Chapter Text
Shoto first found Two Tails Cat Café when Endeavor dragged him along for a day’s patrol. That fine day, some villains had the misfortune of attempting a robbery along the flame hero’s route. It hadn’t taken long to subdue the robbers, but Endeavor was stuck talking to police while Shoto waited outside. Rather than stand idle, Shoto decided to explore this less familiar part of town.
At the nearest cross street, he saw it: a sign with a pair of cats adorning it, a large black cat with thick fur and tufted ears and a smaller, sleeker calico sitting beside each other with their heads turned to touch noses. Their tails curled to form a heart behind them. Shoto wasn’t very familiar with cats, but he thought the images were well made, if the heart made of tails seemed a touch unrealistic. He read the actual kanji of the sign and raised an eyebrow. Huh, he didn’t know there was a cat café around here.
That was as much thought as he could give it before Endeavor bellowed for him to follow once more.
He occasionally passed Two Tails on subsequent “patrols” but never spared it more than a glance. He passed it a few more times on his own when his mind and body were wound too tight to stay in the suffocating silence of Endeavor’s home. He’d long since found the section of the moss-covered garden wall with hand and footholds melted into it by another Todoroki who was prone to sneaking out.
Shoto thought it fitting he remembered his brother in such small rebellions.
He never went far on his outings for fear of being missed, but walking—being away—helped him clear his head and settle his nerves enough to rest when he returned. He never went in anywhere, just walked a random circuit of the streets on that side of town. More than once, he found himself slowing or pausing in front of the cat café’s front window to watch the furry inhabitants. Or would they count as employees?
There was often a cat or two sitting in the window watching him back, most often an odd black and white cat. (The oddness came in even the black hairs having white at their root.) They’d stare at each other with their odd-colored eyes, Shoto’s blue and grey meeting the cat’s blue and yellow. The cat usually lost their staring contest, blinking slowly at him through the glass. The loss never seemed to bother the feline, and Shoto never gloated.
This routine changed one late evening when Shoto’s walk was rudely interrupted by a rainstorm. He hadn’t brought an umbrella. Hadn’t even thought to check the weather on his phone before leaving.
(If only physically removing himself as quickly as possible from Endeavor and his most recent training session could banish the man’s voice from Shoto’s head. “You’ll never reach you full potential without your fire, Shoto!” He hadn’t been able to stomach dinner at all, though that might have just been the bruises across his abdomen rather than Endeavor’s presence.)
He picked up his pace, mentally cursing himself. Getting back over the wall was going to be a challenge with how slick the mossy stones got when wet. At least the rain should cover the sound if he slipped and fell.
The street had emptied out within minutes of the rain starting, leaving Shoto to race through the storm alone besides the occasional car or lit storefront. It was getting late enough that even those dwindled. Between one moment and the next, the tolerable rainstorm became an unrelenting deluge. Shoto ducked under the first lit awning he could reach, glaring briefly up at the now pitch-black sky as he hunched over to relieve the ache in his abdomen and ribs. The sky flashed white as lightning arced between clouds overhead. After graciously accepting he wasn’t going to win this staring contest, Shoto turned his eyes to the storefront behind him.
He blinked in surprise when he saw three cats, answering the question of which establishment he’d taken shelter by. The usual unusual black and white was there plus a small yellow and grey cat and an equally small off-white cat with pale grey at its face, paws, and tail. The two smaller cats (when did they stop being kittens?) stared up at him, but the black and white stared up at the sky with rapt attention. Shoto spared the more familiar cat a glance before eyeing the cats studying him. The grey-faced cat blinked once at him before glancing to the side.
Shoto followed the cat’s gaze and saw the door with the hanging sign showing the cat café was still open. He looked back at the cats. The cats looked at him. Lightning cracked the sky, and the resultant boom rattled the window glass.
For the first time, he went in.
He blinked and tilted his head when he found a second door immediately past the first. There was a sign taped to it reading, “Please wait to open this door until the other door is closed and the light turns green. Some of the cats fancy themselves escape artists.” A glance up showed a red light above the door attached to what Shoto would bet was a magnetic lock. Turning around, he noted an identical sign on the outside door facing inward and another indicator light and lock. Smart.
By this point, both doors were closed, so Shoto checked the light above the internal door—now green—and entered the café proper, grimacing as the AC immediately chilled him and his sopping clothes.
“Welcome to—oh.” The voice pulled Shoto’s attention to a door across the room where a man nearly as imposing as Endeavor, but with black hair and a distinct absence of fire, stood. The man was eyeing Shoto and the puddle swiftly growing under him with a frown. “Don’t move. I’ll get a towel.” The man disappeared back through the far door.
Shoto remained where he stood and examined the main space for lack of anything better to do. There was a counter with the menu and register to the left. A dozen tables were spaced around the rest of the room, interspersed with cat-sized play structures. The walls were busier with climbing shelves, baskets, hammocks, and other structures he didn’t know a name for leading to a literal catwalk overhead that extended in a mirror of the walkways left unobstructed on the ground. Shoto supposed that would minimize the risk of hair falling into peoples’ food and drink.
Counting the three cats in the window, there were a total of eight visible, though two that he knew from previous window visits were absent. Or perhaps hiding? There were a number of cubby holes or box structures that he couldn’t see inside of from where he stood. He knew some animals disliked storms. Hiding seemed a reasonable reaction.
That wasn’t too different from what he was doing by coming in here.
The man returned then with two towels, handing one to Shoto before heading through the door to mop up the water left there. Shoto dried his hair as much as he could before attempting to dry the rest of himself. Once they’d both done as much as they could with their towels, the man squinted at the rain still pelting down outside, then at Shoto. He gestured toward one of the tables. “Sit. I’m not kicking a kid out in that weather, and it’s not going anywhere for at least another 15 minutes.”
Shoto glanced at the clock above the front counter, then around them at the lack of customers. “Aren’t you closing soon?”
The man grinned with only one side of his mouth. “See, that’s the fun thing about being self-employed. No one to tell me to stick to a schedule. Besides, I have no intention of walking home in that. And I still have to feed the cats.”
At that, several of the cats meowed loudly as if in agreement. A few started circling the man’s shoes. The yellow (more of pale orange now that it was in better lighting) and grey half-sized cat from the window appeared from thin air to bite the man’s ankle.
Unflinching, the man sighed and gestured at the cats as if to say “See?”
Shoto did see. Yes, the cats would certainly not let the man leave until they had their food. He…supposed it wouldn’t hurt to stay for a bit, especially if the man wasn’t locking up yet.
Shoto hadn’t been sitting long when the off-white and grey cat from the window approached him. It eyed him as if deciding whether or not to jump onto his lap. What was Shoto supposed to do? Didn’t cats dislike getting wet? He’s pretty sure he heard that somewhere. Would the cat be angry at him if it jumped on his lap only to find him soaked through? He didn’t want the cat to hate him.
The cat crouched.
Shoto made a split-second decision and pulled on his fire side. Not enough for fire, just enough to evaporate the water from his clothes. He immediately felt disgusted with himself, Endeavor’s voice crowing in his mind.
Then there was a tiny paw pressing on his nose and another point of pressure on the right side of his chest. Shoto scrunched up his face and blinked down at the cat now standing on his lap. The cat blinked back at him before withdrawing its paws from his face and chest to sit back on its haunches. Then it headbutted the left side of his chest, right where his bruised ribs were.
Shoto wheezed and curled slightly around the cat.
The cat seemed unbothered by his misery, moving on to start kneading on his stomach and its bruises. It only stopped to give a long, loud meow when the café’s owner walked back in with a tray loaded with little bowls of cat food.
The man gave Shoto’s tormentor a puzzled look before a second meow sharpened it into something a bit too close to Endeavor’s when he got a lead. He nodded at the cat before distributing bowls to the circling cats.
A rusty, raspy meow preceded a truly retched cat wearing a plastic cone poking its head out of one of the box structures. An equally hoarse but deeper meow answered the mangey silver tabby as a pale yellow tabby extricated itself from another enclosed bed. This one was missing several patches of fur as well, but these were more clearly scars. They almost looked like burns.
Who would ever hurt a cat like that? Shoto’s mind briefly provided him with a picture of Endeavor chasing a villain and lighting up a whole alley while a cat cowered beneath a now-flaming dumpster. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment to banish the image.
The yellow tabby spotted him when it hopped down from the catwalk to one of the taller towers on the ground. It froze and stared Shoto in the eye for a second before its fur puffed up as its ears fell back, and it let out a vicious hiss.
The cat on Shoto’s lap let out a meow that trailed off into a growl, eyes fixed on the yellow tabby even as it settled into a loaf on his lap. Were whiskers supposed to curl forward like that? Was that a good or a bad thing?
The yellow tabby’s hiss cut off, and the scarred cat looked between the cream and grey cat and Shoto a few times before lashing its tail once. Then it was on the ground trotting over to an unoccupied food bowl beside the mangey cat. It seemed to have decided Shoto wasn’t worth the time to murder. At least for now.
All cats had their food now, except for Shoto’s little tormentor/guardian and the black and white cat still staring out the window.
The man sighed and set the tray and remaining two bowls on the table next to Shoto’s before walking over to the front window. He picked up the entranced cat, earning a startled meow from it, and carried it back while scratching under the cat’s chin. “Cloud, you can go back to storm watching after you eat.” He set Cloud and one of the bowls from the tray on the ground and stared at the cat pointedly until the feline started munching away.
Then the man turned to Shoto and the last unfed cat. “Alright, Nighteye, dinnertime. Good job. I’ll take care of the rest.”
The cream and grey cat gave the man some of the best stink eye Shoto had ever seen, and Natsuo was a professional. After several seconds, Nighteye leapt off of Shoto’s lap and waited for the man to lower his food bowl.
Cats finally fed, the man looked at Shoto again. Shoto was unfamiliar with this look. Endeavor certainly never made it. “I suppose we should do introductions. I’m Midoriya Hisashi.” He offered a small bow before almost diving to snatch the pale orange and grey cat from where it had been sneaking up on Nighteye. The man held onto the squirmy feline as if this was perfectly normal.
Shoto decided it probably was after seeing that one bite the man’s ankle. Who knew cats could be so chaotic or violent? He inclined his head and continued introductions, “My name’s Shoto.”
Midoriya raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment on the omission of a surname. “Shoto, then. You know, Nighteye has this thing where he’s really good at reading people. I think he had to with whatever life he had before coming here. He’s a good judge of character. Also good at spotting injuries.”
Shoto went very still in his seat.
Midoriya looked down at the cat who had finally gone lax in his arms and started scratching its ears, setting off a surprisingly loud purr. “I won’t ask how you got hurt, but I do keep a well-stocked first aid kit in the back if you need it. And if you happen to be in the area around this time in the future, you’re always welcome here. So long as you don’t hurt the cats or other customers.”
He paused when the cat he was holding chomped on his finger. “Alright, little Blood Queen; that’s about enough. Go roughhouse with Charcoal or Mochi.” He leaned over and gently tossed the cat (her?) in the direction of the scarred and mangey cats. Blood Queen darted toward them as if she’d been given an important mission. A surprised yowl preceded a chase around the room.
Midoriya ignored the ensuing chaos to lock his too-seeing red eyes back on Shoto. “Where was I? Oh, yes. You’re welcome here anytime we’re open. And if whoever hurt you ever escalates or if you simply decide you’re done dealing with them, I might know a way to help with that too.”
Shoto narrowed his eyes at the vague wording of that last part. “I’m fine. Just a few bruises.”
Midoriya hummed and set about picking up empty food bowls.
Shoto watched him until a quiet mrrp drew his gaze down to find the black and white cat—Cloud—looking up at him expectantly. Shoto cautiously extended a hand for the cat to sniff. Cloud seemed to like whatever it smelled, because it pressed its head up into his hand. Shoto allowed the corner of his mouth to twitch as he proceeded to pet Cloud, marveling at how soft its fur was and the way his fingers parted black to reveal white underneath.
“It’s called smoke.”
Shoto snapped his eyes back to Midoriya.
“That coloring. It’s called smoke. Only the ends of his hairs have any color.” Then the man bent over to pick up Nighteye’s abandoned bowl.
Shoto blinked in surprise when he spotted a bit of white at the roots of the man’s black hair. Ah, it made sense he knew about smoke then. He hadn’t realized humans could have it too. Then again, most people probably just dyed the roots to avoid the appearance of premature greying. Personally, Shoto didn’t see what was so wrong with hair losing its color with age. His hair was already half white, and he’d much prefer it to be all white.
“What about the solid white patches?” He found himself asking.
Midoriya shrugged. “Any color cat can have some white. Some cats will even get white hairs where they have small scars.”
“What about the other cats?”
Midoriya grinned and set his stack of bowls on the table. “Well, Nighteye is what’s called a lilac point…”
Shoto and Midoriya talked about the cats until the rain outside fell silent. At which point Shoto remembered how late it was, and he hurried out and to home. Thankfully, Endeavor hadn’t noted his lengthy absence. Shoto tucked his cat hair-coated clothing deep into his laundry basket and hope Fuyumi wouldn’t notice. Then he carefully arranged himself on his futon to sleep.
He dreamed of cats with too-intelligent eyes. They ran circles around Endeavor. Blood Queen bit him. It was a good dream.