Touya Todoroki just wants to be his father's son. Wants to train and fight and shine so bright that the world has to notice, has to see him, has to think hero. There are stars in his eyes and so much of his father's pride. He's built up by a legacy. Is cherished and coddled on stories and posters and toys of a man he is told he will be one day.
Will surpass one day.
It's all he knows and all he dreams because who doesn't want to be a hero? Who doesn't want to be like their father? Touya wants it so badly he wears himself into the dirt hours at a time, week after week. Accepts scoldings from his mother for every scrape and scuff like badges of honor. Watches the news each day for a fleeting glimpse of his father.
Waits for a quirk that will be nothing short of Amazing.
(They say the longer a quirk takes to show itself, the stronger it will be.)
Nobody tells him that the higher someone builds you up, the harder the fall. Touya is only six and full of so much hope. Unaware this pedestal—this pillar—is just as much his pyre. He stands tall and proud and is still so naive that when reality hits the kindling that builds up his world, it's ripe to be set alight.
All it takes is a spark.
.
.
Fire is power, it's life—the thing that bonds father and son. It warms their home in winter and heats their meals at dinner. It's what villains fear and heroes wield.
Fire is the tool that will make Touya a hero.
This is what Touya knows right up until his arm bursts into flames.
Then he meets a new definition for fire. It's death and destruction. A dish of pain served in three degrees of suffering. A promise of scars and blisters and tears.
Fire ravages him like a disease. It smokes him out, chokes him out, consumes him.
Endeavor's cure is training. Touya is a child. He's young and rash and lacks control. He just has to work harder, has to train up his quirk if he really wants to grow up like his old man. Touya latches onto that belief like a lifeline, a mantra, the rope that keeps him from falling.
He tries and tries—tries so hard to claw his way out of that looming pit that is his father's disappointment.
They're in and out of hospitals with a frequency that sets media gossip ablaze. Leaves his friends a distant memory in the 4-by-4 white walls of the Shizuoka General Burn Unit. Touya lies in bed each night, wrapped in gauze and ruined skin and so much pain. He cradles thoughts of a career that will never be. Holds it tight in his heart. Remembers scribbles of crayon costumes pinned to the fridge by a softly smiling mother. Thinks of those rare family dinners spouting off names to his scowling father—eyes coveting, desiring—brimming with things Touya once thought was pride.
.
.
A father and mother speak the silent tongue of parents. They talk with their eyes above Touya's bed as he sleeps through the aftermath of his first skin graft, drowsy with pain meds and anesthesia.
At home they whisper, a tense discussion of children and quirks and the cruel burden of legacies.
Rei, for the first time in 8 years, finds that gnawing strain in their marriage. The thing that will rot her family from within if she's not careful—This fragile union bought by wealth and sacrifice.
There is a line she will cross, a choice she will make if it means she can save father and son from themselves.
(It's one she's done before. To save her parents, her brothers, her sisters. To save a family name when the price was just herself.)
.
.
In recovery, there's weeks of tests and questions. A prodding of needles and swabs and a hustle of nurses and doctors with smiles that don't quite reach their eyes.
Then there's specialist, after specialist. They all bleat the same diagnosis and prognosis:
Quirk Instability Disorder.
Touya will die if he doesn't stop.
.
.
.
.
Endeavor won't train him.
(Touya doesn't quit)
.
.
His quirk is a blessing, is his curse. Fire, blue and brilliant and hotter than his father's. It should be perfect. It would be perfect, but these Hell Flames are one part in a fusion of two quirks. He's ice and fire—doomed from birth by marriage and desires not his own. A by-product of a father's ambition and a mother's acquiesce. A broken thing of contradictions.
Touya is a failure—another chink in a marriage crumbling under its own foundations. His father still won't look at him. His mother grows round and soft with Touya's replacement.
At night they scream and argue above his bedroom. These walls are thick, but the floorboards are thin. They catch every echo, amplify the noise so Touya knows every yell, every crack, every thump is about himself.
By day neither can meet the eyes of a boy wrapped in bandages and balms as he cries dry tears and curses his mother's skin—fragile as ice. Flesh that all but melts under the weight of a quirk so strong it's practically useless.
.
.
Touya hugs his knees to his chest. He ignores the burn on his arm, the tears in his eyes. Won't acknowledge the sting of his backside or maid set to watch him sulk in his bedroom. Grounded.
(He didn't mean it, he didn't mean it, he didn't mean it. Touya just wants to be a hero.)
...it's just...
Shouto Todoroki is born perfect. An even split of body and quirk: half hot, half cold. A chimera of red and white, blue and grey. Their mother and father so visible in his features, it's like the world lives to mock Touya with the things he cannot have.
They won't know for sure for another 4 years, but his father has eyes for only one child at a time and that child is almost never Touya, not anymore. Shouto is his parent's dream made real pre-packaged in baby fat. His career already slated while he sleeps snuggled up to their mother's chest.
Touya's dream snatched from his grasp and slapped onto his baby brother.
.
.
Touya knows he has exhausted all hope and patience, but still he tries. Tries to win back that look in his father's eye through agony and pain and that stubborn determination he knows could have never come from his mother.
(Accept one day, it all goes wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.)
.
.
The fire that comes out Sekoto Peak is wild and hot. A twisted thing born of opposing natures. Red and blue, hot and cold. It scorches the earth, feeds on itself, snuffs out every plant and animal in its wake-sparks a raging forest fire so hot the city glows blue in the backdrop. A rapid spread of over 3,000 degrees blown in every direction.
Not many humans awaken like this in this day in age, in this era of quirks and heroes.
Most do not live through the transition, even fewer survive the virus.
He heads for the source, intent to kill, to inflect punishment, to put down what will at best be a mad thing in need of the only peace he can give.
Instead, he returns with a boy on his shoulder. A demon born fresh from his own ashes, smoking from the fire, but with skin as cold as ice.
(Hiei has always had a soft spot for Yukina's descendants)