Chapter Text
“Do you think I talk weird?”
Momo’s mouth forms a small O, her lipstick smudging a little as her head half-turns to look at him in the reflection of her vanity. Her proper upbringing prevents her from stuttering. In her place, Shoto would already be going, Ummmmmm…
“Do I think you talk weird,” Momo parrots. She removes the lipstick stain from the corner of her mouth with a pinky. “Well…”
She’s clearly fishing, and the answer is clearly a yes, so Shoto flops back down on her bed. He pretends he doesn’t hear her chuckling. It’s just like her, he thinks, childishly cross and then cross that he’s being so childish. Momo’s always one to add insult to injury.
Like that time they were seven and he ate shit trying to go up a tree in her backyard. Well, ‘backyard’ is perhaps not the correct word for the sprawling gardens of the Yaoyorozu’s estate—the perfectly trimmed, hypnotically green grass, the neatly shaped bushes. There is an ancient ginkgo almost at the edge of the estate, where it borders with some other wealthy family’s palace.
He remembers this day like it was yesterday; his stubborn assurance that he could make it up there just fine, he didn’t even need his Quirk. Momo’s politely skeptical expression. He was bluffing, of course. Shoto spent most of his time in the dojo or being berated by his tutors—he didn’t have any experience at all climbing trees.
It was something about the sun, he thinks now, something about the heat he could only feel faintly while Momo’s nanny fanned herself in the shade, and how it made him feel so out of place. Then Momo’s eyes on his, so dark they were almost black, shining with intelligence. How that made him feel fluorescent with something unknown.
Something he’d later try to call love, to Momo’s continued, unimpressed chagrin. They were seven, she argues. What did he know about love? And she’s more right than she could ever know.
They hadn’t exactly made a run for it. Momo is and has always been too much of a lady for that, too prim and proper to give in to childish impulses.
(Except for when she’s not. But don’t tell anyone. Only Shoto is meant to know. The whispered laughter of children holding flashlights under the covers. Only Shoto is meant to know that one, too.)
They had definitely hustled, though. A pace too quick to be called walking—though not quite running—took them right below the branches of that enormous tree. Shoto craned his neck back and looked up, up, up at the flashes of sunlight that filtered in through the yellow leaves. He remembers feeling small. Smaller than that, tiny.
Smaller than that. So of course he had to climb it.
He fell flat on his face. Of course. But he toughed out the nosebleed like a champ. That was their first shared secret. Two collared shirts, ironed to perfection, her dark brown skirt, his pair of child-sized loafers. The grass stains she stared at for hours while they lay there in mutually understood silence. She stared with something like awe. Shoto likes to think she also discovered something that day.
Mostly, he likes to think that he is at the very least useful to his friends. He won’t ask for more. Shoto’s entire life is comprised of asking for more—from himself, from his Quirk, from life in general. Shoto is a crybaby and a whiner and he loves to get his way. Sue him. But in this, he is the picture of selflessness.
(Well. Maybe not quite. But close to it.)
By the time Momo’s nanny found them, the evidence of Shoto’s little mishap had been neatly and efficiently hidden. He wonders sometimes if his once-white button-up is still there, buried deep under the shade of Momo’s ginkgo. He outgrew the new, Quirk-made shirt ages ago. But it’s still in the depths of his closet, folded cleanly, safe from any wayward flame.
Do you remember, he almost asks Momo. She’s taken off the first red lipstick and is now putting on another nearly identical red lipstick. He stops himself at the last second. Would that be a weird thing to say, he wonders. He sighs.
“I’m going to fucking kill him,” Shoto says mutinously under his breath.
Hitoshi opens his big fat mouth once—as he’s wont to, the chatterbox; god, is he annoying—and now Shoto can’t stop thinking about it. Dude, has anyone ever told you you talk weird as fuck? Thank you for the valuable fucking input, Hitoshi.
“Violent,” Momo observes mildly. She twists her mouth in displeasure at her reflection. She turns around in her chair and points to her mouth. “This one looks worse, right? Do you think this one looks worse?”
“You’re as beautiful as the day I married you,” Shoto says flatly.
“Useless,” Momo mutters, turning back to the mirror. She takes this lipstick off too.
“I think I talk normal. I do normal things with my mouth and my face,” Shoto argues.
Momo gives up on lipstick and starts doing her eyeliner.
“I don’t know why I bother with the liquid ones; I don’t even like them. I always end up…” And here she goes silent to get the thin black wing right. “I always end up wearing the same lip tint. I suppose I just like the idea of branching out, but…” Here she does her other eye. “In practice, not so much.”
Mascara is applied with similar efficiency. Then Momo opens a drawer in her vanity and pulls out a well-loved lip tint, its plastic label rolling up, the glue that held it weak with age.
“I can feel Mother rolling in her grave,” Momo says, slightly distorted by the way she’s moving her mouth to put the lip tint on. It’s red, this one too, but not like the other ones. Dark, staining almost the color of drying blood.
Shoto doesn’t know if she means at the state of the weathered tube, or the boy in her bed, or her red lip that dares be anything other than a tasteful nude and a sheer gloss. The scandal. The agony. She’ll survive.
“Your mom is alive,” he can’t help but point out.
“That’s how I like her,” Momo says lightly. Ridiculous.
She fishes again in her drawer, this time for a glittery gloss, one that is a dark, deep gold color, but whose fuzzy applicator has long been stained red with how many times Momo layers it over this same lip tint before it gets the chance to fully dry. Both go into her small brown purse, taking up valuable real estate he knows she’d rather dedicate to the battered pocket edition of Chichi no Shūen Nikki she’s been reading.
Men don’t like it when girls read, Momo has told him a million times, laughing at him blatantly, but Shoto struggles to internalize it. He thinks he still understands, though; there are some things about it he understands. The art of selling your daughter to the highest bidder. Being a Quirk, a body part. This is a film he’s seen before.
She reads at lunchtime and during free periods. Mostly poetry. Haikus and sonnets, Japanese and otherwise. Sestinas, laments, odes, and elegies. For someone whose Quirk revolves around scientific knowledge, facts and figures and hard truths, she never seems to translate that into daily life. One day, having lunch on the roof—somewhere they’re not supposed to be able to access, but hey, he won’t talk if she doesn’t—she reads aloud a fragment of Chichi no Shūen Nikki. He begs her to stop not even halfway through the page, and she laughs at him just like she did that day under her ginkgo, a hand delicately placed in front of her mouth but doing nothing to mask her amusement.
Momo says that something about misery has to be naturally appealing to people on a fundamental level. Shoto argues that there’s more than enough misery to go around even without actively seeking it out. Momo replies that that’s why the two of them are how they are.
“We didn’t get enough hardship growing up,” she says, the corners of her mouth twitching up. “So nowadays we have to manufacture it.”
And Shoto hides his laughter in her shoulder.
Satisfied at last with what she sees in the mirror, Momo stands and gathers her things. A compact mirror, her mascara, and her dainty pink wallet all follow the lip tint and gloss into her purse. Her phone goes last and barely fits. She hangs the thin strap on her shoulder and spreads her arms to show off the outfit. Shoto sits up and claps accordingly.
The dress she sports is simple and elegant, a pastel yellow number with a high neck and short, airy sleeves. It cinches at her waist and falls long past her knees, Yaoyorozu-approved, almost down to her dark brown heels. She does a small twirl to show him the bow at her back. It’s almost—but not quite—covered by her hair falling down her back in dark waves, meticulously curled and styled. Her bangs—most of the time hidden in her ponytail for practicality—are framing her face, bringing attention to the tasteful earth tones of her eyeshadow. Her only rebellion is the usual one.
She’s gorgeous; she really is.
“You look beautiful,” he tells her, and Momo tilts her head at him, the white of her teeth peeking through her embarrassed half smile. His eyes catch on her dimples.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
“He won’t know what hit him,” Shoto returns. Momo gnaws on her lower lip, disturbing her make-up.
Shoto sort of wishes he hadn’t said anything. He’s not good at this sort of thing. He’s really not sure why Momo still puts up with him. He closes his left eye as she approaches him on the bed, tracking her movement with his good eye.
Then they’re in a position as familiar as breathing, her hands cradling his face and tilting it upwards. Shoto opens his eye. He tries to focus on what she’s saying and not the warmth of her hand on the right side of his face. Half his willpower just goes into holding himself up and staying something resembling a person, not a dog.
“Will you be here when I come back?” Momo asks.
Shoto’s eyes drop, purposefully, to her red lips, then back up. The golden shine of her dark eyes rewards him. Momo flicks him on the forehead, laughing lightly, and lets go of him
“You’ll be begging me to leave by the time I’m done here,” he promises.
“I could never,” Momo says, faux-scandalized.
“Good luck to the lady,” Shoto calls after her as she walks out.
Momo blows him a kiss that he pretends to catch and then smack, hard enough to sting, on his cheek, pushing his own face to the side. Her laughter, light and airy like a wind chime, sticks to his gums long after she’s closed the door behind her.
Shoto wishes things were simpler. That he loved her like he should. Some days he thinks he could if he just tried hard enough. He lays back down on Momo’s bed. Some days he thinks he’s not broken in any way unfixable. He runs his tongue over his teeth. Then does it again.