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The best is a lonely place to be.
Katsuki knows this, he has always known it. From the moment he could conjure tiny sparks to dance across tiny unscarred hands, he has understood that to stand strong is to stand alone, and he treats this isolation with a kind of reverence.
Respect the nature order of things, and the pieces will fall into place; this is what he thinks as a child, as a middle school student, and even as he enters high school, with the weight of million expectations upon shoulders that have little strength left for more- but he bears them, the proud introductions by his mother and the jealous glares from other high schools’ students and the pitying frowns that dare to cross his classmates’ faces.
There is nothing Bakugo Katsuki cannot control in his life, and then he falls in love.
The fall is inevitable, perhaps, when Todoroki decides one day that he wants to be friends with class 1-A’s wildcard. There is no revelation, no moment of truth, just the gradual slide from casual acquaintances to tentative friends, and then one day Katsuki’s world shifts on its axis.
It’s like gravity has shifted overnight, like waking up in a new solar system where the rules have changed and he despises it. From the moment he acknowledges it, the situation is tedious and unstable- and how could it be anything else when he’s done so much to create this exclusive group of distant friends, and when he’s been weak enough to let Todoroki get this far past his defenses?
He’s lucky Todoroki doesn’t notice the staring or the way Katsuki is so, so easy to fluster now, how a simple look of those mismatched eyes has him dazed for hours.
Katsuki doesn’t want to be in love. He wants willpower and motivation and determination, things that will get him to Point B. This, Todoroki, it’s just a distraction, and he’s not sure how to get rid of it.
(a confession, he decides)
Oh, Todoroki says, all soft, round vowels and remorseful tilt of the head. Oh, he says like he doesn’t know how he’s the center of Katsuki’s world, how in just a few short months everything has changed. Oh, and it carries the weight of everything Katsuki already knows.
That Todoroki doesn’t feel the same way, that he’s not interested in Katsuki that way, that Katsuki is not an object of his affections.
And oh, does it sting. It stings like salt poured into an open wound, it burns like frostbite creeping slowly up a limb, it’s like there is no gravity anymore and suddenly everything is spinning, spiraling, careening into the open vast unknown and there’s no way he’ll ever be able to put things back neatly where they belong.
Todoroki has burst into Katsuki’s heart and torn apart the room. He’s upended the logical thinking, the angry spite.
There is Todoroki, and there is an anguish that runs so deep Katsuki fears he will never forget it. He doesn’t have room for all of it, not as his feelings become heavier and the anguish larger. He is forced to get rid of the things essential to his being, and others notice.
It’s his unwashed hair, his wrinkled uniform, the deep circles under his eyes that never seem to go away. It’s the jolts in class when he’s called on and the small pencil X that’s put next to his name for the first time ever when Aizawa collects homework.
He blames himself, mostly, for letting someone so far in that they were able to destroy him. He’d greeted Todoroki at the door and shown him around before leaving him to do as he pleased.
And he’ll never admit how close they were, how comfortable Katsuki felt, able to express his anger at the world to someone who finally understood, who didn’t pity him for his feelings and accepted that he’d make some poor choices. If he can keep that bit to himself, he thinks maybe it will be the glue that keeps his heart in one piece at the end of this.
It’s funny how he’s so set on building walls again, stronger ones this time, ones that he will never let anyone into again. From inside, from atop the throne he’s trying so hard to rebuild, Katsuki thinks he’s done this to himself. He created a hero too afraid to risk anything. The self-imposed isolation has made him weak for the comforts of familiarity, the soft touches and quick glances and easy silences.
He replaced any desire for those things, the little indulgences that everyone shares with someone, with anger, and strength of the body, and neatly tucked the rest into a box that he’d nailed shut.
But then Todoroki, with his soft smile and calm words and genuine kindness, had opened Pandora’s box of needs.
How does one reconcile the things that define them with the things that define who they aren’t? There isn’t room for both, in Katsuki.
There is a void filled with the worst parts of him, and he has become the best for it, but is it worth if he’s created a Katsuki who is fundamentally unlovable in all the ways he needs?