MHA Shorts

Re: Enji Todoroki and his Relation to Subject 01 (Experiments AU: pt. 3)

[MHA Characters are test subjects in a secret, underground lab, because for some unknown reason they were born with strange and mysterious powers. They were all brought there against their will, nineteen because they had powers, and one to see if those powers could be given to, or awakened in a regular person (part four) The circumstances surrounding, and events leading up to Mr. Enji Todoroki's termination.]

The situation regarding Subject 01 and Enji Todoroki, one of the children's trainers, was a sensitive one, complicated and fragile. Dr. Inko Midoriya always made sure to keep a close eye on the two of them and their relationship to ensure that things didn't get messy.

Years before, Enji Todoroki had been an officer in the military, and received a commendation and an honorable discharge at the age of thirty-two, at which time he was able to return home to his wife and son, Toya. Over the next few years, his wife gave birth to two more children, a daughter, Fuyumi, and another son, Natsuo, before Toya died at a young age, trying to re-create a dangerous stunt his father had shown him. Shortly after the death of his eldest, for which Mister Enji blamed himself, he discovered that his wife was once more pregnant.

It is after this point that the story gets jumbled. Mister Enji believed that on January eleventh, his fourth child was stillborn in room three of Rikabari hospital's maternity ward, while Subject 01 was being born alive and healthy in room four, right next door.

It's a tragic coincidence, to be sure, Mister Enji losing both his eldest and youngest sons in a span of less than a year, and it broke him. He was never the same after that. He ignored his own children in favor of taking out his frustrations on the young subjects in the underground lab by giving them vigorous training regimens and no mercy.

His youngest would have been about their age. His youngest would have been exactly Subject 01's age. Subject 01 who looked like the left half of one child welded together with the right half of another—the right half of his stillborn son, who had inherited his wife's albinism. These children were unnatural and inhuman, and their existence alone wrought chaos and misfortune, or so he chose to believe in order to justify his own misplaced aggression to himself.

What actually occurred, however, was not the same as what Mister Enji remembered. His wife had given birth to a perfectly healthy, if odd-looking, baby boy, who was very much alive, and despite his strange appearance, Enji had loved him wholeheartedly. He swaddled the newborn child in blankets and held him, swaying gently, smiling to see how absolutely tiny the infant looked nestled in his huge, muscular arms.

When the child reached out with a right hand scarcely larger than a bottle cap, and tugged on Mister Enji's red beard, the man had chuckled, even as ice crystals formed on the follicles. His baby boy was special, and if that meant other people were afraid of him, or that they would exclude and oppress him as he got older, then he would protect his boy until the sun went cold and hell froze over. At least, that's what he thought.

Then the lab caught wind of the strange child born, and quickly snatched him up, altering the family's memories, making them forget him altogether.

It was a risk, bringing Mister Enji in as one of the children's trainers, but he was the best fit for the position, skilled, powerful, disciplined, and he had come out of retirement to train cadets for the military after the deaths of his sons, so he had experience both with teaching and with children, of which their other trainer had neither. Mister Enji's results spoke for themselves, and so once the subjects were old enough to crawl, he was brought down to the lab along with the other trainer they had chosen, a highly skilled master of martial arts named Shota Aizawa.

Explaining the situation and purpose of the lab to Mister Enji without giving away his relationship to one of the young subjects was not as difficult as Miss Inko had expected it to be. Mister Enji was too deep in his grief and anger to consider the truth to be even a remote possibility. Instead, he focused on driving the twenty small children to their breaking point every day. When Subject 15, Yaoyorozu, was brought down to the lab, Mister Enji was in charge of getting her up to the level of the other subjects, and he did so without a shred of leniency. He always worked the kids to the bone, pushing them past their limits with every training session.