#periaske

[tiang0u]

peri have you been doing well recently? i hope that your christmas break is going well! have any projects planned or stuff? or anything that you want to share with ur fannnnnns, complete, incomplete, in the works, and the like? (sorry if i sound too thirsty or anything xD i just miss your writing so muchhh)

Anon, my friend, thank you for your concern! As you may be able to tell I don’t possess my usual lowercase spastic exclamatory aesthetic; currently bedridden from a pretty debilitating cold so it’s taken quite a toll! I’m finishing up some things for the td/dk zine, so I don’t have anything recent… but exploring emotional relationships and trauma narratives have always been on my mind, and I do feel pretty guilty that I’ve left a few people hanging, so here’s a piece that I’m always thinking about! (Ahaha, sorry, I took the opportunity to vent out some WIPs, since I’m currently at an impasse with writing!)

Of course, I haven’t really fleshed out any major plot points. Haha, I have all the tags and everything ready, but beyond that, a vague outline and some scenes. Even then, it’s long as hell; the outline itself. I estimate this fic would take at least 20k-30k, because I love wasting words. I guess this will give you perspective into just how disorganized I am~

I’ll probably never write it though. Just the thought of it is depressing, and writing angst fics always bums me out really long afterwards. I like the complexity of human interaction, but it’s draining. Thanks for giving me this opportunity to bring it into the world though!

we met in a sea of dreams (and again when i woke, you were not there, and i was alone.)

rating: mature

tags: angst, implied/referenced torture, implied/referenced child abuse, emotional hurt/comfort, emotional constipation, codependency, body horror, dreamsharing, trauma, friendship, pain

no pairings.

Midoriya Izuku is taken by the League of Villains in their second year. It goes exactly as well as you’d expect. Because the truth of it is they can’t be kids anymore, and the tragedy of it is that they can’t be anything else.

Todoroki Shouto’s first kiss is a sequence of clashing tongues.

A thick, heavy, wet one, in his mouth, pulsing the way a person retches. Pushing mingling saliva down his throat. Forcing him to swallow viscous spit.

Midoriya’s eyes are wide open, lips parted widely against his own, and it’s obscene, wet, profane, and horribly off, and when he catches his breath, Midoriya looks at him, conveying remorse, gratitude, sorrow, guilt, f - e - a - r—and the warp gate closes over his beaten form and falling arm, and separates them in all dimensions.

Todoroki Shouto wakes up choking, lungs burning for air.

As you can tell, this does not bode well. Todoroki is catatonic for a few days; and then one day, he asks for water. And Todoroki doesn’t like hospitals, so he doesn’t cooperate with the nurses; he gets released, gets cleared for school, but not for training or active duty, not by the psychiatrists or Aizawa. One, psychologically. Second, his right arm is entirely shattered.

“The principal and All Might,” Aizawa says, as an afterthought, “want to check up on you.”

“Is that the only reason why,” Shouto says.

There are multiple questions. Why Aizawa has asked him to sit this one out. Why they want to meet him. “Recovery Girl’s orders,” Aizawa answers. “And no.”

Aizawa doesn’t lie to him. That’s nice.

“When.”

“Lunch time. You can take your lunch over there.”

Aizawa is halfway out the door, making his way to the training field where Shouto’s classmates wait, before he leans back in. His face is unreadable.

“If you don’t submit to a psych evaluation by next week, you will fail this course,” he promises. His tone is flat. “Take this time to think about what you’ll do.”

Shouto gives a clipped nod.

/

He didn’t have dreams in the hospital. They sedated him so hard that he had to be helped up to piss. Because he woke up yelling one day and tore all of the catheters out of his arm. He doesn’t remember why.

So, at lunch time, when he goes back to the dorms, he thinks about the reprimand he’s going to get, and then shrugs to himself. He takes the elevator to the second floor and waits outside of Midoriya’s room.

He’ll probably have nightmares without sedation. That’s a given. Thick, black, curling mist. Shoved down his throat, gagging him. Probably. Losing the gravity inside of him, organs getting tugged through a dimension of non-existence, coming out on the other side, reborn and regret. These are the kind of dreams he predicts because Midoriya was dragged through that warp gate with his teeth gritted. And when he caught Todoroki’s gaze, he smiled—

A groaning sound, whining metal. His fingers are suddenly killing him.

He looks down. The door knob is crushed in his palm, his fingers are bent, and when he pulls back, they dangle like dolls with snapped necks.

This is not a dream. The formless scrap hanging from Midoriya’s door has the shape of his fingers pressed permanently. His fingers are killing him.

This is not,

a dream.

“Todoroki, my boy,” a voice calls to him, and when Shouto turns to look, hand dropping to his side, All Might is there, without a smile, and Shouto can’t be saved.

/

“I told the principal that it may be better if I spoke to you alone,” All Might says.

His voice is different in this form. It has a layered quality. Baritone. And grief. Probably.

“Sorry,” Shouto says.”

“I would have come to you anyway,” All Might replies, waving a bony hand in reassurance. He slides a tea cup on a coaster over to Shouto.

All Might is sitting in his room. It turned out like this because he had to go to Recovery Girl for his broken fingers, and All Might walked with him, and then asked if they could speak in private. Shouto wasn’t sure how to respond. And All Might had asked so formally, like he was giving him a choice.

So he bowed his head and waited for All Might to take the lead. They ended up walking back to the dorms. They were almost to the elevator when Shouto finally asked if they were doing this in his room. All Might blinked at him, almost nervously, and then answered, if that was comfortable for him.

All Might is sitting in his room. All Might has just poured and offered him tea. All Might looks like he has attended several funerals, one of them his own, one of them his, and yet he is here, and he is trying to offer something close to salvation. Shouto does not look into his eyes. There are other, more satisfying ways to practice masochism.

“How was your day?” All Might asks.

There are other, more satisfying ways.

“I can’t participate in training,” Shouto says. “My provisional license is suspended until I get a psychiatric evaluation. I’m going to fail out of the hero track if I don’t get one within the week.” He goes silent. And then, just so he doesn’t sound overly petulant, “It was good.”

All Might folds his hands over the table. How will he respond? Shouto just described an obviously really shitty day and then topped it off with flippantry.

“It is okay to say that it was bad,” All Might says.

“I’m not upset,” Shouto returns.

“You don’t have to be.” All Might’s expression softens. “But know that your grief is just as valid as mine.”

So this is where he paves the segue.

“Are you comfortable talking about it?”

Shouto doesn’t know.

“A safe word,” All Might insists.

There. Are. More. Satisfying ways. To practice. Masochism.

“Enji,” Shouto says flatly.

“I would like to explain a few things, then,” All Might tells him, brow quirking at his choice. 

Shouto nods.

“Young Midoriya gave something to you.”

The saliva thickens in his mouth the way a foreign tongue might have filled it. “Enji.”

All Might immediately stops.

This marks the end of everything coherent, as far as what I’ve written! But the first few days back at UA go like this: he doesn’t train. But he doesn’t sleep. The first time he did, he had a nightmare; he woke up cold and sweating and someone was knocking as his door and his back must have been bleeding the skin was literally stripped off he 

was dreaming. He missed dinner; Iida delivered it. Shouto then went to the corner of his room, pressed in from both sides, and waited for the sun to rise again.

And that’s how it goes really, the first few times. The next nightmare is skin stripped from his arms. Water dripping down on his forehead, rolling down his cheeks. Or tears. Then his fingertips. The skin stripped from his fingertips, taking his identity, he wants to die

And then the skin is stripped from his bare feet. He becomes afraid to get up to walk, so he stays in bed.

He has a week to decide to get that psychiatric evalution. Thanks to Recovery Girl, his arm has healed. Aizawa still won’t let him train, and Shouto can’t even punch a wall out of frustration without obliterating a) the wall and b) his hand. With a no-holds-barred he could probably kill his classmates. He can’t control it.

Aizawa doesn’t pressure him to get the psychiatric evaluation. But Bakugou lingers during lunch time and strides up to Shouto’s desk. They are the only two people in the classroom and Bakugou says flatly that Shouto has Midoriya’s quirk. They have this really one-sided discussion that Shouto really does not want to have, and Bakugou ends up giving him a flat ultimatum–either get his head out of his ass or pass it on.

Shouto first wants to clarify that, one, his head is not in his ass. It’s in a place far worse, so if Bakugou wants to jibe, he needs to up his game. Two, didn’t think you cared–

And he wonders if Bakugou will punch him, but Bakugou just levels him with a very, very blank stare.

“You aren’t gonna save him?” he says, and fucker is that a punch.

Shouto blinks, and the sound of existence becomes white noise on the brink.

He thinks about the way Midoriya smiled at him. When they were on patrol that day, they were talking about Shouto’s mom. She was moving out of the hospital. Going to Ito. It was—

“I want to punch you,” Shouto says honestly. He knows Shouto can’t. Not without killing him. “The principal has guards stationed on me. I can’t even leave campus. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Because you’re fucked up in the head and you need a psych evaluation,” Bakugou replies and repeats, “If you’re not gonna do shit, pass it on.”

Shouto has two more days to decide and ultimately, after a few more nightmares, he decides he wants to talk to Midoriya’s mother. He should, since he was the last person to see her son, so he tells Aizawa he’s headed out and Aizawa’s like, you already know that you’re not allowed off grounds without someone posted on you.

Shouto tries to reason he won’t do anything, but Aizawa shrugs. Shouto’s a liability until he gets evaluated, but luckily, someone else is going to see her too. After school. Teacher’s lounge. It’s All Might, of course. They go to see Midoriya’s mother, and Shouto can’t go inside, so he grits his teeth and waits in the car as All Might returns, and he finally decides that he’s going to get that psychiatric evaluation. And he tells All Might that he wants to save Izuku, and so they end up with training sessions! And when Shouto returns that night, he realizes what those dreams were. Izuku’s and his consciousness are linked, the way all OfA users are; and the dreamsharing has occurred because both users are still alive. And so begins a saga.

Points that I really want to make:

And so all of this is the set-up to All Might and Shouto talking, All Might and Shouto taking on a similar mentor-student relationship to All Might and Izuku. It starts off awkward, not necessarily rocky, but their common ground is first Izuku, and then Endeavor, and Shouto doesn’t try to let slip the abuse, it lives with him and in him, but–but when All Might becomes more of a father figure to Shouto, it’s harder for him to draw the line. In turn, he has a lot of resentment and burgeoning feelings of longing for All Might to be his father instead–and even if he was taught to hate All Might by Endeavor, he could never demonize this man. It’s not that he hates All Might. It’s that he hates feeling the complexity of his abuse, and he doesn’t want to think about it, but being around All Might in close proximity like this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

It does, in fact. Shouto is humiliated when he explains to All Might what happened throughout his childhood. All Might is furious, and then All Might promises him, and says that he is doing well, that he is strong, and he is brave.

They find out that All Might could probably do the dreamsharing too. But he takes sleep medication because sometimes, if he doesn’t, all he can dream of is the way he crushed All for One’s skull and shifted his skin and bones irreparably. 

“He was originally quirkless.”

“Yes.” And All Might’s firm gaze tells him everything he needs to know.

Shouto doesn’t ask.

“You won’t ask why…?”

Shouto shrugs. “It’s Midoriya,” he says, and All Might’s eyes widen before he turns away. The shadow is cast over his face.

“Do you want to talk about it?” All Might asks him softly after regaining his composure.

Shouto stares at him.

“Todoroki, my boy?”

Shouto realizes his face feels warm. Because above all of the shame and anger at himself for not being strong enough, he can remember the distinct sensation of Midoriya sticking a tongue in his mouth.

“…No,” Shouto says.

One of the reasons why he does not pass One for All onto Mirio is because he can’t be sure that Izuku will get One for All back, if the administration have anything to say about. All Might hears his concerns loud and clear and accepts his decision to keep One for All until Izuku is returned.

Mirio personally admits that having a quirk again would be nice. Mirio knows that if he pushes the issue, he, more qualified, would naturally be given One for All. But Mirio says Midoriya wanted to save that girl, above all, despite everything. And then Mirio says, All Might and Midoriya are really the same. He smiles wryly at Shouto and says that Shouto seems to be of the same stock.

Bakugou and Shouto are not friends. But they’re allies. However, this fic does have Bakugou redemption, or post-redemption + exploration of how Midoriya and Bakugou are. Shouto and Bakugou do not get along, but they come to understand each other more than they want to. Shouto is cruel in how he pushes away others. Bakugou is cruel in the way he pulls them in. That’s an antiparallel that I like writing, so I’ve included it, haha. But ultimately, Bakugou wants to save Midoriya, and if asked why, he would answer, Ask questions that can actually be answered. Shouto asks him once exactly what Bakugou thinks of Midoriya, because he knows that Bakugou would never directly admit that he wants to save Midoriya out loud. Bakugou responds, he’s Deku. And that could mean any sort of thing from insult to identification, but the utter disdain in his voice, like Todoroki even has to ask, like it’s obvious to all and every, really takes the cake.

Shouto has purely platonic relationships. He is purely asexual. This story really has no sexual or romantic pairings. It does deal with some aspects of asexuality that I personally wanted to address. In this fic, I headcanon that Shouto is ace while Bakugou is aromantic asexual. Anything with these two characters is either platonic or one-sided from the other party’s perspective. Of course, there is subtext. You never know.

The reason that Shouto and Midoriya can share dreams is because Midoriya is the ninth wielder and Shouto is the tenth. It was said that Midoriya could actually see the previous wielders, including All Might, so I thought it could be extended that the ability to communicate with previous wielders becomes more available as the power of One for All increases, as a consequence. YOLO. First, Todoroki just has nightmares of being tortured, unbeknownst to him that this is Midoriya’s visceral experience, and then he finally synchs up with Midoriya after five nightmares, and they appear in the same dream.

Half of this fic is interactions between the two of them in their dreamshare. The other half is interactions with All Might, Bakugou, introspection, and the like.

The relationship that they build is codependency on Midoriya’s part. Being alive in the League of Villains’ dungeon is such a living hell that he’d rather be asleep, so he’s always unconscious. Shouto, on one hand, somehow becomes addicted to sleeping. Or rather, he thinks about the way that Midoriya is floating alone on the wavelength shared between them, and he thinks about the way that he must be the only reprieve in Midoriya’s currently miserable existence, and he starts sleeping a lot as a result. All Might mistakes it as depression—which, correct diagnosis, but wrong symptom, there were other signs — but Shouto explains that it’s that he’s talking to Midoriya and doesn’t respond otherwise.

The first dream that they have together, Midoriya sees him and asks if he’s real. And then he apologizes for the kiss, and when Shouto takes it in stride by waving it off, Midoriya wonders if this isn’t really a dream? Shouto says that it really isn’t, and Midoriya insists that it is, he was sure Todoroki-kun would have been at least a little disgunrlted? And Shouto is like, this isn’t a dream and I was fine with it. And Midoriya grimaces and says, I forcefully kissed you and made you swallow my spit. Todoroki-kun, seriously.

There is one instance of tension. Midoriya wonders if he’s going to die here. Or he wonders if it would be better to die. Shouto says that they are going to save him. Midoriya says that it’s okay, the fact that he could become a hero in this life is enough for him, and Shouto orders him to stop talking like that, and Midoriya says jokingly that he guesses if he did have one regret, it would be that he didn’t really get to experience anything else. He says, “I’m really glad that I made friends in high school.” But he guesses that he really will never have a first love, or hold someone’s hand, or be held by them, or go on a date, or a kiss—

Shouto pulls Midoriya forward and kisses him, brief, angry. It’s the dream. It’s made him something different. You kissed me back there, Shouto points out, pulling back, a little sour. It was his first. Then he laces their fingers together, wrapping his other arm around Midoriya’s shoulder, and he says, even though I can’t give you those things in the way you want, here.

Midoriya relaxes against his hold. Do tears exist in a world of dreams? Todoroki-kun, are you in love with me?

I don’t think I am, Shouto admits. Not in love, at least. But I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to kill someone. Until Shigaraki.

And Midoriya replies that that’s fair.

Are you, Shouto asks.

In love? Midoriya responds. Faraway, he says into Todoroki’s shoulder, I was. Once. Someone. I don’t have the capacity for it any more.

Shouto is relieved to hear this. 

Anyway Midoriya doesn’t let on when he’s getting tortured far worse. When Shouto asks him if All for One knows he doesn’t have One for All anymore, he doesn’t know if it’s better or worse when Midoriya rasps, he knows.

At some point, Shouto tells Midoriya to stop wearing his projection. Midoriya falters and says that it looks pretty bad. Shouto says that he needs to know how bad.

Midoriya asks if Shouto can share dreams with All Might. When Shouto asks if he wants for him to bring All Might into the dream, Midoriya seems to think better of it and says no. When Shouto asks why, Midoriya finalls says:

“He’ll ask me if I’m doing okay, and then he’ll—” and then, face crumpling, he shakes his head.

Bakugou and Midoriya are hard to quantify. I guess I’d say that I heavily implied some one-sided love on Izuku’s behalf, but of course they both realize it’s an unhealthy relationship. It’s complex in a way that I can’t describe in a sick state. But Bakugou figures it out, he’s smart. It’s one of the many more things he avoided thinking about as a result, but Midoriya not being there anymore is scary.

Bakugou didn’t return these feelings at any point.

The reason he was so cruel to Midoriya wasn’t because he was disgusted by the idea of love. It’s his superiority-inferiority complex.

He in no way ever used that love against Midoriya in an abusive way. Just repeatedly pushed him away and the like; got cruel when Midoriya was persistent–but he never used the fact that Midoriya felt this way against him.

That’s really all I can say on the matter. It’s closed. Of course, Midoriya doesn’t feel that way anymore either. They’re kids with the capacity to move on. It was highly toxic, and it won’t be happening in the fic at all.

When they do rescue Izuku, Shouto shatters his index finger striking a blow against Shigaraki in a way that ensures he’ll never be able to touch all five fingers down on any surface, ever. Bakugou even says, what the fuck, Todoroki.

Shouto gives One for All back to Izuku. He says, full circle, that it’s Midoriya’s power.

It ends with the three of them. Unspoken is the sheer amount of trauma recovery that will be required, the fallout and aftermath of this serious failure on behalf of the hero industry. Haha, I was going to take the easy way out and time-skip.

It ends like this:

“Todoroki, my boy,” All Might says kindly. “You are doing well.”

Thank you!

[auradot-blog]

Peridot, where are you right now?