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Shouto holds him from behind, he nuzzles the nape of his neck sending shivers down his spine, the kiss he plants on his bare skin feels like it singes, and it keeps burning scorching hot even as he moves away and turns his attention someplace else while his hands snake underneath his shirt.
Katuski knows exactly what Shouto’s doing, he’s heard him sniffle a few times. He closes his eyes for a second, braces himself before he starts to whirl around slowly, turning on his heels as if he’s being pulled by the gravity around Shouto, drawn in by the magnetism of his mismatched eyes.
The boy leans in by only a fraction, and though there are only a few inches that separate them, it feels like they’re a hundred feet apart. At least that’s how it feels like, it’s as if he becomes small and powerless whenever Shouto smiles at him that way, all careless and clueless; he’s disarmed, immediately, all attention goes to small lips, plump and moist, and inviting.
A hand is lifted and it moves in slow motion until it reaches all the way up. Shouto covers his eyes, drowns Katsuki in an overwhelming pool of darkness, not for a flimsy trick or some deep-rooted fetish, but out of shame. He feels ashamed by having his vulnerabilities out in the open, glaringly noticeable otherwise, in his red-rimmed irises, in the way the color has been almost entirely swallowed up by the black of fully dilated pupils.
Katsuki has learned how to tell apart the times when he’s the one causing it and the ones he isn’t.
This is how Shouto deals with his bad days, by indulging in all of his pernicious vices all at once.
It perhaps comes as a surprise to whom it may concern that the least destructive vice on Todoroki Shouto’s wide assortment of decimating coping mechanisms is Katsuki.
There are a million questions lingering on the tip of his tongue, but they waste away as soon as Shouto draws him in and captures his lips in an igniting kiss, all the words get swallowed up in the frenzy. Shouto is never so eager, not overwhelmingly so, except when he’s like that.
Shouto tastes like nicotine and grapes. Despite Katsuki having always hated wine and every other over-sweetened drink, he’s always been addicted to the sweetness he tastes out of Shouto’s tongue. He chases after every hint of flavor in it with his own tongue willingly as if he’s trying to commit it to his memory and fill all of his senses with him.
Katsuki lifts Shouto’s hand from his eyes with such painstaking diligence as of someone pulling off a layer of skin — not his own, though, he would never be that much forgiving to himself. There’s a twisted notion he’s found out not long ago that the only way to be cruel with the boy in front of him is by offering him kindness.
And so he does.
He doesn’t ask about the drugs, or about the crafty stashes he could easily figure out if he wanted to, or about the people Shouto had been with to get the drugs, he doesn’t say a word about all the self-inflicted punishment and scourge driven by a death drive that always seeks for fulfillment in his own destruction.
Instead, he denies, and denies, and denies while Shouto begs, and begs, and begs.
Katsuki will never wrap his hands around the neck that’s been purposefully exposed so carelessly, he’s never going to cut the air from his windpipe with a squeeze, he won’t rip off his clothes, no matter how much he begs, he’s never going to pepper his body with bruises that’ll cover the ones he so wishes to forget.
He could, but he never will.
He has always suspected that Shouto has only chosen him because of it, but he’s never going to be the catalyst for his devastation, the responsible for his annihilation. And all that’s left is dismay, the frustration on Shouto’s end for what he’s thought he could ignite in Katsuki with his shallow tricks and empty promises of this is the last time repeated in hushed tones a thousand times over like a broken record .
Katsuki could be the most destructive vice on Shouto’s cocktail.
But he never will be.
Instead, he kills him with kindness, hurts him with sweetened words pressed over every single scratch, over every trace of red, and blue, and purple of faded bruises that shape into constellations and planets for Katsuki to worship. He traces the sharpened edges, draws boundaries that have been blurred with patience and dedication, he ignores each and every plea of be cruel to me, be like him.
Katsuki will never be like him.