Work Text:
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Katsuki Mari had always known she was different, though it was a subconscious thing.
Some things were almost instinctual, things she knew without reason, things that she, by all accounts, shouldn't know or understand. Some of these were mundane, like how she already knew her numbers or already knew her addition and subtraction. Multiplication and division as well, despite her young age. Reading also came easy to her, though clumsy fingers made writing challenging even though she knew how to form the words.
At first, it was merely another oddity, that alien intelligence. It didn't take long before it became clear to those who knew the girl that the strange knowledge she held wasn’t just for things that could be hand-waved away as a prodigious level of intellect.
Beyond schoolwork, Mari knew many things that no ordinary child—or rather, no ordinary person in general—should know. She knew how to make and defuse a bomb; she knew how to wield a knife in a fight; she knew how to clean wounds especially heat related ones. (burns, it was soon found, were suspiciously familiar to her)
Yes, little Katsuki Mari was a survivor, that was a thing easily made clear to everyone who met her.
The phantom smell of burning flesh seemed to get caught in her mind, leaving her dreams full of blue fire and her adrenaline spiking erratically near open flames, fire singeing her thoughts and making her mind feel frayed and unraveled as she shakily insisted on taking care of any burn around her, no matter if it was on family or guest.
She knew how to patch clothes and how to treat infection (this knowledge was only theoretical so far, found after one of the Onsen guests decided to quiz her on various topics after hearing of her strange ability), how to stitch a wound closed (sadly, this was not merely theoretical; she'd stitched herself up after a hard fall on the roughest area of the beach, cutting herself badly on the rocks. It had been a scare for her parents when they saw the stitches she had sewn into her thigh), and she had knowledge of how to separate trash from treasure, picking out the objects she knew could be repurposed to suit her needs.
It was quite obvious from all these strange skills that she was a girl geared towards survival more than anything else.
Yes, it was well known in the little town of Hasetsu that little Katsuki Mari was a survivor, it was a thing easily made clear to everyone who met her.
The constant question in her parent and loved one’s minds was simple: “What exactly is it that she needs to survive?”
Mari didn’t have an answer for them, she was even more uncertain than they were.
Sometimes she looked in the mirror, strangely unsettled by her appearance. It was how she had always looked, and yet… Brown-black hair and brown eyes didn’t feel familiar. She found herself swinging back and forth between being confused why it wasn't white then being confused why it wasn't black. Sometimes she even thought it should be red, though that was a rare occurrence. Looking herself in the eyes always gave her a strange sense of happiness though, the brown-grey hue oddly nostalgic-comfortable, even.
Perhaps too much so, she decided one day after her mother found her sitting in front of a small compact a guest had left behind, having been gazing dazedly at her own reflection for at least an hour as whisps of thought danced just out of her reach.
It was all enough to make her avoid mirrors as much as possible, not liking the feeling of disconnect they gave her.
On some nights Mari would lie awake in bed, mind flipping through her strange encyclopedia of unexplainable knowledge, trying desperately to piece together how she knew these things. None of it made sense, she had never done research on half the topics she felt intimately aware of, fingers twitching and clenching around imagined knife handles and eyes darting through every room she entered, constantly devising plans to fight or escape. She knew there wasn’t a moment in her life where she would've felt unsafe enough to learn these things, and she had albums full of pictures her parents took cataloguing every important moment from her birth to the current day, making it clear she couldn't have gone missing at some point before she could remember.
It wasn’t until she was almost seven years old that the memories came. And the catalyst of it all? The unassuming bump in her mother’s stomach.
“...Isn’t that so exciting? You’re gonna be a big sister!” Mari heard through the ringing in her ears, her mother, Hiroko’s voice seemed far away, softened almost, a dull roar in her ears like she was underwater. She distantly registered her lack of response was worrying her mother, who called her name a few more times, but her head hurt too much to care.
“...Endeavor..!”
“...Look at me, father..!”
“Nothing’s changed… They moved on…”
“Filthy street rat!”
“...The name’s Dabi…”
“Toga…”
“...Shigaraki.”
“...Paranormal Liberation Front…”
“The past never dies!”
“His Masterpiece …”
“This is… The end…”
Mari fainted.
Da-Tou-Mari woke up only a few moments later, hi-her mother hovering over her, checking her breathing and heartbeat, worry clear on her face. She didn’t know if she desperately wanted to hold on tight to her or run. The personality of Mari that had been building up and the newly awakened memories and mannerisms of Dabi fighting each other.
In the end, the struggle was decided for her when her mother pulled her dazed daughter tight to her chest, rocking slightly and humming as she kneeled on the ground in front of her little girl. It was only then that Mari realized she’d been crying. Quiet tears, hitched breath covered as much as possible. Crying was a weakness after all.
Weakness? Mari wondered at the unexpected thought. How silly, mother cried all the time! His mother cried all the time, too.
A faint image of a white haired woman with her head fearfully lowered appeared in her mind, tears dripping from the face hidden behind her tangled curtain of hair.
"Mama..?” She whispered, voice hoarse from swallowing the urge to whimper and sob. Hiroko just hummed a soothing melody in response, still rocking her gently. Mari had no idea what she was going to ask, but whatever it was seemed irrelevant to the question she found herself asking her mother; “Who am I?”
There was a pause for a moment as her mother seemed to consider the question. It wasn't often that your six year old child had an identity crisis. She sighed, pulling back slightly and looking down into Mari’s eyes. A slow smile appeared on her face. “You are Katsuki Mari, with the Kanji in Katsuki meaning Victory and Life, and the kanji in Mari meaning Genuine and Reason,” She whispered softly.
"You are Katsuki Mari, and you are the daughter of Katsuki Hiroko and Toshiya, who love you very much. You are Katsuki Mari, and you know many strange things that you use to help take care of the inn. You are Katsuki Mari, and your favorite band is some strange rock and roll band I don’t understand, You are Katsuki Mari…”
Mari felt herself steadying as her mother continued talking, memories receding deeper as they shuffled into place alongside her own. The sound of her mother repeating her name into her ears like a prayer grounded her, helping the sharp sting of the memories lose the rawness of emotion, becoming no longer quite as personal as the latent personality that almost took over faded away. She found herself mentally chanting her own name even as her mother slowly trailed off, just holding her daughter as she thought.
Mari had heard of reincarnation of course, but hadn’t truly believed it. Was that what this was? The only thing she'd heard of it in... This life was from a fiction book she had found in the local library about someone that was reincarnated--a light novel of some sort, she thinks. She'd read only a bit of it before wandering off to find a picture book. (Genius she may have been called, but that didn't mean she couldn't enjoy some pretty picture books.)
From what she'd read, the novel had shown that the main character had simply… Taken over the life of his reincarnation. Whoever he was in the current life just... gone. Irrelevant to the story. Never mind what he planned with his life, what his loved ones thought of the sudden personality switch. She shuddered at the thought of the man she’d been in her past life destroying her fragile sense of self, or worse, trapping her in her own mind as he did as he pleased. She couldn't imagine what a man so broken would do to her family...
But no, Mari was no longer Todoroki Touya. No longer did a drop of Todoroki blood flow in her veins. No fire twisted around her fingers and no burns marred her delicate skin. Touya was long dead and buried deep in her mind, only Mari remained, a little girl with knowledge and experience far beyond her years and far beyond her world. She shuddered, releasing the last of the tension in her frame before curling up closer to her mother, tired from crying. Comforting assurances started again from her mother’s mouth soothing her aching soul, which felt bruised and battered from the unexpected assault of memories. She distantly registered her mother standing, carrying her through the house towards their own private abode.
Blankets were pulled up to her chin, her body being shifted onto her bed, though her mother's hand never left Mari’s own as she was set down. Quiet whispering, her father’s voice speaking quietly with her mother before her mother's hand gave her one last squeeze before retreating, the sound of the shoji door closing as her mother went to bed, leaving her alone with her father.
A hand, calloused from hard work, larger than her mother's but still soft with affection, brushed over her head, running gentle fingers through her hair. She sighed in content, a light warmth filling her as she drifted off to sleep.
The last thing she felt before sleep claimed her was a gentle kiss upon her brow.
Mari stared intensely as leaned over the crib, looking dangerously close to falling in. Touya, she knew, had never taken a moment to really look at his siblings when they were this small. At the age they were born he was never interested in anything he deemed unimportant to either training or his father.
At only two months old, Yuuri still slept a quite a bit, something most children would’ve found disappointing, but Mari was only pleased, Yuuri was a very calm baby, he accepted her strange habit of staring for concerning amounts of time and her random bouts of coddling without much fuss. Nor was he anything like a Todoroki in either temperament or looks, no red and/or white hair and no teal eyes in sight, though Mari thought she still would've loved him if he did seem more Todoroki-like, it would just hurt more.
Her mother currently sat in the old wooden rocking chair nestled in the corner, relaxing after a day of cooking and cleaning at the Onsen, only broken up by Yuuri’s demands for food and attention.
Mari felt her heart in her throat as she considered saying what she’d wanted to since a little more than half a year ago, when his memories awakened. She knew it was something she had to say, for her own peace of mind if nothing else. She couldn’t get rid of the guilt she carried from the man she gained the memories of, even if there was a disconnect between them, an acknowledgement that Touya and Mari were not really the same. Or at least, were no longer the same.
“Mari.” Her mother’s gentle cajoling voice called softly, prompting Mari to pull back from her lean over the crib’s railing. “Are you ready to talk to me?” She blinked in surprise, sometimes Mari swore her mother had a sixth sense for things like this.
She took a deep breath-though it seemed more like a desperate gasp for air from someone who was drowning-before she spoke, “Do you… Believe in reincarnation?” She whispered into the quiet of the nursery, stiffly sitting back on the stool besides the crib, not looking at her mother.
A noise of consideration came from her mother, before she spoke, “I believe it’s possible. I cannot say if it’s true though. My aunt was a Buddhist, and she spoke often of it. There’s really no way for me to know what happens after death until it’s my time to go.” Hiroko mused.
“I believe in it.” Mari’s voice slowly became more firm once her mother didn’t outright reject the idea. “I… I know it’s true.” She turned to look in her mother’s direction, almost flinching from the gentle affection and dawning understanding on her face. “You are one, aren’t you?” Her mother asked softly, holding out a hand to Mari.
Mari nodded shakily, barely managing to stumble her way over to her mother’s lap, the stool rocking and nearly falling in her haste. “I remember… I remember such strange things... Awful things, impossible things, things that never happened here, only there, in that place-” Her words sped up as she became more afraid of her mother’s reaction.
A gentle but calloused hand smoothed along her back as she laid on her mother's lap, so different from the cold, fleeting touches of Touya’s mother, whose hands were always featherlight in the affection she gave, as if she were afraid that she would run out of love if she gave him too much.
“My name… His name was Touya. Todoroki Touya.” Mari choked out after a few minutes of soothing. “He was the oldest of four children. He was supposed to be the best, he was supposed to be the strongest, I-He-” She stuttered, willing herself to calm down before continuing, “He wasn’t. He was deemed a failure, and nearly killed m-himself trying to prove that he wasn’t useless.”
A tightening of her mother’s arms kept her grounded in the present, away from the thought of forests and pain and fires and Burning, burning, b urni ng-b ur n i ng-bur n-b ur n- b u r n . . !
She shook herself out of the bloody mantra that echoed eerily in her head.
“He was presumed dead, but was secretly taken to a sketchy facility where He spent a year in a coma. When I awoke I was covered in skin grafts and scars.” She spoke, not noticing the shift in words between "he" and "I" as she remembered the scared confusion of waking up in that place that felt more like an unsettlingly twisted version of a daycare, with the obvious sickeningly sweet manipulation of the staff and childish decorations.
“I escaped. Burned the place down on my way out.” She said after a few moments of quiet.
“Burned?” Hiroko muttered, hearing from the tense hesitance in her voice that Mari had left something unsaid.
“There, in that place, people…” She hesitated, “I suppose this will make you think me crazy. It sounds so childish…” She mumbled unhappily, biting her lip nearly hard enough to bleed. She decided to rip the band-aid off, speaking quickly. “People there had powers. ‘Quirks’ was what we called them. I, or, rather, he had fire. Blue fire.” She waited for her mother to start trying to shush her, tell her it was all a dream and that the thought of a superhuman society was just delusional.
She didn’t, she merely hummed, running her fingers through Mari’s shoulder-length hair.
Mari waited a few moments more before hesitantly continuing. “I went home, I thought they’d be happy to see me, but…” She swallowed heavily, “I couldn’t do it, not after I saw that nothing had changed. That I had such little impact on my family that not even my father-who trained me day in and day out to succeed him since I was four-cared, he just switched me out for the newest model, for the one he wanted as his ‘masterpiece’.” The last word was spit with surprising vitriol, considering the pity that Mari herself usually held when she thought of Shouto. Perhaps Touya’s mannerisms were peeking through because of how close the memories were to the surface.
“After that I left. I became a street rat.” She sighed, leaning heavily into her mother, face turned to look in the direction of Yuuri’s crib. “I did whatever I could to survive. I pick-pocketed and smuggled, I beat up whoever I was instructed to in exchange for cash.”
Mari ‘s lip quivered, this was the make-or-break moment. “I killed dozens of people. Entire gangs wiped out with a well placed fire. Innocents who witnessed something they shouldn’t have. Detectives that got too close for comfort…” Mari’s tears picked up rapidly, making her give into the urge to shove her face into her mother’s arms as she held Mari close. “I’m a terrible person! I tried to kill my own family! I burnt myself to death trying to murder my youngest brother! I hate that part of me! I hate Todoroki Touya! I hate-” Her rant of anger and hatred was cut off by a long drawn out “shhhh” from her mother, who carefully lifted her chin until their eyes met, matching brown tones peering into each other.
“Katsuki Mari,” She spoke quietly, her voice firm but no less loving than before, “That's you, Mari. Perhaps once upon a time you went by the name ‘Todoroki Touya’, but you no longer are that man . You’re the loving elder sister of Katsuki Yuuri, daughter of Katsuki Toshiya and Katsuki Hiroko.” She echoed the words from the reassurance she’d given Mari months earlier, the ones that had settled her enough to feel in control of her own mind. Given even before she knew of Mari’s reincarnation.
“Perhaps you didn’t have a happy life last time, but you were given to us this time, and you deserve the peace of this life. You deserve a happy ending this time around.”
The tears flowed heavily from Mari now, shaky, relieved sobs ripped from her body almost painfully as she shook.
The sound of soft cooing came from Yuuri’s crib, making Mari look up and over at him. Through the bars of the crib she saw the baby wiggling slightly, head turned just enough to look at them. A slow, toothless smile slid across his face, making Mari pause to look at him in shock.
“He's smiling..!” She whispered in awe, sliding out of her mothers lap and wiping her tears on her sleeves before approaching the crib in a trance, looking at the gummy smile of her brother. She found herself tearing up for completely different reasons than before. "This is his first real smile, isn't it..?"
A smile appeared on her mother's face as well, leaning over the crib beside Mari to look at Yuuri, who was busy wiggling on the soft mattress in his crib. "So it seems. And he'll keep smiling because he has you, his caring big sister." She reaching into the crib, picking the baby up and carefully handing him to Mari, who held him close, slightly hunched over as she looked down at him.
A pudgy hand wrapped around a strand of her hair, tugging on it. She laughed wetly. "It's odd that it's brown, isn't it?" She whispered, sitting back on the stool with the baby. "Maybe it's time for a change. What do you think about blonde? That would be a nice compromise between brown and white, hmm?" She rocked him gently, letting him pull at her hair without complaint. "The past never forgets, but..." A quiet sigh, "Maybe it can forgive?"
Yuuri babbled quietly, letting go of her hair as he grew tired, eyes drooping closed.
"Yeah, I think... Given a little time I can forgive myself. I can forgive... him." She decided, closing her eyes as she let go of the guilt she'd felt ever since Touya's memories awakened. "I... I am forgiven."
Todoroki Touya had been a broken child and a mass murderer who attempted to kill his family multiple times, and though his hurts and memories lived on in Mari, she was not him. Katsuki Mari was a little girl, only seven years of age, who held tightly to her own memories, refusing to be drowned out of her own life by a past she wasn’t supposed to know or have any knowledge of. She dyed her hair blonde on her eighth birthday. She decided she would remember the life she came from, but wouldn't lose sight of where she was going.
And Katsuki Yuuri was her little brother, one who grew and bloomed like a flower as he aged before Mari’s eyes, he was taught with a loving hand everything she felt he needed to know on how to survive by his fiercely loving older sister, who was a constant guiding light. She held him when he broke, and pushed him forward when he hesitated, she bulldozed through his fears, clearing the way for his tentative confidence. She’d had Vicchan professionally trained as an emotional support animal so he could keep his precious friend at his side when traveling. She refused to let him disappear to America for years on end without visits, instead showing up in Detroit and dragging him home on the next flight when it seemed he would miss the summer they’d tentatively planned over the phone.
She’d shown up in Sochi for the Grand Prix, waiting with open arms for him after his disastrous free skate, his anxiety having caused him to land badly on his first jump and throwing off the rest of the routine, though he skated through the entire song with the encouraging eyes of his sister on him.
She’d kicked in the bathroom door when she heard Yuri Plisetsky yelling at him, telling the boy off and handing Vicchan to a teary Yuuri, completely ignoring the fact that it was a men’s bathroom.
She’d waited patiently in his hotel room for him to return from the banquet, silently cursing the fact that she hadn't been able to get in. She took care of him when he returned drunk on champagne and full of a mix of sadness and drunk excitement, speaking choppily about Viktor Nikiforov.
She’d made sure he stayed healthy, even as he wanted nothing more than to give in and eat far more than his fill of unhealthy food and wallow in his misery over messing up so badly when he’d finally gotten the chance to skate on the same ice as his idol.
She’d encouraged him at Nationals, even as anxiety left him a wreck and caused him to skate stiffly, missing a few jumps, just enough to miss the podium by a hair.
She’d watched with a slow blooming acceptance of Viktor when he’d shown up unannounced at Yu-Topia, proclaiming that he'd train her little brother. Spoken to him seriously about Yuuri’s easily shaken confidence and how even "encouraging" jibes could shake him, and perhaps twirling a kitchen knife a bit too dangerously in her fingers as they spoke.
Then she’d sat back for the first time since Yuuri was born, and watched someone else take care of her precious brother, someone that so obviously cared about him it was impossible to ignore.
And finally, she’d walked him down the aisle with her father on his wedding day, giving a nod to his partner, earning one back as she stepped to the side and into place as her brother's Groomswoman.
She’d observed as Yuuri finally settled into his place in the world, comfortable and surrounded by support.
Katsuki Mari was satisfied. She’d done her best. She’d watched her dear brother grow up, and it was time to turn to taking care of her own life. She took over the Onsen from their aging parents, using every resource at her disposal to keep business booming and provide for her aging parents.
Yuuri often came to visit the Onsen with Viktor, at first with just them, but later with a mess of adopted children, each one precious to Mari, who slipped them treats and told them stories of their father, who tried to deny the tale she wove of him accidentally drinking their father’s alcohol and attempting to tap dance on the dining room table (which somehow ended up in Yuuri taking a strange variety of dance classes).
If karma was real, Mari didn’t know she did to deserve ending up so happy. Sometimes she felt she didn’t deserve it all, but in the end she was glad.
She was happy.
And she would do her best to keep that happiness alive until the end of her days, a pillar of support in her family, Aunt Mari being loved by all her brother's children, and then loved just as much as Grand-Aunt Mari by their children.
And when it was finally time to go, an older, wrinkled Yuuri by her side, eyes solemn but still glowing with affection, knowing she was satisfied with her life, she found herself completely at peace.
This life was a good respite, a good balm for her cracked and aching soul, but now she was onto her next life.
Who knew what would happen there?