Chapter Text
It was as simple as breathing for Touya, the hours of hard work and training to get where he was now. A barre and a mirror, both soft shoes and pointe in pale flesh tones, hands stretching him just that little bit further - little bit better. He went after proper form and poise and grace with all the veracity of a predator chasing prey.
He’d been dancing since the tender age of four, a class he was signed up to in the desperate attempt to get him to socialise like a “normal kid” sparking lifelong obsession. Twelve years and much spilled blood and split nails later, it was still him and the barre. It was still pliés and tour en l'airs and all eight positions.
The difference was he wasn’t a child stumbling through his assemblés anymore. He was a strong, lithe seventeen year old with the spoils of his rampant, manic fixation at his fingertips. He was in a specialist school with enough funding and resources to make his dreams of becoming premier danseur in The Tokyo Ballet Company a possible reality.
Well, he should call it a goal. It was a goal. A dream was something for sad people with no motivation to moon over in the privacy of their thoughts. He was doing everything in his power to climb the ladder and improve everything about himself.
“More height,” His teacher huffed, breaking him from his thoughts, observing his Grande Jeté as if it’d personally offended her.
It probably had.
“Land like an elephant in front of an audience, and they’ll know you are not worth the satin of your shoes,” She continued, her Russian accent thick as she picked him apart, “And Touya -”
“Yeah, yeah,” He huffed, crossing his arms as he cut her off, “You can see my lunch.”
Probably as he had eaten lunch. But that was common sense, and when something came between him and perfect form, that went out the window.
He used the short walk to his duffle bag to catch his breath and steady himself somewhat. Swan Lake’s Siegfried variation (third act) wasn’t exactly lengthy, but it was taxing - particularly when you were made to do it over and over again in the hopes of perfecting the less than two minute long routine. His stomach was beginning to flip with every leap, also.
Perhaps he was actually slightly grateful for the excuse to stop for a minute, he supposed as he pulled his black hoodie over his head. He snuck a split-second drink of water in, also, blinking hard and refocusing himself for the task ahead.
“No, no,” His teacher dismissed as he retook his starting position, “You’ve made Reisinger turn in his grave enough for today. If you need basics, we work on basics.”
Heat flared in Touya’s cheeks at that, his teeth gritting as to not allow himself to spew the venom on his tongue at the Хуй in front of him. She was his ticket to greatness, after all. He insulted her (learned Russian specifically to do so), he gave her attitude and bared his teeth - but he didn’t push his luck.
If he was going to perform like some second-rate hack, then she was going to treat him as such. It was his own damn fault for the humiliation he felt closing up his throat, and so he simply scratched at his forearms as he awaited further instruction, swallowing hard.
“Arabesque,” She ordered with a snap of her long, thin fingers, and Touya complied immediately.
His back was straight, leg lifted behind him with a practised ease and face placidly neutral. Any less control, and he probably would’ve bitten his lip. He knew exactly what was coming.
Holding one hand on his chest, ever so close to his throat, she placed the other around his willowy thigh in a strong grasp. Practice was the only reason Touya gave no visible or audible reaction to what happened next.
She bent his back into an accentuated curve, bringing his thigh up so high that he swore his scapula and femur nearly kissed. His abdominal muscles stretched and his vertebrae and tendons screamed as they were bent beyond his highly trained limits.
The only thing he did was close his eyes, resisting the urge to screw them up unpleasantly. He didn’t dare breathe, so the swelling of his lungs didn’t pull the skin and muscles tighter still.
She simply held him that way, pushing his resistance and flexibility. Testing the strength of his will, his features were practised pleasant. She could break his back, yet it was the job of the danseur to keep porcelain placid. Nothing less was expected, after all, and it could certainly be worse.
“Good,” She nodded after what felt like aeons, but was likely only a minute, “Not completely useless after all.”
He hated that his chest swelled at the back handed compliment the way it would with true praise.
As was usual, this continued on and on for he didn’t know how long. Stretches changed, running through different extensions, splits and all the usual fayre, muscles being pushed to the limit. However much they screamed, however, not a single sound slipped past his lips.
He waited, until she’d deemed the practice enough and released him from his position, legs spread apart and chest touching the floor. He didn’t spring up too quickly, the itch in his brain saying that he had to prove this wasn’t a chore or painful for him outweighing any physical sensation. Instead, his torso rose slowly, watching her with a sharp gaze as she bid him goodbye in clipped tones, her handbag over her shoulder and sensible heels in hand to slip on when outside of the studio.
Touya still didn’t leave. He sat himself up properly, taking a much-needed, deep breath and reorienting himself with the studio around him. The walls were bright white, the sun reflecting off the many floor-to-ceiling windows and directly into his eyes. He barely recoiled, turning his gaze to the floor and blinking hard at the pale, washed out wood below him.
He still had his slippers on, he noted, making start-and-stop movements to take them off before he arrived. The one he’d waited around for in this too bright room, every day after ballet training for the last three months. Takami “Hawks” Keigo.
Appearance-wise, they were complete opposites. Touya was tall and svelte with corded, lean muscle, whilst Keigo was much shorter, barely brushing 5’4”, and built like a brick wall. Keigo was strong on the ground, impossible to knock over, whereas Touya aimed to be as high in the air as humanly able. Touya’s hair was smothered in Blackest Black hair dye, and Keigo’s natural hair was a golden blonde - like sunshine or some other romantic bullshit.
But they got on well. They were both intelligent and quick-witted, both aiming for the stars and chasing those goals with dogged determination. They were both awarded scholarships by their prestigious school because of how well they ran the rat race and improved in their own ways. They debated as they studied, anything from analysing the works of Nakahara or Akutagawa, to politics.
Touya had attempted to argue physics with Keigo, but the other boy was much better with the subject’s practical applications than the more subjective, theoretical side that Touya favoured. Although the difference of skill in different areas was a bonus, seeing how the studying they did whilst hanging out only served to improve both boys’ already stellar grades.
That, and Touya got to just… see Keigo…
Touya bit his lower lip, pushing himself up onto his messy feet, feeling the new bruises overlap the old bruises, but not really caring. He was used to it, after all. It was more important to get himself out of his sweaty shirt and tights before Keigo would arrive. It was probably a good idea to stretch out his overtaxed muscles, also, before he seized and concerned Keigo with his stuttered breath.
Keigo’s hearing was actually insane.
He pulled off his shirt and hoodie at the same time, bundling them up ready to shove in his bag when he got his clean clothes out. Reaching for the bottle of deodorant he kept in his gym bag, he side-eyed his bent over form in those massive mirrors beside him, eyes on the small rolls of skin on his stomach.
Can see his lunch, indeed. Stupid bitch.
He bodily turned so his back was towards the ostentatious things - no more sun in his eyes - and sprayed himself down. He’d have a shower when he got home, but this would avoid stinking up their make-shift study space with BO.
Next, the shoes. The shoes were on their way out after five months of rigorous training, but that wasn’t too unusual for soft shoes. His pointes were falling apart after barely nine weeks. It’s not like his actual feet were any better right now, held together with blister plasters, medical tape, second skin and IcyHot ointments.
The tights slipped off of him easier than they had when he’d first got them, probably from the amount of wear, and he noted a hole in the thigh with disdain. He must have caught it on something whilst going through stretches. Fuck. Those were his favourite, too.
At least they were easier to replace than his shoes. Hopefully, he could keep them together for another week. Put off asking his old man for more stuff for a little longer.
Enji Todoroki was not someone he sought out the company of, if given the choice. Father or not.
He threw his dirtied clothes to the side, a small growl rising in his throat before he could trample it down. Who cared? No one was here but him, after all.
He didn’t spare nearly as much care putting on his casual clothes as he did removing his ballet ones, tugging his ripped jeans on roughly (and, subsequently, putting his foot through one of the many rips and nearly falling on his face - what a graceful danseur). He threw on his spare, baggy hoodie and began shoving his sweaty clothes in his gym bag.
There was no clock in the studio - he still didn’t know why - so he had no clue how close Keigo was to being let out of hockey practice. Or how long he’d been staring at the walls. He just slipped on his socks to avoid Keigo seeing his gross feet and retrieved his school bag from beside the door, rifling through textbooks and notes to find what he needed.
Just in time too, with the creak of the door signalling the other boy’s arrival.
“Hey-o!” Keigo chirped, a megawatt smile on his face and cheeks flushed with the adrenaline spike of beating up his teammates for the past two and a half hours, and Touya’s heartbeat skipped accordingly.
“That your mating call or something, birdbrain?” He huffed, although a smile did pull at his lips as he playfully rolled his eyes, holding up the newest book from his Japanese Lit class, “Come sit down, I’m not reading this depressing, misogynist bullshit by myself.”
“Okay, hotstuff, jeez,” Keigo laughed, and the dickhead’s pretty hair caught the sunlight perfectly as he moved to sit down. Prick.
***
“I have never seen such an inscrutable face on a man.”
Touya flicked his gaze up to Keigo’s face once the reading was finished, curious as to the blond’s reaction to this character. Of course, there wasn’t much, considering they’d only read the prologue. Conversely, everything had been revealed at once.
Dazai uses beginning, middle and something of an end in the prologue alone, making it reductionist and simple. You can interpret the narrator being someone removed from the situation, the use of first person tense present throughout the novel, but this being in reference to photographs of the main character himself...
“Depersonalisation: the novel,” Touya theorises, hand moving in a sweeping movement, as if introducing a circus act. He knows Yozo calls himself a clown, from his baseline knowledge of the book.
“All that, to say he hates himself,” Keigo begins, and if Touya didn’t know what the other boy was doing, he’d have cut him off there, “A whole prologue to say I act insufferably, but won’t ever change.”
It sounds so flippant, like a critique from a lazy student. From a student one might believe Keigo was, just to look at him and ascribe a stereotype, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth.
No, it’s a push to elaborate. Touya expects people to infer a lot more into his statements than they do. Awkward in real life, disastrous in literature exams. He does try to treat the examiner as an idiot - an interesting piece of advice from his teacher - but it seems idiots are far stupider than he thought. Keigo lures the intent of his thoughts from him rather expertly, not allowing him to stick to the cryptic one-liners that people only listen to maybe half the time.
He’s glad he’s not a character in a novel, one teenagers are meant to read and analyse and criticise.
“Well, it’s a core theme,” Touya shrugs, “You can tell by how the author chooses those particular descriptions. It’s important to give them that level of attention, because the beginning, middle and end are important. The lack of change is important. The knowledge of why and how you’re fucked up, even having some inkling of how to change it, but never implementing those changes. It all just gets worse and worse, yet you stay the same, because you can’t be anything else.”
Maybe he is just a character. The staging is too deliberate, saying these things in a room full of mirrors.
“And if it is someone else?” Keigo asks, “There’s nothing to say it is Yozo looking at these pictures.”
“Then even this stranger seems to have contempt for him,” Touya shrugs, leaning back on the heels of his palms and staring up at the ceiling, away from golden eyes that don’t blink as often as they should, “And that’s pitiable.”
Keigo hums in the back of his throat. They’ve only read the prologue, but he shuts the book and lays it to the side, picking up his notebook.
This one is a dark blue, “Japanese Lit: homework and notes” marked out in neat, small kanji on both the front and spine. Keigo keeps very beautiful notes. Keigo likes notebooks, stationery and organisation. He copies out and gets rid of notebooks that start looking beaten up. He despises mess .
Touya swallows hard and hates the mood literary analysis brings out in him. Did Yozo hate those notebooks being read as much as he hates this feeling?
One ugly child relating to another.
***
Keigo and he stayed another hour, discussing specific turns of phrases used by Dazai. Keigo writes out the quotations in his dark blue notebook to expand upon the meaning there, whereas Touya annotates in the margins. His kanji is somewhat squished into the small space, but that’s fine.
His kanji can deal with it.
When he finally returns home, nearing dinnertime, he’s almost bowled over as soon as he opens the door. As usual, Shoto is the culprit, clinging to his waist so tightly that anyone would think this is the first time they’d seen each other in months.
In reality, they ate breakfast together that morning. Shoto just goes through phases of being clingy, to near-worrying levels. Still, Touya handles it because that’s just what he does for his baby brother. Shoto can cling to his leg as long as he needs, because he can work around it well enough.
It’s nice to be wanted, too.
He just rustles Shoto’s red hair, streaked with stark, poliosis-white. Like his own hair, before he smothered it in dye; although his became more and more white with age.
“Hey, Sho,” He murmurs, reaching around the boy to unzip his boots and step out. As he does so, Shoto stumbles slightly as his brother suddenly shrinks four inches with the lack of platforms.
Shoto doesn’t answer him, and Touya sets his jaw, because that can only mean one thing -
“Touya.”
He looks up, finding a sight that he’s seen a million times over.
His father is an intimidating man, taller and broader than anyone has any right being, and a face that automatically settles into something malcontented. His arms are crossed, eyes narrowed, and Touya sneers in the man’s general direction on reflex.
“You were supposed to be home hours ago ,” Enji continued, “We were worried.”
Touya huffs a short, obviously sarcastic laugh at that. Because he knows that Enji likes to pick at him, like some sort of blemish that should be gotten rid of. He’ll scratch and pick until blood wells up and smears everywhere.
On the walls… the carpet… even some on the ceiling… Somewhere, there’s a scream.
“Yet, you didn’t even text me once,” He states plainly, detaching Shoto from his hip but still holding the young boy’s hand, breezing past his father like the man isn’t six foot four and nearly three hundred pounds of muscle, “At least make it believable.”
Enji doesn’t say anything as rebuttal, even as the man shifts his jaw and his eyes narrow further, but that’s not really Touya’s problem. It’s not Touya’s problem unless Enji decides to make it his problem.
“Touya, baby, stay awake. Mommy needs you to stay awake! WHAT DID YOU DO, ENJI ?!”
He won’t. Touya’s not even half his weight, and the grown man flinches back first. A few months ago, he might’ve called it pathetic, but now it’s just a fact; neutral, or as near as it can get.
Instead of entertaining his father’s supposed worry, Touya just leads Shoto to the kitchen and lets the little boy shuffle onto one of the uncomfortable chairs. He squeezes Natsuo’s shoulder as he passes, nodding his greeting, but doesn’t actually speak on his way to the fridge.
“Yeah, yeah - you can see my lunch.”
Touya clenches his jaw, swallows down the flood of saliva in his mouth against a flash of sudden nausea, and opens the fridge. Because Touya Todoroki doesn’t acquiesce to what people want; he does what he wants.
The lower shelf is stacked with neat tupperware boxes. On each box, there is a label. Each label follows the same format: [day of the week] (meal) - Touya’s - DO NOT TOUCH .
Meal prepping makes following his rigorous diet plan easier. When he first started, he’d make everything fresh, but that meant more temptations seeped in. Why not add some more butter, more spices? Why not add some dressing? I’m craving croutons, and not the cardboard, low carb ones, real croutons -
He doesn’t do that anymore. He makes all his meals for the week on Sunday night, just after eating dinner so he’s not thinking of all the things normal teenagers can eat. So he’s not thinking of the fried chicken that Keigo probably got on his way home, but his best friend will somehow still manage to make room for dinner!
“Toyomitsu-sensei says it’s good to get every bit of the food pyramid. Fat also helps with shock absorption, so having some padding between your skin and muscle is good when guys are slamming you into walls, y’know?”
But Touya’s not a hocky player, he’s a ballerino.
He takes out the box labelled “Monday (dinner)” and turns back to the table. He sits, he opens the lid as he does every other night , and sees…
A thoroughly uninteresting dinner. Broiled chicken salad, hold the dressing. He has protein, vegetables, and about a teaspoon of sesame seeds in there… somewhere. The tomato fared fine, as did the lettuce, but looking at it now he just… doesn’t want to eat it.
He pokes at it instead. He shifts around strips of chicken and, for a moment, pictures them deep fried and covered in sticky BBQ sauce. The lettuce becomes fries and he just stares holes into the food. His stomach growls. Everything looks like he’s playing some first-person video game, half a second of lag between him clicking the buttons and the character following commands.
He remembers Tomura bitching about that, once, seemingly forever ago.
“Touya, you're drooling on the table!”
“Fuck off.”
It’s an easy enough response, his sister’s disgusted tone grates on his ears and spine, but he does wipe the corner of his mouth with fumbling movements. It comes away wet, but not overly viscous - he drinks water constantly, so that makes sense.
“Gross…” She mutters, like he won’t hear her. If he were as cruel as he wanted to be, he’d want her to live a second in his body, play the laggy, first-person video game, and then maybe she’d understand that he just…
The thought fizzles out, and he’s back to staring at his uninteresting salad.
Shoto makes a small whine beside him, looking down at his own plate, and Touya follows his gaze. It’s a better meal than his own, still full of vegetables and with chicken, but it’s made with… more . It’s made with spices and teriyaki sauce and noodles.
On everyone else’s plate, they’re mixed together; it’s a stirfry. On Shoto’s, they’re separated. They have their own little sections, and his mother even arranged the vegetables in rainbow order, and it looks like something pulled off pinterest, really. Touya’s focus is on how the sauce is swirled over the dish in a circle, and that the mushrooms are touching the broccoli so the juices are getting absorbed.
Shoto always hated his food touching like this, even if their mom tried her best. Before, Enji had followed the advice of “eat or starve”, but that was before. That was before Shoto lost five kilos in the course of a month and nearly fainted at school. Because Shoto can’t eat unless certain conditions are met.
Touya shouldn’t eat unless certain conditions are met. That’s where they differ. Even if the protein shakes in the cupboard above the sink are for both of them.
And their father, but Touya refuses to factor Enji into this.
Instead, Touya simply leans over and fixes the problem as best he can. He scoops up the vegetables that got hit with the sauce, scoops up all the broccoli, and dumps them into his container of disappointment. The noodles should be mostly okay, he hopes. The chicken is touch and go, so he removes that too. The oil leaks from the crispy batter and onto his own blandly pale meat.
For a split second, he considers both shovelling the lot of it into his mouth as fast as he can, and also throwing up into the garbage can in the corner. He does neither, instead pushing the box towards Natsu with the simple command of “Eat up”, before standing once more.
He gets a protein shake from above the sink - vanilla, he only drinks the vanilla, only one bottle left - and heads off to his room.
He passes Enji, in his own seat, looking at him with stunned eyes and a slack jaw as Shoto tentatively brings a single noodle to his mouth. There’s half a moment where either of them could say something - anything - but it passes and Touya continues on. It’s not that important, he just doesn’t want Shoto to go without.
***
Closing the door of his bedroom behind him is a relief. He slumps against the wood, releasing a long breath he didn’t realise he was holding, and feels his shoulders finally drop. His head lolls somewhat, for a minute, and his head feels too full of cotton.
He should fill in his habit tracker. He should listen to some music. He should text Tomura and Shu for the first time in, what, a month?
Instead, he flops onto his bed, and takes small sips of his protein shake. From the end of the room, the mirror reflects his currently shit posture, and the low lighting just exaggerates the dark bags under his eyes. He’s cold, he’s in pain, and he’s hungry - because drinking this shit isn’t the same as eating a meal and he knows that . But it’s fine. Really
After all, ballet is the most beautiful way you can torture yourself, and Touya was nothing if not a porcelain doll with the temperament of a machocist.