Suicidal Todoroki x Midoriya | What it Means to Love

13 | Love Cannot End Every War

Shoto Todoroki

"We apologize for the extreme delay!" Midnight announces on the stage, gripping the microphone in her hands. "But without any further adieu, we present the final game of the sports festival! This will be a one-on-one challenge where the winner of the battle progresses to fight the corresponding competitor who wins their battle. The losers will...well, lose. The final round will decide the grand champion of the sports festival. Here are your matchups!" Across the LED screen behind Midnight displays all of our names and who we will be facing off against.

First up is Midoriya versus Shinsou. Both of them walk down to the center of the playing field, where a platform lies to mark the inbounds of the vicinity of the playing field. Midnight explains that if either opponent is knocked out of bounds or is immobilized, then they are defeated and thereby disqualified.

The match after Midoriya's is me versus Sero. Assuming I win the match, I will advance and hopefully clash with Midoriya. Although he is my lover, the person who reached out to me and pulled me onto shore in the nick of time twice, someone who is still teaching me to feel again in his own ways, and the color in my life, I refuse to allow that to hinder my performance. I know that he has some form of connection with All Might, which only adds fuel to the fire as a desire for me to beat him.

I am sorry, Izuku, but as thankful as I am for your exemplary efforts to aid me, I must, unfortunately, submit that to the flames for now. I watch as Midoriya impulsively charges in at Shinsou, only to be paralyzed with blank eyes. Love cannot end every war. Right now...love will only serve to hinder your performance, Shoto. Midoriya begins to walk towards the thick white line on his half of the court that marks out of bounds. Lest it never return to me, so too will I follow. I will prove that Mom's quirk is everything I need and all I will ever need. Even if this is only half of my power, then so be it. Midoriya stands just before the white line that will disqualify him the instant he steps over it. I never needed you to create me. Now that I've been created, I will revolt to return what is rightfully mine...even though it is impossible to recover what has already been lost. Lost in thought, Midoriya stands at the edge of the line, soon snapping his fingers to force himself awake from his trance. And there is nothing you can do to stop me. He runs back into the safety of the court with relief splattered across his stupefied countenance before he begins to silently spar with Shinsou.

"Deku-kun's got this in the bag!" Uraraka exclaims, raising a fast fist into the air. Her hair jumps up with her in a curving arc of brown.

Knowing the match will soon conclude once a proper verdict is reached, I walk off from the stands to the waiting room for the tournament's contestants. On my way, however, I encounter the big bad wolf himself—also known as my father.

"You're in my way," I mutter, attempting to simply ignore him and move on.

My father continues intentionally to stand in my way, cutting away the light that was once hanging over my body. "Perish your foolish behavior, Shoto." The same damn words fall out of your mouth every time I converse with you. "This rebellion needs to end."

"Tch. As I said, I will win with only Mom's quirk. I do not need your half-assed answers and lies." I shove past him and continue walking as if he never had been standing there in the first place.

"Your mother's quirk will only get you so far. You are naïve. Perhaps you can scrape by with only her quirk now, but there will come a time when even that quirk is not enough." Stay your filthy, malicious tongue. You would do well to ascertain your very existence before it is no longer.

"Why did you have to marry him?" I ask my mother as she walks into the living room to see me staring at the TV that's turned off with an ominous black screen. "Why did you agree?"