Chapter Text
Izuku Midoriya cares for a lot of things.
He adores his mother and his father. He idolizes Heroes and Quirks. He’s a huge fan of All Might like countless others. He always wants to protect others, to never see even a complete stranger be hurt. He loves the posters hanging on his walls, the way his room lights up with colours from the hero-themed decor. He cares about his best friend, Kacchan, and he’s excited at the prospect of becoming partners with him in the future.
Overall, he wants to be a Hero who can help someone smile — like All Might. He wants to give people hope that tomorrow will get better!
Asides for all of that, however, he loves nature.
It was all the same to him, really. A hike up a mountain path, the air fresh and crisp and the feeling of being free . Camping in the woods with the smell of tree leaves, where he and his parents would huddle around the campfire, the way his father would blow a wisp of fire into the campfire to keep the flames going. He loved the skies above, with it’s tie-dyed colours and cotton candy changes — and while the sky simply absorbed colours and was never truly blue, the possibilities were limitless, infinite, vast . Swimming in clear lake water, or walking in the shallow river water, the way the water wrapped him in a cold hug or the way it would splash around his feet.
He’s infatuated with the beauty of it all, really. Summer’s breeze is warm and burningly clingy, and wintertime is bitingly cold and numbing. Beautiful cherry blossoms springing into life, the gorgeous sights of autumn where leaves break away from their ties to tree branches.
Everything about nature was fascinating to him, really. It was a gentle calm, a safe silence from his hectic life.
It starts when he’s only four years old, sitting on the living room sofa of their family’s apartment. His father is home for once — he always works long days and hours at the agency, but today he has a day off.
They’re waiting for his mother to return home from the law firm. She’s home later than usual, but she appears with a briefcase filled with papers in one hand, but a bouquet of vibrant flowers in the other. And his father dramatically swoons, looking silly but brighter than before as his father kisses his mother on the cheek and delicately takes the flowers from her. Tomorrow is their anniversary, they mention, because tomorrow he’ll get to spend the night at Kacchan’s house for a sleepover.
(It’s a blurry memory of his parents, but he thinks of it fondly.)
“Marigolds and carnations,” his mother softly murmurs as he sits in her lap, letting her card her fingers through his messy black-green curls — curls that he got from his father. And his father smiles at them so fondly that it hurts, humming as he places the flowers into a pretty vase, placing it on the dining room table. “He loves those flowers the most.”
And he’ll remember that night, because he doesn’t ask to watch All Might for once and instead asks to look up what carnations and marigolds mean. And he’ll remember how fascinated he feels the moment he learns that flowers have meanings attached to them. The red carnations meaning admiration, love, and affection, while marigolds can mean creativity and success. He doesn’t care much for the negatives, focusing on the positive and happy meanings.
Because he doesn’t know much about his father due to how often he’s busy with work, but Izuku will gladly cling to every new bit of information he could reach.
. . .
The next year, his father doesn’t return home by his fifth birthday. He hasn’t been home ever since he found out that Izuku’s Quirkless. And in that same year, the flowers that his mother brings home after work for their anniversary wilts in the vase on the dining room table. His mother is always distraught, always trying not to cry in front of him. His friends all scorn him, including Kacchan, and he doesn’t know why he’s never invited to play together with them at their house any more.
There’s a lot that happens in that year because Izuku doesn’t understand, even though he’s supposed to be smart. Izuku doesn’t understand why everything had to drastically change just because he’s Quirkless now, and his mother tells him that it isn’t his fault. That his father leaving is never his fault.
But Izuku is a smart kid. He knows that his father left for a reason.
He’s pretty sure it’s his fault.
. . .
His mother still brings home flowers for his father on days when she misses him the most. It’s the days when she reaches the point of nearly crying, and it’s days when she’s trying to pretend that he’s still here in Japan with them and not overseas. And like always, she hugs him close, has him sit in her lap as she runs her fingers through his messy hair and tells him a story about his father with watery eyes and a wobbly voice.
She tells him both new and old stories. She tells him about how they often went camping, that his father would go out of his way to make her flower crowns, and how they would laugh as his father called her his flower queen.
With almost every flower bouquet brought home comes with a story he’s never heard before.
He learns that his father has dual citizenship, how the man adores nature and often tried to stick pink flowers into his mother’s hair because it would make her look prettier. Granted, his mother always look pretty, but he sees the point his father is trying to make — flowers are pretty, it’s only natural to put pretty flowers with pretty people. And at first it makes his heart sing at the similarities that he shares with his now distant father.
But even though he inherited his father’s love for nature, he makes it a point to never show it. Only Kacchan knows about this aspect of him due to their now souring friendship. He’s always mean, but at least he wordlessly agrees to never bring it up to prevent his mother from crying about his father more than she already does.
He hates this shared connection to his father sometimes, because no matter how much he likes hearing these stories and letting his mother go through her denial phase of grief, he was still left behind by someone who claimed to love him unconditionally.
(And yet… he keeps wondering if his father will ever come back.)
“I love you, Izuku,” his father once smiled at him, tucking him into bed as he kisses his forehead.
Once, his mother tells him that before he was born, before she and his father got married, back to when they were still just boyfriend and girlfriend, his father would always give her flowers just to see her smile. She tells him that he loves flowers, that he even tried to grow flowers of his own, but that he could never keep the flowers alive for more than a week. He would always blame it on the summer heat, and she would laugh and pretend that he was right.
Daisies, marigolds, carnations, roses, cosmos — Izuku was in love with every different floral arrangements that coloured his life.
But years, months, days, and seconds go by. As he gets older, his mother’s smile begins to resemble the curling, withering flowers. Her shoulders would slump in defeat, her eyes sad and filled with resignation. There are days when she comes home, tired and sad when she thinks he’s not looking. Days, where she would be lost in thought as she stares up at the night sky through the windows as if the stars above held all the answers in the world.
And some days, instead of going to the library to research heroes, he would read books on flowers. Instead of looking into the physiology of Quirks, he would learn about flowers. He tried to do his best to help her care for the flowers when it became obvious that she no longer tried to keep the vase flowers alive for more than a week.
He’s pretty sure that if he wasn’t dead set on becoming a Pro-Hero and nothing else, maybe he would’ve considered becoming a florist, or anything relating to flowers and nature.
Or maybe it’s because of his father that becoming a florist was out of the question.
(Maybe, he hopes, maybe his father will come back.)
He tries to keep his mind occupied.
Heroes and Villains. Quirks and Analysis. It fills up his time, allows him to keep on his rose-tinted lens and allows him to feign ignorance of the cruelties of life. He watches videos, learns a bit of sign language; his mind is a sponge thirsting for knowledge. Unlike his peers, he doesn’t have a Quirk, therefore, he knows that in order to keep up, he needs to learn as much as he possibly can.
His friendships wilt, his mother busy with work, his teachers never caring for him. It’s lonely, but all he can do is look forward, and he knows that he can do it.
Because at the end of the day, he still has his dreams to keep him company.