Chapter Text
A peaceful quiet stretches languidly in the brightly lit room, comfortably interspersed with the sounds of graphite against canvas and the occasional low murmurs of students working on their respective pieces.
Midoriya Izuku surveys their movements from where he is seated on a stool at the center of the semicircle the students and their canvases form around him. “Not too fast,” he speaks lowly, mindful to not change his expression too much. “Take time to look at me. Pay attention to how my arms are placed. My hands.”
Someone curses softly as they presumably mess up and Izuku barely keeps his mouth from twitching up into a smile of amusement, quickly shifting his attention to something else before he can be distracted into moving.
Distantly, he decides that he’d much rather be on the other side of the canvas instead.
Izuku has never thought himself to be one for the spotlight. He does better when he is the one left to watch and observe in his preferred environment, away from intrusive stares and unwanted attention.
It is a shame that they had no one else available to pose as the subject for this class on portraiture.
Heaving a quiet sigh and barely keeping from letting his shoulders slump, Izuku’s gaze wanders from one student to another, searching the room with no purpose in his gaze aside from simply wanting something to look at.
And then he sees it.
Nestled at the back of the room among the rest of the paintings kept on display, like it was always meant to be there—a painting Izuku had been carefully trying to forget as though it would somehow be enough to fill the hollowness within him that he hasn’t quite been able to get rid of even after nearly three years.
It isn’t his best work necessarily. The strokes aren’t as fine as his more recent pieces and the blending of shades is nowhere near as seamless as he is usually credited for it to be. Izuku’s reputation is solidified in a softer, gentler style of painting that is all smooth edges and dreamlike imagery.
This particular painting however is hard strokes and stark colors layered over each other to create an endlessly stormy sky and the open expanse of a field underneath that cannot resist the winds the artist has forced it to bend under. It is raw and cuttingly inexpert and clearly not meant to fall into the neat categories and styles of professional artistry. That doesn’t take away from its striking vulnerability and its capacity to draw the viewer however.
Something about it is painfully personal even without any blatant intimacy on display.
And at the center of the piece is a young man whose face is set in the same storminess as the skies above him. His hair is an even blend of red and white, swept across his forehead by the wind, and curiously, the very end of his hakama is caught on fire. The young man, however, appears to be unperturbed as he stares down the viewer with unwavering intensity in his mismatched gaze that so fittingly reflects the edges of the flame by his feet.
From across the room, Izuku feels his breath catch in his throat as he stares at the heterochromatic gaze that he still sees in the fleeting wisps of his dreams but does not dare to think of in his waking moments.
Swallowing around the sudden dryness of his mouth, he asks, “Who brought that painting out?”
The students pause in their work, their confusion almost palpable as they all turn to trace his line of sight to the painting in question.
Sero Hanta swivels back to look at Izuku, a frown on his usually smiling face. “I found it in the stock when I went to grab the canvases,” he says. Then, hesitantly, “Should I not have?”
Before he can even think better of it, Izuku whispers, “No.”
Any other time—any other painting—and he would have been undoubtedly more understanding. It is in his nature to be almost timid and unfailingly polite. But not now; not when his heart aches with a longing he can do nothing but succumb to.
“Who painted it?” Uraraka Ochako asks, head inclined. She poses it like a question, but Izuku has a feeling that she already knows. The young woman may be his student as far as art is concerned, but Ochako is first and foremost one of Izuku’s dearest and oldest friends, and though she doesn’t know all the details of what happened, she knows enough to hazard an educated guess.
Exhaling slowly, Izuku closes his eyes briefly. “I did,” he admits softly. “A long time ago.”
“What is it called?” Tsuyu questions, studying the painting with unbridled interest.
Izuku is quiet for a moment as he simply sits and counts his breaths. He thinks of a summer past, of the smell of salt in the air, of grays and reds, of ice and fire. He thinks of regret and remembrance and how on some days the lines between the two get blurry. He thinks of waiting and staying and doing neither. He thinks of love and the inevitability of goodbyes.
Finally, he says, “Omoidasu.”
(I remember.)