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When Shouto first met Katsuki, he knew he was already in for a wild ride.
There was something about him that was intoxicating. He carried an intense allure that Shouto has only ever seen in movies. The way he carried himself boasted of a past filled with unspeakable secrets that Shouto wanted to unravel. He wanted to peel back every layer of this mysterious man, tear down his iron walls, and see him at his most vulnerable.
But Katsuki was such an irritable little tease. He stared at Shouto like he was nothing but a defenseless little bunny in the big forest of New York City. He talked down at him, sneered at his given privilege, and talked about how Shouto would just go crying to his daddy if he just as much as laid one of his dirty, street rat fingers on his pristine, porcelain skin.
Katsuki made Shouto so immensely angry . At himself and at the society he was born in. Katsuki talked of dirty riches and underground tycoons that clink wine glasses with his father at dinner like they were a pack of wild hyenas. He spoke to Shouto as if he was one of them, spoiled, can barely lift a finger, and has lived his short life entertaining middle-aged men behind fake smiles and locked doors.
The worst part is… Katsuki is absolutely right. Shouto couldn’t fight for himself then. He was weak in every sense of the word but he made it a point to slap Katsuki’s smug little face for ever comparing him to his father. He hated him with every fibre of his being. He hated living in his shadow, eating the scraps off of the table of his high-end friends, and doing everything as he pleases just because he was the prettiest and most desirable young Todoroki.
“It’s all unfair, is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Exactly!”
“Welcome to my world, brat.”
He was disgustingly blunt and downright nasty when he wanted to be but the first time they spent alone together was when he was patching Katsuki up after he ambushed his father’s gala. He didn’t really say anything while Shouto wiped disinfectant on his wounds and wrapped bandages around the bullet holes on his shoulder. Their current conditions aren’t exactly sanitary but Shouto has learned to grit his teeth and bare it lest he gets another earful of lectures about the injustices of society from his favorite rebel with a shotgun.
Katsuki is surprisingly quiet even while Shouto picks out the shards of glass from his skin. Shouto isn’t sure what he was expecting. This was the most feared gang leader in all of New York. He wouldn’t even be phased if a cannonball came straight at him. He’d probably grin and run towards it too like the fucking deranged maniac that he is.
“Where’d you learn how to do all this?”
Shouto looks up from placing the bloodied shards of glass in a clean tupperware, wiping the tweezers thoroughly in between. It’s very unlikely for Katsuki to want to start a conversation but who was Shouto to call it out? Talking helps stall the pain. “I was a pre-med student.”
“You were gonna become the family doctor, huh?” Katsuki stares at him with a calculating expression. Shouto couldn’t look away even if he tried. But something about this gaze was different from the other times Katsuki looked at him. Shouto couldn’t quite put a finger on it. The unusual gaze was gone though as quickly as it came and Katsuki made a snide comment about the Todoroki family just wringing out every ounce of blood from their human resources.
Shouto grimaced. “It was my father's plan for me.”
“Did you want to be a doctor?” Katsuki asked and Shouto could hear genuine curiosity in his voice. Maybe it was the knock-off anaesthesia making him talk like this. Or the blood loss.
“I expressed interest in the sciences at an early age.” Shouto tended to the wounds left behind by the glass, wiping at them gently with disinfectant. “My eldest brother works for the government. Fuyumi became a scholar. Natsuo was the lawyer. So, naturally, I had to become the doctor.”
“Thank you for a rundown of your siblings’ positions, which I couldn’t give less of a shit about by the way,” Katsuki said with a condescending roll of his eyes. “You still didn’t answer my question.”
“It was my duty.” Shouto says through gritted teeth but even he could hear that it’s utter bullshit.
“Duty means jack shit if that’s not what you wanted to do.” Shouto avoids his eyes but his hands shake while he wipes the blood away. He hates when Katsuki does this. When he psychoanalyzes him to the point where Shouto just completely shuts down. He’s angry. But he’s never angry at Katsuki. No. He’s angry at the cold hard truth .
Katsuki always tells it as he sees it. Shouto, the spoiled baby of the Todorokis who grew up tainted by the upper crust society behind closed doors. Shouto, the little boy who can’t go to his siblings whenever his father would have his way with him. Shouto, future doctor only to serve the needs of his father and his reckless politician friends. He sees it all and yet… Katsuki never faults him.
Sure, he talks about it with nothing but disgust and anger lacing every vicious remark, but Shouto always hears the underlying concern through it all. He took Shouto’s hand during that party one day, asking him if this whole spectacle that he grew up in was something he wanted to continue living in. He criticized every aspect of Shouto’s life if only to make him open his eyes to the possibilities that he could take in order to turn it all around to his favor.
Katsuki showed him that he didn’t have to live in his father’s stead any longer. That he could strip himself of the responsibility that has burdened him since the day he was born. That he could breathe in the air without coughing over expensive cologne. That he could save his siblings from Enji’s wrath if he could show them that even he could break free.
That’s why he chose to take Katsuki’s hand and run.
“I wanted to be a poet.” Shouto whispered softly, a lump forming in his throat at the mere utterance of the words. How long has it been since he’s talked about this formerly unattainable dream? Katsuki remained quiet, listening attentively, and providing an oddly comforting presence despite him goading Shouto a few moments ago. It’s in Katsuki’s rare silences where Shouto finds himself able to breathe.
“I would write pages upon pages of poems when I was younger. I would escape to the roofdeck with my notebooks because that was the only place without security cameras.” Somewhere along the way, tears started to fall down his face, but he didn’t make an effort to wipe them away. He couldn’t and he didn’t want to. “I had thousands of poems about the New York skyline, the lily pads on the Hudson river, and about how beautiful my mother was.”
His breath caught in his throat as he remembered his mother. “I wrote about her everyday. Sometimes the poems would become letters to her. I was foolish enough to think that I could ever send them to her.” Shouto’s face contorts in pain. His last memory of her was one of her crying. He has ten poems about that memory alone.
“I never wanted to be a doctor. You’re right, so don’t rub it in.” He’s surprised he’s able to throw out a sarcastic remark while tears kept flowing down his cheeks. “But there is no place for a poet. Not in this world.”
“Not in that world, you mean.” Katsuki finally spoke up, reaching out to wipe a few tears away from Shouto’s face with his thumb. The gesture is surprisingly gentle and soft. Katsuki’s hands are rough but warm. Shouto nuzzles into his palm subconsciously and Katsuki lets him. “ This world could use a poet like you.”
“Your world is no different from mine.”
“That maybe so,” Katsuki this time tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. Soft. Gentle. Warm. “But your old world didn’t appreciate poets. This one likes to be reminded of the beautiful parts of life every once in a while.”
“When you’re staring down the barrel of a gun, would you be thinking about one of my poems?”
“I’d be thinking about you either way.”
That’s the exact moment where Shouto sees Katsuki’s iron walls crumble to ashes beneath them. With those few words, his breath is snatched right from his lungs, and his tears are nothing but those of overwhelming relief.
He could write a thousand poems about this moment alone.
But words cannot portray this feeling in his heart that he made the right decision to follow Bakugou Katsuki. Verses cannot describe their bond forged from bloodshed and rebellion. At this moment, he’s not the runaway child of a wealthy New York family. He’s just Shouto, slate wiped clean, and with a future ahead of him that’s brighter than any path his father could have ever laid before him.
He decides in this very moment that he’ll be by Katsuki’s side no matter the cost. He seals that decision with a kiss. Katsuki kisses back without a moment’s hesitation, as if he was prepared for this. Shouto smiles into the kiss, his heart soaring higher than ever before. When he first met Katsuki, he knew he was in for a wild ride. But he was totally unprepared in the face of a Katsuki with his heart on his sleeve and gazing at him like nothing and no one else mattered.
Luckily for Shouto, no one else mattered either.