Chapter Text
“You should eat.”
Shouto didn’t look up to see who it was. He hadn’t bothered to do that in days— their captors wore helmets and masks that covered any defining features, along with almost Zodiac-style jumpsuits to obscure anything else. There was no identifying one villain to the next; they all blended together in a mash of blacks and greys and yellows.
The room they were held in was tiny, more of a concrete box with a grate of bars instead of a door than an actual cell. It smelled vaguely damp and rotten, but was blank on all sides. Whatever sins caused it to smell like death had long been washed away.
Shouto had been allowed to keep his jacket and his shoes. Aside from the part where he was actually kidnapped, their captors hadn’t touched him at all. They’d provided food and clean water, there was central heating in the room, and he could use his Quirk freely.
The bars wouldn’t weaken to fire, ice, or raw strength. Shouto had tried.
They hadn’t touched him at all. The same could not be said for Izuku, who was shivering next to him, Shouto’s flannel overshirt wrapped around his tiny frame.
From the second the two of them woke up in the god forsaken place, it was all hands on deck for Izuku. Their captors had slammed his head into the wall the second he tried to talk. They did it again any time he made a noise.
Izuku hadn’t talked in the two weeks since day two of their capture. Shouto was keeping count.
They wouldn’t let him eat, wouldn’t let him drink water, and wouldn’t let him sleep. He wasn’t allowed to look other people in the eyes. Shouto wasn’t allowed to say his name, and nobody else said it— they just called him the subject . Guards dragged him away during the daytime, and he came back every time bleeding and bruised and burned. Sometimes he was blue from oxygen deprivation. Izuku wouldn’t tell him what they were doing, but Shouto knew somewhere dark that it was worse than what he could see physically. There had to be some psychological aspect, as well— they were trying to take away his humanity.
“Let me share it with him,” Shouto said, like he did every time the guards told him to eat or sleep.
Izuku was laying limp against his shoulder, eyes wide open. They’d stripped him down to his boxers and a thin tank top on the first day. Shouto lended his jacket when he could, but— Izuku still shivered, no matter if Shouto lent him the jacket or even used his Quirk in a desperate attempt to warm him up.
Izuku’s ribs dug into the soft skin of his left side. Shouto didn’t mention it.
“You know I can’t, kid,” the guard said, and he put a hand through the bars to push the plate of apples and peanut butter closer to Shouto before turning and walking away.
The moonlight filtered into Midoriya’s room through the blinds, and it looked like peace personified.
Midoriya was asleep on the bed behind him, and Shouto was sitting in his desk chair, eyes wandering around the room. It was dark, but that was expected seeing as it was past three am. The only source of light was the cool moonlight. The place smelled like coffee and rain, but it wasn’t abnormal, considering that it was Midoriya’s room, and he had an absurd amount of scented candles. By the door, boxes overflowed with old comics, labelled in big black sharpie— IRON MAN, ALL MIGHT, SPIDER-MAN. The fourth box, much smaller than the others, had thirteen notebooks, one charred to oblivion and ruined by water damage but still vaguely legible, the others in impeccable condition. A fourteenth notebook sat near Midoriya’s backpack on the desk, fresh, with only two entries (One labelled KACCHAN and the other TODOROKI) and many more to come. Posters and pictures of Midoriya and his friends lined the walls, and Shouto was proud to say that he was in well over half of the polaroids that Midoriya had hung up around the room.
It felt like a home.
Midoriya was stirring behind him, shifting, and then a sleepy voice said Todoroki and Shouto snapped out of his thoughts. He turned to Midoriya like a deer in headlights— guilty.
Midoriya was just smiling, softly. “We’re friends, right, Todoroki?”
“Best friends,” Shouto assured him.
“I want you to call me Izuku. Because— because you’re my best friend,” and Midoriya— Izuku’s cheeks flushed pink. His freckles stood out where the moonlight reflected onto his cheeks. He looked… ethereal. Maybe it was because he was too tired to argue, but Shouto smiled.
“Only if you call me Shouto.”
“Pinkie swear you’ll stay?”
“Yeah,” Shouto said, looking at Izuku with a sort of fondness that seemed reserved only for the green-haired boy, “Pinkie swear. Go to bed, Izuku.”
(When Izuku woke up in the morning, Shouto was gone. That didn’t stop him from finding the little note covered in smiley faces, reading Call me Shouto. )
Izuku screamed, sometimes.
Shouto could hear it echoing through the hallways after they dragged him away for the day. He tried to block it out, because— even when Izuku broke his own goddamned bones, he never screamed, never cried. His pain tolerance was insane, and there was so much raw power in his one-hundred and fifty-six centimeters of existence that Shouto used to wonder if he felt pain at all.
He tried to block it out, but it was there, in the back of his mind, wondering how much Izuku was hurting to have him screaming like that. It was day thirty-seven of captivity, and worse, it had been one of those days.
They threw Izuku back into the cell like they always did, but Shouto knew it was worse from the very way he was breathing. It was heavy, and each exhale shuddered in his chest, interspersed with desperate hacking coughs. He was shivering like always, but— his tank top was bright red and his boxers were soaking with it, sticky and thick and dark, blood.
Shouto, in their thirty-seven days in that godforsaken room, had dealt with a lot of injuries. He had put his base knowledge of field medicine into use more times than he could count, but this?
“You might wanna cauterize it, before the bitch bleeds out.”
Shouto looked up, and all he could think was that they were just kids. They were sixteen. His best friend, the person he would give up the world for, was covered in blood, shaking and struggling for breath on the concrete floor. He hadn’t been called by his name in over a month and they’d been hurting him every damn day and Shouto didn’t know what they were doing out there to keep him alive, but they were only doing it in some sick way, because that’s all their captors were. Sick, wrong , to do this to a child.
“Today’s your lucky day, kid. Doc already pulled the bullet out.”
Sick, sick, sick —
Shouto steeled himself for the worst, preemptively whispering his apologies as he peeled Izuku’s bloody shirt off and stared at the wound on his abdomen. It was already clean, but no less nauseating to look at. This was Izuku. This was Izuku, with a bullet hole in his gut.
“This is,” Shouto’s voice cracked, broke, and he thought he might start crying, “this is gonna hurt, okay, Firefly? I promise it’ll be over fast.”
He took a deep breath of his own, let it shake in his ribcage. It was okay. They would be okay. His hand smoothed out against Izuku’s skin.
The screaming started again.
“You’re like— you’re like a firefly.”
Izuku snorted next to him, licking the ice cream cone melting against his skin. It was pink and sticky against his scarred hands, chunks of strawberry swimming down the sides of the cone. Shouto’s own was in a cup, vanilla, which Izuku insisted was one of the worst ice cream flavors, next to cotton candy, birthday cake, and mint chocolate chip.
The day was beautiful. It was cold, thanks to the impending winter, but no less pretty. Izuku was wearing an oversized hoodie with a UA patch on it, something that had to be at least five sizes too large for his frame— even though he was built like bricks and strong as hell, he was still thin and short, and weighed very little for someone with so much strength. The oversized clothes were endearing, in a way.
They were out alone, a rare occurrence with Izuku’s track record of disastrous villain encounters any time he was out of sight. Most of their classmates were around somewhere, but Shouto had settled down on the swingset at a playground, which by default meant that Izuku had sat there too.
In a world where he didn’t have that crazy strength Quirk, Shouto was sure that Izuku’s Quirk would simply be to find. It was like he already had it, really— no matter where Shouto went, he was there. He’d turn up and sit down, sometimes silent and sometimes full of chatter, but he always, always could find.
“You are,” Shouto insisted. Izuku looked at him with the same kind of bright interest and near reverence as always, something that never failed to make him feel special, like he was really worth listening to.
“I’m pretty sure that I’m a regular, average, very plain-looking human boy. My Quirk—”
“—still convinced that All Might is your dad—”
“—oh my god, shut up.”
Shouto paused. “Really, though. You look like a firefly, whenever you do Full Cowling and the whole green lightning thing happens. It’s like— magical.”
“Shouto, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but our society is literally built on magic,” Izuku said, grinning. It looked a bit maniacal, with his wildly curly hair sticking up everywhere in the breeze and ice cream running down his fingers.
“I’m right, Firefly.”
Izuku looked at him, softening, “Yeah. Maybe you are.”
(Two days later, Izuku showed up at his dorm room, lit up with green lightning, and said he’d figured out how to do it just for the sake of glowing. He wanted to learn because seeing him like that made Shouto smile.)
They were going to die here.
It was something Shouto had accepted days ago. They were on day forty-nine of captivity, and he’d gotten to thinking about it, as Izuku’s condition only continued to worsen and Shouto’s emotional resolve and the hope he held for rescue were slowly chipped away at. Izuku would die here, and he— that was something he couldn’t live with. If Izuku let go, Shouto would too.
The case had probably gone cold, by day forty-nine. As much as Shouto hated to think about it, it was true. Endeavor wasn’t a patient man, he wouldn’t wait forty-nine days and keep searching not even if the person missing was his greatest creation. Izuku was a different story, because people— people cared about him, so maybe they’d still be looking, but Shouto couldn’t help the dark little part of him that whispered that everyone outside had given up.
Izuku had, after being shot on day thirty-seven, grown too weak to use his powers. Maybe it was the starvation, or the sleep deprivation, or just how many different wounds had collected on his skin and deeper still, but the last time he’d tried, he couldn’t even summon the strength to light up again. The green lightning had buzzed and sparked around his body for only a few seconds before flat out disappearing, and after that, no matter how hard he tried, it wouldn’t come back.
Izuku had freaked out, when that happened. It had been day thirty-nine, and he had a panic attack curled up in Shouto’s arms, hyperventilating out of his own skin with the fear of losing his Quirk. He’d fallen asleep somewhere along, still mute and so damn scared, and when their captors arrived on day forty they kicked the hell out of him for sleeping. Shouto had beaten his fists bloody trying to break out of the room that day, no plan, just a desperation to save Izuku. It was hopeless.
On the night of day fifty-two Shouto discovered Izuku had a temperature, burning scarily hot. He had contracted a fever from something, and Shouto had tried to keep his wounds from getting infected, he had, but a cut on his abdomen had turned green and yellow around the edges, and Shouto hadn’t done something in time to salvage it. The fever had taken three days to disappear, but they never gave Izuku a break. There were no sick days here.
Shouto counted it as a small blessing when the guards pretended not to notice him sneaking Izuku food while he was delirious with fever. They also pretended not to notice when Izuku fell asleep on Shouto’s shoulder, and when he woke up shouting for a savior.
The worst part, Shouto thought, was when he overheard one of the villains outside saying that Izuku had earned a rest, as if being treated with a ghost of kindness was something he had to work to deserve. As if they hadn’t been torturing him, treating him like he was less than human for nearly two months, doing that to a kid and expecting another child to fix whatever bloody, burned up, sickening injuries he came back with in a little cell with bare hope that they would make it through the night.
They still hadn’t dared to lay a hand on Shouto, but it was a different kind of torture to watch Izuku come in more and more broken with every passing day.
By day sixty, with the fever gone and another week passed of pressing ice to burns and cleaning wounds that bordered on unfixable damage, watching as cuts faded to scars around Izuku’s body, Shouto had given up his hope.
Their captors had seen it too, he thought, and they knew something about Izuku’s past and what would hurt the most, because on day sixty Izuku came back bleeding out of his face. When Shouto wiped the blood away to check the wound, he could see it, and he felt the hollow ache in his chest from the memories.
On day sixty, their captors carved DEKU into Izuku’s cheek like a brand.
“Why do you let Bakugou call you Deku?” Shouto asked him, a month after Izuku asked to be called by his first name.
“Kacchan? Oh— I guess… because it’s what he’s been calling me since we were four, you know? It’s pretty much my name now, I guess. Just like my name is Izuku Midoriya, and your name is Shouto, and his name is Kacchan. It’s just… part of me.”
“Why do you call him Kacchan?”
“When I first met him, I couldn’t pronounce his name right. He still thinks I can’t say Katsuki, it drives him insane.”
Izuku looked back at the sunset, but Shouto just kept staring at him. They were sitting on the rooftop of the 1-A dorms, relaxing. It had been a long day with classes, but somehow Izuku still looked— perfect.
It was a thought he’d had a lot, recently, that Izuku looked somewhat otherworldly. He was short, and very pretty— freckles decorated his face, his arms, his knees. His shoulders and cheeks, scattered with so many that Shouto couldn’t count them. Once, Shouto had taken a marker and drawn lines between them to make constellations.
His hair seemed to only get curlier as time passed, going from a frizzy, wavy mop during the entrance exam to wild green ringlets as the year went on. It was a little too long, sticking up every which way, and he had three dark green curls that never failed to fall in his face. It didn’t matter how thoroughly he brushed it, because it would always end up that same mess at the end of the day.
When he got excited, green sparks jumped from his hands and shoulders, completely harmless, and when he got upset the same green sparks would appear from his upper arms. His fourteenth hero analysis notebook was already halfway full from where it had been started not even a month ago.
He wore that same hoodie with the UA patch, which Shouto found out was, indeed, five sizes too big, every time he got the chance. He rolled up the cuffs of his jeans and tucked in his shirts— most of which said shirt or some variation of that on them— with a belt and those same red shoes, like a model, if models wore clothes that were way too big at every opportunity.
Apparently, he dressed like that because it hid all his insecurities. Shouto thought he’d still look pretty no matter what he wore.
“I think,” Izuku said from beside him, and Shouto stopped staring, blush rising to his cheeks, “I think that he cares. Deku isn’t so much an insult anymore than it is like, an affectionate nickname. Like how you— how you call me Firefly, or how the teachers labelled me that Problem Child of Class 1-A.”
“He gets mad if somebody other than you calls him Kacchan,” Shouto felt amusement bubbling in his throat like a laugh. “The other day Kaminari tried and Bakugou damn near blew his face off.”
“Deku,” Izuku said. “Kinda comforting.”
Shouto smiled, and Izuku turned back to the sunset.
(He didn’t realize it, but there were eyes on their backs the whole time. He didn’t realize it, but in three days somebody would press chloroform to Izuku’s face while he was too surprised to stop them, and Shouto would follow, because that was all he knew how to do when Izuku went places. It was all he knew how to do, even if it meant dying in a concrete room by Izuku’s side.)
On day seventy-five, Izuku stopped breathing.
It was only for a few minutes. Two and a half, tops. They threw him back into the room and he landed limply with a thud on the ground, and Shouto went to pick him up and wrap him in the now-bloodied flannel jacket, check him for anything he could ice, but Izuku wasn’t breathing, and that was so much worse than the fever, so much worse than the bullet wound that had barely just healed on his torso.
For a second there, Shouto was sure that he’d stopped breathing too. He didn’t know what was happening. He would have begged for help, he should have, but he’d be begging the same people who did this, and there was no safe bet there.
He started rescue breaths. It was all he could do.
Izuku gasped after Shouto’s third attempt. It was coughing, hacking, before his breathing evened out again, and a few minutes later, his eyes blinked open. Shouto held him and cried, cried, desperate gasping sobs that he hadn’t known since he was five years old. The first time he had cried in eleven years.
He wished it didn’t have to be like this. That it wouldn’t end here, in a concrete room, with Shouto crying over Izuku’s failing body, completely unharmed by their captors while his best friend lay half dead in his arms.
He didn’t sleep that night. Started sleeping during the day instead, in case Izuku stopped breathing again, because Shouto needed to be able to help. He slept during the day and whenever nighttime came, when they deposited Izuku back into the room, he iced bruises and burns and watched for any signs of bigger injuries. They were lucky enough that he hadn’t had to cauterize anything since day thirty-seven, since the gunshot wound.
He wasn’t sure when he started thinking that five and a half weeks without having to keep Izuku from bleeding out was lucky. He wasn’t sure when preventing Izuku’s death became a daily chore. He wasn’t sure, but he had started to forget what a normal life was like, he had started to forget what the sunset looked like, he had started to forget what it looked like when Izuku wasn’t covered in blood and what it felt like to say his best friend’s name, he had started to forget.
It ached.
On day seventy-six, when their captors came to drag Izuku away again, Shouto started begging for them to take him instead. That was the first time they ever hit him: one stinging slap across his face, not hard enough to bruise and not hard enough to make his eyes water, but seeing it made Izuku’s eyes widen like saucers. He went willingly, that day, on a promise that nobody would touch Shouto if he behaved.
Izuku came back and he was breathing, far less hurt than usual, and when he curled into Shouto’s side, ribs pressing sharply against skin, Shouto realized what had been happening.
“I’m their leverage,” he said, more of a statement than a question. Dull. “They’re holding my life over your head. Fuck.”
Izuku curled into his side, exhaling soft and sad. Shouto could almost hear him: I couldn’t let them hurt you. I’m sorry, he’d say, except he wouldn’t really mean it, because Izuku was the most self-sacrificing idiot that Shouto had ever met, and their captors knew. They knew that Izuku would do anything for someone he loved, and Shouto— as much as he hated it sometimes, Shouto was on that list.
This was his fault.
Izuku grinned at him, absolutely mischievous, nearly bouncing on his toes with excitement. They’d only been at the gym for a few minutes, but by now Shouto could practically read the shorter boy’s mind, and he knew exactly what Izuku was getting at with that sort of smile.
There was a scene in the Avengers, before Quirks appeared and hero work became a real profession, where the Black Widow kicked off Captain America’s shield and launched herself into the air. After the two of them discovered that Izuku could pick him up without even using One for All, it opened new opportunities for practice, and this was one of the more bizarre ones.
If Shouto ran— and he was a good runner, not as fast as Izuku with One for All or Iida, both Quirkless and with his engines, but quick enough— he could amass enough momentum to do almost exactly what Black Widow had done in the movie.
Izuku could hold his hands out and concentrate his Quirk into his arms, and if Shouto jumped and pushed off of his hands— it was enough to launch him into the air. They’d practiced it with and without the use of Quirks, but when they did it with them Shouto was able to use force from his flames to subtly change directions mid-air and shift towards walls or places he could grip onto. It allowed him to get far higher than he could alone, and it sped up the process of getting into difficult places.
They’d managed to pull it off once in class, Izuku launched him up the side of the building, where he broke in through a window to search from the top, and Izuku rushed in to search from the bottom. They’d finished the exercise faster than any other team in the class, and recovered all the hostages with no casualties. It was still one of Shouto’s— and Izuku’s— proudest moments.
It did make him a little anxious, though he’d never admit it— there wasn’t a shield. He was pushing off Izuku’s hands, with boots literally made for hero work, and his own body weight. The first three or so times they’d done it, his heels dug too deep into Izuku’s palms and left cuts behind, and the second time Shouto missed his palms altogether and accidentally hit his fingers instead, and with the momentum and the force he’d almost managed to shatter them. Those first few times, it was rare for either of them to walk away without something wrong. After a while, Izuku had taken to wrapping his hands for practice .
Still, he insisted that they kept working on it until they could consistently get it right. It was two days past their conversation on the roof, and Shouto had started to realize exactly how much he liked Izuku— more than friends. It was, most certainly, more than friends, and Shouto had never been good with his emotions, but Izuku gave him some kind of feeling in his stomach and when he was around everything seemed right with the world, and nobody could quite drive Shouto up the wall like Izuku could but he liked it, liked the chaos for once, and there was nobody else he’d rather be with. He was also pretty sure it wasn’t normal to fantasize about kissing your best friend in the middle of sparring and consequently get your ass kicked because you weren’t paying attention.
So— yes. He liked Izuku… more than friends. More than anyone in the world, really.
And as Izuku braced himself and Shouto started running, he realized that really, if there was anyone he’d die for, it was Izuku Midoriya.
(He didn’t realize, at the time, that Izuku would do the same thing. He didn’t realize how much that would hurt later on.)
Day ninety-one.
Shouto still blamed himself, Izuku still silently insisted that it wasn’t his fault. Whenever a guard went on break, Izuku would tap it out in morse code for him, and Shouto would feel his heart break a little more.
Not your fault. Not your fault.
Dots and dashes. He’d tried to do it in sign language, but someone saw him and now Izuku’s middle and pointer finger on his right hand were broken. Shouto had done his best to set and splint them using a cut pair of chopsticks that he’d bribed the guard for and some ripped up strips from his shirt, and honestly, it wasn’t a shabby job. Izuku’s fingers would be fine. Probably. Hopefully.
Still. Day ninety-one. It was the first time they didn’t drag Izuku away during the daytime, which meant Shouto wouldn’t sleep that day, but that was okay. Izuku barely slept at all, and even though he insisted Shouto sleep at least a little it never stopped the hurt that came seeing Izuku starving and exhausted.
He seemed even more determined since the first (and only) time that the villains had hit Shouto. Determined to survive, almost, because he forced smiles onto his face now and hugged Shouto every day before they took him away, and every time Shouto offered to help him out— ice the bruises, lend his jacket, which was now horrifically bloodstained and smelled like death— Izuku accepted.
As the days passed on, Shouto still held no hope for rescue, and he knew that there was no way for them to escape on their own, so instead he ran his fingers through Izuku’s dirty, matted hair and tried to get the tangles out, and instead he tried to wash the blood out of their clothes with the water bottles their captors provided, and instead he sang Izuku to sleep the way his mother used to do for him. Instead, he tried to keep himself sane, and he tried to stop life from being quite so horrible. He retold Lord of the Rings, even though Izuku knew the story by heart, and he told Izuku about every happy memory he had growing up. He called Izuku Firefly whenever he could, just to remind him, to help him hold on to some sense of identity, to keep him feeling like he was human, because he was and Shouto refused to let this hellhole take that away from him.
It was still bad. Izuku still collapsed into Shouto’s arms whenever he was brought back to the room, but the severity of his injuries dwindled, and he didn’t look quite so sick and dead anymore. There was a little bit of that old light in his eyes.
On day ninety-eight, Izuku’s body lit up like a Christmas tree, green lightning wrapping around him like a gift from fucking god. Shouto wasn’t religious and Izuku wasn’t either, but he wanted to thank someone , and so he said thank you to his faint memory of All Might that Izuku was able to have this. This one little part of himself could remain.
The sparks went out again as soon as someone walked by the room and peeked curiously into the door, but Shouto couldn’t keep the grin off his face.
It wasn’t much, but it was something.
“Do you want to get ice cream?”
Shouto looked up from where he was reading comics on Izuku’s bed. It was four in the morning, freezing cold and thundering outside, and he was very comfortable where he was, coffee scented candle burning and offering the little bit of light he needed to see the pages.
“I know it’s way too early, but! Today is the six month anniversary of you officially being my best friend, and I want to do something nice before it starts raining,” and Izuku was grinning a little bit wildly, hair even messier than usual because it had dried too quickly and turned into a cottony cloud.
Shouto stared at him, blankly. They weren’t allowed to leave campus alone and weren’t allowed to exit the dorms before eight am, which meant he’d be breaking the rules and sneaking out with his… crush. Best friend. Whatever.
There were two things wrong: one, rule breaking may be a Shouto-Izuku specialty, but that doesn’t mean the fallout is fun, and two, Shouto could already feel the waver in his foundation because Izuku was smiling, and he was a sucker for that grin.
“I don’t… think we should. We’ll get in trouble,” he responded slowly, “and wasn’t there a villain attack down the street last week?”
Izuku leaned back in his desk chair. “The heroes got them! It was just a store robbery, we could handle that alone anyway. And I have my phone, and my keys, I have the Aizawa on speed dial and All Might is my emergency contact.”
“You mean your dad is your emergency contact.”
Izuku huffed like a scolded child, linking his fingers together. Even in the low lights, Shouto could see the marred skin of Izuku’s hands and arms, proof of villain attacks— and of Shouto himself, throwing fire like that at a kid half his size and seven times stubborn, leaving the skin settled wrong.
He was still smiling, though. It wasn't that infamous Deku smile that had started to become a symbol for people already, but something softer. Something reserved for post-midnight hangout sessions, hours Izuku had always saved up for Shouto especially.
“Please?”
It couldn't be too bad, right? Shouto trusted Izuku, more than anyone. It was just paranoia getting the best of him.
“Yeah. Let’s get ice cream.”
The shop— Kittycream— was just down the street. The lights inside were a warm glow against the night, and there were cartoon cats all over the walls. Thirty-something different tubs, different flavors.
“That one’s my favorite,” Izuku said, pointed up at a cat breed that Shouto couldn’t recognize. Is orange a cat breed? “What do you want? I’ll pay.”
“Vanilla… it’s bland, like my personality.”
Izuku snorted and shoved against his shoulder, shocked gasp and then another laugh when he grabbed Shouto to prevent the inevitable fall. “You’re funny— and nice— and smart— and you’re always there on my bad days, and you hand write all your essays, and your favorite flavor is vanilla which, uh, is bland, but that’s okay with me.”
Shouto felt vaguely nauseous. Ashido called this part butterflies.
Izuku’s hands were wrapped, covering a mess of cuts and bruises that had taken hold the day before during training and not quite healed yet. The bandages were old, fabric ripped away from a sleep shirt he had owned years ago, which Shouto only knew because Izuku’s med kit was on his nightstand and more often than not open. Less of a med kit and more of a glorified lost-and-found, and for as much as he got hurt Izuku never bothered to buy a better one.
He wanted an EMT certification, someday.
Izuku smiled at the girl behind the counter. “Could we— could we get a vanilla cup and a strawberry… with gummy bears, please?”
The whole interaction takes a few minutes, but it drags on for an eternity. Watching Izuku stumble through his words is always a little endearing, but nerve wracking. Every time they go out there’s a new kind of awkward to tackle. Shouto thought he was bad with strangers— Izuku Midoriya was only a people person when there was hero work to be done. At the end, though, Shouto’s holding the cup in his right hand to keep it cold, and Izuku is already picking gummy bears out between bubblegum pink strawberry chunks.
“Hey Shouto?”
Shouto hummed. Izuku had a little bit of a skip in his step, and there was an absent sort of smile on his face, soft.
“Do you think that if you cool the air around you and then superheat it really fast it’ll make a blast? Like frozen glass! Where if you freeze it and then pour boiling water it explodes. But with air.”
It was five-something in the morning. Of course Izuku, only Izuku, could think about quirks at five-something in the morning. “I think that we could try it.”
He’s walking for a few seconds and there’s no response. There’s no response. When he looks up from the ice cream cup the street is empty, save for Shouto, Shouto, Shouto and…
He whirls around, and Izuku’s eyes are rolling back into his head, cloth over his mouth. The fragilities of reality start to crack.
(It ends and begins again all at once, too fast for Shouto to remember. All he knows is that there’s something wrong, and that he will follow, because anywhere Izuku is— Shouto would walk by his side until the world ended.
God knows his just did.)
The morning of day one hundred and twenty-seven, Shouto opened his eyes to Izuku stock still staring into the hallway. He heavily favored his left side— Shouto didn’t even want to think about why.
On day one hundred and twenty-six, Izuku got sent back with a gunshot wound in his leg. Shouto had to cauterize it again and the entire time—
Izuku had been begging him to stop. He’d been crying, whines and little whispers, a horrible wet gasp when Shouto had to up the temperature for it to work. He’d been begging, and Shouto hadn’t stopped, couldn’t stop, because he wasn’t ready for Izuku to bleed out in his arms, and maybe it was selfish. Maybe he was being unfair, to let Izuku live in this much pain, but he wasn’t ready to let go. He wasn’t ready to lose the person who taught him what it meant to love again.
They’d ended up falling asleep together, Izuku’s head in his lap, breathing evening out as the tears dried on his face. Shouto was sure that the memory of it would haunt him forever.
Izuku, begging him to stop . Izuku, begging him . Izuku begging. Izuku, who whipped around, nearly falling to the right but catching himself at the last minute with a little pained gasp, but his head snapped up and he looked Shouto in the eyes for the first time in months, terrified.
“Shouto. Shouto.”
“Don’t— don’t talk,” Shouto warned him, “what if they hear you?”
Izuku flinched, like he was remembering their situation, and froze again, gesturing towards the door. Shouto stilled himself and the panicked breaths he didn’t even know he was taking, staring out of the little barred doorway just like Izuku had, and the doorway was lighting up with burning heat and the sound of detonations—
—he choked on a laugh, uncharacteristic, because holy shit. It was too startling, too unrealistic. Izuku was staring at him, looking like he was going to die of a heart attack, and Shouto wondered if he even remembered. If Izuku genuinely thought it was their captors screaming, or that the thundering footsteps that could be heard from the other side of the building were people coming to take him again.
“Firefly. Izuku.”
Izuku shook his head frantically, and then there was a looming shadow outside the door and Izuku flinched, scrambling into Shouto’s arms like a scared cat, buried his head in Shouto’s shoulder, and panicked gasps filled up the space as the door blew open in a blast of orange and white.
The dust settled, ringing in Shouto’s ears, and Izuku was shaking.
“I swear to god if the two of you ever do this again I’m going to let you die,” Bakugou said, brash, entirely unapologetic. He was standing in the doorway, metal bars blown out around the room, chunks of concrete crumbling around him, and Shouto had literally never been grateful to see him before, but damn if he wasn’t glad now.
Izuku, upon seeing this, passed out.