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Katsuki is early to class.
That isn’t an unusual occurrence. He’s usually one of the first ones there, behind Yaoyozoru and Kouda. So what if he’s been sitting here for the past hour, glaring at whatever extra tries to slink in? They should know better than to come to a classroom that wasn’t theirs.
(Never mind that he is the first one here because no one is ever an hour early. Never mind the fact that he can hear his teeth creak every time some snot-faced kid withstands his glare to scuttle to the back of the classroom. Never mind the date. )
His classmates trickle in slowly. Yaoyozuru seems momentarily surprised to see him, eyebrows lifting into her hairline as she mouths an oh; she recovers quickly enough (of course she would) to greet him formally before she walks to the back of the class.
Katsuki scowls, and turns his glare out the window. It’s miserable outside. Sleet drips down from the gray sky, helpfully sticking to the ground to create a treacherously icy path. Kaminari slips face first the second he steps out of the dorms, saved only by Tsuyu’s tongue, as she catches and hovers him mid-air.
Cloudy vapor abruptly rises from the ground, streaking along the path to the main building. It doesn’t take long to dissipate; when it does, the gaggle of his classmates by the door has tripled. People break away to run along the (now-melted and significantly less treacherous) path, and it doesn’t take long for her to follow them out.
Izuku is with her, of fucking course, and so is another blond (must be Aoyama); Jirou has her earjacks wrapped around Ashido’s waist. Shouto keeps her left hand raised and Katsuki watches as steam rises above their heads in a crescent shape as they leave Heights Alliance together.
It doesn’t take long for the rest of 2-A to arrive. Shouto doesn’t have her hair in the half twist hairdo she usually keeps it in, and the part is messier than usual. She glances up at the clock as she walks in, and it's a few minutes earlier than when she usually arrives (which is always right before class starts). Her eyes look alive as she listens to their classmates banter.
She looks happy.
Something in Katsuki’s chest squeezes violently.
Ashido shrieks loudly, and grabs Shouto’s and Uraraka’s hands as she drags them to the back of the class.
“Ashido! Please maintain an appropriate volume in class!” Iida says sternly just as Katsuki yells “Oi! You tryna blow out our eardrums, or what?”
Iida, at least, was speaking as class rep. Katsuki was speaking as someone who wanted an excuse to keep looking at Shouto (…and maybe have her look at him too).
“You two need to liven up!” Ashido exclaims, waving her arms in the air. “It’s Valentine’s Day!”
“A day for amor! For hearts to join!” Aoyama adds, rose (really?) in his hand.
“Yeah! When you build up the courage to confess to the person you like!” Kirishima says.
“I know what Valentine’s Day is, dumbass,” Katsuki scoffs. “Stop trying to explain it to me, you’re embarrassing yourself.”
Sero slings one arm across Katsuki’s shoulder, taping the blonde’s arms to his side. “I don’t know about that,” he says with that dumb grin on his face. “Bakugou probably scared everyone off from giving him valentines.”
Katsuki jerks forcefully, trying to flip him off, and Izuku squeaks from behind him as their desk rattle violently. “Um, Sero, maybe you should let him go…”
Sero breaks the tape, stepping just out of range of Katsuki’s explosion as he rips through his bindings. “Nah, he’s just grumpy,” he says, hands raised in mock surrender. “Probably didn’t get his ten hours of beauty rest.”
“I’ll give you permanent rest,” Katsuki threatens.
“Aw, don’t be like that!” Kaminari yells from the back of the class. “You did better this year. Look!” He waves several envelopes in his hand, standing in front of Katsuki’s cubicle.
Katuski vaults over three desks in five seconds, ignoring Iida’s scandalized remarks. Kaminari shrieks and throws the envelopes in Katsuki’s face, trying to deter him; Katsuki catches them in one hand and tries to singe the other’s hair off with the other. “I’m kidding! I’m kidding! Hey, it’s a good thing! I didn’t even get any!”
“Idiot,” Katsuki grumbles, stuffing the papers back into his bag. He should have gotten rid of them when he had the chance. None of them, even the unsigned ones, were written with the lazy hiragana he had gotten too familiar with.
“You’ll show us what you got during lunch, right? Right?” Ashido says sweetly, sidling up to him. She’s holding up chocolate and letters together. “I’ll show you ~mine~”
“Why would I want to see yours?” Katsuki says, rolling his eyes (he does, in fact, want to see them, if only to know what idiots thought they had a chance at confessing, but he doesn’t need to tell her that). “You and Kirishima are already dating. I see enough of your gross goo-goo eyes already.”
“Oooh, here we go,” Ashido says, non-sequitur. She pokes him in the shoulder with raised eyebrows before leaning around him, ignoring his sound of annoyance as he follows her movement.
“Sorry to have bothered…” Shouto is saying.
“Oh, it’s no problem at all!” Yaoyozuru replies, pulling the handles of a large bag out of her thigh, skirt pulled up. Behind them, Jirou looms over Mineta’s desk, jacks hovering in the air. Mineta tries to discreetly turn around, recoiling back with a high-pitched scream as Jirou almost takes his eye out. “You’re a close friend, Shouto-chan! I would never say no to you.”
Shouto frowns. “You can say no to me if you need to—“
“Augh! Enough chit-chatting! It’s time for the moment of truth!” Hagakure says. Probably says. It’s coming from her direction anyway.
“What truth?” Izuku says.
“Doesn’t concern you,” Katsuki interrupts. Izuku sighs, and looks towards Uraraka.
“How many Valentines the prettiest girls in school got!” Uraraka says, at the word Valentine, a bright pink flushes her face. “Except Yaomomo already took hers…I guess she’s used to it…”
Yaoyozuru appears even more uncharacteristically shy than usual. “Well, it doesn’t matter this year…”
“Damn right,” Jirou says, stabbing Mineta in the neck again.
“I thought Valentine's Day was for girls to give the chocolates, not receive them?” Shoji says, joining their conversation. There was seriously no sense of privacy in the room.
“It was like that in the Dawn of Quirks era,” Izuku answers. Of course he knows. (Katsuki knows too, but he’s not about to be a nerd about it.) “I think it started to change more in the last hundred years…but traditionally, yeah, it’s supposed to be like that.”
“Oh, who cares about tradition! This is way more exciting.” Hagakure exclaims, waving (?) her arms in the air.
“Shouto-chan! Hurry up! Before Aizawa-sensei comes!” Ashido says.
Shouto’s face doesn’t show much, but the tension in her shoulders gives her away. Probably not used to all the attention. Katsuki wonders if she even knows what Valentine’s Day is. This time last year, they didn’t even have class, too busy focusing on fighting a war.
Shouto’s hand hovers over the latch mechanism. There are papers stuck into every crack in the side; she’s already holding two that must have fallen to the ground in her hand. She chances a look backwards and catches Katsuki’s eyes, who scowls, shrugging his shoulders as if to say hurry up already.
Shouto opens her locker. The first bell rings, the other girls shriek, and a small mountain of colorful paper and small boxes fall into the open bag Yaoyozuru is holding underneath. Katsuki has no idea why she seems surprised.
That’s not true. Of course Shouto’s surprised. Of course she’s too dense to realize how stupid the other classes get around her. She probably thinks people are being nice to her. She probably encourages it in her dumb quest to prove herself as someone reassuring, not realizing how enamored people get.
“Real exciting,” Katsuki says sarcastically, and returns to his desk.
She really shouldn’t doze.
There’s twenty minutes until their afternoon hero training. The rainy weather outside has them confined to the lunchroom for the entire period, and Shouto sits with the rest of the 2-A girls, sans Hagakure, who was…well she didn’t explicitly say it, but spying on love confessions in the stairwell. Shouto had somehow become the third secret-holder to this plan, after Mina had sworn her to secrecy (how did she always end up holding people’s secrets?)
(“ C’mon, even you have to be curious about who’s got the hots for who!” Hagakure had needled at her.
“Not really,” Shouto had responded, because Hagakure wasn’t going to witness anyone that Shouto was interested in.)
So Shouto sits with most of the 2-A girls, and tunes back into the conversation.
Ochako is slumped miserably in a chair across from her. “I’m hopeless,” she laments, arms dangling at her sides as she speaks to the table.
“You’re not hopeless, kero,” Tsuyu reassures. “You just need inspiration.”
“And guts,” Jirou adds, elbowing her in the side. Ochako’s moan is muffled by the table.
“Inspiration for what?” Shouto asks.
“You need to pay more attention, Shouto-chan!” Mina grins. “Ochako is finally going to confess to Deku.”
“ Finally,” Jirou echoes with a well-worn sigh.
“Don’t say that so loudly!” Ochako hisses, head snapping up off the table. “I thought you were supposed to be helping me!”
“If Midoriya overhead, that would solve this whole problem,” Jirou points out, and at Ochako’s despairing look, hurriedly follows with, “but none of the guys are anywhere near us, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
Midoriya is, in fact, sitting near the back of the cafeteria, for once not in animated conversation. Instead, he sits sandwiched by Iida and Shinsou, who themselves are flanked by Kirishima and Bakugou. Several students are hovering a few feet by Kirishima, nervously shuffling amongst themselves. There’s no one by Bakugou, who sits with his arm crossed, undoubtedly glaring at anyone who dares to come by.
Shouto thinks he might sit up straighter if she were to come by.
“Do you want me to text Izuku to come over?” she asks, already pulling her phone out.
“No!” Three people exclaim at once, Ochako with a scandalized look on her face, Mina choking on a laugh, and Jirou with yet another sigh. Shouto blinks in surprise, raising empty hands in a peace offering.
“It’s okay, Shouto,” Ochako says, head falling back onto the table with a dull thud. Shouto can still see the bright red on the apples of her cheeks. “I’ll figure out something or the other to say…”
Shouto thinks back to what Tsuyu said. “If it’s inspiration you need, we could look through the letters I got,” she suggests, and leans back in surprise again, as five heads snap towards her at once.
“…we don’t have to?” she says, trying to diffuse a situation she’s not sure how came about.
Mina has a look of intense glee sparkling in her eyes, which is a reliable marker that Shouto has suggested something of the less responsible variety. “No, wait, that’s a great idea!”
Tsuyu cocks her head. “You don’t want to read them privately?”
Shouto looks towards Momo. “Are they supposed to be read privately?”
“Well,” Momo says hesitantly. “That just depends on the person.”
“I don’t mind,” Shouto says. She’s likely gotten the most in the class by virtue of being one of the more prominent fighters in the War. She was used to being talked about (afterall, she was His daughter), and stares had followed her since she had started at U.A.
Her friends had contributed just as much, if not more than she had. If she was going to share them with anyone, it would be with them.
“Yes!” Mina punches her first in the air. “Show us! Show us!”
“You brought them with you?” Jirou asks. Shouto nods. The bag Momo had made for her didn’t fit in the locker anymore, and three other people had handed her envelopes on her way into the cafeteria.
“If you’re sure…” Ochako says, but she’s sitting up now, eyeing the bag Shouto’s placed on the table with interest, so Shouto knows she’s made the right decision. Even Jirou is perked up.
“Hopefully it helps,” Shouto says. There was enough that Ochako shouldn’t have any trouble picking something out.
(Not that she had any trouble to begin with, but Izuku had sworn her to secrecy, so Shouto doesn’t say that part out loud.)
Mina upends the bag in one go. “At least be careful with it!” Momo cries out, envelope openers clattering on the table from her forearms.
Jirou and Ochako already have one open each. “No way,” Jirou says, eyes blown wide, showing the letter to Momo. “No fucking way.”
“I told you,” Momo says, shaking her head, but she has the barest hint of a self-satisfied smile at the corners of her lips. She hands the letter over to Shouto to read.
Todoroki,
I’ve been thinking a lot about the moments we share, like finding a favorite book with hidden meanings. Won’t you let me read to you?
Amano Sakura
Class 3 Support
Shouto’s almost as bad as Bakugou when it comes to remembering people’s names, even though she’s made the effort to remember people outside of their class as well. Try as she might, she can’t place the girl at all.
“That’s nice of her,” Shouto offers, even though she’s not quite sure what moments they’ve shared together. She’s been tagging along with Izuku after class to the support workshop a little more these days, even though she mostly stands around, vaguely overwhelmed as Izuku rapidly discusses improvements to his hero suit with a support student, and definitely overwhelmed when their attention turns to her.
Jirou’s giving her a look she can’t quite decipher. Shouto looks to Momo.
“I thought she might give you one,” Momo explains. “She was hinting at it the other day to me.”
“About reading to me?”
Jirou fails to stifle a laugh. “No, moreso seeing if you…would be interested in it.”
“Is there another meaning to it that makes it a confession?” Shouto asks. It is Valentine’s Day — but Fuyumi is handing out cards to every kid in her elementary class, and encouraging them to do the same as a gesture of friendship. This seems more like the latter to Shouto.
“There’s no other meaning,” Momo reassures. “It’s just a fancy way of asking you.”
“Oh…I see,” Shouto lies. She picks at the corner of a cuticle, a bad habit she had picked up again after the War, and risks a glance towards the back. A girl (maybe one of the business course students?) is bowed over, presenting her gift to Katsuki, who takes it and shoves it into his bag. Shouto turns back and tries not to smile.
“Argh! They’re all so boring!” Mina moans, having made her way through several of the envelopes already.
Ochako, by comparison, is blushing a bright red. “I can’t — I can’t say any of this to Izuku!”
Snatching the letter from her, Mina scans it quickly, before taking her phone out and snapping a picture of it. “For reference.”
“Mina, that’s not nice,” Tsuyu says, clicking her tongue, but Shouto is distracted by Ochako burying her hands in her hair as she passes two other papers to Shouto.
One of the letters is so full of writing it covers front and back, and Shouto shoves it back into its envelope, resolutely saving to read later when she can give it proper attention. The other one has significantly less writing.
You and me. February 16th at Spring Cafe. 8:30. I’ll give you a whole new experience.
There’s a single name on the back that Shouto doesn’t recognize. “A whole new experience in what? I’ve been there before.”
Jirou reads the name off the letter. “Ugh, he’s always been such a creep. Don’t even ask. Just ignore him, Shouto.”
Ochako mumbles something unintelligible, and accepts another card from Tsuyu. She sits up a little straighter. “Hey, this one isn’t so bad,” she says, and scribbles onto a paper next to her. Shouto peers over her shoulder to read it.
… your kindness, grace, and intelligence inspire me daily, and your presence has always been a guiding light…
Shouto blinks twice and leans back. Kindness, grace, intelligence…she wouldn’t use any of those words to describe herself. Any of those words could be applied to several of her classmates before she could even come into the picture. She flips the empty envelope, but her name is written across the front.
It seems more like the fan letters All Might would read on the television when she was younger. But All Might was different, bigger than life, even in retirement. Shouto hadn’t done anything near that to deserve such words, and she especially doesn’t deserve them when she can’t place who the writers are.
There’s a pinch of pain at her thumb, and Shouto looks down to see a drop of blood collecting at her cuticle. Surreptitiously, she cauterizes it before sitting on her hands for good measure.
“Ugh, yours are so much better than mine,” Mina is complaining, shamelessly reading what Ochako is copying down. “Even the boring ones are all fancy.”
“It’s not a competition,” Tsuyu chimes in.
“I know,” Mina groans, slouching over the table. “Otherwise Todoroki would win easy.”
“But you’re already dating someone,” Shouto points out. “Isn’t that better?”
Mina sighs. “Yeah, but you could too if you –” she cuts herself off abruptly, previous slump disappearing in an instant, only to be replaced by what Shouto could best call her manic gleam. “Say, Shouto-chan…are you giving something today?”
Which, as a matter of fact, she was; not that she had gone out of her way to tell anyone (Izuku knew, of course. He was a little too good at knowing her— not that she had made that very hard to begin with).
“My family helped me make chocolates for all of 2-A,” Shouto says, and focuses on the black of Mina’s irises before she does something obvious like look towards the back of the cafeteria.
The slump returns. “Not like that,” Mina groans again.
“Thank you for that, by the way,” Ochako says, pen idly floating between her fingers.” Shouto tilts her head in acknowledgement. “Is it the recipe Bakugou taught you?”
Shouto meets her wide, innocently blinking brown eyes, and knows what Ochako is really asking. It’s not a secret Shouto is deliberately keeping. She is, after all, doing her best to share more with Class 2-A, so they never have to worry about her like they did during the War, when everything leaked.
But—
Maybe she’s selfish, to keep this close to her heart for now. Calloused hands grappling with hers, competitive fire in his grin and her eyes, and the desire to win without any of the shame. The quiet in her mind, the stilling of anxiety in her chest, even as Musutafu had burned and shrieked around them. Sitting in the hospital’s garden at dusk with IVs trailing behind them and being distracted, distracted, distracted from everything and just being her.
Maybe that’s it. Something that’s hers.
(But isn’t that the definition of being selfish?)
“No,” Shouto replies. “It’s my mom’s. She used to make it a lot when she was younger, for her friends.”
“Just like you, then,” Tsuyu says.
Shouto stills, and the chatter of the cafeteria blends into a monotone buzz. “Like me?” She echoes.
Endeavor used to say she was like her mother, whenever she would collapse in training earlier than he demanded. Weak, sensitive, useless — she sits harder on her hands as she remembers. The worst of her mother and the worst of her father: that was Shouto.
“You’re doing the same.”
It’s so small, so simple, yet Shouto is still taken aback by the comparison. “I‘m not really like her at all.”
“Really?” Jirou says, looking over the letter she’s reading. “You two look so alike. Besides, you know,” she gestures to her left, “the color.”
Shouto gives her a disbelieving look.
“She’s right,” Ochako adds. “All of your siblings look like her, I think. Except for, um, the one in college?”
“Natsuo-nii?”
Ochako nods. “I bet if you colored half her hair red from her high school photo, you’d look like twins!”
“Maybe,” Shouto says, unconvinced.
“Ask her for pictures the next time you see her!”
Which – she could do . Her mother had shown her the photo albums, after all – although that had ended up with Shouto sobbing in her arms.
Rei would likely ask her how things had gone with Katsuki the next time they met. Touya definitely would. It was easier and easier every time to talk with the both of them – and with a small start, Shouto realizes they both already know about Katsuki. It was odd, yet…comforting, that her relationship with the two of them had progressed to that level, for them to know this about —
— her.
A chime rings from the PA system, and students around them stand, clearing out their lunches. Ochako tries to neatly place Shouto’s letters and chocolates into Momo’s bag, and then resorts to stuffing them as people begin to leave the cafeteria.
“Time for training,” Mina says mournfully.
“Thanks, Shouto,” Ochako says in a similar tone, handing her the bag back. “It helped. But I think I might be hopeless.”
Shouto thinks of her own letter wrapped neatly with the one box of chocolates she hadn’t given out yet. “I don’t think it matters what you write,” she says. “As long as it’s from your heart. And, Ochako – you’re good at speaking from your heart.”
“I am?” Ochako says, surprised – and she shouldn’t be, not when it was that kindness that drew Izuku to her.
“Of course,” Shouto says sincerely. “One of the best, I think.”
“You’re being too nice,” Ochako says, with a shy laugh.
I don’t think I’m too nice, Shouto doesn’t say. Ochako would reassure her of the opposite; she might even believe it. It was who she was. She didn’t have to dedicate herself to a pledge that came as easy as breathing to her. She deserved the letters Shouto had gotten infinitely more than she did.
“I don’t think I’m wrong,” she says instead.
Ochako’s smile turns softer, a little more genuine. “Thanks.” This time, when she laughs, her eyes are warm. “I feel like I’m saying that to you a lot today.”
Shouto shrugs. “It’s the least I can do.”
“You’ve already done a lot. You know that, right?”
The sensation of pins and needles she shakes from her hands seems to reappear in the back of her throat. “We should probably get going.”
Ochako doesn’t push the matter, as much as she seems like she wants to, and the two of them follow their classmates out the door.
The shuddering burn through his arms following afternoon quirk training is satisfying . Katsuki flexes his arms, shaking the wobbling feeling through them, and slings his gym bag over his shoulder.
He leaves the lights on as he exits the training gym. Someone (Izuku or Kirishima most likely) would be by later anyhow to train until god knows how long into the night, and they would be the type of people to train in the dark because they couldn’t find the lightswitches as some sort of environmental practice. Katsuki does not need to told (against his will) how that went.
The borrowed light doesn’t brighten his path back towards the dorms for long, and soon enough the dreary weather darkens the sky once more. At least it isn’t raining anymore. The biting chill could be dealt with, if he peppered the smallest of explosions across his body, just enough to warm without singeing his clothes (and that was something Shouto had suggested, had practiced with him, after the war; and it was this gym where he had snorted at her attempts to fly and pointed out where she could improve–)
He’ll be at Heights Alliance soon enough.
He’s crossing the path opposite from what Shouto had melted earlier in the day, and on instinct, he glances towards the Class 2-A homeroom windows, to where he sits — and has to stop and squint in confusion because the lights are on.
It’s three hours after the class training for the day had concluded. It’s late even for those who had stayed after to continue practicing. Who sits in a classroom by themselves, anyway? If they were ashamed of being behind in their studies or whatever, they could easily ask for help in the common room. Lord knows there were enough of them who would be glad to help out. They’d probably be easier to tutor than Kaminari and Kirishima.
And really, he couldn’t care less (energy cost aside, because Nedzu obviously had an incredible amount of money). Other classrooms are lit as well, making for a patchwork hazy glow onto the field.
But—
But.
Towards the back of 2-A is the blurry shape of a person, far enough from the window that he can’t tell who it is, but close enough that they might be sitting one seat over from the last window.
Katsuki is heading into the building before he thinks too hard on that. He’s going to drag whoever back to the dorms and foist them back onto the rest of the class to deal with.
He walks as silently as he can down the hallway. The door to the classroom isn’t even shut, cracked open just enough to let light spill out but not enough of a sliver to peer in.
Stopping behind the door, Katsuki listens intently, but there’s no conversation, only the scratch of a pencil. He leans in, peeking as inconspicuously as he can — and of course it’s Shouto who sits alone, hunched over something with a pile of envelopes on the table next to her. Her red hair is in a state of disaster, frizzy after training even as the right side is still (somewhat) straight. The colors liberally mix together after being freed from their braided updo for training; and he squashes the bizarre urge to sit next to her and separate them out.
He nudges the door further open as slowly and obviously as he can, but Shouto still startles, head snapping up with wide eyes, knocking a few envelopes off the desk. Katsuki suppresses his own urge to look away in guilt and pushes in, shutting the door behind him.
She visibly relaxes when she sees him, and there’s something in his chest that is smugly pleased at that. “Oh, Katsuki, it’s you,” she says, shoulders dropping as she slouches a little in her chair (and anyone who’s ever said she’s a prim and proper ice princess has never seen her slumped over the kitchen island at 5 in the morning in crumpled Sanrio pajamas, whining about the hour but still keeping one eye open so she can accept whatever Katsuki makes her.
…maybe the princess part is accurate. But he’ll be damned if those extras in her letters mean the same thing as him.)
Gesturing broadly, he asks, “What’s with all this?”
Shouto looks up at him. “The cards?” She picks one up, looking at it like she hadn’t just been reading it. Katsuki recognizes some of the envelopes from this morning and one or two names from other students at U.A. He has to cross his arms across his chest to contain the burst of jealousy. “Oh. I’m writing thank yous back.”
Katsuki blinks, hard, eyes very much popping out, and with great difficulty, chokes back his initial what the fuck to say, “You’re writing what?”
“Thank you cards,” Shouto repeats, like he’s the weird one here.
“For what?” Katsuki says, incredulous, grabbing one with fresh ink still drying and ripping it open. And sure enough —
“…to say thank you.”
He drops her response to pick up one addressed to her instead. Roughly pulling out the card inside, he almost gags at how nauseatingly cheesy the message is. “What the fuck are you saying thank you for?” So much for choking that back. He flips the card over and reads the name out. “Do you even know who this person is?”
“It’s polite ,” Shouto says, pulling the card out of his hands once it begins to singe where her name is.
“Polite??” Katsuki raises his eyebrows. “Since when have you cared about being polite?”
“I wrote thank you cards for my birthday,” she says pointedly.
“Yeah, for your fucking birthday,” he scoffs (and she had given him one right after he had shoved his gift into her chest right before he went to sleep, saying I knew you would give something, so I already had it written). “Not for — for fucking Valentine’s Day!”
“What’s wrong with Valentine’s Day?”
“‘Since the first day I saw you, I’ve liked you, and it burns hotter than your fire’— they’re love letters, idiot. You like all these people back, or something?”
Shouto furrows her brows. “No. Why would I like them back?” she says, in an obvious tone, like it’s Katsuki who is dumb for thinking she would like them back.
Which — he’s not fucking dumb, or whatever, but he wouldn’t mind it too much if it meant being right. If it applied to everyone but him. “Because you’re acknowledging their feelings, dumbass. Of course they’ll think you like them back!”
“…oh,” she says, and her lips and eyes mirror the circular sound. “Really?”
“Fucking Halfie,” he mutters, more to himself than her. “Yes, really.” He knocks at her forehead with his knuckles. “Where’d you even get it in your head to do this?”
“It’s customary to express gratitude for other things,” she defends.
“And you put two and two together to end up at zero, huh?”
He can see the way her eyebrows just barely pull together, the flash in her eyes, the way she clenches her teeth, but only on the left side, (not that Katsuki spent time thinking about her mouth, or anything).
“It took effort,” she says. “It took time, effort, and strength to write these and — I owe it to them. To return the same effort, even if I don’t feel the same way. I don’t—”
“You don’t owe anyone anything,” Katsuki interrupts. “You’re not responsible for that.”
“I don’t deserve it,” she says with bone deep conviction. “I should be responsible for it.”
And — Katsuki isn’t going to solve a lifetime of guilt in one conversation, no matter how much he wants to. No matter how much he’s said it in the past, either. He knows (a little) about what that’s like, about complexes worsened by the War.
But he wants to; wants to be there for that lifetime of reminding her it’s not true. And it isn’t true, regardless of what she or her family or the school or the public think about her. They’re wrong; and he knows it’s arrogant of him to say it so bluntly, claim he knows her that well but — he’s seen her train, heard her offhand comments betraying her worry, witnessed the effort she’s put in to take responsibilities that never were hers.
So instead, he says, “Why?”
Shouto’s eyes widen in surprise, lips parting. As if she had never thought of why, or maybe because it seems obvious to her, or even maybe because Katsuki managed a succinct one word reply and not a what the hell makes you think that .
It’s probably all three. “Why?” she repeats, and looks down at her hands, flexing her left one. “Because I want to—I need to make up for everything that’s happened. I know people see me and think of my father, and Touya-nii. I want to change that…I want to prove that Todoroki can mean something better.”
“Thought you said you weren’t the blood in your veins?”
“I’m not— ”
“None of that shit was your fault,” Katsuki cuts off. He pushes himself onto one of the desks next to her, and his foot hits one of the metal supports, a loud clang echoing in the silent room. Shouto doesn’t flinch, looks more taken aback by what Katsuki said instead, paused in the moment.
“My mom said the same thing,” she says in a distant voice, looking back down at her hands.
“Well, she was right,” Katsuki huffs. “Maybe you should listen to her instead of being stupid.”
“…she remembers that.”
It takes him a moment to place what she means. “ Tch . Well, I wasn’t wrong, huh?”
Her lips quirk in a tentative smile, and whatever disproportionate glee he gets from that evaporates immediately when she follows with a sniffle.
“Don’t go tearing up on me or whatever,” he mutters, stifling the urge to look again, or do something even stupider like maybe brush them off with the back of his hand. He shifts closer to her before he thinks too hard about it. “I didn’t say anything you didn’t already know.”
Shouto swipes a quick hand across her face but doesn’t say anything. She’s back to staring at her hands like she’ll discover the self-worth she deserves within them. She hasn’t changed since the beginning. He could take her hands into his, if only to stop her from constantly looking at them.
“Listen,” Katsuki says instead, voice sticking in his throat, and he has to clear his throat to try again before it does something embarrassing like crack. “I thought your hero name was Shouto?”
“It is…?”
“So be Shouto then.”
And Katsuki could swear that she laughs, that he makes her laugh, shaky, soft, brief, a deeper exhale, sending a thrill through him that makes it undeniably her s. “You make it sound so easy,” she says.
“It is that easy, idiot,” he grumbles, trying to calm his heart down before his quirk starts sparking all over the place — and fails when Shouto laughs again, a hint of smoke where his chest has sparked against his shirt.
He stands up, collecting the envelopes with her handwriting before he can say something incriminating or grab her right hand is his to cool his quirk off. “You are not fucking sending these.”
Shouto sighs, and lets him gather up the cards. “That took me half an hour,” she says, but she’s watching him instead now, eyes still vulnerable but dry. “It was hard thinking of different things to say.”
Katsuki shoves another handful of cards into his gym bag to burn later (but not before reading all of them and memorizing the senders’ names, obviously). “Used up both halves of the same brain cell, IcyHot?”
“It put in good work,” she agrees seriously, in what he now knows (after many, many times) to be her I’m going to pretend to be clueless and/or agree with Katsuki on something stupid to rile him up tone (and it is unfortunately still quite successful even with the knowledge, even if half the time he plays along for her).
“Dumbass,” he says, rolling his eyes. He could never really muster up his previous aggression with their class anymore, and least of all with her. “Only you would do something like this.”
Shouto crosses her arms over her desk and rests her head on it, lazily watching Katsuki take training equipment out of his bag to shove envelopes into. Stupid princessy Shouto with her stupid crowd of admirers. “I think other people have done it too. It doesn’t make sense to say thank you to some things and not say thank you to others.”
He has to press his foot onto his bag to zip it closed. “Nah,” he says. “You’ve got all of them beat.”
“I’m Number 1?” she says blandly. Her eyes have been giving her away for months.
Katsuki fights his smile into a smirk. “No one comes close.” He kicks whatever didn’t fit under his desk and lifts his bag onto his shoulder, gesturing towards her with his other hand. “C’mon,” he says, curling his hand in emphasis. “I’m not dragging your ass to class if you stay up too late.”
And — she takes his hand to stand, pulls herself out of the desk she steps out of every single day without any help, lets Katsuki pull her closer to him.
(Turns out, her right hand doesn’t cool him. It makes him jittery in a way his quirk never did.)
Their class wouldn’t have gone to bed so early, especially not the night owls like Tokoyami and Kaminari. And so before they get too close to Heights Alliance, Shouto grasps Katsuki’s hand to still him.
“Wait.”
His hand is warm, comforting in a way warmth never was to her. Stopping, Katsuki half-turns towards her, a note of question in the air.
“Before we go in…” she starts, letting go to sift through her bag. She hesitates over the letter and chocolates — for a moment too long, because Katsuki comes right up next to her, breath ghosting her forehead, to look into her bag as well.
Shouto tempers her fire down very carefully. She didn’t know much about romantic moods, even with all the movies her friends had shown her and what Fuyumi had told her, but causing a reactive explosion because she got flustered seemed inconsistent.
“Katsuki, you’re being nosy again,” she says, pushing his cheek to the side with her free hand and ignoring the the fuck you mean again ?!
“Don’t tell me you’ve got more in there, Halfie,” he scowls, still trying to look. He doesn’t rip her hand away, or explode the sweat against it like he does when the paparazzi decide to get too handsy with him. Doesn’t even shrug it off like he might have with All Might or Aizawa.
Maybe she’s reading into it. Maybe she’s been reading into the past few months, the persistent gazes (and Katsuki was already blatant with his staring to begin with), remarks that wouldn’t have been said to anything else, lingering touches that lasted a little too long.
She could be wrong. Shouto’s good at that. But – she’d rather say this than be silent (...ever again).
”I do,” Shouto says. “It’s not for me though.” She presents the letter and carefully wrapped chocolates to him, orange detailing Fuyumi had been entirely too excited to find. “It’s for you.”
Red eyes slant in suspicion. “Then why do you have it?”
”Katsuki,” Shouto says, and hopes her tone doesn’t betray either her amusement or her nerves. “It’s for you. From me.”
Even in the dim light, she can see how his eyebrows pull the curve of his eyes up with them. He takes it from her, turning the letter over a few times. “This is your handwriting.”
“It’s from me,” and this time, she can’t hide the soft smile tugging her at her cheeks.
Katsuki looks at the unopened letter, back to her, and then back to the letter for a few moments. “The hell’s that mean?”
“Open it.” He doesn’t even grumble about being told what to do, just pulls the letter out to stare at — and stare and stare, until Shouto breaks the silence.
Her words echo the only sentence written in the letter. “I like you.”
Even in the dim light, Shouto can see how his face flushes, looking up but unable to meet her gaze directly. “Is this some—”
“It’s not a joke,” she interrupts softly, sincerely. “I mean it.”
“Why…” His voice is quieter, giving way to uncertainty.
“Why?” she repeats, then smiles. “Because I want to. I do.”
He’s tracing his index finger over the top of the letter. There’s not much else written besides both their names at opposite ends. He flips his hand over and opens the clasp on the box.
“Chocolate,” Shouto supplies. “I made it with my mother. Well,” she amends, “It was mostly my mom and Fuyumi. But I remembered, and I didn’t burn the chocolate.”
Katsuki snorts under his breath. “Yeah? Didn’t half-ass it? You’ve gotten better.”
Shouto matches his tone, teasing. “So I’ve been told.”
When he looks at her again, properly, his gaze is tense, searching — and he clicks his tongue loudly, an exasperated, dramatic sound. Taking a worn paper out of his pocket, he scratches furiously over it, before shoving it into her chest. Shouto blinks in surprise, and unfurls the paper with both hands, tilting it up to catch the light. Over the scratched out writing is indented black hiragana spelling out thank you.
“Oh,” Shouto says, and can see half the kanji of her name underneath some of the scribbling. “Really?”
“You’re so fucking annoying,” Katsuki says, and reaches to pull her in at the waist. “No one comes close.”
She offers him a piece of chocolate, and he tilts his head down to accept. “Do you like it?”
“Idiot. What do you think?”
“I think you’re taking me to bed.”
She lets him fluster. “Didn’t you say I should sleep early?”
“Idiot,” Katsuki repeats, grabbing her hand and pulling her along behind him, resolute even as they cross the common room to the stairwell and his face turns red, red, red. Shouto makes eye contact in his stead, catching Izuku and Ochako sitting in the corner under balloons the same color as their cheeks. Izuku smiles reassuringly even as his face steams from holding hands with Ochako, the latter of which glances towards her and mouths thank you .
Shouto bites her bottom lip in a half smile, and does not draw blood. The heavy door to the stairwell smiles shut behind them, and Shouto pulls at their grip, stopping Katsuki from climbing another flight of stairs.
“What?” Katsuki says, trying to scowl and failing. He doesn’t let go of her hand. The corners of her mouth are beginning to ache.
“The girls' dorms are on the other side.”
“And?” he grumbles. “So are your nosy ass friends.”
“Katsuki,” she says, amused. “They’re your friends too.” They push into the fourth floor, and Katsuk is lucky his room is first from the stairwell.
Unfortunately, his room is also next to Kirishima’s, outside which Mina stands, clearly waiting. Her face breaks out in glee.
“Not a fucking word, Racoon Eyes!”
A camera shutters, and a flash goes off — or perhaps an explosion. Shouto meets Kirishima’s eyes over the settling smoke, who shrugs as if to say what did we expect. She mirrors his action and slips into Katsuki’s room.
He comes back soon enough. He’s predictable like that – or maybe, it’s Shouto who can predict him. The air around him is charged with the after effect of his quirk, no longer just centered around his palms. Shouto attributes her goosebumps towards it.
“I’m going to kill her,” he seethes.
“If you go to prison, I’ll send you letters,” Shouto offers, and is rewarded with a barking laugh. Her skin tingles further with the sound.
“You’re going to go through all that effort for a few words?”
“I’ll write more,” Shouto promises, then pauses. “I’ll use some of my letters as inspiration.”
Katsuki glares at her, which might have been intimidating if she didn’t know Katsuki at all. “I’m burning that shit right now.”
“You’re going to read through all of them,” Shouto corrects.
He isn’t even fazed. “They should have thought of that before giving you anything.”
“They should have known the Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight would be screening my letters?”
“Damn right,” Katsuki huffs, and settles next to her. Shouto interlaces his fingers with hers and thinks she might already be addicted to the warmth. It was a change she wouldn't mind getting used to at all.