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Birds and the cold didn't mingle well. She knew that when her father told her that she'd marry Hawks. It wasn't ideal. Fuyumi had never really imagined herself marrying anyone. Let alone having a marriage arranged for herself. He called it advantageous. A chance to further their family line with more powerful quirks.
She wished he didn't care so much about power, and that he cared more about their family. He claimed to be seeking redemption to be trying to do better for them and then he'd turned around and done this. Signed her off like a piece of property. Perhaps that's all she was anymore.
Perhaps she wasn't even a person to him anymore. It was fine. She could take it. She'd manage. Anything was better than him tormenting her brothers. If this kept him off their backs. She'd do it. She'd do it without hesitation.
No. Birds and the cold have never mixed well. And she wondered if they knew that when the car dropped her off at the private residential complex where she'd be meeting the man she was set to marry in a matter of days. This was meant to be a trap.
She hadn't been expecting to take to him, and his presence like ice on a window pane in the depths of a winter storm. She wondered if they had? He was sweet. Albeit distant at times, he kept her at arms length but---he was never once cruel to her. Just… distant.
She could live with distance. The reality of the situation was Fuyumi Todoroki had been living with distance her whole life. She could live with distance.
But distance faded, and they grew closer until arms length turned to soft touches, and late night conversations into early morning hours about how much they wished things could've been different. Bitter feelings led to the bitter cold. And she feared that she'd freeze him with the weight of it all.
But he assured her they were different. Assured her that despite everything that told her she was becoming just like her mother, that they wouldn't be her parents. And she wished she could believe him.
She wished she could believe soft touches and gentle caresses, and sweet words and loving kisses. She wished she could believe in him, in them… but she'd seen the reality of what marriages like theirs meant, and she was scared.
He understood her fear, and gave her space when she asked for it. He never took too much. But always gave more than enough. Until hope built up in her chest and gave her the strength to carry on in spite of her fears.
Fuyumi Todoroki had fallen in love with the man who had warmed her bitter heart.
But birds and the cold had never mixed well.
She remembered when her quirk had developed, she'd been playing outside as a child, it'd been an accident, but all she could think about now was the tiny avian body in her hands, frozen and dead.
Her voice betrayed her in the shadows of the night with only the stars shining through a wall of windows to light their night. She'd fallen asleep, cold fingers against the warmth of his chest.
The nightmare had struck out of nowhere. She had only ever had nightmares in her youth, and right after Touya had died. But now, her brain concocted horrors beyond her worst imaginings.
Because it wasn't images of dead brothers or images of the things that had destroyed all hope she had in holding her family together. It was him. The red winged angel who had saved her from a self destructive spiral that she'd started down in an attempt to save a family that had been doomed for the better part of 15 years.
And cold fingers had grown colder against his chest as her anger grew. As she tried to piece together how it had happened until silent and lifeless had turned to warm hands grasping at freezing fingers trying to pull them away from where she'd started to freeze the patches of skin the pads of her fingers had been touching.
Fuyumi had always imagined herself becoming her mother… right down to falling in love with the person she'd been arranged to marry… but she'd never imagined herself her father.
Her recoil seemed to startle him more than her touch did, and she tried almost desperately to keep the tears that threatened to spill at bay. And he stared after her in the star dotted darkness, golden eyes adjusting to the dimness of just them and the moon and the sky. She'd cleared their room in record time putting as much space between them as the room would allow.
It was an accident. She hadn't meant to hurt him. But all she could see was the practically glistening evidence that she had.
"I…" She tried to explain herself, but the words wouldn't come. There was no excuse.
He climbed from the bed, feathers instinctively returning to his back to form his wings. And he approached her slowly, like she was a wounded animal and not the woman who could've frozen him to death while they slept had she not been woken up… or had her fingers been just a few inches to the left.
"Fuyumi…" He said, his tone soft, careful. Her name sounded like a plea. "It's gonna be okay."
Was it though? Was it really? She had to ask herself if in the end maybe they were doomed to fail. It felt like it. Like they new such a thing would happen when this had all been arranged.
"Please don't… I don't want to hurt you, Keigo." She breathed, breath like frost in the air in the edges of her panic.
Fuyumi had always been the level headed one. The one that held everything including herself together. But the image of herself holding the little bird flashed back into her mind.
"You didn't hurt me. You had a nightmare and your response was normal." He attempted to reassure her.
Oh how she wished it worked.
"I could've killed you…" She sobbed, the dam on her tears finally breaking and allowing them to spill forward.
"Yeah. Maybe. But that's okay. You weren't trying to hurt me. I know that." He said, closing the rest of the distance between them. Distance that she almost craved. "You know that." He added, lifting her hand gently in his and placing it against his bare chest.
She was frigid. He didn't even flinch.
"I'm sorry." She choked out, as he gathered her into his arms.
"Don't be." He whispered into her hair, "I love you."