Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Todoroki mansion was filled with laughter.

It was a tender sound - gentle and bubbly and soft - that flowed through the rooms of the house with the tides of conversation. It bounced around open doors and messy bedrooms. It caught under old school portraits and over several pairs of shoes piled by the entrance. It danced across old, traditional Japanese walls and more modern decorations, drifted out over a garden that had never before been so lovingly maintained, and seemed to cling particularly hard to a picture of a young man with red and white hair holding a trophy inscribed with the words Rookie Hero of the Year. The happy melody seemed to paint the whole house in a pleasant glow, warming the halls and the inhabitants inside more than a roaring fire ever could, and though the sound rolled and changed as the evening progressed, it never truly faded. The lively sound simply ebbed this way and that as different voices were highlighted in turn above the constant chatter.

The most frequent voice to rise above the rabble was that of Natsuo Todoroki, recent medical school graduate and up-and-coming doctor at the local hospital. He was the loudest of them all by far, with a laugh as large and boisterous as he was, and his voice echoed from the open living room as he won yet another round of cards in front of a baffled audience. His fiancee sat just to his right on the couch, small mouse ears just visible where she had dropped her head into her hands and was shaking it from side to side in defeat. Across from them sat Shouto Todoroki and Izuku Midoriya, both frozen comically in expressions of confusion and exasperation as they tried to puzzle out just where they had gone wrong. Shouto’s mouth had pulled into the barest of frowns, hands lying open across his lap, while Midoriya had doubled over, one hand on his chin and his elbow on his knee as he stared intently at the pile of upturned playing cards as though they held all the answers. He hummed quietly and discordantly, breaking through the noise as his eyebrows scrunched in thought, before the quiet sound was again drowned out by Natsuo wheezing and choking on his own breath and laughing in unashamed delight.

The air changed, then, breaking and shifting to make way for a softer sound - a tired sigh from the kitchen just behind the group of troublemakers, tinted with fake exasperation and poorly concealed amusement. Fuyumi Todoroki had to raise her voice quite dramatically to make any headway over her younger brother, and gestured with an open palm as she chided him about “cheating Midoriya.” She scolded Natsuo with a ferocity that only years of teaching at an elementary school could have perfected, but even her yelling couldn’t ruin the mood. Natsuo turned back over the couch, arms digging into the plush back and shit-eating grin firmly in place, and retorted that, “winning all the time doesn’t mean I’m cheating, excuse me - maybe you should come over here and teach Shouto how to play!" Their voices melded together, loud and bright with mellow and sarcastic, and the room shifted again, changing to something more heated and yet more familiar as the siblings got into it. This time, poor Midoriya ended up losing himself in laughter as the taunts grew more and more childish around him.

Fuyumi gasped in mock outrage and went to push Natsuo off the couch with little success as the quietest sound of all slipped into the chaos - it was almost inaudible, diffused and silenced over the area of the room as though it had leaked from the very foundations themselves. Rei Todoroki laughed quietly behind a pale hand, sitting off to the side in a large, light blue sweater and an overstuffed armchair. Her eyes were fixed on the rabble between her middle children, gentle wrinkles pulling to the sides by her temples as she smiled kindly and genuinely, and she was for the most part unobserved, save for a single set of eyes locked tightly on her.

Touya Todoroki was silent.

He stood against the wall in the dead space between the living room and the kitchen, floating on the edges of a scene that he had been invited to and yet felt so distant from. He leant back against the wall with a slouch, shoving his left hand into the pocket of his jeans while the other wrapped loosely around a half-empty and now decidedly lukewarm drink. He kept his eyes focused on his mother as Shouto started to join in on the arguing with his own quiet yet biting remarks, gaze blurring and changing the longer he stared.

She seemed so small in comparison to her surroundings; her modest stature was dwarfed by the armchair she sat in, which itself was dwarfed by the pointlessly high ceilings in the pointlessly large and painfully empty mansion surrounding them. She moved silently, she talked softly, and she laughed like she was afraid of being caught. Dainty to the point of fragility. She was a ghost - complete with the white hair and fair skin - haunting the halls of her own home. She tethered herself to her family and yet constantly relegated herself to the sidelines, and Touya felt like she would blow away and disappear again if he closed his eyes for a moment too long.

Rei smiled and clasped her hands in front of her stomach and glanced to the side, catching Touya out of the corner of her eye. Her smile fell as she caught him staring, the wrinkles around her eyes smoothing out as they softened and she fixed him with a gaze that was all too knowing, and Touya dropped his own eyes to the drink in his hand. He swirled the sad remnants of his matcha around the glass, sending the green liquid splashing gently against the sides. The soft lighting in the room refracted through the cup and glinted off the metal in the hand holding it - even in long sleeves, the edges of his scars were visible, held to his healthy skin with a row of silver staples injected brutally into the back of his hand. It was an inescapable reminder of his suffering that followed him everywhere he looked - on his hands, on his face, in every mirror and street window and muddied reflection. He was a failed experiment twice over. First as the hands of his own genetics, then at the hands of a doctor with too much power and too few morals. Now, he was damaged goods; his body was too messed up and his quirk too volatile to ever have a chance at undoing the damage and looking normal, though oh how the doctors tried. In the end, it was decided that it was safer to leave the grotesque vents and modifications that Ujiko had created, fearing that replacing and rejoining the damaged skin would cause him to burn alive from the inside out.

And so, he remained a monster.

Touya huffed under his breath and took a swig of his drink with a grimace. His mother wasn’t the only ghost here.

Oftentimes, he wondered if the others could hear it - Rei could, he was nearly certain, but the rest of his siblings seemed unaffected. Unaffected by the way their laughter bounced and warped around the poorly painted-over dents in the wall. Unaffected by the way their footsteps grew louder and heavier over the floorboards that still creaked. Unaffected by the way the now long abandoned training room remained cold and silent no matter how kind and inviting the rest of the house was. They never seemed to hear the way their voices shifted and changed as they stepped over the threshold leading to the back of the house, never listened closely enough to hear how old screams and sobs still called out from where they were trapped in reconstructed walls, or how the flames that had torn through and destroyed half of the house that night still flickered in the shadows on the ricepaper. Even the quiet crackle of the flames in the living room fireplace felt too loud, and Touya closed his eyes with a sigh. That sound, which brought a sense of comfort and family and relaxation to so many others, would never stop sounding sinister to him. He could hear all too clearly the sound of the wood charring and flaking away under the oppressive heat of the fire, could smell the acrid and bitter tang of the ash, and could see the way the colors warped from red to orange to yellow even behind his eyelids. The casual destruction resonated with the blaze trapped under his own skin, calling out to its poorly restrained sister within him, and shed light on memories he would rather leave buried under that wave of familiar and inescapable blue.

The scar tissue across his face twinged in sympathetic pain, stinging and suddenly feeling too tight across the staples that held it in place, and Touya forced his eyes open.

Oftentimes it felt like he was going insane. Other people called it growth, he knew - always chattered on about how good it was that their family was finally healing, how wonderful it was to see them finally moving on. But to him, it just felt like forgetting. To see the rest of his family so blissfully happy while he was permanently unable to escape the scars of his past - both physically and mentally - felt like a slap in the face. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he was forced to talk about himself to psychiatrists in stuffy offices, he felt like he was unable to move forward. Family dinners and new trim didn’t fix the rotten foundations that plagued the Todoroki name and legacy, but it felt like he was the only one that could see it.

He swallowed uncomfortably and bit the inside of his cheek until it started to hurt. He knew that he was being unfair - after everything his siblings had suffered at the hands of their father, he could hardly begrudge them their happiness now, but still… It was always worse here; his own self loathing and dark thoughts seemed to reflect perfectly off the walls of the Todoroki mansion, refracting and multiplying until he felt buried by the crushing weight of his own past. 

He pulled the corner of his lip into his mouth absentmindedly, continuing to bite down until the faintest hint of copper hit his tongue. Maybe he just didn’t belong here anymore - if he truly was the only one still hung up on their father, perhaps it was better that he didn’t infringe on the rest of his family’s optimism. Maybe Touya Todoroki really did die that day so many years ago, and whatever was left of him now was just holding his family back.

A cold hand appeared over the lip of his glass, just barely brushing his fingers and startling him from his thoughts with a jolt, and he lifted his eyes to the smiling face of his brother. Natsuo was smirking at him as though he was laughing internally about having snuck up on him so successfully, but his eyes were gentle, and serious, matched by the single unobtrusive point of contact between them. Natsuo tilted his head to the side, looking poignantly at him with a silent and now familiar question and a quiet reassurance. Touya dropped his eyes for a moment with another sigh, before he looked back up and nodded once, lips pulling up into the shadow of a smile. Natsuo returned the expression with a much more genuine smile of his own, and then dropped his hand away from Touya’s before pointing at his half-empty glass.

“You want a drink? Brought some fancy beers just for tonight,” Natsuo asked, and Touya sucked in a low, deep breath as he brought himself back to reality.

He glanced down at his drink as he spoke, and shrugged. “Nah, I’m not trying to get wasted,” he answered dryly, and Natsuo chuckled as he turned and moved past him into the kitchen.

“You sure?” Natsuo called back over his shoulder, smirk visible even on the sliver of his face the Touya could see, and he resisted the urge to sigh again as he let his head fall back against the wall. “That’s not the Touya I know,” Natsuo continued, pulling open the door to the refrigerator and starting to fish around inside, and Touya rolled his eyes.

Some shuffling sounded from behind Touya as people moved around in the living room, before a bright, feminine voice cut above the noise. “Hey, Nat? Can you grab me one, too?” Touya’s eyes darted to the side towards the noise, but he didn’t bother to turn around - Natsuo’s girlfriend, now fiancee, Hana, had been coming around long enough to now fit in seamlessly with the rest of the family.

“Yeah, I got it!” Natuso called back, straightening up from the fridge with two drinks in hand and knocking the refrigerator door shut with his hip. He glanced back towards the living room obliviously with big eyes and a wide smile he was surely unaware of, and Touya’s eyebrows jumped up of their own accord at the sappy expression. Natsuo was horribly, stupidly in love, and was still staring back at his fiancee even though Touya could hear that she had fallen back into conversation with Fuyumi. Touya would make fun of him for it if he were only a fraction less tired.

But then again - he smirked, absentmindedly spinning his own wedding ring along his finger within his pocket - maybe he wasn’t one to talk.

Natsuo reappeared by his side, two beers now cracked open in his hands and staring off towards the living room with that same content expression, and Dabi tilted his head back to follow his gaze. Hana and Fuyumi were leaning comfortably against the back of the couch as they chatted idly - Hana laughing and Fuyumi gesturing as her face twisted into a theatrical sort of frown - while Shouto and Midoriya gathered up the cards strewn across the coffee table and the floor. Rei ended up helping as well, bending down to grab a queen of hearts that had slid its way under her chair, and as she handed the offending card to her youngest son, Touya felt the corner of his mouth twitch up into a smile.

“Hey, would you ever be willing to pierce my ears?” Natsuo’s voice pulled Touya’s attention away from the living room, and his eyebrows pulled down in confusion as he turned to face his brother.

“...What?” Touya retorted after a too long pause, but Natsuo only smiled, and gestured to his ears with the bottle in his right hand.

“You heard me,” Natsuo replied. “Would you pierce my ears? I think it’d look cool,” he finished, smile morphing distinctly into something more devious, and Touya rolled his eyes and scoffed. He pointedly turned his head away from Natsuo, pretending to be suddenly engrossed in whatever Fuyumi was talking about some feet away, only for Natsuo to immediately elbow him in the side in retaliation.

“Come on, can’t I take advantage of the fact that we have a professional piercer in the family now?” Natsuo continued unabashed, and Touya, unamused, glared halfheartedly at him from the corner of his eye. “And you’d get to hurt me, which I’m sure you’d enjoy.”

Touya huffed and hid the beginning of a smile behind another sip of tea. “You’re 25, Natsuo, you can pierce your ears if you want to,” he replied dryly, and recrossed one ankle over the other, the frayed edges of his jeans briefly tangling together as his shoes scuffed across the hardwood.

He felt Natsuo’s posture shift into something even more needling beside him, relying on that uncanny sense that all older siblings seemed to have, and fought down a preemptive sigh. “Awwww,” Natsuo cooed mockingly, jabbing him in the arm with a chilled beer bottle, “but with you, I get a family discount, right?”

“Ugh.” One of Touya’s eyebrows quirked up towards his hairline of its own accord as he turned back to face the irritatingly smug expression across from him. “Who told you that?” he asked, and Natsuo tilted his head to the side towards him with an even cockier smile.

“My favorite brother?” Natsuo replied sweetly, grey doe eyes wide and innocent until Touya planted an open palm in the center of his face and shoved him away, sparking another loud laugh from the center of Natsuo’s chest.

“You can fuck off,” Touya grumbled with a smile, and Natsuo’s laughter grew louder even as he wiped at his face with the back of one of his hands.

“You love me.”

“I could never.”

Natsuo eventually settled down with a muttered ‘yeah, yeah, sure,’ under his breath, and Touya busied himself with taking another sip of his disappointingly warm drink. Their brief outburst seemed to have drawn the attention of the room, and Touya dipped his head when he noticed the sudden weight of everyone’s focus on him, leaning further into the shadows on the wall and slowly blending back into the scenery. Beside him, Hana appeared with a quiet swish of her dress and a smile on her lips, and he watched as she chided Natsuo for getting sidetracked on his way back with their drinks. Natsuo blushed as she reached forward to snag the bottle out of his hand, a subtle pink poking easily through pale white skin, and he reached for her seemingly subconsciously as she danced away back towards the living room where Shouto had begun to argue quietly with Fuyumi.

Touya shook his head as Natsuo rubbed the back of his neck, goofy grin back in full force. At least the idiot had gotten around to proposing.

The front door slammed violently against the hallway wall.

The crack of the heavy collision jolted Touya from his happy musings, sloshing the remainder of his drink over the back of his hand as adrenaline startled through his limbs. The liquid stung as it came into contact with the open scarring, and he cursed at the unexpected burst of pain, heart tripping over itself in his chest while the sound of the front door banging shut reverberated around his ribcage. As he shook the offending droplets from his unsteady hand, he let his eyes dart up towards the shadowed doorway in the center of the room, and forced himself to stare up at that emptiness until he could force his shuddering lungs to inhale normally.

He blinked, crushing his eyes closed for a second longer than normal.

He wasn’t here. He was never coming back.

Touya sighed as his gaze dropped to his now empty drink and macha stained hand, before deciding fuck it and scrubbing the remaining moisture into the dark fabric of his jeans, hoping that for once luck would be on his side and he wouldn’t wake up with an infection tomorrow. The seam burned and itched, discomfort already seeping past the skin and deeper into the muscle where chronically inflamed nerves sprung to life, and he grimaced at the loss of what had been an unusually good pain day. He could feel his mother’s eyes on him, but he refused to look up and meet them. Instead, he turned back towards the kitchen and let his eyes rove slowly and longingly over the countertops. He was beginning to regret turning down Natsuo’s drink offer now, consequences be damned, and he frowned as his hand throbbed and his fingers itched for all the things he shouldn’t have. He shrugged off the wall, but only managed to take a single step towards the kitchen before the hurried patter of tiny shoes on the wooden floor interrupted him, and he turned just in time to see Natsuo throw his hands up in the air and cheer with excessive excitement.

A familiar head of wavy, strawberry blonde hair just visible around Natsuo’s legs rounded the hallway corner in a flash. It slid across the slick floor and careened dangerously towards the far wall before it righted itself, darting out towards the common area, and Touya’s shoulders loosened and slid down from where they had unconsciously pinched around his ears. There was the sound of high pitched giggling, and a ‘hey, high five!’ from his brother, and Touya set his glass down on the table as the raucous drew ever closer. He crouched down and opened his arms, just in time for his little menace to catch sight of him.

“Dad!” His daughter bounded over to him, weaving around Natsuo’s feet and skidding to a stop just in front of him, hair wild and eyes wilder. Her long-sleeved, flowy t-shirt had been blown up to expose a hint of her stomach and the top of her soft pink shorts, and her braids had come undone, but she seemed to notice none of this. “See? I told you, less than five minutes!” She said and bounced on her feet once, smile stretching to fill out red, windburned cheeks and squishing up the black eye markings and golden eyes she had inherited from her other father. “That’s even faster than last time!”

Touya smiled in return and tilted his head to the side, reaching out to mindlessly pull a knot loose from the very ends of her hair. “I’m glad you enjoyed your flight, kiddo,” he said quietly as Takara pushed his hand away with a short-lived pout.

“Next time I bet we’ll do it in under four! Papa says I’ve been getting braver so he can fly faster, and I know he’s been working on his speed too, and oh! Papa -” Takara looked quickly side to side, before leaning in closer to him and whispering in his ear “- Papa let me pick out some strawberry mochi, too,” she mumbled loudly, and then leaned back to grin at him mischievously, hands twisting together at the bottom of her frilly shirt.

Touya raised his eyebrows. “Did he, now?” he muttered, and looked up over her head just as the man in question finally entered the room. Keigo was in the middle of pushing his flight goggles up and into his hair, his feathers floating around him at various heights as they carried a couple of grocery bags, and he smiled as Fuyumi came to intercept him at the threshold. When she reached him, he straightened up with a mock two finger salute and snapped his wings against his back, muttering something along the lines of, ‘mission completed successfully, ma’am,’ with a conviction only undermined by the grin he didn’t bother to smother. Touya could feel Fuyumi roll her eyes at Keigo, and then she smacked him across his bicep with a slap that was clearly more noise than pain, but Keigo clutched his arm and doubled over with a gasp anyway. Unbothered by his antics, his feathers whisked away and set the items Fuyumi had requested softly along the kitchen countertops, Keigo dabbing away fake tears all the while.

Touya finally managed to catch Keigo’s eyes just as an errant feather pried open the freezer door and not-so-subtly crammed a small, light pink box amongst the other desserts already inside. Touya sighed. His husband, however, only grinned, and the small genuine smile he had been wearing upon arriving from his errand morphed in a flash into something more crooked. Keigo slid both hands into the front pockets on his jeans and shrugged, sending a ripple of petulant motion through both his shoulders and the expanse of his wings, and nodded his head down towards the little girl in between them. He tacked on his best puppy eyes for good measure, and Touya glared back in return.

As if that would work.

It did work, of course, but he and Keigo would both pretend that he wasn’t so spineless when it came to spoiling his daughter for both their sakes.

“Hey, hey, Dad,” a high pitched voice interrupted Touya’s silent conversation, and his eyes drifted back towards Takara, who was now fidgeting impatiently with his sleeve. “Can I go play with Uncle Izuku? He promised that we could race when I got home and I wanna show him what I’ve been working on!”

Touya smiled and looked over towards the man in question, currently checking his phone as Shouto peered over his shoulder, and nodded. “Yeah, sure, just be careful, okay?” Touya responded, and though he was sure Takara had not bothered to listen past, ‘yeah’, he wasn’t too concerned. The new Symbol of Peace and his hero prodigy boyfriend (god, Shouto had grown up fast) should be able to keep his daughter from tripping and scraping her knee, else he was going to have some very strong words with whoever had given them their hero licenses.

Touya stood from his crouched position on the floor with a groan and stretched his arms over his head as his daughter darted out into the garden, pursued avidly by Midoriya and much more lazily by Shouto. As he turned to watch her dash across the damp grass and carefully manicured flower beds, he felt a mass of feathers drag gently across the back of his shirt, and he hummed under his breath as Keigo stepped up next him. Keigo leaned his head against his shoulder as their daughter shrieked in delight, and Touya glanced down at him, daring to exchange the happy sight in front of him for the gorgeous sight just beside him. The evening sunlight drifting in through the glass door dappled Keigo’s face in hills and valleys of warmth, catching and illuminating the flecks of gold in his eyes and in his hair in between the shifting shadows of the tree leaves. The ever changing light blurred out the few imperfections there were and erased the hardships of his life, muting the thin white scar across his jawbone, the thicker scar through his eyebrow, and softening his cheeks, until he became the very picture of an angel in Touya’s mind’s eye. Keigo smiled as Izuku hefted Takara into the air and spun her around, and the affection that radiated from his eyes made it feel like the sun itself was bleeding into Touya where Keigo was pressed against him.

And for a moment, the weight of his scars didn’t feel so heavy.

He felt Keigo slide his hand into his, and Keigo squeezed around his knuckles, just below the scar tissue line. “Sorry about the door, by the way,” Keigo murmured quietly, eyes still tracking their daughter as she danced and laughed away from her mock pursuers. “She got excited about your little bet and wanted to make sure we made it back in time.”

“It’s fine,” he answered easily, and tipped his head to the side to rest on top of Keigo’s, where the healthy flesh of his cheeks was tickled by his permanently messy hair. They both knew that wasn’t entirely the truth -  that there are some things that would never truly be fine, but things were better, and that was all that mattered.

A squeal of well-kept athletic shoes shuffling across the hardwood just behind him shook Touya from his worrying and signalled Natsuo’s imminent return, and he felt a resigned kind of smile tug at his lips in spite of himself. He felt Keigo perk up as well, already donning his more lively personality in an instant and with ease, and he wiggled his head free from under Touya’s own to turn and greet Natsuo.

He felt Keigo’s wings fluff up imperceptibly against his back, and then heard Natsuo whistle cheesily. “Damn, Touya, fraternizing with your parole officer? So scandalous,” Natuso called out shamelessly, and Touya’s resigned smile grew decidedly more pained. He let his head fall back for just a moment to glare at the ceiling, and fixed his eyes on a small black spider he saw spying from the corner, offering it a silent prayer to save him from his own brother.

“That joke still sucks, please, get some new material,” Touya scoffed, dragging his eyes from the ceiling and forcing himself to confront the annoyance behind him, letting go of Keigo’s hand as he did so in order to turn and face his brother more fully. He pivoted on his feet just in time to see his husband use said hand to high-five his shitty brother with a resounding slap!, and he made a mental note to refuse to invite Keigo to their next family dinner as a crash of betrayal and a soft undercurrent of happiness washed over him.

Natsuo raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms over his broad chest in a smug show of pride. “See? Keigo loved it,” he teased, and Touya could feel his husband beam from just beside him at the attention, even though they both knew he was only being used to further Natsuo’s own troublemaking.

“That’s because he’s an idiot and his sense of humor sucks,” Touya hissed back with no hesitation, and he would maintain that the immediate retaliatory wallop of red feathers across his face was entirely worth it, even including the several small, fluffy feathers that got stuck to his lips and managed to make it inside his mouth with no shortage of help from Keigo himself, he was sure.

“If Fuyumi were paying attention she would have loved it, too,” Natsuo continued with a grin, and Touya jumped on the bait. Touya pointed with one finger off towards the woman in question, working pleasantly and obliviously in the kitchen, while his other hand worked to clear his mouth of tiny red feathers.

“You’re insane if you think she would have laughed at your stupid, years-old joke,” Touya griped at him, leaning in and straightening from his usual slouch in a vain effort to close their height difference.

“Am not .”

“Oh yes you are.”

“Fuyumi loves me -”

“You keep telling yourself that, maybe one day it’ll come true -”

“It is true! She told me herself I’m her favorite brother!”

“Psch, that’s bullshit, we both know it’s Shouto - “

Their petty squabble was cut off by an exuberant laugh from Keigo’s wide open mouth, eyes scrunched up and wings shaking with delight, and any annoyance that might have been building under Touya’s skin vanished in an instant. Natsuo shoved lightly at Keigo’s shoulder as his laughter continued with no end in sight, and Keigo whacked him back, and Touya smiled at the easy familiarity and childish antics, only for his expression to suddenly pinch at the corners. 

I’m so lucky to be alive right now.

“So, Natsuo, did I miss anything good in the couple of minutes I was out?” Keigo spoke up on the tail end of his laughter and leant back casually against the kitchen table. He rested one taloned hand on the table’s edge and spread both wings ever so slightly as to not drag along the wooden top, and looked up towards Natsuo with an easy expression that Touya slowly felt himself match.

Natsuo shrugged, before his eyes flicked over towards Touya and his face brightened. “I tried to convince Touya to pierce my ears,” he said pointedly, and the tips of Keigo’s wings flicked with excitement.

“Really?” Keigo asked, and turned to face Touya with a stupid grin that made him want to both sigh and laugh. “Are you gonna?”

“No,” Touya said sternly, only to watch Keigo’s shoulders slump in fake and clearly exaggerated disappointment. “No, no, don’t take his side on this,” he continued, trying to dispel the needling arguments he could feel forming behind Keigo’s eyes and speaking more firmly. “He’s not being serious, he’s just being annoying, and if he wants to give himself an infection, he can do that on his own time.”

Natsuo frowned at him with an irritated, ‘hey!’, though he did nothing to disprove Touya’s words. Keigo, on the other hand, seemed to accept his logic immediately and jumped swiftly onto the next topic of conversation, expression shifting back to mischievous happiness as he leaned a shoulder towards Natsuo.

“Did Touya tell you that someone came into his piercing shop asking for an autograph yesterday?” Keigo said conspiratorially, and Natsuo forgot all of his feigned offense in an instant as he turned to Touya with raised eyebrows and a half open mouth.

“What? No, he did not.”

“Mhm, seriously!” Keigo continued, gesturing towards a now exasperated Touya.

“Because it’s stupid - “

“No it’s not, don’t interrupt, Touya,” Natsuo interrupted him, and Touya rolled his eyes with a sigh, gaze drifting back over towards Fuyumi in the kitchen. She was in the midst of cutting up a collection of vegetables she had spread across the counter, a few strands of hair draped down across her face as she appeared to work diligently, but Touya could tell from the unusually sluggish motion of her knife that she was much more interested in their conversation than actually preparing dinner.

“Yeah, two young women came in to get their ears pierced and then asked for Dabi’s autograph when he was done,” Keigo said with a nod of his head towards Touya himself, and began to absentmindedly tap his dulled talons across the table. “He did it, too, though I feel that was more to get them to leave than anything else. I’m just lucky I was already there keeping him company while he worked or I never would have found out!”

Natsuo laughed, smiling from the ends of his unruly hair to the tips of his toes, and then glanced back towards Touya with a smirk as he shoved his hands into his back pockets. “Look at that, man, you’re a real celebrity now.”

Touya exhaled slowly, and allowed his eyes to wander longingly past Natsuo’s smug face to his empty glass still resting on the kitchen table behind him. “I’m not a celebrity, don’t say that shit,” he deadpanned, and wondered not for the first time how Natsuo managed to be so boundlessly and obnoxiously energetic, before chalking it up to middle child syndrome. “This was a one time thing, I can promise you that.”

“Nah, you’re a celebrity, Dabi!” Keigo cheered at him, and sprung forward off the table with a flutter of his wings and a wide sweeping gesture with his arms. “You’re already married to me, remember?” he chuckled smugly, and tilted his head back to smirk up at Touya as he crowded into his space, and pressed a finger against his chest as he continued.

 “Besides! They could make a soap opera out of you -” Keigo dragged his finger up along Touya’s sternum before catching it under his chin, and Touya’s eyes darted away just long enough to catch Natsuo fake gagging behind him  - Mad supervillain falls for the darling hero turned unwilling spy? Rejects evil and turns on his fellow villains, taking down the greatest threat of modern times, the League of Villains, all in the name of love? Risks his own neck in order to expose corruption in the government, and! - ” Keigo dropped his voice and his mouth into a fake gasp, and Dabi brought his hands to rest lightly against his waist “ - behind closed doors in the home of the number one hero? Who wouldn’t want to hear more about that?”

Keigo’s voice faded into a murmur with his last words and a shudder of his feathers, and Touya let his forehead rest against Keigo’s own, appreciating the smile on his husband’s face reserved just for him. “Darling hero, hm?” he mumbled as Keigo brought his own arms up around his shoulders. “Guess I couldn’t save you from your own ego, what a shame.”

Keigo trilled low in his throat in place of a huff, throwing his weight to the side to force Touya to sway back and forth with him, and Touya went with a chuckle and only a token show of reluctance. Around them, he could hear Natsuo and Fuyumi starting to argue about one of her students, could hear Hana’s giggles as she drifted in from the living room, and could feel the calm, reassuring presence of his mother as she watched her children from the sidelines. He knew, too, that if he turned his head slightly to the left, he would be able to see his daughter and his youngest brother racing across the grass, egged on by a green haired hero that he actually believed in. He let his eyes drift closed as Keigo danced to his own silent melody, and pulled the other man more tightly against his chest as he let himself enjoy the peace of the moment for once.

“Regardless,” he whispered quietly to Keigo, “we both know that’s not really what happened.” Keigo hummed, and ran his hands along the tops of Touya’s shoulders.

“Maybe,” he agreed with a tilt of his head, “but they don’t need to know that, do they? Much better for your image that they don’t know the whole truth.” In this instance, they meant not only the two women in the shop that had come to ask after Dabi, but also the heroes, the civilians, and even the rest of his family. What had actually occurred on that day that Dabi had chosen to betray the League to win his own freedom was a closely guarded secret - known only to himself, Keigo, and a group of misfits living under fake names at the outskirts of the city.

Touya felt Keigo still and pull away, and he opened his eyes in time to see Keigo’s relaxed expression - a face he only ever wore around Touya and their daughter - shift back into his favorite teasing mask. “Guess you’ll just have to put up with being famous, hm?”

Touya chuckled, and pinched at Keigo’s sides. “Too late to choose prison instead?”

“Mmm,” Keigo hummed, and glanced away to look outside. “I think our little Taka would miss you too much.”

Touya followed Keigo’s eyes, watching as Shouto created a slide out of ice in a single motion, and Takara clambered onto it without hesitation, shoes slipping along the surface as she squealed.

“Damn,” he whispered, all too fondly.

Chapter Text

Touya felt the air subtly cool and part with the appearance of a gentle, silent presence behind him. He pressed his forehead once more against Keigo’s before he slid his hands from his waist, and turned his gaze back towards the kitchen to meet his mother’s soft grey eyes. His mother’s face was scrunched up into an easy smile that only grew as he moved to face her, and she fixed him with a knowing look that was half teasing, and half pride, before her eyes drifted over to Keigo. 

“I hope Touya hasn’t been giving you any trouble lately,” Rei said gently, and Keigo straightened up immediately, dropping his arms from around Touya’s neck and turning to give her his full attention.

“No, no, of course not, Ms. Todoroki!” he insisted, shaking his head and causing his flight goggles to slip forward and threaten to slide down over his face. “Your son is as perfect as ever. If anything, I’m the troublemaker most days,” he laughed, pressing both hands against his chest, and Rei responded with a much less exuberant but no less happy chuckle of her own.

“Good,” she said brightly, and let her gaze flicker playfully over towards Touya. “He needs someone to keep his life interesting. And-” she looked back to Keigo, and pointed at him with one slim finger half concealed by her loose blue cardigan “ -I know I told you to call me Rei, Keigo.”

Keigo’s wings fluttered softly against his back as his name escaped her lips, and his fingers twisted together where they were still clasped in front of his sternum. “Right, of course, I apologize,” he said more timidly, and the flashy smile that had painted his face started to crack and loosen, shifting from a performance into something much more real as his eyes stayed pinned to the graceful woman in front of him.

“No need to be sorry,” Rei continued easily, before stepping forward and reaching out towards Keigo, lifting a pale hand to grab his yellow tinted glasses and sliding them gently off the back of his head. She wiped them once against her cream colored skirt and then replaced them lightly, centering them once again atop the crown of his head and tucking a few stray blonde hairs around his ears. “I’ll remind you as many times as I need to,” she finished, and patted Keigo twice on his cheek with dainty fingers before she stepped back once again.

Touya watched Keigo subconsciously try to follow her touch, leaning forward onto the tips of his toes without meaning to and having to stretch out his wings behind him to counterbalance and keep from tipping over. Keigo laughed in an attempt to cover up the potential awkwardness, one hand darting up to rub the back of his neck, but his mask didn’t cover his eyes. Touya could still see the hesitant vulnerability in them, the desperate longing and hunger for attention, the desire to be wanted and to be seen, and it made his heart ache, but he knew that Rei would never disappoint him.

It was a second chance for both of them - to be both a mother and a son.

Keigo blinked and his eyes shuttered closed again just like that, and Touya exhaled slowly as he traced over his lover’s face and all the little tells and twitches that only he could read.

The only thing you can control is the present.

His mother brought her hands together and suddenly perked up, and Touya dragged himself from his head. “We should all head out into the garden before the sun sets and keep the kids company,” Rei suggested. “What do you think?”

Hana was the first to speak up, sidling over from where she had been leaning on her elbows against the kitchen counter. “I think that sounds lovely, Rei,” she agreed, and his mother’s smile grew wider. “Will you two be joining us as well, or are you still finishing up the food?” she asked, and her eyes flicked over to Touya’s two siblings still bustling around the kitchen.

Fuyumi looked up at Hana’s words, setting down a knife and brushing off the sleeves of her shirt. “No, no, I think everything’s good to go!” she said cheerily. “Just have to let the main pot simmer for a little longer.” She stepped out from behind the stove and slid around the counter as well, coming to join the growing group and bumping Hana lightly with her elbow. “What about you, Natsuo? I don’t want you messing everything up!”

Touya smirked and he could feel Natsuo roll his eyes even though his back was turned, currently pulling a set of plates out of a cabinet. “I’m not going to screw anything up, excuse you,” Natsuo chided, and turned his head just long enough to glare at Fuyumi. “Touya and I will be right out in a minute.”

Touya paused at Natsuo’s words, and his expression faltered. Natsuo offered no further explanation, and a creeping anxiety started to slip into his bloodstream and pollute his thoughts while the others continued on unbothered. He dragged his thumb along the creases in his pointer finger uneasily. He could hear the patio door open just beside him, and watched Fuyumi and Hana meander out shoulder to shoulder in his periphery, but his eyes didn’t move from the back of his brother’s head until he felt a hand brush lightly against his bicep.

Keigo was standing just beside him, wings pulled back flat and eyes wide with veiled concern and comfort as he read Touya’s face in an instant. “Hey, I’m sure it’s nothing,” he said quietly, and rubbed his thumb along the muscles in Touya’s arm before his lips twitched up into a grin. “In the meantime, I’m gonna go challenge Deku to a race, so don’t take too long or you won’t see me win,” he teased, and Touya offered a small appreciative smile as he felt some of his paranoia lift away.

“Trying to prove you’ve still got it?” He flicked Keigo’s hand with a long finger, and smirked as Keigo wrenched it away with a scowl. “Don’t destroy the flowerbeds or Fuyumi will kill you,” he warned, and Keigo rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue before he turned away and disappeared through the open door. As soon as Keigo crossed the threshold, Touya looked away and focused back on the task at hand - eyes landing on the broad frame of his brother that now stilled where he stood.

Natsuo was silent for a moment more before he sighed, and his shoulders drooped down as he brought a hand up to his face to rub at his eyes. “Sorry, just wanted to talk to you in private for a moment,” he said, and quietly shut the cabinet that hung open in front of him.

Touya sucked in a slow deep breath, and nodded once to himself in an attempt to clear his mind and be the older brother Natsuo seemed to need. “Alright. Drink first then,” he sighed, and grabbed his abandoned glass from the edge of the table before shuffling into the kitchen. He ignored Natsuo for the time being - giving him time to collect himself and prepare whatever he was clearly nervous to talk about - and instead crouched down, flinging open a cabinet and shuffling through the bottles within. He eventually landed on a bottle of mitsuya cider, rolling it along his palm and absentmindedly wondering if he might be able to trick his body into thinking it was alcoholic before swiftly upending it into his cup. Once the glass was brimming, he shoved the bottle roughly back into its place and stood from the ground with a groan. He closed his eyes and took a long drink. When he finally opened them again, the tension in the room had twisted and thickened into an almost physical weight in his stomach, and he steeled his expression into something passive and neutral as he turned to face his brother.

Natsuo was leaning against the counter on the other side of the kitchen, and looking down at his feet.

“Hana’s pregnant.”

Touya could barely hear him, but the words were enough to put a dent in his calm mask nonetheless. “Oh, shit…”

Natsuo huffed through his nose - half laugh, and half scoff - and folded his arms in front of him, twisting his fingers into the fabric and hunching his shoulders forward as though he was trying to curl in on himself. “Pretty fucking funny that that’s your first reaction, huh?” he said bitterly, and Touya paled.

“Oh, fuck, I’m so sorry -”

“No, no, it was the right reaction,” Natsuo cut him off, and started to dig his fingers into his arms through the fabric. “That’s why it’s so fucked up. I… -” He paused, and then sighed, and closed his mouth with a twist of his lips before finally looking up and staring off to the side towards the rest of the house.

“I… I didn’t think I ever wanted kids… you know?” Natsuo said slowly, and Touya listened patiently, both hands wrapped around his glass. “Not because I didn’t like them, or because I didn’t have the time, or whatever, it just - it didn’t seem fair to them. I mean, not only do I not know how to be a parent, I don’t even know what a normal fucking childhood is supposed to be like.” Natsuo hissed through pursed lips before he paused, painstakingly relaxing his expression, and went back to staring at some point on the floor between him and Touya. “But Hana wanted kids. And we weren’t, like, actively trying, but we weren’t trying to prevent it either, so it wasn’t really a shock, but when she told me, I -”

Touya’s heart stilled in his chest and his grip tightened around his glass as he watched his brother, who finally looked up and met his gaze with watery eyes.

“ - I was so fucking happy, man,” Natsuo mumbled. “I cried and everything, I’m so excited. I didn’t even know that I could be this happy. But that just -” Natsuo’s expression crumpled, and his gaze fell again to the floor “ - but that just makes me feel guilty. And selfish. Like I don’t - like I don’t deserve to be actually happy for once in my fucking life,” Natsuo spat bitterly, laughing around the tail end of his words as though that would somehow lessen the ugly truth, and Touya’s scars ached with sympathy.

“But I - I know that it’s not completely unfounded,” Natsuo continued, one hand gesturing to no one before it slid up over his face and into his hair, curling into a fist at the back of his head. “I know that there are risks, I mean, I’ve read so much about the cycle of abuse, and I know that - that no matter how much better I think I am there’s always going to be some chance that I end up -” Natsuo’s voice cracked, and he swallowed “ - that I end up like him. ”

“And I don’t know what to do,” Natsuo pushed on, voice rising in distress, “things just keep happening -  Hana’s going to tell her family this week, and she and her friends are already picking out stuff for a baby’s room, and she wants to talk about names already - but I feel like - like I still can’t even come to terms with the fact that we’re having a kid at all, and I feel like I’m already fucking up as a parent because I can’t be there for her like I need to be right now, and I - I feel like I’m going crazy.”

Natsuo’s hands fell, both coming to rest at his sides as his fingers smoothed restlessly over the sides of his pants, and he exhaled shakily, shoulders gradually falling as he forced the tension and the anger away. His hands tightened once, and then released, and he tipped his head up to look past Touya and out towards the garden, expression smoothed and yet equally shadowed by the remnants of the evening light filtering in. He sighed again, and wet his lips before he spoke softly. “I don’t know, I know I’m rambling, I just -” he tilted his head to the side as his eyebrows furrowed, shrugging with only the barest of motions “- I had to tell someone and I thought that… maybe you’d get it. But I don’t know, maybe I’m just overthinking things.”

Touya nodded once as he slowly breathed in, and started to spin his glass back and forth in his hands, eyes tilted down to watch as the cider moved and splashed ever so slightly against the sides. “You’re not overthinking it,” Touya said quietly, and watched as Natsuo’s head turned in his periphery to look back at him. Touya took another breath as the gears turned, and tried to order his thoughts in a way that would be helpful to Natsuo instead of disheartening. “After … everything that happened to us … it’s normal that - that you would worry so much, especially about big family shit,” he continued unsteadily, and wondered idly if his therapist would be proud of him for trying to actually deal with this instead of pushing it away.

“And you’re not crazy, Natsu, fuck, look who you’re talking to,” Touya huffed under his breath, and saw Natsuo’s lips quirk up ever so slightly. “Feeling like that - I mean, hell, maybe it’s not normal for normal people, but for us, you’re doing just fine, you don’t have to freak out about it…” he trailed off, pausing and digging his teeth into the uneven scar tissue on his bottom lip, hesitating around words he hated to say but Natsuo needed to hear.

“You know, I didn’t want kids either,” Touya continued, staring down into his glass as he raised one shoulder in a lazy shrug. “Neither did Keigo, actually. Both of our parents were shit, and he was still working full time as a hero back then, so…uh -” he swallowed uncomfortably, and saw Natsuo shift against the opposite counter to offer his full attention “ - I was… really scared, when we first had her. I didn’t realize it at the time - too caught up in all my other fucking issues back then - but I was terrified. I loved both of them so much, but I thought that fucking it all up was inevitable, that just being around was enough to ruin their lives, and I - … I sabotaged myself.” He moved his glass to the other hand and wiped his palm across the end of his shirt, fingers trembling almost imperceptibly. “I dunno if it was intentional - if I was trying to prove something to Keigo, or make him regret it, or if I really just couldn’t cope - but I was… I was such a piece of shit to him.” His voice slid to a whisper, and he cleared his throat. “I started disappearing, just leaving in the middle of the night and fucking off for hours or days until the guilt got to be too much, and then I’d show up drunk, or high, or whatever the fuck else. I was afraid to even be in the same room as our kid, so I never did shit to help, and every time Keigo tried to talk to me I snapped at him. I was killing him and I hated myself but I couldn’t stop. Eventually I would have just - …” He paused and sighed through his nose. “Well, shit would have turned out very differently if Keigo hadn’t cornered me and told me to stop fucking around, told me to actually step up and be a father or not bother coming back,” he forced out with a choked laugh, as though that would somehow lighten the meaning of his words.

“You never told me any of that,” Natsuo said softly, and Touya raised his eyes to look at him. Natsuo was staring back with wide eyes and pinched eyebrows, and his gaze flickered pointedly to the non alcoholic drink in Touya’s hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I wish that I could have -”

“Oh, shut up, Natsuo,” Touya mumbled back from behind his glass as he took a drink, clinging to the few seconds of pause that the motion offered him. “You can’t blame yourself for everything. We both know I wasn’t really in a place where I could just come and talk to you back then. Just know that whatever happens, you’re doing better than me.”

Natsuo’s lips twitched into a poor imitation of a smile, expression still painted with blunt strokes of melancholy and regret, but he let the issue go nonetheless. He sighed quietly as he let his body droop. He slid back to prop his elbows against the smooth counter, and stretched one leg out just barely past the other while echoes of Keigo’s laughter and Fuyumi’s disappointed shouts melted through the glass door to their sides.

“Does that feeling ever go away?” Natsuo continued on after a moment. “That fear?”

Something cold bloomed in Touya’s chest, leaking into his veins and spreading through his fingertips, and his expression fell. 

“No. It doesn’t,” he murmured, interrupted by a peal of shrill giggling as Takara shrieked from outside, and his shoulders hunched forward subconsciously. “I still wake up everyday worrying that I’ll screw up and she’ll end up like me… But… -” he sighed, and tipped his head to the side “- it gets easier. It’s not as painful anymore. And it’s a reminder… of just how badly shit can go if you fuck this up. It keeps you going, makes you want to - to give them the childhood that you never got.” Touya ran his thumb over the scarline on his opposite hand, and looked back up at his brother. “And Nat, Hana’s not stupid,” he chuckled. “She wouldn’t agree to marry you if you were a monster. You’re gonna be fine.”

Natsuo smiled faintly at him - genuinely this time - and let his gaze drift over towards the backyard again, no doubt finding the woman in question where she was socializing with the rest of their family.

“I hope the kid takes after her,” he said fondly, and Touya smiled back, pushing away from the counter he was leaning on and idling towards the patio door.

“Yeah? The mouse ears would be cute,” he said half seriously and half sarcastically, and Natsuo laughed from somewhere behind him as he came to join him at the door.

“Ha, you think so? Boy and girl?” Natsuo teased, and knocked into Touya’s side with his elbow.

“Mhm,” Touya mumbled, his own eyes having drifted away to the scene in front of him, watching as his husband twirled feathers in between the other guests and his daughter chased after them, skidding around at top speed and nearly colliding into Shouto.

“I got lucky that she looks so much like Keigo,” Touya said softly, talking more to himself than to his brother, and drumming the tips of his nail along the glass in his hand.

“No one else deserves to be cursed like we are.”

Takara screamed so loudly that Touya felt his ear drums would burst, or the very glass around them would shatter, and his eyes widened as he was ripped cruelly from his thoughts.

His daughter screamed again, a sound so purely driven by panic, and fear, and terror, that Touya’s heart stopped, and he watched, frozen, as she thrashed and fell, landing hard on her back as she tried to flee from the inescapable horror consuming her. Bright blue flames wreathed her hands, dancing and flaring wildly between her fragile fingers until her hands were almost completely obscured beneath the plume of dense, dark heat. The fire cast the entire backyard in a sickly and unnatural glow that seemed to drown out the last peaceful rays of sunlight, and buried Takara’s frightened face in harsh black shadows, warping her childish features into a caricature pulled straight from a nightmare. She flailed again, pushing back on her legs and sinking her heels further into the mud as she stretched her shaking arms out in front of her as though she could still get away, and the flames crept on, slinking from her hands to her wrists, to her forearms, to her elbows, and when she screamed again the first tears burst forth from her eyes and evaporated almost immediately on her skin.

His daughter locked eyes with him from where she lay sobbing, and the glass slipped slowly from between his fingers, seeming for just a moment to hang suspended in the air as his world burned down around him.

By some miracle, Touya made it to her first.

He pulled his daughter into his arms with no regard for his own safety, tucking her burning hands against his chest and hugging her tightly to his own body, supported on knees that he had no memory of falling to, and curled forward over her as though he could somehow shield her from the horror. Takara shook violently, choking on screams and sobs that stuck in her throat as her hands curled into fists against his skin, and Touya pressed her head into the crook of his neck as he squeezed her as tightly as he dared, whether out of some instinctual need to smother the flames, or to comfort her, or to protect her, he didn’t know. His cloudy vision was filled with a blue, putrid light from the still burning fire, leaking from between his trembling limbs and pouring out across the ground around them in a demented halo. The light only grew more agitated as his daughter continued to struggle - still trapped in that all consuming fear, still acting purely on instinct to run, to scream, to flee - any yet Touya could see it less and less as his eyes blurred over, unfocused, and his ears began to ring with the deafening sound of starving flames. His body started to grow cold, pins and needles oozing into his feet and fingertips and brain, and Touya felt himself slip away.

“Something’s wrong with me, Mom! Please, you have to help me!”

He can’t see her face - he can only see the soft, tan sweater that he has thrown himself against and a hint of the padded mats beneath them - but he knows that she is upset.

“Why do you say that, Touya?” his mother breathes quietly as she cards through his hair, and the first tears slip from his eyes.

“Just look at me!” he wails, and tilts his head down to look at where his hands are shaking in his lap. “S-something’s happening to me - my hair is - is dying and my quirk is -” he gasps, and his hands curl into fists, pulling at the bright red burns that have already started to stretch across his wrists “- it’s hurting me, Mom, it hurts so bad, it hurts to use my hands, and I c-can’t sleep, Mom, I -”

He looks back up towards his mother, but her features are blurred, and it feels as though she is very far away. “Did I do something wrong? Is this - is this my fault? Dad said that I was gonna be the best - I was gonna be number one, but now he - he says that -” a sob slips from his lips and interrupts him, and he can taste the salt from his tears as they stream past his mouth “- I promise, Mom, I’m not trying to disappoint him, please, I promise. I still wanna do it - I can still be the best, I just gotta -”

His chest rattles as he tries to suck in the next breath, and he wraps his hands into his mother’s cardigan, sending bolts of pain up his damaged arms. “Someone can help me, right? They c-can make it stop? Please? I’ll do anything, please, Mom, I just want it to s-stop hurting, then I can train again, I promise, I won’t ever complain again, p-please I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry!”

His hair falls into his face, obscuring his already blurry vision with trails of white, and he tugs at it harshly, sparks of blue light falling from his fingertips.

Several hours from now, in the middle of the night, he will take a pair of scissors to his head and cut out all the white he can see, as though he could somehow stop the infection.

“Mom, look at me!”

His mother doesn’t look at him, and his hands start to heat with frustration as they shake, smoke curling off of his mothers clothes and his own hair.

“Mom! Please, help me!”

“Touya … Touya, can you hear me? It’s okay, she’s okay.”

Someone’s voice gradually drifted into his consciousness, warping and distorting around his skull as though his head was underwater, and Touya gritted his teeth as his head throbbed with pain. Sensation came back to his limbs slowly, static fading into the feeling of soft clothes and wavy hair pressed up against his fingertips, and then the sharp feeling of someone tugging at his wrist, pressing down hard around his scar tissue and trying to wrench his arms away from his daughter.

“Don’t -” He barely recognized his own voice, as dry and grating as it was, and tightened his hold around Takara even as the assailant grew more insistent, a shadow in the shape of a man flashing in front of his unseeing eyes. “Please - don’t -” he whispered, vocal chords straining to produce any sound at all as his daughter shifted and whimpered quietly against his collarbone.

“Touya, look at me. Touya.” There were fingers that he could barely feel along the side of his jaw, and they turned his head, forcing his gaze off the ground and knocking his eyes into focus. Natsuo had crouched down beside him, one knee pressed into the grass and one hand raised to Touya’s face, expression disfigured with worry and pockmarked with pools of shadow that made him seem flat and lifeless. Behind his head, the rest of the backyard seemed irrelevant, even as people moved and whispered and pulled at one another with an urgency that Touya could hear but couldn’t recognize, and the buzzing in Touya’s ears threatened to overwhelm his thoughts.

Natsuo opened his mouth to speak and Touya’s eyes followed the miniscule motion. “It’s okay, you can let go, Keigo’s got her,” he said quietly, and raised his other hand to rub across Touya’s forearms, joining the insistent hand that was already there, “she’s okay, it’s over. It’s over.” Touya felt the stiffness in his limbs drain away sluggishly, and then a pressure in his shoulders as his arms were pried open, and a brush of blonde hair against his cheek as Takara was pulled away from him.

His head rolled away from Natsuo’s hand to follow the motion, and the scene around him expanded and sharpened until he could see Keigo a few feet away. His husband was crouched down into a squat and gingerly examining Takara’s arms with one of his hands, rolling them each back and forth and comforting her with a smoothing smile as the shock started to break and Takara started to cry in earnest.

“See? Keigo’s got it, let me look at you,” Natsuo said calmly, and Touya felt a hand on his shoulder as Natsuo turned his body, but he didn’t look away.

Keigo’s wings were wrong - they glinted in the low light at the very base where his smallest feathers were located, hard, sharpened, and unforgiving, and rustled in erratic waves that Keigo seemed unable to stop. They were curled too rigidly to his back to be comfortable, and moved almost robotically as he reached forward to wipe Takara’s cheeks and pull her into a hug with one arm. One arm, because the other was held stiffly to the side and almost behind his back, ending in a fist so tight that his tan knuckles had turned white. His smile was fake. His eyes were terrified.

“He’s not -” Touya’s voice cracked, and he swallowed painfully as he tried to rise from his knees. “I need to -”

“Oh, fuck, Touya…”

Touya’s eyebrows pinched together in confusion at Natsuo’s whispered words, and he dared to look away from his family and turn his head back towards Natsuo, only to find his brother staring not at him, but at his chest. Touya finally looked down.

The center of his shirt had been incinerated, creating a gaping hole and revealing the angry, bright red skin beneath. Burns spiraled out across his torso, starting at the center of his ribcage just over his sternum and bleeding out in every direction, reaching the very edges of the scarring over his collarbone and below his chest and warping the staples there. Blisters had already formed and popped in the center where the skin was the most damaged, leaking and dripping down towards his stomach, and Touya raised one trembling hand, fingers hovering over the mottled skin as his lungs contracted unevenly and struggled to draw in air. He couldn’t feel them through the blanket of shock still dampening his brain, but burns were an old friend - he knew that he would be in agony within the hour.

He gingerly touched the very edge of the inflamed skin, and was hit with a sudden wave of dizziness undercut by a familiar cold and apathetic numbness. “... Did she see?”

“No, no -” Natsuo stumbled over his words, and Touya turned slowly back to face him. He looked like he was about to cry. “ - I mean, I don’t think so. I couldn’t tell, um, let me - let me help, please.”

Touya didn’t resist as Natsuo carefully lifted his arm and draped it over his own shoulder, one arm holding it in place while the other wrapped around Touya’s waist to steady him, and together they slowly stood from the ground, one foot at a time. Touya’s knees buckled almost immediately, and he sagged further into Natsuo as they walked forward towards the house, passing by people that Touya didn’t care to notice.

His daughter was still crying.

Dad was upset again today.

He had tried so hard. He had tried so fucking hard to prove that he could do it - that he could still be the hero Dad always wanted - but all he had gotten were concerned glares and frowns and ‘don’t push yourself’ before he had been cast aside again. It doesn’t make any sense - Dad used to be so happy to see him push himself, to go beyond, to try harder, to be fucking “Plus Utlra”. He used to be excited to train with him, to try out new things with his quirk, but now no matter what he does, he gets the same disappointed look.

Like it wasn’t good enough.

Like he isn’t good enough.

The tips of his toes catch on an uneven floorboard as one foot drags against the ground, and Natsuo huffs, readjusting his grip on him as he pulls him further over his shoulder. His little brother is supporting almost all of his weight now, and he stumbles as they round the corner into another dark, empty hallway.

He hadn’t even been able to move after training today. Dad had left - had left him there - and he had just collapsed onto the ground, consciousness fading in and out as the pain from his burned arms and legs threatened to overwhelm him. Before, he wouldn’t have had any problems with the great flares of fire he had produced - before his quirk mutated, before his body turned on him, before the fucking universe itself had decided to punish him for not being good enough. For not being grateful for his father’s attention.

But not anymore.

Natsuo had found him some time later, whispering to him that he had been worried when Touya didn’t come to his room after, eyes filling with tears, and Natsuo had picked him up off the ground and told him that it would be alright in that high pitched voice of his.

He doesn’t think that it’s going to be alright.

His knee bangs into the doorframe this time as Natsuo slips into his room, sending more pain ricocheting up his leg, and his little brother tearfully apologizes, but it falls on deaf ears. All he notices is how easily Natsuo is able to pull him closer, to adjust his legs and support him completely over his own back, and how very tall Natsuo had gotten when he wasn’t paying attention. In no time at all, Natsuo will be taller than him, just like Yumi already is.

A hot burst of shame breaks through his apathy, and his lips start to wobble.

Just one more thing for him to fail at.

The sudden burst of cold air as they passed into the house made Touya jerk, and he gritted his teeth as pain started to catch up with him, his burns agitated by the difference in temperature and the dry, stale air inside. The house was empty and still save for their own quiet footsteps - the living room and kitchen were now deserted except for the ugly fire still burning in the fireplace, the inhabitants from earlier either having disappeared or hidden in silence -  and Touya wanted to laugh. It felt almost like vindication. This he was familiar with. This he understood.

Natsuo pulled him along into the hallway where the light from the main room faded away into curling shadows, and with it faded Touya’s brief burst of bitter amusement, his mood pitching down wildly into paranoia and anxiety. His fingers curled into the back of Natsuo’s shirt as they stumbled along, and his breathing grew more hurried even as it grew steadily quieter.

He could feel it - without turning his head, without looking away from where he fixed his eyes firmly on the ground - he could feel that thin, rice paper door, those four familiar walls, the padded mats that still lined the room, as though they somehow leaked freezing, unbreathable air into the space around him, and cold sweat started to break out on the back of his neck.

He could just barely feel Natsuo shift, his brother’s hair skimming over his face as he turned to look at him.

“Hey, Touya, stay with me, you’re okay -”

He presses his ear to the thin rice paper door of the training room, holding his breath as he listens desperately to what is happening inside.

His father’s sudden shout jolts him where he’s standing, sending pain across the still open burns on his back, but he forces down the hiss in order to listen in. He’s yelling something about defense, about vital areas and blocking with palms and forearms, and he thinks he hears Shouto mumble something in agreement.

Then there is the sound of shuffling, and the sound of something hard colliding against something else with a sharp smack, and the sound of his baby brother screaming as he falls to the floor.

His face twists into a grimace, and his stomach turns over and threatens to force his way up his throat. He shouldn’t be here - his father has made it clear time and time again that he has no place anywhere near the training room - but he can’t stop. He’s obsessed, he can feel it, and the constant whirlwind in his head makes him want to tear into his own skin until he bleeds.

Shouto whimpers again as his baby brother is likely yanked to his feet, and he crushes his eyes and his fists closed.

He feels sick. He feels more and more sick everyday, and he’s losing the ability to tell what part is caused by his quirk and what part is just in his head. He feels sick when he has to watch his father drag Shouto away without a second glance at him, and he feels sick when he has to listen to Shouto cry for hours later in the room next to his. Some days it seems like he can watch the life leave his little brother’s eyes in real time, and his body aches in sympathy when his sees all the bruises and the lacerations that poke out from around the perfectly pressed fucking outfits that Endeavor forces Shouto to wear, to maintain his perfect fucking family man image, just like Endeavor used to make him wear when they went out.

But there are never any burns.

Shouto never burns.

Heat flares around his fists, aggravating the open skin on the backs of his hands, but he is so used to the pain that he doesn’t even flinch. Shouto screams again, and he jams his burning palms over his ears, pressing against his skull and squeezing his eyes shut tighter until it starts to hurt.

He doesn’t realize it, but he is shaking.

It would be so easy to sink his hands into the door, to catch all of the flimsy rice paper and tatami of their house on fire. His father wouldn’t ignore him then - couldn’t ignore him - and he could prove that he’s not worthless. He has to tell himself that there is still something that he can do - that his father hasn’t given up on him entirely - and so he lets himself get lost in the euphoria of what it would be like to throw open the door right now and throw himself in front of his father.

He’s been practicing. He’s been practicing alone, out in the forest, where no one can tell him to stop or see him cry when the pain becomes too much. He knows that he’s gotten better - he’s learning to control his quirk, to control his father’s fire, all he has to do is make Endeavor fucking look at him!

He digs his nails into his head subconsciously, leaving crescent moons across his scalp and  trying to press deeper and deeper as though he could claw the thoughts out of his head and make them a reality.

All he has to do is beat Shouto, right? He just has to prove that he’s better than a fucking baby, that’s not hard.

Shouto wails again mere feet away, and his chest starts to heave.

He can go in there right now and prove it, he’s better than Shouto, he can beat him, he can do it, he can be the best again. His flames burn so much hotter, his baby brother doesn’t stand a chance, and then once he’s gone, once he’s out of the way - 

His eyes snap open, and he presses both hands over his mouth as the sudden urge to vomit overwhelms him.

Out of the way? That’s not what he - that’s not what he meant, he doesn’t - 

But the image is already there; he can see it so clearly, wrapping his hands around Shouto’s neck and burning straight through his throat until he reaches his spine and - 

He bends at the waist and dry heaves into his hands, trying even now to remain silent as tears start to leak from his burning eyes.

Shouto sobs in the training room, and another blow lands.

God, what’s happening to him?

Touya sat down hard on the edge of the bathtub, and a spark of pain shot up his spine as he brought both hands down and tried to steady himself.

The bathroom felt too bright; the fluorescents above reflected and intensified along the smooth, white, sterile surfaces lining the room, doing nothing but deepening the throbbing in his head, and he squinted his eyes with a pained frown. He let himself slump and lean against the cool tiled wall just next to him, pressing the healthy skin of his face into the chill in some futile attempt to alleviate the heat always churning inside him, and groaned as the burns on his chest started to sting and pulse with pain.

“Here, take this.”

Natsuo appeared in front of him quietly, kneeling down on the floor and looking up at him through messy white hair, and pressed an oblong white pill into the palm of his hand. Touya swallowed it without looking, grimacing as it slid down his unusually dry throat, and watched as Natsuo screwed the cap back on an unlabeled orange bottle.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t really care.

He let his head roll back limply, and ended up with his forehead pressed too hard against the wall and his neck bent at an uncomfortable angle, adding more pain to a body already brimming full of it. He stared at himself in the mirror over Natsuo’s head as his brother pressed something cool to his ruined skin, dead eyes meeting dead eyes hollowed out under pitch black hair, and he traced over every staple, every wrinkle in his scar tissue, every fucked up reminder of his past that he could see. It felt wrong - the freak in the mirror copied his motions perfectly, garish patches of purple standing out so starkly against its pale skin, taunting him, and carving into its skin just under His sickening blue eyes.

Touya’s lips twitched up into a smile, tugging the staples around his mouth and spreading them enough to see a hint of the pink muscle beneath, and he imagined for a moment the satisfaction of burning those eyes out of its head.

“I’m fucked,” he whispered, and felt Natsuo stop where he was smoothing something over his chest. “I’m cursed, I -” he started laughing, giggling breathlessly at nothing while those same empty eyes stared back at him. “I can’t get away from him. He’s haunting me. He’s - he’s in my head, he’s -” his stomach flipped and his hands dug into the porcelain beneath him “- he’s in her.”

It felt like something solid, unmoveable, had fallen into place as the words passed his lips. An unshakeable truth.

“He’s in her.”

He could see how sick Natsuo looked just at the bottom of his field of view, watched as his expression crumbled and his lips twisted up, and Touya laughed again, tightening his hands until he felt his staples threaten to rip free. “Keigo should have fucking left me when he had the chance,” he gasped out, and let his head tip forward as his shoulders curled in around him. “I should have known - I should have known it was only a matter of time.” He shook his head limply from side to side, knocking his hair into his eyes. “Good things don’t happen to me. I - I should have fucking offed myself before I ruined his life, too.”

His next laugh got caught in his throat, and he choked, lips starting to tremble. “I ruined her life. God, I fucking ruined my daughter’s life.”

“No you didn’t,” Natsuo cut him off, and pulled him forward by the upper arms until his head rested against Natsuo’s shoulder, his brother’s arms immediately rising to hug him. “It won’t be like that. It won’t be anything like what you went through, because he’s gone, Touya. He can’t hurt you anymore, he can’t hurt her.”

Touya’s eyes started to burn, and he chuckled as he looked down towards his arms, still lying limply in his lap, eyes skating over injuries new and old. “Can’t he?” he whispered, voice grating even to his own ears. “It’s his quirk, his fire. His decisions. His fucking thirst for power.” He swallowed hard and his lungs struggled to breathe without spasming. “We’re nothing more than the consequences of his fucking cruelty. We were only born to serve his purpose, we’re nothing more than - just stepping stones, and rejects, and -”

Natsuo’s arms tightened around him, pressing his forehead harder into the soft fabric of Natsuo’s shirt, and Touya stared down at his open palms as he whispered. “How long…? How long before she looks like me? Before her skin starts to burn away because her grandfather didn’t care about the downsides, because her father was - was too fucking selfish to end the cycle?”

The pain in his eyes heightened as sealed over teal ducts tried to function, and Touya’s chest convulsed with near silent sobs. “What am I supposed to tell Keigo when her quirk tries to boil her organs from the inside out? When the migraines get so bad that she can’t move? W-when she -”

“We won’t let it get that far.” Natsuo’s voice was wet, and he cleared his throat as he dropped one hand to rub insistent circles into Touya’s back. “We won’t make the same mistakes he did. He was too proud to look into medication or support gear, but we aren’t, right? We can be better, for her. He doesn’t control us anymore, Touya.”

Touya smirked, his scar tissue pulling painfully, and hissed out a strangled laugh. “And yet here we are,” he rasped, and let his hands slide from his thighs to dangle freely towards the floor, falling limp against Natsuo. “Huddled in the bathroom again while you patch up my burns and I cry on your shoulder.”

He could feel Natsuo’s hand stutter on his back, and he laughed bitterly again.

“... Funny.”

Natsuo was gone.

The lights in the bathroom were still on, but he was alone, sitting on the hard floor with his back pressed up against the cool bathtub and his head resting uncomfortably on one shoulder. His ruined shirt had been removed and replaced with one of Natsuo’s hoodies, zipped up carefully over the bandages encircling his chest and drooping lazily over both his hands, drowning him in extra fabric. The pain in his tailbone and the static in his legs suggested that he had been sprawled there for quite awhile, and so he slowly pushed himself to his feet with a sigh, one hand braced against the wall as he struggled to stand.

A few moments later he wandered out of the bathroom, shutting the door silently behind him and stumbling on feet still half-numb down the hallway without much direction. The house was quiet; the dead air only broken by low voices that rumbled through the walls at random intervals, unintelligible save for their anxious tone and in stark contrast to the happy racket from earlier.

Touya continued silently and mindlessly down the corridors, shadowed nooks and divots all blending together until they were broken by soft yellow lighting spilling from a door cracked open. He hesitated just on the opposite side of the hallway as his eyes slid naturally to peer inside the room.

Shouto and Midoriya were sitting shoulder to shoulder on a small padded bench pressed to the wall in what Touya came to realize was Shouto’s room here, talking quietly to each other, heads down. Midoriya had one hand resting reassuringly on Shouto’s knee, rubbing his thumb along the outside of his leg while Shouto’s hands remained clasped together in his lap, unnaturally pale and shimmering ever so slightly with sweat. As Touya exhaled and turned to move away, Shouto’s head jerked up, eyes wide in surprise and hair pressed down messily across his forehead.

“Wait -” he moved to stand, and Midoriya’s hand fell away, the other boy looking up at his little brother with an exhausted sort of grief. “Touya… I’m sorry. I could have -”

“Stop.” Touya held one hand out to Shouto, eyes locked firmly on the ground, and forced himself to breathe normally. “Just stop. I don’t want to hear it.”

Shouto froze instantly, hurt rolling off of him in waves, and Touya let his hand fall listlessly to his side before he forced himself to move forward. He heard Midoriya stand behind him and say something softly to Shouto, pulling his brother gently back towards their room, but he didn’t turn around, even as he felt Shouto’s eyes drill into the back of his head.

The burns on his chest started to ache in time with the pounding in his head and the tension lining his scars, and he clenched his jaw as he staggered on.

Gradually, the seemingly endless hallways came to their end, and the hushed murmurs grew louder around him until he finally stepped into the main living room and they cut off all at once. He leant his shoulder and his head against the doorframe with an air of casual ease that he no longer felt, and refused to address the endless pairs of nausea-inducing eyes on him, save for those set in the tired face of the man just across from him.

Keigo was leaning back against the kitchen table and looking at him with an exhausted but genuinely relieved smile that grew when Touya met his eyes, his wings fluttering faintly where they were curled over his shoulders and drooping along the ground. He held Takara between one of his arms and his hip, their daughter’s head turned away over his shoulder and slumped as though she was sleeping, while Keigo’s other hand was stuffed into the front pocket of his pants.

Touya would bet his life that it was still cramped into a fist.

He exhaled heavily as Keigo stood from his spot and ambled over towards him, only barely jostling their daughter as he did so and yet prompting her to lift her head anyway. She rubbed the back of one hand across her face and yawned, glancing first up at Keigo and then turning sleepily until she locked eyes with Touya. Her soft golden eyes widened, still puffy and inflamed from earlier tears, and her hand curled slowly into the fabric of Keigo’s shirt just below his collarbone.

Touya’s eyes darted immediately to her arm, and his knees threatened to buckle when he saw that it was still unblemished - unhurt, unburned, and just as healthy as it had been this morning - but even still, this did nothing to abate the dread pressing down on his body. He clenched his teeth until his jaw ached as flashes of fire and pain and the nausea of betrayal flickered through his thoughts, and he found his feet stuck to the floor, and he hesitated.

For an eternity that lasted barely a second, he looked at his daughter and he felt sick to his stomach.

Touya dropped his eyes to the floor as he stepped forward and wrapped trembling arms around both Takara and Keigo, holding them tightly against his body as he exhaled slowly and pressed his face into his husband’s shoulder. He felt his daughter’s tiny arm pull him in closer as she nuzzled her head against the crook of his neck, and he squeezed his eyes shut as his chest started to ache. Keigo’s wings soon encircled them as well, separating them from whatever onlookers still remained, and Touya felt his husband press a kiss to his forehead.

“Let’s go home.”

Chapter Text

They had slipped quietly into their dark apartment a little while ago, and Keigo had sighed in relief upon seeing those familiar walls and that old, comforting view of the neon city skyline where it stretched over their balcony. His plastered on grin had fallen away as the feeling of being home had washed over him and slowly began to leech the tension from his shoulders. Takara had been sleeping fitfully against his chest the whole commute home, and she had shifted again as he had turned back to lock the heavy door softly behind them, murmuring nonsensically into his shirt and pressing her cheek harder against his shoulder in protest of being awoken. Keigo had patted her back with a hum and smiled softly to himself, hugging her impossibly closer and feeling his body relax as warmth seeped into him from her tiny frame, only to tense back up in the very next instant as he turned again back towards the main room.

Touya had frozen not a few steps in, back turned to Keigo, with his head tilted down towards hunched shoulders and his hands curled loosely into fists at the end of ramrod straight arms. His thin, lanky frame had turned imposing in the harsh, artificial light flooding in from the large windows in front of him, backlighting him severely and turning his figure into nothing but sharp lines and blurred features. In the dark, he had seemed to become nothing more than another shadow filling their home - silent, lifeless, and cold. Tension had rolled off of him in waves, coiling from the tips of his long, pale fingers and slinking through the darkness like snakes, and Keigo’s heart had stilled in his chest at the sheer force of the pain radiating from Touya’s back.

Just as Keigo had stepped forward to reach for him, Touya had moved away, coming back into himself with a shake of his head and disappearing wordlessly down the hallway towards their bedroom.

Breath in. Breathe out.

Keigo’s wings threatened for the hundredth time that evening to sharpen and harden around him defensively as his brain again tore apart every second of what had happened earlier. He closed his eyes as he breathed in slowly through his nose, forcing his feathers to relax and uncurl from where they had coiled up against his back with a restless shudder and no small feat of concentration. 

He was no stranger to conflict; their relationship had started on rocky and hateful terms and stumbled several times as it matured, and yet it still felt like years had passed since the last time the air in their apartment had felt so chokingly thick. Their daughter could feel it, too. After he had woken her up, she had moved silently throughout her room, promising to get herself ready for bed with none of the arguments or laughter or escape attempts that he had come to expect from her, and his wings shuddered again as the sullen and dejected look on her face flashed once more through his thoughts.

He sighed, and let his head drop for just a moment, closing his eyes and clenching his hands restlessly by his sides as his bare toes curled against the cold wood floor. He didn’t have time for this right now. His family needed him, needed him to be strong - he was the last pillar standing in their three man crew, and he refused to be the reason that the roof came down on all of their heads. His daughter was upset, and his husband was injured - in comparison, his anxieties were nothing, and he refused to listen to them. He dragged the tips of his talons along the edges of his palms, and forced himself to focus solely on the uneasy staccato of his heartbeat as it gradually relaxed and the adrenaline began to fade from his veins.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Keigo opened his eyes slowly, and rolled his shoulders once as he stretched his neck from side to side, shaking out his wings one last time before he promised himself he’d stop fidgeting with them. He ran one hand lazily through his hair, scratching his scalp lightly and fluffing out his tangled mop, and let his eyes rove over the darkened corners of his and Touya’s bedroom once more before he directed them back to the task at hand.

He stepped forward quietly from where he had gotten stuck in the center of the room and approached the lone chair in the corner - a tacky, upholstered nightmare that had been shoved just beside the window and was now serving as a rack for his discarded clothes. He shifted through the pile carelessly, knocking a sweatshirt off the arm and having to skewer it with a feather to prevent it from dropping onto the ground, and tugged out a pair of red checkered pajama pants and a clashing KFC branded t-shirt from within. Touya’s exasperated expression flashed briefly through his mind as he tugged at a wrinkle running through the Colonel’s arguably misprinted face, and he smiled to himself as he tugged the ugly thing over his head and rangled his wings through the slits in the back. As he straightened the sleeves, his eyes darted over to the nearby bathroom unintentionally.

Soft yellow light was spilling from underneath the closed door, leaking out across the floor of their bedroom and flickering ever so slightly as Touya moved around within it. He had locked himself in the small ensuite immediately after they had arrived home and had remained holed up in his makeshift fortress for the near half hour that had passed, and Keigo’s smile creased at the edges. He sighed softly through his nose, letting his eyes dip to the floor as he tied the waistband on his pants, and then moved silently from their room.

As he passed the bathroom door his feet faltered and paused, and he rested one hand gently against the white wood, dragging his thumb over the grain and patting it once as though his comfort might somehow reach the man inside.

He forced his sluggish feet to continue on down the hall, but soon found his steps growing lighter the closer he drew to his daughter’s room.Even in these circumstances, some of his worries faded as he turned the corner and peeked his head around the door. Takara had already tucked herself into bed, burrowing under her purple comforter and drawing the puffy fabric up to just below her elbows, where an oversized plush, stylized chicken was wrapped tightly in her embrace. Her eyes darted up to the doorway as her father slipped into the room, and Keigo found himself smiling again as happiness bubbled up persistently, fighting against his fears.

“Hey, chicklet, ready for bed?” he murmured softly, squishing his wings through the half open sliding door and crossing the short distance to reach his daughter’s bedside. Beside him stood a short white desk that was cluttered with drawings and illuminated by a warm, lavender-painted lamp that shone up and into his face, and he blinked against the light.

Takara nodded at him slowly, mussing her hair against the pillow before her gaze fell away from Keigo’s face and towards the floor, and she buried her face farther into her stuffed animal until only her eyes and the tip of her nose were visible above the mound of yellow fuzz.

Keigo’s eyebrows pitched into the barest frown at her unusual silence, but it didn’t dent his smile, and he kneeled down, dropping his knees to the chilled wooden floor one at a time until he was again within Takara’s direct field of view. “Brush your teeth?” he prompted lightly, and tipped his head to the side until his daughter was looking at him again. “Gotta show me, remember?”

He pressed the tips of his pinkie fingers against his upper lip, pulling his grin overly wide and cartoonishly showing off his teeth, and scrunched up his nose as he leaned ever so slightly down towards Takara. It was a challenge issued without words. She stared at him for a moment, solemn and immobile, before gradually her tired eyes started to spark back to life and crinkle at the edges, and she pushed her chicken down with one hand as she moved to copy him. She showed off crooked baby teeth proudly, fingers hooked in just above two unusually long and unusually sharp canines that matched the now much duller set in her father’s own mouth, and warmth sparked and flared in Keigo’s chest. He stuck his tongue out at her - an action that was also immediately mirrored - and then released his lips with a huff to instead pinch Takara’s cheek and tug her teasingly from side to side.

She pushed his hand away with both of her own almost instantly, digging her tiny claws into the side of his palm, but she was giggling, too, and Keigo found himself laughing along under his breath as he batted at her face once more before finally relenting to her protests. She glared at him halfheartedly, her mouth still curved unconvincingly into a smile, and rewrapped her arms forcefully around her stuffed animal. She ended up crushing its beak upward towards its eyes as she did so, and Keigo laughed again. He moved his hand lightly towards her hair, rustling it once before he idly began to brush through it and smooth it down over the crest of her head.

“You need anything from me before I let you sleep?” he asked, eyes darting away to look for anything out of place, and eventually landing on the collection of other pillows and throws heaped into a pile at the bottom of the bed. “Want any more blankets or anything?”

Surprisingly, his daughter’s face fell at the question, eyes moving back down towards nothing, and Keigo faltered for a second before resuming his lazy detangling of her hair.

“No, I’m good…” she said slowly, and curled her hands slowly but tightly into the chicken’s fluff, drooping with an impressive speed back into her previous glum mood. Keigo let his smile slowly fall as he watched her face, still picking gently at the waves in her hair and splaying them loosely across her pillow, and felt his fingers itch with concern as conflict played out clearly across his daughter’s face. He exhaled quietly through his nose, and then forced his eyes away as he shuffled and sat back on his heels, electing to simply sit in amicable silence as Takara worked up the confidence to talk. He had just begun to haphazardly curl the ends of her hair into sloppy hearts against the sheets when he felt her finally shift, and she spoke.

“Hey, Papa?” she said quietly, pausing and looking over at him anxiously before Keigo responded with a gentle and encouraging hmm? , his head tilted as he poked at a certain disobedient strand of hair. “... Is Dad mad at me?”

Keigo felt both of his hands cramp instinctively as anxiety pushed into his bloodstream, and he wavered for just a moment before he sacrificed the one still in his lap. His fingers jerked and snagged over his pajama pants as they curled violently, talons once again piercing into the flesh of his palm, and formed a fist he knew he wouldn’t be prying open any time soon. He resisted the urge to curse out the more annoying aspects of his quirk. He had known something like this was coming; he had run through every possible question, every possible fight, every possible breakdown obsessively on the silent ride home, knowing that Touya would be in no place to effectively comfort their daughter, and yet all his preparations had done little to reduce his nerves once the moment had come.

It was funny - he swore that these difficult conversations with his kid were more stress inducing than his most demanding missions as a hero had ever been.

He didn’t let himself hesitate for more than a second before he resumed carding soothingly through Takara’s hair, his free hand - trembling, and painful, but controlled - pausing for just a moment at the end of one strand of hair to squeeze her shoulder lightly. “Of course not, you silly goose,” he said teasingly, and met her eyes with an easy smile as he forced his wings down from around his shoulders and relaxed them lazily across the floor behind him. “You’re much too sweet to get mad at.”

The visible half of Takara’s face scrunched up in apparent dissatisfaction, and one of her hands began to pick idly at the chicken’s fluff, fingers yanking and digging into a particular yellow knot just at the base of one of its stubby wings as she huffed through her nose. “But he seemed really upset…” she stuttered out, “... I’m really sorry… I didn’t mean to… to - “ She pressed her cheek harder against the pillow as she spoke, and her eyes started to turn glassy where they stared off pointedly towards a barren spot on the wall.

“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Keigo insisted gently, and started to rub his hand back and forth along her shoulder as the talons on his opposite hand dug deeper into his skin. “He was just scared. We both were. Believe me, it’s really frightening when someone you care about suddenly catches on fire,” he said as the corner of his mouth twisted into a smirk, his lips tilting up towards eyes that had failed to match the humor in his voice. “That doesn’t mean that he’s mad at you.”

Takara’s eyes flickered over to him - wide, vulnerable, and yet so trusting - and she sniffled softly against the chicken’s head. “Okay, Papa,” she mumbled, half muffled by the stuffed animal, and Keigo hummed quietly under his breath. “I didn’t know that getting your quirk could be so scary…”

“Quirks are weird,” he replied with a shrug of his shoulders, and Takara’s gaze shifted to watch as his wings moved and fluttered in response, drooping eyes tracing over one long red feather to his left as it brushed along the leg of her desk. “There’s really no way to tell how one’ll behave until it decides to show up.”

Takara’s eyebrows furrowed together, and Keigo let his hand slide from her shoulder to rest lightly on the bedspread just in front of her, scratching idly at a mystery stain just by the chicken’s bright orange foot as he watched his daughter frown.

“Does that mean I got a bad quirk?”

 Something cold started to soak through Keigo’s veins and into his throat, and he swallowed uncomfortably before he even tried to speak.

That’s always the question, isn’t it?

“No quirk’s a bad quirk,” he said seriously, and watched as his daughter’s eyes darted between his own before they fell and squinted down at her hands.

“But - but it was so - awful -  “ she stammered, and clenched her hands into fists as her eyebrows contorted further in frustration. “And I couldn't - “

“Hey, none of that,” Keigo interrupted her quietly and wrapped his hand around both of his daughter’s own. “Everyone’s quirk is hard to control when they first get it. Mine was, too.” He squeezed once, and then caught sight of an assembly of figurines haphazardly smushed together on a thin shelf behind his daughter’s bed, and his eyes softened.

He leaned in closer to his daughter, resting his weight on his elbow, and spoke in a hush as he ran his thumb over her knuckles. “Did you know that Deku broke both legs and an arm when his quirk first came in?” he whispered, and smiled as the tension in Takara’s face evaporated as she lifted her head from her stuffed animal, eyebrows lifting from watery eyes and creeping towards her hairline.

“Really?” she whispered back, and Keigo nodded.

“Mhm,” he continued, and patted her hands. “He struggled with it for a long time, broke his arms and his fingers more times than I can remember. Some people even said that he’d never make it as a hero, but look at him now.” He reached up and poked her cheek as he spoke, and Takara smiled ever so slightly. “So don’t worry if your quirk seems scary at first. You’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

Drops of anxiety started to trickle into his stomach at those words, a what if at the back of his mind that he couldn’t bear to look at.

His daughter’s smile grew faintly even as she rolled her eyes, and she pushed her stuffed chicken down away from her face as she turned her head away from him. “Thanks, Papa,” she mumbled, and an uneasy warmth started to creep from Keigo’s chest and up to his cheeks.

“Of course.”

Takara hummed softly, and then rolled fully onto her back, lifting her arms into the air in front of her and examining the back of her hands. In the warm incandescent light, her slim arms looked even tanner and more like his own, all the way down to the sharp black talons at the tips of her fingers, but Keigo knew now that the resemblance stopped there.

She closed her hands once, and then let her head fall back along the pillow to look at him. “My quirk is like Dad’s, right?” she said, and dropped her arms with a thump to the mattress beside her. “Did - does he have a hard time, too, trying to control it? Is that why he doesn’t use it?”

All at once, too many images and old aches flashed behind his unfocused eyes, one after the other. A ring of blue flame encircling him, towering over his head and thrashing out towards the city rubble as he struggled to stand, choking on the overwhelming heat surrounding him. The feeling of his forearms blistering as he carried Dabi’s limp body through his apartment while fear and desperation burned through him sharper than any pain. Silver staples melted into purple scars and shiny red flesh, and smoke that seemed to pour endlessly through the cracks in his face, even on the good days. Nightmares that ended with black handprints burned into his sheets and the sound of a freezing shower running at 3:00 AM. A row of bright orange pill bottles on the bathroom sink and the endless, sterile floor of hospital hallways.

Keigo shrugged stiffly, and forced himself to meet his daughter’s eyes even as he unwillingly focused on her arms in his periphery - still smooth, unblemished and healthy - and he felt something warm trickle across his palm as the fingers in his lap drove ever deeper.

“How much you use your quirk is up to you,” he said instead, warping his face into a casual smile even as anxiety began to pool and spread through his system - her hands looked so frail where they rested against her stomach, tiny and fragile. “And besides, every quirk is unique - yours won’t be exactly like Dad’s anyway -” Another stake of worry, another what if tangling his tongue, and he pushed on “- you shouldn’t worry about comparing yourself to other people.”

Takara pursed her lips together into a frown. “I guess that’s true,” she sighed in apparent acceptance, and Keigo felt his smallest feathers flutter against his back as he tried to hide the relief he felt. “Will you help me figure out how to use it? Or Dad?” she continued, and slumped back further into the pillow behind her, shifting ever so slightly from side to side as she looked up at him.

Training, his mind supplied. Quirk training.  

He would never, ever call it that.

Keigo forced himself to keep smiling even though it still felt pinched around the edges. “Of course we’ll help,” he replied easily, and pressed his hand against the bed as he lifted himself to his feet, shaking out his tingling legs as he did so. “But tomorrow, yeah? You should get some rest, Taka,” he said earnestly, and patted the comforter around where he estimated her lower legs to be.

“Okay, Papa. I love you,” she murmured, and Keigo bent at the waist to press a kiss to her forehead, brushing her hair back and off her face as he did so.

His tongue felt heavy in his mouth with the weight of all the words he wasn’t saying, and as he looked down at his daughter’s face, a little voice that he had never wanted to hear again whispered in his ear that omission didn’t count as lying.

He swallowed.

“I love you, too, kid.”

Keigo slipped his fist into the pocket of his pajama pants as he straightened, petting Takara’s stuffed chicken once and pulling another smile from his daughter before he turned and flicked off the lamp beside him with shuddering fingers. He smiled down at his daughter once more as the light faded, before finally stepping away from her bedside and slipping back towards her half open door.

“Hey, Papa?”

He paused just as he reached the threshold, and turned back over his shoulder. “What’s up?”

In the moonlight spilling in from the lone window, he could just see how Takara twisted her hands together, and how she pressed her lips together for a second too long before she dared to speak.

“We can still go flying, right? I can still - nothing changed because I got Dad’s quirk … right?”

Keigo’s expression cracked at the hesitation in her voice, and he was infinitely grateful for the darkness in the room as he spoke.

“Nothing’s changed, chicklet,” he said, and pushed enthusiasm into his voice that he couldn’t bring himself to match on his face. “I’ll still take you flying whenever you want.”

Takara nodded once, and then closed her eyes, and Keigo forced his uneasy feet into the hallway as quickly as he could, sliding her bedroom door shut behind him without turning around. He crumpled against the wall as soon as he was alone, pressing his temple against the cool plaster and crushing his eyes closed, and covered his mouth with his free hand as he tried to get his breathing under control.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

You will not freak out. We don’t know anything for sure yet. Whatever happens, you will handle it.

His lungs spasmed in direct contradiction to his orders, and he pressed his hand harder against his face to muffle the sound, all while an impossible pressure seemed to push harder and harder against his shoulders until he felt that he could barely stay upright.

Handle. It.

He gave himself thirty more seconds to wallow before he forced it all back down. It felt like trying to close a door against a tsunami, difficult and painful and ultimately pointless, but he had dealt with so much worse before, and he refused to splinter now. He blinked open watery eyes and stood up straight on his own two feet, slowly pulling his hand away from his mouth when he was sure he could be silent, and focused his gaze on some point in the far distance. He had a task he needed to accomplish, so that was all he needed to think about right now.

He listened to his breathing and the cadence of his bare feet against the floor as he made his way to the bathroom at the opposite side of the apartment, and let his mind go blissfully blank for as long as he could maintain it. He stepped into the small tiled room, squinting against the harsh light as he flipped it on, and turned on the tap as he pulled his other hand from his pocket. He let himself fall back into an all too familiar rhythm as he stuck his fist under the running water and slowly massaged it open with his other hand, barely feeling the sting as his talons slowly came free from his palm and the water rinsed the blood away, moving without thinking as he went through the steps to clean, to disinfect, and to bandage.

He didn’t know how much time had passed when he finally reemerged, and didn’t care to check either, and instead tried to keep his panic from creeping back in as he stared down the hallway and towards the dark gap leading to his and Touya’s bedroom. They hadn’t fought in years, not seriously, but the fear was still there. It still crept into the back of his mind when he least expected it, poisoning his thoughts and whispering to him that this was just a fluke, that Dabi hadn’t really changed.

He never listened. But the voices didn’t stop, either.

The walls seemed to lengthen and stretch unnaturally in the darkness, tilting in at the top and leering down at him, and Keigo shook his head, gritting his jaw and reprimanding himself.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

He reached their bedroom and stepped in quietly, tugging their door shut gingerly behind him as his eyes fell to their bed and the lone figure already curled up there. Touya was turned away from him, lying on his side at the very edge of their bed with his knees tucked up towards his chest and his arms wrapped around a white, rectangular pillow just visible over the slope of his shoulder.

He remained unnaturally still as Keigo approached, which had the exact opposite effect of what he had intended and made it all too obvious that he was still awake, and Keigo’s mouth pinched at the corners as he stared down at his husband. He stretched out one hand towards the comforter and towards Touya only for his fingers to curl in at the last moment, pausing centimeters before contact and hanging restlessly in the air, and he exhaled a silent sigh.

Maybe… maybe right now was not the time to push. Maybe right now, digging questions were the last thing that Touya needed. Maybe right now was a time for distractions, and easy smiles, and the unspoken promise that they were still okay, even if the thought of having to maintain his mask for even a moment longer made him ache. Touya had always hated when he had tried to force him to talk before , snapping and recoiling at any mention of feelings , and it was true that things had gotten so much better lately, after months and months of therapy, but Keigo was … 

Well. He wasn’t sure which Touya he was dealing with right now.

 So instead, he diverted - he swivelled his arm away in the opposite direction and towards his nightstand where he latched onto his phone and clicked it on, squinting into the harsh blue light until the room around him melted back into the featureless dark.

The clock blinked up at him accusingly, but unsurprisingly - it was well after their household’s usual bedtime and creeping into the morning, and Keigo fought the urge to yawn as those little white numbers gave voice and value to his mounting exhaustion. He thumbed mindlessly through the other notifications from his lockscreen, scrolling past the twitter mentions and instagram likes blocking the sleeping faces of Touya and Takara on his wallpaper, until the monotonous stream was suddenly interrupted by an unexpected message. He narrowed his eyes as he read it, thumb hovering just to the right of the paragraph of text as he skimmed over the words once, then twice.

“Your brother pulled some strings at the hospital he works at,” Keigo said slowly, gaze not breaking from his phone. “Got an appointment set up with your quirk specialist the day after tomorrow to see Takara.”

Saying it outloud made it that much more real all at once, and equal measures of relief and dread flooded into his stomach as he stared down at the words quirk specialist , and he ran his thumbnail up and down and up along the crack in his phone case as anxious energy poured into his system.

“You know, Natsuo also says that he texted you first, but I’m guessing you couldn’t be bothered to reply?” he asked, chuckling not quite naturally under his breath as he pointedly turned off his phone and set it face down on the side table. “If you’re not careful he’s going to start liking me more than you.”

He turned towards Touya as the last syllables left his lips, pulling them up into an easy smirk that fractured as soon as his eyes met Touya’s back. Touya was so motionless that for a brief moment Keigo thought that he must not have actually spoken at all, and all of his anxieties curdled and soured in his chest, sapping away his poor attempt at humor until there was nothing left but exhaustion, and his face fell as he lost the strength to keep pretending that everything was fine.

“Touya?”

It seemed as though it took several seconds for Keigo’s words to reach his husband, fighting through the thick blanket of tension filling the room and stretching taught across the space between them, hanging by a fragile thread.

“...Mhmm,” Touya finally answered, if such a sound could be considered a response, and then moved only to tuck his head further into the pillow in his arms, curling in tighter on himself and farther away from Keigo, and Keigo felt as if all the air had been forced out of him. All of his promises to be strong for Touya’s and Takara’s sake seemed to vanish into smoke, seeping out of him and blowing away. His shoulders slumped forward as his eyes fell from Touya’s back to the very edge of the bed, and he exhaled slowly as the urge to just collapse then and there onto the floor became more and more tempting. It took him three more breaths before he was able to muster the strength to even lift his arm, and he pulled back the covers sloppily as he moved dead limbs into bed, twisting his pant legs around his thighs as he did so but no longer caring enough to remedy the discomfort.

He fell onto his side, staring in towards the center of their king sized bed and at Touya on the far end, and let his wings droop into disarray, one dragging across the floor and one bent up and over his body. The sheets were cold where they touched his skin - too far from Touya and the furnace under his skin to be anything but freezing - and Keigo pulled his elbows and knees in, leaving only his fingers and his face visible where they extended past his wing. His eyes focused on Touya against his will; in the near pitch black darkness of the room, broken only by faint slivers of cloudy moonlight slipping through closed blinds, his body seemed to almost disappear. His black hair became nothing more than lumps and creases on the pillow beneath it. His black tank top and black shorts a feature of the bedspread. The wrinkles and gashes in the purple scar tissue exposed along his limbs nothing more than brush strokes through the paint on the wall behind him.

Keigo’s eyes burned the longer he stared, and his vision blurred until his nightmarish thoughts came true right in front of him.

Their bed suddenly felt much too large all at once, and he swallowed hard. It felt like their relationship had regressed years in hours, plunging him back in time to the days where every moment he had with Touya was stolen and uncertain, where it wasn’t unusual to wake up alone and remain alone for days without warning, and problems were ignored through alcohol and silence. His chest ached, and he dug his teeth into his bottom lip as he wrapped his wing tighter around his shoulders, hugging himself as his mind spiraled. Even though logically he knew his husband was still there, mere inches away, he felt more alone than he had in a long, long time, and his fingers trembled. Old familiar fears sprung to life and thrived in his mind as though they had never left, and he broke in silence, feeling irrationally and yet no less strongly that this must be the beginning of the end. That Touya had finally reached a breaking point that he couldn’t come back from. That he wouldn’t be enough, this time, to save his lover from himself. That the family he had struggled for so long to find was about to be torn away from him while he did nothing but sit back and watch.

The blankets only seemed to grow colder around him.

“ - go. Keigo, hey.”

Something brushed against the back of his hands, and he snapped violently from his thoughts, jerking where he laid and jostling his feathers unintentionally. A small smile sprang back to his face as he blinked away and choked down his fears, and the very ease and practice with which he was able to put on an appropriate expression made him sick to his stomach.

Touya was looking at him over his shoulder, and he tapped Keigo’s hands again with one of his own. “Stop fucking up your hands,” he mumbled.

Keigo’s eyes broke from Touya’s face, and he found his hands curled up in front of him, well on their way to turning into tight, cramped fists in the sheets, and he forced himself to relax his body, purging some of the tension from his muscles via a shaky exhale.

“Sorry,” he whispered back, and he fought to keep his face from falling into something less than perfect as he jammed his cheek further into the pillow.

“Don’t apologize,” Touya replied, and moved to turn back around before his eyes passed over Keigo’s face, unnervingly bright even in the dark, and he paused. Keigo couldn’t hold his gaze for very long, but he could still see how Touya struggled and hesitated in his periphery, and he felt something not unlike shame or embarrassment at the fact that he must only be making Touya’s mood worse.

He sniffled.

Another heartbeat passed, and then Touya sat up slowly, dragging the spare pillow from where it had been hugged against his chest and replacing it along the headboard. He moved as though the motion pained him, and Keigo realized with a jolt that it likely did, and he somehow managed to feel worse as his eyes slid to where the white bandages encircling Touya’s torso peeked out around his loose tank top. Touya slumped onto his back, now propped up somewhat, and rolled his head along the pillow until he was facing Keigo with an unreadable expression. He stared at him for just a moment before he extended one arm and laid it across the space between them, palm up.

Keigo’s lip wobbled as the waterworks he had suppressed threatened to slip out again, and he wrapped his sore hands around Touya’s forearm, slotting them into place over the numb tissue like he had so many times before. The instant he stopped trying to suppress his instincts, his hands started to hurt less, even as his joints in his fingers cramped and contracted further, and he slowly shuffled over on his elbows until he could lay his head onto Touya’s shoulder, hiding his face in Touya’s shirt and draping one wing over them both. He brought his legs up as well, tangling one with Touya’s and sinking into the heat radiating off of him as the tension he had been holding for hours started to melt away.

Keigo blinked, and a tear finally slipped free. “Sorry,” he whispered hoarsely.

“Don’t apologize.”

“S-” Keigo cut himself off before the cycle of sorry’s could continue, and he laughed quietly at himself under his breath even as more tears trickled over, the restless emotions within him bubbling up and escaping in any way they could. “Okay…” he mumbled instead, and he could feel the vibrations of Touya’s chest as he hummed softly in response.

Touya shifted slightly, and then there were fingers combing through his hair, and Keigo closed his eyes. His expression crumbled as he allowed himself just to feel, crying almost silently save for the gasps he couldn’t quiet, and Touya’s shirt slowly grew wet beneath his cheek, drying his tears and giving him a place to rest his sorrows.

“Today was fucking awful,” Keigo whimpered, sniffling as his voice broke. “That was so scary. I never wanna hear her scream like that again. And I couldn’t even get to her because I’m so god damn flammable, all I could do was watch .”

He paused to swallow, trying in vain to clear his throat as his chest heaved, and Touya dropped his hand from his hair to his cheek, catching his tears with his thumb and pulling him closer.

“She cried for so long after that,” he continued after a few breaths. “And I was so - I couldn’t even make her feel better, her own father… Deku was the only one who could get her to stop. And sure, I get it, but it still hurt.” He laughed disparagingly as his hands squeezed Touya’s arm, and he tucked his wing more firmly around them both. “She’s been so quiet all night, and it’s killing me. Even getting her to smile felt like a struggle, and she asked - “

Keigo snapped his mouth closed, ending that sentence before he could make a mistake.

She asked if you were mad at her.

If Touya noticed, he didn’t mention it, his thumb still rubbing soothingly and steadily along his cheekbone, and Keigo sighed as he deflated further into his husband’s warmth.

“... Is she okay?”

Touya’s voice surprised him, quiet and raspy either from disuse or from strain, and some of the guilt managed to worm its way back into Keigo’s chest. His lips pulled down into a flat, somber line.

“She’s shaken up, but yeah,” he mumbled back, curling his toes against Touya’s legs as he stared out into the shadows in the corner of the room. “She was feeling better when I left her, and she’s not… she’s not physically injured.”

Touya’s hand paused on his face, and Keigo felt him stiffen, and his own heart did something painful as he pulled his lower lip into his mouth, sinking his canines into it and wishing that he could yank those words back in and just lie instead.

There was an unexpected burst of heat across his cheek, and then Touya’s hand was gone, lifted away and curled into a fist atop his chest and just in front of Keigo’s eyes. Nevertheless, there was no emotion in his voice when Touya spoke.

“How much did you tell her?” he whispered, and Keigo’s feathers flicked erratically against his neck.

“Nothing,” he answered, and could feel the air heat around them. “I - I didn’t want to make her any more upset. She was so scared of her quirk already,” Keigo continued breathlessly, words spilling out between his lips, “and she looked so sad when I went to put her to bed, I - she didn’t need to worry about anything else tonight.”

It all felt like excuses, even as a little voice insisted that he had yet to say anything untrue, and each syllable seemed to leave a chalky, bitter taste across his tongue. His eyes were hyper focused on Touya’s hand in front of him, and his own fingers tightened as something hot and uncomfortable started to spill into his veins. “Besides,” he continued, shrugging almost imperceptibly, “we don’t know anything for sure. Quirks are fickle - there’s no guarantee that hers will act just like yours, so until we know for sure, there’s no need to upset her.” He swallowed hard. “I mean, her quirk didn’t hurt her tonight, scary as it was. Her arms are just fine. There’s still a chance…”

His words trailed off until they were barely audible, and were cut off entirely when he felt Touya freeze beneath him. His eyes flickered up to Touya’s face, and watched as his husband gritted his teeth and crushed his eyes closed as a wave of pain rolled over his features. Touya exhaled through his nose, and then turned his head away, looking away from Keigo and out towards the nothingness in the room.

“... We both know that doesn’t mean shit, Birdie,” Touya said quietly, voice low and caustic, and Keigo grimaced. “I still burned, didn’t I?”

His eyes slipped to the back of Touya’s head, landing on a flash of white hair just visible behind his ear where his roots had started to grow in, standing out in stark contrast to the surrounding black and becoming almost blinding in the dark.

“We’ll figure it out,” Keigo whispered. “We’ll know for sure two days from now and we’ll - we’ll figure it out.”

Touya’s shoulders tensed beneath his cheek, locking up and lifting towards his ears before they lurched away, twisting ever so slightly as Touya turned his head ever further away, distancing himself consciously or otherwise from his husband and this conversation, and Keigo’s words faltered on his tongue. He bit the inside of his cheek, and then wrapped his wing more firmly around Touya in retaliation, struggling to keep his breathing steady as the air suddenly got that much thicker.

“I promise. We’ll be alright, I promise.”

Chapter Text

Keigo opened his eyes, slipping out of sleep all at once, and inhaled with a groan that was muffled by some kind of fabric attempting to get into his mouth. He was lying on his stomach, face pressed suffocatingly into the soft pillow beneath him and body half draped over the edge of the bed, and he blinked a few times as the discomfort of this position finally caught up to him. His arm was asleep, trapped beneath his side and the weight of one of his wings, and he frowned as he wiggled it, far too tired to exert any more effort and hardly bothered by the pins and needles as it was.

The room was still pitch black around him, obscuring the chair and side table filling his vision, and lazy relief washed over him at the prospect of falling immediately back asleep. He yawned once as he pointed his toes and stretched his legs, and then sluggishly maneuvered his wings as he rolled onto his side and shifted towards the center of the bed, turning his head and reaching his half numb arm out towards Touya.

His fingers found nothing but cold, disturbed sheets.

His eyes snapped open. The bed was empty next to him, the comforter pulled back haphazardly and crumpled halfway down the bed to reveal the bare sheet beneath it, and any lingering drowsiness vanished in an instant as adrenaline hit Keigo’s system. The sight was so simple and unassuming, and yet so violently out of place, and Keigo lurched upright in bed as the void next to him seemed to consume all reasonable thought.

His fingers brushed over the spot that Touya had left and found it freezing. Touya had been gone for a while.

This isn’t happening. This isn’t - 

Keigo’s fingers curled into the sheets as though he could somehow bring Touya back by sheer force of will, and his wings trembled and thrashed behind him, threatening to sweep his phone off the nightstand. Panic flared to life and filled his head, sudden, burning, and all consuming, and he struggled to keep himself from hyperventilating, counting beats in his head as the urge to cry or to scream nearly overwhelmed him.

He sucked in a breath that turned into a gasp as his throat constricted, and forced his hands to let go of the sheet. Instead, he directed them towards the blanket tangled around his waist and legs and carefully pulled it free, moving deliberately slowly as his hands shook and his talons snagged and cut through the soft material, his delicate motor functions deteriorating as his heart tried to beat its way out of his ribcage. He spread his wings and closed his eyes the moment his feet hit the shockingly frigid hardwood floor, and he tried to listen for any movement in their apartment only to be unable to hear anything over the blood rushing through his ears. He shook his head, frowning and trying to clear his brain but only making it worse, and another shot of adrenaline rushed through him as he failed to locate Touya.

Because he left you ag -

He pressed a hand over his nose and mouth as panic started to turn into nausea and forced his wings back against his spine, curling them as tightly as he could in an effort to silence the constant feed of vibrations that he had accidentally invited to the forefront of his brain. That useless noise now churned and combined with the racing thoughts already there, making him feel not unlike he was drowning, and he forced himself to breathe slowly as his stomach jumped into his throat. He pinched the side of his leg through his pants, once and then again much harder, and ordered himself to calm down, slamming the lid on the hysteria infecting his thoughts and removing himself from the situation.

He inhaled. Exhaled. Counted to ten and then a hundred, then backwards by seven and up by three. He stood stock still until his legs stopped trying to give out on him, and then slowly opened his eyes, taking in the still dark room around him.

He turned to his phone first, still within reach just beside him and turned it on without picking it up. It was just past four in the morning, but Keigo paid little attention to the time as he scrolled through his notifications, chest tightening for all he ordered it not to as he reached the end and saw no text from Touya.

Just like always , a little voice whispered.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

He released his phone and looked back up at the room around him, the details gradually fading in as his eyes readjusted to the near blackness, and took his first steps away from the bedside and towards Touya’s half of the room. The bed, still empty, glared at him from the corner of his eye, and his wings fluttered anxiously and cut tiny divots into his back while he resolutely turned his head away. The room was largely untouched. Touya’s slippers were still sitting just by the door, Natsuo’s borrowed hoodie in a pile on the floor just a few feet away, Touya’s bottle of sleeping pills still standing watch at the corner of his nightstand, and something that felt dangerously like hope flickered under the downpour of half suppressed fear.

Touya’s phone was missing.

Keigo let his eyes sweep over the room once more, and then left the bedroom, walking silently through the dark hallway and towards the main body of their home. He reached Takara’s bedroom first and quietly cracked open the door, not expecting much but not willing to risk it either, and exhaled when he found her sleeping peacefully just as he had left her some hours ago. He stood there for a moment longer, tracing the relaxed lines of her face and her arm where it was draped over the ever present stuffed chicken, before he forced himself to close the door and turn away, leaving her behind happy and unaware.

The rest of the apartment was as dark and silent as he knew it would be, and all his writhing fears stilled and froze under the oppressive hand of cold acceptance as he moved from empty room to empty room. His feet faltered and stopped when he made it back to the living room at the center of their apartment, ice curling up his feet and legs as the reality of the situation drained all the energy from his limbs, forcing him to stop running and confront just how alone he truly was. He wrapped his arms around his torso as his face fell, wings encircling his shoulders as a chill sunk deep into his veins and into his spirit, and he hated himself as his lips started to wobble. He could check the front door, he reasoned, ever trying to put off the inevitable conclusion, and determine whether or not it was still locked, but he couldn’t bring his feet to move. 

Either way, the result was the same, after all.

His breath caught as he inhaled, rattling through his aching chest, and he let his eyes fall shut as the four blank walls around him raced in and threatened to crush him.

The moment his eyes closed, the smallest spark of blue light jumped behind his eyelids, and he jolted as his eyes snapped open again, widening in shock and disbelief. His eyebrows pinched together as he wondered if he had suddenly gotten so bad that now he was seeing things, but that train of thought was upended as the same miniscule blue flare sparkled to life again, and Keigo turned his head to follow it.

The tiny ember was visible through the large, floor to ceiling windows that overlooked their balcony, floating suspended in the air only a few inches behind the glass and drawing all of Keigo’s attention like a pixel out of place. Keigo watched as the miniscule spark faded from blue, to white, to a dull orange barely noticeable against the harsh city lights, and watched as the light dared to go out for barely a second before it jerked upward and flared to life again, illuminating the very edge of a scarred hand and the tips of pitch black hair.

Touya leaned his head back as he took another drag from his cigarette, and Keigo’s body went numb all at once as the sheer force of his relief collided with him.

One of Keigo’s hands sprung to his mouth while the other latched onto the couch, bracing himself as the tension melted out of his muscles all too quickly and he swayed unsteadily on his feet. His worries fizzled up into euphoria and that sickening chill evaporated into a scorching, comforting heat, and he found himself laughing into his hand even as his eyes burned more intensely than ever. His wings fluttered as he struggled to keep his balance, taking one wobbly step backwards, and he sniffled as he finally convinced his lungs to take a real, deep breath. The world seemed to upend itself around him, room spinning on its axis and turning his expectations on their head once more, and yet he had never been so happy to be wrong.

Stupid fucking - abandonment issues idiot - 

He ran his hand up and over his face, pausing to wipe at his watery eyes before sliding his fingers into his hair and brushing through the tangles absentmindedly as he let himself smile. In the grand scheme of recent horrors, this was hardly a victory, and yet he still felt like celebrating in the face of just how much worse it could have been. He gave himself a few more steady heartbeats to collect himself, waiting until the worst of the lightheadedness had passed and he was able to let go of the couch without stumbling, and berated his limbs until they too stopped trembling. His eyes darted briefly and unwillingly towards Touya before he forced them down towards his own disheveled form, and patted his hands over his sleep shirt as though pressing out the wrinkles could somehow undo the breakdown he had only just narrowly avoided. There was no chance that he was falling asleep now - his emotions were locked into a rollercoaster that he would not be escaping any time soon - but he hardly wanted to anyway. Instead, with one last brush over his shirt, he directed his bare feet to the patio door and the man sitting just beyond it.

Touya pretended not to notice his arrival, and refused to even spare him a glance as he slid open the glass door gently and stepped out into the chilly night. His husband was sitting to the side some feet away, back propped up against the windows and brick of the building and knees pulled loosely up towards his chest. He was staring out through the slats in the railing and off over the city, vibrant neon lights reflecting and highlighting bright blue irises trapped in eyes that seemed very far away, and Keigo traced over the downturned lines in his husband’s face as he approached.

He dropped to a seat on the cold concrete, close enough to touch but not yet touching, and curled his wings around his shoulders as the warmth from their apartment withered in the night air. He crossed his legs in front of him while Touya took another silent drag from his cigarette in his periphery, and shifted his hips until he was as comfortable as he could reasonably hope to get, pressing his palms into the hard ground and leaning his back against the uncomfortable brick.

“You come out here to chastise me?”

Keigo’s eyes turned to Touya as he spoke, voice as harsh as it was quiet, and let his head roll back along the wall as he turned to face him. Touya’s own face wasn’t visible - still hidden beneath a mess of black hair as dark as the night behind him - and so Keigo’s gaze fell to his fingers and the cigarette pinched between them, the unnamed and yet undeniable focus of Touya’s question. The innocuous little stick did not unearth pleasant memories, and Keigo’s stomach turned over slowly as he watched the ember flare and fizzle. A bitter taste crept into the back of his throat that had nothing to do with the thin stream of smoke trailing into the air a few feet away. It was strange how many vicious fights such a tiny thing could symbolize, all the sick days that had turned into sick months before Touya would even accept the word addiction into his vocabulary, and old words started to creep unbidden into the corners of Keigo’s brain, but they didn’t make it much farther than that.

Keigo’s eyes darted up, away from the cigarette, and back towards the man holding it. Touya’s head was turned down to stare at nothing, locked in place between shoulders so tense that Keigo could imagine the muscles underneath cramping and straining, stress bleeding from his ears all the way down the lengths of his arms to the very tips of his fingers. His fingers twitched where they held the cigarette, thumb tapping erratically against the filter and squeezing too tightly around the rest as he went to ash it. Keigo’s lips twitched into a sad sort of smile. Other people might only see the abrasiveness, the standoffish, apathetic front, but Keigo had always been good at reading people.

He could never be as hard on Touya as Touya already was on himself.

“Nah,” Keigo said slowly, finally answering Touya’s question a few breaths later as he let his head fall until his jaw rested lazily against his shoulder. “I’m your parole officer, not your sponsor, remember?” he quipped, and caught the way Touya’s muscles relaxed in relief before irritation replaced it.

Touya exhaled sharply through his nose as he jerked his head to the side, burying it deeper beneath his shoulders and looking farther away from him. “Keigo -”

“Touya,” Keigo interrupted, smirking to himself, and that got his husband to look at him. Touya’s face was a mixture between slack and appalled, mouth dropped open in disbelief beneath eyes that were shifting quickly from exhaustion to frustration, and Keigo’s smirk stretched wider as Touya’s eyebrows stretched towards his bedraggled hair.

“It’s fine,” he said before the anger could figure its way out of Touya’s mouth, and shrugged one shoulder lazily as his wing moved to follow. “Nobody’s perfect and all that jazz, yeah? Don’t worry about it.”

Touya faltered, and his eyes darted across Keigo’s face as his eyebrows pinched together, shock splitting into equal parts relief and distrust, and he finally snapped his mouth closed as he swallowed uncomfortably. His lips pressed together as though he was looking to argue, falling back into old habits of picking fights to cover up the feelings he couldn’t deal with, but Keigo leaned forward before he could continue and plucked the cigarette from between his fingers, bringing it to his own mouth with smirk.

Smoking had never been his vice of choice, and his nose still wrinkled as he inhaled the acrid smoke, but he exhaled with an ease and a measure of experience that he never should have had. He blew the cloud of smoke up towards the pitch black sky just to the side of Touya’s head, and let his eyes trace the way the wind blew apart and scattered the vapor before he extended the cigarette back out towards its owner, wrist and arm falling limp in a lazy offering. Touya hesitated, eyes still pinched with uncertainty and apprehension. The cigarette hung suspended between them for a moment longer, trailing smoke into the atmosphere and around the both of them - a physical thread to share both the guilt and the reassurance that one mistake was not the end of the world.

“Sounds like a problem for tomorrow’s Keigo, don’t you think?” Keigo mumbled with a flick of his fingers, and watched as relief finally won out against the doubt and anger in Touya’s eyes. Touya’s fingertips brushed over his own as he reclaimed his cigarette, and Keigo’s lips curled up into a sad sort of smile as Touya took another drag, tension visibly fading from his face and shoulders as he exhaled.

Keigo let his hand drop to the concrete, nails scratching idly over an uneven pattern on the ground, and leaned his cheek back against the wall as Touya finally lifted his head and looked out towards the city.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Keigo pushed quietly, and felt a burst of relief of his own when Touya’s shoulders slumped further down instead of stiffening once more.

His husband’s lips turned down to the side as though he was biting at the inside of his cheek, and Touya sighed as he let his head tip further back, eyes closing for just a moment too long before they returned to staring up at the black above them. The ember between his fingers burned brightly and ate away at Touya’s cigarette as the moment stretched on, encroaching on his fingertips before he flicked his hand and opened his mouth to speak.

“I snapped at Shouto again today,” Touya said quietly, words dragging sluggishly and reluctantly through the air between them, and Keigo tilted his head to listen more intently. “Didn’t have any reason to. Think he was just guilty about not doing more to help, but I just told him to fuck off.”

Touya’s lips pursed together, and he sighed again through his nose. “Was shitty to Natsuo, too, I guess,” he continued weakly, and fell back until his head hit the wall behind him, still staring resolutely away from Keigo as he swallowed. “Dumped all my problems on him and then left without saying a word… Guess that makes me, what? Two for four?” He huffed miserably, and then tipped his head to the side as though he was considering. “Though I ruined dinner, too, so I’m sure Fuyumi’s pissed as well…three for four…what an incredible job...”

Keigo’s eyebrows pinched together as Touya trailed off, Touya’s motivation to talk visibly evaporating as his unoccupied fingers started to fidget with the fabric of his shorts, and Keigo’s chest ached as he forced a smile. “Isn’t that kinda stuff how Todorokis show their love?” he teased, and was rewarded with the smallest twitch of Touya’s lips, hinting at a concealed smile before it, too, faded.

“That, or this is the last straw,” Touya said tiredly, exhaling as he spoke and expression falling towards some mixture of contemplation and frustration. He moved his cigarette idly to the other hand and wiped his hand along the fabric over his upper thigh, pressing down harder and dragging his fingers up and down longer than he surely needed to as he sighed. “Remind them all what a mistake it was to invite me back into their lives.” 

The bitterness in Touya’s voice dragged the corners of Keigo’s mouth down, and he leaned forward, trying to catch Touya’s eyes as he let all the jokes and distractions fall away for just a moment. “I don’t think you could do anything to make Natsuo stop loving you, Touya,” he murmured, and brushed his fingers gently against Touya’s side.

Touya scoffed and pushed his hand away, lightly but insistently, and dropped his head to stare back down at the concrete beneath them. “... You’re probably right,” he acquiesced with the smallest shrug of his shoulders, though Keigo’s reassurance had done nothing to combat the harsh tone of his voice. “I’ve never deserved that idiot.”

Keigo pulled his hand back towards his body and tucked it loosely against his chest as Touya’s words stretched out between them and faded into silence. He left his eyes locked on Touya’s face. Touya’s eyebrows drew further together the longer Keigo stared, the ever growing distress in his expression only accentuated by the deep shadows painted over it, and Keigo ever so gently angled his body towards Touya in anticipation. Apprehension trickled through his limbs and into the air around them - they were circling around the meat of the issue now, falling slowly but inevitably towards the conversation they had been avoiding like a ship orbiting a whirlpool, and the atmosphere stilled and stagnated with trepidation as Touya’s cigarette slowly burned down.

Keigo pulled the edge of one wing into his lap and started to absentmindedly run his talons through the feathers there, and watched as Touya’s eyes fell closed.

“... This whole situation feels like karma, you know?”

Keigo tugged on the edge of a primary as he listened silently while Touya continued. “I should have expected it. I … I let myself grow complacent. Shit was good for so long that I stopped thinking about the consequences, but after everything I’ve done - “ he scoffed, shaking his head ever so slightly “ - I should have known that it would never last.”

He paused, pulling his bottom lip into his mouth as his shoulders slumped further towards the ground, and Keigo watched Touya’s eyes scrunch up before they slowly rolled open. “Did you know that she would ask me when she was going to get her wings?” he whispered, and Keigo’s mind flashed to the dejected little girl sleeping not too far away, and the sadness that had laced her voice when she had asked if they could still go flying. “And I know it’s shitty. I know it is, to get her hopes up like that and not say something or correct her, but I - “ he lifted his head and stared out towards nothing, flicking the filter of his cigarette as his eyes seemed almost to unfocus “ - she looks so much like you. So much. And I’m so goddamn grateful that she does. And I thought… that maybe it was possible. That with the way your wings regrow, maybe she really would sprout her own,” he muttered. “Or if not that, than some other kind of flight, or telekinesis, or whatever the hell your mother’s quirk was, because I just - “ he cut himself off as his jaw clenched involuntarily, struggling over his words “ - I couldn’t stand the idea of her taking after me for anything. I never even considered that she might get my shitty quirk, like I thought ignoring it might somehow prevent if from fucking happening, and well…”

He swallowed, and the ember between his fingers flickered.

“... Look at us now...” 

Touya’s eyes caught the light of the city where it filtered in over their balcony, and for a moment, Keigo could almost imagine that his irises shuddered and warped like those bright blue flames had only hours ago. “I never wanted - she doesn’t deserve any of this. I can take it. I deserve it - I deserve a fucked up quirk to match how fucked up I am,” he said, emotion leaking into his words as his voice rose, and he pressed his empty hand against his chest. “All the pain, and the all pills, and the all doctor’s visits, and the ever growing fucking list of all the ways fucking Endeavor’s fire is still trying to kill me, I can handle it, but she -”

Touya’s hand curled into his shirt, metal staples glinting in the harsh glow of the skyscraper in front of them, and his expression creased with a patchwork of sorrow and anger. “She’s just a kid!” he continued, “she’s barely five years old, she shouldn’t have that - that weight on her shoulders, she shouldn’t have to worry about any of this shit, ever. Shouldn’t have to come to terms about how ruthless the world can be at such a young age.” He tore his hand away and dropped it to his lap as his fingers curled into a fist, exhaling harshly as his lips twisted into a perverted, depreciating smile. “She didn’t do anything wrong, but it doesn’t matter does it? Her only sin was being born to a bastard of a father ,” he sneered, spitting out the last word as though it was a curse, “but that’s enough to ruin the rest of her life.”

Keigo’s feathers moved restlessly in his grasp, flickering against his palms and threatening to sharpen, and his eyes traced over Touya’s face as his husband’s words settled in. Anger leaked through every seam in Touya’s body and struck Keigo’s own as though it was a physical force, burning across his skin, his fingertips, and through his chest, and for a second, Keigo felt almost like he was watching a moment lost in time - a piece of the past that had been so carelessly dug up, a fragment of the Dabi he used to know who had been driven by nothing but rage, who had terrified thousands and burned down the world on willpower alone. But then Keigo blinked, and the similarities ended; though the flames in front of him might have burned just as viciously, they were built on grief, not revenge, directed in, instead of out, and all Keigo wanted to do was get closer.

Touya brought his hand to his mouth as his shoulders shuddered, shaking through an inhale, and Keigo tightened his grip around his wing to keep from reaching out. Touya’s fingers tightened over his mouth until it was almost as though he was physically restraining himself, digging into the scarring on his cheeks and pulling on the staples there, and Keigo wondered if he was using the burst of pain to center himself. He swallowed as Touya audibly sucked in another breath through his nose, and wet his lips before he finally dared to speak. “You didn’t ruin her life,” Keigo said softly, tilting his head forward to try and catch Touya’s eyes only to watch Touya laugh weakly into his hand.

“You know Natsuo said that same shitty line to me earlier,” he retorted, half muffled by his hand before he slowly loosened his grip, dragging his hand up over his nose and eyes as he started to rub at his temples with his thumb and middle finger, and Keigo felt his lips lift into a smile of their own.

“Guess that means you should listen to us, huh?” he said with a smirk, enjoying the single crack in the otherwise overbearing tension while he could, and forced his feathers to lay back flat against his back while Touya’s mouth twisted.

“... Yeah…” Touya said reluctantly before he sighed and let his head tip forward, propping his elbow against his knee and leaning into his hand as he continued to press into his temples. “Doesn’t mean I have to believe you though,” he muttered more quietly, and brought his cigarette to his lips for another slow drag.

Keigo’s expression fell just as quickly as it had risen, and he let a sigh of his own slip silently through his lips. He couldn’t - wouldn’t - pretend that he wasn’t scared; no father wanted to see their child hurt, and after years of living with Touya and learning just how bad bad days could get, he knew exactly what was at stake. He wouldn’t pretend that he hadn’t been terrified when Takara’s quirk had awoken, wouldn’t pretend that his stomach hadn’t dropped through the floor when he had realized just what that meant, and wouldn’t pretend that he wasn’t sickened by the thought of having to watch his daughter fight everyday against her own quirk, her own body, but neither would he just give up and accept defeat. 

And he would never, ever, blame Touya.

Keigo ran his tongue over the back of his teeth as he thought, struggling over what he could possibly say to reassure his husband while he himself was worried and uncertain. “Touya…” he started without thinking much where he was going, “I promise that you didn’t ruin her life.” He paused, pulling his bottom lip into his mouth as he watched the ember flare at the end of Touya’s cigarette, casting his face in a dark orange hue only broken by darker shadows. “Have some more faith in us, yeah? I’m still planning on giving her the best life I can. And maybe that’ll be a little more difficult now, but who cares? I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge -” Touya’s lips twitched at that, no doubt remembering some past ridiculousness that proved his point “ - and we have more money than we’ll ever know what to do with. Whatever she needs, baby, I promise she’ll get it. We’ll know for certain the day after tomorrow and then… we’ll figure it out.” Touya’s shoulders slumped, and Keigo hesitated, mouth open, for a heartbeat before he continued, “We’ll make sure that her childhood is nothing like yours was. I promise.”

“It’s already too much like mine,” Touya whispered. His cigarette trembled between his fingers, the cinder at the end now very close to his fingertips, and he took one more long, desperate inhale off it before he crushed it without looking into the concrete beside him, dousing their only miniscule light source and plunging them back into the darkness of the city around them. His now free hand joined the other where it was still rubbing at his temples, and he ran both over his face before steepling his fingers together against his forehead, resting both elbows on his knees and leaning forward in a position that Keigo wished he was less familiar with.

“I just wanted one thing,“ Touya started quietly, voice almost lost in the soft rumble of the roads beneath them, and Keigo’s eyebrows pinched together as his eyes widened, locked on Touya’s hidden face. “Just one thing in my life that wasn’t tainted by him , or by my own fucking actions. One thing where my past wasn’t constantly thrown in my face, where I could just be fucking happy , and that was her. Keigo I -” Touya swallowed, and Keigo’s feathers quivered in trepidation “- Keigo every time I look at her now I see myself.”

Touya’s fingers twitched. “And I hate it,” he continued, talking down towards the concrete, and Keigo slowly and quietly shuffled closer, lifting himself on the palms of his hands and inching along until his leg was almost touching Touya’s own. “It’s not a happy comparison; you already know how I feel about myself. And it sucks, because she doesn’t even look like I did, but for some reason that doesn’t fucking matter,” he said scathingly, and a wave of heat rolled off of his exposed arms and ruffled through Keigo’s feathers. “Her quirk is enough to fuck me up, apparently. It’s like she’s cracked open my head… I keep remembering shit - remembering more awful things from when I was trapped in that fucking house, or out on the streets after everything went bad, or even the early days back before my quirk mutated and we were still pretending to be a happy family, and I can’t make it stop . I don’t want to remember any of it.”

Touya sucked in a breath through his hands, and curled farther into himself as though he might be able to shield himself from his own words. “I never - I never dealt with all of it,” he muttered. “I’m sorry, Kei, I’m really sorry, but I just couldn’t. And I tried, I promise I did, but even after years of doctors fucking around in my head, trying to figure out the right combination of words or pills to fix me, there was still some shit that I just couldn’t forgive. He hurt me so fucking bad -” his voice cracked and slipped further towards a whisper “- he took my childhood away from me, and so much of my life, and he fucked up my head permanently , and he doesn’t deserve to ever be forgiven,” he spit out, fingers tensing in front of his face before he forced them to relax. “But then I would come home to you,” he continued much softer, voice almost trembling, “and I felt so guilty when you would smile at me, and tell me that you were proud, and that you were so happy that I was getting better.” He inhaled unsteadily. “So I just tried to forget about it. Just stop thinking about those memories, about the past, for everyone’s sake. And I know it doesn’t work. I know repression doesn’t help, because here we are, and it’s all coming back. ”

Keigo felt his eyes start to burn, and his wings fluttered against his back before they subconsciously moved forward to wrap around his shoulders in a phantom hug as he watched Touya break in front of him.

“I feel like I’m slipping,” Touya whispered. “All the emotions, all the rage that I couldn’t deal with, all the self hatred and - and feeling worthless, it’s all coming back, and I don’t know what to do. I feel angrier than I have in years. I feel like - like how I was back then, and it doesn’t make any sense, because it’s over ,” he gasped, and let his hands slide up over his forehead to dig into his scalp. “He’s already gone, there’s nothing more that I can do, but all the emotions are still fucking here . I don’t know how to get rid of them without getting fucking drunk, or high, or burning something, because I already tried to do this the healthy way, and it didn’t work, and now I’m worried - “

Touya cut himself off, and swallowed visibly, and when he spoke his voice was rough and rasping. “And now I’m worried… that I’m going to… to start looking at her… like that.” He was almost silent, words almost buried under the city around them, and Keigo’s fingers started to twitch in his lap as he leaned in ever closer, shoulders almost brushing. “Like how I used to look at Shouto, how I still… how I still look at him sometimes. Because it’s already happened once, right? I couldn’t fight back against Endeavor, so I picked someone else to blame, to get angry at, someone that I could actually hurt. I needed an outlet, for all those same fucking emotions, and now…”

Touya’s chest heaved, and Keigo dared to rest one hand against his lower back, rubbing his hand in small circles over the sweaty fabric, and felt the itch running through his veins begin to subside when Touya didn’t push him away.

“... I don’t want to become like him, Keigo,” Touya whispered, sounding almost like he was begging to the empty air. “I’m already stuck playing his game of fucking eugenics, already passed on his fucking fire and hurt her, the last thing I want to do is - is -” Touya’s voice cracked as he tried to inhale, and Keigo extended one wing to wrap around him. “It feels inevitable. It’s in my blood. Fuck, look at all the violent shit I’ve already done, it’s almost expected, isn’t it? That I would … abuse my kid, too. I’m sure no one would be surprised, they’re probably just waiting for it to happen,” he spat out, choking on a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sob.

“I mean, even Rei hurt her kids, too, didn’t she? Look at what she did to Shouto - all because she thought he looked like Endeavor, right? I don’t stand a chance. I’m already seeing myself in her, already seeing him, and his fire , one day I’m just gonna - I’m gonna snap and hit her, or burn her, either on purpose or after I have a fucking mental break -” one of Touya’s hand had slid down from his hair, and as Keigo watched him, he dug his fingers into the seam along his cheek like he was trying to rip it open, blood already pooling around his fingers. Keigo’s own hand snapped forward immediately, latching around his wrist and pulling his now red fingers away from his face, and Touya finally turned to look him in the eye.

“I’m so scared, Kei,” he murmured, lips trembling under red, swollen eyes, and blood streaking down one cheek. “I don’t want to fuck up the only good thing I’ve ever had. She’s - she’s the only person in my life that I haven’t already hurt. Please, I don’t want to - I can’t lose her.”

A tear slipped out of Keigo’s eye as he brought both his hands to Touya’s face, cupping his cheeks gently over his scars and staples, and forced Touya to look at him. “Hey, listen to me,” he said softly, words sounding much wetter than he had anticipated, and he cleared his throat. “You are so much more than just your parents’ son. Okay?” Touya’s lips pressed together at his words, and Keigo ran a thumb gently over the unblemished skin beneath his eye. “You are not your father, and you are not your mother. You make your own decisions. You are your own person, with your own life, and your own family, and your own husband.” 

Touya’s eyes flickered between Keigo’s own. “I know that,” Touya said haltingly, “I know that, I know that I’m… I -”

“And I believe in you,” Keigo pressed on quietly. “Because you have already overcome so much. You’re not that same person anymore, and you’re not gonna let this stop you. And you know how I know?” He paused, and watched as Touya’s expression wavered between his fingertips. “Because you care.”

Keigo swallowed hard, lips turning up into the barest smile as his voice fell to a murmur. “You care so much. Just the thought of hurting her has you this broken up, and that means that you’re gonna do everything that you can to prevent it. It means that you’re gonna work for it, and watch yourself, and do what’s best for her. It means that you want to be better than him, and you will be, Touya.” Keigo squeezed his face ever so gently. “And if it ever gets too hard, I’ll be right there, okay? We’re in this mess together.”

“I know that,” Touya repeated at a whisper, before his voice fractured and his expression crumbled. Keigo released his face only to wrap his arms around his shoulders, and tugged him forward to lay against his chest as his wings encircled them both. Touya went willingly, falling forward to tuck his face against the crook of Keigo’s neck as he shuddered, and Keigo began to gently card through whatever black hair he could reach as he squeezed Touya tighter.

“I know you know,” he said softly, lips twisting up ever so slightly at the wording even in the face of just how unfunny the rest of the situation was. “But I’ll tell you as many times as you need to hear it. You had a terrible fucking day, but that doesn’t undo all of the progress you’ve already made, I promise. I love you so much, Touya.”

“I love you, too,” Touya whispered back immediately, and another tear slid free from Keigo’s eye as he turned to press a kiss to the side of Touya’s head. “Fuck, I’m such a fucking mess,” Touya gasped, half muffled into Keigo’s shirt, and Keigo felt himself chuckle as his wings shuddered and drew closer around the pair of them.

“Hey, that makes two of us,” Keigo muttered, and he was almost sure that he felt Touya smile against his skin. Touya shifted slightly in his embrace, moving his arms where they were pinned between their bodies and curling his hands into the fabric of Keigo’s shirt, unintentionally warming his husband’s chest through his clothing and chasing away the chill of the brisk night air. Keigo’s feathers fluttered at the comforting heat as he smiled, and he gently pulled Touya more firmly into his lap, sliding Touya’s half bare legs forward between his own as he began to slowly rock them back and forth.

Touya sniffled, and cleared his throat, and then tilted his head ever so slightly to lean his uninjured cheek against Keigo’s shoulder so that he could speak. “God, I hate that I keep doing this to you,” he mumbled, breathing unsteadily just below Keigo’s ear. “I’m sorry that you have to keep putting me back together, you shouldn’t have to be strong all the time. I still don’t understand why you would ever agree to… to spend your life with this. I don’t deserve you... Fuck, I’ve never deserved you.”

Touya shook his head, tickling the side of Keigo’s face where his dishevelled hair dragged across his neck. “You risked so much for me back then, Birdie, just to give me a second chance at life, and I never appreciated it. They should have thrown you in Tartarus for that stunt you pulled - I still don’t believe any of those fucking heroes actually believed I was a ‘vital informant’, especially after the information you passed along didn’t result in the capture of even a single member of the remaining League,” Touya murmured, and chuckled under his breath, “... but I guess it doesn’t matter in the end. Still…” Touya’s voice softened, and he leaned further into the embrace, pressing his face into Keigo’s shoulder “... I never actually thanked you for it.” He swallowed. “I’m pretty sure I’d be dead by now if not for you.”

Keigo gently removed one arm from around Touya’s torso to wipe at his face, brushing away tears with the back of his hand, and smiled into Touya’s hair. “Hey now, don’t go getting sappy on me,” he laughed quietly. “Maybe I just didn’t wanna be a single dad, you ever think about that?”

“Kei…” Touya uncurled one of his hands and jabbed Keigo in the sternum with the tips of his fingers, digging his nails in surprisingly hard. “...always got a fucking joke, don’t you,” he mumbled, much too affectionately to actually be angry, and Keigo had to force down another laugh as he rewrapped both arms around his husband.

Touya sighed into his shoulder, and slowly slid his own two hands out from between their bodies before wrapping them lightly around Keigo’s chest, finally returning the hug and brushing his fingertips haltingly along the smallest feathers at the base of his wings.

“You know,” Touya said after a moment, “you basically were a single dad for a while... you realize that, don’t you?”

Keigo’s smile dimmed, but didn’t fall, because the realization simply didn’t sting anymore. It had sucked. It was one of the hardest things he had ever done. And he wouldn’t deny that there had been some days where he had wondered if he had made the right choice, if he had fallen in love with someone who couldn’t be saved and doomed him and his daughter to misery - but then things had gotten better. Touya had gotten better. And Touya had chosen them, over and over again, no matter how hard the road to recovery got.

Keigo pressed a kiss to Touya’s temple, and leaned his head against Touya’s own, squishing their faces together as they continued to sway back and forth.

“Guess that means I can do it all, hm?” he teased, and Touya huffed, shoulders shaking ever so slightly.

“Of course you’d turn it into an ego boost,” his husband muttered back, and Keigo squeezed him more tightly in retaliation.

“You love me,” he whispered.

Touya paused, and then pushed back ever so slightly against Keigo’s arms until they were able to look at each other face to face, and brought one heated palm up to cup his cheek, rubbing his thumb along tear tracks that had yet to fade. Touya’s eyes were as startlingly blue as they had always been, and Keigo felt the world disappear around him as he stared into them, losing himself in the honesty and vulnerability that only he got to see.

“Yeah, I do, Keigo,” Touya whispered back earnestly, and Keigo felt his eyes start to burn viciously again all at once. “Thank you for never giving up on me.”

Keigo grabbed Touya’s jaw in his hands just as the tears returned and started to spill back over his cheeks, and kissed him on the mouth, smiling against mismatched lips. Touya jerked in surprise, and then relaxed, breathing out against Keigo’s face as he leaned into the kiss, and Keigo felt all at once like laughing again.

Keigo pulled Touya closer for another heartbeat, and then forced himself to let go, wiping one hand yet again over his face. “Okay, fuck, that’s enough,” Keigo laughed, still mere inches from Touya’s face. “That’s enough shitty emotions for one day, we’re going back to bed.”

Touya smirked, and raised an eyebrow. “Oh we are, are we?”

“ Yes, ” Keigo said and rolled his eyes exaggeratedly before flicking Touya across the forehead. “Yes, we , don’t be difficult.” Before Touya could reply, he lurched forward and slid his hands underneath Touya’s upper thighs while a handful of longer feathers wiggled their way beneath his armpits, and he stood up with his husband in his arms.

“Hey!” Touya shouted, tilting back and unbalancing them both before he jolted forward and grabbed Keigo’s shoulders, legs tightening around his waist and ankles crossing behind his back. “Put me down you fucking pigeon,” he hissed, and kicked Keigo in the ass with the heel of one bare foot, but his husband only laughed.

“Nah.” Touya glared at him with enough venom to kill a lesser man, but Keigo and his long developed tolerance to his husband’s antics remained unphased, and his amusement only increased, burning so much sweeter through his chest after the heartache of the day. Altogether Touya’s much lankier limbs, taller frame, and childishly petulant expression made for quite the hilarious picture, and Keigo leaned forward to knock his nose against Touya’s as he beamed and his husband gagged.

Keigo readjusted his hands carefully along Touya’s legs, and shifted him up to better support his weight. “I’m not hurting you, am I?” he said quietly, and met Touya’s eyes with a softer smile. “Not pulling any staples anywhere?”

Touya’s eyebrows furrowed, lips wavering halfway to a frown, and then he sighed exasperatedly. “No,” he muttered, “I’m fine, asshole.”

Keigo’s expression brightened instantaneously as Touya sealed his own fate and resigned himself to being carried. “Great!” Keigo chirped, smirking as Touya rolled his eyes, and detached a few feathers from his wings to pull open the glass door for them, slipping them into the handle and yanking it open smoothly.

The apartment was much warmer than the balcony had been, and Keigo’s wings fluttered unconsciously as the heat seeped in, rustling against his back and expanding ever so slightly to take in the warmth. The door was shut and locked behind them, and then they were off into the dark apartment, stumbling not quite blindly around walls and furniture as Keigo carried Touya back towards their room, voices dampened under the blanket of the shadows around them.

...

“I’m going to have to look at your cheek, you know.”

“Mmm… fuck, you’re right.”

“You’re keeping me from my beauty sleep, Touya.”

“Hey, fuck off, I didn’t make you get out of bed. I was happy to sit on the balcony in peace, alone.”

“Mhm, sure you were.”

… 

“… oh my god, are you wearing that fucking KFC shirt again? I fucking hate this thing, I can’t believe I didn’t notice earlier.”

“Don’t you insult the Colonel in my house.”

“ Our house.”

“It’s about to be me and the Colonel’s house if you keep that attitude up.”

“Oh, shut up, Birdie.” 

Keigo drifted awake slowly, dreams still lying lazily overtop of reality and blurring the line between awareness and unconsciousness, and Keigo pressed his forehead more firmly into the pillow beneath it. His body was comfortable and warm where he was sprawled out diagonally across the bed on his stomach. His legs and waist were tangled below in the comforter while his upper torso was bare, and he stretched his wings out slowly behind him, draping them across the sheets and into the sunlight that he could feel gently pouring in from the window. He exhaled deeply as he relaxed into the plush mattress, fully intending on returning immediately to sleep, only to be suddenly prodded back to consciousness once again as a high pitched giggle rang through the apartment.

Keigo’s eyebrows furrowed in disappointment, adding another crease to his already smushed face, but he reluctantly pried an eye open anyway. As he blinked against the morning light, he heard the giggling get abruptly cut off by a quieter, lower ‘ shhhhh ’ noise, and Keigo felt himself smile as he stretched and slowly pushed himself onto his forearms. There were a pair of voices fading softly through the closed bedroom door, and Keigo rolled unhurriedly out of bed, dragging a corner of the sheet onto the floor as his legs twisted and dropped onto the hardwood.

Behind him the bed was empty, Touya’s spot noticeably vacant once again, and yet Keigo hardly registered it at all.

He stretched once again, this time raising his arms above his head and shaking out his wings, and then slowly meandered from their room and down the hallway, tugging his sweatpants up higher along his hips as he went. He crept silently, listening to the voices as they grew louder and more familiar the closer he drew to their kitchen, and his smile grew as he turned the final corner and leaned casually against the wall.

Touya was in front of him at the stove, back turned to Keigo, with their daughter sitting upright on his shoulders and resting her tiny arms loosely across the top of his head. Touya had one hand wrapped around Takara’s calf, anchoring her in place, while he reached forward with the other to turn on a burner on the stove and drag a metal pot into place by the handle. Keigo’s mouth watered instinctively at the sight, and he let his eyes fall from his family from just a moment to trace around the kitchen, spotting the rice cooker already plugged in and turned on next to what could have been a plate of natto. He inhaled deeply, grinning as the faint aromas of a sizzling breakfast wafted across their spacious kitchen, and tried not to chuckle as his stomach grumbled quietly in either excitement or protest.

“Taka, hey.” Keigo’s eyes flickered back over to his husband, and he watched as Touya squeezed their daughter’s leg, head still turned down to focus on his cooking and voice kept low. “What was rule number one?”

Takara squirmed in response, shifting her weight across Touya’s shoulders, and curled her hands into his dark hair to keep her balance. “No wiggling,” she said earnestly, speaking as though she was answering the most important question in the world, and Touya hummed under his breath as he pulled another plate across the counter with his free hand.

“And why no wiggling?” he continued.

“Because I could fall, and then I could get hurt,” Takara answered just as passionately, though she fidgeted once again as she spoke, and Keigo could just barely hear Touya sigh through his nose.

“Exactly,” he said, pinning her leg more firmly against his shoulder as Takara giggled. “So that means you have to sit still, ” he reiterated, and reached up blindly with his other hand to poke their daughter in the side. “What was rule two?”

“Be quiet!” Takara responded instantly, smacking away Touya’s hand with a smile and dislodging a few strands of blonde hair from behind her ears, which sprung forward to spill around the sides of her face.

Touya tapped her cheek once in retaliation, and then pulled his hand back down as he returned to his task, sliding open a drawer and pulling out a pair of chopsticks. “Very good, and why do we have to be quiet?” Touya asked, and turned farther away from Keigo he began to carefully lift bite sized pieces of tofu off the plate and drop them into the pot.

“Because we don’t want to wake Papa,” Takara replied, and pushed her hair back out of her eyes with one hand, tangling it amongst the other curls.

“And why don’t we want to wake him?”

“Because it’s supposed to be a surprise!” Takara beamed, and with impeccable timing, turned over her shoulder just as the words left her lips to lock eyes with Keigo himself across the room. Her smile stretched as her eyes widened in surprise and happiness, apparently entirely unbothered by her failure to follow Touya’s rules, and Keigo felt his own mood brighten similarly.

“Hi, Papa!” she shouted across the kitchen, lifting one hand to wave at him and noticeably unbalancing Touya, who himself then turned sharply in Keigo’s direction, face much less happy than their daughter’s above him, and Keigo nearly laughed.

Keigo watched Touya mouth the words ‘ oh, fuck ’ silently before his lips twisted into a mix between a grimace and a smile, and he sighed again as he let his chopsticks fall loudly to the counter.

“Hey, Kei,” he murmured, and Keigo felt his wings flutter against his back as he met Touya’s bright blue eyes from across the room, heart stuttering and time seeming to slow as the early morning light reflected and shimmered so perfectly within them.

He had never been one to believe in fate, or signs from the universe, or any other nonsense that people pointed to when they were looking for reassurance that things were going to work out, but god, just this once, he wanted to.

“Hey,” Keigo said softly back, and Touya smiled.