Chapter Text
Fuyumi finished reading the quite small file about the little girl, then finally looked up to her ‘parent’.
Eraserhead stared back with his bored gaze, but the young woman could detect a glint of anticipation in them. She smiled. He must care a lot about her if he was this worried about a preschool teacher’s opinion enough for it to actually show.
‘’Eri-chan sure has an interesting ability’’ She commented, still smiling, mostly to break the ice.
The man nodded. ‘’You don’t have to worry about it, I just want to know if she would be able to join the other kids this late into the year, and well, she’s also a bit older than most of them, no?’’
Ah, so that was what worried him.
‘’This school specializes in children with… difficult, quirks. I’m kind of new here, but I assure you Eri-Chan would fit right in, her age is not a problem, Eraserhead-san’’ She tried to sound as professional as possible but it was becoming harder and harder with that stare that she knew was not ill meaning, but intimidated nonetheless. It wasn’t as if she had a quirk worth erasing anyways, she thought with a shudder, feeling stupid.
‘’Glad to hear that, when can she start, then?’’ There was no smile on the man's face, but Fuyumi was pretty sure he relaxed after he got the answer he wanted to hear.
‘’Next monday would be her official start, but she can come tomorrow for a bit if you want, to test the waters, so to speak’’
‘’I’ll ask her’’
The rest of the conversation went on deciding the details, and just like that, Todoroki Fuyumi had another child under her care.
And if what she read on that file didn’t lie, Eri-Chan was one of the most interesting ones she’d had so far in her young career. And with a school like the one she worked at, that was a powerful statement.
Fuyumi walked out of the office with the underground hero right behind, and escorted him to the main door of the small establishment. When the vehicle the man came in was out of sight, she looked back at her workplace, sighed deeply, then went back inside.
To anyone observing her, they would think she was unhappy with her job or something about it bothered her, but that was not the case. Everyday she fought a battle inside her own mind, to stop herself from thinking about the reasons she decided to teach children with problematic quirks in the first place. She knew she wasn’t entirely selfless for choosing this path, but even though she could never change the past and help the person she really was doing this all for, she still felt she was doing the right thing. The sighing and the sadness were unwanted side-effects of being in the right place, but at the wrong time.
As she walked down the halls of the tiny school, she waved to one of the cleaning staff members that was still working, even though it was almost 7PM and pretty much everyone but the director, herself and that janitor were still around.
She was wondering why the woman was still in the school when her curiosity got satisfied without her having to ask.
‘’Miss Fuyumi! I was waiting for you to finish your chat with that man’’ The woman was already dressed normally and probably heading out, and Fuyumi felt a bit bad, wondering how long had she waited for her.
‘’What is it?’’ She asked.
‘’I found this in one of the classrooms, and I don’t think it belongs to any of the kids. I know all those little ruffians and their toys’’
The woman handed Fuyumi what seemed to be a quite large gem. Except it didn’t look like anything she had seen before, when she would usually be able to identify gem's and minerals pretty easily. She had the hobby of studying them in her spare time, after all.
‘’Strange...’’ She commented, turning it over to inspect it. Then it clicked. ‘’Oh! I think I know what it is!’’
‘’I hope none of the children stole that-’’
‘’No no, it’s part of a quirk, it just had never manifested before, oh Taro's mother will be happy!’’
Fuyumi kept staring at the violet crystal in her hands, trying to remember exactly what Taro’s quirk did exactly. That kid had never manifested this before, but she remembered his parents and a very similar conversation to the one she had with Eraserhead moments ago, happening a couple months back, when Taro joined her class. To her own frustration, she had forgotten entirely what the quirk did, but she was pretty sure the gem wasn’t just for show.
‘’Miss Fuyumi? Did you do something to it? It’s glowing…’’ The woman’s worried tone woke the teacher out of her thoughts, and realized that the gem was, indeed, glowing.
She was starting to get worried when the gem got suddenly, extremely hot. She yelped and let it drop to the floor, and immediately her instincts told her to grab the confused woman beside her and push her away from it.
‘’What is going on?!’’
‘’Aiko-san, behind me!’’ She yelled, then breathed in a gulp of already hot air, lifted her hands in front of her, and let her quirk out.
She hated using it, her faulty quirk, but this situation called for it. She concentrated like her mother tried to teach her to do long ago, and did her best to surround the gem -which was now growing at a fast pace- with a thick wall of blue, glacier-like ice.
‘’C-cold’’ Aiko commented from behind her. The woman was grabbing onto Fuyumi’s back, trying to protect herself from the ice quirk as well as from whatever the gem was doing, but that wasn’t gonna help. Fuyumi would soon be just as cold as the ice wall she was making.
Fuyumi wanted to apologize, but she had no time. It was either her somewhat controlled cold, or the definitely out of control heat that emanated from the gem. If she didn’t do anything, her precious school might be destroyed.
She noticed that the gem, now just a white blob from behind the ice wall that surrounded it, grew until it was the size of a person. Make it two. Was she getting crazy, or were there two people, shining as brightly as the gem was moments ago, inside her frozen cage? She decided to take that as a que to stop, and then dropped to her knees, feeling weak.
‘’Miss Fuyumi!’’ The woman exclaimed, putting a hand on one of the teacher’s shoulders but then retiring it immediately. ‘’Cold!’’
‘’I’ll be fine, I just need... a moment’’ She started the routine her mother taught her. It was pretty much the same thing someone with a panic attack would do to calm themselves down, but it also included her having to consciously make her own quirk retreat back to the depths of herself, where she usually kept it sealed away. Most people didn’t need to do that, especially not as adults, but Fuyumi got used to being faulty at a very young age. It was part of the reason she was passionate about her job: She didn’t want any other kid, defective quirk or not, to grow up and feel like she did everyday. Like a mistake.
‘’Yumi what did you do?!’’ Someone exclaimed from within the ice, a male voice that sounded exasperated.
Fuyumi, confused at someone calling her by the nickname only her brothers used, was about to speak when someone else did for her.
‘’Nothing! What did YOU do, huh?!’’
Was that her voice?
‘’Where did the villain go?’’ The woman from inside the ice spoke again, and Fuyumi’s confusion peaked with her previous suspicion confirmed. That sounded exactly like herself, except her mouth was busy being wide open and unspeaking, not arguing with someone inside an ice cage. And ice cage that was melting quickly.
‘’You’re gonna leave a bunch of water lying around, let me do it, idiot’’ Said Not-Fuyumi again, just as exasperated as the man sounded before.
The ice disappeared in a second after the woman spoke, and just like that, Fuyumi found herself staring at what looked like… well, herself. And-
‘’T-Touya?’’
The Not-Fuyumi was too busy looking at her surroundings and finishing ‘absorbing’ the ice to notice her clone staring confusedly back at her at first, but the guy, that looked exactly as the way her twin brother would look like if he got to grow up, did notice.
‘’Uhhh’’ He said, just as confused as everyone else.
‘’Why are we in a school all of a sud-’’ Not-Fuyumi started asking when she noticed Fuyumi presence.
The long and awkward silence that transcurred while they stared at each other was too much for poor Aiko, who spoke first after a good minute of no-blinking contest.
‘’You didn’t tell me you had a twin, Miss Fuyumi!’’ She exclaimed, obviously joking as she patted Fuyumi’s back. Nervous laughter followed the woman's statement, but no one else reacted.
The young teacher was too busy just… staring. First thing she noticed, aside from the fact that those two people were there, staring back at her, was the suits. Not-Fuyumi was wearing a gorgeous white spandex littered with blue snowflakes, her hair was on a bun and her eyes were partially covered by what looked like snow goggles. The guy, who she decided not to think of as Touya, even though he looked exactly like her deceased twin, was sporting a black spandex with a similar design to the woman’s, except it was black with blue flames. He also wore black cargo pants and similar eye-covering goggles. Both of them had, at the center of their chests, a round support mechanism with a symbol that combined the blue flame with the blue snowflake into one logo.
They were obviously heroes. Heroes she had absolutely no idea where they came from, or why they looked so familiar.
‘’Should I call the police, or the heroes?’’ Aiko had already her phone on one hand, and was just waiting for Fuyumi to say something before making a call. The woman was probably seconds away from doing it anyways if she didn’t answer.
‘’No no… ‘’ She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want any authority here yet, but she was grateful for Aiko listening anyways. ‘’I’ll handle this, you can go home Aiko’’
‘’You sure?’’ The woman’s gaze doubted Fuyumi’s choices with all her power, but the young teacher had already made up her mind.
‘’Yes, just go’’ She then stared at the two newcomers, who were having some sort of mental conversation with each other, and asked them: ‘’There will be no problem, right?’’
They both looked at her like she was a ghost, then again had a silent conversation, and then Not-Fuyumi nodded, while her twin said: ‘’No problem, Ma’am’’ In a calming fashion.
The very second Aiko was out of the place, which had almost no vestige of what just occurred other than some water on the floor, the three spoke at the same time.
‘’Ok who the heck are you?’’ Asked the man.
‘’Where are we?’’ Not-Fuyumi asked. ‘’And why do you look like me? I only have one twin, and it's this asshole right here, no more’’
‘’Who the fuck are you two?!’’ Asked real Fuyumi, who was mildly worried at her own mind-voice having to refer to herself as the real one.
Then there was silence again as the three of them started rubbing their eyes with frightening coordination.