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He’s been told it’s a little morbid, but Shouto likes to go to the graveyard to think.
Whenever Shouto needs some time alone between lessons, work study, and the extroverted monolith of the entirety of class 3-A, he grabs his walking shoes and visits the Todoroki family grave.
It’s really not a bad day out, he explains to Midoriya: the graveyard is beautiful, it always smells pretty, and nobody wants to bother the kid visiting a grave. Midoriya only ever gives him a pained smile in return.
But that’s okay. No-one has to understand. They just have to accept it.
(Sometimes when Shouto goes alone, and the weather is particularly bad, one of the caretakers will bring him snacks.)
He makes a token visit to his family’s grave, of course. He’ll leave an offering and tidy it up, and perhaps the surrounding graves will need some attention so he’ll potter about with them too, and suddenly he’s adding flowers to any bare graves and has an entire routine.
Anything to put off thinking about who lays beneath his own family’s grave, he supposes.
He circles back around after he’s had his fill of semi-productive wandering; once his head is clear and still, and he’s not thinking about whatever it was that drove him out here in the first place. It’s taken a lot today, and it’s dark by the time he’s suitably calm to attend to the Todoroki grave.
He learnt the hard way that doing so in any other mood tends to ruin the entire evening. Shouto needs to approach this with a clear head, as his father has always been the source of conflicting, tumultuous thoughts, and that hasn’t changed just because he’s dead and buried.
He’s typically alone by the time he returns—few others spend their evenings in graveyards at this time of year, when the dark encroaches early and the chill is bone-deep—but not tonight.
Tonight, he has company.
He doesn’t recognise the man standing in front of the family grave, but it’s possibly because there’s not much to go off. The stranger wears a long, hooded trench coat with heavy boots visible at the bottom, and tufts of white hair poking out around the head. At first, Shouto thinks Dabi—but it can’t be, because Dabi is still in the secure hospital wing, under an armed guard, until he’s deemed healthy enough for a trial. And it can’t be Natsuo, who’s so much broader than this stranger.
Not that the hooded figure has to be a Todoroki—but they never publicised the location of the Todoroki grave, and Shouto can’t think who else might show up, even if white hair isn’t uncommon.
But he can remember one other tall, white haired figure with Todoroki links, and that’s Geten of the Paranormal Liberation Army, so Shouto rolls up his left sleeve and flexes his fingers in case he needs to fight.
“Can I help you?” Shouto asks, approaching slowly. The stranger turns around.
“Sorry, I—Shouto?”
Shouto jumps back. He almost recognises this man. If his hair were spikier, and his skin were scarred, and his eyes held more anger, it could almost be—
“Dabi?”
Not-Dabi’s blue eyes widen.
“Shouto?”
Shouto tenses. What’s more likely—that his oldest brother has a doppelganger, or that Dabi waited until the hospital could patch him up and escaped?
Of course it’s Dabi. He’d know those eyes anywhere.
“What are you doing here?” Shouto demands, raising his voice as a warning for anyone in the vicinity, and drops into a fighting stance.
“Shut up,” Dabi hisses, and takes a step toward Shouto. Shouto ignites a spark in his palm, ready for whatever Dabi has to throw at him. “The fuck are you doing, don’t—”
Dabi raises his hands. Shouto’s hero instincts react before he consciously thinks about it, and he sends a wall of ice at Dabi. Even now, after the war, after Endeavor, after everything, Shouto can’t bring himself to try and truly hurt him.
He expects Dabi to dodge the wall, honestly. To jump around it, or melt it.
Instead, it smacks him squarely in the forehead and he goes down like a dropped sack of potatoes, leaving Shouto alone in the cold graveyard.
“...Dabi?” Shouto calls out tentatively, not quite believing it could be so easy. He stands still for one, two, three, waiting to see if Dabi is planning a trap, but there’s no movement save for the steady rise and fall of his chest.
Shouto inches closer, slowly, just to be sure. He’s learnt not to trust this man.
He cautiously reaches out and nudges Dabi’s leg with his boot. No response. Emboldened, Shouto crouches down beside him and presses a hand to Dabi’s chest to rub at his sternum—painful if Dabi’s actually awake, but Dabi doesn’t react, so he’s probably not trying to pull anything.
He doesn’t feel any staples under the blue tank top. Now he’s looking closely, he finds no scarring at all: Dabi’s face, neck and hands are bare and smooth.
Modern medicine truly is a marvel.
He props Dabi into the recovery position and, not sure what he’s supposed to do in this situation, tentatively peels back Dabi’s jacket. Shouto’s desperation to know his brother has been stymied by the layers of security and cameras and observation at the hospital, and if this is the only chance he’ll ever have, he has to take it.
Shouto’s first discovery is that Dabi wears bracers similar to his own on his wrists. Perhaps they’re quirk-suppressing? He can’t imagine the commission letting him run around with both his temper and his quirk, even though Hawks has taken over. Perhaps especially since Hawks has taken over, given the burn scars he now bears. Shouto wouldn’t blame him.
His second discovery is a set of keys bursting with keyrings. Shouto has no idea why Dabi would have this on him, and there’s no identifying information as he rifles through them. He spots several charms he thinks he can associate with people he knows—a red feather, a plushie rabbit’s foot, a snowflake, a half-red half-white cat. Unsure what to make of this, Shouto tucks the keyrings away in his pocket.
Surely more exploration will yield better results, he thinks, as he pulls the hero licence out of Dabi’s pocket.
Blueflame, the card reads, above a photograph of Dabi’s face—except it’s not Dabi’s face. It’s this stranger's face, with his smooth skin and wide eyes. Shouto tilts the card closer into the light from a nearby lamppost, and he can even see how Dabi would have been struggling not to smile when the photograph was taken. His mouth is pressed into a tight line but his eyes are bright, like someone has just told him a joke.
His Dabi—he’s come to think of them as his Dabi and not-Dabi—has smiled at Shouto twice in his life. He was attempting to kill Shouto the first time, and watching Shouto testify at his trial the second.
(He testified neither for nor against Dabi. He simply went up to the stand and told the truth.)
So why on earth does he have a not-Dabi with a smiling hero licence card?
He stands and looks around, checking that he’s not about to have any witnesses before he bends down and hefts not-Dabi onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry. He only drags him back a couple of rows up the graveyard, enough that they’ll be out of sight if anyone passes by and doesn’t look too hard in their direction, but he’d like some privacy to puzzle this one out.
He settles not-Dabi’s unconscious form back down and runs through the basic first-aid he’s been taught by Recovery Girl. He checks for a pulse (yes), for breath (yes), and he also conjures a small flame and shines it into not-Dabi’s eyes. He might not know what, specifically, he’s looking for, but not-Dabi sure does have eyes, so that has to count for something.
Well, he’s alive, so that’s good. Shouto should probably call someone. He’s just not sure who. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, and thinks about it while he turns it on. He muffles the speaker with his hand as it powers up, expecting to find a barrage of notifications and missed calls about Dabi escaping from the facility, but there’s nothing.
Midoriya has sent him a message wishing him a good day, and Kaminari has asked him a homework question, but there’s nothing urgent. Nothing that gives Shouto any insight regarding the not-Dabi lying on the frozen ground beside him. On the off-chance that something has happened, and they’re trying to keep it quiet, Shouto calls the one person he can count on to be in the middle of any shenanigans.
“Oh, Todoroki! Hi!” Midoriya’s voice rings out from his phone, loud in the quiet night air. “Everything okay?”
“Yes,” Shouto answers automatically. “Is everything… okay over there?”
“Um, yeah, everything’s good. I’m hiding in a cupboard because Ashido is collecting everyone for dance lessons but I forgot to write this English essay for Present Mic and I swear I know how to do verb tenses but every time I reread it my tenses are all wrong again and—”
Shouto is empathetic, he really is—he’s spent many an hour puzzling over Midoriya’s English homework with him—and he doesn’t want to cut Midoriya off, but he should probably get going. Not-Dabi groans beside him.
“I believe in you,” he says when Midoriya pauses for breath. “Thank you. Goodbye.” And, as not-Dabi twitches awake, he hangs up.
“Dabi?” Shouto is tentative, not quite sure whether he wants to be here when not-Dabi wakes up. “Please don’t try to kill me. I didn’t mean to hit you. I thought you’d evade.”
The man that isn’t Dabi, but that wears Dabi’s eyes and spiked hair, sits up.
“The fuck’s a Dabi?"
Shouto’s body freezes. His spine locks up and his fingers go numb as not-Dabi rolls onto his hands and knees in short, sharp jerks.
“Do you think you have a concussion? You should let me shine a light in your eyes now you’re awake.”
Not-Dabi shakes his head vigorously before sitting back on his knees. Shouto finds no hint of murderous desire in his face. Can a knock to the head cause amnesia? Is it temporary?
“Oh,” Not-Dabi says, his eyes focusing on Shouto. “Nah, I’ve had a concussion before. This isn’t that. I’m Dabi, huh?”
Shouto’s tongue feels too big for his mouth.
“You sound confused,” Shouto says, sweating. He’s not one for self-pity when there’s work to be done, but Shouto’s had his life turned upside down by the man on the ground before him—and now he has the audacity to remember none of it. How dare he decide to have a nice family discussion in front of the entire country, so that people only look at Shouto with either hatred or pity, and simply forget?
“I’ve never gone by Dabi, shit, that’s morbid. I’m just Touya to my Shouto. But you’re not my Shouto, are you? You have a different Touya.”
Touya squints at him again, and Shouto obligingly squats down and brings his flame closer between them so that Touya can look at him. He’s mostly sure that Dabi wouldn’t bother with a ruse—he’d simply attack. Maybe this can be safe.
“Who do you think I am?” Shouto searches Touya’s face for any hint of deception, or of his Touya, and finds nothing but smooth skin and a total lack of Dabi’s anger. He’s not great at reading faces but he suspects that, if this were all a ruse, Dabi would have broken and attempted to murder him by now.
Touya’s eyes flit to Shouto’s school tie.
“You’re U.A. student Shouto. Hero course?” Touya sounds as though he’s asking a question. “Look, this’ll sound fucked up, but there was a quirk.”
Of course there was a quirk.
“I’m, uh…” Touya grits his teeth and looks up, likely trying to figure out how to explain whatever this is.
Shouto’s simply happy that at least one of them has any idea what’s going on. He’s even happier to find a docile Touya. Whatever the reason behind it, Shouto’s grateful that he gets even this small moment. He’ll take the scraps of his eldest brother if that’s all he’s given.
“You have quirks right? Thank fuck. So yeah, villain with a quirk that sends me to other places. I gotta find them and make them send me back. You up to the task?”
“There are other Shoutos? Other Touyas?” Shouto says. “Can I—”
“It’s not worth it,” Touya says, averting his gaze. “You don’t wanna know the maybes and couldas.”
Shouto puts as much conviction into his voice as possible when he says, “But I do.”
Touya looks sad.
“I’m sorry about whatever happened to me, to your me. If you can get me somewhere safe to figure this out, maybe we’ll talk, yeah?”
Well, Shouto can handle rejection. He can pack it up and shove it so far down underneath everything else he feels about his family and worry about it later. “Can you walk? It’s not far to the house.”
“Maybe?” Touya shuffles to his feet, rocking alarmingly side to side, but doesn’t topple over. Shouto offers his arm to hold onto, and Touya takes it without question, clinging on with an unscarred hand.
"We can stop and rest if you need," Shouto says, and gingerly leads Touya out of the maze of gravestones and monuments to the dead.
***
Sneaking Touya into his house is an easier affair than Shouto could have imagined.
"So who's here?" Touya asks, squinting his eyes in the light of the genkan. Shouto eyes the slippers taken and the shoes left behind.
"Just mum," he says. "It looks like Fuyumi is out. She always wants to sit and talk about my day." Which Shouto knows is his sister's way of caring and making up for lost time, but he and his not-brother have problems to fix.
"With Rumi I guess," Touya says. "Huh. I have slippers."
Shouto doesn't ask why Touya thinks their sister would be out late with a top five hero.
"Of course you do."
Their mother insisted on it, even if Dabi is a convicted murderer that would sooner burn the house down than ever enter it again, by his own admission.
"Assumed I was dead here," Touya says merrily, sliding his feet into his slippers. Shouto opens his mouth to explain, but Touya cuts him off. "Better not tell me. I go mad thinking about the possibilities. This ain’t the first world I landed in."
Shouto doesn't admit it, but he appreciates it. Better to luxuriate in this one good moment with Touya than ruin it by talking about possibilities. He turns to tell Touya to be quiet, so they stand a better chance of sneaking in without being caught, but Touya seems content to move quietly, peering intently at everything in the house as they go.
“Is it different to yours?” Shouto asks in a low voice, not to be clandestine, but to give the question the weight it deserves. He’s really asking what the house looks like in a world where Touya didn’t die and their family had a chance to grow up happy.
“It’s sterile. More severe,” Touya says, just as quietly. “Like you, really.”
Shouto doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all.
“Why the fuck is your room so far away from the rest of the house,” Touya hisses, once they’re near the other end of the building.
“It’s okay to talk normally here. Nobody really comes over to this half of the house,” Shouto says, ignoring the question. It’s probably rhetorical, and Touya is simply expressing his opinions even though he doesn’t really want to know. If that’s the case, Shouto will let him express his opinions all he likes. There are many years of missed opinions he would like to make up for.
He tries not to watch Touya too closely as they walk, lest he make him nervous, but this Touya—like his own—isn’t shy or quiet with his opinions.
“Fuck me,” Touya wheezes, stifling laughter as Shouto slides open the door to his room. “It’s exactly the same!”
This pleases Shouto, even if he can’t pinpoint why.
He pulls out his futon and indicates that Touya can have either the desk chair or the space beside him. Touya chooses to sit beside him, and Shouto holds back a smile.
“Right,” he says, all business, because he’s a pro hero just as much as he’s a sad brother. “The best way to find someone with this kind of dimension jumping quirk would be the Hero Network.” He pulls out his phone and finds Aizawa at the top of his contacts list.
“Smart,” Touya says as the call rings. “Will he be up this late—”
“Todoroki, what’s wrong?” Aizawa answers on the third ring.
“I’m safe,” Shouto starts, because he can only imagine what Aizawa must be thinking about an unplanned call from one of his students. “There’s no danger. I just have an urgent query.”
“...explain.”
Shouto gives Touya a thumbs up.
“Please use the Hero Network to search for anyone with a dimension jumping quirk. We’d like to find them, if possible.”
A loud clatter sounds out from Aizawa’s end of the phone call, followed by a string of curses.
“Sorry,” Aizawa says, and clears his throat. “You’re the third this week. Who’s with you?”
Shouto swallows. “Touya. We’re at home.”
“Ah.”
“There are more? People from—elsewhere?”
“Yes,” Aizawa says, gruffly. “I’m on my way. It’s a quirk I can cancel with my own. No need to track down—the quirk user.”
“No!” Shouto says this with such fervour he surprises even himself. Touya gives him a questioning look. “You can’t.” He needs more time. “It would look suspicious.”
Aizawa is silent for several long moments.
“I’ll tell my ride not to hurry, but I am coming, Todoroki.”
Shouto suppresses a sigh. “Yes sir,” he says, before saying his goodbyes and hanging up. “You’ll probably be back home within the hour,” he says, sadly.
He doesn’t want this to be over. The brother whose ghost hung over his childhood is here, talking to him of his own volition—sort of—and there’s still so much to talk about.
“I’m sorry for whatever happened with this Touya.”
Shouto looks up from where he clutches his phone too tightly to find Touya leant back casually on his futon, arms crossed behind his head.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Touya hums in acknowledgement.
“We’ve got an hour, right?”
Shouto nods. Touya pushes himself upright, all tousled hair and comfortable smile, and Shouto’s heart aches for the life that almost was.
“I get as much Shouto as I want at home, so—I’m all yours. How do you wanna spend this time?”
Shouto would say that he’s never thought about the answer to this question, but he’s thought about it so much that the answer is immediate.
“Stay here,” he tells Touya, and jumps to his feet. “I have leftovers.”
Touya smiles, bemused, but doesn’t get up as Shouto scrambles for the door.
When Shouto returns, he holds two bowls of cold soba.
“For you,” he says, and hands one to Touya. Touya dutifully takes his bowl with a raised eyebrow. “It’s my favourite. I always wanted to share a bowl with you.”
Touya bursts out laughing. Shouto can’t see why, but he kneels down beside his brother in the hopes that, once he’s stopped guffawing into his noodles, he might give an explanation.
“Cold soba?” Touya reaches out a hand and places it on Shouto’s head. Shouto freezes, bemused, until Touya ruffles his hair. Oh. “The Shouto I have says his favourite is hot soba!”
“Huh,” Shouto says. “I wonder why that is.”
Between snickers, Touya manages: “Probably because my favourite food is hot soba!”
And then Shouto has to laugh.
“I want to know more,” Shouto says, resting the bowl on his lap. “Tell me everything about you, Touya. I want to know all your favourite films and manga.”
His phone buzzes: a text from Aizawa; he’s on his way. Shouto is going to ignore it and have his one perfect evening.
***
Shouto fidgets, shifting from foot to foot as the guards look through his phone and tablet for the third time.
“I’ll leave my phone here,” he snaps, having reached his limit. “And there’s no internet access on the tablet. You can see that. It’s full of films and shows.”
“The prisoner’s connection to the outside world—”
“He’s not going to break out of here because he saw a University Challenge rerun. Get me your boss,” Shouto says, and snatches his phone from the guard’s hand.
“What’s this, then?” The guard points to the lunch bag in Shouto’s other hand.
“Lunch,” Shouto says, unhelpfully. “You’re not sticking your hands in it. It’s hot.”
“Listen here, you—”
“Sorry I’m late,” Aizawa calls, jogging around the corner. He slots himself between Shouto and the guard, and Shouto unpuffs his chest. “Are you ready to see him?”
Shouto hugs his insulated bag of hot soba protectively.
“Yes. I’m ready.”