Chapter Text
This was the fight Nagisa was actually looking forward to. He was looking at Shouto as he stood in the ring, his chest rising and falling, mouth hanging open ever so slightly, wearing slight signs of exhaustion in a way that seemed almost out of character. Nagisa appreciated the honesty of it, a thing he found himself more often than not unable to exercise. The tournament itself didn’t really excite him, so contrary to who he was and seemingly just drowning out the aftershocks of the attack at the USJ, but the thought of facing off against Shouto one on one did. They were alike in a number of ways. Nagisa looked away from Shouto and up to the stands where the pro heroes sat, searching for Endeavour’s stony face. He didn’t see his mother’s hysteria reflected in that visage but the cruelty barely hidden beneath the visage was achingly familiar. Nagisa shook his head and looked away. The similarities, the quiet composure painted over everything tumultuous or dangerous inside of them, the parents with grabbing hands and turned backs and forked tongues, the capability, the fear, weren’t what Nagisa was looking forward to. He knew Shouto more than well enough to know that this was going to be fun.
There was a pause in the schedule, a break. He was half-certain it was put there just to build spectator suspense rather than to give the final two students still involved in the first year battle a moment to collect themselves, to relax before everything came to a head. Still, he would take the break when it was given to him. He picked himself up from the stands and though somewhat surprised that she had chosen to, made no attempt to stop Momo from following him. The first thing he wanted to do was get out of the way of all of those eyes, of Present Mic who, though well intentioned, kept chorusing his mother’s name alongside his achievements. Of course, he couldn’t have known quite how loaded that was for him but that did nothing to soften the blow. He was tired of the hero act, ready to slip back into small and unassuming, thriving on his anonymity rather than bolstering himself, grinning at a crowd and shouting victory like a mantra. Plus Ultra. He wasn’t sure he believed in it.
He slipped back into the interior, away from prying eyes, and slid his back down wall barely into the entrance. Momo stopped in front of him, stood strangely in the middle of the space like she didn’t know what to do with herself, didn’t know how to relax. Nagisa slumped further down the wall, let all the tension drop from his shoulders, and looked at her at last. He didn’t say anything, just raised an eyebrow and watched as her awkward sort of stoicism gave way to something more fidgety, less conducted. He realised there was something child-adjacent in how she interacted with the world, like none of it was quite made to fit her and, for the most part, she was ill-adjusted to fit it. She didn’t say anything either so he breathed in, tried to feel how his body reacted, to make sure that there was no lingering ache or pain or exhaustion sitting in his body. He had to be ready for this next fight. Really ready. Because he also had to win, more than ever. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “I don’t think I understand you,” but they had been friends, or at least friend-adjacent, for a while and Nagisa knew that she never had, that it didn’t matter, that it didn’t change what she thought of him in any meaningful way. “You are effective but you are not heroic. And today: I have never seen a person’s quirk develop so much in such a short amount of time,” there may have been jealousy in her voice but it wasn’t something Nagisa would hold against her. “Can you explain yourself?” Nothing about it was demanding, a genuine question of his ability to tell her what was going on instead of a stern prompting for him to divulge every last one of his secrets and leave them all laying at her feet.
He stretched, back popping, and eased himself back to his feet. “I can’t.” He looked at her and she just nodded. “I don’t know either,” it was neither a complete lie nor the real truth; he was hardly the type of person that felt a deep sense of responsibility to complete and constant honesty. There were too many parts of his life that encouraged lying that it wasn’t even second nature, it was just who he was, who he always had been. He was born a liar, he supposed, inherited it from his mother who was doting and cloying and neglectful and abusive in their home but perfectly attentive, a comfortable balance of strict and caring in public. She wasn’t even a liar, just a lie.
Momo didn’t look untrusting of his answer, just displeased with it. “I wish I knew more about you, but Shouto I understand a lot more. I don’t know which one of you will win but I want you to make a show of it,” For Momo, it was an odd thing to say. She was extremely capable herself but she had been eliminated a few rounds before and her social awareness wasn't up to par; he didn’t understand quite why she cared what he did. He expressed as much by cocking his head to the side, cracking his knuckles and raising his eyebrows. “I think we all have something to prove. The more impressive the winners are the better it reflects on the rest of us. You might be the only ones in the ring but you aren’t the only ones who are fighting.” It made sense but he couldn’t help but wonder if that was really all of it, if there was something else going on. Either way, he didn’t push it, just nodded curtly and smiled back. He knew there were some people that couldn’t help but see it as a threat but Momo wasn’t one of them. He didn’t really enjoy that so many people were so scared of him because of his stupid quirk and his stupid bloodlust. Gone were the days of his classmates being nothing but amiable to him, the people around him unable to know any better than to trust him until he wanted to show them otherwise or they said that trigger word. It just so happened to be Katsuki’s go-to threat and that meant that he couldn’t hide what he was. Untrustworthy, villain, assassin. But not to Momo.
“I think we’re both determined enough to win that you don’t have to worry.”
“Good. And good luck, Nagisa. I don’t know if you need it, but it’s there if you want it,” He smiled back. He also didn’t know if he needed luck, necessarily, but he would take it, even if empty sentiment was all it was.
Shouto’s ears rang as Present Mic announced their match. He didn’t hear a word of it. His hands felt stiff, burned with extreme cold that could only be relieved so much by him standing in an empty hallway and heating the air until he started to sweat. It helped, sure, but it wasn’t enough. He knew Nagisa well enough that, before they even began, he knew it didn’t matter quite so much, because there was no way he wouldn’t need to lean on his father’s side of his quirk as well as his mother’s. The thought made his chest hurt which, in turn, made Nagisa’s earlier words swim in his head dizzyingly. What did he want? What did his father want? What was his and what was his father’s and how much did it really matter. He shook his head. It was a break in composure he had to hope would be next to imperceptible for anyone but Nagisa who had this disturbing habit of looking too closely, knowing too much. He knew, though, that it was a trait that Izuku shared and there were enough people watching him standing there waiting for the match to start, that somebody else out there, whether they be at home or in the stadium, had to know too.
Nagisa gave half of his attention to Mic’s announcement so he might be prepared for the start of the match and set the other half on considering his quirk. He couldn’t know what all of the individual agencies saw in him and what they thought of it, or even what each was looking for in a potential recruit, but he could guess he was coming off as powerful and, somehow, the excitement of the event had managed to dull the edge of villainy that normally attached itself to him. The absence of his usual blades was probably aiding him in that pursuit, actually. Shouto wanted to earn the use of all of Nagisa’s quirk in this match, but Nagisa didn’t know if he should use it. Of course he could, but there was only so far he could step into villainy before the spectators turned their backs on him, and he wasn’t sure how willing he was to do that to a friend. Still, Shouto had asked and, so long as Nagisa held back on it, he was sure Shouto was going to keep pushing him to.
He flexed his fingers and met Shouto’s eyes. A knot sat heavily in his stomach but he could ignore it in favour of the buzzing excitement pulsating in his nerves, his fingertips, his heart. Even if he came out of this with horrific burns or frostbite, blood trailing from his nose all down his front, hands shaking, vision going black from the corners, he was determined to enjoy it.
The klaxon sounded and the battle began. They had both had more than enough time to think, to plan, to try to attempt to predict what the other would do. Nagisa was glad he had done as much when he charged to the middle, meeting Shouto half way, all guns blazing. Shouto reached out to him, his palm outwards, finger spread, and right where Nagisa had been there was a burst of bitter cold, a cruel obelisk of ice sprouting from the floor. But Nagisa was nimble, fast-moving, and good at reading people. He had darted out of the way before the localised cold had even been able to make his skin prickle. The cold against the hot air clouded it, slightly obscuring Shouto’s grin. Nagisa wasn’t the only one who was going to have fun with this, then.
Nagisa could do melee, but he didn’t need to be up-close to act. He had only leapt forwards to be able to distance himself from the boundary of the ring. He wanted to always be much further than one step away from an absolute, crushing loss.
He was at a disadvantage, the stadium lights overhead glaring and obnoxious. He shook his head. He’d turn them off again eventually, he was sure of it, but there was a lot of energy involved in maintaining the darkness when the lighting was so stark and white and burning and he knew doing it too early would only lead him to lose, draining his energy all too quickly. For now he had to subsist on shadowy corners, on the pockets of darkness that gathered in near imperceptibility in crevices and cracks about the stadium and the people in it. The most obvious source was the archways leading into the corridors where the waiting rooms were, the sudden conglomeration of shadows so stark against the insistence of the light it seemed almost eerie. He pulled that darkness inwards, stretching it into a simple shape. A tripwire, hair-thin. Shouto stumbled over it, his next blast of ice misfiring away from Nagisa. He returned Shouto’s earlier grin. He couldn’t imagine, in that moment, being Izuku when he had faced off against Katsuki, so sharp, so angry, so willing to maim. He could assume he and Shouto would both come out of this somewhat battered, but that was never the goal, not the point of their battle.
Shouto was barely slowed, his movements fluid and practised. Nagisa wasn’t alone in having thought ahead, Nagisa was only able to trip him because of his stealth, his care, his forethought. It was no wonder that Katsuki had lost when he was so defined by his desperation, his rabid urge to win overpowering rational thought.
Shouto didn’t try to get close this time. Like Nagisa, he didn’t need to. Ice crawled over the floor, climbed over itself and in Nagisa’s direction so fast it was hardly perceptible to the naked eye quite what was happening. It filled Shouto’s vision, that of his scalded eye never quite up to scratch since it had been scarred, until he couldn’t see Nagisa. He didn’t spend even a moment thinking he might have won already. Sure enough, Nagisa landed nimbly on a spike of ice, having sprung up and around that sharp point that had erupted from the floor where he stood. He didn’t stop, sprinting over the surface of ice that could only have been sweating and slippery in the warm space they occupied, not once slowing down or showing signs that he was struggling. Everyone would consider Nagisa nimble, of course, but Shouto was beginning to feel that it was something more, something beyond their normal understanding of superhuman.
He watched for a moment, readying himself for a fight. Nagisa sprung to the side, just out of view, and then suddenly Shouto couldn’t see anything at all. The darkness was so absolute he couldn’t believe the lights had been turned off and nothing else had been affected, it was more than what it had been in the match against Tenya. He held his hands in front of him briefly, testing to see if he could see them. He couldn’t even get a sense of the shape of them. He didn’t have time to ponder anymore, because he was suddenly being tackled, the air knocked out of his lungs. Nagisa didn’t weigh much so it wasn’t as devastating a move as it could have been, but he had been fast-moving, springing himself forwards with reckless abandon and launching Shouto backwards.
He landed heavily on his back, his ribs aching, lungs empty. He coughed and sputtered and realised he didn’t know where he was in the ring anymore, didn’t know how far Nagisa had sent him flying backwards. He could clamber pitifully to his feet and be disqualified for a misstep. He wondered momentarily if there were night vision characters catching this, broadcasting his embarrassment. His father was in the audience; he couldn’t stand to stay sprawled on the floor any longer. He made sure he didn’t move any further backwards as he pulled himself to his feet, finding himself suddenly unable to right himself. A wave pushed him backwards, dark and immense and impossible to overcome, and he fell straight back. Still, a bruised tailbone was not enough to discourage someone like Shouto Todoroki, somebody who needed this so desperately. He just had to think, to do things differently. Afterall, Nagisa was perfectly immersed in his element. Shouto had to figure out how to break it.
It didn’t take him long to realise he had just the way to do that. He knew he’d have to lean on it eventually but he thought maybe he could hold out just a little bit longer. No such luck. He gritted his teeth, revolted as he stretched his hands in front of him and felt the god-awful relief of unleashing his father’s quirk after leaning on his mother’s for so long spread it’s cashmere warmth throughout his chest and across the length of his limbs, settling comfortably into his fingertips, once burning with persistent cold.
He lit a fire, large and burning. And still, its warm light was only able to cast an orange glow over a small perimeter around itself. Nagisa was fighting back then, the darkness chewing at the edges of the light, consuming it. He could imagine reeling amongst the crowd, his father’s self-satisfied smile painted across his face. Shouto had never been able to see himself in it. Small mercies. He could just see it, see that the boundary line was close behind him but he still remained safely on the correct side of it. He flung himself to his feet, eager to continue, to fight for that precious upperhand Nagisa was holding in an elegant grip. The fire should have been burning brighter than it was, stronger. It flickered, weak and sickly. Nagisa was suffocating it then, slowly smothering it. That might just explain why he had let Shouto back up, attention too focused elsewhere in that exact moment.
One of the scariest things about Nagisa was his ability to adapt, how quickly his quirk grew into something else, something newly terrifying and impossible to properly predict with any real accuracy. Shouto could tell, then, that he was figuring something out, learning on the spot how to fight the fire like he did the lights. It wasn’t instant, wasn’t even particularly fast, but the terrifying thing was that it was working at all.
Shouto lit another fire before the first could quite sputter to a sad, smoky death. The first fire died as the next licked at the air like a forked tongue. In the red-tinged glow Shouto could see Nagisa’s white face illuminated, his smile sweet, excited, set in an expression of the determination that twitched in his fingers until Shouto’s next fire, too, was quelled. He didn’t mind that alone so much as he minded that it had been so much faster than the first one. He couldn’t keep stalling, he had to move, to manoeuvre himself and snatch away the advantage, push Nagisa back or force him to give up his grasp on the lights. Even though they weren’t working their electric hum still thrummed at the base of Shouto’s skull.
Another fire, a leap forwards, hands outstretched, crawling ice over the ground, covering as much of the real-estate of the ring as he could in that moment with contrasting but equally unliveable temperatures. Shouto was returned unceremoniously to the ground, his ankles suddenly clapped together, impossible to move. It was a weird feeling, he decided, because he couldn’t feel any sort of binding there to stop him moving even though he knew it was there. It just felt like his body was fighting itself. He reached out both hands, ice and fire springing around him in every direction. It was a desperate move but it also covered the ring in its entirety, leaving nowhere to hide. The light it granted was much greater this time, the golden glow ab, to cut through the darkness but certainly not able to cleave it like the stadium lights. He looked around, bringing himself up to his knees even if he knew it would be foolish to stand because he would only be unstable and immobilised. He had to find Nagisa whilst there was enough light to see by. He wondered why his opponent wasn’t killing it, returning the darkness to its overwhelming absoluteness.
“Thank you,” he heard a soft voice say. He whipped his head around and found Nagisa standing right by his side. He was certain he hadn’t been there a moment before. “For giving me a challenge,”
The air smelled like smoke, thick and heavy. Shouto wondered if they could smell it from the stands. “You aren’t winning,” he announced and, desperately, determinedly, he clenched his left fist and shoved his right as far to the side as he could. Ice grew. He needed it to encompass Nagisa. He needed it to be enough. Only it wasn’t. Because as quickly as he appeared he was gone. Shouto didn’t even know if he was teleporting through the dark as he had against Tenya, though he hoped his breaking of the darkness had made that more difficult, or just running, moving with the marked quickness of somebody who was used to fighting, to running. There it was again, that questionable, off putting experience.
He tried to unclench his left fist, light the middle of the ring on fire and spread it outwards until Nagisa had no choice but to watch himself burn or move to the safe cradle of a well-fought loss, but it wouldn’t move. Shit. More bindings, then. He desperately needed a new plan and now he couldn’t even choose how to use his own power, reduced to just his mother’s, just his ice. Then he wondered if the bindings on his feet were still there. He tried to move, lift a foot and place it ahead of the other. He could. He had no idea how long he had been able to, how long he had been keeping himself still and contained and at so much of a disadvantage when he was completely free to move. That meant he had two options then: he could keep fighting the binding and waste fast-dwindling energy and at least a little of his mental capacity, or he could risk not knowing, keep using abilities and hoping he would be given the opportunity to.
He ran, the fires still burning ever so slightly casting enough light for him to see through. He was almost certain it was lighter than it had been when the fires had burned much bigger and brighter. That could mean he wasn’t the only one fighting exhaustion alongside his opponent, that Nagisa had needed to let up at least a little of his control. It was the darkness he had fought Tenya in, and the fires, dying as they were, could cut through it. It was the first time in a while he was able to see Nagisa properly. The smile had fallen, a look of deep thought instead overtaking his face. His nose was bleeding again, dripping claret to his chin. Maybe it was interesting to know it was just a consequence of the overuse of his quirk instead of a specific consequence for the side of his quirk he still had not been forced to use against Shouto, but he had much more important things to think about. Namely, he had to push back, to force Nagisa to dive into darkness in its more metaphorical sense.
Finally the fires died in full, nothing but smouldering embers that glowed orange but gave no real light to see by. Shouto tried to uncurl his fist but found himself still unable. Almost blind, he had only his ice to rely on. He was sure he could manage it, he had to be.
Achingly, painstakingly, and yet rapidly, he made spires of ice rise one by one. He had to keep them smooth and individual, leave Nagisa with absolutely nothing he could climb even though he moved like no person Shouto had ever seen before. More ice, deadly sharp spikes, a sinister spiral. For the first time, Shouto started to hear heavy breathing, signs of exertion Nagisa couldn’t pretend weren’t happening. It gave Shouto a small spark of satisfaction but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t his much-needed win. More spikes. He must be running out of space now, Nagisa must have been on the edges, the spaces between deadly spikes inaccessible, nowhere to go but out. He was sure it would be just a few more spikes before he won. He strained the muscles of his hand harder than he ever had before, feeling the strain in every part of his being as he made more ice fly skywards.
Until he didn’t. His view of a small figure barely making an impression on the scene of darkness, sprinting in that forest of ice, was suddenly gone, replaced by a face he knew achingly well. His mother’s.
Oh.
She was smiling, a giggle he thought he had forgotten the sound of spilling over parted lips. These features were ones he saw in his own face. And suddenly that was exactly what he was seeing, shrinking, shrinking, until he was young, his scar a wound, his mother’s giggle, something he hadn’t heard in a decade, longer, a sinister backing track. And then that face morphed into his father’s, feature by feature so he could see just where they matched up, just how much of their beings they shared. A face he didn’t recognise, some sort of monster, then a teenager, unfamiliar. A burst of sharp pain across his face that made him want to tear his skin off, familiar. A shock like an explosion, a sting like a slash. An overwhelming onslaught of feelings, of unpleasantness, of so much at once that it overtook him, rendered him incapable of moving or thinking. He was sure he must have fallen because he was suddenly returned to the stadium, surrounded in ice and grazing the line. He must have fallen past it, lost the match for himself. It was silent but he could still hear the ghost of a laugh, a close-up view of a woman’s face painted on the insides of his eyelids. Her eyes were a familiar pale blue, her smile unfamiliar, easily seen though, tightly clenched teeth making it more akin to a grimace. He couldn’t see her body but he had an odd feeling like he was being prodded and poked.
Present Mic was speaking again. He was barely able to comprehend it, catching only “Powerful new generation” from what he knew was a full speech. He was too focused on the woman, on his mother’s laughter. The strange unknowns must have been from Nagisa, a consequence of using this power being that, inadvertently and abstractly, he couldn’t help but share. Shouto shook his head, came back to himself. One person in the crowd started clapping after a prolonged stint of silence--he knew it was Izuku without seeing him--and the rest followed. He wondered what they were all thinking as he flitted his eyes about the ring looking for Nagisa. He found him in a few seconds, a small figure crumpled and vulnerable on his knees, head bowed and cradled in hands that shook so severely even from his distance Shouto could see Nagisa’s thumb bouncing against his temple. His front was painted in claret, no doubt spilling from his nose. That must have started sooner than the final desperate attempt to win, must have just been a side effect of the overuse of any element of his quirk. The crowd didn’t quiet. Shouto wondered if they knew what they were thinking.
Nagisa didn’t look up. Through a weak laugh, so quietly it couldn’t have been intended for anyone but Shouto to hear, he said “I can’t see anything.”