Chapter Text
It’s a cool, calm morning when Todoroki notices something wrong—quiet, heavy—in the way Midoriya breathes. Midoriya’s breath catches and rattles in his lungs. Every move he makes becomes weak and unsure. When he holds him at night and kisses the back of his neck, he shakes until the morning and both of them, sleepless, crawl sullenly out of bed.
Six months or so, they say. That’s all.
He buys the flowers and rips the instructions from the book without thinking. Never a believer in any of this sort of thing, he carries the supplies in a bag to the graveyard with little preparation or real consideration. His body moves, he follows.
It says to start when the sun falls, so Todoroki sneaks through the iron gates once he sees them lock up for the night.
Todoroki used to tell him, “I’ll love you for the rest of my life, baby.” Now, whenever he says it, Midoriya puts his hands over Todoroki’s lips and closes his eyes.
“How about the rest of mine?” he asks. There’s no laughter, no hint of a smile. He just says it, simple.
When he’s sleeping Todoroki listens to his body, pressing his ear against his ribcage softly, hearing the slow drag of his heartbeat. It pounds so feebly and slowly.
Sometimes he wishes his beat just as slowly, so Midoriya wouldn’t be alone.
The lilies and the red tulips, the lavender and the forget-me-nots, the rosemary, the rainflower, the asphodel. Todoroki has to grind them together in a bowl mixed with honey and water. Once that is done, he pours it over the grave. It says to wait.
When he’s fifteen, Todoroki accidentally kills the family cat. Her name’s Naho and she’s only a year old, fat and orange and his little sister’s favorite thing in the whole world. He has to do the laundry that day and he’s rushing so he can go hang out with Momo and Jirou and they’re texting him that they’re outside over and over and he’s not looking and he dumps the pile of blankets into the dryer and turns it on. He leaves and he doesn’t look back.
His mother calls him, asking if he’s seen the cat. She says she’s been gone for hours and his sister’s worrying beyond belief. “Can you just come home and help us look for him?” she begs.
He gets home and after a while of searching out around the yard with his crying sister, he remembers the laundry. “I’ll be right back,” he tells her. The moment he starts unloading the sheets he realizes something went wrong. Everything has orange hair sticking to it and it takes his brain just seconds too long to catch on. He finds her limp body, small and patchy, in between the blankets. She must’ve been hiding in the dryer for warmth when he threw the sheets in.
Before anyone comes to find him, he takes her in his arms and runs out to the front where the garbage cans are and sits in the driveway out of view of the house. Todoroki leans up against the brick retaining wall and cries so hard he can’t breathe. Naho’s body feels so strange in his hands. Holding something without life, with no heartbeat or soul or movement, is wholly unsettling. It feels leaden and wrong—the most unique sensation he’s ever felt. This is the closest to death he’s ever been, aside from the burns and the heavy hand of his father.
Thank god, he thinks, that it’s garbage night. He places her gently inside one of the trash bags and mutters, “I’m sorry, oh my god I’m sorry,” while he closes the lid. All the trash has already been taken out, so no one will notice. He runs back into the house and starts the washer again.
His sister is still out in the yard, tearfully calling out the cat’s name. She’s never lost anything before, besides bruises from her body from their parents. Granted, he hadn’t really either—except a proper childhood, but she’s only ten. Todoroki can’t tell her this. He takes the flashlight she’s been sweeping the ground with from her and leads her back inside, telling her, “Maybe she just ran away, it’ll be okay.” It breaks his heart and he feels sick when she keeps crying.
In the morning he wakes up early from nightmares of crushing Naho’s body with his own hands. Gapsing awake, he hears his sister asking their mother from the room next to his if Naho will ever come back. In the background, the sounds of the garbage truck coming down the street, the men shouting to grab the bins and empty them into the pile, makes him clutch his sheets tight in his fists.
The feel of something so lifeless, hugged to his chest, surges back. He hopes to god he never has to feel that again. Never has to feel something that was bright and sweet completely cold and gone.
Todoroki asks his mother if she can do the laundry, for a while, after that.
Midoriya doesn’t wear his ring anymore. He wants to ask him why, but he can piece it together. Why would he remind himself of the wedding he won’t be around for?
On days where Midoriya hardly speaks at all and sits at the window watching the dying summer days, Todoroki wonders if he even wants him there. All he is to him is a reminder of the future he will never have. The things he’s said to him, the promises he made; they all rattle inside him as he mills around the house busying himself. Midoriya probably hears them every time Todoroki moves past him. Every I’ll never leave you, every I’ll love you even if we die.
They all resound through the room even if no one speaks, even if no one moves.
All the flyers in Todoroki’s first college dorm suggest he joins a club. The only one to catch his eye is one of the more obscure ones, listed on the bottom of the school’s website. Lighthouse Preservation Society. When he shows up, it’s only him and the founder of the club. He has an obsessive love for lighthouses and is passionate about their preservation and restoration. At least that’s what he tells Todoroki when he walks in.
His name is Izuku Midoriya, and he is the most wonderful thing Todoroki has ever seen.
First Todoroki is too caught by his hair, green in the flourescent lights of the empty classroom. Midoriya prattles on, flitting around and gesturing with the widest smile he’s ever seen. It’s so bright and incredible that Todoroki thinks he may be in love.
No--he’s definitely, very much in love, right from the start. From the very first word that tumbled from Midoriya’s mouth.
“I just really like how,” he says, stumbling along for the words. “How they’re beacons of light against a raging and turbulent thing.” His voice softens, as if he’s embarrassed to sound too dramatic, but Todoroki just falls and falls.
“Yeah,” he says, looking at Midoriya as he looks at the sign up sheet. “That’s why I like them, too.” It doesn’t matter that he isn’t talking about the lighthouses. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t give a shit about them at all.
The instructions say wait until the mixture has seeped into the ground (wait longer if 1. there’s grass 2. time has passed since the burial. Wait less if it’s a fresh grave) so he waits as long as he can in the bitter air. He can really feel the autumn covering everything as the night comes. It smells crisp and clean out, and it would be a beautiful night if he weren’t lying on dead leaves over the grave of his fiance, waiting for stupid flowers and honey to seep into the ground.
Fuck Tokoyami for recommending this stupid, sorrowful book filled with hope and spells for lost loved ones to him. Fuck Tokoyami for knowing, probably, that this was one way to heal, at least.
He never would try this for his father, maybe for his mother. He thinks there’s no one he would’ve done this for, not really.
Midoriya heals wounds he never made, never could see. He kisses Todoroki’s scars both visible and hidden deep in his bones. They tangle under Midoriya’s lighthouse posters in his dorm, and Todoroki fucks him so slowly it’s cathartic.
“Please,” Midoriya begs, raising his hands above his head and palms against the wall so he can push himself onto Todoroki’s cock. “M-More baby.”
Leaning down, Todoroki sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, runs his tongue along the inside of his cheeks. He wants to devour him, every last inch. Midoriya feels like heaven around him. He wants to be buried inside forever.
The room is dark but Midoriya is the light, his smile shining and calling him home.
“I love you,” Todoroki says as he thrusts harder, Midoriya crying up into him.
“I love you,” he says again, and again, and again.
Behind Midoriya’s back, he secretly buys books on how to survive the death of a loved one. Going to the bookstore and placing all of them on the counter draws looks from customers and employees, especially Raising the Dead: A Loved One’s Guide to Grief. He feels their pity wash over him. The older woman ringing up his order looks at him with sad, drooping eyes. Todoroki wishes Ochako was on shift today. He wants to say something like, Go ahead, fucking ask me. Give me your shit advice. But he just smiles politely and hands her the crumpled bills. Her hand lingers on his a moment and he rubs the spot she had touched.
He reads them in the living room at night when Midoriya’s sleeping, knocked out from the meds. Flipping through the pages of other people’s grief and their lonely, desperate advice makes him cry, hard. Maybe he hadn’t realized it until this point or maybe he’s heartless or maybe he’s too scared to think about it but it hits him, right here and now, that he is going to lose him. Midoriya’s going to get worse and he will become so thin he’ll be like paper and leather and his light will fade away like he was never there, leaving a gaping empty space where Todoroki’s heart once lived. His body, Todoroki’s temple, is shrinking and he feels like he’s the one being evicted even though Midoriya’s the one dying.
It could be selfish to be so worried about himself when Midoriya’s the one who needs him. When he’s the one who’s sick, who’s losing his hair, who’s throwing up everyday, who’s developed anxiety and is scared to answer the phone or talk to his mother or un-invite everyone from the wedding or even to kiss Todoroki. The guilt from reading books on how to survive without him while he’s still fucking breathing makes Todoroki feel like he’s drowning. He can’t stop crying and the books don’t help.
He thinks of how unfair it all is, knowing that he has to live on without him. Todoroki’s heart will continue to beat, and beat, and beat even though the pain will never end and it’s going to feel like he’s dying every moment he’s without him. He wants to tell him, “We have so much left to do baby, stay with me.” But Midoriya’s heart will stop and it’s echo will haunt Todoroki for the rest of his days.
There’s no solace in knowing other people know this pain, this abyss. The unthinkable is happening: he is losing him, he is losing him. He is losing him, he is losing him.
Midoriya wouldn’t make it to the honeymoon, so he takes him (with the doctor’s permission), to Maine. He packs all the medicine and writes down all the emergency phone numbers and procedures that he would need, just in case. Before they go, he does research on which lighthouses along the coast are worth seeing. In the end, he decides taking him to Portland Head Light would be the best idea. It’s a popular one with one of the best views of the ocean. More importantly, it was only a two hour drive. He couldn’t handle something longer. It was the best Todoroki could find.
During the drive, all Midoriya talks about is lighthouses. Todoroki feels like they’re in their freshman year again, both of them spearheading the club at their school, desperately trying to get signatures for petitions to change government laws on lighthouse preservation, and shit like that. Half of the time Todoroki didn’t even care what they were doing. He only showed up to the meetings to see Midoriya.
When they walk up to the lighthouse, Todoroki stays behind him to take his picture. He didn’t ask to bring the camera--what need does he have for pictures? This is for Todoroki. He wants to remember Midoriya, staring up at the lighthouse, the wind moving around him and the ocean roaring in the background. The sun kisses him and the salty air beats against his skin, making him look more alive than he has in months.
Todoroki takes a thousand pictures.
When Midoriya notices the camera, he wants one of the both of them and asks a stranger to take it. They pose with the ocean to their backs, the lighthouse towering behind them, each of them holding onto each other and smiling against time.
Todoroki’s parents don’t come to visit after the funeral, but his siblings do, and all their friends. They bring food and clean clothes and offer to clean the house up for him. They tell him that it’s okay that he’s like this, that’s he’s hardly moved in days and every call has gone unanswered, every text unread, all contact ceased. They don’t get angry or tell him to get up and move like the books said they might. They sit with him in the dark and silent house until he tells them that it’s alright to leave.
Momo comes the next day and she brings alcohol, a photo album he’s never seen, the wedding portfolio, and matches. She says, “It’s okay if you don’t want to light them, I just figured you might need them at some point. Or something.”
Momo puts her arm around Todoroki as they both go through the album. It was a surprise Momo was making for them, for their wedding, before Midoriya died. There are pictures from when they first met, shy selfies in dorm rooms and awkward club photos of only the two of them in front of the banner. She must’ve taken these from their social media. There are pictures of them both lying in bed, smiling. One from the time they went to the islands, Midoriya’s pink-burned back and freckles the most beautiful thing he could hope to touch. Candids Todoroki never knew anyone took that bring tears to his tired eyes. Some from when Todoroki proposed, which Momo took. They’re on a park bench and Midoriya is there, smiling at him, and his whole body feels like a cavern, expansive and hollow. The last picture is the one that stranger took at the lighthouse. If only the stranger had known what they were capturing in that moment.
Todoroki does decide to use the matches when they get to the wedding portfolio. He and Momo burn the samples of invites they didn’t use and the sheets with numbers and emails for references. They burn and he feels worse than he ever thought he could.
Midoriya was his goddamn guiding light, his beacon to land in a storm. He can’t see where to go from here without him. He’s lost in the dark, vast, ever-raging sea.
After the honey and water seeps into the ground, he’s supposed to confess something to the person’s grave. Todoroki thinks that part is ridiculous, but through his heartbreak it almost makes sense.
He leans forward, close to the tombstone and whispers, as if the other dead will hear him, “I’m lost without your light, Izuku.” He’s supposed to wait, again. It feels as if all the air has left his body, so he lies down and sees the stars shining from their long away graves. He wonders if there is someone out there on a far off planet, existing but not existing. Alive in once place but not the other.
Midoriya, alive in Todoroki’s heart, but nowhere else.
Waiting, and waiting, seems almost fine to him. The longer he waits, the longer hope continues to live. Besides, he’d wait forever for Midoriya, if he had to.
This is how it would have gone:
The leaves would be just blossoming from the trees, mid-April. Cloudless blue sky, warm breeze. Midoriya’s bouquet would have white lilies, purple roses, and fern. It would be just as he described in his day-dreams.
Todoroki would watch Midoriya walk to him, glowing in the sunrays. Despite his objections to the contrary, he would cry, but it’d be okay because when Midoriya reached him, smiling and laughing, he’d take him in his arms and he’d be whole and well. They would kiss and walk from the ceremony hand in hand and they’d get into the car and drive off to the coast, Midoriya next to him, and it would all be fine. It would be the best day of his life.
“I don’t want to die like this,” he half sobs, his waning body groaning with effort. He’s bent over the toilet at three in the morning. His pajamas hang off of him and Todoroki can see the bones of his back. He’s pushing back the hair he has left and rubbing his shoulder.
Todoroki remembers when they were younger and Midoriya was muscle and sweat and grace. He remembers splaying his fingers over the freckles down his back, pressing him against the bed. These memories hurt.
“Have you ever seen anything more pathetic?” he says, trying to make light of the situation. But Todoroki is there holding his hair and it is so hard to joke.
He says, “Yeah, when I held my dead cat in my arms after killing him when I put him through a cycle in the dryer. That was pretty fucking pathetic.”
His head sways low towards the toilet bowl, almost laughing. “I didn’t know I was that pathetic,” he moans.
Before Todoroki can reply, he tenses up and cries again. He grips the sides of the toilet bowl hard enough for his knuckles to turn white. “Please don’t let me die like this,” he begs, “please.” The glint of his ring startles Todoroki after being used to an unadorned finger for so long and he squeezes his shoulder reassuringly.
He wishes love was enough to cure a sickened heart.
“I won’t, Izuku, I promise.”
This is how it would have gone:
Todoroki would kiss Midoriya forever, until they were old and wrinkled, and then some.
“I used to want a cat, you know,” Midoriya says while they read together on the couch. Todoroki looks at him and raises his eyebrows, wondering where this thought came from. “I don’t think it’d be the best idea, with you being the one to do the laundry and all.” He stares at him for a moment, then starts to laugh, softly, and then with his whole body. As he laughs, Todoroki starts to as well, getting caught up in how wonderful it is to hear him happy again.
But his laughter turns to sobs, and Todoroki holds him as they both cry into one another, shaking with the inevitable.
After finishing one of the books on loss he’d privately started to devour, he walks into their room to find that Midoriya’s not breathing.
He’s in bed on his side, the way he normally sleeps, but his eyes are half-closed and he can see that his thin frame is much too still. Todoroki had thought about this moment a hundred thousand times—how it would happen, what he would do. Would it happen in the middle of the day while he’s making him lunch and telling him that he loves him? Would it be in the morning when he firsts wakes up to discover Midoriya’s limp, lifeless body next to his? Would it be while he’s out in the garden raking the leaves and he’s inside, watching him?
In each scenario, Todoroki panics and his heartbeat quickens as he screams into the phone, begging the ambulance to arrive sooner. He always runs to him and clutches him close and desperately prays to time, or anyone that would listen, that they give him back to him.
Instead, Todoroki’s body seems to drag down as he moves towards him. He slides behind him in bed and pulls him in, holding his head to his chest. He kisses Midoriya’s hair and tells him he’s sorry. Todoroki sees the nearly empty bottle of pills on the nightstand and he doesn’t blame him at all. He wishes Midoriya had let him say goodbye, but he doesn’t blame him at all.
Contrary to what they say, the sun can choose to set. A light can choose to go out.
Midoriya was his light, his call home, while out on a raging and turbulent sea. But darkness always comes.
He’s so heavy in his arms. It’s easy for Todoroki to feel the weight of his bones and muscles and tissues and blood, and how it sinks down, tired.
“It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s okay.”
There were no guidelines or rules on how long to wait after the last step. His breath drifts off into the sky as he gets up and re-reads the pages he tore out from the book.
It says he should return to him if all has been done right and with a desperate heart. He stares at his undisturbed grave and hope burns like a fire within his chest. The stupidity of what he’s been doing hits him so hard that he laughs, and then cries. He wanted him back so badly. That’s all he ever wanted.
The flowers and the honey water weren’t going to give him back. Nothing ever comes back. Naho, Midoriya. There’s no more hope, no more lighthouses, no more kisses. But still, he waits for a little longer, just because when it came to Midoriya, Todoroki was always willing to wait—to give things one last chance before leaving.
When he doesn’t crawl from his grave into Todoroki’s open arms, he wipes his tears and turns back for home.
Midoriya took everything with him when he died. The lighthouses, the ocean air, all laughter. Even Todoroki’s own heart was down there, six feet deep, with him.