Chapter Text
July
Age 5
The first time her quirk emerged, Souma had fallen out of a tree. She argued later, when she had both feet on the ground and was no longer bleeding from various parts of the body, that she’d only been climbing said tree because Kou refused to play with her and had run off with their cousins.
It was half true - despite the promise he’d made to their father to keep an eye on her (that she had heard herself), Kou had only mildly tolerated her for twenty minutes before he said something about going to the bathroom and vanished for an hour consequently. Souma may have been told multiple times that she was small and gullible, but it wasn’t to an extent where she didn’t recognise that going to the toilet didn’t take longer than an hour unless you had broken bowels.
The other half of the story was that a lonesome child left to her own devices didn’t need any reason to be climbing the maple in her grandmother’s Zen garden other than “I was bored”. Souma had been eyeing that tree for ages but had never actually gotten around to scaling it, since Kou would more or less keep her on a leash whenever she stepped foot outdoors, and her grandmother was rumored to hang the head of anyone who dared to step foot in her private garden without permission.
But being the ice queen’s granddaughter must give her some sort of protection, was Souma’s reasoning when she wrapped her admittedly short arms around the trunk of the tree and crawled up its length using nothing but brute force and tenacity.
That was when the wind came. It was sudden— one second, she was shivering from a sudden chill that overtook her body— the next, a whirlpool of wind was raging through the garden, and the tree she was clinging to began rocking so hard she was thrown to the ground.
Her rambunctious wails from scraping what seemed like every surface on her body during the fall was what called her older brother to the scene of the crime barely half a minute later.
“Souma!”
“Kou-nii, you suck!” Souma hadn’t even attempted to get up when her brother reached her and had taken to writhing face-flat on the grass instead, crying like the infant she was.
“What did you- Stop moving!” was all Kou could get in before Souma was rolling over, despite the throbbing ache in her left hand, and scrambling toward the house. “I said stop moving, dammit!”
“I want Dad!” she cried. Kou inevitably caught up to her and picked her up under the arms to place her unsteadily on her feet.
He looked over her wearily. Scratches, dirt smears, and signs of a fresh bruise blooming by her shin, but nothing he hadn’t seen before on his sister. A glance to the suspiciously leaf-less tree she had been lying under pretty much confirmed his suspicion that she had fallen from it.
“Well, you’re moving fine… Anything hurt?”
Souma sniffed, “Everything hurts.”
“I’m gonna need something more specific than that.” Kou held her in place by the shoulders to squint at Souma’s pupils, useful only for doe-eye pleading and drowning everything in sight with waterworks. He sweatdropped at her sniffling and tried for a joke to lighten the mood. “I don’t think you have a concussion, but you look stupid all the time, so I can’t be sure?”
She wasn’t amused. Kou softened and decided to cut her some slack. “Okay, I’ll go get Dad, yeah? You okay?”
Souma was not okay. Souma was in pain. The scratches and bruises she could deal with after the countless ones she endured on her usual adventures, but this time her hand felt bad. Like, bad bad. And her head was pounding. Souma found herself swaying on her feet when their cousins ran up to them.
“Souma…hurt…? okay…?”
Garbled voices trickled in through one ear and out the other, and the scuffing of buckled shoes could be heard against the sandy paths. Her eyes were drifting closed.
A few seconds later, she vaguely registered that someone was shaking her by the shoulders and tried to half-heartedly bat the insistent hands away with the arm that wasn’t screaming with pain every time she so much as breathed. But as if the sudden motion flipped a switch, a wave of nausea suddenly washed over her, and Souma was out like a light.
Tatsumaki Eita was a man who took pride in the steady and unwavering foundation he built his life and career on. He wasn’t a man who was fazed easily and it was something even the media commended him for in the line of duty. But the day his twelve-year old son ran into the room screaming at the top of his lungs that his sister had just died in the back yard with said five year old limp on his back, he nearly went into cardiac arrest.
Eita had managed to calm his son down to some semblance since he’d run into the house with Souma hanging deathly pale in his arms, the twins in tow, but Kou was still too pumped with adrenaline in his fright to string together a sentence half an hour later. For the case of his daughter, however, he could tell straight off the bat that something in her wrist was broken, and she was running some sort of weird fever.
Upon some examination by the Kazetanis’ private doctor, it was deduced that Souma’s quirk must have manifested sometime while she was alone. Her irregular body temperature was most likely a side effect of the sudden turmoil her body was going through. And so the girl in question was not, indeed, dead - she had merely fallen into an induced sleep.
But then again, since nobody had truly seen what had happened, the family was left to wait awkwardly in the foyer until the girl awoke.
It took them some time, but after the doctors had confirmed that she would be alright with some rest, Eita had somewhat managed to shoo away his flocking relatives so he could tuck his five-year old in to bed. Souma’s face was cool to the touch when he brushed away choppy bangs from her eyes but was still warmer than she had been earlier in the day. She had always been somewhat smaller than the other kids her age, but it wasn’t starkly noticeable during the day when she was running around causing mayhem in one place or another— now, tucked into a bed sized for an adult, she seemed to drown in the covers.
Eita closed the door to their guest bedroom behind him and blew out a shaky exhale as soon as he was out.
It was tremendously good luck that Souma’s quirk had manifested over the break - the rare occasion when Eita was on long-term leave from his duties as a pro hero - and that they were on their annual trip to his extravagantly wealthy in-laws’ estate. He couldn’t have imagined if this had happened back home and he was blissfully unaware that his daughter had passed out cold while he was out apprehending small-time villains.
No. Even when he was around he was in the house, taking a phone call from his agency back in Aichi about a case he was putting on hold for the sake of this trip, while his kids were somewhere out of his ears and eyes.
The thought sickened him. As a hero, he told himself it was inevitable. As a father, he knew he was a failure.
His eyes shot open at the sound of rustling fabric and he turned to see Kou standing from where he had been crouched by the door to their room. The tension dropped from his shoulders immediately. He knew instantly what his son was doing there. “Kou, Souma’s fine- there’s nothing to be worried about.”
Kou shook his head. He didn’t meet his eyes. “It’s ‘cause I left her to hang out with Kujira and Hitode.”
Eita softened. He moved to kneel by his son’s side quietly like he was a baby deer that would be scared away if he made any sudden movements. In a sense, he was. Kou wouldn’t hurt a spider if it crawled up his face, but he was easily spooked. He placed a hand on his shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting gesture. “It’s not your fault, Kou—”
“But it is!” Kou’s expression crumpled. “She wouldn’t have fallen— I would have caught her if I was there! And she wouldn’t have passed out like that…!”
It pained him because even as a snot-nosed six-year old, Kou had always been like this, deeply caring and shouldering responsibility that wasn’t his. One of Eita’s memories of his son’s childhood was the time a younger kid from their neighborhood was crying at the playground because she had gotten separated from her parents. Before Eita— the pro hero— could even get a word in, Kou had pressed his ice pop packet into the girl’s hands and flashed the broadest grin he had ever seen him sport. Eita had consequently tagged after his kid the whole afternoon while he’d run about with the girl in search of her parents. It was undoubtedly a funny experience, but when Kou had run up to him after reuniting the family, Eita was just speechless with awe. Needless to say, he’d bought him another ice pop for his hard work after that.
Kou sniffed and glued his stare to the floor stubbornly. “I’m sorry.”
Eita waited for a moment to make sure Kou had gotten everything out before starting, “You’re right. She wouldn’t have fallen if you were there,” and tried not to kick himself when Kou visibly flinched and wilted. He dipped his head to look him in the eye before continuing, “That’s why I trust you, Kou. Your sister is not your responsibility to protect. That’s my responsibility. But you still do it, you always try to catch her, and I know you’ve done it a thousand times over when I’m not around.
“That doesn’t mean it’s your fault when she gets hurt. She might be small, but Souma’s old enough to know what’s good for her and what’s not; sometimes she just doesn’t want to follow the rules and that’s when she does things like falling out of trees that we’ve told her a million times over not to do. That’s just how she is. It’s not your fault if you can’t stop her, ‘cause we both know she’s too stubborn for that.”
Eita mirrored the small smile that got from his son. “You’re an amazing brother, Kou. Just the fact that you’re beating yourself up over this shows that. I know it’s hard to have to babysit Souma all day when she’s so much younger than you, so when you're fed up with her, just find me, okay? I’m sorry I’m not around a lot to take that off your shoulders.”
A disgruntled scowl crossed Kou’s face. “She’s not that bad.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
Kou laughed and wiped at his nose. Suddenly glad that he had snagged some stuff earlier, Eita reached into his back pocket and handed him a pack of tissues. Pausing to let his son dry his face, he added, “Also, the part where you’re a great brother stands, but not when you’re making fun of Sou like there’s no tomorrow. Go easy on her.”
“Wha— she’s the one who starts it half the time! If I don’t put her in place, she’s gonna be a brat until she’s thirty!” Kou looked so bewildered that Eita couldn’t help but chuckle. “Really! She’s not even six yet and she orders me around like I’m a servant!”
“Hmm, I wonder where she got that from.” He knew, of course— their mom. Definitely their mom. Eita often mused that his wife would have loved Souma if she was still around— they were so alike down to the unruliness— although in hindsight, she might have just spoiled the girl rotten and fueled her stubborn tendencies. A sudden thought struck him as he got up. “You weren’t waiting outside the room all evening, were you?”
The shifty expression he made gave him away easily. “Tunnel vision,” he sighed, ruffling Kou’s hair. “Come on, I’m sure Mai-san can get you something to eat. Souma’s going to take a while to wake up.”
The head housemaid, Mai-san, bless her soul, was able to quickly fix up a plate of fried rice for the boy to chow down on in ten seconds flat. But the latter wasn’t actually true— the girl was only asleep for a few hours before she awoke. The pair had opened the door to her room a little after eleven to hopefully be there when she woke up sometime during the night or in the morning, and instead they were met with the sight of a very bored-looking Souma sitting up against the plush pillows, bandaged arms crossed.
If he wasn’t also worried, Eita would have snapped a photo of Kou’s expression when he shot straight to his younger sister’s bedside. For all his griping about how annoying Souma could be, Kou was all bark and no bite.
“Why are you up? You should be resting! Does your head hurt? Why’d you have to climb that tree!?” The boy’s remarks got progressively more frantic as they bubbled up.
“No ‘are you okay’? ‘Sorry I left you all alone for an hour’?” Souma’s scowl was way too dramatic for any five-year old to be donning, though she would have argued that she was practically already six if she’d heard that. Eita simply stood back and watched as his children bickered over seemingly nothing. It was quite a sight. Souma’s hair, the same shade of cobalt blue as Kou’s and Eita’s own, was ruffled and sticking up in all different directions from presumably tossing and turning in bed while she slept. She had never been a heavy sleeper, evident in her atrocious cases of bedhead each morning. On the other hand, Kou’s eyes were ringed with dark circles and rubbed slightly raw from the few angry tears he had shed earlier.
It was only when they resorted to calling each other names that Eita finally stepped in, patting Kou on the shoulder. The boy instantly closed his mouth and huffed. “How are you feeling, Sou?” he prompted, gently pressing the back of his hand to Souma’s forehead. Her temperature had risen to a more human degree since he had last checked it, he confirmed with relief.
Souma scratched at the cast on her left arm. “Cold. What’s this?”
Kou quickly moved to gather the spare blankets from the closet while Eita moved her hand away from the thick bandaging. “Your wrist is broken, so try not to move your arm too much. Kou said you’d probably fallen from your grandmother’s maple tree— is that true?”
“Oh, yeah! I was, like, thrown off when I tried to climb it.” Souma shrugged like that was totally normal news.
Ignoring the fact that she’d basically vandalised his in-law’s beloved garden (he’d deal with the consequences later), Eita blinked, bewildered. “Thrown off?” He did a quick mental scan of his and his wife’s family tree, but no one in their lineage had a recorded quirk that was even remotely close to whatever might have caused a tree of all things to move like a sentient being.
“I didn’t fall on my own, I’m too good at climbing for that.” Souma puffed her chest in pride as Kou returned to dump a pile of fluffy-looking blankets on the foot of her bed. But then she added, “Oh! But it was also really windy all of a sudden when I fell,” and the pieces clicked.
Eita was deep in thought for a moment— it was highly unlikely that Souma’s quirk could have caused a tree to rock so hard it physically threw her to the ground, but adding in wind as a factor changed things. Eita’s own quirk dealt with the gravitational pull of objects and entities, and his late wife, or his children’s mother’s ability was solidifying air, the quirk that Kou had inherited. Considering those, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched if Souma’s could call wind. It was pretty close to air, after all, Eita thought. He’d never had much of an affinity for quirk science back at U.A., though, so he quickly made a note for himself to contact a quirk specialist soon.
Switching between layering the blankets over the sheets and weakly attempting to smother his sister, Kou shrugged and said, “Maybe the tree hates you. Couldn’t bear to have a brat touching it and just— thwap. Offed.”
"Trees can't move, idiot!"
"Maybe they can, how do you know?"
"You two..." Eita sighed, but his kids didn't hear him over their own voices yapping nonsense at each other. Oh, well. At least they were back to normal.
“Lemme sign your cast.”
“No way! You’re gonna draw something weird.”
“Nonsense, I’m just gonna make it prettier.”
Souma hissed and slapped away Kujira’s insistent hands inching forward with permanent marker. “Don’t touch me with your rat paws!”
Finally, after what seemed like hours of arguing, the rat groaned and tossed the marker away to fall back on the wooden deck. “You’re so not fun, Sacchan. I bet if I was the one who broke my wrist, you’d be dying to draw on my cast,” he said accusingly.
“If you had a cast, it would be a full-body one because one of us finally got sick of you and pushed you off a building.” Hitode snorted, reaching over to gleefully high-five Souma amid her twin’s protests. See, this was why Hitode was her favourite cousin.
Summer had rolled in fast that year— the days dragged out longer than humanely possible, the nights humid and unbearable if not for the air conditioning their grandmother blasted at all times throughout the house. It was customary for the family to spend the summer break at Kazetani Futaba’s grand estate in Musutafu since the cousins’ side of the family lived all the way in Tokyo, while Souma, Kou and Eita resided in Mishima, on the outskirts of the Shizuoka prefecture. Summer and winter holidays were the only times the cousins met, and yet they would simply pick up where they left off six months ago.
But the children, whom you would be lucky to even catch a glimpse of during the day, were too affected by the sweltering heat that month to take up their usual routine of chasing each other and exploring the unmapped nooks of their grandmother’s estate. Instead they took to languidly sprawling across the cool floorboards of the engawa* overlooking the sunny Zen garden. The glass wind chime tinkling occasionally with the breeze was thanks to Hitode and Kujira’s mother, who was notorious for her love of trinkets and oddities.
Souma was itching to try and call her quirk ever since the incident with the maple tree a week ago. They’d called a quirk specialist to examine her as soon as she was relatively injury-free, but since one of her arms was in a cast that hindered her abilities, and Souma’s rendition of the story became progressively muddled with fiction every time she told it, they couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the nature of her quirk was.
And since then, her father hadn’t exactly told her not to use her quirk, but his disapproval was evident in the deadpan look he gave her that morning; she’d accidentally blurted out over breakfast that she was going to suffocate Kujira in his sleep as soon as her quirk showed itself again. Souma blamed her cousin. He was annoying and deserved it.
She flexed the fingers of her right arm, the one that wasn’t currently mangled and compressed in the pristine white cast Kujira was intent on vandalising. Although she had been buzzing to get her quirk ever since she could remember, what from regularly being subject to running into invisible walls of air when Kou was annoyed with her and from watching her father on TV saving people everyday with his power, this quirk stuff was undoubtedly new to Souma.
Once upon a time, she had even entertained the idea that she might be quirkless. She wasn’t that far behind the other kids her age, but Souma was still nearing six; Eita had reassured her once after one of hers and Kou’s disputes that ended in a severely bruised ego (he’d said she was going to end up quirkless if she kept being a brat and she’d never fully recovered) that while four years old was about the standard age of quirk manifestation, some kids were slow starters and got theirs later.
Her father had ruffled her hair and said that being quirkless wasn’t a bad thing either - Kujira was quirkless, and he was still as much of a tyrant than any other kid - but having grown up with the number 3 hero as her father, an uncle ranked number 8, and the former number 4, 1 and 7 heroes for a mother, grandmother, and grandfather, she couldn’t help but put a sense of urgency on her own shoulders. Heroes surrounded her. She had to have a great quirk. If not to make her dad proud, it would be to wipe that silly smirk off Kou’s face whenever he showed off his own ability.
Souma jumped when Kou suddenly flailed his limbs on the floor next to her.
“Ugh, it’s hot!” he yelled, eyebrows scrunched. “I’m drowning in sweat.”
Hitode twirled a lock of black hair around one finger and wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah, I can smell it.”
“Shut up, Hitode.”
An idea formed in Souma’s mind and she quickly sat up against the shoji screens. A beam spread across her face while she shook out her free hand. “What if—”
Instantly, “No.”
“Oh, come on! I’m like, seventy-percent sure that my quirk makes wind,” she cried, turning to Kujira and Hitode for help since Kou seemed hellbent on boring her to death. “You just said you’re hot! If I make it windy it’ll be less hot!”
The air really was stagnant with heat since there was no breeze to counter it. Souma brightened when Hitode tilted her head curiously and opened her mouth, but one look from Kou and she was pointedly glancing away, sweating, “Sorry Sacchan, maybe next time.”
“But you were about to say yes!”
“Your brother will wring my neck!”
Souma groaned. She’d thought that since the twins were closer in age with Kou, he wouldn’t be as pushy with them, but even a two year age gap seemed to put him in charge of most things.
But weirdly enough, it was Kujira who came to her aid. The boy propped himself up on his elbows and shrugged with one shoulder, “Why not let her? She’s gonna have to learn how to control it sooner or later.”
The smile that had dropped off Souma’s face a mere second ago returned in tenfold at Kujira’s suggestion. Who knew Kujira could be a decent person?
Kou, however, didn’t seem convinced. He frowned, “Yeah, later. She hasn’t even started school yet, she won’t know how to handle it.”
“Didn’t you get your quirk when you were three, Kou? Sacchan’s nearly six already, and she’s stronger than you were at her age— don’t lie, me and Hitode both know it. What’s the big deal?”
But Kou simply huffed and tried another route. “You saw my dad’s reaction at breakfast when Souma brought it up!”
Souma shook her head frantically, “Nuh uh! That was just ‘cause I said I’d kill Kujira in his sleep!”
“Precisel- wait, you said what?”
“You were half asleep from playing on the Game Boy until 2am. You weren’t paying attention,” offered Hitode, poking at her twin’s side and giggling when he pouted at her.
“It’ll be fine, Kou-nii. My wrist doesn’t even hurt anymore, see?” Souma flapped her still thoroughly bandaged left arm to demonstrate, commending herself for not showing the twinges of pain on her expression. “And you’ll be there if anything happens! Please, please, please?”
Kou fixed his darkest glare on Souma, but having gotten used to it long ago, she wasn’t fazed, and looking directly into her googly eyes just had the opposite effect on him. “I hate you, you know that?” he said, and yet Souma beamed brightly like she had just heard the best news in the world. “Gah! Fine! Do whatever you want.”
Souma whooped triumphantly while the twins cheered in unison. Kujira finger-gunned at her and said, “Y’see Sacchan? We just bested your big bro in an argument! Aren’t you glad I’m your super cool cousin?”
“Hell yeah!” She grinned and returned the fist bump he offered to her while Kou rolled his eyes and sulked in the background, “You didn’t best me.”
But when she pulled away, she saw too late that Kujira’s expression had morphed from triumphant to crafty. “So since I did you a favor, you need to do me one— those are the rules, you know. Starting with… letting me draw on your cast!”
Souma shrieked and shot off as Kujira leaped into the air and chased after her, laughing maniacally all the way.
The four of them eventually ended up crashing into an antique cabinet somewhere on the third floor - Souma and Kujira brawling despite her useless arm, Hitode trying to pin down her twin brother, and Kou being no help at all and simply laughing at the scene. They were promptly punished with no dessert for the following week, but Souma’s cast had managed to survive mutilation for another day, so it was a fair deal.
And, thanks to Kujira, she was allowed to attempt using her quirk from then on— at least when her dad wasn’t around. Since kids would always be kids, that meant that they had to find a secret meetup spot for the occasion that was strictly off-limits to the adults.
It was slightly cooler the next day but no less bright. Huge summer clouds sat in the sky, barely moving since there was a noticeable absence of wind. Perfect, thought Souma, as she bounced along behind her brother. It wasn’t often that they ventured outside of their grandmother’s mansion - they had everything they wanted there, even an outdoor pool that was of no significant use to a sixty-year old woman who barely even saw the kids most days - so each time they did, it was an adventure.
Although all she really wanted was to run off and explore, her dad had warned her repeatedly of not doing so in public without himself or Kou to supervise, and she was smart enough to know that it was for her own good. She held herself back for once; she was turning six in just a couple months, for god’s sake.
But Kou was twelve, the twins ten, meaning they were all older, taller, and had longer legs than Souma. No matter how energetic she was, she struggled to keep up with their pace and ended up tugging on her brother’s shirt instead. With a glance, he took her hand easily and slowed his pace.
Souma stuck closely to Kou while they walked and noticed the twins doing the same even if they were bickering with each other all the while. Even at twelve years old Kou exuded an overwhelming bubble of safety.
They only had to walk for a few minutes through the slow stream of passers-by but they were drenched in sweat by the time the street opened up to a large field bracketed by trees and greenery. It was too hot. Souma hummed a tune from one of her cartoons as they trudged through the tall, dry grass and toward the trees, which revealed a small stretch of land beside a running stream hidden from view by the thicket. A familiar buzz of cicadas resonated throughout the clearing.
“Woah.” Kujira ran over to the water and peered at his rippling reflection. “Cool!”
“I found this place a few days ago,” Kou declared proudly as the younger kids wandered around in awe.
Souma, however, quickly snapped out of her excitement and spun around. “You found it how long ago and didn’t tell me!?”
“Dude. It was on, like, Monday.”
“Why didn’t you bring us here sooner?”
“You were napping and dead to the world when I got back! Also, I’m the oldest— you guys are too childish for me, I get sick of you sometimes. I don't have time to entertain you.” Kou stuck his tongue out and laughed as she snarled. What part of the boy currently making faces at her didn’t scream childish?
A sudden squeal caught their attention. Kujira and Hitode were splashing around in the shallow stream, shoes and socks discarded haphazardly by the bank.
Kou jogged over to the stream and threw his hands in the air. “Hey, what happened to finding out Souma’s quirk?”
“We have plenty of time for that later!” Hitode laughed, yelping excitedly when Kujira let out a battle cry and dragged his palms through the water to splash it everywhere in a five-foot radius.
“Come on! It’s too hot out here, and the water’s cool!” said Kujira, hurriedly darting away as Hitode chased after him to splash him back.
Souma puffed her cheeks distastefully. Normally, she’d love to join her cousins and play in the water, but she had also been dying to try out her quirk for a week now— five years, if you were counting the time she waited for it to emerge. Her impatience surpassed her frantic desire to play. Plus, her dad would probably get mad if she got her cast wet for the third time that week.
Kou seemed to notice her sudden glumness and it warmed Souma’s heart when he turned away from the shrieking twins to sit on a nearby log instead. He leaned back on his palms and offered her a rare, encouraging smile. “Go on. You were buzzing the entire walk here— try it out.”
A grin broke out across Souma’s face and she nodded fervently. She planted her feet in the ground and waited. And waited. And waited.
Wait. How were you supposed to use your quirk?
Nervous sweat trickled down her neck. She had no idea where to start. Caught up in the excitement of finally getting her quirk, she hadn’t planned very far ahead and had only focused on what came after, not what she had to do between. Souma glanced at Kou over her shoulder and stuttered out, “Uh. How do I use my quirk?”
Kou rolled his eyes so hard she swore they could’ve got lost in his skull. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“How am I supposed to know!? It’s not like anyone’s taught me!”
“This is why I said we should wait until you at least go to school or something!”
That wasn’t happening. Souma stamped her foot impatiently, “That’s too far away! I want to learn now!”
“Souma—”
“Now!”
Kou groaned. “I hate you.”
It was an empty phrase - after being subject to so many renditions of the same three words, Souma was a master of telling when her brother was actually annoyed and when he was just being a ‘pre-teen’, or whatever her dad called it. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, restless. “Teach me.”
“It’s not that simple, Souma. You said you probably have a wind quirk, right? I asked Dad, but no one in the family on his side or Mom’s has had a wind-based quirk before— air’s close, but it’s not the same. Which means you probably got some mutant of Mom and Dad’s, and that’s gonna be hard to figure out, let alone try to control.”
Souma stared at her brother blankly. She’d only understood ‘wind’, ‘Dad’, and ‘mutant’. “So… what?”
“So your quirk’s really different from mine. I don’t know how you can trigger it.”
“But why?” She’d been impatient before, but now she was getting frustrated. “Can’t you just tell me what you do when you use your quirk?”
Kou opened his mouth and closed it. A thoughtful look crossed his face. “Huh. Actually, that’s kinda smart. Okay, I guess we can try it.”
The casual words of praise made her flush proudly as Kou ambled over to where she was standing, but a flick to the forehead grounded her again; Souma frowned and rubbed at the afflicted area. Kou stretched his arms out. “Alright. Watch carefully.”
Nothing happened for a moment, but Souma remained alert, eyes flickering this way and that in fear of missing a single thing. Then she saw it - a sheen of light reflecting off an invisible surface. Just as soon as she had, Kou darted off and leaped into the air, bounding off his platform of air and onto another one, higher, and another, and another, until he looked like he was simply hopping about in the sky.
“Hey!” Souma cupped her hands over her eyes and squinted at Kou’s laughing form high up in the blue sky. It was too bright, and she couldn’t look at him directly unless she was okay with blinding herself for the next five minutes. Trust Kou to find a way to mess with her using his quirk. “How is this helping me!?”
Kou hopped back down a minute later. His face was brighter than before, bright blue eyes gleaming with exhilaration. Souma had no sympathy for the boy who had just left her looking stupid on the ground. “Necessary demonstration! I’m showing you that it’s as easy as breathing to use your quirk once you’ve got the hang of it!”
“Didn’t look as easy as breathing when you spent a minute on that first jump,” huffed Souma, folding her arms.
It pleased her to no end when a slight flush made its way up his ears. “That— I was getting prepared!”
“Whatever. Now teach me properly or I’ll cry.”
They spent the next twenty minutes arguing back and forth about Kou’s strange ways of describing the feeling he got when he used his quirk. His vague speech (”You just… turn it on! Like, shoom! And bam! And it’s there!”) only served to confuse Souma. It reminded her of whenever she’d pointed at a math equation in one of his workbooks and asked about how it worked - Kou was an excellent student but a horrible teacher when it came to studies, and his inaptitude for teaching seemed to apply to quirk business too.
Finally, after taking a break to splash their faces with water from the stream to ‘refresh their brains’, as Kou had put it, he turned to Souma and shook his head. “Okay. We’re not getting anywhere. Forget everything I just told you, ‘cause I can tell you aren’t following.”
“Info forgotten.” Souma nodded.
“Good. Now think about that time you fell from the maple tree. You said you were climbing it when the wind came, right?” She nodded again, unsure of where this was going. “How did you feel when it came?”
The question stunned her. "Huh?"
Kou rolled his eyes. "Didn't you feel, like, a rush? I think I did when I got my quirk, even though I was kinda too small to remember. You just focus on that feeling and try to make it happen again."
Souma frowned. What did she feel? Her recollection of that day had faded the more time passed, so it was difficult. But still Souma could remember, somewhat indistinctly, that she had been scaling the tree like she had with others so many times, when she’d suddenly felt very cold. It was an odd feeling, like the air around her had suddenly dropped twenty degrees.
She shook her head. That couldn’t be it. Pushing aside the memory of the chill, Souma put all her focus toward finding whatever Kou was talking about. A feeling.
And after a minute of squinting angrily at the ground, there it was. Like she was suddenly very aware of something simultaneously old and new buried deep in her body, waiting to be released. Souma reached inside and tugged, fingers flexing involuntarily.
It was over in a split second - the chill came, first, and then a fierce gust of wind was sweeping her unevenly cut hair off her shoulders - and it was gone.
Souma blinked. Was that…?
“Hey— you did it!” Someone was shaking her elatedly by the shoulders— no, not someone. Kou. His excited face filled her vision as he jumped on the spot in front of her, babbling inanely. “You did it, Souma, you did it! I felt it! You felt it too, right? The wind!”
If there was even the smallest trace of wind in the air, it couldn't have been natural; summer in Musutafu barely brought by a breeze and it was the same that day. For a second, Souma felt rooted to the ground, delirious, but at Kou’s words, she felt herself unsticking. A tentative smile inched itself across her face. “I did it?”
Kou laughed, tousling her hair roughly. “You did it!”
Later that afternoon, the children unanimously agreed to keep the fact that Souma was able to use her quirk quiet from the adults. Kou could tell that Souma was dying to tell their father the news - his sister often did weird stuff in an effort to impress people, Eita most of all - but at the same time, Souma was dying to do ten billion things at the same time, all the time. He reckoned she could wait a little longer if it meant keeping herself and the others out of imminent trouble, as well as to give herself more time to hone her quirk and wow everyone with her spectacular control in the future. Right now all she could really do was make it windy around herself.
They had just made it back in time for dinner at dusk. The four had spent the day at the creek alternating between playing in the water and egging Souma on to test out her abilities more while drying off in the sunshine. By the time Kou realised the sun was dipping dangerously low in the sky, it was already almost six o’clock, and as the oldest of the group, it was his responsibility to rally his sister and cousins to get their shoes on and run them all back to the house before their parents, or god forbid, their grandmother noticed how long they had vanished for.
Breakfast and lunch they could get away with by scarfing down finger sandwiches and platters of sushi the cooks whipped up before going off on their way again, but dinner was apparently a different affair, for the children were required to eat at the dining table and work on their table manners with the adults most nights.
If the dining table at the Kazetani abode was a massive thing, like the one from Beauty and the Beast that the teacups and candles danced on, the hall itself was tremendous. Back when Kou was a little younger and before Souma was even born, he had been dressed in a tiny tux and paraded around in the very same room for some dinner party that his grandmother had thrown. He didn't remember much about it anymore except that a bunch of other pro heroes and rich people had been there.
While Kou and the little kids sat on one end of the table, his father, Aunt Sora, Junya-san and Uncle Satori were gathered in hushed conversation beside them, pretending that their children and nephews and nieces weren’t all clearly eavesdropping. Uncle Satori caught Kou’s wandering eyes and ears more than once and made funny faces at him every time.
Kou didn’t mind the extravagance of it all. He’d figured out long ago that their family, or at least, his grandmother's side, was wealthy to an extraordinary extent after having played at his friends’ houses back home; he restrained himself to only be quietly curious when their mothers were the ones cooking curry for dinner instead of a private staff of chefs. But whereas Kou sat still and did what he was told, getting Souma to cooperate was a different challenge altogether.
After a while, he sighed and put down his salad fork, unable to ignore the way she picked disinterestedly at her food. “Stop playing with your food, it’s rude.”
She looked at him sadly as if she’d known he would say something. “This isn’t food, Kou-nii. It’s like… fish leaf water.” She stabbed at the prawn lying in her untouched bowl of what looked like seaweed essence and lifted it to watch as the liquid dripped off its meat. Kou found himself half-heartedly agreeing. No matter how tasty it might be once it was chewed up mush in your mouth, a plate of crawfish floating around in green liquid wasn’t a sight that kids usually jumped at.
“I mean… okay, yeah, you’ve got a point. But doesn’t matter. Quit doing that ‘fore Obasan or the other adults sees.”
“Obasan won’t care. Her own kids are being weird too,” drawled Souma. Kou turned to see his ten-year old cousins tearing apart their prawns and arranging them in one shared bowl to make a fleshy portrait of Uncle Satori's face. Gods help him, his whole family were demon spawn.
He’d managed to wrestle the fork from his sister’s grasp before she could copy them and replaced it with a spoon that was less likely to do significant damage to the fish when their father spoke up from behind them.
“Well aren’t you two a funny pair,” said Eita, who had just returned from taking a phone call. Kou grimaced when his gaze flicked to the snickering twins seated across from them. “Almost as weird as your cousins. Is that Satori’s face they’re making?”
“I told them to stop, Dad, I swear.” Kou deadpanned, dismayed that their father had to see that embarrassing image.
Eita just shook his head and reached over to correct Souma’s grip on her spoon as he sank into the chair beside her. “Let them be. This food is probably as appetizing as mint toothpaste to you kids.”
“I like mint toothpaste,” Souma piped in helpfully, abandoning her soup in favor of a dinner roll.
“’Course you do, demon,” said Kou, ignoring the way his sister mimicked him in an exaggerated high-pitched voice. The girl usually ate anything and everything— apparently that extended to toothpaste flavors— as long as it wasn’t fish eggs and leaves served on a massive plate. Unluckily for her, that was pretty much all the cooks served for dinner at their grandmother’s house.
Kou glanced around. Futaba hadn’t appeared at today’s meal either. The woman was notoriously difficult to pin down despite living and roaming under the same roof as them for a month each year, and although he knew the adults regularly had meetings with her to discuss grown-up stuff like the annual finances, politics and the Hero Billboard Charts (that they never let him join- he’d been shot down several times before he learned to simply huff and look the other way when they disappeared during the day), their grandmother rarely sought out the children themselves.
The thought made him glum - why couldn’t they eat pizza for dinner in the TV room if they were only keeping up table etiquette to please the lady of the house, who didn’t even show up at meals?
“Chin up, Kou-kun!” cheered Aunt Sora from across the table, effectively making him jump out of his seat. His aunt was a boisterous woman with long, coffee brown hair that matched her brother’s. “You’ll get used to the food in a few more days.”
“The food’s fine, Obasan!” Kou replied sheepishly. It really was, as long as you ate it cross-eyed, and had multiple side dishes to fill your stomach with afterward. But his reassurances just made Uncle Satori cackle good-naturedly.
“Your face is screaming ‘I want pizza’, kiddo, you’re not fooling anyone.”
Souma frowned and said through the laughter, “I can’t eat pizza.”
“Well I can. Get over your allergies or starve.”
“Kou.” Eita gave him a stony stare.
“I’ll shove your pizza down your throat since you like it so much,” hissed Souma.
But just as soon as laughter and chatter had broken out at the table, sudden, distinct footsteps cut through the noise.
Kou turned, and there she was, gliding through the double doors to the dining hall in all her glory.
Kazetani Futaba, the former number one hero, and his grandmother. Kou suddenly felt like he had jinxed her appearance.
Having not seen her since the day they’d arrived at the mansion, he couldn’t help but examine his grandmother - she'd held her place as the greatest hero in Japan for a solid two years in her prime, after all, and that wasn’t a title even Eita had reached, thanks to the rise of the Symbol of Peace. But Futaba was nothing more than a severe-looking woman with pristine raven hair pulled back in a tight knot at the back of her head, icy blue feline eyes, and nary a wrinkle on her face. Kou thought she looked more like a strict primary school teacher than a sixty-four year old mother of three.
Aunt Sora rose from her chair immediately. “Mother—”
She was silenced with the swift raise of a hand. Futaba stepped easily toward the dinner table without a care for how the whole room had gone silent at her appearance. She cut straight to the point. “I heard your daughter has finally gotten her quirk, Eita. What of it?”
Kou saw his father place a hand on Souma’s head and pat it twice out of the corner of his eye. Like a proud gesture. But he could tell then and there it wasn’t that.
Eita smiled politely. “Good evening, Futaba. How are you?” he said, and resumed speaking only when the woman nodded curtly. “We aren’t aware of the nature of Souma’s quirk yet since it’s just manifested. Souma hurt her wrist climbing, so we can’t determine it right away.”
Futaba’s stare was stony as usual, but something in her gaze flickered. “Is that so. A lesson for all children to learn eventually— one mustn’t attempt to climb the ladder that isn’t on their level.”
His father's smile was more forced that time.
If she could tell, she didn't show it, instead tipping her chin in their direction, eyes hooded. "Remember your heritage, children. You all come from a long lineage of powerful figures in society. Power comes naturally to a Kazetani."
The last thing she said before walking away was, “I expect big things from you.”
That night, Souma was reminded of an encounter she had once had with the infamous Kazetani Futaba.
She had been looking for a bathroom after licking clean one too many watermelon slices in competition with Hitode (she had no idea why she ever thought that would be a good idea, her cousin was ages older than her and had a bigger stomach, even though she had let Souma win on purpose in the end) and made a wrong turn somewhere.
Despite having spent all her summers at the same estate, her grandmother’s house was virtually a maze— such an establishment couldn’t be reduced to a title like ‘house’. It was why the cousins usually dedicated half of their days aimlessly wandering around the endless hallways, in search of something as if their grandmother was a dragon hoarding a stash of treasure somewhere deep in her castle.
That's why when she rounded a corner, she was taken aback to see Futaba gliding down the corridor toward her. The woman was a phantom floating about the house - Souma couldn’t remember the last time she had bumped into her grandmother unintentionally.
Souma bowed awkwardly and said a quick, “Hi,” when they crossed paths. What she didn’t expect was for the woman to halt her footsteps before her, causing Souma to look up and meet her gaze.
It was cold— Futaba had irises that reminded Souma of glaciers, the ones that were usually made by pro heroes on TV. Just looking into them sent a chill down her spine.
Before she could get a word in, Futaba was tilting her head to one side almost curiously and said, “You look so much like your father.”
Her tone was flat. Souma smiled nonetheless and twisted a lock of blue hair around one finger. She had been told so many times before, although Eita would argue that she looked more like her mom as she grew. “I think so too!” she exclaimed, and blinked at the way her grandmother's expression softened almost imperceptibly before she was whisking past her again.
Souma simply smoothed down her dress and kept walking. Her grandmother was a strange person— she didn’t mind that much if she was just an after thought to her.
But when she peeked over her shoulder in hopes to catch a glimpse of her again, Futaba had already vanished.