Archive of Our Own ^beta

It started when Todoroki Shouto was seven years old and freshly scarred.

The flesh on the left side of his face hurt for days, weeks afterwards, but that wasn’t the worst part of it. Seeing himself, in pictures and reflections—that was the worst. The throbbing would dull with time, but the scars remained. Something happened when he saw himself, something a child couldn’t articulate. The moments when he passed a mirror were not the same as every other moment. His burnt face stared back at him, and a hand reached up to touch the scarred skin, permanently red flesh interrupted by fingers that had not known burning.

Whose were they?

It didn’t matter how many times Shouto thought the question. The answer didn’t come. Whose hands were those, whose face? He didn’t know. And suddenly he was no longer in the bathroom, but with his father, moving through the motions of training without realizing it. Even the hurt of being thrown off his feet did not register, not until the next day when his body screamed its soreness to his attention.

Move, Shouto. Do better, Shouto. You will get this right, Shouto.

Whose body was that? Someone iced the floor, someone moved forward, someone did as his father told him to. Was there something moving his limbs for him?

And so he slipped into it like a second skin, a blanket of detachment that came when he needed it most.

--

As a child, it was present often. Close to every day. In the hours he was training, the minutes he spent in conversations with his father—it was there, pulling a fog over himself that allowed him to continue without thinking. Some of the time, he couldn’t remember what it was that he did when detached. Endeavor would give a rare compliment on a move he pulled off, one Shouto couldn’t remember doing, or suddenly he’d be in a different room without memory of walking there, or eating without realizing he’d prepared any food.

The fog began to fall even when he wasn’t with Endeavor, even when he didn’t need it. In the shower, as he was falling asleep, studying—there wasn’t a time that wasn’t susceptible to this detachment. Shouto lived the first fifteen years of his life in a complete haze.

--

Then he entered U.A.

--

Midoriya talks a lot.

Despite his quiet, anxious demeanor, once he gets to know someone, he’s good at keeping a conversation. This surprised Shouto when they first started really talking—although he guesses it shouldn’t have, since whenever he saw Midoriya sitting with Iida and Uraraka at lunch he was chatting away, mouth moving at a mile a minute. It hadn’t occurred to him before they were friends that Midoriya might act differently around those he’s close with than he does around acquaintances.

Shouto’s used to it now, though. They started getting to know each other after first year’s sports festival, and have been close ever since. Midoriya’s chattering—especially when it comes to things that he’s passionate about—is just another part of him. Shouto forgets, now, that not everyone is privy to that.

So he talks a lot. It works since Shouto’s a good listener; he’s spent most of his life doing nothing but listening, and besides, he likes to know what Midoriya’s interested in, what he likes and what he doesn’t, the things that make him passionate. More often than not it’s about school or his mom or heroes, and Shouto will pitch in when needed, but when Midoriya gets going, he usually just stands back and lets him go.

The problem is that the detachment doesn’t like to just stand back and let go. It’s times like these that Shouto finds himself drifting. The cracks in the sidewalk stare at him; when he lifts his face to look at Midoriya, Midoriya’s freckles stare at him too. Midoriya’s mouth moves; sound comes out; there’s silence. Shouto realizes it’s an invitation to respond.

He looks from those freckles, finally. “Sorry, uh...”

“I asked if you’ve finished your essay yet.”

“Yeah, last night.”

There’s silence again. Shouto is beginning to wander again when he sees Midoriya’s lips pull into a small frown, his eyebrows pinching in.

“Are you okay?” he asks. He says it like he genuinely wants to know, not like he’s only asking out of courtesy, but Shouto is still hesitant to answer truthfully.

“I’m fine. Just...” He shrugs, mind racing to find a plausible excuse. “Got a lot on my mind, I guess. With exams coming up.”

Midoriya is still frowning. Shouto looks away and hopes his guilt doesn’t show on his face. He doesn’t—he doesn’t want to worry anyone with this. The detachment, the fog...it’s really not as bad as it sounds. It’s not fun, but he’s used to it. And it doesn’t hurt him, or bother him anymore. It just is. A fact of life.

He wonders briefly what would happen if he told Midoriya that. If maybe he would get it, or think that’s it’s...weird, or scary. Momo knows about it, only out of necessity. She’s known him longer than anyone else at U.A., seen it from him more often, known the moments where he needed to be present and couldn’t force himself to stay. It scares her, she’s told him. Says it feels like she’s losing him.

He doesn’t want to scare Midoriya.

Midoriya doesn’t push the subject. Shouto keeps drifting.

--

It used to be in moments that he was scared—that he needed protecting—when it would happen. Then it started happening when he was bored, or when he didn’t need to be fully there.

It calmed down when he entered U.A. Maybe the hero work required him to stay in the now more than his training did, or maybe it was the distance from Endeavor. He doesn’t know the real answer, but he knows that something happened and the switch in his brain flipped.

It still happens when he’s scared, but...more small fears. In his first year, during times of crisis, he was always there. The fog never came for him when he was fighting villains or saving classmates. But Endeavor’s presence or the thought of friendships—small things like that, the kind that made his pulse race and his palms sweaty and his mouth dry for little to no reason, those always did it.

Take now, for instance.

“Are you ever going to talk to him about it?”

Momo gives Shouto a look from across the table. Not the kind that means she’s pushing for his answer, but the thoughtful kind, the kind that means she’s curious and only wants to know, but doesn’t demand a concrete answer.

Shouto stabs a fork through a piece of meat in front of him but doesn’t eat it. He’s not really hungry, but they haven’t hung out alone in a long time so when Momo suggested eating out he didn’t have the heart to decline.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know.”

She nods thoughtfully, taking a sip of her drink. The sound of her glass being set on the table is louder than maybe it should be. He counts the drops of water sliding down the glass’s side and gets to fifteen before Momo speaks again.

“You know,” she says, “it took me a long time to talk to Jirou.”

“I’m aware.” Shouto had been there for ninety percent of that crisis. The other ten percent had been Momo’s actual confession, which he heard about in great detail later on.

Momo’s silent again after that, maybe switching tactics. Shouto’s fork moves, skewers a separate piece of his dinner, and raises to his mouth. He doesn’t taste it when he chews, and he doesn’t remember swallowing, but he hears himself say, “It’s different.”

“Not that different,” says Momo. “You’ve been friends with Midoriya for longer than I was with Jirou before we started dating. And it’s obvious that he really likes you, whether or not it’s romantic.”

“But we’re not talking about ‘whether or not’.”

“Yes, and there’s no way to know if he likes you without one of you saying it first,” Momo reasons. “If you wait for him to say something first, he could be waiting for you to say it, too. And then you’ll be stuck in relationship limbo until one or both of you gets fed up or loses interest and moves on. And you’ve wasted an opportunity, why?”

Because I’m scared.

Shouto’s fork lowers itself back to the table.

Because I’m terrified.

The fork clanks against his plate and sounds louder than Momo’s drink had. “I hate when you’re right.”

She smiles at him. He doesn’t remember looking up.

--

Even in dreams, Shouto isn’t always there.

Somehow this fog transfers over even when he’s unconscious. The memory of his childhood self, looking through a cracked door at his mother with a phone pressed to her ear, becomes a stranger hiding and some other stranger turning, pausing, stopping, running, grabbing, throwing. The first stranger screams. The second screams too.

He wakes up covered in sweat, like the heat had escaped his memory, and his room is so hot, so much more suffocating than he remembers. It’s three A.M. when he wakes from this dream then suddenly it’s four-thirty, and he’s being pulled out of his bed and to his feet, slipping into workout clothes, then the hallway.

When he first described it to Momo, when he was trying to help her understand, he told her it felt like he was out of his body; like he was watching another person move. Sometimes that rings true. Other times, it feels more like he’s in his body but not in control, like he had strings attached to his muscles in his sleep and some unknown puppet master is pulling them, moving him through the motions of his life.

He is pulled through them now, walking down the hallway and making his way to the gym. He’s usually here around six A.M. so that he has time to shower and get ready for class after working out, but today he didn’t want to wait that long. He’s alright with an early start; it’s nice, actually, with no one else around. The dorm is empty besides him. His body moves on its own, and he’s at the gym entrance, pulling the door open.

He realizes there’s somebody else already here just before he turns a corner and sees Midoriya on the ground doing pushups. He’s covered in sweat and counting the number under his breath, just loud enough for Shouto to make out: seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four...

He gets to eighty for Shouto moves forward slightly, and the movement must catch Midoriya’s eye because he freezes and looks up. Relief washes over his face when he sees that it’s Shouto, and he stops, letting himself collapse on the floor and roll over to see Shouto.

“How long’ve you been there?” he asks between pants, out of breath.

“Just got here. How long have you been working out?”

“Half an hour.” Midoriya sits up, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm. “I usually stay a whole hour if you don’t mind us sharing.”

“I don’t mind,” Shouto says. He watches Midoriya stand up and makes his way to one of the benches littered around the room, sitting down and taking up a water bottle. He pats the empty spot next to him before uncapping the lid and tipping his head back.

Shouto looks away but takes the invitation to sit down. At least it’s harder to stare at Midoriya if they’re sitting beside each other, he thinks. On the downside, he can feel Midoriya’s body heat, and their shoulders brush with every rise and fall of Midoriya’s chest, still catching his breath.

“I didn’t know you came here in the morning,” Shouto says once Midoriya is done drinking. He starts conversation mostly to distract himself. If they don’t talk, he’ll drift, or at the very least he’ll stare at Midoriya for longer than socially acceptable and he doesn’t want to begin his day by embarrassing himself in front of his crush.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Midoriya shrugs. “Not super regularly, but recently I’ve been waking up earlier, so I figured I might as well use the time for something productive, right?” He sort of laughs at himself, like the notion is silly. Quieter, he admits, “Plus, it’s easier to work out alone. I didn’t realize how nice it is to not have to worry about people looking at you when you’re exercising.”

“No one looks at you,” Shouto tries to assure. He thinks that’s mostly true, at least when it’s just the rest of their class. They’re used to Midoriya having to wear a sports bra in public, and they’re all pretty good about respecting him. Even Bakugou doesn’t go there when he’s criticizing Midoriya.

The other classes, though...

Midoriya kind of shrugs like he’s accepted it. “No, people still do sometimes. But it’s fine, I’m used to it when it happens. Now that I’m doing this, it’ll be easier.”

“You don’t mind that I’m here? If you want to be alone, I mean, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or...”

Midoriya shakes his head. Green curls stick to his forehead with sweat. “I like working out with you. I don’t mind my friends seeing me, it’s just people I don’t really know or that would...you know, be weird about it, that I don’t like.”

Friends. Some part of Shouto revels in being considered Midoriya’s friend; the concept is still sort of new to him, and he loves being able to say that he has friends, that he’s part of other people’s lives, that he cares about people and they care about him in return. Another part of Shouto realizes what friends actually means.

Then the fog.

“Oh,” he says. Shorter responses or no response—those are common when he’s stopped being here. People often tell him how quiet he is, how reserved, but it’s not that he tries to be this way, not that he wants to. It just happens. It’s difficult to hold conversation when you’re not even really in your own body.

“Todoroki-kun,” Midoriya is saying distantly. He hears the water bottle being set down on the metal bench, then feels Midoriya moving closer. Their legs are close to touching, the fabric of their shorts overlapping. “Are you okay?”

That question again. The answer is complicated. It doesn’t hurt, this, so he says, “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?” as casually as he can.

“You look...” Midoriya stops there. Starts over. “You’re just acting kind of weird. All the sudden, you just...shut down.”

Shut down. Maybe that’s a good way to describe it. Floating away, moving without permission, shutting down. Shouto bottles these descriptors up for later use, even though he doubts he’ll ever use them anywhere but in his own head.

“I’m fine,” he repeats. He stands up, making sure they don’t touch, and cracks his knuckles. “You’re okay with working out together?”

Midoriya blinks at him and pauses like he wants to push the subject. Instead, he nods and stands up too. “Yeah, that’d be fun.”

The next half hour is a blur for Shouto. The only proof that he moved during that time at all is the ache in his limbs and the exhausted smile that Midoriya sends him as they’re leaving the gym to shower and get ready.

--

A knock at Shouto’s door brings him into conscious, and he realizes his phone is buzzing incessantly on his bedside table too. It’s a series of texts, all from Midoriya and all sent within the last thirty minutes.

He must have fallen asleep in the middle of texting, he thinks, and pulls himself out of bed reluctantly to answer the door. Midoriya slips into his room before Shouto can get out a greeting, and once the door is shut again, he’s got a body wrapped around his.

Midoriya is shaking against him. Shouto hugs back, even though he doesn’t know why they’re hugging.

“Oh my god,” Midoriya mumbles into his shoulder. “You scared me!”

Shouto’s hand is in between Midoriya’s shoulder blades, and the contact burns him even through layers of clothes. He pats the other’s back in the best comforting gesture he can give while confused out of his mind. “How did I scared you?”

Midoriya pulls away. The hands that had been around his waist seconds ago settle on his shoulders, pulling him to look Midoriya in the eye. The way Midoriya is staring at him makes Shouto shift his weight from one foot to the other self-consciously. Is he supposed to know how he scared Midoriya?

“Your text,” Midoriya says.

“My…?”

He frowns. “Did you fall asleep?”

Shouto fights to urge to rub the back of his neck sheepishly. “Uh, yeah, I didn’t mean to…”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Midoriya assures. The hands on Shouto’s shoulders fall away, and it’s Midoriya’s turns to rub the back of his neck. “You just…stopped responding, and after…you know, I got worried. You don’t usually do that.”

“Sorry,” Shouto says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s fine. I’m just glad you fell asleep and hadn’t, uh…” Midoriya trails off awkwardly. Shouto tries to find something to fill the last blank and comes up short. What text had he sent? He couldn’t remember texting before he fell asleep; he couldn’t remember much of earlier today, honestly. There had been a villain, and fire, and a child was being held hostage, and…they caught the villain, everyone returned to school, he and Midoriya were reprimanded for being on the scene despite still being students…

He knows the moments he leaves himself are meant to protect him, usually. That’s why they happen when he’s scared, when he doesn’t want to talk about something, when something is too new or too risky or too closely involved with Endeavor. Shouto’s never been to a therapist, but he knows that this thing—whatever its name is—is a coping mechanism. To deal with everything, maybe.

What he doesn’t know is why it doesn’t happen when he’s fighting a villain, when he’s actually in danger. He doesn’t mind at all that it seems to skip out on those moments; it would probably negatively impact his performance if it did. But today, something was different. He’d shut down during battle for the first time.

He remembers sending a text after they got back into their dorms. What it says, he can’t recall; he must have been falling asleep. Or maybe he’d been so removed that his brain deleted that memory all together.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, for lack of anything else.

Midoriya shakes his head before running a hand through his hair. Its messy, no doubt from lying in bed for hours. Shouto glances at the clock beside his bed. It’s nearing midnight.

“Don’t be,” Midoriya says. “It’s not your fault I’m so paranoid. I just, you know, after how you were today when we were fighting, I didn’t know if you were doing okay or not and then you stopped responding and it just…I jumped to conclusions. Dumb ones. I’m sorry for waking you up.”

“Don’t be,” Shouto parrots.

Midoriya smiles. It falls flat of being genuine and he lowers his gaze, looking to a spot left of Shouto. Quietly, he asks, “Why don’t you ever want to talk about it?”

Shouto’s pulse quickens. “About what?”

“That thing you do, when you shut down. I can tell when it happens sometimes, but whenever I ask you about it, you just tell me you’re fine. Yaoyorozu—“

“She talked to you about it?”

Midoriya looks at him now. Maybe he hears the betrayal in Shouto’s voice, because he assures, “She didn’t tell me anything, she just said that you don’t like to talk about it. I was the one to bring it up, so if you need to get mad at anyone, it’s my fault.”

Shouto pauses. He can feel himself starting to drift, to lose control of his body, to shut down as Midoriya described. He tries to reel it back in, force it down, but the awareness that it’s happening only makes it worse. This conversation has been deemed unsafe by his brain, and so the fog comes to protect him.

“No,” he says. “No, it’s fine. I’m not mad at…anyone.”

Midoriya nods. Then he’s silent, and Shouto wonders what he’s thinking, and the thought of someone else thinking of him only makes the fog worse, and he drifts drifts drifts. He doesn’t want to be talking about this. There’s no way to reel it back in, and his head hurts, and legs are moving and suddenly he’s sitting on the bed and Midoriya is next to him and someone’s hand is touching his—or—someone’s. Is that his? He sees a thigh touch another, and can’t tell whose either of those are.

“Todoroki-kun?” Midoriya is saying. Midoriya is there. Midoriya is there. He’s saying Shouto’s name, but it doesn’t sound like a name, and Shouto remembers that villain today, and in his memory they are so much bigger than him, and that hostage is so much smaller, and covered in so many more burn scars. One had swallowed her eyes whole, and in his memory, her scar recedes until it leaves her right one untouched but still steals sight from the other. If he doesn’t exist, Shouto still has sight in his left. If he doesn’t exist, he does not have to be here, talking about this, remembering this.

They hadn’t saved that hostage today. She died in the hospital an hour later from burn wounds that hadn’t been treated quickly enough, and Shouto thinks about this now. If he doesn’t exist, if nothing exists, then this memory can’t hurt him.

“Todoroki-kun?” Midoriya. Midoriya. Skin touches his wrist, and the touch doesn’t pull him all the way back, but enough to turn to Midoriya and count the freckles on his cheeks. He’s to thirty when he realizes that Midoriya is frowning, worried, speaking now.

“Todoroki-kun, what’s wrong?”

Shouto opens his mouth to say nothing’s wrong, I’m fine, just give me a moment, you don’t have to worry about me, you don’t have to be scared of me or, or for me.

What escapes is, “She died.”

He watches from a distance as Midoriya’s face falls, as recognition replaces his worry. The hand on Shouto’s wrist moves lower until it’s laying over his hand, not holding it but just touching, resting there softly. Midoriya’s hands are smaller than his, but now Midoriya’s left hand seems to engulf his right, covering it completely. He can see pale skin peak out from underneath Midoriya’s tanned fingers, the scarred and mangled flesh and pink knuckles. Midoriya has his fair share of scars, too.

“I know,” Midoriya says. “I know.”

“We couldn’t save her. The heroes—no one saved her.”

“I know.”

“From burns.”

He nods. Shouto wants to stop talking, wants to stop making Midoriya look like this—heartbroken, a hand coming to cover his mouth like he’s about to cry, eyebrows furrowed and nose scrunched, head bowed. Shouto wants to stop it, but now that he’s started, his mouth won’t close. Whoever’s controlling him is doing a shit job of it.

“We beat the villain but still couldn’t keep her from dying, Midoriya. Isn’t that the whole point? To protect people? We didn’t—“

“I know.”

The fourth time is the quietest, but in Shouto’s ears it’s a scream. From there, he doesn’t stop. Just keeps talking, blabbering about this stranger he’d never even known existed until she died, about this girl that he’d never get to meet or know because she’d been taken. The memory of her burns haunt him as he speaks.

Sometime in between talking, Midoriya’s fingers find their way in between Shouto’s and then they’re holding hands with fingers entwined on Shouto’s bedspread. Midoriya lets him speak. When he’s done, the hand lets go, and before Shouto can mourn the loss the hand is on his cheek, turning his face to look at Midoriya’s.

“It’s hard,” Midoriya says. For some reason, that’s the thing that gets Shouto; he hadn’t cried when he heard the news, and he hadn’t cried when he was falling asleep, but he does now. It’s only a few tears, and they escape as silently as they can, but he still knows that shame will burn in his stomach later for it.

In the moment, he ignores that shame, though. Someone tilts his face so it’s nudged into Midoriya’s hand. Midoriya blinks in surprise at the action before he smiles gently. They only sit there for a while, silent now.

“I’m not here sometimes,” Shouto confesses finally. Midoriya doesn’t look surprised or confused, and the lack of concrete response allows him to continue. “Sometimes… a lot of the time, I…shut down. Like you’ve noticed. And I’m not here anymore.”

Midoriya doesn’t say anything, waiting for him to continue.

Shouto looks away. He stares at his sock-clad feet on the floor, watches his toes curl anxiously under the fabric. The hand on his cheek slides away and finds its home again laced with his own.

“I’m blind in my left eye. Did you know that?”

Midoriya shakes his head. “No. I…thought maybe you were, but I didn’t know.”

The admission is too much. Shouto can’t continue that line of conversation. He’ll touch it another day, but for now he takes a deep breath and squeezes Midoriya’s hand. Wonders if maybe another person touching him would help keep him here.

“I’ve never shut down in the middle of battle before. For some reason, it doesn’t happen when we’re fighting or actually in danger, but it happens all the time outside of that. But today when we saw that girl, it was different. Nothing felt real.”

“Is that what it always feels like?” Midoriya asks softly. “When you shut down? Like nothing’s real?”

“Yeah. Always.”

The hand in his tightens. He doesn’t know if it’s meant to comfort him or Midoriya. He asks, because he’s too scared for the answer not to, “Does it freak you out that I’m not here most of the time?”

“A little bit,” Midoriya admits. Shouto sucks in a breath, but Midoriya continues, “But I’m not scared. I just…want you to be okay.”

“I don’t want you to worry about me.”

“Is that why you never talked about it?”

Shouto pauses. He shrugs. “I guess. But I guess that only made you worry more.”

Midoriya smiles again. “Yeah, probably. Can I ask you something?”

Shouto nods.

“Are you doing it now? Like, are you…here right now?”

“Some of me. Not all the way.”

It’s harder to admit that than he thinks it should be. Midoriya only nods and moves closer to him on the bed. Past Midoriya, Shouto can see his clock, reading that it’s almost one A.M.

“We need to go to sleep soon,” Shouto says, nudging Midoriya’s foot with his. “You’re going to get in trouble being in here.”

Midoriya sighs. “Yeah, you’re right.” But neither of them move. “Can I help?”

Shouto blinks. “What?”

“With your…shutting down thing? Is there any way I can help so that you don’t do it so much? Or so that I can bring you back when you do?”

Can someone else bring Shouto back to himself? Maybe. He isn’t sure. He thinks the hand on his might’ve done, thinks grudgingly that talking about it might have done something too. He shrugs a shoulder halfheartedly and admits, “I guess if you’re okay with it, I think touching helps.”

Midoriya nods. Squeezes Shouto’s hand. “Things like this?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll have to let me know when you need it then,” he says. “I don’t think I can always tell when you’re doing it. Promise you’ll tell me if you need me to help.”

It’s not a question. Shouto doesn’t think he’d be able to decline even if it was, with Midoriya looking at him like that, with their hands still together. He nods.

Midoriya nods too and stands. He doesn’t let go of Shouto’s hand as he does it, and Shouto stands to make up for the distance. They stay standing there, looking at each other for longer than necessary. The clock tells him its 1:05 A.M.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Midoriya says, even though he hasn’t made a move for the door. “Tell me if you’re feeling like this, okay? And…thank you for telling me at all. I didn’t mean to push you.”

“You didn’t push me,” Shouto assures. Which is true. He’d collapsed all on his own.

Midoriya smiles and finally lets their hands go. He makes his way to the door and pauses with his hand on the doorknob. “’Night, Todoroki.”

“Goodnight,” Shouto says. Midoriya turns around and leans up on his tiptoes, and Shouto feels lips against his cheek before he realizes what’s happening. Midoriya pulls back as quickly as he’d moved forward, and he’s left the room, the door shutting quietly behind him, before Shouto can think of a proper response.

--

The next time he drifts, Shouto finds the courage to reach for Midoriya’s hand under the lunch table. Midoriya shows no outward sign that anything had happened, but he laces his fingers with Shouto’s, and Shouto sees him fumbling with his phone in his other hand before Shouto’s own phone buzzes with a text. It reads, it’s happening right now?

Shouto admits that it is, and instead of sending another text, Midoriya squeezes his hand and moves so their legs are touching under the table.

He doesn’t see immediate results, but slowly, over the days, Shouto notices a difference—the fog doesn’t stop coming for him, but he can feel himself start to push it away, if only a little.