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Izuku Midoriya is a patient teen. He isn’t sure if that’s one of the few traits that he managed to inherit from his mother, or if it’s a by-product of waiting desperately for news that would never come for year after year after year. The boy can be certain, however, that it is one of the traits he did not receive from his father.
It’s not hard to see the resemblances when you know that it’s there. It’s in Izuku’s eyes, too round and open to be linked at first glance but with a trademark fire burning behind them that gives it away. A jaw that sets too square too often, the self-righteous anger that bubbles up within him and always overflows in the worst possible moments. The truly perceptive might even pick up on the way that they both share a distaste for the number one hero but they wouldn’t live long past mentioning it.
It’s almost funny now thinking about how they must have looked when Izuku finally met the man, rage and disappointment echoing off each other and growing in intensity with every word exchanged. Even funnier to wonder how it had taken him over a decade to put the pieces together when it had never been that complex of a puzzle to begin with.
“You know,” The voice is gruff, but not unkind, as the door closes behind Izuku. “We don’t have to do this if you’re having second thoughts.” The boy next to him is grounding, even when there is so much of their father in him. The same eyes and determination to be better and to burn whatever is in his way to the ground. The only part that might shatter that illusion was the hair that never stayed away very long regardless of how often Touya tried to dye it, though the fact that it had gone white some time ago was a blessing in and of itself in that it let his brother distance himself just a touch more.
“Second thoughts on what? This is what we’ve been waiting for,” The teen twirls the knife absentmindedly in between his fingers and doesn’t look at Touya. Green eyes never leaving the dual chromatic boy still pretending to be passed out in front of them. Izuku wants to remove the cuffs around his wrist and show him to a room, wants to open his arms and tell him that he understands. That he’s sorry. That Shouto never has to be alone or fight for anyone other than himself ever again. But if this is going to go anything like Touya’s first meeting it’s safer this way. Especially given that the majority of the league had to be down the hall monitoring their other hostage of the night.
"Yeah, and I’ve been waiting my whole life to punch Endeavor in his face but i’m probably still gonna get burned when I do it.” That gets a small twitch in the teen’s shoulders and Izuku shifts in his seat. He was hoping the simple hoodie and jeans would help him seem less threatening to offset Dabi’s, well, everything.
There’s a beat of silence before Izuku sighs and looks pointedly at Dabi and then back at Shouto. The taller boy straightens his back, and moves slowly, purposefully making his footsteps louder than they usually are, before gently kicking at Shouto’s chair. “So how long are you going to pretend to be asleep? We don’t have all night.” the response is near immediate, the dual chromatic boy’s eyes snapping open and quickly taking in his surroundings.
“If you’re trying to get at my father you’ve picked a poor way to do it.” Izuku can hear the slightest strain on the words, exhaustion and stress. His older brother moves to stand along the wall, nearly blending into the shadows as Izuku leans forward excitedly, putting on his best smile to lighten the mood.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t about Endeavor, at least not really. Do you want a drink? Compress’s quirk is pretty handy but it always leaves me thirsty when i get back out of it.” Shouto says nothing, wrists tugging gently against the quirk suppressive cuffs to no avail. With a shrug, the green haired boy pulls a file from the floor beside him and begins to flip through it.
“We have a lot to get through, do you want to start with the public records or the private ones? They’re both pretty bad, his approval ratings have never been high but in recent years they’ve plummeted. HIs civilian casualties are up and the amount of settlements he’s had to pay off would be enough to bankrupt any hero below the top twenty and put a dent in anyone who wasn't higher than six.” Shouto still doesn’t move, doesn’t even look at Izuku, eyes still locked on the door in front of him so the teen keeps going. “He’s had to deal with backlash for several comments caught during fights or public recognitions concerning quirk bias, which might explain the way he cuts himself out of his children’s lives the second they stopped being perceived as useful-" the boy's head finally snaps up and it feels like a victory.
“You don’t know anything about my family.” The words are carefully cold and Izuku wonders how many times Shouto has said that exact line to people who were concerned about him.
“You’d be surprised.” Comes the light response, the young villain thumbing through the papers with the same amount of interest as one would a week old newspaper.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Dabi snorts from the wall, but says nothing. His eyes glued to Shouto the same way that Izuku's had been. Maybe later izuku would tease him for it but not now, not when it could topple the careful script he's laid out for the evening.
“It means that Enji was never interested in love, he was interested in breeding the perfect weapon. He almost got it the first time, a child with fire that burned so hot so fast it destroyed the wielder but when Touya-”
“How do you know that name,” Dabi shifts again and Izuku’s eyes slide to his, sharing a look. It’s hard to say whether the chill in the captive’s voice is from disinterest or hitting a raw nerve. Izuku presses on regardless, as his older brother’s gaze locks back onto the human chimera in front of them.
“When Touya began to show the downfalls of this quirk beyond just minor burns along his hands Enji began trying for one without quote unquote deficiencies.” He can see the clench of his brother’s fists in his jacket pockets and wants to take the words back out of the air. He wants to make Enji apologize, shove the folder down the man’s throat until his tongue is lined with paper cuts and he can’t breathe around all the reports he paid to go away. “Three children later, he finally succeeded with you, but things only got worse from there, didn’t they?”
“Did you know that he didn’t even look for Touya when he disappeared? There’s not a single missing child’s report, not one newspaper clipping or online posting. Not just under Touya’s name but for anyone matching his description either. All those years and no one even knew what to look for.”
“Well, he did change his hair.” There’s an almost inaudible intake of air from Shouto as he begins to put the pieces together.
“I didn’t find you through your hair, I found you through your blood. The same way I found Enji and,” Izuku switches his gaze from the paper to the still bound Shouto and he watches as the final bits of the puzzle fall into place in his head, eyes snapping between Izuku and Touya like he can't decide who's a bigger threat at the moment. And while he would argue that neither of them would ever hurt shouto, he can already hear pieces of the first time he met the league in the back of his head, Dabi warning them that Izuku was everything they thought the fire quirked man was and more.
“We’re not related.” It's meant to be a statement but Izuku can hear the waver in his voice, the underlying question of are we ?
“Endeavor said the same thing, but somehow he still recognized the quirkless runt of an extra-marital affair eleven years later by hair and eyes alone." He bristles saying the words aloud, still hearing his fathers voice echoing off alley walls as Shouto decides, at least for now, that he's a bigger problem.
"Did you know that Enji carries the Cis AB mutation in his blood? It’s funny really considering that less than one tenth of a percentage of the population in japan has that genetic makeup.”
“I was never very good at biology.” Shouto’s eyes are locked on the door behind Izuku, watchung his captor through his peripheral vision alone. The green haired boy understands though, when he first brought the evidence to dabi, the man had looked at him like he was the sun, as if it hurt to maintain eye contact with him for too long.
“When i got old enough to understand that he wasn’t coming back, I started looking for my dad. The only thing I knew about him was that he had a quirk that let him breathe fire. It took me a couple of years to save up enough money for a test to trace my bloodline and when they came back and told me that my father carried that same gene. From there it was just a matter of finding him on patrol.” Honestly, Endeavor was easier to track than almost anyone else that Izuku had studied before or since joining the league. Even when there was a change in the man’s patrol it was usually only for something like a festival or parade that would announce he was going.
“You don’t look anything like me.”
“I take after my mom.” Izuku doesn’t let the grin fade even at the ache in his chest when he remembers her. He has her picture in his bag, but he’s long since stopped taking it out. It feels like she’s looking into him through the photo when he does and he doesn’t know what she sees anymore.
“You know what he’s like. More than Touya, more than me, and certainly more than the public and after tonight he is going to be given the number one mantle despite the allegations and critics and outlash that it will cause. They are going to put a man who trained his children like soldiers and threw them away when he was done with them on a pedestal and call him a symbol of peace.” Izuku doesn’t mean to lean forward as he speaks, he isn’t even aware of it until Shouto leans back in his chair ever so slightly and he realizes it’s in an attempt to keep space between them.
“All Might would never let that happen.”
“By the end of the night All Might is going to be a man who pushes himself too far and leaves the shattered remains of the world balanced on the back of a child abuser and a teenage boy.” The venom that seeps out seems to shock the multicolored teen, his eyes widening ever so slightly before shrinking back down to a scowl. Izuku lets his head drop and hang for just a second to clear the memory of closets full of hero merchandise and a too hot presence saying he was foolish for daring to dream. When he raises his gaze again he doesn’t force the smile to come back, letting just a bit of the mask fall free in an attempt for authenticity.
“We’re not going to hurt you. Not now, not ever. The heroes are coming to rescue Bakugo and Ragdoll any minute now and if you decide to go with them we won’t stop you. But you don’t have to. I know that some of the people from the league are rough around the edges-”
“You almost killed my teacher and my classmates. The USJ attack left several of us in the hospital.” The tone of the words is strange. Not quite concerned, but something more than neutral all the same. Annoyance perhaps? Frustration? Izuku had known that Shouto was struggling to make friends but surely the teen cared for them on some level, right?
“And it was a wake up call that brought stricter guidelines on field trips and more security for public events. You’re kids, you shouldn’t be training like soldiers and the quickest way to prove that was to show you put in danger now rather than wait for you to age out into the real world.” The word soldier causes something to seize up behind the teen’s eyes, a wall coming down in a way that Izuku remembers from his earliest meetings with Touya.
“Why should I believe you? Fire quirks aren’t rare and for all I know everything in that folder is fake.” Shouto’s tone finally simmers with something more than mild interest and Izuku wonders who it is that the teen is mad at. Green eyes lock onto brown and blue, letting the other search him for something that he can use to prove his story one way or the other and in the silence Dabi speaks.
“The training room always smelled like bleach because they would clean it overnight so the stains didn’t set. Enji never let his fire drop for a second when he walked around the house even though there was no one to impress or intimidate other than us. Fuyumi sings lullabies to herself as she cooks and studies, but pop tunes when she showers or is getting dressed, and if dad is home it’s nothing at all. Natsuo would never admit it but he hates soba and pretends not to because it was a dish mom liked to make.” Shouto is stiff as a board in the chair that he’s sat on, hands freezing in their latest attempt to tug against the cuffs. His face is unreadable, and Izuku wonders if maybe they were wrong. If maybe Shouto would want a different type of revenge than they did. Dabi continues speaking anyways.
“Hero society is corrupt. The people that he works for knew what he was doing every step of the way and didn’t care. The people don’t like him but they still support him. Stain had the right idea-” Izuku is quick to cut his brother’s oncoming rant off at the head. There is a time and a place for spreading Stain’s ideals and considering the run in Shouto’s classmate had in earlier in the year this was neither.
“Even if his methods were a little extreme. You could be a great, no, the best hero, but in this structure it wouldn’t mean anything at all if you weren’t willing to become corrupt and broken like them.” Izuku pauses again as he hears the shouting down the hall come to a momentary silence and his hairs stand on end. “All we’re doing is giving you the chance to be your own person instead of his clone.”
By the next morning there are two news stories circulating. The fall of All Might and the reveal of his skeletal frame following the defeat of All for One. What his retirement meant for Japan and the world. Whether or not his actions were reckless or selfish. Why he would spend his last days as the symbol of peace becoming a teacher.
But equally as popular are the articles that circle that remind everyone the raid failed. That there were three hostages and only one was recovered in the same condition that they were taken in. Bakugo Katsuki is vicious in any attempt to interview him, his quirk popping along his palms as his friends drag him away from the reporters. Everyone wants to know if he saw Ragdoll loose her quirk and what the villains had to say to him. If they told him what they planned to do.
But even more want to know what happened to Todoroki Shouto. As if the answer isn’t clear in the empty quirk suppressive cuffs they found on the floor of the bar and the spears of ice that kept the building’s infrastructure from collapsing in on one of the rooms in particular.