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Shouto wakes up slowly, bones aching as though he'd fallen from a great height.
That alone is not unusual, it was a staple of his childhood to be injured and left alone to patch himself back up.
He had been injured more often than not ever since he was young.
What is immediately strange to him is the silence.
At home, there was always a fan running, Natsuo snoring, his father stomping through the halls.
In the dorms, he could always hear his peers awake at all hours of the night through the thin walls.
It was never silent.
So now, the fact that it is silent alarms him about one of two things. Either, he's lost his hearing all together or he is not at home.
Steadily, he opens his eyes to a pitch black room. Incredibly helpful, really.
That's when he really registers his own position, though.
One, he's sitting upright. Two, his arms are pinned behind his back with shackles. Third, and perhaps most pressing, there are three other people in the room sitting next to and in front of him.
He can hear their breaths now, incredibly slow and steady in a way that indicates they're unconscious.
He wiggles slightly, testing the bonds but they seem to be strong and secure. They were likely to prevent him from just burning his way out.
Which is interesting in and of itself. To have positioned his hands and feet in exactly such a way that his quirk is canceling itself out is… well it hints to a level of preparedness that Shouto wasn’t expecting. At the very least whoever did this was not only aware of the inner workings of Shouto’s quirk, but they’d possessed enough knowledge to arrange his limbs so that he cannot use it to break free.
His fingers have been wrapped just so, right fingers squeezing his left wrist, left fingers squeezing his right, and then everything bound and wrapped in layers upon layers of roped knots winding around the entirety of his wrists and forearms, tightly enough to be actively biting into Shouto’s skin.
His quirk is…
He is…
Utterly and completely useless right now.
He can’t isolate his ice, or his fire, not trussed up and bound up in himself like this. At most all he’d be able to manage is water. Which would of course simply soak into and swell the ropes causing them to bite into him even further.
And that’s just his arms! The hopelessness of his current predicament is further exacerbated by the large basin of water his tied feet are resting in. If he so much as tries anything with either of those limbs, he’ll either freeze his legs solid up to the knee or he’ll boil them up to match his face.
For the moment he is totally and completely out of commission.
Which all begs the question, who could have known enough about him to go to all this trouble, and why the heck would they bother?
This is clearly someone that knows extremely detailed information about his quirk and its usage. Not something just any random joe blow off the street would know. Whoever this is has planned and planned well, down to the minute detail of how to sideline Shouto.
And who is present with him? He can’t help but hope that they haven’t been nearly so cruelly restricted. Is it Midoriya and the others? Shouto fights to remember what had been happening and where he’d been before this but the last thing he can reliably remember is being in bed at the UA dormitory.
Nothing had seemed amiss, he and Midoriya had studied together, he’d had dinner with Momo and Uraraka and gone to bed.
He must be missing memories then, because going to bed in as safe a space as the dorms are shouldn't have led to him being tied to a chair in a dark room.
Shouto attempts to wiggle around more in the vain hope that he can twist free enough, or get his feet out of the water.
All he gets for his trouble is the sting of the ropes on his skin.
Breathe, don’t panic. Panicking will make it worse, breathe. He mentally chants within his head as he twists his arms a little more, making the water ripple and his wrists start to burn.
“Fucking stop that already.” The voice from the darkness on his left startles him.
He freezes as recognition settles in.
Dabi.
Dabi is here with him. As a hostage or as a kidnapper Shouto can’t say. If this is the League…then Midoriya must be here with him.
“Your wiggilling isn’t going to get us out of here, idiot,” Dabi says.
The realization comes to him embarrassingly slowly. Dabi is also kidnapped alongside him.
Shouto just huffs, trying to consider his options. Being locked up with a villain alongside two other unknown people certainly isn’t a good idea and he doesn’t have any initial ideas on how to get them out of here.
“I don’t see you with any better ideas,” he snips at the villain.
A groan comes from his right, indicating another person waking up in the darkness.
“Huh?” the voice says, thankfully easily recognizable as Natsuo.
Seriously, what were these kidnappers thinking? It’s not like he was related to Dabi and they didn’t have particularly similar quirks either other than just the basic fire aspect.
Dabi’s fire was obviously a lot hotter than his own and they didn’t look particularly similar either.
“Shouto?” Natsuo asks softly through the darkness. He must’ve been awake longer than Shouto thought.
“Yeah, I’m right here,” he responds softly.
Dabi, surprisingly, stays quiet.
“Great,” the last person says sarcastically. He’s really not sure how long she’s been awake. “Three Todorokis and a villain in a room, this sounds like the start of a bad joke.”
Of course it’s Fuyumi, the sibling that tries her very best to not be publicly associated in any way with their father.
Whoever kidnapped them certainly did their research. Shouto knows for a fact that Fuyumi hadn’t appeared alongside their father since she was very small alongside Touya.
He’s still concerned, though, by the fact that he has no memory of how he’d gotten kidnapped in the first place.
They all sit in silence for a moment.
“So,” Natsuo eventually says. “Does anyone have any ideas of how we got here or how to get out?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know!” a dramatic voice interjects out of nowhere. With what sounds like a single clap of their hands, a light comes on, a single spotlight illuminating what must be their kidnapper up on a stack of crates in the corner.
Shouto nods his head. “Yes please.”
Silence follows as the villain stares down at Shouto, mouth open and everything while Shouto gets the feeling his siblings and Dabi are staring at him as well.
“Sho…” Natsuo starts with an aggrieved sigh, but the dramatic villain cuts him off before he say anything else.
“So polite, I suppose I could indulge you.”
He snaps his fingers and another wider spotlight comes on, this time lighting up the section Shouto and the others are restrained in.
Shouto’s heart sinks. Oh no…
The four of them are arranged in a perfect square, Shouto facing Natsuo, Dabi facing Fuyumi. And all four of them have their feet in basins of water to the knee with what looks to be piping running from basin to basin. Shouto’s water runs to Fuyumi’s, whose water runs to Natsuo, which runs to Dabi’s which runs to Shouto’s.
The implication is clear. Try and use your quirk and you affect not only yourself but the person to the right of you as well.
And Shouto… well Shouto is positioned to the right of a villain that quite frankly wants him dead.
“Now then!” the villain claps, the spotlight over his head going out to return him to the darkness once more. “I’ve got to go prepare! See you soon!”
Shouto almost wants to remind him that he’d never answered Shouto’s question but the villain is already gone.
He couldn’t see how he’d left thanks to the darkness. It almost felt like he’d vanished from one second to the next. Which… if that’s their quirk then maybe it has something to do with how they all got here?
But why would they include Dabi?
There doesn’t seem to be anything to gain by his inclusion, unless it was by accident, or–
A plant.
Dabi could be here to remove the implication it is the League involved. Though once more, why would they include Natsuo and Fuyumi…there is little logic to that unless it's to try and force Endeavor to do something.
Shouto likes to think his father would do something about it, if push came to shove. He does have a reputation to maintain after all.
“Alright so how are we getting out of this, it seems like drama queen has cut off all viable use of our quirks,” Natsuo tries again, ever the one ready to keep forging on.
Shouto takes a deep breath, preparing to give his brother a potentially viable response when a snarl from Dabi cuts him off.
“I’m getting out with or without you fuckers,” he snaps before the fire flares to life around him. The villain is utterly unconcerned about the damage he will cause to himself and others.
“Stop,” Shouto cries out, the warmth from the flames already washing over him.
“Fuck no.”
The water heats and Shouto can’t breathe.
The water is hot, so hot, steam rising from it.
He can’t breathe.
He knows he needs to, knows that will help but his body won’t respond.
His face hurts, there’s no hot water there but he can feel it anyways.
Someone is shouting his name.
Shouto can’t breathe.
The heat slowly goes away.
It’s hard to recognize at first, his own mind taking priority over his body. Over reality.
The water, though, it doesn’t leave. The steam cooled into water droplets as it touched his skin but it still feels wrong.
So wrong,
The water itself is still too much. It’s warm against his skin, too warm, warmer than it had any justification being.
He’s not sure when he started shaking, probably around the time he started hyperventilating, but it only makes everything worse.
The water is there and it’s moving and he’s back at home laying in a puddle of his father’s creation against Shouto’s quirk during one too many training sessions when he’d been too young to know better than to not say no to his father.
He’s not sure where he is and he’s not sure where he’s been and he isn’t sure which is scarier.
It's too loud and too hot and somehow he's still cold.
“Shouto!” Fuyumi breaks through his thoughts, practically screaming for his attention.
The world seems to still.
He wrenches his eyes back open, looking down to see his leg coated in ice, the chill slowly freezing the rest of the group's legs.
“Shit, kid,” Dabi says to him, surprisingly kind in tone for a mass murderer who'd tried to kill him previously.
Incredibly hesitant with his movements and quirk control, knowing that his emotions aren't well controlled but also not wanting Dabi to be the one to unfreeze them, he slowly uses a little bit of his fire side, just enough to warm the water and melt all the ice for the others.
“Sorry,” Shouto offers softly. It'd been a long time at this point since he'd lost control like that. That had been, in fair part, due to finally being out of his father’s house, but that was besides the point.
His heart is still jackrabbitting in his chest but Shouto forces himself to take slow even breaths if only so his siblings will stop looking at him like that.
Natsuo’s devastated expression is practically inescapable considering it’s directly across from him and Shouto looks away first.
“I don’t like hot water,” he finally says when the silence becomes more stifling than even his panic attack had been.
Dabi snorts. “No shit.”
Shouto braces himself for more, something harsher and more cutting, but surprisingly that’s all the villain says. Shouto turns to look at him in an attempt to hopefully gauge his reaction and finds that Dabi is already looking at him.
The expression on the villain’s face makes him feel weird so Shouto simply looks down at his feet. He’d rather stare at the remnants of his panic attack for the rest of this experience than have to face any more open concern and pity.
Especially from a stranger like Dabi.
The door slams back open and the villain stomps into the room dramatically. “Alright chucklefucks, how much longer am I gonna have to wait?!”
At last! Someone to look at that won’t have his stomach twisting into itself in shame!
Shouto immediately fixes his gaze on the villain and offers his most astute contribution to the conversation. “What?”
The villain snarls, kicking over a pile of crates in frustration. “What’s the point of going to all this trouble if Endeavor won’t even show! You’d think he’d care about his kidnapped kids huh?”
Dabi startles. “His what?,” he hisses, leaning forward to glare the villain down.
“Oh come on, don’t try to deny it. You can’t escape my quirk. Let me tell you, it was no easy feat getting my hands on Endeavor’s hair, I had to spend a whole day posing as a temp at the agency and even then he wouldn’t hold still till I asked him for an autograph.” He huffs indignantly. “Some people I tell you. No appreciation for the long con.”
“Wait,” Natsuo breaks in, brow furrowed in confusion. “So you, what, used the hair to magically summon his kids?”
“Pretty much yeah.” The villain flicks a bit of imaginary dust off his cape in a show of mock humility. “Timed it for the dead of night too so you’d all be sleeping. I honestly wasn’t expecting four of you to show up but–”
He cuts off as Dabi suddenly snarls at him, teeth snapping in a rage so visceral Shouto can practically feel it.
“Oh.” The villain claps a gloved palm over his mouth in mock sympathy. “Did you not know?”
Shouto cannot even begin to process this revelation. He turns wide-eyed to Fuyumi, who turns in horror towards Natsuo, who ducks his head to his chest and offers a very solemn, “my condolences,” to Dabi.
“Old man’s a piece of shit,” Shouto offers, somehow not entirely shocked to think that Endeavor is enough of an asshole to have cheated on his wife.
Of course, that’s when the incredibly amazing timing of Aizawa kicks in and he quite literally busts down the door alongside Endeavor. Shouto is really wishing that the old man wasn’t present because he does really just want to go back to bed at this point and deal with everything else in the morning, but alas.
Thankfully Aizawa and Endeavor wrap up the entire situation incredibly quickly, although Dabi does get away during transport, and the Todoroki siblings are left to deal with the repercussions of the day.
They don’t mention the discovery that Dabi is their sibling.
It honestly just feels like too much for one day.
Aizawa and Fuyumi are already attempting to put him into therapy from him accidently mentioning the post hot water panic attack, he really doesn’t need to deal with Dabi on top of that.
Though who knows. Maybe it’ll come up in therapy after all.