Archive of Our Own

We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children

We come out of the womb hungry. 

We kick and cry and scream for our mother’s milk — for a feeding spoon, for our father’s gentle smile, for a hand in our own and a home to keep warm. 

We come out of the womb hungry for love, and so many of us die starved. 

Todoroki Enji was a man built for warmth. He was a man with the kind of smile Himura Rei spent her entire life craving from her own flesh and blood. He was a man who seemed ready to feed her stomach full of everything she’d spent her life without.  

His wedding proposal is fattened by an antique vase  from the Meiji period, hand-crafted and meticulously detailed with the indigo brushstrokes of a rising phoenix, filled to the brim with bright and blue rindou flowers, “I was told these are your favorite.” 

Just the sight of Todoroki Enji’s big hands engulfing the ceramic piece worth more than the entire Himura estate awakens the ravenous beast in Rie’s stomach — claws out and ready to gorge on every vow that drips so deliciously from stern lips.

“They match the color of your eyes,” Rei accepts and bats her lashes — the way her mother said thin women must do should they seek to be nourished by plentiful men. 

Stern lips pull into a pleased smile, “Then let us hope our children have my eyes and your elegant taste.”

Oh, how famine makes us so desperate. 

The very thing you're best at is the thing that hurts the most

Sometimes, Rei wonders about a life where her husband is not a hero.

Would his shoulders relax? Would he smile wider? Would he touch her more? Would he still have the insatiable need to be the very best and would he still feel absolute devastation when he is proven, yet again, that someone else has already taken that place?

Would this marriage be the same? Would he be the same? 

Would he still slam the front door in the dead silence of their enormous home to announce his presence? Would he still kick his shoes halfway across the living room and shove his coat into Rei’s arms with nothing more than a curt,  “What’s for dinner?” and would Rei still find the site of his retreating back more familiar than the warm smile he had gifted her on the day of his proposal? 

Is there a world where Todoroki Enji is able to enjoy the life he already has? 

They eat in a silence that Rei has learned to find a belly-aching comfort in. 

“This is good, thank you,” Enji’s comment surprises Rei, and the corners of her lips are already ticking upwards.

“Thank you,” She feeds herself a spoonful. 

“You haven’t made this in a long time.”

Rei laughs as she lays her hand over her protruding belly, “This little one has been making me crave the randomest cuisine,” She hopes her first-born looks like her. 

Enji smiles, and for a second, Rei’s heart sings full with it. 

“He’ll be a strong hero with an appetite like that.”

Her smile falters, “Our child will be strong in whatever they pursue.” 

Enji stops eating. 

‘Gods,’ Is there a world where Todoroki Rei’s shame over her gluttonous heart will ever swallow itself whole into the gratitude her mother demanded up till her dying breath?

Enji puts his fork down. His eyes are angry, and the base of Rei’s spine straightens automatically — in preparation for what, she hasn’t figured out yet. 

“Do you not want our son to become a hero?”

If Todoroki Enji was not a hero, would he still twist every single thing that comes out of Rei’s mouth?

He calls their child ‘son,’ as if he’s already laid out their entire life. Rei wants to protest — ‘What if our child does not feel like our son? What if our child is not born with the same hunger as their father?’ — but she holds her tongue. 

Women who protest are often left to starve.

You need your rotten heart, your dazzling pain like diamond rings

In all the ways Rei could not have imagined, it is the call of her first-born that quenches her parched heart.  

Touya’s soft and giggly, ‘Mama,’ fills every single one of her husband’s empty promises. She holds his tiny feet in her palms and stretches out his fat thighs in rotation as she sings the radio tunes that have been filling the silence her husband leaves behind when he goes to work. With every passing day, she feeds her son until her sore breasts are empty and he no longer needs her help to waddle toward where she cooks his next meal. She pours all the light and love she never received into Touya’s bright blue eyes until they bloom just as beautifully as the rindou flowers she starts to buy herself.

For three whole years, her happiness is not tied to the efforts of a bountiful man, but to those of her own two hands. Her first-born inherited the fiery red hair and resolved blue eyes of his father, but for all intents and purposes, Touya is Rei’s child. 

Unfortunately, after Touya’s third birthday, it comes to light that her first-born had also inherited his father’s flames. 

It happens during a tantrum. Rei is out of ingredients for cold soba, and Touya is crying — “But-but! Mama always makes cold soba when I’m s-sick!” — and Enji is slamming his newspaper on their dining table, about to reprimand his son when the room flashes with heat and the smell of Enji’s burning newspaper fills Rei’s nose with smoke while her husband's astonished smile fills her heart with dread. 

“Enji, please tell me that was you…” 

Enji shakes his head, “It was not.”

“I-I — wha — that wasn’t! M-Mama…?” Her first-born looks so scared, “I-I didn’t mean to!” Touya begs, rivers of fresh and frightened tears running down his chubby cheeks. 

Just as she’s about to comfort her son, Enji’s booming laughter drowns out her first-born’s fear and makes both mother and son jolt in surprise as Enji swings their child upon his shoulders, “My boy!”

Touya’s breath hitches and he scrambles to catch his balance on his father’s broad shoulders, tiny hands gripping the perfect crop of auburn hair. A questioning whimper escapes Touya’s throat, and Rei’s heart breaks. 

It is the first time his father has held Touya since his birth. The first time her husband has laughed in all the time Rei has known him. The first time Enji has shown a pride that has nothing to do with his competition’s failures.

“You’re going to be the best hero in the whole world, Touya!”

Her son sniffles, “O-Okay.”

It is the moment Touya stops being Rei’s child, and instead Enji’s successor. 

You need to go to war to find material to sing

“Gods, he’s not even in fucking Japan, and he’s still the Number One Hero!”

Every day is like this — ‘All Might this, All Might that, are the people blind? What more do I have to do? These quirkless idiots don’t know a worthy hero when it’s staring them in their fucking faces!’

“Touya, hurry and finish your food. It’s almost training time.”

Rei hardly has an appetite these days, “You need to let him rest after eating, Enji. He’ll get sick.”

There’s ice flowing through her veins but nothing freezes her blood like when her husband gives her that look — the one where brilliant blue eyes demand her to remember her place.

“Nuh-uh! I’m strong, Mama!”

Rei takes a deep breath and tries to remember that she is a person, not a placeholder. “I know you are, Touya,” She smiles at her first-born, “But your food needs to digest before any activity. You got sick last night, didn’t you?”

A thoughtful look passes through her son’s undeniably young face and he turns to his father, “That’s true…” 

The large fists on the dining table clench, and the sparse auburn hair dusting over Enji’s knuckles stands out against the whitened skin that’s been cut off from its regular blood flow.

“That is why we pay for those doctors to stay with us,” Her husband cajoles through gritted teeth, “They gave you medicine, didn’t they, son?”

Touya’s small spine straightens, “Uhm, y-yeah, that’s true! I’ll be fine, Mama — Dad will make sure I’m okay!”

Rei misses when Touya’s trusting smile was directed towards her, towards the one person in this house who would never push their first-born to the point of needing medicine intravenously. For all his claims of being a traditional man, her husband berated her one night for grinding up the roots of her rindou flowers into the bitter tonic her mother used to pour into her upset stomach — “Please, in this day and age, really, Rei? It’s ridiculous, an utter waste, to ruin your flowers for something that will only work half as well as what the doctors I pay will clear up in an hour. Silly woman, let the flowers do what they’re meant to and keep our home looking elegant. That’s why they’re your favorite, hm? There’s no need to overcompensate.”

For a Top Hero, her husband can be quite thick. Back then and now.

Enji’s training schedule has ripped her first-born from the right to his childhood. When her husband leaves for work, Touya is to practice his form and meditate in the training room, while Rei is to leave his lunch at the door like a prison guard. When her husband returns from work, their family dinners are allotted a measly thirty minutes before Touya is to spend the rest of the evening training with a man six times his age and experience. All the while Rei is to sit outside, listen to her child’s pained cries and heaving gags, and zip her lips shut lest her husband finds out that his refined and thinly disguised torture is not as secret as he thinks it is.

Rei has not spent time with her child in so long and with every passing day, the voracious beast in her heart screams at the starvation of it

*

“Touya needs a sibling.”

Shock moves through Rei’s body, “I… I was thinking the same thing, actually.”

Could Todoroki Enji actually be paying attention to the loneliness that harrows their first-born’s beautiful blue eyes? 

In the rare moments Rei manages to wheedle Touya into a sit-down breakfast and play a movie before starting his training, Touya tilts his head in wonder at the portrayal of siblings. They often have to watch these movies in increments — half one day, the other half the next — and the method gives Touya the eager excitement of hope for the new day, something to look forward to.  They often pause the movie in the middle of its climax. 

“Mama, Mama! That guy’s sister isn’t gonna actually die, right?”

“I guess we’ll have to see, baby.”

“I like it when you braid my hair, but it’s funny when her sister does it like that — all messy and with the clips!”

“I guess her little hands need more practice, hm?”

“I’d be the best older brother — like him! No, wait, better than him! I wouldn’t make ‘em cry like he does — that’s mean!”

There are times Touya will be immersed in the plot, but the conversation he always brings up with his mother surrounds the concept of siblings — family his age to exchange embarrassing secrets with, to play around in the pristine Todoroki backyard, to take care of and be taken care of by small hearts and juvenile hands that will grow wrinkled and frail together. 

The hope for her husband’s humanity dies with his next sentence, “It will be good to have a motivator. Competition makes the best of us.”

The cold that wraps around her heart has nothing to do with the dazed look in her husband’s foolish eyes, “Enji?”

But he does not hear her concern. “I had hoped Touya would inherit both our quirks, but perhaps that was naive,” He turns to look at Rei, “I ensure Touya will come out a truly worthy hero, but we must keep trying for a dual-quirked child. Perhaps, that child will even strengthen our son, push him to overcome his weaknesses! Ah, Rei, I promise you — the Todoroki name will go down in history, and no one will even remember All Might.”  

*

The night of Touya’s conception was the closest semblance of something like love Rei has ever felt in her life. On the night of their wedding, Enji was gentle and attentive. His large hands had wrapped around Rei’s waist as if she was an entity to be savored. His warm lips traced over the lines of her untouched skin as if he were sending a prayer into her very bones. His husky voice had spent the night checking in with everything that made Rei soar to the skies and stop short at anything less.

So when her husband had declared he was ready for more children, against her gut instinct, Rei’s heart had cracked open at the wish to feel that reverent touch again.

The fates laughed at Rei’s inability to understand that broken dreams are the only thing they have in store for her.

The conception of Todoroki Fuyumi was a horribly clinical affair. Gone were the soft hands and devout lips, the gentle check-ins and the concern for Rei’s pleasure. Todoroki Rei had never felt so used in her life, and it’s a feeling she’ll never forget. 

Thus, when her first daughter was born, Rei manifested her children’s embrace would erase whatever craving she had for a husband’s touch. As she rested on the delivery table, she pushed her slick bangs from her forehead and watched with tired eyes as her first-born marveled over the small bundle of his wish-come-true. 

“I’m gonna protect you from everything, Fuyumi-Yumi-chan. Dad says I was born to be the best, so I’m gonna be the best older brother ever!”

But alas, the fates do not favor the Todoroki family.

Her husband is quick to cast Fuyumi aside, and there is nothing her older brother can do to protect her denied heart. Rei is all too familiar with fatherly famine, and in her remedy to feed Fuyumi with everything she has, Rei forgets that starvation takes form in many different ways.

Her first-born is barely seven years old when his parents find out that he did, in fact, inherit both of his parents' quirks — in the worst way possible.

The whole family reaps the consequences.

Natsou’s conception is when Rei finally learns that her no’s do not matter. It is the turning point where she experiences to the fullest extent exactly how her husband will always get what he wants.

*

“I know how we can ensure this child is perfect, Rei. There’s this new technology, in vitro fertilization — it is specifically for quirks. Genius! To think, we could have done this from the start… Oh, how our efforts would not have been wasted.”

*

“I have told you time and time again, he is your responsibility! Why haven’t you stopped this nonsense? Are you really so useless? Gods, it is because of you that Touya is acting like this — you poisoned him with your weak constitution, and it is that same constitution that weakens you as his mother! If it is up to me to train that out of him, then it is only fair that you receive the same treatment!” 

*

“What have you done… What have you done to my perfect son!”

But a woman is a changeling, always shifting shape.

The blinding white light makes Rei’s head pound. 

“... oki-san. Todoroki-san, are you with us?”

Rei hums. She tried to nod but her neck had never felt so limp.

“The medicine we gave you is starting to wear off.”

“M-Medicine?” Rei’s throat feels like sandpaper. 

“Yes, Todoroki-san. Do you know where you are?”

She wills the strength to shake her head once. It makes her stomach roll.

“You’ve been admitted to the Musutafu Behavioral and Wellness Hospital by your husband. Don’t worry, you’re in good hands now.” 

She vomits all over her hospital gown before everything goes black once again.

*

Rei can’t quite pinpoint the moment she started to fill the void of her aching belly with alcohol. She thinks it may have started after her eldest son attacked his newborn brother.

A glass of red wine paired with her dinner quickly escalated into one that accompanied every meal of the day, then an extra for a midnight snack, then a glass for every hour in between to punish herself for the silence of all her children ignoring her poisonous presence. And when Enji caught on, like the vigilant hero he is, he quickly banned her from the one thing that numbed the gnawing beast she was born with down to nothing but a silent phantom — acknowledged by the chilling tension in the air, but no longer a physical commodity to be felt or heard.

But Todoroki Enji is a hero, and heroes are rarely home. 

Rei turned to the solution of sneaky teens under orthodox households who found that clear spirits poured into water bottles are enough to ward off the attention from authority figures that care more about frivolous things like reputation and image over the human that supposedly lives inside their genetic possessions. And just like those sneaky teens, Rei found that the harder the alcohol, the easier it is to live under a dictatorship. 

Gin, vodka, tequila — they all take away the burden of caring.  

So Rei’s body doesn’t belong to her — so what? It never did. So her children despise her — so what? She hates herself, too. So her husband doesn’t touch her — so fucking what? She hasn’t craved the heavy grab of his thick hands for years. 

So her fourth and last child is her husband’s prized possession — so what? It’s better to be the luxurious watch on a businessman’s wrist than to be tossed away like the dirty tissue paper stuck to the bottom of his shoe, like the rest of the Todoroki family. 

During one of these blissfully blurry nights, Rei makes the fascinating diagnosis that she is fireproof. 

How? Well, under the haze of whatever she poured into her last cup of coffee, she’d accidentally switched the wrong setting of her iron to Enji’s new silk dress-shirt for his upcoming Hero Gala and burnt a hole straight through it. She was so out of it, she didn’t even flinch at the flaming grip coming to engulf her tiny arm — ‘when did I lose so much weight?’ — and when nothing happened, when she felt absolutely nothing beyond the bruising pressure of his grip, when Enji’s azure eyes widened at her lack of agony, she laughed.

“Huh, would you look at that?” She snorted, “If only I had poisoned Touya the right way!”

Unfortunately, she was not immune to the crack against her face. However, the alcohol helped with that, too. 

Caught in the wonder of her nonflammable skin, it seems she must have tested her theory about whether or not, this time, she poisoned her youngest son the right way. 

*

When the doctors tell her what she did to Shouto, Rei cries for three days straight. 

*

It took one horrible, drunken mistake to completely eradicate twelve years of carefully constructed motherhood. It’s hard for Rei to come to terms with how her husband’s deliberate actions will never erase his entitlement to her children — his children, now.

The doctors don’t care for her sober pleas. They don’t take her fears seriously, they don’t allow her to mourn what she’s lost, and they most certainly do not let her forget precisely why this abandonment can only be the fault of her own. 

When she raises her fists, they trap her in unmovable fabric so tight it’s hard to breathe — so she does not fight.

When she raises her voice, they drug her to the point that she wakes up to a new month — so she does not scream. 

When she declines to eat, they strap her down and inject her with liquid that only churns the ache in her belly to something sick — so she does not refuse.

She does not fight, she does not scream, she does not refuse — it’s almost like she never left home. 

What strange claws are these scratching at my skin? I never knew my killer would be coming from within

There’s a television in Rei’s room that the doctors almost never let her turn on. It’s symbolically there for incentive. For when Rei takes the medicine that lulls her to a dreamless sleep, attends the group activities for anger issues she does not identify with, and eats the food that does nothing to sate the lifelong hunger that brought her into this mess. 

A privilege — ‘not a right!’ — for when she is a very good girl.

Only — it’s on now. 

Rei doesn’t know much about the outside world. The son she disfigured grew up into someone who has found it within himself to visit her semi-regularly this past year, but he treats her frustratingly delicate — like a shattered cup hastily glued back together, pouring the tiniest bouts of information into her decade-empty cavern with the expectation the contents will leak through and splatter the floor of these hideous off-white tiles. 

He’d said nothing of the faceless zombie who sits in the 20-inch box of her unearned privilege. 

“My name…” The zombie’s head lifts up to reveal his very-much-alive eyes, “is Todoroki Touya.”

Her whole body freezes over. 

“The Number One Hero is my father.”

She starts to sweat. 

Is this a trick? Has she finally lost her mind?

But she knows those tired eyes. Grotesque and patched up, surrounded by unhealed burns stapled to the pale skin she used to rub the pads of her fingers over and over again to wipe away heartbroken tears, mottled bruises, and training-induced vomit. 

“Yes, the so-called ‘villain’ in front of you is Endeavor’s eldest son.”

Villain? Please, Rei has long stopped labeling people as villains when she realized she was legally tied to one. The way he says it, though… He must be infamous. He announces his name like it’s some grand secret, and the beast within Rei wails, ‘How did no one recognize my long-lost first-born son?’ 

Who else could hold such brilliantly blue eyes, carry the petite nose of his mother, and above all else, his scars — proof of a body poisoned by his mother’s weak constitution and the blazing azure of the too-hot fire his father was never meant to pass down?

“I’ve killed more than 30 innocent people.”

Rei wonders if anyone is truly innocent. 

Before hospitalization, before marriage, and before the development of her first-born’s quirk, Rei remembers how people used to speak so highly of doctors. They are portrayed as saviors, empathetic do-gooders ready to ease and eradicate the pains of their patients. And yet, it was those very doctors who witnessed firsthand the source of her first-born’s anguish and decided to lock that secret in a steel box and swallow the key for stacks of yen that once brought stars to Himura Rei’s eyes. The same batch of falsely altruistic doctors she’s spent a decade under the fictitious care of, who kept Rei away from the funeral of the very child who now declares the consequences of his ignored agony through the television of her lavish jail cell. 

Despite all of Touya’s physical damage, she can’t help but think her first-born looks… free.  

Was murder the price Touya had to pay for his independence? … Is murder the only way to buy her own? 

A sharp prick at the curve of her palm, right under her thumb, stuns Rei out of her thoughts. With furrowed brows, she looks down at her clasped hands and gasps. 

Embedded in the skin of her knuckles glitters the ticket to the very thing her first-born has found outside the clutches of Enji’s selfish grasp. 

She rips her hands apart with a wet squelch and holds them up to the light. Translucent blue-gray crystals embed the tips of her fingers into sharp points, dipped with the fresh blood of her punctured hands.

Ice claws.

Today, the fates welcome Rei to laugh alongside them. 

Hurried steps thud outside her assigned door and she jumps to action, shoving her metal chair under the doorknob and hurrying to the window. The frantic jiggling of the doctors trying to invade her room drowns out the horrible screech of her evolved quirk cutting a neat circle into the glass just above the window’s lock. She pushes out the carved circle and jams her hand through the opening to unlock the window from the outside. A loud bang invades her ears and the clatter of the wedged chair falling to the ground makes her move faster, opening the window and getting one leg over the ledge before she’s violently pulled back. 

The doctor who managed to barge inside is a burly man, the one who’s not afraid to stuff bread down her throat and call her all the synonyms of ‘mentally deranged’ under the sun. He grips her arm unbearably tight while another doctor holds a familiar syringe that will knock her out to next week. 

Cold fury floods her chest — she will no longer let others take control of the body she has been starved of. 

She swipes her free hand in a grand arch, snagging both doctors’ throats. She feels their light leave their eyes through the lifelong beast that’s finally incarnated and come out to play.

One moment, she’s watching the two doctors wetly choke out their last breath, and the next, she’s jumping out the second-story window of her husband’s expensive dungeon and willing ice around her ankles to break her fall. 

And despite the hot blood coating her gifted claws, they do not melt. Her ice is as fireproof as her. 

I need my golden crown of sorrow, my bloody sword to swing, I need my empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology

Rei waits in her old closet of the bedroom she once shared with her husband. 

The moon hangs full in the sky and illuminates just how much her husband has burned away every single aspect of her presence from their once-shared home. It’s amazing, really, how thoroughly an entire person can be wiped from existence. When Rei had crept through the living room window, she almost didn’t recognize the very place where she spent so much time watching heartfelt movies with her first-born, breastfeeding her only daughter, counting Natsou’s first steps, and drinking herself into a soothing oblivion that drowned out her last and final son’s cries. 

When her husband tiredly walks into their — his, really — bedroom and changes out of his tattered hero uniform, Rei is silent like the ghost he molded her to be. She waits as patience had been her first lesson in the matters of famine. There is a time and place you are fed without consequence — too early and you’ll be scorned, too late and you’ll upset your stomach.

Through the wooden slats of her wardrobe, the one that hasn’t been touched since the day she was sent away, she spies her husband rubbing his weary eyes. He sits at the foot of the bed with his heavy head cradled by his meaty hands. Rei finds no pity, no sympathy, and no love to nourish the beast she was born with — there is only one thing it wishes to feast on.

She watches as her husband finally gets up to leave their bedroom and walks in the direction of where Rei had left behind her heart and the last bits of her sanity.

When the faint click of her first-born’s closed door echoes through the stillness of midnight, she abandons her hiding spot and keeps her feet light. She makes a quick pass to her daughter’s room before freezing the lock — she will not tolerate any interruptions to the one and only gift of freedom she will bestow her children tonight.

For the first time in this wretched place she once called home, the sober calm of an ocean’s summer breeze washes over her. 

A smile creeps at her lips as she stands at her first-born’s door. 

It’s time.

She opens the door and slips inside.

The look of her husband’s gaping bewilderment animates the rapacious beast inside her, clawing at her belly with the same manic glee it had when the doctors’ blood had dripped down her iced talons. She freezes the door locked, snickering as she traps husband and wife in the room of the boy they had murdered so slowly. 

Her husband’s speed had always been one of the major talking points of his hero career, but velocity will always equal zero when an object is at a stand-still. The second he shifted to make a move towards her from where he kneeled, she froze his body in place with a swiftness that the Hero Billboard Chart would marvel at.

“Ah, ah, ah,” She tsks.

Those brilliant blue eyes widen in horror when he realizes he cannot melt his wife’s shackles.

“Oh, Enji,” She pouts, her head lazily dangling to the side, “Don’t tell me you forgot the sole reason you married me.”

“Wha — how…?”  

“What is it your favorite hero would say?” She hums and taps the claw of her index to her lips, “‘Plus Ultra’?”

Now, Rei never got the chance to become a scientist but biology was always her favorite subject in school. She still remembers the lesson of homeostasis and she’s pretty sure her husband’s body is entering the fight for its life. Too bad it’s a losing battle — what good is fire to the incombustible?

The chatter of her husband's teeth is so satisfying against his quivering blue lips, “W-what a-are y-y-you doing h-here?” 

“I think that’s obvious,” She steps towards him and squats down to his level, resting her elbows on her knees, “I have a better question — what are you doing here?” and lazily gestures to the picture of their first-born’s shrine before folding her hands under her chin.

Her husband’s blue eyes glaze over and his thick auburn brows twitch momentarily before he looks down with something a little like the shame Rei has carried her entire life. 

“T-Touya, he — ”

The beast rages. 

The resounding crack of Rei’s palm against her husband’s face thunders in the quiet storm of her first-born’s chambers. 

She sneers at the scratched lines that bead bright red on her husband’s stern cheek and points the bloodied tip of her index at his face, “Do not say his name.”

Enji bristles, “H-he is m-my s-son — ”

“No!” She clutches her husband’s throat, “He is my son, and you are only the monster who took him away from me.”

It’s almost exhilarating, the fear in her husband’s eyes. The way such brilliant blue is unable to look at anything but her, the undivided attention she yearned for so long literally within her grasp, and his realization of the undeniable power Rei finally wields over Enji in the very house her husband spent years denying her of. The hungry savage of her born companion begs to glut on this feeling until it bursts.

“H-he’s,” her husband rasps, “a-alive.”

Rei grins and lets go of his throat, “I know.”

Enji sucks in a gasp, “Y-You d-d-don’t u-unders-stand,” he coughs, the deep sound utterly grating to Rei’s ears, “H-he’s a v-vi —  villain.”

Rei sighed and opened a palm to rest against her husband’s bloodied cheek, “Then, perhaps, that is the only capacity of what he inherited from you.”

Enji scoffs and his eyes narrow, “C-Coming f-from t-the w-w-woman who m-mut-tilated h-her y-y-youngest’s f-fa– face.” 

And there it is — that familiar sick satisfaction gleaming in her husband’s bright azure orbs at the opportunity to tear into his wife’s heart and turn her beastly companion on her. Except —

“Don’t you understand, yet? Your words don’t mean shit to me anymore, Enji,” Rei can see the exact moment when Enji finally registers the reality of his impending doom. 

Her husband sucks in a quivered breath and opens his mouth to scream for help but the chance is cut off with a flick of Rei’s wrist as she calls on her quirk to freeze her husband’s tongue and shatters it in his mouth. 

“Sorry,” She chimes over the sound of her husband’s pained gurgles, “But I’ve had enough of your voice to last a lifetime, dear husband.”

Though the idea of her husband suffocating on the chunks of his own venomous tongue is an end Rei would find darkly humorous, there is a theory she’s been wanting to test since breaking out of the hospital forty-eight hours ago. She knows her ice is fireproof and that she is, too. Thus, when her ice engulfs an object, it is swallowed down to become irrefutably hers. Rei wants to know, if she is able to move her ice freely from thin air in order to freeze something, whether or not she can telepathically move whatever object her ice consumes.

She spent half a decade eavesdropping on her first-born’s lessons with the Number Two Hero, so she’s picked up a thing or two. She focuses first on feeling the ice of her talons, drowning out the slowly quieting sounds of her weakened husband’s suffering. When she has a full grasp of every crystalized centimeter that weaponized her hands, she focuses on the frozen form of her husband’s kneeling statue and absolutely delights when she touches the beat of his heart. She can feel every working organ in her husband’s body, the way each pump of his aorta grows more sluggish than the last with hypothermia. Finally, the bits and pieces of Enji’s shattered tongue start to materialize as if they’re already in her hand. She calls upon them to slither out of her husband’s throat and float into the air. 

Sheer dread takes over her husband’s face as Rei juggles the congealed pieces of tongue. 

“Oh, Gods!” She cackles, “I’m unstoppable!” 

Rei cannot believe she ever got married. How, once upon a time, she wholeheartedly thought a man would be the only thing to protect her from this vicious world and spoon down her throat the slew of what she’d been neglected her whole life while her presumably incapable hands sat firm in her lap.

From now on, with these very hands the whole world convinced her were utterly useless, she will feed herself. 

“You know,” Rei tosses the chunks of her husband’s tongue in the wastebin near Touya’s shrine and wonders what her first-born would have thought about that — the epitome of tossing his old man’s fallacies in the garbage, “I was planning to gouge your eyes and tear out your heart with these,” She waves her twinkling talons in Enji’s face. 

Her husband lets out a stunted whimper when the tip of her middle talon brushes the auburn lashes of his left eye. 

“Shh,” She croons and pulls back, “There’s no need for that anymore. You’re a disgusting excuse of a man, but maybe if you had kept your lessons strictly verbal, you would’ve made a half-decent teacher.”  

She slowly frosts over her husband’s vile heart from within his body, and it’s as if both ventricles caress the skin of her palms directly, “Maybe, now, you will finally feel what I felt all those years when you would put your hands on me.” Her nerves stimulate with every declining pulse of his atriums until the organ finally atrophies.

The frightened light fades from her husband’s brilliant blue eyes, and the insatiable beast that endlessly razed her soul is finally at peace. 

And I was never as good as I always thought I was, but I knew how to dress it up

After Rei had moved Enji’s chilled corpse back to his bedroom, removed the ice from his body, and tucked him into bed, she sat at the dining room table and wrote her final goodbye. 

My Dear Children,

You have all grown so wonderfully, despite the hand you’ve been given for having me as your mother.

I am so sorry for all the ways I’ve failed you. It is foolish of me to assume you’ll find comfort in the fact that my motherly shortcomings will haunt me for the rest of my life. For most of your lives, I’ve been nothing but a ghost. The woman I wanted to be before marrying your father was one who would protect you with every fiber in her being, but somewhere along the way, that woman was murdered just like the man you were forced to call Father. 

There are many regrets I have in my life, starting with accepting Enji’s proposal and ending with abandoning you three all those years ago, but I cannot find it within myself to regret bringing you all into this world. I am immensely proud of the paths you’ve chosen for yourselves.

Fuyumi, my best and cherished daughter, for becoming a teacher — you have always had the astounding ability to see the light in every dark, and that is because you are the moon in this pitch-black world. You generously offer so much of yourself, and I hope you remember that while it is a beautifully noble thing to dedicate yourself to the next generation, you are not obligated to give the whole of yourself to anyone. You belong to yourself, first and foremost. 

Natsou, my bold and righteous son, for becoming a doctor — you have always been incredibly bright and incredibly kind, and with everything I have, I believe you will be one of the few doctors who will utilize your empathy for your patients in the many ways our family was denied. And on the days you feel yourself running out, remember to let yourself rest and enjoy the one and only life you have because you belong to yourself, first and foremost.

Shouto, my little miracle, for becoming a hero — you are not a miracle due to your genetic material, but to the lovingly open heart you’ve approached this life with, approached me with, despite having hurt you so deeply. Your truly heroic resolve will take you far, and while I am excited to see the change you will bring to the world, I want you to know that should you decide to leave the hero-life, you are still worthy of every single breath you take because you belong to yourself, first and foremost.

I want you all to squeeze out the very best of this cruel life.

You three have chosen to lead your lives with morality, and I cannot belong to the honorable world you’ve chosen. And so, I will only ask you three for one incredibly hard favor. 

Please, let me go and continue onwards with the wonderful lives you’re building for yourselves.

Love always albeit imperfectly,

Mama 

With a bittersweet smile on her face, Rei unfreezes Fuyumi’s bedroom lock and thanks the funny fates for her daughter’s uncanny ability to sleep so deeply.

*

As it turns out, villains are extremely forthcoming when desperate to thaw their blood. They eagerly spill details about a man who calls himself The Doctor who has a direct connection to the League of Villains. Apparently, word travels fast amongst evil mouths because one minute, Rei is turning a street corner to track down another lead, and the next, she’s gagging out thick gray sludge and opening her teary eyes to a dark laboratory lined with neon incubators encasing monsters. 

“Todoroki Rei!” A smarmy voice exclaims behind her. 

She whips around to find a portly man with giant goggles and a funny little creature held in his arms. 

She coughs and spits out a wad of that disgusting sludge, “The Doctor, I presume?”

“I heard you’ve been looking for me.”

She feigns looking around, calling upon her quirk to wrap a microscopic frost around The Doctor’s heart, so light that his body temperature only changes a quarter of a degree. Just enough to feel his organs in the palms of her hands without him suspecting a thing. 

“If you know my name, I’m sure you can guess what it is I want.”

Interrogating villains had the dual advantage of training her quirk. She didn’t have a particularly strong desire to kill anyone — in fact, it only took two pedophiles freezing to death for Rei to master the levels of frost necessary to own her prey. 

She also knows the importance of stealth. Leaving behind a trail of dead bodies is a surefire way to attract a hero, and mystery is key. The less her foes know about her, the more they believe she’s a wild animal with no control and visible ice, the closer her freedom is. 

The Doctor chuckles and Rei looks back at him, even though she really doesn’t need to. He’s in her grasp now, she felt his leering smile before her eyes caught it.

“Everyone in Japan knows your name now, Todoroki-san. You’ve left quite a gruesome impression — taking down the Number One Hero is no small feat.”

Rei gives the man a smile of her own, “I’m a widow now, Doctor-san. Please, call me Himura.”

The Doctor laughs, and through the spike in his heart rate and the sweat beading under his white coat, Rei knows it’s a tactic to cover up his anxiety, “The Paranormal Liberation Front thanks you for your service, Himura-san. Though, I’m not sure if your son will extend that gratitude.”

“Well,” Rei wiggles her icy talons in false threat, “Why don’t we call him over and find out?”

The Doctor takes a serious moment to think, petting his little monster on the glass encasing its exposed brain, “Would you indulge my curiosity in return?”

Rei raises an eyebrow, “Meaning?”

“Oh, nothing bad!” The Doctor assures, though his heart picks up with adrenaline, “I’m a scientist, as you may have gathered. I simply would just like to know more about your quirk, specifically how you were able to hold your own against Endeavor. Fire and ice — seems obvious which one should have won. And yet…”

“And yet,” Rei confirms. She shrugs, “Fine, bring Touya here, unharmed, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.” 

The Doctor nods and looks at his beastly pet, “You heard Himura-san, Johnny. Let’s bring about this little family reunion, shall we?”

That same gray sludge starts to seep from the creature’s — Johnny’s — smiling mouth, and it clicks for Rei that the teleportation is a quirk not of The Doctor, but of his experiment.  

Rei is so sick of men and their power-hungry creations. 

On her right, gray sludge starts to form on the floor’s ceramic tiles and build upwards to reveal white boots and billowing white pants lined with staples, followed by a scarred torso wrapped in a white coat with burnt arms and pale hands peeking out the sleeves, until finally the sludge disappears and uncovers a face Rei has only seen trapped in a little black box. 

“Ugh, you fuckin’ creep,” Blue fire engulfs her son’s hands, “What the hell do you — ”

“ — Please put your fire away, Dabi, we have a guest.”

“The fuck?” Her son looks to his right, and then to his left, tired blue eyes widening, “What the fuck.”

Rei smiles, “Hi, Touya.” 

She feels The Doctor move and take hold of something, clearly trying to take advantage of her son’s shock while thinking Rei isn’t paying attention because she’s not doing something as primal as looking.

She freezes The Doctor’s body in place while also using her frost to keep Johnny’s mouth shut, “I’m sorry, Doctor,” she tsks, “Just where did you think you were going?”

Her first-born shakes himself out of his stupor and whips his head towards The Doctor’s paralyzed figure, “You fuckin’ shithead!” His staples snag at the scars of his cheek with the downwards twist of his mouth as he recognizes the object stuck to The Doctor’s hand, “You thought you were gonna tranq us and put us inside your fuckin’ Nomus?!”  

Rei giggles and the snarl on her son’s face softens to a wary frown. 

“So that’s what you meant by wanting to study my quirk,” Rei turns away from her son and walks up to The Doctor and peers into his panicked eyes, magnified by his goggles, “Aren’t you curious how I killed my husband?” 

It’s a rhetorical question, given how she’s frozen The Doctor all the way up to his mouth. She’s not entirely sure how much sound needs to escape his mouth for his little monster to obey a command — better safe than sorry.

She bends down to trail a crystalized claw down The Doctor’s hardened throat, reveling in the clink clink clink to his chest, right around his — “Y’know, his heart was beating really fast, too. I could feel it, just like I can yours — slowing down as the hypothermia kicks in,” She whispers, well aware her son is hanging onto her every word with only the whitenoise of faint bubbling from whatever substance the nomus reside in filtering the silence. 

Rei hums, “You’re a bit like him. You steal away children in hopes of engineering the perfect quirk for a selfish ambition that means absolutely nothing,” She commands her quirk to encase the struggling pumps of The Doctor’s cold heart, “It’s fitting you should die the same way,” and squeezes.

And this time, Rei doesn’t care much about stealth when she shatters The Doctor’s heart in his chest. As if filming a video, her frost captures the way each shard of aorta, ventricle, and atrium explode and pierce into their neighboring organs in mute catastrophe.

She rises and turns around to meet her first-born’s slackened jaw. Her heart catches in her throat as she finally takes in the damage up close, “Touya…”

In his broadcast, Rei remembers her son having more unmarred skin on his face than he does now. The blackened and purple burns that cut his cheekbones now connect to the scars below his eyes. His stress-induced white hair covers most of his forehead, but Rei knows if she were to smooth it back like she would when he was half her height and braiding his only sister’s hair, the pads of her fingers would find the rough leather of her husband’s inability to love his children the way a father is supposed to.

Her first-born’s face tightens in the same anger it had all those years ago when he had realized his birthright was as flimsy as his mother’s appetite, “What the fuck’re you doin’ here?”

She flicks off her icy claws to clatter to the ground, “The monster is gone,” and hopes the silent ‘I come in peace,’ is read between the lines.

Her first-born grips his hair the same way he used to when his father would ignore his hunger for acknowledgment and turn the other way, “He was mine to get rid of!” 

“I’m sorry, Touya,” Rei sighs, her heart aching at having denied her first-born the very thing that has kept him alive this past decade, “But Enji was my responsibility to deal with long before he was yours.”

Rei does not flinch at the tragic cackle that leaves her first-born’s cadaverous mouth to bounce off the walls and echo his despair. 

“Oh yeah?” Her son storms up to her, smoke seeping through his seams and stinging their identically delicate noses, “What about you, huh?” Flames of cremation engulf his hands once more, “You gonna pay the price your precious husband was supposed to? Make it up to me?”

Brilliant blue eyes glow with the phenomena of her first-born’s raw power.

Still, “I’m fireproof, Touya,” She gently reminds him, “If you want to take your revenge out on me, you’ll have to do it another way,” for she cannot even feel the azure blaze that cowers this society’s useless heroes.

His fire snuffs out, and with a speed to rival his father’s, Touya snags a dagger from his boot and holds it to his mother’s throat.

“I didn’t get this far just relyin’ on my cursed-as-fuck quirk.” 

Rei closes her eyes and her smile never falters, “Do what you must. I understand, Touya. It’s okay, if it’s you,” because, really, she just wanted to see her son one last time. She, of all people, knows that freedom is not eternal. When she had asked her children to let her go, she very well knew the many forms of what that could mean. Death is no longer something she fears because now, she knows, that when she enters Hell or Purgatory or whatever resting place the penance of her racked-up sins entails, her husband will be right there with her. If and when she must leave this Earth, she won’t be leaving the Devil behind in her place. 

The dagger shakes against her throat and cuts the skin — but still, she does not wince. She won’t feed guilt into the many things that already eat at her son. 

“You… You dunno what it’s like, to deal with the fact that you should’ve been there,” Touya’s voice cracks at the last two words with the lifelong misery of yearning for a mother who should have done more.

The beast inside her weeps, “I’m so sorry, Touya.” 

She stuffs her tongue to the roof of her mouth and swallows around the thick building of all her sorrows pushing up her throat. She will not cry, she will not let her emotions overtake those of her first-born any longer

“Fuck,” Touya rasps, his trembling voice matching that of his unsteady hand, “Fuck!” 

Suddenly, the pressure is gone from her throat, and at the loud rattle of Touya’s knife being thrown against the wall, Rei opens her eyes and gasps.

Her first-born cries tears of blood. 

Her towers over today, having gone through a growth spurt that Rei was denied witnessing, but at this moment, he looks every bit like the little boy that filled her rumbling belly with all the things she was promised and never given. His broad shoulders hunch over the strong chest branded with all the ways in which he’s been left empty. 

There’s a famished beast inside her eldest son, too, one he was born with. And just like his mother, Touya was tossed aside and abandoned to the fate of nourishing it himself with the meager means of his own two hands — hands that are held together by crude staples that dig into the bleeding tears spawned by all of Rei’s desperate mistakes. 

She wraps her cool hands around his steaming wrists, “I’m sorry for giving up all those years ago,” She pleads, gently pulling Touya’s hands from his face so that he will look at her and sanction her promise, “But I’m here now, and I am never giving up again. On you or myself.” 

“I’ve killed people,” He whispers as if that will change her mind.

Rei cheekily tilts her head towards the glacier of The Doctor’s corpse, “So have I.”

“I’ve killed many people,” He insists. 

Rei shrugs, “How do you think I got here?” 

Her son lets out a frustrated, “Innocent people.”   

“Innocence isn’t real,” Rei tightens her hold on his wrists with her conviction, “Not in this world.”

Touya strains his neck to the ceiling and shakes his mother’s hands off him. “It’s too late,” He growls, “I don’t need a mother.”

Rei only smiles — her first-born has always been so stubborn. She’ll miss being called ‘Mama’.

“Then I won’t be your mother — I was never very good at it in the first place,” and that actually pulls a soft snort from her son. It’s not a proper laugh, not the belly-gripping squeal he’d let out when Rei would tickle his sides or chase him around the living room, but it’s a start and she’ll greedily take whatever her first-born is willing to offer for the slightest chance of their freedom, “Instead, I will be your comrade, if you’ll have me. And maybe one day, your friend.”

Some of the anguish finally leaves her first-born’s brilliant blue eyes and his shoulders begin to sag. He takes a long moment to think before, “We can’t go back to the League. Handjob’s gonna be pissed you killed that creep.”

The beast inside of Rei is singing with glee, “Then we won’t go to the League, if that is what you truly want.”

“Tch,” Touya looks around the lab, “Never really liked the guy anyway. He was just a means to a shitty end,” before he narrows his eyes at his mother, “That you stole from me.”

Rei laughs, “Sorry for stealing your thunder.”

“Yeah, well,” Touya huffs, “Dunno what m’supposed to do now. Wasn’t really plannin’ on stickin’ around after killin’ the old man — thought we’d both, y’know,” and makes a silly bkshoo! sound with his mouth, using his hands to mimic an explosion. 

“Well, in that case, I’m no longer sorry,” Rei deadpans. 

Her first-born rolls his eyes but the smile that pulls at the corner of his lips is too noticeable to the both of them.

Excitement wells up in Rei’s chest and she slowly offers her hand, palm out and welcoming, “So…?” 

“… Okay,” Touya tentatively accepts, long fingers wrapping over his mother’s, and a printless thumb grazes the back of her knuckles, “Fair warning, this is probably gonna suck. We’ll be on the run for the rest of our shitty lives.”

Rei shrugs, “The hospital kept me fit. No exercise, no food.”

“Bastards,” Touya scoffs, before a mischievous smile takes over his lurid face, “Say, before we go, how would you feel ‘bout a lil’ arson? Feels like a waste t’leave the job half-done.”

“I like the way you think,” Rei scans the suspended creatures carrying the poor souls of The Doctor’s sick objective before turning back to her son and taking in his scars, “Oh! That reminds me, I have a theory.”

“Mm?” Touya prompts.

Rei lifts Touya’s arm while untangling their fingers, supporting his elbow with her hand, “So, your body is built to handle cold, and my ice is fireproof. From what I remember, this area,” She uses her index finger to trace the middle of Touya’s palm to the tips of his fingers, “is the only place your fire doesn’t burn you, right?”

He nods, catching onto his mother’s idea, “You’re saying you wanna try icing my body so I don’t burn when I use my quirk.”

Rei grins, “Worth a shot. You’re gonna do it anyway, maybe this is how we protect you.”

“Protect me?” Touya raises a thin brow, “I barely feel anything these days.”

“Which is even more dangerous,” Rei’s smile falls into a stern frown, “Pain tells our body what our limits are. Being numb won’t keep you alive, it’ll just kill you more slowly.”

Touya rolls his eyes, “Alright, fine, whatever.”

And as the laboratory blazes in the glory of blue fire and sets every lost soul free to eternal rest, mother and son confirm Rei’s hypothesis with the lunatic laughter of mad scientists and genius success. Hand-in-hand, they flee with only the stars of Japan hot on their heels and little Johnny tucked away in the large pocket of Touya’s white trench coat.   

I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king

Himura Rei came out of the womb hungry.

She stuffed herself full with the violent scraps of her husband’s carnage, the trivial crumbs of her father’s greed, the cloying handfuls of her mother’s self-sacrifice, and the bountiful chunks of her first-born’s resolve. 

We are what we eat.