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Bakugo being dead has its upsides.
Like finding out that he'd cheat the universe to come back, sporting red horns and tiny wings and a demon crescent on his cheek, because even the grim reaper thought it too mean to keep him away from Todoroki.
But It isn't like Bakugo missed him.
"It's not like I missed you or anything."
It isn't like Bakugo even likes him.
"I don't even like you, bastard."
And it isn't like he made a deal with the devil because of just how much he doesn’t miss or like or orbit around Todoroki like he has his own angry moon, Bakugo was just pissed that he didn't go out in a blaze of glory like he was planning on. Todoroki should know.
He’d killed him.
Todoroki nods at the explanation as a whole and doesn't bite into any of Bakugo's denial, for once. He owes him that. Or maybe Todoroki is just barely-awake enough that his mind can't argue against anything, so he rubs his eyes and turns on his night light and accepts it. Bakugo is dead, and now he’s in his room too.
Todoroki sits on his bed while Bakugo floats above the ground in front of him, arms crossed, scowling in a way that never scared him before and still can't, even with the addition of living hellfire in his eyes. A look at the clock tells him 3am. No one else is awake to help confirm that this isn't some sleepy hallucination, so he's forced to believe it for now. It's a temporary truce with reality.
Bakugo had woken him up from a dream where he was swimming in cold soba until his arms had become noodles, too. It must be the reason why Todoroki feels like liquid. Why he isn’t in control of anything yet, and the speed of his heart ricochets from a steady drum to something wild.
Then he says, deadpan, “You look good,” because it’s true. There’s no trace of anything bad left on him. The burns are gone, the scars, the clothes that melted to his skin replaced by something nice. Something tight.
Bakugo rolls his eyes and calls him out. "What are you smilin' about?"
The way he talks is like there’s nothing wrong with this. It sounds like his voice, looks like his face, maybe it is him.
"Nothing," Todoroki scrunches his nose. "I've never had a ghost before."
The crescent under Bakugo's eye flashes brightly. "You don't have shit, and I'm not a ghost. Do you really think I'm here to float around shout, 'Boo, fuck you'?"
It sounds like him, it really does, but-
The whole thing starts to crumble.
This is a dream, he never woke up. Todoroki is sure of it now because everything has that hazy quality of one, like neither of them actually exist, and he knows Bakugo doesn't because his funeral is tomorrow. Todoroki has his suit picked out already and everything, It's all black, red tie. Bakugo liked him in red. It was the color of his eyes and sometimes he was predictable like that when he wasn't too busy trying not to be.
So Todoroki lies back down on his bed and stares at the ceiling instead of the trick he'd fallen for, like he just can't help but falling for Bakugo Katsuki all over again, every time, every painful reincarnation the world sends him. His angry moon. Bakugo wears that crown and circles him, pulled so close by Todoroki's gravity that he doesn't even need to use his new wings.
Todoroki lets out the longest sigh of his entire life.
Bakugo doesn't breathe.
He's already dead.
"You're just gonna ignore me, now, hah?" His voice echoes and rattles around. It brings the guilt back piece by piece. If Todoroki didn't know better, he would think Bakugo is annoyed at being brushed off so easily, especially after what happened, what Todoroki did to him. But this isn’t real anyway. Instead of replying, Todoroki only closes his eyes and stays silent.
And the silence stays.
Eventually his dream must give up trying to play him for some heartbroken fool, and it's about time, too. Todoroki is sick of being one.
He isn't sure if he falls asleep again or just exists in the nothingness behind his eyes, but when he opens them again, he feels the weight of Bakugo’s loss like he'd died a second time right there in his room. Todoroki killed him twice. One an accident, this one on purpose, and now he can't tell which one hurts more, or if he doesn't hurt at all because then he would have to feel something in the first place.
Todoroki borrows from Bakugo and exclaims out loud, where no one can hear him, "Fuck."
The silence breaks.
"Where was that mouth when I was still here?"
Chills, the words push chills into his neck like cold thumb prints. Todoroki swallows and turns his head to where Bakugo's voice came from, where he sits on the shallow desk against the wall, still here because he never vanished. Still real because he always was.
Todoroki melts into his pillow. He couldn't move again if he tried to. "Cursing is a bad habit."
"You're a bad fucking habit."
Bakugo’s reply turns those chills into something warm and inexplicable, and all at once he’s convinced.
Staring at him hurts but Todoroki can’t stop himself, now. He can’t hold back. He missed him too much, and he's suddenly realizing that the hellfire in Bakugo's eyes was there when he was alive, too, and the only reason it feels different now is because he finally learned how to use it.
Maybe that’s why he’s here, to burn Todoroki like he burned him. He'd deserve it. He'd welcome anything that Bakugo has to give him.
Bakugo waits, but it can't possibly be for an apology.
Todoroki sits up, stares back. "So if you aren't a ghost, what are you? I mean you're still..." Trailing off is cheating, but he can't finish that sentence out loud without something inside him snapping in two.
"I dunno," Bakugo ignores the part about being dead. "Ghosts are like, see-through, and I feel pretty solid. I mean I'm solid, right?" He pats his own chest, pulls his hair, starts floating across the room towards Todoroki. It intimidates him in a way that Bakugo could never manage to pull off in life.
Todoroki shifts on his bed. "I think so."
"You think so."
"I'm 95% sure."
"Make it a hundred," Bakugo tells him. The mattress doesn't dent when he sits on it, like no matter what Bakugo touches there's an infinitely small space that he can never close.
The room turns upside-down.
Todoroki wants to touch him just as badly as he wants to refuse. What if it doesn't work? What if it never will? What if their orbits have straightened into parallel lines instead of how things were before, spinning around like they couldn't help themselves, day and night, being touched, touching back. Finding something so raw in each other.
God, Bakugo must hate him more than anything in the world, and yet here he is, asking for Todoroki's hand. The one that took his life.
"Bastard," He curses, in that small voice, the one that Todoroki could only ever evoke on accident because when he tried too hard Bakugo would catch on and bite his tongue first. "Just do it already."
Bakugo grabs his wrist and pulls his hand impatiently.
Todoroki watches it happen.
He watches it happen but he feels nothing at all, not skin or warmth or even faint pressure, just air. The absence of Bakugo. Only the knowledge of what his hand would feel like if the world were a kinder place that forgave mistakes instead of scarring Todoroki with every one of them.
"What?"
Bakugo must not recognize what sad looks like on his face. He died too quickly to see it before.
"I can't feel you."
Saying the words out loud numbs him like ice. He tries to pull his hand away because it doesn't matter now, it doesn't matter, except Bakugo won't let go. Todoroki watches him squeeze his wrist, wishing he knew how it felt. How tightly Bakugo is holding him right now.
"Huh." He goes, like Todoroki's life isn't crumbling right in front of him.
And then a pause. A breath. Life puts itself back together. "'Cause I can feel you."
Todoroki doesn't know what to think except that it must mean something. Something good. Bakugo can feel him, he's real and he can feel him and this isn't a dream. He isn't a ghost.
So all Todoroki can do now is touch him, even though it's one-sided. Especially because it is. With Bakugo sitting in front of him again it’s like nothing else matters, not even himself, and that’s okay because Todoroki hasn’t felt alive for thirteen days anyway.
Now he closes the space between them in an instant. Instead of touch he uses sight to guide his hand along Bakugo's jaw, brush his lip, lace their orbits. He can't feel any of it. It doesn't matter - he's touching Bakugo again, exactly how he doesn’t deserve to. For whatever reason, Bakugo doesn’t call him out for being greedy. He lets it go for too long.
Then when Todoroki sees how his eyebrows knit together, how he tries to conceal an attempt to clutch the sheets, Todoroki stops worrying so much about where his hand goes.
"Cut it out." He growls when Todoroki traces that little crescent mark, and again when he twists his fingers around in the locks of his hair. Then all of a sudden Bakugo goes rigid completely.
Did Todoroki- did he hurt him? The thought makes him more uncomfortable than not being able to feel him does. "What is it?"
Bakugo tries to shake him off - of course it doesn’t work. "Nothing, just- Stop. I'm solid, you can call off the ghost hunt."
He’s trying to deflect, something else happened. Todoroki knows that face. It's the same one he can't get enough of, the one that appears right alongside that small voice when Bakugo knows he doesn't stand a chance in a room alone with Todoroki.
He wonders, "What are you, then?" And keeps twisting his hair, tugging that fistful of nothing, leaning in so close that Bakugo jerks backward and causes Todoroki to brush the side of his hand against his horn.
"I don't- Fuck."
Oh.
Todoroki repeats that last part - twice, so he's sure.
Oh.
He's sure now, so certain that he's found something worth exploring. Todoroki wraps a hand around his horn and squeezes, choking the empty air while Bakugo says everything he needs to with his eyes. That fire is back and it holds it all; the anger he died with, the hell where he picked a fight with fate, the burns that disappeared so he'd come back to Todoroki with none of them. Then he makes that noise. The small one; it's pulled right out of his throat.
But it’s different.
Todoroki can’t enjoy it like he wants to. He can’t forget everything else, the reality of this, knowing that this moment is only a reminder of what he doesn’t have anymore because it went up in a pillar of smoke.
He scratches the horn with his nail, and Bakugo purrs.
This is too much life at once. Todoroki's being spoiled by it, he shouldn't be able to do this anymore. Where's his punishment? He deserves one, a harsh one with absolutely no forgiveness. Or maybe this is all part of it, to be wrapped up in the imagined warmth of Bakugo again, and to be given a perfect moment so that it hurts even more when Bakugo dies the third time without ever hearing the words love or sorry.
Todoroki still doesn't use them now, he never will, they aren't his to say anymore. He lost that privilege. Instead he rubs his palm against Bakugo's horn - crimson and curled like a ram's - thinking about what it must feel like. Smooth and hollow. Furled deep in his hair, or down in his skull. Pointed at the end. Gorgeous. Gorgeous like Bakugo.
Even when he deliberately presses his thumb against the tip, Todoroki still feels nothing at all.
"Hahh..." Bakugo doesn't even pretend to fight it. He's never had a weak spot, he doesn't know what to do with one except clench his jaw while Todoroki exploits it for all it's worth. What it's worth is another quiet noise, a gasp without any lungs, the way Bakugo bucks his head back and forth the same messy way he'd buck his hips.
It’s worth the way Bakugo looks at Todoroki like he hadn't fucking killed him.
Todoroki grips the base of his horn just as Bakugo stumbles, "I think- shit, I think I gotta go."
Todoroki pulls away with a sense of dread he didn't think was possible again, because surely he'd experienced the worst of it on that day, after his misfire put Bakugo's screams in his ears - but it's just like he thought, isn't it? The punishment. He tried to hold on when he shouldn't have, and now Bakugo is being cast up into empty space where his orbit can't reach him.
"Bakugo." He can't say anything but his name.
"I'll come back tomorrow night."
Todoroki’s dread turns into hope, turns into false hope, and then finally into a wish that aches in his chest like something awful.
"How do you know?"
Bakugo looks at him. That expression is like nothing he's ever worn before, it's too empty, like he’s holding back and swallowing blame and trying so hard not to explode like Todoroki deserves him to. Slowly, the fire drains from Bakugo’s left eye and channels into the crescent-moon mark underneath it.
He tells Todoroki how he knows. "Because I have to."
The words curse the room and everything gets a little darker.
Todoroki blinks for no more than a second. It’s a mistake, he should’ve said something before in the warmth of that perfect moment, because now he’s choking back a guttural noise and his room is emptier than ever before. No Bakugo. No ghosts.
He sits just like that for a long time. On the edge of his bed, dissecting Bakugo's reply in a hundred different ways like it's a hidden message, because he's so starved for anything, anything. That wish left in his chest turns to ashes. All he can do is trust that Bakugo will come back tomorrow, whatever’s left of him, whatever Bakugo is now.
One more night, that's all he needs.
One more orbit.
Todoroki shuts his eyes and clenches his hand, the one that touched Bakugo and didn't feel any of it. He squeezes it even as breathing gets harder to do. Even as he trembles, as his knuckles turn white and two little words are pushed so far down his throat that he'll never speak them again, and as a drop of blood appears on the tip of his thumb - right where Todoroki had pushed it into his horn.
Todoroki sees none of it.
His eyes stay closed as he spins and spins.