Unlikely and Unusual
Day 9 - Warmth - InaTodo


"Ha-choo!"

Yoarashi Inasa pauses in the middle of an impassioned speech about the miracle of childbirth he'd happened to witness first-hand in the form of a cat giving birth in the shed of his house to stare at Todoroki Shouto in mild shock. "TODOROKI! THAT WAS A LOUD SNEEZE!"

Shouto sniffles as blankly as he can and momentarily fumbles for the handkerchief he keeps in his back pocket. Before he's able to put it to his nose, however, Yoarashi already has his huge hand loaded with pulls of tissues, and he's already shoving it not-so-gently into the smaller boy's face.

He grunts in mild annoyance. He knows the overenthusiastic boy means well, but one of these days, Shouto is sure that the large boy'll break a bone or two. He almost broke his nose just then, for example. He shoots him a mildly annoyed glare, which has no effect at all on the boy's excessive enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, he feels his nose itch, and so he takes the tissues hurriedly. He sneezes again, three times in succession, an another two after that. By the end of it, a row of fire escapes from his left nostril. It singes the tissues and just misses the gawking Yoarashi, who manages to dodge in time.

Yoarashi directs his gaze at the trail of smoke that the fire just left in the air. "I KNOW YOU HAVE JUST SNEEZED BUT I HAVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY."

The smaller boy ices the dirty crumple of tissues in his hand and throws it in a nearby dustbin. "Yeah?"

"YOU SNEEZE LIKE A KITTEN."

"... so they tell me." He can't deny it even if he wanted to.

"FURTHERMORE, I THINK YOU MIGHT BE SICK. A COLD MOST LIKELY."

Shouto is already feeling breathless, both from the effort of sneezing his brains out and from the beginning congestion in his nose. "… you don't say."

"YES I DO SAY." Blissfully oblivious to his sarcasm, as usual, Yoarashi places one of his giant hand over Shouto's forehead. It's so big, the palm covers over half of the smaller boy's face. "YOUR FOREHEAD IS WARM. ALSO, YOUR VOICE IS BEGINNING TO SOUND HOARSE. ALSO, YOU'RE SHIVERING. THOSE ARE CONVINCING SIGNS OF A FLU."

He hasn't even noticed that he was beginning to shake against the chill of the fall air until Yoarashi shouted it in his face. Great. Now he's painfully aware of the warmth rising to his face and his sudden inability to control his internal temperature. He shrinks himself in his scarf and uniform blazer, stuffs his ungloved hands into his pockets. "You might be right." It isn't warm enough.

He feels Yoarashi's arm go behind him. He blinks curiously as a heavy fabric weighs around his shoulders, encasing him in warmth.

To say that the larger boy's Shiketsu uniform blazer is large is an understatement. It's so gigantic he feels like he's drowning in it. To Shouto, this feels like the time when he was a very small first grader and he snuck into Natsuo's closet to wear his gakuran to feel like a proper grown-up, only to find out that he's a small boy who only succeeded in looking ridiculous and smaller than he already was.

Except, this one is nicer, because even though he looks like a kid in a giant's jacket, it's so, so warm. Yoarashi boasts so much about having a fired-up outlook in life, and perhaps the best evidence of it is the amount of body warmth that's now embracing Shouto all over.

(Not to mention the smell. Like sandalwood and a musky something or the other that's probably Yoarashi's natural scent. Though the smaller boy'll never admit that it smells nice [at least, not out loud, not while his nose is horribly congested], the feeling of being surrounded by this scent causes a blush to form on his already flushed skin.)

Soon, Shouto feels the chill cut in half. He stops shivering.

"IS MY BLAZER WARM ENOUGH FOR YOU, TODOROKI?"

"Yes, it's good. Thanks."

"IF IT'S NOT WARM ENOUGH, I CAN RUN TO THE STORE TO BUY YOU FURS. SYNTHETIC FURS. OR I COULD WEAVE SOMETHING FROM THE PLANTS AROUND HERE. AND BEFORE YOU ASK, YES, I KNOW HOW TO WEAVE CLOTHES OUT OF PLANTS. THEY TRAIN US IN SHIKETSU HIGH TO SURVIVE IN HARSH ENVIRONMENTS AND DESERTED SITUATIONS-"

"No… please leave the plants alone." Shouto sighs, and not just because he feels the flu eating away his energy. "I think I just need to get back to the dorms… sorry I can't hang out with you for longer, Yoarashi."

"IT'S NO PROBLEM. NO-ONE LIKES GETTING SICK. I THINK YOU SHOULD GO HOME AS SOON AS YOU CAN, TOO. YOU CAN RETURN MY BLAZER TOMORROW. I HAVE TEN EXTRA ONES IN MY CLOSET."

Even if he says that, Yoarashi's still standing in his way like a giant hunk of rock. Even when Shouto stares at him without hiding his annoyance at all, the guy just isn't moving. Before he is able to take more than a few steps to go around the large man, he suddenly feels the ground beneath him disappear.

Yoarashi has succeeded in lifting him up by the waist, letting him settle on one strong arm. Shouto's flustered, not only by the way he's hoisted up like he weighed as much as a tiny kitten (… dammit), but also because for the first time he's looking at the taller man above his head.

Is this what it's like to be gigantic? It's not a bad view, he thinks blankly as he stares at the top of his trademark Shiketsu High hat. "What are you doing?"

"TAKING YOU TO THE UA DORMS. IT WILL BE FASTER THIS WAY."

"It's fine. I don't need help walking," he says stiffly, thinking about the safest way to climb down this tree-of-a-man. Sensing his movement, Yoarashi just holds on to him tighter.

"OH WE'RE NOT WALKING. HOLD ON TIGHT, TODOROKI."

Before Shouto could ask what he means by that, he feels the beginnings of a tornado swooshing around them. He doesn't need to be told twice to hold on tight.

Like a hungry lion leaping after a wild gazelle in the Serengeti, Yoarashi leaps off the ground, until they're five, ten, fifteen feet in the air. The sound of the wind rushing past his ears is catastrophic, but Shouto sees the fine control that Yoarashi uses to keep them afloat. The city below them begins to shrink. He doesn't have time to worry about how he's actually breaking rules by using his quirk in public, how cold it is up in the air, or how people on the streets are pointing to them in awe before he realizes that they're already landing in front of the Heights Alliance complexes.

"THERE WE GO! CAREFUL NOW!" Yoarashi bends over considerably to let Shouto down. The smaller boy tries not to think of how daft he must have looked, with his wind-swept hair and giant jacket and wobbly legs and stuffy nose and beet-red face as he attempts to stand on his own. "SEE? WE'RE HERE IN NO TIME."

"Y… yeah…" Shouto wraps the other boy's blazer tighter around him semi-consciously. "Thanks. But don't ever do that again."

"NOTED! BUT I'M TOTALLY DOING IT AGAIN." Yoarashi does a funny salute. "WELL THEN, I AM GOING TO MY OWN HOUSE NOW. TAKE CARE, TODOROKI! STAY WARM!"

Soon, the giant boy is running off using giant strides (no public use of his quirk this time, thankfully), his boisterous laughter fading off in the distance. Shouto watches this with the flush of fever and something else before he turns to go up to his warm, Japanese-style room to sleep the sickness off.


AN: ... the size difference... T_T I think given the chance Inasa would carry Shouto everywhere all the time