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When Shouto feels his side flare up in pain, he’s surprised because it’s been a while since his flames had burned himself. Not since he started raising his temperature past the threshold that his body can safely handle. Then he realizes that the burning pain wasn’t really a burn, it was a blade, or more specifically a long piece of jagged glass that sank almost halfway through his side. It had definitely nicked his liver judging by the pain. He gasps and let himself calm down, slowing the flow and loss of his blood by calming his heart. He put a chunk of ice so that the glass doesn’t get jostled as he moved. There were several people collapsed around him, and there is the familiar feeling of frost creeping through the ground.
Shouto doesn’t remember being on duty, though. Had he been hit by some kind of quirk?
“You have nowhere to run, Ice Flare.” An all too familiar voice says to him uncompromisingly, he could hear the smug confidence in its utter victory. Several blasts spark to life as Katsuki rushes him. “Surrender or die!”
Shouto is confused but he leans on a nearby wall and cradles his side, trusting that Katsuki would handle whatever the problem was. Katsuki was consistent like that. “Okay.”
“HUH!?? Okay?! Are you fucking messing with me, bastard?” Katsuki’s infuriated voice is immediately tuned out. It doesn’t really translate properly in his internal Bakugo translator like his usual tsundere self, but that’s probably because his brain is addled with pain and blood loss. “You go ahead and terrorize these civilians then say sorry!? What the fuck?!”
“Sorry.” Shouto says evenly, betraying none of his pain. “I don’t understand? You’re making less sense than usual. Midoriya might worry, so don’t tell him? Tell him I didn’t leave my stove on?”
He feels the feeling in his legs leave him and his body wobble.
Shouto loses consciousness.
Katsuki was here, he’ll be fine.
==
Katsuki stares at Ice Flare dumbfoundedly.
His agency had been contacted by a smaller agency with a request for aid when Ice Flare had popped up in a raid in a Liberation Front base, a video of his cold cold eyes staring through and past a security camera in the building alerting the agency involved in the raid. They promptly sent out an SOS for heroes with high firepower. Which was him.
He’d pay the bastard back for freezing him to the side of a building. And dropping him on a bunch of wild ducks in a nearby park. And rescuing him when he didn’t fucking need to be rescued. He could have handled a few fucking mutated trees, goddamnit.
He’d rushed to the building, taking care of extras and unimportant thugs on the way to the top floor when he sees Ice Flare off the side of the room, a shard of glass impaling his left side.
Then he starts babbling nonsense and mentions Deku? What the fuck.
He pulls out his phone as his sidekicks clean up the villain and the heroes that were collapsed on the floor.
It rings for a second and the person on the other end answers.
“You have three seconds to tell me how you know Ice Flare.” Katsuki growls into the receiver.
“Kacchan?” Fucking Deku just says.
“Three seconds!”
“I don’t?! Know him? At least, you know, personally, since I’m pretty sure—”
“Then tell me why he told me not to tell Midoriya not to worry to my face. Everybody knows you fucking know me.”
“I really don’t know, Kacchan!”
Then Shouto wakes up to beeping on a hospital bed. He slowly sits up, miding the bandages around his torso but the nurse he wakes up to stares at him warily and slowly backs away to the door.
He nods silently, calmly.
“May I ask the date and time?” Shouto asks politely, a small serene smile resting on his lips, eyes gentle. He makes sure to let his lips slant just the right way to broadcast calmcalmcalm. Momo had sicced a communication expert at him during his second year who in turn worked with him so that he can find the best way for him to put people at ease. It generally included a lot of smiling, but small gentle smiles rather than the wide beaming smiles that both All Might and Deku had or the mildly unsettlingly wide teethy smiles that Bakugo tended to use when he was feeling particularly bloodthirsty. They’d told him to study controlling the tones of his voice, also making him memorize cheesy lines that could have been ripped off from a C-rated movie but he can definitely confirm that they work. He’d probably been drugged to unconsciousness judging from the lagging in his brain. He wonders if he missed his weekly lunch with Momo and Hagakure.
The nurse relaxes a bit and he sees a tinge of pink settle on her cheeks which he still doesn’t understand but finds convenient nonetheless. “It’s Wednesday. You’ve been out for four days.”
He feels his brows climb his forehead. “I see. Thank you. Would it be possible to have my phone?”
The nurse tenses again and shakes her head. The she purses her lips and promptly leaves the room.
What?
How unusual.
==
“Ice Flare.” Detective Naomasa, flanked with two heroes that he doesn’t recognize enters the room with grim expressions.
“Detective Naomasa. Hello.” Shouto greets mildly, still not understanding why they were calling him Ice Flare. Sure he’d considered it once as his hero name but he’s Entropy. The total sum of chaos and order. “And it’s Entropy. Or Shouto if you must.” He offers.
The detective’s expression pinches even more. “The only reason you aren’t tied down is because Ground Zero witnessed your surrender. Please refrain from provoking the heroes.”
Shouto tilts his head slightly and his vision is curtained with an unfamiliar black rather than his lighter white and red. He blinks and raises his left hand, the heroes in the room bristling at his action. “Huh. I don’t remember dying my hair.”
Then, ignoring his comments, Naomasa says,
“Ice Flare, you are under arrest for five accounts of arson, breaking and entering, two hundred twelve incidents of theft, fifteen counts of murder and abetting the Liberation Front. You will not be able to escape this place without hurting yourself, so please come with us peacefully.”
Shouto nods slowly. Was he in another person’s body, then? That would explain the different hair, and lets his quirk simmer lightly. That was his quirk though.
He cooperates.
“I don’t think I can walk yet.” Shouto says lamely as he attempts to stand the soreness of the muscles protesting. If they were going to question him as if he was a criminal, them he was going to be petty about it. He doesn’t know how to tell them that he wasn’t a villain though if he looks like a villain. Is probably a villain.
“No matter.”
==
He’s brought to another building after being blindfolded. His wrists are secured to the table with handcuffs. He’s been on the other side of the mirror enough times to know that the handcuffs themselves were flimsy things that were just placeholders the for the red lights of the interrogation room that was a weak imitation of Aizawa sensei’s quirk.
“My name is Tsukauchi Naomasa and procedure requires me to explain the nature of my quirk. It’s called Lie Detector, so I highly discourage you from lying.”
Shouto nods passively.
“What’s your name?” Naomasa asks.
Shouto still lets his ice settle in his lungs just to confirm that he was indeed himself. He raises his hand to prod at his scar, feeling the familiar slightly uneven skin.
“Todoroki Shouto.”
Naomasa freezes before he writes. “Todoroki?”
“Yes?” Shouto sighs.
“Any relation to Todoroki Enji?”
Shouto’s nose wrinkles of its own accord. He still couldn’t reign in his automatic distaste when it comes to his father. “I wish there wasn’t.”
“Relation?” Naomasa presses.
“Father.”
Naomasa takes a fortifying breath and looks at the far wall. Where the heroes were probably hiding behind a one way mirror.
“Alright.”
“Age?”
“26.”
“Now—”
“Detective.” Shouto interrupts. “You do have a truth telling quirk, yes? May I ask questions before we continue?”
“I will be the one asking the questions.”
“Just one, please.” Shouto says calmly. “You may use your discretion to refuse to answer.”
Naomasa nods.
“Who is currently the Number 1 Hero?”
“Tha’s public knowedge, why—”
“Please just answer the question.”
“Lemillion.”
Shouto nods. “Alright. Then I will speak. Your questions might be answered by what I’ll say.”
He was himself but at the same time, he wasn’t.
“My name is Todoroki Shouto, 26, Blood Type O, Number 2 Hero: Hero Name Entropy. I’m currently working in the Artemis Hero Agency together with Number 16 Hero Creati. The last thing I remember would be returning from my regular patrol when I lost consciousness and woke up with a sharp piece of glass piercing my left torso, seeing Ground Zero and losing consciousness. And I’m late for my weekly lunch with Momo and Hagakure-san. I also may or may not have left my stove on.”
“That’s not possible—”
“If you would let me talk to Bakugo Katsuki, Midoriya Izuku, Yaoyorozu Momo or any one in their graduating class except for Mineta, they might be able to say if I’m telling the truth.”
Naomasa went silent, then the door opens violently as if kicked open and Katsuki strolls in. “You can’t just—”
The detective just sighs.
“Talk IcyHot.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m in an alternate universe.” Shuoto says wryly.
Katsuki analyzes him with narrow eyes. “Convince me.”
“Izuku sings when he’s drunk.” Shouto starts. “I don’t think anyone’s been able to stop him from singing that old All Might theme song whenever we went to karaoke. Is Kirishima still pining after him in this world, too? And that face he makes when Izuku gets a bit too close and they suddenly turn bright red and then curls into himself like a… ‘retarded chinchilla’? You also tend to put extra spice in Uraraka’s bowl when you cook because she secretly likes things spicy.”
Katsuki snorts. “The fuck you know that.”
Shouto shrugs. “Alternate Universe. You probably won first year Sports Festival, then? If I’m a villain.”
“Of course, I fucking owned that festival, shithead.”
“Bet you lost to Izuku, Third year.” Shouto’s eyes glitter in amusement.
“Fuck you!” Katuski snarls.
That was pretty much a yes, then.
“Ice Flare—”
“Shouto, please.”
“How do you know Ground Zero?”
“Oh.” Shouto tilts his head to the side. “We’re dating.”
Katsuki bursts into fireworks. “The fuck—Did you just—What the hell, you little shit!”
Shouto grins at him and pulls out the cheesy lines he could never stamp out of his brain that his Katsuki has forbidden him to say on threat of death, dismemberment, and the couch. “Yes, cupcake. You look utterly ravishing even in an alternate universe.”
“CUPCAKE!?”
Naomasa pinches the bridge of his nose.