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It’s late, way too late for Midoriya to be in your dorm right now. But, even though you did scold him about Aizawa catching him in your dorm, he simply laughed you off and reassured you with that stupidly simple smile of his and a warm, knowing look in his eyes. His gaze was tired and yet somehow still full of that teasing mirth he keeps for you, always aware of your constant worrying. If you weren’t so weak to the butterflies you feel when he looks at you like that—like he knows just how much you know him—you would’ve been asleep hours ago.
But you trust him. He knows you like you know him, so you let him stay. Besides, you don’t mind the company.
‘I could never say no to him.’ You grumble to yourself, glancing towards him with a flush on your face, unbeknownst to the offending mess of green sitting on your floor against your bed.
Sprawled across your bed, you squint at the alarm clock’s blaring red numbers on your bedside, reading a little past 1 AM now. Tired of scrolling through your socials, you decide to scoot over a little to hang upside down over the edge of your bed.. to interrupt the comfortable silence, and finally get a look at his perfectly imperfect face.
"Hey, Izuku.." You trailed off, interrupted by the most beautiful yet mundane scene you’ve ever witnessed in your life.
He was upside down to you right now, but you didn’t need to be right side up to know how right everything felt. The light from his screen accompanied by the soft luminescence coming from the moon shining through your window made for a picturesque scene of the green-haired man next to you, the shadows on his face making him look like the perfect muse for a yearning artist.
You looked over at his face, taking it all in. The way his eyebrows furrowed when he found something interesting in some article online. You had no idea what he was looking at, what he was reading, because who cares? Why would you look at his phone when you could stare at him and thrive in the way your heart feels light just being 12 inches away from him?
You don’t realize your eyes dancing across Midoriya’s face, admiring every single feature on his face. Imperfect to him when he looks in the mirror, in a photo on the wall of his childhood home, but perfect to you when you walk with him to class and he’s smiling, happy to be with his friends, with you, with the work he does as a soon-to-be-hero.
Perfect to you when insecurities creep up on him late at night, moments when he’s vulnerable and tears are flowing from his eyes..
His dark, viridian eyes, now softly shining under the moonlight coming from the balcony. They look calm now, a little tired, but calm. These eyes you’ve seen in all sorts of shades of green in all the vivid emotions he seems to be so good at expressing.
Bright, when excitement can’t be hidden by the creeping grin on his face. When curiosity spills out of him and he can’t help but let it all out in one of his long-winded rambles that leave him in a shade of pink.
Dull, when he can’t hide the pain and sadness he’s always so keen on locking away to keep to himself. When sorrow and guilt consume him for all the wrongs he’s convinced are his fault. When he can’t help the shades of blue that pour out of him, unable to stop, flooding him, drowning him.
However, not all colors of viridescence can be described physically. He’s introduced you to a whole other world of green.
Some are cold, when he feels nothing but quiet fury. For others, for those that have been wronged or want to wrong the world. Anger seethes through him when the shades of cold appear. Sometimes annoyance leaks out when these cold colors appear, you two aren’t perfect, but no matter how icy those eyes are towards you, you will always see them as beautiful.
Because, so, so many shades of green are warm.
Warm in the way he looks around at his fellow classmates. Glad and thankful he’s finally found friends, people he knows he can rely on but will never want to for fear of losing that warmth in losing them. Warm in the way he is always humble and satisfied with where he is and how he’s grown to be now.
Many are so warm they light your heart on fire.
In looks he gives you when it’s just the two of you face-to-face, and you have nowhere to hide from his unwavering viridescent warmth that he can so easily pin you under. In the way he can’t help but just..
Slowly, your own eyes traced down to his lips. The shape and feel of them are as familiar to you as the number of days in a year. Consistent, achingly familiar in a way you always feel when you kiss him. Like drifting away from him and his lips sometimes feels like drifting away from the other piece to your puzzle.
‘Fuck, you are so cheesy.’
Having thoughts in your head, you shake them off. Clearly, he didn’t hear your first call for him, so you decide to just sit next to him and linger in his honey-warm presence. You made your way down to him, not sitting side-by-side, but rather facing him as he continues to occupy himself with his phone. He knows you’ve moved down next to him at this point, you can tell by the pretty flush creeping up the back of his neck. You decide you don’t want to remove his wavering attention from his phone and take another moment to keep admiring him, forever immortalizing yet another image of Izuku in your gallery full of him. You notice his freckles. The scars scattered over his face, some peeping underneath the collar of his shirt. How they were splattered all over the likeness of him like a beautiful work of art. You’re both like this for a while, with you adoring your masterpiece while more shades of red are added to him the longer your gaze lingers.
He wasn’t even looking at you, you think if he finally looked up from his screen right now with those eyes everything would feel even more complete. Like the picture-perfect portrait in front of you right now is an incomplete puzzle screaming for one more piece to finally be done, to finally be perfect.
Sure enough, he finally does.
His lips are ever-so-slightly pouted, his eyes ablaze with mock irritation and embarrassment from being picked apart for so long by those eyes of yours. Eyes of nothing but a lover.
His lover.
He looks at your dopey, satisfied grin with those oh so familiar shades of rose and ruby spread across his face, only further accentuating the galaxy of freckles and scars you have yet to explore. You’re curious. You want to see more. You want to indulge in him, right now.
“Hey, dummy, what are you—!“ He instantly shuts up the moment you lay your hand on his surprisingly soft cheek, your thumb on a cluster of freckles right underneath his eye. Your eyes are inches away from his own shades of green, but yet they aren’t looking into the forest right in front of them. No, right now your eyes are captivated by the dazzling assemblage of both freckles and battles won, lit up by his flush and the true moon right outside your balcony.
Midoriya stills underneath the weight of your gaze. He feels your thumb brush across the bags under his eyes, down to the scar that he’s most ashamed of underneath his chin. You feel his throat bob when he gulps, so you move your other hand not currently tracing the constellations of him to the side of his neck. You feel his pulse, every shaky breath he makes due to your overwhelming touch that he thinks he wants more of, but is also so, so unsure of.
His eyes are now on your own, distracted by the feeling of warmth caressing him. He feels you trace the shape of his cheekbone, a small scar left from an injury that didn’t need a healing quirk. He feels you trace his jaw, a recent bruise almost healed, earned from a rather rough spar during training.
You keep going, you keep tracing him like a dot-to-dot of flaws with the softest touch he’s ever felt from you. There’s no pattern to how you touch him, the only consistent thing is the hand on his neck feeling him, his pulse. He swallows again and lets out a shuddered breath.
You feel that, too.
Neither of you are sure of how much time has passed now. Every scar is traced, then touched. Every freckle is smoothed, felt by the brush of your thumb. His face is carefully held by you. He burns under the delicacy of your touch, and you feel it. You feel him.
Time is still as your fingers feel every curve of him. Memorizing every patch and garden of his beautiful freckles. Memorizing ever crater in his skin caused by something he more or less couldn’t control. Memorizing every breath and tremble he makes when you just touch him.
Until suddenly, you feel tears trail down your thumb, down your hand, onto the sleeve of your sweater, and you finally meet the forest looking back at you. He is shades of warm with shades of blue pouring out of his soul, and he is so, so delicate.
His lips part and he tries to speak, but he doesn’t know what to say. He is overwhelmed, but at the same time it’s not nearly enough. It’s like you broke him apart and looked through every broken crack and crevice of his imperfections, his imperfect self. Yet you still continue to look at him like he’s gold.
But he’s not, he is shades of green and that’s what you love most of all.
You speak for him. You speak for him by finally putting a hold on your actions and take his face in both of your hands. In all of this you are still gentle. You are gentle and it makes him cry even harder because he knows you love him and oh fuck you smile at him.
You speak to him by simply pressing your lips to his. Actions speak louder than words.
You can no longer see Izuku’s crying eyes looking at you like you are his world, his galaxy. Instead you feel it in the way he melts into the kiss. In the way that he tries to mold the shape of him into you as he pushes you down and kisses you like you just broke him apart and put him back together. In the way that his tears feel hot against your skin, and the way that you can feel his gratefulness through his touch.
He is a forest. He is a constellation. He is a painting. He is so many shades of green. He is imperfect. He is broken.
That night, you held him in your arms as he cried into your neck. The moonlight continued to shine on Izuku Midoriya laying on top of you, and after all of that, you can’t help but think back and laugh a little;
“.. Maybe I shouldn’t have let you in my dorm.”