This is... a fanfic of a fanfic !
Wrote this for @lumilasi‘s writing contest. They write really great fics, and nearly all of them are among my favorites in the Shigaraki fandom, so I’m really happy to write about one of them.
Featuring Crossroads!Tomura + Dabi and Izuku.
(Not beta’ed so I apologize for any mistakes.)
Being the heir of a villain lord’s empire was surprisingly very little time-consuming, especially if the position was half-heartedly embraced, as it was the case with Tomura. Not that he minded: it left him all the time in the world to spend time at his favourite bar, hang out with Dabi, and stalk his newly-acquired little brother. Of course, there was the occasional mishaps from his underlings he had to fix, or other villains interested in him, but otherwise, he had a lot of downtimes.
It was during one of those long afternoons he spent at Dabi’s place, lazily lying on the couch and cushioned by his personal heater, that he got a phone call from Izuku. It was a bit unusual since the green-haired boy always asked first by text if Tomura wasn’t busy and if they could talk, but maybe he got overexcited about something, like he often tended to do, or it was an emergency.
With that in mind, Tomura answered the call quickly.
“Hi, Tomura… Are you free right now?”
Tomura looked back at Dabi, who was half-falling asleep on his shoulder, lulled by the background sound of the television.
“I’m not doing much,” he answered with a little smirk.
“Then, could you pop by my room? You know, with your teleportation quirk,” Izuku said, relief clear in his voice, before hesitating for a bit. “I have something I would like to show you.”
Tomura frowned at the request and straightened against Dabi, carelessly disturbing him and waking him up.
His relationship with Izuku had always been peculiar: they were brothers, but also hero and villain, and as such, they didn’t really meet up like ordinary people. Their interactions consisted mostly on late-night texting, with Izuku wanting to know more about his brother and Tomura teasing him about his crush on the Todoroki boy.
So why would Izuku ask to see him now?
“Who’s that?” Dabi mumbled behind him, but Tomura hushed him, gesturing to him to go back to dozing off.
“You want me to come to your house?” Tomura wanted to check.
Izuku gave him an affirmative hum, then seemed to realize something. “Ah, but don’t worry, it’s not a trap or anything, I swear.”
Tomura snorted, because he never thought that. He knew Izuku by now, and anyway, he would have sensed it if there was any kind of foul play. “I know, but still, why?” he insisted.
Izuku let out a nervous chuckle. “Can’t you just come and I’ll tell you? It’s kind of a surprise.”
Now Tomura was getting really curious about this. “Alright, but you better not waste my time.”
He hung up the phone halfway through Izuku’s protest that it wasn’t going to take long, and extracted himself from Dabi’s embrace. He was only wearing boxers and a t-shirt, and while last time it didn’t prevent him from showing unannounced in Izuku’s room, this time he had time to put on some pants.
Before teleporting, he checked back on Dabi, but the fire-user seemed still a bit drowsy, so Tomura let him be. They’d stayed up late, after all.
When he appeared in Izuku’s room, the boy was sitting on his bed. He startled at his brother’s sudden arrival, but otherwise smiled at him with genuine warmth.
“Hey,” Tomura nodded to him, and took the chair from Izuku’s desk to sit in front of him. “Everything’s okay?”
“I’m fine. Mom’s fine too. Everything’s fine.”
The boy seemed clearly nervous to Tomura, but not in a bad, angsty way. It was just how Izuku was.
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Ah, yeah… You see,” Izuku cleared his throat, clearly having no idea how to begin to say what he wanted to say. “At first, I didn’t really know what to choose, because we don’t know each other that well yet, and of course some things were obvious, but too obvious to be really meaningful so it wouldn’t do. So I asked All Might, because despite everything that happened between you two he is good advices and know you a little, well, at least more than anyone else I could turn to, and so we managed to figure something out.”
Tomura held back a bit of annoyance at the mention of the former number one hero, because even if it was still a sore spot, he had decided that he was done caring about it. Instead, he sighed at the lack of clarity in Izuku’s speech and interrupted him before he could go further. “I didn’t get a single thing you just said, so shut up and get to the point.”
The green-haired boy opened and closed his mouth, apparently confused by the contradictory demands, but then he just smiled and reached toward his nightstand. He opened the drawer, and suddenly Tomura got a sense of foreboding.
Sure enough, what his little brother retrieved from the drawer was a present, clumsily wrapped in a package that was fortunately not All-Might related.
“Happy birthday, Tomura,” Izuku grinned, looking so happy it could have been his own birthday and not Tomura’s.
So that’s what it was all about.
“How did you know it was today?” Tomura asked with a frown, not making a move to take the gift even though Izuku held it out for him.
The hero-in-training smiled sheepishly and rubbed the back of his head. “I asked Touya-san. But don’t be mad at him! I was really persistent.”
Tomura sighed, making a note to himself that he needed to annoy Dabi latter in retaliation for this huge betrayal. “Why?”
“Why were you interested in my birthday?”
A bit of sadness flashed on Izuku’s face, but was quickly replaced by determination. “Because that’s what families do. They celebrate each other birthday because they are happy to have each other. I know that we’re not the most conventional of family, but you’re still very important to me. Besides, you got me something for mine, so even if you weren’t my big brother, I would have gifted you something back, it’s only polite,” Izuku ended in a mutter.
The kid’s cheek were red, but he was looking at Tomura with earnest eyes and the part-time villain couldn’t help but be a bit moved, even if he wanted to argue that the gift he got Izuku (a t-shirt with written ‘Don’t mess with me, my big brother is an edgy villain overlord’ that Izuku obviously couldn’t wear) had been nothing more than a joke, and not anywhere near as well-thought as Izuku’s gift seemed to be now that his first rant had more context.
“Come on,” Izuku whined. “Open it!”
He was obviously excited, even if a little nervous around the edge, so Tomura gave in and took the package.
It wasn’t that he was against celebrating his own birthday. It was more the fact that he never did. Not when he was with his father, not when All for One took him in, and not even when he got his independence. He had told Dabi once, on a drunken night at the bar, because they were talking about their zodiac signs, but he really hadn’t expected the fire-user to remember it.
Slowly, he weighted the present, but couldn’t figure out what it was. He was tempted to just decay the wrapping, but he didn’t want to accidentally destroy what was inside, so he carefully tore it apart. He found himself with a little wooden box and he opened it to find a pair of gloves inside.
Not any gloves: they were Nana’s.
“Where did you find that?” he asked Izuku, bewildered. The last time he saw them was quite some time ago, since they had been taken along with all his belongings when the heroes raided his place.
“All Might gave them to me. We thought that maybe you would want them back.”
Tomura slightly nodded, looking at the gloves. They were as he remembered: yellow and of medium size, worn and even bloody in places.
The silence stretched for a while, and Izuku fidgeted a bit. “So…” he cleared his throat. “They must have some meaning to you, obviously, since she was your grandma but… All Might and I were kind of wondering how you got them.”
“It was one of All for One’s trophies,” Tomura recalled, and Izuku raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“He kept trophies? That’s so sick…”
Tomura hummed, agreeing. It was indeed sick to keep reminders of the people you killed to gloat. However, he hadn’t realised what it really was when he found All for One’s collection the first time around. He was barely nine, and sneaky through things he wasn’t supposed to. But when his mentor died, nothing prevented from going through his things again and that’s when he realised whom the gloves belonged to.
“Ever since I found out about her, I’ve been mad at Nana for abandoning her son to become my fucked-up dad, and yours as well, but I wanted to keep the gloves as a reminder of what could have been,” Tomura explained to Izuku. “I considered wearing them but I would have had to cut one or two fingers so I decided against it.”
“She was a great hero, and she would have made a great grandma,” Izuku nodded with a tiny smile. “Ever since I was little, it has always been my mom and me, so I would have liked to have her around.”
Tomura thought it best not to mention that if Nana had lived and decided to raise her son correctly, Izuku probably wouldn’t have been born.
“Anyway, thank you, I guess,” he smiled a little, ruffling his brother’s green hair with four fingers. “I didn’t really think about them much, but it doesn’t hurt to have them around. Won’t you and All Might get in trouble for stealing evidence?”
Izuku frowned. “All Might told me he used his influence.”
“Right, he totally stole them,” Tomura deadpanned. “Not very heroic, in my books.”
“Well, he is retired, and it doesn’t hurt anybody, so stop criticizing,” Izuku pouted a bit, making Tomura laugh.
They chatted for a bit about mundane things, before Izuku remembered something and went downstairs to give Tomura some of the cake his mom made for him when Izuku told her it was Tomura’s birthday. It was good, and the villain took some for Dabi as well.
When he teleported back to the apartment, the wooden box in one hand and a plate in the other, Dabi wasn’t on the couch anymore. Since he could sense him in the bedroom, he guessed that the fire-user had relocated his sleeping activities on the bed. Tomura himself was feeling a bit tired, so he set down what he was carrying in the living room and made his way to the bedroom.
“You awake?” he whispered while approaching the bed.
The sheets rustled a bit and he saw Dabi’s peeking from under them. He was squinting, since Tomura had the delicacy to turn on the light.
“I was,” Dabi grumbled, but he made an inviting gesture, showing that he wasn’t really mad.
Tomura took off some layers then slipped next to him. “I heard you’ve been naughty,” he whispered to his boyfriend’s ear.
That made Dabi laugh. “Is it about the birthday thing? You never told me it was a big secret, so I’ve done nothing wrong. In fact, I would even say I’ve helped,” he said with a confident grin that Tomura wiped off his face with a kiss.
“Well,” Tomura mussed. “I got a gift and a cake, so it’s not that bad I guess.”
They kissed some more, before Dabi propped himself on one elbow, towering a bit over the other man. “Want another gift?” he raised an eyebrow suggestively.
Tomura snorted. “So original.” He added an eyeroll.
Dabi flicked him on the forehead. “Don’t be a brat and let me treat you nicely. Happy birthday, babe.”
Tomura gave him a flat look and opened his arms.
In earlier chapters of Crossroads you have this scene with All Might finding Nana’s gloves in Tomura’s things, and I was wondering what was up with that, so I made up this thing.
