Arranged marriage with Hero!Touya but he stubbornly refuses to acknowledge your wedding or basically your whole existence.
Untll he walks in your shared room and see you crying and something in him just BREAKS. What was he doing? He didn't want to be like his father and hurt you like Enji had hurt Rei but was ignoring you really the best way to do it?
Then he started doing little things, a jab here and there, asking you to eat more, glaring at Enji every time he said anything negative about you even if it's barely noticeable.
And that's the story of how he went from a neglectful husband to an unbearable prick who have made it's his life mission to annoy the shit outta you.
“ @flamehero_dabi did the honor to visit me and the kids I teach today. They were so happy to see a real hero among them. This was the best afternoon of the month for us! ”
Not at that AU, but white haired Touya is beautiful too! Just in my head she (he) is pro-hero - one who made her father's dream come true (or tried to do this).
Don’t ask why do I think so.
I LOVE the “Dabi is Todoroki Touya” theory, so my headcanon is that Enji put Touya in U.A. even with his weakness since, for him, a good quirk shouldn't be wasted. He went unwingly cause he didn’t want to follow his father’s footsteps, but in U.A he meets Aizawa and a lot of other true, good heroes. He looks up to Eraserhead for being an underground hero, completely out of the spotlight and couldn't care less about the rank bullshit that seemed to be the only thing his father cared. So he (much to his father’s dislike, which is a plus) becomes a underground hero.
He left home as soon as he could, never came back but still calls and meet his siblings outside the house. The one he sees less is Shouto cause Enji barely allows him to leave home.
I’m also pretty sure he would dye his hair in this world too, he hates looking like Endeavor. I’m not sure about the scars, cause we don’t know whether they were made by accident (by himself or by Enji) or on purpose (in order to ride his face), I’m gonna take a guess and say they are accidental (cause his quirk really hurts him), but I headcanon that him as hero could get some kind of support equipment to protect his body, so he has scars from childhood but not as many as Villain!Dabi.
my interpretation of Hero!Touya/Dabi, as per my fic Dragon Head, Snake Tail
patented nerd rambling below the cut
let’s start from the head down! the hair thing.. idk, he’s 22. i’ve never met a 22 year old who could keep their hair dyed consistently, and the stakes are much lower for Touya than they are for Dabi.
the mask i was initially basing on like those protruding jaw/cheekbone masks you see in kabuki theatre, but nothing had the right dragon feel to it. in reading about the color symbolism in kumadori (blue is usually villainous lmao) i saw comparisons with Chinese Opera. while kabuki isn’t descended from chinese opera, the aesthetics of the face-painting share similar approaches to emphasizing expression and alignment. so i flipped through some designs and stumbled across this one, the mouth of which in particular inspired me (well, i say inspired; the mouth is more or less identical in design).
oh fuck i’ve given him an extra piercing. well. that’s canon now
the jacket is sort of a cross between classic biker gear and traditional japanese firefighting coats. the material is hardy, dyed with indigo, and insulated with the aforementioned liquid nitrogren. since Touya is cold-resistant, he can touch it with no ill effects for about as long as Shouto can use only his ice side.
what’s the red u may ask? welllll traditionally hikeshi banten are reversible! and as a reward for trying to parse my bullshit, you get to see the inside of the jacket:
i was going back and forth on the reverse side tbqh. couldn’t decide if i wanted to draw my own or find a pre-existing image. i did find a lovely print of the stage at kiyomizu that i almost went with, but in the end this Daoguang tapestry won me over with its bold colors and beautiful representation of a flaming pearl. since the tapestry is chinese, i had to edit some things, which is why i ultimately decided against putting this on the ref sheet–i feel almost as weird editing this kind of stuff as i would making my own shitty attempt–but it was mostly to naturalize the dragon to japanese depictions of them. like i changed it from the imperial 5 claws to the japanese 3, took out the bats because the pun doesn’t translate (they’re lucky, it’s a whole thing, don’t ask) and then the clouds because they looked weird without the bats. and of course, took it down to one dragon. both for size constraints (it’s not that big a jacket) and because touya’s counterpart is the phoenix
god i didn’t realize how much i had thought about this shit until i started writing it all down. there’s something wrong with me man we’re not even through his torso yet
the necklace looks at a glance to be either a magatama or half of a heart, but it’s actually a stylized red wing, bc i’m not subtle at all
kept the elbow braces from Dabi’s villain costume, bc it makes sense with the backdraft his quirk has exhibited
the bracers have more concentrated cells of liquid nitrogen because his forearms seem particularly vulnerable, particularly the way he wields his quirk hand-first. if the pattern is incidentally similar to someone’s hero shirt, well, that’s none of my business
the claws were a spur of the moment, how-can-i-distinguish-these-as-dragon-scales-and-not-fish decision. there are three because again, japanese dragon. the resemblance to wolverine is unintentional but retrospectively hilarious. the tricky part with those was actually figuring out how he gets them to retract–i didn’t want him to like accidentally hit a button and spear his coffee or some shit. so he can either smack his fists together or slam one into a hard surface. he doesn’t actually use the claws much, since his quirk discourages would-be melee battles, but they sure do look cool
ah, the fire pole thing. another borrowed element of traditional japanese firefighting. he uses it to maneuver in burning areas, not for combat. i wish i could say it was telescoping because i thought “oh, it would be inconvenient to carry” but uh. the reason is much less rational. in journey to the west Sun Wukong got his Ruyi Bang from the Azure Dragon and i was like ‘oh that’d be cool’ lmao. anyway it attaches to that red strap at his hip
the belt buckle! i spent way too long on the belt buckle. it’s kind of his ultimate ‘fuck you’ to Endeavor, tbh. the shape is the same as All Might’s belt buckle (though inverted) and the character inside is… well, you know how Enji’s a narcissistic bastard and put the 炎 from his name on his belt? Since that’s just two fire kanji stacked, this is going for something similar–except the kanji for ice (氷) doesn’t stack. nor does the ice radical. but you know what has the same aesthetic?? the Old Chinese version of the ice radical, 仌! that’s right baby. touya was so psyched to flip off his dad that he resorted to old chinese. yeah. his decision. don’t mind me
the boots are cobbled together combat boots & hiking boots, and are treated with the same material as Endeavor’s. so like theoretically, he could be walking around with hotfeet all the time, but that’d be like, silly. it’s great for kicks though
alright, i think that’s it. god help me. god help you, the reader at home
