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Todoroki Enji has been seventeen again for six hours when he decides he’s going to kill Dabi.
He's sitting in the UA nurse's office when he comes to this decision- apparently it's one of their bases, because the hero world is at war, and it's All Might's fault or it's his fault or- it doesn't fucking matter whose fault it is. Everything has gone to shit and he's been blasted back to a past that is his present because this quirk doesn't just de-age your body, it de-ages your mind as well.
He couldn't get anyone to explain just what the hell had happened aside from 'a funny thing happened on the way to the latest villain fight', but the medics who had been fussing over him figure this quirk has a time limit- seventy two hours- which would be a real damper on that whole find and kill Dabi thing, except that Enji- having made his way around a smartphone that is apparently his, judging by all the flame decals- is 89% sure he knows where Dabi is.
The fact that he hasn’t shared this information with the two men who claim to currently be his mission partners in this war someone started for some fucking reason is…concerning.
Enji’s not as worried about them and their working relationship as he is about himself, though.
He knows because they've told him that he's an adult- hell he's 46.
He made it to forty six. He'd get a drink if he had the time.
Right now, though, Enji is seventeen. When this quirk fades, he'll remember all the time between the then that is now and the now that is future. Which, according to everything he's absorbed by listening to the hushed conversations literally everyone seems to be having just outside the nurse's office door, is bad.
Because this Dabi prick is his son.
Apparently.
-
Killing Dabi is important because Dabi is the firepower and any villain army down a pyromaniac is better than a villain army WITH a pyromaniac.
Enji has no proof that Dabi is a pyromaniac but he's more than willing to make assumptions.
The campus has expanded in the years he can't remember and security is definitely tighter than it was, but that back fence is still there and hopping it is easy as sunday morning. He feels a little smug about getting out from underneath his minders.
Outside is fucking bad.
Enji thought he'd have trouble finding a car to jack but they're just scattered all over empty streets. The lights are on but no one's home. Shopfronts are closed, there's nobody walking. It's like the city has become a ghost town. It fills him with a hopeless rage that singes his ears and makes his breath come quick and hot but he has no time to think about that because Dabi needs to die and he is running out his clock.
Enji grabs a gossip rag on the way out of town because of course the muck rackers still have a job in the localised apocalypse. This particular magazine has his face on it- or his older face, anyway- and he catches up on the life and times of Endeavor as he gases the car with money from the grown up wallet he found in his too-big coat.
Yep.
Yep he’s definitely killing Dabi.
And who knows, maybe himself when he’s done.
-
First step, home.
The estate doesn’t look much different than he remembers. Quiet. Cavernous. Filled with regrets and pain. Enji'd done well to keep it exactly as it always had been, then.
The floorboard in the tatami room is still loose and the box is still there. Hell the gun even looks like it’s been recently cleaned. Good to know older Enji is still capable of proper weapons maintenance, maybe that had bumped being a decent fucking person down the list.
Next, a map, food- jesus does he not eat anything out of a can anymore? None of his clothes fit properly but Enji takes some anyway- this quirk isn’t gonna last forever. Rope, tape, a tarp. Thank fuck at least this den of bullshit still has a tarp in it.
Enji turns on the TV, catches a bulletin amongst the doom and gloom of the newsreels and the long reports on where the best shelters are and how to get necessities if you can't leave the house. They’re looking for a ‘lost teenager’.
Damn heroes work fast now. He’s almost impressed.
He goes back to the car.
-
It’s too easy, in the end.
The drive to the mountainous area marked in the notes on the phone with the flame decals is long but it's not hard. He pulls the car off the non-existent road a half a mile out from the perimeter, which is less of a perimeter and more of a straggly fencepost line that is occasionally wandered by people with automatic rifles. The giant rotting manor house beyond is barely guarded. This league is A) run by a complete fucking moron and B) looking for sudden surges of kitted out heroes, not one teenager with a backpack. There’s a couple close calls and one lady with extra eyes goes down but Enji figures she’ll be fine.
He finds Dabi dead asleep on the world’s least-comfortable looking chaise lounge.
Enji stands over him for a moment. Stupid habit, sleeping so hard, Enji’s tried to break himself of it and maybe adult him has, but that sort of thing passes generations.
Kind of like being an absolute fuckhead.
Shit they really do look alike. This kid could be his brother (or, you know, son) if not for the rotting fleshy bits. The white hair must be the lady he'd beat up and thrown in an institution. It's kind of pretty.
If he were a better person at the moment Enji might wake the kid up. Might try to shock him with his age. He might reach deep inside himself, try to find some vestige of his older self, the guy who was- how did that magazine put it- 'torn down into a puddle of worthless nerves' at the appearance of his not-dead kid on a battlefield.
He doesn’t.
Eji puts the gun to a sleeping boy’s temple and pulls the silenced trigger.
Then he leaves the way he came.
That takes a little longer than he'd like.
After all he's dragging a body.
-
Enji had decided when he left the estate to go on this little murder-based field trip that he probably didn't want to be back in the city when he ran out his quirk clock. Grief is a weird thing. Eventually the corpse in the trunk of this car is going to be his kid again, and when that happens he has no idea which of the seven stages he's gonna hit first, but he's willing to bet it's going to involve fire.
He does send a text once he's back on the road.
Out for a walk.
Just because Enji doesn't remember the stupid war doesn't mean he wants manpower wasted looking for him when they could be doing something like, oh, winning it.
He can't stop at a campground or even pull off the road- eventually someone is going to go checking on Dabi and all they'll find is the gun and the bloodspatter. It didn't look like anyone there had the manpower to start a hunt but if Enji remembers one thing about getting his ass handed to him in hero training it's that you always assume your enemy knows more than you and is super mad you just dropkicked a flaming bag of shit in their direction.
Okay maybe that's a more personalized lesson but it still counts.
-
There’s an hour left in his time limit and a little less than a quarter tank of gas when Enji pulls off the road and up to a small house. It looks abandoned and a quick inspection confirms it. Good place to wait. Good place to freak out. He parks and gets the cigarettes out of his too-big coat’s pockets. Jesus he grows up to smoke menthols? He really is a monster.
Whatever. Enji lights up with a forefinger and sits on the porch. Beside him the phone keeps vibrating but he ignores it. They’ll either find him or he’ll remember how to find them, it’s fine.
Everything is fine.
He closes his eyes, blows a smoke ring. Does he still remember how, as an adult? The cigarettes are old. Doesn’t seem like he indulges much- in anything, if the absolute shit food situation back at the estate had been anything to go by.
He thinks of Dabi sleeping. He’d looked peaceful. Probably full of dreams of bashing his old man’s head in with a superheated rock. Not a bad way to go, dreaming of victory. Enji wouldn’t know. He’s never actually been victorious in his dreams. He always wakes up.
-
Twenty minutes to go and there’s a noise. Something whispersoft, like the birds that would sometimes land on the walls of the estate and judge his form when he was outside training. It’s followed by a solid thump.
“Come out,” Enji says, “or it’s gonna be real bad for you.”
Two people come out. One had to have been carrying the other, he thinks, the man with the wings and the little half and half kid.
His half and half kid.
“Didn’t know you smoked, Endeavor,” the winged man says. Hawks. Takami Keigo. His wings had been fuller once, but the shithead in the trunk had made short work of them.
“This isn’t smoking this is giving a blowjob to a stick of spearmint gum,” Enji says. The half and half looks shocked.
Shouto. His name is Shouto, and the shithead in the trunk is Touya. Dabi- stupid villain name. Enji could have told him what picking a name like that would do, but it seems like any teaching he had to do had been more like a nail in a coffin that hadn’t been shut yet because the corpse inside still wanted its say.
“Any particular reason you decided to go for a walk, Endeavor?” Hawks says. He’s friendly but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Enji wonders how he can tell. The quirk must finally be letting go.
“Had shit to do,” he says. “Couldn’t wait. Golden opportunity, as it were.”
“What did you have to do?”
Ahhh Shouto always asking the fast, brutal questions. Does he? Man this quirk shit is aggravating.
In response, Enji stands. He’s taller than his son even now, and he prowls to the back of the car and silently opens the trunk.
“Tadaaaa.” he intones.
Then he puts his cigarette out on Dabi’s dead forehead, right in the middle of the gore.
-
Hawks is upset. Enji knows he should care and maybe in ten more minutes he will but right now the supposed number two pro hero is just shaking and barking commands into a phone and Enji’s smoking a fresh menthol with his son on the porch.
“We were supposed to do it together,” Shouto says and Enji says, “That’s fucked up.”
“We’re sort of fucked up.”
“Yeah. I gathered.”
“Well. I guess it’s not surprising. You are number one.”
“Kid I’m a lot of things but number one is definitely not one of them.” Enji watches Hawks stalk around the car. “I thought about burning it, but someone might want him. Your mom. Your siblings. Me, maybe, when I remember.”
“That’s why you did it.” Shouto says. “Because you can’t remember.”
“I mean I’m gonna,” Enji says. “And it’s gonna suck some hardcore shit.”
Shouto snorts. “You don’t swear so much as an adult.”
“Not where you can hear, anyway,” Enji says. “How’d you find me?”
“Hawks did. He has a tracker on your phone.”
“Why the fuck?”
Shouto shrugs. “He said you had one, too.”
Oh.
OH.
Fuck.
-
Five minutes. Enji’s managed to get Hawks to hand off his bigger clothes. They’re waiting for the calvary, apparently, though who that is Enji has no clue. He does the last button on his too-big shirt and sits back down with Shouto.
“I don’t know how to feel,” Shouto says.
“Bad. My best bet’s on bad.” Enji says. “Gotta tell you this has been pretty shit and it’s not gonna get any better.”
“I mean about you.”
“About me? I’m a bad dream. Just forget about me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? Seems like your best option.”
“You were getting better.”
Enji snorts. “I was a piece of shit like my old man was a piece of shit like his old man was a piece of shit. There’s no getting better from that.”
“Yes there is.”
“And how are you so sure?”
Shouto looks him dead in the eyes.
“Because you are too stubborn to walk away.”
“Fucking tell me about it,” Enji murmurs, and then his ribs explode in pain.
-
Enji had been been right.
Remembering made it so much worse.
On the bright side, he doesn’t burn the little house down, and he’s lucid when the calvary shows up. It’s cops, mostly, but Best Jeanist is there too, and so is All Might.
On the not so bright side, his son is dead in a trunk because he put him there with an unregistered handgun. Touya, still and silent and real in a way he can finally touch, not ash and a jawbone but blood and viscera leaking onto someone else’s upholstery.
His firstborn son.
His baby boy.
His beautiful little monster.
Everyone does Enji the courtesy of pretending not to hear when he walks out beyond the treeline and screams.
-
Alright so technically it’s a murder charge and everyone knows it but no one tries to stuff him in the back of a police car. That’s what being number one gets you.
He is sat beside All Might for the drive home, though. Maybe someone sees this as a punishment.
He pretends like he isn’t holding the other man’s hand tight enough to break bone, and Yagi is pretending that he doesn’t see the tears. It all evens out.
-
“Did you think I couldn’t do it?”
Enji looks up from the report that Jeanist had brought him. It’s almost one AM, now. Shouto should be asleep.
“No. I knew you could do it.”
“Then why didn’t you take me?”
“Because you shouldn’t have needed to do it.” Enji says. “Not you, not Hawks, no one. I made the mess. I had to clean it up. I’m old enough that- it’s fine.”
“No it isn’t.”
“…you’re right. It isn’t.”
“You loved him.”
“I love you,” Enji says.
“You love what I can do.” Shouto replies. “what I could become. My- capabilities-“
“No.” Enji says, sharp and hard and Shouto flinches. Enji shelves the self hatred that flares there for later. “No. I did. I won’t lie to you about that. But now- Shouto you have friends. A life. Goals that- maybe aren’t related at all to being a hero, I don’t know. I was a poor father and a poor teacher and I broke precious things that mended in spite of me, not because of me. I love you. I don’t have the right. You don’t have to accept it. But it’s true.”
Shouto stares at him then. It’s a wide eyed look of shock and yep there’s that self-hatred again.
“..they’re telling your mother that it was infighting with the league. We found him like that.”
She won’t believe it. They both know she won’t. Rei is too smart a woman, too accustomed to grief, to not be able to taste its tang in a lie like that. She also won’t ask because separated or not she had spent years married to a pro-hero, and she knows what things are too heavy to speak aloud.
Shouto only nods. “Natsu will be mad.”
“Natsuo will always be mad.” Enji is still making peace with that. Truth be told Enji mostly kept the body for Natsuo. They’d been the closest. Natsuo deserved to give his brother peace. Besides he'd said he would stand by his father until Touya was taken care of and Enji had promised Natsuo once that he wasn't looking for forgiveness. It's an open and shut case. Provide corpse, eject dad. If only it all could be so neat.
“I’d have done it.” Shouto says. “If I knew you kept a gun.”
“I know you would have,” Enji tells him. “Which is why you didn’t know.”
Shouto nods, and leaves. There is still another battle to fight. There is still Midoriya, recovering. There are still foreign heroes to contact, alliances to test. Still a war to win.
-
Hawks hasn’t come to bother Endeavor in a week and that’s bad.
They’ve been cooped up at UA, planning their next move. Dabi’s death has hit the League unexpectedly hard and Enji gives up trying not to feel a tiny bit of twisted pride at that- look at you, kid. Look at you go. Local chatter says that another member of the league took him out when he was unguarded and that All For One is not pleased about it but hardly looking for revenge. There’s been a couple purges, that they can tell.
This is all Hawks’ area of expertise and so he should be the one giving the reports but it’s poor Jeanist relaying the intel from a barely winged man at large. Jeanist has had just about enough of both of them, Enji can tell. When this phone call finishes he looks Endeavor dead in the eye and speaks. No denim-based puns, no platitudes, no reassurances.
“Deal with this,” he says, and leaves.
-
It’s unsurprising that the tracking app isn’t picking up on Hawks. He probably turned it off after he dropped Endeavor, Shouto, and the dead body of one of their mortal enemies off at UA.
Enji locates Shouto, just finishing a training session with his classmates.
“May I talk to you?” he asks. The other students in 1A watch him like he’ll explode at any second, which is fair. Shouto only nods and assures them he’ll catch up.
“It’s Hawks, isn’t it?” he asks when they’re alone.
“Do you know where he might have gone?”
“Don’t you?”
Enji does know, or has a solid idea.
“I don’t think I can do this alone.”
Shouto looks up at him. “No. I don’t think you can.” He turns on his heel. “Let’s go.”
-
The house that the HSPC had stuffed Keigo’s mother into is beautiful and barren and echoes the estate in a lot of ways Enji doesn’t want to think about. He and Shouto clear the place room by room, floor by floor. It’s a pointless exercise, and Enji knows that, but it gives the red feathers scattered around ample time to flit away- gives Hawks ample time to flee.
He doesn’t.
He’s waiting at the top of the stairs and he looks like he hasn’t slept in months.
“Hey, pretty bird,” Enji says, because he is out of pride, out of bravado, out of time. “may we come up?”
Hawks’ throat works. He narrows his golden eyes. A raptor’s eyes, Enji had noted once- so beautiful and frightening when focused.
He spins on his heel and walks down the hall, and Enji, Shouto on his tail, meekly scurry after him.
-
Hawks can and probably has fit his whole life into a single duffle bag before, so it’s not a surprise that he’s been living in a single room- a parlor? Enji’s rich man senses tell him it was a parlor once- on the top floor.
“Why did you bring him?” Hawks asks. Shouto replies before Enji can.
“He didn’t want to kill Touya with me. He wants to fix something instead.”
Hawks laughs and it’s not a good sound. “What is there to fix? You ran off half-cocked in the middle of a goddamn war, no warning, no nothing despite everyone telling you you had to stay put and to what? To achieve what? How did you know where he was?”
“I found out a week before the fight with the regression quirk,” Enji says.
“Found out. You found out. that’s MY job, Number One. Finding out.”
Enji watches Hawks’ wings twitch and stretch, the feathers shivering and rising like they are just on the cusp of rushing off to stop a disaster. Is Hawks drunk? Tipsy maybe, definitely impaired in some way; his control is excellent. Enji has never seen his feathers do this before. It's like he's a startled bird, or upset-
It all comes together in a rush. Enji can almost hear the sound of the pieces snapping together in his head and he looks at Hawks like he's just discovered a hairline crack in the paint of the mona lisa and through it is rushing a river of technicolor blood.
“You’re angry you couldn’t kill him first.”
-
There is a certain kind of silence that comes after the speaking of horrible things.
Enji is intimately aware of this silence. It has been his companion, his yoke and his prize, for years now. He watches it surround Takami Keigo and wipe his resistance away like a typhoon sucking a lone oak off an oceanside cliff.
“That’s stupid,” Shouto observes.
“Is it?” Hawks demands. “He hurt you, Endeavor. He tried to kill us all, he took my wings, and I was inches from him! INCHES! I never knew! I never suspected! I failed at the most basic fucking level at doing my job and the end result was you nearly dying and the entirety of the country blaming the actions of a madman on a single family. If I had been faster, if I had been harder, if I had looked-"
“My responsibility.”
“Oh don’t you fucking-"
“My injuries are my responsibility,” Enji says, and he is mad, he realizes, furious, a cold fury he has only felt once or twice in his life. He is a man of blazes and bluster and rage but this is different, this is tinged darker and it burns icy in his chest. “My mess is my responsibility. He was my responsibility, not Shouto’s, not Midoriya’s, not yours, MINE.”
“You can’t take that all on yourself!”
“This is something I had to take on myself!” Enji barks back. He gets up in Hawks’ space but the younger man does not back down, as unmoved by the rockslide of Todoroki Enji as a butterfly is by an airplane far above. Gold and blue meet.
“I fucked up, Keigo!” Enji says and is he shouting? It’s hard to tell. “I fucked up over, and over, and over again, and my son turned into a homicidal maniac! He threatened my other children! He nearly killed Shouto! He took your wings from you and that is not your burden, it is not my family’s burden, it is mine! I was not going to let him live to try again because my love might be fucking poison but it’s all I have left besides hating myself and I dropped the fucking gun before I could take care of that so you’re STUCK with me, and if you don’t want that then use your goddamn words!”
Someone's chest is heaving, and Enji realizes it's probably his.
-
There is a similar silence that comes after moments of crystallizing ultimatum.
Enji is not as familiar with this silence as Shouto is, and even he has only experienced it once or twice. He remembers Midoriya’s voice as clear as if his friend is speaking in his ears now, telling him it’s not Endeavor’s power, it’s his.
Todoroki Shouto does not hate his father.
Not like he used to.
It’s easy, almost, to pity Endeavor, but Endeavor will not allow him that pity. He is a man who spits in the face of it, who looks at a pit he dug and down at the bloody stumps where his hands had once been and resolves to shove the dirt back in the hole with his feet.
Shouto remembers the face of the seventeen year old who had popped the trunk to show Touya’s dead body curled up like a sleeping toddler wrapped haphazardly in a tarp he’d recognized from his father’s toolshed. He remembers the smell of the menthol cigarettes, of the sheer hopeless acceptance of that boy who asserted that he was a piece of shit like his old man before him.
Where did boy become man? Where did Enji become Endeavor?
This, Shouto knows, is why he is here.
To witness Takami Keigo, snarling and crying all at once, throwing himself at Flame Hero Endeavor, who catches him in an embrace that is nothing at all like one ever shared with Todoroki Rei, and is dangerous and precious for that.
He is there to watch his father quietly sob Touya’s name while clinging to the one person he felt safe in front of, a person who had not been around to lean on, and who rightly shouldn’t be holding the burden but will anyway.
This is Todoroki Enji sharing a secret with his son that Shouto could easily use to destroy him.
This is love.
-
The war ends with a whimper.
There are a lot of pros who won’t be going back to work. Despite losing an arm, Endeavor isn’t one of them, and neither is Hawks.
The kids make it through but they’ll never be the same. Enji’s heard all of class 1A collectively being called One For All, and none of them like it but it fits. More than fits.
Touya gets an urn to go with the rest of his jawbone, Shouto agrees to pick up shifts at the Endeavor Agency, Fuyumi and Rei have compromised on a curtain color and Natsuo blocks his father’s number.
Enji sits on the engawa in the beautiful ugly home he built, turning his new prosthetic over to check its joints while smoking a menthol cigarette.
The press is having a field day outside. News of his divorce has just gone public. News of where Keigo lives, coincidentally, has also just gone public.
He does not even have it in him to care.
A warmth settles at his back. Enji closes his eyes and blows a perfect smoke ring.
“Menthols,” he says to the love of his life, who found him too late and somehow just in time. “I always knew I was gonna be a monster.”
Keigo laughs and it is a beautiful sound. It makes Enji feel young. It makes him feel- alive.
Like there’s still a future out there somewhere, if he can just burn bright enough to see it.