Natsuo adores Kushina-néechan. Oh, he loves his mom and his siblings but Kushina-néechan is easy to be with and to love with everything in him. It's at odds with how hard to handle her personality is, boisterous and bright and dangerous in a way Endeavor could never hope to match. Kushina-néechan will judge you on a lot of things- how well you fight, how well you can cook, your looks -but it's all light-hearted and gentle teasing. She draws out laughter and sarcastic retorts and thrives in it but she never, never, holds your family or differences or quirk against you. She loves and she hates for your personality and she's loud and teasing and taunting when she likes you and so cold and burning all at once when she doesn't.

Natsuo knows all of this but he doesn't understand. Doesn't understand how she works or thinks or lives. Doesn't understand how Endeavor and Kushina-néechan could be siblings. He can see she loves him, so fiercely like she can't believe she has a brother, and he thinks about Touya and he doesn't understand.

What he does understand is that it isn't Fuyumi or him that step between Shouto (Shouto, who was a sweet, sweet child and now is just small and quiet and scared like they are) and Endeavor. It's Kushina-néechan, blazing with blood red flames so similar to her hair and glittering with golden chains, with a rage so palpable that Natsuo is choking on it even as he watches it in awe. Fuyumi, her hand in his, is so, so quiet next to him and he knows she's crying because she loves this family, loves all of it because she's too good, and she's breaking under the strain of it. He doesn't really understand Fuyumi, either.

And Endeavor- oh, Natsuo thrives on Endeavor's surprise and fear. He tucks the image of Endeavor's desperate horror at his flames (revels in the idea that the fire that plagued his own nightmares might finally make an appearance in Endeavor's), his fear of Kushina-néechan's violent, wrathful beauty away to savour.


He doesn't like hospitals. They smell bad and their endless white halls seem to stretch forever. The despair of the patients makes him angry.

(In the back of his mind, he remembers blue flames and the smell of burning flesh so strong in the air he can nearly taste it-)

Kushina-néechan is still angry and the chair she's sitting in is melting, painfully slow. The smell of burning plastic hasn't reached him yet, but he knows it will soon. Between them, Shouto is on a hospital bed.

(-and there are blue, blue eyes and a feeble smile despite the burns-)

He's not hurt, not really. There's some strain to his muscles and tendons and quirk and the doctor puts it down as a young boy not knowing his own limits because Endeavor doesn't pay him to look any deeper. Kushina-néechan's lips pull back into a feral snarl and her hands clench in her lap. She's wild and tied down and it's such an oxymoron that he wants to laugh, bitter and humorless.

(-there were words too quiet for him to hear, and there was no angry, comforting woman beside them-)

Kushina-néechan can't do anything, he knows. Endeavor will never allow it, sister or not. The hero, though he dirties that term, has too much wealth and power and clout in the world of politics for her to ever rescue them from his clutches. Oh, but will she try. He knows she will because, if things had been different, he knows he would have ended up just like her. Instead, he's quiet and scared and will never be able to work up the courage to step between his little brother and the man that dares call himself their father.

(-he doesn't see those soft eyes and softer smiles again, will never see them again-)

Shouto's alive, though, but he'll never have Natsuo and Fuyumi's freedom. Their anonymity in their own house. Not home, never home, but they live there so it is, unfortunately, their house. Shouto's alive and Natsuo will do anything he can force himself to do to make his life even a little better, the way he know Fuyumi and his mom and Kushina-néechan will. It'll never be ideal, he knows, but hopefully it'll be enough.

(-hopefully he won't loose another brother to Endeavor, to the #2 Hero.)