A/N: I literally kept you guys waiting for almost a year. Ack. You guys might have to re-read the first chapter because of how long it took me to finally regain the urge to write again. :]
Updates might be sporadic but hopefully, more consistent as I try to make new writing habits. But again, I have major mental fatigue regarding BNHA, and the manga events just bounce off my mind, no matter how much I try.
Btw, this chapter might have a different writing style - I took out some excessive purple prose from my style and plan to edit the first chapter to make the sentences more accurate and concise.
Disclaimer: Kohei Horikoshi is the author of MHA.
WARNINGS: Graphic, gory descriptions of death; implied adult/mature scenes (not descriptive, but implied).
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暑さ寒さも彼岸まで
(Neither the heat nor the cold last beyond Shūbun)
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It was during the most inconvenient time—the time during her final moments in her miserable life on this earth—that the mind of Rei Todoroki, née Himura, remembered those days.
Especially that day.
Breathing raggedly, the Todoroki matriarch hurriedly encased her bindings with ice and smashed her wrists repeatedly against the concrete wall, trying to break them. She could already feel her psyche shaking—no, she needed to stay calm - return to Fuyumi and Natsuo and Shoto—and when her entangled wrists got free, she almost succeeded in reeling in her panic.
Rei suppressed her racing heart rate, breathing harshly through her nose with her eyes scrunched up tight. I just need to be alive. I need to get out of here–
Her wrists bled from the ice shards and chunks of frozen rope that were embedded in her skin. Shuddering, she held herself up agonizingly, and began limping through the freezing corridor of concrete. She bit back sharp yelps of pain from her twisted ankle as her bare feet smacked the floor clumsily. Where's the exit? Todoroki Rei, you have to focus—
All of a sudden, she heard stark footsteps behind her. Freezing in terror, the pale-haired woman swallowed back a scream. A second later, her head yanked back, and all Rei could do was not scream to the high heavens from the pain and the hope that was unjustly taken away from her.
"Please, just leave me be—–"
Her neck wrenched back, and it snapped from the rebound, effectively cutting off her words, and she cried out, instinctively rising to her toes to relieve the agony.
"Todoroki-san didn't listen to me." The man tutted disapprovingly as Rei gagged. "I told you to wait."
The man then flung Rei to the side, and as her head smashed sideways to the stone panel beside her, the gauzy world shifted to another time when her legs trembled so strongly—
.
.
On the night of their marriage, her legs trembled.
With a nervous swallow, Rei smoothened back her shorn hair while looking into the mirror, wishing nervously that it was long enough to hide the blush that suffused her cheeks—and more embarrassingly, her chest.
She remembered the talk they had as her okaa-san fastened family heirlooms of lustrous mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell onto her hair, hours before the wedding. She heard that it hurt—that the sensation was like the sharp ripping of tautly-stretched fabric—from her mother, who had murmured it into her ear while caressing Rei's hair.
At the memory, her cheeks flushed heatedly, and the pale-haired girl hurriedly clasped her cool palms to them, hoping to diffuse the red bloom.
He had only allotted three days for their Shinkon ryokō, but it didn't matter to Rei. After all, he freed her from her house, albeit in an undesirable manner, but freed her nonetheless. Perhaps if she pleased him enough, maybe everything would work out.
Yet she was terrified. Terrified of the unknown, somewhat terrified of her husband who looked like he could rip her in two. But she had to. She had to uphold her end of the deal—
.
.
"We had an agreement, Todoroki-san," The man said as she collapsed at his feet, almost blacking out from the sudden stars that burst from her eye-lids, "And I am not patient enough to handle your misgivings—"
"You abducted me," Rei choked out staggeringly, crushing her fingers into fists as she tried to haul herself up in vain, "That was an immediate breach! And you're telling me I should trust you? Tell me where I am!"
If only I wasn't so weak—
"That would be inane of me to say." The man crouched down, and fisted her dirt-trodden tresses once more.
Rei deliriously wished to shear away her long hair, like how her father had done in her maidenhood. Dishonorable it was, but she would rather take on the disapproval rather than having to remember all those who tainted her history after her horror-stricken marriage—especially, her husband, and certainly, this vengeful man.
Then a realization tore through her. She could cut her hair.
Kami-sama, she was brainless—
The floor zoomed closer to view. The man smashed her face down, and her swollen, broken nose crunched sickeningly upon the dusty ground. Blood gushing from her face, Rei cried out.
A breathless wave of pain crashed through her veins, unlocking the deeply frozen lock within her. A shiver erupted throughout her body, as the knot in her core froze harder and harder. But there were only goosebumps, no frost—
At her failure, Rei squeezed her eyes shut. She was a Himura. At her birth, Rei had been born encased in steaming ice. But she hadn't called her birthright for far too long—
Mercilessly, the man swung her back up again. Crystallized blood plinked from her nose, and Rei desperately unleashed another wave of pain towards her quirk's core.
This time, her hand grew cold—a jagged dagger of ice formed instantly in her palm, and with a cry, Rei swung it backward at her assailant's hand.
Before long, it bit heavily into something solid. Droplets of blood sprayed vigorously, and the man howled in agony. Slashed pale hair flew through the air, and with a gasp, Rei stumbled forward as he released his hold on her. Her dagger of ice clattered to the floor, its bloodstains hissing with a crackle.
"You bitch!"
Deaf to the man's guttural curses, the matriarch limped with all the strength she could muster while whipping her head around to see her surroundings. To her utter surprise, a door of steel stood a few steps away. An icicle of hope ripped through Rei at the sight. Outside meant hope. Outside was her children—
Drops of sweat froze on her forehead, pulling at her skin. With bated breaths, Rei hauled herself towards the door. She finally reaches it, panting with exhaustion, and heavily slumps against the door as she tries to open it. Her frost-covered hand weakly grips the door handle, then with a wrench, the door creaks open.
Before her eyes were rice paddies—full of budded golden plants, swaying and swelling with wind. The sun glows with an autumn intensity, searing into her eyes, yet Rei staggers through the door, hope becoming life within her veins. Please—!
Then cold metal pierced through her back. It jutted through her bone and muscle with a stunning ferocity, and all Rei could do was to let go of her door. She fell, too stunned to even let a cold wisp of air escape her bluish lips.
The matriarch collapses onto the ground, gasping. Liquid rises within her, and with it, chunks of frozen blood prickles inside her throat.
And right there, Rei nearly gives up.
"Todoroki-San. You can't dare to escape punishment. " The man enunciates every syllable with thinly veiled rage. "You know the saying. The child bears the sins of the parent. That murderer, Dabi—," His voice becomes garbled, strangled with wrath, "—was brought up by your hands. For that, I can never forgive you!"
He leans over her, his hazel eyes ablaze with vengeance. And hate. So much hate. But within Rei's eyes, they blaze with a furor. A furor that vowed to never break, to never lose—the sight is so familiar to her. It's of her husband.
Hazel morphs to cold, burning cyan, and as the man leans over her to slip out another knife, his eyes makes Rei's psyche shift upside down—
.
.
She was a fool to think that Enji wouldn't notice her trembling thighs when he leaned over her with his massive frame.
His hands stilled, then loosened on her bare hips. Surprised, Rei peeked through her pale lashes up at her husband. Unexpectedly, he snapped his gaze away from her immediately, yet she already saw an unusual flicker of uncertainty in his narrowed eyes, usually filled with cyan iron-will.
At the sight, an understanding rose up within her mind. Rei felt a certain camaraderie, the realization that she wasn't the hesitant one—but before she could blurt out a quivering reassurance, Enji had folded himself away, wrestling his body away from her with surprising agility.
"Let's do it tomorrow," He muttered. He slid over to his futon, refusing to meet her gaze.
Stunned, Rei stared at his backside, holding her shedded clothes together in a vice grip. How come he suddenly changed his mind?
Tearing her eyes from his backside, she then slipped on the sleeves of her yukata in extreme confusion. Cold relief splashed forcefully over her puzzlement, her stiffened muscles slowly relaxing their tension. Yet Rei didn't know what to feel.
After retying the knot of her garment, she numbly lifted the edges of her cool blanket and slid within them, breathlessly settling in without a noise. The awkward atmosphere smothered her lungs, banding them tight. So he had noticed.
As she slowly mulled his decision over in her head, the pale-haired girl hesitantly began to conclude that he had stopped for her sake. Not that he lost his nerve.
Maybe her husband wasn't as hardened as he seemed to be.
For the next few hours, her body remained frozen. Her bones stayed stiff. Then Rei's eyes fluttered with exhaustion from her busy day, and her limbs slowly eased into sleep, the day's tension released.
Perhaps we can peacefully sleep together.
But her budding hope got extinguished when the intimidating enigma, Todoroki Enji, suddenly got up from his futon, tatami mats creaking. Alert, her brown eyes snapped open.
For a moment, it seemed like he did nothing but stand there. Rei could feel his eyes sweeping over her still form so she steadied her breathing.
Is he going to do anything now?
A tiny shard of hope appeared. Perhaps they could talk, or at least, do something together, for he hadn't said a single word throughout the whole ceremony and day.
Without a word, he then stepped outside, before sharply sliding the paper door behind him. Rei numbly settled back on her mat, her eyes squeezed shut with unexpected hurt.
A pain pulses in her stomach, but Rei ignores it anyway. Slipping away into sleep, her body feels as if she is sinking through the mat and through the wooden floor, down, down below. Her mind dissolves, and a wide field of rice is before her—
.
.
Her broken body was being hauled somewhere.
Swish, swish.
The rice plants swayed in the wind, their fat buds dangling. Rei drifted in and out of consciousness.
From the past, the strong aroma of the grassy tatami mats swung in the air, drifting past her nose with a warm, summer wind. Then the scent shifted. It was now damp with watery mud and the musty odor of over-ripened rice.
Her ice-covered, open flesh scraped along the gravel road, as the man dragged her on and on. Then he stopped. He hauled her up on something, hastily made with smooth stones and mud.
Twigs and gravel cut into her torn back, but Rei couldn't say a word or express anything. Her lips were plugged with jagged frost. If she even had the strength to open them, her flesh would rip into two.
Nor could her eyes express her anguish. Her tears bubbled, then cooled under the sheen of ice that blocked her tear ducts. The ice refused to melt. All her emotions that were held back during her harrowing days of her marriage, all her hidden rage, her bitterness—kept her temperature as frigid as Siberia.
But her ice couldn't encase her mind.
So the past trickled through her consciousness, as the man set her aflame.
Her infant's cry. The soft down of Touya's head as she held him close, gasping with exertion with her first birth.
Fuyumi's carefree laughter. Her hair swinged gracefully through the air like a white cardinal, as she appeared around Rei's door.
The brusk footsteps of Natsu echoed in the hallways of their home. They ran toward her, as she collapsed to the floor, her mind whirling out of control.
The air became charcoal. Then the scent of melted ice, then the steam of boiling water brushed her nostrils—-
Shoto's scream as she flung boiling water on his face, wild with terror.
The rattle of her room's tv as her oldest son appeared on screen. Hands clasped, and hair white as death.
As the flames crackled over her head, her eyes began to still. Her stare bored holes into the sky, as her bones burned for hours. Rei slipped into the darkness, with her regret stinging greatly.
It had all been too late.
.
.
Or so she thought.
The darkness lightens, with the black spots slowly disappearing. Figures swarm around her, crowding her gaze. As her eyes gradually cleared, Rei slowly realized that they were humans who were robed in white and burgundy, calling for each other with an air of graveness—
"Todoroki-San! Are you alright?" A pink-haired nurse in burgundy scrubs shook Rei lightly. As the woman stared into the distance, the nurse whipped her eyes back and forth from her face and the monitor nearby, hurriedly adjusting its dials. "I found you on the floor when I went to take you from the therapy center for your visitors–"
A doctor, creased with age and seriousness, reached for her eyes with a tiny flashlight. "Todoroki-San, please blink once." Frozen, Rei obliged a few seconds later. "Good. Now, the other."
The woman set down her tiny flashlight and performed the other parts of her exam before speaking. "Todoroki-San, your vitals and blood pressure seem to be fine. I don't know why you suddenly collapsed like that, but—"
"Okaa-san!"
A young, shrill voice suddenly pierced through her muted ears, and Rei turned, unconsciously craning her neck toward the voice, feeling a familiar stirring within her. It was no stranger; it was familiar—no, more than familiar.
A lithe girl appeared around the door, her brown eyes alight with alarm. The nurses tried to stall her, but she pushed through their arms with surprising strength. "Okaa-san!" The girl called, reaching out to her. "Are you okay?!"
Blank, Rei stared at her in absolute silence.
/
After many years in the psychiatric ward, she finally arrived home. The bamboo swished in the wind rhythmically, and Fuyumi, fully-grown and bespectacled, ran out of the main doors. Her wavy hair, pale with crimson streaks, is lustrous in the sunlight, and her eyes are filled with brown joy.
"Okaa-san!" Fuyumi crushed Rei in her warm embrace before reaching for Rei's cold hands. She smiled through tears, ear to ear. "Welcome Home!"
/
Her brain suddenly whirred alive, as if someone re-started it, and her body burst upright from the bed. Rei crashed onto the floor, and staggered over to her.
"Fuyumi!"
Arms outstretched, she latched onto her daughter, almost blindly through tears. In her delirious joy, Reí forgot to register the shrunken stature of her daughter or her wide, un-bespectacled eyes through her heaving sobs.
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A few days later.
For what seemed like an eternity, Todoroki Enji stared at the banks of the river.
The sky was dark as the evening star arose, streaking the clouds indigo. Water lapped calmly onto the shore, reflecting the dying sunset's colors. It was painfully clear, almost like glass, yet it darkened the moist sand that sank under his feet.
Then something bobbed in the distance, rippling the calm waters—Enji craned his neck, squinting his ruined eyes to see it, and it finally drifted towards him, washing languidly ashore in front of him. He bent down, and held it up in the dying light. Yet as he was about to place a name to the object, the soft sediment shifted under him, revolving the world upside down—
"Endeavor-Sama? Endeavor?"
Shaken out of his focused reverie, Enji immediately trained his eyes on Burnin', his second in command. She peeked her blazing head through his office's doors, with a concerned look on her round face.
It looked like time had rewinded her—her face was less creased with stress lines, her cheeks round and rosy. At the present, she was only an amateur pro-hero, freshly recruited from the recent batch of UA graduates, but Enji couldn't forget the image of her blood-streaked face of pure exhaustion at the final battle—
The future flashing within his mind, the pro-hero mentally shook his mind to disperse the image. He couldn't afford to be shakened; he needed to act strong, to be strong for now. "Yes?"
She strode inside his office and shut the door behind her, her gait uncertain but steady. "I… I have the report from yesterday, sir."
Without a word, he took it, skimming through its pages without the ferocious intensity from his younger years. "Anything else, Burnin'?"
At her acknowledged hero name, the pro-heroine brightened considerably at Enji's recognition. "Not at all, sir."
Enji remembered his initial indifference to her with smarting guilt, only acknowledging her once she began to advance from her early mistakes during her first years at his agency. Do better, whispered his consciousness, his regret swiftly brushing by. He then dismissed her with a nod. "You may go then."
He could see that she was fighting to keep her grin from spreading fiercely across her face. "Yes, sir." Burnin' replied, then sharply bowed and left the office promptly.
As soon as the doors shut, Enji eased himself back onto his chair before rubbing his forehead with a sigh. His unscarred hand ghosted over the left side of his face, its coarse scar now gone. Another proof. Another evidence that he was in the past—
/
When Enji came back from the dead, he found himself inside his room. He lay inside there, dark and cold for a few hours—tormented by the phantom burn pain that struck across his body like electricity and the memories that ran through his torn mind.
He was too shocked to even grieve.
It took Enji everything to process the fact that he was in the past—and if it weren't for his housekeeper, he couldn't rouse himself and momentarily break through his torpor to realize that his present self needed to call his agency. In the end, he was forced to take a day's leave from his pro-hero work—something that his younger self would have greatly scoffed at.
The next morning, he sat there in the dark, deeply brooding over his current younger self would have left the house at the crack of dawn, but Enji couldn't bring himself to come out. His children were out there. He needed to think of something, something that would be an olive branch to finally start to healing them and their relationship—
And he was ashamed to his core to realize that he didn't know what to do.
Then the quiet pattering of feet was heard outside his room, and Enji slowly turned his head towards the door.
There was a pause, and a tiny clatter ensued as a tray was left on the floor. A feminine voice, thin and reedy, quavered behind the door.
"Otousan?"
Enji's heart stopped.
Fuyumi.
Unknowing of her father's immense turmoil, Fuyumi continued, hesitant hope and wariness pitching her voice high. "Y-You haven't had breakfast yet… So I thought I should bring you some…"
At his daughter's voice of worry, Enji bowed his head. His eyes burned with shame. Then he stood up, the wooden floor panels creaking, and walked towards the door, opening it just as his daughter turned to leave.
"Fuyumi."
At her name, his daughter froze. Fuyumi then turned back to face him timidly, dwarfed by his towering height. "…Yes, Otousan?"
In surprise and growing marvelment, Enji stared down at her. It was as if his daughter had shrunken to her younger self—she seemed to be around fourteen or fifteen?—with her stature more petite and frail.
Fuyumi was tense, with her lips pursed with nervousness. As she looked at him, her eyes widened at his fire-less face before hurriedly avoiding his direct gaze, and for the first time, Enji noticed the dark circles underneath her tired, brown eyes.
I never noticed that my own daughter was suffering.
To hide his watery eyes, Enji bent down and picked up the tray that Fuyumi left for him. On it was a sizable dollop of steaming white rice, harusame soup, and a small portion of kuzumochi, drizzled with black sugar syrup. "….I'm not going to eat this here, Fuyumi."
Hope faltering across her face, Fuyumi lowered her head. "I-I see. I'll take it then, Otousan."
She reached out to take the tray back, but Enji shook his head. "No, Fuyumi. I'm going to eat this in the dining room."
Fuyumi blinked in surprise. Enji knew that it was because of his younger self's habit of never eating at the dining room with his family, and internally gritted his teeth at his younger self's wrongs. Without a warning, his hesitant hand reached toward his daughter, and lightly brushed a pat on her head. "Thank you, Fuyumi."
His ungainly hand drifting to his side, Enji then made his way down the hallway with the tray, pausing when he realized that his daughter wasn't following him. He turned, and saw that his daughter stood there, frozen with shock.
"Fuyumi, are you coming?"
At his question, Fuyumi unfroze and scrambled up behind him. "I'm coming."
Enji was about to move on, but another thought resounded forcefully across his chest. "And Fuyumi?"
Fuyumi stared up at him, wide with alert surprise. "Yes?"
"Tell Natsu that you and him are now allowed to talk to Shōto."
/
Brrr-tre! Brrr-tre! Brrr-tre!
The sound of his phone ringing snipped through Enji's strings of memory of the day before, making him realize that he was still inside his agency office. Taking his phone from a hidden pocket inside his suit, he saw the caller"s name.
Doctor Inazu, read his phone screen. Enji frowned deeply. Something about the name rang a bell in the recesses of his mind. He slid open the call and placed it near his ear.
"Todoroki-Sama, I have news for you. Your wife wishes for her official dischargement from the ward."
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A/N: To be honest, I don't know how well I wrote this chapter, but I know that there were some moments that I had to stop writing to stop myself from tearing up :)
By the way, my sister says that Endeavor seems to be a lot different than how she remembered him to be, but I reasoned that he changed because the trauma of (technically killing his son).
Any thoughts on the chapter?