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Katsuki is 23 and waking up every day with iron on his tongue and tears in his eyes – not crying, he doesn't cry, he's Ground Zero, for god's sake – when he decides to see a therapist. It's not a spur of the moment idea. He's been sitting on the thought for years. But now.
Now it's affecting his performance. He doesn't get enough sleep, too busy tearing his throat apart as he screams into his pillows at night. Something sits in his chest, heavy, all the time.
He thinks it might be guilt.
His heart is like a rock, pumping stone through his limbs. He's used to this. He's used to it.
He doesn't like it, though.
Kirishima's tried to get him into therapy for years, telling him: “It's manly to care about your health – especially your mental health!” Sure, maybe.
Katsuki just wants to sleep.
They don't bring him up until he's 24, Number Two hero for the third year in a row. He's starting to get used to second place even if he doesn't like it.
Katsuki doesn't say much at first, even if this is probably the main reason he needed to see a therapist.
It goes slow, but he says it all, eventually.
It's freeing. It shouldn't be, but it is.
He's getting better at apologizing. He thinks he knows what to do. Kirishima agrees. His therapist, Dr. Sai, also thinks so.
Support is nice. He should communicate that to his friends. He's getting better at that too.
He's 25 when he scrolls through his contacts, down to the name 'Deku'. He's avoided anything to do with him, the shame a heavy smoke burning his eyes and lungs, and thus hasn't touched the contact in years. The accusing, blocky characters make him take a deep breath.
He changes the contact to 'Midoriya'. Types out a message. Deletes it. Types it again.
Deletes it.
He turns off his phone.
It takes him two weeks to send 'Hey, it's been a while. Are you free to meet up anytime soon? I have something to tell you.'
Belatedly, he sends 'I'll pay if you want coffee.”
It makes sense that the other man doesn't reply.
It still stings.
His call is rejected. Again. And again. And again.
He eventually thinks that maybe the phone number is out of service. Goes to find a phone book. Finds Inko's name, but not his.
It's strange but he doesn't question it.
He's relieved, then.
He's relieved.
After a month of stalling, he calls Inko. He calls, over and over and over again. It's... probably too much, but Katsuki wants to show that he's serious.
She doesn't respond. He sends her a message, wondering if he's been blocked.
The message never says 'delivered'.
His therapist says that he needs to leave it alone. Dek-Midoriya clearly wants space.
He does, for a little while. The nightmares get worse, though.
Dr. Sai says it's from the high adrenaline situations he's in as a hero – Number One, now – but his nightmares are filled with green.
He wakes up and smells grass, the wet damp of a stream, moss –
Something is wrong.
He runs into him at the grocery market.
“Oh, hey, Bakugou, wow, never thought I'd see you again. Holy shit it's been, what? Ten years?”
He grunts, looking at the man. Brown hair down to his chin, creepy fingers – ah, finger dude. 'Doesn't look like he's changed.
“Hey,” he says, pushing his hands in his pocket to stave off any sparks that he might let off. He doesn't know this man, he never has. All he can remember of him is his laughter as Katsuki burned and crushed everything he thought he was better than.
He wonders if the man in front of him ever wakes up with Midoriya's pleas echoing in his ears. Wonders if he's already apologized to the quirkless man. They went to the same high school, he's pretty sure.
“Yeah, a little longer,” he answers the man's rhetorical question. He doesn't remember his name.
Doesn't ask.
The man laughs awkwardly. “So, uh, what have you been up to? I guess that's a stupid question. My wife doesn't believe me when I say I grew up with the Number One Hero. Showed her pictures and everything and she still thinks I'm pulling her leg – “
“Heh,” he fake-laughs, not sure why he's entertaining this faux-politeness with Fingers. He doesn't do that. He doesn't awkwardly fumble through idle chit-chat. He just –
“Have you been in contact with Midoriya lately? I've been trying to reach him, but he's hard to find,” he cuts the man off in the middle of his speech, the words fueled by what even Fingers could tell as desperation.
Fingers freezes. His face is a pale epicenter of disaster, Katsuki just at the edges.
“M-Midoriya? You don't know?”
“Know what?” There's a twist in his gut, his vision turns blurry. Somehow, he knows what the man's going to say before he says it.
“Midoriya, he uh, killed himself a few years ago. It was our second year,” the man shifts from one foot to another, eyes averting to a spot on the ceiling.
It's as if he's been struck by a thunderbolt. The world spins.
He throws up on the linoleum floors. Someone takes a picture. He distantly wonders what the media will say.
It doesn't matter.
He wasn't told.
No one told him.
Like he isn't important. Like he doesn't wake up every morning with apologies falling from his lips like leaves in autumn.
But apologies don't matter if they're too late to even be heard.
Midoriya Izuku died at age 17. He jumped off an abandoned building somewhere on the outskirts of Musutafu.
It tastes an awful lot like karma.
It tastes an awful lot like shame.
Dr. Sai takes too long to answer him when he asks if it's his fault. If he'd apologized sooner, would it have happened this way? If he'd never done it at all, what would have happened?
She says that he can't change the past. Her eyes look heavy. It looks like grief.
He has the same eyes. Seeing them in the mirror is like staring at two pricks of blood. When he cries, he wonders if his tears reflect the vivid crimson of his irises – cut tracks of scarlet down his cheeks.
He wonders what Midoriya thought of his eyes. Of him.
The people you leave behind are never really gone. He's known that for a while now, bright laughter – cruel chuckles – echoing in his ears.
He wonders if words are enough to explain this.
He visits Midoriya's grave.
It's small, decent, clean.
Well-loved.
He walks away before he can read the name on the gravestone. It still doesn't feel real.
No one told him.
Kirishima comes with him next. He's solemn. He doesn't talk, just takes Katsuki's hand in his own and leads him; helps him to his knees in front of the grave.
“From what you told me about him, he would be happy you're here.”
“It's been eleven years, Kirishima,” he says, tears already hot on his face, “I don't know him – never did.”
“You did,” Kirishima says, firm, like a rock. Katsuki leans on him. “He was brave and kind and good. You told me that. You're not a liar, Katsuki. You knew him. He'd be happy you came.”
Kirishima repeats it. Like he knows.
He does, Katsuki supposes. Katsuki's told him everything – every little thing he ever did to Midoriya Izuku.
It took years to say it all.
Katsuki wonders how Midoriya survived so long at all. The grief is already weighing him down and it's only been a month.
They say goodbye. Katsuki apologizes. It feels like someone has ripped his heart through his chest. Like there's a great gap in the space where his sternum is. Like a breeze is billowing between his ribs, sending flayed muscle and tissue waving like white flags in the wind.
He has never felt so heavy. So breakable and raw.
Kirishima rubs his arm.
He turns, buries his head in Kirishima's chest, and sobs.
No one stops to listen, but it feels as though all the world can hear.
“What does it mean to be a hero?” Ground Zero asks the crowd. No one raises their hand, as if thinking it's a rhetorical question. It's not.
The reporters all share glances when he doesn't continue speaking.
“Come on, I'm interviewing you now,” he says, signature sharp voice on full display.
“Er,” a woman in the crowd interjects, “to save?”
“Close,” he says, face impassive. His smirk hasn't been seen in months. The press has been going wild. It aligns perfectly with the puking incident in the grocery store. Everyone wants the scoop.
“Being a hero means helping others. It means supporting others, but those are all actions. Anyone can fake it. What does it mean to be a hero at heart? It means you need to give a shit. You need to care – about others, about their feelings and thoughts and beliefs. You need to care a shitton. This isn't a job for people who don't care. It doesn't matter your quirk or your lack of one, all it takes to be a hero is a good heart. There are not enough real heroes in the world anymore. People are so quick to snuff them out.
“It's our job to save them. It's our job to care.”
The journalists erupt with questions. Katsuki doesn't care.
It's ironic in the best of ways.
The world is contemplative. The world is curious. The world finds what it can, brings it to light, blinds it as it tears into the young, hopeful-dead as if it can find sustenance in the brittle bones of corpses.
Secrets aren't easy things to keep as the Number One Hero.
Midoriya Izuku deserves to rest in peace. It's just one more thing Katsuki has to atone for.
“Sir, is it true that you told Midoriya – “
“What can you say about the – “
“Do you still think quirkless are – “
“Zip it,” he says to Kirishima sitting beside him, a bag of popcorn in hand.
“I haven't said anything yet – “ Kirishima protests with a smile.
“Ah, zip it.” He tries to grin. It cracks across his skin like a tear in old leather; dry and painful.
“But you know I can never stay quiet during movies,” Kirishima whines, eyes round and pleading as he stares at Katsuki, “You expect too much of me.”
“Well if you would just shut the hell up it wouldn't be a problem.”
“We put on subtitles for a reason!”
“And?”
“And you can read them while I talk!”
“That's stupid, who reads while people are talking?”
“...Katsuki, are you saying you can't multitask and read subtitles while someone's talking?” Kirishima asks, grinning slyly. Katsuki scowls.
“No! Shut up! I can multitask fine, I'm the Number One Hero!” Kirishima laughs and Katsuki doesn't fight the upward tug to his lips like he used to.
Progress.
“They'll be here soon,” Kirishima says softly, ruining the moment. Katsuki almost wants to be mad, but he knows it's necessary.
He doesn't like it, but he doesn't like a lot of things nowadays. Hasn't in a while.
“I know.”
“Figured out what you're gonna say?”
“Yeah.”
“I'm proud of you, y'know?” Kirishima says, whispered voice loud in the quiet room. The paused All Might movie blankets them in an artificial glow.
“I don't know why.”
Katsuki probably never will.
“Man, what the fuck – ?”
The words are cut off before she can finish, Ashido stopping herself when she sees him tucked into Kirishima's arms. She deflates, anger leaving her in a little 'oh'.
Sero's face is hard to read. Uraraka's is fiery hot. The rest of the class just looks wary and curious.
It kind of makes him sick.
“He used to be my best friend,” he says to nobody in particular, “and I didn't even find out he was dead until 4 months ago.”
He cries. In front of all of his class. Some cry with him, others comfort those crying.
He doesn't really know what's happening, but he talks. They listen.
It feels like the start of something.
He's scared. The media doesn't usually make his gut twist like this, but this is different. This is Midoriya, and grins, and bruises, and burns and 'I'm sorry's' to a gravestone 8 years too late – 11 years gone.
This is redemption, and this is punishment, and this is the end and the beginning.
He steps onto the stage. The cameras are running live so he can control what's said – so nothing's cut out.
“I spent the last two years writing an apology to a boy I didn't know was dead. To a boy I grew up with, laughed with, loved with.
“Hurt beyond repair.
“I don't think I'll ever be able to atone for how much harm I've caused. I've tried so hard to get better, and I am, but this isn't something I can outgrow. I'll always have this stain of sin, this pain that I've caused the world – that I burdened on one child who deserved so much better.
“But it's no longer about me and the past. It's about what I can do in the future – to the future. So many of us grow up thinking heroes are about power. Wondering what quirk we'll get, how it will help us on our path to being loved and revered by all.
“It's not real. It's not true. It's a lie for children that we never seem to grow out of. We aren't heroes just 'cuz we've got a license. We're heroes when we put others' lives above our own. We're heroes when we work to save others not just in battles, but before battles can even begin.
“Did you know that providing rehabilitation for drug addicts lowers their chances of committing crimes by 90%? Or that the majority of villains start out with petty theft because they're so poor they can't even feed themselves or their family?
“I didn't. I never did. I never cared. I wasn't a hero when I got my hero license. I was the farthest thing from a hero, but the commission looked at my quirk, my physical capabilities alone, and said 'this 16-year-old bully is now responsible for the public's welfare, good luck'. I've gotten better. I've changed.
“But I should have never been allowed to become a hero,” he says the words with a hot vehemence, his cheeks warm and flushed from anger. People gasp at the words as if they can't imagine he would think such a thing.
“Now though, as the Number One Hero, I have responsibilities I can't abandon. And I swear to you, I will do everything I can to fulfill them and more.
“Never forget that quirks don't mean a damn about who you are and what you can do. The bravest and brightest hero I've ever known was quirkless. His name was Midoriya Izuku and he deserved so much more from the world.
“I'm going to make sure no one ever has to experience what he did again.”
Yaoyorozu and Todoroki use their ins in the business world to scrounge up sponsors. It's not like they need the money, but having other names besides Class 1-A and hero agencies backing them is necessary. They need civilian support.
It's small, at first. It feels impossible.
But they get two. Two turns into three. Three turns into four.
Four turns out to be Midoriya Inko's law firm, and from there the support spirals into another scandal – this time favorable, even if his hands feel heavy and his eyes are wet as he types an email thanking them for their support.
He wonders if she'll see it.
The first project of many is setting up Recreation Centers all over the country for quirkless youth. The second is implementing counseling programs for quirkless kids similar to quirk counseling, but despite the lack of physical construction, it's infinitely harder to accomplish.
The third is anti-bullying programs. It's hard work making a program that won't be a load of bullshit and will actually help, but Kirishima, Shoji, and Tsukuyomi lead the project with confidence. He wants them to have agency in it too. He wants people who've experienced this firsthand to be in this more than he is – this can't be an organization led by a bully. It won't work.
It's not fair.
Dr. Sai tells him nothing's fair. That it's okay.
It doesn't feel okay.
He names it 'Green Hands Charity'.
Green, 'Midori', for Midoriya. Hands for Katsuki's own – weapons at the end of his arms. Grenades within a child's palm and now nuclear explosions at age 26, calloused and sore.
He used to wage war against the stars with them. Now, he uses them to heal – as best he can.
He thinks Izuku would be happy.
He hopes.
He's better. He takes his hands, builds mountains with them. Builds a world in which maybe kids will grow up a little kinder. Words will be softer.
Planting seeds, he plans to nurture them into a garden. Watch it grow green, like life.
Like forgiveness.