Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Shouta meets Backfire a number of times before he meets any of the rest of his family.

He runs into Endeavour a few times during that period, mostly at events and on patrol, but he feels like that doesn’t really count. Nobody really meets Endeavour. You can talk to him, and he talks back, but his eyes don’t see you, and when he leaves, no part of his life has been touched by your having been there. Later, it will seem like everyone in their sprawling industry has met Backfire; but Shouta will know then that he knew him first.

The first time Eraserhead and Backfire cross paths, it is at a gala for up-and-comers hosted by a charitable organisation whose aim is to put disadvantaged youths with unconventional, unmarketable, or heteromorphous quirks in touch with the resources to enter the industries of heroism and law enforcement. The outfits are terrible. Shouta wouldn’t be here if not for Hizashi, who wouldn’t let him get out of it and even rented him a half-decent suit. They are both twenty-five and still living on ramen and instant coffee like college students. They share an apartment downtown. They share almost everything these days. It feels unbelievable that somehow they are half a decade into their careers as Pros and not still shithead U.A. students who wondered about this stuff without ever really believing it would happen, not really. 

They arrive without fanfare, twenty minutes late. The chandeliers are sparkly and so are the people. Hizashi speeds off in a whirlwind to talk to the dozen heroes and sidekicks he knows that Shouta doesn’t, a flute of champagne in each hand that Shouta isn’t sure how he got. 

The snack table is full and even it is expensive, piled with traditional foods Shouta doesn’t think he could name, let alone say he’s tried. He sips water and finds a wall to lean on in a corner. He’s their designated driver. The shitty twenty-year old hatchback they split the gas bill for is parked three streets down so nobody will see it. Being young, indie heroes without day jobs doesn’t pay well. 

Strangers in tuxes flit on and off the stage at the front of the gala, praising each other endlessly, giving and accepting awards. People cheer but not with much enthusiasm. This sort of thing is the kind of event you only attend because you know there will be questions if you don’t. Nobody really gives a shit about those kids.

When Backfire leans against the wall beside him, holding a potsticker in one hand and a whiskey shot in the other, Shouta doesn’t recognise him at first. He looks different out of costume, soft, unkempt hair outgrown slightly into red at the roots, suit clearly not quite fitted correctly. His black formal shoes are scuffed with age and use. His eyes are a sharp, cool blue.

“Eraserhead,” he says, inclining his head a little but not looking at him. He eats the potsticker in one bite.

“If you wanted to have a conversation, you should have gone for Mic,” Shouta replies.

Backfire laughs a bit, way back in his throat. “Guess that’s true.” 

“And yet you’re still talking.” 

A nearby hero crackles with laughter at something one of her companions said, clearly sloshed, her face very red. The chandeliers chime gently over their heads, pieces of glass ringing like bells. 

Backfire shoots the whiskey and grimaces a bit. He must be eighteen or nineteen. He only graduated earlier this year.

“I promise I don’t mean to be a bother — I just can’t help it,” he tells Shouta cheerily.

Shouta and Hizashi were three years out of U.A. when it made it onto the news that Endeavour’s eldest son was enrolling at their alma mater. Very little is known about the personal business of the Todoroki family, even within the hero world, and such a thing itself draws attention — considering the lack of public appearances of any of the siblings in a number of years, there was no shortage of press present to photograph the kid as he walked in on his first day, head down, looking mildly embarrassed. He laughed at a joke one of the reporters made on the sidelines — clearly he hadn’t been media trained. There were countless articles. It was exhausting. He and Hizashi bitched about it over dinner a few times, he remembers, between Hizashi’s day shift and Shouta’s graveyard.

Todoroki Touya has grown out of the little kid he was when, at fifteen, his potential as a future top-ranker was already being hotly debated by the public. He bleaches his hair bright white now. He is taller and a little filled out, though he still has an incorrigible slouch. Shouta thinks he probably doesn’t have much room to complain. Backfire’s daytime costume is blue like his fire, streaked with hard, white, geometric lines down his shoulders like racing stripes. 

He only recently made his debut. He’s something like a hundred-and-tenth in the Japanese rankings. He isn’t particularly loved by the public. They say he doesn’t seem to have much of a personality. It’s hard to say he compares to his dad.

“Hate these things,” he says. 

“They’re made even better by small talk,” Shouta bites back mildly. 

“My father thinks you’re a pain.” Backfire’s eyes flick left to him for a second, just a second. “Last I heard, he thinks an Underground coming out of U.A. is shameful. He’s proud of his school. He thinks we should all be a good example.”

“Maybe he’d be willing to lend you a member of his PR team for a few hours sometime,” Shouta shoots back without hesitating. 

Backfire tips his head back and laughs, a full, real laugh. It startles Shouta so much that he finds himself staring. Endeavour would never make such a noise. Endeavour’s face probably isn’t capable of smiling. His son doesn’t look anything like him at that moment, empty shot glass palmed in one hand, head knocking back against the wall, laughing like a little kid. 

“You’re funny, Eraserhead,” he grins. “I’m glad we met. You know, I don’t have many friends out here.” 

“Out here,” Souta repeats idly, curious despite himself. 

“Out in the desert with these jackals.” Backfire waves a hand through the crowds, the strangers all wearing the same smile. “Heroics is a wasteland, you know that. Nobody’s willing to give an inch.” 

“Neither are you.” 

“Need an inch to give.” Backfire reaches over and pats Shouta’s shoulder. His hand is hot even through the fabric. “I’m making my way up. I’ll see you around, alright?” 

Shouta watches him leave. He thinks of how utterly strange the whole thing was all night, and doesn’t tell Hizashi about it — he isn’t sure why. 

The second time is on patrol. Shouta is twenty-seven and in costume and daydreaming about the hot milk tea he’ll make for himself when he gets back to their apartment, wondering idly about the email U.A. sent him about that teaching position, when Backfire flies out of the sky like an asteroid and smashes into the pavement. 

“Sweet Jesus,” says Shouta to himself. He was about to head home and now there’s a corpse burning an ugly smear-mark into the asphalt five or six feet ahead of him. 

He is about to pull out his radio to report that the sky is raining flaming cadavers when up out of the fire-patch swings Backfire, cackling like he’s just won a race, blue fire skittering over his shoulders and through his hair as it burns itself off him. 

He beams when he catches sight of Shouta. It’s nauseating. Shouta thinks about the joke he made about Public Relations the last time they saw one another. 

“Got carried away leaving a scene!” he says, that winning smile — everyone’s obsessed with the kid lately. There was this picture of him that went viral on the internet last month. The photographer captured the precise moment at which he extinguished himself, seeming almost to hover two feet above the ground as he leapt down from a wall, grinning like it was a competition as smoke folded itself off his body in pleats like the ocean behind a ship; he seemed to radiate cheerful hardiness. There was blood coming out of one of his ears. He’s clambering the rankings with a steady sort of diligence reserved for poisonous fungi. He must be twenty now. 

“You’re still on fire,” Shouta remarks. 

“Ah! I am. I thought maybe I was.” Backfire slides his hands up and down over his arms, over that fire so hot that even here Shouta can feel it like a sunburn. He pats himself out. “Sorry, Eraserhead. As you were.”

“Ground’s on fire too.”

Backfire slides his foot through the fire as if that’s going to help. He looks bashful. Maybe that, too, is an act. 

They put out the fire together, and it is as they’re doing it that Shouta notices Backfire bleeding steadily out of the back of his head, as steadily as he seems to do everything else. It’s a lot of blood — and head wounds bleed a lot, but this one is spewing petulantly, spitting. The soft blue spandex of the back of Backfire’s costume bears a dark, spreading stain almost the perfect shape of a long half-oval, dark and hard-edged, stretching down his back. 

“At least let me look at it,” he implores when Backfire refuses. 

They end up back at his and Hizashi’s apartment at five thirty in the morning. Later, neither of them will remember how that happened. It was a long night. 

It’s a scene they’ll laugh about later: as Hizashi stumbles bleary-eyed around their tiny kitchen, brewing coffee in the moka pot with his costume half-on, Backfire sits in one of their two tiny hard-backed plastic chairs backwards, facing the dirty stovetop and hugging the chair-back, and Shouta perches on the kitchen table between the unpaid bills and a bag of name-brand cat food, barefoot, one leg pulled up to his torso, and sanitises a thin needle from the first aid kit. None of them talk for a long while.

“We need to get a real coffee machine,” Hizashi says when he finally seems awake enough to process external information. He brews his coffee so strong that it pours like motor oil. He leans his hip against the kitchen counter two feet away, takes a sip from his HPSC CIVILIAN LITIGATION TRAINING DAY mug, and squints into the fuzzy light of the stovetop bulb. “Is Backfire in our apartment?” 

“I’m in your apartment,” Backfire assents decently, as the needle makes its way in and out of the back of his head. “Unless this is someone else’s apartment and we broke in.”

“I was about to clock out when he fell out of the sky,” Shouta explains. 

Hizashi nods knowingly, as if this happens to people all the time. 

"Well, you need to finish with his head so you can help me get my boots on," he says. "I keep telling the agency they're impossible on a good day with a shoe-horn but nobody listens to me."

Shouta does finish with Backfire's head, and he does help Hizashi with his damned boots, and it only takes them about ten minutes to get them on his feet, which is good. They joke about the precision of surgery. He waves him off at the door. They do this every day. 

"I'd love to live with another hero," Backfire sighs from his residence in the chair when Shouta makes his way back into the room. "It seems nice."

"You live alone?"

"With my folks." Slung over the back of the seat like a discarded coat, Backfire stretches out his arms to either side of him with a great deal of effort, then flops back down, sighing like an old dog, chin propped up on the cheery yellow plastic.

"Endeavour's a hero." 

"Suppose so. We don't really talk." 

"Family troubles?" 

"He spends lots of time with my youngest brother," Backfire says faintly. He reaches up to feel the back of his head. "Oh, it's a bandage? Okay."

He goes to sleep ten minutes later. 

Shouta turns him in his seat and manhandles him down so his head is pillowed atop his arms on the table, on top of the bills. They're only seven years apart, give or take some months, but Backfire really does look his full young age in the spotty light through the window, the blanket of dawn, suit unzipped at the shoulders, narrow windows of pasty white skin out in the cold air. There's a faint bruise on the underside of his chin, right in the middle. Uppercut. Whoever got that near to him must have been a tough villain to deal with. Few can stand to be so close to fire. 

A season passes, all of the rolling weeks like scenes of a play. Hizashi and Shouta both accept their offers to interview at UA. Neither of them has ever taught before. 

“It’s part of an initiative to bring on board more heroes from different market demographics,” one of the interviewers tells Shouta as she escorts him to the door after his third round. “We don’t have an underground hero on staff just yet.” 

“What about Mic?” Shouta finds himself asking. He pulls his civvie scarf tighter around his neck. Soon it will be winter. Here, they get a lot of snow. 

“He has a spotless record.” She shrugs, somewhat helpless, as if his miraculous success overwhelms even her. “He’s one of the only independent heroes we’ve found who is loved by the public and the industry alike. Most of you are controversial. No offence intended, you understand.” 

“Yes.” 

“And we’ve been avoiding employing signed pros—” 

“Yes,” Shouta assures. “Don’t worry, I understand.” It would be a hassle for all involved. With how tight-wound the agencies and management overheads have been in the last two years — worried about oversaturation, flailing quarter after quarter toward projected growth accelerations, scraping promised profits from the sides of the fishbowl they’re all stuck working in — it’s no wonder. 

The interviewer waves him off into the sparse afternoon light. If Shouta makes it through this round, he thinks, he might do it; he might finally have a real job. He and Hizashi laugh about it sometimes, when they’re both awake enough to do such things as laugh and talk. Mostly they’re too tired all the time. 

Bundled-up strangers bustle in the streets outside the campus. Shouta waits for Hizashi in the car, blowing hot air onto his fingers and watching his breath fog up the cold windows. 

By this time, it has been three or four months since Touya Todoroki was fired like his name states right out of the empty sky. He was gone by the time Shouta woke up that sleepy evening, before Hizashi was even back from his shift. He had left fifteen thousand yen on the kitchen table with a scribbled note on the back of a coupon for the udon place down the road: for food you gave me, it read, and Shouta was confused at first — he hadn’t given Backfire any food — and then checked the fridge. 

He doesn’t remember how it happened now, but at one point or another after that inopportune meeting, one of them got the other’s personal number from somewhere or other. They don’t text a lot. Shouta gets the idea that Backfire doesn’t have many friends in the industry. They only communicate when events are coming up. 

There is a ball tomorrow night; Backfire’s text comes through as Hizashi is walking toward the car, like clockwork.

u going to hspc fundraiser tomo yes ? 

Shouta doesn’t bother to reply just yet, just watches Hizashi slide into the passenger seat. 

“Our limpet wants company at the fundraiser tomorrow,” he says as greeting. 

Hizashi turns to look at him. Alarmingly, there are tears in his bloodshot blue eyes. Through the exhaustion he looks just like he did as a teenager, when all he was was emotional — he wouldn’t learn how to be brave until later, when they were both older. Shouta is transported for a single moment. It’s as if he’s back there and they’re kids again. This was all you wanted, a small voice says in the back of his mind, and it sounds like the dying; it sounds like the dead. You have everything you wanted. 

“I got the job,” Hizashi says in the voice of someone normal. Then, he tips his head back and screeches.

By the following night, Shouta still has a constant ringing in his ears. 

Backfire finds him against the back wall of the mixer in the entrance hall and puts a potsticker into his hand without asking whether Shouta wants it. He’s holding a champagne glass so full that he has to balance it precariously, with a fearsome grip on its stem. He must have poured a second glass in with the first. 

“The suit’s too big,” he greets. 

“You’re going to have to stand on this side of me,” Shouta replies promptly. “I can’t hear out of my left ear.” 

The story of how it happened makes the kid laugh until people stare. Shouta glowers at the floor and chews his dumpling, wondering whether he has a right to be embarrassed by anything anymore with what he chose for himself, for his life. 

“Hope he doesn’t do that to his students,” Backfire chortles. “Oh, that’s ridiculous. Were any civvies injured? No? I can’t believe that. I need to get to know Mic better. You’re too nocturnal for me. You always reply to my texts at two in the morning and it’s disruptive to my health.”

“You’re always awake anyway.” 

“No! My house has a curfew, I have little siblings,” Backfire jokes. “I’m asleep by eight thirty every night, you know.” 

They wander the ball together, watching for sightings of Hizashi around pillars and up on the vintage-style elevations on the edges of the room which make it feel like an amphitheatre for gladiators. He appears in flashes through the haze of wine and conversation, a singularly charming force, almost destructive as he reverberates between old friends and older ones. Shouta watches him and wonders, this shitty twenty-year old stuck to his side like glue, finding himself wishing they had more substantial food, wishing they could have just made it by now so they could give this up — he wonders. In the half of the world he can still hear, everyone is just as cynical as they were two years ago, but they’re reacting now, noticing them, truly seeming to see them as they turn about the crowd together to the quiet edges. 

Backfire’s life has been a documented one since he joined school, but especially since his debut. Most people know the story.

Shouta certainly does, but he still asks later that night as they sit on the fire escape at the top of the building, both tired of the crowds and of talking much. He isn’t up for a conversation but he can’t help himself, and he’s been drinking. 

“It was never a question,” says the oldest Todoroki child idly, like it’s nothing. He runs one pale finger over the textured metal beneath him. He’s sitting on a step a few under Shouta. From up here, Shouta can see his red roots growing in through his parting. “You know, it was just how it was going to be. Always.” He raises his dusty hand and lights it up. The fire burns the dirt off his skin. 

“It’s not your father’s quirk, though.” 

“They thought it wasn’t for a while, but it is — I burn hotter than him, of course, but I was born into a body that can handle the heat proportionally.” Todoroki shrugs. He lounges back onto the steps, long limbs spread out down into the darkness. “It’s the same quirk, just a different heat index. And I don’t have his endurance. But nobody does. But anyhow, they figured I was suited for heroism when I was little, once they’d settled the issue of my quirk. It’s almost always been like this.”

“You like the job?” 

Todoroki laughs his little-kid laugh. “I hate the job. The job sucks. I get paid dick for it and my father’s agency won’t let me out of my contract. I used to dream about being a hero and then I got older, you know. You know how it is.” Then, just as quickly, as if he expects Shouta to argue with him: “It could be worse. I feel like I have a stable life, I do. I didn’t choose heroics but I also think I’m just lazy, you know, and I’d hate whatever job, so maybe this is better. It has its upsides.” 

“Like living in your parents’ house with a curfew?” asks Shouta, cringing inside at the mere idea. 

“I get to see my siblings a lot — it makes it worth it.” Todoroki shrugs. “I don’t make enough money to move into my own place. You know they don’t even pay me minimum wage? I calculated my hours against my salary.”

“You could report them for that.” 

Todoroki looks up at him upside down, and he looks exhausted in the faint light off the street underneath them — he looks like he could just go to sleep here forever. In public he seems to shimmer these days with the kind of incandescent charity they expect of upstart heroes. The industry doesn’t love him but the people certainly do. He isn’t shimmering now, though, on the metal, on the matinée-showing; he’s on the wheel. 

“I’m happy with things,” he says after a moment, and looks away. “I was a sickly kid for a few years. There was a time — I don’t really remember it, but they thought I might not be able to use my quirk as an adult. I remember a doctor told my dad I was going to burn the power out of me before I hit maturity, or disable myself, you know, just burn my body up. And of course I didn’t, but for a little while, they thought it would happen. I think things ended up well all things considered. It could have been worse.” He shakes his head. “You’re going to be a teacher. I saw the article about it.” 

“They haven’t accepted me yet.” 

“They will! They’d be litigating against Capes Daily already if it wasn’t true that it’s happening.” Todoroki flicks a blue spark at him. It leaves an ash-mark on the knee of Shouta’s slacks. “You’re going to be a good teacher, Eraserhead.” 

“We’re out of costume,” Shouta points out. “You can just call me Aizawa.” 

Todoroki smiles at him upside-down, then twists around to look at him the other way. “Then you have to call me Todoroki, Aizawa.”

They stay on the fire escape for another twenty minutes, not speaking at all. Todoroki rolls and then smokes a cigarette methodically. Aizawa watches his hands as he does it, the occasional twitches of repetitive strain injury or carpal tunnel, how the tendons jump every once in a while below each of his fingers. 

The lights on the street all go out at once when it hits one in the morning and it’s as if the world has lost all of its noise. Everything seems suddenly quiet and hollow out in the loud, fast-spinning world of their city. It really is a shit job.

Chapter Text

Todoroki helps them move to a bigger apartment and complains the entire time. This is how they interact now. 

Aizawa got the teaching job, and it’s shit, but it pays well. He and Mic are upsizing. They’re both twenty-eight around this time.

“You own more books than I will ever read in my entire life,” Todoroki says as he grunts, hefting a scuffed cardboard box into his arms. He’s filled out a little recently, building just a bit of muscle. He doesn’t look so much like a teenager anymore. 

“It’s all Shouta’s; I don’t read,” says Hizashi as he tries in vain to do a single pull-up in the kitchen doorway. One of his bright purple slippers falls off his foot. He flops miserably down onto the floor to retrieve it. 

“You’re an English teacher,” Shouta tells Hizashi with an affect of mild, antagonised horror, but it isn’t real. He knows Hizashi is a shithead. He knows neither of them is really that good at their jobs, at least not yet. 

Todoroki staggers under the weight of the box down the stairwell and out to the hired moving van outside, then bends to drop it down onto the pavement. He straightens and wipes sweat off his face. Aizawa watches him from the entryway to their building as he hooks a fist up around his straightened arm and twists his torso around, trying to straighten a kink in his back. This morning, for a brief moment, the sun was shining, a momentary break in the snow clouds that have yet to break. It’s been a slow winter this year. 

“You need to do more weights at the gym,” Aizawa calls dryly. Then, seeing no real reaction, he idles across the asphalt and picks up the box of books and hefts it into the back of the van next to the others. Maybe he does own too many. 

“I don’t go to the gym.” Todoroki flexes his weasley arms. “This is all home-grown, baby.” 

“Where do you train then?” Aizawa notices a folded chair sliding slowly down the wall at the back of the van and steps up inside, into the darkness, to fix it. 

Everything he and Hizashi own is in here, everything they brought with them to their first apartment when, at eighteen, they were living on payday loans while they waited for the HPSC paperwork to clear and for their meagre income to initiate. A cheap plastic dehumidifier in its box huddles between their mattress and their ironing board on the floor, bought for the mould. They both still have awful credit because of those days. 

Todoroki wanders to the back doors of the van, propping his elbows up on a box, standing on the concrete. He squints up at Aizawa through the clutter. 

“I run in circles around our neighbourhood for hours until I think I’m going to pass out.”

“Ah.” 

Aizawa remembers doing the same thing in the days before he could afford a gym membership, and doing bicep curls with the grocery bags in the kitchen, and slogging through dozens of rounds of pushups in the outer hallway to the sound of the cars on the street below as other residents stepped over him to get to the stairs. There was no floorspace to work out in their unit. They had both had to improvise. 

They both sit on the back of the van for a few minutes, catching their breath, legs dangling two or three inches over the road. The fluffy white sky hangs low to the earth, and the landscape feels small, scalped to a fraction of its usual width. It’s as if there has been a blanket thrown out over the world. 

Something seems to burst free from Todoroki and he pushes his hands down on either side of him into the metal rim of the van’s underrun and whips his head around to Aizawa. 

“My littlest brother,” he says all at once, “—he’s won this award. At his school. He’s so smart— he’s just so smart, and he’s so creative, it’s amazing, Aizawa. Last year he got into advanced art classes, so he takes Fine Art with the high schoolers in the evenings, which took a lot of convincing— but we got there, and anyway, he takes these Fine Art classes and they let him submit one of his paintings for the end of year showing at the high school, and he’s won some kind of award for the arts from his middle school, a real award, you know, and he’s thirteen, but they’re blown away by him, you know, how good he is at this stuff. And he really is amazing at it. You should see it. Wait.” And Todoroki fishes his phone out of the front pocket of his sweater. “Wait, look. Look at this!”

Before Aizawa has had a chance to respond to any of this, there is a phone in front of his face. He squints to draw the picture into focus. 

It’s a slightly blurry photo of a painting, a white circle against a dark background. Aizawa blinks and makes out what it is: it is the mouth of an industrial tunnel as seen from inside. Scraggly green foliage dangles down from the roof into the bright bullet-hole of light below. Beyond the darkness of the outside of the painting, the faint, sun-faded outlines of trees can be seen in the world outside, hanging unkept out over the smudgy brown trapezoid of a dirt road. 

It’s a pretty painting. Aizawa doesn’t know enough about art to judge it. But the sense of light and shade and dimension give it a sense of realism that belies years of practice. 

“It’s good,” he remarks, upon realising Todoroki is waiting for a response. “Kid deserves the award.” 

“He’s working so hard at these classes. And you think, what other kid is putting all this into their education? I didn’t. I didn’t give a shit the whole time, just wanted to leave. I think most kids just want to leave.”

“Not all of us didn’t care about school,” Aizawa says, even though he himself didn’t. 

Hizashi sticks his head out of the front door. “Working all on my lonesome here, kids! I’ll make tea if we can get the last of it before it gets dark.” 

They keep Todoroki’s favourite brand of mint tea in their cabinet now. And that’s the end of the conversation about Todoroki Shouto. 

Aizawa finds himself thinking about that painting again a few times in the coming weeks, though; where it may have been viewed from, what inspired it, which tunnels the youngest Todoroki must frequent in his free time to have such a vision of one. When he tries to envisage the younger Todoroki siblings, he just finds himself picturing a row of increasingly smaller Touyas, all sporting his same badly dyed hair and winning smile. 

A few weeks after the move, Todoroki turns twenty-one. There is a media hullabaloo about it. With his soaring success in the charts as of late, people seem to be forgetting that he himself used to be forgettable. He takes three different press hits between jobs through the day, thrumming with his vibrant, crowd-pleasing energy, and then he, Aizawa, and Hizashi get noodles together at a hole in the wall on the street perpendicular to the wholesale heroics gear warehouse. 

Snow curls gently from the clouds outside the window as Hizashi pours over the menu. Aizawa watches Todoroki watch the sky. There is a tiny line of blood dried in a ring around one of his nostrils, almost impossible to spot. 

Later, he will learn that it was Shouto’s birthday too only a week before, and that he didn’t get to see his eldest brother because Endeavour booked Touya’s day full of press. Now, he doesn’t know what the problem is, only that Todoroki looks mildly sad at that moment, staring at the snow like it’s an old friend he doesn’t talk to anymore. Once, he told Aizawa that he likes the cold. 

Hizashi orders them all beers, then more beers. The noodles aren’t great, but the booze is cold and cheap. The night wears on and Todoroki eventually seems to tire of the window and deigns to speak with them, something like a coming back to consciousness happening behind his eyes. 

“Hate getting old,” he says, and huffs a great slog of drink that he barely seems to swallow. 

Hizashi and Aizawa exchange despairing glances. The kid wouldn’t know old if it stamped his face across the front of a style magazine. 

“I think you’ll survive it,” says Aizawa. “Don’t drink so fast.” 

Todoroki raises his head. “I want vodka,” he says with the ruinous certainty of someone who grew up a rich kid but isn’t really one anymore. He writhes over Hizashi out of the booth. Gunning for the bar, he calls over his shoulder, “Shots!” 

“Do you know if he had a job go wrong or something lately?” Hizashi leans forward and whispers the moment Todoroki is out of earshot. “Kid’s losing his mind.” 

“His approval ratings are still through the roof.” Endeavour’s fans love the kid because he seems so much like his father; Endeavour’s critics love him because he seems so different. The five different kinds of line Todoroki is walking at once are lines he walks exceptionally well. 

Far later, he will learn that early in the morning after Todoroki Shouto’s birthday, Touya made it home at four and snuck to his brother’s room to check on him, only to spot his hand in a fresh cast. In the ensuing argument, a fight broke out in the middle of the night so vicious — between all three of them — that multiple windows were destroyed, as well as a table, a writing desk, a mattress frame, and a number of exceptionally rare antiquated linen tapestries. It was standard fare, Todoroki will tell Aizawa later. It was the kind of fight they had all the time. 

The second conversation they have about the youngest Todoroki happens in the middle of the night, two years later. Aizawa recently turned thirty. He took a week of annual leave to mourn, and then it was back to work.

“Eraserhead.” Todoroki isn’t laughing like a kid anymore. “Aizawa. Listen. I know you don’t owe me anything — I know that, listen, I do. But I need to ask you for something. It’s the first and last time I’m ever going to ask you for anything.” 

Aizawa isn’t sure where the sudden gravity has come from. They are seated on either end of his and Hizashi’s old leather couch. It’s two or three in the morning, and in the morning it will be April, and the years continue to roll by like pieces of puzzles sliding almost into place. 

“What do you need,” he says, not asking. 

Todoroki shakes his head. He pushes his face into his hands and rakes his fingers back through his hair, then looks out over the dimly-lit room, to the windows crowded with darkness, to the world that’s been grinding them into a fine paste since they first met at that gala years ago, when Aizawa was still young and broke, when nobody really knew who Backfire was yet.

“I need you to take care of my little brother,” he says. “He’s going to be in the class you’re assigned this year.”

The internet tells Aizawa a number of things about Todoroki Shouto. None of them are things his Todoroki (perhaps Big Todoroki, or Todoroki Elder) ever told him about his youngest and most impressive sibling. 

Far from being known as an artistic force, Todoroki Shouto is a prodigiously formidable young prospective hero; physical chimerism, quirk chimerism, purportedly exceptional intelligence, a spotless record of interactions with press and public; all the potential in the world to rocket through the rankings as a young hero someday and destroy them all. In the photos, he looks like a shell. His face is impeccably blank in every single one. Some especially self-centred people do that, Aizawa thinks despite himself; they think cameras and questions are so beneath them as to preclude acknowledgement. 

But of course, Todoroki Shouto is not a callous old golden-age relic. He’s just a boy. A boy who likes to paint and needs Aizawa’s help, according to his older brother. 

Their conversation about it was short and unhelpful. It didn’t give Aizawa anything. 

“Why,” Aizawa asked through the fuzzy darkness, when he thought he could get the word out, when Todoroki had finished speaking. Again, it was no question. 

Todoroki eyed him warily. He seemed to be trying to come up with a good lie. 

Aizawa reached across and dug his knuckle hard into his cheek til he knew it would hurt a bit. “None of that shit.” 

“Fine.” Todoroki looked away, considering the ceiling. “He’s smart — won’t be difficult to teach — and he’s very strong, but he’s going through a rough phase. There’s a lot on his shoulders.”

“He’s a teenager,” Aizawa said, unimpressed. 

Todoroki frowned. “He’s the teenage reason why every agency for the last three years has been rushing their rookies out to debut before they’re even able to lace their own shoes. Everyone expects him to be phenomenal. They’re trying to avoid competing with him. And he is phenomenal, but it isn’t an easy thing.” 

“So you’re telling me to expect a narcissist?”

Todoroki winced. “He has his moments.” 

“I won’t tolerate that in the classroom—“

“He’s a sweet kid!” Todoroki bulldozed on. “He really is. And you know—“ He looked back at Aizawa now, and the seriousness in his eyes was unmatched. “You know I wouldn’t ask you for this if I didn’t think he needed taking care of. I barely get to see him anymore. He’s alone.”

“You live in the same house.” 

“I live in the East Wing,” dismissed Todoroki shiftily. 

“You fucking rich people,” Aizawa groaned, rubbing at his forehead with both hands. “If I’m going to take care of your kid brother, Todoroki, you’re going to have to give me a bit more than this. I’m sorry. But by all accounts, including yours, he’s a great kid, talented, strong, smart. Sounds like he won’t need me. So unless you tell me…” 

Todoroki considered his options. Aizawa watched it all playing out on his face bit by bit, the things he could do, the things he couldn’t say but was obviously thinking. There was obviously gravity in the process. He looked like a man on trial. 

“I don’t get to see Shouto much,” he said truthfully. “I wish I did. But I don’t. If it was up to me, I’d be there to drop him off for fuckin’ school every day.” 

“You can’t drive.” 

“Just listen to me.” Todoroki turned his chin toward the ceiling, his head of soft, downy white hair buried back in the couch cushions. He stared into the light fixture. “I hate doing this. You know I do. The kid’s the most important thing in the world to me. I love him to death — we fight, sometimes we don’t like each other, but I’d do anything for him. And he’s in a difficult situation. All I’m asking is that you look out for him, because he needs it, and you know I wouldn’t ask you for anything I didn’t need, you know that.” 

Aizawa opened his mouth to ask more questions and found he couldn’t speak them. He wasn’t sure why. 

Now, two nights later, only one article he can find mentions in any detail the relationship between the Todoroki siblings. 

It’s marked as having been released two and a half years ago, when Todoroki The First’s ratings were at a serious and steep incline. Aizawa clicks through to find a short clip of Todoroki (his Todoroki) interviewing at the scene of an impeded bank robbery, face shining artfully with soot and sweat,  leaning against the pane of a window behind which the golden-backlit shapes of cops and investigators mill around. 

The moment is clipped from the middle of the interview. “—Must be proud,” the interviewer is saying, “To have you as a brother.” 

Todoroki flashes his softened, camera-shy smile. Bullshit. 

“I live with my siblings still,” he says, and then laughs, putting his hands up in surrender; “You got me! I just can’t seem to move out.” 

“You all get along?”

“I love them to death. Ask any of them and they’ll tell you I smother them. But we get along like a house on fire.” Todoroki makes a motion with his hands like a structure blowing up. “But, well, that’s what having a common enemy will do, isn’t it? We terrorise my old man.” 

The interviewer pauses, then laughs, short and startled. Todoroki beams at her over the camera, and his expression confers that he is joking, but his eyes are steady in his face — nothing changes about his eyes. 

At the beginning of April, Aizawa packs his shit into the back of he and Mic’s car, packs Mic into the passenger seat, and drives them to UA for the first day of the new school year. 

Mic talks the whole time. Aizawa is glad for the noise. Winter came slow and then lasted too long; it’s almost cherry-blossom season, but there’s still a faint chill in the air as they load their stuff out of the car and trek up the steps to the school’s entrance, past milling groups of students. Hizashi isn’t a homeroom teacher like Aizawa, so his day begins a little later; still, he waves goodbye to Aizawa as their paths diverge, slogging to the teachers’ lounge for coffee while Aizawa goes to set up his desk in the 1-A homeroom, then take a nap. 

The new, green Class 1-A is insufferable. Loud, talkative, almost hyperactive. Kids these days don’t have any manners, Aizawa finds himself thinking, and then has to shake himself, horrified by how old he’s getting all of a sudden. 

He ushers them outside for testing. They’re terrified, all of them, but somehow they still manage to keep talking. While herding them to the sports pitch, he scans the tops of their heads for the youngest Todoroki, who is, he knows, on the taller side, with very distinctive hair. 

It still takes Aizawa some time to spot him. He lingers a bit away from the others, face totally blank, walking with a stilted, measured gait. 

In person, he looks somehow both smaller and larger than in the photos; tall among his classmates, he nonetheless has this look about him that makes Aizawa suspect he probably wants to sink through the floor. He doesn’t look arrogant, not necessarily. Just somewhat retreating, maybe a little anti-social. 

One word Aizawa wouldn’t assign him at first glance is ‘prodigious’. But he’ll let the quirk testing decide that, he figures. 

And it does. Of all of his new first-years, Todoroki is undeniably the strongest; it’s not close. Yaoyorozu edges him out narrowly for points — her quirk is absurdly useful, and Aizawa finds himself marvelling at it multiple times — but in terms of pure physical ability, quirk or no, Todoroki runs circles around the others. 

He doesn’t seem to take his loss to Yaoyorozu hard either, just nods vaguely in her direction as she congratulates him eagerly on second place, face blank. 

The strange thing is, despite him having demolished all the others, they don’t really seem to notice the young Todoroki. Perhaps to them he’s just that unassuming. Bakugou — third place, though with his lack of sportsmanship, he really should have been last — is too focused on fighting with Midoriya to pay much attention to those who beat him. The others just seem relieved not to have come last. 

Midoriya is a fascinating one, too. On a whim, Aizawa decides not to expel him. He hates going back on his word, but he’ll do it if it means keeping a potentially fascinating case in his classroom. Whatever’s going on with the kid, he’s determined to find out. 

In the classroom later that day, as his new students scramble to take notes on Aizawa’s lecture (which he put together last night, but they don’t need to know that), he finds himself looking occasionally in Todoroki’s direction, despite his attempts not to. He finds himself searching for signs of Touya there, in that strange kid. They look very alike—you could pick them out as brothers in a lineup. But Touya has a face suited to the stage, and he knows it. The younger Todoroki has no such pretences, no cheeky grin, no over-caffeinated manic energy, no hint of madness buried miles beneath the method. He looks perfectly controlled. Still, silent, and unruffled. 

His eyes snap up to meet Aizawa’s. Blue and grey. 

Despite himself, Aizawa is the first to look away. 

The first time Touya called him to pick him up in the middle of the night was years ago; at the time, Aizawa had no idea what had happened. Now, with the power of hindsight, he can figure it out.

It was maybe six months after they'd met. Touya was still living primarily on his father's name, ranked somewhere in the hundreds. He called from a bus stop across town at one in the morning, voice carefully pitched to sound embarrassed rather than anything else.

"Sorry to bother you," he'd said, "but I'm a bit stuck. My card isn't working and I don't have cash for the bus. My family are all on holiday, somewhere in the Maldives…”

When Aizawa pulled up, Touya was sitting on the bench in civilian clothes, hands tucked into the pockets of a hoodie that looked new. There was a tear in the knee of his jeans. His hair was still styled from whatever he had spent his day doing, though it was falling limp around his face, slowly but surely settling as gravity took hold. 

There was a gym bag beside him. It was expensive, the kind popular pros get sponsored to carry, but it looked hastily packed — clothes spilling out of the top, a shoelace trailing on the wet ground.

"Going somewhere?" Aizawa had asked as Touya slid into the passenger seat.

"Just got back from somewhere." Touya's smile was easy and pristine, a toothpaste-commercial smile. "Thanks for this. I can pay you back for gas."

"Don't worry about it."

They drove in silence for a while. Aizawa noticed Touya wasn't giving directions back to the Todoroki estate, but he didn't comment on it. The kid was holding himself carefully, like something hurt.

"You can drop me at the station," Touya said eventually. "I know where I'm going."

"The trains stopped running an hour ago."

"Oh." A pause. "A hotel then. Any hotel."

"You have money for a hotel but not a bus?"

Touya's laugh was perfect, rueful. It was a dance they did a lot when their friendship was new and then never really stopped doing.

They ended up at Aizawa's apartment. Hizashi was working nights that week, a rare occurrence, so the spare futon was free. Touya set his bag down like he wasn't sure he was allowed to unpack it.

Now, years later, Aizawa can piece it together: the new hoodie bought with a card that would soon be cancelled, the gym bag packed in a hurry, the careful way Touya held his ribs. It had been his first real attempt to leave home. Obviously, it hadn’t worked. Of course it hadn’t; Touya didn't yet know all the rules to the game. 

The gym bag stayed under Aizawa's bed for months before Touya came to retrieve it. Neither of them ever mentioned it again.

Now, years later, it happens again, the second time their entire friendship. 

The phone rings at 2:47 AM. 

Aizawa knows it's Todoroki before he even looks at the screen - nobody else calls at this hour anymore, not since he quit weeknight work. The ringtone sounds thin and artificial in the dark of the house. In bed beside him (who uses that futon now? Only Touya when he’s drunk, really), Hizashi groans and stuffs a pillow over his head. Far be it from him to complain about noise. 

"Hey," says Todoroki when he picks up. His voice is steady, somewhat energised. He sounds like it’s the start of his night, not the end of it. "You busy?"

There's something wrong with the sound quality. Too crackly for Todoroki’s expensive smartphone. Background noise suggests he's outside somewhere — traffic, maybe wind. A payphone, Aizawa clocks in the back of his mind. 

"Where are you?" he asks, already pulling pants on in the dark.

"I think I got lost. Been out and about tonight." Todoroki laughs, a bubbling thing. "Around. Near that convenience store we got that shit instant coffee from last month? The one with the cats always out front. Well. It’s raining now. Think they hid.”

Aizawa pulls on his boots, phone wedged between ear and shoulder. He knows the place — it's a good twenty minute drive from the Todoroki estate, longer in this rain.

"Stay there," he says. "I'm coming to get you."

"You don't have to—" Todoroki starts, then stops himself. Aizawa can almost hear him weighing his options. "Well, I did call you. Yeah, okay. Thanks."

"Are you hurt?"

"No, I'm fine. Didn’t work today. First day off in years." Another laugh, perfectly calibrated to suggest sheepish embarrassment rather than deflection. "Just needed some air. Couldn't sleep."

"Todoroki."

"I got caught in the rain and then everything started to look the same, you know how downtown it all looks like a maze at night?" There's a slight waver in his voice now, barely perceptible. "You don't have to rush."

He finds Todoroki exactly where he said he'd be, perched on the curb outside the closed convenience store. The rain has plastered his hair to his face, turning it from white to a muddy kind of grey. He's wearing what looks like training clothes — track pants, a long-sleeved compression shirt. No jacket. No phone.

When he sees Aizawa's car, he unfolds himself from the curb with his typical easy grace. Even soaked through and obviously exhausted, he manages to make his ambling gait look intentional, like he frequents this dingey sidestreet for its views all the time.

"Sorry about this," he announces on an exhale as he slides into the passenger seat. "Didn't mean to wake you up."

Aizawa doesn't start the car. Instead, he stares at his friend in the harsh fluorescent light from the store sign. Split lip, barely visible — but it’s old, and could easily have come from a nasty encounter at work. A slight awkwardness to how he's holding himself that speaks of bruised ribs or worse, but then again, who’s to say it’s not the cold. 

It's his hands that give him away. They're steady — they're always steady, painter-steady, though Touya can’t draw for shit — but the knuckles are purple and there are burns spiralling up his forearms. There’s blood under his nails but no visible bleeding flesh wounds. He must have clawed someone like an animal. They’re defensive wounds. 

"What happened?" Aizawa asks flatly, not willing to take bullshit.

"Nothing happened." Todoroki's smile doesn't waver. "It’s a shit job.”

"Todoroki."

“Jesus, get off my dick, Aizawa.” 

It’s a sharp, unexpected jab, more harsh than they ever really talk to each other. By the look on his face, Todoroki didn’t expect it to come out either. 

They drive the rest of the way back to Mic and Aizawa’s place in silence. Aizawa wants to let Todoroki sit and stew in how unreasonable he’s being. He suspects Todoroki’s hoping he’ll let it drop. And he probably will, he thinks. He doesn’t have the energy to fight him on this. 

Todoroki may care about protecting his younger siblings, but Aizawa was an only child. As mercenary as it sounds, Touya Todoroki isn’t his little brother. 

The neighbourhood is far out from the city centre. It’s so quiet and dark at night, a separate world from the urban centres where they all make their money. 

They trudge up to the front door in silence. Todoroki's shoes squelch with every step.

The kitchen light flickers twice before catching, casting their shadows long against the wall. Without speaking, Aizawa pushes Todoroki into a chair and retrieves the first aid kit from under the sink. Todoroki holds his arms out obediently as Aizawa begins cleaning the burns. Neither of them speaks. The tap drips steadily in the background. A car alarm goes off somewhere down the street, then falls silent.

"Fuck." Todoroki hisses suddenly when the antiseptic hits a particularly raw spot of burnt skin. Then, so quiet Aizawa almost misses it: "Kid's getting stronger."

Aizawa's hands still for just a moment. 

His mind flashes to his classroom, to his new student with his perfect posture and dead eyes. Unassuming, impeccable, impossible. Touya couldn’t mean anyone else, he knows. Their other two siblings have both long-since moved out. There is only one ‘kid’ to refer to.

Aizawa knows better than to push it. Todoroki will lie to his face. He says nothing, just wraps the gauze a little more carefully around his friend’s slim forearm.

"Couch is yours," he says when he's done. "You know where the blankets are."

Todoroki nods, already half-asleep in the chair. His wet hair drips onto the linoleum floor.

When Aizawa slides back into bed, Hizashi rolls over, barely awake. "That the hero world's darling out there?"

"Yeah."

"Mm." Hizashi burrows closer, radiating warmth. "Poor kid."

Aizawa lies awake for a long time, listening to the rain. He thinks of Shouto Todoroki, his formidable power, the quiet, calculated ferocity of him. He thinks of the Endeavour Agency, the rumours surrounding its inner workings. Despite himself, he thinks about rankings, numbers flicking ever-downward in his mind, stills of a flipbook; he thinks of the new generation coming. In the living room, Todoroki doesn't make a sound.

Chapter Text

The teachers’ lounge is unbearable at the start of the new school year. Hizashi loves it — loves the bustle, the excitement, the gossip — and especially this year, with All Might, a big blue blimp in every room he’s in, prancing through their halls like he owns the place, there’s much to be talked about. Like every year, the faculty holds its long-standing betting pools about which students will make it in the industry. Aizawa refuses to participate. He knows too well how those predictions usually turn out — all the bright stars that burned out, all the underdogs who survived. His money's usually on the quiet ones. This year, it’s anyone’s game.

As a result of the pointless hubbub, Aizawa has taken to eating lunch in his classroom. Eating is generous. He dozes, mostly, slumped over his desk while his students mill around outside in the April sunshine. The weather's warming up. Cherry blossoms drift past the windows like confused snow.

His first years are exhausting in the way only teenagers can be. He’s sleeping through every break. Today, though, something keeps him from sleep: the soft scratch of pencil on paper from the back of the room. He doesn't need to open his eyes to know who it is. Only one of his students regularly foregoes the cafeteria.

The classroom door slides open with a rattle that could wake the dead. Aizawa doesn't stir.

"Todoroki!" Midoriya's voice, breathless like he ran here. "I thought I might find you — oh! Sorry, Mr. Aizawa!"

Aizawa lets out a low grunt that could mean anything. Midoriya, one of his most interesting cases, has that same rabid enthusiasm Hizashi had at that age, before the industry ground them down. Neither of them knows how to shut up. It’s some kind of talent; Midoriya talks like he's being paid by the word.

Through slitted eyes, Aizawa watches the scene unfold: Midoriya hovering in the doorway, practically vibrating with nervous energy. Todoroki The Younger at his desk, one hand sliding something under his notebook. His face gives away nothing. Establishing boundaries.

"Did you need something?" Todoroki asks. It’s amazing how he can speak without any acknowledgement of commonly known expectations of inflection. 

"Oh! Um, well..." Midoriya scratches the back of his head, takes two hesitant steps forward. "I just noticed you're always alone at lunch, so..."

"I prefer it."

"Right! Of course! I just thought..." Midoriya's voice trails off. He rallies: "Was that a drawing? I saw you working on something—"

"Homework." And Little Todoroki's hand twitches toward his notebook, a protective claim.

"Oh." Another step forward. Todoroki leans back imperceptibly. "Um. I was watching some hero footage last night and I saw your brother! Uh. You know. He was incredible at that warehouse explosion in Shibuya—"

The temperature drops several degrees. Literally — there's frost forming on the edge of Todoroki's desk. Something hardens in his eyes. Even squinting, still pretending to be half asleep with his hood up over his head, Aizawa sees the unhappy twitch of the corner of his mouth. 

"My brother and I aren’t close," Todoroki says, voice arctic. "If you're interested in his work, I suggest following his fan forums."

Midoriya wilts. It would be funny if it weren’t so painfully earnest. "I— uh— I do, actually. Anyway. Right! Sorry, I didn't mean to... that is... would you maybe want to—"

"I have work to do." Todoroki's already turning away, tilting his body ever so slightly to the left, but it’s such a clear dismissal in its simple, uncaring passivity that even Aizawa can imagine how bad that stings. 

Midoriya retreats like a kicked puppy. The door slides shut behind him with considerably less enthusiasm than it opened.

In the silence that follows, Aizawa watches through narrowed eyes as Todoroki pulls his sketchbook back out.. He draws like he's angry at the paper.

After a moment, Todoroki's eyes flick to Aizawa's desk. Aizawa keeps his breathing steady, feigning sleep. But he catches the brief flash of something raw on the kid's face — frustration maybe, or exhaustion — before the mask slides back into place.

If there’s one thing he shares with his brother, it’s that they’re both good at hiding, Aizawa thinks. But Touya hides in plain sight — a spark, a grin, a witty remark, and then he’s gone, like holding smoke in your hands. He was gone from their house by morning after Aizawa picked him up last week. There is no such faltering, almost-there weakness present in this classroom. Shouto's face might as well be carved from ice.

The bell rings. Todoroki packs his things into his bag with military precision and leaves without a sound. Only when his footsteps fade does Aizawa sit up, rubbing his face. Preparing to step back into the firing line. 

Through the window, the cherry blossoms continue their silent fall.

That afternoon is practical training, and the upper-floor gym looks like a warzone by two. Concrete barriers Cementoss put up in preparation for the class have been reduced to rubble. The kids have only broken three windows so far, to their credit. Scorch marks from acid paint the walls, ice crystals melting in the spring sun as it streams in. His students mill around between exercises like destructive ants, practising the rescue drills he designed last night over a pot of coffee.

"Yaoyorozu!" Aizawa calls down. "Support beams, not scaffolding. Think load-bearing." 

She adjusts quickly, not fussing. Smart kid. They're all smart, really, in their own ways, even if some of them — like Kaminari, currently shorting out the building's auxiliary power — have yet to figure out quite how.

Aizawa turns his attention to one of the other stations, elbows resting on the railing, peering down into the chaos like a spectator at a sporting event. "Your turn, Uraraka. I want to see a controlled descent."

She manages to lower Ojiro safely to the ground this time, though they both look slightly green. Beside them, Midoriya mutters furiously into his notebook, documenting everyone's progress; you’d swear he's writing a thesis. His arm's still in a cast from yesterday's mishap. With him, there’s a mishap every day.

Aizawa finds his gaze drawn, against his will, to the far corner. Todoroki decimates another practice dummy with mechanical precision. He moves like someone mapped out his motions in advance. No wasted energy. His ice comes in clean, geometric shapes.

"Are they finally redecorating?" Hizashi asks, appearing at Aizawa's shoulder. His voice is rough from teaching back-to-back English literature classes, scratched record-raw. "It’s a hell of an ice sculpture garden down there."

"Cold day in hell." Aizawa watches Iida attempt to sprint up one of Todoroki's previously erected ice walls, engines sputtering. "Finished with your third-years already?"

"They blew out the speakers again during oral presentations. Had to end early. Wasn’t me this time. Nobody can prove it." Hizashi leans against the railing alongside him, nudging their knees together. Winces as Bakugou's hundredth explosion shatters a fourth window. "Your lot's more interesting anyway.”

Below, Uraraka manages to float one of Todoroki's larger ice structures. It crashes back down when she loses focus, shattering into pieces that catch the light like broken glass. Asui's tongue darts out to snag a falling shard before it can hit Ashido.

"Good catch, Asui," Aizawa calls. "Watch your surroundings, Uraraka."

They both watch as Todoroki moves to the next station. There's something off about his gait today, a slight favour to his right side, barely noticeable unless you're looking for it. Aizawa’s certain Mic hasn’t picked up on it. But he has. He notices everything about his students, though he can’t really understand why just yet.

"Got the same look in his eye as his brother," Hizashi remarks. "I miss Touya. When’s he coming over next? I saw him on the cover of a tabloid in the teachers’ lounge and tossed it out of the window.”

Aizawa grunts noncommittally. Across the training ground, stationed at obstacles close to one another now, Midoriya attempts some kind of conversation, notebook clutched to his chest. Todoroki's response is to create a wall of ice between them, ostensibly as part of the exercise. 

"Next time, tabloids go in the shredder," Aizawa says finally.

Beneath them, Yaoyorozu is creating what appears to be a mediaeval siege engine, complete with weathered, sun-bleached wood panelling and a reserve of cannonballs.

Hizashi tilts his head. "You're teaching them rescue protocols?"

"I'm teaching them to think creatively."

"That's a trebuchet."

Aizawa pops each of his knuckles one by one, yawning. “She went to private school.”

They watch as Bakugou launches himself at one of Todoroki's ice walls with an explosion that rattles the floor. The wall doesn't even crack. Bakugou's creative string of curses echoes across the training ground, drawing a scandalised gasp from Iida audible even from here.

"Shame about that USJ trip," Hizashi says after a moment. "Could've been good for them to get off campus. This lot's wound tight as springs."

"Security concerns," Aizawa mutters. 

"Still. They need the experience. Look at them — half of them still think it's a game."

He's not wrong. Kaminari and Sero are turning their quirk practice into some kind of improvised sport now. Jirou keeps score. Laughter rises up toward them from below, high and lofty.

"Alright," Aizawa calls down, when he’s heard enough. "Last rotation, everyone, move to the station you haven’t attended yet.”

The exercise ends with varying degrees of success. Yaoyorozu creates a perfect pulley system to lift dummies to safety. Bakugou blasts through the obstacle course. Midoriya manages not to break any more bones as he deals unimpressive kicks and punches to the vessels Todoroki left iced-over.

As the students drag themselves toward the locker rooms, exhausted but chattering, Todoroki lingers behind. He methodically melts his ice structures. It's the first time Aizawa's seen him use his fire quirk. The heat is precise, controlled. Nothing like Touya's wild blue inferno.

"Think he'll be okay?" Hizashi asks quietly.

Aizawa watches his student work, sees the way he checks his surroundings before each flame, like someone might catch him at it. He isn’t sure how to answer, so he doesn’t. 

He thinks about texting Touya, then decides against it.

Below, Todoroki turns and walks away, leaving puddles of melting ice behind him like footprints. The spring sun turns them into mirrors, reflecting a sky that's almost too bright to look at. From the locker rooms, the sound of his classmates' laughter echoes across the empty training gym. Todoroki doesn't look back.

"Come on," Hizashi says, pushing off from the railing. "I need coffee before my next class. These kids are killing me."

Aizawa follows him down the stairs, mind already on tomorrow's lesson plans. Behind them, the last of the ice melts into nothing.

The weekend drags itself by, slow and sweet like molasses. Aizawa and Hizashi spend most of Saturday catching up on grading, takeout containers creating a small city of squat white structures piled on their coffee table. The house still smells faintly of soot from Touya's visit last week. Some stains, Aizawa's learning, don't wash out.

Blood washes out, he’s learned over the years. You can keep the same hero costume for years if you learn how to repair it, if you wash like a pro (ha!), if you blitz bloodstains on high heat; but the smell of smoke lingers, rises when you rinse, sticks in the fibres.

"Remember when we thought teaching would get easier?" Hizashi asks from his nest of papers. His voice is still raw. "That we'd develop some kind of immunity?"

"You're the one who wanted us to get good day jobs." Aizawa marks another essay with red. Correct this in future. Source? Informal. Incorrect. Did your last school teach you how to read? D-. "Could've stayed full-time."

"Yeah, because that was sustainable." Hizashi snorts. "You were sleeping in dumpsters when the trains weren’t running."

"They were tactical positions."

"They were dumpsters."

They work in comfortable silence until Hizashi's phone buzzes. He reaches for it, then makes a sound like a cat puking. "Your problem child's on the cover of HERO INSIDER again."

Aizawa pulls up his phone and stabs Touya’s civvie name indignantly into the search bar. The tabloid photo is grainy, caught through rain-streaked glass: Touya, wearing civilian clothes, ducking out of a downtown hotel. His roots have grown right in. He looks exhausted even in the bad lighting. The top headline reads: BACKFIRE BURNS BRIDGES? Hero Heir Spotted at Downtown Hotel.  

The ‘related articles’ brought up by the search engine below all feature the same photo, with variations on the sentiment. 

COLD SHOULDER: Has Backfire Been Frozen Out of Todoroki Estate? 

UP IN SMOKE: Top Hero's Son Makes Mysterious Midnight Exit.

Aizawa stares at his phone longer than he means to, thumb hovering over the messaging app. Finally, he types out a text, then sends it before he decide against it.

staying downtown now?

The sky darkens like it’s thinking twice about it. The response comes hours later, when they're both half-asleep on the couch, TV playing some mindless hero ranking show neither of them is watching:

ya lol my room’s getting renovated

dad's idea

dw abt it

Something about the casual deflection sets Aizawa's teeth on edge. 

let me know if you need anything, he responds despite himself. 

Touya, moments later: ur not my mom lmao

Sunday bleeds into Monday like a watercolour left in rain. Aizawa has strange dreams about paintings and pencils and sleeps through his alarm. They're both almost late to work, stumbling through their morning routine with the practised choreography of the perpetually exhausted. The car’s in for a service. The trains are packed with salary workers looking just as tired. Some things never change — you just get older.

"You're brooding," Hizashi tells him on their walk up the ascending stone steps to UA’s main entrance.

"I'm thinking."

"Doesn’t happen much, so I worry." Hizashi bumps their shoulders together. "Whatever you're planning, be careful. They live in a different world than us."

He could mean one of two things. Either way, Aizawa knows he's right. 

Class 1-A is restless, the air heavy with coming rain; they bring the scent of dew in with them, chattering, identical black shoes all spotted with droplets of morning mist. Aizawa watches Todoroki through the morning, though there’s nothing to see, just that wall, the impenetrable stillness and silence of him. He keeps to himself during group work, deflecting his classmates’ persistent attempts at friendship with practised ease. The bruise at his collar is mostly faded now. Aizawa pretends not to notice when he winces reaching for his textbook.

When the final bell rings before lunch, Aizawa says: "Todoroki. A moment."

The rest of the class filters out in their usual chaos — Bakugou shoving past Midoriya, Uraraka floating her bag to avoid carrying it, Kaminari trying to convince someone to get coffee from the only good vending machine way up on the fifth floor (he’s right; it’s the only good one). Todoroki remains seated, face blank. Only his hand tightens slightly on the strap of his bag.

"Sit," Aizawa says, gesturing to the desk in front of him once they're alone. The classroom feels bigger without twenty teenagers filling it with noise. "How are you finding UA?"

"Fine." Todoroki moves with the same precise grace as his brother, but where Touya's movements suggest barely-contained energy, his brother's suggest careful restraint. He sits carefully at the desk before Aizawa. "The facilities are excellent."

"And your classmates?"

A careful pause. "They're capable."

"That's not what I asked."

Something shutters behind Todoroki's eyes. "I prefer to focus on my studies."

"You're not here to make friends?"

"I'm here to become a hero." His tone suggests this should be obvious.

"Being a hero means working with others."

"I work fine with others when required."

"During training exercises, maybe." Aizawa leans back in his chair. "But you've turned down every study group. You don’t take any extracurriculars. You eat lunch alone, or not at all. You leave campus the moment classes end."

Todoroki's expression doesn't change, but his shoulders tighten imperceptibly. "Is socialising mandatory?"

"No. But isolation can be a warning sign we have to look out for."

"Of what?" There's that edge again, barely detectable.

They study each other across the desks, across the immeasurable space between them. Outside, low, dark clouds threaten rain. 

This time, Todoroki is the first to look away. He looks down at his hands, then at the clock on the wall. "Is there something specific you want to ask me, sir?"

Aizawa considers his next words carefully. "How are things at home?"

"Fine." The word comes too quick.

"You seem tired lately."

"I train extensively."

"At home?"

Another careful pause. "At home. We have our own facilities.”

"With your father?"

Something flickers across Todoroki's face, too fast to read. "Sometimes."

"And your siblings?" Aizawa keeps his tone casual, like he's working down a checklist.

"They're busy with their careers."

"Must be complicated. Two pro heroes under one roof, and you."

Todoroki's fingers tap once against his knee, then still. His back is still pin–straight, his chin high. "The estate is very large."

"Still. Public eye, expectations..." Aizawa lets the sentence hang. "Can't be easy."

"Nothing worth doing is easy." The response is automatic, rehearsed. 

Rain starts to patter against the windows. Todoroki's eyes track the movement of water down glass. He looks as if he’s considering something important. Perhaps, Aizawa dares to wonder, they’re close to a breakthrough.

"Would you like some tea?" Aizawa asks after the silence stretches. "You’ll be late for lunch at this rate."

A careful consideration, then: "If it's no trouble."

Aizawa retrieves his electric kettle from behind his desk. It’s stuffed into a drawer with dozens of empty blister-packs of painkillers. 

He watches Todoroki from the corner of his eye as he works: the careful scan of the room, the way he catalogues exits. The kid has better situational awareness than most pros.

The kettle clicks. Aizawa pulls two mugs from his desk drawer, along with the tin of mint tea he keeps here as well as at home. He’s been drinking it for years now, by habit rather than particularly enjoyment. He always seems to have it on hand. 

Todoroki's eyes lock onto it. For a moment, Aizawa isn’t sure why.

"That's an interesting brand," he says, voice perfectly neutral. 

"Someone recommended it." Aizawa keeps his movements steady as he pours.

"Someone with expensive taste." Todoroki accepts the mug.

They drink their tea in silence for what could be four or five straight minutes, both of them refusing to speak, neither willing to concede in their quiet, unstated battle. The silence between them has teeth.Todoroki's hands are perfectly still on the desk beside his mug. Even his breathing is measured, like he's counting the seconds between each inhale. Aizawa has interviewed villains who weren't this careful with their tells.

"My eldest brother's in the hospital, you know."

Aizawa's head snaps up before he can stop himself. 

For a heartbeat, he sees it in his mind, though he isn’t sure why: Touya in that gala, years ago, green and eighteen, fresh meat, seeming to know implicitly that they were going to tear him apart and accepting it with his flat, cheery pragmatism. The wear of the years, how none of it seemed to shock him at all. Touya, now twenty-three years old, in a hospital bed, burnt almost to nothing. 

Todoroki's eyes narrow a fraction.

"That was a lie," he says. "But you believed it.”

The silence stretches between them like a tripwire.

"How long?" Todoroki's voice is winter-cold now. "How long has he been having you watch me?"

Aizawa clears his throat. “Todoroki—”

There is no yelling. Todoroki sets the mug down with a soft, ceramic tap. “How much is he paying you?”

“Todoroki. Calm down.” But of course, he is calm. “I don’t know your brother. He certainly doesn’t pay me. I’m concerned about your wellbeing, and as your teacher, it’s my responsibility—”

He stands, and suddenly he looks very much like his brother. There’s the resemblance. There’s that rich-kid-contra-blunted-knife outrage, hard and brittle at the same time. "Did he ask you to spy on me? To report back about how I'm doing? I knew he’d do this."

"Todoroki, if you don’t calm down—"

"Tell him," Todoroki cuts him off, voice sharp as ice, "that if he wants to know how I am, he can come home and ask me himself.”

He moves toward the door. Aizawa opens his mouth to speak, but isn’t sure how to begin. 

“Todoroki,” he calls to his unanswering back. 

Shouto ignores him. The door slides shut behind him with barely a sound. In the empty classroom, Aizawa sits very still, mind spinning. The tea has gone cold between his hands; it’s cold in here, he realises, like a window has been left open.

That night, Aizawa takes his first weeknight patrol since he started teaching. 

It’s not a healthy way to deal with stress. It’ll put more pressure on him for the rest of the week, he knows, to catch up with paperwork, essay-grading, and the other million things on his plate. It’s a bottomless plate. You think you’ve started to clear the plate and then it seems to deepen into a chasm.

Rain has brought a thick, gummy chill. Aizawa perches on a rooftop to look over the district. The city wears its darkness like cheap jewellery. Light pollution washes out the stars, leaving only the brightest to pierce through, cold and distant as the blinking red pupils of security cameras on the street. Below, inchworm-slow traffic moves in arteries of red and white, bleeding slowly toward the suburbs. It’s midnight and yet people are still on their way home for the night. The air tastes like rain and exhaust fumes.

His comm crackles. Just interference — most of the other heroes cleared out hours ago. Smart of them. It's a dead night, nothing worth staying up for. His students will be insufferable tomorrow if he doesn't get some sleep.

His students. Strange how that happened, how twenty teenagers took up residence in his head without his permission. It didn’t feel this way last time, with the last group. He catches himself thinking about them at odd moments now. Wondering if Midoriya's arm is healing right. Whether Yaoyorozu is eating enough to maintain her quirk. If Bakugou's gotten into any fights. 

Blue fire splits the western sky like summer lightning.

Aizawa's on his feet before he processes moving. The flames are distant but distinctive, bright against the clouds, a rising funnel of fire. They paint the underbelly of the sky the same cold cyan as a canister of spray paint, a fuzzy wash of brightness, vanishing before his eyes. 

For a moment, he considers moving closer. But that's the wealthy district across town, and technically outside his patrol route, and anyway, if it was Backfire, it was probably because he was patrolling. If there was or is a serious threat, Aizawa will be notified, he knows. Still, he finds himself staring at the hole in the sky where the flash was.

But the fire is gone as quickly as it appeared. Nothing follows. No explosions, no sirens, no signs of disturbance. Just spring rain falling steady on empty streets.

Aizawa sinks back down, suddenly tired in a way that has nothing to do with the late hour. Tired right in his bones. The rain picks up, driving needles against his capture weapon. Tomorrow is a new day.

Chapter Text

Their first alarm goes off at five, splitting the silence. It breaks Aizawa out of a dream about being in school, a student again. He’s been getting those dreams often since he took the teaching job. Hizashi gets them too. Outside, the sheer glow of first light timid against the window, the city hasn't quite decided if it's awake yet. Their bedroom fan clicks arhythmically against itself, fighting a losing battle with the early heat.

Hizashi makes a dying-engine noise beside him and burrows deeper under their blanket. "Five more minutes."

"I’ll leave you behind." Aizawa's already reaching for his phone, squinting into the screen's harsh glow. Unanswered emails, safety notices, a bank statement, a low-funds warning on the current account. 

He swipes to his messages and stabs out a text before his brain fully engages:

coming to watch todoroki no.4 today?

Touya's response is immediate. Either he's up early or never slept.

workin

Aizawa stares at the message until the word looks blurry, then gives up on trying to understand it. He sets the alarm to go off again in ten minutes, places his phone on the pillow beside Hizashi’s head, and rolls out of bed, stumbling into the shower. 

They move through their morning routine like sleepwalkers, a careful choreography of avoided elbows. Mornings have always looked like this. Coffee drips slowly into the pot while Aizawa feeds the cat and Hizashi attempts to wrangle his hair into its extraordinary updo with about half a pound of shaping gel. 

"Left the iron on yesterday," he mumbles through a mouthful of toothpaste as they brush their teeth side by side. “Had a nightmare about it. Got up in the night but it was unplugged.”

Aizawa hums, then leans over and spits. "I turned it off."

"Mm. Did you do the shopping?"

Aizawa rinses his mouth out, then towels his face roughly, peering at himself in the slightly grimy mirror. "They didn’t have the soy milk you like."

They pull on their costumes in the dark. Both of them aren’t as lean as they used to be—Aizawa’s costume looks and feels the same as it always has, but Hizashi will need to commission a new one soon, and they run up cost fast. Their kitchen light flickers twice before catching, like it's also having trouble waking up. They drink their coffee standing up, shoulder to shoulder at the counter, watching the sky think about changing colours.

"Ready?" Hizashi asks finally, voice still morning-rough.

"No."

"Me neither. Let's go."

Spring has hit its stride overnight. The morning air tastes like pollen as they load the car, warm breeze thick enough to chew. Aizawa's capture weapon is already damp with sweat around his neck as they trudge toward the stadium behind UA through the silence, the sun not even properly risen yet.

"I love these festivals," Hizashi announces in the strained voice of a man truly on the edge.

"We don’t get paid the overtime,” Aizawa replies idly, just to see what he’ll do.

Hizashi downs the rest of his drive-thru coffee in one gulp, then Aizawa’s. He gives a full-body shudder. Then grins at the sky. Running laps. 

The stadium looms ahead like a concrete mountain, empty now, but not in just a few hours. Security's already busy—black uniforms and hero costumes dot the perimeter, ants on fruit. They flash their passes at the main gate. The guard's eyes linger on Hizashi's hair, trailing up. At least they’re not looking at our shoes, Aizawa thinks, then spots a familiar shock of white among the milling heroes, police, and security, twenty feet away against the fence. 

Touya looks like death warmed over, hugging himself a costume Aizawa's never seen before, sleek black material with faint blue lines running through it like circuit boards. No sign of his signature white speed-stripes. He's shivering despite the morning heat.

When he sees them, his face lights up, and he ambles over to meet them halfway, looking comically relieved to see them both. Aizawa is reminded of all the other times they’ve done this. 

"New suit?" Hizashi greets. “Looks good.”

Touya spreads his arms and spins around. Then he goes right back to shivering, stamping his feet a bit as he tries to get warm, hunched around his core. "Internal cooling system. Like wearing a refrigerator. Very chic, I’ve been told the ladies go nuts for a guy who feels like he’s been in the morgue freezer.”

"Didn't know standard security required specialty gear," Aizawa prods.

"Any excuse to test the new toys. My coordinator at the agency wanted to give it a shot." Touya's languid smile slides toward the arena. "Plus, keeps me from melting the barriers if anyone tries anything funny."

A group of young heroes, likewise working security, cluster near a security checkpoint not far from them, pretending not to watch and doing a bad job of it. 

Heroes used to be good actors in my day, Aizawa thinks despite himself. 

Touya catches Aizawa looking and shrugs one shoulder, still hopping around. "Tried to wave hello. Been wondering what their deal is. Maybe they know all my friends are old farts and they know they can’t compare.”

"You're working security," Aizawa says flatly. "Today. They’re probably a bit confused."

"UA requested someone from my agency, and I just can’t seem to stop working." Touya whips out his security fob and flips it back and forth over the backs of his fingers, a nervous fidget. "Hey, drinks later? After this circus packs up? Been ages.”

"Your treat?" Hizashi asks.

“You bet. New cat?” 

“Azuki.” Opening the door.

“I want to meet her.” Ah—he’s still not gone home. 

“We’re splitting the bill,” Aizawa cuts in. “You’re a grown-up.”

Touya beams. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Aizawa!”

Hizashi and Aizawa wave him off as he turns and wanders into the small gaggle of heroes. They all part around him like water around a stone, not wanting to get too close. Touya is in the sweet-spot right now, has been for a couple of years. Famous enough to be beloved, but not enough to be despised just yet. He’s bigger than any of those no-names, Aizawa finds himself thinking, a bit vindictively. 

They climb four flights of stairs before Hizashi flags, conceding. They take the elevator the rest of the way up to the very top of the arena. The commentary booth smells like dust and old coffee. The view down from its glass panneling is severe. Hizashi immediately starts rearranging furniture while Aizawa slumps in the corner, watching dawn creep across empty seats. In a few hours this whole arena will be packed with spectators, pros, families, and media. Somewhere in that crowd, Endeavour will be watching his youngest son perform. Somewhere outside the arena, Touya will be stewing like that’s what they pay him for. 

"You're brooding," Hizashi says without looking up from the board of knobs and fade-switches beneath their microphones, below the slanted glass. 

Aizawa huffs. "I'm thinking.”

But he’s not, really. So eventually, he gets up, turns on the screens over their desk, and watches the panels flick to life one by one as the camera crews all around the site begin to set up sound-checks, taking room-tone, readying. 

The stadium below them fills like a tapered bottle, slowly at first, then all at once. Families cluster in the general admission sections, their excitement a physical thing. Some hold signs with their kids’ names plastered across them. The press box across from Aizawa and Hizashi’s booth is already stuffed with cameras, lenses pointed down like accusing fingers into the belly of the stadium.

Endeavour's arrival creates a distinctive ripple. They both watch on the screens overhead as cameras follow him. He takes his seat in the VIP section with the kind of ceremony usually reserved for state funerals, trailing handlers and hangers-on. Half his agency is with him. Aizawa wonders whether he saw his son outside as he was ushered in through the crowds.

"Five minutes," Hizashi mutters, shuffling his notes. He's been practising under his breath for an hour. "Did you review the profiles I sent?"

"Mm."

"That means no." Hizashi taps his mic, winces at the feedback. "Try to sound interested when I introduce them?"

“I’m interested in the relevant ones,” Aizawa protests dully, and he means it. He is. One of his class will win the day today, he’s certain of it. 

He detests bias, but it’s inevitable—it’s going to come down to Bakugo or Todoroki. 

The screens above them flicker to life with UA's logo. Somewhere below, a drum starts beating, the kind of manufactured tension that makes Aizawa's teeth itch. 

Hizashi straightens his shoulders, takes a breath.

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!"

Aizawa's capture weapon does little to muffle the sound. Below, Class 1-A files onto the field like soldiers on a suicide mission, almost all looking pretty terrified. He spots Todoroki immediately—it's impossible not to, with that hair. The kid moves like he's somewhere else entirely, like none of this pageantry can touch him.

Hizashi's voice booms across the arena, introducing classes, running through his script, building the crowd into a frenzy. God knows why they fuss so much. He does the same thing every year. Aizawa watches it all through the glass like it's happening underwater, everything slightly removed.

"And with us today in the commentary booth," Hizashi crescendos, "Fellow UA faculty member, esteemed hero, and Class 1-A's homeroom teacher, Eraserhead!"

Aizawa leans toward his mic. "Let’s get this over with."

The crowd laughs. They always do. It’s not a joke. 

In the VIP section, Endeavour leans forward in his seat. On the field, his youngest son stares straight ahead, face blank as fresh snow.

"Let the games begin!" Hizashi announces, and the crowd roars, and somewhere outside Touya shivers in his cooling suit, and Aizawa settles in to watch it all fall apart.

"First years, to your positions!"

Midnight's voice carries across the stadium like a whip-crack. The morning sun has crept over the top wall of the stadium by now, and it catches on her costume (or lack thereof), on the weapons systems built into the arena walls, on hundreds of pairs of nervous eyes down in the fray.

Obstacle race. Aizawa and Hizashi expected it. The crowd holds its collective breath. They've been building to this moment since dawn, when the first spectators started lining up outside UA’s front gates.

"And here we go," Hizashi practically vibrates beside him, thumb on the ‘mute’ button for a moment as he sips his water and steels himself. His hands dance across the sound board. "You ready?"

"No."

Through their wall of monitors, Aizawa catches fragments of his students below: Midoriya's lips moving in endless calculation, Bakugou's teeth bared in a permanent snarl, Uraraka bouncing on her toes. Todoroki stands perfectly still a bit away from the pack, staring straight ahead like none of this is real. 

Steam rises from his left side, bright in the timid sunlight.

The starting gun splits the air—

Before the sound dies, before anyone else can move, ice blooms across the ground in perfect tessellation. 

More than half of the students are caught mid-step on their first stride, trapped ankle-deep in frost that spreads faster than lightning. 

Aizawa blinks, and Todoroki's already twenty feet ahead, powering ahead with the form of a long-distance runner, mouth only slightly parted, feet hitting the ground with rhythmic precision. Breathing evenly, running smoothly. The ice spreads behind him, impossibly wide and thick in the starting tunnel, a sea of unbroken glass.

"AND TODOROKI TAKES THE LEAD WITH A STUNNING FIRST MOVE!"

Hizashi's voice rings through the entire stadium. The confused crowd rallies into cheers, scattered at first, then rising into a tumultuous din, until the howl feels like it’ll shake the entire stadium behind. 

"A magnificent opening from the son of—"

"Focus on the race," Aizawa cuts in. He’s not watching the race, though, and he doesn’t pay attention to Hizashi’s continued commentary, nor the struggles of the other students trapped in the tunnel. Instead, he watches Todoroki's form. 

Something's wrong with his movements—they’re too sharp, too stuttered, like a video playing at the wrong speed. His ice has come out wrong, too, jagged and organic, a strange cluster of uneven cells. It spreads in fractals and pockets rather than sheets.

It’s no wonder, then, that the other students of 1-A and 1-B have begun to figure their way out of his trap already. 

Bakugou rockets out of the tunnel and through the clear blue sky, trailing smoke and creative profanity. The air fills with the sounds of escape: Yaoyorozu creates cleats with mechanical precision, Kirishima simply shatters his way through, Kaminari shorts himself out trying to melt free. Midoriya wrenches one foot out of the ice with a burst of power that sends cracks racing through the entire glacier and, Aizawa suspects, probably results in a broken toe. Three or four of the Class 1-B students have escaped too, and soon, there will be more to come. 

However, the battle has only just begun for all of them—including Todoroki. Through the tunnel's mouth, metal gleams. The first obstacle towers against morning light as Todoroki approaches it: an army of defensive robots, towering impossibly high, casting long shadows across the course. Their metallic green hides shine in the sun.

"For those just joining us," Hizashi announces, "These are the same robots from UA's infamously brutal entrance exam for the Hero course! Though some of our contestants might be seeing them for the first time, since only our Hero course students will have encountered these nasty little—”

"Todoroki got in on recommendation," Aizawa cuts in. Through the monitors, he watches, waiting for his student's pace to change—a slight hesitation, an acknowledgement of the sheer stupidity of facing them outside of the crowd. Hubris? Perhaps. "He's never faced these before."

But Todoroki doesn't slow. Ice erupts from his right side in a wave that shouldn't be possible, too big, too fast—the kind of output that speaks of desperation rather than control. 

It engulfs the robots in seconds, freezing them in grotesque poses.

For a moment, the stadium goes perfectly quiet, as if it, too, has been frozen solid.

Then: the ice-covered robots begin to creak. 

Todoroki's already sprinting between their legs, leaving perfect footprints in the frost. Behind him, the robots start to fall.

"A calculated move!" Hizashi's voice rises with genuine excitement. "Not just immobilising the obstacles, but creating new ones for his pursuers!"

The robots crash down like dominoes, bringing sheets of ice with them. A thick, sparkling dust of frost rises into the air. Students scatter, diving for cover. Bakugou blasts his way through narrow gaps, cursing. Yaoyorozu creates a shield. Midoriya somehow vaults over a falling arm; the camera closes in on him as he bashes one of the one-pointers’ heads off with a plate of its own metal armour.

The crowd is going wild. Todoroki's lead is absolute now. He runs like he’s in chase, an efficient, unyielding stride. Perhaps he runs in his spare time. 

"It was well calculated," Aizawa mutters grudgingly into his mic. Some part of him had been ready to announce Shouto out of the running. 

Second obstacle. The screens have all started to split around the stadium. There are two ‘pelotons’ almost; Todoroki is so far from the rest of the contenders that the cameras can’t track them at the same time. While on the left side of the screen, Aizawa keeps an eye on his class and the rest of the first-years battling their way through the remaining robots, on the right side, Todoroki runs alone, approaching what comes next. 

That stretch of track isn’t far from where Touya is stationed on security. Can they see each other? 

Is that the reason for what happens next, Aizawa will wonder later. 

The ravine yawns ahead. Rope bridges hang across its sparse islands of rock, dental floss strung between molars. It’s a long drop down to the bottom. Most years, when they whip this one out, nobody dies. 

Todoroki hits the edge at full tilt. In the VIP section, caught in a frame on the bottom of the screen, Endeavour unfolds from his seat like a switchblade.

The ice bridge is promising, a clean arc of frost. It cuts through the air to the first island, perfectly straight, holding strong. 

But when Todoroki's left foot touches down on its surface, his flames betray him—the bridge begins to melt instantly, weeps itself apart.

"That's not right," Aizawa murmurs despite himself into his mic, watching frost splinter against heat.

There is a single, suspended moment. The stadium holds its breath. Todoroki’s arms pinwheel in the air—he tries to take a faltering step backward. Ice shoots out from under his left foot, but he can’t make it faster than his heat is eroding it.

The bridge shatters, a bad prediction. Todoroki’s body drops into the darkness below like a stone.

He doesn’t re-emerge. An impossible stretch of time passes. It isn’t an illusion; Aizawa counts the seconds precisely, tapping his finger against his wrist. The other kids are catching up now, spying the ravine ahead of them. Five seconds. Eight. Ten. 

Still, even as the other students begin to approach, it’s almost silent in the stadium. 

Even Hizashi has gone quiet. One of his hands shot out when Todoroki fell to grab Aizawa’s arm, and he’s still holding it tight, nails digging in under the table. 

Then: light. Fire erupts from the depths like a geyser, bright enough to leave afterimages burned against Aizawa's eyes. The flames paint the morning sky, turning the leftover mist to steam, and Todoroki rockets upward, trailing fire like a comet, and lands hard on the other side of the ravine, scattering earth.

The stadium erupts. Endeavour’s face doesn’t change—or if it does, it’s difficult to see under the fire—but he sits back in his chair, arms crossed, eyebrows set.

Bakugo, in sight of the fiery re-entrance, lets out a fearsome roar, blasting through the air. Aizawa was right, he thinks. It’ll be between them. 

The last stretch of course unfolds before the kids—Todoroki reaches it first, but Bakugou isn’t far behind, along with the rest of 1-A and 1-B. The cameras catch Todoroki's hesitation—a quarter-second break in stride that he must know will cost him. 

He really is like a little soldier, Azaiwa finds himself marvelling. He has a diligence, a quiet, calculated understanding of what has to be done, that most adult pros will never have. He certainly doesn’t share it with his brother—Touya’s fought tooth and nail for his good standing in hero society, but he’s lazy, or at least, Aizawa can tell he wishes he had the opportunity to be.  

Hizashi's voice carries the kind of enthusiasm you can't fake as he shouts out the final obstacle. "Our competitors face a field of landmines! Don't worry folks, they're non-lethal—just enough punch to knock you off your feet!”

“They weren’t that tame back in our day,” Aizawa mutters, too low for the mics to catch. Hizashi rolls his eyes at him. 

Tiny on the glowing screen above their heads, Todoroki picks his way forward with characteristic care. He must know he can’t afford to waste time. His lead haemorrhages with every careful step. But if he makes an ice-bridge, he risks allowing others to catch up. 

Then, behind him. Bakugou hits the field like a meteor.

"Mines don't mean shit to me!" His voice carries even to the commentary booth as he rockets toward Todoroki through the air, explosions detonating in his wake. "Die!"

Todoroki's ice lashes out through the air toward him, ruthlessly sharp, but Bakugou's already dodging through the air, arms spinning like turbines. A blast of fire. They clash in mid-air—the force and heat of it are so massive that Aizawa almost feels it. 

"What a display of power!" Hizashi leans forward. "These two competitors—"

At the back of the minefield, there is another explosion, equally massive. Someone sails into the sky like a bullet, incredibly fast and forceful, soaring toward the leaders of the race. 

Midoriya, Aizawa clocks, though he’s a blur, flying too fast for the cameras to catch him. 

This kid.

He sails over Todoroki and Bakugou, their battle forgotten as they watch him pass. His trajectory is perfect.

"And he didn’t even use his quirk," Aizawa mutters into Hizashi’s stunned silence. Somewhere far off, he’s imagining it, but he swears he can hear Touya laughing. 

Midoriya wins the race by a hair. 

The end is incredibly close. Todoroki comes third—in the final tunnel, his movements had become slightly ragged. When his left foot caught on nothing at all, he stumbled, then finished a fraction of a second after Bakugo.

Others follow soon after. Aizawa peers down onto the field below, watching his class all make it— yes— and begin to gather loosely, congratulating one another, panting. Todoroki stands perpetually away from them, steam rising from his left side, frost crawling up his right arm like ivy. His face gives away nothing, but his hands shake as he braces them against his knees.

"Well," Hizashi says to him as they cut to commercial, huffing out a sharp breath. "That was unexpected."

Aizawa can’t lie and say he could have predicted this. 

“That kid,” he says quietly, shaking his head and leaning back in his chair. “I’ve got one hell of a class.” 

The cavalry battle sounds like a war game, because it is. Teams assemble from the mess, dark little mould spores on the grass. Aizawa tries not to pay attention to how his class are talking to one another—some of them are clearly already exhausted, and between others, he thinks he can spot the telltale signs of the first serious rift of a teenage friendship. They’ll all move on once this is over. It’s still not fun to watch it happen on the screens. 

The game itself passes in the blink of an eye. Hizashi speaks a mile a minute, and Azaiwa barely gets a word in. From the commentary booth, it's almost beautiful to watch the groups  move around one another below, strategising, holding nothing back. 

Todoroki’s team collects headbands like trophies of war. Midoriya's ten million points fall to them early—a precise strike that leaves the other boy's team reeling. After that, it's just cleanup duty. Even Bakugou's desperate final charge can't breach their defences. Todoroki runs that team like the military. 

When Midnight calls time, the kid doesn't even acknowledge their victory, just walks off the field like he's following a script. Aizawa watches him bee-line for the staff exit, which opens onto a patch of trees out back. 

"Forty minute break," Hizashi sighs as they cut to commercial. "Then the real fun begins."

But Aizawa's watching Endeavour rise from his seat in the VIP section, too preoccupied to reply. The pompous asshole. If looks could kill, Aizawa would have long ago exploded Endeavour with the sheer power of his mind. 

When his phone buzzes in his pocket, he pulls it out compulsively, squinting down at Touya’s message. 

do u have a lighter 

i fear it’s been a stressful day lol 

and i can't light up my fingers with this stupid suit on they're numb

Aizawa sighs, already typing back: I won’t feed your habit.

Touya, a moment later: pls

Hizashi clears his throat. “Endeavour’s heading down to see the kid. Are we running interception?” 

“I’ll go down,” Aizawa groans, stretching, popping his back. “Touya wants a light. I don’t fancy mediating a family reunion.” 

As he adjusts his scarf, heading for the door, Hizashi whistles. “Never heard you call him by his first name.” 

Aizawa props the door open with his foot. “It’s going to get confusing if we don’t find a way to classify them. I still think numerically works best.” Hizashi’s laugh chases him down the hallway. 

The stadium's guts are all concrete and fluorescent lights, service corridors that smell like dust and old paint. Aizawa's footsteps echo off walls plastered with safety notices and outdated evacuation plans. He passes a group of support staff hauling equipment, a medical team prepping for the afternoon's fights, two security guards comparing lunch plans. A couple of his students wave at him as they pass, making their way up to the stands, looking acutely worn out. 

No sign of Endeavor. Small mercies, he figures, or a problem for later.

The staff exit spits him out into a rectangle of shade behind the arena, dense with trees.

It's like stepping into another world - the roar of the crowd muffled to a distant hum, the morning heat cut by shadow. Aizawa eyes the space he can see for Touya—or any other Todorokis, for that matter. But he sees nothing. 

He’s about to pull his phone out when he hears it. 

Years of underground work have taught Aizawa when to reveal himself and stay hidden; something in the tone of the voices as he follows them further into the trees makes him pause behind a thick maple trunk, peering through leaves gone translucent in the morning light.

They're arranged like points on a compass. Endeavor faces north, flames licking at his costume's edges and alight across his face, casting strange shadows through the trees; Shouto is to the east, looking small against a tree but still straight-backed as a Marine. 

Touya is between them, rocking on his heels, hands spread like he's directing traffic in Hell.

It’s such a striking scene. Somehow, body frozen in place, Aizawa cannot force himself to step out and intervene; he simply watches. 

"Third place." 

Endeavor makes it sound like a criminal charge. He sounds like he’s talking to a villain, somehow. 

And Shouto's voice could freeze mercury: "Sorry to disappoint."

They glare at one another, neither moving an inch. Not conceding the battle. Kaminari’s up in the stands, Aizawa is sure, but it feels as if he’s nearby. The static in the air is painful.

"Hey, speaking of disappointing," Touya cuts in, bright as artificial sweetener, "did anyone catch my stunning security work earlier? I held the family legacy on my back in my own way, you know, Dad, standing in front of the gate with my thumb up my ass.”

Aizawa is baffled. Whatever this tactic is, he didn’t expect it. 

Neither Shouto nor Endeavour acknowledges him for even a second. Touya is directly between them, and yet, they stare directly through him. The temperature drops several degrees.

“The tournament isn’t over,” Shouto says eventually, in his even, quietly wrathful voice. 

"Your control is slipping," Endeavor rumbles. He takes a step forward. Threat in it. You get to know that step. It’s an I-step-on-bad-guys’-heads step. "That ice bridge—"

"Would you believe," Touya tries again, louder, "they didn't even give me a whistle? I had to make all my own sound effects. Wee-woo."

A muscle ticks in Endeavor's jaw. "Boy."

"That's Security Officer Todoroki to you, old man. I've got a badge and everything, or, at least, it’s like an ID card, want to see? No? It’s—"

"Shut up, Touya!"

They say it in perfect unison, father and son, then catch themselves. They look as if they want nothing more than to will him away from their fight.

Touya's smile doesn't waver, but something flickers in his eyes. Right beneath the surface. Neither of them seems to see it, but Aizawa knows it. 

"Who says I can’t talk to my family once in a while?”

"Nobody asked you." Frost spreads from under Shouto's feet, crawling across grass in fractal patterns. 

"You're wasting what little time you have." Endeavor's voice drops lower. "Both of you. Touya’s abject failure doesn’t bear thinking about; the other's drawing pictures when he should be training—"

Touya's cheery voice has a hard veneer now. "Remember when I used to draw as a kid, before Mom died? I did some pretty sick stick figures. Want to see? I've got a pen somewhere—”

"Maybe I should show you how untrained I am." Flames start crawling up Shouto's left arm. It’s unclear just who he’s threatening. “Right here."

“I’d like to see you try, boy—”

"Wow, tough crowd." Asserting a boundary, a line between territories: Touya re-angles himself between them now, hands still raised. His body is tilted toward Endeavour, back to his younger brother. There’s a squareness to his shoulders. They’re set apart. He knows what’s about to happen. Of course he does: he knows how the game goes.

Aizawa feels heat on his face. The air ripples with competing temperatures. 

They all look at one another for a second or two: Touya looks at Endeavour, Endeavour looks at Shouto, and Shouto, Aizawa sees, stares at Touya’s back, an expression on his face Aizawa can’t describe. 

He’ll think back on that look years later and still not know how to describe it. 

Endeavor moves faster than someone his size should be able to. 

He strides across the grass toward his sons; Touya takes one step back, then another, and braces his feet, a kind of half-pivot. Building the wall up. Time slows. 

Aizawa is a teacher. He sees the fist swing for his student and moves to step out, capture weapon already in hand. 

But there’s a rush of assertive movement, and it catches Touya instead. The impact produces a loud, hard thud. A nasty, gut-twisting sound like breaking the flesh of a fruit. 

Touya’s head snaps to the side. Hair in his face, he breathes in through his mouth, then out. The sound is loud in the silence. For a moment, nobody moves. Shouto is holding his breath—Aizawa can see it. 

Then Touya straightens, all pretence of cheer burned away, blue fire flickering at his fingertips. 

When he speaks, his voice holds none of its previous artifice. It’s just plain, an unembellished truth in it. "Back off him."

Endeavour does, surprisingly enough. He knows he’s made his point. Behind Touya’s back, something crosses Shouto's face too fast to read, gone too quick to matter. He opens his mouth, then closes it again. His hands ball into fists at his side and he glares at the ground. Something like humiliation. Aizawa isn’t sure. 

"Fix your performance." Endeavor turns away, flames rising at his shoulders. "Both of you are embarrassing."

He walks away, just like that. 

Aizawa expects the brothers to talk—to exchange glances, apologies, anything—but Shouto's gone before his father's footsteps fade, striding away fast with his head down, leaving frost-scarred grass in his wake. No amendments, no explanations. He doesn’t look Touya in the eye once. 

Shame, perhaps. Or perhaps this is normal. 

Alone now, or so far as he knows, Touya lets out a short, frustrated sigh. He prods at his bleeding mouth with the casual assessment of someone accounting for familiar damage.

When eventually he leaves too, holding the back of his sleeve against his split lip, Aizawa does not move for a long while. When he finally does return to the arena to again preside over the final one-on-ones that will determine the winner of the first years’ Sports Festival, he expects Shouto to pulverise his opponents by sheer force of angst and rage. 

Somehow, though, when Todoroki throws his very first match, glaring into the stands with a fire hotter than his own on his face as he’s tossed out of bounds, that isn’t a surprise either.