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When Natsuo received his acceptance letter to university, he told Fuyumi to do the same. She had completed her own schoolwork at home, gotten her certifications at home, and continued to live at home. She had him to take care of, and eventually, Shoto as well. She wasn’t going to leave either of them with just Dad, and she told him as much. He had called her crazy, had packed up all of his stuff into a car he bought himself that had more duct tape for a back bumper than actual metal and had driven away. A week later he called her, crying, and asked her how to cook miso. I—I’m sorry, Fuyumi I—I don’t kn-know what I’m d-doing wr-wrong. I’m s-sorry for calling you crazy p-please help—and then she was cutting in, shushing him with a soft voice hey, it’s okay. Just take a deep breath and calm down, why don’t you tell me how you’re trying to do it, okay?
Of course she helped him. Touya was dead. Mom was gone. Dad was no help. Without their nanny, it had been just her and Natsuo, clinging to each other at the bottom of a dark closet hidden in a forest of coats and dresses while her heart hammered so hard she felt it was going to burst from her chest and she would die and then Natsuo’s tiny hands would curl into little fists in her shirt and bring her back to reality.
She finally moved out with Shoto’s blessing, a shaky assurance of I’ll be fine, Fuyumi-nee, said to her in the prison parking lot. Mom and Dad are getting in separate cars, and Shoto is going with Mom and her. Natsuo brought his own car. Dad will leave alone.
She had been moved out for a year when she was asked back, Touya’s coming home, Mom told her, much to her confusion. Touya’s in a coma, Touya’s in prison—not anymore. Rehab, President Hawks approved, all the official stamps and documents and signatures, just for a little while.
A return to her childhood home sees that Fuyumi return to childhood rituals. She awakens in the middle of the night and gets up in search of a glass of water.
It had been her nighttime routine when she was younger, in middle school and verging into high school, a bit of teenage rebellion. Not like Dad cares. She would slip from her bed and wander the house at night, she knew which of the boards in the hall creaked and knew just where to put her feet to make the least noise. She knew how to move slowly or quickly should she need to, the best escape route to another room depending on angle or layout. Dad wanted a hero and instead he made her a sneak. It made her very effective at sniffing out when the kids in her class were trying to get something by her right under her nose.
It had been her nightly routine, her little act of rebellion, just after Touya’s accident. Just after they installed the altar in his room and she would sneak in to see it at night because Dad was always there in the mornings and he didn’t like for anyone else to go looking at it. But Dad doesn’t live here anymore, this is Mom’s house now and when Fuyumi opens the door to her room she nearly screams when she catches sight of another person standing stock-still in the hall.
Loose powder blue clothes, more like pajamas than anything else and discolored skin that seemed to envelope his arms like a glove, right up until the fingers and the palms—Touya is standing in the hallway, very much alive. Fuyumi lets out a beleaguered sigh and leaves her room.
Her brother is staring into the room that opens up at the end of the hallway with wide, unfocused eyes. “Touya,” she says to him, keeping her voice down to a whisper. “What are you doing out here?”
He doesn’t answer her. He never answers her.
At his side she can see the scar at the back of his head where they inserted the chip to dampen his quirk, long healed yet uncovered still as his hair slowly grows back, soft white down all over his head.
They’ve taken out all the extraneous staples he wore. There was a little line of holes in the shell of his ear where all of his piercings had been removed.
He didn’t speak in the hospital when he woke up and he hasn’t spoken since he got home. Mom had taken him by the hand, an arm around his waist and guided him up the drive in his soft pajama-like clothes, pants drawstring removed. His shoes didn’t have laces. He’s barefoot now.
What was he doing? The last words he ever said to her had been a wish for her death. Now he simply stares ahead blankly.
If you held his hand, or touched his shoulder, he could be led; but mostly he made his way around on his own. She touches his shoulder now, “Touya,” she says, once again voice low so as to not wake anyone else up, “would you like to go get something to drink with me?”
He doesn’t answer, but when she starts to walk towards the kitchen he follows her.
Fuyumi takes one glass down from the cupboard out of habit, then realizing her mistake, takes another and fills them both up in the sink. Touya doesn’t seem to notice, standing and staring for a moment before he walks to the table of his own volition and sits down.
He doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t look at anyone, unless you happen to walk in front of him, and then he wasn’t really looking at you, he was just looking in your general direction.
Taking a seat across from him, Fuyumi slides a glass towards Touya. “Here you go.”
He doesn’t answer, but he does drink.
He looks different from the little boy she knew. There were pictures of a boy with fluffy white-within-red hair holding her as a baby, grinning ear-to-ear. That same boy sits before her with his downy white fuzz, purplish grafts beneath his eyes giving him the look of a chronic insomniac.
Sometimes she could barely connect that the person sitting before her was the same person she once played with. The villain Dabi had been a mysterious stoic figure on the TV, shrouded in shadow with his dark black hair and his slick black clothes. There had been a moment, watching the news alone in the living room when the League had first made their appearance, when she first saw the blue flames flash across her television screen and she thought, what if, what if, what if? But no, that couldn’t be true. They found what had been left of Touya amid a scorched grove of trees, a small and blackened jawbone, the ashes of which had been interred at the family shrine years ago. The man on the TV had been nothing like Touya. And yet he was.
Cackling. Stamping his foot in excitement, just like Touya, she remembers thinking. An urgent news report, all of her kids marched single-file out of the classroom to join in neat little rows with their fellows before being bussed to safety. But she saw Touya on the TV.
Dabi is a violent monster. Touya was dead. And as wretched as the thought was—it might just be a husk that sits next to her.
No, no—it can’t be. Touya is in there. Dad changed—Touya might come back to them. She fought for him. The scars on her hands are proof enough of that.
On school nights—or any night really, every minute past his mandated bedtime set by someone who wasn’t his mother nor his father—Natsuo’s most guilty pleasure had been to turn up the volume on his headset until it was probably unhealthy, he now knows, and play Resident Evil. It was two-fold. A rebellion, to drown out the sound of Mom and Dad arguing—and then later to drown out the sound of Dad hitting her, of her pained cries. He had vivid memories of tears pouring down his cheeks while attempting to navigate a dark house with nothing but a flashlight to poorly light the way, and he hadn’t been crying because of the game.
A hundred years ago, it felt like, and yet so much feels the same as he watches his brother stagger by in the hallway, completely oblivious to Natsuo’s presence; even when he moves, even as he jumps in mild surprise, heart briefly beating at breakneck pace as something eclipses his doorway—oh fuck, what’s that? It was just Touya.
It’s Touya, palms sweaty, heart in his throat as his fingers left filmy fingerprints on his phone screen, horror crawling up his neck—that Touya was alive and yet at the same time not at all the brother he once knew, the sweetness and energy gone to something far more insidious, maddened glee as he declares who he was and what he planned to do live on television. At least, it was live. He had five missed calls from Fuyumi when he checked, his phone on silent for the duration of his lecture, and when he calls her back the first thing she asks, breathless and afraid, is—”Did you see him? On the TV?”
See who, Fuyumi?
It’s Touya, moving through the house silently like a pursuer monster in his favorite video game, eyes wide and unseeing when Natsuo abandons his homework to chase after his brother.
(”Touya, I’m trying to sleep…” Whined from that strange place between sleep and wakefulness, not fully aware of his surroundings. Touya’s turned on a lamp.
It was a quiet night, for once. Mom and Dad were asleep, or Dad was ignoring her, and for that he was grateful. He can hear Touya sniffling, trying hard to stifle a sob. ”Can—can we talk? Just for a few minutes? Fuyumi doesn’t understand…”)
Touya used to crawl to him sometimes, burnt and bruised, on his elbows and knees like a baby. He had been off somewhere playing with his fire, and Dad had discovered his transgression upon his return home. Now he walks down the hallway, steps unsure as if he hadn’t grown up in this very house. “Touya? What are you doing?”
His brother simply trudges on, as if Natsuo hadn’t spoken at all.
On her knees, bare hands working at the upturned soil with the deep loamy scent of the earth and dirt beneath her nails, Rei is attempting to fix her garden. She can feel the warmth of the dirt through the thin fabric of her pants, the moisture soaking into the knees. She was acutely aware of the warm and sticky weather around her, moreso than others; but she was enjoying her work, planting a small patch of her favorite flowers in the garden. Beside her, Touya sits and waits with a trowel in-hand, doing nothing.
“Here,” she gently takes the trowel from him, “let me borrow that for a second.”
He says nothing and relinquishes the tool without so much as a tug, as if his grip were like paper. Rei digs at the soil for a moment, creating a hole deep enough to slip another one of the flowers in, and hands the trowel back to Touya. She watches as his fingers slowly curl around the handle. She takes the trowel back immediately without any resistance. She repeats the action several times. He takes it each time.
Rei finds herself suddenly misty-eyed, looking at her son’s hands wrapped around her gardening tool. He holds it and he gives it up. He walks around the house with wide unfocused eyes. Should she take his hand, she could lead him somewhere—is there anything of him left? When she cards a hand through the white fluff slowly growing back over his scalp she could see the long-healed incision at the back of his head, the place where they slipped that device that controls his quirk—does it just control his quirk? Or did it have some other, more insidious purpose? Rei bites her lip, wipes at her cheek with her damp soil-stained hand.
“Thank you for helping me, Touya,” she tells him, turning back to her work. She slowly and gently frees the flower from its pot, roots and all, so she could transfer it to the hole she’s dug. What does he pay attention to? she thinks to herself. The TV, sometimes. Usually the news. When it was on he would walk into the living room and sit down on the sofa. “I, um—I know you’ve been watching a lot of TV lately. I thought coming outside might do you some good.”
Touya says nothing.
When she fought her way through the heat to save him, he had no face for her to search for some subtle difference in expression; but she remembers the way he called to her, M-mom? She searches his face now for anything, for something to tell her what he’s thinking. Even as the inferno, she had known, she had known, her boy, her baby—
“Is there anything specific about the news that you like to watch?” She asks, “your brother, Shoto—he used to love watching All Might—” a laugh bubbles up then at the memory of the small boy with his white-and-red hair sat in her lap, utterly engrossed with the TV as he watches All Might, smiling and saying his signature phrase; everything is fine now. Why? Because I am here. Shoto had turned to her one day and put a tiny hand on each of her cheeks, and in a soft voice said, I wanna be just like him, Mama, and she had thought to herself, yes, yes—you want to be a hero like him and not like, like—and instantly the shame swept over her. Not like Enji—but of course he’ll be like Enji just not like him. Not like that. She prayed he wouldn’t be like that. Her laughter dies as quickly as it starts.
There had been a television mounted in her room at the hospital. She had seen her boy all grown up, oh, Touya—her first, her baby boy. But the jawbone, that jawbone—
“Dabi’s quite the morbid choice for a name,” she says. The words pour forth from her before she has the chance to think it over, it had been the same thought she had in the hospital watching his broadcast, Dabi is quite the morbid choice. It’s what she imagined at Sekoto Peak, in the scorched grove of blackened trees. Seems most of the remains were cremated, they had been told, but for the jawbone, which was then cremated too, placed in an urn so small, too small, the urn she wept bitter tears over as she cradled it all the way to the family shrine.
She watches her boy twitch beside her. A flick of the eyes. She finally takes the plant in her hands and places it in the hole she’s dug, smoothing the soil overtop the roots. “I’m happy you’re home.”
“How’s he settling in?” Asks the familiar, if a bit tinny, voice on the phone.
“He’s—” she thinks back to the garden, to the way his fingers would instinctively curl and release. The flick of his eyes. “—I don’t know. He still won’t talk. But he gets around on his own, he eats and watches TV.”
“Do you think I could come and see him? Just for a little while—”
“I—Enji I don’t know—”
“Please, Rei, please—” he pleads in that same voice he used in the hospital, low and breathy with tears in his eyes, forgive me Rei, forgive me—
(”Do you like those?” A large hand, far larger than hers, far larger even than her father’s—Enji was a big man, a bit frightening, really—points to the bright blue flowers of her mother’s carefully cultivated garden.
Rei nodded, keeping her gaze carefully down, just like Father taught.
She watches as Enji bends and plucks a bloom from her mother’s garden and does not cry out in offense, although she wants to. Be quiet, be polite, make him happy. He holds the flower out to her, delicately.
She takes the flower and thinks, maybe, I could love you.)
Rei lets out a shuddered breath, chest aching, one she didn’t know she had been holding and says, “alright, but only for a little while.”
“Fuyumi, could you get the door?”
Mom has Touya by the arm, leading him into the family room. He’s wearing one of Natsuo’s shirts, the one that had FRONT on the front in big white letters and BACK on the back in the same print. It was too big for him, hanging off of his lanky frame. Soft sweatpants and bare feet. His bionic arm hangs limp at his side, and she can see his prosthetic foot shining in the light, just beneath the cuff of his pants.
When Fuyumi answers the front door, she finds Dad standing on the stoop. He’s hunched over, as if trying to make himself small. He looks like one of her students after she’s just caught them passing notes, guilt written on the face and eyes. “Hey, Dad.”
She’s always tried to be cordial with him. She does love him. She just wishes their past wasn’t their past. She wanted her dad to ruffle her hair and tell her he loves her, the way he did when she was so much younger and Touya’s fire hadn’t left burns on his wrist yet. He doesn’t. He didn’t. He told her he was proud of her years and years later, long after she had already completed her certification and become a teacher, and she felt warm pride bloom in her chest that left her feeling equal parts vindicated and pathetic.
“Do you mind if I come in?” He asks, shy like a little boy. She lets him. He has a small bouquet of blue flowers for Mom.
“Um…sure. Mom’s in the living room,” she tells him, and directs him there.
Natsuo scowls as soon as he sees him, and flees the room soon after. Touya is sitting on the couch, and Mom is sitting next to him.
“Rei—”
“Enji,” Mom stands and takes the flowers from him, face soft. “Thank you.” She looks ten years younger, and the thought makes Fuyumi sad.
Dad takes her place next to Touya on the couch. Her older brother doesn’t turn to look at their father. He doesn’t even acknowledge his presence.
Fuyumi takes the flowers from Mom and goes to find a vase.
“Touya…”
Blink.
“I know that I’m probably not the person you’d like to be speaking to right now—” blink, “—but I want you to know I’m very happy to see you up and about—” blink, “—and, you don’t have to forgive me. In fact you never have to. But I wanted you to know that—” a hand rises in his periphery, extended towards him. The fog in his brain begins to thin…
Blink.
Dabi flings out an arm and pushes Enji’s away as hard as he can.
“Touya—!”
His shoulders drop, arms back at his sides again. He keeps his gaze fixed to the floor. He can’t bring himself to open his mouth to say anything in reply.
“Touya please, I just—”
Blink.
“—I want things to be different between us—”
Blink.
“—and I know I wasn’t a very good father to you—”
He remembers Shoto laying in his mother’s arms doing nothing but being a pudgy useless little baby, and Enji looking at his littlest brother as if he’s already hung the moon and stars. He remembers when Enji would guide his hands through the motions of different moves, his moves, the way he fought, because he wanted Dabi to be like him, and then he remembers the day it stopped and the day he started hearing Mom and Enji fight through the walls and the dread building in the pit of his stomach, Fuyumi’s excitement when she first lay her eyes on Natsuo and how Enji immediately dismissed him the same way he had suddenly dismissed Dabi himself and in that moment he hated Shoto, hated his own infirmity and he felt something building deep inside of him that had never truly gone away. I wish he looked at me like that. Now he can’t take his eyes off of him and Dabi says nothing.
Blink.
His mouth won’t work so he lets his eyes do the talking instead, flicked away, off to the side where he could only see Enji through his periphery.
Enji is silent and this is when he is at his most dangerous, when he was thinking, the calm before the storm. “Is this what you’re doing now?” Slow and quiet, and then building, “is this your new grand plan to get back at me, then?” Building, “you hurt your mother and your sister and your brothers—”
Enji had been there in the hospital when he woke up. Dabi remembers seeing him, and then turning his face away. He remembers hearing his father cry.
Dabi wants to laugh. Don’t act like you care about them now, he thinks, don’t act like that after what you did. His mouth feels cemented shut. Enji just keeps on talking, louder and louder. Building.
Building to an inferno.
Mom and Dad are fighting again, except this time he’s twenty-one instead of nine and he’s a lot bigger than he used to be, back when Dad would scream and yell and set shit on fire. Back when he would hit Mom and spout flame at Shoto and all he or Fuyumi could do was run and hide.
Touya never went with them. Maybe he hid somewhere else.
Right now he’s sitting on the couch, staring at the floor.
“If you’re going to yell then you have to leave—”
“Rei, you—you can’t seriously be entertaining his antics again, can you? He just—”
Natsuo can’t help himself. He raises his voice like his father. “Get out!” He cries, “you heard her, now get the fuck out!”
Shock washes over his father’s face. Mom’s face turns pale, paler than usual. Natsuo feels like someone has suddenly wrapped something around his chest, tight like a vice. “Get out—” he says, strangled, “go.”
Dad leaves.
As soon as he’s gone Natsuo sucks in a breath, desperate as if he were starved for air. His lungs still feel trapped, chest tight and the sound of his own blood roaring in his ears threatens to overtake all other noise. He hears Fuyumi’s voice somewhere behind him, somehow so level and calm—”okay, is everyone alright?”—talking soft and slow—”Mom, why don’t you sit down? Natsuo, you wanna come with me? Let’s go outside—” and before he knows it she’s taken him by the arm and he’s outside.
It’s muggy today.
Natsuo squats down and begins picking at the grass, breaking off little stems and playing with the tiny blades.
“You alright?” Fuyumi asks after a few minutes.
He keeps seeing Mom’s pale face. “I’m fine. I’m not one of your kids.”
“I know.”
“Then why take me outside?” He used to get pulled out of class all the time. The teacher would wrap her fingers around his arm and yank. Then he would be put out in the hall. Classroom disruption, usually.
“Because you needed to cool off, and Mom needed to calm down.”
“I’m sorry.” He keeps seeing Mom’s face. It’s making him nauseous.
“It’s alright. You were mad.”
It’s alright. Just like with Dad, trying to placate him, cooking for him, sitting down at his table and eating with him, when he hadn’t eaten with them in years, when he wasn’t even allowed to know Shoto’s favorite food—”stop it.”
A sigh, “stop what, Natsuo?”
“Stop—stop being so fucking nice!” Natsuo can feel something bubbling up within him then, fighting to get to the surface, “you’re always so fucking nice to everyone and I hate it! Touya was right when he said you wouldn’t understand, you were never his heir or whatever the fuck he wanted us to be, you—”
“Shut up!”
He’s breathless again, breathing hard. Fuyumi’s gone all red in the face, a rare fury sparkling in her eyes. His face feels wet, his neck hot, everything is too warm and too sticky and it’s not raining, so why is his face wet?
Her lower lip is wobbling; but when she opens her mouth to speak, her voice is still deathly calm. “You have no idea what it was like for me growing up, Natsuo.”
And then she turned and walked away.
“—I don’t know. Everything is up in the air right now.”
“Are you having any trouble with—you know—”
“Not with him, exactly. Dad came over today and it… didn’t go well.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—” someone else is talking in the background, boisterous and loud, “—sorry, I’ve gotta go. Talk to you later? I hope everything works out!”
The call ends. Shoto pulls the phone away from his ear and tosses it onto the nearest surface—a nightstand—next to him. He lays down with a sigh, and stares up at the ceiling.
When Enji wants to apologize he does so with flowers. During their short betrothal, he caught Rei staring out at a patch of flowers—morning glories, bright blue in their bright mid-morning splendor. Enji had pointed to them and asked, do you like those? He’s gotten them for her ever since, he started sending them to her all the time while she was in the hospital, started writing to her every week. At first she would rip them up, tossing them in the trash while she stowed Shoto’s away in a little box by her bed. Then she started reading them, and then she thought, well, maybe he could change.
They’re my favorite, she had told him later, and ever since, she could find the bright blue blooms in a vase somewhere in the house. He brought them yesterday, when he tried to speak to Touya.
Is this what you’re doing now? Is this your new grand plan to get back at me, then?
She had just started back to watching TV when she saw her son’s broadcast. She had been happy—and she knew immediately from the way the news anchor spoke about her son that she should not be. Villain, murderer, traitor, monster. Many feelings warred within her at this revelation—happiness, so much happiness, but shame too, disgust. Sadness. She had been so happy to see him, and then so, so sad to realize what she was actually watching. She knew Enji’s rejection hurt him. She knew it hurt all three of her eldest children, to varying degrees—even Fuyumi, even if she wouldn’t admit it, sweet girl standing with a ball in-hand, asking after her father, Dad, wanna come play with us? Always so hopeful. Touya wanted to be like him—but not like that, not like that—worshiped the ground he walked on. Natsuo had a desire that quickly turned to incandescent rage as he and Touya clung to each other, knowing what they were to Enji—failures. At least with Fuyumi, he hadn’t expected her to be his heir, he thought he had found it already in Touya, poor thing. Disgust for herself, then. For what Touya had become. Dabi. What a morbid thing to name oneself.
At the heart of the inferno he had screamed for her, not in the voice of a man but the voice of a boy, m-mom? She reached to touch his cheek and her hand met char, sloughing away in her hand and the tears had come unbidden. The next time she was near him his face was covered in shining fish scales, mouth open for a tube, all of him covered in tubes, is this what he looked like the first time, after Sekoto Peak? How did he survive? Then she sat down and wept once again. She wept for him and the people he killed. She wept for all her children. She wept for herself.
And then she asked Enji for a divorce. She didn’t expect him to relent immediately, a sad frown and a nod, if that’s what you want. The same thought from before, from the hospital while reading his letters came to her then, maybe he is changing.
You can’t seriously be entertaining his antics again—the words sting. She begged him once to spend time with Touya. It had been after he attacked Shoto, when he was still very young and Enji had accused her of favoritism, had accused her of enabling Touya’s behavior, of not disciplining him enough—it was cruel to have more children, she thinks. He had taken Touya by the shoulder, proud when he saw that his son’s flames surpassed his own and told him, you will be my legacy, until he wasn’t anymore. And she would take Touya by the hand when he had burned himself again as Enji raged in the background, clean him up and dress his wounds—Fuyumi would always bring a box of Hello Kitty bandaids to her and insist that's what they use, and once Touya had consented to one being pressed to his face and to his arm and to his knee; and Fuyumi had smiled and declared he would be fine in no time, because she was a child and children always believed that bandaids and kisses had such power—but he wouldn’t listen. I’m fine Mom, he would insist, little man, running off on his own and she was too weak and too pregnant to follow.
He does not run now. He sits next to her on the couch, inert. She counts his blinks, watching pale white eyelashes flutter up and down; blink, blink, blink.
The TV is playing the news. She takes the remote and changes it to something else.
Touya moves. His fuzzy white head tips towards her and for a brief, terrifying moment of white-hot panic she thinks he’s fainted until he lays his head against her shoulder, eyes open and breathing even, blink, blink, blinking at the TV.
Rei tries not to react. She bites the inside of her cheek and looks at the screen, trying to pay attention to whatever was playing on the TV, but she can’t help it. She keeps glancing at Touya in her periphery.
Fuyumi is chopping leeks in the kitchen, knife flashing in the light as it comes down over and over on the leeks in her practiced hands, smooth chop, chop, chop. She does not cut herself—she’s been preparing and cooking food for years. She would cook for herself, for Natsuo and Touya, and then it was just her and Natsuo, and then it was just her. And then she came back, and it was for everyone. Dad would smile at her and thank her for the meal and she felt… strange. Vindicated, because he recognized her efforts, hard-won from a tender age when their nanny got sick and stopped coming, and Mom was already in the hospital so there was truly no one to look after them. Yet at the same time she felt angry. Why now? Why after all these years? She pushed the feeling down—they were all together again, and that’s all she really wanted. The hazy memories of her childhood were coming back in full color, and she didn’t want to waste it being mad at a past she couldn’t change. Yet it lingered.
You were never his heir. Her nostrils flare as she huffs. Chop, chop, chop.
You have no idea what it was like for me growing up. Dragging a chair around the kitchen with Natsuo to pull down pots and pans, searching through the pantry, trying to figure out how to put together something edible. Her brother was more likely to burn whatever it was they tried their hands at making, and Touya ‘died’ before he could make any more attempts. She stopped letting Natsuo try when he started a fire and Dad came down to yell at them.
She remembers his face, beet-red with fury, fists smoking as he got in her face, spit flying as he told her don’t make me come down here again, and your brother doesn’t need distractions, and I won’t hesitate to beat your ass if you do this again. Fuyumi never let it happen again.
Once she had envied her father’s attention to Shoto, even with the yelling. He had paid more attention to Touya too. After that, she was glad he barely paid her any mind. She didn’t want him to turn his gaze onto her ever again.
Yet years later the same man sat at the table—her table, the table she set for just her, Touya and Natsuo, and then just her and Natsuo—and complimented her cooking, asked her how she got so good at it, since she certainly didn’t get it from him and once again the vindication bloomed within her, her pride swelled and she smiled. Natsuo scowled.
Chop, chop, chop. Their nanny was sick, Mom in the hospital. She would get Natsuo up in the morning and make them both breakfast. Sometimes she caught him in Touya’s room instead of his own, nestled in the blankets of a bed that had long-lost its use. Sometimes he would complain about breakfast, little boy voice, whining, I want eggs, I want rice. She already knew she wanted to be a teacher by then, she started practicing on him. Sometimes we don’t get what we want, and she tried not to sound too annoyed. She wanted him to turn out right. She wanted him to live.
She must have gotten something right, since he wanted to go to medical school. She must have gotten some stuff wrong, too. Why after all this time? She wonders to herself, chop chop chopping away at the leeks beneath her knife. He just doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what life was life before Dad… changed. It had been nice. In her hazy memories of her early childhood, there was Touya and her happy mother, and Dad would smile when he saw her, would pick her up and put her on his shoulders and run around with her, laughing. Then Natsuo was born and she didn’t quite know what was happening, not until the yelling and the fighting started, not until Touya started ranting and crying, what did I do wrong, Fuyumi?
What did I do wrong?
“Ow—!” Pain spikes in her finger, white-hot before quickly dulling. Blood blooms across the cutting board. “Ugh, shit.”
Fuyumi throws down the knife in frustration. Dripping bloody red all over the once-pristine kitchen tiles, she walks to the sink to clean herself up, dirtying a dish towel in an attempt to stop the bleeding. “Shit, shit, shit—”
“Are you alright, Fuyumi?” She hears Mom before she sees her, walking through the doorway with a frightened gasp. “What happened?”
“I’m fine, Mom—” the damn thing won’t stop bleeding. She adjusts the towel and watches as more red bleeds across the fabric. “Cut myself while cutting the leeks.”
Her mother rushes to her side, delicate fingers reaching to Fuyumi’s own. Her mother’s fingers are burned. “Here, let me help…” she peels the towel back, bright bloody red stains all over it. Her mother’s fingers are cool to the touch, they always were, soothing coolness on a hot day, smooth cool fingers against her brow when she was sick, before everything went to shit. Mom turns off the water and gets another towel, “here, it’ll stop in a minute, let’s just keep pressure on it…”
Fuyumi stands there by the sink while her mother keeps a dish towel pressed firmly to her bleeding finger. She watches as Mom worries her bottom lip between her teeth, fretting. Her vision starts to go blurry as tears suddenly fill her eyes and then she’s crying, and she doesn’t know why. It’s only a cut on her finger.
It’s only—
“Fuyumi—!” Panic in her mother’s voice, “I’m sorry—am I hurting you?”
Fuyumi whimpers, “no, no—I’m sorry Mom, it’s—”
Stop being so fucking nice! You’re always so fucking nice and I hate it! You were never his heir—
What did I do wrong?
Pulling up chairs to pull down pots and pans, Dad screaming, don’t make me come down here for some stupid shit again or I’ll beat your ass!
I thought we might turn into a real family…
“It’s—I got into a fight with Natsuo, and—and—”
Mom’s fingers brush across her forehead, blessedly cool, smoothing some of her hair back. “Oh honey, it’s alright.”
Fuyumi tries, futilely, to stop crying, sniffling like a little girl. “I just—I just wanted us to stay together as a family and—and I know he’s mad but sometimes he’s just—”
“He’s upset,” Mom says, “we were all upset yesterday. You both just need some time, you’ll see.”
The dish towel is pulled from her bloody finger and Fuyumi winces when she sees the deep line cut across the tip of her finger, still seeping but much less than the gush from a few minutes before. “There… here, keep this on while I get a bandaid, alright? Go sit on the couch, I’ll finish dinner—”
“Mom—”
“It’s alright,” she doesn’t appear to have a choice, as Mom takes her by the arm and leads her out into the family room, where Touya was already sitting on the couch, staring at the TV.
She’s plopped down next to her brother while her mother bustles off to retrieve the bandaids. Fuyumi toys with the dish towel in her hands and wipes futilely at her eyes. Touya shifts beside her and she feels a weight settle against her shoulder.
You and me, and all of us, die. We should die.
Is that really what you wanted, Touya? She wonders to herself, looking at her brother’s head resting against her shoulder out of her periphery, or were you just saying that?
He used to carry you around the house, said Mom. He used to crawl into bed with Natsuo. He used to play with her whenever she asked. He cried when Dad ignored him, he cried when he attacked Shoto, he cried when Dad took Shoto away. She didn’t recognize the man on the screen that made that broadcast, a man with dead eyes. Touya without life. The past never dies.
Fuyumi-chan, he cried at the heart of the inferno, Natsuo?
Fuyumi wonders if he wanted to stop and he just couldn’t, anymore. Sekoto Peak had been burned down to cinders, a grove of blackened charcoal. His jawbone had been burned black too, small and fragile. She remembers his mouth, open wide and blue deep in his throat—she didn’t know how he was still alive, she didn’t know how any of them were still alive.
“Do you really want all of us to die?” She asks, out loud.
He doesn’t reply. Fuyumi bites her cheek. All of that and now what? Stillness and silence. She wanted her brother back, she fought to keep him alive, from killing their dad, from blowing up a fucking city. She didn’t want that to be her last memory of her brother, mouth wide open spitting fire. She didn’t want that to be the last of the boy who used to laugh and play ball with her.
“So you’re just—you’re just not gonna talk ever again, then?” She can’t help herself.
Again no answer. His head moves. She looks down and he looks back.
It's dark in the room like Mom's room was when Shoto would sneak in as a child, fresh from a nightmare, trying to seek some kind of solace in her arms. For most of his childhood Mom had been a safe place to run to, with her soft body and welcome embrace, arms blessedly cool after one of Dad’s tirades. Now he creeps into Touya's room not to climb into bed with him but with the desire to talk.
Not that his older brother would. He doesn't talk to anybody. He barely reacts to anything, he just stares at the wall, or out the window, or right at your face if you happen to walk in front of him. He went outside with Mom once to help her with the overgrown plants in the garden, but he didn't say anything the entire time. Shoto heard Mom talking to him the whole time, and laughing, he doesn’t think he’s ever heard her laugh before. Touya hadn't said anything, he just knelt there with her in the dirt.
Instead of speaking, Shoto enters the room and sits on the side of Touya's bed. His older brother is awake, staring at the wall. He wonders if Touya thinks about anything at all, if there was anything left in there. Fuyumi said she saw him reading once.
Shoto curls up against him and lays his head on his brother's chest.
He's always been jealous of Fuyumi and Natsuo. He loved them, but he was jealous of them too. He would watch them out the window, Fuyumi, Natsuo and Touya too—his memory of his brother before the accident was always a bit hazy. He wanted to be out there too. He wanted to throw the ball and play action figures and scrape his knees; but Dad only let him scuff himself up if it was in the name of following in his footsteps, you’re my legacy. Shoto remembers being small, small enough he could crouch beneath a bed with no trouble, and running after his brother and sister, running with them to their hiding place beneath the bed, or in the closet, but Dad would always find him, drag him screaming and crying out from the safety of the clothes or under the bed. Fuyumi and Natsuo would watch between the slats or from under the bedskirt and he would look back at them just barely able to see their eyes, help me, please. They never did.
They were scared. He was too. He can hear Touya's heartbeat. He did that to you too, didn't he? He only has fuzzy memories of Touya, but he remembers All for One's words. Continuing to abuse your eldest.
The only time he ever saw Touya react to anything had been the day Dad came to visit. Mom walked him to the couch and Dad sat down with him. Dad talked. Touya did nothing. When Dad tried to touch him Shoto watched as Touya struck out at him with one arm, lightning fast. Then he went back to sitting there, inert, all while Dad got angrier and angrier, voice rising, deaf to Mom’s demands that he leave until Natsuo raised his voice in turn and stunned everyone into silence.
Fuyumi had been talking but he just turned around and left.
Shoto sits up, but Touya doesn’t follow. He stays where he is. “When we were fighting, I wanted to tell you—there are things I want to say to you, arguments I want to have. Things I didn’t get to say, or do and—you even said it yourself. You’re still my big brother.”
It was then that Touya moved, eyes blank no more as they sparkled with some kind of unreadable emotion, staring now directly at Shoto. Shoto feels his heart race, then, as his brother’s lips parted and sound came out; “wha—aht—” Touya shoots up with a harsh hocking sound, Shoto flinching back at the sudden movement while his brother’s attempt at clearing his throat quickly turns into a coughing fit, violent hacks that double him over. Shoto puts a hand on his shoulder, some instinct he had learned from Izuku, a hand on the back or shoulder but Touya shirks him off.
The coughing slowly begins to peter out. “Touya—”
“What—” Touya gasps, “—what do you—what do you want me to say, Shoto?”
Shoto blinks, stunned, heart still racing. Anything, he wants to say, but he hasn’t planned for anything. It occurs to him then that the only things he knows about his brother are from the memories of a boy long in the past recounted by his siblings and his mother. The forlorn glance to the room with the altar, where Dad prayed nearly everyday, an old bed that saw no use and a collection of toys that forever gathered more and more dust. A ball, a gundam, a computer that no longer turns on.
“Um…” he goes over the list in his mind, everything he’s ever wanted to ask the boy in the portrait on the wall, every imaginary argument he’s thought of since he found out Touya was still alive—all the things he wanted to ask. All he has are hazy memories of watching from far away, Fuyumi waving up at him from the courtyard while Touya pointedly wouldn’t look, and then he was just a photograph, and most of those were put away and Mom cried more than she used to. The boy is alive again in front of him, taller, older. All the staples removed but the grafts remain. His mind circles back to the conversation with Bakugo and Iida, about how he didn’t know anything about Touya, that he only watched and once he could mingle with his siblings no one really talked about him, and he didn’t even know something as mundane as a favorite food.
It’s gotta be piping hot udon, Bakugo said it with such confidence, arms braced behind his head. The thought actually makes him laugh.
If that’s the case, I’ll make him sit down for a bowl with me.
“What’s your favorite food?”
Silence follows, his brother’s face screws up in confusion and for a brief moment of shattering disappointment Shoto fears that Touya has gone back to not speaking, but then—”Soba.”
When he had been hospitalized, he thought about the dark rage in Touya’s eyes. The hate. The mean slant of his furrowed brow and how similar it had once been to his own. We’re the same, he had thought. We could have been the exact same. Midoriya’s voice rings in his head, so sweet, too sweet; but it’s not his—his fire, his father’s fire, but not really his; it doesn’t come from him he realizes, it came from Shoto, and his fire would be different—it’s yours!
They had that in common, and now they have this.
His brother doesn’t look at him, hunched in on himself, arms folded against his stomach. “Mine too,” Shoto says.
The silence comes back. Shoto lets it linger. Then he asks, “would you want to get some with me sometime?”
Touya swallows.
The silence remains. It fills his ears—what was that old saying? A loud silence. When he was younger, the silences in the house were just as loud as Dad’s yelling, a glare or flick of the eyes could be just as painful as any words, as any blow; because he knew with that angry look in his father’s eyes that something was coming, even if there were no words to herald its arrival. The silence was worse. It was him sitting in his mother’s lap when his father would come and snatch him up, and then everything would explode. Silence was the natal-stage before disaster. All it needed was for the other shoe to drop.
“Decided you don’t wanna talk anymore?” Why isn’t he talking? The small army of doctors that handled his case had informed his mother of his brother’s condition while Shoto listened through the door, we’ve restored and preserved what we can, but… physical therapy, prosthetics, permanent organ damage. Were his vocal chords one of the many things preserved, but unable to be fully saved?
At the time they didn’t know he would be going home with them. House arrest and ankle monitors weren’t even on their minds. He went to Tartarus for a time before Takami intervened, slotting him into a rehab program.
His gaze drifts from his brother to the nightstand next to his bed, a few dusty trinkets left over from a long-lost childhood and several orange medicine bottles.
“It’s just—” Shoto’s eyes snap back to his older brother at the sound of his voice, raspy, deep in the throat; “—hard, sometimes.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t know what to say to that. Hard how?
He has a hard time connecting the person who wrapped his arms around him to try and kill him with the person sitting before him now; but they were one and the same. Touya stopped when Dad wasn’t conscious to watch.
“Did you mean it, that day?” Shoto suddenly finds himself asking, “when you said you wanted us dead? That you wanted to kill me, or Natsuo or any of us if it meant you could hurt Dad?” Touya’s blue bright eyes flick up to meet his own, mismatched.
Of course he meant it. That’s why he tried, right?
“Why did you—forgive him?” His brother answers him with questions of his own, “after everything he’s d-done?” His voice seems to catch every few words, as if it were getting caught somewhere down in his throat.
It’s not his, Midoriya says in his head, it’s yours.
“I didn’t do it for him,” he tells Touya, “I did it for myself.” And he’s not here anymore; they’ve taken his house with its walls that were built to ward off flame but not to cover shouting or screaming, the ringing smack of a fist on flesh and they’ve turned it into something else. The shadow of the home he wished for as a child while he sat on his mother’s lap, crying because he didn’t want to be whatever Dad planned for him to be; but then All Might would come on TV and he would think, maybe I can do this.
“Why?”
“It was hurting me.”
Touya laughs, curling further into himself as his hoarse laughter quickly morphs into another coughing fit, shoulders shaking with each heave and its accompanying eked gasp before it slowly peters out.
“I needed to heal,” Shoto says.
“And I’ll heal in hell.” Touya spits, voice like gravel. “You’re a nice boy, Shoto; but that’s not my style—”
“Why are you being so stubborn?” Shoto asks, interrupting his brother—he’s been that stubborn too, just another notch underneath their similarities, by never using my father’s quirk, by rising to the top without it—I’ll have denied him everything as he had once said to Midoriya. Denying his father the satisfaction of seeing him use the quirk he had attempted to cultivate within him, had screamed at him over, had hit him over—had hit his mom—he had wanted it so bad until Midoriya had risen up in challenge, it’s yours! because his fire was not his father’s, it came from him and him alone and only he could have created the phosphor at his beating heart that had been enough to keep his brother alive when Touya’s own ice had sprouted deep within his chest. Stupid Aniki, he remembers saying, quit being stupid and come home. “It’s like—”talking to myself.
“Is this the part where you beg me—” Touya’s voice goes phlegmy and he coughs to clear it, “—beg me to let you help me? Gonna forgive me?” There’s a growl in his brother’s voice as he speaks in challenge, a cat arching its back and fluffing its tail, trying to make itself look bigger.
Midoriya had said it but it had ultimately been he, Shoto, who made the realization. The fire comes from me, and only I can do this. “I’ve done all I can,” he says, “the rest is up to you.”
He receives no reply and once again the silence begins to grow between them. Shoto stands. “I should get back to bed.” Touya remains silent.
Blink.
His vision is beginning to blur.
Blink.
He’s crying, frothy pink, just like the time he did a shitty patch-up on himself after an accident and his eyes just wouldn’t stop, constant leak for hours and hours that he couldn’t control until they stopped and he realized nothing was coming out of them even when he wanted to cry. He would never cry again. And when he came to that horrible realization he had bent double and sobbed, and nothing came. Just another way his body had come to betray him, first with its weakness and now this. But he’s crying now, fingers coming away filmy red; because it's not quite blood but it’s not wholly just water either.
Blink. Blink blink blink—
“Ugh…”
He and Shoto are too similar. It’s like looking in a mirror, but the reflection is slightly off. A funhouse mirror, and he’s on the wrong side.
Blink.
Dabi wipes at his eyes.
Fuyumi and Natsuo used to cluster up around him when Enji started yelling, ducking behind him, one little hand twisted up in his shirt before they would both run somewhere; the closet, the bed, the couch, because sometimes he would leave them to scream back. Shoto’s just a stupid baby, Enji had said before Touya’s flames were even stronger than his own so why, why, why—(was all of this his fault?)
Shoto curled up to him the way he would with Natsuo, bawling his eyes out. (Stupid.) The only time he ever hugged Shoto had been in an attempt to kill him.
Blink.
He didn’t want to cry on Sekoto Peak when Enji didn’t show up. He always cried when he was upset, be it angry or sad the tears would come and now they come again. Is he angry or sad?
Oh, Shoto…
Blink.
When they were kids they lived separately, ate separately; because Dabi attacked Shoto. Summoned up a weak fist of fire and ran at Mom, little Shoto clutched tightly in her arms, tears blurring his already tunneling vision, look at me, LOOK AT ME—and Fuyumi would cook for all of them, Natsuo was banned ever since he accidentally set the kitchen on fire. She would make food for Shoto too, but none of them knew if he ever ate it. Maybe Enji threw it out and had something completely separate made. Maybe he thought Dabi would poison him somehow.
Mine too. Turns out they both like soba. The innocence of it is sickly sweet at the back of his throat. When they were children he couldn’t figure out why Shoto would look down on them with that sad wistful look in his eyes—he had everything Dabi wanted. He wanted to be down with them, roughhousing in the dirt, and Dabi wanted to be up there, he wanted Enji to train him again, to love him again, he wanted to be more than some failed experiment.
Touya, do you even really want to be a hero? Asked Mom, because she knew where he was going and yes, yes it’s all I’ve ever fucking wanted to be—because why else was I even born? and his spoken response had been just as harsh, accusatory you had a hand in my creation too and in that moment he hated his mother as much as he hated Shoto, as much as he hated himself and his febrile body. As much as he would come to hate Enji, because it all comes back to him, doesn’t it?
(He never did apologize to her.)
You had everything. We share the same blood and we turned out so different. After all, a warped track doesn’t cross the straight and narrow—these are the conditions of the world we live in.
We will mingle.
Oh, Shoto…
Blink.
He gets up and goes to the bathroom at the end of the hall. There are filmy pink tear tracks on his face. He wipes them off.
He feels the miasma that settled over him in the hospital drawing its cloak up around him once again. He goes back to his bedroom and lays down.
I’m sorry.
“I know it’s hard, it’s just—it’s my brother and I don’t know how much longer this is gonna last, you know?”
“I know, I know. I just miss you, is all.”
Natsuo smiles, sad. The thought of his fiance all alone in their apartment for the time he’s been away makes his heart hurt. “I miss you too. I’m sorry—”
“Natsuo, don’t apologize! I know how important this is to you. Maybe I could visit—”
“No! No—my dad’s been around, and I don’t…”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t want them to meet, because he doesn’t want Dad in his business after this is all said and done. They’re done. They’ve got Touya.
A blank stare, a ghost that silently wanders his childhood home. Dad roared in fury when the ghost wouldn’t respond and Natsuo raised his own voice in turn, and Mom’s face turned pale and he felt sick—
“Babe?” He suddenly croaks, sucking in a breath, chest too tight. Fuyumi, he needs to apologize to her too—
“Natsuo?” His sweet fiance’s voice is full of concern.
Fuck, he shouldn’t have said anything—”I—I’m sorry. I um—he came over the other day and it got a little—and he and Mom were yelling and I just fucking—” he sniffles, vision blurring as tears gather, “—I fucking snapped and then me and my sister got into it—”
“Hey, hey—it’s alright—”
“It’s not—”
“Not right now. But it will be. Just give it time. You’re gonna apologize, right?”
“Of course!”
“Then just start with that, and go from there, okay?”
Breakfast is quiet. Natsuo picks at his food and Touya eats mechanically, eyes unfocused. Shoto seems to be acting normal, he’s always been a bit quiet—and Mom too. Fuyumi’s eyes keep snapping between them all, until finally she decides she’ll have to be the one to do something about it—”are you alright?”
Natsuo’s head snaps up, and drops almost immediately after, “hm? Yeah, I’m good I’m—I’m alright—”
She doesn’t believe that for a second. “Natsuo, don’t—”
“Sorry, I—” she watches him bite at his lip, chopsticks now laying forgotten next to his plate. “Fuyumi I… I’m sorry. And you too, Mom, I’m sorry—”
Mom chimes in before she has a chance to speak, “Natsuo, it’s alright—”
“No it’s not!” He cries, face beginning to turn red as distress paints itself across his face, brow furrowed and eyes wet, “I shouldn’t have said that, I wasn’t thinking—and I—I shouldn’t have yelled, I didn’t mean to—”
Fuyumi feels her chest tighten, “Natsuo—”
“You were just—keeping it together for everyone,” he speaks haltingly, sounds seconds away from sobbing, “you’re always trying to take care of everyone and I got so annoyed because I just fucking—” Fuyumi’s brow furrows at that, “I was acting like him—”
“No!” Mom cries, “no—honey no, that was just a misunderstanding, you weren’t—”
“You’re not.”
The fourth voice cuts through the rest of them like a knife, all eyes turned immediately to where Touya sat at one end of the table, head turned towards Natsuo. His eyes were focused, sharp blue staring intently at their little brother as he repeated himself, “you’re not.”
Fuyumi doesn’t know what to say. She opens her mouth, thinking to reply but ultimately coming up with nothing. She thinks once again to the man on the broadcast with dead eyes, Dabi, announcing to the world that he was her brother and thinking he looks so much and nothing like her older brother all at the same time—and how similar the feeling is to now. That this man sitting in the dining room—this ghost—is so much and so little like her brother. Touya was excitable, loud, and this man is diminished, quiet. And yet she sees him in the defiant rise of his eyes, the jut of his chin.
It’s Natsuo who recovers first, breaking the silence that followed Touya’s utterance with his own quiet, “Touya?” Breathless, almost in disbelief.
Touya blinks at them. And then he says; “stop staring at me. I’m not a damn tourist attraction.”
“Wait, wait, wait—dude, wait—”
Blink.
He’s walking away.
Natsuo’s hand closes around his wrist. (Enji’s hand, yanking him back by his arm as he tries to unsuccessfully sneak back into the house—I need to work on how sneaking around if I want to be a hero, he remembered thinking to himself, flinching as his father’s hand pulled at a fresh burn—and just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?) Natsuo’s grasp is weak and he slips free with ease. “Wait, Touya, wait—”
Dabi waits.
“Just—just come back to the table, please. We won’t stare at you.”
But everyone is staring at him. He can feel their eyes. This is what he’s always wanted, actually—for everyone to look at him, and now that he’s got it the feeling leaves him itchy, right at the back of his neck like he’s being watched by a voyeur.
“Sorry man, you just surprised us.”
Blink.
Shoto is still eating his breakfast, but he’s watching too. Dabi looks to him and they make eye contact, briefly. Dabi looks away first.
His mother and sister make similar statements about their own shock and surprise, coaxing him back to the table. Dabi sits back down. Mom rests a hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, and gives it a squeeze before she takes her place next to Fuyumi. He never apologized to her.
You had a hand in my creation too. And he made her the target of all of the bubbling rage and hate in his belly, the simmer that became the inferno that swallowed him up for the first time on Sekoto Peak, cooled to embers and replaced with guilt. He had felt so guilty, waking up and realizing that was the last thing I said to her. Sure, he’s been mad at Mom, but to say that—it left him feeling sick. But then he went home and she wasn’t there and instead he found Enji standing over Shoto with flames licking at the walls and that all-too familiar rage in his eyes, and he realized with sudden clarity, with the kind of anger that makes the entire world stand still: nothing has changed here. He saw the altar. They thought he died and nothing changed. And then his anger fell squarely onto the true culprit behind it all: Enji. It all came back to Enji.
But he had been too weak to do anything at the time. Too weak and too small and his flames sputtered red-orange instead of brilliant blue, guttering out as soon as they left his palms. Why didn’t you come home?
I did, but I didn’t find anything for me there. Three years and nothing changed, they thought him dead and he came home to that same old scene. If he stayed, if he had revealed himself, would it have changed anything?
Blink.
Everyone is trying to get back to breakfast. Everyone occasionally shoots him a glance.
Everyone is looking at me. The thought contained so much glee when it had first passed through his skull, delirious with pain and heat at the heart of the inferno contained within his ribs. He was giddy with the thought, everyone is here and Dad is watching me, for the first time in years but it was wrong and everyone was crying and he realized far too late that he couldn’t stop and even if he did there was still a part of him that didn’t want to stop because fuck Endeavor, fuck his father and everything he stood for but—but—
Funny how he was the only one who really went into that fight planning on dying. Everyone else was fighting for something to change—Toga and Spinner (and Twice, poor guy) all wanted a world where they could exist as themselves. He supposes he wanted something similar—he wanted it all to come crashing down the way Stain did, because if people like Enji were considered heroes, then maybe there shouldn’t be any heroes to begin with. But he had planned on dying that day, looking into his father’s eyes and Enji finally wouldn’t be able to look away—he would be the very last thing his father ever saw and that wasn’t what happened at all. Because Mom came to stop him. Because Fuyumi and Natsuo came to stop him. Because Shoto came to stop him.
We will mingle.
Toga died. He doesn’t know what happened to Spinner or Compress. Twice died a long time ago like Magne, and Shigaraki had died too, he watched that on the news when he finally woke up. Everyone’s gone and he’s still here. He’s still here because—
Don’t leave us again, I can’t stand it!
Quit fuckin’ around, bro!
And Mom, shouting, practically a scream, louder than anything, louder than the desperate pulse of blood in his ears—Oh Touya—I’m sorry!
Mom, Mama—
“Touya?”
Blink.
It’s Mom, because they’re still sitting at the table. They’re eating breakfast, he, his mother and siblings. It’s domestic, disgustingly so—the kind of thing he used to dream about.
Dabi stares down at the food on his plate, half-eaten, suddenly nauseous.
“Are you alright?”
There’s a burn stretching across her face that she got from walking through his inferno, arms outstretched, ice spreading in shining fractals that melted almost as soon as they formed. Fuyumi has one on her chin that looks a bit like a scrape, like that time when they were kids and she fell outside, and she cried because Mom wasn’t there to kiss it better. Instead all they had was their nanny. The guilt had bubbled in his stomach as he watched her cry, as their nanny took her by the hand and walked her inside, as he looked down at Natsuo and similarly found tears brimming in his little brother’s eyes.
He can feel the guilt bubbling in his stomach now. Why the fuck is he even here? His handlers explained it to him but he hadn’t listened to half of it. Something about rehabilitation and safety, but he barely had the energy to do anything other than sit up and stare. Staring and staring and how long was I asleep this time? There’s a chip in his brain that keeps him from using his quirk, or at least—that’s what he’s been told. He hasn’t actually tried. Maybe if he does it’ll give him a mighty shock, maybe if he goes too far it’ll kill him and he wonders…
What am I doing here? Everyone who actually wanted to change anything is gone, and dying didn’t even get them what they wanted. Everything was still here.
Actually—Enji wasn’t here. Mom and Natsuo kicked him out. That was pretty satisfying.
He can feel the itch of eyes again. That hungry-heavy feeling he used to crave that made his stomach drop a little, the knowledge that everyone was looking at him, a weight on the back of his neck.
“Touya?”
Blink.
This time the person speaking is Shoto, brow furrowed, eyes alight the way Toga’s were atop Gigantomachia—is your arm okay?
“I’m—” the word drags at the back of his throat, a phlegmy rasp that he tries to clear away with a cough that turns into a series of hacks, his mother bracing a hand against his shoulder to keep him from bowing over. When it stops it leaves him gasping for air, stomach hurting from the clench of his diaphragm. “I’m good—I’m…” his voice is shot, hoarse as it tugs at the back of his throat. Mom is looking at him with those dark grey eyes, big and sad. Natsuo had her eyes, while he got Enji’s. Sharp and blue. After he tried to hurt Shoto, sometimes she would look at him and there would be something in her eyes he couldn’t quite identify, something like a flinch. She avoided looking him in the eyes and he hated that too, hated her and hated himself and you had a hand in all of this too and the look on her face hadn’t brought the mean satisfaction he thought it would but it felt good to say anyways, running away from the house with the taste of sour bile on his tongue. She looks him full in the eyes now, face soft.
I said some awful things. I need to apologize to Mom.
“I’m sorry.” He croaks.
Barely a second later he finds his senses awash with the smell of his mother’s flowery perfume, face pressed into her shoulder as she holds him tightly to her, as if she were afraid he would disappear. Dabi blinks, once, twice—he wasn’t sure what he was expecting when he said that. He only wanted them to know that he was. Only wanted her to know—he was trying to hurt her when he said that but he was sorry, he was angry and she was there, trying to stop him from going out and that was the day he finally burned so hot he almost died and that would have been the very last thing he ever said to her. I’m sorry, he wants to say, I was acting like him.
“It’s okay,” Mom says, pulling away from him, “it’s—”
“Whoa! Bro, what’s up with your eyes!?”
Fuyumi is already up and out of her seat, disappearing into the kitchen. Shoto’s offered up his napkin and Mom takes it, and Dabi quickly realizes his face is wet—
He wipes at his eyes before Mom can, the back of his hand coming away frothy pink.
“Here…” Fuyumi is back, a bit blurry. Everything is a bit blurry, now that he’s really looking around—probably from the tears, ugh—Mom wipes at his face with a warm washcloth.
He used to enjoy ruining things. Now it’s making his chest hurt.
Blink.
Blink.
There’s a host of birds chirping away in one of the few trees that dotted the courtyard.
Dabi has no idea how he got out here. The fog had come and it was as if he were watching himself go through the motions. Everyone calmed down and ate breakfast. It felt like the hospital stay, turning his face away and listening to his father’s soft sobs. Floating, guiding his body through the motions. Sometimes things became sharp, color and touch turned up all the way to maximum; and then they would abruptly slip away just as fast.
He remembers playing in this courtyard. He remembers staff watching them, their nanny telling them to be careful, sometimes Mom would come out to see them for a few minutes but would disappear just as quickly, I know, I’m sorry—Shoto needs me.
Blink.
He doesn’t know why he’s here—some lesson to be learned, some time in rehab to serve. What are they going to do with him after this, he wonders—stick him back where they think he belongs? He didn’t think about what his life would be like afterwards, because he wasn’t planning on getting to this part.
“Hey.” It’s Shoto. “Mind if I sit?”
Dabi doesn’t answer. Shoto sits.
A scant few years ago he wanted this kid dead.
A few years ago he was trying to kill this kid. He looked at him and saw everything he wasn’t—everything he fell short of. But Enji wanted him to be perfect, and Touya saw his chance instead of seeing the real root of the problem.
“Are you alright—”
“Has anyone ever apologized to you?”
He sees Shoto’s head, chimera white-and-red, snap towards him through his periphery.
“What?”
“Would you believe me if I said it?”
He has no reason to. Enji apologized and Dabi didn’t believe him either.
Shoto doesn’t answer.
Dabi taps his foot against the ground, something like apprehension building in his stomach.
Because he is sorry. He just doesn’t know how he’s supposed to make this up to Shoto. He tried to kill him and his friends—and his hands aren’t exactly clean either. There was a point when he got fed up with all of Shigaraki’s recruits and torched them. Annoyed and angry. And then there was the business with him trying to kill Shoto in front of their father—he just wanted to hurt him so bad and the opportunity was right there and, and—
It’s always Enji.
He still wants to hurt his father. Maybe Hawks too. For Twice, since Toga wasn’t able to get him. Heard the smug bastard was the reason he was here, had gone and snagged himself the position of president of the HPSC.
“I didn’t forgive him immediately, you know. Dad—I mean.”
“No?”
“No.”
It’s fine if Shoto doesn’t forgive him—he can live with that. He’s not Enji. Dabi just wants Shoto to believe him when he says it.
“Well, you don’t have to forgive me either,” Dabi tells him, dropping his gaze to his lap where his hands were, picking at his palm, one metal and one flesh. Then he looked to Shoto, sitting next to him. “I just want you to know I’m sorry. For—for everything.”
I’m here because if I ignored you, I wouldn’t be a hero. We will mingle.
His eyes start to sting. He looks away. Everything begins to blur again.
He can feel his little brother’s eyes. “Thank you, Touya.”
Touya smiles.