Work Text:
Shouto knocks gently on Kaminari’s door on a Friday morning, and twists the knob open.
“I need to go,” Shouto manages through numb lips.
Maybe he’s barged in, but Kaminari’s got the grace to understand what he means. Kaminari is the only one in the entirety of Class 1-A who knows how to drive, for some god-cursed reason, and despite how his words tend to overflow and spill without much grace, he’s got enough conscious tact to not question Shouto’s request.
It’s not like this is a first.
“Okay,” Kaminari says, without hesitation. Shouto likes that about him. He also doesn’t reach forward and try to touch Shouto despite his general touchy-feely-ness, which he appreciates because he doesn’t particularly want to be touched right now.
Kaminari inhales, and breathes out gently as Shouto remains standing still, unable to move his limbs quite right. “Okay then. Where do you want to go, and who else is coming?”
Shouto doesn’t have a lot of friends. He’s close with everyone in Class 1-A, in the way that people who experience severe and repeated trauma together are, and Midoriya, Uraraka, Asui, and Iida are the first people he’s ever genuinely called friends. He loves them a lot, in an unfamiliar but not necessarily bad way; yet he doesn’t want to talk to them, because they’ll know that something’s wrong, and he doesn’t want everyone to know that there’s something wrong with him. Despite how it might seem relatively ironic on the surface, Kaminari is his best bet at getting out of here without anyone prying at his feelings.
Kaminari is just like that: his outward investment in other people doesn’t stretch beyond what’s individually and situationally warranted. And if Shouto needs to be in the stabling presence of another real person for an extended period of time without being pitied and picked and peeled, Kaminari is more than enough human for the both of them.
It’s selfish, he knows. But right now, Shouto is too far in the back of his mind to actually care about these things.
“Me,” Shouto decides. “And you.”
Kaminari blinks. Blinks a few more times.
“Are you sure?” he asks carefully, voice not too soft to feel like he’s cradling Shouto in blanket-swaddled words, because Shouto is not fragile and he doesn’t like being treated as such. “You don’t really want to be stuck in my exclusive company for extended periods of time.”
They both have to know that’s a lie. Kaminari is one of the very few people who truly, instinctually understand how much Shouto needs a certain form of silent care.
“Yes.”
People tell him he’s blunt all the time, but Kaminari has never minded. It’d be ironic if I were to be a dick about being bad at socializing, he’d said once, laughing when Shouto pointed out the fact to him. Sometimes, the best response is to just say the truth, y’know?
Present-time Kaminari’s lips tilt up ever so slightly, his toothy grin poking through, and he gives a somewhat subdued thumbs-up. “If you insist, Todoroki! I’ve got you.”
Shouto knows.
⇆
Kaminari is kind enough to pack for himself without asking the context, only quietly requesting for Shouto to receive permission from Aizawa-sensei prior to leaving. Shouto does so, aware that Kaminari doesn't actually keep a car on school grounds — rather, needs to take a train to a place where he keeps a car.
(At this point, Shouto's too afraid to ask if the car's actually his, or if he acquired it through other means.)
Aizawa-sensei knows, as an underground hero. He knows why Shouto needs to go, and it's kind of embarrassing but he asks it anyway because facing his teacher is preferable to facing his friends.
Who’s accompanying you? he’d asked, and Shouto had shrugged.
Kaminari offered to drive me, he says, even though he’d mostly showed up and asked Kaminari to drive him because it’s a thing that their relationship has. Shouto’s brain gets bad more frequently than he’d like, and Kaminari keeps his door open at all unholy hours of the night, so he’s inevitably ended up laying on the fluffy striped rug and sometimes the squishy striped bed for the sake of company more often than he’d like to admit. Shouto shows up in the dead of night more frequently than anyone needs to know, and they don’t talk about it outside the darkness.
Aizawa graciously hadn’t questioned the whole driving factor.
So he'd gotten permission, despite taking time off of the lowest ranked student's Friday classes and weekend meant for studying on those very crucial exams taking place next week, with reassurances from the guy himself that he was cool with the arrangement, and now they’re stepping off the train from Musutafu to the edges of Tokyo-Saitama, and suddenly Kaminari is pushing him into the shotgun seat of a scrappy violet-red car, and Shouto blinks rapidly when he realizes that he has no idea how they got here.
“You doing alright?” Kaminari checks, a tinge of worry laced in his voice some distance away from where Shouto sits despite being only a few feet away. “Oi, ‘Roki. You in there?”
“Yeah,” Shouto says, or thinks he says. He’s not entirely sure if human words are coming out of his mouth properly — sometimes it happens.
It’s fine.
Okay, Kaminari says quietly, or maybe he’s shouting; Shouto’s not sure. That’s okay.
Shouto lets himself drift away for a while, burrowing beneath the billowed snow blanketed quietly over his feelings. Nothing buzzes beneath the distilled polar surface, the way bears go into hibernation when the flurries get too thick to see and move through; not living, just existing. It must be nice to be able to retreat into the back of your mind and detach from the world on an annual basis without it being weird, because then nobody can judge you and nobody can see you and all you need to do is keep breathing.
(Sometimes, Shouto forgets how easy it can be to forget how to breathe.)
He doesn’t really know how this came to be.
Shouto was born with fire in his lungs and ice in his veins, and a purpose that he’s never been too good at fulfilling as well as the people who matter want. It’s complicated, because Shouto has been trying his best since the day he was born, but his best is never enough, and then suddenly it’s more than enough, and then suddenly the man who’s defined him all his life is gone, and the ground beneath his feet is swept away like tsunamis against a rafter.
There’s a hand gently pulling him along.
Everyone in the Todoroki family keeps dying. Touya died at twelve because he wasn’t good enough, and then Mom died in the sense that she wasn’t coming back because she wasn’t good enough; and now, the old man’s died as well, even though he’s always been good enough for hero society despite everything he ever did. It just proves that being good enough isn’t enough to prevent the loving candlelit cradle of death.
Who’s next?
It’s between Fuyumi, Natsuo, and Shouto himself, because everyone in the Todoroki family keeps dying.
Shouto can look at these things logistically. Shouto is the one running headfirst into battle — not the one being a hero to people who need one, but he is the one who’s going to get burned first if the world was set on fire further than it already is.
He knows, he does; and somehow, he’s never minded it too much.
Kaminari pulls him into a car, closes the door. Starts driving.
Everything is soundless under the styrofoam blizzard.
When Shouto blinks himself back into life with a flinch, half-wishing someone had just punched him out of it, Kaminari is humming lightly to some turned-down music reminiscent of a screeching Bakugou, eyes fixed on the road and hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. The golden blonde strands fall softly around his face, framing an oddly neutral expression for the general embodiment of the sunlight. Shouto reaches over for the waterbottle pressed in the cupholder between them.
“Hi,” Shouto says when he finishes downing a solid half of the bottle, immediately grimacing at the roughness of his voice, and the other boy half-jumps in surprise, the car jerking along with the motion.
“Oh!” Kaminari’s face shifts into an excited smile. “Hi.”
Shouto isn’t used to people smiling so excitedly at him in specific, for nothing but Hi . It’s kind of cute. “Hi.”
“Do you need anything?” Kaminari blurts out, immediately reaching for the mutual waterbottle and unscrewing the cap before holding it out to Shouto.
Shouto stares down at it, and Kaminari spares a look.
“Um. I just drank from the waterbottle,” Shouto says slowly.
“Right. I knew that.”
Heavy-metal cockatoo-Bakugou-screeching-hoarsely continues its skirling from the radio.
"Alright, what do you want to do?" Kaminari questions. “I’ve just kind of been driving in the general direction of Hikawa.”
Shouto considers. "We could walk somewhere," he suggests blandly. "In the mountains."
Kaminari snorts from the driver's seat beside him, reaching over to change the music station. "I hate to break it to you, buddy, but you do not have the most generally creative ideas I've ever heard."
"Oh," Shouto says, "sorry. Would you rather walk in the forest?"
"I hate how inherently genuine you are with everything," Kaminari grumbles, shifting his seatbelt against his shoulder. "C'mon, let yourself be a little unhinged! You don't need to work so hard to conform to society's definition of ‘roadtrips’. It's just us — two bros, driving in a car, to a place for some time. We can go fucking wild ."
Shouto squints, contemplates. "Would you prefer to go to a forest to commit arson?"
"Preferably at your dad's house," Kaminari objects, "but I'm cool with that too, though it’s not very healthy for the environment. Plus, we can roast marshmallows over the open fire that way." He grins brightly and winks, the expression lighting up his face in a way that Shouto likes to look at for no really good reason at all, and jerks his head at the backseats stuffed with undisclosed bags that Kaminari had taken the liberty of bringing along. “I brought some with that in mind!”
“Oh.”
Kaminari… wants to have fun with him. Which Shouto appreciates, because nobody aside from his closest friends really interacts with Shouto for no reason other than either A. Being the press, or B. Wanting something he can give them — except Kaminari is taking this roadtrip(?) and running with his feet off the ground and ideas on his mind.
Shouto is kind of tired. Has been for a while, maybe ever since the day he was conceived in the head; but with how death crawls into life like a crab into tidepools, it’s dripping into his marrow now and weighing down his bones so unlike a bird at flight, the sensation dragging its residue around an unmoving body in a cumulative flurrying spiral bouncing against the hollow pillars of structure.
Shouto just wanted to leave.
Kaminari seems to sense a certain air of disappointment around Shouto, even though he’s not particularly disappointed. “Don’t worry about it,” he promises. “That was a joke. Mostly. Sometimes, just walking in the mountains is better.”
Thank you, Shouto wants to say, but words are too hard to pronounce right now.
“I’ll just compile a list before we head out, yeah?”
⇆
Todoroki & Kaminari's Unofficial Roadtrip-List Item #1: Walking up a mountain.
“Todoroki Enji died earlier today,” Shouto announces flatly at the halfway point.
Todoroki & Kaminari's Unofficial Roadtrip-List Item #2: Talking about traumatic events with the approximate bluntness of a knocked-out green goat’s tooth.
Kaminari almost trips on his face to plant in the dirt of the trail. Shouto tilts his head and wonders if he should’ve tried to catch him. He waits for Kaminari to tell him that promptly leaving the city and walking up a mountain isn’t exactly the most appropriate reaction to the death of a father, especially not for any self-respectable, favorite son, but he doesn’t.
“Oh — Oh. ” Kaminari is visibly trying very, very hard to not look like his brain has fried itself. “Oh, fuck. How does this work? Welcome to the dead fathers club, I guess?”
“Your father is dead?” asks Shouto curiously, because as far as he’s aware, Kaminari’s father is not dead.
Kaminari finger-guns awkwardly. “Dead to me, at least.” The finger-guns drop. “Um. Sorry about that. Shit, that was probably super insensitive. I — Do you need a hug?”
“Probably,” Shouto acknowledges to the latter, not making any moves to receive a hug because who knows what to do with their body and arms when they intend to go through the motions of physically hugging another human being?
“... Would you like me to give one to you?” he attempts to rephrase.
Shouto thinks about it. “Sure,” he says. That’s what people do after death happens sometimes, right?
Kaminari laughs tightly and steps forward. Shouto’s got a solid eight-or-so centimeters on the smaller boy, so his arms go around under Shouto’s and meet comfortably around the back. There’s some unwritten rules about this somewhere out there. Shouto’s head drops lightly onto the knitted beanie nestled in his hair, and for a moment, the clinging colors of warmth bleeds into the hazy plane of existence that he’s been floating above for the past few hours or so.
Todoroki & Kaminari's Unofficial Roadtrip-List Item #3: Receiving a hug.
It’s rather impressive how fast they’re flying through Kaminari’s hypothetical list of accomplishments to achieve during a spontaneous roadtrip.
“Do you feel any better?” Kaminari ventures hesitantly.
Shouto only hugs him tighter. It’s probably not within social etiquette to do so; but if anything, Shouto’s been filled with nothing but spite since the moment he realized that in his father’s eyes, his only purpose behind being born was to surpass an almighty idol. Yet Kaminari doesn’t pull back at all and clings on with a steady heartbeat beneath the grey jackets, which reduces some of the vexing complexities of touching other human beings, and positions himself so Shouto can bury his face the rest of the way he so desires.
And he does.
The mountains don’t stop singing, but it’s quiet enough in this encapsulated bubble of time where death’s candlelit cradle rocks away that for a moment, Shouto can almost forget that he’s a real human person who exists.
(Shouto doesn’t really suffer from the typical teenager’s lack of self-esteem, no. He’s well aware of his purpose in life, as it’s been so drilled into his head from the moment his quirk kicked in. He doesn’t entirely consider himself a waste of space. A waste of time, maybe, and most certainly a waste of emotional exhaustion from his strange classmates; but he can serve a purpose as a hero, and he knows that he’s good at it, too.
But he is insecure in the fact that nobody normal really wants to look at him like a human being, and he’s insecure in the fact that his existence has been prolonged beyond the simplicity of intentioned weaponry. He’s insecure in the fact that his family never really loved him for the convoluted reasons; the fact that he’s the perfectly balanced product of two certified adults; the fact that his eye burns from ice, not the fire it’s scared of.)
He realizes that his hands are being pressed in between smaller, softer ones, calloused tips and curved knuckles, firmly but still gentle as to not harshly disrupt his spiraling descent from the clouds.
Oh, he thinks dizzily, retracting his fingers back towards himself.
“You’re okay,” Kaminari murmurs. “You don’t need to talk about it unless you want to.”
Shouto remembers being four and being told to hold his flames he doesn’t know in for as long as he can by a sheet of white hair, being five and being told to hold his words he doesn’t know how to pronounce in for as long as he can by a sheet of red flames. He remembers being twelve and being told to pronounce a truth that isn’t real to the people who ask; being thirteen and being told that the people who ask are the key to success in a world he never asked to be in. Fifteen, and being told to use his flame and ice as his own, and achieving everything he was ever meant to be in the eyes behind the ashes.
And now, he is sixteen, and watching the ashes he’s been built of crumble away from their intangible urn and dissipate in the wind, leaving him a handful of scattered grey dust.
“Um,” Shouto says, hating the way his voice sounds all stuffy and clogged in his ears. “Okay. Thank you.”
Kaminari gives a slight huff of amusement. “You don’t need to thank me either, Todoroki. I’m your friend.” He nods, as if Shouto has provided him with a sufficient response, then abruptly starts walking again, nearly tripping on a rock underfoot and flailing his arms in desperation to balance himself. Startled by the unexpected burst of action, Shouto tips and strides after, nearly running straight into the other boy with the sharp adjustment.
It’s silent the rest of the way, but Shouto’s thoughts aren’t overwhelming in the company of others despite the open sky being a blank canvas for their paint tin of words.
… Well, mostly silent.
“You know, you’ve got the social grace of a fancy plate of escargot,” Kaminari suddenly declares.
Shouto blinks. “‘A fancy plate of escargot’?” he echoes, somewhat impressed by his creativity.
“Yes,” he insists. “Hear me out.” He jabs a finger at Shouto, points at the ground. “Snails. But boiled. And fancy, with finely chopped garlic and butter. A superlative dish of tears, trauma, and indicative of bad taste from those who make it.”
Clearly, Kaminari has thought about this analogy far too much.
“I’m not fancy,” Shouto protests.
“I bet you’ve never been in a thrift store.”
Shouto does not want to confess that he has no clue what exactly a thrift store might be.
“You, and Yaomomo, and Class Prez.” Kaminari sighs dramatically. “ Rich . Explodey Boy, Kiri, Ash? Also all rich for some reason. What is with you all?”
⇆
“Listen,” Kaminari says urgently after they finish walking down the mountain, sitting on the trunk of their transportation. “I found this… thing in the aisle of 7/11 when Kiri and I went downtown last weekend.”
He holds out a mysterious white-bottled and yellow-capped tube of English characters scrawled across the front. Underneath the logo, there’s the outline of a headless-dog illustration beneath spirals of horrific yellow trails leading down to what may or may not represent a pretzel. There’s a certain inherent discomfort to be instilled in one upon witnessing the labeling of itself, let alone the advertising imagery and coloring; and quite possibly, the distinct urge to vomit.
Shouto regards it dubiously.
“And it was the only one on the shelf,” Kaminari goes on enthusiastically. “So of course I bought it. I was going to give it to Aoyama, but then you showed up and I figured, well, I might as well share!”
“Does that say ‘Easy Cheese’? ” Shouto breaks in to inquire.
Kaminari looks down at the packaging and nods in all his English-fluency. “It most certainly does,” he agrees serenely, much more so than he should. “Want to join me in brutally eviscerating my bowel functions for the next week or so with this abomination? It’s pretty effective in taking the mind off other things to be sad about, except it doesn’t lead you down a spiraling path of crippling alcoholism.”
“That looks like it could kill a Noumu,” Shouto observes thoughtfully, not denying the most certainly objectively detrimental suggestion. “That concept sounds like it could kill a Noumu.”
“Ah. Never too soon for death jokes, eh?”
He takes the bottle between his hands, turns it over to inspect the bottom with a hum. The dating goes back to August 5, 2150.
Kaminari leans over to take a look.
“Huh.”
Todoroki & Kaminari's Unofficial Roadtrip-List Item #4: Evade premature-death induced by America’s favorite product in a tube, following whipped cream.
Kaminari sighs. “Well, that label can’t stop me, because I can’t fucking read.”
“No,” Shouto says with no small amount of internal horror the moment he realizes exactly what Kaminari’s intentions are. “Don’t.”
“I’m going to,” Kaminari says gleefully, pulling out his phone and shoving it hastily at Shouto, who barely manages to maintain a grip on it with how lightly he touches the screen. “Here. I want you to film me so I can send it to Kiri and Ashido and Sero. Maybe Bakugou too, because it’s funny to see him trip over his salty feet over how much he indiscreetly secretly cares about my wellbeing.”
“I am not filming the death of a minor. I won’t be responsible.”
“I would never die from a mere can of measly, outdated spray cheese. I could never become a spurious-cheese-defecating corpse in the middle of the woods. You won’t be responsible for shit.”
“Somehow, I doubt that statement.”
Kaminari sulks, crosses his arms. “Not gonna lie, but your preservation over your own life is kind of boring.”
“If you die,” Shouto says, with zero inflection in his tone, “I’ll be isolated here, in the middle of the woods, all alone with your spurious-cheese-defecating corpse. There will be no chance of initiating contacting human society to rescue me through cell service, due to the fact that my phone is dead, and you’re going to be too dead to charge it for me. By conclusion, I’m going to have to set the entire forest ablaze and wait for someone to find the source, since I am at a loss as to how to return to civilization from this remote location. The arson on the list will be fulfilled at the wrong locations, and it’s not healthy for the environment, nor particularly becoming of a future pro-hero.”
“That’s melodramatic.”
“You’re making bad life choices. It’s not healthy for you.”
“Bold of you to assume I’m not a bad life choice.”
“Were you created by accident?” asks Shouto insouciantly. “I was a very deliberate life choice.”
Kaminari stares at him.
Shouto stares back. Blinks twice.
Kaminari sputters, then cackles. Laughing, then wheezing, then choking on what might be his own spit with how he suddenly starts coughing.
Is it really that funny?
Shouto passes him the waterbottle in replacement, prying the mere can of measly outdated spray cheese from the other boy’s hands and forcefully uncapping it to unsubtly set it on fire. He grimaces at the fumes and promptly spews a fistful of ice into the darkness.
“You know,” Kaminari manages after swallowing half the bottle, voice raspy, “it’s good that you can make jokes as awful as that so soon.”
Oh. Shouto had almost forgotten for a moment.
Kaminari has a certain talent to him about making people forget about their wallows. It’s something that he’s done consistently when Shouto enters his room too late at night for human beings to be awake, where he pulls up TikTok archives on his cracked phone screen and invites Shouto onto his leopard-patterned bedsheets to show off the origins of the greatest sense of humor of humankind until the fire that plagues his dreams become a distant drift of chimney smoke. Where he talks so much that there’s no more air for self-destructive words and ocean of fear swamped in Shouto’s mind, where he makes objectively terrible jokes and distractions at the expense of his own dignity — occupies Shouto’s head with himself, a vibrant flurry of spraying sparks. And once the racing has calmed to a functional heartbeat and mind to match it, Kaminari will go silent and wait to let him say the words he wants to say if he knows how to.
Even if he doesn’t know what’s going on, Kaminari will wait. It’s a certain kind of care that Shouto likes more than he deserves, and Kaminari probably doesn’t even consciously know it.
Midoriya can spend ages and pages analyzing quirks and behaviours, and figure out how to make people who have seen too much smile; Iida can break the needs of drowned teenagers down over the course of a class year, and provide their materialistic compensations with an undeniable choppy care; Uraraka can see when people aren’t feeling well and offer inherently soft comfort if sought, even though she can’t give materialistic compensations; Tsuyu can see the blatant truth behind denial, and bluntly state it when no one else is able to confront it. Shouto loves them, more than he ever thought he’d love any person since the day his mother turned to exported embers from the dwindled flames.
Except Kaminari intrinsically gets people on an instinctive level, more than most people do. Kaminari gets Shouto.
Shouto himself doesn’t really get people at all. He doesn’t even get himself, most of the time — no one ever taught him, and maybe part of it is that he’s always been missing this certain something that seems to hold everyone functionally together.
He doesn’t know if it comes from an innate sense of self, or if it’s because he’s been there before. If Shouto were to be honest, he thinks it comes from Kaminari the way the sunlight bleeds out of his lightning veins. It’s effective, holding off until some semblance of ease seeps back into his bones.
(If he doesn’t want to say anything more about what’s happened today, then Kaminari will be okay with it and won’t press. They’ll go back to Yuuei a day from now, go back to their classes and training and resume heroism, and they won’t need to talk about it, and this drive will only exist in the back of their minds.)
“It wasn’t a joke,” is all Shouto ends up saying; although, in retrospect, it is rather funny.
“Now that’s where the concern really kicks in, because I, too, have unfortunately also extracted that fact.”
Shouto really does not know how to feel about that.
⇆
Todoroki & Kaminari's Unofficial Roadtrip-List Item #5: Do classic driving-to-places things, like playing guitar.
“Jirou taught me this one,” Kaminari says breezily, perched on a shaded rock and hunched over his (Jirou’s loaned?) acoustic guitar with his tongue sticking ever so slightly out of the corner of his mouth. Shouto doubts the other boy is even aware of that habit, considering how frequently he sees it occurring, but it’s cute, so he doesn’t say anything about it now, either.
“Well,” he admits, “more like I shoved the music in her face and demanded that she teach me, and she rolled her eyes and grumbled about how sappy I am, but like — I have good taste.”
Shouto doesn’t really know what to say to appease the guy, so he just shrugs and pulls his scarf around his neck a little tighter even though he’s not cold.
Kaminari hums under his breath, letting Shouto not respond, picking away at the strings at an almost excruciatingly slow pace. “Don’t make fun of me,” he warns.
Shouto would never, and says as much.
“I’m serious!” Kaminari whines, setting the guitar to the side and leaning forward on his elbows to stare into Shouto’s eyes from where he sits only a few feet away. “Jirou would never let me live this down if she gets ahold of the fact. I only have her guitar because I forgot to give it back to her last time I borrowed it, and because she already owns, like, five and isn’t really into acoustic that much.” He pauses consideringly, then adds, “It’s kinda ironic, considering that I actually prefer acoustic over electric, because I’m electric and — you know, electric —”
“I get it,” Shouto interrupts seriously with a nod of affirmation. “That’s funny.”
“I know, right?” Kaminari beams, like Shouto’s handed him his entire lost childhood wrapped up in a nice snow globe to put up on his shelf. “Jirou doesn’t think it’s funny.”
“Disappointing.”
“Anyway,” Kaminari goes on, satisfied, “now that we’ve established that you’re not going to make fun of me, I would like to present to you the greatest song to ever exist.”
“The… greatest song to ever exist.” Somehow, Shouto is skeptical.
Kaminari does not seem like the sort of person who would be able to choose a single favorite song, and this is only verified by the way he coughs and elaborates, “Well, the greatest song that I am personally capable of rendering to exist.”
“Is it a song from TikTok?”
“Oi! ” Kaminari squawks indignantly. “I’m far more cultured than TikTok.”
His apps page says otherwise, as does the many late nights they’ve spent up together, but alas.
Kaminari’s voice isn’t bad at all, Shouto will admit. It cracks a lot, accordingly to how his voice cracks a lot in general, except not to the dangerously fluctuating degrees it normally wavers at, and he can’t hit any of the lower octaves without breaking off and laughing. His guitar-playing has significantly improved since the school festival, where he kind of just learned some chords and roughly transitioned between them to the beat — he must practice with Jirou pretty frequently during all those hours they spend in each others’ rooms, which upon memory, gives Shouto a strange pang that he can’t quite identify.
But it’s soft. The music is soft, and for some reason, it feels oddly like it’s being addressed to Shouto even though he can’t really imagine anyone ever having that much dedication to him as a person.
“You should try it,” Kaminari encourages after he finishes and Shouto’s quiet applause dies out. “It was great, right?
“So, here.” Kaminari doesn’t wait for a response, moving over to Shouto’s rock and scooching up close to his side, physically lifting his arms and dumping the guitar in his lap. “It’s fun! Maybe this could help you acquire some hobbies outside of solely being pretty, or at least an idea.”
Shouto flushes at the ridiculousness of it all. “Huh?” he says dumbly.
“You heard me right!” He winks, then starts positioning Shouto’s arms into some semblance that mirrors his previous actions. Normally, Shouto doesn’t know how to feel about human touch, but he finds that he doesn’t mind it too much when it’s from Kaminari, who touches other people like it’s about as natural as angering Bakugou.
“Will Jirou-san not be upsetted by my playing of her instrument?”
Kaminari frowns, pausing. “I mean, I’ve been borrowing this one for about three months now. As in, I’ve been using this one for three months, and she pretty much implicitly trusts me with it even if I don’t return it to her.”
“Why don’t you just get one for yourself?”
“Dude, I’m literally broke. Those things are expensive as shit.”
(Shouto will keep that in mind next time Kaminari’s birthday comes around. Or maybe even sooner — after all, Endeavour doesn’t really have much more use for his credit card anymore.
… That’s morbid .)
Kaminari somehow gets even closer, and starts humming to himself as he rearranges Shouto’s fingers into a very uncomfortable position that makes him wonder how guitarists are still functional human beings. “This one’s the G-Major chord,” he says. Tracing his fingers vertically down each string, he continues, “E, A, D, G, B, and then E again. The frets going down the neck basically raise each note a half-step, so the fingering is basically forming the notes that would be in a G-Major triad. If you know the equal temperament patterns for piano, you should be able to apply them to the chords according to the original pitches.”
Shouto tries to organize those words into a box in his mind. He took piano lessons for about three years, from seven through ten until his father decided that they were irrelevant to becoming a proper pro-hero, so he should probably know what Kaminari is talking about better than he actually does.
“Now, you just. Like. Strum the strings,” Kaminari describes descriptively.
Shouto panics, and fire comes out of his fingertips, singing the strings. Immediately, he pulls a Todoroki Rei by releasing the neck and smothering it in ice with his left hand, except too much ice comes out and he ends up with an entire frozen and definitely burnt guitar in his lap.
The two of them stare at it for an excruciatingly still moment.
The crickets chirp.
Shouto starts to question why he ever let one of Jirou’s prized guitar get within a ten-foot vicinity of himself.
“Fuck,” Kaminari pronounces eloquently, by conclusion.
⇆
They manage to unfreeze the guitar via heating some more of Shouto’s ice to pour over the instrument, cringing as the steam rises into the air. The strings are definitely ruined, and Shouto promises to replace them, because Kaminari is broke and Shouto is the one who ruined it anyway.
(Fire does have the tendency to ruin things.)
There’s still some hours left in the day, but it remains unstated between them that they’re not returning until Sunday. Kaminari’s slumped over a particularly uncomfortable-looking rock, both his and Shouto’s phone chargers stuffed into his mouth, and scrolling through the former. Shouto himself is sitting on the ground, legs crossed, and reading the last chapter of a novel Mic-sensei assigned last week without actually processing the words in it — in the way where he’s reading each word aloud in his mind, but he doesn’t actually know what they mean, and he can’t string together comprehensive sentences or paragraphs or stories out of it.
It’s something similar to life in general. Something similar to whatever this roadtrip-drive has been.
Shouto closes the book, and lets out the air in his lungs for seven full seconds.
“I still need to go to the funeral,” Shouto says softly. “Whenever it happens. Probably before the end of the week.”
Kaminari lifts his head, looks over. “Oh. Do you want to go?”
"Does anyone want to go to a funeral?" he deadpans back.
“That is an excellent point.”
But Shouto doesn’t know what he wants, and though Kaminari laughs, he waits patiently for an answer. So he gives one: “I’m supposed to go,” he settles for.
Kaminari nods, like he understands. “I can see why,” he concedes, wincing, sitting back into a normal human sitting position and clicking his phone light off.
Silence falls over them, nothing but the barely-rustling foliage above their heads filling the air.
“They’ll expect me to say something nice about the old man,” Shouto hears himself saying. “The people who attend, I mean. It’ll probably be a lot of people. I wouldn’t be surprised if the press somehow makes it in.”
(Fuyumi will, too. Fuyumi will be disappointed if Shouto can’t be bothered to say something kind about their father. Somehow, he doubts that she’ll be able to get Natsuo on the train at all, and the presence of his mother is still debatable despite the expected publicity.)
“If the press can infiltrate the funeral of the number one hero on the charts, I’m not sure if I’d be more impressed by the press’ apparent ninja skills, or disappointed by the security department’s inability to actually follow up on their job,” Kaminari jokes, underestimating the press’ asinine resolve of invading privacy.
“I don’t really have anything particularly nice to say about him, though.”
Kaminari changes position again, wrapping his arms around his leg. “Then don’t.”
“You don’t get it,” Shouto says despairingly. He lights his left palm, watching the flare of an entity dance whorls of ignited fuel veins. “I can’t just — I can’t just say, ‘He was an abusive asshole, and I’m here at his funeral because of obligatory familial duty and the fact that I’m his greatest creation and he’d be disappointed more than he’s already been if I didn’t come, and I want to go home’.”
Kaminari actually snorts at that, like he finds it funny. “Well, you don’t need to say it in such blunt terms,” he says, amused, “but you shouldn’t force yourself to make up happy memories of him in order to sate the public.”
Shouto points out, “Isn’t it kind of disrespectful to ruin the dead’s reputation so soon after death, though?”
“Asshole deserves it. Plus, he might hear you from the grave if it’s soon enough!”
Now it’s Shouto’s turn to snort at the implication, before he looks away and back into the fire nestled in his hand. The flame flickers, a familiar sight that has lived in the dredges of his mind from the moment he was born and his father came to see him. Sometimes he hates the wavering spiral of chemical reaction so much, and sometimes he recognizes how utterly lost he would be without the inner flame that burns within his soul, and he wonders if it would’ve been easier to love the sight before him if it weren’t for his father.
Or maybe he was always just destined to be this way.
He abruptly extinguishes the flame to leave them alone in the filtered out sun.
“You know, you don’t really have to know how to feel about it all,” Kaminari suggests quietly to a sage meadow of human loneliness, dropping his chin into his arms. “It’s okay to not know. It’s fine if you’re relieved in the most fucked-up ways possible, or if you’re bitter and angry, or if you’re so depressingly sad it feels ironic for all that he did to you. Your siblings will take it how they take it, and your mom will take it how she takes it, and you take it how you will, alright? There’s no constraint on how to feel these things.”
Shouto swallows, unsure.
How did you know? he wants to ask. How can you put it into words so easily, all the different abject terrible things that I’m thinking that I shouldn’t be thinking because it’s wrong?
Because — Kaminari is right. He’s relieved, more than he should be at the death of his own father, and he’s bitter and angry because the love he was promised was never fulfilled, and he knows that in a moment, it’ll all set in and his bones will grow even more tired and he won’t understand why due to everything that’s ever defined him.
“I just… wish someone would tell me how to react,” Shouto confesses. “I — I don’t know how to feel.”
(What about Fuyumi, who’s trying so hard and has been all her life?)
Kaminari considers that. “I feel like,” he says, clearly thinking hard to formulate the right words, “that we’ve been ingrained to have these ideas of how we’re supposed to react to grief of any form, and that other ways are just wrong.” He looks down at his own hands. “But that’s not really true, even though how you feel might seem morally questionable and unspeakable of. Grief isn't the same for everyone, and neither is circumstance. I know you want to be told that you should be sad, or something like that, but if you try pushing your feelings in one direction, then you’re just going to feel worse about yourself.”
These words matter so much to Kaminari, and he cares enough to make sure they translate. Shouto can see it. The boy gives an awkward grin as the words die out — and though it’s not his typical self-confident smirk or the eruption of laughter from his friends, small, it still makes his heart flutter uselessly and his fingers feel warmer.
“Does that make any sense?” The sudden rambly anxiety emerging from Kaminari is startling, as he leans backwards and almost falls off his rock. “I don’t want to sound, like, pretentious or anything. I don’t want to impose my thoughts on your anything.”
Shouto turns the words over in his mind for a while. “No, I believe it makes sense.”
He can do that. Learn how to feel his own feelings before learning how to feel everyone elses’.
The tension bleeds out of Kaminari’s shoulders. “That’s good.”
⇆
(“Man, we’ve really ought to start an entire Dead Fathers Club. Do you think Midoriya would be down to join?”
“Midoriya’s father is alive.”
“No shit, really? You’ve met him?”
“We all have; he teaches at Yuuei. Didn’t you know?”
“Am I expected to know that apparently Midoriya’s dad teaches at Yuuei!? ”
“Well, it’s not been stated explicitly quite yet, but as discovered upon reading between the lines, Midoriya is evidently All Might’s secret love child. It’s obvious.”
“... Now that you point it out, it is rather obvious. Guess it’ll just be the two of us, then.”)
⇆
“List item #69!” Kaminari announces after a day of walking up and down a mountain and determinedly avoiding human society, pretending to straighten out a sheet of paper tasks in his hands. Coughs gently, a slight flush to his cheeks. “Watching the sunset.”
“Do we really need to?”
“Duh. It’s not a true wilderness-scenery-camping roadtrip without the sunsets. I’ve let you get away with not going on all the list items, because you’ve got dead-father privileges, but you can’t escape this last chance.”
“... What happened to ‘compiling a list’?” Shouto finally asks.
“Ah, about that.” Kaminari looks sheepish, like he’s been caught frying the microwave at three a.m. yet again. “Might’ve forgotten about that.”
“But you didn’t,” Shouto points out.
“Oh. Okay, yeah, you caught me. I didn’t bring a pen or paper, and writing shit in the notes app on your phone doesn’t really have the same vibe, you know?”
A list is a list, Shouto thinks nonunderstandingly, but doesn’t say, because that lightning-fueled mind is so fascinating from the outside perspective. Sometimes, he wishes he understood Kaminari’s world more than anything.
Maybe then life would make more sense, and maybe Shouto would make more sense; but more than anything, he just wants to know.
“I figured we could go up the mountain again, but then I realized that after sunset, it tends to be dark until the sun rises again. So, uh, we could just go out to that outcrop I found that's probably illegal to go to, but laws, amiright?”
“Sure,” Shouto agrees absently.
So they walk there, and perch on the ledge like some cheesy scene in one of Kaminari’s favorite English romances. Kaminari swings his body up without hesitation and lets Shouto figure out the rough edges, moving to the right side. They’re almost early, but it’s better that way.
Todoroki & Kaminari's Unofficial Roadtrip-List Item #6: Watching the sunset.
Shouto watches the other boy for a while, the way his silhouette outlines against the gradually dripping sunset, hair flickering in the wind and face so almost terrifyingly tranquil in this distillation. Golden eyes capturing the sunlight that dips steadily over the horizon, arms wrapped around his knees and rocking back on his heels, and a certain awe painted across his features like the whole globe’s been pressed into his palms of a snow globe to curve his fingers around and drag across the textured surface.
Shouto doesn’t know if he’d ever be able to live with himself with such a peacefulness in his gaze.
“How do you do it?” Shouto wonders.
Kaminari hums, not bothering to turn. “Do what?” he asks somewhat flippantly, though genuine with a mild curiosity in the undertones.
Shouto gestures at the boy helplessly. “That,” he tries.
Kaminari looks vaguely bemused. “You mean how do I do me? That’s kinda gay, bro.”
“No,” Shouto answers, a little frustrated because he doesn’t know how to put it into words. Words are hard, and Kaminari cares so very much about words, and Shouto doesn’t want to break a plate of carefully-loved words and throw the shattered shards at his feet. “How do you… do it?”
The thing is, Kaminari isn’t a happy-go-lucky goldfish in a goldfish bowl who happened to have landed a toilet-less home amongst elementary schoolers at a spring faire. People haven’t been nice to him most of his life, and his father didn’t want him so he gave him up — which is so ironically opposite to Shouto’s general life story —, and he’s always getting hurt and takes it in stride without a word for his own feelings. Yet Kaminari sits here beside Shouto with his head tilted gently at the purpling skies and a hint of a smile settled on his lips like it’s belonged there all his life, and Shouto doesn’t really get it.
How can you love so hard for a world that never loved you back?
His face softens ever so slightly, like he understands where Shouto is coming from even though he hasn’t put it into words yet. “How I’m not a dark lord of edgy angst like Tokoyami, you mean?”
“Yes.” It’s sort of hopeless, but it’s close enough.
Kaminari lets out another quiet hum with an oddly pondering tone to it, untwining his hands and leaning back on their palms in the soft dirt. “That’s a good question.” Kaminari likes words and poetry, weaving them a tapestry of golden waterfalls when permitted; likes them the way Shouto likes to comb his fingers through flame and snow and listen to people who spill sunlit words and the way he likes to breathe in the night sky. "I mean, it's not like I'm quite as mentally stable as I like to pretend? But…" He trails off, thinking, and Shouto can almost feel the visceral thoughts vibrating through the air in roiling tidal waves.
“I guess, I tend to think that there’s sort of two kinds of people in the world — those who are ready to take the bad things that come with life and love it anyway, even when it hurts back, and people who are more afraid to be openly vulnerable like that.
“It’s not that they’re cowardly, or weak. Everyone’s pretty far from that, you know?” Kaminari shrugs lightly, eyes still fixed on the sky as the colors shift and reflect against gold. “It’s not that the amount of hurt we’ve experienced is the most influential factor in that, because there’s so much out there that we’re bound to find a way, even though of course it’s got its effects. That doesn’t invalidate however we take things. I get let down far too easily, sometimes, ‘cause I’m bad at remembering when I get too caught up in the swing of better things. We all think we don’t know how to feel good in this world at all, yet there’s always those moments where everyone does, and some people’s chase after those momentary lapses of happily is easier than others. Where you start doesn’t really matter; don’t let yourself think that luck’s the only definition behind your happiness — because otherwise, you’re going to spend your life pining after a thread of destiny that doesn’t exist.”
Shouto rolls the words around in his mind for a moment, feeling them slip between his fingers like a waterfall through the fractured crevices. “Okay,” he says, half-comprehendingly to the presented paradox.
“You’re not broken if you don’t know how to be good at life yet,” Kaminari says, fiddling with the shoelaces on his dirt-encrusted yellow shoes. “We’re all still working on it. I don’t think anyone ever truly masters it.”
Shouto instinctively reaches over and pries the fraying strings out of his grasp, idly wondering what happened to the plastic casing, and Kaminari lets him without a word, settling his hands back at his sides and turning to look at Shouto in the eye. His breath catches in his throat at the intensity there, even though it is so warm, something intangible that he wants to cradle between his fingers like the passing summer gales.
“But you’ll get there. There are a lot of people who love you, and want you to be okay, including all your friends. And… I’ll be here for you, too, anytime you need it.”
It's something you need to work for, but I want to help you with it. Because I care about you. Because we're friends.
“Okay,” Shouto says again, quieter yet more certain this time, hearing his voice crack at the second syllable, and Kaminari smiles at him softly, the glowing yellow tightroping the edges of crisp mountains slipping into his face. It makes his hair look like it’s wreathed in a halo of sparking lightning, but the sort that’s been harnessed gently to a pulled-glass bulb.
Ethereal. That’s what the sight is, and that’s what Kaminari is.
Oh.
Oh, Shouto realizes faintly, not entirely sure what to do about the realization.
Kaminari cares so much. He cares about these things more than they deserve, cares about Shouto more than Shouto’s ever really deserved, and there’s something so very enthralling about the idea despite how it wants to trip up its web of guilty threads and tangle the spool through his combed-out care.
It’s easy — it’s so easy, to be alone with Kaminari who draws people into the very idea of life through the thread of his handwoven tapestry of words; to be on what feels like the top of the world, looking out on a forest that cups the sunlight in gently dappled greens next to a boy who wants to swallow it whole; to be alive at a time where the suffocating pressure has pulled away for long enough to take in the night air and smile at the world that can be beautiful for just a moment.
He's been hurt, undeniably hurt a lot, but he's in this world now, and he appreciates it anyway. Kaminari loves the world so deeply, more than Shouto believes he will ever truly get, but it’s something that he can feel himself wanting to understand.
Todoroki & Kaminari's Unofficial Roadtrip-List Item #7: Fall in love.
Kaminari fell in love with life, and Todoroki Shouto fell in love with him.