Chapter Text
Touya woke up to a hospital ceiling, those telltale pockmarked squares winking back at him. He'd been here before.
"Hey, Touya."
At least he hadn’t woken up alone this time.
His whole body ached. His whole body. In that metal cocoon he’d felt nothing, suspended in a high sponsored by some incredible drug cocktail meant for the most grievously wounded and the dying.
But death never quite seemed to stick to Touya Todoroki.
"Hurts," he managed to croak out. He recognized his voice this time around. No sudden shock of puberty.
"I know. I'm sorry."
He didn’t need condolences. The pain throbbing through him, it was extraordinary. It was a gift.
"I haven't felt it in so long," he said in a crackling rasp.
"Felt what?"
"Anything."
He didn’t notice when his eyes blinked closed. He didn’t know how long it was before he opened them again.
"Touya." That same person again. It tickled the back of his mind.
"Mhmm.”
"I have soba, if you'd like to eat with me. It's hot, though. I don't know if you prefer hot or cold."
His stomach turned at the idea of food, but he was hungry. He could probably manage the broth.
Soba. Oh.
Touya turned his head, a miniscule movement that required a mountain of effort. He was covered in bandages. A tingle of dread rippled down his spine at the mystery of what lay beneath them. Was his skin regenerating? Was he nothing more than a mess of blood and muscle and bones? Maybe they'd pulled him out of that device because they figured he was fucked no matter what.
“Why are you here, Shouto?”
His baby brother sat in a chair pulled up next to his hospital bed, with a brown paper bag balanced on his lap. His unscarred eye was wide and unblinking.
“... To have lunch with you.”
Touya moved to push himself up, but his arms screamed under the weight of his own body, and he couldn’t.
"Aw, fuck—"
Steady hands gripped him and helped ease him back down gently.
"Don't push yourself." A quick press of a button had the bed slowly levering him into an upright position. The change in equilibrium kind of made him want to throw up, but when the bed stopped moving he received a juice box, pressed delicately into the palm of his hand.
"You're pale."
"I've always been pale, Shouto," he grumbled. But he took a sip — the straw had already been punched in for him — and found it took away some of his shakiness. It was some sort of children’s juice, a concentrate heavily diluted with water. He couldn’t even identify the flavor.
"Mom dropped me off.” Shouto maintained his gaze, but it was softer, less piercing than their father's. He wasn’t wearing his school uniform; perhaps he thought it would be rude, or boastful. Instead he'd dressed in a simple pair of joggers and a hoodie. "We didn't want to overwhelm you with visitors."
“Thanks.” It felt strange, thanking someone he could have sworn he hated his entire life.
But it wasn't hate. It was just hurt.
A nauseating seed of shame burrowed into his stomach.
“You're a bigger man than I am,” he admitted. It was hard to talk with all the bandages, but he tried his best.
“I don't think so.” Shouto shook his head. “I think we did what we could with what we had. I don’t resent you for it — for any of it.”
Touya’s eyes burned. “Shouto—”
“Come on.” Shouto snapped a pair of chopsticks apart, saving Touya from having to form a coherent response. “Let’s eat.”
Shouto had taken many meals with Touya over the past month or so, but this was the first time Touya wasn’t restrained in a metal chrysallis. Shouto had stopped by with a bento box or a bag from some nearby convenience store and sat by the observation window, eating his lunch. Most of the time Touya hadn’t had the strength or the emotional capacity to talk. Shouto had kept coming anyway.
Now he was in a normal hospital bed. He might have been covered in a fuckton of bandages and hooked up to every machine under the sun (including an internal catheter, which he chose not to think about) with every sort of fluid you could ask for stuck into his forearms, but there was no longer a pane of glass separating him from Shouto. He wondered if Shouto was unaware of the tension that hung like humidity in the air, thick and oppressive, or if he simply chose to disregard it.
This had all been intended to be palliative care. A means to a peaceful end. All these new things stuck in him, pumping him full of nutrients a dying body certainty wouldn't require, didn't seem palliative.
Todorokis were stubborn. None more so than Touya — although he saw now that his youngest brother could put up a worthy fight for that title.
“How'd you get me to a hospital?” Touya asked. “Dad was all screwed up.”
Shouto paused, chopsticks halfway to his mouth with a shiny ribbon of noodles pinned between them, cascading into a tupperware container.
“I carried you.”
Shouto spoke matter-of-factly, as if it had been the easiest thing he'd ever done, the simplest and clearest choice he'd ever made. Touya, for once, was speechless.
“My friends helped me," Shouto explained. "Iida, and Kirishima. I was pretty hurt by the end and they're both very strong.” Shouto pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’ve been keeping them updated about you. They wanted me to tell you they say hi, if you were awake. And you are, so, 'hi.'”
“But—”
“I know.” Shouto nodded in agreement with the thought Touya didn't even finish. “You're Dabi. But you're also my brother. They understand that. They want you to be okay because I want you to be okay.”
Touya unwillingly thought of the League. Magne, Twice — Shigaraki.
In the whirlwind of news his family had told him while he was in and out of consciousness in that chamber, that had been one of the things that stuck. One: His heart was very weak, and he was probably going to die. Two: Hawks of all fucking people was the president of the Public Safety Commission now.
And three: Tomura Shigaraki was dead.
“Seems like you’ve got a good group of friends.” There was a lump in his throat that was hard to speak around.
“I do.” Shouto nodded again. “I’d have gone to some pretty dark places if not for them.” When Touya didn’t reply, Shouto went on. “You know Midoriya— he… he did all he could, with Shigaraki. I know he did.”
Touya sniffed, which hurt the insides of his nostrils, and brushed off the sentiment with a quick shake of his head. “I don't wanna talk about that.”
“Okay.” Shouto clicked his chopsticks together. “If you’d ever like to talk about him, or any of them—”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Shouto repeated. Still so composed. Keeping emotions under wraps when he was Dabi, not letting them show on his face, had been a Herculean task. Shouto appeared to do it without even thinking.
“You've got a pretty flat affect, you know that?”
Without missing a beat, Shouto replied, “Bakugou says it's because I’m autistic.”
Touya barked out a laugh like an old dog and it made his lungs ache.
“Fuck, sorry,” Touya backpedaled, covering his mouth with one hand and waving away his laughter with the other. “Sorry, that's not funny.”
“No, it's very funny.”
That sent Touya into another peel of laughter. Shouto smiled. Then the laughter turned to coughing as his lungs spasmed. Soot sprayed into Touya’s hand in small black flecks and Shouto tentatively patted his back.
“I think you cleared my airway with that one,” Touya said, clearing his throat and wiping the soot on his hospital gown.
“Have some broth,” Shouto encouraged. He poured some from the tupperware into a smaller plastic cup he'd brought along with him. It was light enough that Touya could hold it on his own even in his trembling hand.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Mom made it.”
Emotion closed around Touya’s throat in a vice grip. He remembered her that day, how she ran straight into his flames with no regard for herself, her only wish to reach him and tell him she was sorry. She’d come by to see him just as Shouto had, talking more to him than with him, but that was through no fault of her own. He simply… hadn’t known what to say. Years and years of imagining all the things he’d tell her if he could, only for all of it to evaporate the moment he saw her.
Some days, when he was certain he would die before the sun rose again, it was enough just to hear her voice.
“Tell her I said thank you,” he said, once he found the strength to speak again.
“You can tell her yourself,” Shouto reminded him. “She wants to see you.”
His belly curdled into a ball of nerves at the thought of it, so he instead directed his attention to the cup in his hand.
“What the fuck, Shouto.”
His little brother’s mismatched brows perked up in concern. “What is it?”
Touya tipped the cup Shouto’s way, showing the ridiculous Jacob’s Ladder of chives that zigzagged along the surface of the broth. “These are insane. How did you manage to cut chives like that?”
“... I suppose ‘autism’ isn’t a valid answer—”
“It is not.”
Touya took a careful sip of the broth, minding the string of chives. It warmed him from the inside out, and it struck him then that this was the first time in over a decade that he was tasting his mother’s cooking. He was suddenly flooded with questions, like if Shouto had ever tried her okayu when he was sick, or if she still oversteeped her tea. But he doubted he’d be able to ask those questions or receive their answers without crying, so he held his tongue. There would be time for all of that, hopefully.
Another miracle: he was hoping for more time.
“How’re your friends, then?” He asks. “I mean, are they all...?”
“Midoriya and Bakugou are still recovering in the hospital,” Shouto replied once he’d finished swallowing a mouthful of noodles. “Uraraka was also there for a while. But everyone is alright.”
“You must just spend your days running back and forth between us, huh.”
Shouto smiled, the widest one Touya had seen yet. “I do.”
“What're you smiling for? It sounds like a pain.”
“No.” Shouto took a sip of his broth. “I feel incredibly lucky to have so many people to love. It didn't use to be this way.”
Right.
There in his mind sat a frame of memory, one where Shouto looked on from the balcony of the second story of their home while he and Natsuo and Fuyumi played together in the courtyard, before being carted away by their father. The center of that memory had always been Touya’s jealousy, his desperation to know what attention and devotion and encouragement Shouto was being afforded that he wasn't. But now it expanded, the frame widening to expose the profound ache of Shouto’s loneliness as a child.
“Do you remember very much?”
“Of our childhood? Yeah.” Shouto set the thermos on the floor next to his chair. “I remember a lot.”
“Do you…” Touya swallowed. “You were just a baby when this happened, but I— I tried to attack you.”
Shouto searched his face, as if he could find the memory of it within Touya somehow. “I don't remember that.”
Touya’s eyes welled with bloody tears. “Good,” he rasped, and blotted the tears with his bandaged wrist. “That's good.”
“I remember the night you didn't come home,” Shouto said, courteous enough to pretend Touya wasn’t crying. “Snapshots of it, at least. Dad was scared — I’d never seen him like that before. It was almost worse than seeing him angry.”
Shouto recounted what fragments he had of that day; mostly a cloud of confusion around what had happened to his eldest brother. At five years old, death was a difficult concept to grasp, one that only fully set in when Enji built Touya’s shrine.
Touya took a deep breath, then winced at the pain that sliced through his chest, bright and acidic. “There's some other timeline,” he said, “where I stepped into the training room and showed myself instead of running. One where I… I dunno. I knelt beside you and shielded you from him.”
By now Shouto had scooted his chair closer, close enough that his knees touched the side of the hospital bed and his hands sat on top, loosely clasped together. “It wasn't your job to protect me, Touya. It was his job.”
“But I could've tried.” Something wet dripped off his chin. “I could've tried to love you.”
They sat with that for a moment, absorbing the grief of what could’ve been together while Touya tried to compose himself as quietly as he could manage. What might have become of them, had Touya walked through that door? Would they have grown closer? Trained together in whatever ways Touya was able? Become friends? Or were things fated to end up this way, no matter what? The infinity of possibilities threatened to swallow Touya whole.
Then Shouto shrugged with a lopsided shadow of a smile, and said, “You're trying now.”