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Katsuki opens his eyes to the darkness with no recollection of what woke him up.
He breathes, blinks, scrolls the last vestiges of sleep off his eyes.
The mid-July breeze sculpts the pale curtains in silent billows of ghastly white in the moonlight. The city, for once, is silent. Only a faraway siren breaks the quiet, its wail swallowed by the heat of tonight.
A little wind and some pretty lighting do not warrant a night of lost sleep. Katsuki closes his eyes and shifts deeper in the mattress, arms crossed under his pillow, careful not to jostle Kirishima’s head on his sho—
Eijirou is not with him.
Katsuki shoots up on his elbows. The other side of the bed is empty, the blue sheets Kirishima picked last week pooled to the side, exposing the shape of him on their creases.
The silence and the moon promise that morning will not come for a long time still. Katsuki sighs, faceplanting in his pillow.
A little wind and some pretty lights do not warrant a night of lost sleep but locating his nightmare-riddled boyfriend certainly does. Why didn’t Katsuki wake up when Eijirou did, is the real question.
The house is quiet as he pulls on one of Eijirou’s scattered t-shirts and stumbles out of the bedroom. He doesn’t remember wearing drawstring pajama pants when he went to bed tonight, and the thought makes him smile. Eijirou must have pulled them on him sometime in the night. Katsuki tends to suffer the cold at the oddest of times.
The floorboards creak quietly under his bare feet as Katsuki shuffles through the house in search of his missing boyfriend. The gym, Eijirou’s preferred haunt on nights like these, is dark and empty. All along the hallway, Katsuki looks for the bright slashes of artificial light under the doors and finds none.
When he rounds the corner of the living room, though, here he is.
Eijirou is standing next to the table as if struck immobile on the way from the kitchen to the couch, shoulders wide and lined by the light filtering in through the wide windows, hair tangled and loose on his shoulders.
Katsuki’s heart jumps in his chest. Six years, and the sight of Eijirou still sends his heart on overdrive. Katsuki grunts before sliding his arms around Eijirou’s neck and collapsing against his nape. “Whatcha doin’ up at this godforsaken hour.”
The skin under his brow is soft and feverish as Eijirou turns around to hold him properly. Katsuki hums when Eijirou’s naked arms lock around his waist.
“I’m not awake,” Eijirou breathes against his hair.
Katsuki snorts. “’S that so?”
Eijirou shushes him, lips skimming Katsuki’s forehead as his hand searches Katsuki’s around his neck. He keeps him close with the other. “This is a dream.”
Eijirou pries Katsuki’s fingers from his nape, and Katsuki lets him. He twines their hands to the side as he begins shuffling them into a slow dance. If this is really a dream, Katsuki could live in it forever. “What woke you up?” he asks instead, reclining his head on Eijirou’s shoulder, because sometimes it’s all too much, his love for Eijirou too big for his body, almost suffocating with the way it strips away layer after layer of the unstable structure of Katsuki’s displays of affection.
“Death.”
So he did have a nightmare. Katsuki sighs against his skin and steps closer so that he can maneuver Eijirou’s head in the crook of his neck. Eijirou doesn’t fight the movement, he falls into it instead.
“Shoulda woken me up, asshole.”
Eijirou’s lashes tickle his neck, his breath fanning over his collarbone. He keeps quiet.
Eijirou is the one who hears the music, who feels the rhythm and translates it for Katsuki to draw circles on the carpet with him. He swings them side to side, weaving their way around the table and the couch, and then towards the kitchen, and back again, seamless in his steps and fluid like flowing water, as if three AM couldn’t touch him.
Katsuki closes his eyes and lets him lead. He follows the steps through the haze of silence in his mind, both his sense of time and direction shot and yet comfortable that way in Eijirou’s warm embrace.
Eijirou sniffles. Soon damp spots begin spreading on Katsuki’s shirt.
Chest squeezing painfully, Katsuki hums and drags his hand up from the middle of Eijirou’s back to his nape to card through the hair there. He’s all choked up because Eijirou in tears is the stuff of his nightmares, vertigo in his stomach, the question to an answer that escapes him. They knew the nightmare was coming tonight, like every other 17th July of the past four years.
Five years ago, Eijirou lived the nightmare. Every year since, he dreamt about it.
“Love, you’re here now.”
Eijirou sniffles, and his back bows as he sobs harder, soaking through Katsuki’s thin shirt. “No, I’m not.”
Katsuki opens his eyes then, searching for Eijirou’s face as he shuffles them through the illuminated indentations in the shadow of the windows carved on the floor. What he sees, though, is the carpet where they’ve danced streaked in bloody footprints.
White noise fills Katsuki’s ears, and then the steady dripping against the floor registers, and then it sinks that there’s too many tears, too much—
When Katsuki pushes him off to look at him, Eijirou is crying blood.
Katsuki stumbles back with a strangled shout and there’s blood everywhere—on Katsuki’s hands, his thin shirt is soaked in it, and the carpet is slick with it, and it is on Eijirou’s hair, and over his feet, and it’s gushing from the gaping hole in his chest.
Katsuki screams and he’s not sure he can even hear himself, because Katsuki remembers—the steel beam through Eijirou’s chest that killed him, and the collapsing building that buried him, and the funeral, ugly, the ugliest, because Eijirou wouldn’t have wanted it that way. He would have wanted colors, and soft rock ballads, and someone who’d recount all the stupid shit he pulled in high school and way past any age of supposed responsibility.
He would have wanted to be remembered less like an angel and more like a person.
But Eijirou’s Hero Agency needed a public ceremony, didn’t they, you see, it’s in the contract, he signed it like that, and Katsuki remembers they had fought about it when Eijirou told him; and he remembers that he had sat through the whole service unable to focus on letting Eijirou go because simmering rage and betrayal was all he could feel as his eyes bore holes in the casket—its lid bolted shut, because the building didn’t have any more mercy on Eijirou’s grace than his Agency did.
And Eijirou is here, bleeding out on the carpet, but he isn’t because he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead and Katsuki can’t breathe, can’t breathe at all, he’s choking on his sobs and then—he isn’t, because he lurches upright on the bed and pulls in his first lungful of air, ice and fire coursing in his veins, sweltering and freezing in his skin at the same time.
“Bab—”
Eijirou, the real Eijirou, alive Eijirou. He’s wide-eyed and stricken, hands hovering about him as he decides whether touching is allowed.
Katsuki hooks his fingers in the stretched-out collar of his nightshirt and rips it open to expose his chest. Square under his right pectoral, big and ugly—a pink scar.
It was a nightmare. A fucking nightmare.
Eijirou survived it.
He woke up.
The last stitch that kept Katsuki together snaps and he collapses against Eijirou’s forehead, sobbing out his weight in fear and grief—because Eijirou survived the beam and the building. He’s here, circling his arms around him, warm and alive, and Katsuki still feels the slickness of blood on his hands, between his toes. His mind replays over and over the scene of blurry-faced government officials shaking his hand and telling him they’re sorry for your loss, a tragedy, truly, stark and clear like a lightbulb memory, overwhelming like his need to scream until he keels over, and it isn’t fair because Eijirou is under him, and he’s breathing and comforting him, and he doesn’t deserve to get scared out of his mind in the middle of the night because Katsuki can’t keep it together.
Katsuki cries harder in his embrace and faintly registers Eijirou moving them upright and then against the headboard even as he keeps them connected, his corded hand cradling half of Katsuki’s face against his shoulder as the other slides up and down his back. His lips press all around the crown of Katsuki’s hair, and among it all Katsuki can dully hear his heart beating, pumping blood through tissue and muscle—a promise, a guarantee that this is the real Eijirou. Katsuki is not going to wake up a third time with a pit in his soul.
He’s not sure how long the crisis lasts, but he knows that it’s a long time because Eijirou sports proud shadows under his eyes as he gets to the tail-ends of what must have been an exhausting monologue. At some point, Katsuki asked him to talk and he did; he never stopped, he just went on and on and on with his speech, cramming it with all the sappy shit he says (because he’s Eijirou) and all the things Katsuki needed to hear (because he’s Eijirou).
Katsuki drags his eyes down the ridges of his profile as Eijirou breathes under him, carding his hand in the short hair at his nape.
“D’you wanna talk about it?”
Katsuki grunts. “In the morning.” His nose is stuffy, and he must smell disgusting, but Eijirou nuzzles his cheek anyway and presses a lasting peck on it.
Any other time, Katsuki would have grunted and escaped his easy affections. But right now his limbs are heavy, and he really can’t bring himself to give up the reassurance of Eijirou’s skin against his, even clammy with sweat. He wipes the wetness under his eyes with the ragged edges of Eijirou’s shirt.
“Think you can go back to sleep?”
Katsuki snorts. He’s never sleeping again.
Eijirou hums. “How about an early breakfast then?”
It’s too fucking early to even call it breakfast, but Katsuki pushes off his chest to climb off the bed. As Eijirou hunts down a new t-shirt to pull on, Katsuki eyes the blue sheets, stomach curdling.
He yanks them off the mattress and marches them through the hallway to the living room.
“Lights on. Stay where I can see you,” he tells Eijirou as he moves to the open space kitchen to fiddle with the cabinets.
Katsuki raids the alcohol stash under the sink and then the kitchen drawers. Eijirou doesn’t say a word, but Katsuki knows he’s paying much less attention to their breakfast than he should.
Katsuki kneels before the fireplace. An unnecessary expense, Katsuki had deemed it when they bought this house, but now he’s grateful for Eijirou’s insistence on keeping it functional. The carpet beneath his feet is off-white. Katsuki’s breath rattles in his chest. There is no blood. He dumps the sheets in place of the logs and drenches them in Bourbon. It’s an unfortunate Christmas gift, since alcohol turns Katsuki’s control on his quirk shaky at best and drunk Eijirou is a threat to public decency, but they’ve kept it around in loving memory of the time the ever-responsible, goody-two-shoes, mama’s boy, No. 1 Hero Midoriya Izuku made last-minute Christmas shopping while drunk off his ass on the Todoroki’s eggnog.
Katsuki strikes a match and watches the sheets go up in flames.
Eijirou hums from the couch. “Come here?” he asks. His idea of early breakfast is dry cereal for both and a cup of stale coffee for himself. He places the cereal box between his knees as Katsuki grunts, collapsing against his side.
Eijirou offers him a handful of honeyed rings, silent like snow.
Katsuki’s chest hurts with the love he holds for this man. “Think there’s something we can watch?” and he’s more choked up than he’d like to admit, but Eijirou hums again and flicks the TV on.
“Cartoons?” he asks.
Katsuki pops a Cheerio in his mouth, Eijirou’s free hand already drawing circles on the naked skin of his knee. He leans over to place a kiss to Katsuki’s brow.
Katsuki sighs, closing his eyes and letting himself lose sight of Eijirou. But he’s warm against his side, all here, dented but not broken, real and alive.
“Cartoons.”