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The incidents reached a ridiculous level immediately after the war. Frankly, Aizawa was about to conduct an investigation into everyone of his students home life even before he saw it. And, while he didn´t exactly vouch for the mental health of any member of the Todoroki family, he didn´t expect the sister to actually walk up her former villain brother, the brother she hadn´t seen or contacted in the last few years, and just slap him hard in the face. Dabi also didn´t expected that, because he looked at her as if she was insane. Fuyumi only looked angry... or a little bit unhinged in a totally new way.
“One normal family!! That´s all I asked out of you all!!” she screamed at his face. “Why did you have to make such a fuss, Touya? Especially when everything was going so well? Finally… finally dad was trying to become a better father… Shouto was… was getting closer to us and… and you and Natsuo and Shouto… why did you have to ruin my hard work?!”
“Nice to see you too, Fuyumi” he answered, turning around.
“You didn´t even want Shouto when he was born! Why take him away?! Why trying to hard to destroy our family?!”
“Our family was already destroyed…”
“I have kept it together!! Just so all of us can have somewhere to belong! Why… why not keep silent now that things were going so well? What…”
“Fuyumi, stop” Dabi sounded even more tired than before, actually glaring at his sister. “I know you always wanted us to be one of those families, but we are not. No matter what you do, there is no way to change that or fix.” The girl seemed to want to open her mouth to say something else. “Besides, do you think that this is the time to talk about this?”
“There is nothing more important than our family”
“And I love my boyfriend, so excuse me”
Shouta sighed. He really didn´t want to intrude in such a conversation, but he had thought something was wrong with the sister since she accompanied her father to the interview with him. that she could only worry about her dream falling apart when her brothers had just fought a war, when her brother´s partner laid on a hospital bed fighting for his life, spoke volumes about that. Because yes, Hawks was critically injured in the last battle against one of Shigaraki´s underlings and they didn´t know if he would survive.
“Thankfully, the quirk didn´t affected any internal organs but the heart” a doctor informed Touya and Shinyo. “Now, this should be good news, but… the nature of the quirk was aggressive and made considerable damage. So much that we don´t know if we are going to manage to repair it, even with a quirk.”
“What are you saying?” the avian asked.
“Hawks needs a transplant” he informed. “A heart transplant” he passed a page. “Now, there are good news in that front too. Along with the international delegation of pro-heroes, many doctors came with the aim to treat the injured from this war. One of them has an organ replicating quirk that can make the new organ in minutes. The bad thing is that the damage sustained by Hawks heart won´t allow to replicate a healthy organ.”
“And? Are you saying that you need a compatible donor?” the older raptor gritted his teeth. “Am I compatible as a family member?”
“We believe so, but… Mr. Takami, I don´t think you understand the risks. If you are to allow this procedure, the doctor will have to hold your beating heart for an entire hour with his nude hands. The risk of infections, even with the help of quirks…”
“It would save my son´s life, no?” the doctor could only nod in front of the avian´s gaze. “Then there is nothing else to talk about. Where are the papers I have to sign?”
“Shinyo, are you really not thinking about…”
“What is there to think about?” the thief grabbed the forms and pen. “Keigo is the only good thing I did in my dammed life, he is… he is my son. My baby” he finished signing. “I will do even the unthinkable for him… I would give him my heart if there was no other way to save him. I love him that much.”
Aizawa felt relieved. At least the Problem Eyas had a… relatively safe to be around father, which meant that he was going to be okay. Or at least better than the Todorokis, who didn´t seem to understand paternal love at all. Maybe he should put the entire family on therapy? Endeavour had to go, yes, but… what was Fuyumi doing there? He thought she was done with her eldest brother when he categorically refused to help her fix their broken family. Also, he expression she had in her face… he couldn´t help but feel worried for her. The hero followed the girl to the rooftop, where she stopped.
“Miss Todoroki”
“Mr. Aizawa, I… only came here to think, I´m not going to do anything rash” she smiled weakly. “Couldn´t do that to Shouto or mom or…” she sighed. “I guess you are here to interrogate me about the damage I have done to my family…”
“The damage was done to you too, Miss Todoroki”
“Really? Because by supporting my father I have hurt everyone else and… I don´t know how to fix this any longer” she let some tears fall. “Sometimes I wonder if there was even one thing to fix in the first place. A family to keep together…” she took off her glasses. “Do you know how my obsession with a perfect family started?”
“You would call it an obsession?”
“Oh, yes, it´s… the only thing that kept me going all this time. The thing I wanted to get no matter what” she stared in the distance dreamily. “I was really isolated as a child. Dad… put a special attention to Touya and Shouto, but… I was the only girl and alone and not allowed to be out of the house outside school… except for a few times, for school projects. And those times… those times I saw other girl´s families. It was so beautiful… their parents loved them so much and there was no screaming or uselessness…”
“You wanted that”
“More than anything in the world. I became obsessed with that picture, the perfect family I was never able to have… I even promised myself that one day I would achieve that, no matter who I was hurting… I told myself it was alright, because… because dad will realise his mistakes if I worked hard towards it, that everyone would realise their mistakes, forgive each other and we will be the family I thought I deserved.”
“Even after Touya?”
“I told myself it was an accident, that dad hadn´t meant to kill him” she sighed. “Then, when I found out he was alive, I blamed for all my hard work to be falling apart after everything seemed to be getting better…” Fuyumi shook her head. “But it wasn´t better, no? He couldn´t even accept that Shouto was…”
“Miss Todoroki?”
“I´m just so tired of this. Also wonder if Touya was right after all and there is nothing to save of our family. If there was something in the first place…” she hugged herself. “What Mr. Takami was willing to do for Hawks… I can´t picture father doing something like that for any of us. Not even for Shouto.”
Shouta could feel the envy there. He understood her too. Despite not having a perfect family, what with his crazy uncle, immature father and absent to bitch mother, Hawks had a support system now that he was free from the Commission in his father and boyfriend. And Shinyo would do anything for Keigo. Fuyumi… barely had a hostile relationship with her own siblings now that she took her father´s side during the entire Touya incident. Her mother wasn´t exactly taking sides or… simply was tired of all the fight. She felt alone and it was her own fault, for taking the wrong side.
“Damn, I´m so stupid” Fuyumi covered her eyes. “So stupid that I even let all this shit carry on to my work. Now I have troubles because I told a little boy that he should just shut up about his father hitting him and his mom for the sake of his family. Why did I say that?”
Why indeed, Aizawa thought. This woman can´t keep going on as a teacher, not with such a dangerous mind-set. She could do so much damage. Cursing Enji Todoroki to hell, he offered Fuyumi the number of his therapist. Yes, he had a therapist. With the amount of bullshit he managed on daily basis, it would be a miracle for him not to have one. Then he approached Dabi, who was waiting for news on the delicate operation that was now being held.
“She really said that?” the former villain sighed, shaking her head. “She didn´t get in troubles over that, did she?”
“You are only worried about that?”
“No, I mean… I always knew that this was going to bring her troubles eventually, but… Fuyumi has always been… like that” he lowered his head a bit. “I love my sister, I really do… but she is screwed up in the head in ways that creeps even me out. It´s a result of the abuse, I know, as much as Natsuo´s, mine or Shouto´s anger is… but different.”
“You mean her obsession with a happy family”
“Exactly” he picked on his staples. “Frankly, I don´t know how people didn´t pick up on our troubles with how much Fuyumi obsesses over that. I mean… there was a time I also thought that the bastard would recover his sanity and stop his abusive ways, but that hope disappeared a long time ago. In her case, it froze in her mind. Made her think that if she could sweep enough things under the rug, she would get the picture perfect family that she never got to have.”
“This seems to be a touchy problem”
“Imagine that all your life, you have seen your little sister´s eyes lit up when seeing happy families on the park or on TV… that was the only kind of programs she used to see… and kept muttering about it even when icing her brother´s wounds…”
“And she never blamed Endeavour?”
“Nah, she didn´t have it in him to hate like us boys did. Sometimes I worried that she was actually going to end up worse than we did…” he rubbed his neck. “And my own life choices are hard to beat.”
The doctor entered the room in that moment to inform them that the procedures have been a success. Hawks would still face hospital stay and rehabilitation before going back to the field, but he will eventually be alright. Shinyo, apparently, too. They have kept the place sterile and none opportunistic bacteria seemed to have entered either of the bodies. Dabi let out a sigh of relief when he heard the news. With everything that was happening recently, he really needed some good ones.
“So… you are really opening a case for child abuse against the old man?”
“I said I would, no?” Aizawa answered, a little bit eager to see Endeavour in handcuffs. Almost as much as Yoroi Musha. “The only thing that´s bothering me is that he is going to need a new legal guardian. With your father out of the way, your mother and sister mental health compromised and your brother in college…”
“Wait, didn’t UA made me his guardian?”
“That was a temporary thing, you have to go through many more procedures to actually get legal guardianship of your brother. It´s going to be a hard, full of inquiries time, but I think you will manage.”
“Yeah, especially because Keigo and me are going to therapy as soon as all this shit is over” Touya confessed. “what? With everything that happened to us, we kind of need it.”
--------------------------Days later---------------------------
“I was waiting for you, Eraserhead”
Aizawa lifted an eyebrow. This was not how he pictured his confrontation with Endeavour, beginning with that the man was calm. He imagined the disgraced former N°1 would be a raging inferno when he came to arrest him for all the crimes that were exposed by the League during the war… but he had waited quietly in the same agency he had worked in all his life. An agency he was going to lose soon along with his freedom and hero licence.
“Did your daughter tell you that I was coming?”
“I haven´t talked to Fuyumi since that day in the hospital where she confronted Touya” he sighed. “Frankly, until I talked to her then, I didn´t realise how much I was hurting even her… she was always my favourite, you know.”
“I thought it was Shouto”
“Shouto was my prodigy, it´s not the same. And he was rebellious, which didn´t endear him to me as much as I would have liked. Fuyumi, on the other side, was… always by my side, always supporting me. Even when I was in the wrong” Enji shook his head. “I certainly didn´t appreciate her enough.”
“She is going to therapy now”
“Good, she is going to get better” he got up. “And Touya…”
“Won´t visit you in jail”
“It´s fair”
There was some awkward silence as Eraser got the cuffs out and walked over to the future inmate. Then he noticed the single photo that sat on the table. Humm, for such an impersonal place, Endeavour actually kept a photo in his office. And of a man that resembled his son Natsuo too much for not being a blood relative.
“Before I hand you over to the police, I want to heard it from you. Why did you think it was a worth it or a good idea to torture your family for a place on the rankings? I mean, you were doing quite well and being N°2 would be an achievement to anyone. Why fucking up so many children to be N°1?”
“It… sounded a lot better in my head” Enji rubbed his forehead. “I never handle loss very well. And if I couldn´t be N°1… well, I didn´t care what I have to do, I would be N°1 somehow. Rei, the children… I somehow manage to not see them as people, but as means to an end. Which is why it was so easy for me to threat them as such. And when I finally had that goal accomplished… I couldn´t stop threating them as such.”
“So you say that you simply couldn´t stop yourself from being an asshole”
“Something like that” Enji answered. “I didn´t mean to explode the last few times either, it´s just that… it pissed me off that both Shouto and Touya didn´t do what I wanted them to do. Or weren´t what I wanted them to be.” He looked down at the photo. “I would be such a disappointment to him.”
“Your father?”
“Yoshino Todoroki” he said with a fondness that wasn´t characteristic of his. “He was the best father ever… which makes my failure even more painful. I don´t know if I will ever be able to face him after everything I did…”
“And Shinyo Takami?”
“What about him?”
“You did something despicable to him despite being the closest thing you had to a friend.”
“The bird deserved it, he was a villain…”
“But did HAWKS deserved it?” Shouta raised an eyebrow. “Don´t misunderstand me, I understand that you had to throw him into jail so the public could be safe, but the method you used was one of the most heartless things to do. And you did it to a child.”
“Hawks would have become another villain if I haven´t…”
“How are you so sure?”
“With the kind of parents he had…”
“I believe Shinyo Takami would have supported him if he decided to become a hero. And he would have become one” Aizawa cuffed the N°2. “Now move it, I have other fake heroes to arrest. Like Yoroi Musha.”
“Yoroi Musha? Wait, you are finally arresting that quirkist asshole?”
“You knew he was a quirkist?”
“Of course I did!! He worked with my father in his few missions and dad always complained about him and his sidekicks spreading fear or causing victims among the mutant population. I think I still have some archives from Dad´s cases in the basements that detailed some of the cases he botched when there were mutant victims involved.”
“Hummm, looks like we are making a detour”
-------------------------------Later--------------------
When Aizawa arrived with more files to analyse to the house, Yamada didn´t even raised an eyebrow. He knew this was eventually going to happen, with the amount of heroes they were arresting for several accounts. What really surprised him was the date he read when he took a look at the documents. What was Shouta doing with such an old investigation? And why did they have the name Todoroki on them? He thought that the investigation on the abusive piece of shit was over.
“I certainly hope Todoroki follows his grandfather´s footsteps as a hero. The man was certainly a good one, or at least better at actually being a hero than his son” Eraser commented as he passed the pages. “Do you remember Yoroi Musha? Tomorrow I´m going to handle the arrest.”
“Thought Tsukauchi told you to wait for more solid evidence than autopsy reports from missing bodies ages old and the declarations of a villain that it´s condemned for several instances of death and cannibalism…”
“I have official reports from a known associate of his, reports that he mishandled the investigations when the mutant community was involved for a long time ago” he handed him a paper. “Just like Junto said, Yoroi Musha knew very well what he was going to find at the Bone Breaker´s lair. Because he handled the investigation of the cases in which the women went missing and connected the dots.”
“Kitten, this is sick…” then something else caught his attention. “This are missing people´s reports, not murders. Where did the bodies end up in?”
“I won´t be surprised if they didn´t appear at all, Takami mentioned his father´s… unorthodox food preferences”
Hizashi wanted to vomit. He didn´t know what else, but someone needed to get rid of the fake heroes and former Commission employees for the heroes of the future. And, apparently, the one that needed to do it was Shouta… with a little bit of help from Nezu. Talking about the rat, he had actually given them paid vacations to have that honeymoon they never had that summer. If Shouta ever finished arresting people, that´s it.