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Fractal | Shouto & Touya Todoroki | poetry/prose | 580 words
Shouto’s world changed when he woke up in the hospital.
Touya’s world changed when he woke up in the hospital.
His face had been burned, the doctor told him.
He had burned his body, a stranger told him.
Shouto remembered the shouting.
Touya remembered the desperation.
The kind of argument that felt like it shook the walls around him.
The disappointment in his father’s eyes, twisting up his insides as Endeavor shouted and raged and forced Touya to stop.
(He was being burnt up)
(He was being replaced)
Long after the echoes of his father’s voice had faded, Shouto remembered walking into the kitchen.
He remembered watching his mother’s unmoving form while she refused to say anything- anything- and then Touya blazed out the door without looking back to see if her expression had crumpled with regret.
He remembered watching his mother’s face flit from terror to anguish in the span of a breath as he entered, looking like she had been shattered by his soft-footed, pattering approach.
By then, Touya knew better than to search for regret in his father’s eyes.
And then the woman before him became unrecognizable.
Endeavor didn’t think Touya was strong enough but he was. He could be.
Shouto burned with the memory of a pain more intense than any he’d ever felt before.
Touya remembered the screaming in his veins, remembered the burn- harsher than anything he’d ever felt before. Remembered a startling break in the anguish and thinking, with his last shred of clarity, that this had to be good enough for his father.
It left Shouto numb and shivering beneath the thin, white hospital sheets.
It had to be.
“Mom..?” Shouto croaked and the doctor shook his head no.
It had to be.
Shouto didn’t cry when he saw the scar marring his face, but something inside of him felt sick.
Touya didn’t cry when he saw his mottled, purple reflection held together by crude stitches. Or when they told him he had died.
Shouto let the shock pool over him like ice and held the freezing shards close to his chest, hoping that they might be enough to douse the monstrous pain in his chest.
The disappointment was his own when he realized that he hadn’t been enough, after all. That he never was and never would be.
Shouto thought of the heat that always seemed to lick at his father’s eyes and fists when he shouted- warm enough to be felt even when Shouto couldn’t see the flames through his closed eyes or hear the words through his ragged, warbling breaths.
The bitterness was his own, too, but the expression in the mirror was startlingly familiar.
Heat thrummed uneasily beneath Shouto’s veins and the second he realized that the fire within himself was nothing more than his father’s furious legacy, pawned off onto Shouto like a lead shackle, was the second that Shouto Todoroki decided to freeze.
The second that Touya realized he was wearing the face his father had always greeted him with was the second time Touya Todoroki died and left a rotten shell of himself to walk the earth.
Shouto cast his eyes downward and didn’t respond to the doctor.
He didn’t notice that his father couldn’t look him in the eye.
Shouto grew older and decided that he and his mother were both victims of Endeavor.
Touya grew smarter and decided that the world would soon know who had driven him to an early death.