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When Midoriya Izuku is five years old, he slips from the monkey bars on the playground and falls into a coma and almost doesn't wake up.
When he regains consciousness three months later, the doctors call it nothing short of a medical miracle.
Not to mention the fact that his quirklessness had made sustained quality medical care virtually impossible. Years later, Izuku overhears his mother tearfully telling Mitsuki that two more weeks and his care team would have given up fully; the only thing that had kept them going that long in the first place was her breaking out most of her life savings.
As it was, against the odds, miraculously and inexplicably, he had survived with minimal lasting damage other than slight temporary amnesia and an unfounded aversion to fire.
When Todoroki Touya is thirteen years old, he nearly dies after losing control of his fire quirk on Sekoto Peak, and he ends up in a coma for three full years.
When he finally does wake up one otherwise ordinary day, it feels almost as if he's being called back to the land of the waking. Almost as if somebody is waiting for him, as if he's not allowed to die just yet. He's sure it's Enji — surely his father has seen the error of his ways by now — so of course he returns to his father's home.
And yet he finds it the same as before, all except for the shrine in his name where his bedroom once was.
That day, Touya dies and Dabi is born; Dabi, who thinks of his past only to remind himself of why he hates Endeavor, why he hates heroes, why he can never go back there. That voice calling him back to life — it was nothing but a hallucination, he now understands. There is nothing, nobody in this world for him.
Throughout the years, although Izuku and his mother bring up the event occasionally, it has little effect on his day-to-day life. The only time they are forced to acknowledge it is when Izuku fills out his medical history for his UA application — although he's sure that with his spotty record marred with the sabotage of his Aldera Middle School teachers, the coma will be the last of the UA admission committee's concerns. Maybe he'll ask the famed Recovery Girl about it if he gets in — although, who is he kidding, it's not like he's going to get in anyway.
And then he breaks every bone in his body during the Entrance Exam, and he ends up meeting Recovery Girl after all, but of course he doesn't have a chance to ask her because he passes out immediately.
But- he got in, so he still has plenty of chances to ask, after all.
It comes on suddenly, from out of nowhere, with no logical explanation as to why Dabi's body suddenly feels like it is being set ablaze all over again, as if his body has finally went supernova and exploded from inside out. He's thankfully alone when it happens, nobody there to witness him and his failing, broken body in this pathetic state, although for the first time in a very long time he wishes Rei or Fuyumi or Natsuo somebody was there to help him breathe through the pain.
And then, as quickly as it came on, the burning sensation fades to nothing and he can breathe again, and all is well as it has always been.
His first week at UA is truly wonderful — Izuku fanboys nonstop over the teachers for his various subjects (all Pro Heroes he's idolized for literally forever!) and All Might's heroics classes are, well, interesting and eventful to say the least. Either way, he's learning so much, he's improving rapidly, none of his new classmates know about his former quirklessness except Kacchan, who he can deal with-
Nothing could have prepared him for what goes down at the USJ.
He could have died. His classmates could have died. Aizawa-sensei very nearly almost died.
And what use was he? He had frozen, something weighing him down, an unseen, hostile force striking hesitation into his every movement, rendering him unable to try and give assistance to his homeroom teacher until it was almost too late.
They all survive in the end, but for weeks afterward, Izuku can't shake the unknown feeling that's taken root in him.
Dabi is determined to make sure that precious Shouto doesn't make it out of this stupid hero class training camp untouched. Endeavor's perfect creation had managed to take control of the zone he'd been dropped into at the USJ last time, not only embarrasing and capruting the villains but also showing the world his strength. All the while, Dabi felt as if he'd been fighting at half capacity — yes, Tomura had specifically ordered him not to burn down the entire place as he could've done easily, but even so it was as if something had him holding back on the innocent students. They were honesty just young and naive and impressionable, even Shouto — it was people like the licensed corrupt heroes who deserved his wrath, not-
He shakes his head furiously. What even is this thought? Where had this come from?
He will exact vengeance on his little brother. And the rest of those hero kids. And nothing can stop him.
The attack goes smoothly, other than a brief bout of pains that has him almost worried about a recurrence of That Other Incident from a few months ago. But he recovers quickly enough, and everything falls very nearly according to plan — except Shouto slips from his grasp at the very last moment, replaced by that wide-eyed green haired boy who'd broken all his bones at the Sports Festival. Dabi's arms hurt just thinking about it.
Surely he can get something useful out of this self-sacrificial, reckless kid.
Izuku's been feeling increasingly off since he was brought into the League's base. And it's not just regular old 'I've been kidnapped by a villain organization whose leader wants me dead and I'm scared for my life' weird. It's something else, something he can't place, something eerily similar to what he'd felt coming back after the other two times he'd faced the League.
The gut feeling that there's something he's missing, something he needs to know, something that will change his life as he knows it.
It persists through round after round of interrogation, first by one of the League members that Izuku doesn't know, then Tomura, then even a brief and terrifying audience with All for One himself. The feeling lingers.
And then he's roughly shoved in a chair in from of Dabi, the flame villain. And their eyes meet, and Izuku remembers everything.
He's five years old again, slipping from the monkey bars as blue-hot flames flash before his eyes, consuming everything around him, consuming his very own body, burning and burning and burning so painfully that his young brain cannot process it and shuts down to protect itself as well as his soulmate.
He's asleep, one month into his coma, and so is Dabi Todoroki Touya, angry at a father who cared too much about everything and then nothing at all, a man who abandoned him at the time when he needed it the most.
He wakes up three months after that fateful day, feeling as if he is so, so alone, as if something (or someone) is missing from his world.
Touya/Dabi's turquoise eyes narrow and his almost-vulnerable expression hardens into something unreadable once more.
"Get out."
Dabi doesn't want a soulmate. He doesn't need a soulmate. He most definitely doesn't need a pathetic hero as his apparent soulmate.
(He pops his head back in to tell the kid as much when he's sure nobody else is eavesdropping in.)
Although… this hero's life hasn't been so good after all, has it? Quirkless, bullied, manifesting a quirk (very painfully, he might add) the very day of the UA Entrance Exam, and now he's about to meet his demise.
But something prevents him from relaying his findings to Tomura and the rest of the League. Maybe he just doesn't want to have to explain how he knows this. Whatever. It's irrelevant and probably nothing All for One doesn't already have figured out. And besides, it won't stop him from doing what he came here to do.
And then one night he awakens abruptly, a forgotten memory having occurred to him.
It was the kid- Izuku- who had called him back when he'd been in that coma, wasn't it.
And the reason he'd hesitated at the USJ — he couldn't kill his soulmate.
He can't kill his soulmate.
He can't harm his soulmate.
They may share each other's pains, each other's life-and-death experiences, but Dabi cannot bring himself to bring direct harm to Izuku.
So what choice does that leave him, then, when the kid's friends come to try and stage a rescue as reckless as Izuku himself?
Izuku hears the commotion at the same time everybody else does. He knows that his friends have come for him and Kacchan. And he knows that he isn't making it out of here regardless.
Not the way he is currently, tied up and isolated in a room that allows no sound to escape — nobody will hear his cries, and the longer they search for him will only result in the higher the likelihood that they too get captured alongside him. By the time he is found, if he is even found at all, it will surely be too late.
But then—
The door opens the most gently it ever has, and he looks up to see Dabi standing over him, face shadowed, eyes stormy, sharpened knife in hand.
"Do you trust me?" his soulmate asks. It is a question to which Izuku answers yes without hesitation, a yes that Dabi need not have asked to know, but words which need to be said between them.
"If anybody asks, I was never here."
With that, Dabi slashes through the main rope binding Izuku's wrists together, then makes quick work of the ones that bind his legs and torso to his chair. Once finished, he crosses the room to the door. "Go. Just— go."
"Thank you," Izuku tells him, knowing that there is no way those two words can encompass all he wants to say and praying that Dabi understands — and hoping that perhaps, one day, they can properly talk again without being on different sides of a war.