Full Summary: In some other universe not all too different, Todoroki Shouto got away with just a scar on his face and some emotional scars that extended past the superficial blemish. This particular Shouto was not quite so lucky in that regard and the burns of his mother and father combine leaving him half blind. In typical Todoroki Enji fashion, the man denounces Shouto as another failed attempt in achieving the perfect hero. But with a younger sister he must now care for, Shouto soon finds himself overwhelmed. Leaving his father behind might prove to be not only the most beneficial to his sister's and his own safety but for their emotional wellbeing as well.
Midoriya Izuku enjoys meeting a friend that accepts his Quirkless state despite having the coolest powers he'd ever seen. Even if he seems a little strange and quiet at times. His mom always told him to accept people however they were and try to be there for them in whatever ways they needed. If Shouto couldn't raise his own voice than Izuku would try his hardest to do it for him. Along the way he may even try raising his voice for his own self too.
In other news, Yagi Toshinori really shouldn't be trusted with any more children…
Hello!
This is my first fanfic for BNHA. This is mostly the result of me just being obsessed with TodoDeku as well as Dad Might. I needed more of a preface for the story than that though, so I thought well what if Shouto was more than just scarred by a pot of boiling water straight to the eye... Then I thought, well knowing Todoroki Enji, he'd probably just try for another kid so...
This is the result.
I love long fanfics, but we'll see how far I actually manage to keep this one going...
Keep in mind that especially this chapter deals with Shouto and his relationship with his father. Endeavor ain't a nice dude, so slight warnings for abuse including a very brief, not even kind of detailed instance of marital rape. There is no direct comment on it, but it's heavily implied.
I hope you read and enjoy!
The first time Shouto thought his father was going to give him a burn on his face to match the other side was two weeks after his mother left.
It was during training. Or whatever torture amounted to training in the Todoroki household.
He had been a little too slow, a bit too clumsy. His eye had burned beneath the bandages, and he still wasn't used to the lopsided vision. But to Endeavor, those were all signs and symptoms of weakness. The slowness- an indication that Shouto had been slacking in practice, the clumsiness- a sign of his inability to work harder, the eye- a symbol of his own incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity.
Shouto should have been fast enough to avoid it or powerful enough to have burned the water to steam or even just strong enough to lash out at his attacker.
But truly any weakness now in Shouto's body had to have stemmed from the mother. She had been weak, emotional, unstable, and so obviously that had transferred over into her son. He was as much of his mother as his father, and that fact at once made him the greatest success and the paramount of failures waiting to collapse.
And so that first day, like so many after it, Endeavor stood over his youngest son, hand clenching flames within his palm, fire dancing over his face, alighting the fury in his eyes. He said nothing, but Shouto heard and understood it all.
Disgrace. Unworthy. Weak. Failure.
Shouto waited on the ground until the man left the room before he collapsed inwards, curled into a ball, and sobbed quietly. The tears burned; the sobs ached, but it was so much better to be alone and in pain than to be with the man he called Father.
The first day Shouto woke up without feeling in his eye was three weeks after his mother left.
He hadn't had a day off in training over the past week, and his father, if anything, had been even more harsh than usual, wielding his flames with a cruelty not previously experienced by Shouto. He seemed to gain some sort of sick pleasure in watching his son flinch every time the heat neared the sensitive flesh of his face. It was almost like a game to him, and now it seemed that the flames had licked his healing wounds one too many times, the scar tissue warping and bending and spreading to accommodate it, searing over the eye.
When he woke up that day, he knew something was wrong as every day previous since the incident, he had awoken to the dull, pulsing throb of the wound surrounding his eye.
He brought a finger up to poke at the delicate flesh. He brushed it gently at first then poked it harder then once more then again just to be certain. He pinched the flesh, prodded sharply at it with his nail, scratched and clawed and gouged at it.
There was blood on his fingers and scar flesh beneath his nails, and his face was still so numb.
He ripped the bandages off his face, tried to open the eye with no response from the muscles. He ran to the mirror in the bathroom connected to his bedroom and stared at the scarred flesh that forcibly kept his eye closed, blood dripping down his cheek on one side, tears flowing silently down the other.
He forcefully pried the eyelids apart with his fingers. The eye was blotchy and scarred, and it saw nothing.
The tears poured down in earnest, a sob wrenching at his throat, choking the air from his lungs. He didn't know what encounter with which burn had caused the eye to lose all vision, but in all cases, his father was the one to blame.
Half of his face pure and white and clear, half of his face awash with the red of flames and burns and blood. Half of him was so in pain and the other was completely blind to it and numb against all the tears of the purer half. The image was all too ironic and infinitely more cruel. He was the physical embodiment of the war between his parents.
Like some grotesque chimera, he was a heap of mismatched parts haphazardly smashed together without a care as to what unlucky soul was created as a result. He was an unholy abomination that shouldn't even exist.
Disgusting. Foolish. Weak. Failure.
He didn't have training that day.
The first time Shouto saw his mother again was a month after she left.
His father by this time had accepted that his son was forever scarred. His greatest success, the only one of his children that had not been a failure, was marred at the hands of the foolish, idiotic mother. He never stopped to consider that it could have been himself that was to blame in all of this.
So as he had every time previous, when Todoroki Enji realized the failure of this child, he ignored that scion and went back to the mother once more to hopefully create a better one.
They were willing to release anyone from the mental hospital if you had an important enough name and threw enough money at the problem. And so it was that one month after she scarred her youngest son out of sheer panic that Todoroki Yuki was released from the mental hospital with a clear bill of health.
She returned to the house that night but spoke not a word, a hollow, vaguely accepting grimace on her face as her husband steered her to their bedroom.
Shouto covered his head with a pillow that night in order to block out his mother's screams.
He didn't see her after that ever again. One day nearly a year later, his little sister was brought to the house, but there were no other reassurance that his mother was even alive up until that point.
His mother died in childbirth.
Shouto never even got to tell her that he forgave her for everything. He knew she was just as much a victim of Father as Shouto himself was; only she had been a victim for far, far longer.
Shouto found that being scarred was infinitely more enjoyable than the consternation of remaining under his father's "tutelage." Neglect was better than the outright abuse; at least he never had physical wounds to deal with any more.
The verbal abuse wasn't much different from before. The focus had changed to ridiculing his disability as the sign of incompetence and failure rather than his own slowly strengthening skills with his Quirk, so at least it was no longer something he could blame himself for.
Grotesque. Useless. Weak. Failure.
If Todoroki Enji wanted to mock him for something he caused then fine. At least he wasn't throwing up on a near daily basis anymore…
After a while Shouto stopped comparing everything from before his mother left to after she was gone. Some things were worse. Truly his mother had been one of the few things that had kept him sane during those years of constant torment from his father. Some things were better. He enjoyed getting to be around his siblings once again, and he liked it even more when he eventually got to act in the role of big brother once Yukiko came home. Some things were the same. His father, not any less of an asshole, was just around Shouto a bit less.
When he had the time to think about it later on, Shouto figured this must have been the cycle before he was born as well. The child is born; Enji doesn't stick around much for the first few years until the Quirk develops, and once it does, he ensures that they're a failure before ignoring them again.
Only this time Shouto got to see it from a different perspective. He finally actually got to talk to and bond with his siblings again.
Fuyumi was the best. She was the oldest of them, almost ten years older than Shouto, and she had just graduated from high school and was studying how to be a teacher. Shouto thought she would be the best teacher ever; he almost wished he could just keep her for himself instead. She was like Mom, warm and sweet and beautiful. She was the one who would help Shouto take care of Yukiko the most (though if he was honest with himself, it was probably the other way around). Shouto like holding Fuyumi's hand almost as much as he like getting to carry Yukiko. He loved his sisters.
Junichi was the next oldest making him the oldest boy. He was eight years older than Shouto and was just going in to his last year of high school. He didn't spend a lot of time around the house, but Shouto couldn't really fault him for that. No one would willingly stay at the Todoroki house when they had no clue as to when Enji would be home nor what mood he would be in when he arrived.
But Junichi knew a lot of fun card games that he learned from his friends. Shouto liked those games a lot. Plus, Junichi would always go out of his way to bring back cool books for his littlest brother from the library.
Haruki was the closest to Shouto in age, just 4 years older than him, and he was still in Junior High. Haruki didn't like Shouto all that much, and Shouto couldn't say he was all that fond of the red-haired boy either. He was the only one of the siblings to have gained the fire Quirk from their father, and he had a temper to match it. Unlike Enji however, he would never use his powers against his family.
Haruki did know lots of cool swear words though. Sometimes the two would see who could come up with the worst name for their father; Haruki could be nice if he tried.
But more than anything or anyone else, Shouto loved his little sister Yukiko. The first thing Shouto noticed about her when he met the baby was that she was loud. The only loud Shouto was used to hearing was his father's anger. Enji was always angrier if anyone happened to disturb the "peace" while he was home, so Shouto had grown accustomed to the hesitant hush that always lay uncomfortably over their house.
Loud was not something Shouto was comfortable around, but the little baby that sat in front of him wasn't nearly big or muscular or downright frightening enough to be anything like their father. Their father…
Their father- who hadn't even been home since he dropped the baby girl off, whose only words to his children were of the harsh reality of their mother dying in childbirth- that man had to be kept as far away from this happy boisterous little girl as possible. Judging by her hair there was a chance that she could end up with a combination of both their parents' Quirks just like him. She had more white hair than red, but it was still hard to tell with the fine baby fuzz that she had.
She hadn't even been home for a week, and Shouto was already worrying over what Quirk she would develop as he sat on the couch, watching her sleep contently.
"You could hold her."
Shouto started and looked up at Fuyumi, countless questions lingering in his single, uncovered eye. He thought about the idea, a small frown tugging at his cheeks as he glared down at his hands. He didn't trust his left side, not with something this precious.
"She should get to know her big brother. I'll be here the entire time. She'll just sit in your lap for a bit; she probably won't even wake up," Fuyumi was going to be a great teacher. Shouto had visibly perked up at her reassurances.
"Just sit there on the couch," she instructed him calmly, tenderly like he was some small animal that could bolt at any sudden movement. She wasn't all too far off for thinking that.
Fuyumi picked up her sleeping sister from the baby carrier she had been left in. The other brothers finally had freetime this weekend, so they were finishing the setup of the nursery. Shouto apparently just got in the way. At least, that's what Haruki had said when he tried to help.
"Now make sure you support her head while you hold her," Fuyumi positioned his arms as she settled the little girl in Shouto's lap. "Let most of her weight rest in your lap, or she'll get too heavy, too quickly. There you go! Look at you, already a pro at this! You'll be the best big brother, won't you Shouto?"
"Mm," Shouto nodded once emphatically, careful not to jostle Yukiko.
She was so tiny and fragile and innocent. Shouto couldn't imagine anyone or anything in the world that was better or cuter than his little sister. He made a solemn vow then and there (all promises are infinitely more serious as a child too) that he would never allow their father to lay a single hand on his little sister regardless of what Quirk she formed, regardless of how she behaved, regardless of how angry and volatile their father got. Shouto would protect his sister with everything he had and more.
Perhaps it was some distant noise in a dream or in reality or maybe just the machinations of the universe, but at that moment as Shouto finished his promise, Yukiko opened her crystal blue eyes for the first time that the boy had seen. She yawned and glanced up at him. Mouth opening again, this time to form the closest thing a baby can to smile, the red flush of her cheeks alighting like her eyes in happiness.
In that moment, everything his father had ever called him didn't matter. His lopsided vision didn't matter. His mother's torment and suffering, his father's scorn and dismissal, his siblings' distance and tension- none of that mattered.
Shouto couldn't stop the small smile that spread across his own face as he gazed in awe down at the beautiful little baby that had drifted back to sleep on his lap once more.
Idiotic. Broken. Weak. Failure.
He would be smart enough and whole enough for her. He'd show Yukiko his strength when she couldn't find her own. He'd teach her victory when their father spat them out as disgraces. He would do anything for her, so long as it meant she could stay pure and happy and hopeful forever.
If she never had to hear those mocking words of her father, never had to feel the heat of his flames or the weight of his fists, that would be enough for Shouto.
A note on the names and ages of the Todoroki family:
I gave Mama Todoroki the name Yuki meaning snow. Basic but hey I killed her off anyway so nbd
Fuyumi keeps her name and I made her almost 10 years older than Shouto making her 17 at the time he was burned and 18 at the time Yukiko was born according to my timeline. She has ice.
Junichi, the oldest brother, is a little bit more than 8 years older than Shouto (16 at burn and birth of Yukiko), and his name can mean either "submit/obey" "one" or "pure" "one". I'd like to think that Enji likes the first version better, but Yuki gave him the second meaning instead. He has ice.
Haruki is 4 years older than Shouto (11 at burn and 12 at Yukiko's birth), and his name means "light, sun, male" "brightness". He has fire hence the focus on burning.
Yukiko can mean "snow" "child" or in this case the literal meaning of Yuki's "child". I see this as Yuki's final "up yours" at Enji before she dies. Even if Yuki is dead, her will lives on in her children and now Enji has to be constantly reminded of that especially if Yukiko ends up with a quirk that combines their powers.
This was a far longer not than I anticipated, but I hope you enjoyed the Prologue. Let me know what you thought if you wanna do that. Otherwise, maybe I'll see you next time if you're still interested...