Touya and this cat that wouldn't stop following him around. 🍂

I constantly have ideas in my head (all of them being dabihawks related) but the other night a song from my brainless teen years had me thinking, what if Touya & Keigo formed an insanely close bond as teens on the streets. Touya is trans (ftm), and he’s a scrawny little thing who didn’t hit a growth spurt until he was 16/17 (after managing to source testosterone, because despite that being unrealistic, my trans self doesn’t care to make him suffer like we do.) Keigo was always head and shoulders taller than him until that point, so Touya always looked younger, so people perceived him as also being weaker. This doodle was once a “aw, cute lil babies in love” doodle, until my goblin trauma brain graced me with its presence and decided to write a backstory to the picture. I hate it just as much as you will. Also I shouldn’t have to say this but I will: this literally is not and never will be sexual, they’re both 14 in this scenario - it’s literally just angst and comfort.

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“You’re no son of mine.”

The words stung more than Touya could have ever imagined. He’d spent weeks preparing (with Keigo’s help) to go home, to show his father that his quirk wasn’t a handicap, that he was still alive despite extensive scarring. He wasn’t up to the impossible Todoroki standard. He was expected to be some pristine human being, a combination of fire and ice. That happening was a lottery at best, the jackpot prize that nobody seems to win. Keep having children, discard the ones that don’t fit your mould, then drive the one that does to despair. All he’d ever wanted was to be enough, to be accepted, to prove his father wrong. But now he knew that was an impossible task, no matter how strong he’d become, it would never be enough for. Touya’s flames were already as strong as his father’s own quirk, despite him only being 15. If it weren’t for Keigo, he wouldn’t have even made it to that.

Keigo Takami. The only person on Earth that had ever believed in him. Both had been rejects of both their family and the system that was supposed to protect them, but they were deemed “too complex” to handle. They’d been left to their own devices, living in back alleyways since they were 9 years old. They’d been best friends since then, having met within days of being cast aside. They’d been through everything together, and neither ever backed down or walked away when things were hard to handle. More recently though, they’d become more than friends. It started out with Keigo wrapping his wings around the both of them when he held Touya close, to soft kisses buried in his ash-stained hair to comfort him. After a while, every time they made eye contact had begun to fuel something much deeper, a deeper love and trust for one another. While many roll their eyes and laugh in a patronising fashion about the idea of “kids in love”, of teenagers being incapable of caring about one another on a level that the adults reserve only for themselves (and fail to do well enough to keep them out of therapy or divorce courts), the only thing they truly lived for was each other.

Sheltering from the rain, Touya didn’t have chance to break down before Keigo pulled him close, wrapping him up in his wings, caressing his hair as he pressed those comforting soft kisses into it. He hummed quietly, swaying both of them back and forth as he held Touya tighter than ever before. “He might not accept you, but I do. I always have, I always will. Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it. He’ll never deserve you, mi fuego. Not now, not ever.” In that moment, all Touya could do was run everything through his head. Why wasn’t he enough? Why couldn’t he just be accepted like everyone else? Why did he have to be here? But the second Keigo began to speak, he was pulled right out of his own head, back into reality. If he’d never been put out on the streets, he would never have met the boy he was so desperately in love with. He didn’t care what anyone else thought, he had someone who cared about him, who would do anything for him, who did everything he could to protect him. They may have been the same age, but Touya still looked much younger, he hadn’t had the same growth spurt that Keigo had - much to his dismay, as he loved to affectionately point out how small he was.

“If I can’t be enough, then fuck it. I’m not keeping this name, this identity. I don’t want anything to do with him.” Keigo stroked the smaller boy’s hair gently, listening intently to every word. “Oh? Have you thought of another name?” He nodded, his cyan eyes twinkling. “Touya is dead. Call me Dabi.”