Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s a cold winter night. There are police sirens in the distance, the origin being the house that the two have just fled. It’s freezing— two children wouldn’t be able to survive in these temperatures, and they have nothing and no-one. 

Fuyumi is barefoot, with just the flimsy, short sleeved nightgown she wore to sleep on her body. Her hair is unkempt from the running she just did, and her feet are blistered. She’s shaking.

Her brother is in worse condition.

He’s wearing training clothes, because when their father came home in the evening he was angry for one reason or another. There are burns littering his arms, on his throat. A section of his pants looks like it’s melted into his skin. His skin. Red and blistered, sizzling, leaving steam in the cool night air. Fuyumi drags them deeper into the alleyway.

Touya heaves . Fuyumi cries.

They have been this way since the moment they were born, Fuyumi first and Touya seven hours later the next day. Fuyumi would follow Touya everywhere, and Touya would in turn follow her. They’re twins. Two halves of the same body, and their mother says they received two halves of the same quirk.

That was when everything went wrong, for the first of many times. 

Touya’s half is Cremation. His flames burn bright blue, an inferno more powerful than anything their father could ever hope to produce. It burns so powerful and hot that sometimes Fuyumi could feel him using it from across the house. If only the damned thing wouldn’t try to kill him all the time. It burns everything into ash, even her sweet brother from the inside-out.

Fuyumi isn’t supposed to curse, but she wants to. She’s pulling her brother’s limp body with her weak limbs deeper into the darkness so no one can find them and steal them away back to that house. Damn quirk. Stupid quirk. Stupid quirks .

Fuyumi’s half is Moist, and it has always been a cold, useless hell. It lets her produce water, but all she can do is make her skin, already so cold all the time, sometimes become slick and wet. After a while, the water would freeze because of her low temperature, and she would have to spend hours plucking ice from sticking onto her. Her mouth is always so cold that it freezes the air she breathes and even the food inside of her mouth. She can remember times when she could eat warm foods, like her mother’s soba, instead of forcing herself to swallow hard rocks that would scratch her throat on the way down.

She remembers a time when she could feel warmth. Now, everything is cold. Too cold, too cold.

Her father disregarded her as soon as he found out she had a useless water quirk, not even ice like her mother. At first, it wasn’t all too bad. She thought he would come around. She thought he’d want her, too. Fuyumi watched as her brother was dragged into the training room day after day, coming out with burns etched into his skin and tear tracks almost permanent on his cheeks. On the days her mother was in her far-away place, staring out of the window, Fuyumi would patch him up.

“It’ll be okay!” She would say. She would smile and press her forehead against her brother’s, white hair meeting white hair, pale skin touching pale, grey eyes gazing into blue.

It was not okay and it still isn’t.

Stupid father. Stupid quirks, stupid quirks, stupid quirks. Stupid Fuyumi.

Stupid Fuyumi, stupid Fuyumi , she thinks. She tears a piece of her flimsy gown off of the bottom and it exposes even more of her legs. Cold, she’s so cold. She presses the cloth against her brother’s bleeding wound. It’s not the worst of them— this one is on his arm, but the worst is on his neck. God, his neck. It’s so red. It’s bleeding. His arm stains the white cloth red so quickly.

Touya coughs and blood comes out. Fuyumi can’t see. Her glasses have too many tears collected in the glass and she’s sputtering, sucking her lip in and out with each quick and shallow breath while she cries. Touya, Touya.

Her baby brother by seven hours, her twin for the rest of her life. Touya, Touya, Touya. 

“Hhhuh,” Touya groans. He opens his eyes and from how close she is, Fuyumi can see tears, too. Underneath each of them, there are red scorchy burns. His tears are burning him.

“I’m sorry,” Fuyumi croaks.

“Hhhuhh,, mmh.”

“I’m sorry, Touya.” There’s drool coming out of his mouth, traveling down his jaw. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Hnng, mnnh?”

Stupid Fuyumi . It’s all she’s good for. Saying sorry and crying. Fuck. 

She always told him it would be okay and she ignored the way his eyes would narrow, the way he would look away from her. She can feel it in her chest, the way her twin feels. Sometimes it wakes her up in the middle of the night, a burning ball of hatred in her stomach that doesn’t quite belong to her.

Before their father separated them onto opposite sides of the house, it was easy for her to go to her twin. It was easy for her to be quiet in the halls, knowing exactly where the wooden floorboards would creak. Easy for her to open his door quietly, and see his shaky form.

“How did you — ?”

“Because I’m your twin, Touya!”

“I’m sorry,” She says. Fuyumi rubs her eyes and tries to dry her glasses. She’s getting emotional, and her hands are making more water. It makes the lenses get even wetter, and it drips onto the floor. Useless, useless, useless.

Then, Touya’s training got more intense. Then, he was moved.

“Failure,” Her father had spit at her. Her mother looked horrified.

Then, she saw her twin less. That’s when the cold began, through her whole body, constantly. It was only when she saw her twin, her best friend, her favorite boy in the world that it subsided, even for a moment.

For just a moment, her hands would stop being too numb with cold to feel textures beneath the pads of her fingers. For just a moment, it would be her and her brother, the person she loved most.

She loves her mother. She loves baby Shouto. She loves Natsuo. Sometimes, she loves her father. But this—

“Please, God, anyone, please, ” Fuyumi sobs. Her baby brother is barely moving anymore. He isn’t making any noise, just shallow, slow, infrequent breaths. “No, no, no, please, I’m sorry, I’ll do anything—”

This love she has for her other half is something different, something deeper. Something that she can’t ever lose. No matter what the cost.

They’re only thirteen.

Please.

Fuyumi picks up her brother’s arm. She abandoned her effort of wrapping it, she doesn't know when. She puts the limp hand against her cheek and cries into it. Her eyes are bleary, glasses on the floor. She can smell the trash around them, from the dumpsters. Unknown wet stains on the hard ground that aren't from her, bugs milling about and noises from rats and strays. She can feel her heartbeat in her head. Her blistered and bleeding feet sting. Touya isn’t moving.

Please.

The simmering stops. The bubbling on Touya’s skin stops, and so does Fuyumi. 

No, no. He can’t be dead, no, no, No!

A single breath, visible in the cold air. Then another, then another again.

Fuyumi looks at where they’re connected. Water. More than enough to coat her skin, dripping onto the dirty alley floor in a small puddle. A puddle too big for her weak quirk to have produced, but one that she somehow produced anyways.

He’s her baby brother, her twin, Touya. They’ve always been two halves of one whole. Maybe —

She leans down to her brother's red, bloody neck, and places a single cold fingertip. She touches the pad of her finger to the bleeding, and she feels the blisters. She puts her whole palm on it. He sizzles for a moment at her touch, and fear enters her body, but it stops. Then—

Then the red dies down, and it’s his normal pale neck.

Fuyumi touches each of her wet hands onto the burns of his arms, and they cool down instantly. She stares at his burned, bloody leg. Nearing into the night, before everything went wrong, she had felt it . She felt that feeling that consumed her body when Touya was about to get hurt badly, so she snuck to see the training their father was putting him through.

She peeked through the door and almost threw up. Her brother, her everything, was sobbing on the floor while their father loomed over him. And then her father had grabbed his leg, heated his hand, and branded it. Her brother screamed, and Fuyumi can still hear it.

The handprint is still there, and it looks like violence. It’s not exactly a handprint, because she had seen the way Touya thrashed away and away, and how their father tried to make his hand follow. It doesn’t have the right edges, instead just a large blot of burn . Fuyumi puts her smaller, colder hand on it, takes a deep breath, and feels . She feels her brother’s warm heart, her brother’s soul, she hopes he feels hers, too. Her hand wets with more than just a small sheen of water and as quickly as it touched the angry brutality on his body, it disappeared, and so did the angry marks.

Pale skin, normal and healthy, if not a bit scuffed.

It didn’t burn her, Fuyumi barely registers. Nothing registers as she presses her hands against her brother, her cold countering his heat and leaving nothing but skin behind. His blue flames didn’t burn her, would her frost freeze him?

She can still hear the sirens in the distance, at their house but not their home. She can imagine, now, the lies her father was spewing. Calling her Touya rebellious and violent, calling her weak and confused for following him. The news tomorrow would have Touya branded a criminal kidnapper, and Fuyumi his innocent, girlish victim. 

Natsuo would be peeking around the corner, hate in his eyes, and Shouto would be too exhausted from the training he had before Touya’s that he would be in bed, irritated at the commotion and trying to sleep.

Their mother would be milling about, trying to keep a smile on her face, trying to keep the last strands of her family and her sanity together as not one but two of her children, her first births and first loves, were gone into the night like ghosts.

We will stay ghosts , Fuyumi thinks bitterly.

There is nothing for her and her brother back at that house, that evil damned place with no warmth and no light. What were her father’s lies for? Once she would have thought it was for the greater good, for protecting their family from being ripped apart by people who didn’t understand, but he ripped her and Touya apart because he didn’t understand. 

His lies were to protect his reputation and his money, nothing more.

She was so naive, all that time, dismissing her brother. She was so naive to think that her father’s heart was warmer than her frozen one, that there was anything but limited space already full of his own image inside of it.

If they went back, their father would kill Touya.

That will not happen. Fuyumi’s thoughts dip to a dark place, and she grounds herself by clenching Touya’s warm hand in hers. No. Villainy is not the answer to anything, ever.

Not even the answer to watching her everything suffer is seeing their father bleed.

Their father needs Shouto. Baby Shouto, six years old, is the masterpiece. He is the golden child of the Todoroki house, and the world already knows his name. Their father needs his wife to show off at galas and to the press before bringing her back to that dark place, forcing her to clean and cook and care for four children all on her own. His father doesn’t need Natsuo, but Natsuo isn’t a threat. His quirk is steam, useless to their father.

Useless, the way he thought Fuyumi was.

No, he was right, Fuyumi thinks. She watched violence and pain in her house and did nothing, and now she sits in the darkness, listening to crickets with dirt under her knees because she wasn’t enough to protect her baby twin.

Touya was her father’s backup plan, in case something happened to Shouto. But nothing would happen to Shouto, because he’s a diamond boy. Shut off from the rest of the family, too precious to be around the dirty, rejected children and wife and maids.

Fuyumi was just a pawn- insurance for the future. She heard their father on the phone, once, talking to a colleague of his. A colleague who had a son just a few years older than her, seventeen, who had an interest in Fuyumi’s grey eyes and developing body. He’d lost his soulmate at a young age and was looking for a future spouse now. 

It didn’t matter that Fuyumi was waiting for the day she could meet her own soulmate, not when the boy in question was the heir to a rather large business and had a powerful quirk. His father arranged for them to meet three days after the phone call.

Fuyumi had sat, crying in her bedroom, tracing the engine exhaust marks on her arms. She’d seen her soulmate on the television before, an up and coming pro-hero. He came from a pro-hero family, he came from money, and he had a good quirk. It should have been enough— but not for Todoroki Enji, who had already been enticed by the idea of having grandchildren the heirs of such a large and successful company, who thought that the boy’s quirk was a much better match for Fuyumi than Ingenium’s. His word on the matter was law, until it wasn’t.

She had never seen Touya so mad, had never seen Touya so bold as he rejected the idea, screaming at their father and their father screaming back.

The meeting never happened.

Touya always protected Fuyumi, so why is this the way things turned out? Two dirty children in an alleyway, in torn and tattered clothes. She should have been braver. She should have been better. She should have been stronger.

If Touya could be bold, why couldn’t she?

This is how things have always been for Fuyumi and Touya. Where Touya went, Fuyumi followed into the chaos. Into the lake even though they couldn’t swim, into the gardens to look at the flowers under the midnight light. Fuyumi would follow her baby twin to look at stray cats and stray rabbits, and would follow him to meet with Shouto even though it was prohibited.

Fuyumi would follow her twin into the training room, and into the night with bare feet and nothing to their infamous names.

Fuyumi would follow Touya into his inferno, and now it’s time for him to follow her.

This is bad. The worst thing they’ve ever faced. 

“Guuh,” Touya groans again. His eyes focus on nothing, but Fuyumi can’t help but smile. Her twin is breathing again, and it’s because of her.

They are two halves of one whole, separated from each other by someone who didn’t understand what he created. Someone who sought to control one piece of a duo.

This is the best Fuyumi has felt in years. Her skin isn’t blue, her teeth aren’t chattering, and her tongue feels warm in her mouth. She blinks and her eyelashes aren’t hard and they don’t stick to each other. Her hair isn’t clumping together in weird juts down her head, frozen together. Her twin under her isn’t burning up. 

She’s never exactly tried to create more water than the usual sheen because of how upset father would be when she’d make a mess, but now is no time to be thinking of him. She creates a small little sphere of water, and for a moment it floats above her hand. It doesn’t freeze. She drops it on her brother’s pants where they were stuck to his skin, and the burns disappear. Slowly, she peels the fabric from his leg. After a few moments, there is just skin left behind, with a few gashes here and there. Their bodies respond to each other automatically, with ease that hasn’t lessened after years of not being given proper time together.

If they went back to that house, they would be separated again. If they went back to that house, Touya would be killed, and Fuyumi would be left back in that house, alone in the world again, to be given away to some man she doesn’t love and repeat her mother’s history.

This isn’t fair , Fuyumi thinks. She doesn’t want to cry again, but she will. The wailing of sirens in the background feels overwhelming, and her twin hasn’t woken up, and both of them are injured- Fuyumi on her bloody feet, and Touya beaten and bruising everywhere .

It’s not fair that Touya living means Natsuo and Shouto being forsaken and left behind with a woman who stared out of the window for longer and longer times each day, and a man so obsessed with his own legacy that he stopped seeing his children as people.

It’s not fair that to save Touya, she has to leave behind her two brothers. Her baby brothers. Natsuo, who loves fish and sneaks to watch american football on the TV when Father isn’t home, who runs his hands through her clumped up hair to try to make it lay flat even though it freezes his fingers. Natsuo, who would emulate their brother Touya and take the blame for her when father came home, who constantly waits day in and day out for that one, single “I’m proud of you” that will never come.

Shotuo, little Shouto. Six years old with the world on his shoulders. Shy little Shouto, who would hide behind their mother’s legs when she spoke with the maids, who would follow Fuyumi around like a puppy and try to play with her when father wasn’t around. Sweet Shouto, who deserves none of this at all, who loved cold soba but isn’t allowed it because their father doesn’t want to ‘spoil’ him.

It’s not fair that to save Touya, she has to leave behind her soulmate. Her other half in a way that’s different from Touya. She’d seen his kind smile on the television, she'd heard about his good deeds. She’s spent hours researching him, learning about the times he visits orphanages and his younger brother that he loves so much. Hearing his speeches, seeing his fights in actions. His loving personality, his shining heart.

Fuyumi has to make a choice, and it isn’t fair at all.

Her eyes dart down at her brother's form, breathing heavily and occasionally groaning, but fine. Her brother, her Touya, that doesn’t deserve a quirk that rips him apart from the inside out, a quirk that ravages his own skin, a quirk that’s torture to use that he’s forced to use every day. Touya, who stands up for them all every single day, who takes on responsibilities far too big for a thirteen year old in the name of letting at least Fuyumi and Natsuo sleep peacefully. Touya, who mouthed off at their father. Touya, who deserves better.

Touya, who destroyed an entire section of their home, who Fuyumi forced to run and run and run away from that house. Touya, who just caused a scandal, a blot on their father’s precious reputation. Touya, who will be beaten so badly by their father as retribution for this blatant disobedience tonight that if they go back, Fuyumi thinks he may not survive it, not after already being beaten and bruised today.

She has to make the choice.

It’s cold, but that hasn’t bothered her since she somehow removed every single burn, old and new, from her brother’s skin and left behind bruises and gashes and blisters. The sirens stopped, but she can hear a car pass by. The moon is high, and there’s a gentle breeze fluttering her now pin-straight, unfrozen hair.

She can smell something nasty in the garbage bags.

Fuyumi looks down at her twin, at her Touya. At his soft white hair, at his bruised, bleeding lip. At his half open blue eyes and the bags underneath. At his skinny, bony frame because no matter how healthy and nutritious he ate he threw it all up during training.

Fuyumi looks down at where she’s connected their hands together, at the hand that’s no longer freezing cold and moist as it should be. At the hand that warmth was slowly spreading from, up her arms and probably to the rest of her body.

She breathes in deep. The heat is from her brother, her twin, there’s no way it isn’t. His warmth in her cold world.

I will never stop feeling this warmth , she decides to herself. 

She moves, crouching up on all fours with dead legs and wobbling. She accidentally kicks a metal can back, and it’s rolling away is one of the first sounds she’s heard over her own sobbing and brother’s groaning since they’d collapsed.

Fuyumi pulls her brother’s lanky body with weak arms, stomach grumbling angrily at the dinner she wasn’t allowed earlier that night. She pulls her brother’s chest to hers, and begins to drag.

Chapter Text

The world gets brighter, slowly, and that’s the first sign that something is wrong.

Days start in one of two ways. Sometimes, it would be his father yanking him out of bed roughly for morning training since afternoons were when he had more time to devote to Shouto, the one he truly cared about. Most days, it would be his alarm clock blaring in his ear so he could start his morning routine before getting ready to meet his tutors.

When was the last time that he was allowed to wake up quietly and by himself, after his body had actually gotten enough rest? When had the light last teased his eyes open, soft blankets coaxing him to slip back under for just five more minutes… ?

Touya looks around, and the worry in his chest grows even more. Something is wrong.

He isn’t at home. He’s in some kind of concrete building, by himself. In the concrete, there are large gaps where he can see outside, as if they had been stacked one and on top of each other. He can tell that he’s a few stories from the ground. There’s the ocean in the distance, with a beach absolutely covered in trash. There are cracks in the concrete walls, and some on the floor. When he looks down at the ground, it’s covered in dirt with some few plant buds growing. They shake, and that’s when he notices that it’s windy.

Touya looks at what he’s wearing, only for his eyes to grow wider. He’s wearing a dirty and flimsy white hoodie, shoes that are too big for his feet, and his training pants that have large holes singed in them.

When he looks at the exposed portions of his skin, he can see blue and purple bruises blooming across the pale complexion. He can feel more underneath his clothes.

What the fuck?

How did he get here? Touya tries to think of the day before. He remembers hearing his little brother screaming, loudly, in the training room. He remembers his mother pleading with him not to interfere because she didn’t want their father getting any angrier than he already was.

He remembers seeing his sister Fuyumi for the first time in weeks since he was rarely allowed outside of his allocated area in the home, hidden away from his sister and younger brother Natsuo. She gave him a look and immediately went to Shouto, who was crying and shaking and bleeding, as she always did when their mother was too busy staring out of a window to nurture her own children.

He remembers feeling rage, but what came after that?

Fuck , he thinks. I’m in so much trouble.

Dressed the way he is, wherever he is, in the morning? Father would be absolutely pissed. How did he even get here?

He stands up on shaky, sore legs. The bottoms of his feet hurt. Maybe that’s why he didn’t remember anything, he muses. Their father must have pushed his body to a blackout again. The joke leaves a weird feeling in his chest, and Touya knows it isn’t laughter.

When he stands, he takes a deep breath of air to try to ground himself, only to notice that the air isn’t warm. In fact, the air is… cold?

When was the last time he’d felt cool air in his lungs? Upon entering his body, everything got warmer. Cold soba was just soba, and the coldest he could get water was slightly above room temperature when he drank if he concentrated. Cold tea boiled on his tongue and burned if he wasn’t careful.

He feels… good. On the inside, too, actually, other than the aching of his bruises. He isn’t stressed, which is weird, because he’s about to go back to that house and do the same daily duty over and over again of being beaten by his father while his siblings watch.

“Stop it, you’re burning him!” His mother screamed. She had tears in her eyes. “Can’t you see that he’s in pain?”

“If he burns all of his skin away, then it’ll stop hurting, eventually.” His father replied, simply. His voice was hard and devoid of all warmth. There was only the heat of his fist, the tears of his mother, and the fear of Touya’s heart in that room.

God, he doesn’t want to go back, and for a moment he thinks about if he didn’t.

What would it feel like, to be free? To do things that other thirteen year olds do, instead of training day in and day out to fill the shoes of a man far too golden and great for him to ever catch up with?

“Hah,” Touya laughs bitterly at the thought. That job isn’t for Touya anymore, it’s for Shouto. Shouto, the golden child, the one who got the best tutors and best meals and got taken to every event like some kind of toy while the rest of his children had to stay behind, in the shadows.

Nobody even knows who he is, that’s how little their father cares. Why did he train him every day if he wasn’t going to parade him around the way he did Shouto?

He could disappear, and nobody would notice. Nobody would even look for the missing Todoroki child, because they didn’t even know that any Todoroki child other than Shouto existed anyways.

He could...

He could…

“Touya!” A high pitched voice breaks Touya out of his thoughts, and when he looks up from where he was staring at the dirty ground he feels like the most selfish person on earth.

Because there, in all of her untold and unrecognized glory, is his sister. Fuyumi.

She launches herself at him, and he feels a barrage of happy, happy, happy hit his chest that feels almost foreign, but familiar too. It takes a second for him to wrap his arms around her waist after she wraps her around his neck, but he doesn’t regret it.

He’s glad that he grew out of his years of being the smallest, frailest sibling. Even if he is still really skinny despite the workout and eating regimes his father has him on, he sprouted like a beanstalk. His mother says that one day he might get near his father’s height.

He doesn’t want that. As long as he’s a few inches taller than Fuyumi, enough to bury his nose in her head when she hugs him tightly, that will always be enough.

Fuck you, he thinks to his past self from about fourty seconds ago. How could I have ever been contemplating leaving this ?

“Fuyumi,” he breathes out. He feels even better than when he did when he was waking up. Before, he was glad to have not felt too hot, but now? Now he feels… energized. He could lift a train, he thinks.

He looks down at his skinny arms. Alright, maybe not a train , but…

“Touya!” Fuyumi says again. He stares at her and tries to get a better look. She’s wearing a jacket with the hood pulled up, and underneath it some kind of dress with a jagged rip at the bottom. She’s barefoot, and her hair looks absolutely wild. “Are you… do you…?”

“Is this one of father’s tests?” He blurts. Touya hates bringing the man up, but if that monster is now dragging his sister into this... He feels a surge of flame in his arm, but he stops it. He can’t afford to burn so early into his father’s new game.

He expects his sister to be a little scared, maybe. Their father took her into the training room, once, and threatened her instead of him. It worked, and he burned their father’s arm so badly that he was the one being treated by the family doctor for once. 

It was one of the only times that their father had ever looked proud of him, and it put a disgusting feeling in his chest for weeks afterwards.

Instead, she looks kind of confused at him , but not their surroundings. Like she knows something.

“Do you... not remember, Touya?” Fuyumi asks him, and he can only join her in her confusion. 

“Remember what?” 

“Last night. When dad pulled you into the training room.” She starts to look bashful, looking down at her feet before looking back up again.  Her bare feet. Where the fuck are her shoes? “Or, do you remember anything after that?”

Touya tries, but all he can see is black after seeing Fuyumi cleaning up Shouto when it should have been their mother, who was staring out the window at nothing.

“No. I guess he knocked me on the head real hard, huh?” His sister looks so shy, he wants to make her laugh. He needs to make her smile, if not a little one, so he tries to coax one out with a joke. Only, the joke is about their father, so it isn’t funny at all.

“You don’t remember anything from last night?” she says, and Touya nods.

She sighs a bit, and rocks back and forth on her feet. She sways from side to side a bit, thinking, and pulls a hand up to adjust her glasses on the bridge of her nose.

“I guess I’ll have to show you, then,” she says, and Touya can only feel like he’s missing a large part of the picture. She steps forward and hugs him before stepping back a bit and clasping their hands together.

All he can do is search his sister’s face for answers, and Fuyumi meets his eyes. They’ve got an edge to them all of a sudden.

She’s always had a good glare , Touya thinks. He won’t avert his eyes though, because if he’s anything, he’s stubborn as he’s stupid.

“Ignite your hand, Touya. As strong as you can,” She says. She’s wearing a hopeful smile, and Touya doesn’t ever want to see her lose it.

Wait, what?

“Not to sound rude, because this is, but are you fucking insane?” Touya stares at his sister, trying to see if there’s any gashes on her head from probably being hit there harder than their father must have hit him.

“No, just do it!” Fuyumi shakes her head. Touya can’t believe what he’s hearing. 

“No!”

“Touya!” his sister whines, as if this is some kind of game, like he can’t permanently scar her.

“I’m not going to do it, no! I don’t want to hurt you!” Touya’s voice breaks, and he hates it. He hates everything about himself. He hates his voice, he hates his bony frame. He hates how he can’t protect his little siblings, his mother, his own twin. He hates, and he hates, and he hates.

He hates how he bows at his father’s feet in the training room: burned up and fearful.

… Burned?

Wait, what?

Memories start to trickle into his head. He remembers staring at their mother while she stared out the window, resentment leaving a scorching trail through his body. He remembers watching their father leave to go to some press conference, and feeling relieved at the thought of having a few hours away from him. He remembers playing with Natsuo, whom he hadn’t seen in days.

Then their father came home, flames burning bright and violent and barking at Touya to change and go to the training room immediately . He remembers their mother still sitting idly and unmoving, not hearing anything as she stared out at the sky.

He remembers a training session that wasn’t training. He remembers not being human anymore, just a punching bag while their father took all of his rage at the day's events out on Touya's little body.

He remembers his sister, Fuyumi, an angel in disguise, coming in and defending him while he sobbed under his arms, hiding the world from his eyes. He remembers an opening burned through the wall, then running. Exhaustion. Collapse. 

“I’m not burned?” Touya voices. His eyes are on his arm, where he knows their bastard father grabbed him and increased the temperature. He remembers screaming in pain, feeling some sort of worry in his chest that he didn’t really think was his. He remembers tears.

There’s a bruise there, purpling and blackening, but not a single burn. The bruise can heal- will heal- but how did the bruise get there, replacing the angry injury he remembered so vividly?

Everything is coming back now. He remembers burns all over his body. He remembers hands around his neck, on his thigh, boling tears burning his cheeks as they fell. He remembers snot and vomit, drool and blood mixing on his clothes.

“No.” How his sister is smiling is beyond him. “You aren’t.”

“How…?”

“Ignite it, and you’ll see.”

“I just don’t-”

“Ignite it,” Fuyumi says. There’s something hard in her voice, harder than her older sister act, something Touya’s never heard before. He blinks, and turns his head away, focusing instead on the gentle cold breeze and the distant ocean waves. He can’t face her when he hurts her. He’ll never understand how their father can look them in the eyes while giving them pain.

He doesn’t want to, but something in the back of his brain is telling him to trust his sister.

“Promise that if it hurts, you’ll pull away,” He asks.

“I won’t have to.” She replies, and Touya’s confusion deepens again . What’s going on? Why are they here? Where are they? Why is Fuyumi making such crazy requests that he can’t understand? She might as well be speaking Korean.

Huh? Touya thinks. 

“Just promise me, please.” He repeats, and meets her eyes, pleading. If he has to hurt her, he wants it to at least be quick.

“Alright, I will. Now do it.”

He turns his head away again, and closes his eyes, and summons a bit of his blue fire.

Moments pass, and there’s no smell of burning flesh. No yelping and crying, no begging for forgiveness.

Touya opens his eyes. Fuyumi is grinning , and when he looks down at their hands, his flame licks at the both of them, moving almost like liquid in the pale morning light.

By now, he should be screaming, the fire eating him from the inside. Instead, his flames feel… peaceful?

He can only stare at his sister. She giggles, which is absolutely unnerving since she’s never done that before, but it’s a beautiful sound that he promises will never get lost underneath the crunch of an angry boot again, a sound that will never again be drowned in a sea of shouts.

“More, Touya. Make it stronger!”

He does. He feels no pain, only the telltale surge of power into his fist. The blue burns brighter, higher towards the ceiling of the building they’re in. It climbs, licking at the cement at the top and leaving trailing black marks. It scorches near the ground where their hands are, leaving the smell of ash, the scent of burnt .

But not burnt flesh.

“How? How, Fuyumi?” Touya looks at his sister. Her nose is slightly red from the heat, but other than that, she’s perfectly fine.

She’s okay.

“Touya- last night, I- when you- we-” She takes a deep breath, brain moving way too fast  for her mouth to possibly catch up. “When we’re together, neither of us burn. Move away a bit,” She commands. Captain Fuyumi , Touya thinks to himself.

He moves a few steps back, but Fuyumi doesn’t seem very impressed. She turns on her heel and walks halfway to the other side of the room, towards the area that the sun doesn’t quite reach.

“Ignite,” She says, and Touya does. 

It doesn’t hurt.

It doesn’t hurt.

What?

He summons a larger stream, and it rockets to the wall. It leaves a giant, shadowy mark, a ghostly reminder of the flame that once was. He looks at his hand to make sure adrenaline isn’t tricking him into thinking he’s fine when he isn’t.

He’s fine.

“Fuyumi-”

“He kept us apart because he didn’t realize,” Fuyumi says. “He didn’t understand, and neither did I until last night.”

“It’s almost like…” Touya starts, but stops himself at the ridiculous thought.

“It’s like we’ve got one quirk that split in two, like mom used to say.” Fuyumi finishes. “Your fire, my water. You burn your own body alone, but together, we’re perfectly fine. I don’t freeze anymore, Touya.”

“That’s not how genetics works at all,” Touya tries to argue, but try as he might, nothing else makes sense for their… predicament?

“Touya,” Fuyumi chastises. He rolls his eyes because he can. “Touya. When… he started to separate us, I started getting colder, and I’d always be wet. I was always so cold. I’d chatter, and- and I’d freeze food in my mouth. Everything was cold, no matter how many layers I put on!”

Touya remembers. He remembers her walking around the house with several coats on in the middle of summer, their father yelling at her to take it off and stop being ridiculous.

“Last night, when I healed all of your burns I realized- it was because I was missing you, Touya. We need each other more than he realized.”

Touya thinks back and tries to remember a time when he wasn’t always running too hot for his body. When he didn’t have to stumble into his room after training and take all of his clothes off for the slightest relief. When he could drink cold water that didn’t immediately turn warm upon touching his lips. It’s distant, but it’s there. The memories are all before the day his quirk came in, when him and his sister were still allowed to sleep in the same room and play with the same toys. The time of before.

“We’re twins,” Touya whispers. For the first time since before their father started segregating him and Shouto, it feels true.

His sister, his other half. He needs her. 

Without him, she freezes. Without her, he burns.

It sounds like a curse but is it really when it’s his sister that he’s stuck with?

Touya watches her bumble around the abandoned building that they’re in- a parking garage?- and fully takes in the situation. They’re wearing dirty clothes, some that don’t even belong to them, in a parking garage with no phone or money.

“Fuyu, where is this stuff from?”

“I robbed someone,” she says, like it’s normal.

“Oh, okay,” he replies. He stares out of the cement gap at the grass and empty parking spaces. “Wait, I’m sorry— what?”

“Yeah, I robbed someone,” she comes back over to where he is again, and looks outside. The sun is slowly setting over the beach. It looks beautiful, despite all of the garbage.

Now that he thinks about it, when was the last time that he had been to a beach? When was the last time he stepped off of that fucking house at all ?

Their father forbade them from going to regular elementary school, and they would be going to Tokyo Science and Leadership Academy for junior high in a few months in April. Until then, they stayed in the house to do tutoring and entertain themselves.

It must have been when the villain their father captured right after Shouto’s birth got out of prison and threatened to kill them all. Just months after their twelfth birthday, Touya and Fuyumi were shuffled out of the Todoroki house with their younger siblings and into an unmarked police vehicle. They all had to leave and stay at a secured hotel.

Yeah. That must have been it.

“Yeah, I’m gonna need a bit more than that.” Touya looks at his Fuyumi. Yesterday, she was meek, and today she still is, but there’s... something new milling underneath her skin. Something that wasn’t there before.

“Last night, you were still unconscious, but I needed things for us after I frosted all of your burns, so I went out and looked around some dumpsters. I found this ratty hoodie, a jacket and shoes for you, and a bit of money. Well, I only found the hoodie, and then someone tried to rob me, so I robbed them back using my quirk,” Fuyumi explains. She looks hopefully at him.

“They tried to rob you… so you robbed them back?”

“Yeah! He had a knife and told me to give him my money, but I summoned water on him to make him slip, and I stole his knife and took his wallet and his jacket and his shoes for you.”

“You- you summoned water?” Touya probes.

“Father never let me practice, but after seeing you, I was able to make more than just a little layer of it over my skin. I’m not even wet or cold anymore, I’m dry!” She has a bright smile on her face while she tells him about it.

“Your quirk works now, too?”

“I already explained this, Touya. Weren’t you listening?” Fuyumi puts a hand on her hip and scrunches her eyebrows at him, and for a moment Touya thinks that she looks like what a normal thirteen year old should look like, minus the dirty jacket and ripped dress and bare feet.

Touya’s mind flits back to his selfish thoughts from earlier.

What if they didn’t go back? What if he and Fuyumi turned tail and ran from that cursed house, never to be seen again? 

“What’s the plan?” Touya shocks himself with how quickly he spits the words out, but he can’t afford this right now. He can’t afford to not convince her. It would hurt to leave Natsuo, who sometimes played ball and ate fish with him when they were allowed to interact. It would hurt to leave behind innocent little Shouto, who, even though Touya resented sometimes for being the apple of their father’s eye, didn’t choose that life.

But with everything- with how his sister launched herself at him, so glad to see him, treating him like the human he is and not the monster their mother thought he was- how much would it hurt?

How much would it hurt to look in the mirror and see the parallels of the twin he left behind? The twin who he felt an ache in his chest for in the middle of the night, missing, feeling distraught over?

Does it matter? Does it matter that they saw each other sometimes even less than Touya saw Natsuo? Because the feeling of her being his other half never subsided. How could it, when even now after their father separated him and Shouto from the rest of the family, she would still risk her own safety to slowly tip tap across wooden floors to reach his room and hold him tightly?

He’d rather rip his fucking heart out.

Fuyumi’s eyes look comically wide on her face. How could those sons of their father’s coworkers look at her so sexually, when she was always so awkward and funny? He’ll never understand it.

Another reason why they couldn’t go back. Touya would sooner die in flames and take their father with him into his blue rage than let his sweet, innocent Fuyumi become a empty shell of a human incubator for some rich fuck that’ll never compare to the soulmate she’s been waiting for.

“Plan?” his sister repeats. Touya’s brain tries to form sentences- we have to go, we have to leave them all behind, I know you love them, I’m sorry- but nothing comes. 

“What’s our plan? Father will want us, but if you went out and got us clothes instead of getting him and telling him where we were, then that must mean you’re thinking of something different.”

“Well, yeah, actually,” Fuyumi looks down at the ground again. “Because we can’t go back, Touya.”

We can’t go back, Touya.

What?

“What?” 

“We can’t go back, Touya. He’ll kill you.” Fuyumi looks up from where she was glaring at the ground, her soft gray eyes pleading. In the darkness of their house, they always looked so stormy. Now, he knows that isn’t true. The color was probably affected by their father’s genes, making them lighter and kinder than their mother’s ever could be.

“He’ll…” Touya’s throat feels dry.

“You made him so angry, Touya. We escaped and you burned the house and him so badly that I saw an ambulance that was probably for him and a fire truck. People are going to ask questions about how the flame hero’s house burned, so if he ever sees you again he’ll be furious!” Fuyumi waves her hands around wildly and her eyes are wide. 

“I don’t… I don’t remember that at all. I just remember you saving me.” Touya swallows, and meets his sister’s terrified gaze.

They stare at each other for a moment, silence accompanied by soft winds. It’s getting darker.

“What are we going to do?” he whispers. A tear slides down his cheek, and then another, then another. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m so sorry!” His legs feel like jelly and he collapses to the floor, knees hitting the concrete hard. His hands wipe at his eyes furiously, trying to dry up the wetness.

Wetness. He can cry again. Usually, tears boiled on their way out, leaving marks on his cheeks because his body ran so hot. But his sister fixed him. His sister.

His sweet, sweet sister. His twin. The angel that never left his side. 

Their father will kill him, and then sell her to the highest bidder. And it’s all his fault.

Fuck .

“Fuyumi, I’m so- I’m- I-” He’s blubbering like he’s a little toddler again. Only, instead of his mother’s tired eyes or his father’s shouts at him to shut the fuck up, there’s only kind grey framed by black glasses, and a soft hand on his cheek.

“It’s okay, Touya. It’ll all be fine.” The kind words should sober him up back to reality, should remind him that they need to make a plan and figure out what they’re going to eat, where they’re going to stay, if they’ll ever see their family again. Instead, he leaves that thought to future him, and buries crying his eyes in his sister’s neck.

Touya doesn’t know how long he stays there, cold fingertips tracing patterns on his neck to ground him, but when he decides to meet the world again there is only his sister’s soft smile, not a single trace of hatred or resentment in them. 

What did he do to deserve her?

The sky is darker, oranges and reds slowly giving way to dark purples and blacks. Without even thinking, Touya opens his palm and lights a small plume of electric blue fire.

Blue fire. Hotter than their father’s. Blue fire burns the man who proclaims himself entitled to All Might’s position, and on most days he can’t even summon it. It exhausts him, and hurts him if he keeps up with it for too long.

To Touya, blue fire came as naturally as breath. His body couldn’t handle it before, but now? Now he has his twin. 

It’s funny how hypocritical the man is. Blue fire burned both of their skins before, but only when it was Touya was it a sign of weakness.

“We need a plan, a good one.” He starts. He won’t let Fuyumi lead anymore. She led him out of that house and healed him, and then she went into the streets by herself to find him clothes, and then she taught him how to use his own quirk properly. 

It’s Touya’s turn now.

But, that doesn’t mean that he has to be their father’s version of a leader. No. Instead, he’ll be the kind of leader that Fuyumi needs.

“What are your ideas?” He says. Fuyumi looks shocked at his probe, and Touya can’t help but make a face.

Another sin of their father: making Fuyumi feel like she’s too little, that she’s less than her brothers for her gender and her quirk, two things beyond her own control.

Another thing that she’ll spend a lifetime undoing. 

But in this lifetime, she has Touya, and Touya has her. He hopes that it will be enough.

“My ideas?” she utters, voice barely there.

She looks so confused at the thought of having a say that Touya has half a mind to go back to the house and square off with his father right now . But that would mean leaving behind his sister, so their father better count his lucky fucking stars. Touya tries not to think about his realistic chances of winning that fight, and instead focuses back on Fuyumi.

“It’s ok if you don’t have any,” he offers. He pulls their hands together again, and he doesn’t want to let go.

“Well, I thought that maybe we could just… keep doing this. I mean, with our quirks, no one would bother us?” she offers up.

“Keep doing this? What do you mean?” Touya questions.

“Well, I don’t have a plan , exactly, but I was just hoping that with our quirks not hurting us anymore, it would be easier for us to survive out here instead of going back to the house, and that one day we could go back for Natsuo and Shouto.”

“Fuyumi, if we stay on the streets, as soon as he announces what we look like and spins some kind of story, it’s over.”

Unfortunately, as the effect of spending more time with their father, Touya knows the way that man works. His sister was largely ignored unless he was looking at Fuyumi as some kind of object to give away to a weird older man or some older man’s son. If Touya had just taken off one night, he wouldn’t have even looked for him. But because he’d not only apparently destroyed the house but also taken the daughter their father would be selling at some point, this is so much worse than it would have been otherwise.

“He probably has people looking for us,” he says. Fuyumi’s arms gather to hold herself, each hand touching an elbow. She’s afraid, he feels before he notices.

Their father is relentless, so they need a plan, now.

“He probably hasn’t told anyone other than those people, though. There’s no way that nobody noticed the fire at the house, but he wouldn’t want to tell people that his oldest children burned the house down and are missing. He’ll want to find us himself and then come up with a different, better story later.” Touya’s mind is reeling, thinking, turning . He remembers the kind eyes of their grandmother, and everything clicks.

Their father has always been so controlling, so quick to keep everything quiet.

If he ever found out about his oldest children today, hidden away in a dark and dirty parking garage as the sky grew blacker, how much rage would he feel that his own notorious mystery in the eye of the media is what allowed his children to escape his grasp?

“I didn’t see anything or hear anyone talking when I was dumpster diving,” Fuyumi offers up. She adjusts her glasses again with the hand that isn’t in her brother’s clasp.

“Do you know what that means Fuyumi?” Touya can’t help the smile growing wide on his face. He shouldn’t get ahead of himself, but…

“It means we have time .”

Chapter Text

“We have time?” There’s something building up behind her brother’s eyes, a quiet determination that she sometimes saw when he faced off against their father outside of the training room.

It was rare, but it would save Fuyumi and her siblings and her mother from whatever their father had planned for them without fail, every time. Their father would be too tired, pissed off, or both to go through with whatever he wanted to previously after beating down Touya while he scratched, screamed, and kicked with all his might to exhaust him and buy them time.

Another thing that Touya did for them that Fuyumi took for granted. Something that she allowed to happen, every day, and did nothing. She’s the big sister, the eldest, but she let her brother take the brunt of everything. Never again.

“He won’t want to say anything for, if I had to guess, at minimum today and tomorrow. He might start to get desperate, maybe he’ll send more people, but there’s no way he’ll make a statement. He has too many enemies in villains and journalists waiting to gobble something like this,” Touya says. His blue fire accentuates his features and casts shadow along his face and the room. It makes his blue eyes look brighter, but to Fuyumi, he doesn’t look scary at all.

“So as long as we lay low, we’ll be able to form a plan?” There’s a light in her brother’s eyes when she says this, and she never wants to see it die out again.

How did she ignore it when it disappeared for the first hundred times? 

“We don’t have to form a plan. I already have one. Do you remember our grandmother?” Touya says, quickly. He shifts, still keeping their one hand intertwined with hers and the other forming their light source. As he moves, it flickers and shadows dance across the walls. It’s beautiful.

Grandma? Fuyumi thinks back. She knows that their grandmother and mother are Korean, and that their grandmother used to only speak to them in korean before their father banned it. She remembers some of the songs and phrases their grandmother used to sing and say to Fuyumi and Touya, once even Natsuo, before she was caught and forced out of their home.

They had been seven years old the last time they saw her. Natsuo didn’t remember her, and Shouto had never even met her.

Fuyumi knows that their mother still has a better grasp of Korean than Japanese, and that their father hates her accent. He knows that he ordered her to only speak Japanese to the children, and that Natsuo and Shouto weren’t old enough to remember the language. 

Fuyumi and Touya are, though. They still understand bits and pieces, enough to get by, enough to decipher what their mother is saying while she has her fits rocking back and forth, or what she whispers in comfort to them after their father would scream and yell. What she would exclaim in horror at Touya sometimes, even though he looked more like her than their father with his soft white hair and round face, because he had his eyes.

Another thing that their father stole. An entire language, an entire culture, that they would never get to know because of him.

“What does that have to do with anything?” She asks, and knows it’s the wrong thing to say. Touya’s eyes narrow in the blue light, and she wishes she was quicker to pick up on whatever he was saying.

“The song, Fuyumi, do you remember the song that grandma taught us?” he says, quickly. Fuyumi forces herself to think quickly, too.

Song, song, what song? She remembers soft hums and quotes and lullabies all in korean, but what does that have anything to do with anything? She remembers sitting in their grandmother’s lap, toying with her long blue hair while Touya was drawing somewhere, drowning out the noise of their parents fighting.

She remembers sitting next to Touya while their grandmother locked the door, and told them never to sing this special song to their mother or father. She remembers the tune of Hush Little Baby, but with all the wrong words that didn’t rhyme and clashed together.

Oh.

Oh.

“Hush little babies, don’t say a word. Make sure to remember all these words. That if Da-ddy won’t step yell-ling, go run and hide in the kitchen pan-try. And if he kicks down that pan-try door, run out the door ‘till you two can’t no-more.” She begins the song, remembering every word clear as day despite not having to recite it for their grandmother in years.

Touya picks up right where she left off. “And while you’re run-ning keep look-out, ‘cause cop cars have black bot-toms and white tops. And if that cop car won’t pull over, run ‘till you find a po-lice off-ic-er. And if they try to bring you home, run ‘till the two of you can’t run no-more. Listen close, this is the most important.”

“Grandpa’s from Se-oul, his name is Sun Ji. So if all else call your grand-pa, 82-2-312-3456, love you. ” They say the last bit together, just like their grandma taught them.

A song. 

The words didn’t rhyme in some places, it was stuttery, and their grandmother taught it to them with her thick korean accent and without an extensive knowledge of the Japanese language. But she taught them the song, and drilled it into their heads so they would know what to do in case their father ever got too violent. And they never used it, not a single time, because after he threw her out his behavior got so, so much worse.

Grandpa’s from Se-oul, his name is Sun Ji. So if all else call your grand-pa, 82-2-312-3456 love you.

“Grandpa,” Fuyumi breathes out. She wants to cry. Her chest doesn’t feel so heavy anymore, and she never even noticed the pressure.

“We’ve ever met him, but if he’s anything like grandma described, he’ll get us out of here,” Touya says. He’s so sure, putting all of his faith in this man they’ve never met, and Fuyumi wants to, too. But —

“What if he doesn’t?” She asks. She doesn’t want to ruin the mood, she doesn’t want to ruin everything and ignore his feelings like she used to, but she has to ask. She can’t put her heart into something only for it to get destroyed. Not again.

Touya puts a hand on her cheek and turns her head, gently, to face him again. It’s nothing like how their father would violently grab her jaw and make her look him in the eye while he screamed. “Stop feeling bad for speaking your mind,” he says.

“I’m dampening the mood,” she counters. He looks at her so kindly, and Fuyumi wonders how. How could he look at her with those eyes, knowing that this is all her fault?

“No, you’re being realistic. We’re thirteen, we’re desperate, and we’re calling a man in another country who speaks a language we barely remember to help us. He could have changed from the man grandma knew. He could be abusive, he could hit us, he could want nothing to do with us. He might have even changed his phone number.” He laundry lists things that could go wrong, and Fuyumi wants to cry.

Why them? Why is this all happening to them? Why couldn’t they be a normal brother and sister, going to real school instead of being tutored, with a mother that would look at Touya and see what Fuyumi saw instead of their father, and a father that saw them all as more than objects to advance himself? With siblings that talked to each other instead of brimming with anger in a house of hate? 

Why is the only option for Touya not to be killed and Fuyumi not to be married off to run away? Why is their only option to never see Natsuo, Shouto, and their mother again? Why is her only option to never meet her soulmate, and for Touya to never know the owner of those gorgeous red wings decorating his back?

“Why can’t we just be a family?” She whispers to her brother, eyes full of water and voice quiet. She lets a few slip, and her face is scrunching up ugly and her nose might start to snot. Her brother pulls the hand that’s not giving them light up to her face, cupping her cheek gently and using his thumb to wipe each tear that falls from it from underneath her glasses.

So gentle, so different from their father. How could their mother look at how sweet Touya and think otherwise? Why did Fuyumi accept it, and not fight her mother on it the way Touya would fight their father?

“We will be,” he promises. 

What did she do to deserve him?

“You can cry, Fuyumi.” He says, and oh, she wants to, but she can’t. She cried in the alleyway, almost not realizing that the key to saving her brother was her own quirk because she was blubbering too much. She cried everyday instead of doing , and now is her chance to do.

She can cry later, in a different place, with Touya. They’ll be safe and sound, then. They’ll be okay, and she’ll be free to pull her head under his chin and cry as much as she needs to. Then, she will pull his lanky body underneath her chin, even though it might be a bit of an uncomfortable bend for him, and she’ll let him cry if he wants. Or, they can sit in silence.

It will always be okay if we have each other.

Pull it together, her brain commands of her, and she does.

“No.” She says. She uses her own hand to wipe at her other eye. She quickly wipes the water away from the lense using a clean patch of her nightgown, and looks back up. The only way this will work is if she matches her brother’s determination and confidence. She can’t find it in herself quite yet, but if she follows her brother’s lead, it will appear soon enough.

It has been this way their entire lives, she thinks. Making up for what the other lacks. Fire and water, fury and frost. 

“I can cry later,” she states.

“Fuyumi — ”

“We’re running out of time, Touya. We need to get out of here. What’s the rest of your plan?” She cuts him off, and she hates to, but she needs to. Touya’s need to protect, protect, protect sometimes overrode all else, and now that she’s cried tears he might be distracted until he thinks she's fine again.

She’s good at pretending she’s fine. Perfectly good at it.

He sighs, and looks to the left for a bit, thinking. He sighs again. He’s upset at her, but she’d rather an upset Touya than the Touya she saw the night before, burned to a crisp and on the verge of death. She won’t be able to live anymore if she faces her brother like that again.

“You said that you took the guy’s wallet. How much was in it?” He asks. Fuyumi crawls back to the wall, towards a hole that she placed their belongings in. Touya’s old, fried shoes. His old, burnt up shirt. The money.

Touya lights up the room more, a bluish glow taking over everything. She’ll pick it over their father’s foreboding red every time, again and again. She’s grateful for the light as she counts.

“Eleven thousand yen,” She says. She looks up, and sees her brother smiling. When was the last time she saw him smile that bright? She can’t help but smile too. The pain and sadness is still there in her chest, but her brother’s bright eyes are fighting them back.

“International calls on a payphone are only thirty yen, and if we are where I think we are, I know where a phone that accepts international calls is.”

He stands up abruptly. He’s still smiling, so bright, brighter than his fire. How did she ever let it get snuffed out?

“Come on, we need to be quick.”

They reach closer to the beach she saw in the distance. It’s dark, and the sky is twinkling with stars. There are a few clouds.

They must look quite odd. A girl in a long, dirty dress that’s torn wearing a jacket, barefoot, and a boy with shoes too big for his feet, a hoodie, and burned up pants. She hopes they’re fast running enough for the maybe three people they’ve passed not to have noticed.

Suddenly, Touya stops. They’re in front of a dingy green telephone box. Inside, the device honestly looks… crusty.

You’re wearing dirty and ripped clothes, Fuyumi. Don’t be stuck up, she thinks.

It’s not being stuck up, it’s called being hygenic, she bites back.

“This... this is it?” She asks. It’s cold, but that hasn’t made her uncomfortable since she and Touya have been together again. It honestly feels kind of nice against her normal, not frozen skin.

“I saw it on the television once. Some lady mentioned how it was the only one she could use to make international calls to her cousin, but it was all dirty since no one ever came to clean it. We’re at Dagobah beach, nobody ever cleans anything around here.” He rattles off. He pulls the two of them into the cramped box, closing it behind them. He tries to lock it, but the lock falls to the floor.

Their father always called him stupid. Stupid, dumb, worthless, a failure. He was wrong in every single respect. Would their father have remembered a single segment of a news show under pressure? No. He probably doesn’t even remember that he has a mother in law wandering around somewhere in Japan.

“Oh, alright,” is all she can really say to that, because wow . She digs the money out of her— well, that man’s— jacket pocket, and hands it to him. She’s careful not to let any of the coins fall.

Touya puts in enough to last ten minutes on an international call, and waits. 

They agreed on the way there that Touya would be the one to speak. Well, she more or less pushed the responsibility onto him. She doesn’t want to stutter away their time on the phone. When speaking Korean, he sounded more like their grandmother did than her, so that must mean he’s better at the language, right?

This has to work, she hopes.

Ring, ring ring. The loud noise of the phone hurts their ears against the quiet noises of the outside world. Fuyumi’s heartbeat starts to quicken, and she puts a hand on her Touya’s arm, the one that isn’t holding the phone. 

God, what if their grandfather doesn’t live there anymore? He could have moved, if it’s a landline they’re calling.

Ring, ring, ring.

What if it’s too late, and he’s asleep? Is there a Tokyo and Seoul time difference? No, right? That means it’s late for him, too. What if he’s away from the phone, or sleeping soundly while it rings in another room?

Ring, ring, ring.

Oh, no. He changed his number. He changed it, didn’t he? Their father has had to change his number a few times, when a few fans who didn’t know boundaries leaked it. Fuyumi remembers his angry face, and squeezes her brother’s arm. Touya moves it from her grasp and wraps it around her shoulders, bringing them closer.

He’s warm.

Ring, ring, ring.

Is it because they’re an international number? Is he the kind of person that doesn’t answer calls from people he doesn’t know? She hopes not. She prays not.

Ring, ring, ring.

It’s over. This was their last chance. Could they call back tomorrow? Will tomorrow be too late? Will they somehow have to call during the daytime? How are they going to pull that off?

Touya’s rubbing circles on her shoulder, trying to calm down what he can probably feel is her panicking, but she can’t. She can’t go back to that house. She doesn’t want to leave Natsuo and Shouto, she doesn’t want to leave her soulmate, but she can't take Touya back there and see him get hurt anymore.

Her hands are starting to frost over, water dripping on the floor.

Ring, ring, r-

“Annyeonghaseyo?” A deep, sleep-deprived voice on the other end of the phone rasps. The call made it sound a bit static-y, with a small amount of echo.

Fuyumi can’t breathe. Is that— is that their grandfather? She hears Touya’s breath catch.

From where she’s pressed up against her brother’s side, she can hear someone shifting. In bed? She wishes she had a bed right now. God, she’s so tired. Her feet hurt, her legs are sore from running, and her emotions have been beating on her heart. Their grandfather started to speak again. Korean words, some that she can recognize and some that she can’t. 

She’s shaking.

Touya’s the first to snap out of his trance, and begins speaking in slow, but hopefully understandable korean. “Annyeonghaseyo,” He says. “Is.. is this Sun Ji?”

A pause.

“Who is this?” The voice says. It sounds suspicious. “Who are you?

“This,” Touya searches for words, “This is Todoroki Touya and Fuyumi, please. Your,” He pauses again, “Your daughter, she is Mom.”

“My daughter,” The voice on the other end says. Fuyumi waits in apprehension. Is he happy to hear from them? Does he not want a reminder of his past that was violently robbed from him? “My daughter.”

“Yes! Yes, we—”

“Fuck you.” The voice says, sharp. Touya pauses When Fuyumi looks up at him, she can see the smile leaving his mouth. “My wife… are you playing with me?”

“No, no, please—”

Their grandfather begins cursing at them. Fuyumi understands it perfectly, and she wishes she didn’t. He’s using some of the same words that Mom used on Touya when he went near her.

“No, no, listen, please,” Touya begs. The phone box is getting hotter with his fear. “You—”

“ Shut up, ” The voice growls. “My daughter, my daughter. How dare you,” He starts to cry. No, Fuyumi thinks. This can’t happen. He can’t just curse them out and not hear what they have to say.

They need this.

Touya goes to speak again, but Fuyumi snatches the phone. She will speak, and this man will listen.

“Sun Hyun-Ae,” She says, and the man pauses in his cursing, “Blue hair. Sun Rei, white. Ice. Grey eyes.”

“Grandma loves you,” She says into the phone, because it’s true. Their grandmother always said that she wished they could meet her husband, that her soulmate was kind, that he was clever, the best person she’s ever met. That man has to still be there, somehow, even after fifteen years of being apart from his wife and daughter.

The man breaks down crying on the phone. Fuyumi has tears on her face too, and Touya is frantically rubbing at his.

“Please,” She begs. ”Help us.”

Touya takes the phone back to add his own voice. “Please, Oe-Halabeoji? Please? ”

The voice takes in a shaky breath. “Okay.”