Todoroki's fingers are burning. The sensation is vague, a sort of peripheral spark of pain delivered with the plain finality of a printed test result. Todoroki is not unfamiliar with it, this one of many sensations printed into the back of a winded mind in size-twelve Mincho-tai, and it would be simple, if not easy, to print it out for someone else's perusal. But such documents are meant to be restricted, at least in theory, so Todoroki lets the paramedic take in their resultant effects only, wiggling blue-tipped digits at the young woman's request, and watches with a detached sort of fascination as she frowns at their jerky movement.
It must be nice, Todoroki vaguely posits, to be her; to be free to worry about the troubles of the body as much as those of the mind.
"It's frostbite," she says, and rotates the hand in hers so it's palm up. The bloodflow to the region is blotchy, spots of pallor interspersing the flushed red of inflammation. The paramedic runs a thumb over the frozen flower-field, and the report comes in with nary a delay; the whole hand is hurt, an observation instantly confirmed by the young woman's worried comment. "Nearly to your wrist. Were you attacked by someone?"
"No. It's only my quirk." A shake of the head would probably be beneficial, here; Todoroki feels it move, more than does it. "I had to use it more than usual." And against a different enemy; but that is probably a given.
"You have an ice quirk?"
This is the part, Todoroki knows, when a person is meant to offer their quirk's name, and perhaps some details. Half-Hot, Half Cold is a familiar designation; printed in neat black characters, stamped with a loathsome certainty. It burns with microscopic shards of ice and miniature flames alike, seared into bicolour retinae like ink onto a pressed white shirt. "Yes," the reply comes, and nothing more, because Todoroki will never see this woman again, and vision coloured is vision ruined.
She purses her lips, her look disapproving. "You've really done a number on yourself," she says, as if Todoroki isn't well aware of the body's failings. "You should be more careful, next time. You can lose fingers from this, you know."
"I'm aware," Todoroki says, and doesn't touch the knowledge of what flesh looks like, rotting away on still-living bones. It's not that the image is somehow a pretty one; just that it's tired. Such a fate wouldn't be so bad, anyway. The Todoroki family has seen far worse.
She has a look on her face; a very specific, grown-up look, of reproach and irritation and it's-for-your-own good. It's not a pleasant one, the blank hearted notes observe; it writes broken lines and unpleasant distress in the frown-lines of her expression. But then she sighs, and lets the hand caught in hers go free. "Warm it up. Soak it in warm water if you can. Nothing too hot, and don't rub it. Try not to use that hand at all, until it's warmed and healed," she says, and Todoroki nods. The instructions are superfluous; the knowledge has been there, in Todoroki's head, as far back as memory goes. But there's no point to protest, and none to ignorance, either. So Todoroki nods.
"Alright," the woman says, with reluctance, as if she's tempted to drag the interaction on. She doesn't, though; the supposition crumples, thrown away with its failure to appear. "You can go home. Make sure you do what I told you to."
"Okay." The words are simple; easy to get out. Easy to escape a conversation with. They do their job; and Todoroki's legs walk to where they're meant to be.
"Do you think Sensei will be alright?" Satō whispers, at the end of class. He's more ashen than he was on his first day, even with the stressors of their teacher's rather unique methodology, and his eyes remain fixed on their teacher as the man shuffles, near-mummified, from the room. "I know he said not to worry... but it looks really bad, doesn't it?"
Kōda wrings his hands nervously. The fact that he's always nervous is spelled across his face; but this feels larger, bolder, a thicker typeface for a stronger state of being. "Maybe it's worse than it looks?" he murmurs back, barely audible over the racket of the rest of the students packing up their things, and Satō sighs in concern.
"It's gotta be!" Mineta proclaims, a little too loudly. "They wouldn't let him teach if it wasn't safe, right?" His voice is shrill; barely brushes the hysterical. It grates the bones; black ink spills into the handprints of a child. Mineta, surely, saw his first true terror yesterday. Todoroki would feel sorry for him, if there was time spare for it; but there isn't, and for such a trifling matter the sanctity of the eyes are hardly a fair trade. So the would-be-could-be pity drops away, and the will-be-always-be irritation blooms instead, an empty buzz in an empty mind.
"I don't think anyone could make Sensei do anything," Satō mutters. "Short of tying him down."
"Sensei," Tokoyami offers, "Is possessed of the spirit of a demon. With such darkness dwelling within him, such physical means would hardly affect him."
"Right," Mineta says. "So it - it can't be that bad?"
"Severity precludes nothing in the face of the dark," Tokoyami proclaims. Todoroki's gaze drifts to the dramatic teen's face; there's no hint of true mischief there, though, just a certain sense of florid, boyish drama, a name written by brush rather than pen.
Satō calls Todoroki's name; it flits to one ear and halfway out the other before it can be copied to paper, and by the time it's been read, Satō is always halfway through his sentence.
"Say that again?" Todoroki asks, and Satō repeats, obligingly,
"What about you? Your dad's a Pro, isn't he? D'you think Sensei's going to be alright?"
Todoroki thinks of bodies that survive anything thrown at them and come back stronger, angrier, deadlier, names written endlessly over-over in cheap newspaper type; and then thinks of bodies like broken glass, cobbled together with pieces sloughing off, explosive shards and intended fissures. Thinks of names stamped in red ink, and names written in it.
Somewhere, hovering between reality and the phantasmal, the eyes see fire, and don't agree whose it is, only that nobody will put it out.
"Why wouldn't he be?" Todoroki's voice asks, in that held-high, frozen-over manner, and the body wonders what mimicry it's meant for.
There is a clamour, of sorts, in the air locked into the school hallways and free around the public pavements alike; needles of curiosity from already-coloured eyes, ghosts of awe and concern in cocktails toxic and halfway-indulged-in, flecks of disdain and jealousy's foul-staining spray. The report of their presence floats, dispassionate, through Todoroki's air of calm, and lands on the cranial floor already dismissed. Fingers twitch, itching for something real, to crush, to discard, to distort into a crumpled mess and hurl away - anything, anything to clear the decade-or-more of backlog, anything to ease the downwards pressure on a blocked off throat and heart caged into a chest too small. Of course, nothing comes; the documents stack ever higher, shifting and slicing around phantasmal calves, and Todoroki's body's legs, whole and barely bitten by the shadows of a self split in two, take their form where it needs to go.
"My mother says it was inevitable," Yaoyorozu says, voice an elegant script. The pages curl through the air, translucent and rosy peach-blossoms tumbling from the tree. It occurs, to Todoroki, that for all her poise and grace, she seems all too aware of the ephemeral nature of her being. It's terrible to see, made worse through the eye's fog of water-spray; its counterpart catches what it can, tucks them away before the mind behind can panic at the sight of sodden pages and dark inks washed-out to grey and white. "It's awful of the media to milk this so much, of course, especially with their deplorable conduct that allowed the information to be leaked in the first place; but we must retain our poise, or else everything is for nothing."
Todoroki puppets a hand, numb with something not-quite-cold, anymore, and not-quite-not, still, to the classroom door. Pushes it open to let her in. Her smile is just a touch outside of the bounds of politeness; not so wide as Uraraka's, nor as unabashed as Ashido's, nor as wistful as Fuyumi's - not yet - but something lingers beneath, tentatively vivacious and sweet.
"It would be prudent," Todoroki says, "To focus on the criminals at hand, and not the students involved."
Yaoyorozu's smile twists at the corners, fine ligatures of a well-practiced brush. Her hair flows like strokes of a brush to frame the mild beauty of her face, the curves soft with a half-innocence, half-kindness Todoroki has no note of being afforded. "Perhaps," she agrees. "But accepting the iniquity of others is a sacrifice we must make as heroes, is it not?"
Todoroki's eye fixes itself on her; the writing is on the wall, blocky and official, ink running in the sorrow-blue and steam-white of a view tarnished by its colour. Yaoyorozu Momo, it proclaims, has accepted her fate; tied the knot on her own strings.
It is a shame, a post-it missive comments, even as Todoroki's voice, not-enough-father to bring itself to roar, not-enough-brother to bring itself to scream, hums out an agreement. Yaoyorozu's smile really is nice.
It will be missed, Todoroki thinks, the old horror stencilled in neat lines along the dark confines of a too-small ribcage, irrespective of whether the girl behind it turns to a poisoned heart, or else to be eaten alive. The head turns itself away in a motion of self-preservation; Yaoyorozu calls that all-too-familiar name, stamped by a hand forever unknowing of fruit-knives in its back, and the voice, at its blade-edge of damning resemblance, speaks a perfunctory reassurance. The presses print the words garbled, the ink bleeding through sodden pages; in the fog of premature regret, Todoroki fails to read them at all.
"Do you know who you - who you want to be?" the child asks, looking up from his scribble-covered notebook. "It doesn't - doesn't have to be complicated, you know. Just - just enough that you don't look like - well, um. You."
"Do you have examples?" Todoroki asks. Expectations, the mouth means; even if the rest truly hopes for the words in their written definition.
"Not for you," the child admits, but holds the notebook out anyway. The body reaches out automatically to take it, long before Todoroki has really thought much about it at all. "I have the sketches from myself, and my second, though."
The child's hand is rushed; the pen is low-quality and dry, and the precision of the strokes pales in comparison to even the sketches haphazardly rendered across the lined paper. Even in the absence of of reported evidence, something like a voice whispers in Todoroki's ear; this is not the child's best work. "These were meant to be you?"
"Ah? Oh, yes." The child settles over Todoroki's shoulder and points to a masked figure, all pointed ears and flowing form. The sketched-on fabric clings like a heroic bodysuit, the eye casually reports; the resemblance, in a vigilante, is uncanny. "That one was meant to be - to be more anonymous, but I didn't think I'd - didn't think I'd need it, that much. And - and it didn't feel right, you know?" His finger moves across the page, lands on a young, dark-haired man in a button-up and gloves, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, waistcoat containing the lot. "And this one! I almost - almost went with it, you know."
Todoroki eyes the sketch. Grown-up, the lines spell out in silver pencil; casually-controlled and with an odd counter-propriety. "Why didn't you?"
The child makes an odd noise; the sound filters through Todoroki's ears as if distorted by water, meaningless and incoherent. "I'm just a child," he says. "I didn't want to hide that."
He wants to be a child, the sketch at the far-right agrees, clumsy unadorned strokes steadfastly crisp before the humid, teary blue tinge that dyes all Todoroki's eye manages to catch. It makes no sense, even less so than the child's vague hums and odd aside-glances; but the longing, at least, for clear eyes and crisp paper, and bodies that move at one's own will; that, Todoroki can comprehend.
The notebook feels solid beneath the fingers that flip its pages; sketches of someone halfway between a girl and a young woman fill the next spread, twirling skirts and loose sleeves and kimonos in varying patterns, hair in all manner of styles. "This is your second?"
"Could have - could have been," the child corrects. "She's as much a child as I am, though. Most of these were too old."
Todoroki's eyes flick across the page; scribbled notes, mixed in with the child's own hand, flutter from their desks onto the ground, cursory with the rapid intake of too much information to handle. The cognitive pen sticks; the eyes stop on a short-haired figure in unpatterned clothings. "And this one?" the voice asks, and Todoroki catches up a moment too late, in the vague confusion of the figure's incongruence.
The child makes another inscrutable noise. "Oh, that one. Well, we - we considered it. It would have been a - a good disguise, really. But Ku - my second isn't - isn't much of a boy on the inside. And she wasn't sure she could - could be one on the outside, either. So we - scrapped the idea."
The sketches, Todoroki notes, are black and white. Blue soaks into one eye's notarised copies, discarded in the wake of the opposite's clarity; the white haze is nowhere to be found. The words, unmarked, fall into place, hand well-practiced and familiar mixed with scratchily-penned scrawl, characters torn out of haphazardly scattered pages and stuck together into amalgamated pages with improbably perfect edges.
"Does that - does that help?" the child asks; and this time, under his blue-violet gaze, when the voice goes to speak, it's with the mind's full embrace.
"It does," Rei's child says, with a smile that belongs to her and not her puppet-strings, and lets the eternal press in her eyes rest, for once. "I know who I want to be."