Archive of Our Own

Bakugou is laying on the floor in Shouto’s room, grumbling expletives under his breath at the DS in his hand when Shouto decides to ask him a question.

“Why does Izuku kiss you?”

Bakugou’s eyes flick up to where Shouto is lounging on his bed, half-heartedly tossing a knitted ball back and forth. His character dies a high-pitched, digitized death on the other side of the room.

“Hah?” Bakugou huffs. “The fuck kind of question is that?”

Shouto lets the ball fall gently onto his sheets and rolls onto his stomach.

“I mean, he’s always doing it, but…” Shouto tips his head to the side. “But how do you get him to?”

Bakugou’s eyebrows twitch unhappily. “I don’t get him to. He fucking chooses to, asshole.”

“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

Bakugou scoffs and restarts the level he’d been working on, a frown pulling down his features. Midoriya refers to it as Bakugou’s pouting face- usually with an endeared smile tugging at his lips- but Shouto fails to see a difference between this face and Bakugou’s usual angry face.

Perhaps he’ll ask Midoriya about it later.

“It’s not like in the movies,” Shouto continues, and Bakugou has his ear turned slightly toward the bed so Shouto knows he’s listening, even as his thumbs jab manically at the game console. “Ochako gave me a list of recommendations and the formula for a kiss seems clear: sustained eye contact, accidental close proximity, and sometimes spaghetti.”

Bakugou’s mouth twists, eyes never leaving the screen.

“What the hell? Are you taking advice from Lady and the Tramp?”

“You say that like I shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, obviously fuckwad. It’s a cartoon.”

Shouto sighs softly and lets himself fall back onto his bed, staring at the slow turn of the ceiling fan above him.

“I enjoyed it.”

Bakugou mutters something underneath his breath that Shouto ignores, not really sure if it was directed at him or the game. He thinks about the Kiss Formula instead.

In every romantic movie on Ochako’s list, there was the accidental stumble into closeness and then a long moment of intense eye contact before the on-screen couple would kiss. It seemed like a simple enough strategy, but Shouto has been standing close to Sero for weeks now with his attention locked on the other boy’s eyes (or his smile, or his piercings, or on one notable occasion the rogue eyelash that had fallen onto his cheek) and the results were clear.

No kiss.

Usually, Sero flashed a nervous grin and asked if there was something on his face.

So maybe there’s some other factor in the formula that Shouto’s missing. He thinks of Midoriya again, and the way he waltzes across the room to press his lips to Bakugou’s cheek without any lingering eye contact to let Shouto (or Bakugou) know that it’s coming. But maybe the rules are different for cheek kisses.

Maybe Shouto has to learn how to get Sero to kiss his cheek first and that’s why all of his carefully laid, lip-oriented plans aren’t producing any results.

Across the room, Bakugou lets out a weary sigh.

Shouto twists his head to look at him and finds Bakugou’s attention still locked on the screen, even though his eyes are clouded over in thought.

“Think it’s because of my scar,” Bakugou offers uncomfortably.

Shouto continues to watch Bakugou curiously, the sound of him advancing further in the level exceedingly loud in his quiet room.

“Izuku…gets sad, sometimes,” Bakugou says, jabbing more aggressively with his thumbs. He bites down on his bottom lip and then lets it go just as quickly.

It’s a nervous habit Shouto’s used to seeing on Midoriya’s face and he’s not sure how to feel about seeing it on Bakugou’s.

“Gets caught up in the what-if’s,” Bakugou continues. “All that nasty shit.”

“Oh,” Shouto murmurs, thinking back through his memories of Midoriya marching across a room full of romantic purpose and re-categorizing them in his brain.

Bakugou shrugs, stiff.

“Makes him feel better to come over and kiss my scar. Remind himself we both made it out.”

Shouto lets his cheek sink into the bedding beneath him. He closes his unscarred eye and peers at Bakugou’s blurry form through the other. Shouto’s never said out loud that he can’t quite see through it but, somehow, he thinks his friends already know. He thinks of Midoriya and the bags under his eyes and the way he marches across the common room to kiss Bakugou’s scar, then returns with a small brightness in his expression. A new softness around his shoulders.

“Because scars mean survival,” Shouto says.

Bakugou smirks.

“Damn right they do,” he murmurs. Then he pulls himself up from his spot on the floor, knees popping, and tosses the DS onto Shouto’s bed. “There,” he says, “beat the level for you. Now pay up.”

Shouto shoos Bakugou back a few steps, then leans over his low bed to pull out a shoebox he’d stashed underneath there full of random objects and keepsakes.

He’s had it since the middle of second year when he found a similar one in Kaminari’s room, neither of them able to sleep that night and bored of the infomercials playing on loop on the common room tv. Shouto had followed Kaminari to his room and stayed up until the early morning hours listening to his friend explain the significance of each object in hushed and happy tones.

Bakugou plucks the box from Shouto’s grasp as soon as it’s visible and tosses the lid at Shouto’s face.

“Ow,” Shouto complains.

“Baby,” Bakugou shoots back.

Bakugou pulls out a stack of printed pictures and returns the box to Shouto’s lap, flipping through each badly taken shot with a half smile Shouto’s been seeing more and more of, these days.

Shouto leans closer to peer at them over Bakugou’s shoulder. Most of the pictures are of Midoriya, outside of the store they’d bought the disposable camera in, while Shouto had tried to get a handle on how it worked.

Bakugou snorts at one that catches Midoriya mid-fall as he trips backward over a wheel stop in the parking lot.

“Asshole,” Shouto says, lightly shoving Bakugou’s shoulder.

“Fuck off,” Bakugou laughs. “It’s funny.”

“You only get to take two.”

Bakugou waves him off with a lazy hand. The one it had taken him months to learn to use again after the war, and that he still goes to physical therapy because of.

Shouto lets himself smile, but only because Bakugou is too distracted to notice it.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bakugou dismisses, deciding on the picture of Midoriya tripping and another of him holding a very fat neighborhood cat up to the camera, his pleased smile a stark contrast to the cat’s obvious frown. “Call me the next time you get stuck. Same deal.”

Shouto places the rest of the photos back in his shoebox and spares a sideways glance toward Bakugou.

“Does Midoriya know you make deals with people for photos of him?”

Bakugou huffs an amused sound while he hunts down the house slippers he’d tossed at Shouto when he came into his room an hour ago.

“He fucking shouldn’t, but his nosy ass is always snooping. I know for a fact he knows I have them.”

Shouto wonders if Bakugou keeps them in a shoebox beneath his bed, too.

“He confronted you?”

Bakugou rolls his eyes, shoving at Shouto’s shoulder as he crawls onto the bed and sticks his arm between the mattress and the wall, searching. “Absolutely not,” he says, mouth twisting in concentration as he feels around for his slipper, “but I came back to my room one day and he was weirdly happy. Kept dropping hints about how he and Round Face had taken her new polaroid for a spin in the park, that embarrassing fuck.”

Shouto remembers Ochako bringing that camera to the dorms, saying it was a surprise gift from her parents. Ochako had been especially happy then, and Shouto more than happy to supply Endeavor’s money for more film once she’d used it all up.

“Wait,” Shouto says, “is that why you made so much mochi that month?”

Bakugou emerges triumphantly with his left slipper and lightly smacks Shouto on the head with it.

“Jackass charges a steep price.”

That makes sense, Shouto thinks. Ochako has always been particularly shrewd when it comes to money. Or, he supposes, mochi.

“I’m outta here,” Bakugou says, heading for the door, but he pauses with his hand on the knob and turns back toward Shouto with a vaguely constipated expression. “And don’t try that fucking spaghetti shit with Tape Face. It’s cringe as fuck.”

Bakugou leaves before Shouto can argue that, in the movie, that spaghetti shit does in fact end in a kiss. But it doesn't matter. Shouto already has a new plan.

All that’s left is to put it into action.

*

“Um, dude?” Sero says.

Shouto tilts his head a little further, certain that the light hanging over their dining room table is illuminating his scar.

“Yes?”

“You’ve uh…” Sero licks his lips; looks around at the few other classmates who have gathered together to work on their homework. When none of them pay him any mind he looks back at Shouto, who’s having a hard time making out Sero’s expression at this angle.

Plus his neck is starting to hurt.

“You’ve been looking at the ceiling for a while. Is everything…okay?”

Shouto lowers his gaze. Casts his scar back into shadow so he can peer directly at Sero’s nervously compassionate face.

“Yes, I’m okay.”

“Okay,” Sero says, attention lingering on Shouto like he doesn’t quite believe him but doesn’t know what to say, either.

Shouto lets him look.

Sero clears his throat. “Do you, um, do you need help with the assignment?” he asks, gesturing towards the blank paper that has been sitting in front of Shouto, untouched, for the last twenty minutes. “Maybe I can take a look?”

Shouto does not need help on his assignment. He practices English fairly often with Midoriya and Kaminari, and sometimes Bakugou if Kaminari decides to let up on calling him Kacchan and Midoriya calls him Kacchan at least twelve times- slowly loosening up Bakugou’s crossed arm frown with each one until he’s shouting at them all about conjugations and the present tense and slipping in every English curse he knows just to show off.

Sero cringes as soon as he’s finished offering. “Actually, maybe you should ask-”

“Yes, I do,” Shouto lies, leaning closer. “You’ll help me?”

Sero blinks and his dark eyes go wide, flitting from the arm Shouto has placed on the table to his face, nose only a few inches from Sero’s own.

“Um, I mean, yeah?” Sero says, tacking on an awkward laugh and scratching at the hair on the back of his neck. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be but I’ll definitely try.”

Shouto scoots his chair towards Sero until their knees bump underneath the table.

Sero’s lips thin with a thwarted smile, pink blossoming over his cheeks, eyes glued to the pencil sitting by his own, half-finished homework sheet.

For a moment, Shouto merely watches his reaction. Licks his lips and takes a deep inhale, picking up hints of the soap Sero’s so fond of. The one with the cartoon sea monster flailing wildly on the label. Shouto likes to think the monster’s name is Penny.

When Sero doesn’t say anything more, Shouto slides the blank assignment into his line of sight.

“Right,” Sero says, scanning over the assignment and humming. “Right,” he says again. He clears his throat. “So for this first one, the uh- the conjugation stays the same in the present tense, so…so it would be Alfred run to get to class.”

Runs, Shouto thinks.

“Okay,” he says.

On the opposite side of the table, Bakugou scoffs lightly under his breath.

Shouto resists the urge to roll his eyes. He has it on good authority from Midoriya that Bakugou thinks he and Sero would make a good couple.

“Does that make sense?” Sero asks hopefully, tugging his bottom lip into his mouth while he peers at Shouto through his bangs. His new, shiny silver lip piercing catches the light distractingly.

“Yes,” Shouto says, placing his hand on Sero’s forearm while he leans closer to the paper. “Can you help me with the next one?”

Sero, with his shoulders pulled all the way up to his burning ears, says, “Yeah, totally.”

Shouto redoes the assignment later, when he’s back in his own room, and when he’s finished he draws a picture of Penny in the margins- bench pressing a pirate ship. Sometimes Present Mic adds dialogue and Shouto’s curious to see what the man comes up with this time. He wonders if the character who looks suspiciously like Aizawa-sensei will make an appearance. Perhaps as a pirate.

Then he sends Midoriya a message asking him to help Sero with their English homework.

*

Shouto finds Ochako early the next morning, curled up on one of the porch chairs with a letter in her hands and a notebook balanced on her lap.

“Good morning,” Shouto says, taking a long sip of his strawberry smoothie before settling into the empty chair beside her.

Ochako smiles warmly at him, but her eyes are red-rimmed and watery. “Sorry, I stole your morning brooding spot,” she murmurs.

Shouto hums.

“I’m amenable to sharing.”

Ochako makes a soft noise that Shouto is mostly sure is a laugh.

“Still no luck with your three step plan to woo Sero, then?” she asks. “Or, three step plan to have him woo you, I guess.”

Shouto leans further into the support of the chair, the back of head gently thumping against its wood. “No,” he tells her. “Bakugou vetoed step three anyway.”

“Bummer.”

“But it’s fine. I’ll make a new plan.”

Ochako reaches over to briefly squeeze Shouto’s arm. “That’s great!” she says. “I hope it works out for you. Really, I think you and Sero are a great match.”

The sentiment warms Shouto more than he expected it to, and he offers her a small, genuine smile.

“Bakugou thinks so too.”

Ochako’s eyes widen, slightly, and the curl of her mouth turns more mischievous.

“Now how would you know that,” she says lowly. “There’s no way Bakugou would ever admit it to your face. Not with his I don’t care what you extras are up to nonsense.”

“He…does care though?” Shouto points out slowly. “Weren’t him and Hagakure trading gossip on the stairs the other day?”

Ochako smothers a laugh beneath her fist. “Oh my god. That loser,” she says, her smile bright and open. “I knew he was getting info through somebody.”

Shouto gets the distinct impression that, maybe, Bakugou and Hagakure’s whispering was supposed to be a secret.

Oh well.

“I bet Deku’s the one who spilled the beans though,” Ochako guesses.

“Naturally.”

Ochako snickers again, mumbling under her breath about nerds and something called Kacchan notes for the future volume one. Her Ryukyu pen starts to float away and Ochako watches it for a moment before deactivating her quirk. She looks less sad, now, if only slightly.

Shouto tilts his head until he can make out Ochako’s profile with his good eye.

“What are you writing?”

Ochako brushes the pad of her thumb against the letter in her lap and it crinkles softly under her touch.

“You know…I’ve been talking to Himiko,” she says, tilting her words like a question even though it isn’t one. Shouto knows they fought each other in the war. Knows the way Ochako’s tears feel against his neck and the way her voice trembled with something tender the first time she said Himiko instead of Toga.

It doesn’t tremble, now, and Shouto’s glad for it.

He suspects it has something to do with her monthly visits to the HPSC rehabilitation center Hawks had christened mere days after the war ended, saving Toga from Tartarus. Or perhaps something worse.

“I know,” Shouto says, and Ochako’s shoulders loosen like she’d been waiting for permission to relax.

“I…” Ochako starts, her pensive gaze resting on a single point in the distance. “She’s been writing me these letters, lately.”

Absent-mindedly, Ochako untucks an envelope from between her notebook’s pages and begins to fiddle with the open flap.

Shouto blinks when he realizes the red markings he can see around the seal make the shape of a bright red pair of lips.

“They’re love letters,” he says.

Ochako’s face grows pink. She fans herself with the empty envelope.

“It’s…she’s telling me all this stuff about her childhood. Life with the League. Everything.” Ochako licks her lips and gently sets down the envelope. “I had no idea how she lived, before.” Ochako turns towards Todoroki with a small, wobbly smile. “But I want to make her smile, you know? Take some of that hurt away.”

Shouto hums. Out of everyone in their class, he thinks he might understand Ochako the most. In this, at least, they stand together, shoulder to shoulder. Touya is never far from Shouto’s mind and he knows that the only person who visits his brother more than himself is Hawks, though Shouto’s never been able to get a straight answer as to why. His current prevailing theory is that they made a blood oath together while they were in the League that they have to regularly renew in order to survive.

Looking at Ochako’s warm cheeks and small, private smile, he wonders if it might be something else entirely. Something softer.

“Are you going to write her a love letter back?”

Somehow, Ochako’s cheeks grow even more pink than before, a bubbly laugh escaping her mouth, then quickly covered up with her hand.

“Yeah,” Ochako says, eyes still shining with unshed tears but brighter than before. “Yeah, I think I will.”

Shouto nods, once. Then gives her a thumbs up.

Ochako laughs again, reaching out to briefly squeeze Shouto’s hand- thumb still raised.

“Do you still visit your brother?” she asks.

Shouto nods.

Ochako smiles warmly.

“Would you like to talk about him?”

The rest of Shouto’s smoothie sits forgotten and half-finished at his feet as he opens his mouth and says more about Touya in one sitting than he has in all the years he’s been alive. It doesn’t even take his conspiracy board to figure out that Ochako is the one who asks Sato to switch that night’s class dinner from gyoza to soba. Or for her to know that Shouto’s the one who slipped the “Go for it, Ochako-chan!” drawing underneath her dorm door that same day.

*

Shouto lingers after homeroom, standing patiently in front of Aizawa’s desk, watching the man slowly grade the stack of papers in front of him.

“What,” Aizawa asks after Shouto has been standing there for at least sixty seconds.

“Can I have a sticker from your drawer?”

It takes Aizawa another long moment to look up from his desk, wearing the expression of a man who just took back-to-back redeyes next to multiple crying children. “I don’t have a sticker drawer,” he says.

Shouto rocks slightly on his heels, one hand on the strap of his schoolbag.

“Eri claims otherwise.”

Aizawa slowly blinks, expression unchanged, and then opens a side drawer in his desk and offers Shouto a small yellow bin full of various stickers and small cat toys.

“Take your pick on the condition you tell no one else this exists.”

Shouto quickly selects a heart-shaped sticker, satisfied with the efficiency of his mission.

“Understood, sir.”

“And don’t be late to family dinner tomorrow.”

Shouto hesitates near the doorway, mind catching on the word like a shoe against uneven pavement.

“I won’t be,” he promises after a moment.

In the hall, Midoriya and Bakugou are waiting for him. Midoriya smiles wide and waves while Bakugou rolls his eyes but waits patiently, leaning up against the window with his arms crossed, and Shouto thinks, for a moment, about family. About broken things held together with craft glue, or stitches, or nothing at all, and about hands outstretched and offered like a promise in a time of need.

Family is something you’re born into, Shouto knows. Something shackled to your last name. But maybe family is also something you choose.

“What the hell took you so long, IcyHot?” Bakugou barks.

Maybe, Todoroki thinks, family is something that can choose you, too.

*

Shouto finds Sero lounging on the common room couch when he, Midoriya, and Bakugou return and he extends a closed envelope toward Sero with both hands, the heart sticker he’d gotten from Aizawa placed over the seal.

Sero’s mouth drops open, eyes wide and unblinking.

“Is this…?”

Mina and Kaminai wear matching grins on either side of Sero. Shouto can see Jirou peeking over her bowl of cereal at the kitchen counter, too, trying to see what’s going on. When Sero doesn’t finish the question, Shouto clarifies.

“It’s for you.”

Sero’s eyes flick between Shouto’s and the envelope a few times, ears pink.

“Oh my god,” he whispers.

Mina shoves his shoulder. “Well, go on!”

“Right!” Sero says, jumping up from the couch to accept Shouto’s love letter. “Right. Yes. Totally.”

Then Sero just looks at Shouto for a moment, eyes still wide, like he’s shocked, or lost.

“Can I…um,” Sero says, pausing to lick his lips.

Shouto’s attention briefly diverts to the silver ring on Sero’s bottom lip. Shouto wonders if he’ll be able to feel it when Sero kisses him. He wonders if it will be cold. He wonders if half of his own lips will feel cold. He’s never tested that before.

Sero clears his throat.

“Can I open it now?”

“Yes.”

Carefully, Sero peels open the envelope, eyes scanning over the few lines of text once, then twice, and then a third time.

“It’s-” Sero says, before breaking into a nervous laugh, face redder than before. “Oh man, I thought this was…”

Shouto doesn’t know why Sero isn’t finishing the sentences he starts today. Shouto wishes he would.

Sero takes a deep breath before turning to face Shouto properly.

“Yes, we can meet in my room this weekend to read manga,” he says.

Shouto stares. Waits for Sero to move closer.

People have to be close in order to kiss.

But Sero doesn’t move, instead squirming slightly under Shouto’s rapt attention, so Shouto simply says, “Cool.”

It’s a half-success, anyways.

“Oh my god,” Jirou mutters from the kitchen.

Sero buries his face in his hands, still gently holding Shouto’s love letter, and then collapses back into the couch between Mina and Kaminari, who are cooing and poking at his hidden face, making jokes about steam coming out of his ears even though there is none and if anyone could make steam come out of their ears it would be Shouto.

So, maybe Shouto miscalculated. Maybe Sero wouldn’t like for there to be other people around when he kisses Shouto for the first time.

Shouto turns to Midoriya and Bakugou, who are plastered against the back wall of the common room, having been more quiet in these past few minutes than Shouto can ever remember them being since he started at UA, and asks, “Was your first kiss the one on the training field or was it in private?”

On the couch, Sero makes a sound Shouto doesn’t know how to interpret. Midoriya blinks at Shouto like he’s having a hard time understanding what just happened and Bakugou’s wearing his You’re An Idiot face. Shouto has no problem recognizing that one. Nor how it transitions into Bakugou’s normal angry face.

“The fuck was that?” he shouts. “That’s it?”

“What’s it?”

“Oh my god,” Midoriya murmurs.

Shouto…doesn’t understand the problem, so he makes the easy decision to go up to his room and pull out his conspiracy board, wiping away his latest theory about Hawks and his brother in order to start on a new plan.

In bold words at the top of the board he writes, PRIVATE ENVIRONMENT

Then he underlines it. He’s certain that was the only flaw in Operation Love Letter.

*

Shinso is the one to open the door when Shouto shows up at the Aizawa-Yamada household for family dinner.

“Sup,” Shinso says, half of his attention locked on the phone in his hand, thumb tapping skillfully away at the screen.

It’s not unlike the way Aizawa behaves, and Shouto mentally places a tally in the secret love child category in his mind.

“Hello.”

“Shouto!” Eri calls, bounding towards the open door and pressing slightly up into the hand Shinso fondly places on her head. “I have the next movie on our list picked out. It’s already in the DVD player.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“After dinner, Er,” Shinso reminds her, ushering Shouto further into the house and toward the kitchen table, where there’s a fifth place setting waiting for him. Aizawa is stirring something that smells good on the stovetop in a pink, cat-themed apron, dark hair pulled into a bun like the one Ochako sometimes wears when she’s working out, and he doesn’t turn around when they enter the room.

“Welcome,” he says, easily pulling Eri into his arms when she wanders closer to his side, offering her the opportunity to stir for a while.

“Thank you for having me,” Shouto murmurs.

A warm hand claps Shouto on the back.

“We’re happy to have you, little listener!” Mic-sensei’s hair is down the way it always seems to be when he’s at home and out of his hero costume, and Shouto finds it no less shocking than the first time he was invited to family dinner at Eri’s behest. “I love a good movie marathon!”

Together, the five of them have been going down class A’s list of best childhood movies, though Shouto is confident only he and Eri are the ones discovering these movies for the first time. Shouto suspects that’s part of why Eri was so insistent that he be included, something kind and knowing in her wide, gray eyes after overhearing that Shouto had never seen a movie about a fish she herself had only just discovered a day or two before.

It feels warmer, here, with his teachers and new classmate and a gentle little girl he’s only just getting to know, than dinner in Endeavor’s house ever has.

Mic-sensei gives Shouto’s shoulders a brief squeeze before moving to pour glasses of water for everyone.

“Go ahead and sit down. Dinner’s just about ready.”

Shouto takes the open seat next to Shinso, who’s still typing away, now with a small smile on his face.

“Who are you texting?” Shouto asks.

Shinso meets his gaze for a second before ducking his head and looking back at the screen.

“Monoma,” he says.

“Ah, from your old class.”

“Ooh,” Eri calls out before dissolving into a quiet fit of laughter, squishing her face against Aizawa’s shoulder.

Shinso’s brows draw low, face reddening, and Shouto makes a noise of understanding.

“Monoma’s your boyfriend,” Shouto says.

Mic ruffles Shinso’s hair as he walks past, settling into his own seat on the boy’s other side, and Shinso sinks lower in his chair, still typing.

“We’re not dating,” Shinso corrects, frown slipping into a pleased, almost smile. “Yet.”

“Careful,” Aizawa says mildly from the stove. “That almost sounded like confidence.”

Shinso huffs a small laugh through his nose. “Shut up.”

“I, for one,” Mic says, leaning across the tabletop, “am all in favor of a dramatic confession. Music! Roses!” Mic clutches his chest. “Heartfelt declarations!”

Aizawa-sensei rolls his eyes and Shinso shoves Mic’s face away from himself with one hand.

“As if, old man.”

Eri starts giggling again.

Shouto tilts his head. “If not those methods, then how are you planning to confess?”

Shinso’s shoulders rise closer to his ears. “I’m not,” he says simply, typing faster now than he was before. “He’s going to confess to me. As soon as he works up the nerve.”

In perfect sync with Aizawa, Eri heaves out a big sigh. “Teenagers,” they complain, neither able to fully get through the word without smiles beginning to crack through their put-upon expressions.

“C’mon,” Aizawa says, pressing a quick kiss to Eri’s forehead, “food’s up.”

The movie they watch that night is about a rat who wants to be a cook and Shouto thinks it’s probably his favorite of all the movies they’ve watched so far. Even so, he finds his attention drifting every once in a while, eyes wandering to where Aizawa and Mic sit on the floor in sleeveless shirts, Eri on the couch behind them with a pack of markers to color in their tattoos.

Shouto didn’t know either of them had tattoos before tonight.

Aizawa’s, somewhat surprisingly, is a songbird. Perched on his right shoulder blade with its beak proud and open, a perfect counterpart to the cat on Mic’s left shoulder- its paws waving in the air but nose and eyes angled back toward the songbird.

Shouto gently thumbs the temporary, All Might tattoo on his inner arm. It’s soft against his skin and only says, I AM

The tattoo on Sero’s arm finishes the phrase. Midoriya had brought a whole pack down for everybody the other day and when Shouto struggled to pick, Sero had suggested they split one down the middle.

I am…happy, Shouto thinks to himself.

Shinso shifts until his socked feet are pressed against Shouto’s leg, on his warm side, and Aizawa spares a backwards glance in the dark that might be knowing. Might just be gentle.

Shouto thinks that this might be family, too. That one day he might have his arms full of all the family he’s collected since the day Midoriya turned his life upside down and told him the fire in his veins didn’t make him the same as his father.

In the blue light of the television, Mic-sensei takes Aizawa’s hand and twines their fingers together. Eri has moved on to playing with Mic’s hair, eyes focused on the movie. Shinso’s phone buzzes, but he doesn’t reach for it yet.

Shouto smiles.

I am happy, he thinks again.

*

Shouto is in Sero’s bedroom, in Sero’s bed, which is technically a hammock, with his head pillowed on Sero’s chest while Sero flips through a new manga volume he’d gotten recently. He’d offered to let Shouto read it first, but they could both read it perfectly well at the same time like this.

After one, considering glance sent towards Sero’s face, Shouto lifts a hand and rests it in the other boy’s hair, gently taking one long, dark section between his fingers and moving it side to side.

“Um,” Sero says, heartbeat strong and quick. “Not that I’m complaining. But. What’s happening?”

“Trying something,” Shouto says, repeating the action.

“Trying…” Sero repeats, before letting out a bright laugh. “You watched Ratatouille last night, didn’t you?”

Shouto hums, repeating the action for a third time to no avail. He leaves his hand in Sero’s hair, though.

“It lied.”

“It-” Sero starts to echo again, teeth a bright line as he sets the manga aside, page unmarked, and shifts to be facing Shouto without jostling the hand from his hair. “You’re totally putting me on.”

Shouto twines Sero’s hair through his fingers, then lets it slowly fall away, repeating the action in another place a moment later. It’s soft. It smells like Penny.

“I’m putting you on,” Shouto confirms, mouth twisting into a gentle smile.

Sero laughs and Shouto can feel it in all the places they’re pressed together. Pride swells in Shouto’s chest, alongside something that feels like fire, and Shouto focuses extra hard on making sure he doesn’t accidentally set half of his hair alight.

“You know,” Sero says, knuckles gently resting over Shouto’s heart while his other hand brushes the All Might tattoo on his wrist.

HERE, it says.

Shouto kind of wants to line them up, but he doesn’t want Sero to stop touching him. Doesn’t want to remove his hand from Sero’s hair. Doesn’t want to be anywhere but here, right now.

“I keep telling Bakugou it’s a fucking long shot. Like, long ass shot, but…” Sero takes a deep breath, rolling his bottom lip into his mouth to tug at the ring before letting it go again. “Heroes are brave, right?” he whispers.

Quietly, Shouto hums his agreement, fingers still running through Sero’s hair. He’s not sure what Bakugou has to do with this conversation.

Sero steels his expression.

“Shouto,” he says.

“Hanta,” Shouto murmurs back, pleased by the exchange. Pleased by the way the firm line of Sero’s mouth wobbles with happiness.

Hanta is here, and his name falling from Shouto’s lips makes the world feel upside down for the second time in his life, a fire in his chest that he doesn’t want to run from and a new type of bravery taking root.

“Hanta,” Shouto says again, and it feels like he swallowed a burning beehive. “Will you kiss me?”

Sero’s dark eyes blow wide- shock then joy then happy disbelief. This close, Shouto can read him better. This close, he can feel it when Sero begins to lean in, breath warm and shaky over Shouto’s face. Lips sweet and gentle over Shouto’s mouth, the press of his piercing firm like a promise between them.

Sero pulls back.

“You totally stole my thunder,” he murmurs, leaning close to peck Shouto on the lips again. “I was just about to confess.”

Sero kisses Shouto’s cheek. The cold one. He doesn’t even seem to mind. Then moves up to his brow. The place where Shouto’s scar meets the skin of his forehead.

Shouto’s hand tightens in Sero’s hair, gently nudging him back down.

“Kiss me again?” Shouto asks.

Sero makes a punched out sound.

“Oh my god, literally whenever you want. All you have to do is ask.”

The sound is sweet when they pull apart and Shouto slowly peels open his eyes, watching Sero with rapt attention. He thinks about the Kiss Formula.

Close proximity, eye contact, no spaghetti.

“All I had to do was ask?”