Chapter Text
As far as Katsuki’s concerned they have a decent thing going. They're on each other all the time, biting and sucking and kissing like they're too tired to even think. Todoroki gets to lie down in all sorts of weird positions on Katsuki’s bed and monopolize his time and attention during prime sleeping hours he normally doesn’t mess with for the sake of anyone else. And the stuff they do? It feels fucking great. It feels good to let the hard stuff just go and wreck the world’s most perfect, pristine boy with his touch.
It’s not complicated.
Then Todoroki stops kissing him, one day, and just sits there, still straddling him, and asks him why he wears a mask with his hero costume.
“Die! I’ll wear whatever the hell I want!” he rebukes, instantly. Because what else is there to say to a question like that in a situation like this.
“Everyone already knows your identity, that’s why I asked.” Todoroki continues, running his fingers across where the mask is supposed to sit, on Katsuki’s cheekbone and under his eye. “Isn’t a mask supposed to obscure you?”
It’s a stupid argument. Everybody knows where masks come from, the history of secret identities and vigilantes that came before hero society. People who use them now are doing it because it’s supposed to be a tribute to that. The past. It’s not rocket science.
“It has a history, or don’t you even know a simple thing like that?!” he scoffs.
“Maybe for the others, but you wouldn’t do it because of that,” the other boy says, and he’s staring right through Katsuki, like he knows, which is so like him, god, just because they’ve swapped spit a dozen times. “Your favorite hero is All Might. Like Midoriya’s, and mine. That’s the only hero you would honor like that.”
(And All Might doesn’t wear a mask. Not literally.)
He’s mad, mad because it’s true. Mad because Todoroki knows this about him. “If there is a real reason, you’re the last fucking person I’m gonna tell!”
Hearing that, Todoroki deflates immediately. He hasn’t, ever before, shown any kind of physical reaction when Katsuki dismissed him like this. Usually he just takes it in stride. And it’s happened dozens of times, the dismissing. It’s not like it’s a personal thing, or—he doesn’t think it’s meant to be. He just doesn’t have the time to listen to dumb shit.
“Alright,” Todoroki’s tone changes. His ‘mask’ slips, he gets off of Katsuki’s chest and sits beside him on his bed instead and for some reason, Katsuki can’t stand it. The loss of his warmth and his heat, and his face. The way he’s sitting there like that, frozen, and cold and stiff. It's not right like that.
“Okay. Fine! Maybe not the last person. I wouldn’t tell anyone!” he clarifies. He doesn’t want the bastard getting all weird around him. That’s all. “Why do you want to know anyway?”
“Bakugou, we kiss all the time, and I’m not allowed to know you better.”
For the life of him Katsuki can’t figure out if it’s a question or a statement. The answer though, if it was a question, should be no. He isn’t allowed to know, because once he knows one thing, then he’ll ask to know another. Then it’ll never stop. Better not to even go there.
What does Todoroki even want him to spill, huh?
About how he was five years old the first time he thought about having a hero costume with a mask? Free play time in preschool, where he used to get out the fat crayons and focused hard to make a good design, grinding the orange and the green colors into the paper as hard as he could, because he wanted to be bright, so damn bright and the best ? Does Todoroki want to know about how he left the mask till last, and how Deku was standing there next to him, with his mouth gaping like a fish, so fucking impressed. Does he wanna know that?
Does he want to know the conversation that followed? One that Katsuki still remembers, even though it’s been ten years.
All Might doesn’t wear a mask, Kacchan
Yeah, idiot, that’s because I’m not gonna be just like All Might, I’m gonna be even stronger
Amazing! When I become a hero though...when I become a hero I’d wanna a costume just like All Might, except in green
Green is my color, you can’t have it Deku
I don’t really like this green though...maybe a green more like blue…
Does Todoroki want to hear what Katsuki did next? The way he reached his limit, feeling like Deku was looking down on his green, and on all the things that he picked, and shoved him down for the first time?!
Would Todoroki still kiss him then, run his hands all along Katsuki’s body if he knew the look on Deku’s face? Probably not.
Would it make it any better if he told him how he took the drawing home? How he showed his dad only, and how the old man ruffled his hair and told him it was good when he didn’t even recognize what it was. How they had it out that night, him and his mom, when Katsuki said it was super dumb that his dad didn’t recognize what it was supposed to be and how great it was, just like Deku hadn’t, and he was frustrated and all she could focus on was that he was a bad kid. Which he was, probably, a horrible brat, but still.
Would it make Todoroki feel more connected with him when they do stuff, if that’s what he wanted...if he knew that Katsuki’s home life wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows just because it wasn’t the complete trainwreck that his own was? Would it make Todoroki pity him, even? No, fuck no.
“I don’t owe you a thing,” he starts off saying. “But it’s a persona, you think All Might acts like All Might when he’s at home, all that I AM HERE shit. You think he says that when he walks into wherever the hell he goes to sleep?! He acts like that so he can feel like the person that’s gonna come in and kick everyone’s asses and then he does it.”
“The mask is a part of mine! I work on it every single day, it lets me focus on what I’m supposed to be, and I don’t owe anyone an explanation about it.”
Other than, granted, the explanation he just voluntarily gave. If only to prevent his soul from leaving his body due to Todoroki’s stupid fucking kicked-puppy face.
“I see,” Todoroki muses, “I wonder what All Might is really like.”
“Ask Deku, not me. They’re the ones who are always whispering around the place.”
“I did ask him,” Todoroki says, then points to his scar. “The same day I told him about how my father gave me this.”
“Yeah, I know, you said it was your mother, but it was him that drove her to it.”
It's a slip-up. A mistake. He knows as soon as he says it.
“How did you know about that?” Todoroki asks, then seems to figure it out for himself. “You were listening.”
“It’s not like I was trying to! You were talking out in a public place,” he explains. For the record, he is kinda sorry. It’s deeply personal and it’s not like he was looking to know.
“You never said anything.”
“Yeah. It’s not the kinda thing that comes up when people talk.”
It would be awful, probably. To just bring it up.
“But...you don’t mind touching it, you even kissed it once, when we—”
“Shut up!” he hates when Todoroki refers to that stuff when they’re not literally in the middle of it, or actually, even then.
Then he continues, because there’s actually several things about what Todoroki just said that piss him the fuck off. “Why not. It’s just skin isn’t it?” he pauses. “You not want me to or something? I’ll stop.”
He was careful, he’s pretty sure, when he did it.
“Don’t stop, you can do it again. It just surprised me. I thought you didn’t know.”
“Well I do,” he mutters, then adds. “Sorry.”
“Do it again,” Todoroki says, closing the distance between them, so Katsuki leans up, brushes red bangs out of the way, cups his cheek and does it.