Chapter Text
Fuyumi had hated hospitals since she was young. Perhaps it was because Touya had always come and gone from them like a migratory wound, each return marked by more burns freckling his skin, small, furious constellations that no child should have to memorize upon her brother’s body. Or perhaps it was because hospitals were so very white. White walls, white sheets, white ceilings humming with fluorescent indifference. White in a way that made her mother seem to dissolve into them, as though Rei were not a patient but a smudge of breath upon glass, fading, thinning, finally saying goodbye without theatrics. Gone. Faded. Hidden. Ignored. Ignored.
Maybe Fuyumi had been afraid because she looked like her mother. Because her hair carried that same pallor (she had cried tears of joy when red peekaboos began to grow through), that same surrender to light. In those corridors, the white of her own reflection would blur into the walls, and her father’s eyes, sharp, appraising eyes, would all but skip over her as though she were a trick of glare. A daughter-shaped absence. Fuyumi had never liked hospitals.
Her hatred was beginning to bloom again now, slow and resentful, as she watched the hour hand of the clock hesitate in its crawl, mocking her patience. It seemed indecently still. She sat beside the body of the man she called father; he had been father for such a long time. She wondered if he ever thought why she had stopped calling him daddy or papa, if she even crossed his mind long enough for that to be a concern. Machines breathed and beeped in a rhythm not quite human. She wondered, not for the first time, if he had tried—as Enji, as Endeavor, or as a father. She did not know which attempt she should prefer. She suspected she would hate whichever answer proved true.
Her hands clasped one another, fingers weaving, unweaving, covering and recovering themselves as if ashamed of their own tremor. It was only her now. Had it always been only her? That soft, stubborn middle, the easy to ignore white that faded, hid, gone. Neither the first son nor the final masterpiece. Realistically, she knew it was because she had yet to do it. To pick up her phone and call. Or text. She could not decide which would be kinder, which would be braver.
Would her voice hold steady? Would it betray her—crack and splinter and humiliate her with its need? Perhaps she would break down and cry and cry and laugh in that unhinged way grief sometimes demands, and ask why no one ever wanted to fix it. Why wasn’t she enough to hold them all together? Why did her hands, so small and pale and careful, fail to bind what he had torn? Maybe.
The hour hand has yet to change. If she texted, she worried it would be too blank, too cold and distant. Maybe she would text natsou and call mother and text and call shouto in that order. She could not afford to improvise. She did not think she could bear it if Natsuo said something sharp, something cold, something he had every right to feel. Righteous anger is a blade that cuts clean. She could survive cruelty; she was less certain she could survive truth.
Sometimes she wanted to seize him by the collar and shake him until his teeth rattled, until his fury scattered like loose coins. “He ignored us both,” she would shout. “He abandoned us both. I know, I know it hurt, it hurts! But why leave? Face it head-on. Look him in the eyes. Don’t run.” And then, softer, uglier: Don’t abandon me too.
But she never did. Not because she was timid. She was not, but because both possible answers terrified her. What would he say, her brother? Would he crumble and promise to stay, bend to her will the way he had so many times before, guilt lining his spine, anger clenched in his jaw? Could she live knowing he suffered for her, because of her? That he remained shackled not by love for their father but by love for her?
Worse still, if he refused. If he gave her that look. That look that said she was still a child, tugging at sleeves, begging, please just look at me, I can do it too, I can be a hero too, please love me, please. If he left because his hatred for that man outweighed his love for her—cast aside, cast aside.
Her hands clasped again.
Mother would prefer a call; she wasn't good at writing what she desired to say sufficiently via text. She was getting better at it; Fuyumi knew. A few nurses had shown her patiently before she left the ward—thumb hovering uncertainly over letters, brow furrowed in concentration. She would let her speak, not cut her off and let her speak. She wouldn't gasp or cry, even though Fuyumi sometimes wished it. She wouldn't cry for Enji, never again. But she would ask where they were, and as she asked, she would already be on her way. Fuyumi could hear it now—that soft, fragile voice that always sounded a breath away from fracture. Controlled. Composed. Brave in its quietness.
Fuyumi hated looking at her mother. She hated looking in mirrors.
She would tell her the room number. She would know Rei would ask to be alone with him. Because Rei now had the strength to be alone with him. Strength acquired the way scar tissue forms, slow, involuntary, permanent. Her mother would murmur something only the two of them would understand. She would trace the stub where his hand used to be, fingers ghosting over the absence. She would smile and frown in equal measure, grief and history sharing the same thin mouth.
Fuyumi would watch from outside the room, through a pane of glass that reflected her own pale face back at her. Her father would be grateful. Or ashamed. Or silent.
How she hated hospitals. Her fingers tightened together, then released. Tightened and released. Tightened and released.
Shouto would reply blandly with an okay. He would be there quickly as well. He would cut the call before Fuyumi had said her fill or where they were. He would be there quickly. He would stand beside her, would call their father a fool maybe, say something Natsou-like, maybe not. Maybe he would look hurt or frustrated, maybe he would leave the room and cry in the privacy of the halls like he did as a child or call a friend or someone who wasn't emotionally stunted and understood feelings, have someone feel for him. Later, once the words had settled inside him and hardened into something manageable, he would respond to her earlier text with a thumbs-up emoji. Their own small dialect. A punctuation mark that meant: I am here. I cannot say more.
Maybe.
After that, she would call Hawks. Because he and her father were friends. Because that fact made her both pleased and resentful. I can be a hero too, look at me. Hawks would care. Hawk's wings had been as red as Endevor’s flames, was that why? He would say all the wrong things in all the right ways, that crooked levity masking something observant and sharp. Her father would threaten to roast him—if he woke. Or perhaps he would not. Perhaps Endeavor would agree with him, and the bird would fall uncharacteristically silent.
Maybe.
She wrung her hands again.
It had been nearly 4 hours, and it was 8 pm now. The hallway had grown quieter, visiting hours thinning into that nocturnal hush hospitals wear like a shroud. Shouto had messaged her an hour ago. Natsou had called, and mother had sent a post asking for clarification on some new slang. Father's phone hadn't pinged, hadn't rung. No missed calls lighting up the screen with concern.
She'd give it another hour.
Hawks would call. Or text something stupid. Or something serious disguised as stupid. Someone would call. maybe Burnin, who sometimes @’d him in her posts, eager and proud, documenting her progress like a daughter presenting report cards. The first time she had seen the girl, she had politely made an excuse to leave. Would he look at her if she had fire and not ice, not snow, not something so useless? Maybe. Even Shouto could, their relationship was better. Sometimes he’d join her for dinner with their father, sometimes he wouldn’t. It was good, she told herself. Two out of four children at a table was good. It was progress.
It was better than nothing.
Had he done it knowing she would come around, punctual and pliant as ever, orbiting dutifully back to him? Or had he simply forgotten, forgotten that tonight was family dinner, that she would come to set the chairs and wash rice. Her small, stubborn ritual of togetherness prepared like a prayer no one quite believed in? Did he care? Maybe. The word floated before her, soft and treacherous. Maybe was a kindness she afforded him too often. She stared at the clock again, at the relentless, unromantic sweep of time. In the sterile light, her reflection shimmered faintly in the darkened window—a pale girl dissolving into white walls. She bowed her head. She hated hospitals.
She had said it once. Twice, perhaps, in passing, in that airy tone one uses for mild dislikes, like disliking olives or rain. No one had asked why. They had all, she presumed, supplied their own sensible conclusions, their tidy little diagnoses of her aversion. She hoped. Oh, she hoped. That they had thought of her enough to construct reasons on her behalf, to grant her interiority even in silence. Maybe they had imagined she was squeamish. Maybe they believed she simply disliked the smell.
Maybe.
Overexertion from training, like Father, like Touya, like Shouto. Pushing the body until it protested in smoke and blister. Or detachment, like Mother, like Natsuo, who chose to train not in flame but in healing, who studied the anatomy of damage as though dissecting their shared history. The irony had not been lost on her. He had chosen the white. Even his rebellion had circled back to these halls.
When Natsuo had left, left the house, left the orbit, she had looked instinctively to her parents. One of your own is leaving, she had wanted to announce, as if they had not noticed the vacancy forming. One of your own is choosing distance over us. Her father had accepted his absence with a composure so smooth it felt rehearsed. A calm loss. As though Natsuo were a minor miscalculation in a larger equation.
Father cared only for fire.
She had wondered then, bitter and ashamed of the bitterness, whether the same composure would have held if it had been Shouto. If the prized masterpiece had walked away. Would the house have trembled? Would the air have split with something like grief? And what of her?
Of his only daughter.
Of her mother’s only daughter.
The phrase felt ornamental in her mouth, decorative and fragile. She had always occupied a curious middle ground—neither heir nor rebel, neither cautionary tale nor triumph. She was the soft interlude between conflagrations, the pale pause in a lineage of extremes.
How she hated hospitals. How she feared them like something alive.
Still, this was not about her; she knew that with weary precision. It never was about her, and she feared the half-bitten anger of her own if she failed to call now, if she allowed four hours and a little more to stretch into accusation. She was not one to wield guilt like a weapon, but perhaps tonight she would. Perhaps she would ask them, with a thin little laugh trembling at the edges, how they could be angry that she had not called the very second she sat beside their father’s bedside. Perhaps she would ask them if now, now, he was their father again, now he was their husband, now he was something to rush toward and gather up, when all she had done for years was arrange and rearrange, exhausted and hoping, always hoping, to help and to care and to carry everything on her back like some dutiful mule. To fix it. To mend what fire had split. But then again. Who had asked her to?
If she stopped arranging their dinners, if she let the plates remain stacked, the table bare, the illusion unperformed, would Enji have noticed? Would he have called it repentance, some grand gesture of distance? Would he have nodded gravely and said, yes, this is right, this is a consequence? If—
It hurt. It hurts. She hates hospitals.
Those cold nights sitting outside in the hall, her hands placed neatly one atop the other, her head bowed just so, posture straight and impeccable. Something worthy of the Todoroki name. Something worthy of being called the daughter of the number two hero. She had hated All Might when she was younger; she had hated a great many things when she was younger. Then she had seen what hatred had done to her mother. She had glimpsed, in Rei’s fractured gaze, the outline of her own possible future. So she iced her anger. She froze it over until it gleamed and numbed. She was not like them. She was not afforded the same luxuries of eruption. She was not the heir, nor the firstborn, nor a son. She had not birthed a masterpiece nor been sculpted into one. All she was expected to be was dutiful. A daughter who did not crack the porcelain of the family name.
Had she not succeeded?
She picked up her phone and sent a quick text to Natsuo. It was late; he was likely home by now, back from work, shoes off, perhaps already in the comfortable quiet of a life deliberately distanced from this one. She hoped it would not be too much of a hindrance. She often felt that way with him—as though her presence were an interruption rather than an invitation. Sometimes she wanted to seize him by the shoulders and demand whether he thought her pathetic, whether he saw through her careful smiles. That she had become a teacher for children in order to feel needed, to patch the hollow inside her with small hands tugging at her sleeves. Would he think it pathetic that she called her students her children? That she feared having a child of her own—feared giving birth to another Rei, or worse, another Endeavor? That her hands shook when the topic of children arose on her many tentative dates, that romance made her jittery and ill, that somewhere deep within she felt ruined, ruined, dirty. The perfect daughter.
Maybe.
She called Rei next. Her voice was composed, perhaps a touch too composed, the faintest tremor betraying her beneath the surface. Her mother asked for the room number. Asked about his condition. Asked how he had done it. Fuyumi replied to all three promptly, efficiently, like a nurse reciting a chart. There was a pause on the other end. Then Rei asked how she was doing. Tightened and released. She replied, fine. The word slid out like a practised lie. The line went dead soon after. It would take Rei some time to arrive; the hospital was far from her apartment, and at this hour, cabs were scarce and reluctant. Still, she would come. She was still his wife, after all. It was expected of her.
Next was Shouto. She glanced at the clock; he would arrive first. He would use his Quirk, fire and ice, inheritance and defiance intertwined and cut through the distance. It might take him ten or fifteen minutes to notice her call if he did not answer immediately, plus the journey, less than an hour. He would be the first here. It was not a bad thought. She would have to explain it to him. She would have to accept whatever expression crossed his face, whatever verdict lingered in his mismatched eyes. She could not overload him. She could not tell him how she had found their father lying there, barely breathing, how she had stood there at first, frozen, watching Endeavor become Enji become father, or was it the other way around? His eyes had been closed; she could not tell which man lay there.
She pressed call.
It took two rings before Shouto’s voice came through. He did not sound tired, which was good; he had borne enough already. She told him what had happened, and as she had assumed, all it took was “Father’s at the hospital” before the line clicked dead. He would be here in less than an hour. He would sit beside her in silence, a silence that was never empty with him. She would answer his questions if he asked them, though Shouto had always been observant; he would piece together the scene from fragments. And then he would leave when she insisted on staying the night, or perhaps Rei would leave first, if she didn’t slip back into what she had been trained to do since girlhood, if she didn’t insist on serving him even now.
The rest were not good with the domestic. They burned and burned and burned.
She wondered, sometimes idly and sometimes with a quiet horror, if she would have been rageful like Touya, incandescent and devouring, or passionate when angered like Shouto, fierce but focused. She had dyed her hair once, standing before the mirror and attempting a boastful smirk, a grin edged with arrogance rather than her usual placid sweetness. The unfamiliar expression had curdled in her throat; she had ended up retching into the toilet, scrubbing the dye from her strands until her scalp stung. She wondered a great many things. She had wondered even more when she was younger, sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting outside rooms like this one.
Who knew waiting could be so tiring?
She should text Hawks now. She would tell him the rest of the family was coming. He would be polite enough to arrive later then, very late, long after Shouto and her mother (if Rei did not insist on performing the rituals she had been taught since childhood) had gone. He would be kind. He would say her name softly and tell her he could take it from here, or perhaps he would drape a blanket over her shoulders and sit beside Enji, speaking in low tones as though unaware she was listening. Hawks was kind; he saw her because she saw him. But she was white, and he was red, and red had always burned brighter in the end.
She would thank him if he stayed, bow her head and murmur that she would return after her lessons were over. Or if he could not—if this proved too much, even for him—she would nod and say she understood. She would call in sick. She would remain. She would sit and wait and wait and wait.
She was the best at it, after all.