tierfallen

Title: secondhand hymns
Fandom: My Hero Academia
Characters: Natsuo, Todofam
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,561
Warnings: "Todofam" is the warning
Summary: Natsuo just wants a chance to try to play the cards he's got.
Author's Note: This one is about how grief is messy and angry and unkind. I think Horikoshi kills it with this in the background, with a light touch that tells us just enough of those stories, but I wanted to explore Natsuo's a little more. This starts shortly after the nomu fight and then continues through roughly chapter 300/recent anime stuff. ♥


secondhand hymns
Natsuo had had an exam the day after his father got into the fight with that thing.

The professor probably would have let him schedule a make-up session.  Everybody is always disgustingly accommodating when they see his last name, out of simple fear of retribution.  He’d be sympathetic if he wasn’t so sick of it.

He feels entitled to take advantage of it sometimes, though—not that much, not that often, not for anything serious.  But the universe owes him that much, right?  The world saddled him with all of this shit—set it all on the scale.  He shouldn’t feel bad about accepting some of the perks.  It wouldn’t make him a better person to stand on principle and push them all away.  If he doesn’t use them, no one else will, and in the long run they’ll help him climb out of this pit.  His father’s money and influence will make it objectively easier for him to reach his goal, and his goal is to compensate for everything that his father wrecked to get there.  It evens out.

So he could have moved the exam.  Fuyumi knows it.  He’s not sure if Shouto does.  Shouto’s still trying to break out of the bubble in a lot of ways.

Fuyumi didn’t say anything, though, when Natsuo used it as an excuse for why he couldn’t go to Kyushu to go see the old man lying in another hospital bed.  Shouto had school, too, obviously.  Fuyumi kept calling the hospital and the doctors and updating the group text all night long, reiterating over and over that their father wasn’t dying, and they were even optimistic about his eye.

But she didn’t go either.

Natsuo had struggled to study.  He hadn’t been able to sleep.  He knows how much blood there is in a person.  He knows how much you can stand to lose.  He’d wondered if that was how Touya had looked, too—incandescent, like a falling star.  He knew which one of them should have died from it.  It’s such a heavy-handed metaphor—ambition as self-sustaining, all-consuming heat.  So obvious.

But their father had come back from the brink like nothing had ever happened.  Like nothing had changed.

When Fuyumi had begged him to come around to the hellhole for dinner, Natsuo had thought it over before he answered.  He’d neatly listed out the pros (ha fucking ha) and cons inside his head.  She could probably use some moral support.  He was curious to see Shouto.  The food would be good.  Based on the horrific power and intelligence they’d seen from that thing, their father had probably saved thousands upon thousands of lives by splattering his own blood across those streets instead.  Purely objectively speaking, that was a positive thing.  That’s what heroes are supposed to do.

It probably never even occurred to Endeavor to wonder what would have happened to them if he’d died.  He’s the type to have a will or something.  He’s the type to think that that’s all there is to it—documents.  Objects.  Accounts.

It was his father’s money paying for the cab, though, so whatever.  Natsuo went.

And he lost his grip.

He’s better at it, everywhere else—better at holding it in.  His father just lit him up on the inside, standing there like a block of wood, like he’s got any right to play stupid when the house still echoes.  When they all remember.

But before Natsuo had walked out—

Just for a second—

His father had looked at him.

Really looked at him.

Like he actually took up space.

Like they’re not just props in his performance of greatness anymore—like they’re not just a backdrop for his power-tripping self-promotion.  Like they’re not just a front to try to prove that there was one thing he could do that All Might couldn’t.

That had made Natsuo angrier than any of the rest of it, and he can’t even figure out why.










Four days later, he logs on to see his exam results.

He bombed it.

He shouldn’t be surprised, let alone disappointed, let alone the rest of it.

It feels like he’s dreaming.

He’s better than this.

He has to be better than this.

He doesn’t fail.

He bangs the lid of his laptop shut so hard that his desk shakes, and then he gets up and slams the knuckles of his clenched right fist into the bedroom doorframe.

He dents it a little.

The pain is fucking unreal, which is what wakes him up.

He knows he’s damn lucky that he just bruised the hell out of his hand instead of breaking it.

He knows he’s lucky about a lot of things.

But he isn’t like this.  He isn’t, and he won’t be.  He will never make someone he loves afraid of him.

Maybe the one good thing he inherited from that fuck is the sheer force of will to refuse to accept any of the other things.

He can’t help thinking that Endeavor would have splintered the wood into shards without getting a scratch on him—would have destroyed it, the way he destroys everything.

He ices his knuckles as the bruises start to bloom, dark red like burn marks before they start to deepen into violet.  He tries to bite back the bitter taste of wondering whether Shouto would have punched through it, too.

Natsuo is the only one with their father’s hands—wide and square and strong.  Shouto has Mom’s.  Long fingers.

But there are a lot of different kinds of power.  Natsuo has seen the way the veins stand out on Shouto’s wrist, seen the loopy texts he sends at two in the morning, either because he’s still up studying or because he just can’t sleep.  They’re driving him into the ground at that fucking school.  They’re carving him into a hero whether he likes it or not.

Natsuo doesn’t know if he hopes that Shouto likes it.  Shouto more or less claims to be doing it for his own reasons—and God knows Natsuo cheered louder than anybody, watching on the little TV in his dorm room as Shouto thrashed opponent after opponent in that awful gladiatorial Sports Festival thing; God knows Natsuo was hoarse the next day from how loud he shouted every time they cut to Endeavor in the stands looking increasingly incensed—but Natsuo can’t take that at face value.  Natsuo knows that it’s wanting that life that’s the poison.  Wanting it is what killed Touya.  He doesn’t want it to take Shouto, too.

It was their father’s fault, like everything else—he handed out the matches.  But Touya was the one who wouldn’t stop playing with fire.

Natuso can’t remember any of it right anymore.  He can’t tell if flashes and flickers of it are memories or dreams—especially the really old ones, when he was so little that he was barely conscious of himself.  Was it better, then?  Less bad?

He’s pretty sure it was, before Shouto was born.  It just figured that he had to come screaming into the world right before Touya’s birthday.

Touya had cried so hard that Natsuo could hear him through the wall, so he’d dragged his duvet over into Touya’s room and curled up with him on his bed, clumsily trying to wrap the blanket around both of their shoulders.  Natsuo had secretly thought that it was cool to have another brother.  Babies were funny-looking and kind of interesting, even if they were unbelievably loud, and now he didn’t have to be the littlest anymore.  But Touya was older than him, and so much smarter, and he was crying like the world was going to end, so Natsuo had kept quiet and kept him company for half the night.

Natsuo has tried to hate Shouto—the experiment gone horribly right, the bright spot that blotted out the rest of them forever.  Natsuo has tried to hate his blue eye and the red half of his hair—and it makes his heart lurch, sometimes, when he glances at a photo too fast, or sees a glimpse of them on the news.  But his instinctive reaction is terror, not revulsion.  He doesn’t know which one it was for Mom, but he guiltily sort of gets it.  In that first second of gut-wrenching startlement, he wants to lash out, too.  He wants to protect himself.  He wants to push it away as hard as he can, no matter who gets hurt.

Maybe there’s some sort of genetic predisposition built into brotherhood, though, because he’s never quite succeeded in hating Shouto, even though he hates every last iota of what Shouto represents.

Touya had tried to put him up to it a lot—Touya had said super weird stuff sometimes, like that Shouto was ‘usurping their rightful place’ even though at that point Shouto was a bobble-headed baby more invested in spitting up on the carpet than anything else.  Natsuo had usually sort of nodded like he agreed just so that the intensity in Touya’s expression would calm down a little bit.  Touya always looked like he was going to vibrate out of his skin when he was all worked up about something like that, and it sucked to see him so upset over something stupid that they couldn’t even do anything about.  Even then, Natsuo had recognized it for what it was, whether or not he’d had the vocabulary to describe it—Touya was angry, but the anger was misdirected.

It wasn’t Shouto’s fault.  None of it was anybody else’s fault.

The ice keeps the swelling down.  Not much to do for the bruises, though, so Natsuo bandages his knuckles and keeps his hands in his pockets for a while so that people won’t ask.










The bruises are fading into yellows and browns and an almost turquoise color that turns his stomach.  He keeps them wrapped up.  He’s lucky he didn’t split the skin.  There won’t be any trace of this in a couple of weeks.  No one will ever know.

Flexing his hand and shifting the bruises reminds him of the card slap game.

They’d been—what?  Six and ten, maybe?  Touya had had a way of going on these wildly obsessive little research binges when he got interested in something, and the YouTube spiral of choice that week had led to him trying to adapt an unsun karuta deck to play Western card games.

There was one particular one he liked where both players dealt cards from their hands, trying to pull a card of a higher rank than the other player, but then any time that both cards happened to match, you could slap your hand down on it to claim them and win all of the other cards underneath.  They’d hidden off in the shed in the back garden, muffling their laughter and shushing each other the whole time, because Mom would say that it was violent, and their father would hound them through the house for wasting time on something childish and unproductive.  They had to keep it from Fuyumi, too—she could be such a tattletale.  All goody-two-shoes all the time.

She only ever ratted them out to Mom, though.  And she only ever did it when it wouldn’t be that big a deal.  He realizes that, now.  She knew even then that they were all in this together.

Natsuo had felt special, though, that Touya had picked him to teach it to and play it with in the first place, even though Touya—bandaged hands notwithstanding—had always smacked the cards so hard that any time that Natsuo was faster, Touya ended up hitting his hand so sharply that it stung.  Sometimes, if they played too long, Natsuo started to feel the bruises, and he’d reach for the doubles a little slower on purpose, but Touya always noticed and yelled at him that he wasn’t playing right, which tended to be worse.

Maybe Touya should have learned from him instead of from Endeavor.  Maybe Touya should have learned how to pull the punches.  Maybe Touya should have learned how to back down.

Maybe he’d still be alive.

Natsuo daydreams about it sometimes—what Touya might be like now.  About hanging out as grownups, playing video games, ordering pizza, texting stupid stuff in the middle of the night, talking crap about the rest of the family like they used to, even though sometimes Natsuo thought Touya was way out of line.  He can see it clearer now.  Touya was always angry, because he was always scared—scared of failing, scared of disappearing, scared of being replaced.  Touya was constantly scrabbling for someone to blame.  He just kept grabbing for every single person except the right one, which meant that the rage never settled in him.  The fury never ebbed.  He was always searching.  Always fighting.  Always burning.

Natsuo wonders what it feels like to be able to let the fire out.










Fuyumi says their father is changing.  She says he’s learning.  She says he’s trying, and they could try, too.

Half of the intervening years—between when Shouto was born and when Touya died—are like a black miasma in Natsuo’s head.  All smoke.  Some of it probably happened.  Some of it’s probably nightmares.  He thinks it was better.  Less bad.  Even then.

Knowing that he’d gotten Touya killed was what really made their father into what he is.  That was what pushed him over the edge once and for all.  Touya had thought that he could do anything, could be anything, could win.  Touya had thought that he was the master of his own little destiny.  If he’d survived it, Touya would have thought that it was his own fault that he’d pushed himself too far past his own limits and paid the price.

Their father knew better.  Their father knew whose fault it was.

That was the turning point.

Fuyumi says their father is changing, even as he keeps pushing Shouto’s head down onto the blood-wet wood of the fucking guillotine.

The fact that he’s had his own head on a bigger one for twenty-five years doesn’t make a difference.










The patchwork freakshow on Natsuo’s phone screen doesn’t look like Touya, except for the eyes.  He doesn’t sound like Touya—voice too much older, too scratchy, too raw.

Except for the cadence.  Except for the way his sentences unfurl, the way his thoughts unravel.  Except for the vengeful bitterness.

Natsuo feels like he’s falling.  Like he’s dreaming.  Like he’s dead.

His thoughts spin—over and over, tumbling on themselves, swirling into muddied turbulence that rushes and splashes and drowns out all the words.  All the questions.  Anything linear, anything logical, anything sane.

He doesn’t know how he gets out of the lecture hall, but he must manage it somehow, because he finds himself leaning against the wall outside, hearing his breaths hitch in the air.  His head swims.  His knuckles throb from how tightly he’s clinging to his phone.

It is Touya.

Dabi is Touya.

Thirty murders.  Thirty human beings.  The hands that smacked his too hard over an improvised card game, that tossed him the ball and ruffled his hair and pinched his arm when he talked about running away from home and taking Shouto with them, how they could totally live on the streets and use Touya’s fire for a carnival show to busk for cash—

His big brother.

His best friend.

Three students push through the double doors, laughing loudly, chattering about the next exam.

Natsuo can’t take his eyes off of the screen.

He has to—

They would tell him.  Wouldn’t they?  If Shouto was dead.  If Endeavor was.  They would tell him.  They have to.  Next of kin.  Next-next-next, maybe.  Fuyumi would tell him.

His knees give out.  He slides—scraping down the wall, bunching up his jacket, sinking to the ground.

He can’t feel his fingers.  His hands are shaking hard enough that he can barely focus on the phone.  His heartbeat is erratic.  His stomach is a roiling, churning, ever-changing knot.  He’s cold—so cold.  He never gets cold.

It occurs to him, hazily, that he’s going into shock.

He makes himself breathe, slowly, carefully.  He lays his phone down in the dirt by his feet.  He folds his arms on his knees and rests his forehead on them and closes his eyes and tries to get a hold of himself.

Touya isn’t dead.

Touya never was.

Of all the impossible fucking things his father has handed them to have to deal with—

He kicks his phone away.

He throws up.

He feels a little less insane after that.

But not much.










He takes the deadline extensions this time.  He doesn’t know what else to do.  He doesn’t feel like he knows much of anything.

He sits on his bed.  He stares at the computer.  He watches the video over and over.

It’s Touya’s smile.  Same as it ever was.  How the fuck did they give it back to him, after all that?

He looks up the list of the dead—Touya’s, and from the battle.  One of Shouto’s teachers got killed.  A dozen other heroes.  People with families, some of them.  Not many.

He sleeps, a little.  As much as he can.  The dreams are a mess of ash and bandages, but they’re better than being awake.

He ignores the calls.  Texts back I just need some space.  Ignores the answers.  The sentences that people send him don’t make sense.

On the second day, there’s a knock at the door of his dorm room.

He knows who it is.  Nobody else on Earth can make it sound urgent and unimposing at the same time.  Nobody else can walk that line.

The front desk always lets her in.  She usually brings them food.  He gets up.  He goes to the door.  He hauls it open.

“Come on,” Fuyumi says.  “I just got clearance.  We need to go.”

He stares at her.  “Where?”

“To the hospital,” Fuyumi says, like he’s an idiot—but he can hear how brittle the briskness is.  How narrowly, how thinly, how desperately she’s holding it together.

He looks her in the eyes and tries to breathe.  “I’m not going.”

She looks right back.  Cold steel.

“Yes,” she says, “you are.”

He steps back, further from the doorway.  She’s not big enough to impose her will the way their father always did.

She doesn’t move.  Somehow that’s almost worse.  Her voice stays level.  He doesn’t know how she’s doing that.  “Mom’s coming.”

Distantly, he recognizes that that’s important—that that’s huge.

Here and now—pinned to the screamingly hollow void inside his ribcage, the impossible weight of the questions rocking back and forth with sufficient force to crack his skull, all he can do is swallow hard and scrape out the words.

“I don’t want to see him.”

Fuyumi hadn’t stopped looking him directly in the eyes.  “I don’t care.”

He tries to think of something—tries to find some shield, some weapon, some reason.  Tries to find anything that doesn’t sound like cowardice.  Like quitting.

“He isn’t going to die,” Natsuo says.  “It wasn’t as bad as the last time.”

“Don’t give me that,” Fuyumi says, so quietly and so mercilessly sharply that he loses the next justification somewhere in the tightness of his throat.  “You don’t know that, and you’d never forgive yourself if you were actually right.  I know you, Natsu.  And I know that if you didn’t care—if you really didn’t care—you wouldn’t waste time being angry.”

He works his jaw—the one he inherited, the one he can’t get rid of, with a bone inside it like the one they found in the cinders, that they thought was the only damn thing left.

Fuyumi’s eyes soften—only slightly, but it loosens up his frozen lungs.

“But you are,” she says.  “That’s your right.  I’m not going to hold that against you, and neither is he.  Shouto’s hurt pretty badly, too, okay?  Come for him.  And for Mom.  The only way we’re going to get through this is together.”  She takes a deep breath, and her shoulders tremble, and she tries to smile.  “Somehow.”

Somehow.

He’s hated his reflection for as long as he’s understood what inheritance means.  He fantasizes about changing his name.  He never asked to be some second-rate side-story celebrity.  He never asked for the cameras on the streets and the side-eyes in the campus halls, for the credit card and the nightmares and the endless, tireless burn of the resentment in his chest.  He never wanted any of this.

What he wanted doesn’t really matter anymore.

Maybe it never did.

He digs for something solid in himself.  The anger feels like steel—like it’s reinforcing his entire skeleton.

This is their father’s fault.  This is his legacy.  This is the outcome of his ambition.

He’s going to have to reckon with it now.

They all are.

Somehow.

Fuyumi nudges her glasses up with the back of her wrist and rubs her eyes.

Natsuo holds his right hand out to her—his father’s hand.  Wide and square and strong.

She takes it.  She holds on tight.

“Fine,” he says.  “Let’s go.”