Chapter Text
“Enji, please! He’s only a child,” their mother pleads from where she crouched down, folding five-year-old Shouto into her embrace. Enji scowls, taking a step forward and encroaching on Rei’s space, grabbing her wrist in his tight grip and he attempts to yank her away from the sobbing child.
To their mother’s credit, she only flinches a little bit when he wrenches her hands off their son and throws her in the other direction. Her back hits the wall with a thud and she falls onto the hardwood on her butt. Her vision swims for a moment before she refocuses, silver lining her eyes as unshed tears fill them as she stares at her husband.
“Mommy!” little Shouto cries, trying to run to her side in vain before his path is cut off by the hulking man in the room. He levels the boy a glare hot enough to stop him in his tracks. Shouto whimpers unconsciously, taking a step back.
He turns his attention back to their mother with an ugly look on his face. “I will do what I want, Rei. It would do you well to remember who you speak to,” their father — He’s Endeavor, not our father , Touya had said once with an ugly sneer that, to Fuyumi’s abject horror, made him look exactly like Endeavor — snarls. Poor baby Shouto is crying even harder now, fear in his dichromatic eyes as they flick from Father to Mom and back again.
Today was supposed to be a day of celebration for him. After all, it’s not every day that you awaken your quirk for the first time. Everyone was supposed to be happy .
Fuyumi stands silently in the foyer, frozen to her spot as she watches the scene unfold in the living room with bated breath. Her trembling hands grip the door-knob tightly, hardly noticing at all when her quirk begins frosting over the polished brass, her hoarfrost creeping from her clenched fingertips as she stands. When she had come home from the library, she had expected dead silence, maybe some giggling from Shouto, but not this .
She thanks God that Touya had to go pick up Natsuo from school and was out of the house so that neither of them could get involved and make the situation worse than it already was.
It was still pretty bad though.
Rei stands up again, a determined look on her face under the copious amounts of fear and she stalks to Endeavor. “Enji, don’t forget that Shouto is my child too!” She exclaims, showing more backbone now than Fuyumi has ever seen in the past few years. A foreign emotion rises up in her chest, threatening to burst with its intensity, a mix of pride and fear. Endeavor hates disobedience. It didn’t matter where it came from, their father hates being challenged almost as much as he hates being Number Two.
Rei stops in front of Endeavor, pointing her finger at him as anger colors her painfully pale cheekbones a dusky red color. “And I will not allow you to t—”
Everything else happens so fast, Fuyumi is still left reeling in the aftermath. All she saw was their father raising his large palm and before she knew it, her mother is on the ground again, this time nursing a quickly purpling face. Rei lets out a wounded yelp as she crashes to the ground, unable to stop the freight train that was Todoroki Enji when he is angry.
“Mommy!” Shouto cries, his voice rising in pitch as he watches their mother get so cruelly handled.
Having seen enough, her feet move of their own accord, down the foyer and rushing over to their mother’s side as she cradles her rapidly bruising cheekbone in her hands, her quiet sobs wracking her body. Fuyumi’s cold hands hold their mother and she stares up at their father who, like usual, ignores her, his gaze instead zeroing in on Shouto once more.
For some reason, that grates on her more than usual.
“Shouto!” he barks, his temper bubbling over. “It is time to begin your tra—”
Before Fuyumi can even think about it, her mouth forms the word. “No.”
Dead silence.
Fuyumi desperately wants to take the words back into her mouth and stay quiet but the damage is already done. For the first time in her short life, she has her father’s full attention on her, his burning gaze directly on her.
“What did you say?” he says, his voice low in warning. Fuyumi notices dimly that his flaming facial hair has started burning brighter with his ire, raising the temperature of the room several degrees. Still, she holds her ground in the face of her father, a stubborn set in her jaw.
Todoroki Fuyumi is all of eleven years old, thirty-six kilograms soaking wet, and less than a hundred-forty centimeters tall and she had just said no to Endeavor. I said no to Father , she realizes belatedly, her heart climbing into her throat.
“I, uh, I said no,” she repeats shakily, standing up from her mother’s side and facing the person that most frequented her nightmares. Shouto glues himself to her side, burying his face into her leg. She gently nudges him behind her and out of their father’s line of sight. “Shouto… Shouto is too young to be training with you,” she says, forcing strength into her words as she stares their father right in his piercing blue-green eyes. “He deserves to… to be a kid. Not to, uh, be your legacy,” she finishes awkwardly, her heart racing in her chest because never, has she ever spoke to her father like that.
“Fuyumi, get out of my way,” he bites out, nearing the end of his rope. His mustache burns brighter and hotter but Fuyumi pays that no mind.
“No,” she says again, planting her feet into the ground solidly. She is made dimly aware of the front door opening by Natsuo’s quiet rambling and Touya’s quiet footsteps. They both silence themselves in the genkan, but Fuyumi redirects her attention to her father who takes a threatening step forward.
“Fuyumi, I will not tell you again,” he threatens, getting in her face close enough for the fire on his face to get uncomfortably close to her skin. Part of her brain is roaring, screaming at her to do what he says. It would be much, much easier to just move out of the way. But, she can’t. Not when she can still feel Shouto trembling against her in fear, his crying muffled against her. No. If she moves out of the way now, she would fail her otouto. She’d never forgive herself.
“ No ,” she repeats evenly, astounded by the strength of her quiet voice. She stares him dead in the eyes in a show of bravery that she never thought herself capable and clenches her teeth, ready for the worst.
She doesn’t have to wait very long.
Suddenly, Endeavor is moving to hit her across the face like he’d done with mother and Fuyumi doesn’t think. In her panic and anger, her quirk flares out as she screamed, all of her anguish and panic and fury releasing in one, untrained shot.
Endeavor’s vision is suddenly filled with white as her quirk, now released from her tight control, climbed up his arms and onto his torso, stopping his movement with its intensity. When she regains control of herself, she is floored and more than a little terrified of the scene before her. Their father, the great Endeavor, only second to All Might, is trapped in her quirk.
He was frozen .
From his feet on the cracking wood to the top of his neck and everywhere in between, her ice had covered him, stopping him from moving the slightest bit, the ice dropping the temperature in the room several degrees.
And Endeavor looks furious . “RELEASE ME NOW!” he bellows, the veins on his forehead standing at attention. Fuyumi thought she had known fear before when she watched her mother become despondent and retreat into herself due to her treatment by their father. She thought she knew fear when Touya kept coming to her with burns upon burns upon burns after his daily ‘training sessions’ with their father and his skin was peeling and blistering and it was all Fuyumi could do to slather the burn salve onto his scorched limbs and bandage them. She thought she knew fear when she came home today and saw their father’s sights set on her baby-brother and she had stepped in to defend her family from the monster who wore the face of her father.
She was wrong.
Panic and nausea tear through her and hot tears fell onto her cheeks as she watches her father struggle to get out of the hold of her quirk and she realizes He can’t burn himself out .
Fuyumi had known that she had a decently powerful quirk. It was from her mother’s side, the ice she can produce from her fingertips, and it was enough that Todoroki Enji deemed her a failure and ignored her from the moment it had been discovered. It was… easier to be ignored, she’d supposed. If she wasn’t, she would be subject to his “training” and judging by how badly injured Touya had come to her every other night, it was bad .
Fuyumi knew her quirk was colder and more powerful than her mother’s. She just wasn’t aware of just how much colder and more powerful it was. She has trapped Endeavor in her quirk, something very, very few people alive can say and judging by his murderous expression, he isn’t very happy.
“FUYUMI RELEASE ME THIS INSTANT!” All of her previous bravery evaporates as she stares at her handy-work, terror like none she’s ever felt erupting in the pit of her stomach because I’m not sure I know how to release it.
“Holy shit, ‘Yumi,” she hears from the entrance to the genkan. Touya looks both impressed and horrified at their father’s predicament, his grip on Natsuo’s hand slacking a little. He leans down and whispers something in Natsuo’s ear that haa the smaller boy running for the stairs before Fuyumi can say anything.
“Fuyumi.” The girl in question looks down to their mother, whose face was purple with the huge bruise taking up half of her face with tear-filled eyes. “Relax from your stomach and exhale,” she instructs quietly, with more lucidity than she’d shown in months. Trembling, Fuyumi does as she says, hyperventilating the entire time.
What happens when he gets free? she ponders as she watches her ice melt into nothing as it evaporates . Easy, she realizes, feeling Endeavor’s burning gaze on her again.
He kills me .
Not wanting to die at the tender age of eleven and a half, Fuyumi does the one thing she could think of.
She runs.
Fuyumi bolts out of the living room, back through the foyer, and wrenches the door open before anyone can even register her movements. The shouting is cut off by her slamming the door and taking off down the streets, her breaths shaky from panic and exertion as she sprints full-force down the streets of Musutafu, dodging concerned pedestrians with keen reflexes as she tries to put as much distance between that man and her as humanly possible so that he doesn’t burn her alive.
Fuyumi runs and runs and runs until she can’t run anymore and she collapses in the middle of a park near Natsuo’s school, devoid of any children, surprisingly. She walks along the grass, the blades tickling her bare feet until she reaches a small swing near the west end of the small park and begins swinging.
Then, and only then does Fuyumi allow herself to cry.
A keening whine forces its way out of her throat and it’s over for her. Great, shuddering sobs wrack her small frame as she cries for her mother, for her brothers, and for herself, her hands gripping the chains holding the swing aloft. Todoroki Fuyumi, the only daughter of the great hero Endeavor, stays on that swing for a while. Maybe it was a few minutes, maybe it was a few days. Time kinda melded together as she cried herself out on that swing.
It’s a long time before she stops crying, but when she does, she makes a promise to herself.
Never again will I allow him to make me feel so small, she decides once dusk has settled over the park and begins coloring her world the shades of sunset. I will protect my family, even if that means from Fa— Endeavor , she corrects herself in her mind, scowling. He doesn’t deserve that title. He never would.
However, the only way to protect them is to become more powerful and how can she do that with no training? She purses her lips and narrows her puffy eyes at her feet as they hover over the mulch of the playground. Then, it hits her.
What better way could there be to protect her family than to become a hero ? The idea causes some of the ache in her heart to go away as she rolls it around in her mind. That way I can train my quirk and my body so I can be strong enough to beat him . Besides, it’s not like being a pro-hero isn’t in her blood.
And it was decided.
There, on that swing-set, as the sun set below the horizon, hours after the eleven-year-old girl had frozen her terrifying father with her quirk, Todoroki Fuyumi made a decision that would change the trajectory of both her life and the life of her family.
She just didn’t know it yet.
With that new goal in mind to bolster her courage and give her strength, she peels herself off of the swingset and starts the walk home, crushing the fear that begins building in her chest down low. There’s no space for fear anymore , she thinks, squaring her shoulders as she walks barefoot down the rapidly dimming street.
By the time she makes it back to the quiet estate, Fuyumi has a rough plan in her head on how exactly she is going to protect her family and that plan starts with going to UA in three years.
I have three years to prepare for the UA entrance exam , she thinks, her brow furrowing. It’s going to be a lot, but I know I can do it.
On that day, Todoroki Fuyumi decided she was going to become a Pro-Hero.
And no one, no one , was going to stop her.