"She's yours."
"Prove it."
In response to the giant man's lackadaisical nonchalance, I exerted myself a little bit and conjured up a wisp of white flame. It wasn't much to be impressive of, barely more than a small orb, but the man's eyes bulged with what I could reasonably believe to be fear… and then excitement?
"Mutation?" The man was beside himself by now, pacing around the room and giving her side glances, as if afraid she would vanish into the air. "The Nanako Forest fire?"
"No, none of that matters. Go, leave now. I'll make sure to properly compensate you."
"Leave? What the hell do you mean by that Enji?" My mother demanded angrily.
"It's not your business anymore," he said coldly. "You've given me a very fine birthday present indeed."
The two moved to a different room to bicker, preventing me from continuing to eavesdrop. Not that they suspected me anyway - I was much too young for them to care about, and even if I did hear something sensitive, it was probably assumed that I would forget with time. Most children were like that. Except for me.
I remembered.
After the conclusion of the argument, I never saw my mother again.
I was taken to a vast, sprawling estate built in the traditional style, with tatami mat flooring and paper walls straight out of the sixteenth century. The man who I now understood to be my father led me through the house, his far larger hand palming my own as he pulled me along.
"You're Todoroki Tanya now," Enji stated brusquely, his tone indicating more command than statement of fact. Enji pushed the doors open and walked me in. Three faces swivelled and turned to meet her. None of them looked happy to see Enji.
"Tanya will be joining you all from today on," Enji announced. "She's your sister."
The room then promptly exploded.
The eldest, a white-haired girl, looked aghast. "How could you?" She said reproachfully, glaring at Enji. "After what happened to Mom? No - this was before!"
I personally thought it was interesting that infidelity was the first assumption they jumped to, even if it was the correct one. Enji's other children didn't even extend to him the benefit of the doubt of adoption.
Enji wasn't fazed in the slightest. "Your mother was unstable and abusive, and I sought comfort in a moment of weakness Fuyumi. Please make Tanya feel welcome. I need to go handle the press."
Enji thus departed, snapping the door shut with an audible thud and leaving her to the mercy of her half-siblings.
Without exception, I was immediately shunned by everyone present.
Even Fuyumi, whom Enji had said would welcome me didn't talk to me. The others, Natsuo and Shoto as I came to learn, didn't give me the time of day either.
My existence was anathema to them, such that they even avoided making eye contact with me even if we were right next to each other. Whenever I met them in the hallways, they would go the other way, at dinners, they would sit at separate corners, and even in sleep, I would find no respite from their shunning, for Natsuo moved his bed out of the room they shared so he could be away from me.
Unlike what the others might have expected, I actually appreciated that they didn't bother me. It gave me peace and quiet, and I was able to idle my time away without the chattering of children being forced into my eardrums constantly.
Still, that didn't stop me from cursing Being X with every fiber of my body. Curse you Being X! It wasn't enough to reincarnate me once! Shame on you, you scoundrel! You hooligan! You false deity!
My scorn was not reciprocated by heavenly punishment or any out-of-body experience, so I had to suffer myself to make breakfast once again,
Enji hadn't come back for the past week, too busy was he in dealing with the press and his infidelity scandal, but I knew the beast that was his PR Team was turning and twisting the story in his favor already. I could practically hear the cogs spin.
Since none of the others bothered me or wanted association with me, I had learned to make myself busy by practicing control over my quirk.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed, and a blaze of white fire roared into existence above my hands.
Although I couldn't feel it, I knew the heat to be oppressive from the way the air distorted and rippled around the fire. The cloth beneath me started to blacken and char just by mere proximity, so I quickly dispelled the flames before the house burned down.
I disciplined myself carefully and released the fire again, but this time, I strained to the utmost and only a tiny wisp came out, just like when I'd shown Enji for the first time.
My control has gotten shoddy. If only Rudersdorf could see me now.
The dangerous nature of my quirk in itself wasn't the problem - it was the fact that heat built up over time in my body if I didn't create any fire.
Like a blazing volcano, I grew gradually hotter with every passing day that I didn't use my quirk. Although it was of no personal consequence to me, there was a very marked financial consequence towards my surroundings: namely, the heat emanating from my body set fire to everything flammable nearby, and given enough time, I suspected that I could even boil the fluid right out of a human body if someone sat too close to me.
Now, the obvious solution to preventing heat buildup was to create fire and release it outward, but that came with its own set of problems.
My fire was hard to control. I could almost describe as a rabid beast struggling against its chains, and the slightest lapse in my attention would be like unlocking its restrictions and letting it run wild. The moment I created any fire, it would attempt to explode out and consume everything around me.
Through the sacrifice of many rocks and boulders in Nanako Forest, I'd slowly developed a semblance of control over my quirk, enough to barely control its release, but still not enough to do anything further. Each time I let out my fire, I would let it incinerate a rock into ash before quashing the flame forcefully.
The one time I tried to go further, I burned most of the forest down.
My mistake was in letting the fire devour an entire three boulders. When the boulder had been fully carbonized, I tried to quash the fire as usual but it resisted my efforts. That was the day I found out my fire grew stronger the more things it burned.
The firefighters who came to put out the forest fire were unable to suppress the flames I left behind. According to the incident report given to the news, the flames appeared to be almost adhesive in nature, spreading and sticking like glue to the trees, the soil, the gravel, and everything in its path. Water only served to mollify the fire briefly before it erupted ever hotter than before, rapidly growing and spreading outwards without stopping.
In the end, several teams of quirk specialist firefighters was called in and successfully eliminated the white fire using a special foam solution developed by Apollo, a big Pro-Hero support company specializing in disaster control.
That was the incident which led mother to bring me to Enji. The cost of damages to the forest area was much too great for her to bear, so she had come to Enji in the hopes of getting him to pay it off.
She'd done more than succeed. And now, I was a Todoroki.
Things weren't all bad though. I wasn't a child soldier in this life, and there didn't seem to be any active wars going around in my country, nor did I foresee a war happening.
During my free time, which was the entire day, I would occasionally do research on the state of the world and the political economy. I already knew plenty since mother was a journalist and liked to talk about her work, and gaining access to a laptop only furthered my world awareness.
If I really thought about it, Being X had done me a solid this time. My 'start point', if it could be called that, was far more generous than last time - indeed, I no longer needed to live on bread crumbs or army rations, and I could wake up and eat a full breakfast every morning without fighting orphanage kids to get scraps of food.
The only downside... was that my current world seemed to be seized by the craze of costumed heroics and dastardly villains straight out of a Golden Age American comic. Furthermore, nearly everyone had a unique superpower called a quirk, with only 20% of the population lacking quirks. I could scarcely imagine the logistical nightmare that the government faced in trying to deal with a population of people with superpowers who could disregard the laws and become criminals at any time if they wanted. In a society where even common criminals, let alone supervillains had powers, you had to kind of admire the government for keeping things under control.
As a former human resources manager, I definitely appreciated the logistics behind the stable functioning of society in my current world.
I was enjoying the breakfast I made when Enji burst through the doors.
"Come," he beckoned. "We must test your quirk and its limits."
Enji had finally come back from dealing with the public backlash of his infidelity, and his PR team had indeed managed to shift public opinion as I had predicted.
His first wife was 'mentally unstable' and caused him much distress, forcing him to seek comfort in the arms of another woman. As a Pro-Hero working constantly and tirelessly in a high stress environment, Endeavor naturally couldn't be blamed for making a mistake like that… right? Well, that was the public's opinion now.
I followed him without any complaints to an ominous looking bunker door covered in fire hazard symbols, and Enji heaved the doors opened with his bare hands. Inside was a massive chamber filled with exercise equipment, various fire suppression systems like sprinklers and foam sprayers, and what I even suspected to be a support device capable of creating a localized vacuum. Perhaps that last one was too absurd. My imagination was getting the better of me probably.
Enji pointed me towards a meter tall block of metal. "Release your fire onto that," he ordered. "Try your best to make your fire as hot as possible."
I obliged, sending out a small wisp of white fire to cover the metal block. The fire quickly spread outward and towards the floor, but Endeavor stopped it with his own flames by creating a ring of fire around the block. When my white flames made contact with his orange ones, it reacted violently, rearing up almost like a living being and furiously trying to consume Enji's fire.
Enji just snorted and increased the temperature of his flames, suppressing my white fire until it was forced back onto the metal block instead of spreading outwards. He let the white fire burn the block for a few minutes, before extinguishing it completely.
"It should be hotter than that," he muttered with disappointment. "Why isn't it melting?"
I knew then that the time to show my personal worth had come. Although I wasn't confident in my analysis, it was the only plausible reason I could think of: Enji was looking for a successor. I mean, marrying an ice quirk user? And Shoto being able to use ice and fire? The whispered conversations I'd heard from behind doors talking about his brutal training sessions with Enji, and how Enji ranted constantly about making him surpass All Might?
His marriage had definitely been a quirk marriage, of that there was no doubt. Even my own mother - the only reason Enji had even bothered to cheat with her was probably because he'd seen potential for synergy in her quirk.
There was only one logical conclusion to make of the current situation. Enji was testing my worthiness as a possible heir.
"My fire gets hotter the more things it burns," I told him quickly, afraid that I would start losing value in Enji's eyes. "If you give me a few consumables to burn, it adds to the heat and intensity of my fire."
That got Enji's interest.
He hauled in a few other types of metal blocks for me, ones with lower melting points, and once I set them alight with my flames, they began to immediately melt as they were consumed by the fire. Once I'd incinerated them all, I turned back to the original block which I now had guessed to be tungsten.
Melting point: 3422 celcius.
This time, there was a noticeable change. While the tungsten didn't melt quickly, it was melting, and the more it melted, the faster the reaction sped up as my fire grew stronger and hotter and more intense.
When it was done consuming the tungsten block, I was pale and struggling to control the fire from continuing to grow. Enji smothered my flames with his own, turning up the heat and opppressing the white fire. It struggled furiously like last time, but Enji formed a cage around it and quashed it into nothingness. Nothing of the block remained.
Enji was silent, staring at the spot where the tungsten block once stood. "Tell me more about your quirk."
"Heat builds up in my body whenever I don't create fire. If I go long enough, I start radiating heat and setting fire to things around me."
"Is it ever painful?" Enji asked softly, his voice indicating genuine interest this time. "Does your body ever heat up to the point that you feel uncomfortable?"
"No."
From the simultaneously jealous and excited expression on Enji's face, I knew that I had succeeded.
Enji put off the remaining tests after hearing that and brought me straight to get my quirk registered and named.
I had the perfect name in mind.
"Heavenflame." Enji smiled broadly as he read the words I'd written on the registration form, possibly the first time I'd ever seen him do so. "A wonderfully fitting name. How appropriate, that my hellflame has become heaven in your hands."
AN: I was inspired by A Young Woman's Political Record and Princess of Mandalore, both are great, you should go check them out if you have time. I've been wanting to write my own Tanya fic for a while, and I finally decided to get around to doing it today.
