Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

And to think he had been looking forward to internships. It hadn’t quite been the worst week of Katsuki’s life, but he would have much rather spent the entire time taking entrance exams… to apply for a college specializing in goat herding… in hell. He had more sympathy for goats now, given that Best Jeanist had herded him around like an animal all. Damn. Week. Long. The guy was crazy, like, legitimately crazy. The things you don’t realize from watching news reports…

The very first thing Katsuki was going to do was fix his hair. As soon as he was out of the nightmare’s sight, that’s what he was going to do. The hero had offered to--insisted on--seeing “his student” safely back on the train to UA. Katsuki had rolled his eyes and growled, but the nutcase had not been deterred.

The student, back in his school uniform, suitcase in one hand, glared at his unneeded and unwelcome chaperone out of the corner of his eye. It seemed the hero had decided to give up on chastising him for his demeanor now. Why did the guy even care? Katsuki was here to learn to be a hero, not look pretty for civilians or kiss the media’s ass. Katsuki should’ve interned somewhere else. He had so many offers, should have gone to Dare’s agency. That woman was a terror, not that highly ranked, but a terror. Katsuki could have spent his week running through cities blowing crap up and having a blast. Instead he got this. Whatever. It would still look decent on a resume, even without a letter of recommendation--which he wasn’t going to ask for and certainly wouldn’t receive if he did ask. Jeanist had made it plenty clear he didn’t like Katsuki at all and wouldn’t do him any favors in the future.

“I know this was not what you expected, or wanted, from this week,” Jeanist said as they approached the bulky, brown architectural monstrosity that served as a train station. “You are a very interesting young man with a lot of potential. I wish you nothing but the best. Most of all, I hope you learn to turn your temper towards productive avenues. That will certainly serve you well.”

Katsuki snorted. “See ya,” the student spat out, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to say “thank you” or anything like it.

“Wait.” The hero grabbed his shoulder, eyes narrowed.

“What now?”

Where did that guy come from? There was a tall, raven haired man on his left--and suddenly Miruko of all people lunged out from between two office buildings. She ran hot on the tail of some lady with a gruesome transformation quirk--the woman looked like a demon hedgehog, big black quills, glowing red eyes, the remains of a dress in tatters across her back. There were four other villains, none nearly as impressive as the spiky woman, but all armed to the teeth with knives and… claw hammers? Sure. Why not?

Jeanist pulled Katsuki back by his shirt. “Hey!” Katsuki snarled, explosions dancing on his palm as he sized up the hedgehog--Miruko was dealing with two other villains now. This was a hundred times more action than Katsuki had seen all week. Hell yes! Better late than never. He dropped his suitcase, squirmed out of the fiber manipulator’s hold and darted towards the fight.

Jeanist was yelling at him, but he was well and truly through listening to that jerk. The guy never had anything useful to say, so why should Katsuki listen? The student aimed an explosion at the hedgehog lady, catching her across the face. She staggered then turned towards him with a hiss. One of the other villains, some guy with hair nearly as green as Deku’s, lunged and grazed him with a hand--and Katsuki could barely move, as if he hadn’t slept in a week, the world flickering into dark gray and the ground rushing up to meet his hands and knees. There wasn’t much time to reflect on that. Katsuki was vaguely aware of the hedgehog turning toward him, claws bared--even less aware of Best Jeanist bodily tackling him out of the way--someone else touched him… and then they were falling...

The two of them reappeared at that extremely inconvenient height where there is enough time to realize that one has been teleported into mid air but not enough time to do anything about it other than reflect on the amount of pain that will shortly result. Not that Tsunagu was teleported into midair all that often--it had only happened thrice before. Though, from a certain perspective, four times was a lot. Provided he didn’t break his neck on the landing, and provided he eventually made it back to Japan from wherever this was, Tsunagu should take a survey and see how often this happened to other pro heroes. Was he doing something wrong that caused this to keep happening to him? Or was this normal in the profession?

The fiber hero rolled with the impact, tumbling down a short slope, coming to rest tangled up in a section of krumholtz. That hadn’t hurt as much as he expected--he had managed to avoid slamming his head into any rocks. Reaching out with his sixth sense, he found Bakugou lying in a disheveled heap twenty meters to his right. He wasn’t moving, not even a subtle shift of muscles against fabric--might be stunned, might be unconscious--not dead, thank all the gods in heaven--Tsunagu could feel him chest rising and falling evenly against his clothes.

The fiber hero disengaged the krumholtz, wincing as he staggered to his feet and discovered a sprained ankle--could be broken but he was going to say it was sprained whether or not it was broken. Coniferous cellulose fibers danced through his awareness as soft, glowing presences tasting of green tea. Turning his attention back to the visual plane, he quickly made his way to his intern’s side. “Bakugou,” he called to the heap. “Bakugou Katsuki.” No reply.

Check for bleeding. Check for broken bones. Check for spinal injuries.

As far as Tsunagu could tell the intern was fine, uninjured save for some bruises and cuts. Why was he unconscious then? A quirk effect? Could be. He had collapsed after one of the villains touched him as if his strings had been cut.

With his student apparently stable, the fiber hero took the opportunity to assess his own injuries. He had his fair share of cuts and bruises, too. A compression bandage seemed to be all the ankle injury required. That was ten second’s work with Fiber Master. The ankle was not damaged too badly. He could put weight on it.

Tsunagu hoped his phone or short range locator beacon would be in working order, but there was a good chance they would not be. During one of his previous unscheduled teleportations, the innards of all his electronics had unraveled like centuries old cotton in a dog’s teeth. It seemed to be a common side effect of teleportation quirks. Tsunagu pulled the items from their respective pockets. Dead. Extremely dead. Spewing acrid smoke, in fact.

There was always a chance that they might be close enough to some human presence for Tsunagu to sense something… he pressed his senses to the the limit in every direction in turn, searching for human-made fibers or clearings that might indicate roads or logging operations. Trees, trees, small gaps which were probably ponds, more trees. Well, then. There went any hope of contacting help.

Alright. Now down to the business of wilderness survival. The two of them could not stay here. The sun would be setting soon. Maybe not that soon? They were clearly at high latitude, so daylight might remain for some hours yet, but finding shelter was unlikely to be easy and it would certainly be needed. A chill breeze sliced across the tundra, tossing old pine needles in every direction. It would be a frigid night. Were they in Siberia? No… these trees didn’t look quite right and the shift in daylight was wrong. Canada, then.

Tsunagu had never been to Canada before. He shook his head and sighed. The passport situation was going to be a disaster. That was probably something to think about at a later time. You know, if they survived the trek back to civilization.

It figured that it would end this way. Perfect end to a perfect week. Maybe Tsunagu really should have gone to art school instead of hero school. Become a professional tapestry weaver or something. Too late now.

Tsunagu fashioned large, broken branches into a south-pointing arrow, just in case the teleporter knew where they had been sent and was convinced to relay that information, then he grasped Bakugou in Fiber Master’s firm hold and slung the student over his shoulders. The kid was lighter than Tsunagu expected. That did not make the following three kilometer slog pleasant.

The land was mostly flat. T ravel was not easy, though . The krumholtz were everywhere . Many of the horrible little twisted, spiky trees were dead, and the dead ones did not want to move when he told them to either with Fiber Master or with his boot. Everything that wasn’t krumholtz was either a swamp or a lake. It might be easier to just wade, but it was far too cold to stand the idea of getting his feet wet. On top of this, his ankle was killing him.

So far, no decent shelter had presented itself. The hero had hoped to find a boulder with an overhang at least. Maybe he should have just built an A-frame where the two of them landed. It seemed he would now have to do that anyway after exhausting himself carrying a first year hero student for two hours.

The next piece of decently elevated, non-swampy land he found, the fiber hero laid his intern down and set to work on a shelter. It had been a very long time since he had built such a thing--he had been Bakugou’s age--but some skills stick to you like sap.

Indeed, there was a lot of literal and figurative sap sticking involved. He stripped branches from dead little trees and used the trunks for the supports. Branches ripped from live trees served as side insulation and flooring, piled layer after layer. He took fibers from his sleeves to lash where necessary. More live branches covered the entrance and exit. It was far from a work of art, but it would do. See? This was why he didn’t go to art school. He knew there was a reason.

The fiber hero half-carried half-dragged his still unconscious student into the shelter. Please let him wake up in the morning. Tsunagu didn’t know what he was going to do if he did not. He couldn’t leave Bakugou, he clearly couldn’t travel carrying him, and if they stayed here too long they would certainly die--exposure, disease, starvation… annoying mosquitoes. The breeze kept many of the buzzing insects away--for now--but they were already irritating.

Tsunagu emptied his pockets and unraveled the entire outer layer of his costume, hesitated, and took apart the second, thicker layer of denim, too, showing off the body armor few people realized he wore beneath. He ripped through stitches, pried pliant fibers into new shapes, pushed and prodded and flattened until he had a double layered blanket large and broad enough for both of them. He crawled into place beside his student and completely covered the two of them with the fabric.

If Tsunagu had accurately extrapolated Bakugou’s temperament, should the student wake up to find that the fiber hero was effectively cuddling him--regardless of how cold it was--the student would scream, swear, and blow things up. This would be extremely inconvenient, not as inconvenient as if the kid remained unconscious, but it would still be bad. This should be an excuse for the universe to allow Bakugou to wake--it would still be causing Tsunagu immense inconvenience, after all, so it need not feel it was letting the fiber hero off too easily.

Katsuki woke up to find someone cuddling him. It was too dark to see who it was, but a warm body had stretched out beside him, clearly beneath the same blanket. Who did this guy--girl?--think they were? “The hell is wrong with you?” Katsuki yelled, explosions leaping from his palm as he sat up, shoulder immediately colliding with a low roof. He shook his head, clawed at the blanket, pulled it off at last--and realized that he was in an improvised structure, a hastily constructed a-frame. “What the actual hell is going on here?” he demanded of the half-awake blonde in black beside him.

“Please calm down, Bakugou,” said Jeanist placatingly. The voice gave the hero’s identity away, that combined with the radioactive-green eyes. His hair was every bit as wild as Katsuki’s own and he was dressed all in black, nose to toe--a thin mask covering his face and throat. It took Katsuki a few seconds blinking in shock to realize that the hero was wearing body armor but not a shred of denim. That’s because the blanket Katsuki had thrown off was denim--presumably the entirety of Jeanist’s costume repurposed.

He understood the blanket’s purpose now--it was frigid. “What the actual fu--”

“Language.”

“-ck is going on here? This is crazy!”

“I agree with you there.”

“Where are we?” Bakugou kept shouting, at a loss for anything else to do.

“Northern Canada I believe.”

“Why the hell are we in northern Canada?”

“Because this is where the miffed teleporter decided to dump us after you charged at his ally in a rage and nearly got yourself killed.”

“I did not nearly get myself killed!” Jeanist raised an eyebrow. “What do you know anyway?”

“About almost getting myself killed? Quite a bit. Done it two or three dozen times now. I have endured,” the hero continued in that infuriatingly calm tone, “the most exquisite lectures from concerned friends, angry teachers, and disappointed coworkers.” They probably screamed at him because they couldn’t stand how damn calm he was about everything.

Katsuki fumed, not quite sure how to reply to that. He’d just pick insults until he got a reaction, then. “This is a terrible A-frame. You suck at building stuff.” The fact that it was light enough for him to assess the quality of the structure meant there wasn’t enough insulation--it should be nice and dark.

Jeanist cocked his head from side to side, critically assessing his own work. “It’s not that bad. It did the job. You are correct that it is far from pretty. It has been at least a decade since I last built a survival shelter.”

“I could do better,” Katuski growled.

“Excellent. I look forward to seeing your work this evening.”

“Graaah!” Why did he have to be stuck in Canada with the most irritating single human being on the entire planet? He thought Deku was bad, but he would rather be stuck here with the nerd listening to him say “Kacchan, Kacchan” all day long.

Jeanist sighed. “If you could calm yourself long enough to have a rational discussion with me about how we are going to stay alive that would be greatly appreciated.”

“Grrrr...” He had zero interest in doing that. Jeanist decided not to notice.

“I have no idea where we are. We are certainly in range of wolves and grizzly bears. There may also be polar bears depending on how close to the coast or the Hudson Bay we are… I cannot recall what times of the year they would be on land. Up until yesterday I could not have cared less.” Jeanist just kept talking, like they were discussing the weather or something, and Bakugou found it difficult to stay furious. “I am not sure if you are aware of just how dangerous polar bears are. They are exquisitely dangerous. Grizzly bears are nothing to underestimate, either, but my understanding is that they do not often attack humans with the intent to eat them. That being the case, I presume either of us would be a match for the average bear provided it did not get the drop on us.

“All of my electronics have been damaged beyond any hope of repair with the sole exception of a small LED flashlight. Thus, there is no possibility of contacting help. We have to walk out. I started off heading south yesterday--there are more people in southern Canada, but in some sense any direction is as good as any other. If we need to travel more than, say, a few hundred kilometers I would not give us good chances of survival, so population density is not likely to become a serious factor. Oh, can you light a fire with your quirk, Bakugou? I do not carry matches or a flint and steel on typical patrols. I have never been in a situation where I would need them given that I work in an urban environment.”

“Uhh… yeah. I can do that.” He’d never done that intentionally before, but it’d be a snap.

“Excellent. I was freezing all night. A fire will be welcome.”

“It’s not that cold,” Katsuki snorted. “And you’re wearing more clothes than I am.” Katsuki was just in his school uniform. Jeanist was wearing all that heavy body armor.

“If we were to compare our builds, you are a heavy jacket and I am a tank-top,” Jeanist replied. What was it with this guy and bizarre clothing metaphors? And now Katsuki was imagining Best Jeanist in a denim tank-top. Oh, this image needed to burn. “I have zero built-in insulation. I presume you are not carrying any food or water?”

“No,” and food would definitely be nice. Water would be nicer.

“I do have a small water bottle and, fortunately, it is steel so it can be used to boil additional water to dispose of microbes.” Katsuki licked his lips, but there was no way that he was going to admit he’d kill to have something to drink now. “Here,” Jeanist handed the water to him without being prompted. It was a very small bottle, just something that could be left, unnoticed, in a pocket. “Please leave me half.”

“Sure.” He was thirsty enough to drink without pointing out that he wasn’t some wimp who was going to cheat the hero out of his portion.

Katsuki handed the silver bottle back. Jeanist turned away from him to drink his share. The metaphors were weird, the obsession with hiding his face was weirder.

“Alright. Would you like to start walking now or would you prefer to build a fire here, purify some additional water and try to locate something to eat?”

“What do you think there would be to eat around here?” Katsuki didn’t have any idea, yet, what the surrounding environment was like…

“Presumably the mosquitoes are eating something .”

It was his choice, huh? “Let’s get out of here,” Katsuki decided with a grunt.

“Alright. Allow me a moment.” Jeanist flicked his fingers, rolling up the improvised denim blanket, fashioning a bag from it to hold a small pile of items which had presumably been in his pockets the day before.
Katsuki pushed the piles of conifer branches away from the entrance of the A-frame and crawled out into a misty land full of dead little bushes, stunted trees, shallow ponds and buzzing insects. The student fixed his eyes on a landmark--just an unusually tall tree--to the south and set off, using explosions to leap over twisted trees and across water barriers. This was almost fun.

“Please don’t get too far ahead, Bakugou,” Jeanist called.

“Why don’t you keep up?” the student snapped.

“I am not nearly as fast as you are,” the hero admitted easily, as if it didn’t even bother him. The fiber manipulator smashed his way through tree barriers or, occasionally, used his quirk to bend them out of the way. Katsuki had honestly thought Fiber Master only worked on clothes… but if it worked on cotton, which it clearly did, because that’s what denim was made from, and cotton was a plant… could Jeanist strangle someone with a pine tree? Okay, that was a weird image

Jeanist did, eventually, catch back up. Good for him, old geezer. “Don’t tire yourself out, Bakugou,” the fiber hero chastised. “The goal is to make decent time all day, not excellent time for one hour and terrible time for nine hours.”

“I’m not gonna’ tire myself out. You worry about you!”

Katsuki tired himself out. He had great endurance--he’d dare you to tell him otherwise--but his arms were aching soon enough, and he found it harder and harder to clear the trees with each jump.

“You tired yourself out,” Jeanist said as the fiber hero overtook him. He might as well have said “I told you so” outright given how damn smug he sounded.

“Shut up.”

Chapter Text

It was very irritating to deal with someone who regarded every single comment directed at him as some sort of threat to his importance as a human being. Forget dying of exposure, Tsunagu was liable to die of exasperation. The fiber hero did have a temper--nothing like Bakugou’s but he was capable of getting into shouting matches. This would be a terrible time for that, though, especially given that his intern seemed to be trying as hard as he could to start one.

The student had gone ahead and exhausted himself about an hour into travel. The endurance was impressive, but “I have the endurance to use my quirk to combat specs impressive” and “I have the endurance to use my quirk to travel long distances impressive ” were fundamentally different things. Tsunagu wasn’t using his quirk much at all , just circumventing krumholtz or kicking them out of the way, Bakugou now following him grudgingly.

“Why don’t you bend them out of the way more often?” the student asked abruptly. “It works better than randomly kicking crap.”

“I, too, am trying not to exhaust myself,” Tsunagu replied. “Fiber Master can have… intense energy requirements for manipulating wood given the low content of subpar cellulose and it is going to be difficult,” impossible, “to make up a serious calorie deficit in the middle of the Canadian wilderness. Unless we happen upon some kind of large quadruped that is.” They had not seen a single animal yet, save insects and something that could have been a fish or a frog in one of the deeper pools.

“ And it’s not like you carry any spare weight, twig,” Bakugou pointed out.

It was probably meant to be an insult, but Tsunagu couldn’t help but laugh. “ Indeed.” Bakugou’s quirk probably required a huge amount of energy, too. “I imagine your quirk is a drain on your reserves as well.”

“Yeah,” the student muttered, crossing his arms defensively, perhaps rethinking wasting all that energy racing ahead for the sole purpose of annoying Tsunagu.

Tsunagu kicked another set of branches away, wincing at a sharp pain in his ankle. It has seemed mostly fine after a single night’s rest. Loathe as he was to ask such a thing of the intern he should be protecting, Tsunagu couldn’t afford to cripple himself on the first day of travel. “Could you lead for a while, Bakugou?”

The student snorted. “Why, tired already, twig?”

Hopefully that nickname would not stick around too long. Oh, that was a terrible pun. “No. I injured my ankle yesterday and it is bother ing me again.” Another snort was the only reply, but Bakugou took the lead. “Thank you. I appreciate it.” He should have asked earlier. He bound the improvised compression bandage more tightly, but soon could not hide the stutter in his gait. He would probably be outright limping by the day’s end. Wonderful. As if things were not bad enough. In situations like this, even the most minor of injuries could snowball into insurmountable disasters. And it wasn’t clear this was a mild injury.

H unger was an inconvenience, but nothing to worry about, merely a distraction. Tsunagu often missed meals on busy days--days when he also tended to spend sever al thousand extra calories beating strange fibers into submission and then got maybe two or three hours of sleep on an uncomfortable piece of office furniture. Bakugou probably never missed meals, but was certainly too proud to admit that hunger was slowing him down. It clearly was. It wasn’t as if there were anything Tsunagu could do about it if the student did say something other than curse himself for being too slow to keep the both of them out of this ridiculous situation in the first place.

After perhaps te n hours of travel, the fiber hero suggested--didn’t declare because that was just asking for Bakugou to argue for the sake of arguing--that a nearby rise would make a good camp site.

“Yeah, looks good.”

“Do you think we might find something better in another thirty minutes?” Tsunagu asked, knowing the answer was “no” but hoping that he could avoid an argument by phrasing things this way. He was utterly exhausted and limping and not in the mood.

Bakugou definitely caught on. The student glared at him. Oh, well. “I doubt it.”

“Shall we stop here then?”

“Fine,” the student growled.

“I believe you were going to show me your A-frame skills tonight. I am happy to collect wood for you and provide ropes as needed.” Namely the same ropes as were used the previous night, all carefully recovered before their departure. “We should also start a fire. I will set some water to boil if you can get me a flame.”

“Yeah. Sure.” It seemed Bakugou was so grouchy in normal life that it would be impossible for him to become more grouchy when exhausted and famished. He almost seemed less cantankerous than usual.

Tsunagu collected fallen branches, dry and long dead. Bakugou set about collecting rocks, arranging them in a ring, and stacking wood into a pyramid, dry needles serving as kindling. He had clearly done this many times before. “Usually I carry matches for this part,” the student muttered, cupping kindling in his hands and setting off a series of small explosions until a spark caught on the needles. Bakugou blew gently on the tiny flames, coaxing them to life, before lying them down within the ring of stones. Flames lapped up the pyramid, spreading eagerly. The student smiled smugly as the cheerful blaze warped and warmed the air.

Tsunagu twitched at the odd sensation of burning cellulose, immediately turning his senses elsewhere to escape the gritty taste of decay. “Does it make more sense to build a shelter or just curl up by the fire?” Bakugou mused.

“I do not think it is safe to allow a fire to blaze without constant supervision,” Tsunagu pointed out.

Bakugou shrugged. “Doubt anything around here’s really prone to go up in smoke… the whole damn place’s a swamp.”

“I would prefer not to wake to find my hair on fire,” Tsunagu said. “If both of us plan to sleep, we should see to it the fire is out first. It could also rain, of course, in which case we would sorely regret having no cover.”

Bakugou rolled his eyes. “Sure. Whatever.” The student started methodically fetching materials, ripping off large branches from krumholtz or even using his quirk to topple dead trunks entirely.

“Do you want help with that?” Tsunagu asked, watching curiously as Bakugou put together the basic frame. The student was, indeed, very skilled.

“Hell no. You’d ruin it.”

“Fine.” The fiber hero sat with his back to the fire, basking in the heat. The sun had yet to set, but he already found the cold bitter.

The smoke did a decent job of keeping the mosquitoes away, and Tsunagu had little enough exposed skin as it was. Bakugou, on the other hand, cursed about the bugs every thirty seconds or so. “They weren’t so damn bad when we were moving,” Bakugou muttered, swatting a big fly away.

“Shhh,” Tsunagu raised a hand, trying to identify the soft, red hum on the edge of his awareness.

“No, you--”

“Don’t scare the rabbit,” Tsunagu said, finally identifying the creature. He was not particularly good at sensing hair and fur, worse at manipulating it. He hated it when villains wore wool clothing--it was such a struggle to tie them up with it. Hence his constant efforts to convince the world that everyone should be wearing denim at all times.

Bakugou froze, eyes searching. “Where?” he whispered, apparently hungry enough to behave if a meal might be on the line.

Tsunagu pointed--then realized there was no way Bakugou would be able to see it. The hero gathered a collection of denim threads, reinforcing them with some fibers borrowed from his body armor, and crept across the ground. It was a good distance and he dared not move quickly. Tsunagu peered out from behind a collection of low bushes. The dusty brown creature still had not noticed him. Tsunagu stilled and sent the fibers ahead of him. That was close enough for an ambush. The hero clenched his fingers and wrapped the tendril around the creature’s throat.

Killing something with Fiber Master was terribly intimate. He might as well be hugging the creature as he strangled it with his bare hands, feel ing its pain and terror as it struggled against the killer it could never understand. He managed to get leverage by wrapping the fibers around a few tree trunks , enough to snap the little animal’s neck and end its suffering.

As he fetched the warm body, Tsunagu forcefully turned his thoughts away from all the unpleasant memories this dredged up. Society always managed to gloss over it when a villain was killed in a fight with a hero--it was always made out to be the villain’s fault. But that wasn’t always the case, now, was it? Unless “suicide by giving the hero no choice but to kill you” was listed as the cause of death. Not now. Think about that some other time.

The fiber hero returned to the campsite. He, fortunately, carried a multi-tool with a long, sharp blade when working, so this would not turn into a brutal ordeal with cutting edges improvised from rocks. “I do not suppose you know how to skin and prepare this? I knew how to skin a rabbit, but this is another occasion where that was decades ago.” He had decided, immediately after learning how it was done, that fur clothing was a sin-- starving, killing, and mutilating a creature for the sake of subpar fashion.

What kind of question was that? “Uh… no. I may enjoy hanging out in the woods, but I typically go home for dinner.”

J eanist sighed, eyes narrowing in concentration as he unstitched his sleeves and stowed them behind his back. “This should be brutal then.” The hero’s arms were ghostly pale--probably never saw the light of day--somewhat gaunt and riddled with raised scars. Aizawa had plenty. Jeanist had more.

“The hell happened to you?” Katsuki asked.

“What do you mean?” the hero asked as he suspended the rabbit by its back legs from a tree branch and pulled a pocket knife out of his jean-bag.

“You look like you were mauled by a bear.”

Jeanist raised an eyebrow. “Heroics is not a particularly safe profession, Bakugou. Those scars are from at least ten separate incidents.” The pro cocked his head. “What, did you think me somehow pampered just because I like to dress up and comb my hair in the morning? I assure you this is not the case.”

Katsuki coughed. “Since when are you a sarcastic bitch?”

Jeanist looked like he wanted to reprimand him for his language but decided it wasn’t worth it. “Since always. You just did not notice.”

“I would’ve freakin’ noticed,” Katsuki muttered, returning to work on insulating his shelter. “You must’ve been pretending not to be.” He hadn’t built an A-frame shelter in a while, but he’d had plenty of experience when he was running around the woods. It was easy.

Katsuki turned around perhaps fifteen minutes later to find that Jeanist had messily skinned the animal--which apparently involved cutting its head and forelegs off--and was now ripping its guts out. Katsuki swallowed bile. Come on, he wasn’t this much of a wimp--but that was just a lot of blood. The only time he’d seen that much blood before was at the USJ when one of the villains he was fighting fell following an explosion to the face and slammed his head into a piece of rebar. That creep had apparently been fine in the end, but man that cut had bled a lot. “That is brutal,” Katsuki heard himself say.

“ I said it would be,” the hero replied. “I barely remember how to do any of this. Heart, kidneys, lungs, and liver are edible? Or is there something about not eating livers in tundra regions?”

“Yeah, vitamin A poisoning,” Katsuki remembered. “I don’t know if that really applies to a rabbit, though.”

“Best not to risk it. Do you think you could work on setting up a spit to roast this creature while I see if I can remember what to do with the pelt?”

“Sure.” The sooner he could get some food the better. He didn’t often skip meals--wasn’t good for you when you were training hard--and he was absolutely famished. Setting up a spit wasn’t something he’d done before, but it was a heck of a lot easier than building a whole survival shelter. Green wood was a good choice for the thing, less likely to burn. Jeanist could have left the cleaned animal here and Katsuki could have started it cooking. The condescending bastard probably didn’t do that on purpose, probably thought Katsuki couldn’t handle the blood. The student growled under his breath, seething.

Jeanist, no longer covered in gore, returned shortly with the cleaned rabbit pelt and set the animal to roast.

The rabbit sizzled over the fire, Katsuki turning the spit every ten seconds or so. The small collection of edible organs cooked on a flat rock lying amidst a heap of ruby coals. Jeanist had gradually drawn closer to the fire as the air grew cooler. He was now close enough to risk setting his hair alight. The guy must not be kidding about having zero built in insulation. Made sense, come to think of it, given that the hero was always wearing that head-to-toe denim monstrosity in the sweltering heat and humidity of summer without any apparent discomfort. He must like his weather really hot.

“You think this is done yet?” Katsuki asked, referring to the rabbit.

“I have not the slightest idea,” Jeanist replied. “You can try poking it with a stick.”

Katsuki rolled his eyes, but found a stick none the less. “Not done,” Katsuki decided. “But the water’s definitely been boiling long enough.” Time to let it cool, then they could set another round to purify.

“Absolutely. It only needs ten minutes or so… I just forgot about it,” Jeanist plucked the bottle from its place among the coals with a tendril of denim.

“Why do you know how to butcher a rabbit, anyway?” It was convenient, but pretty unexpected.

“A misspent youth.”

Katsuki growled. “Fine! Be that way.”

Jeanist sighed. “I did not mean it like… fine. Take it however you like. At one point in my life I thought fur clothing was fashionable for some unspeakable reason. I like to know how things are done behind the scenes. It was a very long time ago. I do not regret it, in the sense that I am glad I learned early just how awful the fur industry is.”

“Huh.” What else was he supposed to say to that?

After perhaps ten more minutes of staring blankly into space, Katsuki poked the rabbit again. “Looks done now. Crispy.”

“I concur.”

“Why can’t you just say “yeah” like a normal freakin’ human being?”

“Why can’t you go five minutes without swearing or snapping at someone like a normal human being?” Still, his tone was perfectly calm and level. Honestly, why couldn’t the guy just scream at him? The nice, calm, collected drone was insufferable. “Would you like to carve the animal or would you like me to do that?” asked the hero, taking the spit from the fire.

“Let me at it.” Ripping meat apart sounded fun… now that it wasn’t bleeding and didn’t look like an actual animal.

Jeanist handed over his knife--sterilized by heat since its role in gutting the creature--and Katsuki set to work hacking apart bone and sinew. He impaled a thigh on a scorched branch. “Here. Have a leg!”

“Thank you. If I recall correctly, they are the best part.”

Well then, Katsuki should take the other one for himself. It was delicious; on a normal day he would probably call it mediocre, but he was starving so it was delicious. There wasn’t enough. He gnawed on the bones. Jeanist clearly wasn’t interested in them, so Katsuki could have them all.

“The inner bark of some of these trees is probably edible,” Katsuki mused.

“If you are confident that you can identify an edible tree, feel free. Just don’t poison yourself.”

What were the edible tree barks? Willows. Pines… aspens… were these pines? Or firs? Did firs have edible bark? Katsuki spent the next ten minutes staring at some needles trying to remember whether it was flat needles that made a tree a fir or whether it was something with the cones… He didn’t really know how to harvest the stupid bark, anyway. “Whatever.” No reply.

Jeanist was asleep, curled up beside the fire like a big, condescending house cat… which was not immediately obvious because he was sleeping with his eyes open. It wasn’t really that weird on some level, but… unexpected? Katsuki reached forward and shook the hero’s shoulder, “why the hell do you sleep with your eyes open?” he demanded.

Jeanist started awake--and Katsuki found himself winded on his back, not really sure how he ended up on the ground. “Oh my god I’m so sorry!” the hero half-yelled--it was the most Katsuki had ever heard him raise his voice.

“What the fuck?” Katsuki coughed. In retrospect, that had been really, really dumb, assuming that just because Jeanist was a typically a long range fighter that he wouldn’t have any violent reflexes when awoken suddenly like that…

“I do apologize,” the hero repeated, already--infuriatingly--calm and collected again. “That was an extremely atypical reaction from me, but in the future, please just call to me. I am a very light sleeper. You need not shake me awake. It will be easier on both of us.”

Katsuki glared at the hero. It really pissed him off that Jeanist had caught him off guard like that. He shouldn’t have been thrown that easily. “Fine.”

The fire died down. The sun dipped lower.

“Can you touch these stones without burning yourself?” Jeanist asked, gesturing towards a number of rocks lying in the glowing coals.

“Yeah. Sure. My hands are temperature resistant up to several thousand degrees. Gotta’ be or they would have long since burned off.”

“Could I convince you to use some of these stones as the floor of the shelter? Covered by a thick layer of branches of course.”

That was actually a pretty good idea… and it wasn’t like Katsuki was totally immune to the cold, although he was definitely faring better than the fiber manipulator. The student moved the rocks while Jeanist refashioned his jean bag back into a blanket. “Keep to your side,” Katsuki told his companion as the two settled down on a bed of warmed needles to attempt to sleep. “Don’t touch me.”

Chapter Text

The student was staring at Tsunagu when he woke. “Is something wrong, Bakugou?”

“Do you always sleep with your eyes open?” the student asked.

“Not always. Just occasionally.”

“Why?”

“Quirk side effect. Vision is your most powerful sense, as such you close your eyes to block it out when you sleep so that it does not distract you. You do not feel the need to cover your ears or nose in order to sleep. Similarly, vision is not my most powerful sense, as such I sometimes forget that my eyes are open at all.”

“Huh.”

It was a long day. The terrain was every bit as difficult as the previous day. Neither traveler had much energy. Bakugou used his quirk occasionally to leap over particularly annoying obstacles so that he could cross his arms and smugly leer at his companion as the fiber hero picked a longer bath. Tsunagu did not use his quirk at all--it was not worth the energy. To top off a perfect day, his ankle expressed its disapproval loudly at every other step.

Tsunagu sensed few mammals--tiny and fast--probably shrews or voles. The previous night’s rabbit had clearly been a stroke of incredible luck. This luck did not repeat itself.

Tsunagu’s friends and coworkers would be panicking now. His right-hand sidekick, Three Ring, would be frantic--the poor man was always frantic but it would be justified this time. Kuugo would be frantic, too, but he would have to pretend that he was not for the sake of appearances. It would not do to have top pro heroes publicly falling to pieces when other top pros went missing.

It would probably be a huge news story--fourth ranked hero and UA student disappear in the middle of public fight involving sixth ranked hero. It would be the talk of the country, probably international news. The story would be so sensationalized that everyone would probably forget that Tsunagu and Bakugou were actual people and just refer to them as “the missing hero” and “the missing student.” Perhaps the public would remember that he was called Best Jeanist. Perhaps they would not. Sometimes, when the news used his hero name with a certain tone, it made Tsuangu feel like a paper doll, a figure stripped of all humanity. If the two castaways ever made it back, the fiber hero was going to pointedly avoid ever seeing any of the coverage of this disappearance.

The day stretched on. The land never seemed to change. All the krumholtz on this side of the lake looked exactly like all the krumholtz on that side of the lake. The next lake looked just like the lake before it. Bakugou apparently navigated by choosing an unusually tall tree to the south and then making his way to it by whatever path necessary, but “unusually tall” usually meant perhaps a meter taller than the rest of the scraggly bushes. It was as if they had stepped into some alternate dimension where time and space did not exist. Hopefully that was not actually what had happened.

Bakugou looked positively miserable as he huddled near the fire that evening. The student muttered angrily under his breath, cursing about this and that. Tsunagu did not really listen. Rather, the fiber hero stared, comatose, into the flames, not paying attention to much of anything.

“If they were gonna’ figure out where we ended up they would’ve done it by now,” Bakugou said abruptly, “wouldn’t they?”

“Probably,” Tsunagu agreed, huddling closer to the fire as the wind picked up.

“So either we get ourselves out or we die here.”

“Presumably.”

“Oh? Presumably? What else do you think could happen?” and Bakugou called Tsunagu condescending.

“We could be found by an unrelated search party,” it could happen. “We could run into an intelligent, quirked animal which provides us with aid. We could happen upon a commune of anti-government protesters and decide to forswear our former allegiances and join their society. Rapid climate change could occur turning this part of the world into a tropical forest overnight. The teleporter’s quirk could turn out to be temporary displacement rather than permanent relocation.” That last idea wasn’t actually ridiculous.

Bakugou snorted. “I thought you were being a bitch and then that last one wasn’t obviously stupid.”

“I meant for it to be stupid, but then it hit a rebellious streak.”

Tsunagu set to work taking apart his denim bag and turning it back into a blanket. He had thought of dubbing the bag a jag, but that word made him think about lawyers--one of the most aggravating necessities of a hero’s life--so he would have to keep working on that pun.

They pulled the same trick with the hot rocks as the day before, but it was much colder than either previous night. Tsunagu woke shivering perhaps an hour before Bakugou woke shivering. The student was adamant about not being touched, so the two of them lay there, teeth chattering, not speaking a word, until it grew light enough to safely travel. It took several hours of walking before Tsunagu finally declared himself warm again.

Bakugou was in a thunderously bad mood that day. He had every excuse to be, running on no food and little sleep. The student’s reaction, however, was to do idiotic things and hurt himself in an attempt to make Tsunagu angry.

Bakugou managed to get a good distance ahead using his quirk for propulsion. Tsunagu sighed as he tried to catch up. “If I scream at you like you clearly want me to, will you stop doing this?” the fiber hero asked as he rounded a large set of boulders and caught up with Bakugou--and a polar bear. “Well, that can’t be good,” Tsunagu said as the bear reared onto its back legs, snarling.

Chapter Text

Tsunagu hadn’t been even aware of the damn thing, too busy being annoyed with Bakugou, trying to come up with some strategy to keep the student from getting himself killed--now and in the future. It was truly embarrassing that Tsunagu hadn’t noticed this creature. Rough, spicy and dark, it stood out to his sixth sense like bell bottoms at a formal dance. It was a stunning sight, too. Were polar bears supposed to be this big? On its hind feet it was twice as tall as Bakugou--the animal must weigh a metric ton at least. Those claws looked like cleavers.

The bear roared. Bakugou set off an enormous explosion in its face. Tsunagu winced at the decibels and the shockwave. The bear roared louder--it seemed rather unperturbed by the massive detonation, covered in soot and singed but not dead. What the hell? That should have taken a chunk of the thing’s head off. It had a durability quirk. Fantastic. Tsunagu just had to make that comment about “an average bear” and now the universe was having its revenge for his insolence.

“What the fu--” the student didn’t manage to finish his sentence, cutting himself off as he leapt away from a massive paw swipe. Bakugou avoided the second paw as well, but tripped on a broken branch and stumbled backwards, nearly falling into a puddle.

Tsunagu pulled the seams of his sleeve apart and unraveled the rather uncooperative aramid fibers, tossing them at the bear and wrapping them tightly around the creature’s throat. The huge animal growled, turning away from the flat-footed student and charging towards the fiber hero with a murderous expression no animal had any business wearing. Except Nedzu, of course. But Nedzu’s version of murderous was a delighted, beady-eyed smile that clearly conveyed, “I like you so I’m going to make your demise fun! You want a fun demise, don’t you?”

Tsunagu managed to wrap another set of fibers around the creature’s legs and trip it--he did not manage to dodge the paw that came flying his way--he had fought double-S supervillains slower than this. Bakugou was back in the fight by then. Jeanist took the opportunity to get a bit of distance while the bear tried to decide which of them to murder first. He tried again to choke the animal, but that seemed only to anger it further… it did get its attention off his student… and then the creature ripped the aramid fibers around its legs like they were nothing. Oh my god, it was like fighting a bear-shaped knock-off of All Might. Is this why the number one pro was so secretive about his abilities? Was he secretly the child of some quirked polar bear?

The animal was unbelievably fast--right in Tsunagu’s face in a moment. The fiber hero ducked the bite, dodged away from the swipe of a paw. Bakugou jumped on the creature’s back, shouting like a rodeo cowboy, and repeatedly set of explosions against the enemy's ears. The bear roared, shaking its head, bucking--it was going to roll and the student either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. Jeanist snagged the bitter, metallic synthetics in Bakugou’s sleeve, found leverage on a rock and yanked the student out of the way moments before the bear would have slammed him into the ground. “I wasn’t gonna’ let it smash me! I’m not an idiot!” Bakugou screeched as he rolled to his feet.

Okay. Another strategy was needed. Weight per weight, cellulose wasn’t nearly as strong as aramids, but the amount of available cellulose was an advantage. The krumholtz screamed in protest as Tsunagu twisted them into a spiral around the bear’s leg. He hadn’t expected a headache to appear quite so quickly.

The bear growled, biting at the binding on its leg. Bakugou, who was clearly still winded from the fall and ought to have taken the opportunity to get some distance and reassess the situation, of course decided this was a good time to reengage. The student was extremely fast, but maybe not as fast as he thought he was. Tsunagu smacked the bear in the face with another tree to keep it from ripping his intern’s head off, straining to control the disorganized, uncooperative fibers and trying to ignore the flares of pain behind his eyes. This was why he never manipulated wood in heroics. The fiber behaved clumsily no matter what he did, drained calories like a sieve, and showed its displeasure by repeatedly slamming an ice pick into his skull.

Tsunagu managed to get one more tree under control, twisting it into a knot around one of the bear’s back legs as he tightened the grips around its throat and foreleg--something snapped. The animal roared in pain as the leverage provided by a conveniently placed rock broke its wrist. It jerked against its bonds, but it was clear from the creature’s demeanor that it had decided the fight wasn’t worth it and was attempting to flee. Bakugou wasn’t going to give it the chance, of course that was just...

They had it now! The thing could hardly move, bound around the neck, the ankle, and the wrist. Jeanist had broken it’s leg, too, and the thing had clearly taken damage when Katsuki was hanging off its head, blowing up its ears. He was just getting ready to jump back on and kill the freakin’ thing when Jeanist collapsed in a heap. Oh, come on! Now? What the hell? Fine. He’d deal with it. He couldn’t keep fighting with an unconscious ally right there… if the thing got out of hand again it could kill Jeanist before Bakugou could do anything about it.

Katsuki ran to the hero’s sighed, grabbed Jeanist’s slim form and tossed him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He made sure to snatch the hero’s bag, too, because losing the knife and water would be a disaster. The guy was missing the entirety of his right sleeve--had used it to try to strangle the bear--and there were five bloody gashes across his bicep where the animal had cut him early in the fight. Come to think of it, Katsuki was bleeding, too. He’d deal with that later.

The student set off at a jog, used a carefully judged explosion from one hand to leap over a copse of shrub-trees and a fair sized pond, felt the tail end of an adrenaline surge and hit the ground running.

He wasn’t sure how long he carried on like that, jumping as far and as often as he could, hoping it would make it hard for the monster to track them by scent. His lungs burned, breath coming in shallow pants, but he was way too jittery to quit running now.

At some point, exhaustion overpowered adrenaline. Katsuki staggered to a halt in the center of a broad, dry clearing--good visibility in every direction--and collapsed to the ground, careful not to be too rough with the hero slung across his shoulders.

Jeanist’s arm was slick with blood now, as was Katsukis’ lower leg where the bear had managed to scratch him. His injury wasn’t too bad--mostly clotted already. Okay then. Keep Jeanist from bleeding any more.

The student pawed through the jean bag. Yup, first aid supplies. As far as Katsuki could tell, pretty much all heroes carried this kind of stuff around with them all the time. Every UA teacher always seemed to have an infinite supply of bandaids, cotton swabs, disinfectant and ibprofen.

Gauze pads, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, gauze pre-soaked in alcohol, a thin roll of bandages, triple antibiotic ointment, a few doses each of ibprofen, some name brand antibiotic, a general antiviral medication, oxycotin, asprin, epinephrine, naloxone and… xanax? Huh. That last one was unexpected but probably a really good idea--must make it much easier to get panicking people out of a dangerous situation. The antivirals and antibiotics weren’t so surprising--there had been several cases of people with quirks that could transmit the pneumonic plague, in which case having an immediate does of antibiotics was a life saver. Same idea for the antivirals.

Katsuki opened one of the gauze pads and set to work cleaning the cuts on Jeanist’s arm. He’d never actually treated any injury this serious before--he’d had plenty of scrapes and shallow cuts himself, skinned knees, sprains, bruises and black-eyes and split lips… but the only times he’d been seriously injured Recovery Girl patched him up. The first years had barely started talking about first aid procedures.

The cuts cleaned, Katsuki ripped open a larger gauze pad and pressed it against the wounds. The hero shifted and groaned dramatically. “And that, ladies and gentlemen,” Jeanist mumbled, “is why I don’t use trees in heroics. Thank you, Bakugou. Oh, and mind telling me what happened?”

“You passed out like a pansy,” Katsuki said, “I picked you up and ran for it.”

“I’m not getting that sleeve back, am I? I liked that sleeve,” Jeanist coughed out.

“Should’ve gone with the trees first if you didn’t want to wreck your clothes.”

“I did not expect to lose consciousness, but I knew I was going to hurt myself manipulating that much wood,” the fiber hero replied. “Lignin and hemicellulose are much harder to work with than plain cellulose and the polymer chain lengths in wood are less than a tenth of what you get in refined fabric.” The hero paused to wince and hiss. “It was a last resort. I have the most exquisite headache… I probably cannot even stand right now.” He paused, considering. “Are you injured, Bakugou?

“A few scrapes,” Katsuki shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

“Is it really nothing or are you just saying that it is nothing because of some irrational fear that people will think less of you if you admit that you are subject to the same physical laws regarding injuries as every other human being on the planet?”

“The hell?”

“You heard me and I know you understood.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Alright. If you are certain. Just make sure to clean your injuries thoroughly. An infection could be lethal out here. And I like you,” wait, what? “I would be very unhappy if you died. Not to mention that I would certainly die, too, because if I walked out of here without you Eraserhead would rip me apart at the seams.”

“You don’t like me.”

“Really? That was what you picked up on? And how would you know whether I like you or not? That is something I get to decide.”

Katsuki snorted. “Every damn minute of every damn day, you ripped into me about everything--the way I look, the way I talk, the way I am.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t like you,” the fiber hero blinked up at him in incomprehension.

“Yes it freakin’ does!”

Jeanist flexed his fingers several times, like he did when he was getting ready to do something fancy with his quirk. “I don’t understand you,” the hero said at last. “Why do you have to be perfect?”

“What? You’re the perfectionist, always laying into me about some tiny little detail.” Every conversation, every moment, nothing could please this guy.

“No. No, no, no, that is not at all what I meant. You don’t have to be perfect. You can’t be perfect. No one can be perfect. Not being perfect is not a sin. You can be better, though. When someone tells you there’s something you could be doing better, that doesn’t mean you are somehow a bad person.”

“Fat words from someone who calls himself Best Jeanist and works at the Genius Office.”

“Hey. Leave my horrible ability to come up with good names out of this. I told you that names are important; they are, I know all too well as someone who is bad at choosing them.” Jeanist slowly sat up, taking over the task of holding the gauze against the cuts on his arm. “Honestly, why are you so insecure?”

Katsuki felt all the hairs on the back of his neck stand up with rage. “I am not insecure!”

“You are one of the most insecure people I have ever met. People who like themselves and feel confident in their own skin are capable of taking stock of their strengths and faults--”

“Shut up and mind your own business!”

“--and accepting criticism in order to improve without fear or wounded feelings.--”

“Shut up!”

“--Funny that you insist I don’t like you when I probably like you more than you like yourself.”

Katsuki was tempted to scream at Jeanist to shut up again, but for some reason his tongue wasn’t interested in forming words; it just lay in his mouth like a dead lizard. He wasn’t insecure. He was going to be the number one hero in the country. He was at the top of his class in every way--academic skills, combat… why should he even care what anyone thought about him? Why did it even bother him when Jeanist ripped into him about his appearance and his attitude? He wasn’t going to think about this. Nothing was making him think about this. Katsuki crossed his arms and looked away.

He did like himself. He did. He set high bars for himself and always exceeded those expectations. Others set higher bars for him and he exceeded those, too. He didn’t care what anyone thought because he was the best just the way he was and… but he did care. Why did he care?

“You’re wrong,” Katsuki said eventually, but he couldn’t muster much conviction, because now he wasn’t sure. Jeanist could be right, but there was no way Katsuki was going to admit that. Ever.

Jeanist just… stared at him.

“I suppose we have to stay here tonight,” the hero mused.

“Sunset isn’t for...” some number of hours.

“I am not going to recover enough to travel any significant distance today. I cannot imagine you would like to carry me any further, and I would object to this idea on the grounds that it puts you at risk for injury, something we absolutely cannot afford.”

“Fine.” There seemed little point in arguing. Katsuki really was too tired to carry the hero anymore, and if the guy really couldn’t walk… “I’ll get a fire started.”

“Thank you very much.”

Katsuki sat beside the flames watching steam rise in fluffy tufts from the boiling water. Jeanist was sleeping with his eyes open again, lying at the very edge of “too close” to the fire. He looked absolutely terrible--pale and gaunt, hair tangled and caked with mud, remaining clothing frayed and torn in places, blood drying in spatters across his exposed arm. Did Katsuki look that bad? No. He wasn’t missing a sleeve, he’d cleaned all the blood from his leg already and his hair always looked about this messy.

A cold pit slowly settled in his stomach, although he couldn’t immediately figure out where it came from… It hit him like a hammer blow that this was all his fault. The anxiety made his head spin with vertigo. He tried to find some vestige of anger left--because he was used to feeling that and it hid everything else so well--but he was too exhausted to be angry, so the other feelings exploded out into the open and strangled him.

If Katsuki hadn’t run ahead like he did, the bear wouldn’t have surprised them like that. Jeanist got hurt because of him, protecting him. He might not like the guy and disagree with everything he said, but that didn’t mean he wanted him to get hurt and, god, it smarted that he’d needed someone to protect him in the first place. And they ended up in this stupid situation because Katsuki ran into a fight without taking stock of the combatants. He really thought he could handle it… he should have been able to handle it. No matter what he did or how hard he tried, it was just never good enough.

Chapter Text

Tsunagu’s headache had decreased from “apocalyptic” to “cataclysmic.” He was able to sit up beside the fire without an intense desire to wretch.

Bakugou had huddled in on himself, hugging his knees, eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. Had Tsunagu actually heard that? “Don’t look at me that way! I’m not gonna’ say it again.”

Well. “For what?” Tsunagu asked carefully.

“Getting you into this stupid mess,” the student growled. “You look terrible by the way.”

Tsunagu’s brain edited out the deflecting insult as easily as ripping out a bad stitch. “It is true that you probably should not have charged blindly into a fight with several powerful villains like that,” it was easy to make things worse if one attacked with no context and no plan, “but this situation is not your fault. Do you not see what you are doing here? You are blaming yourself for something awful that a villain did to you. You are not responsible for how others choose to use and abuse you.”

Bakugou growled. “Still… if I hadn’t done that...”

“I would probably be here alone,” Jeanist said simply. It wasn’t necessarily true. The only reason Tsunagu was still alive was because he was very good at not getting hit in close combat; he was so lightly built that even a single well-placed blow from a strong opponent could put him out of a fight. There was a rather slim chance that he would have allowed the teleporter to touch him had it not been necessary to tackle a semi-conscious student out of melee range. But it was still a possibility. “And I would not give myself good survival chances on my own.” He might be able to come up with a way to set a fire alone… maybe…

Bakugou bowed his head, misery and exhaustion clear in his expression and his deep sigh. Tsunagu hated seeing that, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. “Don’t suppose there’s any chance of catching any food tonight, even if something happened to wander by.”

Tsunagu flexed his fingers, stretching his powers by sending ripples through what remained of his body armor, feeling it like a second skin. “If something happened by I could catch it,” he decided.

Bakugou stared into the fire. Tsunagu occupied himself by combing fingers through his hair, brushing the dirt out. The strands were painfully greasy, and there was nothing he could do about that, but he felt better for making the effort.

“What’s the point?” Bakugou asked, far less hostile than usual, almost sounding interesting rather than derisive. “It’s not like there’s anyone around to see.”

“I like fussing with hair and clothes,” Tsunagu shrugged. “Kuugo once pointed out that my fondness for any given individual is directly proportional to the amount of time I spend trying to fix their appearance.”

““Their” appearance?” the student sniffed. “Didn’t expect you to screw up grammar like that.”

“His or her would be more grammatically acceptable, but “their” is really more appropriate in a diverse society. I work with a number of heroes who identify as neither gender or as both.”

Bakugou blinked. “I didn’t notice anyone like that.”

“Really?” Tsunagu chuckled. “You met several such individuals. Glazer, for example, is gender-fluid.” Glazer was out and quite open about their identity, so it was acceptable to share.

Bakugou tilted his head back, blinking, apparently stunned by this revelation. “It’s… I mean Number 13 is openly non-binary and I guess I know a few gay or bisexual heroes, a couple people in the top fifty but no one really high ranked. I just… kinda’ got the idea that there wasn’t much diversity in the industry.”

Tsunagu couldn’t help but laugh. The student stared at him with an expression that clearly conveyed the “what the hell” he had not yet managed to vocalize. “Really? Really? I have been out for years and somehow nobody knows. I think everyone somehow mistook it for a tabloid scandal story...”

Bakugou furrowed his brow, trying to squeeze the meaning from the previous, somewhat ambiguous statement. “Are you gay?”

“Is it not obvious? Honestly, I look like the cliché “gay friend” from an American sitcom.” Bakugou snorted, shoulders shaking ever so slightly.

“Huh.”

“What?”

“You actually have a personality.” Tsunagu stared at him, apparently stunned speechless. “And no, being a sarcastic bitch does not count as a personality trait. Any chat-bot can be annoying.”

It was rather shocking to realize that Bakugou had finally found something to say that actually hurt. Maybe it cut because the student hadn’t intended it to. Insults, swearing… those were just ploys, just reflexes, like an internet troll trying to rile up emotion. Tsunagu ignored them. This… Bakugou actually felt that way. The fiber manipulator lay back down beside the fire in silence. The student squinted and cocked his head in confusion. Bakugou clearly didn’t realize that he’d finally achieved his goal… by forgetting about trying to achieve the goal and just being genuine. It would do no good for Tsunagu to explain his reaction. It wasn’t clear whether Bakugou would take this opportunity to pull at the stray thread he’d found or whether he would not care in the least. It was also possible that he would feel bad about it--for all that he was coarse and fiery, constantly looking for a fight, it wasn’t clear that Bakugou ever meant to cause anyone real pain. In any case, the student certainly didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand. It would be easiest to just keep quiet.

Bakugou fixed his eyes on something moving in the grass. The student, grinning maniacally, crept over the ground like some huge, explosive centipede, then lunged. “Got you,” the student hissed, holding up some kind of grasshopper-like insect. He twisted its head to kill it, returning to place it on a rock near the fire.

“That was quite impressive. Are those edible?” Tsunagu asked. He had more commonly seen them in the roles of pets and good luck charms than food sources, but desperate times called for a lack of sentimentality.

“Oh yeah. As long as they’re earth colored, you can eat ‘em. I usually went home when it was dinner time, like I said, but I read somewhere that they’re actually pretty good and I wanted to see for myself.”

Bakugou returned to the hunt. Apparently there were a number of the agile insects hiding in the grass. The student was shockingly good at capturing them--not a single target escaped once Bakugou set his sights upon it. “You’re mine now, hopper,” the student snarled, lunging for another victim. The time between lunges grew longer. The student foraged steadily further afield.

By the time Bakugou had cleared out the surrounding area of its colony, he had accumulated a moderately large pile of insects. He squeezed their abdomens to clean them, ripped off the spiky legs and wings, then set them to fry on two sizable flat rocks in the fire, turning them with his fingers, fearless of the heat. After a time, the student popped one of the creatures into his mouth, nodded, and pulled them from the blaze.

Bakugou meticulously divided the fried insects into two piles, one to the left, then one to the right, careful to count the insect he had sampled as one of his. “Thirty seven,” Bakugou muttered, staring at the extra.

“You can have it,” Tsunagu said, because apparently Bakugou found the single excess insect to be a serious conundrum. The student narrowed his eyes. “You caught them. You should, of course, get the extra.” Bakugou shrugged and handed the fiber hero a handful of fried grasshoppers. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, sure.”

There was another long pause in conversation. Grasshoppers were definitely not going to make it onto anyone’s list of favorite foods, but the crunch was extremely satisfying. Finishing his share, Katsuki decided it was time to think about changing course. “So. About the bear. That means we’re really close to the coast, right? They come off the ice in the summer and stay close to the ocean. Should we like, try to change direction, head north to try to get to the ocean? It’d be a hell of a lot easier to travel on a raft, and I bet your quirk would be great for fishing. Plus there’s shipping, right? Some at least? We’d have a better chance of being able to signal for help with a fire.”

Jeanist cocked his head in consideration. “Well… there are a number of factors to evaluate here.”

“Like?”

“Like that was not a normal bear. It… was not behaving like an animal. I swear it was glaring at me.”

“Yeah. I noticed that. I mean, I understand where it was coming from...”

The hero sniffed, not quite laughing. “There is no reason to assume that such an animal would behave exactly as typical polar bears do. Even if it does, I recall a news story about sea ice reduction that reported a bear more than three hundred kilometers inland, but scientists concluded that this was actually normal behavior, not directly attributed to climate change.”

Oh. Okay. “Yeah. That’s more walking than I want to do just to get lost somewhere wetter.” A number of other factors occurred to Katsuki, too. “Plus, no guarantee that north is the closest ocean. It could have wandered from the Hudson Bay, which could be to the east or the west, right?” He tried to call up a world map in his head. He’d never paid that much attention to this part of it. If the bear was from the Hudson, if they were to the west of the bay and started heading north presuming it was the quickest way to the ocean… that would be really freakin’ bad. They’d end up even further in the middle of nowhere in an even harsher climate. “Are you sure we’re not in Alaska, Jeanist?”

“Call me Hakamata off the job. I am fairly sure that we are not in Alaska,” the hero replied. “The change in daylight when we teleported was very dramatic. My knowledge of North American time zones is minimal, but my best guess would place us somewhere in north-central Canada, so it is certainly possible this animal came from the Hudson Bay. As to signaling someone from the coast, I have no idea how much shipping traffic there is in the Arctic Ocean or the Hudson. I suspect it is minimal… there might be oil tankers?”

Bakugou sighed. “I don’t know if there would be any active oil fields ‘round here. Can’t remember. Not sure I ever knew much about this place.” And, of course, “here” had an error bar of about a thousand kilometers in any direction.

Hakamata--fine, he’d call him what he wanted to be called--nodded thoughtfully. “I also know nothing about building boats of any kind. Do you?”

“A couple neighborhood idiots and I built a raft once when I was a kid.” Bakugou couldn’t help but grin. “It worked unbelievably well given how young and clueless we were.” But traveling by boat in the arctic was higher stakes than puttering around a lake at the edge of a city in Japan. “But we all did get wet in the end… and that would be really bad given how damn cold it is all the freakin’ time.” He would also have to get Hakamata to repurpose more of his clothing for rope, and he’d feel kind of bad about that given how poorly the hero fared in the cold. “I read about how to build a canoe once. No idea how hard it is. Presumably pretty hard or people would be doing it all the time, but I bet I could figure it out.” It was beside the point. “Doesn’t matter though ‘cause it seems like it’s best to keep heading south.”

Hakamata nodded. “I agree.”

“Probably time to get to work building a shelter,” Katsuki decided, glancing at the sun. “You have the ropes I used for lashing last night?”

“Unless they fell out of the bag when you were running.” The hero paused to consider his next works. “I am quite impressed that you could carry me such a distance, by the way. I may be light, but Kevlar is not.”

“Hmph.” He couldn’t help but feel ever so slightly pleased at the compliment.

Katsuki set to work finding dead trees for the main supports, tossing them to Hakamata to have the branches stripped while the student collected live branches for insulation. To think that he was getting used to sleeping on pine needles. Fir needles? He really wished he remembered how to tell the difference.

Most of what Katsuki remembered about North American plants and fungi was really only relevant to the United States, and it was mostly just which things would kill you--anything that looks like a wild carrot might be water hemlock; hooded purple flowers might be monkshood; stay away from larkspurs; berries on an upright stalk might be bane berries; something called golden banner looked like peas; something about poison sumac… Water hemlock, monkshood, and bane berries were really, really nasty stuff--regularly killed people. Amanita mushrooms… death cap, destroying angel… grew from a sac like structure in the ground. Destroying angel was a scary one--you’d seem fine for days and then liver failure would sneak up on you.

Katsuki was back in practice now. The construction went much faster than the night before. When he nodded to his work, satisfied, he turned to find Hakamata stitching the cuts in his bicep, apparently with some thread that had once been part of a bandage. “Why didn’t you do that earlier?” Katsuki asked as the hero clenched his fingers and pulled the skin together, another few drops of blood dribbling down his arm.

“This requires concentration,” the hero said, “something I had in short supply earlier this evening. Unless very carefully controlled, thread will not pierce skin. If you are through with construction, I would like to settle down for the night.”

“Yeah, whatever. I’m going to see if I can find any more grasshoppers,” Katsuki decided. He was certainly tired, too, but still very hungry. “I’ll save you some if I do.”

“If you can stand the idea,” Hakamata said carefully, “it would probably be wise to keep a watch tonight.”

“In case the stupid bear comes back. I jumped over trees and ponds and stuff, hoping that would throw it off the scent.”

“I suspect that it is not interested in a rematch, but it could be.”

“Yeah. I’ll wake you, and I’ll keep the fire going--should keep it warmer.” He had built the A-frame a good way from the flames, of course, but since someone was going to be awake all night, it was okay to build the fire high--high enough to provide a good deal of warmth over a broad area.

“Thank you. I appreciate it,” Hakamata vanished behind a veil of pine needles.

After a few more grasshoppers met their demise, Katsuki found himself staring blankly at the fire, watching the red tongues lick across new fuel.

What would they have told class 1-A? What would they have told his parents? Somehow… it hadn’t quite hit him that he was stuck on the other side of the goddamn planet and nobody knew that except Hakamata. Did… they knew the guy was a teleporter, it was obvious, so Katsuki and Hakamata wouldn’t be presumed dead… not immediately anyway. Unless the teleporter lied and said that he dumped them in a volcano or the middle of the ocean… Ugh. Don’t think about that. Katsuki could almost hear Kirishima crying, his father sobbing and his mother screaming. Deku would probably cry a literal river--not that Katsuki cared what the nerd did, or thought but… he really, really hoped the stupid teleporter didn’t lie about what happened. Katsuki was going to beat that piece of crap villain senseless when he got back to Japan. Screw that guy.

Presuming there weren’t going to be funerals there would certainly be search parties. Jeanist was famous and important; there would be a massive search effort. Not that it made any difference. It was hard to appreciate just how overwhelmingly huge the world was until you found yourself tossed in the middle of a hopelessly deserted part of it.

Sometime in the middle of the night, fire still blazing high, Katsuki roused Hakamata and they exchanged places, the fiber hero huddling by the flames and Katsuki taking their ridiculous jean blanket. Well, building a shelter had definitely been worth it--he’d thought that maybe it had been a waste of time and just sleeping in the open by the fire like Hakamata seemed so fond of doing by day might have been a warmer choice--but the night wind was bitter, and there wasn’t a neat way to situate yourself near the fire so that every side could be warm and you could avoid constantly breathing smoke--it wasn’t clear that it was much warmer inside, but it was definitely more comfortable. He was exhausted enough by then to let bitter thoughts of home flow through his fingers. He could worry himself sick about that crap tomorrow.

Chapter Text

Tsunagu had finally rid himself of his headache and Katsuki had left him another small pile of grasshoppers. Things were looking up! He should not have thought that.

The fiber hero quickly glanced in all directions then searched with his sixth sense, too--because any time he thought something like that another shoe dropped. Not tonight, though; no bears appeared to ruin his good mood.

Katsuki woke late--the sun had long since risen and crawled a good distance up the sky. Nights were extremely short here, and Tsunagu was always bad at estimating elapsed time, but he guessed the student had slept close to eight hours.

“Hey,” said Katsuki. “Time to get going?”

Tsunagu nodded. “Allow me a moment to collect my things.” Meanwhile, the student kicked dirt over the fire, picking up a few of the coals, grinning as he juggled them briefly, before dousing the flames for good. Apparently everyone was in a good mood this morning… for whatever inexplicable reason.

There really was no reason to be in a good mood. Having burned an great deal of energy the day before, Tsunagu was exhausted by hunger. He could feel it in ever step, how every--normally instinctual--movement required effort. The student had to be in similar shape.

Katsuki had finally, finally decided not run ahead while they traveled. Sorely tempted as he was to make some snide comment about it, Tsunagu bit his tongue. Chances were if he mentioned it, the kid would go back to wasting his energy and endangering himself by leaping over trees and ponds.

“Feathers,” Tsunagu said abruptly, coming to a halt.

“Huh?” asked Katsuki.

Fur was hard to sense. Feathers and scales, keratin fibers in different arrangements, were even harder--they were just barely present, just a hint of earthy, post-storm scent and smooth surface. It had been several years after he manifested his quirk before Tsunagu realized he could sense feathers at all. “There may be a group of ptarmigans,” he thought that was what they were called, “behind those rocks.” It was a good distance. They might just be song birds… or he might be mistaken. Katsuki licked his lips then tried to pretend he hadn’t. “Stay here, please. It will be easier for me to approach alone.”

The hero treated it like an infiltration mission, stalking the birds like he would stalk criminals. He crept over the boulders, careful not to step on any sticks or send any loose rocks sliding. There were four of the ptarmigans. They were small animals, really, thin, but anything would do now. One of the speckled, brown birds slowly turned towards him but did not flee. Perhaps it had never seen a human before. Perhaps it did not recognize a predator. Tsunagu borrowed denim from his bag, adding aramid fibers from his one remaining sleeve, and slithered up to the creatures with this small extension of his body, planning out the quartet of constrictor knots he would fix about their necks.

He ambushed them flawlessly, pulling the bindings taught as they flapped and squawked. Two other birds which he had not spotted--so excellent was their camouflage--panicked and fled. That was unfortunate, but at least he had these four...

It was just a horrid feeling, being so intimately aware of the suffering he caused as he wrapped himself around their throats and squeezed. Given the complexity of the situation, Tsunagu could not see any way to get enough leverage to break their necks… there were no convenient trees or rocks immediately accessible. He could clench his fingers and crush their throats… but bludgeoning them to death with a rock or branch was far preferable to choking them, especially because a cascade of horrifying memories prevented him from summoning the conviction to do it quickly.

“I hate this, I hate this,” Tsunagu said as he found a suitable rock and set about his gory task. “When this is all over, I think I will become a vegetarian.”

“Ugh, god,” Bakugou grimaced, having approached when the sounds of a struggled faded. “Couldn’t you have just strangled them? That’s just awful...”

It did look awful, but it did not feel nearly as awful as strangulation. A single blow had dealt death to each of the birds. Tsunagu collected the carcasses, stringing them together over his shoulder. “Imagine strangling something to death with your bare hands, Bakugou,” he said, “imagine feeling a bird gasping for breath beneath your fingers, its heart pounding and lungs heaving, as you tighten your grip. Now imagine that, on several occasions in your life, you have found yourself in a situation where you had no choice but to do exactly that to another human.”

The student’s eyes flew wide. “Um… uh.. what?”

“Then you would probably prefer the rock, too.”

Tsunagu set off towards the south again. “What the hell?” Katsuki yelled. “You can’t just say shit like that and then just walk off. What the hell do you mean, Hakamata?”

“I thought that was quite evident.”

“But… heroes don’t freakin’ kill people!”

“Who told you that?”

“Number Thirteen! Eraserhead. The news. Parents. Everyone! Heroes are the good guys, they don’t...”

UA should probably rethink presenting their curriculum in such a manner. Young as first year hero students seemed, it was unfair to send them to internships and potentially work-study without warning them of the dark sides of hero work. It was cruel to leave them to learn the meaning of “me or them” on the street without ever mentioning it in the classroom. The amount of psychological damage that could do… the first time Tsunagu was nearly killed had been orders of magnitude less traumatic than the first time he killed someone, and he had not been naive. He had been well aware of the inevitability of a body count in his occupation. “Society likes to hide the dark sides of hero work, sewing patches over all the ugly holes.” The poor kid looked petrified--furious and petrified. “Do you actually want to have this conversation, Bakugou? You are still very young.” And emotionally immature.

“Hey! I… grrr! Stop being such a condescending bitch! I’m not a child.”

In retrospect, Tsunagu should not have phrased it that way. “There are plenty of adults that would much rather not discuss these subjects.” Most had the luxury not to. Those who did not work in the police and hero industries could usually go their entire lives in blissful ignorance. Bakugou, of course, would not be able to avoid this reality long, but this was probably not the best context to start such a discussion.

Bakugou growled, clenched his fists. “Why the hell would you ever… kill someone. Your quirks is perfect for capture. You shouldn’t have to hurt someone to get them to do whatever the hell you want.”

“Combat can become extremely complicated. Are you really sure you want to hear this?” Are you sure you want to make Tsunagu talk about it? He did his best to visit these memories as rarely as possible.

Bakugou cocked his head, furrowing his brow. “You’re so freakin’ weird! I don’t understand you at all! You keep talking perfect-flat and level, like it doesn’t even upset you, and yet you were willing to smash those things’ brains in rather than remind yourself of… this.”

Tsunagu just didn’t see the point in raising his voice in typical conversation. “You and I are similar in that we take the same tone regardless of how we feel about the topic under discussion. You scream. I speak levelly.”

“Hey!”

“Thank you for demonstrating this phenomenon.”

“Hmph.” Bakugou crossed his arms. “I do, though. Want to know.”

Tsunagu had talked about this with interns before, especially those like Bakugou who had very dangerous, “all or nothing” quirks. They needed to hear this sooner rather than later. That did not mean it was ever a pleasant experience to relive. “Have you ever heard of the trolley problem?”

“Why the hell are we talking about trolleys now?”

That would be a no. “The trolley problem is a famous dilemma in philosophy. You are in a control room for the trolley’s tracks looking down at a street. The trolley is inches away from a switch--currently, it will be sent to the left and will immediately strike and kill five people who are in its path. You can switch the trolley to the other track--”

“Well then of course I do that!”

“And there is one person standing on that track as well. The only action you can take is to flip the switch… or not. There is no other option. What do you do?”

“I… well… one’s better than five, isn’t it? I mean...”

“Do we measure lives with numbers?” Tsunagu asked, and he was asking; he would really like to know if that was what he should be doing. “In heroics, we often complicate,” or perhaps simplify, “the problem by saying “the five are villains and the one is an innocent civilian” or vice versa.”

Bakugou crossed his arms. “What’s the answer? What are you supposed to do?”

Tsunagu sighed. “There is no “right answer...” people have argued about the trolley problem for decades upon decades. I cannot tell you what you would or should do, but I can tell you what I did six years ago.” Bakugou nodded ever so slightly. “It had been raining for about a week straight. I was working with one of my newest sidekicks, Three Ring, as well as four individuals from another agency. There had been a string of high-profile kidnappings. Analysts compiled information about the missing individuals’ habits and determined a likely location for the kidnapper’s hideout.

“We arrived promptly and split into groups of two to search the building. Three Ring and I took the basement. We discovered that we were too late. There were no survivors.” Bakugou took a deep breath, staring at Tsunagu with wide eyes. “They looked as if their life forces had been drained out of them--they were shells, each with a horrible, black hand print across the forehead. We tried to get in contact with the other teams. There was no reply.” Tsunagu stomped on the terror. It was years ago. It was not now.

“I was able to track them by their clothes. We found them on the top floor. They were still breathing, but barely, and they all had black hand prints across their faces.” Tsunagu wasn’t sure if it was him breathing too quickly or Bakugou. Someone was breathing too quickly.

“The villain responsible stood there in the dark, grinning at us. Three Ring was young and inexperienced, but thought he knew everything.” Not unlike Bakugou. “I found myself the only one in the room without a black hand print. I had no idea how to keep this psychopath from killing my companions. Well, I had one idea, and only one.”

“But,” protested the student, “you didn’t know. Maybe he’d poisoned them and there was nothing you could do, what if…? Or maybe he had to be awake to use his quirk! You could’ve just knocked him out!”

“I, of course, tried less drastic measures first. It did nothing. You should be aware that, unless you are Midnight, there is no safe way to knock someone unconscious; a head injury that leaves someone disabled for any time not conveniently measured in seconds is liable to cause brain damage or death. All drugs used for similar purposes can cause potentially fatal reactions.”

“Still, what if nothing would have stopped it?” the student demanded.

“It appeared that he was draining their life forces to strengthen himself. It is true that, for all I knew, ending his life would merely increment the number of required body bags.” That had been an unspeakable feeling. It made him nauseous to think about it even after all these years. “He was unnaturally strong and fought me viciously. I cannot begin to explain to you the sheer horror of the entire situation. I did not return to work for more than a week.

“I have killed fewer people than any other hero in the top twenty, perhaps with the exception of Hawks who has only been working a few years.” Tsunagu was not completely sure what the younger hero’s numbers were. Probably fairly high for the amount of time he had been on the scene; the winged hero’s quirk was exceedingly dangerous--it was so easy to unintentionally cut an artery when wielding a blade. “As you mentioned, Fiber Master is perfect for capture operations. But situations still arise where there is no choice… and accidents do happen.”

“What?” snarled Bakugou derisively. “Did ya’ accidentally strangle someone to death? I don’t see how that’s possible.”

Tsunagu couldn’t begin to fathom what exactly had brought this tantrum on. Topics like this tended to play havoc with emotions. “Most recently, I bound a suspect during a raid and she had a panic attack... and then a heart attack. I was otherwise engaged and did not even notice.” The poor woman had been nothing more than a petty thief and clearly in need of serious mental health support. She had not been a danger to anyone, just desperate and frightened… Tsunagu had not bound her very tightly. He still did not understand why this had happened. She probably hadn’t even been a flight risk. He could have just told her firmly to exit the building and wait for him and she probably would have done it. And even if she had run he would have much preferred the poor woman escape than die.

“That sucks,” Bakugou said, sounding less furious and more confused.

“You have no idea,” Tsunagu sighed. But you will. It is simply a matter of time.

The travelers were both happy to let conversation die for several kilometers.

Thirteen once gave them that whole long speech about being careful with their quirks ‘cause it was just villains who killed like that… Katsuki hadn’t paid that much attention to their talk, honestly. It had all seemed obvious. Except it wasn’t obvious, and apparently it was an over simplification.

And it turned out Hakamata Tsunagu really did have a personality, and a somewhat screwed up one at that. Katsuki didn’t spend a lot of time imagining himself in another’s shoes, but that story about the black-handed villain in the dark… he could imagine that. He’d met Three Ring during internships--he substituted Kirishima into the guy’s place, Kaminaria, Ashido, Sero and Jiro taking the roles of the other extras.

Would… could Katsuki have done the same in that position? He could well understand why Jeanist had chosen to do what he did. It left a bitter taste in his mouth, but he couldn’t fault the guy. But what would Katsuki have done? Enough! He didn’t have to think about this. It wasn’t going to happen to him, after all, ‘cause that villain was dead. And Katsuki was here alone with the man that killed him.

“You’re freakin’ scary,” Katsuki realized with a start.

Hakamata raised an eyebrow. “In what way?” Katsuki spread his arms, refusing to elaborate. If it wasn’t obvious, then he couldn’t explain it. “I see. Do you understand now?”

“Understand what?”

“How important presentation is,” Hakamata said. “If I interpret your comment to indicate that it has finally occurred to you that I am an extremely dangerous individual, turn your eyes towards yourself. You are every bit as dangerous as I am, more because your quirk is liable to cause more inadvertent damage than mine. When you present yourself in as threatening a manner as you do, you become just another terrifying villain, all be it one operating with a license.”

“I am not a villain!” Katsuki snarled. If there was one thing he knew, that was it.

Hakamata sighed. “Yes, focus on one word you did not like and use anger as a shield and excuse not to think. Feel free. You are an extremely intelligent individual, Bakugou. I know that you understand exactly what I meant.” The bastard continued, “I am not suggesting that you erase your personality, but change the way you dress it. You will need the public to stand behind you in your chosen career. You will need their support, physically in combat and emotionally when the battle is over.”

“I don’t need anybody. You can’t rely on people,” Katsuki crossed his arms. “’Cause there’s no one you can count on but you.” And heroes were supposed to be the ones everybody relied on; they weren’t supposed to need anyone.

“Human beings are not islands, Bakugou. For example, how well do you think you would fare out here on your own?” Katsuki growled. “No, never mind. You will find some way to interpret that as an insult to your survival skills, which are quite impressive. Rather, if you had the opportunity to bring additional individuals to Canada with you, friends with hunting, fishing, and backpacking experience, would you not choose to do so?”

“Well, yeah, probably but that’s different!”

“How is that different?”

Katsuki bristled. “The world will chew you up if you’re not strong enough. You can’t afford to let someone help you in the real world, ‘cause that makes you weak and then you can’t take care of yourself! And people can leave or turn on you. Then what are you going to do, huh?”

Hakamata looked at him in bewilderment. “Have you suffered some horrifying betrayal by a close friend, Bakugou?”

“No.” Unless you counted Deku pretending to be quirkless... but Deku wasn't really a friend.

“Then I am mystified as to the origin of this attitude.”

Katsuki snorted. “My folks were always plenty clear that they wouldn’t back me up if I screwed up and that no one else would either, ‘specially not if I became a hero. They taught me to look after myself.” Silence. When Katsuki chanced a glance at the guy, Hakamata was glaring at him suspiciously. “The hell is your problem?”

“You, but you are really less a problem and more a puzzle.”

Katsuki had no interest in talking for the rest of the afternoon, which couldn’t be over soon enough--mostly because there would be food at the end of the travels. Yesterday’s handful of grasshoppers was nice, but it did little more than take the edge off the hunger.

As Katsuki corralled firewood, Hakamata painstakingly collected each and every one of the feathers he plucked from the four birds, bundling them together into a tiny little travel pillow with a few denim threads. Katsuki had mixed feelings about not being asked to help prepare the meat--on one hand it was a messy, gory task that he would really rather avoid--on the other hand it was insulting that Hakamata still didn’t think he could handle it.

The birds were quite small without the feathers, but two apiece would make a decent meal. They cooked much more quickly than the rabbit. Katsuki bit into a crisp wing. It was actually quite tasty…

“Don’t eat it too quickly,” Hakamata warned, “or you may make yourself nauseous.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know my limits,” Katsuki replied. “This is actually really good.”

“I suspect that both of us would find it bland and uninteresting under normal circumstances,” Hakamata mused. “But at the moment I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment.”

The birds eaten down to the marrow, Katsuki stared at the fire and found himself thinking on the same unpleasant subjects as the night before. “What do you think is going on in Japan?” Katsuki heard himself say. He hadn’t really meant to ask aloud…

“A very sensationalized news story I presume,” the fiber hero replied. “It is likely international news by now. I imagine Three Ring has reluctantly given at least a dozen interviews on behalf of my agency assuring the public that we will be found, even though he may not believe it himself. Your parents might have been interviewed, too… are they the sorts to agree to such an appearance?”

Katsuki nodded. “Yeah, they’d eat up the attention.” He wasn’t quite sure what they would think or what they would say, but his folks would be very happy to say it publicly. “I wonder what the rest of my class thinks.”

Hakamata shrugged. “Some people like to assume the best until evidence forces them to reconsider; their philosophy is that there is no sense mourning until a tragedy is certain. Some people like to assume the worst so that, should the worst be confirmed, the pain is expected and more tolerable. Some people like to assume the worst but secretly hope for the best.”

“Huh.” That pretty much summed it up, didn’t it? Kirishima was probably an “assume the best” type, Deku, too… Aizawa was probably an “assume the worst” type. He wasn’t quite sure about Ashido or Kaminari… “Which type are you?”

“I like to assume the worst but secretly hope for the best,” Hakamata replied. “So I would assume we were both dead but hope that we might reappear suddenly following a short vacation at a lovely, but very isolated, tropical paradise.”

Katsuki sniffed. “Yeah. Tropical paradise sounds really good right now… I’d love a mango milk shake...”

The hero winced. “Oh, please, do not start talking like that or we will both spend the whole evening in despair.”

“Yeah… guess so.” Though maybe a bit of despair was warranted at this point. The student’s expression must have been easy to read.

“There is no call for despair just yet,” Hakamata said. “I have been in worse situations. Though not many, I admit.”

It was another frigid night. Katsuki woke in the darkness of early morning chilled to the bone. Hakamata was shivering so violently that Katsuki could hear it, but keeping his distance as much as possible like Katsuki demanded… losing that sleeve must not be doing the guy any favors. It was kind of painful to listen to. Katsuki shuffled to the right until his shoulder brushed against the hero’s side. It was too dark to make out much of anything, but he just knew Hakamata was blinking at him in surprise. “If you ever mention this to anyone I will find a way to make your life hell,” Katsuki hissed. He’d thought about threatening murder like he usually would, but after some of yesterday’s creepy conversation sunk in… well, that was starting to seem like a really serious thing to say, maybe not something he should go around shouting all the time.

Chapter Text

Tsunagu did not comment on any of the previous night’s events. There was some saying about how the true measure of a person was what they did when no one was watching. Most people were far more likely to do good when seeking the praise of an authority figure, friend, or society and thus behaved best when there were many eyes upon them. Bakugou seemed to be the exact opposite--he was most likely to be kind, selfless, and helpful when no one was watching and if anyone commented on his good behavior he would immediately explode into a firestorm of rage and random violence. In other words, he was a fundamentally good, kind-hearted soul absolutely committed to hiding his true personality from everyone. Their conversation the day before suggested that this was because he expected others to see this kindness as weakness and take advantage of it to manipulate and injure him. And Tsunagu never would have realized this had the two of them not made this unexpected trip to nowhere. He had completely misjudged Bakugou Katsuki.

No one is born thinking that way, thinking that the world is out to smother every bit of light they have. No, one has to be taught to think that way, forcefully. Presuming Tsunagu was not reading too much into their brief conversation on the subject, it seemed Bakugou’s parents had taught him to think this way… by making it clear that the child was on his own, that they would not support him. That might explain the perfectionism--children do not have the resources to recover from all the false-steps they inevitably take as they mature and learn how to live. That was why parents existed in the first place--to provide support--but if Bakugou had always been left to his own devices, mistakes of any kind would have been disastrous, unaffordable calamities. Poor thing. Tsunagu had best hide that pity well. Bakugou would not react favorably to any show of sympathy--he would immediately translate it to an accusation of weakness.

“Was that a song bird?” Tsunagu asked, cocking his head to better catch the distant cheeping. There were definitely several small birds within earshot.

Bakugou shrugged. “Don’t hear anything.”

“Are you sure? They are rather loud...” but definitely too small and distant to chase after given that Tsunagu could not sense them clearly. The high pitched squeaks faded into silence.

The wind changed and it was suddenly warm. It was shaping up to be an unexpected, beautiful and relatively pleasant day. Of course, it was less than ten minutes after Tsunagu thought this that the entire sole of Bakugou’s shoe ripped off when the student slipped on a rock.

“Damn it,” Bakugou hissed, glowering at the traitorous garment.

“May I see, please?” Tsunagu asked. Bakugou pulled what remained of his shoe off and handed it over.

The sole was some kind of plastic, nothing Tsunagu could manipulate, and it was worn and ripped in several places. The rest of the sneaker was synthetic, too, an imitation of leather, and not in much better condition than the sole. “I can tie the sole back on with threads,” Tsunagu said, “but it is liable to fall apart completely in a few more kilometers.”

“’S fine. I can walk barefoot. Not a big deal.”

Oh but it was. “It is a big deal, Bakugou. We are surrounded by sharp rocks and sticks--if you cut your foot or twist an ankle as a result of your lack of footwear it could very well lead to one or both of us dying here.”

“Well, what do you suggest then?” snarled the student, but the look in his eyes wasn’t angry; it was frightened. There was good reason to be afraid.

“I have the remains of your shoe, a rather poorly prepared rabbit skin,” he was glad now that he had spent some time working on it as they traveled each day, “and sufficient thread. Give me thirty minutes to improvise something for you.” The skin really wasn’t ready to be used for any purpose, but there were no other options.

“This is totally ridiculous,” Bakugou declared of the--admittedly bizarre--amalgamation-footwear Tsunagu had managed to piece together. It looked like part of a monster costume, but it would last.

“Is your other shoe in as bad condition as that one?” Tsunagu asked, hoping the answer was no, because he did not have the resources to improvise another solution.

“Nah,” Bakugou shook his head. “It’s fine. I was planning to get a new pair soon…”

“Alright. Let us continue, then.”

Some time later, Bakugou stopped and narrowed his eyes. “Sounds like a waterfall,” he muttered.

Tsunagu forced Fiber Master’s constant, domineering input aside to focus completely on the auditory realm. He could hear nothing save the wind hissing through the trees. “Are you sure? I cannot hear anything.”

“It’s pretty loud I… I mean...” The student abruptly fell silent, a look of anger tainted with shame on his face.

If it weren’t for Bakugou’s strange reaction, Tsunagu likely would have thought nothing of it, but no, Bakugou could definitely hear a waterfall and Tsunagu definitely could not, and Bakugou clearly knew why that was and was somehow ashamed of it… and the student had not heard the song birds. It wasn’t that he hadn’t heard them, he couldn’t hear them. It made perfect sense. Tsunagu was something of an expert on the odd side effects quirks could have on one’s senses. “You do not hear the same auditory range as most people, do you?”

“None of you god damned business,” the student hissed, hunching his shoulders.

If he couldn’t hear the birds, he probably had trouble understanding the speech of children and high-voiced females. It might also explain why he was so loud.

As humans aged, they lost the ability to hear higher frequencies that carried more energy because the sensory apparatuses attuned to such short wavelengths were necessarily delicate. Bakugou’s quirk, if his ears were the same as quirkless standard, would have long since destroyed his hearing… so his body’s solution was to shift his audible range downwards. The apparatuses for detecting longer, low energy wavelengths were sturdier, able to withstand the constant, violent noises.

“How very useful,” Tsunagu said. Bakugou just growled, but Tsunagu could hear the question there, the implied “how can this be a good thing?” “Long wavelengths tend to carry further, as you have demonstrated with this waterfall--which I would very much like to see, by the way, please take us there--anyway, this will provide you with an early warning in many situations. I imagine you can hear a car start from several streets away--no one would ever be able to hide a getaway vehicle from you.”

The student clenched his fists. “It’s not useful! It’s broken and it’s wrong!”

In some psychology textbook there was a definition of “unhealthy attitude” and right beside it was a picture of Bakugou Katsuki. “It’s wrong?” Tsunagu fought to keep his tone even.

“It’s wrong! It’s not normal!”

“Normal?” Tsunagu raised an eyebrow. Bakugou opened his mouth and closed it, because what did “normal” mean in quirked society? “Miruko can hear too well, you know. She has to wear earplugs almost all the time and becomes overwhelmed in crowds. Is that wrong?”

“I… well, uh--”

“I find it difficult to recognize someone if they have fundamentally altered their wardrobe since the last time I encountered them and, as you so recently noted, I often sleep with my eyes open. Am I broken? Gang Orca cannot eat even a tenth of the variety of foods you or I can. Is he broken?”

“It’s… it’s different!”

“How is it different, Bakugou?” Tsunagu pressed.

“They’re not me! They’re--” the student waved his hands. “I don’t want to talk about it!”

“But you are going to talk about it anyway!” Tsunagu raised his voice to a roar and the student reeled back in surprise. One of the perks of being soft-spoken was people taking notice when you screamed. “So help me god I will not let you walk around thinking such twisted, damaging things!”

They had stopped travel, and now the two stared at each other across a fallen tree trunk. “It’s the truth!” Bakugou hissed, “it’s a weakness. It’s exploitable. I hate that you know. I hate that anyone knows!”

“Like most things,” Tsunagu said, voice perfectly level again, “it is both a strength and a weakness, but that duality is irrelevant to this conversation. You were born as you are and there is nothing wrong with that. One’s quirk or lack there of is a fundamental part of someone. When you say that there is something broken about your quirk what you are really saying is that you are a broken person. This is not the case. You would not tell Miruko that she is broken because of how her abilities affect her hearing; you may find me to be the most irritating creature in the multiverse, but you would not tell me that I am broken because of how my quirk affects my senses. You recognize that this is untrue and unacceptable to say to me--it is equally unacceptable to say such things to yourself. You deserve the same consideration you give to others.”

“I do not!”

Tsunagu really hadn’t been expecting that. “Bakugou… are you… you didn’t really mean to say that did you? You were just reflexively disagreeing with me as usual?”

“No!” That was ambiguous. Tsunagu sighed and waited. “That’s how you’re supposed to be and this is not how I’m supposed to be. My quirk isn’t supposed to screw me up like this! It’s supposed to be perfect!”

Oh. Oh dear.

Katsuki glared at Hakamata. Somehow… what the hell was this guy’s problem? It was like they lived on separate planets. Jeanist just didn’t get it. The hero spoke very softly, a sharp contrast to the screaming he had done only minutes earlier. “If you try to go through your life with that attitude it will destroy you inside and out.”

“You worry about you. I’ll be fine,” Katsuki growled.

“Worrying about people is literally in my job description,” Hakamata said in that same painfully soft voice. “I have seen heroes with that attitude plenty of times, those that believe they must know everything, must be perfect, must never need, ask for, or receive help from anyone. Endeavour is a less extreme example. No one who works with Endeavour likes him. He shares no information. He treats everyone around him like a disposable napkin. He is disrespectful and cruel.”

Katsuki blinked. Wait. Really? “But he’s popular...”

“In comparison to the rest of the top ten he is actually widely disliked. You may believe that you do not care what the public or your coworkers think, but you will find going home day after day amidst the weight of thousands upon thousands of angry and suspicious stares to be soul crushing.”

So what? No, he wouldn’t like that, but Endeavour didn’t seem any worse for the way he lived. Katsuki was certainly just as tough. “If you’re right, and I still don’t think you are, I’ll deal with it.”

Hakamata crossed his arms. “You will not be able to reach your full potential if you continue to demand perfection and complete independence from yourself in every part of your life.” The fiber hero sighed. “This is probably above my pay grade, though. No one has ever accused me of being a psychotherapist, and, clearly, people have been beating these ideas into your skull for your entire life. But these are not your ideas. You are too fundamentally kind to have invented such a cruel philosophy.”

Kind… him? Cruel… philosophy? What was Hakamata even trying to say to him? That didn’t make any sense… did it? “The hell are you saying?”

“It took me a very long time to realize this,” the pro continued, “but one’s teachers and parents are not always correct. I have no doubt that they meant well, but the philosophy that has been instilled in you causes you harm.”

There was no call for bringing his folks into this. Katsuki bristled at the insult to his family. “What do you know?”

“About your family life? Only what you have told me and what I have inferred from our conversations. Please, please don’t do this to yourself, Bakugou,” Hakamata sighed. “You have the potential to be legendary, but you are allowing others to smother you and hold you back. At least think about why you believe these things, please? I don’t want to see you end up like Crater or Cross-Wire.”

“Hmph.” Katsuki didn’t know who those people were and he did not care.

The two gazed at each other for another two minutes before Hakamata sighed and turned away, giving Katsuki the victory in the unofficial staring contest. “About that waterfall? The one that started all of this? Can you please take us there?”

“Sure,” Katsuki muttered, setting off in the proper direction. The low roar echoed through the air, a clear beacon.

Travel in this hellish place always took way longer than it should. “I hate these trees,” Katsuki hissed, freeing his hair from yet another branch. “I hate them so much!”

“Krumholtz,” Hakamata said.

“Huh?”

“They are called krumholtz. And you are correct, they are terrible.”

“You know why I want to be perfect?” said Katsuki suddenly. He wasn’t sure exactly why he had chosen to begin their stupid conversation anew.

“Because you are worried that you will be used, manipulated, and left to fend for yourself against insurmountable odds if you show the slightest hint of weakness?”

“So no one ever has any damn excuse to chain me to a podium again, that’s why.” Katsuki retorted bitterly. “You see? That’s how people are. That’s how they treat me if I give them an inch. I should’ve hit them harder and left sooner, then they wouldn’t have had the chance!” He shook with rage at the thought. Even now, his blood boiled with the humiliation.

“What did you do--no. Allow me a moment.” Hakamata paused, apparently to collect his thoughts. “When I saw that portion of the UA Sports Festival,” he began carefully, “I presumed that you had violently attacked teachers and students following the bout and also demanded to be given your medal at the threat of a lawsuit--UA is, in some sense, legally obligated to provide medals to the victors live on television. Is that what happened?”

“What? Hell no! I didn’t want that damn medal,” he hadn’t earned it. “Icy hot didn’t give me a real fight. And I didn’t… okay I might have started something with a couple people afterwards, ‘specially Midnight when I woke up, might’ve said I was going to make the coward give me a real fight...” his memory was a bit hazy--Midnight’s quirk tended to do that to you. He wasn’t completely sure what he’d said. “But I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, or get the stupid medal, I was trying to fucking leave. That was all! Why the hell would you think I demanded the medal? Thought I made it clear I didn’t want the thing on the podium.”

“Because,” said Hakamata carefully, “those were the only circumstances which could, within any suspension of disbelief, potentially warrant chaining a student up on live television, and I had sufficient trust in UA to presume that they were handling these affairs… appropriately.”

Katsuki hunched his shoulders, wrapping his arms around his chest. Everyone was like this to him. Everyone always treated him like a dangerous animal. No one… ever gave him the benefit of the doubt. He rubbed his wrists, feeling the cold echo of the chains. “Then why did they?” It was disgusting to hear that miserable, plaintive note in his voice. “You say there’s nothing wrong with me, but clearly there is something wrong with me! Why else would they do that?” He hated himself for saying that. He hated himself for feeling this way. He was supposed to be the best; but he wasn’t… and that was unacceptable.

Hakamata sighed. “Are you aware of Nedzu’s history, Bakugou?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Quite a bit, just as your history has everything to do with your decisions. Although this is not common knowledge, it is not a secret and I see no reason not to share it with you now. Nedzu was kidnapped at a very young age, experimented on and tortured mercilessly by “scientists” for years, perhaps decades. I doubt even Nedzu himself knows how long he was kept in captivity.” Holy shit. “I suspect that, due to how his past treatment has warped his perspective, he legitimately did not understand that restraining you in such a way was a wholly inappropriate reaction to your transgressions and utterly unacceptable. That does not,” Hakamata held up a hand before Katsuki could get a word in edgewise, “excuse what was done to you. If someone does something terrible without the capability to understand that what they are doing is wrong, this excuses the person but it does not excuse the act. And those teachers and officials who allowed this to be done to you have no such excuse. Some of them may well have made the same assumptions about your behaviour as I did, but certainly Midnight, who you have implied witnessed everything prior to the ceremony, and All Might, who spoke with you on the stage as he gave you your medal, have not even my flimsy excuse to hide behind. I will be having words with them when we get back to Japan.”

“You… you can’t yell at All Might!” Katsuki protested as the meaning of the last sentence became clear.

“Why not?”

“Because… because he’s All Might! And it’s not worth yelling at him over me!”

Hakamata stared him dead in the eye. “You are absolutely worth yelling at All Might.”

Katsuki, busy meeting the hero’s death-stare, walked into a tree. “God damn it!”

Continuing as if the tree had never interrupted them, Hakamata finished, “and please accept my apology for making assumptions about your character based on a single television appearance. That was beneath me. When I first saw you, I saw a beast that needed to be tamed lest he doom himself or others. That is not what you are. There is a difference between being vicious and reacting understandably to mistreatment. You are decidedly the latter. I am sorry that you were treated in such a way and I am sorry that I sat idly by and allowed it to happen.”

“Yeah, sure,” Katsuki muttered, plucking branches from his hair. The guy meant it, didn’t he? Jeanist spent literally the entire internship tearing him down, and now he was saying that Katsuki wasn’t “bad” and didn’t deserve any of that and… should Katsuki believe him? Believe someone who pulled a 180 like that?

They arrived at the fall maybe a quarter hour later. White water cascaded down into a deep, frothy pool. It was not a very large waterfall--this was a creek, not a river, but it was plenty impressive and the trees nearby seemed stronger and healthier for the change in environment. It was loud enough at this distance that even Hakamata resorted to shouting. “Do you think there would be fish in this creek?”

“I don’t know!” Katsuki yelled back. “I’d think something this shallow would freeze solid in the winter! You can sense feathers, so can’t you sense scales?”

“Not well! They are sort of… it is hard to explain!”

Katsuki jumped down to an algae covered rock beside the pool and gazed into the crystal-clear water then ran his fingers through the cool stream. He didn’t see any signs of movement. Returning to Hakamata, who still studied the water, the student asked, “should we follow this creek now? People like to build houses and stuff by rivers!”

“It seems to be headed more or less south for the moment, so that seems the best course of action!”

The pair left the falls behind, trying to keep the running water in sight as they picked their path. The trees were definitely taller and stronger--it was hard to say exactly when that change had occurred--but no less annoying. It was impossible to really follow the river. Travel along the bank would be impossible--too many stupid, pointy branches grabbing at hair and clothes.

They called an end to the day’s travel after perhaps another hour. There was nothing to eat, again, but at least Katsuki hadn’t had to run from any crazy bears, so that was something. He was getting used to the constant ache in his stomach.

“Your hair has so many pine needles in it you look like Kamui Woods,” said Hakamata as the two of them rested beside the fire.

Katsuki snorted. His lips quirked into a half smile. Why? It wasn’t very funny. “I really hate these trees. They just suck… so much.”

“Come here and let me fix your hair for you,” Hakamata beckoned. “If you like, that is.”

Katsuki had not appreciated the hair gel incidents at the Genius Office, but presumably Hakamata didn’t have any of the weird stuff now. “I don’t much like being touched,” Katsuki said, crossing his arms.

“Perfectly understandable.”

“But I also don’t really like having sticks in my hair...” and it would be hard to find all of them himself. Katsuki settled down beside the pro and watched the fire as Hakamata’s long fingers combed through his hair, catching every needle, stick, or stray piece of bark. Katsuki had kind of expected it to hurt; his mother never babied him when she was doing his hair. It was never a pleasant experience. Hakamata, though, was terribly gentle. It was actually pretty nice, not that he’d ever admit it.

“So fluffy,” Hakamata muttered.

“Do you have a problem with fluffy hair? That what all the hair gel was about?”

“No. I like your fluffy hair.”

“So what was with the weird-ass style during internships?”

“If you had stayed another week I would have done something else with it. As I said before, I just like fiddling with hair and clothes.”

Sap crackled violently as the flames ate up another log. “Did you mean it?” Katsuki asked at last. “When you said that you thought...” the hero had said a lot of things, but there was one that mattered the most, “when you said that you were wrong? That I’m not a beast and there’s nothing wrong with me?”

“Yes,” Hakamata replied forcefully. “I mean what I have said, every word. You deserve to be accepted for who you are by others and by yourself.”

“But you meant it when you said I need to not present myself the way I do.”

“Yes. From what I have seen and heard from you in these past days, you are a kind, pure-hearted and self-sacrificing individual trying desperately to hide your character from the world in order to protect it. You should not have to hide it, Bakugou.” Katsuki wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. No one had ever accused him of being “kind,” “pure hearted,” or “self-sacrificing” before. No one had ever accused him of being a “nice person” of any kind before, except maybe Deku back when they were five… before Katsuki got his quirk and Deku didn’t. Hakamata pulled one last pine needle from the student’s hair. “There we are.

“Heroes cannot believe everything we read about ourselves. According to last month’s tabloid, I was seen buying party drugs at a rave in New York six weeks ago. I was in Japan six weeks ago and everyone knows it. Heroes cannot believe everything we hear about ourselves, either. According to a young woman I met at the convenience store the week before internships, I am retiring next year to pursue a career in stock trading.” Katsuki snorted. He could not imagine… maybe he could imagine Hakamata hanging out in the stock exchange all day shouting… still completely dressed in denim, of course, even though everyone else was in a suit. “Do not believe everything that you have been told about yourself, either, Bakugou.”

“You’ve been telling me all kinds of things about myself,” Katsuki pointed out snidely.

“Yes, but you should believe me because I am correct and you know it.”

Chapter Text

Tsunagu awoke to the cold approach of impending death. He’d felt this way before, plenty of times--the most notable occasion when he had taken an unexpected swim and then someone had dropped a significant chunk of a bridge on him. Why did he feel this way now…? A haunting choir of inhuman notes drifted through the night.

“I have always loved wolves,” Tsunagu said, feeling Bakugou stir to wakefulness beside him. “But I hope these will keep their distance.”

“How far away are they?” the student asked as another round of the strange singing twisted through the night.

Tsunagu pushed his senses to the limit, feeling a thousand nearby conifers--they were mintier near the stream--millions of blades of grasses--a barrage of information that could so easily become overwhelming if he allowed himself to narrow his focus too sharply. He let the information drift through him like a breeze. “Out of my range,” Tsunagu replied as his search came up empty.

Bakugou nudged some of the entrance insulation aside and poked his nose out into the night. The sheer number of stars astounded as always… and there was an aurora, not just hints of light in the sky as they had both seen before, a real aurora, arcing and green and wild like a dragon coiling across the heavens. “Wow,” Tsunagu heard himself say.

“Shhhh...” Bakugou whispered.

Tsunagu fell silent. He understood the request. There was something mystical about this night, as if all the mysteries of the universe might reveal themselves if one were calm enough, patient enough, willing to listen. The wolf pack continued its serenade. The dragon in the sky continued its dance.

“They’re coming closer,” Tsunagu said, at last shattering the glass atmosphere. He could not make out how many of the animals there were yet, but the pack had drifted into his range.

“How far…?”

“Too close,” Tsunagu shook his head, even though it was much too dark for the student to see that. “There are eight of them.” Their fur was nothing like that of the polar bear, but rather luminescent, acidic, sharp and cold, like polished steel dipped in lemon juice. “And they taste terrible.”

“Taste?”

“Fiber Master is a complicated quirk, okay?”

The pack did not circle them, nor did any of the animals approach too closely, they merely waited, watching. “I think I see one,” whispered Bakugou. Perhaps he caught sight of a silhouette slipping between the trees. Tsunagu paid no attention to the visual realm, but knew, none the less, exactly where all the potential assailants stood.

“Please, for the love of all that is pure and sacred, do not make me fight wolves. I love wolves,” Tsunagu muttered.

“I’m not making you do anything…?” Bakugou asked, confused.

“I was speaking to the cruel and indifferent universe, not to you.”

A stick cracked somewhere in the anonymous blackness. “There’s something wrong with you,” Bakugou decided.

“What a shocking revelation.” Tsunagu had considered retorting with “pot, meet kettle,” but he had just given the child a long speech about how there wasn’t anything wrong with him, and Tsunagu was through telling Bakugou to stop being rude, or any variation on that theme. He would not get anywhere with that approach--their recent conversations had elucidated that much. No, if Tsunagu wanted to help the poor thing, Bakugou would have to be convinced that he was a good person, that there was nothing wrong with him, and chastizing the child for bad behavior would not achieve that.

The wolves ventured closer, but still did not try to pen them in… please let them just be curious. Seconds passed like hours. And, for once, the universe took pity on him. “They’re leaving,” Tsunagu whispered as the pack set off at a trot to the west.

“You sure?”

Tsunagu nodded. Oh, right, it was too dark to see and Bakugou wouldn’t be able to feel the motion the way Tusnagu could. He would have to answer verbally. “They could come back, but they are definitely leaving at the moment.”

“That’s a relief…” The pack disappeared, vanishing into the anonymous wilderness beyond the limit of Tsunagu’s sixth sense. “Honestly, that was really freakin’ cool. Now that they decided not to try to kill us and all...” Bakugou replaced the insulating branches; the aurora disappearing behind a thick layer of needles.

“That was… magical.” Tsunagu agreed. “And the universe has decided to hear my pleas… though I would not be surprised if it were to start pouring tomorrow as revenge for our good fortune.”

Bakugou settled back down to sleep. The student had, apparently, accepted that there was no shame in huddling for warmth and Tsunagu greatly appreciated the close proximity of the human-shaped space heater. The student seemed to fare significantly better in the cold than quirkless standard--it could be a quirk side effect of some kind, or maybe Bakugou was just naturally a cold weather person. Or maybe Tsunagu just fared so badly that “average resistance to cold” seemed to be “superhuman resistance to cold” from his perspective. “There is definitely something wrong with you,” Bakugou muttered, sounding as if he were nearly asleep already. “I think people are out to get me but you think the whole freakin' universe is out to get you.”

“How many times have you been the victim of an attempted robbery at gunpoint courtesy of a drunk woman with a squirrel mutation while standing in line in civilian clothes trying to renew your driving license?”

“Uh… none… have you…?”

“Twice. That may not seem like much, but still, it is inconceivable that it has happened more than once.”

It began like any other morning--perhaps cloudier than usual--and then it started pouring. “I called it,” Tsunagu sighed as he ducked into the meager shelter provided by a thick, tall conifer.

Bakugou growled, flicking water droplets off his shoulders as the two of them crouched beneath the low branches. The rain still seeped through--Tsunagu’s hair was already soaked. Bakugou seemed more annoyed than anything else… he really did seem to fare well in the cold…

“You’re shivering,” Bakugou pointed out.

“Yes. Did you happen to see any better shelter… anywhere?”

“There was a boulder with an overhang a ways back…”

Tsunagu had not noticed this boulder, but he often missed things that were obvious to sight but not to Fiber Master. “Would it provide enough shelter to build a fire?”

“I think so, but we’d get soaked running back there.”

“I am already soaked,” Tsunagu pointed out. “I have no idea how long this rain is going to last, but I will need to dry off beside a fire before we start walking again regardless of whether we backtrack to this overhang or not.”

The walk was intolerably long. The wind and the rain together cut straight through any meager protection either traveler had, slicing to the bone. Where was this stupid rock? Tsunagu was freezing, could barely feel his fingers. His toes were fine--always invest in good boots--here it was. The direction of the wind and the size of the overhang provided sufficient shelter for a fire. The lee even protected a sizable pile of fuel from the rain, keeping it dry.

Tsunagu ran to the overhang as soon as it came into view, huddling against the stone. The rock face seemed very warm in comparison to the storm he had escaped.

Bakugou arrived and promptly set to building a fire. Tsunagu tried to help him at first, but found his fingers too clumsy and numb to perform any task at all and, despite his best efforts, the fiber hero at last curled up into a useless, shivering heap.

The fire crackled to life. Tsunagu edged towards it. He hadn’t really been… afraid when it started raining. It hadn’t occurred to him just how chilled he would become or how quickly numbness would set in. He didn’t think he actually had hypothermia… maybe he did. What was that supposed to feel like? So cold that one felt warm?

“Hey!” Bakugou slapped Tsunagu upside the head. “Snap out of it and get your soaked clothes off before you freeze to death, idiot!”

Tsunagu blinked open his eyes--the student had already stripped off all but undergarments. Tsunagu was not feeling flexible enough to remove his clothes in the conventional manner, so he carefully unstitched the seams--which took much longer than usual with his clumsy fingers--and squirmed out of them. He kept his own undergarments and face mask of course. “You’re not supposed to treat hypothermia with dry heat,” Bakugou muttered as the fiber hero crept closer to the flames.

“I do not think I actually have hypothermia,” Tsunagu replied, “and unless you want to cuddle me until I warm up, there are no other options.”

“You’re acting like you do. You’re mumbling like Deku and being super clumsy.” Bakugou reached out and grabbed Tsunagu’s wrist; the fiber hero fought not to flinch. He preferred to cover his form completely with fabric at all times, feeling quite exposed otherwise, and, save for the occasional ungloved handshake, only a handful of people had ever touched his actual skin. “You have a thready pulse to match,” the student sounded quite concerned.

Maybe Tsunagu did have hypothermia. “My pulse is always somewhat thready, though.” He was mumbling, wasn’t he? But that was mostly because his cheeks were frozen. That always made it difficult to speak clearly. He was not taking his mask off, though, even though it might have been a good idea.

“Do not pass out,” Bakugou said sharply, “because if you do I will have to… cuddle you,” the student grimaced, “and I really don’t wanna’ do that.”

“Seconded,” Tsunagu agreed, “I dislike people touching my actual skin.”

“Wha’…? But you don’t mind being touched.”

“The clothes I wear are a second skin to me… only a handful of people have ever touched my actual skin given how little of it I show and I find it… strange. It is just… so unusual. I avoid it.”

Bakugou nodded slowly. “I guess I sort of get that.”

It continued to pour only a meter to the left. Bakugou slowly fed larger portions of wet wood to the flames sending great plumes of smoke spiraling into the sky. Tsunagu’s shivering faded ever so slowly. “Who is Deku, by the way?” the fiber hero asked. “Is that a nickname?” Tsunagu could not imagine someone intentionally naming a child that. It would be cruel.

Bakugou, who did not even look cold anymore--lucky--blinked and glanced in either direction as if not sure of what to say. “He was… my friend when I was little… his real name is Midoriya Izuku.”

“Why do you call him Deku?” Tsunagu asked.

Bakugou fidgeted, looking at the ground… ashamed? “To hurt him,” the student said in a blunt monotone.

There was no one else in existence capable of repeatedly rendering Tsunagu speechless like this.

“Just… to hurt him? Really?” Hakamata asked in that insufferable, didactic tone that conveyed “I do not believe you” as clearly as if the hero had tattooed it on his forehead.

“Yes,” Katsuki hissed.

“So you are a sadist, Bakugou Katsuki? You enjoy hurting people?” For someone who had been damn near--if not actually--hypothermic minutes ago he was awfully sure-spoken now.

No. Katsuki… didn’t like seeing people in pain, but then why would he treat Izuku the way he did? He must be a sadist. Everyone thought he was. Maybe he should own up to it? But Katsuki really didn’t want to think of himself that way. “No? Izuku just makes me so angry...” but he knew he was hurting his old friend and he knew it was wrong and… just being angry didn’t really explain or excuse anything. Katsuki was almost always angry… “Yes.”

“Are you sure about that? You seemed awfully concerned about me both during the bear incident and now. A typical sadist would have… laughed I suppose, tormented me. Have you just not got around to digging your teeth in yet, Bakugou?”

“I...” Katsuki crossed his arms. He wasn’t going to do anything like that and they both knew it. “I… have treated Deku like dirt… for years. I have hit him and burned him and stolen his things and called him names and encouraged other people to slam him in lockers and all that cliché teenage bullying shit that you get in the movies. You see now?”

Hakamata cocked his head and narrowed his eyes, considering things, perhaps. Katsuki had expected a lecture, some disappointment, some more shouting, maybe a: “I was wrong about everything I said before--you’re a horrible person.” That was not what he got. “Why are you telling me this, Bakugou?” the fiber hero asked at last.

“Because you’re wrong,” Katsuki hissed. “You went on about how I’m a good person, but you don’t know me, and you’re wrong.” And Katsuki couldn’t stand hearing that kind of… praise. Not when he didn’t deserve it. Not when he deserved the exact opposite. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”

The hero narrowed his eyes even further. “You cannot stand that you got away with it.” Katsuki blinked… and the affirmation must have showed on his face. “You know that what you did was wrong and you cannot abide by the fact that you never faced any consequences for your transgressions. You want me to punish you somehow.”

“You’re wrong,” Katsuki repeated, refusing to acknowledge that Hakamata was dead-on the money, had somehow read him like a book, ferreted out confused feelings Katsuki didn’t even know he had. “I’m not nice. No one’s ever mistaken me for nice. All those things you’ve said to me, they’re wrong.” Don’t waste your time on a lost cause.

“You really do want a punishment, don’t you? Well, if you like I can assign you to write, “I was unacceptably cruel to Midoriya Izuku. I am very sorry and will not behave this way ever again,” five hundred times when we get back to civilization, but I am not going to yell at you or hit you as you so desperately desire.” Katsuki spluttered, not quite sure what to think of that. That wasn’t the kind of punishment he was accustomed to… was Hakamata even serious? “Now, tell me, do you really want to win this argument, Bakugou? Do you want to convince me that you are a monster unworthy of appreciation, respect, or love?” Katsuki’s mouth hung open for a moment before he closed it with a snap. Of course he wanted to win the argument. Well, maybe? What else could he want…? “Or do you want to lose? Are you hoping that I will convince you that you are incorrect, that despite any wrongdoings, you are a good person at heart? I think this option more likely… although, perhaps it is the former. These are all relative terms, of course, but those who we can loosely classify as “bad” people have a much easier time of it than those we can loosely classify as “good” people. It is easy to say to yourself, “I am a bad person who has done bad things and I care nothing for my sins” but much harder to say to yourself, “I am a good person who has done bad things and I care and desperately wish to atone for my sins.”” Katsuki squeezed his eyes shut. These sorts of conversations really made his head hurt. “As a self-proclaimed good person who has done some very, very bad things,” Hakamata said almost too softly to be heard above the crackle of the flames, “I know how tenaciously regret can torment you. It is always there… every day it lurks in the background. I understand the appeal of convincing oneself that one simply does not care. But you are not the sort to take the easy way out, to back down from a challenge, are you?”

“I told Deku to jump off the roof,” Katsuki blurted before he could fall into the trap Hakamata had set with that last sentence. Katsuki really wasn’t sure now whether he wanted to win or lose the argument, but he still wanted to argue, and this seemed the next logical thing to bring up.

Hakamata stopped gazing into the fire and turned to begin another of their weird staring contests. “I tied twin brothers together and flung them off a skyscraper.” Katsuki lost the staring contest. He knew, they’d already talked about this, but it was so damn jarring to imagine this man, who really was like a condescending house cat in every imaginable way, sending someone to a morgue. It was like… imagining Iida stabbing someone to death with a kitchen knife, he just couldn’t wrap his head around it. “I am sorry. I am not just sorry that I had to do that. I am sorry that I did that and, as you will someday learn, those are not at all the same thing. The latter cuts far more deeply and haunts far more persistently. Are you sorry, Bakugou, for telling your childhood friend to end his life?”

“I don’t know,” Katsuki decided, crossing his arms. He did know, just couldn’t make himself say it, couldn’t bring himself to lose. It was starting to seem like he had put himself in a position where he was gonna’ lose regardless of who won the argument.

Hakamata never stopped chasing something once he caught a whiff of a trail and somehow Katsuki was losing the ability to keep his mouth shut. “If Midoriya had done as you said, if your childhood friend had taken his own life,” asked the hero, “would that have been what you wanted? Did you wish to see your classmate’s body consigned to the earth?” Katsuki hunched his shoulders and bit his lip. “To hear shallow, empty words amidst a small crowd of mourners, knowing you were the straw that broke the camel’s back?” Katsuki was shaking, and not from the cold. “Did you wish to listen to his family sob brokenly, knowing you brought those tears?”

He couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t stand imagining. “No! No, of course I didn’t want that!” Katsuki screamed.

“So you are sorry.”

“Of course I’m fucking sorry! But I’m still exactly like that! If time reversed and I was back on that day I’d still say it!” It was kinda’ weird to be screaming at someone when both of them were wearing undergarments and huddling around a smoky fire while it poured a few feet away. Whatever.

“Do you want to know why?”

“Uh… huh?” He had expected just “why” there.

“Do you want to know why you would still say that? Even though you know it is wrong, even though you are sorry for saying it once.”

Katsuki stared out into the haze of spattering rain. He… felt he would still tell Deku to kill himself, but Hakamata was right in assuming that Katsuki didn’t understand why this was. “Yeah, I wanna’ know.”

“Then tell me.”

“But… but I don’t know! I just asked you that damn question ‘cause I don’t get it!”

The fiber hero shrugged. “You know these answers. You just need to put them into words in order to understand them. So, if you want to know, tell me.”

“That sounds stupid,” Katsuki pointed out.

“Perhaps, but it is true.”

Katsuki was usually better at doing than talking and better at talking than thinking… at least when it came to this sort of crap. But he did want to know. “Because he was quirkless.” And now Deku was something else, but he had been quirkless then. “And I hate him for it.” There. That explained something at least.

“You hate him for a genetic trait he has no control over?”

“Yeah. I do. I hate him for being weak and… squishy.” And nice. Despite everything done to him, despite everyone constantly throwing every effort back in his face… Deku never stopped being the same sweet little kid who offered to pull Katsuki out of the river, the same sweet little kid who made him look like a pansy, made Katsuki look like he needed help.

“You could just as easily have been born quirkless as your compatriot. It is a random, recessive genetic trait. You might as well hate someone for having green eyes.” Hakamata blinked his emerald irises at Katsuki innocently.

“I know that! I’m not an idiot. Everyone knows that!”

“Then why do you hate him for it?”

“Because… because...” Katsuki threw up his arms in frustration.

“Oh… I see.”

“What? I don’t get it so why should you get it? You told me to tell you!”

“I did tell you to tell me, but I think I understand now. I “get it,” as you say, because you do not hide your expressions very well, because I am good at reading people, and because I have been paying attention to the larger picture.” Hakamata nodded slowly. “One comes to hate what one often fears.”

“Huh…? I’m not afraid of anyone! And why the hell would I be afraid of a quirkless nobody? He couldn’t do anything to me!”

“Because it could have been you.” Katsuki felt the blood drain from his face. He thought that was just a figure of speech, but apparently you could really feel it. If Katsuki had been born quirkless, if he had rolled the unlucky number instead of Deku… what even would have happened to him? He wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows all the time like Deku, Katsuki’s parents… would they have even kept him? Deku’s dad took off because of Izuku not having a quirk… and Katsuki couldn’t just shrug off the weight of the world as his old friend somehow could--what would Katsuki be like now? “Do you think, given how you view the world to run exclusively on opportunistic cruelty, given how no one has ever offered you comfort or support without demanding greatness and favor in return, that you would have been abandoned if you had been born quirkless in his stead? Do you think that any imperfection unveiled now might see you suffer a similar fate? Did you think about that every time you saw him?”

“Yes,” Katsuki said hoarsely. Somehow it didn’t occur to him to lie or scowl or refuse to answer. Here he was, stripped of his soaked clothes, his physical defenses, and now all the mental armor that hid his greatest fear… and he was unable to call up even a flicker of anger to hide himself. “Yes. Every time.” And now, he looked at Deku and saw a liar who had faked being quirkless, who had tricked him into feeling this way for years on end… and that was beyond unforgivable.

The rain had not lightened in the slightest. Sheets of water cascaded down around the overhang, wind whipping the droplets into wild spirals. “I really doubt that your family would have abandoned you if you had not been born with a powerful quirk,” Hakamata said. “And if they had, I would have been happy to take you off their ungrateful, unworthy hands.”

Katsuki blinked. “I… what?”

“I think I have made myself clear. You would--you will--always be welcome with me. No matter what.”

“Why… but… I wouldn’t be worth anything to you without a quirk,” Katsuki muttered.

Hakamata sighed. “Life is more than exchanging favors, Bakugou. I would take you in, regardless of the circumstances, because I care about you, not because of anything you could do for me.”

Oh. That didn’t make any sense, but it was somehow really nice to hear, that he was worth something not because he was something in particular but just because he was. “You actually like me,” Katsuki realized with a start. “Even after I just told you the worst thing I ever did, still… you like… actually care about me.”

Hakamata made a very interesting noise, something like a squeak. “The astonishment in your voice breaks my heart.”

Chapter Text

Society was vicious. Bakugou was not entirely wrong about that. Tsunagu had good reasons for hiding his face, for wearing a public persona so flamboyant no one ever felt the need to dig deeply through his personal affairs, or could even tell his personal affairs from his public affairs. There was good reason to be… wary of the world at large. But that didn’t mean it was right for society to be that way, and it didn’t mean that every individual person was like that. No indeed. If everyone behaved like the average, like a mob, incapable of empathy… life would not be worth living. People, relationships, those were the threads that wove a life. If Tsunagu had to spend the rest of his days alone, isolated in the wild, even if it were in some kind of tropical paradise rather than a frigid forest… he would rather take his leave of the world than face a lifetime of isolation without the hope of connection with another person.

The tears of joy when loved ones reunited after a disaster, the atmosphere of collective relief when a would-be murderer was brought down without any loss of life, the antics of sidekicks overestimating their sneakiness as they tried to hide the Genius Office betting pools from him, the camaraderie and excitement the night a new clothing line launched, the laughter of friends celebrating over dinner after a hard but successful day on the frontlines… those were the things that motivated Tsunagu to drag himself out of bed every morning… and by bed he meant “enormous and ever expanding nest of interesting fabrics.”

Bakugou did not have any--did not even believe in many--of the things that were the essence of life. How did the poor kid manage to get up on time every morning? Tsunagu would not be able to survive like that…

All that fear and anger with no one to turn to, no one to confide in, no trusted friends or family… the child lashed out at a scapegoat. Midoriya Izuku… Tsunagu had schooled his expression well during their discussion. He had not allowed any of his disappointment, shock or disgust to show through, because Bakugou was looking for that, looking for the slightest hint of reproach. The child would pounce on it and shout, “see? You were wrong! I am a bad person!” and then likely use that as an excuse to continue behaving viciously towards his colleagues. The child knew what he did was wrong. He did not need Tsunagu to reprimand him for it. Rather, he needed Tsunagu to encourage him to turn over a new leaf--a dark past need not mandate a dark future.

The wind changed and Tsunagu was roughly awakened from his half-conscious musings when a cold spray of rain splattered across his chest. “Grrr,” he mumbled, blinking his eyes open. Bakugou raised an eyebrow. “I think I have been spending too much time with you. Your mannerisms are rubbing off on me,” Tsunagu told the student as another wave of rain buffeted them, the fire hissing in displeasure. “I really wish my clothes were dry.” Any layer of protection would be appreciated. Bakugou had long since dressed again, water evaporating from his mud-spattered uniform rapidly.

“Well, we might be able to use even wet fabric like curtains. To break the wind?” Bakugou suggested.

“I would be very unhappy if something worked loose and fell into the fire,” Tsunagu mused, “but I think it is worth a try.” There were a few small trees growing on top of this boulder and their spiderwebbing roots provided good anchoring points. Tsunagu made use of all available fabrics and managed to rig minimal cover for them. It was going to take him significant effort to piece everything back into actual clothes when they started moving again… which would have to be tomorrow. The sun had nearly set, although the dark clouds and the firelight obscured this fact.

“I never really thought about weather proofing my costume,” Bakugou muttered, poking the fire with his fingers just to see Tsunagu flinch. It was hard to adjust to his partially fireproof companion’s antics. “I’m gonna’ have to come up with something different to wear in winter or the rain. Gets cold really freakin’ fast.”

“Indeed.”

“What do you do? Do you just freeze half to death every time it rains or…?”

“I have a weatherproof costume, but I only wear it when absolutely necessary. PTFE and I do not get along.”

Bakugou squinted. “PTF-what?”

“Gore-tex.”

“Oh. Swear I’ve never seen a picture of you in anything but full jeans… or good weather for that matter.”

Tsunagu chuckled. “The paparazzi do not like to get wet any more than I do and, unlike me, the worst thing that happens if they take a day off work is that a publisher may be forced to use an embarrassing photo left over from last year.” Bakugou actually chuckled, too. “You finally laughed at one of my jokes. I have fulfilled my life goal.”

“Really? That was a life goal? Since when?”

“A few days ago.”

Bakugou sniffed. “Why do you care so damn much about me? I’m not that important.”

“Well, for one thing, it is hard not to come to care deeply about someone when trapped alone with them for days.” The student raised an eyebrow, “well, perhaps this is not the case for you, but it is certainly the case for me. But I always cared. I offered you an internship position because I cared. Because I thought I could help you.”

“You seriously thought you could somehow change my life in one magical week? What are you, an “Extreme Makeover” show? Gordon Ramsay from that ancient thing with the horrible restaurants?”

The student had a point. “I did. Having got to know you now, understanding what a complex individual you are… I was being very foolish. I thought I had you all figured out.” Yet Tsunagu had understood nothing. The fiber hero was not blind to his own arrogance, but it was an integral part of his personality, and if he pulled that thread the rest would unravel. Tsunagu tried to accept it… and hope that it would not someday lead to his tragically poetic demise.

“You’re full of yourself,” Bakugou muttered.

“Hazard of the job,” Tsunagu replied.

“And you’re shivering again.”

“Also a hazard of the job.” It was going to be an extremely unpleasant night. Trying to get some sleep huddling against a cold rock face with freezing wind and rain occasionally sneaking through the improvised curtains? Doable. Trying to get some sleep under these conditions without the comfort of a layer of fabric over his rarely exposed skin? Impossible.

“I could come over there and provide you some extra cover or somethin’ to lean on,” Bakugou suggested awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable at the idea.

Tsunagu shook his head. “I do not want to put you ill at ease… and I am not likely to get any sleep regardless of what arrangements are made. Hopefully it will stop raining by morning.”

Bakugou surprised them both by joining Tsunagu anyway--leaning against the pro’s shoulder to provide warmth and block the wind--and further surprised the fiber hero by being very careful only to touch his skin with fabric. It was greatly appreciated. “I told you that you were nice,” Tsunagu murmured.

“Not a word ‘bout this to anyone,” Bakugou grumbled. Tsunagu just laughed at him.

It did stop raining at some point during the night. Tsunagu repeatedly dozed off for a few seconds then jerked back to dazed wakefulness as the lack of protecting fabric set off alarm bells in his brain. Sometimes, he would shake himself fully awake to attend to the fire. During one of these countless, exhausting episodes he noted that the stars had reappeared. Bakugou was only occasionally awake when Tsunagu fed the flames, so at least one of them got some real sleep.

“That was absolutely miserable,” Tsunagu said as daylight finally appeared.

Bakugou yawned and stretched dramatically. “You didn’t get any sleep at all, did ya’?”

“Not for more than a minute or two at a time,” Tsunagu sighed. He felt absolutely wretched now, exhausted by hunger, sleeplessness and stress. The curtains, however, were dry enough for him to reassemble them into clothes. Finally.

“You really hated taking those off, didn’t you?” Bakugou asked. Tsunagu must have visibly relaxed as he finally sealed the last seams.

The fiber hero nodded. “That was not a pleasant experience.”

The night's rain left the landscape soaked, droplets of water gleaming like tiny prisms on grass blades and conifer needles. The constant sogginess of the plant life combined with the lingering humidity and cold made for an unpleasant morning of travel. Tsunagu could hardly focus his eyes, vision blurring. Eventually, he surrendered and allowed the world to fade into a vaguely colored blob. He could just let Fiber Master tell him where to walk. He cursed himself for this choice when he ran into a stealthy boulder after only a few minutes. “That came out of nowhere,” he muttered, dusting himself off in an attempt to regain composure rather than remove dust. He would have to keep his eyes focused after all.

“I really hope we find something to eat today,” Bakugou said as the sun peaked. “I’m so hungry I don’t even notice it anymore...”

“I am sorry,” Tsunagu said.

The student snorted. “Why? It’s not like it’s your fault, and presumably you’re every bit as ravenous as I am.”

He could try to explain that, because Bakugou was still a student and Tsuangu was a working pro, the fiber hero was responsible for Bakugou’s well being… but it might be better to take a different approach. “I am very sorry that there is nothing I can do about it. I told you that I care about you. It is very true and I do not want to see you suffer.”

Bakugou nodded. “I wish I could do something about it, too.” He crossed his arms and said, almost too quietly to hear, “I’m kinda’ worried about you.” Tsunagu had tripped over an inordinate number of things that morning… the worrying might be justified.

They circumvented a tall set of thick trees and arrived at the lake. “Thank you!” Tsunagu shouted as the huge expanse of sparkling water finally came into view. It was the size of a shopping mall and evidently quite deep given the pieces of large logs floating near the shores. On the far side stood the mouth of another creek and a small island in the lake’s center played host to half a dozen fully grown trees. On closer inspection, Tsunagu could make out the fuzzy, salty tingle of water plants far beneath the surface--this was definitely deep enough for fish.

“Yeah! Didn’t you see this coming, though? Or, feel that there weren’t any trees? Isn’t that how your weird sense thing works?”

“I did notice, but I was afraid that if I mentioned it before we got here it would somehow find a way to not be a lake because I desperately wanted it to be a lake…” Never name a chicken before it hatches.

Bakugou, deciding not to dignify Tsunagu with a response, stared out at the water with a broad grin. “Fish,” he hissed, cracking his knuckles. “I even know what to do with fish! I’ve caught some before, know how to fillet them and stuff. I’ve never cooked one over an open fire but whatever.”

“Oh, wonderful.” Tsunagu as he searched through the water--there were definitely scales lurking in the depths. Many, many scales for their stiff, ozone-tinted impression was quite clear...

“You ever heard of dynamite fishing?” asked Bakugou with an evil grin.

Oh dear. “Let us set up camp before you inflict any carnage.”

Dynamite fishing turned out not to be as easy as Katsuki had hoped. He had always used a rod before… that being said, he had managed to kill four fish, one of which was large enough to be a meal on its own. The student had settled beside a fire by the lake shore to fillet and roast his catch as well as the two victims Hakamata had snagged so far. The fiber hero perched on a rock a good distance into the lake, seeking out the submerged animals with an insidious web of threads. The meat would keep a day at least if they caught more than they could finish, and Hakamata’s quirk would be convenient for stringing leftovers up in a tree to dissuade scavengers. They didn’t want to actually keep the stuff by them during the night. That would likely cause more trouble with bears.

The fiber hero yanked his hand back, pulling another flopping fish into view. “Catch,” the hero said, meeting Katsuki’s eye. The student snagged the slimy projectile out of midair with one hand. “Nice reflexes.” Katsuki couldn’t help but smile a little. The student dispatched the animal--it was painfully obvious that Jeanist had tossed the catch alive because the hero just couldn’t stand killing things and Katsuki didn’t have a problem with ending the lives of fish--and set it in a pile on a stack of conifer branches.

“The first two are finished,” Katsuki called after prodding the meat with a stick, “why don’t you come eat?”

Hakamata gingerly jumped along a series of partially submerged rocks, landing lightly on the shore. “Thank you very much for preparing these. I would not have had the slightest idea how to filet a fish.”

“It’s easy, you just cut along the chest and stomach, rip out the guts, get rid of the fins. Then you cut down to the spine along the gills and the ribs come off when you rip the spine out.” Hakamata gave the student an incredulous stare as if saying “easy for you, I’m sure.” “Anyway, here’s yours.”

“Again, thank you.”

The hero turned away to eat his share as always. “What is it with you and the mask?” Katsuki asked at last.

“It is… complicated.”

Katsuki snorted, taking another bite. This was absolutely delicious, tender and smoky. Or it seemed delicious after days with nothing. What kind of fish was this? He’d have to look it up once they got home. “You’ve been asking me all kinds of really complicated questions, I think I’m entitled to a few complicated answers.” He didn’t actually expect Jeanist to explain anything, didn’t really expect the hero to trust him that much. Why would he?

Hakamata considered for a moment, tilting his head from side to side, then nodded to himself. “Fair enough I suppose.” Katsuki reeled away in shock when Hakamata turned back to him, face and throat fully revealed.

“Holy shit what happened to you?”

“I told you that heroics is not a safe profession.”

“You really were mauled by a bear, weren’t you? That wasn’t your first fight with a polar bear, was it? You just don’t want people to know you look like someone ripped half your face off ‘cause you run such a high class fashion line and it’d be bad for business?”

Hakamata shook his head vigorously. “No. That is not it, not really. Well, I hid them out of shame at first, but I am not really ashamed of my scars… I am ashamed of some of the events that led to me acquiring these.” The hero gingerly ran a finger along the raised, pale ridge that traced his jawline. There were matching lines along his cheek--he really did look like he’d been clawed. “Those who do evil… will often have evil done to them in return.”

Did he seriously just call himself evil? “You do what you have to do,” Katsuki said. “We talked about this. You explained… you showed me what you have to think about in fights where someone’s gonna’ die either way.”

“This was different,” Hakamata almost whispered.

“What, you think it was karma or something? That you deserved it?” That was… unsettling. What did Katsuki deserve, then?

“I do not believe in karma, as such. I have seen too many sweet people die terribly and too many vicious murderers get away with everything to think the universe imposes any sort of balance like that…” Katsuki couldn’t help but flinch. He knew what the world was like and yet… he’d never seen someone die. People just didn’t talk about this. It was always a slap in the face when it came up. “I do think that the universe has a cruel sense of humor, especially when I am involved.” Hakmata paused to rip a piece from his fish. “The story of these scars would have made a good fable.”

“Are you gonna’ tell me what actually happened or are we gonna’ ever get back to why you hide your face if it’s not about being ashamed of looking horrible?”

Hakamata took a deep breath, clenching his fingers. “For legal reasons I should not tell you about how I got these scars.” Woah. Well then.

“If you told me you’d have to kill me?” Katsuki grinned, hiding the unease the statement dragged up behind a cocky smile.

“I would end my own life before I would raise a hand against you,” the hero said. Again with the slap in the face. That was both terrifying and flattering. Katsuki was blushing. And Katsuki knew Hakamata saw this, and Hakmata knew that Katsuki knew that Hakamata saw this… but they weren’t going to say anything about it… they weren’t going to discuss the fact that Katsuki didn’t know how to process that… declaration of devotion. “To circle back to the first topic, I have always preferred to be covered by a layer of fabric at all times and wore face masks long before I decided to become a hero. I absolutely cannot stand… random people touching my face or throat. Never revealing either thoroughly prevents that.” Fair enough, but that didn’t explain everything, not really. “After I got these scars, I was ashamed of their story as I said, and I became quite religious about hiding my face because I did not want anyone to see them, did not want anyone to speak of them or ask about them or wonder how I got them. Later… I realized that it was… well, fun to have this kind of secret. Some friends have secret handshakes or hideouts that they share. I share my face with my friends. That is our secret. Only a handful of people have ever seen me without a mask, only those closest and dearest to me.” Katsuki was closest and dearest now? His cheeks might actually catch fire. “It is also,” he changed his tone abruptly from serious to playful, “absolutely hilarious to watch villains and paparazzi alike desperately try to find out what I look like. The paparazzi are more entertaining than the villains… and more creative. I sometimes worry what will become of the world if a large group of disgruntled gossip rag employees decide to band together into a criminal organization.”

Katsuki chuckled. He could just picture it. “I can see it now--hoards of villains wielding cameras, staplers and clipboards roaming the streets… chaos everywhere!”

“The pen is mightier than the sword, as they say.” The hero hummed to himself. “Those are the fundamental motivations. Some other perks are being able to vanish in a crowd, or even do undercover work if I really need to. The scars are very distinctive… but no one knows I have them. It is also useful to build a public persona which is so… deep and colorful that no one feels the need to dig into my private affairs. That alone would be sufficient motivation for hiding my face so religiously. The press can be absolutely vicious; it is best to throw them some bones.”

“They are vicious,” Katsuki agreed bitterly. “They’ve been saying… lots of things about me since the Sports Festival I know.” He tried not to read it, tried not to think about it, tried to stay away from websites that published that garbage… he’d put it out of his mind during internships and during their trip to nowhere. Until now. Hakamata might actually be right about a lot of things. “Maybe I believe you after all, about needing people to believe in you and support you some.” Because seeing that picture of himself chained up like a rabid animal before All Might, article full of speculations about him, most wrong and all horrible… that hurt like hell.

“Hmmm...” Jeanist muttered. “There are always going to be people, websites, and occasionally serious news sources that dislike you, sometimes for legitimate reasons--no hero can avoid raising controversy--sometimes just because tearing into someone makes money.”

“Can’t imagine you have that problem,” Katsuki said.

“I told you about the gossip magazine that said I was seen taking Ecstasy at a rave in New York?”

Oh. He had mentioned that. “I kinda’ thought you were kidding.”

“Not at all. There is a difference between “behaving in a way that makes one so unpopular that it affects one’s mental health and ability to work” and “being mocked by some gossip rag idiots and the occasional mainstream critic just like everyone else.” Even All Might gets negative press from time to time.”

“Really?” Katsuki couldn’t recall any such thing. Who would dare say something bad about All Might?

“Do not ask me why I know this,” Hakamata continued after his final bite of fish, “but there have been a total of fourteen articles critical or extremely critical of All Might published in mainstream news sources in the last twelve months.”

“Are you sure? I don’t remember anything like that...”

“Because most people forget about those sorts of articles very quickly as long as the hero in question keeps doing good work. The Sports Festival events will never truly be forgotten--I imagine you will have to answer annoying interview questions about them many times in your life--but they will not dominate your future unless you choose to allow them to do so, unless you decide to keep presenting yourself in the same way. The collective memory of the public is very short, for better or for worse. You are free to make your own path from here, to change, or to stay the same.”

Short memories… true enough. “That’s… kinda’ nice to think about. But you said that being chained up wasn’t my fault and I didn’t deserve it, so I don’t present myself that way anyway.”

Hakamata nodded slowly. “I have said before that you are not responsible for how others choose to use and abuse you. You did, however, viciously attack your classmate after the bout ended… and when I saw that… you appeared murderous and Todoroki absolutely terrified. I believed that you intended to cause him serious harm.”

“I didn’t!” Katsuki shook his head. “You know I didn’t! I just wanted him to treat me like a real opponent! I wanted him to fight me at his best!” Katsuki was blushing again, wasn’t he? And from a very different kind of embarrassment--the shameful sort--this time. Katsuki still wasn’t sure when he’d started liking his traveling companion, but he definitely liked him now, and more than that he wanted Jeanist to like him, too… and it hurt to hear what the hero had thought of him. It had hurt during internships, too, but not like this… because during the internships Katsuki hadn’t much cared what Jeanist thought of him, had written the guy off as perfectionistic and biased, condescending and self-obsessed to the point that nothing he said held much weight. Moreover, during internships Hakamata hadn’t known Katsuki, either, but now they knew each other and Hakamata still thought those things, still meant those things… even understanding him. That burned.

“Of course I know you did not intend to hurt him. I now understand your motivations and your true colors,” Hakamata said gently, breaking Katsuki out of his spiral, “but I did not at the time. All I knew about you was what I saw in those few fights. The public at large will only ever know you from media appearances, so you have to be sure you show the cameras the person that you want to be.”

“Oh.”

“I should mention that I plan to say many, many nice things about you very publicly when we get back to Japan.” Oh, god, this was a conspiracy to give Katsuki a headache from the whiplash. Emotions were not his thing and he wanted them to stop now. “I will say them before I go find All Might.”

“But… you just can’t. You can’t yell at All Might! I’m serious!”

“So am I. You just try to stop me.” Hakamata grinned at him, and somehow Katsuki found himself smiling, too. The guy had done this on purpose, probably, trying to lead them back into safe topics, probably thought Katsuki’s cheeks might really catch on fire if they talked about more emotional crap.

“So… since I’ve seen your face… are we on a first name basis now?”

“You are welcome to call me by my given name,” Tsunagu said. “You may choose to grant me a matching privilege or not.”

“Sure. Call me what you like.”

Chapter Text

Tsunagu woke alone the next morning. He had left the conscious world behind early and slept like a rock. Having been well fed for the first time in… he had not tried to keep track of the days--following a sleepless night, he had fallen asleep well before sunset and stayed that way until well after dawn. The fiber hero shook the blanket off and ventured into the wild.

“Hey,” Katsuki grinned at him. The student already had a fire blazing, several flat rocks serving as improvised frying pans. What was cooking, though? They were plants of some kind… with the same milky-white presence as potatoes. “Look what I found!”

“What are those?” Tsunagu asked, still not sure--the twisting, insidious feeling as they cooked kept him from making a guess.

“Cattails,” Katsuki grinned. “It’s too late in the season for the female flowers… they’re all pollinated and dried up but you can eat the roots year round. I didn’t know if you had them this far north… but they’re around!”

Tsunagu gazed at the roasting roots suspiciously. “You are sure these roots are safe?”

“Oh yeah. You can eat ‘em raw… though I’ve heard it’s not that fun. I peeled ‘em and washed ‘em and everything so they should be good to eat.”

“I meant are you sure these plants are what you think they are?”

Katsuki nodded vigorously. “Nothing looks like a cattail except for a cattail. They’re an ultimate survival food.”

“How did you dig these up?” Tsunagu asked. It must have been a serious endeavour. Pulling even small weeds taught one not to underestimate the power of a root.

“Sharp rock and big stick.” Well, that was obvious in retrospect.

“Fair enough. Thank you very much. I am plenty fond of fish, but I have missed vegetables.”

Katsuki sniffed. “I miss sugar. Not that I have a big sweet tooth or anything… but it’s nice from time to time.”

“I would not judge you for a sweet tooth. I have one of my own, after all.”

“Really?” the student asked with a wry smile, turning the frying vegetables with his fingers, trying to keep them from charring or sticking to the rock.

“Indeed.” Now he really missed sugar…

“So, what do you think we should do? Do you want to hang around here for a day? I could really go for that… but I also don’t wanna’ waste a bunch of time.”

“It seems I slept most of the morning away already,” Tsunagu hummed, “and, given that this is the first time we have come across ample food since we arrived here, it seems logical to take a day to rest and recover before continuing.”

Katsuki had definitely wanted to hear that. “I can dig some more roots so we can take them with us--they’ll keep a while--and we can take some fish, too--that shouldn’t spoil right away if we cut the meat in thin strips and smoke it.”

“This seems to be an excellent plan.”

Katsuki showed Tsunagu how to get at the cattail roots. This was a process that required removing most clothing--Tsunagu really hated doing that--and becoming unbelievably muddy. The two of them slew a significant number of the towering, green plants before washing the mud away in the icy lake. They dried off beside the fire before returning to the previous day’s fishing protocol.

Tsunagu let his threads drift through the water, waited until he felt scales brush against him, then seized his prey, yanking the creature into the open air and tossing it to Katsuki to meet its demise. It was very kind of the student to spare him the distress of the slaughter.

With sufficient gathering completed, the pair settled down to nibble on their catch and watch the lake. A sharp, repetitive cry announced the arrival of a raptor. The bird circled the lake, dark wings swept back, then stooped into an elegant dive, talons raking into the water. “Nice catch,” Katsuki commented as the fish-carrying bird slammed its wings down, droplets of water cascading from the feathers as the creature fought to gain height. “It’s an osprey I think.”

“A beautiful creature,” Tsunagu said as the raptor vanished above the trees.

“Can Hawks fly with wet feathers?” Katsuki asked curiously.

It took Tsunagu a moment to realize the student was talking about the hero and not the animal. “Yes,” Tsunagu replied. He had worked with the number three pro during a downpour once. Hawks did not like the rain any more than Tsunagu, but he could clearly fly in a storm.

The cold did not seem quite so vicious when one was well fed. The fiber hero slept well that night… until Katsuki kicked him, thrashing and breathing heavily.

Tsunagu woke with a start, reflexively grasping hold of every fiber nearby and twisting them to his whim--which meant that several branches fell from the sides of their shelter, nearby trees creaked, the blanket the travelers shared became stiff as stone and Katsuki’s clothing gave the student a sneak attack hug. Where were they? Right. Canada. What was going on? Nothing really seemed to be the matter… there were no animals nearby, at least nothing with fur, and there would not be any dangerous reptiles or birds this far north, just mammals.

“Let me go! Let me go!” Katsuki roared, squirming in Tsunagu’s fabric grip.

“Sorry, sorry,” Tsunagu said, releasing his hold. The student clawed at the collar of his shirt, hyperventilating. “It’s not real,” Tsunagu said forcefully. “It is not real.” Usually he would say something like “it’s okay” but Katsuki would likely take offense to such a “babying” phrase.

“It was real,” the student choked. What did that mean? Nightmare based in memory, probably. Katsuki abruptly fell silent, probably wallowing in humiliation at having allowed to Tsunagu to see that kind of “weakness.”

An anonymous insect chirped in the darkness. The bug had best be careful or Katsuki might hunt it down for breakfast.

When nightmares were particularly bad, Tsunagu was in the habit of listening to the radio, usually music stations. Sometimes, though, the commercials were more soothing than the songs. Katsuki would likely appreciate a distraction, but the poor child would never admit such a desire. Rather than ask if Katsuki would like a distraction, Tsunagu would provide one and the student could choose to accept it or demand silence. The fiber hero began a meandering story about a time he offered to take all of his sidekicks out to dinner--on him--and the process by which the agency chose a restaurant. “So after the first hour, a total of one hundred and twenty-two emails had been sent as well as seventy-three text messages. There were now seventeen different suggestions and three vetoes… At this point, Three Ring offered to pay Glazer to stop making new suggestions… We managed to convince Jazzmere that no one had stolen their coffee mug in an attempt to blackmail them into changing their vote, but not before they took two other mugs hostage...” The Genius Office was an interesting place to work. Presumably this was Tsunagu’s fault. Katsuki fell asleep during the recount of hour three. The fiber hero smiled and closed his eyes as well.

They set off the next morning quite early with a significant quantity of smoked fish and raw roots, enough to have at least something each night for the better part of a week. Everyone was very happy about that.

The travelers followed the creek at the far end of the lake. It was much larger than the little tributary that had brought them to this haven. The small river meandered south, well southwest, really, so it seemed wise to continue alongside it. Katsuki tried to walk very fast in order to avoid having a conversation. Tsunagu, however, had a secret weapon: really long legs. No one could out walk him. That being said, Tsunagu was not sure if he should press on the nightmare issue despite the fact that the student clearly expected him to. If Katsuki showed other symptoms of PTSD, Tsunagu could justify prying into this part of the student’s private life… but the child did not, not that Tsunagu could spot anyway. There were plenty of things that Tsunagu saw in nightmares that he would prefer never to discuss with anyone. It might be cruel to pry.

“I really wish you hadn’t seen that,” Katsuki said without provocation, hunching his shoulders. “I hate that. It's pathetic, waking up screaming or punching blankets.” There was no bite in these words, though. Perhaps Tsunagu was reading too much into it, being too optimistic, but it sounded as if Katsuki had brought this up with the hope that the fiber hero would disabuse him of the notion.

Tsunagu was all too happy to oblige. It would likely be better to share his own experiences rather than give a clinical lecture about trauma. “I dream about drowning,” the pro said softly, forcing his breathing to stay even with the hope that he would not be treated to this recurring nightmare again anytime soon. “About being trapped underwater in a debris field… pinned under a support beam I could not hope to move on my own… I dream about desperately trying to arrange a pulley to drag it off, about staring up at the distant daylight filtering down through the green water knowing I would never see the sun again… Everyone has nightmares, Katsuki, especially in our line of work. They are no more a sign of weakness than scars on flesh. It is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“What happened?” Katsuki mumbled, correctly surmising that Tsunagu’s nightmares were not just dreams but memories as well.

“Kuugo saved me. Even the two of us together could not move the debris… when he swam away I was so heartbroken I nearly surrendered and breathed the water right then, thinking he had given up on me. Some part of me never believed that, though… and he came back perhaps half a minute later with rescue SCUBA gear. They had to get a crane to free me in the end… Kuugo stayed with me for the two hours it took to get the beam off… minus trips to the surface for air of his own, of course. It is amazing the conversations one can have without words… or really being able to see someone through the murk.” Tsunagu really had caught hypothermia that time despite Kuugo sharing what body heat he could. The beginning of this memory was unspeakable, soul-crushing terror… the end, however, was almost sweet. It was nice to have someone to depend on, to trust implicitly. Hopefully Katsuki could find people like that. Tsunagu would take such a role if he could.

Katsuki whispered. “I dream about drowning, too.” Tsunagu waited. Katsuki glanced at him, mouth a twisted line, as if expecting a comment or question. Tsunagu waited. They cut off an oxbow in the river--no sense following the meander. So... was this something Tsunagu should press on? A thread he should follow or a personal detail he should question only if Katsuki encouraged him to? “Last year some nutcase tried to asphyxiate me in broad daylight,” the student blurted.

“I… what?”

“There were half a dozen heroes standing around but they couldn’t do anything about it. Creep had some sort of quirk that turned his body into a pool of sludge--tried to force himself down my throat which is just… all kinds of fucked up. I fought, ‘course I did, but I couldn’t get him off me.” Katsuki clenched his fists, hunching his shoulders, “couldn’t get him off me, no matter what I did, and then Deku--Izuku--nearly got himself killed trying to save me and then finally All Might showed up and saved us both...”

That was a lot to digest… poor kid, left to deal with that on his own. Chances were his parents had provided little to no support after the fact. Tsunagu would not ask about that, though, unless the student brought it up as any unkind statement about the child’s parents might well end their conversation. There was a lot of baggage to unpack here… but one thing stood out. “What do you mean there were half a dozen pros and they “could not do anything about it?””

Katsuki shrugged. “Their quirks were shit for that kind of fight.”

How could he say that as if it were obvious? “That is no excuse. No!” Tsunagu protested. “My quirk handles terribly against fire as you can well expect, but that does not mean that I stand around like a piece of denim-coated furniture when someone nearby is being attacked by a flame-wielding villain!”

Katsuki raised an eyebrow. “What do you do?”

In situations where his quirk was essentially useless? Anything but stand around. “Think creatively. Use hostage negotiation tactics. Bluff. Throw things. Create a distraction. Threaten to call villains’ mothers.” He had actually done that on three separate occasions; on one occasion it had worked. “Request specific back up. Punch people. Speaking of punching people, give me the names of these so-called pros who stood around and watched you nearly die.” That was utterly unacceptable behavior. Clearly those heroes were all in need of a good, long lecture. When it came to “chewing people out” as Kuugo put it, Tsunagu was unmatched in the top twenty.

Katsuki shook his head. “I could handle it! Mostly… I should have been able to handle it.” That was the expected reaction, but Tsunagu could see little cracks in Katsuki’s expressions--the student was actually rethinking some of his opinions. “No crappy villain should be able to take me down. The pros knew that. They complimented me about it afterwards, before they sent me home.”

Wait. They did what? “Sent you home?”

“Yeah?”

“Not a hospital?”

“Yeah?”

“Give. Me. Their. Names.”

Tsunagu was really mad, and Katsuki didn’t really get why. “I don’t even remember most of the pros that were there… I think Backdraft was there, but he was working crowd control… literally had his hands full. I think Kamui Woods might have been there?” No… it hadn’t been him, had it? Why couldn’t he remember? The whole thing was… well, the villain was crystal clear, like it happened yesterday, but everything else was blurry. If someone told him that it hadn’t actually been Deku who tried to save him, that it was some other green haired kid… Katsuki might believe them.

“I will find the news footage then and if it was him he will rue the day…”

“You’re not seriously gonna’ track these people down and punch them, are you? That’s just...” totally crazy for one thing, and the last thing he would ever expect from Tsunagu. “I mean, they didn’t do anything wrong!”

“I am going to track them down, dress them down--figuratively… maybe literally--and send them to sensitivity training,” Tsunagu replied. “That is… can you imagine if it were any other child? Choose one of your classmates, someone you don’t hate,” Kirishima, then, whose quirk would be useless for that kind of fight, “and imagine that child captured by the same villain. Can you imagine, imagine standing on the sidelines, leaving this person to struggle and perhaps die? Can you imagine, imagine sending this person home afterwards without so much as a checkup to make sure they had not been seriously injured?”

Katsuki couldn’t quite bring himself to say “no, of course not,” but the answer must have showed on his face. “It’s not the same thing,” the student said, crossing his arms. “’Cause my quirk was good for fighting it, so they let me handle it.”

“Your quirk has nothing to do with this,” Tsunagu scowled. “They were pros. Stopping villains from hurting people was their job, not yours, and the way they treated you afterwards, what you have said and implied... Even if you had been a hero student, or even a fully fledged pro that would have been unacceptable. I cannot fathom ever leaving one of my sidekicks to suffer like that. I would die first. I noticed recently that you seem to like me now. My quirk would be about as useful as yours in such a fight. Can you imagine leaving me to fend for myself in a situation like that for minutes on end?” Katsuki shook his head. No, never. He would never abandon anyone like that, let alone someone he’d accidentally started caring about. “Can you imagine sending me home afterwards without making sure I was alright, seeing to it I saw a doctor?”

“No,” Katsuki muttered. “I guess I’m just tougher than you,” but his heart wasn’t in that last sentence, not really. Tsunagu was plenty tough--in more than one way. That thing with the rubble, being pinned underwater totally helpless, nearly drowning, nothing your quirk could possibly do to help you--that was even scarier to think about than the noxious sludge prying his mouth open, trying to force its way up his nose...

“You are very strong. No one denies this, but you should not have had to be. No wonder you think the world is out to eat you alive. Morons, all of them, I cannot believe actual, trained pro heroes did that to you, but I promise you this: neither I nor any hero I have ever employed would have behaved that way. Not everyone is like that, Katsuki.”

“I know.” Deku wasn’t like that… Deku had been willing to die on the spot to save him… and Katsuki had screamed at the nerd for it, because he was secretly scarred and terrified… and if he yelled enough no one would figure it out. No one would see the weakness and have the chance to rip at the scabs. No one would see he desperately wanted someone to tell him how to stop feeling the slime on his arms all the time, how to feel safe in his own skin again. Ah, damn it, thinking about it brought it back--the crawling feeling across his arms. He scratched at it futilely.

“How did you get away from the villain in the end? You said your old friend tried to help you? And All Might was there?”

Katsuki shook himself back to reality. “Yeah. The quirkless idiot tried to blind the thing, nearly got himself killed, too… then All Might showed up.”

“Thank goodness for that,” Tsunagu muttered. “I presume he took off immediately rather than face the media circus that follows him like a hungry jungle cat?”

“Yup.” Katsuki couldn’t help but smile a bit… All Might being stalked by a panther… ridiculous. No panther could take on All Might. Unless it was like that polar bear. Tsunagu’d said something about “furry All Might” when they talked about the fight again the day before--and now Katsuki would spend weeks trying to scrub unbidden “All Might the furry” images out of his mind. He was pretty sure Tsunagu knew what a furry was, but the pro’s brain just hadn’t gone there. Lucky.

“For our dear number one pro’s sake, I hope he believed you received medical attention after his departure.” Katsuki had given up trying to convince Tsunagu not to yell at All Might. “I am very sorry that happened to you and I am very glad you were not seriously hurt.”

“Thanks, I guess. It wasn’t a big deal, really.”

“It most definitely was,” Tsunagu shook his head, “and it frightens me that you do not appreciate that. These sorts of traumatic events… trying to brush them off makes things worse.”

“I’m not traumatized,” Katsuki huffed.

“Give it a few years--a few more brushes with death--with that attitude and you will be. Losing someone on the the job… will happen to you eventually.” Katsuki flinched, couldn’t help it. That was probably true, but… it was too soon to think about it. “And nearly losing someone is a soul-crushing horror, especially after attending a funeral or two, especially after learning what it feels like to say a permanent farewell.”

“Yeah, I get it,” and for some reason he was now wondering where Kirishima was and where his old hag was and whether they were safe, “but where the hell are you going with this? Just torturing me with how much the world secretly sucks?”

“You treat yourself fundamentally differently than you treat other people. The idea of someone hurting or even killing you seems relatively unimportant because it is “just you,” and you should be strong enough to shake off any damage or threat to yourself. Thus, I am explaining why this incident was a “big deal” in a roundabout way.”

Katsuki raised an eyebrow. Usually people didn’t explain the mind games they were playing with him. “I guess you’re not wrong?”

“Wonderful. I shall continue. When you nearly lose your life, everyone who knows you suffers terribly just as you suffer when one of your companions is gravely wounded.” Katsuki blinked. He hadn’t actually considered that. He understood that fear, that helpless, nauseating ache from the USJ… and from watching Tsunagu nearly pass out in the cold. That was how Izuku must have felt watching Katsuki choke… That explained why the nerd was willing to risk his life like that. “And you, whether you recognize it or not, suffer even more terribly because you are losing everyone all at once. When this villain attempted to asphyxiate you, you very nearly never saw your mother or your father again. You very nearly never had a chance to attend UA.” Katsuki hadn’t thought about that at the time, there was no time during the fight for his life, but afterwards… as he waited for the heroes to finish yelling at Deku, as he waited to go home… he’d mostly thought about how ashamed he was that he couldn’t fight the thing off, how disappointed everyone would have been if he’d died. He’d not really thought about never seeing his folks again, never getting into UA.

He was thinking about it now, too much. Nausea and vertigo seeped through him. “Grrr… thanks for making me think about that… now I feel even worse!”

Tsunagu sighed. “You always felt this way.” No he did not. “You simply hid it from yourself behind flimsy defense mechanisms that will inevitably shatter someday. I have seen this happen… again and again to colleagues who take old fashioned attitudes towards mental health. Three Ring was like this in the earlier days. He had a nervous breakdown that required a month of leave to address. When we return home, he will be happy to talk to you about mental health, tell you about his struggles and about how he recovered.

“I assure you, much as you may hate wrestling with complicated emotions, it is best to deal with them in manageable quantities rather than allowing them to accumulate into tangled monsters.” The pro looked him over carefully, reading his expression. Tsunagu winced and sighed. “I apologize for the distress I have caused you… perhaps I should have left this conversation to a mental health professional. But do you understand now why this incident was a “big deal?””

Katsuki scowled. “Yeah, sure.”

Conversation died for a kilometer or two. This was a lovely creek, chortling as it bubbled along its twisting path. Now that he wasn’t so tired, wasn’t so hungry all the time, Katsuki found traveling pleasant. If it were a bit warmer at night, if it decided never to rain again… he might really like this place. He’d missed hanging out in the woods. It had been years since he had the time to run wild like this.

He was still thinking about the stupid slime, though, couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I have nightmares about it a lot,” Katsuki said abruptly. Why was it so hard to keep his mouth shut right now? “I’m kinda’ surprised that was the first one you saw, actually.”

“Hmmm...”

“There is something wrong with me, isn’t there? I know that’s not normal...” He shouldn’t keep thinking about it. It was just a few minutes, a few minutes on a single day of his many year long life.

Tsunagu cocked his head from side to side, considering. “I have said it before and will say it again: there is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken; illnesses, mental or otherwise, are a normal part of life… and all pro heroes deal with the echoes of past traumas reverberating through far reaches of their worlds. It is unavoidable. Recurring nightmares of this kind are a PTSD symptom, but I do not think that you actually have that illness. That being the case, I am not a psychologist and I encourage you to speak with your school counselor when we return to Japan. He is there to help you. He will not tell anyone what you disclose nor even admit that you have been to see him. Take your mental health seriously--it is every bit as important as your physical well being. You must attend to the condition of both your body and mind to achieve your full potential as a hero.”

A week ago Katsuki would never have considered talking to Hound Dog about any of this… but after everything they’d been through… if Tsunagu thought it was a good idea and there was nothing to lose, maybe he’d consider it. “I… sure. I guess.” The pro was definitely smiling at him, looking proud, almost, but Tsunagu didn’t comment beyond a nod.

As the afternoon dragged on, the sun vanished and it drizzled on them. Travel became abruptly miserable. It didn’t pour, they weren’t soaked or anything… they kept walking even as Katsuki closely watched Tsunagu to make sure the twig-thin pro wasn’t going to freeze to death. Katsuki had been… quite terrified during the storm when it seemed Jeanist had passed out from hypothermia. He’d kept thinking, “how can I possibly make it out of here on my own?” not just because Tsunagu had skills that were keeping them alive, but also because… the idea of being all alone out here in the wide, empty world was just… he couldn’t stand the thought. He wanted someone to rely on… much as he argued for absolute independence… he wanted to trust people. And it was more than that. The idea of never talking to Tsunagu again was… it hurt, like someone raking talons down his ribs. The idea of leaving his companion’s body by some anonymous rock in the wilderness burned like someone driving a spike into his heart.

As such, the rain made Katsuki very uncomfortable. If Tsunagu noticed the constant, nervous glances--and he probably did--he didn’t comment on them.

The next day was much the same--drizzly. Tsunagu said it was the universe taking revenge on them for having such good luck finding food. Katsuki wasn’t sure about that, but maybe. The creek continued to wind to the southwest. Katsuki found another group of cattails and dug a few roots to make up for those they had eaten. No one had spotted any fish in the creek so far… but they still had several days of provisions if they rationed carefully.

They talked some--about stupid things. Katsuki had had enough of talking about feelings for a while. He wanted to forget about the slime, forget about the inevitability of really horrible crap happening in the heroics profession, forget about how things were in the real world and just live in the moment. He still found himself chewing on things, trying to decide what to think about their past conversations. What to do when he got home. What to do about Deku.

Katsuki got Tsunagu to finish the bizarre story of how the Genius Office finally picked a restaurant--it escalated quickly and ended with someone being suspended for two weeks. Katsuki talked about some of the things he used to do when he was alone in the woods… and also about dumb stuff class 1-A had been up to recently. At one point, Katsuki and Tsunagu spent three hours in a meandering conversation about how much they both liked flying kites. It had been years since Katsuki last did that, but he put it on the list of things to do once they made it back to Japan.

He missed home. And school. And his classmates. God, he really missed those idiots. Maybe even Deku… though he could barely stand the idea of looking at his childhood friend now that he understood why he had treated him the way he had. Katsuki always knew it was wrong… and now he knew why he’d done it anyway and, god, he despised himself for being so weak that he couldn’t deal with his problems without taking them out on Izuku. Katsuki wasn’t sure if Tsunagu had really assigned him to write “I am very sorry for what I did to Midoriya Izuku and won’t do it again” five hundred times or whether the pro had been kidding… but Katsuki was going to do it regardless. Maybe it would ease the guilt some. Maybe not. Maybe he didn’t deserve to have the guilt eased.

Tsunagu definitely missed his friends as well. He sounded quite wistful when he mentioned Three Ring or Gang Orca… especially Gang Orca.

“Are you and Gang Orca dating or just friends?” Katsuki asked as another day (thankfully dry) drew to a close.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Well… yeah...”

“There is a cumulative total of over one thousand euros wagered on this and related questions by employees of the Genius Office. I do not intend to settle their bets so easily.”

Katsuki barked out a laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“Did… they told you about this?”

Tsunagu’s eyes sparkled with mirth. “Of course not, but my sidekicks are not as sneaky as they think they are.”

“Huh… who’s book keeper? Who can I place a bet with when we get back?”

“Of that I am not entirely sure… anyone who is not me will know, though. I believe almost everyone is in on it.”

“Huh. Are Gang Orca’s sidekicks placing bets, too?”

“Yes, although I do not think the amount of money wagered is quite as high among his coworkers.” Katsuki definitely needed to get in on this.

The next day started out like any other cold, dry morning. The pair woke shivering and Tsunagu did not stop shivering until they had been walking for an hour or two.

“I think I hear something,” Katsuki said. “I do. I hear a motor!” It might be many kilometers away, as this frequency was too low for standard hearing.

“Light a fire!” Tsunagu said, snatching up the nearest branch.

Adrenaline setting his fingers trembling, Katsuki piled wood onto the haphazard blaze, fanning it with an intact branch. Tsunagu, meanwhile, had disassembled their bag and turned it into something that looked like a flag. “For smoke signaling,” he explained. “You can blow the smoke away with it to create gaps for Morse code.”

“Oh! SOS then?”

“Indeed.” Since fabric was kind of his thing, Katsuki let Tsunagu carve out a distress signal from the smoke while the student fetched green wood, the kind that burned dirty. The pro repeated the message--sloppily but probably recognizably--a few dozen times. Katsuki felt his heart might pound out of his chest. This was the first sign, the very first hope--come on, let it work out. He wanted to get out of here!

Was that a shout in the distance? “Here!” Katsuki yelled. “We’re over here!” His accent wasn’t great, but it should be understandable English.

“Hello!” someone yelled back.

Tsunagu quit carving out their message in favor of shouting--he was fluent of course, have to be if you want to make it in the international fashion scene.

Movement. Katsuki couldn’t hide the near feral grin that split his face as they finally came into view. The four Canadian rescue heroes--that was clearly what they were given their outfits--approached them and Katsuki wondered if he was going to pass out from relief. They had been found. Finally. They were free. They were going home! “Well,” said the apparent leader of the heroes, a tall woman with dappled, gray hair and a gorgeous golden eagle on her shoulder, “you are not Christina Long and Julia White, but I’m very glad we’ve found you!”

Oh my god. Katsuki started laughing and couldn’t stop. Tsunagu face palmed. Katsuki sank slowly to the ground, sure he wouldn’t be able stand much longer. The Canadians must be accustomed to all kinds of strange reactions from relieved citizens they rescued, because all of them just smiled at him kindly. The universe really did have a twisted sense of humor when Tsunagu was involved, didn’t it? When Katsuki demanded what else could happen besides the two of them walking out… the pro said all that stupid stuff, in a blue moon stuff, and now the very first thing on that list came to pass. “Oh my god,” Katsuki howled, “it’s an unrelated search party!”

Chapter Text

Eijirou should do his homework. If he didn’t work on it now, he’d have to make himself work on it tonight, and he wouldn’t be able to make himself work on it tonight. He was so exhausted… he went to bed at the same time as always but now he spent half the night staring at the ceiling thinking about how much he missed Bakugou. The news was talking about him like he was dead. Had been for days. Eijirou didn’t want to think that way. He kept insisting to himself that his missing friend was fine, that he’d turn up. Maybe Bakugou and Best Jeanist were hiding on purpose because someone was after them. Maybe they got amnesia or something and were living normal lives in some remote town trying to figure out who they used to be? It could happen!

He should do his homework. The paper stared up at him accusingly. “I hate you,” Eijirou told it helplessly. He didn’t hate his homework so much as he hated feeling this way. There was nothing he could do. Nothing. He had gone out searching at first, looking through nearby forests with some of Bakugou’s other friends. They all knew it was pointless, that if Bakugou had been teleported somewhere like that he would have shown up again within a day at most--but they needed to do something. All the useless things had been done already. Now there was no distraction, no relief. Nothing to do but try to go about daily life. Without his friend. Not knowing was the worst part. He couldn't stand the idea of living years like this--years not knowing if Bakugou was alive or dead but having to assume the latter.

Eijirou wrote his name on the assignment. There. He’d started it.

Present Mic exploded into the room like an invading army. Midoriya jumped a good meter in the air. “Shouta! Turn on channel seven!” Eijirou’s stomach dropped and anxiety stole his equilibrium. Although Eijirou wasn’t the brightest bulb in the class, it was clear what this was about. The student gripped the sides of his desk to avoid falling out of his chair as Mr. Aizawa turned on the projector…

“...related news,” said the bleach blonde anchor, the same wicked gleam in her eye as always, “the missing top pro Best Jeanist and hero student Bakugou Katsuki have been found,” alive? Found alive? Why was she torturing him like this? Say they were found alive! “The pair, missing for twelve days following an encounter with a teleportation-quirked villain in a battle also involving number six pro Miruko, were found today in Manitoba, Canada.” The screen cut to a map, highlighting the location where Bakugou had turned up.

“I don’t care where they were tell me if they’re alive!” someone shrieked. Why was everyone staring at him? Oh. It was him. Eijirou was the one shrieking.

“Both the hero and student are in good condition.” Oh, thank god! Why couldn’t they start with that? Whoops and cheers broke out throughout the classroom.

The report moved to a photo of a rescue helicopter. The side door of the vehicle was open and Bakugou was frozen in mid leap as he jumped to the ground. The recovered student’s face was gaunt--Eijirou winced as he realized just how much weight his friend had lost. Bakugou, thin and wearing utterly filthy clothes, grinned in the photo, not angrily or smugly like Eijirou was used to. He looked just… legitimately overjoyed. Eijirou felt about that light, too, the weight of a week and a half of heart-break and anxiety lifting from his shoulders.

“Aww! Yes! He looks so happy,” called Ashido.

“The pair were found by an unrelated search team of Canadian rescue heroes led by veteran Carousel,” they showed a photo of the woman, eagle perched on her shoulder, against a dramatic mountain backdrop. Whatever. How soon would his friend be home? “Best Jeanist and Bakugou are expected back in Japan within the day, transportation arranged by the Unintentional Quirk Relocation Rapid Repatriation Agreements.” The anchor explained some legal jargon as the report cut to a video of Best Jeanist and Bakugou walking through some Canadian airport. It appeared the two had showered and acquired new clothes between the helicopter scene and whenever this video was taken. Jeanist was… visibly exhausted. Eijirou only knew the pro from a handful of television appearances, and with his whole face covered Jeanist should be hard to read, but there was no doubt that the guy was asleep on his feet. Bakugou was looking at the pro in a way… Eijirou didn’t think he’d ever seen Bakugou look at someone that way.

During internships, Eijirou’d texted his friend plenty and it was clear that Bakugou had hated every moment of the time he spent at the Genius Office… and now he was looking at Best Jeanist as if he really liked the guy, like he was worried about him. Bakugou said something but the camera’s microphone didn’t pick it up. Best Jeanist replied with something equally incomprehensible and Bakugou laughed--laughed not like he was angry or plotting someone’s demise, but like he was… happy.

“Why is Bakugou acting like that? What happened to him?” asked Kaminari.

Ashido shrugged. “But they hated each other. What do they like… like each other now?” Best Jeanist ruffled Bakugou’s hair. And Bakugou didn’t try to kill him. There was one final picture, clearly from someone’s cellphone camera, of the pair curled up in first class seats of a jet… and Bakugou was sleeping on Best Jeanist’s shoulder as the hero read through some paperwork. Jeanist was staring at the photographer out of the corner of his narrowed eye. Every bit of the pro’s body languages said, “you will leave us alone or suffer grave consequences.”

“Oh my god,” said Midoriya. “Who is that and what have they done with Kacchan?”

“If you’d kept going along this creek, you would have hit a bridge in a few days, been back in civilization within the week,” explained Carousel, the leader of the rescue heroes as the two travelers followed the Canadians back to their camp.

“Could you speak a little more slowly?” Katsuki asked as one of the other heroes, a bubbly young woman, excitedly explained how glad she was to have found them.

“Shriker, calm down,” said Carousel. “You two must be starving… chocolate?”

“Yes, thank you,” Tsunagu accepted the bars, handing the second to Katsuki. The student ripped his open and sank his teeth into the squares ravenously. Tsunagu would have to be more subtle--eating in public was always a dance when one wished never to expose any facial features.

“Anyway, we’ve radioed command and the boss says that they’ll send a helicopter from Churchill to pick you up. It’s the nearest town with something approaching a real airport. By the time we get back to camp, we should be ready to ship you guys out.”

How much of that did Katsuki understand? He was not fluent, was he? “Did you get that?” Tsunagu asked the student.

“The gist of it,” Katsuki nodded.

“Anyway,” Carousel continued, “they’ll fly you to Churchill then down to Winnipeg and then to Vancouver. They’ll get you back to Japan from there.”

The Canadians’ camp came into view--eight tents set up in a clearing. It appeared the motor Bakugou had heard was actually a chainsaw. Interesting… did the rescue heroes just carry that along to cut firewood or was there some other purpose? Another hero, a bulky middle aged man, turned away from a stove and waved to the lot of them as they approached the camp. “Helicopter’s about fifty minutes out,” he growled past a graying mustache. “I’ve got some hot oatmeal for our guests if they like.”

“Please,” Tsunagu and Katsuki said in synchrony.

“Hero name’s Silky by the way.” Katsuki blinked, surprise evident in the quirked eyebrow. Tsunagu remained unphased. “Don’t ask--someone else gave me the name and it stuck.”

Tsunagu accepted a bowl of hot cereal from Silky and slowly collapsed to the ground, utterly exhausted. Katsuki glanced at him in concern. “You okay?” he asked in English, trying to be polite to their Canadian rescuers.

Tsunagu answered, “I had just… not noticed how unbelievably stressful this experience had been. Now that we are safe, it finally hit me.” Every day, somewhere in the back of his mind, an inner voice fretted nonstop wondering how far they were from civilization, what their chances were, whether it would be the day one of them were injured, whether something else would go wrong… There had been no safety net, no leeway, no recovery. He had desperately hoped that he could get himself and his student out of this situation alive and had not allowed himself to consciously think about how poor their odds were. The sheer relief he felt now revealed just how dark his subconscious thought processes had become.

Carousel gave Tsunagu an understanding smile as she took a seat on a rock to his left. “That’s understandable. You two seem to have done quite well for yourselves given how long you have been lost, but that doesn’t make the experience any easier.”

“Mmmhmmm...” Tsunagu hummed.

“Don’t fall asleep in your cereal,” Katsuki chastised. “Eat it.”

“Mmmhmmm...”

“What does that mean?” the student asked. It would be rude not to eat the oatmeal after accepting it. Tsunagu forced himself to do so then collapsed to the bare ground in a heap as Katsuki talked--quite amicably--with the rescue heroes. Maybe Katsuki didn’t know how to be prickly in English or maybe something had really changed for the student during their unscheduled vacation.

The helicopter woke Tsunagu as it descend from the sky like a great, white vulture. “Time to send you guys home!” Carousel said as the fiber hero dragged himself to his feet.

“Thank you, so, so much,” Tsunagu told them.

“Thanks,” Katsuki nodded to the heroes.

Helicopters are really loud. Tsunagu had ridden in plenty before, so he jumped up into the machine’s belly without hesitation. Katsuki followed suit. The Canadians waved to them as the pair strapped themselves to the long, upholstered bench that would allow passengers to sit or lie down as necessary. The pilots checked that the passengers had properly secured the straps then closed the doors. At Tsunagu’s feet lay an enormous pile of blankets. “I am so happy right now,” Tsunagu whispered as he mentally buried himself in the comforting, warm presences of familiar fibers. He quirk-dragged the lot of them into his grasp, hoarding them like a European dragon.

“Let me have some!” Katsuki shouted to be heard over the roar of the rotors as the vehicle took off. It was at this moment that the fiber hero again remembered how tired he was...

When the helicopter's landing jerked him back to consciousness, Tsunagu woke in a heap of blankets, leaning on Katsuki, who did not seem to mind in the least. The kid was actually smiling at him.

At the Churchill airport, such as it was, they were provided with a change of clothes--or rather Katsuki got some loose-fitting jeans, a flannel shirt, and long coat which looked pretty strange on him while Tsunagu was given several pieces of denim clothing. He assembled the fabric into something resembling his normal hero getup. The Canadians fed them again--a real meal this time, hamburgers, fries, salads… then ushered them onto a tiny plane which flew them to Winnipeg. Practically the moment that plane landed, some weird guy in a black suit took them aside, scanned their fingerprints, checked Tsunagu’s hero license, and asked for some identifying information from both of them. After that, airport security officials offered them a shower. Both tripped over their tongues accepting. Hot water… oh my god that was amazing. Katsuki’d lost track of just how unspeakably filthy his skin felt.

The travelers were herded onto an airliner bound for Vancouver. After they got there, they’d catch a plane to Tokyo. Katsuki was plenty eager to get home… but this was a little fast. He would have liked the opportunity to call his folks… He would have liked to get a decent night’s sleep in a warm bed before being shunted onto a plane. Tsunagu had slept on Katsuki for the entire flight from… wherever the hell they had been in Manitoba to Churchill but the pro still seemed exhausted. Katsuki was also dead on his feet.

There was a huge amount of whispering. The two travelers were secluded in a quiet little corner of first class for the second intranational flight, but that didn’t stop the recognition and the speculation. The flight attendants did a good job of shooing curious travelers away from them, which was much appreciated. Tsunagu squinted at some paperwork, immigration documentation maybe. The hero didn’t ask Katsuki for his signature on anything and the student fell asleep on Tsunagu’s shoulder halfway to Vancouver. Not as comfortable as a bed… but acceptable.

Katsuki hadn’t paid much attention to the details of how they were getting home. Presumably it was in that packet Tsunagu had been going over. “Do we have to wait for them to ship our passports to us?” Katsuki asked softly as the plane began its descent into Vancouver, which was clearly a really interesting place. There were some cool things in Canada… even the part they had been stuck in was pretty cool. Katsuki should come back someday.

“At it turns out, we do not have to wait for passports. It seems there are international agreements about how to rapidly repatriate the victims of these kinds of quirk attacks… or accidents,” the pro explained. “I was only vaguely aware of them. The Japanese government has confirmed our identities from fingerprints and the questions asked in Winnipeg. The Canadians are cleared to send us home.”

“Are we taking a commercial flight…?” Jeanist was rich enough that Katsuki had to ask. The hero clearly understood what he meant.

“The Genius Office does own jets, but we can get home more quickly by taking a commercial flight. There is one leaving within an hour of our scheduled arrival in Vancouver… which will again preclude any possibility of making phone calls, but will get us back to Japan very rapidly.”

“Commercial flight it is then.”

Vancouver was actually a real airport as opposed to Winnipeg which had like five gates. A few Canadian security agents--one of whom was apparently a fan of some Japanese heroes and trying (failing) not to collapse into a puddle of Deku-like babbling goo--shepherded them around the security and customs lines and sequestered them in a quiet part of first class on the hulking trans-Pacific jetliner. The seats on this plane were some kind of velvety material. The last ones had been leather or some synthetic leather crap. Tsunagu melted into the seat, practically purring--really was a house cat, wasn’t he? “I take it you like the seats?” Bakugou deadpanned.

“I cannot even tell what it is… it is exactly like cheesecake in every respect. I must identify this material when we get home. Maybe I should start flying commercial more often… I have been missing out.” The hero passed out in a heap not even thirty seconds later. Katsuki didn’t have the heart to wake his companion for the safety presentation. Presumably pro heroes didn’t need the flight attendants to tell them how to act in a disaster. In retrospect, this had been the most horribly stressful time in Katsuki’s life and had probably been even worse for Tsunagu who considered Katsuki’s well being to be his responsibility somehow. The poor guy deserved some sleep.

“In case of water landing, Tsunagu is right about the universe hating him,” Katsuki muttered as the lady demonstrated the workings of the life vests. Katsuki wouldn’t even be surprised if the plane did go down in the middle of the ocean--oh god, he’d really spent too much time with Best Jeanist. The jetliner took flight. They were finally on their way to Japan.

“What are you doing?” Tsunagu asked.

“How long have you been awake?”

“About thirty minutes… and you have yet to decide which of these in flight movies to view.”

Katsuki nodded. “It’s the first television, the first media in weeks--it’s an important decision. It’s like… restarting my life. What note am I gonna’ start it up on?”

“Hmmm...”

“What’s your taste in movies, anyway? Can’t imagine blood and guts is your thing, so these three movies are out...”

“I watch documentaries from time to time.”

“Boring.”

Tsunagu sniffed. “I enjoy a good comedy. I like my main characters to be… bitingly sarcastic.”

“Oh, you like it when they’re just like you?”

Tsunagu cocked his head. “They do not have to be exactly like me.”

Katsuki sighed, leaning against the pro’s shoulder. “We made it. We’re not dead.”

“Always a good thing,” Tsunagu hummed.

“Oh god, I’m gonna’ have so much makeup work… two weeks worth... I’m not gonna’ sleep a night ‘till the freakin’ year is over.”

Tsunagu narrowed his eyes. “Sleep is more important than school work.”

“Alright, sure. I’ll get some sleep.” In a few more hours he’d see his folks again. “I can’t believe we’re gonna’ see everyone again… it’s just… everything… so fast,” he finished lamely, unable to express the mental whiplash of being lost in Canada one day and safe in Japan the next.

“Oh, you think that is bad? Imagine how I felt. You slept through our arrival and woke up to a radically different situation, but I was in Japan one moment and lost in Canada the next.”

Katsuki hadn’t considered at the time how jarring that must have been… He hadn’t much cared what Jeanist thought or felt back then. “That must’ve really sucked.”

“It was a bit shocking,” the pro muttered.

“But now we’re going home and we can forget all about it.”

Silence stretched on… A baby screamed somewhere in coach. “I hope you do not forget everything,” Tsunagu said softly. “I intend to forget nothing. I am going to miss you. I had rather accustomed myself to your presence. Please keep in touch.”

Katsuki felt his cheeks burning. He’d kind of got used to having Tsunagu around, too… It was going to be really weird to suddenly not see him everywhere… and the pro was really miserable thinking about not seeing Katsuki anymore if that tone were anything to go by. “’Course I’ll keep in touch. I’ll give you my number, you can text me once you get your new phone number. Your old one’s slag, right? Did you have another?”

“I have a personal phone which was not with me during this incident. I will give you that number when we arrive in Japan and have some writing utensils at our disposal.”

“Cool… and maybe I can work with you again someday?”

“I certainly hope so.”

Katsuki turned his attention back to the screen on the wall in front of him. Which movie, which movie… “Oh, fuck it,” Katsuki muttered, choosing a film at random.

“I thought the first movie was an important decision?”

“Yeah, but I’d like to finish watching something before we get to Japan,” Katsuki said.

A total lack of luggage and seats in the very first row made deplaning a rapid process. There would be a car waiting for them once they got out of the terminal… but getting out of the terminal might be a trick. There were a hundred cameras between the edge of the secure area and the outside doors. This explained why his folks weren’t meeting them right here--didn’t want it to become some kind of public spectacle. “Alright,” Tsunagu turned to Katsuki with a very serious expression, as if they were about to head into battle, “for your safety and sanity, please do as I ask as we navigate this trial. Keep a hand in front of your eyes to shield yourself from the camera flashes, walk straight ahead, do not make eye contact with anyone and do not answer any questions. In fact, I recommend you not say anything at all. I am going to repeatedly say, “please address all questions to the Genius Office press representative.” Walk behind me--the person in front is always harassed more and you are not accustomed to that yet. Do not stop for any reason. Do not let them separate us. Alright?”

“You’re more serious about this than you were about the wolves...” Katsuki pointed out.

“The press are nothing like wolves. Do not insult my favorite animal.”

Katsuki chuckled and followed Tsunagu into the fray. How could a bunch of reporters be so freakin’ loud? It was so much worse than that day the paparazzi swarmed UA’s gates. Jeanist walked ahead like an icebreaker and the student followed closely, not giving the pack ice--journalists--a chance to close back in. They somehow weaseled their way out of the airport, identified the waiting car from its license plate, and slid into the back seats. The driver pulled away from the curb the moment the doors closed.

“Thank you for the lift, Shuffleboard,” Tsunagu said to the driver, a middle-aged woman with long, black braids.

“Shuffleboard? What kind of name is that?” Katsuki muttered.

“Last I heard you didn’t have a name, pipsqueak, so it’s automatically better than yours.”

“Hey!”

“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” Tsunagu told the lady.

“Where are we headed?” Katsuki asked, blinking away fatigue from the long trip. God, jet lag was killing him.

Shuffleboard said something garbled. On the repetition, the garbage turned out to be, “Genius Office lobby. Safe place to meet up with the kid’s parents and friends. Jeanist’s family and friends would be there, too, if he had any of either.”

“I have friends. I have lots of friends,” Tsunagu replied. Katsuki could see how these two might get along.

The press had accumulated in front of the Genius Office, too, but a group of denim-wielding sidekicks shooed them out of the way so that Tsunagu and Katsuki could duck into the building. They stepped through the second set of double doors--Tsunagu squeaked, actually squeaked like some kind of mouse as Gang Orca swept him off the ground. “Kuugo! Put me down!” the hero yelled.

Gang Orca triumphantly carried Tsunagu across the room. “Make me.” The student stared in bewilderment as Best Jeanist tried to wriggle out of Gang Orca’s grasp… Katsuki really needed to get in on this “dating or friends” betting pool.

“Kacchan!” Deku launched himself at Katsuki, beating even the old hag… oh, god, she was crying… his father was crying, too… parents crying tears of joy over him. Inko was there, also crying, but that was to be expected. His own parents--that made no sense. They weren’t like that. Oh god, what was he supposed to do in this situation? Parents crying, Deku lunging at him covered in green lightning? What to do, what to--

Deku slammed into Katsuki, nearly knocking the student over. He had lost a good amount of weight during the ordeal, and his old friend seemed to have become… much stronger and faster. The hell had he missed? “Oh my gosh I was so worried! You both disappeared on live television and then they were looking everywhere for you and no one knew where you were and after a week they were saying you were probably dead and everyone in class was so heartbroken and Kirishima seems like he’s almost clinically depressed and Ashido was crying after class and Aizawa had to give this long, horrible speech about how he lost one of his classmates and friends during school and even Todoroki was bawling at the end and I thought you were dead Kacchan!” Katsuki grimaced… that was a lot to take in. Aizawa lost a classmate? Todoroki was crying? And Izuku… still cared so much even after everything… Why did Katsuki have to be such a bitch to this guy? He still felt like being a bitch to him, even knowing exactly how stupid and misplaced that feeling was…

“Calm the fuck down, nerd. It wasn’t that big of a deal--”

“Brat!” the old hag grabbed him, wrestling his thin form out of Deku’s grip. “Don’t you ever scare us like that again, you hear me? God, that was so stupid. You stay out of fights like that for now, you hear me? You are still in school and school children should not be on the Hero Public Safety Commission’s Missing In Action list!”

“Not like it was the damn plan, hag!” Katsuki shouted at her. “And I’m gonna’ be a hero! Dangerous is in the job description!”

His dad grabbed him then, crushing him into an inescapable hug. “I am so happy to see you. I’m so glad you’re alright. I know heroics is dangerous, but listen to your mother… please be more careful. I… didn’t know what I was going to do without you.”

The pain you feel losing a loved one is the pain they feel when they lose you… Katsuki winced. “That sucks. I’m, ugh, it really wasn’t a big deal. We’re fine.”

“It was a big deal, but you’re home now,” Inko said, beaming. Katsuki’s dad let him go and the student allowed Inko to hug him as well. “I am so glad you’re safe.”

Across the lobby, Tsunagu had escaped from Gang Orca and was trying--unsuccessfully--to get a huge gaggle of sidekicks to give him breathing room. Apparently they had a cake. “I actually need to have some real food, first,” the pro protested as someone shoved a plate at him.

“Fine,” Gang Orca decided, “we’ll order food for everyone, on me.” A cheer erupted through the lobby.

“I cannot possibly allow that--I should pay,” Tsunagu protested.

“Are you kidding? I swear, you would insist on paying for the food at your own wake.”

“Isn’t that how it is supposed to work? Were you planning to charge guests at your wake an entrance fee? “Come one, come all to a wake for a great hero and philanthropist. All mourners must contribute 600 yen to the sushi fund?”” Katsuki laughed. Izuku joined in after a moment. Their parents at least smiled a little.

“You’re not paying, Tsunagu.” Jeanist threw up his hands in surrender.

“So… where do we want to order from?” asked Three Ring, easily recognizable by his top hat. “Suggestions and a vote?”

“Oh no you don’t!” One of the other sidekicks shook their head vigorously. “Last time we did that I got suspended for two weeks. We’re ordering from the same place as last time!”

“Sure… but where was that?”

Tsunagu sighed and buried his face in Gang Orca’s shoulder.

“I’m kind of surprised this couch isn’t denim,” Katsuki commented, sprawling out on the sofa. Tsunagu had chosen to curl up in an arm chair.

“I like velvet,” Tsunagu said, “and I recognize that denim does not make good upholstery.”

“Huh. Really? You recognize that denim isn’t everything?” Tsunagu shrugged. “School’s been crazy--trying to catch up on all this work really sucks, but they’re letting me just… not do some of it. There was an essay I missed and they’re just gonna’ drop it from grade calculation.”

“Only fair,” Tsunagu smiled, “I think you had enough practical experience to make up for a missed essay or two.”

“People keep asking me about the god damned polar bear. I kinda’ wish you hadn’t mentioned that to the news.”

“Hmmm… would you rather everyone be asking you about the polar bear or digging into less superficial subjects? News anchors love to ask heroes whether they were afraid,” Tsunagu scoffed, “yes, obviously I was afraid, and I would appreciate not being constantly reminded of that fact. I expect you prefer your classmates harassing you for details about the “above average bear” rather than constantly inquiring whether you are alright.” Tsunagu did not “expect” this to be the case so much as he knew this to be the case.

“Yeah, fair,” Katsuki agreed. “How are you with everything? Getting back to work and all?”

Tsunagu had merged back into the routine of every day life quite smoothly, save for one thing. “I am fairing well, except that I find myself missing your company sometimes.”

Katsuki nodded knowingly. “I keep on saying things and then expecting you to say something sarcastic and you don’t ‘cause you’re not there.” Tsunagu translated this to, “I miss you, too.”

“I am glad you could come by tonight,” the fiber hero said.

“Yeah. Your apartment is super weird by the way...”

“Did you expect anything less?”

“No. Really didn’t expect your psycho pet, though.”

“Ah, yes… Marid is in a particularly bad mood due to my absence. Kuugo is terrified of her… but still feeds her for me when I am indisposed, be that hospitalized for a day or missing in action for weeks.”

Katsuki nodded to himself. “I’ve been thinking of getting a cat,” he said.

“Good choice. Dogs are not for heroes.”

Katsuki raised an eyebrow. “Dogs aren’t for heroes?”

“The necessity of walks at regular times is not conducive to a hero’s lifestyle. A cat will be displeased if one arrives home twenty-four hours late, but such an event will not be disastrous. A dog, on the other hand… unless one has a domestic partner it is not feasible.”

“I mean, you could hire a service...”

“Villains will target your pets,” Tsunagu rushed out. Katsuki blinked. “It is heinous. A poor, defenseless animal being tortured or killed just because you love it… The creature can never understand, and that makes it so much worse.” Of all the dark truths of hero life, this might be the one he hated the most. “I encourage you to get a cat if you want one, but never publicly mention that you have a pet. Never even say that you are a “cat person” or anything of the sort. It is easy to keep cats inside, secret and safe… that is not the case for dogs. Even if you manage, as I have, to keep your place of residence completely secret, someone will see you walking a dog at some point… using a pet walking service leads to all kinds of additional dangers and complications.”

Katsuki grimaced. “That’s… I feel like it should make me mad but I just feel sad about it.”

“It is soul crushing to recognize that there are people on this planet who are so depraved,” Tsunagu agreed quietly. “I will admit to encouraging Marid to be unfriendly in the hope that if anyone ever did manage to find my home and break in, she would make herself scarce and not be discovered.”

Katsuki rubbed his forehead. “I swear, that’s the saddest freakin’ thing I’ve ever heard.” It might be the saddest thing he had heard in the last twenty-four hours, but certainly the student had heard some sadder things. “Maybe I shouldn’t get a cat...”

Tsunagu shook his head. “You cannot lead your life like that--choosing not to love to avoid the pain of loss. You want a cat, do you not? Why do you want one?”

Katsuki’s cheeks acquired that familiar, lovely tomato shade. “I’ve always thought it would be nice, and my folks are kinda’ doing whatever I want right now ‘cause I scared the hell out of them and they’re rethinking their entire lives.” How interesting. That could be good or bad. “So they’ll finally let me get one, and… during our lost in Canada episode I kinda’ got used to sleeping next to something warm and now I can’t. Sleep I mean.” Tsunagu tried very hard not to laugh. He shouldn’t laugh; it said an immense amount about how much Katsuki trusted him and how much the child had changed in such a short time that he admitted such a thing. Tsunagu should not laugh. He could not help himself. “It’s not that funny.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Tsunagu got out. “If that were the real reason, though, an electric blanket would suffice. I think you are just using this as an excuse to get a cat.”

“I’m gonna’ keep thinking about it for a while,” the student decided. “Might get one. Or maybe I’ll get a big rabbit... or a ferret.”

“I should tell you that I tracked down all the heroes involved in the slime villain incident, lectured them mercilessly, then stared at them in disappointment until they wilted like diseased flowers,” Tsunagu preened as he said this, immensely pleased with himself. Never underestimate the power of a stare. “And then I sent them all to sensitivity training as promised.” There were perks to top ten status, intimidation among them.

A smile quirked across Katsuki’s lips. “You didn’t have to do that… I’m not...” fragile? Worth it? For once, Katsuki did not finish the self-deprecating sentence.

“If I had to, what meaning would the gesture hold? I wanted to. Because I care about you, and because I anticipated having this conversation with you and having the opportunity to say things that would turn your ears a lovely shade of red.”

“Grrargh!” Katsuki grumbled, covering his ears and glaring. Tsunagu laughed at him again. “You’re ridiculous!”

“I know, but so are you, and I would not want you any other way.”

“Oh, here, by the way,” Katsuki pulled a notebook out of his bag and handed it over.

Tsunagu cocked his head and opened the cover, “I am very sorry for being so horrible to Midoriya Izuku and will not do it again. I am very sorry for...”

“Five hundred, like you said,” Katsuki nodded to himself.

Tsunagu had not really meant to assign the student this task, but was not surprised that it had been completed anyway. He flipped through the pages. “I will take your word for it. It is not words that I hope to see from you so much as actions.”

Katsuki ducked his head and crossed his arms defensively. “I don’t know what to say to him,” he admitted. “He was there when I got back like I… like I never did anything wrong to him. But I did and I don’t know what to do.”

The wronged child had treated Katsuki like a best friend, not a bully… That was a horrifically complicated relationship, and Tsunagu worried for Midoriya’s mental health, too. The fiber hero had spent quite a bit of time considering whether it would be appropriate to raise his concerns with Eraserhead. “Apologies are difficult for me, too,” Tsunagu admitted. “I find it hard to deliver one while looking the wronged party in the eye--I always end up inspecting my footwear, but that is still better than nothing. I mean what I say.”

Katsuki nodded. “You said all those nice things about me on the news...”

“I did.”

“But I’m not… What if I’m not like that, not good enough for all those things you said?”

Ah. Perhaps Tsunagu had set the bar too high, high enough to be intimidating. It was the fear of eventual failure, the certainty that one would not be able to keep a relapse at bay for long, that led to much unnecessary backsliding. “You worry you will let me down, me and yourself?”

“Yeah,” Katsuki hunched his shoulders more. “It’s just…” he waved his hands helplessly.

“I apologize for putting this kind of pressure on you. That was not my intention at all. I believe the praise I gave you was completely deserved. I expect that, just by continuing to be yourself and seeking to broaden your horizons, you shall more than live up to my quote “expectations.” Whatever happens, you will have my support. I will not reject you or turn on you for any mistake or “failure.”” He made finger quotes to emphasize the ridiculousness of such an idea. “Consider my affection unconditional.” Within reason, of course. Tsunagu had been betrayed by a friend once, betrayed nearly to his death, and “unconditional affection” had not survived that. But through anything short of that it would endure… and Tsunagu could not imagine Katsuki ever turning his coat. Never. It simply could not be--the fabric of the universe would disintegrate. “You will never get rid of me. So do not try.”

Katsuki smiled hesitantly. “Hm.” They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, considering. “I’m glad I got stuck with you,” Katsuki admitted at last.

“As am I. Would you like to sign the card?”

“What card?”

“A thank you card to Eagleeye, the villain that arranged for our brief trip to nowhere.” Tsunagu was not in the habit of taunting villains--it rarely ended well--but so many of his companions had already sent Eagleeye sarcastic (or vaguely threatening) letters that Tsunagu did not see the harm… and he felt the need to make a few jokes about the situation to cure himself of lingering anxiety.

“You’re seriously sending him a thank you card? What’s it say?”

“Dear Mr. Eagleeye, thank you for arranging wilderness therapy for myself and my associate…”

Bonus Scenes: Public Statements Are Fun

“Tsunagu you’re chortling,” Kuugo pointed out. The number four pro glanced up from his laptop screen to meet his friend’s eyes.

“I am.”

“Why are you chortling?” Kuugo tried. “Should I be afraid?”

“You need not fear. Public statements are fun.”

Gang Orca nodded. “Ah… deciding what you’re going to say about your unscheduled vacation?”

“Precisely.”

“What’s so fun about that?”

Tsunagu couldn’t help but start chortling again. “I am planning all these nice things to say about Katsuki and I just know that he will have no idea how to process them… His ears turn a lovely shade of scarlet when he’s embarrassed. For example, try this: “Bakugou Katsuki is a resourceful, resilient, persevering and caring young man who will certainly make an excellent hero. It was a pleasure to get to know him so well, although I would have appreciated less dire circumstances, and I hope very much that I will have the opportunity to work with him again in the future.””

Kuugo chuckled. “That would make anyone’s ears red.” There was a long pause. “Have I told you how glad I am that you’re both okay?”

“About fifty times.”

“Expect another fifty at least.”

“Bakugou!” Kirishma yelled--the room erupted into cheers. The Explosion wielder had just barely got his act together in time to get to school that day, so he was the last to arrive. Katsuki winced, crossing his arms and looking away because he didn’t know how to handle this. Aizawa left him to the mercy of the extras, just smiled wryly and refused to intervene or demand quiet.

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh! It was on the news that they found you and I was so happy I almost fell out of my chair!” Ashido yelled, jumping up and down. She looked like she was going to try to hug him… Katsuki threw his arms out in front of his chest and walked rapidly towards his desk to avoid this.

“Welcome back!” Kaminari shouted.

“As class president,” Iida began, “it is my honor to present you with this.” Oh god, they’d made him a giant “welcome back” card! What should he do? He kind of felt like yelling at everyone… but he also didn’t. Before Canada, he probably would have screamed at them about something or other… Had he really changed that much? He ended up just grunting and accepting the card.

“They said you were dead, Bakugou!” Kirishima yelled, throwing himself across Katsuki’s desk. He was crying. Oh, god, what should he do about this? Deku’s tears he understood. He knew what to do about that. This, though… how should he deal with a crying Kirishima? This guy ran around yelling about how things were “manly” all day long… “Don’t do that!”

Running on autopilot, Katsuki said the first thing that came to mind, which happened to be, “Uh… sure.”

“Alright, we do actually have class,” Aizawa said at last. Thank god.

As Aizawa began to explain the day’s lessons, Katsuki inspected his card. It was no professional work of art--but everyone in 1-A had signed it as well as some other students and teachers… 1-B’s enforcer lady must have threatened Monoma to make him sign. Someone had gone overboard with the glitter… probably Aoyama. Katsuki couldn’t help but smile a little reading over all the messages… messages from people who were just happy that Katsuki was alive. He felt like he might physically melt. What kind of emotion was this and how could he get rid of it before it destroyed him?

“You’re different,” Kirishima said bluntly as they sat down to lunch, Katsuki’s typical squad and a couple extras joining them.

“Oh?” Katsuki growled. Was he obviously different? Seriously, he hadn’t changed that much. It was just a week and a half. What was twelve days compared to the rest of his whole damn life?

“Yeah, you’re growling like… at least twenty percent less...” Ashido pointed out. “Weird trip, huh?”

“Hmph. Yeah… sure.” He wondered vaguely what Tsunagu was up to right now.

Kaminari looked up from his phone. “Did you guys actually fight a polar bear?”

“Where’d ya’ hear that?”

“Reading highlights from stuff Best Jeanist said this morning.” Right… Tsunagu mentioned that he would be giving interviews and crap. And that he was going to say lots of nice things about Katsuki. The Explosion wielder pulled his phone out, typed in the search bar. Oh god...

“Best Jeanist says that Blasty is a “persevering and caring young man who will certainly make an excellent hero,” Ashido read off her phone. Katsuki leaned ever closer to the lunch table so none of his… friends… could see his cheeks turn the color of strawberries. His ears were probably giving him away, though, damn it.

“Bro?” asked Kirishima. He wasn’t laughing, but Katsuki just knew he wanted to laugh.

“Shut up, spiky hair,” Katsuki mumbled. “Damn it, Tsunagu, you’re laughing at me right now aren’t you?” Katsuki could practically hear the guy cackling.

Sero asked, “what did you just call him?”

“Tsunagu. It’s his given name.”

Kirishima blinked at him. “You’re on a first name basis with the number four pro in the country?”

Seriously, this wasn’t that weird. In retrospect, he couldn’t imagine any version of the Canada incident where they didn’t end up on a first name basis. “I spent a week and half with the guy, just us, in the middle of fucking nowhere! Of course we’re on a first name basis.”

“So, seriously, did you two really fight some kind of super polar bear?” asked Kaminari.

Katsuki cringed--in retrospect, he had not handled that fight very well… “Yeah. That sucked. Don’t fight polar bears, especially polar bears with quirks. They’re horrible.”

“It had a quirk?” Kirishima gaped.

“Yeah. Later, Tsunagu said something about it being like a furry version of All Might...”

“But you beat it?” asked Ashido excitedly.

“It got it’s leg broken, we got some scratches, we went our separate ways.” He wasn’t going to mention that Tsunagu passed out at the end--Tsunagu hadn’t mentioned any of Katsuki’s… issues.

“So what’s Best Jeanist actually like?” asked Sero. “Like you said, you spent almost two weeks alone with him. You must know so much stuff. Spill!”

How to sum it up without straying into forbidden territory? “He is a condescending house cat. And Fiber Master is a freakin’ weird quirk.”

“Condescending house cat?” Kaminari snorted.

“Seriously, that’s all you’ve got?” Sero quirked an eyebrow.

Katsuki shrugged. “I know all kinds of stuff, but he’s not going around telling people weird crap about me. Even if he were I wouldn’t go around saying weird crap about him.”

“Gossip isn’t your thing, is it?” Ashido pouted.

“No.”

Bonus Scenes: Kamui Woods Ruing The Day

“Good evening, everyone, I suppose you are wondering why I have called you here today,” Tsunagu addressed the group of heroes he had summoned to his office.

“Uh… yeah, Jeanist,” Death Arms said nervously. It was unusual for the number four pro to assemble a group of heroes like this. Tsunagu had made it clear that attendance was compulsory.

“I have summoned you here to discuss an incident with the UA student Bakugou Katsuki prior to his enrollment in high school.” Most of them looked confused, but Kamui Woods squirmed uncomfortably. The others might not remember this incident, but Kamui clearly did and the look on his face said he understood, to some degree, that he had made a serious error in judgment.

“What are you talking about, Jeanist?” asked Death Arms. It was infuriating that he did not even remember.

“All of you were present when a villain with the ability to turn his body into slime attacked Bakugou Katsuki and attempted to asphyxiate him for more than ten minutes. Now, since I was forced to watch this footage and cringe in horror as all of you stood idly by like mannequins--I needed to determine who was involved--you are going to watch it, too.” Tsunagu powered on the screen embedded in his wall, hit play, and folded his arms, fixing his most withering stare upon all his guests as the footage rolled on. God, it had been agony to watch that. He set his gaze upon his guests, not the screen, because he would rather have an ice pick driven into his skull than again see his poor student dying while all these heroes just… watched.

“I mean, he was doing really well--” Death Arms began while Backdraft waved his arms, frantically trying to indicate to the other hero that he should stop talking now.

“How can you, a pro hero, sworn to protect your fellow citizens say such a thing? How dare you? His quirk is irrelevant to this discussion; it has nothing to do with your obligation towards him, and, good lord, if you were to treat one of your sidekicks like this, if you were not to even attempt to help your coworker, I imagine you would find it impossible to keep anyone in your employ. If you were to treat me like that I would refuse to ever work with you again. How could I trust you to have my back? And treating a civilian this way, a child, is far worse!” Tsunagu drew himself up to his full height--he was not a very intimidating figure even with the added bulk of his costume, but he allowed his fingers to twitch and curl with his anger and that subtle tell was enough to frighten his lecturees. Tsunagu’s fingers were dangerous. “I understand that it might have been difficult for any of you to defeat this villain but you did not even try and that is inexcusable. I cannot imagine what was going through your heads!”

“I mean, I did try it was just… I couldn’t get a grip on him...” Death Arms protested.

“Are you truly so short-sighted that you could not think of anything else to do?” Tsunagu hissed, exasperated. “Or anyone to call? I know that All Might’s appearance was coincidental. The moment you realized this villain was more than you could handle and a life was at stake, I should have heard your voices on the emergency channels.

“You left this poor child thinking he was somehow unworthy of your help, that he was obligated to always fend for himself, that heroes would leave him to die!” Tsunagu roared, and the lot of them shrank beneath his fury. They had never heard him roar before, not even in combat. “You sent him home without so much as a checkup! Again, this would be unacceptable even if he had been a full-fledged pro hero! What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t,” Kamui said, having the decency to look ashamed. “It was… at the time it made sense, in the heat of battle. I was mostly trying to do crowd control… and I should have focused on the kid. When I thought about it afterwards, I knew we’d handled it badly.”

“At least one of you has some sense,” Tsunagu sighed. He turned his gaze to the others. They were all staring at the ground. “Indeed, your shoes are very interesting,” the fiber hero said.

“What do you want me to say?” sighed Death Arms.

“I do not want you to say anything,” Tsunagu replied. “I want you to do something about that frightening attitude of yours.” He tossed a stack of envelopes to his guests.

“You... want us to attend sensitivity training?” asked Backdraft, pulling open his envelope.

“That is an almost insulting oversimplification of the content this program offers. I think you would benefit from some self-reflection… I recently had the chance to engage in this activity for a significant period of time.” The Canadian wilderness had provided excellent opportunities for that. “It was good for me.” He stared at them.

Death Arms shook his head, “I don’t have time for this I--”

“Definitely have time for this,” Tsunagu interrupted, voice frozen to the core.

“I--” began the hero again. Tsunagu clenched his fingers.

“He’ll be happy to attend!” Kamui Woods intervened.

“Excellent. I trust I shall never have to have such a conversation with any of you. Ever again.”

“Of course not, Jeanist,” Kamui assured.

“Thank you for speaking with me. Be advised that I may keep a close eye on you in the near future.” Everyone recognized this as Tsunagu’s code for “I am still mad at you. Watch yourselves.” Everyone except Death Arms, perhaps… who apparently could not take a hint.

“I really don’t have the time--” the hero whispered as the group departed.

“Yes you do,” hissed Kamui. Did they not realize that Jeanist could still hear them? “You want to live, don’t you? Then you have time!”

Well, that was just slander. Tsunagu would not kill any of them for refusing. Well, probably.

Bonus Scenes: Best Jeanist Yells Some More

“Nedzu,” Tsunagu said to UA’s principal. “Thank you for speaking with me about my concern.”

“Of course, Hakamata. May I ask what this is about?”

“The UA Sports Festival.” Would Nedzu have any idea what he was talking about?

The mammal cocked his head. “What, specifically, did you wish to address?”

“As you are aware, I recently spent a significant amount of time with Bakugou Katsuki. We discussed the events of the awards ceremony.”

“Ah… you believe the restraints were inappropriate?” the mammal’s ears flicked out to the side… a very interesting tell of unease.

“I understand that you may not have realized this… but when I saw Katsuki chained up in that way I presumed that he must have done something to warrant it, and the only infraction that could possibly fit that punishment… would be attempting to cause serious harm to classmates and teachers while also demanding to be given his medal on television. I expected my intern to be a villain in the making.”

“Ah...” the mammal considered, grimacing. “That was… not the impression I wished to give of this student. Volatile he may be, but I do not believe him to be an… actual threat to the safety of himself or others. Certainly Eraserhead would have expelled him if he were…”

Tsunagu nodded. “You have caused him… serious psychological harm. He was, perhaps still is, convinced that there is something fundamentally rotten in him that warranted such treatment.”

Nedzu sighed. “There are some parts of human society that I find… nearly impossible to understand. I depend upon my teachers and friends to explain such things to me and see to it that my behavior is,” he paused, “appropriate. There was a famous psychological experiment once in which scientists demanded subjects deliver increasingly dangerous--lethal even--electric shocks to other participants in neighboring rooms. So long as the scientists--the authority figures--insisted that the shocks continue, most subjects did as instructed. Had the setup been real--had the screams the subjects heard not been actors paid to pretend they were being electrocuted to death--most participants would have been willing to kill an innocent person--a person begging for his or her life--just because an authority figure demanded the killing take place.”

Tsunagu was aware of this. “I know of the experiments. And I know what you mean by bringing them up.”

“It seems it is time for another staff meeting in which I tell that story in detail and explain that I do not wish for blind obedience…”

Tsunagu nodded. There were not many heroes in his employ brave enough to call him out when he was wrong--Three Ring would, as would Glazer from time to time. They were valuable for it. “Do I have permission to speak with Midnight and All Might about this incident?”

Nedzu cocked his head. “Did you just ask my permission to scream at two of my teachers?”

“What’s going on in there?” asked Kirishima as he and Katsuki came across a small crowd accumulating near an empty classroom. Braver members of the group peeked through the windows, others crouched near the door.

“Best Jeanist is yelling at All Might,” Izuku whispered, looking awed and horrified.

“He was yelling at Midnight but now he’s yelling at All Might,” Kaminari explained.

Katsuki gulped. “I still hoped he might have been kidding.”

“Kacchan?” asked Izuku, bewildered.

“He said he was gonna’ yell at a lot of people when we got back,” Katsuki shrugged. “I kept telling him he shouldn’t yell at All Might and he kept saying I couldn’t stop him. Also, safe to say he knows we’re here.”

“Neither of them have been looking this way,” whispered Ashido.

Katsuki shook his head. “Jeanist doesn’t need to look at you to know where you are. I’m gonna’ get out of here before… well, I think he’ll just glare at you… but see you later.” Katsuki walked rapidly back towards homeroom.

Bonus Scenes: Kamino Ward (because I love the kind of drama that results form someone nearly dying)

What were they going to do with him, then? The League of Villains hadn’t been after him in the first place. He was a consolation prize. They’d been after Todoroki, Monoma, and Ragdoll--Monoma had been safe and sound in remedial courses. They hadn’t managed to get Ragdoll, either… they got Todoroki, and Katsuki was just in the wrong place so they grabbed him, too.

They’d mostly ignored him for… it might have been days. They chained him up, left him in a cell. Occasionally Toga, the creepiest damn girl he’d ever seen in his life, came by to check on him, feed him and stuff. He’d almost prefer to starve, then he wouldn’t have to listen to her crooning about his blood. He cringed away from her cold touch as she prodded at him curiously. That smile, too… she was a nightmare. Then something finally changed and they dragged him out into a bar. Shigaraki was there, and Kurogiri… the lizard guy, everyone.

“Honestly,” rasped the hand creep, running four fingertips through the student’s hair, “I thought you might have been a good candidate to join the League… but given what we heard about you from the pro you were lost with… I think you’re a lost cause.” Well, that was nice to hear, even if it meant horrible things were going to happen to him. He’d rather be dead than be the sort of person villains liked. And maybe someone would rescue him? It could still happen. Carousel and company found him in Canada against all odds so clearly it was possible. Eraserhead would be looking for him, would never abandon a student. Tsunagu would be looking for him, leaving no stone unturned. Todoroki’s father would be looking for the League, too, and no doubt Endeavour, Best Jeanist and UA combined could call in a freakin’ ton of favors. Out beyond those walls, heroes were turning the country inside out looking for the kidnapped students. Maybe… maybe they weren’t going to find him in time, but they were looking and that bit of hope made everything… bearable at least. Shigaraki continued in his rasping lilt, “I think we ought to hand you off to the doctor… see what he can do with that lovely quirk of yours. You’re not our kind, are you?”

Katsuki squirmed, not quite sure what that bit about the doctor meant but desperate not to find out. The heavy chains held him fast. “Let me go! I’ll show you what “kind” I am, bastards!” Katsuki screamed, not totally sure what that meant, either. He just needed to say something defiant. The anger helped him push away the fear.

“Hmmm…” Shigaraki smiled and Katsuki’s blood ran cold as five fingers slowly crept towards his wrist.

“Pizza delivery!” What the fu--?

The wall exploded inwards, All Might flying at Shigaraki, villains flung into every corner--and before they could recover, their clothes unraveled, pulling wrists and ankles together. “Katsuki,” Tsunagu said, voice overwhelmed with relief. Jeanist knelt beside him and worked threads into the locks, freeing him in seconds. “Sorry this took so long.”

“Yeah, you’re slacking off,” Katsuki said, flinging the chains away with a clatter and flexing his wrists. Other heroes poured into the remains of the bar and villains that could still run retreated out a back door.

Tsunagu pulled the student towards the remains of the entrance. What had happened to All Might? Must've chased Shigaraki into the building where Katsuki used to be. “Let’s get you out of here--what is that?”

Katsuki hadn’t seen this villain before--no face but still dressed like a politician. The villain raised his hand--Tsunagu raised his and Katsuki felt his own clothes grab him and pull him towards the ground--the fiber hero did the same for all his allies in the room, attending to everyone else but forgetting himself. Katsuki yanked Jeanist to the ground with him--not quite, just not quite fast enough.

The wave of razor-sharp wind glanced across Tsunagu’s shoulder and the very, very edge caught him across the neck. The fiber hero collapsed in a heap, gasping and choking, fumbling with his collar. All Might reappeared, was fighting with All For One and everything was collapsing into chaos around them, but Katsuki didn’t care. He ripped Jeanist’s collar off--well, really Jeanist disintegrated it when Katsuki pulled at the fabric--which was good. Very good. Still responsive… The student ripped at the second layer, managed to pull it up enough to get a look at the damage. The fabric Katsuki shoved aside was dripping blood, the skin beneath soaked in crimson. The edge of the attack had shallowly slit Tsunagu’s throat.

“Oh god, oh god,” Katsuki coughed out, using both hands to apply all the pressure possible to his companion’s slit jugular without crushing the hero’s trachea. “You idiot! Bastard! Why did you do that?” The shielding anger didn’t last long. “Please don’t die. Please don’t,” Katsuki begged. He thought he understood from the USJ, from their time in Canada, what it felt like to be truly terrified for someone’s life, but that had been nothing. This, this--the whole world was blurry except the hot blood spilling between his fingers, the ragged coughs, someone he cared about who he might be seeing for the very last time right now. And this was a horrible last way to see Tsunagu… cringing against the floor, eyes shining with pain, blood pooling beneath him. Please don’t let this be Katsuki’s final memory of Best Jeanist. “Don’t die,” Katsuki nearly sobbed.

Tsunagu’s fingers twitched and a frayed thread on Katsuki’s sleeve stitched a few clumsy characters onto his shirt. “You will be okay.”

“No! I will not! So don’t die you idiot!” Katsuki was crying and he couldn’t have cared less if anyone saw. “Help! Please!” he howled for anyone. No one came. No one could come, not with the battle raging on… the battle Katsuki tuned out because it wasn’t important. Tsunagu fell limp. His eyes were still open, but he was definitely unconscious.

Blood seeped between the student’s bone-white fingers, the air heavy with the coppery scent. Tsunagu drifted back to consciousness, but wasn’t aware enough to do more than shift beneath Katsuki’s desperate grip. The hero’s shoulder was such a mess, too, but there seemed little point in worrying about that. Tsunagu lost consciousness again, and this time closed his eyes. Katsuki wondered helplessly whether he would ever see that particular shade of emerald again…

“Hey, let me see,” two EMTs and a rescue hero sank to the ground beside him.

He wasn’t sure who the rescue hero was. She was strong though, dragged him away even as he protested and thrashed. “Let them do their jobs,” the hero said.

Screams and shouts ricocheted like bullets across Kamino Ward, search lights and emergency vehicles lighting the night into a lurid disco ball. He stood in the center of the chaos, powerless. What good was he, standing here, useless? What good was anyone? How could it end like this?

Katsuki was calling him names. Most of those names involved some reference to him being “condescending” or a “house cat” or a “sarcastic bitch.” But from Katsuki those were almost terms of endearment... Tsunagu pried his eyes open. He could hear Katsuki to his left… but he looked like he was collapsed in a hospital chair to the right… and Fiber Master said that the student was above him, in the ceiling somewhere. He was also sure that Katsuki’s hair was blonde, not black--and hospitals rarely had walls that dark in gray…

Tsunagu reached for the IV he could barely make out in his left wrist--except he was moving the wrong hand and the IV was actually on his right wrist--and ripped it out despite Katsuki yelling at him not to and calling him more names.

“Drug… doesn’t agree… with me,” Tsunagu spat out of his sand-blasted throat. Every breath burned and speaking was much worse… Lots of drugs did not agree with him. There were at least ten notes in his medical records about which medications he should and should not have. People with mutation quirks often had these kinds of problems, as did those like Tsunagu whose quirks significantly altered their brain chemistry and neural pathways. Painkillers and anesthetics frequently posed a problem for him.

More people arrived. “He said that a drug in the IV didn’t agree with him,” Katsuki explained. The doctors and nurses prodded him, touched bare skin carelessly. Tsunagu hissed at them--couldn’t help making his intense discomfort clear somehow--but couldn’t get words out of his burning throat to demand they stop. This probably wouldn’t help with the “house cat” reputation, would it?

“Hakamata? What did you mean that the drug did not agree with you?” asked the doctor. Her name tag said “Yamamoto...” Tsunagu knew like twenty people with that name.

Pushing past the fire, the fiber hero coughed out, “senses… don’t match… hear you to the left… see you on the right.”

There was some nondescript muttering. “What idiot...” Tsunagu barely made out. “No wonder,” the doctor said, “you have it written five different places in your file that you are not to receive this family of painkiller under any circumstances. There will be words about this, I assure you.” The doctor flipped the chart, stared at something in horror and said, “in fact, someone is going to be fired… and face legal repercussions.” That was not comforting.

Tsunagu woke up again, although he did not recall losing consciousness. The room was no longer upside down or backwards. He could see Kuugo half lying on the bed to his right and feel him there as well. Katsuki was still collapsed in a chair… though given how much better Tsunagu felt, Katsuki must have left and come back. It had probably been several days since the “wrong painkiller” incident.

These drugs definitely had some interesting side effects, too, because the first thing that Tsunagu said to Katsuki was, “you know I was anesthetized for surgery with chloroform once?” Katsuki stared at him. “It’s true. It was some tiny hospital in a rural area… the only real drugs they had would’ve killed me, and someone dug up a bottle of this carcinogenic slop and I told them “fine! Just do it already!” because I was tired of bleeding all over everyone.”

“You’ve gotta’ be freakin’ kidding,” Katsuki said, horrified.

“He’s not,” Kuugo shook his head. “I was so mad when I found out…” Gang Orca reached forward to stroke Tsunagu’s hair. He didn’t say “I’m so glad to see you,” because he did not have to.

Tsunagu tried to shrug and nearly passed out from the sudden burst of white-hot steel that lanced through his shoulder. He coughed a few times before finally continuing, “the chloroform didn’t kill me then and a single exposure probably won’t do much damage in the long run...”

“They seriously didn’t have anything better than chloroform?” the student spat.

“No--it’s even more annoying for Kuugo.”

Gang Orca shook his head. “It’s not, actually… I don’t have Tsunagu’s issues with anesthetics and painkillers. I have a long list of other drugs that I cannot have… including acetaminophen for some reason… but I’ve never been in a situation where a medical professional decided that knocking me out with chloroform was the best option.”

“Wait a second,” Katsuki said suspiciously, “you’re distracting me from yellin’ at you! Seriously, we had that conversation about how much it hurts when someone you care about gets killed, or nearly, then you decided to go demonstrate! Fuck you!”

Tsunagu mumbled, “why do people always act like dying was the deceased’s idea?” He had reacted by reflex--no comprehension that he might be killed by whatever the villain was about to do--not that he had been unwilling to lay down his life to protect his companions. The horror and terror of a potentially mortal injury had not hit him until he was on the ground, choking, with Katsuki’s hands pressed against his neck, seeing the look of utter, helpless dread and despair in that scarlet gaze. He’d regretted putting that look in the student’s eyes about as much as he’d regretted yelling at Glazer the day before, allowing that stress-induced, largely undeserved tirade to be his last words to his sidekick. He’d regretted plenty of other things, but those were the two that really burned his soul. He needed to apologize to Glazer as soon as possible.

“I’m not sure whether I should be yelling at you or not,” Kuugo said, scratching above Tsunagu’s ear. “I appreciate that you got everyone out of the strike zone, but if Bakugou hadn’t knocked you clear in turn you would probably have been permanently injured or killed… given what a glancing blow did.” The glare he received as Kuugo said this was code for, “I am not going to yell at you in front of this child, but you are going to get it next time we’re alone.”

Tsunagu sighed. “Mind telling me what my injuries actually are?”

Kuugo nodded slowly. “The air cutter caught you across the shoulder, broke two ribs and your collarbone, shredded a good chunk of muscle and some lung tissue, dislocated the join. All of that is on the mend. The very edge of the attack also caught you across the neck… slit your throat. That seems to have healed very well. They focused on that first.”

“Hmmm… That explains why talking hurt so much last time. How long has it been?”

“About a week,” Katsuki supplied. “So, uh,” Katsuki fidgeted. “I’m really, really glad you’re not dead.”

“That makes at least two of us,” Tsunagu smiled from beneath the medical mask he always wore when doctoring was involved.

“Yes, I’m also glad you’re not dead,” Kuugo said, crossing his arms. “But you put me through hell; you definitely owe me a proper apology when you get out of here.” After the yelling, presumably.

“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” Tsunagu sniffed.

Kuugo reached forward to ruffle the fiber hero’s hair one more time. “You’d better. I, unfortunately, have to run. I should have left half an hour ago but you looked like you were finally going to wake up and I wanted to be here. Lots of things are going down out there. I’ll be back this evening, Tsunagu. Hang in there.” His friend leaned forward and nuzzled him gently before giving him a chaste lick just to the side of his eye. Perched in his silly little hospital chair, Katsuki was visibly rethinking his wager about the nature of the heroes’ relationship. The student was, however, reading far too much into this particular interaction. It would be fun to see whether Katsuki’s observations made it back to the Genius Office rumor mill.

“See you soon, Kuugo. Thank you for staying.”

The other hero left him alone with Katsuki, whose vaguely grouchy expression crumpled immediately into misery. Katsuki abandoned his chair and came to sit on the floor at the hero’s bedside, easily within reach of Tsunagu’s good arm. The fiber hero took the cue and combed his fingers through the student’s hair. Tsunagu had a good idea of how gory he must have looked, bleeding out from a throat wound. Katsuki was far too young to have to see something that horrible. It was hard enough to watch a stranger bleeding to death… so much worse when it was a friend. Oh, this poor thing. Katsuki looked like he might cry. “Nothing much I can say to make it hurt any less,” Tsunagu murmured. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m going to be fine, though.” That much was evident. “And thank you for your perseverance. I imagine I likely would have died without your help.”

“I thought I’d never see you again,” Katsuki hissed. “I literally just got to know you--you were the first adult that ever bothered trying to earn trust, not just demanding it and then--it’s like, I don’t know… it’s not fucking fair!”

“Sorry,” Tsunagu said lamely. Sometimes words failed him. This might be one of those times. “But you know there are other nice people on the planet, right, not just me? You can go find them. You do not have to be alone.”

Katsuki nodded wordlessly. “Don’t… do that again.”

“I will do my best. That is all I can promise.” It was an ambiguous promise, too. But Katsuki knew that and did not demand clarification. They understood each other. “Do you know… the rest of what happened on the raid?” Tsunagu shuddered to think of what worst case scenarios might have come to pass, but the fact that he did not bleed to death on the battlefield suggested that something had gone right.

“All Might is out, not dead or anything, but he’s retiring.” Oh. Oh hell, that was… no one was ready for that. “You were the most seriously injured hero on site--Mt. Lady did something nasty to her leg and Edgeshot broke his arm, crap like that, but nobody else got airlifted to emergency surgery. There were several hundred civilian casualties. A handful of fatalities,” Tsunagu groaned. That was a harsh failing. “I think the news said all of them were idiots who refused to evacuate because they wanted to see heroes fight. Not much you can do about that kind of stupid.”

“There is something you can do. You can bodily fling them off the battlefield. It is allowed.”

Katsuki sniffed. “Todoroki Shouto is okay and the bastard that tried to kill you, All For One, got arrested. Most of the League cronies got away, but people think they’re done for.”

“That seems overly optimistic...”

“I knew you were gonna’ say that. You’re fine, so something else has to go wrong, right?”

“Mhmm… exactly.” Tsunagu curled the student’s fluffy hair between his fingers. It was unclear which of them took more comfort from the combing.

“I wouldn’t have been okay,” the student said abruptly. “You had a lot of nerve saying that… making that the last thing you ever said to me.”

Tsunagu tried to initiate a staring contest. Katsuki resisted for a time, but eventually met his gaze. “It would have taken some time, but you would have been alright. Caring for someone is an act of bravery--it requires strength to allow oneself to grow fond of someone or something knowing that the subject of affection may be lost someday... and great fortitude to survive such a loss. You are both brave and strong. You would have been fine if I had died. And any future losses you will endure.”

Katsuki made a noncommittal grunt and seized Tsunagu’s hand between his own, pinning the fiber hero’s fingers. Was Katsuki aware of what a great show of trust it was on Tsunagu’s part to allow this? The fiber manipulator could not adequately use his quirk to defend himself with his fingers so restrained and his other arm incapacitated. Tsunagu raised an eyebrow but did not jerk away as he would when any other save Kuugo or perhaps Three Ring did such a thing. Katsuki glanced at him, read his expression. The student’s eyes widened as he realized the magnitude of what he was doing and comprehended what it meant that Tsunagu allowed Katsuki to render him helpless like this. “Not that I mind, but why are you doing that?” Tsunagu asked gently.

“I… I don’t know. Just...” Katsuki shook his head.

Ah. It was the obvious explanation, then. “I think I understand. I often find myself wishing to confirm that someone I nearly lost is really there.” The world abruptly faded from focus, exhaustion crashing into Tsunagu like a typhoon. “Apparently that was all the energy I had for the day… make sure you give me my hand back before you leave.”

Katsuki snorted. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You wouldn’t like me any other way.”