deercountry | [closed] Time is fake

cw: ableism-flavored Quirk discrimination, harassment/bullying (verbal, mention of physical)

It's becoming quite rare nowadays, but... He possesses no Quirk at all.

The doctor's words from earlier that day are drowned out by the computer playing a video of a well-muscled blonde man carrying disaster victims out of a wreckage.

"A super-cool hero like that," the small child with green hair breathes as he shakily points at the screen and looks back at a diminutive woman. His eyes are brimming with tears at the prospect of his dream being crushed. "That's... what I wanna be."

The woman doesn't have freckles or a riotous bush of hair, but she is surely the mold from which Izuku was cut, right down to the open expression worn for others and closed gentle gestures. Inko runs and collapses against him and the chair. She wraps arms around them both and sobs,

"I'm sorry, Izuku. I'm sorry!"

It's a bright day. Five small children, as yet unmolded by the notions of good and bad, march across a large trunk bridging over a shallow creek. The foremost of them slips and tumbles in. Izuku, the last, is down wading into the water before he can think. He sticks out his tiny hand, eyes huge with concern.

"Need help? Can you stand? Hope you didn't hit your head!"

The soaked little boy with red eyes and ash blonde hair immediately grits his teeth in outrage.

An older version of the same boy wearing a black school uniform, a bit of smoke around him from his Quirk, declares with brash confidence, "You're totally Quirkless. And you think you can rub shoulders with me?!"

"Wa...Wait, no, Kacchan," a skinny, sweating Izuku stammers pathetically, scooting right up against the wall to and bonking his own head with zero dignity. (Why is he on the floor in the middle of class? Half the students are out of their seats. All order has been lost here.) "I wasn't... saying I could compete with you! Not at all! I mean it. It's just... been my dream. Since I was little. And well... There's no harm in trying..."

Lapsing into trembling appeasements and a defensive non-smile, he can hardly bear the air made stifling by his own improper breathing. His classmates seem to blend together in a single dark silhouette as they laugh at him.

"What can you even do?!"

Izuku is older, shoulders filling out his loose house clothes. He's smiling, bright with a quiet, sure confidence that more recent friends have come to know in him. He's showing a letter to a sweet-faced woman sitting on a cushion at a low table bearing half-peeled satsumas--his mother, plumper over the years.

She's sniffing back the tears pouring over her round cheeks. Her expression is an unfettered mixture of sorrow, happiness, and pride as she looks at the strong young man across from her with scars on his right hand.

"When you were little, you'd pretend to be All Might... You'd try to help people in trouble and come home covered in bruises... because you didn't have that sort of power. As your mother... I felt I had to protect you. That's how it was, for so long."

Izuku sniffs back his own tears as his throat tightens in sympathetic emotion. Inko continues,

"But now, seeing that look on your face… It's like I don't have to worry anymore."

They both burst into tears, absolutely comical in the amount of them, absolutely heartfelt.

It all seems innocuous. Midoriya didn't have friends as a child, but he still had a loving home. He got good grades. He had a hobby, one which he threw himself into so much that he barely thought about how lonely he looked. He didn't carry a heavy burden. (That came later, with none of the people involved fully understanding the scope of what it means to pass on One For All.)

Midoriya, who is moved to tears at the mere sight of his mother's, is the kind of person who can't bear to see loved ones sad about him. He hides pains, great and small, with years of practice. He does it easily, automatically, at times well enough to fool people he's met in more recent years.

He is aware of his own awkwardness in social situations. These flubs and panics could even be seen as endearing. Harder for Midoriya to examine are more subtle things: his discomfort about being embarrassed in front of a group of people, the way he doesn't take up space unless called to, or even how he tends not to initiate touch, as if he's not used to having peers with which to do so. It doesn't follow logic; he has a good number of friends now. It doesn't have to.

cw: torture

The memories that arc back across the bridge of their brushing fingers over a plate of half-eaten sliced apples could hardly begin more differently.

A little boy with dark hair kneels in a garden courtyard under a cloud-streaked blue sky, cupping water in his chubby palms, small chest rising and falling in a smooth, slow rhythm as a kindly looking man observes. The water does not ripple with the boy's movement, a smoothly reflective mirror of the vault above. The man's smile is slight and proud as he leans over to inspect it.

"Very good, young master," he says, placing his hand on the boy's shoulder

which is sharper now, the last of toddler roundness lengthening out into coltishness. He stands in a training room on woven mats, his feet set as the base from which he may wield the knife he holds assuredly in guard position.

"Nice stance," a broad-chested man with dark hair and wiry beard tells him, squeezing his shoulder before he steps around to stand in front of the boy, holding his palms out. "Now show me how you take me down."

The boy obliges, alighting forward

before he hits the soft turf of an open cliffside on his back, arms flung wide before he coils like a spring and snaps back to his feet, twisting sideways to avoid the lunging jab of a grim-faced man with wrapped knuckles.

"Hah!" The man grits, but there's a glint of satisfaction at his thwarting, until fingers held like the point of a spear strike precisely into a nerve cluster on his side and he curses lavishly, a rockfall of untranslated vulgarity. "You little-"

The boy laughs, as light and bouncing as he is, even as the man turns on him with a growl full of more affection than threat, fists coming up to

set splayed fingers along the lines of the boy's face at the end of a shadowed hallway, a crease of worry underlining the black diamond on his forehead, this man and memory one that Midoriya has seen before.

But he has not seen how it ends.

There is a point past which pain is only an obliteration. There are no thoughts, no past or future, no self except the one which experiences the agony of each eternal instant of destruction. The flashes of other images, of another world and time, are spliced into the annihilation of his hand nerve by nerve, cell by cell, until

he draws his hand whole and unblemished from the box, staggers to his feet under the cold lash of the Reverend Mother's words, all of him still burning with revelation, a boy who is his mother's son and does not yet understand (but he will, soon) what that means.

Paul jerks his hand back across the table, clutching it to his chest with his eyes blown wide and fixed, breath coming in shaking near-silent hitches. He does not move from his seat for a string of frantic heartbeats, and then the chair legs shriek against the wooden floor as he shoves back from the table so he can scramble around its side to reach for Midoriya, his palms outstretched urgently to cup his face.

"Izuku-kun," he says, in a voice that breaks like a wave crashing into jagged stone, a dagger of panic lodged in the scar beneath his sternum.

It is a pain so great that--even after he splays out Paul-his unharmed fingers in the library, even after further discussion at the end of the memory--the mere phantom of it invades the waking world. It recalls fire the color of Paul's eyes when they go wrong, or One For All's heat under Midoriya's skin as full power smashes his bones over and over... His poor mind tries to contextualize it. There are no endorphins this time.

His hand seizes where it is next to the apples and notes they've been working on. His heart, the simple muscle, hammers insistently at him. Tears swell, his nose is wet, but there is no sorrow. His teeth are bared in pain. His eyes are battle-red, ready for anything that would threaten the two sitting here. Midoriya is not master of these reactions, because he knows they do not change the only thing he has left after everything else has been burned away:

He does not move, because if he moves, Paul-himself dies--

The phantom pain visits and leaves in the space of a moment. Midoriya's features flit into a bewildered, harmless gasp. Stupid. Paul moved his hand just fine in the library, at this table, he even stands...

These are not a crone's or a mother's hands. They're long, slim, and known. Midoriya's face ripples, but not due to any fault of the hands cupping it. Midoriya's fingers twitch. He allows his eyes (they are his, this is his body, his mind) to sweep Paul, the room, his own hand, unblemished but for the old scars. Everything returns out of the fire piece by piece.

Only now does he permit himself to raise his hands towards Paul's face to quell that unbearable note in his voice. His right hand aches with constricted muscles.

"It's all right." It is not. His words are garbled. His face is a mess. "We're safe." They are.

"We're safe," Paul agrees in a gush like cool water, soothing but still uncontrolled, a pouring out of intent as he moves his fingers with subtle purpose. He traces an unwinding pattern over hidden lines of his nerves, one meant to ease the shock of what Midoriya has suffered through proxy at his hand.

(The wordplay of the thought strikes him distantly, too late, an absurdity he can only observe as it flits by him.)

"You'll be all right," he says, which is not the same thing as being all right now, and they know that well, the pair of them. The scarred hand on his face has already known agony, and there are the deeper scars that great pain carves, the ones that mark where you were severed from yourself, knit together always altered.

Paul smooths a hand down the side of Midoriya's neck, slips it up the length of his arm with firm pressure, and cups Midoriya's hand in his so he can turn to brush his mouth across his palm, more whisper than kiss: "Tell me about her. Anything. Don't think, just talk."

To confirm, Midoriya calls on a different, unseen part of One For All. His eyelids flutter slightly as he focuses with his usual visualization exercise of a heavily-bolted door unlocking. Danger Sense picks up nothing. This should comfort him, that this crossing of memories wasn't a direct attack by someone nearby, but it doesn't. Midoriya's arm remains taut and knotted.

(You don't have to face the pain today... But if you never do, it'll hold you back.)

Words spoken in earnestness when the door to the library was closed. Now the door is open. It both was and wasn't as Paul had described to him the day they met in December. Paul had not told him the extent which he would be hurt, or why. To Midoriya, Paul isn't the hard-eyed person kneeling as his nerves (his self) are stripped away. Paul is the person touching him here and now, kind and precious to him.

"Who? That person who hurt you? The Reverend Mother, in the library? She used her Quir--her power on you. Threatened you with a poison needle and made you put your hand in a box--" He stops himself from rattling off what would devolve into a report because, "You remember."

Midoriya has perhaps misunderstood who he was supposed to be talking about. He rises from his chair and wraps his arms around Paul, cradling his head, though he cannot protect him from the things inside it. He presses his cheek against his, forgetting the smear of tears. Midoriya's whole body shudders under a brief tremor of fury. Then it passes, because he cannot defend Paul from the Reverend Mother if she is not in this world.

Midoriya recounts what happened in the memory with a controlled rage Paul has only heard a handful of times in his life. He clutches Paul fiercely, the evidence of his sorrow and hurt wet on the side of Paul's face. Paul is anchored and guarded, gathered up in the wake of a bad dream.

He doesn't know what's wrong with him that a nascent panic sets his heart shuddering like a cornered mouse before he can restrain it. He half-turns his face against Midoriya's like he can hide in his unruly hair, a small, shivering sound lost somewhere around his temple.

"Not her," he says, muffled by soft green, "Tell me something about your mother. Something good."

With her tearful, earnest eyes, her arms warm and enveloping around him in a fading borrowed memory that overlaps with Midoriya's arms, his hands, his determined and relentless protectiveness.

"Please."

He immediately does as bidden because it's what Paul seems to need. He scrubs through the memories like a video, images flashing past in a scramble until he finds his place with the first one of his mother: himself, very young, sitting in that chair, his dream spilling out of his eyes in saltwater.

"She didn't believe in me," he says quietly, all in a rush. That's a terrible start. "Um, she didn't believe in me until later, because she'd given up. She helped me follow my fitness diet, let me take the exam, but she never told me I could be a hero. My, uh, my first teacher was the only one. Only...hang on..." He recalls a memory at school and the afterschool exchange that followed it. Time was folded together like a fan today, but he's too shaken to linger on the thought that nearly breaches the surface of consciousness. He continues,

"When I passed, she apologized. I didn't expect that at all. She surprised me with my first jumpsuit. Told me she'd be supporting me from then on. My first day of school, she told me I looked cool. I... I was always bad at tying the tie..."

His voice breaks. He remembers closing his hand around hers in the hospital while she cried. He gave her his gentlest smile while hiding the wreckage of his own spirit. He slips his fingers up to close around Paul's right hand (with his left, because his right could not have managed it). The deep breath he takes opens his lungs like a pair of wings. His heart is still thundering.

"Paul-kun." Nothing at first, just that, as if his voice had never broken or wavered. "You're not there anymore. You're here," slightly softer like an offering or a confession, "with me."

Paul squeezes Midoriya's fingers as soon as they're entwined, his other hand shifting to Midoriya's back at that expansive breath. He draws a slow, soothing circle, rocking them both back and forth in tiny oscillations, and it could almost look like they were dancing to nothing in this bright, warm room.

When Midoriya's voice broke, something in him cracked with it, and through the crack comes the first chill of understanding. Midoriya's mother loves him. Paul knows this as much as he knows his own father loved him, a truth legible in even the most briefly felt moments between parent and child. She cherished him, sought to protect him, but she didn't believe in him, and if not for lack of love, then why?

He possesses no Quirk at all, a prognosis so gutting it sent her to the floor. Quirkless, wielded like a weapon, while Midoriya trembled at the feet of a boy who once took his offer of help as a dire insult.

"And you're not there," he says, slowing his own breathing with mechanical precision, "You've got me," a deliberately ambiguous construction, meant to carry both possible interpretations simultaneously. He has Paul, kept safe; he has Paul, to keep him safe.

"Disrupting the memory formation." There a low pulse in his voice, the emotion in it obscure even to him. "It helps. Do you want to come outside with me? It's warmer out there," and more private than any room in this house.

He tries, with his hand barely able to move, to draw similar circles on Paul's back at his center. His arm can only do it in a lopsided ellipse. He makes a mental note to tend to his hand properly. The way Paul controls his body is always impressive, but right now Midoriya is only interested in being a strong tree that will not break because it sways gently in the wind. (He keeps the subtle rhythm well. Ashido taught him how to dance.)

"She loved me no matter what." Trust him and his scattered thoughts to forget to get to the point of all that, the eventual conclusion of recounting his memories of her.

He misses home and the people he knows there. Paul has heard him grieve like a restless spirit. He has heard him speak of home and his mother with love. Midoriya has always glossed over his hurts, slights, and true pain. Some of them don't hurt him anymore, except as proud markers of his progress, like a shirt outgrown. Others are fresh in recent memory. (His mother's hand in his while he explained why he had to leave and what he had to do.)

"I'll go with you wherever." It doesn't matter much to Midoriya why, only that it's a thing Paul wants, and he can't tell if Paul is talking about mitigating pain for him or himself. To clarify,

"Paul-kun, I'm..." he frowns, trying to find the shape of it, "I'm not scared. Just sad. And angry for you."

He brushes his lips against Paul's cheek and tastes saltwater. He brushes it away fretfully, remembers it's his, and feels bad about it. He wipes his wet face on his sleeve.

He makes his way outside conscientiously, aware that the seizing of the muscles in his right arm makes him about as useful at holding another person as the walking wounded. He knows what to do. Stiffness during the healing process anytime he got injured had to be mitigated. He starts massaging near the top, minding the skin of his largest scar, and follows muscles and tendons down, paying attention to their origins and insertions. Most of the tenseness is in his hand and forearm, cords bunched together like arrows in a quiver. He meticulously follows them to each of his fingers. He flexes his wrist--supinated, then pronated--slowly in a routine way.

This is something he has done before while walking or chatting. The sun's warm summer rays will help.

Paul kisses the top of Midoriya's head when he wipes his tears from his face, throat swollen closed by a surfeit of emotion. There's sorrow, easily explicable, and protectiveness, even more so, but there's also another cornered pulse of bright, panicky static. That has no explanation. None that makes any sense.

He doesn't want to think about angry for you the way Midoriya says it, gentle and restrained, like Paul is somehow fragile. He isn't, and it's a misunderstanding he should correct, a reassurance he should offer up as he ushers them out of the house. All he does instead is nod, an ungraceful twitch he pairs with a squeeze of Midoriya's hand.

There's a fallen log on the edge of the forest a distance from the house that Paul has judged to be sufficient for his purposes. He guides them there on sure, silent feet, watching Midoriya work his knotted arm out of the corner of his eye, and it's only when he sits them down and clears his throat that he realizes he still hasn't said a word the entire short journey.

"It's not only what your mind remembers," he says, quietly, a buzz under his skin, "The body has a memory. Especially for pain."

Midoriya knows that, knit with scars, but a person doesn't always know everything they know. Paul touches their knees together, angled to face him, and holds out the hand not still wound around Midoriya's.

"May I?" He asks, indicating Midoriya's arm with a flicker of movement in his fingers almost like the signs he was demonstrating at the table. "I can help."

The inflection of please is barely unvoiced.

"We're lucky," almost a non sequitur, "To have mothers that love us. Not everyone does." A pause, barely a heartbeat. "But that's not always enough, is it?"

Midoriya squeezes his hand back immediately. He only pauses to put his red sneakers back on before he goes out, having never acclimated to the house custom of wearing them indoors.

He sits on the log and laces their fingers together. He passes them over Paul's knuckles to give him something other than sorrowfully breaking voices. Paul's limbs are long enough that Midoriya has to scoot closer, weaving their knees. He is unable to wrap his arms around him properly, so he presses his outside leg against his with warm companionship.

He holds out his arm with a murmured "It'll be all right." By now--because Midoriya says it quite often--Paul knows that the same syllables can be used in Japanese for You're all right and I'm fine. Context and people give specificity. Sometimes vagueness is used on purpose. Here, Midoriya gives Paul one of his open looks that draw him close and says that he's not just talking about his arm.

"Enough for what?" he asks gently and curiously. His barely-there smile (for Paul, not himself) seems innocent, from someone who hardly ever asks for more from anyone, but he knows there are plenty of things he can't ask his mom for, things he has to do himself. He also thinks of Kaworu, motherless, but his name pauses just before leaving his parted lips.

Instead he asks softly, "Do you blame your mother, Paul-kun? She was like a hostage, and so scared." She did not wail or scream. She was a tightly shimmering mirror of Paul when he fidgets or looks like shattered glass barely held together.

"I wanted you to tell me, in your own time," he adds lowly. "I didn't want it to be like this." There's something I have to tell you, Paul wrote. Midoriya sets that thought aside. There is only Paul now, here and unsettled.

Paul releases Midoriya's hand to take up his arm in both of his own, slipping up to the cap of his shoulder to roll his sleeve back over it, leaving the whole exposed. He strokes his fingers down his skin in a tracery that might seem purposeless, except for the keenness of his focus on the tactile and visual feedback that comes in the wake of his light touch.

The words he has for what he's doing are all doubled in their meaning, as much so as Midoriya's carefully layered syllables. He could describe energetic fields, the uniqueness of each human body, the crucial understanding of the nature of the branching pathways of the nervous system.

"No," he says, instead, like the flat of a blade, a ripple of tension that he arrests at the elbows so as not to interrupt his work, "I don't blame her. I don't blame you either." He trails down to his wrist, sweeps across the back of his hand. "I know you didn't want this. Neither did I."

He retraces his descent, skimming over the smooth curves of muscle and the jagged paths of scars. They make this slightly more complex, with their interruption and reconfiguration of underlying structures, but he can adapt. He presses his fingers down, and begins another pass, pressure firmer and unrelenting as he targets the eddies of residual pain binding Midoriya's arm like iron.

"Enough to keep us safe," he says, plucking the conversational thread back up like it was never set down, "No matter how much they wanted to."

He lifts his eyes from his slowly stroking hands, storm-dark: "I didn't know it was like that for you."

The dark splotch of his largest scar dominates his upper right arm. There are several others, lighter and more jagged, on the inside of his elbow, his wrist, and his hand, and still others that cross everywhere over his body. He wants to brush Paul's hair and disquiet away, but he rests the back of his left hand on his knee instead. He knows he should try to remain still, like he's at the doctor's. He finds trying just tenses him more. He concentrates on relaxing his whole body, starting from the top, and letting himself settle with gravity.

This lowers his eyes as well, idly resting them on various things without really looking at them, like Paul's shoulder, a lock of hair at his neck, his mouth as he speaks. They narrow slightly as Paul finds the clogged pools of tension, and he trips over keeping his breaths deep and even. He looks up. Paul's eyes look like the green that sometimes blooms before an upheaval in the sky.

"She did want to, yes. I worried her a lot when I got hurt, back when it was harder for me to control my Quirk... I've seen her cry too much recently too. Things have gotten bad in my world, Paul-kun," he says softly.

He has his mind on more recent pressing concerns than his early childhood. He's thinking about what it means to inherit power in his world. His Quirk was passed down with a specific purpose: to defeat its creator. He sees a finger pointing at him on a screen and telling him it's his turn.

"That person said something about your birthright? From your mother?"

He always kind of knew it, a feeling, that when Paul was roused out of bed by his mother and they walked down that hall towards the library, Paul would experience a change as irrevocable as Midoriya receiving One For All. Why else ascribe enough importance to the memory to conscript a stranger to help him in it?

Midoriya isn't going to let him redirect. Paul hardly expected that he would. When he looks back at his (nearly unscarred, delicate seeming) hands on Midoriya's knotted arm, he knows that he was only ever playing for time. He might have only ever been playing for time since their first meeting, that illusory night where Midoriya had done the improbable and altered Paul's course.

"The Reverend Mother Mohiam, Truthsayer to the Emperor. One of the most powerful of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. My mother's teacher." He digs his thumb under a particular nexus of nerves at the elbow, gently, and holds it there. "So in a way, she's one of mine."

It's a sideways admission, a hint at his capabilities. He slides his other hand back up the inside of Midoriya's bicep, a counterbalance hold as he applies a downward pull on his elbow. His words are as meticulous as the care he takes with Midoriya's vulnerable joint, but where there's tenderness in his palms, there is abstraction in his tone. He could be talking about the clouds in the sky, or the roll of waves.

"The Bene Gesserit manipulate the Empire from the shadows," he says, softly, "They sit at the left hand of power, working in secret to see that things turn out according to their design. They train certain daughters of the nobility under the cover of their finishing schools, and there are few wives as prized as those with Bene Gesserit shaping," softer, still, "And where a wife isn't required, they provide concubines. Like my mother."

"They're responsible for the bloodlines of the Empire, unofficially." He releases the bind of Midoriya's elbow, skimming down to his elbow. "Overseeing consanguinity between and within Houses, matching favorable traits to other favorable traits, balancing out flaws. Working towards a more perfected version of what we humans can be."

Paul brings the metal shutters down against the storm within. Midoriya would let him slip away, except--he's done this. He didn't allow himself to cry the last time he left his mother in tears. He spoke brusquely to his mentor, who had become like a father, who tried to get him to slow down on his reckless path and just eat a bento.

He should stay still for Paul's ministrations and let him say everything without interrupting. He should... There is only so long he can allow someone to suffer as they speak. (There was a point, in the pouring rain, when his friends refused to back down. Midoriya should follow the example of people he admires most ardently.)

He reaches with his free hand to draw Paul's head close. He presses his forehead against his and strokes the back of his hair. He wears a strength for others to lean on, but the old habit also breaks through it, the one that widens and softens his eyes, baring them as an invitation. It's one that sometimes makes others avoid his gaze. It has gotten his outstretched hand slapped away. His voice is a small candle, faintly flickering but not in danger of going out.

"I understand." Not I accept that, but I'm listening and The concept is familiar. The world of nobility and concubines is old history to him but, "The advent of the exceptional--Quirks--changed what being human looks like. There are some people who do Quirk marriages in my world. As for the kids... Any number of things can happen. They can be neglected, or, if their Quirk turns out as planned, raised and trained to fulfill someone else's ambition, like a tool."

To Midoriya, Paul is more than the things that made him. Midoriya remembers Lady Jessica raising her hands as if to clutch her son for possibly the last time, then holding herself back. Defiance in the eyes. Like his father. Is that a flaw? To want to defend his mother against her teacher?

"She wanted to kill you if you didn't turn out how she wanted." He slips out of Paul's hold only enough to clutch him, hand still cradling his head, his other arm wound tightly around him. He presses his face to where his jaw meets his ear.

Paul shouldn't tense inside the protective cradle of Midoriya's arms, as still as set glass, breath stuttering to a halt on a torn inhale when the other boy presses his face to that place which holds so much tension in his own body. It has the effect his thumb was meant to have on Midoriya's arm, unrelenting pressure to force contraction - and the subsequent relaxation when the nerves are exhausted, when the fragile flesh gives into itself.

No one held him like this, after. It's a foolish thing to think, an even more foolish one to have wanted, and it ought to have no place in this exchange of sober facts.

Except that he can only lie so well, even to himself, and he can only hold on so long, as much as he has tried to make an unbreakable whole of what was left in the wreckage between who he was before that night and who he was afterwards. (He never was who he thought he was. He could never have been who he thought he was.)

His arms are already around Midoriya's back, his fingers curled fiercely into his shirt, clutching him like the last piece of flotsam in a turbulent sea; he doesn't remember the decision to move, only that it was made, his head bowing towards Midoriya's shoulder as he starts to breath again in shuddering jags, too sharp and too close together.

"But I did," he says, brokenly, "I turned out like she wanted. Like they all wanted." The first threat of tears comes like the tremble of opening clouds. "Kwisatz Haderach. The mind to bridge time and space, to - lead us into a better future - to be the end of beginnings, a final link in a chain."

"And they tried to kill us anyway," low and awful in his bewilderment, in the betrayal of it, the unfairness (and nothing is fair, in this life or any other). "I was everything they wanted me to be, and it wasn't enough."

The severe Pro Hero whose Quirk could see forward in time said he worked towards a bright future full of laughter. In doing so, the last years of his life were filled with great sorrow and heavy burden.

One For All is a culmination of a chain carrying forward the hopes of many others and manifested in stockpiled power. But Midoriya never forgets the original purpose of One For All: to destroy a great evil.

To kill a man.

He does not want to kill.

He splays his fingers out on Paul's back and rubs in small slow circles. He trembles, eyes staring into Paul's curls and the bit of sky beyond them. His gasps brush against Paul's ear in a staccato beat with the crashing waves of the other's breath. Paul's pain is his own, entwined like their arms around each other. So, tears spill out of his eyes as they did when he nearly broke down in front of Paul after speaking to One For All's predecessors. He had thought he understood the scope of Paul's burden then. It is heartrending to think that Paul could understand his if he knew.

"I meant you turned out to be--you. Not your power. You. The person I met. The person I love. Kind and gentle. I used to think it wasn't okay for me to cry as a hero. It's not true. Even heroes cry when they need to. So, it's okay..." for you to cry.

He brushes a soft kiss on his neck--much better than the thin sliver of air between skin and needle--before his face crumples in anguish. So often he has to remind those he cares for that they are not just what they can do.

The kiss undoes him, in the end.

The words that came before it bring him to the precipice, but Paul has always felt first in his body, despite all the burdens his mind gathers to itself. Midoriya presses the petal-softness of a kiss to vulnerable skin, and it's a needle of another kind, lancing into an aching, sealed over wound.

He tells him that it's all right for him to do what he needs to, and Paul falls further to his shoulder with a little diving cry that turns into more, a whole wet, shivering flock his words have to weave through to be voiced.

"You love me?"

He shouldn't have to ask. Midoriya said it. But he wants (needs) to hear it again, while his tears soak hot, damp twinned circles in Midoriya's summer shirt, and he lets himself break apart in the safest place he knows.

Paul would plummet like a falling bird, but Midoriya catches him. He presses his face into his hair and shivers and rocks with him. Paul has done this for him before next to the sound of surf, receiving the bloom of tears into his shirt. Is not the desire to be kind, and acting on it, a kindness in itself?

"Yes," he says, throat tight. When he shifts to Paul's ear, saltwater runs freely over his freckles.

"I love you."

His voice breaks in a wave. Fervor hammers in his chest with the shared ache. He's said words to Paul in the same way before, even just his name, caught in a storm of emotion.

"I don't even know when I started..."

Paul once asked his father when he fell in love with his mother. He had been eight, old enough to understand certain circumstances of the world and their sting, but young enough to still dare a question whose answer held such potential for disappointment. His father had smiled, tucking a stray curl behind his ear, and said she's never told me when, and Paul had learned something about love that day he never stopped trusting. That it can came to you before you know it, and change everything before you can convince yourself not to let it.

He lets himself be gentled in the storm. He breathes in the mingled smell of tears and boy, nestled in Midoriya's embrace until the surge of tears begins to slow, monsoon giving way to the soft spring rain. That's when he breaks away only enough to bring his hands up to Midoriya's cheeks, drawing their forehead together and stroking the pads of his thumbs across slick freckled skin.

"I love you too," he says, like revelation, that which was veiled brought forth into sunlight, "Before this," and Paul kisses him, their faces as soaked as if they stand in seaspray, the taste of salt bright on his tongue, "I don't know when, either."

How many times has he looked at Midoriya and felt this shiver down his spine, this light that breaks across dark waters? He could count them all, add them to any sum, and it would be less than the whole that is made up of each part. He knows it now, sliding a damp hand into Midoriya's hair to cradle the nape of his neck, kissing him soft and slow and sweet as he knows how, his other hand sliding to press over his heart between their chests.

His face is easily cradled in long fingers. It has acquired new subtle angles and solidity in the past year, but it is still round and gently featured. He sniffles wetly. The saltwater their bodies make is free from the fetid taste of grit that comes with the tide as it brings dead things to shore.

He curls his hand over his, pressing it to his chest like a treasure. Under Paul's hand, Midoriya's heart implodes in a sunburst of joy not unlike when Paul first began to call him friend. By then, Midoriya knew how rare it was for Paul to trust, how singular and special.

It was easy for him to fall into a great need to act and move for the sake of another, all while safeguarding their trembling heart. He's not quite naive enough to say it will last forever. He lost a friend at the age of four, and it took years for them to understand all the reasons why. But he feels, in the place pulsing under Paul's fingers, a fervid familiarity and devotion that is strengthened by time and trial. Paul is his.

His body settles and gently molds Paul to him within his arms. Paul's kiss is as sweet as the honey that inspired the pet name he uses for him. He closes his eyes and hums softly. His heart beats faster, and he has to gasp for breath to keep up with it, breaking his kiss into little fleeting ones over his face like sea birds nimbly alighting on crags and dips.

"It's okay. We don't have to know," he breathes as his lips curve in a gentle smile against his cheek. "I've got you, okay? Kaworu-kun and I... We're here to step in when you can't handle it all on your own."

His voice pitches ever so slightly lower, but it doesn't flatten like it does when he's quoting something written. It's something he heard spoken, and now he's paying it forward.

The last vestiges of the memory have been banished. Paul is present in the warmth of the sunlight, in the flitting brushes of Izuku's soft mouth over his skin. He is buoyed by the enclosure of Izuku's arms and the speeding of his heart, which matches Paul's own. He's safe, here; he is different, transformed. He's someone else when he's with them, a person who may not yet be better, but could be.

He could chose to be better. He doesn't have to handle it all on his own. What else can love possibly be, if not that?

"I know you are," he says, and, "I love you," again, which is nearly the same thing. He is pliant and soothed in this embrace, thumbing the curve of Izuku's neck as he breathes deep and exhales the remnants of his tears.

"You're perfect." He doesn't mean it literally. (He does.) Paul kisses the sweet curved corner of Izuku's mouth, humming back to him, and maybe he is a bee, if he's this drawn to petal-softness and salt-sugar.

"I want you in my House," he adds, not as afterthought. It's one of the things he'd already meant to ask, before this, but it fits here still. It feels natural to ask, almost unnecessary. "Do you want that?"

Midoriya is not perfect. There is always somewhere he can improve. He has always worked hard to. But here, for this, he is, and he blushes at being called such. The color of a gentle pink sunrise blooms on his cheeks.

I want you in my House. It's direct, as they're used to being with each other now--almost imperious, but for the softness of it in the humbling wake of a storm. Paul wants him. They belong to each other. They're meant to be side by side. They are already entwined in each other's lives, promised to protect one another. Paul draws people to him. He builds things. He needs a family. They both do, the two boys who sat facing the ocean feeling like ghosts and clinging to each other. Midoriya, who has been lost, knows what it is to be held and supported by people who have become family here.

Then Paul softens it with a question, and it occurs to Midoriya he has a choice and an answer to give. It doesn't occur to him to say no, because it is already something he's done in practice, with every call he's answered. He parts his lips, and they brush against Paul's.

"Y--"

"Y-you're not asking me to marry you, are you? I-I-I'm not ready for that??"

Paul's laughter is gentle, a far cry from the mocking echo in Midoriya's memory. He shakes his head, half-hiding his face alongside Midoriya's to conceal the pleased tilt of his smile, dark curls brushing over damp freckles.

"No, I'm not," he says, offering Midoriya a swift reprieve from his torment, "If I was asking you that, you'd know."

He has thought about the concept of marriage in an abstract, strategic sense, the way he evaluates all relationships by rote. In a world without Empire or Landsraad, property or bloodline, the practical value of a marriage is all but zero. But the way that Kaworu talked about it, the way that Midoriya has fallen into a blushing fluster over the idea - something in him flutters for entirely impractical reasons.

"It's more like joining a family." Not a perfect translation of the concept, and neither is: "Or a battle alliance."

He exhales his relief, his breath trembling on Paul's curls, but it's not complete. You'd know makes it sound like a bullet Paul is keeping for just the right time. Getting married is encouraged where Midoriya is from as well, for better or worse. There is property in Trench too in a way, even if it's just whatever material possessions one can keep safe.

But marriage feels like such a far-off idea that Midoriya recoils from it in confusion. He does not ask things for himself like others do. To someone who takes his promises very seriously, he does not think about pledging hearts together (for a lifetime? forever?) as something soft and wistful.

(You'd know reminds him of something else his mind calls forth unbidden, and he is lying with a throbbing head and two boys draped over him. Paul insisted he'd remember if... His face suddenly feels very hot, and it takes him a moment to function. Paul is very close.)

"It... feels like we're that already," he murmurs. He shifts his head slightly to catch his eye questioningly.

Something Paul is relearning is true patience, the kind that expects a future measured in months and years, not minute and hours. The horizon of possibilities has begun to open up in a way that has little to do with prescience. He's been having better dreams, lately.

The here and now has his primary attention all the same. Paul pulls back enough to meet his eyes, those complementary greens he's become so familiar with, and smiles in a tentative, half-shy way, reticence coming after the fact of his bold request.

"It does," he agrees, with a more direct ripple of happiness at the confirmation, "It is. It's...this is something important, where I come from."

That's not quite it. He breathes out slightly, and a rare shade of vulnerability shines through him, the one tinted with an odd kind of hope.

"It's something that's important to me," he says, "I'd never been alone before I came here. You helped me not be. You were one of the very first ones. I want...I just want you to be part of this. Part of me."

When Paul carefully unwraps more of himself like the first green shoot of a new seedling, Midoriya cradles his hope softly with a warm kiss.

"I will always be a part of you. And you will always be a part of me. That's what the time we spent together means." This time he looks at him with certainty.

"A family," he repeats what Paul said, "or a battle alliance." His sure smile would be amused on anyone else, but he's too gently earnest, even as it fades into one of the serious, quiet looks he acquired after the battle with the Leviathan. He continues,

"The time I just spent in the cocoon again... The last time I left Mom, she was crying. When I returned, she cried again. Things have gotten bad in my world, Paul-kun. But my friends were there. They saved me again. People who find you when you're lost, take your hand when you're falling, and hold you when you're sad, no matter what. If belonging to a House is like that, then I think I understand."

His fingers tighten on Paul's hand over his heart. His eyes are wet again. He always cries so easily, each of his tears no less heartfelt than the last. He smiles tremulously.

"You have all that from me."

Izuku speaks from his heart with such sincerity Paul almost imagines he feels the rhythm of his pulse match the words.

"And you from me." He puts weight into the heel of his hand, knowing that the hero can bear it, wanting to affirm the bond between them in flesh and blood as well as words - even if not so indelibly as some do. Izuku's softly certain always already is nearly too much without his own heart growing so light it takes flight from his chest and spirals up towards the summer sky.

He understands, but it's more than that. He understands, and he builds on that understanding, helps define the shape of the growing thing that Paul seeks to nurture. If the reborn House Atreides is to have new words, Izuku's will be etched among them.

"I'll find you when you're lost," he repeats, wonderingly, and when tears come to his eyes, he lets them come, "I'll take your hand when you're falling. I'll hold you when you're sad, no matter what. I promise, on everything you are to me, and I am to you."

He cups Izuku's cheek, traces across a spray of gleaming freckles.

"Things can be better here," he says, earnestness for earnestness, "I believe in that. I believe in you, and you believe in me, in us, and- you changed my life, Midoriya Izuku. Why not the world, too? With us together, all three, what can't we do?"

Edited 2022-08-09 13:11 (UTC)

It is a mark of devotion to choose someone again and again, and to open oneself enough again and again to understand and be understood. A conscious thing that isn't directed or compelled, it is a second gift that accompanies the first gift of vulnerability. The choice often humbly goes unseen.

Midoriya sees it. He's seen that it comes easily to him (except when it doesn't) but not to others, especially those like Paul. He didn't expect his own words, given as a simple retelling of his experience, to be repeated back to him as a promise. He didn't expect Paul's tears, but he doesn't look away from them.

"I promise." His voice breaks but not his smile. He didn't need to say it, because he's always kept his word as his bond with the same unrelenting tenacity, but he says it anyway. He presses his free hand to Paul's heart and a kiss to his lips as tears run freely down his cheeks.

Paul kisses him back like he needs it to breathe, accepting his promise as whole-heartedly as it is given. Midoriya always gives with the whole of his heart, and perhaps everyone where Midoriya came from was wrong, after all - because that seems like a power as miraculous as any superlative one.

I love you, he signs against the steady throb beneath his hand, and Midoriya almost surely will not be able to read the shape of it this early in his learning. He will still understand, as he understood how much this means to Paul, and what it is to him to be able to open himself to this again.

What he does not sign, held close still, for another day, is thank you. Under the arching boughs of green leaves and the radiant warmth of the sun, he doesn’t want to think of the fear that had held him in its palm. But he will remember it, when he remembers anything outside of this kiss, on the walk back to the house with their hands entwined, and he will mark its absence whenever Izuku looks at him, green new-leaf eyes full of his still-tender heart.

Paul is luckier than anyone has any right to be. He marks it on his own heart like a brand.

Midoriya generally wasn't in the habit of inviting people over, even before old enemies from his world arrived in town. Starting this month he's relaxed his villain-related moratorium on guests. It's dangerous to be around him, but he's going to follow the wise words of someone more direct than him: Scrub that bullshit outta your head. He's got Danger Sense. He may as well use it.

His place is a small one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a modest Edwardian multiplex near the western border of Crenshaw. The owner provided the furniture: plain, generic Trench-Victorian with leaf motifs that shyly hint at freeform Art Nouveau but don't commit. It's not Midoriya's style, not that he had much in the first place, but it blends in with the worn wallpaper of the place that is only his month to month.

The apartment has been left mostly as it was given to him: boring. His only decorations were bought out of necessity, like brightly-colored curtains and blue floor pillows around the coffee table where the three boys sit. The results of Paul's most recent baking practice are served in the middle.

Sometimes he needs a bit of secrecy, but not so much that he must go to the hideout. And sometimes, like today, it's an activity for just the three of them. Midoriya mutters and pores over his usual notes with one tapping finger curled over his lip. (This is usually the extent of his unconscious fidgeting in the midst of his focus. His feet idly poking someone else's is entirely conscious, however. He's gotten used to an absent sort of playfulness from the other two.)

"I spoke to someone last year about sign language, but wasn't able to get in contact again. I thought nonverbal communication would come in handy, especially against, for example, a Beast that hunts by detecting sound."

In full nerd mode, he barely pauses for breath and continues, "We have a bit of that in standard hero operations. I even sparred against a schoolmate who mimicked our voices, so we couldn't speak without putting ourselves at risk. That kind of tactic is a sure way to introduce confusion in an all-out brawl."

He keeps going, "I severely underestimated how important it could be in other contexts besides combat. I'm not cut out for a covert role at short notice, but I don't want to be the one to blow our cover either. I understand how important Atreides House Sign is, so I won't teach it to anyone else, except maybe a few used in the field in an emergency if we're collaborating with others, at your discretion."

And going, "I'm learning enough signs now that my visual memory isn't cutting it. But putting anything sensitive down in writing..."

Edited 2022-06-16 21:20 (UTC)

Paul listens with slightly tilted head as Midoriya speaks, nodding occasionally at this point or that, a nearly dreamy smile slanting his mouth in one of his unguarded, uneven smiles. He kneels as correctly as a scholar on his pillow, bare feet tucked underneath him in deference to house rules, toes curling whenever Midoriya's brush along their arches. He keeps one hand occupied sifting Kaworu's hair through his fingers, a comforting gesture for the angel face down on the couch, who is clearly exhausted from some unknown cause.

"I could teach you the notation cipher," he offers, slipping into the trailing space between words when it makes its appearance, not an interruption so much as a continuation from another angle, "But if you want to improve your visual memory, that's something we could factor into your practice. You have a developed conceptualization stream. All you need to do is..."

He lifts his free hand, shaping flow and concentrate in slowed sequence, inflected in the non-literal case, because he never misses an opportunity to reinforce a lesson.

"...create pools." His smile broadens as he leans forward to tap Midoriya's temple, which turns into an ever-convenient excuse to play with a tuft of his hair as well, rolling it between his fingertips before tucking it behind his ear. (He thinks nothing of the fact that his other hand continues the same soothing tempo on Kaworu's head, does nothing to pretend at not being able to split his focus that neatly. He no longer tries so hard to be less, not around them.)

"What memorization techniques do you already use?"

Edited 2022-06-17 03:17 (UTC)

"Ugh," Kaworu finally raises his head from the couch, messy hair and fabric lines indented in his face do nothing to mitigate the sheer indignance that radiates from his tiny body. He likes being in their company. But he's still unable to shake his need for attention, to be part of things, and he can't be part of this.

He doesn't look at things the way Paul and Midoriya do. To them, things to be learned are defined, retraceable, that can be sorted and put into boxes like a physical object and then examined at will. To Kaworu, the knowledge is more ephemeral. It's something to take in, absorb, experience, and do. Like musical notes flowing into melody.

"It's not that hard. You just have to use it. Speak. Like you do words." he signs the key ideas in that statement. "It doesn't do anything to think on it. So... do it or else... I'm going to go to the Achelliac and find someone else to have fun with."

The word "fun" is signed but it might as well be a rude gesture.

His gaze darts routinely away from his notes, knowing he should meet Paul's eyes and follow his hands for proper conversation in sign. He curls his fingers around Paul's, who should have known better than to touch his hair and not expect his hand to be briefly taken. He's about to answer the question--

Kaworu draws his attention, but in a crinkly, displeased way. In a moment, from the back of his mind to the fore, Midoriya understands he's gotten carried away and lost track of time. Kaworu prefers to experience things rather than study them. While Midoriya tends to fearlessly jump into activities, he got his start with visual observation and written analysis.

He releases Paul's hand. He is spoken to in sign, so he responds automatically in kind. He doesn't have enough to form long conversations, but he has enough for this, his hands jerking nervously.

"W-What??"

He still lets out his concerns verbally, his voice rising and wobbling at the end of his sentences. It could be an exaggerated threat, but Midoriya has always been about safety first. He's inclined to let Kaworu fly where he will, given his upbringing, but always with the caveat that he will catch him if he needs to. He leans back against the couch and the rumpled person on it.

"I-If that's what you really wanna do, but, take us with you? I don't think you should go alone?? One of them might ask you to do... you know... eggplant stuff..."

He does not know the sign for eggplant. He makes do with a belated stuttering of bed, out of place from the rest of his sentence.

Most of the time, Kaworu's disgruntlement almost feels like part of a game. The angel readily makes his displeasure known, and then Paul can attend to whatever it is that has him out of sorts. He knows it's a bid for attention. Attention is one of the things he can provide best, most of the time - except here it seems like he's fallen short, and more seriously than usual.

The threat-not-a-threat makes him straighten up, following the exchange with widened eyes. As Midoriya follows Kaworu's advice (even if he may not realize it yet) to sign by feel instead of thought, Paul shifts closer, scooting off the pillow to prop himself against the couch too.

He doesn't blush at 'eggplant stuff', or Midoriya's improvised use of bed as a stand in for another sign Paul hasn't taught either of them yet. He can't be certain that Kaworu is making the implication he thinks he may be, even in a huff of insincerity, and that does bring a faint wash of color to his throat, though he keeps it from his face.

"Izuku-kun is right," he says, with slightly strained lightness, using his personal name since it's only the three of them. "I wouldn't want you around all of that strange fruit by yourself."

It's a childish act, really. But by someone who has never allowed to be a child, so it doesn't even register as such. A flare frustration at being left out when Kaworu wants nothing more to be in. He's different from the other two in how he examines things and sometimes he doesn't like being reminded of that. It's easier to think about going to a place where no one cares for hand signs. Or about hands changing from signs to trying to pull him close.

Kaworu's lip curls a little at the improvisation of "bed" to mean something else. He knew Izuku had it in him. Still, he swings his legs up and over the edge of the couch to stand in a single fluid motion. It's one of those moments where he seems to float through the space around him more than walk through it.

"Are you sure? You seem so busy. I figure I have to entertain myself. Or learn. Just like Izuku."

He neatly leans away from catching a leg to the head.

"L-Learn...?" he wheezes, barely audible. His face reddens in earnest now. He throws Paul a look of desperation but only sees a hint of hopeless pink flush stopped short of his face. He can't count on salvation from that quarter, and Kaworu is already on his feet.

He curls a leg out in a loose attempt to hook Kaworu's. It's not a real move; anyone can easily see the languid movement coming.

"Kaworu-kun." Nothing else, just that. He might be gently chiding him for bad manners at the store, except for the tight huff of breath that accompanied his name. After Kaworu had expressed his aggravation at not being seen as his equal, Midoriya had resolved not to coddle him. So here he is, not coddling him, but asking him to pause in the hopes of a little mercy. (It's still attention, of a sort.)

Strategically, joining forces is rarely anything but a wise choice. Paul elects to rise up on his knees and reach for the hem of Kaworu's shirt to tug him along the fall line established by Midoriya's hooking leg, with the aim of pulling the angel down to nest against one or both of them.

"Kaworu," Paul echoes Midoriya in tone and intent, more or less, but with a ripple of as yet undefinable energetic tension, "We're sure."

Another way to outflank him, numerically. There are times Paul appreciates the dynamic of a triad simply because it means that any two points of their three can align as needed when the other is being unreasonable (though less so when he's the unreasonable one, but that's to be expected).

"You're right too. We've been selfish." He says, once Kaworu has been secured one way or another. "What do you want to learn that you think you'll find a better teacher for at a bath house?"

As much as Kaworu is a shameless instigator of trouble, he's also easy to soothe into a more relaxed and gentle state with simply the right approach. He pushes at Midorya's foot as it tries to sweep him but allows Paul to pull him down, dropping with little resistance like he can't resist their gravity. He settles against them, hip against Paul's thigh and playfully pressing his feet against Midoriya's ankle, trying to get him to push back.

He leans back and looks at Paul, red eyes glinting like embers about to ignite.

"You have to know what I mean. Izuku knows. Look at this face."

If there was ever any doubt, it evaporates under that heated gaze. That may be part of why Paul does look, obediently, to Midoriya's face, only absently aware of the kindled flush in his own that finally matches the other boy's.

He's only bolder than Midoriya up to this edge of Kaworu's flirtations. He understands the mechanics of physical intimacy (he suspects better than many people who've tried to advise him about it, present company blessedly not among them), with no provincial reservations about the idea. It's not the abstract that's been his stumbling block.

It's the definite. It's the ripe red gleam of Kaworu's hungry look, the blush that paints Midoriya nearly fit to match. The spare, warm line of a body molding to his, the closeness of them both, the way he feels something in him shift restlessly at all of it, a want that opens faster to shivering depths each time it's called out of him.

His hand has skimmed down to the slight curve of Kaworu's waist above his hip. He's hooked two fingers underneath his shirt's loosened hemline, revealing a sliver of creamy skin. He looks at Midoriya, like he was told to, as he slowly pulls it further.

"I think he should have to ask for what he wants before he gets it," Paul says, softly, "Don't you, Izuku-kun? How else are we supposed to be sure?"

He winds his ankles with Kaworu's to trap them, which ends up just being an excuse to press against him. Two pairs of green eyes form an alliance, one half of it unwitting. It's always a little quicker each time, more familiar, that rush of blood to his face. Live and electric like a stripped wire, his body betrays him in various ways--such as: His eyes are compelled towards what Paul's fingers are doing with Kaworu's shirt.

In further betrayal, his scalp tingles and heralds the images conjured. He is someone who habitually overthinks things and readily runs scenarios through his head. He imagines lying tangled with these two--like any other day, but that picture is accompanied with more flushed skin and sweat than he anticipated.

His lips part slightly to accommodate a slow, careful, humid exhale. Well, Midoriya has always prided himself on looking out for others. That includes being ready at all times, especially in case of emergencies. He is ready for anything, although--and this is a flaw of his--he never expects anything. He never expects to receive the good things others seem able to, so readily and easily without question.

He can't take being frozen and flustered anymore, so he completes the circuit of looks and moves his to Kaworu's eyes. He covers Paul's hand with his own and guides it under Kaworu's shirt, long fingers and short joining to glide along pale skin.

"I have... what we need..." he manages to croak before burying his face in the top of Kaworu's hair. He thinks that if Paul has any mercy in his heart, he will allow his curls to remain as a shielding curtain for Midoriya to further hide behind.

"Yes, you do." Kaworu hums as he pulls Midoriya closer, moving his foot up Midoriya's thigh like a serpent posed to strike. Then the sudden bite as he wraps his legs around the boy's slender but muscular torso, trapping him and holding him firmly against him.

The hum, like of a cat playing with their prey, changes to a soft sigh as exploratory hands move up his slender waist, fingers pressing against bone, scar, and soft skin.

"Come on, don't you want to be one? Just for a bit. There won't be under misunderstandings between us. We'd all compliment each other. We'd be perfect."

The impact of both their weights against Paul's steadying chest rocks him back, his tucked knees parting for stability and ending up catching them both between his thighs, and his tongue flattens against the roof of his mouth.

He squeezes Midoriya's hand in his as they glide up the trellis of Kaworu's ribs together, his other arm looping around Midoriya's shoulders in echo of Kaworu's legs around his waist. He curls around the boys in his lap, and he doesn't understand what he could have done to deserve all of this as he tucks his face alongside Midoriya's, leaving the veil of his curls undisturbed.

"You take such good care of us," Paul murmurs in the shell of Midoriya's ear, soft and sincere, "Let us take care of you, all right?"

Then he traces the outer curve of his ear with the tip of his tongue, his breath hot on the slicked and sensitive skin he leaves in its path.

"Do you want us, Izuku-kun?" As tautly heated as the question is, he asks because he needs the answer. Kaworu's is already there, in the heady promise of perfect, but there's a difference being having what they need and having what he wants.

His muffled breath hitches in Kaworu's hair as slim thighs clutch his middle. He likes being touched around his core, so close to the rapidly beating muscle behind his ribs and the warm vulnerable vitals he's memorized and learned to protect. There is no need to shield himself here.

It's easy to adjust himself pliantly just so, pressing Kaworu into Paul and slipping his free hand around both their waists to steady and keep them close. His body knows this dance better than his mind, and he has practiced the first few steps with these two many times.

Paul's tongue is a delicate touch amidst the broader embrace of their limbs. He moans softly into the safe bed of their pearl and shadow hair. He turns his head and looks into the green eyes of someone who subtly switched alliances to trap him, all too willing. His own are brightly glazed like the shine of new leaves tasting air for the first time.

"Yes," he breathes before pressing a kiss to Kaowru's temple. A sharp breath through his nose draws in two scents.

He has no idea what he's doing. Midoriya, who often in life jumps into things under-qualified and improvises by the skin of his teeth, knows better than to believe they'll be perfect in the sense of lacking flaws. They will be in other ways. Nature has a way of using imperfection to bring balance and draw out its true loveliness.

[closed] Time is fake

a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world

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