Work Text:
Then
The common room is empty now. It should’ve been hours ago, but his classmates had been too leery of leaving him alone with his thoughts – not when he’d spent an hour staring blankly at the television as it replayed the same four clips of his father’s battle with the nomu in an endless loop – to know that the thing they were going to such lengths to prevent was all Shouto wanted.
But they’re gone now, lured off by his repeated promises to go to bed when they did. There’s no light to illuminate the tear-tracks on his face or the light coating of dust on the television screen, save a little sliver of moonlight past the curtains. There’s no sound, either, nor scent, and he feels as if he’s floating in a sensationless void without form or direction even with the chill in the night air or the heat of his own body or the movements of the couch cushions beneath him when he shifts his weight. Being alone with his thoughts always feels like this – like being underwater, almost, weightless and suspended in surroundings he can’t quite make out.
He’s heard that the calmest place to be in a storm is far beneath the surface of the sea. Sometimes that’s true. Other times he remembers that it’s impossible to breathe underwater, and it’s not much of a comfort at all.
Without thought or effort, Shouto finds his body curling in on itself. His knees tuck up into his chest and he folds his arms atop them so he’ll have a place to rest his head as he folds himself inwards so he’ll take up as little space as he can. That’s no comfort, either, but time and trial have taught him that this – reduction, inconspicuousness – is safety. His arms wrap tightly around his shins, and he keeps a firm grip so as not to come apart; vaguely, he starts to notice the beads of sweat forming at his brow and the warmth radiating from his core. He’s not trembling anymore, but feels like a leaf in the wind even so. He’s senseless to his surroundings, but he listens to nothing at all with vigilance that would let him hear a pin drop.
Footsteps, Shouto registers numbly after a span of time whose length he cannot even estimate. They’re light, like their owner is trying not to wake anyone, and he doesn’t turn his head when the door cracks and a sliver of light from what must be the flashlight app on someone’s phone filters through the crack.
“Todoroki?”
Midoriya.
Todorki doesn’t trust his voice, so he doesn’t use it, and he doesn’t move to acknowledge Midoriya’s presence.
“Hey,” Midoriya murmurs, his voice coming closer, getting softer, and there’s warmth at Shouto’s side as a weight disturbs the cushions beside him. A hand that has to be Midoriya’s comes to rest on his clenched shoulder. “I thought you were going to head up.”
No, he replies without words, and he wants to scream the syllable until his hoarse throat can’t take it anymore – no, no, no, no, NO. He’d only wanted to be alone and he’d had that until Midoriya had intruded but he can’t bring himself to think of the gentle hand at his shoulder as an intrusive, not now. He weathers his storms in silence, here in the formless calm beneath the surface of the sea, because he has to; he’s never thought to wonder if that might not be what he wants, not when it isn’t a choice he’s ever had. But there’s someone beside him in the calm now, and he wants to resist – to turn on Midoriya, to lash out and demand he leave. But when he thinks of the silence again, something desperate and unknown claws its way up his windpipe and leaves him gasping for breath and he just knows, somehow, that if he tells Midoriya to leave it’ll come racing back down to his queasy stomach and claw up his throat until it bleeds and he cannot take the pain, not now.
He tries to say something – he tries – but there’s that desperate clawing in his throat again, and the choking sensation that always comes with trying to breathe underwater, and nothing but a helpless whine that escapes at a hitch in his breathing will come out.
Midoriya doesn’t say anything, either, but his question’s been answered already and that hand at Shouto’s shoulder drifts downwards and up again in a circular motion that only stirs up the desperation that’s managed to settle in the pit of his stomach. It’s gentle and well-meant and exactly the kind of touch he never receives and probably hasn’t since he was five years old, but it’s alien and invasively near and he feels so exposed-
“Sorry,” Midoriya mutters, pulling his hand back when he notices that Shouto’s already-tense shoulders clench at the touch.
“No!”
Shouto’s shocked at the intensity of his own voice, shot as it is, but something in the thought of getting what he thought he’d wanted drives him into a panic and it’s that or a desperate, keening whine that’d probably drive Midoriya away even faster than his reaction to being touched had.
“Please,” he stammers, finally raising his eyes, and they close in surrender when Midoriya’s hand settles against his back again. His next breath escapes as a broken whimper, and Midoriya moves his hand across Shouto’s shoulder until it rests against his opposite arm, brushing his back so tentatively it feels like a breeze blown in through an open window as he skirts it across to the other side. “Please…don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Midoriya asks. Shouto is tucked against his side now, one arm around his shoulders, and he thinks they might begin to shake if he thinks too much about what he’s allowing his friend to witness.
“Don’t…don’t leave,” he croaks.
“Of course not,” he replies, his free hand gently prying Shouto’s clenched fingers free so he’ll release his iron grip on his knees. Obediently, and perhaps a little catatonically, Shouto lets his hands fall slack to his sides.
He is under Midoriya’s arm now, tucked in as snugly as he’d been willing to allow, and he wants to run away from this unfamiliar feeling as much as he wants to release the tension in his muscles and curl up against his friend and fist his hands in the ratty, two-sizes-too-big All Might commemorative shirt Midoriya always wears to bed and cry. Nothing is right or safe right now; nothing feels real, and yet this is right and safe and real and terrifying and Shouto never would’ve realized had Midoriya not happened upon this idea that he needed this.
A soft place to land, to crumple and fall apart when he’s supposed to be the one holding it together.
A soft place to land.
Shouto untucks his legs and his chin and turns so abruptly that Midoriya lets out a gasp, though it’s barely more than a slightly-sharper-than-usual intake of air, to wrap his arms around Midoriya’s waist. He lets himself bury his face in the crook of Midoriya’s neck even though he’s shorter and this shouldn’t work and fist his hands in the fabric of his shirt, and soon he’s shaking again as hot, briny tears soak Midoriya’s shoulder. But he doesn’t seem to mind, shifting to accommodate the change of position, and a moment later he leans back against the pillows so Shouto doesn’t have to prop himself up anymore.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmurs, one hand cradling the back of Shouto’s neck as the other rubs circles against the back of his shirt like he’d done before. “We shouldn’t have left you alone.”
His voice is so tender and so apologetic when it has no need to be that it almost cracks what little is left of Shouto’s composure, and he buries a choked sob in Midoriya’s shoulder. He clucks (he really is a mother hen – Shouto files away the tidbit for later reference) and the hand cradling his neck brushes through his hair.
It reminds him of something he thinks he can’t place, until he realizes that he’s recalling something his mother used to do when he was almost too young to remember. Shouto probably hasn’t been held like this since; the thought alone is enough to have him clinging to Midoriya like the last plank of driftwood from a sunken ship, tears spilling over even as he nudges into the palm of the hand stroking his hair.
Yes, the gesture says. More. Please.
“I thought you’d want to be alone,” Midoriya says softly. Of course you did, Shouto thinks, because that’s what he’d thought he wanted too and of course Midoriya – wonderful Midoriya, who knows these things, knows Shouto when Shouto doesn’t even know himself – had figured that out. He’d probably been the one to herd everyone from the room, and if he were any less shellshocked, Shouto would be grateful.
I thought I did, he’d say if he trusted his voice not to break.
But he doesn’t, so he lets out a breath and leans into his friend’s embrace instead.
**
Now
He’s gone.
There’s a moment after Shouto reaches the last line of Midoriya’s letter that he can’t think to do anything but sit in shellshocked silence.
He’s gone.
He’s gone?
He’s almost disinclined to believe it, because Midoriya’s there – it’s in his nature. He never deserts the people he cares for and he’d never walk out on his friends at a time like this. They need him here at UA – doesn’t he know how much? – and he wouldn’t possibly have ignored that.
I’m so sorry, Todoroki. I’ll miss you.
But he meant it. It’s undeniable that he meant it.
Todoroki prides himself on his cool demeanor under pressure. He’s not one to freeze up like Midoriya or to explode like Bakugou; he maintains an even keel, and not much fazes him. Perhaps it’s his training, or perhaps it’s the fact that he’s never felt things quite the way others do – regardless, he only rarely allows anything to get the better of him such that he acts irrationally.
But as he rereads the letter front to back, his vision begins to swim with stinging tears, and – he’ll probably regret this as long as he lives – he rips the letter in half and tosses it to the floor, as crumpled and torn as his own heart.
The successive days don’t improve matters much. He retrieves the letter from the floor only hours later, of course, and tapes it back together even though it’s pockmarked with tearstains now. He lets his friends be of what comfort they can, and tries to extend the same favor to Ochako (whose eyes bear the permanent puffiness of grief) and Iida (who looks so utterly unsure of himself that Shouto’s heart shatters every time he catches a glimpse of his dazed expression or hears a telltale wobble in his strong, clear voice). When Yaoyorozu comes to him with offered condolences, he’s glad to let her hold him.
But he still lies awake at night, and he still rereads that letter nearly every day. He doesn’t cry anymore, but the ink’s still blotchy from the places where he did before. And almost every night that he lies awake, he hugs his knees to his chest and tucks his head between them and hugs his legs and tries not to think about the danger his best friend might be in, the way he’s all alone out there, the fact that he’d left without so much as saying goodbye.
He’s not the type to talk things out but he tries to pen a return letter, as if it’ll close some of the gaps Midoriya’s loss left behind. Anything, he thinks, might be better than the misery of holding himself at night, knowing that the arms around him aren’t his friend’s. But every attempt results in crumpled paper and his forehead pressed to his desk as he tries to fight back tears.
He wishes he had words, or something more productive to do with the anger and worry and confusion and overwhelming sadness he feels than penning opening lines and throwing balled-up drafts into the wastebasket.
(He never empties it.)
**
Later
Deku’s coming home.
Those words from a teary-eyed Uraraka barely register as Shouto stares at the television, unbelieving. They probably don’t really ring in anyone’s ears, though; they’re all too shocked to think of anything but the nightly news. There’s not a dry eye in the room – at least, not one that looks like it’ll stay dry for long – and Shouto wants to collapse in on himself.
Deku is coming home. The man he grew up admiring is dead. Deku is coming home. Midoriya’s lost the only person he hadn’t left behind. Deku is coming home.
It doesn’t feel real.
Still doesn’t, when Midoriya stumbles through the doors looking like death warmed up. His face is bruised and puffy; he walks as if he’s been punched in the stomach with brass knuckles a few too many times, and when he’s mobbed by classmates who forget their moderation in their tandem grief and relief, he doesn’t even move. He’s rooted to the spot and Todoroki doesn’t approach.
You left me. You didn’t say goodbye.
He’s wearing one of his All Might shirts. Shouto can’t imagine why that reminder isn’t unbearably painful.
Why?
He’s passed around as student after student embraces him, and he returns each one wearily. But there’s a deadness in his eyes that strikes Shouto like a slap to the face with a sheet of cold steel. It stings, seeing the light drained from those eyes, and suddenly he’s almost moved to run and apologize and promise to do anything he can to right this wrong even though he knows nothing in the world ever could.
I know why you did it. But why didn’t you say anything?
He passes Midoriya in the hallway on the way to the cafeteria, and it’s an almost out-of-body feeling when he’s spent so long forcing himself to acknowledge that he’s never getting his best friend back. But he has to keep up the convincing – he might as well be a ghost for as much as he’s barely a shell.
You were my best friend.
I’d never had a best friend. Did you know that?
It’s impossibly easy to understand why, really. All Might was everything to Midoriya and everyone knew it long before the origin of his quirk was made known. And even if he’d been alive and well, Midoriya has probably seen things – out there in the world, unprotected by the walls of his school – that Shouto couldn’t even comprehend. (It would be hard to shock Shouto now; he doesn’t doubt that some of what Midoriya probably knows now could do it.) He was never going to come back unchanged; that he’s even still in one piece is a minor miracle.
But understanding does nothing for the ache in his chest.
Shouto had never had a friend before.
Sixteen years, and not a single person he could truly call a friend – pathetic, he thinks, wrapping his arms around his knees like he’s learned to lately. Midoriya doesn’t realize that he’s changed everything, and he probably never will. And even if he did, what difference would it make? His path is one that’ll soon make Shouto irrelevant.
It’s late – almost two. No one’s awake to text and there’s no one he’d really want to, anyway. His homework is done. He can’t go outside for a breath of fresh air or to the gym to work out his frustrations without tripping a thousand alarms. This is the worst part of the night, unquestionably; it inevitably leaves him alone with his thoughts. So he almost thinks he’s hallucinating the knock he hears at his door.
But no – it’s 2:13 now, and someone’s knocking.
Probably an emergency. Shouto sighs wearily and pads to the door, throwing a jacket over his t-shirt in the event that he’ll have to evacuate or, worse, fight.
But it’s not an emergency and it isn’t even Kaminari asking for help on the homework due in six hours (that would’ve been his second guess).
“Todoroki?”
Midoriya’s a mess: hair sticking up in every direction, puffy red eyes, mismatched pajamas when he’s always meticulous about that. His slippers shuffle with every step. He looks unbelievably defeated. He’s not wearing a single piece of All Might merchandise.
“M-midoriya,” he stammers. “What’s going on?”
He doesn’t answer, at least not in words, because he’s only one step over the threshold when he collapses, and Shouto’s instincts won’t let him do anything but reach out to catch him. It’s as if someone’s flipped a switch, and Midoriya is crying in seconds, slowly at first and then so violently his whole body shakes. His hands fist in the back of Shouto’s jacket and he buries his face in his shirt; without thinking, Shouto wraps what little of his jacket he can around Midoriya in a vain attempt to close him in.
Crying makes Shouto feel exposed. Perhaps Midoriya feels the same way; perhaps he hates it as much as Shouto does. This is something he can do when there’s so much unwanted emotion welling up in his throat that he can’t get words out. It seems to work, though, because Midoriya burrows beneath his jacket like he’s taking shelter from a storm. Okay, he thinks, okay. There’s a thousand things he wants to address, but right now, Midoriya needs him; that has to be the only thing that matters.
Not that he has any idea what to do about that. Midoriya was always the one to start these sorts of things and the comfort of touch is a native language of his, while Shouto can barely stutter out a greeting.
“Um…” he mutters, carefully taking a seat at the edge of his futon and trying not to topple under Midoriya’s weight. When he does, he gingerly removes his jacket and drapes it over Izuku; it seems as if he likes the cover. He runs through the list of things that’ve helped him when he’s been in distress: this, pillowing his head in someone’s shirt, is one; the feeling of a gentle hand stroking his shoulders is another, so he heats his palm just enough to feel inviting and rubs awkward if well-meaning circles against his jacket.
Slowly, Midoriya’s trembling begins to abate under the warmth of his palm, but when it does, it gives way to sound – shuddering, breathy sobs that rise in volume even though he has to know it’ll wake the whole campus. No one would even mention it but Shouto still winces with each gasp for breath, unconsciously wrapping his jacket tighter around Izuku’s shoulders. But nothing seems to work; Izuku clings to his waist and Shouto holds on just as tightly but it isn’t long before his sobs turn ragged and animal and there’s no word for it but wailing.
Like a part of his heart’s been ripped from his chest.
Shouto knows him well enough now to know that it has.
“Um…” he scrambles for the kinds of meaninglessly comforting words that seem to come so easily to Midoriya when it’s him doing the consolation. “It’s…you’re okay,” he mutters, and curses himself for it almost as soon as the words are out. He’s not and there’s nothing in the world less comforting than pain denied. “I mean…I’ve got you.” That one just makes him cringe – he sounds like the mother of a toddler. “Um…I’m here?”
Izuku freezes.
His shuddering stops, and he goes dead-silent.
Did that actually work?
Then Izuku’s entire body goes rigid.
Somehow, that stiff soundlessness is a thousand times more terrifying than the frantic, keening sobs of a moment before. A hundred times more than those nights he’d spent staring at the ceiling and believing he’d never get his best friend back. At least ten more than the one and only time he’d visited Izuku during his coma, not knowing if he’d ever wake. And something has to have triggered it; there’s a reason, and it’s probably Shouto’s fault-
Oh.
“I’m here,” he’d said.
I am here!
Shouto wishes he could disappear into thin air.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts out, arms encircling Midoriya’s shoulders insistently, begging him to do something to let him know that he’ll come back from this. “I’m so sorry and I wasn’t thinking and I…”
“Todoroki,” he croaks.
“Mi…doriya?”
“Please.”
“Oh.” He nods, and – he’s not sure if it’ll work but he has to try – he rests his chin against the top of Izuku’s head.
He likes to feel sheltered. That’s about the only thing Shouto knows for sure now, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t use that knowledge to the best of his ability.
“I…really don’t know what to say,” he admits. “Except I’m sorry.”
“I…it doesn’t even feel real.”
“I know it doesn’t.” Shouto closes his eyes. “I kinda feel like it’s never going to.”
“I’m sorry I never said anything.”
“Later,” Shouto sighs. He’d wanted that apology for months; it can wait.
“I missed…” he breathes in shakily. “…being here. All of you.”
“I…” Shouto takes a moment to collect himself. “We didn’t know if you were ever coming back.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t be the reason y-“ Izuku pauses mid-sentence. “…my classmates were in danger.”
“We’re all in danger.”
“But-“
“Always have been.”
“Idiot,” Shouto mutters under his breath, wondering when he’d started absorbing Bakugou’s less-charming personality traits. “We needed you.”
“The world needed me more.”
“I needed you.”
“I’m sorry, Shouto.”
“Don’t…don’t call me that.” It’s all so much easier to see now that Izuku’s not sobbing anymore.
“W-what?”
“I’m still kind of mad at you.”
“Be mad, then.” There’s no malice in his tone, or in the way he burrows his face into Shouto’s jacket. “I deserve it.”
“No, you don’t, and I’m being selfish and you should be making me feel like a terrible person because what right do I have to be talking about myself-“
“Stop.”
“I have,” he shudders, and he suspects that it might soon be his turn to cry, “an entire wastebasket full of letters that I tried to write because you left us all so torn-up and you just stayed gone and you probably always would’ve if…if…”
He can’t even bring himself to say it.
“And I have no right to be upset!” Shouto’s body warms like it always does when he’s not in control of his anger. “None! I’m not the one who felt like he had to go off on his own to protect his friends-“
“I’m sorry.”
“And I’m not the one who just…who just…”
He still can’t say it.
“And no one’s been through more than you and I have no right to make this about me but…” he tries to stop the shaking in his hands, tries not to think, but it doesn’t work and he’s gripping Izuku as tightly as Izuku is gripping him now. “I…I thought that I lost you.”
Now they’re both crying.
Great.
Shouto doesn’t know what he expected of someone as spectacularly terrible at feelings as he is, but it had at least been better than this.
“I…can’t…lose you.”
And that’s the worst of it.
He cannot lose Midoriya Izuku. Knowing that makes him selfish and stupid and all the things that he can’t afford to be, but it is an unavoidable truth. And now he’s made his best friend cry in a dorm room close to three in the morning, acting like an inconsiderate boor in his hour of need, and he can’t even muster the strength of character to feel guilty about it when the weight of Izuku in his arms makes it so painfully clear that he’s been clinging to the first person who’d ever given him something to cling to and he doesn’t know where he’d fall if he let go.
And he’d had the gall to tell Izuku that he was mad at him.
Of all the stupid things.
“I…no one,” he stammers incoherently. “You’re…I had no one and you…you…”
It’s only a moment before he can’t see or speak through his tears. Maybe it’s for the better – how could he possibly put it into words? What words could even describe the bitter loneliness of his childhood and the arduous process of pulling himself from it, or the way Izuku’s offered hand had given him the assist he hadn’t known he needed? Could anyone – let alone him – articulate what it was like to have a visitor on his desert island, then three, than an entire class who’d reached out hands just like the first?
Maybe I owe you my life, he’d say if he were honest.
“I’m sorry,” he says, because he’s not.
Midoriya has no words, either, and Shouto knows what that silence means. He is perhaps the central figure of Shouto’s life; Shouto will never be anywhere near the center of his. Why would he be? He has nothing Midoriya needs, nothing he’d even want.
“Please,” Midoriya pleads. “Don’t.”
His hand stills in motion. “Don’t…what?”
“Don’t leave,” he sobs, as if it should be obvious.
“Um…”
What…what do I do with that?
“Of course not,” he promises, and perhaps he’s never been more honest. He’s always been good at giving what’s not returned, and this silence is easier than what they had earlier.
But it only lasts so long before his own words have to break it.
“Midoriya?”
“Yeah?”
“Why did you come here?” he clears his throat. “Why me? Specifically?”
His hands are like claws now, clutching his jacket so tightly its fabric will probably be stretched in the morning.
“Because even if you didn’t want to, I knew you’d understand.”