Hey friends! If you’ve been following me for a while you probably know/have heard that I’m working on another big fic to rival Mr. Loverman (which you can find here on ao3 if you haven’t read it yet, it’s 20 chapters and ~103K completed). And as a special treat for all of you who follow me on here, I wanted to share a sneak peek of what’s to come! I’m super excited about this one guys, I have a beta reader and everything (she’s the best, an absolute gem)!!
But first, I need to tell you what it’s about. Izuku is a famous photographer/social media celebrity, just returned home from yet another trip abroad. He decides to take his sailboat out for a trip to get some final photos and top off his portfolio for the month, but he ends up falling asleep on his boat. What happens when he wakes up on the shore of a secluded island with a strange man shaking him awake?
(Please forgive me, I haven’t touched up the summary just yet.)
Anyways, if you’re interested in reading a sneak peek of the first chapter, please click the ‘read more’ option below!
June 30, 06:48am
It’s hard not to feel some sort of rush, being awake this early.
Izuku has always been a morning person, and even more so in the summertime, when the sun wakes with him. Like today! The sun is up just moments after he is, peeking out from the shroud of ocean it hid behind. Izuku is home today, his second night home after his latest trip (he’d gone to Norway, and of course taken photos of everything). He recovered from his jet lag – yesterday he slept in until nine in the morning and was disgusted with himself – and has his swim trunks and an unbuttoned Hawaiian tee on before the sun can even cast a glare on his floor.
He lives in Horiuchi, a small town with a beautiful beach. His apartment is small – mostly because he spends so little time in his actual apartment that it’s more of a postcard address than anything. It has a single bedroom, a kitchen with a dining table crammed in its center, and a living space about big enough for Izuku’s couch and a wall-mounted television. And even then, Izuku often ends up vaulting the couch to get through.
But the balcony is beautiful, outstretching over his view of Morito Coast. The apartment isn’t as costly as some of the others with worse views, probably in part because this isn’t a vacation town but also because nobody wants to live in the shoebox Izuku lives in. Before him, there hadn’t been an inhabitant in the apartment in well over six months, and they gave Izuku a pretty hefty discount on the place even though Izuku said he’d take it full price.
Izuku throws back the curtains to his balcony door (after vaulting his couch), allows the sunlight to wash over the ground. He opens the balcony door wide, the fresh sea air pouring into his apartment, the cool wash of the last remnants of summer night coming through. It almost makes him shiver, and it does push his rowdy curls into even more awkward angles than before, but he opens his arms anyway to the fresh air.
He pulls his phone from his pocket and snaps a picture, as he always does on mornings he’s home. Though he isn’t around much in the summer, the photos of the sun rising over Morito Coast always seem to be more popular than the rest, and Izuku supposes he will never truly know why. He does suspect, though, that it’s because the view is just so perfect.
He nearly forgets to eat breakfast before he starts his live stream, seats himself out on the balcony in his little lawn chair and enjoys the wash of the summer sun slowly creeping up his bare legs. “Good morning!” he calls to the phone, waves to the camera as he’s joined by tens of thousands of people to watch his live stream. He constantly has to remind himself that not all of his fans are located in Japan – because if they were, he’d be more than surprised at how many people jump on at seven in the morning to watch him stream just talking through his day plans.
“Today I’ll be going off Morito Coast on my sailboat!” he announces brightly. He’s had this on the calendar since he was back in Norway. His sailboat is nothing special, barely large enough for three people comfortably, but he hasn’t had a chance to sail since he left almost three weeks ago and he’s anxious to get back out on the water. A few comments roll in telling him he should try surfing one of these days; he laughs it off and takes a note in the back of his brain to call Ochaco next week and have her teach him the basics.
It’s a normal stream, for the most part. Comments roll through, Izuku answers questions that reappear when he can and apologizes for the missed questions when he can’t. It’s shorter than most, and perhaps that is the most out-of-the-ordinary part of it, but otherwise it isn’t anything noteworthy.
So, then, how does it become his last?
08:16am
The sun is hot, now. On the brink of July is when summer becomes sweltering, enough even that it almost deters Izuku away from the heat. Truthfully, it’s why he went up to Norway – it’s much more temperate up there, less direct sunlight to try and inflict Izuku with skin cancer. He lathers up the sunscreen, though, and heads down to the beach – perhaps a ten-minute walk – in his flip flops, his Hawaiian shirt (now buttoned, but only twice), and his dark green swim trunks.
A few of the locals are already on the beach, and they wave to Izuku, shout good-mornings and ask how he’s doing out of courtesy. Izuku recognizes Ivanka, a retired Russian woman who lives in the next apartment building over. Her Japanese is stilted, but she likes Izuku because Izuku knows Russian. (And English, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and a touch of French.) He recognizes the twin girls from downstairs, Kamiko and Hana, putting together a sandcastle with their mother, Rin, off to the side reading a book. Izuku’s sailboat is further down the beach, closer to the jagged rocks protruding from the water, roped there tightly to keep it from straying too far. Still, he has to yank it to shore by the rope, an activity that might have been impossible when he was scrawnier, but now barely makes him break a sweat.
The boat’s name is S.S. All Might, a silly name perhaps, but Izuku doesn’t care. He’s named after Izuku’s favorite comic book character from when he was a child, a man he always looked up to because he saved everyone with a smile. And though comic book heroes don’t exist, Izuku has vowed to make a hero of himself as best he can in this modern age, by making people smile with his goofy tourist-y photos and livestreams and videos. And though he probably should be past the comic book stage of his life by now, he keeps All Might’s spirit buried in his heart, and All Might’s vintage comic book collection buried in his closet.
He unties the anchoring rope and pushes off from the rocks. It takes a little bit to get past the waves trying to push Izuku back to shore, but they aren’t too rowdy yet today, and for that he’s thankful. Out on the water there’s a decent breeze, and it brings with it a spray of seawater that tames the bubbling heat on Izuku’s skin. As he catches a drift his boat takes off, out to sea, while he pulls the sail taut the best way he knows.
Though it probably isn’t the safest place for his cell phone, Izuku pulls it out of his swimsuit trunk pocket and captures a photo of the sun’s steady ascent past the water. There is a full separation now of the sun and the water, but it still refracts brightly on the water below, makes for a stunning stock image that will likely be the source of Izuku’s rent money this month. Perhaps next month, too. He doesn’t too much care about that, though; he flips the camera to selfie mode and holds it up, peace-signing with the sail in the corner and the sun behind him. His skin looks much tanner than he is in this angle, and his freckled shoulders are hidden underneath his Hawaiian shirt, but he plans to post it anyway – when he’s back somewhere with a cell tower, that is.
Izuku has sailed the space past Morito Coast many times. It isn’t a huge expanse of water, but it’s enough to feel like an adventure. It’s not too vast that Izuku gets lost, but vast enough that he can if he tries. But today, the wind carries him further, and he lets it. He lets it because he has a cooler secured to the floor, complete with four bottles of water and a few sandwiches in case he decides to stay out on the water longer than he’s expecting. And there’s more sunscreen, a portable charger for his phone, a change of clothes being kept dry below deck. What could another mile past his normal stopping point do?
The sunlight can only be kept at bay for so long by the spray of seawater, and Izuku is beginning to feel the heat going to his head. The sun is higher in the sky now, and Izuku can tell without even checking his phone that it’s nearing noon, with the sun beating directly onto him, thrumming like a drum. He can feel every pulse of his heart. His first three water bottles are gone and he’s nursing his fourth. Still, he smiles lazily. This is where he’s meant to be – underneath the sun. He sits on the deck of his sailboat and pulls his phone from his swim trunks again, snaps a few photos of himself with the sun hot overhead. His freckles are well-visible, and his Hawaiian shirt has been tossed aside in the heat, so his shoulders and chest (also dotted with freckles) are visible. He stretches out on the deck and holds the phone above, snapping a picture of himself lying on the sailboat deck. His abs look more defined than ever, considering the sunlight above is casting rather harsh shadows from this angle.
He knows he shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t, and he will kick himself every day for doing it, but he closes his eyes, lets the warm summer sun be his blanket as he takes a cat nap on the deck. He’s even so bold as to dip one of his legs off the edge of the boat and into the water, like kicking his foot out from underneath a blanket in the summer when it gets too hot. And he sleeps, he sleeps through the sunlight drawing behind a cloud, and reappearing only to be drawn away again, by angry gray storm clouds that he hadn’t expected today. But when has he ever been one to check the weather?
A/N: Hi friends! Happy (almost) December! As a treat this year, I decided to write a short fic (and by short, I do mean around 40k - so not terribly short) about the Dekusquad spending a week at a winter cabin! The first chapter will officially go up on my AO3 page (you can find it here!) tomorrow, with updates coming out every Tuesday/Friday for the next 4 weeks, but I decided to post a sneak preview of chapter 1 here early!! Hope you enjoy!
Tuesday, December 01, 20XX
It’s been four years since Izuku graduated from U.A. Four years, and he’s moved three times since then – once, to an agency based in Kyoto, where he lived the longest. He worked many of the smaller cases there, the more personal ones – stopping a villain who’d kidnapped a mother’s newborn; keeping a local corner store from being robbed; catching a stray piece of scrap metal dropped from a crane near a construction site, and saving two children playing tag. He accredits most of his fame to Kyoto, and though it’s certainly not a small city, it feels small when he moves two years later to Hiroshima.
It’s in Hiroshima that Izuku takes on his first major case – ends up working beside Eijirou in the process, and both of them (already well-established and in the high twenties in hero rankings) skyrocket to the top ten after busting the case wide open. It’s a child trafficking ring, where children are abducted and sold for their Quirks. And, just following this case, he has perhaps a hundred offers to other agencies that will pay better or get more exposure. After all, Midoriya Izuku is just past twenty and he’s ranked number four, below Suneater and Lemillion from U.A., and, yet to be overthrown at number one, Endeavor. And while he still hasn’t learned Hiroshima’s roads, nor has he unpacked all his boxes yet, he uproots once more, and heads for Tokyo.
The biggest reason he leaves is because of the agency. Tokyo is crawling with them – agencies nearly on every block – but they’re small, full of sidekicks who haven’t broken one hundred yet, even. But there’s one agency in particular whose letter stands out amongst the rest, because the signature on the offer letter is his old friend Hitoshi’s, and Hitoshi knows just whose names to drop to garner Izuku’s attention – “You would be working side by side with Uravity and Ingenium, and perhaps partnering with Shouto and Ground Zero.”
And now, almost seven months since he’s become acquainted with the Tokyo agency, has climbed past Suneater in the latest ranking, he drums his fingers on Ochaco’s office door. She pops her head up from behind her monitor, still wearing her hero costume from her patrol while she types up a final report before lunch. “Oh!” she says, as though she isn’t expecting Izuku, despite the fact that they always go to lunch together on Tuesdays.
“Ready to go?” Izuku asks, hanging off Ochaco’s door, now. “Tenya coming today, too?”
“Tenya got wrapped up in a petty theft case,” Ochaco rolls her eyes. “Seriously. Who tries to steal a dozen watches in the middle of the morning?”
“People who don’t know Tenya exists?” Izuku shrugs, and Ochaco laughs, pushes herself away from her desk on her rolling chair and hops up. “I need to stop and grab my key card before we go. Hold on.”
Ochaco trails after Izuku down the hall to his office, one with arguably the best view in the building. It overlooks the rest of the city, some of the smaller agencies the size of peanuts from way up here. His door is ajar when he walks up, light still on. Along the right wall is a photograph – himself, at graduation, with Ochaco and Tenya to his left, and Shouto to his right. Behind all of them is All Might, having managed his heroic form just for the click of a camera. They all wear navy graduation gowns, though Izuku’s is unzipped and reveals his hero costume underneath. Shouto’s hair is swept back from his face, his graduation cap in his hands, and he’s actually smiling – Izuku thinks it may be the only photograph in his entire collection of pictures of Shouto where he isn’t frowning. And Ochaco and Tenya are leaning into each other, smiles bright and happy, caps on and hands clasped together.
“Can’t believe you still have this hanging in here,” Ochaco muses as she steps into the room, wandering directly to the photograph.
Izuku spares it a second glance before going to his desk and rooting through the drawers for his key card to get back into the building. “It’s my favorite,” he says with a defensive huff, and Ochaco laughs.
“It’s not a bad thing,” she says. “It’s just that my forehead looks huge in this.”
“I think you hung this one because Shouto is in it,” Ochaco jeers, because she knows it will get a reaction out of Izuku. And it does; Izuku, who had bent down to check under his desk for the key card, thuds his head on the bottom side of it when he tries to sit up too quickly.
“Th-that isn’t it!” Izuku huffs, rubbing his head. “Stop with that, you know I’m over it.”
“How come you’ve been waiting for the opportunity to work a case with him, then?” Ochaco says, and she sounds innocent, but when Izuku looks over he sees mischief in her eyes, the pure evil of a friend who’s been given explicit information to a secret crush that maybe shouldn’t have been told.
“Is it a crime to want to work alongside a friend?” Izuku says back defensively, still searching for his key card. Eventually he finds it atop a stack of reports he’s yet to take down to the accounting department – the longer he waits, the longer it’ll be until his next paycheck, but seriously, he makes way too much as it is.
“Well, no,” Ochaco says, crossing the room and perching herself on Izuku’s cluttered desk. “I mean, that’s how you ended up working here.”
“Exactly,” Izuku says as a means of ending the conversation, grabbing his wallet off his desk as well (he’d forgotten that, too, it seems) and heading for the door. Ochaco follows after him, realizes he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, and thankfully, after being best friends for almost a decade now, she respects that.
The walk down the road to their usual noodle shop is cold. The first snow hit about a week ago, and the temperature has warmed enough and cooled again since then to freeze mounds of slush at the lip of the roads. The sidewalk is clear of snow, busy despite the cold weather with people walking around downtown.
When they step inside the noodle shop, the warmth floods their cheeks and hands. They’re regulars here, and the waitress seats them as though they aren’t the number three and number sixteen heroes – after all, she gets to have this experience every Tuesday. She does, however, comment on Izuku’s latest search-and-rescue, says she’s glad someone like him was there. And it’s the comments like these that always make Izuku proud of his profession, the ones where he’s not being gushed over for his abs or his good looks (though those still make him blush); it’s the gratitude that Izuku’s presence has made a difference on the scene of a crime, or natural disaster, or whatever the occasion. It’s knowing people are glad Izuku was there.
“So,” Ochaco stretches back in her chair after she finishes her noodles. “Tenya and I have been thinking about taking a vacation.”
“Oh?” Izuku says, folding his hands in front of him on the table. He’d finished his noodles a few minutes ago.
“Yeah,” Ochaco hums, twirling her weightless chopsticks around her fingers idly while she speaks. “We were kind of thinking of inviting a few old friends from U.A. to come with.”
“Oh, so not like a romantic getaway then?” Izuku tilts his head to the side, curious. Ochaco and Tenya have been together since their second year of high school, and vacations for the just two of them aren’t anywhere near uncommon.
“More like a, um, reunion?” Ochaco says, dropping the chopsticks now. “What do you think, Izuku? Are you in?”
Izuku blanches. Somehow, even with Ochaco suggesting friends from U.A. accompany them on their vacation, he hadn’t considered that might mean him. Which is absurd, because the three of them have been best friends since high school began – they even chatted on the phone all the time when Izuku was in Kyoto and Hiroshima. “Of course,” he says after he scoops his jaw up from where it dropped, and Ochaco laughs.
“You seriously thought I wouldn’t extend the invitation to you?”
“That’s not what—”
“Come on, Deku,” she giggles, rolling her eyes. “You can’t lie to me. I know all.”
He laughs, shakes his head. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting it, sorry.”
“Well, you’re obviously the first person on the guest list. Tenya and I have already found a place, too! There’s this beautiful vacation lodge for rent on the edge of the Kiso Mountain chain.”
“That’s almost four hours from here,” Izuku says, suddenly a bit afraid of what might happen being so far from Tokyo. “What if a big villain or something finds out we’re all gone on vacation?”
“You act like our class from high school are the only competent heroes around anymore,” Ochaco rolls her eyes. “C’mon, if anything happened Suneater and Lemillion alone could take them, not to mention Nejire-chan and that wind hero guy.”
Izuku exhales, forcing himself to nod and agree. “I guess you’re right,” he sighs, his smile a tad nervous still.
“What, worried the public will forget about their favorite hero Deku after a week?” Ochaco reaches across the table and pokes at Izuku’s cheek. “Have some faith! And learn to take a vacation! Seriously, when’s the last time you took a break? Never?”
“Never,” Izuku affirms, though in the past he’s been proud of the fact; now he’s a little embarrassed. “How much would I owe you?”
But Ochaco waves off the question, and she grabs for the bill on the table – Izuku doesn’t even remember the waitress dropping it off. “You know more than any of us that money isn’t a factor,” she says, shrugging. “Tenya and I can cover it.”
“Shut up,” Izuku rolls his eyes. “You guys shouldn’t have to pay for everything. At least let me cover gas and groceries?”
It takes a bit of coaxing, but eventually Izuku convinces Ochaco to let him cover grocery costs; the two of them make plans to visit the grocery store together the night before they leave. Ochaco doesn’t reveal the guest list, nor does Izuku even think to ask about it until after they’re walking back to the office, bumping shoulders and laughing over inside jokes from their high school days. And as they ascend the staircase side by side, Izuku finally does ask, and Ochaco laughs, and that’s the most of an answer he gets.
Hello hello! I’m back again! This is very fun to do and I’m loving the positive feedback. Thank you all for keeping up with me as we go through the spookiest month of the year! Click here to see the other prompts, and click here to see yesterday’s prompt! Until tomorrow!
Fandom: Ouran Highschool Host Club
Pairing: TamaHaru
Rating: General
Word Count: 410
The minute they stepped inside, Haruhi vanished.
Tamaki looked around erratically (he wasn’t exactly used to commoner places like this) and anxiously called his girlfriend’s names over the bookshelves.
Finally he saw her mop of brown hair poking up from one of the shorter shelves and breathed a huge sigh of relief. The rest of the customers in the shop did, as well; Tamaki wasn’t exactly quiet about finding her. He rested his hand on her shoulder as she turned around, revealing the massive stack of books in her arms.
His jaw dropped. “How are you even going to read all those?” he asked in astonishment. He had told the girl money was no object, and he really didn’t mind her taking advantage of that, but he wished he could at least know when she would make time to read them.
“About half of these are required for my university classes,” she explained. “The other half are classics I think we should read together.”
“Oh, my Haruhi is absolutely adorable!” Tamaki chirped, and was immediately shushed by someone an aisle over. Haruhi blushed and smiled up at him.
He hadn’t noticed that she was wearing her reading glasses today. His heart leapt in his chest as she pushed them up the bridge of her nose, similar to Kyoya and yet entirely different; as if she were cradling a child. He wondered if she was worried about breaking them, despite him offering to literally pay for her entire university just because.
“You want all of these?” Tamaki asked, taking the books from her carefully. She let out a huff of relief at the weight being lifted from her.
“If it’s not a problem,” Haruhi replied softly. She was still trying to get used to Tamaki’s large amount of money; he often pushed her to accept this new lifestyle by doing things like buying a dozen books for her.
“Of course not. Are you serious?” Tamaki chuckled, taking the stack to the counter. He set them down and the cashier’s eyes went wide. Tamaki laughed even more at this and handed over his debit card.
“You know, I wish you wouldn’t ask me that like it’s a bad thing to be a little frugal once in a while,” Haruhi teased, but she accompanied it with a loving smile. Tamaku shrugged.
“Being frugal and acting homeless are two different things, sweetheart.”
“Your total is--”
“Don’t tell me,” Tamaki sighed dramatically, “just bill me.”
