#but god bless u mermie for putting this into my brain

[andypantsx3]

Andie. 🥺 Florist Shouto giving you a big bouquet of peonies. 🥺 Fat, full ones that are ruffled like petticoats. 🥺 Wrapped in brown paper with a trailing ribbon. 🥺 And they’ve been sitting there in the glass fridge, waiting for you to come past the shop on your way home from work. 🥺🥺

omg stop my ovaries are about to explode

rip those flowers as they get squished between us when i lay it on him

The shop bell jingles gently as you shoulder open the door, ducking out of the rain and into the tiny florist's shop.

Immediately the thick scent of greenery washes over you, delicate florals and the tangy smell of earth. The bright bouquets stand out even more than usual against the dreary grey of the sky outside, the shelves straining under the weight of tightly-packed buckets bursting with color.

You quickly smooth down your hair, trying not to look like a wet rat before the shop's owner catches sight of you, frantically dredging your brain for some event that might occasion flowers this time. Over the past few months, you've developed a bad habit of wandering into this particular shop on your way home from work--inventing a million and one things you need flowers for. Your friends are quickly growing sick of bouquets for everything--birthdays, anniversaries, congrats on quitting your job, dinner party gifts, the lot.

But you can't help it.

Because even more beautiful than the arrangements that grace these shelves, even more lovely than the atmosphere of the shop itself, is the shop owner, the man who keeps drawing you back, again and again.

Todoroki Shouto.

As if on queue, the man in question emerges from the back room, lugging a large earthenware pot filled with perennials--probably the next display piece to be positioned just outside the front door. Under his blue button up, you can see a bicep cording with the effort, and his handsome face is scrunched in concentration, long eyelashes dusting the top of ridiculously high cheekbones.

He's so horribly beautiful, tall and packed with lithe stretches of muscle, and he has a face like an elven prince from a fantasy novel. The yelp reviews of this shop are filled with just as many covert shots of him as they are of the flower arrangements, jammed with fawning comments like "the most beautiful bloom of all," and "this dude is even more gorgeous than his arrangements and that is saying a lot."

You can't say you disagree.

Your heartbeat kicks up a bajillion notches, like it always does at the sight of him, and you suppress the urge to flatten your hair again. Todoroki looks up, then, pinning you with his mismatched gaze--his right eye an icy, wintery grey like the sky outside, his left an unearthly blue, like the center of a flame where it burns the hottest.

"Hi, Todoroki," you say quickly, before your brain loses capacity for human speech, the way it usually does in his presence.

With a flex of his arm that you will absolutely be reliving in the dark of your own bedroom later, he heaves the pot onto the counter, quickly dusting his hands off on the white apron he's tied around his waist. You try very hard not to notice that the way it's tied emphasizes the ratio of his broad shoulders to his trim waist, and fail spectacularly.

"Y/N," he intones in his deep voice, low and smooth. "You're back."

You wince.

You are most certainly back, unable to avoid the siren call of the fifteen minutes you spend together on almost a weekly basis, your eyes desperate to drink your fill of him.

You'll never take this anywhere, would never dream of being inappropriate or making your move on him. He's so obviously uninterested, with a face and a body and a voice like that. But you can't help but want to spend these few, small minutes with him anyway. He's so beautiful--and beyond that, there is something about the way he speaks, the way he moves, the careful way he does everything that soothes some strange itch in you--that blurs the daily stresses of your life into the background.

You always leave feeling calm, somehow. Content. Like you can handle the rest of the week if you just hold the memory of him like a protective charm against the rest of the world.

He's fucking magic.

"Uh, yeah," you say stupidly. "Here I am!"

Those eyes flicker over you evaluatively, and a heart-rending hint of a smile pulls at his full mouth. "What's the occasion?"

You realize you've failed to come up with an excuse, too focused on the movement of his biceps as he carried that pot.

"Uh, just, uh, something for me this time," you say. "It's supposed to be rainy all weekend and I'm thinking some flowers would keep my apartment bright and friendly." You give yourself a little mental pat on the back for pulling that idea out of your own butt.

Todoroki makes a low humming noise that goes right down your spine. "Did you have a long week?" he asks.

"Ugh, the worst," you say before you remember that no man likes a complainer. But Todoroki doesn't look like he minds, watching you curiously like he wants an explanation.

You wave a hand. "Just, office politics stuff. I had a big report due and spent like an hour trying to stop marketing from trying to spin the numbers their way. It got, uh, heated." You scrub a hand over your cheeks. "But anyway it's the weekend now and that's over. I'm going to curl up with a good book and a glass of wine and pretend for the next forty-eight hours like I've never even heard of marketing."

Another curve of a smile pulls at Todoroki's mouth.

"Any plans for you this weekend?" you ask, eager to hear about him.

He nods, his red and white bangs dipping in front of his eyes for a moment. "I'm going to visit my mother," he says. "It's her birthday soon, her first one since leaving the hospital."

Over the course of the last few months, you'd worked the story out of Todoroki, about how she'd been hospitalized when he was young, of the growing and changing and forgiving his family has had to do since. He always talks about it in such a conscientious way, and it's a major part of the reason you like him so much. If only you too, could be so patient and thoughtful and good.

"Oh my god," you say. "Please tell her happy birthday from me! Can I--I want to get her a little bouquet from me, then, if you--uh--if you don't mind. Um. Arranging it?"

Todoroki's eyes fix on you unblinkingly, and for a minute you think you might have overstepped, until his eyes crease and his mouth softens in a way that you know means he's pleased--the same way he looks when he finishes an arrangement and you can't help but pile him in heaping praise.

"I'd like that," he says.

You grin.

Used to the routine, you dump your bag off by the register and follow him to the buckets of unarranged flowers he keeps along the storefront, watching his broad back as he leads you, trying not to stare at the slim fit of his pants as he does.

"What are the feelings you want to convey?" Todoroki asks, like he always does when you start.

"I want something happy. Joy, um, good wishes. I want these flowers to symbolize my most excellent vibes," you say, cringing when it comes out as stupid as it does.

Todoroki huffs a tiny little laugh, though, and a hot little thrill of pleasure sweeps from your head to your toes.

"Your most excellent vibes," he repeats in his low tone, sounding dangerously close to amused.

He reaches out, and under his hands, a small, beautiful bouquet comes together--creamy yellow lilies and tiny coral roses and a spray of white buds and bright leafy sprigs of greenery. Lilies symbolize happiness he tells you, orange roses energy and joy, and the white buds are for rebirth, new beginnings.

It's lovely, almost as lovely as he is.

You're pleased, and happily hand over your card to him, taking a blank note card from the register till and penning out a short note of best wishes to Rei, who you have heard so much about.

You chat a little bit more, and insist on Todoroki letting you pick out the wrapping for when he brings the flowers to her, picking out the brown paper you've always liked and a little orange ribbon to match the vibrant roses.

"You have to make it extra fancy when you wrap it," you order him, pointing your pen at him like a weapon. "No taking shortcuts because she's your mom and she'll love anything you put together regardless. I want pictures when I'm back here next week."

His eyebrows raise, and a real smile pulls at his mouth, then, a glowing half-moon grin, so utterly devastating in its beauty. Your heart almost falls out of your butt and you have to grab the counter just to keep your knees from getting too wobbly.

"The vibes will be excellent," he teases, the words sounding so strange and foreign in the crispness of his almost princely tones.

You watch him place them in water and attach your card, carrying them over to the fridge which is already overstuffed with a million different bouquets, each more beautiful than the last.

You shoulder on your bag again, eyes drinking in one last fill of Todoroki Shouto and his shop to keep you sated over the coming week, when Todoroki glances back over one broad shoulder.

"Wait," he says. Your feet freeze on the tile obediently.

You watch curiously as he tucks his mother's bouquet into the fridge, and then even more curiously as he pulls an absolutely gorgeous bouquet of flushed pink peonies from the top shelf. Some are light pink, little shy blushes of color, and others are deep rose, full and pouty and absolutely perfect. Little green leaves peek through in colorful bursts, breaking up the color palette just so.

It's so classical and beautiful, and your eyebrows climb into your hairline when Todoroki pulls them from their vase, wrapping them in that brown paper you like and tying them off in a trailing emerald ribbon with a deft twist of his deliciously long fingers.

"Do you need me to make a delivery?" you wonder aloud. "Because I accept cash, credit, or praise and eternal gratitude."

But Todoroki just smiles again, stepping up to you, so close that your back bumps the counter--close enough that you feel the whisper of his apron across your coat. This near, his face is even more lovely, and you can see the flushed pink skin of his scar so clearly, smell the earthy fingerprint of flowers on him.

He presses the peonies into your hands, leaning down to look into your face.

"They're for you," he says, his voice suddenly lower than you've ever heard it. "The pink ones have a special meaning."

He can't mean anything by it, but your heart is working overtime, every inch of your skin breaking out into a furious flush with his proximity and the low, conspiratorial register of his voice.

"I--they do?" you manage to squeak out.

Todoroki nods, a slow incline of his head, and moves forward just a little bit more, pressing into you where you stand immobilized against the register.

Just then, the bell overhead jangles, and Todoroki closes his eyes, a still cast overcoming his features, almost like he's disappointed. He steps away, but not before trailing one long, pretty finger over the petals of one peony.

"I trust you'll figure it out," he says, and moves to help the customer, an elderly woman with a helmet of shiny silver hair.

When you let yourself out back into the rain, it's shockingly cold against your overheated skin, but you almost can't feel it, a strange haze settling over you. The train ride home is a blur, a churning, choppy sea of replayed memories from your encounter with Todoroki.

It's only when you let yourself into your apartment that you realize there's a tiny notecard buried among the flowers, and you watch as it flutters to your floor. Todoroki's untidy scrawl is all over as you pick it up with curious fingers, and you accidentally drop the peonies flat on the floor when you read it.

Y/N--

Have dinner with me

-- S

And it's followed by a phone number, carefully written so that all of the numbers stand out clearly, as clear as Todoroki's intentions suddenly are to you.

It's even more clear when you remember to google the meaning of the peonies and get caught on the words love at first sight, your face going hotter than the surface of the sun.

Your phone is in your fingers before you register you've even moved, and your message is shot off with shy but certain finality.

I'd love to.