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“Are you actually going to eat your breakfast or are you going to keep pushing it across the plate?”
Izuku blinked up from where he’d been staring intently at his food to see his mother fastening him with a less-than-impressed look.
“I’m… I’m eating,” he defended, shoving a spoonful of it into his mouth and grimacing past the gamy flavor of cold eggs.
“You didn’t hear a word that I said before that, did you?”
“You’re, uh…” Izuku licked his lips, eyes scanning the bare walls of their one-bedroom home as if searching for answers. “You were talking about how excited you are about the sowing today.”
And for his part, Izuku managed not to show his own surprise at his mother’s shock.
“There’s a first time for everything.” She walked over to the wash basin and placed her dishes inside. “I think you’ll really enjoy it this year. Lord Ikama will probably let you drive the plow. Won’t that be exciting?”
“Riveting.” Izuku winced at the bitterness of his own tone.
Winter was recently over and now that the days were growing longer, warmer, the entire town was abuzz about what they were going to plant. Every time that Izuku took a step out the door, it was gossip of “corn or beans?” “lettuce or sprouts?” “Do you think the Lord of the land will let us plant our own seeds this year?” Talk of crops had made him so nauseous that looking at food alone was almost enough to make him sick.
Izuku took another bite of eggs.
Almost.
“Your father and I met while he was driving the till, you know?”
“I know.” Izuku picked up his plate to put it into the sink as well, helplessly smiling at the starstruck look on his mother’s face. Her expression always grew so soft, no matter how many times she talked about it. So Izuku leant his hip back against the counter, arms across his chest with a small smile.
“Izuku, I’m telling you, sowing season is one of the best seasons around and everyone pays attention to the plow driver. And I’m sure a certain someone ,” the stress she put on the word made Izuku roll his eyes and laugh, “will be watching too.”
“You’re never going to give up on Ochako, are you?”
“Can you blame me?” She shuffled forward a step, bringing her fingers through Izuku’s hair in a pitiful attempt to make it lie flat. “She’s the only girl in the village you talk to.”
“That’s not fair. Madame Detra and I always have such delightful conversations.” He couldn’t help his laughter when his mother softly knocked him upside the head.
“I don’t think talking with her about the spirit of her dead husband and children counts as conversation.”
It’s more interesting than what most everyone else around here talks about , Izuku thought to himself. At least she told stories.
Izuku shrugged. “She sometimes talks about dragons, too.”
In a single moment, Izuku knew that that was the wrong word to say. He watched as his mother’s face blanched, the area around her mouth as pale as fresh snow as she drew her hands away from Izuku and stepped away.
“ Izuku .” He winced as she hissed. “Are you still on about--?”
“ No , I’m not,” he cut her off, trying to avoid that argument. “I’m just saying. She’s seen dragons, so she talks about them.”
“Has she been filling your head with stories about them?!”
“What? No, I--”
“Have you been telling Ochako about this, too?”
“A little, just--”
“What does she say about them?” she demanded.
“N-Nothing… Nothing too important. Just that they existed and that she’s seen them.” But that wasn’t true. She told stories so vivid that Izuku swore he lived them. Ever since Izuku had been a child, since he’d seen the first dragon flying low over the fields on direct passage to the capital, he’d been fascinated by them. They came in all kinds of shapes and sizes from the long, delicate dragons of the Southern Hemisphere to the hearty, winged creatures of the East. Some breathed fire like the old stories told, others breathed ice or gas or even had powers just beyond the mundane. Madame Detra had told him once about a dragon so powerful that it could probe a person’s mind. How could anyone not find them interesting?
That being said, almost every single person in the town seemed to look upon dragons like they were some scourge and, hell, Izuku couldn’t even think of an interaction that his people had had with dragons. Like most things, it was just spouted from the words of Lord Ikama’s mouth and people went with it.
After Izuku’s insistence, there was a small victory to be had in the fact that his mother didn’t press any further. With her arms across her chest, all she did was shake her head, gaze focused on the window. His mother’s distaste for dragons was a little more personal. Maybe it was because she knew Izuku’s father long enough to be upset by his death, to Izuku, all it was was a story.
“The sun’s almost starting to rise.” Izuku reached forward towards his mother, holding her hand gently and relaxing when she let him take it. “I should head out so I can talk to Lord Ikama. Get the plow and all, right?”
That seemed to work better than anything. The smile that she turned to him was gentle, taking his face in both of her hands to kiss his forehead.
“You should. Just… be careful today, alright? And have fun. Oh. And tell Ochako hello from me.”
“I will.” Izuku paused a moment longer before enveloping her in a hug and running out the door.
Despite the fact that it was first light, almost the entire town seemed to be awake for sowing. The streets were the busiest that Izuku had seen them in weeks--the baker was sending off his sons with a wave and a jaunty call; Madame Cutter and Madame Lellar, the doctor and the apothecary, were together on their front porch, watching with twin smiles and waving at the passerby; the judge was sitting with his wife as well, calling out good will to anyone who would hear it.
“Midoriya Izuku!”
He hardly had the time to turn around before a figure wrapped their arms around his shoulders, squeezing him from behind.
“Good morning, Ochako.”
“Good morning.” Slipping to his side, she linked their arms together, tugging him deeper into the crowd pushing forward towards the fields. “How’d you sleep?”
“It was… fine.”
“Fine?” she parroted back with a sly smile. “I slept… fine, too.”
Izuku snorted.
“Yeah? And why wouldn’t you sleep fine? You’ve just got to plant today. You and… everyone else.”
“You’re actually going to try and take on the plowing?”
“Mom is dead-set on it.” But that went without saying, really. Since Izuku was a child, she’d been telling people about how he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps. Fantastic planter. An asset to this tiny little town.
“Try not to look too excited,” she chided, pushing at the corner of Izuku’s frown. “Do you think that Lord Ikama is actually going to let you?”
“I don’t see why he wouldn’t. It’s guiding ox across the field. Besides, I know how to handle oxen.”
“It’s oxen and the plow. Zuzu, that thing weighs, like, infinitely more than you do!”
“I wouldn’t say infinitely…”
“Close enough.” She jabbed him in the ribs and he let out a dignified squeak, rubbing his side. “You’re still a kid--”
“I’m sixteen! Hell, I’m practically dying already. Mom’s been bugging me about who I’m going to marry--”
“Yours too? My father’s started talking about trying to pull together a dowry for me and about all the eligible young men in the town.”
“Ah, yes. So many of them.” Izuku let his eyes wander briefly to the group that they were surrounded by. Their town wasn’t large to begin with and the children population was constantly fluctuating. For all of the kids that either got sick and died or killed themselves by wandering too far away from the edge of town, there were another few kids born. Surviving to adulthood just meant you had just enough common sense to rub together to keep yourself from bleeding out.
The handful of boys their age were loud, obnoxious, and had every intention to follow in the footsteps of their fathers before them. Syngo would become the tailor, Dikev would become the baker, Mellis would become a smith, and they’d go on to get married and raise tailors and bakers and smiths after them. The town of Markol was a never-ending circle of the same monotony with slightly more similar-looking faces as each generation married closer and closer.
“What’d they say when you told them that you weren’t interested in the local choices?”
Ochako laughed. “They said that beggars can’t be choosers and my father reminded me that the boys in town are a perfectly suitable match.”
“Did you tell them that you don’t like boys?”
“Never got that far.”
It made sense. That kind of oddity wasn’t really favored in their town. It wasn’t exactly shunned the way that it was in other towns, Izuku had heard that two towns over, closer to the sea that the royal guard had been involved due to the town’s attitude and subsequent treatment of same-sex unions. People just ignored it, really.
For as long as Izuku had remembered, the apothecary and the doctor had lived together. If you asked anyone in the town, they were close friends sharing space, but Izuku had seen them kiss each other off to work almost every single day for his sixteen years.
“My mom thinks that I should just settle down with you.”
“It’s a smart match,” Ochako admitted. The only reason that Izuku didn’t stop in his shock was that he was immediately pushed forward from behind (“Sorry, Mister Callack.”). “You do?!”
“Why not? I like you well enough and you don’t have any interest in girls either.”
“Keep it down,” he hissed, pulling her a little closer as they tucked their heads together. “It’s not that I don’t have any interest in girls…” They were pretty and he’d willingly admit that, it was just that he had no interest in any of the girls in town. Yeah. That was it.
“Regardless, it’s not like we’re going to want to marry anyone else. We could settle down, get a place a little closer to the forest, find a way to pass our days in, how did you say it once? Ah, peaceful mediocrity?”
Izuku’s face suddenly felt a little hot.
“We could always move away from this town?”
“And go where and do what?” Ochako pursed her lips slightly. “As much as I despise this town, and I do, It’s not like we’re going to be any better in another town. What do we have to offer?”
True, their formal training was limited, since both of them had stopped going to school as soon as they were old enough to help water and weed and plant. And, alright, neither of them had the training to be anything more . Ochako’s family, just like Izuku’s family, were all farmers and farming wasn’t exactly in hot demand closer to the capital.
“I think that I’d honestly rather be homeless in a large city than comfy here.” Ochako stared at Izuku like he had three heads and he shrugged. “At least things happen there. Nothing happens here.”
“Good morning, Markol!”
From a caravan just at the edge of the field, a man stood tall in colours brighter than a summer sunset with twice as much glitter. He was tall and exactly as Izuku remembered seeing him the last time. Lord Ikama wasn’t exactly a man of the subtle things; subtlety was left for those who didn’t have to remind the world that they were important.
Lord Ikama came around the town exactly four times a year--at the beginning of sowing season in the spring, in the summer when they sowed again for the new set of crops, in the fall to take from the harvest, and in the winter to take a little more to sell in the capital. Sure, it was a little skeevy and depending on how deep the pockets were of the people he was trying to fill, he took arguably more than his share, but it wasn’t always terrible.
That didn’t mean that Izuku didn’t stand there, gripping onto Ochako’s hand for dear life as he gnashed his teeth and hissed under his breath.
“You’re going to draw in everyone’s attention,” she snapped in his ear. “Shush.”
“But listen to him go on.”
“...waited all year for this time of the season. I could not be more blessed to have all of you come out today to help with this. As always, I will oversee the preparations and the run of today and then I will leave it in your capable hands…”
“He makes it sound like it’s some sort of blessing that he lets us work for a living. He doesn’t even do anything. While we work all afternoon, he sits up in his carriage and has the tavern girls bring him something to drink.”
The workers were given a glorified trough that every few hours they could take a drink from and if someone wasn’t doing “their share” of the work, they didn’t drink. The only problem was that it was the Lord and his underlings who decided what “their share” of the work was.
Izuku remembered during the last harvest when Cappara had passed out. The only reason that she’d lived to see the current season was because the doctor had come out to speak with the Lord about the land she was renting.
“I didn’t say it was fair.”
“It’s not fair.”
“Zuzu, quiet.” They waited for the Lord’s voice to carry again before she leant closer to Izuku, letting her mouth brush against the shell of his ear. “He keeps our city protected and we don’t pay as many taxes to him as other towns do.”
“Says the butcher.”
“Otherwise, we’d have to go to the capital and that’s a journey across the badlands. There are all kinds of highwaymen and wild animals out there. Not to mention other towns.”
“That doesn't give him an excuse.”
Izuku remembered the days where his mother had been up in arms about these things, too. She used to hold him on her hip, hissing under her breath almost the exact same words that Izuku did. The most insidious thing about the town, in Izuku’s mind, wasn’t how dull it was, but how complacent the people within the town became just by living in it. “Good enough” was a standard to live by.
“What’re you going to do? Fight him?”
And he shifted to fold his arms across his chest, shooting Ochako an amused look. “Maybe.”
Seeing Ochako dissolve into laughter was enough to relax Izuku, listening to the last few refrains from the Lord as the people around them applauded and cheered in response. It wasn’t until the word “assignments” caught Izuku’s ear that he even fully tuned in.
“As always, I do my best to keep in mind the abilities of everyone--”
“Bullshit,” hissed Izuku and Ochako nudged him hard in the ribs.
“--so the breakdown is as follows.”
He stood anxiously beside Ochako, feeling himself bounce up and down. Never in his life had he been more intent on Lord Ikama’s words before. A head shorter than most, Izuku was on his toes to watch the man. This group was the foremen, this group was going to cover the south field, this group was going to cover the north field…
“Midoriya Izuku, the east field, covering the planting of corn.”
No . The weight in his shoulders returned as he gripped at his arm, shooting a look to the ground. A knot gathered in his stomach that he couldn’t quite explain, sucking in a deep breath.
“Excuse me!” He looked up to see Ochako glaring at the front of the group. “Lord Ikama!”
“No, no, Ochako--”
“Lor-- What? That can’t be right!” Izuku felt his face heating up, several people now turning around to look at them. Some looked angry that they were trying to interrupt Lord Ikama, others looked piteous at Izuku; he couldn’t even imagine trying to tell his mother, yet.
“Drop it. It’s… It’s not that big of a deal. Next year, you know?” Izuku forced out a laugh and smile at Ochako. “At least we’re together, right?”
She seemed tempted to press it for a moment more, brow heavy and lips turned down. But as the names continued, the corner of her mouth twitched and she sighed, too. “Yeah. At least we’re--”
“Uraraka Ochako, the north field, covering the planting of wheat.”
By the time that the sun had risen high in the sky, Izuku was coated in dirt and sweat. It’d take a solid week to scrub himself clean and even that was iffy. Usually, he could commiserate with Ochako about the heat and the smell and the grime, but the last time he’d seen her was when the north sector and the east sector had met up at the end of the first lines, several hours previous.
Now, he was just hot and exhausted and they’d only gotten halfway through the fields. Because there was only one plow for the entire land, it was a lot of waiting up. They’d finished the line for the east field and the plow was starting on its way back from the south, but it’d be another ten minutes until they actually finished that. So, some had gone to the trough to cool off, but most were staying put either too tired to move or too wary to draw the attention of the foremen.
Izuku had taken a spot on the ground, watching the tiller plow the field and wrestle with the ox (Pillack, a beast of a man and the butcher’s son, had gotten it). Another time and another place, it might have been funny to see him shout and snarl at the plow, but it was just annoying at the present. He was pushing it too hard and the yolk wasn’t situated on one of the ox right. At this rate, they’d be done an hour after sundown and have to waste wood to see the rest of the job. Hell, he’d already had to double back a couple of times to redo lines that he’d ruined.
“The fuck are you staring at, Midoriya?”
He shook his head, coming to when he realized that Pillack had moved back onto the east field.
“Uh, I just… watching you…”
“Just… Watching…” Pillack mimicked, raising his voice in mockery, throwing his weight against the plow to the distaste of the oxen. “You think you can do this better than I can? Huh?”
“Well.” Izuku found himself on his feet, gaze shifting up the rows of the crops. The rest of the east field planters had turned to look with him with that sick mixture of laughter and pity. “You could probably… I mean, if you moved the yolk on the… It…” By the time that he looked back to Pillack, the boy was laughing as was half of the field. His face was burning, but his continued to grit his teeth past it. For all of a second, he considered walking forward as Pillack shoved the plow again and Izuku jumped about a solid foot. Laughter erupted and that anxious feeling took root; he was nauseous again.
“Of course not, Pillack.” Rubbing the back of his neck, Izuku made some excuse about going to the water trough. The more of the rows he hopped over, the softer and softer both the laughter and the distressed cries of the oxen became.
The water was a blessing on his skin as Izuku scrubbed it over his face and dumped some onto the top of his head. It didn’t do anything to sting the heat of the embarrassment, but at least the heat of spring was starting to subside.
“That was something.” He looked up to see Ochako taking some water for herself.
“Saw that, huh?”
“I think the whole town did.”
“Great.” Izuku took another handful of water and this time drank from it. When he looked back up, Ochako was staring at him.
“What?”
“You know what he’s doing wrong.”
“Obviously. Mom’s taught me about plowing since I was a kid. Why?”
“You should have said something.”
“And what? Have him laugh his ass off at me? I think he was ready to plow me over.”
Ochako shook her head, reaching out to ruffle Izuku’s hair. “Zuzu, you can’t keep backing down like this. One of these days, you’ve gotta stand up for yourself. You deserve it.”
Real life didn’t work like that, though. This wasn’t fights picked with school children the way that they had when they were kids. Angering Pillack could anger his dad and then where were Izuku and his mother supposed to get their meat? In a town this small, pissing someone off was a liability.
That being said, it was nice for Ochako to put any kind of faith him and he looked up at her to say so, but the moment that he looked up, something else caught his eye.
Past the fields and towards the forest, Izuku saw a stream of red flit along. For a few moments, it might have been a lost scarf or a darterfly just out of perspective. But it moved wrong. And the wind wasn’t even blowing in that direction, not by the way that the trees moved.
No, this streak of red snaked and wiggled its way along the horizon, something stilted in its movements. At a certain point, Izuku was willing to guess the heat was playing tricks on his eyes, until two large masses spread out from the strip of red, almost as big as it was.
Wings.
Dragon .
Izuku reached a hand towards Ochako who’d started to ask what he was staring at, whipping her around and pointing. For a few moments, the pair of them watched in awe as the dragon bent and arced before crashing down into the treeline.
“Move! Move! Out of the way! Coming through!”
Izuku and Ochako had been over the fence and sprinting towards the city by the time any of the foremen had noticed. Neither of them had asked or thought about it or anything. Izuku was sprinting like his life depended on it, the exhaustion of the day just a memory as he vaulted over a cart and ducked under a worker carrying a tray. Distantly, he was aware of the voice that were calling out to him, asking where they were going in such a rush, but neither he nor Ochako stopped.
By the time that he started to register that pain from the stitch in his side, blistering and awful, the town was behind them and the ascent to the forest in front. The clear road was left behind, rock and branches catching at their legs and shoes, but still they pressed on.
Like a pair of wild animals, they panted and huffed their way through, pushing past trees. It wasn’t until they were in the forest with nothing familiar around that either of them realized that they didn’t know where they were going. Not really.
Ochako clutched onto a tree, breath ragged from her lips as Izuku doubled over beside her.
“Did you… Do… Is…?” Ochako let out a whine beside Izuku as he tried and failed to look up at her. If they’d been trying to track anything, it would have been long gone by then. Even still, there was no damage, no other sound around them, so the dragon couldn’t necessarily be close to them.
Maybe it didn’t even hear them.
Given how easily that he’d seen the dragon from a few miles away, it had to be massive. No, it was deeper in still.
When they had caught their breath enough to move, both he and Ochako were far more careful about their steps. One hand over their mouths, they crept through with ears pricked and eyes wide.
Every snapped twig made them catch and every heavy rustle of trees made them stop. What might have been minutes or hours or days passed in the forest as they continued to push on, nothing jumping out at them--literally or metaphorically.
Just when Izuku was ready to call it heat exhaustion and turn around, he saw something in the trees ahead. Something bright and red.
He slowed to a halt as the pair of them strained to see through where the trees began to thin out.
Massive was a good word to describe the beast, long, broad, and twisted through the destruction that it caused. If there hadn’t been a clearing there before, there was now.
The beast didn’t seem to move and if it wasn’t for its mid-section expanding now and again, Izuku might have thought it dead. Swallowing down his fear, Izuku shuffled a little closer.
Izuku had seen one or two dot the sky before on their flight from the Southern Continent to the Capital, but he’d never been this close before.
The beast’s head was tucked down towards its mid-section, a long snout bright red in colour, crafted of thousands of scales slotted together like chainmail with points raising up on the top of its head in a crest of two golden horns. Its eyes were closed like it was asleep, breathing slow and emitting gentle billows of smoke from its huge nostrils.
Never in his life had Izuku seen something so wondrous. By the time that he realized he’d stepped up to the very edge of the clearing, he couldn’t bring himself to move away. His eyes couldn’t strip from its body, tracing where the body wove and dipped through the demolished trees. It had two hind legs tucked up under itself and its massive wings seemed to have a hint of black on the inside with claws of that same vibrant gold at the tips, pressed tight to its body.
Madame Detra was right about one thing: they were beautiful.
As Izuku was about to pull away, he heard a sharp snap of a twig. In the same moment, the dragon’s head lifted up with eyes black as night fixed harshly on Izuku and he was knocked to the ground.
He’d expected the dragon to strike or a panther, not a person. With the force of his head knocking so hard against the ground, it took Izuku a couple of moments to focus, pain blistering across his senses.
What he was met with was a boy who couldn’t be any older than he was. His eyes were the same shade of red as the dragon with teeth somehow more fierce and deadly with his mouth shaped into a snarl. A mess of blond hair was streaked with red in places and Izuku belatedly realized that this was blood . He was wilder looking than any animal that Izuku had ever seen, either in his town or from the circus that passed through on its way across the continent.
The boy was strong and intimidating and… and, Izuku kind of hated to admit it, gorgeous.
When the boy spoke, his voice was harsh, lips and teeth wrapping in a hard string of noises, but Izuku couldn’t recognize a single word that he said. Only when he repeated the words again did Izuku realize that the boy had something sharp pushed against Izuku’s neck and his attention immediately detracted from how pretty the boy might be.
“I-- I don’t-- I’m not-- I-- I!” Izuku’s voice cracked all over the place, eyes darting around to try and find Ochako. “I don’t know what you’re saying!”
The boy was still snarling at him when Izuku dared to look back, but his eyes were dragging across Izuku’s body, thinking.
“You speak Standard.” The boy’s voice was still gruff and it took Izuku a couple of moments to process what he said.
Izuku nodded his head emphatically, eyes still wide. “Yeah. Yeah, I speak… I speak Standard. You speak Standard. Good. Great, that’s really…”
The boy who was going to kill him spoke Standard. Great!
“I told you to get away or I’ll fucking gut you.”
Oh. Oh .
“I’d… I’d love to, I really… really would except you’re--”
“Did you come to take my dragon?”
“What?! Did I--?” Izuku finally looked back to where the dragon in question was watching them. Its teeth were bared as well, wings spread wide. He finally realized why Ochako never came, the girl pinned to the ground by a massive claw. “ Your d-dragon? I mean, we saw it… saw it crash down and… No! No, we’re not here for… We just.. We saw it crash.”
“You’re not with the royal city?”
“No! Well, not… We’re… I’m… We have a lord and he’s a royal and--” The boy pushed the knife harder against Izuku’s throat until Izuku felt it bite into his skin. “I’m from Markol! It’s just this little town! I’m a farmer, don’t kill us!”
The boy pulled back a little, looking to his dragon for a moment and Izuku swore that he saw them exchange a look. It seemed to be the right thing to say, the boy sheathing his knife, but continuing to perch on top of Izuku.
“Do you have a doctor there?”
“Yes! Yes, we have… She’s really great. Really nice, but she’s never looked after a dragon before and--”
He heard the boy laugh, that deadly mouth now twisted into a bastardized smile. “That’s fine. She doesn’t need assistance.” When he stood up, Izuku realized that the boy was bleeding profusely from his bare side. “However, you will get me to your town.” His eyes darted to the dragon and he said something in that harsh tongue again and the dragon raised her claws to free Ochako.
Izuku never really got a chance to question him further about that as suddenly the boy’s eyes rolled back into his skull and he collapsed back on top of Izuku, unconscious.