#Touya is Dabi | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

gardenofnoah · 2 years ago

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it lives where i live

part 2 is here! this was a difficult one to write because there’s so much i want to say and i have no idea how to say any of it. but this is an important one and i hope you enjoy it :)

wc: 3.4 k. cw: angst, unintentional self-harm (touya scratches himself in his sleep), injury (scratch), blood (scratch), reader is not well mentally, gn reader, no pronouns used

read part 1 here, read part 3 here

There is a warmth against your cheek when you stir, creeping up to heat the skin of your forehead as you stretch and squirm—fighting the lure of just a few more moments of sleep. Blinking slowly, you study the beam of light peaking through the sheer curtains—the way the little refraction cuts through the otherwise dark of your room.

For a moment, in the light, you forget.

But when you roll to your side—away from the light, looking to the door—you feel everything with a force that leaves you breathless.

Despite the weight of it all, you push up off your bed to sit, head hung a little as you take in a few deep breaths. The house is quiet, but you didn’t expect anything else. Your eyes burn a little, and you wait for the tears to come. When they don’t, you sigh—there’s nothing good to come from crying, anyway.

You stand and move to the door, opening it quietly and distantly wondering when you started moving around like an intruder in your own home. There’s a heat that comes with the thought—it curls in your stomach, slithering around the other feelings you’ve been holding there, and you shove it down, down, down, because you don’t want to be angry at him. Because he’s been through enough.

You don’t listen to the thought that tells you: so have you.

When you walk down the hall, the bathroom door is open, and Touya’s bedroom door is not. He must have woken up before you, if he slept at all. You don’t imagine you’ll see him today—at least not during the day. You fight the urge to hover outside his door, ear crammed to the wood to try to hear him breathing.

You make it to the kitchen, flicking the switch on your old coffee maker and reaching your arms above your head, stretching a little. It does well to put you back in your body—you reach to the ceiling and remember that you are still a human being.

You realize that you’d forgotten that, since Touya had come back—that, despite the void inside you his absence caused, the world continued to turn. You felt indignant about that, for a while—how dare anyone else move forward, when he could not? But despite yourself, you did just that. You graduated, went to college, graduated again, got a job. You made other friends, but none ever made it as close to you as he had.

Every single thing you did felt insignificant, despite your best attempts at a normal life. That in itself was something to grieve—you found no sense of accomplishment in the things you’d done, and the loneliness, despite being surrounded by other people, was debilitating. You had found it hard to connect, and sustaining friendships had been difficult because he was always the comparison in the forefront of your mind. Every day, he haunted you. He would never know that you never even asked him to stop.

The coffee maker beeps and you are back again, sighing as you reach for a mug. You pour, breathing the smell in deeply and allowing it to bring you some semblance of comfort. You didn’t much care for the taste, if you were honest—but it was warm in the morning and it felt like something of a ritual—a small, rare indulgence you allowed yourself—so you drink it.

You move through the house on autopilot after that—dressing quickly, brushing your teeth, splashing water on your face in a half-attempt at washing it. You grab the grocery list from where it’s taped to the fridge, and you are halfway to the front door when you hear movement down the hall. You pause, listening as the floor creaks under Touya’s weight, and then it stops.

All at once, you are overcome by the need you feel—the longing that tells you to open that door and hold him to you. To breathe him in and feel the flutter of his heart beat from behind his ribs and know for sure that he is alive and there with you, because you’re still not convinced.

The feeling fades as quickly as it came, and it leaves you gasping, sagging against the wall as you try to come back to yourself. You wonder if it will always be like this. Grieving for him with his ghost in the next room.

You manage to pull yourself together enough to reach a shaky hand toward the door and stagger out of it. The cold, winter air hits you, and it jars you enough that it’s all you can do to just stand there, gulping down the chill into your lungs. You let it move through you, summoning whatever bravery you have to make it to your car and put the keys in the ignition. You feel a tug behind you as you walk—the same one that you felt when you were 13 and walking away from the scattering of the little ash that was left of Touya. The same one you felt as you all but carried his mother back to the car from the hospital after seeing him again. The thread that ties you to him. You wonder how long it can stretch before it starts to fray—or if it already has.

Your phone rings as you pull into the grocery store parking lot. You feel a tinge of regret as you answer it.

“Hi, Natsuo.”

“Hey!” he says into the phone, and the kindness that radiates from his voice warms you a bit, makes you smile. He’d always been a light, despite all he’d been through.

“Sorry,” you tell him, opening the car door and climbing out, back into the cold, “I just got to the store. We needed food—Touya’s still at home.”

“Ah, that’s okay. I can try again later, it’s not like he’s going anywhere.”

You huff out a tiny laugh at his bad joke, and it makes you feel a little lighter. You find that the ache of putting one foot in front of the other is lessened, however minutely.

“Listen,” he starts, sounding a bit cautious, “I was actually hoping to talk to you. I wanted to see how you were doing—I know this probably isn’t easy for you.”

And you hate the way you want to hang up the phone immediately, because now your eyes are burning as you walk into the store and this is definitely not the place to let out whatever has been lurking in your gut, but it’s Natsuo and he’s so good and he cares for you like he always has, so you try to hold on to yourself. When Touya was gone, he stepped in and looked after you, adopting you as some sort of pseudo-sibling. You think he may have needed it as much as you did.

“I’m…managing,” you say after a pause, too tired to tell him anything but the truth, “I just—I feel like I’m going to wake up and he’ll be gone. And it scares me a little that sometimes I wish that were true.”

You think that maybe you shouldn’t have said that last part, not to Natsuo—but the knowing sigh from the other end of the phone tells you that it’s alright.

“Has he said anything yet?”

“No, not really. I think he might have told me good night last night, but I was so tired that I’m not convinced I didn’t make it up.”

“Hey, that’s progress!” he says, but his tone doesn’t quite deliver the excitement you think he wanted to. You realize that he might feel as worn down as you do.

“Do you think it’ll ever get better?” you ask quietly, not sure if you want to know the answer.

There’s a pause, long enough that you start to think the call may have been disconnected, and then he says, “Don’t give up on him, okay? I think…I think he’s trying.”

You make it back to your house and you haul the groceries up to the front door, the conversation with Natsuo at the forefront of your mind, despite your best attempts to will it away. You know how hard it’s been for him to be away from Touya—to know that he is alive and so close and not be able to see him. The commission has not yet given you the greenlight to have his family over to visit, even without Enji. You understand, and you think it would probably be too much for Touya anyway—to see all of them and believe that the only thing that has changed—really, fundamentally changed, into something so mangled and nearly unrecognizable—is him. You wish you could show him that it wasn’t true, but it’s hard, and the guilt you feel reinforces that. Either way you spin it, the world kept turning. You all kept living.

You think you could understand why he’d want to burn everything to ash, after seeing that.

You set the bags on the counter, grabbing one and moving to the fridge to fill it, and you think of him, like you have done every waking moment since you found out he was still alive. Part of you is angry at that, like you seem to be at everything now, because the life you are suffering through and the thoughts you think are not yours. You wonder if they ever were, really—was there ever a single moment that you were separate from Touya? Even in his absence, you never could tell where he stopped and you began.

You all but jump out of your skin when you hear movement behind you. You whip your head around, a surprised shriek preemptively gathering in the back of your throat, when you see Touya—glass from last night in hand, visibly startled by your reaction. Setting it down in the sink, his movements are slow, and you have to fight to regulate your breathing. You stand there, eyes wide and clutching a bag of spinach to your chest, frozen in place as he turns to look at you.

His eyes meet yours and he doesn’t look away, for the first time in the weeks he’s been here, and suddenly you are 13 and he’s the king of the castle made of sticks. He’s telling you that he’ll protect you —his counsel, his confidant, his right hand—from anything, and all you can think is you liar, you liar, you liar.

It takes every ounce of control you have to not audibly whimper under his stare, but then he opens his mouth and rasps a soft thanks, and you think he’s probably thanking you for the water from last night or maybe for the groceries but then it doesn’t matter at all because suddenly your vision blurs and then you’re crying.

It’s too much—the blue of his eyes that hasn’t changed at all and the way you are so angry at him you think the feeling alone might burn you alive from the inside and the way he is standing in front of you like a deer in headlights, an arm half-extended to you because he has no idea what’s happening or how to stop it. And you want to laugh, because you don’t either.

But right now you can’t do anything but cry, head hung and arms around yourself, fridge door still open and groceries dropped on the floor around your feet. Suddenly you’re afraid that if you let go, you may very well fall apart, bodily.

You cry until you feel like there’s nothing left in you, and when you wipe your eyes you find that he’s still standing there. And then you’re wishing that you were still sad because now you’re just angry, and there’s nothing to stop you from scrunching up your face and spitting out a venom-filled where were you? at him.

And you can’t really blame him when, after a pause, he turns on his heel and retreats to his room.

You find yourself once again suffocating in the silence of your house through the evening. You drag yourself to bed early—not bothering to clean yourself or change—and faceplant into the covers. It’s not necessarily your intention to fall asleep, and you don’t even realize you have until a hoarse, sharp cry has you shooting upright from your bed, blinking blearily and trying to sink your fingers deep enough into your consciousness to drag it up to a functioning level.

You sit there for a moment, barely breathing as you strain to hear through the wall. And then you hear a tiny, pained whimper and you are out of your bed and moving out of your room before you can even consider if you really heard it or not.

You do the only thing you can think of, and you hurry to the kitchen to fill up the glass Touya had returned earlier. Water in hand, you walk back down the hallway—slowly, like you’re approaching a feral cat, with a forearm hovering in front of your face to thwart any fearful swats—and stop outside of his door.

“Touya?” you call gently, knocking on the door softly with a knuckle, “I have some water for you.”

There’s no movement behind the door—you expected as much, so you let out a slow breath and take a seat, back leaning up against the door. Part of you wonders if this is okay—if you should just leave it outside of the door for him to pick up after you’ve gone back to bed—but the other part is so tired of this. Tired of tiptoeing around him, tired of pretending that god forsaken elephant in the room that crushes both of you isn’t there. You think you might owe him an apology for earlier, too.

You realize you’d fallen asleep when the sudden absence of the door behind you has you startling. You look up from your spot on the floor, and he’s there in the doorway—blue eyes wide and staring at you like he doesn’t know what to make of this. Doesn’t know what to make of you.

“Sorry,” you say quietly, despite the bitterness you feel, “I just wanted to give y—hey, are you bleeding?”

His eyes move to where yours are now locked on the hand of his that grips the door, and he sucks in a breath when he sees what you are seeing.

A fresh wound over the back of his hand—a tear of the skin over the exact spot his staples used to be, the blood now dripping onto your floor.

Neither of you move, let alone say anything, for a long moment.

You are the first to shatter the silence: “Can I clean that for you?”

His head is down, but you can see him eye you from under his white bangs, carefully mulling it over. It is a painfully long time before you see him nod minutely. You pull yourself to your feet and turn, walking toward the bathroom. You hope he chooses to follow.

You throw open the cabinet under the sink to locate your first aid kit. Luckily, Touya’s care team had sent some supplies with him to care for his skin, but you’re not sure if there’s anything that can be helpful if he needs stitches.

You hear him enter the bathroom behind you, and a wave of something akin to relief washes over you. You hand the glass of water you’re still holding to him, and he takes it from you silently. You gather up the supplies you think will be the most helpful, and you turn to face him.

And you’re immediately a little woozy, because he is still bleeding, a little more than what you’d consider a reasonable amount. It doesn’t seem to bother him, though, and he just stands there, eyeing you. Cautious.

“You—can you sit on the toilet so I can look at it?”

He moves silently after a moment, sitting before you. It is another before he lifts his hand up to you, so slowly, his whole body tense.

“Is it okay if I touch you?”

He hums, short and more of a grunt than anything, and you slowly wrap your fingers around his wrist, turning it to examine the gash.

After cleaning a little bit of the blood away, you realize it’s not as bad as you’d thought. But it does need rinsed out, patched up.

“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” you tell him quietly, unwrapping the sterile wipes from their packages, “but if you think there’s a problem with the grafts, we should call the doctor.”

He’s silent and you continue working, unfolding the towelette and wiping it over the wound, murmuring a small apology for the sting. You’re not sure if he feels nothing or everything—not sure how the nerves in his body react to stimuli anymore—but if he’s in pain, he’s not showing it.

“It’s—not that,” he mutters, and you have to physically restrain yourself from tensing the hand that’s still holding onto him. To hear him speak is so foreign and so devastating that you almost have to block it out to focus on the task at hand. He hesitates, and out of the corner of your eye you see him open his mouth and shut it again, like the words are there but unwilling to come out.

“Okay,” you tell him, pulling a piece of gauze from its wrappings and applying it to the clean wound. You pull another few to add to it, and he finds his voice again. You hope you’re not shaking.

“Happens when I sleep,” he says, so quietly you almost don’t hear him, and he’s turning his head away from you, like he needs to look at anything else to get it out, “the—the dreams.”

You don’t look at him, but you desperately want to. You unwrap the roll of bandages, considering your next words carefully.

“Did you do this to yourself?”

He sighs at that, like you’re the biggest idiot in the world for asking. Like it inconveniences him to have to even hear it. You want to kick yourself, and after a lengthy pause, you wish you hadn’t asked at all.

“Not…on purpose. In my sleep.”

You have no idea what to say to that, and you have the feeling that if you say anything at all you might start crying again and you know that would startle him, so you grit your teeth and nod—almost mechanically—as you wrap the bandage around his hand with as much finality as you can muster. You force yourself not to linger, drawing your fingers back like he burned you. Immediately regretting it when you realize that’s probably what it seemed like to him.

“Should be okay now,” you say, and it’s almost a whisper. Thick with emotion that refuses to leave you be.

“Thanks.”

And it’s so much softer than you think he should ever be, especially now. It’s alien—wrong, you think, bitterly—and you don’t respond because there’s a part of you that is so, so devastated at the fact that up until very recently he’s had no one to tend to his wounds like this. Like he deserves—gently, and with humanity. You wonder if he’ll ever tell you about the dreams.

“Are you—” he starts, and then stalls, and you watch as his hands clench and then unclench in his lap, the fresh bandage straining around his knuckles. You watch the movement and wait for him to continue.

“Are you angry?”

Your eyes snap up to meet his, already searching for you. You see him tense, like it’s too much, but he doesn’t look away, and neither do you. You decide that it’s not fair to either of you to lie, so you tell him the truth.

“Yes,” you whisper, and his face doesn’t change. He doesn’t say anything to that, and you think that maybe it’s for the best, because right now would be just about the worst time for him to suddenly want to unpack your anger. You are bone tired, teetering on some edge that is far too unstable, and you just want to retreat back into your bed and cry it out. So you stand, murmur a quiet good night to him, and you do just that.

You’re not sure how long it is before you’ve wrung yourself out, and you give up on any hope of sleep, pulling yourself up off the mattress with the intent of making sure Touya made it back to his room.

When you walk into the hall, you nearly trip over it—the glass of water from earlier, full again—a white flag at your door, waiting for you.

this fic belongs to me (@b-writes-things). i do not allow anyone to repost, edit, or reproduce this work.

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shadow-bringer-ao3 · 1 year ago

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ripples reach far from a single pebble (she is far from a pebble)

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 sweet promises of not-quite revenge.)

He throws himself into this small family where fire is golden instead of red and his dad 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 painithurtsiwanttodie of abuse.

Kushina shows 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.

Part 3 | Part 5

#nart fic #bnha fic #crossover #touya todoroki #dabi #touya is dabi #kushina uzumaki #minato namizake #kushina x minato #child abuse #fire #burns #au #originally posted on ao3

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