Shouto stared blankly at the featureless, sterile walls and they stared blankly back. Reluctantly, he snapped a photo and then trudged out of the room, past the plaque reading Todoroki Shouto and into the hallway that still smelled faintly of new paint.
"That's my new home, I guess," he said later that day, showing the picture to his mother. The words tasted strange on his tongue. "At least until…"
Shouto found his voice trailing off. He still wasn't sure what he should or should not share with his mother, but surely news of the awful events of the past weeks would upset her? Bakugou's kidnapping, Shouto's failure to stop it, the impromptu rescue mission demonstrating clearly and viscerally the meaning of do or die, All Might's fall… Shouto was considered an even-tempered person, and these things upset him.
"For a while," he decided on, and looked up to meet his mother's solemn grey eyes.
"That's so exciting, Shouto!" The smile in her voice was bigger than the one he'd tried to paste on his face.
"Really?" Shouto hadn't considered it like that.
"Every new home is the start of a new phase in life, you know."
A bitterness registered on the back of Shouto's tongue. "Is that… a good thing?" He thought of his mother's new homes, her phases of life, and couldn't see it.
"It's what you make it, Shouto." There was no sadness in Rei's voice, and she gently took the phone from his hand. "Look. You have blank walls, right there for you to put something you like on them. Space for your furniture, your things, space that only you can fill. What do you want it to be?"
Shouto considered. "I don't know."
Space for only him. How could such a simple thing be so exciting yet intimidating at the same time. "How did you know?"
Rei almost laughed, and Shouto found that now he couldn't help the smile slowly blooming across his face. "How?" he demanded.
"Find the things that you love, Shouto. But before that, find the people that you love."
Shouto felt his brows scrunch together. "How?" he asked again.
"It's not difficult," said Rei, messing up his hair with a cold hand. Shouto leaned into the touch, and found that she was right.
"Can you help me?" he asked anyway.
"Of course I will," Rei answered, and scrutinized the photo once more. "You're right, it certainly is drab. So much concrete gives it such a harsh feel, even though the wood floors aren't bad. I'd still want some tatami to make it homey, but I've always been a traditional woman in my style choices. Some shoji would be lovely, too, and then my mother's redwood chabudai that's in your room wouldn't feel so out of place. What do you think, Shouto?"
Despite everything that had happened in their family home, Shouto could never find it in himself to hate the way it was made. It hwas because of Rei that it looked the way it did; he'd known this as long as he could remember. Every time a vase broke or a delicate paper wall caught on fire - a fairly regular occurrence with three boys and three fire Quirks - she was the one to pick out the replacement and fuss over it until it looked perfect once more. Fuyumi did the same now, even though accidents were fewer when they were down to just him and his refusal to use fire. No, he could never hate the house and its traditional stylings. In fact...
"I love it," Shouto decided.
Move-in day came in a whirlwind of classes, training, packing, picking out materials, and more practical math than Shouto had ever done in his life. But now, standing with Fuyumi and stacking the last of the boxes next to the neat row of mats and panels leaned up against the concrete wall, it felt strangely calm.
"Well, there you go!" Fuyumi exclaimed, way too cheerful for the early hour in the morning. "I wish I could stay and help you with everything, you know that, right?"
Shouto nodded. It wasn't Fuyumi's fault that her school had a teacher's conference today.
"If you get lost with how the flooring fits together, or anything else really, please bug Natsuo," Fuyumi continued. "Whatever he says he's doing, I guarantee it's not as important."
"Mmmm." Shouto still felt awkward talking to Natsuo, and he thought the feeling was somewhat mutual. But he vaguely remembered that Natsuo had been the one most often glimpsed with a tool in hand - likely tasked with fixing something he'd broken in the first place - or at Mom's side when she was debating if a painting was hung straight or not.
"You'll be okay, right? With all this?" Fuyumi's gesture encompassed the small room.
"I will," Shouto promised. He was growing slightly alarmed at Fuyumi's expression; her eyes were glittering with moisture. Although there was plenty of dust in the air from the scrape of boxes and such across the floor.
"You'll come visit, right? And obviously if you forgot anything, or need to pick up something else, or get tired of the cafeteria food, just call me, okay?"
Shouto nodded, watching Fuyumi hover in the doorway. He felt oddly reluctant to let her go, even though he knew she needed to soon.
"Don't forget to thank your downstairs neighbor for being so accommodating," Fuyumi added. "It's so early to be making this kind of noise!"
Now Shouto knew that Fuyumi was procrastinating. "I don't think he knows the meaning of that word," Shouto informed her. The only time he'd heard Bakugou use it had been in the context of shouting your ass can accommodate my fist or something equally aggressive, which was not only irrelevant to the training exercise but also impossible. Or perhaps he'd said your face instead, as this had taken place not too long after Kirishima had a visit to Recovery Girl following Class 1-A's competition to see who could put their entire fist in their mouth (Shouto remained convinced that Hagakure had cheated, but it had been worth it to see Bakugou lose miserably).
He said as much to Fuyumi, and that of all things seemed to spur her out the door. Shouto could commiserate; annoying neighbors were a problem for people with small houses, and given the size of their property the Todorokis had never needed to learn how to handle them.
He might have to be the first, Shouto thought ruefully, closing the door behind Fuyumi and surveying his domain as its sole owner.
Any thoughts of his neighbors immediately fled, faced with the sudden reality of it all. Shouto closed his eyes, and remembered doing so at his mother's side a few days ago.
"Can you picture it?" she'd asked, one hand on his shoulder and the other gesturing expansively as if he could see it. Shouto had felt the motion, and smiled. She'd always been one to talk with her hands. "You still have that chandelier in your room, right? The square lantern?"
He had nodded.
"Good. Start with that; it will affect everything you see, so put it up right away."
Shouto swallowed, opened his eyes, and took the light fixture out of a box. He unfolded the paper into its proper shape, and inspected the ceiling. Setting the lantern aside, he slid a box of books underneath the light bulb and climbed on top. It was simple enough to snag the wires of the decorative fixture around the hook that lived near the light bulb. He hadn't even needed Kaminari's Quirk to do it, thought Shouto, as he jumped down from the box, thoroughly pleased with his success.
Right. Walls were next. Most of the panels wouldn't need to slide, which simplified his job somewhat, but Shouto had still never done this before. Digging through the toolbox Fuyumi had sent with him, he managed to locate a hammer and a measuring tape.
His indecision must have manifested as butterfingers, because the hammer slipped from his left hand to thump onto the wooden floor. Shouto leaned over to pick it up, saw a distinct crescent left by the heavy head, and frowned. Not that it should really matter, as he would cover everything with tatami anyway, but -
A sudden thump from below startled him into dropping the hammer again. What was that?
Two thumps this time, then a short pause, then a rapid series of five. The best Shouto could figure was that someone below was banging a broom handle into their ceiling. Was Bakugou remodeling too? But why would he need to sweep his ceiling? Should Shouto have started with that?
Idly, he tapped out a short rhythm with the hammer, careful not to leave any dents.
A fierce drumming answered him. It was somehow still rhythmic despite the speed. Shouto's eyes widened, and he dove for his phone, dropping the hammer with a clang.
There was definitely a dent under it this time, he thought, tapping his foot impatiently as the phone rang and rang. Finally a groggy voice answered him. "Who's dying? It'd better be the old man."
"Hi, Natsuo," said Shouto. "Remember how Fuyumi told me once that you two and Touya had a code?"
There was a short pause that was also long enough for Shouto to wonder if Natsuo had fallen back asleep. "No, cuz I wasn't there when she told you. But yeah, we did."
"Do you remember it?" Shouto demanded.
"That was so long ago, bro, we stopped after…after." Natsuo swallowed. "Maybe. Bits of it. Now tell me why it's worth waking me up at ass o'clock in the morning on a weekend for."
"I need you to teach me. It's urgent."
"What are you even doing? Aren't you supposed to be moving or something?"
"Yes."
"Oooh, wait, do you think your room is haunted? Ah, never mind, ignore me, those are new buildings, aren't they."
Shouto pondered, then pulled the phone away from his ear for a moment to address the empty air. "Hagakure?"
No answer came, so any hauntings were not in the mood to reveal themselves, and the only angry spirit was confined to his own room down below. "Not haunted," he confirmed. "I just need to know what someone's saying."
Shouto tried to replicate the fast series of blows that Bakugou's broom or whatever had made on his ceiling by tapping on the speaker of his phone, but it didn't sound right even to his own untrained ears.
"Does that mean anything?" he asked hopefully.
"Either it's a bunch of gibberish or a bunch of swear words, take your pick."
Well. That made sense. It didn't mean Shouto wasn't disappointed though. "Oh."
"Making friends with the neighbors, eh?"
Shouto sighed. "I don't think so."
"Hey, cheer up kiddo. Dorm life is the shiz. Soon you'll have the same formerly-white pink shirts as everyone else and the same mystery stains on your walls, plus that one patch on the stairwell that no one talks about."
"Oh." Shouto was back to not knowing what to say. He wasn't opposed to pink, although wall stains sounded unpleasant as that would mean he'd have to replace the shoji he hadn't even begun to put in place.
But he didn't hang up the phone.
"Soooo," Natsuo drew out the word longer than it deserved. "Since I'm already awake, why don't you put the camera on and show me what you've got planned? 'Yumi mentioned some grand design, but if you ask me anything's better than a dartboard with a picture of your sperm donor pasted to it."
"Okay," Shouto agreed, and put on the camera and speaker. "It doesn't look like much, I know, but Mom -"
"Whoa, is that tatami? How are you going to put that in? Do you even know how?"
"Not exactly," Shouto admitted, and then remembered what Fuyumi had said. "Can you teach me?"
"Heh." On the screen Natsuo's face emerged from behind a large mug of coffee. He was smiling. "Sure thing. What else you got? Any furniture?"
"Just the chabudai and some drawers, and then Fuyumi picked out this cabinet thing that Mom really liked. It's in a box, though."
"Let's do that first, then, before the floors. You have no idea how many finishing nails I've lost inside the tatami."
That was a rather worrying revelation. It was not, however, as concerning as the length of the instruction manual Shouto found inside the box with the cabinet pieces.
"Are you sure you've done this before?" Shouto found himself very skeptical of Natsuo's construction credentials half an hour and a half dozen steps later. The cabinet was no closer to looking like the picture.
"Dude, just trust me. Measure once, cut twice, everyone knows the saying."
"But what about this piece?" Shouto held up the board to the camera.
"You've still got nails left, right? So stick it with the pointy end."
The cabinet, despite the many nails sticking into it at various points, still creaked precariously when Shouto delicately stood it up for the first time, before giving out and disassembling itself into a heap of its component boards with a dramatic clatter.
Shouto frowned into the dusty aftermath, and opened his mouth to say I told you so to Natsuo.
"HEY!" yelled an irate voice from below. "Keep it down, Half-'n-Half, if you're going to suck at Jenga at least do it silently!"
Shouto grabbed the hammer, ready to pound a hole into the floor so he could treat Bakugou to his very best resting bitch face. Jenga was one game he was actually good at, and he didn't even need to ice the blocks together most of the time.
"Step twenty-five." Natsuo's suddenly deadpan voice issued from the phone's speaker. "Same thing, but louder."
Shouto found himself smiling as he put the hammer down and started collecting the pieces of fallen furniture. He was going to re-build it so perfectly even Edgeshot couldn't fit through the cracks. And if that meant that he'd have to pound in the nails with extra-loud force, well. That was just a bonus.
Hours flew by in a list of never-ending, repetitive steps and watching the room slowly start to resemble the sketch his mother had made all those days ago. Natsuo had been on and off the call, sometimes supervising and sometimes snacking while complaining about his college classes.
Shouto found that it was quite easy to listen, and not as difficult as he'd expected to contribute his own small share to the conversation. Classes and teachers were something they finally had in common; it appeared that homework and last-minute scrambles to complete assignments were things college students weren't miraculously better at than high school students, and caffeinated beverages and snack foods were topics to have strong opinions about. So were sports, Quirk-assisted or not, and Shouto finished setting up the shoji to tales of the drama embroiling Natsuo's tennis club.
"Hey, not to be a nag, but you'd better eat something," Natsuo declared when Shouto turned to re-measure the tatami. "Since you're growing and all. At least, you should hope you grow a bit more." Natsuo slurped up a large mouthful of cup noodles to prove his point.
"Mmmm," Shouto responded, noting a number in his head and scribbling it down. He'd done the math twice, and Fuyumi had checked it, so why did he still doubt that everything was going to fit properly?
"Shouto! Don't make me text Fuyumi to call you to tell you to eat!"
"What?" Shouto looked up, having vaguely recognized a threat, and then tried to recall what he'd heard. "Ah. Hmmm. It has gotten late."
"Nutrition's important. Secondary only to taste," said Natsuo, slurping up the rest of the soup to make his point.
Shouto thought something lower in sodium would have made his point better, but Natsuo was still generally correct. Eating was a necessary thing, even when he had no appetite.
Fuyumi had always been the one to make sure he ate properly, Shouto thought as he trudged down the stairs. Mom, too, years before that. Probably. He couldn't remember clearly that far back. It felt somewhat lonely to be the one who had to do that for himself, now.
He pulled a bowl out of the cabinet, opened a packet of pre-made noodles, and put them in. Shouto wondered if he was supposed to say 'itadakimasu' to himself.
"Every hero needs the proper amount of vitamins!" announced Iida, setting a glass of orange juice in front of Shouto with a gesture that surprisingly didn't spill any of it, before sitting down to his own meal. "Itadakimasu! Plus Ultra!"
"Oi, Icyhot, soba's not a food group. Eat some damn vegetables," Bakugou snarled on his way past, dumping a heap of steamed bok choy onto Shouto's noodles as he did so. Shouto could've sworn he heard a grumbled 'meshiagare' hidden beneath loud footsteps.
Shouto felt his frown melt away as he clapped his hands together and said his own itadakimasu. He was suddenly very hungry.
The early evening light was slanting through the balcony window by the time Shouto had finally secured the last mat into place. He gratefully straightened up, stretching out his spine as he played with the sliding shoji, changing the light from a golden cloud to sharp beams as they closed and opened, traveling smoothly on their rails.
He settled on one open, one closed, then tested the strength of the cabinet one last time (it was as steady as Kirishima) before turning to the one box that he'd carefully carried on his lap on the way over.
Breaking the tape and lifting one cardboard flap, Shouto turned the box towards the sun as he finished opening it. Dark green pine needles and the lighter, wider leaves of the miniature banksia greeted the light.
Shouto carefully disassembled the rest of the box from around the bonsai, scrutinizing the two trees for any signs of damage. Satisfied, he placed the heavy pot atop the cabinet and stepped back.
"Welcome to your new home," he told the trees.
The lodgepole pine had moved before, to join Shouto's banksia, right when he'd started learning to take care of them. It had seemed a waste to abandon the pine just because its original owner was gone. Later, when he'd grown older and resentful of everything related to his father, Shouto had considered letting the plants go their own wild ways. After all, it was Endeavor who'd instructed him in their nurture, applying the same principles of iron discipline and tight-fisted control as he did to all things.
Begrudgingly, Shouto had to admit it worked for the bonsai. Besides, he couldn't bring himself to let the trees die.
Shouto busied himself with setting up the rest of his things; the notebooks, pencils and brushes which looked more at home in the school context, and the decorative ceramic Fuyumi had insisted on buying him for good luck, along with the bamboo as a symbol of flexibility and prosperity in his new home.
It's not like he was getting married and leaving forever, Shouto thought, shifting the pot so that the bamboo's sparse leaves wouldn't block the light. Still, he liked the plant. It was simple and straightforward, like himself.
To a certain degree at least. Shouto was also a hungry teenager who had worked all day, so he was tired enough to just shove the last few boxes in the closet and splash some water on his face by the time the dining hall opened for the evening meal. Properly unpacking could wait until tomorrow.
With a full stomach, Shouto was ready to call it a night when his boisterous classmates - housemates, too, now he supposed - called it a Room King competition and dragged everyone along in the inertia of their excitement.
It was really quite interesting how much a room could reflect a person, Shouto thought, seeing hidden facets of Sero, or the stark philosophy of Shouji laid out for everyone to see.
He wondered what his room said about him.
Not much, he was sure, but he pushed open the door anyway. There wasn't so much of him in it as Mom, and Fuyumi, and even Natsuo, in the careful joins of the panels. Although, Shouto thought, at least he could be in his room and sleeping soon if…
"It's so… Japanese!"
Shouto sighed. At least the Bakusquad wasn't failing architecture.
"Are we even in the same building anymore?" Ashido exclaimed.
… They might still be failing geography, but Shouto's concerns for their grades evaporated once he realized everyone was staring at him for an explanation.
"My family home is a traditional style house," he settled on. One thing he'd learned from the Sports Festival was that sharing extensive backstories only led to people breaking their bones.
"Who cares about the reason?" yelled Kaminari. "How'd you remodel your room in one day?"
But it hadn't been just one day. Mom had started the planning as soon as she'd known; Shouto couldn't wait to see her again and show her pictures to check if they matched what she'd imagined back then. And Fuyumi had helped him prepare everything, taking him shopping and checking the math and insisting on the small touches he'd never think of by himself. Even Natsuo's construction advice had come from years of kicking soccer balls into paper walls, and the discipline required to follow exacting instructions had been instilled in Shouto by his father, whether he liked it or not.
So what really was Shouto's contribution to it all?
"I worked hard," he declared. Maybe decorating a room didn't matter to becoming a hero, but he hoped it would make his mother smile. It had put Natsuo at ease, a contrast from their normally stilted conversations, and even though Fuyumi was sad that she'd see Shouto less often, at least she could see he was in a comfortable place.
It was an answer that seemed to satisfy the crowd, even if Shouto himself found it somewhat lacking.
"Midoriya." Shouto reached out to stall his friend as the group prepared to leave, his hand hovering by the smaller boy's jacket sleeve.
"Todoroki-kun! What is it?"
"Can you take a picture for me?" Shouto handed Midoriya his phone.
"Of course!" chirped Midoriya, looking down to the screen. "Uh, could you unlock this? Oh, what a nice photo! Is this for them?"
"Ah." Shouto took the device back and tapped in the numbers over the solemn yet happy faces of himself, his mother, and Fuyumi, and the ridiculously contorted face of Natsuo. "Yes, it is."
He paused before handing the phone back. "And for me, too, I think."
Midoriya tended to bring out Shouto's oversharing tendencies, but they were ignored with grace. "You should be proud," Midoriya said instead, holding up the camera and searching for a good angle to showcase the room's features.
"Ready?" He positioned Shouto near the bonsai on the cabinet and flashed a quick thumbs-up before stepping back. "Smile!"
Shouto did. After all his hard work, that was the easy part.
A/N: So if you know anything about trees, you know that the lodgepole pine and certain types of banksia cannot reproduce without the aid of wildfires. Two guesses as to who the pine belonged two, and the first one doesn't count ;)
I see plenty of fics where Shouto goes off and discovers neon and whatever else once he's in the dorms, but there's nothing wrong with being a traditional person.