Chapter Text
1.
Summer drags on.
Everything seems quiet. Still. The block is nearly empty, most of the neighbors having likely retreated to the comfort of the seaside or the mountains to counter the ongoing heatwave.
From his window, when he’s not training, Shouto watches the courtyard, with its yellowed grass that’s growing long and unkempt. His father sent most of the service staff away on paid leave for three weeks, leaving only a cook that shows up in the morning to prepare the meals, and a maid that cleans the house twice a week.
It’s like living in a ghost town. And in a haunted mansion, Shouto thinks to himself; but he doesn’t find it funny.
Time slows down nearly to a halt, unraveling in a dense, sticky mass, like melted wax dripping.
Every day is identical. When his father is at home, Shouto is woken up at six in the morning, then he has breakfast, then he trains until lunch. He goes back to training after a short break, usually until sunrise, or until Endeavor’s work requires his presence elsewhere.
When his father isn’t there, there isn’t much to do. Shouto mostly sleeps in, or he hangs out in his room, reading a book without paying much attention. He likes staying in his room.
He goes to the local swimming pool, one time, by himself. There are too many people; too many families. Mothers with small children. It gives him a headache, but he got there, and he swims until he’s exhausted.
Another time, he and Fuyumi go get ice cream and they buy some for Natsuo, as well. It’s not very good, there are better places; but they eat it all together anyway, the three of them, on the sofa in the living room.
When Shouto goes to sleep, that evening, he can still taste chocolate and strawberry on the back of his tongue.
The end of this summer will come, eventually. Sitting cross-legged on his futon, Shouto lazily picks with his nails at a few sunburnt spots on the back of his legs, on his shoulders. The reddened skin itches and hurts, and comes off in little dried pieces that he scrapes off.
It’s shortly after five in the morning, and he can’t sleep.
Endeavor will soon come to wake him. It’s good that he’s already up. He might as well go wash his face and get dressed, get ready for the day.
He slumps back against the mattress, sinking his head into the pillow. He closes his eyes against the light that is starting to peek through the window, and savors the pulsing of his skin.
This weather is abnormal, the news keep saying.
Everything seems mostly calmer than usual, not much to report; not much that matters. A sharp drop in criminality is announced over the course of July.
When there is crime, however, these sudden spikes are notable in their violence and brutality.
Two armed robberies, one that ends with a body count of five. Seven murders. A disappearance, and a mangled-up body that turns up under a bridge a few days later.
They say it’s the unprecedented heat that is making people go crazy.
Shouto watches the news on television; he catches glimpses of conversations he overhears when his father is on the phone, in his office, and case files he finds on his father’s desk or on his laptop. He doesn’t know why he risks so much to steal these small crumbs of information. He could ask, but he knows that the thought of showing interest only makes him angry.
Endeavor’s schedule becomes more and more unpredictable. Sometimes he’ll be at home for three or four days on end, leaving the smaller, less important infractions for his subordinates to handle. Then a serious case comes up and he leaves at odd hours, often with no warning, returning hours or days later.
Shouto grows restless, fidgety. A heavy sense of something undefinable starts following him around; he feels it weighting on his back, on his chest, grasping at his ankles. He takes to glancing behind his back, at times, when his father isn’t home.
He doesn’t like not knowing when he’s around.
He doesn’t like not knowing when he’ll be back.
When he’s at home, Endeavor supervises his training sessions, as usual. Shouto complies, looking away.
They spar less.
There are sharp words that form at the back of Shouto’s mouth without a real reason, but he bites them back, and something inside his chest churns and wants to burst, wants to claw its way out.
Endeavor makes him use his ice until he almost passes out, and at times Shouto feels the fire in himself, so carefully suppressed, threatening to explode.
Never. He’ll never use it, never, not in front of Endeavor.
His father doesn’t talk to him, aside from what is strictly necessary. It should be a relief but Shouto feels on edge all the same.
His father barely even looks him in the eyes.
He tells Shouto to train, and when they’re done he turns his large back to him, his fire flickering in the sun, and he leaves.
He doesn’t hit him.
When he’s not around, Shouto carefully tries to remember how to breathe.
2.
They’re sitting at the table for dinner, he and Fuyumi and their father.
The heat is unbearable. The silence between the three of them is a solid presence, pressing against Shouto’s ears. Natsuo hasn’t come out of his room since earlier in the afternoon, and Endeavor didn’t insist for him to join them.
Fuyumi’s chopsticks scrape against her plate and Shouto winces, tightening his grip on his own.
He toys with a dumpling, pushing it around.
Stop playing with your food and eat properly. The reprimand echoes in his head in his father’s voice, cutting and impatient. But Endeavor doesn’t say anything to him about the way he’s eating, this time, or anything at all.
Shouto stabs one corner of the dumpling. His left side feels too warm.
His sister’s soft voice rises at his side, timidly attempting to initiate a conversation. Shouto doesn’t really listen, keeping his eyes glued to his unfinished food. He’s not hungry.
Without needing to look, although Endeavor replies to whatever Fuyumi is saying, Shouto knows his father’s eyes are on him.
Shouto’s knuckles whiten around the chopsticks. He’s sweating. He puts them down and gets to his feet.
He stands up, his hands twitching at his sides.
“I’m done,” he mutters.
Endeavor turns to look up at him. Shouto’s gaze flickers from his face, to the floor, to him again.
His heart beats wildly. Words stumble and get caught up inside his throat.
“I’m going out,“ he says quietly, to no one in particular.
His sister stops talking.
His father glares at him in silence, and now he’s going to say something, he’s gonna do something, he has to. He’s going to get up and – and stop him, he will demand to know where Shouto thinks he’s going at this time –
But Endeavor turns away as if he heard nothing, and resumes talking to Fuyumi, like nothing happened at all. Shouto might very well have turned completely invisible.
Shouto stands next to the table, paralyzed, until he can bring himself to move his body again and walk out of the dining room.
The only reply is the deafening silence in his ears.
3.
It’s early in the afternoon, and Shouto is in his bedroom.
From the open window hot wind rolls in, faintly shaking the blinds with a soft rustle.
He’s lying on his back on the futon, with his arms and legs sprawled out. He could grab his earphones, tossed somewhere not far away near his feet, and listen to some music, but he doesn’t feel like it. He looks at the ceiling, and listens to the silence.
An entire day all to himself, free from training and duties. Father left early in the morning, left a message to tell them he’d be back before dinner. Fuyumi is reading downstairs.
Shouto glances at the familiar shape of the paper sliding door. It’s closed.
He never had a room with a wooden door, much less the possibility of locking it; Endeavor cares about preserving the original style of his family’s house, and in any case, he would never allow his children the chance of keeping something from him, of doing something behind his back that he wouldn’t approve of. They all have to be available at all times, if they’re summoned; Shouto knows fully well Endeavor will just barge in, if the response isn’t appropriately timely and he tires of waiting. This applies to him more than anyone else: Shouto is always under training, during every moment he spends under that roof.
Shouto shifts a little on the mattress.
Endeavor isn’t there now.
He runs his right hand down his belly, idly lifting up the hem of the yellow tank top he’s wearing. He traces lazy circles with his fingers on his naked skin, producing just a tiny bit of frost. His body relaxes against the coolness and he sighs, bending his knees and planting his feet more firmly on the mattress.
His hand stalls just above his hip and he tenses, listening. Nothing.
He lets his hand dip inside the waistband of his shorts, he pulls them down to his ankles. He kicks them away.
With his cool fingertips Shouto brushes back and forth through the small bush of soft, slightly curly hairs between his legs. They’re red and white, split rather neatly in the middle. His cheeks flush.
He’s gotten hairier than he’s used to, under his armpits and on his legs. Coupled with the heat, he can’t shake the feeling that he smells bad all the time, in a lingering way that’s more embarrassing than if it were simply sweat. He keeps changing his clothes meticulously, almost too often, sniffing them suspiciously before putting them in the laundry basket. He’s gotten taller, too. His Quirk compensates for it, but it makes him feel off balance, clumsy, like he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
He looks away.
There’s something uncomfortable about looking at his own body for too long, even when he’s alone like this; something like a knot tied in his throat when his eyes find all the spots where new scars bloom on top of old ones, crowding on his skin. A bitter aftertaste at the resemblances he finds in himself, in his two powers, reflected by his mismatched colors.
Shouto shakes his head. He furrows his eyebrows and bites his lip in concentration, and experimentally grazes the inside of his right thigh with his cold fingers, then brushes his knuckles against his soft dick.
He flinches at the sensation, although his body does react, and he feels himself harden a little bit.
Too much. Too sudden. He wraps his right hand around the base, holding his breath.
He tries controlling his temperature, breathing out slowly, and tentatively touches up and down a few times. His dick twitches softly, just barely, but the sting of the cold borders on unpleasant.
Frustrated, he pulls his right hand back with a muffled groan.
He has tried with his right hand already, two or three times before; he’s even managed to make himself come. Mostly in the middle of the night, when he was desperate and frantic enough not to care about the cold. But it was always hasty, clumsy, almost painful.
Slowly releasing his breath, he cautiously wraps his left hand around the base of his dick. Shame rolls through him at the familiar ease of it, a wave of heat that spreads through his belly and his groin. He tightens his grip and grits his teeth and starts moving.
His fingers glide up and down easily, and he’s soon bucking up his hips and thrusting into his hand. He slaps the palm of his right hand over his mouth, suppressing the sound of his breath inside his chest.
The heat of his fingers melts into the heat of the room and he thumbs at the sensitive skin on the tip. Pleasure and disgust bloom in his gut, dirty, and a small sound slips through his lips, and he’s hard now, and he closes his eyes, fucking messily into his hot palm…
There’s the sound of steps.
Shouto halts, dropping both hands on the mattress. His pulse pounding in his ears, he stays still, pinned to the futon.
The steps are approaching.
He sits up, frantically reaching for his shorts. He scrambles to slip his legs inside them and pull them up, the fabric clinging uncomfortably to his sweaty thighs. He hears the creaking of the wooden tiles under heavy steps.
No. It can’t be.
He can’t be home so soon – he wasn’t supposed to come back until the evening.
Shouto rolls down on his side and pulls the covers over his body. He curls into himself, turning his back to the door, his entire body a tight mass of nerves. His cock is throbbing faintly, still half-hard, tensing the front of his shorts. He presses his knees together, but the friction only sends a spark of unsatisfied arousal through his hips. He hides his head under the covers.
With his eyes squeezed shut, Shouto doesn’t move.
His right fist is clenched under his cheek. His right arm quickly begins to tingle, protesting at the uncomfortable position.
The steps are right outside now, hammering down on the wooden floor. They echo through the thin paper, thumping so loud that their sound seems to fill the room.
Then – they fade.
With his heartbeat drumming in his throat, Shouto listens as the sound gradually dissipates, the steps seemingly proceeding down the opposite end of the corridor.
He loses track of time.
When he opens his eyes again, he doesn’t know what moment of the day it is. He might have slept a bit, slipping in and out of a light dozing.
He pulls himself up, slipping out of the tangled up mess he must have made of the cover without noticing. The light outside is less blinding, tinged with an orange color.
Shouto rubs his eyes. He does feel drowsy, slightly light-headed. And hungry.
He looks around as he stands up. He walks up to close the window.
When he gets downstairs, sometime later, he finds an empty living room. A message on the coffee table, written in Fuyumi’s handwriting, informs him that their father brought her and Natsuo out on an errand.
He’s already looked at his phone, but Father didn’t text him.
Shouto sits on the couch, alone in the empty room.
4.
The blistering sun burns over his shoulders, but he barely feels it. This corner of a street among all the others, the sidewalk, this alley are shrouded in a haze that turns all things into blurred, flickering shapes.
Sweat rolls down his forehead and Endeavor punches, once, a powerful uppercut that lands squarely on the robber’s jaw and sends the man back against the brick wall, in a mess of bloodied mouth and flying teeth.
A kick to the stomach pulls a pained groan from the criminal, who curls in on himself, covering his head with arms.
He’s young, in his twenties or mid-twenties, with a mop of black hair and the tips dyed a bright green. His dark clothes are streaked with dust and dirt from where Enji tackled him into the ground. There are small wisps of smoke rising from several burned up spots where Enji grasped him.
Dark blood is pooling in a small stain on the concrete under the young man’s face – a broken nose.
Endeavor steps closer, standing over him. His fire roars around him, familiar, instinctive, rising forceful with the heat and the adrenaline in his veins.
“Please,” the robber rasps, “please, mister Hero, have mercy—”
Endeavor leans down and grabs him by the front of his shirt. He lifts him up against the wall and the man flails his arms uselessly, palms raised up in a desperate surrender. He has a black eye. Dark blood has dripped from his nostrils down to his busted lip and his chin and is starting to dry, sticking into place in a dark red mess.
He’s a nobody, just a petty criminal he’d been observing for a while. He works alone and he’s not particularly strong, but he’s skillful, with a Quirk that seemingly allows him to bend certain electrical appliances to his will. He targeted several ATMs over the last two weeks, always managing to escape at the last moment right before he could be captured.
Today, Endeavor got him.
He clenches his fist and the criminal shakes and wriggles, uselessly trying to break free with his scrawny, weightless body.
Enji raises his fist and his brain is filled with a quick flash, an image – droplets of water clinging to Shouto’s pale thigh, rolling between his sharp shoulder blades and down his spine. Shouto sitting on the wooden stool under the shower, throwing his head back and massaging his hair with soapy fingers.
Enji grinds his teeth with a low growl and he punches the criminal’s stomach with a scorching fist.
The man would yell, if he could breathe; instead he yelps softly, an airless sound, like a tire deflating, and he falls to the ground.
Later, when the police arrives, Enji stands next to the handcuffed criminal and lifts him up to hand him to the agents, grimacing as he touches him.
The young man groans, only half-conscious.
“He resisted,” Enji says flatly, holding his head high and keeping his gaze fixed on a spot in front of him.
He’ll have to fill a lot of paperwork for this, a tedious waste of time. There might be an investigation, and boring explanations to give to people who aren’t in his line of work and understand nothing about what it’s like. He glances at the robber as they lift him into a police car; their eyes meet briefly. Then the car door gets shut, and they take him away.
Endeavor won’t be brought to court over something this trivial, of that he’s pretty certain. The criminal is in no position to speak against him, to dare complain about an unfair treatment after breaking the law.
Enji looks away.
He is a top-ranking hero, regardless of the opinion the mindless crowd may have of him. He protects this town; he makes sure all these citizens can go around living their peaceful everyday lives. They can sleep soundly at night, and they owe at least some of that safety to him.
It doesn’t matter if they don’t like him.
He is a hero – and he does what he has to do.
5.
Enji walks down the corridor of the upper floor. The sunlight burns bright, creeping through the blinds of the row of identical windows. Thin blades of dark and light follow one another on the wooden floor under his feet.
He’s lost in thought, at first. A new, complicated case has come up; a villain with a nasty Quirk who likes to leave his victims permanently maimed in gruesome ways. Enji is reading a report on his phone and he’s slowing down, almost stopping to a halt, when he hears a sound.
It barely registers, at first, hanging at the edge of his conscience.
Then he hears it again. Something like a sigh, or a muffled cry. It’s small enough that he might have imagined it, that he could explain it away as a creaking of the wood or a bird outside. But he heard it.
He looks up and he’s standing next to the door to Shouto’s room.
The door that isn’t closed all the way, leaving just a small crack open.
Another tiny noise, but unmistakable now. Enji grips the phone in his fist.
He could leave. There’s nothing here he needs to see, nothing he doesn’t know.
He understands, after all, that in a house full of young people certain behaviors are unavoidable. Despite his efforts, there are certain aspects of his children’s lives that he cannot control, no matter how distasteful he may find the thought of them doing those – things. Shouto is a teenage boy; it’s only natural.
Although he could have had at least the courtesy of trying to be more discrete.
He should go. There’s a slim possibility that he might be mistaken; Shouto could be crying. But Shouto doesn’t cry, he hasn’t cried in years; surely never in front of him. It might make sense that if there’s anything upsetting him to that degree, his son would keep it private, take it to a place where he can deal with it on his own.
No. He doesn’t believe it.
He should leave. Or he could say something, call out Shouto’s name and alert him to his presence. Certainly Shouto has only chosen this particular moment because he hasn’t noticed Enji is home. He came back early, he went upstairs for a shower before he has to go back to work again.
Enji doesn’t move.
The small crack where the door has been left open is thin, maybe two or three centimeters wide.
Enji closes in, quiet and careful.
He looks.
Inside, he sees Shouto sitting at the foot of his futon. His profile offers the red side of his hair, the ruined skin on his face. He’s naked from the waist down, with his thighs spread wide – his back arching backwards, supporting himself lopsidedly on his right elbow.
His left hand is between his thighs, but he’s not – he’s not masturbating. Not exactly.
He’s… it takes a moment for Enji to process it, but then he sees thin spirals of smoke around his son’s hips, and he understands.
Shouto is using his fire, on himself – on his skin.
Shouto’s eyes are closed. His face is red, his head thrown back, his neck strained with effort.
He has a balled-up cloth, a handkerchief, held tightly between his clenched teeth.
His son dips his left hand between his legs again, and presses it to the inside of his left thigh. Another guttural moan shakes Enji to the core.
Then Shouto lets himself fall back on the futon, panting heavily. His upper body disappears from Enji’s sight, and Shouto’s left hand grips his member, flushed and hard, curved against his flat belly – and Enji recoils and steps away from the door.
He takes two – three – four steps backwards. His pulse roars inside his head.
He opens his palm and looks at the crushed, slightly melted plastic and cracked glass and metal of his phone.
With a curse between his teeth, he slips it inside his pocket, and strides away from that room.
He storms out of the house.
That night, he doesn’t come home.