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“But what if what you’re feeling is actually a spell she casted on you?”
That’s what Shouto had grown used to hearing every day from most people around him, and the answer he always gave was just a simple, “fuck off and mind your own business.” It was tiring already and he truly, from the bottom of his heart, could not understand where the comments were coming from.
It was not a common thing for him to want to protect someone else as much as he wanted to protect you, a simple girl from a middle-class family who looked as innocent as they came yet your Quirk really affected how the rest of the world saw you – for some you were nothing more than just a girl without sense of fashion, for the majority of people you were a stereotype. Of course, someone with a witch Quirk just had to look like that, with bushy hair, big glasses that covered a lot of your cheeks and a strange love for combining random colours and patterns depending on your mood for the day. Surely, they said, you were plotting behind everyone’s backs to take over the school somehow.
You’d be lying if you said you weren’t already used to it, but you truly didn’t expect it to follow you all the way to Yuuei, where rumours started to run from the very first day you were there; people looked at you funny, pointed at you and even told you that you had made it through the entrance exams by bewitching the teachers into thinking you were good enough. Most of your days were filled with snarky remarks about you and your life, and while you didn’t pay much attention to it, it did get on your nerves to the point where you actually wanted to cast spells on everybody just for them to see what it was truly like.
But just as you were about to do it after a very bad day, Todoroki witnessed some guys trying to follow you to put something that looked like a frog in your bag as you walked out the school gates and he felt compelled to get involved. Walking faster until he was right behind the two boys, his right side came into action and he froze them to the floor, making them scream in surprise and you turned around with a scared look. He could’ve sworn you thought he’d do the same to you but instead he moved forward and looked at his ‘victims’ with disdain. “Next time I catch you fuckers trying to mess with her, pray for the teachers to find us before I can hurt you.” And after he melted the ice carefully the boys ran away, looking behind their backs and shouting that they were going to speak to the principal about it.
“You didn’t have to do that,” your small voice caught his attention and he looked at you, a loose strand of hair falling onto your face right on the middle. He noticed your cheeks were flushed and he felt his own redden as well, but he wasn’t sure why. Your big eyes found his and, with a wide smile, you thanked him quickly before turning around to leave, but he gently grabbed your arm. Shouto noticed you froze in place and he let go before you thought he wanted to hurt you too, something that made him feel guiltier than he should have.
“You…” he said, but the words got stuck in his throat as you looked at him again, and he was briefly mesmerized by the way you looked at him curiously. Ignoring those new (and frankly irrational) feelings he added, “You should be careful about these types of pranks. You never know what will happen, so you need to keep your eyes open at all times.” To be honest he had only noticed you that same day, but he wondered why he had never seen you before given your not-so-subtle hairstyle and fashion.
From them on Shouto made sure to take care of whatever students tried to pull pranks on you by freezing them to their respective lockers, something that gained him your admiration and more than one private talk with Aizawa before being sent directly with principal Nezu. “That is most certainly not the way to handle things, young boy,” the white rat had said, a small frown on his face.
“You sure as hell ain’t doing anything about it either,” Shouto responded that time with a neutral expression, which gained him detention for a day, news that spread like wildfire around the school halls.
You were one of the first to approach him after the incident in the same shy fashion with which you had thanked him the first time he helped you. Grasping at his jacket from behind while he went to his first class, he turned around thinking it would be someone looking for revenge but instead he saw you, cheeks flushed red as your hand gripped his clothes gently. People were staring and pointing fingers, but he couldn’t have cared less. “You… didn’t have to get in trouble to help me, you know,” you said slowly, your gaze fixed on the floor but Todoroki wanting it to be focused only on him for some reason. “I’m used to it, really.”
And he snapped for a second, reaching out to grab your hand and making you look at him while turning an even deeper shade of red. “Just because you’re used to it doesn’t mean it’s okay,” he retorted with an angry tone. His own face turned red when he noticed he had gotten way closer to you than he had expected, and pulling back he cleared his throat and looked to the side, trying to hide his very obvious blush. “I’ll keep an eye on you still – if you don’t take care of yourself I’ll do it.”
“But why me?”
That question Todoroki didn’t really have an answer for yet. Sure, you made him blush and even almost stutter, your hair was all over the place but looked soft, your eyes were bright and full of life behind those giant glasses, your voice was gentle… but he couldn’t fully comprehend why, of all people, it had to be you that awoke those feelings inside. Not giving you the answer you looked for, he turned around and quickly made his way inside the main building, not even noticing when Izuku and Tenya joined him.
They were the first ones to know about his situation that day, and while they were a bit sceptical about the way you first met they still thought it was cute that he felt all protective towards you when he barely knew you, and greatly encouraged him to get to know you better if he desired to do so. After them came Ochaco and he was grateful to have a girl’s opinion on the matter – however, he didn’t expect her first reaction to be a squeal and a ‘congratulations’, since he didn’t feel it was exactly something to be celebrated.
Days passed and he found the hardest part was talking to his family about it; the first one to find out was Rei during one of his many visits to the hospital, and she was happy and fully supportive of her son finally finding feelings for someone else. “I hope I can get to meet her someday,” she said, to which he told her it was still too soon to talk like that since he was still figuring things out for himself. Next came both Fuyumi and Natsuo, who had similar reactions to that of their mother, but Natsuo joked a bit more about it.
Then came his father. The hardest one to talk to and the one Shouto didn’t really want to talk about this with, Enji found out about his son’s feelings through making small talk with Fuyumi, something Shouto didn’t like at all. “You know you cannot date someone who’s below us,” the number one pro-hero said while having dinner with two of his three children – Natsuo wasn’t around to witness the scene. “I don’t know how you can’t see this. This could all be a trick to get inside the family and steal everything from us; you cannot trust a witch.”
“The one I can’t trust is you actually,” Shouto replied as coldly as his noodles.
He took everything he had been told and made his own choice of getting to know you before anything else, and he found your company to be oddly comforting. You always made sure he had lunch, gave him little luck charms (you claimed you hadn’t put your magic in them but Shouto always smiled knowingly), and every now and then you’d present him with little potions that boosted his energy so he could give his all in class. After a few weeks Shouto had grown used to your presence in his life and even noticed the bullying and pranks had almost completely vanished, yet all but one thing people told him still made him mad – “it’s all just a spell she’s put on you, there’s no way you’d actually like her,” people said.
But they would never know how wrong they were for not looking beyond your Quirk. They would never know the sweet, caring girl that you were, they would never know just how nice your hugs felt, they would never know anything about you…
And maybe it was okay, because it was him that had been lucky enough to see it first.