章 1: Chapter 1: twilight
Summary:
twilight: (n.) The time after sunset or before sunrise when the sky is not fully dark; the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon, caused by the refraction and scattering of the sun's rays from the atmosphere.
The first fifteen years.
Notes:
A rough prologue. Things will start picking up soon. :)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Memory is fickle. It isn't like the floodgates just open and voila, there's all the knowledge of a life, of another person's experiences. Human brains don't work that way. We have pattern-matching machines that encode and store and retrieve on cue, and good luck trying to remember small details in order if you didn't take the time or care to learn or memorize them in order.
Which is to say that I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be dead.
There isn't a singular moment in time where it's possible to point out that revelation. The human brain develops slowly, and a baby doesn't have object permanence. It takes a while before the finger in front of my face becomes my finger, the curl of the hand my hand.
By the time I realize oh, this is weird, I've induced a combustion reaction where the fuel is nothing, I've cupped your hands around a small flame, warming them because the house is always cold.
The house is always cold, and Father's face is always warm, and when he sees the cupped hands his face changes. The corners of his mouth go up. Mother has the same expression on her face, but it is smaller and (something that the oldest brother whispers under his breath, throat tight) sadder.
I miss math, and physics, and free body diagrams and the world making sense. I miss clean diagrams drawn with rulers and the sweet simplicity of the world narrowing down to an equation.
I miss the stars.
All that exists in this house is Father and his fire, Mother and her ice. The world has seen fit to have their child inherit both. It puts the laws of physics in my hands again, the mind learning what the body remembers (the transfer of heat is the universe balancing out), and for that, at least, I am grateful.
And then Mother upends a teakettle over my head, and I trip – stumble – fall over when I try to curl over myself, protect my eyes from the hot water, and then Mother is whispering, murmuring, the ice is coming to try and soothe the hot, hot, hotter than the fire has ever gotten –
Father sends Mother to the hospital. He uses the familiar words, but there is already a ringing in the ears, in my ears, and I know I've seen this song and dance before.
You're not my Father, someone whispers inside my skull, but the evidence is staring at me in the mirror. Mother poured hot water over the head of her child, hot enough to leave a third-degree burn, because of it.
The evidence is there, but it's also a true statement. Schrodinger's cat, the voice whispers again, and it sounds like me. It is me. (I think, therefore I am.)
And, another truth: You're supposed to be dead.
The week after, eldest brother – my eldest brother, he is yours in the way your hands and your fingers are yours – Touya-nii ends up in the hospital.
He doesn't leave it.
He's dead, says the snapshot-memories of longer pianist's fingers and carefully shortened nails, and you're supposed to be dead, and your two older siblings walk around the house like they might as well be.
What a family this makes.
The body remembers only because of the brain. Life is private tutors – homework – training – eat dinner under the strict orders of the nutritionist that Father had hired – sleep. Rinse and repeat.
Math is easy. Physics is easier. Thermodynamics is relevant and one of the first things taught in the dojo that Father insists on using.
One year goes by; then two. There are no birthday parties, and the sight of cakes in bakery windows reminds me of It's your birthday, so of course I bought you a cake! You think I forgot?
I research psychology and brain development by myself. There's no way that I'm being haunted by a ghost, because there are more people worthy of being haunted than the son of Endeavor, the Number Two Hero. The man himself, for example. Maybe the Number One Hero if the ghosts were villains.
But the science is familiar, and it explains a lot. It explains everything.
I run my finger below Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory after the third time I'd raised my arms up to the sky, then bent over at the waist, in stretches that Father never uses and my Mother never taught but that I remember doing every morning for as long as I can remember. It aids the performance of particular tasks without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.
Nobody wants to give a ten-year-old a textbook on neuroscience and brains and child development, but the internet is a wondrous thing, and no private tutor ever wants to face Endeavor's wrath on a particularly bad week.
Older Sister – Fuyumi-nee – asks what I'm reading, just once.
"Mom said I didn't have to be a hero," I tell her. She blanches, her face going white. Her eyes flick toward the door, as if Father is just around the corner and listening in, just waiting for a hint of rebellion.
But she turns back to me after one moment, then two, of nothing happening, and there is something in her eye. I don't recognize it. "I thought you wanted to make your powers your own, like All Might said?"
The Number One Hero did say that on the TV, but a memory of a voice says People say a lot of things on TV for a lot of different reasons.
"I am," I tell her, because it's true. Fire might have been the thing that made my Mother snap but That poor woman, she didn't realize that "Heat comes before fire, and there's a lot you can do with heat."
Fuyumi-nee doesn't look like she believes me, but she never comes to training so she wouldn't know. Father thinks I should have skipped this step years ago, continues to push for brighter, hotter, bigger flames, but there is a lot that you can do with fire.
There's a lot you can do with fire with ice, and that's the only thing that stops me from burning Father in his sleep: he pays for Mother's medical bills still.
I miss the math. I miss the stars.
The stars are different here from what procedural-memory-raised-hands-to-trace-out-lines says they should be, and that, I think, is the worst.
(Don't make it too easy, Fuyumi-nee whispers at one point. Slow down. Don't let them know what you can do.
She doesn't look at my closet with its false backing, but Fuyumi-nee is Fuyumi is Fuyumi. She hadn't asked why I was reading books on brains, not after that one time, and her advice is well-founded.
Father – Endeavor – wants a hero son. So that's all that he's going to get.)
The next year, Fuyumi-nee turns eighteen and leaves the house as soon as she can, using the excuse of higher education. It leaves me and Father in the house. It leaves our brother Natsuo-nii in the house.
He is silent at dinner and quick to vanish afterwards. He has Mother's hair and Mother's eyes. He always hides when Father needs to go from room to room.
He never visits when Father barges into my room in the middle of the night for training, and he never looks me in the eye afterwards.
At least Fuyumi-nee had the decency to acknowledge it. But what can he do?
Algebra doesn't have the answer, and neither does trigonometry. In the end, it is Newton who does: force equals mass times acceleration. The law of inertia, the thing that makes an object thrown into the air come back down. What is already in motion will be difficult to stop, and vice versa.
A lifetime of making yourself small and avoiding the man who thought you a failure didn't make for an easy habit to break.
And maybe it's better that Natsuo-nii never visits. I freeze the dojo walls and leave Father with frostbite when he throws me against them, and fire is bad but maybe reminding him of Mother would be worse.
"Why won't you use the fire?" Father yells – demands – asks. "You're using it to make heat, you idiot boy – the flames should be the logical next step!"
But letting things burn is easy: the universe tends towards disorder, and by very nature a combustion reaction is disordered. It is a far better usage of time and training to achieve the fine motor control of causing fingers-palms-knuckles to smoke, to make the air above them shimmer with heat, but never let it reach combustion.
And how do you create ice? Most Quirk handbooks describe it as willing what you want to happen to happen, but the universe is more complicated than that. Something cannot be created from nothing. Matter must come from somewhere. Ice is frozen water molecules in lattice, solid form, and the amount of ice that can be created is limited to the humidity of the air.
I spit blood out of my mouth and try to wipe it off with the back of my left hand. It smokes and smells acrid, like burning blood always does. "Because there's more than one way to use a Quirk."
The next hour and a half are bloody and full of fire, but it had been worth it for the mad look in the man's eye.
Here's the thing: brains are complicated, and memory is fickle, and maybe without the math and the physics and the stars I would think the only way out is being a hero.
But with knowledge comes perspective – with knowledge comes power – and there are more ways out than playing Endeavor's game.
The internet is a beautiful, beautiful place; Japan values its blood relations; and after the age of majority, anyone can open a bank account.
Treat yourself to something nice, says the text from an unknown number, but Fuyumi-nee had gotten a work-study recently and she knows how to stock a first aid kit and a go-bag because she'd taught Natsuo-nii and I how to do it before she'd left. She knows what she's doing. Natsuo-nii knows it, too, if the way he pries up the floorboards under his bed and keeps an extra change of clothes and emergency cash in his schoolbag is any proof.
I leave a thumbs-up on her message and put my phone away. Cash is better than check is better than favors owed, and everyone recognizes the boy with split hair colors. The aspect of the Todoroki heritage that gave me the two halves of thermodynamics split into the left and right side of my body is the same one that keeps me under self-imposed house arrest, because everyone recognizes my face.
(You're ten, Fuyumi-nee had hissed last year. You should be a child.
She's in university to learn how to be a teacher, and Fuyumi-nee – elder sister – isn't stupid. There's a reason why she's picked that subject, picked that age bracket.
Natsuo-nii pretends not to notice; I pretend not to care.)
I don't remember dying. But that's how it goes, isn't it? That's what all the books and articles and interviews on brains and human memories say. If it's traumatic enough, you forget.
I don't remember Mother and the kettle, not really, and I don't remember Touya-nii and the accident. But it's the logical conclusion – three for three – pianist's fingers and physics calculations on graph paper and a telescope set up in the backyard to peek at Mars.
There should be a beginning or at the very least an ending, but all I get are the bits in the middle. How typical.
The work gets harder. The training goes on longer. Father drags me out of bed five times a week instead of the previous three, and though he's given up on making me use fire, he hasn't given up on ice.
What goes through his head, I wonder, almost banally as I curl up on the dojo floor. Beneath the ringing in my ears I can hear someone wheezing. I thought to have the strongest hero is the entire point of this family?
It's something Father has mentioned time and again. Fuyumi and Natsuo didn't demonstrate better capabilities than he did, so they weren't trained. Touya died, and it was an accident, and it was tragic. Have you prayed to your elder brother lately, Shouto?
I have not, because Touya-nii is dead, and I am not, and if spirits are real then he would have haunted Father already. Of that, I have no doubt. Like the way the sky is big and water is wet: Touya-nii had cared for Fuyumi-nee, but he had loved Natsuo-nii. If an afterlife or ghosts exist then he would have come back for Natsuo-nii at least.
But he hasn't. The private tutors swap out at the end of the year like clockwork. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen years and change, or so the calendar says, but it feels like it's been longer.
For Natsuo-nii's eighteenth birthday, he moves out, too.
On my birthday, Father signs me up for the U.A. Recommendation Entrance Exam.
"U.A. is the high school with the best heroics certification," he says. "You will have the advantage of both Quirk and academics. I fully expect you to succeed."
I had known better than to hope. I had known better, but still.
The written test is easy. The practical test, not so much. Though Father had encouraged conditioning and stamina, there hadn't exactly been a track on which to practice sprinting speed.
One of the other test-takers has a Whirlwind Quirk, and from the show-off at the beginning of the Entrance Exam, he knows how to use it to his advantage.
But what is wind? It's the displacement of air based on temperature difference. Unless the boy is physically moving the air molecules, but that would cost more energy than anyone would be willing to spend at an Entrance Exam –
Or not. Yoarashi Inasa blasts his way to first place, and the gust of wind generated from blasts of hot and cold air combined brings me to second.
"Congratulations, son of Endeavor!" Yoarashi says afterwards, and gives me a smile big enough to count teeth. "It was a passionate race!! Will you be my friend??"
…what.
"He…llo," I manage at last, when his grin hasn't flagged and it seems as though he's expecting an answer. "And. Sure."
Far be it from me to tell him what he can or cannot do. And besides, Yoarashi had announced his intentions already. He wants to be friends with the son of Endeavor.
"Let's be friends," I tell the widely grinning middle schooler, while meaning none of it.
The house is dark and silent when I get home after the entrance exam. Father will not be home for hours yet, and the cook has already been here and gone, packing away meal-prepped portions into the fridge.
When I check, there is a message from Fuyumi-nee that simply says, Congratulations.
One from Natsuo-nii that says, You don't have to do this, you know.
(He'd offered to take me with him, but there was no way that Father would let that go. He would drag me back, kicking and screaming if he had to, because there was no future in his mind where I would not be a Pro Hero.)
And a third from the new number that brought my contacts list up to five: I enjoyed competing with you today, Todoroki-san!!
How do you stay that passionate for heroism, I think but don't ask. Instead I close the notification without opening the chat (muscle memory, procedural memory, unconscious task performance) and dig through the refrigerator for dinner.
U.A. sends their acceptance holograph straight to the Todoroki house. Father asks about it that night at training, because of course his Agency would be abuzz with news. All of the internet was, with student message boards and parental forums alike alight with gossip.
The next day, bruises from training concealed under the makeup that Fuyumi-nee had taught me how to paint on before she'd left for university, sees me on campus.
More than one person try to say hi, but Natsuo-nii picked a good pair of headphones for his own congratulatory gift, and after five minutes of me playing asleep to dead air and eavesdropping on their classroom first-day-of-school excitement, they stop trying to talk to me.
Which is good. Because after all, I won't be in the Heroics track for long. As soon as I've carried out my plan of failing out of the class, I'll be transferred into the General Education department like I need to be if I want to take up Fuyumi-nee on her offer for me to go to her university for astronomy.
クリエイターの想い 
IAmGOD
IAmGOD You can't just say that somebody creates fire from nothing but also can create ice from nothing, that's not how the universe works
So Shoto can still create fire/ice like he does in canon, and does so during spars and fights. However, he has an intimate, molecule-level physics-based understanding of what he's doing, which is that his body has endothermic and exothermic properties. As such, he can also do things like generate wind via rapidly fluctuating temperatures of air.
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