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➳ tags ;; fluff, confessions, deku is smooth, kissing, fluff, fem!reader implied i think
➳ plot ;; izuku midoriya listens to you when you tell him to confess to you again later. he’s waited his whole life for you but he doesn’t know how much longer he can
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He thinks to himself often that it has to be you he’s been chasing all this time.
This isn’t so much a revelation to him. It’s nothing like eureka moment, an aha that he uncovers after years of reflection. After all, he’s not the type to know what he really wants.
Which is funny for many reasons but mostly because he’s a hero. He did want that, still does - but it wasn’t really an active choice. It wasn’t the desire to become a hero in terms of glamour and fame but a deep-seated knowing about the fact he had to become one. That the desire to save people above all else was rooted and deeply ingrained in him that there would never be anything that would fulfill him quite the same way.
He finds it more often than not he’s acting out of pure instinct. Something carnal and perhaps other-worldly that pins him to the world in an almost divine way. All or nothing, there’s one way to approach existence and it’s with this unwavering desire to be kind.
He’s always been that kind of person.
But, if he sat down and thought about it, the desire to be with you is perhaps one of his own. It’s one of the only things he’d chase to the ends of the earth.
Izuku Midoriya has loved you since he was 14
The first time he ever confessed to you was when he was 15, about half way into his first year at U.A. It was outside of your apartment - your childhood home. He’d walk you there after his classes, when he caught you returning from your own. It was an awkward and clumsy teenage confession even then but he can remember the details clearly.
It comes to him a series of images. Orange-yellow light that fell over your face, hairs sticking a little your head, trembling hands, ricocheting heartbeats, the sound of cars passing. He wasn’t very confident then, it makes him laugh thinking back at. But he told you anyways, bursting at the seams with his feelings.
Your first reaction was shock immediately followed with a somber smile. Though he told you he had liked you, it was in the brief moment afterwards that he though there was more to it than that. He wouldn’t call it a rejection, but a wake-up call. You leaned in to kiss his cheek before whispering something back.
“If you mean it,” ― you whisper, hand on his shoulder and eyes heavy ― “Tell me again later,”
With that, you turned on your heel and went home. He wasn’t sure how to feel for a while, because it’s not like you said no. And you kissed him so that had to mean something.
Rather predictably after that, he became so caught up in hero work, it was only natural that you two grew distant. Once frequent conversations became words in passing, spoken quietly to each other. He went off to become a great hero, and you went off to study what you love.
It was a natural occurrence - he knows this now. He wonders what kind of thinking you had to have been doing to know that at 15. The older he got, the more he thought about what you said. How the once vague mention of “later” became a narrow time-frame. Not a moment too soon and not a second too later.
Izuku Midoriya has loved you all of 8 years. For most of them, it’s been a passive yearning. The emptiness of his bedframe and his disinterest. 8 years and he’s tried and failed to love other people. Maybe he was testing if later would ever come.
He’s 22 and he thinks to himself that he’s been chasing the feeling of loving you this whole time. That adrenaline from when you kissed his cheek all those years ago, he wonders to himself if it’s still there
He’ll have to go find out