(Ok so I’m flapping my hands in excitement, THANK YOU KIND STRANGER, I really wanted to do this. If anyone else wants me to do a prompt, the post is here! )

Warnings: Strong language, violence – basically the boys are adult heroes

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A part of Shouto that feels far too close to his father comes crashing over his conscious mind as he grabs a fistful of Deku’s costume and drags him onto his toes. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” His voice is hoarse, and his eyes are stinging, and he decides to blame that on the smoke and not the recently deceased villain on the other side of the room. 

Deku, for his part, with a mask half destroyed and wide eyes already streaming with tears – the smoke, again, it’s the smoke – doesn’t try to pull away from him. As quickly as Shouto’s anger had risen, it disappears, and his grip loosens on Deku’s shirt, fingers uncurling from where they’d been clenched painfully tight. He takes a deep breath, and chokes, and thinks that they should probably get out of the burning building before it’s too late. “Sorry.”

Deku shakes his head, and rubble and ash fall out of his hair as he does so. “No, it’s alright.” He hesitates, and Shouto can’t look at him. “You’re shaking.”

Shouto huffs a bitter laugh. “Does that surprise you?” There’s a splintering crash and Shouto startles, letting the familiar high of adrenaline rise in his veins. “We need to get out of here. I’ll get him.” He starts marching across the devastated building to the villain’s corpse. Mass-murderer or not, he could have a family somewhere. They’d want to bury him. And it wasn’t like either he or Deku had entered this situation planning on casualties.

Deku follows him, and Shouto does his best to ignore him. The flames in the room are pushing the temperature higher, and he tries to throw cold air into a circle around them. It’s difficult with so little moisture in the air, but not impossible. It’s not like he hasn’t practiced in heated environments, after all.

“Shouto…” Deku trails off. Shouto keeps ignoring him, bending and hoisting the villain – his name had been Snapdragon, over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Then he turns and walks past Deku, and pretends the stricken look on his face doesn’t hit him like a punch in the gut.

By the time they get outside, the emergency services are already there. One of the paramedics takes Snapdragon’s body from Shouto’s arms with a grim expression whilst Deku gives a statement to the police. Once Shouto has done the same, they’re free to go.

Shouto wants to sleep for a week. Instead, he lets Deku pull him into an alley. 

“Shouto, look at me. Are you…”

Shouto lets out a deep breath. “Please do not ask me if I’m alright.”

Hurt and confusion fight for possession of the wrinkles running over Deku’s brow. “What…” He blinks, seeming to calm himself. There’s a vivid red cut on his cheek that he really should have let the medics take a look at. Shouto swallows, and gets his first aid supplies out on autopilot. “If you don’t…If you’re not able to talk about it, it’s ok.” Shouto ignores him, gently tilting his face to the side so he can start to apply the antiseptic. Deku had pulled his hood off almost as soon as he’d left the building. It wasn’t like his identity was much of a secret.

Shouto carefully cleans the cut on his cheek and waits. After about a hundred heartbeats, Deku purses his lips. “You’re still shaking.”

Shouto shuts his eyes, briefly, hand going still on Deku’s cheek. “Yes. Adrenaline does that.”

He doesn’t need to look at Deku to know that he’s frowning. “We both know that’s not what this is about.”

For some reason, this is what trips his temper. Shouto scowls, pulling back from Deku’s face, and raises his eyebrows. “Do we? Has it ever occurred to you that I might not like you to make assumptions about what I am or am not thinking?”

Deku’s frown deepens. “Of course, but Shouto, that’s…”

“Don’t say that’s not what this is about. You don’t know what this is about.”

A muscle in Deku’s jaw twitches. “Because you won’t tell me.” Almost as quickly as Deku’s temper rises, it’s gone again, and Shouto hates himself for it but he can’t help but resent him a little, for that. “Shouto, come on. Please, I need you to talk to me.”

Shouto looks down the alley. The street beyond is bright and white in the late afternoon soon, slowly filling with commuters as the police move their barriers, redirecting traffic. It would be easy to move back into the crowds and let this wait until later, when he felt less like the world was trying to pull itself out from beneath his feet. Certainly easier than leaving by the rooftops, where Deku could and would follow him, easily. 

But that would be running away. And there were a lot of things you could call Todoroki Shouto, but a coward is not one of them. His fingers twitch, and he smooths his uniform on impulse, getting ash on his fingers. He looks at the concrete instead of Deku when he speaks. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?”

“Wait, what?”

Now Shouto does look at him, but Deku doesn’t flinch at his glare. Instead he meets it, patiently, waiting for an explanation. Shouto breathes out through his nose. “In that building. With Snapdragon.” He finds himself gritting the words out between his teeth, and the part of them that rose with his temper: the part that felt hot and too much like his father – was already screaming. How could you not have noticed this? How is this not a problem for you?

Do you really think so little of your own safety?

Deku blinks, and his expression clears. “Oh, you mean my leg? Well, yeah, I know, I knew that before I did it.”

Shouto feels his temper slipping from between his fingers like a dog on a leash. “You…knew…that you….risked losing…a leg. You risked losing a leg.”

Deku frowns, and something flickers across his features, too fast even after all these years for Shouto to catch it. But then he settles into a smile. “Well, yeah, calculated risk. It’s kind of part of the job description. If it helps, it was pretty unlikely that he was gonna be able to hit me.”

“Pretty unlikely.” Shouto thinks that living with Deku has shaved more than a decade off his predicted lifespan, and most of the time he doesn’t care, but sometimes he wants to pick him up and shake him by the shoulders until he understands what he does to the people who care about him. Like now. Now was one of those times. 

Deku snorts, covering up whatever was flickering beneath his poker face with false bravado. “Well, yeah, Shouto, I mean… he was good, but he wasn’t, I wouldn’t say he was All For One good, you know.” Shouto mostly wants to be sick. 

“Traumatic amputation and death by blood loss does not fall within the margin of acceptable risk, Deku.”

Now Deku does look annoyed, his frown deepening as he juts out his chin and sets his shoulders. Which is brilliant. Because Shouto loves him: loves him more than he expects to ever love anything or anyone for the rest of his natural life. But his partner is also as stubborn as an ox and thickheaded to boot and Shouto still really wants to just go to sleep and forget this whole nightmare of a day. 

“Well, what did you want me to do? It wasn’t like I had a lot of time to think about. And again, blood loss and missing limbs are kind of part of the job. You know that.”

“I expect you to trust me!” Shouto’s raising his voice, and he can’t quite find it in himself to care. Deku doesn’t flinch, but his frown deepens. “I expect you to fall back until you can think of an option that doesn’t leave you as an amputee in the best case scenario. I expect you not to fling yourself headlong into danger in a job which already puts your life in danger every. Single. Day.” Shouto is breathing too fast, and as he speaks he jabs his finger into Deku’s chest. “I expect you, Deku, to take five seconds to think about all the people that love you, and remember the fact that even if you continue to have no apparent regard for your safety, we do. I DO! Do you ever stop to think that hurting yourself also hurts the people you care about? You ASS.”

“YOU COULD HAVE DIED!”

Shouto cuts himself off mid-rant, feeling his temper leave him like wind from a full sail. Tears have sprung into Deku’s eyes, and he ignores them as he grabs Shouto’s shoulders, pushing him back against the wall of the alley and squeezing his arms too tight to be comfortable. Decades of mutual trust means that fear doesn’t even occur to Shouto, or at least, not for himself. Deku looks like he’s one punch away from falling apart. Deku takes a deep breath, and it’s wet with tears, and he stares at Shouto with something not unlike desperation.

“You could have…I saw him…He was going to…He was going to cut off your head and you hadn’t seen him and there was no time and all I could see, all I could see was him doing that and I didn’t think, I couldn’t think, I just moved.” Deku chokes, and Shouto can hardly tell if he’s sobbing or retching, and his grip on Shouto’s arms lessens a little but he’s still holding him an inch off the ground without any apparent effort. Deku ducks his head, chest heaving as he weeps, hands and shoulders shaking. “He was going to…You were going to…you could have died, Shouto.” Deku is not a small man: broad shouldered and strong, adulthood had suited him well. But his voice in that moment is as small as it ever was, and all at once they’re fifteen again and realising just how frightening death can be. 

“You could have died.”

With that, Shouto’s temper disappears, and he folds over Deku like wheat in the wind, curling around his broad shoulders and gently rubbing circles over his upper back. Shouto swallows the lump in his own throat: even now, Deku so rarely allows himself to fall apart, even with him, even when they’re alone. Softly, he starts to murmur reassurances, pressing kisses to the top of Deku’s head, still dusty with rubble and smelling of smoke. “It’s ok. It’s alright. I’m here. We’re ok.”

Eventually, Deku starts to stop crying, and when he does he looks up ruefully at Shouto and carefully sets him back down on the ground. Shouto wriggles his toes as pins and needles fall into his feet, and Deku wipes his nose. Deku brushes his hands lightly, gently, over Shouto’s arms, which are already sore from his grip. He looks like he’s just kicked a puppy. “I’m sorry, did I…?”

Shouto sighs, and leans forward, pulling Deku’s head to rest on his shoulder and pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Come here, you big idiot.”

Deku sniffs. “’M as smart as you are.” 

Shouto grins, and presses another kiss to his cheek. “And yet you so rarely show it.” Deku makes a soft sound of annoyance, and Shouto’s smile widens even further. He runs his fingers through Deku’s hair, pulling bits of plaster from his curls, and his nose wrinkles as he does so. “This is going to be a pain.”

“I’m not shaving it.” Deku sounds sullen, but more like a petulant lover than a man on the edge of falling apart, so Shouto counts that as a victory. He runs his hand self consciously over his own buzzcut of red hair. 

“It would be a lot more convenient.” Shouto teases, mostly for the sake of a conversation that feels more like normalcy. Like the kind of argument two lovers who didn’t have to put their lives on the line every day would have. As if they were safe.

Deku pulls back from where he’s been leaving a damp patch on Shouto’s neck and frowns at him. “Shouto. We’re not having this conversation again.”

Shouto smirks to hide his relief, and tilts his head to press a slow, gentle kiss to Deku’s lips. He tastes of blood and sweat and smoke. Shouto winds his fingers carefully into his hair: he’d seen Deku take a hit earlier and half expects to feel the bruise. Then he pulls him close, and keeps kissing him, lazy and gentle and soft. He shuts his eyes, and bumps his nose, and feels Deku, Izuku, warm and whole and alive under his hands. 

When he pulls back, Deku speaks first. This does not come as a surprise. “I love you, Shouto. I’m sorry I scared you.”

Shouto sighs, and tries to wish away the way his knees turn to jelly, still, at the memory of Deku’s shin heading for the bear-traps Snapdragon had for hands. “Ditto. On both counts. Occupational hazard, right?” He looks up at Deku, and sees his smile moving somewhere south of reassured, and swallows.

Because he can be strong, too, if Deku needs him to be. So Shouto presses another kiss to Deku’s lips, and pulls back, and grins at him. “Why don’t you take me home, hero? Remind me why life is worth living after all.”

Deku raises his eyebrows, and Shouto bites his lip and rests a hand on Deku’s side, doing his best to try and keep a straight face. “I think I’m going to need a very…thorough…reminder.”

Deku snorts, but it doesn’t do much to hide the way his pupils are blowing out, and Shouto can feel the tension in the air shifting from what had been dangerous and hopeless into something more promising. Then Deku gives him a quick kiss, and squeezes his arse, and jumps onto the roof of the nearest building. 

Shouto swears, following him, and Deku laughs over his shoulder as he bounces from rooftop to rooftop, silhouetted against the blushing sky. “Race you there!”

And Shouto did.