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Shouto likes to watch Izuku the most.
He’s pretty, in an odd way— his eyes catch the light of the sun like it is shining just for him. He shines in return: Shouto basks in his warmth, the radiating softness of the other boy. Izuku laughs loudly, lives freely: he is everything Shouto thinks a hero should be.
Shouto wonders why Izuku wants to be a hero.
Izuku gazes at All Might like the man has hung the stars, formed a planet from between the spaces of his breaths— Shouto wonders how anyone can look at the man who ruined his life like that. It’s petty, illogical, and Shouto knows it.
But Shouto was built to overcome a man who always had more to give: Touya was born (and burned) to overcome All Might. Shouto made a monster out of his mother, because he could not be better .
He likes to think that if All Might hadn’t existed, Shouto wouldn’t either. It’s a comforting thought— that in some world, there is a place without Shouto.
(He wishes it was this world)
But this isn’t that world, because in this world Shouto watches Midoriya Izuku and wonders why his smile makes him feel warmer than anything he has ever felt. Warmer than Touya, than their father— warmer still than the sensation of hot water on his face.
So Shouto watches Midoriya Izuku and sits in the light of the sun.
And when the day is done, and the dorms fill with noise: still, Shouto watches. He sees a lot— it’s easy, when people learn to ignore him when he sits in the common room. They know he prefers it— that this is his time to float, to exist as neither student nor hero nor friend. This is the time for Shouto , and he is grateful that they have remembered this.
Not even Bakugou interrupts this time— drawn into study at a nearby table, furious and intent on mathematics. It’s a contradiction of opposites: Shouto has never met anyone who confuses him as much as Bakugou Katsuki. Hot and cold, no pun intended— he is mercurial to a fault, aggressive down to the last sinew connecting his bones.
But he softens, when he sees Kirishima. Softens further when Izuku enters his field of view, before Izuku notices Bakugou.
Shouto has heard it from Uraraka a hundred times over, about how Bakugou treats Izuku with something like malice: Shouto doesn’t know how she cannot see how deeply Bakugou Katsuki loves Midoriya Izuku.
And when the dorms grow quiet, Shouto pushes away from the couch that has grown warm and soft under his weight, standing with knees that crack with the strain of two sedentary hours. The burner phone in his pocket weighs him down— he feels like it should pull him down, down, through the ground, to suffocate him.
He should say it burns him, aches hot and fierce against his skin.
But heat is not a thing that scares Shouto, the flicker of flames is not a sensation that sends him reeling into a cataclysm of memory and remembrance.
The thought of lying deep below the earth, when he has so much to do —
That is the true fear consuming Shouto’s life and he doesn’t have the energy to lie to himself about it anymore. Shouto has chosen his paths, dug a grave big enough for a family and he will lie in it, until one by one his family lies with him.
And then—
Shouto will be content to suffocate under the earth.
The soft vibration of a text against his thigh— it is past eleven pm, twenty minutes before the next teacher patrol comes through. They will check them, one by one— Shouto wonders if this is the care one is meant to associate with a parent.
He wonders— when he thinks of Aizawa and his gruff, acerbic affection— whether the man will look like his father does when he realises the truth.
When he finds the safety, the privacy of his dorm room: it is like a weight falls from his shoulders. In between these walls— this space is his. It is not Touya’s, nor is it Endeavour’s — this space is for Shouto alone.
He hasn’t had something wholly his own before.
Shouto dials the only number in his phone and thinks of wide, green eyes that light up with sunlight even when the sun has sunk below the earth as he holds it to his ear.
“I’ve done the last of the profiles.”
A low hum in his ear, almost beyond the register of the phone microphone. “Good job, little brother.”
Shouto shuts his eyes and thinks of a world where he isn’t a traitor, and maybe, just maybe— a world where Shouto doesn’t exist anymore.
Touya laughs in his ear, and Shouto can almost smell the scent of ozone and ash of the monster that his brother has become.
“Oh Shouto— there is no world but this one.”