Work Text:
Rei emanated warmth. She trailed it behind her like a fog, the furnace of the house, the comfort of her children, the hot coal at the core of a broken family. Ever since her children were young, they’d always been able to find her by gravitating to the warmest room in the house, and she would take them into her lap and let them run their fingers through her candlelit hair.
Enji, on the other hand, was always cold. By the time Natsuo was born, Rei’s older two children knew by habit to make themselves scarce if the temperature in the house ever suddenly dropped. It meant that Enji was home, and worse, that he was angry. And he was always angry. Angry at Rei, at the children, at anyone who got in his way.
Natsuo had once described Enji (well out of his father’s hearing, of course) as ‘what happens when hell freezes over.’
The first time Touya came to her, fingers pale and stiff with frostbite, teeth clattering together uncontrollably and shivers wracking his body, so young and so fragile, her heart broke. She came so close to leaving, then and there, to scooping up her son and daughter and fleeing home with nothing but the clothes on their backs, but-
-but then what? Where could she go? Where could she possibly go that he wouldn’t find her?
She missed her family home, her mother’s flames that had always danced in the fireplace, the way the furnace had always been lit. She wished she could have raised her children in a place where the air didn’t crackle with ice, where her babies could breathe without choking on the cold.
Rei was a daughter of fire and ash, but she had never blazed brightly. She had never known how to be brave, how to flare bright and angry and consume anything that dared draw near. All she knew was how to burn low, like candlelight, like the gentle warmth of an oven. She’d never been taught any other way.
She took Touya’s frozen hands in hers, let heat flow from her hands, soft and steady, getting the blood flowing once more and thawing the frostbitten skin, and whispered, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
It seemed like those were the only words she ever said to her eldest son, and no matter how many times she said it, it was never, ever enough.
Her daughter inherited Rei’s own quirk, flames dancing on her fingertips and down her arms, fireworks above her palms. Enji took mild notice at first, but when it became apparent that Fuyumi’s fire would never grow beyond party tricks and flashlights, he turned away, and Rei nearly collapsed in relief.
Fuyumi used her fire to light the stove on the nights Rei didn’t feel well enough to cook, or the nights when Enji had hit her so hard she couldn’t move. She used it to light her brothers’ lanterns on Koshōgatsu. Used it to light a nightlight in her hands when she crawled into Touya’s bed to try and calm his muffled sobbing.
Gentle. Rei’s daughter was so, so gentle, and it made her weep to see her carry their family on her shoulders, to see the way she hardened far younger than she should have had to, to see how effortlessly she lied.
All of Rei’s children were survivors, all of them developing their own ways to protect and arm themselves against the world. They had the fire, the bright, hungry light that Rei herself had long since lost, and she was glad to see it. It would be what kept them alive, what warmed them when the world was too cold to bear.
Because this was the secret about Touya and Fuyumi, about Natsuo and Shouto: they might have been Enji’s offspring, but they were Rei’s children.
Natsuo was the luckiest. He didn’t think he was lucky, Rei knew. He hated his fortune, hated that his father’s eyes had never for a moment fixed on him except in disdain, but he was so lucky. He only had the weakest of heat quirks, though she still recognized the coals buried deep within his bones.
The last time she saw Touya, he had frostbite blisters blooming on his hands, his fingernails greyish blue and his steps tender to avoid re-injuring his feet. She’d reached out to take his hands to warm them, like she’d done so many times before when he was young, but he yanked them away, balling them into fists even though the frozen flesh cracked and bled.
And then, just like that, he was gone, leaving the smell of ash and snow behind him. He was fourteen years old. She never saw him again.
She cried herself sick that night, silently, so she wouldn’t wake Enji sleeping beside her. Even her marriage bed was frigid.
Each new loss, each fresh hurt piling on, brought the fire in her chest lower and lower, reducing it to embers and coals, smothered by Enji’s oppressive cold.
She couldn’t remember what it felt like to be warm.
When Shouto’s power showed, she thought again about running, because she knew that once Enji saw, he would grab onto his treasure and never, ever let go. But she was tired, and sick, and so, so cold, and she could barely find the energy to walk some days, let alone run.
The cold was killing her, slowly, sapping the warmth away that had once been buried deep in her chest, leaving only dull hollowness in her heart and behind her eyes. She was so very tired, and true rest seemed to dance eternally out of her reach.
She just wanted to sleep. She wanted to feel warm again.
Fuyumi, bless her soul, filled the gaps that Rei left with her own candlelight, her flickering flames that only ever seemed to burn brighter as Rei’s own embers were burning out.
It was an evening in July, at the height of summer, when she collapsed. Even the sweltering heat outdoors couldn’t penetrate the cold that had sunken down to her muscles, permeated her being and strangled the fire out of her. The kettle slipped out of suddenly nerveless fingers and she stumbled, collapsed on the kitchen floor.
At the hospital, they would tell her she had acute hypothermia. That her body temperature was twenty degrees below what it should have been, and her heart rate and blood pressure were far below the average. None of them could understand how it had happened, in the humid depths of July.
Rei would have laughed until she cried, if only it had been funny. Instead she just wondered what it meant that she’d grown so accustomed to the cold that she hadn’t even noticed it was killing her.
Those predisposed to fire are more vulnerable to hypothermia, they told her, and she thought about Fuyumi and Shouto. About Touya. They told her she couldn’t go home, that they would have to keep her at the hospital until her body temperature returned to normal.
Yes, she said. Yes, please, let me be warm again, and the tears were hot on her cheeks. The nurses exchanged a look before one of them took her (cold, cold) hand, very gently, and asked if she was alright.
Fires are easy to extinguish, but hard to kill. Sometimes, all it takes is a spark, and the charcoal can spark back to life no matter how cold the air is.
During those weeks and weeks in the hospital, between the summer heat and the visits from her children, in the absence of Enji’s ever-present oppressive cold, Rei felt the long-dead fire in her chest kindle back to life.
One lazy August afternoon, the television in her hospital room broadcast a story. Breaking news, about a new group of criminals. One of them was a grey-eyed boy she knew at once, mutilated arms black and frozen with dead tissue, frostbite scars striping across his face, and he was smiling.
In all her years raising him, she’d never seen Touya grin like that before.
Natsuo arrived then, with a bouquet of orange and red for her bedside table, and Fuyumi followed after him with Shouto’s small hand in hers, and Rei tore her eyes away from the television to smile in greeting.
With Shouto sitting on the edge of her hospital bed as Natsuo told her stories of his day at school, Fuyumi shaking her head in fond disapproval as he went off onto a tangent, Rei finally, finally felt warm.