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It’s raining heavily on the streets near the hospital.
Shoto’s late for the visit with his mother.
All in all, it’s not been that great of a day. He completed his internship for the week but forgot his coat amidst the stress of it all and it started raining on his walk to the hospital; of course, he’d gotten soaked through almost immediately. Just his luck.
He can’t afford to get sick right now, not with all of his exams coming up - so he’d hurried back home, since it was close enough to the hospital that it wasn’t too far out of the way, and quickly changed into the first clothes he saw.
All of his clothes are at the dorms now, anyway. Hopefully Natsuo won’t mind a few missing items of clothing, if he’s assumed correctly and the clothes he’s wearing are either his or whatever Shoto had forgotten to take when he moved into his dorm room.
But, he digresses - because now he’s clean and dry and thankfully wearing a coat as he walks the streets of the city to visit his mother, not too far behind schedule but late enough that she might start to worry if he doesn’t pick up his pace.
It’s a relatively normal visit. Rei asks how school is, how his classes are going, how Fuyumi and Natsuo are since they haven’t been around as much lately. But even when she’s asking about his latest homework assignment, eager to know about his schoolwork, she’s acting… odd.
She keeps frowning. Not angrily but just strangely, in a sort of confused way Shoto doesn’t normally see on his mother. She keeps frowning and awkwardly clasping and unclasping her hands, where they normally stay perched still in her lap. She glances out of the window and her breaths are uneven, dampened.
Shoto fiddles with the hem of his shirt as he talks. Would it be weird to ask her what’s wrong? Are they there in their relationship yet?
Sure, she’s his mother. But the whole throwing boiling water on her son and getting sent to a mental hospital incident sort of blurs the line on what’s okay to do, and what isn’t.
They’re not a normal family. They don’t have a normal mother-son relationship. Shoto just observes her uncomfortable sort of nature and doesn’t know what to do about it, just finds himself crippled with indecision instead.
In an odd mirror of Rei, Shoto keeps moving his hands, not able to find a place to put them that’s quite comfortable. Normally he feels safe in her presence, but there’s something about her today that almost makes him feel uneasy; there must be something wrong.
He already finds himself thinking the worst. After everything his class went through, why wouldn’t he? Is this an imposter? Has somebody taken his mother? Are there villains waiting underneath her bed, waiting to-
“Shoto, dear.”
Rei’s voice jolts him back to the present.
“...Sorry.”
He doesn’t want to end their visit on a bad note, doesn't want to leave with a bad taste in his mouth. He doesn’t see his mother often enough and so he cherishes the times that he does - he doesn’t want to go back to the dorms thinking that he did something wrong and hadn’t even asked her about it. He wants to mend their relationship, right? So why does he feel so frozen?
It’s ironic. That Rei is the one with a full ice quirk, and he’s the one frozen still, unable to speak.
Ice is fragile and delicate and Shoto doesn’t want to push too hard, just in case she didn’t actually want him asking and then what if she doesn’t want him to visit anymore, what if he doesn’t see her again for years? What if she starts to hate him?
Maybe he’s overthinking. Maybe Rei has just had a bad day. Or she’s coming down with something. Shoto doesn’t know.
Instead of asking her what’s wrong, Shoto asks if she’s been enjoying the warmer weather recently, now the spring is slowly fading into summer.
She smiles but Shoto can still see the uneasiness etched into her face. “I’m very fond of the longer days,” she tells him. “It’s nice to see the sun more often, to be outside more. You are getting enough sun in the dorms, aren’t you?”
Shoto nods. “I had lunch outside yesterday.”
“It’s a shame it rains so often,” she muses, staring longingly out of the window. “But I’m sure it’ll pass. It always rains more at the end of spring.”
Shoto has no idea if that’s true, but he’s not going to fight her on it.
“It rained on the way back from my internship,” Shoto explains. “I forgot my coat and had to get changed at home before I came. I promise I hurried.”
Rei’s mouth forms a silent oh and the conversation dies out there, with Shoto’s explanation of why he might’ve arrived a little later than normal. Is that it? Is she upset that he came late? He didn’t think it would matter, because he’s still here after all and visiting hours are still on until the evening and it’s not like she was doing anything anyway-
…Is she really mad at him?
Shoto feels a hot, sinking guilt start to accompany the nausea in his stomach. If there’s one thing he can’t handle, it’s Rei being angry at him; he doesn’t want to disappoint her and not to mention the certain memories it brings back.
The silence settles across them both, over Shoto’s doubtful shoulders and Rei’s stiff hands. He doesn’t know what to say and is going to fill the quiet with more small talk, maybe about some books he’s been reading recently, but Rei opens her mouth to speak and Shoto shuts his instantly to let her talk.
“...That shirt was Touya’s,” she whispers quietly.
Oh.
He looks down at his clothes. It’s just a simple shirt, loose and baby blue and long-sleeved, a texture on his skin that’s not really rough or soft.
Shoto had wondered why he didn’t recognise it. He’s not one to forget things, even trivial items of clothing, but he’d been in such a rush to get here that he hadn’t even thought and why didn’t he think it makes complete sense now and if his father had seen he probably would’ve berated him for being so careless-
How could he be so negligent, even in his haste? How could he be so thoughtless as to accidentally wear the clothes of a dead boy?
Not just a dead boy. His late brother. He’s wearing Touya’s clothes.
Oh, he thinks, over and over again. Oh.
“I can take it off,” he whispers back, body hot with shame.
Rei quickly shakes her head. “No, no, don’t do that. You’ll catch a cold with all this rain.” The unease seems to have disappeared almost completely from her. “It was just… odd to see, after all this time. That's all."
“Sorry,” Shoto apologises through the lump in his throat. It’s all he can think to say.
The rest of the visit goes as normal, if not a little stilted. Shoto does end up telling her about some of the books he’s read over this past month and asks her in turn what she’s been reading, too. He asks and he talks and he listens and all the while, he tries so desperately, desperately hard not to think about the shirt that he’s wearing.
Of course, Enji wanting him to surpass All Might and become Number One were some pretty big shoes to fill - but it’s nothing like wearing Touya’s clothes.
Maybe one day, he could live up to All Might. But even he knows he could never live up to Touya.
Shoto wouldn’t dare try and replace him. He doesn’t want to. But even still, the facts remain thus: Touya was born first, Enji trained Touya first, and Enji abandoned Touya to train him.
The clothes are big enough to fit him now in his sixteen-year-old body because - even though Touya had been thirteen when he died - the baggy clothes helped hide the burns. Shoto had been far, far too small at the time, but he’d heard small notions of what was going on through shouts behind closed doors and sneaking glances around corners.
Touya had been too young.
Shoto is sixteen years old now and he’s older than Touya will ever be.
He clutches onto the fabric with sweaty palms as he listens to his mother talk and tries to ignore the horrible feeling of his skin crawling. Touya wouldn’t want him wearing his clothes. Touya hated him. Touya tried to kill him. Touya would think, first you stole father away from me, and that wasn’t enough? You had to steal from me even after I died?
Shoto listens to his mother talk and tries not to think about the sweat on the back of his neck, the rising sickness in his throat. He doesn’t deserve this. Touya’s shirt is warm and the texture feels comforting and it’s a soft, gentle colour but it’s not Shoto’s to have. He should never have even touched it. It was Touya’s and now he’s tainted it with himself-
He hadn’t even gone to Touya’s funeral.
(His father wouldn’t let him. Enji himself hadn’t gone, either).
“I should go,” Shoto whispers, not sure whether he needs to fight back tears or not. He can’t really tell if they’re coming, if he’s actually upset or just numb.
Rei smiles softly. “I think it might be best,” she says, squeezing Shoto’s hand once before she lets go. “Don’t catch a cold, okay? I’ll see you next week.”
Shoto wraps his arms around himself as he’s leaving, feeling every bit embarrassed in the clothes that he’s wearing. It’s not like any of the hospital staff would know but it still feels like they could and no matter what anybody else knows, Shoto still feels ashamed.
As soon as he gets home, he takes off the shirt like it’s been burning his skin this whole time. He doesn’t feel like he deserves to wear it, he feels like Touya would hate him wearing it; it’s not for him and he wishes he’d never picked the damned thing up in the first place. He should’ve just gone straight to the hospital after the internship ended for the day and got a cold, then just sucked it up.
Shoto can handle a cold. He can handle fighting through an illness.
But what he can’t handle, he thinks as he gently folds up Touya’s shirt and places it neatly and delicately on his desk - is the loss of his eldest brother.
As it turns out, the death of Todoroki Touya wasn’t a proper death at all.
Touya is very much alive. Touya is alive and going by Dabi and Shoto has been crying since he got discharged from the hospital a few hours ago.
He didn’t want to cry when he was there - not in front of all the nurses and half of his class and his entire family and even Hawks and Best Jeanist. He had just held it in as best he could, and tried to think about the pain of his injuries instead of thinking about Touya.
Being home alone helps. He’d trudged back through his front door as soon as he’d been allowed and immediately collapsed onto his bed, curling up on himself and sobbing, not having to worry about being quiet.
Because it’s not like he can talk to any of his friends. They’d let him, sure - but they wouldn’t get it. Nobody would get it. There’s no way Shoto could properly explain what he’s feeling, not with every single small and traumatic event that led up to it over every single year of his life, even in the years before he was born. There’s no way Shoto could properly explain what he’s feeling because he’s not sure he even knows himself.
He could visit his mother, he thinks. She’s back in the mental hospital now.
…And she would get it more than anyone else.
There are very few people who knew Touya before he was Dabi - and by extension, there are very few people who actually had to deal with the loss of him. There are very, very few people who can feel something similar to what Shoto’s going through, and one of those people is his mother.
It’s only after he thinks he’s cried himself out that he changes out of his clothes. He’d been wearing the same thing in the hospital for ages but he couldn’t hold onto his composure for any longer after he’d walked in the door, so he’d just broken down in the week-old clothes. What does it matter if he cries onto an already dirty shirt, anyway?
The shirt on his desk catches his eye and Shoto stops still while he’s half in and half out of his clothes.
It’s been sitting there since he had set it down months ago. Touya’s shirt, carefully folded into a neat rectangle of cloth, next to some old stationary and schoolwork. He didn’t dare touch it again, half out of guilt and half out of fear of what it might make him feel.
He feels kind of guilty as he stares at it blankly, unable to take his eyes off of it.
…Whatever. Touya can’t hate him any more than he already does.
He slips the shirt over his head before he can think any better of it, and already the feel of the fabric is calming. He pairs it with some black sweats and puts a raincoat on before he leaves the house, because the shower season still doesn’t seem to have ended despite it being a while since he and Rei last talked about it.
It’s not raining while he walks. Just quietly drizzling, enough so that he keeps his hood up and tucks his chin down-
But maybe it’s partly because he doesn’t want anyone to recognise him. People recognised him after the sports festival was televised in his first year - and that wasn’t nice, but he could deal with it.
But people knowing him from Touya’s broadcast…
He doesn’t think he’d be able to deal with that.
Does Touya- Dabi know that Shoto misses him? That Shoto had always wanted to play with him when they were kids? That Shoto never wanted any of this?
Does Touya know that Shoto’s wearing one of his old shirts because he’s never felt the same after seeing Dabi in the flesh, hearing his story firsthand?
When he finally arrives at the hospital, Rei seems a little shocked to see him. They’d seen each other not long ago and they don’t normally ever see each other more than once a week; but that didn’t count, Shoto wants to say. They couldn’t talk properly because Enji and Fuyumi and Natsuo and Hawks and Best jeanist had been there at the same time.
It’s not exactly visiting his mother if his entire family and both the number Two and Three pro heroes were also there in the same room. Also talking about his dead (not dead) brother.
They exchange polite hello’s like Touya didn’t reveal he was somehow alive after eleven years and try to kill him less than a week ago. Shoto smiles graciously like he’s not breaking inside.
“It’s good to see they took your bandages off,” she says, not acknowledging the reason he actually needed them in the first place. “Is your hair all alright now?”
Shoto nods before unzipping his coat and hanging it over the back of the chair. “It was uncomfortable under the bandages, but-”
He stops when he hears Rei’s breath hitch, rapidly turning on his heel.
“...You’re wearing his shirt,” she just says, softly, sadly.
Shoto hadn’t even thought of what Rei would think. He’d just wanted to see his mom, he’d just been sad and craving her affection, and he’d been missing Touya, too - but just like last time, he didn’t think. It makes him feel so selfish: wearing Touya’s shirt to make himself feel better and going to visit his mother for comfort, all the while forgetting that these two things would become linked.
He can’t decipher the look on Rei’s face.
He doesn’t want to speak. Instead, he just nods-
But then all of the emotions from the last week crash into him, and he bursts into tears where he’s stood by the door of Rei’s room.
He thought he’d finished crying when he left for the hospital but apparently not, because his chest is suddenly overcome with tight sobs that he can’t hold in; he feels pathetic, because this situation was all of his own doing. He chose to wear this shirt. He wanted to visit his mother. Nobody made him do any of this, and yet here he is. Crying.
Rei moves over to him across the room, gently wrapping her arms around him as he cries but still not saying anything. It makes him cry harder, thinking that he’s made her angry or even upset her.
He just melts into the hug, his back sort of aching with the awkward angle.
Shoto’s much taller now than he used to be. He’s much taller than his mother, a good 5”9 to her 5”5, and so even though she’s hugging him - she can’t hug him like she used to.
Like when he was small. Like when he was a child. Like when he would cry over something small and trivial and she would pull him into her lap, rest his head on her shoulder, stroke her hands through his hair. Maybe it would make hero work a bit harder but he’d so much rather be shorter than Rei again, just so she could hold him.
He doesn’t want to feel disappointed with the touch. He feels bad about being disappointed. But even as they embrace, it feels like he’s hugging her, and not the other way around.
Shoto feels so overwhelmingly tiny under the weight of the world. Under Touya’s reappearance, Dabi’s broadcast, everything that he hadn’t been expecting to deal with but was forced onto him anyway. Shoto feels so horribly small but his body is too much, too much for his mother to cradle like she used to.
Maybe it’s childish to want that, he thinks. After all, he certainly wouldn’t admit it to anyone.
He tips his head down into her shoulder as he shakes and Rei taps him on the back twice, silently signalling him to pull away.
Against his own will, his body starts to cry harder because he doesn’t want to pull away - but what can he do? He doesn’t want to potentially ruin his relationship with Rei any more than he already has.
He’s still hiccuping and blubbering like a baby and he hastily wipes his tears as she pulls away. He’s almost expecting her to be angry with him, to berate him for wearing Touya’s shirt again because the first time could be excused as a mistake, but now? How dare he, Touya was her firstborn and Touya is alive-
“Shh, baby,” she whispers gently, very much not the furious tone he’d been dreading. Instead of shouting at him, she cups his face in her two slender hands and wipes away his tears for him, tenderly with the pads of her thumbs, unlike Shoto’s frantic rubbing with his sleeves that had left his skin red and irritated.
Rei holds him like he’s done nothing wrong, still softly thumbing over his cheeks to dry his tears when new ones fall down to replace the ones that had already been wiped away.
“Sit down on the bed so I can hold you properly, okay?” She says, squeezing his shoulders with what Shoto thinks is a reassuring smile. He can’t see properly through all the tears.
He wants to collapse in relief.
Being as gentle as she possibly can, Rei slowly coaxes him to sit down on her bed, helping to steady him as he does - and Shoto cries all the while, sniffling into his hands as Rei sits down at the head of the bed, then pulls him into her arms.
Why can’t he stop crying? This is what he wanted, he wanted to feel held, protected - and now, even when Rei has her arms around him and he’s lying half on top of her like a child, he’s still crying, still wholeheartedly and soul-crushingly miserable.
“It’s my fault,” Shoto sobs into her chest. “What happened to Touya, it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” Rei murmurs.
Her hand splays out across his spine, soothingly rubbing up and down, and his throat hurts with how strongly he cries. Rei tries to hold him through it and yet he’s still just so sad.
“If I had never been born-”
“Don’t say that,” she presses her lips to the crown of his hair, interrupting him before he can finish.
“But he would be fine,” Shoto says in a gasp, fingers gripping Rei’s shoulder as hard as he can manage, which is, to be perfectly honest, not very hard. “It’s because of me that father-”
“Sweetheart,” Rei interrupts whatever he’s about to say. “What he did has never been your fault, okay? You were a baby. There was nothing you could’ve done.”
Shoto dissolves into broken sobs, fisting his hands into her shirt to try and keep himself tethered to the world, to where they are, laying on Rei’s bed together in her hospital room. He cries so hard it hurts, makes his throat sore and his stomach ache, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Rei just softly fusses and plays with the hair on the top of his head, separating the red and white on each side of his head where it had become messy from the wind.
They haven’t done this in a while.
Twelve years, Shoto remembers. He’d been four.
He doesn’t even remember what he had been crying over, now - but he remembers his father had been working late, and his mother had been in her bed, alone. He remembers pushing the door to her bedroom open even though he was barely as tall as the door handle and toddling up to her bed, asking if he could lie with her until he felt better.
They lie in the same way now as they did then. Sixteen-year-old Shoto, all gangly limbs and growth spurt pains, lies by his mother and presses into her side, like the good memories of his early childhood are going to fix him and Rei’s hand on his head will protect him from the world.
Rei holds him like he’s four again and crying over nothing.
He stays long after visiting hours are over this time, finally coming down from crying after a long while with her fingers carding through his hair and her body protectively tucked around his.
The hospital workers all saw Dabi’s broadcast. Shoto doesn’t particularly like that all of the nursing staff are aware of his family’s dirty laundry, but it does also mean that after the week they’ve all had, nobody is coming to ask him to go home since visiting hours are over. Nobody is coming to separate Todoroki Rei from her son.
For the first time since he was four, Shoto lies in bed with his mother next to him, his chest softly rising and falling with every quiet breath he takes.
Shoto falls asleep with Touya’s shirt wrapped around him and Rei’s hand resting on his head.