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“That’s an expression I haven’t seen in quite some years.”
Those were the words that greeted Shouto the second he stepped into his mother’s hospital room.
The sterility of these rooms always unsettled him a bit, stepping into what seemed like a space disconnected from time and space all together. In these plain, purely white walls barren of any real personality, it was almost like he’d stepped into another world all together, one where nothing happened, where no one actually existed.
It was an uncomfortably familiar feeling, to forgo reality like that.
“Hi, mom,” Shouto said quietly as he slid the door shut behind him quietly and walked over to his mother.
“Shouto,” Rei greeted softly, reaching a hand out towards him. Shouto was proud of himself for not flinching when she placed a hand on his cheek softly. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too,” Shouto responded, earnest and truthful, as he leaned into her touch. He let his eyes flutter shut, taking deep breaths and allowing himself to just feel her presence. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to visit as much.”
“That’s alright, I know they have you in those dorms now.”
“I still wish I could come more.”
“As do I. But it’s for your safety, so I don’t mind too much.”
“Hn.”
Shouto slowly opened his eyes as the hand pulled away from his cheek, and he looked down to see his mother shifting on her hospital bed. She patted the now-free space beside her, silently urging him to sit down. He did so compliantly, but he found himself surprised when she coaxed him into turning around, so that his back was facing her.
“Mom?”
In lieu of a verbal response, Shouto felt Rei’s thin, lithe fingers press against his scalp lightly.
“Okay?” she asked quietly, and Shouto found himself nodding embarrassingly fast.
Playing with his hair had been one of his mother’s go-to ways of calming him down when he was a child, but it had been a painfully long time since she’d done it. Even after the Sports Festival, after Shouto started visiting her regularly, they always kept a particular distance apart. It was both out of courtesy, and out of fear.
Those precautions were gone now, though, and Shouto wondered if he really looked so bad for Rei to initiate contact like this.
He couldn’t bring himself to care much, though, as he quickly found himself melting into the familiar touch. His mother was gentle but firm, running her hands along his scalp with strong presses, letting her nails scrape across his skin and her fingertips twirl locks of his hair playfully. Even if Shouto was no longer young, no longer tiny and curled up in his mother’s lap as she combed her hands through his hair, her actions were still unimaginably comforting.
They stayed like that for a while, silent as Rei played around with his hair, until Shouto finally allowed himself to speak.
“He came to the school,” he said lowly, grimacing as the hands stilled in his hair for a second before moving again. “Not, not for me. As a pro. For a guest lesson, or whatever.”
“I see.”
Rei’s voice was quiet, tone flat and unreadable, and Shouto wanted nothing but to turn around and see the look on her face. He didn’t dare do so, though, not wanting to give up the comfort of her hands on his head just yet.
“My…my homeroom teacher, the one who supervised the guest lesson. He wants to talk with me now,” Shouto finally said. “I, I think he suspects something.”
Rei hummed and scratched his head slightly with her nails, but that was the only signs she gave of acknowledging his words.
“I don’t think I want to talk with him, though.”
“Shouto,” Rei said softly, her voice almost chiding.
“I don’t want him to know,” he continued hurriedly. “I… I never wanted any of them to.”
Not like this.
“You told one boy though, didn’t you? That friend of yours, Midoriya.”
Midoriya, with his sunshine-like smiles and words sweet as serenades. Shouto had been angry and impulsive when he first divulged his past to Midoriya. He’d been tender and hopeful when he continued to give him more detail after that.
Now, he knew how much of a mistake it had been both times.
“I shouldn’t have,” he whispered. One of Rei’s fingers drew circles into his hair lightly, and Shouto fixated on the pattern to ease his rising nerves. “None of them should… none of them need to know—”
“Need is a strange thing, sweetheart,” Rei chirped.
Shouto shut his eyes and felt as her hands dragged downwards slowly, settling around his neck to start rubbing harder circles into the skin there. He groaned softly as she worked out knots he hadn’t realized was building up in his muscles.
“There’s a lot of things people don’t need,” Rei continued softly, “and a lot of things people think they don’t need.”
“So which one is it this time?” Shouto grumbled, and Rei just laughed in response, the sound tinkling and gentle on his ears.
“That’s not really for me to decide, I suppose,” she admitted, “but it does beg the question: do they not need to know, or do you not want them to?”
“…Both, I guess,” he admitted, pausing to let out a shaky exhale as she massaged out a particularly bad lump in his neck. “It’s just…they wanna be heroes, mom. We all do. And he’s…he’s the top. If they knew, if they found out, it wouldn’t—they wouldn’t—”
“And how do you know that?”
Shouto clamped his mouth shut, not wanting to respond. It wasn’t like he had much of a response anyway, besides the fact that he just knew. He knew what would happen if he told his classmates the truth, knew how it would rock the very foundations of heroism for them. It would call into question everything they thought they knew about heroes and plant seeds of distrust in the whole system that they wanted so badly to be a part of.
They didn’t think of heroes the same way he did. They didn’t have a safety net for their boundless optimism if their world came crashing down on them. They relied on unwavering faith in the morality of their heroes, and Shouto couldn’t ruin that for them.
He’d already ruined enough.
“I won’t tell you what to do, Shouto,” Rei said finally when he never replied. “Who you choose to tell is ultimately up to you. I’ll never hold it to you, nor would Fuyumi or Natsuo or… Touya.”
“Mom—”
“Just think about it,” she cut him off. “It felt good, didn’t it, when you told that Midoriya boy?”
It had, if only for a second. Unloading even parts of his baggage onto Midoriya in the middle of the night always felt like the sweetest relief possible, but it never lasted. The second they were apart, Midoriya stepping out of Shouto’s room after a night of talking with him and comforting him, shame would rear its ugly head. Guilt would wash over him, as he berated himself both for telling Midoriya too much, and for not telling him enough.
“He doesn’t know everything,” he said instead. “I didn’t…I wasn’t going to—”
“It doesn’t have to come all at once, Shouto. Don’t forget that.”
He didn’t say anything in response, and Rei just hummed some song to herself as she worked her way down the column of his neck with her hands before moving sideways. Shouto let himself get lost in the massage, soothing as she dug her thumbs deeply into the crook of his neck, as she squeezed around his upper back, as she scratched his tingling skin. He could’ve probably fallen asleep sitting up just like that, with how much her touches were relaxing him.
He swore he was about to, when a sudden sharp pain in his shoulder had him crying out as his eyes snapped open.
Instinctively, he lurched forward and away from her hands, immediately reaching up to cup at his right shoulder. He spun around and faced her with wide eyes, feeling almost frenzied as his heart pounded chaotically in his ears. His reflexive shock almost immediately melted into regret, though, when he saw the stunned look on his mother’s face.
“Sorry,” he muttered, trying not to wince as the astonishment on Rei’s face morphed into fierce worry.
“What happened?” she asked sharply, scooching closer towards him without even a second of hesitation.
“It’s nothing,” he said quickly. “I just—”
“Shouto.” Rei’s voice was chastising as it was frightened, and it had any protest he might have had die in his throat. “Please, don’t lie to me.”
“It’s not that big a deal,” he murmured, averting his gaze. “It’s just training.”
The statement was innocuous enough, and anyone else might have just accepted the explanation without complaint.
Training meant something very different in their household, though.
“T…training?” Rei stammered, her voice quivering even with how quiet it was.
Shouto made the mistake of glancing over, and he grimaced as he saw her expression. Her eyes were wide and shaking in horror, while her bottom lip wobbled and her jaw hung slack open. Shouto knew it wasn’t his fault she was looking at him that way, but that didn’t stop guilt from wracking up in his system almost immediately.
“Mom, I just—”
“You were supposed to be safe,” she whispered. “In, in that school. You live in the dorms now, you shouldn’t be—”
“Like I said,” Shouto interrupted, only a little surprised to find that he couldn’t speak louder than a whisper either. “He came to the school.”
“B…but, if they, if they saw, then they should’ve been able to stop it, or, or at least, to hold him accountable—”
“He has people for that.” Dry as the desert, his voice was. “You know that.”
“…who was it, this time?”
“The redhead. The one with the recording quirk and the shrilly voice. She even came to the dorms.”
“They, they allowed someone like her, to come, and, and—”
“They didn’t have any reason to say no.”
“B-but—”
“‘Sides,” Shouto cut her off, waiting a beat before continuing, “he’s Number One now. What’re they gonna do?”
There was silent for a moment, then two, then three, and Shouto’s insides twisted uncomfortably with each second that passed by. The hysteric look never once left his mother’s face, and she was still petrified as a myriad of emotions flashed through her face. He almost wondered whether this news would cause another episode for her, and he readied himself to call in her nurses, when suddenly, she was moving.
It was his turn to be frozen still, as Rei scooted towards him and cupped his cheeks delicately between both her palms. She was running colder than normal, and the panic on her face was quickly giving way to something akin to remorse. Somehow, Shouto hated that look on her even more, but he didn’t voice his thoughts as she lowered her hands and started tugging at his jacket.
“Show me,” she demanded, though her tone was soft and imploring.
Shouto obeyed without a word. There were times to be stubborn, but now was not one of them. He shrugged off his jacket and let it fall behind him in a soft heap, before reaching down to the bottom hem of his t-shirt. He halted there for a just a second, a flash of hesitation shooting through his spine.
He glanced up, only to see his mother nodding at him encouragingly, and that was all he needed to tug the garment up and over his head.
The bandages were next, though they didn’t take all too long to remove. They were old gauzes, ones that Recovery Girl had told him the previous night to replace first thing in the morning. He never did though, so the adhesives on them came apart gradually, then all at once. The bandages unraveled around him in a spiral of white, and Shouto gulped when he heard Rei gasp sharply.
“Shouto, this, this is…”
“Don’t. P-please.”
There was too much to be said, none of which Shouto wanted to say himself. His mother understood that best of all, and he tried to ignore the wetness welling in his eyes as she just gave him a sad smile and nodded.
“Let me.”
Shouto choked out a sob when her cold hands landed on the Hellfire wound. He all but collapsed into her, letting his head fall onto her shoulder and rest there heavily as she worked. Her touch was chilling along his blistering shoulder, unlike anything he could imagine.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true, he supposed. He could very well imagine it, if he tried hard enough. Hell, he could have very easily done this himself. He had the quirk and the control necessary to ice himself, and he certainly had enough experience in self-treatment to make his way around the injury safely and dexterously.
Yet there was something incomparably soothing about the way Rei did it, and he supposed it just boiled down to a mother’s touch. What else could it be, especially when he had spent nearly a decade longing for just contact like this? Nothing else explained why he simply melted into her arms, body wracked with poorly-contained sobs as she did the only thing she could possibly think of to heal him.
To heal them.
There, held in his mother’s icy arms, Shouto allowed his first tears to fall.
-
It was late, far more than usual, when he finally got back to the dorms.
Shouto wasn’t all that surprised at the sight that greeted him when he entered the common room: most of his classmates hanging about, gaming or watching TV or just chatting happily amongst themselves. It was fairly late on a Sunday night, but while they all knew they should be in bed, the temptation to stay up and hang out was always so much stronger than any desire for sleep they might have.
Shouto never understood it—if he had a choice, he’d sleep for an eternity and a half, and never socialize once in his life. His classmates, though, they fed off of each other’s social energies in the strangest ways imaginable. Shouto’s heart panged as he thought of all the times they tried to include him, to share their friendship and companionship since the very beginning.
As though he deserved it.
Keeping his head low, Shouto nearly bolted to the elevator. He could hear a small hush fall over the room as he entered, but it left as quickly as it came. All the hitches in their conversation were glossed over, smoothened out to the point where, had Shouto not been so observant, he probably wouldn’t have noticed a thing.
But he did. He could feel their stares piercing into his back. He could hear the stutters in their conversations as half their minds focused on him instead. He could practically feel that they were longing to talk to him, to hear about where he’d been and what he’d been doing and what the hell was going on with him.
They didn’t need to know.
The suffocating weight on his chest only partially cleared when the elevator doors closed behind him. It was still there somewhat as he rode up to the fifth floor, as he made his way over to his room, as he creaked open his door. It was there even as he tossed his keys to the side and shut the door behind him, and it only released a tiny bit more when he saw familiar tuft of green in his already-lit room.
“Todoroki-kun.”
The strangling sensation around his heart was still there, but Midoriya somehow made it all feel bearable.
“Midoriya.”
Shouto was a little surprised to see him in his room like this, but he supposed he shouldn’t be. It wasn’t the first time they camped out in each other’s rooms, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Still, it was the first time Midoriya had done so since…
“I’m back,” Shouto said quietly as he shuffled into the room a little more.
He stopped, though, when he saw Midoriya making small but steady strides towards him. Almost out of habit, Shouto let his eyes flutter shut and waited. He waited for short but firm arms to wrap around his waist loosely, for chaotically messy hair to tickle at his neck, for warmth to fill his system.
Midoriya loved hugging, and it was almost a given that he greeted people with hugs now. Shouto hadn’t been all too thrilled about it at first, but he’d come to accept it eventually and, after a while, he even started to enjoy it. He never hugged too tight and squeezed too hard. His embraces were gentle, yet grounding, and they somehow always felt like they were holding Shouto in the reality his brain tried to escape.
Now, though, seconds passed, and Shouto didn’t feel anything.
He didn’t feel the tickling hair, the strong arms, the gentle passion. He felt nothing but the chill of the surrounding air, and after ten seconds had passed, he forced himself to creak one eye open.
Both eyes snapped open wide, though, when he saw that Midoriya was, indeed, in front of him. Stood barely inches away, he was staring down him down with a fervor Shouto rarely saw outside of training or actual villain fights. It was a calm, analytical, but ardent look that had Shouto’s insides squirming.
“Midoriya?” he asked quietly, hoping his expression seemed neutral enough.
“I’m sorry.”
The words were quiet, soft-spoken, but it still felt like they punched the very air out of Shouto’s lungs.
“W-what?”
“I’m sorry,” Midoriya said again, and it gave Shouto the same stabbing ache in his chest as before. “I, oh god, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—I was so stupid, I sh-should’ve done something, I, I let you down—”
“Midoriya!” Shouto shouted, loud enough to stop Midoriya before he could dive into his usual ramblings, “Wha…what are you talking about?”
Midoriya actually reeled back, as though he was shocked, and the expression had Shouto’s gut curling painfully. When he finally did speak up again, Midoriya’s voice was quiet, as heated as it was regretful.
“I knew,” he said, cryptic in away Shouto wasn’t used to. “You, you told me, about Endeavor. I knew, and I felt, I felt uncomfortable when they said he was coming, but I, I didn’t think to say anything! I could’ve—we could’ve avoided all of this, if I just said something—”
“No.”
Shouto wasn’t all too sure how he managed to get the one-worded denial out past the world-sized lump in his throat. His fingertips were shaking, biting chill starting to dance up his right arm unbeknownst to Midoriya’s caring, ignorant eyes.
“No,” Shouto repeated, firmer than before but still shaky as he wobbled backwards, away from Midoriya. The urge to run away, to flee, to escape, itched under his skin, but where could he go?
“Todoroki-kun—”
“You can’t,” he snapped, with all the rage of a frail, cornered kitten. “You can’t tell anyone.”
Midoriya’s shoulders dropped at that, a sort of silent resignation and understanding that ran jolts of panic down Shouto’s spine. They stared off at each other for a good minute in complete silence, neither willing or able to break the delicate ice they were balanced upon. Shouto resisted the urge to run into the bathroom and scrub his skin raw, until he couldn’t feel the sting of those kind green eyes singing into his soul.
But then Midoriya was raising his hands, palms open and facing Shouto as though to appear nonthreatening. As though to stop him from running.
“Back then,” he said slowly, cautious as he tested the water, “when you first started telling me about… about him. If I’d said something, someone could’ve helped. Like Aizawa sensei, or—”
“Absolutely not.”
“The school could’ve done something!”
“They can’t do shit!” Shouto growled.
He was rushing forward before he knew it, stomping towards Midoriya and snatching up his wrist in the blink of an eye. Something bubbled beneath the surface of his skin, and Shouto wished he could fool himself and say it was just anger. He so wanted to pretend an call it rage, instead of what he truly felt.
Pain. Fear. Shame.
“Listen to me,” he snarled, his voice magma and his breathing a hurricane. “They can’t—they don’t know anything. They think they do but all any of them do is get in the way.”
“They’ll help—”
“No they won’t!”
Quivering quakes ran down Shouto’s spine, but he didn’t pay attention to that. Couldn’t, when a fog of fury and failure fell upon his mind like a phantom, haunting him with the ghost of what was, what could be.
But Shouto stopped being frightened of the ghosts long ago. What was the point, when the living was scary enough?
“Todoroki-kun, wait—”
“All they do is pretend to know what you’re feeling, pretend they understand what you feel—”
“Stop—”
“And what you need—”
“Listen to me—”
“And how to fix you but it doesn’t mean shit—”
“Todoroki-kun!”
It wasn’t the shout that snapped Shouto out of his rage, but what came after instead. He startled back when Midoriya yanked his arm back roughly. There was none of that brutal, bone-crushing strength Shouto knew he had—he’d only used just enough strength to break Shouto’s iron grip on his wrist, but not nearly enough to even risk hurting Shouto at all. Even so, the break was alarming quick and merciless, and Shouto couldn’t help but stumble backwards a couple steps in response.
The murkiness in his mind was fading again, but Shouto had always known that that wasn’t the problem. The haze would always be there, a companion in the worst of times. But now, as his eyes narrowed in to where his fingers had been wrapped around Midoriya’s wrist, a slender prison of his own making, the realization dawned upon him harsher than the worst punch.
The fog was never the worst part, he knew—it was always what came after.
“Midoriya, you…”
To give him credit, Midoriya always was remarkably fast. If Shouto had even an ounce of his own sense back, he’d marvel a little at how quick Midoriya was to hide his hand behind his back. The move would be casual and natural if not for the urgency with which he moved it, if not for the searing burn marks in the unmistakable shape of handprints he was hiding.
Shouto hadn’t even felt his left side heat up.
“Todoroki-kun,” Midoriya said softly, kindly.
Too kindly, like Shouto wasn’t the horrible nuisance, the disgusting brute he was—a demon branding his anger into those who were too good for him.
Monster.
The thought was but a whisper in the back of his mind, but it stuck like glue to Shouto’s conscience. Plastered across the walls of his brain, engrained into his retinas as though projected by his very heart. For what else could he be, to do such a thing?
His father’s son, indeed.
You stupid boy.
“Todoroki-kun,” Midoriya said again, firmer this time, as though he could sense in his gut the spiraling in Shouto’s mind. “Let the teachers help. Talk to them, or if you want I can—”
“Don’t you dare,” Shouto cut off, not angry and spiteful like before and more flat, hollow. Still, he was just as demanding as before, he though he had any right to be after burning his friend—
“Todoroki-kun—”
“Please.”
It was a broken thing, split halfway through as his voice cracked in the middle of the word. A single, stumbling plea that he knew he had no entitlement to, that he had the sheer nerve to present when he didn’t deserve to even be standing in this very room as Midoriya right now.
Stupid. Pathetic. Weak.
“Todo… Shouto-kun.”
Useless.
“Please don’t. For my sake.”
It was grossly manipulative. Midoriya—sweet, kind Midoriya who could do no wrong—would obviously melt at such a desperate request, no matter what he himself thought. Shouto knew that, and he used it to his advantage abhorrently. He didn’t even flinch as he saw the fight drain out of Midoriya’s eyes, leaving nothing but exhaustion that Shouto knew he caused and apology that Shouto knew he didn’t deserve.
“It’ll be okay,” he said vacantly, knowing Midoriya would hear it as just his usual flat tone and not blankness from disbelief in his own words.
Guilt gnawed at his bones, but he said nothing as Midoriya stepped in for a hug—one-handed this time, the other still stubbornly hidden behind his back. Shouto closed his eyes returned the embrace in kind, greedy in the show of affection even as he knew it was the last thing he deserved.
In one silent thought, Shouto selfishly wished Midoriya’s arms were colder.
“It’ll be okay.”