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When Natsuo heard the news that his father was dead, he didn’t cry.
He might have blinked once or twice, trying to process, and then he nodded and hung up the call, wondering why he felt so empty.
It apparently happened during a battle at Kamino, the one to save that kid who was kidnapped from UA. Some monster thing got him — Natsuo doesn’t care much for the details. The point was, his father is dead.
His shitty, shitty father. The one who ignored Natsuo’s existence for years because of something as stupid as a quirk. The one that was barely a father at all.
Of all the memories of his childhood, Natsuo’s happiest are always with Fuyumi. Fuyumi, who raised him almost single-handedly after Touya died and Mom… was removed. Natsuo thinks he would cry if Fuyumi died, but he has no need to cry for his father. No reason to shed a single fucking tear.
And yet… he feels a strange sense of loss, like he dropped a puzzle piece somewhere and can’t find it to fill the whole picture. A puzzle piece he barely even notices is missing, but is missing nonetheless, niggling at the back of his mind.
The media is having a field day. Field days, plural. A field week, really. They do this with every hero, but Endeavour was a top hero, so he gets extras. Highlight rolls, long speeches about how great a person he was, lists of statistics. Lots of tears.
Natsuo tunes it out, mostly because the whole thing is stupid. A great man. Heh. Yeah, right. People tend to forget that how people are perceived isn’t indicative at all of who they really are. Every interaction with a person only fills in a part of the picture of who someone is, and a lot of times the picture is painted with incorrect proportions anyway.
A great man.
Natsuo doubts anyone is capable to living up to that title, really. Everyone has their faults, and Endeavour’s was parenting. Being so obsessed with his job that he forgot about his family. Natsuo read something once that said that flaws are just extensions of virtues, and if Endeavour’s virtue was how great of a hero he was, then his flaw was that in order to get there, he had to ignore his son. If Endeavour’s virtue was how driven he was to get to the top, then his flaw was that he couldn’t see anything beyond that.
He must have seen at least something beyond that, though, because a few days after he died, they opened his will. He left them letters. Individual letters. One for Natsuo, three for Mom, one for Shouto, one for Touya, ridiculously enough, and zero for Fuyumi. Natsuo told Fuyumi she could have his when he realized she was upset about not getting one.
Because he hasn’t read his stupid letter and honestly doesn’t think he ever will. What does Father have to say to a kid he ignored anyway? It’s been years since Natsuo has even considered asking Father for help for something, has ever wanted his advice or his love. He gave up with that a long time ago. He doesn’t need Father anymore.
So, no. He doesn’t particularly care that Father’s dead, other than the weird feeling that something’s missing. That’ll go away with time, he’s sure.
He skips the funeral. He’s not even sure he knows where the gravestone is.
—
Of all her strengths, Fuyumi is most proud of her ability to pretend everything’s fine when it’s not. To pretend she is stable and healthy when really she’s falling apart inside. It took a great deal of practice to get there, a great deal of stifling sobs in the kitchen, and a great deal of deep breaths.
That’s one thing she can safely say her father taught her. Maybe the only thing he taught her, although it’s less safe to say that. She doesn’t think he taught it to her intentionally, but she learned regardless.
How to be strong when the world is falling apart.
How to pull together a solid mask when she’s cracking to pieces.
She’s doing it now, actually, at Endeavour’s funeral. She’s reading a speech she wrote, a carefully crafted speech about how great a hero Endeavour was, and how much they’ll miss him. None of it is a lie, mostly because she doesn’t say anything emotionally charged whatsoever. It’s clinical, actually, a list of his accomplishments as a hero, avoiding talking about his accomplishments as a father, and a few anecdotes about smaller events at home she had to rack her brains to remember. When he got her her first pair of glasses. The day Natsuo crashed his bike. The first time Shouto had ice cream.
She keeps it light, and she doesn’t cry.
She thought she would, actually.
But she finds that after all the effort she put into fixing their broken family, she’s angry with Father for dying. It’s rare for Fuyumi to be mad, but she can feel it now. How is she supposed to put their family back together again, if Father’s dead? Like it or not, he was the glue that held them together, the piece of absolute shit that molded all of them into a group. And he’d died before Fuyumi could tie the family together strongly enough that they’d stay together, even after disaster.
She’d given him all she had. Sacrificed her own mental health at times to give him the benefit of the doubt, to help him keep a family he seemed to care so little about.
And he’d just… died.
And that’s fine, because she’s used to being abandoned when she needs help the most. Fuyumi’s learned how to keep everything together alone. She’s learned how to keep herself from falling, to cling to the cracks of the clifface. It’s fine.
Or she’ll say it’s fine, anyway. Pretend it’s fine. Put on her strong mask and hold the family together with the barest tips of her fingers, grip slipping.
When really all she wanted for most of her life was for Father to see her. To see what she was trying to do, and help her with it. To look her in the eye and tell her he was proud of everything she’d become. She wanted to be noticed, and Father never bothered to.
He didn’t bother enough to write her a letter either.
He left everyone in the family a letter except Fuyumi. He left Touya a letter, and neglected to write Fuyumi one. He left Mom three, and Mom doesn’t even live in the house anymore.
It’s like Father forgot Fuyumi was there at all, even after everything she’s done.
After the funeral, she doesn’t visit his grave again.
Not because she doesn’t care— she does— but because there’s nothing there for her to find. No last words of comfort, no glimmer of hope for a happy family, no promises of a better future. No gold stars. No thank yous. No hugs.
Just a gravestone with a name Father barely used anyway.
He never was Todoroki Enji, really. He was always Endeavour.
Fuyumi didn’t love Endeavour. She didn’t want Endeavour in her house. She wanted a father, and since she never had one, she doesn’t visit his grave. There’s no need to mourn something that doesn’t exist.
Or that’s what she tells herself anyway.
—
Enji left Rei three letters with his will.
She hasn’t read them.
All three of them have been sitting on her nightstand since his death, still fully sealed. For some reason, she feels like if she opens them, she’ll fall apart. So she hasn’t opened them, and she won’t open them, and they will remain carefully enclosed on her nightstand until she can bring herself to throw them away.
Rei knows she wasn’t a good mother to her kids.
She’ll never forgive herself for half the mistakes she’s made, and the ones she might be able to purge will take years to recover from.
But she also knows that she was not fully responsible for her own mistakes, that most of them were brought on by a raging man with an unattainable dream. She knows there were days when she could not function because her husband was a hateful comet heading straight for the sun, regardless of who he blew away to get there. She knows many of the mistakes she made were not her fault.
Rei has two regrets.
She regrets marrying Todoroki Enji, even if she didn’t have much of a choice about it. She regrets having his kids. She regrets staying with him after she saw what he did to Touya.
And secondly, she regrets not leaving after she started to see Enji in her children’s faces. She regrets not recognizing her slipping mental health for the danger it was to her family.
Fuyumi has his nose, the flashes of red in her hair like warning signs. Natsuo has his face, his eyebrows, his chin. Shouto has his hair and his blue eyes, on one side anyway.
Touya.
Touya’s eyes… his anger, his stubbornness. Touya was the most difficult for her to be around. She didn’t have the courage to talk to him, to love him like she should have.
Enji was everywhere. In her nightmares, around every corner, waiting in the shadows to start up another argument.
And Rei should have left sooner.
He sent her flowers in the hospital sometimes, and she wondered about him. She was never truly able to understand him, his obsessions. Sometimes it almost felt like he cared, and then that was all ripped away.
Their family was broken. Rei was broken.
And now Enji is dead, and they can stop living in the past. Finally they can stop living for Enji’s goals, and make ones of their own.
It’s almost… relieving.
She goes to Enji’s funeral because she feels like she has to, to send him off, but after that she does her best not to think about him. She doesn’t visit his grave because she’s afraid of the memories that will stir up.
She gets a new apartment, has dinner with Fuyumi once a week, and calls Natsuo whenever he’ll let her. She goes to see Shouto at school, and starts slowly inserting herself in her children’s lives again. She won’t miss anything else because of fear. To make up for her mistakes as a mother, she’ll work extra hard now to make a relationship with her kids.
And slowly, ever so slowly, she starts to forget Enji.
Not forgive — never forgive. But she forgets him, and she forgets pretty blue flowers, and she forgets the letters on her nightstand.
And one day, she throws them away.
—
There are a few things Dabi would like to say to his old man, but mostly he’d just like to kick him in the shins and shove his face into the dirt.
Difficult to do that when the man is already six feet underground, far away from where Dabi can touch him.
He had plans.
He was going to finally make his father see him, and now everything he’d worked for is ruined because the old hero couldn’t endure a little bit of a bashing from a nomu.
Of course, he’ll still carry through with his ideas, make the rest of the family see the monster they made, but it won’t have the same impact anymore. Stupid Todoroki Enji, dying before Dabi was ready.
It seems even in death he left Dabi out. Still didn’t see him, still didn't want anything to do with him. Stupid man.
What’s really pissing him off, though, is the reactions of the populace to it. They’re mourning him, putting his name on a pedestal and saying look, this was a great hero.
The thing about heroes is they’re blinding. People look to the sky to see them, distracted by the pretty lights and flashy costumes, and while they’re looking up, they miss the dirt below them. They see only the costumes, not the terrible people hidden behind the masks.
When villains die, no one mourns them. No one thinks about their achievements. They barely even notice, only to say good riddance.
Endeavour was a villain. He was a villain to Touya. He was an enemy to Dabi. He was a monster in his memories.
Everyone thinks in black or white, and that’s why they see a villain in Dabi and a hero in Endeavour. They don’t look at what they don’t want to see. They put people in little categories and close their eyes to anything that would challenge their labels.
Dabi hates his stupid father.
He thinks about going to his grave to vandalize it, to show people exactly what he thinks about his shitty old man, but he decides to save that until later. He’s too angry now to go see it. And he’s not nearly sappy enough or crazy enough to talk to his dad through six feet of earth. So later, after he’s ruined Shouto, after he’s shown his family what they did to him, then he’ll visit Endeavour’s grave and light the headstone aflame.
Like lighting a candle.
—
Shouto wants to say he doesn’t care.
The words are in his mouth, the very tip of his tongue, but his voice won’t make a sound.
Because he does care.
He cares because he’s angry, and because he’s sad, and because now that his old man is dead he doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore.
Everything. Everything he’s worked for is now pointless. He was created to surpass All Might, but that was his father’s goal, not his. He was working toward it to show his father he could do it, to prove something to him, but now Endeavour is dead and Shouto doesn’t have anyone to prove himself to anymore.
He wants to say he doesn’t care, but he cares a lot, because now that his father is dead, Shouto is lost. Who is he, if not Endeavour’s son?
Midoriya says he doesn’t have to know everything. He says Shouto doesn't have to have all the answers. He volunteers to visit the grave with Shouto, but Shouto doesn’t want to visit the grave. He doesn’t want to look at the stone and see his dad’s name there. He doesn’t want to regret.
He wants to know who he is, and looking for that in his father will get him nowhere.
Which is why he doesn’t understand why he says yes to Midoriya. Why he met his eyes and nodded, saying he’d like that very much, yes. Saying they could visit tomorrow. Saying he’d research what flowers to bring.
And he does, and they leave together, and Shouto stands over the headstone and wonders what on earth possessed him to come here.
There’s nothing for him here.
Nothing, and yet, he’s crying, tears blurring his vision and chin shaking so hard he’s almost worried it’s going to fall off. He clenches his teeth and balls his hands into fists and resist the urge to scream, because of all the things Endeavour taught him, how to understand his own emotions wasn’t one of them.
“It’s okay to be upset,” Midoriya says softly.
“I know,” Shouto answers, glaring at the name carved into the stone. “I know. I just don’t know why I’m upset. I shouldn’t be.”
“I don’t… think you have to know why,” Midoriya says. Shouto looks back to find a frown on his face, a furrow in his brow. “Sometimes things are just sad.”
“I didn’t like him,” Shouto says, turning back to the grave. “He wasn’t a good father.”
“But he was your father. I think that counts for something.”
That’s what it is. Midoriya knows a lot more about things than he lets on, is wiser than he should be.
Shouto never liked his father, never enjoyed spending time with him. But he did love his father, and care about him, and that’s why this hurts regardless of how terrible of a person Endeavour was. Because Shouto loved him, despite everything.
Emotions are weird.
Shouto turns to go, Midoriya falling silently into step beside him. He doesn't know why he came here, and he knows he’s not going to come back.
He doesn’t need his father’s guidance, or his goals, or his empty promises. He doesn’t need him anymore.
Endeavour can remain loved by the populace, but Shouto is putting him behind, abandoning his grave. He has other things to care about now.