Chapter Text
Love.
Todoroki had heard it before in songs, had read it in stories and seen it in movies. From what he’d gathered, it was the feeling of butterflies fluttering in one’s stomach, it was lightning shooting down one’s spine, it was sweaty palms and the knot that formed in one’s throat when one was lost for words.
But when Todoroki fell in love for the first time, he found out that it was all that and more. Indeed, it was butterflies and lightning and fireworks but love was also surprisingly quite simple. Often it was quiet and subdued, like a morning mist.
Sometimes it was a warm cup of her favorite jasmine rose green tea. Sometimes it was the way she would wipe the cold sweat and tears away from his face after he would he would wake up from a nightmare. In those moments, her arms would circle around him and embrace him tight, desperate to hold him together before he fell apart. Sometimes love was as simple as a “hello”, a “how are you?” or a “I missed you”. Or sometimes, it was an evening like todays: the two of them taking a leisurely stroll in the snow, their hands clasped together and stuffed in his pocket for extra warmth.
“Yaoyorozu.” The two of them stop at Todoroki’s voice but when she looks up and locks eyes with him, the words disappear like smoke in his mouth. Her raven-black tresses dance and twirl in the winter breeze, her cheeks glowing a rosy red from the sting of the cold. But she smiles at him and the warmth that rushes over him is unlike any fire he’d lit from his quirk.
“Yes, Todoroki-kun?”
“Can I kiss you?”
It would be an understatement to call her beautiful. A sunrise was beautiful, the Aurora Borealis glittering in the Artic night sky was beautiful, and the tender weeping of a violin was beautiful.
But the sound of her shy laughter, the starlight twinkle in her eyes and the way she lifts up a hand to politely cover her smile (despite him wanting so much to see it)?
That was breath-taking.
“Of course,” she replies, bashfully tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear as she shifts her gaze to the ground. Todoroki swallows hard. He had faced off against the worst of the worst, had defeated villains of every kind and creed, but all of that paled in comparison to the courage he needed to take one step closer to her.
His heart dances erratically as he takes her chin and lifts her gaze back to meet his. Moonlight dances in her midnight eyes and Todoroki wonders how it was possible to fall more in love. He runs a thumb along the plump of her bottom lip and her eyelashes flutter shut as she sighs and savors his touch.
“I love you,” he breathes out, as he leans into her, “only you.”
His lips capture hers and he tastes the night air. The moon and the stars, the sea and the wind; everything that was beautiful and lovely in the world he found in her kiss.
“I love you too,” she tells him after they part, foreheads pressed together, “only you.”
Love.
Sometimes it was this and sometimes it was that.
But always, it was her.
Only her.