Work Text:
"If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring."
They had watched a French story, made into an English movie, with Japanese subtitles. Half the class had fallen asleep twenty minutes in, but the quote had stayed with her.
She’d been watching it happen for weeks, and now she had the words for it.
Not falling — that implied something accidental.
A loss of control.
Ungraceful.
What Todoroki was doing was deliberate.
The way water found its level.
Inevitable. Patient.
Completely without drama.
She noticed it first with the little things.
The forgotten phone was the first— a notable, confident excuse. It had taken her a solid minute to stop Iida from going after him. Tsu had caught on and helped steer their class rep out.
Now, it was a second cup of tea or hot chocolate made with his own. The perfectly timed packing of his books so they always left together. Deku starting a sentence, and Todoroki listening with his whole body in a way he didn’t for anyone else.
Deku saying, offhandedly, that he was cold — and Todoroki shifting the whole room several degrees warmer without being asked.
*As you wish,* she thought, the first time she clocked it clearly. The phrase surfaced from the back of her memory. From a movie watched on a rainy afternoon with her mother when she was sick and home from school.
The words were deceptively simple.
They meant something profound.
She assumed Todoroki knew what he was saying.
But it was hard to tell.
She kept it to herself.
-❀-
The spring festival had been Kaminari's idea, which meant it was joyful and loud. Chaotic and somehow perfect. The park was strung with lanterns not yet lit, the vendors still setting up, the class spreading out in that particular way they had — centrifugal, individual, but always finding each other again.
Like planets in a galaxy, orbiting. Aligning. Then continuing on.
Being able to see and hear everyone else was mutual assurance that everything was fine.
She wanted to ask what had changed. What caused that expression she'd been cataloging since Midoriya’s return. It was soft, slightly stunned, like he was still adjusting to something wonderful being real.
In the end, she didn’t need an explanation to understand.
-❀-
It was the sword stall that did it.
The vendor sold decorative weapons — replicas, theatrical props — and the class had descended on it with predictable enthusiasm. Bakugo was contemptuous. Kaminari was dangerous. Iida was delivering a safety lecture that no one was listening to.
Deku had picked up a piece and was examining it with genuine interest, turning it in the light, murmuring to Todoroki, who stood at his shoulder.
Ochako was near enough to hear.
"This one's weighted wrong," Deku said.
"Yes," Todoroki agreed.
"You can tell just from picking it up."
"You could. I wasn't sure until you said so."
Deku looked up at him. There was something in the exchange — the easy back and forth of it, the way Todoroki had admitted uncertainty without care — that caught in her chest.
The way they stood so close, only the breeze could get between them.
She was still watching when Deku set the piece down and turned, gaze drifting up to another.
The piece that caught his eye was out of reach for someone their height. Without a word, Todoroki reached overhead to take it down. Offering it with interest to see what Deku might say, that same soft, awed expression she’d caught so many glimpses of.
As you wish.
-❀-
She almost missed the moment.
She'd been distracted — Tsu asking her something, a vendor calling out, Kaminari nearly taking out a lantern — and when she looked back, she almost walked directly into the entrance of a narrow lane between two stalls.
She stopped.
Deku and Todoroki were a few feet ahead, half-hidden in the shade, the noise of the festival softened by distance. She missed what Deku said. But she caught his worried tone. Could see his face — wide-eyed, a little stunned, turned up toward Todoroki and hanging on every word.
She could hear Todoroki.
Low, deliberate, with the steadiness of someone who had chosen their words carefully and was absolutely certain of them.
"Hear this now," he said. "I will always come for you."
She pressed herself back against the stall. Facing the festival, she decided — it wasn’t her love scene, but she could protect it. A one-woman barrier between them and every well-meaning idiot who might stumble into something fragile and ruin it with a joke.
-❀-
She gave them three minutes before she walked loudly back around the corner, announced that Kaminari had nearly set something on fire, and watched them both turn with exactly the expressions she expected — Deku flushed to the ears, Todoroki composed except for the faint blush along his cheeks.
"Everything okay?" she asked, eyes wide and innocent.
"Fine," Todoroki said.
"Great," Deku agreed, approximately a half-second too late.
She looked between them as the silence stretched. Ready to bounce, dance, and cheer.
It took all her control to limit her excitement. To simply take Deku's free arm in both hands and steer them back toward the festival and their class.
"Come on," she said, "before Kaminari actually does burn something down."
She didn't say anything else.
She didn't need to. Didn’t want to. Warmed to her core and weightless without using her Quirk.
-❀-
The lanterns came on at dusk. Gold and warm, strung between the trees, catching the last of the light as the day cooled around them.
Ochako watched the lanterns and the performers. Felt the drums and the occasional bump of shoulders as her friends whispered and played politely at the edge of the crowd.
Even this late in the day, they were a mass of barely contained energy. The need to touch, the persistent need for reassurance still a factor even though they’d been together all day.
Near the center, Todoroki and Deku stood shoulder to shoulder. When she peeked down, past the edges of their sweaters, she saw their pinkies linked.
She thought about the movie, and her mother crying at the end. It was confusing then.
She understood now.
*If people did not love one another,* she thought, *I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.*
She stayed close, hiding their hands. They'd been through too much.
This small, ordinary happiness? She'd guard it like it was her own.
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･❀˖°