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Keigo frowned, pulling his sports bra down lower and pulling his shirt out so it laid baggier against his body. Touya sat next to him, paying him no mind as the other teen sipped lazily on a Capri Sun, thumbing through his phone mindlessly.
Keigo tugged the collar of his shirt forward and huffed at the curl of wrong he still felt when he looked down. “I think I’m gonna order a binder,” he said offhandedly to Touya. “I should have enough money saved to buy one.”
Touya glanced at him with raised brows. “Really?” Keigo nodded determinedly. Touya shrugged. “Alright. I have some recommendations,” he said, typing something on his phone.
Keigo felt a smile break out over his face at the easy acceptance and offer of assistance. “That’d be great, actually.”
Touya nodded, leaning over to show his screen to Keigo, who looked down with bright, excited eyes, before he froze. “Dragon Shield makes some of the best ones,” Touya said, not noticing Keigo’s frozen state of shock. “They hold a shit ton of cards, so if you’re lookin’ for volume-“
“Touya,” Keigo interrupted quietly, laying a hand on his friend’s shoulder. Touya paused and glanced at him. “I meant a chest binder.”
Touya blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.
“Oh,” he said. Understanding dawned across his face in sync with a furious blush the same color as the specks of red in his hair. “Oh. Oh my fucking god, I’m so sorry-“
Keigo snorted before he threw his head back in laughter, arms wrapping around his stomach as he cackled and Touya hid his face in his hands.
“Oh my god, dude,” Keigo cried, wiping away the tears that were welling up in the corners of his eyes. “Fuckin’—holy shit, did you think I was saving up for a card binder this whole time?”
“No!” Touya said defensively. “It’s—I—Shut up!”
Keigo only howled even louder, his stomach starting to ache as he continued to laugh at Touya’s expense. “I think I might just save up a little bit more to buy another binder, if only so you’re not disappointed-”
“Listen, Shimura has been extra annoying lately!”
“That kid you babysit? I’m gonna tell him you listen when he starts talking about Yu-Gi-Oh.”
“Ugh,” Touya groaned, burying his face in his hands once more. “You’re an only kid, you don’t get how much spending time with your little siblings messes with your head.”
“No, but it’s funny to watch you suffer for it.”
“When’s the last time you took Shouto out with me?”
Keigo blinked, taken aback by the sudden shift in conversation. “Like, February, I think? I dunno, he’s been spending a lot of time at the broccoli kid’s place.”
“Yeah, Midoriya’s from his daycare. You know that list of reasons you have to justify dropping money on a binder?” Touya asked, adding under his breath, “Even though I’d pay for it if you asked me.”
Keigo raised a brow. “Yeah? I’m struggling to see the connection here—is this going to turn into using him to guilt-trip me into accepting your money, because I’ve already told you ‘no’ like a million times.”
“Nah, just thought of another reason why it’d be great.” Keigo tilted his head in curiosity, and Touya kept talking. “When you get a binder, we might finally be able to convince Shouto that ‘long white hair’ does not mean someone is a woman.”
It took Keigo a long, long moment to figure out what Touya was getting at. When he finally did, however, the noise he let out in response was nothing short of unholy.
Touya huffed, throwing his hands up. “I’m serious! His only basis is mom and Fuyumi, and he’s four and doesn’t get that there’s exceptions yet so that's his hard and fast rule for identifying women. You have no idea how many senior citizens with long beards I’ve had to apologize to! I had to apologize to Inko the first time I took him over to his friend’s house because he called her ‘Mister Midoriya’.”
Keigo’s smile was so wide it hurt his face. “You’re an absolute disaster, you know that?”
Touya rolled his eyes. “Not like you’re doing much better.”
Touya knew Keigo was a boy before anyone else.
The first day of kindergarten, a boy with red and white hair had walked up to Keigo, who was trying to figure out how to best climb up a tree to get closer to a little bird nest he had spotted, and simply gone, “Aren’t girls supposed to be doing the glitter crafts?”
Keigo, in his muddied pink floral shirt, had simply huffed as his wings puffed up, scowling at Touya. “I’m not a girl!”
Touya had blinked and cocked his head. “Okay,” he shrugged. Apparently that simple three-line exchange was all that was needed when you were six. “Wanna play frisbee?”
Without waiting for a response, Touya grabbed Keigo’s hand and began dragging him over to where all the other boys were playing around the field behind the schoolhouse. Touya herded Keigo towards a small group on the outskirts who seemed to be arguing about teams.
“This is-” Touya paused and looked at him. “What’s your name?”
“Keigo.”
“Keigo!” Touya smiled brightly, turning back to the group. “He’s gonna play with us so we have equal teams!”
And that was that.
Keigo didn’t realize that he wasn’t—physically like other boys until he was in sixth grade. It wasn’t like his parents paid enough attention to ever correct him. Puberty was a bitch, and Keigo realized that faster than anyone.
He got his first period while he was at Touya’s house. He looked down at the little red stain on his underwear and screamed.
That, of course, had brought Touya’s mother running, and when she arrived, it was to a panicking Keigo and a confused but equally panicked Touya, both wondering if Keigo was gonna die.
“What’s wrong?” Rei had asked, crouching down to be on level with them. Keigo looked at her with tears in his eyes as he grabbed her sleeve desperately.
“I’m bleeding from my privates, I’m gonna die!”
Rei had taken a few moments to process Keigo’s words. Looking back on it, Keigo would understand that she hadn’t known Keigo wasn’t biologically a boy either. And that realization after knowing him for six years and maybe three conversations with Keigo’s parents was a little bit of a shock. She recovered quickly, however. “Alright, Keigo, sweetie, come with me for a minute. Nothing bad is happening. It’s completely fine, you’re not going to die.”
Keigo sniffled and exchanged looks with Touya, who was calmer at his mother’s reassuring words but still looked uneasy. But he liked and trusted Rei, so he grabbed her hand and followed her, even as Touya was told to stay put for a few minutes.
He followed her to the master bathroom, where she handed him a packet that sounded like a chip bag when he held it, and explained what to do with it. Keigo was calmed by her explanation. If Rei knew what to do, and there were products for his problem, then it was normal. Probably.
With a pad stuck to his underwear, he and Rei went back to Touya, who immediately asked if he was going to start bleeding from his privates too.
Keigo had gone over to Touya’s house to play in the yard of the Todoroki estate with Touya, Fuyumi, and Natsuo (and maybe Rei would sit and watch on the porch with an infant Shouto). He instead got the sex talk. A very watered-down version of it, but enough that both he and Touya knew something was off.
“So…” Keigo had started hesitantly, looking down at where his hands were clenched in his lap, sitting next to Touya on his bed. “I’m- I’m a girl?” He fisted the fabric of his shorts uneasily. He didn’t want to be a girl.
“Nuh-uh,” Touya said, puffing his cheeks up in annoyance. “You’re a boy!”
“But I…” Keigo patted his chest, remembering how it’d felt a little weird recently, and remembering Rei's explanation, and then he sniffled. He promptly burst into tears.
“Keigo, sweetie, please,” Rei said, wiping away the tears that were rolling down his cheeks. “If you believe you’re a boy, then you’re a boy.”
“But you said-!”
“You are a boy,” she reiterated firmly. “Just because your body got a little confused doesn’t mean you’re not a boy. Okay?”
Keigo hiccuped wetly, nodding along. Rei gave him a gentle smile, and Touya pulled him into a hug, crushing their cheeks together. “I’ll punch anyone who calls you a girl,” Touya said with dead seriousness, although the way he’d smushed his face against Keigo’s took away some of the ennunciation that might have helped his words hold some level of impact.
Rei looked disapproving of the concept of Touya starting fights, but didn’t say anything to dissuade him, which might as well have been as good as permission to him (Touya had used it as his primary defense against his parents when he’d gotten suspended for punching someone in tenth grade).
Keigo had felt a smile split across his face, arms wrapping right back around his friend. If nothing else, at least he knew Touya would always be there for him.
“So you found one?” Touya asked, taking a tiny step forward as the line progressed. He lifted the bottom of his shirt up to scrub the sweat dripping down his face in the hot summer sun. Keigo’s cheeks flushed slightly at the shamelessness, but responded easily nonetheless.
“Yeah. It’s supposed to be high quality and it’s within my price range. It was available in my size when I checked, so,” he shrugged, “I bought it.”
“Oh, nice!” Touya said, giving him a bright smile as they walked up to the ice cream cart. “Uh, two chocolate cones,” he told the worker before he turned back to Keigo. “So when’s it supposed to get here?”
“Sometime in the next two weeks. It’s surprisingly located in Japan, so shipping wasn’t as bad as I had been anticipating.”
“Excited?” Keigo gave Touya a hesitantly optimistic smile in response, opening his mouth-
“Ma’am?”
He flinched.
His eyes flicked over to the ice cream cart worker, holding out his own chocolate cone for him to take. His throat felt dry, and yet the frozen treat didn’t appeal to him at all as he took it from the attendant. Touya was tense beside him, but Keigo kicked his shin to stop him from causing a scene. It wasn’t worth it.
Touya paid in stony silence and they walked off, Keigo staring numbly at his cone. He should be used to it, he knew it wasn’t the worker’s fault. He felt a cold trickle over the back of his fingers as he realized the ice cream was rapidly melting in the sun. He quickly licked away the melting parts, using his other hand to pull his shirt out a little further from his chest. Despite being a size or two too big, it still tried to cling to his sweat-damp body.
“Yeah,” he muttered, good mood effectively struck down. “I can’t wait.”
Keigo threw the binder at the wall, growling out, “God fucking dammit!” before he simply collapsed to the floor, too frustrated to even bother putting his shirt back on. Tears began to prick at his eyes as he curled into himself.
Keigo squeezed his knees to his chest, an ugly sob ripping its way out of his throat. What a fucking idiot —sports bras were lower cut than binders, and they already rubbed the base of his wings raw, so why didn’t he realize-
“Keigo?” Touya sounded concerned. “Are you alright? Does it not fit?” Keigo let out a pitiful wail in response, burying his head in his knees. “I’m coming in, okay?” Keigo didn’t move as he heard the door open and Touya take in a sharp breath. A few moments later, a blanket was draped over his back and wrapped around the little ball he’d curled himself into, warding off the chill from his bare torso. Then, he was pulled into Touya’s arms as he continued to cry. “Hey, it’s okay,” Touya tried, rubbing Keigo’s arms through the blanket. “If it doesn’t fit we can return it and get another.”
Keigo shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut. “Tha’s not the problem,” he said, throat so tight it hurt to speak. “I have wings on m’ back, th’ binder was gonna dislocate ‘em.” He turned around and pressed his face into Touya’s chest. “Doesn’ matter if it’s th’ right size, I can’t even wear one.”
There was a pause, in which the only sound was Keigo’s little whines and sniffles as he cried into Touya’s shirt like a baby. One arm hugged Keigo tighter as the other reached up and began to thread through his hair. “We’ll figure it out, Keigo,” Touya said softly. “I promise. We’ll get your chest flatter than your ass in no time.”
Keigo let out a watery, unstable little laugh. “You’re horrible.”
“You love it.”
Keigo would never say it out loud, but he really, really did.
Keigo had quietly resigned himself to living with sports bras until he was able to afford top surgery, which, considering his… everything, would probably take until well after college. Or maybe he could justify it right out of college, if he could pick up a job that paid him well enough to pay his way through, or got that track scholarship-
“Hey.”
Keigo looked over as Touya plopped himself down on the bench next to him, Capri Sun already in his mouth, and a manic gleam in his eyes that made Keigo nervous. “Do I want to know what you did?”
Touya made an offended noise. “What makes you think I did anything?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?”
“Shut.” Keigo laughed, and Touya let out a defeated sigh. “Ungrateful. How dare you. Can’t believe it. I come here with good news and you immediately start accusing me of crimes I didn’t commit-”
“You have a track record.”
Touya flicked Keigo’s forehead as he rolled his eyes, unlocking his phone and passing it to Keigo as he rubbed at his head. “Just read it, idiot. I think I found a solution to our problem.”
Keigo squinted at the text on Touya’s phone, the harsh glare of the summer sun overhead making it near impossible to read. “Hakamada’s Tailoring Service?” He looked up at his friend. “Which problem is this supposed to be solving?”
Touya bit his lip awkwardly, which immediately set Keigo on edge. “I, uh, reached out to them. The guy who runs it has a fiber quirk or something like that, so it allows him to manipulate fabric pretty easily, so he specializes in mutant quirk tailoring. He said he would be willing to have an appointment with you to try and see if there’s anything we can do about your binding situation.”
It took Keigo several moments to fully digest that. “I-”
“Kei, I’m begging you to not say anything about money,” Touya said, looking into his eyes desperately. “You—I was willing to let it go before, but you’re so miserable right now, and I don’t want to see you cry like that ever again. I have more money than I know what to do with, and if spending some of it means you’ll be happy, then I’ll do it in a heartbeat.”
Keigo’s face felt hot as he pulled his feet up onto the bench, wrapping his arms around his knees. “Tailoring services are still expensive, Touya.”
“Think of it as an early birthday present, then.”
“That-”
“And if you’re still going to be upset about it,” Touya interrupted, fishing his wallet out of his pocket, taking out a card, and presenting it to Keigo with a flourish. “Mom said to think of it as a present from the family.”
Keigo choked on his spit as he read the name on the credit card. Todoroki Rei.
“Touya, I-”
“She said she’ll make those yakitori you like for dinner if you come to the appointment.”
“You already set one up?”
“Yep,” Touya said, tucking the card away and putting his wallet back in his pocket with a far too self-satisfied air about himself as he stood up, holding out a hand for Keigo. “Paid the deposit. We need to be there in an hour.”
Keigo gave him a dirty look as he accepted Touya’s help to stand up. “This is underhanded.”
“And? If you don’t accept this, I’m ninety percent sure my mom will insist on paying for top surgery for you.”
“No she wouldn’t-”
“Dude, even Fuyumi thinks she likes you more than me. She would.”
“It’s certainly doable,” Hakamada said, circling Keigo one more time. “However, I will not guarantee that you’ll be able to wear it for the full eight hours that most other binders offer.”
Keigo blinked. “Why?”
Hakamada came to a stop behind him. “May I touch your back?” Keigo nodded, spreading his wings slightly to the side for ease of access. “While this will have an open back to accommodate your wings, there will still need to be ample tension in order to properly bind. As your wings are placed where most of this pressure normally goes, we will redirect it here,” two fingers pressed against Keigo’s spine, an inch above where his wings rested, “and here.” Hakamada's other hand pressed against the middle of Keigo’s back, just below his wings. “It will be more concentrated, so the pressure on your back will be greater.”
That… was probably fine. School was still eight hours, but Keigo would most likely have to change into a sports bra for gym and track regardless. “I can work with that,” he said quietly, watching as Hakamada made his way over to a side table with a few piles of black fabric draped across it.
Hakamada nodded absently, fingers moving oddly as his quirk began to twist the material to his will. Touya, who was sitting in a chair off to the side, watched the proceedings with curious eyes, as did Keigo. It was almost hypnotic, the way the fibers moved around. It was certainly a useful quirk, Keigo had to admit to himself, when Hakamada turned around less than a minute later with a completed garment.
“That was fast,” he said quietly, accepting the binder with almost reverent hands.
Hakamada let out an amused huff and his eyes quirked upward in a smile. “I pride myself on speed and quality. You may try it on in the changing room and see if there are any more adjustments that need to be made.”
Keigo nodded numbly, glancing over at Touya who gave him a reassuring smile and made a shooing motion.
It felt almost unnervingly quiet when Keigo closed the door to the dressing room. He stood there for several moments, still processing that it was real—that he’d finally made it.
He shed his feathers, allowing them to all pile up in a corner before he tugged his shirt over his head, followed by his bra, and tossed them on the floor.
Keigo was nervous as he slipped his arms through the holes—the binder having been designed to zip in the front so that he wouldn’t risk dislocating his wings again. It surprised him how much strength it took, yet also how easy it was to bring the bottom of the zipper together, the low noise it made ringing through the room as he dragged it up.
Keigo took a deep breath, nose twitching as he realizing that all those posts online about how tight binders are weren’t fucking around. There went his thought process of ‘it can’t be so bad that I’d have to change out for track.’
Alright. Moment of truth.
He shrugged his shirt back on, turned to look in the mirror, and he froze. He turned to the side, simply staring at the angle of his chest. He ran his hand down over where he used to swell out, almost reverently as he noticed how fucking flat it was.
There was a knock on the door. “Keigo?” Touya asked hesitantly. “You good? It fits, right?”
Keigo swallowed roughly, his throat feeling tight. “Yeah,” he called back shakily. “Yeah, it fits.”
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah.”
Keigo felt like he was caught up in a haze, overwhelmed yet completely numb at the same time as his hand ran up and down his torso again and again. He couldn’t stop staring. He flinched when a hand touched his cheek, wiping away a few tears he hadn’t even noticed he’d shed. He’d blinked, turning to look at Touya, who gave him a proud, soft little smile. “You look good, pretty bird.”
Keigo sniffed wetly, wrapping his arms around Touya’s neck and shoving his face in his shoulder. Touya hugged him close, and Keigo was almost knocked off his feet by the unexpected euphoria of his chest pressing flat against Touya’s. It was a small difference, but it made him feel ready to burst into tears all over again.
“Thank you,” he whispered hoarsely, quiet enough that he almost worried Touya wouldn’t hear him.
“Of course,” Touya said, squeezing him. “Anything for you.”
Keigo laughed, pulling back to rest his forehead against Touya’s, grinning at the dumb smile on his face.
“You absolute sap,” he muttered.
“You love it.”
“I do,” Keigo said. “I really, really do.”
And then he kissed Touya.