Chapter Text
Katsuki wet himself in fear at a local school festival’s “haunted” classroom.
“S-shut up!” he’d hollered, at the time.
He held Izuku down by the arm until he promised not to tell anyone, and then used his pocket money to buy a plate of yakisoba to spill on himself and obfuscate the mess and smell.
He let everyone assume it was Izuku’s—let them think the smaller boy had thrust it at him as he tripped on the ground until Izuku, in a teary-eyed diatribe, told his mother the truth when he asked for money to buy Katsuki some new clothes.
“You told her that just to make me look stupid!” he cried. “I had it!”
The line of snot running from Izuku’s nose splattered as he shook his head from side to side like a wet dog shaking water from his fur. “ No, Kacchan!”
Mitsuki, who stood alongside Izuku's mother, wore an expression stuck halfway between glee and disgust as she waved away the offer of a Midoriya coin purse. “You do look stupid, standing there with piss and noodles on you,” she pointed out.
“Shut up!”
Katsuki shoved Izuku to the ground and almost gave a personalized fireworks show amongst the stalls before he stormed off in humiliated fury.
Katsuki hated that kind of thing: ghosts, phantoms, monsters. The unexplained. His was the gift of light to chase away the darkness in which they hid; his was the gift of noise to drown out the creeping echoes they made in the dead of night. But what is the solution when the haunt is from something within? What is the light bright enough to keep such things at bay from inside?
Izuku thought to save Katsuki. He thought to throw himself in danger and save Katsuki, who was supposed to be his example. Katsuki, who was meant to be the Hero .
Who taught him? Who taught Izuku that? Who taught him and why wasn’t it Katsuki?!
Why did Katsuki fall?
Why didn’t Izuku have a quirk?
Why Izuku? Why was it Izuku?
And what would have happened next if it was Izuku who had fallen into the river instead and Katsuki could not catch him?
What if Izuku had died?
Would it even matter? If quirks were the essence of a person and Izuku didn’t have one, then did that mean that Izuku lacked something else, too? That he didn’t have a soul? That there was nothing special about him? No identity? Was he just an empty shell of a person waiting to put something inside himself? A revenant corpse in search of something to fill itself with?
Or not. That would be absurd, not to mention impossible! Cataclysmic and absurd. That would be like acknowledging children are people with complex internal lives even if they can’t express it worth a damn.
It was as simple as this, obviously: Katsuki hated, hated, hated ghosts.
Katsuki went home by himself. When he made it out of the bustling festival thoroughfare, he took off running all the way to his house before anyone might recognize him.
He hated the feeling of being afraid; of being at a loss for answers; of losing control. He hated even more the idea of being seen at his smallest; at his weakest; at his most frightened. Of being seen as helpless; as useless ; as not enough .
Oh, but Izuku was looking. Izuku already knew.
One of the neighborhood kids thought to call Katsuki’s mom a fat sow while they were playing Heroes and Villains. He socked him in the jaw and threw him in the dirt while the other children watched.
Izuku told Katsuki to stop, so Katsuki beat him up, too. It was disappointingly one-sided. Not even cathartic.
One Children’s Day, Katsuki’s father taught him to fold newsprint kabuto helmets - but with a twist.
Katsuki held up the finished product against the overhead kitchen light and marveled at the elongated front pieces. “It’s got All Might’s haaaaair!”
Mitsuki chuckled while Masaru quietly wiped mottled newsprint ink from his pale fingers with a watery smile.
“I thought you’d like that,” his father said.
Katsuki plopped it on his head, and then ran outside in a fit of energized joy to frolic in the neighborhood with the other children only to discover that Izuku’s newsprint hat had exactly the same bunny-eared touch. They matched. Exactly the same. Quirk or no quirk, they were exactly the same.
Katsuki smacked Izuku’s hat off his head with a stick.
Suddenly, setting off sparks wasn’t something special unless Katsuki made it something special. So he made it something special with a single-minded and faithful pursuit; a focused predator for whom what others labeled as bloodthirst was really starvation . He made it more, and more , and bigger, and louder, and more .
But then, while Izuku may not have gotten a quirk, other kids got their quirks. And then some other kids. And then other kids. They learned to skip rocks, and read, and dribble balls. Izuku was enthralled by it, but Izuku was enthralled by everything .
Katsuki was the best at everything. He made certain he was the best at everything through calculated practice, unbridled determination, and the adamant direction of his mother. That included applications of his quirk.
Look at me, Katsuki thought; hands shaking from his own explosions and the fearful spasms born from an ineffable withdrawal. Look at me!
And other people did. Izuku did. There was Katsuki, who was incredible, who needed to be incredible, be something , and there was Izuku. Izuku, and everyone else who wanted to be like Katsuki. That was the world: a hard binary. There was Katsuki, and there was Izuku. Nobody else seemed to matter quite as much.
It was double-edged, as all addiction is. To Katsuki, Izuku’s praise—the world’s praise—and their jealousy was one and the same. Any disapproving scolding directed towards Katsuki and his loud quirk was also one and the same; it was all envy, just envy, because the only thing separating the rest of the world and Katsuki was that Katsuki had an incredible quirk and the rest of the world did not.
Why? Why did Katsuki have an incredible quirk while the extras of the world did not?
“Because you’re amazing, Kacchan,” Izuku offered, often in repeat of the paranoid voice in Katsuki’s own head. Daily, even when he wasn’t prompted, because Izuku was watching.
Liar, Katsuki thought, though it was unclear whether he was addressing himself or Izuku.
Izuku watched Katsuki and recorded to eternal memory every choice he made. Every choice, good or bad. Izuku watched, he saw, and he knew . His eyes ran like cold green spring water down the back of Katsuki’s neck in the heat of the summer for all the days they were together, which was all of them.
He watched—and reached out like he could take Katsuki’s quirk like a piece of candy or a rubber ball. Like it was something of his and Katsuki was only using it until he got a turn. Izuku watched Katsuki like Katsuki was his to watch. Like Katsuki was merely holding something for Izuku until Izuku decided to take it back.
Or not. That would be absurd, not to mention impossible! Someone’s quirk and their essence was unnervingly similar. Izuku taking his quirk would be like pulling out a piece of Katsuki and sucking it down into himself like a black hole swallowing a star. Cataclysmic and absurd. Completely absurd.
Besides, Katsuki was a child. Everyone knows children don’t feel such complex emotions or internalize using such spiraling, cannibalistic reasoning. That would be stupid.
End scene.
Katsuki found Izuku hiding under an umbrella leaf in the park. He had been so enthralled by the sight of a spider catching a fly in its shimmering web that he had not noticed his own red shoe sticking out from the shaded cover of the plant where any extra could see it.
Katsuki lifted the leaf.
“Gotcha,” he said. And then he frowned; childish brow wrinkled and ridged. “Did you even try to hide from me?”
“Um,” said Izuku, pointing at the spiderweb. “Wait,” he said, and put his fingers into it.
It stuck to his fingertips. When he pulled back, it snapped and disappeared in the light like so much mist under the duress of the morning sun. Like a dream in a daybreak awakening.
“What’ja do that for?” Katsuki asked.
Izuku looked into his hands.
“Hey,” repeated Katsuki.
“The fly,” Izuku said, and held it up. “It’s still alive. Wanted to save it.”
And sure enough, it was. Katsuki leaned down to see it rub its limbs and proboscis until it came clean of whatever invisible trap snatched it from the air. It looked like a scheming old man with bugged-out eyes and putrid hairs, or perhaps an affronted cat sprinkled by water. Then, it flew off in a spontaneous buzz past Katsuki.
Katsuki recoiled back on instinct and waved a preventative hand in front of his face.
“Ugh! So you’re just gonna screw over the spider, huh!”
And that got Izuku to look at him. The shadowed silhouette of the umbrella leaf cut a dramatic divide diagonally over his face. Big green eyes blinked in the half-there summer sun. “Huh?”
“Idiot!” Katsuki’s tongue darted out experimentally as he spat paranoid air; the fly’s proximity to his mouth left him disgusted even if it had never touched him. “Y’really didn’t think about it first, huh? Stupid idiot!”
“Oh,” said Izuku.
Katsuki stared at him. At his freckles; his clear eyes as they moved back to the spiderweb; how his curly hair almost disappeared into the shadows of the undergrowth; at the way his hand came to rest just under his lower lip like he might squeeze the two sides of his mouth together. It was as if he’d totally forgotten that he was meant to be playing a game and instead could only consider the spider.
“How many flies’re they s’posed to eat a day? What do they do if it’s raining real hard and the web breaks in the middle of a storm? Can they still use the broken web, or do they…”
Izuku’s mouth started working nonstop around a series of statements centered around what he did and didn’t know about spiders and their webs, and how long it might take for a spider to build a new one if they did so every day.
Each word sank to the bottom of Katsuki’s stomach like a stone. His nails bit shallow half-moons in his palms. It was as if he wasn’t even there.
“Aw, shut up!” Katsuki bellowed. “Can’t you do anything right?! Why d’you even care? ” He reached down to push Izuku further into the stems of the overgrown plant with a forceful press to his forehead. “You didn’t even try to run! You goin’ easy on me, or somethin’? I’m faster than you!”
“Kacchan!”
Katsuki spun around on the rubber toe of his shoes. The underfoot concrete scuffed them with a subliminal crunch.
“I’m gonna go play by the bridge.”
He did not need to look to know that Izuku was tottering to his feet behind him.
Why do spiderwebs only last for a day? Why does the mantis rip off the heads of the things it eats?
Because they need to do so. They need to keep eating if they want to be the one on top, and that is the way they know how to do it. Katsuki needed a way to bury the first of the unignorable thoughts bubbling just beneath the surface of his skin: Izuku was always better than Katsuki, and one day, he and the rest of the world would even know it if Katsuki didn’t do something about it.
So Katsuki renamed Izuku “Deku.” Useless. Blockhead. Puppet. Early childhood literacy and entitlement was a potent and cruel cocktail, sometimes. Still, it was something. Revenge for the spider; revenge for that moment in the river. A challenge for Izuku to prove himself. An insult because Katsuki thought Izuku could stand to try and throw it back; maybe learn something from Katsuki’s example. It was a pet name.
“No pets,” said Mitsuki, deadpan, when she glimpsed a pet store catalog open in her son’s lap. He’d been looking at cage animals, like rats and rabbits.
“Why not?” asked Katsuki. “Y’think I won’t take care of it?” He narrowed his eyes. “Y’think I’d blow it up? I’m not some little kid with piss-poor control of their quirk, yanno.”
His mother’s mouth dropped into a quiet, unreadable shape—a surefire prelude to detonation if there ever was one. Katsuki even crossed his arms and squared his shoulders in altercation preparation, and then tensed when he realized a standoff wasn’t forthcoming. The only thing more frightening than the punctuated shouts of Bakugo mother and child were their silences.
Mitsuki held up one of her own palms and pointed at it as if in representation of the caustic sweat she had genetically gifted her only son.
“Small animals? Inhaling and ingesting nitroglycerin from you and me, every day , with nowhere to go but this house? Or maybe at night decided to lick your palms while you were asleep? The poor thing’s heart would stop.”
“Dammit,” Katsuki said without heat. He let the magazine drop along with the topic.
“Don’t talk to me like that, you little asshole.”
Katsuki sunk into the couch. “Hag.”
She answered with about as much vitriol as she would when discussing the weather. “Brat.”
Then, she turned on her heel and schlepped upstairs in her seafoam green slippers with a decisive sniff. To her credit, she did offer him a parting comment over her shoulder.
“It’s incredible your little playground gang didn’t keel over just from being around you all the time,” she joked, like the situation could be construed as funny since it didn’t happen. “Say. Is Izuku not sick of your bullshit yet?”
On the way to school, Izuku’s enthusiasm over All Might’s last live rescue overtook the living sound of the traffic around them. He practically tripped over his own feet as he wove alongside the curb to reenact All Might navigating a crowded street without hurting any of the people or slamming into the hastily-parked cars. The collar of his red-yellow-blue shirt bunched up from the straps of his yellow backpack pushed against his neck as he zipped around.
“And then, he jumped over the guard rail and swung around a pole before taking off! I wonder if he did that because just jumping off the concrete would leave a crater?”
“Shut up,” said Katsuki, but it disrupted Izuku’s stream of consciousness as much as a fishing line interrupted an ocean current. Still, he could not help trying to make Izuku bite: “Bet I could go higher without the pole, if I tried.”
It’s fruitless. “Or wait—wouldn’t he have bent the pole in his grip if it was super strength? Or maybe…”
Izuku wove and stumbled like a baby deer as he rattled off more and more hypotheses on the finer points of All Might’s quirk. Katsuki set off an explosion and startled him before he stepped directly into the road.
“Bwaugh!” Izuku screeched. He stumbled back to the center of the sidewalk.
“Stupid nerd!” Katsuki answered. “Pay some damn attention!”
The local crossing guard had something to say about it, too: “Hey! No quirks in the road!”
Katsuki wrinkled his nose and did something with his head that could maybe be misconstrued as respectful at the right angle.
“Sure,” he spat.
And then he whirled on Izuku.
Guanyin forced the Monkey King to serve Tang Sanzang, but why?! Why should one have to wear the diadem when the other was the one who never obeyed? Because they thought it was enough for him to have a shiny crown and call him a king? The monkey was stronger than the priest, or something, right? Katsuki doesn’t know about that; doesn’t care about that, but he knows this: why should Katsuki care what happens to Izuku? Why? Why?! Why was it always Katsuki’s responsibility to mind Izuku—even if he did it poorly? Why didn’t Izuku listen to Katsuki when he told him to do something—to go away; to come back; to look at Katsuki; to not be so reckless; to grow a spine; to shut up for once in his life when he knew nobody else was listening to one of his many inane diatribes?!
“Idiot Deku! Do you want me to kick your ass?!” Katsuki snapped.
At which Izuku flinched. But a second later, he was ogling Katsuki’s hand like it was a fantastical creature.
“Kacchan, wow! Those were even bigger than before! How’d you do that? When’d you start? Oh! Do y’think if we added something to your sweat, we could make the explosions change color? Do you think…”
Katsuki sneered and turned away even as Izuku tugged a notebook out from his yellow backpack with an expectant gleam in his eye.
As it happened, Katsuki was not the only one contemplating his perfect origin story. Izuku wrote stories of his own—in the sense that he wrote down other people’s stories in the notebooks he carried. They weren’t narratives in the classic sense, but analyses of Quirks and the Heroes who carried them. And, oftentimes, the quirks of regular people. He loved understanding what they were, how they worked, what they were best at, how to use them, and what circumstances might cause the downfall of their wielder.
It was that last one that got under Katsuki’s skin the most. He was very aware that some percentage of Izuku’s notes were about him. Not that it mattered, since Izuku had no quirk and Katsuki would never let Izuku catch him unawares, but surely Izuku had thought about it.
And in thinking about it, it manifested. Samson was no fool to Delilah’s schemes: “Say, Kacchan, since your sweat’s flammable, do you think you’d have trouble with someone with a fire-based quirk?”
“Don’t ask such a stupid question, Deku!” Katsuki shouted. And then, as Izuku absently scuttled forward while scribbling away in his notebook, Katsuki grabbed him by the handle of his backpack and shoved him behind him. “And walk behind me, dumbass! Don’t start acting like some big shot when you know damn well you aren’t!”
“K-Kacchan, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to—!”
Katsuki rankled and coiled as if he might release like a spring and strike Izuku, but then he pulled back. Cool. No pets. No quirks in the street. He wiped his palms off on his pants.
“Cram it,” he repeated. “Can’t hear myself think.”
He’d shake Izuku off in Middle School, somehow.
April came. Again. School started; they were classmates; Katsuki had a birthday. Again. Izuku gave him an All Might action figure that Katsuki knew for a fact Izuku wanted for his own collection.
“You want me to get you the same thing?” sneered Katsuki from over his mother’s homemade chicken karaage and cake. “I know you wouldn’t shut up about this. Hah? Deku? This some dumbass hint?”
“Huh?”
“Son, you don’t have to say it like that,” tutted Katsuki’s father with as much authoritative gusto as the dehumidifier spinning white noise in the corner.
Izuku pulled his sparkling eyes away from the newly unwrapped toy sitting in Katsuki’s hands and instead looked at Katsuki. It was something that had grown harder and harder to accomplish—for the two of them to look one another in the face—and something about Izuku’s big eyes made him want to shove him into the table; mix his nose with the tomato salad and fried chicken in front of him.
“Think I need help picking out a birthday gift,” growled Katsuki. “That it? Thought you’d get a start planting the seed before July even got here?”
Izuku’s hands splayed out in front of him. “What? No! No! I just thought it was cool, and I know you and I both like All Might, so I just,” he gestured lamely to the figure. Green eyes flashed demurely from one plastic smile to one plastered frown. “I thought it was the best one.”
“If it’s the best one, why didn’t you keep it?”
“Because Kacchan’s the best,” said Izuku.“So I thought you should have it.”
Katsuki did not miss the way his hooded eyelids cast his returning stare in dark, moody pools. That look. Whatever else Izuku was thinking, he was not saying.
Condescending shit, Katsuki thought, with the prejudice of a lightning strike seeking a metal pole. But Mitsuki’s hand gripped around her son’s neck before he could take his next breath.
“Oh, stop it! Izuku, we both know he’s a turd,” she said. Her nails bit into the skin on the back of Katsuki’s neck like the teeth of an elegant, bloodthirsty animal. In another moment, she might rend it in two like a wolf snapping the neck of a feral cat. “It’s a very nice present! Katsuki should consider himself very lucky to have a friend like you!”
She pressed down on her son as if to make him bow like he was just as much a puppet as Izuku and this was the curtain call of some larger production. Ridiculous—this was his story, and he was going to do as he damn well pleased! He was not going to bow to Izuku, and he was not going to be fooled by whatever trick the little nerd was pulling!
Damn Izuku! Damn him! He knew he could get Katsuki’s mother on his side if only he bowed his head and said sweet bullshit like a weeping honeycomb poised over a glue trap. Motherfucking kiss-ass!
“Let go of me, you stupid hag!” Katsuki screamed. The butt of his palm hit the table with an outraged slap.
Mitski pulled him into a headlock. “Get your head out your ass, you damn brat!”
“K-Kacchan!”
“Shaddup, Deku! Don’t look down on me!”
“ You shaddup, brat!”
The party rapidly devolved into a standard fight between mother and son. Everyone who had somewhere else to go fled there—except Izuku, who skulked to the kitchen alongside Masaru with the empty plates and watched from a distance as Katsuki thrashed like a wild animal caught in a snare and not a human boy.
When Izuku’s wet, judgemental eyes followed him at the start of his journey down the slow path of avoidance - when Katsuki had thrown pinecones at Izuku’s head, or had shoved him out of his way, or tossed him to the ground, or kicked him in the shins, thrown half-baked pittances in his face like a flimsy wall, treated him with the smug superiority of an arrogant, false king of a kingdom of trembling underfoot peat and crumbling dams—to now, that unnameable churning inside Katsuki grew stronger, roiled , and frothed until it finally spilled out in a wave of blinding, frustrated anger.
Anger and smoke.
The anger was easier. The anger was always easier to live with and to use. He drank it down like water, bathed in it, let it fuel every sparking explosion he let loose to propel himself forwards and drown out the rest of the world.
The quietest corner in Katsuki’s heart whispered: liar.
That wasn’t all. The warier adults in his periphery; the ones he couldn’t dazzle nor pin down in deference; the ones he just knew were whispering to themselves away from the children and out of his mother’s earshot, might be right about him. They might be right that he wasn’t a Hero after all. He might be something else. Katsuki might have been told—and told himself—a lie.
He was not a star. He was never a star. He was only feeding a spark eating through his own gunpowder fuse. His days of grandeur were numbered, and it was only a matter of time before his counter hit zero and he engulfed himself with a villainous plume of black smoke. That’s what they said in the shadows Katsuki couldn’t chase out.
The first time Katsuki destroyed with his quirk, palms volatile and filled with a filthy, rancid black-brown smoke, he realized with a dull roll in his chest that he might have told himself a lie. He coughed violently within the self-made halo of ash and shrapnel floating about in the aftermath of his explosion, one empty hand over his mouth in a pitiful defense against the consequences of his own actions. Katsuki hated smoke, hated smoking; turned up his nose like a spoiled cat at anything that disagreed with his constitution. Still, there he’d been, doubled over, squeezing out irritated tears and inhaling a noxious haze of his own making.
A necessary evil , he decided—though with less eloquence. It was only natural to produce this much smoke. This was part of the process. This was part of what it meant to have power. Right?
Katsuki learned to play drums, krav maga, five new throws, and how to propel himself in midair with his quirk. He learned how to pick pockets, intimidate adults, dominate a room, hotwire a car, and treat burns up to the third degree. He advanced to the next grade at the top of his class.
Izuku didn’t learn shit —besides how to stand exactly close enough to and far away from Katsuki to deflect what other people might do to him while staying on the edge of Katsuki’s sight. That, some hero trivia, and what he needed to pass the grade.
They could have been the universe: Izuku as the world and Katsuki as the spark to inspire its enlightenment and creation. They both wanted to chase the same dream: Heroes. Stars. But what was Izuku doing as Katsuki learned to use his quirk behind closed doors? Where was Izuku when Katsuki began to train his body to handle all the blowback his quirk might give him? Where was Izuku in those moments when Katsuki was only himself without his quirk?
Where was Izuku when Katsuki needed him?
Why couldn’t Katsuki make him any stronger? Pushover idiot. Holier-than-thou asshole. Reckless Deku.
Katsuki feared Izuku. He needed Izuku. He needed Izuku’s eyes on him. He feared Izuku’s eyes on him. He’d never touched drugs in his life, and yet he was an addict.
Sometimes, Katsuki beat the crap out of Izuku to get him to go away—or turn his head from Katsuki’s weaknesses. But what good did that do? They were childhood friends. Their lives belonged to one another. Katsuki was a coyote gnawing off its own tail after being caught in a trap and then telling himself he would be better for it.
He said to himself he’d shake him in Middle School, but not when. Maybe in third year. Maybe the day of graduation.
But Izuku, who knew all the ways Katsuki was pathetic, who mocked Katsuki by pretending he belonged on a pedestal, was never far—but never close, either.
Then, during their third year in Middle School, just before Izuku’s birthday, Katsuki told Izuku to take a dive off a roof; almost died at the amorphous hands of a murderer made of sludge; and endured Izuku’s mindless attempt to get himself killed in a fit of hubris when he tried to save Katsuki. That brings us to the present, just about.
All things considered, Katsuki’s last year of Middle School is very quiet. It’s quiet in the sense that he and Izuku barely say a word to one another even as they see each other in the classroom every day.
Katsuki has never been without Izuku. There is almost nothing about him Izuku does not already know. There is nothing special, novel, or different between the two of them. Their lives are practically the same, and worse, Izuku knows everything about him. Everything, everything, everything. Over the course of their short lives, he has learned everything about Katsuki—has collected bits and pieces of him like a child catching so many butterflies in a net. Izuku will spread Katsuki out, will hold down his arms and legs, will pin Katsuki to a board, suffocate him in glass, and hang him on the wall. He has him stuffed on a shelf like a figurine made to collect the dust of time and disregard. Izuku has read him like a book cover-to-cover, plagiarized the plot, unsewn his spine, ripped out his pages, and left the cover to rot in the trash. Katsuki has nothing. Katsuki is nothing but packaging. Izuku has sucked out his insides and absorbed him, just as he absorbs knowledge of quirks; of Heroes; of everything he loves.
But Katsuki can’t name those fears yet. If they had names, that would make them real. He can barely look them in the face. Instead, he shuts his ears as they call for him as if in the distance, searching for him from the dark corners of his mind.
What lies underneath is this: yes, Katsuki was particular, and volatile, and callous, but Katsuki was Izuku’s to love as terribly and as well as he wished. Katsuki knew it in the way a child can recognize the color of the sky before learning how to speak. He knew it that way, because that was the same way he knew the opposite to be true. Katsuki will deny both.
Katsuki is not a Hero, a victor, or even his own person, he doesn’t think. His life is Izuku’s forever and he is desperate to escape it and make sure it is true all at the same time, even if he cannot understand it yet. It isn’t fatalism; Katsuki would never accept fatalism. He chose for it to be complicated, and chose to keep pursuing it and pushing it away despite how complicated it is.
Despite all intentions, this is literally the story of his life: learning to love someone. Learning about himself through accepting someone else. Learning about the world in coming to care for someone else more than himself, even if he had to think he hated them first. Even if he has to live with the knowledge that he did everything wrong. Even if he has to accept that he caused so much hurt that he can never take back. Even if he has to accept that he cannot blame only himself and that he cannot absolve the world of evil by taking personal responsibility for it in totality. He’s just not that important.
But it is as it is. No matter how naive he is in his childishness—no matter how complicated he makes it in his head under the influence of his life lived and colored by the nature of good and evil—Katsuki’s mind and heart will ultimately forget about all of his anger. All he has to do is accept himself as he is in truth and let the rest go like an obscuring cloak sliding from his shoulders as he leaves the bitter memories of what was and could have been behind, and focus only on what is.
That’s the punishment for his mundane crimes. That’s the ending.