Work Text:
THE MIDDLE
Looking out from his classroom window, Katsuki can see the swell of green mountains. He’s seated in the middle of the class due to the teacher’s positioning, and he finds he misses being able to lean his back against the wall and put his fingers against the glass. He likes the mountains of his small-town school, the way they loomed over them like monoliths, old and ever-lasting.
They seemed a constant that Katsuki lacked in his life.
Two rows in front of him sits Izuku, head bent in concentration. He’s nibbling the end of his pencil, eyebrows furrowed. He can feel the familiar bubble of annoyance — almost habitual, by now — fester inside him, but he pushes it down for now. They’re still in class, after all, and no one is looking his way. He twirls his pen and finds the tingle in his fingers subside. Anger is a pulse that sits in the centre of his chest and burns, radiating outwards, pushing up through his throat and to the very base, where his neck meets his jaw. That’s where anger hurt the most.
He frowns, tapping the corner of his desk in impatience. He hasn’t done anything big today, not enough to satisfy the growling, growing need that is the student populace to see someone humiliated. It never mattered who.
Katsuki thinks, quite poetically for a moment, that he wonders if the person the people he hurt call monster isn’t him after all, but those who guide his hand. But then the teacher raps hard on the board, and the moment is shattered. He refocuses on his work. They have physical education next, an excuse to get the boys out and running around aimlessly, and he knows before that they will have to change. He can do something then.
He does do something while they change, and it’s Izuku’s bag ending up in the showers, the water soaking into the papers. Izuku’s tears only add to the dampness, but now that the main spectacle is over — Katsuki, tugging the bag from his hands. Izuku, already crying, begging, please no. Katsuki, ignoring how alive the words are, wrenching the straps from his grasp and lobbing it into the showers. Izuku, stumbling, tripping over shoes and clothes. The class, laugh laugh laughing — they all troop outdoors.
Katsuki finds he lingers, watches Izuku pick up his things and hurry over to the windows, letting in the tiny bit of light the bathroom needs. He watches him place each book and worksheet out in the sun, careful to let it dry, careful to peel the pages off one another without tearing them. Izuku’s dark shirt is damp, his hair is wet and sticking to the nape of his neck — he needs a haircut. Briefly, the thought of giving one to him in front of everyone crosses his mind, but he knows that crosses a line. His mother would know.
Izuku hasn’t registered he’s still here, he’s too busy sniffling. Now that he’s gotten all his things sunning, he stands from it and pulls his damp shirt over his head — and the whole world stops.
Katsuki used to think it was an exaggeration. How hard panic can flood you, how your brain can suddenly just do itself in. He’s aware one of his ears has started to ring, high-pitched and incessant, a racket on his mind, and he thinks he might have stopped breathing. His chest is tight, too tight, so painfully tight he cannot breathe and everything is a mess, and his hands are balled so tight he thinks one touch might shatter it because there’s something on Izuku’s back and it shouldn’t be there.
Across Izuku’s left shoulder, spreading about the size of Katsuki’s palm until it reached his armpit, is a patch of taut pink skin, stretching dully as Izuku rolls his shoulders out, shaking his shirt a couple of times and wringing it. It’s a pale pink, almost peachy, but it’s a stark contrast on his normally paler skin, and not natural with how stretched tight and puckered it is.
Katsuki’s head swims. It’s a birthmark, he says, but he feels like retching. It’s a birthmark.
(It’s not a birthmark. Katsuki has known him since he was four years old. He’d know if Izuku had a birthmark that big. He’d have made fun of it a long time ago.)
Katsuki forces air into his lungs and marches out of the bathroom silently. It could be anything, he reasons. It could be anything. He’s jumping to conclusions. It could be anything, please let it be anything.
(Deep down, he knows it's not.)
He can’t shake the feeling, and he knows he can’t shake the feeling because he’s guilty. He’s so, so, so painfully guilty. Guilt is a black hole that grows in his heart and takes everything Katsuki is.
He’s never felt guilty before, but he knows what he saw, and what he saw is so real he cannot ignore it. A burn. A burn scar. Healed over. Maybe from hot tea — Katsuki did that once. Maybe hot water. Who knows what was in Izuku’s flask when he dumped it over him in the hallways? Who knows what the other boys do to Izuku when he isn’t around, enticed by the promise of tears and quivering lips and feeling important.
(Suddenly he realises he’s one of them. One of the people enticed by the promise of feeling strong. How could he be a police officer if he hurt people like this? This wasn’t the law, it was evil.)
It’s not that Katsuki hasn’t hurt people before, but this is the first time he’s seen something so irrevocable. So tangible. Izuku will look back, ten, twenty years from now, and he’d still see the scar in the mirror, and still be a scared little boy in pain all over again, crying in the hallways.
He needs to know when he got it. He needs to know he needs to know he needs to know, he feels like there’s something within him trying to claw its way out of his throat and his mouth. He’s lost in thought, head bent, he looks up just in time to see Izuku at the end of the hallway.
They make eye contact, and Izuku’s pupils dilate with fear. Oh god, he looks absolutely terrified. Does his shoulder hurt when he sees Katsuki? The phantom pang of a scar? Does he remember how much agony he must’ve been in as the skin bubbled? Burns don’t heal normally, you know. They blister first. He must’ve had to sleep on his side for weeks, putting on a shirt then a schoolbag must’ve been torture.
And he’d done it all silently. (While Katsuki hurt him. Not entertained. How can you be entertained by a burn?)
Katsuki opens his mouth, he doesn’t know what he’s going to say. Izuku flinches and hurries away, not fast enough, because Katsuki’s friendship circle helps him — how kind of them — to corner Izuku, pressing him against the school lockers.
“Got something planned today, Bakugou?” One of them asks, painful grin on his face. He’s positively leering. “We got him caught for you.”
Katsuki slows down as he nears them, and watches Izuku through the cracks in the boys’ arms. He’s shaking, the small thing, and as he shakes Katsuki remembers how he’d shivered in the bathroom and his skin had goosebumped and everything moved but the horrifically dead skin on his back.
Izuku opens his mouth, but Katsuki beats him to it.
“Not today,” he says, and he sounds so tired. Of course he’s tired. Every time he closes his eyes he sees the skin in front of his eyes like a brand. His eyes slide away from Izuku, and he continues to walk. “Just leave him alone.”
The boys gape at him.
Izuku shakes and slides to the floor, knees pressed close to his chest. The boys step away from him, Katsuki still intimidating enough for them to listen.
(He can feel Izuku’s eyes on his back, but he doesn’t turn around to look at him. He can’t.)
He avoids Izuku like the plague. If he sees him in the hallway, he turns the corner before they make eye contact. He ducks into classrooms to let him pass, but he cannot avoid him forever. He cannot avoid them forever, because high school hierarchy demands his payment in their lingering sneers.
Suddenly, minding his own business in the hallway, just trying to stuff his books into his bag and leave, he’s cornered by his Friendship Circle. They pass him a water bottle and point to Izuku, standing not too far away, enraptured by a book in his hands. He clearly handles it with care; he loves it. It’s also evident in the furtive looks he sends to his side, as though searching for someone who’d come to take it away.
Katsuki stares at the bottle in his hands and realises he is that person. He is the one who is going to have to take it away. He looks at the leader — an upperclassman, the eldest. His mouth is quirked in an expectant smirk, but his eyes are cruelly cold. He looks around at the others, notices the similar expressions on their faces, how hungry they looked.
It occurs to Katsuki that some people do this not because they chase the vicious feeling in their chest but because they like it. It also occurs to him that they’d have no problems turning on him if he refuses.
He glances at the bottle in his hands and clenches it tightly, pushing past them to walk over to Izuku, nose deep in his book. He looks peaceful, serene even. The corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles at whatever is inside the book. He stands directly behind Izuku and presses finger into his back, lightly, but he doesn’t react. Katsuki frowns and looks down, deciding just to pour the water over him and get it over and done with. Izuku yelps when the water hits his head, but Katsuki, just this once, had been careful enough to avoid the book.
Katsuki’s hand automatically reaches out to grab the back of his neck when Izuku tries to turn around. “I would start crying now,” he says. There’s an unusual thickness to his voice and he resents it. “They’re looking.”
Izuku stiffens, then does as he’s told, the water acting as fake tears as he sniffles for the eyes trained on them, drinking in the sight. Good kid. He steps back from Izuku, his eyes following the path of the water as it soaks into the white PE t-shirt, and as he watches, the water spreads across his left and oh, that’s why Izuku hadn’t reacted. He’d been poking his left shoulder does he not feel anything how deep did the burn reach is it Katsuki’s fault? He can make it out it through the see-through white, the way the skin is slightly unnaturally more pink.
You can see it if you’re looking for it, and Katsuki had never looked for it until now.
Is it Katsuki’s fault? Is it Katsuki’s fault? His entire world collapses, and he drops the bottle in his hand. He didn’t even check if the water in this bottle was hot.
“Kacchan?” Izuku asks, turning around to look at him when he feels the grip on his neck loosen. His doe eyes are wide with concern. Concern.
How did he get it? How did he get hurt so lastingly? When did it happen? Why does he still call him Kacchan?
He stumbles away from Izuku, struggling to force air into his lungs. His own body has turned against him, poisoned by the sight of something Katsuki must have done with his own two hands. There’s a small hand on his shoulder, green eyes swim before him. Katsuki is reminded of his green mountains. He shoves Izuku away from him and straightens, turning away and walking briskly to the bathroom. He gets in, locks the door to a cubicle, and sags against the wall. There’s wetness on his cheeks and he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s crying or it’s the water from the bottle. Just above his throat, at the backs of his cheeks, something throbs.
There’s a sharp rap on the door.
“Katsuki,” it says, and the voice is familiar but there’s a commanding tone he’s never heard before in it. Instinctively, he responds to it. “I need you to listen to me.”
He can’t form words. There’s dark spots in his vision.
“Katsuki. You’re having a panic attack. Do you understand?”
A panic attack? Katsuki doesn’t get panic attacks. Panic attacks were for people who weren’t built from the same stuff as him.
“It’s only temporary. It’ll pass, but I need you to breathe.”
“I- I can’t,” he chokes out, hands scrabbling at his throat. His legs feel like they’re going to give out.
“You can. On my count. Breathe in for four seconds, then breathe out. Ready?”
No.
“In,” there’s the sound of the person on the other end taking in a deep breath. Katsuki struggles to follow. He holds it in for four seconds, then says, “out.”
He can feel the death grip he has on his shirt loosen with every breath he takes. The boy on the other end leads him through it until he’s stopped shaking and trembling and as the fog leaves his brain he sucks in a deep breath and realises the voice on the other side is familiar because it’s Izuku.
Separated by a thin wooden door, Katsuki finds it helps to collect his thoughts. He rests his forehead against the door and asks, “why are you here?” He can see Izuku’s feet, and he sees them tense when he asks the question, ready to run.
Izuku sounds mystified when he replies, “because you needed help.”
“But I hurt you,” Katsuki’s hands curl into fists. He tries to stave off another wave by breathing. “I hurt you real bad.”
Izuku’s feet stop angling themselves to the door. There’s a rustling sound, and Katsuki knows his hand is on his shoulder.
The air stills.
“You didn’t know it was hot,” whispers Izuku, and that’s the all the confirmation he needs as he sinks to the floor, knees pulling up to his chin. The tiles are cold and his entire body is running warm.
“I didn’t know it was —,” Katsuki chokes, the heels of his hands pressing into his eyes. “So I did do it. When?”
“It’s not important,” Izuku’s voice is placatingly. “It’s healed over.”
“When?” Katsuki demands, his voice startlingly loud. Izuku must jump a little, by the sounds of the clothes behind him.
“Six months ago,” he concedes, his voice cracking slightly. “It was a Tuesday.”
A Tuesday. It had been a Tuesday yesterday.
Katsuki stares at the way the white light bounces off the tiles. “How long did you take to recover?”
Izuku rattles the door, trying to unlock it. “Katsuki—“
“How long?”
Izuku stops trying the door. “Two weeks for the skin to grow back. Another two for me to be able to touch it.”
“Hot water?”
“Tea.”
“What did your mother say?”
“Said someone bumped into me.”
“Why don’t you hate me?” Katsuki slams his fist into the door and it rattles alarmingly, but Izuku doesn’t flinch back from it. “Why are you here?”
“Because you’re not cruel,” says Izuku, and it sounds, startlingly like Izuku understands him more than he does himself. He doesn’t like it, but what can he do, when he’s the one on the floor in the bathroom, and Izuku is still trying to unlock the door from the outside. “I saw you today. You avoided my book.”
Katsuki squeezes his eyes shut. “Leave,” he says. The please in it is conveyed through his tone. “Leave, just leave.”
Izuku steps back from the door. “Katsuki,” he says, like he’s trying to say something more. Instead he just thumps his hand against the door in parting. Katsuki waits until Izuku’s feet retreat from view before he unlocks the door and comes out.
He doesn’t recognise the person in the mirror. The person in the mirror looks like a mess. His eyes are red-rimmed, his nose and cheeks flushed. His hair lies in a mess on his forehead.
Katsuki clutches onto the bathroom sink and shakes.
The next few days at school, no one says anything but there’s palpable shift in the air. Katsuki doesn’t sit with his Friendship Circle at lunch anymore. He can feel the questions the student body places on his shoulders when they see him sitting in the corner, table empty.
He knows there’ll be hell to pay with this move, but he can’t help himself. Every time he thought about sitting at that table, over there, in the centre, he remembered Izuku’s burn. He’s quiet, swirling his udon about his soup, watching the seaweed follow the current, when there’s the sound of clattering and footsteps. Katsuki swivels his head up, on edge, in time to see Izuku slide into the seat opposite him and place his tray very deliberately down onto the table.
To say Katsuki’s mouth falls open is an understatement, he’s positively gaping. Izuku digs his chopsticks into his rice and smiles at Katsuki, eyes crinkling.
“What are you doing?” Katsuki asks, the shocked tone in his voice almost comical. “Are you fucking crazy?”
“You looked lonely,” says Izuku, with a sort of steely determination that begs Katsuki to challenge him.
“How — how can you sit here and be fine with me?”
Izuku studies him critically. Then he says, “I don’t think I need to be scared of you anymore.”
The sentence is loaded.
Katsuki swallows thickly. He looks at his udon.
“Eat,” says Izuku, kindly. “You’ll let the soup go cold.”
Izuku usually walks the same way home as Katsuki, both of them pretending that they didn’t know each other as soon as they stepped out of the school building. So when Izuku isn’t as always, three steps in front of him, Katsuki pauses five minutes into the walk and looks back at the building.
It’s been a week since Izuku has started to sit at his lonely table during lunch, and while they never talked about what happened during the seven years they’d started to fall out in, he felt like — like they were getting somewhere.
So he turns around and rushes into the building, shooting past the security guard and bursting into the hallway. It’s quiet, so quiet something is definitely wrong. Katsuki prowls the corridors, peeking into classrooms, until he hears a telltale cry and he knows it’s Izuku, he’s long since memorised the cadence of his voice.
He takes off at a dead sprint and skids around the corner, nearly flinging himself into the remnants of what used to be his Friendship Circle.
The leader, the cruel upperclassman with that look in his eyes has Izuku up by his neck, pressed against the wall. His legs are kicking uselessly, but he sees Katsuki over the man’s shoulder and his first thing is to squeeze his eyes shut and shake his head imperceptibly.
Stupid fucking Deku. Suddenly he understands why Izuku has never stood up for himself but always did for other people — he was too self-sacrificial. Izuku did it so that their attention would be on him, always on him, and no one else would suffer.
The thought makes his heart break — it shatters into tiny pieces that threatens to send him howling. He wants to run away from the truth, run away from everything happening in front of him, but his hands are already balling into fists and there’s that anger again, sitting in the middle of his chest and crowing in delight at being put to use.
Katsuki grabs the one nearest to him and quite almost throws him into the other at the side, knocking the two of them into each other like dominoes. There’s another two to the side of the upperclassman who turn around at the noise and narrow their eyes when they see Katsuki standing there, shoulders heaving with the force of his breaths.
The upperclassman puts Izuku down not gently. There’s a red ring of his fingers around his pale neck, and Izuku coughs and shakes.
“Kacchan,” he wheezes, and Katsuki realises he’s been used as bait but he can’t bring himself to care.
He dodges the first punch easily and retaliates with a strong uppercut that sends the boy stumbling into the lockers. He’s not so lucky on the third one and gets it right across his jaw, splitting his lip. The pain dizzies him, but with the boy still coming at him Katsuki shakes it off, ducks under his open arm, and sends his fist into his stomach. The boy drops, groaning low.
Now there’s only the upperclassman, watching him as though he can’t believe what’s happening.
“You used to be —,” he starts, his mouth curling. “When did you go soft?”
Katsuki’s knuckles hurt. Izuku is watching him from behind the senior’s legs as though seeing him for the first time. Then he puts a finger to his lips and slowly starts to get to his feet.
“It just fucking occured to me,” says Katsuki deliberately not looking at Izuku, understanding what it was he was trying to do. “I’m not a loser.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t jerk off to people crying,” he taunts, miming giving a blowjob. The senior’s eyes nearly bug out of his head at the obscene gesture, but it’s enough, because just as he’s done, Izuku reaches out two hands, grips the senior’s waist, and pulls him down at the same time he brings up his foot and gets him right in the jewels.
The senior makes a pained sound and drops to his knees, body convulsing in pain. Katsuki holds out his hands and Izuku steps delicately over his prone form and rushes to him, passing his open hands and pushing his arms apart, stepping into his space and throwing his arms over his neck.
“You’re bleeding,” babbles Izuku. His voice is still slightly hoarse “I’m so sorry. They took me as bait and I kept telling them you wouldn’t come but you did come and I didn’t even see that coming, I’m sorry for doubting you.”
Izuku is warm. Katsuki doesn’t know where to put his hands — god, who hugs people anymore — and settles for placing them on his back and patting awkwardly. Izuku is still mumbling something incoherent in the background. It used to annoy him, now he kind of realises he does it because he’s scared.
“We should go,” Katsuki says, voice gruff with embarrassment. Izuku pulls back from him and grins stupidly at him.
“Walk me home,” he says, and doesn’t take no for an answer.
Izuku brings him into his house and puts ice on his lip in the sweltering summer afternoon, the sun high in the sky. Inko, Izuku’s mother, is so shocked to see him there, sitting on her counter with her son like it’s the most normal thing in the world, she drops her groceries on the floor. A tomato rolls and hits the counter, but she gathers herself, picks up her bags, and goes to the fridge.
(She’d tell Katsuki later, tears pricking her eyes so much like her son, that she didn’t think he’d ever be here again. Katsuki doesn’t know how to tell her he’d thought so too.)
After the event with the senior in the hallways, how he can’t come to school because he’s so sore, how the others are walking around slightly busted, they steer clear of Katsuki and Izuku. He’s lost his crowd scattering privilege, he’s lost the way people whisper his name in awe and fear, how infamous he’d been in the student body, but it’s not a lot he’s lost.
Somehow, he thinks he didn’t lose himself, and that’s — that’s the most important.
(Somehow, he didn’t lose Izuku.)
He finds out, as he spends more and more time with Izuku, the boy had a rep in the school too, one that is a blinding opposite of Katsuki. Where people stayed away from Katsuki people longed to be near Izuku, because he was kind and good and always ready to help. Because he existed not to be above them but to be equal to them.
With his insistence, and Katsuki’s persistence to stick around despite the glares sent his way, they eventually warm up to him. Never enough to be friends, but enough to lend each other pencils in class and intervene when something wasn’t going their way.
It’s an odd sort of feeling, being depended on. It kind of makes him feel funny. He’s lying awake in bed, thinking on it, reflecting, when he sits up in a hurry because he realises despite everything he’s never actually said sorry.
It’s not — it’s not important, he tries to reason. First of all, Katsuki doesn’t apologise.
(But Izuku does.)
He finds himself on his porch at three in the morning, the summer weather making it hot on his skin despite it being dead in the night. There are no stars tonight — the moon is too bright, drowning them all out. He squints at it as he follows the outline of the circle with his eyes and his fingers in the air, waiting for Izuku to open the door. It takes about five minutes until the screen door is cracking open and Izuku’s bewildered face is coming into view. His green eyes are luminous at night, they remind him of the mountains he so likes.
“Kacchan,” he says, dropping to sit by him. “Everything okay?”
Katsuki stares at him, flinching slightly at the affection in his voice. He hasn’t done anything to deserve it.
“Fuck,” he swears. The word seems coarser and rougher than it normally does in the sunlight. “I just…I never said…”
Izuku blinks mildly at him.
“I never said sorry,” he forces out. “For everything.”
It seems that whatever Izuku was expecting, it wasn’t this. Izuku’s mouth drops open, then he’s covering it with a hand and opening his eyes wide at him.
It makes him uncomfortable.
“Yeah,” he trails off. “I don’t know. This — might have been important to you.”
There’s silence for a while. It’s not as painful as you’d think.
“Thank you,” says Izuku, eventually. “I missed you. This you.” He looks expectantly at Katsuki, as though asking him to understand what he meant. “I really missed you.”
Katsuki squares his shoulders, prickling at the sentiment. “I’ve said it. I’m going home.”
Izuku laughs, pushing off the front steps and into the yard. “I’ll walk you back,” he says, surely.
“You don’t have to,” Katsuki insists.
“I don’t care,” Izuku smiles a little at him, but he sounds shy. He’s putting on weight again, his cheeks are filling out. He used to look a little like a squirrel with how chubby his cheeks were. His mother used to love to pull on them when he came over.
“Fine,” spits Katsuki, not finding it in him to squash his newfound confidence. “Let’s go.”