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The house is quiet. Nearly silent, in fact.
That’s the first thing Katsuki notices when his eyes crack open and shift around, taking in the darkness of his bedroom and grimacing as the cold air hits his exposed face, neck, and shoulders. It’s winter, he knows that much even through the haze of half-sleep, and the heater isn’t on, that much is obvious. But he sits up, shivering as he feels a draft run through his damp locks of sweat-soaked hair like icy fingers, and pauses.
Katsuki can barely hear it over the tinnitus ringing in his ears, but there’s a television on somewhere in the house. He only registers the noise because of the associated static, drowning out whatever program that’s currently playing.
The bedroom door is ajar, letting in the smallest, faintest beam of moonlight that’s pierced the hallway windows, doing its best to illuminate the darkness.
It’s not enough. He can’t see a damn thing aside from that little beam of light, and he can’t hear a damn thing aside from that faint crackling of static.
Katsuki shivers again.
He rolls out of bed and grabs a black tee that he’d haphazardly tossed to the floor at some point or another, tugging it on as his feet slide tiredly across the carpet. He’s still groggy, that much is obvious, and he pokes his head out the door to look down the hall.
The moon’s out, and it’s high in the sky, muting the lesser pinpricks of light. It must be late. Eijirou should be home by now. Katsuki’s eyes linger on the moon, feeling a strange sense of pity as it desperately attempts to pierce the shadows that pool inside the house, but the dark feels strange tonight. It feels alive, the entire house does, but he still can’t hear anything. He can barely see anything.
But he doesn’t turn on the lights.
Katsuki frowns and grumbles under his breath, feeling along the wall with his palm, trudging along with a slowness that doesn’t match just how wrong everything feels. The cold, the dark, the static, the creeping numbness in his feet and fingers that’s way too powerful for just a chill in the air. He chalks it up to a few hours of sleeping in a house with no heat, ignoring the persistent chill creeping down the back of his neck.
“Eijirou?” He gets no response, just the persistent television and the subtle ringing that’s ever-present in his ears. There’s no way Eijirou isn’t home - he never works overnight, and he always calls if he’s going to be out after his shift.
There’s another bedroom down the hall, the guest room they use for when stupid ass Deku or the idiot Kaminari come to visit. It only takes Katsuki a second to determine that the static’s coming from inside, past the half-open door, past the trail of artificial light that pours forth from the offending television. The television’s light is a poor imitation of what’s shining down from the sky above, but it stabs through the shadows in a way that the moon cannot. At least, not tonight.
And in that false glow, Katsuki can see the faintest tips of pointed red hair, otherwise enveloped by the dark.
That’s Eijirou’s hair, there’s no mistaking it. But why is he in the guest room? All of his belongings are in their shared bedroom, the one Katsuki had just left. The room that had chilled him to the bone before he’d even opened his eyes.
With a frown, Katsuki pushes down the feeling that something isn’t right and presses onward, pushing the door fully open with the side of the fist. “Ei? Why are you standing in here? Why’s the TV on?”
Eijirou doesn’t respond, he doesn’t move. His back is to Katsuki, and in the faint light, Katsuki can make out what looks like Eijirou’s hero costume, still firmly applied to his body. The entire ensemble is still on, which is strange in and of itself; Eijirou always pulls off his boots and those damn gears the second he walks through the door.
Now that he’s inside the room, Katsuki can finally tell what’s on the television - Breakfast at Tiffany’s , an old movie from the 60s that Eijirou was, for some reason, a fan of. His favorite part is playing, the scene in which the main character sits on a fire escape and sings a romantic ballad. It’s a song Katsuki’s heard before, too many times, enough that the lyrics are already running through his head as Audrey Hepburn sings them through a mouthful of static.
But Eijirou doesn’t move.
Katsuki hesitates, creeping forward, reaching out a gentle hand. “Eijirou…? Are you alright…?”
And the instant he touches Eijirou’s shoulder, Eijirou’s head turns in a jagged, utterly inhuman way.
And Katsuki screams. He screams in a pitch that he’s never screamed in before.
Eijirou’s eyes are gone. Black, empty sockets dripping with tears of blood faintly reflect the television’s light, a macabre imitation of tears.
His teeth are gone. His gums are gone. His lips curl upward in what can only be described as an alien attempt at a smile, revealing a void of darkness that’s so much deeper, so much colder, so much more horrible than any real shadow.
Katsuki’s feet carry him faster than he’d ever thought possible.
His heart has never raced this quickly before, not when the slime monster had captured him, not at Kamino, not during the war against the League of Villains. He’s stared death in the face so many times throughout his life, but this is something entirely different. This isn’t death he’s facing. This is something he can’t understand, and that makes it infinitely worse.
Katsuki’s mind is moving even faster than his heart, even faster than his feet, even faster than his hands which slam the guest room door and his bedroom door shut. His thoughts are racing too quickly, he can’t string them together coherently. It’s panic and terror and dread and confusion and nothing makes sense, he wants to rip the door open and look again to make sure he saw what he thought he saw, but he doesn’t know what’s on the other side of that door.
He doesn’t want to know.
His fingers, numb from the cold and the fear, wrap around his cell phone and tap in Deku’s contact as the ringing in his ears grows. He can’t hear footsteps, but does that thing outside even walk? How long does he have before it tears down his door?
Deku mercifully picks up, and Katsuki speaks in a panicked whisper, his voice shaking, his breaths coming quickly and painfully. “D-Deku, something h-happened to Eijirou, I d-d-don’t, I can’t, I—”
There’s a sigh on the other end. A sigh of exhaustion and exasperation, a sigh that snaps Katsuki out of his terror for just a second. “Kacchan...I know. We all know. We all know something happened to Eijirou.”
There’s the footsteps. He can hear them now, coming down the hallway with an otherworldly softness. He has to strain to hear them, and they’re nearly drowned out by the movie down the hall.
“Wh-what do you mean you know,” Katsuki hisses into the phone, holding it like his only lifeline, and it is, because that thing is coming down the hall, he can hear it, it’s nearing his door, and Katsuki feels tears sting his eyes because he doesn’t know what’s about to happen and—
“Kacchan. Eijirou died last year.”
It stops.
It all stops.
Katsuki can’t hear his own breathing anymore. He can’t hear the television, or the footsteps, or Deku’s voice. He can’t hear the breaking of the door that he’d been so sure was coming. He can only hear the ringing in his ears and the faint pulsing of his heartbeat in his head, and some part of him knows that Deku’s still talking. But he can barely hear it. It’s so far away, like he’s speaking across a vast distance.
“Eijirou died a year ago,” Deku shouts across the chasm, as though he knows he’s not being heard. “This happens every night, Kacchan! You have to stop calling!”
There’s the song again. The song from that movie that Eijirou likes so much. What’s it called? Katsuki can’t remember.
“Don’t open the door. Whatever you do, don’t open that door,” Deku continues, but Katsuki can’t hear him anymore. All he hears is the song, and the ringing, and the sound of his bedroom door as the knob begins to rattle.
“ Moon river...wider than a mile… ”
It was so nice of Deku to call. Katsuki hadn’t been expecting that. He doesn’t get many calls. People are usually afraid of him. That’s so strange.
“ I’m crossing you in style...some day… ”
Katsuki ought to call Deku more often as well. And the others, that electric boy, and the gravity girl. He misses hearing their voices. What are their names? He can’t remember anymore.
“ We’re after the same rainbow’s end...waiting ‘round the bend… ”
Why is the house so cold? And why aren’t the lights on? The cold’s creeping into Katsuki’s bones, but he doesn’t feel it. Not anymore. In fact...he feels...warm. So warm, warmer than he’s ever felt before.
“ Moon...river… ”
The door knob turns, and Katsuki looks up with a bright smile, even though he can’t feel his face. Why are there tears on his cheeks?
“ ...and me. ”
Oh, Eijirou’s home.