Chapter Text
It all starts on the night of his fifth birthday.
Everyone was sat at the table after dinner was packed away and the table had been cleared. The cake was brought out by his mother with the candles already lit and set down in front of him. With the lights in the room dimmed, his eyes reflected the flames that glowed in contrast. When the last notes of a birthday song faded out, he was prompted to make a wish. Looking around at everyone at the table, he closed his eyes and made a silent wish with all his heart. When he opened his eyes, he took a breath with his fists held up against his chest and blew.
However, instead of the candles blowing out with a gust of wind, he blew out a small stream of fire. With a gasp of surprise and shock, he jolted back and looked down at his hands as his left flickered into flames while his right side started to frost over.
With a squeal of excitement and a smile that brightens in awe at his newly established Quirk, he did not notice the look of fear and apprehension on the face of his mothers and the look of greed in his fathers as he gazed down at him with a manic grin while his siblings clapped and cheered in excitement with him.
When he looked up at the two, his mother quickly schooled her expression into a gentle smile and clapped her hands once, resting the back of them against her cheek. “My~ Shoto, what a wonderful Quirk, aren’t you excited?”
He gave a nod of affirmation, “mm! My Quirk is so cool, my wish really did come true. Look papa,” he lifted up his hands to showcase his Quirk to his father that sat to his left, “It’s so warm on my left and cool on my right!”
With a grunt, he mumbled as he looked on at the flames and ice with a thoughtful expression, “a Quirk befitting of the number one hero.”
That same night after going to bed, dreams and visions of a life that isn’t his, but it feels like it is starts to appear. Of kind parents and an older sister. Of snow and laughter. Of warm hands and gentle smiles. What a nice dream, he thinks. He hopes that he has more good dreams like this.
But he hoped too soon.
The next morning, he wakes up, he feels as if his body temperature has risen to abnormal temperatures, yet at the same time, he feels cold chills running down his body and he can’t stop shivering. With a check-up from his mother and a call of their family doctor for a home visit, reveals a heavy fever that should be closely monitored and had continued to last for the next three days. The consensus seems to be due to the appearance of his Quirk and his body attempting to adjust to two vastly different temperatures of his left and right sides. However, it is anything but that.
In those three days, his dreams and visions get worse as he ebbs and flows between being conscious and unconscious. With not being able to differentiate what is real and not as his mother comes to take care of him during those days.
He dreams of parents long gone, passed due to an illness that couldn’t be cured and from then on, it was only him and his older sister. His sister, whose appearance had long braided raven-colored hair that was tied with a bow, deep ocean blue eyes matching his dream-self and wearing a plain maroon colored kimono with a black hakama tied just below her chest.
Time passes in his dreams and suddenly, he dreams of someone new entering their lives. His sister meets a well-off and kind man, who treats his sister with the happiness she deserves, who takes them out to festivals and games as they both so obviously falls in love with each other. Words and dialogue continue to pass between the people around him which sounds like they were underwater. Warbled and unfocused.
Time keeps on passing and skips like a reel of film as he keeps looking in the perspective of someone small, yet a little bigger now. They were inside their home this time as he takes his older sister’s hand. Words are muffled, directed towards him and he can feel his mouth moving with no words coming out in return, but he can tell with the traditional white wedding dress she carries in her other hand that it is the night before her wedding.
Everything starts to slow and go downhill from there. These nightmares are often fuzzy he notices. The happier ones are clear, but these were one of the fuzzy ones, so that’s how he knows. He knows that something is going to go wrong, but he can’t stop whatever it was from happening. He can’t stop it; he can’t stop it.
The nightmare begins with a sudden thud at the front door, which jolts the two out of their stupor, followed by scratching as if someone is trying to pry the sliding door open. His older sister knows that something is wrong and takes immediate action by gently grabbing his wrist and tugs him down the hallway and into her room. With a glance around the room, she guides him to a cabinet of her dresser and putting her dress aside, pulls open the wooden door at the bottom to peek inside to make sure it was empty. She faces him and guides him inside the cupboard until he’s all snug and he sees her mouth moving, it warbles for a second. Then suddenly her voice and the vision become clear. She’s saying, she’s saying--
“--ide in the cupboard Giyuu. Hide and don’t come out until I can come back, ok?”
Oh, so Shoto finally learns who he’s looking through the eyes of. But who exactly is Giyuu? The name feels familiar-- is familiar to him. But he doesn’t recall where he had heard it from until now. In any of his conversations in his dreams so far that wasn’t warbled, there were seemingly certain words of importance being blanked out. As if preventing him from knowing more.
The person-- Giyuu, he remembers --senses now that something is terribly wrong and feels himself shaking out of fear for his sister, so before she goes to close the door to the cupboard and leaves him alone to check the front door, he grabs the sleeve of her clothes. He speaks with a voice that wasn’t his, but small and scared just as he feels now. The bottom of his lips juts out in a wobbly pout as tears start to collect on the rim of his eyes. Shoto finds that he can’t control the words that come out of his mouth as these words aren’t his, but someone else’s. “Promise? Promise you’ll come back nee-chan?”
With a smile so warm, it reassured his fears and melted his heart, she nodded. “Yes, I promise ‘yuu. I’ll come back, so promise me that you won’t come out until then? Can you do that for me?”
He nods with determination, “mm, I promise nee-chan.”
“Good and don’t make a sound, ok?” He nods and let’s go of her sleeve as she hurries to close the door with a quiet thud, turning away after that, she quickly makes her way down the hall after closing the sliding door to her room. By that time the sliding door at the front rattles louder and creaks. The sounds of everything on the other side of the wooden door is muffled.
He’s not sure of how long he stays in the cupboard, but in the first half of the night, he hears Tsutako yelling, then there’s scratching noises and growling. Of breaking wood and splinters and the sounds of something shredding and ripping. Of chewing and liquid dripping onto the floor. He’s scared.
It swirls around in his head and makes him dizzy. Was it out of fear, worry, or the lack of air in the cupboard that was making him dizzy he doesn’t know, but he wants to go out there, he really does. He wants to make sure that his sister is ok, and everything is alright and that she wasn’t hurt. But then that would mean breaking the promise that they made to each other, and he doesn’t want to make his sister upset by coming out before she comes back.
There’s a lull in the noises and he thinks that everything is over until he heard heavy footsteps go down the hallways that gets closer to where he was hiding. That wasn’t his sisters’ footsteps. Who were they? Where was his sister? He hurries to cover his mouth with both of his hands and tries to shimmy backwards as much as he could in the tiny space as the door to the room slides open and the heavy footsteps go around the room. At one point it stops in front of the cupboard, and he holds his breath and closes his eyes tight. Tears start to gather at the corner of his eyes as he loses the oxygen in his lungs at the long wait. Too afraid to take a breath in the event that whoever came into their house could hear. What felt like hours, was only a couple seconds as the footsteps started moving out of the room and left the house.
He releases the pent-up breath that he held back and even if he knows that whomever it was has left, his sister has not yet returned. So, he waits and waits. He forces himself to stay awake throughout the night and only when the light streams in through the windows and slivers through the cracks at the bottom of the cupboard door, does he slowly open the door and crawls out. He looks around and stands up as he whispers out loud, “nee-chan?” She hasn’t returned yet and he knows he’s breaking the promise, but it’s now morning and whoever it was had left, which means that everything is safe now, right?
That was until his eyes land on a smear of blood across the floorboards around the room leading out into the hallway. His blood freezes with a gasp and before he thinks any longer, he sprints out the door and down the hall. The more he runs, the more blood he sees splattered everywhere until he makes it to the room near the front door. He skids to a stop when he sees where all the blood pools around a solid form crumpled on the floor, face unrecognizable and intestines strewn about.
He dreams of the dark, of fangs and claws, of blood so heavy he can even smell it. Iron so strong and metallic, it tickles the back of his throat and makes him choke. He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe.
He dreams of, “Tsutako-nee?”
And he wakes drenched in cold sweat.