Todoroki Touya burns himself alive without screaming. Fire sweeps over him and his body draws rictus-tight, and his mouth drops open into what should be a howl of agony, but when he dies- and he dies every time she sleeps, every time Father slams the door behind him, every time Shouto sits at the dinner table with bruises blooming, which is to say, Touya never stops dying- he dies silent.

Fuyumi doesn't wake up screaming, anymore. It woke her brothers.

(Father was irritated that Shouto's training was suffering from poor sleep.)

Touya isn't dead, because "dead" implies that it is something that happened and can now be dealt with. "Dead" is a state that Fuyumi could do something about. She could sweep up the ashes of her twin brother's life and step forward. She could sweep up the ashes of her twin brother, except that he wasn't cremated. Officially, he died on the way to the hospital. Unofficially, Touya isn't dead because every minute that Fuyumi spends in this hellish house with her Hellflame father and hell-raising Natsuo and hell-hounded Shouto is a minute that Fuyumi wants to scream in his stead. She doesn't. She can't. Touya burnt himself alive and Fuyumi wailed as glaciers melted in the gap between their bodies, too far from him to dull the heat because she couldn't get close enough. Father held her back. Father would have been burned. Father didn't want her to get hurt. She tells herself this when she wakes, smoke at the back of her eyes and her hands numbed purple-red from sleepfrost: Father held her back because he didn't want Touya to hurt her.

(Fuyumi's Quirk came in early. She and Touya were nearly three, newly walking, chasing each other and giggling. They were two halves of a whole. They were children. Mother had just set down steaming bowls of udon curry when Fuyumi tripped and went sprawling face-first into the food. Mother gasped and scooped her up instantly, wiping steaming curry off of Fuyumi's face with the sleeves of her jumper and a look of horror. Touya completed his lap of the kotatsu before investigating the loss of his playmate, fisting a chubby hand in Mother's skirt and looking up at his sister with wide eyes. Fuyumi noticed that her forehead was sore, there was udon everywhere, and Mother looked upset. She wasn't burned. She started crying anyway. The tears froze on her face, and she cried all the harder from how their frost bit at her skin.

Mother told her this story, later. Father was with Touya, and Mother was pregnant with Shouto, and Fuyumi held Natsuo in her lap. Natsuo, past three, with a little extra joint in his toes. Natsuo, dismissed outright as soon as Mother couldn't hide him in soft boots that obscured the distinctly quirkless shape of him. Fuyumi's Quirk came in before her brother's, Mother said, staring into some sad middle distance. She had screamed snowflakes and Touya had caught them on his tongue, unmelting, pressed them to his teeth. He had flicked fire by accident and sobbed when it burned, only for Fuyumi to catch onto his hands and coat them in frost. They held onto each other when they used their Quirks, Mother said, one hand on her stomach. Fuyumi kept her hand in Natsuo's.

In the training room, Father was keeping his hands full with Touya.

Fuyumi left her door unlocked so Touya could creep in once the house was still and sleeping. Touya, bristling and burnt, would give her a cocky smile as if promising that he could take whatever the old man dished out. He never said it out loud. They never spoke aloud, in the dark of Fuyumi's room. Touya would demonstrate a form, and Fuyumi would copy, mimicking until she could move the same way and then until she could move the same way backwards, blue fire glancing off her skin and black ice glistening on his. They never fought each other. They fought together, equal opposites, a perfect balance and a perfect team. Thermoequilibrium. Together, Fuyumi and Touya could save everyone, surpass All Might, but separate they could only hurt themselves and their father did not look at joined hands and see strength. Father did not look at Fuyumi and see anything. Father looked through Fuyumi and his eyes landed only on Touya. His failed successor. His forgotten son.

Father forgot Fuyumi, too. Forgot her failure of a Quirk. Father held her back because he didn't want her hurt.)

Touya's eyes flash at her in the mirror, some mornings. They burned when his fire did, the same way hers iced over. The rest of the time, they were the same dull blue-grey that Fuyumi only misses when she thinks about the dreams for too long and discovers her hand is tingling against her toothbrush because she has frozen them together.

Todoroki Fuyumi is a school teacher. She lives with her father, the great hero Endeavor, and is proud of her younger brother, the nurse, and believes in her youngest brother, who's just been accepted to Yuuei. Todoroki Fuyumi is nothing special. Todoroki Fuyumi has a raging inferno where her brother used to be, where he has nothing but a steady chill as he lies, ice-cold, in his grave. He died on the way to the hospital. He is dying still. He will never stop dying the same way he will never be truly dead: Fuyumi survived. One half of a whole. Part of a set, irreplacable but impossible to deny as being matched to something, even if it's no longer there. Fuyumi is half-hearted, now. Fuyumi has been frozen in place since she was four years old.

Fuyumi sees the damage that her father does when he rescues civilians and she thinks, we could've done better.

Shouto leaves. The school has on-site dormitories and Father raged, obviously, but there are more than enough training facilities at Yuuei, there is intelligence to be gathered against All Might's protege, there are no good reasons for a disobedient boy to stay in his hellish home. Father does damage. Father looks through Fuyumi, the only other person in his sprawling, empty home, and sees nothing at all on the other side of her. Father is a hero and he should be dead for what he did to Fuyumi because he didn't even touch her. He stood at the center of her life and ruined everything she cared about on accident because he never cared about her. He still stands there. Fuyumi cooks dinner and does laundry and hires the same discreet cleaners when Father is away for long enough. She tips well. They keep their lips sealed about the way the hero Endeavor lives. The way it's at the expense of others.

Fuyumi cannot save everyone the way she planned to with Touya at her side. Fuyumi cannot save anyone without him. She couldn't save him, and there is nothing to make up for that. There is no substance that would feed the burning guilt in her chest to satisfaction.

Father saves people and property and his pro ranking stays, raging, in second place. At the dinners he doesn't thank her for, he speaks of work, the rankings, or Shouto. Fuyumi pretends he is leaving space for her to share news of Natsuo's sports meetings, Mother's friends at the inpatient group activities, her students' antics. Fuyumi pretends he is speaking to her, and not to the wall. Fuyumi pretends she can stand to live in this house.

(Fuyumi snuck into Touya's room and practiced forms until her feet felt ready to bleed. Fuyumi held her brother's hand and they flexed their Quirks in perfect synchronicity, two halves of a whole, thermoequilibrium.)

Fuyumi stitches warm linings into her blouses, wears leggings under her slacks when she goes into work, never takes off her cardigan. She doesn't overheat. She can't burn. Fuyumi doesn't have any monochrome colours in her closet, and she texts Shouto to ask if he would like to go shopping with her. Just the two of them. Father would never allow it; Shouto agrees, and neither of them tell him. They wander the mall together, Fuyumi on her baby brother's left side, far enough apart that the silence between them could be a natural consequence of the busy outlet's noise instead of two jagged edges pressed together, not quite meeting. Two siblings sharing an afternoon. Two strangers with shared blood. Shouto points mutely at a small café, and the two of them stop inside for a slice of cake and a coffee, respectively. Shouto gets extra whipped cream by virtue of the barista thinking he's adorable, and he stares at it in quiet alarm while Fuyumi carefully scrapes the filling off of each layered crepe. "Coffee stunts your growth," Fuyumi says as soon as Shouto's finally made it through the topping to the drink itself.

He narrows his eyes at her. "You drink coffee."

"That's how I know."

He seems to think it over, the fact that he's nearly her height and eight years younger. Then he drains half the cup in one sip. Fuyumi doesn't smile, but she feels herself untense, just slightly, at the reminder of a shared inimical streak. Touya and Fuyumi, training together and making plans to debut as a duo. Natsuo, forcing his way into fields where he refused to be treated as fragile. Shouto, making his way to the top of the sports festival with nothing but his ice. Contrarians, all of them. Shared spite. Shared blood.

They wander. They find a clothes shop with large signs plastered in the window proclaiming it's an everything-must-go sale, and Fuyumi tilts her head towards it with the same silence and same cautiously optimistic expression as Shouto had, earlier. He follows her inside and they drift apart between the shelves. She pulls an out-of-season white trench coat off the ¥2,500 rack, squeezing gently at the subtly quilted sleeves and throwing it over her arm atop the pair of thick, steel-grey cargo trousers with elastic at the ankles, and then her eyes catch on the dark red scarf Shouto is holding out to her. "It's soft," he says simply, a matching spring green one already wound around his neck. Fuyumi takes it gingerly and rubs her thrumb across the fabric. It is soft. It matches her glasses.

She looks away from it to meet his eyes and ask, "Did you see any in blue?" Fuyumi doesn't skate much, anymore, but her skates are nearly the same shade of blue as Touya's fire. They're exactly the same shade as her winter gloves, and while she doesn't have them to hand, she's willing to bet that the scarf Shouto points her to is very, very close.

Father foots the bill. If he notices, he'll assume it was Shouto, alone. It's hardly the first time he's done this. Fuyumi ducks into a crafts shop and buys more fleece lining, and when she re-emerges, Shouto has a friend hanging off his arm, chattering a mile-a-minute and gesturing widely as her brother watches him with an expression of cool disinterest but doesn't push the other boy away. Fuyumi hasn't seen him without steel in his gaze for years. Fuyumi raises a hand, hopefully just enough to catch Shouto's attention, and when his eyes snap to her she gestures with a thumb over her shoulder and furrowed eyebrows. Should I leave?

Shouto looks to his companion, then back to her. He mouths, please stay. Fuyumi readjusts her grip on her shopping bags and cuts through the crowd to the pair, an easy smile already softening her sharp features, and she calls, "Shouto! I finished up with my errand; are you ready to go?" The other boy startles, head whipping to face her, awkwardly dropping Shouto's arm.

He's wearing Shouto's new scarf. It matches his eyes. "Oh," says the boy, "I'm sorry, Todoroki, I didn't know you were here doing something important with your family, I never would have-"

"Midoriya," Shouto interrupts mildly. The friend- Midoriya, who is almost certainly the same Midoriya from the Sports Festival, the one Fuyumi watched her baby brother nearly kill on live television- closes his mouth with a click. Shouto continues, "It wasn't important." Fuyumi frowns at him, and he raises an eyebrow slightly, tilting his head in a judgemental way that could be passed off as an idle readjustment if she didn't pull the same move. "Fuyumi wanted to spend time with me without the old man knowing about it." She closes the distance, standing next to her brother as the other mall-goers part to allow them space. Some of them are staring at Shouto. Some are staring at Midoriya. Fuyumi stands, inexcusably part of the trio, and blends into the mob around them.

Midoriya, flustered, argues, "That sounds important to me!" His eyes cut to Fuyumi's and he jolts straight up, spine newly 180˚ as he adds, "Not that! Uh, I mean, not that I think- Endeavour is a- wh-why would I know what you mean by that, um, exactly? Haha?" Shouto, blankfaced, watches him stumble. Fuyumi briefly considers asking how much Shouto has already told him, but thinks better of it. Unless it's dangerous or mean, she finds it's usually best to to leave liars be. It's an important skill when dealing with six year old children. "It's nice to meet you, Todoroki-san. Um, I'm Midoriya Izuku, I- I-I'm in Yuuei with your brother." Midoriya dips his head in greeting, still flustered, and Fuyumi wonders how he could stand to befriend Shouto, who never gives any sort of cue that he's enjoying a conversation, let alone listening to it.

"I remember," Fuyumi says instead of her musings, watching with a detached sort of interest as Midoriya's soft face gets even redder. He's a child, and he attends Yuuei. Another hero set up to buckle under all the pressure dropped on his shoulders. She watched Shouto nearly kill him. That wasn't even the worst thing that she's heard the news say has happened to him. "Should I keep an eye out for your hero merch?" Shouto stays rigid at her side and stares at her. Fuyumi knows he wants her to cut the conversation short and leave, give him an excuse to be rid of his classmate, but she doesn't want to leave the mall just yet. It feels too distant. Like she stopped in with a coworker, not her youngest brother.

But Midoriya has a lot to say about hero merch, past and future, and Fuyumi has to make her escape anyway. She and Shouto stand face-to-face on the train back to Yuuei. People on the train are still staring, and they're still not staring at her. Eyes slide off of Todoroki Fuyumi because hers is not a name that anyone will recall. Hers is not a face of any note. Her Quirk is a failure and her job is boring. Shouto gets off at his stop. "Get home safe," is all he says, and then the doors close between them while Fuyumi is still struggling to find a response.

(Home is not safe for anyone but their father.

Fuyumi goes anyway.)

She texts Shouto, I had fun today! She stitches new, thick linings into her just-bought clothes. She has an old set of silk thermalwear, somewhere in her closet, but she decides against pulling it out. Silk is hard to stitch. It breaks needles if it's pressed against the wrong way. Mother told her that silk underweave is considered a necessity in any thin costuming, as it can't stand up to slashing but turns the points of blades away. Fuyumi cooks dinner. Father gets home and talks about his day, and Fuyumi doesn't talk about hers. She has school tomorrow. She didn't grade the children's tests. She was out shopping with Shouto and rediscovering her invisibility. She baked cookies and pulled them from the oven without a pot-holder, and she stared at her hand where it didn't so much as sting, and she was alone in the house so no one heard when she screamed and threw the entire batch at the wall.

Her throat crackled. She held a burning hand to it. The warmth was barely tangible through her Quirk, but it eased the icicles anyway.

Fuyumi cleaned up the crumbs. Wiped the walls, scrubbed the pan in the sink, her fingers wrinkling under the would-be scalding water.

Father does not leave room for her to tell him this, so she doesn't.

Father is not a good man. Fuyumi knows this. Father is not a good man, nor a kind one, but he does good things. Fuyumi is kind, and she tries so hard to be understanding and to do good things, but Fuyumi sits at dinner as her father speaks and she realizes that she is not a good person, either. A good person would have saved Shouto. A good person would have saved Mother. A good person would have slammed frost-blackened hands into her father's vice grip and jumped into her brother's blue fire and put him out. A good person would save people.

A good person would follow up to see what has been done about the reports she's made, concerning Moshin Komei.

Komei-kun is clumsy. He walks into doorknobs and trips over nothing and wears long sleeves to class. He flinches when Fuyumi raises her hands too quickly. He's loud and brash and cheerful and when his mother comes to pick him up, he is silent as he gets into the car.

Fuyumi reported her suspicions to the principal.

It's been six weeks.

Komei-kun has a black eye. He's quiet all day. Touya burned without a whisper of a sound. Fuyumi keeps snapping her chalk, and Komei-kun keeps wincing so hard that blackness fills her vision, and she has to fight to keep her voice level when the class starts shrieking with delight and terror and she says, "Komei-kun, please don't blind us." She knows he can hear her fighting to keep it level. She knows because she can hear the inflections of her other teachers and pick out what they mean and what they don't and when they're truly upset and when they're laughing at a joke they haven't noticed Fuyumi isn't in on. She can tell what it sounds like when people are laughing at a joke because Fuyumi isn't in on it. (It only happens when she stops by Father's agency to bring him lunch. The rest of her life is insulated from cruelty. The rest of her life matches her kindness, and that makes it easier to pretend it's good. That she's good.) "I didn't sleep well," Fuyumi tells the class during quiet time, "so I'm sorry if I'm a little bit cranky today. If I sound upset with you, please understand that I'm only upset with myself for not going to bed on time."

Fuyumi has had multiple conferences with Moshin Hanae. She seems like a decent woman. Her husband had some snide comments about nepotism, but aside from that, the meetings have been fine. Except for the fact that Fuyumi knows the size of the hands that leave fingerprint bruises on Komei-kun's forearm, sleeve left rolled to the elbow once by accident and rapidly shoved back down to the wrist, but not before Fuyumi could note that it was not his father hurting him. Not with those half-crescent grooves when Moshin Keiji keeps his nails bitten to the quick. Fuyumi knows that mothers can hurt, too. The reminder is unwelcome, all the same.

Moshin shared the name of her favorite bar, the last time they talked.

Fuyumi knows her home address. Her birthday. Her Quirk. Fuyumi knows that if she gets caught doing this, she will be fired from her job and tried in a court and Father will be able to see her. She will never leave her house. She will never be free of the guilt. Touya will never stop dying.

Touya has been ashes for longer than he's been alive. Fuyumi knows where the broom is, now.

Moshin's Quirk is called Dimmer, which allows her to manipulate light levels around her in up to a two-metre radius. Fuyumi's Quirk is called Frost. It's the same Quirk her mother has. Except it isn't, and it never has been, because she doesn't burn and her fingers threaten frostbite, which is why she has her bright blue scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face and instant heating packs in the pockets of her jacket and the toes of her winter boots. (She couldn't run in the skates. She can sharpen black ice under her soles, anyway.) She knows Moshin overuses her Quirk. Self defense is legal. Fuyumi is just going to talk to her. Fuyumi is just going to ask some questions. Fuyumi is going to do so inside the bar, with witnesses, and she is prepared to use her Quirk in self defense but she will not instigate-

Moshin slams the door open and Fuyumi flinches. It's the only thing that keeps Moshin from bumping into her. "Eh?" Fuyumi swallows, hard, as Moshin's eyes lock onto hers. "Th' fuck're you dressed like that for?" She's slurring her words. She isn't stumbling, quite, but she had her eyes on the straight lines of the sidewalk as she traced them with her footsteps.

"I get cold easily," Fuyumi answers instantly. She answers questions as soon as they're asked. She is silent unless spoken to and never causes any trouble. Touya died without a sound. "Are you Moshin Komei's mother?"

The streetlight above them flickers. "You stalkin' me?" Moshin asks.

"No. No, I only-"

"You that freak from Kamino?"

"N-"

"My husband's inside," she snaps, even though her husband doesn't drink. It interferes with his quirk control, makes him more likely to interfere with the pressure systems around him. If Fuyumi were stalking her, she would know this. Fuyumi knows this anyway. "If you try and take my wallet, I'll call 'im out here!" It's a threat. It's an empty one. Fuyumi knows what bluster sounds like, the precise inflection of it, and she knows it's best to let liars be.

Fuyumi takes a step backwards, toward the alleyway. "Your husband is at home with your son," Fuyumi says. Her voice is level. Quiet. Her hands aren't shaking. "Your son prefers it when you go to the bar, you know. If he's quiet enough, if the living room is empty of any sign of his existence, he knows his mother is less likely to hit him than if she comes straight home from work." Komei-kun doesn't know what his mother does for work, just that it's really stressful. Just that she yells about it all the time, and how he'd never make it in that sort of workplace environment. Those exact words, like they're a mantra he's heard a million times. The streetlight sputters out.

Moshin is staring at her in the dark. "You don't know me."

Fuyumi doesn't. Fuyumi knows her son. Fuyumi knows what it looks like when a child makes themself small to avoid retaliation for any crime that their judge, jury and abuser has decided they comitted. "Do you know me, Moshin-san?"

She expects a yes. She expects Moshin to call her that fucking teacher and for a formal complaint to be lodged. She expects to lose her job. She practiced fighting forms in the dark, and it's crusted-over instinct that leads her to sway back from the unexpected punch that Moshin throws. It's old muscle memory. Touya coats both their arms, so Fuyumi reaches back with black ice and grips an imaginary wrist, an imaginary shoulder, stops just short of the wall of her room with the imaginary assailant's face slammed against it, their shoulder creaking as she twists. Moshin yelps. Fuyumi grabs Moshin's other hand and forces them together behind her back, then immobilizes them in a block of ice.

There's nobody else to see them. The world around them is dim. Moshin used her quirk first. "I'll know if you ever hurt him again," Fuyumi says. Quiet. Level. Her hands are shaking, now, her fingers stinging all the way up to her elbows as she keeps Moshin against the wall, fingers wrapped tight around icy wrists. "You should go to a clinic as soon as you can, Moshin-san; I don't want you to get frostbite." Moshin shivers. Her phone's password is her husband's birthday, and he picks up on the first ring.

Fuyumi puts it on speaker, places it a few feet away from Moshin in case she tries to hurt Fuyumi again, and walks back to the train station. Moshin doesn't try to follow. Moshin stays on the phone with her husband, and Fuyumi doesn't think that she's done a good thing, exactly, but she did something.

Fuyumi unzips her coat with stiff fingers, unwinding her scarf and slipping it into one of her many trouser pockets. The gloves go into another. Her bare hands go into her jacket pockets, and the heat packs feel so nice she could cry if she were still capable. Todoroki Fuyumi could be anybody as she rides the late train back to the house. No eyes catch on her, even though she's dressed strangely.

There is no mention of her in the news.

Komei-kun doesn't come in with another bruise.

Fuyumi did something. Fuyumi did something.

Fuyumi makes bigger portions of lunch and dinner, and she stops skipping breakfast. Fuyumi finds a beginner's fitness class being held at a gym near her school, and she makes friends with the instructor. The other women there. One of the men, Harada, asks her on a date and she doesn't say no, exactly, just apologizes for how busy her schedule is, but he gets a furrow in his brow and says, "Todoroki, if… if you don't want to have dinner with me, that's fine. Don't get me wrong! You're very pretty, and I think your dedication to the class is impressive, but I… I'd rather have a good friend than an unhappy girlfriend." Fuyumi wants to hug him. She hasn't wanted to hug someone in years. She doesn't do it, as those would be very mixed signals, but she thinks about it and that's enough.

Touya didn't scream, when he died. Fuyumi lives alone but for her perpetually-absent father, and she doesn't scream when she wakes from dreams of her brother's face flaking to crematory ash. Fuyumi goes to school, where Komei-kun is bright and unbruised; she goes to the gym, where Harada beams when she asks him to spot her; she makes dinner for herself and Father before going on a quick jog around the neighbourhood. Fuyumi keeps busy. Fuyumi stays active. Fuyumi is surprised when she manages to bring all of the groceries in with a single trip, all of the bags piled over her arms and weighing less than they used to. Touya has been ashes for longer than he was alive. Fuyumi knows where the broom is.

A man slams into her on her jog, one night, and when she stumbles he doesn't offer an apology, just keeps running the opposite direction. She'd be able to hear, if he had; the force of him jolting her shoulder sent her headphones clattering. There's a purse clutched in his hand. There is, she hears now, a woman shouting. Fuyumi isn't wearing her new clothes, but she reaches out anyway and the ground beneath her feet slicks over with ice that streaks out over the sidewalk until he takes one step too hard and crashes over himself. Fuyumi doesn't run with her glasses. She runs with a face mask, just in case someone recognises her as Endeavor's daughter, and she wishes she ran with her scarf in a pocket, instead. Her hand is searing cold. She skates over to the thief and pulls the purse from his grip, turning to the owner. "This is yours?"

"Thank you," the woman gasps, hands on her knees as she slumps out of her poor sprinting form, "thank you, I have all of my rent money in there, and my medications, and you- thank you." The thief hisses sharply and grabs at Fuyumi's ankle, only to give a hoarse yelp when she unthinkingly anchors herself in place, the block of ice enclosing his hand up to the wrist. The woman isn't looking, too busy catching her breath. Her ice is pitch under the distant white porch lights, offering only dim relief from the blue dark, and Fuyumi directs it to seep away from her skin, back into the asphalt's cracks. The would-be thief stays, frozen to the black tar.

Fuyumi can't call this in herself. "Call the police to come collect him," she tells the woman as she pushes the purse into her arms.

And the woman's eyes are wide and rust-brown and sparkling, nothing but sheer relief and gratitude in her voice, and Fuyumi doesn't know what to say when she's asked, "What's your name?"

How could she know what to say?

Todoroki Fuyumi is not a name anyone will remember, and it has to stay that way because what Fuyumi just did is, in the eyes of the law, wrong. Todoroki Fuyumi is one half of a whole, a mumbled set up for a punchline that won't ever come again, a failed peacekeeper and a worse homemaker. Todoroki Touya burned himself alive, and she's what his crematory protest left behind. "Ihai," she answers. The woman's face twists with confusion because there isn't a hero named Ihai, because why would a hero with a frost quirk name herself after human ash, but Fuyumi just reiterates, "The police." The woman grabs her phone out of the purse and dials, and Fuyumi's sneakers don't do a very good job keeping her feet separated from the thin blades of black ice that she forms to rocket away from the scene of the crime.

When she gets back to the house it's the fastest she's ever managed it. She isn't out of breath.

Father isn't home; he has pressing matters in Hokkaido, dealing with a group of mutant extremists and the corollary anti-mutant extremists. It's something normally beneath the notice of the Endeavor Agency, but his presence was specially requested as the head of the mutant extremists has some personal, one-sided feud with her father, and he's never been the type to let a slight against him stand. Fuyumi drops her shoes at the door and walks gingerly to the bathroom, drawing a warm bath and sighing with relief as she starts to soak her too-cold skin. When she looks in the mirror, she is blurry from the distance and the steam, but all she can see is Touya staring back at her in a way that makes her ache.

She was a replacement mother to Natsuo and Shouto. A replacement caretaker for her father. Fuyumi sits alone in the house, the only one left to see their family as family instead of broken links in a chain, and alone, with no one to expect anything from her, she is a replacement for Touya. She is doing good where he can't. Her face stings from frozen tears and her feet and hands still ache from being warmed too quickly, and she looks in the mirror and Fuyumi realizes she doesn't want to look like her brother, anymore. It's not a good hurt. Fuyumi knows good hurts exist because that's the welcome burn after she finishes a run, that's the ache in her arms the next day after a good day at the gym, that's what she feels when Komei-kun talks about his mother without fear. Pain is part of life, and Fuyumi knows that, but she's learning that there are more ways to live with it than endurance alone.

Father won't be home until next week at the earliest. Fuyumi goes to bed shivering and makes an appointment with her hairdresser for the next morning.

(There aren't any mentions of Ihai in the newspaper. She double-checks as Torii-san brushes deep red dye over her roots, chattering happily about the chemical processes and the bright future of her distant relation's child, who recently manifested a quirk they're calling Crinkle. Fuyumi hums agreeably as the dye soaks in, and she doesn't bother asking what Crinkle actually does. It doesn't factor into over-optimistic dreams of knowing the next generation's #1 hero. )

The students all gasp when she comes in on Monday, and Fuyumi can't help but smile. "It looked so nice at the ends of my hair," she explains to an enraptured classroom, "I decided I wanted my whole head that colour!"

"Now you really look like Endeavor!" Tsuruko-chan cheers, "But less scary!" Fuyumi laughs as the others rush to agree with her. Endeavor hasn't quite realized that Shouto will never be a true successor to him, that his legacy ends with his retirement and not a second later, but Fuyumi knows. Fuyumi has herself listed as a priority contact on Shouto's paperwork, and she's the one who goes to parent-teacher conferences, and she knows that Shouto will surpass their father and will spit in his face. Fuyumi has strived to help people her entire life. She has no hope of surpassing Father, but she has no desire to rub his face in her victory, either. Fuyumi is making up for lost time. Fuyumi is not a good person, but she could be. She wants to be. She wants to redeem the Todoroki name where her brothers want to do away with it.

Fuyumi grades their spelling homework while the class is at lunch, eating in her classroom, and Imahara stops by with a knock on the doorframe. They exchange pleasantries, small talk, and then Imahara grins and asks the big question, tugging at lock of hair: your dad finally notice you? Fuyumi snorts. Of course, he hasn't. Imahara shrugs amiably and offers a light sympathy that does as little for her heart as Fuyumi's apparent invisibility, and they both know it. Imahara doesn't know everything- how could they? But they know that Fuyumi has two younger brothers and Father only cares about the youngest, the hero, and Imahara has drawn mostly-correct conclusions from there. They don't know the full extent of it. It's not for Fuyumi to tell the full extent of it.

The papers don't mention Ihai. Fuyumi grades homework and pins construction-paper butterflies to the walls and remembers the names of her new students, could pick each and every one of them out in a crowd. The papers mention a sharp rise in assault hospitilizations near Kamino. Dinner is waiting for Father on his return, and they eat as a family. "Your hair is red," Father says.

"I had it dyed while you were gone," Fuyumi answers.

"Hm," Father says. "It's a shame none of you truly inherited my hair colour. I had expected Touya's fire to be weaker than mine." Fuyumi looks at her father across the long table as he spears a bit of tofu, cleanly slicing it in two, and the edges of her vision are hemmed by a now-familiar red. She has never eaten dinner with her father and mother, the edges of her vision hemmed by her little brothers. She's part of the Todoroki family, even if the rest of them aren't here, and she's going to make that name mean something good. Father retires for the night. Fuyumi cleans the table, the dishes, and then ties her hair out of her face and finds her contacts as she changes into the outfit she wore when she confronted Moshin.

Her scarf stays in her pocket. Her jacket stays off, tied around her waist. She could be anybody.

She holds onto the railing as she rides the train to the edge of Kamino, and if anybody asks, she's going to tell them her name is Ihai.

Ihai doesn't know what her plan is. Wander around looking lost and hope for the serial assaulter to find her? Hope she can fight him off? For the most part, when there are people around, she gets strange looks and street crossings to the sidewalk opposite her, and Ihai wonders how underground heroes manage this sort of thing. The judgement. The blatant mistrust. With a license, she imagines, this is easier. A license that would take years to get, and months to get proper support gear, and months again to convince her father that she is capable enough to act on her own-

There's a tug at her midsection.

Ihai's hand shoots to her stomach, feeling gingerly through the coat padding, but when she looks down she sees that her whole body is glowing a faint pink. The buttons on her jacket are pulling tighter to her, as is her belt, and when she stumbles back in surprise the feeling only gets stronger. There's nobody else on the street with her. This is illegal Quirk usage. Ihai turns in the direction the feeling seems to be emanating from and takes a few cautious steps forward, then starts jogging, then- when the street stays empty, despite various neon signs declaring how late the bars and other establishments stay open- sprinting. Not skating just yet. Just in case she has to reserve her cold tolerance for the person illegally using their quirk.

The feeling is pulling her in, and Ihai doesn't know what she's expecting to see when she finally reaches its source but she certainly wasn't expecting it to stop. She slows down again, a light jog in the same direction before she hears... laughter. "Don't be silly," chirps a voice that's far too close for comfort, one that sends Ihai diving for cover behind a dumpster. A man, maybe twenty years old? Or perhaps a bit older, but certainly younger than middle age. "We're not gonna kill him, Big Sis!" Ihai's blood runs cold. Two of them. The assaulters. She found them.

What now?

Ihai isn't trained properly. She was prepared for a petty thief, and minor attempted scuffle with a drunk woman, but this man- and his sister- they've been sending people to the hospital for weeks. Some of those people don't leave the hospital unless it's in a body bag, Natsuo's tried not to talk about it but she understands more than anyone suspects about how to read between the lines. "Why not?" The other voice is low, rough but fond. "You lured him out here way too easy. I don't like the thought of a guy who followed a little girl into a backalley just getting back up again."

She's missing something. There's a piece of this that doesn't make sense. Ihai shuffles closer to the edge of the dumpster, craning her head to hear them better. "I'm not even that hungry," the man explains, and Ihai's brow wrinkles involuntarily; I, the way Teizo-chan from her class says I. A voice implying a petulant eyeroll, perhaps an overexaggerated pout, the way some of the other girls that Ihai went to school with would do. Could she be the 'little girl' in question? But she doesn't have a child's voice, even if she has the intonations and manner of one. "I could go back in and get him banned from the bar!" The other woman laughs, a sharp exhale that puts Ihai in mind of the sound Touya would make when she batted at his arm and forced him to repeat the motion, unsatisfied until she could copy it perfectly, beat for beat and breath for breath in sync with him. Not an understanding laugh, but a warm one all the same.

"He showed off Propulsion too much, Himiko; they'd know you weren't him in five minutes."

A man's voice and a young girl's words, talking about blood and pretending to be someone she isn't, talking to Big Sis and not attacking the victim further because she isn't that hungry. They lured a man out to a back alley with a sixteen year old girl. "I can do a lot of bannable stuff in five minutes," insists Toga Himiko, one of the villains who attacked Shouto's camp and nearly killed the students there. Her 'Big Sis' must be Magne, the woman with the magnet powers, the reason Ihai's metal buttons and belt buckle pulled so close to her skin. An errant blast of magnetism. Ihai just happened to be there, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now- now what? Now, she calls the police? Now, she finds a hero, the way she was taught, and tells them what she knows? Now, she fights two dangerous women with half-remembered training and a month of gym lessons?

Ihai stands slowly, her mind spinning over itself. What she should do, she imagines, is go into the bar and ask after the man using Propulsion. She'll say she thinks it's him, lying in the alley outside, and ask if there's someone who could call an ambulance because it looks as if he- tripped, and hit his head, because there was blood. And if the police come, she'll mention seeing the same man nearby, upright and unharmed with blood at the corners of his mouth and a large woman at his side, and the police will put two and two together. They'll increase hero presence and Ihai won't have another excuse to come out this way, and she'll have done something, and she'll have helped. The man might even survive if she's quick enough about it. Magne used her Quirk not even five minutes ago, surely when the man put up a fight, so if the blood-drinking was that recent, then surely it isn't too late.

Ihai's foot catches the wheel of the dumpster and she goes down hard, the lid coming down even harder with an ear-splitting crack that stops the women's friendly bickering in an instant.

New plan.

"Apologies," Ihai calls, certain they can hear the tremor in her voice. Certain Toga can smell her fear. (It turns out, Ihai defaults to formality when she's fearing for her life.) She begins to rise to her feet, grateful at least that her current outfit has extra padding sewn in. "I had meant for our introduction to be-" and then she can't speak because the pull is back, and it is breathlessness alone that keeps her from yelping when pink surrounds her body and jerks her around the edge of the dumpster and right toward the prone blue body of the man who is also staring at her with a wide smile and a knife. "...less dramatic," Ihai finishes as she feels her arms being grabbed and held firmly in place. She can't ice Magne to the spot without freezing herself, nor without Toga attacking first.

Toga licks her lips. "Y'know, I'm pretty full, but I can always make room for dessert."

[magne interrupts to know why tf ihai was eavesdropping, ihai's like "i wanna join?" and they're both like "uh huh yeah sure you do" and ihai grits her teeth and is like "my dad's endeavor. he quirk-married my mom and drove her nuts, he drove my brother to kill himself, and i'm watching him drive my younger brother to kill himself too. if a man like that can be the #2 hero then yeah, hero society deserves to burn. i deserve to be the one to do it. i want to join." and then a taylor hebert ass beat of like oh god oh jeez oh fuck, I sure hope they believe this and I sure hope I can turn all of this info over to the heroes later.]

UNDER CONSTRUCTION