Chapter Text
The twinge in Kirishima’s chest grew lighter, and his run slowed to a light jog through UA’s forest.
Eijirou’s name was ready to fly past his lips, before Kirishima spotted him, kneeling. Curled up into a ball, almost blending in with the rocks dotting the perimeter of the lake he was crouching by. It startled Kirishima; to think that the building of a dragon his counterpart was, the great silhouette that the roar of the noon sun hurled upon him and his friends, could make himself be so discreet, and so small.
It came like the warmth after a massage he didn’t know his muscles needed. As if, with that singular, incidental thought, Kirishima felt relaxed for the first time since this bizarre day had started.
Something about that felt out of place, though. Like he found the corner pieces to a jigsaw puzzle he didn’t know he was completing. But he was abruptly fished out of his thoughts by Eijirou looking back at him, a blush of scales framing his human eyes, even though Kirishima hadn’t said a word.
He tensed for an instant, wondering if Eijirou’s powers included sensing his thoughts, when he saw the smile crinkling his lip.
“…Hi,” Eijirou murmured.
The sound of water sloshing as he turned caught Kirishima’s attention. His eyes latched onto the lake, onto the tarry red slivers slithering into the clear water, widening when they traced it back to a long cut on Eijirou’s arm.
“Crap, you’re hurt.” Voice tight with concern, Kirishima stepped over briskly, next to Eijirou before he took a knee. “We can get you to Recovery Girl, our school nurse. She can help you heal it and everything.”
Critical of the cut, Kirishima looked up at him in a rush, before going still. Eijirou, though listening, didn’t seem quite so alarmed by all this. His scales had slid off his human face, not a one sheltering his gaze, which stayed squarely on the cut he was rinsing on his arm. Yet his expression remained oddly mellow all the while; an echo of a smile lingered on his lips.
It wasn’t anything like Kirishima had really ever seen before, on his own face. But he didn’t have to see it to know if he had felt the same before. And Kirishima felt like he’d been dislodged, disoriented, thrown out of bed having to face himself all over again.
“…Hey…” He studied Eijirou warily. Out of concern. “Are you…okay?”
“Yeah,” Eijirou hummed. “I got clumsy. Cut myself while transforming back. It…happens at times, when I panic,” he admitted; not too proud of it, but not too ashamed either, with the way he chuckled at himself. “My Katsuki’s never happy with me when I do that.”
“Right, but that’s, uh…not really what I meant.”
Kirishima chewed his lip. Watched Eijirou take in the words. Yet his smile never faded, all the same.
“…Katsuki and I…we made a promise about when we spar. When I’m a dragon. We…He would never fight me. While I am one.”
The words slipped out of Eijirou’s mouth, the whispery air and volume giving them less of a body. Like they made up phantoms of distant times, yet ones that tapped into a well of nostalgia, and Eijirou was bearing witness to them. Like he found it predictable yet wondrous all at once, as they floated up to the skies, and he watched them go. In a way that, belatedly, made Kirishima wonder if they really were so similar after all, and how much older Eijirou might have been, compared to him.
Why hadn’t he managed to stop Bakugou?
“I…” Kirishima’s lips flapped without closing, like mould had grown on his tongue. “I’m so sorry that Bakugou did that. That he did this to you—he should never have charged you like that. He could’ve even gotten the others in danger, I…” His neck and face felt so acidic that it would burn him from the inside. Shame welled in his mouth. “I wanted to stop him, too, I…I’m sorry I—that he—”
Eijirou laughed. Not meanly, but knowingly. It was a snicker that matched the rustling of a fallen pile of leaves, wherein a mischievous critter was hiding to play—the tiniest, most innocuous of sounds, which boggled Kirishima’s mind.
“You don’t have to apologise for him, you know? To be honest, it’s probably best that you don’t,” Eijirou says, sing-song and matter-of-fact all at once. His smile grew from the roots of his mirth, grew until his levity came true. “If I’ve learnt anything, it’s that…well, it’d be two things. The first would be that your Katsuki is definitely not my Katsuki, if the past couple of minutes have been any indication.
“The second, and more importantly…” Eijirou rose to his feet, “…is that if your Katsuki is anything like mine, then he can learn to speak for himself, if he doesn’t already know how to.”
His expression grew brighter and opener, like the curtains sliding open to a new day. Kirishima’s eyes couldn’t help but follow his face, before seeing Eijirou bend his injured arm up, water sluicing down from his wrist.
Through the filter of the foliage, Eijirou struck another blinding silhouette. With a smile that loomed over him, the water making Eijirou’s cut-up arm shine in the sunlight, Kirishima felt like a bug, crouched as he was, swallowed whole by his shadow.
—After which Kirishima stood up quicker than he needed to.
Looking aside to the blood dissipating in the lake water, he didn’t trust himself to speak. Something akin to bile roiled in his gut, making him want to curl back up close to the ground again. His chest must have had a tumbleweed of barbed wire rolling around it, growing with each passing second. And every time he kicked himself for it, he would only be irritated further, adding another layer of hurt on top of the pain scuttling through his insides.
If he felt like this at what could only be called solid advice—at Eijirou—Kirishima wouldn’t know how much longer he would be able to hold out.
“Kirishima?”
With a call of his name, that tension came back again—bleeding from his jaw down to his chest, when all Eijirou did was cock his head. “Is something wrong?”
“I…Sorry. I’m sorry, I—”
Kirishima huffed, trying to come up with something. Anything. Before all the barbs would just keep growing and spill forth. Before they did.
“I keep…I keep getting annoyed!” he blurted, eyes flashing. “Part of me…part of me wishes that this day was all just a weird, bad dream. Even though my friends and…and everyone likes you so much. And you haven’t done anything wrong…but even though you haven’t…!”
Realising he was looking at Eijirou’s feet, he squared up his neck, so he looked him firm in the eye. “…Even though you haven’t, I get so annoyed at that! At you! Honestly, if we didn’t have to be joined at the hip in order to not die, I’d wanna get away from you, first thing! The farther, the better!”
It almost made himself laugh. At how, while he was barrelling on, Kirishima found himself nearly yelling. Out of frustration, to be sure, but it was to vent out the steam that made his insides hot to the touch. And Eijirou, wide-eyed as he was, seemed almost intrigued with how he kept watching, and listening.
“You get on with everyone here. My friends love you. Bakugou…Bakugou likes you! You talk to them like you know him—know them, better than I do, and I—I hate seeing that! I don’t like any of that, but…but more than anything else, I—!”
Kirishima winced, the next words stinging as they snaked themselves past his lips.
“…I hate that I feel this way about you,” he mumbled. “Because you didn’t ask for any of this, and even if you did, you don’t deserve it. You did nothing wrong. I’m the one who’s been feeling awful all on my own, who’s been such a selfish asshole. It’s the least manly thing I could do, and I’m so sorry. I don’t...I don’t deserve to be…a…”
It stung before it even left his lips. The words never truly did. But the thought remained—leaving stains wherever it roamed in his body. But Kirishima had to consciously loosen his fists before tightening them again, before all his tension left so his shoulders simply deflated.
Kirishima’s eyes suddenly stung, and he pressed the heels of his palms into them. Like he could hide how naked he felt as he stopped seeing it—stopped seeing his counterpart, looking at him, a literal world apart from him—as he swallowed thickly. Even after he spilled his guts, he couldn’t bring himself to speak again. Even at his weakest, he felt like he’d already been kicked down again. At least then it would be easier for the ground to swallow him whole after.
A hand at his shoulder stilled him. Eijirou’s hand, he noticed when he opened his eyes, his vision tinged green at the edges from the pressure leaving his eyeballs.
He saw Eijirou looking at him with nothing but a patient, kind, if amused expression. And Kirishima hated himself all the more for it.
“Kirishima. It’s okay,” Eijirou said. The hand on his shoulder gave him a little squeeze. “I understand.”
“I know you’re me, in some ways, but…I really doubt it,” Kirishima shook his head, scoffing. He felt like he could throw up from how sour his own mouth tasted. “…I’m the worst.”
“No, no, really. I relate. More than you, or even I know, maybe.”
The pensive tone in his voice pricked at Kirishima’s ear. He looked to Eijirou properly, perhaps for the first time since finding him in the small clearing in the forest by UA, as they both stood side-by-side.
“After all,” Eijirou continued, giving him a lopsided smile. “We’re jealous at heart, even if we can’t help it.”
Like a needle through the heart, the hit was so piercing and precise, Kirishima was winded before he could even register the words. But the warmth in Eijirou’s gaze never changed. His hand stayed firm on his shoulder, all the while, making Kirishima search inside himself.
“But I…I don’t…” Kirishima swallowed, mumbling lamely: “I don’t want to be.”
Eijirou laughed. “Trust me, neither do I,” he shrugged. “But it’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be. It’s what lets me—lets us protect the people and things we care about!”
Kirishima digested the words. The jigsaw he found himself thrust into seemed to gain more pieces, more edges that suggested what the end result should look like.
Belatedly, it then occurred to him, as he looked upon Eijirou’s grin; this was the first time he and Eijirou were by themselves since that morning. Left to just talk between themselves.
The smile on Kirishima’s face felt like an old friend finally coming back to him, when he clasped Eijirou’s hand on his shoulder.
Far, far away—where the horizons bled a plentiful violet before the next day took over—the windows of a modest tavern glowed a warm yellow in the rising night.
Inside the candlelit bar, a group of friends sat scattered around on barstools, some clustered by a roundtable, a couple sitting with their legs swinging off the edge of the bar. Two of them, however, were standing—one with his arms crossed leaned begrudgingly against a wall, the other paced up and down the length of the floor, his plumed boots tapping frantically on the hardwood with his thoughts.
“…So…let me get this straight,” the man pacing stopped, hand on his face as his other stretched towards the man loitering by the tavern wall, who rolled his eyes. “You tore through Trapper territory and decimated their guild—single-handedly, might I add—with enough bloodlust that now news has travelled two towns over without my help, meaning at least two populaces including their reigning nobility thinks the Barbarian King is not only back”—he gestured sharply at the large, serrated blade resting by an orange fur-lined cape by the door—“but wreaking havoc with one of the twain blades of All Might entrusted to him, and—”
“And I didn’t find him,” the man at the wall said brusquely. “And this, unsurprisingly, is a waste of my goddamn time, Kaminari.”
“Uh, hello? Have you even realised what you’ve done?!” Kaminari turned on his heel, eyes blazing. “Bakugou, we’re all wondering where he went, there’s not a single one of us who isn’t worried—but none of us have waged a small-scale war that everyone, their grandmother, and small dog’s now heard of!”
“I mean, not to say that the Crappers didn’t have it coming, but Kaminari isn’t wrong,” Sero sighed, tracing the rim of his empty pint glass. From behind the bar, Asui picked it up for him. “They were our biggest lead, and, well…” He pulled a face. “Were is the key word, here.”
“Whatever. They were a blight on this land anyway.” Bakugou crossed his arms, before his eyes narrowed hard at Kaminari. “Are you telling me you wouldn’t have done the same, given the chance? Knowing what they did to him?”
Silence consumed the tavern.
“I…never said that, but...” Kaminari pursed his lip. He cursed under his breath. “—Dammit, man, this just isn’t what we need right now! There’s a timing to these things, at least! We’ve enough on our plate as-is, with Kirishima missing!”
“Bakugou…” Sitting on the windowsill, Jirou spoke tentatively. He glanced over at her. “If Kirishima was captured, the people who took him might have heard of what you did by now.”
“Good,” he spat suddenly, his weight going back onto his own feet, away from the wall. “Because they’ll know I’m coming for them, and that we will find him.”
“Yeah, but why do you think we told Midoriya and the others to keep the search on the down-low? For fun?” Cross, Ashido looked like she was about to stand from where she sat near Sero and Asui. Eventually, she just sank back down on her stool, looking defeated. “Now whoever’s got Kirishima knows we’re coming for them, so they’ll be trying even harder to get away from us.”
“I know you had your reasons to do what you did, Bakugou. And I don’t think anyone here really blames you for it, deep down,” Asui said. “But it’s really likely this has made the search harder now, whether you want to recognise that or not.”
Whittled down by Asui’s even tone, her straightforward gaze, Bakugou flattened his lips painfully thin. Jirou walked over to Kaminari, murmuring to him with a hand on his arm. Sucking on his inner cheek, Kaminari took a seat by Sero, hurt still clear on his face. The tavern—their tavern, closed early for the night by Asui, felt the most sombre it had been in months.
Looking away, looking pained, Bakugou felt a headache coming on as he sat down in the chair nearest to him. With a steady tug pulling at his heart, he massaged his temple, focusing on his breathing.
“…He’s alive,” he whispered, finally. His arms fell between his knees as he stayed sitting, leaning over. Staring at the laces of his bloodstained boots. “I don’t know where he is. I don’t know, and it kills me, but…I know he’s alive.”
“We know that, Bakugou,” Jirou said gently.
“Yeah, man,” Sero said. “We know you’re not just saying that, either.”
Bakugou studied the toothy, if strained grin Sero gave him. Ashido, who kept her arms crossed, didn’t say anything. Jirou kept rubbing soothing circles into Kaminari’s back, who looked like the one thing he wanted to do but couldn’t was to say something. Asui had turned around to put some more glasses away.
Bakugou looked hard at all of them, at the clock installed above the glasses and drinks on the wall, injecting all the belief he could muster into the words he and his friends had said. Into the steady, rhythmic tug on his chest that matched the ticking clock on the wall—that he pressed his palm into, wishing he could take hold of it and pull, so Eijirou could come back to him.
The bell on the door jingled. Everyone’s head whipped to the side, where a doe-eyed witch dressed in purple came through the front door.
“Uraraka,” Bakugou stood to his feet first. “Did you find anything?”
“Todoroki and Iida haven’t heard any news yet,” she shook her head, but continued with determination. “But I talked to Deku and Yaomomo, and we found something in the library that could explain what happened. And if we’re right, we’ll need you for our idea to work, Bakugou.”
The relief that swept the tavern was palpable—the smiles and whispers that took over everyone’s lips filled fast with elation. But Bakugou whipped his head back to the others, his eyes like daggers aimed at them. Even past his own deafening pulse, he wanted it to resound in silence. He didn’t need any more false alarms, false starts, or false hope.
When everyone had fallen silent, he forced himself to relax, squaring his shoulders before he looked back to Uraraka.
“Tell me what to do.”
“So, where did you learn to fight, man? There’s something about the way you moved when we sparred I couldn’t put my finger on.”
Back at UA, Kirishima and Eijirou made their way back through the miniature forest that surrounded the school grounds. They had already walked for a few minutes, but Kirishima estimated reaching the school would at least take another five. Despite the circumstances, he couldn’t help but be a little impressed at the distance Eijirou crossed in seemingly no time.
“Oh, I never learnt formally like you would have, in your academy,” Eijirou said, pushing aside a few fronds that tried to tickle his nose. “Just picked up some tricks while growing up, I guess.”
Kirishima frowned at the answer. He looked back to Eijirou, who found himself being delighted by the occasional butterfly or bug that graced his path.
When Eijirou reached out to touch a ladybird on a leaf, Kirishima suddenly spotted them. Scars littered over his forearms, like a spray of netting, of varying depths and sizes next to the new gash he had now.
Pursing his lips, Kirishima hesitated, looking away but not quite towards UA at the same time.
“…I’m sorry.”
“Hm? For what? You haven’t done anything wrong.”
Kirishima looked back to Eijirou smiling kindly, watching him. It wasn’t enough to cast away his concern or pity; not all of it, at least. But he did his best to answer back with a smile of his own.
But he ended up then watching as Eijirou paused. As he looked up at the sky again. His smile, muted now, seemed to entwine itself with the warmth, the joy, the sadness he held in his eyes, how he wore it all his heart on his sleeve. It fascinated Kirishima again, to think that maybe he himself would be capable of looking the way that Eijirou did right now.
“You okay?” Kirishima asked. Quietly, so as to not disturb Eijirou’s thoughts. It didn’t seem to break Eijirou out of his trance either way.
“…Yeah. I’m okay,” he answered softly. “I can just tell I’m worrying Katsuki. My one, right now,” he clarified. His shoulders bobbed slow with the deep breath he took in, then out. “I don’t know if you have soulmates, here. But it’s hard not to miss yours when you’ve found them, finally.”
Kirishima blinked, riveted in the way Eijirou closed his eyes, the way a deep contentment enveloped his face, even with the notch between his brows that marred it. Absently, privately, Kirishima decided this version of himself must have been at least a few years older than himself. That was how he could make sense of the yawning chasm he could feel between the two of them, making itself known only at the most incidental things Eijirou would say or do.
What was it like to have a soulmate?
Kirishima was about to ask, before the bushes shifted beside them. Both their heads snapped to the sound, hearing footsteps beating the soil towards them.