Chapter Text
A scream tore from Touya’s throat, the coils of blue flames licking his skin leaving reddened burns in their path, before fizzling out just before they could become little more than a flash of embers. He fell down on his knees in the training room despite how little flame he had produced, breathing heavily as tears flowed unbidden down his face, his blurry gaze trying to focus on the boots of the man looming over him.
“Pitiful,” Enji scoffed, and reached down, putting his hand on one of the boy’s burned shoulders, gaining another choked whimper at the heat, and pulling him back to his feet. As soon as he was standing, he was released, and the man’s arms were crossed once more. “Again.”
“S-sorry, Father,” Touya cuts himself off at the fury in his father’s glare, flinching a moment before the strike lands, head snapping to the side as Enji slaps him. He doesn’t cry, not again, tongue darting out to lick the blood from the new split in his lip before focusing once more on his flames. They’re blindingly hot, the blue embers forming in his hands, igniting as they travel up his arms, to his shoulders, and he struggles to breathe at the searing heat so close to his neck. He forces it to travel down to his chest, but his resolve wavers and the flames are snuffed out before he can steel himself, the searing heat leaving behind a chill that makes him shake from the sudden temperature change.
“Forget it. We’re done for today. Go get your sister. Maybe she won’t fail me, like you.” Enji’s words have Touya flinching again, but he runs out of the training room. He nearly runs into his sister, who had been standing just outside the entrance to the training room. When she sees him, her eyes go wide, and he finds himself yanked into the embrace of his twin, feeling her body temperature suddenly plummet, hands pressing soothingly on his fresh burns.
“He wants you in there, Kamiko,” Touya whispers, but makes no effort to pull from the blissful cold that his sister emits.
“He can wait,” Kamiko responded, more concerned about her twin than their father’s wrath at the moment. However, she pulled away as Enji shouted her name, squeezing her brother’s hands before entering the training room, schooling her face into an expressionless mask, as she so often did when dealing with Enji.
Touya doesn’t stick around, not wanting to hear his sister when training pushes her to the limits of her resistance, when the frost and ice she creates begin to give her the frostbite her quirk is named after. Instead, he goes to their shared room, hiding his face in his knees as he sits in his bed, closing his eyes and trying to pretend he couldn’t hear when his sister - hewassupposedtoprotecther - screamed in pain as their father watched with disdain. They were just kids, their quirks had only manifested two years before - Cremation and Frostbite, so much more powerful than either of their parents, but their bodies were adapted for the other’s quirk, making every training session a gauntlet of pain and suffering. What he would give to have just been considered another failure like Fuyumi and Natsuo, to just be allowed to live on the edges of their father’s indifference rather than having to be the focus of his blind ambition. What he wouldn’t give to never again have to burn his own hands to bring his twin back from the brink of freezing to death from the inside out.
When his sister returned from training, he ran to her side, seeing the way she was shaking, the blue of her fingertips, the way she was swaying on her feet. He forced himself to heat up as he pulled her into a hug, relieved when she still had the presence of mind to hug him back, to cling to the heat he put off. He looked over her head, out the window that was in the hallway, and a plan began to form in his mind, his hatred of their father finally given some outlet. “I’m not letting him do this anymore, he can’t get away with this.” He whispered to Kamiko, who looked up at him in confusion but didn’t speak.
He’d tell her the plan later. For right now, he just needed to get her warm again, then they could make plans to run away. They’d be fine, he knew, as long as they had each other they could face anything the world threw at them. Even the wrath of Todoroki Enji.