deercountry | wolves in the middle of town

The interior of the cave is sweltering. Saltwater slicks the ceiling and patters down like intermittent warm rain, but in spite of all of that, Paul is dry, his hair stuck in the wild salt-tangle of the summer after swimming.

He knows enough about the things that happened to Bakugou and Ochako to hate this all the more for Deku, even before everything he did to Kiriona and to Kaworu with his unchecked flame. The memory of covered dishes and nights spent with Midoriya’s damp face tucked into his shoulder, Kaworu curled up at his back protectively, all seem very far away from the ashen wreck Paul left behind him before he fled here.

To do nothing. To be useless to them, when they needed him at their sides again, when Merlinus unraveled like a ruptured star into the black hole that draws everything inevitably to itself.

“Hey, Izuku-kun,” Paul says, still uselessly, dropping his hands back to his sides. The longing in him hurt like a living thing bleeding and starved: to touch, to hold, to kiss, to gentle and be gentled. Flames trace the tips of his fingers like an illusory lover’s flirtation. “How are you? How is-” and he barely flinches, when he asks, but he does flinch- “-Kaworu-kun?”

He stands as close as seems safe, which is measured by his own approximation of a meter and how much Paul's finely webbed perception of personal fire-space seems to make him tremble invisibly. (Midoriya is finely tuned specifically to distress in someone he knows well.) Kaworu is well enough that Midoriya feels alright peeling himself away from his side where he had stayed since going to the house in Gaze. (As staunchly as the cavaliers its residents keep talking about. And Gideon.) He tells Paul as much and a little more, because Kaworu is their beloved, and just the surface details will not do. Midoriya and Paul shared the sentiment that this blue fire had to be dealt with, but there were more immediate concerns.

"Anyway, I'm fine," he finishes, finally remembering himself. "I already got angry at everyone." He's only quick to anger in certain circumstances, and it never lasts long. It's only useful when he can channel it like the rest of his emotions born from his regard for others' wellbeing.

He and Paul had to be careful in March when Warmbloods ached when touched, but the stakes were lower then, and Midoriya could still eke out a hug if he really wanted to. His body subtly leans that way, ever on the precipice with every small movement... He sits instead, resting his arms across his knees. This Desolation is more volatile, like a Quirk out of control, and more dangerous than even that due to the book's claws sinking deeper.

Paul listens to news of Kaworu with raw, vulnerable yearning interlaced with his deep concern. It touches the bruised guilt in his heart, but it also calms some of the fire, in a degree that only someone as sensitively perceptive as Midoriya would notice. Then comes the near afterthought of Midoriya's own condition, and Paul's lips quirk in a smile shaped by memory more than the moment itself.

"We're always causing trouble for you," he says, with a pallid touch of wryness, and he follows Midoriya to the floor, his folded posture a mirror of the overburdened hero's.

He stays like that a while, observing Midoriya's features like he might ever be in danger of forgetting them. The droplets of water that fall upon him hiss on his skin, but they leave no mark upon him.

"I'm sorry for that," he says, quietly. "I'm sorry I wasn't there. I should have been there. I should have-" he hugs his knees tighter, worrying the inside of his cheek "-I should have - it's always the things I should have, and I didn't. And it's always everyone else who has to pay for it."

"Paul-kun..." he murmurs with an ache in his voice.

He expected Paul to be angry about everything that happened to Gideon and with the fight and to have to talk him down. Perhaps it's still hiding beneath the surface of his sadness, but Paul was always his own worst critic. How many times has Midoriya seen this stricken downcast look on his face? He wants to gather him in his arms and let him bury his face in his hair. It's not fair that the uncaring drops of water in this cave are allowed to kiss Paul's cheek as they vaporize themselves.

"I've caused trouble for you too." It's the nature of beings who care for one another. It's only trouble if one cares enough to be troubled. "You had to search the forest for me."

He shifts and retrieves fire-proof gloves from his backpack. He puts them on but makes no move. Even under normal circumstances, he tends to invite touch initially rather than smother with it.

"I know these probably won't fully protect me, but it's better than nothing."

Another day, another place, and Paul might have mustered up an argument against Midoriya's claim. He'd have pointed out that Midoriya only ever tried to hide from the world for other's safety, as misguided as Corruption may have made him, and that besides - there was no trouble that Paul would not gladly take on for his sake. That this argument would only take them in a circle wouldn't have been lost on him, but he might have made it all the same.

So if there is one slight blessing here, it's that, at last, Paul is too worn down to argue much of anything.

(It's all he can do not to show how much everything hurts, the maelstrom shrieking under his skin. A true burn stops feeling like anything, when it sears deep enough. This never stops. He remembers standing at a door, persuaded not to step through it. He should have stayed on the right side.)

"I don't want to hurt you," he whispers, staring at Midoriya's gloved hands with terrible desire, the nightmare of flames around him flaring hungrily, "I never wanted to hurt you."

Edited 2022-10-23 13:06 (UTC)

"The thought of seeing someone else in pain... Doing what you can to prevent it... It hurts you because you care. It's that kindness I admire in you. I always have."

His voice is full and soft with gentle but unwavering incandescence. It's more grounded and strong than when it jumped unschooled all over the place that day when they first met and he pressed gauze to his pierced hand. He watches Paul's dark brows knit and his blue eyes yearn for touch like two spots of flame ready to burn holes in paper. Midoriya's eyes flash in a different way.

"So why do you keep hurting yourself? I never asked you why you thought the book would be a good idea. Are there any other secret dangers we need to know about? And you know--you know I won't leave you alone."

His voice brims with emotion that echoes against the salt-slick walls of the cave, but it's not cutting. The library door, the basement, the black beach studded with radiation heat and glass, the hands clasped with claws digging in. He has never left him alone.

Before Paul came to this world, he thought he had begun to understand something of the weight of love. He can look on that nascent understanding now without scorn for his past self, who knew so little, and know he had only glimpsed the shadow of love's toll, flickering in such slight candlelight.

When he sees it in Midoriya's face it's near enough to blinding that he should look away, his molten, unnatural eyes not fit to bear it. This is love, as much as slowed heartbeats nestled against his own as they sleep, as much as watching a miracle knit Midoriya back together. This claim on him that makes him no longer entirely his own.

My choices don't only belong to me, he told his father once, in a dream. He thought he'd known what he meant. He's spent every day since learning better, and Midoriya has been one of his greatest teachers.

"I wanted to make myself strong enough to protect you," Paul says, plainly, "I wanted to know enough, to be enough, to keep all of you safe. I wanted to make myself ready to challenge God, if I had to, whether the one I lived with, or any of the rest of them. Everything I did was for that...you know almost all of it, now. The bloodstones, the trials, the book. But I should have told you why."

He looks downward, as if he might see through the rock itself, and puts his hand upon the stone, splayed and tented.

"I'm not good enough." Paul tells Midoriya, so brave and true and kind. "I see the world, and I see everything in it, and I see what I have to be in order to be enough...and I'm not. And everything I try to change that goes wrong, and I don't understand why. I don't understand why everyone else can be all of these things, and I can't."

He flinches slightly as if Paul had yelled and torn a hole in the universe with the terrible things he did to himself and others. Midoriya recalls standing on a roof and being told his dream was impossible with the way he was then--Quirkless. He tried so many ways to make One For All truly his own power and caused himself pain so many times. It's not only the wicked who seek power.

Black smoke emanates from Midoriya and unwraps itself like the shedding of a cape. His Omen forms a few times larger than a ram should be, blocking the light behind Midoriya for a moment so he is only illuminated by blue. They never emerge without need, so they have a tendency to choose a suitably protective size. As usual, half of their sandy-colored wool is shrouded in Omen-smoke. Without a word--they never talk--or waiting for permission, they leave Midoriya and settle down right next to Paul in a loaf.

"None of us are all of these things, Paul-kun. Why do you think we need the support of others?"

He shifts forward to sit on his knees and reaches his hand out. He flattens his gloved palm on the ground, so close, fingertips just barely occupying the spaces between Paul's fingers.

"I couldn't have thought that last year. I thought that if I was just strong enough, I could do everything on my own, and no one would have to worry about me."

There were sheep on Caladan in the north, on the high, craggy islands, half-wild creatures tended by shepherds who seemed to grow to resemble their charges. Sometimes Paul would watch them be worked from the deck of a ship or the cockpit of a 'thopter, and as was his duty, he had been party to lambing and shearing season. He doesn't know if he really smells lanolin and turf when Midoriya's solid wall of an Omen settles down next to him, and he doesn't care.

It's like the terrifying, necessary splay of Midoriya's fingertips between his, touching without touching. His mind can conjure the sensation as if it's real if he half-closes his eyes and draws it to him across the seas of time. He flattens his hand to keep it rooted and perfectly still, and the fire does not leap the gap between them, but it burns hard and hot in his chest with its need.

"I remember." He looks up, and the blue of his eyes has lost some of its radiant malignancy, is shaded through with oceanic complexity. "And you have done better. I should tell you that more often. How proud I am of you."

He smiles. It's half-sick, uncertain, made strange by the flickering shadows.

"I don't think about it as hurting myself," he says, "I didn't think about myself, and it's still selfish, isn't it? Because what hurts me hurts you - because when I make mistakes, I make the worst ones, every time. I cut myself from the equation, and act surprised it solves wrong." A dry, scratching ghost-noise, like laughter's pale shadow. "Some oracle I am."

He licks his lips fretfully. He wants to take him in his arms and alight small kisses all over his face. Seabirds huddling together for warmth, soft white splotches on the unforgiving gray cliffs.

The seer does not act, because that is what a hero does. Paul is both. It's an unusual combination, because in stories they're usually separate. Quest giver and receiver. Twice the burden.

"I'm proud of you too."

Where Midoriya comes from, there are a lot of things that go unsaid, and subtext is the primary language. But Inko Midoriya is loving and doting in the language reserved just for them, and it is from her that he takes his cue when it comes to things they should be hearing from absent parents. His eyes and tentative smile convey the softness and warmth words cannot.

He remembers Paul on the beach surrounded by radiation and fury while his voice displaced itself in the mouth of an Omen. Unbidden, Midoriya thinks of fish floating dead in the water. His smile fades. His voice is still soft, but it is low and woven with steady iron.

"You won't try to go after Teacher, will you?"

There will be hours later where Paul will cradle those words like the fragile light of a candle in the high winds of darkness, while flame without warmth opens in endless fission inside his veins. It gentles him now for a moment, some of the rigid fear in his set arm easing off as he exhales.

Directness of feeling isn't Paul's first language either, which gives these straightforward words more impact when they come. He smiles back with emptied lungs, drawing up a line of strength from their hollowness.

It braces him against the sharpness of his sucked teeth inhale at Midoriya's question. He was expecting it. It would have been foolish not to, and he's only so much of a fool at a time.

"No." The unusual directness repeats. Paul holds Midoriya's gaze levelly, the word as unornamented and uninflected as he can make it. He doesn't want to seem like he's trying to convince Midoriya, even as he so fervently wants him to believe him.

"I've seen the kind of thing I'd have to make myself." His face is drawn and pale, even under the blue ribbons that crackle in a corona around his head. "I've seen what would happen. I won't go after him. What would it help, anyway?"

The blue halo--lambent holiness, azure crown, fission wreath--is abruptly and unceremoniously broken by a blunt snout. His Omen nuzzles the side of Paul's hair amidst their clouds of curling wool. They have no scent or warmth, but they are soft. Midoriya is not so stalwart, which is half the reason his taciturn Omen has made one of their rare appearances. Midoriya asks what he's been afraid to ask in a trembling voice,

"What will happen if the fire takes over? Isn't there anything I can do?"

The last time he felt this helpless was when Dabi killed Bakugou at the end of last month. He knew when it happened because Murder Hound wordlessly informed him before going to wait at the Farther Shores for his Sleeper. Before that, another helplessness in the same month, Midoriya's community turned on him for his decision not to slay the Bugge. There is no Sophia in his pocket murmuring encouragement or poking her tiny nose into his hair now.

His throat tightens too much around the scent of scorched air, and he can't say, How will I keep you safe?

Paul threads his fingers into wool that is not wool, his reluctance to touch the Omen unprompted broken by their comfort. He needs it when Midoriya unearths that shallowly buried fear - another inevitable question, but this one worse.

He thinks of the Bugge too. He thinks of what Midoriya asked of him on the reeking shores of the Salt Lake. Did his expression look like this then, or is this a fear he reserves for the people he loves?

Out of his shadow a shape coils, sinuous and blunt-mouthed, limned with rending blue light in echo of her Sleeper. She slides across the space between them like she moves through water, and Midoriya may recognize her from the stories Paul tells, from the mural that they set on the wall at a birthday party long ago.

"I'd forget myself. I'd forget you. I'd forget why I ever wanted to stop, why I ever wanted to change." The creature that is not Sophia as she was stops short of Midoriya's boot, eyelessly turning herself up towards him. "You are doing something. It's easier to remember when you remind me, but if I forget -"

(He is Paul Atreides. He is his father's son, his mother's son, his teachers' student, his sibling's brother, his lovers' beloved. He is part of the world. His eyes are green.)

"I want you to ask Chara to stop me. I know they could do it. I don't want it to be you."

It's a horror to see his Omen changed and make a guess as to why. Paul's soul is transmuted, and he is already forgetting himself. "Sandworms use vibrations to hunt," Paul once told him, and Midoriya stills his breathing for a moment as if it's happening now. She looks at him with nothing, the eye of the universe hidden. One of his gloved hands is splayed between Paul's fingers. The other rises palm up just under the worm’s head, inviting her to rest on it.

When he cries, he is in a more natural state, letting the full tide of his feelings ebb and flow. That day, he insisted his power had to be for saving people like a child insisting a schoolyard bully stop picking on others. It's right and true, but it came from the protesting part of his heart that doesn’t think ahead or plan.

Things are much, much worse when his mobile face stills like the Salt Lake during the day. He gazes forward. It's hardly a true sound that escapes him. Paul might know it as the barest noise of surprise someone makes the moment a knife snuffs their life out.

At fifteen, he learned that All Might had tried to defeat All For One, but the villain somehow survived. Midoriya took the news that he might have to face and kill him with no protest. Things haven’t turned out at all as Midoriya expected. Here in Trench, he secretly promised Shigaraki he would kill him if he became an uncontrollable Beast. He knows Shigaraki hates not being in control of his own body like he hates his own teacher.

"You can say it, Paul-kun."

Kaworu was direct with him once, letting the words about his death at the hands of the Leviathan fall from his lips because Midoriya couldn't utter them. Now Midoriya has seen so much more, and he can. He knows Paul asks him this because he knows Midoriya has it in him, and he doesn't want it to be Midoriya that does it.

"Kill you, and give Chara-san another reason to hate this world, using it as an excuse for hurting others? I have to think of Chara-san's feelings too."

He looks at him unblinking, and it makes his eyes dry and lifeless. He once told Chara he couldn't imagine hurting Paul and Kaworu, and promised not to, because their pain is his. Is it a mercy to extend to Paul the same promise he made to Shigaraki, to fulfill his pre-Beast wishes, or is it like giving up? He doesn’t know.

“I know I asked you to do something like this for me. And I’m sorry. It’s unfair that you have to think about it. I don’t expect anyone but a Hero to take on the burden of saving someone no matter what. I won’t let it come to killing you. I need Kaworu-kun to believe that there are people who will save, and that he isn’t alone. I need him to be able to carry hope. As long as I’m alive, I won’t give up on you.”

His brows knit--finally, a ripple across the glasslike surface of a lake. “I don’t know if this is right or if it respects your wishes at all...”

The Omen lets her head sink into Midoriya's palm, nuzzling the blunt tip of her closed mouth against it. All her teeth concealed, shrunk to this size, she's not so terrifying a creature as her likenesses shown the great sand worms of Arrakis to be. If not for her unnatural, feverish heat, it might not even be unpleasant to feel the pliant nudging of her snout against his gloves.

"None of this is right, Izuku-kun."

A water-thin mercy: in the face of the impossible and the unbearable, the knowledge that this is not how things should be. Paul half-closes his eyes, as near as he comes to a flinch after listening to Midoriya's stark honesty. He can say it. If Midoriya can say it, so can he.

"I never see you when I dream about this." He holds up his other hand, cradling a pool of pale fire. "I want it to be because you asked me not to see you. I want it to be because you're somewhere out of my vision, not..."

He closes his hand. The light in it goes out. There are gestures even more direct than words. He stares at the backs of his soot-streaked knuckles, contemplation and faded grief making his soft expression seem wiser than his years - or, perhaps, only more tired. He doesn't know if there's much of a difference between the two.

"But I wouldn't let it come to killing you either," he says, looking up to meet Midoriya's sore eyes, "So who am I to tell you anything? Except that Kaworu isn't the only one who needs to be able to believe that people can saved. So do you. That's a part of why you won't give up on me, however many reasons I give you to."

The horrible thing Paul asked Midoriya to ask of Chara to spare him guilt, or worse. The books and the stones and the Beasts in the woods, the ill-considered choices, the cutting through the world like a knife instead of a human being. Midoriya as wide-eyed as this on his knees on the deck of a ship. So many of the things that Paul could be, so many of the things he already is.

"And so I need to believe it too. For both of you. For me." New steel slips into his voice. "We won't let that future happen."

Edited 2022-12-04 17:11 (UTC)

Paul can say it, but he shouldn't have to. That knowledge makes it worse. The nerves to feel would be dead, but they aren't. They scream, and Midoriya's chest hurts when he watches Paul hold fire blooming in his upturned palm like a deadly lotus. It scours the air dry.

Paul had simply agreed that day, but now Midoriya knows his true sentiment. They refuse to accept the world as it is, the one that says one of them must die.

"I've told you about the person back home who could see the future," he says lowly. "There was an unforeseen outcome. It caught them by surprise. They looked, and they thought we would fail and die, but we didn't." It was a bittersweet victory. Sir Nighteye died of his wounds later. Midoriya sat at the kitchen counter with Paul and obliquely mentioned it in the wake of the Leviathan's destruction.

He runs his glove along what is presumably the Omen's sinuous neck. It is calming to concentrate on making a soothing motion as if he can make trials vanish like wrinkles. Perhaps occupying his hand with comforting the Omen will make him feel like he can remain poised sitting here... He finally shatters, and he clutches the worm that isn't Sophia to his chest. She's too warm, but so are his tears, and he buries his face into her like a heated blanket.

"I love you, Paul-kun," he chokes between sobs.

The sand worm coils as comfortingly as she can against Midoriya's chest, her tapering tail wrapping around his wrist and her closed mouth nuzzling at his tear-slicked face. Unlike her living counterparts, the water holds no terror for her.

The hum starts slowly. She's never done it before. It builds to a pulsating vibration like a rolling purr, or the thrum of an alien engine in the place of a heart. Her heat cools to warmth as she offers Midoriya all the comfort her Sleeper can't.

"I love you too, Izuku-kun."

Paul doesn't realize he's crying with him at first. The sting at the inner corners of his eyes could be anything until he notices the difference in the shimmering of light in front of him. He leans into the ram's wool and half-hides his face there, shoulders rising and falling in breath that saws like a knife.

"I'm sick of looking at the future. What does it have to show me? Everything I want to see is here. It's with you. I should have seen that." His throat aches, his heart caught in it. "I see it now."

Did that shadowy seer see it, in the end? Paul doesn't want to know. He thinks he might finally understand why Midoriya asked him so desperately not to look for him in the black waves that stretch endlessly on ahead.

Edited 2022-12-07 05:53 (UTC)

He remembers Sophia's weight, so slight that it was better marked by the patter of her hands and feet than any heaviness. He remembers the drawing of the worm and its eye of teeth, a creature that has always so fascinated Paul. He buries his sobs into her, and he can only liken her comforting purr to a car that is somehow alive and hums like no car should. Midoriya's Omen solidly supports Paul's weight and tucks their chin over his curls as if he is in danger of being blown away like ash.

He has never looked away from Paul's tears, though there were times he could have to help Paul save face. It's not in Midoriya to look away and abandon him to his sorrow. Watching Paul cry with him deepens his own sobs, and he takes minutes to surface from them.

"I've brought food, some clothes for us... You can see me as long as you want. I'll be here." I promise, though he doesn't need to say it.

When the tears taper off to a shivering ache, Paul doesn't feel lighter or more whole, precisely. Everything is as horrible as it was before. What he feels is cleaner, like he's expelled some intangible filth in the salt crusted at the corners of his eyes he rubs away in the wool of Midoriya's Omen. He sits back and looks at him again, longing as strong as it ever was.

"I'd like that." Paul's voice catches at the top of his throat, and he swallows thickly, mouth tasting like ash and char.

Midoriya will have to visit Kaworu again, eventually. The rest of the city will call him back too, his Hero's work never done. Paul has a whole world to share him with, and he will let him go when he has to. But not yet. Not while he can keep Midoriya here, his Omen still curling herself into him with all the love in Paul's heart, while they can sit and share a meal like this is any day by the water, while Paul can lie down and drift off to sleep next to his protective, constant Izuku.

He always has better dreams when they're next to someone else.

wolves in the middle of town | october catch-all

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cw: mercy-killing pacts, mention of loss of autonomy

cw: mercy-killing pacts

cw: death mention, mha spoilers (anime-friendly)

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