[open] Oh the weather outside is weather

[wannasmash]

Who: Izuku "DEKU DON'T" Midoriya and YOU. Featuring a Warmblood who will, per this month's effects, influence you to be your best self... whatever that may mean.
What: Catchall log with: a snowball fight, fishing Paul out of a collapsed basement, giving mushrooms to Illarion, event things. Event plotting comment.
When: January
Where: A park. Abandoned basement. The Red.

Content Warnings: fantasy violence against a snake-shaped rock monster, panic attack, teens in danger. Mention of: being kidnapped, child abuse and/or neglect. More TBD in comments below.

Open prompts:
Snowball Fight!
Wallflower Time (Snake Den at The Red) (Event)
Taking Note (Snake Den at The Red) (Event)

Comments

[wannasmash]

A little resentment is normal, even expected. It won't stop Midoriya from walking Paul through the steps of remembering he is a person and not just a bundle of fevered instinct. He feels the breath of Paul's apology on his singed hair. At the first sign of Paul moving, he opens his arms and slips free. He keeps one hand on Paul's elbow should he need it.

The battle high begins to leave him, an unintentional side effect of acting so calm. He notices his fingers aching, though not as much as his bruises. He overdid it slightly with Air Force and might have to ice them later.

He smiles back in reflex, ultimately unable to keep his feelings at bay. The fighter, the defender, gives way to the friend. Soft warmth seeps into his voice at the expense of steadiness, for better or worse.

"You don't have to apologize. Do you want to move? Sit down?"

[terriblepurpose]

What does he want? It's a reasonable question. If Paul were to make a list of what he wants now, he might start with being able to taste anything but ash in his mouth (ash over sand) and a glass of water, which does at least give him a direction to start in.

"Can we still go try to find some yakiniku?" Paul asks, as he lowers his head and runs his sleeve over his face, wiping away some of the soot and smoke only to leave more dust from his sleeve behind instead. His pronunciation is careful, followed by a glance up at Midoriya to check it against his response to it.

"It's good to eat something, after a fight," he adds, and it's like the words spill out just to occupy the space between them, "It helps calm the body, reaffirms the threat has passed."

As if he's talking about someone else, his own responses held at a distance despite being so obvious and present. (He's vulnerable, like this; he needs it to stop.)

[wannasmash]

He flashes a tired grin. Paul's accent is endearing.

"We definitely will," he promises. "But we may have to sit outside." He rubs his dry, crinkly hair. What establishment would allow the two of them to enter, covered in dirt and looking like they just escaped the fiery gates of hell?

He lets his grin drop into a searching look, as if his eyes are trying to find and remove a stray speck of dirt from Paul's face. (Futile.)

"Have you felt like this before?" he asks gently but without showing worry. Of course he's concerned, but not in the sense that he doesn't know what to do. Paul is already thinking about food. That's good.

He adds another question, "They look normal now, but your eyes did something earlier. Magic?" That's the part he doesn't know, and he tries to keep his voice casual.

[terriblepurpose]

"Oh." Paul somehow sounds surprised, reaching up to touch underneath one of his eyes. "That. Yes."

He's not being clear about whether he means felt like this before or magic, in part because he means both, then because he doesn't want to mean both, or to admit to either.

"I don't think that my Paleblood always agrees with me," he says, dropping his hand and his gaze at the same time to make this concession, "Physically. When I'm under pressure, sometimes it...reacts. Like a chemical experiment, in a way, one those ones that projects light. It's getting more manageable. It's only an adjustment period, I'm sure. I'm all right. I'll be all right."

It's something of a feeble attempt to direct attention away from himself. Midoriya pays attention to things, and Paul imagines he'll be able to connect Paleblood to the haste and urgency of Paul's response, but he doesn't want to talk about this. Not yet. (Preferably never, says some jealous, selfish part of him, the one that doesn't want Midoriya to look at him like he did when Paul half-joked about atomics.)

"Sitting outside is good for conditioning. Someone told me that once. I'm not sure it's true, but it can't hurt."

[wannasmash]

He stares at him, mouth parting slightly to say something. There is a lot of truth in Midoriya's face, and only a fraction of it will leave his lips. Now he's the one lowering his eyes. He ducks his head. He works one glove off, wincing, and holds up his scarred hand as he raises his eyes to Paul again.

"Look." His middle finger is red and swollen, like he just shut it in a drawer. "I still need to work on Air Force. And forget about using Blackwhip to its fullest either--too dangerous. The first time I used it... I was so scared, even when someone held me. In my world, we call it panic or panic attack. Kind of like the fight or flight response. I'm not really good at explaining, but I can try to when we find something to eat."

He falls into place beside Paul, facing in the direction of commercial streets and potential yakiniku. He invites him to walk with him with a turning of his shoulders and a small smile up at him.

"I don't know about magic, but I know about Quirks. They're physical abilities. Mine doesn't agree with me either. You will be all right." He wants to turn Paul's deflection (that's what it is, he can tell, he does it too) into reality. "I use mental visualizations to imagine releasing only as much power as I can handle. I can help you come up with some."

They'll be cheesy and kind of lame. It's nostalgic. He used to do that with his mentor back home.

[terriblepurpose]

It's getting easier to accept revelations of vulnerabilities from people like this without a thrum of what Paul thinks of as panic too quickly to stop himself, the word's proximity to his feelings brought too close to ignore. He hadn't thought of himself as a person weighed down by taboos, but there he is, reminding himself that Midoriya is doing this freely, that Paul doesn't need to step in to shield him - and from who would he be shielding him from, anyway?

Paul falls into step with Midoriya, hovering a half-step to his right and behind him anyway, close enough to see his face and yet guard his back at the same time. His expression is still drawn, but there's an unwitting edge to it again, a vigilance that borders on the side of excess.

"You're good at explaining," he tells Midoriya, because he's still deflecting, still reflexive. He breathes in sharply through his nose, abruptly irritated at himself.

"I should be able to do that already. Control myself. Figure it out, like you are, with your visualizations. I know - I knew how to do that. But since I came here, sometimes it's as if -" Paul's tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, and he looks up and away at the sky "- I come away from myself. Pull apart. That never happened to me before."

[wannasmash]

He keeps having to glance at Paul hovering in his periphery. At first he thinks Paul is just tired. He expects him to be, after all that. Midoriya slows for a few steps, but Paul stays roughly around his 4 o' clock. He feels it in the tamping of the ground under their feet: Their positions are reversed. Midoriya once followed Paul down a hallway of memory and pain, maintaining a certain protective distance at all times.

Wordlessly he jabs his thumb at the sky without looking up himself. He knows what's there. Paul might see Midorya's Omen gaining altitude and starting to circle with a calm vigilance. An Omen can meet and exceed a human's sense of danger. He and his Omen have a silent agreement that Midoriya should be able to hold his own by himself, but he is, after all, still in training. It just wouldn't do to have a Beast come hurtling out of the woods to take out the two ragged humans.

His brows knit in concern. Paul is gifted like so many of his classmates who had years to adjust to their Quirks. Midoriya never knew what that felt like. He had to work very hard to use his Quirk like others do. Having that ease ripped away...

"Something you trusted and worked hard on suddenly isn't working like you thought it would," he says softly. "I understand."

Blackwhip had manifested like a monster, throwing him around the training ground like a doll. He steps deliberately to Paul's side, breaking the invisible guard bubble. With his Omen in the sky, he feels Paul, tense and drained, shouldn't need to guard his back.

[terriblepurpose]

Midoriya disarms Paul like it's nothing, and Paul doesn't even think that Midoriya sees it like that. He wouldn't imagine this as pulling unseen weapons from Paul's reach and setting them aside. But he will see the fall of Paul's shoulders when he shifts their position, a trace of the bewildered relenting that he displayed in that memory when Midoriya persuaded him to turn away from that closed door.

Paul's still not sure how to feel about it staying closed. Sometimes that makes him feel like a coward. Sometimes it makes him feel nothing. Sometimes, like this moment does, it feels like a mercy.

"How do you do that?" Paul asks, drifting closer, as if Midoriya is a gravitational point. "Always know what to say when it's important. I'm the other way around."

He believes that Midoriya understands, a resonance not unlike the inverse of the Unsnakely's earth-shuddering pass. He feels himself drawing back together, piece by piece, his own harmonics restored.

"Thank you for coming for me."

[wannasmash]

He wants to put Paul at ease. Midoriya waits patiently for if Paul ever wants to talk about shadows behind closed doors. He's familiar with having friends with darknesses they're reluctant to bring up. A lot of those things aren't exactly conversation starters.

"Just saying stuff I learned," he says, briefly contemplating the ground. He looks up and gives Paul a small smile. (He has to tilt his head up at his tall friend.) "There have been a lot of times I didn't know what to say. Anyway, what I do is more important."

Not everyone responds well to people just saying things. The words are a promise, and his actions are the fulfillment of that promise. Of course he came for Paul. He was able to do something, so he did.

[terriblepurpose]

As Midoriya is learning, Paul is only reserved about touch until he's not. His hand finds its way to Midoriya's shoulder and squeezes as he smiles slightly back, letting quiet relief and ruefulness show in his eyes.

"You're right, about actions." It's softly spoken, but there's a ribbon of certainty underneath it. "They show you who a person really is."

It might be too far, today - too influenced by the trailing edges of that unsettled feeling - to add that's how I know you're good. The sentiment bleeds through anyway, Paul's hand lingering a moment longer before he drops it and continues alongside someone who is both good, and his friend, and maybe this hasn't been such a bad day after all, if he can do that.