Work Text:
Katsuki tells himself that there are worse things in the world.
He could be dead. He could have been speared by a twisted piece of rebar, poking out of the concrete, he could have been shish-kabobbed to fucking death. He could have been sliced in half, he could have been decapitated. He could have had his leg crushed. Maybe then he could make himself the pirate-hero, Peg Leg Riot. Katsuki huffs at the thought.
The waiting room is empty, save for Aizawa-sensei, who hasn't left yet. Two years after they've all graduated and sensei is still there, even though he's got a whole new class of students, ones that probably need him more than Katsuki does—a thought that'd earn him a smack upside the head if vocalized, he bets.
Sensei looks like shit, but he's made himself at home in a waiting-room chair, arms folded and head bowed, dirty boots crossed on dirtier carpet. He looks up as Katsuki approaches and keeps it ever-so-blunt.
"Arm?"
Katsuki sucks his teeth and shakes his head.
Sensei sits up a bit more as Katsuki takes a seat in the chair next to him. "He's gonna pull through, though?"
Katsuki nods again.
Sensei doesn't say anything for a moment, and then, "You okay?"
Worse things, Katsuki tells himself. There are worse things.
His eyes burn. The weight of the day seems to crumble on his shoulders, he blinks tiredly at the floor and works too hard to keep his voice level. "You don’t gotta stay. I mean, you’ve probably got a whole ‘nother class of brats to—"
"I think I know what brats need me most, thank you," Aizawa-sensei says, but the kindness in his eyes betrays the sentiment, like they’re sixteen again and crying over Kamino, like he's talking to another class after an attack, trying to piece the world together again from where it lay splintered at their feet.
Katsuki nods, eyes locked on the carpeted waiting-room floor. "Suit yourself.”
Sensei stands up and holds Katsuki’s gaze with the same bloodshot eyes that picked him up at that shitty police station after Kamino ward, the same ones that looked on as he graduated with honors.
He picks up a clean a pair of scrubs off the chair on his other side and tells Katsuki to clean himself up before leaving in search of coffee.
Katsuki stares at the bathroom sink water that runs red under his fingers and wonders why life has to be so fucking difficult, wonders why it had to be Eijirou, out of all the fucking people he could’ve pulled out.
Not to mention they haven't spoken in five months.
-
He’s missing an arm.
The doctor tells him this prior to Katsuki entering the room, of course; reminds him that Eijirou’s left arm is still lying in the rubble somewhere for some poor clean-up fucker to discover later—as if Katsuki would’ve forgotten this in his time in that ugly-ass waiting room.
Still, his stomach drops when he sees Ei, impossibly small amongst machines and tubes.
Well. Eijirou, minus his left arm.
It’s a bandaged nub, like a snapped-off doll arm. Katsuki can feel his throat tighten as he steps forward into the room, trying his best not to focus on the gaping absence on the left side of the bed and instead on Eijirou’s stupid face, on his eyes, bruised and motionless, stationary under puffy eyelids. His skin is porcelain, white and breakable, and Katsuki’s mouth tastes sour.
Sensei is talking to the doctor in the doorway, asking important questions that Katsuki can't bring himself to ask, as his eyes start to burn again.
Because five months doesn't change the fact that when he looks past the blood bags and the IVs and the bandages, when he thinks back to yanking Ei’s limp, battered body out of the rubble, Eijirou probably should’ve been dead.
He hovers awkwardly by the bed for a moment before swallowing what little pride he has left for the day, pulling a chair up to the side of the sheets. Might as well do it proper if he's going to do it.
Sensei and the doctor have moved to the hallway and Katsuki finds himself alone in the dim room, as the last dregs of the sunset are swallowed by the horizon outside the window.
He's forty hours out of sleep and there's blood caked under his fingernails that won't wash down the drain. In the aftermath of carnage that still flickers through his mind, Katsuki feels like a little kid when he reaches out and takes Eijirou's limp hand in his own.
Careful not to touch the IV ports, he places his fingers on top of Ei’s. The skin is soft, of course, and Katsuki almost laughs, because of fucking course Eijirou’s skin is soft, even half-dead.
Compensation for your scaly, heat-damaged lizard skin, Eijirou would tease him when they were younger and naïve and life was easier, when Katsuki would elbow him and Eijirou would pull him in for a kiss and they'd fall into each other. Katsuki would grumble and the tips of his ears would turn red and Eijirou would win, a satisfied smile playing on his lips.
Katsuki doesn't elbow him now, though, and Eijirou lies there with his eyes closed.
No winners here.
Katsuki exhales through his nose and pulls his hand away.
Outside the room, the doctor commends him on his fast thinking.
Worse things.
At least he's not a fucking kabob.
—
Sensei gives him a shitty hospital coffee that burns his tongue and waits with him for a long time.
"What happened to you two, anyway?”
Katsuki stares at his dirty boots. "I left. It was better for him—for us. It was just better that way."
"I see."
Eijirou’s mom comes and gives him a tearful hug, even though it's been a while and Eijirou’s probably shit-talked him halfway to hell and back by now.
(That’s not true.)
Her voice wobbles when she thanks him, but her eyes are kind like he remembers them, and his heart aches for a golden slice, a small sliver of the life he used to have.
No use fucking crying about it. He relays the information he can and leaves.
—
“You just left him there? ”
“No I didn’t just leave him there,” Katsuki snaps, “his mom was there.”
Ochako huffs over the phone. “But you left?”
Katsuki sits on his bed, sheets mussed. “Yeah, I left. I was covered in his blood, and I stayed ‘till she got there, the fuck was I supposed to do, Uraraka?”
The line is silent for a moment. “You okay?”
He stares at the wall above his bed and swipes at a drop of water that trickles down the back of his neck post-shower. “I’m fine.”
“I’m sure he would’ve liked to see you,” she says a little softer.
“Why would he want to fucking see me? We broke up months ago, it’s not like—”
“I don’t know, maybe because you saved his life?! I mean, you dated for almost four years, it’s not like you’re strangers. God, you can be so thick sometimes—”
He bites his tongue before he can fling a childish insult.
“Just—look,” she says, “you were there. The guy just lost his arm, maybe you being there could’ve, I dunno, softened the blow? I mean, couldn’t you just be, like—friends?”
He sighs and presses a palm to his eye.
For the Anti-Gravity hero, Ochako sure knows how to weigh a person down.
—
They met once after they had broken up, after Katsuki had left.
Eijirou stood on the edge of a pier as the sky burned orange and asked for closure.
"You know, I never wanted you to leave."
It was for the best, Katsuki had told him, and they both needed some time.
"Will the time come again?" Eijirou asked, and that was the worst part, the cherry on top, the sucker-punch to the gut.
No matter what, Eijirou would always wait.
(Couldn't he see that he deserved so much more?)
Katsuki doesn't say it. He turns it into a fight, and Eijirou leaves when he sees that they remain unchanged.
They're puzzle-pieces that fit together, Katsuki thinks, but the image doesn't match. They look right at first, but when the puzzle's half-done and something's amiss, it all comes back to those two pieces.
Did they ever really fit?
-
He gets a text from Eijirou’s mom the next day as he’s filling out the incident report.
New Message from: Ei’s Mom
1:54 pm: Thank you for taking care of him, Katsuki.
He sits there and stares at the screen for a long moment. He still has her number saved, and it’s a little thing that makes it that much more personal. He sighs and puts down his pen.
She must’ve seen the news, then. It’s all over the internet—grainy helicopter footage of Ground Zero pulling a body out of the rubble, nearly unidentifiable, soaked in blood that smears the ground, pools over Katsuki’s lap as he yells for medical, as he stares into Eijiriou’s half-dead eyes and threatens him with his own death, should he die.
The video doesn’t show that part, obviously. But Katsuki was there, as Eijirou took shallow breaths and ruined his damn uniform.
He can’t help but think that the action figures are going to have to change. All those snot-faced kids’ll have to snap off an arm of their Limited Edition Red Riot figurine, the one with Eijirou’s stupidly pointed teeth and his half-hardened, plastic body.
He smirks to himself. They never got his eyes right, anyhow.
—
Eijirou has the fucking nerve to smile at him when he drags himself to the hospital days later.
He looks—
He looks better.
Still missing a damn arm, and his hair is limp and greasy, and his face is still bruised and two shades too-pale, but he doesn’t look dead anymore. And it looks like Katsuki’s not the only one that’s bothered to visit—the sun streams in from the open curtains near his bed and lights up the yellows and pinks of cards and flowers that litter the small room.
That same stupid grin, too. “Hey!”
"Hi,” Katsuki says dumbly, standing in the doorway with a bucket of flowers like an idiot—you know, how you usually greet your ex (fucking christ why did he think this would be a remotely good idea).
“You can come in, you know,” Ei says.
Katsuki stands there and looks stupid for a moment longer before walking in and shoving the flowers into an empty space on the windowsill. “They’re not from me. They’re from--”
“Ochako. I know.”
So they have been talking.
Eijirou’s voice is thin and tired, but he’s still smiling. “Took you long enough.”
“Yeah, well.” Katsuki can’t really make up an excuse for that.
Ei nods to the empty chair against the wall. “You can sit if you want. How’ve you been?”
And Katsuki doesn’t know how he does it. Eijirou’s ability to bullshit like this, to act like everything’s fine and this is just another chance meeting on patrol is truly astounding. His sunny optimism can go fuck itself.
“How’ve I been?”
Ei’s smile falters for a moment and Katsuki blinks and sits down. He can hear Round-Face yelling at him from halfway across the city.
He doesn’t know what to say. Hey, sorry that you lost your arm, hope you don’t remember when I cradled your lifeless, mangled body in my arms and thought you were going to die.
He’d almost cried in the ambulance, crammed against a wall and holding Eijirou’s limp hand as paramedics frantically worked. He’d looked on with blood everywhere, sticking his clothes to his skin. The overwhelming iron grit in the back of his mouth was so strong it was suffocating, and he’d blinked back the tears because they weren’t going to help anything as Eijirou coded for the fifth time and Katsuki thought for sure that this was going to be the one, the one that he doesn’t come back from.
Not that Eijirou needs to know any of this. But Katsuki?
Katsuki won’t forget it.
He leans back in the chair and tries to calm down, tries to channel some nonchalance that he’s never possessed at any point in his life. “How long you stuck here?”
“I started physical therapy yesterday,” Ei replies, “They said I should get fitted for a prosthetic soon. Recovery Girl stopped by the day I woke up—she sends her best, by the way.” Katsuki huffs and quirks a corner of his mouth.
Eijirou fidgets with the sheets on his bed. There’s a lapse in conversation. “Hey, I don’t remember much, but I wanted to say thanks. And, uh, I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”
Katsuki squints. “What? Shut up.”
Eijirou smiles, a bit smaller this time, softer around the edges. “I owe you one. If it weren’t for you burning my shoulder shut, I—.”
“Don’t.”
Eijirou looks taken aback. “I didn’t—”
“Don’t say shit like that,” Katsuki barks again, feeling a fire in his sternum, annoyance, frustration. He lost a fucking arm — “It’s my fucking job. You don’t owe me shit, Eijirou—.”
There’s so much he wants to say.
But the words won’t form, they stick like peanut-butter in the back of his throat, so he stands there like a damn idiot, yelling at a guy who’s sitting in a hospital bed, and he looks into Eijirou’s eyes full of confusion and hurt and he says, “I should go.”
And he bolts.
—
The news cameras didn’t catch that part, either.
Two minutes after Katsuki pulled him from the rubble, two minutes after he realized that Ei’s arm was gone , two minutes after the blood pooled and Ei’s skin went white with shock, after Katsuki took the weakest pulse he’d ever taken on a human being, Katsuki realized that Eijirou was going to die.
The amount of blood he’d lost was doubling by the second, and he’d already been bleeding when Katsuki pulled him out—he gave it three minutes tops before Eijirou went cold.
Katsuki thought about it for a half-second before he did what he had to.
With wildly shaking hands, lungs clogged with ash and soot, Katsuki pulled off his gloves and pressed a hand to Ei’s matted hair. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he muttered, trying to keep his voice steady, don’t panic, don’t panic, do it, just DO IT—
Pressing his bare palms onto the open wound, Katsuki turned his head, squeezed his eyes shut and let go.
Eijirou screamed.
Moments later, after Katsuki had called for medical again and talked himself down from a nervous breakdown, after he’d made sure that the bleeding had stopped and that it had worked, the paramedics arrived. He tried to slow his breathing and knotted his hands in his hair as the paramedics swarmed and circled every inch of Ei’s body on the ground, so that Katsuki couldn’t even see Eijirou, let alone know is he was alive, and it's all…
It’s all a bit much. There was a smell in the air, one that curdled when he inhaled, and it was wrong, so wrong, it coated the back of his throat and inside of his mouth—he found himself kneeling hard on the ground with force that would leave bruises if not for his kneepads, grinding his bare palms into the asphalt and scraping , trying to get the crusted black blood and charred flesh off of his hands, forcing back a gag, it’s not coming off, it’s Eijirou’s, he’s dead, you burned him, he’s going to die with a fucking burnt nub—
One of the paramedics came up to him and asked him if he was responsible for the burn.
He asked them what they fucking thought.
They left him alone, after that.
-
Ochako calls that night.
“What the fuck?”
He very nearly hangs up at the sound of her voice.
“I said to go talk to him, not to go and yell at him! What were you trying to do, pick a fight?!”
Katsuki snarls, “He fucking apologized to me, Round Face, he’s the one missing a goddamn arm and he fucking apologized —”
“So what he fucking apologized, that’s what he does! You know him, Katsuki, you know how he is, that’s—”
Katsuki feels something shrivel inside and says, in a voice that trembles, with a lip that quivers, “Ochako, I had to burn his fucking shoulder shut.”
The line goes silent. Her voice is small. “What?”
He swallows and closes his eyes, feels like there’s a boulder in his throat. His chest has started to heave and his eyes burn. The words are breathless. “He was dying. He would’ve bled out. I thought he was going to be dead.”
There’s silence on the other end, and then, “I’m coming over.”
-
She comes over and sits on his bed, makes him explain, and he’s the one that cries.
He’s a fucking mess. And it’s taken nearly two days for it to hit him, but it hits.
It hits hard.
She hugs him and talks soft, “Okay, it’s okay.”
It’s definitely not.
-
Eijirou’s face has color again, but he looks deflated, blinking at Katsuki over a cup of jello—for breakfast, yes.
(What do you want, Katsuki? What have you ever wanted ?)
Katsuki stands in the doorway, heart beating, and Ei puts his spoon down.
“Hey.”
“Hi,” Katsuki says. He’s not holding anything. EIjirou doesn’t smile.
He vaguely thinks that there should be a greeting card for this situation.
I’m sorry I had to cook you shut with my lava powers, hopefully you’re not as scarred physically as I am emotionally.
“I’m sorry,” Katsuki says.
“I know,” Eijirou says. He sets down his jello.
Katsuki swallows.
“Will you sit down?” Ei gestures to the chair next to the bed. “Please?”
Katsuki sits. Eijirou’s hair is pulled back, and there’s less bandaging on his shoulder. The blood-bags are gone—all that remains is a single IV drip. Morning light filters through the window, casting shapes on the bed, but he looks exhausted, puffy eyes and dark circles. A tray is folded over his lap from where he sits up in bed.
“I’m sorry, Eijirou.”
I'm sorry for walking away that night. I'm sorry for never calling back. I'm sorry you’re going to have my burnt handprints on your shoulder for the rest of your fucking life, I’m sorry, I'm sorry—
“I forgive you. Katsuki, it’s in the past,” Eijirou says softly, in a voice that Katsuki would know anywhere, across the world, in outer space, lying in a bed, under covers in the dead of night, only for him.
Katsuki stares at flowers—Ochako’s, still on the windowsill.
Is that it?
“You saved my life," Eijirou says.
He rakes a hand through his hair. It's infuriating, the way Eijirou's able to just— say it. Without missing a beat, like it justifies five months of Katsuki avoiding him like the plague on patrol, like he’s hung the moon and the stars, like it’s that fucking easy.
Like Katsuki hasn't spent the last twenty weeks gutted like a fish with every crimson sunset, with every crooked smile in the world. Like the stained red towels under his bathroom sink aren’t even there, like the picture in his drawer that remains untouched since that morning when he shoved it away, missing the garbage can on purpose half-asleep and fragile, because Eijirou was his world—
Easy. It’s easy for him.
Thing is, it was never that fucking easy for Katsuki. Nothing ever is.
He looks up, and without scorn, says, “That’s it?”
Eijirou looks tired. "Katsuki, what do you want me to say? You want me to be upset? Because I can’t be, I just… I can’t. I mean, if there’s ever a reason for a fresh start, you’re…” he glances down at his shoulder, wrapped in bandages. “You’re lookin’ at it.”
Katsuki doesn’t say anything.
Eijirou smiles sadly. "God forbid we move on, Katsuki. God forbid you forgive yourself, for whatever you seem to think needs to be forgiven."
You know, I never wanted you to leave.
There's a long silence. Eijirou fumbles with another jello cup.
I’m glad you’re alive. I’m glad you’re going to be okay. I’m glad you’re still in the world.
Katsuki stares at the floor and says, like an idiot, the only thing he can think of to break the tension.
“Your action figures are going to have to be remade.”
Eijirou looks up. “Huh?”
“Your action figures.” Katsuki licks his lips and if Ochako were here, she’d punch him. This is fucking insensitive, even for him, so he hesitates, but then Ei says, with a glint in his eye,
“Say it.”
“Your action figures are going to have to be remade.”
It hangs in the air for a long moment and Katsuki thinks he’s gonna need to beat another hasty retreat, but then Eijirou cracks the first real grin of the day.
“Katsuki?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re so bad at this.”
“You know I’m bad at this shit, you already know—”
“Really, my action figures? That’s what you’re going with right now?” Eijirou laughs. He shakes his head, with that stupid grin that Katsuki fell in love with when they were seventeen in those UA dorms, that grin that still has the power to bring him to his knees in the most unexpected moments (in the most unexpected places).
Eijirou laughs to himself again. He ponders it for a moment.
With bags under his eyes and a flicker that Katsuki hasn’t seen in weeks, he says,
“You know, they never got my eyes right, anyway.”
-
“I’m really glad he has you again,” Ochako says, leaning forward over her salad, a smidge of dressing dotting the corner of her mouth.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just glad you two are at least friends again, or whatever you are.” She stirs her tea. “I visited him the other day, he said he likes it when you come and visit him.”
Katsuki swallows. “Stop that shit.”
Her eyes soften around the edges. “Katsuki, you can’t deny that it’s probably helping him to have someone familiar back in his life.”
Katsuki shakes his head.
“Do you think you’ll get back together?”
He freezes. God, she’s so fucking blunt sometimes. Katsuki puts down his chopsticks and glares. “The fuck kind of question is that?”
Ochako sips her tea and blinks at him with those stupidly round eyes. “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t think it was a possibility, from both parties involved,” she says simply.
He bristles, “Don’t ask me shit like that, okay?” and she doesn’t ask again.
(He lies in bed and thinks about it for hours.)
-
Three days later and Eijirou is crying.
Small, dignified tears, sitting on the edge of his bed, his fingers curled into the starched hospital sheets. He keeps his head down as he weeps, breaths of sobs, quiet enough that Katsuki can just hear them from the doorway.
He’s getting discharged today.
The bandages are off. It's a stump, a nub, it really does look like a little kid snapped off a doll arm. Where his bicep should be is mottled skin, stretched across the shoulder, crossed with a jagged line of black stitches that hatch over a line of red, puffy flesh.
Katsuki can see the burns from where his palms were. The skin is a mass of scar tissue, looks like the shadows of water on the back of a hand in the ocean, like the bottom of a pool on a sunny day. It looks like Sensei's elbow, like All-Might's stomach, but it's fresh, still blood pink. Eijirou keeps his head turned away from it, tears dripping off his nose.
Katsuki leans against the threshold, arms at his sides. "Does it hurt?"
Eijirou flinches. His head jerks up, and he brings his shining red eyes to meet Katsuki's. He sniffles. "Sometimes. Yeah."
Katsuki walks in, while the tears still stream down his ex-lover's face. Eijirou's tears have always been his greatest weakness, he thinks, and the twang in his chest tells him that nothing has changed. He sits in the chair that he's occupied for the last three visits or so, staring at the slivers of mid-morning sunshine on the bed that try desperately to peek their gold through the drawn curtains.
Eijirou palms his face. "Sorry."
"Don't apologize," Katsuki wants to say, but the words die on his lips and he can only manage, "Rough morning?"
Biting his bottom lip, Eijioru nods smally. "It's just... ah," he pauses, voice wobbling. "It's rough, you know?"
No, Katsuki doesn’t know, but he nods anyway. Eijirou buries and buries and buries, conceals so much, and in a moment of blistering fragility Katsuki’s caught him peaking.
(Eijirou is the sun, and when the clouds cover his face, Katsuki will never feel more useless.)
“Do you want to talk about it?”
It’s a formality. Eijirou would always ask when he found Katsuki with a hand knotted in his hair, when the sharpness of his tongue was more than just his demeanor, and now that the roles are reversed, Katsuki feels that he owes it to him, at least.
Eijirou takes a breath and lets it out, trying actively to calm himself down, but Katsuki can tell it’s not working by the way that his breath continues to hitch, by the way he’s unable to look anywhere else but the floor.
Moving out of instinct, Katsuki scoots his chair closer so that their knees are very nearly touching.
Is this right?
“I don’t even know if I’ll ever be able to hero again,” Eijirou whispers, so brokenly.
It hits like a lead weight, sinking down into Katsuki’s stomach. Jesus.
“I mean, it’s been, like, my whole life,” Eijirou chokes, tears spilling over his cheeks more rapidly. “What do I—I mean, what even am I? If I’m not Red Riot, what do I—”
“Stop.”
It comes out sharper than it should, but Eijirou stops with the stream of BS coming from his mouth, at least. “Eijirou, you’re—you’re so much more than that, you can’t just—”
Don’t you realize that you’re still my whole world?
Katsuki swallows hesitantly, eyes searching the wall for the words he needs to say.
Don’t you realize that five months has done nothing to erase your stupid smile from my head, nothing to stop the way my chest jumps at the crinkle of the corner of your eye, the way your voice sounds after sleep, you stupid fucking idiot--
Eijirou draws in in a shallow breath, sniffles and tilts his chin up to meet Katsuki’s eyes.
Didn't you know that night that my world was going to end right along with yours?
“You’re more than that, Ei,” Katsuki manages softly, feeling his own throat tighten.
He could say it, he could spill his guts on this hospital floor in front of the person he can’t seem to live without, with his missing arm and his tears on his cheeks, Katsuki could put his hand on top of Eijirou’s bandage, where his IV used to be, Katsuki could say it to his puffy face right now:
I think I still love you.
But that would be so shitty. Katsuki knows that. Eijirou’s in his own crisis, miles away from Katsuki’s, one that’s going to consume his life for the foreseeable future, one that’s uprooted life plans and careers and weeks and months and years. To tell Eijirou now would be the most selfish thing Katsuki could do.
So he doesn’t.
Because he’s not sixteen and jaded, he’s not in high-school anymore, and he’s still inconsiderate but not that inconsiderate.
He stands up on knees that are weaker than normal, with a heart beating harder than it should be.
Eijirou looks at the ground again, and Katsuki lowers himself onto the bed and lifts an arm.
At first he doesn’t move, but then Ei brings his hand to his eyes and leans into Katsuki’s shoulder like it was made for him, tears soaking through the cotton of Katsuki’s tee-shirt.
The puzzle pieces still fit.
“You can’t predict the future,” Katsuki says in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own. Eijirou’s hair brushes his jaw. “There are a million things that could happen, and there are prosthetics and—and robotics and a hundred people behind you that would drop everything to help, you know.”
Eijirou is warm, pressed to his side. Katsuki brings his hand to rest on Ei’s shoulder, just above where the stitches are. He traces callused fingers on the bumpy skin—this is his work, his warped artistry.
“It might be a while,” he says quietly, voice low. “But you don’t give up, Ei.”
Eijirou sniffles. Katsuki’s heart aches for something that used to be.
“Thank you for being here,” Eijirou whispers. He presses his forehead into Katsuki’s collarbone, an old move that used to get him attention but now only wears into Katsuki’s heart like a bruise.
Katsuki holds him a bit tighter.
-
Eijirou comes home, and the world keeps turning.
Two weeks after he’s discharged and Katsuki’s slamming the door to his car, looking up at trees and foliage that burn with autumn colors.
“We can go rollerskating.”
Eijirou closes the passenger door. “You hate rollerskating.”
“But you don’t.”
Ei shakes his head and leans against the hood next to Katsuki, hair spiked, eyes sparkling, one sleeve of his tee-shirt hanging limp. “You said this was my present, you said you’d take me to the mountains when I was all finished with therapy.”
“I did.”
“Well, I am.” Eijirou turns his head to look at him, crooked grin the exact melting point of Katsuki’s steel walls. “I tied my shoes today all by myself, don’t you dare tell me I did it for nothing.”
Katsuki smirks and pushes off the hood.
The trail is even more breathtaking than it was two years ago, and Katsuki thinks that as the years go on, he’ll only grow to appreciate these things more.
Walking is still weird for Ei sometimes, something about the balance of missing his arm, so he keeps his pace next to him, on the side where his arm is.
Eijirou’s face is brighter than he’s ever seen it. In the mid-morning sunshine, filling his lungs with crisp air, all traces of sterile gray hospital gone from his skin, Eijirou looks like he has life. He’s staring at the colors above their heads, the reds and yellows of passing time. Katsuki can’t help but feel fond.
They reach a bench on one of the trails, a serene spot that offers the view of a sprawling valley, of fluffy clouds and a sky so blue that Katsuki wants to bottle it up and paint his apartment walls with it.
Eijorou shrugs a sweatshirt on and takes a sip from his water.
Katsuki leans to the side and pulls out a small box that he wrapped himself with newspaper. He nudges it into the side of Eijirou’s leg.
(“Would you help me, maybe?”
Katsuki had frozen.
“I mean, you obviously don’t have to, but. I mean. We were always good sparring buddies in—in high school… I just thought maybe you could—could help with, I dunno, getting me back into shape, or something—”
Katsuki shook his head and crooked the corner of his mouth upward. “Why else do you think I’m hanging out with your pitiful ass?”
The smile on Eijirou’s face was enough to power three city blocks.)
Eijirou puts down his water and takes the box into his hand. “What’s this?”
Katsuki shrugs and looks out into the golden-orange valley.
There’s the rustling of paper, and then, softly, “Katsuki.”
He turns his head back to look at Ei, staring down at the box in his lap, looking like he’s about to fucking cry.
“Where—how—”
“Deku has, like, eight billion figurines. Figured he had to have a few places that would make 'em custom.”
EIjirou balances the box on his knees and takes the figurine out with child-like gentleness. “You made it?”
“Well, I guess. The people at the factory or wherever put it together and stuff.” Katsuki swipes his nose with the backside of his hand. “It’s kind-of stupid, but I just thought. I dunno. Like, the other ones are incorrect now, and you should be able to look like yourself—”
He turns and sees that Eijirou has tears in his eyes.
“No, don’t fucking cry, Ei—”
Eijirou’s chin crumples. “You got my eyes right.”
Katsuki blinks. “Well, yeah . ”
Eijirou dabs his eyes with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and lets out a small, wet laugh. “Now I don’t have to snap the arm off of my other one.”
“Yeah, that’s the point—”
Eijirou grabs his hand. It’s warm.
“Thank you.”
Katsuki feels a lump in his throat. “Sure.”
Eijirou’s eyes are shining, holding the world like Katsuki always remembers them. He places his hand on Katsuki’s cheek, cupping his jaw with that soft palm.
Katsuki closes his eyes.
Thumb brushing across Katsuki’s cheekbone, Ei’s lips are just the way he remembers them. Eijioru pulls away and rests their foreheads together, when Katsuki’s fingers make their way into that shitty red hair and the tips of his ears have turned red.
“You sure?” Katsuki asks quietly, just loud enough for Ei to hear.
Eijirou nods, eyes still glossy, inches away. “I’m sure.”
Katsuki swallows and lets his hand wilt on the back of Ei’s neck.
Eijirou breaks into that stupid grin again. “Come here.”
Under a blue sky, backed by miles of the exact shade of red that he tried so hard to forget, with a one-armed Red Riot figurine that’s got Eijirou’s eyes right on the bench at their knees, Katsuki does as he’s told.