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Shouto's running so fast he can barely feel his legs—although it may just have to do with the fact that one of them is covered in and shimmering with ice. Ice does that sometimes.
At least he isn't sweating.
He's pretty sure Tenya is.
His arms always pierce through the air in rigid angles, launched by a calf-engine burst as he juts his whole body outwards, glasses still miraculously stuck to his face, as his chest heaves from exertion—which is saying something about how much he really gives it his all in his sprints, considering the incredible shape he's in.
Or was Shouto just looking too closely all those times? No, no—after all, Izuku and him have both discussed the phenomenon that is Tenya running before in private, as Tenya snores lightly into the night and the two of them sit cross-legged on the wooden floor of his dorm under the starlight, talking in hushed tones about oh, god, how that boy was practically chiseled from a boulder. A smart, well-spoken, very attractive boulder.
"Tenya...Tenya told me the kids in his class would make fun of him for it," Izuku confides one night, one particular night after Tenya had ended up dislocating a shoulder from the usual vigor of his arms as he ran—although really, that wasn't the problem at all. Miss Shujenzi has, after all, seen far worse injuries grace the hospital and her lips. Izuku was, as she puts it, "endurance training" for her. And so Tenya's shoulder is just one smack away from back to normal. But Izuku and Shouto can still see him burning with shame as he defeatedly trudges back to the dorms to bury himself in textbooks.
So Shouto knows what Izuku means when he says "it," but still is fairly appalled at how kids can be so cruel. They filter out the stragglers with ease and choose to jump on them, and he knows, he painfully knows that Izuku can relate to what he's confessing to Shouto under the cover of night; he can still see Izuku jump a bit whenever a hand meets his shoulder, regardless of whether it's his or Tenya's or not. He's gotten better—he's gotten much better, of course, but Shouto can see that there are scars marring him beyond the ones carved into his arms.
It was that sort of innocent cruelty of children that had preyed on the cruel innocence of them both.
And yet, even as all that goes through his mind, he still decides to ask. He still decides to mouth, "What?" Make fun of what? And Izuku mumbles, "Y'know..." and swiftly boxes his body between his elbows, fingers glued together into stiff palms that point in Shouto's direction. "That."
That.
"They, uh, apparently called him names he'd rather not repeat." Izuku's arms fall back into his lap. The moon shines behind his face, and his hair is lit by the grey-white sky, and his face is lit by his veil of green hair, and Shouto's heart is just lit on fire.
"His voice, too," Izuku continues. "His…everything, really. You've got no volume control, you never speak normally, you're way too fancy and it's freaky, why the hell do you walk like that, stop doing that weird thing with your hands—"
He pauses and even in the dim lighting, Shouto can see a faint blush pass Izuku's cheeks as he realizes his own hands are waving around—not really in the same, rigid, orderly way as Tenya's, but in more fluid semicircles of sorts—and quickly tucks his hands back into his lap.
(Damnit, that's cute).
"And...why didn't he ever tell—?"
The question trickles out slow and tentative, but the answer is delivered anxiously, hastily.
"N—no, no, no, Shoucchan—! (god, does his heart still feel prone to bursting as he realizes he's still not used to his new nickname—Izuku's new nickname for him) We...we just weren't friends then. It was back before Hosu. Before the sports festival. He didn't want to bother you about it. He didn't want to bother me about it either, until I started making what he called a 'disproportionate fuss' about it."
And now, for some reason, Shouto's face is on fire, too. He's the one burning with shame now, realizing that of course, of course there was a time before he was friends—and boyfriends—with both Tenya and Izuku, even though he never really tries to remember that fact. Maybe he doesn't want to. Or maybe the two are so familiar to him now that his brain is just physically unable. For all he knows, they grew up alongside him in that large, regal, Japanese-style house at the edge of the city.
It's a childish, and frankly embarrassing, fantasy. He bites the edge of his thumb.
"I hope they all know that they're a bunch of damn idiots," he finally says, inserting his voice into the silence. He seems to be saying it moreso to the darkness surrounding Izuku than to Izuku himself; and Izuku laughs lightly in response at the strong wording before agreeing and then suddenly freezing up with his sentence terminated halfway as he frantically mimes Tenya getting up as the bed creaks, and the two of them quickly fall back into their respective sleeping bags and fake through a session of REM the best they can before Tenya can make out their shifting silhouettes as he stumbles to the bathroom.
And so, now, as his ice-numbed legs slide him across the asphalt to his advantage, he finds himself nearly slipping and falling as Tenya cuts through and takes the lead, his stiff, confident strides seeming far from weird or freaky; beautiful, really, more than anything, but then he finds his eyes meeting that boulder-chest again and he stops himself entirely. Or more like Tenya stops him entirely. And then Tenya stops entirely.
A green, full-cowl flash soars above their head like a shooting star, but they don't really need to wish for anything.
He's already here.
But then, as they see that fierce light in his eyes, that adrenaline-fueled grin on his face as he curves through the air and whips the clouds around him into a frenzy with a face far, far unlike the trembling, fear-stricken one the first few months of Yuuei and the first few days of dating had gently coaxed out of him, Shouto's back on the ice again and Tenya's reciproburst has him flying across the asphalt in one clean stroke.
He's their inspiration, really.
And soon, before they know it, they're all headed towards their unmarked line of demarcation—a single dandelion swaying gently in the sunset near the place where the track meets the grass—and they land in a heap because of a severe lack of friction, a pair of engines that forgot to brake, and a slightly miscalculated trajectory that sends Izuku crashing down between Tenya's back and Shouto's chest.
But before any of them can apologize, Shouto just—he just—
—He starts laughing.
It's a soft titter at first, but then he can't contain it anymore. He sees the two on top of him in perfect clarity, the rims of Tenya's glasses (still miraculously stuck to his face—perhaps it's the sweat that makes them stay there?) bouncing off rays of brilliant orange as his face turns a shade of brilliant pink at the sound; Izuku's hair, every single greenish strand of it, tickling his freckled forehead as he gapes at Shouto in wonder; the dandelion that was formerly swaying there near the asphalt, now finally dissolving into little, white parachutes as the wind whisks them away into the sky; the sheet of ice underneath him, his palms pressed against it as it gently melts away. He deactivates his quirk for now and feels his fingers slowly press through the frozen water until it's a sizzling puddle on the ground. It's only then when he can compose himself, at the cost of the composure of everyone else around him.
"Shouto..." Tenya murmurs in wonder before quickly putting a hand to his mouth. "Ah—! Forgive me, Todoroki-kun, I—"
"Shouto's fine," he responds back as Tenya untangles his legs from his and Izuku's, "Shouto's fine."
"Shoucchan," Izuku says, just as equally in wonder. "I've never heard you laugh like that before. Well—I've never heard you laugh."
And Shouto—he can't really explain why he laughed, it just seemed like the right thing to do, all of them so caught up in the taste of victory (it is Yuuei, after all, no matter how supportive they are of each other) that they just couldn't see—the real victory? It's right in front of them (aside from the three-way-tie from their race, that is).
It's right there as they all help each other up, Shouto laces his fingers between each of theirs, Izuku announces he's getting a little hungry, and Shouto quietly asks them both if they'd like to go out for ice cream before it's lights out on campus.
And managing to convince Tenya to have dessert before dinner? Now that was a victory worth more than anything.