deercountry | Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

Midoriya barely looks human, claws, fangs, and a tired prowling slouch altering his shape, iris and pupil impossibly clouded and ringed with sleepless shadow. He is all too human, a bundle of the acute nerves and instincts that fear harm to another. He's a star spinning faster and faster into an explosion that never comes to relieve him. It's a wonder he did not enter by smashing through the roof, but he knows a thing or two about proper raids and pissing off powerful villains with hostages at the wrong time.

He closes the door gently. Midoriya still has aftertears in his eyes after seeing Gideon on the couch. They throw and twist the light in his vision, blurred rainbows haloing Kaworu. He stays standing where he is, feeling odd in the armored shoes he chose not to remove at the door for the first time here. It's not the number of eyes, but the look in them, that keeps him rooted still.

"Without you? No." His voice is still hoarse from all the screaming during the storm, so he keeps it low with only the faintest emphatic defiance in that No. Sometimes his relentless determination is quiet, but no less present.

"You've got to come with us. Teacher doesn't care about people's lives. It's too dangerous. Now that he's made enemies, he could hurt you."

[He can't help but feel he made Midoriya that way. All of his foolishness, his lack of control, his naivety... Midoriya had suffered these things at his hand. His small weak hands who tried to grasp more than they could hold.]

No one can hurt me. You know that.

And you know I don't care either.

[Midoriya had been angry at him for killing the pirates but... even now he didn't feel bad about that. He only felt for what had transpired after. Maybe Midoriya had started to forget he was dealing with something inhuman and strange.]

I... think this is where I belong.

He bares his teeth. Fresh tears fall from his eyes. He always gets too emotional when he wants to protect someone dear to him.

"Plenty can hurt you. It has. What's stopping you from being hurt by someone who can manipulate life and death at a distance without warning? I can't let that happen."

He can't force him to come with him. That would undermine all the work Midoriya has put into reminding Kaworu of his own agency. It might also provoke another pitched fight. There's been too much death already.

"I wanted to protect you from this. Remember? What I said before we went to rescue Anon-san, about how you don't have to be what you were raised for. You can make a new life. We can make a kinder world. Teacher went against that."

Pain in existence is inevitable. What difference does it make it comes from him or someone else? He's been kind to me before. At least I know there's more than pain if I stay.

[His voice is flat, quiet, as though he needs to be soft to keep everything together.]

I think I am only what I was raised to be. Everything here in this house was just an attempt at being something I'm not. Playing human like we played house. If I leave this place... then I'll have to admit that part of me also wasn't real. Just like the rest of it.

"It is real, all of it. Everything you tried so hard for. The kindness you showed others, including me. When you do stuff you don't have to, when I wouldn't like you any less if you didn't. When you promised to protect us without hesitation. When you kissed my tears away. What was going through your mind then, huh?! You've already changed."

It’s not yelling, but his voice is emphatic. Tears stream from his eyes in rivers as his ruined eyes widen. He sticks his hand out, palm up.

"I'm not leaving you."

Then why did you leave me...?!

[The question comes out strangled, like he's barely containing a howl of pain inside of him. A howl like the wind on the shore when he awakened after being submerged into the darkest depths. And a bone chilling cold that burned into the depths of his bones when he realized that he was completely alone on that beach.

Alone except for Teacher.]

Teacher was still there. You'd left. I didn't know if you'd be back.

["If" not "when".]

Edited 2022-07-15 21:46 (UTC)

He crumples at the waist a little. Being stabbed feels like being punched, at first. Then the pain of sliced nerves comes a moment later, and one realizes too late the extent of the damage.

"I didn't leave you," he sobs quietly, hands cradling the air as if to hold his gutted flesh in (or to hold one angel close). He recites and paraphrases, "'When outnumbered, until more help comes, make a line. A safe zone. Put the wounded there. Guard it with your life.'”

He's without the cloak he swaddled Kaworu in after he was returned from Beast form. It's probably somewhere in this house. He feels cold even though it's summer. Reciting his notes usually reassures him. It doesn't.

"'The walking wounded are low priority because they can move.' I got Sauveterre-san and Paul-kun off the battlefield so I could protect you. I held the line. You were my top priority. You were safe. And then you were gone..."

His voice fades weakly. He bows his head and squeezes his eyes. Tears drop onto the floor and are lost forever. He may have followed his training, but all that matters to him is results. Those reflect on him. It's a harsh standard he doesn't hold others to. A hero is supposed to save everyone. He failed to save Kaworu, and this eclipses everything he did before that moment, even giving of his own blood to return Kaworu's will and sense of self.

"I wasn't in sight. I failed to reassure you. I'm sorry."

[There are few people as light on their feet as Paul is, and he knows this house, its warped floorboards and its resonances. He drifts through it in the silence of a ghost. He lingers in the hallway with all of one's presence, listening to Izuku and Kaworu speak to one another.

He is the last person on this world they could possibly want to see right now. He has to remind himself of that with every wrenching word, his hands nerveless fists at his side for aching to reach out to them. If he had any decency, he would have waited at the base of the stairs, like he said that he would.

But if he did, none of them would be here.]

He wasn't there for you because of me.

[Paul stands in the doorway. Where both of them bear the stigmata of corruption, Paul barely appears different than he did when he left this room on the morning of the voyage, except for the violet shadows under his eyes and the slanted bow of his shoulders.]

He didn't leave you. [His voice is dull, his eyes flat.] I took him away.

[Kaworu's hand raises unconsciously, drawn towards one of the first people he was drawn towards and who willingly came closer.

His first friend. Then something more.

But he can't cross the distance between them. Even as part of him wants to run to Paul, taking Izuku's hand and dragging him along. He could be angry, he could be so angry at him, but if they were together, it would be alright.]

It's okay if it was... I don't want you hurt but...

[He drops his hand, it collapses against his side.]

I'm wanted. Here.

[It's not true. Part of him knows that. But it's easier to live a lie where he never has to consider waking up so alone.]

He tenses subtly between quieting breaths. It's not as though he needs to protect Kaworu from Paul at the moment, but perhaps the image of Paul--a reminder of the person who hurt him on that ship.

"He wants--Teacher uses people like tools. Everyone on the ship..." He trails off because the subject of Teacher is less important than Midoriya's primary motivation.

Midoriya sinks to sit in the middle of the room uninvited, bulky Iron Soles tucked under him as best they can, chin tilted up towards the person sitting in the window.

"I can't make you leave, so I'm not leaving until you do. Anyone hurting you has to go through me, and I can warn you. I can warn everyone who would fight alongside me in an instant, and that is not a fight Teacher wants."

Probably. He doesn't know if John would allow him to stay. He doesn't care. John could rip the bones out of Midoriya's body and he would still sense the danger coming. He'd warn everyone via Omen in the battle-quick way he learned with the Leviathan ground forces.

It's his nuclear option. He doesn't know what else to do to protect Kaworu, who has killed and is slated to kill again under the tutelage of someone who regards lives as pawns. There is more than one way to be lost. As long as Kaworu is under this roof, he is someone who needs saving, and Midoriya will not rest until that is done.

[Kaworu slides off the windowsill onto the floor, his movement so light and delicate that it's a reminder that he is, either fundamentally or in some part, inhuman. He stands above the hero on the ground, looking down on him, seven eyes unreadable, expression impassive.]

Izuku.

You're the one who hurt me.

[His eyes glance up to Paul to know that he is not excluded from being the source of pain. But Paul knows this. They had spoken about this after all in a night so happy that harm to each other seemed impossible.

He reaches out to touch a freckled cheek but there's no affection in the gesture. It's as though it's a message that he exists to tell and nothing more.]

And I have hurt you.

Though I knew it was inevitable, I was... not prepared for how much it weigh on me to be hurt by those I cared for and to hurt them in return. I... couldn't bear it if I was left again. Or if I hurt you both again.

If I remain here. None of that will happen.

[Midoriya sits down on the floor, teary-eyed and resolute, committing himself to self-destruction. Kaworu drifts over to him with a velvet, razor-lined tongue, dreamily damning himself alongside him. Paul watches it all unfold with wide eyes, a bleak event horizon of obliteration approaching that he doesn't need his prescience to see.

Leaving Midoriya here with Kaworu like this would destabilize the already tenuous situation under this roof in days, if not hours. Midoriya would impale himself on God's splintered patience, and Kaworu's horror would destroy him not long after, one way or another. The attempt to pull one person from this wreckage ending with two left in it is an unacceptable end.

Paul takes another step into the room, and he thinks about Midoriya never wants him to hold back during a fight, how Kaworu wants him to see him as capable and strong. He thinks, already, that he's sorry. He doesn't think about whether they will forgive him.]

Kaworu. He doesn't want you. He didn't want any of us. He wants shadows he can paint ghosts over. Izuku-kun does. He gave his blood for you to bring you back, and he was only gone to keep you safe. You know that.

[Where Midoriya is raw and Kaworu is abstract, Paul is controlled. The dullness has left him, replaced with heated clarity. He looks between them as he speaks.]

Izuku-kun, staying here doesn't keep Kaworu safe. It only gives him another thing to hold over his head. Over mine. [There is a ripple of fear there, at the edges.] He stopped you on the ship. He could do it again. He could do worse, and Kaworu would blame himself for all of it.

If you stay here, if either of you stay here, it protects no one. Not each other, not yourselves.

And if you stay here, so will I. [His voice drops, but his gaze doesn't.] Neither of you want that.

In the end, Kaworu is plagued with the same selfishness he is, that of refusing to see them hurt again. It's the one selfishness Midoriya allows himself. (Paul gave into one with a double edge, and it hurt them anyway.)

His tears continue to run. He just barely cups those pale, emotionless fingers scouring an icy brand on freckles once kissed with tenderness. It would have hurt less to kneel and be devoured by the Beast on the beach.

This is not the first time he has left someone in need to avoid all three of them being killed. Back then, it was a scared little girl in an alley, and Midoriya acted (or didn't act) under the guidance of his senpai. His mind understands the logic. It was a lesson he took seriously. Paul glows with an unclouded sight any Pro Hero would admire.

Midoriya's heart still aches.

"I won't let it end like this," he says roughly after a pause that seems to last for eons. "I'll find a way to save you. And I'm not saying goodbye."

He clutches Kaworu's hand tight before letting go. He rises, trembling and burning bright, tears still flowing. He says instead,

"I love you."

Edited (misery) 2022-07-30 04:52 (UTC)

Don't. I don't want it to end but... I don't know what the future will be like. I don't know where to go. So for now, all I can do is stay and try to find that answer. If one exists.

[He doesn't mean to make his foolishness sound like poetry. Just like he doesn't mean to clutch Izuku's hand so tightly, only letting it go with the same reluctance that the other boy displays.]

I love you too. If I am capable of it. Then I love you.

[This is where Paul would have once closed the circuit. Midoriya and Kaworu exchange their affections that are not goodbyes, that cut worse and deeper, and he is no longer here. He is where he went on the beach, where he stood in Lazarus' safehouse, untouchable in the whirring machinations of purpose shorn of feeling.

He holds himself like an atomic core on the criticality threshold, breath clean and even, and all he does is nod to Kaworu, an acknowledgement so passing and light as to become a nonsense, and once again, he leaves him behind - only this time, without guard or shepherd, in the unstained hands of an untrustworthy man. If his face has any expression when he steps from the room back into the hall, he doesn't want to know about it.

(At least Kaworu wasn't sick.)

He doesn't stop moving until the end of the hallway, a distance covered in quick, short steps, his thoughts bearing him along in motion like a current. He stops short there, flexing his hand at his side, and now, finally, he fixes his focus back to Midoriya with a hot electric arc of reckless fervor.]

You don't trust me. [He states a fact; there's nothing more to it.] You're right. But you know that I would do anything to keep either of you safe, and I'm asking you to trust that.

Do you?

His throat works as he swallows several times, his hand burning as if touched by angelic fire. He wants to take Kaworu in his arms. He does not. There is an ocean between them, an impossible stretch of water Midoriya struggles to find a way to cross as he breathes quickly through his nose as if readying for a sudden escape. He hears, as if through cotton, Paul leave the room.

He has no notion of how many moments it takes for him to follow, stepping backward through the door, then looking over his shoulder, unable to take his eyes off Kaworu. Losing that line of sight is a blade released to fall and cut part of himself away. He walks slowly down the hall with a new wound and stops when he finds it blocked. (Really it's not, but he would have to go around, close, and he wants to know why.)

"Yes," he says with the immediacy of sure (obvious) knowledge. His thick voice does not match Paul's fervor. Paul is looking back at him in a hallway. There is nowhere else for Midoriya to look except at the slim black-sheathed blade of a person. Yet somehow Midoriya has perfected the art of looking straight ahead at him without looking at him.

"You proved it on the ship."

[The arrow passes through him like air. There's a hideous freedom to feeling nothing. He does not even want to reach out and wipe the tear stains from beneath Midoriya's moon eyes flooded with an echoing hollow of grief.

(His fingers keep twitching at his side. A tiny pulse, one-two-three-four. He matched those freckles to the stars.)

The manifestation of this freedom is that the idea that has taken shape in his mind doesn't concern him as it once would have, for the sake of not introducing an uncontrolled variable to an already volatile situation. For the sake of sense, of reason, of bald self-preservation.]

We're calling the Reckoning.

[He turns to continue down the stairs, no longer blocking Midoriya's way, adding his coda over his shoulder. He might be heard by other ears, far from this place. He hopes that he is.]

And we're putting a curse on this house.

Now he is reminded that it is the seventh month. That doesn't mean anything definite, but the confluence of a Sleeper's birthday and Blessed Day happens often enough to set a precedent for the chance. He'll know in a matter of days if the Reckoning is his Patron. He thinks of Cloverfield, the lost almost childlike Pthumerian who gave him that picture of his mother. Midoriya regularly visits him when he can find him on the Farther Shores.

He does not entertain the vain notion that his possible Patron is like Cloverfield--or that he really knows Cloverfield well to begin with.

It doesn't matter if anyone hears the half-formed plan, because who can stop them? (Plenty of people in the moment, but the two of them would simply rise up and try again.) Midoriya can stop them, the two boys hurrying down the stairs. He knows what it is to be possessed by something inexorable: the need to do something to save someone.

"You'll die."

He's never so blunt when shooting a strategy down, but he's picked it up from others. Midoriya calls on that clear sight now, the focus that does away with his overthinking and lets the conclusion rise on his lips in protest. It's exhaled from a knot of life, not hollowness, a life that is desperate to protect another. (It wasn't enough during the storm.)

He's had no time to process anything that happened. Anger, sorrow, love, and betrayal fight for prominence in an uncertain future. He brushes aside the thought of what could have been in favor of what could still be, and what is. He sucks in a quick breath.

"She'll just curse or kill you as punishment. Then what's the point? It's the same as me staying here."

His voice shakes at the end, growling through his fangs. A life lost in this house or on its lawn to one god or another, and either way Kaworu has one less protector. That is not a victory. (And there is always the chance someone cannot come back.)

That catches Paul up in a pause. His shoulderblades flare as he pulls them back, his head tilting as if he might look back.

"Maybe.” He doesn't.

He starts as smoothly as he stopped, pushing on through the house and towards the open front door. His explanation flows from him lightly and with sureness. He knows these gods as he knows any adversary.

"There's a ritual to call her. A sinner's blood spilled alongside a punishment, and she can be appealed to by her supplicant to intervene on their behalf. Most people inflict it after a violence against them. We're going to use it to prevent a violence against someone else. It's not as though she doesn't have reason to scourge the head of this House. All we're asking for is a more specific set of conditions."

He's practiced deference here, sheathed his most decisive actions in discretion. He's doubted himself, mistrusted directness. All of that exists somewhere outside of him now. His marrow hums with rightness.

“I can’t call on her. You’re right.” He pauses in the open doorway, his hand resting on the frame. “But if someone else does, if they punish me first, she may accept it. And if not, if I’m wrong – if she curses me, or kills me – she’s going to do that whether she comes here or not. The Reckoning takes her due. It might as well be worth something.”

“It doesn't have to be you,” he says, softly, and this is when he looks back, eyes shaded like the dark, lonely green water of a mountain lake, because we is more a broken hope than it was a promise.

In the same place Midoriya picked up and carried Paul and Kaworu upstairs while laughing, Paul acknowledges the possibility of being killed. Midoriya clutches we like a promise. He will not simply follow in Paul's wake. He will act.

Midoriya doesn't so much choose what comes over him as it chooses him. His eyes widen and he bares his blood-lined fangs. His claws tense at his sides. One For All remains unsummoned, save for the Danger Sense he keeps on at all times while here.

"No," he growls. "She hasn't killed you yet because I'm punishing you, not her." Punishing with what exactly, he's not sure how to articulate. "With all the hard things you have to do."

The world is shaded in grays, a blend of fear and anger. Forgiveness can be granted easily, too easily, but the path of trying to change, atone, and redeem is long and arduous. Midoriya has seen the start of the long road ahead before. If it's something he wants them to do, he's got to be there to watch and extend a helping hand. He will solidify this sunburst of thought more clearly later. Right now his head is clamoring with outside threats and how to keep people safe.

"She puts a finger on either of you, I make her stop," he says with the same cold vehemence he turned on Paul when he warned him not to interfere with his UA friends if he called them during a rescue. Needless to say, this goes for John as well.

Paul pivots on his heel as if struck hard in the shoulder, staggered and whirling, seized up in a mirror of Midoriya's compulsion.

"No."

Panic is scrawled across his face as it was in the ruined street where they faced the fiery wyrm, as it was on the cold beach where they clasped hands and swore that the future where Midoriya fell in tatters to the sea would never come to pass, as it was when Midoriya shattered his bones to throw himself at God on the deck of the ship. All he sees is a door closing, the lips of an open grave drawing together over the toothed eye of an insensible universe.

In the handful of steps it takes him to cross the space between them, he feels no closer, his eyes collapsing to cloudless blue luminosity even in those fractions of seconds.

"Izuku-kun-" He reaches for his shoulders, his strong arms, his voice an unbearable, shaken thing that reaches out with him in terrible yearning - and he catches himself short, staring at the blue flames that lick his fingers. He makes a torn, wet sound at the back of his throat and pulls himself back.

"I must not fear," he breathes, trembling, and when he presses the heels of his hands against his eyes it's impossible to tell where the light of one meets the other, "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

The fire dies with every word, the approach to the criticality threshold averted. He doesn't lower his hands when he speaks again.

"She'd kill you," he whispers, harrowed and low, "I can't let people keep dying for me."

Paul's curls catch the air with their movement. His eyes match the fire on his fingers. Midoriya is very familiar with the heat of blue flame, but he doesn't flinch. Danger Sense doesn't need to tell him there is no ill intent. He will not flinch from someone in need reaching for him either. He never has.

He only moves without thinking when it looks like Paul will burn himself. His fingers in their tattered gloves have wrapped themselves around his forearms. He doesn't remember doing it. Paul's litany flows like water attempting to assuage the heat.

"Then think carefully and don't summon a Pthumerian you'll regret. I love you," he says quietly with a ripple of emotion across the disturbed waters. Somehow it feels like the force of a thunderclap.

On a bright summer day, Paul led him out of this house and the darkness of a memory. Now Midoriya takes Paul by the arm (by the hand if the heat will let him) and gently steers him towards the door for some air.

Paul lets Midoriya take his arm, lets his hand slide down to the still-hot but cooling curve of his own hand, lets himself be led. His eyes oscillate in blue-greens, their shade unfixed as he is guided out of this house, expression empty but not blank. It is hollowed, a bare field of ash.

He may never cross this threshold the other way again. When he left Caladan, it had been the same, but he had not felt the doom that hung over them all so certainly then. He had faced the future with courage. He had been willing to believe in the transience of bad dreams. He had believed that the good and the just might not have their victory assured, no, but that it would be theirs if they were clever, and they were strong, and they stood side by side with their comrades-in-arms.

The air tastes of storms.

“I love you,” he whispers, as much a ghost as anything that has ever stalked the shadowed halls at their back, and he wishes that he hadn’t. He wishes that his tongue would cleave to the root and fall out of his mouth, as one wishes when one does not believe in wishing.

“I love him,” he says, and it’s worse, “I won’t regret anything that keeps you safe. Not if the one paying the price is me.”

The last, and the worst, in its helplessness: “I’m not done yet.”

Paul's hand feels like it has just held a hot cup of tea. A fine illusion, as if they can just sit and share one together by a fire to drive the nightmares away. It will take more than that. When he touches him (and he does without hesitation) Midoriya still sees the blood on Paul's hand like an involuntary fever chill. They're not done yet, but that struggle is also a hope.

He leads Paul to the far end of the yard away from the clatter of everyone loading the truck and potential questioning looks about the third person not accompanying them. The air is cooler outside. There is a thin breeze coming in from the sea, and it promises to swell. It carries the warning of upheaval, but it does not yet threaten to cleave the sky in two. It clears Midoriya's head. His goal remains unchanged.

He squares his shoulders and says quietly to the trees at the edge of the property, "You can't pay if you're dead. You've studied the Pthumerians; if you think the Reckoning will see it this way, go ahead and do it. I'll protect you so you can see it through."

He turns and looks at him with the solemnity of someone who knows what it means to experience the fear of death and push forward anyway. "Don't be afraid."

He looks up at Kaworu's window, but distance, sun, and shadow obscure what is in it. He thinks of how he left his mother in tears, how he didn't shed any at all, how the light in his eyes had died.

"I can't tell if he's watching us, but sign to him anyway. Tell him you love him. You didn't before. He needs that."

Edited 2022-08-17 06:04 (UTC)

Paul slips his hand out of Midoriya's soundlessly, folding to his knees where he stands as he did on the beach. He has even less to work with now, nothing but his still sharp fishknife, a single cone of incense, and his own guilty blood. It will be enough. The Reckoning is not a god of subtlety.

"No, he doesn't," Paul says, with matching quiet solemnity, and something in him has given way. He sets out his incense and lights it with a flaring finger, not caring that he's seen to do it, only that the bright arc of pain that runs up his arm adds to the siren's call of his yet unopened veins.

"Neither do you." He traces a scorch circle in the grass around it, a tang of ozone blending with the faint trace of salt in the air. His voice rises, steadily, swelling up with resignation like a bruise. "You think I don't know that this is over?"

The house and everything that was built in it are coming apart, even if it stays standing. He can hear its bones being broken and its sinews being torn. They are shattered and scattering, with everything Paul had thought he had made safe ruined and destroyed. This, them, everything - all of it done, so much dust.

"Look at what I did to him. What I did to you. What I did to everyone else. And you think I should tell him that. I shouldn't even have said it to you." He sits back on his heels and lets his hands fall to his lap, head tipped back to stare up at the blank, pitiless sky. "But I can't help myself, can I? I ruin things. People. It's what I'm best at. Every time I try to do anything else -"

He shrugs. It's off-balance, one shoulder higher than the other. He rolls his head forward, his neck bowed, and he takes a long, slow breath, in and out.

"What do you think I'm afraid of?"

Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: metaphorical description of being gutted

no subject

no subject

mha manga spoilers

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

cw: gore description

cw: gore description, psychological horror

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)