Chapter 3. It Was a Pleasure to Burn.
I lash out my left hand with the sick feeling of resentment clawing into my chest. Dad hitting me over and over with that shinai didn't make me sad. It only made me angry. Flames blast from my hand with a vengeance. A leftover feeling of self hatred rose in my chest. If I wasn't so weak, Dad wouldn't have hit me. If I was stronger maybe I would be left alone. If I didn't cry. If I didn't feel anything. Screw that! I have something to reach for! Thinking about Mom. That picture of me entering elementary school that Fuyumi found of me clinging to her leg.
If I was that close with her. Why did I forget her? How did I forget her? Not only that but that day in Osaka where I felt like his son and not just another kid to him replayed over and over in my mind. All I could think when I saw Dad raging out of the house with eyes wide and nostrils flared with flames aglow was…
'You asshole…' His arms suddenly scoop me up and I squirm and fight against his bear hug. He's too strong for me to fight my way out of. He carries me inside with his anger still rising. I can feel it through his flames and my own wink out.
"What will it take for me to fix you?" he yells "You momentarily got better!"
My teeth grit and tears blur my eyes. Rage rising in my chest alongside fear. The raging fire and the cold claws dig into me. Roaring and freezing waves smash into the barrier keeping it all in. I clench my hands into fists as he looms over me.
"Have… Have I ever been good enough?!" I started to rant with my hair billowing around my face. "I swear! I do everything for you! I train and train and it's never good enough!" I glare at him with tears freely falling stinging my eyes and I take a deep breath.
"All you want is someone to become number one! Just because you never could!" I snarl. He had let me go but I don't waver at all. "Your standards… your goals… they're not mine. Beating me half to death isn't gonna make me better."
Dad looks ready to swat me and I stare dead into his eyes. I fight so hard every day. Bruises marking my body. Drilling the same sayings that hurt so familiarly. I feel a bubbling sense of snark emerge.
"Go on. You're halfway there! Go ahead and hit me! Hit me!" I urged with the biggest grin on my face, "All I need to do is take it, right?"
Dad freezes. His eyes full of confusion. "What's wrong Dad? You made me like it cause that was the only way I ever felt like your son!" He backs off and I smirk. He goes inside and leaves me alone.
Once he was gone, I fell to my knees and screamed into my arms. "That was so scary! Holy shit! Holy shit!" I squeak, "That was pure luck! I didn't have ANY control!" I curl into a little ball and begin to cry. Suddenly I feel a hand on my back. Cool and comforting almost. I look up from my fetal position to see my big sister rubbing my back gently. She sits me up and smiles.
"Hey. It's okay." She says. "I know that was scary. How about we get you inside and you can calm down?"
"N-no…" I mumble. "Lemme stay out here… okay?" I sniffle and she dries my tears. "I've got… training to do." Fuyumi looks at me strangely. I get to my feet and extend my left hand again. Flames glow cheerily there. My right hand crackling and solid ice. She watches me alternate over and over. My body is getting used to the changing temperatures. I don't try to be as drastic as earlier. Gently going from ice to fire. Steady. Letting it flow rather than crash.
I smile and continue for the rest of the day.
Lesson Five. Take Risks.
Corusan Middle School is elite. Even by other school standards. I keep on slamming myself into work. Apparently Dad went here too. I rub my eyes and yawn as I pore over hours and hours of homework in my study hall. I remember all the stares. All the muttering. Just because I didn't go out didn't mean I was a NEET or Otaku or what have you. Just that my Dad is a total control freak.
"You're in here again?" The Librarian Mr. Wantanabe sighs. He's balding and around Dad's age. The only teacher I could really call one of my favorites because the rest just kind of blurred together into a primordial dispenser of homework and rote memorization.
"Yeah. No work means I die poor and alone right?" I sigh.
"Todoroki. You're a bright kid." He says. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
"Gee… Comparing me to Jack Torrance. Next thing I'll do is grab an ax and roar for Danny." I huff with a smile. "Or a roque mallet."
He grins and sees the books I'm checking out. All three of them being Sci-Fi slash Adventure books.
"Around the World in 80 Days and War of the Worlds also Fahrenheit 451," I list. "I dunno why but they're familiar."
He nods. I see. "Seems like you're attached to them. Almost similar to the only other person who comes in here."
I just grab my bookbag and books. Snatching up my work. "Gotta go. See ya."
"Have a good day Todoroki!" He calls after me. I head on to my next class with my books cradled reciously in my arms. My eyes on the door because sometimes I get carried away. I get into class and I sit down. I don't notice much during class. Not that there was anything really to focus on other than notes and even more homework that makes my head swim with all my free time consumed by Dad and that.
"Todoroki. Read the passage on the board for us." The mass that was our literature teacher said. Voice neither male or female. I clear my throat and feel all the eyes on me burning into my body. I let out a shaky smile and cleared it again.
Then I begin. My voice is strong and clear. Not even a stumble in it.
"It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning." I recited. My eyes closed and breathing out.
When I plunk down on my chair all I could see was that I barely halted. Gave it the weight and impact it needed to show Guy Montag at the beginning of the story. As if I wanted to show the others how good the story really was.
"What does that mean, class? What does Bradbury want to demonstrate?" No hands go into the sky. Not one. I resist the urge to do it myself but… then… a hand shoots into the air like a rocket. Fast. Belonging to a tall girl with a big ponytail. Her voice goes over me like a calming summer breeze.
"He wants to demonstrate that Montag enjoys the feeling of burning books. Almost taking a sort of childlike wonder in it." The girl says. She must've been a transfer. Or… or maybe I never noticed her.
But the moment I saw her my heart skipped a beat. Sending me into an awkward haze of admiration and maybe even fascination. Not that I ever felt it before. Almost like the time Dad dragged me away from my siblings playing outside.
Telling me… "You're in a different world than them, Shoto."
After class was dismissed for lunch I settle in my usual seat cracking open my copy that I pretty much owned at this point from reading it so much. I sit and read. Eating only after I came to a stop. I notice the girl from Literature class looking around with some slight confusion. Her parents must've moved her because High School was coming up. A lot of families move their kids closer to whatever school they want to go to to make commutes easier. I bookmark my place and stand up. My eyes on her.
I find myself walking over to her. Asking her if she needed help. Maybe forming small talk? Turns out I never moved. Another girl swoops in and shows her to her side of things. She gets smaller and smaller until she's lost in the tide of similar uniforms and bobbing heads. Back to the mass made by my father and myself.
"That was pathetic, Shoto!" He screams in my head. "So pathetic! She was right there! All you needed to do was talk to her!"
I whisk myself away on booklike wings of Fahrenheit 451. Another chance to break myself out taken away. Just letting myself be absorbed and soaked in the kerosene and set alight. Ah well. She's way too out of my league anyway. Also the whole thing from Fuyumi where she told me Dad and Mom were a Quirk Marriage. Chances are good that Dad might be throwing her into one or me too.
I sit there alone. Not noticing someone coming towards me. My short sighted focus on nothing but my book. Just silently reading. My eyes momentarily flitter uward to see her right in front of me. Dark eyes meet my two different colored ones. Gray and Blue locked to hers.
"Forgive me for interrupting you but…" she begins with that same warm feeling overtaking me. "Do you have any notes on the book?"
I nod and hand her my notebook. "Here."
She takes it and settles next to me "Thank you." She says.
I just busy myself with the book "Who sent you?" I ask.
"Well it was Hanabi-chan. She told me you have an annotated library copy and read it over and over." she says. I nod and flip the page to the next one. A pregnant silence hangs between us.
"I'm Momo Yaoyorozu. Nice to meet you… uhm…" she sounds a little shy. I look at her with a slight smile.
"Shoto." I answer.
"Shoto?" She's waiting for my surname and I answer.
"It's for me to know and for you to find out."
"So mysterious." She mutters. I just go back to my book but she doesn't move the whole time. Reading my notes with a glimmer of something in her eyes. She's pretty. Her eyes were so focused on my notes. Almost as if she was willing them to be absorbed into her head.
Her hair billows slightly in the wind with the page threatening to go crazy. The bang in front of her face wiggled. I steal glances. Seeing how proper she is. How her posture is ramrod straight and how she barely has any casual looking anything. Her uniform is cleaner than mine. Her hair glossier. Her entire being shone with how well she was raised and how social she was.
Here I am hunched like a gargoyle or some decrepit creature squatting in a cave with a ring. Hair tousled by invisible hands and barely tameable even if I drag a comb through it. Blue and gray eyes ringed by sleeplessness and my gakuran rumpled and crumpled into wrinkles because Dad insisted he do laundry this week. My scar adding to the creepy image.
No wonder the other students call me Neetoroki or Creeper. I look two seconds away from it at any given time. Yaoyorozu sits next to me as if I was already her friend. She hands me back my notebook.
"Thank you, Todoroki." She says.
"You're- Wait, hang on!" I squeak. "How did you know?"
She puts her finger over her lips. Smiling with a wink. "Lady's secret~!" She walks away before I could say anything more. I take my notebook and slide it back into the bag. I feel the warmth still staying in my chest. Spreading through my body like a warm campfire. A sinking feeling overtakes that. Knowing that if I ever tell Dad or Fuyumi or even Natsuo about her, it'll open a flood of interrogations and conjectures and all kinds of bad things. I close my bag and hoist it onto my back.
Luckily I finished my homework back in the library earlier and I went to say goodbye to Mr. Wantanabe before school let out. I make my way towards the library. Suddenly I freeze seeing Momo talking with him. It all made sense. She must've been the person he was talking about.
"War and Peace this time, Miss Yaoyorozu?" he asks.
"Why yes. It's one of my favorites. I had neglected to bring it with me on the move towards UA." she says. The warm feeling coming back in force. I shake myself to get it out of me.
"Well Mr. Todoroki is Corusan's first recommended student. Although it's not really for academics… it's more because his father is a real piece of work." Mr. Wantanabe sounds like a sad father talking about a son he lost.
"Oh. I see." Momo says softly. "Makes sense. To me he's just… tired." I move away from the wall and towards the exit of the school. I could skip the goodbye today and give Momo time to talk with him.
And that's what I did. All I want now is to get to UA. Then… the world is my oyster. Freedom is just around the corner and if I have to force that corner to come faster I will. I will burn down all the bridges I have to. Because I wanted to show my father I didn't need him. That I could make my way on my own. Doing whatever I needed to…
Just so I could feel that warmth again. Just so Momo and I could really be friends because she looked at me like no one else ever had so far. She treated me like her friend despite not knowing me for long. Just like that I have a goal.