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It’s easy to corner All Might’s son in a conveniently-shadowed corner moments before the tournament stage of the Sports Festival begins.
“My life,” he states without preamble, “was ruined by a Quirk marriage.”
He’s driving me insane.
“My mother poured boiling water on my face.”
He clenches his right hand hard enough to feel his whole arm shake with exertion.
“I could have lost my eye.”
You look just like him.
Midoriya’s eyes are round like a wounded animal’s, huge and wet with dew.
“I never knew what I did to her.”
The hallway curves inward around him. It has heard many secrets over the years, and it receives Shouto’s with a patience thick with something tasting close to remorse.
You’re so unsightly, Shouto.
“I can never forgive her. What kind of—what sort of mother does that? She doesn’t deserve to be a parent.”
Sometimes when I look at you, all I see is him!
“That’s why I will not use her ice to defeat you.”
Midoriya’s throat bobs with a harsh swallow.
Shouto’s throat is as dry as bone.
I’m so sorry, Shouto.
So sorry, Shouto.
Sorry, Shouto.
Shouto.
“If it weren’t for her,” Shouto says brokenly, “I would still be whole.”
Midoriya looks at him for a long, long moment.
He is still a wounded animal, but one whose teeth are stained with his own blood. Animals can and will gnaw off their own limbs to escape a trap, you know. A crippled life over a whole death: even animals know that.
All Might’s son breathes in the sorrow of the hallway as if it’s the water in which he’s swimmed all his life.
“Don’t,” he says very quietly, “blame anyone else for things outside anyone’s control.”
Shouto looks back at him uncomprehendingly.
Even when Midoriya leaves to prepare for his match, Shouto still doesn’t understand.
He stands alone in the hallway until Midoriya’s parting words swirl up and around, around and up on the current of the roaring fire that consumes him.
His match begins, as all things do, with fire.
“Fight me!” Midoriya screams over the roar and crackle of Shouto’s flames. They swallow up everything: the fraying fibers of their uniforms, the ground, the very air between them. Shouto blazes until his senses are lost in the fever pitch of gold and vermillion. “Fight me with all you’ve got!”
“I am,” Shouto says—or maybe he thinks—as he swings a fist wreathed in red. Concrete melts before his touch connects.
Midoriya twists, ducks, even as the heat singes half of his hair right from his head. “You’re not giving it your all!”
Shouto burns.
“How dare you.”
“How dare you fight with half your power,” Midoriya shouts. Blood flakes from the corner of his mouth, evaporating right off of his skin. “You’ll never be number one if your own spite is holding you back! Fight me! Fight me man to man!”
Shouto erupts.
“I DON’T NEED HER QUIRK!”
The inferno explodes around him until he can’t tell where it ends and Todoroki Shouto begins. His vision gives way into pure yellow and white and orange and blue.
“Why do you hate your ice so much?” Midoriya screams over the roar. “It’s not your mother’s Quirk—it’s yours! Your fire and your ice! All of it is yours, isn’t it?”
His skin is melting off, he thinks. His skin is melting and his blood is boiling and his flesh is charring itself to pieces and he will surely, surely not come out of this unscathed.
He was always destined to end up like Touya.
And then everything truly, completely goes wrong.
Midoriya does something—Shouto can’t tell, but through the blurry curtain of flames he sees the other boy aim—and he is blasted clear into the air by a monstrous gust of wind. He tumbles backward head over heels, over and over and over. Every skid over the concrete leaves a bloody trail like a macabre abstract painting.
He loses control of his fire, and it goes out—but the rest of what’s left of the inferno is blown up and away, away and up, thrown up like the tail of a huge blazing cloak of fire.
The cheers from the stands turn into screams.
The very earth shudders as Cementoss conjures up massive concrete walls, but it is too late. Air is faster. The last of the walls shoot up milliseconds after the plume of fire passes.
Shouto sees all of this from his broken, bloody heap on the floor.
Logically, there should not be enough time. All of these events transpire between breaths, between one blink and the next.
Shouto, however, has been trained to excel in achieving the impossible.
There is no time for thinking, so unthinkingly he acts.
His right hand shoots up and he pushes.
Hana bought herself and her seven-year-old son tickets to the UA Sports Festival as a treat, thinking that she hasn’t had much time to bond with him recently.
Work has been draining, but…you know what? It’s important to remind themselves of what’s really important in life.
As she throws her arms around her son—crushing the teal party hat he’s wearing against her chest—and watches the enormous wall of fire come down on them both, she cannot even scream.
She has killed her son, she thinks.
He will not live a day past his seventh birthday.
“Mama?” says seven-year-old Ryouta into the darkness of his mother's embrace. “Mama?”
The ice sizzles instantly at the moment of contact, great billows of steam wafting off from the surface and filling the entire stadium. For more than a minute, no one present can see a thing.
The steam clears.
A shining wall of ice curves protectively over the stands, the lip of the wall towering dozens of feet off of the ground.
Shouto’s right hand trembles and drops to his side.
The burning is gone. He no longer feels like he is melting and charring beyond recognition. Instead, he feels like he has been drop-kicked off of the tallest point of UA and left there for twenty hours without food or water.
He faints dead away just as the shocked silence melts into shouting.
When Shouto wakes up, his pounding headache and sore everything immediately make him wish he hadn’t.
He groans. Even that hurts.
Shouto forces his eyes open. He turns to his left. Curtain. He turns to his right. Midoriya, leaning in six inches away from his face.
He screams.
Midoriya screams.
“WHAT THE—”
“—WAHHHH—”
“Midoriya? What—where am I? What time is it?”
“The tournament’s over. You got second place, by the way—congratulations!”
Shouto suddenly registers the weight of a medal on his chest. They gave it to him while he was unconscious?
“Um, yeah…it was kinda awkward when they had to carry your body onto the podium. I helped prop you up for the picture! Kacchan, um, didn’t really want to help though.”
Shouto blinks.
He files that away for another day.
“What happened?”
“Oh, um—everyone’s okay! You saved everyone with your ice.”
Oh, right.
That.
No wonder Shouto’s suffering the effects of Quirk exhaustion of the likes he hasn’t seen since he was half his age.
“You’re a real piece of work,” he tells Midoriya.
His eyes instantly fill with tears. “I know. I’m so sorry. I should never have done that. I shouldn’t have pushed you. I should’ve minded my own business and stayed out of your way and never tried to use my stupid Quirk—”
“But we should spar again.”
“—and—wait, what?”
Shouto flexes his right arm.
For the first time he can remember, it feels right.
“Don’t you remember what you were yelling about? Let’s spar, man to man, and next time I’ll use my Quirk.”
He grins, and reflected in Midoriya’s eyes he sees the glint of both fire and frost.
“All of it.”