#aaaahhhhh

as promised.

So late for v-day, but w/e IT’S DONE AND I’M TIRED. Please accept this humble Hansry offering 🙏

Oh, okay.

Origami

Requested by @sleepwriter620

The first time it happens, Tamaki almost mistakes it for trash.

He is already halfway through a mumbled apology to no one in particular for existing in the same space as a piece of litter when his eyes actually focus. Sitting in the exact center of his desk is a tiny paper crane. The folds are crisp and deliberate. One wing is slightly crooked. It stands on its own, balanced with impossible care.

Tamaki freezes in the doorway of Class 3-A. His classmates are filtering in around him. Mirio is somewhere behind him, probably beaming at the sun itself. Nejire is already asking someone seventeen questions about their shoelaces. No one is looking at his desk. No one is paying attention to the paper crane at all.

He shuffles to his seat with his shoulders hunched up near his ears. His fingers tremble when he picks the crane up. It weighs nothing. The paper is a soft, muted blue. He turns it over in his palm, searching for a note, a signature, some indication of why this object exists and why it is on his desk of all places. There is nothing. Just the paper. Just the careful, imperfect wing.

He places it in his pencil case with the slowness of someone handling an ancient artifact. His heart is beating much too fast. He does not look up for the rest of homeroom.

The next morning, there is a rabbit.

It is green this time, folded from paper so thin it glows when the light hits it. The ears are slightly uneven. One is longer than the other, and the shorter one has a small tear at the edge where someone creased too hard and had to start over. Tamaki stares at it for an uncomfortably long time. He can feel the back of his neck heating up. Someone made this. Someone sat down and folded this with their own hands and then put it on his desk before he arrived.

He cannot fathom why.

He puts the rabbit in his pencil case next to the crane. The case does not close properly now. It bulges at the zipper. He does not fix it.

You are sitting three rows behind him, chin resting on your palm, watching the back of his head as he ever so carefully tucks a green paper rabbit into his pencil case. Your mouth curves into a small, satisfied smile. You do not say a word.

The animals continue.

A paper frog on Wednesday. A tiny paper dog with lopsided ears on Thursday. By Friday, Tamaki has five small origami creatures living in his pencil case, and he has started arriving at the classroom seven minutes earlier than usual. He tells himself it is because he wants to avoid the crowded hallways. This is a lie. He knows it is a lie. He still does it.

On Monday, the game changes.

Tamaki stops dead two feet from his desk. There is an origami clam sitting next to his pencil case. It is round and ridged, carefully shaped to suggest the grooves of a shell. It is unmistakably a clam. Something specific. Something related to his quirk.

His head snaps up. His dark eyes scan the classroom with the skittish, desperate energy of a prey animal. Mirio is laughing with another classmate. Nejire is drawing spirals on the chalkboard for no discernible reason. A few students are milling around. No one is looking at him. No one has ever been looking at him.

But someone knows he ate a clam once and manifested its characteristics in a way that was, apparently, memorable. Someone paid enough attention to his quirk, to him, to think of this.

He does not sit down for a full minute. When he finally does, his hands are shaking so badly he nearly knocks the clam off the desk. He catches it with both palms and cradles it like something precious, something he does not deserve.

You, three rows back, are pretending to review your notes. Your pen is motionless. You are watching his shoulders slowly rise toward his ears, watching the tips of his ears turn red. You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing. Not meanly. Never meanly. You just think he looks like a startled octopus curling in on itself, and it makes your chest feel too full.

The next day, there is an origami octopus.

Tamaki makes a small, strangled noise when he sees it. It is a sound that lives somewhere between a gasp and a whimper. The octopus has eight tentacles, each one curled at the tip. It must have taken forever to fold. The paper is a deep, ocean purple.

He touches one tentacle with the tip of his finger. It springs back slightly when he lifts his hand. Springy. Alive. Made for him.

He looks around again. His eyes are wider this time. There is something almost frantic in the way he searches the room, looking for the source, looking for evidence that this is some kind of elaborate joke. He finds nothing. No one is laughing. No one is pointing. The classroom hums with the same pre-homeroom chaos it always does.

You watch him from your seat, chin on both hands now, your expression so soft it would startle anyone who knew you as the loud, bold thing you usually are. You are not being loud right now. You are being very, very quiet. Patient. You fold a new piece of paper under your desk, out of sight, a small rectangle of yellow that will become a butterfly by tomorrow morning. You have been practicing butterflies for three days. Your first few attempts looked like crumpled moths. These ones are better.

You learn about the butterflies by accident.

It is a Tuesday afternoon, and you are in the common room, sprawled across an armchair with your legs dangling over one side, loudly arguing with Kaminari about whether pineapple belongs on pizza. You are winning. You are always winning. Your voice carries across the entire room, bright and unapologetic, and you gesture wildly with your hands as you list reasons.

Tamaki is pressed into the corner of the farthest couch, trying to become one with the upholstery. He is not part of the conversation. He is never part of conversations like this. But he is listening. He cannot help but listen. Your voice is like a bell, clear and ringing, and it cuts through the static in his brain in a way that terrifies him.

Midway through your impassioned defense of sweet and savory combinations, you glance over and catch him looking at you. It is brief. A flicker of dark eyes before they dart away, his face flooding with color, his entire body curling inward like a dying fern. You pause mid-sentence. Then you grin, wide and warm, and return to your argument without drawing attention to him.

Later that evening, you overhear Mirio telling Nejire that Tamaki likes butterflies. He says it the way someone might mention a friend's favorite band, casual and fond. "He never shuts up about the Red-spotted Purple once you get him going," Mirio laughs, ruffling the back of his own hair. "He's just too shy to bring it up himself."

You file this information away with the same meticulous care you use when folding a new shape for the first time.

The next morning, Tamaki finds a butterfly.

It is yellow, small, and perched on the corner of his desk as if it landed there of its own accord. The wings are angled slightly upward, mid-flight. It is the most detailed piece yet. You have been practicing.

Tamaki does not put this one in his pencil case. He holds it in his palm for the entire duration of first period. His thumb traces the edge of one paper wing over and over. He does not take notes. He does not hear a single word Aizawa says. His entire world has narrowed to the impossible, fragile thing resting in his hand.

Someone gave him a butterfly. Someone knows he loves butterflies. Someone is leaving pieces of themself on his desk every morning, and he is starting to feel like his chest is going to cave in from the weight of wanting to know who.

The confrontation, when it happens, is not a confrontation at all. It is an accident.

Tamaki has started arriving at school absurdly early, earlier than anyone else, partly to avoid crowds and partly because some small, hopeful part of him wonders if he might catch the origami person in the act. He never does. You are too clever for that. You slip in just before the first wave of students, leave the day's creation on his desk, and slip out again before he can spot you.

Until the morning you oversleep.

Your alarm fails. You wake up fifteen minutes late, curse loudly enough to startle your neighbor's cat, and sprint to school with your shoelaces half-tied and a green paper butterfly clutched protectively in your palm. You are so focused on getting to the classroom before Tamaki that you do not notice him until you are already through the door.

He is sitting at his desk. His head is bowed. He is looking at something in his hands, probably yesterday's butterfly, waiting for today's to appear.

You skid to a halt. The door clicks shut behind you. He looks up.

You have been caught.

Tamaki stares at you. You stare back. The green butterfly is still in your hand, very obvious, very incriminating. You can feel your heart pounding somewhere in the vicinity of your throat.

"Oh," you say, brilliantly.

He does not speak. He cannot speak. His mouth opens and closes, and his eyes flick from your face to the butterfly in your hand to the empty spot on his desk where it is clearly meant to go. The realization dawns across his features in slow motion. The paper cranes. The octopus. The butterflies. You. The loud, bright, overwhelming force of nature who argues about pizza and laughs like a firework and has somehow, inexplicably, been leaving him gifts every morning for weeks.

"You," he whispers. It is barely a sound. It is a breath shaped around a syllable.

"Me," you confirm. Your voice is gentler than it normally is. You are not being loud right now. You are not being bold. You are holding a paper butterfly and looking at him like he is something precious, something you are afraid of startling away.

"Why?" The word sounds ripped from him. His hands are shaking. The butterfly from yesterday is crumpling slightly in his grip, and he does not notice.

You walk toward him slowly, each step measured. You stop beside his desk and place the green butterfly next to the spot where his elbow rests. It sits there, small and perfect, a new companion for yesterday's worn one.

"Because talking to you felt too big," you say. "And I wanted you to know I saw you. Without scaring you off."

Tamaki looks at the butterfly. Then he looks at you. His eyes are wet. He blinks rapidly, and one tear escapes down his cheek before he can stop it. He scrubs it away with his sleeve, humiliated, but you do not laugh. You just wait.

"I thought," he starts, and his voice cracks. He tries again. "I thought maybe it was a mistake. That someone put them on the wrong desk."

"No," you say. "They were always for you, Amajiki."

He does not know what to do with that. He does not know what to do with any of this. So he does the only thing his terrified, overwhelmed heart can manage. He whispers, "Thank you," and stares at the butterflies until the rest of the class starts arriving.

After that, you do not need to hide anymore.

You still leave origami on his desk sometimes, but now you hand it to him directly. You sit beside him at lunch with Mirio and Nejire, and you do not force him to talk, but you fill the silences with your bright, effortless chatter, and something about the way you never demand a response makes it easier for him to offer one. Small words at first. A comment about the food. A question about your quirk. Then longer sentences. Then, one miraculous afternoon, an entire opinion about a hero documentary, spoken to you while looking at your shoulder instead of the floor.

Progress.

The teasing starts naturally. You cannot help yourself. You are you, and you have always shown affection with a grin and a sharp tongue, and Tamaki is simply too easy to fluster.

"You're cute," you say one afternoon, completely casual, as he fumbles with a water bottle and nearly drops it. You say it the way someone might comment on the weather. There is no fanfare. No dramatic confession.

Tamaki freezes. The water bottle slips another inch. His face undergoes a rapid and impressive transformation from pale to pink to red. He stares at you with the expression of a man who has just been informed that gravity has been revoked.

"Wh—what?"

"You're cute," you repeat, slower this time, savoring each syllable. You prop your chin on your hand and smile at him. "When you get all flustered like that. It's cute."

He cannot form words. He makes a series of noises that might be an attempt at a sentence but sound more like a deflating balloon. You laugh, bright and unguarded, and nudge his shoulder with yours.

"Relax, Amajiki. I'm just stating facts."

He does not relax. He does not relax for the rest of the day. But later, when he is lying in bed staring at the ceiling, he replays the moment in his head seventeen times. You called him cute. You were joking. You had to be joking. No one calls him cute. No one looks at him the way you did and means it.

Surely, you are joking.

This becomes your routine. You compliment him. You call him cute, sweet, wonderful, a marvel of a human being. You say these things with a grin, your voice bright, your delivery so smooth it feels like part of a bit. And every time, Tamaki turns red and mumbles and waves his hands and tells himself it is just your personality. You are like this with everyone. You are bold and loud and you hand out affection like candy. He is not special. He just happens to be in the blast radius.

You notice this. You notice the way he deflects, the way he never quite believes you. It makes your chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with pity and everything to do with wanting to fold yourself into his life the way you fold paper into butterflies, careful and deliberate and impossible to ignore.

The butterfly in the hair incident happens on a Thursday.

It is the last period of the day. The classroom is warm and drowsy, the windows cracked open to let in a lazy afternoon breeze. Aizawa's voice drones on about hero law, a steady monotone that has already put half the class into a trance.

Tamaki is asleep.

His head is pillowed on his folded arms, his dark hair spilling across his desk in messy waves. His breathing is slow and even. His face is relaxed in a way it almost never is when he is awake. He looks younger like this. Softer. Unburdened.

You are sitting directly behind him. You have been staring at the back of his head for the past ten minutes instead of taking notes, and an idea has been forming in your mind like a slow, golden sunrise.

You pull a sheet of paper from your notebook. Purple, because you know he likes purple. You tear it into several small, neat squares. Your fingers move with the practiced ease of weeks of repetition, creasing and folding and shaping. By the time you are finished, you have seven tiny origami butterflies resting in your palm. Each one is no bigger than your thumbnail. Each one is perfect.

You lean forward. Very carefully, with the stealth and precision of someone diffusing a bomb, you begin to place the butterflies in his hair.

One settles into the dark strands just above his ear. Another you tuck into a wave near the crown of his head. You scatter them like wildflower seeds, nestling them into the chaos of his bedhead until his hair is dotted with small purple shapes that look like they simply flew there and decided to stay.

The students beside you are watching with barely concealed glee. Kaminari is biting his fist to keep from laughing. Ashido has her phone out, recording, tears streaming down her face. You ignore them all. Your focus is entirely on Tamaki, on the gentle rise and fall of his shoulders, on the way a small sigh escapes his lips when your fingers accidentally brush his temple.

When all seven butterflies are in place, you take one final sheet of paper. Red this time. You fold it with painstaking care, creasing each petal individually, coaxing the shape of a rose from the flat square. It takes you several minutes. By the end, your fingertips are sore.

You place the origami rose on the desk directly in front of his sleeping face. It stands upright, the petals curled inward like a secret.

Then you sit back and wait.

Tamaki wakes up slowly. It is the shift in Aizawa's voice that does it, the end-of-class announcement filtering through the fog of his nap. He blinks groggily, lifts his head, and immediately becomes aware of two things.

The first is the origami rose sitting on his desk. It is red, intricate, and beautiful. It was not there when he fell asleep.

The second is the sensation of something light brushing against his forehead. He reaches up, confused, and his fingers find a tiny paper butterfly nestled in his hair.

He goes very, very still.

He pulls the butterfly from his hair with the careful reverence of a man handling holy relics. He stares at it. Then his fingers find another one. And another. He plucks them from his head one by one, seven small purple butterflies, and with each one his face grows redder and his breathing grows shallower and his hands start to shake.

The classroom is silent. Everyone is watching. Aizawa has stopped mid-sentence and is observing the scene with the tired, resigned expression of a man who has long since given up on controlling his students.

Tamaki turns around in his seat.

You are there. You are beaming at him, your smile so wide it crinkles the corners of your eyes. You do not look sorry. You do not look embarrassed. You look like someone who has just pulled off the greatest prank in the history of pranks and is waiting for the applause.

"You," he says, for the second time in your friendship. His voice is a strangled whisper. His hands are full of butterflies.

"Me," you say again, and your voice is warm and unrepentant and full of something that sounds suspiciously like love.

"There were butterflies in my hair."

"There were."

"You put them there."

"I did."

"While I was sleeping."

"You looked peaceful. I didn't want to disturb you."

He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. He is holding the purple butterflies in one shaking hand and the red rose in the other, and you are looking at him like he hung the moon, and he does not know what to do with any of it.

"Why?" he finally manages.

You lean forward and rest your chin on your crossed arms, close enough that he can count your eyelashes. Your voice drops to something quieter, something just for him.

"Because you're cute when you're flustered," you say. "And I wanted to see you wake up surrounded by something beautiful. It seemed fitting."

Tamaki stares at you.

The classroom erupts. Kaminari whoops. Ashido shrieks. Mirio, who has been watching from the doorway with the world's proudest smile, gives a double thumbs-up. Aizawa tells everyone to sit down and shut up, but even his voice lacks its usual sharpness.

Tamaki does not hear any of it. He is still staring at you, his heart hammering against his ribs, the paper butterflies trembling in his grip. You called him cute again. You looked at him like he was something precious. You folded a rose and left it for him to find.

Maybe you are not joking.

The thought lands in his chest like a butterfly itself, delicate and terrifying and full of impossible, fragile hope. He does not know what to say. He does not know what to do. So he does what he has always done. He holds onto the origami like a lifeline, and he lets your smile wash over him like sunlight.