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When Izuku suggested that he, Ochako, Tenya and Shouto take some sort of post-graduation vacation, he hadn’t expected Ochako’s first suggestion to be camping.
An unexpected idea, but a great one that they latched onto rather quickly. They coordinated a relatively organized plan through a very unorganized group chat.
Shouto and Ochako were in charge of food prep— picking out meals and bringing both the food and equipment to cook it.
Tenya and Izuku were in charge of locating a suitable campground with availability the weekend after graduation and figuring out how they’d get there.
Shouto paid for it all with Enji’s credit card, and had the forethought to call the credit card company ahead of time (or rather make Tenya call), so the card wasn’t deactivated when they left Musutafu.
They each packed for themselves, and they voted on activities. Making s’mores, rafting down the river, and quirkless tree climbing were just a few of the highlights.
Izuku’s personal favorite activity, though, was stargazing.
No matter where you went in Musutafu, there wasn’t much of a chance to see stars. Even in the small parks, light pollution obscured the stars, much to Izuku’s displeasure.
Camping in the middle of nowhere was the perfect chance to catch a glimpse of the vast skies above, and Izuku couldn’t be more excited.
He had to last through the drive, first.
“Are we there yet?” Shouto asked.
“No,” Tenya said, sighing. “When you asked twenty minutes ago I told you we still had five hours to go, and now we have four hours and forty minutes.”
“It’s only been twenty minutes?” Shouto asked, scandalized.
Tenya nodded, his thumbs drumming against the steering wheel.
“Yikes,” Ochako said. She glanced over at Izuku, who was in the backseat with her. “Why’d you let him pick the furthest possible camping spot?”
“Well, the farthest one we considered would’ve been five hours farther, so…” he said. Ochako gave him a look , and he shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Why.”
Despite the many complaints, they make it there without too much fuss.
Locating the campsite is easy enough. They hop out of the car, stretch their legs a bit, then get to work. Setting up shop goes about as well as one would expect.
“What do you mean there’s only one tent???” Tenya gasps scandalized, looking aghast enough to almost pass out.
Shouto blinks. “There’s only four of us so I just went for the deluxe model. It’s got plastic flooring, room for up to five sleeping bags and even a sky light zipper in the ceiling.”
Tenya lets out a noise of frustration before turning to Ochako, probably to launch into a lecture slash apology fest about the impropriety of sharing a tent and the utter lack of privacy afforded her in the situation.
Ochako simply raises an unimpressed eyebrow and crosses her arms. “I’ve literally seen all of you in various states of undress before. Shut the fuck up.”
Shouto’s eyes widen. “You wanted her alone? On our Dekusquad Bonding Friendship Post Graduation Weekend Camping Getaway Extravaganza?”
Behind Tenya’s back Ochako and Izuku share a silent high-five at Shouto’s amazing delivery.
Tenya turns imploringly to Izuku for backup but the latter merely widens his own eyes in the picture of innocence and says in a hushed reverent tone, “there was only one tent.”
Ochako laughs so hard she almost chokes.
Somehow they manage to get the tent set up once Ochako calms down, a miracle considering Tenya insisted on first spreading out all the pieces so he could check them against the list of parts in the instruction manual.
But finally they’re ready to choose their first activity.
The debate over the first activity begins fiercely. Tenya vehemently expresses his desire to eat first, while Ochako and Shouto both demand time spent in the wide pool the creek has naturally created first.
Izuku watches this go on for a time, a small smile of affection on his face as he enjoys the interactions of his closest friends.
“I desire the water first,” he says finally, standing and darting to the tent to change into proper swimming attire.
He’s done in record time, racing out of the tent with Shouto on his heels in a flat race for the water. Izuku hits the water mere moments before Shouto, crowing his triumph as he reaches the surface only to hear laughter from nearby.
Turning he sees Ochako floating on the far side of the pool, smiling broadly. “I win, Deku!”
“That was cheating!” Shouto complains as he circles the pool.
“It was not . I always knew we’d go swimming first, so I prepared. Preparation is the way of champions, Shouto.”
“But what if we’d decided to do something else?”
“Shouto we were never going to do anything else. I wanted to swim, you wanted to swim, Izuku wanted to swim. Even Tenya wants to swim for all he’s slower than molasses getting out here.”
Speaking of Tenya, he is currently striding towards them with a frustrated frown drawing his eyebrows together and a bottle in his hand.
“You heathens! You all ran off and forgot the sunscreen. Come out of there promptly and apply the sunscreen. We can swim, but we are going to do it safely. ” Tenya waves the sunscreen around as he speaks before stabbing it towards them to punctuate the end with emphasis.
Laughing, Izuku slogs his way out of the water and darts over to grip Tenya in a nice cold, wet hug. Shouto and Ochako join him in dogpiling their friend and dripping cool river water on him.
After they finally climbed back onto their feet, they obligingly applied sunscreen and returned to the water with Tenya joining them.
Fire flickers in front of Izuku as they settle around their campfire to get warm after swimming the afternoon away. They are quieter now, the ongoing discussion over what they would have for dinner being conducted in a far more mellow fashion.
Izuku idly watches Shouto leave and fetch something out of the cooler, Tenya and Ochako paying little attention to anything but their discussion of the finer points of camping food.
He turns his attention back to the fire, simply content to bask in the warmth and watch the dancing flames in front of him as it crackles and pops occasionally.
A scandalized gasp draws his attention back to his friends, and he finds Tenya staring at Shouto as he attempts to cook an egg on his hand. In Izuku’s assessment it isn’t really working as well as the one they’d done at training camp all that time ago, as it spreads and drips off his fingers to the ground below.
“Shouto what are you doing?” Tenya asks, despite the answer being quite clear in Izuku’s eyes. Ochako dissolves into laughter.
“Cooking eggs,” Shouto replies, tone deadpan.
“For the love– Shouto that’s what the frying pan is for!” Tenya rises to his feet and all but stalks over to look for the frying pan.
After a long search–during which time Shouto manages to cook enough eggs for all of them–Tenya comes back, exasperation written all over his face.
“Where’s the frying pan? You were in charge of the dishes, Shouto.”
“Oh. I forgot.”
“You…you forgot? Shouto .”
By this point, both Izuku and Ochako are laughing hard enough that they are having to hold each other up, tears of mirth running down their faces.
Somehow they managed to have a proper dinner, it even turned out quite tasty. After dinner came the first round of s’mores.
It is all going perfectly until Tenya catches sight of Shouto’s extra charred marshmallow as it goes onto his carefully prepared chocolate and graham crackers.
“More heathenry! Gremlins the lot of you. That isn’t even a marshmallow anymore, it is in fact a corpse.”
“It’s the only proper way to cook a marshmallow, Tenya.”
Ochako chimes in. “Make s’mores not wars, Tenya!”
“Yeah, there’s s’more where that came from,” Izuku chimes in.
Tenya simply sighs and sits back down to cook his own, grumbling about menaces and leaving the heathens here and going home.
After the s’mores comes Izuku’s most anticipated part, the stargazing. They carefully gather blankets and pillows under Tenya’s watchful eye and begin the walk over to the trail that will lead them to the viewpoint to look at the scattering of stars in the sky from.
Upon arriving, Izuku can see that it is a meadow on the top of a short cliff over the creek they’d been swimming in earlier.
They settle their blankets on the grass, each of them phishing and shoving playfully at the others to try and claim what they see as the best spot until all their blankets are laying on top of eachother, and even their own bodies are wrapped around and over each other, a tangle of bodies and limbs. But Izuku wouldn’t have it any other way as he finally catches a glimpse of the night sky.
Once, when he was younger, his mother had taken him camping on one of the rare weekends they both had free, just after he had gotten his quirkless diagnosis, before the other kids at school had really grasped what that meant.
They had played out on the beach of the lake they had been staying at and she had taught him how to make ice cream. They had roasted hot dogs over the fire and she had shown him exactly how to make smores the way she liked them, the way he likes them.
Then, just as he had been about ready to nod off for the night, his skin warm and his belly full, his mom had laid out a blanket and shown him the stars.
It had been a different time of year, so it looked a little different than it does now. But staring up at a sky resplendent with twinkling lights, he is thrown back into that moment, into feelin infinite and finite. An insignificant blip, and impossibly large at the same time.
Back then, as Izuku had stared up into the stars, he had been convinced that he would fly amongst them one day, a Hero in his own right.
Now he is a Hero, a graduate of U.A., surrounded on all sides by his best friends. Izuku has achieved his lifelong dream, and it is more than he ever could have hoped for.
“Does anyone know any of the constellations?” Izuku asks, breaking the silence that has settled over his friends. It does not feel like an intrusion though, simply the next breath in the conversation.
Unsurprisingly, Iida pipes up with the constellations, pointing out which stars connect where. Uraraka knows all the stories though, and she tells them as Iida points out each one, outlining the lives of gods and monsters and Heroes just like them who were trying to make their lives better in the best way they knew how.
Izuku is starting to allow himself to be lulled by the sound of Uraraka’s voice, mingling with the sound of the water below them and the bugs humming around them. Then Todoroki shifts and asks, “What about the ghost one?”
“What?” Iida asks, completely thrown off his groove.
“The ghost one, you all keep telling the constellation stories, but you haven’t told the ghost one yet, that’s my favorite.”
“The ghost one?” Uraraka asks, clearly trying to figure out what story Shouto is talking about.
“The ghost one, where the ghost comes back to haunt the person who killed them, it’s a constellation story my brother always told me,” Todoroki says.
“That is every ghost story Todoroki, I don’t know how we’re supposed to discern which one you’re talking about,” Iida says, and Izuku can feel the pile shift as one of his friends moves. He doesn’t know which one it is though, and he is not tearing his eyes away from the stars to look.
“There’s more than one ghost story?”
Uraraka starts laughing first, then Izuku, and finally Iida and Todoroki join in until the night is alive with the sound of their joy.
“There are so many ghost stories Todoroki,” Izuku explains once most of their laughter has died down.
“Oh, can I hear some of them?” And so Izuku launches into the best ghost story he knowns, talking about a person being locked out of their house as they hear something getting closer and closer to them with a click, click, pull . Then Uraraka tells a story about her a humming friend who does not have a head. Even Iida contributes a ghost story about a woman who got lost in the woods while a villain was at large, her ghost coming back every anniversary to warn people away from the ghost of the villain who was still searching for his next target. Finally Todoroki tells his ghost story, it is halting and clearly only half remembered, but Izuku reaches out and grips Todoroki’s arm to let him know he is listening.
They go around telling random stories after that until it is late in the night and Izuku’s eyes are drooping closed, his voice heavy in his chest as he struggles to keep going.
He loses the fight though between one blink and the next.
When his eyes open again, they do so slowly, with the lagging drag of sleep still clinging to his eyelids and trying to keep them shut. There’s something thick and warm draped over him, and more solid warmth on either side of him. Izuku shifts in his place, rolling to get comfortable, still barely awake, when he feels his hand gently fall against something soft, that twitches in reaction to his touch.
Izuku manages to pry his eyes open, and finds his face very close to Iida’s back. He’s curled up against his friend with his knees pulled to his own chest, Iida’s shoulder being what he knocked with his hand. Twisting his head, Izuku determines the other solid warmth behind him to be Todoroki, who actually has his hot left hand laying outside the sleeping bags, and draped across Izuku’s hip. Uraraka takes some finding, but Izuku is able to spot her with his hazy vision snuggled deep in Iida’s arms, a content little smile on her face.
Their sleeping bags may all be separate, but they still managed to tessellate together despite the fluffy barriers.
It makes Izuku feel so loved, so cherished, being able to press himself so closely to his friends and feel so safe in their arms. After such a fun day too, where they spent time in each other’s company, making such precious memories together.
Izuku finds himself nestling back down into the little space carved out for him, eagerly pulling Todoroki closer to him as he presses his forehead into the center of Iida’s back. His sleepy eyes drift shut once more, and a soft smile settles on his face as they do. This is exactly where he’s meant to be.