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eyes.
Todoroki Shouto meets Midoriya Izuku’s eyes for the first time on their second-ever day of classes.
Midoriya is sitting at his desk, Uraraka Ochako bouncing on the balls of her feet as she talks to him about something, and they’re both smiling, Uraraka bright and Midoriya a little nervous but genuine. It makes the bridge of his nose wrinkle just a little bit.
When Iida claps a hand on Midoriya’s shoulder and says something, too-loud and too-authoritative and too much of everything, the way Iida always is, Midoriya jumps a little but doesn’t flinch away from him. He just opens up, lets Iida invite himself into their conversation like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
It’s funny, Shouto thinks, as he watches them. Strange, in a way he doesn’t have a name for.
The thing is, Shouto doesn’t remember the last time he smiled at someone and had them smile back.
(He also doesn’t remember the last time he touched someone without them flinching.)
He watches them for awhile, watches Midoriya stutter and Uraraka giggle and Iida gesticulate, even though he can’t put his finger on why, exactly, he’s doing it. On what he’s waiting for. Midoriya troubles him - maybe that’s it. The quiet, odd boy who passed the entrance exam when he should’ve left that day with nothing.
Like he feels the weight of Shouto’s gaze on his face, Midoriya shifts in his seat. Looks up.
Their eyes meet, and Shouto thinks about how Midoriya Izuku’s eyes look like fire and ice at once. The thought curls, strange and foreign, in his chest, and makes a home there.
shoulders.
When Midoriya’s talking to Bakugou Katsuki, his shoulders set like he’s readying himself for a punch.
It’s something Shouto observes almost by accident. Watching Midoriya is second-nature by now, something he does idly and automatically, and he tells himself that it’s because the other boy is a threat; he is something Shouto does not understand, something he cannot account for, and that makes him dangerous.
He doesn’t act dangerous, though. That’s the thing. He acts like he’s waiting for a fist to collide with his teeth, like he’s been ducking under punches his entire life.
With a quirk like the one he’s got, that should be ridiculous. Shouto can tell - Midoriya is built from raw potential, from a vicious kind of ability that might even rival All-Might’s, if he could just figure out how to use it. He shouldn’t be like this: skittish, soft-spoken, intelligent but quick to panic and quicker to cry.
And yet.
Shouto watches Bakugou Katsuki pass him by, and he watches Midoriya’s shoulders curl inwards, like he’s trying to make himself disappear.
voice.
When Midoriya screams at Shouto, “It’s your power, isn’t it?” his voice does not waver. The words settle somewhere inside Shouto’s brain, in his fingers, under his skin. When his left side catches fire, he does not feel the heat.
hands.
After their matchup in the sports festival is done, and something heavy and Endeavor-shaped has begun to be scrubbed from Shouto’s shoulders, peeled from his skin, Shouto thinks about Midoriya Izuku’s hands.
He thinks about them bunched at Midoriya’s sides when he accepted Shouto’s declaration of war. He thinks of them pressed flat against the pages of Midoriya’s ever-present hero journal, knuckles smudged with blue-black ink that’s also blotted just a little across Midoriya’s cheekbone. He thinks of them curled nervously in the hem of Midoriya’s shirt, curled into fists during training, curled around Shouto’s wrist, thumb pressed against his pulse point.
(That last one is a new thought, one that he does not allow himself to chase.)
He thinks about them shattered, destroyed, and he thinks about how it’s his fault.
That particular consideration sits badly with him, makes his mouth taste bitter-sick, so the next time he sees Midoriya in the hallway, he calls his name, and waits for Midoriya to turn around.
Midoriya’s hands are heavily bandaged, just the slightest hint of skin visible beneath the clinical, sterile white. Shouto can still see the bruise-colored beginnings of scars across his fingers, along his palms.
“I,” he begins, and then realizes he can’t seem to find his voice and hates himself for it.
“Are you okay, Todoroki-kun?” Midoriya asks, soft with concern, and no, no , that’s wrong, how can he look at Shouto like that when he’d just… when he’d just-
“I’m sorry,” he finally manages to croak, that suffocating, unfamiliar, heavy-dark guilt bubbling up in his stomach, and Midoriya’s face goes slack with surprise.
“Sorry?” he echoes. “For what?”
“For.” Shouto hesitates. Tugs a hand through his bangs, angling his hand so it covers his scar almost automatically. Jerks his chin sharply at Midoriya’s ruined hand. “I’m sorry, Midoriya, I didn’t mean...”
“You needed to win,” Midoriya says, like it’s obvious, and Shouto wants to scream.
Not like this.
A touch at his elbow startles him, almost into flinching back. Instead, he hesitantly lowers his hand away from his scar and, too surprised to do anything about it, allows Midoriya to nudge his arm lower so that his hand is outstretched in Midoriya’s direction. Midoriya holds his injured hand out, too, holds it steadily over Shouto’s open palm. Their fingers graze each other, just the barest hint of a touch, and Shouto’s heart is in his throat in a way that it never is when he’s fighting.
“I’ll recover,” Midoriya says, just as steady as his hand is over Shouto’s, and then, almost too quickly for Shouto to process, he squeezes Shouto’s hand very gently before stepping away.
It isn’t until he’s several steps away that Shouto realizes what he’s done: proven that his hand is healing, that he’s still able to form a fist, and that he is not afraid to touch Todoroki Shouto in one fell swoop, even with a limb that’s already been ruined.
“Good luck against Kacchan,” Midoriya tells him, but Shouto thinks he maybe means I forgive you.
For the second time in his life, Shouto feels like kindling, like gasoline, like a match waiting to light, and it doesn’t feel like fear.
smile.
Midoriya Izuku has at least thirteen (13) different types of smiles - not that Shouto’s counting.
They are friends now, Midoriya’s told him so, so he doesn’t have any real reason for watching Midoriya anymore. He’s not a threat, after all; or at least, he’s not a threat in the way Shouto expected him to be. He watches him anyway, though; he finds his gaze drifting to Midoriya without even really thinking about it, like the tide tugging him out to sea.
It’s not just muscle memory. Shouto doesn’t have a word for what it is, though. Not really.
He’s working on that part.
In the meanwhile, he saves all of Midoriya’s smiles and files them away for later. Midoriya has a smile that he wears particularly when he sees All-Might. He’s got one reserved just for Uraraka, one for Iida, one for the rare occasions when Kirishima makes Bakugou laugh. He’s got one for when he’s nervous, one that’s small and fierce and determined, one that’s a little wobbly and water-logged but still blinding-bright. He gives them free and easy and often. Like they cost him nothing.
Shouto memorizes all of them. He memorizes Midoriya, the way his face lights up when he’s greeting Shouto, like seeing Shouto means something to him, like it makes him happy, even though Shouto cannot even begin to fathom why.
They are sitting together after school one day when Shouto notices that Midoriya has just the hint of a dimple on the left side of his mouth, right below the crook of his lips, the half-moon curve of his silver-gold smile.
(And maybe, just maybe, that smile is particular to him.)
hair.
It is not until Midoriya walks in early to school with his bangs pushed back by a slender white headband, his hair curling softly around it, looking sleepy but excited to start his internship, that Shouto realizes that he is falling in love with him.
back.
When Shouto entrusts Midoriya Izuku with his back, Midoriya Izuku trusts Shouto with his.
The hero-killer watches, unimpressed, as Midoriya levers himself off the ground for the hundredth time, the thousandth, lifting his chin. His back is curved under the weight of his injuries, his proud shoulders hunched, and Shouto think he looks like salvation, even though Shouto is supposed to be the one doing the saving.
Shouto is bleeding, his pulse slamming in his ears. Too loud to think. Too loud to breathe. They might lose this, Shouto is realizing. They might die. Him, Midoriya. Iida, too - all of them.
(He hadn’t been fast enough. It is not the first time.)
But then Midoriya turns to look at him, his eyes blazing, and Shouto’s mind quiets. Settles. Begins all at once to reflect the calm on his face.
“Todoroki, you’re losing too much blood. I’ll draw his attention,” Midoriya is saying, rapid-fire, and Shouto’s fingers tighten on the wound on his arm, ready to argue. And then Midoriya says, “So be my support,” and Shouto thinks, oh.
“It’ll be nothing but touch-and-go,” he says, slowly, but he’s already made his decision and they both know it. “But… you’re right.”
He says, “The two of us will protect them,” and he does not know when, exactly, he and Midoriya became a team, but that does not change the fact that they are.
freckles.
Midoriya has freckles on his nose. The tone of his skin is warm enough that they’re difficult to spot from far away, but the hospital bed they’re squeezed into is small; Shouto could not seem to bring himself to stop Midoriya from scrambling under the blankets when he asked to, shivering, the shadow of his nightmare still clinging to his face.
He isn’t sure he wanted to stop him.
(Shouto’s close enough to count his freckles, now, even illuminated only by moonlight.)
Midoriya sighs, shifts slightly closer to Shouto. His eyelashes flutter against his cheekbones, feather-light across the sugar-scatter of his freckles, and then he whispers, without opening his eyes, “Go to sleep, Todoroki-kun.”
“How did you know I was awake?” Shouto mumbles back, a little embarrassed to be caught, but Midoriya doesn’t seem angry or repulsed.
Instead, he hesitates, and then says, very softly, “You breathe differently when you’re looking at me.”
His eyes open slowly when Shouto does not respond, close enough that Shouto can pick out every single individual sliver of color in them, close enough that he could press his mouth to every single one of Midoriya’s freckles, if he wanted to. If Midoriya would let him.
They’re close enough that Shouto can feel Midoriya breathing, soft against his cheek, and it is beautiful and terrible and everything.
It is everything.
“I,” Shouto begins, voice rasping, but Midoriya shakes his head slightly.
“You don’t have to explain,” he says. “I breathe differently when I’m looking at you, too.”
Shouto leans forward to press their foreheads together and tries to forget what Midoriya looked like under the hero-killer’s knife. And when Midoriya kisses him on the mouth, lips parted into the ghost of a smile, the world blooms the colors of a sunrise.
heart.
Midoriya Izuku is a brilliant, unfathomable brand of brave.
He is smart, sharp, clever, quick.
He is soft-hearted, with a soft smile and soft hair and soft lips (against Shouto’s knuckles, his throat, his jaw, his mouth).
He cries too often, wears All-Might pajamas the ugliest shade of yellow Shouto has ever seen, has more scar tissue at this point than he has skin.
Shouto presses his palm to the place on Midoriya’s chest above his heart and feels it beat.
“Izuku,” he says, and it sounds like, I love you.
“Shouto,” Izuku says, and it sounds like, I know.