"Mom? Can I..?"
His voice trailed off. He had spoken loudly enough to be heard, but she hadn't even reacted.
"You're tired. Can I help?"
He moved toward her, but she didn't say anything. It was like he wasn't even there.
"Mom, they're crying. You've been standing there for almost an hour. Let me help, okay?"
Her white hair was pulled back behind her face. It was easy to see how pale she's gotten, and how deep the bags under her eyes were. Bruises were forming on her neck and shoulder, and one of her fingers was broken.
She was holding onto the baby as they screamed and wailed in her arms, writhing and kicking with their little arms and legs as they were swaddled.
He gently put a hand on her shoulder, and grabbed his little brother. She still didn't react, but and the baby was still crying.
It looked up at him with its face all scrunched up and pink. It probably hadn't been fed in hours.
"Let's get you something to eat, alright?"
Touya walked into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle from the fridge. It was glass, so he was fine heating it up with his hand.
He tested it out on his wrist and cursed when it burned him. He set it on the table to cool and tried bouncing his brother in his arms to quiet the screaming.
After a few moments, he tested it again. It didn't burn him, so it was probably fine.
His arms were strong from training, but their head was cradled right next to a large and colorful bruise. It was sore even without the extra weight.
The cries finally stopped when they started drinking, and the milk cooled whatever pain the screaming had produced in his throat.
Sweet and shiny mismatched eyes looked up at him.
Their face was round, and pinkish, and they had only been home for three months but things were already bad again.
At least when Natsuo had been a baby, Mom took care of him. Touya had helped out, of course, but training wasn't bad yet and Mom didn't have her episodes as often. She'd sing, sometimes, when Dad wasn't home and she was having a good week. When no one else was around.
Now, she rarely came out of her episodes.
He hadn't heard her sing in over a year.
Shouto had never heard her sing her songs. He wasn't even sure their Mom had even talked to the baby, just held him on occasion, or stared at him like she was some sort of ghost haunting him.
He held them a little tighter for a moment, trying not to imagine himself with those same eyes.
He didn't know how long passed before he looked back down at them and saw they were asleep, so he put the bottle in the sink and carried them back to the nursery.
He undid the swaddling and changed them into their pajamas. Then he laid them on their back.
His mom was still there. She hadn't moved at all, still staring off into nothing.
Touya put one of her hands in his, and put the other on her shoulder as he moved her to the sitting area. She barely resisted the touch, surprisingly. She still wasn't looking at him.
He made sure she was seated and then grabbed the first aid kit from the wall.
He couldn't do anything for the bruises, but he set her broken finger and splinted it. He used a cotton puff and neomycin and gently cleaned and disinfected the small cuts he could see on her arms and face where she'd been hit too strongly or had been shoved into things.
He then treated his own injury, grabbing an instant cold pack and holding it to his face for a few blissful moments to ease the throbbing. There was a giant hand shaped bruise from the bottom of his chin to near his eye.
It had been watering all evening because of the swelling, and now his other eye was watering too.
He blamed the swelling anyway.
He didn't want to lead his mom all the way back to her bedroom, and coax her into standing, and take care of her and the baby even though he had training and school and more training tomorrow.
He wanted her to hold him close, to look at him and not see a smaller version of his father, to tend his wounds and tell him he was doing okay, that he was doing a good job taking care of everyone because she couldn't right now.
But she just looked away at nothing with those empty eyes of hers.
He put the medical kit away and left the ice pack out on the table.
He picked up his mother even though his arms hurt. She wasn't heavy. She hadn't eaten as much since she'd had the baby.
He carried her to her room and put her down on her bed. He took her shoes off and helped her lay down and covered her with a blanket.
He kissed her on her forehead like she used to do to him.
Then he turned off the light, closed the door behind him, grabbed the ice pack and went to his room.
…
Dabi twirled a knife between his fingers before throwing it at Endeavor.
Shigaraki had already tied him up before he arrived. There were a few patches of dissolved skin, but he still appreciated the restraint the other man had shown.
This, he supposed, was a please-don't-kill-me gift for accidentally dissolving his entire stash of jewelry. That included his necklace which he had left unattended for all of five minutes for the first time in seven years.
Thankfully, he had taken the photograph out, and had been intending to clean the necklace, so no real harm was done, but knowing how close he came to losing his Most Important Thing was irritating, to say the least.
Dabi had asked Shigaraki how he would feel if he had threatened to light his father's hand on fire and burn it to ashes.
He had paled severely, turned, left, and called two weeks later with a set of coordinates.
Now, standing in the park next to the blue haired hand-freak, cameras rolling and thousands of witnesses available to his long-awaited vengeance, he couldn't help but feel all was forgiven.
The knife had cut off a bit of his old man's ear, and he grinned as he tossed another one and had it slice just slightly below, hitting the same ear and severing yet another part of the cartilage.
Endeavor smoked and blazed but was no match for metal rope, quirk dampening bracelets, and a giant All Might Statue.
Shigaraki handed him a canister reading DANGER: Liquid Nitrogen.
Endeavor's eyes widened and he demanded to be released.
Dabi's mouth turned into a grin. The folded up picture in his pocket had never felt like less of a burden. This was what he had wanted his whole entire life.
Endeavor was afraid of him.
"I'm going to have so much fun with this," he declared.
…
Fuyumi and Natsuo were with Grandma again.
She didn't watch them as often anymore, now that they were older. Touya hadn't seen her since his before quirk manifested.
But Father was always more lenient with them. He didn't care about them. They didn't have his attention.
They were lucky.
Shouto wasn't even a year old yet and still, Mom was pestered every single night about his progress.
Dad didn't know that Fuyumi was taking care of Natsuo more than Mom was, and he didn't care. Nothing she did was important to him as long as she didn't embarrass his family name. He didn't know that she took up most of the chores because Mom couldn't do them anymore, or that she got up late at night, or got up early, and made them all lunches for school and mixed up bottles full of formula for the day because making it in a hurry absolutely sucked.
He especially didn't know that because Natsuo was too little and Fuyumi was too busy, and because Mom wasn't coming out of her episode anytime soon, it was Touya who took care of both her and baby Shouto.
Mom wasn't usually so bad that she couldn't feed him or change him, but she sometimes tried to hold him and forgot he was there, and she could never bring herself to look at him. He did not trust her to give him a bath. Sometimes he got up in the middle of the night, having to check she didn't smother him in her sleep.
He couldn't forget the night he woke up to her holding a pillow above his head, smiling with those same distant eyes.
She hadn't said a word, just smiled at him as he knocked the pillow away and ran out of the house.
His father gave him scars the next morning, he'd been hit so hard. He didn't even remember the attack, just waking up later that same day to his sister crying over him and baby Natsuo fussing while Mom tended him.
Mom was in the other room. She was looking at an old book without a title on the front. It had a bit of shiny embroidery, but he hadn't looked at it closely enough to know the title.
He'd have said she was reading, but she was just staring at that same page all day, lost in thought.
He did his schoolwork. Today was for English and History, and those were easy subjects for him. He did his workout while his littlest brother napped and practiced maintaining fire without burning himself successfully for all of seven minutes before he got distracted.
He did some of the chores to help Fuyumi out for when she got back and even got a bit of a head start on his assignments for the next week.
And then he'd checked on the baby and he was gone.
He ran into the sitting room, but Mom wasn't there. She wasn't in Fuyumi's room or Natsuo's or her own. He called the lobby and found she hadn't left the building, and then for the roof for a top-down search.
She was near the edge and holding Shouto.
He approached her from behind, and put one arm underneath hers, effectively pulling her backward while making sure she didn't drop his baby brother.
He then took Shouto from her and used one hand to grab the sleeve of her jacket as he pulled her back toward the stairs.
"You can't do that again, Mom. If you do that again, I swear I'll…"
He wasn't sure what he was going to say or how he felt when he looked back at her expressionless face.
But when he noticed the burn scars on her neck below it that she didn't meticulously cover with makeup, he felt a certain and indescribable fury.
He felt it burn in him even when he took a deep breath and looked down at his sleeping little brother.
"You don't have to look at us. But you can't kill him, Mom. I won't let you."
…
Dabi ran out of knives, so he used the Liquid Nitrogen. He poured it into one of his hands, enjoying the sensation.
Fire couldn't hurt Endeavor. Cold couldn't hurt Dabi.
He watched it swirl and smoke before pouring it on Endeavor's face.
The Second-Rate hero screamed and struggled against his bonds while Dabi laughed.
He gathered more in his hands and sprinkled it over his legs.
"Not so fun when it's your turn, is it?"
Endeavor didn't respond. He probably couldn't, too occupied with the torture to notice.
His face was already blistering pink over the newly damaged areas and some were even dark and shiny with blood and facial muscles.
A reporter screamed and fainted into a cameraman, who dropped the camera.
Shigaraki laughed at that.
"I have waited way too long to do that."
So he did it again, and it was just as fun as it had been the first time. And then he took out a knife that had already stabbed The Bastard and reinserted it through his hand.
The angry growl he received didn't even make him flinch. He just pushed it in deeper until it fell out the other side and added a kick to the sternum for good measure.
"The Final Boss will be here soon."
"Fine by me. Cameras are rolling and I already had the most fun fifteen minutes of my entire life. Now I just have to kill him."
He lit a blue fire in his hand and held it in front of Endeavor's eyes. He made it steadily grow hotter and hotter until he saw the flesh start to change colors on his nose.
Then he set his head on fire.
Endeavor could only manage blue fire if he was absolutely focused, and couldn't maintain it.
It used more oxygen. It required more control. And heat resistance could only resist so much.
He didn't even get to scream. All his air was gone and he suffocated. Then he burned.
It smelled familiar.
He looked at the smoking, burned corpse. Its head was black and nearly fallen off. One blue eye was still mostly intact, only partially melted, and stared at something far away.
"Hey, look, Dad. We match."
Shigaraki doubled over in laughter, and Dabi felt inclined to join him.
And then it didn't stop.
He didn't know what it was. It wasn't that this was funny, but something in him decided that this was the time to laugh like crazy with Shigaraki. That turned into some sort of screeching, and then just crying, hiccoughing while grinning like a madman at his father's burned body.
"We match… We match!"
…
…
…
This is my first time writing for BNHA. Sorry if the formatting is weird or if it was hard to follow. I'll write more for this, so let me know if you're interested in me posting it on here or if you find any mistakes.
Thank you for reading.