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Katsuki’s timer really hasn’t been ticking for very long.
He knows some people have theirs set for whole decades, has heard of soulmates that miss each other by minutes year after year after year. His own timer is dated somewhere around his high school years and, although he threatens anyone that even alludes to the concept of “high school sweethearts,” he’s relieved.
Meeting his soulmate in high school means they’ll be able to grow together, develop their fight patterns together, and go pro together. It’s been set in stone that Katsuki will be going to U.A, which means his soulmate is going to be a hero just like him.
Equals, he thinks, late at night. They’re going to be my equal.
On the first day of high school, Katsuki meets Kirishima, studies the boy’s unbreakable skin. Built to withstand anything.
He wonders.
Wonders, wonders, wonders until USJ, until Kirishima leaps at the same time as him to punt the mistfucker into the fucking ground, until his wrist is on fire and he knows this is it, this is the rest of his life, this is a boy made out of mountains and fire and wicked sharp steel, this is his.
“Our first battle,” Kirishima declares, when it’s all over. He raises his hand for a high-five and Katsuki… Katsuki grits his teeth so hard that his head rings. The ringing grows ear-shatteringly loud and the numbers on Kirishima’s wrist count down, down, down.
Stupid, Katsuki admonishes. You’ve never had a good track record with kind things.
After decidedly not thinking about it, Katsuki realizes he was perfectly fucking fine with keeping his secret to himself. Fine was maybe an overstatement, resigned probably worked better. Regardless, he's accepted it. He isn't about to ruin a real friendship or make himself the target of one of those sad tearjerker pieces about regret and unrequited love.
Unfortunately, his shitty class didn't share the sentiment. Which is, all in all, kind of impressive, how none of them knew about his biggest secret but still managed to use it to fuck up his life completely.
It’s Friday night and the class is holding a small party to celebrate settling into their second year together. The only reason Katsuki hasn’t left already is because someone apparently managed to sneak in alcohol. It’s not shitty either, Katsuki admits, grudgingly. The sake is the right kind of sweet and it burns nicely going down.
“Who brought this?”
Hanta raises a hand.
“It’s decent.”
He grins. “Aw, thanks, dude! I’m glad you like it.”
From beside him, Eijirou beams. “Careful Bakubro, you almost look like you’re enjoying hanging out with us!”
“There isn’t enough alcohol in the world to make me put up with you,” Katsuki replies, but it’s half-hearted at best. Eijirou’s smile grows brighter at that and Katsuki… doesn’t say anything. The sake is warm in his gut and it’s making him tired. He deserves a break, he thinks, after an entire year of this bullshit. Pretending not to be in love with your best friend when he’s the clingiest fucker alive is difficult, but Katsuki can manage it.
He’ll be the best at everything, including emotional repression. Just. Not tonight.
“Guys,” Denki warbles, a grin spreading across his face, “we should play one of those drinking games!”
To Katsuki’s absolute horror, nobody takes his bottle away from him, choosing instead to agree? Fucking hell. Even the class rep who doesn’t drink looks oddly relaxed with his glass of apple juice.
“As long as nobody goes overboard, I guess it’s alright,” Yaomomo says, her smile irritatingly loose.
“We got Mom’s permission!” Mina cheers. “Everyone, sit in a circle, we’ll play Never Have I Ever, it’s the simplest one!”
Before Katsuki can blink, Eijirou drags him down to the floor. He’s sandwiched between him and Uraraka and his stupid, wine-drunk reflexes are too slow to get him out in time.
“You have to say something you haven’t done before,” Mina explains, “and everyone who has done it has to take a drink. Iida, your juice is fine!”
“Fuck no,” Katsuki grumbles.
“If you leave, you can’t take the sake with you,” Eijirou says, hurriedly. Oh, fuck him, Katsuki genuinely can’t stand the guy.
“Friendship card revoked,” Katsuki growls. “I fucking hate you.”
Eijirou gasps. “Guys, did you hear that? He said we’re friends!”
“Guys, did you hear that?” Katsuki echoes. “We’re not anymore because this bastard betrayed me!”
Instead of getting up and letting him leave, the circle of idiots laugh.
“If I knew all it took to get you to loosen up a little was sake, I would have gotten you drunk months ago,” Hanta says, laughing.
“You’re really going at it, huh, Bakugou?” Uraraka says from beside him, eyeing him critically.
Katsuki resolutely ignores her. “Are you shitheads going to keep harassing me or are we actually going to start playing this stupid game?”
“Well, if that’s what you want, Kacchan,” Denki purrs. “I’ll go first! Never have I ever wet the bed!”
“Oh my god.”
It continues like that, for a while. The circle gradually becomes louder and gigglier, several people giving up on sitting up by themselves and slumping over on their classmates. Eijirou is a warm, comfortable weight against his side, which is dumb because they have the couch right behind them so what the fuck is his excuse?
“Never have I ever called the Symbol of Peace a “star-spangled motherfucker” to his face!” Hagakure crows, from her spot on Mina’s lap.
“Fuck you, stop trying to get me drunk!” Katsuki yells, taking an aggressive swig.
“Wait, you said what?” Deku looks at Katsuki like he’d just murdered his mother and offered her marinated corpse to him as an alternative recipe for his beloved katsudon.
“He was being a star-spangled motherfucker,” Katsuki mumbles, mulishly. He doesn’t feel like elaborating.
“Drunk Katsuki really is the gift that keeps giving,” Mina wheezes.
“Hey, every Katsuki is the gift that keeps giving,” Eijirou defends. Katsuki turns to him and immediately wishes he hadn’t. Eijirou is still smiling his trademark, good-natured smile, but there’s something dark in his eyes, something sharp in the lift of his chin. It’s cruel, Katsuki thinks. His kind, generous, stupidly chivalrous soulmate is the cruellest person he’s ever met, because Katsuki knows, knows in his heart that he doesn’t love him.
But every so often he does things like this.
Uraraka nudges him. “You’re staring,” she whispers.
“Go fuck yourself,” Katsuki whispers back. She jerks back, wincing. So maybe that hadn’t quite been a whisper. What the fuck ever, Katsuki’s kind of going through something right now. Has been going through something for the past year.
What the fuck ever.
“Never have I ever met my soulmate,” Uraraka says.
Katsuki freezes. Around the circle, a few people take their drinks. Deku and Todoroki both smile softly before sipping. Yaomomo and Kyouka grin and clink their drinks together, before sipping at the same time. It’s so fucking stupid, this is a dumbass game and he could most definitely lie and nobody would even know–
Drunk Katsuki takes a sip and the room goes silent. At his side, Eijirou goes rigid.
“Sorry, Katsuki, what ?”
“Oh boy,” Mina whistles.
Katsuki glares at his drink like it’s betrayed him because technically it has, it absolutely fucking has, this is why he doesn’t drink. Drunk Katsuki has all of Sober Katsuki’s emotions and none of his repression and it’s why he drinks alone in his room and not with his shitty class and his stupid beautiful unrequited soulmate.
“Katsuki, you met your soulmate? Why didn’t you tell me?” Eijirou’s eyes are wide and hurt and too fucking close, Katsuki needs to move away, far away, maybe to America, land of star-spangled motherfuckers.
Katsuki stares at the ceiling. “You don’t need to know my whole life story, Shitty Hair.”
Eijirou flinches. “It’s just… you’re my best friend.”
You’re my best friend.
The words play again and again and again, becoming a nauseating pounding right behind Katsuki’s eyes. They rattle his jaw and cut at his temples. Eijirou is his best friend. Eijirou is his soulmate. He is Eijirou’s best friend too. But he is not his soulmate.
Drunk Katsuki keeps his eyes trained on the ceiling and ensures that his voice does not break.
“I want you to think about why I might have never mentioned my fucking soulmate and then I want you to move the fuck on and say your shitty never have I ever.”
It’s like the entire room cringes. This is it, this moment right here is exactly why Katsuki never wanted anyone to know. It’s a symbol of how fucking weak he is, how goddamn hateful he is, how utterly unloveable he is–
“Who is it.”
Katsuki turns. “What?”
(“Are we all seeing this?” Kyouka mutters.
“Kinda wish I wasn’t,” Denki replies.
“Please be quiet,” Yaomomo breathes, riveted.)
“Who is it,” Eijirou repeats. “I need to know, so that I can go ask them what the fuck is wrong with them.”
“What,” says Katsuki.
Eijirou’s eyes are red-hot molten lava dragon scales and dripping blood and they’re looking at Katsuki.
“You’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met,” Eijirou says. “Who the fuck would turn you down?”
And Katsuki’s blood is on fire inside him and there are frustrated tears building behind his eyes and the alcohol is burning in his gut and you’re my best friend has become a dull echo and it’s been three hundred and sixty-five fucking days of knowing his soulmate doesn’t love him back and he is so, so tired–
“He doesn’t know,” Katsuki says, softly. “My timer stopped and nothing happened. He’s not mine.”
He leaves the room and nobody stops him.
There is a moment right before he slams his hand down on his alarm that Katsuki relishes. It’s one where he is so in tune with his routine, already in the motions of his gut reaction that there is no time to think about anything else, reminisce about what it means to be awake and alive. There is Katsuki and his alarm clock and the space between the two of them.
And then his hand comes crashing down and with it, the memories of yesterday.
Satan’s fucking ballsack.
For a brief moment, he contemplates skipping school. For an even briefer moment, he considers pursuing a modelling career and leaving his hero studies behind. For the slightest second, he thinks about climbing out the window and running away to his family friends in France.
Three hundred and sixty-five days, Katsuki reminds himself, and your weak ass can’t do one fucking more? He’s always known this, really. Regardless of whether anyone found out or not, Katsuki was going to spend the rest of his life with an unrequited soulmate. His pathetic love life wasn’t about to take being a hero from him too. Fuck no.
So Katsuki does his morning run and if he goes fast enough to almost collapse near the end, that’s nobody’s business. And if he blasts his music loud enough to drown out any attempts at conversation, well, it is five a.m. He times his walk to class just right so that he enters right as Aizawa starts rolecall. Everyone’s looking at him as he walks through the door but nobody actually says anything, so he counts it as a win.
One more day, Katsuki tells himself. One more year. This is the rest of your life. Get the fuck over yourself and get fucking used to it.
There are eyes boring into the back of his skull all through the lesson. His classmates wouldn’t know subtlety if it hacked their hair off with a butter knife and Aizawa picks up on it.
“Bakugou,” he calls, as the rest of the class is filing outside for English. “Stay behind for a moment.” When the room is empty, his teacher looks at him with appraising eyes. “Is there anything you need to tell me?”
It’s not an option. “No, sensei.”
“Kid,” Aizawa says, his voice coloured with something close to concern, “if there’s something going on–”
“There isn’t,” Katsuki interrupts, quickly losing his patience. “If it was something that was gonna fucking interfere with class, I would have told you.”
Maybe. Probably. Hypothetically.
“I’m not asking if it interferes with class,” Aizawa says, exasperated. “I’m asking if there’s anything bothering you.”
“Nothing’s bothering me.”
It’s the truth. Nothing is bothering him. Something is ripping out his lungs and painting his skin red and making him feel like he’s shrinking smaller day by day until he is inevitably ripped up like scrap paper. But it’s not bothering him.
Aizawa opens his mouth to say something but evidently thinks better of it. Good, Katsuki thinks, savagely, he knows his old man wisdom would be fucking wasted on me.
“Are we done here?”
Aizawa dismisses him.
Katsuki slips into English late and it’s a testament to the U.A. faculty group chat Shinsou had exposed back in their first year that Present Mic doesn’t even acknowledge his tardiness. He drowns himself in conjugations and tenses to ignore the eyes trained on his back and doesn’t fully exhale until the bell rings. Finally, he’ll be able to slip up to the roof and get away from these gossiping fuckers for at least a little while and–
Denki’s hand claps down on his shoulder. “I heard they’re making mapo tofu today!”
“Congratulations,” Katsuki replies, shrugging him off.
“If you come to eat with us,” Denki says, swinging his arm around Katsuki with none of the fear the asshole should logically possess, “I’ll dump as much hot sauce as you want on whatever I get.”
They play music at funerals, Katsuki decides. And all things considered, Denki really isn’t that bad a singer.
“Fine.” His lips quirk up, unbidden. Denki… is a good guy.
Denki’s a fucking snake.
“Friends,” he said, magnanimously, arms spread wide like a preacher’s son, “we are gathered here today for one glorious purpose.”
“What the fuck,” Katsuki groans, drowning Denki’s noodles in hot sauce.
“We are here,” Denki says, ignoring him, “to find one Bakugou Katsuki, yes, the same man currently doing his best to give me heart failure, we are here to find him a date. ”
Three things happen in very quick succession.
Katsuki unscrews the cap of the bottle and just lets the entire 200 mL bottle empty itself into Denki’s bowl. Denki squawks loud enough for several tables to give him a warning glare. Eijirou stands up and leaves.
“Denki,” Hanta sighs, “you couldn’t have timed that any better?”
Katsuki frowns. Eijirou’s retreating posture is tense and angry, his shoulders ramrod straight.
“What’s wrong with him?”
Mina sighs. “Honestly, Kats, I know you guys have probably talked it out but it’s still hard for him. You need to give him time.” She tries smiling, but the edges of it are flat. “I’ll go look for him later but, for now, we’re getting you a date!”
“What the fuck.”
Kaminari shudders, setting down a vibrantly red spoonful of broth. “Look, dude, we want you to be happy, okay? You deserve it.” He looks down nervously. “Someone who might soften you up, you know?”
“Drink your fucking soup,” Katsuki orders.
Hanta snickers and offers to spoon feed him. Denki, giggling, actually accepts and, before long, the two idiots are alternating between cooing at each other and hurriedly finding glasses of milk and water for Denki to chug. The normalcy of it all helps Katsuki zone out and his thoughts drift back to Eijirou. Has he truly fucked up everything so thoroughly that his best friend isn’t even speaking to him anymore?
“Oi, Raccoon Eyes.”
She looks at him, phone still raised from recording the antics of the idiots sitting on the other side of the table.
“Yeah?”
“What were you talking about when you said that Shitty Hair and I had already talked about shit? The fuck is there to talk about? Is he that fucking mad that I didn’t tell him about my soulmate?”
Mina tilts her head. The new angle kind of makes her look like one of those lopsided troll dolls. It’s just his luck that he comes up with shit like this when there’s nobody to tell.
“I mean, I wouldn’t say he’s mad, but it’s really hard to be okay with that when he… you know…” She gesticulates vaguely, like Katsuki’s supposed to understand what she means. He’s about to communicate that through a series of displeased grunts when her eyes widen. “Wait, wait, oh my actual Yaomomo, you don’t know.”
Katsuki slams his sparking hands down on the table. “How fucking hard is it to give me a straight fucking answer?!”
“Blasty, I’m a lesbian, you know this,” Mina replies, distractedly chewing at her lip. It’s a bad habit, she’s going to end up like fucking Handsy McFuckface if she keeps this up.
“Kats, are you listening to me?”
He shakes himself out of imagining Mina with bright pink hands Sero-taped to her face.
“Fucking of course, what is it?”
“I said, you need to go talk to Eijirou right. It’s super important, ‘kay? Please just… listen to what he has to say.”
“I don’t even know where he fucking is–”
Mina, proving once again why she is his sleep paralysis demon, aggressively jabs at him with her chopsticks. “Get up get up get up get up get up–”
He shifts backwards until his ass almost slides off the bench. “Get the fuck away from me, I’m going, Christ– If I look like a fucking weirdo when I finally find him, it’s your goddamn fault.”
Mina shoves noodles inside of her mouth instead of answering and Katsuki puts on his big boy pants and leaves to confront his soulmate. Behind him, Hanta wolf-whistles. Katsuki’s about to turn back and blow the dipshits’ head to pieces when Denki, apparently having reached his limit, accidentally shocks the mullet-having tape dispenser until he drops onto the floor in an undignified heap of horse teeth and regrettable haircuts.
Good. It’s what the asshole deserves.
He had lied to Mina and she knew it. Whenever Eijirou gets angry or overwhelmed, he heads for the roof. This is mostly because whenever Katsuki is angry or overwhelmed, he broods on the roof and, after bringing Eijirou up there one (1) time, the hollow-skulled idiot had decided that it would be “their place.”
Their friendship can’t be irreversibly fucked up if Eijirou is still on the roof, Katsuki tells himself, over and over again. There is a heavy sigh of relief that escapes him when he finally steps out and sees Eijirou leaning against the outer railing.
Katsuki deliberately loudens his footsteps and Eijirou turns abruptly, his eyes wide and unfocused.
“Oh, Bakugou–”
“Mina said we needed to talk about something,” Katsuki cuts in and, fuck, that’s not right, she had also told him to listen, but he’s all over the place and he’s hurting and confused and… and… Eijirou is so close. Had he always been this close?
…Or had Katsuki’s traitorous fucking legs moved him all the way here.
“Mina said we needed to talk about something,” Katsuki repeats, steadfast, his current position notwithstanding. “She said that it was really important and that I needed to listen to you.” He frowns. “You’re… fucking hell, you’re my best friend, okay? And I don’t know what I did to make you this mad at me but I want to fucking fix it. And I’m… sorry, I’m fucking sorry that I didn’t tell you about my soulmate but it,” was you, it was my best friend in the whole fucking world, it was the only person I’ve ever really seen as my equal, and it makes so much fucking sense but apparently the universe doesn’t agree, “really fucking hurt. And I didn’t want you to see me like that.”
Eijirou’s voice is so, so quiet. He’s looking at Katsuki like he’s never seen him before. “What do you mean? Didn’t want me to see you like what?”
There’s a familiar burning behind his eyes. Katsuki resolutely looks upwards because this conversation is already uncomfortable enough and he point-blank refuses to start crying like fucking Deku in the middle of it too.
“That’s not the point–”
“Katsuki,” Eijirou says again, still painfully soft and sweet. “Please?”
Katsuki meets his gaze, then, and… well. Eijirou’s eyes are dark and heady and there’s a flush high in his cheeks, accenting his cheekbones and making his skin glow in the afternoon sunlight. His eyes have a glassy sheen to them but it doesn’t make their gaze any less intense.
For the second time, Katsuki reluctantly allows himself to let go.
“My soulmate doesn’t love me back,” he explains, haltingly. “Which must mean that I’m fucking unloveable, right? And it makes sense, which is the worst fucking part because he– He’s like… like the sun and I don’t deserve him. I know… I know that I don’t fucking deserve him. But I’m just so fucking tired of losing at everything, I lost to shitty Todoroki and I took All Might away from the whole world, and I’m going to lose him and, fuck, I just want to be good enough for once in my goddamn life –”
He stops.
He stops because Eijirou’s calloused hands are cupping his face and Eijirou’s beautiful red eyes are bright and angry and Eijirou’s low, mountain range voice is speaking, saying, “Please stop. I can’t let you say that. I am refusing to let you say that.”
“What are you–”
“Katsuki,” Eijirou murmurs, branding his fingerprints onto Katsuki’s skin. “My timer went off at Kamino.”
What.
Eijirou continues like he hasn’t just shaken Katsuki’s world down to its foundations. “Ever since I met you, it was like I was in the presence of the sun. You were… you’re amazing, you’re so smart and brave and dedicated and you push our whole class to do better. I compared everything to you. You’re my measure of victory, you know? But I didn’t think that I could ever be worthy of you. I didn’t think that I would ever be able to stand beside you as equals. I wanted to be partners, but I wasn’t ready for it.”
“Asshole, what do you mean, you’re–”
“Please,” Eijirou interrupts, “Katsuki, please just let me say this. I wasn’t ready until Kamino. When you were taken…” He’s crying too, Katsuki notes. It should make him feel better, but it doesn’t. Eijirou isn’t meant to cry, isn’t meant to look this miserable.
Katsuki did this. It’s his fault.
“It’s not your fault,” Eijirou breathes, cupping Katsuki’s face in his hands. “I know you, I know you blame yourself for everything that’s ever happened to anyone, but you shouldn’t. To be honest, I blamed myself so much, and I still do. I think that’s when the class found out… that night in the hospital, when I told them we needed to help you. I thought it would have to be Midoriya that would reach out to you but he said–” He takes a long, shuddering breath. “But then he said I was the only one. Whose hand you would accept, I mean. I only realized after you had already gone home that my timer had stopped.” He smiles, shakily. “Because I had accepted myself as someone that could be worthy of carrying that title. Your soulmate. I finally believed that we could be equal, in everything you know? I wanted you to be my partner and I knew… I knew that I could be a good one. The best. For you.”
“Idiot,” Katsuki chokes out. “You've always been the best one for me. Ever since we fucking met, I can’t believe you.”
“And I understand that your soulmate is someone else,” Eijirou rushes, “but I promise I’ll be the best fucking partner, I’ll work so hard, I’ll push you just like you push me–”
Katsuki stares at him. His brain feels like it’s overloading and he can barely even hear Eijirou over the thundering of his own ears. “You’re saying… I’m your soulmate?”
“I’m saying that I’m in love with you,” Eijirou corrects. “And that you’re my soulmate.”
Three hundred and sixty-six days of being stuck in hell. Watching Eijirou smile and laugh and glow and knowing that none of it would ever be for him. Feeling the weight of his arm around his shoulder and wanting to keep it there for the rest of his life. Forcing himself to shrink away from it, hundreds of times over again.
“My timer went off at USJ,” Katsuki says. “When I attacked Kurogiri and your dumbass was right there beside me. And after all the bullshit that happened after that, I didn’t have the time to tell you. But you never said anything and I saw… that your timer was still ticking. So.”
Eijirou freezes. His hands tighten around Katsuki’s jaw. “Wait, so you–”
“I have been in love with you for so fucking long,” Katsuki says. “You complete fucking asshole, you made me think– I thought that you–”
“If it’s me,” Eijirou murmurs, drawing him closer until their foreheads are touching, “it’s only ever going to be you.”
Katsuki grins. It’s wet at the edges and a little too soft but it’s also been a year in the making and he decides right then that he deserves it.
“You owe me so much,” he declares. “A fucking year, Eijirou, I cannot believe you.”
“Anything you want,” his soulmate agrees, breathlessly. “I’m going to romance you so fucking hard because it’s what you deserve–” He pulls back then, eyes bold like a forest fire. “Please tell me, whenever you’re feeling like that. I can’t… I can’t have you feeling like you’re not good enough.”
Katsuki stares at him. “Are you– Are you fucking crying?”
“You don’t see yourself the way I see you,” Eijirou cries and honestly, Katsuki is so gone for this over-emotional loser. “No, Katsuki, this is important, you need to tell me when you’re feeling like that, okay? So we can talk it out.”
“Because we’re both so good at communication,” Katsuki replies, dryly. Eijirou looks at him, unimpressed. “Fine,” Katsuki concedes. “But you have to do the same too.” He glares, warming up to his point. “Not worthy of me? Are you fucking kidding me, Eijirou? You’re the only goddamn person I’ve ever seen as my fucking equal and you’re telling me–”
Eijirou cuts him off, laughing loud and bright, and it sets Katsuki off too until it’s just the both of them, wrapped around each other, laughing like crazy people. Awash in the warm glow of the sun, wrapped in his requited soulmate’s arms, Katsuki comes upon a realization.
This is it , he thinks, wonderingly, as Eijirou peppers kisses all over his face. This is the rest of my life.