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Crying little children like having a calm, grounded presence with them; someone to hold and reassure them, to tell them that it will be okay in a way that would make them believe every word.
Ten month old Todoroki Shouto, however, had a hissing, stomping 8-year-old eldest brother by the side of his crib, aggressively yanking at the wooden bars to his left in a futile attempt to replicate what his mother does to calm the boy.
Young Touya Todoroki has neither his mother’s forgiving tone nor the gentle touch of her fingertips which cooled the world around him the very second they entwined with the fading red streaks at the top of his head. He has words, loud and decisive, an echo of his father’s storm. They boom against the four walls the way a tiny commander would instruct his recruits. “Stop it,” he orders through gritted teeth, ignoring the one wisdom tooth that is wobbly and hurts when he presses down on it too much. Shouto doesn’t stop. In fact, he screams louder, more pained, a worrying red hue painting his features. Touya glances towards the shoji, left slightly ajar after he snuck into the room.
An anxious feeling washes over him at the thought that someone could find him there — in yet another place where he does not belong anymore. As much as he wishes that opting to ignore such emotion actually helped, the nausea rose in his stomach and clawed its way upward, only accelerated by the mutinous beats against his ribcage.
He is not allowed in Shouto’s room. He’s not allowed anywhere near Shouto without supervision, as a matter of fact. If his knuckles turn red, skin flares, and he needs his mother’s soothing hands, he is to ask Natsuo or Fuyumi to go fetch her for him. He is allowed around his other two siblings without any such measures, so they must be different from Shouto, too. ‘I’ll come when you call,’ his mother had promised through glistening eyes and shaky words the day after he’d tried to bring down his fire on the masterpiece — the most precious of all Todoroki children.
Because Shouto was precious, and they cannot risk him getting hurt at the hands of his useless big brother.
“Stop crying!” He speaks more sternly, “this is your fault. Why’d you wake up anyway? I wasn’t even being loud or nothin’.”
More screaming ensues, and he thinks there is no way his mother won’t hear soon. She’s in the bathroom. He knows because he looked for her after training, when the skin around the upper side of his left arm started peeling and itching, and he’d scratched it open with the impatience of an antagonized pre-schooler whose lunch box won’t open. The bleeding on his arm had stopped by the time he came down the mountain and started looking for his mother, but when he peeked inside the room where she usually stays with Shouto, she was nowhere to be seen. Only the faint sound of the shower and Shouto’s babbling from his crib could be heard, and Touya thought that, perhaps, he could wait for her there.
Indeed, he had been careful not to wake him. His intention was never to be perceived as the monster sneaking into Shouto’s room in the dead of night to finish what he had previously started, in a flare of anger that he remembered very little of. He simply entered the room as a boy who desperately needed his mother, regardless of where the little masterpiece was at the time.
Right then, as he sat down next to the most precious of Todorokis, the first of many screams to come pierced his earlobes. “Quit your crying, you—” he pauses momentarily, what ugly name to call the child more proficient than himself at everything, even at an age where he could not even stand upright? Shouto Todoroki is precious — more than Fuyumi, more than Natsuo, and especially more than Touya, whose distress is starting to affect the burn marks across his belly. “Shouto, stoooop,” he draws out, forehead colliding with the child’s crib. He’ll be in trouble if he’s caught there with Shouto crying his eyes out. “Mama will think I did something again, please!”
Instead, his baby brother chokes on his sobs and goes into a terrifying coughing fit. Touya waits a beat, in hopes that it is one of those coughs that clear up themselves; he used to have them often, according to his mother, because he would breathe in his own spit in an attempt to talk more. Shouto, however, goes rigid and red, face slightly swollen from his crying already. Overcome by panic, Touya yanks at the bars of the crib, looking for the ones that he knows to be detachable from back when Natsuo was a baby.
Once he manages to free up enough space, he turns Shouto to the side and gently taps on his back until the coughing subsides. He’s done this before only once, some years ago, when his mother was preparing a bottle for Natsuo and he choked on his own spit, and Fuyumi didn’t know what to do. He did. He’s seen their dad do it before, and everything Endeavor could do, Touya could replicate just as well. At least back then, he could.
Now he watches as Shouto’s breathing becomes more even and his little eyes, which were horrified and struggling just a moment ago, bore into his skull like nothing of that sort had happened. “Hmph, don’t act brave now,” he blew out a scoff, hand still comfortably resting on his brother’s back. Touya is always warm, a side-effect of his quirk, so maybe that helps with calming him down. “You’re gonna be dad’s masterpiece. Can’t just let yourself be defeated by some spittle,” he mocks, or tries to at least, like a toothless bite, a last-ditch effort at maintaining his pride after practically jumping to save his greatest rival. Stinkin’ little brother, he thinks, can’t even cry by himself. “I’m gonna fight you one day, and I’m gonna win. And when I do he’ll see I’m not a failure.”
Shouto, ever the optimist, merely babbles in response and tries reaching for Touya’s hand but the elder boy keeps him in place because the last thing he needs is another run of his screaming or his choking. Touya sighs, palm rubbing gentle circles into his brother’s back, “you’ll probably be good. Dad thinks so, anyway. He’ll show you lots of cool stuff that he didn’t show me because of my stupid body burning up too soon. But maybe…” He’s speaking in whispers now, as though someone could overhear him admit to a horrible secret, “... maybe you can show me some.”
The words burn on his tongue and twist his stomach. It’s an admission of inadequacy, no doubt, to ask his baby brother for tips but he, Endeavor, refuses to even see him. He sighs, finally withdrawing his hand to sit more comfortably next to the crib, eye to eye with his replacement — the new and improved Todoroki Touya, one who would never have to withhold tears during training or wear longer sleeves in the summer to cover the failures of resisting his own flames. Shouto was born lucky, given every advantage from day one in areas that suffocated Touya, and he would simply have to accept it, clench his jaw through the pain, mend his wounds and try again.
“Even your eyes are all messed up,” he mutters, “head couldn’t decide if you’re replacing me or Natsuo, yeah?” Shouto babbles some more in response, something that sounds vaguely like ‘na-na-nanan-na-brrrrb’. When Natsuo was a baby, his mother used to tell him to talk with him as often as possible because it was good for him, despite the fact that his finger was up his nose more often than not and the only things he responded to were gargled noises. He’s a better student than Touya now, so he thinks it must have helped.
Touya assumes he got the joke and that, somewhere in a world where he isn’t destined to defeat Shouto someday, he’ll feel good about smiling and think his utterances are sort of adorable. Natsuo was a quiet kid for the most part, aside from the gargling, and from what little he remembers about Fuyumi, she was screaming all the time when their mother couldn’t hold her. Shouto talks so much that it seems like he already knows the world will be his. “Not like I’ll have any of dad’s hair for much longer, anyway. Then you’ll just look like mom and dad.”
He watches as Shouto attempts to prop himself up on his tiny arms and sit but, while sleeveless, the sleeping bag he’s wearing is a bit too big for him and the very next thing he does is step on it wrong with his legs and plant his face straight into the tatami in the crib. Touya snorts at the sight, unable to control it in time. Stinkin’ little brother can’t even sit, he thinks, and he’s supposed to beat me. Shouto lets out a noise that one can only identify as the baby’s first instance of annoyance as he tries to, against the judgement of his twisted up sleeping bag, roll himself over and repeat his previous attempt. Instead, his face meets the cushion once more.
“Wait, you’ll hurt yourself,” he chides, the way he used to with Natsuo when he hit himself in the head four times trying to reach a toy outside his crib, and extends his arms towards Shouto, detangling the sleeping bag and helping him sit up against the bars of the crib. In doing so, Shouto leans into his embrace and tries to — to Touya’s complete and utter horror — hug him. “No, no, no, no, you stay there,” he steps away, pointing at him as a warning, “we’re enemies, you hear me? No hugs for those, I gotta beat you in a couple years.” Suddenly, he feels less like the distant, cold rival and more as though this little boy managed to cage him into the most dangerous position he could be in — one where he’s treated and looked at the way an older brother is; with unrestrained joy in Shouto’s eyes as he tries to step away from him, the position of his hand still more akin to defending himself against a wild animal than a baby.
What followed the dead quiet of their first showdown in many to come is the loudest sneeze he’s heard in his life, followed by Shouto shooting snot all over his palm, “maybe more than a couple years actually.” The comment slips through his disgusted grimace, “come on, gotta get you cleaned up before mama sees you makin’ a mess.”
Touya knows how to hold a baby. He’s held Natsuo before, with both arms around him while he carried him as far as he could before it tired him out. Natsuo is, however, not a ‘stinking little snot monster’. Thus, Touya held him with both arms out and as much distance between them as possible as he brought him down to their mom’s bed. “Stay there,” he instructs with all the seriousness of a pre-teen. The very second he turns to look through their mom’s stuff for wet wipes, he hears shuffling behind him. Shouto, ever the insubordinate thorn in his side, is trying to get over to him, “do you ever listen? I told you to stay there. How’s dad supposed to train you if you won’t hear, hm?”
With that, almost as though the universe decided to mock Touya and then some, Shouto wipes his snotty hand against their mom’s tatami.
“Ugh. Well played, Stinker,” the eldest Todoroki grumbles, taking out more wipes than anyone would need if a volcanic snot eruption spontaneously hit their house. He sits next to Shouto, first taking care of the crisis zone — his nose — and, eventually, getting to the tatami and discarding the wipes. Shouto scrunches his nose in discontent at the wipes touching his face and Touya refuses to acknowledge how cute that is. “You gotta know how to do this stuff,” he has that tone again, chiding, like he’s telling Shouto something incredibly important, and like he’ll definitely understand, “mama’s not always here, dad’s got hero stuff to do. I’m—” the quiet that envelops him feels like an eternity. I what? He thinks to himself, the bitterness burning him from the inside, messed up isn’t even a start. “I can’t be here. I just… maybe when you’re older and dad sees who’s the better successor, then we can hang out or somethin’. Fuyumi and Natsuo don’t know this stuff neither. So just do what I do.”
Shouto stares at him with the intensity of a child who’s just been handed a phone. Touya coughs once, then once more, and knocks on the back of his neck. “Now you do it,” Shouto does, in fact, not do any of that. He stares at him with mismatched saucers like he’s grown a second head. Touya repeats the action again. “C’mon, dad thinks you can do anything, so just watch me. You need to know this in case you choke up again.” And right then, Shouto does it and Touya is ecstatic, to put it mildly. He does a little excited jump and claps, the way he used to when Natsuo learned something new. He immediately catches it. It’s like a gravitational pull slams Touya back to the ground, straightens his posture and neutralizes his expression. He knows, realistically, what he felt was pure joy about the fact that Shouto learned something from him, and a response to his elated giggles as he copied Touya’s behavior, unushered by what they must do eventually.
And yet, they were still rivals for the title that defined their very purpose.
“Quit looking at me like that,” he says, nose scrunching up as he feigns annoyance, which, somehow, makes Shouto smile more. He points his, well, pointer finger at him as a warning and Shouto, ever the little stinker, reaches for it instead of taking his warnings seriously. “Hey, stop that!” He says as he wraps his little hand around his finger and starts, for all intents and purposes, yanking him forward. Surprised by the strength behind the pull, considering Shouto was still very small, Touya topples forward and barely catches himself from falling over. He blinks for a second as the disbelief and shock washes over him. All those years of training, only to get thrown around by a toddler who was, on top of that, laughing it up and pulling more.
“You think that was funny?” He’s never heard a toddler snort before, but now he has. Touya narrows his eyes and puts out his finger once more — a challenge, he’ll consider it the first of many to come. “That was luck, don’t think you’re better than me or nothin’. Do it again, I won’t hold back this time.”
With furrowed eyebrows, Touya devotes his full concentration to keeping his hand in place as Shouto continues to pull like his life depends on it. It’s the first time he’s ever heard an annoyed sound from him, a waaaah of pure wrath when he wouldn’t budge. Touya wins this round and, content with his victory, topples over comically slowly and pretends to have fallen because Shouto’s gargantuan strength was simply too much for him to handle, avoiding the critical spot that is his injured arm in the process to minimize his pain. He doesn’t need to look to know it had the intended effect as the sound of Shouto’s chuckling and babbles fills his ears, and he feels him yanking him back up by the shirt to do it again.
He thinks that Shouto isn’t that sore of a loser and maybe, once the succession is finally settled and he’s proven to their dad that creating him wasn’t a mistake, they can be like real brothers.
Some time later, with her hair wrapped in a towel after airing out the bathroom, Rei prepared a bottle for Shouto and made her way towards their room. There’s a beat of silence once she reaches the open shoji and spots Touya there with Shouto, both curled up on her tatami.
She panics, at first, blood running cold as the worst possible scenario comes to mind. Had she been too late? Had Touya done something irreversible in her absence? Rushing towards them with speed that is only second to her heart rate, she’s immediately struck with a wave of guilt. The closer she gets to the two boys, the clearer she can hear the soft sound of their snoring. Touya is a good boy, she reminds herself — it’s easy to forget he is, when her orders are to keep him away from the brother whose hand he is holding so tightly as they sleep.
A gentle smile reaches her lips as she decides to leave them be for the moment. She can tend to whatever wounds Touya gathered while training once she fetches the first aid kit.
There’s a distinct feeling of nostalgia that tugs at her heart strings when she’s making her way down the hall — one that wishes things were different, one that wishes for her boys’ dreams to wander in different places, that in their slumber they find that their paths never need to cross as rivals.