get you out of the way of my grand plan to—”

All of it’s fair, even if not all of it is true.

And all of it is still burning.

But that’s not the point. Not now.

Enji knows deflection when he sees it. Enji knows a last-ditch defense better than the back of his hand, these days.

He gathers himself, suppresses the heat, lets himself breathe.

“I’m sorry about Hayami,” he says. “I… Everyone is trying to push you past it to deal with the kids. And they need you—there’s no question of that. But that doesn’t change the fact that you just lost someone you loved.” He swallows, keeps his hands still, breathes again. “I’m sorry she’s gone. I’m sorry it had to happen like that. I’m sorry no one is even acknowledging that part of this—the part you’re dealing with.”

The part you’re drowning in.

The part that’s keeping you from them, keeping you buried in the grave beside her, keeping you from coming back to life.

The part that’s killing you, Natsuo. The part that is bleeding you out while everyone asks you why you won’t stand up and move ahead.

Natsuo’s face twists, his glare directed towards the water in the glass, his hands shaking so hard that the liquid shudders like the sea.

“I don’t want your fucking pity,” he says.

He puts the glass down in the sink basin, and it clatters too hard against the steel as he tries to compensate for the tremble in his hands. The remnants of what looks like a halfway-decent meal are still on the table, the single serving looking vanishingly small as Natsuo drops into a chair next to three others—two empty, one with a bright red booster seat very similar to the one in Enji’s kitchen. The nearby high chair, slightly battered from prior use, is designed a bit differently—the back is open where the seat joins it, leaving a gap between. Hayami must have been prepared for the possibility of a tail with both of them.

Natsuo chose the chair that turns his back towards Enji. He stares at the sink, at the scarred wood of the tabletop, at the leftover food. There’s a puzzlement in his expression, like he’s still not entirely sure how he got here, or what the hell he’s supposed to do now that he is.

“Pitying you,” Enji says, stepping into the kitchen, slowly circling around to the far side, trying to stay in his sight, “would be an insult to everything you’ve already been through. I know, Natsuo. I… remember. I’m not trying to criticize you. I’m here because I know how much it fucking hurts. But I need you to—they need you, all of us need you—to find some way through it.”

Natsuo’s breath catches—and comes loose, rattling out of him; and then catches again.

“They said—” His hands pass over the table, fingertips grazing over the ends of the chopsticks, the edge of the bowl. “They said she was already gone when I got there. But she—wasn’t. She wasn’t. She was breathing when I found her. She breathed when I touched her. She did. I felt it. She was—she was still—”

Enji read everything he could dig up—all the reports he still has access to, several he didn’t that Hawks deliberately left open on his laptop for a little too long, every scrap of a news story and press release that it was possible to find. He wanted to know. He wanted to know what Natsuo went through. How bad it really was.

There were so many casualties that he can’t trust the only definitive statement in all of the miserable text.

25-year-old female identified as Hayami Hanabusa Todoroki, pronounced deceased on the scene by emergency personnel.

He can see it, clearer than daylight. Etched in stone.

He can see his child with both arms wrapped around the woman he loved so much that he forgot how to hate himself for seven years. He can see Natsuo burying his face in her neck where her pulse should have been, can see the blood smearing over his hands, can see the way she stared open-mouthed into the sky as he folded in around her and sobbed to nothing, to no one, to a universe that had already crushed the heartbeat out of his reason for greeting the dawn. Enji can hear the scream.

He’s heard a lot of them, over the years.

He couldn’t speak for the better part of two days, after Sekoto Peak.

He doesn’t move. The ache is everywhere, in everything—the air, the breath, the blood. It’ll only hurt more if he tries to shift it. It’ll only spread.

Natsuo’s eyes well. He blinks, letting the tears spill, nudging at his cheek with the back of his wrist, smearing the gleaming trail.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he says, and the words are cold and sharp and jagged—a mouthful of broken glass. “You can’t. Because you’ve never really loved another human being. You’ve never loved anyone like you loved that fucking dream.”

Enji doesn’t move.

“And for what?” Natsuo says, up out of the chair now, flinging both arms out through the air beside him, swinging outward, gesturing at everything, at nothing— “For fucking what, after what you put us through?” His eyes are too bright, illuminated with the heat of it, snowmelt running from the corners even as his lip curls, as his fists clench, as he spits more of the words. “The one time—the one time in my fucking life that I needed Endeavor—where were you?”

The odds are good that Enji would have saved her.

The odds are good that if the Endeavor Agency had still been combing through the streets, cleaning up the messes, chasing out the darkness, they would have nipped that incident in the bud. They would have caught it early. They would have stopped it before it spiraled.

The odds are good that if Enji had kept his iron grip on this city, kept going, kept trying—

Hayami would still be alive.

It’s fitting, for Endeavor to have failed one more time, when it really counted. When it mattered most. One last letdown. One last bridge burnt to ash.

He cannot say The woman you love is dead because I was too tired. You had to bury the mother of your children because holding up the world hurt too much.

He can’t say anything.

Natsuo’s eyes keep him frozen where he stands.

“It should have been you,” Natsuo says, voice rising again as the breath enters him, as the revelation reaches the surface. “It should have been you that went and died, you fucking parasite—what are you good for? Why are you here?” More tears spill, and he swipes them away—angry at them, angry at everything, brimming over with directionless fury, with hideous revulsion for the entirety of a world that would do this to him, pile this on him, take this from him. “She was so—she was everything you’ve never been, she was so fucking good, she was their mom, she loved everybody she ever met, you couldn’t get her to treat someone like shit to save her life—”

The next breath scrapes into him sharply and shudders out harder still. His fists curl, eyes more glacial even than before, and Enji can read the words in the tightness of his shoulders well before he releases them.

“It should have been you,” Natsuo says, voice shaking with the surety. A smudged tear gleams on his jaw as he swallows. “You should be dead.”

In a just world, it would have been.

In a just world, this conversation would never have begun.

In a just world, Natsuo wouldn’t even exist.

A just world would have struck Enji down the instant he even conceptualized propagating the misery—the moment he considered passing it to innocent children who asked for none of it, who would have to bear his insufficiencies on their shoulders all their lives.

Enji makes himself breathe. He makes himself think of Eiji’s fingers—tiny, tiny—wrapping themselves around his thumb and pulling him towards the books, towards the garden, towards the whole rest of the world.

“I know,” Enji says. “But it wasn’t. And you have to find a way to live with that.”

He reaches forward—towards the cold food on the table, but Natsuo recoils away from his right hand as he wraps the fingers carefully around the edge of the bowl.

He’s right to, in a way. An earlier version of Enji would have used this hand as a weapon.

Enji takes the bowl and the chopsticks to the sink. There are a few other dishes in it, next to the new glass Natsuo just set down—two more bowls, two coffee mugs. None of them have lingered there long enough to constitute a health crisis.

Fuyumi said it earlier—it could be worse. It could be a lot worse.

Enji opens the cabinet beneath the sink. The trash bin isn’t overflowing either. That’s something.

He dumps what’s left in the bowl and starts washing the dishes.

He keeps his ears piqued and his posture unassuming. The sponge is in sad shape, but it’ll have to do for now.

There are a few dishes already sitting in the drying rack. He started with washing the mugs—they’ll be easier to fit in without splashing the others, so that he can put the rest away.

Some dozen breaths scratch in and out of Natsuo’s throat before he clears it and asks:

“What are you doing?”

Enji doesn’t turn around. “What I should have done thirty years ago.”

It means too many things to spell out, but Natsuo knows that. Natsuo knows what it adds up to.

I should have taken care of you.

I should have paid attention to you.

I should have shown you that when you fall, I’ll be here. I’ll help you back up. Whatever you need. Whatever it takes.

It’s remarkable that he can hear the breaths shuddering in and out of Natsuo’s lungs even over the hiss of the water running from the faucet and splashing in the dishes, spilling over his hands. By the throb of his heartbeat in his ears, he can’t help wondering if their vitals are synchronizing—if all the adrenaline in this room has coalesced, if all the pain has winnowed the world down to a single rhythm.

Breathe. Bleed. Make the best of it.

He just has to help Natsuo reach that part. He just has to convince him that there’s something to survive for. He just—

The chair creaks. Natsuo’s hands or sleeves or something whisper over the tabletop.

“It’s too late,” Natsuo says.

Enji shakes some of the water out of the mugs. “I know.”

He lays them on the drying rack. He wipes his hands, cautious of the metal joints against the towel, and then opens a few cabinet doors to put the dry dishes away.

Maybe everyone stores things in the same places. Maybe there’s some carved-in human logic to the sequence of things, the grouping of objects, the arrangement of utensils and the proximity of teacups to glasses to mugs to bowls to plates.

Or maybe many of these are so easy to find because Natsuo did take some of it with him, no matter how much he fought it. Maybe he did build this home on top of some of the pieces, in the end.

“But it’s not too late for you,” Enji says.

The silence says enough—says that it’s such a stupid argument, to Natsuo’s mind, that it isn’t even worth contesting. That the statement is so fundamentally wrong that disclaiming it would be a waste of breath.

You have to breathe anyway. Might as well use it.

Enji washes the remaining contents of the sink, slowly and systematically, and stacks everything carefully in the drying rack. He wipes his hands. He centers himself, steadies himself, holds tight to the shards of iron left in him—the steel that held him upright all those years.

He turns around. He crosses his arms. He looks down at Natsuo, sitting at a barren table, staring back up at him in as much disbelief as disgust, for once.

“You’re coming back,” Enji says. “You’re going to see them.”

Natsuo chokes the words out: “I don’t want to.”

Enji bites back I don’t care.

He does care.

That’s the whole damn point.

It always has been.

“You’re going to do it anyway,” he says.

“They don’t need me,” Natsuo says, and one arm wraps itself slowly across his chest, then the other—a barrier. Another wall.

Enji breathes in deep and digs deeper.

“I don’t know what they need,” he says. “I don’t know what’s ‘best’. But you’re going to do it.”

Natsuo’s empty gun-barrel eyes find his. The fear is—

Boundless.

Incredible.

Familiar.

“I can’t,” Natsuo says, in a whisper.

Enji takes the steps slowly. He carefully draws out the chair. He sits. He lays his hands out on the table, and the steel fingers clank down quietly on the surface.

“But you will,” he says. “Because you made them a promise. You promised to protect them. And no matter how hard you fight it, you will always be my son.”

Natsuo shakes his head, faintly at first, and then harder.

“They still love you,” Enji says.

Natsuo stares at the table, dropping his hands onto it, staring at them. “No, they don’t.”

“They do,” Enji says, resisting the instinct to raise his voice—to make Natsuo hear him. “Eiji talks about you all the time.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Natsuo says, hands lying on the table, pale and still, fingers half-curled where they fell. Like a corpse. “He’s never going to forgive me for what I did to him.”

Enji breathes. “Yes, he will.”

Natsuo looks up into Enji’s eyes.

“No,” Natsuo says, with a chilling, unequivocal, exhausted sort of certainty. “He won’t.”

Enji breathes again. He reaches across the table and gently pushes Natsuo’s fingers until they curl in closer—until he clenches both his hands into fists.

“If he doesn’t,” Enji says, “then you’re going to have to find a way to live with that, too.”

Natsuo pulls away, folding his arms across himself again.

But he doesn’t relax his hands.

Enji stands. He buries his left hand in his pocket, digging for his keys, dredging them up.

“But I think he will,” he says. He works slowly and carefully to pry open the ring, to slide the smaller sub-clasp off of it. “Because he has your heart, and hers. Because he loves you. Because he knows you still love him.”

He sets his house keys down on the tabletop. They clink against his metal fingers, jingling like a tiny bell.

“Come when you’re ready,” he says. “They miss you. You can still fix this, Natsu. You’re stronger than you think. You’re stronger than I ever was.”

Natsuo stares at the keys on the tabletop, jaw set, eyes gleaming. He keeps his arms folded tight, fingers clenched into his sleeves, and doesn’t move even when his pale eyelashes tip the first new tear down his cheek.

Enji steps back. He wipes down the countertops. He checks the refrigerator, finds it desolate, makes a list on his phone of things to have delivered—easy things, low-effort food, the kind Hawks used to cram into his body all the time, because they only take a handful of minutes in the oven or the microwave. The lowest possible energy expenditure for someone who’s already drained.

He tries the closet in the entry hall, finds a broom and a dustpan, sweeps up what he can. There are crumpled sweatshirts scattered on the couch—putting laundry on would feel invasive, even setting aside the practicality of needing to ask Natsuo if this apartment complex has its own facility, and where, but he collects them and deposits them in the basket.

Natsuo’s bed is a mess. Enji can’t tell if it’s because he’s been sleeping so poorly that he’s dragged the blankets every which way on both sides, or if he’s left the sheets drawn back the way they were the last time that Hayami touched them, on the morning that she left.

It’s not his place to straighten them either way.

He wipes down the bathroom fixtures, swaps out the towels.

“Would you go?” Natsuo calls from the kitchen, voice shaking.

A little helps a little. Anything he did is something Natsuo doesn’t have to do.

“Yes,” he says, stepping back in.

Natsuo hasn’t moved. He keeps his hands clenched on the tabletop, head bowed, back bent.

Maybe this isn’t Enji’s place either. Maybe it’s a bridge too far. Maybe he should just be grateful that the spindly one he’s standing on has held his weight so far.

But he’s never gotten a damn thing worth having by playing it the way he thought was safe.

He keeps his footsteps even and audible as he crosses over.

He sets his left hand very carefully on Natsuo’s shoulder.

Natsuo doesn’t pull away.

His voice comes so quietly, so hoarse with the tears and so ragged with the weight of what’s behind them, that Enji barely hears the words. “I don’t feel strong.”

“No one ever does,” Enji says. “That’s the hardest part.”

“I thought that was supposed to be what you were good at,” Natsuo says. “I thought that was the only thing you were good at.”

Enji squeezes his shoulder gently. “So did I.”

Natsuo doesn’t answer, and doesn’t move. Enji can’t tell if he’s looking at the keys or looking directly through the table.

Enji grips his shoulder one more time before letting go, and walking out the door.

Chapter 5 Notes:

Here we go all over again… When I started this section, I figured Natsuo would sketch out his side of the story, we'd all make some meaningful discoveries about fathers and sons and grief and growth, and that would be about it. And that is what happened… But this is also the beginning of an entire second fic. (Of which this chapter accounts for just under 30K.)
A content warning: I wouldn't quite call it suicidal ideation, but Natsuo is generally uncommitted to the idea of continuing to exist. He is very, very depressed and very, very angry. And he's also got some PTSD issues with envisioning children getting grievously injured. Take care. ♥
Also featuring more beautiful art from Kae!!! It will hurt. :]
On a completely different note, next weekend I will be at ~*~Fanime~*~! If you will, too, say hi!, not least because I will have candy and Meta Liberation War notebooks to give out. I'm weird but nice.
Please bear with me if I end up pushing next week's update back to Monday on account of the con, because holy hot damn I am old and tired these days. :') Con crunch consumed my ability to reply to comments this week, but I'll try to catch up as soon as I can! Thank you all so, so much for the love on this fic so far – it really means so much. ♥

Chapter Text

The problem wasn’t that he didn’t care.

The problem was that he wanted to, but he couldn’t.

How many black-hole emptinesses are you supposed to carry?

How much are you supposed to take?

The problem was that he sat up the whole first night, knowing rationally that he was in shock, watching his fingers Google shit like How do you feed a baby when his mom is dead.

How do you live?

How do you die?

He tried.

He fucking tried.

Eiji kept looking at him with her eyes and asking where Mommy was, where she went. Daddy, what’s wrong? Daddy, stop. Daddy, you’re scary, you’re scaring me—Daddy, don’t cry—Daddy, I’m hungry, I’m scared, I’m cold, I’m thirsty—

The problem was that he’d known from the start that he couldn’t do it.

He’d known who he was. What he came from. What was in him, and what wasn’t.

He’d known he was still Endeavor’s son, in blood and name and fucking insufficiency, if nothing else. Even if he’d never stand on podiums, never fill the shelves with trophies, never prompt a million headlines, never strike a spark.

Hayami’s soft fur and the tiny little whiskers had always tickled his cheek so that he’d never been able to kiss her without smiling.

She’d said “We’ll figure it out together, Natsu.”

She’d said “What are you afraid of?”

She’d said “We’ll prove them wrong.”

This is what he was afraid of.

This is what he’s always been afraid of.

This is what he’s been running from his whole fucking life.

Not good enough.

Not strong enough.

Fuyumi and Mom found out because of the news coverage. They brought food over, kept touching his hands and his hair and his face, kept saying things he couldn’t process because he didn’t care. He’d nodded, tried to smile, clicked buttons. You could click a button and purchase an urn for the ashes of the love of your life. What a world.

He’d sleepwalked, until the funeral, more than he’d held it together, but from the outside they looked the same. Things to do. He had things he had to do. Checklists. Paperwork.

But when it was over—

When he’d stumbled through it, and the chasm yawned beneath him—the pit of the rest of his life—

Mom had come by, the second day. Tried to be nice. Tried to tell him how you do it for the kids, how you pick up and move on. His head had hurt so much from crying that he couldn’t think, and there were more tears burning behind his eyes—simmering underneath his skin, scalding up his throat.

He’d yelled at her in the way that makes her eyes shutter up. Eiji had cowered behind the couch. She’d said “I’ll come back later.”

She didn’t come.

Fuyumi had kept calling and texting, nonstop—a million beeps and pings and rings and jangles assaulting his ears, stabbing into the meat of his brain. He’d turned the phone off. He’d locked the doors. It was fine. It was dark in here. He could rest. He’d feel better.

Naru had cried and cried and cried and cried until his ears numbed to it. Until he didn’t even hear it anymore.

The lockscreen on his phone is a picture of Hayami at the beach, smiling into the sun, wearing one of her unfairly overpriced custom hats with the earholes. She’s so happy. She’s so happy. He loves her so much it fucking kills him to look at, and he can’t stop. He can’t. This is all there is. The only person who’s ever come back is fucking Touya, and he came back a murderer. He tried to kill them. He would have done it.

Natsuo dreams she comes back sometimes.

He dreams she never died.

He doesn’t know what’s worse.

He doesn’t know fucking anything anymore.

Art of a phone screen, with the photo showing Hayami at the beach wearing a sun hat.

He doesn’t remember much about the time in between. Everything was glass and syrup, stop motion and slow motion, time slipping past him and then jerking him forward and then spiraling away. He drowned and drowned and drowned and didn’t die. It didn’t end. He couldn’t hold it.

Eiji looked at him with her eyes, and he’d known he was his mother’s son, too.

He’d known he couldn’t do this.

But he tried.

He remembers snatches of the day they came for the kids. The banging on the door hadn’t even registered at first. He’d thought it was his heartbeat. He’d thought it was his head. He’d thought Eiji was making noise just to annoy him again. Right as he’d turned to tell him to knock it off, they’d forced the door.

It had just been so fucking confusing at first—he hadn’t done anything wrong. He was in his own home, minding his own damn business. He wasn’t some fucking villain. He wasn’t some criminal. He tried to shout it loud enough to carry over the way that they were shouting at each other.

A cop had found Eiji hiding behind the couch—reached out and grabbed his arm way too tight, hauling him up to his feet, and his scream had split with tears halfway through.

Natsuo remembers that specific second, frozen like a photograph.

They were taking his kids.

Her kids.

The only thing he had left.

Something in him had snapped.

Something had broken, again and again and again.

Nothing had mattered except prying Eiji out of that sick fucker’s filthy fucking hands.

People were yelling at him, and he was roaring back—Don’t you fucking touch him, get your fucking hands off of my fucking son before I take them off—

He threw some shithead who grabbed for him, hurling the guy back against the kitchen table—something tipped the couch over on its side. Ice poured out of his hands, the whole room seething with it, frost streaming up the walls. Eiji was screaming, screaming—Naru letting out a wail like a siren as one of those motherfucking pigs scrabbled for him, yanking him out of his crib and hauling him away, towards the door—

Natsuo had flung himself at that guy first, with a spear of ice already forming in his hand.

Not his kids.

Not his fucking—

His head had spun so hard, vision swimming, that it had taken him a long, long moment to realize why he couldn’t move.

The force that had slammed him up against the wall materialized as his eyes focused, as his lungs filled.

Hawks.

Fucking Hawks—

Feathers, at Natsuo’s extremities, fixing his wrists to the wall, prying his fingers violently open so that the icicle slipped out and shattered on the floor.

But it was a surprisingly strong hand that was really holding him—pinning his chest so hard that he could barely breathe.

Hawks’s eyes were worse than the feathers, worse than his hand—a cold, flat yellow, piercingly bright, illuminated in the dark.

Predator eyes.

“Stop,” Hawks had said, in a voice devoid of anything like emotion—a nothing-voice. A vacuum, dragging everything in and ripping it to shreds, reducing the room to streaks of dark. “Get a grip.”

Natsuo had wanted to get a grip on his fucking throat and feel his windpipe crumple.

He’d helped them—

Eiji was gone, he was gone—

Hawks shook him, hard, just once—banging his shoulders against the wall, eyes still boring into his.

“Wake up,” he said, empty voice lowered to a hiss. Snake eyes. Unlucky. “Natsuo, for fuck’s sake—they’re going to take you in. Okay? Get your shit together.”

What the fuck was he supposed to gather up, anyway?

There’s nothing left.

But the churning room around them, chilled like a meat locker by the frost still climbing all the walls, had stilled for a single second of comprehension.

It was too late to fight this one. He’d lost. He’d failed. Hawks had him trapped. The cops had the kids. Superior force had triumphed again, the way it always did—might didn’t make right, but it sure as fuck made its will manifest. It sure as fuck won out.

He had to fight it from where he was standing now.

He had to get them back.

They’d—people would be looking at him, assessing him. Shit. He’d done this himself, he’d been here—been in Hawks’s boots, pried people away from their rictus grip on some dwindling reality, some unhinged fucking notion of the world that had caused them to neglect—

Neglect—

The shaking had come on so fast and so violently that his teeth had chattered.

He was two people, and no one. He was some fragment of a ghost, a wisp of trembling breath and fading fury, pinned to the wall by a bright-eyed demon from his own half-buried past, one more time.

And he was also Natsuo. He was all the Hey, good work, mans, all the commendations on his evals, all the exams he’d passed with flying colors, all the endless hours he’d clocked dragging other people out of their worst nightmares. He was all the slippery bloodied hands and all the neat bandages and all the needles slipped cleanly into a tiny vein with one foot braced against the wall in the back of an ambulance rocketing down the road.

They had confiscated the kids—like he was the three-year-old, like they’d caught him with candy in the middle of the night.

They would be holding them hostage until he could prove, past a shadow of a doubt, that he was better.

‘Better’.

As if this would stop.

As if this would go away.

As if the world would re-form itself, heal up its cracks; as if an earthquake that had shattered the bedrock and split the bridges and collapsed entire highways could simply be undone.

As if he could turn himself into an automaton, a metal doll, a mechanism that moves and talks but doesn’t feel, which could smile and raise one jerking hand and say I’m fine now. The pain is gone. I’ve removed every trace of her from the clockwork inside myself so that I can be presentable for you.

He had to do something.

Eiji and Naru—

He sucked in a breath. Felt it, didn’t feel it, watched from above as it filled his chest. Watched Hawks’s fingers ease, slowly—watched them release him, watched Hawks’s weight shift back and away, watched the flooding wings fold up so small that you could almost forget their breadth, their weight, their power.

“There you go,” Hawks had said. Voice like the morgue. Voice like the center of the pit of rubble, in the moment that Natsuo had turned, seen, disbelieved, second-guessed, and started praying—the moment that the helicopters and the cracking concrete and his radio and all the screaming had just whited out. Gone. The moment that nothing else existed but the knowing—the recognition. The obliterative instant of understanding that everything was over. Everything had fallen away. “Come on.”

Hawks’s hand hovered near his shoulder as he made his legs move. His feet were a thousand miles away, but they responded, when he begged. One shuffle of a step at a time. Strange, distant, clumsy, but he could do it.

The swell of bright light outside the doorway had blinded him as he fixated on it—on a destination that burned his eyes. He’d stumbled over the shoes in the genkan. Hawks caught his arm, held him upright, gripped way too tight. His fingertips tingled. Something was running down his face—tears, maybe; blood, maybe; melted ice. Didn’t make much difference.

Red flickered around them, and someone reached for him and missed.

“Lay off,” Hawks said, so sharply that he sounded like a person. “He needs a psych eval. Where’s the—take him. Get him in the—”

Hawks had always looked strangely small, both on TV and in real life. It was partly in the way he moved—the flitting, the agile speed. He danced through the air like a songbird, so deftly that it tricked your mind into thinking he was tiny, he was too swift and too clever and too streamlined to catch.

It was partly in the way he’d always stood at Endeavor’s side.

Natsuo was much taller than him, when both their heels were on the ground. The wings hadn’t grown all the way back to the staggering size he remembers—from how they were the rise of the upstart, from the hubbub that filled headlines and subsumed half the internet. They used to make him seem larger, in person, but Natsuo had always been able to look down at the top of his head.

His hand on Natsuo’s shoulder now, though, was so fucking strong that it was startling.

He hauled Natsuo down, pushed him forward, shoved him into the back of a car. Natsuo fell wrong—tweaked his wrist as his weight landed on it. Gritted his teeth, wrested his body around, tried to settle himself on the seat before anyone else grabbed for him.

The door slammed.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” Hawks called through the window.

They’d started the car.

Everything had coalesced and twisted like a whirlpool, winding around and around.

Impossible things happening to a version of himself that he didn’t know, didn’t really understand. A blitz of endless questions raining down on the mechanical Natsuo they expected—the one who offered cute, curated answers. The one who knew what they wanted to hear.

I just lost control. I’m sorry. Are they okay? Where are they? I’m so sorry. I was really struggling. Grief is a tough thing, in my family. I sure was in a spiral, huh? It’s okay. I’m okay. Where are the kids? Can I see them? Oh. No, of course. I understand. I’ll do whatever you think is best. I know. I’ve seen this before. Ha. It’s weird, it feels so far away. But I’m okay now. I’m okay.

Easy.

He is exemplary at inpatient therapy.

Of course he is. He’s a Todoroki. Never settle for less than the best.

They’re understaffed, and all they have to hold him up against is a rubric—a checklist. All he has to do is regurgitate the words they want to hear at the right times—not too soon, not too fast, not too precisely. All he has to do is give them reasons to check the boxes, without alerting them to the fact that he knows exactly what the boxes are. They can’t afford to keep him here, occupying a creaky little cot, for any longer than the court requires. They need to open up that space to the next incoming psycho. They need him gone. All he has to do is pass the test.

He rearranges the stages of the grief. He lapses, circles around, drifts back and forth between anger and bargaining—but never too messy. Never loud. Never violent.

He was a good dad. He was so good. He was so careful. He never raised his voice. He never shouted. He never scared them. He was so careful. He was always in control.

When they pull the chairs into a lopsided ring and talk about it—whatever it is; for all of them the festering wound smells slightly different—he sits still, straight-backed, hands folded between his knees, and listens close and nods along. When they ask him to talk, he keeps his voice low and twists his hands together. When he talks about her, he mixes up the past and the present tense, falters, gets a little weepy, apologizes, reels back. Says he’s still confused, sometimes. Still coping.

He’s not confused.

She’s in the past. Everything he loved, everything that ever went right for him, is in the past.

That’s what’s killing him.

But he knows—knows he has to play smart, lay his cards down carefully. He knows he has to win, because the anemic, poison-colored light at the end of the echoing tunnel is the kids.

He has to get out of here.

He has to get them back.

He’s strong enough. He’s smart enough. He knows how this works. He knows all the buzzwords, all the phases. He strings the little milestones together, touches the bases, takes it at a measured pace to line it all up so that they’ll have no choice but to release him right on time.

No more fucking around.

This is the one last thing that he can give her.

This is the only thing that he can offer.

He will pry their children out of the jaws of the monster if it’s the last fucking thing he does.

Once they cut him loose, the rigmarole of the classes is even simpler. He sets a dozen alarms on his phone—a day before, four hours before, two hours, one hour, go time. He dresses up as Mr. Todoroki and arrives a few minutes early, says hello to the moderator who holds his fate in her hands, asks about her day, her weekend, the traffic. Sometimes he makes himself hesitate, wince, and ask about her kids.

He sits up straight. He takes notes. It’s all very formulaic. They give him questions to answer, prompts to write from. He’s always been damn good at exams.

I miss her every minute, but I think it’s softening a little. It doesn’t feel as terrible. It doesn’t feel like every second is shards of glass. Some of them are easier.

I think I’m starting to appreciate the time I had with her. I miss her so much, but it hurts less. I was so lucky to have her in my life for as long as I did. I know she would want me to keep going. She would want me to be happy. She would want me to live.

She doesn’t want anything.

She’s dead.

Mr. Todoroki sits in the hard plastic chair and waits it out. Mr. Todoroki turns in all of his assignments on time. Mr. Todoroki knows exactly how to care for his kids, exactly how to nurture them, exactly how to follow all their cues and feed them when they’re hungry and make sure that they never feel afraid again.

Mr. Todoroki says goodbye to everyone by name, and gets back in the car.

Mr. Todoroki steps back into the well of darkness and sheds the clothes, the choreography, the polished shields.

And he’s Natsu again.

He’s ten, and he can’t stop crying—can’t stop trying to empty himself, expunge the misery, cut it out of his insides piece by piece. He can’t stop crying, because the person he loved most in the world, who loved him the most, who protected him from everything, who made it all make sense, is gone. Forever. Never coming back. And nothing will ever be good again.

He’s ten, and he’s sobbing until he almost throws up, and Fuyumi keeps hugging him tighter and tighter, trying to shush him—trying to get him to stop. Begging him to be quiet, to calm down, to hold it in. Trying to smother him, silence him, subdue him before a shadow fills the doorway—because it’s better to be unknown, unseen, unwanted than to draw his attention. The ones he wants end up dead.

Or worse.

It’s better to be invisible than dead.

Mr. Todoroki does his homework, exceeds the expectations, brings a box of tea to share with the other ghosts who drift in and settle in the hard chairs, staring at the tired whiteboard with the new lines smeared across the old ones that never quite erased.

Natsuo sits in the dark and covers his mouth with his useless hands.

Things don’t happen for a reason. They just happen, and you do the best you can.

She was still breathing. If I’d been faster, stronger, better—I could have done something.

If I’d been more like him, I could have saved her.

Things don’t happen for a reason. They just crush you down until you quit.

“You can try again,” Mom says, after the phone call that slipped through his fingers and blew up in his face.

He has to be half Mr. Todoroki, with her, to hold himself together—but no more than that, because she’d see through it. It’s a pain in the ass. He’s so tired. He just wants her to leave.

Maybe that makes him ungrateful or something. She didn’t have to come. He should be appreciative.

He doesn’t have anything left to give.

She brought him food. She’s sitting on the couch next to him, watching, so that he has to eat it.

“On a scale of one to ten,” he says, “how pissed is Fuyumi?”

“She isn’t mad at you,” Mom says.

“Bullshit,” Natsuo says.

“She’s upset,” Mom says, “but she understands.”

No, she doesn’t.

She took his side.

When it really counted, she abandoned him.

Mom sighs, quietly, and takes Natsuo’s right hand in both of hers. It looks too big.

“This isn’t just suddenly going to get easier,” she says. “There isn’t a trapdoor. You can’t get out of it.” She nods towards the folders on the table, subject by subject, lie by lie. “Is any of that helping at all?”

“No,” he says. “I know how to take care of my damn kids. I just—can’t. Right now.”

She squeezes his hand. It feels like it’s happening to someone else—to Mr. Todoroki, probably. To the shell. To the suit of armor.

“It is bullshit, isn’t it?” she says, and a little part of him that apparently still registers surprise jerks against her grip and turns to look at her. She half-smiles. “Well, it is—for them to expect you to push through it on someone else’s schedule. Time is the only thing that even starts to help, and they won’t let you have it.”

The time doesn’t help.

The time isn’t real.

The hours in between obligations slip like earthquake faults, grinding jaggedly against each other and then dropping away. The ground gives out, and the earth yawns open, and he tumbles through and falls—and falls—and falls—

He spent yesterday writing down everything he can remember that she ever said. No one else knows. No one else ever knew her like he did. No one else was ever granted that privilege, the indescribable honor and the incredible joy.

She used to wrap him up in a blanket in the bed before throwing all her limbs around him—including the tail—and clinging to his side, because he’s always so cold, but she wanted to be close to him.

She’d drawn a heart at the end of his birthday card pretty soon after they’d started dating, and it had come out a little lopsided—he’d given her a hard time about the lumpy little thing to try to distract her from how choked up he was. She’d taken to drawing deliberately uneven hearts on tiny post-it notes and hiding them at random in his textbooks, in his notebooks, in his backpack and his jacket pockets and his shoes. He never figured out when she was drawing them or when she was hiding them—never once caught her in the act even though she kept it up for eight damn years.

He found one in the freezer last week. In the fucking freezer.

He sat down on the floor and cried until the dry-sobbing was more like dry-heaving, and he didn’t have the energy to move.

She always had to stay impeccably professional at work—between the heteromorph thing and the nature of the job—but she would save up all of the sly little jokes and snarky comments that she’d wanted to make throughout the day, and she would tell him every single one of them once the kids were in bed. Some of them required recapping days’ worth of setup to make the punchline make sense. They were always worth it.

The only other person he ever heard her joke with that freely was her dad, who she’d loved like the whole damn world. She’d trusted Natsuo with that. She’d trusted him as much as the most important person in her life. She’d trusted him with the truth of herself, and he’d loved every single second, every cell of her, every molecule of every breath she drew.

His wedding ring keeps sliding off of his finger. His knuckle catches it, mostly, but it slipped off earlier this week—two days ago? three?—and he tore half the place apart before he found it in the laundry basket.

Time isn’t going to heal him, because time isn’t going to bring her back.

“Saturday, right?” he says to Mom, with Mr. Todoroki’s voice, with Mr. Todoroki’s lungs and careful intonations. “I can see them on Saturday.”

She squeezes his hand again, harder this time.

“Right,” she says. “One day at a time, hon.”

That’s bullshit, too, and she knows it.

When Endeavor leaves, the silence feels towering. There should be flaming footsteps on the carpet, smoke sinking into the walls—he shouldn’t ever have fit in here. This place shouldn’t have been able to contain him.

Natsuo looks at the floor. He looks at the dark screen of the TV. He looks at the crumpled blankets on the couch.

He can’t sleep in the bed without her. Just makes him cry all fucking night, and then he’s a headachey mess on top of the regular kind.

He doesn’t really know what to fucking believe now—now, lately, anymore. The kids looked happier without him. Probably that’s fake—it’s easy to stage a photo, easy to say I’ll hurt you less if you sit with your brother just like this and smile, and Eiji is such a fucking sweetheart, he’s so gentle and so accommodating and so warm that he’d do it thinking one more concession would save him.

But what was the point of coming here and needling him about it? Why rub it in his face? Endeavor already has what he wanted—the next generation of Todorokis is in his grasp, with no champion and no defender and no way to escape. No recourse. Nowhere to run.

Why does everybody believe him?

People don’t change that much.

They don’t.

Which complicates things.

Because Mom wouldn’t turn into a liar. Because Fuyumi wouldn’t hang him out to dry.

Endeavor’s right, isn’t he? Natsuo needs to go to them. Natsuo needs to hug them and kiss them and hold their tiny hands and promise them that this isn’t forever. He needs to tell them that he’s coming back for them. He needs to light a torch at the end of the tunnel and give them a reason to survive.

He can’t drive right now. He’ll kill someone. He’s on another jag, now—fucking thanks, Endeavor; always right on time—with the sobs shaking through him like earthquake aftershocks, and the tears ebbing and flowing like the tide but never really stopping. Just dripping out of his eyes like he’s sprung a fucking leak, like the gaping hole that it ripped out of him shattered all the plumbing.

It still doesn’t feel real. It still doesn’t feel possible that he’s supposed to keep going—that there’s some fucking point to the rest of a life without her.

He has to do it, though. Enough of it. He has to get the psychs and the hospital-prison wardens and the lawyers and the social workers and the thousand circling sharks to believe that he’s better. That everything’s fine. He has to get them to sign off on another piece of paper grinding a universe of pain down into shitty legalese. He has to convince them to let him get Eiji and Naru back.

It’s all or nothing now.

These are her kids. These are her babies. They’re the only part of her that’s still alive.

It doesn’t really matter if it kills him. They’re all he’s got left—what the fuck else does he have to lose?

He’ll go tomorrow.

He’ll go tomorrow morning, and he’ll pry them out of Endeavor’s burning hands if he has to.

He sleeps a little—fits and dozes, snatches here and there. Feels like he’s in a hammock, or on a spring—dipping in and out of consciousness, slipping back and forth across the line so subtly that he can’t tell worth a damn when he’s awake.

At seven or eight or nine he gets up and takes a shower. Shaves. Gets dressed, nice and neat, the Grown-Up Special, slacks and a collared shirt. He can’t find socks that match. He doesn’t know if he’s dreaming.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the kids. Nothing matters except getting his babies out of the monster’s den.

He checks his phone, pockets it, and then has to pull it out again, because he didn’t process the piece of information he was checking it for.

It’s Sunday.

He doesn’t know if Hawks will be at the house. Endeavor used to work weekends, nights, mornings, half-days, double days—whatever the fuck suited him. Whatever left him time to torture Shouto, scream at Mom, relegate the rest of them to the corners of the place where the silence stretched thin and brittle like warping glass.

Hawks is one of the monsters. Hawks is one of the nightmare shapes with teeth.

Natsuo already knew it, before the day they came to take the kids—he’d figured out a long time ago what Hawks really was, long before he shacked up with fucking Endeavor like a middle-aged divorced abuser was the world’s single most eligible bachelor, and he couldn’t believe his luck.

The fight with that nomu thing was a footnote. Heroes do that shit all the time—put it all on the line in front of the cameras, prioritize everyone’s safety over anything personal. That didn’t prove anything except that Hawks wanted to look good, like they all do.

It was later, in the hospital, after Jaku and the villa and Touya.

Endeavor was a blubbering mess of bullshit apologies, and Hawks looked at him with respect.

The kind Endeavor had never fucking mustered for a single one of them.

Maybe it’s all part of the game. Hawks is fucked up, too. Hawks is the only pro on record who’s ever killed someone in the line of duty and not wound up in Tartarus to make new friends. Maybe he’s just so broken that he latched on to the only person he’s ever found who’s more fucked up than he is. Maybe it’s as simple as trying to feel virtuous by comparison.

That doesn’t matter, either.

If he’s there, he’s there. If he’s not, he’s not. Natsuo hates his guts, but not for what he did—not for what he helped them do. That was part of the job. Hawks didn’t do it for fun. That’s not what Natsuo holds against him.

Christ. Who the fuck knows? Maybe Hawks is just another victim. Maybe he got drawn in and tangled up. It sounds like his family was shit, too. Maybe he doesn’t know any better. Maybe he never really had a choice.

Natsuo scrubs his eyes. The missed sleep makes them feel gritty, and the crying makes them ache.

He can’t ask the one person who knows him best if he’s acting insane. He can’t ask the one person who wanted to keep him if he’s losing it.

Hayami used to say Is it his Natsuo saying that, or mine?

She could do it for the kids, too. All she had to do was look in Eiji’s direction, and he’d stop fussing, stop crying, stop whining—whatever it was. The love would radiate out of her so fast, so warm, so far that she’d just… melt it. All of it. Dissolve it away.

Natsuo goes to the table and looks at the keys that Endeavor left behind.

He needs to know what to prepare for. He needs to know what the war is. What to fight.

He sits down.

He taps over to the last text from Shouto that he never answered.

He swallows, taps his foot, bites his bottom lip hard. Nothing is too much—not anymore. Not when his kids hang in the balance.

Have you been over there? he writes.

He sends it.

He waits.

He probably doesn’t deserve it—he hasn’t been much of a fucking brother in any way that counts. Obviously it’s mostly someone else’s fault for setting him back sixteen years, but he could have done more. He could have been there more often, stayed closer, tried harder.

It’s the job. The pro shit. It makes Shouto parrot all the things that Endeavor used to say, makes him stand the same way, with his shoulders back and his head high and his eyes too sharp.

That’s an excuse.

The bottom line is that he doesn’t deserve it, but Shouto almost always gets back to him right away anyway.

He watches the little Read 10:24 am materialize on the screen.

He watches the little bubble bounce.

He watches it burst into one word.

Yes.

A momentary pause, and then another—

Twice.

Natsuo breathes deep. He taps the words out slowly. Just writing the sentence feels fucked up, but he has to know, and Shouto will tell him.

Are Mom and Fuyumi lying?

The bubble bounces again. The motion looks too fucking cheerful. Makes him feel seasick.

No, Shouto writes. I checked for bruises and burns and welts. Volunteered to change Naru’s diaper to be sure (you’re welcome). Asked Eiji to show me the tag on his jacket so that he would take it off and I could look at his arms.

Maybe it’s some kind of long game.

Endeavor would have to wait for the social workers to go away, after all—they’ll be looking at the kids all the time, asking all the same questions, doing evals, taking notes, breathing down his neck. Endeavor’s smart. He’ll convince them that he’s safe. He’ll get them off his back before he tries anything.

The text log pings with another message.

Izuku talked to Eiji too, Shouto added. Asked him how he likes living there and he just talked about the garden and learning to read and how the house is so big.

That’s got to be what it is.

Endeavor knows how to pick his battles.

Thanks, Natsuo writes. You’re the best.

Shit.

Probably not the way to say it.

He’s lucky, with Shouto.

They all are.

Shouto’s just… good. He’s so good down to the core that nothing can whittle it away. Nothing can break that, or beat it out of him.

The bubble bounces again.

Are you going over?

Natsuo rubs his eyes again. They burn a little.

Yeah.

He owes Shouto this truth, for today’s kindness on top of the million other things he did for all of them—and the million other things he did for the whole damn world.

I was supposed to yesterday. I couldn’t do it.

He doesn’t think Shouto’s ever run up against anything he couldn’t do.

Maybe Shouto always was the pinnacle of the lineage—not because of the power, but because of the strength of his heart. Because of the resilience of his soul. Because a world of hurt couldn’t stop him from being gentle.

Natsuo wants to be more like him, sometimes. Funny how life works.

Another bubble pops up in the text log, and then another, and then more.

The first time is the hardest.

I thought I was going to throw up.

But keep reminding yourself that you can just walk away.

You can just get up and leave and walk down the street and get a cab. Any time it gets bad. You don’t just have to take it.

And you can call me if you want. I’ll be around.

They’re really good kids.

Eiji’s so smart but he’s so sweet too.

Naru is very slimy but in a cute way. Mostly.

Natsuo feels his mouth curving up.

It kind of hurts. Kind of helps. Kind of feels like falling.

Thanks, he types back. I hope this isn’t weird but I should say it more. I love you.

Shouto is… Shouto. For better. Always for the better.

It is a little weird but only because of how weird the whole family is, I think. I love you too. I meant it about the call if you need it. Take care, Natsu.

He’s sure as hell going to try.

He tries to treat it like an exam. He has to focus really hard right now, for the next few minutes—can’t let a single wisp of any other ideas into his brain. For the duration of this trip, he needs to be a machine whose only purpose is and ever has been driving this car to Endeavor’s house.

He can’t be Natsuo until he gets there. He has to be a foot on the gas and both hands on the wheel and a compendium of traffic laws. He has to be nothing but the task until he’s finished it.

He can’t afford to wonder where that strategy came from. How he learned.

It’s been a long damn time, but the streets haven’t changed. A lot of people moved after the war, and a lot of neighborhoods just got leveled, but this place is practically frozen in time—untouchable. Thinking about it, he’s not surprised.

He’s not supposed to think about it.

He grips the wheel, checks his mirrors, makes himself breathe. The clock’s running down. He’s going to ace this one.

He parks about as far as he can from the gate without obstructing the road. What Shouto said was important. Even better than a taxi is a getaway car.

Maybe he can just grab the kids and run. Maybe—

No. That’s crazy shit. That’s the sleeplessness talking, the mashed-up dregs of his brain scrabbling around and coming up with nonsense. Even if he somehow made it to the door, he’d never make it to the end of the street.

And she wouldn’t want him to think like that. She wouldn’t want him floundering like this. She’d want him to do it the right way—pull himself together, hold his head as high as he can, earn back Eiji’s trust and convince all the assholes with their shitty two-year psych degrees that he’s fit to raise his own damn kids, and they can give them back, now, please.

Maybe one of the things Endeavor said has value. Maybe one of them could be true.

It’s not too late for you.

Unlikely. But possible. If he walks the wire and plays his cards precisely right, it’s possible. It’s only been five weeks. Kids are good at healing up, and letting go.

Maybe.

Standing at the end of the walkway makes his skin crawl. His head feels too light, and his lungs feel small. Walking up to that wide, hulking door sounds fucking intolerable.

He takes the keys out of his pocket and wraps his fingers around them so that they won’t jingle. The metal is warm from the proximity to him. There are a couple of other keys on the ring, too, that don’t match. Apparently they weren’t very important, or Endeavor wouldn’t have given him the whole ring. There’s another that looks similar to the ones for the house, but those have always been labeled with numbers, and this one has Garden etched in instead. He’s never seen it before.

But that’s an idea.

He crosses past the front of the house and goes to the side gate. He flicks through the keys until he finds the right one, then opens up the keypad and thumbs in the code that he’s reluctantly grateful he hasn’t scoured out of his memory by now. It still works. The lid unlocks, so he opens it up to reveal the keyhole underneath. He shoves the key in, turns that, and then yanks on the cable to raise the last latch, and then he throws his shoulder into it to push it open and lets himself into the side yard.

The garden looks different. It used to be all hyper-traditional Zen shit—looked nicer than a shrine, thanks to the fleet of people who maintained it and shooed the pesky excess progeny out into the courtyards so that they couldn’t damage any of the plants.

There are a lot of flowers now, and a lot of meticulously labeled tracts of dirt along the walls of the house, which are in various states of progress attempting to produce leaves. There’s a little wooden fence around the pond. The sozou fountain hasn’t shifted an inch in either direction. All the pathways look new—wide blocks of stone, pale gray shale, lined up to wind through the grass.

The little outbuilding on the far side also looks different. It was supposedly some sort of servants’ quarters, way back in the day, but it was functionally just an oversized storage shed by the time Natsuo came along. It looks prettied-up, though—new windows, new door, roof redone.

He stands at the end of the pathway and listens to the water trickling. That shit’s supposed to be good for you—supposed to tip over little endorphin dominos in your brain or something. Trees are good for you. Touching people. Sunlight. Birdsong.

He’s good at homework. He’s read all their little articles, all the sniveling self-help treatises, all the well-paid assholes’ promises that things will get better. That it’ll feel different someday.

Some part of him recognizes, wearily, that there’s some truth to it. He vaguely remembers how bad it was at the start, after Touya. He remembers that it hurt all the fucking time, at the beginning. His teacher at school kept calling the house, and when nobody was picking up, she started writing letters. Natsuo doesn’t know if Endeavor ever noticed, let alone read them. He was probably too busy kicking his new project into high gear.

The garden looks superficially different, but it’s still the same place.

The sound of water splashing isn’t going to do a damn thing for him here.

Neither is waiting—putting it off. Drawing it out.

He has to do better than that, for them. He has to be more.

The world is bigger than he can possibly imagine, and kinder even when it feels cruelest. The universe is infinite, and his story is barely beginning. It’s okay to feel like less of himself as long as he keeps moving. It’s okay if sometimes he has to stop and rest. It’s okay if it feels like it’s getting worse instead of better, sometimes. Storms end. Everything is always changing. It won’t disappear, and it will leave marks behind, but rain erodes the coastline, and the sun comes back. He has to weather it. It’s what she would have wanted—she would want him to be happy, someday, even if she’s not here to see it. The least that he can do is try.

What a load of horseshit.

He has to get through this because he has to get his fucking kids back. He has to.

Last night, Endeavor was—

Off.

Weird.

Endeavor isn’t good at games. He’s a whole lot of shit, but he’s too stuffy and upfront to spin a large-scale lie. He’s not an actor. He doesn’t have it in him. He could have been coached to deliver a line or two, but he wouldn’t have been able to keep it up for the full length of that conversation.

Some parts of it must be true.

Maybe he does want Natsuo to take them back.

Right?

They’re no good to him. Eiji’s quirk hasn’t even manifested yet, and from the ears, it’s good odds he’s going to lean towards Hayami more than anything else. Naru is clearly in the heteromorph camp. He’s destined for extremely sharp hearing, an acute sense of smell, and a slightly uncanny ability to fit himself through or into spaces that he really shouldn’t be able to.

As far as Endeavor is concerned, they’re not worth anything.

He’s probably getting tired of dealing with them. He never wanted kids—he wanted successors. He wanted someone to carry the last name on their shoulders, and the fame on their back. He wanted a vehicle—a vessel for his arrogance, for his infernal compulsion to win no matter what. He wanted a puppet that could handle the heat.

Maybe it’s not that bad.

Maybe—

Maybe it’s worse.

Maybe Endeavor thinks he can forge them into whatever he wants this way.

Maybe he’s so bored out of his mind in retirement that he’s been spending all the intervening time coming up with new ways to make children miserable, new ways to pulverize the joy out of them and replace it with scar tissue and tempered steel.

Maybe he’s only getting started.

Maybe buying everybody’s trust is the first step.

Maybe Natsuo has underestimated him all along.

He makes his feet carry him down the pathway, following its slow turn to the steps near the engawa. Four stairs. Touya used to jump off the edge specifically because Mom hated it—she always thought he was going to fall and break his neck, or at least twist his ankle. One time he did skin his knee when he landed, but he hid it so she wouldn’t know. He recruited Natsuo to help him pick the gravel out in the bathroom later, because Fuyumi would have told on him in a heartbeat.

Natsuo stands on the engawa for a second. He doesn’t let himself look back.

He puts his right foot ahead of the left, and then the left ahead of that. He raises the keys, sorts through them—his fingers remember their weight and their shapes. He unlocks the back door smoothly and lets himself in. He draws it shut behind him.

He leaves his shoes on. Fuck that.

The tatami minimizes his footsteps anyway as he drifts towards the sound of voices—as he ripples down the hall, then through the kitchen—

“Aha!” Hawks crows. “It’s Mousebaby, my do-gooding nemesis! I’ve got you this time, Mousebaby! Plunge him into the oscillatory vortex!” He follows that nonsense with a completely ridiculous fake supervillain laugh, and Naru chortles back.

“Grampa,” Eiji says, “what’s a—an ossi—what’s a vorteck?”

“Let’s ask Hawks,” Endeavor says, voice so low and so calm it doesn’t sound like him. “Hawks, what’s an oscillatory vortex?”

Hawks laughs again, with his real voice this time.

The fact that anyone is laughing in this house feels like fucking whiplash.

Natsuo makes himself step into the room.

The laughter stops.

They all stare at him for a second, and the silence stings.

Hawks must have known he was there—must have heard him with the feathers. He can’t be so settled here that he doesn’t even register that kind of thing anymore.

Nobody settles here. There are ghosts in the walls—ash under the tatami and ground into the carpet. There are bloody children’s handprints scattered everywhere.

Endeavor is sitting on the floor, entirely still. It’s like somebody hit the pause button on Natsuo’s entire life.

Then Naru wriggles, arms flailing out towards him.

Eiji scrambles up off of the floor, races over so fast he almost trips, and flings his tiny little arms around Natsuo’s right shin.

“Daddy!” he says, beaming up, Hayami’s gorgeous green eyes fixed on Natsuo, and his heart crumples over and over. It hurts so much. It hurts so much. “Daddy, how far can you count? Grampa said I’m good at counting! Can you count with me? I wanna count to a hundred.”

The words come up too fast to get his teeth around. “Don’t ever let him tell you what you’re good at.”

Eiji’s face falls. His feelings are always overwhelming. His world is so small that they exceed the size of it.

His upturned face goes deeply wounded.

He speaks the words slowly, looking troubled and betrayed.

“But I love Grampa,” he says.

The crinkled fragments left of Natsuo’s heart rip right out of him.

He can’t breathe. His lungs are full of smoke, full of acid, full of seething ice—

“Eiji,” Endeavor says, very quietly. “Why don’t you help your daddy go get something to eat?”

Eiji hesitates, glancing back and forth between a demon and his own fucking father, weighing both of them equally.

That fucking does it—that—

No. No fucking way.

Natsuo reaches down and grabs Eiji up off the floor, wrapping him tight into both arms.

So tight.

Keeping him away from—

“Ow, Daddy,” Eiji says, squirming, and his voice catches, and everything is just so fucking cold— “Daddy, that hurts—”

Feathers rattle loudly as Hawks opens his wings.

Endeavor’s ugly metal hand snaps out towards Hawks, fingers spread, but he doesn’t get up from the floor. He doesn’t move.

He’s just watching.

It is fucking crazy how intense his eyes are—how feverishly, furiously bright; how scaldingly sharp. They get under your skin. They shred you open. You’re never going to be good enough for a man who looks at you like that. No one and nothing ever is.

Natsuo thinks maybe he understands, now, why Touya was willing to kill for it, and ready to die.

“Put him down,” Endeavor says—there’s the iron. The steel. The spark. “He doesn’t belong to you.”

Natsuo understands Touya very well.

“Even for you,” Natsuo says, hearing his voice shake even though it all sounds so damn clear inside his head, “that’s a level of hypocritical bullshit fit to—”

Eiji twists in his grip, whining.

Red feathers start to hover just past the edges of where Hawks’s wings are supposed to stay, like crayon strokes streaking outside the lines. It’s the thinnest-veiled threat humanly possible.

Inhumanly, Natsuo thinks.

Hawks has killed people, just like Touya. Nobody knows how many. The one on the record can’t be it.

“You’re hurting him,” Hawks says, flat and hard and sharp—merciless, with his superior power behind him, openly on display.

Clearly, he learned from the best.

“He’s fine,” Natsuo says, grappling with the surge of adrenaline, the spike of panic, the glee of provoking both of them like this—of having something they want, when all they’ve ever done is take. From him, from Mom—from Shouto, and Fuyumi, and the whole fucking world that believes the lie. “He’s my son.”

Eiji’s little body wriggles against his grip. “Daddy—”

Natsuo looks at Endeavor.

He looks frozen. He looks trapped. He looks like he’s in pain.

It’s about damn time.

“Call off your lapdog,” he says.

The ongoing whining from Eiji cracks into little racking sobs.

Fuck. Fine. Okay, fine, okay—

Natsuo strides back into the kitchen, relaxing his grip, stroking quickly at Eiji’s hair. It used to be softer. It’s turning out like his. “Sorry. I’m sorry, bud. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s okay.”

Eiji’s face is already buried in his shoulder, little fists clenched into his shirt, but the crying doesn’t stop.

Hawks shouldn’t even be here.

It’s fucked up that nobody cares—that nobody even questioned it. Not even anybody else in this family.

It makes a sick sort of sense. Of course Endeavor wasn’t satisfied with having the kind of mid-life crisis where some asshole buys a red convertible and blows a bunch of money gambling and makes some really stupid stock investments. Of course he had to go all-out. Of course he had to fuck it up so royally that it sounds like a joke.

And nobody said anything.

No one even batted an eyelash at the imposition of the boytoy now working double-time to turn Natsuo’s kids into smartass, back-talking brats. Endeavor filed for divorce and then immediately started living with a guy younger than half of his kids, and then he unceremoniously bailed out of the job that he’d burned them all to ashes for.

For what?

So he can sit around in his stupid fucking glasses and judge Natsuo’s parenting?

Fuck that. Fuck him.

Eiji’s hands tighten in Natsuo’s shirt, and he draws back far enough to look up, tears still dripping from Hayami’s eyes.

Natsuo’s brain won’t process it. He can sense that there’s a tidal wave of agony with his name on it—with his DNA coiled up inside of every drop—ready and waiting to rip him to shreds and bloat the pieces, rot the flesh and shatter his bones to slivers and shards.

But he can’t feel it.

He can’t feel anything.

He knows—rationally, he knows. He can’t give in to the anger. That’s Endeavor in him, scrabbling for a handhold; Endeavor aided by his own fucking PTSD, jacked up on the adrenaline spiking through him from forging back into this place.

He has to be careful. He has to act like he should, like he knows he can, like he used to. He has to act like their fucking dad who loves them.

He does. He knows he does.

He just can’t feel it.

He crouches down, making himself exhale, forcing his shoulders to relax, and carefully sets Eiji’s feet on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. That stings a little. At least it’s something. “I’m so sorry, bud. I’m not mad at you. You’re perfect. I love you.”

Eiji drags in a little hitching breath that makes his shoulders shiver, twisting his hands in the front of his jacket. It’s that Shouto merch one again. “I love you, too, Daddy.”

He probably shouldn’t, at this point.

Eiji lets one more sob out and then starts knuckling at his eyes. “You—do you want—are you hungry, Daddy?”

“I’m okay, bud,” Natsuo says. Funny, kind of. “Thanks, though.” The thought spears through him, steel-cold. “Are you? Do you need something to eat? Is—”

Is he even feeding you?

Back up. Back up, slow down, grab it by the throat and strangle the life out of it. He has to fake it. He has to stay calm.

Shouto was right. Shouto usually is. It’s this place, it’s Endeavor just sitting there—it makes him feel so crazy that he starts acting on it. Makes him feel unhinged, unglued, unreal; makes this feel like a nightmare where his choices don’t matter.

They do matter.

He just hurt his kid. His baby. The best kid in the whole world, the sweetest one, the smartest one. He’d cut his heart out for Eiji, slice it up and serve it.

Eiji shakes his head, scrubbing at his dribbling nose with his sleeve. Probably not the first time the jacket’s gotten that treatment, and probably won’t be the last. “I’m okay, Daddy. We had fish for lunch ’cause it was left over from yesterday. It was really good.”

Natsuo breathes out.

Keep breathing.

Get through this.

He has to think like Shouto—has to remember what Shouto said. He can’t let this place trap him, can’t let it trick him, can’t let the past creep up behind him and cut his throat. Eiji needs him. Eiji needs the family he’s got left.

Natsuo needs to be more like Shouto. Shouto had it worse than any of them—had more hellish memories of this place than the rest of them put together—and he muddled through the mess, somehow.

Natsuo can do this.

He’s strong enough.

“Good,” he says, softly. “That’s good. Hey—why don’t you show me the garden? You—you said you planted some flowers, right?” Shit, fuck, hang on— “Irises?”

Eiji’s eyes brighten a little bit. “Yeah. I saw them at the market, and Grampa said I could pick whatever flower I wanted, and we’d do some—we’d look it up and see what—see what it liked, and where we should put it, and then we planted them. On a little mountain with their roots all down.” His face falls. “But they aren’t—you can’t see them, Daddy. They haven’t grown enough yet.”

“That’s okay,” Natsuo says. “Just show me where. And you can show me the other plants, too. It’s all different from the last time I was here.”

Eiji smears a few tears away with his sleeve. Natsuo pats around his pockets for a kleenex, but he knows, distantly, that he doesn’t have one. It didn’t even cross his mind before he left. Hardly anything did.

His skin is still crawling. Endeavor is right there, just on the other side of the wall, waiting him out. Holding Naru hostage.

He doesn’t belong to you—what kind of fucking—

Doesn’t matter. Not right now.

Natsuo gets up and holds his empty hand out to Eiji. “C’mon, let’s go see.”

Eiji grabs on tight, hauling him along down the hall as he moves with the hunched-over scuttle walk that accompanying a three-year-old requires when you’re six foot. Eiji strides through this house like he owns it. He occupies this space like he’s afraid of nothing.

Maybe Hawks is keeping Endeavor on decent behavior instead of just amusedly enabling him like he always did before. Maybe Hawks draws the line when it comes to kids, or something. Maybe it’s the presence of the social workers, the pressure of the possibility of being found out. Endeavor got off pretty easy, the first time. Surely the public would crucify him for a second recurrence of the same crime.

Eiji starts to tow Natsuo around the circumference of the garden, then gets distracted by the pond and drags him over to start telling him about the frogs. There’s one that’s browner than the others, which he thinks is a boy and calls Kero because of the sound. He puffs up his cheeks and imitates a particularly gravelly ribbit noise.

There’s also a little patch near the remodeled shed—on the side that gets more sunlight, further from the eaves that encircle the courtyard—with fastidious markers claiming that the disturbed dirt is the future home of some carrots, green onions, radishes, and corn. Eiji says the corn was his idea—they were at the market looking for other flowers to try, and he picked it out, and ‘Grampa’ bought some other vegetables so that it would have some friends.

The idea of Endeavor asking a child what he wants in the first place, let alone actually indulging the answer to the point of planting corn in a goddamn flowerbed in what used to the the most pristine, manicured, relentlessly traditional garden on the face of the Earth—

It doesn’t add up.

Eiji picks his way around the whole garden, giving Natsuo the grand tour in just his socks. He’s excessively careful making his way along the path, hopping from one slab of stone to the next. He skirts the places where the soil is damp, but Natsuo can’t help kind of hoping he tracks mud back into Endeavor’s precious house and grinds it deep into the damn tatami.

When Eiji has pointed at everything he can think of and told Natsuo in rambly little-kid detail about all the birds he’s seen and all the bugs he’s found, he leads the way back over to the engawa.

Natsuo doesn’t think he’s ready to go back into that place yet. This is better. This he can handle, so far.

“Let’s take a break, bud,” he says, sitting down on the edge. He lifts Eiji up next to him. Eiji leans forward, gazes down, swings his feet, glances up at Natsuo, and looks out over the yard.

With his jacket on, all Natsuo can see is his tiny little hands—the right is slightly gummy with some unidentified substance, as tends to be the case for toddlers more often than not, but there aren’t any visible bruises. He has a pair of healing scrapes on his palms, mostly hidden under a couple of Hawks-themed band-aids, but he’s clearly been peeling them back to pick at the scabs. Natsuo looks at his neck above the collar, at his pudgy little cheeks. No marks there. Yet.

“I need you to be completely honest with me, bud,” Natsuo says, as softly as he can when the entire world is shaking itself to pieces all around him one more time. “Okay? I need you to tell me the whole truth. I can keep a secret.”

Eiji blinks up at him, face completely still. The trust in it is heartbreaking. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body or a suspicious drop in his blood. Anybody could— “Okay.”

Natsuo holds himself together. He keeps his voice low, keeps it steady, keeps his battered heart inside his chest in spite of the way it keeps banging.

“Does your grandpa make you do anything you don’t want to?” he asks. “Anything. Anything at all.”

Eiji blinks again. His mouth screws up as he tries to think that through. “Like what?”

“Like running,” Natsuo says. “Or—fighting. Or any kind of exercise that you don’t want to do. Or making you not say stuff to your auntie or your grandma or your Uncle Shouto—does he make you promise not to tell them stuff?”

Eiji frowns deeper.

He shakes his head slowly.

“Okay,” Natsuo says, trying to sound encouraging instead of skeptical. “What kind of stuff does he tell you that you have to do?”

Eiji’s eyes widen.

His bottom lip sticks out.

Natsuo’s heart stutters. Here it is. Here it—

“I gotta wear shoes,” Eiji says.

Natsuo gives that a second.

Eiji keeps blinking.

“Every time I go outside, Daddy!” Eiji says, insistently now. “No matter what! It’s—it’s—he says it’s ’cause sometimes there’s glass or rocks or things you can’t even see that’ll hurt your feet, but—but is there? I never seen any glass. Sometimes there’s rocks, but they’re big, and I would just run around them, it’d be fine! But he always says I gotta wear ’em anyway ’cause it’s more safe.”

“Oh,” Natsuo manages. “Every time, huh?”

“Yeah,” Eiji mutters. He looks down at his knees, swinging his feet, tiny hands curled together in his lap. “And he always says I either gotta try some vegetables every dinner, or eat a—a vitamin. He says I can pick. But I gotta pick one, so I can get bigger and stronger and have a good—a—an immnoon system.” He heaves a giant, histrionic toddler sigh. “And—and mostly the vegetables are okay, but they’re weird sometimes.”

“Weird how?” Natsuo gets out.

“Slimy,” Eiji says. He thinks it over, very seriously. “But Naru’s slimy, too. And I love him.”

“Is he being good?” Natsuo asks, not letting his voice shake with the weight of the question he wants to ask—Are they being good to him? “You keeping an eye on him?”

Eiji nods solemnly. “He’s real good, Daddy. He doesn’t even cry much, and he gets a lot more sleep at night now, and he’s really good at bouncing. And drooling! He’s a party baby.”

“Okay,” Natsuo says, which seems like the safest bet when he has no damn clue what that means, but Eiji said it with such enormous confidence that he doesn’t want to question it. “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Eiji says, so serenely that it makes Natsuo’s throat tighten up before he fucking knows it. He sounds—happy. Happy enough.

Eiji crawls over to him, ducks under his arm, and climbs into his lap, nestling in against his chest.

Maybe—

Fuck. God. Okay.

Maybe Endeavor was right.

Maybe it’s not too late. Not yet. Not quite.

Natsuo wraps both arms around him, drawing him in, hugging him close. Not too tight. This poor fucking kid. He made it worse. Eiji’s already going through so much, and he made it worse.

“Naru’s funny,” Eiji says, voice dropping to a mumble as he leans his head against Natsuo’s arm. His eyes slide halfway shut. “He’s so noisy. One time he threw up on Hawks.”

Natsuo is not ashamed to admit that he enjoys that mental image. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eiji murmurs. “Auntie Fuyumi was there. Which is good. ’Cause Hawks threw up too. But not on Naru. He’s getting teeth, Daddy, you can just see ’em. When is he gonna talk?”

“I dunno, bud,” Natsuo says, softly, very carefully stroking at his hair. “You started to talk when you were a little older than one. You had a lot to say. He might decide he wants to wait a little longer.”

“Huh,” Eiji says. He shifts, wriggles, settles again, sighs out a little breath against Natsuo’s shoulder. “What’d I say? The first thing.”

That one hurts. That one scrapes its way out of Natsuo like sharpened fiberglass, shredding everything it touches on its way up.

“You said ‘Mama’ first,” he says.

Eiji stays quiet for so long that Natsuo hopes maybe he’s fallen asleep. It’s just about naptime, and he must be so overwhelmed by all the shit Natsuo just put him through—

“Daddy?” Eiji whispers. “Do you miss Mommy?”

Natsuo narrowly resists the urge to cling to him, way too tight. It feels like a hurricane at the base of his guts.

“Yeah,” he says, keeping his voice low. “So, so much.”

Eiji curls a little closer to him, one tiny hand clenching in his shirt.

“She was the best Mommy in the whole world,” Eiji whispers.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says, hearing the beginnings of the breaking in his voice. “She sure was.”

Eiji tugs on his shirt. “But you’re the best Daddy in the world.”

The tears burn the backs of his eyes, scald their way up his throat, sting under his skin. His head aches. It never really stops aching, these days.

“I don’t know about that, bud,” he says. The words quaver. “I’m messing up a lot.”

“That’s okay,” Eiji murmurs. “Everybody messes up. You just gotta show you’re sorry.”

Natsuo smooths his hair back off of his forehead and kisses it right at the hairline, gently, gently. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I—for all of it.”

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Eiji breathes. “It’s gonna be okay.”

It’s not. It never will. Because she’s never coming back. Because a day will never come when he wakes up and doesn’t wish that he could see her, talk to her, stroke her hair and take her hands and kiss her perfect palms and listen to the hilarious play-by-play of her day. A day will never come that it doesn’t hurt.

He still misses Touya—the Touya he knew, the Touya who did die, whether or not someone resurrected his corpse and stoked the hate in him up to the point of incinerating everything around him, scorching through his skin. He still misses the real Touya. The kid with a smart mouth and a strategic head, with the biggest dreams and the biggest smile, who used to let his dumb kid brother in on all the secrets—used to trust Natsuo even with the pain. Who used to teach him how to make stuff, how to convince people to take your side, how to build little mud houses in the garden for the frogs to live in. Who used to walk with him all the way to the konbini at the corner of the neighborhood and munificently buy him a Ramune, who showed him how to pop the little globe in, how to blow on the neck of the bottle so that it made different sounds depending on how much soda you’d drunk.

That Touya is gone.

Maybe it’s Natsuo.

Maybe the people he loves the most are just fucking doomed.

Maybe he’s the cause of it. Maybe he’s the curse.

Eiji’s head rests heavily against his chest. Natsuo tries to pull his jacket in around the tiny warm body like a blanket.

“Sorry, bud,” he says. “Guess I came right about naptime, huh?”

It seems implausible, honestly—surreal that time is still passing at all. He didn’t register a moment on the clock when he left. All the hours are empty.

“Don’t wanna nap,” Eiji mumbles drowsily. “Wanna stay with you.”

Natsuo rubs his hand slowly up and down the curve of his back. “I’m right here.”

“Don’t leave, Daddy,” Eiji says, with a hitch of urgency tearing through the somnolence for a second. “Please don’t leave.”

Natsuo’s throat starts to close up again. “I won’t. I’m right here, Eiji. I’m right here, okay?”

Eiji mumbles something else that gets lost in his shirt. Pretty soon, the faint, quick little breaths even out, and his heavy head settles against Natsuo’s chest.

Natsuo sits for what feels like a long, long time, stroking his hand gently over Eiji’s back, watching the arm of the fountain tip back and forth. Running water.

The footsteps in the hall are far too light to be Endeavor’s, but he tenses anyway. To say that he’s not expecting any good conversations to come of this would be severely understating how bad he fucked up.

Hawks opens the door very quietly, steps out, and doesn’t slide the door shut again behind him. Natsuo braces himself and looks.

“Thought so,” Hawks says, his eyes on the white puff of Eiji’s hair showing over Natsuo’s arm. “C’mon in and put him down.” That sounds hellish enough on its own, but— “I want to talk to you.”

He deserves it.

And he owes Hawks compliance, at least.

For all that he resents the attitude, Hawks was here when he wasn’t.

And he hopes—he hopes—that Hawks was standing in between Endeavor and these poor fucking kids. He hopes Hawks was holding back all the ways in which it could have been so much worse.

And he has to give the scraps of credit where they’re due: Hawks said I want to talk to you.

Not I’m stronger than you, and I’m not giving you a choice.

Little feathers swirl past his arm, supporting Eiji’s back and his legs as Natsuo puts his other hand down on the planks to lever himself up to his feet.

Eiji will sleep better in a bed. That’s more important.

He makes himself follow Hawks back into the house, holding onto Eiji and holding himself together. Endeavor vacated the living room while Natsuo was outside—disappeared without a trace, and took Naru with him. Hawks crosses directly through to the hall, casually stepping over the chaos of scattered blocks and books and pieces of a train set.

Eiji’s sleeping in the room that used to be Fuyumi’s—the next one down from the master except for the bathroom in between. Natsuo used to sneak in here at night. Half the time, she was up reading under the covers anyway, but when she wasn’t, he would wake her up and make her hug him until he was tired enough to go to sleep.

It looks different, now, but not much—all the furniture is the same, just rearranged. There’s a neat stack of little books on the nightstand next to a sippy cup, and there’s a cluster of small rocks and dried-up wildflowers and leaves on top of the dresser. Weirder still is the tiny plastic figure of Shouto next to them—doubly weird for the fact that it’s Natsuo’s brother, and for the fact that it looks like it came out of a gacha machine.

And he can just hear Endeavor from the bedroom that used to be Touya’s, on the opposite side.

“Is that so? You make a compelling argument. I’ll have to reconsider my position.”

What the fuck.

He must be talking to Naru, which—

Natsuo can’t listen hard and focus on lowering Eiji carefully to the bed at the same time, though. The sheets are new—nice, too. Pattern of cartoony dinosaurs.

Eiji makes a little whimpering noise of protest as Natsuo settles him down and tucks him in, and his eyelids flutter, but he doesn’t wake up. He pushes his thumb into his mouth, curls up, sighs, and goes back to sleeping peacefully.

There’s a crack, somewhere in Natsuo’s chest.

And there’s magma underneath.

He can feel it.

He can feel something other than the fucking agony.

He loves this beautiful kid so, so, so much.

He leans down and strokes Eiji’s hair back, tucks it behind his little satellite-shaped ears—just a sliver of her, compared to Naru, but unmissable all the same. He kisses Eiji’s warm temple and smoothes the blanket out over his arm.

He’s so perfect.

He should get a chance to be happy.

He should never doubt that he’s loved.

When Natsuo straightens and turns, Hawks is leaning against the doorframe waiting for him. It’s stunning how much folding the wings—reconfiguring them, reshaping them, holding them this way or that way, high or low or tight or wide—can change how he occupies a room. He takes up so little space, when he wants to, and he looms like an avenging angel when it suits him.

Natsuo knows he’s in for it. But he also knows that Hawks kept him out of the cops’ hands, that first day—that would have ended much worse for him than what he got instead. He knows that Hawks helped make sure that Fuyumi got the call immediately so that she could start fighting for the kids right away.

And he knows Hawks has been here with them, looking after them.

And he hasn’t.

Hawks dips his shoulder—it’s a masterwork of unassuming body language. Makes it look like a casual suggestion when really he’s ordering Natsuo back outside.

Fine. Natsuo can take it. He’s had worse.

When they step back into the living room, Endeavor freezes where he was just settling down on the couch with Naru, a stack of board books clenched in the thick fingers of his steel hand. Natsuo’s spine tightens, but Hawks flicks all of the longest, pointiest feathers at the tips of the wings—drawing his eyes away before he fucking knows it.

“We’ll be right back,” Hawks says, calm as you please, and then he’s sauntering down the hall like he owns the place.

He does, doesn’t he? Nowadays.

He opens the door, steps barefoot out onto the engawa, waits for Natsuo, and gently shuts it. He swans forward to the edge of the flooring, tips his face up to the sunlight, tucks his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and breathes so deeply that it lifts his shoulders. He sighs.

Asshole.

Doesn’t matter.

Natsuo has waited out people who are much more patient.

Hell—Natsuo had to wait out Eiji during the terrible twos. Bedtime was a war of wills for two months solid, and sometimes the only thing he could do was surrender.

Hayami cracked it, of course. She used to say “Okay, baby. Let’s do it your way,” and then she’d lie down on the couch and talk to him in a soft voice, petting his hair the whole time, until he crashed out on top of her, and Natsuo could scoop him up and slip him into bed.

The point is—

Hawks he can handle.

There’s not really anything else that Hawks can do to him anyway. There’s nothing anyone can do that’s worse than what he floated through to get here, a faceless corpse in a nameless river. There’s nothing anyone can say that hasn’t already seeped into his skin.

So he folds his arms and looks out at the garden, and he waits.

Hawks is looking at the garden, too. The wings shiver, re-shuffling, and then settle. A little breeze twists through the grass and coils itself around them, and it tousles his hair, but the barbs don’t move.

“I know you don’t want my advice,” Hawks says, at last—as cool as a fucking cucumber, after all that drama. “But you’re getting it. And you’re going to listen, because you owe me.”

Natsuo despises that he’s right.

Hawks’s eyes slide over to him—too long, too narrow, too yellow. Too alien. They’re striking when they’re edited to hell for a magazine photo, or when you see him from a distance on the TV, but up close, they’re terrifying. They’re jagged chips of tiger’s eye.

“Put down the knives,” Hawks says. “Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes from you. Let go. Put them down. Walk away. They just make you cut yourself to pieces, and cut everyone around you, and pretty soon you can’t even control where you’re pointing them anymore because there’s too much blood on your hands to get a grip. Just put them the fuck down, Natsuo. While you still can.”

Typical of a pro to show up and stick his damn nose into the middle of this when he has no idea what he’s meddling with.

Natsuo bites back the worse version of what he wants to say, which at least is something. “You don’t understand.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Hawks says, still so calmly that it sounds like he’s talking about the weather, but his eyes went cold. Frozen amber—fossilized. “My dad used to beat the shit out of me.”

Natsuo’s heart slams up into the back of his throat and stays there.

“Not for any reason, either,” Hawks says, sounding almost disaffected, like it’s an offhanded thought. His gaze drifts out over the pond. “No objective. Not to make me stronger, not to teach me something—just because he could. Because I was there. Because it made him feel better, maybe. Because I was too small to fight back.”

His eyes slide over to Natsuo again.

“I believe in second chances,” Hawks says. He doesn’t sound idle anymore. He sounds like a blade scraping over ice. “You just burned yours to the ground. If you ever treat Eiji like that again, I’ll report you myself. I don’t care how pissed off Enji gets. I don’t care if they throw you back into the psych ward, and your mom never speaks to me again. This is it, Natsuo. This is your last shot.”

A wisp of wind shivers through the grass.

“He’s going to let you get away with shit,” Hawks says. They’re both still breathing, somehow. “He’s still convinced it’s all his fault for laying shitty foundations, so he’s going to let the little stuff slide.” The eyes are yellow slits. “But I’m not.”

Natsuo feels very, very cold.

But it’s fair.

Isn’t it?

Hawks’s job is protecting people who can’t protect themselves.

You might say Natsuo hasn’t made a favorable impression lately, where that goes.

Hawks keeps watching him for a long, long moment before turning towards the garden again. There’s a special sort of power in not even caring about being the first to look away.

Natsuo runs his tongue over his teeth. “You don’t like me, do you?”

“Not right now, I don’t,” Hawks says—just like that, easy as you please, without even looking at him. “But I love your kids. And I respect the fact that Enji loves you.”

He doesn’t.

Endeavor can say whatever the fuck he wants. That doesn’t make it true.

Hawks glances over again.

“On the bright side,” he says, “you’re still not my least favorite.”

It’s nice to know that Natsuo continues to edge out the sibling who tried pretty hard on multiple occasions to murder this guy. “Gee, thanks.”

“Oh,” Hawks says, lightly. “One more thing.”

There’s still nothing playful about his eyes. They’re straight venom.

“If you ever call me a dog again,” he says, pleasantly, “we’re going to have problems. And you’re not ready for the kind of problems I can make for you. Trust me.”

Right as the Dabi is Touya Todoroki dust had begun to settle—as soon as everybody knew about the murders and the monstrosity splashed across Endeavor’s hands—the vultures had started circling around Hawks in earnest.

And the world found out that he’d been the Commission’s pet the entire time—their biggest, boldest public works project. With their headquarters smashed to rubble, with their PR department scattered to the winds and their figurehead sleeping coldly in a crematorium, all bets were off. There was no one to protect their precious reputation. It was a clickbait free-for-all.

So it came out that they’d made Hawks. They’d controlled him. Nobody knew precisely what they’d made him do, over the years, and with the records ripped up to confetti, odds were no one ever would.

But everybody did know that Japan’s beloved angel-winged superstar had been in the government’s pocket from the beginning—on their leash.

Natsuo knows what it’s like to owe everything you have to someone that you hate.

Hawks probably doesn’t have it as easy as he likes everyone to think. Hayami had told Natsuo, sometimes, about the way that people had always used the word animal against her. He saw the way people looked at her ears, at the whiskers; she used to cut her sharp, fast-growing nails so short that her cuticles would bleed. The world’s not the way it should be. People are fucked up.

Arguably, Hawks is one of the lucky ones—he looks ordinary except for a quirk that most people qualify as aesthetically appealing.

But Natsuo is willing to bet it hasn’t been all fucking roses. Not with things like they are.

And he can respect that.

He can even respect Hawks, some of the time. Enough of it. Regardless of whose side he’s on.

So he makes himself breathe deep and crush down the anger like a trash compactor. He has to do better. Can’t burn all the bridges, can’t set the whole damn world on fire. He’s not like Endeavor. He’s not.

“Got it,” he says, keeping his voice level. “Sorry. My problem is with him, not with you.”

Hawks’s face doesn’t change, and his eyes don’t relent. “Your problem is with who he used to be,” Hawks says. “You’re angry at a person your kids have never met. If you tell them that their grampa is some kind of villain, you look like the crazy one. You might want to keep that in mind.”

So much for the trash compactor, which is now also on fire.

This is the same fucking arrogant asshole who took the kids from him—who walked in and helped the cops pull his entire life apart, helped them rip away the last threads he’d been clinging to with the remnants of his strength. This is the same fucking monster who granted himself the authority to decide who lives or dies, and waltzed in to aid and abet them in destroying him.

Some fucking hero.

Some fucking human being.

“Is that,” Natsuo bites out, “a threat?”

Hawks blinks so slowly that it looks like he’s half-asleep.

“I don’t need threats,” he says. “I already have the power here.” He rolls his shoulders, and the feathers shift like there’s a hand carding through them, ruffling up the tiny barbs before they sink back into place like armored scales. “This is a warning.”

Natsuo sets his jaw just in time to cage the snarl he wants to release in return. Not worth it. Not for this two-faced, shit-starting bastard. He has to keep the peace.

Hayami wouldn’t rise to it. She’d keep her head. They’d laugh about it later. She used to walk through fire with her head held high; she was just so good at rising above it—and later she’d tell him how much she’d wanted to snipe back, how much she’d wanted to sink down, how much more satisfying it had been to watch their disappointment spread like gangrene when they realized they couldn’t even touch her with the rot. Her dignity burned so brightly that they shriveled away from the light.

“Okay,” Natsuo grits out. “Noted. Thank you.”

Hawks arches an eyebrow, a half-smile tilting his mouth. “Man. Haven’t seen that expression in a long time. Nostalgic.”

As if Natsuo needed the reminder of who this freak has devoted his nasty little life to.

Breathe deep. Head high.

Natsuo keeps his voice low. “Do you ever get tired of pretending that other people’s pain is funny?”

Hawks’s smile splits into a flicker of a grin. “Yup.” He swivels on his heel, the wings suddenly alive, every feather shuddering for a second before they settle. “C’mon. You want tea? I’m sure Naru can’t wait to slime you up good.”

Natsuo’s throat sticks, and his stomach turns. Doesn’t change anything. Hawks holds the door for him again. “I’m fine.”

“Sure you are,” Hawks says, with the blitheness so sardonic that it nicks in deep. He doesn’t slow down. “Mousebaby! Egads! You’ve escaped the vortex!”

Endeavor looks up from one of the books, and his eyes flick to Natsuo for a second, the lights gleaming on the lenses of those stupid glasses too much for Natsuo to get a read on him anyway. “A testament to Mousebaby’s ingenuity and fortitude, I’m sure.”

He lifts Naru up—holding him in both hands, grasping around the waist, and Natsuo can’t see the metal hand well enough to tell if—

Feathers snatch Naru up before he can get a good look, and they cart the giggling miracle swiftly through the air to deposit him directly into Natsuo’s reaching hands.

He’d barely realized he’d moved, but when he saw that little face—when the prospect of touching his son, his baby, suddenly seemed more real—

“Hey, you,” he whispers, wrapping the wriggling little bundle as tightly against himself as he dares. Naru still smells the same, still looks the same, still gazes up at him wide-eyed and chortles and shoves a wet fist into his mouth. “How’s it hanging, guy?”

Naru withdraws his fist and extends his arm up towards Natsuo, gooey fingers spread wide.

“Bahh,” he says.

Natsuo shifts Naru over into his right arm—babies gain weight so fast that he’s not surprised that the balance feels slightly different than he remembered—so that he can offer the fingers of his left hand for Naru to grapple onto.

He focuses in. He doesn’t look, doesn’t think about it, tries to wall off the rest of the world. None of it matters now.

“Bahh,” he says back. “Are you being a sheep? That’s some pretty good multitasking, given that I’m pretty sure you haven’t mastered the mouse thing yet.”

Naru grabs his index finger and tries to eat it. Natsuo holds it back just far enough to keep it clear of the teeth Eiji mentioned—sure enough, he can see a gleam of something white through the prolific spit. He lets Naru slather him in slime, though. He missed it, when he was feeling coherent enough to recognize the emptiness around him, instead of just the one still ravaging in his chest. He missed everything about them.

Maybe it wasn’t that long, as far as the calendar goes. Plenty of people take business trips that last a month; plenty of people have to leave for lots of reasons, sometimes for much longer.

But this wasn’t necessary.

It was his own fault.

It was the consequence of his own fucking failure as a father, after trying so goddamn hard to do it right.

But this—

This he can do.

Touching Naru, talking to him, with that papery-weird baby smell wafting up—it just feels better, just feels… Shit. It feels like something other than nerve-grating, brain-numbing excruciation scraping him from one indistinguishable day to the next like old gum on the sidewalk.

If he stands here and keeps his eyes on Naru, he can do this. He can wait here for Eiji to wake up; stay longer than that, maybe—last through the afternoon. If Endeavor would just fucking go away, he could handle this indefinitely, but he can feel the cold-fire eyes on the back of his head as he chucks a finger under Naru’s chin to make him giggle again. He’s so cute. So perfect. Even with some spit dried in it, the fur’s so soft, and his little ears twitch up towards Natsuo’s voice, and he’s perfect. He’s a perfect baby who deserved a perfect life.

They were so fucking close.

Why do these things—

Endeavor clears his throat.

Natsuo will do this. He’ll do it for his kids.

He holds his shoulders level, cradles Naru slightly closer, and looks up.

“Natsuo,” Endeavor says, quietly. “Hear me out.”

Natsuo doesn’t want to hear a damn thing, but for whatever fucking reason, this man has his kids wrapped around one giant metal finger. He has to stay calm. He can’t put them in the middle of this anymore.

He watches Endeavor’s eyes. “Okay. Shoot.”

“You could stay here,” Endeavor says, and the pillars of the universe crumble yet again, complete with chunks of marble falling from the sky. “For—a while, if you want. Or just try it for a few days and see if it helps or not.”

Staring at him reveals nothing—stone-faced neutrality, sharp-edged, hard-carved.

Natsuo slants a glance at Hawks.

Eyes narrowed, jaw set. Clear implication of I’m going along with this for the sake of the kids, but if you make him regret it, I will make you regret ever being born.

“I renovated the outbuilding in the garden,” Endeavor says, slowly, into the thickness of the silence. “Into something more like a guest house. If you give me an hour or so to sweep out all the spiders, you could start staying there tonight.”

That can’t—

Natsuo’s head pounds, his heart pounds, something’s spinning.

He swallows, but it doesn’t wet his throat.

This fucking maniac can’t be serious. He can’t—

“Is this,” Natsuo says, measuring the words and clipping them out one by one, “your idea of a joke?”

He’s good at body language. He’s good at reading the whole room in an instant. That was usually all the time you got before you had to choose whether to run. If you were deep enough in the shadow of a doorway, kept your footsteps light and your breathing soft, sometimes you could slip away without anyone the wiser. But Endeavor’s reflexes had been impeccable, and his observational skills had been scythe-blade sharp from all those years of almost getting murdered on the job. He didn’t miss much. Which meant you had to be ready to spot a tempest and turn tail in the first second that you could see it on the horizon.

So Natsuo notices that Hawks tenses, even though it’s slight.

He notices that Endeavor doesn’t.

Endeavor just looks at him, wearily. Doesn’t even seem surprised.

“You know it’s not,” Endeavor says.

Natsuo’s heart pounds harder, and he makes himself resist the urge to clutch Naru too tightly to his chest. He can do this. “Did you get that crackpot plan approved by your favorite social worker, or what?”

Endeavor’s eyes don’t leave his face.

“Eventually,” Endeavor says. “It took—convincing. But Ayuko agreed to a trial period on the condition that I’m physically present when—”

Natsuo hears the creaky parody of a laugh wracking its way free of him before he feels it.

Endeavor’s face shutters up, the eyes going even colder—like crystal, sharper and smoother than the ice—but he still doesn’t even have the grace to look upset about it.

“Think it over,” he says. “I wanted you to have the option.”

“I have never,” Natsuo fires back, “been less interested in making nice with you.” He shifts his arm around Naru, bounces gently—the poor thing will be able to hear it in their voices. They learn young. “I’m here for my kids.”

Endeavor’s eyes narrow. “And you think I’m not?”

Naru fidgets, whimpering, his next little breath hitching with a hint of a wail.

What Hawks said is true.

They’re holding all the cards.

Natsuo can’t fight them—or at least can’t expect to win. Endeavor already has the kids. He and Hawks can tell the social workers anything they want—make up any story they like to get Natsuo legally barred from ever laying eyes on his children again, if they really want to. He has to play their game. He’s begging for scraps.

But what Shouto said is also true.

Natsuo bounces Naru again, gently, and then gathers the wriggly warm body up over his right shoulder, lightly patting Naru’s back all the way.

“C’mon,” Natsuo says, steadying his voice. “You’re okay. Let’s go outside. Yeah? Let’s get some air, what do you say?”

Endeavor doesn’t even move—nothing so much as shifts in Natsuo’s peripheral vision as he strides through the kitchen to reach the front hall this time, petting Naru’s back as he goes.

He stops in the genkan. There’s a tiny little coat, and some tiny little shoes.

Someone came by and picked up a fair amount of the kids’ stuff from the apartment while he was in the hospital. It almost had to be Fuyumi, because whoever it was didn’t disturb anything—didn’t root around at all, like they already knew where everything was. They left all of his stuff alone, and they left every single iota of evidence of Hayami’s presence untouched and intact.

Natsuo figures some social worker probably grabbed up some crap, too, the day they all raided the place.

But even between the two of them, they didn’t take enough clothes and toys and accoutrements to last a week, let alone to stock a house, so Endeavor had to buy a bunch of shit brand-new.

Natsuo sits down on the edge of the step just like he always does at home, plopping Naru down in his lap and then reaching forward for the itty-bitty sneakers—white with red stripes. He finagles Naru’s feet into them and ties the laces into the neatest bows he can muster with his hands still shaking.

“These are some cool kicks,” he says. “Look good on you, bud.”

“Gahm,” Naru says, seriously, and then makes an even more serious attempt to wipe spit all over Natsuo’s sleeve.

Natsuo lets him.

Natsuo never took his shoes off in the first place. Fuck Endeavor, and his tatami, and this entire house.

He gets up, grabs the little jacket—light brown, velvety-soft corduroy—and then sits them down again to guide Naru’s arms into the tiny sleeves. “Look at you, Mister Fashionista. Are you heading to Harajuku, or what?”

Naru blinks at him, fingers already finding their way back into the source of the slime, and then smiles broadly around them.

“Bwah?” he asks, emphatically inquisitive.

“You know it,” Natsuo says. “Bwah as all get-out. Bwah from wall to wall. C’mon. Let’s stretch your legs, huh? Road-test those fancy sneakers.”

Naru doesn’t offer any pressing objections, so Natsuo carries him outside, sets his little feet down on the front walkway, and leans down to hold him upright with one hand under each of his arms. Naru’s hands are way too slippery for this.

Natsuo can’t see it, but he’ll be damned if there’s not a feather tucked away somewhere nearby, listening in to make sure he doesn’t fuck this up, too.

“There you go!” he says as Naru undertakes a few slightly reckless attempts at navigating the concept of a step. “Literally making strides. Phenomenal. You’re setting records. Master of the Bwah, without a doubt.”

Naru leans far forward, giggling when Natsuo carefully lets him tip, and then tries to reel his weight back, which is no mean feat when your head is, like, twenty percent of your entire body mass.

“Bubububub” is the verdict on that subject. Natsuo helps straighten him up and then slowly guides him through a couple more steps. It’ll be a while yet before he’s particularly inclined to use this practice, but it can’t hurt.

And it’s cooling Natsuo’s head—which isn’t twenty percent of his mass anymore, but it’s got to be at least twenty percent of his problems.

He needs to hold it together.

He knows he does.

This is all he wants to do—stumble around on the pavement with his kid, having nonsense conversations, with the auditory ambrosia of that little baby chuckle winding its way into his ears. This is all he wants life to be right now. It’s so simple. He can handle this.

But he couldn’t handle being under Endeavor’s thumb again—dropping right back into his shadow.

Naru gets bored of practice-walking predictably fast, so Natsuo scoops him up before the fussing resolves into anything more concentrated and carries him out to the street.

This neighborhood has always been a ghost town—huge houses positioned far apart, occupied by the type of people who choose to live in opulent isolation for a vast variety of sordid reasons. Natsuo paces up and down the paved area in front of the gate, bouncing Naru gently in his arms, letting him babble his little heart out.

He looks at his car.

He still has the car seats strapped into the back.

He could take Naru.

He could get a long way. Endeavor wouldn’t want to admit that he’d fucked up—violated the sacred precepts of the Rules cast down by a government agency whose entire purpose is reducing human suffering to three-page forms. Hawks is fast, and he’s got resources, but the only person who understands how Natsuo thinks is dead. He could—

Leave Eiji behind. To this, whatever it is. Ensure that Eiji forgets all the good things that ever were, guarantee that the framework of a family that Natsuo built with bloodied hands and no damn tools to speak of shatters once and for all, because Daddy dying a criminal would blot out Mommy dying a saint.

He has to do this right. He has to keep his head down and his heart strangled and his hands to himself. He has to beat them at the game he’s got.

Fine.

The one thing Endeavor taught him is what it looks like when you just refuse to quit, no matter how the cards fall, no matter how the odds are stacked. The one thing Endeavor taught him is that you don’t have to be the best to win.

One of the trees extends over the wall these days, branches dipping from above. Natsuo hikes Naru up high enough to reach for the leaves. He doesn’t figure they’ll mind the baby spit too much.

“What do you think?” he asks. “You think we should run away to Aruba and see what happens?”

“Gahm-bah,” Naru says, grasping for the nearest twig, and missing, and grasping again.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. “Me, too.”

He holds out for a couple more hours after Eiji wakes up from the nap. He and Eiji head back outside to explore around the garden a little more, bringing Naru with them this time so Eiji can make a valiant effort to teach him the names of all the plants. Natsuo can’t even remember what’s what by the end, but it’s good of him to try.

Natsuo has to wonder what the hell is getting said inside right about now, but it doesn’t really change anything. Eiji’s little beaming grin is the important thing. Getting baby-slimed is the important thing. Having a warm bottle delivered to his hand by a rather considerate feather is the important thing.

He doesn’t want to leave.

But he can feel his nerves wearing, can feel his patience thinning, can feel the dark deepening on either side of the bridge as he edges carefully across.

He doesn’t want to blow up at the kids again, either. He doesn’t want to lose control.

He has to be careful. He has to pace himself. This place poisons him. He can only withstand it for so long.

He lets himself be coaxed back inside—where he carefully passes Naru off to Hawks’s reaching arms—so that Eiji can regale him with the possibilities of a little train set. Hawks drops onto the couch and bounces Naru on his knees for a while, swirling feathers up and down for him to grab at, and then uses one of them to retrieve a couple of the baby books lined up against the wall, which look like they’re waiting for a shelf that got lost in transit.

Hawks reads remarkably quietly for someone whose entire public presence is blisteringly loud, but not quite quietly enough that Natsuo doesn’t notice a few embellishments to the written text. Apparently “The bear says Roar! because he’s sticking to the script—this one’s gotta be his big break, and he’ll get much meatier roles as soon as he can get a better agent.”

Endeavor stays out of the room the entire time that Natsuo and Eiji are working on the train track. Natsuo hears him from what sounds like the laundry room, first, and then mostly in the kitchen—measured steps, like a soldier, but there’s no banging pans or huffing breath or slamming the door of the refrigerator. Sizzling from the stovetop is the primary noise. Something beeps. Something else pops; there’s a scraping sound; Endeavor grumbles something and then sighs.

He’s going to have to be more convincing than just that, or at least keep it up for a hell of a lot longer.

Eiji lies down on the floor, propping himself an inch up off of it with his arms, so that he can peer through the plastic arch designed to look like a tunnel made of rock. It has a couple of cute molded ferns attached around the bottom. He watches the train come through, but then his eyes drift away from the engine and towards the kitchen.

“Grampa!” he calls.

Endeavor comes to the doorway, wiping his left hand on a towel. He’s got one of those clear plastic food prep gloves on the right. His eyes only flick to Natsuo for a second. “Yes?”

Eiji scrambles up to his feet and bounds over, gazing up at a mountain of a man who routinely used to set furniture on fire—who illuminated every room with the threat of a proximity burn because he was always so angry that he let flickers of it slip—with no trepidation whatsoever.

“What’s for dinner, Grampa?” Eiji asks.

“Donburi, if that sounds all right,” Endeavor says, in the voice that isn’t his, with an expression to match it. “Is that—”

“Yeah!” Eiji says. He whirls on his heel, beaming. “Daddy, are you going to stay for dinner?”

Natsuo’s heart lurches in him, but he knows the answer. He knows how little he has left. He knows that the thought of sitting across a table from Endeavor still turns his stomach so hard that it strangles his appetite.

“Nah, bud,” he says, keeping his voice as neutral as he can. “I’m gonna take off for a little while.” The way Eiji’s face falls twists his already beleaguered stomach into a nasty knot. “But I’ll—come back. Really soon. I promise.”

Eiji looks like he just found out that a professional puppy-kicker lives two doors down. “When, Daddy?”

Natsuo sets his shoulders and looks over at Endeavor.

“Any time you like,” Endeavor says, quietly. “When we’re out, it’s usually not for very long. You can keep the keys. I have a spare set.”

Natsuo makes himself breathe evenly. “Okay.” He turns to Eiji. “I can—I can come back tomorrow. How’s that?”

Eiji tears across the floor and flings himself at Natsuo’s chest to cling to him. “You mean it, Daddy? You really promise?”

Natsuo lets his body fold in around Eiji the way it wants to, lets the warmth spread through him, buries his face in Eiji’s hair for a second and breathes. “Yeah, bud. I really promise.”

“Okay!” Eiji says, hugging him tighter. Just like that—he believes it. He believes someone who’s betrayed him before. “I’ll save you some donburi! Hawks, we gotta save some!”

“You’re the boss, kiddo,” Hawks says, with a dry note that Eiji will need another decade or so to appreciate.

Natsuo walks out past the gate, sits down in the front seat of the car, shuts the door, and lets the adrenaline bottom out a little bit—lets it shudder through him, lets his body shake.

He takes out his phone and taps over to the texts with Mom.

I did it.

He barely has time to breathe out before she texts back.

I’m proud of you, Natsu.

That shouldn’t matter anymore. It shouldn’t mean anything to him—he’s creeping towards thirty, he’s got two kids, and half his interactions with her during his adolescence took place in a psych ward. He doesn’t need her approval. He’s hacked out his own way, and he’s done well, all things considered, up until… recently. Up until now. Up until the world caved in and swallowed him with it.

But it does matter.

She’s his mom.

And for the first time in weeks of swimming and spiraling and fumbling through the vicious emptiness—weeks of every breath crashing into his chest and splitting open another heartbreak—it feels like maybe he did something right.

His phone buzzes with another text from her.

Can I bring you some dinner, or would you prefer a break from other people for a little while?

He looks out at the darkening street and thinks it over. It settles in him somewhere—distantly, almost indistinct—that he’s lucky to have a mom who would ask the question that way, and who he knows would respect his answer.

And he’s starting to think that maybe—

Maybe it’s worse, when he lets the silence chew away at him, wearing through his nerves like they’re sandstone standing against the ocean.

Or maybe it’s not worse—maybe it’s all the same, maybe nothing changes and nothing will.

But distractions seem to make it get to him slightly less.

Worth a shot. Anything is. Anything is better than what he’s been, what he’s been reduced to.

It’d be nice to see you but you don’t have to bring anything, he types out. I’m about to leave the estate so I’ll be home in about fifteen minutes. Any time is fine.

He sends it, breathes out, and adds what might be the more important part:

Thanks, Mom.

He starts the car.

There’s a big package on the doorstep—groceries delivered by some service.

He tries to nudge it out of the doorway with his foot, but it’s too fucking heavy. He steps over it, barely managing to fit his foot into the tiny gap between the box and the threshold of the door, and lets himself in. He can’t leave it out there, or he’ll look like a slob to the nosy-ass neighbors. He already learned the worst way there is that Mrs. Suzuki next door is a fucking narc. She’s probably got that Jimi woman on speed-dial. They probably chat on weekends and talk shit about the crazies who—

God. Okay. Slow down. Dial it back.

He’s fine. He’s just worn out. One thing at a time. He can handle this. It’s just a fucking box.

He drags it inside. It’s not too heavy to lift, at least, but he doesn’t even want to know what’s in it—what Endeavor thinks is good for him. What Endeavor thinks ‘caring’ for another human being looks like. He’d rather starve.

…okay, that’s stupid. And it’s melodramatic. Which might be worse than stupid.

Whatever.

He shoves the box in front of the fridge and then doubles back to collapse onto the couch. He checks his phone. Twenty minutes since Mom read his last text. She could’ve died in a car accident by now. She could’ve started driving in the opposite direction, with a full gas tank and a clear conscience, because she’s realized at last that this whole family is too fucked up to salvage. She might have finally figured out that she can set herself free.

He’s staring blankly at the dimmed screen when it lights up again, and the phone vibrates in his hand. The notification banner at the top tells him it’s a text from Shouto.

Mom said you went over. You ok?

Maybe they’re all just fucked-up enough that they’re stuck with each other. Birds of a feather.

Yeah, Natsuo writes back, even though that’s generous enough to be almost funny at this point. Thanks. Everything you said helped a lot. I dunno if I would have been able to take it otherwise.

Shouto writes back I’m glad to hear that—which would sound brutally sarcastic coming from anyone other than an awkward middle-aged businessman or, you know, him. Kids are ok?

It seems like it, Natsuo writes. It’s weird.

Shouto just writes back I know.

Which helps, in a way.

At least it’s not just Natsuo. At least it’s not all in his head.

There’s a knock at the door, drastically different from the one last night.

He pockets his phone and swings himself up to go open it.

Mom hugs him as soon as the door is out of the way, and then cleverly uses the leverage to draw him onward into the kitchen instead of letting him sink back down onto the Depression Couch.

“I need some tea as soon as humanly possible,” she says. “Do you want some?”

She’s really good at this game.

She probably had to be.

“Sure,” he says. “Thanks.”

She tilts her head towards the box by the fridge as she pulls a few tins down from the cabinet. “What’s all that?”

“No idea,” Natsuo says, trying not to let his voice go tight. “Endeavor must have sent it.”

She glances at him. There’s a worry line that digs in between her brows. He’s barely seen her without it these days, but probably that’s no surprise.

She puts the water on, then rummages through drawers until she finds some scissors. She cuts the box open. She doesn’t make a big deal about any of the contents—doesn’t say much of anything at all—but she puts it all away in the fridge and on the shelves while the water boils and then the tea steeps. Maybe he’ll get desperate enough to make use of it.

Maybe not.

It used to feel pragmatic to accept the auspices. It used to feel like he’d earned them, somehow—the benefits of the last name, the safety net of the savings account and the swanky place to live and the way people treated him fractionally different because they were afraid he’d go running to Father and get them reduced to a streak of soot for looking at him the wrong way.

But over time it just started to rankle—started to feel like a rot.

So he cut things out, a little at a time. He cut himself loose.

Or he thought he did.

He believed it, on purpose, with his eyes half-shut and squinted, as if only the things that he allowed himself to see had ever existed.

No one does it alone. No one lives in a vacuum.

Mom sets a mug of tea directly in front of him and then lays her hand over his for a second before she sits down in the chair opposite.

It’s the same chair Endeavor was sitting in last night. It’s shocking that he didn’t break the damn thing.

Natsuo and Hayami used to sit side-by-side at the table—even before they were flanked by kids and each trying to mop up after one. It’s easier to hold hands that way, or knock knees, or lean against each other. Easier to be close. Feels better.

Well—it did. Before.

It hurts.

It hurts like fucking hell.

He wraps his hands around the mug.

Mom blows on the surface of hers even though it’ll be way too hot to sip from for a while yet.

“How did it go?” she asks.

Not How are they or How are you, because she already knows the answers to both of those.

Natsuo breathes out and loosens his grip on the mug before the ceramic burns his hands.

“I almost messed it up,” he says. “Right at the start. I mean—I did mess it up, but Eiji… he’s so…”

“Gentle,” Mom says. “Like his dad.”

Natsuo shakes his head helplessly, but it doesn’t pry that spear back out of his heart.

“You can’t just forgive people when they hurt you,” he says. “You can’t just—”

“You didn’t do it on purpose,” Mom says softly. “And you’re going to do everything in your power to make it right.” She sits back, drawing her long hair forward over one shoulder and twisting it into a pale tail before she lets go. “He’s already forgiven you, hasn’t he? That’s his choice. All that’s left is for you to forgive yourself.”

The truth shudders out of him unbidden, the way it always does: “I can’t.”

She smiles at him, and there’s a meditative sort of sadness to it.

“Keep trying,” she says.

He stares at her through the uncoiling steam. “How the hell am I supposed to just—ignore the fact that I did that to my own kid, Mom? I can’t forgive that. Ever. I wasn’t the one it affected. I don’t have any—”

“Not for that,” she says, one hand lifting to wave a little like she’s trying to ward the words away. “Not for hurting him.” She smiles, bitterly. “That you have to carry. Try to forgive yourself for the fact that you let yourself down. Try to forgive yourself for disappointing your own expectations. If you carry that, too, it’s going to be too much to move with. It’s too heavy. You have to let go of as much as you can.”

She sounds like Hawks.

Natsuo hopes this tea has a lot of ginger in it, or he’s going to throw up.

“It’s more important that Eiji’s okay,” he says, gripping the mug again to try to ground himself. “Naru’s not going to remember any of this, but Eiji—”

“Just found out that his family is bigger than he thought,” Mom says, pushing the handle of her mug with a fingertip to swivel it, “and happens to include the number one hero in Japan. He’s shaken up by what you did. But he’s seen his aunt and his uncle and his grandparents rallying around him to take care of him. He’s not even four. He’s not going to hold this against you.”

She’s wrong. Natsuo remembers being that age, remembers the way that moments like that carved themselves so deep into his psyche that they never stopped bleeding. He doesn’t have to remember them all individually. He can still see what they’ve done.

But arguing with her about it isn’t going to help, and it’ll probably just make her feel worse about what happened with Shouto.

All that, over an eye.

But he gets it better, now—the weight of that gaze. The things that it’ll rip out of you. What it can make you do.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” he says. “Endeavor invited me to live in the old shed.”

The way she just blinks makes his blood stick. “Have you seen the inside? It’s actually pretty nice.”

He stares at her, feeling like his hands are very far away. “Who cares? It could be the Ritz Carlton, I’d still be moving back in.”

She turns the tea mug again, lifts it, blows softly on the surface, takes a cautious sip, and sets it back down. “What if you did, though?”

It feels like every single one of Natsuo’s vital systems goes haywire at once. “Mom, are you crazy?”

She smiles thinly. “On paper, at least, not anymore.”

Fuckfuckfuck. “That’s not what I—”

“I know,” she says. “Just… don’t reject the idea on principle before you’ve thought it through.”

He’s not going to be thinking about much of anything very clearly if his mind keeps churning like this, but he doesn’t need to.

Before he can summon his voice, she looks into her tea, forehead furrowing.

“Environment is important,” she says, almost wistfully. “And I can’t imagine…” She gives him an apologetic look, then lets her gaze drift around them. “Well. I can’t imagine that being here all alone is helping at this point.”

The only thing more unbearable than staying here in the silence with every last material trace of who she was is the prospect of throwing them away.

“Wasn’t it better?” Mom asks, quietly. “Being with them?”

“Of course it was,” he chokes out. “So much. Like—night and day. But—”

“This will get you to them faster,” she says. “You could be close enough to stay with them all day long, and if he ever starts to get to you, you could retreat back there and regroup for a while. Natsu, what do you have to lose?”

His temper. His mind. His dignity, his independence, his composure, his control.

All the things he’s had to scrabble for, the last few weeks. All the things he’s lost his grip on one or two at a time, but never all of them. Not at once.

It would mean tiptoeing again. Holding himself back every second of every day so that he didn’t pick a fight in front of the kids.

But at least he’d be there. At least he’d be able to keep an eye on Endeavor, at least he’d be able to see them—he almost missed Naru’s first teeth, for fuck’s sake.

He scrubs his hands over his face, up and down, harder and harder as he goes.

“Would you do it?” he says. “If you were in my shoes right now, would you go back?”

She waits until he looks up.

“Yes,” she says. “At least for a few days, to see if I could take it.”

She reaches across the table to take both of his hands in hers, pulling them out past the mug of tea. Her hands look tiny around his—thin and pale, but he knows better than to ever think of them as weak.

“If this is the way you can stay in their lives right now,” she says, “do it. He’s going to try to help you. It’ll be clumsy, sometimes. A lot of the time. But sometimes it’ll be so remarkable you’ll wonder where it came from.” She searches his eyes for a second before she looks back down at his hands. “Whatever you get will be better than regretting for the rest of your life that you weren’t there for them in every way you could be.”

He grips her hands, gently, and she squeezes back.

Then she looks up to meet his eyes again. “You owe it to them to try.”

She’s right.

And Shouto’s point still stands.

If it starts to feel intolerable, he can leave.

The one and only true blessing of adulthood is how many things it’s possible to walk away from, when it comes down to it. How often you have the power to make that choice.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll give it a trial run.”

She squeezes his hands again, then wraps them around his mug. “Drink. You’re dehydrated.”

She’s probably right about that, too.

He drinks. It’s still a little too hot—when he swallows it down fast, it prickles meanly all over his tongue and the roof of his mouth instead of burning him outright, but it’s a close thing.

Today is… Sunday. He draws his phone out to double-check, but the schedule’s pretty straightforward, when he can keep track of what day it is.

“I’ve got a class tomorrow afternoon,” he says. “Could you—would you mind telling him I’ll go over after that?”

She doesn’t say You’re going to have to start talking to him yourself if you intend to live there.

She just nods.

Then she asks what he did with the boys today, so he tells her about the garden tour and the train set while they finish the tea. After that, she gets up, ties her hair back with a horrible pink scrunchie with little yellow flowers on it that she was keeping in an innocent pocket this entire time, and starts digging through the fridge.

“Mom,” he says, fighting the way he feels pinned to the chair by the impact of the rest of this fucking day. “You don’t have to cook for me.”

“I know,” she says. “But I want to. And if you’re leaving tomorrow, most of this is going to go to waste.”

Tomorrow.

The practicalities of it seem impossibly surreal. Does he have enough clean underwear to pack for a couple days so that he can find out the hard way whether he’s willing to avail himself of the amenities in a house he escaped from as soon as he was old enough to run?

He rubs his eyes and tries to convince himself to get up and wash the mugs. The sink’s right there. It’s five steps. All he has to do is stand up and shuffle his feet and reach for a sponge. It’s easy.

Mom hums under her breath as she picks things off of the shelves and sets them on the counter. She opens the freezer next.

“Don’t do extra work on my account,” Natsuo says.

“It’s not work,” she says.

“It is,” he says.

She smiles without turning around. That scrunchie is really godawful. It’s even more pronounced against the silver of her hair. It looks like the early nineties spun around in circles on an arcade carpet until they threw up. He should get her a ton of super-nice ones to replace it with—normal colors, and some soft, silky fabric so appealing underneath the fingertips that she’ll never grab that abomination out of the drawer ever again.

“Okay,” she says, warmly. “I guess it technically is work. But it’s work I want to do for you, because I love you, and you went through a lot today, and you’re still standing, and I want to help keep it that way, however I can.”

He rubs his eyes harder. He should get up. He should just get up.

“I guess I can’t stop you,” he says.

She crosses over, lays one cool hand on either of his cheeks, tips his head forward, and kisses the top.

“Nope,” she says.

So that’s that.

Monday morning washes away in the midst of the arcane leave of absence application form that his supervisor sent with a vaguely threatening deadline and no other text. Always nice to be reminded that the people you’ve dedicated the past five years of your life to are ready to feed you into the capitalist bone-grinder as soon as you become an inconvenience.

He sends it back. The unprovably sarcastic “Thank you” that he puts in the email reply is much safer than his first instinct, which was a smiley face and a “I’m doing fine now that my entire life has collapsed, thanks for asking!”

He’s exhausted by the time he straggles back out of the stupid fucking class and into the waning afternoon.

Don’t starve your kids. Revolutionary. Balanced diets. Multiple meals a day. You can’t just shovel rice into them, or they’ll eventually get scurvy. Vitamins are your friend, but setting a nutritional precedent is your best friend. With picky eaters, you just have to fight the battles. Get creative. There are ideas in the handout. Could someone please wake up Mr. Aito? He must be working night shifts again. Thank you, Mr. Todoroki. For your homework—

Even though he packed his bag into the car beforehand, it’s well past five by the time he winds his way through the traffic and makes it to the estate. He took the train to class once, but it felt like everyone was looking at him—like they knew, somehow. Maybe he was just such a wreck that he was a fucking eyesore. A grown man who’s clearly spent most of his morning sobbing into a couch cushion does stand out a bit on the average commute.

Endeavor left the gate open.

Gates can be closed.

Natsuo parks outside of it.

He stands on the walkway and stares at the front door for the better part of fifteen seconds before he takes a breath deep enough that the chilly evening air touches the bottoms of his lungs. He grips the strap of the duffel bag and shifts his shoulder to balance his backpack better. Sometimes the only thing you can do is shove yourself forward until it’s too late to back out.

Or to back down.

He makes his feet walk him up to the door. He makes his right hand reach for the keys. He fits the teeth into the lock. He turns. He pushes.

There’s only half a heartbeat of silence.

“Natsuo?” Endeavor calls.

He hates the sound of his name in that voice.

He hates his name, period. Every single iteration of it reminds him that he’s always been an afterthought.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Daddy!” Eiji’s voice cries. There’s a rustling, a creaking—heavy footsteps, and then shifting, and then little pitter-pattering feet running—

So that Eiji can burst out into the hall and hurl himself at Natsuo’s shins, wrapping his arms around as far as they’ll go.

“Hey, bud,” Natsuo says through the tightness in his throat and his chest. He leans down, strokes back the hair, rubs Eiji’s little back. “How’d your day go?”

“Good!” Eiji says, peeling away just far enough for Natsuo to crouch down and hug him properly. Burying his face in Natsuo’s shoulder doesn’t stem the toddler chatter. “Isamu at school has a train set too, so we talked about our trains, and this girl I didn’t know before—she likes trains, too! She knows lots about them! Her name is Minori. She’s really cool. Daddy, you have so much stuff!”

“Yeah, bud,” Natsuo says, nudging his shoes off towards the wall. That’s going to have to be good enough. He doesn’t want to let go of Eiji for as long as it would take to fuck around with the cabinets. “I’m gonna stay for a while.”

Eiji’s eyes and his mouth both go wide and round at once. “Really, Daddy? For real?”

Natsuo picks him up. Kid weighs a hell of a lot more than the backpack. Slowly, he starts for the kitchen. Can’t hide here forever. “Yeah. I’m gonna stay in the room in the garden.”

“Naru!” Eiji calls delightedly. “Naru, did you hear that? Daddy’s gonna stay!”

Naru, settled in his high chair with a kingly assortment of colored blocks, probably isn’t particularly invested in this turn of the conversation, but he does look up and grin toothlessly the instant Natsuo steps into the room, and that ought to count for something.

Endeavor half-turns towards him, face completely still—the most neutral expression possible when all of them are underpinned by the disdain and the judgment. “Leave your things anywhere you like for now.”

It’s actually pretty impressive that he just managed to rephrase Make yourself at home in a place that never was as a command.

Natsuo hugs Eiji a fraction tighter to steady himself. Long day. Stupid class. He’s already tetchy. This situation is a goddamn powder keg, but he’s not going to be the one who sets it off. He’s not.

He gently settles Eiji back in his booster seat at the table—on the tabletop in front of him is a half-finished coloring page of an old-fashioned train station. “Okay,” Natsuo says. None of the contents of the bags are fragile, but he doesn’t want them to be underfoot, either. He slings them down in the far corner by the door.

Then he sits down next to Eiji, who immediately offers him a green crayon.

“You can color, too, Daddy,” he says. “Do you want your own book?” He starts pushing at the table to try to shove his chair back. “I’ve got more, you can have one. What do you want to color, Daddy? I’ve got farm animals and dinosaurs and cats—Uncle Shouto gave me the cat one, it’s really nice—”

“I can just help you,” Natsuo says, grabbing the back of the chair before he tips it over and slams himself down onto the floor.

The vision flickers swiftly into the forefront of Natsuo’s mind, in high-definition detail—the way the side of his skull would hit the linoleum, the way the impact would crack through, the splitting of the skin, the first splash of blood, the shards of bone digging backwards and chewing up the impossibly soft meat of his brain, the dribble of the crushed pink spongy mess seeping out around the damage, the thickening glossiness of his eyes as his systems abruptly started shutting down, the twitch of his fingers followed by a stillness unlike any sort of sleeping, the dripping of fluids in the silence as the blood welled wide underneath his head and diffused upward to stain his snow-white hair, the—

“Natsuo,” Endeavor says, quiet but sharply distinct.

It makes him want to throw up.

But it shakes him out of the thought.

“What?” he says.

Eiji’s mouth twists at the harshness of his voice. Fuck. Okay. He’ll do better next time—he’ll be more careful.

“Is nikujaga all right for dinner?” Endeavor asks, watching him too closely—way too knowingly.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. As if he has a choice. “I’ll eat whatever.”

Endeavor watches for another second.

They should have made him take all these classes, but they could have skipped the food one. Natsuo supposes he has to give the bastard that—he provided for them.

He just never gave them anything.

Endeavor nods once and turns back towards the cooking. A part of Natsuo’s brain tugs at him, urging him to offer to help, but the rest of him knows that the last damn thing he needs is a knife in his hands right now.

Maybe Hawks was on the money about that one—just not in the way he thought.

Natsuo slides his chair closer to Eiji’s, leaning in towards the page. “I like this one anyway,” he says. “Is there a part you don’t like doing? I can do that.”

Eiji blinks at him. “Are you sure, Daddy? I…” He looks down at the image, chewing on his lip. “I guess… The grass takes so long. It’s boring.” He winces, hard. “But—I don’t want you to get bored, Daddy. I want you to have fun. So you don’t leave.”

Natsuo sympathizes with gutted fish.

He reaches out and gently rubs at Eiji’s shoulder. “I’m not gonna get bored. How could I when you and Naru are here, huh? And I’m not gonna leave. I brought all my stuff, remember? My pajamas and my toothbrush and everything. I’m gonna stay with you guys for a while. I love you guys. I don’t want to—have to be somewhere else anymore.”

Eiji searches his face, eyes huge and gleaming with the first hint of a flood of tears, mouth trembling.

Then a big wet block bounces onto the coloring book, and they both startle so hard they almost fall out of their chairs.

“Mahhhhh,” Naru says, straining against the strap on his high chair to try to recover the escapee. “Bah-dah-ibbib—”

“Whoops,” Natsuo says, trying desperately to smooth out how rough his voice sounds from the way his chest contracted.

Eiji thinks he’s going to fuck off again as soon as it suits him—on a whim, at a moment’s notice, over coloring book grass. Eiji thinks that’s how the world works now: the people he loves just leave him, and leave him behind.

You can’t tell a toddler I’m not lying to you this time.

You have to prove it.

Natsuo reaches over and places the block back on the tray next to the others, which are apparently much less coveted, since Naru has pushed them to the far edge.

“Got a pretty good arm on you, there, kid,” he says. “Is this your way of telling me you want to try out for baseball?”

“He’s too little for baseball,” Eiji says, but at least he sounds a few inches further away from the brink of tears. “He can’t even stand up, Daddy.”

“That’s a good point,” Natsuo says. He folds his arms on the tabletop, leans close, keeps his voice low. “What if we helped him stand? You think he could swing the bat?”

Eiji shakes his head. “They always throw the ball waaaay up here—” He extends his arm as high as it’ll go. “It’d just go over him.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Natsuo says. “I think he’d like it. Maybe in a couple more years. What do you think?”

“Maybe,” Eiji says, looking dubiously at his brother. “He’s small, Daddy.”

“So were you, not too long ago,” Natsuo says. “And now you’re so big and strong I bet you could hit the ball out of the park.”

Eiji wrinkles his nose. “I dunno, Daddy. Not even the players do that very much. And they’re grownups.”

“You want to try sometime?” Natsuo says. “We could practice together. See how it goes.”

Eiji’s eyes light up. Natsuo’s whole chest aches, but maybe that’s better than the constant collapsing. “Yeah! There’s lots of parks here, Auntie Fuyumi took us to one that’s big and had a baseball thing—the—the place they—we could go there!” He twists in the seat to look at Endeavor, who has stayed utterly silent, back turned to them, pointedly toiling away at the stovetop this whole damn time. “Grampa, do you have a baseball bat?”

Natsuo knows the answer to that one. Natsuo knows that the only sports equipment allowed in this house was shit that could be used to train future soldiers.

But Endeavor turns to Eiji and says, in the bizarre little quiet voice, “I’m not sure. We can look around later. If we don’t find anything, we can buy one.”

Eiji looks delighted.

Natsuo has to make that be enough.

Through the entirety of an awkwardly quiet dinner, they don’t see head or tail or hide or hair of Hawks. Nobody comments on it. This sort of thing must be common if even Eiji, who thrives on consistent routines, isn’t bothered by it.

Endeavor used to do the same thing, as far as Natsuo can remember. The failures were usually relegated to other parts of the house as much as possible, but the front door slamming shut used to wake him up in the middle of the night sometimes, or they’d get up to go to school, and Endeavor would either already be gone or never have come back in the first place.

It’s none of Natsuo’s business. History can repeat itself all it fucking likes—these are his kids, and he’s going to shield them from it. He’s going to change this. He’s going to give them a chance.

The same part of himself that nudged him to try to help cook wants him to offer to clean up, like all of them haven’t mopped up enough of Endeavor’s messes over the years. It wars in him for a few gnawing seconds as Endeavor starts clearing bowls away.

He stands up, cautious not to scrape his chair, not to move too fast, not to jerk his elbows around or set his shoulders too tight. Eiji’s watching him. Eiji knows there’s something wrong.

“I can do the dishes,” Natsuo says. “Give you a break.”

Endeavor sets a stack of things gently down in the basin of the sink—he knows what damn game they’re playing, trying to convince Eiji that this is anything other than a battleground. “It’s all right. They haven’t gotten to see you much. Spend the time with them.”

How does he always manage to make the thing that you wanted to do anyway sound like an order?

Eyes on the prize. Natsuo got what he actually wanted. The particulars of how it came into his hands aren’t important. Lion’s den. Lion’s rules. The lion’s condescending bullshit is irrelevant. He’s going to make the best of this.

“Okay,” he says. He snags a napkin, carefully wipes a smudge of sauce off of a squirming Eiji’s squishy little cheek, and then plucks him up out of the booster seat and sets him gently on the floor. “What do you want to do, bud?”

Eiji looks over at Endeavor, first, before turning back to him.

Swallow it down. Choke out the smoke.

“I wanna read, Daddy,” he says. “But—” He starts fidgeting, shifting his weight, twisting his hands around each other. “But Grampa always helps me. I can’t do it all by myself yet, ’cause it’s too hard, but Grampa says that’s okay, he says I’m doing really good, and Hawks says it’s crazy I even—that I—what’d he say, Grampa?”

Endeavor sighs quietly, and Natsuo’s blood boils, but he just turns off the water and gives Eiji a rueful look. “He said it was crazy that you’re even trying when most kids your age are chewing on the caps of childproof medication bottles, but excessive ambition is hard-wired into your genetic makeup, so it’s not your fault.”

There’s a pause, which Eiji spends staring intently at Endeavor like he’s contemplating that nonsense very deeply.

“You… don’t need to worry about that,” Endeavor says. He shifts his weight, tips his head slightly— “I can help you in just a few minutes. I’m going to make something for Hawks to eat when he gets home. It shouldn’t take too long. You can show your Daddy your books first, or watch some TV. Is that all right?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says, grabbing for Natsuo’s hand. “Daddy, get Naru! He’s got books, too. They’re dumb, but we can read to him together. You wanna?”

“Sure thing,” Natsuo says. “I just need both hands to pick him up, bud, gimme a second.” Eiji obediently grasps a fistful of his jeans instead, staring up at him as he struggles a little trying to figure out how to extract Naru from the fancy-ass high chair. “What makes ’em dumb?”

“They’re for babies,” Eiji says, his tiny voice ringing with such immense disdain that Natsuo doesn’t really have a choice:

He laughs.

It sounds a little strangled even to him, and it kind of hurts.

But it’s good, probably.

He can feel from the prickling of those eyes on his skin that Endeavor glances over at him, but he focuses in closely on gathering Naru—and a few choice blocks—into his left arm so he can offer Eiji his now slightly damp right hand again. “Man. It’s hard to be a baby, huh?”

“It is if you’re Naru,” Eiji says, calmly leading him out into the living room and directly over to one of the neat rows of shelfless books he saw earlier. “You gotta get dumb books read to you, and you wanna eat blocks but you can’t, and you gotta make slime all the time. Deku said he’s good at it, though! Making slime, I mean. Isn’t that cool, Daddy?”

It should probably be even weirder than it is to realize that three of the nation’s most famous up-and-coming pros, as well as its unshakable number one, are all stated fans of his second child’s innate ability to produce abnormal amounts of saliva.

“That’s pretty cool,” Natsuo says.

Eiji hums tunelessly and starts sorting through the brightly-colored board books. “Oh! This one’s not as bad. It’s got sharks. Let’s read him this one first!”

“You’re the boss, bud,” Natsuo says.

“Hawks is the boss,” Eiji says idly, handing it up to him before considering a few more. “He’s got a… thing. A… agency. Full of people. They’re nice. They’ve got popsicles.”

Toddler talk didn’t make a whole lot of sense before, and now that Natsuo doesn’t have any damn context for what Eiji’s been doing, it practically sounds like a foreign language. It doesn’t help that Hawks is such a loose cannon that ‘popsicles’ could be code for just about anything, or they could just have the world’s biggest snack room at his agency. Natsuo wouldn’t put either of them past him.

That’s another problem he can’t solve now.

“Well,” he says to Eiji, “you’re the book boss right now. So sharks it is.”

Eiji pauses in sorting through the remaining books to grin up at him. “You should pick the next one, Daddy. You can be book boss, too.”

Natsuo looks down to consult with the other affected party. “What about Naru?”

Eiji reaches up and pats Natsuo’s knee very seriously. “He’s too young to be a boss, Daddy.” Natsuo should have known. Undeterred by his ignorance of baby book etiquette, Eiji grabs his hand again and tows him over to the couch. “C’mon!”

The storyline is not exactly a riveting page-turner, but the sharks are cute while still looking kind of cool, and Eiji is glued to the pictures the whole way through, tucked under Natsuo’s free arm to be closer to the pages with his thumb shoved in his mouth. Naru doesn’t waste time putting single digits into his mouth, of course, instead favoring the efficiency of the half-fist approach, but the babbling seems to be relatively appreciative. Apparently this one is a hit with the entire under five demographic in this household.

Natsuo tries to get himself to do voices for the different fish and crustaceans that have starring roles, but Hayami used to be so damn good at those—at differentiating them, and giving them distinct cadences and tones and accents and even different laughs—that it just aches to try to think about. He hopes Eiji isn’t disappointed. Hopefully the sharks are so mesmerizing that he just won’t think about it.

When they finish, Eiji scrambles down to bring back a few more books for Natsuo to pick from.

Natsuo’s not a big damn fan of the traditional nuclear family for obvious reasons, but the thing is—

The thing is, practically speaking, juggling two kids is a whole hell of a lot easier when you have two pairs of hands working together. The character of the hands is not as important as the quantity.

Endeavor is still making unobtrusive but detectable noises from the kitchen, so Natsuo makes himself breathe out, chooses a book at random, and forces himself to focus again. He’s hanging on by his fingernails at this point, but he’s not going to waste this. He’s just not.

They make it through one more baby-friendly literary masterpiece—this one is about a honeybee who is extraordinarily anthropomorphized even by children’s book standards. Eiji starts to get restless during this one, which Natsuo attributes more to the lack of sharks than to his lackluster presentation skills, although it could be a bit of both.

The moment they’re done with that one, a shadow fills the doorway.

Natsuo looks over first, but Endeavor is looking at Eiji.

“I’m ready whenever you are,” he says, “but take your time.”

Eiji smiles at him so warmly that Natsuo’s stomach turns itself inside out.

But then Eiji’s aiming that smile at him, and he can’t help wondering if maybe it really just does have as much power as it feels like.

Maybe Eiji changes people. Maybe that’s just something that a little boy this special is capable of. Maybe he just loves so much, so brightly, that it fundamentally alters the universe around him.

And the people, sometimes.

“You’re staying ’til tomorrow, right?” Eiji asks. His face falls, his eyes widen— “Are you still gonna be here when I come back from school?”

“That’s the plan, bud,” Natsuo says, keeping his voice as steady as he can. “I’m going to have a couple annoying grownup things I have to go do sometimes, but mostly—I mean—mostly I’ll try to be here.”

This kid could definitely terraform a continent with the force of that smile.

He climbs down from the couch again and bounds over to a different set of books, from which he reverently selects one with a marker set about halfway through. He trots back over to Endeavor with it. “You ready, Grampa?”

“Yes,” Endeavor says. He shoots a glance over at Natsuo again, but not for long enough to react to—like he’s gauging something Natsuo can’t even guess.

Eiji shamelessly grabs his metal hand and drags him over to the couch, where he positively looms even when he sits down and lifts Eiji up into his lap. His shoulders are just too damn big for furniture in general. He always looks like he’s crammed in, anywhere he goes, and the whole place will have to crack open just to fit him.

Endeavor takes his stupid little glasses out of his shirt pocket and puts them on, then lays his left hand against Eiji’s back where Eiji is wriggling around, settling on his knee and flipping over to the bookmark. The glint of determination in Eiji’s eyes is—

Familiar.

Terrifying.

It makes him look like Touya, for a second.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

Is that the game?

It’s not about crushing Eiji down and molding him into another Shouto.

It’s about reaching down into him for the potential already there, the sick twist of the same genes—that feverish curiosity, that fervent desire to know, to find, to fight, to get to things—

It’s about tapping into the insatiable fire that feeds his love of the world, and guiding it into the same shape.

Round two.

Second chances.

Another fucking horror show on the horizon.

Another—

“I’m gonna start, Grampa!” Eiji says, lifting the book up, shuffling himself around until he can rest it on his tiny knees. “Ready or not—”

“Go ahead,” Endeavor says, softly.

Eiji presses his fingertip to the page, leaning in closer to concentrate. “I—I can go… to… the… p… pah—the park.”

“Good,” Endeavor says.

Naru warbles, patting at the closed board book that Natsuo left resting against his tiny little leg. On his second try, Naru manages to grasp the edge of the thickened pages with his chubby little fingers. He picks up the book and puts the corner in his mouth.

Fortunately, they’re kind of designed for that. Natsuo and Hayami once spent, like, two hours trying to verify online whether most publishers made sure these things are printed with food-safe ink, given how many kids must put teethmarks into them over time, but they came up pretty empty.

He needs to calm down. He can’t panic. He can’t pick a fight. He needs to breathe, needs to focus, needs to hold it in and hold himself together.

He can practically feel the heat of the poisoned pride radiating off of the gigantic fucking monster on the couch next to him—so close it feels claustrophobic.

He gathers Naru up into his right arm and collects the less-appetizing books. He gets up, under the premise of going over to return the rejects, and then paces back and forth a couple times, bouncing Naru gently in his arms, looking at the wall, keeping his back to the couch, keeping his head on straight by force of will.

“I—can—go—to the park—now,” Eiji works out. “I can go—to the—park—l… lah… lah-ter. Later. I can go to the park later.”

“There you go,” Endeavor says.

That’s not him.

That’s not him.

He’s not even capable of a single act of gentleness, let alone a sustained course of encouragement.

Tiny, tiny wet fingers bat themselves at Natsuo’s jaw.

“Okay,” he whispers, carefully adjusting his grip. “Okay. I got you.”

He makes a quick assessment of the wild assortment of sources of baby entertainment scattered over the floor. There’s a well-defined aisle through the center of the room, but they’ve clearly given up fighting the tide of the toys.

Right by the play gym, there’s a promising specimen—one of those blocks of wood with thick wires curling up and out around each other, all of them strung with blocks with holes in the centers, so that little hands can move them back and forth around the dips and curves. It’s not exactly an intellectually stimulating tour de force, but maybe Naru’s just as tired from babying all day as Natsuo is from surviving. The fundamental problem is the same, isn’t it? It’s just that the world is too damn big.

He sits down cross-legged and carefully settles Naru in his lap, folding his pudgy legs up to stabilize him.

“I can—I can go—to the park—to… to-mah… tomar—Grampa?”

“You’re almost there,” Endeavor says, quietly. “It’s okay to guess and be wrong.”

Natsuo drags the wire block over into Naru’s reach, which earns him an excited little trill.

“Yeah?” he says, stroking the soft, soft fur on the right ear, then the left. “Have at it, buddy. Show this thing what’s what.”

“Num,” Naru says, definitively, as he grabs for the closest couple of blocks and catches one. He yanks it back and forth a little, struggling with a tighter curve in the wire that requires a little more finesse to nudge the block through.

Natsuo lets him work at it for a couple of seconds before reaching forward and tapping the corner to help it over the curve so that it slides. “There you go. You got this.”

Naru seems to agree: he starts shifting the block of choice around the course set for it, pausing when he runs into others on the same track and has to push harder to compel them all at once. He makes it about a third of the way along that wire before it loses its appeal, and he moves to a different one. That occupies him for a few minutes of thoughtful garbled babbling, and then he sits back and just starts flailing his arms around and whapping at the blocks with his hands like maybe a miracle will emerge, and the desperation will set everything into its proper place.

That’s a mood.

Eiji struggles through several more sentences with different combinations of simple words.

Which is incredible.

Natsuo doesn’t remember exactly when lines on a page started resolving themselves into ideas in his own little kid brain, but he had to have been a hell of a lot older than four.

His baby is so goddamn smart that it feels like it stings a little—like it’s needling at the back of his mind, maybe trying to find its way down to his heart to stab him good again. His baby is amazing. The tiny life that he helped drag into the world, feebly kicking and much less-feebly screaming fit to shake the whole damn hospital, is sitting on the couch learning how to read at least a year early.

Not to diminish Naru’s block-whacking, but this is—humbling. Mind-blowing. Phenomenal.

He wishes so fucking much that she could be here. See this. Feel it too—this awe of what Eiji is capable of. The impossible privilege of getting to see who he’s already become, who he wants to be, where he’s headed, how far he’s made it in such a brief gasp of time spent on this miserable planet.

Eiji doesn’t even think it’s miserable. He thinks it’s magical. He thinks it’s full of gardens and donburi and playgrounds and coloring pages and an infinite number of books that will open up to him if he keeps trying. Even now—even now, he believes that the world is good. He believes that it’s full of love. He believes that it will carry him kindly to the million places that he wants to go.

Is that what a parent is supposed to help you do?

Are they supposed to try to make it so you never stop believing?

Are they supposed to lie?

Endeavor hasn’t taken his eyes off of Eiji and the book for a single second—hasn’t glanced towards the TV remote, hasn’t pulled out his phone, hasn’t spaced and started staring at the wall. He’s barely moved.

Eiji looks even tinier perched on his knee. Endeavor could snap his wrist between two fingers.

Endeavor could do a lot of things he hasn’t done.

Natsuo waits for the pause when Eiji finishes out another laborious page before clearing his throat.

Eiji’s head snaps up instantly. Natsuo ignores the way Endeavor’s does, too.

“Hey,” Natsuo says. “You’re doing so great. I’m really proud of you.”

Eiji’s face lights up. “You mean it, Daddy?”

God. He says that so often now—like he needs to verify everything grownups say to him.

Or like he has to double-check the things that Natsuo says, because Daddy has fucked him over before, and he’s never going to forget.

“Yeah, bud,” Natsuo chokes out. “I do mean it. You’re doing amazing. Just take it easy on yourself, okay? It’s fine if sometimes you just want to relax and watch some TV or something instead of doing homework all on your own.”

Eiji wrinkles his nose.

Endeavor’s hand touches his teeny-tiny shoulder. “He’s right about that. It’s okay.”

Eiji makes a face at him next.

It occurs to Natsuo at that point that they’ve all done a pretty shit job of demonstrating work-life balance. He was picking up shifts at all kinds of hours. Hayami was working with her laptop at the kitchen table sometimes trying to catch up after maternity leave. And now…

Well. Now, right on cue, like Natsuo did this with the power of his mind, the front door opens, and Hawks yells, “What’s good in the neighborhood, jellybeans?” from the genkan.

There’s a pause.

Eiji looks at Endeavor quizzically. Endeavor shrugs.

Naru is less bothered by the incomprehensible diminutive, though, and grabs for another block.

“We’re not jellybeans,” Eiji yells back.

“Oh!” Hawks says. Boots hit the wall. Natsuo has to set his jaw, holding himself still so he won’t startle even now. “Silly me! I thought this was the Jellybean House, but it must be the Todoroki Residence, huh?”

He appears in the doorway, hands planted on his hips, and grins.

Then he flits over to the couch in the time it takes Natsuo to start to blink.

“Hey, babe,” Hawks says, to Endeavor, who sits still and lets Hawks plant a wet kiss on his forehead.

Eiji beams up like his arrival is a highlight of the whole damn week. “Hi, Hawks!”

“Hey, kiddo!” Hawks returns, leaning down to kiss the top of his head, and then he darts over to crouch down in front of Naru and squish his little cheeks. “Hello, sweet Mousebaby and your existentially terrifying unfinished skull.”

“It’s normal,” Endeavor says.

“I don’t see how statistical significance has any bearing on the intrinsic body horror,” Hawks says, calmly. “Hey, Natsuo,” he adds, managing to sound so calm that Natsuo almost believes it himself. “Sorry, I’m not going to kiss you. No matter how much you beg.”

“Bummer,” Natsuo says, as deadpan as humanly possible.

Hawks snickers.

Endeavor eyes him. “Go eat before you pass out.”

“Bossy,” Hawks says, but he’s already halfway to the kitchen.

“You like it,” Endeavor calls after him.

Natsuo realizes his mouth just fell open and tries to make ducking and snapping it shut look less obvious.

Endeavor doesn’t banter.

Endeavor barely even understands the concept of a conversation, except as a vehicle through which to articulate the imposition of his will.

“I’m a glutton for punishment,” Hawks is saying from the kitchen, followed immediately by a heartfelt “Oh, my God. Amazing. No notes.”

Endeavor fixes his attention on Eiji again, who was watching Hawks intently until he left the room, at which point the book got more interesting again.

“Do you want to keep going?” Endeavor asks. “Or is that enough for tonight? You made it a long way.”

Eiji smiles. Natsuo’s head spins. The words are right—they’re good words, nice words, supportive, reassuring, unassuming. But the voice delivering them howls like the wind at the door in a thunderstorm in all his dreams.

Instead of answering outright, Eiji lowers his head over the book and lays his finger back on the page. The halting lack of a narrative has moved on to some of the things you’d see at the park that you’re somehow going to at multiple different time points—the trees, the sky, the grass. Eiji starts picking his way through the syllables of the next few observations.

Hawks saunters back in with an overflowing bowl in his hands, steam rising from it. For one long second before he layers some wry amusement over the top of his expression, the guy looks as exhausted as Natsuo feels. Maybe worse.

Feathers scoop Eiji up—he doesn’t bat an eyelash, just tightens his grip on the book as they pop him up into the air—and then set him down on Endeavor’s other thigh to clear the couch cushion on Endeavor’s left side. The rest of Hawks’s wings hike themselves up over the back of the couch as he settles in and curls up close against Endeavor’s arm.

Endeavor’s eyes flick over him. “You’re covered in dust again.”

Hawks’s thin smile disappears behind the rim of the bowl as he raises it to his mouth. “You like it.”

Endeavor doesn’t argue, which is colossally weird in and of itself. He watches as Hawks starts shoveling food into his mouth fast enough that Natsuo’s worried the guy will fucking choke, or maybe stab through the roof of his mouth with the chopsticks and land them all in the ER.

Then Endeavor reaches over and touches Hawks’s wrist—which instantly stills his hands, like flipping a switch.

“It’s not going anywhere,” Endeavor says, very quietly.

Hawks stares at him for a second and then lowers the bowl into his lap, breathing deeply. Holy shit. Is he going to throw the thing at—

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks. Autopilot.”

“I know,” Endeavor says. He glances up at the clock on the wall and turns to Eiji again. “Eiji, it’s about half an hour until we need to start getting ready for bed. Is there anything else you want to do first?”

Eiji thinks about it with the seriousness that he applies to nearly everything.

“We could do Legos,” he says, slowly. “You wanna do Legos, Grampa?”

“Yes,” Endeavor says. “That sounds nice.”

Eiji barely even starts to move before Endeavor catches him up under the arms and deposits him on the floor. He scrambles over at kid-speed—as fast as his tiny little legs will carry him without tipping him over onto his face, because every minute is such a huge portion of his life that any time not maximized feels wasted—and grabs the edge of a pretty good-sized clear box chock-full of tiny bits of colorful plastic, the better to start dragging it across the carpet.

“Daddy!” he says, smiling like a tiny sun again. “You wanna help?”

“I wanna see what you make,” Natsuo says, shoving aside the visions of Endeavor ordering his kid around, telling him what walls to reinforce, commanding him to use carefully-matched colors, brutally criticizing his architectural insufficiency— “Is it okay if I just watch?”

“Sure!” Eiji says blithely. Endeavor squeezes Hawks’s knee with one giant hand before he gets down off of the couch and settles cross-legged on the floor. Eiji pushes the box closer to him. “You start first, Grampa. What are you gonna make?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Endeavor says. It’s slightly miraculous that he can even grasp the damn Legos in the first place when his fingertips are so big. He has to pick them out a few at a time, tucking them up into his curled palm, because he’s only using the left hand. “I think I’ll just start and see what happens.”

“I wanna make a tower,” Eiji says. “Like the one Prince Iji was climbing in the story, to get to the top to rescue the magician who knows how to make the special map that will take him to the desert—”

Yet again, Natsuo has no idea what the hell Eiji is talking about, but just listening to him ramble excitedly is so goddamn wonderful that the content doesn’t matter very much.

With some shockingly unaggressive pointers from Endeavor, Eiji manages to assemble a decent foundation for a tower that isn’t round so much as it is extremely angular, with so many facets that it almost achieves roundness. Endeavor spends more time consulting and digging through the box for useful blocks for Eiji than actually making anything. Hawks scarfs the rest of his food, conveys the bowl back into the kitchen with a couple of feathers, and lies down on his front on the couch, wings and arms both folded, most of his face tucked in behind the fence of his forearms. The way he watches Eiji and Endeavor discussing Lego plans makes Natsuo’s heart hurt for reasons he can’t even really get his head around.

The eyes don’t go blank like polished brass around here—not like they do out in public, in the open, on the talk shows and in the magazines.

The affection would be weird enough, but there’s a wistfulness to it, and then a hint of something darker. Protectiveness, maybe. That’s what Natsuo thinks he’s hoping for. None of the alternatives are any better.

Naru, in the meantime, continues valiantly fighting the forces of the blocks on wires. Progress is painstaking. He doesn’t seem to mind.

Endeavor gives Eiji a countdown to bedtime—reminding him every couple minutes and telling him how long he has left. It’s surreal as hell, and smart.

It’s good parenting. Guardian-ing. Whatever this is.

And when it’s time, Eiji helps pack up the extra Legos, and they set his construction-in-progress on top of the lid of the box, and Endeavor puts it aside again before returning to offer Eiji his left hand.

Eiji takes it, hauls himself upright, and then grips it as he looks over.

“Daddy, are you going to bed, too?” he asks, eyes huge and round and so profoundly concerned that Natsuo doesn’t think Satan himself could bear to disappoint this kid twice.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think I will.”

Eiji wrings the two fingers of Endeavor’s hand that he’s able to seize onto with his. “Do you remember how to get there?”

“Pretty sure I do,” Natsuo says, “but why don’t you walk me over, and then we can say goodnight?”

The smile breaks broad and bright. “Okay! C’mon, Grampa—Daddy, you got Naru? He needs to say goodnight, too. He’s been doing so much better, he sleeps almost all night, and he’s quiet, and when he cries, it’s not as loud as before.”

Endeavor doesn’t look like he agrees with all of that, but he keeps his mouth shut.

As Eiji leads their little procession towards the back door—Naru mourning the loss of a toy he didn’t even like that much with a faint whine the whole way—Hawks doesn’t move.

“’Night, Natsuo,” he calls.

“Goodnight,” Natsuo calls back, because it’s what Fuyumi would want him to say.

It’s hardly a hop and a skip over to the renovated shed, but Eiji has solemnly accepted the responsibility of leadership, and Natsuo’s not about to argue. Eiji even swapped out slippers for sandals in spite of the indefatigable distaste for shoes.

They’ve made it a few steps past the halfway point when an owl hoots, the sound resonating through the cool air, low and lonely.

Or it would be, except that another one answers back.

Eiji pulls on Endeavor’s arm and immediately gets lifted up to shoulder level to peer around them.

“Grampa!” Eiji says. “Is that an owl?”

Endeavor stops moving altogether and raises him a fraction higher, looking slowly back and forth at the trees nearer to the house. He pitches his voice just above a whisper, but the deepness of it makes it carry anyway. “It sounds to me like two.”

Eiji drops the volume of his voice to match it. “Where?”

“I’m not sure,” Endeavor says. “If we listen closely at night, we may be able to figure out where they are.”

“Okay!” Eiji says, fist curled into Endeavor’s shirt now. “Daddy, you gotta help. You can listen for them while you’re falling asleep!”

“Sure thing, bud,” Natsuo says, wrapping his arms a little tighter around Naru. It’s colder out here than he expected.

Endeavor glances at him as they approach the door, and he has to put his duffel bag down to fumble for the keys. They’re labeled, of course, but it’s not like he can read the little engravings out here in the dark.

He can hear Endeavor drawing a breath to say something, but he slots the right key into the lock in the last half-second.

“Okay,” he says. “Here’s my stop. G’night, bud.”

Eiji barely even has to shift before Endeavor lets him down. Natsuo crouches, keeping Naru balanced against his shoulder, and opens the other arm to hug him.

“G’night, Daddy,” he mumbles into Natsuo’s chest, clinging on hard. “I love you.”

Natsuo draws back and braces himself. He settles his hand gently on the back of Eiji’s neck, then kisses each of his cheeks in turn followed by the tip of his nose.

It’s what Hayami used to do at bedtime.

Eiji’s eyes well up.

“I love you, too, Eiji,” Natsuo whispers. “Sleep well, okay?”

“Okay, Daddy,” he manages. He reaches out and tugs on his brother’s tiny hand. “Say ‘G’night’ to Daddy, Naru.”

Natsuo kisses the top of Naru’s head. The fur and the hair are both so silky-fine and soft he can hardly tell what’s what. “G’night, you.”

Eiji hugs him again before scampering back over to Endeavor, who leans down to hoist him up. A part of Natsuo’s stupid brain wants to clutch Naru closer, shield him with an arm, hold him away—

That’s the part of his brain that got him into this.

He lets Endeavor carefully gather Eiji into his metal arm, and then when he extends the left one for Naru, Natsuo gives his baby one more quick kiss on the nearest big, beautiful ear before passing him over.

It’s so fucking weird looking up at Endeavor with one of his kids bundled into each arm.

“We get the boys up around seven,” Endeavor says, “so that we can leave to take Eiji to school at seven forty.”

In this family’s language, that’s an invitation to participate in his own damn kids’ new morning routine.

And… possibly an offer of free breakfast. Which admittedly isn’t an odious prospect, considering the way Natsuo has been eating lately, i.e. hardly at all.

“If you need anything,” Endeavor says, “come inside. Or call my cell.”

Natsuo nods.

Which leaves them staring at each other for a second in the dark, while Eiji buries his face in Endeavor’s warm shoulder, and Naru burbles aimlessly and waves his hands.

“G’night,” Natsuo says, feeling like a spectacularly unentertaining broken record at this point.

“Goodnight, Natsuo,” Endeavor says. He looks like he’s hesitating for another moment, but then he changes his mind and turns and walks away.

Fine.

Natsuo drags his stuff inside and flicks the lightswitch next to the door.

Come to think of it, this place did have power running to it before—enough, at least, to illuminate one bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. He remembers he could stand on the tips of his toes and just reach the pullcord, but Touya couldn’t, which made Touya so damn mad that he punched Natsuo in the arm with enough force to bruise him.

It looks a hell of a lot different now, though—like a little hotel room. The futon rolled up in the corner looks extremely plush, and there are extra blankets folded up on the windowseat behind it. The curtains are pulled, obviously, but that would probably actually be kind of a nice place to sit and look out at the garden. There’s a slim dresser off to the side, and the walls are all done in a sort of soothing beige. The big framed photo of Mount Fuji mounted opposite from the bed kind of makes it look like a therapist’s waiting room, which—knowing this family’s collective propensities for damaged psyches and repression—might well have been subconsciously intentional.

There wasn’t much space to work with, so the bathroom’s small, with a shower stall that might not be quite so cramped for someone of an average height and build, but isn’t going to do Natsuo a whole lot of favors. Still—it’s bright and clean and pleasant, overall. It’s honestly a pretty nice place to crash, other than its locational proximity to hell.

Natsuo unrolls the futon to give himself a place to drop his body and pulls his backpack over to him, but the idea of doing his fucking court-mandated child care homework right now makes him want to throw up.

That’s one of the worst parts of it—even when it doesn’t feel like his chest is collapsing, nothing ever sounds good. He can’t think of a single thing in the vast reaches of the near-infinite world that he actually wants to do. He doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t really feel anything except the anger—the constantly simmering resentment of a universe that would cut her down and hack him open.

What’s the point? What’s the point of being alive, of building anything, of trying at all—trudging through bills and taxes and car payments and replacing lightbulbs and white-knuckling it through live footage of Shouto on the news and standing in the aisles of the grocery store calculating the best deals to try to scrape up more cash to blow on diapers and single-use plastics to fling into a landfill or the ocean or to burn like the corpse of the only person who ever devoted the time to him to learn how to snap him out of a spiral like this and tug him back into a world where you keep trying anyway?

You do, though.

Keep trying.

Because you made it this far.

Because tomorrow might be better, but you’ll never find out if you don’t wait and see.

Because life won’t wait, and death won’t spare you.

Imagining her arms around his neck and her head on his shoulder and her voice in his ear makes it worse.

Eiji is so much like her—so hopeful, so committed to the conviction that pouring goodness into the world around you has to have some reactive effect. So confident that there’s an equal and opposite force governing the universe, and if you just love enough—

He has to do it.

It doesn’t matter anymore, if he ever really convinced himself it did.

But the kids matter. He brought them into this hurricane, dragged them through the wind by the hand, gave them no choice but to be, to be here, to exist.

The purpose of his life now is to make it suck less for them. He exists to stand between them and the storm as much as he can, to block the rain, to steady their feet when the water rises. The fact that Hayami can’t help him doesn’t change the goal.

He gets up. He roots through his stuff, finds his haphazard plastic bag of toiletries—because the nice bag she bought him back when they used to be able to travel more was too nice. Too precious. Stains on the surface of the Earth that no one can quite scratch out shouldn’t be toting their toothbrushes around in fancy leather dop kits.

Endeavor hung up more fluffy towels in here than anyone could possibly need. The sink isn’t too narrow for a few drawers on the side, which have stuff in them—new toothpaste, nice razors, an extra box of tissues, tons of soap and shampoo. Lotion, for Chrissake. It’s impossible to imagine Endeavor as a lotion guy.

Natsuo cleans up and settles into the futon, throwing some of the blankets over it for good measure. Just cold enough out there that some of it bleeds through the window.

Especially after he opens the curtain to check if he can see anything.

And he can.

He has exactly the right angle to look up past the overhang of the roof and glimpse a sliver of the sky.

He pointed the pragmatically-provided little space heater at the futon and cranked it up, but the idea of getting up to turn it off later is sounding progressively more horrible. He scrolls on his phone without really seeing the screen, flicking past filter-flattened images of people that he used to know pretending that their lives are picture-perfect. He double-checks the schedule for his stupid classes—holes blown out of the week, pits of shattered rock with their own unfathomable gravity, dragging the other days in towards them, deforming time around themselves.

He can’t tell if he actually wants to sleep or not. His brain is a clot of static—which is better than a lot of the things it could be, these days.

There’s a part of him always trembling feverishly with a compulsion to tap over into his photos and flip through them, again and again and again—to see her, frozen, and prove to himself that she was ever real. To remind himself that she lived and smiled and loved him, that she stuck her tongue out and crossed her eyes in selfies, that she looked at the kids with that precise mix of elation and something more like awe. That she looked at him that way, too. That she was here. That she was happy. That they made something wonderful together, for a while. That he was capable of that much.

But it’s—worse, sometimes. Looking at her. Starting to calculate the number of seconds left in the average life—the breaths he has to take, the heartbeats he has to labor through. At what point is it like trying to wean yourself off of a drug your body’s used to? At what point does going back and back again, trying to sink his fingers into the thinning mist of a superior past, more or less amount to wallowing? Where’s the fulcrum that balances honoring the memory of the best person he’s ever loved and embracing the fact that his stupid life has to keep moving instead of clinging on to the trinkets and trivialities and digital ghosts that remain of her?

He’s not special. He never has been.

He’s not the first person in the world who’s ever lost a spouse. He’s not the first person who’s survived it.

Maybe it’s good, in a way, that Eiji and Naru wound up in a different house, even if it had to be this one. Maybe it’s good that they were physically removed from the place that all of them associate most with her, and they had to start fresh here, in a building that bears no resemblance to anywhere they ever saw her. Maybe it’s good that there’s a sharp, distinct dividing line in their lives—one phase with her in it, and then abruptly another era, with an entirely different set of people made prominent. Maybe the shock value of suddenly being supervised by a grandfather they’d never met and the nation’s flashy, flighty, bafflingly weird number one damn hero was a windfall for them. Maybe it distracted them from everything they’d lost.

He lays his phone down on his chest, lies back, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. Not helpful. Not productive. Hashing and rehashing the same shit, cycling it through his mind over and over until the shapes warp, accomplishes nothing except straining what’s left of his reserves. He has to knock this shit off. He has to find a way through.

He has to change.

He has to learn how to live with it, even if he can’t let it go.

Endeavor is in control of his universe again because he lost control of himself.

But it hasn’t been bad.

Endeavor hasn’t done anything.

Eiji fucking loves him, no less.

Natsuo is behind the curve on this one. Even Mom keeps telling him to give the guy a chance.

But no one is telling him he has to forget where they came from. What Endeavor did, then. What it meant, and what it led to, and what it was.

Natsuo crawls over to turn off the heater. Warming the bed up by yourself is crap, but it’s not as bad as starting a fire.

As soon as he stops rustling around, though, it’s too quiet without the low hum of the thing—the deep kind of silence, the same heavy hush as the funeral home, the lawyers’ offices, the wake, the waiting, the endless hours staring at the dark ceiling in absolute quiet, where Naru fussing his way up to a wail felt like the only proof that any of them were still alive without her there to anchor them.

He lies still on his side and stares at the wall. The words start to swirl, start to twist, start to fester, start to pry their way free even though he knows no one’s listening.

“Am I doing the right thing?” he whispers. “What the hell does that even mean anymore?”

No answer. Obviously.

“I miss you,” he says to the silence and the moonlight. “I miss you so much I don’t know—it’s not supposed to be like this. This wasn’t the deal.”

No answer. Obviously.

He rolls over and looks up at that sliver of sky.

“Help me,” he says. “Please. Now would be the perfect time for a sign, baby. Anything you’ve got.”

The clouds don’t shift.

No shooting stars.

No streak of moonlight passing over him, slow like a caress.

There’s no such thing as signs.

There’s just you.

And the dark.

And your best guess.

Chapter 6 Notes:

Hello, dear friends. I lived! ♥
Forgive me for not having caught up on comments – I'm trying, but my brain is SO broken I'm not entirely sure that the replies I attempted tonight are making sense. OTL
This time:
- 26K!
- shit, meet fan. I think you're going to hit it off.
- more Shouto (my beloved)
- the bit that Kae rightfully calls 'the beach episode'

Chapter Text

Six forty-fucking-five in the morning arrives exactly as too-soon as Natsuo expected.

He’s always struggled to sleep well in a new place, but this one was a prizewinner for obvious reasons, and it’s not like any of the sleep he’s scrounged up at various miserable hours back home has actually been restful anyway.

As he stumbles over to the bathroom, excessively grateful for the slippers protecting his bare feet the frigid floor, he catches himself thinking that tomorrow night might be better.

Huh.

He shelves that one. His kids are going to be up soon, if they’re not already. He gets to take Eiji to school for the first time in over a month, gets to help his babies eat their breakfast, gets to watch them scrub their eyes and yawn and blink and mumble.

He missed that.

He missed everything.

He even missed the tantrums, for fuck’s sake.

He washes his face and puts some clothes on, and tries to rinse some of the fitful-sleep exacerbated morning breath out of his mouth. He’ll brush his teeth later. Gotta set a good example and all that.

He keeps breathing. He has to set an example there, too. He has to make them believe that Daddy’s strong enough to keep going through the worst of this, so that they they’ll believe he’s strong enough to help them for the rest of their lives. He has to convince them that he knows what he’s doing, and where to go from here.

He straightens his hair out a little. Maybe tomorrow he can try smiling in the mirror or some shit. It feels like he’s out of practice.

He squares his shoulders and heads into the house.

Smells good inside, at least. And it’s warm.

Endeavor is cooking again, which still sort of feels like seeing a notoriously violent tiger with a spatula in hand. The kids are already at the table, Naru babbling away and banging blocks together while Eiji drowses in his booster seat.

Until Natsuo steps in, anyway.

At which point he calls “Daddy!” and reaches up with both arms.

“Hey, bud,” Natsuo says, crossing over to hug him tight and kiss the top of his head. His hair tickles. “You sleep okay?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says. Sometimes Natsuo tries to remember if he ever felt that particular flare of energy, the power of that enthusiasm. He always comes up from the archives of his memory empty-handed, but there must have been a time when the world was so new and big and beautiful and bursting with potential that he greeted every day with that same unfettered excitement and burgeoning joy.

“How about you?” Endeavor asks, quietly, glancing over his shoulder once instead of turning around. “Was it all right?”

Set an example.

Keep the peace.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. “It’s pretty nice in there. Thanks.”

Endeavor just watches him for another second instead of responding like a normal person. You’d think this fucking man had never had a conversation in his life.

“Breakfast is tamagoyaki,” he says. “But if you’d prefer something different, I can—”

“Nah,” Natsuo says. He squeezes Eiji gently one more time and steps over to ruffle Naru’s fluffy hair. “That’s fine.”

Take the high road. Take control.

He breathes out, braces himself, balances his brain, and battens down the surging impulses of the anger, whirling through him faster with every pulse of his blood.

That’s not a person he can afford to be anymore. He can’t blow up anymore, because he can’t blow it anymore. He can’t make any more mistakes, and being angry—or hurt, or sad, or scared, or all of them together—is what makes people fuck up. Emotions that get the better of you make you worse.

He scratches a fingernail very softly behind Naru’s right ear, earns a little chortle for it, and goes over to the counter. He stays a safe distance from Endeavor’s metal elbow, but he doesn’t set his jaw.

“You need any help?” he asks.

Endeavor looks at him again—judging, processing, whatever. Who the hell knows, given the way his brain is wired.

“Thank you,” he says, slowly. “It’s nearly done. You could get bowls for us and Eiji, and a tupperware for Hawks.”

Given that the winged wonder is MIA so far, with no feathers lurking around the kitchen and nary a sardonic comment from the other end of the house, Natsuo assumes that he’s still passed out after the day he had yesterday, so probably he’ll eat later.

Which is… kind of fair, all things considered. Natsuo doesn’t have to like the guy to respect the grind.

“Sure,” he says. He finds the right cabinet on the first try. Nothing has changed.

Except—

It has.

Because when he goes for cups for tea, they’re backed up against no fewer than seven different Endeavor-themed mugs—and one Hawks one with a shiny wraparound feather design. And when he goes for the chopsticks, they’re crowded in their compartment by multiple brightly-colored training sets, one of which somewhat unsettlingly uses Hello Kitty’s disembodied head to hold the tops together. And the fridge is full of bottles of formula and boxes of strawberry milk.

Endeavor scoops rice and an omelet into one of the bowls so swiftly and smoothly that it looks like he’s been doing this his whole damn life. He hands it over. “Eiji’s.”

Apparently Natsuo is a waiter now. Cool.

He delivers the bowl. “Here you go, bud.”

“Thanks, Daddy!” Eiji says, which makes the sudden career change more than worth it. “Thanks, Grampa!”

“You’re welcome,” Endeavor says. “Remember to slow down.”

“I know!” Eiji says, already digging in.

By the time Natsuo turns back towards Endeavor to try to get a read on whatever that meant, there’s a bowl in his face.

“Is this enough?” Endeavor asks.

It’s almost full. Natsuo doesn’t even want to eat. He can feel, distantly, that he’s hungry, but the desire to resolve that problem doesn’t exist—let alone the energy to act on the desire.

The parts of his brain that know that their duty is to sustain him resist, pushing and pulling at the rest of it, nudging the parts sequestered in shadow and languishing under the weight.

It smells appealing. He’ll have to eat eventually. It’ll be good to get to sit with Eiji for a meal again—he’s missed that, too.

He takes the bowl.

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks.”

A normal person would smile. Endeavor just looks at him for another second, piercingly, before turning around again and filling the tupperware up to the brim. He gestures with his elbow, guiding Natsuo’s gaze further down the counter. “There’s coffee if you want.”

Adding some jitters to the instability sounds like exactly the right kind of bad decision. Natsuo sets his bowl down next to Eiji’s place at the table and fills a mug—one of the plain ones, obviously—halfway. Then he sits down.

Everything tastes all right.

Eiji seems to love it.

He pauses in picking out bites long enough to smile over, and Natsuo’s heart shatters again. And again. And again.

“What’d you dream about, Daddy?” Eiji asks.

“I don’t remember,” Natsuo says. It’s a kind lie. “How about you?”

Eiji actually puts his chopsticks down. “There was a horse! He came up to the engawa in the middle of the night, and I heard him ’cause he had a big bell around his neck, and I went to go see. And he said we had to go, because there was gonna be a tsunami, but I said I had to get Naru and Grampa and you and Hawks and the frogs. And he said the frogs would be okay, and everybody else had already left, but I dunno how to ride a horse! And he said it’s just like in the movies—you jump up, and you go. Have you ever been on a horse, Daddy?”

“Nope,” Natsuo says. “Did you jump on?”

Endeavor brings Naru a bottle, which prompts a renewed bout of babbling that quickly gets lost in the avid sucking. Endeavor sits down. The chopsticks look slightly awkward in his left hand, maybe just because every motion of the right was always so damn authoritative.

“Yeah!” Eiji is saying. “And he flew up over the roof—”

“Was he a magic horse?” Natsuo asks.

Eiji wrinkles his nose. “He could talk, Daddy. He had to be magic.”

“Good point,” Natsuo says.

Endeavor reaches across the table.

Natsuo’s spine goes tight, his mind whites out, his heart races, his head roars—not his kid, not his fucking kid—

Endeavor’s fingertips graze Eiji’s forearm. “Don’t forget breakfast,” he says. “Otherwise you might get hungry at school.”

Natsuo breathes. Makes himself do it again. Makes himself hold the next one, let it out slow.

“Don’t they have snacks at school?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Eiji says, already burying the chopsticks in his food again, “but they’re gross.”

Natsuo remembers some previously-filed complaints on that topic. “Still? What are they giving you guys?”

Eiji makes a face. “Gross stuff.”

Natsuo instinctively flicks a glance at Endeavor, only to find him watching Eiji with a supremely weird sort of unsurprised patience that verges on indulgence. “You’ll want to make sure to finish your breakfast, then, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Eiji says, grabbing up the next bite. “Breakfast isn’t gross.”

“Good to hear,” Endeavor says, and then his attention shifts to Naru smacking the bottle down on the tray, and Natsuo eventually remembers he should probably eat his damn breakfast instead of just moving it around.

Eiji’s right, though. It’s not gross.

Natsuo is about halfway finished picking at the bowl when he hears keys in the locks on the front door, followed by boots hitting the wall, a faint sigh, and a rush of air.

And then Hawks is in the kitchen, ragged-looking wings propelling him rapidly forward to collide with Endeavor on purpose.

Hawks kisses Endeavor on the mouth this time, shamelessly and kind of hard—like it’s urgent. Like it’s a compulsion, not a choice.

Endeavor shuts his eyes and leans into it, left hand rising to rest against Hawks’s cheek and jaw, thumb sweeping up through the tangled hair at his temple.

Natsuo’s brain short-circuits. It is too fucking early in the morning to feel confused and surprised and a little bit repulsed and altogether like you’re unwillingly bearing witness to something you’re not supposed to.

Evidently Eiji has no such qualms, which has implications on its own.

“Hi, Hawks!” he says through his next bite. “Are you okay?”

Hawks pulls back from Endeavor, releasing a long breath, eyelids lifting slowly.

Then he blinks, plasters on a magazine-cover smile, and turns towards Eiji, reaching out to tousle his hair gently.

“Never better,” he says. “Thanks, kiddo. You have a good day, okay?” When Eiji crams more omelet in his mouth and nods, Hawks turns to Naru, who gets a scraped knuckle rubbed gently against his cheek. “You go easy on ’em today, troublemaker. I got my eye on you.” Naru giggles, grabbing for the nearest feathers. Hawks’s gaze slides across the table to Natsuo. He smiles, wearily this time. “Mornin’. See you later, huh?”

“Yeah,” Natsuo says.

If Hawks had just popped out to deal with a late-night emergency and then come back, he wouldn’t say it like that. This must be only a break before he goes back in to work and finishes out the rest of a full day, running on interrupted sleep and a crash nap.

Endeavor’s hand finds Hawks’s face again, enormous fingers threading themselves into the hair at the back of his neck. “Go rest.”

Hawks twists around fast enough to kiss the inside of his wrist before he pulls his hand away. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

He doesn’t leave Endeavor time to protest that, though: the feathers flicker, and he whips out of the room in a blur of red and gold. A door shuts down the hall.

Natsuo eyes Endeavor, trying to wring the silence for something like a clue, but the bastard’s just leaning over to wipe spit very gently off of Naru’s chin.

This is not the man he knew, then.

But he’s still the man who did those things.

And Natsuo knows even better, now, how suddenly the tide can turn and bring out the parts of you that you tried to kill. You never stop being the people that you used to be, no matter how far you run from where you started. No matter what you give. No matter who you beg for mercy.

Natsuo takes care of getting Naru ready—the burping and the changing of the diaper and the selection of the morning’s tiny, soft apparel items, which Naru will have dutifully coated with spit and spit-up and snot and God knows what else by eleven at the latest. The kid’s on a mission.

Endeavor sent Eiji trotting off to brush his teeth while making a start on the dishes, which left Natsuo to figure out the lay of the land on his own—which is better, honestly. Naru’s room is laid out pretty logically, and he doesn’t have to pull too many drawers to find all the neatly-folded new baby clothes. It’s bizarre. He was so used to seeing Naru in all of Eiji’s hand-me-downs that having all this different stuff for him almost makes it feel like it’s the first kid all over again.

Natsuo tries to keep the noise to a minimum, since Hawks is presumably trying to sleep on the other side of the wall. Fortunately, Naru plays along and doesn’t produce any particularly loud commentary on the little mobile of stars and planets over the crib, or about the clothes Natsuo picked for him. Hayami liked blue. She always said it was the light spectrum equivalent of aromatherapy.

Naru’s tail is two and a half inches long now—which is crazy fucking fast, because it was barely more than a nub before. Hayami had a little puffball of fur on the end of hers—the perfect kid tickler, as it turned out; he’d only ever just sort of stroked his fingers through it idly to try to help her relax, but apparently it had had a purpose all along—but some of the family members he’d met at the wedding had had tails with plain tips. At this point, they’ll just have to wait and see what genetics coughed up this time.

Naru has also started to develop very, very faint outlines of slightly darker pink on his palms and fingertips and toes and the balls of his tiny feet. Paw pads.

If history is indication, they’ll never quite be pronounced enough to prevent him from holding a pencil and won’t even really draw much attention, but—

But it’s amazing.

And it feels like someone shoved a metal spike between Natsuo’s ribs.

She should be able to see this. She should be the one kissing his little fingers and tugging his tiny socks into place, cooing back at him, dumbstruck and awestruck and staggered by how much of each of them you can already see in him.

Natsuo hopes his eyes don’t change color—lots of babies’ do, but the gray they are now looks exactly like Mom’s eyes. That’s special.

When they’re finished, Eiji’s voice from the genkan makes him drift down the hall with Naru a little bit faster—just in case.

“But I’ll be careful,” Eiji is saying, the whine twisting his voice into a higher register. “I’ll watch where I’m going and look for rocks or glass or—or bugs, or—”

“I trust you to try,” Endeavor says, quietly, “but there are a lot of things we can’t control. If we’re crossing the street, we need to look at the cars, and it would be hard to check for glass. You could get hurt very badly.”

“I won’t,” Eiji insists. “I don’t wanna, Grampa, please—”

Natsuo has always wondered where the bohemian streak in Eiji came from, since he’s never met another human being so deeply offended by the notion of footwear. Hayami had usually had to handle it on the difficult days—the That’s just how society works, kid argument doesn’t carry much weight with a three-year-old, and Natsuo hadn’t really been able to come up with a better one.

For now, though, he makes his own, much less objectionable feet carry him over towards the genkan so he can try to pitch in before the trademark Todoroki stubbornness makes them late as well as fundamentally miserable.

“How about this,” Endeavor is saying. “Can you wear shoes to school today, just to be safe, and then you can play in the garden without them in the afternoon?”

“Grampa,” Eiji says, “I don’t like them.”

“I know,” Endeavor says. “How about if we go to the beach this weekend? All of us. And you don’t have to wear shoes there at all.”

There’s a pause. Natsuo hesitates in the hallway, just out of view.

“No shoes?” Eiji says. “At all? The whole day?”

“That’s right,” Endeavor says.

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

Eiji sighs like this is the biggest sacrifice of his life so far. “Okay.”

Natsuo steps over the threshold. “What’s wrong?”

Eiji gazes up at him. “Shoes, Daddy,” he says, with the all-encompassing world-weariness that only an inconvenienced toddler can express.

The world’s greatest tragedy doesn’t quite stop him from cramming his feet into a pair of Dynamight-branded sneakers. He secures the two strips of velcro over the top of each shoe with fastidious baby-clumsy care and then stands and stomps his feet to make the soles light up orange.

If giving him the most enviable shoes at preschool was part of the footwear-acquiescence plan, Natsuo has to give some credit where it’s due: that was smart.

“Grampa, can I help?” Eiji asks as Endeavor draws his brown leather Oxfords—Oxfords—over towards himself, the laces trailing.

“Of course,” the alien inhabiting Endeavor’s body says. “Thank you.” He slides his feet in, shifts the left shoe forward towards where Eiji just crouched down, and takes up the laces of the right. “Are you ready?”

Eiji grabs up the laces on his side, mouth set. “Yeah!” He looks up, ecstatic all of a sudden about other people’s shoes. “Daddy, I can tie them! Mostly. Naru, you gotta watch, okay?”

Natsuo bounces Naru so that he’ll look over. “We’re watching, bud.”

Always. Always, in this house.

“Okay,” Endeavor says. “This side first—let’s fold it back to make a loop.”

It takes Natsuo a few seconds to realize that part of the reason Endeavor is moving so slowly is to help Eiji keep up, but part of it is the difficulty of getting traction against the lace with the fingers of his metal hand. Every motion is calculated and deliberate, keeping the little rubber protrusions of the fingertips aligned with the laces as much as possible, adjusting minutely as he goes.

It speaks to an incredible amount of practice that he pulls sharply and makes a tight, neat knot.

Eiji’s is… less impressive. The halves of the bow and both tails are lopsided, and the knot is sort of floating above the tongue. But the fact that he accomplished it at all, given where he ought to be with his small motor skills, is pretty damn amazing.

“That’s very good,” Endeavor says. “Thank you.” He puts his left hand on the step behind himself to lever himself up to his feet. “Let’s get your bag.”

“C’mon, Daddy!” Eiji says, reaching up to accept his tiny yellow backpack from Endeavor’s giant hands. “We don’t wanna be late!”

Endeavor hesitates again, then holds both arms out—the left more prominently—for Naru, so that Natsuo can put his shoes on, too.

Slow down. Breathe deep.

Natsuo passes Naru carefully over and grabs up his sneakers. “I’m right behind you.”

Sitting in the passenger seat is weird, but not any weirder than the rest of it. Endeavor drives one of those compact SUVs now, apparently. Maybe it gives him more space to cart around shit for the garden.

“Eiji,” Endeavor says right before the silence gets to be intolerable, “what are you going to do at school today?”

“Lots!” Eiji says, which is fairly ambitious given that he’s only got three hours to work with. “Isamu and I are gonna do this train puzzle we saw the other day, and I wanna go on the swings, and I wanna make a fort with the big blocks I was telling you about, Grampa. I dunno what craft time is gonna be. I wanna draw.”

“We can always draw when you come home, too,” Endeavor says.

“Okay, Grampa,” Eiji says. “Will you draw with me?”

“If you like,” Endeavor says.

Natsuo watches Eiji in the rearview. “Hey, bud?”

Eiji doesn’t even look up from his intense examination of his seatbelt. This kid. “Yeah, Daddy?”

“Why don’t you like wearing shoes?” Natsuo asks.

Eiji does look up at that. Natsuo twists as much as possible to meet his eyes around the side of the seat.

Eiji blinks at him. “I just don’t.”

“Do they hurt?” Natsuo says. Eiji blinks again, then shakes his head. “Are they too heavy?” Another headshake. “You just… don’t like them?”

“Yeah,” Eiji says.

Natsuo watches his expression, but the solemn toddler blinking continues unabated.

“Okay,” Natsuo says. “Just wanted to check.”

Eiji smiles.

He’s still smiling when they walk him up to the gate at the preschool, Endeavor having gathered Naru up out of his seat even though they’ll only be out of the car for ninety seconds. Eiji chatters the whole way over, pointing things out like Natsuo’s been gone for a year, not five weeks. It makes his heart ache worse. He might be getting used to that feeling.

Once he’s inside the gate, Eiji runs a few steps towards the door to his classroom before stumbling to a halt, turning around, and waving at them. Natsuo waves back until his elbow hurts.

He keeps waiting after Eiji turns the corner. Endeavor gives him the better part of a minute to stand there staring like an idiot before heading back towards the car.

They pack Naru into his seat again, and other than the occasional babbling, the drive starts out silent again.

As they near the neighborhood, though, Endeavor takes up hesitating in the meaningful way, shoulders and jaw both set, hands shifting back and forth along the circumference of the steering wheel. Apparently the great Endeavor fidgets now, too.

“Just say it,” Natsuo says.

Endeavor glances at him, looking surprised for a fraction of a second, and then—amused?

No. That Endeavor doesn’t do. He doesn’t even know how.

“Thank you,” Endeavor says.

What the fuck is going on today?

“For thinking of that,” Endeavor adds into the silence. “About his shoes. I didn’t consider that there could be another explanation.”

Natsuo looks out the window so that he won’t stare. “Doctor training. You—” Fuck it. The truth is the truth. “You did a pretty good job negotiating earlier.”

“I committed you to a beach trip,” Endeavor says.

“I like the beach,” Natsuo says. “Except in summer. He’s a tough customer.”

The houses flick by. He keeps his mouth shut. He’s not going to offer more.

“He does,” Endeavor says, with another trace of that impossible amusement, “make battling with the HPSC’s bureaucrats seem straightforward in retrospect.”

Natsuo wonders, sometimes, if the kids who grew up in the other houses on this street were happy—if their rich-ass parents paid attention to them in addition to paying for their tuition at the fanciest private schools.

He wonders if they were loved, in some way they recognized.

He can’t go Google-stalk them—even the rejects weren’t allowed outside very much. It’s perfectly possible that some of the kids he went to school with lived half a dozen doors down, and he just never knew, but he doesn’t have any names to go on. All he has is the sondering. The question mark.

Probably he’s being a fucking ingrate. If he sets his life against someone like Hawks’s, there’s no goddamn comparison. By those standards, the universe treated him like a prince.

He worked so hard to leave all of this behind—to build something new that could stand on its own, without the strings and the cobwebs, without the half-buried memories and the nasty nightmares and the endless pulse of anger waiting in his chest.

He tried so hard to be free.

The past never dies.

“Yeah,” he says. “Policy doesn’t mean too much to a three-year-old who wants to be a marine animal when he grows up.”

Endeavor grimaces. “It… may not have been a good idea to volunteer the beach.”

Natsuo tries to remember if he’s heard Endeavor admit to fault anywhere other than that hospital room and the bullshit press conference that followed.

Most of the cameras zoomed in, but he remembers one of them showing Hawks, too—still visibly charred, voice wrecked, but his tired eyes stayed fixed on Endeavor like there was nothing else in the damn world.

Maybe none of them even should have been surprised.

There are worse ways to make conversation than following that train of thought.

“Was Hawks out working all night?” Natsuo asks.

Endeavor’s hand tightens fractionally on the steering wheel. “He got the call about two thirty.”

Ouch.

The morbid curiosity wins out.

“How often does this happen?” Natsuo asks.

Endeavor’s fingers curl a little more. “On average, once or twice a week.”

Natsuo remembers a lot of nights and mornings when the house was silent like a burial ground, with a cautious reverence—remembers tiptoeing on instinct, like he could avoid summoning the dragon if he didn’t make a sound. It was understood that if Endeavor wasn’t at the house, he was at the agency. They all knew which one was more important.

But Natsuo didn’t understand, back then, what a job is—especially a job like this. What it takes, and what it takes from you. The way it drains the little bit of life you have, the way it bleeds you, the way it shakes you to pieces small enough to crush. The way you have to force yourself to keep going, keep doing the ‘right’ damn thing; the way you sit up in bed with your head pounding and your hands clammy and your mouth dry, and you choose to get up and do it again. How hard you have to fight to keep hold of any fraction of your humanity when the shit you see out there tries to grind it out of you one waking nightmare at a time.

He wasn’t paying attention to how often Endeavor left in the middle of the night, how often he never came to the house in the first place, how much of what he shoved aside was sacrifices for a world he couldn’t save.

Endeavor just kept trying to save it anyway.

And they all paid the price.

Natsuo looks out at the old trees, the tall fences, the looming mansions hunkered down behind them. “Has it gotten worse?”

Endeavor is quiet for a few seconds, but he isn’t gripping the steering wheel hard enough to indent it anymore.

“It got worse after All Might retired,” he says, slowly, like he’s making sure the words are perfect before he speaks them—and he probably is. “Between his presence and the enormous amount of resolutions he put in, he was covering a lot of ground. The time immediately after the war was… difficult in a different way. The chaos of the shattered infrastructure on top of the fact that so many pros had stepped down made it impossible to keep up. To some extent, it’s always been one of those things where the end result is determined by what you put into it—but there’s no upper limit. The more you give, the more it will take. And Hawks…”

“Wants to be like you,” Natsuo says. “Wants to be the best.”

“No,” Endeavor says, and the syllable is sharp with the certainty even though he keeps his voice low. “It’s never been about that, for him. He just doesn’t want anyone else to have to become what they made him into, and the only way he can see to prevent that is to try to improve the landscape by force. He’ll give anything he has to.” He exhales. “He’ll give up anything he has to.”

Natsuo eyes Endeavor sideways, watching the dappled morning light dance over the harsh lines of his face—the jaw, the cheekbone, the browbone, the stark nose, the vicious scar. Natsuo has always hated the way so many of those things sit on his own face—like he’s a mediocre copy hacked out of paler stone. He had to work so fucking hard to try to be softer than marble, to try to learn how to move.

“Except for you,” he says. Gross, gross, gross, as Eiji would say, but the truth is the truth. “Right? He’ll give up anything but you.”

Something ripples over the carving. “I—don’t know. I used to think…” He swallows, hesitates—since when does fucking Endeavor hesitate all the damn time? “I used to think it was convenient enough to be worthwhile for him, but ultimately dispensable.” His eyes tighten. “But if that was ever true, it isn’t anymore.”

He glances in his mirrors in practiced sequence, one at a time, and then looks over his shoulder into the blind spot before he signals, checks again, and turns—like he’s demonstrating the damn driving manual.

“Maybe I was always wrong,” he says.

Strangely, the street doesn’t fall away beneath them, and nothing explodes, even though that admission should definitely herald the apocalypse.

“I was afraid to believe in it,” he says, which is somehow even worse. “I didn’t trust myself to find a way to make it work, so I tried to convince myself that it was smaller than it was—that it mattered less, to both of us, than I think it always did. If I could tell myself that he wasn’t really invested in it, then it wouldn’t be a failing on my part if he changed his mind. If he didn’t mean it, then I could use that as an excuse not to put my heart into it, if the odds were high that it was temporary anyway.”

Natsuo’s heart hurls itself against the backs of his ribs. Caged animal. Barely contained.

“You put all of yourself into everything,” he says. “We all do.”

Endeavor’s eyes flick to him. “Precisely.”

On a very belated second thought, it occurs to Natsuo that he would actually rather rip off his own fingernails than discuss his abusive absentee parent’s fucking love life for the rest of this drive.

If there’s one good thing that can be said about Endeavor, though, it’s that he’s no stranger to a sudden, graceless subject change.

Natsuo folds his arms over his chest and tries not to notice how hard his heart is still beating. “How come Hawks isn’t buying the kids his own merch?”

Endeavor releases a breath that almost sounds like a sigh. “His code of ethics is still a black box to me. But I think… I suspect he wants to draw Eiji’s attention to Shouto and his friends instead. And to the others who have treated it… differently.”

The words burst out before Natsuo can wrangle them back and tie them down. “How’s he doing out there? Shouto, I mean. He’s only been talking to me about me, and Fuyumi doesn’t tell me anything anymore, because she doesn’t want to upset me or whatever. Does he talk to you?”

“No,” Endeavor says, with just the tiniest hint of another emotion under the flat neutrality—annoyance, probably, but it could be something else. Something softer. Something he covers up with the coldness. “I don’t blame him. He’s a little more open with Hawks sometimes. It sounds like he’s handling it. It’s…” He checks his mirrors again, hesitates, sets his jaw. “You’re always too young, and it’s never enough.”

With every fiber of his being, Natsuo hates how true that is, and how close that brings them, in this moment.

Endeavor has no fucking right to care about Shouto now. He had his chance.

Natsuo swallows the clapback. It rankles all the way down his throat, but he doesn’t want Naru to hear him snarling like an alley cat. He has to do better than that.

Prickly silence isn’t great either, but it could be a lot worse.

Endeavor doesn’t push it. Natsuo will give him that much.

When they get back to the house, Endeavor plucks Naru up out of the carseat—the parachute buckles on the little belts disappear beneath the breadth of his hands—and leads the way back inside. True to what he said before, he uses another set of keys.

Naru has a little more gas in the tank before the next round of naptime. He coos over Endeavor’s shoulder, reaching out, and smiles the big gummy smile.

Natsuo doesn’t even try to resist. He pulls a face as he reaches back, playing at it being a big strain, swinging and missing, grimacing and pretending to struggle. Naru giggles unreservedly, and something in Natsuo coils tighter while other things loosen just a little bit.

“Okay,” he makes himself say when the door is firmly locked again behind them, and all the shoes are neatly lined up near the wall—except Hawks’s boots, which are gone again. “Now what?”

Endeavor glances towards the kitchen. “I usually take him around with me and talk to him while I clean up and check on the garden.” He shifts Naru in his arm, tilting him towards Natsuo. “You could read to him until he’s ready to nap.”

It’s a good idea—good enough that Natsuo honestly can’t think of a better one. The fact that it came from Endeavor is the only reason his hackles rise, and his instinct is to balk. His body is being deliberately contrary even though his brain knows better.

He can’t help the fact that everything the bastard says resonates backwards—everything echoes with a thousand other things Endeavor said, snapped, snarled, shouted across the house. Everything is shrouded with the shreds of the past.

It’s a good idea. It doesn’t matter if it sounds condescending coming from him, if it feels like the unholy intersection of a command and a dismissal. Fuck’s sake, it’s not even like the guy is telling Natsuo to do the dishes. He gets the easy job.

It doesn’t mean anything if he agrees with Endeavor sometimes. It doesn’t determine anything about him. A good idea can just be a good idea.

He holds both arms out for Naru.

In the transformed living room, he hunts down one of the rows of books that Eiji was browsing before, while Endeavor starts making muted kitchen noises. He flips through the choices slowly, turning the covers towards Naru one at a time.

“Which one’s your favorite?” he asks. “Grab for the ones you like, bud.”

He holds each one up within reach. Naru is more interested in chewing on his own fingers than in any of the first four, but the especially bright colors on the fifth catch his eye, and he extends his hand towards it to spread some slime over the cardboard.

“I’ll take that as a vote of confidence,” Natsuo says, giving it to Naru to hold—barely—as he carefully hauls himself back up to his feet. “Let’s see what riveting literary masterpiece we’ve got today, huh?”

This future Sankei Award winner is about an anthropomorphized triangle who goes around meeting other shapes. The textures and colors are way more interesting than the story—that is, the ‘story’. There are lots of cutouts and little multimedia bits to guide Naru’s fingertips across: fluffy, scratchy, rough, smooth, ribbed, ridged, bumpy.

Naru spends a lot of time patting them and making unrelated sounds, then shoving his fingers back into his mouth. Natsuo doesn’t even have a good remedy for that back at home, because Eiji completely obliterated the teething ring they got him around this age. It had been made of that sort of rubbery plastic that you can’t break even though it has a fair amount of give, but Eiji had put so many teethmarks in the damn thing that it had looked like a pack of dogs had gotten to it.

Natsuo shifts Naru over into his left arm and takes his phone out to order a new one. Maybe they have an upgraded extra-strength model now or something.

Scrolling past the Order again! prompts for stuff he got for Hayami and then having to input this address for shipping makes him feel sick—but he can handle it. He can handle all of it. This is for Naru.

They finish out a good-sized stack of books—most of them eking in above the average mark for mind-numbing badly-rhymed heavy-handed allegories, at least—before Naru’s eyelids start to look heavy, and the yawning begins in earnest.

Up until now, Natsuo’s only seen Endeavor once—he swept in and back out, cutting through to collect laundry from the bedrooms and then carry it off to the far end of the house.

But the moment Natsuo says, “Are you getting sleepy, bud?”, the shadow reappears in the doorway.

“Do you want me to take him?” Endeavor asks.

It’s the volume, mostly—that’s what makes him sound so different, isn’t it? He keeps his voice so low that it doesn’t cut through the house, doesn’t carve through the air, doesn’t land like the head of a hammer.

“I can do it,” Natsuo says, nudging the books onto the next couch cushion and gathering an increasingly drowsy Naru up into both arms before starting for the hallway, cradling him in close to stroke his hair as they move.

There’s a pause, but then he hears the footsteps following him, a deliberate distance behind, as he heads down the hall.

Like Endeavor has any fucking right to mistrust him with his own goddamn kid—

It’s not even all in his head: he really can feel the hulking presence in the doorway, because the form that creates it radiates heat.

He changes Naru’s pants out for something a little comfier to sleep in, trying hard to focus on asking him the silly rhetorical questions about who’s a sleepy baby, and how sleepy, and if he’s ready for naptime.

Endeavor just stands there, filling the doorway, choking the air out of the room, until Natsuo has laid Naru gently down in the crib and tugged the blanket over him and tucked it in around him.

Then Endeavor strides soundlessly over to the dresser that Natsuo had been perching Naru on top of, where he fires up the fancy-ass baby monitor. He adjusts the little gooseneck camera that’s attached to the side, leaning way down to look at the preview screen. Apparently the live feed of Naru passes muster, because he straightens again, steps back into the doorway, folds his arms, and waits.

Nobody could prove that Natsuo takes a little more time fussing over Naru than he normally would, or that it has anything to do with spite.

Endeavor moves clear when Natsuo pulls the door quietly shut, but he doesn’t walk away.

Natsuo eyes him. “Now what?”

The eyes practically glow in the dim hallway. “That’s up to you. Generally I work out until he wakes up, and then it’s usually about time to go pick Eiji up again.”

A tiny spark strikes in Natsuo’s mind.

It catches.

It ignites.

“Train me,” he says.

Endeavor stares at him. “What—”

“I’m in pretty good shape,” Natsuo says. He can hear his heart in his ears, rushing with the giddy adrenaline and the disbelief. “And we’re here, aren’t we? So train me. Less of an interruption to your regularly-scheduled plan anyway, right?”

Endeavor watches him, stony face immutable, and says nothing.

Still not even good enough for open disdain.

“What?” Natsuo says, biting it out through the surge of acid streaming in his chest. “Is that still a privilege reserved for your favorites?”

The cold eyes don’t so much as flicker. “What do you want to learn?”

How to get to him.

How to hurt him.

How to matter to him.

How to tear the world apart.

“Teach me how to fight,” Natsuo says.

The silence settles heavily for a long second, the frozen eyes shifting incrementally back and forth across his face—searching.

Then Endeavor turns around, lumbering off towards his bedroom. “Go get dressed.”

The interim’s a blur. Natsuo packed some track pants with some vague notion of walking the kids around the neighborhood. His heart is beating in his throat so hard that he keeps thinking he’s going to choke on it—that it will keep swelling and slamming until it ruptures the wall of his esophagus or knocks one of his vertebrae out of whack.

It just—happened.

It just came out of him.

Is it what he wants? Is it just a bone to pick—another excuse to start something with the emblem of everything that went wrong? Is it just a last-ditch distraction from the ravenous, roaring void of all the pain?

Doesn’t matter.

He got it.

Time to find out what they’re both fucking made of.

His skin crawls as he approaches the training room, one step at a time. The faint slap of the backs of his slippers on the floor sounds intolerably loud, and his breath scrapes in and out of him like metal on concrete, and the thudding of his heart feels at once impossibly distant and like it’s shaking the structure of the world. His head swims. It’s like walking up to a murder scene, except that the corpse isn’t a stranger—it’s him. This is the place his childhood died.

Breathe.

He has to breathe.

The room hasn’t changed much. There are more streaks of soot reaching up the walls than he remembers, but none of them look new. The equipment is all clean and well-maintained, of course. Endeavor has always known how to take care of the things that are actually important to him.

The receiver of Naru’s baby monitor is set in the center of the seat of a three-legged stool off to the side. There are two gigantic nalgene water bottles on the floor next to it—one of which has had its measuring lines and numbers nearly rubbed off, the other of which looks like it’s never been used before.

Natsuo could tell by the sound that Endeavor hadn’t waited for him—he’s already jumping rope, the neon green plastic cord whipping around him so fast that it blurs to the eye, looking like a force field.

Or like a cage.

He’s so goddamn nimble with it even at his size that it’s weirdly mesmerizing for the second and a half that he keeps it up before he snatches the rope out of the air and coils it, favoring his left hand with every movement. He hangs it from a hook on the wall next to a rack of hand weights so large that they look like something out of a cartoon.

He reaches across himself with his left arm—as much as he can when his chest takes up so much fucking space—and pins his bicep to himself with his right arm, pulling at his shoulder to stretch it.

The expectant look is enough. Natsuo swallows down the retort about how well following Endeavor’s lead has ever worked for any of them and mimics the position. He went running a couple times without stretching first and regretted it. This is for his own benefit.

“Have you boxed before?” Endeavor asks, still sizing him up like a mutt at the pound.

“No,” Natsuo says.

Endeavor just nods once, then switches arms. The metal whispers across his T-shirt, almost snags.

The stretching feels like it takes a geologic age—just them and the silence but for the occasional faint crackle of the baby monitor, stranded in this old, battered room with Endeavor’s relentless thoroughness. Endeavor’s spine does make a really painful-sounding popping noise at one point, but other than that, it feels like the air thickens with the weight of this place, with the burnt-in echoes, with the unremitting misery of its purpose.

Natsuo can’t shake the image of Shouto’s face at four, at five, at six, at eight, mismatched and streaked with tears—glimpses of it from above the balcony, around the corner, like a dream, like chasing a ghost. He remembers Touya’s seething envy, the vituperations so vicious that they made him cringe even though a part of him started to agree. Stupid fucking Shouto erased the rest of them, like they’d never been—stole their place, their pride, their reason to exist; and he didn’t even want it. Stupid fucking Shouto made them all irrelevant by being born.

That’s what this room is for.

Destroying people while they’re still too young to understand.

Natsuo’s old enough to hold his own, now.

He’s old enough to fight back.

After some half-eternity of stretches that Natsuo never could have made up if he’d gotten high and watched an eighties aerobics marathon, Endeavor goes over to the cabinet against the wall and tosses him a roll of tape.

“Watch what I do,” he says.

As if Natsuo has ever had a choice. As if he ever once even got the option to look away.

Endeavor hooks his own tape below his left thumb and then wraps it around slowly, weaving it between his fingers and securing it around the base of his thumb, then drawing it over the side of his palm, covering his knuckles, and encircling his wrist. He pauses after every loop and twist to leave Natsuo time to copy the maneuvers one by one. This must be how he taught Eiji to tie his fucking shoes for him.

When they’re both mummified on the left side, Endeavor works much faster on the right—in spite of the seemingly pertinent detail that that damn hand is metal, and couldn’t sustain bruises if he tried.

He notices Natsuo’s skepticism, because he notices everything.

“It helps to fit the glove,” he says. “Friction.”

Natsuo isn’t sure he believes that, but he is sure that he doesn’t care much either way.

The quick job frees Endeavor up to eye him critically as he tries to remember the order of steps and mirror them for his opposite hand. Endeavor does have one thing straight: subtly manipulating material with your non-dominant hand is a pain in the ass.

But Natsuo learned a long time ago how to memorize instructions almost instantly, because there are so many damn life-saving procedures that you have to pack into your brain if you want to survive in the medical field—you always have to be able to pull one out of your ass in a crisis to save somebody’s life. His right-hand wrap isn’t quite as clean as the left, but bandaging an unusual shape isn’t exactly a new concept either. He flexes his fingers, watching them bend, and then looks up.

Endeavor has turned away, the better to open up the cabinet again. He tosses Natsuo a pair of boxing gloves that look nearly new, the finish creaseless and spotlessly clean. He takes out a second pair for himself, which look like they’ve had the shit beat out of them for a while, and lays them on top of the cabinet. There’s a third set inside that looks smaller. Maybe he and Hawks pummel each other sometimes. Probably that’d be right up Endeavor’s alley, and who the hell knows what kind of pressure releases a psycho like Hawks is into.

Endeavor nods to the gloves in Natsuo’s hand. “Not too tight. They should have a little give.”

Natsuo fumbles his way into them. Following Endeavor’s advice is slightly higher on the list of things he doesn’t want to do than accidentally spraining his wrist because he was too proud to listen to a fitness expert, regardless of that person’s other charred credentials.

While he’s tussling with the velcro for the second glove, Endeavor picks up a set of target boards and slides his hands into the straps. He raises them. They don’t look like they’ve seen much use—not like the huge bag hung from the ceiling, the surface of which bears a strong resemblance to a suburb after a major earthquake.

“The objective,” Endeavor says, “is to put your weight behind your arm by using the torque of your torso. The complication is that you need to stay light on your feet—you don’t want to commit your full momentum like swinging a baseball bat. Jab out, snap back, but with intentionality. Exhale when you strike. Shield your head with your forearms at all times.”

He lifts his to demonstrate, and Natsuo understands a few things about the Billboard rankings that he hadn’t quite grasped before.

He always saw a shitty father casting firelight from the stages, the podiums, the pedestals.

From here, though, it sure as hell looks like nobody on the fucking planet could hope to push past Endeavor’s arms and clock him around the head. He looks like a monolith, and the easy surety of his stance paired with the calmness of his cold eyes makes it patently clear that he knows exactly what he’s doing. There’s a startling fluidity to his movements despite his impossible size. He’s in his element, here. He’s effortlessly confident, with only a faint acrid trace of arrogance.

Natsuo hates him.

Natsuo hates the breadth of his shoulders and the ropy veins in his forearms and his neck, hates the way he plants his feet like an afterthought, hates the casual tilt of his jutting chin and the hint of boredom that he hasn’t even bothered to crush out of his expression.

He could, if he wanted. He’s very fucking good at crushing things.

He tips the boards in Natsuo’s direction, then straightens them again.

“Come on,” he says.

There’s hardly anything in the world he could have asked for that Natsuo would be happier to oblige.

He’s watched a lot more hero fights than boxing matches, but he caught a few—he remembers the way they moved, the bouncing energy of an aggressor staying nimble, constantly shifting their weight while searching for an opening. He tries to stay on the balls of his feet, keeping his eyes on the sliver of space between the boards. That’s a weak spot, as a matter of physics. That’s where he’ll break through.

He swings at the cushions on the boards a couple of times, alternating his right fist and his left like they do on TV.

But he was right.

Monolith. Monument. Mountain.

He gets a satisfying thud out of each hit, but the boards don’t even quiver in Endeavor’s hands.

“Give it more of your weight,” Endeavor says. His feet haven’t budged a goddamn centimeter. “Push from the shoulder, not the elbow. Imagine your elbow like a spring to pull it back.”

That last bit sounds like the same brand of envision it to enact it bullshit that they had Natsuo guzzling down at inpatient therapy, but he makes an effort to try the rest.

He gets a bigger, better, louder thud.

Endeavor still doesn’t move.

Natsuo tries to keep himself agile, adaptable, dancing back and breathing in deep before he dives for the gap between the boards again.

He propels his right fist with the force of all of his body weight and slams it into the closer cushion.

Endeavor’s eyes narrow. His fucking arms don’t even twitch.

“Easy,” he says. “If I’d dodged that, you’d have lost your balance. Stay in control.”

Oh, that’s fucking rich.

“I am,” Natsuo says, driving in again, but there’s something to it—Endeavor takes one measured step backwards this time, and he can feel his body tipping too far into the next swing.

“Be careful,” Endeavor says, and the stark note of scolding in it makes Natsuo’s blood burn. “This is skill-building. In a real fight, you want to end it immediately, not exchange blows. But learning the basics—”

“I know,” Natsuo chokes out, the words scalding the walls of his throat. He forces himself to step back, keep his heels off the floor, keep his eyes on the boards. He breathes deeper, tries to clear the steam out of his head, repositions his hips and his shoulders to settle his weight. He still has some power to put behind his arms without having to lunge into every hit.

He holds himself upright, paying more attention to his center of gravity, focusing on the movements of his feet as much as on his hands. Advance and retreat—in and out, back and forth, surge and recede, the rhythm of the tide and the universe. Keep his shoulders up, keep his eyes on the prize, keep his body aligned, his steps swift and light—

“Good,” Endeavor says.

Natsuo grinds his teeth. “Don’t do that.”

Endeavor’s eyes narrow. “Don’t talk?”

Deliberate misread. He knows.

“Don’t blow smoke up my ass,” Natsuo snarls.

The eyes narrow further, to little slits the color of superheated stars. “I’m not. You’re doing well, especially considering—”

“I’m not a kid,” Natsuo grits out.

Endeavor’s eyes go flat and hard and cold like metal. “I am acutely aware of that.” Natsuo can see the answering flare of fury hardening his fists, tightening his shoulders, solidifying his feet where they’re evenly spaced out on the floor. “I meant what I said. I’m not—”

“Don’t fucking lie to me,” Natsuo fires back, opening his hand to slam the heel of it into the board—anything to move him, to shake him, to change him, to topple the statue and crack the stone— “I never needed your fucking approval, and I sure as hell don’t want it now.”

Endeavor’s eyes narrow, and his spine twists subtly—tilting his chest, sinking his weight, holding his ground. “You can’t improve without feedback. I want you t—”

There it is.

The biggest lie.

The surge of magma crests and crashes.

Natsuo rams his fist into the space between the boards, aiming just like Endeavor said—putting himself behind it, winnowing the window of the application of the force to concentrate all of the energy towards that single spot.

“No, you don’t!” he howls, hearing it come out hoarse as his fist in the glove catches just the edge of the board on Endeavor’s right hand, colliding hard enough to turn it, hard enough to break through—

His knuckles slam into Endeavor’s collarbone.

And it’s not enough.

“You never fucking have,” he spits, bashing his elbow into the board, knocking Endeavor’s metal wrist aside—it hurts, but vastly distantly, a burst of a future bruise that belongs to someone else. “You never fucking wanted me, so cut the fucking bullshit, old man—”

He ducks just far enough to knock the other board aside with his shoulder as he straightens back up.

He reaches for Endeavor’s throat.

He doesn’t have time to breathe.

Endeavor moves like a shadow, impossibly fast, impeccably smooth. The fingers of his left hand burn against Natsuo’s forearm for a split-second, and his huge shoulder drops and rises and meets Natsuo’s sternum. The world spins, then flips over, and the burning hand releases him as the floor rushes up—

Natsuo tries to catch himself with his hands, but the gloves make him clumsy, and his body crumples underneath him. He drags a breath in, jerks his elbows in and underneath him, braces his forearms on the tortured tatami, and scrapes himself up onto them.

His head lists and wheels. How much was the sudden upending of gravity, and how much is the sheer fucking rage flooding his mind and drowning every conscious thought is anybody’s guess.

But the unholy heat blazing through him—scalding his skin, illuminating his veins—slings him back upright, steadying his knees underneath him as he staggers to his feet.

Endeavor dropped the boards. His knees are bent, his hands held loose—prepared, defensive.

He’s watching.

Natsuo scrabbles at the velcro biting into his wrists, rips the gloves off, hurls them away.

Then he throws himself at Endeavor again, bare-handed, visions glimmering—gouge him, tear him, make him fucking bleed for this, for all of it, for everything he’s been and done and burned to ash. Make him fucking hurt. Make him suffer for it.

Endeavor’s voice rattles the room. “Natsuo—”

The name of a byproduct. The name of a botched backup plan. The name of a discarded disappointment.

He goes for the eyes.

Endeavor twists back, huge left arm swinging up, elbow bent—Natsuo smashes into his forearm, flails out trying to reach past it, trying to grab at him—

Endeavor pivots, redirecting Natsuo’s momentum and sending him tumbling to the floor even faster this time. He just manages to catch himself on his right hand, but his left elbow buckles underneath him.

Not good enough.

He scrambles up to his feet again, hearing his breath rasp in and out of him, drying out his mouth. His heart pounds in him so hard that his fingers tremble until he curls them into fists.

He tries again. And again. And again.

And with every attempt, it’s like Endeavor moves at a different speed from the rest of the world—like time flows around him, passes through him, grants him favors. He always knows where Natsuo will reach or grab or swing, where the blow will land; always steps back or aside with horrific grace before Natsuo’s next move has even carried through. It’s like he knows what will happen before it does.

“Natsu,” he says, effortlessly diverting another try, and the gravel in his voice grates Natsuo’s nerves as much as it scratches at his ears. “Get a hold of yourself—”

Natsuo has always had a hold of himself—a tight one. Regulated. He’s always kept himself as unobtrusive as possible—always tried not to take up too much space. He’s always known he’d be fighting for scraps, and he’s always known that the demon in him would kill him if he let it loose. He’s always toed the line and kept his head down and followed the rules.

And what has it gotten him?

What has he won?

It’s not fair.

It’s not fucking fair that the world cuts down the good people, the best people—that it rips them to shreds at a moment’s notice and scours them away.

All while it offers the monsters an infinite list of second chances.

It isn’t fucking fair.

He lunges at Endeavor again, and the bastard’s left hand darts out—always the left, but diving at his right doesn’t help when he can move at such inhuman velocity. Endeavor catches Natsuo’s arm like always, twists in the direction of their combined momentum, shifts to release his grip and send Natsuo toppling over onto the floor.

There’s something in his eyes—something glinting, something sharp and dangerous, still indistinct.

It’s not remorse.

Natsuo scrambles back up, just quick enough to grab on to Endeavor’s wide wrist.

And he calls up his quirk.

Frost seethes up Endeavor’s massive forearm—thickening into a sufficient base, from which Natsuo calls up half a dozen spikes of solid ice.

He aims for the head—for the eyes, for the one Endeavor never should have kept after that disgusting scar split his face open, for the hallmark of the frigid fire that burned this whole damn family down to nothing.

The surging flame scalds Natsuo’s skin. It feels like a slap all the way across himself—he smells the hair on his arm burning in an instant, and his whole body jerks backwards instinctively as the heat unfurls across him, blasting up over his face like effluence from a furnace.

The spikes melt to nothing—some of the water splashes to the tatami, some of it sublimated right into steam, hissing as it dissipates harmlessly.

Endeavor’s hand clasps around Natsuo’s elbow before he can stagger back, hauling him forward with the leverage and then twisting again, forcing him inward so abruptly that his balance goes, his ankles tangle, and the floor rushes up to greet him one more time.

Pain blooms in his knee, and then his shoulder, and then his jaw—all of them meeting the tatami in rapid succession as Endeavor uses his weight to throw Natsuo down hard this time.

It works.

Endeavor’s concentrated efforts usually do.

The impact jars his brain enough that his vision wavers, flickering black shadows encroaching on his view for a dizzying second before they clear, and he tries to wrench his arms back underneath him enough to brace himself, draw himself back up—

Endeavor descends.

As always, he moves incredibly fast and fluidly in spite of his monumental size. Natsuo doesn’t even manage to raise his right arm before Endeavor’s fingers close around his wrist in a grip a vise would envy, slamming it down to the floor. The unyielding metal fingers of the right hand clench around his other arm—pinning that one further down his forearm, securing it too. Natsuo tries to get his feet beneath him to work up the leverage to fight it, but before his heels find purchase on the tatami, Endeavor’s knee plants itself in the center of his chest, pressing into his sternum—hard enough that he can’t twist a single inch; just too lightly to restrict his ability to gasp in the next miserable breath.

They stare at each other.

This is what Endeavor always wanted, isn’t it? This room was designed for his defeated children to gape up at him in awe and terror. This house was built to trap them with his exhibitions of violence, his endless shows of strength. These walls were constructed to contain the smoke, to help it thicken, to help it asphyxiate them all.

That same shit is in his eyes again—that same cold, crystalline thing, making them look deeper, darker, bluer.

Endeavor’s enormous chest heaves with a breath, digging his knee into Natsuo’s ribcage. The exhale sighs back out of him, and he lowers his head.

It’s watching him struggle with it—his jaw clenching and unclenching, his eyes flicking back and forth over the empty air beside them—and the measured release of his next breath that makes it click.

What’s in his eyes right now is—

Fear.

Not of Natsuo—fuck knows Endeavor isn’t afraid of anybody in the goddamn world, and he just demonstrated why.

But—

For him.

Fear for him.

Endeavor looks down again, searching Natsuo’s face for what feels like a long time before he swallows thickly and withdraws his hands, then retracts the knee. He sits down, cross-legged, and wipes his forearm across his shirt to clear some dampness from the ice that the flame didn’t dissolve. He looks at the floor for a few seconds, just breathing.

Then his gaze rises again.

“Natsuo,” he says, very quietly. “Nothing that you can do to me will bring her back.”

He’s right.

She’s gone.

Nothing anyone can do can change it. The horror is set in stone, carved into the cosmos, fixed in the past, sprawling out into a future so bleak it wrings Natsuo’s heart like a tired fucking sponge. What’s done is done. It’s already over. There’s nothing to fight, and nowhere to run.

There is nothing that can fill the hole in him that the world ripped her out of. There’s no fucking healing. There’s no salve. There’s nothing.

He can fling himself at brick walls—person-shaped or otherwise—until they cut him to ribbons. He can’t unwrite the tragedy. He can’t transfer the pain. He can’t trade an injustice in for a crime and expect the universe to offer her up to him for bringing the proud old Endeavor to his knees.

She’s never coming back.

She’s never fucking coming back.

He will never get to hear her footfalls on the doorstep, her keys in the lock, the “Hey, baby!” uttered with an unmistakable adoration that swept the worst of his day right out of him. He will never get to hop up from the couch and jog over to wrap her up in his arms before she’d even kicked her shoes off, before she’d even pushed her hair out of her face. He will never get to watch the way she watched Eiji—the way she somehow mustered up new heights of gentleness even though he would have sworn she’d kissed the ceiling of kindness with the way she’d always treated him. He’ll never get to slip his arm around her shoulders as she gathered Naru up to her chest and rocked him back and forth at two, three, four in the morning. He’ll never get to press his mouth to her cheek, her little pink nose, her soft ears, her forehead, her neck, her throat, the insides of her wrists, her knuckles, her lowest rib, her hips, the small of her back, her perfect mouth as she started to smile—

She’s gone.

And Endeavor’s right.

He has to keep living.

He has to do better.

The kids are going to need him.

Eiji and Naru are going to have to go the rest of their lives without a mom. This shit excuse for a fucking world has already taken so much from them—he can’t, he can’t, make it worse.

He wedges his arms underneath himself and sits up. The tightness climbs his throat, claw-fingered, greedy and ineluctable. He lets the first breath hitch in and out of him, lets the second one shiver, draws his knees up to his aching chest and drops his forehead down onto them. He lets the tears come.

Endeavor is a liar and a bastard and a bully and a hypocrite, but not about this.

Natsuo doesn’t have much in him. The tears mostly just leak out slowly these days, like a reflex. His body is too enervated from all the long, long stints of abject sobbing to muster a whole lot more.

He catches his breath again before too long. He scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands, and the tape scratches against his face. It stings, distantly. He pulls up the bottom hem of his shirt instead and wipes his cheeks with it. Fucking Endeavor made them all stand there while he dripped snot into an oxygen mask in front of total strangers. It’s his turn to cope with a little bit of indignity.

Endeavor doesn’t flinch. He sits still, breathes steadily, says nothing. He waits it out.

And then he stands, every movement deliberate—hand spread on the tatami, weight shifted onto it, elbow locked, muscles tightening as he braces them; and then his knees slide, and then his huge feet.

He breathes out, when he’s upright.

He crosses the room, footsteps patting strangely softly on the floor, and picks up the gloves that Natsuo cast aside.

He comes back.

And then he offers Natsuo his left hand.

“We’re not done yet,” he says.

Natsuo stares at him.

His eyes narrow, just slightly. He doesn’t deign to flex his fingers.

“It helps to have something else to focus on,” he says. “It’s better than nothing.”

Natsuo can’t say he’s sure about that.

But he’s out of options. He’s out of ideas. He’s running out of steam, and out of spite. There’s nothing left to burn.

He reaches up and clasps both hands around Endeavor’s, waiting until the huge fingers curl around the side of his palm before he starts to pull. Endeavor hauls him upright. It doesn’t even look like he has to try.

Endeavor lets go, and offers him the gloves again.

He takes them.

Endeavor retrieves the target boards. He slides his mismatched hands back into them, and positions his feet, and holds them up.

“Again,” he says.

Natsuo’s energy dwindles before Naru has even started fussing on the monitor—and before Endeavor has let him anywhere near the punching bag, but he doesn’t have it in him to care anymore.

He strips the gloves off, hands them over, unwinds the tape, balls it up. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Endeavor says.

Natsuo eyes him, but it probably looks more weary than wary at this point.

“We’re going to run down to the market once we pick Eiji up,” Endeavor says, putting the gloves away. “Think about what you want for dinner.”

Shoving aside the searing rush of resentment at the way Endeavor is ordering him around again, he stumbles on the rest of it.

It sounds—

Strangely idyllic, all told.

Eiji loves being outside, loves public places, loves making grown-up decisions like what to eat—and people love him, and dote on him everywhere he goes, because he’s charming and shockingly smart on top of being adorable as all hell. He probably treasures the experience every time.

Natsuo envisions the smile, the excitement, the way those sweet little carbon copies of Hayami’s eyes would light right up.

“Okay,” he says.

Wait.

“What market?” he asks. “How far is it?”

Endeavor pauses. “About two miles.”

Fuck.

Endeavor pauses again. “Each way.”

If Natsuo survives this, maybe he’ll try to kill the guy again tomorrow.

Eiji bolts down the paved walkway at the preschool to meet them. He flings his arms around Natsuo’s knees, then releases and slings them around Endeavor’s shin instead. “Hi, Daddy! Hi, Grampa! Hi, Naru!”

“Hey, bud,” Natsuo says. “How was school?”

“Good!” Eiji says, grabbing for Endeavor’s right hand to avoid displacing Naru, then reaching for Natsuo’s left. “We did the train puzzle! And the swings! Grampa, can we draw at home?”

‘Home’.

Holy fuck.

It’s been five weeks.

“Yes,” Endeavor says. It looks like he’s walking in slow motion to keep pace with Eiji, especially compared to the way he was moving hardly more than an hour ago. “Is it okay if we let your daddy choose what’s for dinner tonight?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says. He kicks at the paving stones, scuffing his much-maligned shoes against them until the soles light up again. “What do you want, Daddy?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Natsuo manages as they approach the car. “Maybe we can see what they have and decide when we get there. What do you think?”

“That’s good, Daddy,” Eiji says. “You’ll like the market! They’ve got so many fish! But they’re the whole fish, they’ve got eyes and gills and fins and—and—scales and stuff!”

“No kidding?” Natsuo says. A vision darts into the back of his mind, of Endeavor setting Eiji on a stepladder so that he can reach the kitchen countertop, forcing him to learn to gut a fish.

“They’re stinky,” Eiji says, equably. “But sometimes Naru’s stinky, and he’s still my favorite. And fish taste good.”

“That’s true,” Natsuo says.

Endeavor releases Eiji’s hand to open the car door, and Natsuo lifts his wriggly charge up into the backseat while Endeavor heads around the back of the car to deposit Naru in the brand-spanking-new carseat on the other side.

Eiji’s face crumples up as Natsuo buckles him in. “How about you, Daddy? Was your day good? Are you okay?”

This must be pretty close to what it feels like to get hit by an eighteen-wheeler.

“Yeah, bud,” he gets out. “I’m okay. It’s really nice of you to ask. Thank you.”

Eiji smiles, the enduring worry at war with a burgeoning hope. “’Course, Daddy.”

It’s a need, not a desire, to lean in and hug him tight, booster seat be damned. Eiji’s tiny fingers clutch into his sweatshirt. The warmth of him hushes something—quiets some fraction of the tempest, even if the storm’s too big to stop.

“Bahhhh,” Naru says.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says, making himself draw back. “We oughta go get some lunch, huh?”

“I love lunch!” Eiji says. “You will, too, Daddy! Grampa’s a good cook!”

Endeavor has already slipped into the driver’s seat, shutting the door so softly that it barely registered. He turns just far enough to look at Eiji—seriously, as ever, but his eyes are softer than Natsuo’s ever seen them. “Thank you. Your Auntie Fuyumi taught me. She’s much better than I am.”

“She’s a master chef,” Eiji says, with the effortless assurance unique to toddlers still convinced that the world bends to their will. “She should have a show on TV.”

“Watch your hands, bud,” Natsuo says, and Eiji lays them flat on the little tray of the booster seat, and Natsuo closes the door. He breathes out as he takes the two steps, and then he climbs into the passenger seat and puts his seatbelt on. Endeavor doesn’t start the engine until after the click. “Maybe you should tell her that—about how she should have a show. Then she could teach all of us how to cook, huh?”

Endeavor looks both ways and into every mirror twice before he even hits the gas to pull the car out into the street, and Eiji starts to ramble about how the show would be for other people who don’t have an auntie, because they can just call her any time, and Grandma’s a good cook, too.

Natsuo’s phone pings in his pocket.

It’s Shouto.

How is it going?

There’s something deeply reassuring about the fact that Natsuo could tell him It’s the weirdest nightmare I’ve ever had, and Shouto would understand. He wouldn’t go prospecting for silver linings. He wouldn’t try to peel a bright side off of the surface of the shit.

Natsuo breathes in, breathes out, doesn’t look sideways.

Could be worse, he writes. It’s the truth, after all, and Shouto’s got enough to worry about.

Shouto like-reacts to it.

Then he adds:

I could come by tonight. Let me know.

The thought of having him there, diverting the intensity, makes something else loosen up in Natsuo’s chest.

Only if you WANT to, Shou. I know you’re busy as hell.

Shouto likes that, too.

Then he writes Warn him it’ll probably be about dinner time and that he DOESN’T need to make soba for the millionth time, I can and will eat other food

Natsuo shares that message word-for-word, albeit partly just to watch Endeavor wince.

He does not get the last laugh.

Before the past few weeks, he was doing his best to stay in decent shape—he needs to be able to lift forty unevenly-distributed pounds at a standstill; he needs to be able to chase an over-stimulated ball of energy and catch it before it can veer into the street; and sometimes he needs to be able to drag unconscious human bodies, carry stretchers, and maintain his balance in a racing ambulance just to do his job. He used to jog a bit, used to walk to work, used to try to make a showing at the gym at least once a week when it wouldn’t leave Hayami in the lurch dealing with the kids on her own. One of Hayami’s coworkers’ daughter had been a pretty good babysitter when Mom couldn’t come by, so that at least they could both get out of the house here and there when they needed to.

He’s not exactly a marathoner, but he figured this wouldn’t be a big deal.

So far, it’s been all right. They’re moving at a good clip, and he thinks two miles is going to feel a whole lot further than he anticipated, but he’s holding up.

Up until he discovers that when Endeavor said the run to the market was two miles, the bastard neglected to mention the fact that there’s a monster of a fucking hill at the halfway point.

Endeavor’s pushing the stroller, which he makes look effortless, like so many of the things he does that aren’t anywhere near that easy.

This hill is going to be an absolute beast.

But damn if Natsuo isn’t going to show him a thing or three. If Endeavor wants to bring out the stubbornness he burned into all of them, so be it—a reflection of his own furious tenacity is what he’s going to get.

Natsuo sets his jaw, and his mind, and keeps moving.

A third of the way up the slope, he’s starting to think furious tenacity is highly overrated.

“Faster, Grampa!” Eiji calls, both arms flung up like he’s on a roller coaster. “Go fast!”

The familiarity of it tells a story.

Natsuo eyes Endeavor. “You’re going easy on me.”

Endeavor glances at him, eyebrow slightly raised. It’s as good as admitting it.

Natsuo’s blood boils—he can’t afford it. Cool it, cool it, haul it back in. “Well, don’t.”

Endeavor takes a breath, which rises right up to the edge of an exasperated sigh. “Natsuo, it’s not a matter of the challenge. It’s a matter of practice to build up endurance, which—”

“Don’t,” Natsuo says again. He’d say it louder, but Eiji—

Eiji is right here. Is the thing. And it’s not worth it. Endeavor’s not worth it. He has to stay calm.

Endeavor pauses—in aspect, but also in the run. He keeps his left hand firmly clasped around the handle at the back of the stroller, arches the eyebrow unbroken by the scar again, and then glances up the hill.

“All right,” he says.

He takes off again, twice as fucking fast—like the steep incline doesn’t even exist, and he’s about to miss a damn bus if he doesn’t book it to the top.

Furious tenacity is a fucking scam.

Natsuo doesn’t exactly keep up, in any traditional meaning of the term, but at this rate, not collapsing on the pavement in a sweat-soaked heap is something of an accomplishment, and he’ll take what he can get. The way Eiji whoops and giggles and waves his arms in the air goes a long way towards preventing him from giving up on existence altogether, and Endeavor does wait for him at the top.

He straggles up, panting, and makes a motion that’s supposed to be Let’s keep going. It’s completely insincere. They have to have at least another fucking mile to cover, and lying down underneath a rosebush and taking a nap of shame sounds like the most viable option available by a longshot.

Endeavor leans down and asks Eiji to try counting to twenty. It takes three rounds of countdowns before Natsuo catches his breath, but he does, in the end—and his kid is a goddamn genius. It’s pretty tough not to let the positive attitude creep in a little bit.

“Okay,” Natsuo gasps out. “You can—you can go—a little easy—on me. For now.”

The half-smile isn’t quite as condescending as he would have thought.

When Natsuo can stand up straight again without wheezing, Endeavor twists the stroller and tilts the handle towards him.

“Your turn,” he says.

Downhill.

Cute.

Fuck it, though. It’s high time Natsuo practiced checking his pride at the door. Eiji and Naru need the best of him. They need the man he could be.

This side isn’t quite as steep, but he does keep both hands tight around the handle, and he plants his heels so that he won’t slip as he navigates. The last goddamn motherfucking thing any of them needs is for him to dump his babies out on the asphalt because he overestimates his strength.

Endeavor hovers closer by his elbow than he’d like but doesn’t interfere. Natsuo thinks they both breathe a sigh of relief when they all make it to the bottom of the hill unscathed, and it’s a little easier from there—not least because Endeavor lets him set the pace.

It also helps that the bastard addresses all of Eiji’s cheerful little comments, so that Natsuo doesn’t have to sustain a conversation when all of his breath is already earmarked for survival.

The market’s nice—expansive without being too overwhelming, busy but not crowded. Half the vendors wave to Eiji and ask him how he is. Several of them look at Natsuo and then back to Eiji, and then look at Endeavor.

And Endeavor tips his head towards Natsuo. “This is my son.”

The first time, Natsuo doesn’t steel himself in time, and the words make him flinch.

Repetition files the edge off of it. It just starts to sound like a greeting—like a platitude. Hi, how are you? Any plans for the weekend? The weather’s been great. This is my son. What’s on sale today?

By the time they reach the guy selling ‘the chicken Eiji likes’, they’re just syllables, just sounds—just noise. They roll off of him, part around him, disappear.

Except that the chicken guy grins broadly, putting his gloved hands on his hips.

“I never would’ve guessed,” he says. He gestures between them. “No family resemblance at all.”

Endeavor gives him a dark look.

He laughs, wipes his hands, and sweeps them out at his refrigerator case of meats instead. “The usual?”

“A half-pound more,” Endeavor says. “My youngest is also visiting tonight.”

Eiji flings his hands in the air again. “Uncle Shouto! My uncle is Shouto—the hero! Did you know?”

The chicken guy casts a sly look at Endeavor before leaning over the top of the case. “I thought he might be. Quite a family you’ve got.” He glances up at Natsuo, then jerks his chin towards a cup of lollipops. “Can Mr. Eiji have one?”

“I think that’s up to you,” Natsuo says, “given that they’re yours.”

The guy laughs again. He reminds Natsuo of Hawks in the worst way—although that might be redundant to think, given that there probably isn’t a good way. “Take one for yourself, too. Sweeten up your day!”

Fuck it. Natsuo takes one. He needs all the help that he can get.

The run back isn’t exactly enjoyable, but at least he knows what to expect.

When they reach the hill again, he takes back what he said earlier about this side being shorter. It looks like a lot of things, but short sure as hell isn’t one of them.

Natsuo stares up at the slope ahead.

Eiji throws his arms up again, eagerly. “C’mon, Daddy! Go fast!”

Natsuo steps back and twists the stroller towards Endeavor, tilting the handle towards him.

“Your turn,” he says.

Endeavor laughs.

It’s a quiet, creaky, awful little fucking thing, but—

Natsuo didn’t know he could.

Cramming the groceries into the fridge around all the formula and strawberry milk is no easy feat. Natsuo fills up the crisper drawers before he knows it. Endeavor grabbed out last night’s leftovers to work up into lunch. Eiji sits at the table, doodling prolifically with crayons and chattering even more avidly than he draws. Preschool seems much more eventful nowadays than Natsuo remembers it.

Endeavor prompts Eiji as he talks, asking for details about the games they played, how long they spent on the swings, what mediocre snack were offered up today. Eiji says they tried to feed him worms.

“Wow,” Natsuo says. “That’s not good, bud. We might have to get them in trouble.”

There’s a pause. He looks up from his fridge quest, keeping his expression as neutral as he can.

“Well,” Eiji says, slowly, “maybe it wasn’t worms.”

“It’s still okay if you didn’t like it,” Natsuo says.

Eiji makes a Hm noise, and then bends over his drawing again. “Auntie Fuyumi should make the snacks. I bet she could make worms taste good.”

“I bet she could,” Natsuo says.

Endeavor turning away catches his eye. Another smile—faint, but genuine. It makes him look like a different person altogether.

Maybe he is.

Maybe that’s the point.

It doesn’t erase the shitty person that he was—the million shitty people that he’s been—but Natsuo can’t pretend it isn’t there.

He closes the fridge, stands up, and breathes in deep.

When Natsuo goes to put Eiji down for his nap, he gets the breath hugged right back out of him before Eiji settles down in the neat little bed. It almost squeezes a few more weak tears out, too.

He straggles back to the living room and finds Endeavor settled on the floor in front of the couch, tapping away at a laptop while Naru avails of the play gym’s apparently infinite mysteries. Natsuo figures that that’s his cue to go get his impossibly stupid so-called homework. He doesn’t really want to sit around and toil aimlessly next to Endeavor, but he doesn’t want to leave Naru alone, either.

It’s weirdly peaceable, anyway. Endeavor leaves him alone and keeps quiet except for occasionally responding to a particularly enthusiastic squeal from Naru with a quiet “Is that so?”

Natsuo makes himself focus in on the task at hand for a while, but when it’s getting close to time to wake Eiji up again, he knows he needs to bite the bullet just in case this starts to go sideways fast.

“So what’s the long-term plan here?” he asks, trying to pitch his voice as calmly as he can. “You said we have to report to the social worker pretty soon. Then what?”

Endeavor looks at him for a long moment, and the eyes are unreadable.

“That’s up to you,” he says, slowly. “I don’t know what other assessments they might have to do, but it’s your life. Think about what you want it to be now. I’ll do what I can to help you make it work.”

The really fucked thing is that he clearly believes himself.

Natsuo doesn’t.

But there’s a sliver of him that wants to.

Dinnertime rolls around. Natsuo slices vegetables while Endeavor does pretty much everything else. It’s a good arrangement, honestly. Natsuo can’t fuck this up enough to get yelled at or to ruin his son’s meal, but he doesn’t have to feel guilty for sitting on his ass while someone else takes care of his kid.

Endeavor looks up.

A full second later, Natsuo hears commotion from out front.

“I need to know!” Hawks is saying. “For science, okay? I am a student of the human condition.”

“You’re nosy,” Shouto says.

The door opens, making Hawks’s laugh louder by the moment. “I am so clearly both.”

Eiji’s mouth falls open. He looks to be torn about who to yell a greeting to first.

The air rustles, and Hawks appears in the center of the kitchen, slicing through like a gust of wind. A tiny feather tickles Naru’s cheek and then dances above his reaching hands as he coos and claps.

“Hi, kiddo!” Hawks says, ruffling Eiji’s hair. “Look who the bird dragged in!”

Endeavor sighs. “That’s not—”

“Hey,” Shouto says, sauntering in with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He’s wearing his hero clothes. There’s a streak of someone’s blood on his right thigh. His eyes flick around the room, then linger on Natsuo. “How is everyone?”

Endeavor went still by the stove, watching Hawks first and then Shouto, but he busies his hands again.

“Great!” Eiji says. “How are you, Uncle Shouto?”

Shouto smiles slightly. It still looks a little foreign on him—unfamiliar.

“I’m doing well,” he says. “Thank you for asking. May I see what you’re drawing?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says, scrabbling to gather the paper up from the table and hold it out to show him. “It’s the garden, see? I got the bridge and the tree, and there’s owls! We heard them last night! Daddy’s gonna listen for them, he promised.”

Shouto’s smile widens. “That looks great. I think owls are the coolest birds.”

“Dang,” Hawks says. “What am I, chopped liver?”

“You’re a less celebrated species,” Shouto says, calmly.

“He gets celebrated enough,” Endeavor says. He pulls a dish off the heat and hands Natsuo a bowl—this one is for Eiji. Natsuo hates that he knows that without any words being exchanged—it feels too intimate. It feels like something that should only be possible if they got along. “It’s someone else’s turn.”

Hawks mimes being stabbed in the heart. Extensively.

Endeavor takes advantage of the histrionics to cross over to him, catching the collar of his coat in one of those giant hands. Endeavor positively fucking looms over Hawks, but—as has, maybe, always been true—Hawks is utterly unperturbed.

“I’m fine,” he says as Endeavor pushes his tangled hair back off of his forehead, then pulls the collar away from his neck, then inspects his hands.

“That’s what you said the other night,” Endeavor says. He straightens the coat collar again and very gently pushes the center of Hawks’s chest. “Go clean up.”

Hawks grins at Shouto, raising his right hand with his middle finger hooked around the first. “Bossy and nosy. Good match.”

“Go,” Endeavor says. “We’re not holding dinner up for the likes of you.”

Hawks laughs.

Then he vanishes, his passage marked only by the faintest streak of red.

Endeavor mutters something indistinguishable as he comes back to the counter. He hands Natsuo an empty bowl, and then goes over to deliver an empty one to Shouto, who’s been leaned over Eiji’s shoulder to admire the art, next to which the bowl that Natsuo just delivered sits unattended. “Serve yourself,” Endeavor says. “There should be plenty.”

“Thank you,” Shouto says. He meets Natsuo’s eyes. “Go ahead, Natsu.”

Endeavor doesn’t acknowledge it—instead retrieving one of the bottles from the fridge, heating it in his hand, and trying to coax Naru to trade out the latest well-slimed block for it.

Shouto watches the faint curtain of steam still drifting from the back of Endeavor’s hand. “That must be useful.”

“Extremely,” Endeavor says. Naru cedes his prize into Endeavor’s metal hand and accepts the bottle, at which Endeavor strokes his left-hand fingers lightly through the pale fluff of Naru’s hair before striding out through the living room. “Go ahead and get started.”

Shouto watches him walk away, then turns to Natsuo and shrugs.

Natsuo is one step ahead of him, and makes as much noise as reasonably possible filling up his bowl so that he won’t hear whatever nonsense Endeavor sees fit to say to Hawks when they’re alone.

Eiji wasn’t wrong—the food is good. Fuyumi could still cook circles around all of them put together, but it’s worthy of seconds.

Hawks must still be in one continuous piece: he leads Endeavor back into the kitchen by the hand after only a couple of minutes. He’s wearing an Endeavor-branded sweatshirt—one of those especially stupid designs that’s just a big flaming E.

He’s barely even sat down at the table before he spills rice all down the front of it, screams out loud, and zips down the hall towards the laundry room so fast that his bowl spins on the tabletop.

Eiji stares after him. “Grampa, is—is Hawks okay?”

Endeavor is watching the doorway, too, a deep line dug in between his eyebrows. “Yes. He’s just very tired.”

Eiji plays with his chopsticks. “Maybe he should have naptime, too, Grampa.”

Endeavor smiles again. “Maybe he should.”

“Heard that!” Hawks calls from the direction of the laundry room.

Endeavor reaches out to nudge Eiji’s bowl a little nearer to him. “Are you getting enough?”

“Yeah, Grampa!” Eiji says. He turns towards the rest of the table, eyes wide. “Did everybody?”

Natsuo rubs Eiji’s shoulder first, to buy himself an extra second to clear his throat. “We’re okay, bud. Thanks.”

Eiji smiles at him—then twists around, leaning halfway out of his seat to peer at his brother, who’s still valiantly slurping away. “Are you okay, Naru?”

Naru blinks at him over the bottle, then pauses in drinking just long enough to grab for him, wet fingers gleaming. “Gahbah.”

Eiji nods sagely. “Good. You gotta get big and strong.”

Natsuo catches Endeavor smiling again.

And it’s just—

Too much.

All of a sudden, it’s too much, like it crossed a threshold—flipped a switch. Like Natsuo’s head is swelling, like the dam is flooding, like the fuse is dwindling, like the walls are crumbling all at once.

He sets his unfinished bowl down on the tabletop, shoves his chair back, grazes his hand over Eiji’s arm, gets up, and walks away.

The plaintive “Daddy?” that trails him makes his heart writhe in agony, but he can’t go back. He’ll say something—do something, start something, break something.

He has to walk past Hawks, leaned against the doorway to the laundry room in just a black T-shirt and his jeans. The baggy coat and the loose hoodies mask the breadth of his shoulders and the bulk of his arms. He’s a hell of a lot smaller than most of this family, but even without the hundreds of knives on his back, he’s no damn slouch.

Hawks just watches him pass—arms folded, one ankle kicked up over the other, eyes impregnable and unwavering.

Natsuo lets himself out onto the engawa and closes the door behind him.

He makes himself breathe.

It’s okay. There are enough people in this house right now who really do have the kids’ best interests at heart—well, there’s definitely one, with passable odds of two—that he can afford to take a break before his tenuous control starts to slip. This isn’t selfish: it’s smart. He’s playing the long game. He’s pacing himself.

He sits down on the edge of the engawa, rests his elbows on his knees, holds his head in both hands, and just… breathes.

The dim blue twilight feels faraway and indistinct and unchanging—he can’t tell how much time has passed by the time that the door opens behind him.

He can tell from the footsteps that it’s Shouto, but that would have been his guess regardless. Hawks and Endeavor would just let him be.

Shouto sits down next to him and passes him his bowl, and then his chopsticks.

“I don’t deserve you,” Natsuo manages.

“Shut up,” Shouto says, voice faintly warm.

Natsuo adjusts his fingers around the chopsticks until he has enough leverage to move them. His hands feel like they belong to someone else, and he’s urging them along from a great distance, with no guarantee that they’ll interpret the signals that he sends.

He takes a bite he can’t taste. He looks at the fountain. He looks at his feet.

Shouto will understand.

He lays his chopsticks down over the edge of the bowl, sets it aside, and scrubs both hands over his face.

“I feel like I’m going crazy,” he says.

The quiet settles. The arm of the fountain clacks down—swings up—fills—trembles—tips—and clacks down again.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Shouto thinks he’s stronger than this, thinks he’s stabler, thinks the comparatively easy life he’s had, out of all of them, shouldn’t have depleted him. Maybe Shouto thinks he should be able to take it. Maybe Shouto thinks it’s his damn turn.

He always has this instinctive sense that Shouto is on his side, because they’re brothers, after all. Their souls are sketched out on the same page. Their heart cells were built from the same blueprints. Fuyumi will never give up on him. He’ll always see a sliver of Touya in the cold, dead eyes of the demon that tried to burn the whole world down to ash. His guts will always drop out of him when he watches footage of Shouto fighting in the field.

But even though they’ve done a lot better over the last couple of years, he still doesn’t actually know Shouto all that well. They never got the chance to cultivate the specific solidarity that comes of blundering around the house and the garden and the street and the school. They never got to stay up late whispering, never got to have a howling argument about who could claim the last mochi, never got to seize onto each other’s hands in a crowd and drag each other through. They never got to huddle under the blankets and cry until everything just felt empty instead of so devastatingly wrong.

He should have tried harder—when they were kids, sure, but especially when they got a second chance. When Endeavor loosened his grip enough that at least they could circle around each other like dogs that had been kicked one too many times.

It’s just that everything got so hectic when he and Hayami had the boys, and Shouto has always been so busy with school and then the work—Natsuo stopped having free time, and trying to impose on any part of the limited amount that Shouto had left felt like piling another burden on him. Fuyumi, of course, ensured that they stayed in each other’s orbits, but it shouldn’t have been her responsibility to keep them connected. He should have done more. He should have reached out even if his arm shook with exhaustion when he did. He should have been there for Shouto now, precisely because he couldn’t do it all those years before.

It’s his own fault, at this point, if he misreads his own flesh and blood. It’s his own fault if Shouto expects more from him than he can give.

Which must be what it is—the source of the silence. Shouto is understandably pissed about having to babysit him, when he’s older and purportedly wiser and had it easier in most of the ways that matter, all this time. Shouto—

Reaches over and squeezes his shoulder, slightly too hard.

“I know,” Shouto says. “It doesn’t… he’s good with them. And to them. He’s been changing for a long time, but it’s been slow. Small steps. The direct comparison is… disorienting. At best.”

“If that’s your way of saying it’s a mindfuck,” Natsuo manages, “then we’re on the same page.”

Shouto claps his shoulder very, very awkwardly and then plants the palms of his hands on the boards behind them and leans back. “That’s a much better word. It’s advanced mindfuckery. And then Hawks acts like it’s so normal, and Fuyumi and Mom keep trying to just move forward. Which is… good, I think, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I wonder if they think that if they even acknowledge just how bad it was, they’ll bring it back. Like they don’t want to speak the name of the demon in case it’s still alive.”

“It is,” Natsuo says.

Shouto looks at him. Natsuo’s heard Bakguou call him ‘Half-and-Half’. Maybe there’s something to be said for it—the yin and yang of it all; the delicate balance; the merging of two disparate elements into a whole far greater than the sum of the parts. He has Mom’s kindness but none of her carved-in terror of retribution, from her own family or from this one. He has Endeavor’s drive but none of the callousness that lets it run unchecked and scorch the Earth behind and beyond. He’s a hero who’s still a human being.

“No,” Shouto says, decisively. “Endeavor is dead. I’ve been watching.”

He’s a frighteningly smart kid, but he’s wrong about that one.

The past never dies.

And Enji Todoroki has never had the guts to be anybody except the mask of heedless flame.

“They’re safe with him,” Shouto says. “He knows he never should have gotten another shot. He knows it doesn’t change anything. But he’s giving it everything he’s got. He wants them to be happy.”

Natsuo’s instincts reject it—refuse to entertain the possibility.

But the man he saw today—

The man who leaned in and listened seriously to Eiji’s complaints about shoes, whose strange patience never wavered no matter how much drool he wiped off of Naru’s chin, who devoted ninety percent of his waking hours to shepherding them gently through the day—

It’s not the same.

Nothing is the same.

God, if Hayami was here—

She’s not.

She’s never going to get to see the way Eiji’s eyes light up when he talks about the garden, when he brings up trains, when he rattles off the long list of accomplishments he barreled through at school.

Natsuo lost Touya, but he didn’t lose his mom forever. He can barely imagine how difficult it’s going to be. People talk about their nice, normal families all the time. It always just made him burn with envy, but for Eiji and Naru, it’ll be so much harder—so much worse. Every stint of small-talk, every elevator conversation, every other day at school, someone will remind them of what they’ll never have.

“I do, too,” Shouto says, thoughtfully. “I want them to be happy. And I want to be happy for them. For the fact that they get to have something so much better than what we had. But it’s…” His eyes go cloudy in that way they do, where the tiniest line sinks in between his eyes, and the corner of his mouth turns down subtly. His expressions are still so habitually muted from the years and years of hiding—of holding it in. “Hard. Harder than I expected.”

“How do you do it?” Natsuo gets out.

Shouto blinks at him, which is no surprise—Shouto does a million damn things, so it’s not like he’d know which one Natsuo’s referring to. The whole situation is a little humiliating, really, but Natsuo has to force the words out. He has to get through this. He needs to know.

“You’re never angry about it,” he says. “About all the shit he did to you.”

Shouto blinks again.

“Of course I am,” he says.

Natsuo stares at him. “But you—”

Shouto, naturally, just fucking blinks again. The kid’s practically an asymmetrical owl. Eiji is going to be ecstatic, since apparently he’s in his owl era.

“I still get angry about it,” Shouto says. “And I used to all the time. I couldn’t even think about him, when I started at UA, or I’d just boil for hours and waste whole afternoons fuming.” He sighs, shifts, shrugs. “So eventually I just had to look at it as… it’s my quirk, not his. It’s my name, not his. And it’s my anger.”

Is that my Natsuo talking, or his?

“The situation is finite,” Shouto says, eyes on the fountain, or maybe the trees, or maybe the flowers pushing feeble leaves up from the suffocating dark. “It’s fixed in the past the way that it happened. If the anger is mine, I can reshape it, even if I can’t always control it. I can let it run through me. I can choose to look right at it sometimes, or to walk away from it other times, depending on how it goes.” He swings his left foot. “I have a lot I want to do. What he did to me gave me skills that other people don’t have—they came at a cost, but everything comes at a cost. It’s my life. And I’m not going to let resentment trick me into repeating his mistakes.”

Natsuo makes himself breathe.

“You’re off to a good start,” he forces out. “Twenty-three already, with zero kids you don’t want. Keep up the good work.”

Shouto gives him a sly look—not quite a smirk, but damn close. “Very little danger of that, given the current state of my love life.” He pauses. “You know what I mean, though.”

“Yeah,” Natsuo says.

He does.

He knows the way you grip the edge of the bathroom counter with both hands and stare at the parts of him that glare back at you from the mirror, and you promise yourself that you learned. You learned without having to hurt anyone. You have to remember. You have to rise above it. You have to stay strong.

Shouto kicks both feet for a few seconds, watching them. One of his socks is relatively subtly Dynamight-themed, black with a wide orange X across the toe. The other has Deku branding, teal and black and red with a small white bunny head shape on the top of the foot.

“I’m always running,” Shouto says. “No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, no matter how many hours I put into it—there’s always more, and I’m always running. And I…” He sighs again, softly. He opens his hands, the heels pressed together, like he’s going to cup water in them. The faintest trace of flame licks up the lines of his left palm, and slender spikes of frost dart over the right. They both vanish when they meet in the middle. “I think… that if I didn’t have the people around me that I do—if I didn’t have people who understand, who keep telling me that the running counts, that it still gets me somewhere, that it’s good cardio, that it’s okay to take breaks to catch my breath sometimes, that they’ll help me back up if I trip over my own feet…” He clasps his hands together, crushing both the fire and the ice. “If I didn’t have them, and that, I think I’d be…”

He wouldn’t.

He’s too kind.

He’s too good.

He hasn’t cut his own heart out and replaced it with a fistful of coals and kindling.

He’s—

“Scared,” Shouto says. “I’d be scared, all the time. So scared that none of the rest of it would ever seem real.”

Natsuo chokes on his heart in his throat. “That’s not an excuse.”

“Of course not,” Shouto says, calmly. “I’m not looking for an excuse. I’m looking for a way to understand. I know I’m never going to kill it. But if I take out its teeth, I think maybe I can live with it. I think maybe that’ll be enough.”

He turns, eyes flicking up and down over Natsuo—and then past him, to the neglected bowl.

“You want me to heat that up again?” he asks. He opens his left hand and shoves it out into the narrow space between them. “I can’t promise it’ll be completely even, but it’d definitely be edible.”

“What the hell,” Natsuo manages. He passes it over. “Knock yourself out.”

Shouto takes it into both hands as he accepts it, fingertips tracking back and forth—assessing the thickness of the ceramic, probably, to figure out where and how vigorously to apply the heat to distribute it through the food without making the bowl itself burn Natsuo’s fingers as soon as Shouto hands it back.

The way his eyebrows draw together, and his eyes fix on the task at hand like it’s the only thing that’s ever mattered and pretty much the only one he’s ever seen, is devastatingly similar to the look of concentration Endeavor gets when he wraps his fingers around one of Naru’s bottles to do the same.

The words spill out.

“He acts like he loves them,” Natsuo says, watching Shouto’s left palm redden ever so slightly where it’s curled around the curve of the bowl. “In a—in this stilted, awkward, overly formal kind of way, but it’s… there. And Eiji responds to it.” He swallows the thick pustule of poison in his throat. “Eiji thinks he’s great.”

Shouto takes Natsuo’s chopsticks in his free hand and stirs the rice around with a cavalier crudeness that would make etiquette professionals pass out on the spot. “That’s what I mean. He is great, now. That can be objectively true without changing the fact that he was never great for us. He didn’t have it in him then.”

“He didn’t love us,” Natsuo says.

It’s always been so patently, painfully obvious for his whole life that he’s not sure he’s ever said it out loud until now. No one ever needed to say it. Everyone knew.

But—

Some of the things Endeavor said on Saturday night, back at home, in their kitchen.

Some of the things he didn’t say—some of the things he knew better than to parrot to a person who’d lost someone their life had revolved around.

“Except Touya,” Natsuo amends. “I think he loved Touya. Once.”

“I think the love was always there,” Shouto says, quietly. “For all of us. Just—buried. So deep. Because the life he’d chosen kept crushing most of it out of him, and he didn’t know how to carry the rest without breaking. So he killed it, day after day after day, in order to get by. He wasn’t strong enough to carry anything except Endeavor. We were a necessary sacrifice. But I think it always hurt him, too. He just kept it so far underground that even he couldn’t see it for a long, long time.”

“I don’t buy it,” Natsuo says. That sticks, too, like one of those early landmines that looks like the head of a mace, lodged in his throat, spikes slowly puncturing the walls. “And I don’t care about what hurt him.”

“You should,” Shouto says, turning the bowl in a slow circle now to press every part of the exterior against his palm. “You should learn from it. Do you like your job?”

Natsuo stares at him.

Shouto stares back. He must have freaked the fuck out of all of those defenseless quasi-normal, vaguely well-adjusted teenagers when he started at UA.

“I don’t—know,” Natsuo says, slowly. “I don’t know anymore. It’s—meaningful when things go right. But they—so often they—don’t. And after what…”

After Hayami. After realizing how much blood there was in the rubble, how much had already streamed out of her, pooling in the crevices, turning the dust to rusty mud, trailing almost delicately from the corner of her perfect mouth. After how cold his whole body went, the blank white that flooded his brain, the shock and then the moment that her chest hitched—

He knows it did. He knows what he saw.

Every person he’s ever lost on a scene could have been her—every one of them might have been the light of someone’s life, the core of their being, the reason they rolled out of bed. Every person who’s ever bled out in his arms—or faded in the ambulance and slipped away, or died in surgery because their battered body simply couldn’t take it anymore—might have been Hayami to someone.

Most of them probably were. All of them had lives. All of them were on their way to somewhere, to something, to someone, when everything went so, so fucking wrong, and he couldn’t stop it in time.

Shouto holds the bowl out. The rice steams gently.

“Careful,” he says.

Natsuo cools his hands with his quirk and takes it. “Thanks.”

On Wednesday, Endeavor lets Natsuo hit the punching bag. His hands ache more than they probably should afterwards, but the exhaustion feels strangely clean.

On Thursday, he sits through his stupid class like a good boy, nodding and taking notes, but it feels almost like he’s Natsuo—not a distorted reflection, or a tissue-paper silhouette. Not a figment. Not a liar. Not a ghost.

On Friday, he makes it three-quarters of the way up the hill before he has to call for a time-out.

On Saturday, Hawks takes a day off, so that Endeavor will be able to fulfill the promise to Eiji of a day at the beach without shoes.

Even after all of the recent batshittery, taking his kids to the beach with Endeavor and Hawks hadn’t made it onto Natsuo’s Life Is A Sick Joke bingo card yet.

Endeavor made a list on his phone of everything that they should bring, and he double-checks the bag he just packed in the genkan before he slides his giant feet into his equally giant sandals. Hawks is even more of an eyesore than usual, because he’s wearing a lemon-yellow shirt with a pattern of neon pink and blue starfish, paired with Endeavor-themed board shorts. Natsuo kind of wants to choke him out, but in a distant way that feels disgustingly close to grudging fondness.

Hawks got Eiji tiny kid-sized aviator sunglasses, which have an ice-blue reflective tint on the lenses. Eiji has been excitedly putting them on and taking them off again for the better part of ten minutes, when he’s not pestering Endeavor with questions about whether the shoe-optional agreement still holds.

Endeavor very patiently pauses in combing through the list every time and says, “No shoes. But I did bring socks for you if your feet get cold.”

The backpack looks like they’re embarking on a weeklong expedition to Siberia, not a day trip to the beach. Hawks keeps dancing back and forth up and down the hallway with Naru while he waits out the list-belaboring, cupping a cradle of feathers around Naru and holding both the slimy little hands, swinging them back and forth in rhythm with some unheard beat. Natsuo keeps an ear out for anything other than Naru giggling helplessly, but his eyes are mostly on Eiji.

Eiji was like a grounded bird, after he found out—like a fledgling whose very first flight had ruined his wings past repair. Every time Natsuo had looked at him, the sheer inarticulable misery in the wide, wet eyes had run him through like a jagged spear. It had been his own grief in miniature, in duplicate, standing before him and trembling like a leaf. It had looked weak. It had looked inescapable. It had gouged the hurt out deeper, picked around the edges, ripped out any stitches that he tried to set.

He’d been so fucking scared. He’d been so afraid that they’d never get better, that it would never get easier—that he’d never be able to give his son anything of himself ever again, because there was simply nothing left. That he’d already failed them. That it was just too fucking late.

But now—

There’s still a haunted sort of sadness in Eiji’s eyes when he pauses in the rigorous toddler rigmarole. There’s a way he looks out into the open air like he’s still waiting to wake up.

But most of the time, he’s… fine.

He’s happy, here of all places on the face of the fucking Earth.

He’s smiling and laughing and vociferously expressing all of his opinions, and Hawks and Endeavor both drop everything to stop and focus in and listen to him so intently that it makes Natsuo’s heart hurt worse.

Endeavor finally zips up the backpack, fastidiously dragging each of the two zipper pulls up separately with his left hand to make them meet in the exact middle.

“Everybody ready?” he asks.

A chortling red missile streaks past them, and the door flings itself open. “Been ready, babe!” Hawks says, taking a flying leap over the backpack and trotting on out the door to put Naru into his carseat.

Endeavor sends a Look after him, but there’s nothing vituperative in it—coiled snake, no venom.

Natsuo doesn’t get much time to think about it before Endeavor is bent double, huge hands hovering around Eiji’s elbows as Eiji gallops out after Hawks and Naru, barefoot as the day he was born.

Natsuo had cried so much when they’d put the tiny screaming wonder into his arms that one of the nurses had asked him if he needed a sedative.

“Be careful,” Endeavor says, quietly, as he follows close behind, the bulk of the backpack making him look like an overprotective turtle. “Be careful—watch your step.”

“It’s okay, Grampa!” Eiji crows. “You should take your shoes off, too!”

“I will when we get to the beach,” Endeavor says, opening the car door and then scooping Eiji up into the booster seat. “May I see?”

Eiji immediately shoves the soles of his feet into Endeavor’s face.

Endeavor takes one of them gingerly in his left hand and tips it back and forth to pretend to examine it, then follows suit with the other.

And then he grazes his fingertip against the center of the underside of Eiji’s foot just hard enough to send Eiji into a fit of giggling before Endeavor buckles him in.

“Did you see, Grampa?” Eiji says. “They’re fine! I got strong feet!”

“Yes, you do,” Endeavor says. “But strength isn’t everything.”

Hawks snorts loudly.

Endeavor eyes him for a second before turning back to Eiji and folding both arms crosswise over his chest, elbows down and fists pressed against the opposite shoulders. “Arms in?”

Eiji mimics the gesture, as sharply as if it was a salute, and Endeavor steps back and closes the door.

Natsuo approaches the car from Naru’s side.

“Don’t even think about it,” Hawks says, darting in front of him. “I get to sit in the back with my favorite humans-in-progress.”

“I think we’re all humans-in-progress,” Endeavor says, depositing the backpack in the trunk and slamming it shut.

Natsuo hates that he jumps at the sound.

“No appropriating my weird commentary,” Hawks says, making a big show of climbing into the car. Feathers plaster themselves all over the ceiling to clear his back for settling against the middle seat, where he’s penned in by plastic on both sides. He barely fits. “Quit it.”

“I don’t know how,” Endeavor says.

The feathers flood back, filling out the wings, which drape themselves over the back of the seat to dangle into the trunk with the precious backpack.

Natsuo gets into the passenger seat, but not fast enough to miss the way that Hawks is grinning.

Endeavor waits until Natsuo’s seatbelt clicks in before even starting the car. Again.

“Daddy!” Eiji says. “What do you want to do at the beach?”

In all honesty, Natsuo wants to do the same thing he’d be doing at the house—lying down with his eyes closed and trying to forget the fact that he exists.

He doesn’t think that will be an acceptable suggestion for the toddler weekend trip agenda, though.

“Maybe I’ll just relax and listen to the ocean,” he says, which might qualify as a version of the truth. “What do you want to do?”

He turns to look, but Eiji is already leaned towards the window, grinning as he gazes out. “Everything!”

Maybe this is how it’s always going to go.

Maybe this is just who they are.

Natsuo could have his real wish, but he settles for the one that he expressed.

Hawks is like a dying sun, spitting energy in every direction even though he got in late again last night. When they parked, he lowered all of the windows just a crack and left most of the feathers in the car, except for a handful hidden underneath his horrifying shirt. He kicked his sandals off as soon as Endeavor had laid out a towel from the beloved backpack to claim their space, and immediately went racing off with Eiji to go chase the waves and kick at the foam.

Endeavor somehow crammed a collapsible umbrella into the bag, which he takes out and assembles with the utmost seriousness in spite of the fact that the spire isn’t even three feet high, and the umbrella itself has a pattern of stylized blue waves being surfed by ducks wearing sunglasses.

It’s perfectly Naru-sized.

Natsuo takes Naru’s little sandals off and settles down cross-legged with him to let him wriggle his tiny toes in the sand under the auspices of the patch of shade.

Endeavor’s shadow over them is much bigger and much cooler, truth be told.

Natsuo braces himself, but Endeavor wordlessly hands him a tube of extremely posh, organic-this-and-that, minerals-over-chemicals baby sunscreen, as well as a bottle of a slightly less remarkable stuff suitable for adults.

He has another two bottles in his metal hand, and strides directly down to the water to Hawks and Eiji. Hawks plays at dodging away from him, which makes Eiji do it, too. Every time he reaches for either of them, they scatter and splash away into the waves in different directions, darting just out of range of his fingers.

Endeavor’s shoulders tighten.

Then they rise.

And fall.

And loosen up again.

He pivots swiftly on his heel and tosses the larger bottle at Hawks’s chest—both hands snap up to catch it, although Natsuo thinks he sees a flicker of red at the collar of that abominable shirt, too.

Endeavor crouches down and beckons to Eiji. Natsuo can’t hear what’s being said from this distance, but Endeavor gestures to his own bare forearm several times, then points back to where Natsuo has already dug up the sunhat that Endeavor packed and re-packed into a front pocket, and has started slathering this stuff on Naru as thickly as he thinks he can get away with.

Natsuo gives Eiji a thumbs up, and then puts Naru’s palms together into a prayer-like position and leans forward so that they both bow their heads at the same time.

He can see the way that the giggle ripples through Eiji’s whole body even from here.

Then Eiji holds both arms out to Endeavor, albeit while still bouncing on the balls of his feet, squirming more every time a cool wave rushes up over his ankles.

When Endeavor is almost done—which takes a while, given the characteristic meticulousness—Hawks leans in and starts smearing sunscreen on Endeavor’s face, and then leaves the globs there and goes for his arm, and then uses that leverage to drag him further into the waves.

Endeavor’s outfit would also not suffer from a good soaking—his shirt is less obnoxious, since it’s a fairly plain off-white that only has a hideous flame-patterned border at the bottom hem and the ends of the sleeves, but his swim trunks are way worse. They’re shorter than Hawks’s—they don’t quite reach his knees, which is such a fucking dad move—and they’re dark orange with a pattern of rounded red flames scattered everywhere.

Hawks only manages to haul him hard enough to make him stumble two steps, though, before Endeavor ducks and then strikes out almost too fast to track—feinting forward, letting Hawks twist back, and then grabbing Hawks’s waist with the left arm and slinging Hawks easily over his shoulder.

Natsuo can hear that laughter from here.

Endeavor wades four more steps out and then grabs Hawks’s hips in both hands and hurls him out into the waves.

Hawks comes up completely soaked, looking utterly bedraggled with his wild hair plastered to his face, and still howling with laughter like this is the best day of his damn life.

Endeavor offers him both hands and helps pull him out.

By the time Hawks is back on his feet, Eiji is reaching up and begging for a turn.

The discussion that follows is somewhat animated, at least on the part of two of the parties involved. Hawks keeps patting Endeavor’s arm insistently, although that could be partly just to drip seawater all over him.

Eiji pouts a little, jumps up and down a few times, reaches up again, and then concedes to be gathered up into Endeavor’s arms, Hawks apparently cheerleading the whole way.

Evidently, the resolution is for Endeavor to hold onto Eiji’s hands and dip him into the water instead of flinging him away like an undersized fish.

“Bah,” Naru says.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says, offering him a new little plastic shovel in a desperate and probably doomed attempt to keep his sandy hands out of his mouth. “‘Bah’ is right, bud.”

When the nap cues are accumulating, Natsuo lies down on the huge towel and positions his chest and as much of his head as possible underneath the umbrella, then lays Naru down on top of himself, sprawled out over his ribcage. Naru settles down quick—new environments have always tired him out but never deterred him from a nap. Natsuo’s just going to close his eyes for a minute—off towards the parking lot, Hawks is clambering around on the large rocks, tiny feathers whipping around Eiji’s arms and shoulders as he tries to keep up, and Endeavor is following them at a much less frenetic pace. It’s fine.

Just this once—it’s fine.

He wakes up to a fidgeting Naru, an impressive pool of drool on his sternum, and a remarkably minimal shriveled-horrible scalded sensation all over his skin.

There’s something that feels like a towel draped over his legs and feet. It takes his eyes several seconds to adjust to the sunlight, and then several more to focus on the source of the shadow cast across him.

It’s Endeavor, standing just past the edge of the blanket, arms folded over his chest. The immense breadth of his shoulders and torso cast such a wide patch of shade that they’ve sheltered Natsuo’s entire upper body, and doubled up the protection from the umbrella over Naru.

Endeavor’s eyes are indistinct from here, especially given how little of his face Natsuo can see around the bulk of his arms and the intense glare of the sun behind him, but he seems to be looking not too far past Natsuo’s feet.

Natsuo gets enough of his right elbow underneath himself to lever his body up a little. His hazy vision wavers for a second, then graciously allows him to see Hawks and Eiji plopped down in the sand about a dozen feet back from the water, using the dampened sand to attempt to construct an ambitious and noticeably lopsided sandcastle.

Naru whimpers, and both of Natsuo’s hands latch themselves right back onto him to steady him before he starts to wriggle or roll.

Endeavor’s weight shifts subtly even before he starts to look down, and then he’s reaching out, the metal hand absolutely blinding in the sunlight, and lifting Naru up off of Natsuo’s chest so that he can actually move on his own again.

Naru makes some minor-to-moderate whining noises, but before they can develop into anything dangerously cranky, Endeavor hikes him up in the crook of the left arm and dangles the metal fingers in front of him to be grabbed at. Naru seizes onto the index finger and immediately pulls it into his mouth to chew on.

Gross. He doesn’t know where that’s been. Natsuo doesn’t either, and doesn’t want to.

Well. At least it’s a step up from eating sand. Hopefully.

“Drink something,” Endeavor says. “There’s water in the bag.”

There are sufficient supplies to start a colony on a desert island in the bag.

Natsuo winches himself upright, shakes out the towel that someone did indeed throw over his legs to shelter them from the evil sun, and roots around in the backpack.

It doesn’t take much rooting, since everything is so damn organized. There’s a bottle for Naru mummified in ice packs, with a towel around those, the whole bundle swathed in a plastic bag to contain the condensation; and there are four nalgene water bottles huddled in around it, leaching the cold. Each one is neatly labeled with a name written on a tiny piece of tape—one for each of the three adults, and a smaller, more brightly-colored bottle for Eiji.

Natsuo stares at them for a second, and all the things that Shouto said start cycling in the back of his mind.

Trying to control the variables that affect the lives of the people that you care for—

Trying to rig the game in any way that’s in your power, to make things fractionally easier for them—

Trying to grip too tight and strangling them in the process, your hands compelled by the blinding terror of what could happen to them—

Trying to order them to make the choices you would make, because that’s the only path you know for sure will keep them alive as long as you’ve scraped through—

It’s not a kind of love that makes any goddamn sense.

But it is a kind of love.

And nothing makes sense in a world that doesn’t have Hayami in it anymore.

Natsuo tugs out the water bottle with his name on it. Hawks’s is red, Endeavor’s is yellow, and his is pale blue.

“Thanks,” he says.

Endeavor doesn’t answer—just bounces Naru up and down a little, too gently to jar the metal finger against the tiny little teeth.

But he doesn’t go anywhere, either.

Natsuo chugs some of the water, and it does feel damn good. He fishes his phone out of the bag—Endeavor put them all in the front pocket before they got anywhere near the water, which in retrospect saved Hawks’s ass from a communication freeze when Endeavor dunked him.

“It’s almost time for Eiji’s you-know-what,” Natsuo says, not sure how far his voice will carry with the faint, sharply salty breeze.

“I know,” Endeavor says, without looking up from his inspection of Naru’s forehead, which Natsuo has to figure is an attempt to find out whether the hat fits too tight and is leaving marks. “I’m hoping he’ll sleep in the car.”

“We should get him fed ASAP,” Natsuo says. “Postpone the crankypocalypse as long as humanly possible.”

A flicker of a smile passes over Endeavor’s face again. “Agreed.”

“Hey, bud!” Natsuo calls over to the sandcastle crew. “How about a break? C’mon over and have some lunch!”

“I’m busy!” Eiji yells back, in the hazardously stubborn voice.

It’s too late. The crankypocalypse is nigh.

By some miracle, between the three of them, they manage to avert the worst of the carnage—Hawks stays by the sandcastle to guard it from waves and passersby alike, crouched over it like the world’s weirdest crab with his arms out to the sides, grinning like he’s won the lottery instead of taken up an incredibly stupid and uncomfortable pose in public. Having the castle protected allows them to coax Eiji over long enough that he bolts down a third of his little bento box—with a minimum of added sand. After that, he immediately forsakes the castle in favor of running off down the beach with Endeavor in tow. Endeavor passes Naru and the newly-warmed bottle to several feathers, which in turn pass both back to Natsuo.

Naru pauses in drinking long enough to gaze wide-eyed at the twirling feathers overhead, reach for one, and murmur “Bah.”

“That about sums it up,” Natsuo says.

The genkan is scattered with clumps of wet sand, and dusted with more.

It’s the sort of thing that would have sent the Endeavor of Natsuo’s childhood into a fit of rage, but the one they have now just stares at it for a second, stifles a sigh, and steps out of his sandals.

Hawks vanishes before Natsuo has even finished kicking his sandals off to the side, then reappears dressed much more familiarly, buckling his belt and hitching the pouches around to settle them against his back. He meets Endeavor’s look with a weary grin.

“Are you going to be back for dinner, Hawks?” Eiji asks, eyes so pleadingly round that the Devil couldn’t hope to resist him.

“I’ll try!” Hawks says brightly. “Lots of sandcastles out there that need some defending. I’ll be back before you know it, okay?”

“Okay,” Eiji says. He grabs for Naru’s wrist and makes him wave one spit-smeared hand. “Say goodbye to Hawks, Naru. He’s gotta work.”

“Bah-bah-bahg,” Naru says, but the fact that he almost seems to be responding directly to verbal prompts already is pretty amazing, considering how young he is. Eiji talked early because he just had so damn much to say, but even by those standards—

No. To hell with ‘standards’. To hell with any measurements, any checklists, any comparisons. Natsuo’s kids are not, are never, going to feel like they have anything to live up to, let alone like they have to outdo each other to compete for a limited quantity of approbation.

They are always, always going to feel loved—unceasingly, unconditionally, no matter what they do or don’t. No matter who they turn out to be.

Eiji is, of course, still gloriously shoeless, but as soon as Endeavor has finished brushing the worst of the sand off of Naru’s tiny beach outfit, Natsuo scoops him up and starts shepherding him and Eiji together towards both of their bedrooms. “Let’s get you out of these wet clothes, bud.”

Endeavor shoots him what might be a grateful look, which is sort of stupid, because it’s not like Natsuo is jetting out of there for his benefit. It’s purely self-serving: he doesn’t want to have to witness whatever goodbye Hawks might have in mind.

“Daddy!” Eiji says as Natsuo corrals him in the direction of the far hallway, trying to focus hard enough to prevent himself from hearing any of the quiet murmuring in the genkan. “Can I learn to swim? I wanna learn to swim! Like a shark!”

It’s always a good thing—to give them the tools to find or fight their way out of anything. To help them cultivate the skills they’ll need to subsist in a world that no one survives.

It’s always a good thing to let them drive their own destinies, and to hold your hands beneath them in case they ever start to fall.

“Sure you can,” Natsuo says. “We can find some lessons for you as soon as the weather warms up. How about that?”

Eiji grabs up blindly for his hand until he shifts Naru into his elbow and offers it, then hauls him to the bedroom. There’s going to be grains of sand rattling around on the tatami for weeks. “Yeah!”

Natsuo imagines elasmobranches must have their own problems, but the shark transformation plan is starting to sound better by the minute.

There are too many goddamn hours in the day—especially when you retreat to your weird little garden ensuite enclave as soon as your toddler goes to bed—but as they slide into the next week, sometimes Natsuo can get through one or two hours at a stretch before it hits him again like a sucker punch right in the guts.

Endeavor’s always been something of a master at staying so busy that there’s precious little time to spare for sifting through the mountain of regrets. He keeps them moving—literally, with the insane amount of exercise, especially considering that he’s wrangled his way past fifty now; and figuratively, in that he doesn’t let a waking moment go by idly.

Mom and Fuyumi stop by once each for dinner, and Shouto texts a lot. Natsuo starts paying attention in his stupid classes—not to the board, or the lessons, or the self-help spew, but to his classmates. They’re all here for the same reason. They all fucked up, but they want to make it right.

There’s a strange sense of miserable solidarity to it, when you look at it that way. Before class, he leans over and asks Aito what he likes to do on the weekends. The guy’s eyes light up, and he starts talking about his tropical fish, and how he used to let his daughter pick the next one, because she loved their colors, and he’d try so hard to make the tank dynamics work regardless of which species she thought were the prettiest.

Ritsu leans over and starts asking about how he aerated the water, and Machida asks about whether they need heat like reptiles do, and Saki says she always wanted to try sculpting some of those decorative rocks and fake plants and treasure chests and shit that people always put at the bottom, and asking if they’re usually finished with resin or what.

It’s the first time since they started that nobody falls asleep in class.

Friday is the check-in with this woman Jimi that Endeavor keeps talking about.

She calls on Thursday afternoon, when they’re working on dinner. Endeavor puts her on speakerphone and calmly tells her that Natsuo is with him.

“Even better,” she says, which Natsuo totally believes, given that he was born yesterday and all.

She explains that they’re all going to have to meet with her separately, one by one—Eiji, Natsuo, and Endeavor, in that order—to answer a few questions about ‘how things are going so far’. Their appointment is at four. She recommends that they allocate about an hour. The office is in the city, not far from where the agency used to be.

Natsuo keeps trying to crush the part of himself that wants to panic. He knows these people now—knows how they think, knows what answers they look for, knows what words to use.

The only genuine risk is that Endeavor will use this opportunity to slander him and steal the kids.

Endeavor is a lot of fucking things, but he’s not a liar.

Then again—

He has been living with Hawks for the past few years.

And Hawks is no stranger to doing whatever it takes to accomplish what he thinks is necessary.

Maybe Hawks has already cooked up some complicated plan—planted a bug or even just a feather in that office, so that he can feed information about what Natsuo says back to Endeavor, allowing him to contradict or undermine anything he wants, to make Natsuo out to be some sort of unhinged psychopath inventing things on the spot—

He makes himself breathe.

This isn’t helping.

This isn’t helping.

All he can do is tell the goddamn truth. Eiji will do the same. What Endeavor does is irrelevant. The world has taken enough. It won’t take this. It can’t.

And a part of his mind has to admit, in spite of the rest, that Endeavor hasn’t given any indication of not wanting him around. The guy is seriously training him to box, now, for Chrissake. They’re running buddies. It’s fucked, sure, but Endeavor doesn’t seem to dislike it any more than he dislikes everything.

Natsuo makes himself breathe again—in, deeply; and out, slowly; and in again.

He must not be the only one.

“Relax, babe,” Hawks says that night, patting Endeavor’s knee. They’re cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch with their laptops, like they usually are before they put the kids to bed. “It’s going to be fine. Why don’t you guys go out and get a nice dinner right after? Give yourselves something to look forward to.”

Endeavor glances over at Natsuo. “Let’s see how it goes.”

Is that a threat?

Or is it a precaution?

Eiji looks up from a puzzle with extremely large pieces, already halfway to reassembling the shape of a stylized bird. “How what goes, Grampa?”

Endeavor pauses, regroups, and then moves his laptop aside—feathers ferry it up onto the couch—so that he can shift forward and focus his attention on Eiji.

That hurts almost as much as how effortlessly attuned Eiji is to his voice—to everything he says, no matter how trivial.

“Do you remember Ms. Jimi?” Endeavor asks. “She brought you here the first day, and she’s come by a few times to say hello.”

That was not what she was fucking doing.

Eiji’s expression crinkles into concern. “I remember. Is she okay?”

“Yes,” Endeavor says. “But we’re supposed to go see her tomorrow afternoon, after you’re back from school—you, me, and your daddy all together.”

Eiji’s bottom lip sticks out. “Why?”

“Because it’s her job to make sure that you and Naru are okay,” Endeavor says.

The tiny frown deepens into a tiny scowl. “Why?”

It just is, bud. So many damn things just are. And there’s nothing we can do.

Endeavor looks Eiji right in the eyes. “Things weren’t okay when she met you. It’s important that she gets to talk to you and ask you if they’re better now. She wants to help.”

“I don’t wanna talk to her,” Eiji says, lip quavering now. “I don’t like her. She—she took us, and they were yelling, and—and—and she pulled my arm, she pulled really hard, she said we had to—had to get in the car, but I wanted to go back to Daddy, and she wouldn’t let me, and—and—” The tears boil over. “She said I couldn’t, and she took Naru, I had’ta go with him, she said—”

Choking the words out hurts like fucking hell. “I’m sorry, bud. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. All that is my fault.”

Eiji turns towards him, the tears already streaking down his cheeks, carving gleaming trails over the blotchy pinkness seeping in. “You were so mean, Daddy, but I wanted—I wanted—she wouldn’t let me—”

Natsuo holds both arms out.

Eiji dives at him so hard his little shoulder cracks against Natsuo’s collarbone, with enough force to bruise both of them.

And then he just shatters, in the way kids do—the sobbing, the howling, the devastated desperation to be heard, to be held, to be helped. To be wanted enough to make up for the rest of the whole damn world.

“I know,” Natsuo whispers to him, clutching him as close as they can get. “I know, Eiji. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. I should’ve—I should’ve—”

“You didn’t love us anymore,” Eiji sobs out, and Natsuo’s blood goes so cold he can’t feel a goddamn thing. “You didn’t love us anymore after Mommy died, and you were so mean, and she took us, and I don’t like her, I hate her, I don’t wanna go—Daddy, don’t make me go, d-don’t—”

Endeavor’s shadow cloaks them both, and Natsuo’s arms tighten before he can stop himself. Eiji whimpers, and he tries to loosen them, tries to tamp down on the spinning panic in his stupid brain—

Naru starts fussing. Feathers catch him up out of the play gym and zip him over into Hawks’s arms, and the soft shushing mingles with the half-voiced almost-cries, and it feels like Natsuo’s heart is being drawn and quartered while he sits here frozen solid, tongue-tied and helpless and cut to the core.

“She’s not going to hurt you,” Endeavor says, quietly. “She’s not going to take anyone away, or make you go anywhere. I won’t let her. I promise.” He lays his left hand against Eiji’s back, just above where Natsuo’s arm encircles him. He’s so close that the heat radiates like a furnace cranked all the way up. “I don’t want to go either. But we need to tell her how things are now, because she’s the one who gets to decide whether your daddy can keep staying here with us.”

“No!” Eiji wails. “No, she can’t! She can’t make him leave, Grampa, you can’t let her!”

“I won’t,” Endeavor says, with the same unshakable authority he used to project at press conferences—calmer and steadier than he ever was in real time, because he’d always prepared for ages. Natsuo has a vague memory of one time he was pacing the halls for hours at night—remembers being too scared to go to the bathroom for fear of running into him and getting yelled at for being out of place. “No matter what happens. But she doesn’t want to do that, Eiji. She doesn’t want to make you upset. She just needs to talk to you to make sure that things are better for you now.”

The tears spill faster, the wail increases in volume and intensity, and Eiji’s whole body trembles as he writhes in Natsuo’s arms. “I don’t wanna!”

“Hey, hey,” Natsuo says, trying to wrangle him back into the safety of the hug. “C’mon, bud. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

The sobbing reaches a fever pitch that verges on hysteria.

Right. Way too close to bedtime for this conversation. Duly noted.

The tiny body twists harder, and Eiji shoves at Natsuo’s chest. “Let go, Daddy—I don’t wanna—lemme go—”

Natsuo’s vision blurs. He can see the razor-sharp gleam of gold that was in Hawks’s eyes when they had that conversation on the engawa. He can see the resignation in Eiji’s eyes the next time they settled on him after that first night—the recognition of his father’s mediocrity, blisteringly clear by the age of three and a half.

Natsuo’s heart thuds hard in his empty chest. The sound echoes.

He lets go.

Eiji flings himself at Endeavor—throws both arms around the giant neck and buries his face in the enormous shoulder and sobs brokenly.

Endeavor gathers him up carefully, left hand stroking slowly up and down his back.

“Let’s go outside,” Endeavor says, so softly it’s barely audible over the hiccuping and the howling and the carrying on. He stands up, slowly. “Is that all right? Let’s go to the garden. It’s nice and quiet.”

Eiji’s reply is utterly unintelligible, but Endeavor just keeps patting his back, and then starts taking measured steps towards the hallway, murmuring in Eiji’s ear.

“No one’s going to hurt you,” he says just before he moves out of earshot, and the rest fades away. “I promise. I’ve got you.”

Hawks shifted over to slouch against the couch again, with his knees drawn up so that he could settle Naru on his lap, propped up against his thighs. Naru has a damp death grip on his index fingers, one in each hand, and Hawks is waving them back and forth, making faces at him—wide-eyed and then puffed-cheeked and then a shocked open-mouthed expression.

“You’re going to be fine,” he says, apparently to Natsuo even though he hasn’t stopped mugging for a second. “She’s going to ask him if you’re hitting him, and then if you’re feeding him, and then if you yell. That kid’s crazy about you. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Natsuo curls his fingers into his jeans and clamps his jaw shut. Nothing he can say will even change anything, let alone help. They have to go. He has to do it. He has to wait and see.

“Ha,” Hawks says after a second of the fraught silence. “Okay. Point taken. Stressing is this family’s bread and butter, blah blah, I know. Look at it this way. She just wants to get the case closed and the folder filed and the paperwork off her desk. Most people do—they just want shit to stop being their problem. If you work within the parameters of that—”

Natsuo’s voice is not his own.

“I’m not ready to take them back,” it says, creaking with the weight of the terrible sounds that turn to words, and the words that turn to meaning.

He can’t see anything but a haze of carpet ahead of him, dotted with the blurry colors of the blocks and the puzzle pieces and the bits of the train track strewn across the floor.

He can feel Hawks staring.

His voice seethes up and out of him again, uncoiling into the air.

“I can’t do this alone,” he says. “Hayami—it was—it wasn’t just splitting the work, it was everything, and she was everything, and—and I’m not—I can’t—”

“God,” Hawks says. “Stupid really does run in the family.”

Natsuo’s eyes jerk up and focus on him, half just out of the sheer disbelief.

Hawks half-smiles, one of his weird, unruly eyebrows arcing.

“Nobody is asking that of you, idiot,” he says. “And nobody ever will. This is what families do—or at least what your family does. You help each other. You don’t have to be okay all of a sudden. Fuck knows you’re never gonna be. It’s never going to go away. But all the psychs need to find out is whether you’re better enough that you can be left unattended with the ice mice and not have anybody end up in the ER. And we all already know that’s true.”

At least this time they’re staring at each other.

Distantly, that’s… nice. Maybe? Distantly, Natsuo recognizes that there is significant value to anything that Hawks says like that, with a ringing conviction and an unironic sincerity. What he just said was real. It mattered. It meant something. And that’s rare.

Hawks wrinkles his nose as it seems to register that he just instigated a Moment with someone he doesn’t even like very much. He clears his throat, turns back to Naru, and blows a raspberry into the air. “Anyway. Long story short, cool your damn tits, wouldja?”

“If you ever say that to me again,” Natsuo manages, “I will walk out the door, keep walking until I hit the ocean, and then keep walking into the water until I drown.”

“Come on,” Hawks says, with a hint of a much more familiar smirk playing around his mouth. “What the hell is the point of having an ice quirk if you can’t drop your body temperature by ten degrees the instant someone says ‘Cool your tits’, and then look them in the eyes and slap their hand to your chest?”

“You’re the one who needs to see a psych,” Natsuo says. “But the good news is I’ve got, like, fourteen on speed-dial now.”

Hawks snickers, leaning in as he does to rub the tip of his nose against Naru’s, which summons an answering giggle and some renewed squirming, then a little squeal of delight. “Listen, if I had a hundred yen for every time Enji’s therapist has tried to corner me and analyze my damage, I could drape the wings in actual fuckin’ diamonds and call it a day.”

There’s a pause.

Then Hawks extracts one of his fingers from Naru’s grip, wipes it shamelessly on the side of his sweatshirt, and digs for his phone.

“Hang on,” he says. “That’s a photoshoot.”

Natsuo makes himself get up, and makes himself swallow the sigh. “I’m gonna put on tea.” For himself, and for Eiji, and maybe for Endeavor—because it’s what Fuyumi would do, and he needs to be more like her, at times like this. He needs to let the storm pass through him—let it shake the branches, rattle down the leaves, and disappear into the night. “You want some?”

“No, thanks,” Hawks says, awkwardly tapping one-handed at his screen while Naru tries to chew on his other hand. “I’m good.”

Maybe he is.

Maybe they all can be.

Maybe it never has been and never will be quite so cut and dry.

Maybe they’re going to make it through anyway.

Endeavor treats Friday like he treats every other damn day—like they have a schedule to keep, deadlines to make, and no room for error.

It’s colossally weird, though, that Natsuo can’t unsee it now that the trick of the optical illusion has settled in his brain.

When Natsuo straggles into the kitchen for breakfast, Endeavor looks like he barely slept, and it had nothing to do with Naru this time. Endeavor looks like he’s narrowly holding his composure together, pinning it between his hands as all of the seams start to split, and the edges fray.

Eiji just looks so miserable that Hawks darts into the kitchen, takes one look at him, emphatically shouts “No!”, and immediately wraps both arms and both wings around him where he’s perched up in his booster seat. The tickle of the feathers coaxes a faint giggle out of him, and Hawks peppering the top of his head with kisses extracts a couple more.

Natsuo glances at Endeavor—who was working on getting Naru fed, but paused to look up.

His expression still seems impossible.

Endeavor isn’t capable of fondness, let alone of adoration. He doesn’t even know how to offer something unconditional.

But it’s there.

Is that the secret?

The sliver of love deep down in him persisted long enough to outlast the bonfire, and when all the cinders scattered, it finally had room to grow?

If Endeavor isn’t capable of loving like this, then maybe this isn’t Endeavor.

Not anymore.

Maybe Hawks made sure of it.

Maybe the pathetic man in that hospital room after Jaku needed to be seen—needed to be found, needed to be understood by someone who didn’t hate his weakness even more than his strength—so that he could be carried far enough and made to feel safe enough to turn into this someday.

Maybe it was a long damn time coming, but it was always in the cards.

Maybe that’s the curse—learning what you’ve lost, what you are, when it’s too late.

But maybe it isn’t too late yet.

Not quite.

It’s possible that Natsuo should be grateful for the fact that the day crawls by at the pace of a limping snail. It’s a pain in the ass to watch the second-hand of the clock shifting in slow motion to spite how desperately he wants the afternoon’s upcoming torture to be over with, but at least time has meaning right now, even if the meaning sucks.

He almost jumps out of his skin when Endeavor hits the punching bag in the training room so hard that he tears it out of the ceiling, and the whole thing slams down to the floor with the force of a small earthquake.

Endeavor stands there with his left arm outstretched for a second, staring at it in a bewilderment slightly too resigned to look like disbelief.

So at least Natsuo’s not the only one struggling with this shit.

Eiji still looks uncharacteristically distraught when they collect him from preschool. One of the teachers waves them over, waiting with him by the gate, and Natsuo spreads his hand on Naru’s back to try to balance out how quickly they stride over.

She glances between him and Endeavor, gestures down at Eiji’s slumped shoulders and tired eyes, and asks quietly if everything is all right.

“We have an appointment this afternoon,” Endeavor says smoothly. It’s a deception by omission—it makes this whole fucking thing sound like Eiji has to go to the doctor, and he’s nervous about getting shots—but it’s not a lie.

Endeavor has been spending way too much damn time with Hawks.

Which doesn’t stop Eiji from looking up at him like he personally lights each one of the stars with a candle just before bedtime.

“How long is it ’til then, Grampa?” he asks.

Endeavor crouches down and holds out his wristwatch. “It’s at four o’clock today. Do you want to count the hours? I can help.”

“I can do it, Grampa,” Eiji whispers. He presses his tiny fingertip to the watch face. Natsuo bites back the wince at the prospect of the little greasy fingerprints. Endeavor hates messes, hates disorder, hates anything that doesn’t slot neatly into his worldview and anything he can’t control.

Endeavor stays perfectly still as Eiji slides his finger from one number to the next, tracing his way over the arc, counting softly as he makes his way around. Natsuo sneaks a glance at the teacher, who looks impressed—as she should. The kid’s a genius. He’s perfect. He’s incredible.

“Five,” Eiji says, brow furrowed and mouth set with the concentration. “Five hours.” He looks up, pleadingly. “Is that right, Grampa?”

“That’s right,” Endeavor says. “That’s very good.”

Eiji smiles slightly. Endeavor opens his arm, and Eiji immediately climbs up into it, and then that’s that.

Five hours.

A fucking eternity, and the beat of a butterfly’s wings.

Chapter 7 Notes:

A few quick things about this one: it includes an even more specific depiction of an panic attack than before!, and we also get needles. The fun never stops. :')
Also just wanted to say thank you again, so much!, to all of you for your investment in and support of this fic. ngl, EndHawks and/or Todofam fans are the most insightful and engaged that I have seen in 17 years (wheeze) of writing fanfic. I am living for your thoughtful and fun and kind and wonderful reactions, and I'm just so glad you're enjoying this wild little world Kae and I made as much as we do! I appreciate you all so much. ♥
I am also GENUINELY sorry I'm so behind on replying to your lovely comments. ;A; I do not know where the time keeps going, but hoooooly shit is it gone. Fittingly, given the themes at work in this story, I'm going to try again next week.
Anyway!, let's get at least a little bit of this healing party started. This one is the second-to-last chapter(!!) and comes to just a hair over 32K. Stay hydrated. ♥

Chapter Text

Natsuo can’t run today. His heart keeps trying to blast its way out of his chest, keeps jittering up into the back of his throat and sticking there and blocking his breath.

Endeavor just stops and waits for him every time.

It registers as rankly condescending, and he can feel the impatience rolling off the bastard’s skin in increasingly incandescent waves, but he has to admit that the alternative would be worse.

The upshot is that they agreed in the car—with reluctant buy-in from Eiji to boot—that Hawks’s idea of getting dinner immediately afterward was a good one, so at least they don’t have to head up that godforsaken hill and run all the way to the market. They veer off much earlier instead, and haltingly run the stroller over to the park.

It’s… nice. There are echoes of the place it was when Natsuo was young—he remembers playing tag with Touya and Fuyumi, and being so much faster than both of them that it really wasn’t fair. They would weave in and out around the trees, and the nurse would call after them, but they’d just keep running, and she couldn’t keep up.

Touya started to get into the habit of climbing the trees and trying to jump down on people like a leopard.

The playground equipment has changed so much that only the shapes of the place look familiar—the way the ground dips low towards the play structures, the circular concrete border around them to separate them from the grass, the sharp angles of the frame of the swings.

The baby swing is unoccupied, which verges on a miracle in a park this pleasant in the middle of the day, so Natsuo plops Naru in and just keeps pushing until his arms start to ache. Naru doesn’t let up cooing, and dribbling what seems like an approbatory amount of drool.

There’s something meditative to it—the rhythm, the rush of air, focusing on making sure his hands slap against the filthy rubber in the same place every time, right at the peak of the backwards oscillation, so that Naru’s path away from him stays smooth, and it doesn’t jerk his neck or tweak his spine or upset his stomach. Nice and easy. Even. Simple as that.

Endeavor follows Eiji around the playground, only ever needing to take one stride to Eiji’s three, peering after him when he clambers up and disappears into tunnels, races across the little rope bridge, or hurls himself fearlessly down a slide.

Endeavor always hovers at the bottom, hands outstretched, but waits until Eiji’s tiny feet hit the ground before reaching for him.

They more-or-less-run back. Natsuo gets the kids cleaned up while Endeavor throws lunch together. Eiji’s so tired from all the extra activity that he goes down for his nap without so much as an inkling of a fight, although Natsuo knows better than to take that as a good sign. He’ll be wearing out and starting to get hungry right when they step into the interrogation room.

In light of which, as soon as both of the boys are blissfully asleep, Natsuo makes a beeline back to the kitchen and raids the cabinet with the kid-approved snacks. The granola bars look like they taste like cardboard, but the box is half-empty, so Eiji must not hate them too much.

Natsuo shoves three into the diaper bag just in case.

And then they wait.

The drive over is excruciating even though he expected it to be.

The silence makes Eiji antsy, but Natsuo is fucking terrified that if he unclamps his jaw for more than a couple of seconds, he’ll actually scream.

Endeavor’s hands are curled so tight around the steering wheel that it’s slightly shocking he hasn’t cracked it—especially with that metal hand.

“Do we have to?” Eiji asks, sullenly, after a long stretch of prickly quiet. “I don’t wanna go, Grampa. I wanna go home.”

There are so many other weapons lodged in Natsuo’s nicked and battered ribs right now that that one—the increasingly familiar “home”—feels dull this time.

“I’m sorry,” Endeavor says, voice low, eyes on the road. “It’s important that we go, and do the best we can.”

Natsuo’s best has never been fucking good enough for anyone.

It wasn’t good enough for him.

And it wasn’t good enough to keep Hayami alive.

It wasn’t enough to save her.

The terror climbs his throat, cold and tight and vicious. The vultures circle—wheeling incessantly, insistently inside his skull. Something will go wrong. Something always goes wrong. He’s a Todoroki, for fuck’s sake. The only thing they know how to do is ruin shit, and let shit ruin them.

He can’t think like that.

It’s a disrespect—it’s a dismissal—of everything she was, and did, and helped him to become.

Hayami loved Natsuo. She loved the broken little boy in the background, the child shoved aside. She loved the reject. She found him, lost in the lack of expectations, stranded in a sea of other people’s standards, and took his hands, and towed him gently out into the light.

She loved him.

She loved him.

She chose him for a reason. She stayed because of everything he was, and together they’d both been able to be so much more. She sat down in the fog with him and said Let’s build something that’s just for us, and they did. And it was beautiful.

It’s his, now. It’s his to protect.

He can be better.

That’s what it means—to be a Todoroki. To carry this soot-streaked, scar-riddled, scream-wracked name.

He can be better.

And he will.

He twists around to look at Eiji around the side of the car seat.

“What are you going to order for dinner, bud?” he asks, and his voice only quavers a little with the thudding of the terror in each beat of his pulse.

Eiji blinks at him, then looks out the window, fiddling with the fins of the new shark plushie Hawks got him, which he’s clutching to his chest like a lifeline. He mumbles so quietly that Natsuo can barely hear him over the rumble of the engine. “I dunno, Daddy.”

“You don’t have to decide right now,” Natsuo says, well-aware that he’s flailing for a handhold. He hates how familiar it feels. He hates that it barely even bothers him anymore—barely registers. Treading water in his own life has become the baseline. “But it’s going to be really nice, don’t you think? They’ve got all kinds of stuff with chicken.”

Eiji turns slowly to look at him again. Natsuo’s heart clenches. Three-year-olds should not experience despair.

Natsuo is trying so hard to believe that Endeavor’s understatement to the teacher wasn’t just a clever deflection—that it was also the truth. It’s just an appointment. It’s just an hour. It’s just an experience they have to get through. It’s not so much. It’s not so bad.

Eiji nods a little in acknowledgement of the weak attempt at a distraction, and then he goes right back to staring out the window like he’d rather be anywhere on Earth than here.

Natsuo twists a little further around, straining at his seatbelt, to try to check on Naru, whose seat is directly behind his.

“Be careful,” Endeavor mutters.

“I’m fine,” Natsuo says, even though the belt is digging into the side of his neck. He fishes a tissue out of his pocket and smudges a little spit away. “There you go, handsome.”

Eiji glances over again at that, and a tiny smile flashes over his face. “He’s not handsome, Daddy. He’s just cute.”

“Why not?” Natsuo asks. “I think he’s handsome. And you are, too.”

The smile flickers wider before Eiji tries to wrangle it under control enough to make a face. “‘Handsome’ is for grownups.”

“Well, it should be for everybody,” Natsuo says. “You’re already plenty handsome. And I bet you’ll only get handsomer.”

Eiji wrinkles his nose, but the vise grip on the shark has loosened just slightly, and that’s about as much as Natsuo had hoped for.

The faint waft of heat is his only warning before a huge hand grazes his arm.

He recoils away, heart in his throat, breath burnt to nothing.

Endeavor’s eyes dart to his, nearly luminescent as the car dips down into the shadowy confines of a parking garage. “Sit. You could get hurt.”

Natsuo clenches his teeth to cage the words. Endeavor drives so absurdly cautiously that there’s no damn chance of that anyway, and even if there was, he’s not a child, and he can’t be shamed back into his seat as another form of exerting control over—

Eiji whimpers.

“Grampa,” he says, voice immediately quavering up towards the point of breaking again. “Grampa, I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna. Don’t make me, Grampa, please.”

Endeavor parks the car and curls both hands so tight around the rim of the steering wheel that something creaks.

“I’m sorry, Eiji,” he says, very softly. “I wish we didn’t have to, but we do. It—might not be as bad as we’re all afraid of. We all need to be brave for a little while until we find out.”

“I don’t wanna,” Eiji gets out, breath already hitching. “I don’t wanna be brave, Grampa, I have to be brave all the time, I don’t want to—”

Endeavor kills the engine and leans his head back against the seat, squeezing his eyes shut.

He breathes deep, and his chest expands so far it makes it look like Natsuo’s seatbelt got off easy.

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry. Can you try? Just try. If it’s too much, we can leave, and try again another time. But I need you to try, for now. Please. Just do the best you can.”

There’s a long silence except for the whole chorus of ragged breathing.

“Okay,” Eiji mumbles. “I can—I’ll try. I’ll try. Grampa, will you carry me?”

Endeavor is already getting out of the car.

They walk up an ordinary staircase, along an ordinary sidewalk, into an ordinary office building, and then into an ordinary elevator.

Natsuo thinks he’s going to be fucking sick.

Eiji peeks at their surroundings from where he’s mostly buried his face in Endeavor’s shoulder. Naru likes the mirrored walls of the elevator, so Natsuo—ever so slightly spitefully—steps over to let him touch them and streak some spit across the glass.

Sometimes the unremitting mundanity of terrible things peels your skin off slowly to accompany the burns.

They step into an extremely unremarkable waiting room, indistinguishable from any doctor’s office except that the magazines are all soothing self-help shit or childcare-focused, and there are no fewer than four small pots of bamboo distributed around the place—one on the receptionist’s desk. That one’s a long way from the window, but given that the shades are pulled anyway—which flings the whole place into an eerie dimness that Natsuo presumes is supposed to seem calming—probably all of the plants are suffering equally.

Eiji keeps clinging to Endeavor like a tiny koala while Endeavor lumbers over and checks them in. He holds Eiji’s weight against him with his right hand, flattening it against Eiji’s back, to free his left for signing paperwork. The fact that he barely responds to the prompting from the receptionist—who also has such a smooth, soothing voice that that must be a prerequisite for hiring in this job—is vaguely reassuring in the worst way. Natsuo is honestly unsure which of them hates this the most.

They’re a solid quarter of an hour early, because Endeavor is physically incapable of merely showing up on time, or even just eking in with several minutes to spare. He comes back from the desk and sits down in the mostly-comfortable chair directly next to Natsuo, wrapping his left arm around Eiji again. He says nothing.

The rest of the place is empty. The clock is so fucking loud.

Natsuo swallows and swallows and swallows, and it feels like he’s choking on his heart every time.

He reaches into the diaper bag to get Naru’s new rubber teething ring, which is green with white polka dots. There are a couple soft plastic attachments looped through it to make a little chain of interrelated toys that he can bat at or dangle or nibble on as it suits him. One has a pattern meant to look like a cow’s hide for some unfathomable reason. One is shaped like a key.

Naru contentedly starts gnawing on the green ring, babbling to himself very quietly, like he doesn’t want to disturb the crypt-like almost-silence of this place, either. There are two doors along the closest wall, both of them firmly shut. No sounds. Nothing moves. It feels like an exam hall.

Natsuo wants to crawl out of his skin and fucking disappear.

That’s been the problem all along, hasn’t it? He’s always wished so fucking hard that he could change—that he could be somebody else. That he could rewind time and undo all of this from the beginning, and have a different life altogether.

But it’s the life he had that brought him here and made him want that in the first place.

It’s the person that he is that makes him want so much more.

Endeavor’s phone pings. He tries to operate the metal hand delicately—every movement looks deliberate and overly cautious, but the intentionality is so painstaking that it betrays him. Seven years on, he still doesn’t trust it.

He doesn’t tilt his screen far enough away for Natsuo—slouched against the back of the chair, idly praying for the floor to consume him and leave no scraps behind—not to be able to skim the texts.

Hang in there, babe <3

All you need to do is tell the truth and you’re WAY TOO GOOD at telling the truth!! This is cake!! (You also have the best cake)

You’re so much stronger than you think. I love you. Give Eiji kissies from me.

Natsuo has a creeping, clawing feeling that the way he used to look at Hayami was nearly identical to the way that Endeavor looks at his texts from Hawks.

The first door along the wall opens.

Jimi is gazing down at a clipboard as she steps through it. “Mr. Todoroki?”

“Yes?” Natsuo and Endeavor say in the exact same breath.

Natsuo’s heart tries to tear its way out of him.

Endeavor glances at him out of the corner of one of those awful, awful eyes.

Jimi half-smiles. At least she’s looking at them now—back and forth, slowly, between the two of them. Deescalation. Nice. “Good afternoon,” she says. “Thanks for coming.”

Like they had a fucking choice.

Like Natsuo has ever had a fucking choice, like he ever wanted to be any of this, like he ever wanted to be anything except normal and happy and safe—like he ever wanted anything except to live—

Naru drops the ring into Natsuo’s lap. It takes him two tries to pick it up and give it back, because his hands are shaking. His fingers feel weak—like they’re miles away. It feels like his skull’s empty, his stomach is knotting, his blood is vibrating in his veins, and his chest is going to explode. It feels like someone’s squeezing the top of his spinal cord and slowly closing their fist. The howling void in his head keeps growing, and the pressure’s getting worse.

Endeavor’s voice stays low and relatively courteous, but he doesn’t humor her with any chitchat—Natsuo will give him that. “You said you need to talk to Eiji first?”

That summons a whimper out of Eiji, and at least Jimi has the grace to wince. “That’s right.”

Endeavor gets up.

The way Eiji buries his face deeper in Endeavor’s shoulder, curling up as small as he can go, hauls Natsuo up out of his chair, too, hiking Naru up higher against his chest.

“Hey,” he says, chafing his hand gently up and down Eiji’s arm as Endeavor starts slowly towards the door that Jimi’s holding meaningfully open. “It’s gonna be okay, bud.”

As they get close, Endeavor eases Eiji down towards the floor, the tiny light-up sneakers dangling, and he whimpers again.

Jimi crouches down to Eiji’s level, smiling gently, to her credit. “Hi, there, Mr. Eiji. Do you remember me?”

The look he gives her as he nods is so profoundly mistrustful that it’s almost funny to see it on a baby face.

“Great,” she says. “Can you come in here with me for a couple of minutes? We’ve got lots of nice toys. You can play with anything you want. We’ll just play for a little while, and you can tell me about how things are going when you’re ready, okay?”

Natsuo glances past her. She wasn’t kidding—they’ve got a tall shelf of puzzles and plushies and blocks and dolls, and there’s a low coffee table strewn with crayons and blank sheets of paper.

Past the table, there’s another woman about his age with short dark hair, sitting in an armchair with a notebook in her lap.

She’s looking back at him.

Eiji’s eyes drift over the display, but he stays still, bottom lip trembling, one fist still clenched in Endeavor’s sleeve, the other arm wrapped tightly around his stuffed shark.

“We’ll be right outside,” Endeavor says, about as softly as Natsuo has ever heard him say anything. “Right out here.”

Eiji stares up at him, damp-eyed, for a long second before turning the unvoiced plea on Natsuo instead.

“It’s okay, bud,” Natsuo says, stroking the puff of white hair gently back. “What do you want to play first? Just let Ms. Jimi know.”

Eiji eyes her balefully for another second before he turns and shoves his shark out towards Endeavor. “Will you hold him for me, Grampa?”

“Yes,” Endeavor says, accepting it, movements slow and careful as his huge hands obscure Eiji’s entirely.

“You can bring him with you,” Jimi offers.

“No, thank you,” Eiji says stiffly. “He and Grampa can keep each other safe.”

Eiji releases Endeavor’s sleeve and trudges in like he’s going to the gallows for a noble cause. Before Jimi closes the door in their faces, Natsuo glances over at the other woman again. She’s still watching him.

The door shuts.

Endeavor shifts his weight onto his back foot before he starts to stand up. Natsuo only realizes once they’re both upright that that’s probably the only thing that prevented them from smacking their heads together.

He lets Endeavor go back to the chairs and settle down first. Endeavor doesn’t drop back into his, even though it looks like he wants nothing more than to collapse and close his eyes—probably because the chair would shatter underneath his weight if he did. He sets the little shark down on his thigh and lays his fingertips on top of it to hold it still.

As soon as Natsuo sits down, Naru takes up yanking at the drawstrings of his jacket hood, trying to pull one into his mouth.

“Hey, hey,” Natsuo says, prying it out of his tiny, tiny grasping fingers. “I brought you nothing but safe stuff to chew on, kid. What gives?”

Naru is, none too surprisingly, distraught to lose the latest opportunity for sliming something that would be better off unslimed. He fusses enough that Natsuo has an excuse to get right back up and pace back and forth across the room with him—which helps more with the fussing than it does with the relentless rushing current of the anxiety.

When Naru has settled a little, Natsuo sits down again. He offers the teething ring up. Naru chomps down on it.

“There you go,” he whispers, swiping a bit more drool off of the soft fuzz on the perfect little cheek.

Endeavor glances at him, and then away, and then pulls his phone out, and then puts it back, and then glances at Natsuo again. Just too quietly for the receptionist to overhear, he mutters, “Could you hear anything?”

He’s always been smarter than anybody ever gave him credit for—smart enough to do the things he wanted very, very well. Smart enough to bludgeon his way through any obstacle if he cared enough.

“Nope,” Natsuo says. “They know what they’re doing.” He bounces Naru gently, cupping a hand under the ring to help him as he tries to adjust his grip, the better to gnaw on an untested portion of the circle. He keeps his eyes on Naru’s impossibly small fingernails and keeps his voice too low for the receptionist to hear. “Do you think they’re gonna go for it?”

Endeavor frowns. His fingertips shift in the shark’s fake fur. Natsuo has so far valiantly kept his mouth shut about the prospect of a shark having fur in the first place.

Or the furst place, maybe.

He’s generously refrained from unleashing that one, too.

“I don’t see why not,” Endeavor says, slowly. “But people do a lot of highly illogical things.”

Hang on.

“What are you gonna say?” Natsuo asks.

Endeavor glances at him. “That depends entirely on what they ask.”

“It does not,” Natsuo says. “Are you going to tell them that you think it’s healing my soul to be around the kids, or are you gonna tell them that I’m still a menace to society, and they should slam me back in the loony bin and lose the key?”

Endeavor is not an actor.

Endeavor could not fake the horror-tinged scandalized expression that he’s wearing now.

Natsuo needs him, right now.

Natsuo needs this bastard on his side.

Natsuo can’t say That’s your M.O., isn’t it? For Mom, and now what’s left of Touya? Just throw the crazy ones in psycho jail and let ’em rot. Out of sight, out of mind. Somebody else’s problem now.

It’s not fair, anyway—not in Touya’s case. Natsuo hated visiting him, hated seeing him. Hated thinking about what it could have been, and what it became. Hated looking at him, through the glare on the glass, and flipping through the fucking Rolodex of human beings that he wiped off of the face of the Earth with his own two hands.

Incineration is an exquisitely painful way to die.

Natsuo looked up every single person that he killed—pictures, articles, everything that he could find.

He knows Endeavor did, too.

He doesn’t even know, really, what he thinks about it, because he tries not to think about it at all. It feels like a tempest too big to touch.

The ringing silence after his most recent little outburst makes his skin crawl.

Right.

The receptionist.

Endeavor’s eyes narrow as he recovers from the initial shock, and Natsuo’s blood heats just looking at it.

“If they ask,” Endeavor says, voice sharpened to a cleaving edge, “I’m going to tell them that you being with the kids seems to have helped all of us.”

It’s the fucking eyes ripping words out of him, words that he doesn’t— “It hasn’t helped you.”

Slits of stark blue. “How do you know? You go out of your way to avoid knowing anything about me. That’s your prerogative. But you can’t have it both ways.”

The heat in Natsuo’s chest surges, but he can’t afford to fuel it.

He can’t.

Everybody here is on Endeavor’s side. Everybody here is looking for reasons to crucify him—waiting for him to put a foot wrong, to fuck up and prove that he’s too unstable to be trusted with his own damn kids.

He has to keep his cool, no matter what it takes.

He needs to be logical. That’s the way Endeavor operates.

And in a way—

Endeavor’s right.

They’re both different now. It’s been almost a decade since the world flipped, and hardly any of the most important things in either of their lives are still the same. Natsuo has worked his ass off to keep the trajectory of his as distant from Endeavor’s as possible, but he knows for a fact, now, that Endeavor has traveled a long, long way, too. It doesn’t make any damn sense to approach a situation today with the same assumptions he would have used eight years ago.

Endeavor’s right.

Natsuo doesn’t know him at all.

He looks down again—at how carefully Endeavor has caged his fingers around Eiji’s little stuffed shark, to keep it safe without crushing it under the weight of his gigantic hand.

Natsuo breathes out.

“Okay,” he says. “That’s fair.”

Endeavor’s eyes stay narrowed, but his shoulders relax—just slightly.

Naru drops the teething ring again, and it tries to bounce off of Natsuo’s thigh and over the side of the chair, but he catches it just in time.

He makes himself breathe even deeper as he offers it back up, and Naru fumbles to grab it.

“I know I need to work on giving you the benefit of the doubt sometimes,” he says. The words taste like chips of glass. “I’m sorry.”

Endeavor’s metal fingers curl and uncurl and curl again—tightly—where they’re resting on his knee.

“Don’t be,” he says. “I understand.”

“That’s what I mean, though,” Natsuo says. The joints of the steel fingers are interesting—intricately engineered so that they can flex and release in a way that mimics the real thing. The whole contraption makes a faint, faint humming noise, too low to be quite a whine. “You’re trying really hard to be understanding about how I feel, but I’m… not. I’m not doing that for you. I’m not trying hard enough.” Naru whaps at his arm with a wet palm, babbling a little to himself, and Natsuo nudges idly at his cheek with a knuckle again. “But I need to.” He makes himself swallow, makes himself say it to the silver hand. “We’re on the same team.”

Endeavor stays silent for a few seconds. The fingers clench, but it doesn’t look as much like a fist when the back is laid on his knee like that.

“You’ve had a few other things on your mind,” he says, quietly.

The weak laugh wriggles up around Natsuo’s heart in his throat and hurls itself out into the air.

Endeavor’s metal fingers unfurl.

The silence settles for a few seconds more, except for the receptionist opening a drawer and moving some files around.

“Has the room been all right?” Endeavor asks.

Natsuo adjusts a little tuft of Naru’s hair that was flipping itself at an especially crazy angle. “Yeah. It’s pretty nice. Haven’t figured out where the owls are yet, but I do hear ’em sometimes.”

Endeavor rearranges the position of the shark. “I could ask them to keep it down.”

“Cool,” Natsuo says. “Thanks. Tell the crickets to chill while you’re at it.”

“I’ll put that in their performance evaluation,” Endeavor says, and the dryness of it wrings a fragment of another shitty laugh out of Natsuo’s chest.

They sit there in something like companionable silence for a little while. Naru gets bored of the ring and starts trying to chew on Natsuo’s hand, and he’s got just enough tooth protruding now that it hurts, so Natsuo digs in the diaper bag and whips out one of the books with really thick cardboard pages so that he can gnaw on that instead. Eiji used to love trying to eat paper. Hayami would get this faint look of chagrin every time that made Natsuo think maybe it was a mouse genes thing, so he just handed over the board books, tried to keep anything actually ingestible well clear, and pretended that it wasn’t kind of fascinating.

Sometimes his brain still tries to believe that she’s just… away. That she’s on a trip. That it’s temporary. That she’s elsewhere, instead of gone.

She’s never going to get to see Naru learn to walk. No first words, no solid foods, no clapping games, no pictures of the boys together on birthdays or holidays or just because.

He knew they were going to be forever when he realized that there was no one else he’d ever been able to share his thoughts with the way he did with her—and, incredibly enough, vice versa. She thought manicures were an insipid waste of money, but admitted—only to him, only ever to him—that it was probably partly because the one time she’d gotten one with friends, the salon employees had stared at her nose and her ears, and the salon worker who’d drawn the short straw had spent the whole time handling her tougher-than-average fingernails like they were knives.

Her favorite color was a particularly soft shade of lavender, which she only liked when it was slightly ephemeral—gauzy fabrics, background images, watercolors, not in hard-lined paint or clothes that were too defined. He’d spent a long-ass time hunting for a cashmere sweater so soft that it blurred a little around the edges, in exactly the right shade. She’d always worn it on difficult days—when she needed to remind herself how loved she was.

She’s never coming back.

This is it.

This is what the world is, now.

It’s a long, long string of moments to seconds, seconds to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to days—to weeks, to years—without her.

It’s a lifetime that’s all time and no life. It’s a tunnel with no terminus, and no lights.

Naru chews avidly on the book, one tiny hand clenched around the corner, one around the spine.

Endeavor brings his phone out again, checks his emails, flags a few of them, flicks over to his texts, answers one—Hawks, obviously. Natsuo can’t see his screen well enough to read it, but the not-quite-suppressed expression says it all.

Natsuo could whip his phone out, too, but there’s no point.

He hasn’t talked to most of his old friends in a long time. Everyone just kind of went their separate ways, after a while—which used to burn him, because he couldn’t help agonizing over the possibility that they’d only ever acted like they’d enjoyed his company because of his last fucking name, and as soon as they could, they ran for it. His old coworkers probably just resent him for disappearing and leaving them with all his fucking shifts.

The only people who reach out to him now are Fuyumi and Shouto and Mom—the ones who are tied to him. The ones who are stuck with him, bound by blood, no matter what.

He hopes it’ll be easier for Eiji—living, loving, finding people. The kid makes friends everywhere he goes without even trying, because the sheer sweetness of him just resonates, but Natsuo still worries about him. People might take advantage. People might take it the wrong way. People might take it away from him—gut it, grind it down, pry it out.

It’s hard to tell at this stage what Naru’s going to be like, although he’s a charmer so far. Odds are good he’ll give Eiji a run for his money someday.

Natsuo can’t get caught up in that shit right now. With any luck, Eiji is turning the full force of his innocent charisma on Jimi and the woman in the back, and absolutely bamboozling them with his capacity to cherish a world that has already stolen so much from him.

With any luck, he’s saying decent things about Natsuo.

…as if this family has ever had a speck of luck.

Natsuo supports Naru with his right arm and hooks the left underneath the book so that it won’t fall on the floor if Naru’s slippery grip falters. He leans back against the chair and stares at the ceiling. If they’re planning to talk to all three of them inside of an hour, Eiji’s stint in hell can’t last more than twenty minutes, right?

This is shaping up to be the kind of twenty minutes that feels like half a day.

“Bah-gob,” Naru says around the book.

“You’re tellin’ me,” Natsuo says.

Apparently that was meant to be his warning that Naru is all tuckered out from a rigorous day of baptizing defenseless people and objects with baby spit, because he snuggles in and starts dozing shortly after that, the book still clenched in both tiny hands.

Endeavor takes the shark with him when he goes out, all the way down to the car, to bring the car seat carrier back.

Natsuo tucks Naru in and settles him in the next chair over, and he’s out like an especially adorable light.

And they wait.

The faint hubbub of voices from the far side of the closed door makes both of them abruptly sit up straight. They’re both up on their feet by the time it swings open, and Jimi ushers Eiji out ahead of her.

He doesn’t look thrilled, but he also doesn’t look like he spent the whole session sobbing, which Natsuo thinks they have to take as a positive.

The way his whole little body relaxes when he lays eyes on them again makes Natsuo’s heart clench. He smiles at them, not quite as strongly as usual, but not too bad. He has a few pieces of paper in his hands, and he doesn’t even wait for Jimi to beckon him ahead of her before he trots over and shoves them up at Endeavor.

“I drew the garden,” he says. “And Naru, and Mr. Hawks. Ms. Jimi wanted to know a lot about Naru.”

Natsuo suspects she also wanted to know a thing or two about what the country’s number one damn hero is like at home, but she seems professional enough to have refrained from indulging her curiosity at Eiji’s expense.

“I see,” Endeavor says. He crouches down, holds the shark out— “Would you like to trade?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says. He sorts through the pages and gives Endeavor three of them in exchange for the stuffed animal, then rounds on Natsuo. “Here, Daddy!” he says next, shoving the last sheet up at him. “I drew you at the beach. Can we go to the beach again?”

“Sure thing, bud,” Natsuo says. His heart feels too big for him, and way too heavy. The drawing features the usual blobs-of-color toddler aesthetic, but after the description, he can tell that it’s meant to be him sprawled on the sand under the umbrella with Naru sleeping on his chest. “This is really nice. Thank you.”

“Mr. Todoroki,” Jimi says.

They both look up again. She pauses, winces, shakes her head.

“Sorry. Natsuo.”

She opens up the next door over. The silent woman steps out of the playroom behind her and shuts that door, then moves in through the new one.

Natsuo’s fingertips feel numb.

They tremble a little as he fumbles to fit the corner of Eiji’s drawing underneath Naru’s carrier for safekeeping. He gets up. “Okay,” he says, in spite of the relevant detail that it’s about the least-okay he’s felt in days, and that’s a high damn bar.

They’re going to take them. Aren’t they? This is his punishment. This is what he deserves for slipping—for failing, for fucking up. The world is going to beat him, going to keep beating him, going to bash him into the ground and kick his bleeding body, batter bruises in on top of bruises, crush him down over and over until he splatters or shatters or splits.

Breathe, breathe, breathe—

A shadow moves, and a sudden heat grazes his shoulder—he flinches hard away from the movement, sidesteps—

Endeavor lowers his hand very slowly, eyes narrowed again.

“Whatever happens,” he says—nearly under his breath, so quietly that Jimi might not quite be able to hear; “we’ll figure it out.”

Easy for him to fucking say.

Easy for him to fucking believe when he’s not the one on trial.

Stay cool. Play nice. Win the game.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. He leans down and gently ruffles Eiji’s hair. “You okay, bud?”

Eiji snuggles the shark to his chest and nods up at Natsuo seriously. Then he holds up the shark. “You need him, Daddy? He’ll protect you. Sharks are brave.”

“He can protect you,” Natsuo says. “And you can protect Naru. Here.” He scoops Eiji up and sets him on Endeavor’s knee. “How’s that?”

Eiji immediately wriggles in against Endeavor’s body, pulling the side of Endeavor’s jacket around himself. “Good.” He glances over. “You gotta go, Daddy. They’re waiting for you.”

That’s what they need in this family: another rule-follower toeing the line no matter how many times it scorches the soles of his feet.

“Oops,” Natsuo says. He flashes Jimi the best smile he can manage. “Sorry.”

“Quite all right,” she says, giving him a bland one back.

Play the game.

Win.

He makes his feet carry him across the waiting room, makes his shoulders stay square and high but loose enough to look casual. He scrubs a hand idly back through his hair, tucks the thumb of his other hand into the edge of his pocket. He’s a little bit anxious, but he’s handling it. He’s got nothing to hide.

Jimi ushers him into a much more boring room than the one they had set up for Eiji—beige walls, coffee table, a couple of armchairs, a loveseat couch, a desk and some filing cabinets, the obligatory potted plants. The silent woman sat down in the armchair right underneath the little window. There’s a notebook resting in her lap. The window looks out onto a blank wall across the way.

Jimi gestures towards the couch as she closes the door behind herself. Natsuo sits down, wipes his palms on his jeans, and watches her with the most unassuming expression he can muster.

“Thanks for making the time,” he says as she settles down in the armchair that’s positioned at a ninety-degree angle from him, at a distance where she could lean over and kick the silent woman if she wanted. “And for letting us—you know. Try out the whole arrangement in the first place. Sounded like it wasn’t protocol.”

“We do what we can,” she says, crossing her legs at the knee and resting her clipboard on the higher one. She doesn’t pull the pencil out from where she slid it in behind the clip. “Nervous?”

“I gotta be honest,” he says, to plant it in their minds that he will. “I think I’d be more comfortable if I could get some toys, too.”

Jimi smiles—mostly even sincerely.

He kind of means it, though. He wishes he had something to do with his hands. They’re already getting clammy, and they’re shaking again.

He clasps them in between his knees and deliberately refuses to clench his fingers together. Loose. Nice and easy. Relaxed. He’s in control. He can make them believe it.

“Maybe we should get some of those brainteaser puzzles,” Jimi says. “I’m afraid there’s not much we can do for today, though.” She leans forward slightly, still smiling. “In the meantime—how are you doing?”

He takes a deep breath, lets it out slow, and makes himself smile back.

“Better,” he says.

The woman in the armchair jots something down in the notebook.

Jimi glances over.

The woman holds the page up towards her, at an angle where Natsuo can’t see what’s written there.

The “Hold on” bursts out of him before he can bite it back. “What’s that?” The frigid suspicion races up his spine and wrenches his mouth open again. “Can she—you can’t subject me to psychic evaluation without a signed waiver. You can’t. It’s the fourth clause of the quirk amendment t—”

“She’s not telepathic,” Jimi says. She’s still smiling. He wants to knock her teeth out. He can’t afford to think that, can’t afford to think anything— “Her quirk just indicates the gist of someone’s emotional register compared to what they’ve said. She’s sort of like a polygraph.”

Natsuo’s heart slams in his ears. “I didn’t agree to that either.”

Jimi blinks at him serenely. “Your father did, on your behalf.”

Natsuo’s brain whites out for a long, long second with the fucking rage.

But he can’t—

If this woman can read him—

Slow down—slow down—

Jimi said that the quirk interprets speech.

If he keeps his mouth clamped shut, they won’t know how bad it is. They won’t know he can see his hands around Endeavor’s fucking throat, won’t know the whole world is disintegrating around him, won’t know—

“Mr. Todoroki?” Jimi says, slightly cautiously.

He can do this.

He can do this for Eiji.

He lowers his face into both hands and scrubs at it, grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes, makes himself hold his breath and then let it out in a long sigh.

He has to put his money where his mouth is.

It didn’t really look like Endeavor read the stupid fucking forms he signed at the desk. He was glancing at Eiji the whole time, shifting him gently. He didn’t pick up the page and scour the fine print.

Maybe he missed it completely.

Maybe he doesn’t even know.

Maybe it goes back further than that—Endeavor would despise the idea of somebody reading his thoughts as much as Natsuo does, possibly even more. What if he never really had a choice? What if this was a non-negotiable condition of the arrangement to let Natsuo stay at the house at all?

He could have said something.

But maybe they’re backed into the same damn corner.

Maybe.

Maybe they really are fucking in this together. Just this once.

Natsuo pushes the fury out of himself one breath at a time—envisioning it like steam that has to be siphoned away. No hurry.

When his ribs feel less like razorwire cinching in, he raises his head.

He tries for a smile.

“Sorry,” he says. He does mean that. He’s sorry any of them have to deal with this shit. He’s deeply sorry it went sideways so fast. He’s sorry he’s already risked so much by losing control. “Caught me by surprise.”

The observer’s eyes are flat—emotionless. Reminds him of Hawks in the field.

She scribbles something down without even breaking eye contact, then tips it towards Jimi.

Deceptive, probably. Misleading. He’s barely hanging on.

‘Barely’ still counts.

Jimi’s gaze slides to the notebook and then back up to him, and her pleasantly neutral expression doesn’t change.

“My apologies, then,” she says, smoothly. “I didn’t realize you weren’t aware. But I can assure you we’re going to try to make this as painless as possible. We’re on your side.”

Bullshit.

He smiles. He nods. He keeps his mouth shut.

“Right,” she says, ever so slightly wryly. It’s not exactly a subtle tactic, but it’s not like she can blame him. “Let’s get to work. How would you say it’s going—staying with your father?”

Directly for the jugular.

Fine.

Natsuo presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth and chooses the words one by one.

“He’s being… gracious. And he’s doing well with the kids. I never—I didn’t expect that. I’m still struggling a little to get my head around it.”

He is, obviously, struggling a lot, but he’s gambling on the hope that the uninvited psychic on the far side of the room won’t be able to parse that level of nuance from an idiom.

Jimi nods and writes something down. The ferociousness of the curiosity dries out his mouth and burns under his skin.

“How much time are you spending with the kids?” she asks. “On average.”

“Pretty much the whole day,” he says, slowly, trying to feel around for the trigger to the trap. “I’m… trying to follow his lead, I guess. ’Cause the schedule he got going for them seems to be working really well, and helping Eiji a lot. We’re sharing parts of it relatively evenly right now. He’s still doing a lot of the heavy lifting with bedtime and breakfast and stuff, since I’m off in the in-law suite or whatever, but…”

She’s just watching him—waiting for him to stop rambling, or waiting for him to keep at it until he weaves himself a noose made out of words and thrusts his head right through it.

“He doesn’t leave me alone with them for more than a minute or two at a time,” Natsuo says, hearing the acid starting to creep into his voice and fighting it down, “if that’s what you’re getting at.”

She smiles. Dead neutral. Pleasantness with no emotional association whatsoever. Maybe that’s her quirk.

“The only thing I’m trying to get at is a better understanding of where you are,” she says.

He doesn’t seethe. He doesn’t sneer. He doesn’t let himself clench his fists or dig his fingers into the fabric of his jeans.

Play to win.

“It’s great that you’re already able to spend so much time with them,” she says. He wonders what the psychic in the corner thinks is underlying that. “But let’s go back to what you said—how he acts with them, and wrapping your head around it.” Her eyes narrow, just slightly. “You don’t trust him?”

His head echoes.

“Trust him?” comes out even though he tries to snap his mouth shut, bar it, catch it just behind his teeth. “Trust him?”

She doesn’t fucking know.

She doesn’t fucking know fucking anything.

“I understand that the two of you have history,” she says, and his mind whites out again—an instantaneous blizzard, screaming wind and swirling snow, too thick to move through, see through; so frigid it extinguishes the flaring of your neurons, and you can’t even think. “And he wasn’t there for you when you were—”

“It’s not about what he did to me,” Natsuo says.

She blinks.

“He destroyed my brothers,” Natsuo says, grinding the words out as evenly as possible—as neutrally, as levelly, when they’re the base of the volcano in his guts. “He trained them starting when they were barely older than Eiji—beat the hell out of them, crushed the life out of them, used them, and discarded Touya when he wasn’t enough. He locked Mom up for a decade. He turned Fuyumi into a perpetual servant, because her whole life has been a constant fear that she’ll be next if she doesn’t make herself too useful to get rid of.”

Silence, and snow.

“Sure,” he says, tasting the magma. “It was ‘a long time ago’. That’s what everybody’s going to say now. But you don’t know who he was—what he was. He’s the reason Touya functionally killed himself when he was fourteen. He’s the reason Shouto has a life expectancy of twenty-six. He’s the reason none of us can fucking sleep through the night. So forgive me if it’s taking me a little while to come around to this fantasy that he’s some kind of wounded saint.”

Jimi looks at him.

He looks back. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t flinch. Let her think it over. Let her try to understand. Let her—

Her eyes tighten slightly. She doesn’t quite look sad.

“You don’t have a while,” she says, quietly. “Your kids need you now. They need you to either make your peace with it, or get out of the way.”

His heart strains. His blood seethes. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then you have to put it aside,” she says, “if you can’t let it go. Maybe there’s no getting over it, but you have to get around it. Because you have a job to do.” She blinks again, just once. Lays per pencil down on the clipboard. Tilts her head back, ever so slightly, chin raised, watching him. “Can you do that?”

He’s a Todoroki.

“Doesn’t matter if I can,” he says. “I will.”

“We need to see progress, Natsuo,” she says, and the calm, smooth voice rakes through his mind, tearing up all the feeble seeds he’s tried to plant, all the spindly foundations he’s tried to build. Nothing he’s done, been, tried—nothing is ever good enough. “We need to see that you’re ready to take responsibility for them again, that you’re able t—”

“Any time,” he says, choking on the smoke, chest heaving with the effort of breathing, with the wrench of his heart in him as every beat rocks it back and forth, the heat surging up and blooming in the back of his throat, “that you want to lose the love of your life and your best friend in the world without any warning, and get mobbed by people telling you to buck up and pull yourself together and move on with your life—any time your whole life ends, and you want people to box you in and demand that you get over it on a timeline—be my fucking guest. You don’t—you didn’t know her, you don’t—do you fucking understand what it means?”

She started to stare at him in slightly unsettled disbelief half a sentence in, but she’s blurred past recognition by the end.

He can feel his throat closing—can feel the pressure squeezing the tail end of every breath, strangling the oxygen out of them before he can haul them down into his lungs; he can hear the high-pitched wheeze it leaves in its wake. His brain whirls, half-formed words cascading everywhere, a deluge of fragmented thoughts—a downpour. The drowning.

He drops his head into his hands and lets it rattle through him. He’s cried in so many public places and in front of so many strangers over the past few weeks that it barely even registers as humiliating anymore.

He has to get a grip.

She’s deciding his fate.

Maybe it’s good, in a way—for her to watch him grappling with it. For her to see firsthand how much he’s willing to give.

He focuses on deepening the breaths, making them fill his lungs to capacity, holding them for a second before he lets them out—reminds himself that he is still breathing, that the world’s still turning, that the next moment can still be his if he wants it bad enough. He focuses on extracting slivers of meaning from the tumbling cyclone of his thoughts.

He wrings the weak little hitching sounds out of his inhalations slowly—one laborious breath at a time, waiting for them to diminish and then to disappear. He scrubs his sleeves over his eyes, wipes his cheeks, sympathizes with Naru. Maybe he got them quick enough that the salt won’t crust.

“Sorry,” he says. He is, in a cosmic sense. Jot that the fuck down, psychic witch. “I know that’s not what we’re here for.”

“No,” Jimi says, very delicately. “I apologize if I made it sound like what you’re going through is irrelevant.”

It is, to them.

It is to everyone.

“But I know you realize,” she says, “that my job is just to assess whether they’re safe with you.”

“They are,” he says, shamelessly swiping his sleeve under his nose next. Better than the slow drip. “I know you’re going to ask him all the same questions, anyway. He won’t bullshit you. He’ll probably say something about how I never learned how to deal with grief, but trying to fix it by force is in my blood.” Verbatim, very likely. “It’s better. It’s better when I’m with them. Gives me something else to think about. I’m—the way you saw me out there is the way it is. That’s how I act with them all the time. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

Jimi looks at him for a long second before she turns to glance at the notebook that the other woman is angling towards her. She reads whatever’s there. Her eyebrow shifts, just slightly. She tilts her head and then half-nods, and the woman lowers the notebook again.

Natsuo makes himself wait, clutching his hands around each other, trying to ground himself, but when she looks at him again, her expression is still so damn neutral that there’s nothing to go on.

He meant what he said—it’s the truth. It’s all the truth.

And Endeavor won’t lie. Not when it matters. Not about this.

Natsuo swallows. His hands are so cold. “I know I fucked up,” he says. “At the start. But I know—what it is, now. What that looks like. It’s not going to happen again.”

She just keeps watching him. She taps her pencil against the clipboard—once, twice, three times before it goes still.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

Something about the coolness of the question makes his lungs seize up again.

“Yeah,” he says, slowly. “I’m—careful. I’m watching for the signs. I’m—what kind of a question is that?”

“You’re fighting two wars right now,” Jimi says. “One is with your grief, and one is with your childhood. When they converge, it’s more than you can handle—isn’t that what just happened here?”

The blizzard in his head comes back.

“I’m fine,” he says, stupidly.

The other woman’s pen scratches on the page—it feels like thorns on his skin, needles, knives—

“I’m not—” He swallows harder this time, reels it back, grits his teeth. “I know what I need to do for them. I’m doing—okay. I’m doing okay when I can see them and remind myself what’s important. I was—like, the very first time I went over, I was on edge, and I was—I—scared Eiji. A little bit. But we talked it out, and I told him how sorry I was, and I—now I know I can’t let it get to me. I know I can’t afford it. So I’m just—I’m managing it. And it’s fine.”

The pen scrapes across the notebook, whispering over the page.

“How long do you think that’s going to hold?” Jimi asks, quietly. “You’re walking a tightrope.”

To hell with that. “Like I said. I can do it. I am doing it.”

Jimi taps her pencil, glances towards the door behind him, and then looks at him again. There’s something sad in it.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck—

“They deserve better,” she says, and the pounding of his heart almost deafens him as she takes a breath, “than to have to rely on a balancing act in your psyche.”

No.

It boils over instantly.

It rips its way out of him.

He leans forward, gripping the arm of the couch, choking on the tears again—

“Don’t take my kids,” he says. “Please don’t—please don’t take my fucking—I’m begging you, don’t—what do I have to do? Tell me what I have to do, I’ll do it—just—please don’t—”

“You need to make peace with your father,” Jimi says, watching him. “And with the part of yourself that’s still terrified of becoming him.”

The breath leaves his lungs.

The room is empty for a long second—a featureless void home only to impossible words, to words like lightning carving through the night.

And then it’s disgustingly ordinary again, and horrifically real—detailed down to the nicks in the plaster on the walls, the topmost file folder on the desk set at a different angle than the ones stacked beneath it, the worn spots on the ugly mauve upholstery of the armrest underneath his clenching hand.

Jimi lays the pencil down on the clipboard. She looks him in the eyes. Hers are brown and very tired.

“I didn’t get into this line of work because I enjoy prying people’s kids away from them,” she says. “I did it because someone got me out of a bad situation, and it let me have a life.” She smiles, faintly. “I know you love them. But that’s not enough on its own—you need to love them enough to be willing to do what’s right for them, too. You’re smart. I think you already know all of this. I think that’s why you’re trying so hard to dance around it, but you can’t duck and weave forever. He cares about you. A lot. And he has devoted himself to your kids like I’ve barely ever seen in the twelve years I’ve been at this job. He wants to help. You need to let him.”

Natsuo’s head throbs—deep, like double black eyes, like the tension will never stop winching itself tighter, heartbeat by heartbeat, breath by breath. He can’t keep pulling back forever. He’ll snap.

And it’s not out of the question anymore.

Four weeks ago, he would have laughed in her face.

He looks at her.

Hawks was onto something. She does care—she’s genuinely invested in the welfare of his children, which is a hell of a lot more than you could say for most government hacks—but she’s tired. She’s here to keep a roof over her own head, to fulfill a series of obligations in exchange for a paycheck. Whether she realizes it or not, deep down, she wants this to be easy.

Everyone does. That’s what life is—trying to make shit easier. Fighting your way towards the top of the hill in the hopes that you’ll live to see the other side.

“Is that it?” Natsuo asks.

Jimi watches him for a long second before her head tips fractionally to the right side. “What do you mean?”

Natsuo curls his fingers slowly. Keeps breathing. “Is that all I have to do to convince you that I’m safe around the kids? ’Cause if that’s what it takes, consider it done.”

She picks the pencil up again, and then puts it back down. She glances over at the other woman, who shows her the notebook again.

He’s telling the truth.

He didn’t inherit anything worth celebrating, or recognizing, or nurturing.

But he did get the willpower.

He did get the stubbornness that levels cities or moves mountains, depending on where you start and where you stand.

Let them set their damn checklist. Let them choose their damn milestones.

If they give him an objective, he’ll exceed it.

If they give him an inch of leverage, he will lift the whole fucking world.

What they will not do is take his children away from him again.

Jimi is eyeing him now, after whatever she saw in the notebook. Her expression might be more considering than skeptical—more analytical than judgmental.

She might believe him now.

“We’ll need to set up regular check-ins,” she says. “And home visits, which would be unannounced.”

“Of course,” Natsuo says.

That came out sounding like—

Him.

Like Endeavor. Like whoever’s underneath.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

People listen to him.

“I still need to speak with your father,” Jimi says.

He watches her face for traces, but she keeps it clean. She’ll probably get Hawks’s number from Endeavor and call him, too—try to verify what Natsuo said in here, try to dig a little deeper.

Let her.

Hawks wants the happy little house he never had. He’ll tell them exactly what they need to hear.

Natsuo nods.

Jimi smiles a little. It doesn’t look insincere. “This doesn’t exempt you from your classes.”

Natsuo lets himself grimace. “Didn’t figure I was getting that lucky.”

Luck has nothing to do with it.

Never has.

He stands up, but she makes an indistinct gesture with her hand that stops him before he can take a step towards the door.

She reaches behind herself and picks up the box of tissues on the low table next to her chair. She offers it out.

Right.

Fuck.

At least the boys—Naru in particular—have given him a lot of practice scrubbing tears and snot and various other crap off of a face in a hurry.

By Jimi’s slightly strained expression, he still looks like shit, but he doesn’t really care. He doesn’t want to be in this room anymore. There’s a trashcan by the door, so he starts for it.

She gets up to follow him, not too close. “You can… take a minute. We have time.”

“It’s okay,” he says, and opens the door.

Endeavor is up on his feet before Natsuo has even let go of the door handle, but it’s not the suddenness of the movement that makes Natsuo stumble one step back.

In the first instant, when his eyes fix on Natsuo’s face, he looks horrified.

Steam rises.

And Natsuo sees something he hasn’t since he set foot in the house.

Fury.

Endeavor—with Eiji still curled up in the crook of his arm, eyes huge, thumb tucked into his mouth, little shark clutched to his chest—turns the heart-of-flame eyes on Jimi.

“What,” he bites out, “exactly did—”

Natsuo flings his arm out in front of her.

“It’s fine,” he blurts out. “It’s—I’m okay. It’s fine. Just—tough. It was tough. It’s okay now.”

Endeavor’s giant shoulders heave with his breath as he looks back and forth between the two of them.

Eiji wriggles, and Endeavor startles, then carefully crouches to let him down.

Eiji dodges past the coffee table and runs across the carpet, the soles of his shoes blinking bright orange. He throws himself at Natsuo’s shins again and hugs tight, squishing the shark against the back of Natsuo’s right calf.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” he says. “Is it—” He looks up, eyes filling. “Is it ’cause you miss Mommy? Or because we’re not—because—”

Natsuo ducks down and wraps both arms around him tight. “No, no. It’s okay, bud. I promise.” He rubs Eiji’s back but looks up at Endeavor, meaningfully. They can’t blow this. Not now. “It’s just because I’m so worried about you guys. I’m okay.”

Endeavor works his jaw for a second before turning to Jimi, inclining his head. “I’m—sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she says, although Natsuo imagines the woman with the perception quirk would have a thing or two to say about that declaration. In this line of work, it can’t be the first time this week that Jimi has been subject to intimidation by a guy twice her size, but most of them couldn’t crush her skull in their hands and then burn it to ash. “Let’s all take a deep breath, and then… whenever you’re ready, Mr. Todoroki.”

Endeavor sets his shoulders and immediately starts towards her. She looks like the only one who’s surprised.

“Grampa,” Eiji says as Natsuo tries to draw him gently out of the doorway. “Here. He’ll help you.”

He shoves the shark up into the air.

Endeavor pauses, kneels down, very carefully takes it in his right hand, and very gently sweeps the left through Eiji’s hair.

“Thank you,” he says.

His eyes meet Natsuo’s.

Same team.

Same page.

He’ll do whatever it takes.

“Go easy on ’em,” Natsuo says.

Endeavor almost smiles.

Then he touches Eiji’s shoulder gently, stands, and steps into the room.

Jimi has to back out of the way to make space for him, because he fills the entire doorway.

Naru whines softly from his carrier on the chair, so Natsuo walks Eiji back over to check on him and then tucks the blanket in a little closer around his tiny feet. He shoves his hand back into his mouth and settles with another incoherent murmur.

Natsuo sits down and hoists Eiji up into his lap. Eiji curls in against him and clings.

“I told her I want you to stay, Daddy,” he says in a child-whisper the receptionist won’t be able to miss.

“I told her I want to stay, too,” Natsuo says. He pets Eiji’s hair back, kisses his temple, hikes him up just a little higher. “Let’s hope she thinks it’s a good idea.”

“She can talk to Hawks,” Eiji says, helplessly. “He’ll tell her.” Not even four, and he instinctively understands how power structures work. Damn. “Is she gonna listen to us? And Grampa? Grampa’s so smart. He knows all kinds of things.” Nice to know that Natsuo’s extensive medical education earns him no authority whatsoever. “Or—or she could talk to Gramma. And Auntie Fuyumi. She could talk to Naru, if she told him—if she said ‘Slime if it’s yes’, if she—”

“It’s okay, bud,” Natsuo says, keeping his voice low, keeping his hands steady. “Our job is to tell her how we feel, and we did that, right? Her job is to figure out what’s the best thing to do next. So we did our job. We need to let her do hers.”

Eiji reaches up and pats Natsuo’s cheek, then his jaw. “Are you sure you’re okay, Daddy?”

Ah, jeez. Hold it together. “Yeah. I’m okay. Thanks, bud.”

“It’s okay if you’re not,” Eiji says, hugging Natsuo’s neck a little too hard, especially given that his throat just went tight again. Having a tiny forearm digging into your windpipe isn’t especially pleasant at the best of times. “It’s—the important thing—Grampa says the important thing is to look at yourself and think about why you’re not okay, and see if you can figure it out, and then to ask for help if you need to.”

Whatever they’re paying Endeavor’s therapist, it isn’t half enough.

“That’s pretty good advice,” Natsuo gets out. “But I’m okay. I promise. I was talking to Ms. Jimi about how much I love you guys, and I don’t want to have to leave. I got scared. But we need to just wait and see what happens, okay? It’s okay to be scared, but it doesn’t help. We need to be patient.”

“I’m scared, too,” Eiji mumbles into his neck. “I don’t want you to leave, Daddy. Mommy left forever, I don’t—I don’t want—”

Natsuo squeezes his eyes shut, presses his mouth shut, and starts stroking meaningfully at Eiji’s back. “I—know. I know. Look, it’s—you’re right. She’ll listen to your Grampa. And he doesn’t want either of us to be scared. Right? He wants us to be happy.”

Natsuo’s eyes open. They stare stupidly at the first thing he sees—the metal sign hung up at the top of the alcove over the receptionist’s desk, which says Check in here.

Endeavor—Enji Todoroki, his father—wants him to be happy.

It’s true, isn’t it?

It’s true.

And it’s been that simple for longer than he’s been willing to think about.

When Natsuo told him they were expecting a kid—and told him to stay the fuck out of it—he did. No pushing, no threats, no wheedling, no guilt trip. Not a whisper. Not a word.

“I’m bad at being patient, Daddy,” Eiji says, with such unrivaled misery that Natsuo’s chest rings even hollower at the sound. “It’s too hard.”

“That’s okay,” he makes himself say. “I’m not much good at it either, but we can practice and get better together. All we have to do is not give up.” Eiji nods weakly, face still pressed in against his neck, and Natsuo rubs gently at his back. “You want to color a little while we wait? Or draw some more? Your drawings are so good.”

“Okay, Daddy,” Eiji mumbles, reluctantly releasing him to start climbing down. “Maybe Grampa can help. Hawks said—Hawks says he’s real patient, he’s the most patient, it’s just that people just don’t see it right. Maybe he can teach us.”

Natsuo takes a deep breath and lets it out slow. That’s a start.

“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe he can.”

They should incorporate idle crayon-scribbling into the psych ward classes: it’s weirdly soothing. Then again, maybe that’s more of a reflection on Natsuo’s aborted childhood than on any sort of universal truth.

Doesn’t matter now—the time passes, whisking by him, and it doesn’t chafe his skin.

There’s a faint swell of conversation beyond the interview room door, and then it swings open.

Endeavor has his huge thumb and finger pinched around the fin of Eiji’s shark like he’s holding its hand. He looks like he got run down by an even bigger emotion truck than Natsuo did, and then it reversed and rolled back over him to make sure.

Eiji takes one horrified look at him and tugs on Natsuo’s sleeve. In a kid-whisper so loud it almost shakes the walls, he says, “Daddy, I don’t think we should come here anymore.”

Natsuo can’t help it.

He drops his head into his hands and laughs.

“I don’t want that,” Eiji says.

Natsuo and Endeavor lean in on either side and look into his bowl.

He points with his chopsticks. There’s a frog on the top end of this set.

“It’s slimy,” Eiji says.

“It’s daikon,” Endeavor says.

“It’s slimy daikon,” Eiji says.

“Show me?” Endeavor says.

Meticulously, Eiji grasps a sliver between the ends of the chopsticks and raises it for inspection. Endeavor extracts his ridiculous glasses from his shirt pocket, slides them on, and peers at it for a few seconds.

“That’s strange,” he says. “It looks to me very much like the daikon that we have at home.”

“It’s slimy, Grampa,” Eiji says, waving it around a little, presumably for illustrative purposes. “When you cook it, you don’t make it slimy.”

“I thought slimy wasn’t always bad,” Natsuo says. “Naru’s slimy, right?”

“Naru’s special,” Eiji says, with the air of one stating the staggeringly obvious.

Natsuo can’t really disagree with that.

Endeavor unhooks his glasses from around his ear, flicks his wrist to swing the arms shut, and tucks them back into his pocket. “You don’t have to eat it if you really don’t want to. But it’s good for you, sliminess notwithstanding.”

Eiji makes a face, which then evolves into sticking his lower lip out and turning the wordless plea on Natsuo.

“Sorry, bud,” Natsuo says. “This guy’s the family expert on healthy food. If you wanna get big and strong, what he says goes.”

Eiji considers the daikon very seriously.

“Maybe I’ll stay small,” he mutters.

Not with these genes, he won’t.

There’s a faint, faint impression of a smile pulling at the corner of Endeavor’s mouth. “You can just set it aside for now. Maybe later you’ll change your—”

He twists around so fast he almost knocks his teacup off of the table with his metal hand.

Then Natsuo hears the explosion.

He’s on his feet within the next heartbeat, but he recoils away from the surge of flame.

Endeavor is already at the door to the restaurant, watching through the window, his left hand curled around the handle of the door.

Waiting.

Waiting for somebody else to come.

Waiting for someone to save them.

Natsuo can see it in the tilt of his shoulders.

There isn’t anybody else.

Endeavor’s right heel shifts.

Something else out there explodes.

Everybody in the restaurant ducks—scattered screams, the glass of the front window rattling, ceramic clinking as the dishes and utensils shake—

The door slams against the wall, the bell jangling feebly through the rest of the cacophony.

Endeavor’s gone.

Natsuo’s mind goes still.

This is what he does.

This is the only thing he’s ever done well.

He takes two strides and grabs the arm of the waitress who had just started to approach their table, sidestepping the hot pool of tea seeping into the carpet from where she dropped her tray.

“These are my kids,” he says over the growing chaos of the voices rising around them—the startled comments, the ambient, angry disbelief. “Protect my kids. You hear me?”

She stares at him for a second, and he grips her arm tighter, hauls her a step forward—snaps her out of it. Her eyes clear of the haze of the shock, and she glances over at Eiji, white-faced and wide-eyed, with Naru whining and reaching and wriggling beside him.

She looks back at Natsuo and nods.

And then he runs.

He doesn’t have his bag—doesn’t have so much as a goddamn band-aid, let alone a resource, let alone reinforcements.

But he can’t… not.

He can’t be anything other than he is.

The street feels familiar—the screaming and staggering, the gesturing and crying and cowering behind objects that won’t resist a single dose of concentrated force but seem better than nothing.

Natsuo’s brain scans it like a computer—assesses the balance, the tipping points, the pointed threats.

Endeavor stopped with one foot down off the curb, staring up at a mass of twisted metal—a tower of tortured cars, flipped and engulfed in flame, steel wound around itself like taffy, riddled with jagged puncture holes bigger than the shredded tires—atop which the most important feature of the hellscape has delicately perched.

The guy looks like a geode. His eyes glow deep blue; at a glance, his skin looks impenetrable—thick, rough, a mottled gray like marble. His fingernails stand out stark white except where they’re streaked with soot from raking their sharp points through the roofs of the pile of cars. Several wide teal crystal formations protrude from his right shoulder, jutting up against the flickering backdrop of the heap of destruction in his wake, gleaming dully in the sparking light of the battered streetlamp teetering behind him. He’s wearing the shreds of a bomber jacket, tattered khakis, and a grin like a bared knife.

His pockets and a hip bag slung over his shoulder are both bulging with what must be personal belongings, wallets or purses or jewelry or whatever.

It’s a nice part of town. It can’t be too hard, really—to sit in a bar or a department store and watch the news, bide your time, wait for something serious to start on the other side of the city and take your chance. Dive into the vacuum left by all those retirements, all the quitting, and scrape up what you can get while the big-league backs are turned, then disappear again. Easy money. If nobody gets killed, the cops are way too strapped to do anything except slap your file down on a table and forget it. They won’t even try to track you down.

The guy who killed Hayami and six other civilians is in Tartarus.

But every one of these people ducking behind a mailbox or a parking meter—as if it won’t turn to shrapnel as it rips through their guts—could be Hayami to someone.

All it takes is to be unlucky.

Natsuo lifts his right foot.

And Endeavor vanishes—the plume of flame behind him the only marker of his searing trajectory, launching him skyward in such a swift arc that blinking would make you lose him. The fire has already blackened the shoulders of his shirt, already charred the heels of his stupid Oxford shoes, blossoming bright, the metal hand shimmering in the light and the heat as he draws his elbow back in the same instant that he starts to fall.

Fall is an unintentional word. Stars fall.

Endeavor falls like a bullet.

Endeavor falls like an arrow.

Endeavor falls like the jaws of a trap.

But the geode guy laughs, a grating sound like rocks rubbed together, and sure enough—

Crystals pour up from every inch of his shoulders, jabbing outward like a fistful of knives, transforming him into the hedgehog from hell.

Except that this idiot has no concept of hell.

Not yet.

Endeavor rains a torrent of fire down on him so smoothly and effortlessly that it looks like the sky split open, and the inside of the universe is pure inferno.

The glowing blue eyes spark, and the crystals quaver, and the paint peels off the squealing metal of the cars—

The geode guy’s clawed fingers grab up a chunk of melting tire and fling the glob of bubbling rubber directly at Endeavor’s head.

Endeavor dodges cleanly, the fire under his feet whipping him back, smoke pouring up from his shoulders now—and then ducks a second volley, followed by a chunk of half-liquified metal that used to be someone’s side mirror, and then a smoldering piece of a seat. He holds the right arm back, angling his left side towards his target, easing up the curtain of flame as his stark pale eyes flick over the scene to reconsider his options—

And land on Natsuo, standing at the foot of the wreckage, skin scorched by the heat.

Flame flares up from his cheekbones, engulfing his eyes.

“What the hell are you—”

There he is.

There’s Endeavor.

Geode guy doesn’t wait for them to hash it out—he tucks his body into a tight circle, huge crystals spurting out into a razor-sharp ring, and rolls down the side of the mound of cars, perforating them as he goes. Metal shrieks, the civilians wail, the concrete cracks and buckles—

Fire roars and then sputters under Endeavor’s feet as he slams down onto the pavement right in front of Natsuo—directly between him and the danger.

He spares one scalding glance over his giant shoulder. “Stay with them!”

But if Natsuo knows it, he knows it, too.

This villain is impervious to fire.

Natsuo will never be Shouto. He’ll never be the Chosen One, the golden boy, the vessel for every twisted hope of a fire that never dies. He doesn’t have the control or the finesse—never had it beaten into him, burned into his fingers and his forearms, every scar a scoured-in reminder of what he’d survived. Every tender bruise a transcript of what he was still capable of.

But he’s still a Todoroki. No choice. No more running. There’s no escaping it.

“You need me!” he shouts back.

Gravity gives the geode guy one last burst of mad, shuddering speed, propelling him out of the end of the descent with enough momentum to smash a brick wall to pieces, let alone a has-been hero.

Natsuo reaches for Endeavor—to grab him or drag him or shove him clear or something—

The sudden intensity of the heat snatches the air out of his lungs.

It takes him another half-second to register Endeavor’s arm around his torso, the surge of flame behind him slamming them both sideways out of the path of the spiked crystal mace macerating the sidewalk where they’d stood.

The geode guy narrowly misses a fire hydrant as he crashes into a storefront, shattering the wide window and pummeling the wall, which summons more nearby screaming, but Natsuo can’t even breathe—

Endeavor doesn’t release him so much as shove him backwards—the better to plant his feet in between Natsuo and the enemy again.

Glass rains down from the obliterated window that took the brunt of the geode guy’s intended assault, tinkling as it hits the concrete and chiming strangely when shards collide with the crystals.

Geode guy flings himself upright, unrolling himself as easily as if he was born to it.

He probably was.

He must be a hell of a lot stronger than he looks to jump up to his feet so fast with all those columns of rock sticking out of his back and his shoulders and his spine.

His eyes illuminate again, sapphire blue, way too bright.

He raises his right arm and shifts his weight, turning away from them.

Or—

Turning his back towards them.

Endeavor has already lifted his left hand in response, but it won’t fucking work—

Natsuo grabs a fistful of the back of Endeavor’s shirt and pulls with all his weight behind it, swinging his other hand up the way he’s seen Shouto do it on TV a million times.

He has to concentrate.

He has to reach for it—he has to dig down fucking deep and drag it up screaming.

But it comes.

The ice answers.

It seethes along the path he casts out with his arm, spilling out and up like a frozen tidal wave, and he coalesces it as tightly as he can—thinking density, layers, thickness; thinking cold—

The mass of crystals that slice through the air towards him plunge into the far side of the frigid wall.

But they don’t quite pummel through.

So they don’t skewer Endeavor where he stands.

Geode guy snarls, soundless against the cracking and hissing of the ice and the scouring flame still rippling up off of Endeavor’s left arm. The crystals piston forward, smashing through the remnants of the barrier, but Endeavor’s metal fingers seize around Natsuo’s wrist, and he hauls both of them two strides sideways. The crushing force of that battering move must be how this bastard managed to flip cars—Natsuo can’t help the way his head rings with the prospect of what it would do to a person’s body, can’t help that he stumbles, can’t help that his next attempt at reinforcing the fence of ice sputters and gasps and barely produces much more than frost.

It’s not the first damn time he’s faced down this kind of shit.

It’s not the first damn time his life was on the line.

It’s not even the first damn time he’s had to estimate the force it takes to shatter a human skull and run the odds.

But he’s got kids back there.

And if they have to watch their daddy get stabbed through the eye socket with a crystal spear—if they see it pierce his brain and snuff his breath and shoot out on the other side, dripping and oozing, slick with dreck—

If his kids have to watch him die—

He’s always been good in a crisis. His job has always been emergencies.

But he usually handles the aftermath.

And he’s usually got a patch on his shoulder and a red cross plastered across his back.

He’s usually about as safe as you can get on a battlefield or a disaster scene.

He’s usually in control.

The scalding heat of Endeavor’s metal fingers tight around his wrist starts to singe through his sleeve.

And in the chaos, in the everything and nothing, he hears—

Natsu.

Wake up.

Move.

Endeavor lets go of him—once again more of a shove than a release, pushing him backwards and further from the crystals pulverizing the last shreds of the ice.

Endeavor moves so swiftly and so smoothly that the rest of the world seems to decelerate around him, the fire undulating in slow motion off of his shoulders and his hand. He strides directly towards the adversary, leaning down to scoop up a length of thick metal pipe from one of the cars or who the hell knows what.

He grips it in both hands like a baseball bat, draws it back, and slams the other end down on the outlet of the fire hydrant near the shop.

Natsuo should have known.

Endeavor resolved more incidents than any pro hero in the history of Japan This can’t be the first time he’s run up against an opponent that fire alone could not subdue.

And it won’t become the first time he backs down.

The metal on metal rings with the finality of a gunshot—the blow hacks the valve cap off of the hydrant altogether and sends it spinning into the street, and the water sluices free. The stream crashes into geode guy right as he starts to swivel, slamming into his chest so squarely that the initial impact knocks him backwards three full strides, and Natsuo can barely believe he keeps his feet at all.

The flame dancing off of Endeavor’s form turns stray droplets both from the hydrant and from the melting edges of Natsuo’s ice into rolling waves of steam. He hefts the pipe, his eyes on the geode guy’s knees—then on his ankles, then on the crystals shifting on his back. Their facets glimmer madly from the far side of the wall of spraying water. “This is your chance to—”

Endeavor ducks the spire of crystal—a fucking blessing, given that Natsuo’s retaliatory sheet of ice slams into the side of it instead of blocking its path.

Too slow.

Not good enough.

He breathes in—draws from deeper. Wraps his hands around the blisteringly cold heart of it—the truth of the quirk, the root of the rot. The frozen thing the Himuras built so high that the avalanche buried everything it touched. The ice that lives in all of them.

This family bequeathed him a lot of absolute shit, but there are gifts in the gene pool if you dive to the bottom.

Mom gave him one of the most powerful quirks the world has ever seen.

His father gave him the guts to use it.

The geode guy retracts the extended crystal, eyeing Endeavor through the smoke and the mist. He clenches both fists, squaring his shoulders—pointing them towards a target.

Natsuo lifts his right foot, breathing so deep that snowflakes prickle in the bottoms of his lungs.

He slams his sneaker down on the pavement.

His sharp exhale fogs in the air as the ice seethes out from him—and then surges up. He guides it like steering a bike, leaning his body weight, pushing himself through it, uniting himself with its momentum to shape its trajectory.

And it flows.

The wall rises stark and thick around geode guy before he’s even finished flexing—a spiral whisking around him, one layer and then another, ribbons settling in rapid sequence to accumulate into a tower not too unlike the one that Eiji built with Legos a couple nights ago.

The top edge stays jagged and insubstantial, patchy with unfilled holes, but at the level where it surrounds the villain, the ice should rival the solidity of stone.

Natsuo pants out two sparkling breaths as the dust settles, and the flakes melt in the air, dissipating into more steam every time they drift near Endeavor, who tightens his grip on the pipe and watches the wall.

It’ll hold. Over the discordant noise from everywhere at once, Natsuo can just pick out the sirens starting to howl a few blocks down. It’ll hold until then. It’ll—

A teal crystal-swathed fist punches through.

The next breath lodges in Natsuo’s throat and sticks—cold to heat, like licking a frozen pole—so that he can’t even gasp out the Are you fucking kidding me that just leapt to his tongue.

Shards of ice spray everywhere.

Geode guy drives his crystal-spiked shoulder through the weakened edges around the original hole, widening it enough for the glowing eyes to illuminate the half-shattered rim.

Natsuo stumbles back.

Endeavor ignites.

Natsuo barely sees Endeavor’s knees bend before the fire beneath his feet launches him into the air—a swift, steep arc that carries him above the battered cylinder Natsuo built.

Geode guy staggers back from the widening chasm in the ice so that he can shove his right arm skyward. Natsuo can only see glimpses in the gap, but he must aim his hand directly at Endeavor—tiny crystals flash through the air like sharp-edged bullets.

Endeavor dodges the whole barrage, whipping back and forth as smoothly as if he’s had a flight quirk the whole damn time.

One of the things Natsuo learned a long time ago is that most villain fights aren’t like the knock-down, drag-out marathon Endeavor had with that giant nomu right after eking his way into number one. Most of them don’t last long at all—not when the pro in charge knows what the hell they’re doing. A smart hero locks shit down as fast as possible to minimize the collateral damage, the lost opportunities for showmanship notwithstanding. But a smart hero also trains for stamina as well as strength.

The villains don’t tend to plan as far ahead.

It makes sense—a significant number of them still seem to end up in this position more or less by accident, rather than because they have some sort of grand scheme for societal upheaval or a penchant for unscheduled urban reconstruction. And most of the ones that hurl themselves at a major player seem to intend to go out in a blaze of glory more than anything else. They give it everything they’ve got right out of the gate.

So it pays to wait them out.

It pays to wear them down.

It pays to be stubborn as hell, and to work harder and train longer and want it more than anyone else on the planet, let alone in the profession.

Power matters.

But willpower matters more.

Geode guy can’t keep this up forever.

He wasn’t expecting a fight—no armor, no support items, no escape route, his pockets jammed full of people’s credit cards. He meant to hit this spot and then bounce before anybody who’s ever kissed double digits in the Billboard charts was the wiser.

Instead he got up-close and personal with one of the greatest heroes the world has ever seen.

And physics isn’t on his side. Natsuo doesn’t know how much it takes out of him to produce all that rock at high speed like that, let alone to propel it out of his body with damaging momentum, but he can’t have much left to give.

And Endeavor always will.

He’ll always find something.

He’ll never quit.

In the air above the half-shattered tower, Endeavor twists like a pennant in the wind in spite of his ridiculous size and the long metal pipe still clenched in his left hand, whipping away from another crystal moving so fast that Natsuo can barely track it.

Another chunk cracks off the side of the ice wall. Endeavor is buying time—drawing geode guy’s focus and aim and eyes away from Natsuo.

He can’t just fucking stand here and watch this asshole destroy his only contribution to their offensive. He has to do something.

He reaches down into himself again and wraps his resolve around the shards of ice shivering in the pit of his stomach, the freeze creeping outward through his veins.

He grips it.

He shifts his weight, gathers his concentration, lets the cold cycle through him, winding itself up, sinking itself deep—

Geode guy stops firing. A widening crack in the top of the wall gives Natsuo the tiniest glimpse of him panting, every breath misting thickly in the air, as he lowers his shaking arm.

The perfect opportunity to reinforce—

Endeavor unleashes a cascade of flame so devastatingly intense that Natsuo dives back and throws both arms over his face on instinct.

The pavement bites his elbows and his knees, the jaggedly cracked topography of the concrete bruising his side. No goddamn time for that. He scrambles up, backing away, ignoring the twinges and the distant stinging of his scratched palms.

The heat scours at him even from here.

Wreathed in red light and streaming smoke, a hulking shadow hovering over a cowering form, Endeavor looks exactly like the demon he remembers.

The tower of ice melts to nothing in the span of a handful of heartbeats.

An answering flame flickers hot and high in Natsuo’s chest, climbing the back of his throat, choking its way out of him in a ragged shout. “What the fuck are you—”

Endeavor’s madly-gleaming right arm whips out, flame licking up the steel and eating through his shirtsleeve.

It points at the still-spewing hydrant.

Bastard always has to have it his way.

But this time—

He’s probably right.

Icewater sloshes on the broken pavement, pooling in the fissures, unmelted chunks and slivers twirling in the eddies as geode guy staggers backwards under the impetus of the superheated air. He may be fireproof, but no one’s physics-proof.

Through the veil of steam hissing up where the effluence of the flame meets the pooled water, Natsuo can see geode guy’s heels sliding—but he sets his shoulders, and the crystals shift as he gathers the strength for another barrage.

Endeavor turns up the heat.

He channels the flame along his right arm—flooding it down the steel and spreading it past his fingers. He guides it with his hand like weaving, like twisting a kite string, like uncoiling endless ribbons from his fingertips.

Natsuo can smell his own hair singeing. It feels like he’s sunburned every inch of his face.

He makes himself suck in an agonizing breath as he moves forwards—closer to the inferno, deeper into hell.

Towards the fire hydrant still sluicing water out onto the street.

Geode guy plants his back foot in the sizzling puddle, braces his weight, and curls his fists. He tips his head up, eyes illuminated a starker, brighter blue than ever, and casts a leering grin up into the burgeoning flame.

Endeavor is hovering so close above him, concentrating the fire to try to pin him down, that he thinks he can’t miss.

The crystals part his skin—what Natsuo can see of it through the distortion of the heat looks like rubber, splitting open to let them swell. Their edges sharpen, the angles glinting, the cloudy stone inching upward, finessing its own facets as it grows.

Geode guy bends his knees.

He probably doesn’t even realize that he’s telegraphing every single move.

He steadies his feet and readies to shoot, or spear, or whatever comes next.

The fire under Endeavor’s feet goes out.

His colossal weight brings him down onto the concrete so fast that the last jet of flame twirls around him as he slams into the ground, dropping to one knee.

He doesn’t stay down.

He rises, already turning—already wrapping his right hand around the base of the red-hot metal pipe to grip it with both fists.

Already leaning into the windup, so that when he steps forward, he puts all of his body weight into the swing.

Geode guy gets less than a quarter of a second to recognize that the game has changed.

He manages to slide his feet back.

Then the game slams a superheated iron rod into the side of his head with enough force to knock him right off of them.

Natsuo dives forward, closing the rest of the distance, and grabs onto the hydrant with both hands.

He unleashes the cold.

He repossesses the stream from the broken valve—transforms it into a thick, fanning arc of solid ice.

He freezes it over in the precise instant that geode guy stumbles backwards into range of the spray.

And it engulfs him.

Natsuo recruits every last damn molecule of water left in the air—every single drop that Endeavor hasn’t scalded right out of the atmosphere—to build it higher, backfill it, reinforce it, thicken every cord and stretch its reach and wrap it around the target’s shoulders to mummify the crystals, then around his waist and his knees and his ankles—

He can’t tell if geode guy blacked out when Endeavor hit him, or if the fight’s just finally gone out of him, but he barely seems to wriggle, and the ice keeps flowing, and Natsuo’s breath clouds out ahead of him in jagged bursts.

He eases off.

He stumbles back.

He’s sweating and shivering at the same time. How does Shouto do this shit?

Endeavor approaches the trapped villain, looking him up and down, closer than it really merits—closer than he’ll be able to glean much from anyway, given how much ice is obstructing most of the guy.

Then Endeavor punches him in the fucking jaw.

A captive.

A—

Orange flares, high and bright.

Natsuo’s brain whites out—animal panic, mindless terror, incoherent screaming rage. Endeavor—

He just—

He just beat a defenseless man about to surrender.

And then he dissolved the restraints for a second time.

Geode guy crumples to the pavement, soaked to the impenetrable skin, as the ice falls away.

Endeavor starts to reach for him and stops dead. Something changes in his stance—something bad. His shoulders strain for a second, enough that Natsuo’s surprised that the charred wreckage of his shirt doesn’t just fall off of him, and then he grabs onto the nearest large crystal with his left hand and hauls the geode guy bodily up onto the sidewalk, where at least he won’t drown in the puddled water while they wait.

What the hell is—

The sirens wail, the sound resonating against the storefronts so loudly that the broken glass shakes. The first car careens around the corner and skids to a halt.

Natsuo leans on the hydrant, staring as his father straightens up.

And then rounds on him.

It’s mostly incandescent fury, in his eyes.

But when all the flame winks out at once, and the shadows stop flickering, Natsuo can see him better—too well.

The firmness with which he clenched his teeth deepens the lines on his face, exaggerating the deep set of his drawn brows, the rigid angle of his jaw and the sharpness of his cheekbones. His eyes went orange in the firelight, but there’s an emptiness to them, now, in just the dimness, as glass crunches underneath his feet, and another piece of the incinerated collar of his shirt crumbles away.

“What were you thinking?” he demands.

It still stings—still burns.

But it also echoes.

Natsuo hears himself. Sees himself. Sees the adrenaline fading, and the unfulfilled terror sweeping in beneath it—sees the horrified recognition of what could have been. What could have happened. How much worse it could have gone.

His father’s eyes are too wide for it to be all anger.

He sees Eiji jumping off of the curb of a busy road just because, yanking his hand free of Hayami’s to go greet a cat, trying to shove a record number of grains of rice up his nose.

Your kid is never thinking about the risks. Your kid is never thinking that one little choice might get them killed. Your kid is never thinking about how desperately you’re trying to protect them from the brutality of the entire world.

But you are.

Another wisp of fog leaves Natsuo’s lips, but it doesn’t really feel like he’s breathing.

His father steps closer, and he wants to recoil away, but his body won’t move. The sirens whoop, civilians clamor, the red lights from the tops of the cars whip across the fronts of buildings and along the chaos on the ground and over the side of his father’s face.

His father steps in front of him again—positioning himself precisely between Natsuo and the cop who just jumped out of the first car.

“I have a provisional license for emergencies,” his father almost-growls, so low it’s almost lost under his breath. “You’re not legally allowed—”

Natsuo stares at him. “Are you going to turn me in?”

It would be perfect, wouldn’t it? Endeavor gets to lock up one last pretty criminal, gets to weep to the whole world about how tragic it is that so many of his children inexplicably ended up so broken on the inside, like he didn’t shake them all until they shattered with his own two hands—

And then Natsuo is out of the way.

Shuttered up for good.

His father glances at him again, eyes sharply narrowed but remarkably—

Confused?

Stunned, possibly.

“What?” he says. “Of course not, I meant—” His eyes flick to the officer approaching at a run, and his voice drops again. “Let me handle this.” He clears his throat, clenches his left hand. “Natsuo. Please.”

The words stick in Natsuo’s throat like a hundred hypodermics. Nothing comes out.

The cop slows to a jog and then stops three long strides away, staring up at Natsuo’s father, then down at the limp form of the geode guy sprawled on the soaking wet sidewalk. Parts of the overturned cars are still smoldering. Enough ice seems to have lodged in the hydrant to have slowed the spray to a trickle, but this place is a near-apocalyptic fucking mess all the same. People have started to creep out of the nearby buildings, gathering into a ragtag perimeter to gawk at the destruction.

It might be too subtle for anyone who wasn’t so accustomed to watching him to recognize, but Natsuo has more practice than he ever wanted:

His father squares his shoulders, plants his heels, straightens his spine, and raises his chin. Even before the flame licks up his jaw, he’s back—he’s changed. He’s Endeavor again.

The cop smiles.

Just looking at his uniform makes Natsuo want to puke. It could have been him. It could have been this exact fucking man who smashed through the door and dragged Eiji out through it screaming. Natsuo doesn’t remember the faces. They were just uniforms. They were just reaching hands ripping what was left of his life away.

“Wow,” the cop says, both hands curling around the chain of the handcuffs he unclipped from his belt. “It’s—it’s honestly an honor to meet you, Endeavor. I never thought—”

“Give me that,” Endeavor says, holding his left hand out for the cuffs.

The cop stares. Endeavor snatches them away from him, turns, strides over, sinks to one knee, and moves to put them to use on geode guy’s broad wrists.

And then he goes still—just for a second, but there’s something chilling about it. There’s something wrong.

He huffs a breath in, steam curling out from between his clenched teeth, and then he grabs with his metal hand for geode guy’s arm to reposition it. He misses. He tries again, movements jerky and startlingly imprecise. He favors the left hand, wrangling the guy onto his front on the pavement, gritting his teeth—

The cop stares at Natsuo for a change. “Who’s this?”

Endeavor is up again—taking one step closer to the cop to tower over him, eyes alight, voice mercilessly cutting. “How is that relevant to your investigation?”

The cop gapes up at him for a few seconds, flicks a glance at Natsuo, and then laughs nervously. “It’s—I mean, he’s a witness, so—”

Endeavor extends his left hand sharply. “Give me the forms.”

The cop stares again.

Natsuo gets it.

It’s like gazing into the heart of a bonfire—terrifying, mesmerizing, inescapable.

But he’s finally taught himself to tear his eyes away from the mask.

Endeavor’s right arm hangs at his side, uncannily still.

The cop fishes out some folded papers. They must just prep those damn things in the car as soon as they get the call.

Endeavor snatches those out of his hands, too.

Past the ripple of flame rolling off of him, bystanders have started to cluster closer, and the paramedics are coaxing people out from behind mailboxes and newsstands and downed streetlamps. The helmets and cross-marked baseball caps cast too much of a shadow for Natsuo to tell if he recognizes any of them. His hands twitch as one of them grabs a civ’s shoulder and shines a penlight into their eyes. That would be him. It should have been. What the fuck is he—

He makes himself turn, tries to force his eyes to focus well enough to search the crowd when his brain keeps spinning and spinning and spinning and—

The waitress from the restaurant is in the second row of people, with Naru held to her shoulder on one side and Eiji clinging to her neck on the other.

Endeavor finishes skimming the forms, struggles to fold them one-handed, and then shoves them into the front pocket of his slacks. “I’ll have them back to you tonight.”

The cop is staring around himself now. “Is that—there’s so much water.”

There is.

There isn’t so much as a flake of ice left—the flame melted every single one.

The cop looks up at Endeavor.

Endeavor stares back, bright blue eyes flat and cold—diamond facets. Unbreakable.

His voice is toneless, like he’s already bored.

“I’m branching out,” Endeavor says.

He glances away—searching the ragged crowd with searing intensity until his gaze finds Eiji and Naru.

Not bored.

Impatient.

Natsuo clears his throat. “I’ll—”

“Go,” Endeavor says.

It all feels like a dream.

Natsuo drifts over to the crowd. His skin still feels too hot, and his cheek itches—smeared ash, maybe. He doesn’t think he’s bleeding. It’s so fucking weird to be in shock when this isn’t that different from what he used to do every single day. A little part of him is laughing, albeit breathlessly. It’s just so funny that putting yourself directly in the line of fire—looking the villain in the eyes when all that stands between their weapons and your gravestone is your wits and your speed and your quirk—has transformed a scene so familiar that he should be yawning.

Eiji almost wrenches his way loose from the waitress’s grip trying to fling himself at Natsuo, reaching out with both arms.

Fuck it.

He makes his knees lift. Makes himself run.

Eiji bursts into tears as he comes close, and then time ripples strangely, and Natsuo is gathering him up into both arms and holding him so, so fucking tight—stroking his hair and kissing his temple and whispering It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay over and over, like either of them believes it.

Natsuo has never seen a pro tie up a discussion with the cops as fast as his father does tonight. He can’t hear the words exchanged from here, but he can see his father’s lip curling further and further, and the sentences getting shorter and swifter. He takes Naru from the waitress, who keeps apologizing for something he can’t even process, and rocks Eiji gently back and forth. He watches his father’s eyes narrow to near-luminescent ice-blue slits. He watches the right hand hang at his father’s side like a plank—like a ball and chain.

It takes three officers to hoist geode guy off of the sidewalk and start attempting to carry him towards one of the cars. Natsuo’s father turns his back on them as soon as they’ve gotten a grip.

Naru claps wetly as he approaches.

He’s backlit. It takes Natsuo a second to see how strained his shoulders are now, and just how tightly he’s holding his jaw.

“Grampa!” Eiji howls, twisting towards him, keeping one hand fisted in Natsuo’s soot-streaked jacket and scrabbling to try to reach him with the other. “Grampa, Grampa—”

Natsuo’s father breathes so deep it almost pops the beleaguered buttons of his ruined shirt.

He forces a gentler expression, raises his shaking left hand, and very carefully wraps it around Eiji’s.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is still too deep—too low, roughened by the effort, ravaged by the smoke. “Let’s go.”

Natsuo tries to finagle a whimpering, wriggling Eiji around enough to balance Naru better. “Hey—”

His father’s eyes dart up to his, and there is so fucking much in them in this instant that it feels like he’s the one who just got hit in the head with a pipe.

“We’re going,” his father says.

It settles, hazily, in Natsuo’s head that he can call the restaurant later to pay their bill over the phone and give that waitress the tip of her life.

His father’s eyes linger on his for one moment more before his father turns, sharply, and stalks off down the street. People part for him, silently, their eyes wide and gleaming in the intermittent intensity of the red lights. Ash flakes off of the collar and the shoulders and the sleeves of his shirt, drifting behind him like snow. His left arm rises, and the fingers curl around his right bicep just above the place the prosthetic connects, creasing the fabric and dimpling the flesh.

“Grampa!” Eiji calls again, voice quavering with tears.

Many of the people in the crowd turn, slowly, and stare.

Natsuo clutches both kids closer to him and starts walking—fast. Naru babbles idly in his ear.

There’s something very fucking wrong, and the adrenaline is still shaking him like a ragdoll as it tries to get out of his veins, and all of these people just saw him using his fucking quirk—

He keeps his eyes trained on his father’s back.

He keeps walking.

They parked close by so that Eiji could stretch his legs a little without getting tired. Natsuo’s father’s movements still look mechanical in their deliberateness—like he’s forcing one muscle to contract at a time. He pulls his keys out of his pocket, pauses, flips the fob open, and manually unlocks all the doors from the driver’s side with the key.

Natsuo comes close enough to see the melted plastic buttons on the top.

His father opens the back door, and Natsuo lets Eiji clamber up into his booster seat, feeling feverish in his caution not to bump Naru’s head against the top of the door while he fumbles around for the seatbelt latch in the seat. It finally catches. He dodges around the back of the car and fights the door open on this side, deposits Naru in his seat, buckles him in—

His father is still standing on the sidewalk, key trapped in his curled fist.

Natsuo closes the door.

He approaches very, very slowly.

His father glances up.

And then down.

He works his jaw, looks away, meets Natsuo’s eyes—his are always so fucking cold when they’re calculating. What’s left? What could he possibly be planning now, when it’s all over, and the adrenaline is winnowing away? What—

“Are you up to driving?” his father says, quietly.

Natsuo stays very still. Let the storm pass. Let the predator keep seeking. “Why?”

His father sets his teeth, and his next breath sounds—ragged. Rough. Uneven.

“My arm is—I overdid it,” he says, biting the words out one at a time. “It’s—worse than—I expected. I wouldn’t be able to focus on the road. If you’d prefer I get a cab—”

“I can do it,” Natsuo hears himself say.

Breathe deep. Dig deeper.

Natsuo doesn’t know the first damn thing about robotics, but he knows a hell of a lot about nerves. He looks dubiously at the steel-plated forearm, and then up at the suppressed agony etched into his father’s face.

Too familiar.

“Would it help to disconnect it?” he asks.

“No,” his father says.

Natsuo waits a second.

Apparently that’s it.

Resentment bubbles from low in his chest again—dismissal, now, after all that, when he’s finally trying to fucking help—

His father holds out the car key.

He grabs it away and climbs into the driver’s seat. He shoves the wrecked fob up against the button that you normally push to start the stupid car and hopes his instinct is correct—that his father’s paranoia would never let him purchase a vehicle that didn’t come with built-in backup plans.

The car bleeps resigned recognition.

He looks up.

His father is still making his way around the front of the car to the passenger side. He’s only just reached the headlight and started to turn the corner.

He’s walking so slowly—so laboriously, his left hand clasped around the right arm again—that it clicks.

He wasn’t blowing off Natsuo’s attempt at an olive branch to be a shithead, or to extract revenge for all the times that Natsuo has rebuffed his efforts to make peace.

He’s in so much fucking pain that he can barely move.

He opens the door.

He eases himself down onto the seat.

He pulls it shut.

He looks at the seatbelt like it showed up at his house in the middle of the night, broke a window, and tried to stab him. Repeatedly.

He drags it across himself. His hand is shaking. He fits it into the buckle on the third try.

“Grampa,” Eiji says, voice pitched high with the anxiety, booster seat creaking as he leans forward as far as he can. “Grampa, are you okay?”

It isn’t the light refracted through the windshield making him look pale. There’s sweat beading on his forehead—enough to generate a faint wisp of steam as his skin evaporates it—and he’s gripping his right bicep with his left hand so tightly that it’s bleached his knuckles bone-white.

Natsuo gets the sense that someone with a lower pain threshold would have gone into shock.

His father swallows, hard.

“I’ll be all right,” he says, tightly, keeping his voice low and his eyes squeezed shut. “Thank you. For asking.”

Natsuo watches him for another second and then leans over. “Stay still.”

He bends the metal arm, positioning it like it’s in an invisible sling, and then wraps both hands around the elbow—the middle point, more or less.

He keeps the layer of ice extremely thin, concentrating on the temperature. It doesn’t have to last long—it just has to dull the heat. It just has to counteract the inflammation.

He spreads the ice slowly, trying to keep its surface a quarter-inch above his father’s steaming skin, laying on a layer too thick to shatter at the bumps in the road, but not thick enough to add much more weight. He stacks several extra layers on the bicep, right where the rim of the metal meets the stump—the part his father keeps grabbing for and seizing onto, like he’s trying to squeeze the hurt out of it by force.

You’d think he’d have learned by now.

You’d think both of them would.

Natsuo sits back. It won’t cure anything, but even if it doesn’t alleviate the pain, it ought to numb everything enough to dull it slightly.

Enough to get them back to the house.

Where—

What?

What next?

He can’t fucking worry about that yet.

He has a job to do.

His father breathes out. His left hand hovers over the ice cast for a second, and then he seems to realize that him touching it would precipitate it melting all over his car. He drops his hand.

“Thank you,” he says, almost under his breath.

Natsuo puts the car into gear, checks the mirrors, glances over his shoulder to make sure neither Eiji nor Naru has escaped from their safety restraints in the last ninety seconds, checks the mirrors again, and pulls the car out into the road.

“You’re in bad shape,” he says, keeping his voice low—and completely neutral, so that Eiji won’t freak out.

His father swallows audibly. “It’ll—pass.”

Natsuo bites his tongue on the Bullshit.

He did his part.

He tried.

“Brace yourself,” he says. “I don’t drive as nice as you do.”

His father grips the armrest and says nothing.

That might be a first.

Damn shame it’s not worth celebrating.

Eiji’s fussy the whole way back, sniffling and whimpering at intervals, which makes Naru fussy, which wears on the frayed, fragile remnants of Natsuo’s nerves. He whips the car into the driveway and hits the brakes a little too hard. Eiji makes an unhappy noise as his head jerks forward, and Natsuo’s father hisses through his teeth.

“Okay,” Natsuo says, trying to sound brisk and businesslike instead of delirious with the deluge of mixed emotions. “Here we are.”

His father clambers out of the car and heads straight for the front door, water splattering on the walkway from the melting sheathe of ice.

Natsuo scoops Naru up first, then unbuckles Eiji’s seatbelt and extends the other arm to him so he can jump up into it. There’s so much of her in it, somehow, when Eiji scrabbles to get a grip on Natsuo’s jacket—the way he hurries, the way his fingers curl into fabric like he’ll never let go.

Natsuo can hear keys jingling arrhythmically as he nears the door. His father shoves one into the lock just as he gets close, then plasters his left hand over the scanner. He’s breathing too fast. Natsuo skirts the puddle of water on the step.

The “Hey, squad!” that greets them from the direction of the living room sounds ever so slightly uncertain—Hawks hears everything, obviously. He must have noticed Natsuo’s father’s struggle with the locks on the door.

Natsuo sets Eiji down on the floor to reduce the risk of himself tipping over or dropping his fucking kids as he tries to pry his shoes off with his toes. Naru pats a wet hand against his face. His head feels so light, whirling like a lost gear with nothing to latch onto.

“Grampa,” Eiji manages again, twisting his hands together and staring up at Natsuo’s father, mouth trembling.

“I’m just going to rest for a little while,” Natsuo’s father says, and you can hear how hard he’s trying to soften the roughness of his voice. “Stay with your dad.”

Natsuo makes himself clear his throat. “Can you take your shoes off for me, bud?”

Normally that would be cause for unparalleled rejoicing, but Eiji just plunks down on the step and starts picking at the velcro on the sneaker tops.

Natsuo sidesteps to keep an eye on his father, who sweeps out of the genkan and into the living room without once easing the vise grip he has on his right arm with his left hand. The ice is gone.

Hawks, standing very still, watches him approach—eyes flicking up and down, then back and forth.

“Hawks,” his father says, voice tight, moving past him—shifting almost like he’s going to pry his hand away from his right arm to reach out, but then he doesn’t. “Can you call—”

“Already did,” Hawks says, the fingertips of his right hand grazing Natsuo’s father’s shoulder feather-lightly. “Emi’s on it. Texted Okamoto, too.”

That earns him a nod, and then Natsuo’s father disappears into the hall.

The second name sounded familiar. “Wait,” Natsuo says. “Who’s on what?”

“The PR dream team,” Hawks says, “is on the case.” He jerks his chin towards the TV. “You’re in the news, pal. Their job is to get you back out of it.”

Natsuo’s mouth is dry. His head feels hollow. He isn’t even really nauseous so much as just sort of—faint. Like someone erased enough of the lines of him that something’s going to spill out somewhere.

He’s spent years mopping up blood and sewing up guts. He’s spent his whole life ducking away from the press trying to sink their teeth into his father’s broken legacy.

This should be nothing.

But it’s different.

It’s like that psychopath with the road lines.

It’s like the war.

He never really had a choice—he had to do what he did; had to be who he is—but now that the tidal wave of the danger has receded, the gravity of all of it is hauling him down.

He could have left his kids orphans.

He could have made them watch his corpse get zipped into a body bag.

He could have turned them into Endeavor.

It’s beyond fucked that even he—someone who grew up in the shadow of this, someone who watched it consume a family piece by piece, someone whose little brother still lives and breathes the poison every day—forgets, sometimes, that the reason that it’s pro for professional isn’t about the ad revenue and the self-aggrandizement. It’s not all ego.

These people risk death for a living so that no one else will have to.

They train—they practice—at not fucking dying so that they can be better at it than any average person, so that the average people can stay out of the way.

So that people like Natsuo can duck back instead of diving in.

Maybe Endeavor could have handled that without him.

Maybe not.

But Endeavor saved a whole hell of a lot more people than he ever pulled directly out of the burning buildings and the shattered glass and the villains’ grasping hands.

Endeavor saved people from having to choose whether to put their lives on the line for strangers.

And Shouto and Hawks are still doing it, every damn day.

It’s different than the traumas Natsuo was juggling in the field, in the collapsing basements and the unlit alleyways, in the ambulances, stumbling to keep up with the stretcher and shout information over the screaming in the doorways of ERs.

It’s different to stare the whole history of sacrifice in the face and realize how much of it you’ll never understand.

For a long, long second, Hawks looks at the doorway through which Natsuo’s father vanished into the dim hallway, but then he glances over at Natsuo. His eyebrow arches. He heard what was said in the genkan. For the time being, it’s better for everyone if they take the man at his word.

Right?

Natsuo shrugs. That leaves Hawks eyeing him instead, which makes his skin crawl. His clothes smell like a housefire. He puts Naru gently down in the play gym and then peels his jacket off. Taking it all the way to the laundry room sounds like a trial beyond his fortitude, so he slings it over the back of the couch and collapses onto the cushion next to it.

Eiji trudges in.

The way Hawks’s face lights up just looking at him makes something in Natsuo’s chest hurt. The fact that it even registers over the rest of this shit is pretty remarkable, all things considered.

Hawks plants his hands on his hips and leans down, grinning. “Your dad and your grampa were pretty cool, huh?”

Eiji’s face crumples, and he starts picking at a loose thread on his sleeve.

“No,” he says.

Hawks stares.

“It was scary,” Eiji says, picking harder. “I thought they were gonna get hurt.” His lip quivers. Mayday. “I thought Daddy was gonna get hurt and—and die, and—”

Hawks scoops him up before Natsuo can even shove himself up off of the couch, gathering him tight into both arms and rocking him back and forth, bouncing gently as the sobbing starts. “I know. I know. But it’s okay! Your grampa never would have let anything happen to him.”

The wailing increases in volume. “I thought Grampa was gonna stay on fire forever and burn up and—”

Natsuo stands up, steps over, holds his arms out, and gestures.

Hawks makes eye contact.

And then hesitates.

Natsuo swallows down the impulse to hate him for it—to incubate the heat and breathe the smoke and let the venom circulate.

In Hawks’s shoes, he wouldn’t trust himself either.

Hawks was here for them when he wasn’t.

Hawks has never hurt them.

Natsuo breathes, slowly, in and out, and then makes a beckoning motion again.

Hawks’s eyes narrow, but he steps forward and carefully transfers the shaking bundle of crying toddler into Natsuo’s arms instead.

Natsuo tips Eiji back just far enough to wipe tears away with the end of his shirtsleeve, smudging them gently off of Eiji’s reddening cheeks.

“Hey, bud,” he says, softly. “I’m okay. And your grampa is okay. We’re right here. We’re not going anywhere. We’re not gonna leave you.”

Eiji searches his face desperately, mouth still trembling, and his whole body shivers with a hiccup next. “Promise?”

“Promise,” Natsuo says.

This kid has the most beautiful eyes in the world, even when they’re welling.

“Okay,” he whispers.

Natsuo wipes his eyes. “I mean it,” he says. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

A flicker of red draws both of their eyes, and Naru flails trying to grasp the feather fluttering between his fingers, cooing at it in delight. Natsuo lets a breath out slow and sits down next to the play gym.

“You, too, guy,” he says, reaching out to pull on Naru’s foot with the hand he doesn’t need for rubbing gently up and down Eiji’s back. “You’re gonna be okay, too.”

Eiji leans his head against Natsuo’s neck, sniffling. His breaths gradually even out, but he doesn’t let go of Natsuo’s shirt.

“Naru’s got a tail,” Eiji murmurs after a few minutes of watching Naru try to catch the feather, presumably in the hopes of shoving it directly in his mouth.

“That’s right, bud,” Natsuo says.

Eiji shifts. “Are people gonna make fun of him? At my school—sometimes at my school, they—one time Ryuuzou said—he said I got big ears. And one time Isamu said this girl who’s not there anymore—he said she had a weird face.”

Natsuo knew this one was coming, but he’d kind of been hoping it would take more than four years to get to. And he wasn’t exactly planning on dealing with it at a time like this.

“People might say stuff,” he says. “But we’re going to make sure Naru knows they’re wrong. And he’s going to know they’re wrong. Because he’s going to know the number one hero personally, and that guy’s got wings.”

A snuck glance over at the couch confirms that Hawks is smiling, his elbow on the couch arm and his cheek resting on his fist.

“I like Hawks’s wings,” Eiji mumbles. “They’re really pretty.”

That’s a nice thought—simple but surprisingly sweet, in the way kids’ perceptions so often are.

People usually talk about Hawks’s wings being powerful and versatile. They talk about what they can do—what their purpose is. What they can be used for.

Not just what they are.

The distinction clearly hasn’t eluded Hawks, either, by the way his smile has gone even softer but slightly wry.

Then he blinks, and his eyes narrow.

“Hang on,” he says. He’s up and off the couch, starting towards the hall, in the time it takes to blink. “He’s been gone too long.”

Natsuo isn’t sure what that means, exactly. This is what they do, in this family, when something goes wrong: they hole up in a quiet place. They lick their wounds until there’s enough blood in their teeth to get back up and take another swing at whatever cut them.

The feathers flick around the corner.

The door to the bedroom creaks.

Hawks says “Hey—hey, what the hell?”

Natsuo’s father replies, but so quietly that nothing but the resonating timbre of his voice makes it to the living room.

“No,” Hawks says. “No, no, no, hell to the fucking no—”

Natsuo covers Eiji’s ears.

His father murmurs something back.

And then Hawks’s voice rises swiftly, arcing towards its upper register as the volume spikes. “No, you’re not! Enji, for fuck’s s—”

“Keep your voice down—”

“I’m calling a fucking ambulance—”

“It’ll pass, just—”

“‘It’ll pass’—fuck off with—look at you!”

Natsuo’s heart beats in his ears, in the back of his throat, in his palms where they’re cupped over Eiji’s ears. It thuds against his ribs.

He can’t shake the image of his father sitting in the car, pale and still like a corpse.

“Eiji,” he says, gently pulling the tiny hand loose from his shirt and then setting the whole warm little body down on the floor, “can you please keep an eye on Naru for a minute? I’m going to check on your grampa. Shout if anything happens, okay? If you need anything. We’re just down the hall.”

He gets up. He hopes the voices are distant enough that Eiji doesn’t really register the words.

“Give it back—Enji, I am not fucking around—”

“Calm down.”

“Enji, I swear to God—”

Eiji grabs onto Natsuo’s dusty jeans and tugs, tiny face drawn in deep concern. “Is—is Grampa gonna be okay?”

“Yeah, bud,” Natsuo says, ruffling his hair. “I’m a doctor, remember?”

Eiji’s eyes light up—Hayami’s eyes. “You’re gonna take care of him?”

It feels like his heart sticks between two ribs. Hurts like fucking hell. “I’ll try.”

Eiji hugs his knee. “Thanks, Daddy.”

Natsuo touches his soft hair for one more second, and then ghosts down the hall.

The argument has gotten quieter but more vehement. Makes his spine prickle, makes his skin crawl, makes his skull feel echoingly empty and way too small at once.

It’s only a handful of steps to his father’s bedroom.

His feet carry him down the hall obediently enough, but then they stop—just beyond the threshold. He swings a hand out, catches the doorframe, tries to believe his eyes.

His father—Endeavor, the Flame Hero, six-foot-four barefoot, with shoulders that could block the sun and a temper like Vesuvius; the stubbornest, the cruelest, the coldest, and the hardest-working man alive—is curled up on the bed clutching the violently reddened stump of his right arm, breaths quick and shallow.

The metal prosthetic lies where it fell, half-swallowed by the crumpled sheets. It doesn’t even look real when it’s not on him—it looks like a toy. It’s far too still. It’s just a thing.

Hawks isn’t threatening to call for help anymore.

He’s wrapped too close around Natsuo’s father, stroking desperately at his hair trying to draw his attention.

“Babe. Talk. Come on. I’m not doing this anymore. You’re going to the fucking hospital whether you like it or not, Enji, this isn’t a fucking game—”

“You need something serious,” Natsuo says, looking at the cords standing out in his father’s forearm, the pulse of the vein on the side of his neck. “Medical-grade. You have any fentanyl?”

Hawks takes a break from clinging to stare at Natsuo. “Yeah, let me just pop open the controlled substances cabinet and—”

“Oxymorphone,” Natsuo’s father mutters. “Nightstand. Back of the top drawer.”

Hawks freezes.

Natsuo moves.

He breaks the silence by striding straight over and yanking the drawer open. Mostly worn paperbacks, little boxes that might be fucking cufflinks, a couple folded handkerchiefs, three bottles of different types of over-the-counter painkillers ready to be mixed and matched, an eyeglass case—

The little glass vial and several sealed-up needles are tucked inside a bigger plastic tube with a child-proof cap, like a ship in a bottle.

Natsuo cracks it open, tips them out, and checks the vial.

The prescription is from two and a half years ago. His father barely touched it.

Hawks’s voice is very low.

“They gave you opioids for this,” he says. “They gave you opioids, and you didn’t even tell me?”

“Not the time,” Natsuo grinds out, holding the bottle up to the light and shaking gently just to be sure. No visible contamination or coagulation. That’s about the best that he’ll be able to do.

“I didn’t even want to fill it,” Natsuo’s father mutters as Natsuo strips the plastic off one of the needles. “I only used it once. Changed the tactics instead. Worked around it. Avoided getting it to that point.”

Natsuo breathes. He settles his shoulders and sets his jaw. Focus. Do it right.

He reads the label, reads it again, breathes out, and does the calculation for the concentration three times.

He slips the needle neatly into the vial, hooks his fingertips around the plunger, and draws back slowly, steadily, meticulously inching towards the dose.

The estimated dose. Even without the right arm, his father is fucking huge, and much more of his weight is solid muscle than an average patient’s.

But too much of this shit will make him stop breathing.

“I didn’t know,” Hawks says, and his voice shakes. “It was killing you, and I didn’t know.”

Perfect.

Natsuo withdraws the needle carefully and sets the vial down on the nightstand.

He turns to Hawks.

“Move,” he says.

The look—

Makes Natsuo’s stomach drop right out of him.

“Hawks,” Natsuo’s father says, softly, roughly, raggedly. The cold bronze gun barrel eyes snap away from Natsuo, down to him instead. “Go check on Eiji.”

The way Hawks looks at him—the barely-contained rage boiling just behind the tightness of his expression, his jaw clenched to shaking, his fingers curled into the duvet, all the feathers overlapping tightly like protective scales—makes Natsuo feel very, very cold.

Natsuo’s father searches Hawks’s face. He’s not afraid of that look. He’s not afraid of what’s behind it. He doesn’t budge.

“He shouldn’t be alone this long,” he says. “Check on him.”

Hawks doesn’t breathe so much as seethe with a side effect of respiration.

Natsuo’s father just keeps meeting those eyes.

“Hawks,” he says.

Hawks uncurls his white-knuckled fingers from the duvet one by one. He stands, too suddenly, like a marionette jerked up to its feet. He spends one more second glaring down at Natsuo’s father, mouth twisted, eyes narrowed and uncannily bright.

Then the feathers shiver, and several slip out of the room ahead of him, twirling down the hall.

He turns, sharply, and stalks off after them.

Natsuo stares at the empty doorway. It’s just—way too much. There’s way too much shit going on here, right now, tonight.

Life doesn’t wait for you to get back up. It just hits you again.

The moment Hawks has swept out into the hall, Natsuo’s father twists his arm around, offering Natsuo the inside of his elbow. If nothing else, the fact that he burned his long-sleeved shirt into a short-sleeved, cinder-shedding catastrophe offers easy access to the veins.

“Clench your fist,” Natsuo says.

He couldn’t exactly have missed the mark, given the swollen ropes that pass for veins on his father’s arm, but he’s not about to take any chances with a drug this potent, on a night this wild.

His father curls his fingers in. One of the faintly bluish cords pops out a little further, tracking up his forearm like a cardiovascular superhighway.

Natsuo takes a breath and lets it out slow. Easy shit. Day one in the field. Focus on the next second—on the precision of the task. Easy. Easy.

He flicks the needle, double-checks for air bubbles, then grips his father’s elbow—as much of it as he can reach around to, anyway—and rests his elbow on the bed to steady his hand.

He doesn’t waste either of their time counting to three. He lines it up and commits.

It’s a piece of cake with such a huge target.

The skin parts for the needle tip. He doesn’t need much depth—it’s a narrow hypodermic and an extremely potent drug. It’ll do its job if he does his.

He hooks his thumb around the back and depresses the plunger smoothly.

He should’ve thought to get some gauze, or at least a tissue. There’s no way in hell Enji Todoroki doesn’t have a blood pressure problem. At least this bedding was already doomed on account of the massive quantity of ash rubbing off of Natsuo’s father’s clothes and out of his hair.

The instant the barrel is empty, Natsuo withdraws the needle, pinning his free thumb over the tiny site even as a trace of red starts to well. He can’t exactly ask his father to put pressure on it.

His father breathes out slowly. “Bandages in the second drawer.”

The bastard is a fucking mind-reader, too, now. Today is just full of wonders.

They’re Hawks-branded band-aids. The one Natsuo slaps on looks so absurd there that he wants to laugh, but his chest just sort of shivers with it, and nothing comes.

He sits down on the edge of the bed, as far away as he can justify, pushes up his sleeves, and reaches over to press two fingertips to his father’s neck below the jawline, just clear of where the beard would brush his hand. He keeps one eye on the smudged face of his wristwatch.

His father clears his throat quietly. “It—kicked in quickly. The first time.”

“Should be just a couple minutes,” Natsuo says. Stay steady. Nobody else in this fucking house can right now. It’s his turn. It’s his responsibility. “Do you remember if you had any unusual problems last time?”

His father shifts—likely thinking to shake his head and then remembering he shouldn’t displace Natsuo’s read on his vitals. “No. Just—hazy. And nauseous.” He swallows, with no small effort, the fingers of his left hand clenching and unclenching. “Couldn’t work. But the pain is… just as disorienting.”

That’s probably the kindest word a human being could use to describe it.

His pulse hasn’t lagged any more than Natsuo would expect. Natsuo hasn’t figured out yet what he’ll do next if it does. Maybe the bastard’s got a couple epi pens tossed into the back of a drawer in the bathroom.

Natsuo doesn’t know how the arm works, and he doesn’t want to.

But if it taps into the nerves his father has retained, and it bathes them with fire every time he fuels a spark—

Natsuo can’t indulge the way that creeps claw-fingered up his spine.

Obviously Endeavor has always had a talent for stretching the adrenaline, but how the fuck did he make it this far?

And then—

It all clicks.

“This is why you retired,” Natsuo says.

His father closes his eyes and breathes in slowly. It still sounds difficult—ragged and shallow.

The fact that he’s still breathing at all is a major plus, when you start slinging narcotics around.

“I couldn’t concentrate,” he says. “Couldn’t aim. When—when my vision started to deteriorate, I couldn’t—compensate with a perfect read on a scene anymore. Everything I’d cultivated all that time was disappearing. Everything I’d ever been good at was gone.”

Natsuo… knows.

He knows what it’s like to spend your whole life figuring out one thing, ripping proficiency out of the jagged claws of your own mediocrity one day at a time.

And he knows what it’s like to lose it.

To watch it drain out of you, to scrabble at the grating at the bottom of the sink, trying desperately to cup enough in your hands to see your own reflection one last time.

But it’s gone.

His father’s pulse beats evenly against his fingertips.

Natsuo watches the second-hand of his watch flick forward.

There’s nothing to say.

This is all there is.

It’s surreal, like so much of what he’s drifted through in the past few weeks. It’s unspeakably bizarre to be sitting on his father’s bed—the bed his father shares with Hawks, no less—waiting for a highly-regulated drug to kick in and muffle some of the excruciating nerve pain drawn out by a stint of dubious ad hoc hero work. It’s weird to be touching him. It’s weird to be looking at the side of his face, the white-streaked breadth of the beard along his jaw, the dulled defiance of his stark blue eyes half-shut, gazing unseeing at the sheets, his one hand wrapping itself tightly around the truncated bicep again.

It doesn’t feel familial. There’s nothing warm and fucking fuzzy about it, and certainly nothing inspirational. They’re two assholes cut from the same cloth, and the weaving of the world dragged them back together no matter how hard he fought it. No matter how far he ran.

It’s strange to be together, like this, floating on the surface of the necessary peace. He’s too fucking exhausted to question it, or resent it, or reject it.

It’s strange not to have to say anything.

It’s strange to be understood.

It’s strange to keep his finger pressed to the pulse of a human being who never seemed like a man, to him—only ever a specter. Only ever a threat, or a warning. A monolith and a monster, an urban legend come true, haunting every minute of his childhood and every corner of this house.

“You were good out there,” his father says, quietly.

“I was not,” Natsuo says, perversely grateful for the flare of anger. At least it pulls him away from the edge of the pit.

“You kept your head,” his father says. “Adapted. That’s half of it.”

Isn’t this what Natsuo was always holding out for?

You did well. You were worth it.

He doesn’t want it.

Not if this is what it costs.

“Eiji’s a mess about it,” he says.

The silence quavers for a second.

“I know,” his father says, quieter still. “I could—hear. Enough.”

Natsuo’s brain is convinced that the oxymorphone should be hitting any second now, even though of course it isn’t that precise. Five minutes, six, seven and three-quarters, nine, thirteen—and it’s not going to change anything. It’s not going to undo any of the damage. It’s just going to let them keep limping on.

Natsuo’s eyes unfocus. He coaxes them back, tracks the painstaking progress of the hand on his watch.

The rhythm of his father’s pulse has slowed a little, but that could have a thousand different meanings—it could be the quiet as the adrenaline finally filters away. It could be the minuscule molecules starting to latch on to the pain receptors in his brain, barring the signals from passing through. It could be the very faint impression of Hawks’s voice from the living room saying “Oh, no, he’s still in the car? That’s okay, look! A feather can get him. Shark rescue!”

Natsuo waits, watches his father’s giant shoulder rise and fall, watches him deliberately relaxing his fingers. He left bright red marks all over the stump of his right arm.

“Breathing still okay?” Natsuo asks.

“Normal,” his father says.

Natsuo considers what that means, for someone this huge, who keeps all of that muscle mass so fastidiously refined. Nothing about his father is normal. He’s never had a normal breath, because he’s never had a normal day.

Is it harder for him, than it is for Natsuo? Filling his lungs must require more effort simply on the basis of how much of him there is to move.

Natsuo heard it, once.

He heard the same thinning wheeze that he heard out of himself in that interview room today. He heard it crimping the edges of every one of his father’s labored breaths.

It was in the aftermath of when that fucking road-line guy had come for him. He’d been pinned to his father’s shoulder, trying to pull free, with Bakugou flailing and hissing like a trapped alley cat in his limited peripheral vision.

He’d heard his father struggling to breathe, then.

Something cracks the dam.

And the words tumble out.

“I almost had a panic attack in that fucking office,” he says.

The next breath is deeper, and the shoulder sinks lower before it rises again.

“So did I,” his father mutters.

A part of him wants to laugh.

This is it, huh?

The legacy.

This is the Todoroki line.

This is what they’re made of.

But there’s a terrible sort of beauty to it—to muddling through.

To gritting your teeth and greeting the wall of shadow with I don’t know how to do this.

But I’ll try.

Natsuo looks at his watch, listens to the next inhalation, and keeps his voice level. “You think we pulled it off?”

“Yes,” his father says. “She’d have to be stupid not to see how much we’re both willing to put into this. And she’s not.”

Natsuo doesn’t doubt her intelligence, but her motives—

His phone pings.

He withdraws his hand for a second to pull it out. It could be Jimi kindly gracing them with a text message to let them know that they don’t need to bother coming ba—

Shouto.

Are you okay?

Natsuo probably should have figured that he’d be one of the first to hear.

“It’s Shouto,” he says. Practically everybody in the world knows his father would prioritize Shouto over his own pulse anyway.

And it won’t take long to tell the truth:

About as much as you’d expect I guess

Shouto sends back the emoji with big eyes and no mouth. It’s sort of disconcertingly funny, actually—that was always how he looked as a kid. Just… staring. Watching, and waiting, and thinking things you couldn’t begin to guess.

Is he okay? Shouto writes.

Dutiful sons and all that.

“He wants to know how you’re doing,” Natsuo reports.

His father laughs—the same awful, rusty thing as last time, weaker but unmistakable.

Natsuo types in Close enough.

Shouto will tell Mom and Fuyumi, and they’ll both simultaneously sort of freak out and kind of understand.

Natsuo sets his phone down on the wrinkled duvet. He puts his fingertips back on his father’s neck, and his eyes back on his watch.

No change.

“Are you feeling it yet?” he asks.

His father’s next breath is slower and longer. It makes his pulse beat double before it settles down again.

“Yes,” he says.

“Good shit?” Natsuo says.

The tiniest trace of a smile flickers at the corner of his father’s mouth, tugging at the nasty little indentation of the scar beneath his lip. “Extremely.”

Natsuo lets the seconds tick away. His father breathes, deep and even. Maybe this should feel intimate or something. Meaningful.

It’s boring.

He can’t hear Eiji’s side of the conversation with Hawks. Hawks sounds slightly strained, but he’s covering it—of course he is. He does interviews splattered with blood, and talk shows decked in designer shit, and in both situations, they question his judgment and trivialize his life’s work in front of his face. He knows everything there is to know about sharks already.

“Wait, hold on,” he’s saying. “Since when can you count that high? Nobody can count that high.” The distant murmur, the intonations Natsuo would know anywhere. The one he’s here for—living for. Fighting for. “Oh. Yeah, that’s probably true. Are you sure you can count that many? Here, you wanna count feathers? I’ll give Naru some, too, so he doesn’t feel left out.”

Natsuo watches his father’s shoulder rise and fall.

Enji Todoroki did something right.

Somewhere in the midst of all the intertwining nightmares, he did something right.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore if it was a choice or a coincidence, because he saw the lantern in the mist and kept going—kept walking towards it.

And they wound up here.

Here’s not as bad as it could be.

Natsuo gives it another five minutes, on the dot, before he pulls his hand back. “How is it feeling?”

His father shifts, wedges his elbow underneath him, and levers himself slowly up to a half-sitting position. He pauses, eyes intent on the middle distance, drawing a few deep breaths, and then pushes himself the rest of the way up. He flattens his open palm on the mattress. He blinks, works his jaw, breathes deep again.

“All right so far,” he says.

Ringing endorsement.

But it’s better than vertigo and vomiting, so Natsuo will take it.

“You should probably just go to sleep,” Natsuo says.

His father shifts slowly over to the edge of the bed. “Probably.”

Natsuo shoves his phone back in his pocket and gets up. He folds his arms. There’s no way in hell he can catch this idiot if he falls anyway. “That was a medical recommendation.”

“I’m aware,” his father says, gradually easing his weight down onto his feet.

He stands. Ash cascades down the front of his shirt from the soot-streaked tatters that remain of the collar and most of the right shoulder.

He pauses.

“I think,” he says, grimacing down at it, “that I’m going to take a shower.”

Natsuo eyes him. He’s standing steadily enough, and his breathing still looks and sounds normal. His eyes are remarkably clear given how much oxymorphone Natsuo just slammed into his circulatory system.

Probably that reflects a combination of practice and determination, like everything else in his life.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. “You’re on your own there, old man.”

“I assumed,” his father says, moving over towards the dresser. Natsuo can take a damn hint, so he starts for the door, which brings them close enough together for their eyes to lock for a second.

They look at each other.

It’s not really a Thank you thing. They’re never going to be a touchy-feely family. There’s nothing to say, and no sense hugging it out.

They both did what they thought needed to be done, moment by moment. They both just did the best they could.

They are, inextricably, in this together now.

And they could each do much worse.

“Be careful,” Natsuo says.

His father almost smiles.

Natsuo hauls his bewildered, bedraggled body back over into the living room and sits down on the floor next to Naru, who is grabbing for a couple of little down feathers fluttering in and out of his reach. They’re cute—small and round-ended, soft and fluffy-looking, the barbs so wispy that they almost look more pink than red. Naru is gazing up at them like they’re the best thing since spit, kicking his little feet as he grasps for them and misses, and misses, and misses again.

Eiji is sitting on the couch tucked up against Hawks’s chest, whispering numbers to himself as he reaches over Hawks’s shoulder and taps his fingertip on one feather at a time, counting along a row of coverlets.

Hawks looks—

Wrecked, actually.

Fucking exhausted.

And angry.

He turned the TV off.

His eyes fix on Natsuo, and the merciless recrimination in them is really something.

Natsuo isn’t entirely sure what his crime was, other than administering the damn drugs—maybe that qualifies as enablement. Maybe it’s the fact that he did what his father wanted, just this once.

He can’t quite get his head around the idea that he and his father are aligned like this—on the same side, with the same intentions—for the second time in a single day.

What’s done is done.

Natsuo knows he doesn’t have to recap, because Hawks will have stashed feathers in the bedroom to eavesdrop on the entire conversation—and he’s glad of it, distantly, because another feather is probably monitoring his father’s heartbeat and respiration patterns better than any hospital rig.

The water starts to run.

Natsuo takes Naru’s feet gently in his hands and bicycles them a little, offering encouragement about how close he is to catching the feather every time. Naru trades off which hand he reaches with and which one he sticks into his mouth.

Eiji counts no fewer than thirty feathers before he sits down next to Hawks again, scrunching up his face and staring down at his spread fingers.

“I dunno what’s past thirty yet,” he says.

Shit. Natsuo doesn’t either. His twenties have taken a turn that more than rivals the living hell of his teens. What’s next?

“That’s okay,” Hawks says, wiping all of the half-suppressed scathing indignation off of his expression the instant before Eiji looks up at him. “We can find out.”

“Yeah,” Eiji murmurs, leaning in against Hawks’s side and earning a halfhearted hair ruffle. “We can learn anything if we work hard enough.”

The feathers keep dancing just above Naru’s tiny fingertips. Natsuo keeps his mouth shut.

The water shuts off inside of three minutes. The faint scuffling commotion doesn’t last especially long after that.

Natsuo’s father steps into the living room with his hair still damp and hopelessly disheveled from what was likely an attempt at toweling it off followed by giving up and hitting it with some steam. He’s wearing a baggy gray sweatshirt and navy blue track pants with white stripes, which is somewhat miraculous for two reasons—first, it must be nearly impossible to find clothes that are loose on him, of all people; and second, it’s the sort of dad-typical fashion failure that he usually only exhibits with flame-patterned accessories. Maybe he’s turning over yet another new leaf.

Or maybe, Natsuo thinks, as the bulk of the sweatshirt draws his eyes down the mostly empty, draping sleeve on the right side, it’s just that elastic waistbands are a lot easier to manage with one hand.

Hawks’s eyes have turned to burnished bronze again—honed knives.

Eiji scoots to the edge of the couch. “Grampa, are you okay now?”

“I’m feeling much better,” Natsuo’s father says. “Thank you.” He glances at Hawks, who continues staring stonily back at him, and then returns his attention to Eiji. “What do you think about going to bed soon? I’m pretty tired. Are you?”

Eiji’s bottom lip pushes out. “Kinda.”

“Then let’s get ready for bed,” Natsuo’s father says. He’s curling and uncurling his fingers, very slowly, like it’s some sort of ritual.

Eiji peeks sideways at Hawks for a second, taking in the stiffness of his shoulders and the sharp downward turn of his mouth. He’s already old enough to read a room. Natsuo couldn’t even save him from that.

“Okay,” Eiji says, softly, sliding down off the couch. A few feathers hover close behind him, then retreat when he makes it to the floor without incident. He runs over to Natsuo’s father, who crouches down as he comes close. “I’m glad you’re better, Grampa,” he says, flinging himself into Natsuo’s father’s chest. “I was worried about you.”

“I’m sorry I worried you,” Natsuo’s father says quietly, wrapping the one arm around him. He draws back, looking very seriously down into Eiji’s wide eyes. “Would you go brush your teeth? I’ll come check on you very soon. Just call if you need any help before then.”

Eiji nods gamely.

And then stretches up, grasps a fistful of Natsuo’s father’s beard in one hand and his ear in the other, and uses that leverage to hold him still long enough to plant a wet, childishly overstated kiss on his cheek.

As quickly as he latched on, he lets go, and trots off into the hall and along it to the bathroom.

Natsuo’s father looks stunned into immobility for a second.

Natsuo’s not as lucky: the feathers that have been entertaining Naru this whole time whip away through the air, flickering past all of the intervening obstacles, and fit themselves back into Hawks’s wings.

Natsuo figures that that’s his unequivocal cue to get the fuck out of here before a conversation he wants nothing to do with.

Naru whines at the sudden absence of the feathers, and Natsuo gathers him up, shushing him gently, patting his back, and moves his weight over onto his knees. He has to be careful standing. His brain is such a fucking mess, and he still feels sort of weak and shaky from the multiple adrenaline thrill rides they went on tonight.

His father doesn’t hesitate, though—he’s up on his feet in the next instant, and crossing directly over to Hawks.

Whose eyes burn too bright, whose jaw is clenched too tight, whose fists are curled into his stupid old khaki pants so firmly that it’s a wonder he hasn’t ripped right through them.

“Hawks,” Natsuo’s father says.

Hawks hisses through his teeth, extracts his hands from their death grip on the fabric, and tips his head down to lay both palms over his face instead.

His father breathes deep, leans down, extends his hand towards Hawks’s hair—

Hawks’s voice is clipped to a razor edge. “Don’t.”

“Hawks—”

“No.” The calmness somehow makes it worse. “I’m mad at you.”

Slowly, Natsuo’s father withdraws his hand.

“You hid it from me,” Hawks says, very quietly, into his hands. “You hid how bad it was. So I’m pissed at myself, too. I didn’t even notice.”

“Listen to me,” Natsuo’s father says. “They prescribed that to me after the bridge in Nagoya—you remem—”

“Yes,” Hawks says, flatly, still without looking up.

Natsuo’s father’s hand rolls up into a fist and then opens again. “I didn’t mention it to you,” he says, slowly, “because I didn’t want to make a point of it to myself. It was overkill at the time—some enterprising physician throwing pharmaceutical interventions at a problem I was convinced I could solve on my own. I never intended to touch it. You weren’t living here yet. I didn’t see any point in alarming you when it wasn’t even relevant.”

Hawks’s voice goes lower still. Something about the delicate deliberateness of every syllable makes Natsuo want to clutch Naru tighter. “You think your pain isn’t relevant to me?”

Natsuo’s father stares at him for a second.

Then he plants his feet.

And holds his ground.

“It wasn’t like this,” he says. “It wasn’t this severe.”

Hawks’s voice stays perfectly level and utterly lethal. He doesn’t raise his head. “Don’t bullshit me.”

“I’m not,” Natsuo’s father says. “You know I was pulling punches back then trying not to exacerbate it. And it wasn’t—” He clenches his teeth, breathes through them. “I’m telling you the truth. Today was the worst it’s ever been. This model isn’t designed to take the heat.”

Hawks doesn’t move.

“The combat model was less conductive,” Natsuo’s father says. “It was specifically engineered to channel flame and release it. I’ve never—” He bites off what sounds like the start of a sigh. “I never tested it, with this one. I had no idea what it was going to do tonight. But we didn’t have time for a backup plan.”

We.

Both of them.

Together.

“Think about it,” Natsuo’s father says, voice sharpening slightly—but Natsuo can hear it, now. He can hear the desperation. “How could I have hidden pain that debilitated me the way you saw today? How could you have missed it? You know I’m a bad liar, and you know you’re too observant. It wasn’t like this. I swear.”

Hawks lifts his head, very slowly. His eyes are hard in a different way entirely from when he had Natsuo in the sniper sights.

“You don’t get to run from me,” he says. “You understand that? You don’t. Not anymore.”

Natsuo’s father meets his gaze—the challenge, the command—with a cool resolution that makes him look like a completely different person.

He looks smaller without the arm.

He looks smaller without the scowl. Without the flame. Without the rage.

“I know,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Hawks doesn’t move.

Natsuo’s father sinks down onto his right knee at Hawks’s feet, spreading his hand on Hawks’s thigh. Hawks’s leg practically disappears.

“I downplayed it,” Natsuo’s father says, “at the start. I was convinced I could keep up with you. But I didn’t lie to you. I never do. I’m on your side.”

He gathers both of Hawks’s hands into his left, one at a time, wrapping his fingers around them.

“I’m going to be all right,” Natsuo’s father says, gripping them. “I’m not going to leave you.” He lifts Hawks’s hands in his, first kissing every knuckle he can reach, and then kissing the inside of each of Hawks’s wrists in turn. Then he stands again, leans in and down, and cups his hand around Hawks’s jaw on the left side, steadying it while he presses his mouth to Hawks’s temple on the right. “I love you,” he whispers, just loud enough for it to be unmistakable even from here. “You’re safe with me. That is a promise I will never break, that no one can take away.”

Natsuo tries to stop his heart from beating in the silence. Hawks’s expression has changed, but Natsuo doesn’t know what this one means—it’s complicated, creased across itself to incomprehensibility like advanced origami.

Naru, of course, chooses that moment to sneeze with sufficient violence to spew snot all over Natsuo’s neck.

Hawks’s eyes flick over, and then back to Natsuo’s father. He works his jaw. His head dips—enough to imply a nod, but not enough to count as one.

Natsuo’s father tucks Hawks’s hair behind his ear and steps back. “I’m going to get Eiji ready for bed.”

Hawks just looks at him this time, mouth still set in a hard line.

Natsuo’s father starts to move past Natsuo, pauses, and fishes in the pocket of his track pants. He pulls out a tissue. He wipes Naru’s nose, and then Natsuo’s neck.

“Thanks,” Natsuo manages. “That was gnarly.”

“Very,” Natsuo’s father mutters, and then he sweeps off into the hall.

Naru pulls at Natsuo’s shirt, but it doesn’t have any drawstrings for him to chew on, which seems to be unusually distressing tonight. He starts up the kind of faint whine that can often—but not always—be counteracted by some bouncing and then a snuggle.

“Okay,” Natsuo says, hoping for the best here, following the plan. He does a quick circuit around the play gym, trying to hear what his father is murmuring to Eiji, and then gives up and goes to sit down on the couch. “I got you, I got you.”

Before Natsuo has even really settled, Naru reaches towards Hawks, who stares back with a stricken sort of blankness for a second before offering his hand out.

Naru seizes onto Hawks’s index finger and shakes it.

Hawks shakes back.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, faintly. “I’m Keigo.”

“Gah,” Naru says.

“Took the words right out of my mouth, my dude,” Hawks says, wearily. He levers himself up off of the couch, scratching a hand through his hair, and looks down at Natsuo. “You coming?”

Natsuo blinks up at him. “To what?”

“Storytime,” Hawks says, already starting for the hall. “Best part of the day. I hope he’s not too high on morphine derivatives to pull it off.”

“I heard that,” Natsuo’s father’s voice calls.

Natsuo looks at Naru.

Naru places one damp hand definitively over Natsuo’s mouth.

Maybe that says it all, in a way.

Natsuo gets up and follows after the last flick of red feathers.

By the time he reaches Eiji’s bedroom—what used to be Fuyumi’s bedroom, back in a world he recognized—Natsuo’s father is sitting in a chair right next to the head of Eiji’s bed. Hawks is already curled up on the floor with his arms folded on Natsuo’s father’s knee and his head rested on them, and Eiji is tucked in and settled down, gazing up at him like he personally went out and hung every star in the constellations.

It makes Natsuo want to throw up.

Instead he sits down on the foot of the bed.

Naru claps, wetly.

Natsuo glances over at the nightstand, but there isn’t any book—probably a good thing, since he can’t imagine his father trying to read to Eiji from anything that wasn’t A Complete History of Heroes or Physics for Kids or some shit, but then what—

“Where did we leave off?” his father asks, stroking his hand lightly over Hawks’s hair.

Eiji smiles, curling his fingers in the duvet. “Prince Iji was climbing the mountain! The wizard said he’d never make it, but gave him the magic pack and the special hat that would cast a spell to put him into any disguise!”

“That’s right,” Natsuo’s father says. “Thank you. Do you think he’ll make it?”

Eiji nods vigorously. “Prince Iji is the bravest in the whole world!” He kicks his little feet under the blanket, then sits up halfway, bright eyes finding Natsuo. “Daddy, Prince Iji is the prince of the Land of Snow, where they live in caves made of ice with walls like mirrors, and they can talk to polar bears, and they like the cold! And Prince Iji makes the most beautiful ice sculptures in the whole world with his magic, just like you! Only the queen from the Sizzling Sands kidnapped his sister because she’s jealous of how beautiful and nice she is, and how everybody loves her, so Iji has been on a journey to find her for days and days and days! And the Lord of the Eagles helped him cross the tre—the tree—the trich—”

“Treacherous,” Natsuo’s father says, gently.

“Treacherous swamp!” Eiji takes up, patting the blanket in his excitement. “And he got chased by wolves in the forest and climbed a tree to hide, and then there was a bear that scared them away, but he could talk to it just like he can talk to the polar bears! So the bear’s name is Fuwa, and now they’re best friends. But what Iji doesn’t know is that the Sand Queen is trying to make his sister weave her—her own—the cloth that they put over people when they die! And the queen is gonna kill her as soon as she’s done! But she’s secretly actually weaving a giant kite, and she’s gonna use it to fly away and escape!”

Natsuo blinks, attempting to process as much of that as possible in case there’s a quiz later. “Oh. Uh. Wow. So he’s—on a mountain.”

“Yeah!” Eiji says. “There’s a huge mountain range right before the desert, so he’s gotta get over before he can find the Sand Queen’s kingdom, which is all underground!” He beams. “Grampa always asks me what Iji should do next, and then he puts it in the story. You can help, too, Daddy!”

“I think Iji should take off his shirt,” Hawks mutters.

Natsuo’s father pauses in stroking to tug on his hair. “That’s why I don’t ask you.”

“How far does he still have to go, Grampa?” Eiji asks, leaning forward. “To get to the top?”

“A long way,” Natsuo’s father says. “The mountain is very steep. There isn’t a path, so they have to climb very carefully, and the dirt is difficult to walk on. Iji is afraid he might slip and fall all the way back to the bottom.”

Eiji drops back down onto the pillow but raises both hands, fingers curled. “Can Fuwa dig his claws in? And then Iji could hold on to his fur!”

“That’s a great idea,” Natsuo’s father says. “Iji asks Fuwa if they can, and Fuwa says it’s certainly worth a try. He starts to bury his claws very deep—far into the broken dirt, deep enough to catch them in the roots of the cactus plants and shrubs that still grow up here. Iji is very careful not to pull too hard on Fuwa’s fur, and very careful where he puts his feet. It’s hard to be careful for a very long time.”

Eiji nods solemnly. “You have to be patient.”

“That’s right,” Natsuo’s father says. “But Iji reminds himself why he’s here. He needs to get over the mountain so that he can find Miyu. That’s the most important thing, and staying patient looks very small in comparison. He just needs to keep going.”

Enji seizes onto his blanket, evidently moved by that repurposed Billboard pep talk. “He can do it, Grampa!”

“I think so,” Natsuo’s father says. “He and Fuwa keep climbing. The air is very dry, and it’s getting hotter as they go, as the sun gets higher. Iji is worried about Fuwa with all that fur, but Fuwa has seen many summers. He puts his tongue out.”

Eiji gasps. “Like a puppy!”

“Just like that,” Natsuo’s father says.

Worse even than the bizarre mental image of some grown-up Eiji analogue with ice powers trekking up a mountain with a talking bear is the fact that Natsuo’s father’s voice has soothed Naru so easily that Natsuo barely noticed. Naru jammed a few fingers into his mouth, leaned his heavy head against Natsuo’s shoulder, and started dozing without any further ado.

Maybe Natsuo’s father has been training them.

Just not in the way he thought.

“The higher they go on the mountain,” Natsuo’s father says, “the fewer trees and plants there are. The air gets thinner, and it’s more difficult to breathe.”

Eiji blinks up at him. “Why?”

Hawks, who looks almost as close to sleep as Naru, hides a smile in Natsuo’s father’s knee.

“Because the air is made up of very, very tiny molecules,” Natsuo’s father says. “They’re much too small for us to see, and too small for us to feel, but they do have weight. Those are what we breathe. You can think of them a little like marbles. If you have a lot of marbles stacked on top of each other, the ones on the bottom are stuck very close together, and they won’t move. But when there’s more space further up, they can spread out. Then for every spot, there will be fewer marbles, because they’re distributed more widely. Which means that if you take a breath up near the top of the mountain, where the air can spread out more, there aren’t as many molecules for you to breathe with.”

Eiji continues blinking, then wrinkles his nose. “…okay, Grampa.”

Natsuo’s father winces.

Hawks pats his shin. “That was actually pretty good for kid-level science on a morphine high.”

Natsuo’s father cards a few fingers through Hawks’s hair again. “Hush.” He sighs. “The… point is, it’s getting harder to climb the closer they get to the top of the mountain. With fewer plants, it’s also harder for Fuwa to hold onto the roots with his claws, and Iji’s getting very tired.”

“He’s gotta keep going!” Eiji says, emphatically.

“He does,” Natsuo’s father says. “That’s what he’s telling himself—that every step brings him closer to saving his sister, and he can’t give up. He and Fuwa have come this far already. They just need to go a little further.”

“Can he see the top?” Eiji asks.

“Almost,” Natsuo’s father says. “They’re getting close.”

Natsuo eyes him, but he doesn’t notice.

“But then,” Natsuo’s father says, right on cue, “they arrive at a place where the mountainside has broken into pieces. It’s created a huge canyon in their path.”

Eiji’s eyes go round. “How big is it?”

“It’s much too wide to jump,” Natsuo’s father says. “Even for Fuwa. And it goes in either direction as far as Iji can see. It’s so deep that when he throws a rock down into it, he never hears it hit the ground.”

Eiji looks distraught in the way that means he’s thinking as quickly as the little gears will turn in his three-year-old brain. “What about his magic pack from the wizard, Grampa? Is there anything in the magic pack that could help them get across?”

“That’s a good idea,” Natsuo’s father says. “Iji takes the pack off and starts searching through it. It holds so much more than it looks like, and doesn’t weigh very much even though there are so many things inside.”

“Wizard should patent those,” Hawks mutters. “Max inventory.”

“Does he have a rope?” Eiji asks, twisting at the edge of his blanket. “Is there a tree? He could—he could swing across. Or throw it. He could tie a big rock on the other side and throw it, and then swing across.”

Natsuo starts to indulge an uncharitable thought about his father plunking Eiji down in front of too many shitty cartoons, but then he remembers how often you see pros pulling shenanigans like that on the news, and it occurs to him that he wasn’t setting much of an example today.

He keeps his mouth shut.

“There aren’t any trees left up here,” Natsuo’s father is saying. “At least not anywhere that Iji can see around him. And the roots sticking out of the side of the canyon don’t look strong enough to hold Fuwa, even if they might hold Iji for a little while.”

Eiji frowns. “Could they build a ladder?” His eyes flick to Hawks. “Or—wings?”

“Hmm,” Natsuo’s father says. He withdraws his hand from Hawks’s hair and pantomimes rooting through a bag one-handed. “There are a few planks of wood, but not enough for a ladder long enough to go across. What would you want to build the wings from?”

“Metal!” Eiji says. “And leather!”

“Let’s see what we have,” Natsuo’s father says, fake-rummaging again.

“He could totally just jump,” Hawks mutters, “because there’s no way you would let him die.”

“That is very poor problem-solving,” Natsuo’s father mutters back. “There doesn’t seem to be any leather, but Iji finds quite a lot of metal. It’s already assembled into something, though—it looks like a windmill, or maybe a fan.”

Eiji frowns thoughtfully. “Could he—can he spin it fast enough that it’ll make him fly? Like a helicopter?”

“Maybe that would work,” Natsuo’s father says. “Do you think he should try it?”

Natsuo strokes Naru’s back gently and keeps his voice low. “What about his ice magic?”

Silence for a second.

Natsuo’s father almost smiles.

Eiji’s mouth widens into an adorable little O. “Daddy’s right! He could make a bridge!”

“That’s a great idea,” Natsuo’s father says. “He’ll have to make it very thick so that it can hold up Fuwa’s weight. Do you think he can use anything from the pack to help make it stronger?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says. “He could use the wood! Or the metal, if he took it apart, maybe. But that’s heavy.”

“I think the wood would be the best choice,” Natsuo’s father says.

He looks over at Natsuo.

And waits.

Is he looking for consensus?

That’s… weird.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says, slowly. “It’s worth a shot.” He pats Naru. “What do you think, Bub?”

Naru’s eyelids barely flicker, but he huffs a breath out around his fingers that sounds close enough to affirmative.

“Okay, then,” Natsuo says. “Ice bridge it is.”

Natsuo’s father turns back to Eiji, who is already stretching out both arms out and wriggling his fingers. “Fwoosh! Ice magic! Can he make it go all the way across? You said it was hot, right, Grampa?”

“That’s right,” Natsuo’s father says. “Iji has to concentrate very hard. He can see even when he’s working to build it that they’ll need to use the bridge as fast as they can, because the edges are melting even as it spreads further across the gap.”

“Oh, no,” Eiji whispers. “He better run! And Fuwa, too!”

“He tells Fuwa to go first,” Natsuo’s father says, “while the bridge is still forming—it’s such a long way that it’s taking him a while to make the ice thick enough, and it’s so warm here that it’s getting harder and harder to find enough moisture in the air to create the ice at all.”

Eiji grips the blankets. “He can’t let Fuwa fall, Grampa! He can’t!”

“He’s thinking the same thing,” Natsuo’s father says, leaning forward towards him slightly, “as he works and works, pushing himself more and more, focusing on the ice—trying to make himself feel cold, trying to remember what it feels like, thinking of home and the snow and his sister and the way the cold air tingles in his lungs. He knows he has to make this work.”

Eiji covers his eyes. “They’re gonna fall!”

Natsuo’s father reaches out and very lightly lays two giant fingers on his tiny arm. “Do you think Iji would give up? He’s come all this way.”

Eiji peeks. “But it’s so hard, Grampa.”

“You’ve done a lot of hard things,” Natsuo’s father says. “You wouldn’t give up if it was Naru.”

Eiji gives his brother a thoughtful glance, which Naru blissfully baby-snores through. “No…”

“He’s going to keep going,” Natsuo’s father says. “And Fuwa is running as fast as he can go—as fast as the ice will extend. He’s almost to the other side.”

Eiji clasps his hands. “Really?”

“Really,” Natsuo’s father says, very seriously. “Iji gives it one last push, thinking as hard as he can about the blizzards back home, about the way the cold air used to nibble at his fingertips until they went numb, about the frost that looked like white lace on the windowpanes, about rolling snow in his hands and tasting the wind on his tongue. And he hears the ice crash up against the rock on the other side.”

Eiji worries at the blanket, eyes huge. “He needs to run, Grampa!”

“Yes,” Natsuo’s father says, “he does. And he knows it. So he takes off after Fuwa, running with all his strength, and he can hear the ice starting to crack underneath him. Fuwa jumps off of the far side, safely over the canyon now, but he turns around and calls to Iji to hurry. The sun is only getting hotter, and Fuwa’s weight weakened the ice as he moved across.”

Eiji gapes at him in terror. “Can Iji go faster?”

Hawks smiles again, eyes mostly shut, head rested so easily on Natsuo’s father’s thigh.

“He tries,” is Natsuo’s father’s answer.

Of course it is.

“But as he runs,” Natsuo’s father says, evenly, “his feet are slipping from the way the ice is melting on the top, and on the sides. It’s dripping away from underneath and making it so hard to keep his balance that he can’t run too fast, or he might slip.”

Eiji wails, covering his eyes again. “Grampa, this is scary!”

“The swamp was scary,” Natsuo’s father says, gently. “And the forest was scary, and just leaving home in the first place was scary, too. Just because it’s scary doesn’t mean that you can’t do it.”

“Yeah,” Hawks mutters. “You’re scary, and I do you all the t—mmffff.”

Natsuo’s father keeps his hand over Hawks’s mouth well after Hawks has started laughing.

Eiji looks unconvinced and disconcerted. “Grampa, he has to make it. He has to.”

“That’s what’s going through his mind, too,” Natsuo’s father says. “So he keeps running, as well as he can, trying very hard to keep his balance—even when he slides on the ice, even though it’s so hot now that his head is spinning a little. He keeps his eyes on his feet and on the bridge ahead of him, jumping over the cracks, focusing on reaching Fuwa so they can keep going.”

Eiji clenches his fists, searching Natsuo’s father’s face. “Come on, Iji!”

“He’s getting close,” Natsuo’s father says. “So close—just a few more strides, and Fuwa starts backing out of the way to make space for him, but then he hears the biggest, sharpest crack that he thinks he’s ever heard—from just beneath him. The bridge is breaking, because so much of the ice has melted from underneath, and the part of it just ahead of him is splintering as he watches—one piece fractures and slides down and away, and then another cracks, and more and more chunks of ice fall away in front of him. He hears some crumbling behind him, too—at any moment, the ice under his feet may just drop into the canyon. There’s nothing left to hold it up.”

Eiji leans forward, clutching the blankets to his chest. “Iji, jump!”

“That’s exactly what he does,” Natsuo’s father says. “He runs three more steps until he can just feel the ice dissolving underneath his feet, and then he jumps with all his might—as far as he can.”

Eiji waits, wide-eyed and expectant and—Natsuo can’t be imagining it; he knows his kid—a little bit excited.

“He pushes off as hard as he can,” Natsuo’s father says, releasing Hawks’s mouth from the improvised innuendo jail—but apparently only because he needs his hand back for another gesture. This time it’s a slow impression of pawing through open air. “And he can see the ledge—and he reaches for it, but he can’t tell whether he’ll fall too fast, or if—”

He extends his hand slowly, slowly, slowly through the air towards Eiji.

And then grasps firmly on to the frame of the bed.

“He grabs on,” Natsuo’s father says, voice lowered almost to a whisper at first, then rising. “And digs his fingers in, as deep as he can—the dirt shifts, and his weight pulls him backwards, and he tries to find a place to dig his feet in to the side of the cliff—”

“Fuwa!” Eiji gasps. “Fuwa can help him! Quick!”

“Just as he starts to slip,” Natsuo’s father says, “something slams into his back from above—and the dirt gives way, and he scrambles to try to grasp something, but nothing will stay still. The ice bridge melted on the ledge and made the edge start to crumble, so he can’t grip a thing. It’s only when he frantically reaches upward that he realizes that he hasn’t started falling, even though there’s nothing to hold onto, and his feet are sliding against the wall. He looks up, and he sees that what hit him just now was Fuwa’s claws digging into the magic pack to catch him, and that’s what’s holding him up.”

Eiji stares open-mouthed. “But he’s okay!”

“Yes,” Natsuo’s father says, letting go of the bedframe to start tucking the disheveled blankets back in around Eiji again. “Fuwa pulls him up over the top, and they both lie down on the ground for a little while to catch their breath.”

“Iji should make a little more ice!” Eiji says, sounding every bit as breathless as their imaginary protagonist. “So that they have something to drink! Fuwa must be so hot with all his fur, and Iji’s so tired. It’s like you always say, Grampa—you gotta drink enough water, even plants know that.”

Hawks snickers.

“That’s a good idea,” Natsuo’s father says, for the fourth time tonight and the fourth time in Natsuo’s life. “Iji breathes deeply for a little while, and then he sits up and spins just a bit more ice out from the moisture still left in the air. It’s even harder this time, after having used so much of it—and his energy—to make the bridge, but you’re right. They need to take care of themselves, too, if they’re going to make it.”

“They will,” Eiji whispers. “How much farther is it to the top, Grampa?”

“Not far at all,” Natsuo’s father says. “Once they’ve had some water, Iji looks in the magic pack for some food, too. He doesn’t know what wizards usually eat, but it must be better than nothing. He finds some onigiri and offers one to Fuwa.”

“Bears don’t eat rice!” Eiji says. He hesitates, frowns, tips his head like the sweetest little puppy in the world. “Do they, Grampa?”

“As far as I understand it,” Natsuo’s father says, “they eat just about anything.”

Eiji is awed by this revelation, too. “So if I meet a bear, I should give him onigiri?”

There’s a pause. Natsuo can see that his father is calculating very, very quickly. Hawks is just grinning, the asshole. He could probably talk his way out of this one in a heartbeat, but evidently he’s decided to let Natsuo’s father go down with the ship.

“If you meet a bear,” Natsuo’s father says, slowly, “in real life—a real bear—you should be very careful. If you can walk away without it even seeing you, that’s best. But if it does see you, most bears try to avoid people, so you should start talking in a calm voice so that it realizes that you’re not another animal, you’re a person. You can also wave your arms, but you shouldn’t make any loud noises, and you shouldn’t run—that makes them want to chase you.” He pauses again. “Iji is lucky that Fuwa is a very special bear.”

Eiji nods seriously. “Magic bears are different.”

“That’s right,” Natsuo’s father says, just as seriously. “So—they eat their onigiri as they keep climbing. They still have to be careful—it’s still very steep, and their feet slide. But now they can see the peak, and it’s not much further. Iji is so excited and relieved that it gives him the strength to climb a little faster.”

“Is Fuwa excited, too?” Eiji asks.

“Yes,” Natsuo’s father says, calmly, “although mostly about the onigiri.”

Hawks snorts.

“He asks if Iji has more,” Natsuo’s father says, “but before Iji can look in the pack or answer, they finally come to the very top of the mountain.”

Eiji is so raptly engrossed that he’s in danger of starting to drool like Naru, because his mouth has been hanging open for so long.

“Iji plants his feet,” Natsuo’s father says, straightening his own shoulders as he does, then looking back and forth. “From up here, he can see everything—what seems like the whole world.”

Eiji doesn’t even breathe. “What’s out there?”

Natsuo’s father blinks at him. “Sand.”

Eiji blinks back. “Oh.”

“That’s all that he can see,” Natsuo’s father says. “Just sand, from the foot of the mountain all the way to the horizon. The wind has formed it into massive dunes that curve up like giant ocean waves. There isn’t a single tree in sight. It’s just the sand below them and the sky above.”

Eiji’s eyes go a little hazy as he struggles to visualize it. “Forever?”

“Not really forever,” Natsuo’s father says. “There must be something on the other side. But it seems like that’s all there is.”

“The Sand Queen’s kingdom is underground,” Eiji says, slowly. “There must be a way to get in. People can’t live underground all the time. And the Sand Queen must’ve had to come out in order to kidnap Miyu.” He looks up suddenly. “You said Miyu’s room had a window, didn’t you, Grampa? A window in the ceiling? She was watching the clouds, and then a bird went by, and that was how she got the idea for the kite.”

“That’s right,” Natsuo’s father says. “You have a good memory. Iji is thinking, too, that people must have a way to get in and out. As he and Fuwa start down the mountain, he can look a little closer—and here and there, almost hidden by the sand, he can see little lines of smoke coming from the chimneys of the city down below.”

Eiji turns a triumphant look on Natsuo. “I knew it!”

“You sure did,” Natsuo says.

Eiji beams at him, but then his face falls as he notices Naru passed out and—shock of the century—drooling all over Natsuo’s shoulder.

“Grampa,” Eiji says, looking over, “maybe we should stop now until tomorrow. Naru’s gonna miss the rest.”

“Hard same,” Hawks mutters, eyes mostly shut now where he’s draped over Natsuo’s father’s knee.

Natsuo’s father ruffles his hair and then reaches over and tugs Eiji’s blanket up a bit. “It’s very nice of you to think of him. This is a good place to stop for now.”

Eiji reaches up for him, and he leans in to the hug, carefully wrapping his arm around the tiny, tiny toddler in the bed—somehow without either crushing him into the mattress or displacing Hawks.

“G’night, Grampa,” Eiji whispers. “I’m glad you’re okay. Is your gundam arm gonna be okay?”

“It might take a little while,” Natsuo’s father says, “but we’ll figure something out.”

Hawks drags himself up off of the floor and pops a kiss on the top of Eiji’s head as soon as Natsuo’s father has drawn back. “Sleep tight, kiddo. Holler if you need anything.” He rounds on Natsuo and holds both arms out, wriggling his fingers. “Hand over my do-gooding nemesis, and nobody gets hurt.”

“Uh,” Natsuo says.

His father stands up, although not without wincing and putting a hand to the small of his back. “Translation: we’ll put Naru to bed if you get Eiji settled.”

Natsuo gives Hawks the obligatory You could’ve just said that look while passing the sleeping baby over gently. A glimmering trail of drool splatters on his sleeve.

His father strokes Eiji’s hair back one more time and then steps away—meeting Natsuo’s eyes for a second as Hawks whisks past him, feathers whispering.

Then the pair of them step out into the hall, Hawks talking uncharacteristically quietly—something about the state of the ‘gundam arm’, and then the footsteps halt too soon in the hallway to have reached Naru’s room.

Natsuo’s father sighs. “Would you handle him while I change our sheets?”

“Shit,” Hawks says. “Where’s Wash when you need him?”

Natsuo sidles over, gently closes the door, and then sits back down in the chair his father was using before.

“Daddy,” Eiji says, somewhat urgently, before Natsuo can decide whether to point out the word as a bad word or just hope that Eiji didn’t clock it, “do you think Iji’s going to make it? And save his sister from the queen?”

Given the fact that the sister is clearly a stand-in for Fuyumi, Natsuo suspects that Iji will arrive right in time to pitch in as she unabashedly saves herself, and they’ll escape together with the giant kite. He doesn’t know how the bear is going to get out of there yet.

“I bet he will,” he says, since Eiji is watching him and waiting for an answer. “I bet everything’s going to work out okay.”

Eiji looks down at the blanket, fiddling with the hem. “I dunno, Daddy. Sometimes—sometimes things are just bad. And no one knows why. Right?”

“Yeah,” Natsuo says, feeling it resonate back through his ribcage like it always does. He couldn’t do it—couldn’t protect them. He couldn’t save his kid from growing up in the kind of world that he did, where things are just fucked sometimes, and there’s no way out. “But Iji’s smart, and he’s strong, and he’s brave. And he’s got you cheering for him. That’s pretty special.”

Eiji frowns at him. “I’m not special, Daddy.”

“Are you kidding?” Natsuo says, and it comes out a little louder than he means it to—it sounds intense enough that Eiji’s eyes widen. “You’re the most amazing kid in the entire world. I’ve never met anybody as special as you in my whole life.”

Eiji’s eyes narrow as he frowns again. “What about Naru?”

“He’s the most amazing baby,” Natsuo says. “It’s gonna take him a long time to catch up. And he’ll be good at different things than you are. He’ll be a different kind of special. Nobody else can be like you.”

Eiji holds his hands up, looks at them, and turns them back and forth. “I don’t have ice magic. Or an ice quirk.”

“You might still get one,” Natsuo says. “Or you might take after your mom.”

He suspects that Naru is set that way—safe that way, and stuck with it, and every striation of the spectrum in between.

But Eiji…

He’s lost a lot of sleep about it, but there’s nothing he can do.

Eiji nods for a second, and then he squirms further down into bed until just his tiny face and his tiny hands are poking out. His eyelashes sink so low that there’s only a sliver of green left showing of his eyes.

“Ms. Jimi asked me if I missed Mommy,” he says. Natsuo bites his tongue on What kind of a stupid question is that? She was probably asking it to get at Are there things your mommy used to do to help you that your daddy doesn’t?, which is marginally less cruel. “I told her—I told her I do, all the time. All the time. But I don’t want Grampa and Hawks to be sad that I’m sad. ’Cause it’s not their fault.” He blinks his eyes partway open again, looking over. “And it’s not your fault, either, Daddy. But I know you’re sad, too.”

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. He wonders how fucking long it’s going to be before he can even think about it without choking up.

Maybe there’s some mathematical formula—some way to calculate the half-life of your own devotion. How many years you loved them, divided and divided and divided, whittled down day by day by day.

He’s going to die still loving her. Still missing her. Still feeling like the best of himself went with her.

“We can be sad together,” Eiji says, reaching out, and Natsuo has no damn choice but to take his little hand. “Maybe that’ll be better, Daddy. Everything’s harder when you have to do it all alone.”

Natsuo leans in to kiss each of his cheeks and then the tip of his nose.

“I think you might be right, bud,” he says.

Chapter 8 Notes:

Haha. Well. This one was originally more like 32K, but now it's 38 after the scenes I added during edits. Stay hydrated, take breaks, stand up and stretch!! ♥
I… thought I could do other things today and still have time to edit this and answer comments. Reality intervened, to no great surprise, but I will come back!
I am still, honestly, truthfully, forever blown away by how amazing you have all been in your support of and responses to this fic. I thought people would probably like it because we just threw so much wild stuff in, but DAMN, y'all exceeded my hopes to a degree that is indescribable. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And if any of you were wondering, never fear: Kae and I had delighted screaming sessions about the comments in our DMs after every update. :D
Speaking of which, one last piece of Kae's lovely art for the road in this chapter. ♥
I am genuinely so grateful for all of you. I hope you love the way this goes and the way it ends (odd as it feels to be hitting some of these notes when suddenly canon is ??? ending ????). There will almost certainly be sequels and spin-offs and miscellaneous nonsense. Stay tuned, and thank you so, so much. Take care. ♥

Chapter Text

Natsuo’s not exactly shocked that he can’t sleep.

He manages a couple minutes here and there of the kind of half-assed dozing that makes you feel worse—nauseous and clammy and gritty-eyed, like the sandman threw a handful of his namesake in your face instead of whisking you away.

The dreams are shit.

He gives up a little after one in the morning. It feels intolerably stuffy in this shoebox of a room; it feels like the darkness has weight, and the air is made of marbles.

He gets up. He throws a clean jacket on over his pajamas. He slips his feet into the same sandals he wore to the beach, what feels like eons ago.

Just stepping outside helps a little—the cold air, the darkness, the faint creaking of the tree branches, the breeze ruffling through the leaves, the pair of owls calling to each other somewhere nearby. The stars. His breath. The sound of his footsteps, the coolness making the sweat on the small of his back prickle and then chill.

He’s hauling himself away from the edge of the void. Hand over hand. Doesn’t have to be pretty if you get it done.

He takes his sandals off before he hoists himself up over the edge of the engawa and lets himself into the house as quietly as he can. He sets the sandals down just inside the door and locks it carefully behind him. His kids live here now. He can respect this place for them. He can let them have this kinder version of it.

The shadowed hall, the forgiving tatami, his breath. The sound of his footsteps.

There’s a light on in the kitchen.

For a second he considers turning back around, but it doesn’t matter, does it? Hardly anything does, when you get right the fuck down to it—hardly anything makes any damn difference. Nothing stops the thresher. Nothing slows down time, and nothing rolls it back.

He can just pour a glass of water and then leave, if it comes to that. He can walk away.

He’s not surprised, obviously, that his father started to look up well before he stepped into the doorway.

He’s also not surprised that he knows the expression—the etched-in lines, the set jaw, the glint of desperation in the exhausted eyes.

The pain meds are waning.

The pain isn’t.

His father’s left hand is wrapped around a mug of tea, his right sleeve still hanging empty. Naru’s baby monitor is set down on the tabletop just past the cup—Natsuo’s father’s fingers make it look tiny. His laptop and a small stack of papers are arranged next to monitor, their sides lined up perfectly parallel to the edge of the table.

Natsuo’s father taps his fingertip on the side of the mug. “You want some?”

Natsuo’s also not surprised that he’s not surprised. Maybe this should be surreal. Maybe they shouldn’t understand each other—ever, let alone at times like this.

But maybe they’re most alike when they’re tired, and they’re hurting, and the afterimages of the adrenaline are flashing on the backs of their eyelids—the latest trauma flickering out in a tangled mess, rewinding bits and pieces like there’s a broken projector playing from the far side of their skulls.

Maybe all these jobs are a little bit the same.

Maybe all pain is a little bit the same.

Maybe all people are.

“I’m too warm,” Natsuo says. He hasn’t moved from the doorway. He puts one foot over the threshold, turns his toes towards the fridge, sets the other foot next to it. “Just—thirsty.” The silence weighs too much. Means too much. “Thanks.”

His father doesn’t answer, doesn’t shift, doesn’t really acknowledge it—but his shoulders look a tiny bit smaller at the next glance. Like he settled a little bit.

Natsuo breathes out, moves his feet, crosses the floor.

When he opens the refrigerator door to get the pitcher of fancy filtered water, his eyes skip past the endless baby bottles and land on the seductively soothing pastels of the boxes of strawberry milk.

Fuck it. He’s dragged himself through several of the worst possible kinds of adult obligations today. He’s within his damn rights to act like a kid for a couple minutes at one in the morning when no one can see.

Well. No one who will tell another living soul, at any rate.

The unspoken pact of past-midnight secrecy doesn’t spare him from a raised eyebrow, though.

“What?” Natsuo says. He sits down on the opposite side of the table and stabs the straw in, maybe a tiny bit harder than necessary. “It’s fortified or something, right?”

“Or something,” his father says.

Two can play at the snarky asshole game. Natsuo slurps his first sip expertly, basks in the cringe, and then tips the box in his father’s direction. “You want one?”

Hawks has softened the bastard up so much. He almost smiles again, even after the day they’ve had. “I’ll pass.”

The fact that this stuff tastes too sweet to be drinking at any time other than the middle of the afternoon feels like unequivocal proof that Natsuo has passed the point of no return in the aging department. Figures.

“Your loss,” he says.

There’s a spark of amusement in the cold-burning eyes before they lower to the wisps of steam rising from the mug of tea again.

It makes the room feel a little bigger, and the air feel a little lighter. Easier to breathe.

Natsuo nods to the space where the right arm ought to be. “Is it… you know. Broken?”

His father pushes his index fingertip at the handle of the mug. “I’m not sure. When I took it off, it was still responding, but—erratically. A lot of feedback. It needs an engineer. I’m… I do still have the previous model in storage, if it can’t be repaired, but the best-case scenario with that one is that it would only require minor recalibration.” He sighs, quietly. “We’re probably looking at the better part of a week, likely more. I’ll see if I can get in sooner, but they usually only make short-notice appointments for emergencies.”

Natsuo eyes him. “It’s okay if it takes a little while. That’s… kind of why I’m here, you know. To take care of my kids.”

His father fucking shrugs.

Natsuo’s only consolation is that it looks weirdly uneven with the right arm gone, because he didn’t compensate correctly.

“You’re here to try to heal,” his father says. “As much as that’s possible. As long as it takes.”

Natsuo looks at him. His blood beats a little faster, a little hotter.

It’s the challenge. There’s always a challenge—everything his father says, everything he does, is meant to build to something. Meant to lead somewhere. He can’t just be.

Natsuo can’t either.

That’s part of why he hates it so acutely. He already knows how far he still has left to go. He doesn’t need to be told.

“Sure,” he says, keeping his voice cool. “I’ll heal. Right as soon as you grow back your arm.”

His father sits back, frowning at the tabletop, as if the jibe didn’t even register. “I realize that that’s a reductive way to say it. But we can’t go on like this.”

There’s that we again.

Something… changes.

His father looks up at him, and the eyes are too intense—illuminated from within by that indestructible drive. One in the damn morning, after an adrenaline high, a morphine high, and crashing from them both, and he still wants something.

Natsuo just wants to be able to sleep.

Natsuo just wants to be able to live.

Is that enough?

“Tell me about her,” Natsuo’s father says.

Natsuo’s brain fizzles. His hands on the table feel like blocks of wood—too hollow and too heavy at once. “Why?”

“Because it might help,” his father says. “Because someone should hear. Because I want to know.”

He’s probably wrong. He’s been wrong an awful lot of times before.

But this might not be one of them.

Shit, the guy’s spent so many hours in therapy that he should have an honorary degree, and he’s clearly been examining the hell out of everything that he’s been told—dissecting it piece by piece and analyzing every one of them, instead of just swallowing it and carrying on. This is the battle he’s picked now, and Endeavor—or Enji, or both of them; whatever’s left—doesn’t know how to lose.

Even if he is wrong, that seems to matter to him, these days. If Natsuo refused, he’d respect it. He’d let it go.

Natsuo’s father watches him for a second longer and then looks down at the tea, turning the mug slowly again, around and around. “How did you meet her?”

It sits sideways in Natsuo’s brain that his father—that anyone—doesn’t know. It feels like a bent eyelash prickling at the corner of his eye, nagging at his nerves, not quite painful yet.

But they never had casual conversations in those days. Neither of them wanted to let their lives overlap. Everybody else at the wedding had already heard the story a thousand times.

Maybe there is such a thing as better late than never.

“Crashed into her,” Natsuo says. “I always say she knocked me on my ass literally as well as figuratively. It was the second day of my second year of classes, and I still had no idea where half of my new classrooms were, and we both took a corner too fast from opposite directions. Stuff flyin’ everywhere like a cartoon, papers and everything. She squeaked, and she was so tiny I thought I’d killed her, so I was tripping all over myself trying to get up so I could help her. Only then I got a good look at her, and she was so damn cute that my brain short-circuited, and I was just standing there with my hand out, staring at her.”

His father raises an eyebrow, which is probably as close to a Go on as they’re going to get.

It hurts. It hurts like hell.

It used to be fun to spin this one out for the millionth time. He used to get to revel in the nostalgia-hazy mental images and then turn and look at the real thing and squeeze her hand in his, and revel far more in everything they’d made together since.

It all went so right.

“Natsuo,” his father says, quietly.

Not his Natsuo.

But hers.

Hers would finish what he started—not to win the game; not to prove the point; not to overcome the challenge.

Hers would finish what he started because he loves this story. Because he loves her.

He takes a breath. He clears his throat.

“She said—she said ‘Can I get a number?’,” he says, “and I said ‘Twelve.’ So she stared at me for a second, and I said, ‘No, no, thirteen’, and she stared some more, and I said ‘Out of ten. Thirteen out of ten.’ And then she stared at me again, and then she turned pink, like—chin to tips of her ears, this beautiful quick blush like flower petals, and she said, ‘I meant your phone number, but—um—thanks. Um—really?’”

His father smiles a little. It still looks weird on him—pulls his face into a shape it shouldn’t be. Stone statues are designed to look serious.

“As simple as that,” Natsuo’s father says.

It was.

Love at first fucking sight, and every single one after.

Maybe he doesn’t believe it. Even setting aside the cataclysmic quirk marriage fiasco that fucked them all over to begin with, Natsuo is pretty sure his father and Hawks were more of a almost incinerated the asshole on live television at first sight kind of a deal.

“She texted me later,” Natsuo says. He moves his wooden hands, fitting his elbows on the table underneath them, lifting them enough to lower his head into them. Carved cradle. Fits just right. Funny that the human anatomy is so optimized for gestures of despair. “Said she couldn’t stop thinking about me, ‘only a little bit because of the bruises’. Asked if I wanted to get lunch on Saturday. I kept thinking I should play it cool, but I just—couldn’t. Not with her. It was like that from the very start.”

“It’s better,” his father says, very quietly, “to trust someone with yourself.”

Natsuo eyes him for a second, but that seems to be the extent of the obviousness he wants to state right now.

Okay. That’s not very fair. The lessons that Natsuo’s father had to learn were worlds apart from the ones the rest of them were dealing with, because he lived in a different world. He had to be too good at hiding. Otherwise he wouldn’t have survived.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. Seems safe enough. “Anyway—lunch turned into walking around town the whole day, and then that turned into dinner, and then that turned into walking around some more, and then it was eleven at night, and my legs were on fire, and my face hurt so bad from laughing, and the whole thing felt like it had to be a dream, but when I woke up the next morning, all the texts were still there. I’d taken this picture of her on the canal walk, leaned over the railing pointing at something and just turning to look at me with this—a smile like you wouldn’t believe. It’s kind of a miracle I didn’t flunk out of all my classes that second week, honestly, ’cause I think the only thing I did for three days solid was look at it and think about other things that she might want to go out and do.”

Quiet, for a second.

Natsuo slugs a little more of his hard-won strawberry milk. Feels like a shot of sugar to the brain.

“She loved those weird-flavored KitKats,” he says. “She’d only drink tea with caffeine in it, ’cause she thought tea tasted like dirty leaf water, so she felt cheated if she didn’t ‘get something out of it’. Her favorite pair of socks were this awful bright blue with little yellow sunflowers all over. When they started wearing out, it took me, like, three hours of searching online to find the exact same ones so I could buy her ten pairs. She listened to death metal and K-Pop and practically nothing else.” He pulls the straw halfway out of the box, jams it back in, pulls it out, shoves it back— “One time right after we got the apartment, she was cleaning when I came home. She was blasting BTS so loud I could hear it from outside, and she didn’t hear me come in, and she was dancing to it while she was vacuuming. Not one of the actual dances they do or whatever—just making it up as she went along. It was the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. And she turned around and saw me watching and went white as a sheet, and I was like—‘No, don’t stop!’, and I dropped my stuff and ran over and started dancing with her so she’d do it again, and… And whenever something went really good—like, one of us got a promotion or a raise or something, or it was just a really good day—she’d put ‘Fire’ on, and we’d just dance around the room like idiots, and…”

And love is a cosmic wonder—the staggering discovery that someone else’s soul resonates at the same frequency as yours, and their mere existence shakes your being until you fit more easily into yourself. Gravity gets kinder when they’re close to you.

All the stars went out with her.

“Oh,” his father says, very softly. “That was that—the first song they played. At your wedding.”

Turns out Natsuo is not quite too tired for tears. “Gross, right?”

His father looks at him for a long, long second, then pulls a couple of neatly-folded tissues out of the pocket of his pajama pants and reaches across the table to lay them down next to the box of milk. “No.”

“She was powerful,” Natsuo fights out. He spent an awful lot of time thinking about that, too—how to encapsulate the perfect person in the perfect word. He never got it exactly right. There was too much about her to contain in a single thought, let alone in speech. “You’ve seen it in Eiji. It’s this—she was so determined to love the world no matter what, and nothing was going to stop her. She’d find things. She’d make things. She could turn anything around, but not in the way where people will tell you, you know, like, ‘Just stay positive!’, that kind of sniveling bullshit—she would wrest a situation around by force. Or she’d say ‘You know what? We learned everything we can. Let’s walk away with this and take it for what it is. We’re lucky.’ And she really believed that. I think that’s a lot of it. She was just so grateful to have a world with trees and flowers and sky and coffee drinks and purple sweaters and kids laughing and new books and big fluffy blankets and people to enjoy it all with. I always felt—I would feel like such a fucking drag, you know? But it was never because she was pressuring me or anybody else to be like that. She just wanted to share it. And after a while you started to feel it, too.”

He knows his father understands that, these days.

He knows Hawks is like that—not like her, but just so damn delighted to see the dawn some days that it spills up out of him, and you absorb some whether you like it or not. It’s for a different reason—it’s underpinned by a terror of losing what he’s scrabbled his way into, fighting uphill all the way to find something worth keeping. He’s waded through enough shit that he’ll hold onto the good with his teeth, and defend it with his dying breath.

It amounts to the same thing, though. He loves so fiercely, so freely, that it becomes an infection no one can hope to escape.

Natsuo’s father probably didn’t even recognize it.

He didn’t even think to run.

Maybe he did.

Maybe he wasn’t fast enough.

Natsuo picks up one of the tissues, unfolds it, and blows his nose—loudly. It’s that man’s fault that he’s got this nose anyway.

He doesn’t even know how much sense he’s making at this point, and he doesn’t give a shit.

“She’d do this thing,” he says. “When I was having a bad day—she’d start a document on her phone and title it ‘Operation Make Natsu Snort Coffee Out His Nose’ and then add the date, and she’d write down all the weird stuff she’d heard people say, and put in funny little things she was thinking about, and take pictures of stuff, and then at the end of the day she’d sit me down and scroll through it with me, and the point was to try to make me smile. A lot of the time the pictures were of trees and flowers and stuff, but any time she saw somebody with a dog she’d ask to pet it and then take a picture of her hand. So many pictures of her hand. She got to hold somebody’s pet parrot once. And one time a dog licked her phone, so there was one picture where it was normal, and then one of dog jaws, and then one that was all dark and pink and blurry. I laughed my ass off.”

His father frowns at the table for a few seconds—thinking about how to say something he wants to say without triggering Natsuo’s temper, probably. Reluctantly rearranging words because people hear what they want to hear, not what you say, not what you mean.

Natsuo knows what that look feels like from the inside, but he’s never seen it.

He doesn’t even bother bracing himself. Fuck it. They’re here now. Come what may.

“My understanding,” his father says, slowly, “was that she didn’t have much family.”

Natsuo spends a strange second wondering who told him about the funeral and then remembers—he saw the handful that flew out for the wedding, and they brought the kids here, after all. If there had been anybody from her side capable of taking them instead, there would at least have been a negotiation about it.

“Yeah,” he says. “It was mostly just her and her dad.”

“Eichi,” his father says quietly.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. Broken record o’clock already. Whatever. It’s not like the Todoroki name is known for poetry. “When he—shit. When he died a couple years back—” The laugh emerges from him fractured. “I mean, how fucked up is it now that I thought that was the worst it was ever going to be?”

His father’s voice stays low and unsettlingly soothing. Is this how the kids hear it? Is this how they’ve always heard it? “How could you have known?”

“Still,” Natsuo says. He folds the wet tissue back up along the existing creases, carefully following the lines. “It was—so bad. She was in so much pain. It was like there was nothing I could do.”

The stony look of Yeah, no kidding when he glances up almost makes him laugh again. Maybe he’s a little bit hysterical at this point—maybe the dregs of his self-control drained out sometime between dragging their whole miserable caravan back here and the tipping point a couple minutes ago where he finally gave up on getting to sleep.

No point hiding from someone who knows you too well without even trying, because their blood burns the same as yours.

“They were really close,” Natsuo says. He doesn’t really intend for it to sound bitter—it isn’t, anymore. He choked it down so many times that the acrid coating stripped away. “Her and her dad. He was on the older side. Raised her pretty much by himself. He was living in a little retirement village down on the coast, right outside of Shirahama. Six weeks after we started going out, she asked me if I wanted to meet him, and—well. I mean. I said ‘Sure’ because I would’ve jumped off a cliff for her already by that point, but I was literally fucking Googling stuff trying to figure out if that was normal, or if I should expect some sort of shovel-talk interrogation, and if I answered wrong, he’d kill me and bury my body in the backyard.”

His father considers that much more seriously than it deserves, like it’s one of Eiji’s suggestions about the magic bear. “How big was the yard?”

“Barely could’ve fit a corpse,” Natsuo says. “I checked.”

His father nods, still gazing into space. “How big was he?”

“Tiny,” Natsuo says. “But he was a fighter. He’d had to be.”

The stark blue eyes flick back to him. “So have you.”

Something clenches tight in Natsuo’s chest. He shoves it down. Later. Maybe never.

“The point is,” he says, “we took the train over, right, and as soon as we got to his place and put our stuff down, she was like, ‘Oh, Dad, you don’t have any groceries, I’ll go to the store, you two catch up,’ and she disappeared. I was convinced this guy was going to stab me in the throat for besmirching his beautiful daughter or some shit.”

His father appears to be trying not to look too amused. “…and?”

“And he just started asking me about school,” Natsuo says. “And Fuyumi. And the museum Hayami and I had gone to a couple weekends before. And what I wanted to do when I graduated. And whether I liked dogs. And what my favorite sport was.”

His father appears to be trying not to look too curious.

“Soccer to play,” Natsuo says. “Baseball to watch. So he puts a game on, and we’re talking about it, and then he mentions he’s got this lightbulb that’s out in the stairwell that he’s not tall enough to reach, so when the ads come on, we go change it out, and we’re joking about how many guys it takes to screw in a lightbulb, and I finally realize that she did it on purpose. She wanted to share him with me—her favorite person in the world. She wanted me to get to share her dad.”

Natsuo’s father looks at him, and then down at the tea. The Because practically everybody in the world knows that my dad was crap is deafening without being voiced.

But then Natsuo’s father breathes, deeply, and looks up again.

“And,” he says, quietly, “she wanted him to get to share you.”

That’s—

Knowing Hayami, that’s probably true.

Natsuo never thought about it that way, but—

His father shifts, picks up the tea, pauses, sips, and sets it down again. “What about her mother?”

“She left,” Natsuo says. “Pretty much right after Hayami was born, I guess. She didn’t talk about it much—and, I mean, shit, not like I was gonna pry. But I got the impression it was because of the heteromorph thing.”

The frown directed at the tabletop deepens into more of a scowl. Natsuo’s father clearly has opinions about that, and knows full well that he has no right to articulate them.

At least he abandoned them in their own home. At least he housed them, fed them, fostered them. At least he sustained them, even if he didn’t support them. Natsuo’s a near-certified expert, these days, on all the forms and features of neglect. All of his was emotional. It could have been worse.

Worse like it was for Shouto. And Touya.

It’s not water under the bridge.

It’s water in the foundations, seeped in, sunk deep, rotting the beams. It’s lead in the pipes. It’s never going away.

But the house is still standing.

And his children need a place to live.

“Stupid,” Natsuo’s father mutters, very quietly.

Maybe it’s what they did together, out there, earlier tonight.

Maybe it’s just how late it is—maybe Natsuo is just too tired to start shit.

But there’s something weirdly freeing about realizing that they don’t have to have this fight. His father knows, and knows that he knows, and everything they’d say has been said already, a hundred times, a hundred ways.

“I know,” Natsuo says. “But she had him, and he had her, and they made it work. I think that was part of what made her so… I mean, it wasn’t pride, exactly. But she was… she just—owned it. About herself. And that made it so much harder for other people to come at her about it.”

“Defiance,” his father says. “Of the standard, and the expectation.”

Natsuo looks at him.

And Natsuo knows, again, somehow, that they’re thinking the same damn thing.

In a backwards sort of way, Hayami belonged in this family. The fact that Natsuo tried to shield her from parts of it doesn’t change the facts. She fit.

That’s got to be a lot of the reason that Eiji and Naru have acclimated so easily.

And it sucks.

It sucks all fucking over again.

Because she would have loved this.

She thought Hawks was fun as hell—the way he fought, the way he toyed with interviewers and charmed old ladies and high-fived kids out on the street even when he didn’t know that anyone was watching.

She never said anything about Endeavor, but she would have loved this part for him—for Natsu.

For the deep-down, long-buried, hushed-up secret part of him that always wanted to come back. To come home. To find something better here.

For the part of him that was too afraid to try.

She would have loved to see the way Eiji and Naru make them smile. She would have loved how tiny Eiji looks under Natsuo’s father’s enormous arm, curled up against him, fixated on a book and utterly serious, little mind already disentangling things the other kids in his class might take years to unravel.

She would have loved Naru’s tail.

She would have started calling him Mousebaby, too. She would’ve thought that was the funniest thing. It would’ve stuck. She would have made up a theme song for him and sung it to him in the bath.

“Yeah,” Natsuo says before it chokes him, before it strangles the air out of his lungs and wrings the remnants of the conviction out of his weary heart. “Something like that. You know—we’re gonna be in trouble if Naru’s still in a chewing phase when his tail gets long enough to bring to his mouth.”

His father’s heavy brows lower, and the eyes sharpen. He’s calculating the rate at which Naru’s tail has been growing so far, and then assessing that against the average length of time that children spend teething.

“Hm,” he says.

That sounds like a Get ready for a stockpile of teething toys and a long-term distraction campaign.

“Guess we’ll see,” Natsuo says. He sure as fuck isn’t doing baby tail math at one thirty in the damn morning.

Natsuo’s father watches him silently, making no acknowledgment of what he said. Statements of the obvious don’t merit recognition.

This is probably half of why Hawks provokes him with bullshit all the time—just to get a response.

“Anyway,” Natsuo says. “She used to go visit him—her dad—as much as she could, especially after he got sick. He was trying to be tough about it, but he was pretty lonely. We tried to get him to move up to be closer after the wedding and everything, but he really loved that little place he had. Said it helped to be near the water. We talked about getting jobs down there, but it was just… the town’s too small. There wasn’t much.” He takes a breath, lets it out. “I think she always regretted that we didn’t try harder. She could’ve had more time.”

It’s one of the kindest self-deceptions, isn’t it?

More time. Nobody has more time. They shove your coin into the gacha machine and pull for you, and you get whatever the fuck you get. A clock that you can’t even see starts ticking, and there’s nothing you can do.

His father’s voice is very quiet. “I doubt he held it against her.”

“So do I,” Natsuo says. “But she held it against herself.”

His father looks at him for another second and then takes a cautious sip of tea.

Natsuo slurps some strawberry milk. He has this weird premonition that his dentist is going to know, somehow. Don’t parents snack on their kids’ stuff all the time, just as a matter of convenience? It’ll be fine.

Funny that his instinct is still—still, even now, after all of it—to play unerringly, unfailingly by the rules.

“They had this stupid inside joke,” he says. “Her and her dad. He would point at things with his tail, and she’d go ‘Dad, you have hands,’ and he’d say ‘I’m using all the tools available to me,’ and they’d both just laugh like crazy. I was just gonna let it go, because I could tell it wasn’t about me, right? But she stopped later and explained it to me, because that’s the kind of person she was. I guess when she was, like, five or something, she found this little lockbox on the side of the road on her way back from school, and she picked it up, and it was super heavy, but she lugged it all the way home. And she sat down in the garage with a bunch of her dad’s tools and started trying to open it—this five-year-old girl who could barely hold up a hammer in the first place, right? And the good thing was he came back from work pretty soon after she got home, because he found her planted there in the garage, frustrated to tears, whacking this lockbox with her tail now in her desperation to get it open. And he ran over and saw she was bleeding from it, and in horror he asked her what the hell she was doing, and she said ‘I’m using all the tools available to me.’ Neither of them even remembered where she’d picked it up from, but it was their catchphrase forever after that.”

His father’s head tilts to the side. “What was in the box?”

“Nails,” Natsuo says. “Probably fell out of some construction truck or something. They used them, though. Around the house. All the pictures on the walls—I mean, that was what they said, I don’t know if it’s true—were hung up with nails from that weird box, and Eichi said he’d fixed a couple parts of the roof with them, too. He said there were so many that he’d never had to go to the hardware store. Kinda like Prince Iji’s magic pack.”

His father smiles faintly.

“I’ve been told,” he says, “that when it comes to a good story, truth is imperative, and accuracy is incidental.”

Natsuo sits back. “That sounds like it might’ve come from someone who’s making it up as he goes along.”

His father rubs the one hand hard down his face, pulling at the scar. “We’re all making it up as we go along.”

Natsuo eyes him.

He shrugs unevenly again.

“Right,” Natsuo says, slowly. “Well—anyway. He was—a hell of a guy. Losing him sucked. When—” He needs another stupid deep breath for this one. “When we first started talking about baby names, and I suggested borrowing from his, I thought—I mean, the way she cried, I thought I’d fucked up so bad. But it was a good cry.” He flicks his finger against the corner of the milk carton, which tips it over. By some miracle, nothing splatters out. He rights it again. “It’d be so nice,” he says, “if tears were different colors depending on what they were for. You know? Like a mood ring.”

The silence really brings it home.

“Okay,” Natsuo says, examining the way the light gleams dimly on the surface of the box. “That sounds really stupid out loud.”

His father looks at him for a second and then picks up the tea, swirling the mug. He almost buries the words in the rim. “No. That would be helpful.”

“With kids, it should be topical,” Natsuo says. “Like—if they’re hungry, it’s one color; if they’re overtired, it’s a different color. Take all the damn mystery out. I’m tired of mystery. I want things to be easy for once. Just for five minutes. Is that really so much to ask?”

They both know the answer to that.

His father shifts, sips the tea again, sets it down, glances at him, and glances away. His fingertips skate up the side of the mug. “When did you realize you wanted children?”

“I don’t know,” Natsuo says, meaning it. His father’s fingers settle in the curve of the mug handle. Only two of them fit. “I don’t remember exactly. I just—it—hit me, at some point, that people like her should… should just… continue. There should be more of them. That putting more of a person like her into the world is an act of kindness—of charity. Of good. And… anything that would make her that happy was… I had to. I just had to. It wasn’t about wanting. It just needed to happen. Needed to be.”

His father glances up at him for a fraction of a second before looking down at the tea again. His jaw tightens, but he keeps his mouth shut.

Natsuo’s blood quickens. “What? If you want to say something, say it.”

His father shakes his head, and the weight of the weariness in it makes part of Natsuo feel angrier, and part of him feel just as tired. “Don’t. I just… I was never sure how any of you would feel about the idea of extending either of these bloodlines. I wondered why you’d made that choice. It wasn’t my place to ask. But it…” He nudges the mug. “Of course it makes sense. It was never about that. It was about her, and you, and all the possible futures, not the past.” He hesitates, yet again. “I think that’s how it should be.”

If the game tonight is Honesty Hour, Natsuo’s going to play.

“It was a little bit about that,” he says. “About you. At the start, mostly. It—I spent so many years trying to be the opposite of you that it seemed like the next logical step. I wanted to prove just how easy it is to get it right.”

His father looks at him again, for much longer this time.

There’s some hurt in it, which Natsuo doesn’t think he has a claim to.

But mostly he just looks exhausted.

It’s hard to hate somebody who looks that tired at half past one, in the kitchen of the house you grew up in, with the absolute quiet of the rest of the place curled in around you both like a blanket.

It’s hard to hate somebody who saved your life tonight, and a lot of nights before that—whether you knew it or not.

It’s hard to hate somebody who loves you with the same bullheaded sincerity with which he does fucking everything, even when you know what else it’s driven him to.

“It isn’t,” Natsuo says. “It isn’t easy.”

“Nothing worth doing is,” his father says quietly. “Eiji is—incredible. His spirit, and his kindness. You proved a lot. You got it right.”

“She gave him the kindness,” Natsuo says, and it only sticks like an iron spike in his throat a little bit. “I think I just gave him the endless questions. He wants to figure out the whole world.”

“I hope he gets further than I ever did,” Natsuo’s father mutters.

It’s funny, in the dry, dark way that a surprising amount of the shit he says has started to be.

Maybe he always had funny shit to say.

Maybe he never had anyone to say it to.

Maybe Hawks gave him that, too.

Maybe Hawks set him free.

Maybe Hawks always saw a man named Enji when Natsuo only ever saw Endeavor—scalding the sky and then falling apart.

He doesn’t want to think of them like mirrors here, too. Nothing is his if all of it is echoes—if it was written in the constellations and coded in his fucking DNA.

Hayami found Natsuo in time to save him.

Hawks was too late for most of it—the casualties, the collateral—but he stuck it out anyway. Hellish rescue. Shit odds.

But that’s what heroes do.

“Did you plan on two?” his father says.

Natsuo bites back the Heir and a spare jibe. He can be better than that.

And the answer to that question—

Sucks.

It’s fucking awful to remember, to have to hold onto, let alone to have to say.

“She wanted to keep going,” Natsuo says. This agony isn’t distant—it’s still so imminent that it pulses in his chest, in his throat, in his fingertips. It slams against him with every second thought. He never gave her the one thing she wanted most. The clock ran out. “She wanted, like, six kids. Just—she joked about a mouse nest being better than a rat’s nest.” Joke is a little bit generous. The near-catatonic shock he went into the first time that she suggested lots of kids made her blurt it out without thinking, and then it startled him so much that he laughed before he could help it, so she started saying it every time. It was like a code phrase. One more thing that was theirs together, that’s only his now. One more thing to carry in the coffin of his heart. “She wanted to put ’em closer together, but it was… we couldn’t. She had two miscarriages after Eiji, before Naru.”

His father’s expression says enough on its own. The way his hand clenches on the table until the knuckles bleach bone-white says a little more.

Natsuo doesn’t need to talk about the other shit—about how long he spent convincing himself that it was his fault. How long he spent wondering if it was Mom’s family’s genes getting their fucking revenge. How long he spent wracked with guilt like forked lightning in every single nerve, thinking that maybe it was for the best—that maybe the world was better off without a single other goddamn Todoroki.

How hard she worked to pull him back from the ledge.

It’s no one’s fault, Natsu. It just is. If it works, it works. And if it doesn’t—I mean—that’s okay. Eiji’s perfect. I’m happy, Natsu. I’m already so happy it’s always like a dream. Whatever happens, happens. We can’t lose.

“Here,” Natsuo says. He manages to get his shaky fingers to scroll through the endless wall of thumbnails on his phone until he finds the right one. It’s got a pathetic little heart on it to indicate that it’s a favorite.

He sets the phone down on its side on the tabletop. His father leans in.

She’s so goddamn beautiful. She’s so goddamn beautiful, in an off-the-cuff video on some weeknight, with her hair falling out of a bun and her perfect eyes tired and the living room lights gleaming just slightly on the sheen of the fur. Makes her glow.

“Come here, hon,” Hayami says on the screen, beaming at Eiji where he’s playing on the floor. “Quick, quick—”

Eiji scampers over and climbs up onto the couch with her. “Mommy—”

She slides her hand away from where she’s been holding it, just to the left of the middle of the huge round belly-ball that Naru had been, then. “Put your hand right here, Eiji. Right—”

He extends his little fingers tentatively, and she lays her hand over his to guide him.

Eiji was so much smaller, even then—teeny tiny face, teeny tiny fingers. His mouth opens into a huge O, and his eyes widen.

Then he whips back. “Whoa! Mommy, he kicked me! He kicked!”

Hayami laughs like a bell, like a balm, like a blessing, like all the bad poetry Natsuo always meant to write.

He should have filled the birthday cards, the anniversary notes—should have poured out volumes, should have buried her in promises and pretty words. Should have draped her with jewels and kissed her feet and told her every single fucking minute.

“Great,” his voice says from behind the camera. “Not even out yet, and they’re already whaling on each other.”

“Hey,” Hayami says, eyeing him, but you can tell how hard she’s struggling not to laugh.

“That’s my brother?” Eiji says, still in awe, crawling back over and carefully laying his hand on Hayami’s stomach again. “In there?”

“That’s right,” Hayami says. “He’s so excited to meet you that he’s gotta say it somehow.” She watches him close. “Are you excited to meet him?”

Eiji kneels down and lays his other hand next to the first, then looks up at her and nods so vigorously that he looks like a little bobblehead. “When’s he gonna come out, Mommy? I wanna see him. I’m gonna teach him everything. He’s gonna be the best brother ever. How long do we hafta wait?”

Hayami catches the back of his neck and gently draws him in to kiss his forehead. Even in the phone-quality video, her eyes look a little bright. “Just a couple more weeks—maybe sooner. Can you wait that long?”

Eiji nods seriously, then curls up next to her, laying his head against her, ear pressed just beside his hands. He closes his eyes.

“It’s gonna be worth it,” he says.

The video cuts there, because Natsuo had to leave the damn room to pull himself back together.

It’s having an even worse effect on him now, but he doesn’t have the energy to move.

His father is still looking at the screen. His eyes are wet, too.

Great.

“Anyway,” Natsuo says, hoarsely, pulling back his phone and cramming it deep into his pocket to mask the way his hand started to shake, “it—we were—I just didn’t want him to be lonely. But—but we would’ve—”

The chair scrapes. The shadow moves—up, huge, swift, swinging around the table—

His father’s one arm around him is too heavy and too tight and not enough.

Natsuo closes his eyes. Leans in.

Weirdly warm. His father has always smelled like distant woodsmoke, on the rare occasions you got close enough to tell. And aftershave or something. Tonight it’s just shampoo—something generic, some scent with a name like fresh, so indistinctly pleasant that they don’t even describe it on the bottle—and the same damn laundry detergent he used twenty years ago.

“I’m sorry,” Natsuo’s father whispers, voice so thick that the words barely make it out. “Natsu, I’m so sorry.”

Natsuo knows it’s about her.

But it’s also about the things that he and Shouto didn’t get to have.

It’s about the things that he and Touya didn’t get to have.

And the things that the two of them didn’t. All the father-and-son shit they missed because Endeavor had no space for him. No room. No time.

It’s about all the things the pillar of flame consumed, and all the possibilities it scorched past recognition. All the corpses that it left behind.

His father can’t make up for it.

But they can make something.

“I know,” Natsuo says. Slowly, he lifts his right arm, spreads his hand, and lays it on his father’s back. “I know you are. I believe you.”

It lasts too long. Natsuo can’t tell if it’s partly an attempt to compensate for having just one arm, or if it’s purely an ineptitude for picking up physical contact cues. He has to admit it’s not quite as bad as the one in the road, years ago. Hawks really has put in the work.

But Natsuo still has to pat his father’s bent spine four times to get him to let go.

“Okay,” he says before anybody can have a fucking crisis about it. It’s a toss-up who would start theirs first, at this point. “Okay. I get it. Go finish your tea.”

His father goes from staring with the big, sad, worried-he-fucked-up-again eyes to frowning, which is a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Natsuo can almost hear Hawks’s voice saying “I guess bossiness is genetic, too!”, which is probably exactly the punishment he deserves.

His father sits down again, resting his forearm on the table, positioned like he’s about to fold the other arm across it.

He’s still doing the concerned eyes.

“Finish your tea,” Natsuo says again. It’s admittedly weirdly cold in here, now, with the human radiator at a safe distance.

His father’s eyes crinkle ever so slightly at the corners. “Finish your milk.”

Natsuo makes a point of slurping again—which is something of an art form, with a straw. You have to angle it right to pick up a nice balance of liquid and air, and you have to commit to the suction.

His father looks him in the fucking eyes and slurps tea.

A part of Natsuo has always believed, deep down, that Hawks is a fake—overrated at a minimum, a charmer and a charlatan who took them all in and took them for a ride.

He’s starting to think that everyone in the damn world except the man across from him has been underestimating that guy from day one. Hawks somehow saw this shit under twenty years of rubble and accumulated ash, and kept digging until he could drag it out.

At least someone in Natsuo’s life got exactly what they wanted.

His father sets the mug down, a touch too hard. “Don’t tell Eiji I did that.”

“Ah, damn,” Natsuo says. “I was gonna run over right now and wake him up to make sure he knows that you’re rude sometimes when he’s not around.”

His father gives him a halfhearted dark look and then plants his hand on the table again, pushing himself upright. When he’s raised his weight, he holds his hand out for the empty milk carton.

Fuck it. Natsuo’s exhausted.

He hands it over.

His father drops it into the bin and then doubles back for his mug, which he takes over to set down in the sink basin—too carefully for it to clink.

He shuffles back. He sits again. He looks down at the tabletop for what feels like a long time.

“You should back up those videos,” he says, quietly.

It’s one of the things that flitters around in Natsuo’s heart, dodging away from the light—bat’s wings, silky and elastic, fragile-looking but indefatigable.

“I have a lot of the older ones saved,” Natsuo says. “It—” He swallows. He works the words around in his mouth, works the knives around in his chest. “It feels like—I think there’s a part of me that still… I still don’t believe it. I can’t stop hoping it’s not real. I keep thinking that I’m still gonna wake up and roll over and touch her hair and then her little ear, and it’ll be fine.” He makes himself keep breathing, makes himself show signs of life. “And—it feels like—if I make a point of preserving those things, then it’s… That’s admitting that it’s over. That’s giving up.”

He sneaks a glance, and his father hasn’t looked up from the table.

“It’ll be worse in the long run if you lose them,” his father says.

The words bubble up.

“I keep thinking of things I’m going to tell her later,” Natsuo says. “Just—funny stuff Eiji said, or something that came into my head that nobody else would give a shit about, but it would make her laugh.” It’s got him again. The words collapse under the weight of the walls of his throat. “I want to hear her laugh so fucking bad. I’d do anything. Fucking anything.”

“I know,” his father says. His hand lies still.

“The only dream I’ve ever had was her,” Natsuo says, choking it out, trying to spit all the blood out on the table, trying to make it leave. To tear it out of himself somehow. “This. Raising a family with her. Growing old with her. All of it. And I don’t… I don’t know how to find something else. I don’t know where you get them—where dreams come from. How you’re supposed to dig up some reason to live when the one you had is just…”

“Gone,” his father says, quietly. “Forever. And every night, while you’re sleeping, you forget. And every morning, you wake up and lose it all over again.”

Natsuo watches him. It feels like the whole world is shaking softly.

“Are you talking about Touya?” he says. “Or Endeavor?”

“I’m talking about Touya,” his father says, and Natsuo has to admit that he can barely hear the way the stretched patience is straining even though that was a deliberate provocation, after the day they’ve had. “And about my father. Giving up Endeavor was a choice. I have no right to regret it.”

Natsuo watches him. Easier to talk about this anyway. Easier to think about it.

“Are you sure that was a choice?” Natsuo says.

His father’s eyes narrow. “What do—”

“Did you really make a decision?” Natsuo says. “Or were you backed into a corner so tight that there was only one way to move?”

His father looks back at him for a long moment, assessing. The implicit judgment prickles underneath his skin. There’s always something lacking. He never measures up.

“It doesn’t matter,” his father says. “The point is that you need a new one—a new dream. Something that’s yours. Something to hold onto.”

Natsuo stares at him.

A dream.

Sure.

He means a quest.

He means a challenge.

He means a mountain to climb.

The slopes of Everest are a graveyard littered with corpses that will never decompose.

Natsuo has long since given up trying to control his expressions, and by the way his father has to suppress a wince, that particular opinion must be coming through loud and clear.

“It doesn’t have to be big,” his father says. “Just an objective. Something to keep reaching for. A milestone. And when you get to it, you mark out another one.”

Natsuo’s skin is outright crawling now. “That’s depressing.”

His father half-shrugs. “That depends on your dream.”

Natsuo tries to glower-pin him the way he does to everybody else. “Dragging yourself from one meaningless check-box to the next? That’s it? That’s the best you’ve got?”

His father moves to fold his arms, pauses, and shifts midway through the motion to rest his left hand on the back of his neck instead. His shoulder cracks. “You have at least as many years again to get through as you’ve lived so far. How you survive them is up to you, but you have to survive.”

That sounds like a fucking eternity.

Natsuo did the hard stuff—the stuff that’s supposed to be forever. He was supposed to be set. He was supposed to get to while away days and nights and all the in-between moments with her—all the offhanded texts and idle thoughts and little things that reminded him of something she’d done or said, a glimpse of something that she liked. Almost the right shade of lavender. A passerby wearing shoes that looked like the ones she’d just bought for work. Amazake-flavored fucking KitKats.

But his father’s right.

Eiji and Naru need him to figure it out.

They need him to get his shit together.

They need him to find a way.

He breathes in. Breathes out. Sets his shoulders. Looks up.

“Okay,” he says.

“You’re smart enough to figure out anything set in front of you,” his father says, and those words ring in his ears—like a struck bell, brassy and resonant, the clarity slowly distorting as it overlaps itself. “And you care enough to follow through—which I promise you is far rarer than you think. I wouldn’t say this idly. You can do anything you want. That’s what it boils down to—what do you want to do with your life?”

Boils down to, burns down to, bleeds out to.

Enji Todoroki is a lot of things.

But he’s not a liar.

“You really believe that,” Natsuo says—a confirmation, not a question.

“Look at what you’ve already done,” his father says, evenly, eyes unwavering. “You wanted to go to college—so you did. You wanted to start a career in a dangerous, difficult field—so you did. You wanted to build a loving family even though you had no template from us, no example to work from, no idea what that even looks like—and you did. When you find the next thing you want to do, I pity any damn fool who tries to stop you.”

Natsuo feels his shoulders tightening, the ache rippling up the sides of his neck, jabbing into the base of his skull. “I’m not fishing.”

“I know,” his father says, straightening up, and the eyes light from within. “You never do, because I taught you that your very existence was a burden, so you should try to convince yourself and everyone around you that you don’t need anything or anyone, until it’s far too late. I trained you to ask for nothing.”

Natsuo feels that one slam into his sternum so hard that it shakes its way through every single rib.

His father leans forward. There’s an urgency to it—almost desperate. Searching. Hoping. Eerily vulnerable, oddly soft.

“You can now,” his father says. “Ask, Natsu. I’m listening.”

Natsuo’s heart flits in his ears for a few seconds, and the silence settles deep and thick into his lungs.

You can’t—

Just say that.

But he’s been trying to prove it, too.

Day in. Day out. One minute at a time.

Natsuo looks down at the empty place on the tabletop next to where his father’s left hand has curled into a fist.

“What do you want?” he asks.

The quiet rushes in again—the staggering intensity of an hour this late, a house this big, a wound this old.

Natsuo’s father sighs, softly. The hand lifts from the table, the thumb and first finger parting to spread themselves over his face. They stroke down over his beard and then drag slowly down his neck before they come to rest against his collarbones, pressing his T-shirt to him.

“To protect the people I love,” he says. “From the world, when I can. And from themselves.”

The bright blue eyes flick to him, and it doesn’t need to be said.

Including you.

Maybe it should be too little too late, but it feels like about damn time.

“You don’t have to decide tomorrow,” his father says. “Or next week, or next month. Just… think on it. Move ideas around. Don’t try to force anything to stick yet—just follow thoughts for a while to see where they lead, and then let them go. If they come back to you again, look more closely.”

Natsuo’s first instinct is to figure that that’s regurgitated from the therapist, but on a second thought—

The willingness to offer it might be the therapist’s doing, but the philosophy is not.

His father hit number two at the age of twenty.

His father built an agency from the ground up, carried it higher than anyone had ever done before, and kept it running like clockwork for thirty years.

His father closed more cases and resolved more incidents than any pro in the history of Japan.

His father did it all with a quirk that everybody thought was simplistic.

His father knows a thing or two about problem-solving.

“Fine,” Natsuo says. “I’ll try.”

“That’s all you can ask of yourself,” his father says.

Maybe he believes that, too.

It doesn’t change anything. Natsuo’s kids are going to be up and at ’em in T-minus five and a half hours, tops, and he wants to be there. He wants to watch them greet another day full of things to learn and places to explore and a world to love with everything you’ve got in you, no matter what it takes.

The sugar from the strawberry milk tastes like a sickly-sweet film on the backs of his teeth. He gathers himself. He gets up. He breathes out. He pushes his chair in.

One thing at a time.

And there’s one more thing he needs to do.

No point putting it off. He’s too tired to second-guess it.

“Thank you,” he gets out. “For everything you’ve done for them. And—for waiting. For waiting for me.”

His father doesn’t move. “You don’t have to say that.”

Natsuo looks him in the eyes. “Yes, I do.”

His father searches his expression for a second. It’s heavy—dragging all that doubt behind you, everywhere you go. Never being capable of trusting anything but your own power, or anyone but yourself.

But maybe it’s not quite as heavy as it used to be.

Maybe that’s part of why he could stand tall enough to set off in a new direction.

“Are you gonna go to bed any time this century?” Natsuo asks.

A flicker of something faintly amused. “Probably. But not just yet. I need to send that incident report in to the police.”

Natsuo stares at him. “Tonight?”

His father half-shrugs again. “I said I would.”

“I’m starting to think you should say less,” Natsuo says. “But at that point you might need to learn sign language, and that’s gonna be rough with one hand.”

That wrings out a faint, faint smile.

Weird.

But not bad-weird. Just… different. Just new.

“You might be onto something,” his father says. “I owe Hawks’s office a few things too.” This time Natsuo’s expression makes him grimace. “It pays for itself. Between that and Naru sleeping better, the amount of caffeine pills he’s been sneaking has dropped by at least forty percent, and I’m still finding more things that I should be able to take care of for his agency, to streamline the bureaucracy for them.”

The expression on Natsuo’s face just now probably isn’t a winner either. “Caffeine pills?”

His father shakes his head. “As if I don’t know every trick in the book.”

That wasn’t what Natsuo meant, obviously, but he’s realized now that there’s nothing whatsoever to gain from prodding this particular dragon with a pointed stick. “Are the pills better or worse than energy drinks?”

The wry look is unsettling. “What do you think he was washing them down with?”

“Oh,” Natsuo says. “He’s going to die.”

“I’ve got informants at the agency,” his father says, albeit through another grimace. “And now I also have refrigerator saboteurs. I’m working on it.” He gestures, vaguely, and then opens up the eyeglass case that Natsuo saw earlier, in the drawer with the drugs. “Go get some rest.”

Natsuo’s whole body feels almost numb with the exhaustion—skin gummy, limbs clumsy, head stuffy, feet like cushioned lead. He looks at the dim doorway to the hall and almost just says it out loud.

What if I move back in here for real? I’d be closer to the kids. I could handle the middle-of-the-night shit. Give you guys a break.

Tomorrow.

Or later.

They’ve got time.

It’s unthinkable to think, but so is pretty much everything that’s happened to him in the past two months. Everything he’s done.

What’s one more dose of the impossible after all that?

“Yeah,” he says. “G’night, Dad.”

The slightly stunned silence as he shuffles out isn’t bad-weird either.

Just new.

He is not quite as successful as intended at rising bright and early to watch his beautiful kids greet the beautiful day, but considering that he has to shift the weight of the world off of his body before he can pry himself out of bed, he thinks he can give himself a pass, just this once.

It’s spitting rain from a mottled sky of roiling silver clouds. He straggles through enough of a morning routine to make himself look moderately alive—enough, he hopes, not to scare his sleepy children—and then picks his way across the yard to let himself into the house.

Breakfast is still in-process when he stumbles back into the kitchen—it feels like he’s only just left. He would have expected them to be mostly done by now, but it appears that his father has been substantially delayed by two significant impediments: firstly the lack of a dominant arm; and secondly the fact that Hawks is clinging to his back, both arms fixed immovably around his waist, following him around that way without actually helping.

Hawks’s toweringly advanced abandonment issues aside, though, Natsuo’s kids need to get fed.

He dodges around the winged limpet and holds his hands out. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he says.

His father snorts, hands him a knife, and pushes the cutting board in front of him.

“Excuse you,” Hawks says. “I’m being annoying here. Do you mind?”

“Hey, Eiji,” Natsuo says, getting to work. “Are you hungry?”

“It’s okay, Daddy!” Eiji says. “We don’t have to get to school today, ’cause it’s Saturday.”

Natsuo attempts to make eye contact with Hawks, but finds himself somewhat thwarted by the fact that Hawks’s face is firmly lodged between his father’s shoulder blades. “But you are hungry, huh?”

“I can be patient, Daddy,” Eiji says. “It’s okay.”

That’s his mother in him, as always, but the leading questions have the desired effect anyway—Hawks grumbles prodigiously into Natsuo’s father’s back, and some dozen feathers whip around the food, taking possession of the pans and utensils alike, so abruptly that Natsuo’s father curses under his breath.

Natsuo hands the knife over to one of the feathers and goes to wipe the trail of drool off of Naru’s chin, fighting the impulse to smile.

Maybe he shouldn’t fight it.

Maybe next time, he’ll let it win.

The rain picks up in earnest. It makes Natsuo feel antsy—he knows part of it is just yesterday’s chaos and the shitty sleep that followed, which are sabotaging the higher functions that usually give him control of himself, but the weather makes his brain think that he can’t just walk out of the house at any time that it starts to be too much.

He reminds himself, over and over, that he still can. He’ll just get soaked.

Once the morning starts to settle in, his father makes a long series of phone calls to finagle his way into a consultation appointment for the arm. Natsuo’s shocked that anybody picked up the phone on a weekend at all—maybe this is one of those ex-pro hero perks, but apparently they only go so far. His father drops down on the couch with a stifled sigh after accepting something late next week, by the sound of it, and fastidiously adds it to his phone calendar one-handed.

Natsuo’s brain trills a little alarm that tempts him to make a break for the rain-sodden yard when Eiji immediately climbs up onto the couch and curls up against his father—in spite of the relevant detail that Hawks had somehow already dived in to start occupying the majority of the available lap space.

“Grampa,” Eiji says. “I wanna go outside.”

Natsuo’s father’s hand rises. Natsuo’s spine tightens.

The huge fingers stroke very, very gently down over Eiji’s hair.

“In the rain?” his father asks.

“Yeah!” Eiji says, beaming. “Can we go splash in the puddles?”

“You don’t mind getting all wet?” his father asks.

“I’ll wear my rain boots!” Eiji says. “And I’ll be quick! Like Hawks!”

Hawks snickers quietly, and then a feather pokes at Natsuo’s father’s knee. “We’re out of food.”

“No, we’re not,” his father says.

“We’re gonna be,” Hawks says. He winks at Eiji. “Your grampa hates the rain.”

Eiji’s eyes widen, and then he turns to stare. “Why, Grampa? Rain is nice!”

“It’s very important,” Natsuo’s father says. “And it’s going to help all of our plants grow. I just…” He pauses. “…prefer… consistent atmospheric pressure.”

Eiji blinks.

Then he holds his hand up next to his mouth and whispers very, very loudly “Is it because of your fire, Grampa?”

“It’s because he’s a control freak,” Hawks says, lovingly.

Natsuo’s father very lightly flicks his ear. “I’m a control aficionado.”

Eiji looks at both of them like they’re aliens. “A what?”

Natsuo’s father pauses again. “I… don’t like getting wet.”

Eiji’s smile returns full-force. “You can just bring an umbrella!”

Hawks pats Natsuo’s father’s knee with his hand this time. “That fancy-ass grocery store is less than a mile away.”

Natsuo’s father clears his throat loudly.

There’s a pause.

“Fancy-butt,” Hawks says, burying his face in Natsuo’s father’s thigh. “The fancy-butt grocery store. Cut me some slack, babe.”

“I wanna go to the fancy butt!” Eiji says delightedly. Hayami would be eating this up. “Daddy, let’s go to the fancy butt!”

“C’mon,” Hawks says, slightly muffled by Natsuo’s father’s pants. “You gotta admit that’s funny.”

“You guys go ahead,” Natsuo says, only the tiniest bit vengefully. “Naru’s gonna need a nap soon. I’ll stay here and keep an eye on him.”

Eiji nods seriously. “He’s a troublemaker.” It’s a shame that four-year-olds struggle with the concept of irony, given that the troublemaker moniker definitely came from Hawks, who has absolutely no right whatsoever to bestow it on others. “You sure, Daddy? We could all go. I’ll hold an umbrella for you and for Grampa so you don’t get wet.” He holds his arms up, flexing them. “That’s why I got two hands.”

“Thanks, bud,” Natsuo says. “But I’m sure. You can carry one for Hawks instead.”

“His wings can be an umbrella!” Eiji says. He turns towards Hawks and reaches out, patting the back of his head twice in a way that looks very much like something he picked up from Natsuo’s father. “But I can carry one for you if you want, Hawks! Is it nicer if someone else holds it for you? Your wings probably get tired.”

Hawks stays quiet and still for long enough that Natsuo’s nerves pique, but before he can ask, his father’s hand settles on the back of Hawks’s neck, scratching very gently at his hair.

“They do,” Natsuo’s father says. “All of him gets tired sometimes. It’s very kind of you to think of him. Would you like to go now?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says, scrambling down from the couch before the syllable has even fully left his mouth. “We gotta get rain boots and coats and umbrellas and the shopping bags and—”

Hawks mumbles something that sounds an awful lot like “This fucking kid” into Natsuo’s father’s knee, and then he pries himself up, fluffs the feathers, and trails after. “Do I get rain boots? I want fashionable rain boots. I want people to stop on the street and stare at them ’cause they’re so cool.”

“You’re always cool!” Eiji calls back from the hallway.

Hawks stops moving again, looking utterly stricken.

Natsuo’s father squeezes his shoulder on the way past him, then arches an eyebrow at Natsuo.

Yeah. They did something really right.

Natsuo is not virtuous enough to resist the temptation to go watch his father grudgingly prepare for forging out into the rain.

It doesn’t hurt that Eiji is painfully cute in a tiny green Froppy-themed raincoat, and Hawks plunks a matching hat on him. His little galoshes are yellow.

And he yanks them on and immediately starts jumping and stomping triumphantly around the genkan.

“I thought you didn’t like shoes,” Natsuo says.

Eiji looks at him like he’s a cretin. “They’re not shoes, Daddy. They’re boots.”

Natsuo says the only thing you can say: “Oh.”

“Hmm,” Hawks says. Natsuo blinks and misses the feathers moving—they part for a motorcycle-style leather jacket and then reconfigure themselves too fast to track.

All the assholes on TV are always saying Hawks is slower than he used to be. Either they’re just trying to cut him down to size, or he was the incarnation of a felony against the laws of physics back then.

Hawks blinks innocently at Natsuo’s father. “Humid out there. Aren’t you going to be too warm, babe?”

Natsuo’s father eyes him. “If you’re trying to get me to wear a white T-shirt in the rain, try harder.”

The brightness of Hawks’s grin would put solar flares to shame. “I can’t believe you would malign my character like this when I’m invested only in your comfort, Enji Todoroki.”

Natsuo’s father maintains eye contact while pointedly shouldering on that same old battered beige coat, somehow managing not to let the lack of a right hand interfere with the histrionics.

Hawks struggles against a smile and loses.

“Be good, Naru!” Eiji says, stretching his arms up until Natsuo crouches down. Eiji nods seriously in response to some Gahh-ing and grabbing from Naru, and then kisses his little brother’s forehead. Natsuo’s chest collapses a little, but he’s slowly getting used to that feeling. “Be nice for Daddy, okay? He’s tired.”

“We’ll be all right, bud,” Natsuo says, straightening Eiji’s little hat. He looks like an advertisement. Devastatingly cute. “You have fun, okay? And be careful out there.”

“I will, Daddy!” Eiji says.

Natsuo catches his father looking at him—significantly—but pretends he didn’t. Eiji’s in good hands, even if there are fewer of them than usual. That’s what matters.

Naru produces a truly impressive quantity of spit on his way to the bedroom for the next round of Nap Roulette. Even though it’s his specialty, Natsuo makes sure to compliment him on it. Positive reinforcement. Good shit.

He takes the baby monitor with him as he steps out, quietly closes the door, and then… stands there.

It’s fucking weird being here alone.

His head feels like a swamp of squandered thoughts after the night they had, but pacing around helps more than he expected. The halls feel so much shorter than they used to, but this place is still gigantic. They don’t need to run back and forth to the damn market all the time; they could just do laps around the corridors and call it a day.

He stops in front of the laundry room. The door’s open. That’s different, too—his father used to try to bury all the signs of humanity in this place. Tried to make it look like no one lived here—like it was another office. Another agency.

The hero laundry basket that Natsuo dumps into the washer is sort of horrifying. He hopes spandex doesn’t need special treatment or anything, because it’s not about to get it. It sure doesn’t look like Hawks bleeds this much on TV.

Natsuo wants to ask Hayami whether she thinks that’s deliberately clever filming, to try to make their number one look less vulnerable and more inspiring; or if it’s clever movement, and Hawks is orchestrating it that way. He thinks he knows the answer, and obviously he could ask the source now, but he doesn’t want to. Hearing her thought process would be the important part—the beautiful part. He doesn’t care what’s true.

He starts the washer.

It sounds too loud in this big, old, empty mausoleum of a house. It’s different when the kids are here—the place warms up around them, and the rooms they spend time in are so close together and so continuous that it feels like a smaller subset of the place.

This feels—

More like it used to.

Whenever Endeavor was around, everything was always a cold kind of quiet—enforced silence. It felt like they lived in two worlds, sometimes. When he wasn’t there, they had the run of the place, and you could breathe the air and tear around and jump and shout and laugh all you wanted. But when the door slammed—

They disappeared.

Except Touya. Touya, who had been something other than a ghost. Touya, who had drawn attention, once, that wasn’t negative. Touya, who had gotten addicted to the way it used to be.

The past never dies.

But you do.

With every minute that slips by you, the person that you were the breath before is gone.

Natsuo lets the habit carry him—walks lightly, keeps his hands in his pockets and his shoulders low and his elbows close.

He hated the shrine, as a kid. It felt fucking sick for Endeavor to plaster up a memento of the child he’d murdered in cold blood—more like a warning to the rest of them than any sort of apology. Natsuo hated seeing the lights on—hated knowing that the maniac himself was always in there, late at night, finding brand-new ways to blame the glossy piece of paper that was all that they had left. The smell of incense still makes him gag.

But the years of despising this room have carved such a distinct image into Natsuo’s mind that the change strikes him the instant that he sets foot in the doorway.

There’s a second photo framed next to Touya’s.

It’s her.

He stares at it for a couple of seconds, doubting his eyes—doubting his mind.

He puts his right foot over the threshold, and then the left. The air in here doesn’t feel quite as thick as it used to. Maybe it’s the rain outside—the motion, the sound, the consistent change.

He picks his way across the mats.

There’s no damn way that even his father could have made this happen in a single morning, but the faint glaze of dust on the top of the frame—like the slightest kiss of snow—confirms it. She’s been here for at least a couple of weeks.

He sits down—cross-legged with his arms out behind him, leaning his weight back on his hands. It’s just her. She’s never stood on ceremony, and she’s always loved him at his least.

“Shit,” he says, and it only sticks a little. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, huh?”

It’s a good picture of her, not that there were many bad ones. Recent. Fuyumi must have given it to him.

He must have asked.

“You know,” Natsuo says, “if we’d had all those kids you wanted, we might’ve had to move in with these weirdos eventually anyway. Sure as hell wouldn’t have had space at our place. And if we could’ve afforded something big enough, like, can you imagine cleaning a house that size? Would been a nightmare.”

He would have done it.

Every fucking day.

He would have done whatever it took.

She knew.

She had to know.

He loved her so much that people on the street must have looked at him and known.

He still does.

He always will.

“The other thing that’s getting to me,” he says, “is that they’re just—they’re so young that their memories aren’t… Eiji’s going to keep a couple of strong impressions for a long time. But he’ll forget the rest. And Naru…” His whole chest throbs. “He’s never going to have anything. Nothing at all. Maybe a smell if he’s lucky, but he won’t know what it is or why it matters to him.” He looks at the ceiling, which isn’t any less blurry than the rest of the room. “Just so fucking unfair—to both of you. He’ll see it in the pictures, but it’s not the same as feeling it. It’s just not the same.”

He listens to the rain pattering on the roof until the ceiling slowly comes back into focus. It’s not very impressive. A lid on a box.

“I hate it so much when he’s right,” he says. “I can’t… sit here. Sit still. Not for long. That’s just Todoroki 101.”

He drags himself up off of the floor. He kisses his first two fingertips and presses them to the glass over her perfect smile, her perfect cheek. His hands are too big. Always have been.

“I love you,” he says. “Every damn minute. Everything I’ve got and everything I am has you in it. It’s fucking killing me, baby. But I’m gonna do it. Whatever ‘it’ is—whatever it has to be. And they’re gonna be happy. I promise. Okay? I swear.”

No answer, obviously. It’s not her—it’s ink and glass and devotion without anyplace to land. It’s a whole world of slowly nurtured affection that he wants to give, and empty air.

He watches the light fracture on the surface of the glass as he breathes, and his shadow shifts across it.

She’s going to stay there, just like that.

And he’s going to keep going.

It’s his responsibility now to find somewhere worth going to.

He makes his feet carry him out of the room, down the hall, past the rocking progress of the washing machine. He skips the engawa—just cuts right out one of the side doors that nobody uses very much.

He kicks his shoes off and walks out barefoot. The wet paving stones feel so cold for a second, and then the grass squishes into mush under his toes, wet stalks crumpling, tips tickling at the sides of his feet. Water dribbles down the back of his neck, slowly soaking his hair, dripping in his eyes.

He goes and sits down on one of the rocks by the pond. Water immediately seeps through the ass of his pants.

It is as it should be. The world doesn’t change—not for the likes of him. Not for the likes of anyone.

He pulls up his knees, folds his arms, and watches the sheet of gray shimmer around him, thicker and thinner at almost imperceptible intervals. His clothes are already drenched. Blinking just deposits more rain in his eyes.

There’s no such thing as signs.

But sometimes the ground is pliable enough that you can plant a stake and make your own.

Art of a framed black and white photo of Hayami with short hair, smiling and wearing a dark turtleneck.

By the time the expedition to Fancy Butt returns, Natsuo has dried off, scrubbed half of the kitchen, tidied up the living room, scooped Naru up out of the beginnings of a tantrum, and vacuumed the carpet accompanied by some baby babble commentary.

Natsuo isn’t especially surprised that the trip took so long—given the heredity at work, Eiji is likely to be the most thorough puddle-stomper on the face of the Earth, on top of which he has extremely short legs. Good odds, too, that Hawks drew it out on purpose—both as a way of gently bullying Natsuo’s father by keeping him out in the abhorrent rain, and in order to extend the time away from Natsuo’s judgment when they’re all still feeling raw-scraped and wrong-footed.

His father pauses in the genkan before even taking off his shoes, squinting towards the kitchen. Then he blinks. Then he turns to Natsuo, who brought Naru over on account of the excited clapping at the sound of the door and the voices.

“Thank you,” Natsuo’s father says, slowly.

“Least I could do,” Natsuo says.

They’re in this together.

Which is a major plus, today, really, since his father only has one hand available, and Eiji just splattered a lake’s worth of water all over the genkan.

“Daddy!” he says. “We saved so many worms! And we got daikon! But not the slimy kind.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Natsuo says. “How do you know it won’t be slimy?”

Eiji smiles up at him, tipping back the little hat. “I just know.”

The downpour doesn’t let up on Sunday, but Hawks manages to pry his skin away from Natsuo’s father’s for long enough to head to work halfway through the morning. It feels wrong—especially given what Natsuo knows about his background and his boundaries.

Not all the pros are like this, obviously.

But enough of them are that Natsuo has to keep an eye on Shouto and the others—has to watch their backs and help them build the walls they need, because they’ll never do it on their own.

Otherwise, the world will just keep asking more of them—one exhausted Sunday morning at a time—to fill a pit that’s bottomless. And they’ll just keep giving until they have nothing left. Until it’s all they are. Until it’s worn out the love and filed the warmth to a scalding edge. Until it’s killed them, in all the ways that count.

That must be part of what Hawks and Endeavor always saw in each other—the same desperately-fighting spirit, sinking slowly under the weight of everything left undone. A soul hacked out of the same unyielding stone, just strong enough to withstand the ravages, to weather the storm, to drag itself forward day after day, and dredge up something else to give.

Tethered to each other, they stood a better chance. Better balance. More leverage.

Natsuo has to wonder if it was the first time in his father’s life that he didn’t feel alone.

That was what it was like with Hayami—like the dim press of the world parted just long enough for one perfect gift. Like something shifted, slightly, and the echoes altered everything. Like the endless trudge was tolerable, survivable, surmountable, because if nothing else, she knew him. Someone knew him, and chose to stay.

It doesn’t surprise him that his father goes quiet—quieter—and focused after that. They trade off handling the kids, with Natsuo running point to make use of his limb count advantage. His father’s attention zeroes in on his laptop in the downtime, and he taps away one-handed, the perilous sharpness of his eyes all the more evident with those glasses catching the light. Natsuo would bet his right arm that his father is working on something for Hawks, the way he was talking about last night.

Natsuo tries to leave him to it. Playing quietly with Eiji is fun anyway, and Naru loves very little more than watching his big brother do things, so when they hang out near the play gym, he stays engaged, too.

It’s good. It keeps Natsuo busy enough that his mind can’t wander, and his heart can’t crumple for the hundred-thousandth time.

After a long stint of reading, Natsuo and Eiji burn through a small stack of new board games sequestered next to the books. Natsuo spends the duration of that activity painfully aware that this is a golden opportunity to teach Eiji that winning or losing isn’t as important as enjoying the game.

Once Eiji goes down for his nap—yet again without a fight, because Natsuo’s father quietly reminded him it was coming up, gradually easing them towards the time—Natsuo ducks out into the rain and runs across the yard to go fetch his backpack from the garden room. He brings it back, spreads his homework out on the carpet next to Naru, and flops down onto his front, resting his weight on his folded arms, to dig his way through this crap. It keeps him just preoccupied enough that he can’t think about her, but he can still think.

He can think about what Naru’s going to be like, at Eiji’s age. Whether Eiji will still be a shark fan at six, eight, ten—or whether he’ll grow out of it. Whether he’ll still spurn shoes. Whether the two of them will get along. What they’ll look like. Naru’s shaping up to look like Hayami’s dad, at this rate. And Eiji—Natsuo’s little Eiji…

He watches his father for a second. Yet more of the calm, concentrated effort, narrowed like a laser at his computer screen. There’s a touch of impatience to the way he moves his remaining hand—a hint of the frustration battened down and bound up, barely contained. The only thing his father hates more than inefficiency is inefficacy. Powerlessness.

His father pauses and twists his spine, reaching up to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his first-finger knuckle the same damn way Fuyumi does.

As he shifts, he winces.

“You’re gonna fuck up your back if you keep sitting on the floor all the time,” Natsuo says.

His father looks at him—and looks pointedly at the way he’s sprawled out almost on top of his notebook.

“I’m half your age and didn’t spend thirty years carrying unconscious people out of emergency situations,” Natsuo says.

His father’s eyebrow flicks up. “Right. Only six years so far.” He frowns. “It’s—safer to stay closer to them.”

“Okay,” Natsuo says. He’s not wrong. “But you’re gonna fuck up your back.”

The frown deepens.

And then his father sets the laptop aside, sighs, levers himself upright, settles on the couch instead, and picks it up again.

“Trial period,” he says. “Testing your theory.”

“Scientific of you,” Natsuo says.

“We’ll see,” his father says.

Natsuo and Eiji are constructing complicated train tracks and discussing foods that non-slimy daikon is acceptable in when Hawks staggers back into the house, looking splashed but not soaked. He must have changed his outfit midway through the afternoon, because he should be drenched.

“Salutations, fambam,” he says, which would chart on the worst combinations of words that Natsuo has ever heard if he’d had a less eventful life. Hawks makes a beeline for the couch and drops down next to Natsuo’s father. He opens his mouth, glances at the laptop screen, does a double-take, closes his mouth, and then leans in closer to the computer. “Is that my budget?” he asks. “What are you doing to my poor, defenseless budget?”

Natsuo’s father nudges his glasses up his nose again. “Deleting the popsicle allocation.”

Hawks claps his hands over his cheeks. “My emotional support popsicles? How could you? Eiji, he’s taking away the popsicles!”

Eiji gasps out loud. “Grampa! No!”

Natsuo’s father stares at Eiji, and then at Hawks. “That was a joke.”

“Jokes are funny,” Hawks says. “Threats to the popsicle supply are serious.”

Natsuo’s father blinks at him. “My mistake.”

“Just for that,” Hawks says, leaning closer against his arm, “I’m not going to name my yacht—sorry, the agency yacht—after you anymore.”

“Heartbreaking,” Natsuo’s father says.

Hawks takes the huge left hand in both of his, raises it to his mouth, and nips Natsuo’s father’s index finger.

“Ow,” Natsuo’s father says without even looking away from the screen. “That’s setting a very poor example for the children.”

“Perfect,” Hawks says. “I want them to bite you, too.”

“Better me than a popsicle,” Natsuo’s father says.

Hawks nips him again.

Natsuo’s father turns very slowly and blinks at him again for several seconds.

Hawks scowls back. “What?”

There’s an unusually long pause.

“I… don’t remember,” Natsuo’s father says, slowly. “It’s distracting looking at you with my glasses on. It’s—I always forget about your freckles.”

Hawks stares for a few seconds.

And then bites him much harder.

“Ow,” Natsuo’s father says.

“That was a good bite,” Hawks says, although he looks slightly dazed.

“I believe that’s a contradiction in terms,” Natsuo’s father says.

“I believe you’re full of it,” Hawks says. “You know exactly what I mean. All of the feelings I was having at once defied articulation, but I needed to release them. Good bite. Positive reinforcement bite.”

They stare at each other some more.

Then Hawks goes for Natsuo’s father’s hand again, but this time he whips it away.

“Come on,” Hawks says, feathers flickering at the edges of the wings. What seems to have been intended as a winsome smile slowly gets overtaken by a shit-eating grin as he grabs for Natsuo’s father’s wrist. “Come back here and I’ll show you.”

Natsuo’s father keeps his hand out of reach. “No.”

Hawks wrinkles his nose and then tries puppy eyes. “You let Naru bite you all the time.”

“The metal hand,” Natsuo’s father says.

“Meaningless details,” Hawks says.

Despite the intervening years, Natsuo’s father still glowers with considerable finesse.

His concentration shatters instantly when Eiji moves.

“You gotta be gentle!” Eiji says, scrambling up to his feet and trotting over. He clambers up onto the couch. “Just a little bite. Like this.”

With heavy-handed toddler fastidiousness, he wraps his lips over his teeth and fake-bites the bicep of Natsuo’s father’s severed arm.

Hawks laughs until he almost chokes, and then leans in and starts snapping his teeth at Natsuo’s father’s ear instead.

Natsuo’s father gazes blankly into space for a second like he’s questioning every single last damn life choice that brought him here.

Eiji looks up from making at least one of his shark-related dreams come true and beams at Natsuo. “I can bite you next, Daddy!”

“Nah, I’m okay,” Natsuo says. “Thanks. I wouldn’t want to take all the fun and joy away from your grampa. He’s having the time of his life. You’d better keep going.”

The glare is so, so, so worth it.

Instead of continuing the bitefest, though, Eiji pats Natsuo’s father’s arm in the place he was play-biting. His father safety-pinned the sweater sleeve up close to the end of the stump, and Eiji quickly gets interested in investigating the way it was folded—that is, uncharacteristically messily.

Natsuo has to wonder how much that’s changed his father, too, over time—how much it’s worn away. He can’t be ‘perfect’ anymore. He’s been forced to learn to compromise, and sometimes even to ask for help.

The person who’s stood by him through all of it is currently leaning in towards the laptop screen again.

“Wait,” Hawks says. “The salary lines aren’t even right. What are you doing to my poor budget?”

“Projecting next year,” Natsuo’s father says.

Hawks sits back to stare at him. “What, are you psychic now? There’s a crystal ball joke here.”

“There is not,” Natsuo’s father says. He nudges Hawks’s shoulder—tellingly gently—with his elbow. “Go change. You’re all wet.”

Hawks gazes at him beatifically. “That’s what she said.”

His father glances sideways. “Did she also mention that your immune system has been ravaged by all of the recent stress, and you can’t afford to get sick?”

“Our Lady of Innuendo does not concern herself with such petty trivialities,” Hawks says.

“Your Lady,” Natsuo’s father says. “I’m not taking any responsibility for her.”

Eiji tugs on his truncated sleeve. “For who, Grampa?”

“Hawks’s latest imaginary friend,” Natsuo’s father says, which summons a peal of laughter out of Hawks, but there’s something oddly wry about it. “He’s not taking very good care of himself after a long day of work out in the ra—”

“Slandering me in front of children,” Hawks says, but he slings himself up off of the couch. “Has it come to this?”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Natsuo’s father says—so coolly that he sounds disinterested, but then his eyes flick up from the laptop screen, and he meets Hawks’s gaze over the top of the glasses.

Hawks tries to smirk, but it cracks open into a grin.

“I’m gonna hold you to that,” he says.

“You won’t have to,” Natsuo’s father says. “Go.”

Eiji, still toying with the tormented end of Natsuo’s father’s sleeve, watches Hawks saunter out. Then he peers down at the laptop screen like his admittedly impressive ability to count to thirty will illuminate the mysteries of inflation and estimated employee benefits.

“Grampa,” he whispers. “Did you really take the popsicles out?”

“No,” Natsuo’s father says. “I’m not going to take out anything that makes him happy. I’m just working on helping him make a plan for next year, so that he has a better idea what he can do.”

“What I’m gonna do is triple the popsicle budget,” Hawks says, sashaying back in wearing one of what must be several dozen hoodies blazoned with Endeavor’s likeness. At least this one is just Endeavor standing there stiffly, hands planted on his hips like an action figure, rather than anything awkwardly melodramatic. “And get my yacht.”

Eiji glances up with a smile, but then it drops away to shock as he starts staring at the sweatshirt.

After a half-second of stunned silence, he scrambles down off the couch and over to Hawks, grabbing the elastic hem at the bottom of the hoodie and pulling on it to look intently at the art.

And then he turns towards Natsuo’s father—still sitting on the couch, staring right back, looking like he’s bracing himself for what comes next.

“Grampa,” Eiji says. He tugs on the sweater, then stares up at it one more time, checking the details—the color of the hair that’s visible, the heavy jaw, the shape of the eyes, the breadth of the hands.

He looks again, and the confusion in his expression now—

“Grampa, it’s you.”

The old man takes a deep breath.

“It used to be,” he says. “But not anymore.”

Eiji assesses him for a moment more, and then the sweatshirt image, and then him again. “Because you were tired.”

“Retired,” Hawks says, trying for a smile. “He retired, kiddo.”

Natsuo’s father sighs. “To be fair, it was a bit of both.”

Eiji gazes up at the slightly crinkled screen print of the machismo and the metal gauntlets and the frozen, flattened rendition of the flames.

Then he trots back over to the couch, clambers up, and wraps both arms as far as they can go around Natsuo’s father’s torso.

Which isn’t very far.

“I like it better when you’re not on fire,” he says.

Natsuo’s father breathes out slowly. Carefully, he wraps his arm around the tiny body clinging to his.

“I think I do, too,” he says.

“Works out fine,” Hawks says, a blur of red propelling him over to Natsuo’s father’s side on the couch again. A wayward down feather drifts over to Naru, twirling just above his reaching fingertips to make him giggle. “You’re still way too hot.”

“Well, that’s something,” Natsuo’s father mutters. He pats Eiji’s back, very gently. “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says, drawing back. Even discomfort is exciting to him—an unfulfilled need is an opportunity. “Let’s make the un-slimy daikon, Grampa!”

Natsuo’s father attempts to help him down off the couch, jaw and shoulders both visibly tightening as he tries not to grip Eiji’s arm too hard—but then the feathers sweep in when his one hand wavers.

Eiji doesn’t even blink.

And then he’s off to the kitchen, bounding with all the graceless enthusiasm of a newborn deer, radiating love everywhere he goes.

It only seems natural for Natsuo to gather Naru up, too, and follow him.

Hawks and his father are already doing the same.

“What’s the secret to making it un-slimy?” Natsuo asks, keeping his voice low.

“I have no idea,” his father says.

“Life’s more fun when you wing it,” Hawks says.

They both turn to eye him in distressingly easy unison.

He winks.

Monday goes the way of every other weekday. There’s something existentially horrifying about that, and something fundamentally reassuring.

Stupidly, really, Natsuo assumed that his father would take a break from the exercise regime on account of having eighty percent of his right arm go AWOL. Instead they wind up in the same place as always, at the same time as always, although his father definitely can’t jump rope to warm up.

He still beats the absolute shit out of the punching back with the left hand, his elbow, his knees, and his right shoulder. It’s wild to try to spot the ways he modulates his footwork to compensate for the change in his balance and his body weight.

He must have started the obsessive contingency planning before they’d even taken him off the oxygen at the hospital. He must have started cataloguing the options and considering the pitfalls in the first instant that his eyes would open. He must have started figuring out how to pick himself up and carry on before he’d finished coughing up the first exhale.

That’s what they do.

Natsuo’s father has always been the master of evening out the playing field by force—of making himself sufficient even when the situation should be beyond him. He’s always been the best at never settling, and never slowing down.

Life is never what you lay out in your mind. There are just too many fucking variables. There are just too many ways it can go wrong.

Life is picking your battles, and trying to pick your mistakes.

Natsuo doesn’t feel better, exactly, panting on the floor, with sweat sticking his shirt to the small of his back and stinging in his eyes. But he feels a little further from it. He feels a little emptier.

He waits until his father stops pacing back and forth—he never sits down right away after he finishes the workout. Probably something about keeping the circulation flowing smoothly, the same way Natsuo won’t let people who just fainted stand back up. With what the job did to his blood pressure, it’s probably a miracle he’s made it this far without his heart exploding.

He does, eventually, settle on the tatami and start drinking water in measured little sips.

Natsuo can still chug it cold at times like this without making himself sick. The benefits of youth or something. Maybe.

“Hey,” he says. “What was your father like?”

His father stares over for a second, and then looks away.

He stays still for a long moment, sitting there cross-legged on the floor. Then he swipes his left forearm over his forehead, tilts his head back, and looks at the ceiling.

“He was everything I thought a man was supposed to be,” he says, slowly. “He was so strong—powerful and diligent and driven. Tireless. He was always working. He demanded more from himself than he did from everyone around him. He was never satisfied. He was always trying to improve himself, to do more, to be more, to get stronger still. He never stopped.”

That’s not the same as Nothing could stop him.

“When I’d worked on something,” Natsuo’s father says, “no matter how much, or how long, or how hard I’d tried, he would find something I could have done better. It was for my own good—it was better to hear it from him than to broadcast imperfection to the whole world. Better to get cut down than to fail. And he had to be right. He was always right. He was the strongest and the most intelligent man in the world, and the most devoted to the work. He was the epitome of a hero.”

A curl of fire flickers down the back of his left arm, parting into five evenly-sized segments that dance down to the tips of his fingers in staggering unison.

“And it wasn’t enough to save him,” Natsuo’s father says. “Nothing was enough.”

Natsuo eyes him. Maybe he’s finally picked up games. Maybe he’s added manipulation to his arsenal in retirement. New hobby. “Do you think that changes a damn thing?”

Natsuo’s father sighs, plants his right hand on the tatami, levers himself up. “Of course not. But you need to understand what I gave you if you’re going to overcome it.”

Natsuo wonders if he went to school with his hands bandaged like Shouto’s.

Natsuo wonders if he went to school with bruises.

Natsuo wonders if he did worse to himself at UA, left to his own devices, pushing himself further and further, possessed by the desperation to climb higher and faster and further.

They hammer steel into resilience before they ever start sharpening the edge.

Was it about living up to his father’s legacy?

Or was it about just living?

There’s a ragged animal terror of destruction. There’s a primal, snarling compulsion to claw your way through.

Was Endeavor trying to prove his father wrong, or just trying to survive longer than a man that he’d thought was invincible?

Maybe it doesn’t have to matter anymore.

Maybe Hawks was right.

Put down the knives.

They can end this. All of them together.

Natsuo doesn’t want to be a hero.

He doesn’t want to be great.

He just wants to be happy.

That’s harder—in this family, at least.

But this is the family he’s got.

Maybe it’s not even possible—happiness. Maybe that’s the big lie. Maybe it’s all a long con. Maybe this is how it always ends.

But he’s a stubborn bastard near the end of a towering line of stubborn bastards.

Hayami always liked that about him, for some reason. She always called it persistence, or determination, or something more like that. She’d had nothing but kind words for the characteristic that had ruined all their lives.

Natsuo looks at the dents in the punching bag and the char marks burned into the walls.

Even if they can’t be cleaned, his father could afford to have those replaced. He could remove the reminder, if he wanted. He could pretend it hadn’t happened—pretend that he’d never been that man.

“You remember that time Shouto got clipped pulling a civilian out of the way of that big bus crash?” Natsuo says. “And then that guy with the springboard quirk came after him while he was still dizzy?”

He knows even before the blue eyes darken that the answer will be a nod—his father has always had an encyclopedic recollection of the foes and the fights, his and others’. There’s probably a gigantic spreadsheet somewhere.

“I was out getting diapers for Eiji,” Natsuo says. “Saw it up on one of those screens on the side of a building—breaking news or whatever—and people were just… standing there. Cheering and commentating, complaining every time Shouto got hit. Like it was a boxing match. I was watching my kid brother get the shit beat out of him on live TV, and they were treating it like a game. Like fucking baseball. Shouto’s spitting blood and using ice pillars to keep himself on his feet, and you can see how close he is to passing out, and all these fucking people are shouting ‘Idiot, why’d you miss?’ I almost threw up.”

His father’s fingers curl and uncurl around the neck of his water bottle. He was still active then—still working. Still in the thick of it. Did Burnin or someone interrupt to tell him, if he was in a meeting or doing some office crap? Did he catch it on a screen just like Natsuo, while he was supposed to be on his way to somewhere else? Did he get on the phone and start trying to send reinforcements, medical personnel—did he try to send Hawks?

Or does that sort of thing happen so damn often in this business that nobody makes a big deal out of it unless someone gets killed?

Deku had come out of nowhere. Natsuo had pieced together later that he and Bakugou had been trying to tackle some other bastard, and they’d had the usual in-fight screaming match about it, but the quirks involved had made it clear that Deku needed to be the one who bailed to go bail Shouto out. The pictures online of the craters that Bakugou had left behind on the other site were fucking haunting.

Shouto had only been in the hospital for a single night.

This is the world that Hawks is fighting against—the life he doesn’t want anybody else to have to have.

What if he loses?

There had been a pro hero, one time—Natsuo had never even heard of him. Newcomer, ranked somewhere in the low hundreds, mostly based much further north. He’d been taking the train down to visit his grandmother. Same story as always—some out-of-control villain fucked up the tracks and started raiding the cars for valuables, and this guy tried to intervene, only to get his ass handed to him instead. He almost bled out on the roof of one of the passenger cars—the villain had torn holes in the metal of the train car ceiling as well as holes in him, and so much blood was dripping down through them that everyone inside was screaming, thinking the guy was already dead. If the villain had spent three more seconds shredding him—or if Natsuo had taken three seconds longer to scramble up the twisted ladder on the side; if traffic had slowed them; if it had been raining; if it had been a warmer night—he would have been. It would have been too damn late.

Natsuo doesn’t know anymore—how many times he’s scrubbed blood off of his hands and picked it out from underneath his fingernails. How many times he’s left himself behind, because it’s too much to carry, and something has to go.

Hayami used to find him. Used to coax him out. Used to warm him up. Used to turn him towards the light, and hold onto his hands, and bring him back to life.

And he couldn’t.

Not for her.

Not when it counted.

He chokes it out stinging and writhing. “I don’t want to watch people die anymore.”

His father looks at the floor for a long moment before the soft, soft “I know.”

There are a million different types of courage in the world.

No time like now.

“I was thinking,” Natsuo says, slowly, to someone who has broken every promise that should have come before, “about… going to med school. Or something. Just—if I went into, you know, pediatrics or something—something other than emergency medicine, you know—I could…” He looks at the floor. Maybe it’s weak. Maybe it’s a stupid idea. Maybe it’s going to take too long, maybe it’s going to be too hard. But it’s all he’s got. “I mean, maybe I could practice and have pretty regular hours, office-style hours, and then that’d give me a lot more time with the kids. Consistent time. But it’s—even if that worked, it’d… it’s a long, long way off. Years. And I’d need a whole hell of a lot of help until then.” He clears his throat. “Your help.”

His father stands there silently for so long that he chances a glance.

It’s an expression with the same hallmarks as the anger—the lowered brows and the narrowed eyes, the clenched jaw and the downturned mouth. It’s almost indistinguishable from disapproval.

He’s thinking.

He shouldn’t be. Fucking bastard always has to go and—

He said he would help. He said that anything Natsuo asked for—

“How soon could you start?” he asks. “Are you prepared to walk away if you change your mind?”

Natsuo opens his mouth to give voice to the knee-jerk reaction.

I’m not like you.

He shuts it.

He shrugs.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I think—because it’d affect the kids, I think I could. I can… I want the choices to be for them. If it turns out to be too much, then fuck it. I’ll think of something else.”

His father looks at him.

He looks back.

His father leans down, sets the water bottle on the floor, straightens again, and steps towards Natsuo.

“Good,” he says, holding out his hand.

By the time they come back from retrieving Eiji from school, the rain has let up enough for a good, old-fashioned market run. Natsuo doesn’t want to do it so much as he wants to have done it, but that doesn’t really leave him with many options. When he’s exhausted, it’s slightly easier to get to sleep.

As soon as they straggle back—well, he straggles, and Eiji continues counting up a storm, and his father continues not even breathing very hard—he puts Naru down for naptime. It helps to have two hands to balance the baby head. His father has found a way to slide just the one under enough of Naru’s body to gain the necessary leverage, and his fingers can spread so wide that he can even out the weight, but an ill-timed and particularly vigorous bit of squirming could undermine the caution before Natsuo’s father was able to raise Naru high enough to brace against his shoulder or his chest. Natsuo can see in his face every time that he knows it, and hates that he knows.

Natsuo meant what he said anyway. He gets to repeat Naru’s sounds of the day and pretend to blow spit bubbles back at him, and then kiss his little ears and tuck him in. That’s why he’s here—in the house, and on the planet.

Afterwards, as he crosses the entire garden to reach his room so that he can change out of his sweaty workout clothes, it occurs to him again: this would be simpler if he lived in the house.

It isn’t half past one in the morning this time, but the idea still doesn’t especially make him want to throw up.

Huh.

Back inside, he doesn’t notice how quiet it is until he’s already set his foot on the threshold that leads into the living room.

The couch is occupied—just about every last inch of it, because Natsuo’s father, passed out on his back, is longer than the damn thing, and had to bend his knees just to fit. Eiji, equally insensible to the world, is spread-eagled on top of his chest, tiny little head turned to the side, cheek squished, arms flung out like he was trying to hug as much of his pillow and benefactor as he could reach.

They both look so peaceful that Natsuo just stands there, for a little while, and tries to imagine a life where this was all there ever was.

Then he gets his phone out. He turned off the shutter sound effect years ago, but he silences all the audio anyway, just in case the thing decides to spite him. He shuffles a few steps sideways to even out the light, and then he snaps a good one and texts it to Fuyumi without any explanation.

She texts back before he can even sneak back out of the room. SEND THAT TO HAWKS

There’s a momentary pause, and then she adds: Please!

He sends her a side-eyeing emoji. I don’t have his number.

She sends back the same face. You live in his house.

Natsuo positions his thumbs over the screen to start typing No, I live in our dad’s house, which Hawks has finagled his way into with what is either ‘good looks’ and charm or simply refusing to leave for so long that Endeavor just gave up.

But—

She’s right.

Isn’t she?

It’s Hawks’s house as much as it’s anyone’s.

By the sound of things—by the whispers and what lies silent in their wake—it might be the only home he’s ever had.

And he’s the first one who’s ever lived here, instead of just inhabiting it—instead of sleeping and eating and paying dues.

Before Natsuo has even wriggled his way free of that thought, Fuyumi follows up with another text.

Which reads MEN lol and includes an attached contact.

Natsuo makes sure his sigh is soundless, and then he goes through with it. For her, obviously.

Hawks immediately texts back aaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAA

Natsuo would assume that that’s a reaction to the picture rather than some really poorly-timed speech-to-text, but with this guy you never know.

Another message pops up before he can ask. Naru having little mousy dreams too?

Natsuo wonders a lot what babies dream about. Yeah.

Hawks texts back Sucks.

Natsuo stares at his screen and then gives in to the inevitable: ???

Not the photo, Hawks writes back, which is soon to be my lock screen. Sucks that I’m in a meeting and can’t yeet my ass out the window and hightail it home to get me some of that.

In addition to making Natsuo question the safety of the populace a little bit, that phrasing suggests some things.

Hawks doesn’t seem to have any qualms about canceling, postponing, or outright ditching meetings that don’t suit him, which means that if he’s sticking this one out, it must be with somebody too important even for him to blow off.

But he is still texting Natsuo, with no delay whatsoever, which means that gleaning information about the situation at the house means more to him personally.

All of which implies a not-inconsiderable chance that Hawks is texting about Natsuo’s kids under the table while he’s meeting with the Prime Minister or some shit.

Eiji and Naru are a higher priority to one of the most powerful people in the country.

That’s—

Amazing, in the weirdest way.

They’re special.

They’re special because of what they mean to other people. Because of who they are. Because they’re so, so loved.

Good news for you, Natsuo writes back. This probably isn’t a one-time thing.

Hawks sends a block of prayer hands emojis.

Natsuo stands there for a few seconds, watching his father’s slow breaths lifting Eiji and then gently lowering him again.

He was more or less just looking for a place to sit around and scroll aimlessly on his phone until his brain stops buzzing, but he can’t risk autoplay ads with sounds in here, and he doesn’t want to do it in the kitchen—you need a comfortable seat for a proper mind-numbing session.

He has an idea.

He tiptoes carefully past the couch, and then he turns left down the hall—past Eiji’s room, which used to be Fuyumi’s, and on to the one that used to be his.

He expects it to feel more like excavating some ancient cursed tomb—and the door does creak a tiny bit, and it does yawn out a faintly stale smell of undisturbed dust, and it is shadowy and dim inside.

But someone’s cleaned it in the relatively recent past. Both the wide periodic table and the baseball player posters are still up on the wall, the corners peeling, the colors bleached. Perhaps more impressive, the All Might poster hasn’t been touched.

He and Shouto had ended up with a weird couple of minutes together in the afternoon one time when Shouto was still in middle school—the nurse had gotten sick, and Fuyumi was trying to shuffle everything around to make sure everybody was fed and keep the place on schedule all by herself. Natsuo had known that he probably should have been trying to help her, but he’d been fixated on the blank-eyed kid sitting up too straight on the couch. His brother, supposedly. His blood.

Shouto had been watching All Might on the news. He’d had his hands curled together in his lap, clenched tight. Slowly, slowly, Natsuo had watched a flicker of light enter his empty expression and warm it from the inside.

He’d known Shouto couldn’t get away with an All Might poster in his room.

And he’d known that his father would eventually see the one in his.

He’d also known that it might disappear at that point, that there might be a streak of ash left on the wall—but that was worth two thousand yen out of his pocket money and a trip to the konbini down by the fancy-ass grocery store.

He breathes as deep as he dares with all the dust. He crosses over to the window, pulls up the shades, and pries it open, pushing the pane out as far as it will go. He used to daydream about climbing out and running away, but there was nowhere to run to. So he never tried.

The rush of rain-washed, petrichor-heavy air that uncoils in around him feels nice.

The old futon’s rolled up in the corner, perfectly even and bound tight. The sheets are newer than the ones he remembers, but he knows the mattress—the frayed edges and little holes he used to prod at with his fingertips while he was trying to get to sleep. It’s the same with the pillow resting on top of the dresser—clean new case, but he knows the shape.

He unrolls the bedding, tosses his pillow down, and stretches out.

It sure doesn’t feel as big as it used to.

He wraps both hands around his phone and holds it to his chest, looking at the ceiling. The weak sunbeam slipping through the window ignites every single twirling mote of dust, like a night sky full of stars, suspended overhead in three dimensions, burning in the silence of the void.

He watches them wink in the sunlight for a minute.

Then he goes onto his phone and starts looking up the nearest aquariums. They should take as many trips as they can before he has to start studying like crazy for the entrance exam, and he wants to get to watch Eiji’s face the first time he sees a real shark.

Natsuo will have to head off to one of his last classes pretty soon. He can ask Aito which local place is the best. He trusts that guy more than the reviews. None of those people are strangers anymore.

Maybe Aito would want to go together—bring his daughter. Let her look at all the fish. He talks about her like she’s a few years older than Eiji, but Eiji can make friends with anyone.

Hell, maybe Shouto will want to come. Some of these places have aviaries where Natsuo could pretend to try to shove Hawks over the railing to return him to his people. Fuyumi loves field trips. Mom still savors fresh air, on top of which she likes watching them bicker with each other like regular siblings. And his father…

His father loves the world, in a way he’s never really understood—loves its categories, but also its colors. Its rules, and its laws, and its structure, but also its unknowns—its unanswered questions. Its possibilities.

They could make a thing of it. Do a big, giant, stupid, stressful outing for the whole family. Put the fun in dysfunctional and all that.

Not so bad.

The time slides.

The hurt doesn’t fade. They’re lying, when they say that—he knew it already, from Touya, but it still stings in a distant sort of way. One more broken promise from someone who claimed to be on his side.

It remains a targeted, specific, relentless, knifing pain, and every twist of his body cracks the weak scabs back open. He keeps taking out his phone to text her, keeps turning to say something, keeps listening for her voice and her footsteps and her breath.

She’s not there. She never will be again.

Endeavor was right about one thing.

Keeping busy keeps it at bay, some of the time. Enough of it. Enough that you can function. Enough that you can make yourself believe you see the shore in the shape of the waves.

Between him and his father, making dinner becomes the arm equivalent of a three-legged race. The lack of independence from both of their sides tends to boil into frustration, but they’ve both gotten remarkably good at slowly breathing out the steam—and Eiji’s coloring book commentary goes a long way towards reminding them why they’re here, and what’s at stake.

And it works, in the end.

Because they want the same thing.

Or at least, they do until Wednesday night, when Natsuo’s father’s phone—which he set down on the counter when they started cooking—vibrates with an incoming call.

His father doesn’t seem interested in picking up. Hawks must have a special ring. And the school must. And Fuyumi. And—

The phone buzzes and then starts jittering across the countertop. Natsuo glances down at the screen.

“Spryte?” he says. “That guy with the bug wings?”

His father’s mouth had set into a hard line at the first part, but then it twitches, just slightly. “Yes.”

Natsuo looks at the phone again, and then at him. The obvious is so unusual that he states it before he can help himself. “You’re not going to answer?”

His father pauses, eyeing the screen. “The… last time I talked to him, I got frustrated in front of Eiji and upset him.”

This universe where Enji Todoroki gives a flying, walking, swimming, or crawling fuck about how children feel is still messing with Natsuo’s head.

But it’s objectively better than the universe they had before.

And that’s the point, right?

You bust your ass so that your kids can have a better life than you did.

“Huh,” he says. “You want me to get it?”

His father blinks. “I… if you… like.”

Natsuo grabs it up and swipes.

“Hi,” he says. “This is his kid.”

Long, weird pause. Serves the guy right for calling at dinnertime anyway. Presumptuous fuck.

“Shouto?” Spryte says slowly.

“No,” Natsuo says. “One of the other ones. His hand is full. Can I help you?”

There’s an even longer, weirder pause.

Spryte clears his throat.

“I was hoping that maybe Endeavor could,” he says, delicately, “in spite of the… rough… start. For now—would you just let him know that, ah…” He clears his throat again. “Well—would you let him know that he was right?”

Natsuo glances over at his father.

The raised eyebrow speaks volumes.

“He wouldn’t have said it in the first place if he didn’t know that he was right,” Natsuo says, watching something odd flicker in his father’s eyes.

It doesn’t matter what it is that his father said. Rules are rules.

Spryte sighs very, very loudly. “Yes. Of course. Well—I’ll get out of your hair. Just… if he has more time, soon, I’m a bit… stranded. I’d appreciate any advice he has on where to go from here.”

Natsuo is pretty confident that his father can hear everything that’s being said, so the vague gesture and the faint shake of his head aren’t all that surprising.

“Put him on speaker,” Natsuo’s father says, tipping his elbow at an open spot of counter for the phone. Natsuo smacks it down and taps the button. “Spryte. Brief me. And I do mean ‘brief’.” He releases a deep breath. “Let’s see what we can do.”

On Thursday, while Eiji’s at school, Naru’s napping, and his father is out puttering around in the garden, a big package comes from some online store, addressed to Natsuo even though he didn’t order anything.

It’s crammed full of baseball stuff—in Eiji’s size and his. Underneath those is an equally impressive distribution of soccer gear.

His father won’t say anything. His father will just carry on in silence as always, pretending that these sorts of things just appear out of the ether, acting like he had nothing to do with it.

But Natsuo doesn’t have to.

It’s been years. He used to play soccer semi-regularly with school friends, more to blow off steam than anything else—but when they graduated, and everybody slithered off their separate ways to establish their own lives, he never bothered trying to find a way to bring it back into his life. There are some things that you give up for the sake of convenience, to ease your own schedule, to simplify the scrabbling for limited time, because they just weren’t quite important enough. It’s not like he was ever good enough to play in front of any kind of audience, let alone to be a star.

But he loved it.

Maybe Eiji will, too.

He shoves his sneakers on, steps out of the front door, and dribbles the ball around the side of the house. He bounces it on his right knee as he unlocks the gate and then shepherds it through the side alley and around the back into the garden.

His father is, of course, already looking up as he comes into view—eyes fixed on him, eyebrow raised. The puttering is more complicated with just one hand, but he always soldiers through.

“Hey,” Natsuo says. His balance is a little shaky for quick footwork, but the instincts are still there, and he can still dance around the ball in the way that used to make Touya seethe. “C’mon. You can do this without an arm.”

The eyebrow arches slightly higher. “No, thank you.”

“What?” Natsuo says, smirking at him. “Worried I’ll kick your ass?”

His father blinks slowly. “Yes.”

Natsuo can’t help that he grins.

Not for long. None too strongly.

But it counts.

“You should ask Shouto,” his father says, innocently returning his attention to the plants. “And his… boyfriends. Partners.” A pause, a struggle, a solidifying resolve. “Polycule.”

Natsuo eyes him, corralling the ball with the side of his left foot. “You want me to challenge three of the nation’s top up-and-coming pro heroes to a soccer match?”

“I don’t want you to challenge them,” his father says, calmly. “I want you to win.”

“Fuck off,” Natsuo says, but it doesn’t come out particularly cutting. “I’ll put Shouto on my team. Then we can freeze them to the ground if we start falling behind.”

His father sits back on his heels and doesn’t quite smile, but it’s a close damn thing.

Eiji runs out of the preschool gate that day with a craft project in his hands—what looks like a mess of orange paper affixed to one of those wide, flat popsicle sticks.

Popsicles again. It figures.

Natsuo is perfectly prepared to compliment his three-year-old’s arguable artistic genius when Eiji stops short, plants one hand proudly on his hip, and raises the other to hold his masterpiece up over his face.

It’s a cut-paper version of Endeavor’s mask of flames.

Natsuo feels more than he sees his father going still beside him. That’s about the only thing that registers, other than the throbbing of his pulse in his head.

Naru burbles and then claps.

“Do you like it, Grampa?” Eiji asks delightedly, lowering it just enough to gallop over with his tiny backpack bouncing against his back. “My teacher helped!”

“You did an amazing job,” Natsuo’s father says. Natsuo never even realized where he’d picked up that strategy—keeping his voice low and less inflected to bury the lede when he’s trying to avoid a question without resorting to a lie. “How did you make it?”

Eiji bounds over, tiny feet almost tangling in his excitement—which makes Natsuo tighten his grip on Naru before he can help it, but Eiji tips himself back into balance, cavalier about the close call as always. He immediately starts chattering at them about the base paper and the way they cut it to look like flames, and how it was his teacher’s idea to add little strips of tissue paper to give it dimension, and how he had to wait so long for the glue to dry even though he just wanted to get to wear it.

The play-by-play of everything else he did at school today accompanies them most of the way back to the house, and Natsuo’s father asking him if he has anything in mind for dinner squarely finishes out the trip. Natsuo’s father drives even more exceedingly cautiously than usual with his one remaining hand—Natsuo never even feels the need to reach out for the wheel.

Natsuo dares to think that maybe they’ve dodged the worst of the day’s bullets, but before Eiji has even dispensed of the infernal shoes, he starts digging in his little backpack again. “Daddy,” he says, shoving the paper mask at Natsuo, “can you please hold mine? I got a surprise.”

As Natsuo accepts the wretched object made almost tolerable by Eiji’s enthusiasm, Natsuo’s father somehow manages to wince with the set of his shoulders alone, his expression unchanged. Neat trick.

“We made another one for Hawks,” Eiji says, extracting it from his bag with all the fumbling gentleness his tiny hands can muster. “’Cause Endeavor’s his favorite, too. Do you think he’ll like it?”

“He’ll love it,” Natsuo’s father says, quietly, eyes trained on the wisps of lighter orange tissue paper glued on all the way across. “That was very thoughtful of you.”

Eiji beams at him.

And then pauses, looking down at the paper facsimile, and then up again at its inspiration.

“Grampa,” he says, in no small amount of awe, “can you still do the real one?”

Natsuo’s father pauses and turns to look at Natsuo—waiting for something.

Waiting for permission.

Waiting for Natsuo’s blessing to be Endeavor, for a moment, in front of a child who doesn’t know what that means.

And maybe never will.

“Just be careful,” Natsuo says.

Endeavor always has been, with that—with the trappings of the travesty, with the hallmarks of the job. He’s always maintained an iron-fisted control over the things that mattered to him. In thirty years, he never once burned a civilian. He never once set someone’s clothes on fire, never once misplaced a piece of paperwork, never once said something that they had to bleep out on TV.

He did look like a fucking idiot at Shouto’s Sports Festival, though. At least that was nice.

Natsuo takes a half-step back with Naru, gripping the popsicle stick handle of the other abomination a little tighter than he means to, and then nods towards Eiji. Get it over with.

His father crouches down, the right sleeve of his coat dangling, and rests his left hand on his knee—where he can raise it and push the weight of a toddler back in an instant if Eiji gets too excited and rushes towards the heat to get a better look.

“Are you ready?” Natsuo’s father asks. “It’s going to be bright, and very warm.”

Eiji jumps up and down. The lights in his shoes dutifully wink on and off. “I’m ready, Grampa!”

“Okay,” Natsuo’s father says. “Here we go.”

Natsuo tries his absolute hardest to see it through Eiji’s eyes.

It is—impressive. He can’t bring himself to stretch credulity all the way to cool, but it’s striking. Always has been.

Even when he hated the sight of it the most, the amount of finesse obscured underneath the greediness of the sky-seeking flames always stuck in the back of Natsuo’s mind, because he’d watched Touya striving for years to try to master that kind of precision. Touya had always been so smart, the feverish energy bleeding out of him, unnervingly unstoppable. Touya was a doer—an achiever. Touya was ambitious. He was hungry. And he had both the brains and the grit to back it up—to make it happen. To force life into his wild ideas, no matter how they writhed.

A part of Natsuo had always believed that anything that his big brother couldn’t do was simply impossible.

Touya couldn’t do this—not then, not now.

The flame starts as flickering curls of yellow so pale that Natsuo thinks at first that his eyes are playing tricks—that it’s just the movement of the light, just the shadows shifting in the genkan as his father breathes.

It looks like an extension of his breathing. It looks like an extension of his being.

The elegance with which the deeper orange seeps through underneath, propelling the softness of the yellow tips higher up and further out, consuming the breadth of his beard, unfurling up his jaw, erupting out around his eyes—

His father never used to do this slowly, and it didn’t pay to be nearby when his fragile temper snapped. You never saw the details—you never saw it move. You never saw it ripple over him, never saw the delicateness of the edges, the consistency, the control. He never burns himself with it. He never burns his hair, never deepens that horrible scar, never lets it fall. An exhibition of his quirk so technically difficult that his original protégé could never grasp it is so easy for him that he doesn’t even have to think.

In the later years of living here, Natsuo saw him on TV more than at the house. His father was Endeavor, and Endeavor only; and Endeavor was the mask.

It looks wrong on him now.

Misplaced.

Superfluous.

It obstructs his eyebrows, narrows his eyes, covers his forehead—buries the things that make him human.

Natsuo… gets it. Knows now.

Endeavor was a survival mechanism from the start—something else to become, something unattainable, something to keep running towards and reaching for, to distract from the inescapable reality that Enji Todoroki would never be enough.

His father buried his face because he wanted to bury all of it. He was hanging on by a thread, and then he precipitated the death of his firstborn son—his favorite. He watched his own burning hands rip to pieces the first thing he’d tried to build. He watched himself falling into the chasm that his father had carved out from the start.

Endeavor leached all that strength from Enji Todoroki—drained him dry. Left a shell of him. Left a corpse.

It doesn’t change what he did—everything he did.

But Natsuo has the teeth in his hands, now.

They look an awful lot like the ones he sees in his mouth in the mirror.

He wonders, for the first time, if Shouto could do this—make the mask.

But Shouto doesn’t need it.

Natsuo is willing to bet he’s never bothered to try.

Eiji’s tiny face is lit up orange by the glow. His mouth fell open, his eyes swelled wide—Natsuo can see the entire shape reflected in them, gleaming bright.

“Whoa,” he breathes. He leans forward, his hand rising, and Natsuo’s throat closes—he has to move—

His father shifts back—just slightly, but he twisted his wrist, turning his forearm towards Eiji, readying it to hold him at a distance if he comes too close.

“Grampa,” Eiji whispers. “It’s so beautiful.”

The fire sputters out.

Natsuo’s father stares wordlessly.

“Wow!” Eiji says, bounding forward, darting in between Natsuo’s father’s knees, the tiny hands whipping up to start patting at his face like they’re looking for the source. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” Natsuo’s father says. “Unless I lose control of it. But it can hurt other people, because it’s very hot.”

Eiji gets distracted petting at one of the more pronounced white patches in the beard. “You can just make fire come outta you from nowhere?”

“Yes,” Natsuo’s father says.

That’s not really true. It comes from somewhere.

“And you used to beat all the bad guys?” Eiji asks.

“I tried,” Natsuo’s father says. “That’s what ‘Endeavor’ means. Always trying.”

Eiji nods sagely even though Natsuo knows for a fact that his developing brain can’t process the full weight of that. He keeps stroking at Natsuo’s father’s beard, mouth scrunching slightly as he thinks.

“We got so many heroes,” he says.

Cool. Great. There’s a designated slot in Natsuo’s chest for that knife to slide into anyway. Easy.

“We got you and Hawks and Uncle Shouto,” Eiji says, stumbling a step back to consider Natsuo’s father again, one little hand settling on either side of the heavy jaw. “That’s three already.”

Natsuo’s father’s hand hovers just behind his back, ready to steady him. “I—”

The inevitable: kindling finds the floating spark. “Grampa, can I be a hero, too?”

Natsuo’s father looks at Eiji very seriously for a few long seconds before he clears his throat.

“You can be anything you want to,” he says. “But it’s important to wait and see what makes you happy before you decide.”

Eiji treats that platitude like a priceless pearl of unparalleled wisdom, but it’s not his fault. He’s three.

“Right now, Grampa,” he says, solemnly, still patting at Natsuo’s father’s face, “right now, I wanna go to the market. And get a flower. Can we get another flower?”

Natsuo’s father’s eyes go distant for a second, but Natsuo can’t quite tell whether that’s because he’s still coping with the existential crisis, or because he’s estimating how many square feet of unoccupied dirt they have left to work with in the garden.

“Yes,” he says. “We can.”

Eiji beams at him, and then up at Natsuo. “Daddy, you can help me pick!”

Natsuo breathes out slow. At least it’s good practice for the run. “Sure thing, bud. Anything you want.”

It’s a pain in the ass to have to leave the kids earlier, but he walks to the station and takes the train to class.

It still makes his skin crawl. It still feels like people’s eyes are boring into him—carving tunnels in his skull. The way that people laugh quietly grates on his nerves. You’d think nobody here knows how shit the world is, underneath the gaudy advertisements and the pleasant intonations of the announcements and the weird solidarity of total strangers crammed together in a metal tube.

But he keeps breathing.

Leaving takes a while because it’s finally the last session, and the teacher shakes everyone’s hand on the way out the door. She holds onto his and looks up at him—looking him in the eyes.

She doesn’t say anything except “Thank you, stay in touch.”

He won’t.

But it’s a nice gesture, in its way.

They’ve sent him an official email before the train is even halfway back—he’s cleared to go back to work.

He doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t ever want to wear those clothes and see those things and drag himself out into that existence ever again.

That’s a life for people who are stronger than he is.

He doesn’t want it anymore.

It feels like giving up.

It feels like opening a guarded door and sneaking out into the starlight.

It’s exhilarating.

The walk back is… pleasant, possibly. It’s not too dark, and it’s not too cold, and he likes feeling the air fill his lungs.

He’s just spotted the open gate from down the street when he hears the feathers rattle.

He glances over just in time for Hawks to sidle up beside him, slouched low, hands in his pockets, shoulders tipped at an unassuming angle, like he was walking innocently along the road the whole time.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Hawks says. “How’d it go?”

“I guess I passed,” Natsuo says. “I’m not holding my breath for a trophy or anything, though.”

“I’ll get you one,” Hawks says, which is distressingly plausible even though—or perhaps because—the breeziness of it makes it sound like a joke. “So what’s next?”

“Dinner,” Natsuo says. “Hopefully.”

Hawks eyes him for a second.

And then starts to grin.

“Really,” Natsuo says. “Idiot in there let Eiji bully him into making gyoza from scratch even though he only has one hand. If he even gets them folded, I’m gonna consider us lucky.” Hawks’s grin only widens, which reminds him— “Eiji’s got something for you, by the way. You’re gonna love it.”

“I would love it if he gave me a muddy rock,” Hawks says.

He probably means it.

“Hey,” Hawks says. “Do mice hibernate?”

Natsuo almost trips over his own feet. “What?”

“I’ve got a plan,” Hawks says, which is terrifying to say the least.

“If you’re talking about mice,” Natsuo says, “I have no idea. If you’re talking about my wife, she didn’t get any colder or sleepier in winter than anybody else.”

“Duly noted,” Hawks says, which doesn’t answer the question. Of course. “The plan is to get custom electric blankets done with the design of Enji’s old suit, but I want to be sure they’d enjoy them. You wanna go in on the prototype with me?”

Natsuo stares at him. “You were just talking about buying a yacht.”

Hawks starts up a brand-new grin. Natsuo hates that he can distinguish it from the previous one. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“Just out of curiosity,” Natsuo says, “how often do people try to punch you in the face? On average.”

Hawks grins wider, which is, regrettably, not even a surprise. “Daily? Weekly? Or do you want all the data since I figured out around age seven that being a little shit kept people’s attention on me for longer, even if I was still doing what they said?”

Fortunately, they’re coming up to the gate. “I retract the question. But I’m not going to help you make weird niche merch of my fucking dad.”

“Awesome niche merch of your fucking dad,” Hawks says, cheerfully. “Even if that means forfeiting your vote for what charity the proceeds go to?”

Natsuo has had a long damn day.

The words “I trust you” come out of his mouth before he can stop them.

Hawks looks stunned for a second.

And then incredibly smug.

Just what they fucking need.

It is, though, a bit sweet—albeit also a bit bizarre—how his feathers fluff up a little as Natsuo unlocks the door, and Eiji’s little voice trails down the hall to reach them.

“…and they have a puppy, Grampa!”

“Honeybunnies,” Hawks calls, kicking his boots off so fast his feet blur, “we’re home!”

“Hawks!” Eiji cries.

“And me,” Natsuo says.

Eiji gasps. “Daddy!”

So there’s that.

There’s also the way his father frowns at Hawks as Natsuo trails him into the kitchen. “A favor.”

“Anything,” Hawks says.

Natsuo’s father’s expression doesn’t change. “Never call me ‘honeybunny’ again for as long as I live.”

“Anything but that,” Hawks says.

Natsuo drapes his jacket over the back of his chair, ruffles Eiji’s hair gently in greeting, rolls up his sleeves, and heads to the sink to wash his hands and rescue his father from the moderate culinary cataclysm unfolding—or just not folding in the first place—all over the countertops. “What are the rules, here? Is he allowed to call you ‘honeybunny’ posthumously?”

“Don’t talk about that,” his father says.

Natsuo pauses in taking things away from him to try to parse his expression, which still hasn’t changed.

His father lowers his voice, as if Hawks isn’t standing five feet away with two hundred sound sensors sticking out of his back. “It upsets him.”

Sure enough, a ripple in the air is their only warning before Hawks is clinging to Natsuo’s father’s back again. “See? This is why you’re my honeybunny.”

“He should at least be your honeybear,” Natsuo says. “Works on multiple levels that way.”

The look of sheer fucking betrayal that his father gives him is absolutely magnificent.

“My snugglebug,” Hawks says, trying valiantly not to laugh into Natsuo’s father’s back. “My sugar booger. My giant, angry cream puff.”

Natsuo’s father sighs quietly. “I’m writing you both out of my will.”

“Good,” Hawks says. “Leave everything to Eiji.”

Natsuo clears his throat. “And Fuyumi. And Shouto.”

“Shouto’s fine,” Hawks says. “That disaster triad is putting three pro hero salaries towards a one-bedroom apartment.”

“No way,” Natsuo says. “If they were living in a one-bedroom, somebody would be dead.”

A glance to his left confirms a sliver of the grin past his father’s shoulder. “Wanna bet?”

“No,” Natsuo says. “You have eyes everywhere and all kinds of questionable sources.” He sets his first mostly-successful gyoza down, wipes his hand on the front of his jacket—partly just to make his father cringe—and pulls out his phone. “I’ll just ask him.”

“Somebody died?” Eiji asks, sounding so concerned that it freezes Natsuo’s hand with his thumb hovering over his texts.

“Everybody’s okay, bud,” Natsuo says, quickly, forcing a warm smile for him to reinforce the reassurance. “We’re just joking around.”

Eiji looks at him plaintively for a few seconds. “Okay.”

Natsuo’s father shifts, his voice coming gentler than a moment ago. “Eiji, do you want to give Hawks his surprise?”

“We gotta have dinner first,” Eiji says. “He’s always so hungry!”

That’s Hayami again.

“This kid,” Hawks mutters, slightly weakly. “Thanks, Eiji. You’re the MVP.”

Eiji tips his head. “The what?”

“The best,” Hawks says.

“No,” Eiji says, firmly, “you’re the best. That’s why you’re number one. In all Japan. Japan’s so big! My teacher showed us a map! There must be a gazillion heroes, and you’re cooler than all of them.”

“Enji,” Hawks says, even more weakly. “May I be excused?”

Natsuo’s father reaches around with the one remaining hand to stroke his hair. “Go clean up.”

“Good idea,” Hawks says.

He doesn’t sweep directly out of the room, though—he pauses to catch Eiji’s head between both hands and plant a kiss on the crown of it.

“You’re my favorite kid in the whole, wide world,” he says.

Eiji’s mouth falls open as Hawks keeps moving, disappearing into the living room. “What about Naru?”

Hawks’s voice is already distant. “He’s my favorite baby!”

The matter of his brother’s honor settled again, Eiji nods to himself and returns his attention to the latest crayon masterpiece.

Naru, for his part, blinks over at them and then holds a well-coated block out towards Natsuo’s father. “Pah.”

Natsuo’s father steps away from the food and takes the spit-dripping toy in his solitary hand. He looks at it intently, turning it over and examining all of the sides.

“Good choice,” he says. “Thank you.”

Naru smiles his gummy little smile and claps his sticky little hands.

That last stupid class today was more of the same shit—more of the psychiatric word salad, toiling to convince a bunch of broken people that they can fix themselves by force with a sufficient quantity of mindfulness. Like it’s their fault. Like the world ripping pieces from their sides, from their legs, from their hearts and choking them down raw and bloody is a minor inconvenience, and they can walk the same way they did before if they just try hard enough. That the pain is in their heads.

It is in Natsuo’s head, because it’s everywhere. It’s all around him, prickling on the surface of his skin, crystalline in every breath, twingeing with every heartbeat. He’s not a fucking robot. He can’t replace the damaged parts—can’t re-build himself. Can’t undo this. Can’t unmake it. Can’t move on.

This is what he has now.

These are the tools he has available.

He picks up a knife that his father laid down and slices some daikon very, very thin so that it doesn’t get too slimy.

Towards the end of dinner, Eiji is watching Hawks’s progress carefully. By the sound of it, Hawks has spent the vast majority of his life since he was that age under observation of one kind or another, so he’s definitely making a conscious show of pacing himself as he eats. It should probably be worthy of an eye-roll, but Natsuo is conserving his energy tonight.

Maybe it’s good, though—for both of them. Maybe it’s good for Hawks to have to set an example for someone so, so far from jaded. And maybe it’s good for Eiji to have someone who the hidden daggers have sharpened so much that hardly anything can cut him—someone almost unassailable—standing between him and the rest of the world, feet planted, swords drawn, wings outstretched.

Eiji reaches out and tugs gently at Hawks’s hoodie sleeve. “Are you all finished? You got enough?”

“Yup!” Hawks says. “Are you?”

“Yeah!” Eiji says, scrambling out of his booster seat so fast that a swarm of feathers follows him, since no one else can move to help him quick enough. “Come see!”

Hawks shoots Natsuo’s father a quizzical look, earns only a flicker of a smile and the uneven shrug, and sticks his tongue out before trailing after Eiji.

To hell with it. Natsuo wants to see this.

Naru needs to be burped anyway, so Natsuo gathers him up and heads out to watch the fireworks, and—none too surprisingly, really—his father isn’t far behind.

“Should I cover my eyes?” Hawks asks. “Did you get me a pony? A unicorn?”

Eiji giggles, digging through his school bag. “I couldn’t fit a unicorn through the door!”

“Whew,” Hawks says, swiping his arm over his brow for good measure. “Thank goodness. I didn’t really want a unicorn. I dunno where we’d keep it. Who would feed it?”

“Grampa,” Eiji says, calmly. Natsuo hears his father choke on a breath, and Hawks’s grin goes devilishly wide, but that’s all there’s time for before Eiji straightens up, each hand brandishing one of the masks he made. “Look! One for each of us!”

Hawks stares for a second.

Then his eyes light up, and the smile goes so wide and bright and brimmingly sincere that Natsuo knows he was right.

They’re good for each other.

“No way!” Hawks says. “Did you make these? They’re so cool!”

Eiji races over to shove one at him, then starts bouncing up and down as he holds his over his face. “My teacher helped! You like it?”

“Are you kidding?” Hawks says, immediately flinging his up and glowering through the eyeholes. “I love it! It’s the best! Hang on—”

He boosts himself a foot up off of the ground, then arranges the wings behind himself to double the breadth of his shoulders. He positions himself just under the ceiling light, and the subtle way he flicks the feathers back and forth does sort of look like flame if you squint a little.

He pitches his voice low. “Stay in school, kids. Just—do your best. Or don’t. I don’t care. Do I look like All Might to you? Get that camera out of my face, I’m working. Are you dense?”

Natsuo’s father clears his throat very loudly, but he doesn’t raise his hand fast enough to hide another hint of a smile.

“Was that a direct quote?” he asks.

“Mélange,” Hawks says. The feathers ripple. “I am a connoisseur.”

Eiji reaches up, laughing, and the feathers swirl around him. They lift him to the level of Hawks’s shoulder—putting two paper Endeavor masks near the ceiling, glaring down.

Eiji is doing a rather poor job of glaring, actually, but he’s so good at everything else that Natsuo’s not going to hold it against him.

Hawks nudges him very gently. “You have to look a little angrier.”

Eiji blinks at him, Hayami’s eyes ringed with orange, wide and wondrous. “Why?”

Natsuo looks at his father. His father looks at Hawks. Hawks lowers the mask and stares at the nearby ceiling for a few seconds.

“Well,” he says, slowly, “I guess you don’t have to.”

Eiji squirms, and the feathers swiftly usher him back down, laying his feet gently on the carpet—so that he can run right up to Natsuo.

“Daddy,” he says, emphatically, “Naru wants a try.”

So far, Natsuo has been doing a frankly phenomenal job of not letting this get to him. “You think so?” Fuck it. He kneels down. “You might need to help him hold it.”

It’s the damnedest thing.

The mask actually looks funny superimposed over Naru’s tiny, pudgy baby face. There’s just something unavoidably, delightfully absurd about an infant wearing a moustache made of flame.

“Perfect,” Natsuo says. The laugh tickles at the base of his throat but doesn’t come loose.

“I dunno,” Hawks says, landing easily. “Don’t you think it clashes with his Mousebaby branding?”

“He can be both!” Eiji says, carefully adjusting one of the little bits of tissue paper that protrudes off of the side as Naru chortles at nothing more than the influx of attention. “He can be anything!”

“Gosh,” Hawks says, and there’s an odd quietness to it that makes Natsuo glance up. “You’re right.”

Hawks is looking down at the art project in his hands, fingertips grazing along the clumsily-cut curves around the edge.

Natsuo has seen a lot of different versions of Hawks, over the years—between the magazine covers and the war and the interviews and the sanctuary that he’s made for himself inside this house—but this one’s new.

“Hang on a second, kiddo,” Hawks says, slowly. “I’ve got something for you, too.”

Eiji turns around, but Hawks is already slipping out around the doorway to the hall. Natsuo glances over at his father, who just shrugs again.

Maybe that’s part of the strange magic.

Maybe Natsuo’s father found out early on that Hawks was one thing in his life that he could never hope to control, and he eventually gave up trying.

Maybe it was so much more than worth it.

Rummaging noises emanate from the direction of the hall closet. Something clatters, and then a door shuts.

Hawks saunters back in with something in his hands. Nostalgia or wistfulness or whatever this is—it’s a weird look on him.

What he’s holding is a little plush toy of Endeavor. It’s the first version of his outfit, with the wide orange line down the center of his chest, and the others across his waist and his shoulders. The big, blank eyes as the doll’s only feature make him look thoughtful and approachable in a way the real thing sure as hell never did. He’s got stubby little hands and a round body.

And he’s old. The colors are faded, and the felt is worn.

Hawks carries him over like a precious relic, cradling him in both hands, and kneels down in front of Eiji to hold him out.

“Just in case your sharkie ever needs some help,” Hawks says, and his eyes are tight above the smile. “Just be careful with him, okay? He’s a little bit fragile. He’s been through a lot.”

Eiji hesitates, hands halfway out, searching Hawks’s face. “But he’s yours. I got lotsa toys. It’s okay.”

“I want you to have him,” Hawks says. He straightens one of the little curls of flame that juts off of the shoulders. “He helped me stay strong for a long time. I think he’s ready to help somebody else now.”

Eiji gazes down at the plush for a few seconds and then slowly reaches out to take it this time.

“You can tell him any secrets that you want,” Hawks says. He draws his hands back and curls his fingers as Eiji grasps on. “He’ll never tell anybody.”

Eiji wraps both arms tight around the little plush and smiles. “Like the real Grampa.”

“Yup,” Hawks says. “He’s always gonna look out for you.”

Natsuo takes a deep breath. “What do we say, bud?”

Eiji bounces forward, tucking the plush in against himself with his right arm, throwing the left around Hawks’s neck to hug him. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Hawks says, squeezing him tight.

Eiji presses his face into Hawks’s neck for a long moment before he peels away and galumphs directly over to his brother, who has made several stymied attempts to chew on his own gift. “Naru! Look! It’s a little Grampa! Fwoosh!”

Hawks straightens up, shoves his hands in his pockets, and saunters over to lean against the remnants of Natsuo’s father’s right arm.

Natsuo’s father gives Hawks a look.

Hawks smiles, shrugs, and elbows gently. “What?” he says. “I don’t need Endeavor anymore.”

He slips his arm around Natsuo’s father’s waist, settling in like a contented cat as Natsuo’s father shifts to let him.

“Just you,” Hawks says.

There’s a long pause.

Then Natsuo’s father turns far enough to lay the back of his hand against Hawks’s forehead—an unspoken implication of Are you sick?

“Shut up,” Hawks says, but there’s more than a hint of a wince underneath his grin. “That was cute. You hear me? It was cute as heck.”

“‘Cute’ is what you are normally,” Natsuo’s father says, “when you’re not trying.” He peers down. “That was… something else.”

Hawks stares up at him.

He looks back.

“I’m verbalizing,” Natsuo’s father says, slowly. “Was that—”

“Okay,” Hawks says, swiveling sharply on his heel and extracting himself in a single motion, the better to start stalking directly down the hall. “’Bye.”

Natsuo’s father stares blankly after him. “Where are you going?”

“Somewhere else,” Hawks calls without even turning around. “Because otherwise I will jump your bones in front of two generations of impressionable youth. Thank me later. If you know what I mean.”

“It would be difficult not to,” Natsuo’s father mutters.

Natsuo can’t even make an appropriately disgusted face, because he’s too close to Eiji’s adorable demonstration to Naru of how to make the Endeavor plush’s arms move around.

“Uh,” he says.

His father just shrugs again.

The next morning, Hawks staggers into the kitchen halfway through breakfast, still wearing his pajamas, plunks down into the chair next to Natsuo’s father, and leans against him, blinking blearily.

Natsuo’s father doesn’t even put down his coffee mug. “Good morning.”

“Nnh,” Hawks says.

Natsuo’s father passes the coffee mug to him, and he slugs what must be half of the damn cup.

Maybe Natsuo will keep living out in the yard for a little while longer, until he’s psychologically prepared to deal with all the action that his shitty dad gets these days.

Compromise or something.

Could be worse.

Friday doesn’t mean as much as it used to—but time in general still doesn’t. Natsuo is still losing swathes of it—still periodically looking up and realizing that hours have whittled away, and he can’t remember how he spent them.

But Friday does mean that he gets to spend more time with Eiji for the next two days. And this particular Friday means that he gets to see Mom tomorrow, because she’s coming over to pick up the kids while his father goes to therapy. She suggested taking Eiji to the library before the park. Eiji’s going to lose his little mind when he discovers how many books there are out in the world, waiting to be read—a not-insignificant number of which are about sharks.

Then Mom is going to stick around, and Fuyumi’s going to come over, and Shouto’s going to bring his weird boyfriends, and they’re all going to have dinner. Natsuo doesn’t know how much of it is all of them trying to check on him and how much of it is warm, fuzzy family feelings, but he’s finding that he doesn’t really care. He wants to see them. The precise proportions of their reasons aren’t important. And maybe the desire to check on him is a warm, fuzzy feeling, in its way.

In the meantime, they carry on through the usual routine: taking Eiji to school, puttering around the house with Naru, another adjusted workout, picking Eiji up again, running to the market, loading up, coming back, putting both kids down for a nap. Eiji probably won’t need one for too much longer. Weird to think about. He’s less of a baby every day. The time just doesn’t stop.

Eiji passes out almost before Natsuo has shut the door, but for once Naru doesn’t want to imitate his big brother. He fusses and whines and procrastinates for the better part of twenty minutes before Natsuo finally clocks enough pacing back and forth while stroking his hair and whispering to him to soothe him and set him down.

Natsuo’s father heads out into the garden. Natsuo works on the chaos in the kitchen for a few minutes until it’s time to go wake Eiji.

He slows his steps down as he enters the hallway, and he stops in front of the door to force himself to take a deep breath. He’s fine. Everything’s fine.

He curls his fingers carefully around the door handle and turns it gradually to draw the door open as quietly as he can. Having someone wake you with a soft word is different than bolting upright because you can hear your bedroom door being opened.

It turns out Eiji doesn’t need either one, though.

He’s already awake.

He’s sitting on the floor in front of his bed, bathed in a far too familiar orange glow.

Natsuo’s heart clogs his throat.

It’s not—fire.

But it is, too.

Eiji is sitting cross-legged, leaned forward with both hands flattened on the tatami in front of him. Four little mice made of flame bound and scramble and prance around him, their tails turned to wispy lines of light. One scampers over his knuckles, and he smiles. He flips his hand over, and it curls up in his palm, sniffing at his wrist. He lifts it up to his face, peering at it. It stretches up to sniff at his cheek, and he giggles.

“Eiji,” Natsuo says, with the hoarse, ragged remains of his voice. “What—where did those come from?”

Eiji’s head snaps up. His whole body goes still—and the fire mice freeze.

Fuck. Too rough.

He has to do better.

He swallows, shoves it all aside—pushes with all his fucking might, slams it into a safe, wrenches the door shut, locks it tight.

He breathes.

He takes one step into the room, crouches down, and tries to smile.

“Sorry,” he says. “That startled me. I was supposed to come wake you up.” Keep breathing. That simple. “Did… did you make these guys?”

Eiji cups both hands together, and the little mouse he lifted runs around the circumference of his palms. Eiji watches it move. “I woke up,” he says. “I was dreaming about Mommy, and I woke up, and I was really sad, and… they just came.”

Eiji doesn’t need a brokenhearted shadow of a man.

He needs his dad.

He needs to know he didn’t do anything wrong. He needs to know he’ll be okay.

Maybe he will, someday. Natsuo hopes so.

“Are you moving them?” Natsuo asks, slowly, holding every word in his mouth for an extra second to make sure it sounds gentle when he lets it out. “Are you making them do stuff? Or do they do it on their own?”

“They listen to me,” Eiji says, looking down at the other three, which gather in a slightly uneven line, unanimously gaze up at him, and then turn in a circle all together, their tails flicking behind them. Eiji smiles down at them, eyes gilded orange by their light. “See?”

He could be incredible at rescues.

Or—

Not.

He could stay far, far away from the world that has killed and maimed so many members of this family already.

He could be an accountant.

He could brighten the lives of the people around him with his warmth and his kindness, and leave it at that.

He could be ordinary.

He could make Todoroki just a name.

Not a curse.

“Wow,” Natsuo says. He creeps closer. He chokes his heart down. He makes himself breathe. “That’s pretty amazing, bud. Are they hot? Do they feel hot to you?”

Eiji starts to shake his head and then pauses. “They’re—warm, Daddy. They feel warm. But not hot.”

All the tiny mice turn to look at him in eerie unison.

“Here,” Eiji says. “See?”

Natsuo makes himself sit, makes himself take a breath and hold it, makes himself hold still—

This is Hayami’s son.

Eiji will never hurt him.

Not on purpose.

He doesn’t have it in him.

One of the mice scurries over and pauses just by Natsuo’s knee, unfurling up onto its hind legs, sniffing at the air, tipping its head back and forth as it looks at him.

They’re—pretty, in a way. They’re staggeringly detailed—this close, he can make out individual whiskers, tiny claws, the subtle ripple of the fur. But every single bit of them looks like it’s made of roiling, shifting, churning flame.

Natsuo lays his right hand on the floor, palm open, fingers spread.

The mouse does a distinctly pleased-looking little shimmy as it drops back down onto all fours and then crawls up into his hand.

It’s much closer to hot than it is to warm. Its minuscule feet feel like spindly firebrands, and its whole body radiates. It’s not quite enough to burn him, but it takes all of his concentration to withstand the urge to jerk his hand away.

The tiny mouse sniffs around the base of his thumb, runs down the length of his fingers, runs back, and then scrambles off of the far side of his palm to scurry back over to the other ones again.

Natsuo curls his fingers slowly. His skin retained a lot of the heat.

“I need you to do something, bud,” Natsuo says, trying to even out the unsteadiness in his voice. “Something really important.”

Eiji stares up at him. Hayami’s eyes. “Okay, Daddy.”

He doesn’t even know what it is yet, but he’s agreeing. The trust is still there—in Natsuo himself, and in the whole world. He still believes that people are good, and they want what’s best for him.

“I need you to be really careful with them,” Natsuo says. “Even though they don’t feel warm to you, they still are. It’s important to be really, really careful letting them go anywhere except on your skin. They could hurt other people on accident, and they might even be hot enough to start a fire if they touch the wrong thing at the wrong time. Does that make sense?”

Eiji’s little brow furrows as he thinks it over.

“They’re kind of like candles,” Natsuo says. “When you have them out, think of them that way. Just be careful. And if you need help, please ask.”

That lights Eiji’s face up from within, as well as with the orange glow. “I will, Daddy.” He looks down at that first mouse, which is crawling up into his sleeve, sniffing curiously all the way. Natsuo watches the fabric, clenching his teeth. So far, so good. “Candles are drippy. Like Naru. How’m I gonna know if they’re too hot?”

Natsuo happens to know two experts on the topic of not burning yourself or others with something that emanates from you like this.

One of them is right outside.

“Are you ready to tell your grampa?” he asks, keeping his voice as calm as he can.

Eiji hesitates. The mouse pokes its nose back out of his sleeve, the better to peer up at him. “You think—do you think he’ll like them? I don’t wanna make him sad.”

“I think he might cry,” Natsuo says, because unfortunately it’s the truth. “But not because he’s sad.”

Eiji’s face scrunches up. “Why would he cry if he’s not sad? I don’t wanna make him cry, Daddy.”

“People cry for a lot of reasons,” Natsuo says. “Sometimes it’s because they’re happy.”

That distresses Eiji even more. “Why?”

“I don’t know, bud,” Natsuo says. Even more unfortunately, that’s also true. “People do a lot of weird things.”

“Yeah,” Eiji says, resignedly, as if he’s watched the whole pageant of human possibility pass by him and found it uninspiring. Then he perks up again, just as fast. “You think Naru will like them?”

“I think he’s gonna love them,” Natsuo says. “And you’ll need to be really careful with them around him, too, okay?”

“I will, Daddy!” Eiji says. The other three mice climb up the front of his shirt and nestle in around his neck, one of them sniffing at his ear, and he giggles again, squirming. “Promise!”

The house is too big to yell through, and Natsuo doesn’t want to risk raising his voice in front of Eiji anyway. He fishes his phone out.

He should change the contact name. It still says Endeavor.

Regardless of the fact that his father’s single hand was probably occupied, the line picks up before it’s even been half a ring. “Natsuo?”

“Hey,” Natsuo says. “Come over to Eiji’s room. He’s got something you need to see.”

“I’ll be right there,” his father says, and hangs up.

People do weird things.

And hard things.

And terrible things.

And wonderful ones.

Natsuo’s father doesn’t cry.

He stops in the doorway, frozen like a statue, and doesn’t move at all.

He’s backlit, shadows carved out across his face by the sharp lines of his heavy features. His expression stills, too—an unsettling twist of wariness, first and foremost.

Which could evolve into anything.

It’s not neutral. Enji Todoroki has never felt neutral about anything in his life.

This is the look of limbo—of him calculating, processing, deciding what to do, determining the fate to follow, constructing what the future will be. He’s burnt the world into his image a million other times.

He stays there—utterly still, not even breathing, filling the entire doorway, blocking the light—for so long that Natsuo’s spine tingles, and his head rings, and he feels his body curling itself smaller, leaning towards Eiji. Protecting them both.

Natsuo’s father stays there for long enough that the tiny mice start to get agitated—and then retreat towards Eiji, circling closer, one of them scampering up over his pants leg to climb into his cupped hands.

Then Natsuo’s father breathes out—a slow, long, deep exhale, not quite a sigh. It lowers his shoulders, enlivening the hulking frame. His left hand doesn’t look steady as he runs it down over his face, but he steps forward, evenly enough, and swiftly sinks down onto one knee so that he doesn’t tower over the two of them anymore.

“Eiji,” he says, very quietly, “are you all right?”

Eiji stares up at him wide-eyed, cradling the mouse to his chest. It peeks over his fingertips. “I’m okay, Grampa. Are you?”

“Yes,” Natuso’s father says, which is total bullshit, but okay. He sits down—cross-legged like always, bracing himself on his hand as he settles. His knees crack.

And then he lays his hand down on the floor, the back pressed to the tatami, the broad palm open.

An orange light swells from the center of his palm, but before Natsuo can even lean back, it resolves into the most delicate flicker of fire that he thinks he’s ever seen. It uncoils so daintily that it looks impossible in his father’s hand.

And then it twists itself—just for a second—into the unmistakable shape of a flower.

An iris.

Eiji’s eyes light up. “You can do it too, Grampa?”

“Not quite,” Natuso’s father says, but the gesture had what must have been the intended effect—one of the mice scuttles over and sniffs at the side of his hand, then promptly climbs up into it. He stays very still, watching it explore his half-curled fingers, tiny flickering wisp of a tail whispering over his skin.

Eiji giggles, only a little weakly. “He likes you, Grampa.”

“I like him, too,” Natsuo’s father says. He looks up, searching now—trying to soften it, by the rest of his face, but there’s only so much he can do. It still looks severe in the firelight.

It does to Natsuo, anyway.

Eiji just smiles at him.

“Do you feel warm?” Natsuo’s father asks, gently. He tips his palm slightly, and the mouse hops down onto the tatami again. “Right here?” He raises his hand, touching the fingertips to his sternum. “Just behind the bone, right where you breathe.”

Eiji gazes at him wide-eyed for a second, then looks down at himself. The mouse in his hands scampers up his arm, tiny claws scrabbling in his sleeve, and settles on his shoulder, huddling close to his neck. He lays both emptied hands over his chest, spreading his fingers, and then slowly nods.

“Right here,” he says. “It’s hot.”

Natsuo’s heart climbs like the mouse—all claws and grapples, clambering up the back of his throat to stick there, pounding with an urgency that shakes its way out of him.

All he can think of is Touya.

All he can think of is Touya, who loved the unfurling flame so much that he cherished the way that it ravaged him. All he can think of is Touya’s bandaged fingers and scarred wrists, the peeling blisters that he demanded help with in a whisper in the middle of the night because he couldn’t reach to change the bandages. The way they would peel, and split, and bleed, and he didn’t care—the way he wanted them to. The way he was utterly, intractably convinced that the pain made him stronger.

Natsuo tries to swallow down his heart, tries to breathe around it. He doesn’t want Eiji to sense this—Eiji’s already scared, because he can tell that there’s tension in the room that he doesn’t understand. Don’t make it worse. Don’t make him panic. It’s not his fault. None of it is his fault.

Natsuo’s father nods back, slowly. He looks down at the enterprising little mouse now snuffling at his slippered right foot. He very, very gently strokes his fingertips along its back.

He’s too calm about all of this.

It’s like he was—

Ready.

Like he had time to prepare.

Did he see something, before Natsuo got here? Did he—

“You’re doing a very good job right now,” Natsuo’s father says. “But we need to make sure to be very careful. Anything warm like this has the potential to hurt someone—you, or other people—even if that’s not what you meant.”

Eiji’s eyes go wide and round again, and his mouth turns down. The nearest little mouse nestles in close against him, the other two scrambling up onto his knee until he cups his tiny hands over them. “That’s what Daddy said too. I don’t wanna hurt anyone.”

Natsuo’s father’s smile is soft and… sad. That’s what that is. What it has to be. “I know. And we can make sure that you don’t. But we’ll have to work very hard so that you know exactly how and when it’s safe to let your friends out, and what it’s safe to let them do.” The façade starts to crack. The strain shows through. “You… your uncle Shouto is very good at—”

“I need help,” Eiji blurts out. “Can you help me, Grampa? Please?” He leans forward desperately, and the mice start scrabbling over his clothes much more urgently. The one examining Natsuo’s father’s foot shies away and makes a break for Eiji again. “They just—they just came. I don’t wanna hurt anybody. I don’t wanna be bad.”

“Hey,” Natsuo says, before he can second-guess it—before he can even breathe. “Eiji—bud. Listen. You’re not. You’re not bad. Your quirk’s not bad. You didn’t do anything wrong. Okay?”

There were a lot of bandages, in this house—rolls and rolls of gauze. Like a museum full of mummified remains, still walking.

He never saw them on his father’s hands.

That doesn’t mean that they were never there—maybe they were, a long time ago. Maybe it took his father years to hone the skill, to learn to modulate the flame so precisely that it burned everything except his skin. Maybe he spent his childhood bleeding for Endeavor, too.

But he learned.

He learned how to control it so well that it always looked effortless. It looked like a part of him—like the essence of him. Like he’d been born to it all along.

He might be able to prevent Eiji from ever needing the bandages at all.

“Your grampa is an expert,” Natsuo says. He scoots in closer and gently ruffles Eiji’s hair, gently squeezes his shoulder, gently chafes a hand up and down his back. “And he’s right. You’re already doing so great. It’s gonna be fine. It’s just like reading, right? You have to practice for a while before it gets easier. But you can do it. I know you can. Okay?”

Eiji looks down at the little mice—they’re all still nervous, darting around him and hiding in the folds of his shirt, ducking in and out of his sleeves. Natsuo hopes they don’t get hotter when Eiji is upset, but he’s not especially optimistic. He knows how these things go.

“Okay, Daddy,” Eiji whispers.

Natsuo’s father shifts forward—although shift is a generous word, actually, for the undignified little crawling scramble thing that the motion requires, especially with just one hand.

He settles down on Eiji’s other side, close enough to lay that hand very lightly on Eiji’s shoulder. It completely dwarfs him.

“Eiji,” Natsuo’s father says, very softly. “You don’t need to worry about this. Your daddy is right. It’s going to take a little time and some patience, but you can do anything you want to. And we’ll all help you—with this, and with anything you need. We’re here for you. Always.”

One of the little mice darts up Eiji’s shirt and starts sniffing at Natsuo’s father’s hand as he squeezes Eiji’s shoulder gently.

Natsuo’s father almost cracks a smile.

“That tickles,” he says. “What do you think? Do you think Naru would like to see them? Or Hawks?”

“I gotta be careful with Naru,” Eiji murmurs, slowly rotating his hand so that the mouse can clamber around it like a tiny hamster wheel in slow motion. “He’s my brother. I want him to be safe.”

“Yeah,” Natsuo says. Funny. Kind of feels like he has a fire mouse in his throat, all things considered. “But we’ll help you with that, too.”

Eiji nods seriously.

Then he lowers both hands, cupping them together, and waits for all four mice to climb in before he lifts them up to his face to gaze at them intently.

“Listen up, mice,” he says. “Which one of you wants to try to tickle Hawks?”

All of them stand to attention at once.

Oh, boy.

Hawks has to know that they’re there. The guy knows fucking everything—he’s got radar, sonar, seismic sensors, microphones, and who the hell knows what else attached to his back in bulk.

But when he’s kicked his boots off in the genkan, he doesn’t even glance over to where they’re all peeking around the living room doorway like something out of a damn cartoon.

He just crouches down low to examine the tiny, flickering orange creature that just scampered over towards him, tail whipping jauntily behind it as it bounds along.

He blinks at it.

He tilts his head.

And then he smiles so broadly and so genuinely that he looks younger than he has in a long, long time.

“We’re in trouble now,” he says, loudly. “It looks like somebody in the house might’ve manifested the coolest quirk ever.”

Eiji covers his mouth with both hands, but it doesn’t do much to stifle the giggles.

Hawks peels his gloves off, shoves them into the back of his belt, and lays both hands down on the hardwood with his palms up.

The mouse’s solemn mission of trying to tickle his fingertips is instantly successful, and the breathless way he laughs makes Eiji absolutely bust up giggling, and then Naru starts chortling too, and—

Well.

People do weird things.

And Natsuo would do anything for this.

Natsuo can see as clear as day that his father is struggling with it, too, though, even as they’re both trying to act as normal as possible for Eiji’s sake. After another installment of Iji’s adventures—the overall narrative of which Natsuo reluctantly has to admit really does beat out the quality of any of the kids’ shows he’s been able to find—he and his father and Hawks each give Eiji an extra-tight bedtime hug.

And Natsuo’s father quietly leaves the spare baby monitor in his room.

It’s obvious that they’re all feeling it, because the three of them stand there in the hallway staring at Eiji’s closed door for a couple of seconds before anybody moves.

And the anybody is Naru, who pounds his tiny fists against Natsuo’s collarbones and then tries to nibble on his shoulder.

Natsuo’s father eyes him, then ushers them all into the living room, gesturing for Natsuo to move first before grazing Hawks’s arm and nudging him along too.

Natsuo bounces Naru a little and braces himself.

His father looks at him, frowns at the floor for a second, looks at him again, and takes a deep breath.

“Are you—okay?” he asks. “About Eiji’s—”

“No,” Natsuo says.

He meant to lie.

Too late.

“But that’s not important,” he says. “This is what we’ve got.”

He watches his father swallow a wince before nodding.

His father is still way too relaxed about all of this.

And it clicks.

Natsuo’s head spins, and his throat sticks. Heat climbs in his chest. “Did you—you knew.”

“Suspected,” his father says, wearily. “He ran a fever, the third week. It was…”

Natsuo chokes on the edges of all the things he wants to say—too many vituperations bubbling up at once, too much vitriol to articulate.

His father looks at him, steadily now. “Your mother asked me not to tell you.”

At least that gives Natsuo a target. “How dare you fucking blame this on—”

“I’m telling you what happened,” his father says, with a creeping note—exasperation or desperation, Natsuo can’t quite tell. “She asked me not to tell you until we were sure, because she knew it would hurt you.”

It does.

So does the fact that they kept it from him.

But maybe—

Maybe that was for the best.

If she’d told him then, he might have…

Things were… rough. Really fucking rough. It wouldn’t have gone well. He’s just far enough now from the deepest circles of the pit to understand that much.

Hawks is watching both of them, utterly silent, utterly still, utterly unshakable.

Natsuo takes a deep breath, clenches and unclenches his fist, strokes his hand slowly over Naru’s hair, and lets the breath out slow.

“Okay,” he says. “Fine.”

“I’m sorry,” his father says, so quietly it almost disappears. “I wanted—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Natsuo says. Not enough to change anything. “We’re here now.”

His father looks at him for a second.

“And I don’t care,” Natsuo says, slowly, testing his weight on top of the words. “I don’t care what his quirk is, as long as—as long as he doesn’t let it… As long as he’s safe, and he’s happy, and it doesn’t hurt him.”

The last piece of it slides into place.

“This is a chance,” Natsuo says, realizing how true it is as he puts his voice behind the words, “for both of us to step up.”

Hawks’s shoulders tense, but Natsuo’s father just nods wearily.

“It’s not like I love Mom’s quirk either,” Natsuo says. “It’s… Nothing that it stands for or has been used for has been much of any good. Except for Shouto.”

Credit where it’s due—his father doesn’t look away.

“At least this way,” Natsuo says, tamping down on the rising wave of it—the terror of the unknown, the barreling weight of the expectation; “Eiji gets to carry another piece of Hayami with him for his whole life. Right? It doesn’t really matter what they’re made of.”

“They’re his,” Natsuo’s father says, quietly. “And they’re completely unique.”

Hawks’s voice comes a little too brightly. “And they’re cute as shit.”

Natsuo’s father rubs his forehead with his remaining hand, the pad of his thumb pressing deep into the ridges of the scar. “Yes. They’re the cutest fire hazard I’ve seen in a while.”

Natsuo brushes Naru’s hair back. “Should we—I don’t know. Separate them? Keep Naru away for a little while?”

“No,” his father says, immediate but utterly calm—which is weirdly reassuring, because the aghast look on Hawks’s face is honestly closer to how Natsuo felt even suggesting it. “We need to help him understand the seriousness without any additional pressure, and without any punishments. It’s not his fault.”

Natsuo makes himself breathe deep, hugging Naru a little bit closer. “I know.”

His father moves on to rubbing his eyes. “I—nearly died, when mine manifested. I was at preschool. The teachers panicked. I almost burned the building to the ground.”

Hawks stares at him.

That’s exactly that this family needs: more unexamined, half-buried historical trauma suddenly resurfacing.

Natsuo wants to laugh and cry and go climb into bed and pull the blanket over his head.

“Shit,” he says instead. “Okay. Noted. What about Shouto?”

His father will remember that Natsuo wasn’t there—that he was relegated somewhere else, even then.

“It came out when he was crying,” his father says. “But your mother handed him to me and then calmed him down. Kept it under control.”

That’s… better, at least.

Natsuo’s about to ask the next obvious question when his father sighs quietly, scrapes his fingers through his beard, and shoots a grateful look at Hawks for the hand rubbing at his back.

Then he turns to Natsuo again.

“What do you think,” Natsuo’s father says, “of… showing him? Maybe letting them run over some paper until it catches, so that he can draw his own conclusions.” His jaw works for a long second, and his eyes go distant again. “I don’t want him to be afraid of himself. But I also don’t want him to get hurt.”

He means that.

Natsuo can hear it, now. He can tell the difference.

“Let’s all just sleep on it,” he says. “We’re keeping an eye on him, and we’ve got plenty of time to strategize. He’s going to be okay.” He bounces Naru again, gently, and then taps the sweet pink nose with his fingertip. “Isn’t he? Your big brother can do anything. Can’t he?”

Naru blinks, then whaps his little tail against Natsuo’s arm, then smiles so big that you can see the edges of his tiny teeth.

Natsuo knows one other person who has very targeted experience on this topic.

He can’t go over there. Not right now. Not like this. He can’t exactly say he knows his limits, because he doesn’t know much of anything, but he does recognize an insanely untenable suggestion when his brain floats one.

He feels equal parts guilty and defiant about it. The last time he went was right before Eiji was born. He showed pictures of Hayami to the receptionist and the nurse who briefed him about progress this and current condition that before they let him in.

He didn’t show any of the pictures to Touya. He was too afraid that Touya might say something horrible about her that would linger in the back of Natsuo’s mind every time he looked at her, no matter how wrong and fucked up and untrue it might be. Touya knew how to get to you. Touya knew how to stab hard and fast before you could move, and he also knew how to let the poison seep out slow—how to get under your skin.

Touya had known Natsuo better than anyone, up until Hayami.

They’d talked awkwardly about stupid shit instead—Natsuo’s work, mostly. Books Touya had been reading because they didn’t limit those, approved TV shows he’d binged in his tiny white-walled room. He’d said he was getting good at basketball because they had a hoop set up in the designated outdoor space. He’d said the fences weren’t even electrified, with a tone of artificially triumphant wryness that made Natsuo want to laugh and gag at the same time. He’d said he’d only killed one guy over a rule-related dispute so far, and Natsuo’s fingers had tightened around the edge of his chair until his knuckles had throbbed, and the guard listening to their every damn word had meaningfully cleared his throat.

Touya had grinned like a bleached skull.

Natsuo had choked out something like I don’t believe you anyway, you’re way too short to be any good, and then Touya had laughed—high and bright and ringing.

Come back and play, and we’ll find out.

When Natsuo had been leaving, the people at the desk had asked him when he thought he might—come back, that was.

It was like he’d come down with the flu in that fucking room—shaky and nauseous, his hands clammy, his legs weak, feeling only faintly present in the world around him. Maybe this place turned you into a ghost, if you stayed too long. Maybe it just revived the ones already in you.

He’d said I’m not sure, which had seemed more noncommittal than any of the other lies he could have told. It was weird—they’d almost seemed to care about it, about him visiting, about Touya having someone. Like Touya had charmed them, somehow. Like he’d almost won them over, in spite of all of it. In spite of everything he was, and everything he’d done.

Natsuo had said It stresses out my wife, which wasn’t quite a lie. Hayami was always careful with him, when Touya came to the forefront of his thoughts for one reason or another. She’d seen what it dredged up, and what it brought out.

But she was the one who’d urged him to go. She’d asked if she could come with him, and he’d had to talk her down from it. He’d had nightmares about Touya needling her, provoking her, grabbing her—about him setting her on fire. He’d dreamed that Touya broke through the glass and lunged at her, and it scared her into an early labor, and the baby came out stillborn—frozen silent, ice-shadow blue all over, eyes glassy, with the umbilical cord wrapped tight around his tiny neck.

He’d had to get out of bed and go dry-heave in the bathroom after that one. Which had set off her morning sickness. Which had been a hell of a fucking start to the day.

In the end, he’d convinced her to stay home while he went.

He’d hoped she would forgive him for using her as an excuse.

He’d known he had no intention of going back.

Maybe they’d been able to tell. They were supposedly a bunch of trained psychiatrists or something—at least some of them were. This place was advertised as one of the best in the country. Natsuo couldn’t even imagine how much it fucking cost to keep somebody here.

They’d told him that they were setting up a messaging system, to make it a little easier for busy friends and family members to stay in touch even if they couldn’t make the trip. They’d told him that they’d email him a sign-up link when it was ready, but of course there was no obligation. They’d told him it was just nice, for many of the ‘residents’, to get a sign sometimes that they weren’t alone.

Natsuo thinks he understands it better now.

Just being in the hospital for a week and a half felt like falling off the edge of the world.

He remembers getting the email, back then.

He remembers selecting it and resting his fingertip on the delete key.

He didn’t press it.

It takes him a few minutes to dig it up again. It’s been almost four fucking years, after all.

He wonders the same thing he wondered then: whether they sent an invite to every member of the family—everyone who had tried to visit—or if Touya had asked that they send it just to him.

No one else has ever said anything about it.

It probably won’t even work anymore.

He skims down through the mind-numbing fine print and clicks the link.

He feels like the whole world is vibrating around him as the page loads.

The interface looks janky as shit, with sharp, drop-shadowed edges around the text entry box and headers in royal blue text. The background is a sort of buttery yellow. It looks like it was designed by a high school student in a coding class thirty years ago, not four.

A pop-up expands so suddenly that he almost jumps out of his skin.

!! Please note your conversation WILL be monitored by a Shizukesa Hospital employee, and all messages will be held for approval by this moderator before transmission. Do not discuss sensitive health data or other confidential information. Offensive language will be automatically censored. Shizukesa Hospital reserves the right to delete any message or terminate any conversation that is deemed inappropriate for any reason. Shizukesa Hospital reserves the right to save and store messages for up to 90 days for quality and training purposes. Any indications of criminal wrongdoing, threats of self-harm, or any other endangerment of a participating party are subject to mandatory reporting policies.

Sure, yeah, whatever—does this thing even work?

It feels like Natsuo’s heart is going to explode.

He clicks I accept.

He stares at the screen.

Another pop-up prompts him to type in his name.

And then the page re-loads, and his breath lodges high up in the back of his throat like a shard of ice.

The header updated to Your conversation with TODOROKI, T.

He stares at the empty white box for what feels like a long time.

This is for Eiji.

And—maybe—a little bit for him.

Maybe a lot.

He’s not sure anymore.

He makes his hands move—lays them on the keyboard again, ghosts his thumb over the trackpad to move his cursor into the smaller box helpfully labeled with the words Type your message.

What the fuck is his message?

Start with—

Something.

The basics.

The obvious part.

He types the words out slowly, stares at them, and makes himself hit the Enter key.

Are you there?

It takes twenty-two seconds for the words he just wrote to appear on the screen.

He shouldn’t count.

He can’t help it.

He’s holding his breath, too, like a goddamn idiot.

There’s no indication whatsoever that this thing is even working—and it’s nine o’clock at night. Touya might be asleep. He might be out somewhere in the facility, trying to enjoy what’s left of his life. Natsuo remembers seeing a fairly archaic-looking computer setup in his tiny little room—there wasn’t much else to look at—but there’s no guarantee it’s even on, let alone that he’s looking at it. There’s no—

[Todoroki, T.]
No, I’m in the Maldives

Holy shit.

It feels like he’s plunging his bloody hand into a shark tank.

But Eiji loves sharks.

And Natsuo will do anything it takes.

He writes out:

Sounds nice, how’s the weather?

He stares at it for a long time.

He sends it.

Six seconds later, it pops up in the chat box with his name above it.

Fifteen seconds later, the next replies from Touya appear.

[Todoroki, T.]
You must be doing better
I’m a little disappointed, I had them clean up the cell – I mean room – next to mine :(
Whoa
Holy ****
This guy must be sleeping, I can’t believe he let that go through

It’s—weird.

No. Weird isn’t cold enough, doesn’t creep through him and wriggle under the skin.

It’s completely fucked.

Touya is Dabi—the psychopath who burned dozens of innocent people alive. Who chose that—who lit them up and stoked the fire, kept it raging, sustained it for minute after minute after minute of their desperate, helpless screaming until he burned them down to ash. He murdered people. One by one. Intentionally, deliberately, specifically. He picked out lives and ended them. He gave himself the authority to snuff out the entire existence of another human being—not once, not twice, but thirty-five times, and that’s just what’s on record. No one even knows the final tally. Natsuo checked.

Natsuo dedicated his professional career to trying to accomplish the opposite.

Shouto, too.

And Endeavor did, when you get right down to it. For whatever it’s worth, that’s what he did it all for. That’s what he was gunning for when he gave them up.

But Touya is still Touya, too.

He’s still Natsuo’s brother.

It’s like trying to watch two movies at once with the film reels overlapping, all the contradictory images muddling together.

He’s still Touya.

Touya killed all of those people.

Touya took people like Hayami away from people like him.

That should be the only thing there is to talk about. A murderer should be the only thing he is. None of the rest of it should matter. None of the rest of it should count.

Something sharp and glacial sits heavy in the pit of Natsuo’s stomach even now, just looking at the words on the screen, just envisioning Touya’s fingers—trying to remember how far down the backs of his hands the ribbed purplish lines of the scars extend, struggling to fix them there in his mind instead of imagining the way that Touya used to look. Imagining the person that he was, then. Before. Too long ago to change it. Too recently to forget.

Natsuo swallows hard, breathes deep, and dives in.

[Natsuo]
Touya I’m going to tell you a little secret
Having a severe depressive episode and endangering your kids is objectively not as bad as mass murder

The delays feel endless—every message takes several seconds to go through, and then they come in firecracker clusters. It reeks of an era of the internet that Natsuo just barely remembers from when they were young, when you had to wait for ages for anything to load—where you’d open a video, pause it, and walk away and do something else while it buffered far enough for you to watch it uninterrupted.

Even with the agonizing constraints, Touya doesn’t keep him waiting very long.

[Todoroki, T.]
HA
Look at you go, making jokes about it, I’m so proud
Ok ok you got me hooked with the drama
**** knows there’s nothing else to do around here
All I heard was that they took them away and locked you up for a hot second
Obviously you’re out now, congrats and ****
So what happened?

[Natsuo]
I picked myself up by the bootstraps, what else
Can you send pictures on this thing?

[Todoroki, T.]
How the **** should I know
You can try

Natsuo clicks around until he finds a promising, albeit grotesquely unintuitive, menu that gives him the option to share media.

He adds a photo from a couple hours ago—showing Eiji with one of the mice clasped in his cupped hands, caught mid-giggle as it stretches up to nuzzle at his cheek. One of the others is perched on his shoulder.

It takes just ten seconds for the file to upload.

But a geologic epoch comes and goes before it actually pops up on the screen.

Touya’s reaction joins it ten seconds later.

[Todoroki, T.]
Ermagerd so cuuuuuuuuuute what a perfect little ball of sugar and spice and everything nice and whatever steaming garbage
Is that what you want to hear?

Natsuo’s heart throbs in his throat.

[Natsuo]
Yeah that’s why I messaged
Thanks, that’s all
Catch you later bye

[Todoroki, T.]
Did you reproduce asexually or something?
He looks exactly like you
Except for the obvious **** quirk genetics
Man
Don’t play the lottery

[Natsuo]
I’ll keep that in mind

[Todoroki, T.]
I have to be honest with you Natsuo I could not possibly be less invested in your feelings, but the suspense is killing me
(Killing me faster I guess)
You haven’t talked to me in three and a half ******* years
And you’ve never shown me one of your balls of sugar/spice/garbage before
Is this a therapy thing?

[Natsuo]
No
I just never needed your advice before

[Todoroki, T.]
My WHAT now lmao
Serious question, are you high

[Natsuo]
I’m talking about his quirk you moron
I don’t want him to get hurt
And since he’s your NEPHEW, you shouldn’t either

The box sits silent for what feels like a few seconds longer this time.

Maybe the employee who’s monitoring the messages fell asleep.

Maybe there never was one.

[Todoroki, T.]
You know I’m not the person that you knew anymore
Right?

[Natsuo]
I’m not the person you knew either Touya

[Todoroki, T.]
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, kid
But Touya has been dead for almost twenty years

Hatred is a form of obsession, and obsession is rooted in devotion—however twisted, however warped, however fucked-up and backwards and brutally wrong.

Hatred isn’t the death of love.

Indifference is.

The man who’s messaging him is a lot of things, but he’s not indifferent.

Endeavor is dead.

Touya isn’t.

[Natsuo]
If that was true you wouldn’t even be talking to me

[Todoroki, T.]
You sound like Fuyumi

[Natsuo]
Good.

[Todoroki, T.]
No
Worse
You sound like the old man

[Natsuo]
Okay

[Todoroki, T.]
OKAY?????
NATSUO??????
THE ****

[Natsuo]
Would you just answer the ******* question Touya
How do I help him
Come ON

[Todoroki, T.]
Show me the kid again

[Natsuo]
Twist my arm

He uploads another photo—Hawks took a shit-ton of nice ones and started transferring them to both his and his father’s phones before the mice had even disappeared in little wisps of pale smoke.

It slides into the chat log no faster than the first.

Touya’s reaction is about as instantaneous as seems to be possible.

[Todoroki, T.]
How old is he?

[Natsuo]
Three and a half
Coming up on four really fast
It’s so ******* stupid but it’s true what they say about how fast the time goes

[Todoroki, T.]
He’s so big

[Natsuo]
I know

[Todoroki, T.]
Takes after you

[Natsuo]
I know

[Todoroki, T.]
Which
You know
I mean it’s funny isn’t it?

[Natsuo]
What?

[Todoroki, T.]
He’s going to be a six foot tall wall of muscle with a fire quirk

[Natsuo]
He’s just big for his age
Lots of kids grow early and then stop
Hayami
My wife
Hayami was tiny

[Todoroki, T.]
Nah
Look at him

[Natsuo]
I am.

[Todoroki, T.]
The old man ought to be proud
The eugenics experiment finally worked

[Natsuo]
Touya what the ****
That’s my KID

[Todoroki, T.]
lol
Keep dreaming bro
That’s his kid once removed

[Natsuo]
No

[Todoroki, T.]
Natsuo
Wake up and smell the burning flesh

[Natsuo]
NO

[Todoroki, T.]
Endeavor won

[Natsuo]
Endeavor is gone

[Todoroki, T.]
Don’t ******* kid yourself

[Natsuo]
You don’t know him

[Todoroki, T.]
I know him better than anyone on earth natsuo
I know him better than I know myself

[Natsuo]
Touya

[Todoroki, T.]
Youre ****** natsuo
You are well and truly ******* hosed
Say goodbye to your little baby
He’s the next gen shouto and he’s going to be a STAR :)

[Natsuo]
You’re
You know
Never mind

[Todoroki, T.]
What

[Natsuo]
No.
Never mind.

[Todoroki, T.]
What the **** natsu

[Natsuo]
I’m not going to argue with you.
Because you’re wrong.
But you’ve built your whole life on it.
And if you change your mind now, then you have to admit you did it all for nothing.
Just like he did.
So you won’t.

[Todoroki, T.]
What the **** are you on about

[Natsuo]
Touya
He’s changed.
You haven’t.

[Todoroki, T.]
Ok ok ok that’s pretty good
Tell me the next one
God knows I need a ******* laugh

[Natsuo]
Okay
Try this
He always loved you the most.
If you’d waited him out like Fuyumi or taught him what’s possible like Shouto, you would have gotten everything you ever wanted

This silence lasts far, far longer than any of the others.

[Todoroki, T.]
Sure.
So what did YOU want?

Natsuo looks down at his phone resting on the blanket beside him. He taps his shaking fingertip against the screen to light it up.

He changed the lockscreen photo. It hurt like hell to do it.

Lots of things do. Sometimes you have to do them anyway.

It’s a picture, now, that Mom took of Shouto and Fuyumi fawning over Eiji and Naru. There are a pair of folded arms—one of which is metal—and several flitting feathers in the background.

He kept a different picture of Hayami on his home screen. She always will be his home—the realest one.

But maybe he can do it. Maybe he can make it. Maybe she made him strong enough.

He types into the box.

[Natsuo]
I wanted a family.
And I got one.

[Todoroki, T.]
You really did lose it
Special gold star top tier plus ultra maximum ******* crazy
I’ll see about that cell next door, what do you say

[Natsuo]
I’ll talk to you later, Touya.

[Todoroki, T.]
There’s nothing to talk about

[Natsuo]
Maybe.
Maybe not.
But I’m not giving up.
See you.

He closes the window.

He moves to close his laptop lid, stops, and opens a new browser window instead.

And looks up some fire safety tips for kids.

Natsuo’s extremely well-laid plan for Saturday—which incorporated such elements of genius as inviting Shouto and his weirdos over early and dragging them all out to the park so that he and Shouto can sportfully annihilate them—encounters a minor snag.

Shouto doesn’t know how to play soccer.

“I Googled it when you mentioned it,” he says, but he’s looking down at the ball like it’s a puzzle, or possibly a bomb. “But I’m still a little hazy on the rules.”

“The rules are kick the ball before I kick your ass,” Bakugou says, which is uncharacteristically helpful even if it’s characteristically rude.

Shouto barely suppresses a smile. “It sounded slightly more complicated than that.”

“We can just play a casual game!” Izuku says, as if Bakugou has ever done anything casually in his entire life. “We can tell you the rules as we go along, and then you’ll probably even remember them better, because you’ll be associating them with the situations where they became important.”

Natsuo glances over to where Mom is pushing Naru on the swings, and Fuyumi is following along from the perimeter as Eiji runs around the playground and climbs through every single tunnel.

“You’re quick, Shou,” Natsuo says. “You’ll pick it up. Just follow my lead.”

Shouto smiles.

It’s not quite as easy as that, although Natsuo doesn’t figure any of them are surprised.

Izuku repeatedly forgets not to use One For All, because he’s so ‘acclimated’ to reinforcing every movement of his legs, and blasts the damn ball into the stratosphere enough times that Bakugou eventually tackles him to the grass and has to be pried back off of him.

Bakugou wasn’t hitting him or anything, though—just sort of sitting on his chest and yelling in his face. Izuku was laughing the whole time.

They kick the ball around until Natsuo’s non-pro-hero stamina is giving out on him in a big way, but at one point Bakugou mutters “You’re pretty good,” which is probably the biggest and most direct compliment he’s given anyone in over a month. Natsuo doesn’t have any complaints.

When he calls a final time-out and steps back, he assumes that’s the long and short of it. But as he’s standing there, panting up at the sky, Shouto starts towards him.

And comes closer. And then closer.

And then flings his arms around Natsuo’s shoulders and squeezes tight.

“Eew,” Natsuo manages, with what’s left of his breath. “Shou, you’re sweaty.”

Half of him is, anyway.

Shouto hums idly and hugs tighter. “Tough shit.”

“Kacchan!” Izuku says, racing over. Natsuo tries to wriggle free, but Shouto’s way too strong, and the little bastard dug his fingers into the back of Natsuo’s shirt— “Come on!”

“No,” Bakugou says, but then he piles onto the group hug too, and it’s disgusting, and way too warm, and way too much, and Natsuo narrowly manages not to cry.

It smells like dinner’s nearly done when they all troop back inside. Natsuo hopes he has time for a damn shower.

“C’mon,” Hawks is saying, elbowing mercilessly at Natsuo’s father’s unguardable right side. “It’s funny.”

“It was funny the first thirty-seven times,” Natsuo’s father says. “It has lost its luster since.”

“It’s still lustrous,” Hawks says.

“Do tell,” Mom says.

Natsuo’s father glances over his shoulder and grimaces. “He’s been making variations on the same ‘let me give you a hand’ joke for the past hour.”

“Lustrous variations,” Hawks says. “I am upcycling.”

Eiji tips his head so far to the side that he looks like a puppy more than a mouse. He brought the Endeavor plush to the park but made Mom keep it in her purse while he was playing. It’s back out and safely pinned in the cage of his arms again now.

“But you have a hand, Grampa,” he says. “You just don’t have two.”

Hawks and Natsuo’s father both stare at him in undisguised adulation.

“He’s on my side,” Hawks says, adoringly.

“He is not,” Natsuo’s father says.

A down feather tousles Eiji’s hair. “Is so.”

Natsuo’s father turns back to the counter. “I’m going to set up an anonymous survey immediately after dinner, and everyone can vote.”

“I vote we get out of this loony bin right now in case it’s catching,” Bakugou says.

Izuku solemnly pats his back. “I hate to break it to you, Kacchan, but it’s way too late for you.”

Bakugou seethes. “Say that to my fa—”

Izuku gazes into his eyes. “It’s way too late for you, Kacchan.”

Shouto shuffles over to the counter and holds both arms out. “Do you need two more hands?”

“Oh, gosh, look at all that drool, Naru,” Mom says. “You’re so productive.”

“He’s the best drooler!” Eiji says. “Deku said so! Didn’t you, Deku?”

“Sure did!” Izuku chokes out despite the arm that Bakugou has wrapped, threateningly tightly, around his waist.

Chaos.

The nice kind.

Here.

People do weird things.

Natsuo makes a break for the back door to go get his damn shower, so that he doesn’t miss too much.

There are too many people to fit in the kitchen. Naru starts fussing about it, but he quiets down when Natsuo settles down at the dining table and keeps him in his lap. Honestly, Natsuo agrees—he never liked the dining room much either, but it’s just too much family to cram around the kitchen table, so here they are.

His father has been shuttling serving dishes back and forth—with some help from the feathers—to set the table. The oohing and aahing from Izuku is a little over-the-top, but Natsuo thinks that over-the-top might just be Izuku’s general approach to existence, so this is probably standard behavior. Natsuo bounces Naru gently on his knee and tries to make sure Eiji is comfortable. They sit in tiny zaisus at his school sometimes, but they had to stack an extra cushion on top of this one to raise him high enough to reach things on the table, and Natsuo keeps thinking it’s going to slip to one side, and he’ll fall.

Eiji doesn’t seem too concerned, though, in large part because he’s too busy gazing at the table overflowing with food. Even counting the three guys in their early twenties, this much food could feed this whole room twice and have leftovers.

It’s almost like somebody is trying a little too hard.

Or like he wants to give too much. Like he’s finally sorted out what happens when you don’t give enough.

With all the food painstakingly bestowed, his father makes one last trip to the kitchen for the tea kettle. Natsuo would bet his right hand that his father and Hawks completely forgot about it, and Natsuo’s father is going to rush-boil the water by slapping his palm against the side before he brings it over.

The steam reveals nothing when he finally comes back. Everyone is clamoring amicably, except Bakugou, who is clamoring obnoxiously. Shouto and Izuku keep patting each of his hands from either side in a way that looks like trying to placate an aggravated but extremely beloved cat.

Natsuo’s father pauses in the doorway, steps forward to set the kettle down on the table, steps back again, and retrieves his phone with his left hand. He raises it, flicks his thumb, frowns at the screen, flicks again—

“Sit down,” Hawks says, pretending at indolence, his elbow on the table and his chin on his hand. The warmth of his grin gives him away. One feather snatches the phone up out of Natsuo’s father’s hand, and another curls around his wrist and tugs. “I’ll get it. C’mon.”

Natsuo’s father hesitates, frowns, and then—surrounded by sudden, united, vociferous encouragement—holds his hand up in surrender and sits.

Hawks’s grin brightens.

It tilts into something more polished as soon as he looks away from Natsuo’s father and up at the camera that the feather is suspending at the perfect overhead angle to flatter them all a bit.

“Say ‘aghbah,” he says.

The shutter snaps a nice shot of everybody staring at him.

“What?” he says. “It’s Naru for ‘cheese’.”

Natsuo hates that that’s probably going to work, because Mom and Fuyumi both laugh, which makes Eiji laugh, which makes Shouto smile, which makes Natsuo’s father smile. Izuku never stopped beaming up at the camera in the first place, and Bakugou is a lost cause but never, ever looks bad in pictures anyway.

Natsuo tickles Naru very gently to get a giggle out of him, too.

Which makes him smile.

The feather keeps tapping away at the button even after everybody starts looking down and moving on. Natsuo’s father is probably going to treasure the candids even more than the staged ones. Hawks is too damn smart for his own good, really.

“It’s interesting that the phone picks that up,” Natsuo says. “The feather, I mean.”

Hawks smirks at him. “Comes in handy, wouldn’t you say?”

Natsuo dead-eye-stares him. “No.”

Hawks laughs. “Babe, I think you got the first response for your survey.”

Natsuo’s father very calmly pours Hawks’s tea. “I think I’m going to win.”

“Handily,” Hawks says, with an utterly unsurprising wink.

Natsuo’s father sighs.

Natsuo can tell a lot of the dinner conversation goes over Eiji’s head—as it should, and as he hopes it does forever, given the swathes of it that revolve around hero business and all the bureaucratic quicksand that accompanies the waking nightmares of the work they do.

One thing that does not escape Eiji is Uncle Shouto saying that he had fun learning how to play soccer.

Eiji turns to Natsuo. “Can you teach me, too, Daddy? I wanna learn.”

He wants to learn everything.

Natsuo is so, so afraid for him.

But all he can do is try to help.

“Sure, bud,” he says.

Eiji’s eyes and smile widen instantly. Natsuo’s heart is his, always and forever. “Right now?”

“It’s going to get dark soon,” Natsuo says. “It might be hard to see.”

Eiji looks crestfallen.

“What if we turned on all of the lights in the hallways?” Natsuo’s father says quietly. “That should at least give you enough in the garden to get started.”

Eiji looks at him like he’s magnificent, and then at Natsuo like he is, too. “Can we, Daddy?”

Hayami’s sweetness, and the Todoroki will. None of them ever stood a chance.

“We can give it a shot,” Natsuo says.

He helps take dishes back to the kitchen while Fuyumi wrangles Eiji back into his shoes.

“I can do these later,” Natsuo says.

His father lays another layer on top of the tower in the sink.

“They can wait until tomorrow,” he says. “Go on.”

Natsuo goes.

Befitting even the most enterprising three-year-old, Eiji takes to soccer like a duck to calculus.

But he’s loving the energy and the attention, because Shouto and his boys and Fuyumi and Natsuo are all demonstrating and encouraging him and giving him advice.

He mostly just runs back and forth and laughs a lot. Natsuo thinks he misses the ball more than he actually kicks it, but that’s definitely not the point.

Natsuo pauses for a breather and retreats back towards the engawa to have something to lean against.

Mom is sitting cross-legged close to the edge, with Naru settled in between her knees. She’s leaning down and pointing things out to him, talking to him softly, letting him grip her fingers in his.

Natsuo’s father is next to her—which still weirds Natsuo the fuck out when he thinks about it too much, but that’s her call, and he’s going to respect it.

His father’s left arm is, of course, wrapped around Hawks on the other side, and there’s a stark red wing draped over his huge shoulders, like Hawks’s arm curled equally comfortably around his back isn’t enough on its own.

Natsuo approaches just in time for Hawks to lean forward—way forward—to address Mom past Natsuo’s father’s chest.

“Are you warm enough, gorgeous?” he asks. “I could go get your coat.”

“Really?” Natsuo says, in the same moment that Mom laughs and waves a dismissive hand.

“I’m fine,” she says. “The quirk goes a long way. But thank you.”

Hawks tips his head back to an angle that looks painful, in order to grin at Natsuo’s father instead. “Sorry, babe. Never going to offer you more clothes.”

“Quick question,” Natsuo says. “Could you try not hitting on both of my parents directly in front of me?”

Unsurprisingly, Hawks just smirks at him, curling up closer under Natsuo’s father’s arm. “Hey, man, it’s not my fault your whole family is so hot.”

Natsuo’s life flashes before his eyes. Parts of it were… amazing, really. Parts of it were amazing.

“What?” Hawks says. “Your mom’s hot. Your dad’s hot. Honestly, you’re pretty hot. Not that you had a choice. What do you want from me?”

“A vacation,” Natsuo says, feeling like he just got hit in the head. Firmly. “Or a sedative.”

“With the promos and the time that I have right now,” Hawks says, “I can do a discounted onsen weekend and a stiff drink.”

So much for taking a break. Natsuo thinks his blood pressure is higher now than it was a minute ago. “Close enough.”

Fuyumi pulls away from the cluster of newly-minted soccer psychos and heads right towards them.

Their peacekeeper. She always knows, and she’s always here—for all of them. It’s sure as hell more than he deserves.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Hawks,” Natsuo says, since that’s about the only thing that sums it up.

Hawks preens, fittingly enough.

Hayami should be here.

They could have given her the big family she always wanted. Sure, it’s still pretty fucked up. But her capacity to love imperfect things was boundless.

With the crisis averted, Fuyumi goes over to wipe some spit off of Naru. Behind her, the nature of the game starts to change as the light starts to fade.

Natuso’s not surprised. Every kid in the world plays heroes. Most kids don’t have any idea how good they’ve got it, not knowing firsthand about the real thing.

“Fwoosh!” Eiji calls, waving his arms in a way that might just be intended to represent— “I wanna be Endeavor!”

Very, very quietly, Natsuo’s father murmurs, “No, you don’t.”

“C’mon,” Hawks says, elbowing him more gently this time. “It’s not all bad. The guy’s got a pretty sexy boyfriend.”

“Fiancé,” Natsuo’s father says.

There is a long, deep, meaningful pause.

“Did you just say what I think you said?” Fuyumi asks.

Mom is grinning, which is… bizarre, but okay. “He certainly did.”

Natsuo’s father blinks twice, closes his eyes, and breathes out a heartfelt little “Fuck.”

Hawks is grinning, too. Maybe it’s something in the tea. “Chill out, guys! Isn’t that your thing?”

Natsuo eyes the culprit, who has graduated to massaging helplessly at his left temple. “For real?” Natsuo says. “What—when did you even propose?”

“I didn’t,” his father says. “I received a—”

“Enji,” Hawks says swiftly, “if you really love me, you will lie. And romanticize the hell out of it.”

“Fine,” Natsuo’s father says, tonelessly. “Hawks landed on the lawn in a hot air balloon shaped like a rose, with a basket full of more flowers. It was very subtle and understated. Then we went to a fireworks show, and he sabotaged the pyrotechnic design with feathers to make it spell out my name and a heart, and when I turned towards him to wring his neck, he was down on one knee.”

Mom covers her mouth with her hand and starts laughing so hard her shoulders shake.

“Shit,” Hawks says, sounding thoughtful except for the laugh bubbling underneath. “At least now I know what to do for our anniversary.”

Fuyumi just stares for another second.

Then she calls, “Hey, Shouto, guess what?”

Natsuo’s father sighs, shakes his head, and nudges Hawks. “Your turn.”

It’s kind of gross that Hawks’s grin makes Natsuo morbidly curious how many ridiculous fake proposals stories these two idiots are going to spin before they ever even hint at the real one.

Could be worse.

Natsuo greets the morning with a slow breath out and another attempt to embrace the emptiness.

Naru greets it with an apocalyptic diaper bomb.

Parenthood is so glamorous.

“Hang on,” Natsuo says as his father smoothes out Naru’s outfit for the day, hovering because he can’t help. “I finally put it together. You can replace the arm. This is a diabolical scheme to get me on diaper duty for the rest of my life.”

“Egads,” his father says. “You figured me out.”

Evidently they can now carry out a civil conversation before they’ve even had coffee.

They’ve both come a long way.

Only forty to sixty more years to go, if Natsuo’s lucky.

Last night, Prince Iji left Fuwa waiting at the small oasis that marks the passage down and wound his way through the spectacular underground markets of the lands of the Sizzling Sands. The people there have engineered complicated camouflaged ceilings for their streets and byways, which look like dunes from above but let the light through so that they can still see the sky. Eiji suggested that Iji should just start asking all the merchants questions about where the castle was, and whether they had supplies that might help him.

Every single person that he spoke to gave him something—offered an object or a piece of advice. All of them gave him something of themselves. All of these strangers heard his story and wanted him to win.

Eiji insisted that Iji should give them something in return, and tried to recompense them all with items from his magic pack. All of the merchants refused everything he tried to use to repay them—except for Iji’s last resort, which was spinning up delicate ice sculptures, each one customized to suit the recipient. They wouldn’t last long, in the heat, but water was precious here, and kindness was more precious still.

Miyu, in the meantime, has nearly finished making her secret kite—everything except the steering apparatus, which Natsuo suspects will be a plot point soon. She has also charmed so many of the Sand Queen’s mistreated servants that she’s befriended half of the subterranean castle.

Natsuo can see where this is going, but he’s looking forward to it anyway. The flame-bright enthusiasm with which Eiji interacts with every new piece of the story keeps him riveted no matter what.

For now, though, Natsuo has a squirmy Naru cleaned up and diapered up and ready to slime the day.

The little tail whips out of his reach as he tries to adjust the diaper around it as comfortably as possible. Keeping a fifth limb out of the baby shit is a nightmare every time, but damn if it isn’t incredibly cute when Naru smacks it against the surface of the changing table and coos up at him.

Natsuo grabs his little feet, leans in, and coos back.

Naru squeals—but it’s more than that, so much more. It’s sharper and higher and raspier.

It’s not a squeal—it’s a squeak.

The sound spears directly between Natsuo’s ribs, skewers his feeble heart, and lodges in the bone on the back side.

That’s not coming back out.

He tries to choke down the tears, but it’s a lost cause.

His father reaches towards him, hesitates— “Are you—”

“It’s fine,” Natsuo says, taking each of Naru’s tiny hands in his, letting the little fingers curl in tight. “This—these oughta be a different color.” Lavender, maybe. Pale purple tears. “It’s… She used to—do that. But she had really good control of it. She tried not to. Which meant she only did it when she was laughing really hard.”

Naru gazes up at him, smiling shamelessly, showing off the pointy little tips of those incoming teeth.

You can’t stop it. You can’t even slow it down. You’ll never get your hands around it, never get it figured out, never get it right.

But you can try.

“Didn’t she, Naru?” Natsuo whispers, leaning in to brush a kiss over the fuzzy little forehead, the funny little nose. “Look at you. You’re Mama’s boy. Aren’t you?”

Naru grabs for his ears, pats his cheeks, grins the gummy grin up at him. Tiny whiskers.

“Daaaah,” he says. “Da-da-da-da—”

Natsuo has to pull one of his hands out of Naru’s to scrub his sleeve over his eyes so he won’t drip tears on his own kid.

The huge, warm hand that settles slowly on his shoulder doesn’t hurt him. It’s not as heavy as he remembers. It’s not the way it used to be.

“You really are Mousebaby, huh?” Natsuo says. “Savior of the known world.”

Maybe even the unknown world.

Maybe a lot of worlds Natsuo hasn’t even dreamed of yet, and some he’ll never see.

Or maybe he’ll just be the savior of himself.

That sounds all right.

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Shammstan on Chapter 1 Mon 22 Apr 2024 05:52AM UTC

what an amazing first chapter!! I just love the way enjoy has been characterised and the premise of this story is so freaking good!! its like this fic was custom designed in a lab for me because its dealing with my fav enho/enji/todoroki fam headcannons asdfghj i love it sm 😭 can’t wait to read the upcoming chapters!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 03:14PM UTC
  
  Aaaaa, thank you!!!! ;__; I'm so glad you're enjoying it so far!! We had such an incredible time exploring this little universe, and gosh, I am the SAME – give me a central Todofam conflict to explore with Hawks tangled up in the middle, and I will go completely feral until the fic is done, lol.
  Thank you so much for reading! ♥
  
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perciell on Chapter 1 Mon 22 Apr 2024 09:21AM UTC

WAHHHHHHHH this is so cute and so painful. as always i especially love your hawks pov. to enji he seems to usually have his shit together and be on top of everything but then you pop into his head and it's a constant maelstrom of trauma and overthinking and even more snarky remarks than he says aloud. i love that guy. it's lovely how even though the story is pretty depressing at this stage, it's still packed with humour: i love enji's dry commentary re: drool, the benefit of baby toys for future careers, the amount of milk it takes to fell an infant, et cetera. can't wait for updates!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 03:18PM UTC
  
  [looking at your corvid PFP] Wait, you like Hawks POV?? A fellow Bird Person???? This is *shocking*. X'DDDD
  In all seriousness, though, I am over the moon that you picked up that thread so fast, because all the central characters in this fic ended up with a "Trust the people you love with who you really are" arc but his is the most understated. I love trying to balance Inside Hawks and Outside Hawks, hahaha.
  I'm so, so glad you're enjoying it! ;___; Thank you so much for reading!
  
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ratatoeskrI on Chapter 1 Mon 22 Apr 2024 10:55AM UTC

Oooh I love it!!
Did I read this during work? You bet I did😂
So much trauma and I'm HERE FOR IT!!!
Established Endhawks is my jam, and having kids involved makes it even more wholesome! I'm sorry for Natsuo but we do need a plot right? Also poor Shouto :( And poor Fuyumi :(
It hurts so good!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 03:22PM UTC
  
  RIP work, don't they know there's fanfic out there?? X'D
  I'm so happy you're enjoying it so far!!! ;A; Established EndHawks where they can lean on each other just hits so different… I love it so much.
  These poor kids really did not need another sucker punch in their lives, but unfortunately for them Kae and I wanted to put them under this microscope, so here we are. :')
  Thank you so much for reading!! ♥
  
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class1akids (BrusselsSprout) on Chapter 1 Mon 22 Apr 2024 06:08PM UTC

Wow, this is such a heart-tearing premise. What a way to dig into all the Todoroki trauma! Really, so painful, but at the same time such an enjoyable read. The characters are so spot on. Enji being a terrified grampa, Fuyumi the over-stretched auntie, Hawks the absolutely cool (but secretly overwhelmed) step(grandpa's boyfriend?).... The ice mice are adorable - both in writing and characterization. They feel like real children rather than sickeningly cute and unrealistic anime babies. So extra kudos for that...
Didn't see much of Natsuo (but boy, he must have been going through it), Rei and that one little, petty letter from Touya! He's mean - but he still keeps track.
I'm leaving Shouto for last. That scene absolutely knocked the air out of me. I always loved Shouto's understated way of dealing with his trauma. But him having a panic attack about Enji actually being nice to his grandchildren was so gut-wrenchingly on spot, because like why did he never get any of this? It's so painful. I felt like he was a bit like this during the endeavor internship, where he discovers that Enji can be a really competent mentor to people who are not his sons and looking at him with that kind of sadness that why couldn't it be like this.
I also always adore when Hawks interacts with the Todoroki children - be it Shouto or Fuyumi (and later probably Natsuo).
So yeah, absolutely on board for a hellish ride. Thanks a lot for tackling such a difficult topic with a lot of empathy and sharing this fic!!!!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 03:41PM UTC
  
  step(grandpa's boyfriend?)
  The real unsung struggle of this fic is Hawks trying to find a way to describe his relationship to the kiddos without ever directly acknowledging the age gap and having to do constant linguistic parkour. X'D
  Real talk, though, I'm so glad you're enjoying it so far! It was a challenge to stop myself from idealizing the kids TOO much so I'm honestly relieved they came through okay haha.
  More Rei to come, and SO much more Natsuo!
  I barely even remember writing the Shouto section because it happened so fast – it was one of those ones where the story just wanted to get out and I could barely type fast enough to keep up. I'm so, so happy it's resonating with readers. I know you've definitely noticed how deeply fascinated I am by the shifting dynamics of that relationship over time, and yes, ahh, Shouto's special brand of "I'm just being pragmatic right now" repression… this poor kid. I tried to do right by him in the background in this one.
  There is not a single Todoroki I don't love throwing Hawks at and seeing what sparks fly! He just has so much chemistry with all of them that it's incredible.
  Thank you so, so much for reading! I'm so glad to have you here. I hope you enjoy the rest as well!! ♥
  
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mdarling on Chapter 1 Mon 22 Apr 2024 08:29PM UTC

Incredible first chapter! I really like how you've written retired(ish) Enji. Can't wait for more!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 03:43PM UTC
  
  Thank you so much!! Playing around with this notion of who's left when you give up something so central to yourself, especially with a character like Enji, was just so interesting.
  Thank you for reading!! ♥
  
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Scrumptmuffin on Chapter 1 Mon 22 Apr 2024 09:03PM UTC

Ahhh this already hit in the feels.

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 03:44PM UTC
  
  ;__; This is a Feels Heavy fic and no mistake!
  Thank you so much for reading! ♥
  
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baetama on Chapter 1 Mon 22 Apr 2024 10:50PM UTC

she put in hawks trying to get dadbod enji for me...... ............

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 03:44PM UTC
  
  u know I got u
  
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Angelsbite_demonkiss on Chapter 1 Mon 22 Apr 2024 11:50PM UTC

I'm always exited to read something from you, and I saw your name on the enmail and clicked on it immediatelly, really, you never dissapoint.
For this I was delighted, I do love angst and complicated feelings and for those the todoroki family is perfect.
I loved the children theyre so cute and I really do feel bad about natsuo.
Enji is trying his best and I get how it feels to try to be nice and feel like its all pretence, bc its not really you. Shoto's small part killed me a little.
Him going into this crisis, him going there ready to take the kids at the first sign of anything and seeing his father actually acting like a fathe for someone else, yeah, pretty much gut wrenching. Hawks is always lovely, I do love him as a character all around and you write him perfectly as well.
I love their relationship and how they work, also the fight, God the fight, it hurt, and I'm happy ending retired, but it does also feel sad, after all, was it worth everything that happened before he got there only for it to last so little?
Either way, I loved every inch of this and the art is so pretty as well.
Can't wait for more, thank you for writing.

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 04:04PM UTC
  
  omg, that is so kind. ;___; Thank you!! ♥♥♥
  I LOVE how complicated the Todoroki family is. Nobody is ever "right" all of the time, but they're all trying so hard to navigate around each other and do the best they can, while dealing with all of these strong emotions… it's just so much fun.
  The things you picked out are some of my favorite things about Endeavor as a character, I just can't get enough of this guy! The idea of choosing kindness even when it doesn't feel natural is so important to me. And to me his primary failure was always a failure of priorities, but it's so much more complex than just "Putting the job ahead of your family is bad", so this fic is really grappling with the root of those choices that set so much of the Todofam story in motion and where he can go from here. It's so wonderful to know that's coming through in the fic!
  I love Shouto so much. He tries so hard to prioritize what's best for others even when he has so many personal misgivings. And he really does try to give the people around him the benefit of the doubt, but this one understandably gets the better of him a bit.
  Thank you so, so much for reading, and for the lovely comment! I hope you enjoy the rest too!! ♥
  
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Lovliet on Chapter 1 Tue 23 Apr 2024 02:08AM UTC

This is unreal. I read the summary and was like…surely this scenario with these people is too much…trouble..to write. But ur actually the master of writing interpersonal, generational trauma and I genuinely can’t wait to see how this plays out.
Thank you for sharing!!!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 04:07PM UTC
  
  The Todofam is MADE of trouble, but that's what I love about them, haha! Disentangling all of the complicated relationships they have with each other and with themselves just gives me so much joy. Although you're right, in a way, because I totally underestimated this fic. I honestly thought it was going to be like 30,000 words, not 200,000! :')
  Thank you so, so much, I'm so delighted that you're enjoying it!! ;A; Thank you for reading!!! ♥
  
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TZYCC on Chapter 1 Tue 23 Apr 2024 02:08AM UTC

Oh my, this one is going to be a ride!! Great fist chapter, I cried and laughed and everything in between, so I'm a bit afraid of what's to come.....
<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 04:09PM UTC
  
  It's a HELL of a roller coaster, absolutely ate my entire life for five months, 10/10 would recommend completely losing yourself to a fic for almost half a year! X'D
  I'm so glad you're enjoying it so far!! Lots more ups and downs where those came from, I hope you have a great time with them!! ♥
  
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Darkashes13 on Chapter 1 Tue 23 Apr 2024 03:45PM UTC

Wow. Just…wow. This is amazing! I love this concept so so much! And I can’t wait for/am dreading the moment where Natsuo comes to take the kids back, they want to stay with Enji, but his guilt will force them to go with Natsu, furthering Eiji’s abandonment issues. 🥺🥺😢😢😥😥
Thank you for writing this!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 04:14PM UTC
  
  Thank you so much, I'm so glad you're enjoying it omg!! ♥♥♥
  I don't want to spoil too much, but the Natsuo situation is ALSO going to be complicated and hopefully very interesting – he has so much to work out about himself and the kids and, perhaps most of all, his relationship with Enji.
  Thank you so, so much for reading!! ♥
  
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aannalogyy on Chapter 1 Tue 23 Apr 2024 07:03PM UTC

hawks is actually holding everything together and no one even realizes it he loves enji so much omg
the enho fight scene OMG. everything is brilliant actually came for the enho stayed for the enhoandeverythingelse the kids are SO cute. actually I said hawks but fuyumi too is probably the strongest of them all. very very very excited to see rei. very very excited to see touya too.
shouto's reaction to enji being a good father he's better than me I think I would have just burned the house down and then never speak to enji again lmao.
enji being flirted with on the streets is somehow hilarious he's so hot (in every way).
hawks and enji's back and forth is scrumptious I hope we'll see more of them with the children and have them ACTUALLY talk about it instead of having enji feeling guilty about it <333
tank you so much for this story this is already brilliant

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 06:12PM UTC
  
  Hawks is such an MVP. Getting right up in the middle of all of the family despair and just going "Mmmmmmmnah we're not doing that," and making it so. X'D
  Lots of Fuyumi and Rei coming up! Regrettably I think I should spoil that Touya never shows up in person in this one (~~added this to my list of sequel ideas though I mean what~~), but we do get a lot of flashbacks from when they were kids.
  tbh Bakugou and Deku probably had to sit Shouto down right before like "Repeat after me: No matter what happens, no arson for heroes. You say it." "…only a little arson for—" "SHOUTO."
  I think if I saw a 6'4" incredibly buff redheaded silver fox fussing over two small children on the street I would just die on the spot. What a way to go.
  Rubbing my evil little hands together!! There is SO much more of them with the kids. >:D
  I'm so so happy you're enjoying it!!! Thank you so much for reading! ♥
  
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2. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 12 May 2024 10:50PM UTC
  
  I had to come back here because you were completely right – Touya needed to show up in this fic at some point. Just wanted to let you know that edits made a liar of me, and now he does! X'D
  
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propheticfire on Chapter 1 Tue 23 Apr 2024 10:02PM UTC

This is EXQUISITE. My goodness. Oh I... I do not have the right words for this. It's utterly masterful. Literally everything about this is masterful. L i t e r a l l y. E v e r y t h i n g. The premise is sooo juicy, and the prose and the pacing really highlight the characters' states of mind, and good god that characterization. God-tier. It's all so achingly real and deep. I would quote the whole thing back to you if I had to pick a favorite line. Utterly gutted by Eiji calling Enji "Grampa" for the first time, and by Shouto seeing his father be so gentle, and by Enji confronting himself through therapy, and by Hawks in general trying so damn hard to hold everything together and not let Enji worry. Positively yearning for how much Enji and Hawks love each other. Absolutely devastated for Natsuo. I am strapped in and ready (at least physically, if not emotionally) for the rest of this fic to unfold. Thank you for sharing this GIFT with us!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 06:19PM UTC
  
  /crying a little (okay. crying a lot)
  I'm so glad you're enjoying it! We put so much into this sucker, and it's been just an unending delight to have people responding so positively to it already!
  I love all of these idiots so very, very much, and I'm so glad that is coming through too. ;A; You highlighted so many of my favorite parts from writing this bit. Hashtag Todoroki, everyone is trying so hard to do the best they can.
  I hope you enjoy every minute that is yet to come! Thank you so much for reading, and for the lovely comment. ♥
  
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Rosa312 on Chapter 1 Wed 24 Apr 2024 09:05AM UTC

Oh, this one will devastate me… wait, it already has T_T
How is this one of your must brutal fics when it’s filled with cute babies?
Naru and Eiji are adorable and want to protect them so much and Enji and Hawks getting to be parents for them is everything to me. Enji getting to be gentle and careful and soft in all the ways he couldn’t be before and it scaring him and it hurting Shoto and Hawks loving Enji so much so fiercely and and and…. everything.
Natsuo hitting rock bottom and hurting his kids and hurting Enji ad hurting himself like this. Uff, it hurts ME so much.
But also all the healing and growth and just soft moments of comfort; of getting a golden second go at it and life being unfair, rough, brutal, cruel but blessed, strong, quiet, new, good.
I just ADORE every second of this and already need to reread it. I read all 24k in ine sitting when I had planned to split them up over a little while XD I’m obsessed. And that art is so cute!!!!!! <33333333

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 06:24PM UTC
  
  :')))) This one truly was an adventure in "What if we took kidfic, normally a very sweet and schmoopy premise… and made it INCREDIBLY SAD???"
  One of my favorite things about writing the Todoroki family is that the concept of "family" in the first place is so loaded for all of them in different ways. So dropping a bomb like this was incredibly addictive, getting to see the way it resonated out differently for each of them!
  When I started this, I didn't realize it was a story about Natsuo as much (if not more) than it is about Enji, but… stay tuned for THAT plot twist. X'D
  getting a golden second go at it and life being unfair, rough, brutal, cruel but blessed, strong, quiet, new, good.
  YES!!, so much of this fic (and, tbh, all my fics) is very much "Life is tough, my darling, but so are you" and trying to find that balance where you can hang on to the parts that make it worthwhile. ♥
  Aaaaaa I'm so glad you're enjoying it! Thank you so much for reading!! ♥ And omg right I have all the art saved on my desktop and I just look at it all the time. X'D
  
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Aj (aj2245) on Chapter 1 Wed 24 Apr 2024 05:11PM UTC

Oh, this was the absolute donkey kick to the chest of a story I've been craving. Especially the hard, painful, unholy reality that parents and children aren't ziploc'd in time. We all grow and change and make choices (or DON'T make choices) and it's so hard to get to a place where you can really investigate and interrogate what you and your parent (or child) are dealing with or went through. Ooof. All these Todorokis deserve a nap and a hug and a well paired therapy team of experts.
Thank you for this. It's heartbreaking and lovely and so very thoughtful.

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 06:29PM UTC
  
  Yessssssss, this is exactly why I am so DEEPLY invested in the Todoroki family dynamics. All of them are changing, all the time, and learning, and trying SO HARD to reach out to each other, but it's so complicated and there's so much baggage and the past never dies and they're all so damaged and… I just can't get enough. X'D Kae and I have definitely played with off-the-cuff side stories where Enji's therapist tracks down and corners every single other character in this fic and gives them what for, lol.
  I'm so glad you're enjoying it, thank you so, so much for reading! ♥
  
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2. 1. Aj (aj2245) on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 10:37PM UTC
    
    I could kitten roll in in all of the ways these characters bounce off each other. And I am so impressed with how good the portrayals of generational trauma are in the source. Because the spiderweb damage of untreated mental health issues and trauma are just. You can point to them! You can say "HERE! Fuyumi's reactions make sense because of X, Y, and Z and it makes SENSE!" for basically every character!
    And god, Enji as a character just t-boned my feelings for a whole lot of reasons. I love that the writers took the base foundation of him (he puts in the WORK) and had him pivot to show what that might look like if he realized how he fucked up and WHY and decided to put the work in there. I love how the writers made him a bit of a cartoon villain and then subverted that by showing a man who IS willing to change. THANK YOU for expounding on that and showing that even if he's doing that work and trying his best, there is so much he has to learn and figure out how to balance.
    Also, thank you for doing the work for poor Natsuo! I loved "it flows through me" because you gave him a voice that made sense, and I'm really happy that you're centering him here too. Especially with the premise of the story you set up. Ooof, the neglect story thread. All of the boys are such interesting characters because there's this level of entitlement (neutral) to Enji's time and consideration that pulls all of them together. Touya had it and lost it, Natsuo never had it (that we've seen) and saw what it did to Touya to lose it and thus forced himself to reject the idea of it at all, and Shouto got too much of it too early. And the way that makes sense in the rubix cube that is Japanese traditional society and culture. It's such a crunchy, terrible, wonderful mess to dive in to! And bless you both for doing that work!
    And oh my god, I desperately would love if y'all did a Enji's therapist GOES OFF side story. If just in a desperate attempt to get everyone else professional help. Or to explain, with charts and a pointer, what PTSD means and entails.
    Also, I've reread this chapter twice since you posted it because it's the best kind of painful for everyone involved. Bless tiny, oblivious Naru. He's the only one just existing on vibes and drool.
    
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petraquince on Chapter 1 Thu 25 Apr 2024 12:31PM UTC

I'm slobbering over this chapter, just chewing on it lovingly !! Absolutely losing my mind over the nuances and the depth and the ALL of it <3 <3 <3

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 06:29PM UTC
  
  Aaaaaaa you are too kind. ;A; Thank you! I'm so glad you're enjoying it and hope you love the rest too!
  Thank you for reading! ♥
  
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DamnthatGeko on Chapter 1 Fri 26 Apr 2024 03:33AM UTC

Hi this fic is very good. Like chapter 1 and it already had me crying twice?? What the fuck? You're a wizard? Anyway, the way you wrote multigenerational trauma made me cry. I am super enjoying this fic and the way you write enji is delightful. One million kudos!!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 06:52PM UTC
  
  Oh my gosh, thank you!! ;__; I'm so glad you're enjoying it (hopefully… hopefully the good catharsis kind of crying)! I'm so obsessed with the lines of inheritance in this family and the ways they all get tangled up in them… and I love Enji past words, so I'm extra happy you're liking him in this one!
  Thank you so, so much for reading! ♥
  
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Robinade on Chapter 1 Fri 26 Apr 2024 07:29AM UTC

Daaaaamn. The set-up is brutal, but I can absolutely see the possibilities for healing for all the Todorikis. As hard as it was to read the part from Shouto’s pov (I mean that as a compliment, it was super intense) I really appreciated that he’s allowed to feel betrayed that Enji is giving the kids the tenderness he never showed Shouto. And yet even though he’s feeling that, he doesn’t say anything that might stop Enji from being that way with the kids!! Like, both Natsu and Toya would absolutely blown a gasket without thinking of the consequences. Shouto is a good hero to put those kids first AND make sure he himself has a support system that gives him the mental strength to do that 👏 👏
I continue to love the way you write Enji as a dude who’s doing his best to change. His fear of backsliding feels real so it’s nice to see he’s sticking with therapy.
Hawks is MVP as always. Love that guy!!

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 06:58PM UTC
  
  This comment FILLED me with delight, you got exactly what I was going for in that scene down to the last detail, and I'm so happy about it! ♥ I have always found Shouto's ability to put his feelings aside for the 'greater good' to be so remarkable and special and fascinating – and exactly as you pinpointed, one of the things that sets him apart as heroic in a quiet and non-flashy but really meaningful way. ;__; ♥
  One of the things that really got me hooked on Enji as a character was the slow pivot of his endless drive from "do whatever it takes to beat All Might" to "do whatever it takes to be better". SO interesting. Getting to play with a universe where he's been putting in the work for a long time, but the work still isn't done, was really fun.
  HAWKS! Keeping this family out of their own way as much as anybody can. :'D
  Thank you so, so much for reading! ♥
  
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mixy on Chapter 1 Fri 26 Apr 2024 11:37AM UTC

omgggg i’m so hype for more of this

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1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Apr 2024 06:59PM UTC
  
  I'm so glad you're enjoying it!!! Thank you so much for reading! :D ♥
  
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Tul on Chapter 1 Fri 26 Apr 2024 11:33PM UTC

Ok OK time to end my MHA break because this premise is so deliciously FUCKED UP WHAT4S WRONG WITH YOU GUYS??? Pete's art was so sweet and of course you haaaad to make it tragic (and I love it). I'm totally live-commenting this one.
(does 7 years after canon means we get Enji with sexy greying hair??? the answer is yes I'm not really asking I've made up my mind)

The older boy is Eiji

Lol you are so twisted for picking that name out of the infinity of possibilities.
Natsuo letting Enji come to the wedding but not the funeral makes so much sense. People are more generous when they're happy, and Natsuo might not want to be vulnerable before his father if he still doesn't trust he really cares.

“You know, I think the stupid runs in the family.”

I missed Hawks so much.

“I know,” Enji says, softly. He remembers—some part of him does. Some part of him always will.

OUCH!
No but for real, I didn't think about the fact that Enji is the only one in his family that knows what it feels like to lose a beloved parent when you're still just a kid - and that makes it so much more meaningful that he's the one who gets to help his granchildren going through the same thing??? Like, he can be for them what he needed back then. He wasn't saved but he can save them. Like let me process this for a minute.
Also Enji being soft is killing me. He's trying so hard. You're so good at getting that accross - as a reader I can almost feel the effort he's putting in. Because he's not used to holding back, and he's a mess emotionally because of what happened to Natsuo and it's his first time meeting his grand-children, but he has to hold it all together.
And omg do they even know him? Did someone tell them they're staying at their grand-father's place? Did Natsuo/somone ever tell them about Endeavor???

“No!” Eiji howls, kicking out aimlessly. It was Natsuo’s first word. Enji should have known.

PFFFFFFFFFT.
Of course it was.

“What happened to your face?”

At least tactless defiance is better than tears.

“That was from getting hurt, too,” Enji says.

Enji and the art of not answering questions. Totally missed his opportunity to be cool here. He totally should've bragged. Maybe Hawks can come and do the bragging for him.

“I’m sorry, Eiji. Your auntie—”

“I don’t want her,”

He's so merciless in that way small kids are. Just great characterization.
Also Enji comparing him to his kids when they were small is a gut punch every time. As if the current situation wasn't tragic enough, there's this haunted feeling behind every word. These fantom kids who deserved better. And yk controversial take but I do think the Todoroki kids' childhood was traumatic for Enji too - as monstruous as he was, he was clearly stressed out of his mind in every panel. And now he's going through it again with 0 warning.
(struggling not to stop and comment every single line)

“Oh, shit,” Hawks says.

Enji wants to say If he repeats that later, they are all going to murder me in cold blood.

Your ability to seamlessly weave these kind of gold commedy lines in very somber moments without cheaping them (even enhancing them) is a gift. Seriously. Never change. I love you.

“I’mEijiTodorokiI’mthree,” Eiji whispers.

I love him already. He's so cuuute.

Neglect. What a shitty word for ripping away the foundations of a child’s life. What a mincing, clinical little euphemism for You have destroyed their ability to ever rely on another human being again.

Oh shit, Keigo is going through it. Can I say I love your choice of using "Hawks" for Enji's POV and "Keigo" for his in this btw? It's so perfect. Hawks is Enji's hero. Keigo is that little boy who was never properly cared for by his parents. Hawks is supporting Enji and holding it together, Keigo is angry and internally losing his shit.
Aaaand oh! Rock Lock! He's sooo under-utilized in fics but yeah, lowkey interesting because he's the only hero who knows who has a (seemingly) healthy family. And treats kids like kids.
Love when the pros get to help each other and forge connections outside of work stuff. Like yeah! Make friends! Build a support system! You guys need it.

Enji’s voice kind of always has that effect on Keigo, obviously, because Enji’s voice is his sanctuary and his soul and his home and his heart; the hallmark of belonging and becoming and also getting his back blown out.

Holy shit. I'm saving this one.

Enji’s beautiful forehead furrows deeper. This is just what he fucking needs right now—for the infallible rules to turn traitor and jeopardize the safety and the promised Hours of Educational Entertainment!!!! of his little saliva-factory grandbaby. One more existential crisis for the road.

I'm dead. Enji <3
FUYUMI MY BELOVED!!!!
And then Keigo's heart is cracking because Enji is cracking -- he loves him so much I'm crying
SHE BROUGHT FOOD!!!!

Cutest fucking kid in the world, honestly. Only way he could be cuter would be if he was a redhead. It’s probably a good thing. He’s already devastating. The way he’d stared at Keigo—and stared, and stared, and then carefully threaded his arms into the tiny Shouto-branded hoodie and whispered “Thank you” like it was a secret—had felt like getting hit in the stomach with a spiked mace.

Oh god I agree Hawks he IS devastating.
But also LOOOOL? I can't not comment on that redhead thing. Does Enji have any baby picture? Bby home movies? Would Hawks survive or would he directly ascend to heaven if he was allowed to see/watch one?
Fuyumi is hugging Enji :)))))

“Thought I was gonna have to go get stuff, too,” she mumbles. “Thanks. Thank you.

This woman really is the backbone of her family. She's so fucking grateful when it was never her responsibility in the first place? Rei and Enji are Natsuo's parents, but she's the one who basically raised him, and now she's also the one supposed to handle everything if something goes wrong. They all should just worship her.
OMG HE JUST FOUND OUT ENJI IS HIS GRANDPA
sorry, his "grampa"

But it’s so fucking uncomfortable. If that makes him callous, fine. Then he is. Because that’s the truth. It’s awful. He’s going to be trapped in this emotional pressure cooker with all of this suffering for the foreseeable future, except when he takes breaks to go rack up more PTSD points at work.

Hawks is so relatable. That's why I love him. He's so real.

It’s a good thing that they don’t need Endeavor anymore. It’s a good thing that he’s antiquated—that he’s useless.

The thing I love the most about your Enji is that even though he changed and realized so many of his mistakes, it's still an ongoing struggle and his mindset is still fucked up in so many places.
Like here he is, for the first time in a long time he has the opportunity to be really useful to his family in fatherly way. He gets to be there, fully there, for his two grandkids when they need him. And that's partly possible thanks to his retirement. But to him it doesn't register as "useful". If he can't be out there saving the world, he's "antiquated". He still hasn't learned to value himself for what he can bring to the table as just Enji Todoroki.

Enji—

Smiles.

Enji smiles, I smile. I'm simple like that.

Enji makes a mental note to ask Rei if Natsuo and Hayami talked to a pediatrician about that. It’s much more excessive than he remembers.

Also, it's this kind of details that make your stories feel so rich. I mean, Enji having this so very Enji-esque thought, because ofc he needs to make *sure*. Him always being self-concious about the metal-arm, the perpetual self-loathing, etc. Like, I feel like I'd know I was reading Enji or Hawks's POV (or from your other stuff, Shouto's or Bakugou's) even if it wasn't explicit.

The world has offered him less love than nearly anyone that Enji has ever met, but he gives it away so freely—like it costs him nothing. Like he’ll never regret it, and he’ll never run out.

K, if you heard something that's the sound of my heart shattering accross space and time. No biggie.
Hawks! Hawks!
But I feel like he wants to, you know? That he was desperate to love someone, to have a family that he'd give everything to like Jin did for the LoV. Enji gave him that. And Enji needed the love, so they saved each other? *scream into the void*

I need your help. You have to help me. You have to get them back.

Holy shit. Just a reminder that Natsuo is losing his mind in the background. I dread the time when we move on to him.
(give it to me now grrrr)
Hey! How does Shouto *dare* even THINK that my bestest dearest awesomest girl Fuyumi is lying!
Rei is so gracious and reasonable. She must be in shamble too. Maybe. She's always the hardest Todoroki to predict for me - she just hides herself, idk? I just find her super-intriguing. Will we see more of her in this story?
(CONTINUED IN NEXT COMMENT WTF???)

Last Edited Fri 26 Apr 2024 11:40PM UTC

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1. Tul on Chapter 1 Fri 26 Apr 2024 11:45PM UTC
  
  His father glances up, eyes still unyielding lightning-blue over the rim of his spindly little glasses.
  
  Damn it's such a shock to read Enji from Shouto's POV after so much of his own or Hawks'.
  And the words "spindly little glasses" have no business being so funny.
  LMAO omg wth Eiji just offered that Shouto sit on his dad with him omg omg that kid is savage
  
  “That’s what I think, too,” Shouto’s father says, in the voice that isn’t his, with the face that isn’t his, in a house where children smile.
  
  Oh shit oh shit.
  
  The man in that room looks like he loves that little boy.
  
  Oh shit no Shouto bby
  he just had a panick attack seeing Enji being a dad
  He deserved so much better. God that whole passage was so raw and painful.
  Ok now I'll have to find a happy Todoroki family AU just to heal from this.
  
  Enji loses the debate about setting up a cot and sleeping in Naru’s room to solve the problem (a flash of the animal-eyed ferocity he hasn’t seen in a long time, and a toneless iteration of the words “Absolutely fucking not”).
  
  Lol would Hawks even be able to sleep without his warm cuddly bear? It probably would've been unproductive.
  
  Enji can’t even say that he didn’t expect retirement to be like this, because he never planned on stopping. He never dared to dream that he might give it up.
  
  YES. That's definitely my headcanon too! He didn't know who he was outside of being a hero. I think he felt so empty that he didn't think there was or could ever be anything else in him. Can't see him ever imagining a future for himself beyond heroing.
  Haha, a woman more than 20 years younger just hit on him and instead of taking the compliment he's having an existential crisis AGAIN. This dude is just unsalvageable.
  
  But it’s not just these wide, pleading eyes. Not just this little mouth turned down into a pout, trembling with the tide of emotions that its owner doesn’t have the higher faculties to process yet. Not just these tiny hands reaching out, palms upraised and empty. Not just this child desperate to feel loved.
  
  It's ALL OF THEM *cry*
  
  It’s temporary.
  
  Denial my old friend~
  Hey at some point Enji might also just be protecting himself from his own abandonment issue. I can't even begin to imagine what it would do to him, when it's time and he has to lose them too, if he doesn't know whether Natsuo'll let him stay in their lives.
  I mean Natsuo's not a monster (and hopefully neither are you?????) so we're gonna get a happy ending but I can totally see Enji being fucked up anxious about it.
  
  He could write a better vaguely educational narrative than this.
  
  Endeavor is dead. Long live Grampa Enji, most famous children's book author.
  
  He doesn’t look like Natsuo when he does that.
  
  He looks like Touya.
  
  *chokes*
  
  “You love them,” Takiya says.
  
  This man is brutal lol.
  Their whole session reads like a very intense chess game. Takiya is doing great trying to get through Enji's defenses to checkmate the king. I'm loving it.
  
  Hawks makes them laugh.
  
  Hawks makes them happy.
  
  <3 <3 <3
  Also bless him for taking pictures.
  
  Eiji murmurs, “Indinnities” just before the recording stops.
  
  I love this kid. He feels like a real kid. Good on Enji for expanding his vocabulary. I want him to use that word in front of Natsuo in the future - I bet he'll just immediately know where it comes from.
  Ok, it's just so interesting that Enji had the same reaction to watching himself with Eiji as Shouto did - that feeling that it's fake, because he's not *naturally* that way. And Takiya just breaks down that thought so impeccably.
  
  “You,” he says, “want me to train myself to be nice to my grandkids.”
  
  I love this man.
  
  “You’re retired, babe,” he says, leaning down and flicking the tip of his tongue against Enji’s right nipple, which just so happens to be unfair. “You could let yourself go a little bit. That might actually be good for you, come to think of it.”
  
  Hawks! Hawks is our hero! Hawks is all of us! Get that dadbod for us, Hawks! Feed him!
  Aaand oh shit, that's a very sexy sex scene (even with Enji's adorable little socks).
  AAAND on that very sexy note I am going to sleep and hopefully have very sexy dreams.
  Thank you so much for sharing! You're the best <3 <3
  
  Last Edited Fri 26 Apr 2024 11:46PM UTC
  
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2. 1. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Sun 05 May 2024 02:50PM UTC
    
    Damn it's such a shock to read Enji from Shouto's POV after so much of his own or Hawks'.
    Cannot describe how happy I am to hear this, lol
    And the words "spindly little glasses" have no business being so funny.
    0:) I picked the defenseless glasses as one of the things all of them would comment on but consistently use different descriptors for hat reflect how they see Enji.
    Ok now I'll have to find a happy Todoroki family AU just to heal from this.
    me paging desperately through this fic uHHHHH HANG ON UHHHHHH
    Lol would Hawks even be able to sleep without his warm cuddly bear? It probably would've been unproductive.
    NOT ANYMORE >:)
    The way this fic evolved in this parallel of two deaths and griefs and rebirths, where one of them is Endeavor, was just… shout-out to my brain for doing cool shit while I am not paying attention. Phase one is him trying to find himself, and phase two is him trying to find Natsuo, and both of those are SO tangled up in the fact that he's never had to be an unadorned version of Enji Todoroki before. He's always had a Purpose™ and never even had to think about what's left.
    I mean Natsuo's not a monster (and hopefully neither are you?????) so we're gonna get a happy ending but I can totally see Enji being fucked up anxious about it.
    I do not want to spoil TOO much but let's just say reports of my monstrosity have been greatly exaggerated ahahaha.
    Endeavor is dead. Long live Grampa Enji, most famous children's book author.
    All Might completely innocently releases a kids' book at the same time and the fucking war is back on
    Hawks! Hawks is our hero! Hawks is all of us! Get that dadbod for us, Hawks! Feed him!
    LORD HE IS TRYING
    I am constantly enamored of the fact that this entire bit of the fandom is like "We adore this fucked up beefy man. Also we want to give him snacks. Babygirl you are dehydrated. Come here sit down have a blankie here's an ice cream would you please relax."
    Thank you so much omg, these comments………… just delighted us to no end. You are so kind. Thank you so much for reading and for taking the time to share so many wonderful thoughts. ♥
    
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3. Tierfal on Chapter 1 Mon 29 Apr 2024 04:32AM UTC
  
  Tul, my dear Tul, my wonderful Tul. I need you to know that this giant two-part beautiful monster of a comment-shaped GIFT FROM THE HEAVENS brought both of us just an indescribable amount of joy.
  Re: what's wrong with us, though, like, do you want it alphabetical or chronological or.
  (does 7 years after canon means we get Enji with sexy greying hair??? the answer is yes I'm not really asking I've made up my mind)
  Just you wait for next chapter's art. :)))))))
  Lol you are so twisted for picking that name out of the infinity of possibilities.
  I'd say "this one I can squarely blame on Kae" but I immediately screamed and latched on to it and refused to accept any other suggestions, so…………
  I am DEEPLY preoccupied by how much the different periods of unaddressed grief have fucked with Enji's life and his emotional resonance and how he finally gets a chance to make that pain into something useful, because it lets him understand. ;__;
  as a reader I can almost feel the effort he's putting in.
  may have punched the air but you can't prove it
  And yk controversial take but I do think the Todoroki kids' childhood was traumatic for Enji too - as monstruous as he was, he was clearly stressed out of his mind in every panel. And now he's going through it again with 0 warning.
  yes yes YES YES YESSSSS
  The line I walk as an Enji stan is just always… I read him so sympathetically as a victim of the circumstances, of the impossible pressures of this job and always being under this unrelenting public scrutiny and having this new PTSD he has to crush down to get his job done piled on top of all of the messily half-suppressed childhood PTSD. And in those circumstances he does things which are objectively terrible and destroys the people who relied on him the most in the name of protecting people who despise even his persona. It's such a devastatingly beautiful story. But yeah. This is a fabulous take imo.
  The distinction of hero names and people names in this fandom ALSO keeps me up at night. I had a particularly productive field day with it in this fic, and I am utterly delighted you picked up on it right away, and so aptly too. ;A;
  LMAO YES REDHEAD BABY DREAMS, Hawks would just lie down and die. That's it. The end. RIP.
  Hawks is spectacular but Fuyumi is the truest long-term MVP and I will not take criticism on this point.
  You can probably imagine how long it took me to train my phone to stop changing grandpa to grampa. (The answer is it still changes it.)
  Clutching your comments about Enji's deep, deep damage to my chest. Yes!!!!!! You!!!!!! You get it!!!!!! So much!!!!!!!
  Like, I feel like I'd know I was reading Enji or Hawks's POV (or from your other stuff, Shouto's or Bakugou's) even if it wasn't explicit.
  This makes me scream with joy too, btw. One of the things I really try to do is differentiate characters' narrative voices without being showy about it or working too hard at it, and… it's magical to know they come through. ♥
  But I feel like he wants to, you know? That he was desperate to love someone, to have a family that he'd give everything to like Jin did for the LoV. Enji gave him that. And Enji needed the love, so they saved each other? *scream into the void*
  yes yes YES YES YES YESY ES ES stick with me kid you're gonna love where we're going
  Augh I am out of time before I gotta post chapter 2 so will respond to the rest later but hey uh. You're phenomenal. Thank you so, so, SO much. ♥
  
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