Chapter Text
She's on the phone with her mother, who doesn’t and never will understand.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she says more to herself than her mother.
First Touya, and now Shouto? Is she to have two babies burn to death before she’s thirty? The fear has somehow managed to attach itself more to Shouto’s face, always covered in bruises and puke from pushing his tiny body too far, than to Enji’s, who is always as passively malignant as an unset broken bone jutting through skin. Always angry or unbothered. Lately, Shouto isn't smiling as much. His face is beginning to take on the passivity of his father, if not the malignancy Touya gained in the months before he died.
“I can’t keep doing this-- his face--”
“Rei, dear, you’re going into hysterics,” her mother sighs, nearly bored on the other end of the phone. Rei knows her mother wears the same expression as Enji just from the tone of her voice, because that expression they share is the one willing to abandon your children for your ambition.
She knows her parents received millions of yen for her sale. She knows they sit at country clubs and are able to hold this lofty achievement over their peers’ heads. My daughter is the broodmare-whore-trophy-leech-perfect-wife of Endeavor, yes the number two hero, yes they have kids already.Three of them! The tea kettle begins to whistle. Her mother tells her she is being dramatic, and then Shouto waddles into the room with his little legs. He's only 6, he's barely even lived yet---
The whistle of the tea kettle and her mother’s angry question of 'Are you even listening to me?" boils her eardrums, makes them burn. Shouto’s chubby-cheeked smile is waning before her and a widening chasm of dread yanks the floor mat from under her feet as she realizes that she could pour the boiling water from the kettle over Shouto’s face, then theres a crack that sounds like glass shattering. But it doesnt so much as make her flinch. Shes too far in her mind.
She could ruin the red half, the wrong half, the half that looks so much like his father's it hurts, and then she'd never have to think about how much his wide, shining blue eye looks like Enji’s when he held her down and told her it would be over faster if she would just stay still. She could ruin it all, and Shouto would never look like him, but he would never look at her again. Everything would be different, and maybe the kettle would stop whistling too.
She had dropped the phone, at some point, and Shouto picked it up and handed it to her, his little hands trembling because the screen is now cracked and he's terrified she will hit him like Enji would.
Oh god, thats her baby.
She feels her ears burn hotter, her legs tremble and she's suddenly sitting on the floor; her legs look so fragile nowadays...
Fuyumi is in the room now too, tiptoeing behind her to turn the stove off and pour the boiling water over the tea bag in the mug she'd set out. Fuyumi is barely thirteen, she lost her twin, and shes just as terrified as her little brothers, because she knows she’s not supposed to be out of her room.
Oh god, thats her baby.
Natsuo is clinging to the hem of his sister’s shirt, both too terrified to stay in their shared room alone and too terrified to let his sister investigate the incessant kettle-screech without support.
Oh god, that's her baby.
She’s already lost one. Could she bear to lose another? Could she bear to let Enji brush them callously out of the way, hear them strike the wall with their back, watch them stifle tears because they’re not allowed to cry? How has she taken it for so long?
“Mommy, what’s wrong?” she hears Shouto ask, and Rei sweeps him into her arms, and then she turns and does the same to Fuyumi and Natsuo until all four are squished together, and scared, and shaking.