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For as long as Touya can remember, he's burned at well over a hundred degrees. His insides boil within him, a volcanic eruption that's dormant for most of the day. His flames spark from an icy blue to something whiter than ash. He reaches temperatures far beyond what his family can handle. It's more than he can handle, too, but he doesn't have a choice in dealing with himself.
When he ignites—a star imploding in on itself; a black hole destroying everything around it—there's only one person who always suffers. He stares at himself in the mirror, self-loathing dripping down his face in crimson streaks. He doesn't mind the scars, or the off-color skin-grafts stapled to his body. He didn't see much of himself in the mirror before he got them, so the disconnect he feels now is nothing new.
The hatred comes in the parts he does see. His father's electric blue eyes, the wild white of his mother's hair. Five Todorokis overlapping the eldest son's face, a picture perfect family turned unrecognizable. He's marred the legacy he was meant to inherit, and it makes him sick to think about.
A knock at the door startles him out of his thoughts. It's a soft noise. There are no thundering footsteps or pounding doorframes here. It's confusing, muddling his already hazy thoughts.
"Touya." The deep rumble is too kind to be his father. Eraserhead then. "We're going to be late if you take any longer."
Touya clutches the rim of the sink. His eyes squeeze shut. Everything feels wrong. His teeth ache, his vision is swimming, and he's far too large for how small his mind is. He's too tall, too stringy. He has all the awkwardness of a growing teenager and none of the mental capacity.
He's dressed to feel bigger. His slacks are ironed and his button up shirt is pristine. He has to look good for the social worker, and he can't show how badly he's taking everything in front of his family.
His family, who are waiting to see him today. They do these meetings every week. They're check ups and baby steps towards the eventual end: Touya returning home. That's supposed to be the point of being fostered. Reunification is the goal, everyone says. He wasn't taken away to punish his parents, he was taken away to keep him safe while they make changes. What kind of changes, he doesn't know.
"Touya?" Aizawa calls again.
Touya's head hurts. He hopes the changes are good. Maybe it can become something similar to Aizawa and Yamada's home. It's very different to the one he grew up in. In every metric that matters, it's significantly worse. The space is so much smaller—a two bedroom with an office as opposed to the six bedroom, three office manor he's used to. They have two cats, which means there's hair and toys everywhere, no matter how often they vacuum. The Todoroki home is spotless, maintained by maids when his father is working and his mother isn't in a state to clean.
But it's much more lived in here; cozy. When they were younger, Natsuo would say their manor felt like those magazine covers, perfect for showing off luxury furniture but a stilted shell of what makes something home. He didn't use those words, but Touya knows what he meant. It's a set piece more than anything else. Everything that made it feel livable is wiped clean by the distance between everyone.
Here, that doesn't exist. It's very chaotic with visual noise everywhere Yamada touches. Souvenirs and trinkets on the shelves, photos and beloved music albums hung on the walls, and a splash of 70s Americana in every room. There are dishes in the sink, ungraded papers left on every table, and, other than bedrooms and bathrooms, there's not very many places to avoid each other. It's scary when Touya is sure he's done something wrong, but he likes the constant presence throughout the house. He may not be able to hide, but he also can't be ignored. He sees their faces more than he sees them walking away from him.
As different as it is, Touya is pretty sure this is better, and that makes him feel guilty to say. It's true, though. It's warmer here, and Touya always preferred it warm.
The door clicks open and a shadow of black peeks in. His footsteps are silent, unlike the boorish approach of Touya's father, and he makes no sudden moves. Touya flinches nonetheless. His own feet are anchored to the ground. No matter how much he urges himself, he can't move.
"Touya."
A hand rests on his shoulder, turning his body to face Aizawa. With the eye contact, Touya is made aware of the tears blurring his vision. The dark blob in front of him is nothing like anyone he'd see at home, and it hurts how comforting that is.
"Hey, talk to me. What's wrong?" Aizawa murmurs. After a second of accessing, he tilts his head. "Are you… feeling small?"
He puts too much emphasis on the word. Touya shudders and opts to hide his face into Aizawa's chest instead of answering—which in and of itself is an answer. He didn't realize just how little he felt until now, tucked against his new guardian. 'Safe, safe, I need to be safe,' echoes distantly through his ears in a voice too young to be his.
It's been a few weeks since his new therapist made this particular discovery—the one that proved Touya didn't come out of everything with just physical scars—but it feels too new, too exposing. As far as he knows, only his therapist, Aizawa, and Yamada know anything about his new coping mechanism. For now. The inevitable reality that his real family (because none of this is real—it can't be) will learn about his weakness is terrifying. He feels one step closer to losing everything each time he regresses.
"Yeah, all right," Aizawa says to himself. There's an unreadable expression on his face, but it's deliberately softened. Touya's father was never soft. He was all sharp edges and stark shadows in a way a gruff man like Eraserhead should be but isn't.
Aizawa guides Touya out of the bathroom mostly by shuffling forward a few steps and chuckling when Touya mimics the motion, not wanting to lose the man's body heat. A hand presses to his back and leads him into the living room. It's open, but not empty, and he can finally breathe. Yamada is shrugging on a jacket at the front door. His smile wavers when he sees them.
"Woah, why the long faces?" he asks, up-beat. He slithers over, more height than man, and puts his hand on Touya's head, ruffling his hair. "What's eatin' at ya, baby boy? Somethin' gotcha down?"
Even without looking up at him, Touya knows his guardians are having a silent conversation through eye contact alone. It's better than arguments and screaming, but he doesn't like not knowing what they're thinking.
Aizawa herds Touya to sit beside him on the couch, a couple cats peering curiously at them from the back. Yamada crouches down in front of them and uses his fingers to drum a random beat on Touya's knee. He's less intimidating out of his costume, like most Pro Heroes are, but there's something unnerving about how keen his eyes are, and how thinly shaped he is.
Touya keeps his hands in fists at his sides. Wisps of flame lick at his palms with nowhere to go but out. It's harder to control when he's like this. Aizawa is pretty good at catching it before it gets too bad, but he's only human. There are dozens of scorch marks around the house that Yamada couldn't buff out.
They don't get mad at him, though. They just take him to his Quirk therapy and continue looking into different brands of support gear for him. He doesn't understand why they care so much.
"Ring, ring. Ring, ring," Yamada says. He brings an old school phone gesture—his hand in a fist with his thumb and pinky out—to his ear. He has a warm smile on his face. He's more than used to Touya's constant freak outs, so he focuses more on reassuring everyone than being concerned.
A few seconds pass.
"Pssst, Touya," Yamada whispers loudly, fake phone still to his ear. "You're supposed to pick up, remember? Like this." He mimes the gesture again, and Touya would feel patronized if he weren't for how his brain swells in his skull.
Touya slowly replicates the gesture. "… hello?" he croaks.
His voice sounds so much rougher than it used to. He winces and brings his other hand to his throat, where his skin grafts scratch against his fingers. Yamada continues like there's nothing wrong.
"Hello, hello! Thanks for callin' in, little listener!" he says, even though he was the one to call Touya. In the back of Touya's buzzing mind, all he can think is silly Papa.
"Word on the street is you ain't feelin' so hot!" Yamada says in his radio voice. "Care to leave a comment? Wanna tell us what's got our little boy blue all over?"
Touya blinks away his tears, tinged with blood. His therapist calls this exercise "telephone confessions."
At first, Touya really struggled to talk to his new guardians. He was already so used to being brushed off that he'd gotten into the habit of not saying anything unless it was something he thought would please his father. Then, after his accident, he just wanted to go home. He barely wanted to play happy family with his flesh and blood, let alone with strangers he got saddled with.
Aizawa and Yamada were only chosen because Endeavor's son couldn't risk staying with civilians. Investigations of abuse are serious, especially when the result is a child setting themselves on fire, and that's even more true when the accusations are being levied against the second best in the hero rankings. For his and his family's privacy, Touya had to be given to another Pro Hero. Two scary men that were allegedly "trauma informed teachers."
The automatic trust he has in heroes conflicted with the knowledge of what they do behind closed doors and, for weeks, Touya refused to take any chances. He was already in so much pain recovering. He didn't need more punishment on top of putting his father's entire career in jeopardy by admitting the wrong thing.
Telephone confessions were the solution. Touya would take his therapist's phone and say whatever he wanted into the receiver from the safety of another room. It was easier to admit the scary things when he didn't have to see their reactions or the inevitable scribble of his therapist's pen writing everything down. At that point, it would be their word against his and Touya would go down denying everything if he had to.
But, despite his fears, he never got in trouble for it. Aizawa would thank him for being honest and Yamada would suggest getting a treat to reward him. They didn't judge him for anything he said; they didn't look at him like he was some freak of nature. They used what they learned to help him move into their home and sit in his headspace without panicking.
These days, they just mime it out. He doesn't need the distance to whisper his confessions. All it takes is being upset enough to regress and he's more than willing to babble his heart out.
"I don't wanna go," Touya whimpers, clutching the pretend phone like a lifeline.
"To the visit?" Yamada asks. "You don't wanna go visit your family?"
Shame bubbles in his chest hearing it out loud. He knows he's being weak and stupid, but he can't help it. Every time Touya thinks about seeing them, dread blankets over him. It snuffs out his flame and not even the toothy grins of his siblings can get it back.
He brings his arm around his middle to hug himself, hand still pressed to his ear. He's so used to self-soothing that he startles when Aizawa puts a hand on his shoulder and leans into him. A man of few words, yet so many touches. He never flinches away from Touya's heat.
"Why don't you wanna go? Did something happen last week?" Yamada asks, furrowing his eyebrows.
Touya's memory is a little hazy, trapped in segments of before the accident and after. All of their visits are square in the after category, and they all tend to mesh together. He shakes his head anyways.
"I don't… I don't like how they look at me," Touya says quietly. He saw their expressions in the mirror earlier, and he sees them every time he steps into a room with them.
"How do they look at you?" Aizawa asks. His voice is a comforting bass, one that draws Touya's head to his chest.
"They don't," Touya says. The social worker picked him up from the hospital after he'd been found and rushed to surgery. His parents were in the room when he woke up, and neither could look him in the eye.
His mother wept into her hands and his father was undeniably ashamed. He looked disappointed, like one of his projects fell through. And when they brought Touya's siblings around, they couldn't meet his eyes either—they stare at everything else: his skin grafts, his staples, his new guardians. Touya knows his family is glad he's alive, but they treat him like he's already dead.
"They never look at me," Touya rasps, a thick wad of emotion in his throat. Aizawa uses his sleeve to wipe away Touya's bloody tears. "I—I can't even… I nearly killed myself to get them to look and they still won't. I d-don't understand. Why won't they look at me?"
It's all he wants. It's all he's ever wanted.
"Oh, sunshine," Yamada coos sympathetically. He glances at Aizawa, who has a stormy look on his face and is putting all his effort into petting Touya.
Yamada hangs up the phone and takes Touya's hands in his. He looks directly into Touya's eyes and says, "Sometimes people find it hard to see what's in front of 'em. You get used to havin' certain things—and certain people—in your life, and it gets easy to assume they'll always be there. Then, when they aren't, you get kinda stuck."
"Your parents are experiencing guilt, rightfully so," Aizawa says bluntly. "I imagine it's hard to look at you after it was their fault something happened."
"Shouta!"
"What?" Aizawa glowers at his husband. "They should be ashamed for letting things get to this point."
Touya doesn't like hearing people talk badly about his family, but it does feel vindicating to hear someone else thinking the same way he does. He just doesn't know if guilt is the reason they won't look at him. His mother, maybe—she stopped being able to be in the same room as them a long time ago—but his father only started looking at him with scorn since Natsuo was born, and then he stopped looking at him all together when Shouto was born.
That wasn't guilt, and nothing Touya has seen during their visits makes him think that'll change. He just talks about training with Shouto, or asking Touya if he's learning anything while staying with two capable heroes.
And the longer he stays with Aizawa and Yamada, the more he realizes how much that hurts.
"That doesn't mean they don't love you," Yamada says reassuringly. He pushes his glasses up his nose. "It just means—"
"I don't wanna go," Touya repeats, voice shaking. It feels horrible to say because he loves his family, too, and he doesn't want to leave them behind.
But he doesn't want to go home either. He doesn't think he can handle his father walking away from him again—not after seeing how Aizawa and Yamada look at him. They actually pay attention to him. There's gentleness in their eyes when they help him clean his grafts, or in how they mother him when he's in too much pain to move. They actually listen to the words he's saying and act like they're worth hearing.
He doesn't feel like a dog trying to get his owner's attention with tricks. He doesn't need to prove he's worthy of it. He just exists and the two of them take care of him. Like the parents do in those cheesy movies Fuyumi likes. Like his parents are supposed to do and don't.
"I—I just can't," Touya cries, clinging to Aizawa. "Daddy, please, don't make me go!"
Time exists in a fuzzy overlap of what is and what was. Touya is too young to differentiate between any of it. He just knows he doesn't want to leave, and he loves his daddy, and he wants to be safe.
"You don't have to," Aizawa says firmly. He tugs Touya into his lap, letting the tall teenager curl up until his limbs are sore from the position. He gingerly rocks them back and forth. "We won't make you do anything. No one can."
Yamada takes his spot on the couch and rubs soothing circles into his back. "Yeah, don't worry, honey. We can reschedule—or just wait until next week."
Touya shudders, alarm scorching through him and making his burns itch. Phantom memories of heat tearing him apart leave him trembling in Aizawa's arms.
"I don't wanna go!" he insists, a little too loud. "I wanna stay!"
The goal was always to reunify him with his parents—that's what the social worker said. But Touya lays awake at night, trying to imagine it, and he comes up with a blank. He doesn't see his parents getting better, and he doesn't know how he's supposed to go from this to what he had before.
Maybe that makes him a terrible brother for abandoning his siblings, or a horrible son for not giving his parents a chance, but he can't go through this again.
"Okay," Aizawa says simply, running a hand through Touya's sweaty hair. He sends another look to his husband, an unspoken agreement. "You can stay however long you want, kid. Our door is always open."
"And if ya change your mind, that's okay too," Yamada murmurs, huddling in close despite the feverish temperatures enveloping his foster son. "We're here for ya, sunshine. Whatever ya need."
Relief washes over him and Touya melts into their embrace, feeling so small it's jarring. He doesn't know if he'll ever be big enough to go back. But he's safe here, and it's warm, and that's good enough for him.