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Eijirou feels his phone buzzing in his pocket, but doesn’t bother to check.
He stands, frozen, on a street corner, his feet ready to carry him one way and his soft, stupid, traitor heart pulling him in another.
Neither place is far from here. A fifteen, twenty minute walk at the most. The logical option? To the izakaya where he’s supposed to be in…fifteen minutes, where his friends are waiting. The stupid option? To the building he hasn’t set foot in for nearly three years now.
Katsuki’s place.
His heart squeezes at the thought of the blonde, his best friend turned boyfriend turned ex-boyfriend. A relationship that had flourished and crumbled, all within the span of six years. Eijirou knows he was lucky; knows that millions of relationships, platonic or romantic, won’t make it that long. But when you know someone so completely, even better than you know yourself, anything less than a lifetime feels too short.
He hasn’t seen Katsuki in a while, even though they still share the same friends. Their breakup flipped their dynamic like a middle school science experiment: where they’d once been inexplicably pulled to each other like opposing magnetic poles, a bubble of repulsion pushes them apart even if they try to fight their way back towards each other.
Even so, a thread wraps around the longing lodged in Eijirou’s heart like shrapnel and tugs , pulling him towards something he knows he can no longer reach.
Katsuki was never one for their class’s fragmented attempts at keeping in touch. For the first year after graduation, he’d griped about Eijirou dragging him along, complaining, “I spent the last three years with those dumb fucks. Now I finally get some peace , and you want to disrupt it?”
Eijirou always smiled when he replied, “Hey, you’re the one who decided to shack up with one of us dumb fucks,” which made Katsuki click his tongue and stuff his feet into his shoes.
In the past three years, the number of Katsuki’s appearances can be counted on one hand, now that Eijirou isn’t there to coerce him. Over the past eight months especially, everyone’s stopped hoping he’ll show up, resigning themselves to the fact that he won’t. It’s not hard to figure out the reason, but it still stings.
He knows that Katsuki isn’t totally isolated; he hangs out with Shoto surprisingly often, Sero and Denki too. Mina has become Eijirou’s spy, showing up to Katsuki’s place unannounced, just to make sure he hasn’t imploded. He’s high up in the rankings, ranked higher than anyone in their class; by all reports, he’s doing just fine. So he says.
Still, Eijirou finds himself setting off in the direction of his building, even as his phone buzzes insistently against his fingers tucked in his coat pocket. Brisk wind bites at the tips of his ears and his nose as he walks, considering what exactly he plans to do next.
Just ring the buzzer and hope Katsuki lets him in?
Call him and insist he come along, for old times sake?
Not a single plan seems like it would work, and Eijirou’s not entirely sure he even wants them to. The emotional labor of trying to reason with his ex weighs too heavily.
In the past, shouldering that emotional labor was no easy feat, but Eijirou refused to back down from a challenge, especially where Katsuki was concerned. They’d been fast friends back at UA, from the sports festival their first year, and only grew closer after they moved into neighboring dorm rooms and as their class was thrown through trauma after trauma.
It had been Eijirou who heard Katsuki wake up with night terrors, screaming at the memories of the villains who’d kidnapped him. Eijirou, who heard his best friend crying himself to sleep through the wall. In the day, Katsuki insisted he was fine; if he couldn’t handle his shit himself, he wouldn’t be able to be the best. Eijirou didn’t believe that bullshit for a minute, but he respected boundaries and kept quiet. And night after night, Eijirou resisted abandoning his textbooks and going to knock on his door, because he wanted to give Katsuki his space, let him approach in his own time, when he was ready.
Then Jaku happened.
Eijirou suffered his own traumas at the Gunga villa, while his best friend fought for his life eighty kilometers away. When Katsuki got out of the hospital and their class returned to the dorms—to whatever shreds of normalcy they could salvage—Eijirou stopped resisting the temptation to go to him.
Neither of them knew how to comfort the other; all they knew was that they couldn’t bear being alone with their thoughts. No one in their class could, and they all ended up spending more time together as a result, but Katsuki and Eijirou were nearly attached at the hip, clinging to each other to maintain the dregs of their sanity.
That intimacy bubbled over into full-blown romance their third year, when Katsuki kissed him suddenly over their physics homework. The irony of such a stark change in their relationship happening while they were going over Newton’s laws of motion wasn’t lost on them.
An object at rest will remain at rest unless compelled by an external force, and all that.
The transition from best friends to boyfriends had been surprisingly easy; they still did everything they’d always done, just with kissing, roving hands, and nudity added into the mix. Nobody had been surprised when they came out. The general reaction had been more of an exasperated “ finally ” than anything else.
The transition from students to fully-fledged Pros had proven more of a struggle. Hero society had only moderately recovered in the two years since Dabi’s attempt to burn it all down, but even a complete loss of faith in heroes wouldn’t slow down the crime rate. Alongside busy patrol schedules, they were constantly doing media and campaigns, trying to rebuild Japan’s trust in heroes.
Dynamight and Red Riot had been somewhat of a wonder duo, paired up often by their agencies—for press runs and ad campaigns more than villain fights—but once the hero costumes came off, there was less and less free time for Katsuki and Eijirou.
They’d talked about moving in together, a last-ditch attempt to close the yawning gap between them. Like everything else, that discussion got tabled, their relationship crumbling before they ever got a chance to pick it back up.
It wasn’t even that they fought; that, Eijirou thinks, might’ve made the whole thing easier to swallow. The true heartbreak was something neither of them ever expected: they simply grew apart.
Katsuki, ever ambitious, stayed focused on rising in the rankings, forever at war with the public approval ratings and gritting his teeth through countless social outreach events to make up for it. Eijirou stood by his side through all of it, always the softer touch of the pair despite his ability to turn his skin to stone. He always believed in Katsuki, never wanted to fault his ambition for the rifts in their bond. Once he started entertaining the thought that all their problems could be fixed if Katsuki just set his sights on his future with Eijirou, instead of on the number one spot, he knew he’d passed the point of no return. He couldn’t— wouldn’t —ask Katsuki to give up his drive, the goal he’d been working his whole life for, just for Eijirou. It would be the ultimate form of betrayal.
In the end, Eijirou wished more than anything that his quirk could be used on his heart. He wept on Katsuki’s couch when he finally admitted they were broken and he didn’t know how to go about fixing it. Fat tears turned to body-shaking sobs when Katsuki quietly agreed, when the relationship they’d built over so many years together disintegrated, like the foundations of a ruined sandcastle washed away by the tide.
In the time it takes for him to relive the rise and fall of his first love, he reaches Katsuki’s apartment building.
Eijirou stops on the sidewalk, looks up at the high-rise. He’s passed it a handful of times in the last few years, and every time he tries—and fails—to scrub away the memory of stepping out of those doors for the last time, unable to stop the tears streaming down his cheeks.
He doesn’t bother counting floors. He knows Katsuki is home. Mina told him she’d extended an invitation to come out with them, out of courtesy, but she’d been brushed off with some pitiful excuse. But they all know his public schedule; there’s no events tonight anyway, so it’s not like he has somewhere else to be. He just doesn’t want to be with them .
Eijirou doesn’t blame him. He hates that he’s been the one who spends more time with their friends, hates that Katsuki seems to feel like he’s not as welcome among them anymore. And maybe it’s Eijirou’s fault to an extent, considering that he’s moved on. To Katsuki’s longtime rival, no less.
Izuku could be summed up in two words: ever present. Always ready to offer a helping hand, a shoulder to cry on, a comforting hug. And as the one person in Eijirou’s life that had known Katsuki the longest, with an arguably more tumultuous relationship, he was uniquely suited to understand Eijirou’s devastation.
They’d spent a lot of time together, commiserating over what it was like to have loved and lost (or in Izuku’s case, to have never had at all) Bakugo Katsuki. When Katsuki’s presence in Eijirou’s life faded further and further, Izuku’s brightened, almost enough to block out the shadow of Eijirou’s broken love.
A twisted part of Eijirou’s brain reminds him that his relationship with Izuku follows the same path as his relationship with Katsuki: two friends, knit tighter over shared pain, turning to lovers. A nagging voice taunts him with the idea that this relationship will fizzle out in much the same way, and Eijirou has to suddenly choke back the sob that rises in his throat.
His phone buzzes again, this time with his ringer accompanying, so he drags his hand stiffly from his pocket and answers.
“Hey, babe.”
“Hi, Eij!” Izuku’s voice crackles brightly in his ear. “Just calling to see where you’re at! Denki’s whining that you haven’t answered his texts.”
Eijirou laughs, but it’s halfhearted at best, that pesky string still pulling at his already bleeding heart. “Sorry, I got a little distracted.”
“Oh, that’s okay! You’re not the only one who’s not here yet, anyway. Sho is still finishing up at work, and Jirou’s train got delayed…”
Eijirou scuffs his shoe across the concrete while Izuku speaks, trying to focus on the good thing he has right in front of him instead of the broken scraps he keeps wishing he knew how to mend.
“...take your time! Oh! I was thinking—since we’re both off tomorrow, you wanna stay over tonight? We haven’t had a chance to spend the day together in a while, I’ve missed you.”
Before Eijirou can answer, Denki shouts in the background, and Izuku laughs. There’s rustling on the other end of the line and Denki starts to yell something else before it fades out; Izuku must’ve shoved him away.
“Eiji? Is everything okay?” Izuku’s voice is louder now, less drowned out by background chatter. Eijirou scrunches his eyes closed, grinding the heel of his free hand against them to banish the tears welling up.
“Yeah, no, I’m okay,” he replies, although it sounds more strained than he would’ve liked, and he knows Izuku will pick up on it. “Just—long week, you know?” The night hasn’t even started, he doesn’t want to bring the mood down and make Izuku worry.
“You want me to come to you? If you’re not feeling up to it, we can—”
Eijirou cuts him off. “No, no, I’m fine for tonight. I can tell you all about it over breakfast tomorrow?” He’s already been standing here too long, contemplating doing a whole lot of nothing.
Izuku hums in response. “Sure, we can talk tomorrow. You’ll be here soon, then?”
Eijirou stares up at the high rise before him, one last time, before he turns and steps away in the direction of the izakaya.
“Yeah, I’m on my way.”