When Touya was young, back before he got his quirk, he thought his family was the best family ever. He had a mom that loved him and his dad was the Number Two Hero and they got him almost anything he asked for. He got sick easily but he didn't care about that. All he cared about was spending time with his family. His dad and mom and sister loved him and he loved them. They were happy.
Then Touya's quirk started killing him and something shifted. His dad turned desperate and angry and cold. Colder even than Fuyumi's snow and mom's ice.
That's when he met Kushina. At first, Kushina managed to bring his dad back to him. Everyone was happy again. They were almost back to where they started.
Everything fell apart again when Natsuo got his quirk.
His dad- Endeavor was angry. Furious. Not at them, not yet, but it all still affected the family.
It started off slow. Training now and then for the three of them. Touya the most. Natsuo the least (he would learn later that it's because Natsuo's quirk was the weakest and Touya's the strongest, even if it burned him up from the inside. It doesn't make anything better, to know that).
By the fifth month, they were training once a week without fail, sometimes twice. By the seventh month, the training was harsher. By the eighth, they were training everyday.
By the end of the year, it wasn't training any more. It was abuse and it no long stayed in the confines of the training room. He controlled the house with an iron fist and he wasn't afraid to use his -fireitburnsimafraidimafraidimafrAID- strength to get what he wanted.
In the end, he's seven when Shouto is born. In the end, he's eight when he nearly dies. In the end, he's just turned nine when he disappears from the Todoroki family, proclaimed dead from a dangerous quirk malfunction.
(It wasn't a malfunction he wanted to -kill- hurt Endeavor.)
The second time he meets Kushina, it's when he wakes up in her arms, in the backseat of a moving car with a little blonde baby curled up next to him, blinking up with too-blue eyes.
"This is Naruto," Kushina had said. "He's your cousin."
And oh, it was such a wonderful thing, to have family that -his father- Endeavor couldn't control.
(He remembers Shouto and Natsuo and Fuyumi, of course, and he feels wretched that he left them but Kushina soothes him with quiet murmurs and a sweet promises of not-quite revenge.)
He throws himself into this small family where fire is golden instead of red and -hisuncledad- Minato can teleport with lightning and wind and he only has one younger sibling by the name of Naruto.
Everyone in this new family is so different, so full of life. Minato forgets the time when he's with Kushina and Kushina never steps over his boundaries even though her energy takes her on a whirlwind's path through the house and Naruto is a sweet but demanding child who craves attention with everything in him.
(Kushina and Minato get this look when he flinches away from contact or locks himself away when it's all too much or dyes his red hair black. It's not pity and it's not bad. It's strange and faraway and so, so sad. It's not sympathy, not quite, but it's understanding. It makes him think that maybe, just maybe, they've been through something similar.
He can't think of anything sadder than that.)
They don't stop him from changing his looks or decorating his burns with tiny bits of metal or changing his name. They help him, guide him, but they don't stop him.
So when they find him in the streets, fighting because that's all he knows how to do, they don't condemn him. They teach him. And maybe it should've been less surprising than it was, maybe he should've have seen this happening, but he still flinches away from a blow that never comes.
They train him. They train him but they don't abuse him and he's learned to differentiate between the content burn of well worked muscles and the dark painithurtiwanttodie of abuse.
Kushina show him how to use his quirk without hurting himself, how to make his weak constitution into a strength. Minato shows him how to use his quirk with control so fine that it dwarfs anything Endeavor has ever done, even with so much less flame behind it.
They teach him other things, as well. Like how it's okay to hate Endeavor for what he's done. How he doesn't have to forgive his abuser to move on with his life. How forgetting and living in spite of everything is so much more fulfilling than revenge could ever be. How wanting revenge doesn't make him a bad person, just a human one. They teach him that it's okay that he doesn't trust heroes anymore, that he doesn't want to be one. They teach him that he's -okay fine great- amazing as is and that he doesn't need to have -Endeavor's his father's- anyone's approval to be a great man and a good person.
They accept him and love him and it's heady in it's addictiveness and he can never, ever thank them enough for what they've done no matter what they say to him.
Dabi still thinks his family is the best family ever. Only now his family is Kushina and Minato and Naruto and that team of young heroes-who-might-be-vigilantes and those older guys that stop by to argue with each other and Naruto's two little friends and their parents. His family is made of liars and scoundrels and thieves that double as heroes and friends and good people and he wouldn't have them any other way.
