Chapter Text
It’s too fucking dark in this office, Katsuki thinks as he sits down, the old couch creaking slightly under his weight. The room is lit only by dim lamps and the street lights shining outside the window, the scent of eucalyptus and mint thick in the air. It’s probably supposed to have a calming effect or some shit, but it’s burning his nose and he can already feel his blood pressure rising as the woman in front of him starts to chatter.
He glances shrewdly at the door, weighing the benefits of blasting it open and getting the hell out of this…meeting, or whatever. The longer the shrink keeps running her big mouth, the more appealing it seems, but he reminds himself that the old hag is waiting outside and he’ll have to face her wrath if he decides to ditch his psych eval.
“—Bakugou? Are you listening?”
“No,” he mutters honestly, leaning his chin into his palm.
The lady doesn’t seem perturbed. “I’m just going to go over the preliminary chart you filled out before we start talking about the incident at the Kamino ward. Is that all right?”
Katsuki blinks in surprise. “What preliminary chart?”
“The one that you submitted before we met here,” she says, pulling it out and handing it to him.
He stares blankly at the handwriting that is most definitely his mother’s, scrawling out his information and the “symptoms” he’s been experiencing since Kamino.
His stomach squirms uncomfortably. That bitch.
“Hmph,” he says, dropping it on the coffee table in front of him, paper landing on wood with a muted flutter. The shrink drags it back towards her, clearing her throat. It’s the dry, insincere kind of cough, solely meant to fill the silence.
“So… it appears you’ve been having sleeping problems,” she says, the statement coming off as more of a question.
He shrugs, bringing his feet up to rest on the table.
“Do you have any ideas about why you’re not sleeping?”
He makes a noncommittal noise, picking at a thread hanging from his shirt.
“Do you have nightmares?”
He stiffens. “Why would I have nightmares?”
“Sometimes, when a person goes through a traumatic event—“
“It wasn't a goddamn traumatic event, despite what everyone likes to think,” he says, folding his arms.
“You were abducted. It’s perfectly okay to not be okay about that. In fact, there are many counseling programs specifically tailored to situations that arise out of hero work—”
“I’m fine,” he grits out, teeth grating. This lady is really testing his nerves, looking at him with something terribly akin to pity. The look drags over his skin like sandpaper, crawling up to the base of his skull.
She seems to understand that he’s resisting the urge to burn this office to the ground and backs off, eyes dropping back to the chart.
“Alright, we’ll move on then. On a daily basis, how would you rate your stress level?”
He opens the door to find his mother sitting on the couch, flipping idly through a magazine.
“How did it go?” Mitsuki asks as he slams the door behind him.
“Shitty,” he mutters, sweeping his eyes across the carpet. “She wants me to come back on Tuesday.”
“And you better go,” Mitsuki says conversationally, turning a page. “You may be moving out soon, but I’m still your mother and I’ll kick your ass into next week if you skip.”
“Fine.” He would normally argue, but he feels so drained that he can’t muster up the vitriol he usually spits with ease. Despite his reluctance to respond to the shrink’s prying questions, he really hasn’t been sleeping well since Kamino.
Most of the time it’s the dreams with the strange woman. The ones where she tells him to be patient, that the time isn’t right just yet. For what, he doesn’t know. She never ends up telling him before he’s dragged back up to the surface.
And when he doesn’t talk to her, he keeps seeing Deku’s goddamn face, eyes wide with fear as Shigaraki’s fingers hover over his skin. The black void of All for One’s mask, his deep voice resounding in the nucleus of his entire being. Veins of power lighting up his arms and legs and bringing destruction rolling in their wake. All Might, haggard and tired, stooped over a hospital bed.
They move like the slow turn of film through the night, blurry and out of focus, hovering around his periphery until he breaks violently out of his restless sleep, sheets littered with burn marks and a cold sweat trickling down his spine.
The shrink was wrong—they’re not nightmares. They’re reminders.
Be stronger. Be better. This is what happens if you aren’t.
He trails after his mother, eyes downcast throughout the train ride home, tugging idly at the thread on his shirt.
“You’re on dish duty tomorrow,” Mitsuki reminds him as she unlocks the door to the house.
“Whatever,” he mumbles, trudging inside and kicking off his shoes, hands shoved deep in his pockets.
He pauses outside his bedroom, thunking his head against the door and letting it rest there for a moment. He breathes out, shaky, before wrapping his fingers around the handle and pushing.
He makes a beeline for the bed, collapsing on it without hesitation or grace. Rolling over, mattress sinking underneath his weight, he tries and fails to ignore the unfamiliar bareness of his childhood bedroom. His posters have been stripped and neatly packed away, his clothes folded into a myriad of bins they found around the house. All that remains is his bed, his desk, and storage boxes full of junk, pushed against the wall to collect dust for the next few years.
Katsuki digs his fingers into his sheets, closes his eyes, reconstructing his room as how it was before. He can piece it together like a jigsaw he knows by heart: the pile of comics propped on his shelf, the scattered pens across his desk, the neatly written notes punctuated with explosive little doodles in the margins. The photos hung on his wall. The small bamboo plant he had set on his window sill. Hiking gear, shoved into the corner of his closet.
When he opens his eyes, it’s all gone, with only a few traces of evidence to hint that Katsuki Bakugou once lived here.
“Ugh,” he says, dropping his head back onto his pillow. He’s exhausted. More than exhausted. All he wants to do is sleep, but he’s tired of jerking awake with his heart pounding and hands ready to ignite. Unconsciousness, for the three days he and Deku were in that place, was something to be feared and avoided. Not that he could’ve done much to avoid the masked bastard from pinning him down and injecting him with sedatives that made his head spin.
He grimaces and sucks in a staggered breath, reaching blindly for his phone on the nightstand. He squints at the sudden brightness in his face as he turns it on, typing out a quick, impulsive message before he can change his mind.
K: You awake?
Less than thirty seconds later, he gets a ping.
D: Yes!
D: Is something wrong?
He pauses, thumbs hovering over the letters.
No, he writes, and immediately deletes it.
He tries again: Yes.
Backspace, backspace, backspace. He watches the letters disappear with a few taps of his finger.
K: I don’t know.
D: Oh.
D: …Do you wanna talk about it?
K: What do you think?
He watches the little string of ellipses that indicates Deku’s typing pop up, hover on his screen for a few seconds, and disappear. It does it again. And again. He counts five times before activity on the other end falls silent completely.
He throws his phone to the side, dragging his eyes up to the ceiling. He’s just about to let them drift shut when his ringtone, blaring and obnoxious, buzzes right next to his ear. His body tenses instinctually at the sudden noise.
He looks at his screen. Deku (cell) is calling…
Tapping the answer icon, he pulls his phone to his ear. “What?”
“Kacchan,” Deku says, his voice gentle even filtered over the phone. “What’s going on?”
“None of your business, nerd,” he says automatically, bristling at his soft voice.
“Well—It’s not,” Deku says. “But if you’re feeling bad, you may want to talk to someone about it—“
“No,” Katsuki interrupts. “That’s the whole goddamn problem. The ‘talk about your feelings’ bullshit isn’t exactly what I want to do right now.”
Deku’s quiet on the other end of the line, so he takes a deep breath, and plows on. “I hate the psych evals—and that stupid, pitying tone they get when I tell them something they probably already knew. Everyone’s stepping on eggshells around me, trying to get me to talk about it . I’m so fucking sick of it, Deku.”
Deku breathes a long, shaky inhale, barely a crackle over the line. “I—I understand.”
“I know,” Katsuki says, closing his eyes. “I know. Why else would I be telling you this shit?”
“I just want to forget it all happened,” Deku admits. “I want everyone to forget. I keep…hearing my mom cry at night, when she thinks I’m asleep.”
Katsuki hears the tears in his voice, the slight wobble that betrays him even over a call. “I don’t think she wants me to go back to UA.”
Katsuki sits up, his heart plunging into his stomach like an elevator with the cables cut.
“What are you going to do if she says no?” He asks slowly, trying to imagine a UA with no Deku. Six months ago, he would’ve been thrilled with this development, but all he feels now is an inexplicable sprout of nausea blooming in his abdomen.
“I don’t know,” Deku says. “Go to another school, maybe. I’m going to talk to her before the home visits tomorrow.”
“My folks are fine with shipping me off,” Katsuki says, mouth suddenly very dry. “You should tell her that.”
Deku gives a half-hearted laugh. “You know my mom. And all the stuff with my arms isn’t helping my case.”
Katsuki pauses, frowning. “What about your arms?”
The voice on the other end of the call suddenly sounds sheepish. “Well. It’s not a problem right now, per se…”
“Deku. Spit it out.”
“The bones are fine,” Deku says, “but my ligaments are damaged.” Katsuki imagines him looking down at his sheets, his newly working fingers curling into the soft fabric. “I can’t go all out again if I want to keep using my arms.”
Katsuki is silent, processing the quiet confession.
“You better not,” he says eventually, forcing his words around the lump in his throat. “I still need to beat your ass, remember?”
Deku heaves a tired laugh on the other end of the line. “I remember, Kacchan. I’m working on ideas that could lessen the strain of One for All on my body. I just…don’t know where to start.”
“Work on your chest,” Katsuki replies immediately, grateful for a chance to say something useful. “Blowback is a bitch to deal with when your pecs are scrawny.”
Deku splutters, the sound staticky over the phone. “Th-they aren’t scrawny! Yours are just oversized!”
Katsuki’s mouth falls open in indignation.“You’re a fucking liar, Deku,” he says, scowling. “My chest is perfect.”
“Well—It makes sense for your quirk, definitely,” Deku agrees, clearly backtracking. “Your explosions are localized to your hands, which means that the recoil could potentially dislocate your arms if you didn’t have adequate musculature in your shoulders and chest. You probably developed a significant amount of resistance through consistent use of your quirk as well as additional exercises to develop—”
“Okay, I get it, you’re a stalker and a nerd. What’s the point?”
“All jokes aside, that is good to consider,” Deku says thoughtfully. “Everything in the body is connected; so reinforcing my chest may help with the pressure that One for All puts on my arms.”
“That’s what I just said,” he says, and pauses. “Can’t believe you needed to go on a whole spiel just to agree with me.”
Deku laughs , the sound muffled by what Katsuki imagines to be a hand sneaking over his mouth, trying to capture the soft noise before it escaped too far from his lips.
“What’s so funny?” he demands.
“Nothing,” he says. “It’s just—I’m not used to talking to you like this. I hope this is okay for me to say, but it really makes me feel better.”
Katsuki opens his mouth and closes it again, words failing to come to his tongue. “Yeah,” he settles for, even though there’s that now-familiar ache blooming under his sternum, trying to wedge itself between his lungs. It grows there often, late at night, crushing the air out of him until the rise of his chest feels like it’s lifting up the sky.
He blinks and focuses back on the swell of Deku’s breath through the speaker.
“We should probably get some sleep,” he says.
“Yeah,” Deku agrees. “I’m tired.”
“Go to bed.”
“I am in bed.”
“You asshole; you know what I mean.”
They’re silent for a few moments.
“…Kacchan?”
“Hm.”
“Can I stay? On the line, I mean.”
“Why?”
“It makes me calmer,” he says. “Listening to you breathe.”
“You’re such a creep,” Katsuki says, but he puts Deku on speakerphone and tosses his phone to the side. “Whatever. Fine. Stay.”
“Thank you,” Deku says, his voice a little more distant. Happy, though. He hears that stupid little smile, warming his words like the summer breeze warms the night.
“Nerd,” Katsuki murmurs, maybe the slightest bit too quiet for Deku to hear him. He clears his throat. “Go to sleep.”
He can imagine Deku nodding so clearly it’s almost audible. “Goodnight, Kacchan.”
Katsuki thinks of him, sitting in his hospital bed with the moonlight framing his hair like a silver halo, saying those same words to him in that same soft voice. He sighs, drumming his fingers on his chest in a listless rhythm.
“Night,” he says, closing his eyes, focusing on the white noise of Deku’s breathing, the soft lullaby of the phone static. It’s a comfort and a hurt all at once, swimming in his lungs and knocking gently against his ribs, saying let me out, let me out.
Shut up, he tells it. Not yet. Not yet.
He tries not to think anymore. Tries to fade away from this empty room. When he finally sinks into the dark, it’s a relief, a reprieve from the incessant hurt in his chest and his thoughts bubbling up like water set to boil.
For the first time in weeks, Katsuki sleeps without dreaming.
Their home visit was uneventful—it went as expected, complete with his mother’s sharp jabs that cut much deeper than she intended. Complete with him pushing back, complete with his father weakly protesting, complete with those words turning over and over in his mind while his parents told All Might and Aizawa to take good care of him.
It’s your fault to begin with for being so weak.
He slams a plate onto the dish rack, gritting his teeth in an effort not to scream, to not punch a hole into the wall and let the burning in his knuckles take precedence over the vice clamped around his heart.
Your fault.
That old hag. Does she really think he doesn’t know that? That if he hadn’t let the masked bastard grab him this all wouldn’t have happened? That All Might wouldn’t have been stripped to a shell of his former self? That Deku wouldn’t have had to endure those three days with crushed bones and the fever that wracked through his body like a hurricane?
He presses his palms flat against his damp eyes, careful not to let the angry sparks dance across his sclera. The soap on them burns worse than the tears, but the hurt is something he can ignore, at least for the most part.
He takes a bowl and scrubs it until it shines, fingers trembling as he sets it down beside the plate. It would be so convenient to do that to himself—to wash his memories clean, scour it until there’s no more insecurity, no more guilt, no more of his stupid, stupid emotions dragging him down to the worst, ruined parts of his mind.
Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.
The mug he’s cleaning slips out of his shaking hands and shatters at his feet.
“God damnit ,” he says, staring at the blood welling up, the broken ceramic scattered like a mosaic on the kitchen tile. “God fucking damnit, why can’t you just—”
The last word fractures into a hitched breath, a slight convulsion of his lungs, because Katsuki doesn’t sob , he doesn’t—
“Katsuki, what the hell?”
“I’ll clean it up,” he snaps, head bowed, still staring at the broken mug. He doesn’t turn around to look at his mother, instead bending down to pick up the pieces.
“That was my favorite mug, you brat,” his mother says.
“I’ll buy you a new one; don’t throw a bitch fit,” Katsuki says, rubbing at his leaking eyes.
“You better,” she says with a huff. The slippered footsteps move away from him, and his shoulders slump. He straightens up and dumps the fragments in the trash. The blood on his foot smears across the tiles. Bandaging it up isn’t hard, and neither is washing the red off the floor, but Katsuki feels exhausted nonetheless when he’s done.
He goes to his room quietly, shuts the door, and turns off the lights.
“Why so down?” the woman in his dreams asks him, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s important for heroes to smile, you know.”
“Not when they’ve messed up,” Katsuki says, voice warbling in the black space, floating away from his body of clouds. “Not when they weren’t a hero at all.”
“Especially when they’ve messed up,” the woman corrects him. “Even in the darkest of situations, the strongest people will face their obstacles with a smile.” She punctuates her words with a grin of her own.
Katsuki looks down to the infinite expanse of darkness beneath him. This dreamland is less threatening than the ruins of Kamino, the sky twisting and turning as the buildings crumble around him, but he still feels impossibly small in a room that could fit the universe inside it. He glances back up at the woman, blinking through the oppressive haze obscuring his vision. “I’m… not strong yet,” he concedes. “But I will be.”
The woman places her hands on her hips, scrutinizing him for a moment. Her eyes are sharp, piercing. He feels them cut through the smoke and mirrors until it’s just him she’s seeing. The doubt, the guilt, the grief, the parts of him scraped raw and aching.
She lets out a soft breath. “You already are,” she says. “More than you realize. You’ll see it, soon enough. You just need to keep moving forward.”
“Planning on it,” Katsuki says wryly. The smoke hovering over his eyes is getting thicker. “Who are you, anyways? Why do I keep coming here?”
The woman smiles through the veil of black. “It’s not time, not yet. Just wait a little while longer, Katsuki.”
“Fuck that,” he says, voice distant in his own ears. “If you have something to say, say it now.”
The woman opens her mouth, but darkness swallows her whole before any sound comes out.
Katsuki wakes up with sunlight filtering through the window, spilling onto his floor like slats of glass. His sheets are balled up in his hands, scorch marks and tattered holes blown across the fabric. His alarm clock reads 6:32 AM.
He closes his eyes, rolls over, and screams into his pillow.
These goddamn dreams are starting to get annoying.
The little corner-store near his house isn’t that hard to sneak away to—not that he makes a habit of it, but Kaminari let it slip that Kirishima had invested an absurd amount of money in their rescue, and Katsuki will be damned if he lets himself stay indebted to him. Besides, he’ll take any chance he gets at escaping his prison of a house. He’s tried to burn off his restlessness in the home gym, but he still feels so...confined. So stifled. He can’t breathe properly in there, can’t think properly.
The store is slightly dilapidated on the outside, but it’s clean and air-conditioned, and Katsuki breathes out a sigh as he steps in from the hot, humid alley, zeroing in on the beat-up ATM machine blinking faintly by the cash register. He withdraws ¥50,000 out of his savings with a grimace, thumbing through the stiff papers. 10,000, 20,000, 30,000—
“Katsuki-kun?”
He curses under his breath before turning to Inko Midoriya. She’s clutching a basket full of food, staring at him slack-jawed, like his presence had thrown her off her axis. His eyes flicker over the strands of grey in her hair, the lavender half-moons below her wide eyes, before meeting her stare directly.
“Hey,” he says warily, shoving the bills in his back pocket.
His voice seems to break her out of her reverie, and she jolts, like someone had shaken her. “Katsuki-kun, what are your parents doing letting you out alone?” she asks, clearly horrified.
He wants to snap at her that he’s not a child, that being jailed in his own home is something he’ll never agree to, but Inko’s expression is so, so earnest. So concerned. For a moment, he sees another face in it, but he blinks and the illusion is gone.
Katsuki deflates.
“I needed to get stuff for a friend,” he mumbles, sticking his hands into his pockets.
Inko’s shoulders relax the slightest bit. “Well, I can walk you home, if you’d like,” she offers. “It’s really not that far from our apartment—“
“I don’t need you to baby me,” Katsuki says, refraining from mentioning that he’d have a slightly better chance of fending off villains if Inko wasn’t with him.
Inko pauses and, to his surprise, chuckles. “I remember you were always like that. Independent, wanting to do things on your own. Izuku always came home chattering about how cool you were.”
Katsuki shrugs, looking down and ignoring the rush of heat to his face. He eyes the groceries in Inko’s basket. Pork, egg, panko. Katsudon. Deku’s favorite.
His hand balls into a fist.
“You’re not letting him go back to UA, are you?” he asks quietly, raising his eyes to meet hers.
Inko is the one who avoids his gaze now, her bottom lip starting to wobble in an uncanny imitation of her son when he’s trying not to cry. “I can’t,” she whispers. “Not with all that’s happened…not when he was taken away from me once. I can’t—I can’t handle him being targeted, being in danger, putting himself at risk like that—”
“—It was me,” Katsuki cuts her off
“Wh-what?”
“It was me,” Katsuki repeats, his heart racing. The words tear out of his throat like a bird set free, rushing to escape his chest where he’s caged them for so long. “Deku was following me, and I was the one who got captured, so it was me. My fault.”
“Katsuki-kun—“ she starts, but he plows on, hands clenching and unclenching, palms sparking with the pulse of his heart.
“But I’m not going to let it happen again. I’m going back to UA and I’m going to get stronger, rise higher. That’s what I went there to do, and what happened in Kamino doesn’t change anything.”
He pauses and breathes out a sigh before meeting Inko’s eyes.
“If you want Deku to stay behind and get weak, fine. But he’s going to be just as much of a reckless idiot whether that happens or not. The league is going to have their eye on him. UA is his best bet at being able to fight back, and you know that. “
Inko stares at him, eyes watery and distant. “I…I know.”
“Then why are you—“
“I know, but I need him to be…I just need him to be safe.” She looks down at her shopping basket, clenched tightly in her hands. “Katsuki-kun... will you protect him?”
“Hah?”
“If I let him go back to that school, will you protect my son? Will you look out for him?”
He wants to scoff, wants to tell her that Deku’s strong enough to take care of himself. But when she raises her chin to meet his stare, he sees the crack of bone, teeth showing in a pained cry, the tears that fall from glassy eyes. The hospital beds, the glossy X-rays, the crooked fingers. Over and over and over, a ferris wheel of injury and healing and injury—and eventually, Deku won’t be able to ride it back up again.
He understands. He’s seen it for himself—Deku’s strong enough to take care of himself, but there’s no guarantee that he’ll actually do it.
Katsuki nods slowly. “Okay.”
Inko doesn’t look relieved in the slightest by his answer.
“Then...I’ll think about it. I don’t like it, not at all, but I know…” Her voice cracks slightly. “I know Izuku is never going to be safe. ”
She folds, crumples like a piece of paper. Katsuki catches her as she begins to sob, the shopping basket dropping to the floor with a clatter.
The shop owner comes around the corner. “Is everything alright here?”
“Does it look like everything’s alright?” Katsuki says without looking at him. He steadies Inko and bends down to retrieve the basket. He holds it up to her. “Here.”
Inko breathes in, deep and shaking, before reaching out to take it. Her face is smeared with tears, nose red and eyes bloodshot. “I’m so sorry, I just—I can’t handle the thought of—”
“I just told you I’m going to look out for him, right?” Katsuki says sharply. “So you have nothing to worry about. I won’t mess up.”
Inko hiccups, a stray tear falling from her lashes and onto the gleaming linoleum. “I’m glad you agreed,” she says, voice thick and nasally. She digs a handkerchief out of her purse, rubbing at her leaking eyes and nose. She looks up at him, giving him a tiny, wobbly smile. “Thank you, Katsuki-kun.”
“Yeah,” he says, shifting his weight uncomfortably. “Pay for your food and I’ll walk you home.”
The shop owner sighs and moves behind the counter, smiling kindly at Inko as she shells out a few bills. “Take care, Midoriya-san,” he says, handing the change and plastic bags over. “Tell Izuku I’m wishing him well.”
“Thank you,” Inko says. “I’m sorry again for the disruption.”
Katsuki turns away and steps out of the building and back into the heat, the humidity bearing down on him like a heavy blanket. The sun scorches the asphalt, beats against the chipped paint of the building. He closes his eyes, basks in the searing light for a few seconds. The warmth feels like power, sinking into his skin, pooling in his chest and palms.
Inko steps out of the store as well, and he holds his hand out. “Give me your bags.”
“Katsuki-kun, you don’t have to…”
He scowls, waving his arm. “You saying I can’t do it?”
“I’m positive you can, but—”
“Then hand ‘em over.”
She opens her mouth to protest, thinks better of it, sighs, and yields. She holds out the flimsy grocery bags, and he takes them without a word.
The walk to Deku’s apartment is quiet, the only sound coming from their footfalls and the hum of the cicadas. It’s slightly tense—he can practically feel Inko ruminating, her stress scratching like sandpaper, hands fiddling with the straps of her purse.
Katsuki grimaces.
“Deku’s tough, y’know,” he says out loud as they approach the entrance. Inko jerks, turning to stare at him as they walk. “He always gets back up—he’s annoying like that.” He turns to meet her eyes, stopping outside the door. “He’ll be fine.”
Inko nods slowly, fishing her keys from her purse. “I want to believe that. I hope I can, one day.”
He hands her the grocery bags, which she takes with a smile. “Thank you, Katsuki-kun.”
Katsuki shrugs, unsure of how to respond.
“Tell your mother I said hello.”
“Sure,” he replies, turning on his heels in the direction of his house.
“And take care of yourself too!” she calls after him.
He gives a halfhearted wave, letting his feet carry him away from her. It’s a route that was once familiar; the stretch of sidewalk taking him from Deku’s apartment to his own house was one he traversed all the time as a kid. Two blocks down, across the street, through the playground that they used to hang around in.
Once upon a time, they would sit in the grass and play with their All Might figurines, lifting them up to the sky where they would be haloed by the sun and clouds and piercing blue sky. He still hears Deku’s tiny laugh filling his ears, still feels the sharp grin pulling on his lips. It’s been at least a decade since they’ve been here together, but he sees it like a dream—hazy and oversaturated, but still there. Just within his reach.
He lets muscle memory take him back to his front door. His father is sitting on the couch, and he jumps when Katsuki enters the living room. He sets his drawing materials down on the coffee table.
“Katsuki—what were you doing out?”
“Had to get money for Kirishima,” he says, taking the bills out of his pocket as proof. “Where’s the old hag?”
“She’s running errands,” he says, and then: “The police said you would be safer inside.”
Irritation flares through him, pulsing into his heart and the tips of his fingers, sparks flying from his palms. “So what—I’m just supposed to be on house arrest until I move out?”
Masaru shrinks, scratching the back of his head nervously. “Well—We’re worried about you, son. You haven’t been acting normally since the incident at Kamino. We just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine,” Katsuki snaps. “I’ve been seeing the shitty shrink, I’ve been packing, I’ve been studying. I’m not some broken baby that you need to coddle for the next ten years because one bad thing happened.”
“I know that, Katsuki, but—”
“Bad things happen all the time,” Katsuki says. “Especially to heroes. I’m dealing with it. You and the old hag need to deal with it, too.”
Up close, he sees the lines on his father’s face that weren’t there before—under his eyes, at the corners of his lips. His glasses sit perfectly on the bridge of his nose, but he adjusts them anyways as he exhales, turning back to look at his sketches.
“Your mother sometimes says that we went too easy on you,” he murmurs, picking up his pencil and adding another line to the figure. “But lately I’ve been realizing that we never taught you to go easy on yourself.”
Katsuki swallows the lump in his throat. “I want to be the number one hero. I can’t take it easy if I want to reach that goal,” he says, voice sharp.
“I know,” Masaru says. “You have what it takes to be the best, and I’m proud of you. I just don’t want you to sacrifice your well-being for your dream.”
Katsuki scoffs. “I’m not sacrificing anything.”
Masaru pauses, mouth opening slightly. He looks down to the carpet. Looks back up again.
“Good,” he says softly. He rises to his feet, arms stretching out towards Katsuki. “Can your old man get a hug?”
Katsuki groans. “Fine.”
His father has always been the sensitive, touchy-feely type. Katsuki would like to say they’re polar opposites in terms of their need for physical affection, but as Masaru's arms come around him, he can’t help but lean into the embrace, just a little bit.
His dad smells like laundry and cologne cut with acid. He remembers when he was small, sitting on the couch and watching Masaru’s palms come together, watching the sparks crackle between his fingertips, the burnt, acrid scent filling the air. The smoke clung to his clothes, but he never minded it. All he could focus on were the tiny fireworks bursting between his father’s hands, setting the air alight.
When he finally started making his own, he had been so excited he cried. Mitsuki had snapped a picture, and it’s still tucked into a scrapbook somewhere—a weathered photograph of a five-year-old Katsuki, hands smoking and tears streaming down his face, mouth shaped into a half-moon grin.
For just a moment, being held by his father, he feels like that kid again.
For just a moment, he lets himself be.
It’s still light out when he flops onto his bed, the last embers of sunlight giving a fluttering goodbye on the horizon. Katsuki watches the sky burn through the window, from a blazing crimson to a warm lavender before finally yielding to a deep, rich indigo.
He leans back into his mattress and sighs, letting the tension crawl out of his body. It always creeps back in overnight, but it still feels nice to relax, if only for a little bit. He maps the texture of the ceiling, traces over the lines on the walls, thumbs the hem of his sheets. Counts backwards from one hundred until the numbers float away from him.
His eyes are just fluttering closed when his phone buzzes one, two, three times on his nightstand.
He grimaces, grasps for it blindly, and pulls the screen into his field of vision. They’re texts, all of them from Deku. He squints at the brightness, thumb tracing over the words as he reads.
D: I talked to my mom and she’s letting me go back!! :)
D: I’m so relieved, for a while I thought she was going to say no.
D: So I guess I’ll see you at school, Kacchan!
His lips turn up despite himself, something unclenching inside his rib cage. He lays his head back into his pillow, resting his phone on the jut of his hip and inhaling deeply. The light, weightless feeling is familiar, and he leans into it, basking in it like the sunlight.
Relief, his brain supplies. What you're feeling is relief.
It lasts for a split second before the full brunt of the realization hits him. His stomach starts to spin, heart thudding like a stone. The weight drops back into his chest, heavy and stifling.
Why—why, when he’s wanted Deku out of his way for so long, is he feeling like this?
He has the sinking feeling that he already knows the answer.
He raises the phone back to his eyes, scanning over the curves of Deku’s letters, and taps out a response. Two texts. A promise that he wants and dreads in equal measure.
K: Yeah.
K: See you then.