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“I would die for you.” A wink. A giggle. Toga leans in, kissing Uraraka’s forehead.
“Don’t.” Brown eyes swim with unspoken pain, ghosts floating in the rolling tide of warm affection, waves crashing to reveal jagged rocks of worry just below the surface.
“You’re everything to me, I-” Toga wants to argue - to make Uraraka understand her devotion.
“Live for me?” A whisper. A plea.
“Okay. For you,” Toga hums, “Anything.”
“Hime…”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll never let you go.”
When time moves slow, allowing young hearts to live in golden limbo, savoring the sweet taste of first love, it’s easy to make promises that can’t necessarily be kept - easy to promise the world and expect nothing in return, to breath out “I love you” and breathe in the taste of their “I love you too.”
I’ve heard you reap only what you’ll sow.
“Himiko.”
Uraraka’s breath hangs in the air like a snowflake, delicate and beautiful, cold complexity crystalized.
Crimson highlights Toga’s cheeks. She’s beautiful. An angel of hell. A midnight moon. A flower’s first bloom. Rosy red petals decorate her arms, chest, and face, venturing into her windswept hair in strokes of pink.
“Hime.” It’s a sob now as Uraraka kneels over Toga’s broken form, forehead to bloody forehead, tears dripping and falling, washing the blonde’s stained cheeks, scrubbing her skin with sorrow.
“Occhan,” a murmur softer than the warbling coo of a sleepy dove, “I’m fine.”
Deep lines in Uraraka’s furrowed brow display her displeasure with the lie.
“No, you’re-”
“I have you.”
“Hime, please.” Uraraka’s lungs fill with ash. She can’t breathe. Maybe, that’s okay.
“Y-you…” Toga’s lips part.
A sharp inhale - Uraraka’s.
“Made me feel…” Labored breath. “Like my normal was normal. Occhan, you were my dream.”
“Stop talking like that.” Ice and fire lick Uraraka’s ribs, branding them with a pain she’d never forget: sharp, cold, burning, devastating.
“How could I never let you know?”
“Stop.” Trembling. Tears. Terror. “You did. You did, Hime. You shine brighter than anyone.”
“Stars burn out.”
“But not you.”
“Even me.”
Amber eyes fall closed. Night falls. The curtain draws. Uraraka crumbles.
When colored leaves fall from trees, indicating the passage of time and the coming of winter, the world falls into darkness: days grow short, frost sweeps in, and wind bites at the skin and heart. It is at these times that warmth is missed most.
I’d give up all I have, in exchange for who I love more than anything.
Blinking softly against the bright light of morning, Toga opens her eyes.
“I said I’d never let you go,” Uraraka paces over to Toga’s hospital bed, “I’m yours, and you’re mine.”
“Come.” Toga pats her rumpled sheets and waits for her girlfriend to clamber in alongside her.
Settling in, Uraraka rests her head on Toga’s shoulder, careful to avoid bandages and bruises.
“It smells like sickness here,” Uraraka breathes out.
“Mmm, a bit, but you smell good,” Toga buries her nose in Uraraka’s tousled locks. “You smell like home.”
When dawn swatches the sky in pink and gold ribbons of light and life, it’s hard not to feel hope - hard not to feel like everything will work out, fall into place, and resolve with the passage of time. Theirs was a story that wasn’t over.
And like the grass. I’ve watched us grow.