Work Text:
For Fuyumi Todoroki, love was patience.
A bowl of fruit left by the door, a home scrubbed of dust, a wrapped meal on the kitchen table. Just tasks to fill the time. Or, if she was willing to admit it to herself, gentle reminders. Gentle reminders that she was here, waiting, and ready to welcome them home.
It was never something expected of her; it was something she chose to do. She was the second eldest Todoroki child, after all, and she had nothing better to do, like training. No, she just had school and her family. Moreover, she had a responsibility as the only girl.
It was never an outward expression from her parents.
But Rei Himura was raised by a family with a specific set of values, a family that prized marriage and children above autonomy. Despite trying to distance herself from this, to relegate it to herself and not her children, the rot still spread like an infectious disease.
Where Rei was avoidant, Enji was single-minded. Absurd strength, a power to surpass All Might, that was valued. He didn’t notice how his wife became an object to his desires, how divided the men and women of the household were: strong or weak, ambitious or caring. Whether this happened willingly or not, Fuyumi couldn’t say. She liked to believe it was something born of ignorance, not dispassion; it was what she told Natsuo over and over again. But in the dark hours of the night, when she was all alone and the house creaked like it would crumble, doubt crept in.
And while Enji overlooked this rift, his children didn’t. No—his children couldn’t. It was what they were raised on after all, their precarious foundations.
Touya saw it first. He looked at himself, raised to take his father’s place, and his little sister, seemingly aimless, and quickly discovered the idea of us vs. them. Fuyumi didn't think he meant it, not really. When she was young, her older brother was bigger than the whole world put together, but looking back, he was just a little boy scared his father would leave and never come back. He jumped at the chance of being grouped together with Enji, whether that meant abandoning his babysitting duties to train, or establishing himself and Enji as the men of the household.
Fuyumi herself only noticed it later, though it wasn’t gradual. The morning after her brother’s accident, Rei was gone, Enji and Shouto were still at the hospital, and Fuyumi stood in an empty kitchen, stomach growling as she held her brother’s hand. Their meal consisted of an apple, three pieces of celery, and an overcooked egg. She was barely tall enough to reach the stove.
Afterwards, Fuyumi cleaned the dishes, watered the flowers, and scrubbed the kitchen floor until she could no longer hear Shouto’s screams. When her father returned with her bandaged brother in tow, he nodded at her once. It was the most acknowledgment she had gotten in years, but a bitterness coated her tongue.
The next day, she borrowed cookbooks from the library and, when a mistake was made, bandaged her own burns. She had enough practice with Touya to last a lifetime—to last his lifetime.
Praying at her brother’s shrine, Fuyumi looked up at a face that never changed, that never would change, and she wondered if he had been right all along. That bitter taste overwhelmed her, drowning out the saltiness of her tears, but it would be years before she could name it.
So, Fuyumi continued to cook meals, improving until she perfected it to an art form. Natsuo, the sweet boy he was, ate all her raw and burnt first attempts, complimenting her even when he caught food poisoning one bleary morning. He was such an unfailingly kind child, though when Fuyumi reflected on it, she wondered if he just knew what she wanted to hear. He had always been keenly perceptive of those around him, an easy listening ear yet a trusted advisor; it was why he used to be Touya’s only confidant, after all.
He would joke about his friends' misadventures in hushed conversations over dinner, and she would silently wonder how he had so many. Fuyumi had always been too quiet, too shy to reach out. She would spend hours agonizing over the perfect interaction, planning her words carefully and feeling like she was setting a trap.
Near the end of middle school, she shared a desk with a beautiful girl named Kaida, whose short dark hair reminded her of the night sky. Kaida was quiet and often ridiculed for the faint mole resting on her upper lip, but Fuyumi thought it made her look distinguished in all the ways she wished she was. In all the ways she pretended to be. For three months, Fuyumi sat silently next to her, drafting conversation openers in her notebook instead of what was on the chalkboard.
A golden opportunity arose when Kaida accidentally tore her pencil pouch. The girl had teared up, forlornly trying to fix the seams, before reluctantly tossing it at the end of the school day. But Fuyumi knew how to sew, knew how to fix things. So she dug it out of the trashcan, washed it, and embroidered the tear with the blushing cherry blossoms that decorated Kaida’s water bottle.
But when she summoned all her courage the next morning to present her gift and say the words she had rehearsed in the mirror, she saw that the girl already had a brand new pencil case, that her parents had apparently noticed and bought her a replacement immediately—and wasn’t that something?
The embroidery Fuyumi had worked so hard on ended up in the trash, alongside rotting fruit and crushed soda cans, and honestly this was for the best. Fuyumi had her hands full keeping the house clean, and she was already behind on her chores due to that silly attempt to reach out.
So Fuyumi kept to herself at school and kept to the background at home. During that inferno of a year when Touya died, Rei left, and Shouto came back burned, everything happened too much and too fast. Events unfolded before Fuyumi’s eyes as if she was just a spectator or a member of the audience—small, insignificant, powerless. In the aftermath, it was natural to just… stay there, out of the way with Natsuo.
Once the ash settled, the house became haunted, filled with ghosts plaguing her constantly in the heavy quiet of the night. It wasn’t as if things were much different in the twilight; she had always roomed alone, Touya used to train more often than not, and Rei hadn’t truly done much, but… Shouto’s crying felt so much louder now.
The thought of going outside her room when she wasn’t supposed to filled Fuyumi with more dread than she thought possible. But she couldn’t sleep, and the ghosts around her felt cloying, suffocating—and she knew that she was useless in the grand scheme of things; she would never become a hero, never be strong enough, never say the right thing—but she could wait. She could show Shouto that she was still here in the house, that she would wait for him.
The distance between them was miles long. She didn’t know his favorite color or his favorite meal—she barely even knew what he looked like—but maybe this way the crossing was at least manageable, the waves less choppy. Maybe, just maybe, her boat wouldn’t capsize if she tried to reach him. Or, perhaps more accurately, his boat wouldn’t capsize while she watched from the shore, a forgotten bystander.
Her socked feet slid quietly across the floor as she fetched berries from the fridge, the bowl instantly cooling in her hands due to nerves. She opted for a fork instead of chopsticks, having heard in between shouts that Shouto’s hand-eye coordination was still suffering after the damage to his left eye.
But outside his door, she hesitated. Shouto was kept on a strict diet; what if her interference ruined him, ruined his training—what if Enji got angry with her?
Her fingers fumbled as she nearly dropped the bowl, ice shooting from her fingertips and freezing the assorted raspberries. Her breath came in tumbling gasps as she felt the ghosts close ranks around her, as she remembered her mother’s muffled sobbing and Touya’s frenzied laughter. The house had been so very quiet these past few years, only occupied by the sound of muffled thuds and cries from the training room—and she just can’t take it anymore. She can’t live like this, flinching and huddled in her room, trying desperately to cover her ears and reassure Natsuo with lies that felt so very bitter on her tongue.
But maybe…
But maybe she could wait like this. Maybe she could wait for her family to find their equilibrium, for it to finally return to what she can barely remember it was like. Maybe she could wait for laughter to fill the halls, maybe she could wait for Touya’s absence to not feel like a gaping hole in her chest. Maybe she could wait for Mom to come home. Maybe she could even wait long enough to hear Shouto laugh or see him smile. She didn’t remember the last time he’d done that—if there even was a time.
But maybe there could be.
She set the bowl gently outside her baby brother’s door despite her nerves almost choking her in the ever-precarious silence. She didn’t sleep that night, paranoid that Enji would come find her, that he’d scream and drag her to the training room since she thought she knew so much. Instead, she hugged her pillow to her chest and tried to remember what Touya looked like when he smiled, rather than the cold stare of the picture in the room next door.
She held back tears the next morning when she found the untouched bowl rotting in the sink.
She assumed Shouto had taken after Touya and rebuffed her attempt to connect, but she reassured herself that she wasn’t on his level anyway. Clearly she didn’t understand his training, but she had Natsuo by her side as they were shunted off to the corner. And that suited her just fine.
She was sixteen now, older than Touya had ever been, and feeling the weight of her years like a chain around her wrist. She had been deemed responsible enough to walk her brothers to and from school, but she struggled to navigate conversation with the both of them. Natsuo would usually regale her with stories while Fuyumi deliberated what to make for dinner, but with Shouto there, she felt that type of conversation would seem… superfluous at best. What merit did home-cooked meals have for a hero-in-training? She felt foolish, and surely Natsuo felt somewhat similarly as he walked silently next to her, awkward and stiff-limbed. Despite their familial connection, neither of them really knew Shouto, and she didn’t think the distance was so manageable anymore.
It happened in the blink of an instant, the squeal of tires, the sound of a scream, the smell of burning rubber, the urge to flinch away—get to Natsu, get out of the way—but Shouto, what about Shouto? It’s on his side, his left side “—at a critical time, Shouto! You will never regain your full sight; your reaction time—” He can’t see it, can he see it? Her hand snagged the back of his jacket and yanked, falling into Natsuo, crashing to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Wind whipped violently past her face as she finally registered the crumpled, smoking wreckage of a car in front of them, on the sidewalk where her baby brother had just been standing.
Breath slowly trickled into her lungs and she gasped in as much as she could. Screams and sirens filled the air, but Fuyumi only had eyes for the two boys in front of her, her hand still gripping Shouto’s collar and her shoulder jabbing into Natsuo’s sternum as they lay in a crumpled pile in front of the crash.
Dizzy from the shock, she forced herself to sit up.
“Shouto!” She yanked the boy towards her, feeling him flinch, but too desperate to see him unharmed to stop herself. “Are you alright, are you hurt? Oh God, are you hurt?”
The boy stared at her for a long moment, his cheeks cupped in her palms, his scar rough under her hands—he’s so young, her littlest brother, she almost lost her littlest brother—before he slowly shook his head.
“Thank goodness,” she said, going for a hug before remembering herself and freezing. “I—Oh, sorry—I don't—” she stumbled through an apology before reaching for her other brother, “Natsu, are you—”
“I’m fine; I’m fine,” the boy beneath her quickly reassured, though she could feel him shaking. Ignoring him completely, she laid a hand across his forehead and checked thoroughly for injuries with her own eyes before deeming herself satisfied.
Standing up and gathering herself was an ordeal, to say the least, but she couldn’t falter. She was the eldest now; it was her responsibility to take care of everyone, make sure they were alright, keep them moving. She indulged herself a moment to hug Natsuo, though he was getting so big she had to stand on her tiptoes, before she composed herself.
She glanced over her brothers critically once more as they brushed themselves off, Natsuo offering an attempt at a comforting smile that looked more like a constipated grimace. Fuyumi released a shaky breath. “Okay, okay. We'll all finish walking to school together, and then I'll call Father to tell him what happened.” She frowned, twisting her fingers together nervously. “I hope attendance won’t mark us as tardy.”
Natsuo’s lips quirked to the side in a considering frown. “Do we have to? Tell him, I mean. Nothing happened anyway.” He looked away, hiding his chin in the collar of his coat to muffle his next words. “Not that he’d care.”
“Natsuo!” Fuyumi scolded, glancing worriedly at their impressionable baby brother, who fortunately didn’t seem to be paying attention, instead staring at the wreckage with a morbid sort of interest. She sighed before turning back to him. “Of course he cares. And of course we have to tell him; he’s our father. Now come on,” she gestured, “we have to go or we'll miss first period completely.”
Natsuo grumbled, brushing himself off one last time before grabbing her hand tightly, too forcedly casual about it for him to be anything but embarrassed. Fuyumi was glad for the extra support. She smiled fondly at him before gesturing for Shouto to join her as she started forward.
Shouto followed close behind, almost glued to her right side. Fuyumi was somewhat surprised by this; while she hesitated to call Shouto cold, he never acted overly familiar with her or Natsuo. Why would he when they barely knew each other?
It was only halfway through their trek to school when she realized he had put her in his blind spot. The vision in his left eye was damaged after the accident; she knew that well, could hear Enji’s scolding echo through the quiet house. Shouto must have been more spooked about the accident than she thought, and of course he would be. He was only nine years old; no matter how hard Enji pushed him during training, or how strong his quirk might be, none of that could change his age.
So, if Shouto quietly slipped his hand into her’s as they crossed the street, and if he decided to keep it there for the rest of the walk, Fuyumi wouldn’t tell, not even when Enji gruffly asked her for an update on Shouto’s condition over the phone and didn’t utter a word of concern for her or Natsuo.
It was her little secret, probably the only one she had ever kept from her father.
As she laid in her bed that night, after cooking for Natsuo, cleaning the house, folding the laundry, dropping off another cold bowl of raspberries at Shouto’s door when the sound of screeching tires wouldn’t stop haunting her dreams, she remembered the weight of two small hands in hers.
She wasn’t a mother; she was just a girl at the cusp of adulthood. But there was no mother in this house, just the haunting of another ghost. Rei was somewhere far away, and Fuyumi finally realized she wouldn’t be coming back for a long, long time. There was no one else to cook or clean, no one else to soothe Natsuo’s fears and cover his ears, no one else to attend his graduation and congratulate him, no one else to lie for Shouto. It was just her, all alone in this empty house, with the echo of Rei’s laughter plaguing her every step.
So she didn’t protest when Natsuo gave her a card for Mother’s Day, silenced his embarrassed explanations that they were required to make it in class and that he thought she would get a kick out of it. Instead, she thanked him and kissed his cheek, and made sure he finished all the vegetables on his plate before going to bed.
So she cheered the loudest during Natsuo’s middle school graduation, despite her nerves, despite the people looking over curiously once they heard the name ‘Todoroki.’ This day was about her little brother, and only him.
So she kept sneaking bowls of fruit to Shouto’s room after particularly rough training sessions, her heart leaping to her throat every time she thought of Enji finding out. She drafted up papers in her free time on how healthy fruits were, on how they would promote Shouto’s training and improve his strength. She kept them in a drawer under her desk, just in case.
So she spent days baking a cake for Natsuo’s high school graduation, squirrelling away sugar in the pantry with shaking hands as she fretted over whether Enji would find it. She decorated it with flowers from the garden, the ones she kept alive after Rei had left. And she took a million pictures of him as he walked forward and accepted his diploma, tearing up as she realized just how much he had grown, not just his body, but his heart, too.
So she tried her best to hide her bitterness. She loved her brothers and she loved being there for them even more. Natsuo had grown into such a strong, smart, and exceptionally kind young man and she was lucky to be there for that, lucky to have guided him through that. But when she tackled the nebulous thought of her mother, of Rei’s gentle smiles, of Rei’s kind eyes, of Rei’s heaving sobs and stuttered screams, she felt cheated. Selfish. Because the one feeling that stood out to her the most, above the love, above the admiration, above the sympathy, was bitterness. Every good memory with Rei was tinged with the acrid thought of how she couldn’t have held on for just a little longer, endured just a little more.
Because if she had, maybe Fuyumi would have gotten a childhood, too. Maybe she would have been raised alongside Natsuo instead of raising both herself and him at the same time.
Fuyumi didn’t like to think of Rei.
Fuyumi didn’t like to think of Natsuo’s growing anger, either. His growing grief.
She didn’t like to think of how often she caught him sneaking back to his old room, the room he shared with Touya, the room with that unchanging picture.
She didn’t like to think of how he would sleep there, in front of his brother’s photo, a hand outstretched to him even in sleep.
She didn’t like to think of the quiet jealousy that filled her heart every time she remembered the two of them together. She was closer in age to either boy, but they became comrades in arms while she became an annoyance to one and a mother to the other.
She didn’t like to think of Natsuo’s increasing gripes against their father, of how her reprimands would roll off his shoulders without touching his heart, of how he had taken to glaring every time their father entered a room instead of averting his eyes.
Touya’s ghost seemed to haunt his every step, fueling an animosity she just couldn’t understand—wouldn’t understand, because how could Natsuo not see that at least Enji was here? That nothing could be solved by spitting fire at him, nothing could be won, because they were the only ones left. Rei was gone, Touya was gone, and Fuyumi just wanted everyone else to stay.
So she couldn’t grasp it when Natsuo wanted to leave after graduation, when he asked—no, begged—her to move out with him, when he insisted this house and everything in it was wrong except for her, when he admitted that he missed their mother and hated their father. Because in her mind’s eye, all she could see was a faded memory of her father’s smile as he held her above his head, her mother’s laughter as she called out that dinner was ready, Touya’s hand in her’s as he guided her up the front steps.
Because in her mind’s eye, all she could see was Natsuo chasing the ghost of a dead boy, a foolish boy, and leaving her all alone.
She had thought, even with her bitterness over the role she was forced into, that at least she wouldn’t have to worry about being left behind again, that at least she had one person who would always stick by her side. But the world was wrong, her ears were ringing, and she realized that the sound of her begging would never compare to the sound of Touya’s ghost in Natsuo’s ears.
She watched him pack his bags in a daze; the house was hauntingly quiet after their fight, the loudest they had been in years, and she was still reeling.
But when Natsuo stood in the doorway fidgeting, when he looked at her with tears in his grey eyes as he choked on his words, she remembered the little boy who cried when he scraped his knee playing, when he lost that soccer match, when he got a bad grade on his paper.
So she did what she had done every time before, when a sniffling Natsuo would hold himself so stiffly she was afraid he would fall over, when he was too proud—too scared—to ask for what he wanted.
She opened her arms and let him fall into a shaking, fervent hug. She kissed his brow and whispered that everything would be alright, that she loved him so very much.
And she did what she had never done before; she let him leave—encouraged him to keep going when he turned back with an anguished expression—a willing audience member this time, knowing that she had the power to stop the play, to make him come back, but loving him too much to do so.
That summer was a lonely and harrowing one. She accepted a job as a teacher, a job she found joy and meaning in, but she struggled with the same issues that had plagued her at school: an inability to get close to anyone, an inability to let people in. She cursed her preteen self for never making friends; she had no practice at it now and failed miserably at every attempt.
So she stayed relatively lonely, but that was alright. The kids were sweet. Well, actually, the kids were quite wicked at times, but they were just children. They had the chance to grow. And if she saw a flash of blue eyes, heard a quiet but contagious laugh, or noticed a boy’s unearned confidence and remembered her brothers—a stranger, an absence, and a gaping wound—well then that was her business and nobody else’s.
And when Shouto moved to the dorms, when she was left completely alone in the mansion, when her father slept at his agency more often than his own home, and when her wrapped meals sat rotting on the kitchen table just for the chance to see her father smile, just for the chance to hold that memory close to her chest because the others were starting to fade and she was starting to think the original may have been concocted out of a wishful dream—that was when she sat in her room and waited.
Fuyumi was a patient woman, patient with love, patient with fright, and so she waited for the other shoe to drop in that big empty house, for something, anything, to change, even if it was for the worse. She was rotting in this house, like a bowl of raspberries left in the sink, like Rei’s wilting blue flowers, like the ashes of her older brother buried in a shallow grave.
And suddenly, everything changed in quick succession. Near death experiences sent her heart into her throat, sent her legs collapsing out from under her, sent her to Natsuo’s doorstep, blubbering and barely able to string together a sentence, the first time she had seen him in-person after he left, the first time she had heard his voice without a phone line distorting it.
This time, he held her together and kissed her brow and whispered reassurances.
When her head cleared enough to feel embarrassment, she realized that he had grown even taller now, that even though the bags under his eyes were darker, there was a certain steadiness to his face that she couldn’t begin to understand. But she was happy for it nonetheless.
When her father tentatively reached out, when she noticed a change in his countenance, however slight, she immediately embraced it, showing her soft white underbelly to the silver glint of his knife. She was tired of waiting and so desperate for things to return to the way they were: when her father’s arms felt like the safest place in the world, when she was just a child allowed to be a child.
But she was grown now, as were her brothers, and she realized that, even when Enji was making an effort, her childhood was still out of reach. Touya’s ghost was a constant presence, following Natsuo wherever he went, egging on arguments, and skipping stones in the pond outside after dinner.
She sat in the disquiet, stewed in it, and wondered why she felt so guilty, so purposefully carefree when she’d earned this, when she was finally done with the waiting.
She realized why as she watched the news broadcast her dead brother’s face laughing that same feverish laugh that haunted her dreams. The past never truly dies, and whether Fuyumi Todoroki would admit it or not, she couldn’t keep clinging to an idealistic memory instead of reality. Nothing made sense anymore: ghosts were alive, her family was together again in the most perverse way possible, and maybe waiting didn’t do much after all. Maybe actions spoke louder than silence.
So she went to Touya, went to the man burning himself alive over and over again, and the past overlapped with the present. She saw blue flames, chubby cheeks, and purple scars. She heard a raspy voice filled with smoke, a child’s belly-aching laughter, and her own screams. She remembered an unchanging picture, a warm hand in hers, and felt flames lick up her cheek. She looked at the man her brother had become and couldn’t help but think of the boy who felt bigger than the world combined. In front of her was a looming horror of a man, willing to kill innocents, wanting to kill her, but in front of her was also the little boy who just wanted his father to love him, who only knew how by belittling others and hurting himself.
When all is said and done, Dabi is her brother, and her brother is Dabi. The mass murderer who burned her is the same boy who used to braid her hair. She thinks he has done terrible things, has endangered her family and others to a ridiculous degree, but those thoughts are almost a separate entity from her, a logical alarm sounding while her heart ignores it. She always was too prone to forgiveness, to ignoring the sickening twists of someone’s psyche in favor of her own memories.
She thinks she misses him.
She visits him in the hospital sometimes. At the beginning, she was so nervous that she prepared notecards of mundane stories to ‘catch him up’, so to speak. She figured that was the safest option, something that wouldn’t provoke anger, something that would help him reconcile the young woman he saw before him as the little girl who used to pick flowers in the garden.
Upon entering, her nervous energy had spiked, and she helplessly set to dusting his designated room instead, the sound of automated breathing accompanying her throughout. She started to read what she had written, but when she looked up from her notecards, she was a lonely little girl again, listening to Touya and Natsuo with her ear pressed to the door, always an outsider, always unwanted. She stalled—too long she paused, mouth gaping silently like a fish—but a rasping voice sounded quietly through the room, pausing between breaths, but Fuyumi was patient, had always been patient.
Quietly, she was asked what happened next.
Quietly, she continued.
Time persisted, even when she sometimes straggled behind, lost in turbulent memories. She visited her mother and quietly—ashamedly—admitted her wretchedness, her bottled-up bitterness, her caustic thoughts. Rei had wiped her tears and apologized, even though it wasn’t her fault that her husband had used and abused her, that he had driven her to the brink of insanity and even further, that she had only now recovered enough to live without constant supervision. And the force of Fuyumi’s tears overrode the dam in her mind, which had been built and reinforced over so many years. She hugged her mother back for the first time in a decade, sobbing and sniffling and so very relieved.
It left her exhaustedly hollow, but also cleansed. She was finally ready to move forward.
She left the family estate shortly afterwards. It hadn’t been good for her to stay there, she could finally admit to herself. It was painful and a bit terrifying to leave its familiar halls, to leave its chorus of ghosts, but it was the good kind of hurt, the kind that didn't linger.
She kept in contact with her father, couldn’t bear to cut him out of her life when he had only just started to be part of it, but she can now look at him and see all of him. See the man trying to atone, yes, but also the man she had ignored all her life in favor of a vague memory, the man whose heavy footsteps made her flinch, the man who made her baby brother into a stranger she is only now coming to know, the man who debilitated her mother completely, the man who broke his family so thoroughly that it would never fully heal.
The man who made her feel useless and weak, who had stunted her growth so badly that she still doesn’t know how to make friends.
The man who placed the suffocating weight of responsibility on a little girl’s shoulders and never cared enough to ask if she could take it.
The duality of her father is hard to cope with, but Fuyumi manages.
She manages to grow and make mistakes; she finally has the space for it now, outside of the stifling role she had forced herself into.
She visits Touya every week, the conversations quiet and somewhat stilted, painful and raw, but she always comes back. She has dinners with her brothers at her mother’s house; she takes up gardening, and frames her students’ drawings in her apartment. She calls Natsuo daily and texts Shouto as often as she can, though a hero’s schedule certainly keeps him busy. She gets a cat, a sweet little thing who winds its way between her legs when Fuyumi has had a particularly stressful day, who purrs on her chest as she sleeps. She calls her father weekly to give him updates on her life, accepting his attention with a small smile but without the desperation that ruled over her childhood.
She is happier now. More settled.
And, Fuyumi Todoroki thinks as she pours tea for her brothers, cat hair covering her favorite sweater, laughing unabashedly as she hears them bickering over a video game, I don’t have to wait anymore.
Anything I could ever want is right here in front of me.