The first time she meets Todoroki Enji, Rei is fresh out of high school and looking forward to her future. She's always been kind of indecisive about what she wants to do, but it's easy enough to get a job as a receptionist at one of the local clinics.
"You should be a hero with that quirk of yours." Her coworker tells her in passing. "If I had a quirk that powerful, I'd go right into hero work."
"If everyone was a hero, there wouldn't be anyone left to do our jobs, don't you think?" She retorts, but her coworker just frowns and carries on.
The first time she meets Todoroki Enji, the city is falling apart around her. People flee, shoving and pushing, as a villain topples buildings, sending rubble and concrete raining onto the civilians below. Rei isn't a large person by any means and people spare her no expense. The ground is not a welcoming force, sharp with glass and rock shards.
Rei's first instinct is to panic. She's a soft soul; situations with high tension and stress are bad places for her to be, and being in the path of stampedes of people and crumblings buildings is certainly one of those situations. She's so busy dodging feet that she almost doesn't notice the massive piece of concrete plummeting towards her until the shadow of it covers her.
Her heart jumps into her throat and her hand instinctively flies up, head jerking away to hide. She's going to die here.
Her ice responds to her call, a curved wall of glace protecting her, but the rubble never reaches her.
The first time Rei meets Todoroki Enji, she is laying on her back in the middle of the carnage of a villain attack, and the sky is made of fire.
For a moment, everything sort of loses focus. The edges of her ice start to turn to water, dripping down the sides of the glacier, but her eyes are fixed on the sky above her and it's red and red and then a different kind of red, darker, and blue.
"You need to evacuate," his voice cuts through the haze, and suddenly everything comes rushing back, "can you stand?"
"I-" Her voice fails her momentarily. "I think so."
He doesn't wait. The redheaded boy tows her up to her feet again, glancing between her and the glacier with a furrow in his brow. He couldn't be any older than her, but there's something about him that seems leagues beyond her.
"That's an impressive quirk," he remarks offhandedly, "but you need to get to safety."
He releases her and her arms are cold where his hands had been. "Wait," she reaches out, snagging his sleeve, "what's your name?"
She can't think of eyes as clear and blue as his. There's dirt smudges on his face, but the flames that frame his costume illuminate his features like a halo. She thinks that he must be the type of person who carries the sun on his shoulders.
"Todoroki," he tells her, "Todoroki Enji."
And he marches back into the battle.
(~~)
They call him The Flame Hero: Endeavor and Rei doesn't think for a second she'll ever see him again. She allows herself to think about him frequently for this reason alone, her knight in flaming armor.
"Oh," says someone on the subway, jostling her, "s- wait, I know you."
Rei lifts her gaze and meets the very blue eyes she's been thinking about. "Oh," she replies, eloquently.
It's a week later and he tells her, "You never told me your name."
Her heart ignites like his armor. "Rei."
Enji's smile doesn't quite reach his eyes, but Rei doesn't think much of it.
(~~)
Just like that, she starts seeing him frequently. He's kind to her, even if his personality is rough around the edges and he's always bothering her about her ice quirk. His smiles come rarely, but when it does, it's lopsided and endearing. She falls a little more in love with it.
With him.
"I'm going to become a top hero," he tells her, taking her hand in a strong grip, "and then I'm going to marry you."
At the time, it's less of a threat and more of a promise. At the time, she doesn't realize what that promise entails.
When she's twenty, she comes home to Enji eating dinner with her family.
"Rei," her mother scolds, "you never told me you were dating the number two hero. I'm so happy you're getting engaged."
There's something a little off about her mother's voice, but Rei is too overwhelmed at the words. She's getting married. She's marrying Enji. He ducks his head a little as if he's embarrassed, and Rei gazes at him like he carries the sun.
And to her, maybe he does.
(For a while, she believes he genuinely loves her.)
(~~)
Todoroki Rei, officially, dreams of a fairytale life. She wants to live in a small house with a happy family, where she can spend her days cooking and tending to flowers. It's not like that, she knows, not with her husband being the number two hero, but she dreams.
It's hard being isolated for a while. She no longer lives with her family and Enji is rarely home, but Rei tries to keep herself entertained in the large home Enji's selected for them. She tries gardening, but it turns out she doesn't have much of a green thumb. She cooks, but there's no one but her to cook for until Enji gets home late and tired. She cleans and cleans and cleans, but eventually, the house is spotless and there's nothing left to organize.
But still, she's happy with Enji. For a while.
When Touya is born, there's a new little light in Rei's world, all red hair and blue eyes like Enji. He looks nothing like his mother and everything like his father, and Rei adores him. The pride on Enji's face when he's born is like nothing she's ever seen from him before. It makes her heart swell.
They'll be a family.
She doesn't notice it yet, but something changes in Enji that day, the moment he holds their baby in his arms, large and intimidating and out of place in the small hospital room. Rei is so, so happy.
But Enji is happier.
(Until he's not.)
(~~)
The change is slow. At first, he's an attentive father. And then gradually, creeping like darkness, obsessive. The closer Touya gets to the quirk presenting age, the more Enji hovers, watching like a hawk, like a wolf watches a rabbit.
Touya's quirk is fire. Rei knows first because she tends the burn his flames leave behind on his soft skin. Enji's eyes are painfully bright, twin slits of ice, when he learns of Touya's quirk and the potential his fire holds. And all at once, they're bottomless pits of freezing water, cruel and piercing and angry when he's told that Touya's quirk would almost permanently deform him if used too much.
Enji is suddenly very absent again. Rei has Touya now, but somehow, she's still painfully lonely. Touya stays happy, but somehow that makes it worse.
Fuyumi comes next. Touya is overjoyed that he'll have a sibling to play with now, even if she is a girl and years younger than him. Enji steps into their lives again, and Rei begins to think that he'll be around more with two children instead of just Touya.
For a while, he's doting again.
They're happy again.
For a while.
Fuyumi inherits only an ice quirk, similar to Rei's but nowhere near as powerful. She sees the look in Enji's eyes, twin flints of ice, of hellfire, burning into the backs of their children. His lips press into a tight line, and Rei is suddenly reeling, wondering what had gone wrong and why she kept failing to recognize the man who came home to her every night.
A part of her wishes he would stop coming back, She tucks that part away neatly, safe behind locked doors and thrown away keys,
But she begins to dread Enji's presence, dread his presence in their room and his hands, hard and insistent and again, again, again.
(~~)
Enji buys her a canary for her birthday. He sets in in the front room in its gilded white cage, where it sings and sings and sings. The bird seems content in its cage, where it's sheltered and cared for, but Rei can't help but wonder if it ever wants to stretch its wings.
Sometimes, the bird gazes back at her, head tipped, as if he's wondering why she hasn't left her cage either.
Rei can't remember the last time she'd talked to any of her old friends.
The bird keeps singing.
Rei lets it go and Enji doesn't once take notice to the silence.
Natsuo is born whether Rei likes it or not. He's a hard birth, long and complicated, and the doctor tells her that having any more children could potentially kill her. She only gathers up energy to smile placidly at him and nod absently as the words pass in one ear and out the other. It's a risk she knows they'll take if Enji isn't satisfied. She's beginning to think Enji won't be satisfied until she's in the ground. She isn't sure what he wants from her anymore.
At one point, Rei thinks that maybe the awkward boy with the gorgeous eyes would exist only in her daydreams, and then in her city, and then in her life. At one point, Rei is just a girl in love with a boy, and she thinks Enji is just a boy in love with a girl and that's enough for both of them.
Natsuo inherits an ice quirk.
Nothing is ever enough for Todoroki Enji.
There's a brand of bone-deep exhaustion that takes root in her body and makes a home there.
She thinks about the canary. She thinks about flying far, far away.
(~~)
Rei and Shouto are both hospitalized when he's born. It's a close call for both of them, but they pull through, and the doctors smile when Rei cries, thinking it's of happiness.
Enji's eyes are wild, only for Shouto, only for the child who could be his last chance to achieve whatever goal he's unwittingly dragged Rei into. He visits Rei once for appearances, twice to take her and their fourth child home.
Shouto is a gentle child, cheerful and toddling, but it's painful to her how much the half of him looks like Enji. He's split clean down the center, half her, half his father, and Rei tries to smile when he seeks her attention. It's more than she can do for Touya. She loves her eldest dearly, but when she looks at him, she sees Enji.
Shouto is five when he presents his quirk, split straight down the middle with fire and ice. Suddenly, Rei understands what Enji's been doing this whole time. It was never her. It was her quirk. He wanted to create something powerful enough to surpass the both of them and everyone else.
She knows he's ambitious, but she's severely underestimated how much. She'd known about quirk marriages, but she hadn't thought for a second her family would hand her off into one.
Rei hides Shouto's quirk as long as she can, but inevitably, Enji finds out. It only takes a second and Shouto is that songbird, locked away, separated from his siblings and treated like a tool and a soldier instead of a child.
His happiness is feral and cruel and terrifies Rei to the bones.
"Enji," she pleads, shielding Shouto with her own body as he doubles over on the floor, sick from the horrendous training Enji puts him through, "please, he's still only a child. He-"
If Todoroki Rei had any lingering feelings about their prior relationship, Enji physically shatters them in a heartbeat. She's standing one moment and on the ground the next, and everything aches, from the stinging in her face to the way her heart splits down the middle.
When she sees Enji, she sees a man unfamiliar to her, eyes so blue and bottomless that she could sink forever. When she sees Enji, she sees a wraith of a man, a spectre surrounded in flames and fury and ambition, a man who cares for nothing but his goals and will plow through anything to get to them. There had never been a point where Rei thought, even for a second, that Enji would raise his hand against her.
But he does.
And with it, he slams the door of her cage shut.