Work Text:
Ever since the training camp, Shoto had been thinking deeply about Dabi and the way his bright blue eyes seemed to glint maliciously with an equal amount of recognition, how his low gravelly voice seemed to bring back feelings of comfort and happiness, and especially how his face seemed to be so unfamiliar and yet the most familiar sight in the world all at the same time. He didn’t know why he felt those feelings, as far as he could remember he had never seen the arsonist before in his life.
It had been driving him insane, to the point where he would stay up so late mulling over the topic he would be nodding off in class, only to shake himself awake and try and desperately listen to whatever teacher they were with at the time.
None of his classmates noticed, he was good at hiding it, and even then it didn’t go on very long because he found the answers he was looking for one night on a visit home to see his siblings. When he arrived home, he was greeted with the sight of his older siblings going through old photos, he joined in. The photo they were looking at when he sat down was the one that solved his ongoing problem.
It wasn’t a special photo by any means, in fact it was one that they had all seen a million times before because they had so many copies of it. The night the photo was taken, their oldest sibling Touya, had decided that trusting a 5 year old Shoto with a camera to take a picture of his older siblings was a spectacular idea. The overall photo was blurry, but he made up for quality in quantity by having clicked the shutter button over 10 times. They had just looked at the photo while going through old things, laughed a little, and were about to set it down when Shoto grabbed it and took a good look at Touya, just on a hunch.
Despite the blurry quality, the blue of Touya’s eyes seemed just as bright and as intense as the azure flames dancing across his hand as he held them out to Natsuo’s image self in a teasing manner. In his head, his thoughts raced a mile a minute, trying to find any sort of reason that Dabi and Touya were indeed a separate entity.
If Touya had somehow survived the fire, with his weak resistance to flames, he definitely wouldn’t have escaped fire that hot without a very obvious mark or marks on his body. The mentality to become a villain that followed the ideals of Stain was all there, with a sorry excuse for a pro-hero as a father it would make sense if he harbored resentment for heroes and much of hero society in general.
So then and there Shoto made it his quest to track down his older sibling without telling anyone, because he really didn’t want an outside input on how to handle this situation, they’d probably say that he should report it to the authorities or something like that. And no way he was about to give this shit to the authorities.
So then, he developed an ingenious plan, if Dabi really was his older brother (he was 99.9% sure of it at this point) he would naturally have older brother instincts specially fitted to children that grew up in an abusive household. And if something was to happen to Shoto, say, waltzing into the LoV hideout and almost getting killed, then naturally he would need to protect Shoto from it and the younger sibling could have a whole rant directed at his older brother.
It was a completely foolproof plan. Totally and completely.
Since he was in the shadier parts of town, shoto was wearing a hood to cover his scar and hair, just in case anyone looked too closely at him. It surprisingly didn’t take Shoto very long to find the League of Villain’s hideout. Seriously, how had the authorities not already located it?
Without a doubt in his mind, Shoto walked up to the unlocked, (seriously bad security there) door and opened it wide with the intention of broadcasting his presence to the villains. What he didn’t expect was for them to be arguing over a monopoly board and not casting a single glance in his direction.
“ HA! PAY UP BITCH, YOU OWE ME.”
“FUCK YOU DABI, I DON’T OWE YOU SHIT!”
Shigaraki, had unfortunately landed on Boardwalk, which Dabi not just owned, but had a hotel on, and he was in a bit of a financial pickle.
“Uh, excuse me?”, Shoto awkwardly said from his space in the doorway.
The only person that seemed to hear him was Spinner, who looked over and shouted, “PIZZA GUYS HERE!”
“YAY PIZZA. NO, SCREW PIZZA.”
“IS THE PIZZA GUY CUTE? CAN I STAB HIM?”
During the commotion that had drawn the others towards the assumed pizza guy, Dabi and Shigaraki’s argument had escalated and a shout of “GET THE HELL OFF OF ME HANDJOB”, drew their attention to the members not attracted by the promise of pizza.
At some point in the verbal fight the two were having, Dabi had slapped father off of Shigaraki’s face with the words, “What are you, an incest loving necrophiliac that gets off at the feeling of his dead family’s hands all over his body or something?” and Shigaraki got so enraged at that comment that he tackled Dabi to the ground and was trying to press all five of his fingers into the fire user’s face.
Seeing this scene the other members reacted in different ways, Kurogiri, being the mother/babysitter that he was, immediately went over to try and alleviate the situation. Toga and Spinner whipped out their phones to record the fight, Twice was shouting unhelpful comments like, “C’MON GUYS STOP FIGHTING,” and, “ KILL HIM, FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!”
Mr. Compress and Magne opted to sit down at the bar and wait for Kurogiri to break up the fight, Shoto decided to join them and get a look at the new bar. It had an actual bar part in the right corner where he was located, there was a set of stairs directly across from that leading to what Shoto assumed were the bedrooms. Back on the main floor, there was a large table in the middle for game nights, and a TV with several gaming systems connected to it with some partially disintegrated controllers scattered around it.
While the fight continued to go on, Kurogiri not able to make a portal that would cut off someone’s limbs, and his words not registering in the two’s minds, Mr. Compress looked at the pizza man that he had figured was not the pizza man the minute he walked through the door. “Care to tell me what a U.A student is doing in our humble abode?” Magne was the only other person that heard, and looked over at Shoto in shock.
“How’d you know it was me,” questioned Shoto.
“The hood isn’t as good of a disguise as you seem to think it is.”
“I’m looking for my older brother.” It wasn’t a lie, not the whole truth, but technically not a lie.
“And you think he’s here, why exactly?”
Taking the photo of Touya out of his pocket, he slid it towards the magician. Looking intently at the photo, the two slightly more responsible members of the League quickly made the connection. It was well know that Dabi dyed his hair, and with a flame quirk and Todoroki blue eyes ™ it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. The speedy connection instilled a slight feeling of jealousy in the youngest Todoroki, how’d they make the connection quicker than he did? He was his brother for god's sake.
“Kurogiri, it appears one of the League’s many children has been keeping something from us,” Compress said in a slightly raised tone across the room in order to convey the message in an audible way.
With the realization that Shigaraki probably wasn’t going to actually kill Dabi, and the fact that Dabi could take care of himself, Kurogiri decided to go back over to the bar. Looking at Todoroki, his eyes widened and he glanced over at the other two members in that area who just motioned for him to come closer.
“It appears that Dabi happens to be the now #1’s son.”
“Really Sako?”
“Indeed.”
Coughing from his seat at the bar, Todoroki drew their attention to him, “Can you stop them from fighting so I can say a few things to my brother? If you do, I'll leave and not inform the authorities of your location and I might even lead them down the wrong path.”
Knowing a good deal when it’s offered, Kurogiri managed to push Shigaraki off of Dabi, and keep warping him 5 feet away everytime he attempted to lunge at the blue eyed man and resume his attack.
Seeing his chance, Shoto walked up to Dabi and said three things, “You’re a moron, seriously, the heck, why didn’t you tell us you were alive,” Dabi froze in shock at the sight of seeing his younger brother in the LoV hideout thinking about how he shouldn’t be here and omigodhesgonnadie, oblivious to his elder brothers conundrum Shoto kept talking, “We all hate dad, but you really should’ve tried to legally destroy him instead of you know, literally .”
Walking towards the door, the youngest took a piece of paper and dropped it onto the ground and spoke his last sentence, “Also, call mom you asshole, her number’s on the paper.”
The rest of the league just watched as Shoto left and Dabi collapsed on the ground twitching.
In order to explain the situation, Kurogiri spoke up, “Apparently Dabi’s Endeavor’s son.”
“WHAT?!?!”