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✦ rootbound — midoriya izuku

[ nsfw ] — smut (18+) ; midoriya izuku x reader

word count: 29,260 — read on ao3

tags: yandere!midoriya izuku, obsessive midoriya, delusional midoriya, worshipping, rape/noncon, dubious consent, coercion, somnophilia, forced orgasms, explicit language & sexual content, smut, squirting, vaginal sex, oral sex, fear, stockholm syndrome, abuse, bruises, chains (restraints), gaslighting, emotional dependency, hurt/comfort, loneliness, dark romance, kidnapping, unhealthy relationships, captivity, forced intimacy, imprisonment, not beta read, mdni!

summary:

Maybe it was only a matter of time before freedom stopped looking like sunlight and started looking like him. Or, what blooms in captivity still blooms.

notes:

i was feeling very deku pilled and this came out of nowhere lol. please, heed the warnings! it’s also my first time writing noncon/and also the first time writing for deku. especially yandere deku, so i hope i did him justice! (i recommend reading this on ao3.) enjoy! :)

You think it has been forty-five hours since you last saw the sun.

Forty-five hours, maybe more. The number drifts in your head like something half-drowned, swollen and unreliable, bumping softly against the walls of your mind every time you try to hold it still.

It feels longer than that.

It feels like days have been folded into each other until time has become damp and airless, stripped of shape, stripped of color, until there is nothing left of it but the ache of waiting.

You try to remember the sensation of sunlight on your skin and nearly start crying from that alone. Not even the sight of it—just the warmth. Just that first soft touch of gold over your face, your shoulders, your hands. You think, absurdly, helplessly, about how good it would feel to stand outside and let the sky swallow you whole. To breathe real air. To float in that vast blue openness like a body returning to water.

The thought is so tender it hurts. It has happened before—this counting, this trying to measure your captivity by the absence of light, by the silence under the door, by the way your body begins to crave the outside with the desperation of an animal.

It has happened enough times that it no longer startles you. That's the worst part. Not the fear. Not even the pain. It's the routine of it. The way this horror has grown familiar enough to fit itself around your days like a ritual. A cycle. Something you know too well. Something you have come to anticipate with a kind of nauseated dread, because it is easier to survive when you can recognize the pattern of the storm before it breaks.

And the cruelest thing of all is that, in some awful way, you have helped build the pattern yourself.

Not because you want this. Not because you asked for it. But because survival is an ugly kind of participation. Because every time you learn what makes him gentler, what makes him smile, what makes the sharp edge in him ease for an hour instead of an evening, you hand the routine more bones to stand on.

You learn how to read the shifts in Izuku the way sailors must once have learned to read the sea—watching the surface, listening for the groan beneath it, trying to guess which current will carry you and which one will pull you under. He's never simple. That's what makes him so frightening. He is not cruel in the easy way, not in the way of men who enjoy being monsters.

That would be easier to hate. Easier to reject. Easier to survive.

No, Izuku is worse because he loves you with the full, devastating sincerity of someone who has never learned how to love halfway. He wraps every unforgivable thing in tenderness. He explains himself with that soft, earnest voice, as though if he can only make you understand the shape of his devotion, you will stop trembling under it.

He looks at you as if you are holy. As if your pain wounds him too. As if every chain, every locked door, every stolen choice is an act of tragic necessity rather than the violence it is. He worships and imprisons in the same breath. Kisses your forehead like prayer. Cups your face like you are breakable glass. Murmurs apologies with tears caught in his lashes while still refusing to open the door.

And that is what makes your skin crawl the most—that dissonance, that terrible softness. The way he can kneel in front of you, green eyes wide and wet and aching, whispering your name like it is something precious, while his hands hold you in place with a strength you cannot fight. The way your pushes and shoves mean nothing against him once he decides they mean nothing.

Izuku is strong in the way natural disasters are strong—so immense that resistance becomes a kind of grief. There is no arrogance in it, no swagger, no delight. Only certainty. Pure muscle moving under skin like the sea under moonlight, beautiful and terrible and impossible to command.

He ebbs and flows. That is the only way to think of him.

Some days he is soft enough to break your heart all over again: hovering around you with that familiar nervous sweetness still tangled through his movements, asking if you have eaten, if you are cold, if your wrists still hurt, if the blanket is too heavy, if the lamp is bothering your eyes.

Those days, he still resembles the man people trust. The man people call kind. The man whose gentleness once made you lower your guard without even noticing.

And then it shifts.

Not all at once. It steels. It hardens. His voice drops. His shoulders square. His patience thins into something more commanding, more frightening because it is so controlled. The more you cry, the more you beg, the more you pull away and tell him no, the more some other current rises in him—something possessive, something absolute. Not rage, not exactly. Something colder. A conviction so deep it has gone beyond emotion.

He watches you cry with his jaw tight, eyes shining with hurt and determination, and when you beg him to let you go, he does not yell. He does not threaten. He only strokes your face, presses his forehead to yours, and says in that low, shaking voice, “Baby, I already told you. That’s not an option.” Like he is the one being forced to endure this. Like the tragedy here is not your captivity, but your refusal to accept the shape of his love.

The memory of how he chained you makes tears sting your eyes before you can stop them. Your body remembers before your mind does. Your ankles ache with it—the old bruises half-yellowed, the newer ones dark and tender, your skin scuffed raw where metal kissed bone too hard.

Your legs still carry that deep soreness, the kind that settles in the muscles after too much struggling, too much fear, too much time spent fighting a force that cannot be moved. Your wrists hurt too. They always hurt. Even when he tries to pad the cuffs. Even when he checks them afterward with trembling fingers and a face gone pale with guilt. Even when he apologizes into your skin, over and over, voice cracking at the edges as though he cannot bear the evidence of what he has done.

This time he spares your neck, and you hate that your first thought afterward is relief. Relief that there is one place on you he has left untouched by restraint. Relief that you do not have to feel cold metal there, around your throat, turning every swallow into a reminder of ownership.

The bar for mercy has sunk so low it terrifies you.

It hurts. Everything hurts. But Izuku always has something to say about that too. He always does. His love may hurt a little, he tells you in that careful murmur, the one he uses when he thinks honesty will soothe you. As if pain can be made gentler by being admitted. As if naming the wound changes what made it.

You hate him.

You think you do. You must.

The thought arrives sharp and quick, like a match struck in darkness. You clutch it because you need to. Because hatred is clean in a way nothing else here is clean. Hatred gives shape to things. Hatred reminds you that something wrong is happening, that no matter how softly he speaks, no matter how delicately he touches you, no matter how often he looks at you like you are the center of his ruined little universe, this is still wrong.

He is still wrong.

He has taken your life and folded it into his hands and decided that devotion excuses theft. You hate him for the locked doors. For the chains. For the way your world has shrunk to the size of his footsteps outside the room. For the way your body flinches at tenderness now because tenderness has become the wrapping paper around terror. You hate him for making kindness feel dangerous. You hate him for every time he says your name like a promise and makes it sound like a sentence.

But hatred does not stay clean for long in a place like this.

Because the truth is uglier, softer, more humiliating than that. Because your mind has been living too long under his weather. Because he is careful in ways that make cruelty difficult to isolate. Because there are moments—small, poisoned things—when he brushes your hair back from your face with such aching reverence that your chest tightens for reasons you do not want to examine.

Moments when he notices you are shivering before you even fully feel the cold yourself. Moments when he kneels by the bed, eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep, and asks if your ankles are throbbing again, and there is such genuine distress in him that it makes you feel sick.

Izuku remembers every little thing about you.

He notices every tremor in your breathing, every shift in your expression, every silence that means one thing and every silence that means another. He is observant to the point of obsession, analytical even now, always tracking, always noticing, always trying to understand the people he loves down to the smallest fracture line.

Only this love has gone rotten from being held too tightly.

It has become warped by fear of losing, by the desperate conviction that saving and keeping are the same thing. He reacts to your tears like they physically hurt him; you see it every time. His whole face crumples with helpless anguish. His hands shake. His voice turns small and pleading.

Yet even then—even with his own heart plainly breaking in front of you—he does not let go. That's what undoes you. Not that he feels nothing, but that he feels everything and still chooses this.

The room is quiet now except for the faint mechanical hum buried in the walls and the soft rustle of sheets when you shift. It is always too quiet after he leaves. Quiet in a way that feels curated, controlled, deliberate. Like even silence belongs to him here.

You stare at the ceiling until the pale blur of it wavers with unshed tears. Your body feels heavy, used up by fear and anger and the exhausting labor of resistance. The cuffs at your wrists drag when you move. Metal whispers against itself.

You close your eyes and instantly see sunlight again—not real sunlight, but memory-sunlight. The kind that lives behind your eyelids when you are desperate enough.

You imagine standing beneath it.

You imagine your skin warming, your lungs filling, your shadow stretching long and ordinary across a sidewalk somewhere. Ordinary.

The word nearly breaks you.

Once, your life had been full of ordinary things so small you never thought to worship them: standing by a window, choosing when to eat, stepping outside just because you wanted to, silence that was truly yours. Now even memory has started to feel dangerous, because it makes the room smaller every time you compare.

You hear him before you see him.

Footsteps beyond the door. A pause. The small metallic sound of the lock turning.

Your whole body goes taut on instinct. It happens before thought. Before reason. Before you can stop it, your pulse is already hammering, your breath gone shallow, every muscle in you pulled tight as wire.

Fear blooms fast and hot, but tangled inside it is something even worse: recognition. Because you know the cadence of his steps now. Know when he is tired by the drag of one foot. Know when he is trying to seem calm by how carefully he exhales before opening the door. Know how long he stands outside when he is working up the courage to come in after one of your fights.

That knowledge humiliates you. It feels like contamination. But it's there.

The door opens slowly.

Izuku steps inside as if entering a chapel.

That is the only way your mind knows how to frame it.

Your stomach tightens the moment your eyes land on him. It is an instinctive thing now, cruelly automatic, as natural and immediate as flinching from fire. You hate that most of all—the reflex of it, the way your body knows him before your mind can dress the feeling in prettier lies.

It is hard to keep your breathing even. Hard to make yourself look at him without looking afraid. Harder still to pretend that he has not already gotten inside you in all the worst ways—not like love, not like comfort, but like roots. Like something invasive and patient, threading itself beneath bone, around organs, through the fragile architecture of your body until he feels less like a person standing in front of you and more like a presence woven under your skin.

Something that has learned the map of you too well. Something that lives there now, in the hidden places, and makes even your own fear feel inhabited.

He watches you for a long moment without speaking.

Of course he does.

Izuku has always been good at watching. Good at noticing. That has been one of the truest things about him from the beginning, long before all of this, long before locked doors and chains and the terrible distortion of devotion into possession.

He learned early how to study people—not just as a hero in training, not just as someone who built himself through observation and analysis, but as someone who pays attention with his whole soul. It is in his nature to notice the smallest shift and treat it like important data. The way someone favors one side when they are injured. The way a smile changes when it is forced. The way fear sits in the shoulders, the jaw, the breath.

With you, that instinct has only sharpened into something feverishly intimate. He remembers the way you used to laugh before your laughter became something rarer, brittle and careful. He remembers which subjects made your voice soften, which foods you would pick around on a plate before eating the parts you actually liked, the exact tilt of your head when you were tired but trying not to admit it.

He has catalogued all of it so thoroughly that being seen by him no longer feels like being looked at. It feels like being read. Opened. Sorted through page by page until there is nothing private left.

His gaze moves over you now with that same terrible attentiveness. He sees your shallow breathing, the way your fingers tense against the sheets, the way your eyes flick once toward the chain before sliding away again. He takes all of it in. You know he does. And because he knows what fear looks like on you—because he has memorized it—his face softens with something that might almost resemble pain.

Then he steps closer.

You tense immediately, and the chain gives a small, humiliating clatter when you instinctively draw back. The sound is sharp in the quiet room. Metal against metal. A little cry of helplessness that does not even have the dignity of language. Your body tries to retreat before you can stop it, trying to pull away from him, from his hands, from whatever version of tenderness he has brought in with him this time.

But there is nowhere to go.

There is only the bed, the chain, the room, and Izuku crossing the distance between you with maddening gentleness.

And then he kneels.

It would be almost laughable if it did not make your throat ache.

He kneels at your feet as though you are royalty and he is something lesser, something devoted, something humble enough to live only in service. The posture is all wrong for what he is doing to you.

That is part of what makes him so unbearable.

He has the instincts of a worshipper and the hands of a jailer. He lowers himself before you like a servant attending a queen, green eyes lifted with that reverent softness that always makes your stomach twist, and slowly—so slowly, as if approaching a frightened animal—he reaches for the chain. His fingers are careful. Deliberate. He loosens it with an ease that makes the muscles in your legs jump.

The relief is immediate and terrible, because your body betrays you by wanting that relief no matter who gives it. Before you can pull your legs up and away from him, before you can recover enough to hide the vulnerable line of your ankles, his hands are there.

Warm, steady, and impossible to ignore.

He cups one ankle like it is something delicate despite the bruises blossoming there in ugly shades beneath his fingertips. Then, before you can even brace yourself for what comes next, he bows his head and presses a kiss against the darkened skin.

The breath leaves you.

Not because it is gentle. Not because it is kind. But because it's wrong in such a soft way that your body does not know how to hold it. His mouth brushes the bruises he made as though they are sacred marks, as though the pain on your skin is something to be honored rather than undone.

The contrast is enough to make nausea coil under your ribs.

“I bought your favorite ointment,” he murmurs against your skin.

He says it like prayer. Like an offering. Like this tiny act of thoughtfulness is evidence of a love so pure it should absolve him. And the worst part is the precision of it. The way he says favorite, as if the ointment is your favorite because it brings comfort, because he knows you, because he cares.

Not because it happens to be the one that works best with your skin, the one that reduces swelling fastest, the one that helps the bruising fade quicker.

He makes preference out of practicality. Intimacy out of observation. Devotion out of research.

But that's what he always does, doesn't he? He takes the things he has learned about you and folds them back into his love until they sound romantic, until they sound chosen, until they sound like proof that he understands you better than anyone else ever could.

You want to tell him you don't want anything from him.

You want to say it sharply, clearly, with all the venom you still have left. You want to tell him you would rather ache. Rather bleed. Rather lie awake all night under the bite of the chains than take one soft thing from his hands and let him mistake your need for gratitude. You want to tell him you would rather die than let him turn care into another collar around your throat.

But your body is tired.

You are hurt, and exhausted, and the metal has already worn your skin raw enough that the thought of sleeping with it still biting into you makes your eyes sting. Your pride and your anger are alive and furious, but your flesh is only flesh. It throbs. It begs for relief in ways that humiliate you.

Survival is never noble. It is only practical. Ugly. Necessary.

So you let him.

You let him smooth the salve over your skin while you stare somewhere over his shoulder and try not to look directly at him. You let him lift your foot a little more carefully than he needs to, supporting your calf in one hand as if even your weight is precious to him. You let him rub the ointment into the bruised skin with slow circles of his thumb, and when he presses a little too hard over one of the darker marks you cannot help the small flinch that runs through you.

Izuku freezes instantly.

His whole face changes. Concern flashes across it so nakedly it might have been drawn there in ink. “Did I hurt you?” he asks in a hush, already easing up, already adjusting. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to—was that too much pressure? I-I can be gentler.”

That is another terrible thing about him: how quickly he corrects. How sincerely. He is never careless with your pain once he notices it. He notices everything. He sees the wince, hears the hitch in your breath, and reorganizes himself around it immediately. Like your comfort is the center of his world.

Except, of course, when your comfort requires freedom.

You say nothing.

Your silence doesn't stop him. It never does. But it changes him. He grows quieter beneath it, more careful, as if silence itself is a mood he has learned to navigate. He presses another kiss to the side of your ankle, then another, feather-light and apologetic, murmuring sorry into your skin like the word can seep through pores and heal what he has done.

His thumb moves over the bruise absentmindedly afterward, a slow circling touch that might have been soothing in any other life. Here it feels unbearable. Intimate in the wrong direction. Tenderness used as a tool to sand down the edges of violence.

And then, because he cannot help himself, because Izuku has always verbalized feeling when it overflows him, he starts speaking softly into the hush—how pretty you look; how good you are for him right now; how proud he is that you are letting him help; how much he loves you.

The words fall one by one and each of them lands with the weight of something heavier beneath it. He sounds sincere because he is sincere. That is what makes it so awful. There is no mockery in him. No game. He is not trying to taunt you. He means every word with the full force of his heart, and that sincerity makes the whole thing more frightening than cruelty ever could.

Cruelty can be rejected cleanly. This cannot. This slides into every crack.

He strokes your bruised skin and praises you for enduring him. He kisses the damage and calls it beautiful because it is part of you, because he has touched it, because in his warped little cosmos even your suffering becomes another proof of connection.

You let him.

You let him hold your ankle like something cherished. You let him rub the salve in until the worst of the heat begins to dull. You let his apologies settle in the air between you without answering them; you hate how your body reacts to him the way leaves react to light—automatic, instinctive, betraying.

In some sick way this feels like accepting his apology.

Not in your heart. Not where it matters. But in practice. In action. In the brutal language of survival. You do not slap his hand away. You do not spit in his face. You do not tell him no, not this time. You sit there and let him tend to what he ruined, and that allowance becomes its own kind of message whether you mean it to or not.

It's a message he will read; a message he will treasure—a message he will misunderstand.

It frightens you.

Because with Izuku, every little permission grows teeth. Every compromise becomes evidence. Every moment you are too exhausted to fight becomes, in his mind, a step toward trust. Toward healing. Toward the future he keeps trying to build out of your captivity.

He is always collecting signs, always searching your face for proof that you are softening, that you understand him a little more today than you did yesterday. That one day you will stop looking at the locked door and start looking only at him.

When you glance down at him now, just for a second, you see it there already.

Hope.

It glows in him so quietly you almost miss it. In the softened line of his mouth. In the way his shoulders loosen just slightly when you do not pull away from the next touch. In the care with which he wipes the extra ointment from his fingers before moving to your other ankle, as though he has been entrusted with something fragile and miraculous. He looks at you like you have given him a gift.

The sight makes your stomach turn.

You haven't forgiven him. You haven't forgiven anything.

You are simply tired. Simply hurting. Simply human enough to take relief where it is offered, even from the hands that caused the pain.

But Izuku has always been a man who believes in meaning. In signs. In small things that reveal larger truths. Of course he would see this moment and cradle it like something precious. Of course he would build a fragile little shelter out of it and crawl inside, telling himself that maybe this means you still trust him somewhere deep down. Maybe this means you know he only wants to care for you. Maybe this means he has not lost you entirely.

You look away from him quickly, jaw tightening, throat burning with a grief too shapeless to name. Outside this room there is still a world turning under the sun. Somewhere light is touching windows and pavement and the tops of trees. Somewhere people are walking freely through the day without knowing how holy freedom is.

And here, in this dim hush, Izuku kneels at your feet, devoted and monstrous in equal measure, tending your wounds with the same hands that made them.

You let him.

And the whole room fills with the terrible silence of what that will cost.

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He makes you come with his fingers that night.

The room is still thick with the scent of ointment and the faint metallic tang of the chain when Izuku’s hand slips between your thighs again. His calloused pads find your puffy clit almost immediately, rubbing slow, deliberate circles that make your breath hitch despite every ounce of resistance left in your exhausted body.

You try to scoot away, legs trembling, voice cracking as you whisper, “Izuku… no. Please stop.” The words fall soft and useless into the quiet. He doesn’t listen. He never does when the hunger has already settled behind his eyes, glassy and soft and aching with that terrible sincerity.

You don’t want it. Not the warmth pooling low in your belly, not the way your hips twitch when he presses just a little firmer, not the soft whimper that escapes anyway.

But Izuku believes—deep in that warped, devoted heart of his—that if he can just make your body feel good, everything else will follow. That pleasure is the bridge back to the version of you he keeps locked inside his head: willing, soft, safe in his arms.

So he keeps going, fingers slick and steady, circling your swollen clit with careful precision.

Your hands push weakly at his arm, nails scraping over his skin, but his free arm only wraps tighter around your waist, anchoring you against him.

“Shh, it’s okay,” he murmurs against your temple, voice low and trembling with guilt and hunger braided together so tightly you can’t tell them apart. “I’ve got you, baby. Let me show you how much I love you.”

The pressure builds anyway. Slow. Unwanted. Inevitable. Your clit throbs under the relentless, calloused drag of his fingertips, each stroke pulling another reluctant spark through nerves that have learned his rhythm too well.

You bite your lip hard enough to taste copper, trying to hold back the sounds crawling up your throat. But then his fingers shift—just the right angle, just the right pressure—and a broken whimper tears free.

“'Zuku…”

It’s not exactly surrender. It’s exhaustion. It’s the body betraying the mind because fighting has become too heavy, too endless.

He hears it like gospel. His breath catches, green eyes fluttering half-shut. “That’s it… just like that, baby,” he whispers, voice cracking with something dangerously close to awe. “You’re so perfect. So good for me. I’m sorry—I’m so sorry, but you feel so good.”

He doesn’t speed up. He stays slow, almost worshipful, rubbing tight little circles over your puffy clit until your thighs start to shake and your breathing fractures into shallow, desperate gasps. His thumb replaces his fingers so they can slide lower, pressing inside your cunt with gentle insistence, curling just enough to stroke that spot that makes white heat flash behind your eyes.

Your back arches against your will, a sob catching in your chest as the coil tightens and tightens and finally snaps.

The orgasm crashes through you in waves—unwanted, overwhelming, leaving you trembling and gasping in his arms. Your walls flutter around his fingers, clit pulsing under his thumb, and for a few cruel seconds the pleasure blots out everything else: the chains, the bruises, the locked door, the sun you haven’t seen in days.

All that exists is the shuddering release and the soft, sacred way he keeps touching you through it, drawing every last tremor from your body like he’s collecting proof that you still belong to him.

When the peak finally ebbs, shame floods in immediately. You didn’t want this, yet here you are, limp and warm and leaking against his hand while he cradles you closer, pressing kisses to your damp forehead, your wet cheeks, the corner of your trembling mouth.

“See?” he murmurs, voice thick with emotion, fingers still buried deep inside you as if he can’t bear to let the connection break. “It feels better now, doesn’t it? Your body knows… it knows how safe you are with me. How much I love you.” He nuzzles into your neck, breath ragged, hips rocking subtly against your thigh where you can feel him hard and aching, yet he makes no move to take more.

Not tonight.

Tonight is about this—about making you come, about holding you while you’re soft and pliant, about pretending the arms locked around you are something you chose.

He keeps you there for a long time afterward, whispering soft praises and gentle apologies into your hair, fingers occasionally stroking lazy circles over your oversensitive clit just to feel you twitch.

Even now, something in you leans—just slightly—toward him, like a stem straining toward a window.

(The room stays dim and quiet except for the low hum of the walls and the occasional clink of the chain when you shift.

“Is there something you want to eat tomorrow?” he asks quietly into the hush, his voice soft from disuse, from emotion, from the strange fragile peace he always seems to mistake for tenderness after nights like this. “Anything you’re craving for dinner?”

Normally, you do not answer him.

Normally, you keep your silence wrapped tightly around yourself like the only thing in this room that still belongs to you. Silence is safer. Silence does not soften him. Silence does not give him little pieces of you to cradle in his hands and call trust. It is one of the last ways you know how to resist him—small, quiet, unimpressive perhaps, but yours.

Izuku has learned that too. He has learned the shape of your quiet, the weight of it, the difference between the silences that mean anger and the silences that mean exhaustion. He never stops trying to reach through them anyway.

But tonight, for some reason, you answer.

Maybe it is because you are tired down to the marrow, too worn thin to keep every wall standing. Maybe it is because the question catches you off guard in its terrible, awful normalcy, sounding for one fleeting second like something from another life—something domestic, something ordinary, something that belongs in kitchens and evening light instead of this dim locked room.

Or maybe it is simply because it rises into your mind so suddenly, so vividly, that the word slips out before you can stop it. Warm, peppery, crisp skin. Sticky fingers. The sharp, nostalgic ache of craving something so human and uncomplicated.

“Tebasaki,” you whisper.

The word leaves you in such a soft hush it barely feels real. It hangs there between you, light as breath.

When you glance back at him, Izuku looks as though he has just seen heaven.

The brightness breaks open across his face, so sudden and so unguarded it almost startles you. His whole expression changes. His eyes go wide first, green and luminous and disbelieving, and then his mouth parts in that small, stunned way he gets when something catches him somewhere deep in the chest.

It's not triumph, not exactly. Not smugness.

It's something more earnest than that, which somehow makes it worse. He looks happy in a way that is almost boyish, almost painfully pure, as though you have handed him something precious instead of something accidental. Something he can hold. Something he can keep.

“Tebasaki?” he repeats, softly, like he wants to make sure he heard you right, like the word itself is delicate. Then his face breaks into a smile so bright it nearly hurts to look at. “Okay. Yeah—yeah, I’ll get you the best tebasaki in the whole world.” His voice warms with sudden purpose, his mind already moving the way it always does, quick and attentive and all-consuming.

The conviction in the way he says it makes your throat tighten.

Because he means it. Izuku has never known how to do anything halfway, and that has always been the most dangerous thing about him. Once he latches onto something—an idea, a goal, a person he loves—it ceases to be small. It becomes a mission. A vow. A thread he will follow with his whole heart wrapped around it.

He is already building the answer in his head with the meticulous devotion of someone preparing to save the world, when all you did was whisper the name of a food you missed.

You turn your face away, but his warmth finds you anyway—persistent, invasive, patient as morning.

You ignore the way your heart gives a small, shameful flutter in your chest.

It angers you the second you feel it—that soft involuntary movement, that traitorous little stutter under your ribs. Not because you are touched, you tell yourself. Not because he is sweet. But because you remember, all at once, what it feels like to be listened to. To say you want something and have someone respond like your wanting matters.

The feeling is so ordinary it becomes devastating here. It should not mean anything. It should not reach you at all. But captivity distorts hunger into gratitude, and loneliness makes even scraps of attentiveness feel warm if you are starved enough.

And that tiny flutter disgusts you because it feels too close to something soft.)

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You see the sun again today.

It feels almost unreal at first.

After days and days of rain, of low gray skies pressing themselves against the city like damp wool, the light returns so suddenly it almost startles you. It spills through the windows in long pale bands, soft at first, then brighter as the morning stretches, until the whole apartment seems touched by something warmer, gentler, more alive.

You stand there for a while just looking at it. Not even doing anything, really. Just looking. Just watching how the gold settles over the floorboards, how it catches in the edges of furniture, how it turns the dust in the air into something delicate and floating.

It reminds you that the world is still out there. That somewhere beyond these walls the sky has opened again. That the sun has continued to rise even while your life has narrowed into rooms, routines, and the quiet violence of being kept.

You imagine what it would feel like if you could step out onto the balcony.

The thought comes gently, not in the sharp desperate way it used to. You imagine sliding the door open and being greeted by the cool edge of city air. Imagine the faint noise of traffic far below, the distant hum of people living their lives, the scent of concrete warming under sunlight, maybe something green if the wind happens to catch a tree somewhere nearby.

You imagine the rays landing full on your skin, not filtered through glass, but real and living and warm. You imagine tilting your face upward and letting the day touch you. The image rises in your mind so clearly that for a moment it almost feels like memory instead of fantasy.

For some reason, imagining it feels like enough; you take what light you’re given.

There was a time when imagining something would have made the wanting sharper. It would have made you feel sick with it; it would have driven the absence into you like a blade.

But now the longing comes wrapped in something softer, more manageable, as though your mind has learned to sand down its own edges for the sake of survival.

The sunlight through the window becomes a substitute. A stand-in. A small mercy.

You accept it with a calm that would have horrified you weeks ago.

It's okay, you tell yourself. It's okay that you are not chained right now.

(That thought comes just as softly, and that one is worse.)

You can move around the apartment again.

Your ankles have healed enough that the bruises are only faint shadows now, old stains under the skin instead of open tenderness. Your wrists no longer sting every time you turn them. The sharpest aches have faded into memory. There is no chain at your leg today, no metal dragging behind you when you shift from one room to another, no cold reminder biting into your skin.

You are free to move through the space as long as the space remains what it is: bounded, watched, his.

It has begun to feel less like a miracle and more like routine.

It's not exactly freedom, not really. It only looks like freedom if you squint. It only resembles choice if you stop tracing the outline of the cage.

Still, your body responds to it anyway.

Your shoulders are less tense than they once were. You sleep a little deeper on nights when there are no restraints. You have learned the dimensions of the apartment the way captive animals learn enclosures, making little pathways out of repetition. Kitchen. Couch. Window. Bathroom. Bed.

The geography of permitted movement. The architecture of a life that pretends not to be stolen because it has been made comfortable enough to inhabit.

You tell yourself you are not softening, only surviving—but survival, it seems, has roots.

By the time Izuku comes back, the sunlight has shifted lower.

You hear him before you see him, and that old instinctive tension still flickers through you—quick, automatic, impossible to fully kill—but it doesn't spike as sharply as it used to.

His absence has stretched over several days this time. Days of quiet. Days where his presence lingers only in traces: folded laundry, stocked groceries, the messages he has left, the care arranged around you like offerings in a shrine. And then suddenly he is here again, unlocking the door, stepping inside with the weariness of someone returning from a long mission and carrying the outside world on his clothes.

He looks tired.

Not broken, not injured—not in any obvious way—but worn around the edges. There is a heaviness in the set of his shoulders, in the slight drag of exhaustion beneath his eyes. Hero work always leaves something on him. You see it immediately, because of course you do. Because noticing him has become as involuntary as him noticing you.

He has one bag in his hand, and when his eyes find you standing by the window, something in his face softens so fast it almost hurts to witness. Relief first. Then warmth. Then that quiet, terrible devotion that always lives underneath everything else.

“I’m home,” he says softly.

The words land strangely domestic. It sounds ordinary, but it feels wrong.

You do not answer right away. You never quite know what to do with phrases like that from him, with all the soft little things he says that belong in another kind of life. But he does not seem to mind. He slips off his shoes, steps further inside, and then holds out the small package in his hand almost shyly.

“I brought you something.”

Your eyes drop to it.

Momiji manjū.

For a second you just stare, surprised by the shape of it, the neat wrapping, the unmistakable little confection nestled inside. The maple leaf pattern is familiar enough to make something old and faint stir in you. Sweet bean filling. Soft cake. A treat that feels oddly specific, oddly thoughtful, in a way that immediately puts you on guard and softens you at the same time.

He notices your recognition instantly. Of course he does.

“I got it in Hiroshima,” he says, and there is that careful note in his voice, the one he uses when he is offering something he hopes will matter. “After the mission.” He pauses, just long enough for his gaze to flick toward the window where the sunlight still spills in. “It reminded me of the leaves from the maple trees where I met you the first time.”

The words do something quiet to your chest.

You hate that they do.

The memory rises before you can stop it. Not even the whole day—just pieces. Light through leaves. A season turning. Some earlier version of him before all this, when his attention still felt flattering instead of frightening, when his earnestness still passed for safety, when being remembered by him had not yet become another form of being possessed.

He says it so simply, like he is handing you not just a sweet but a memory preserved inside sugar and flour. Like he traveled far away, completed some dangerous mission, and still came back carrying something small because it made him think of you.

For some reason, despite yourself, it makes you smile.

It's not a big smile. Not radiant, not unguarded. Just something faint that lifts at your mouth before you can stop it, soft and almost fragile with surprise. A little reflex of warmth that escapes your control.

His whole face changes when he sees it.

Izuku doesn't beam—not the bright overwhelming grin he used to wear more easily in older days, in easier times. This is smaller. Quieter. More careful than that. But it is warm in a way that feels almost unbearable. It spreads slowly over his features like sunlight crossing water, gentle and glowing and full of a kind of wonder he cannot quite hide.

He looks at you as though your smile is not just something pretty, but something sacred. Something given. Something earned only through patience and luck and reverence.

And because the moment has already become too soft, too human, too dangerously close to tenderness, you whisper, “Thank you.”

The words come out quieter than you mean them to.

They are almost lost in the room, almost swallowed by the hush of late afternoon. But he hears them. Of course he hears them. Izuku has always heard even the smallest things when they come from you.

His smile deepens just slightly, though it never becomes too much. He seems to know instinctively that too much joy might frighten the moment away. “You’re welcome,” he says, just as softly.

The gentleness of it settles over the room.

For a few seconds, nothing else happens. No reaching. No coaxing. No sharpened edge beneath the softness. He just stands there with the light catching on the tired line of his face, looking at you with that impossible warmth, and you stand by the window holding a sweet from Hiroshima while the sun touches the floor between you both.

The city beyond the glass is alive in ways you cannot hear clearly from here. Somewhere cars are moving. Somewhere strangers are walking under the same sky. Somewhere the day goes on, vast and ordinary and untouched by the little world the two of you have built out of devotion and fear.

You think of the sun after rain. The sweet brought back from far away. A remembered detail. A soft thank you. A softer you’re welcome. The awful, aching normalcy of it. The way he can stand there looking tired and sincere and gentle and make the whole thing feel, for one trembling moment, like a life instead of a theft.

You lower your eyes to the momiji manjū in your hand.

Its little maple shape is delicate, almost pretty enough to hurt.

Somewhere deep in your chest, where anger and grief and exhaustion have all been living together for too long, something small and quiet stirs—something you do not want to name, because naming it would make it real.

Outside, the sun continues to shine.

Inside, Izuku watches you with that same warm, careful expression, as though this tiny moment is enough to sustain him.

You fall asleep in his arms that night without any ceremony to mark it.

One moment you are lying there in the soft dimness of evening with distance still stretched between your bodies like a fragile line, and the next that distance is gone, dissolved somewhere in the hush, until you are tucked against him as though this, too, has become part of the routine.

Maybe it is because he has been gone for days.

Maybe it is because loneliness is a physical thing now, something that lives in the body like cold lives in the body, creeping into the spaces between your ribs, settling in your hands and your throat and the places no blanket can really reach.

The apartment always feels larger when he is gone, and emptier in ways that make no sense because his absence should feel like relief. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the quiet is a mercy.

But sometimes the quiet grows too wide and strange, and the rooms begin to feel less like refuge and more like abandonment. You hate that you can tell the difference now. Hate that his presence has shaped the space enough for you to feel when it is missing.

Maybe it is because you are cold.

That one is simpler. Easier. Something you can almost forgive in yourself. The night air has a faint chill to it, the kind that slips under fabric and lingers at the edges of sleep. Even with the blanket pulled up, warmth feels incomplete until it is shared, and his body has always run warm—it's steady and solid, heat banked deep beneath skin and muscle.

It would be easy, almost reasonable, to blame it on that.

(Maybe it's because you missed him.)

You freeze the instant the possibility crosses your mind.

Not outwardly, not enough for him to notice at first. But something in you goes still and sharp, as if your own body has betrayed you with a language you do not want to understand. Missed him. The words feel wrong in your head, swollen and feverish, impossible to hold without disgust.

Because what would that mean? That absence has started to hurt in the shape of him? That your days are beginning to organize themselves around the gravity of his presence and the lack of it? That captivity has become familiar enough for the captor’s absence to register as an ache?

The thought makes your stomach twist.

And yet you are already here.

Already tucked into the curve of him, already half-hidden against the breadth of his chest and shoulder, already close enough to hear the deep, even rhythm of his breathing beneath everything else. When he wraps an arm around you, it's not sudden. He does it with that same maddening care he does everything with, slowly enough that you could move away if you wanted to.

Or maybe that is the illusion he offers—space to retreat, knowing how tired you are, how heavy your body feels, how much easier it is tonight not to fight every small thing.

At first, you cannot help the stiffness that runs through you.

It's instinctive. Your whole body catches on itself for a second, muscles tightening under the memory of all the other times he has held you in ways that meant control instead of comfort. Your spine goes rigid. Your breath pauses.

He notices immediately; of course he does. Izuku always notices. His arm stills around you at once, not withdrawing, but not tightening either. He waits there in the quiet, his restraint so palpable it almost becomes another touch.

You can feel the effort of it in the way his breathing changes ever so slightly, as if he is talking himself through stillness, reminding himself not to rush the moment, not to spook you, not to break whatever fragile permission has been placed in his hands.

“It’s okay,” he whispers after a moment, and his voice is so low it barely disturbs the dark.

And slowly, you begin to loosen in his arms.

Your shoulders unhook from around your ears. Your jaw unclenches. The tight line of your spine softens by degrees until the bed catches your weight properly again. You manage to bury your cheek against the firm warmth of his bicep beneath your head, the muscle solid and familiar in a way that makes something in your chest ache. He is so impossibly warm.

It shouldn't matter how warm he is. It shouldn't matter how easy it is, physically at least, to fit there against him.

But the body is a simple creature when it is tired enough. It knows warmth. It knows the relief of being held without immediate struggle. It knows the shape of a place where it can, for one moment, stop bracing.

His presence settles over you like warmth through glass—filtered, controlled, but enough. Always enough. You are still confused, still afraid—yet something in you drinks him in like light.

Izuku lets out the smallest breath when he feels you settle.

His hand, resting at first with deliberate stillness against your middle, begins to move only when he is certain you are not pulling away. He strokes your belly in slow, absent lines, not possessive exactly, though the intimacy of it makes your skin prickle. More like he is soothing himself through the contact. Like he needs to feel the reality of you there beneath his palm.

The gesture is almost petlike in its repetition—gentle, rhythmic, tender in a way that threatens to become demeaning if you look at it too hard.

And maybe it is demeaning.

Maybe that is part of why your throat tightens. Because he touches you with such careful affection, like something precious he has soothed by patience, and some terrible part of your body responds to the steadiness of it despite everything your mind knows.

He kisses your cheek.

Then again, softer.

He breathes in near your temple, slow and deep, as if your scent is something grounding to him, something he has gone too long without and is quietly starving for now that he has it back. The closeness of it turns your insides strange.

You feel him pressing his face briefly to your hair, to your skin, to the place where your body yields against his, and there is such aching reverence in the way he does it that it becomes difficult to separate devotion from need.

“I love you, baby,” he murmurs into the darkness.

The words come out unguarded, worn soft by exhaustion and feeling. Not performative. Not calculated. He says them the way people pray half-asleep, the way some truths seem to slip more easily from the body when it is too tired to hide them behind shame.

His hand keeps moving over your stomach in those slow strokes. “I love you. I missed you so much.” A pause, and his mouth brushes your cheek again, barely there. “I love you so much.”

Each repetition lands differently.

Not lighter for being repeated, but heavier. As though he cannot stop saying it because saying it is the only way he knows how to contain the force of it.

He feels with his whole body. His whole heart. He overthinks, over-notices, over-cares. Love in him has always had the quality of flooding—earnest and overwhelming and impossible to hold halfway. Here, now, with you in his arms and sleep tugging at the edges of the room, that part of him is painfully visible.

He sounds wrecked by tenderness. Grateful for your nearness in a way that makes your chest hurt.

The tears that gather in the corners of your eyes don't feel like sadness.

That would almost be easier.

Sadness would have a name, a shape, a clean direction to move in. But this feeling is stranger than that. Sicker. It rises in you like warm water around a wound, confusing and shameful and impossible to fully understand. Your eyes sting, and yet what fills them is not grief exactly. Not relief either.

It's something more twisted than either of those.

Something born from the unbearable tenderness of a moment that should not exist under these circumstances and yet does. The warmth of him. The safety of being held by the very person you should not be safe with. The softness of his voice. The ache of being missed. The horrifying human comfort of having your coldness noticed and remedied by the body beside you.

It makes something deep in you recoil.

And something else—something weaker, more tired, more frighteningly human—leans toward it.

That's the part you cannot comprehend yet. Or maybe you can, and comprehension is exactly what you are trying to avoid. Because if you name it too clearly, it might become real: the possibility that need and fear can grow roots in the same soil. That loneliness can make even poisoned tenderness feel warm when it wraps around you in the dark. That your body, traitorous thing, can relax where your mind still screams.

So you don't answer him with words.

Words would make too much of it. Words would require intention. Meaning. But your body offers something anyway, small and quiet and impossible to take back once given: the soft nuzzle of your cheek against his bicep. Barely a movement. Just enough to settle closer, to acknowledge the warmth there, to let your face rest more fully against him.

Izuku goes completely still.

For one suspended second, the whole room seems to stop with him.

Then you feel the way his arm tightens around you—not enough to trap, not enough to hurt, just enough to hold as if he has been pierced straight through by that tiny, unconscious gesture. His breath catches hard against your hair. When he speaks again, his voice is even softer than before, frayed at the edges with emotion he is trying and failing to contain.

“Sweet girl,” he whispers, almost to himself.

The words are full of awe. Of relief. Of some fragile happiness so immense it has to make itself small to survive.

He presses another kiss to your cheek, then to your temple and his hand resumes its slow path over your belly as though soothing you, soothing himself, soothing the whole trembling thing that has opened up inside his chest. You keep your eyes closed after that. The tears stay where they are, shining but unshed, cooling slowly at the corners of your lashes.

By the time sleep finally comes for you, it does not feel like surrender.

It feels so much worse.

(You wake with a sudden jolt.

A warm, wet pressure blooms between your thighs and a deep, insistent ache low in your belly pulls you from the heavy fog of sleep.

A soft, warbled moan slips from your lips before you can catch it, your thighs trembling involuntarily as the sensation coils tighter, unfamiliar yet already familiar in the worst possible way.

Your eyelids feel leaden, heavy with the remnants of dreams you can no longer remember, and for a hazy moment everything is blurred—the warmth, the wetness, the slow drag of something hot and deliberate against your cunt.

You blink once, trying to orient yourself. Then again, but each flutter of your lashes only sharpens the feeling, turning it from a distant haze into something immediate and undeniable.

When your gaze finally drops downward, the sight steals the breath from your lungs.

Izuku is there, nestled between your spread legs like a devotee at a forbidden altar, his green eyes closed as if the world beyond your body has ceased to exist. His hands are curled firmly around the back of your knees, holding them open with a strength that brooks no resistance, ensuring you cannot close yourself to him even half asleep.

His face is buried into your cunt, tongue warm and heavy, slick with abundant spit that glistens on your folds and drips down to soak the sheets beneath you. He licks a long, slow strip from your entrance upward, savoring every inch as though mapping a sacred path, the flat of his tongue broad and unhurried, before circling the tight little nub of your clit with deliberate, worshipful strokes.

Then he slurps it gently into his mouth, sucking with a soft, wet pull that sends sparks of unwanted pleasure shooting through your still-drowsy nerves.

He eats your pussy like it's his favorite meal in all the world, like he has waited lifetimes for this exact taste and texture, like he would gladly die right here between your trembling thighs if the universe demanded it.

There is no rush in his movements, no frantic desperation—only a profound patience, as though this is his last meal before some inevitable execution, and your body is the heavenly offering that will carry him into whatever comes after.

His tongue presses deeper, lapping at your entrance with slow, thorough strokes, gathering the slick evidence of your body’s reluctant response before returning to your clit, swirling and sucking with a gentleness that makes the pleasure feel like betrayal wrapped in silk.

Another moan escapes you, louder this time, raw and involuntary, dragging you further into wakefulness as heat floods your cheeks and shame twists sharp in your chest. Your hand shakes as you reach down, fingers tangling weakly in his messy green curls, trying to push his head away even as your thighs quiver around him.

“Izuku…” you manage, voice thick with sleep and protest, but he only hums softly against your mound, the vibration sending another unwelcome ripple through you.

He interprets the push as something tender—perhaps a pat, perhaps encouragement—because his eyes flutter open just enough to meet yours, glassy with that familiar mix of guilt and starving adoration, lashes damp with unshed tears or perhaps the sheer intensity of his focus.

His grip on your knees tightens ever so slightly, not bruising, never bruising in these moments when he is trying so hard to be good, but firm enough to remind you of the unyielding strength beneath his gentle exterior.

He doesn't stop.

Of course not. Izuku has never known how to abandon something he believes will make you feel loved, even when that belief warps into something possessive and suffocating.

His tongue continues its slow, devoted worship, licking broad stripes that coat you in warmth and spit, then focusing on your clit with precise, circling sucks that build the pressure in your lower belly like a tide rising against your will.

You feel every detail: the rough texture of his tongue contrasting with the slick heat, the way his lips seal around your nub and pull with just enough suction to make your back arch off the bed, the soft, wet sounds of his feasting filling the quiet room like a profane lullaby.

Tears prick at the corners of your eyes—not from pain, but from the overwhelming dissonance of it all, the way your body responds with fluttering pulses and growing wetness even as your mind screams that this is wrong, that you did not ask for this, that the sunlight streaming through the window should not witness something so intimate and stolen.

Izuku’s cheeks are flushed a deep pink as he glances up, green eyes wide and shimmering with that heartbreaking sincerity.

“I—I missed you. I missed your taste… you taste so good,” he murmurs against your folds, voice muffled and reverent, breath hot and ragged. “Even in the morning… like you were made for me. I’m sorry if I startled you, baby, but I woke up and you were right here, so warm and perfect… and I couldn’t help it. I—I just wanted to make you feel good! I wanted to show you how much I love every part of you.”

The words are raw devotion, like sunlight breaking through storm clouds, soft and golden and laced with the guilt that always shadows his hunger.

He presses a gentle kiss to your clit, almost apologetic, before diving back in, tongue delving deeper into your entrance as if he can drink away your protests, as if pleasure is the language he uses to translate his endless, overwhelming love into something you might one day accept.

Your hand remains in his hair, shaking, pushing half-heartedly while your hips betray you with tiny, involuntary rolls against his mouth.

The pleasure builds in waves—slow and poetic in its cruelty—like dawn creeping over a horizon you never chose to face. Shame burns hot under your skin, mingling with the unwanted heat coiling tighter and tighter in your core, because every lap of his tongue, every suck on your swollen clit, reminds you how deeply he has mapped you, how attentively he has studied your body the way he once studied hero notebooks, turning knowledge into this tender, terrifying possession.

He moans softly into you, the sound vibrating through your nerves, his own arousal evident in the way his hips subtly grind against the mattress, yet he remains focused solely on you, selfless in his obsession, giving without taking in return because making you come is how he convinces himself this is care, not theft.

The sunlight continues to spill across the bed, warming the sheets and illuminating the scene in soft, unforgiving light—the contrast of golden morning against the intimate shadows between your bodies making everything feel both sacred and profane.

Because warmth is warmth, even if it burns.

You are caught in the current of it, half-asleep mind warring with awakening senses, body trembling under the weight of his unhurried feast, while Izuku holds you open with those strong, gentle hands and devours you like a man savoring his final, heavenly meal before the executioner calls.

You feel the familiar fracture: the disgust, the exhaustion, the tiny, traitorous spark of physical relief that his devotion forces upon you, all wrapped in the poetic tragedy of a love so vast it has learned to bloom even in captivity.

In the golden hush of the morning, the only sound that fills the room is the soft, wet worship of his mouth and the broken, unwilling moan that slips from your lips.

It's a prayer you never meant to offer.)

“Izuku?”

You say his name softly, almost without meaning to. It slips out of you the way steam slips from the pot on the stove—quiet, warm, gone the moment it appears. He answers immediately, of course he does.

“Yes, baby?”

His voice is gentle in that way of his, instinctively attentive, the kind of softness that always feels too quick, too practiced, too natural on him. As if he has tuned his whole body to the frequency of you. As if no matter what he is doing, some part of him is always listening for your voice beneath everything else.

The kitchen is full of the smell of sukiyaki.

It bubbles away on the stove, rich and sweet and savory all at once, the scent of soy and broth and simmering vegetables wrapping itself around the room until the whole place feels warm with it. The air is soft with steam. It fogs the edges of the window a little. It settles against your skin.

Meals are not really meals anymore—not in the normal sense. Most of the time you pick at food or avoid it altogether, and when he notices, you end up swallowing under the weight of his fingers in your mouth as he feeds you like a child. Most of the time eating feels less like hunger and more like surrender to another one of his routines, another proof that he knows what your body needs better than you do.

But today, for some reason, you do eat.

Maybe that is why you came into the kitchen at all—drawn by the smell, by the warmth, by the domestic shape of something so ordinary it almost feels unreal. The sight of him there at the stove should not unsettle you the way it does.

And yet it does.

There is something so disarming about Izuku in moments like this, when he looks less like the center of your captivity and more like a man making dinner for someone he loves.

His sleeves are pushed up. His shoulders are broad beneath the soft fabric of his shirt. The scarred line of his hands moves with careful precision as he stirs the broth, adjusts the heat, checks the meat, all of it done with that same earnest concentration he gives to everything. Even cooking. Even this.

His hand finds your back when you drift close enough.

Big. Warm. Steady.

It spreads over you with easy familiarity and gently pulls you nearer, guiding rather than forcing, but impossible to ignore all the same. He touches you and something quiet inside you unfurls, slow and shameful as a leaf opening at dawn.

He tips his head down to look at you better, green eyes soft and immediately searching, as if he is trying to read the reason for your voice from your face before you even speak.

That is the thing about him. It has always been the thing about him.

He does not just look—he studies. He notices. He tracks every shift in expression, every pause, every silence that might mean something. There is no casual attention in him. Only totality.

Your eyes catch on the scar beneath his right eye.

They follow it before you can stop yourself—the pale line that cuts down his cheek and reaches toward his chin, a mark that somehow makes his face look both gentler and harder at once.

It's an old habit now, letting your gaze drift over the small map of damage on him, the evidence of battles and strain and all the ways he has broken himself over the years. The scar pulls your attention in the same way his hands do, the same way the tired line of his shoulders does.

You hate that you notice these things. Hate that your mind still catalogs pieces of him at all.

(The awareness of him being handsome arrives so suddenly it makes your stomach turn.)

It catches in your throat like something swallowed wrong. You nearly feel ill from it—not because the thought itself is shocking, but because of what it means to have it at all.

To stand here, in this kitchen, in this life you did not choose, and find your gaze tracing the line of his face with anything even remotely adjacent to admiration feels grotesque. Like betrayal. Like rot beginning somewhere deep and private.

He is handsome, devastatingly so in a worn, scarred, earnest kind of way, and the recognition of it makes heat crawl up your neck so fast you want to peel your own skin off.

You blink and shake your head slightly, trying to clear it.

You had wanted to ask him something.

You know you did. The feeling of the question is still there, lingering just behind your tongue, but the actual words are gone now, dissolved somewhere between the warmth of the kitchen, the smell of dinner, and the unbearable closeness of him looking down at you like that.

You forget it so completely it makes embarrassment rise in you all at once—small, humiliating, absurd. Like some silly schoolgirl losing her train of thought because a boy is too close and too pretty and too attentive. The realization sends a soft flush creeping over your face, and you drop your gaze quickly before he can catch it.

Of course he catches it anyway.

Maybe not the reason. Maybe not the full shape of it. But he sees enough. He always does.

Your attention falls to his hands instead.

They are both heavily scarred, broad and rough and marked all over with old damage, each line and patch of uneven skin a record of everything he has survived, everything he has thrown himself into, everything he has sacrificed.

A hero’s hands. Working hands.

Hands that have held too hard and held too gently. Hands that have hurt you and cared for you in equal measure. Without really thinking, you reach for one of them.

Your fingers trace the path of the scars lightly.

That too, has become a routine, somehow.

Your fingertips drift over the textured lines with absent care, following the ridges and softened edges as if reading something written there. His skin is warm. Calloused. Solid beneath your touch. Big enough to make your own hand feel slight.

You think, distantly and with a strange pang, that his hands are rough but they are his.

The thought comes uninvited, and you almost recoil from it—not from the contact, but from the way your mind frames it. Possessive in reverse. Intimate in a way that makes your pulse stutter.

You swallow.

“Nothing,” you say at last.

The word comes out quieter than you intend. Almost shy. Almost petulant. Almost embarrassed.

He doesn't answer right away.

Instead, he lets out a warm little chuckle under his breath, the sound low and fond and immediately wrapped in that unbearable softness of his.

When you finally risk looking up at him again, there is a smile at the corner of his mouth—small, knowing, so tender it nearly makes you angry. Not mocking, just affectionate in that way he gets when he thinks your quietness is cute, when he thinks he has glimpsed something vulnerable and precious and has decided to cradle it rather than call it out.

Then his fingers slip beneath your chin.

He tips your face up with infuriating gentleness, green eyes lingering on you for one brief charged second before he leans down and kisses you.

He kisses you a little hard and a little deep, like warmth edged with want, like fondness tipped into possession at the last second. It steals your breath more from surprise than anything else. His mouth is warm, insistent in that familiar way of his, and for one suspended moment the whole kitchen seems to narrow to the press of his lips, the hand at your chin, the smell of sukiyaki still simmering behind him as if the world has not tilted at all.

Then he pulls away before the moment can settle fully into something larger.

His hand squeezes your ass. “You’re so cute, baby,” he coos softly, the words full of easy affection, as though this is all simple. As though your flustered silence is merely something sweet to tease you for. As though the way your pulse is jumping has only one meaning.

Then he turns back to the food.

Just like that.

That might be the strangest thing of all—that he can do something that intimate, that destabilizing, and then return to the stove with such domestic ease. Stirring the broth. Checking the heat. Moving around the kitchen like a man making dinner for someone beloved, as if he has not just left your mouth tingling and your thoughts in disarray.

You stand there for a second longer, saying nothing.

The kitchen is still warm. The sukiyaki still bubbles. He is still there, broad and scarred and careful, back turned for now as he hums softly to himself and tends the meal.

You ignore the lump in your throat.

(And you ignore the flutter in your chest too. )

────────────────────────

You try again today.

The room is dark except for the thin wash of city light slipping through the curtains, enough to silver the edges of his face when you tilt your head up from where it rests against his bicep.

His skin is warm beneath your cheek. His body is half-loose with sleep and half-attentive in the way it always is around you, like even in rest some part of him stays awake to listen for every shift in your breathing, every rustle of the sheets, every word you might offer him in the dark. His fingers had been tracing slow thoughtless paths around your thighs and lower belly, not pushing for anything, just touching the way he does when he wants to soothe himself with your nearness.

The gesture is lazy, intimate, almost tender enough to be mistaken for normal in the dark.

“I want to go outside,” you whisper.

The words are small, but they cut through the room cleanly.

Izuku stills immediately.

His fingers lift from your skin at once, hovering for just a second before retreating entirely, and when he blinks down at you there is a softness in his face that makes your chest tighten for all the wrong reasons. He looks tired. Gentle. Caught off guard. Like he already knows exactly where this is going and hates that he knows.

His curls fall into his eyes a little, shadowing that open green gaze. “You know the answer already, baby,” he mumbles, voice rough with the hour and threaded through with careful patience. “But I promise that soon I’ll ta—”

“You always say that.”

You cut across him before you can stop yourself. The words come sharper than you mean them to, sharpened by repetition, by disappointment worn thin so many times it has become raw. For a second the dark seems to hold its breath around the two of you.

He sighs.

Not annoyed, not exactly. It's worse than that. The sound is heavy with sadness, with that familiar vulnerability he wears so easily whenever you push against the shape of the life he has built around you, like he is the one trying to hold something fragile together while you keep forcing cracks into it.

“I just want to—” he begins, and the ache in his voice is immediate, as though he is already preparing another careful explanation, another promise with no date attached to it, another soft refusal dressed up as concern.

Something in you snaps before he can finish.

You sit up in a jolt, the blanket twisting around your legs, your body moving faster than your thoughts. For one hot reckless second you have to physically stop yourself from saying the thing clawing at the back of your throat—the crueler thing, the sharper thing, the thing that would make the whole room change.

You know him well enough now to recognize the edge of danger even in the dark. To know which words make his face go still. Which ones make his gentleness harden into something unmovable.

So instead you say the truth.

“Izuku, please.” Your voice breaks almost immediately, the plea splitting open before you can make it steadier. “I’m so sick of being here. I want to leave. I want to go outside. I want to go home.”

Home.

It tears out of you raw and desperate, and by the time it lands you are already crying, the sob catching hard in your throat as if the word itself has a blade inside it.

Home. Not this room, not this apartment, not these careful routines and soft little domestic gestures that keep trying to imitate a life.

Home as in yours. Home as in the place that existed before all this. Home as in choice, sunlight, ordinary loneliness, your own bed, your own door, your own self. The grief of it hits all at once.

Izuku’s face breaks the second he hears you cry.

It's immediate, devastating, completely sincere. Something flashes over him so openly it makes him look younger for a second, like that earnest boy who used to carry everyone else’s hurt in both hands is still inside him somewhere, still panicking at the sight of tears.

“Baby, please, don’t cry—” he says quickly, pushing himself up too, his voice fraying at the edges. But even as he speaks, his pupils blow wide and his breath catches, like something dark and hungry is waking up inside him.

“I want to go home,” you repeat, softer this time, but crying harder.

The words are quieter now. Broken. Childlike in their grief. That only makes them more unbearable.

Something shifts in his face.

It's subtle at first. A tiny change around the mouth. Around the eyes. The guilt is still there, the pain still there, but something underneath it firms. Settles.

His expression loses some of its softness, not into anger exactly but into something steadier and more dangerous than anger: certainty. The conviction that has always been the most frightening thing about him. He looks at you the way he does when he thinks you are spiraling into something he has to manage, something he has to protect you from even if you hate him for it.

“You are home, baby,” he says.

His voice is still soft. That is what makes it horrible.

Izuku shifts on the bed, letting his hand settle on—on his fucking bulge.

The sick fuck is getting hard.

It isn’t the first time your tears have done this to him, but the sight still floods you with disgust—and fear.

Your breath hitches. You try to swallow down the lump in your throat, try not to show what he does to you, try not to let the fear show on your face. You blink hard, forcing bravado into your voice even as your hands tremble.

“No.” The word comes out instantly. Sharper now, desperate enough to shake. “No, I’m not.” You wipe at your face with shaking hands, breath hitching, and something wild takes hold of you in the space his softness opens up. “And i-if you—if you aren’t going to let me go, I will leave myself.”

You barely get the words out before you move.

It is not even a real attempt, not really. Not planned. Not practical. Just instinct. Just grief turning into motion. You shove at the sheets and try to scramble away from the bed, away from him, away from the room before you can think about how impossible it is.

He catches your wrist instantly, grip locking around you like iron.

The force of it stops you so hard it sends a shock through your whole arm. You gasp and twist, trying to wrench free, but he is already sitting up fully now, already awake in that terrifying way of his, body moving with fast automatic precision.

In an instant he is all muscle and control and awful gentle efficiency. His fingers wrap fully around your wrist, firm enough that you know immediately you are not getting loose.

When you look at his face, your stomach drops.

There is something dangerous there.

Not rage. Not the loud kind. Izuku is not loud when he is like this. That would almost be easier. No, this is quieter than that. His jaw is tight. His eyes are darkened, not empty but intensely focused, like all the softness in him has been pulled inward and compressed into a single unshakable point.

He looks hurt. He looks scared. He looks like someone holding himself back with both hands.

“Let me go!” you cry, twisting against him, panic flaring so hot it makes your whole body shake. You tug again, harder this time, and his grip only tightens in response. “Izuku, you—you’re hurting me—”

The words hit him. You see them hit.

His expression flickers, guilt flashing again, but it doesn't loosen his hand. If anything, the pain on his face only deepens the terrible resolve in him. He sits up straighter, still holding your wrist, and the mattress dips under the shift of his weight.

“You know I can’t let you leave,” he murmurs.

His voice is low, controlled, and that makes it worse. He is trying so hard to sound calm. Reassuring. Like he is talking you down from a ledge instead of pinning you in place.

“But it’s okay, baby. This is just a little hiccup.” His thumb presses once against the inside of your wrist, a gesture that could almost be soothing if not for the force of his hold. “You’ll soon realize this is for your own good.”

Cold sweeps through you.

You do not like the sound of that. Not at all.

There is a tone he gets sometimes when he has decided something. A tone that says the argument is already over in his head, that whatever happens next is not something you will be allowed to change. You hear it now, soft as velvet and just as suffocating.

Then you hear the chains.

The sound is unmistakable.

Metal dragging against the floor. A low, ugly scrape from beneath the bed, followed by the clinking spill of links being drawn out into the dark. For a second your mind refuses to process it. It feels too immediate, too cruel, too predictable in the exact way you had been trying not to expect. Then you look down and see them in his other hand, the cold glint of metal catching what little light there is.

Your whole body goes numb with dread.

No.

The word doesn’t even feel big enough for what rushes through you. Fear hits first, then shame, then that awful helplessness you have come to know too well—the sensation of the room shrinking, of consequence arriving with the slow certainty of weather.

You had wanted outside. Sun. Air. Sky. Home.

Instead you have walked yourself straight back into punishment.

“No—Izuku, no, please, no!”

Your voice cracks apart on the plea.

(But it's already too late.)

────────────────────────

You avoid him for the next few days.

Or at least you try to.

There is only so much avoiding a person can do in a space like this, where the walls are finite and his presence fills every room whether he is physically in it or not. Even when he is gone, traces of him remain everywhere—his folded clothes, the groceries he brings back, the low hum of routines built around your needs, the evidence of a life he keeps trying to make feel gentle enough to live inside.

But when he is here, when he moves through the apartment with that careful quietness of his, you make yourself into something turned away. Something closed. You don't look at him if you can help it. You don't answer unless you absolutely have to. The only language you offer him is distance.

Your neck hurts the worst.

That surprises you, even though it shouldn't. Your wrists ache, your ankles too—those are old pains by now, familiar in the ugliest way, mapped into your body by repetition.

But it has been a while since it was your neck, and that difference matters.

It's not just pain. It's the location of it. The vulnerability of it. The way it changes everything. Every swallow feels wrong. Every turn of your head pulls at something sore and tight and bruised beneath the skin.

It's too tight for the first day, too present, too impossible to ignore. It keeps you from sleeping properly. Keeps you hovering in that miserable place between waking and exhaustion where every movement reminds you of the metal there and every stillness is its own kind of discomfort.

The first twenty-four hours are the worst.

You cry.

You don't mean to cry as much as you do, but pain has a way of stripping you down to something more raw and frightened than pride can manage.

You claw at it until your nails ache, fingers scrabbling uselessly at the thing around your throat, trying to wedge space where there is none, trying to tear yourself free through sheer panic and desperation. It's ugly. Frantic. Humiliating. Your breaths come too fast. Your eyes blur. Your hands shake. You pull until your skin burns and your muscles seize and nothing changes.

Nothing ever changes.

That's the most devastating part.

Because afterward—after the crying, after the clawing, after your body gives out before the metal does—something in you goes flat. Not calm, not exactly. Just spent. Burned through.

You sit there with bloodshot eyes and a throat gone raw from breathing around fear and come face-to-face with the same old truth again: how useless it was. How useless it always is. How this keeps happening and still, some miserable animal part of you keeps trying to fight it like the ending might be different this time.

It never is.

And eventually even the panic exhausts itself.

What comes after is a kind of dissonance you have started to know too well. A hollowed-out quiet. You stare at nothing for long stretches of time. You stop yanking at it. Stop wasting energy on futile little acts of resistance that only leave your skin more tender than it already is.

Your thoughts move slower. Heavier. As if the mind, when pressed hard enough against the fact of its own powerlessness, begins to dim for its own protection. It's not acceptance. You refuse to call it that. But it is some adjacent and uglier thing. A temporary truce between your body and the reality it cannot change.

By the second day the skin has started to turn.

Purple fading into yellow at the edges. Bruises blooming and softening all at once, ugly little constellations forming beneath the surface.

The skin there feels scuffed and raw, tender in a way that never lets you forget it, every brush of fabric a reminder, every shift of your chin an irritation. Even once the worst of the pressure dulls, the ache remains. Low, stubborn, humiliatingly intimate. The kind of ache that becomes part of your posture, part of the way you hold your head, part of the way you move through the room as if some invisible hand is always still there.

Izuku notices all of it.

It's the curse of him—that there is no wound on you he does not register, no change in your face he does not catalogue, no silence he does not feel the texture of. He still holds you. Still apologizes in that soft, cooing voice that sounds so genuine it makes your stomach twist. Still strokes your hair with warm fingers and presses kisses to your temple, your cheek, the edges of your pain as though tenderness can somehow unmake the fact of what caused it.

He pulls you close with that same aching reverence, tells you he loves you, tells you he is sorry, tells you he wishes you would not make things harder like this, as though the tragedy lies in your resistance rather than his restraint.

You don't answer him.

Not with words, at least.

The only reply you give him is the soft clink of metal when you turn away.

It becomes its own kind of statement after a while. The sound of refusal. The sound of your body choosing distance in the only direction it still can. When he gathers you in, you let yourself go heavy and unresponsive. When he whispers apologies into your hair, you stare past him. When he asks quiet little questions about how much it hurts, if the collar is rubbing, if you need anything, you offer him your shoulder, your silence, the chain shifting when you roll away from the warmth of his chest.

It's a small punishment, maybe. A small resistance. But he feels it. You know he does. Every time the links clink when you turn from him, there is the faintest pause in his breathing. The tiniest ache in the way he says your name.

So you count instead.

Days. Hours. Anything measurable.

Five days and seven hours.

You count them the way prisoners must count light through bars, the way sailors lost at sea must count rations, the way anyone trapped learns to make structure out of what little can still be tracked. Five days and seven hours until he finally removes them. Five days and seven hours of soreness, silence, and his soft guilt circling around you like an animal that does not know it is the one that bit.

And when the moment comes, it's the same as it always is.

Routine.

That is how horror survives longest, you think. Not as an explosion. As repetition.

He kneels in front of you with those careful hands of his. Unfastens the metal with maddening gentleness, as if tenderness in the process changes the nature of the thing. The second it comes away, the skin beneath it throbs with sudden sensitivity, cool air touching places kept sore for too long. He kisses the bruises immediately, like he cannot bear not to. His mouth brushes the marks with the same warmth he gives everything wounded on you.

Then comes the ointment, smoothed over the darkened skin with slow, apologetic fingers. He rubs it in carefully, checking your face every few seconds for the slightest sign of pain, adjusting pressure the moment you flinch. He tells you how pretty you look. How much he loves you. How good you are for him.

The words make something ugly move under your ribs.

Because the whole thing is so practiced now. So horribly familiar. His care arrives in the exact shape of the wound. His remorse always follows his control. He tends what he has damaged with the concentration of a man handling something precious, and all the while speaks to you in that low, warm murmur that might have been comforting in any other life.

(Like a pet.)

There is something in the structure of it, in the praise threaded through correction, in the way he rewards your stillness with softness, in the way his voice gentles when you stop fighting and let him care for you. Something about the way he strokes you after, soothes you after, murmurs what a good girl you are for him after the damage is done. The affection is real. That is what makes it unbearable. It's not mockery. It's adoration filtered through ownership.

You are tired, though.

That is the truth that wins in the end more often than anything else.

Tired in the body, tired in the mind, tired in that deep marrow way that makes every reaction feel like lifting stone.

So when he pulls you against him afterward, once the ointment is spread and the marks are kissed and the chains are gone, you let him. When his hand slides into your hair and smooths it back from your face, you let him. When he presses his cheek to your forehead and wraps his arms around you with a grateful sort of tenderness, you let that happen too.

Not because you forgive him. Not because you want this.

But because sometimes resistance costs more than stillness, and your body has become very good at calculating which pain is survivable in the moment.

So you let him touch you. You let him hold you.

And let him love you in his sick, twisted way.

────────────────────────

There is a bouquet on the bed today.

For a second, when you first see it, you just stand there.

It looks almost unreal in the soft light—too vivid, too carefully chosen, too beautiful for this room that has held so many ugly things.

It's not the kind of bouquet you might expect from someone trying to ask forgiveness in the simplest, most obvious way. There are no roses. No pale peonies. No safe, predictable chrysanthemums arranged into something polite and easy to understand.

No—this is something… stranger.

More specific. Red tulips, their petals smooth and rich like lacquer. Heliotropes with their dusky little clusters, delicate and velvety. Sunflowers bright and open-faced, almost painfully alive. Bluebells, soft as rain. Bleeding hearts, those fragile little blossoms that look exactly like their name, like tiny pink-red hearts split open and hanging from a stem.

They're beautiful.

Really beautiful.

So beautiful that for one disorienting moment you cannot do anything but stare at them.

The arrangement feels less like a gift and more like something out of a story—something a prince would carry through a shadowed forest to lay at the feet of a creature he has wounded and hopes to enchant again. It makes you think of old fairy tales in the worst way. Of girls lured by sweetness. Of fae bargains. Of peace offerings left on mossy stones by those who have already trespassed too far.

The flowers seem almost enchanted in their own right, vivid enough to make the whole bed look softer, stranger, touched by a different world.

Beside them are other things.

A nightgown.

Your favorite perfume.

And otoshibumi.

The sight of that small confection catches in your chest almost as much as the flowers do. It's green like a leaf. Like spring. Like his eyes in certain light when they soften and lose some of their danger. Its shape is delicate and precise, the rolled leaf form of nerikiri crafted so carefully it almost looks too pretty to eat.

You know immediately that it will be sweet and soft and almost melt on the tongue.

It looks mouthwateringly good. That kind of good that aches a little when you are tired, when you have been hungry in more ways than one, when something beautiful and gentle placed in front of you feels almost unbearable.

Your neck still throbs.

That is the first thing you feel when you swallow the lump in your throat.

The pain is duller than it was, but still there. Still persistent. Your wrists and ankles ache too, like little pockets of soreness left behind like old weather. The body remembers what the mind tries to move around. Even standing there taking in the sight of the bed and its offerings, you can feel all the places that still hurt. The tenderness beneath the skin. The bruises not quite gone. The heaviness of your own exhaustion sitting low in your bones.

And beside the bed stands Izuku.

He isn't touching anything.

He is just there, close enough to feel like presence, far enough to look almost uncertain. There is a tension in him that immediately gives him away. His shoulders are too careful. His hands hang strangely still at his sides.

He looks like he is waiting for a verdict. Waiting for your face to change. Waiting, maybe, for forgiveness, or for a glance, or for anything at all that proves he has not ruined the possibility of reaching you entirely.

You do look.

For some tired reason, you do.

Maybe because the flowers are so beautiful. Maybe because he looks so painfully hopeful standing there. Maybe because exhaustion makes people softer around the edges, even when they do not want to be. Your eyes lift to him, slow and worn-out, and he catches the look like someone catching breath after being underwater too long.

A soft, hoarse thank you leaves you before you can stop it.

The words scrape a little on the way out. Your throat is still not fully right. It makes the gratitude sound smaller. More fragile. And the instant he hears it, something in him lights up.

He beams.

Not in that bright, unguarded way he might have once, long before everything got so twisted. This is warmer than that. More contained, but no less real. Relief moves through him first, then happiness, then that same reverent softness that always makes your chest feel too tight.

“You’re welcome, baby,” he says quickly, and the tenderness in his voice is immediate, almost boyishly eager despite how careful he is trying to be. “Do you—do you like it?”

The question catches you a little.

He sounds nervous.

It gets under your skin. Not because it changes anything, but because it makes him seem so earnest, so heartbreakingly sincere in the way he always is when he wants your approval. As though he has spent all this time thinking about what to choose and now stands in the aftermath of that effort suddenly unsure whether he got it right.

You blink once, then nod.

“Yeah.”

It's only one word.

But it's enough to undo him just a little.

His whole face softens. The tension he was holding in his body eases by a fraction, and with a gentleness so careful it almost hurts to witness, he reaches for the bouquet. He lifts it from the bed and places it in your arms as though handing you something sacred. Something living.

The stems are cool in your hands. The flowers are heavier than you expected. Their scent rises immediately—green and sweet and bright and soft all at once. You can smell the sunflowers first, then the tulips, then something deeper and more floral underneath. They smell good. They look beautiful. The colors against each other are so vivid they almost dazzle.

Your heart does something strange.

A weird, unsteady movement in your chest, like something old and fragile is trying to wake up where it should not. It makes you feel off-balance. Makes you tighten your hold on the bouquet without really meaning to. The flowers brush against your wrists, your forearms, your chest. Their softness against skin that has known only ache these last days feels almost cruel in its tenderness.

You look back up at him with tired eyes.

And he is looking at you like you are the most beautiful thing in the room.

That gaze of his has always been part of the problem. The way it lands too fully. Too devotedly. He never looks at you in passing. Never with anything less than all of himself. Even now, even after everything, even with the bruises he knows are still healing and the tension that still lives in your body, he looks at you as though the sight of you standing there holding those flowers is enough to split him open with feeling.

When he leans in to kiss you, it's slow; slow enough for you to turn away, slow enough for you to stop him.

You don’t.

You kiss him back.

The realization is immediate and terrible.

Not because the kiss is forceful. It isn’t. He kisses you with astonishing gentleness, like he is afraid to startle you, like he is aware of how fragile the moment is and knows it could vanish if he presses too hard. His lips are warm. Careful. Lingering. It is not a hungry kiss. Not demanding. Just soft and full of that unbearable, aching gratitude that seems to pour out of him whenever you give him even the smallest thing.

Your mouth answers his before your mind can rise up and stop it. Maybe it's exhaustion. Maybe it is the flowers in your arms, their scent wrapping around you both. Maybe it's the way he asked do you like it with such naked hope in his voice. Maybe it's that you are tired—tired in the body, tired in the heart, tired enough that your resistance has grown thin in places you cannot always protect.

Whatever the reason, the kiss becomes mutual for one suspended moment.

When he finally pulls away, he does it reluctantly, like the distance costs him.

The warmth of the kiss stays with you.

It lingers on your mouth. In your face. In your chest in a place too close to the strange ache already there. You hold the bouquet closer without thinking, as though the flowers can steady you, as though you can hide inside their scent and softness from the fact of what just happened.

Izuku doesn't speak right away.

For a second, he simply looks at you, and his expression is devastating. Not smug. Not triumphant. Something quieter. Something more fragile. He looks like a man who has just been handed a miracle too delicate to celebrate out loud; he looks at you like you are something he has grown himself, and the worst part is how you begin to feel like it.

Then, very softly, “You look so pretty holding them.”

The words sink into the hush between you.

You lower your eyes to the bouquet again, suddenly unable to bear the full weight of his gaze. Red tulips. Bluebells. Bleeding hearts. Your favorite perfume waiting beside the nightgown. The little green otoshibumi like a rolled leaf from some gentler world. Everything arranged so carefully. Everything chosen with intent.

You stand in a room that has held your grief, your fear, your anger, and now this too—this terrible, quiet moment that feels almost sweet if you let yourself stop looking directly at its edges.

It frightens you the most.

Not that he can hurt you or hold you, but that he can fill a bed with flowers and confection and softness, kiss you like you are something precious, and leave your heart feeling strange and unsteady all the same.

You cradle the bouquet tighter.

The petals brush your skin like a blessing; like a warning.

Like both.

This time, when he initiates it, you do not recoil.

You don't turn your face away like you always have before, chin tilting sharply toward the wall or shoulder curling inward to create even an inch of distance. Instead, you stay still—tired, worn thin, hollowed out by the weight of endless resistance that has only ever led back to the same soft chains.

Something twisted and aching inside you needs this tonight. Needs the distraction. Needs the momentary erasure of thought. Needs the way his touch can flood your body with sensation so overwhelming it drowns the sharper griefs, if only for a little while.

Izuku senses the shift immediately, of course he does.

He has always been attuned to the smallest changes—the flicker of an expression, the hitch in breath, the way a shoulder relaxes by a fraction—and with you that attentiveness has sharpened into something almost painful in its devotion.

His scarred hand rises slowly, giving you every chance to change your mind, before his palm cups your cheek with heartbreaking gentleness, thumb brushing just beneath the fading bruise on your neck as though he can erase it through touch alone.

You let him kiss you.

His mouth meets yours with the same careful warmth as before, but deeper now, slower, laced with that sincere hunger he can never quite hide. His lips are soft yet insistent, moving against yours like a question he has asked a thousand times and still fears the answer to.

You answer it tonight—not with passion, but with quiet acceptance, your own mouth softening under his, parting just enough to let the kiss settle into something mutual and heavy. The taste of him is familiar: faintly sweet from the otoshibumi he must have sampled earlier, warm with the lingering broth from dinner, and underneath it all that clean, green scent that clings to his skin like spring after rain.

When his tongue traces the seam of your lips, you do not pull away; you let it slip inside, let the slow slide of it coax a faint shiver from your body. Izuku groans softly into the kiss, the sound vibrating through you—raw, grateful, almost pained in its sincerity.

His free hand settles at your waist, fingers splaying wide over the fabric of your clothes, not gripping hard but holding you steady as though you are something precious that might slip away if he is not careful enough.

He guides you back onto the bed without breaking the kiss, movements fluid and reverent, the mattress dipping under your combined weight as the bouquet shifts slightly beside you, petals whispering against the sheets like secrets.

You let him.

You let his hands slide down your sides, let him peel away your panties, the silk whispering over your skin like a promise he is desperate to keep.

He spreads your legs apart with those strong, gentle hands—scarred palms warm against the insides of your thighs, thumbs stroking soothing circles into the skin as he settles between them. You let him do that too. Your thighs part wider under his touch, knees falling open in quiet invitation born of exhaustion and need, the cool air of the room brushing against your already damp folds.

Izuku’s breath hitches audibly at the sight, his shoulders trembling with restraint as he lowers himself, green curls brushing your inner thighs.

His mouth finds you first.

Warm. Wet. Devoted.

He laps at your folds with long, slow stripes of his tongue, savoring the taste of you like a man who has been starving for salvation. Spit gathers quickly, slick and abundant, coating your pussy as he licks from your entrance up to your clit, circling the swollen nub with deliberate, warm strokes before sucking it gently into his mouth.

The sensation is overwhelming in its tenderness—hot pressure mixed with the soft drag of his tongue, the wet sounds of his feasting filling the quiet room like a private hymn.

You bury your face into the pillow, muffling the soft whines and moans that rise unbidden from your throat, the fabric cool against your flushed cheeks. Your thighs shake around his head, toes curling tightly into the sheets, yet you spread your legs even wider, hips tilting up in silent plea, opening yourself further so he can slot in deeper, so the pleasure can reach further, so it can make everything feel better, even if only for these stolen moments.

He always makes it feel better, in that twisted, aching way that leaves shame blooming hot in your chest afterward.

Izuku moans against you, the vibration traveling straight through your core as his pointer and middle fingers join his mouth. They slide in knuckle-deep with effortless ease, your walls already slick and welcoming despite everything, curling slowly inside you to stroke that sensitive spot with precise, twisting motions.

His wrist turns gently, fingers pumping in and out in a steady, unhurried rhythm that matches the licks and sucks on your clit—coordinated, attentive, utterly focused on unraveling you. Each thrust of his fingers is accompanied by a swirl of his tongue, the dual sensation building pressure low in your belly like a tide rising under moonlight.

Your moans grow softer, more muddled, lost in the pillow as your body betrays you with trembling waves of pleasure, hips rocking weakly against his face in search of more.

He reacts with pure, devastating sincerity—tears gathering at the corners of his eyes as he glances up at you between your thighs, green gaze glassy with awe and guilt and love so vast it seems to swallow the room.

“That’s it… let me hear you, baby,” he whispers against your clit, voice hoarse and trembling, breath hot against your sensitive flesh. “You’re doing so good… so good for me. I-I love you like this—open for me, letting me take care of you. I’m sorry for everything… but I’ll make it all feel right. I promise.”

His fingers curl deeper, twisting just so, while his lips seal around your clit again, sucking with tender insistence as his tongue flicks rapidly over the nub. The combination pulls another broken whine from you, thighs quivering violently as the coil tightens, your body chasing the release he offers like a lifeline in the dark.

The flowers watch from the edge of the bed, their petals soft and vivid in the low light, a silent audience to the intimate scene—beauty laid beside bruises, sweetness beside surrender. Izuku’s free hand strokes your thigh soothingly, scarred fingers tracing gentle patterns as if to remind you that even in this, he is gentle, he is careful, he is only loving you the only way he knows how.

Your face stays buried in the pillow, soft moans spilling out in fragmented gasps, body arching and trembling under the relentless, worshipful assault of his mouth and fingers. The pleasure builds in long waves—warm and golden and edged with shame—until it crests, crashing through you in shuddering pulses that leave you gasping, walls clenching rhythmically around his fingers as your clit throbs against his tongue.

He stays with you through every tremor, licking and stroking you through the aftershocks with the same devoted patience, murmuring soft praises against your skin. “So perfect… my good girl… I’ve got you.” When the waves finally ebb, leaving you limp and trembling, he presses one last reverent kiss to your oversensitive clit before crawling up your body, gathering you into his arms with trembling care.

His heart hammers against your chest, fast and earnest, as he nuzzles into your neck—careful of the bruises—and whispers endless apologies and declarations of love into your hair, voice thick with emotion.

You lie there in the aftermath, bouquet petals brushing your arm, body still humming with unwanted warmth, the ache between your legs now mixed with the deeper ache in your chest. The surrender feels like both relief and defeat, a fracture where exhaustion has carved space for his devotion to settle.

Izuku holds you tighter, scarred hands stroking your back in slow, soothing circles, his green eyes shining with quiet, hopeful tears as he presses soft kisses to your temple, convinced once more that this closeness, this pleasure, this moment of you not pulling away is proof that his love is healing what he has broken.

(And maybe he's right.)

In the quiet glow of the room, with flowers and confection and the heavy warmth of his body surrounding you, you feel the terrible, unsteady shift in your heart; that something small and fragile is stirring again, like petals unfurling in the dark, beautiful and dangerous all at once.

────────────────────────

For some reason, after that, you start gravitating toward him more.

Not in a way that is easy to name. Not in a way that feels intentional enough to confess, even to yourself. It happens in small, humiliating increments—in the quiet little shifts of habit that would look like nothing to anyone else and yet feel enormous inside your own body.

When he is home and sitting on the couch, broad shoulders sunk into the cushions after work or patrol, you find yourself drifting there too. You sit beside him without waiting for him to ask, without waiting for the familiar gesture of his arm opening for you first. Sometimes you leave a little space between you. Sometimes hardly any at all.

The worst part is how natural it starts to feel, as if your body is learning his orbit without your permission, as if some silent thread has begun tugging you in his direction every time he is near.

You hate that you do it.

You hate it even more because it does not feel dramatic. There is no grand surrender to point to, no sharp moment where you can say this is where I changed. It's subtler than that. More frightening.

You just… start appearing near him.

You start choosing rooms where he already is. Start lingering instead of retreating the second he comes home. There are evenings where he is reading through some report or half-watching something on the television, and you come sit beside him with a book or nothing at all, only to realize ten minutes later that you have been listening to the sound of him breathing more than anything else.

As though presence itself has become a kind of narcotic. As though your loneliness, starved thing that it is, has begun learning the shape of relief in the outline of him.

And then there are the mornings in the bathroom.

He stands at the sink brushing his teeth or washing his face or tugging a shirt over his shoulders, and somehow you end up leaning in the doorway watching him. Not entering fully. Not speaking much. Just there, hovering at the edge of the room while the mirror catches him in pieces—his broad back, the strong line of his neck, the wet green curls pushed away from his forehead, the scar beneath his eye standing out pale in the wash of morning light.

There is something intimate about those moments in a way that disturbs you. Something so ordinary it becomes almost sacred. He is simply existing. Sleep-roughened, quiet and tired in small human ways.

And you stand there looking at him as if the sight alone has become something you need.

You don't think he notices. Or maybe you do think he notices, and the lie is easier to live with.

Because Izuku notices everything.

That has always been true of him—before this, during this, probably after this too if there ever is an after. He notices the things most people miss because noticing is how he loves, how he protects, how he understands. He notices which side you curl toward when you sleep, the exact cadence of your footsteps when you are upset, the way your voice changes when you are lying versus when you are simply tired.

So of course he notices when you sit near him before he reaches for you. Of course he notices when you appear in the bathroom doorway and linger there longer than necessary. Of course he notices your gaze resting on him in those quiet domestic moments when you think he is too busy to feel it.

But if he does, he doesn't mention it.

You take what he gives the way roots take water: quietly, desperately, and without asking where it comes from.

And you feel weird.

So weird.

There is no cleaner word for it. You feel off-balance inside your own skin, like the ground of you has tilted by some imperceptible degree and now every feeling slides in directions it should not. Because his kisses are soft. His laugh is warm. He is beautiful in that tired, scarred, earnest way of his.

He makes you feel safe.

Safe.

You don't want it. You don't trust it. The idea itself makes your stomach twist, because what could be more twisted than finding safety in the same hands that took so much from you?

And yet the feeling comes anyway in flashes too brief to catch and too real to deny: in the warmth of his palm at your back when you are half-asleep and cold, in the steadiness of his breathing when the apartment feels too quiet, in the way he checks the lock twice at night not to keep you in, your mind whispers traitorously, but because some part of him is always trying to keep the rest of the world out.

Safety becomes ugly when it grows in captivity. It becomes confused with predictability, with routine, with the simple relief of knowing exactly where the danger is and how gently it will speak to you tonight.

And still your body responds to it.

That is the horror. That is the shame.

There are evenings when he leans in to kiss you and you do not tense until after. Times when his mouth moves against yours slow and deep, patient enough to feel almost reverent, and you let yourself sink into it for one impossible second before your mind catches up and fills with static. He kisses like he is trying to tell you something beyond words, like every soft press of his lips is another page from the same aching confession: I love you, I love you, I love you.

It should be easier to resist than it is.

Easier to keep your face turned away, your mouth closed, your body locked in its old refusals. But something about the warmth of him, the consistency of him, the way he always seems to meet you with more tenderness than triumph when you soften, begins to wear at your edges.

One night he kisses you and when he pulls away he stays close enough that his breath still warms your lips. His hand is cradling your face, thumb resting along your cheekbone, the roughness of his scarred skin so gentle against you it almost hurts.

His eyes are half-lidded when he looks at you, green darkened by softness, mouth still slightly parted from the kiss. “My pretty baby,” he murmurs.

The words are quiet. Full of fondness. Full of that same aching awe he always seems to carry for you, as though even now, even after everything, he cannot quite believe he is allowed to touch you at all.

And your heart—your stupid, traitorous heart—does a small helpless flip in your chest.

It is such a tiny thing physically, no more than a flutter really, but it feels catastrophic. You feel it everywhere at once: in the heat that creeps up your throat, in the sudden weakness in your knees, in the way your breath catches and then softens on the way out. It embarrasses you so quickly and so completely that you cannot even look at him for another second.

Instead you bury your cheek deeper into the hand holding your face, eyes slipping closed like that will hide you from the feeling, from his gaze, from yourself.

Because that is what these moments are, aren’t they? Scraps. A seat beside him on the couch. Your silent presence in the bathroom doorway. The way you let your face rest in his hand instead of turning away. Small things. Accidental things. Exhausted things. And yet he receives them like offerings. Like petals laid carefully into his palms. Like proof that something soft is growing where once there was only resistance.

Maybe something is growing.

You do not want to examine that too closely.

It is easier to focus on the little details instead. The warmth of his laugh when he catches you already settled beside him on the couch and says nothing, only drapes an arm over the back cushion so the space beside him feels more like somewhere meant for you. The way he glances toward the doorway mirror when you linger there and offers you that soft little smile that says he knew you were there all along. The way his kisses never start rough, never assume, always arrive like questions even when he is trembling with the hope of the answer. All of it gathers into something heavier than the sum of its parts.

A life.

Not a real one. Not an honest one. But the outline of one.

You begin to understand how people stay in enchantments. Not because they do not know they are trapped, but because the trap learns how to mimic warmth. How to offer tenderness at exactly the moment loneliness has made tenderness feel holy. He has made a world around you that is both cage and comfort, and your exhausted heart, the poor stupid thing, has started responding to comfort even while your mind still sees the bars.

There is no sun here, not really. Only him—and somehow your body has learned the difference doesn’t matter.

He leans in then and presses another kiss to the corner of your closed eye. Light as breath. His hand remains cupping your face as though he cannot bear to let go yet, as though your cheek fitting so trustingly into his palm has unmade something inside him.

You keep your eyes shut.

Because if you open them, you might have to look directly at what this is becoming.

(Your moan breaks out as a choked sob, raw and trembling, the sound fracturing in the quiet room as he bounces you on his cock like some ragdoll, your nightgown rucked up beneath your breasts, the thin fabric bunched like surrendered silk while Izuku holds you there with his stron hands wrapped around your waist.

His cock is thick and throbbing inside you, stretching you open with that familiar, overwhelming fullness that has always bordered on too much. It has always been like this—too long, too girthy, pressing against every sensitive ridge and spot until your walls flutter helplessly around him.

His thighs beneath you are powerful, heavily muscled, (the same thighs that have dragged you along their firm length countless times until you shattered against them) slick and shaking. Now they flex with each upward thrust, lifting you only to drop you back down, the wet slap of skin meeting skin echoing softly alongside your broken sounds.

You are not moving on your own. You are being used—lifted and lowered with his strength alone—yet every ounce of pleasure is focused on you, centered on the way your overstimulated cunt creams around his length, coating him in glistening slick and white.

You've already come three times tonight.

Your thighs tremble violently against his hips, muscles twitching with exhaustion and overstimulation, every nerve raw and sparking. The nightgown clings damply to your skin where it has been pushed aside, exposing your breasts to his hungry mouth. Izuku mouths at them with desperate reverence, lips closing around one nipple to suck and lick while his tongue swirls in slow, worshipful circles.

A low, rougher moan escapes him—deeper than usual, edged with strain—as if the taste of you is unraveling him thread by thread. He looks beautifully disheveled: green curls messy and falling into his eyes, tie half-loosened around his neck, white shirt unbuttoned just enough to reveal the expanse of his chest, trousers shoved down only far enough to free his cock. His green eyes are lidded and warm, glowing like polished tourmaline caught in soft lamplight.

The resistance that once burned so fiercely has dulled into weary acceptance, your body too spent from the accumulating weight of these shifting habits to push him away with any real force. Now your hands rest weakly on his shoulders, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt without strength, more anchor than protest.

“I-Izuku… ‘Zuku, please—” The plea slips out in a fractured whimper, voice thick with overstimulation and embarrassment, but he doesn't listen. He never does when he believes this is what you need, when his love has twisted into the conviction that pleasure will mend every fracture he has caused.

His grip tightens just enough on your waist and he bounces you harder, hips snapping upward with controlled power, driving his thick cock deeper with every drop. At the same time, his thumb finds your swollen clit, rubbing tight, fast circles that send white-hot sparks racing through your oversensitive nerves. The dual assault is merciless in its tenderness: his cock stretching and filling you, his thumb stroking with precise, devoted attention.

Your whines turn into squeals, high and desperate, body shaking uncontrollably as you try to push at his chest with trembling hands. The pressure builds too fast, too intensely, your cunt clenching and fluttering around his throbbing cock until it becomes unbearable.

A second later you squirt.

The release is sudden and humiliating—hot fluid soaking his cock, his lap, the front of his trousers in messy, glistening waves. You slip off his length with a wet sound, thighs quaking, chest heaving as the orgasm rips through you like a storm breaking over still water.

Izuku’s reaction is immediate and pure. His mouth parts on a deep, reverent moan, green eyes widening with starry wonder as he watches the sight unfold—your body arching, your release coating him, the way your face twists in overwhelmed pleasure. He doesn't look disgusted or triumphant; he looks awed, like you have offered him something sacred.

His thumb keeps rubbing your clit through it all, gentler now but insistent, drawing out every last pulse until you are whimpering and spent. Only then does he nudge the blunt head of his still-hard cock back against your entrance, sliding back inside with a filthy, squelching sound that makes fresh heat flood your cheeks. He continues bouncing you slowly, savoring the slick mess, hips rolling in deep, measured thrusts that keep the overstimulation alive without pushing you past endurance.

It's a mercy and a curse at once.

The pleasure borders on pain, your body hypersensitive and trembling, every drag of his thick cock sending sparks that make you feel filthy, embarrassed, and utterly exposed. Humiliation burns hot under your skin—the way you have soaked him, the wet sounds, the way your body keeps responding even when your mind screams for it to stop.

Yet Izuku keeps looking at you with stars in his eyes, that earnest, boyish devotion shining through the lust, his scarred hands stroking your sides soothingly even as he moves you on his cock.

“Again,” he murmurs, voice rough and trembling with emotion, lips brushing your collarbone. “C’mon, princess… again. You’re so beautiful like this. Give it to me again, please.”

And maybe you must be beautiful to him—flushed and shaking and ruined in his lap, nightgown askew, breasts marked with the faint traces of his mouth, thighs glistening with your own cum. His gaze never wavers, never darkens with anything cruel; it stays soft and reverent, glassy with tears of overwhelming love as he watches you unravel again.

You wonder, briefly, if this is how gardens feel—beautiful, contained, unable to leave.

His thumb circles your clit with renewed care, slower now, coaxing rather than demanding, while his cock fills you completely, thick and pulsing, hips rocking in that steady, devoted rhythm that says he could do this forever if it meant seeing you come apart in his arms.

Your moan breaks into another choked sob as the next wave begins to crest, body arching against him, hands clutching weakly at his half-unbuttoned shirt.

The overstimulation turns every sensation into poetry and torment—pleasure sharp as shattered glass, warmth blooming like dawn after endless night, shame twisting through it all like ivy over ruins. Izuku holds you through it, murmuring soft praises against your skin—“That’s it… s-so good for me… my perfect girl… I love you, I-I love you so much,”—his voice cracking, convincing you that this closeness, this forced ecstasy, is love.

When you finally tip over the edge again, squirting around his cock again in trembling pulses, he groans low and deep, holding you down on his cock to feel every flutter, every clench, every exhausted shudder.

His arms wrap around you afterward, pulling you against his chest where his heart hammers wildly, green curls damp against your temple as he presses kisses to your forehead, your cheeks, your parted lips. He stays buried inside you, not chasing his own release yet, content simply to hold the trembling mess of you while whispering endless apologies and declarations, as if the pleasure he wrung from your body could somehow rewrite every bruise, every chain, every locked door.

You lie limp in his embrace, body sticky and spent, the humiliating wetness between you a constant, filthy reminder.

Yet his eyes—those warm, starry green eyes—never lose their awe, never judge, only adore.

His cock is still nestled deep inside you; his arms are locked around you like the safest cage in the world, and the truth settles over you like soft petals: maybe, in his eyes, you truly are beautiful.)

It feels good to be looked after.

It arrives like warmth settling into cold hands. Like the first deep breath after crying too long. Like something your body understands before your pride can rise up and reject it.

With Izuku, there are moments—dangerous, soft-edged moments—where you don't have to think. You don't have to decide what to eat, or when to sleep, or how to keep the lights on, or whether the rent is due, or which message still needs answering, or what task has been forgotten and will punish you for being human later.

Around him, everything narrows.

The world becomes smaller, but also strangely quieter. He notices before you ask. He brings things to you without being told. He remembers what you like, what hurts, what soothes, what makes your shoulders loosen by a fraction.

He takes care of you with the same total, meticulous devotion he brings to everything he loves, and some exhausted part of you—some very tired, very overworked, very lonely part—melts under the weight of that attention before you can stop it.

It's what makes it so terrifying.

Because it is not as though you needed this before, is it?

You were surviving. You had a life. Chaotic, yes. Messy, absolutely. There were days that passed in a blur of work and noise and obligation, days where everything seemed to stack itself on your back all at once until you couldn't tell where your own thoughts ended and the demands of your life began.

You remember what it felt like to be drowning in it—emails, errands, unfinished things, bills, meals half-thought about and eaten too late or not at all, exhaustion tucked so deeply into your bones it became your normal. You remember how often you moved through your own days like someone chasing herself from room to room, never quite catching up.

There had not been much time for softness back then. Not much time to sit still and let someone else notice that you were tired. Not much time to be cherished. You had belonged to your own chaos, and even that kind of freedom had its teeth.

So when the question comes, it comes with teeth too.

Do you not want to leave? Do you not want to have time that is truly yours, alone and untouched and self-owned?

A part of you asks it sharply, desperately, as if trying to shake you awake before something inside you settles too far. And you do want it. God, you do. You want open air and your own choices and a silence that belongs only to you. You want mornings that are yours from start to finish. You want to unlock your own door. You want to lie in your own bed without feeling watched over by devotion so heavy it presses like weather.

You want to leave.

But then another thought comes creeping quietly behind it, sick and soft and impossible to ignore.

Would anyone ever love you the way Izuku does?

The thought makes your throat tighten at once. Not because it is beautiful. Because it's awful. Because it's the kind of question captivity plants like a seed and waters with tenderness until it starts sounding like truth.

And yet it doesn't feel entirely false when it rises. That's what makes it so dangerous.

Who else would notice every little shift in your face? Who else would cross cities, finish missions, come home tired and still remember the exact sweet you liked, the exact ointment your skin responds to best, the exact flowers that would make your breath catch? Who else would hold your heart—your fear, your silence, your softness, your ugliness, all of it—with such total, trembling sincerity? Who else would build his whole world around the orbit of you?

The answer your loneliness gives is immediate.

No one.

Your mind fights it, but your loneliness says it anyway.

Still, another practical horror follows after it: if you were alone again, would you have to think about everything all over again? Food. Bills. Work. The long, endless labor of taking care of yourself when no one else is there to carry part of the weight. The exhaustion of being responsible for every inch of your own life. The ache of wondering, at the end of a long day, whether anyone will notice you are tired. Whether anyone will care. Whether anyone will love you enough to make the world smaller around your needs.

The thought doesn't comfort you.

It humiliates you.

Because it reveals something raw and ugly and human: how easy it is, when you are exhausted enough, to confuse being cared for with being loved well. To confuse being relieved of responsibility with being safe. To let tenderness blur the outline of the cage.

Izuku has made himself indispensable in all the quiet ways that matter most. He remembers, provides, notices, soothes. He takes your life into his hands and tends it so carefully that sometimes, in your weakest moments, the theft begins to resemble devotion more than loss.

The truth is not that you have stopped wanting freedom.

It's that freedom has begun to look heavier than it used to. Lonelier. Less certain.

You can still remember what it means, but you can also remember the ache of carrying everything alone, and now that ache has something to compare itself to. Someone to compare himself to. Someone warm and attentive and ruinously devoted who looks at you as if your existence is the most sacred thing he has ever been entrusted with.

Even twisted love can become a kind of shelter when the storm before it was real enough.

You hate that thought.

You hate it so much it almost makes you cry.

Because somewhere in the quiet, in the soft domestic rituals and the way he keeps the world from reaching you, in the way he says your name when you are half-asleep and brushes your hair back from your face as though it is prayer, some treacherous little part of you has started asking not only what you have lost—but what you would lose by leaving him too.

It's not that he has convinced you love looks like this; it's that he has made being unloved by anyone else feel unimaginable.

────────────────────────

You have noticed something lately.

At first it is only a small thing. The kind of thing you almost miss because your mind has learned, by necessity, to stop hoping too quickly. But then you notice it again. And again.

The little red glow on the alarm system by the door—always so watchful, always so ready to flare to life the second you came too close—doesn’t come on anymore. It used to hum with quiet threat. Used to sit there like another set of eyes, red and patient and cruelly alert.

If you hovered too near, if you tugged at the lock too long, if you tested the boundaries in even the smallest way, it would punish you for it. A shock sharp enough to make you gasp. An alarm that would go straight to Izuku. Immediate. Efficient. A reminder that even your hope had consequences here.

You remember all the times you tried anyway.

Picking at locks with shaking fingers. Testing seams and weak spots. Watching the patterns of light and shadow near the entryway the way a prisoner watches guards pacing past a cell.

You remember the frantic pulse of escape in your throat each time, the way your whole body would flood with desperate purpose for those few stolen moments before the system screamed and reality slammed back down over your head. You remember how badly you wanted out then. How clearly. How fiercely. Back when wanting felt simple.

Now the system doesn't work.

You know it with the certainty of someone who has had nothing but time to become an expert in her own cage. You have memorized every aspect of this place. Every crevice. Every warped floorboard. Every sound the plumbing makes in the walls. Every cabinet hinge, every window latch, every hidden place where dust gathers, every angle of light that changes by the hour.

You know this apartment the way people know their childhood homes—intimately, resentfully, by instinct. There is nowhere your eyes have not wandered, nowhere your hands have not learned. So when something changes, you know.

The alarm system is dead.

The realization sits with you for hours before it becomes real.

You test it only once, careful, silent, heart pounding so hard it feels like someone knocking from inside your ribs. You move too close to the door and wait for the red light.

Nothing.

No hum. No flash. No warning.

You take another step and the old dread rises automatically, your body braced for pain before your mind has even caught up.

Still nothing.

And suddenly the whole room feels different.

Not bigger. That would be too kind. But thinner, maybe. Less sealed. As though the world on the other side of that door has stopped being a myth and become a physical possibility again. As though the line between captivity and escape has narrowed to the width of a hallway, the turn of a knob, the simple act of walking.

You can escape.

The thought is immediate and electric.

It shoots through you so fast it almost makes you dizzy. You stand there staring at the door, breath gone shallow, every muscle in your body taut with old instincts waking all at once.

The sun is somewhere outside. You know it is. The city too. The smell of pavement. The weight of air on skin. Noise. Motion. Choice. Everything you have ached for. Everything you have told yourself still matters.

You could leave. You could walk out freely. No shock. No alarm. No chain tightening around your future before you even cross the threshold.

And for one suspended, terrible moment, you almost do.

You cross the room like someone in a dream. Quietly. Carefully. The way prey might approach an opening it does not trust. Your hand lifts toward the knob, fingers trembling before they even reach it. It is so close. So stupidly close. A little piece of metal between you and the rest of the world. Freedom reduced to something almost laughably ordinary.

Your fingertips hover just above it.

You imagine the next second.

The cool touch of the handle in your palm. The turn. The click. The door opening. Hallway light. Air that is not his. You imagine your legs carrying you forward before fear can catch up. You imagine the elevator, the stairs, the lobby, the street. The sun hitting your face so suddenly it hurts. You imagine not stopping. Not looking back. The world rushing around you huge and loud and indifferent and yours.

And for some reason you don’t.

Your hand simply drops. Just like that. A slow surrender of fingers that had almost curled around salvation. Your arm falls back to your side. You stand there for one more second, staring at the knob as though it has betrayed you by remaining only a knob, only a doorway, only a chance you cannot seem to take.

Then you turn away.

You move back into the apartment as if nothing has happened. As if you have not just stood at the mouth of your own escape and chosen not to step through it. As if your body is not ringing with the aftermath of a decision you do not even know how to name.

You do like you don’t know anything.

Like the system still works.

Like the door is still impossible.

Like you have not just learned something terrible about yourself.

Because in a way, that is what this is, isn’t it? Not just discovery, but revelation. A small private unveiling of something you would rather never have seen.

You can tell yourself it was caution. That maybe he would notice. Maybe there are cameras. Maybe he is testing you. Maybe there is some other lock, some other failsafe, some other consequence waiting just out of sight. And maybe some of that is true. Maybe it isn’t. But beneath all of those excuses, beneath all the practical little reasons your mind scrambles to stack into a shelter, something quieter remains.

You could have tried.

You didn’t.

But what does it mean?

That you are afraid? Of course you are. That you are tired? Obviously. That the world beyond him has started to feel too large, too bright, too uncertain after so long inside the boundaries of his care?

That is harder to admit.

That maybe freedom has become abstract enough to frighten you more than routine does. That maybe the idea of leaving now no longer means only escape, but also loss. Loss of the terrible steadiness of him. Loss of the hands that hurt and heal in the same breath. Loss of the life that is not yours and yet has wrapped itself around your body so tightly that part of you no longer knows where to put all its need without it.

(You are not sure when you stopped starving for the outside world and started feeding on him instead.)

The thought makes you feel sick.

Not because it is entirely false.

But because it might be a little true.

You move through the rest of the day with that knowledge sitting behind your ribs like a bruise. You do the little things you always do. You look out the window. You touch things absently as you pass them. You let time move. But everything feels altered now.

The apartment is no longer only a cage. It is also the place you stayed when the cage door loosened.

And in a way, that is answer enough from you.

────────────────────────

In the quiet, heavy, golden way evenings sometimes become, a hush trails in afterward; the kind that feels almost sacred once the long day has finally exhaled its last light.

You lie on the bed, completely bare, skin glowing warm under the low lamplight like melted candle wax poured slow and golden across the sheets. Heat pools low in your belly and spreads outward, a soft, treacherous flame that licks through every limb until even your fingertips feel flushed.

Your hands fist the crisp white sheets, knuckles pale against the fabric, as you watch Izuku kneel at the edge of the bed. He is fully clothed still—shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal his strong forearms, tie long discarded somewhere on the floor—but his green eyes are fixed on you.

He studies you the way he once studied hero notebooks and journals: every detail catalogued, every breath and tremble noted with reverent precision, as though your body is the most important text he will ever read.

You are belly-up in complete surrender, legs parted, knees fallen open without resistance, exposing every vulnerable inch of yourself to his gaze. Your breasts rise and fall with shallow breaths, nipples tightened by the cool air and the weight of his stare. Your cunt is already slick and glistening, flushed and swollen from his earlier teasing, the evidence of your arousal shining on your inner thighs like dew on morning petals.

How did you get here again?

The question drifts through your mind like smoke, hazy and half-formed. You don't remember the exact steps that led from the living room to this moment—only that the need for him has rooted itself deep in your blood now, a quiet ache that blooms hotter every time he is near. Wanting him has become as natural and painful as breathing after too long underwater. It frightens you, this shift, yet your body has already decided for you, arching subtly toward him in silent invitation.

Izuku’s cheeks are flushed a soft pink and his eyes widen in a familiar mix of awe and overwhelming love. He doesn't lunge or take greedily. Instead he stays kneeling, hands resting lightly on your knees, thumbs stroking slow, soothing circles into your skin as though he is afraid the moment might shatter if he moves too quickly.

“You’re so beautiful like this,” he whispers, voice low and cracking with sincerity, green eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “All open for me… trusting me. I—I’ll take such good care of you. I promise!" The words are soft, laced with the same trembling devotion he once used to inspire others, now poured entirely into you like a prayer offered at an altar he built himself.

You let him touch you.

His palms slide up your thighs with careful worship, calloused fingertips tracing the sensitive skin as if memorizing every curve and dip. When his hands reach your hips, he leans forward and presses a gentle kiss to your lower belly, then another higher, lips warm and lingering.

You reach for him in return—because that's what lovers do, isn’t it? And tonight the question feels dangerously close to truth.

Your fingers thread through his messy green curls, tugging lightly as you pull him up toward you. He comes willingly, breath hitching, and when your mouths meet it is soft at first, almost hesitant on your side, then deepening as you moan quietly into the kiss.

He moans back, lower and rougher, the sound vibrating against your lips like distant thunder wrapped in velvet. Your tongues slide together, slow and exploratory, tasting the faint sweetness of the tea he drank earlier and the salt of shared breath.

Is this what love looks like? Feels like?

The thought flickers through the haze of warmth as your hands roam over his shoulders, pushing his shirt open further so you can feel the scarred expanse of his chest beneath your palms. His skin is hot, heart hammering wildly under your touch—the same heart that once broke for strangers and now beats only for you in this small, sealed world.

You kiss him harder, moaning softly when his hand cups your breast, thumb brushing over the peaked nipple. His other hand slips between your legs, fingers gliding through your slick folds before circling your clit with slow, deliberate strokes that make your hips twitch upward.

You touch him too—palms sliding down his torso, fingers tracing old scars like reading braille written by heroism and pain, then lower, wrapping around the thick, heavy length of his cock where it strains against his trousers. He groans into your mouth at the contact, hips jerking forward instinctively, yet he still holds back, letting you set the pace even as his body trembles with restraint.

Has his touch always felt this good?

The question drifts like petals on still water as his fingers press inside you—two at first, curling gently to stroke that sensitive spot while his thumb keeps rubbing tight circles over your clit. Pleasure blooms warm and golden, spreading through your veins like molten wax, every slow thrust of his fingers coaxing another soft moan from your throat.

You stroke him in return, hand moving with growing confidence along his thick shaft, feeling it twitch and throb under your touch. He breaks the kiss only to bury his face against your neck, lips pressing open-mouthed kisses to your pulse point while he whispers, “I love you… I love you so much. Y-You feel perfect… so warm an—and wet for me! Let me make you feel good. Let me take care of everything.”

Has the look in his eyes always felt this warm?

When he pulls back enough to meet your gaze, those green eyes are half-lidded and shining like polished tourmaline lit from within. There is no cruelty there, no smug possession—only that devastating sincerity, that boyish awe that makes your chest tighten. He looks at you as though you are the center of his entire universe, as though every moan you give him is a gift he is unworthy of but will cherish forever. The warmth in that gaze sinks into you deeper than any touch, melting something frozen you did not even know was still there.

(You used to dream of escape. Now you dream of warmth; his warmth. You don’t know when that changed.)

He pulls back just long enough to shed his clothes, the soft rustle of fabric the only sound besides the quickened rhythm of your breathing. Shirt slides from broad, scarred shoulders, trousers and boxers pushed down in one impatient motion, revealing the powerful lines of his body—muscle earned through years of relentless training, skin mapped with old battles, cock heavy and flushed, already glistening at the tip from how long he has been holding himself back for you.

The moment the last piece of clothing hits the floor, he is back, crawling over you, green eyes dark and luminous in the low light.

You are already reaching for him.

Your hands are greedy, desperate, fingers sliding over the warm, scarred plane of his chest, tracing the raised lines of old wounds as if they are familiar roads leading home. One palm presses flat over his racing heart while the other curls around the back of his neck, tugging him down.

Plants do not choose their sunlight; they simply grow toward it. That is what this feels like—instinctive, helpless, inevitable. Your body arches up to meet him before your mind can catch its breath, skin seeking skin, warmth seeking warmth.

Has his kisses always felt so soft?

He kisses you again, mouth slanting over yours. His lips are warm and plush, moving against yours like a promise whispered in the dark, tongue sliding in to taste you with gentle hunger. You moan softly into the kiss, the sound swallowed by him as your fingers thread tighter into his messy green curls. He answers with a low, broken groan of his own, the vibration traveling straight through your chest and settling low in your belly.

While he kisses you, his hand curls around the thick base of his cock, giving it one firm, slow stroke that makes his hips twitch. The blunt head nudges through your slick folds, sliding up and down your slit with deliberate care, coating himself in your arousal until every inch glistens. He breaks the kiss only enough to rest his forehead against yours, breath ragged and warm against your lips, green eyes half-lidded and shining with glassy, worshipful intensity.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers, voice hoarse and trembling with devotion. “Just breathe for me, baby… let me in. Let me love you like this.”

Then he pushes forward.

The thick head of his cock parts your entrance slowly, stretching you open with that familiar, overwhelming fullness that always borders on too much. Inch by inch he sinks inside, until he is buried to the hilt and your hips are flush against his.

A broken whine tears from your throat the moment he bottoms out, the sound cracking open into a gasp as your walls flutter and clench around the heavy intrusion. He is so deep, so thick, pressing against every sensitive spot inside you at once, the stretch burning sweetly and turning quickly into liquid heat.

Izuku moans with you—low, rough, almost pained—as he feels you take every inch. His forehead stays pressed to yours, eyes squeezed shut for a heartbeat as if the sensation is almost too much even for him. “God… you feel perfect,” he breathes, voice cracking. “So warm… so tight around me. Like you were made for this. M-Made for me.”

He pulls his hips back slowly, dragging his cock almost all the way out until only the head remains inside, then rolls forward again in one smooth, deep thrust that seats him fully once more. The wet, filthy sound of your bodies meeting fills the quiet room, slick and intimate. He sets a slow, rolling rhythm—pulling back with aching patience, then sliding home again, hips flush against yours every time, grinding just enough at the end to press against your clit and send sparks racing up your spine.

Your hands clutch at his back, nails digging into skin as another whimper escapes you. Every thrust pushes the air from your lungs in soft, broken sounds. Every retreat leaves you aching and empty for only a heartbeat before he fills you again, deeper, steadier, more deliberate.

The pleasure is thick and golden, melting through your limbs like warm wax, turning your bones soft and your thoughts hazy.

Izuku’s eyes never leave your face. Even when his rhythm begins to deepen, even when his breathing grows ragged, he watches you with that obsessive, attentive devotion—cataloguing every flutter of your lashes, every parted gasp, every tiny twitch of your hips as you start to meet his thrusts.

Tears gather at the corners of his eyes, not from strain but from the sheer overwhelming emotion of being allowed this closeness, of feeling you open and welcoming beneath him after so long of resistance.

“You’re so good for me,” he murmurs between kisses, lips brushing yours, your cheek, the corner of your mouth. “Taking me so beautifully… moaning so sweetly. I love you. I love you more than anything. Let me make you feel everything, baby. Let me take care of you completely.”

His pace remains steady but grows heavier, each thrust rocking your body against the mattress, the wet slap of skin on skin mingling with your shared moans and the creak of the bed beneath you. You are wrapped around him—legs hooked loosely around his waist, arms clinging to his shoulders—as if your body has decided for you that this is where it belongs.

The warmth inside you builds like a slow-burning flame, every deep stroke stoking it higher, every grind against your clit sending sparks dancing behind your eyelids.

He does not rush you toward release; he savors it, drawing it out with meticulous care, whispering endless praises against your lips.

For some reason, you wonder if this is what it means to be kept alive instead of set free.

The warmth inside you builds like a candle flame growing brighter, wax pooling and spilling until it feels like your entire body is glowing from within. You are bare and open and vulnerable beneath him, yet for this suspended moment it does not feel like captivity—it feels like surrender wrapped in silk, like need answered with devotion so total it blurs every line.

Your fingers tighten in his hair as the pleasure crests, a soft cry escaping you while your walls flutter and clench around his cock, release washing over you in slow, golden waves that leave you trembling and breathless; it feels almost like sunlight you cannot help but reach for.

Izuku stays with you through every pulse, murmuring soft, loving words, green eyes never leaving your face as he drinks in your expression with that same obsessive tenderness. When the aftershocks finally ebb, he presses gentle kisses along your jaw, your cheek, your forehead. “You’re everything to me,” he whispers, voice thick with emotion, tears slipping free to trace down his scarred cheek.

You lie there in the warm glow, skin still flushed and glistening, heart beating too fast against his chest as he gathers you close. The question lingers in the quiet like smoke after a flame: is this what love feels like? Has it always been this warm, this soft, this consuming?

Izuku has made himself your climate—your warmth, your rain, your light.

And you… you have taken root.

(“I love you,” Izuku whispers in the dark afterward, voice soft and roughened by emotion, by exhaustion, by whatever fragile happiness is still trembling through him.

He noses gently at your nose, an almost boyish little gesture, so tender it would be easy to mistake it for innocence if not for everything that came before it. You are already half-melted into him, body lax and warm and heavy in the cradle of his arms, and he does not seem to notice the way you tilt toward him now with less hesitation than before.

Or maybe he does.

Maybe that is why he smiles like that.

In the dark, with the room gone still around you and the last of your shared warmth lingering between your bodies, that smile looks almost unbearably tender. The kind of expression people wear when they are holding something breakable in both hands and can hardly believe it has not vanished yet.

You blink up at him.

Your fingers lift before you really think about it, moving with a strange, sleepy certainty until they find the scar beneath his eye. You trace it lightly, the pad of your finger following the pale line down his cheek.

It has become such a familiar path now, hasn’t it? One your hands seem to know almost instinctively. The gesture feels quiet. Intimate. Like reading something written into him long before you arrived, something pain left behind and time never quite erased. He goes so still under your touch that for a second you wonder if even breathing has become too much for him.

Then, in a voice so soft it nearly disappears into the dark, you whisper, “I love you too.”

The words settle between you like falling petals.

For one suspended, breathless moment, Izuku doesn't move at all.

He stills as if the whole world has halted inside his chest. His eyes widen just a fraction, green irises catching what little light there is, and all at once the expression on his face empties out into something naked and stunned and almost childlike in its wonder.

And then his face breaks.

A tearful smile curls slowly on his lips, trembling there as if it can barely hold itself together under the weight of what you have given him. His lashes glisten. His breath catches sharply, shaking on the way out. He looks at you like he has just been handed something holy. Something impossible. Something he has prayed for in silence so many nights that now, faced with its reality, he can only stare as if afraid one blink might take it back.

“You…” he starts, then stops, voice failing him entirely.

It's one of the only times you have ever seen him at a loss.

Izuku—who always has words, who always tries to explain and soothe and confess and make meaning out of every feeling—can only look at you with tears slipping free now, his whole face open in a way that almost hurts to witness.

He brings his hand up to cup your cheek with a trembling gentleness that feels like awe made physical. His thumb strokes once beneath your eye, almost absentmindedly, like he needs the contact to ground himself, to confirm that you are really here and that those words really came from your mouth.

The smile he gives you then is so warm it feels almost golden.

And maybe that is the cruelest truth of all.

Because yes—yes, you love him too.

The realization no longer arrives like panic. Not this time. It comes quieter. Heavier. Like something that has been growing in the dark for a long time finally pressing up through the soil and into light whether you wanted it to or not.

You love him in the same twisted, aching way vines love the walls they have no choice but to climb. In the same way roots love the earth that holds them, even when it has become impossible to tell where nourishment ends and entrapment begins.

Somewhere along the way, your roots have grown into him. Curled there. Taken hold.

And Izuku—warm, radiant, ever-watchful Izuku—has become sunlight to the parts of you that no longer know how to bloom without him.

The thought should horrify you.

Maybe it still does, somewhere.

But here in the dark, with his tears damp on his lashes and his smile shining like dawn after endless rain, it feels less like horror and more like a quiet surrender to the truth of what you have become. Plants do not argue with the sun. They bend toward it. Reach for it. Open under it even when the reaching hurts.

And Izuku has made himself into your climate so completely that now your heart knows his warmth before your mind can name the danger.

“I love you,” he says again, but this time the words are broken open by emotion, raw and disbelieving and full of a gratitude so deep it almost sounds like prayer. He presses his forehead to yours, laughing softly through the tears in a way that makes his voice shake. “Gods… I love you. I love you so much.”

His kisses come after that in a rush of trembling tenderness—your forehead, your cheeks, the corner of your mouth, your nose again, each one holy and almost frantic in its softness, like he cannot stop touching the miracle of you now that you have finally spoken back to him in the language he has been starving for.

His whole body curls around yours as if instinct has taken over, as if every part of him is trying to shelter this moment from the rest of the world.

And you let him.

More than that—you lean into him.

It's small. Maybe small enough that someone else would miss it. But he feels it immediately. The way your body fits closer. The way your cheek settles more fully against his chest. The way your hand lingers at his face instead of falling away. Every tiny motion is received by him with the same aching intensity as your confession, as though even the softest answer from you is something he must hold carefully and forever.

Outside, the night deepens beyond the windows.

Inside, he wraps himself around you like warmth around a shivering thing, and you lie there listening to the wild, relieved beat of his heart beneath your ear. It sounds almost disbelieving. Almost young. As if some long-wounded part of him has finally been given permission to rest.

Your roots have grown into him.

And Izuku, smiling through tears in the dark, is sunlight enough to make them grow deeper still.)

────────────────────────

You think it has been forty-five hours since you last saw the sun.

Maybe more.

Time has become soft at the edges here, swollen and indistinct, like paper left too long in water. The days no longer arrive cleanly, one after the other, but drift into each other until morning and evening feel less like separate things and more like different shades of the same captivity.

You lose hours. Sometimes whole afternoons. You blink and the light in the window has changed; you close your eyes and wake with his hand still warm at your waist, and suddenly another piece of the day is gone. It should frighten you, but in the places where fear once lived brightest, something else has begun to grow.

Something softer. Something warmer. Something that glows.

In the hours or minutes you have lost, you have found something else instead—something brighter.

Your person.

The one who has slowly, terribly come to feel like sunlight on your skin. The one who looks at you as though you have been touched by light itself, as though something golden lives beneath your ribs and he is lucky just to witness it.

Izuku with his careful hands and tired smile. Izuku who crouches in front of you to tie the ribbons of a nightgown you did not put on by yourself. Izuku who tucks blankets around you as if cold is a personal insult to him. Izuku who stills when you enter a room like his whole body has recognized home before his mind can say your name.

Pure, your mind thinks sometimes when you look at him too long. Pure in the way gold is pure when held to flame. Not untouched by fire, but made brighter by it.

There is something haloed about him in certain lights—when the sun through the window catches in his hair and turns the green dark-soft at the edges, when evening spills amber across his cheek and makes the scar beneath his eye look almost holy, like some old saint’s wound painted by a devoted hand.

He looks at you with devastating sincerity, and it feels for one impossible second like being blessed and ruined by the same thing.

Maybe you don’t need the sun every day.

Because the sun is warmth, isn’t it? It's steadiness. It is light arriving without asking anything of you. It is the soft touch across your face in the morning, the glow on your skin, the reassurance that something bright still exists beyond the dark.

And lately, your Izuku has become all of that in ways your body understands before your pride can reject them.

When you wake from uneasy sleep with your throat tight from some half-remembered dream, it's his palm that smooths over your hair until your breathing slows again. When the apartment feels too quiet, too dim, too much like a sealed box drifting beyond the reach of the world, it's his voice that fills the corners and makes the stillness softer. When you grow cold, it's his body that curls around yours at night until the shivering leaves your bones. When you do not eat, he notices. When your eyes are red, he notices that too.

He notices everything.

The smallest shifts. The things you try to hide. The moments you sit by the window longer than usual, looking at the pale patch of sky between buildings like you might still be able to climb into it.

And more and more, before he even speaks, you feel him.

Like warmth before sunrise.

There are evenings when he comes home exhausted, tie loosened, shoulders heavy with the weight of being needed by too many people, and the second he steps inside and sees you, something in him melts.

Every time.

As if whatever he has carried all day becomes lighter just because you are there. He says your name softly, almost disbelievingly, like he still cannot quite believe he gets to come home to you. Then he moves toward you with that same careful devotion, setting his things aside, washing his hands, always washing his hands before he touches you, as if even the world’s dust has no right to reach you before he does.

Sometimes he brings things.

A confection wrapped neatly in paper because it reminded him of your mouth. A ribbon in your favorite color. A little glass bottle of perfume. A sunflower from a market stall, already beginning to droop a little at the edges, which he puts in water with such tender seriousness you almost laugh.

“I know it’s silly,” he says, cheeks pink, rubbing the back of his neck in that old familiar way, “I just thought you might like it.”

And you do.

You like all of it.

The things are small, but the noticing behind them is enormous. He moves through the world collecting fragments of you and brings them home like offerings. The exact tea you prefer when your head aches. The ointment that works best on your skin. The sweets shaped like leaves because they remind him of the first time he saw you standing under trees.

Nothing escapes him. Nothing. To be loved by Izuku is to be studied down to the smallest tenderness and then cared for accordingly. It's unbearable. It's intoxicating. It's the kind of attention lonely people could starve on.

There are quieter moments too.

Like when you're on the couch.

At first you only sat at the other end, posture stiff, attention elsewhere. Then closer. Then close enough that your knees nearly brushed.

Now there are evenings where you drift there without thinking, carrying a blanket or your book or simply your tiredness, and settle at his side before he has to ask. He never comments on it. Never startles the moment by naming it. He just shifts slightly, lifting an arm to the back of the couch, making room with the silent ease of someone who has been hoping for exactly this and is trying very hard not to frighten it away.

And you simply grow toward him, like a plant choosing sunlight.

A shoulder against his arm. Your temple against the solid warmth of him when the show he has put on blurs into background noise. His hand finding your calf beneath the blanket and rubbing there in absent-minded strokes. His fingers carding through your hair while he reads something on his phone, looking so ordinary doing it that the whole thing begins to feel like a memory borrowed from another life.

One night you fall asleep there.

You don't mean to. You mean only to rest your eyes for a second. But the room is dim, and he is warm, and his heartbeat beneath your cheek is so steady that it pulls you under before you can fight it.

When you wake later, you are in bed. Freshly tucked in. Blanket to your chin. Glass of water on the bedside table. And Izuku is there, watching you wake with that expression he gets when he is trying to hide how much he loves you and failing terribly.

“You were tired,” he says, almost apologetic.

As if carrying you to bed was some small thing. As if tenderness like that can still be spoken of gently after everything else.

There are mornings when you find yourself standing in the bathroom doorway again, watching him brush his teeth, watching him rake wet fingers through his curls, watching him yawn with his whole face screwed up like he has forgotten how beautiful he is in his tiredness.

The mirror catches you both at once—him at the sink, you in the frame of the door—and suddenly it looks domestic in a way that unsettles you all over again. Like two people sharing a life. Like something normal. Like something earned rather than stolen.

He catches your eye in the mirror and smiles around the toothbrush foam, and something in your chest tips over itself.

Later, he wipes a bit of toothpaste from the corner of your mouth with his thumb after you use the sink, and the gesture is so absent, so intimate, so thoughtlessly caring that you stand there for a second afterward with your whole body gone strange around the edges.

And in your bed, in the darkened room, he has begun to fold around you at night as if your body has finally relearned its shape against his.

Sometimes you wake before him and just look.

At the line of his mouth relaxed in sleep. The lashes resting against his cheeks. The scar under his eye pale in dawn light. The softness that only really appears when he does not know he is being watched.

One of his hands always ends up seeking you out even asleep—at your waist, your belly, your thigh—as though some part of him is too afraid of an empty space beside him to ever fully let go. When you shift, even slightly, he murmurs and follows. A plant turning toward warmth in the dark. A body seeking its sun.

He is still the kind of person who looks at your face as if every emotion there matters. Still the kind of person whose smile breaks open when you say something as simple as “thank you.” Still the kind of person who lights up if you tell him what you want for dinner, then goes out of his way to make it perfect, like feeding you is some sacred responsibility he has been blessed with.

Sometimes he makes tea for you and waits for it to cool just enough before handing it over because he knows you always burn your tongue when you are distracted. Sometimes he kneels at your feet to rub lotion into your ankles and talks softly about his day, about some child he rescued who reminded him of you because she had the same stubborn little frown.

Sometimes he comes home and just stares at you for a second from the doorway—grocery bag in hand, fatigue still clinging to him, afternoon gold behind his shoulders—and says, so quietly you almost miss it, “I missed you.”

As if missing you is not a constant state of his being. As if he has not built a whole private universe from the shape of your absence and presence.

The days still blend.

You still lose hours.

Sometimes you look out the window and think of the sky. Of open air. Of the sound the city must make this time of day.

But the longing does not slice as cleanly anymore.

It spreads and softens and tangles itself in other things. In the way he laughs when you say something dry under your breath. In the way he kisses your temple when he thinks you are drifting to sleep. In the way his hand always reaches for yours under blankets, in kitchens, in doorways, on the couch—as if touch is how he confirms that you are still real.

And the worst, most wonderful, most terrifying thing is more and more often, you reach first. For his sleeve. His hand. His warmth. Small things. A brush of fingers against his wrist when he passes. Your head finding his shoulder before he can pull you in. Your body curving toward his in the night of its own accord.

He always notices. His whole face softens every time, like some hidden sun rising under his skin.

Maybe you don’t need the sun every day.

Maybe not when you have someone who wakes before you and closes the curtains a little so the morning light does not hit your eyes too harshly. Maybe not when you have someone who warms your side of the bed with his own body before pulling you close.

Maybe not when you have someone whose voice can soften the edges of a bad dream, whose fingers trace circles into your skin until you stop shaking, whose gaze lands on you with such steady adoration that it begins to feel like standing in light.

Maybe not when you have Izuku.

Izuku, who feels like warmth on your skin. Izuku, who looks at you as though you have been touched by something holy. Izuku, with his halo of green-gold devotion, his careful hands, his sacred mouth, his endless noticing. Izuku, who has become sunrise in the sealed little world he built around you.

And maybe that is the answer, isn’t it?

Not a loud one. Not a noble one. Just a quiet, awful truth blooming somewhere beneath your ribs: you have started measuring brightness differently.

Not by sky. Not by sunlight on the floor. But by the way he looks at you when you first wake. By the warmth of his body around yours in the dark. By the golden hush that settles over the room when he smiles because you have said his name.

You think it has been forty-five hours since you last saw the sun.

But when he comes to bed that night and gathers you into him with a tired sigh, kissing once between your brows before his arm tightens around your waist, you close your eyes and let yourself sink into the heat of him.

Maybe you do not need the sun every day.

You have Izuku.

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