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Toya Todoroki was supposed to be marching to death.
Slowly, yes, but inexorably. There was no skin left on his flesh and precious little flesh still clinging to his charred bones. The expansion and contraction of his lungs, visible in a heat-haze of blue, had crackled and groaned like the movement of glaciers. Tongueless, lipless, he muttered with smoke and embers rising from the glow of his open throat even as he was removed from the battlefield. The ghastly remains of a failed cremation, and no more. They placed him in the mechanism knowing that it would be an elaborate tomb, doing no more than drawing out the inevitable. It was for the best, of course. After everything, it was a relief.
Within a week, eyes had grown back into his hollow sockets.
He could speak for five minutes a day before his agitation and temperature began to rise to the point of concern. They did not open the machine—it was only a slow march to death after all; it was only postponing the inevitable, for his father more than any other reason; some sense of gratitude that nonetheless left the staff with a faintly grimy sort of guilt and shame when the man came or went—but with Endeavor (with Enji Todoroki) coming to see him every day it was impossible to miss the the slow clarification of his voice as his throat closed beneath the metal. On the second week, the nurse supervising a visit nearly jumped out of his skin when Toya popped his tongue, as fresh and pink as an infant's between the naked rictus of his teeth, against the roof of his mouth in distaste before pointing out that none of them had actually asked him if he wanted to see his old man this often.
There was flesh pressing up in the spaces around his eyes where there had been none before, pressing and discoloring against the metal that had been meant to sustain him only long enough for Todoroki's terrible penance but which, it became increasingly clear, was actually the only thing containing him.
He did want to see his old man that often, as it turned out,
(and when it had been suggested that his father did not strictly need to continue his daily visits Toya's temperature had risen so far so fast the metal had begun to hiss and pop and glow, the fluid lines had begun to steam, and was it containing him, really? Or was it as empty a reassurance as the knowledge that he marched to death?)
perhaps because he had no other visitors as much as anything. Five minutes became ten, became fifteen, became thirty, became Toya mumbling and nattering, endlessly, to any staff who passed through the room in sight of his fixed stare through the glass. Even when his eyelids grew back and he could blink again, the mechanism offered him no motion of the head or neck, keeping his cone of vision mercifully narrow. He wasn't angry at having no visitors, he would assure them. Well, that he understood everyone must be too busy rebuilding to come gawk any more at a morbid tourist attraction like him. No one had explained to him how everything had ended but he hadn't needed anyone to tell him which side won.
He didn't ask after anyone in particular, not of the staff and not of his father. Maybe he didn't care and maybe he didn't want to know.
Toya Todoroki's eyes glowed from the metal mask, a hot bright blue in his tomb behind the glass. Like All Might and All For One in their last stands, a terrible wasted god wrapped in dark machinery (an engine of someone else's penance) , marching towards inevitable death. He would not live to the end of the month. He could hardly have been called still alive when he was brought in.
When they asked his father about his plans for his son's inevitable passing, Enji Todoroki stared at them with hot bright blue eyes in the shadows of his bandages. He said nothing the first time, or the second, or the fifth, or the tenth as days went by; simply stared for a moment, jaw grim, before turning his powered chair and rolling away.
A month passed.
“There are no funeral arrangements in hell,” he finally told them.
Toya Todoroki continued to march towards recovery.