Chapter Text
“Eeeeiiiii-ji!” Katsuki yells at the top of his lungs.
The dense forest around him is unmoved by his display. The branches of its trees rustle in the wind and the underbrush is full of life, and none of it cares at all that a bleeding, limping, lost man from the Yuuei Tribe is currently searching for one extremely shitty dragon, also from said tribe.
“Eeeeiiiii-ji!” he yells again. It’s a carrying call; a long, middle pitch sound followed by a high-pitched yelp, designed to carry over the plains of their home. It generally works in woodlands, too, but either it’s not making it through the dense foliage, or Eiji is out of it and can’t respond.
The thought sets Katsuki to worrying, which annoys him further; of the two of them, you’d think the “frail human” with the fucking head-wound would be the one in need of assistance after a crash-landing but nooo, he had to get stuck with fucking Eijirou, with scales hard as stone and the ability to find all the trouble possible within a ten-mile radius.
So, he sets off, into the trees, still calling for his dumb dragon. The fucker better appreciate his efforts once he finds him.
Deep within the forest, near its heart, a being named Izuku hovers anxiously by the resting place of a vibrantly red dragon, listening to the far-off calls moving slowly towards them.
Whoever it is doesn’t sound threatening – he’s calling “Eiji, Eiji!” and the older trees have set to wondering who Eiji is. Perhaps the dragon? They don’t know, but they’re eager, in their own way, to find out.
It doesn’t matter what his name is, in the end; few things in the forest speak the language of humans or dragons. It’s a bit frustrating – nothing will be able to guide the caller, and he can’t speak to the injured beast before him. There’s only so much that he wants to poke the sleeping dragon – there’s an old saying about being crispy when grilled and tasting good with some sort of sauce that he’s not willing to test out for the sake of checking for a head injury.
He avoids the broken wing for this reason as well – he doesn’t want to risk fire or incur teeth – but he bravely starts tending to the cuts and scrapes along the dragon’s flanks. There are several spear marks, and even an arrow embedded in a scale. The thing is of rogue make, from the north of the forest, where the calls come from. A battle preceded the fall, perhaps?
He puts it out of his mind and starts willing the plantlings in his hair to sprout around him. He pulls a stone from the ground, offering a silent apology to the creatures that scurry from the light of the sun as he deprives them of their shelter, and cleans the soil from it with some of the silken cloths that twirl around his hips. They’re decorative, nabbed from mean-hearted traders that had passed close by the forest forest’s western edge, but today they’re also useful. He dusts off a flat stone, and summons one of the blooms into his hand to pick its petals. He'll grind a poultice to start with, and hope the dragon wakes friendly and receptive to having its wing set.
Eijirou awakens to some sort of cool paste being pressed into the heated wounds on his side. He purrs a quiet, questioning noise – where had Katsuki gotten a poultice so effective on such short notice? He doesn’t know enough herbcraft to have made it himself.
There’s silence in reply, and he opens his eyes, confused, to see a few blooms of acacia and allspice dancing in the air before him.
He cranes his neck to look at his flank, finding there a little nymph, paused in its work to meet his gaze.
“Oh,” Eijirou says, “Hi! Thank you!”
The nymph smiles, a brilliant and beautiful expression of joy, and turns back to its task.
“Um, have you seen a human man nearby?” Eijirou hedges, “Blonde, tall, swears a lot? He’s my friend, and if he’s not here...”
The nymph shakes his head, a shower of tiny yellow carnations and yew flowers blooming and fall from his hair – no, and sorrow. Eijirou thanks the gods that his mother had insisted on his learning floriography as a youngling.
“Okay, thanks, anyway,” Eijirou says, shifting his wings and hissing as he realises one is injured. “Damn.”
Balm of Gilead and cress swirl through the air – the flowers for cures and stability – and Eijirou nods when the nymph points to his wing, “If you know how to, that would be really great.”
“Eeeeiiiii-ji!” he suddenly hears in the distance and perks up. Katsuki is okay!
“Kaaaa-tsuki!” he shrieks back, startling the nymph and making it look at him reproachfully.
“Sorry, sorry, I had to call to my partner,” he says.
The nymph huffs and continues to assess his wing. Katsuki calls again, and Eijirou replies once more, incredibly relieved to know his human companion is safe and well enough to be moving. It’s not saying much – Katsuki would run on broken legs and fight with broken arms to achieve his goals – but it’s a comfort, nonetheless.
The call and response continues for some time, with Katsuki slowly getting closer as the nymph scurries all over him, setting his broken bone and creating splints from saplings, securing them in place with vines. The plants it uses it creates itself, and Eijirou marvels as the little plantlings fly from its head and grow to size in seconds.
He re-evaluates the creature before him – this is no dryad, to be creating life and willingly destroying it, and at such a rapid pace.
He doesn’t get the chance to observe it for much longer, though, as Katsuki crashes through the undergrowth and into the clearing he had created on landing, swearing loudly and cursing him seven ways to Sunday.
The not-nymph stares at the loud man raptly as he yells his grievances at Eijirou. The insults and expletives roll off his scales like water – he knows that Katsuki is incapable of saying things like “you worried me" in a sentence, and so he expresses himself in other ways.
The not-nymph doesn’t know this, of course, and so when Katsuki turns on it and growls, “And who the fuck are you?” looking fit to kill, it up and bolts for the trees.
“Hey, get back here, asshole!” Katsuki yells, scrambling after the creature despite his limp and the blood drying on his head.
Eijirou sighs as they disappear into the dark forest and curls up as much as he can with his injuries. Best to get some rest – his wounds won’t heal if he spends all his time worrying about his silly human friend and his new ally.
“Get back here, goddamnit!” Katsuki yells as he clambers over broken logs and rocks and slips and slides on leaves and generally doesn’t help his limp at all. The forest spirit is quick, and in its element – duh – and easily outmanoeuvres him as the chase continues.
There’s only so much screaming he can manage, especially in the state he’s in, so eventually he has to give up and yell one last thing in a last-ditch effort to make him stop.
“I wanted to thank you, shithead!”
The creature doesn’t even look back and disappears into a tree. Literally, runs straight into a tree and apparently becomes one with it.
Katsuki swears, and stumbles to a halt. He is now lost, alone, and still injured. Just as he’s about to resign himself to playing cooee with Eiji again, the nymph pokes his head out from behind the tree.
Katsuki stares, and then blurts, “Cool fucking trick. What else can you do?”
The creature smiles, apparently amused, and steps fully out from behind the tree. He’s notably tall, unlike most nymphs – only a head shorter than Katsuki, not counting his fluffy hair, which gently curls even as it wildly sticks out in all directions. He wears a thin shawl made of what looks like woven moss over his otherwise unclothed shoulders, leaving his lithe torso mostly bare. A few bangles wrap snugly around well-muscled arms – another oddity, most nymphs are waif-like things – and his trousers look to be deerskin, with several silk belts woven around his hips and draping down over his thighs.
The deerskin throws Katsuki for a loop for a moment – dryads generally hate leather, or any product created from a creature that might conceivably live within their domain. Deer should definitely fall into that category, but Eiji’s new friend doesn’t seem to mind. Maybe the pants were a gift?
“You got a name?” he asks, because not knowing what the guy is called is throwing him off a bit.
The nymph taps his throat, and then locates a stray leaf large enough for his purpose, scratching characters into it with worryingly sharp nails.
“Midoriya Izuku,” Katsuki reads when the leaf is handed over to him, “You really from a far away valley?”
Izuku nods, smiling brightly. He gestures around the trees and then points in a particular direction.
“If you think I have any idea which way is north with all these trees in the way, you’re wrong,” Katsuki says flatly, and Izuku points at him emphatically.
“You’re from the north?”
A so-so hand gesture.
Katsuki squints, and Izuku makes a flowy gesture with both hands.
“The forest used to spread to the north?” Katsuki guesses, “It’s in our history that we expanded the plains to create more hunting room when we joined tribes with the dragons.”
Izuku nods, pleased that Katsuki has figured it out so quickly.
“Sorry for chopping down your forest, I guess,” Katsuki offers.
Izuku waves him off, and Katsuki takes the opportunity to change topics.
“Look, I can’t do herbcraft for shit, and Eiji really needs it, I think. Will you come back? I wasn’t angry, I just have really fucking bad resting bitch face.”
Izuku laughs, a silent gesture of mirth, and nods. Flowers erupt from his hair, blooms that Katsuki never bothered to learn the meaning of. They must mean something, but he wouldn’t have a clue where to start – flower language was even lower on his list of things to learn than herbcraft.
“C’mon,” he says instead of admitting his ignorance, “Let’s get back to the idiot. My name is Katsuki, by the way.”
He turns to go, and walks for a few steps before realising there’s no sound of anyone following him. He turns to ask whether Izuku is coming and startles when he finds himself almost nose to nose with him. His eyes are a multi-hued extravaganza of green, and are bright with laughter.
“You’re pretty fucking sneaky, huh?” Katsuki growls.
Izuku nods, and bounces off ahead, eerily silent even as he treads on dead leaves and sticks and all manner of noisy floor cover.
Katsuki follows, trudging loudly along behind him, and tries not to let his eyes spend too much time trained on the motion of the nymph’s hips. The swaying silks make it hard to look away, but he’s not exactly in a position to be taking liberties with their new host.
Maybe when he’s less beat up, he’ll try his luck.