025 ⋆ what's so funny about strawberries? 🌸🍋

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ship: todokiri

Early spring brings about many things. The flowers bloom, the air warms, and the clouds glide high in the sky in a never-ending stretch of wispy white.

It reminds Shouto of cotton--once a compact ball of fluff now stretched to translucence, cerulean peeking through the thin tufts. His eyes follow the streamline of clouds stretching across the horizon until the high sun blinds him. His eyes crinkle as he forces his gaze back to his lap, his manga book resting atop his crossed legs. Uncrossing them, he brings his knees closer to his chest and rests the spine of the book there, smoothing out the paper with his finger as he traces back to the last panel he read.

It's here on the school's roof that he gets to experience spring at its best; where it's quiet and quaint in comparison to the everyday chaos of his classes. Midterms begin in a few weeks with summer break rolling up thereafter. With that meant less fun and more studying, things Shouto didn't care too much for anyway seeing that his definition of 'fun' is sleeping, but for his classmates, they get antsy. Lately, he's been dragged into more conversations than usual. It started with short chats before he'd head up to his room until eventually his friends kept him up most of the night. Oftentimes he'll grace them with his silent presence and occasional statement or two, and he does try to engage more in their conversations when he can, but it just isn't in his nature to be as extroverted as his friend group.

It gets tiring trying to keep up after a while. It's not like he ever has anything meaningful to add to the convo, so he'd rather sit and listen and simply be in someone's presence.

Cats understand that, he thinks to himself with a smile. He thinks of the stray he came across earlier on his walk to school, it's ear chipped on the left and nose spotted black on one side. Its eyes were curious when Shouto had stopped to look at it, taking in the splash of orange and black fur amongst milky white--a Calico, he deemed. It seemed rather small for its size, whether that was due to malnutrition or age. Younger cats tend to be on the slimmer end, but this one seemed fairly older as told by the patches of scraggly grey fur around its mouth.

"You must be hungry," he murmured to the cat. It seemed startled by his voice, yet had a curious twitch of its tail as he knelt down and took his bag off his shoulders. "You can have my bento. It's salmon."

Shoto opened a box to reveal a fresh grilled salmon atop a bed of rice. He sets it down in front of the cat's nose as it sniffs through the air. He sets the top aside, digging through his bag as his new friend licked at the edge of the fish until his fingers brushed against a plastic bottle. The cat lifts its head as Shouto presents a pink bottle, "Milk." He's supplemented with an eager meow.

Now, his stomach gurgles in protest at his unscripted act of kindness, but Shouto ignores it with a flip of a page. He'll grab a snack from the common room kitchen to hold him over until dinner.

A disembodied voice startled him from his thoughts and Shouto's only warning is a flash of bright red. "Oh, there you are!" Kirishima says from where he stands in the doorway, bag slouched over one shoulder whilst he nurses two bottles in an awkward grip. "I've been lookin' everywhere for you," he says mid-stride.

Shouto blinks. "For me? Why?"

"I noticed you weren't at lunch today, so I thought I'd bring you a snack." Kirishima bends forward to hand him one of the bottles. Shouto takes it and twists the bottle around in his hand. It's milk.

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