Blue Madness (Touya/Dabi x Reader)

V. Why do I exist?

Four years later

The years had gone by and I hadn't seen them pass.

Now ten years old, I had better control of my healing Quirk, and my stamina had practically tripled since the last few years. The same routine had ruled my life all this time; I went to school, trained several times a day and still went to Sekoto Peak to heal Touya's burns when he trained on the sly.

He still had an unbreakable will, and he still longed to become the hero who would one day surpass All Might. However, as time had gone by, I had come to realize, with infinite sadness, that his father might have been right about one thing: he might never fully control his Quirk. Strangely enough, no matter how hard Touya trained, he still got burned as much as he had on his first day. True, his flames had gained in intensity and given off a monstrous heat, but it was still at the cost of too many wounds, which were becoming more and more serious. He could create tiny sparks as well as raging fires, he could aim at the smallest targets with uncommon precision and he could even multiply his flames at will! But he still cruelly injured himself. With all the hours of training he'd put in, Touya would normally have tolerated the high temperature of his flames a little more, but... no. It was beyond comprehension.

At the age of eleven, Touya was still small and frail for a boy of his age. Moreover, his hair was now almost entirely white. Only a few red spikes were still present in his hair. I wondered: did this mean he should have had an ice Quirk like his mother, like Fuyumi and like little Natsuo? It was really strange... Besides, a few weeks earlier, on January 11 to be precise, Mrs. Rei had given birth to another little boy called Shouto. I hadn't had a chance to see him yet, but Fuyumi had told me that her parents had finally succeeded in having a "perfect" child according to Enji's high standards. Indeed, the baby's main physical feature, which had enabled them to assert this from his very first moments of life, was that he was born with red hair on one side, and white on the other. This showed, they said, that he must have both their Quirks inside him. Touya had been born with red hair and a fire Quirk, but the older he got, the whiter his hair became... It may have been a far-fetched theory, but it was the only explanation I could come up with.

Obviously, I had never told my friend about my speculations concerning his Quirk, as I didn't want to fuel the anger he was beginning to feel. Indeed, for all his good will, Touya was increasingly giving in to the frustration of not succeeding. He was less patient, he spoke even less than before and I sometimes caught him clenching his fists and mumbling incomprehensible things, but he continued to train with the strength of despair. He wanted to succeed. He wanted to be his father's pride and joy...

In fact, I had never been able to bring myself to discourage my friend from giving up his greatest dream, despite all the years that had passed. Instead, I would tirelessly encourage him to continue. In any case, Enji was already doing enough to demoralize his son by continuing to insult him on a daily basis. For some time now, he had been refusing to train him at all, without telling him why. Furthermore, since he had begun to suspect that Touya was training in secret, he had even dared to forbid him to use his Quirk! However, his tyrannical orders had had the opposite effect: Touya's determination had only become more fierce, and he was still training just as hard, if not harder. So, since the previous autumn, we no longer went to Sekoto Peak twice a week, but every day. And I had to add that seeing Touya so often, in addition to all the unfailing support I gave him, had finally deepened our friendship. Touya Todoroki was now one of my best friends.

Also, over the last few years, my visits to the Todoroki's had become rarer. I still went to their house sometimes, but I always made sure Enji was away before accepting invitations from Fuyumi or Touya, and that's why I hadn't yet met little Shouto. I was still far too afraid of their father to dare cross paths with him and, as I got older, I'd come to understand that what he was doing to Mrs. Rei was very, very wrong. Perhaps I hadn't yet grasped all the aspects of the scenes I'd witnessed, but I wasn't so innocent any more and I knew enough to realize that the only thing to do would have been to go to the police. However, my friends had made me promise many times to keep their family's situation a secret. They too were too afraid of Enji to dare report him... After all, their father was still the second most popular superhero in Japan, and his status gave him a certain notoriety within the community. Maybe the police wouldn't even have believed us if we'd told them everything...