Quitter Talk

by Tierfal

Summary:

Makoto Takiya has one hour to convince the strongest man in the country that there are worse things than being weak.

Notes:

• For Kaeko_Kae.

Hello, friends!

So Kae won one of my FTH fics, even though she knows very well that I would write her anything she wanted for free (see: the last several fics X'D), and asked for ✨CHICKENS 'VERSE✨ - specifically, for a prequel fic of the very first therapy session for Enji and Takiya.

This is set shortly after canon, and about 5 years before chickens starts. I hope u liek Takiya POV fics, because there are going to be a ton more of them as sequels what

If you're new to chickens, welcome aboard the Pain Train, I'm so glad you're here. ♥ I recommend starting with the main fic, but I am not the boss of you.

Enjoy enjoy enjoy! ♥ Happy birthday, Hawks, ur man is in love with you even if he doesn't know it yet. ♥

“What do you know about me?” Enji Todoroki says.

Makoto knows that loss wears a thousand faces, but all of them have teeth.

Makoto knows that the man in front of him has run out of places to hide.

“I saw the video and the press conference,” Makoto says.  “And I read your Wikipedia page.”

Enji looks at him, so hard that it feels like the intensity of the attention is peeling back his skin.

Shaking Enji’s hand was an extraordinary experience—one Makoto hadn’t even thought to prepare for.  Introductions are usually a quick, awkward, dismissible necessity in here.  It’s everything that follows that’s interesting.

But Enji Todoroki is much bigger than he looks on TV, or in photographs, or in the expectations that a person’s mind builds from those perceptions.  The two dimensions of imagery don’t even begin to capture the breadth of him, which makes his height far more imposing.  He doesn’t loom, exactly—that implies a certain ill intent and a deliberate bid for intimidation.  Looming would require a concerted effort to tip one’s body forward and leverage one’s vastly superior height and weight and staggeringly obvious strength.  Looming is an exertion of power.

Enji Todoroki was not exerting anything, except an effort to keep his expression neutral.

Enji Todoroki doesn’t loom: he towers, as a matter of simple fact.  He dominates the space as a result of sheer body mass.  There is a whisper of a threat in his entirely self-evident physical prowess—an automatic reaction from the animal brain to the recognition that he could tear an ordinary person limb from limb with his bare hands—but he doesn’t press the advantage.

One of his bare hands—the right one, which he extended to meet the one Makoto offered—is made of metal.

Those ten seconds told Makoto more about Endeavor than a dozen so-called exposés could have done.  The self-assurance is hard-earned, hard-won, and bloodily fought for.  Enji doesn’t care what most people think, because most people can’t stop him.  He doesn’t need to cultivate a reputation—he makes his will manifest and keeps moving.

And he’s not used to being off-balance.  He’s not used to being in a situation that he doesn’t understand, where he doesn’t hold the cards, and he can’t control the outcome.

Which will make this very challenging indeed.

But that’s another thing Makoto guessed from the press and can now read off of every line of him:

Enji Todoroki lives for a challenge.

Fortunately, Makoto does, too, albeit usually with much lower stakes.  He’s fairly tall, which made it almost dizzyingly unfamiliar to have to look so far up at someone just to gesture past them at the assorted comfortable seats.

“Take your pick,” he’d said.

Enji Todoroki had muttered “Thank you,” and chosen the couch.

It’s the largest available space, and the furthest from the armchair that’s clearly Makoto’s.  The other chairs are just wide enough for Enji, but the arm rests would enclose him.  This is a cautious, considered choice.  He’s keeping himself safe.

“First things first,” Makoto says.  “A procedural question.  May I call you Enji?”

Enji’s eyes narrow—slow-burning suspicion, and fast-burning intellect.  He’s scouring for a motive before he selects an answer.

Fortunately for both of them, Makoto is very reasonable.  Sometimes to a fault.

“I find that it’s more efficient,” Makoto says, and something flickers in those eyes.  “Shortcutting the formalities is like a back door into the kind of trust that usually takes a long time to build.  The familiarity tricks our brains, and then we can get to the important things faster.”

The eyes stay fixed on him, lightning-blue and unyielding, but Makoto holds his ground and maintains his composure.

Enji didn’t come here for tradition, or terminology, or respect.

He came here for results.

Enji draws in a slow deep breath.  When he lets it out, his shoulders lower—fractionally, but Makoto is good at math.

“Fine,” Enji says.

“Thank you,” Makoto says, smoothly.  He folds his hands on top of the notebook, pinning down the pencil.  “I want to set some expectations.  The first few sessions may be…” Enji’s expression somehow manages to get markedly more judgmental without actually changing.  “They may not feel very useful, because it’ll take me some time to get to know you well enough to work with you.  And once we’re past that, it just gets harder.”

He smiles. 

Enji does not.

Well.  Makoto has had worse.

“Some sessions,” Makoto says, “will feel like we just had a boring conversation in a coffee shop.  But those are progress, too—like a low-impact workout.  They lay the foundations for the sessions where you’ll walk out of here feeling every single minute that we spent pushing the boulder together.”  

There’s a flicker of interest, deep in the blue—a flicker like a catching spark.

That’s about what he expected.  Endeavor wants to work for it.

“Those will hurt,” Makoto says.  “You’ll feel wrecked the next day.  But you’ll be fundamentally different than you were before.  And if we get it right, it’ll be an improvement.  You’ll understand something about yourself.  You’ll have leverage and handholds.  You’ll have somewhere to stand, and something to build on.”

Enji’s arms stay folded, and his eyes stay hard.  His fingers—both sets, metal and muscle—wrap around his biceps loosely, which Makoto takes as a positive sign.  He hasn’t started clenching them yet.  He’s guarded, but he doesn’t feel like he’s losing control of the situation.

It wouldn’t take a high-caliber psychiatrist to figure out that Enji Todoroki prefers to be in control.

“I remember what you said on the phone,” Makoto says, “but tell me more about what you want to get out of this.”

Enji doesn’t move.  “Nothing has changed.”

I need to be able to sleep.  I need to be able to focus.  I need a way to offload all of this—all of the other things.

I don’t have time to waste.  Every minute that it’s like this, I put people’s lives at risk.

I need to be better.  Now.

“You want peace,” Makoto says.

Enji’s eyes narrow.

“That’s good,” Makoto says, but Enji’s shoulders don’t relax.  “Recognizing it is a big first step.”  He picks up his pencil.  “Tell me about the war.”

Enji still doesn’t so much as blink, let alone flinch.  “You saw it on TV.  The whole country did.”

“Not that war,” Makoto says.  “That’s not what’s ruining your rest, is it?”

Enji watches him for five solid seconds, analyzing, before the tiny jerk of a nod.

“So tell me about the war with yourself,” Makoto says.  “The war with the past.”

Enji’s eyes narrow further this time—down to teal slits like the sliver of heat at the heart of the flame.

“Specifically what do you need to know?” he asks, slowly, voice noticeably coarser—like he’s dragged it over coals and gravel to bring it this far.

But much of what makes Makoto good at this job is that he spends twice as much time thinking about what he’s going to say as he ever does saying it.  He plots the data points and plans the angles.  He thinks about which words will reach the person sitting across from him, and which tactics will resonate.  He considers how their mind might work, and he stocks his arsenal to match it.

“Think of it like an investigation,” he says.  “We don’t necessarily know what pieces of information will be critical at the start.  We have to piece together as much of the puzzle as we can by analyzing clues and figuring out how they relate to each other.”

Enji’s brows lower, and his left-hand fingers curl slightly tighter in his sleeve.

“Fine,” he bites out.

That… could have been worse.

Makoto swallows the wince, and not a moment too soon.

“Where should I start?” Enji asks, eyes fixed on him, so bright from within that they almost seem like they’re glowing.

Makoto can fill in some of the blanks about the more recent history.  He expects they’ll have to work their way up to picking at the rawer wounds in any case.  “Why don’t we start at a high level and get an overview, and then we can examine parts of it more closely?  What were things like for you growing up?”

Enji’s jaw shifts, clenches, unclenches, and shifts again.  His arms stay folded.  His eyes flick away and focus on the wall, almost as though he’s trying to find sentences transcribed there that he can speak.

“My father was strict,” he says, slowly, like he’s choosing the words one at a time.  “Perfection was the standard.  Anything less was considered failure.  You can extrapolate.”

Makoto does not wince.  “Extrapolation is good, but extraction is better.  We need to get deep into these things to be able to pull them apart and figure out how they work.”

Enji’s jaw clenches again.  “How they worked is obvious.”

Makoto takes a deep breath.  It’s early.  It’s hardest at the start, and likely terrifying for someone like Enji who’s so accustomed to holding his cards close to his chest, playing for keeps—because anyone who could see what he was feeling or find out what he was thinking would sell it to the press or use it against him.  Any sign of emotion was a liability.  Any sign of humanity would make him weak.

But Enji doesn’t mince words.  He’s extremely logical.

He said in so many words that he doesn’t want to waste time—and people say a lot of things, many of them untrue, when it comes to this room and the daylight specters within it, but Makoto believed that one.  Endeavor’s accomplishments tell the same story.  He would swallow a thousand razor-edged truths in order to conquer a challenge.

“Chopping gets us to the point,” Makoto says.  “Dissecting gets us to the answer.”

Enji’s eyes start narrowing again.  They’re out of time for metaphors, and for diplomacy.

“Think about it this way,” Makoto says.  “Did you replicate your father’s exacting standards for your own children because you found them to be effective?  Or did you end up in the very place that you were trying to avoid, because he’d ingrained it in you so deeply that self-worth should be tied to performance and productivity that the part of you that loved your children wanted them to have a chance to feel worthy?”

Enji’s breath catches.

His eyes aren’t narrowed anymore: they’re wide.

But the objective wasn’t to scare him, or even really to shock him—all Makoto wants is to help him understand.

“The cause and effect that supports both of those explanations is the same,” Makoto says, lowering his voice, smoothing it out.  “But it’s two very different levels of analysis.  One of them brings out things that we should look into and think about.  It opens doors.  We want to open the doors, and clear the air, and let the light in.”

Okay, maybe it’s not quite too late for metaphors.

Enji has resumed breathing, albeit slightly faster than before.  His fingers tighten in his sleeve, and his eyes search Makoto’s face for several seconds before they dart down to the table in front of the couch.

“Fine,” he says, so quietly it may well qualify as a mutter.  “What do I do?”

“It’s no secret that you’re extremely analytical,” Makoto says.  “You apply it in your work every day—you look for details, you make connections, you follow leads.  We can apply that here, too.  What we’re trying to accomplish is working backwards from the emotional responses and the habits that you have now to try to pinpoint not just where they started, but how they took shape—and what’s still feeding them.  If we can understand them, we can anticipate them, and we can identify them as they’re happening, not just after the fact.”

“And then I would have more control,” Enji says, slowly.

“Precisely,” Makoto says.

This is the least resentful he’s looked since he walked in.  “Fine.  So—what?  I should just describe every detail that could possibly be relevant about every event in my life?  That’ll take years.”

“We can be a little more targeted than that,” Makoto says, once again valiantly suppressing a wince.  “The… important things, the big things—those tend to surface themselves.  They tend to touch so many aspects of your psyche that we’ll see them recurring, and we’ll know where we need to dig.  And I’ve learned over the years what kinds of questions tend to make good shovels.”

Enji’s expression goes a little flatter again.

In Makoto’s defense, a lot of people really like the metaphors.

Enji eyes him for what feels like a very long time.

Then his gaze swivels away again, and the harsh blue searchlights land on the edge of the couch instead.

“He didn’t—” Enji stops, frowns deeper, and then starts again.  “My father didn’t believe in rewards.  You needed to give everything you did everything you had because that was the only right way to do anything.  Every action represented you, wholly, to other people.  Every action had your name on it, and that name was dignified and precious.  It deserved to be protected, and it needed to be—” His lip curls.  The word sounds acidic.  “—pristine.”

Makoto stays still.

Enji’s eyes rise to his again, colder than ever.  “I have not made my father proud.”

The matter-of-factness makes the statement chilling in its simplicity.

But there were several lines of that Wikipedia article that lodged themselves in Makoto’s mind.

“You set so many records that the Billboard had to keep creating new special award categories so that they could bring other people on stage,” Makoto says.  Enji doesn’t even blink.  “You’ve been number one for coming up on three years.”

“By default,” Enji says.  “Because the competition walked away.”

Makoto steadies himself.  “If your father was so hellbent on commitment, wouldn’t quitting count as losing?  The competition quit.  You won.”

It feels almost skin-crawlingly sacrilegious to say something like that about All Might, after everything he was and did and gave.

But it does make Enji stare.

“No one is perfect,” Makoto says.  That makes Enji draw in a sharp, indignant breath, and Makoto waves his hand to try to preempt the counterpoint.  “I’m not trying to downplay the things you’ve done.  I’m talking about your father.  Was he there for you?”

The frown deepens again.  “What do you mean?”

“When you were young,” Makoto says.  “The high standards—let’s set that aside for a moment.  What was he like?  How did he treat you?”

Enji scours his expression for a second—searching for a motive, or a meaning.  “I barely saw him.  Except to train.  He was always working.”

That is both elucidating and ominous.

Makoto keeps his voice light and tries to tread carefully.  He doesn’t know this terrain yet.  “He was—distant, then.”  Enji eyes him.  Apparently restating known facts without new observations is not helpful.  Noted.  “Was he involved in any part of your life other than the training?”

Enji watches him for a few more seconds.  Makoto gets the sense, now, that he’s weighing the value of the words he wants to say every time he speaks.

“Rarely,” Enji says.  “He had a lot to do.”

“What did the training entail, exactly?” Makoto says.

Enji’s gaze intensifies, but only for a moment—like he’s trying to strip away Makoto’s skin just by looking, but then he realizes that he won’t find what he’s searching for.

“He taught me how to use my quirk,” Enji says, slowly.  “And he taught me how to fight.”

Makoto waits.

Enji does not continue.

They don’t solve mysteries in this room by ignoring unturned stones.  It’s better to ask more, and know more, and clear the path.

“Nothing else?” Makoto says.  “He didn’t… teach you to read?  Help with your homework?”

Enji doesn’t move.  His jaw is clenched tight.  “He hired people for that.”

Makoto should have been prepared for that answer, but the thought of it—from both sides—silences him for a second.  It’s too imminent, and too sad.

Akina sounded out her first full sentence two and a half weeks ago, sitting in his lap and pushing her tiny finger haltingly across the page.  He was so proud that he cried, which scared her so much that it made her cry, which meant that Asuka found them in a blubbering heap of adulation and panic.

He wouldn’t trade that back for anything.

Enji’s father never wanted it in the first place.

And he passed down the loss.

In the present, Enji seems to be interpreting Makoto’s speechlessness as waiting for elaboration.

His shoulders tighten slightly, and he looks at the wall.

“There were a lot of them,” Enji says.  “They never stayed for very long.”

Makoto gathers himself.  “Why was that?”

Enji darts a glance at him.  “I don’t know.  It never seemed important.  They just came and went.”  He shifts, his mouth working for a moment before he lets more words out of it.  “I didn’t think about it much, but there are plenty of possible reasons.  They might not have met his standards.  He might not have wanted any of them to get too comfortable.  He must have been difficult to work for.  After he died, my aunt picked them.  She was usually in Tokyo—she had a business there, tea and food exports, mostly—but she wouldn’t have been an easier employer.  It didn’t matter much.”

“No?” Makoto says.  “A revolving door of caretakers during the formative years of your life didn’t matter?”

Enji glares at him.

Oh.

Wow.

Goodness.

It’s a wonder there are any villains left.

“She was around more early on,” Enji says, deliberately.  “My aunt.”  He looks away, brow furrowing, fingers shifting.  “She used to—sneak me treats from her store.  She would say that they weren’t gifts, because I was testing them for her to make sure that they were good.  My father hated it, but he let her.”

He pauses.  He swallows.  He looks at a different part of the wall.

Makoto knows by now how it looks and sounds and settles when someone dredges up something that they’d almost made themselves forget and exposes it to another human being for the very first time.

“She visited less,” Enji says, slowly, “after he died.  Eventually she stopped.  She said the business was too demanding.  I wrote to her sometimes, but she usually didn’t answer.  I think—I suspect she didn’t want me following in his footsteps.  It could be that she… In her way, it’s possible that gave me up for lost as soon as I enrolled at UA.”

Makoto lets that sit for a few seconds, but nothing else comes.

He clears his throat.  “What about your mother?”

“She died when I was very young,” Enji says, flatly.  “Complications, possibly.  No one ever talked about it.”  

Makoto imagines that won’t be the last time he’ll hear that.  “Did she have any other family?”

“Not that I know of,” Enji says, the grip of his fingers around his arms slowly tightening.  “It’s not like I was being tortured.  We were well off.  Even when my father died, he left more than enough to sustain the house and make sure that I had everything I needed on a functionally indefinite basis.  What difference does it make?”

“How old were you?” Makoto says.

Enji’s eyes do a fascinating cold smolder because of the sharp teal.  “How old was I when what?”

“When your father died,” Makoto says, keeping his voice level.  “I read—”

“It was his own fault,” Enji says.  He looks shocked for a second—which is quite fair, since Makoto feels somewhat like he’s been struck across the face—and then recovers, gritting his teeth as he scrubs the emotion back out of his expression.  “What I—what I mean is—he was reckless.  He went into a rescue that he was ill-suited for, knowing he was underprepared, without appropriate backup.  And he failed.  He let the odds get the better of him, and he lost.”  Enji’s mouth twists, and his eyes narrow, but he’s glowering in the direction of the wall again.  “In public.  In front of dozens of people.”  He swallows.  He clenches his teeth.  “I was there.”

Makoto makes himself breathe slowly.  Enji is addressing it so calmly that either it’s a wound old enough to have scarred heavily in the years between… 

Or he’s buried his feelings about it so deeply beneath the layers of resentment and denial and relentless forward progress that he wouldn’t be able to access them if he wanted to.

That’s Makoto’s job, in a way.  Excavation.  Disinterment.  Resurrection.  Shining light on the skeletons, whatever state they’re in.

“You were there,” he offers back, slowly.  “You saw your father—”

“I didn’t see it,” Enji snaps, eyes flicking to him, fingers cinching tighter still.  “It was inside of a building.  But they brought out—” He sucks in a deep breath and lets it hiss out through his teeth, back to glaring daggers at the wall.  At least the wall won’t get the chills.  “I saw—his corpse.  Part of it.  When they brought it out.  It was raining.  And the—there was a little girl.  The one he tried to save.  He—” He runs his tongue over the edges of his teeth.  “There was never anything useful in any of the news articles, but I’d be willing to bet it was a backdraft.  Not uncommon with housefires.  He hadn’t—it’s very possible he hadn’t done his research, after giving me so much grief about preparation over the years.  The profession was different back then.  A lot more of it was outside, in open spaces—some fights were prearranged.  But it doesn’t—matter.  The bottom line is that if he’d worked harder and trained better, it wouldn’t have killed him.  He wasn’t strong enough.”

Makoto does know a few more things about Enji Todoroki.

Because he saw the fight against that creature, right after Endeavor rose to number one.

He saw a man—a strong man, an extraordinary man, but a man—stay alive by force of will.

He watched Endeavor win through a combination of ingenuity and ambition and a stark, simple, immovable refusal to quit.

Enji glances at him again, assessing, and looks away again just as quickly.

“The backup thing,” he says, barely loudly enough for Makoto to hear.  “That—what he had wasn’t an agency in the way we understand it today.  He had two sidekicks and a two-room office to store filing cabinets for the paperwork.  But he could have… He should have planned better.  There must have been a way.”

“What you’re feeling right now,” Makoto says, slowly.  “Is it the same as what you usually feel when you think about his death?”

Enji stares at him.  At least the astonishment seems to make him relax his hands a little bit.

He wets his lips.  His eyes narrow.  “I’ve never thought about it.”

“That’s fine,” Makoto says, keeping his voice completely calm.  “Let’s think about it now.  What would you call this?  What are you feeling?”

Everything tightens again—Enji’s jaw, his shoulders, his fingers’ grip.  “I’m not good at that sort of thing.”

Makoto has rarely been less surprised.

“That’s okay,” he says.  “Sometimes the words don’t fit right.  Let’s see if we can plot it on a spectrum.  Would you put it closer to anger, or to sadness?”

There go the eyes.  “It’s been thirty-five years.  That’s almost as long as you’ve been alive.”

Makoto is also not surprised that Enji did some research of his own.

Makoto is even less surprised that he’s avoiding the question.

It doesn’t seem particularly intentional—more like someone flinching away from a pebble colliding with the windshield of the car.  Enji saw the weapon coming towards his head and ducked.

That instinct has kept him alive all this time.

But it won’t save him here.

Makoto lowers his voice, trying to sound nonthreatening.  “Based on what you said, you must still be feeling something.”  He shifts his hand towards the pencil, but the movement instantly draws Enji’s eyes, so he makes himself stay still.  “A guess is fine.  I’m not going to hold you to it.  This is just an exercise.”

The silence feels leaden—thick and heavy, brimming with poison.

Makoto takes another deep breath.

He looks Enji in the eyes.

“If you want this to work,” he says, “you’re going to have to trust me.”

Enji searches Makoto’s face for what feels like an eternity, but possibly only because his full attention is so staggeringly intense.

He’s only here because all of the other strategies he could think of have already failed.

This is his last resort.

And he’s still so entrenched in some vision of unassailability—some unattainable, oversimplified concept of strength—that he can’t even bring himself to put a name to a feeling in front of a stranger.

Makoto has his work cut out for him.

But Endeavor is a fighter.

And he is, too.

“I want to remind you,” Makoto says, steadily, “that this is my job.  I’m not here to judge you.  No matter how uncomfortable it gets, I’m trying to help.”

Enji just keeps eyeing him for a while.

And he keeps looking back, hand flat on top of his pencil, staying still.

He’s not afraid of anything that Enji could throw at him.  He won’t recoil; he won’t recriminate.  That’s not how this works.

And it can work.

If Enji meets him halfway.

Enji’s eyes don’t relent, but Makoto can read in them that he’s thinking it over.

They have a whole hour.  Makoto would put it all towards this, if he had to.  So much of the future hangs in the balance.

Enji releases a deeper breath—not quite a sigh, but heavier than an ordinary exhale.  He tilts his chin very slightly, eyes still on Makoto—an implication of doubt, but then he squares his shoulders and adjusts the angle of his crossed arms.

Makoto wonders if it hurts to hold the right one so tightly.  He expects that that’s another conversation they won’t get to for a while.

“I don’t know,” Enji says, so quietly that it almost disappears even in the stifling quiet of the room.  “I—think—possibly I’ve always tried to be angry about it to avoid being sad.”

Makoto does not punch the stagnant air.

“Okay,” he says, evenly.  “Good.  That’s exactly what we need—that gives us something to work with.”  He hesitates.  It’s probably too early—too much too soon.  “It sounds like you’ve lost a lot of important people in your life.”

Enji looks betrayed, for a split-second—wounded and terrified.  Cornered.  Doomed.

And then it’s gone, replaced by a scowl and a scoff, and he glares at the table again.

“What happened to Touya was my own fault,” he says, voice razor-sharp.  “I don’t—all the—everything I did and felt then was wasted.  I never should have let it come to that, and then he wasn’t even gone.”

“Those are two separate traumas,” Makoto says.

Enji glances up sharply.  “They’re—they’re not—”

“Am I understanding right,” Makoto says, letting the unfurling force of the self-preservative disbelief wash over Enji, then pass through him; “that you lost your father, who you had a complicated relationship with, very suddenly to a fire?  And then twenty years later, you lost your firstborn son in almost precisely the same way?”

Enji is gripping his biceps hard enough to dimple the flesh on the left again.  Makoto hopes it’s grounding him, in some way, but mostly it just looks painful.

Maybe those are the same thing, when you’ve been a pro this long.

He’s seen a lot of them regroup and make a comeback only after the bleeding starts.

“People,” Enji bites out, “lose family members—” Not loved ones.  “—all the time.  Most of my job revolves around trying to prevent it.  It’s not—it doesn’t—change any of—”

Makoto waits—holds the argument in his mouth, holds his hands still, just watches.

But nothing else comes.

Enji struggles with the sentence for two more seconds, and then he shakes his head.

“It’s not some—” He clears his throat, glaring at the wall, glaring at the table, glaring at the corner of the couch.  “It doesn’t justify anything.”

“We’re not here to justify,” Makoto says, quietly.  “We’re here to understand.  We’re not trying to prove that it should mitigate the things you did.  You’re right—it doesn’t change those.  But it changed you.  And you’re carrying all of those changes.  You’re carrying all of the old grief, and the anger that you wrapped it in.  There’s new grief and new stress on a daily basis, if not an hourly one.  The responsibilities you have and the choices that you make from one moment to the next are bigger and more impactful than most of us could bear.  You’re carrying a lot, Enji.  I think that’s why you can’t sleep.  It’s just too much.”

Enji clenches and unclenches his fingers, then his jaw.  He looks at the couch.  He looks at his knees.

“I should be able to handle it,” he says, barely audible.  “It’s not…”

Makoto will have to rein himself in for a while—they’re still strangers.  He doesn’t know Enji well enough yet to start supplying words, and he can’t risk making it seem like he’s rushing Enji to finish a sentence or a thought.  This wouldn’t be his first client who’s stopped trying to articulate his inner self because no one was willing to wait for him to fumble through an unfamiliar vocabulary.

Enji takes another breath—fortifying, this time.  He sits up straighter.

“Look at someone like Hawks,” he says, and there’s a strange shift to his voice and his shoulders as he says it.  “He’s gone through a thousand times worse, none of which was his own damn doing, and he still—he’s fine.”

Makoto very much doubts that.

But it’s beside the point.

The point is:

“It isn’t a contest,” Makoto says, as gently as he can.  “You don’t have to be the most traumatized person in the room—or in the country—to look for solace, or to deserve relief.  I would argue that you actually can’t win at personal pain.  No one can.  You don’t have to compare yourself to anyone in here.  We’re working on you.  We’re starting from where you are.”

Enji’s spine curls a little.  Back to trying to burn a hole in the couch with his eyes.

Actually, he must not be trying very hard, considering that he can do that for real.

“It’s so self-centered,” Enji mutters.  “Indulgent.”

“Whose word is that?” Makoto says.  “‘Indulgent’.”

Enji blinks for a second before he frowns again.  “Mine, obviously.  I said it.”

“I hear words like that a lot,” Makoto says.  “The way you said it as a condemnation—like it was a word that someone used against you.  It sounded very much like the way a lot of my clients call themselves ‘stupid’ or ‘lazy’ or ‘weak’.”

He leans in—slowly, slightly.

“Usually,” he says, “those kinds of words recur when they’ve been used to hurt someone so many times that they stick.  And that person starts to believe the accusation even if their rational brain remembers that it isn’t true.”

Enji doesn’t move except to blink regularly.  What’s truly remarkable is that his eyes can be so cold and so scorching at the same time.

But Makoto can see it again—he’s thinking about it.  Part of the resistance comes from the indignity of realizing that he never put that together on his own.

“If it makes all of this easier to swallow,” Makoto says, “think about it this way—if we help you in here, and we’re able to settle things that have been needling you and distracting you and keeping you awake all this time, you’ll be able to help far more people out there.”

“‘Settle’,” Enji says, each syllable thudding into place.  “Not ‘solve’.”

“Those are my words,” Makoto says.  He spreads his hands, palms open—empty, weaponless.  “I want to keep any promises that I make, so I try not to overstate them at the start.”

Enji shifts his weight, adjusting the grip of both of his hands again, and makes another survey of the wall, the table, and the couch.  The painting on the wall is uninteresting.  Maybe Makoto should get some fake flowers for the table, or an inoffensive table runner.  Something to look at that isn’t quite enough to focus on.

“Fine,” Enji says, the word clipped to sharp edges—but extended, not swung.  “What do I do next?”

“We,” Makoto says, not emphasizing it too much, “can talk about the feelings you had when your father died, and the feelings you had when Touya died, and the feelings you have about both of those things now.  Sometimes just sharing them helps.  Sometimes it relieves some of the weight you’ve been carrying by keeping them all inside.”

Enji eyes him.  “They’re not rocks.”

“No,” Makoto says, softening his voice.  “But you felt it, didn’t you?”  Enji’s brows lower, but he doesn’t look away.  “Everything felt heavier after you lost someone.  And I’d be willing to bet it got worse over time—that each loss piled on top of the others.”

Enji uncurls his left hand from around his arm, raises it, and slowly runs it up over his face.  He pushes it up into his hair and then slides it back down all the way to his chin before he lets it drop.

He shifts the right arm to meet it, joining his hands together in between his knees this time.  He tangles his fingers together loosely, staring down at them—maybe, by the slight angle of his head, staring specifically at the metal fingers on the right.

“I think—” He takes a breath.  Mokoto manages not to hold his in anticipation.  “I think I—lost Touya twice, in a way.  The… what I thought was his death, obviously.  But when he came back, it was like I’d killed him a second time.  His body was alive, but Touya was dead all over again.  It’s… there are flashes of him.  Sparks.  And I can’t deny who he is.  I see myself in all of it; this isn’t about pretending.  But the boy that died just wanted to be loved and seen and wanted.  And this… He’s so cold.  Empty.  Scrabbling to try to fill the space.  I tried to protect him and turned him into a murderer.”

That’s going to need several sessions of its own.

“I want to come back to that,” Makoto says, to acknowledge its significance out loud.  “The guilt, and his trajectory.  But let’s start earlier—way back.”  He watches Enji’s face for any signs.  To say that this is a delicate operation understates it somewhat.  “When your father died.”  There’s a flicker in Enji’s eyes, but Makoto can’t tell if it’s changing gears or raising walls.  The mechanisms aren’t so different.  “How did you grieve him?”

Enji watches Makoto right back for four uninterrupted seconds before slowly giving the answer Makoto had begun to expect:

“There was a funeral,” Enji says.  “I used to visit the marker every year on that date, but—” He clenches his jaw and carries on.  That strategy never failed him until it did.  “Once the agency took off, I—made excuses not to make the time.  I would light incense.  I still do.”

“But mostly you just kept going,” Makoto says quietly.

Enji’s eyes narrow yet again.  “What the hell else was I supposed to do?  The rest of the world doesn’t stop.”

“There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to grief,” Makoto says, keeping his tone as unassuming as possible to deflect the energy.  “And it sounds like you didn’t have any… guidance.  Or any example to follow.”

Enji half-shrugs—a movement sharpened by its abruptness.  “You didn’t answer the question.”

Makoto blinks.

But he’s got a point.

“Ah,” Makoto says.  “Yes.  You’re right.”  There’s a glint in Enji’s eyes at that.  Makoto probably needs to be taking notes, but he can’t risk either of its side effects—he can’t look away without losing ground, and he can’t make it seem like surveillance.  He has to stay on top of this the old-fashioned way.  “It’s not about what you were ‘supposed to do’,” he says.  “There’s no ‘supposed to’.  Grief is extremely individual.  But if you’d had… if someone had been helping you through it, you could have tried to explore ways to release some of that pain.”

Enji is no longer just looking at him: this is an examination.

“It’s not like I’ve ignored it,” he says—louder than a mutter, but rougher, too.  Not quite sinister enough to be a growl.  “Everything I’ve done has been in his name—in our name.  To do the things he couldn’t and save the legacy.”

Makoto doesn’t budge.  “What were the things he couldn’t do?”

“Win,” Enji says, harshly.  “Survive.  Train someone undefeatable.”

Makoto turns those over.  The order of them matters.  “It seems like he did the last one.”

Enji stares at him, looking almost affronted, before the glower kicks in.  He lifts his right hand, fingers outstretched.  “I spent twenty years playing catch-up with All Might only to get dismembered on live TV.”

“And you got back up,” Makoto says.  “Every time.  Isn’t that the definition of undefeatable?”

He thought that was a promising thing to say.

He certainly didn’t expect to be met with venom.

“There’s a chasm of difference,” Enji grits out, “between refusing to stop muddling through in spite of your own mediocrity, and actually being good at something.  Winning because the other person bows out is bullshit.  That’s not a victory.  It doesn’t count.  Winning is about beating someone because you’re better.”

He sits back, arms rising to cross themselves firmly over his chest again.  He sets his jaw and glares at the wall.

“My father never did that,” he says.  “And neither did I.”

Makoto is missing something.

So he interrogates that for a few seconds, considering the shapes and angles of it in his mind.

There’s something fundamental to extract here—the imperative emphasis of Enji’s father’s influence on the idea of being untouchable, chained down by an inferiority complex that has evolved into merciless perfectionism, leaving no space for nuance.

If everything is all-or-nothing—win or lose, best or worst—then there’s no such thing as good enough.  There’s no such thing as satisfaction.

From the way the Endeavor Agency operates, Makoto anticipated some of this.

But it runs much deeper than he thought.

He can work with that.  They can work together with that.

But it’s going to take time.

And time will require an investment from Enji.

Time will take faith.

“When was the last time,” Makoto says, “that you were proud of one of your kids?”

Enji now stares at him like he’s speaking in tongues.  Admittedly, he did forget to try to implement some sort of segue, but he doesn’t imagine that Enji is a stickler for the conventions of conversation.

“Yesterday,” Enji says, as if it was a personal insult instead of a leading question.  “Shouto got the top score in his class on a math exam.  He’s never expressed much interest in it, but he studied hard.”  There’s a pause.  His expression ripples with what might just be the suppression of a wince.  “That’s—what Fuyumi told me.”

Mokoto files that away, too.  It would, unfortunately, be no surprise at all if the eldest daughter is the one who keeps him updated on the others, as part of a desperate attempt to keep the peace.

That’s a topic for later.

For now—

“That’s even more impressive,” Makoto says, “given that I understand he has some extremely intelligent—and extremely competitive—classmates.”

Enji sets his jaw, sets his mouth, and nods once.  There was a faint flush of something genuine and gentle in his description of the achievement, but now he’s guarded again.  He’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Would you still have been proud of Shouto,” Makoto says, evenly, “if he’d studied as hard as he could but not aced the test?”

Enji’s eyes tighten at the corners.  His shoulders shift.

“I want to be,” he says, very quietly.  “I would—I would want to be.  I would try.  His effort counts.  I want him to—I want him to feel like the work he does has meaning.”

Makoto nods.

Makoto takes a breath.

Makoto smooths out the unused page of the notebook.

“With that in mind,” he says, “when was the last time you were proud of yourself?”

By Enji’s expression alone, one might assume that Makoto just asked the most insipid question in the history of human communication.

But Makoto has been doing this long enough to have an instinct for when to stand his ground.

By the looks and the sound and the tenor of it, Enji has spent his entire life building walls—some of them practical, to construct the scaffolding for an agency that now runs like a well-oiled machine; most of them protective.  Most of them are battlements, and parapets, and towers that he’s raised around himself.

They’re not going to knock them down today.

But the only way to start is to batter at any loose bit of brick that Makoto can find until he manages to punch his way through.

He thinks Enji might even respect that.

Eventually.

For now, Enji seems to be impervious to the weight of silence.

In the interests of saving time—since Enji might well sit there staring at Makoto until the sun burns out, given the capacity of his persistence—Makoto picks up the pencil and then lays it back down to signal a slight change of course.

“Should I dial that down?” he says.  “When was the last time you were satisfied with a job well done?”

Enji’s eyes go strangely cold.  “This job is never done.”

“The point I was getting at,” Makoto says, delicately, “is that you’ll accept sincere effort from Shouto as being worthy of praise, but you hold yourself to a significantly higher standard.  I realize there are other factors involved, but what are the standards that you feel that you have to meet?”

The scowl deepens, but Makoto is starting to think that that’s an advantage—Enji’s temper clouds his mind and makes it harder for him to calculate, which increases the likelihood that he’ll tell the truth.

It doesn’t seem to work like that out in the field, interestingly enough—out there, the anger seems to hone his instincts and reinforce his strength.

But they’re not in the field.

“Shouto—” Enji begins, and then he grinds his teeth, fingers sinking into his arms again.  “Other people do—more.  They have—they’re taking care of their families or doing ads or mentoring sidekicks or whatever it is.  They’re out there doing good on top of doing the job.  You can’t expect them to be perfect all the time.”

Wikipedia strikes again.  “You run three separate charities under the auspices of the agency.”

“That’s just money,” Enji says, and the disdain drips like acid.  “It doesn’t change anything.”

“It can,” Makoto says.  “Isn’t that the entire point of philanthropy?  To try to change the future?”

Ah.

“I see,” Makoto says, his mouth moving just a touch too quick for his mind to halt it.  “You mean that it doesn’t change anything about you.”

Enji looks like he regrets not just the previous comment, but every single incident in his life where he’s expressed himself by way of audible speech.

“That’s exactly it,” Makoto says, and maybe the earnestness gets the better of him a bit.  “That’s why we’re here.  We can’t change the past.  But we can use it to improve the future.  That’s what life is.  That’s how we learn.  We make mistakes, and we remember them, and we change.  We can’t go back.  But we can do better.”

Enji’s eyes gleam, but nothing else moves.  “Easy for you to say.  You have no idea what I’ve done.”

That’s exactly what Makoto has—an idea.

And an excellent imagination.

Empathy is a kind of imagination.

Adaptability is, too.

Makoto thinks about Enji’s life—not just the sordid details that they’ve drawn out today, not just the aggregated misery and the guilt that bleeds from beneath its crushing weight.

He thinks about the practicalities.  He thinks about the ordinariness.

At the most basic level, both of them solve problems for a living—or seek to.  Both of them acquire data, synthesize it, and try to push towards a positive outcome.

But Makoto’s job necessarily makes him focus on the process—on progress, made achingly slow; on subtle shifts in attitude that constitute improvements.  He lets the client and the interactions and the tiny hints that they uncover together guide their direction, and he tries to steer them towards ports that look safe.

Enji’s job doesn’t work the same way.

Enji’s life doesn’t work the same way.

Makoto is starting to think that Enji’s job and Enji’s life are the same thing, and that’s at the heart of all of it.

But Enji solves problems in reverse.

Enji accepts one outcome:

He wins.

If he reads a scene exactly right, and there are no casualties, and all the paperwork is unimpeachable, then he might be able to rest—right up until he returns to the home he shattered, which can’t be mended by a hundred-thousand rescues, no matter how masterfully he managed every one.

Enji solves problems by striving for perfection, and refusing to stop until he can seize it.

He works backwards from a single possible solution.  The interim is irrelevant.

“Would you mind if we try something different?” Makoto asks.

Enji does not look impressed, but he doesn’t look especially unfavorable either.  At least in here, his baseline seems to be annoyed suspicion.  “Different than what?”

“I’m wondering if it would help to reverse our approach,” Makoto says.  “Instead of trying to dig up places where the pain started, what if we looked at where we want to go and tried to figure out how to get there?”

Unsurprisingly, Enji’s eyes narrow.  “What does that actually mean?”

“What do you want the future to look like?” Makoto asks.  “What do you want to change?  If we set some goals—at a high level, I meant what I said about promises—maybe we can start working backwards and figure out what’s impeding them.  Then we find what we need to talk through.”

Enji eyes him for a few more seconds before looking away again.  He unclenches his fingers and lowers his hands, resting them together on his knees with the right cradling the left.

“I want them to be happy,” he says, so quietly that Makoto can barely hear him from four feet away.  “I think that’s more feasible if I’m not there.”

“If your goal is to try to repair some of what you broke,” Mokoto says, pitching his voice to match Enji’s, “you can’t do that by disappearing.”

“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” Enji mutters.  “Disappear.  Unless they change their names and get reconstructive surgery, they’ll have to learn to live in my shadow.”

“What if we changed its shape?” Makoto says.

He doesn’t think the glare this time is entirely fair.  Enji started that metaphor; he just ran with it.

“Have any of them cut you off?” Makoto asks.

The glare does not abate.  “As I said.  They can’t exactly get away from it.”

“But they could go no-contact,” Makoto says.  “They could move.  They could leave.  Whether or not other people recognized them as your children, they’re all old enough and established enough that they could get far away from you, if they wanted.  Couldn’t they?”

Enji’s jaw clenches so tight that Makoto swears he hears a tooth creak.

“Touya can’t,” Enji says, voice low.  “But I—realize that that’s not how you meant it.”  He twists his hands together and directs the glare at them instead.  “The fact that they could be more estranged than they are is not something to be proud of.”

“It’s something we can build on,” Makoto says, trying not to sound dismissive.  Enji has clearly written that one off as a failure, but Makoto has a hunch now that he’s written off a lot of salvageable things over the years.  “Can you tell me a little bit about where they all are right now?”

Enji watches himself curling the fingers of his left hand into a fist.  “Shouto graduates next year.  He’s mentioned that he wants to start an agency with his two friends.  I think they’d be wiser to take sidekick positions somewhere else first to make enough money to start something from scratch, and the experience would serve them better than trying to dive right into management.  But if I tell him that, he’ll think I’m trying to push him to work with me.”

Makoto has seen Shouto on the news enough times to know that his communication style is similar to Enji’s—upfront, forthright, and sometimes blunt.  He tempers that with a much gentler and more approachable demeanor, thought admittedly almost anyone would look soft compared directly with Endeavor.

“What if you said it to him just like that?” Makoto asks.  “Start the conversation by telling him that you’re not trying to pressure him, and it’s just advice that he can take or leave.”

Enji eyes him again, but at least in a considering way, rather than with open mistrust.  “Just—lay out the facts for him.  And then walk away.  So it doesn’t seem like there’s an expectation.”

“It’s worth a try,” Makoto says.  He waits, but Enji uncurls his fingers, curls them again, and offers no further comment.  Makoto doesn’t take it personally.  “What about the others?”

“Natsuo and his girlfriend have their own place,” Enji says.  He wraps his metal fingers around his other wrist.  “He doesn’t talk to me much.  Only in emergencies, if Shouto gets hurt, or if Fuyumi or his mother beg him to.”  The tips of his metal thumb and forefinger meet, making a ring around his wrist.  “Fuyumi said he’s planning to propose to his girlfriend soon.”  His grip tightens.  “I’ve never met her.”

“What’s he like?” Makoto asks.

Enji looks at him.

“Me,” Enji says, flatly.  “He’s like me.  So if you mean ‘Will he change his mind?’, the answer is ‘No’.”

Makoto looks back, as steadily as he can.  “You changed your mind about the type of person that you wanted to be.  You’ve changed a lot of things.”

Enji looks down at his captured wrist.  “I didn’t change my mind.  The crisis came on faster than I could run.  I didn’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Makoto says.

Enji’s grip tightens.  His voice lowers, and sharpens.  “It was a matter of survival.  And that’s beside the point.  He doesn’t—I have no right to ask him to change anything.  If he—it makes sense.  He’s starting a new life.  He wants a clean slate, and he wants it to be his, and he doesn’t want to have to navigate around my shortcomings when he has so much to build.”

Enji’s right: Makoto doesn’t know if Natsuo will come around.

But Makoto knows love when he sees it—even if it’s been buried under rubble for so long that it barely even glimmers.

Enji respects Natsuo, and doesn’t want to hurt him any more than he already has.

“Sometimes,” Makoto says, carefully, “when things are going well, people are more… generous.  Sometimes having a lot of things settled makes it easier to open doors you’d had to close.  He might still find it in himself to let you in.”

Enji snorts.

Makoto can’t help smiling slightly, though it feels like as much a wince as a smile.  “I realize I don’t know him.  But all I’m asking is that you don’t rule it out—not yet.”  

Enji eyes him again, and then looks away again.  That’s probably as close to an acknowledgement as they’re going to get.

“What does he do?” Makoto says.  “For a living, I mean.”

An unspoken I would have heard of him if you’d made him a hero lingers in the air despite the lack of breath behind it.

“He’s an EMT,” Enji says, and Makoto hears the swell of it again—the pride, prying its way out of the ropes and hatches trying to hide it away and hold it down.  “Hurling himself into most of the same dangers with none of the advantages.  He doesn’t even get to punch the person responsible when something goes wrong.”

“What about it do you think he’s drawn to?” Makoto says.

Enji said He’s like me.  The answer won’t be particularly relevant in terms of insight into Natsuo’s life, but it’ll be a window into Enji’s perception of himself.

Enji seems to intuit some part of the gambit, judging by the renewed scowl.  “I don’t know.  Even if he was talking to me, there’s no way in hell he’d tell me something like that.”

…well, that is a glimpse into Enji’s mind.

Makoto shifts back in the chair.  He’s barely moved since they sat down.  “Tell me about Fuyumi.”

Enj’s grip on his own wrist loosens slightly.  His face relaxes—incrementally, but Makoto has already learned to watch very closely for the signs.

“She takes after her mother,” Enji says.  “Except for the refusal to give up, even on a long-since lost cause.”  He straightens the crease of his slacks where the line rolls over his knee, meticulously grasping the fabric between the fingertips of his left hand.  “She’s a teacher.  Second grade.  I don’t know how she does that, either.  She’s the kindest person I’ve ever met, but she knows when to stand her ground.  The…” He lets out a breath.  “I wish she wasn’t so resilient.  I wish she hadn’t had to learn that.  I sometimes wonder what she would have done if she hadn’t had to carry so many of my mistakes.”

Makoto keeps watching.  “What do you mean by that?”

“She’s the one who took care of them,” Enji says, looking at the wall.  “Especially after I put Rei in the hospital to keep her away from Shouto while she…”

He stops.

Makoto waits.

Enji’s eyes go very distant, still fixed on the painting on the wall.  His shoulders tighten.  His left hand clenches into a fist again, and the right wraps around it.

“Enji,” Makoto says, very quietly.  “I know about that.  It doesn’t disqualify you from being here, and it doesn’t make you undeserving of a chance to look for clarity.  Regretting that is… good, in a way.  It means you’ve changed.  It means you’ve learned so much that those actions, which probably seemed logical at the time, now make you—”

“I was scared,” Enji says, barely louder than his breath.

Makoto stays very, very still.

“I was—” Enji swallows, chokes on words or an inhalation or both at once, shakes his head, twists his hands.  “I was so afraid that she’d hurt him again, or hurt herself—I thought—I thought she might kill herself.  I thought I’d known what she was capable of.  I knew she was miserable, obviously, but it didn’t seem so strange compared to my own damn misery, and I thought—I thought everything was under control.  And then—when she—she could have killed him.  Like I killed Touya.  And all I could—all I could think, all I could do—was—it never even occurred to me to try to… help her.  Or reach her.  I thought she was lost.  I thought she’d cracked the same way so many of the villains do, and there was no going back, and the only thing that I could do was put her out of harm’s way, and protect them from her.  I didn’t see her as a—as a person anymore.  Only as a threat.”

He swallows.  He takes a shaky breath.

“When the—when the smoke cleared, I wondered… The doctors kept saying she was… very lucid.  Getting along.  Making friends, being kind, being herself.  But I thought—it was too late.  I thought that even if I’d been wrong, it would never… She’d hate me forever, and I deserved it.  She’d always be waiting for a chance to even the sore.  For revenge.  Like everyone else I’d ever overpowered and put away.”

Makoto reaches deep down into himself and checks the locks.

His sentiments are a liability, at times like this.

He can’t afford to look through the lens of his own experience.  He can’t try to imagine what it would be like to do something like that to Asuka—he can’t compare.  He can’t let himself inhabit it.

He’s a professional, here, not a person.  He’s an ally, not a friend.  He’s a doctor.  It doesn’t matter how the bone broke; it doesn’t matter how the wounds started.  His job is to stop the bleeding.

He has to set aside the chill that ripples through him and concentrate on what he can do to help.

And he knows, rationally, that no quantity or quality of imagination could let him put himself in Enji’s shoes.  He’ll never really understand.  The only way to know the war inside this man is to have lived every single battle, and to have felt every single blow.  It’s ravaged him.

Makoto is a medic.

He’s a peacemaker.

So now it’s time to get to work.

“Do you want to talk a little more about that?” he asks, softly.  “Or do you want to go back to Fuyumi?”

Enji hesitates, the metal fingertips pressed deep into the flesh of his wrist.  His brow is furrowed, but his eyes are desperate.

“We can come back to this,” Makoto says, resisting the urge to lean forward.  When Enji is already stretched this thin and guarded this closely, any intrusion into his space might constitute an attack.  “We can come back to anything, any time you’re up to it.  Time works a little differently in here.”

Enji swallows laboriously.  His head shifts incrementally—the faintest implication of a nod.

“Okay,” Makoto says, keeping it light.  “Tell me about Fuyumi.  She sounds like someone special.”

Enji lowers his head and drags in one reedy, ragged breath.  “I—yes.”

“You mentioned her a few times,” Makoto says, “in the context of the others—in the context of her sharing information about them with you.  Does she do that often?”

Enji pries his fingers away from his wrist one by one, slowly and meticulously, like dismantling a machine.  “She—I don’t know what ‘often’ is to other people.  She—reaches out, still.  Talks to me.  Keeps tabs.”

No assumptions.  “You know her better than I do,” Makoto says.  “Why do you think that is?”

“Because I trained her, too,” Enji says, voice steadying and darkening at once.  “Trained her to pick up after me, and report back on all of them.  Status reports.  So that if one of them was causing problems, I could delegate it to her or the nurse to solve them.”

Somehow, a rabbit-hole that Makoto estimated to be bottomless nonetheless runs deeper than he imagined.

“How old is she?” Makoto asks.

“She just turned twenty-five,” Enji says, and the flicker of disgust that crosses his expression is alarming, and interesting, and then gone.  “She—was living in the house I got for her mother.  She has her own apartment now.  She was worried about me starving in her absence, so she came by more often at the start, to teach me how to cook.  Which I already could, because I had to teach myself enough to get by after high school, but she’s much better than I am.”

Makoto sifts back through.  Enji cycles through thoughts like machine-gun shells.  “Why do you think she did that?”

Enji blinks, then frowns.  “I just told you.  She wasn’t sure I was going to be able to handle the house on my own.”  His eyes narrow.  “If you think there’s another reason, just tell me what it is.”

Makoto probably should have figured that Enji would object to the basic premise of talk therapy at some point.

“I don’t know her like you do,” he says, as smoothly as possible.  “But instead of using the physical distance as a reason to stay away, she specifically made an effort to come back and spend time with you.”

Enji’s suspicion doesn’t dissipate.  “I told you.  I ground it into her that dutifully looking after all of us was her purpose in life.”

But Makoto can hear the slightest hint of hesitation in it.  

A little wedge is all he needs.

“How long has it been since she moved out?” he asks.

Enji works his jaw for a second.  “Two and a half years.”

“And she still comes by to check on you?” Makoto says.

Enji works his jaw a little harder.

“She must see you on TV all the time,” Makoto says.  “So she knows you’re not starving.”

“She texts or calls,” Enji mutters, “more than she visits.  Lately.”

“It sounds like your father was a complicated man,” Makoto says.  Perversely, sometimes the easiest way to clear a minefield is to drop a bomb in the middle.  “Did you love him anyway?”

Enji stares at him in naked disbelief.

Makoto gives Enji the better part of ten seconds of silence to process before leaning slightly in.  “Let’s just consider the possibility that it’s that simple.  She clearly hasn’t giv—”

“No,” Enji says, hoarsely.

Arguably, that’s fair.  It stops Makoto in his tracks.

“I don’t—think—that I did,” Enji forces out, fingers tangled together, his susceptible knuckles going white.  “I didn’t—know him.  I idolized him.  But I didn’t… I don’t think I knew how.”

If the man was constantly swapping out different surrogate parents in front of his only child, that does make sense.

“Okay,” Makoto says, watching Enji’s hands as the tell, now.  Easing up the pressure might get them out of here in one piece.  “That’s okay.  It sounds like he created that distance, maybe even deliberately.”  Deep breath.  Put it into gear.  “But you did things differently.  Fuyumi sees you differently.  Do you think it’s possible that she loves you as her father even with your flaws?”

By the icy look that earns him, flaws was a poor choice of word for a series of increasingly disastrous decisions, but at least it got the point across.

Enji looks away again.  He wraps the fingers of his left hand around the thumb of the right, turning them slowly around the metal, squeezing tight.  “It’s—irrational.  After everything she’s seen.  But obligation alone wouldn’t explain it.  She…” He hangs his head, shakes it.  “The strength is from her mother, too.  I can hardly imagine what it takes to live in a world like this and give the way that she does.”

Makoto assesses his face, then the hands again.  “What would you call what you do, then?”

Enji promptly goes back to eyeing him.  “What do you mean?”

“In your work,” Makoto says.  “Which has frequently been acknowledged as the most demanding job in the world, to which you are provably the most dedicated in this entire country.  You give everything you have, every single day.  It seems to me that that’s actually how a lot of this started—you gave all of yourself to the job, day in and day out, which didn’t save anything for your family.  So when they asked for something, you had nothing left.  Trying to scrape an empty vessel hurt, and you passed that hurt back on to them.”

Enji lowers his head.  He draws a slow deep breath that rounds his shoulders for a moment before he straightens them again.  He pries his left hand away from the right and runs it down his face.

“In which case,” he says, quietly, “why in the hell would any reasonable human being still love me?”

“Love and reason,” Makoto says, “don’t always coincide.  But I can think of reasons, too.  You’re her father.  For all that it’s been a difficult road, were there moments where the two of you were close?  Even before she came over and started cooking with you.  I can hear in the way you talk about her that you care about her a lot, even if you don’t know how to express it to her.  Maybe she can hear that, too.  Maybe she’s been watching, and she’s seen what you give and how you try.  Maybe she can appreciate that, even when you don’t get it right where your family is concerned.”

Enji glowers again, which was not exactly the reaction Makoto was hoping for.  “She’s not a pushover.”

“I don’t think any child of yours would be capable of it” comes out before Makoto can wrangle it into a more professional configuration.

Makoto is looking so closely that he sees the corner of Enji’s mouth twitch.

“Have you tried saying it in so many words?” Makoto asks.  “Just telling her that you think she’s special, and you love her, and you appreciate that she tries to stay connected?”

The look Enji gives him does not make him optimistic.

“That’s the second time you’ve suggested that,” Enji says.  “People don’t like it when I’m direct.”

“I’m sure reporters don’t,” Makoto says.  “But your kids might be different.  Shouto is direct, too, from what I’ve seen.  And your children are probably used to listening for what you’re trying to say to them even if the way you say it is…” Hmm.  “…intense.”

Enji’s gaze sharpens, and he turns his head—directing it towards the wall a moment too late to spare Makoto the sting.  “They don’t owe me that.”

“Would you be willing to try it?” Makoto asks, watching Enji’s hands tighten around each other again.  “Just to find out.  They might not see it that way.”

Enji works his jaw, twisting his hands.

“Fine,” he says, quietly.

“Is it…” Makoto pauses, regroups, revises.  “I’m getting the sense that your experiences—primarily in the job, but personally as well—have made life seem very… transactional.”

Enji looks at him again, eyes narrowed for the hundredth time.  “As opposed to what?  Anyone who takes risks for free is a liar or an idiot.”

Makoto meets his eyes.  “Don’t you?”

Enji clenches his teeth.  “I think it’s common knowledge that I’m about as stupid as they come.”

Makoto steps carefully.  “Do you really believe that?”

The way Enji is grinding his teeth, his dentist must be having a premonition of an imminent visit.  “In a lot of ways, it’s true.”

“The impulse to tear yourself down,” Makoto says.  “Where does that come from?”

Enji goes back to staring.

“You’re doing your competitors’ work for them,” Makoto says, slowly, “which mostly seems to be unlike you.  But you undermine and undersell yourself, even though you and I both know that you worked and fought extremely hard to get to the top.  Why do you think that is?”

Enji keeps staring.

There’s something cold in it.  There’s something very, very empty.  There’s some dread.

Delicate stage.

“Sometimes,” Makoto says, “it’s a feature of perfectionism.  If you deemphasize or undercut an accomplishment before anyone else even has a chance to comment, then you’ve beaten them to the punch, and nothing that they say to detract can be as negative as what you’ve already said.  So then it doesn’t hurt as much if they say you’ve fallen short, because you’ve already shot yourself down.”

The staring continues.

There seems to be some disbelief in it, but more than that, Makoto thinks he sees an abject sort of acceptance—something close to hopelessness.

A part of Enji had known that, about himself—known what he was doing, known what the well-established habit fostered, and what it meant.  But he’d let himself get away with it.  He’d let himself look the other way.  He’d let himself choose the easy way out even though he could see the fork in the road.

Makoto just accused him of betraying himself, and running from it.

And they both know it’s true.

Which could be powerful, in the long term, but seems to be paralyzing now.

Makoto takes a deep breath and looks down at his own hands this time.  He resettles them on the notepad, turns the pencil sideways, and then straightens it again. 

“I’m going to give you an assignment,” he says.  “For the next week, when you think things like that, pay attention to them.  You don’t have to write them down—just notice.  Just think about them.  Just for a moment.  And try to get an idea of how many times you think that way, on the average day, and what kinds of things you focus on.”

Enji shifts his weight.  “It—would be easier to analyze them if they’re documented.”

Makoto looks up.  Enji looks cagey and conflicted, but not like he’s about to crack into a thousand pieces under the weight of the existential torment.

Makoto showed him a problem.

And then Makoto gave him a task, and a tool.

He has something to hold onto.  He has somewhere to go—something to try.  He has a weapon, and a purpose.

They can work with this.

They can get a long way with this.

“If you prefer that,” Makoto says, “however you want to handle it is fine with me.  I didn’t want to add more paperwork to your workdays.”

Enji huffs out a dismissive breath, albeit without much force.  “That’s the least of my concerns.”

Makoto believes him.

“We can take a look together next Saturday, then,” Mokoto says, slowly.  Enji hasn’t officially sanctioned a second visit yet, but ending the attempt after one difficult session would likely count as quitting, in his mind.  “Do you have anything particularly challenging on the radar for this week?”

Enji lifts his left shoulder slightly, implying a shrug.  “I try not to schedule too densely.  Something always goes wrong.”  He pauses.  “And I hate meetings.”

Makoto doesn’t think it’s therapeutically relevant, but he can’t help it: “Why is that?”

“Because people bullshit,” Enji says.  “And they bookend the complicated lying with stupid formalities to make themselves look busy.  Colossal waste of time.”

Makoto gives up and folds his hands on top of the notepad.  “What do you do when you have a bad day?”

Enji snorts.  “What do you mean, ‘do’?  The only thing you can do is get through it.”

Unfortunately that doesn’t come as a surprise.  “Is there anyone you could talk to?” 

Enji’s expression doesn’t budge.  “About what?”

“Bad days,” Makoto says.  “The especially bad ones, at least.”

Enji’s shoulders hunch perceptibly—which Makoto is increasingly inclined to see as a protective maneuver.  Enji’s size has kept him safe—kept people at a distance, kept him isolated from their criticism, kept him coming out on top.  His heart has failed him a thousand times, but his fists always hit the mark.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Enji says.

Makoto lets that one sit in the air between them—between the talk therapist and the patient he’s been prying revelations out of for the past forty-five minutes

Enji scowls, scoffs, hitches his shoulders higher, folds his arms.  “This is different.  You’re getting paid.”

Why does that make it sound seedy?

Makoto pushes his glasses up, then tugs them down a centimeter to adjust.  “I will be the first to admit that training and practice do make me more effective at keeping a conversation relevant and useful to the greatest possible extent,” he says, “but think about it like a pressure valve.  Anything that you can release to someone you trust is going to reduce the amount that’s building up inside you.”

“Unless they make it worse,” Enji mutters.  “I can’t—ask that of someone.”

“What if they wanted you to?” Makoto asks.

Enji watches him, but with enough weight and significance that he swallows the follow-up question and waits instead.

It was the right call.

Enji lowers his arms, folds his hands, and feigns fascination with them.  “Hawks.”

Makoto keeps waiting.

Less helpful this time—Enji eyes him again, waiting for him.

“You talk to Hawks?” Makoto tries.

“No,” Enji says, sharply.  His shoulders sink an inch, then another.  “He talks to me, though.  At me.”

Makoto does not need the full breadth of his capable imagination to conjure that.  “About what?” 

“Anything that comes into his head,” Enji mutters.  “Everything.”

“What do you tell him?” Makoto asks.

“I don’t have to tell him anything,” Enji says, quietly.  “He knows what it’s like.”

Makoto takes a moment to thank a lucky star that at least there’s someone in Enji’s life that he seems to trust.

“Two weeks ago,” Enji says, almost unvoiced, “I lost a hostage.  Twenty-year-old girl.  He just—he was just there.  In my office.”  He swallows, almost shakes his head, almost sighs.  “Brought tea.  Sat there while I dealt with the paperwork.  Started being obnoxious at the stroke of eleven o’clock so that I couldn’t focus anymore, effectively forcing me to go home.”

Makoto gives him a few more seconds, but his fingers curl back into his sleeves, and his eyes fix on the wall again.

It’s precious to him—that moment of vulnerability, and Hawks’s quiet, unconventional method of consolation.

“Is he the one who suggested this for you?” Makoto asks, slowly.  “Therapy, I mean.”

Enji glances up at that.

“Hawks hates doctors,” he says, so matter-of-factly that the words feel like a slap to the skin.  “Psychiatrists most of all.”  He looks away, which at least gives Makoto a chance to exhale.  “I—was thinking about Rei.  About how… It changed her.  It shouldn’t ever have come to that—I shouldn’t have made it come to that—but the woman who came back was stronger than the one I knew before.  Wiser.”  He breathes, once, sharply.  “Unafraid.”

That word has come up far more frequently than Makoto expected.

He’d thought it would be the grief, above everything, but they’re tangled together—the loss and the fear, the fear of loss, the amalgamation of death and failure, the mind-scalding terror of them both.

“All I can promise you,” Makoto says, keeping his voice low, “is my best effort.  But if you’re willing to give yours—”

Enji gives him another look that makes him wonder, wavelengths aside, why lasers aren’t typically blue.  “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

With a little luck—all right, likely with a lot of luck—maybe they can change that, too.

“I’m starting to see that for myself,” Makoto says.  “This works the same way as everything else.  What you get out of it is directly proportional to what you put in.”  

Enji’s crossed arms tighten again.  “Then I’d say it works better than most other things.”

Makoto lets himself smile.  He’s hoping they’ve reached that point now.  “True.”  Akina is having an It’s not fair phase.  A lot of things change from when you’re four, but a lot of things don’t.  “Tell me about Hawks.”

Maybe they’re not at that point after all.

Enji’s eyes narrow, and he searches Makoto’s face with blisteringly focused attention.  “Why?”

There’s something strangely sweet about that—he poured his well-guarded secrets out on Makoto’s coffee table like a cache of gemstones splayed out for the taking, but the mere suggestion of sharing something about Hawks made him withdraw.

Enji’s instinct is protecting Hawks, even when he’s miles away.

Makoto holds his hands up, waving them just slightly—gently dismissive, not desperate.  “Nothing confidential.  I just want to know how he fits into your life.  It seems like you would count him as a friend.”

Enji looks at Makoto for a second, assessingly, and then frowns over at the wall.  He must know every single nick in the plaster by now.

“I don’t know,” he says, very quietly.  “I think so.  I’ve never—had a friend, before him.  Jeanist took advantage of my guard being down, after that, but—Hawks—”

His eyes flick to Makoto, calm but critical.  It’s a test.

Makoto stays still and keeps his face clear of anything but moderate interest.

“I don’t think Hawks had ever had any friends either,” Enji says, slowly.  “Which is probably why he’s so annoying.”

Makoto suppresses the smile.  “Tell me about that.”

Enji’s scowl deepens.  “There’s nothing to tell.  I got used to it.”

Keeping the expression at just moderate interest is getting harder.  “Has that ever happened before?”

“Obviously,” Enji says, more than a bit scathingly.  “People annoy me all the time.”

“I meant getting used to it,” Makoto says, watching him.  “That can’t have been as easy as it sounds.”

Enji shifts.  He clenches his fingers, and his jaw.  He consults the wall again.

“We spent a lot of time together,” he says.  “We both—changed.  Settled, possibly.  It—after the first Billboard show, I almost strangled him, but when we fought together, I realized it was all… part of the game.  Part of the plan.  Part of survival.  That he was just… keeping himself entertained.  Trying to make himself laugh.  Trying to be more than just a part of the machine.”

“The annoying part was a smokescreen?” Makoto says.

“No,” Enji says, looking at his knees.  “His mind just works that way.  He’s too fast for his own good, so there’s always something streaming out, and he’s always feeding new nonsense in so that he can burn it off.  It’s like radiation—right down to the enormous source of power underneath.”  He takes a breath.  He sounds remarkably calm.  “Once you learn how to listen for the important things that he buries underneath the noise, none of it seems annoying anymore.”  He pauses.  “Well.  Most of it doesn’t seem annoying anymore.”  He pauses again, eyes sweeping back and forth across the middle distance.  “He… taught me how to concentrate on the good in someone.  Although I guess with someone like that, it’s not exactly hard.  The good is… overwhelming, when you start to let it in.”

“Let’s think about that,” Makoto says.  “When you say ‘good’—what does that mean to you?  What makes him good?  What does he do?”

Enji’s unusually peaceful expression gives way to looking at Makoto like he’s a cretin of unprecedented imbecility.  “Have you never watched the news?”

Makoto allows himself another smile—a gamble, here, wagering that they’ve reached a threshold where Enji will recognize that Makoto is only laughing at himself.

“Here and there,” he says, breezily.  “But something tells me that we’re not really talking about the Hawks I see on TV.”

Enji frowns again, looks away again, curls his fingers and searches for words.

“He’s more like All Might than I ever could have been,” Enji says—barely audibly, but Makoto is acclimating as quickly as he can.  “He—it’s the compassion.  The kindness, the generosity.  He doesn’t let the cruelty of the world kill the hope.  He keeps it alive, and he gives it away.”  Enji shifts, takes a breath, lets it out slowly—not entirely steadily.  “Shouto is the same way.  He’s still… The only good thing I can say about how I raised him is that I failed the right way for once.  I never succeeded in making him like me.”

“What’s been driving you, then?” Makoto says, keeping his voice light—noncommittal, insignificant.  “You’ve been doing this for longer than anyone else.”

Enji eyes him.  “What the hell else could I do?  You can’t go back.  Especially after I sacrificed everything else I’d ever had—everything I ever could have had.  This is all I’ve got.  It’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to do.”

Almost there.  “But what makes you keep giving it so much of yourself?”

Enji snorts, re-folds his arms, shifts the left high enough to wave away the little curl of steam.  “You can’t half-ass something you’ve committed to.  You either do it, or you don’t.  If you do it, do it right.”

“What do you do it for?” Makoto says.  “What are you working towards?”

“Making it easier,” Enji says, without a single instant’s hesitation.  “This—life.  Every life.”  He shakes his head, narrowing his eyes at the wall.  “The whole damn country, if I can.  Make it safer.  Make it so that Natsuo’s children don’t even think about becoming heroes, because there’s no need.”

By the sound of it, Natsuo is on the most direct route towards theoretical grandchildren, but it’s interesting nonetheless that he’s the child that Enji chose.

Dwelling on that, though, would derail the more important point.

Makoto folds his hands on the notebook.  “Isn’t that a type of hope?”

Enji gives him a dark look.  “It’s stubbornness.”

“At the end of the day,” Makoto says, “what’s the difference?”

He has now attained heretofore inconceivable heights of cretinhood.

“I’m serious,” Makoto says.  “Does it matter what it’s called when the end result is that you just never stop trying?”

“Yes,” Enji says, lip curling.  It pulls at the thickened skin of the scar.  “Optimism and pragmatism are worlds apart, and that’s the entire point.  People like me don’t keep going out of some deep-seated belief that we’ll grind our way through the dark to a brighter future.  We fight because we need to win.”

“Win what?” Makoto asks.

“Anything,” Enji says, and the edge on this one almost curls it into a snarl.  “Anything we can get.  Anything there is.  It’s not about making things better.  It’s about being the best.”

“Which you are,” Makoto says, “by nearly every statistical measure.  Which you have been, undisputed, unthreatened—” Enji scoffs.  “—for nearly three solid years.  You are the best.  Why keep fighting?”

Enji grinds his teeth again.  “You don’t—you can’t understand.  It’s not about—it’s never safe.  Hawks doesn’t want it, or he’d have it.  Jeanist’s priorities are elsewhere.  But someone—will.  Someone will want it.  And if it’s someone like Shouto—”

“You want to make it better,” Makoto says.  “Easier than you had it.  That sounds like kindness to me.”

“It’s not,” Enji grits out.  “I’m doing it for myself.  To make myself important.  To—matter, to last.”

“To create a legacy,” Makoto says, “by improving the world around you as much as you can.”

“It’s not like that,” Enji snaps back.  “There’s nothing magnanimous in it—it’s about fame and money and recognition and beating them.  It’s about winning.  It’s self-aggrandizement on a national scale, subsidized by—”

“You hate the fame,” Makoto says.  “You refuse interviews and ignore reporters.  Your charitable contributions are huge.  You’ve beaten every other pro out there except for someone who was technically cheating.”  He leans in.  “What are you fighting for?”

“To win,” Enji snarls again, but the word sounds weaker every time he repeats it.  “To be seen winning, to be known—”

“Everyone in the world with a television set or an internet connection knows your name,” Makoto says.  “If you’re not working yourself to the bone for the sake of others—for the future of your children and theirs and all of the millions of people you don’t know who benefit from your protection—”

Enji is on his feet.

He is—very tall.

“There’s no fucking sacrifice,” he grinds out.  “There’s no hope, there’s no secret—I just can’t fucking die like he did, and leave them with nothing to fall back on and everything to prove.”

Several little pieces softly click into place.

Enji has to be stronger.

He has to survive.

Because the beginning of the spiral—

The first love he was deprived of—

“Enji,” Makoto says, slowly, “how old was your father when he died?”

Enji swallows.  He exhales, harshly, and jerks his head sideways to look at the wall.  His arms rise, and cross, and his fingers curl tightly.

“Forty-eight,” he says.

Makoto takes a measured breath of his own.  “How old are you?”

Enji slants a glance at him—all fire and ferocity in the first instant, but churning underneath—

The anger is only ever effluence.  The candle burns its own vapors to sustain itself, but that’s never where it starts.

It starts in fear.

Fear of losing something.

Fear of losing everything.

Makoto waits—striving to be a statue, holding his breath.

Enji breathes—faintly, raggedly.  He inhales like he’s trying to summon his voice, shifts his weight, clenches his fists.

And nothing comes.

It’s something deeper and darker even than hopelessness.

It’s desolation.

“You’re not him,” Makoto says, forcing his clumsy tongue to find the words.  “His life isn’t a prophecy.  There’s no curse.  That’s not how it works.”

Enji looks down at his right hand.  The fingers uncurl slowly, one by one, as he keeps the left clenched in his sleeve so tight it’s shaking.

Makoto takes a quick breath—just enough to try to clear his head, to try to pry some oxygen out of the stony solidity of the silence.

“Do you feel like you’re heading that way?” he asks.  “Like you’re slipping?”

Enji steps back.

He sinks down onto the couch.

He drops his head into his hands.

“It was always a matter of time,” he says, and the tremor in his voice makes him sound almost like a different person.  “From the beginning, I knew—I had to do it all faster.  I needed more time.  I’d never be good enough to last long enough to see any of it come to fruition—I had to get the kids trained as soon as humanly possible, had to make the agency run like clockwork even without me, had to—had to build it all.  The structure.  Had to make it higher.  I was always on borrowed time.  Always racing the clock.  Always losing.  Everybody loses.”

He starts to scrub both hands down his face and then recoils, lowering the right, looking at it for a second like he doesn’t understand it—like it’s betrayed him.

Or like it’s let him down.

“It’s getting harder,” he says, quietly, but the thickening emotion roughens his voice.  “It’s worse.  I’m worse.  I’m—compensating.  I’m leveraging all of the experience to cover for the fact that I just can’t do what I used to, but that’s not going to carry me for long.  Efficiency only gets you so far.  I’m faking it.  I can’t—I don’t think as fast, or as clearly, and I can’t move like I used to, and my vision is starting to deteriorate, and I—”

He drags in a breath that shivers on the way in and shakes on the way back out.  His shoulders rattle with it, and then lower, and he wraps his left hand slowly around the forearm of the right, gripping it like he wants to strangle the metal to death.

“It hurts,” he says, so bitterly the words almost singe the air.  “It always hurts.  Worse when I put my quirk through it.  Worse when I move too much.  Worse when I do my goddamn job.  The only thing I know how to do.  The only thing I’m fucking good for.”

“Enji,” Makoto says, carefully.  “Let’s slow down.”

Enji just shakes his head, grasps his arm tighter—the metal starts to creak.  “That’s the whole point.  I can’t.  This is the only thing—I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.  But there’s nothing else that I can do except—try.  Keep trying.  But it’s—how do I play my cards exactly right so that I go out without anyone else getting hurt?  That’s fucking impossible.  You can’t rig it.  You don’t get to choose.”

“Let’s take a step back,” Makoto says, a little louder, holding his voice in the gentlest register.  “It’s okay that you’re struggling—it’s okay that it’s hard.  You’re very, very good at getting through things that are hard, Enji.  But let’s—we don’t have to jump right from ‘Things are harder’ to ‘I’m going to die’.”

Enji does, at least, look up abruptly at that. 

Knowing him, he’s probably now starting to worry that Makoto will have to mandatorily report him for being a danger to himself.

“Let’s see,” Makoto says, meeting his eyes, “if we can intervene earlier in that train of thought.  Let’s see if we can look for ways to make it easier before we come to the conclusion that it’s all going to fall apart.”

Enji swallows.  His breaths are still coming short and shallow, and he’s still gripping his metal arm.

“I don’t—” He tries to clear his throat, but his voice keeps rasping in spite of him, grinding like gravel.  “There’s—nothing.  I’ve tried.  Everything I can think of.  Everything I know how t—”

“I believe you,” Makoto says, holding his gaze.  “But that’s why we’re here.  To try together.  You’re not alone anymore.”

Enji lowers his head into his hands again—not quite fast enough.  Makoto caught a glimpse of the startled tears glimmering at the edges of his eyes.

Makoto stays quiet while he fights for control of himself, forcing himself to breathe slowly, gradually ironing out the shuddering to steady himself.

Makoto’s hand itches to jot down a note to talk to him about it.  He’s clearly pulled himself back from panic too many times to number, but he’s probably had to carve his own tools out of whatever broken pieces he could find.  Makoto can give him so many more—

Enji’s phone beeps.

“Sorry,” Enji mutters, hoarsely.  He disentangles his hands slowly and very deliberately draws his phone out of his pocket.  “I have to—”

He blinks at the screen.

Then turns yet another from his boundless supply of suspicious looks up at Makoto.

“It’s two o’clock,” he says.

“Oh,” Makoto says, before he can help it.  Usually he tracks the time instinctively, but this one got away from him.  “So it is.”

Enji shoves his phone back into his pocket.  “That was Hawks.  Asking if I’m alive.”

The fact that Hawks knows that he’s here—the fact that Enji shared with any other human being that he was going to therapy at all—is extraordinary, but they’re going to have to shelve that, too.

Enji plants his left hand on the couch cushion—leaning on that side only instead of using the right arm to help.  “If that’s all—”

“Wait,” Makoto says, leaning forward and holding out a hand—as if he, at five feet and nine inches of white-collar ordinariness, could possibly hope to stop Enji Todoroki from standing if he wanted to.

But Enji listens.

And stays still.

He does look irritated about it, though.

“Don’t get up yet,” Makoto says, hopping out of his chair and hastening over to the desk.  The top-right drawer is supplies; the bottom is files; the middle is sports drinks.  He picks the one with the least added sugar, crosses over, and holds it out.  “Take it slow.  How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Enji says, but he snatches the bottle out of Makoto’s hand.  “I assume this is one of those marathon sessions you were talking about.”

“At risk of feeding your overachieving tendencies,” Makoto says, straightening the notebook next to his laptop as Enji effortlessly pops the cap, “this was one of the most productive first sessions I’ve ever had.”

Enji’s eyes flick to him.

That gamble paid off—there’s a weary sort of amusement in them this time.

“Do you say that to everyone who’s run over their time?” Enji says.

Makoto smiles.  He nudges his glasses up with his fingertip as Enji takes an extremely deep drink.  “I’m not going to try my luck with your bullshit detector.  That was the truth.  I book empty time between every session so I can catch up on my notes—and because I can’t bear the idea of having to cut someone off in the middle of a sentence just because the clock decided that we should be done.”

Enji looks at him for what feels like a long time, then caps the bottle and stands.

Effortlessly, of course.  He’s had worse, after all.

“Be careful,” Enji says.  “Bending over backwards makes it easier for them to break your spine.”

Makoto crosses to him and holds out a hand again.  “I’ll keep that in mind.  Same time next week still work for you?”

Enji clasps onto his hand—the right—with slow, exceedingly deliberate movements.  Makoto holds back the wince.  It must be even more difficult to manipulate the prosthetic when he’s agitated.  “So far.”

Makoto looks up at him.  “Just let me know if something comes up.  We can always reschedule.”

Enji hesitates.

“Most of my clients come once a week for the first few months,” Makoto says.  “Once we have some momentum going, we pick a time to make it once every two weeks.”

The ambivalence lingers.

“I realize,” Makoto says, delicately, “that your time is extremely limited.”  And that most of it is already parceled out for other people, and that Enji will have to whittle away still more of what remains to reflect on what they say in here.  “Think of this like recovery time in the hospital.  It’s painful and sometimes much slower than we’d like, but it’s a necessary part of getting back on your feet.  If you don’t take the time, you can’t heal.  And if you don’t heal, you can’t get back out there and help people.”

Enji’s fingers curl around the neck of the plastic bottle.  “That’s what regenerative quirks are for,” he mutters.  “There must be people out there whose quirks accelerate emotional repair.”

Makoto opens his mouth.

And then closes it again.

Another time.

Enji’s waded through enough revelations today, and the last thing Makoto wants to do is unsettle him.

“Wouldn’t that be the easy way out?” Makoto asks.

Enji sighs so quietly that it almost doesn’t stir the air.  “Yes.”

Maybe if they keep this up, one day Makoto can convince him to take a single, solitary harmless shortcut.  Maybe if they time it right, Enji won’t even feel too guilty.

He shouldn’t get ahead of himself.  Right now, all that matters is that Enji makes it home.

“Be careful on the stairs,” Makoto says.  “For next week, you remember what I—”

“Yes,” Enji says, a bit more darkly.  “I have an assignment.”

“Right,” Makoto says.  He should have known.  “If anything comes up, or if you have any questions, you can call me any time.  I mean it.”

Makoto did anticipate that there’s no way in hell that Enji would take him up on that—reaching out in the meantime, asking for more help than he’s explicitly paying for.

“Fine,” Enji says.  He works his jaw, clenches his fingers until the plastic bottle crackles under the strain.  “Thank you.”  He turns and strides for the door.  “I’ll see you next week.”

“Looking forward to it,” Makoto says automatically.

He can just hear Enji muttering “That makes one of us” before the door clicks shut.

Makoto stands still for three seconds, listening to the heavy footsteps echoing down the hall.

Then he scrambles for his desk, flings his notebook back open, and starts scribbling as fast as he can.

He spreads them across the page—headers, titles, categories; boiling broader truths, all the jets of steam mingling together.

Fear.

Guilt.

Grief.

Control.

And—

Love.

He scrawls out bullet points beneath—repression; retribution; redemption; recrimination.  Perfectionism, punishment.  What does repentance mean?  What does it cost?  What’s the price of pain?  What does a man who’s hurt so many others—saved so many, reached so many, damaged so many, helped so many—deserve to feel?  What single figure does the mangled mess of a life add up to?

Impermanence.  Insecurity.  Unstable, unsure, and always, always running out of time.  Scrabbling for the strength to stay alive longer than the shadow hanging over him—the smoking silhouette of a man who was strong enough to hack holes in him that haven’t stopped bleeding for thirty-five years, but not strong enough to do the one thing he was made for.  Not strong enough to walk through fire.

Enji knows, now, that striking out at any softness offered to him won’t support him, but he doesn’t know what else there is to try.

He was raised in captivity.  It took a relentless course of compounded crises just to make him see the cage.  Even with the gates bent and the glass shattered, he knows how to coexist with these demons.  He’s never breathed the air out in the wild.

He believes that he’s capable of anything, with sufficient effort; and of nothing at all.

He believes in the work as an entity outside himself—he believes in Endeavor.

No one has ever believed in Enji.

Makoto pauses.

He taps the pencil on the page.

He adds one more word.

Hawks.

The firebird with no family, no fear—no expectations.  A flash of color and irreverence at Enji’s elbow in every photograph.  Such a common presence in his personal space that breaking into Enji’s agency office doesn’t even merit explanation.

Too jaded to deter, too sharp to strike, too quick to catch.  Too fast to burn.

Waiting.  Watching.  Holding out both arms and feathered wings to catch a man who’s never had a safety net—who’s always fallen on his own and considered it his due.

Makoto sits back, flicks the pencil.

Natsuo—proposing, considering children.  The threat of the cycle renewing itself.

Shouto—the perfect failure.  The ultimate distillation of Enji’s insufficiency.

Fuyumi—still reaching, still hoping.  Holding out, holding on.

Rei—a towering guilt tempered by genuine admiration.

Touya—the one he dared to love, and lost again and again until he gave up trying.

Makoto looks over at the wall.  He’s probably lucky there aren’t holes burned in it.

He puts the pencil down.  He picks it up.

Give: out, up, in.

What’s left, when Enji has spent his whole life burning himself down to keep the world warm?

They have their work cut out for them.

But Makoto knows the answer to the question that Enji wouldn’t speak, because it felt like giving himself too much credit, and too much grace.

Enji’s here because he hasn’t given up.

Enji’s here because he’s clinging to the cliff’s edge.

Enji’s here because he can’t help hoping that tomorrow might love him back.

Makoto wants to help him.

Makoto wants to help him with the hardest, and the slowest, and the most important rescue of his life.

Makoto wants to offer Enji one more thing that his father never accomplished.

Makoto wants to give Enji Todoroki a future independent of Endeavor.

There’s another object in the top-right drawer of his desk.  He opens the drawer, pulls it out, and undoes the tired little latch.

The picture on the left side of the gold folding frame is of Asuka holding Akina for the first time.  Asuka claims to hate it, because the blurriness of the low-quality picture doesn’t hide the fact that she was soaked in sweat and utterly exhausted, and you can see how close she scraped against the worst-case scenario.  Her soft wings draggle listlessly behind her, and Akina mostly just looks like a tiny, tiny, tiny pale pink blob.

It’s still Makoto’s favorite image, and always will be.  It still reminds him how impossibly lucky he is, and how much love there is in the world.

The picture on the right side is from a different era.

His father looks younger than Makoto feels now, and so deeply serious.  His mouth is set in a thin, tight line that Makoto barely ever remembers seeing, and the light gleams harshly on his glasses, but his arm wrapped around Makoto’s mother’s shoulders looks familiarly gentle.  The angle of the stethoscope draped around his neck always draws Makoto’s eyes to where the disc came to rest over his heart.

This is probably the only picture taken of him while he worked for the Hero Public Safety Commission.  He was only there for six months.

He only ever talked about it once—about the little boy, hardly younger than his son but so much smaller.  About his dirty feet and his giant eyes and his tiny, scraggly wings.

Makoto remembers the next part, because when his father had come home that night, and Makoto had run to the door to greet him, he’d walked back out the door and gone right back to the Commission office, and he’d quit.

It took Makoto until the night in the hospital, near the end, where they talked until the sun came up, to put all of the pieces together.  But some part of him had known that that night was significant.  Some part of him had seen his father change, and he’d remembered.

It’s not a prophecy.

It’s not a curse.

But there are chances.

There are opportunities to offer solace for somebody else’s pain.

There are times that you can stand tall enough for someone else to lean on.

Enji is going to be heavy.

But he’s not the only one who doesn’t know how to quit.

Notes:

Click the triangle for the Takiya lore if you want it!

Ages ago Kae came up with the idea that the doctor from Chapter 4 of it flows through me was Takiya's father, and that experience with Hawks inspired him to go into psychiatry instead. I'd always intended that scene to imply that the character leaves that way because he's about to go hand in his resignation, so it totally jived. Cross-universe stuff is fun! :D

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 2 of curses, like chickens extended universe