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The weight of Eijirou’s last bullet is both a grim and comforting reminder. It’s locked in the pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants like a soldier at the ready, waiting for its first and last command.
Blood-red clouds race past his vision, blurring into the overcast sky. He feels the ravaged terrain of a city he once called home tilting under the worn soles of boots that have been too small for over a year. His lungs burn. Smoke and debris sting his eyes. His body aches down to his bones but he doesn’t stumble, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t stop.
A fleeting thought rolls across his mind: I don’t want to die here.
He casts a glance over his shoulder. The hooded man—a dorobou, probably—is still in pursuit. Eijirou can hear the clack of a rifle bouncing against his assailant’s back.
Eijirou is virtually unarmed; his pistol has been empty for months. He keeps only what he calls an “insurance bullet”—to put into his own head if things turn for the worst. If the choice is between dying as himself or having his soul obliterated by a dorobou, there’s no question about how he’d rather go.
He skids to a stop just before the ground plunges straight down. Loose earth scuttles past his feet and falls over the edge. His blood throbs in his ears. Down below, he makes out human remains, grotesquely discolored, emaciated, and half-floating in dark, shallow water. Discarded hosts. When a dorobou’s human body decays from infection, the only way for them to survive is to move onto a new one.
His hand finds his pistol, his trigger finger twitching.
“You stopped.”
Eijirou’s heart skips. Furtively, he looks back. His pursuer stands a safe distance away, rifle in hand but pointed at the ground. He pulls his hood back to reveal a shock of blond hair.
His appearance gives Eijirou pause. The venom in his gaze is discordant to the roundness in his jaw, as if everything he’s seen has yet to catch up with him, physically.
He’s a kid...like me.
“A dorobou wouldn’t have stopped.” His head falls. He pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a heartfelt, “Fuck.”
Eijirou’s head fills with questions but the only one that forms is: “What are you looking for?”
The boy’s hand drops to his side and he screws his eyes shut, furiously shaking his head. He won’t look up, lest he lower his guard. Eijirou understands that well. Trust can’t be given blindly; altruism was a luxury their world lost.
“You looked like…” He drags a weary hand through his hair. “Same shitty dye job.”
Eijirou raises an eyebrow. “Uh—”
“Whatever,” the boy says. He turns on his heel, slinging his rifle across his back. “I made a mistake.”
“H-hey, wait up!” Eijirou yelps, because to a certain degree all trust is blind and maybe he’s just as angry and tired as anyone unlucky enough to have been born into this hell. “You know, we’ll survive longer with two of us, right? I...I mean,” he pauses, turning his words over in his head. “Unless you’re not alone…”
The boy sneers and the venom in his eyes now drips from his voice. “Like hell. I made it this far on my own.”
Eijirou laughs, which makes the boy turn and glower. He’s got big, rotten pride and an attitude to cut through glass, but if he’s survived this long all by himself, there’s got to be a thing or two they can learn from each other.
“S-shut up!” he stammers, visibly thrown off-kilter. “Give me one good reason why I should let your dumb ass tag along!”
Eijirou’s lips curl into a grin. “Well, I’m not much for offense, but.” He brings his fists together with a satisfying thud. “I’m resilient. I’ll be your unbreakable wall, man. A guard who won’t waver.”
“You are so goddamn weird.” He turns back around. Something like disappointment feels heavy in Eijirou’s chest but before he gets the chance to make a move of his own, the boy calls out, “Fine. But get in my way and I’ll kill you.”
Time elapses and once they’ve gotten to know each other—in whatever capacity Katsuki will allow it—it may have been days, weeks, or even months. He learns the idiot is named Kirishima Eijirou and he’s sixteen just like him. Katsuki is able to connect his ink black roots and faded red dye job to his loud, vivacious personality. Who else but someone with a desire to stand out would even bother keeping up such an appearance in this wasteland?
Katsuki also learns that there’s an organized chaos to the way they work together. Everything about Kirishima should make Katsuki hate him; he’s chatty, impulsive, optimistic to a fault, way too touchy…
But he’s also quick on his feet.
Clever in the emotional ways Katsuki is not.
He’s rock solid and dependable where Katsuki is turbulent.
Somehow, it just works.
One night, a storm chases them into the dilapidated remains of a drugstore. They rush in, sopping wet, the soles of their boots squeaking against the tile. Broken glass and empty food wrappers litter the floor. Along the walls, there are dark, empty refrigerators and equally vacant shelves.
It isn’t uncommon for looters to gut places like this. If anything, Katsuki is annoyed he hadn’t thought to do it first.
They find a corner clear of debris to rest their aching feet and Kirishima wastes no time in talking Katsuki’s ear off.
Katsuki supposes he doesn’t mind the sound of Kirishima’s voice. It’s a way to fill the silence he’s has grown uncomfortably used to—protection from his own thoughts. What’s more, as long as the idiot stays yapping, it means Katsuki doesn’t have to talk back.
His secrets don’t define him, but that doesn’t mean he’s about to let any asshole into his head. Some things are sacred. For now, his memories are fragmented moments in the back of his mind. They belong to him in the form of nightmares and fantasies that will become all too real the moment he shares them with anybody else.
So he lets Kirishima talk.
Kirishima’s head tilts back against the wall. He shuts his eyes as if lost in a moment long gone.
“I can’t remember anything before the orphanage,” he admits. His voice has taken on a softer tone, uncharacteristic of the boisterous pain in the ass Katsuki’s come to know. “It wasn’t much, you know. Overcrowded, underfunded...the food was awful.” He brings his hands together and starts to wring them out. “There were never enough beds either. We’d play games to decide who’d have to sleep on the floor for the night.” His lips quirk into a crooked grin. “I’d always let the younger kids win. It sounds pretty shit, but it was home. It was all we knew. Some kids, like me, were orphans of war but a lot of them were abandoned. We didn’t have anybody but each other.”
Kirishima rests his forehead on his joined hands. “When dorobous Thieved our caretakers, I was thirteen. Nobody knew what to do. So many of my siblings died. I was scared and desperate.” He takes in a shuddering breath. “I ran away. Like a coward. I didn’t do anything. Didn’t jump into the fray like a real man should.”
Katsuki tries to picture it, a younger, doe-eyed Kirishima, running without purpose. All his life he had nothing—he was running toward nothing—and yet, he stayed on his feet with love in his heart and a will to live.
How could someone so kind survive in such an unforgiving place? Katsuki tries to wrap his head around it. These days, survival is earned only by the most ruthless.
Katsuki isn’t sure whether it’s Kirishima or the world he’d underestimated. Both of their truths cannot coexist.
“Do you ever regret it?” Katsuki asks, mulling the pieces over, studying the nuances of Kirishima and the broken pieces of his sorry life. He wants it to make sense.
“What, surviving?” Kirishima chuckles. “What kind of question is that?”
Katsuki wonders if he’d have the same optimism if his strength amounted to something other than more time in hell.
A grin that’s at once hopeful and sad touches Kirishima’s lips. He punches Katsuki’s shoulder playfully. “Besides, I met you, didn’t I?”
The first time Eijirou sees a dorobou die, the shock leaves him reeling. He’s no stranger to death, but something about the way this body—once so omnipotent—hits the floor is horrifyingly human.
Smoke rises from the barrel of Bakugou’s rifle.
Eijirou’s stomach turns at the sight of the bullet nestled between the host’s eyes. A clean shot. From a distance, he might even look peaceful.
As he steps closer, Eijirou studies the details of his face—close-cropped brown hair, patchy stubble on his chin, thick eyebrows and a hooked nose. The veiny black tinge under his eyelids is the only indication that he was ever anything but human.
Who was he before he was Thieved? Whose life did we just take?
Eijirou’s siblings and caretakers, all Thieved or murdered, flash with gruesome clarity in his head. One by one by one.
“Do you think they felt it?” Eijirou whispers. Lead has settled in his bones. His hands curl into fists to keep them from trembling.
Bakugou snorts, slinging his rifle around his back. “Who gives a shit?”
“Not the dorobou,” Eijirou corrects, his voice steadier than he would have given himself credit for. “I mean the man...do people stay conscious when they’re….Thieved? Are they still there? Do they know they’re being kil—”
“You talk too fucking much.” Bakugou’s voice is like ice. “Let’s go. We don’t know if there were more where he came from.”
The way Bakugou withdraws from hard questions isn’t lost on him. It leaves Eijirou wondering what he’s so afraid of and what he’s seen to make him so cold.
More so...why was it so easy for him to pull the trigger?
When Kirishima manages to hotwire a pickup truck, Katsuki supposes he could have done worse in finding a partner. It’s in bad shape, with a cracked windshield and rusty paint job—not to mention the fact that it’s ancient—but it isn’t like they can afford to be choosy.
Methodically, he fiddles with a tangle of blue and red wires, tongue poking out between his sharp teeth, and Katsuki can’t help but study the stern wrinkle in between his brows. He is held captive by the movement of Kirishima’s calloused, dirt-caked fingers looping, tying, pulling, working in such a comfortable motion that Katsuki knows he’s done this many times before.
The truck roars to life; Kirishima sits up and grins. A drop of sweat rolls down his neck, pooling in the hollow of his throat. Katsuki drags his eyes away once he realizes he’d been staring.
“You’re not as dumb as you look,” he remarks.
Kirishima laughs, unapologetically loud. It does something strange to Katsuki’s pulse. He shoves him out of the way and settles into the driver’s side, then looks at the dashboard. The gas meter is a hair away from empty. He sighs.
“You wouldn’t happen to know how to siphon gas too, would you?”
As night rolls in, the two decide it’s best to get some much needed rest. They lay a couple of blankets they stole from a looted shop some weeks ago over the truck bed’s hard ridges and then collapse beneath a threadbare quilt they found in the backseat.
Katsuki’s heavy eyes fall closed as cool air fans across his face. The humble chaos of nighttime has always been so strange to him. Daytime can be so quiet—lonely, when your only company is the terrain. But nighttime rings.
Crickets on the outside.
Memories on the inside.
Kirishima’s breathing so steady and calm...protective in its own inexplicable way and shushing Katsuki’s hurricane of thoughts.
He shifts and Katsuki opens his eyes, transfixed by the way the moonlight drips over Kirishima’s face, delicately tracing his features. He follows the soft silver lines from the ends of his hair, down the slope of his nose, over the curve of his lips, enamored by how they shift and change as he moves.
Kirishima turns on his side and Katsuki can’t breathe for a second. They’re close enough that he could count his eyelashes if he wanted to—long, black, and brushing the top of his cheeks when he blinks.
“Can I ask you something?” Kirishima asks, almost whispering.
Katsuki swallows, something heavy settling in his chest. “What is it?”
“You asked me some time ago...if I ever regretted surviving.” Kirishima wets his lips and the crease between his brows returns, like the question is something he’d considered as carefully as he did the wires in their truck. “Do you?”
He exhales, watching the scar on Kirishima’s eyelid appear and disappear as he blinks. He doesn’t know how to answer that. Survival nowadays is limited only to how desperate you are—more so, how lucky. Katsuki has never been fond of games of chance.
At last, he settles with, “I don’t regret not giving up.” Be it due to luck, skill, selfishness, or a combination of it all, Katsuki doesn’t know how to surrender. He’ll stay alive out of spite if he must. What better way is there to get back at a life that took everything away from him?
Kirishima stares and it makes Katsuki feel naked, like his gaze alone can crack through his armor and sink beneath his skin. He wants to turn away but he’s trapped. Kirishima’s eyes are a deep crimson with sunny flecks of gold—embers that don’t stop burning.
Gooseflesh covers Katsuki’s arms.
He tells himself it’s just the chill.
“My mentor.” The words fall from Katsuki’s tongue. Kirishima’s eyes hold him steady like his own private gravity and it makes Katsuki feel safe.
Maybe secrets whispered in the dark aren’t quite as real.
Kirishima moves closer and their knees bump under the blanket. Electricity sparks in the places they touch.
“I…” Katsuki’s mouth feels dry. He clears his throat and tells him, “My parents and I joined the rebellion when I was a kid. We went out on rescue missions, slaying dorobous and bringing civilians back to the safe house we built. My mentor...he was well-known in our town. A hero, really.” What Katsuki doesn’t say is that Toshinori Yagi was practically his father after his own parents were Thieved and then mercy-killed by their own comrades in action.
He feels Kirishima’s fingertips graze his arm, maybe by accident. Katsuki draws in a swift breath.
“What happened to him?” he asks, gentle and undemanding. Maybe the skeletons in Kirishima’s own closet have given him this specific type of empathy. Or maybe he’s just that kind.
“I went out on my own one night,” he says, curling his trembling hands into fists. Anxiety mangles his words and Katsuki needs a moment to recalibrate. This memory—this confession—isn’t supposed to belong to anybody else.
He keeps talking.
“That fucking safe house felt more like a graveyard than a sanctuary,” he grinds out. “It was full of grief-stricken survivors. I had to get away, just for a bit. Every day felt like a goddamn funeral.”
Kirishima says nothing. His eyes are so damn big, like a puppy’s. It at once throws Katsuki and comforts him.
“I got ambushed by dorobous. Like a dumbass I wasn’t armed so the fight seemed pretty hopeless. I kept thinking to myself that I’d rather die than be Thieved, as if I had the luxury of a choice.” Katsuki grasps the blanket with white knuckles, swallowing the knot in his throat. This fucker will not see him cry.
“Toshinori, my mentor, noticed I was gone so he came looking for me. The idiot was recognized immediately. I mean, people called him All Might. He was their worst nightmare…”
Or at least that had been true before his accident. After a close call with a dorobou some years prior, Toshinori was left walking with a cane and almost blind in his left eye. His aim wasn’t what it once was. He could barely hold his own in a fight. He existed as a symbol, a tactical leader, but he hadn’t been on the frontlines in years.
“I wasn’t as interesting to the dorobous anymore and he saved my life at the cost of his own.” His voice was strangled and he cursed himself for being so weak, even now. “They killed him. And I ran away when I should have died by his side.” Beneath his own anger and grief, he knew why he did. Because if Katsuki had died that night, Toshinori’s sacrifice would have been for nothing.
It still felt like a flimsy excuse.
“It was my fault.” It comes out in a broken whisper that didn’t even sound like himself. “If I hadn’t gone out...if I hadn’t been there…” He shakes his head furiously and curses under his breath.
Kirishima touches his arm, running his thumb across his skin. “Hey...what happened after that?” A soft voice. A steady voice.
Katsuki swallows. “I couldn’t face anyone. I took one of his guns from the weapon closet and ran like hell.” As an afterthought, he adds, “The leader of the attack looked like you from the back. It’s the reason I chased you down that first day. Sorry, I guess.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Kirishima says.
Katsuki finally averts his eyes.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he says again. His fingers stay on Katsuki’s skin. “Look, this world doesn’t really lend itself much to blame. Shit happens and we just have to get through it as best as we can.”
Katsuki turns away from him because suddenly he can’t stand to be touched. He’s surrounded by the ghosts he just set free. It’s all too much.
He hears Kirishima sigh but then the silence feels all too heavy. It empties his mind of the present and leaves too much room for the memories. He comes to a compromise.
“Hey, idiot,” Katsuki says. “Tell me a story.”
Kirishima tenses beside him. He stammers, “Uh, s-sure. Of what?”
“Anything.” He just needs to hear his voice until sleep pulls him under.
And so he does and his gravity returns. When they wake up the next morning, they’re a tangle of limbs.
Sunlight beckons them awake and they extricate themselves from each other without words. For the past few weeks, ever since their first night together on the truck bed, every morning has been this way.
Eijirou tucks his pistol into a proper holster now while Bakugou is bent over his knees, lacing up his boots. Once they’re both ready, they share a glance and then hop into the front seats, off again. Sleepy, laconic conversations have become routine for them and each response brings them closer to some semblance of the energy required to survive.
“You reek,” Bakugou says.
“So do you,” Eijirou says.
“Let’s find a shower.”
“But food first.”
“Food first.”
“And coffee.”
A snort. “Good luck finding that.”
“You really do reek, man.”
“You didn’t think so when you clung to me last night.”
Eijirou laughs, tilting his head back against the seat, listening to the rickety hum of their motor. He catches Bakugou’s smirk out of the corner of his eye.
It’s rare to find an abandoned supermarket stocked up, but when they stumble upon one with its front doors intact, Eijirou suggests they give it a look.
Bakugou grunts an affirmative.
Humid air rolls over them as they step inside. The first thing Eijirou notices is the assaulting stench of rancid meat.
“Eugh,” he half-gags. “That’s ripe.”
“Good sign,” says Bakugou. He stalks past Eijirou. “Means there’s still food here. There’s gotta be something salvageable.”
“Should we split up, then? Cover more ground?”
The faster they’re out of here, the better. If this place has yet to be looted, that means it’s only a matter of time.
“Yeah.” Bakugou cocks his rifle, ever-vigilant. “We’ll meet back at the entrance in ten.”
They part ways and Eijirou combs through the aisles, stocking up on whatever non-perishables he can find. A jar of peanut butter. Saltine crackers. Canned goods. His backpack puts on satisfying weight. But the rotting smell only grows more oppressive the closer he moves toward the back.
He tiptoes forward and the stench sends his stomach lurching. When he turns the corner, fear winds through his stomach.
A girl—no, a corpse—lies at his feet. One yellow-tinted, glassy eye stares straight through Eijirou; the other has been eaten by a festival of maggots that have since found a home in her now-hollow skull.
Infected black veins bulge from her ashen, emaciated hands.
Not just a corpse. A discarded host.
Eijirou draws his gun and calls Bakugou’s name.
Katsuki backs into a wall, aiming his rifle at the horde of enemies closing in on him. He’s limited on bullets and would prefer not to waste any on these lowlife dorobous but if he must, then he will. His eyes dart from left to right, searching for an opening.
Kirishima’s voice falls on deaf ears. It wrenches Katsuki’s heart. Is he alright? Did a dorobou find him? He knows Kirishima is more than capable of taking care of himself.
But still...
The one directly in front of Katsuki cocks his head with amusement. Katsuki’s head spins; something about him sets his nerves on end.
“You know…” His voice is deep and gravelly, grating against Katsuki’s ears like nails on a chalkboard. “You remind me of an old friend. It’s that look in your eyes.”
Katsuki’s blood runs cold but he shows no indication. He narrows his eyes and clicks a bullet into its chute.
“I’ll fucking kill you,” he says, though he’s still careful. Right now, his odds aren’t good.
“Aw, kid, don’t you remember me?” He smiles, displaying a row of decaying teeth. “I wonder if All Might would be proud to know you’re still alive.”
Silence.
Eijirou’s heart sinks.
Without thinking, he breaks into a run.
He keeps his gun drawn as his eyes scan the area, desperately searching for a sign of his partner.
He runs.
Leaping over debris and groceries strewn over the floor.
He runs.
As nightmarish what-ifs fill his head to a point of bursting.
He runs, and runs, and runs.
Because if he doesn’t...
His thoughts and better judgment are so wholly monopolized by adrenaline that he isn’t prepared when he’s tackled. He crashes to the floor, gripping his gun to his chest. Cans of food spill out from his backpack and roll straight into the foot of an adjacent shelf.
Eijirou turns over with a gasp, aiming the gun forward. A dorobou with a nest of blonde hair crushes his legs beneath her weight. Her honey-colored eyes are feral with hunger. A web of black veins blooms from her temple.
Her body has already started to give from the infection; once a host can no longer sustain them, they find their next target.
That insurance bullet flashes in his mind.
She’ll kill him. She’ll take him. The gun throbs in Eijirou’s hand like the heartbeats its bullets are meant to collect.
He should kill her.
He should…
A scream tears through his chest and he jams the butt of his gun into her nose. She shrieks as blood runs over her lips. He wrestles her off and leaps to his feet and he doesn’t hesitate to take off again.
Red floods Katsuki’s vision. Toshinori’s alias falls off the dorobou’s tongue like something poisonous. Visceral familiarity carves into Katsuki’s gut and suddenly the pieces jerk into place. Those smug eyes. The bloodlust that would rather kill than Thieve.
A different host, but it’s him.
“You.” Katsuki abandons logic and self-preservation. He lunges at him. “You son of a bitch!”
He’s shoved to the floor by four or five others and his rifle is wrenched from his grip. It clatters to the floor, out of reach.
“I want the body!”
“Shut up! My host has given way. I need it the most.”
“If you damage it beyond repair, none of us will be able to take it!”
A knee jams into his back and Katsuki’s jaw cracks against the tile. Agony explodes through his body. All of his senses but the ones that register pain begin shutting off. White noise spills into his ears and he feels like his skull is about to burst open.
He can’t breathe.
He can’t see.
He can’t speak.
Why the hell did he let his anger get the better of him? Katsuki tries to curse but pain shoots through his spine.
Maybe this is some kind of penance. To die the same way as Toshinori, the way he should have all those years ago.
Even now, thinking of his mentor’s sacrifice, he’s so selfish.
He’d give anything for more time.
More things to learn. More sunrises to see. More...more nights under the stars and long drives in comfortable silence and more warmth. Warmth under a tender gaze, a familiar voice, a soft touch...
...just...more…
The floor grows warm as pins and needles spread across his back. His heartbeat slows, but so does the pain.
Is it over?
It’s so quiet.
And then, a gunshot.
A scream.
A sob.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
A watery voice calls his name, not Bakugou, but Katsuki. It sounds so sweet. Like a lullaby. He wants to hear it again. Warm hands carefully roll him over and take him into their arms.
“Hey.”
It’s so warm.
“Katsuki.”
It’s so safe.
“Godammit, STAY WITH ME!”
A gentle flame flecked with fierce gold embers. It’s so beautiful.
“I took care of them but we need to leave before we’re ambushed by more.”
It’s...
“Katsuki.”
It’s home.
And then everything burns white.
Katsuki’s eyes open to what feels like the goddamn sun. Slowly, the stiff gears in his mind begin to turn as shards of reality draw together: the ridges of the truck bed under his body, the throbbing in his head, the smell of grass and gasoline, and the faraway sound of music trickling through static—a radio?
He groans and tries sitting up but the pain knocks him back down. Kirishima is instantly by his side, hands hovering just above Katsuki’s shoulders.
Kirishima.
He takes him in: big doe eyes, razor sharp teeth barely biting down on his bottom lip whenever he’s concentrated or confused, the scar cutting through his eyelid. He’s so soft. Kind. For a dumb moment, Katsuki asks himself how someone like this could possibly fit into a world so cruel.
“The….fuck,” Katsuki says.
Kirishima helps settle him into a sitting position, then gestures sheepishly at Katsuki. “I hope it’s okay. I have, like, the bare minimum of first aid knowledge. They taught us at the orphanage. But, uh, I’ve never properly dressed a stab wound.”
Stab wound?
He glances down at his body and connects the pain with a concentrated area just shy of the small of his back. Threadbare bandages are wound tightly around his torso.
“It’s...fine,” Katsuki manages, still dazed.
Kirishima sits back on his heels and exhales; it looks as if it’s the first time he’s allowed himself to breathe in days. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
His head is still full of fog, but through the haze of pain, confusion, and whatever memory he has from that night in the supermarket, he’s able to realize one thing.
Kirishima saved him.
Kirishima, with his gentle heart and careful hands pulled the trigger again and again, crying Katsuki’s name—desperate. Kirishima who once asked him if human hosts could still feel the fear and agony of being Thieved, and then being killed. He discarded his own empathy to save Katsuki.
Dorobou or not, his hands are forever stained with blood now.
“You,” Katsuki begins, then stops himself. He doesn’t need to rehash that. Not right now. There will be time to talk about it just like there will be time for Katsuki to return the favor. Instead, he sighs. “It had to be you, didn’t it? No other asshole could have gotten us out of that mess alive.”
Kirishima laughs and the remaining tension bleeds out of him. There’s still something different in his eyes—not broken, but less naive. They’re the eyes of someone who just learned that the only way to survive is to be more ruthless than the world you’re in.
But those fire eyes with their sunny gold flecks are still unequivocally Kirishima Eijirou.
“Is there anything you need?” he asks. “I mean, now that you’re awake.” He jabs a thumb in the direction of the front seat. “I can change the radio station, though, it’s either this or polka.”
Katsuki has half a mind to snap at Kirishima for coddling him. He doesn’t, though. Because it’s Kirishima. Because when everything was slowing to a stop, all he could see was scarlet eyes and a starlit smile.
So he doesn’t curse at him, or move away, or listen to the parts of himself telling him he’s a fool for letting anybody this deep into his heart.
He says, “You called me Katsuki.”
Pink blossoms on Kirishima’s cheeks. He lets out a nervous laugh and scratches the back of his head. “Sorry about that. I, uh, things were...I mean, you know. I don’t kn—”
“God, you talk too fucking much,” says Katsuki. His fingers wind through the fabric of Kirishima’s shirtfront and he pulls him in for a kiss. Butterflies explode in his stomach and his heart feels like it’s about to burst out through his ribs and at first, he thinks Kirishima is going to push him away.
But he melts.
His hands cradle Katsuki’s face, calloused thumbs circling his cheeks. His flushed skin, soft lips, and the rhythm of his pulse intoxicates him like a drug. When they pull apart, Kirishima licks his lips, and then laughs.
Katsuki is taken aback. Defensively, he sputters, “What the hell?”
“You’re so cute when you’re smitten,” he replies, then presses a sweet kiss to the side of his mouth. Katsuki’s face burns. “Man, I’m so glad you didn’t kill me that first day.”
He snorts, then narrows his eyes. “Once again, you talk way too damn much.”
Kirishima cocks an eyebrow. “What are you going to do about it?”
They fall back into each other and Katsuki smiles against Eijirou’s mouth, thankful at the very least for one thing: that all of the anguish leading up until now gave him something so good. Maybe they were unfairly born into a world where the odds are stacked against them. But maybe there’s also something to be said about the way they’ve kicked adversity in the ass. Destiny, fate, or whatever brought hellfire to their home, challenged humanity to a fight to the death.
Every moment up until now has been about trying to conquer the insurmountable. But now, together, there isn’t an odd they won’t beat.