Chapter Text
In rather un-spectacular fashion, what started it all off, was a simple bit of cartilage in his left kneecap. Specifically, the alarmingly scarce bit of cartilage, growing thinner - in both knees, his long-suffering doctor might add - each passing day. Even with all the best medical attention in the world and quirk-aided healing, it was common knowledge in this industry, that knees were often the first thing to go, and the rest would follow after.
The accelerated cartilage loss had been brought to his attention (over and over in loud shouty tones and endless arguments with doctors who’d had enough of him many years ago) nearly 2 years ago now and true to the script, the rest had followed.
So it’s with an increasingly familiar slight limp, and a stomach full of lead, Katsuki finds himself making his way down old hallways laced with nostalgia. The trickly stream-turned-waterfall sequences carrying him towards what felt like inescapable fate. Ageing. He shudders at the thought. Ageing is the one weakness he cannot train himself out of. No amount of preventative health food or exercise or fancy face creams his mother buys him each year will ever stop it happening. The signs had only started in trickles: an ache here, a strain there. Slightly longer healing time and slightly less training time before getting tired. The trickle had started turning to streams when doctors started giving each other worried looks when they think he couldn't see. And then the mouth to the river had truly opened when he’d been informed that certain parts of him could only be maintained for so long before they would degenerate forever.
Feeling heavier and shakier with each step in a way that has nothing to do with his knees and everything to do with that dead ball of weight in the pit of his stomach. The journey still makes him feel like a teenager about to get a lecture, as that’s probably what's going to happen. The fresh coats of paint and the bit of architectural improvement to his old school halls, cannot dissuade Katsuki from the old familiar impression of walking to the gallows – Aizawas office.
It still looks just the same, Katsuki had been here many a time when he was a student, then as a visiting pro-hero, and then a colleague, friend and family member. The small office-come-bedroom is as bare as it always has been, simple and to the point. A near mimick of the student bedrooms, except with a larger space at the front for a bigger desk and sofa area, separated off by a sliding partition to keep the bedroom and tiny kitchenette area separate from the meeting space. The roller blinds that cover the long rectangular window adjacent to the door are open, and Katsuki can see his old teacher sat waiting for him at the desk, reading a stack of papers. He looks as tired as he ever did.
Without knocking, because some habits he refuses to let go of out of sheer perseverance, he enters. Aizawa, as he expected, doesn’t even look up, not taking the bait of Katsuki walking in unannounced because it’s Katsuki. He’s expecting him, of course, and the roller blinds are up which means he’d caught on to the slight change in the light coming through the window before he’d even stepped in front of it. Katsuki knows this, which is why he simply sits down on the sofa – stiffer than he’d like – and then turns to stretch and lie across it like a patient at a clinic, without even removing his boots. He waits.
“Are you expecting a therapy session? I don’t get paid enough for that.” Aizawa drawls, seemingly unimpressed but Katsuki notices the tinge of long-suffering amusement underneath it. He’s still marking papers, likely student essays, and hasn’t looked at him yet.
“Like they’d give you a licence for that.” Katsuki snorts, because Aizawa may as well be a therapist with the amount of ego-fueled teenagers with death-wishes he’s managed to turn into semi-responsible adults. Even if he does go about it sometimes in entirely hard and unorthodox ways. He’s right though, he doesn’t get paid enough.
“If you’re going to make yourself at home, you may as well make coffee.” Not taking the bait dangling about the small space. Aizawa tuts to himself as he scrawls something on the papers, unimpressed. Katsuki smirks and wonders what poor bastard is going to end up in remedial classes this time. From the increasing scowl on his sensei’s aged face, the essay isn’t getting any better the further through he reads and the scrawling only increases, with growing aggression, until he may as well be re-writing it himself.
Katsuki studies him. He’s still the same hardass he always has been, the only sign that he’s any older is in the softening of his face and the streaks of silver running through his hair, growing more by the day. In another few years, he might be more grey than not. The dark circles are as pronounced as ever and more sunken than he remembers. Though for a man in his 60’s who hasn’t used a skincare product in his life, he isn’t looking too bad, just incredibly tired. So, just the usual level of done-with-the-world that Katsuki remembers.
The only hint in the room that old age may have softened him any is the small shelf on the wall opposite his desk that’s full of trinkets. Katsuki tips his head back on the couch to look up at them, various small plushes, a few photo frames with pictures of some people he recognises and others he doesn’t, and various cards, letters and memorabilia - gifts from past students no doubt. It’s the only bit of clutter in the otherwise barren room and sticks out like a sore thumb, that and the small cat figurine on the desk next to his computer that holds a pen – a birthday gift from Eri, Katsuki remembers shopping with her.
“Coffee, Katsuki.” Impatience getting the better of him, he moans, sighs for what seems like an age, and shoves the papers aside with such lack of care that a few go spilling onto the floor. “And take your boots off while you’re at it.”
There was the telling off Katsuki knew would come at some point. Though it took much longer than he was expecting.
“You’ve gotten soft.” He snorts as he uncrosses his legs and swings them around, slamming heavy boots onto the wooden floor to unlace them.
“You’re as abrasive as ever.” Katsuki would point out that Aizawa is sulking. Obvious from the way he’s grumpily slouched in his chair, work now abandoned with half scowl - but mostly pout - on his worn face. But he decides that even thinking such a thing, let alone saying so, in front of Aizawa, would only earn him a fast-tracked spontaneous combustion experience. He hasn’t forgotten how unrelenting his teacher can be, especially when already in a bad mood.
“As bad as we were?” He asks instead as he goes to make the coffees, nodding to the papers Aizawa’s scattered about, from whatever class he’s currently the homeroom tutor for. He’d seen a few of the newest victims milling about in the common area and got a few gasps, giggles and whispered comments as he’d made his way to Aizawa's room.
Each time he comes across the new groups of brats during visits, he wonders if he’d ever looked so young. Overexcited, oversensitive and naiive. He remembers the days where everything seemed funny or rage-inducing, and cringes as he thinks of how embarrassing the group of them must have been, as dramatic and overbearing as they were. He appreciates now, how much of an asshole he would have been at that age. It’s with a wry sense of pride that he makes coffee in the office of someone who once wouldn't even have let him get a word in until he’d spent 6 months proving he could be worthy of one.
“Of course not.” Comes the reply, with a dry resignment and another – definitely not sulky- glare towards the spilled papers covered in trademark red scrawl.
When Katsuki and Deku come to deliver guest lectures - because they have to come in pairs, Katsuki wouldn’t do it otherwise. But when he can be convinced into it, he’s amazed at just how different each year's class of brats can seem, while still being as predictable as ever. There’s always the group of loud ones, the few quieter ones at the back, the one or two ‘give me attention now’ kind of pairs and one that’s too innocent for their own good. There’s often the one that tries to look fed up with everyone around them while slyly taking in everything everyone is saying so they can feign indifference when asked. So basically, mini versions of his teenage self, scowling all-around at their classmates and even at he and Deku, giving the lecture. He sometimes wishes he could take them aside and give them some advice, maybe like being an insecure asshole isn’t a way to look back on your school years with no regrets. But if someone had done that to him when he was fifteen and thought he knew everything, he’d have blown up and caused a scene, and so he never does. He just hoped they’d learn as he had.
Deku reassures him each time after they leave the room ( eventually, after Deku inevitably gets gushing to some fellow hero nerds about hero related facts and has to be dragged out before they miss the next class) that they would.
“No class could give me more trouble than yours,” Aizawa drawls eventually because even though they fit the pattern of predictability, their class had honed the best and the worst tropes of it all down to an infuriatingly fine art. There’s an insinuated ‘but’ that Katsuki waits for as he pours boiling water over the grounds. Coffee and meal replacement pouches being literally the only things in the two tiny cupboards. It comes moments later with a frustrated groan and hands running over rough stubble. “But they’re just so stupid . I swear they get more stupid every year.”
K atsuki laughs because Aizawa says what he really shouldn't say, like Katsuki often does, and it’s refreshing . In an industry saturated with kiss-asses, power-play politics and bullshit, he always appreciated Aizawas lack of care or engagement with it all. Living life with a simple goal in mind and no regard for what others thought of it, or him, and a mouth that rarely filtered unless it was necessary to achieve something specific. A talent Katsuki shares and w hich he demonstrates on the way back, with scalding tasteless coffee in chipped mugs in his hands, letting a dark bitter smell fill the room.
“I was always your favourite.”
- - -
Hah. Aizawa thinks as his ex-students cocky attitude comes back to cover up for the air of nervousness he thinks he’s hiding. Katsuki had changed more than anyone, but he’s still the same bulldozer of a personality he always was, just softened around the edges and with more of a control and understanding of who he was.
‘ Favourite’ . He wonders about the word and thinks back to the angry tomcat of a boy who’d launched a baseball up into the atmosphere in a dramatic ball of flames with an attached death threat to the un-offensive inanimate object.
“Not at all.” Aizawa says, eyes closed and only stuttering open when Katsuki places a mug right under his nose, aroma waking him like smelling salts.
‘I don’t have favourites’, is what he should say, or at least insinuate, as a teacher and moral role model . But it’s just him and Katsuki here and they haven’t been formally teacher and student in years. Only in the sense that Aizawa can’t seem to let go of being a mentor to th is handful of teens, that have wormed their way past all his strongest barriers he’d built for himself. A nd he still finds himself giving nuggets of advice or turning up in front of his office as if they’ve never left, even now when they’re well into their forties. He’ll stop doing it when they stop listening to him. “You were a pain in the ass for two years. Y ou only started growing on me in the third and even then you were still a pain.”
“Aw, teach, that’s why I was your favourite isn’t it?” Katsuki smirks, and Aizawa sighs again. One day he wonders if he’ll sigh hard enough to launch himself out of the window like a balloon full of too much helium. Maybe he’ll ask Uraraka to tap him on the shoulder at just the right time one day during a visit so he can escape and go nap somewhere peaceful on a hillside.
“I preferred you when you were full of simple insecurity and not this sassy bullshit you’ve decided to claim for yourself. Have you been talking to Kaminari too much?”
He watches Katsuki’s face flicker with a bit of the old anger he remembers. He’s only reacting because he knows they’re both delaying the inevitable conversation – Katsuki had been correct about Aizawa getting soft. The sass, he does believe, would be encouraged by Kaminari, and Jirou, and Sero, who’s constant flirting, sarcasm and wit respectively, must have embedded their way into Katsuki’s own speech patterns. Taking the many years of unlidded aggression and braiding them into a thread of direction that leans more towards ‘good-natured digs’ than ‘cutting remarks with an edge of death threat’ that it used to be. Well, it’s an improvement, albeit an annoying one when it’s directed at him.
He releases another balloon-filling sigh before the only sounds in the small room are the sipping of bad coffee and the odd gurgling of pipes for a while. Katuski is no fool, and so he knows what will come after, which is probably why he takes his time with the beverage.
The deliberate wait, before a predicted-to-be-underwhelming storm, has a nice buzz to it. Probably keeps Katsuki on his toes so to speak, were his toes not currently back up over the arm of the small couch. The feeling doesn’t last long as his own coffee comes to a tragic end. He may as well get the ball rolling (with only a touch of well-earned delight at using almost the very same words he had many years ago.)
“You’re getting old.”
With exactly as much tact as is needed with a man like Katsuki - who knew what he was getting himself into walking into this office at this time of his life - Aizawa shoots a crochet hook into the knot of yarn tangling secretly in his abdomen.
With a sigh of his own, Katsuki puts the mug on the floor and digs an envelope out of his bag, tossing it onto the desk with tight-lipped silence before flopping back onto the couch with an air of drama that reminds both of them of his younger days.
He knows what the envelope is immediately from the medical logo in the corner. Health assessments for those in the public eye. The thickness and weight of this particular one signal a definitive doozy of a statement. The medical staff don't exactly call them ‘end of career assessments’, too many fragile egos’ in the business for that, but they may as well be.
Aizawa removes the papers from the thick envelope and reads quietly, slowly and thoroughly. Getting up once to refill the mugs with awful coffee again as he makes his way through the paragraphs of text and diagrams and diagnostics. Lets Katsuki squirm a little on the sofa in anticipation as he takes in every last word and statistic. When he finishes, eventually, he tucks them neatly back into the envelope and slides it to one side before clearing his throat.
As much as Katsuki knows Aizawa, knows him like one old problem child knows another. Knows him in far more of a familial obligation than he’d ever considered. Knows with logical reasoning and tendency to the same mental wavelengths as the other. There are still many times when Aizawa knows he can surprise him. This is one of them. He considers comfort, statement of the facts, sarcasm, questions, guidance…
“You’re fucked.” Is what he ends up with, and the sheer unexpectedness of it makes Katsuki laugh outright, which is comforting, even though it looked slightly hysterical with the grimness of the situation. Katsuki follows it by whistling lengthily, with a crescendo of agreement and a curt, “Yep.”
“ Does Izuku know?”
That was one of the questions he thinks Katsuki expected, going by the way his simmering body quite obviously calms, his head returning to form like a script error in an operating system resolving itself.
“Not...yet.” He answers carefully, and Aizawa just nods, waiting pointedly for the elaboration he doesn’t need to ask for, which Katsuki will eventually allow to be pulled out of him after a suitable period of silence. Defiance still very much in his nature.
- - -
Katsuki can feel the pulling need to vent closing in around him as his teachers gaze waits patiently. When he can’t contain it any longer he relents, letting the irritation though in his voice. “ If I tell him now then he’ll spend the next six months pretending nothing is wrong and avoiding any conversation about it.” He explains, turning his face into the soothing predictable fabric of the couch cushion to block out all of the information of the room. Even after so long, thinking about Deku still seems to take up much of the processing space of his brain has available. He’s never stopped making Katsuki’s life difficult with that larger than life presence. And once Katsuki had let him in, he’d turned into a drug that had taken him a further decade of dosing, to learn to balance the eclipsing effect. L ike a weekend binge drinker going full alcoholic before returning to a shaky casualty of a nightly glass of wine. “He’s already b eing more difficult since the plasma bastard .”
Plasmaknight had been yet another knot to contribute to the growing tangle of evidence for Katsuki’s body not being what it once was.
About two months ago he and Deku had been rushing to tak e him down in an industrial harbour district on the edge of the city. Plasma himself was just the muscle for a gang of much more intelligent, but much less dangerous men, who had been transporting drugs throughout the country.
Being many years experienced in these sorts of raids by now, the minor members had been taken out by their interns and sidekicks easily and the only real threat had been Plasma himself, who’s lack of brain cells combined with a massive temper meant that he and Deku had agreed to focus on him together while the rest of their agency tidied up the grunts and passed them on to the police waiting nearby.
T hough taking out villains never got boring in the normal sense of the word, it had been getting rarer to see the high-power ones like Plasma. After the rise of crime and peak over a decade ago, it had been steadily falling since. T h eir generation renewing a sense of confidence in the public and fear into villains throughout the country. All Might had said, should he and Deku ever learn to co-operate, that they could be a team that could be unstoppable, and they had proven the fact. So, drawing Plasma away from the warehouse and into the harbour area, Deku in tow and really able to let loose for the first time in a while, had been exhilarating.
They had been going all out in a way that reminded him of his younger days, grimaces of determination plastered across their faces and adrenaline and energy flowing through them in the crackle of lighting and raw power in the air. Katsuki had flung Plasma out to sea and then launched Deku after him in an explosion fuelled catapult to deal the final punch. That had gone fine. It was the jump he’d done afterwards - backflipping to land and roll away so that his muscled shoulders and upper back absorbed the strain safely - that had gone wrong. As he’d rolled, something in his lower back had simply gone .
He’d always been someone who right from the start of his school life, was very aware of his limits and capabilities and worked to push them safely. So the sudden twang of something in his spine simply failing him, completely out of the blue, had been shocking enough to stop him dead on the ground more than the sudden shooting pains travelling from his hips down his legs did.
Recovering from the shock and gritting his teeth through the agonising electric-like spasms in his lower back , he pushed up to see where Deku had landed. The fading glow of Plasma’s blue flames bobbing about on the surface of the dark sea reassured him that the hit had done as intended and downed him. The green lighting he spotted after, creating large shockwaves through the ocean as Deku hung on to Plasma and towed him across the surface of the water, running like a muscled speedboat, reassured him that they were done here.
Sighing with relief as his partner came quickly into view and leapt up onto the harbour, Plasma flopping like a dead fish onto the wet stone behind him, Katsuki had stood.
Or tried to.
Deku’s face had fallen as Katsuki had sworn and crumpled to the cold slabs of concrete underneath him, spasms of pain jolting through his lower body in waves that felt larger than the ocean fight’s aftershock.
“The villain!” He’d bellowed, voice hoarse from trying to contain the rising panic, rage and nausea growing in him as Deku dashed over without thinking , face full of concern and fear. “ Stay with Plasma!”
Deku should have known better, turning your back on a villain even if they were down was never a good idea. They had been caught out by it before, either by crafty tricks or simple recovery time being quicker than expected. Deku’s unrelenting concern and care for Katsuki was one of the reasons he’d been so reluctant to partne r up with him for so long. Caring too much on the field could hinder as well as help. T he desire to run to someone you loved without thinking was as tempting as it could be deadly.
Deku stopped and had turned back to Plasma with only a second of reluctance in it, they’d learnt to listen to each other and trust implicitly in the field. They wouldn’t have lasted this long if they couldn’t, even if their interns still accused them of bickering all the time. In the field, when Katsuki was serious, Deku listened.
It was a good job he did because Plasma stirred just as Deku had run back to him. Katsuki might have panicked but instead , he laughed, as his partner roared and landed another supercharged punch right into the villains face hard enough to crack the harbour wall below, and then threw him like a wet paper bag over in Katsuki’s direction.
The hulking mass of the downed villain splatted next to him limp and heavy. With mild annoyance at getting covered in the spray of wet gravel and blood that resulted, Katsuki sighed and tried to push himself up but only grunted in pain again as more waves started.
“Kacchan! W hat happened?” Deku was on him in milliseconds, throwing himself to a crouch in the wet grey chalky earth beside him with a face steeled in determined concern.
Kastsuki had looked up into the confused green eyes, no less mesmerising for the dirt and blood and rain all around them, or the frenzied unhinged energy within. In fact, it only served to make them more beautiful, in this moment of significance to the rest of their lives , paused in the rain as the rest of the world seemed to start mov ing in slow motion around them. Katsuki, with a slow rise of reluctant and sickening defeat flaring up from the depths of himself, remembered his conversation with Aizawa on a hill years ago. Remembered a promise he’d made with Deku, his now partner, about burning out. It was almost time.
He’d watched Deku gulp, rain running slow down the column of his throat as something had transpired in the soft and momentarily quiet pause of air between them like psychics. Watched as he spotted the tiniest flicker of recognition in the bright green irises before Deku’s whole face wiped over and closed off to him , back to business and forced positivity. The rest of the world unpaused as the rain came back thunderously loud , and their team ran towards them with heavy wet footfall, Deku turned away and shouted over at them to call a medic.
Later. Katsuki had thought, vision becoming blurry and bile rising in his throat as everything dawned on him at once. Later they’d talk about it. They had to talk about it.
That was months ago, months of physiotherapy and treatment for a slipped disc and narrowly avoided surgical intervention. They still hadn’t talked about it. Hence Katsuki’s frustration and being here, shortly after receiving the results for a thorough medical check and statistical prediction. The results of which hadn’t been promising.
H is back was one thing, but it had opened up the gateway to an envelope full of hard truths about the rest of his body. His knees especially were not going to allow him his current lifestyle forever, years of absorbing shock had left them in a sorry state. It was why he’d tried to adapt to rolling different ways in the first place, and then his back had betrayed him as well.
Grumbling and moving further into the soft grey weaving of the couch back, complaints easy on his tongue because he knows Aizawa understands Deku like he does, he continues his complaint . “Being all smiley-nice and leaving healing research books everywhere and making me eat all kinds of supplements and fish oil and green juice shit and making us do endless fucking running . He’s gone full bohemian.”
“I thought I said this wasn’t a therapy session,” Aizawa observes wryly before the telltale thunk of feet on a desk and the rolling open of a well-oiled desk drawer reaches Katsuki’s ears. He scoffs into the cushion as the familiar rustling of a packet and click of a lighter comes next.
“They’ll kill you y’know.” He says just to be difficult about it, as the smell of cigarette smoke joins the bitter coffee scent still lingering in the warm air. Briefly, he wonders about the fire alarm system but realises he wouldn’t put it past Aizawa to have sneakily disabled it for his own office.
“If you haven’t managed it by now, these wont.” Comes the dry reply so Katsuki goes in for a more serious jab .
“She’ll kill you first if she finds out.” Katsuki’s no stranger to going straight for weak points either and the quiet growl confirms he’s hit his mark. Aizawa is stubborn, so he takes another deep pull of the cigarette.
“ What she won't know can't hurt her.” It’s a curt reply that very clearly means something along the lines of ‘snitches get stitches’ (he can thank Ashido for knowing that phrase) and Katsukis’ eyebrow twitches in irritation. From a shared understanding, one damaged person to another, he’s not about to go running to tell Eri. But if she were to come in here later, smell the lingering smoke and then turn her very angry and determined gaze to Katsuki for confirmation, he’d be powerless to lie to her.
He keeps quiet only for the fact that he’s the one who came in here with a problem to get off his chest and out of his head, looking for some kind of guiding hand to reassure him he’s making the right decisions about it before it eats him alive.
Of course, he asks for help in the same way he always has - reluctantly, full of attitude and with the impression that he’s here to solve someone else's instead of the other way around.
“He’ll come to his senses one way or another, Katsuki.”
“I know.” Katsuki snaps and would feel bad about it were it not for the fact this is Aizawa, who has never once taken any notice of Katsuki’s anger. His head feels hot from his defensive hackles raising.
“Have you actually tried talking to him?”
The quick sarcastic guffaw Katsuki lets loose in response says all it needs to, but he hammers the point home anyway with a torrid, “Har. Har.”
T he sighing and frustrated hands upon Aizawa’s tired face are back, the hand that isn’t pulling a discouragingly long breath on the cigarette.
“Katsuki.” It’s all he needs to say really. Katsuki knows how he is. Knows that he’s curled up in a ball with his arms crossed and a scowl in the back couch cushions like an overgrown toddler. He doesn’t need to pretend to be what he isn’t in here.
“It won’t work!” He argues the scolding. “He already knows! He’s the same obsessive stalker he always was, he knows.” If Katsuki hadn’t looked petulant enough before, he does now as he kicks a sock-clad foot into the arm of the couch.
- - -
With crushing slowness, Aizawa puts out the cigarette and rubs his eyes, hard.
“It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to hear it from you .” He tries, feeling more and more resigned by the day. H e’s owed a sainthood at this point with the amount of bullshit he’s still putting up with from the absolute manbabies he’d ended up the mentor of.
He understands though, deep down. It’s harder to know what to do when the stakes are something and someone you care about as fully and unconditionally as Katsuki cares for both Deku and both their careers. It’s s omething that Katsuki’s parents - no matter how loving or attentive they try to be - will never understand as Aizawa does .
So he understands his position as surrogate guardian here, watching Katsuki sulk on the couch in a way he hasn’t in a long time, which tells him how precarious a situation this is. He’s been expecting this ever since he’d announced his plans to slow down and retire, up on that hill the night he’d picked Eri up. Ever since he’d planted that seed in Katsuki’s young and turbulent head, banking on an opportunity that had been presented to him at that moment. When he’d spotted the coming attitude shift, many years of teaching an underground work to aid him in his confidence. As he’d observed the tenderness with which Katsuki had held his adopted daughter and the confused, scared tense air all around him, he’d known it was something he needed to catch.
And he knows he's made the right decision because Katsuki wouldn’t be here showing him his latest medical check-up results if he hadn’t . But as the person who’d planted the seed and left it in the hands of fate aside from a few little bits of pruning along the way, he needs to be sure he harve s ts this correctly.
Because there’s not just one problem child here but two. T wo in tandem because some divinity somewhere has it out for him. He’s aware of Deku’s sometimes unhelpful optimism that manifests into a denial streak several kilometres wide. So he suggests something slightly sly as a solution.
“Have you tried talking to All Might?”
As Katsuki’s face peels away from the couch and looks over his shoulder at Aizawa, it morphs in a way that almost makes him lau gh . Going from a disapproving ‘You cruel bastard I can’t believe you’re sly enough to suggest that’ to a smirking ‘ Oh , you cruel bastard, that’s brilliant.’
He smirks back a little and puts out his cigarette. If setting Deku’s biggest hero on him for some hard to swallow pills is what’s needed then he knows Katsuki will do it. Even if it is slightly blunt, quite sly and does avoid them doing the thing that he’d encouraged them to do time and time again – talk to each other.
He supposes he can let them off occasionally. This pill, will probably be the hardest either of them has to swallow in their lives, and if underhanded tactics and calling in reinforcements are needed over common sense and communication, then that’s just the way they are, isn’t it?
- - -
Katsuki hadn’t expected all hell to break loose before he could ask All Might to try and shake Deku from his cocoon of relentless optimism and denial.
Though. H e supposes as he’s frantically wheeled down a hospital corridor in an oxygen mask, screaming in pain and causing hell for the staff around him as he shouts for Deku in a drugged whirlwind. This probably saves them from that awkward conversation. Aizawa would probably try to tell him they did this on purpose. Sometimes he wonders if they do.
He’s aware he’s being restrained, ‘For his own good.’ he vaguely thinks someone says. His hearing is coming in and out like an old static television, the people around him blurring into abstract shapes and ghosts as his eyes become hazy. He’s not sure if the crying is him or someone else. T here’s a beeping he hasn’t heard in a while in the back of his head. He thinks it’s in his head, but he can’t be sure. He’s trying to find Deku but he can’t move his head. Why can’t he move his head? His eyes are sticking together and there’s something wrong with his chest. He can’t breathe. It feels like someone is crushing his chest. Where’s Deku? Fuck. Fuck, something isn’t right.
As the next attempt to open his lead-weighted eyes fails him, he sees, in the slither of a gap where they fell shut, a flash of green.
He thinks for a moment of the mountains and of freckles and home.
- - -
Sounds, voices perhaps. There are no clear words. The dark picture of consciousness almost makes it through a hazy grey to a brighter white before it doesn’t. Quiet again.
-
Confusion. Panic. Rushing tap tap taps and creaking and...wheels?
-
Lots of people. Maybe. Maybe people. Maybe just his head. Deku? He’s sure he hears him. Maybe he’s dreaming. Someone is talking about Deku...someone…
-
“Sleep Katsuki. It’s ok son, we’re here.”
‘Dad?’ He would have asked, but he can’t speak and he might still be dreaming. He doesn't have limbs right now. Where is he? He’s cold. He tries to tell whoever is here that he’s cold. His dad? Why is he at home? Why is he so cold.
-
Definitely crying. That’s got to be crying. He thinks he almost manages to get his eyes open - if that’s what the growing brightness and ticklish feeling where he thinks his face is, is. He wants to tell whoever to shut up so he can sleep some more but there's some niggly sensation that makes him think something isn’t right.
-
Oh. There’s a room. He’s in a room and his eyes are open. He can feel his eyes. He can’t move his head and he can only see a speckled styrofoam ceiling but it’s something. It sounds like the ocean is rushing through his ears, he can’t make out much else. He clings to the ceiling as long as he can before his eyelids grow tired and the oppressive fog sets in. No. No, I haven’t had enough time yet. Fuck this! Fuck let me…
-
He’s heard this sound before and he hates it. The relentless Beep. Beep. Beep. It should probably be comforting, he’s aware in the logical sense that it probably should comfort him. Surely the calm beeping means that someone is alive.
Ah. He’s in a hospital and he’s alive.
But the sound won't stop and it’s making him feel sick. It’s not comforting him at all, it means something went wrong .
Something... Deku .
He’s shocked by a sudden slurring shout that makes him jump before he realises that it’s him that made it. If he concentrates very very hard he can feel his weighted head, move slightly like a newborn babies, lolling side to side. It makes everything spin wildly and brings him closer to the edge of vomiting but he can do it.
With a herculean effort he tips it over to his right and there’s a split second of conscious, ‘ T here he is.’, before all hell breaks loose.
An alarm starts ringing somewhere, the beeping gets louder, the air gets thinner and there’s a sudden agonising sensation pulsing all over him. All surrender that his body had previously , comes wrestling back into some vague control as he re-finds all his limbs in the places they’re supposed to be. Garbled shouting is falling from his mouth, muffled by whatever is over it - hard plastic. His hand makes itself known to him, appearing without prior knowledge and slapping up over the plastic. Mask? He tries to compute pulling it away and rolling from the bed but he can't. There’s something on his hands. Why are his hands covered in... what is it ? Gloves?
Help. What the fuck? Deku? Please Deku.
But Deku is over there, not moving . Not moving in a very definite way. He doesn’t look asleep. Katsuki needs to get to him. The beeping is too loud and he can smell the smoke and burning flesh .
“Bakugo, sir!”
He won't look away. He won't look away from Deku, a mop of grounding green in an ocean of confusing ster ile white. He needs to get over there. He won’t close his eyes even for a second in case he disappears again.
“Bakugo, please! He’s ok! Mr Midoryia is ok! Please lie back down!”
He’s not ok though. He’s not moving. Someone needs to get to him! Someone has to call an ambulance! He tries to tell whoever it is that’s talking to him. A woman. She looks distressed. A civilian? He can deal with her in a moment he has to get to Deku now.
More footsteps. Reinforcements? Hurried slapping of feet on linoleum. Linoleum? No, that’s not right. It was a cave, wasn’t it? Weren’t they in a cave?
“Katsuki! Deku is alive! He’s sleeping!” It’s a guy this time. He must know him because he’s calling him by his first name. He catches some red from the corner of his eye before his vision spins and he’s seeing ceiling again. The smoke is still filling his nostrils. There’s a lot of voices meshing into one loud cloud of confusion and noise. His chest is burning. “Katsuki, it’s ok buddy! I’m sure he’ll be waking up and talking your ear off soon...Katsuki…you’re ok...shh I know it’s ok…they’re just gloves...your quirk...you...control it...can’t...awake soon...” The sound becomes a lighthouse lamp, whirring around slowly so that he only manages to catch the parts that flash him directly from his place out in a dark and lonely ocean. He tries to follow it round as much as he can, chasing any glimpse of sense as it keeps getting pulled away from him again.
When the tightness in his chest and thumping heartbeat in his ears becomes too distracting he gives up and briefly tries an old favourite eight-second exhale, while he tries to remember what made him panic.
-
There’s a soft trilling of birdsong floating through the room. A golden soupy light shining through Katsuki’s tired eyelids. It must be early. He groans lightly at the light and the noise, wondering why he’d forgotten to shut the curtains last night. There are worse ways to be woken up, he supposes, than by birdsong and the lazy light of dawn. And now he gets the luxury of stretching and sprawling out before dozing a while, cuddled up with Deku.
He reaches out an arm to search for him, eyes still closed to keep out the strong sun rays, and pauses when he hears a noise that he shouldn’t. Like plastic and metal and there’s a strange tugging in his forearm.
G old giv es way to the addition of artificial blue when he opens bleary eyes , and he realises several things all at once.
He’s not at home, the strange noise was the tube from an IV drip knocking against the side of the bed he’s in and tugging the needle slightly in the bruised skin of his arm, and Deku isn’t with him.
Oh. He’s back. Properly this time.
Memory is a strange thing. H e’d been brainwashed before and knocked out before and he’s lived with years of deeply repressed anxiety. So he’s no stranger to the feeling of dissociation or not being in control of his own thoughts. But the way so many memories seem to come seeping back into his foggy mind like a blocked sink straining to drain through too small a hole was a startlingly therapeutic sensation. Like all the little pieces of himself over the course of his life had finally settled again after a long turbulent earthquake.
He and Deku were fighting, they’d been caught by surprise, back up was on the way. The enemy had made a solid trident out of sand solidified to crystal glass with an elemental quirk, and was controlling it in an unpredictable and unhinged way that spoke of a lack of mental clarity.
They were good, but the guy was insane. T here was nothing logical happening anywhere. By sheer accident, Deku had been thrown and caught on some stalagmite rocks, and in the split second before he could punch or kick his way out of them, the crystal trident had been launched right towards his head, that had just raised up, like a zombie, dazed from hitting the back of it on a rock.
Katsuki remembers it being mere inches from Deku’s wide and frightened eyes, like a terrifying freeze-frame that he’d never be able to erase from his mind. He was about to watch Deku die whilst his just-too-slow body tried to get there in time.
The rest was hazy. The freeze-frame marked the last bit of clearness before he remembers a suffocating curtain of heat and light and then a freezing few seconds of stone and gurgling lack of breath.
Piecing together the rest from the crumbs of sensation his brain had helpfully left behind, he swallows quietly, throat sandpaper rough and eyes shuttering closed for a second now he’s sure he isn’t going to pass out again.
T he peaceful light and the birdsong are in stark contrast to how shit scared he is right now. In several of his breadcrumb memories, he recalls Deku being in the hospital bed beside him. He remembers the beeping so he must have survived.
But he doesn’t trust it. He can’t trust it. His brain has played too many tricks on him before and to turn around, thinking he was about to see Deku alive, only to find him gone , would be too cruel a trick for him to recover from. The room is already too quiet, too soft and removed from the previous rushing chaotic cacophony of emergency, that he can’t believe this is real. He might already be dead himself. Everything is too still.
It’s a soft rustle that saves him. Tiny faint shifting of a starched gown on bleached cotton sheeting that brings him thudding back to earth into the very real bed he’s in. Lighting up the rest of the room’s presence like he’d taken out earplugs.
It comes again and he daren’t even breathe, as tears plop onto the too-itchy-to-be-imaginary pillow beneath his head, burning the corners of his eyes. A small but sure shift of fabric on fabric, like a sleeved arm being lifted from a bed, a clink of plastic on metal, but not from him .
Slower than the continents themselves had split many millions of years ago, Katsuki turns his head to the right, biting down on a dry lower lip, to stop it trembling quite so much.
He’s there. Of course , he’s there. Thank fuck he’s there.
Katsuki isn’t a religious man, but the sight of Deku lying closer to him than he last remembered, gazing at him in untamed teary relief with absolute emeralds of irises, and very much alive and breathing in the golden-again dawn light, was as ethereal an experience he’ll thinks he’ll ever get – and he’s pretty certain he’d died and come back to life recently.
“Kacchan.” The sound of him speaking is even better, croaky and broken as it is. Confirming that Katsuki probably isn’t mad or imagining it, because only Deku, could come back from the nearest death experience, and potentially death itself, and call him ‘Kacchan’ like the last 40 years hadn’t even happened yet.
“Nerd.” He can play along for now, because he’s feeling unusually giddy. Briefly, he wonders what drugs they’ve given him because he sure he should be in agony. He can deal with all that in a second.
Right now all he wants to do is keep looking . In the finally-quiet room, free from anyone else and the outside world but for the birds. He wants to just have another one of these moments, just for the two of them, where they’re alive and they probably beat the big bad guy. He wants to remember this one especially because it’s going to be the last one.
On cue, the waterworks start. Deku had never stopped being a crybaby in all these years, but Katsuki can let him off this time.
Katsuki’s just as bad as he reaches a shaky arm – the one without the IV – over the edge of the bed railing. Stretching as far as he can while Deku desperately does the same. Not for the first time he’s reminded of a once-forgotten memory, reaching out across a purple sky to brush blooded fingertips together in absolute trust.
This time he gets more than bloodied swirled fingertips onto him, whole clean hand palm to palm. Or bandage to whatever strange gloves Katsuki is wearing, but it’s enough. He grabs on tightly and doesn’t let go as Deku sobs and says his name again, again, again, like a mantra.
He’s not sure what’s happening with his own face but he suspects it’s somewhere between hysterical smiling and hysterical sobbing like it can't quite decide which emotion to focus on. He doesn’t care , let the snot and the tears cover his sore dry burnt skin. Deku is alive and holding his hand and this is the last time .
This is what Aizawa had been talking about.
He can’t let this happen again.
“D-Deku...Izuku...” His breath is coming in short hiccoughing sobs but he needs to say this while they’re here, while it’s fresh and they’re alive and real and there’s nobody else in the world. He needs to hear it.
He knows from the look of devastated acquiesce on his partners face, that he understands what Katsuki is about to say. Like he’d been thinking it over in the unconsciousness and coming to terms with it. That o r he’s just as shit-scared as Katsuki is right now. Either way, Katsuki knows that he isn’t going to run away from this any more, physically or mentally. “Deku we need...we need to stop .”
A wail sharply falls out of Deku’s heaving chest but the fingers around his only tighter , his arm is on fire from the strain but there’s no way he’s letting go.
“Yeah.” It’s only a word, forced out between sobs, but it means more than anyone can know: ‘I hear you.’, ‘I trust you.’ Deku’s face is an open book, one that’s spilling syllables and tales and prose all over the pillow, bed, floor and room for anyone to see. Gone is the caged off face and the forced smile, betraying the worry and denial that he’d been going on with for too long.
But Katsuki is greedy and anxious, and they’d come far too close far too many times and he needs more . “ Izuku .” He takes a hulking breath. “We made a promise.”
“Kacchan...I know...Kacchan...” Deku’s voice is weak, worn out and raspy from crying, he says ‘Kacchan’ between words like it’s the only thing keeping him going. A rock he can cling to against a battering storm of realisation, the ever-present Kacchan in his mind and right in front of him.
Katsuki wishes more than anything that he had the strength to move from the bed and go to him, bury his face into his neck, check that the smell of death is all gone and remind him that he’s right here . But he’s weak and he doesn’t want to begin to think how many bones both of them have broken and so he twists a slightly numb hand over and clumsily wraps his pinky finger around Deku's’. His green eyes blink, glinting tears away f or a second as they look to their fingers and are taken many years back to a hill on a summer night.
“I won't let you burn out.” Katsuki rasps, teeth clenched as a new wave of ‘oh god what ifs’ begin flooding his head and pouring out of his eyes.
Deku smiles . It’s the first time he’d smiled since waking and it’s the first true one Katsuki has seen in a while now. He hadn’t realised how much he’d needed it, and as it breaks out, large and beautiful over Deku’s freckled face he breathes, freer than he has in ages.
“Yeah.” Deku swallows, smile turning sad but still relieved, as he squeezes around Katsuki’s pinky finger and takes a deep breath. “It’s time.”
- - -