Work Text:
After all these years, Shouto cannot imagine how this all came to be.
He still feels it, the uncertainty, rushing to his head and with it, the urge to pull away and isolate himself.
It’s been burnt into him, abuse sheathed as training, a lesson made over and over and over again, until his body breaks down and he remembers.
Love is not for people like Shouto.
The easy familiarity, open vulnerability, and unrestrained touch. The kind that holds no expectations, no give-and-take.
Love is for people like Midoriya Izuku.
A bursting heart and bleeding tears, a smile that knows the meaning of hurt and plunges anyway, without a second of doubt, just a soul who is the embodiment of kindness and empathy.
Midoriya Izuku cannot be encapsulated, cannot be shoved into a box that defines the limits of the quirkless, cannot live in boundaries or limits.
He is a force of nature that breaks past the speed of sound and light, always pushing, always reaching beyond what is expected.
He is beautiful, in every fault and stutter of honest words. In the force of the acceptance he exudes, the kind of person who believes so deeply in life and what it brings to humankind, hope in the form of a small, shaking but sturdy green-haired boy.
Midoriya Izuku gives someone like Shouto hope, that he doesn’t have to be someone unlovable forever. That everything that makes up Todoroki Shouto, from the grace of his mother, the burning hatred of his father, the stoic facade he has learned to keep himself safe, and the all-encompassing spectrum of power and emotion that lies in his Quirk, Half-Hot and Half-Cold, is beautiful.
Now he just needs to learn it himself.
One day, he will believe it too. He will see the same beauty in his scars that Midoriya swears by, that they show his struggle and his courage and his tenacity, ten thousand times over. That they’re not ugly, that the pent-up self-hatred Shouto holds will fade away, eventually.