Spring was in the air, but Rei Raimu didn't seem to feel it anymore on her skin, and the matter was serious, because that beautiful girl with silver hair and deep gray eyes had received terrible news and felt betrayed by everything and everyone, including her family members.

She was walking with her best friend, Hisu Mankai, a girl capable of making beautiful corollas bloom on her fingers, a power she knew it infuses her tranquility, but not that day. One of the last remaining at her disposal, before... dying.

Suddenly, she burst into tears in the middle of an intersection, on the pedestrian crossings of a crowded area of Tokyo, with passers-by glancing at them curiously and in their own way, participating.

"Rei... Rei please, don't do this... I'm sure we'll find a solution... maybe he's not so bad... we're talking about Endeavor, the superhero!"

"He will ruin my life!"

Hisu looked at her friend, peering inside her marvelous steel irises: she found a frightening look of pure hatred.

Strange, Rei had never been that kind of person, she had always had a gentle word for everyone.

"Rei... you scare me. Let's go to my house and drink an herbal tea, will you?"

The invitation had driven the anguish out of the nineteen-year-old girl for a second.

For a couple of hours, Rei could force herself to laugh and let it out in peace with dear Hisu, who had been with her since middle school. What was the use of studying, if now she found herself stuck in a marriage of convenience? She couldn't had attended university...

Upon returning home, Rei saw her mother meeting her. Sutomu Raimu was a middle-aged woman with her daughter's silver hair and dark blue eyes. Her Quirk was the ability to freeze water vapor in the air and lower the surrounding temperature accordingly. When seeing her with that smile on her lips, Rei almost felt the instinct to slap her.

"Dear... thank goodness you arrived. Enji is here..."

"Ah."

Fearing that she might be rude to the guest, the older woman grabbed her daughter's arm and spoke planting her dark eyes on her:

"Honey, I know I am asking you a lot... but you know what situation we are in... we have nothing left. Your father's death..."

"... My father would have hated all this!" the adolescent spat out angrily.

"I know, but now he's gone." Sutomu was equally determined.

"Good..." Rei muttered resolutely, piercing her with her eyes, "... Why don't you marry Endeavor?"

The grip on her arm increased.

"When did I ever teach you to be so impudent?"

Her daughter didn't answer, she just looked at her with contempt.

She glanced over the path, past the half-closed sliding door of her modest dwelling, the last bastion of her father's inheritance. The late Konran Kaimetsu had been an honest fisherman, but his economic substances were very small and were now coming to an end. Sutomu had married and had Rei at a fairly late age, at thirty-seven. She had worked a whole life in a food industry as a packaging worker and when she retired she had been forced to leave her beautiful family villa, too expensive. Enji Todoroki represented a lifeline for her.

Rei saw him: he was sitting there, in the parlor, on the tatami. In his hand he had a small glass of sake.

A movement of disgust took hold of her throat: she didn't care about him being Endeavor, the famous Hero who jumped to second place as popularity at just twenty years of age. That was the man who wanted to tear her future by playing with her family's difficulties. And he dared call himself a Hero...

Composed, silent, Rei sat with her knees together as far from him as the low table allowed, followed closely by her mother. It all seemed really pathetic, and she had decided to become estranged from those speeches of matrimonial planning, as if they didn't concern her. However, the more the future son-in-law and mother-in-law talked to each other, the more her eyes filled with burning tears. At one point, she rose abruptly, walking out on them. To hell the ceremony.

Sutomu had to perform a sensational apology for not igniting -literally- Enji's wrath, who wasn't used to being treated like this; he already had to put up with Toshinori's interference, all he neeeded was marrying a disrespectful woman!

"Forgive her... she lost her father less than a year ago... she is still upset, poor darling."

"Of course..." replied the red-haired man, who couldn't have cared less about those existential dramas.

Rei had run to the cemetery not far from home, where her beloved father's ashes were kept.

Her slender fingers loved to go through those words written in black, which determined the name, surname, date of birth and death. Konran was sixty-six years old and was involved in a terrible fishing accident, despite the Quirk that allowed him to create water flows from his arms. He had drowned and had been fished out on a beach only after several hours. A destiny without qualms.

After beating her hands twice and starting to pray, Rei was crying in despair, invoking the soul of that kind father, whose smiling picture sat on the marble, inert.

Mr. Kaimetsu had a reassuring face, with sparse black hair and gray eyes like his daughter's.

"Dad... I don't want to marry Enji Todoroki... I don't want... he doesn't love me... and I don't love him... Whatever he has in mind he isn't doing it for love or good heart... he wants my ice Quirk, I'm sure..."

Without realizing it, Rei found herself embracing the tombstone, almost as if that trunk of cold and lifeless material was the torso of the man who had made her grow up protected.

The edges pricked her cheeks and the tears were wetting the dark marble, but she didn't care: she would had preferred to stay forever at her father's grave than to hold Todoroki's hand even for a moment.

Her ears picked up a regular sound, like firm steps that trample a hard floor.

She knew that proud gait, and she didn't want to believe it: that insignificant and shameless being had followed her to that place, to that place sacred and inviolable. How she would had liked to scream in his face that he had to leave, to find some Villains to pursue and let her live her quiet life. How much she would had liked it. But she couldn't do it. First, because she and her mother needed his money. Second, because that man would had beaten her if she rebelled. She had classified him well, that arrogant twenty-two-year-old man, and she didn't like him at all.

"What do you want?" she asked, her arms still around her father's headstone. She felt protected even then, even though he no longer existed in physical form.

Without saying a word, Enji took her arms from the grave.

"There is no need to take refuge in the past, Rei..."

That then... Rei could not allow such an affront and rudely moved away from him:

"My father is not the past!"

In Enji's cold eyes, Rei had to appear to him as a little girl prey to post-traumatic hysteria, because he made no other comments, but closed her hand between his strong fingers, making her go down the steps of the cemetery, up to street level.

Rei closed her heart: if she had made herself impenetrable, that man would had done nothing to her, she would had let him slip away like rainwater. It was enough to simply make herself untraceable with her mind.

Enji Todoroki had won, but only in appearance: for her, he would never had been a husband.