Not accustomed to sleeping in an apartment building, Shouto woke up early the next morning. The sun was already up, but the Midoriyas were not yet. It was Sunday, and as far he knew, none of them had anywhere in particular to be. He sat up slowly and checked his phone. It was running low on battery, but he didn't have any more barrages of messages. He was thirsty and still a little cold, so he decided to get up and make tea. It was a strange feeling, walking around someone else's kitchen wearing someone else's clothes, but considering how they'd treated him the night before, he didn't think they'd mind if he made the first pot of tea. Once it was ready, he sat down at the table and picked up the previous day's newspaper, but he didn't read much before Midoriya came to the kitchen, looking sleepy.
"Ohayou," he yawned. "Choushi wa dou?"
"Better," he told his friend as he poured another cup of tea and handed it to him. "I hope you don't mind I made some tea."
"Not at all," said Midoriya. "How'd you sleep?"
"Well enough."
"That's good." Midoriya drank some of the tea, then opened the refrigerator and looked around. "Can you eat?"
"A little."
Midoriya started pulling things out of the fridge and cabinets. "What do you want?"
"I don't know. What do you have?"
"All sorts of stuff…" Midoriya began rattling off options. "I'm going to have some of this fish, do you want some?"
"No, I don't think so," said Shouto. "I should probably still take it easy since I threw up last night."
"You did?" A cloud of worry crossed over Midoriya's face.
"Yeah. At the beach, remember? You were there…"
"Oh, that," said Midoriya, looking relieved. "I thought you meant after we'd gone to bed."
"Oh. No. Just once. That pressure point you showed me helped." Shouto thought for a moment about telling Midoriya about the dream that woken him during the night, but it was painful to think about, and his friend seemed high-strung enough as it was, so he decided against it. "Maybe you should ask Uraraka if she knows one that'll help you calm down," he said instead.
"Heh heh… yeah, maybe," said Midoriya, looking embarrassed. "Well anyway, we have some vegetables here, and there's always rice ready. Do you think you can eat that?"
"Yeah."
Midoriya scooped these into a bowl and handed it to Shouto, then topped it off with a few slices of gari. "Here. That always helps settle my stomach."
"Arigato." He took a bite of rice, then a sip of tea, pacing himself with the food while he watched Midoriya writing at an almost frantic tempo. He didn't remember seeing him go and get one of the notebooks; they seemed to just magically appear. "What are you writing?"
"About what we tried yesterday," said Midoriya. This is a whole other side of quirks I don't know much about. I still have so much to learn!"
Shouto swallowed, wondering how much other information Midoriya had "on file" on him.
"You don't let anyone read that stuff, do you?" he asked.
"Not usually, unless it's like the other day when I gave you my class notes," Midoriya said. "Which reminds me, I have more of those for you for everything you missed yesterday."
"Good. Please don't share this with anyone. It's pretty personal."
"Of course," said Midoriya, already looking back at the page and writing again.
A few minutes later, Midoriya's mother got up and joined them in the kitchen long enough to say good morning, then returned to her room to get ready. To Midoriya's embarrassment, she ruffled his hair and kissed the top of his head before turning down the hall, and Shouto suddenly felt a steely sense of resolve as he remembered his dream and the doubts it had put in his head.
"I know now what I need to do."
Midoriya looked up from his notebook. "Oh?"
"Yes. There's one more thing I need to ask my mother." Shouto set down his tea cup and took a breath. "I need to know if she loves me.
Midoriya looked shocked. "Of course she loves you!" he said confidently. "Didn't she say she forgave you and it was so good to talk to her, and—"
"So desu," Shouto stopped him. "But she didn't say 'I love you'. Neither did I. If we ever said that… I don't remember."
"Oh." Midoriya looked sadly down at the table. "Well, once she tells you that, you should really be able to accept all your quirks, right?"
"I think so." It struck Shouto that to Midoriya, it was when. In his mind, it was very much an if. "And if she says no, then I know exactly what I'm working for. I will remember exactly what it sounded like when she said no, and I will keep at it until I've shown her that I am good, I'm not unbearable, and that she can love me. If I can hold onto that, then I think I can find the courage to embrace the fire."
Midoriya nodded, staring at him with those glimmering eyes. Though they were filled with more kindness than Shouto remembered receiving in years, they also had a way of piercing those years of defenses. He looked away, afraid of what else Midoriya might find if he gazed any deeper.
"I think that's great idea," said Midoriya quietly. "From what you told me, it seems like if you can make peace with her, you might be able to make peace with yourself."
"That's the idea." Shouto set his chopsticks on top of the empty bowl. "I should get going. I want to change clothes and charge my phone before I go to the hospital. Do you need your notebook before I leave, or can I borrow it? I'll have some time to copy the notes while I'm on the train."
"You can borrow it," said Midoriya. "I'll get it for you in a minute. You can just give it back in class."
"Thanks. I'll give your clothes back then too."
Midoriya returned to his room to find the notebook, and came back with that and a winter coat. "Are you still cold?" he asked. "You can borrow this too if you want."
Shouto wasn't sure what the weather was like, but he also wasn't sure how resilient his recently regained warmth would be, so it seemed prudent to protect his body temperature. "You don't need it?" he asked anyway.
"Not this time of year, but since you've been sick, I thought you might want it."
"Probably a good idea," he agreed. "I'm feeling much better today, and I'm hoping to keep it that way."
Midoriya nodded. "I noticed you're not coughing nearly as much as yesterday. That's good."
"Yeah. It helped a lot to get warm. How are you, by the way? You spent a lot of time on ice last night."
"I'm fine," said Midoriya earnestly as he handed over the coat. "You never went overboard with it, and you were always gentle when you melted it."
"Good. I didn't want to hurt you."
"You didn't," Midoriya promised. "I'm just glad you're feeling better."
Shouto put on the coat and gathered up his own clothes from the previous day, then told Midoriya he'd see him in class. Once he was on the train a few minutes later, he realized it was no use to copy Midoriya's notes; he didn't have his own with him. Instead, he stared out the window at the city, imagining possible conversations with his mother. By the time he got home, he'd considered so many terrible outcomes that he was almost too nervous to go, but he knew it had to be done.
First, though…
"There you are!" Fuyumi cried as soon as Shouto set foot in the house. Before he could even get his shoes off, she was hugging him.
"Oh!" he said, taken aback. "Hi."
Once he was properly inside the house, Fuyumi began asking dozens of questions, effectively distracting Shouto from his anxiety about visiting his mother again. He made sure to plug in his phone first, then indulged Fuyumi in a proper account of where he'd been and what he'd been doing.
"So that's why you weren't using the fire…" Fuyumi mused as Shouto finished explaining. "I had no idea. I'm sure glad to see you're doing better. I was starting to get worried."
"Me too, honestly," said Shouto. "That's why I had to go yesterday, even though I felt awful. I knew if I didn't do something about it, it was probably only going to get worse."
Fuyumi shuddered. "I'm glad it didn't. So what now?"
"Now… I'm going to go see Mom again. There's something I need to ask her."
"What is it? I might know."
Shouto shook his head. "I need to hear it from her."
An hour later, he stood again at the door of his mother's hospital room, heart racing as he prepared himself for the truth. This is the first step from the start line, he told himself as he reached for the handle. Once the door was open, Rei's immediate smile made him warm in a way nothing else had all week.
"Shouto! Back again so soon! Come in!" she beamed, though her face quickly clouded when she saw that he was wearing a mask. "Oh… are you sick?"
"A little. I'm getting over it. Don't worry about it," Shouto said out of habit. Was that a question Midoriya would have answered his mother honestly? Probably.
"Getting over it? You were just here a few days ago, and you seemed fine then. How long have you been sick?"
"I first noticed it when I got home after that," Shouto told her. She seemed worried, and he didn't like that. "It's nothing serious," he said.
"Then take the mask off," Rei pleaded. "I get to see so little of you. I want to see your face."
"Oh. Okay." He took it off and disposed of it, and Rei smiled again.
"That's better."
"Yeah."
Without the mask, they suddenly seemed so much closer, and Shouto was both happy to feel more together with his mother, and more vulnerable to however the conversation might go. It was strange, hesitating to have a conversation. Usually, if he had something to say, he spoke his mind with little concern for the reception. Just a week ago, he'd confronted Midoriya twice in one day, and never during those conversations did he fear the outcome. Midoriya had certainly been afraid, looking as though he were being held at gunpoint when Shouto had asked about his connection with All Might, but he hadn't cared. He hadn't had anything to lose.
This was deeply different. Fearing he'd lose his nerve and end saying nothing, he bit his lip and resolved to get it over with.
"Mom… there's something I need to ask you."
"Anything."
"Alright…" Shouto took a deep breath and looked at the floor, hands clasped together. "I need to know if you… do you love me?"
He'd hardly spoken when Rei threw herself around his shoulders, sobbing into his shirt. "Shouto, my child, of course I love you!" She looked up at his face and ran her fingers along his scar, her eyes stricken in pain. "Ten years you haven't known that, ten years I've been tormented by this guilt for what I did to you, oh…"
"I—Mom." Shouto was choking back tears of his own. "I didn't mean to upset you. That's… that's the real reason I never came until now. I didn't think you'd want to see me."
This only seemed to break her heart more, and she clasped him with a steadfast grip he didn't expect from her petite frame.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," she wept. "I regretted what I did the second it happened. It was never you I didn't want to see… it was a horrible mistake. I don't deserve you."
Shouto swallowed and tentatively put his arm around his trembling mother. "It was never you I blamed for this, either," he told her. "As far as I'm concerned, Dad put this scar on my face. Maybe it happened through you, but it's his fault. And I told him that the day it happened."
Rei took a shaky breath and looked up at him again. "You see too much," she said. "You were just a child then. Any other child would have blamed me." She shook her head and wiped her tears, though more were spilling from her eyes as she tried to dry them.
"Well, I didn't. And I don't. I… I love you too."
"That means more to me than you'll ever know," Rei whispered.
"It means a lot to me too," said Shouto. "I'm hoping now that I know that, I'll be able to do what I set out to do."
"What do you mean?"
Shouto told her about how he'd struggled with the fire for the past week, and how after training with Midoriya and watching him interact with his mother, he'd realized his lingering doubts about their relationship had been fueling his aversion to the flames – and how all of that had been literally making him sick.
"That boy is right," said Rei. "I'm sure yours is a different kind of fire. Why don't you show me? Then you'll really know your power is something to be proud of – something I'm proud of."
"Show you? Here?" Shouto asked skeptically, looking around the room. He doubted the use of quirks was allowed in a patient room at a psychiatric hospital. "I don't want to get you in trouble."
"You won't," she said. "I want to see what my youngest son can do."
Shouto thought back to the sports festival, and how he'd created ice walls that exceeded the height of the stadium. Holding a little hand-made candle seemed like more of a cute magic trick than a showcase of his abilities for a proud parent, but given the circumstances, it would have to do.
"Alright," he said. "If you're sure."
Rei nodded, and laced her fingers in his right hand as he held up his left. The squeeze of her hand, cool like his own, was familiar in spite of its long absence. Shouto closed his eyes and lit the fire in his hand, crackling in between them like a miniature campfire to go with their real-life ghost stories.
"It's beautiful, Shouto."
Back home an hour later, unburdened from his fear and doubt, Shouto sat at his desk with his schoolwork, slowly and calmly working his way through copying the notes from his friend. The stack of internship offers had been set aside. He hadn't read the rest of them, but he knew what to do. Emboldened by knowing that his power was his own, and that he was loved, he found the courage to take the road least expected: he'd intern with Endeavor.
Forgive him? No. But see him in another setting, the way the rest of the world did, and learn objectively about how Japan's number 2 hero worked, yes. He doubted it would be pleasant, but after the obstacles he'd overcome in the past week, an internship with own father sounded like only the next logical step in his journey.
Finally he finished copying down the last page of borrowed notes, and he smiled at them, realizing he'd been thinking of them as belonging to a friend, and although he'd questioned that term briefly, it had to be true. The hard work and kindness Midoriya had shown him had to be something one only did for a friend. Feeling a deep sense of obligation, he wondered how he might ever repay his new friend for it all. He hoped he would get a chance one day, but for the moment, some small gesture would have to suffice. He didn't know how Midoriya might feel about another person writing in his notebook, so he dropped his pen and picked up a pencil, then wrote lightly in the next empty line, Midoriya, Arigato gozaimashita.
~THE END~
Thanks again for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!
