Author's Note: The reason we never see anyone try to stab Endeavor in the heart is because he doesn't have one.
Matters
Fuyumi didn't know what to think the night her mother left. She seen her father stomping towards the separate house that she and the brother she didn't even know lived in. She heard the shouting, watched as light flickered from inside windows. It was the first and only time she saw her brother, bundled up against their mother as she ran from the house and out of the compound. It was the last time she had seen her mother. She watched with Toya and Natsuo, peaking so she wouldn't be caught.
They watched the building burn down after her mother fled. Their father marched out of the ashes, his face a mask of fury. She'd seen the look before, but never so intense. When he returned to their house, he looked at her and her brothers differently, his eyes narrowed more so than they had ever been. She gripped Natsuo's hand, but Toya didn't hold hers. She didn't understand why father wanted their combs, or what he intended to do with them, but she was too scared to do anything but run to grab hers for him.
For the next week he didn't speak to them. He only looked at them, his eyes roving over them, looking for more imperfections. She felt anxious under his gaze. Before she had been a failure, now she was like a prisoner. She didn't find out why until her father's fury returned. At the time she was more relieved that he was grinding down someone from outside the household, rather than her or her brothers. But it was a rare sight she saw when he finished, marching back to the common room and ordering them to meet him. He looked almost defeated.
What he told them, what he showed them, with the sourness of a man scorned, was that their brother, the one she had never seen, was not his son. The child that had been cast out of his home was not his. But neither was he truly their brother. He wasn't related to any of them, not even their mother. He wasn't a failure, he was an accident, someone given to their family by mistake. Their father said that they were his children, and that he would retrieve their mother and find their brother.
Toya said he hoped he failed.
Their father bristled and sent them away, and Fuyumi wondered. Would she see her mother again? Would her mother recognize her when she saw her again? But it didn't happen. Her father did not speak of their mother again, but returned with the boy who wasn't their sibling. Their father announced that he would be a guest, waiting in their home until his proper home and their actual brother was found.
Watching him as her father spoke, she could see her father in him. He may not be her brother, but he was her father's son. Anger radiated off of him like unseen flames, and his eyes were filled with the same smoldering fury. There was envy there too, every bit as naked as her father's envy of All Might, except it was directed at her and her brothers. She wondered if he knew how willingly her brothers would trade places with him if they could, but she said nothing. He wouldn't listen to her any more than her father would.
Having him in the house made everything worse. He was her father in miniature, and the peace that usually existed while he was on a mission or just out of the house was absent while the child her father would not accept lingered in their home. Not being a Todoroki he suffered through none of the training that Toya and Natsuo were still put through, which only ramped up since he arrived, but that just made him even more bitter, fingers digging into his knees as he saw 'failures' trained instead of him. He would glare at the door while her brothers struggled against their father and came up wanting. She never knew what to say to him, and whenever he saw her his red eyes burrowed into her in a way that was matched only by her father's worst days. She avoided him whenever she could.
And then, one day, he was gone. There was no farewell. Her father took the child that was his in every way but blood and returned with the one that was. And it was clear that the boy that entered the house that day was her brother. Looking at him it was obvious that he was kin. His hair, his eyes, his quirks, it was impossible for him to be anything else. But where the boy who was not her brother was her father's son, the boy who was her brother was his mother's son. She could see the misery in his eyes, the wet trails on his cheeks. He didn't want to be here, he never wanted to come here. Couldn't her father see that?
Did it matter to him at all?
Author's notes: Next up, another parent (or two), struggling with their child.