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Year One
There’d been a fire.
Fuyumi was accustomed to flames. She lived in them, in the burning embers of a household that simply didn’t quite fit right. She was used to seeing the burning orange of her father’s work uniform or the small embers that Shouto sometimes accidentally produced.
And, if sometimes she flinched away from it after one too many incidences, no one-- especially Touya-- needed to know.
What she hadn’t known that day as she thought the crude, albeit truthful, words to herself, was that Touya would never know. He’d never get the chance to.
Her mother had told them there was a fire.
In the forest Touya trained in.
Fuyumi was twelve, but she’d already learned much more than most others her age knew. She cooked dinner rather often, she made sure Natsuo was entertained throughout the day, and she did Touya’s homework nearly every day.
She didn’t do all of her chores for nothing, and she wasn’t oblivious to the tatters that seemed to be her home. She’d heard enough of Touya’s angry tirades-- and her parent's arguments-- to know why they were born and what their places were, even if she didn’t share his pessimistic outlook. He always said it was because she was too young, or a girl, or plain stupid.
He didn’t mean it; he was just hurting.
So, when Fuyumi heard that the forest around Sekoto Peak had gone up in flames, alarm bells rang in her head.
The nanny hadn’t let her run out the door, and she’d abided after glimpsing Natsuo’s face.
It was a Saturday, so her father had been home to teach Shouto. It was why Touya had been out there at all.
She’d never seen her father so scattered as he ran out the door, her mother shouting in tears behind him. His angry panicked words had been cut off as he shut the door, and Fuyumi was too distracted to say she was thankful.
Two hours later, ambulances drove by without sirens, lacking the urgency that implied carrying an injured person.
Half an hour later, her father walked back in. He didn’t look anyone in the eyes before marching off, a door slamming moments after.
Their mother had crumbled.
Every sense seemed to fade out as the puzzle pieces of their family clicked together for the first time in their lives with a single understanding.
Fuyumi stood on weak legs, her knees locked, and stared at the closed door.
Touya was gone.
Touya Todoroki, her stupid big brother who didn’t do his homework and got too angry too fast. Her big brother, the one that had stubbornly grabbed her hand every chance he could when they were toddlers. He was nearly her twin, with their ages being so close, and classmates that he didn’t like had joked about it before.
They hadn’t been particularly close, not with the ideology ingrained into his head by their father, but they’d been siblings. She’d loved him. She’d done his homework and laundry and bandaged the burns he couldn’t hide in the only attempt she could ever make to help him, because the only words that had an impact in their house were angry, loud ones, and they only ever had a negative impact.
She couldn’t breathe.
The word was closing around her, the flames growing ten times their usual size. She couldn’t feel, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear.
Touya wasn’t coming back. She wasn’t bandaging his wounds tonight.
She’d already done his homework, and now there was no need to turn it in. He’d never complain about picking his laundry up off the floor again. He’d never make fun of her attempts at cooking again. She couldn’t stick her tongue out at him and tell him that she knew it was good.
He was gone.
The first thing that Fuyumi felt after her world fell a hundred stories down was a squeeze at her hand.
“Yumi? Where’s…”
(She’d been twelve. She’d been twelve, and she’d told her little brother that their big brother, the one he adored, was gone.)
She forced the words out, and she held him the whole night. At some point, her tears faded to numbness, and the blue flames of the world dimmed to ash.
The next morning, she opened her eyes. She hadn’t slept, but at some point, her eyes had fallen closed in an attempt to squeeze the tragedies of reality away.
She needed to go to school. Natsuo needed to go to school. He was curled beside her, both of them in his room. She hardly remembered walking over, but she knew herself well enough to think that it was an attempt to prepare them both for the next morning.
It hadn’t worked. The idea of detaching from him felt like the most difficult thing in the world.
Her mouth tasted bad because she hadn’t brushed her teeth, and her cheeks felt like they’d been molded to be permanently still. Her glasses were digging into her ears, and her clothes were rumpled.
None of it mattered.
Touya was dead. Gone.
They both needed to go to school. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but Natsuo’s dinosaur clock displayed the time just fine, and before she’d have been overly relieved that she woke up on time.
She needed to get up, get Natsuo up, and push them both to school.
She couldn’t make him do that. Not yet. He deserved a day to himself. A day to grieve, to mourn. Wasn’t that what people were supposed to do in this situation? What was anyone supposed to do about the gaping pain in her heart, one that she was sure would never, ever fade?
But, she had to go to school. If all of them disappeared, then something would be wrong, and their teachers might call home. She didn’t want to make her mom answer the phone, and her father certainly wouldn’t do it.
A thought wedged itself into her mind, and she nearly sat starkly upright.
Shouto.
Immediate guilt crashed over her for leaving him alone all night, for forgetting the brother who she wasn’t allowed near. He was in this too. He’d also lost a big brother, even if he didn’t know him well. Touya used to sneak over to Shouto, Fuyumi knew.
She hadn’t meant to forget. Their mother usually took care of him, and she’d been taking care of Natsuo. The news must have distracted her.
She had to go to him. Before their father woke up, and before the nanny came.
Carefully, she replaced the arm Natsuo had latched onto with one of his stuffed toys and stood. Her legs felt like jelly, and she nearly collapsed into the air, but the wall was her support beam. Everything was spinning, and it all felt wrong. Touya should be there.
How many times had he stayed in this room?
He never would again.
The thought felt like a slap to the face. She moved down the hallway nonetheless, her throat dry and aching. She tried to smooth her clothes, just in case someone was awake. Moving her arms took more effort than it had after gym class.
With silent steps that she’d trained herself into long ago, she slid Shouto’s door open.
He was sleeping peacefully.
Did he know?
Would anyone tell him? Or would they let Touya fade out of his memory as if he’d never been there at all, just like she couldn’t remember bits and pieces from when she was only six years old?
She wouldn’t disrupt his sleep. She shut the door and felt her heart get knocked down a notch with it.
What happened now?
Her gaze stuck on one of the panels of the door and couldn’t seem to leave, even as it blurred with tears. She was trembling, despite the hallway consistently being too hot.
School.
She had to go to school.
If she took one day off, people would question why. Beyond that, if she missed one day, she was worried she’d never go back. How could she build up the strength tomorrow if she couldn’t do it now?
The same didn’t apply to Natsuo. She could help him up, and he’d go tomorrow.
Unfortunately, that would require leaving him home alone all day, with nothing to do but grieve the empty space.
She couldn’t do this.
It felt as if someone had taken a wrench to her very soul, taking her heart along with it. She wasn’t particularly close with Touya, but he was her brother, and she couldn’t do this without him. He’d been the exact opposite of helpful at every chance he got, but that was him, and now that he was gone she felt as if the world had gone dark. The flames had died.
She’d stay home from school.
Natsuo would too.
Tomorrow, they’d both go, and she’d put on the concealer that she’d stolen from her mother to ensure no one asked any questions.
Mom.
She picked up the shattered pieces of her soul and wrenched them together as she walked to her mother's parent’s room. The sun had begun to filter through the windows already, so she might be awake.
She took the long way and ensured the light in her father’s office was on, and then pried open her mother’s door with shaking fingers. She was there, alone.
Fuyumi scarcely went into the large room. She wasn’t technically barred from it, but the need never arose. It looked more lifeless than it had when she was little.
“Mom?”
Her voice was scratchy and weak.
She could see her mother’s form, laying on her side and curled up. She was probably asleep, and Fuyumi should let her sleep.
She wanted to hug her. Not just because she knew she was hurting, but because Fuyumi hurt so bad. She missed Touya, and she didn’t know how to do this. It was selfish, but she wanted her mom to help.
“Mom?” she asked again, an irritating tone of emotion wavering in her voice. She blinked furiously to keep away any stupid tears-- Touya always said she cried too much, and he was right.
Her mom moved, looking at her. Her face was mostly shadowed, but it looked puffy. Most of all, she looked sad. Not the usual way that Fuyumi had seen her, but completely devastated and broken.
It only increased the pain blossoming in her chest.
She wiped at her nose to ensure she didn’t sniff aloud, begging her voice to stay straight as she changed her mind.
“Natsuo and I, uh, will stay home from school today. So I can take care of him. Just one day. I’m gonna go to… Sleep.”
She nearly shut the door as her tears dripped down her cheeks at an alarming rate, but her mother sat up.
“Fuyumi.”
Her voice sounded even more broken than she looked.
Wordlessly, she outstretched an arm.
Fuyumi didn’t hesitate as she ran over to her mom, sitting beside her on the mattress and falling into her hold. She wasn’t sure which of them was holding the other as she instinctively wrapped her arms around her.
They both sobbed.
When her mother fell asleep, she stood and detached herself from someone for the second time that day.
Neither she nor Natsuo went to school that day. She made them both dry food that wouldn’t be a pain to throw up and slowly ate it with him, hiding in his room like they did when their parents shouted.
Natsuo cried a lot and asked her questions she couldn’t answer. She reassured him in the way she never could Touya and hoped it’d be enough.
The next day, she woke up to screaming.
She clamped her hands over her ears immediately, looking around for Natsuo, despite having slept in her room. If she could will herself to move, she’d go to comfort him.
One of her hands went over her mouth as her panicked breaths turned to sobs, and she tried to curl back up and pretend everything was fine.
It didn’t work.
Usually, their parents only argued in their room, but she could hear them coming closer down the hall. Her mother didn’t usually shout so viscerally, but desperate words were flying away from her.
It was about Shouto and his training. Fuyumi didn’t know what had happened.
Her father was furious. He was always loud and terrifying when he yelled, but something was different this time. Pounding footsteps dragged down the hallway and past her door, and she wished that her hands did better to muffle the sound.
Once they were past and she knew they’d turned the corner, even as their screams lingered, she ran out of her room with not-so-quiet footsteps and fell beside Natsuo. He was awake, and in a similar state to her.
Half an hour later she found herself on the computer as she brushed her hair, looking up ways to erase the signs of crying from her face. An hour later, she and Natsuo were walking to school, hand-in-hand like they had he was little-- Touya had always been there, back then.
They stopped on the sidewalk where their paths split to their respective buildings. Natsuo had tears in his eyes.
“It’ll be okay,” she said, smoothing his hair.
Touya was gone.
“Pretend it’s like normal, and it’ll go by fast. I’ll be here when you get out, I promise.”
Nothing would ever be normal again, if such a thing had ever existed.
In her classes, people asked questions. They’d heard about the third year who died. They’d seen her walking in the hallways with him, and their resemblance to each other was undeniable. They all knew they were related.
Fuyumi kept her composure and plastered a smile over her face, even if it felt like poison.
Every day went like that.
Prior to Touya’s death, she’d had acquaintances in her classes. Not quite friends, seeing as she never did anything with them outside of school, but people she enjoyed. She let them fall away; it was easier to lie that way.
She smiled and claimed her days were great, and when a teacher asked her to share information about her weekend, she’d tell stories of her parents and brothers that hadn’t been true since she was a toddler.
She pretended everything was fine, because it would be easier that way. For all of them.
Her mother seemed to get worse and worse, and Fuyumi took up more and more chores. She longed to do Touya’s homework, but eventually, the absent time that she would have done it filled up with other tasks.
Just as the dojo filled up with shouts and screams.
She wasn’t even allowed to see Shouto, let alone do anything. Touya’s flames were gone, but the others had only grown bigger and bigger, and he was across a chasm that was impossible to get close to. She wanted to help him. Every time she heard him cry, she longed to help him.
All she could do was bandage his wounds after they’d already been done, and it didn’t make much of a difference.
She was overwhelmed with her own emotions and the tasks she’d taken on willingly, along with her own changes as a newly thirteen-year-old girl. Everything stacked up higher and higher, and she couldn’t help Shouto on top of it all.
He shouldn’t come last.
He did anyway, and she hated herself for it every time.
Natsuo wasn’t the same. He didn’t incessantly ask to play games anymore, and the energy that had been in him before was gone. He began to eat normal meals again, and he bugged her about anything he wanted, but he wasn’t the sunshine-like boy from before.
At least, in the house, he wasn’t.
She began to notice that when she saw him with his friends he’d be happy and alive, just like the brother she’d always known. Their house was crushing them all, and the outdoors was freeing.
Unfortunately, she didn’t go out much.
Time passed, and things changed. They didn’t improve in the way she’d hoped they would, and the gaping hole within her didn’t fill, but time went on without Touya.
That was, until the night she woke up to Shouto and her mother’s screams.
Year Two
Fuyumi sat in the lobby of a hospital she hadn’t known existed with bouncing legs and bitten cuticles. She was thirteen years and two months old, which was older than Touya would ever be.
This wasn’t about Touya.
(Everything was about Touya, though. How could it not be?)
It was a Saturday, and Natsuo had a soccer game, meaning he wasn’t home alone. Shouto was.
It had been four months since screams broke out in the middle of the night and Fuyumi’s life turned on its side for the second time. It was upside down now, and it wasn’t going back.
Their mom was gone. Shouto was even further pushed to a fate that he didn’t deserve; no one did, but especially not the bright eyed boy that stared at the koi fish in the pond.
Her mom had been gone, until two days prior when she snuck into her father’s office and found the location of her hospital. Now, she was at a hospital without parental consent and hoping to see one of those parents.
The silence felt deafening, and the building was collapsing on her. There were no flames, so instead, she was drowning. Drowning in stress and grief and guilt. There was too much, and she simply wanted to see her mom-- even if she couldn’t bring herself to comfort Fuyumi, she was her mom, and seeing her would be enough.
Finally, after an hour, a woman in scrubs walked over. She introduced herself and said a lot of things that Fuyumi didn’t quite understand but knew were bad. Then, she’d asked how she got there and why she was alone. There was a glint in her eye that suggested she might know something, and it terrified Fuyumi, but she kept her posture and widened her smile.
“My dad works most days, and he told me he didn’t know if I needed an adult but wanted me to be able to come anyway, so he gave me the address. It’s not too far from our home, and… I just wanna see my mom.”
She let some honesty flow out at the end, despite having just lied through her teeth. It was as honest as she could get, because the real truth would consist of a meltdown and shouts that reminded her too much of her father-- she’d never minded that; she had his eyes and red specks of his hair, and it didn’t make her reflection unbearable. She just didn’t want to yell like him. Never the yelling.
The nurse let her in.
She and her mother hardly spoke. Her mom only ran her fingers through Fuyumi’s hair, not even looking at her as tears dripped down her cheeks.
She went home to a house that might as well be empty.
She nearly broke down in the hallway.
Instead, she started dinner.
It became a routine to visit her mother weekly, even as her condition worsened. Sometimes, silence turned into meltdowns that resulted in the nurse pulling Fuyumi out the moment she got there. She’d heard her mom say ‘I’m sorry’ enough times to hear the phrase in her sleep.
She just wanted things to get better.
At some point, in the scarce time to her thoughts that she had, she began to think of her childhood-- many would argue she was still a child, but she didn’t act like one, so she didn’t care about the technicalities. She remembered when things weren’t so bad.
When she was really young, her father would still acknowledge her. Her mother would smile and laugh and bump shoulders harmlessly with her father. Touya would grab her hand and then protest that it was only for her safety.
Natsuo and Shouto didn’t fit into the narrative, but she wished that they did.
The ideal family that had scarcely been her own became a dream of hers. She was never actually blessed with dreams of it in her sleep, but she thought of it frequently, no matter how much it saddened her.
A family where they could be happy and get along. Where there are no burn scars, tears, or screaming.
She wanted it to happen one day, no matter how impossible it seemed. Slowly, she filtered Touya out, imagining it as an actual life that could happen. The change was painful, and the first sign of moving on; she hated it, as much as she could ever hate anything.
All she wanted was a happy, complete family.
Year Three
Things didn’t improve.
They seemed to worsen.
Her mother worsened, her father’s treatment of Shouto worsened, and Natsuo’s avoidance of the house worsened. Her classes grew more difficult, and her peers became more frustrating.
She liked school. She liked the escape that it provided.
Fuyumi had learned to forge her father’s signature for school papers, as it was easier than asking for her or Natsuo. She’d decided to be brave one day and asked her father for a debit card, a request he’d obeyed with two words before moving on without another glance towards her. She’d started buying their groceries-- with her father’s money-- and other necessities herself.
Their nanny had left shortly after Touya did, and the idea of having another one was laughable. Their house was a secret that was to be kept inside all of them, and outsiders weren’t allowed in.
Fuyumi wasn’t happy.
She longed for a future that felt impossible, and she watched the crumbled remnants of her world get stomped into ash. She grieved a brother who she barely remembered, and she cried for a brother who she hadn’t known since he was in diapers.
There were two things Fuyumi had a grasp on: school and Natsuo.
They’d grown impossibly close. Her necessary care of him and the trust that they had pushed them together. They were the tossed aside children, one of which was born to support a dead child and the other quirkless, and they depended on each other.
Fuyumi tried to be strong around Natsuo, and she did a good job, but she leaned on him more than either of them knew.
Most days, her encouragement to get up in the mornings was the knowledge that Natsuo needed her. Even Shouto, who ate her dinners and accepted the bandages that she wrapped around him when he so needed them, needed her.
If one day, somehow, her efforts paid off and they meshed to become a happy family, she’d be beyond grateful.
She didn’t like their father. She trained herself not to flinch away from his voice or steps, but the instinct was always there. She cried out of frustration constantly over what he did, and she knew he was the reason that their family was a mess.
She couldn’t hate him. Not like Natsuo did, and not as Touya had.
Speaking to her father, scarce as it was, felt like placing a weight on her chest. It was terrifying and awkward and made her want to fall down and never get back up again. After everything he’d done, how could she even speak to him? It hurt to even be in the same hallway as him.
Natsuo didn’t much like her dream of a happier family, for how could that work with Endeavor as their father and Touya missing? He still didn’t visit their mother, because Fuyumi had a feeling it wouldn’t be good for him-- she wasn’t even sure it was good for her sometimes-- and he didn’t know Shouto.
They only had each other.
Nevertheless, she dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed.
She did the household duties and went to school every day, and during her free time on the weekends, she locked the door to her room and pretended that they weren’t in a living hell.
It didn’t work.
Three years after nearly burning himself to ash, Touya Todoroki awoke in a facility.
He was alive.
He ran from the facility that had brought him back from what he’d thought was death, and went to a house without a single expectation. All that had mattered was pleasing his father, and now he’d been gone for three years, and he didn’t know what that meant.
Fuyumi raced to calculate her homework before she had to once again tend to the boiling pot beside her. Doing her homework while cooking had become something of a tradition, if she ever intended to go to sleep before midnight.
She blinked weary eyes at the paper, mentally taking note to ask Natsuo if he’d done his homework while they ate.
There was the faint sound of booming from the dojo, and she’d hear a wail every once in a while. She was as tense as a rod, but that wasn’t abnormal, and over time, she’d learned to appear normal and happy even as things exploded around and within her.
There was a creak from the hallway.
She bit her lip, giving a sparing glance to her math problem and lamenting the loss of the chance to finish it before stirring the pot next. She turned, expecting to see Natsuo and hear him launch into a story, but no one was there.
“Natsu?”
There was no response.
She stared forward a moment longer, moving towards the entrance to the kitchen and peering down the hall. No one was there.
She sighed and moved to tend to the food.
Touya came home to find his family living a life he wasn’t part of.
Endeavor had moved on from him, and Shouto’s cries didn’t hide his ‘potential’.
Natsuo had been working on homework that Touya used to talk him out of.
Fuyumi had been cooking, looking perfectly happy to hear her father training Shouto across the house.
He accepted his death.
Dabi survived the fire out of pure hatred, his grudge against his father keeping him going even when his destiny said otherwise.
Through all of her nightmarish years as a teenager, Fuyumi had gone on out of love for her family. She had to take care of Natsuo; she couldn’t let him fall as he had after Touya, and without her, no one could pick him up. She couldn’t do much for Shouto, not with her weak voice and constitution, but she could bandage his wounds and give him meals. She even had to help her mother, for who else would visit her?
Fuyumi survived out of love, her hope for a better family and life for those she cared about pushing her forward, even when everything seemed lost.
Nearly ten years after she was told of a fire at Sekoto Peak, she witnessed a broadcast that countered years of mourning and grief, stacking even more pain atop it all.
Just as she had before, Fuyumi would keep going.
Maybe, soon enough, that happy family that she was so close to would come to be.