Chapter Text
The Todoroki mansion was filled with laughter.
It was a tender sound - gentle and bubbly and soft - that flowed through the rooms of the house with the tides of conversation. It bounced around open doors and messy bedrooms. It caught under old school portraits and over several pairs of shoes piled by the entrance. It danced across old, traditional Japanese walls and more modern decorations, drifted out over a garden that had never before been so lovingly maintained, and seemed to cling particularly hard to a picture of a young man with red and white hair holding a trophy inscribed with the words Rookie Hero of the Year. The happy melody seemed to paint the whole house in a pleasant glow, warming the halls and the inhabitants inside more than a roaring fire ever could, and though the sound rolled and changed as the evening progressed, it never truly faded. The lively sound simply ebbed this way and that as different voices were highlighted in turn above the constant chatter.
The most frequent voice to rise above the rabble was that of Natsuo Todoroki, recent medical school graduate and up-and-coming doctor at the local hospital. He was the loudest of them all by far, with a laugh as large and boisterous as he was, and his voice echoed from the open living room as he won yet another round of cards in front of a baffled audience. His fiancee sat just to his right on the couch, small mouse ears just visible where she had dropped her head into her hands and was shaking it from side to side in defeat. Across from them sat Shouto Todoroki and Izuku Midoriya, both frozen comically in expressions of confusion and exasperation as they tried to puzzle out just where they had gone wrong. Shouto’s mouth had pulled into the barest of frowns, hands lying open across his lap, while Midoriya had doubled over, one hand on his chin and his elbow on his knee as he stared intently at the pile of upturned playing cards as though they held all the answers. He hummed quietly and discordantly, breaking through the noise as his eyebrows scrunched in thought, before the quiet sound was again drowned out by Natsuo wheezing and choking on his own breath and laughing in unashamed delight.
The air changed, then, breaking and shifting to make way for a softer sound - a tired sigh from the kitchen just behind the group of troublemakers, tinted with fake exasperation and poorly concealed amusement. Fuyumi Todoroki had to raise her voice quite dramatically to make any headway over her younger brother, and gestured with an open palm as she chided him about “cheating Midoriya.” She scolded Natsuo with a ferocity that only years of teaching at an elementary school could have perfected, but even her yelling couldn’t ruin the mood. Natsuo turned back over the couch, arms digging into the plush back and shit-eating grin firmly in place, and retorted that, “winning all the time doesn’t mean I’m cheating, excuse me - maybe you should come over here and teach Shouto how to play!" Their voices melded together, loud and bright with mellow and sarcastic, and the room shifted again, changing to something more heated and yet more familiar as the siblings got into it. This time, poor Midoriya ended up losing himself in laughter as the taunts grew more and more childish around him.
Fuyumi gasped in mock outrage and went to push Natsuo off the couch with little success as the quietest sound of all slipped into the chaos - it was almost inaudible, diffused and silenced over the area of the room as though it had leaked from the very foundations themselves. Rei Todoroki laughed quietly behind a pale hand, sitting off to the side in a large, light blue sweater and an overstuffed armchair. Her eyes were fixed on the rabble between her middle children, gentle wrinkles pulling to the sides by her temples as she smiled kindly and genuinely, and she was for the most part unobserved, save for a single set of eyes locked tightly on her.
Touya Todoroki was silent.
He stood against the wall in the dead space between the living room and the kitchen, floating on the edges of a scene that he had been invited to and yet felt so distant from. He leant back against the wall with a slouch, shoving his left hand into the pocket of his jeans while the other wrapped loosely around a half-empty and now decidedly lukewarm drink. He kept his eyes focused on his mother as Shouto started to join in on the arguing with his own quiet yet biting remarks, gaze blurring and changing the longer he stared.
She seemed so small in comparison to her surroundings; her modest stature was dwarfed by the armchair she sat in, which itself was dwarfed by the pointlessly high ceilings in the pointlessly large and painfully empty mansion surrounding them. She moved silently, she talked softly, and she laughed like she was afraid of being caught. Dainty to the point of fragility. She was a ghost - complete with the white hair and fair skin - haunting the halls of her own home. She tethered herself to her family and yet constantly relegated herself to the sidelines, and Touya felt like she would blow away and disappear again if he closed his eyes for a moment too long.
Rei smiled and clasped her hands in front of her stomach and glanced to the side, catching Touya out of the corner of her eye. Her smile fell as she caught him staring, the wrinkles around her eyes smoothing out as they softened and she fixed him with a gaze that was all too knowing, and Touya dropped his own eyes to the drink in his hand. He swirled the sad remnants of his matcha around the glass, sending the green liquid splashing gently against the sides. The soft lighting in the room refracted through the cup and glinted off the metal in the hand holding it - even in long sleeves, the edges of his scars were visible, held to his healthy skin with a row of silver staples injected brutally into the back of his hand. It was an inescapable reminder of his suffering that followed him everywhere he looked - on his hands, on his face, in every mirror and street window and muddied reflection. He was a failed experiment twice over. First as the hands of his own genetics, then at the hands of a doctor with too much power and too few morals. Now, he was damaged goods; his body was too messed up and his quirk too volatile to ever have a chance at undoing the damage and looking normal, though oh how the doctors tried. In the end, it was decided that it was safer to leave the grotesque vents and modifications that Ujiko had created, fearing that replacing and rejoining the damaged skin would cause him to burn alive from the inside out.
And so, he remained a monster.
Touya huffed under his breath and took a swig of his drink with a grimace. His mother wasn’t the only ghost here.
Oftentimes, he wondered if the others could hear it - Rei could, he was nearly certain, but the rest of his siblings seemed unaffected. Unaffected by the way their laughter bounced and warped around the poorly painted-over dents in the wall. Unaffected by the way their footsteps grew louder and heavier over the floorboards that still creaked. Unaffected by the way the now long abandoned training room remained cold and silent no matter how kind and inviting the rest of the house was. They never seemed to hear the way their voices shifted and changed as they stepped over the threshold leading to the back of the house, never listened closely enough to hear how old screams and sobs still called out from where they were trapped in reconstructed walls, or how the flames that had torn through and destroyed half of the house that night still flickered in the shadows on the ricepaper. Even the quiet crackle of the flames in the living room fireplace felt too loud, and Touya closed his eyes with a sigh. That sound, which brought a sense of comfort and family and relaxation to so many others, would never stop sounding sinister to him. He could hear all too clearly the sound of the wood charring and flaking away under the oppressive heat of the fire, could smell the acrid and bitter tang of the ash, and could see the way the colors warped from red to orange to yellow even behind his eyelids. The casual destruction resonated with the blaze trapped under his own skin, calling out to its poorly restrained sister within him, and shed light on memories he would rather leave buried under that wave of familiar and inescapable blue.
The scar tissue across his face twinged in sympathetic pain, stinging and suddenly feeling too tight across the staples that held it in place, and Touya forced his eyes open.
Oftentimes it felt like he was going insane. Other people called it growth, he knew - always chattered on about how good it was that their family was finally healing, how wonderful it was to see them finally moving on. But to him, it just felt like forgetting. To see the rest of his family so blissfully happy while he was permanently unable to escape the scars of his past - both physically and mentally - felt like a slap in the face. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he was forced to talk about himself to psychiatrists in stuffy offices, he felt like he was unable to move forward. Family dinners and new trim didn’t fix the rotten foundations that plagued the Todoroki name and legacy, but it felt like he was the only one that could see it.
He swallowed uncomfortably and bit the inside of his cheek until it started to hurt. He knew that he was being unfair - after everything his siblings had suffered at the hands of their father, he could hardly begrudge them their happiness now, but still… It was always worse here; his own self loathing and dark thoughts seemed to reflect perfectly off the walls of the Todoroki mansion, refracting and multiplying until he felt buried by the crushing weight of his own past.
He pulled the corner of his lip into his mouth absentmindedly, continuing to bite down until the faintest hint of copper hit his tongue. Maybe he just didn’t belong here anymore - if he truly was the only one still hung up on their father, perhaps it was better that he didn’t infringe on the rest of his family’s optimism. Maybe Touya Todoroki really did die that day so many years ago, and whatever was left of him now was just holding his family back.
A cold hand appeared over the lip of his glass, just barely brushing his fingers and startling him from his thoughts with a jolt, and he lifted his eyes to the smiling face of his brother. Natsuo was smirking at him as though he was laughing internally about having snuck up on him so successfully, but his eyes were gentle, and serious, matched by the single unobtrusive point of contact between them. Natsuo tilted his head to the side, looking poignantly at him with a silent and now familiar question and a quiet reassurance. Touya dropped his eyes for a moment with another sigh, before he looked back up and nodded once, lips pulling up into the shadow of a smile. Natsuo returned the expression with a much more genuine smile of his own, and then dropped his hand away from Touya’s before pointing at his half-empty glass.
“You want a drink? Brought some fancy beers just for tonight,” Natsuo asked, and Touya sucked in a low, deep breath as he brought himself back to reality.
He glanced down at his drink as he spoke, and shrugged. “Nah, I’m not trying to get wasted,” he answered dryly, and Natsuo chuckled as he turned and moved past him into the kitchen.
“You sure?” Natsuo called back over his shoulder, smirk visible even on the sliver of his face the Touya could see, and he resisted the urge to sigh again as he let his head fall back against the wall. “That’s not the Touya I know,” Natsuo continued, pulling open the door to the refrigerator and starting to fish around inside, and Touya rolled his eyes.
Some shuffling sounded from behind Touya as people moved around in the living room, before a bright, feminine voice cut above the noise. “Hey, Nat? Can you grab me one, too?” Touya’s eyes darted to the side towards the noise, but he didn’t bother to turn around - Natsuo’s girlfriend, now fiancee, Hana, had been coming around long enough to now fit in seamlessly with the rest of the family.
“Yeah, I got it!” Natuso called back, straightening up from the fridge with two drinks in hand and knocking the refrigerator door shut with his hip. He glanced back towards the living room obliviously with big eyes and a wide smile he was surely unaware of, and Touya’s eyebrows jumped up of their own accord at the sappy expression. Natsuo was horribly, stupidly in love, and was still staring back at his fiancee even though Touya could hear that she had fallen back into conversation with Fuyumi. Touya would make fun of him for it if he were only a fraction less tired.
But then again - he smirked, absentmindedly spinning his own wedding ring along his finger within his pocket - maybe he wasn’t one to talk.
Natsuo reappeared by his side, two beers now cracked open in his hands and staring off towards the living room with that same content expression, and Dabi tilted his head back to follow his gaze. Hana and Fuyumi were leaning comfortably against the back of the couch as they chatted idly - Hana laughing and Fuyumi gesturing as her face twisted into a theatrical sort of frown - while Shouto and Midoriya gathered up the cards strewn across the coffee table and the floor. Rei ended up helping as well, bending down to grab a queen of hearts that had slid its way under her chair, and as she handed the offending card to her youngest son, Touya felt the corner of his mouth twitch up into a smile.
“Hey, would you ever be willing to pierce my ears?” Natsuo’s voice pulled Touya’s attention away from the living room, and his eyebrows pulled down in confusion as he turned to face his brother.
“...What?” Touya retorted after a too long pause, but Natsuo only smiled, and gestured to his ears with the bottle in his right hand.
“You heard me,” Natsuo replied. “Would you pierce my ears? I think it’d look cool,” he finished, smile morphing distinctly into something more devious, and Touya rolled his eyes and scoffed. He pointedly turned his head away from Natsuo, pretending to be suddenly engrossed in whatever Fuyumi was talking about some feet away, only for Natsuo to immediately elbow him in the side in retaliation.
“Come on, can’t I take advantage of the fact that we have a professional piercer in the family now?” Natsuo continued unabashed, and Touya, unamused, glared halfheartedly at him from the corner of his eye. “And you’d get to hurt me, which I’m sure you’d enjoy.”
Touya huffed and hid the beginning of a smile behind another sip of tea. “You’re 25, Natsuo, you can pierce your ears if you want to,” he replied dryly, and recrossed one ankle over the other, the frayed edges of his jeans briefly tangling together as his shoes scuffed across the hardwood.
He felt Natsuo’s posture shift into something even more needling beside him, relying on that uncanny sense that all older siblings seemed to have, and fought down a preemptive sigh. “Awwww,” Natsuo cooed mockingly, jabbing him in the arm with a chilled beer bottle, “but with you, I get a family discount, right?”
“Ugh.” One of Touya’s eyebrows quirked up towards his hairline of its own accord as he turned back to face the irritatingly smug expression across from him. “Who told you that?” he asked, and Natsuo tilted his head to the side towards him with an even cockier smile.
“My favorite brother?” Natsuo replied sweetly, grey doe eyes wide and innocent until Touya planted an open palm in the center of his face and shoved him away, sparking another loud laugh from the center of Natsuo’s chest.
“You can fuck off,” Touya grumbled with a smile, and Natsuo’s laughter grew louder even as he wiped at his face with the back of one of his hands.
“You love me.”
“I could never.”
Natsuo eventually settled down with a muttered ‘yeah, yeah, sure,’ under his breath, and Touya busied himself with taking another sip of his disappointingly warm drink. Their brief outburst seemed to have drawn the attention of the room, and Touya dipped his head when he noticed the sudden weight of everyone’s focus on him, leaning further into the shadows on the wall and slowly blending back into the scenery. Beside him, Hana appeared with a quiet swish of her dress and a smile on her lips, and he watched as she chided Natsuo for getting sidetracked on his way back with their drinks. Natsuo blushed as she reached forward to snag the bottle out of his hand, a subtle pink poking easily through pale white skin, and he reached for her seemingly subconsciously as she danced away back towards the living room where Shouto had begun to argue quietly with Fuyumi.
Touya shook his head as Natsuo rubbed the back of his neck, goofy grin back in full force. At least the idiot had gotten around to proposing.
The front door slammed violently against the hallway wall.
The crack of the heavy collision jolted Touya from his happy musings, sloshing the remainder of his drink over the back of his hand as adrenaline startled through his limbs. The liquid stung as it came into contact with the open scarring, and he cursed at the unexpected burst of pain, heart tripping over itself in his chest while the sound of the front door banging shut reverberated around his ribcage. As he shook the offending droplets from his unsteady hand, he let his eyes dart up towards the shadowed doorway in the center of the room, and forced himself to stare up at that emptiness until he could force his shuddering lungs to inhale normally.
He blinked, crushing his eyes closed for a second longer than normal.
He wasn’t here. He was never coming back.
Touya sighed as his gaze dropped to his now empty drink and macha stained hand, before deciding fuck it and scrubbing the remaining moisture into the dark fabric of his jeans, hoping that for once luck would be on his side and he wouldn’t wake up with an infection tomorrow. The seam burned and itched, discomfort already seeping past the skin and deeper into the muscle where chronically inflamed nerves sprung to life, and he grimaced at the loss of what had been an unusually good pain day. He could feel his mother’s eyes on him, but he refused to look up and meet them. Instead, he turned back towards the kitchen and let his eyes rove slowly and longingly over the countertops. He was beginning to regret turning down Natsuo’s drink offer now, consequences be damned, and he frowned as his hand throbbed and his fingers itched for all the things he shouldn’t have. He shrugged off the wall, but only managed to take a single step towards the kitchen before the hurried patter of tiny shoes on the wooden floor interrupted him, and he turned just in time to see Natsuo throw his hands up in the air and cheer with excessive excitement.
A familiar head of wavy, strawberry blonde hair just visible around Natsuo’s legs rounded the hallway corner in a flash. It slid across the slick floor and careened dangerously towards the far wall before it righted itself, darting out towards the common area, and Touya’s shoulders loosened and slid down from where they had unconsciously pinched around his ears. There was the sound of high pitched giggling, and a ‘hey, high five!’ from his brother, and Touya set his glass down on the table as the raucous drew ever closer. He crouched down and opened his arms, just in time for his little menace to catch sight of him.
“Dad!” His daughter bounded over to him, weaving around Natsuo’s feet and skidding to a stop just in front of him, hair wild and eyes wilder. Her long-sleeved, flowy t-shirt had been blown up to expose a hint of her stomach and the top of her soft pink shorts, and her braids had come undone, but she seemed to notice none of this. “See? I told you, less than five minutes!” She said and bounced on her feet once, smile stretching to fill out red, windburned cheeks and squishing up the black eye markings and golden eyes she had inherited from her other father. “That’s even faster than last time!”
Touya smiled in return and tilted his head to the side, reaching out to mindlessly pull a knot loose from the very ends of her hair. “I’m glad you enjoyed your flight, kiddo,” he said quietly as Takara pushed his hand away with a short-lived pout.
“Next time I bet we’ll do it in under four! Papa says I’ve been getting braver so he can fly faster, and I know he’s been working on his speed too, and oh! Papa -” Takara looked quickly side to side, before leaning in closer to him and whispering in his ear “- Papa let me pick out some strawberry mochi, too,” she mumbled loudly, and then leaned back to grin at him mischievously, hands twisting together at the bottom of her frilly shirt.
Touya raised his eyebrows. “Did he, now?” he muttered, and looked up over her head just as the man in question finally entered the room. Keigo was in the middle of pushing his flight goggles up and into his hair, his feathers floating around him at various heights as they carried a couple of grocery bags, and he smiled as Fuyumi came to intercept him at the threshold. When she reached him, he straightened up with a mock two finger salute and snapped his wings against his back, muttering something along the lines of, ‘mission completed successfully, ma’am,’ with a conviction only undermined by the grin he didn’t bother to smother. Touya could feel Fuyumi roll her eyes at Keigo, and then she smacked him across his bicep with a slap that was clearly more noise than pain, but Keigo clutched his arm and doubled over with a gasp anyway. Unbothered by his antics, his feathers whisked away and set the items Fuyumi had requested softly along the kitchen countertops, Keigo dabbing away fake tears all the while.
Touya finally managed to catch Keigo’s eyes just as an errant feather pried open the freezer door and not-so-subtly crammed a small, light pink box amongst the other desserts already inside. Touya sighed. His husband, however, only grinned, and the small genuine smile he had been wearing upon arriving from his errand morphed in a flash into something more crooked. Keigo slid both hands into the front pockets on his jeans and shrugged, sending a ripple of petulant motion through both his shoulders and the expanse of his wings, and nodded his head down towards the little girl in between them. He tacked on his best puppy eyes for good measure, and Touya glared back in return.
As if that would work.
It did work, of course, but he and Keigo would both pretend that he wasn’t so spineless when it came to spoiling his daughter for both their sakes.
“Hey, hey, Dad,” a high pitched voice interrupted Touya’s silent conversation, and his eyes drifted back towards Takara, who was now fidgeting impatiently with his sleeve. “Can I go play with Uncle Izuku? He promised that we could race when I got home and I wanna show him what I’ve been working on!”
Touya smiled and looked over towards the man in question, currently checking his phone as Shouto peered over his shoulder, and nodded. “Yeah, sure, just be careful, okay?” Touya responded, and though he was sure Takara had not bothered to listen past, ‘yeah’, he wasn’t too concerned. The new Symbol of Peace and his hero prodigy boyfriend (god, Shouto had grown up fast) should be able to keep his daughter from tripping and scraping her knee, else he was going to have some very strong words with whoever had given them their hero licenses.
Touya stood from his crouched position on the floor with a groan and stretched his arms over his head as his daughter darted out into the garden, pursued avidly by Midoriya and much more lazily by Shouto. As he turned to watch her dash across the damp grass and carefully manicured flower beds, he felt a mass of feathers drag gently across the back of his shirt, and he hummed under his breath as Keigo stepped up next him. Keigo leaned his head against his shoulder as their daughter shrieked in delight, and Touya glanced down at him, daring to exchange the happy sight in front of him for the gorgeous sight just beside him. The evening sunlight drifting in through the glass door dappled Keigo’s face in hills and valleys of warmth, catching and illuminating the flecks of gold in his eyes and in his hair in between the shifting shadows of the tree leaves. The ever changing light blurred out the few imperfections there were and erased the hardships of his life, muting the thin white scar across his jawbone, the thicker scar through his eyebrow, and softening his cheeks, until he became the very picture of an angel in Touya’s mind’s eye. Keigo smiled as Izuku hefted Takara into the air and spun her around, and the affection that radiated from his eyes made it feel like the sun itself was bleeding into Touya where Keigo was pressed against him.
And for a moment, the weight of his scars didn’t feel so heavy.
He felt Keigo slide his hand into his, and Keigo squeezed around his knuckles, just below the scar tissue line. “Sorry about the door, by the way,” Keigo murmured quietly, eyes still tracking their daughter as she danced and laughed away from her mock pursuers. “She got excited about your little bet and wanted to make sure we made it back in time.”
“It’s fine,” he answered easily, and tipped his head to the side to rest on top of Keigo’s, where the healthy flesh of his cheeks was tickled by his permanently messy hair. They both knew that wasn’t entirely the truth - that there are some things that would never truly be fine, but things were better, and that was all that mattered.
A squeal of well-kept athletic shoes shuffling across the hardwood just behind him shook Touya from his worrying and signalled Natsuo’s imminent return, and he felt a resigned kind of smile tug at his lips in spite of himself. He felt Keigo perk up as well, already donning his more lively personality in an instant and with ease, and he wiggled his head free from under Touya’s own to turn and greet Natsuo.
He felt Keigo’s wings fluff up imperceptibly against his back, and then heard Natsuo whistle cheesily. “Damn, Touya, fraternizing with your parole officer? So scandalous,” Natuso called out shamelessly, and Touya’s resigned smile grew decidedly more pained. He let his head fall back for just a moment to glare at the ceiling, and fixed his eyes on a small black spider he saw spying from the corner, offering it a silent prayer to save him from his own brother.
“That joke still sucks, please, get some new material,” Touya scoffed, dragging his eyes from the ceiling and forcing himself to confront the annoyance behind him, letting go of Keigo’s hand as he did so in order to turn and face his brother more fully. He pivoted on his feet just in time to see his husband use said hand to high-five his shitty brother with a resounding slap!, and he made a mental note to refuse to invite Keigo to their next family dinner as a crash of betrayal and a soft undercurrent of happiness washed over him.
Natsuo raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms over his broad chest in a smug show of pride. “See? Keigo loved it,” he teased, and Touya could feel his husband beam from just beside him at the attention, even though they both knew he was only being used to further Natsuo’s own troublemaking.
“That’s because he’s an idiot and his sense of humor sucks,” Touya hissed back with no hesitation, and he would maintain that the immediate retaliatory wallop of red feathers across his face was entirely worth it, even including the several small, fluffy feathers that got stuck to his lips and managed to make it inside his mouth with no shortage of help from Keigo himself, he was sure.
“If Fuyumi were paying attention she would have loved it, too,” Natsuo continued with a grin, and Touya jumped on the bait. Touya pointed with one finger off towards the woman in question, working pleasantly and obliviously in the kitchen, while his other hand worked to clear his mouth of tiny red feathers.
“You’re insane if you think she would have laughed at your stupid, years-old joke,” Touya griped at him, leaning in and straightening from his usual slouch in a vain effort to close their height difference.
“Am not .”
“Oh yes you are.”
“Fuyumi loves me -”
“You keep telling yourself that, maybe one day it’ll come true -”
“It is true! She told me herself I’m her favorite brother!”
“Psch, that’s bullshit, we both know it’s Shouto - “
Their petty squabble was cut off by an exuberant laugh from Keigo’s wide open mouth, eyes scrunched up and wings shaking with delight, and any annoyance that might have been building under Touya’s skin vanished in an instant. Natsuo shoved lightly at Keigo’s shoulder as his laughter continued with no end in sight, and Keigo whacked him back, and Touya smiled at the easy familiarity and childish antics, only for his expression to suddenly pinch at the corners.
I’m so lucky to be alive right now.
“So, Natsuo, did I miss anything good in the couple of minutes I was out?” Keigo spoke up on the tail end of his laughter and leant back casually against the kitchen table. He rested one taloned hand on the table’s edge and spread both wings ever so slightly as to not drag along the wooden top, and looked up towards Natsuo with an easy expression that Touya slowly felt himself match.
Natsuo shrugged, before his eyes flicked over towards Touya and his face brightened. “I tried to convince Touya to pierce my ears,” he said pointedly, and the tips of Keigo’s wings flicked with excitement.
“Really?” Keigo asked, and turned to face Touya with a stupid grin that made him want to both sigh and laugh. “Are you gonna?”
“No,” Touya said sternly, only to watch Keigo’s shoulders slump in fake and clearly exaggerated disappointment. “No, no, don’t take his side on this,” he continued, trying to dispel the needling arguments he could feel forming behind Keigo’s eyes and speaking more firmly. “He’s not being serious, he’s just being annoying, and if he wants to give himself an infection, he can do that on his own time.”
Natsuo frowned at him with an irritated, ‘hey!’, though he did nothing to disprove Touya’s words. Keigo, on the other hand, seemed to accept his logic immediately and jumped swiftly onto the next topic of conversation, expression shifting back to mischievous happiness as he leaned a shoulder towards Natsuo.
“Did Touya tell you that someone came into his piercing shop asking for an autograph yesterday?” Keigo said conspiratorially, and Natsuo forgot all of his feigned offense in an instant as he turned to Touya with raised eyebrows and a half open mouth.
“What? No, he did not.”
“Mhm, seriously!” Keigo continued, gesturing towards a now exasperated Touya.
“Because it’s stupid - “
“No it’s not, don’t interrupt, Touya,” Natsuo interrupted him, and Touya rolled his eyes with a sigh, gaze drifting back over towards Fuyumi in the kitchen. She was in the midst of cutting up a collection of vegetables she had spread across the counter, a few strands of hair draped down across her face as she appeared to work diligently, but Touya could tell from the unusually sluggish motion of her knife that she was much more interested in their conversation than actually preparing dinner.
“Yeah, two young women came in to get their ears pierced and then asked for Dabi’s autograph when he was done,” Keigo said with a nod of his head towards Touya himself, and began to absentmindedly tap his dulled talons across the table. “He did it, too, though I feel that was more to get them to leave than anything else. I’m just lucky I was already there keeping him company while he worked or I never would have found out!”
Natsuo laughed, smiling from the ends of his unruly hair to the tips of his toes, and then glanced back towards Touya with a smirk as he shoved his hands into his back pockets. “Look at that, man, you’re a real celebrity now.”
Touya exhaled slowly, and allowed his eyes to wander longingly past Natsuo’s smug face to his empty glass still resting on the kitchen table behind him. “I’m not a celebrity, don’t say that shit,” he deadpanned, and wondered not for the first time how Natsuo managed to be so boundlessly and obnoxiously energetic, before chalking it up to middle child syndrome. “This was a one time thing, I can promise you that.”
“Nah, you’re a celebrity, Dabi!” Keigo cheered at him, and sprung forward off the table with a flutter of his wings and a wide sweeping gesture with his arms. “You’re already married to me, remember?” he chuckled smugly, and tilted his head back to smirk up at Touya as he crowded into his space, and pressed a finger against his chest as he continued.
“Besides! They could make a soap opera out of you -” Keigo dragged his finger up along Touya’s sternum before catching it under his chin, and Touya’s eyes darted away just long enough to catch Natsuo fake gagging behind him - Mad supervillain falls for the darling hero turned unwilling spy? Rejects evil and turns on his fellow villains, taking down the greatest threat of modern times, the League of Villains, all in the name of love? Risks his own neck in order to expose corruption in the government, and! - ” Keigo dropped his voice and his mouth into a fake gasp, and Dabi brought his hands to rest lightly against his waist “ - behind closed doors in the home of the number one hero? Who wouldn’t want to hear more about that?”
Keigo’s voice faded into a murmur with his last words and a shudder of his feathers, and Touya let his forehead rest against Keigo’s own, appreciating the smile on his husband’s face reserved just for him. “Darling hero, hm?” he mumbled as Keigo brought his own arms up around his shoulders. “Guess I couldn’t save you from your own ego, what a shame.”
Keigo trilled low in his throat in place of a huff, throwing his weight to the side to force Touya to sway back and forth with him, and Touya went with a chuckle and only a token show of reluctance. Around them, he could hear Natsuo and Fuyumi starting to argue about one of her students, could hear Hana’s giggles as she drifted in from the living room, and could feel the calm, reassuring presence of his mother as she watched her children from the sidelines. He knew, too, that if he turned his head slightly to the left, he would be able to see his daughter and his youngest brother racing across the grass, egged on by a green haired hero that he actually believed in. He let his eyes drift closed as Keigo danced to his own silent melody, and pulled the other man more tightly against his chest as he let himself enjoy the peace of the moment for once.
“Regardless,” he whispered quietly to Keigo, “we both know that’s not really what happened.” Keigo hummed, and ran his hands along the tops of Touya’s shoulders.
“Maybe,” he agreed with a tilt of his head, “but they don’t need to know that, do they? Much better for your image that they don’t know the whole truth.” In this instance, they meant not only the two women in the shop that had come to ask after Dabi, but also the heroes, the civilians, and even the rest of his family. What had actually occurred on that day that Dabi had chosen to betray the League to win his own freedom was a closely guarded secret - known only to himself, Keigo, and a group of misfits living under fake names at the outskirts of the city.
Touya felt Keigo still and pull away, and he opened his eyes in time to see Keigo’s relaxed expression - a face he only ever wore around Touya and their daughter - shift back into his favorite teasing mask. “Guess you’ll just have to put up with being famous, hm?”
Touya chuckled, and pinched at Keigo’s sides. “Too late to choose prison instead?”
“Mmm,” Keigo hummed, and glanced away to look outside. “I think our little Taka would miss you too much.”
Touya followed Keigo’s eyes, watching as Shouto created a slide out of ice in a single motion, and Takara clambered onto it without hesitation, shoes slipping along the surface as she squealed.
“Damn,” he whispered, all too fondly.