Chapter Text
He hated you.
His name was Todoroki Touya and he hated you. He hated everything about you – the way your fitted knit sweaters would hug all your curves; the swish of your hips as you bustled around the kitchen; the melody of your laughter when your coworkers told a joke that wasn’t even funny. But more than anything, he hated how simple and naive you were, how gullible you must be to let someone like him into your life, let alone your home.
He wasn’t sure when it started, this burning in his chest. Maybe the fire had been lit on that fateful night so many months ago when the two of you first met. It was raining back then. It was the rainy season after all, but he didn’t have an umbrella because what kind of villain is scared of a little rain? So he was hiding out in a dark little alleyway behind some Thai restaurant, waiting for the rain to subside. Sure he may have been a villain, but even villains have their limits. No way was he strolling around with wet socks.
That was when he saw you – or rather, your giant umbrella. It was an obnoxious shade of pink with a cherry blossom design. Looking at it hurt his irises. Next he heard the clack clack of your boots against the pavement as you stepped into the alleyway, and he thought he had never heard a more annoying sound. He wanted to kill you just to never hear it again.
But then you stopped a few feet away, right in front of the dumpster he was crouching beside, and stared down at him with those huge eyes. He wanted to rip them right out of your skull. You hadn’t come closer to him though, just lifted the dirty dumpster lid and dropped something inside. So you were only throwing away your garbage, then, not a wannabe hero trying to perform some vigilante justice.
He thought you would walk away from him after that, but you stood there watching him like a fool. When you reached a hand into your bag, his fingers twitched with the instinct to turn you into barbeque. But then you pulled out a melonpan shaped like a turtle and held it out to him, rain bouncing off the plastic bag. “Want it?” you had asked him. Your voice was sweet and light and it grated on his ears.
“Fuck off,” he spat back. He wanted you to leave him alone in that dim alleyway, leave him to sit in the rain next to the dumpster that smelled like rot and piss, because he was perfectly fine where he was.
“Okay.” You put the melonpan back into your bag then. “Wanna share my umbrella? Where are you headed?”
You were so fucking nosy and nothing got him more worked up than people sticking their nose in his business. He wondered if he could scare you off with a little blue fireball, or if he would be better off just roasting you to death all at once. But your quirk must’ve been something like super speed, because suddenly you were holding that ugly umbrella out over the both of you. He hadn’t even heard the stupid clack of your shoes.
“You can stay at my place for the night if you have nowhere to go.” You were a total idiot, weren’t you? You must’ve been, because only an idiot would invite a complete stranger over to stay the night, especially when they looked like him – like a bad guy. But maybe you did have super speed and that’s why you couldn’t care less about what type of men you brought into your home, because you were sure you could outrun them. Whatever. Your super speed wasn’t shit. He could’ve easily killed you at least six times since you stepped into this alley. Still, maybe it’d be nice to get out of the rain.
He had memorized the route to your apartment that very first night. You know, just in case he needed to kill you later. And then when your head was turned, he had stuffed his hand into your open bag and pocketed the melonpan.
Later, he found out that you did not, in fact, have super speed. Instead, you had some bullshit quirk that let you make anything you touched smell like cherry blossoms. He guessed that was why you had that hideous pink umbrella, why you wore cherry blossom hair clips, why your grocery list was stuck to the fridge by cherry blossom magnets. It was too on the nose; it disgusted him. Imagine if he did that shit – if he wore boots with dangly little charms of fire on them, or if he kept his hair back with a blue flame headband. He would become the laughing stock of Japan.
But the bottom line was that you were weak and useless, with a weak and useless quirk, and in spite of it all, you had still brought some strange man home with you. He thought that maybe you were hoping to die.
(You weren’t.)