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Todoroki Shouto is persistent, and stubborn, and remarkably spoiled when he gets comfortable.
In retrospect, your first mistake was letting him get comfortable.
This whole thing started, perhaps predictably, because of a stray cat. Shouto volunteers at his brother’s veterinary clinic on the weekends, and you—who will, against your better judgment, admit that you are weak for small, defenseless-looking creatures—saw the cat abandoned in a damp cardboard box and scooped it up the second it started mewling pathetically at you.
Shouto had been practicing (and failing to make) paper airplanes alone at the reception desk when you first walked in. The cat—currently tucked safely into a contented cat circle on your favorite armchair—now has a name and a collar and regular feeding times. You took it to get all the necessary shots and paperwork, and, in the process, made the dumbest mistake of your life.
Not—
Not that you could bring yourself to call Shouto a mistake even in your own head. The mere thought makes something foreign twist painfully inside your chest. Shouto is—
Well. Too close, for one. Too pretty. Too smart. Too determined to ruin your resolve (and maybe your whole life, too) with a single smile.
And you’re just old and pathetic and lonely enough to maybe let him. Although—
That’s not it. Not really. That’s just the convenient excuse. The easy narrative, clichéd and just loose enough to wear like it fits, to convince yourself that you’re nothing more than selfish and jaded and opportunistic. That you want to suck the joy of living out of someone else’s body just because you’re convinced, somewhere deep down, that they’re kind enough to let you.
Just because a boy with pretty eyes and soft hair and a mouth you’re not supposed to think about at all, let alone want to kiss even when you’re exhausted at the end of the day and seriously considering trading your career for becoming a hermit in the mountains wants you. Pink, pouty, perfect.
Too young. Young enough that you could be his father, if you had been the kind of person to chase after teenage dalliances with the fear that real life is much less forgiving about allowing you to make mistakes. You weren’t, of course. You were mostly just scared of the world, back then. Scared and tired and already worn too thin in ways you couldn’t articulate.
And now you’re thirty-seven (even if you feel a lot older), and your house is quiet when Hizashi isn’t yelling at you about keeping your space clean or getting your life together, and you have a cat, and Nemuri asked you when you started to like them young the last time she ran into you at the supermarket and Shouto came over carrying a box of chocolate pocky sticks and wearing tiny shorts and with the strawberry hairclips Eri gave him because you match pinning his bangs back.
And now you’re—
In love, maybe. If you squint at it. If you peel back the calcified layers from that thing you used to call a heart, if you toss away the cynicism, replace it for something brighter. For something like the way Shouto looks when he smiles after having just woken up, or the way he pats his knees when he’s trying to beckon the cat into his lap. Like—
(God, you’re not supposed to be thinking about this.)
Like the way he tastes and whines and hitches a leg over the sharp jut of your hipbone before saying, “Please, I’ll be good. I’ll be very—ah, very good, I promise.”
And really, this whole thing is just—
The old, painfully human need to be seen. The silly and baseless swell of pride in your chest the first time Shouto saw you with your hair gathered into a messy bun and refused to look at you, instead poking listlessly at his lunch until you were about to leave, and then—
And then he’d taken your hand just as you were about to go out the door, and whispered, “It’s not fair, you know,” like a spoiled child. “That you’re kind and caring and handsome.”
And you had been tempted to accuse him of being wrong on all three accusations, but— Instead, weak and possessed and maybe a little delirious, you remember leaning in, and wiping a smudge of sauce from the edge of his mouth, telling him, “You’re not being strictly fair either, in that case.”
Like everything else you have no control over, like your whole sad, miserable life, really, it had escalated. Until, two and half months into pretending you didn’t have a heart and it certainly wasn’t beating faster with Shouto around, he had rushed out to hand you an umbrella because it started pouring, and you—selfish, selfish, selfish, condemned to live with your pathetic, threadbare sins—had tugged him back by the wrist, kept him from leaving until he slammed into your chest, braced himself with both hands and looked up at you like he was in no particular hurry to go anywhere. And then you had gone and ruined it all for good (yourself, mostly, yourself and your stupid pride) and kissed him like you were parched for it.
And now it’s one in the morning and too hot to fall asleep, and you don’t need to ask to know who’s knocking on your door. You’re trying not to ask too many things in general. Of yourself or the world. Because then you would have to look at yourself, at the fifteen years between you, stretched like frayed rope, and admit that you don’t have a single fucking clue what’s going on in your life, that you’re not all that excited to call it yours in the first place, that the only thing you’re eager to put a label on and claim ownership over is twenty-two and fond of cat-patterned socks and studying molecular biology because he wants desperately to do some good in the world, likes old, cheesy movies and humming along to classical music in the morning, and will absolutely and shamelessly weaponize how good he looks sucking dick.
So. You’re kind of a horrible person, is the point. The unshakeable truth, really. You open the door. Of course you do.
He kisses you first thing, both arms wrapped around your neck, standing on the tips of his toes and getting his hands in your greasy hair like he can’t think of another thing in the whole world he would trade this for. You and your tiny apartment and your spoiled cat and your pile of half-graded work. You and the life that only feels remotely worth it when he’s in it.
Maybe it’s expected, that you don’t like poetry after spending a good decade and something teaching it, showing people how to tug at it from all ends until it unravels and leaves you with a neat pile of meaning in place of any real artistic merit. What did the author mean by this? By comparing his lover’s hands to a stream of cold water, by calling their mouth the place where the world comes together, by saying the truest heaven they’ve ever touched lies between their lover’s thighs?
Who cares, honestly? Who gives a single fuck when the prettiest boy you’ve ever seen wants to kiss you almost as horribly as you want to kiss him, as you want him to want to kiss you? As you want. Because that’s the point of being human, isn’t it? The crushing, inescapable want.
Shouto laughs into your mouth, says, “Missed you,” like it’s a secret. A perfect truth he’s choosing to press into your palms, trusting you to keep safe. And God, you’ve definitely spent too much of your life analyzing meaning if that’s the first thing you think. “Want—want you,” he confesses then, immediately after, like the words were already about to spill out of him on the way. “Want you to fuck me.”
That does mean something, you think. Todoroki Shouto, asking for what he wants. Trusting you to give it to him. Even if it would hardly be kind or fair or particularly likely to land you a spot above the clouds when the time comes.
“God,” you tell him. “Who taught you to flirt, kid? It’s about being subtle. About the anticipation.”
He laughs, tips his head back so the long line of his throat bares itself. “I’m sorry, sensei,” he says, all coy. He stopped by one of your classes once. Intro to Ancient Greek Poems. Sat and listened attentively and took notes and asked actually thoughtful, engaging questions. You hate him, a little bit. But not nearly as much as you love him.
“I’m not your teacher,” you grumble, and he tells you—
He looks at you, and says, “But I didn’t know how to deepthroat before,” and you decide you definitely hate him.
“Brat,” you say, and he looks at you and whispers but your brat, right? before telling you he picked up cat food because he noticed you were running out and also some takeout because he knows you’re hardly better at keeping yourself alive than he is.
And then you’re right back to square one, to loving him so desperately it makes your chest hurt. To not being able to recall who you were before he slipped into your life, into your heart and your head and, regrettably, into your bed, too. (You let him. You keep letting him. You’re pathetic and weak and alone, and he is the best thing your hands have ever held.)
“But you like me,” he says, like he’s as sure of it as he is of the sun. “You like me a whole lot, sensei. Especially on my knees, I think.”
And— You shouldn’t and you know this. (You’ve always been better at knowing than at doing.) “I like you anyway,” you say, and you’re dead, you’re gone, it’s over. Irreversibly set in stone. Unalterable.
And he smiles, a gift and a promise, and tells you, “I know, I like you too. A lot.”
And you let him in, and he takes off his shoes carefully by the door, hangs his coat and his scarf and tucks his cold hands into the pockets of your ratty sweatpants because he never remembers to wear gloves, even in the February cold, and—
And, and, and.
God, you’re a mess. You’re too old for this. You’re supposed to have done the heart hammering in your chest, palms sweating, cheeks heating up thing already. Over and done with. Buried along with your childish hopes, not soaring.
“I love you,” you say.
Shouto’s eyes go wide. “Um,” he says, looking far too young. “Thank you.”
You ruffle his hair. “That’s where you keep your manners, kid?” you ask.
Shouto pouts. “Hey,” he protests. “I’m nice. I feed you, I remind you of your appointments. I suck your dick.”
“How generous.”
“And I—I love you too. Obviously.”
Obviously. Obviously, obviously, obviously. Like anything about them is obvious. Like people wouldn’t scrunch their noses and accuse you of going through an early midlife crisis if they knew the only reason you’ve started shaving regularly is because he complains about your permanent stubble making his thighs sore.
“Obviously?” you say, arching a single eyebrow.
He goes red, red, red. “Yeah,” he says. “Obviously.”
And—that’s it, really. No salvation. No hope. Just Todoroki Shouto. Todoroki Shouto, making himself at home snuggling with your cat and stealing eggrolls from your plate instead of eating his own and telling you he loves you.
You’re a fool. But at least you know it. And at least you’re not alone. (It doesn’t look like you’re going to have to be any time soon.)