Chapter Text
The promise of the New Year fell over the city quietly and efficiently while Izuku and Shoto Todoroki ended the day with sparring and drills before swiftly washing and toweling off in the agency shower. Pine, plum, and bamboo festooned the streets in smiling anticipation of a god for each home and business, though the entrance to the Endeavor Agency had beaten many of them to the punch. Three bamboo poles stood so tall they speared beyond the top of the double doors on either side, and their bases spread wide along the pavement below to accommodate the height. Izuku himself had carried one of the arrangements here from the florist just this morning, smiling sheepishly as Kacchan scolded him for catching the edge of the exterior fabric wrapper on trash cans and streetlights as he passed by. Miraculously, it remained intact despite the abuse.
Even in the low light of the fading afternoon, the same gold and red fabric shimmers and shifts like each kadomatsu is sitting in the center of a flame burning brightly and popping sparks in spite of the cold air. It’s fitting for the Endeavor Agency, but somehow it isn’t a suspended fire that comes to mind when Izuku looks at it. He smiles to himself and envisions sparks and fireworks fizzling to the ground like golden thread spooling out on the heels of a billowing explosion in the winter sky.
Todoroki adjusts his bag on his shoulder like one might juggle an awkward topic as his cool stare travels from where Izuku’s soft eyes rest on the agency’s kadomatsu, and then back to his face.
“If you’re worried about Bakugo, you can say so,” he deadpans.
Izuku clenches from his buttcheeks to his fists. To speak of Kacchan is one thing, but he has no idea how to keep from explaining to Todoroki that the current situation also hinges upon his sister.
“Um, uh, well, you see, the thing is, I kind of–!”
Todoroki shrugs before Izuku can embarrass himself with a spew of revealing word vomit. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I just wanted to tell you it’s okay.”
There is no barb, no accusation, no teasing intention in his heart. Izuku isn’t certain what he did to deserve such an understanding friend, and he is even less certain how he or Kacchan should best manage the guilt of keeping his big sister’s new relationship a secret from him. It doesn’t feel right. Nothing about this feels right. But it isn’t his news to share, and he isn’t even certain about what the situation does make him feel since the initial panicked shock wore off and left him uneasy. Uneasy, surprised, hurt, and…jealous. He’s jealous. Privately, he can admit that to himself the same way he could admit his own envy towards some of his classmates’ easy friendship with standoffish Kacchan.
But still, Izuku smiles and takes the first of many now-familiar steps to the train station because even to be caught thinking about Kacchan gives him an excuse to let the fingers of his memory trace the outline of his back, which is something. Kacchan is his childhood friend and sometimes his rival, after all, though that may not mean much in the years to come.
Izuku wilts along with his sheepish smile. “I don’t think he would like it very much if he heard me.”
Something in Todoroki’s blank expression gives Izuku the impression that, somehow, in a way he cannot understand, he casts an exaggerated look-right and look-left down the thoroughfare as if to make a point of Kacchan’s absence even though he never stops piercing Izuku through with his limpid stare.
“I don’t think he’ll hear you,” he says.
Of course. Todoroki would choose to be difficult without even trying. Izuku runs a hand through his hair. “Y-yes, well, y’see, it’s just that, well.” He glances down the street for a distraction or an elegant way to avoid calling Todoroki a smartass, but he comes up with nothing.
Todoroki waits with the patience of the ages.
Izuku sighs. He wilts further, and then changes tactics. “Kacchan gets upset when he thinks he’s made someone worried,” he admits. And he’s made a lot of people worry lately, Izuku thinks, including your sister and father. “I wonder if I’m making it worse.”
“He worries about you,” Todoroki shoots back, though it comes out more like a bland observation.
Izuku doesn’t lose pace, but his steps falter in surprise. Despite the late December windchill cutting through his red-blue-yellow scarf, something in his chest warms. He holds it close and keeps it to himself like an excited child crushing a flower in too-eager fingers. Old, bruised petals spill out between his busted knuckles, but he can’t find it in himself to care. They are childhood friends, after all. Some things are forever Izuku’s to have, even if Kacchan chooses to spend more time with other people.
“Kacchan expects the best of everyone, so it’s natural he would push me to improve,” Izuku explains. It is almost proud, and definitely fond. “He does the same for you and our class.”
“Hm,” Todoroki affirms without affirming anything.
He leads the turn around the corner. The chilled air fogging around his face swirls like smoke and reflects the light of the street lamps above their head in steady, fading puffs.
They walk in companionable silence through the thinning to nonexistent crowd. Todoroki slows in front of a bookstore window to look at a newly-laminated poster superimposed over the bright series of new release promotions from the month prior, and Izuku matches his pace, but the darkened lights and closed sign thwarts any bright ideas about entry. Todoroki shrugs and turns to lead them on, but a sudden metallic thud stops them in their tracks.
Izuku takes a step back and cranes his head to see into the alleyway defining the side of the building. Todoroki follows suit and nests his head above Izuku’s with a spluttering breath to keep a curl out of his mouth.
The fading daylight and distinct shadow cast by the surrounding buildings delays the adjustment of their eyes to anything more detailed than the silhouette of poles and powerlines emerging from the shaded mass and cutting into the surrounding city, but after a few blinks, the contents of the alley clarify. The texture of the bookstore wall reveals itself as brick, and the well-abused trash cans and vending machines differentiate themselves from the rows of gachapon dispensers flanking the building walls like a phalanx of soldiers for rampant consumerism.
A short figure slams a metal wrench against the side of one with another disruptive bang, this one louder than the sound preceeding it, but the plastic casing doesn’t shatter. Instead, the wrench deflects in a comical backwards arc as it repels off the top and sends the figure holding it lurching backwards to the ground. She trips backwards in a beautifully comical arc, and windmills her arms dramatically before hitting her head on the asphalt and curling into a pathetic ball.
“Owww….”
Izuku acts. He steps into the alley.
“Are you okay?
Todoroki follows. “Getting in trouble for vandalizing a toy machine doesn’t seem worth it.”
At the sound of their voices, the figure, a girl, jolts upright and scuttles against the wall of the alley. At first, Izuku can’t make out her features beneath the jagged, uneven cut of her long black hair, and stares bewilderedly at the two pools of homogenous yellow light glistening back at him like the reflection of a flashlight in a mirror. Then, her eyes cut to Todoroki and lose the strange effect to reveal a pair of blown-out pupils and a wide yellow-green iris that nearly covers her sclera.
A cat heromorph ! thinks Izuku. Like officer Sansa, but all black!
The girl turns tail, literally, and runs out the back of the alley. She doesn’t even bother to pick up the wrench she dropped when she fell.
“Wait,” shouts Izuku, though his feet are already giving chase and Todoroki isn’t even a step behind.
The pair round the corner just in time to see a strip of black fur slip around the other side of the bookstore and back to the main thoroughfare. They pursue with Izuku shooting faint spark trails of One for All and Todoroki gliding on sheets of his self-generating ice. They skid into the mouth of the new alley only to realize that it doesn’t cut through at all. A loading dock and the blank, beat-up canvas of a rolling door for deliveries stares blankly back at them. The heteromorph girl is nowhere to be seen.
“She didn’t break the machine or take anything,” Todoroki points out. “Should we really be meddling beyond this?”
Izuku blinks. “Well, we should probably still make sure she—!”
Suddenly, a shrill cry cuts through the streets. Todoroki and Izuku turn around to find three salarymen crowding a woman against the window of the storefront across the street. The stoutest holds her wrists above her head while the tallest of them, a man with a venus flytrap for a head bundled under three scarves, stumbles into one of the kadomatsu by the door and topples it before slamming his hand against the glass by the woman’s face. Even a sheltered, straight-edge elite private schoolboy like Izuku can tell they are drunk.
While he can’t see it, Izuku can imagine the spittle flying from his mouth as he screams and the woman winces. “So you think you can sleep your way to the top, Hanazaki? That how you got a promotion ‘fore any of us?”
Shoto reacts fastest. Ice appears with a frigid crack in a line across the asphalt and concrete to the feet of the tallest salaryman. His feet are frozen mid-stumble to the kadomatsu he knocked over an instant before, and both are fused neatly to the ground below. The other two salarymen and their victim coworker don’t break apart, but they turn to see the source of the ice with wide eyes.
“Um! Stop that!” Izuku shouts. He lurches forward, One for All already lighting up the air around his sneakers with the intention to get physical since the figures are too close to separate with Blackwhip, but before he even reaches the median, the stout man slams his hand into the glass by his coworker’s head and shatters it. He cartwheels bum-over-face inside the store with a spray of glass and a cacophony of crashes. As he falls, his whirling arms hit his plain third companion and knocks him inside as well with a brilliant smash. They settle into a finale of slow, piano-key flashes of glass raining down belatedly on their heads.
Then, the street falls bafflingly silent. The rumpled and frightened office woman, somehow still standing, smooths down her skirt, bows to Todoroki and Izuku, and anticlimactically runs off with only the clicking of her low heels against the ground to accompany her. Todoroki and Izuku blink after her, then at each other, and then back at the tableau of shattered glass and drunken salarymen. The two splayed out on the other side of the shattered window prove they are alive with a delayed groan and twin upright lurches within the wreckage. Todoroki takes the opportunity to freeze them in place like their cohort, and they yelp in surprise.
“Well, that solves that,” he says. “I’ll call the agency.”
Izuku nods absently at his friend before a sudden movement in the shadows by the bay door over his shoulder compels him to react. Blackwhip closes the distance faster than his feet, but it misses its target as the heteromorph girl hits the ground in a backwards slide with a yowl.
Todoroki sends an embrace of ice after her. It falls just short as she springs to her feet and flattens to twice her size against the nearby wall, piloerect like a cat on a cartoon Halloween card. Her huge yellow-green eyes look like they might swallow the whole world if they don’t burst into tears first. It de-ages her more than her worn middle school uniform.
That looks like Aldera’s , Izuku comments to himself. He doesn’t recognize her.
“Sorry. Habit,” admits Todoroki.
“Don’t freeze Hoshiko! Hoshiko helped you!” she hisses. “S-so that means you gotta let Hoshiko go!” She points a fluffy digit capped by a pointed claw in their direction. “You’re Hero school kids! You won’t ignore Hoshiko’s goodwill, will ya?”
“Oh,” begins Todoroki. “Well, in that case, maybe we should.”
Hoshiko brightens and turns her full attention, ears and all, to Todoroki. Meanwhile, Izuku busily puzzles out how this series of events could be as he trots towards the pair.
“You did that?” Izuku purses his lips in consideration. “How? So your quirk has something to do with the glass or reflective surfaces? Or delayed force? Is that why the gachapon didn’t break but the glass did?”
Hoshiko’s wide eyes narrow into an unimpressed sneer as Izuku sounds off his brainstorming. Todoroki eloquently redirects the conversation.
“You aren’t hurt, are you?”
When Hoshiko looks at Todoroki, she suddenly lights up as if from within. Her fur, while still uneven and unkempt, fluffs into soft edges rather than bristlewire, and her face reminds Izuku more of a Pikpok video edit of a pleased-looking cat captured in a wide-angle lens than a human’s. Her tail curls happily at her side and her voice rises in pitch.
“Yes, Hoshiko is fine , thank you for asking!”
Izuku feels himself flush. “Oh! R-right. Right, that should be my first priority instead of getting off-top—!”
As Hoshiko turns back to him, her demeanor changes with all the drama of the ocean’s moody tides, and then some. Her ears flatten, her lips splay out to show her teeth, and her lowered tail thwacks violently against the wall like a whip thirsting to rend flesh. She hisses.
“Let Hoshiko go,” she demands. “You still got other, more important stuff to do than bully Hoshiko.”
Izuku shrinks into himself and holds his hands defensively between himself and Hoshiko. “W-well, we just didn’t want for—!”
Hoshiko’s eyes flick over Izuku’s shoulder to focus on the salarymen frozen in and around the broken window. An instant later, a distinct crack rings out through the street followed by a series of howls and curses. He and Todoroki whirl around to find one of the salarymen suddenly free of the ice on his left side, but with his right hand and leg bent at a disturbing angle still within the crystal-clear prison.
Todoroki’s eyes widen, but it is Izuku who speaks. “That should have frozen them in place. They shouldn't've been able to dislocate their joints, much less break the ice!”
“I’ve moved beyond being just the hand crusher,” Todoroki mutters solemnly as he whips out his phone from his uniform pocket. In front of him, the howling and cursing does not cease, so he and Izuku make the final decision to ignore Hoshiko and de-escalate the unruly drunks’ situation.
They have the two mostly-unharmed men quiet and subdued and the twisted man supine alongside laid-out splints by the time backup arrives. To his credit, Endeavor’s flaming crown butts in not one minute after Todoroki’s call, and with enough bluster to chase away the winter chill. He grumbles and scolds his son, though Izuku can see the pride puffing out his chest just as he can see the wind leaving Todoroki’s sails with every second they interact.
When asked for a quick recounting, Izuku mentions they spotted someone trying to vandalize a gachapon machine, but when Izuku turns to check the shadows for Hoshiko, she is long gone.
Dabi is Toya Todoroki. Dabi is Endeavor’s son. Somehow, Keigo makes himself tell the Hero Public Safety Commission and lets the knowledge sink into Madame President’s unflappably calm blue eyes. Somehow, he keeps silent as she considers the implications.
Hawks would be completely cut off from communicating with the HSPC directly, his ass. He discovered this revelation and found himself on a direct call within the day. But then again, governments have fallen from secrets less extreme than this.
Madame President’s fingers lace together over her desk. The deep blue of her jacket bunches at the elbows despite the starch meant to keep it crisp. Even through the grainy, striated quality of the screen, Keigo can see it.
“This changes things,” she finally says. “Jin Bubaigawara was our primary concern, but it falls on you to resolve the situation with Dabi before it interferes with the public. I trust you know that this knowledge is not to reach Endeavor or his family?”
Hawk’s composure is something he might have prided himself on had it not been such a necessity, and the bleeding, needy, secret cry of his heart of hearts might be something that brought him greater shame if it was not the only way he speaks his few joys. But he was losing the first to the gravitational pull of the second like an ocean of grief drawn to the shore by the persuasion of the moon.
He doesn’t want the blood of anyone on his hands—not Jin and not the son of Enji Todoroki. He still holds a reasonable hope of convincing Jin to join his side, but with Dabi…
He thinks of jaundiced, shimmeringly dry eyes and staples glinting in the darkness of night cast darker under the shadowed slats of fire escapes, and Dabi’s ambiguous smirk cast at his father and Hawks’ near-fatal plight on the ruined streets of Fukuoka. It is hurt and resentment that fuel his fire, and Keigo doubts that any love he feels towards his family in his blackened heart remains untwisted. Jin believes in his friends, but Dabi believes in nothing but some sort of grudge. Meanwhile, Keigo believes…
The winter air blows freely, blithely, across Keigo’s face. He spends most of his time high in the sky with no walls and no ceiling but the sun above. Up here, he should be free. Far above the clouds, nothing should be able to tether him.
But oh, they have bound him by clipping the wings of his heart. Hawks’ mouth and body move without consulting the rest of himself because he can’t afford to be anything but the man who is too fast for his own good. That is what Keigo believes. He is free only to fail himself.
“I understand,” he says.
Madame President sends him a long, searching look. He feels just as exposed as he did as a child who dragged a doll of his hero with him everywhere. He is certain that Madame President can see that, too. He feels like a child. But he is not a child. He grew out of that quickly. He’s the man too fast for his own good.
“This is of utmost importance. I leave this in your hands.”
She ends the call to leave Keigo alone and suspended in midair hundreds of feet above the city. Hawks has a plan. He always has a plan. But that doesn’t mean he has to like it.
He takes one deep breath, and then two. The wind around him changes direction ever so slightly, and his feathers quiver accordingly.
It’s going to snow again , he urges himself. While it may be true, it sounds shallow and pathetic even to himself. I need to get moving if I don’t want to be left in the cold.
He pulls out his personal phone. Endeavor’s number is not hard to find in his contacts. The strength to hit the call button is, and the will to force nonchalant cheer into his voice upon reception is even harder. But he does it.
“Endeavor,” the Hero himself answers.
He answers. The man Keigo has most wanted to speak with answers him when he calls. He doesn’t understand why he waited so long, and for so many years without approaching him. Maybe this could have been avoided if Keigo had called for him long ago. If Keigo had called for him faster.
The windchill freezes the tears threatening to form from Keigo’s watery smile. “Hey, Number One.”
Even with the wind’s disruption, Keigo can hear Endeavor’s impatient huff. “What is it?”
I wanted to hear your voice , Keigo thinks. I want to pretend for a little longer that I can be a Hero like you.
This is not at all what Hawks says. “Wanted to hit you up about some training. Had a run-in with a gal with a nasty fire quirk who almost got me, and it made me realize that I could use more hands-on experience countering something like that. And I thought, ‘who better than our own Number One?’”
Endeavor pauses. “You called me about training?”
Keigo smiles wider. “Yeah.” What a dream it would have been for him as a child to train not with the HSPC, but the Endeavor.
I would have done anything to make you proud, thinks Keigo. I’ll do anything to help you. Even if I disappoint you. Even if you hate me. Even if it kills me. I’ll do anything.
“I figured an old man like you might benefit from going south for the winter. Bring your son and the other interns, even, if you wanted.”
I’ll do anything.
“You expect me to go to Fukuoka? Now?”
“Well, maybe not right now, but…”
“I’m sorry, but I am not able to do that.”
I’ll do anything, Endeavor.
“Well, we can wait until after the New Year. Surely another fire-wielding villain won’t appear so—”
Anything, Endeavor. Anything, anything, anything. Please, just give me—!
Endeavor’s words come out in, by his stoic standard, a rush. “It’s not that. I need to stay in Shizuoka to spend time with my daughter.”
Ah, of course. Keigo bites his lip and shrinks into the collar of his thick, fur-lined jacket. Endeavor actually has a family and the responsibilities that come with it. The embarrassing longing he struggles so hard to contain gains the upper hand on his heart, and Keigo almost chokes on air.
But Endeavor isn’t finished. “You can come here. I can have a room available at the agency. On the days I am unavailable, you can train with my son. It would be good for him to gain this sort of experience.”
Keigo swallows. He trembles, though whether from the wind or from something inside zipping from his toes to his head, he can’t be certain. The misty sun falls brighter upon him somehow.
Anything, Endeavor.
Keigo is going to orchestrate the murder or capture of this man’s long-lost son, and he can’t even tell him. He shouldn’t feel happy about finding such an easy route to his side. He shouldn’t be allowed to feel happy about this. But he does, he does, he does. The dissonance makes him feel sick.
“Sounds like a plan,” he says.
Anything for you, he means.