Work Text:
Shouto’s inclusion in “Girls’ Night” came about when he admitted to Ochako that he didn’t really know how to hang out with the other guys in their class — or anyone, really, but she’d always been the easiest to talk to. She responded by inviting him to join in on the girls’ biweekly tradition of face masks, snacks, gossipping, and finding the weirdest corners of the internet they could.
That’s why he was there when she originally found the fanfictions about their class.
The intended activity was to find how many heroes they could look up until they found one who hadn’t had any fanfic written about them, but a search for their teacher turned up more results about his students than the man himself — which presented a rabbithole that the seven of them (Ochako, Tsuyu, Momo, Kyouka, Mina, Tooru, and Shouto) immediately decided to go down.
Obviously, they look at each of their own tags, first. With enough searching, they stumble across ship tags, which leads into a game of “Who’s the Weirdest Person Each of Us is Shipped With” that ends up with some remarkably strange results, from Ochako and Shinsou (a guy from Gen. Ed. that they’ve only met a handful of times), to Mina and literally anyone (she’s always been very openly aromantic).
The discovery provides Shouto with a different question — but it’s not one he wants to give the girls any opportunity to make fun of him for (or question him about, really, regardless of their intentions), so he files it away for later.
Or, he tries. Really, he keeps thinking about it and the curiosity eats at him for a few more hours until, finally, all of the girls are asleep and he can indulge himself with this stupid question that’s been bothering him all night.
He tucks himself in the corner of the room — between Momo’s bed and the wall — and pulls his phone out, keeping it close to his face so he isn’t at risk of the light waking anyone else up.
Feeling very much like he’s doing something he shouldn’t, Shouto opens a new tab in his browser and navigates to archiveofourown.org — the same site they were looking through and laughing at earlier.
After a moment’s hesitation, he opens the search bar and types in a tag he’s not even sure exists:
‘Todoroki Shouto | Shouto/Midoriya Izuku | Deku’.
He shuts his eyes as he hits ‘search’, not really mentally or emotionally prepared to see what the outcome of this insane thought is, but after a few seconds and a stabilizing deep breath, he opens his eyes again — and finds himself staring at possibly the most insane sentence he’s ever read in his life.
Because there, right at the top of the page, it says in bold font: ‘584 works under Todoroki Shouto | Shouto/Midoriya Izuku | Deku’.
He’s not sure how to feel about that.
Not only are there fanfics for him and his stupid little feelings about Midoriya, but there are almost 600 of them.
He hears one of the girls move and shuts his phone off, heart beating so fast he can feel it. Did he get caught? Is one of them going to ask what he’s doing? How is he supposed to explain this without talking about his crush?
Luckily, no questions ever come, but that doesn’t make him any less anxious. He decides that he’ll look more into those fics later, when he’s not hiding in the corner of a girl’s room like a coward.
When he has some actual free time to himself.
That comes a few days later, when he’s supposed to be writing an essay. But he’s bored, and he doesn’t really have any good ideas, and staring at the blank page doesn’t seem to be helping. So he closes it — he has a week to finish this thing and he can easily come up with something before that time frame is up.
For now, though, he’s more interested in poring over his options for stories about him and Midoriya. And there are a lot of them — from ones set at UA, to ones set while they’re doing hero things, to ones set at their own houses (usually Shouto’s, but that doesn’t surprise him. The Todoroki family home is considerably more publicized — people know what it looks like).
He picks some with word counts in the 3-4 thousands — he feels like shorter fics are a good way to ease into this whole thing.
They’re sort of bite-sized reads, taking about ten minutes each (give or take), which allows him to get through several before he has to go to dinner. And, honestly… he enjoys them. Probably too much, but there’s something to be said for the therapeutic aspect of allowing himself to indulge in his fantasies, even a little. It takes some of the load off his mind.
As the days progress, Shouto works his way up to longer fics, reading them in his downtime — whenever he’s in his room for an extended period of time with nothing important to do. He considered reading them in break time outside of the dorms, as well, but the anxiety spike he got at the mere idea of someone catching him doing it made him throw that concept out pretty quickly.
For the most part, he likes everything he reads (there are, of course, some duds), but despite the fact that he enjoys them overall, he does notice a very common theme in all of them that he’s less fond of.
The fake Midoriya that exists in these stories — the one who always, inexplicably, returns Shouto’s feelings — is too… well, for lack of a better word, he’s too cool.
Shouto isn’t an idiot. He knows why people have that impression of Midoriya from his somewhat limited interactions with the public, but it’s just… not him. Midoriya isn’t this charismatic, confident, always-ready-for-anything guy. He’s a hero otaku who gets nervous when pretty people (or cool people, or honestly most people) talk to him and makes incredibly stupid decisions with good intentions.
This is the guy who was intentionally breaking his own bones, almost daily, for the first couple months of the school year. Shouto has a hard time imagining him delivering a pick-up line with any degree of suaveness.
But that’s exactly what Shouto likes about him! Yeah, he’s kinda stupid, and reckless, and a total nerd who’s honestly too nice for his own good, but he’s also kind, and passionate, and selfless. And Shouto thinks the constant muttering is kind of cute, even if he seems to be the only one with that opinion.
He’s sort of able to set the mischaracterization aside, at first, but as he gets into longer and longer stories with more and more of the out-of-character behavior, it gets increasingly harder to ignore, and it goes from being a mild annoyance to a genuine impediment to Shouto’s ability to immerse himself in the story.
He still manages to make it a month before he realizes, somewhat painfully, that the only person who can write one of these stories and write Midoriya accurately… is Shouto himself.
He’s never been much of a fiction writer — his mind is more used to essays and assignments — but he decides to give it a shot. At least once, before he gives up on the idea altogether. So he requests an invitation to AO3, in the hopes that he can make an account and maybe post some of the things he writes — if he manages to write anything at all.
What used to be reading time is now writing time, even if ‘writing’ mostly consists of staring at his computer screen and wishing the words would appear on their own. Despite all of the fantasies he’s definitely had, it’s remarkably embarrassing to think about putting any of them out into the world. He knows nobody will know it’s him — the username ‘willworkforsoba’ isn’t really a specific identifier — but there’s a part of him that still thinks, what if somebody does figure it out? What then?
It takes him a week to manage a single paragraph, but somehow, after actually putting something on the page, it gets easier to write the rest. Not necessarily less embarrassing (he still has to take periodic breaks so that his heart doesn’t explode), but he’s able to write a full page. Two, three, more.
When he’s finished, about two weeks later, it’s hovering around 7k words. Not bad for his first try, he thinks.
One of the hardest parts was figuring out what to do for their names. Using their given names felt weird, since they aren’t actually that close in real life, but the thought of referring to himself only as ‘Todoroki’ made Shouto want to throw himself out a window. Since he had, fortunately, decided to set the fic in a practical-exam setting, he landed on using their hero names (which still meant using his own given name, but it felt… less weird that way).
He probably won’t be able to get away with that in other settings, but he decides he’ll figure out what to do about that if he actually writes anything more than this.
And he’s honestly not sure he will — it takes an entire day for him to work up the nerve to post the thing, even after proofreading it no less than four times and making sure it was completely free of mistakes and/or cringe-worthy dialogue. Sharing the product of his imagination with a bunch of strangers on the internet just feels… weirdly personal.
Which is incredibly stupid, because the anonymity of the internet makes this situation far from personal to everyone on the other end of the screen. But for Shouto, he’s still letting other people in on his desires. As much as he can call going on a mission with Midoriya — and only Midoriya — a desire.
(It is, to be fair — there’s something enticing about the thought of being away from everyone else, working as a team with only each other for company. The two of them do historically work well together, as long as there aren’t any secret codes involved. Shouto isn’t the best at deciphering those.)
He stays off of AO3 for a few days after posting, honestly kind of scared to see how people have been responding — or even if they’ve been responding. But once he manages to work up the nerve, he’s honestly a little surprised at the actual results of putting his thoughts out there.
It’s not much — less than 50 kudos, only one comment — but… it’s something. And the comment is nice, too: just a reader telling him that they thought the story was cute. It makes him smile.
Well, if people actually like the stuff he writes… maybe he should write more.
So he does.
He sticks to in-costume stuff until he can figure out what to do with the name situation, but there’s already a lot of leeway to hero work and practice.
He writes it a lot like reality, but with some minor adjustments — the glances are a little more frequent, touches linger a little longer. They stand maybe a little closer to each other when they talk than is really necessary. There are murmured “Be safe”s and “Just call for me if you need me”s. A hand squeeze that they take a second too long to let go of.
It’s a small, unspoken sort of intimacy that Shouto doesn’t really have with Midoriya, but he wishes he did. The little tells that say “I care about you. You can rely on me. I want you to rely on me.”
It doesn’t even necessarily need to be a romantic thing. Some of their classmates (Bakugou and Kirishima come to mind) have that kind of bond already. Shouto just doesn’t know how to form that kind of connection — if he did, he would’ve tried it ages ago.
…he wouldn’t mind if it was a romantic thing, though.
He knows his feelings are one-sided, but he still likes to imagine what it’d be like if they weren’t. Being able to just kiss Midoriya whenever he wants, hold hands, cuddle. Midoriya would still have his fans — including the ones that would date him if they could — but Shouto would be the one who has him at the end of the day. And he’d have Shouto.
(He already does, honestly, not that he knows it.)
While he’s writing, Shouto takes sporadic breaks to both punch his pillow and take methodical deep breaths — emotional regulation tactics learned from Natsuo and Fuyumi, respectively. Spending so much time dwelling on this just brings up a lot of other, less pleasant feelings, including the deep sense of shame his dad ingrained in him when it comes to spending any time doing things just because he likes them, rather than because they’re productive or will make him better/stronger/more powerful.
He knows he shouldn’t be ashamed of having emotions. It’s not like he had a choice — he just likes Midoriya, and he knows that in the same way that he knows he likes soba, or poetry, or spending time with his sister. He can’t do anything to change it. It’s just a fact.
But unlearning years of his father’s bullshit isn’t something he’s going to do anytime soon. So instead he just takes the self-loathing out on his bedding and does a lot of manual breathing.
And it works. Usually.
It at least works for when he’s writing fics, which is good enough for him.
He posts a few fics over the course of a couple weeks — still pretty short, but longer than the first two. They seem to be getting progressively longer with each new one.
He eventually solves the name issue by choosing to use Midoriya’s family name but his own given name. He figures, he’s writing from his own perspective; why would he think of himself as ‘Todoroki’?
And with that decided, he’s able to branch out into other settings — places around the school, locations in the city that they like to hang out at on weekends, the dorms. More casual places, where he can explore more of the interpersonal relationship without having to think about potential danger (real or simulated).
There’s more talking — the kind of things they already talk about, and the kind of things Shouto wishes he could say. He spends several hundred words on describing all the things he likes about Midoriya: his bright eyes, his sunshine smile, the way he blushes when anyone gives him a compliment. His kindness, his humility, his courage. The way he remembers little things about people that Shouto never would’ve even thought about (like how Uraraka’s favorite color is green. Shouto hadn’t known that).
Most of all, though, Shouto likes the fact that Midoriya is always thinking of the best ways to make his mother proud — to become the hero he’s always wanted to be. The one she’s always encouraged him to be.
It does sort of make Shouto miss his own mom — it has, on more than one occasion, inspired him to pay her a visit just to remind her that he loves her and wishes she was at home — but it also proves to him, time and again, how great Midoriya is.
And he puts that all on the page, because it’s true, and now that he has an outlet for this stuff, he can’t imagine keeping it to himself any longer.
He still has to take a couple days of grace period after posting each of his fics before he comes back to see the reception — they’ve picked up somewhat more traction over time, and the comments are overwhelmingly positive, but he still somehow convinces himself every time that, for whatever reason, this is the one that people are going to hate.
But it never is. He still gets a decent amount of kudos, and he’s getting more comments now, from a variety of people.
As more weeks pass, and he writes more ridiculously sappy fics about all of the stuff he thinks about but would never say out loud, he starts to notice repeat readers and commenters. There are only a couple, but it makes him smile to see a familiar username or profile picture. He kind of starts to look forward to it.
One reader, smaller_might, has commented on every single one of Shouto’s fics — they found his fifth or sixth one first, if Shouto remembers correctly, and then went back and read everything older than that. Sometimes the comments are a quick ‘this was really good! can’t wait to see what you do next’, and sometimes they’re several sentences of what seems like careful analysis that makes Shouto feel like they can see into his soul. It varies, but they’re always really supportive.
So if Shouto has a favorite reader, well… who can blame him?
He finds himself using the fics more and more as a way to deal with his feelings — not just the ones he has towards Midoriya, but towards his family, too. He writes conversations with Midoriya that he’s never had, talking about his childhood, his siblings, his mother. The shame and guilt he can’t seem to get away from, even in the dorms. The constant lingering threat of his father’s disapproval that keeps Shouto from trying so many things he’d like to explore.
These are things he’s never really talked about in real life at all, but there’s something easier about sharing them with a bunch of strangers on the internet than there is about telling people he knows, face-to-face.
Midoriya does know some of it — the bare minimum, really. The surface issues. But Shouto would tell him so much more if he didn’t think it might make Midoriya think less of him. So he tells the fictional Midoriya, instead.
He knows most people will think he’s making things up for manufactured drama, just a part of the story, but he knows it’s real. And honestly, it’s probably better if people assume it’s all fake — if they think it’s all made up, it won’t affect how they really view his father or him. Shouto doesn’t want people to hate his dad, really. Just because he’s a horrible parent doesn’t mean he’s not a great hero, because he is, and that’s what matters to the public. And he especially doesn’t want people to pity him, for going through all of that. Yeah, it’s left him with some issues, and he’s working on those for his own sake, but he’s still capable. He’s smart, he’s powerful, he’s… an okay friend (he wouldn’t be so bold as to say he’s particularly great, or even good, but he’s all right).
He doesn’t want to be Todoroki Shouto, the scared kid who’s still standing in his father’s and brother’s shadows. He wants to be Shouto, the hero who helps people.
So… yeah. It’s better if this stuff is fiction. That way, it can’t come back to bite him.
Or, that’s what he assumes at first. A late-night knock on his door that ends up being Bakugou has him wondering if he’s really been subtle enough to fly under the radar. Because Bakugou’s not an idiot. He matches Shouto in almost every respect — intellect, power… lack of people skills (he’s even better than Shouto at some things — his ability to strategize in real time is still baffling).
He’s smart. And Shouto has never been able to tell what’s going on inside his head, so he’s already a little on edge when he asks, “What do you need?”
Bakugou offers him one of the bowls he’s holding, saying succinctly, “I hear you work for soba.”
Shit. Shouto’s been found out.
He takes the bowl. “This conversation is probably better had inside my room.”
“Probably,” Bakugou agrees, pushing past him to get in.
Shouto shuts the door behind them, taking a seat on his futon as Bakugou settles into his desk chair. Because he was raised with manners, he starts with, “Thanks for the food.”
Bakugou shrugs, muttering, “Yeah, whatever, you’re welcome.”
He nods a little, deciding that now that the pleasantries are out of the way, it’s probably best to get right to the point. “You found my writing.”
“I did,” Bakugou confirms, not that he needed to.
“And you’re here to… what? Make fun of me for it?”
“The fuck? No.” Bakugou looks almost offended at the implication. “I came here to present you with a business proposal.”
Shouto has to take a second to process that one as he has some of his noodles. Eventually, all he can manage is, “…what?”
“I want to work with you. Hence the soba.” He eyes Shouto for a moment before stating, “You’re confused.”
“Very.”
Bakugou sighs. “I’m also a fic writer.”
“ What?”
“I write. Wrote. Whatever. Point is, I’ve written a lot of fanfic.”
“About who?”
“Kirishima, obviously. And myself. Basically the same stuff you’re writing, except with my own dumb crush.” Bakugou talks about this like these things should be obvious, but Shouto feels completely blindsided.
“So you want to… collaborate?” As muddled up as his mind feels, Shouto is trying to connect all of the dots.
“Yeah, if you’re up for it.” Bakugou shrugs. “I thought it could be a little last hurrah for myself or whatever.”
Shouto is lost again. “‘Last hurrah’?”
There’s a long moment of silence — it hangs heavy between them, weighted down by whatever Bakugou doesn’t want to say.
Eventually, he asks Shouto, “Can I trust you to keep a secret?”
Shouto’s been keeping secrets his entire life. It might even be his greatest skill. “Of course.”
That gets a sharp nod. After another pause, Bakugou awkwardly mumbles, “Kirishima and I are… dating…”
He’s really just giving Shouto shock after shock. “Really?”
Shouto doesn’t have a reason to doubt him, really — Bakugou’s blush goes all the way up to his ears — but it’s just so… he doesn’t even have a word for it.
Bakugou nods, unsuccessfully trying to hide behind his ramen bowl. “We’re not telling anyone yet, so… keep it to yourself, got it?” He’s not very intimidating when he’s flustered — his voice has lost the usual bite.
“Got it,” Shouto assures him. He’s quiet for a moment, eating more noodles as he considers his next words. “I’ll take you up on your business proposal.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I think it’d be fun.”
“Depends on your definition of fun.”
“Mm.” Shouto can’t really argue with that. “I have one condition, though.”
Bakugou eyes him suspiciously. “Which is…?”
“Can you bring food whenever we get together for this?”
Shouto can physically see the tension release from Bakugou’s shoulders as he mutters, “Yeah, I guess I can do that.”
“Thank you.”
“You better be fucking thankful. I don’t cook for just anyone.”
Shouto struggles to suppress a small smile. “I know — that’s why I asked instead of assuming.”
“Whatever.”
As they continue eating in relative silence, Shouto is surprised to find that he’s rather enjoying himself. He’s never really spent one-on-one time with Bakugou before, but he isn’t exactly sure why not — they have so many things in common, and he’s always been pretty tolerant of Bakugou’s usual attitude.
Maybe they should do this more often. Not just for fic writing, but… to hang out.
He’ll suggest that some other time.
They work out a rough plot concept once they’re finished with their food, and come up with a tentative writing schedule that they agree to solidify some other time, when it’s not almost midnight.
As he leaves Shouto’s room, bowls in hand, Bakugou begrudgingly admits, “This was nice.”
“It was,” Shouto agrees.
And with that, Bakugou is gone.
The last thing Shouto does before going to bed is look up Bakugou’s AO3, since he so graciously allowed Shouto the knowledge of his username. He’s good.
His writing is a lot like him, actually — fast-paced, intense, but straightforward and honest. It’s a lot like Shouto’s in that he seems to delve into the kind of stuff he probably wouldn’t talk about in real life, except with the right person. Shouto feels a little bit like he’s reading something he shouldn’t be, but at the same time, Bakugou trusted him enough to give him access to this stuff, and he feels like he should be using that privilege to learn more about the guy. So he does.
Mostly, he learns that they’re even more alike than he thought — similar worries, similar goals, similar stupid crushes on their best friends. He doesn’t know how many of the little details in the fics are based in reality and how many are made up, but he finds himself wishing that he and Midoriya were as close as Kirishima and Bakugou are. He’d love to be able to just touch Midoriya and have it feel casual and normal and not like he’s overstepping some unseen, unspoken boundary.
When he finally does get to bed, his thoughts have entirely circled back to Midoriya — as usual. He has more fantasies — and subsequently fic ideas — than ever, and all he can do is hope that working with Bakugou will let him implement a ton of them all in one story.
He’d like to think that working with Bakugou will allow him to do a lot of things, really — the least of those being ‘learn more about Bakugou himself’.
He’ll have to see.