I don't really know what I'm doing with this.
I didn't want to go too far into things with just one chapter, hence its brevity. Thought I'd see if this was a good idea first. It's kind of a mess.
Cold concrete like bones in winter, hard and unrelenting beneath his agony.
The scorching sting of wood on flesh, burning raw fire on stripped skin.
Empty eyes, a shell of empathy locked forever behind their abyss.
How long had it been like this? He couldn't remember. Maybe a month. Maybe a year. He hadn't kept count. Somewhere before, he'd seen it on the television, an old film: a man scratching his sentence into the walls of his cell, spelling out the lost days of his life in grim etching. Midoriya Izuku, on the other hand – had he had a life to begin with?
Such philosophic intricacies lost themselves in his undeveloped brain, the buzz of unlinked synapses.
He was five years old – at least, he thought he was. He knew his Quirk was supposed to have manifested when he was four. He knew his mother had tried her damndest to get it out of him. He knew he'd failed to exhibit any signs of a Quirk. He knew she meant well when she used her own to pull over a well-worn wooden spoon and beat him until he cried. Maybe if he hurt enough he'd finally draw out his own latent power.
Right? Right.
Even so, as he sat there, legs sprawled across the uneven concrete, shackled by one slender – no, emaciated - ankle to an iron bedframe that anchored him to his personal acropolis, he couldn't help but sob. Quietly, of course; if his mother heard him, he'd have much more to cry about.
He'd not seen his father in person in a very long time, since before that fateful appointment that had been the undoing of the world he'd known. Midoriya Hisashi was, to Izuku's recollection, a small, cheerful man, a wild mop of dark brown hair atop glinting spectacles and cheeks like overripe apples, wrinkled from the smile that came so readily to his lips. Some days, he'd pray, and pray, and pray, hoping his father would show up out of nowhere, out of the blue, dropping out of the sky like the nanny in an English film he'd watched before his mother had driven his baseball bat through the screen, and that he'd take Izuku away, far away, and they'd live happily ever after.
No such thing happened. As far as Midoriya Hisashi knew, he was supporting his lovely wife and son back home in Japan by working tirelessly on the west coast of the United States, putting his talents to use in the film industry. Izuku hadn't been allowed to watch the films his father worked on.
He had been allowed to see the man a few times on the video phone, fleeting glimpses of hope and happiness in a dismal prison, and his mother had carefully mended his bruises with makeup, his cuts with bandages and claims that he was a rambunctious child who was always getting into trouble (Hisashi would smile, his eyes twinkling, and Izuku would always cry a little; he couldn't help it, even though his mother would glare and gesture over the screen). She brought him out of the basement on those days, and on occasion, he'd even be allowed to have a little treat, as if the call had interrupted a happy afternoon of mother-son dessert parties.
The little chocolate parfait he'd had last time had been wonderful, and his mother's smile had seemed genuine, but that same spoon that could whip up such a tasty treat could also deliver a nasty beating, and he'd gone to bed sore.
His mother made movies, too. Izuku knew this because he was the prop.
Todoroki Shouto did not like Todoroki Enji.
The moment Enji had discovered that Shouto, the youngest in a series of four children (one of whom had disappeared around the time Shouto was born, never to be seen again), had the perfect combination of his parents' Quirks, the training had begun. Rigorous sparring unfit for a child Shouto's age. Forcing him to use his Quirk until he very nearly passed out from the strain of it. Unrelenting demand for better, better, better delivered by mantra each sunrise and hammered home by sunset.
His mother, Todoroki Rei, was the opposite of her husband (Shouto dared not think of Enji as his father but rather as that man).
Todoroki Fuyumi and Todoroki Natsuo could only watch as their parents' relationship fell apart at seams held together by glue and tape, a feeble façade standing in for stitching that had come undone long ago. Shouto, born after the fact and at the center of the decay, knew no differently, but grew to resent their biological father all the same.
He was not kind to their mother, particularly when their youngest was involved. For a man with a fire Quirk, it was almost impressive how cold he could be, and how quickly he could shift from glacier to inferno, in the blink of an eye, the beat of a heart.
He never beat Shouto per se, but he had hit Rei more than once, and he was far too rough with the boy in their sparring, going so far as to use a Quirk he'd had three decades to develop to coerce a child who'd barely a tenth of one to match its power.
Then one day there was an extra serving of breakfast and the youngest Todoroki was nowhere to be found.
Watashi ga kita. I am here.
Except he wasn't, and no matter how hard Izuku believed, his favourite hero wouldn't come.
Really, what does All Might care about one stupid Quirkless kid locked in a basement? asked a nasty little voice in his head, the one he knew was seeing things with an eye far older than he, but he cried harder and it shut up.
People didn't ordinarily visit anymore; after he'd been locked down here and told to wait like a good boy, there had been a lot of visitors, and he'd heard wails from upstairs, but all his mother had told him was that their friends and family had been very sad that he did not have a Quirk.
He
almost
believed it.
Then one night the window disintegrated and a severed hand fell into the basement.
At five years old, Todoroki Shouto found himself trapped in the slimy grip of the sewer sludge of east Tokyo.
For a child who allowed himself no indulgence in fantasy, this scenario was, in a word, unforeseen. No matter how he struggled, the sludge held tight, slick slime curling around small fingers as he clawed at it.
"A child, in the sewers…what are you doing down here, little boy?" The voice was everywhere and nowhere, synthesized from gas bubbles slipping through the sludge and popping at the surface, and Shouto froze.
It talks!? Considering it had covered his mouth, he wasn't exactly capable of answering its question, and he continued to scrabble fruitlessly, aimlessly, confused and frightened. "Oh, yes. This is perfect," came the hiss, and the slime forced itself against his mouth, his nostrils, searching for a point of entry. "I promise this won't hurt, boy…not a bit."
"I promise this will."
The echo of a second voice gave the sludge-monster pause, and in the instant it hesitated, a spiral of blue flame streaked down the sewer corridor, boring a hole straight through Shouto's captor. It howled in pain, frantic bubbling through viscous brown-green slop, and its grip loosened, letting the boy slip through to the stone walkway below him a moment before a wave of azure fire washed over it, completely torching it – or so Shouto thought, until he realized that the ambient temperature in the corridor had more than halved, and he could see little puffs of vapor every time he breathed. Shivering, he conjured a small fire in one hand, holding it close for warmth as he turned to survey what remained of his assailant.
Shriveled, brown, congealed. The borehole from the first attack was crisp with frost. Had it really been fire…?
"So," came that same drawl from the darkness, and Shouto looked up, unsure if he should be frightened or relieved. Blue flared some ten meters away, and by its light, he could see the speaker, a teenager, some ten years older than he, with startling disfigurements across his face and forearms – shriveled, dead-looking flesh, surgical suturing separating it from healthy skin. The damage was symmetrical across both sides of his body, down to the stitching around the bags beneath his eyes, and Shouto couldn't help but wonder if he'd done it himself. "What is a kid doing in the sewers?"
Izuku screamed.
Of course he screamed. The boy looking in through the now-empty window frame at him was doing so through another severed hand that clutched his face like a mask.
With uncanny agility, he slipped snakelike through the hole, landing catlike on his feet and grinning wolflike at the terrified Izuku. "Hey, it's alright," he said, in a voice like cloth over dead leaves, and Izuku stared back, wide-eyed.
"Need to work on your bedside manner," came a grunt from the window, and the boy waved a hand (well, three hands; another pair of severed hands clutched his arm).
"Speak for yourself." Then, to Izuku: "Hold still. I don't think you'd like having your hand join my collection."
"What are you – ?"
The boy slipped off the leather sheaths that covered each of his fingers on one hand, then touched all five fingers to the cuff around Izuku's ankle; immediately, the metal crumbled, falling into a pile of sticky ash as the attached chain dropped to the floor with a thud. Standing, the other paced to the wall, touching it at intervals and disintegrating just enough of the concrete to form footholds and handholds up to the window, climbing up as he went. Slipping back outside, he called back: "Get dressed. We're leaving."
"But Mom said – "
"Is that really your mother?" the boy with the hand on his face cut in, and Izuku stopped midsentence, mouth hanging open. "Matsui's Quirk lets him sense suffering. Tell him what you told me, Matsui."
"Basement was screaming."
Izuku stared at the man's hood. The hood remained dark and impassive.
"Like I said." The boy's tone didn't invite argument. "Get dressed and let's go."
"Dabi," Shouto repeated, tasting the name. "…What kind of Quirk was that?"
The teenager – Dabi, he'd called himself; no last name, not even a real first name – threw his head back and laughed.
"Ahh, my bastard father's Quirk mixed with my mother's, but not how either of them were expecting. It's called Frost-Fire. Can you guess what it does?"
Shouto watched the cold flames lick their way up the other's arm.
"It seems to behave a lot like fire," he observed, speaking slowly. "But it…freezes things?"
"Close." Almost lazily, Dabi gave a vague gesture with one hand, sending tongues of frost-fire snaking along the walls, coating them in a sheen of dry ice. "Ever left ice cream in the freezer too long?"
"I've never had ice cream."
The other paused.
"Guess we'll have to get you some," Dabi chuckled, after a moment. "I wasn't allowed to have any either when I was your age. First thing I did when I had my own money was buy some."
Shouto grunted. A smirk crept across Dabi's face.
"Your Quirk's fire, isn't it?" he prompted, when Shouto didn't speak.
"No."
"Then what was that earlier?"
Shouto shook his head.
"…So what's your Quirk, then?" he tried again.
Without warning, the boy lashed out with his right arm, at the wall next to him, and before Dabi could even blink, the next six meters of tunnel had been entirely frozen over.
"…Impressive. So your Quirk is ice." Perhaps his eyes had deceived him when he'd seen the boy conjure scarlet fire to warm himself…
Shouto grunted.
"You're not a talker, are you?"
Grunt.
"Me neither. I guess that means I can stop talking now."
Another grunt.
Dabi grunted back.
Sirens. Epileptic flashes of red and blue painting the night above the shadow of the fence-line.
"I imagine that was that thing you call a mother finding out her test subject was gone," Shigaraki Tomura drawled. He'd introduced both himself and the giant of a man walking mute beside them, and Izuku had hesitantly told the pair his name in turn.
"Don't call her a – don't call her a thing!" Izuku shrilled, tears welling up in wide green eyes, and Shigaraki shrugged one shoulder.
"I guess I've just never liked parents."
"How do you know so much about me, anyway?"
"Eat the screams," Matsui mumbled.
"He means he can learn about suffering by…eating it or something. I'm not exactly sure. There's a guy where we're going who knows way more about it than I do."
Izuku didn't respond right away. For whatever reason, being around these two calmed him, and he breathed out, trying to straighten his jumbled thoughts.
He'd loved his mother dearly, had looked forward to seeing her each day, as any healthy child would…but for the past year…he couldn't pretend he'd been happy, locked in that basement.
Izuku pushed the thoughts away; he'd just wanted out of that basement. There was a boy close to his own age, so these strangers couldn't be all bad, right? Maybe his mother would miss him, but she'd understand.
"Here." Shigaraki and Matsui both stopped, and Izuku nearly bumped into them. With a massive effort, Matsui leaned down and moved aside a round metal plate that he recognized as the cover to a manhole; the man's hulking shadow forced its way through as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and Shigaraki followed, not even looking back at Izuku.
Alone in the night air, the child took a deep breath and put his foot on the top rung of a ladder to another life.