Fanart Dump

(this is AU after the first few chapters of FLW)

//

It’s only afterwards— months afterwards, that he realizes the full extent of his own stupid actions. 

So many things had to perfectly align in exactly the wrong way for this to happen. But each and every one of them was his own damn fault, so there’s really no one to blame here but himself. 

It had to have happened when Hawks had been sick and recovering in his hotel room, that’s the only way the timing lines up. Gojo has always been good about practicing safe sex— considering how he sleeps around, he sort of has to— and has never slipped up even once… until Hawks. Multiple times, actually, not even counting the time he was sick. There’d also been that time in Palawan, when he hadn’t brought any condoms with him because he’d honestly thought he wouldn’t need them. That had been rather profoundly short sighted of him, in hindsight. And then of course there were the time(s) when Hawks was staying in his hotel room, when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other and once again Gojo hadn’t thought to go out and buy any condoms because he’d genuinely thought he wouldn’t need any. Hawks had been sick! Basically delirious! How was he supposed to know that the moment he’d recovered enough he’d jump him? And on a related note, how was Gojo supposed to summon up enough willpower to stop him? 

To that point— how was Gojo even supposed to know he should stop him?

That too, though, is entirely his fault.

Apparently it’s a regular part of sex-ed during middle school— except Gojo never went to class in middle school, so he’d entirely missed the memo. With the advent of quirks came a rare genetic mutation that allows for male pregnancies among a small subset of the population. Rare, but not entirely unheard of, either. It was certainly common enough for a segment to be taught in public schools, and testing to be done as part of the gamut of health checks most kids go through around puberty. Most kids aside from Gojo, who was out terrorizing organized crime syndicates just for fun at that age. 

Yeah, he’s a fucking idiot. This entire situation was so laughably avoidable, and yet he’d managed to end up in it anyway. 

Anyway so now he’s having an existential meltdown in the middle of his still unfinished bathroom, staring numbly at the flecks of grout still flaking off the new tile, wondering what the fuck he’s supposed to do now.

“Satoruuu,” a voice whines from the other side of the bathroom door. “I need to pee.”

Gojo scrambles to his feet, binning the evidence of all the pregnancy tests and burying it under a cloud of toilet paper just before he wrenches the door open, smile fixed in place. “Sorry Eri-chan! I was spacing out.”

Eri just takes the excuse at face value, bounding into the only current usable bathroom in the house and shutting the door behind her.

Gojo sighs wearily, slumping against the wall just outside the door.

Alright, first on the agenda is finding a temporary residence for them while he gets an army of contractors to fix the worst of the ‘home improvement’ sins he’s committed upon this house as quickly as possible. He’d originally thought redoing the rooms would be a fun bonding activity for him and Eri, but now he knows all those chemicals will be bad for… for the baby, so that’s probably a bad idea now. He’s also going to need this house in livable condition as fast as he can make it happen, because apparently… there’s going to be a baby here in less than six months. 

He’s also going to need a doctor, and a very good and discreet one at that. From what he’s read in his mad frenzy of online searching, male pregnancies are very high risk. He’s not at all worried for himself, seeing as though he can heal from just about anything, but that same protection doesn’t extend to the other person currently taking up roost inside him. He frowns. Or does it? Wouldn’t his reversed-curse technique still work on them when they’re still a parasite leeching off of his body? When exactly does their cursed energy start to deviate from each others to the point he can no longer heal them as an extension of himself? Man, what he wouldn’t give for a conversation with Shoko right now.

He can worry about things like clothes and furniture and baby food after he’s settled the most immediate concerns on his list. Namely, fixing this house and finding a doctor. And telling Eri, although he doubts that will be much of an issue. The girl will be beyond excited to be an older sibling.

Now as for telling his family and telling Hawks…

Gojo winces.

Yeah, okay. It says a lot that he’d rather tell Endeavor, to his face, that he’s getting another grandchild than fessing up to Hawks about carrying his kid. Even the thought of it is going to give him a stress tumor.

Well, stress is bad for babies, right? So maybe he should just table the thought for later. You know, for his health.

At any rate there are a lot of things he could have done differently to stop himself from getting in this situation, and plenty more he could have done to salvage it had he known about it. 

As it stands, mulling in his own regrets isn’t going to help anyone, least of all himself. 

All he can do now is try to find a viable path forward… whatever that may be. 

“All done,” Eri announces as she closes the bathroom door behind her, sounding inordinately proud of herself. “I washed my hands.” 

Gojo huffs out a laugh under his breath. 

She’s so adorably precocious. With the way she quietly longs for a loving home and family, she’ll be ecstatic to hear she’ll get the chance to be an older sister. She already bosses Meow around like he’s a little brother, and has a troop of stuffed animals she often pretends are her baby siblings. Between living with him and starting a life outside of the traumatic confines of the Shie Hassakai, bringing a new kid into the mix will be a lot on a little girl. But Gojo doesn’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing; the change will be good for her, and help her focus on things to look forward to. 

“Good job, Eri-chan.” He reaches down to ruffle her hair. 

It feels sort of silly to praise someone for using the bathroom and washing their hands properly afterwards, but Fuyumi had told him these kinds of habits are good to ingrain at this age. And at least he never had to worry about teaching her how to use the bathroom in the first place.

He internally winces at the thought. 

At almost six years-old, Eri is fairly self-sufficient. She can’t be left alone in the house, and needs supervision for things like bathtubs and cutting up her own food, but he doesn’t have to worry about her accidentally rolling over and suffocating herself, or falling down the stairs and breaking her neck. She can use words to express herself well enough, and for the most part can be trusted to sleep through the night by herself without incident. 

A baby… can’t do any of that. From what little he remembers of Fuyumi and Natsuo’s births, they can’t even lift their own heads up. 

And he remembers what it was like, having those two toddlers running about the house. Rei tried her best, and she even had housekeepers and maids to help her, but more often than not Gojo ended up having to figure out what the hell to do with these strange babbling creatures that kept trying to follow him around entirely on his own. It was definitely a trial by fire. He remembers dragging Fuyumi and Natsuo to the park by himself, trying to push Fuyumi on a swing while Natsuo wanted to climb on his back. Natsuo had ended up falling off his shoulders while he was attempting to keep Fuyumi from jumping off the swing. The two year-old Natsuo had, shockingly enough, brushed the fall off after a few seconds blinking up at Gojo waiting to see his own reaction; seconds in which Gojo had swore his heart stopped. He’d thought he’d accidentally broken his little brother’s neck. 

He’d refused to come out of his room, let alone spend unsupervised time with them, for weeks after that. 

Eventually he’d had to come to the startling realization that the little brats were more resilient than he thought, but he wasn’t liable to forget how easy they were to kill by accident. 

He didn’t do a… completely terrible job with them, in hindsight. 

He tends to forget about that time in his life, before he’d started sleeping out of the house more often than he did in it, before Rei started locking herself in her room for weeks at a time. But he’d been there for it, even if he didn’t have to care for his siblings in the manner he eventually would once both Rei and Endeavor were out of the picture. And despite his best efforts, there were times when a toddler would be thrust at him and he’d had to figure out what the hell to do with them without making them cry. 

But he hadn’t wanted to be put in that situation, and he’s not sure if he wants it now, either. 

He’s all for owning up to his own mistakes, but there’s more at stake here than just his own sense of responsibility.

He looks down at Eri, who’s blinking up at him with a curious expression. 

“Say, Eri-chan, you wanna go on an adventure today?” 

She tilts her head. “Adventure?” 

//

His very first instinct is denial. 

After that comes a surge of fear. He’s not ready for a baby. He’s not even ready for kids, despite the fact he currently has one. He’s never been ready— not in this life, or his last. He’d always shoved the thought out of his mind before it could take root. 

But standing in the backyard of the Todoroki house, he feels a strange sense of peace and inevitably overcome him. 

Sure, this was unexpected, but is he truly as unprepared as he thinks he is? 

Fuyumi is taking advantage of the unseasonably warm afternoon to spread a picnic blanket out by the pond and pull out a bunch of old picture books for Eri. She wants to start a scrapbook for Eri, now that she’s going to be part of the family, and the first step in that is apparently going through all of their old photos. Fuyumi is a little sad to see the box is mostly full of unused materials, and the books themselves are almost entirely untouched, but rallies admirably and decides to use the afternoon as an opportunity to finish them. 

This wasn’t what Gojo had intended when he’d dropped by the house to see her, but they seem to be having such a good time that he can’t bring himself to interrupt them.

He ends up sitting with them and going through the photos, feeling a bit overwhelmed by how nostalgic they make him. 

As much as he’d tried to run away from it all at the time, he’d been just as much of a parental figure in Fuyumi and Natsuo’s lives as their own two parents. Not because he’d wanted to fill that role, but simply because there was no one else. And at the time, it hadn’t seemed like that monumental of a responsibility. Gojo wasn’t alone in raising them; Endeavor could be counted on to fund their lifestyle, and there had been a vast array of staff to help with various household chores. There were some days when the cook had time off, and the messes around the house became too big to wait for the weekly cleaning service, and Gojo would step in to fill the gap, but for the most part he didn’t have to worry about little tasks like that. Their basic needs had always been taken care of, so it was only the more… personal duties that he ended up shouldering. 

They didn’t have staff for things like walks to school and back, or help with homework, or bedtime schedules. If Fuyumi needed help in the morning with her shoelaces, or Natsuo threw a tantrum because his favorite soccer ball was missing, Gojo had been the one to fill the missing parental role. He was the one who bought them all slip-on shoes just to bypass the hassle of shoelaces entirely, and he was the one who took Natsuo on an adventure to the nearest Donki to placate him with a brand new soccer ball and several other toys on top of that whenever he had a tantrum. 

At the time he’d just brushed all that off as the bare minimum an older brother (who was actually mentally a full grown adult) should do for their younger siblings, but looking back on it, that was parenting. 

The amount of meltdowns he had to endure was enough to make him shudder. Rei was never any good with handling those to begin with, growing anxious and frustrated the longer Fuyumi or Natsuo spent crying, and as the years passed she stopped trying to handle them at all. Gojo wasn’t any better at it, at first, but he’d learned through practice when to distract them and when to just let them cry it out. He’d learned a lot of childrearing tricks through pure trial and error; how to get them out the door for school on time without any whining or tears; how to entertain them on rainy afternoons; how to get them to brush their teeth and comb their hair before bed; how to pick out clothes the night before school so they weren’t scrambling around and wasting time in the morning. 

In hindsight, that was probably why he had very few issues with Eri. Aside from her trauma-related meltdown at the toy store, he very rarely had any problems with tantrums. 

Looking back on all the photos of his youth, he actually comes to realize… he’s more experienced and prepared than he’d originally thought. 

At this point in his lifetime(s), he’s technically raised two sets of kids— three, if he wants to count Eri. And each time he’s ended up in this situation, he’s gotten better and better at handling it. Sure, in all three of these situations he’d never asked to be put in the position of a parental figure, but that didn’t make it any less true.

He’s stunned to realize that at this point… he probably wouldn’t be all that awful at fatherhood. A damn sight better than either of his own fathers, at the very least. 

“So, I’m assuming you didn’t come all the way out here to reminisce on old photos,” Fuyumi says, after they’ve distracted Eri in the yard with an old bouncy ball. 

Gojo sighs, scratching at the back of his neck. He supposes he ought to just rip the bandaid off. “No, I didn’t. I actually… had a bit of a favor to ask you.” 

“Of me?” Fuyumi asks, looking rather mystified and perplexed, as if the thought of Gojo needing anything— let alone help from his little sister— was so surreal she could scarcely believe it. 

“Yeah.” 

He really hates to do this, but he can swallow his pride when he needs to. And right now, there’s really only one person he can entrust with this. 

“... Can you call Endeavor here for me?”

//

Truly, this child… Endeavor is never going to meet with him without having heart palpitations, is he?

“So,” Touya claps his hands, grinning brightly at him. “Remember when I said I couldn’t have kids? I lied.”

Endeavor staggers into the seat behind him, wondering if he’s having an out of body experience. This can’t be happening. This is… he cannot comprehend this. 

The strongest villain— and hero— on the planet, with the spotlight firmly fixed on his every move, with so many viciously hungry enemies waiting to tear him down on all sides of the law, is really trying to tell him that—

“You’re pregnant?” He repeats, voice high with disbelief.

“Surprise!” Touya cheers. “I’ve got… I think six more months until I have a baby? Give or take a few?”

“We have to start shopping,” Fuyumi gushes at his side, already looking effusively giddy at the thought. “We have to come up with a theme for the room! Not to mention all the clothes and the toys… let’s do something matching with Eri-chan! That’ll be so cute!”

Endeavor stares at her like she’s grown a second head. She’s taking this news without breaking stride. She actually looks pleased about it. She’s excited. There’s a new addition to the family, and a new child to dote on. A baby, no less. An excruciatingly helpless, tiny, little baby…

Endeavor cannot share in her joy at all.

He’s absolutely, unequivocally, terrified. He doesn’t think he’s been this afraid in his entire life. 

Despite all the chaos he regularly kicks up on a daily basis, Touya is a hard person to worry about. He’s too powerful, too in control of his own abilities and the world around him, to ever truly worry about him, no matter what life or death situation he finds himself in. 

And right now, at what is undoubtedly the most dangerous time in his life— he’s also at his most vulnerable. 

The fact that he’s here, coming to Endeavor at all, means he’s well aware of this fact. 

Endeavor sighs heavily. 

He wants to be happy for his eldest son. In a way, he thinks he is. Touya is an excellent older brother to his younger siblings, and already a wonderful father to Eri. He’ll be a wonderful father to this new child, too. And he doesn’t hate the thought of grandchildren. The thought of them throws him into a bit of an existential panic, but he’s hardly against the idea. If anything it’s a good thing, that his children are growing up and having families of their own, that he hasn’t ruined that for them in the same way he’s ruined so much of their lives… 

But it’s hard to be happy for him when, at his core, he only feels fear. 

Todoroki Enji has always been a creature full of fear. Fear of his angry drunk of a father, fear of being abandoned by his mother, fear of her new husband that was even worse than her first. As he grew, that fear quickly turned to anger, anger into hatred and, finally, into suffering. It’s a cycle that, in hindsight, he’s shocked he hadn’t pushed onto his own children. Torn of any outlet to feel anger towards, all he can feel now is fear. 

“No,” he finds himself saying, abruptly cutting Fuyumi off.

Both his children turn to look at him.

“It’s too dangerous,” he says. “We’ll have an assistant procure the necessities. No one can find out about this.”

“But, dad…” Fuyumi starts to protest.

He shakes his head adamantly. “This is a very dangerous situation, Fuyumi. You may be a private citizen, but you are well known as my daughter. Even that is worrisome, but if anyone was to connect you to Touya…”

Touya tilts his head at him, expression impossible to read. “You think I’ll be putting her in danger?”

“I think you’re putting yourself in danger.” Endeavor shakes his head. “Touya, this is… your situation is already precarious, and for the next few months, you’ll be at your most vulnerable. The media is already hunting for any information they can find on you, to say nothing of law enforcement and the government. You cannot have word of this getting out.”

Touya just raises a brow. “Are you trying to tell me what to do, old man?”

“No!” Endeavor denies, loudly, scared that his eldest will dismiss his concerns out of hand simply because they’re coming from him. 

He knows he’s never had a good relationship with his eldest son. It’s bold of him to assume he ever even had a relationship with him, at all. Touya has never wanted his advice, even as a child. As an adult, he probably wants it even less. 

“No,” he says, softer this time, closing his eyes. “I know I have no right to tell you what to do— just as you have no reason to ever heed my advice. But if I can offer you any bit of wisdom from my own experience having children in the spotlight, let it be this.”

He all but deflates in his seat, opening his eyes. He’s surprised to see Touya isn’t leaping for his throat at the very thought of his worthless father attempting to lecture him in any capacity. But Touya has always surprised him at every turn, so perhaps he shouldn’t be so shocked. If anything, Touya seems rather willing to hear him out, sitting placidly across from him.

He meets that unyielding, crystalline gaze with a solemn expression. “Your mother went to all her prenatal appointments under a false name,” he starts, slowly. “The doctor was aware of her true identity, but I avoided going there in person.”

That was, in truth, both a precaution and a personal choice. He’s ashamed to say he wouldn’t have wanted to go in the first place, and the security the anonymity gave her was simply a convenient excuse. 

“I can vouch for the security of Mustafu General,” he continues. “Almost every hero in the area uses them, and their discretion is top-notch.” 

He rubs warily at his forehead.

If he’d thought having children as the Number Two Hero was a liability, he cannot even fathom what it will be like for Touya. Rei was a civilian, and the secretive nature of their marriage made her easy to slip under the radar. His face and name may have been known unanimously across the country, but hers had not. But Touya was not only in a physically vulnerable position, he was also the one in the spotlight. And if the father is who he thinks it is…

He clears his throat, awkwardly. “May I ask who the father is?”

Fuyumi looks tentatively towards Touya, brow creasing. Touya doesn’t even bat an eyelash as he says, blandly, “No.” 

Endeavor nods. He’d expected that response. Touya has no reason to confide in him. 

“... Touya,” Fuyumi starts, hesitantly. “Do you think it might be… better to tell him?”

Touya shakes his head. “No, I don’t,” he says. He stares Endeavor down in a way that’s rather pointed as he adds, slowly; “I think, for everyone’s sake, it’s best if that’s left to interpretation. Plausible deniability, and all that.”

Endeavor swallows down the dry lump in his throat. 

Yes, Touya is right. It’s best if he doesn’t have definitive confirmation on who the father is. Nonetheless it’s a damning thing to say. Does Touya not trust Hawks? Perhaps. But more than likely, Touya does not trust who Hawks works for. Even now, the HPSC is maintaining a worrying, awful silence when it comes to International Pro Hero Six Eyes. And Endeavor, as a hero licensed under their jurisdiction, is just as beholden to them. If they come asking, for whatever reason, it’s better for everyone if he has nothing to tell them.

“Touya is right,” he agrees, voice grave. “The less people who know the truth, the better. Myself included.”

His siblings are all like 'oh shit wait what' and panic a bit when he tells them this although they try to play it cool, and Shouto is deeply confused because again, as far as he's concerned, they're a perfectly normal family with nothing to hide and no reason to be alarmed that he wants to go to school in Japan, ostensibly where they're from (and also what they speak at home). But Satoru decides he's old enough to know now, so they have this big family intervention where they sit him down and explain they're the runaway kids of Japan's #2 hero, who absolutely fucking sucks, and if Shouto wants to go to U.A. that's fine he's old enough to make his own choices but also like this is something he should know.

So Shouto's honestly just thrown for a loop. His earliest memory is of all of them galavanting in a van in like, New Zealand or something. He has a vague notion of living in Melbourne for a time, so he kind of always thought they were Australian, but it turns out they were just living there for a bit while Satoru sorted out their fake identities and visa situations. He has only a mild crisis about it; mostly he's just curious. Like, why did they end up in Merin county of all places?? So Satoru explains they ended up in California because All Might went to school here and their dad, Endeavor, hates All Might, so they knew he would never upon penalty of death go looking for them here, and then they tried LA but Fuyumi hated the traffic, and also the schools were good up here, and the weather is really nice, so they all kind of decided they may as well stay.

Oh, so his father is alive, a piece of shit, and also hates All Might? This is just further reason for Shouto to idolize All Might. He 100% commits to U.A.

And Satoru's just like, well shit okay if this is what my adorable baby brother whom I have personally raised since babyhood wants to do then I will move heaven and earth to make it happen and make it happen safely, so I guess I'm going back to Japan for a bit.

Shouto applies for U.A., gets in and absolutely clobbers the competition in the entrance exam, because of course Satoru has been training him and all of his siblings since childhood but Shouto is the only one of them who really has the talent for it, and confuses the hell out of the examiners because they'd never once heard of this foreigner in any of the scouting reports and he's easily the best of his class. They look him up and find out he'd just a 'normal' kid from California who's being taken care of by his older brother. All Might is, of course, absolutely delighted to see a Californian in the program and is already partial to him. But everyone else is just plain confused. He has no prior training? His only extracurricular is playing on the school's lacrosse team?? And his brother is... *checks notes* a software salesman??

So now Satoru is back in Japan too, using his cover as Dabi to keep tabs on his little brother and also clean up the country's criminal underground just because he can, and scares the shit out of all the local heroes who start freaking out when an international big name like Dabi starts hanging around the Tokyo area. It's a mad scramble to start keeping tabs on him and trying to figure out what he's doing in Japan - at this point in his villainy career Dabi is the #1 international villain (even more than All For One but only because he's so active) but he usually doesn't hang around in any one country like this.

Shouto has literally no idea the older brother he adores is also the world's greatest villain, and is blissfully unaware of all that drama as he embarks in his own high school drama. He face plants into a crush on Izuku, naturally. Izuku is, like, freaking star struck by him in this universe because he's never met Satoru and hasn't had that boost to his confidence, so attention from someone as cool and handsome as their cute and incredible foreign exchange student gives him literal heart palpitations.

Meanwhile Hawks gets called into the madhouse that is Tokyo, like really who's surprised by this turn of events, and starts getting similar heart palpitations for entirely different reasons. Dabi is insane, his quirk is unparalleled, and there's no hero on this earth who has any hope of stopping him, and he's kind of scared shitless because their quirks are terrible matchups. But also... why is he so flirtatious??? He's downright rude to all the heroes in Japan - and Endeavor especially, who he pranks to no end - but he's always sweet to Hawks and even helps him out from time to time when their goals align. He's also, unfortunately, drop dead gorgeous. And really sweet and funny, once you get to know him.

Idk turning point in this story is probably Kamino, where Satoru again saves All Might but this time solely for Shouto's sake. That's his little brother's idol, and also the guy Endeavor hates the most, so Satoru's just predisposed to like him on principle. And his years as a villain have turned him off to All for One and his whole agenda, so he's happy to square off against him. In this verse, since he has nothing to lose, he just straight up kills him.

Unfortunately in the process of all that he outs himself as Dabi to Shouto, who is predictably distraught, but only for a half second once he realizes that Satoru saved his childhood hero on live TV just for him, and then he gets kind of sappy. He also realizes how much Satoru has done for him - and for all his siblings - starting from when he'd only been a kid himself. He'd only been fourteen or so when he'd faked their deaths and stolen them from Endeavor's abuse, and to give them the life they'd deserved, he's done some unsavory things. Shouto forgives him pretty quickly, although it does sort of force him into a dilemma, what with being a hero in training and all. Satoru, to make it easy on him, takes a deal with Otheon to topple Humarise and become one of their special ops agents and wipe his slate clean, just like in the original fic. The hero world is rather disgruntled about it, but at this point, what can they even say? Dabi killed AFO, the most dangerous villain in history, and now took down the worst human trafficking cult in existence.

Anyway they work it all out, Hawks and Satoru get together and so do Shouto and Izuku, Endeavor probably finds out they're his kids somehow but it's way too late to make amends, and idk Satoru starts No Scrubs because he just has to in any universe he's in, and that's all I'm going to write for now because I'm in an overwater bungalow in Fiji and a bird keeps trying to eat my food off my plate and my champagne is going flat so I'm going to get back to that 😂