Chapter Text
When Katsuki got the call, he plummeted out of the sky.
Serves him right for answering his fucking phone while in the air, but to be fair, no one dared to call him unless it was an emergency. Or, as Icy Hot liked to say, no one wanted to 'have their eardrums burst by his incessant yelling'. But that Half-and-Half bastard was the one that bothered him more than anyone else, with his phone calls and his texts and his showing up on his doorstep at ten-fucking-thirty at night with junk food that should not be consumed by any living person.
For some godforsaken reason, Shouto Todoroki thought they were friends. Katsuki was tired of correcting him.
One would think Icy Hot’d have at least some semblance of shame, but apparently he’d missed the class on human fucking decency. At least Shitty Hair knew when to give him some space.
He pressed the button on his left earpiece. “Dynamight. Go.”
“Katsuki. We found him.” He was straight to the point and as usual, far too fucking informal, but Katsuki thought none of this. Instead, he let out a bellow of surprise and began to drop in the air, unable to keep his explosions up in pure shock. “Katsuki? Your mother will be upset with me if I’ve killed you. Do you copy?”
It was at times like these that Katsuki was thankful for how little fucks the youngest Todoroki gave. With a bark of startled laughter, he felt the air rush back into his lungs as the world rushed past him.
Katsuki regained the use of his quirk about fifteen feet from the ground and shot back up in the air as if he’d been trampolined, and took a few moments to steady his breathing before replying. “What? Then where the fuck is he?” he spat, pointedly ignoring the tremor in his hands and looking for a rooftop to land before he made the same mistake twice.
“It’s not much to go on, technically. But it’s more than nothing, which is better than usual.”
“Well then, hurry the fuck up and tell me! What’ve you got?” He blasted his way to one of the higher rooftops in the area and settled into a crouch, trying to still the hammering of his heart.
“We hadn’t been finding anything with the specifics that we’d been putting out, so I broadened the search. It’s an old trail, but we found a statement from two and a half years ago that leads us to believe he traveled to America. Los Angeles first, to be exact.”
“America? Why the fuck would he be in America?” Some weird fanboy excursion to visit all of All Might’s old haunts? Katsuki could see Deku going for that kind of thing, but that was before he went all self-sacrificial. God knows he was probably tormenting himself by watching bystanders buy tickets for All Might exhibitiions and fucking crying himself to sleep. Asshole. He better be crying himself to sleep, missing everyone. Katsuki refused to be the fucking crybaby out of the two of them, absolutely not. There was no world in which Deku, even a far-off, self-isolating Deku, wasn’t the one who fucking cried about it. Katsuki refused.
Todoroki continued, “I don’t know, but I know this one was him this time.” Somehow, more than the initial shock, this was what dropped in the pit of Katsuki’s stomach.
“How?” he said, barely recognizing his own voice. Prove it, the inner Katsuki begged.
“There was an altercation in the Los Angeles airport. A boy stepped in. He wouldn’t tell the airline staff any way to contact him, and said he didn’t know much English but. It’s him, Katsuki.” He could feel his heartbeat in his ears. Katsuki bit his lip so hard it drew blood. “All he’d tell the staff was that the girl had ‘looked like she needed saving’.”
Katsuki wished he still used a physical phone, because it would have felt so nice to throw it off the building. “Motherfucker!” Of course this was how Deku would slip up. His goddamn complex strikes again, Katsuki thought. It couldn’t be anyone else, it just couldn’t.
“When do you get off patrol? I’ll bring noodles.” Half-and-Half was so damn predictable. Katsuki hated that he didn’t hate it anymore.
“In an hour. Just make sure they make mine with extra-”
“With extra spice, I know, you say that every time.” Todoroki ended the call as quickly as it had begun, and Katsuki was left with his thoughts spinning wildly for the next hour.
Fucking great.
Todoroki, being a human with no fucking manners, had already let himself into Katsuki’s apartment by the time he’d gotten off work. Katsuki found him on the couch, already digging into his cold soba, leaving a steaming bowl of noodles in front of the blonde’s usual spot, papers strewn about the table and most of the couch.
Katsuki didn’t dignify him with a ‘hello’, and instead went straight into his bedroom to shuck off his uniform. Like some unspoken rule to himself, Katsuki couldn’t ever relax if he was still in his hero costume, always feeling like he was on duty. It was best to separate himself from the clothes the minute he walked in.
That usually worked, but Katsuki had a feeling he wouldn’t be relaxing at all tonight, anyways. Still, he went through the motions of pulling off his gauntlets and placing them carefully on their stand in his closet. He was not so gentle with the rest, peeling off his sweaty clothes and chucking them into the laundry bin.
He was wired and disgusting, but there was no way he was going to be able to sit through a shower knowing Todoroki was in his living room with news about Deku. Katsuki would just have to suffer, as per fucking usual.
He trudged out of the room with a glare, but Icy Hot didn’t even look up. The prickle of irritation and unease that had been following him since their phone call intensified and Katsuki barked, “Well?!”
“Well what?” Came the monotone response. Like always, Icy Hot didn’t rise to his bait. The stupid two-toned fuck couldn’t give him the slightest sliver of kindness, could he? He couldn’t just let him shout it out like Katsuki desperately wanted to. Wouldn’t scream at him and let him scream back like he used to have with-
“Tell me what the fuck you’ve got on Deku! You didn’t say shit over the phone, so what else do we got?”
“Like I said, it’s not much to go on, Katsuki. He covered his tracks well. So well, in fact, that I think someone must have done it for him.” A stony expression took over the other man’s face, and Katsuki thought, Finally. But then the words hit him and he stiffened.
“What the fuck, everyone was so fucked up when he left, we would’ve noticed if anyone had- right?!” There came the tremors again, and Katsuki grit his teeth and settled on a snarl instead.
“To be fair, I wasn’t really thinking about that possibility at the time. I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me until now. And you were pretty distraught when he left.”
“I wasn’t goddamn distraught, I was furious! That little fuck thinks he can leave without so much as a goodbye? Screw his goddamn letters, he couldn’t say that shit to my face?” The room was getting warmer, or maybe it was just Katsuki.
“Regardless of what you want to call your meltdown, this means we’ve been missing big clues. But we can use this to our advantage. Whoever has been helping him probably thinks that we’ll never catch their scent if we haven’t yet, and that’s how we’ll get them to slip up. We just have to be smart.”
“We won’t be able to catch anyone if we don’t know who the hell it is. You got any ideas in that boiled egg you call a brain?”
“I don’t know,” and damn it, Katsuki was so tired of that answer. It had been three years of ‘I don’t know’s and ‘Nothing yet’s and ‘He’ll come back when he’s ready, my boy’s, and that just wasn’t fucking good enough.
“Fucking shit,” he said instead, and flopped down into his seat, head in his hands. “So. Someone could have been helping him from the get go. That means someone could’ve been covering his fucking tracks for years.” He thread a hand through his hair and desperately fought the urge to yank some of it out from pure frustration. “Who can we cross off the list? We gotta know who we can go to with this, but if anyone’s compromised…”
Todoroki nodded and set his bowl down, picking up a notepad and passing it to Katsuki. He took it in lieu of letting his stupid fucking hands shake any longer, and gripped the pad harshly. “Obviously, you and I can be crossed off the list. I wouldn’t have told you about this if I’d been trying to keep it a secret, and it’s very apparent that you don’t know where he is or else we wouldn’t be doing this.”
“Obviously,” Katsuki repeated, grinding his teeth.
“I think it’s safe to say Ochako can be crossed off as well. She was pretty distraught when it happened, and I don’t think she would have wanted Midoriya to go it alone.”
“Yeah, ‘cause Pink Cheeks isn’t a fucking idiot like Deku is. She would’ve taken your whole merry band of nerds along with ‘em. Power of friendship or some shit like that.”
“Exactly. And I think the same can be said for Tenya, though I don’t think he would have gotten behind Midoriya’s reasoning for departure.”
“I can vouch for Shitty Hair, too. He can’t lie to save his damn life. Also… if he’d have known, he woulda told me.” Katsuki pointedly did not mention why Kirishima would have told him, and for once, Half-and-Half had the decency to let it be.
“Is there anyone else we can say for sure?”
“Deku has so many damn friends that there’s no way we can know who to trust. We’ll just have to be real fuckin stealthy with this.”
“Agreed.”
The conversation dwindled. Half-and-Half was a shitty conversationalist at the best of times, but the silence made Katsuki all the more restless. He grabbed the noodles from out in front of him and slurped them down, relishing in the burn of the sauce in hopes of distracting himself. When that was finished, he took the bowls to the sink and washed them. Then he dried them and put them away into the cabinet.
He moved on to the shoe rack by his door and reorganized them like he’d been meaning to. Violently, Katsuki pulled Icy Hot’s coat out from under him and hung it up on the stand by the door. Nothing would make the buzzing in his blood go away. God dammit.
Seething, he turned back around to the other man. “So what the FUCK are we going to do? We need a plan.”
“I agree, but I don’t see what we can do until we figure out who was in on it. We have no leads besides this.”
“We’re just gonna have to work our way through the extras until one of ‘em squeals.”
“And how exactly do you propose we do that, Katsuki? If we’re too obvious, or we ask the wrong person and the right one gets word, they’ll lock down the operation twice as hard.” Todoroki stared at him, his words calm but his eyes sharp with intent. “We can’t go in, guns blazing. You realize that, right? I know this probably physically pains you, but we have to be cautious.”
The bastard probably had meant that in a sympathetic way, but it set Katsuki’s teeth on edge. At least he had the balls to say shit like this to his face, unlike the rest of them. Three years later and they’re all walking on fucking eggshells around him when someone so much as mentions the color green. Fortunately for them, that color had been ruined far before stupid Deku left and took the world with him.
Dumb shit like that couldn’t hurt Katsuki. It couldn’t touch him because he wouldn’t let it. He wasn’t some weak asshole that cried when his rival up and left him. It didn’t hurt him when Deku did his vanishing act and left Katsuki to pick up the pieces. He wasn’t in pain because of some fucking dumb shit self-sacrificing bastard with too big of a heart and a stupid go-it-alone mentality and why hadn’t he fucking listened when Katsuki had said-
“Hey. Hey.” There was a blob in front of him, all red-and-white. It looked absolutely idiotic, and Katsuki went to reach for it and found that he couldn’t move a muscle. Suddenly, it all came rushing back in. A gasp burst forth from his lungs. He was drenched in sweat and sweltering with heat that was not unlike being roasted alive. For a hysterical moment, Katsuki wondered if Icy Hot had finally decided to kill him.
“-tsuki. Hey. Look at me.” There was that voice again. So damn annoying. Katsuki let out a groan and tried to bat it away. “Come on, Katsuki.” The voice was so disapproving, he couldn’t help but let out a snort.
“Y’sound like m’mother.” The words were molasses in his mouth.
“If I sound like her, you should listen to me, right?” He gave another snort, and the voice continued, “Listen to me. Breathe.” A hand pushed lightly on his chest and he finally remembered where his lungs were. Oh, right. Katsuki was in the middle of something, wasn’t he?
This was inconvenient. He grabbed the hand by the wrist, feeling for the pulse, and tried to use it to steady him. Todoroki was saying something, but he couldn’t focus for long enough to hear it. Katsuki forced some air into his lungs. It stung his throat, cold and unapologetic.
After a few more gulps of air, Katsuki found his senses coming back to him, bit by bit. He’d somehow ended up on the floor, back up against the couch, with Icy Hot crouching next to him. The other man kept his gaze on Katsuki, intense and unrelenting, his hair falling in front of his eyes. It looked especially stupid at the moment, the ends curled ever so slightly from perspiration. “Tell me what you need right now,” said Todoroki.
He couldn’t.
Todoroki’s hand was still on his chest, and Katsuki had been crushing the living daylights out of it. He dropped the hand like it had burned him (ha), and focused his tilted vision on the shelf of All Might merch in the corner of the room. Wordlessly, he counted the bobbleheads and the figurines like they were sheep, and he willed his weak heart to stop beating wildly. “‘M fine,” he finally said, when he could bring himself to.
Half-and-Half scoffed but said nothing, dropping down beside him with his back to the couch. They sat there for a few minutes in silence, the air still hot from Katsuki’s… episode, and he clenched his shaking hands. There were small, black marks on the edges of his palms, and he glanced at Todoroki’s hand in mild, hazy alarm.
His left hand had matching smears of soot, but no burns. Stupidly grateful that Katsuki hadn’t burned him because he’d lost control, he wrenched a quiet, “Sorry,” out of his throat. He could feel the other man’s eyes on him but Katsuki averted his gaze stubbornly.
“Is this going to be too much for you?” Todoroki began, a hint of awful softness in his tone. Katsuki bristled, ready to spit a wrathful reply, but the man went on. “I’m not saying anything about weakness, Katsuki, I just meant that… this is a long shot. If it’s going to be worse for you to not be a part of it, then fine, but if you’re not ready to deal with this, then I understand-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Katsuki said, as venomously as his parched, cracking throat would let him. “I’m not going fucking anywhere and you’re not shutting me out of this. That was a fluke, it wasn’t even anything-”
“Katsuki-”
“Don’t fucking- I’m fine, I’ll be fine, I’m a fuckin’ Pro Hero for godsakes, I can be objective, I’ll be so fucking cautious, just don’t even think about doing this without me, I will raise hell, Shouto, I swear to fucking god-”
“You called me Shouto.”
“I’ll call you what I damn well please, you absolute bastard-”
“I mean, it’s my name, so yes, you certainly can-”
“Shut up, shut up, your voice gives me such a fuckin’ headache I can’t see straight.”
“No, that was probably the panic attack-”
“I’ll KILL you!”
Somehow, against all odds, Icy Hot’s antagonistic indifference had a way of calming him down like nothing else. Somehow, he could ignore the quivering of his traitorous body and the exhaustion in his bones, and focus on the fact that stupid Todoroki made him so damn mad that he was almost glad he was there.
Not that he’d ever fucking say that. He’s taking that shit to the grave.
Todoroki had slept on the couch, and Katsuki hadn’t slept at all. But he got up when his early-as-fuck alarm went off anyways and began the process of breakfast.
Cooking was one of the only things that could turn his fucking brain off, so even in his exhausted delirium, he found a sliver of joy in it. He could focus on the smells and the sizzling of the pan and tune the rest of the world out.
It was easier to breathe like this, and process. A tenuous, trembling thread in Katsuki had snapped, and a part of him felt like he hadn’t stopped plummeting, like the call from Half-and-Half had been the first push off a cliff.
Katsuki let out a shaky breath. Get it the fuck together.
“Smells good,” came a voice from behind him, and it took everything in him to not startle. Todoroki had no concept of personal space, and he peered over Katsuki’s shoulder, one of Katsuki’s blankets draped over his tall frame. Katsuki felt a coil of angry fire in his gut, and he he sneered and elected to ignore the red-and-white eyesore standing in his kitchen like he fucking owned the place.
The bastard in question moved to open the fridge and pull out the milk, grabbing a mug from the rack next to the sink and moving to the coffee machine. “What kind of roast did you make? It smells new,” he added, and Katsuki fumed.
“It’s just a regular roast with some extra shit in it, and it’s not for assholes! It’ll burn your prissy tongue clean off!”
“Not for assholes? You’re not having any?”
“Get your bony ass outta my kitchen!” Todoroki snickered and finished pouring himself a steaming mug, and moved to make a cup for Katsuki too. “I mean it, Half-and-Half!”
“You know, you’re not as scary as you think you are. I’m not afraid of you.”
“You fuckin’ will be,” he muttered under his breath, and flipped the egg with unnecessary aggression.
Instead of an answer, a mug was placed by his elbow, and the nuisance finally stopped fucking hovering and took a seat at the kitchen island. Katsuki ignored the coffee at his side for a full minute and a half out of spite, but couldn’t hold out any longer than that when he heard a pleased hum from his personal home intruder. “S’good,” the other man mumbled, his voice still soft and scratchy from sleep.
“‘Course it is. I made it.”
“How are you feeling?” Here we go. Possibly the worst thing about Icy Hot was his inability to let shit go. He couldn’t just take a bit of temporary weakness for what it was, he had to poke and prod at it. Curious and nosy and far too fucking close to understanding. It was entirely too much like the reason for Katsuki’s ire, and it set him on edge.
“It’s not gonna happen again, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you’re alright because you had a panic attack last night, Katsuki.” The taller man peered at him from across the island, his gaze tired but firm. Katsuki avoided his eyes and grabbed two plates from the cabinet.
“Don’t fucking call it that- I ain’t panicking!” Icy Hot scoffed, he fucking scoffed at him-
“Do you always have to be so difficult?” The prickles of irritation turned into full-fledged needles, and Katsuki turned off the burner, before slamming the eggs down onto the plate and shoving one at Todoroki.
“Do you always have to be so fucking intrusive?”
“God forbid someone worries about you. You treat concern like it’s some contagious disease. Doesn’t it get exhausting?”
“Why the fuck are you still here?” Katsuki spit. God, he hated him, he hated him, that stupid smug know-it-all bastard. How dare he? He didn’t know shit about Katsuki. He wanted to scream, to jump out of his own skin-
“I’m not leaving.” He spoke like he knew exactly what Katsuki was saying, like he could read between the lines because he was so damn smart. The absolute fucking bastard. Katsuki grit his teeth and willed the hot, itchy tears back into his skull. He clenched his fists tightly.
“Why?” He meant it to be sharp, to be cutting, but his throat had closed up and it came out barely a whisper.
“Because you don’t want me to. And I don’t want to go. I’m not leaving, Katsuki.” God damn him, how dare he care-
“Fuck you,” Katsuki hissed, cheeks suddenly wet. He wiped at his face vigorously, clearing any evidence of the weakness. At some point, Todoroki had left his spot on the stool and had moved around the counter. He was too close, Katsuki couldn’t let him see-
“We’re going to find him. We’re closer than we’ve ever been.”
“We don’t have shit.”
“But we will. We have a lead. We have something. You really think that we can’t do it? We’re the most capable for the job. We know him best, we know how he thinks, and we’ll find him. We have to, so we will.” The taller man leaned against the counter across from him, keeping his distance but still too fucking close. How dare he see Katsuki like this, stand there like it’s nothing. Like Katsuki wasn’t falling apart in front of him, like it was normal for Katsuki to be like-
If fucking Deku hadn’t left, no one would have to see this shitty, weak side of him. No one besides Deku had seen it, until the bastard had left, and Katsuki had lost the one person who could help him keep it under wraps. It was always Deku and his fucking help, whether Katsuki wanted it or not. Screw him for making Katsuki realize how much he needed it.
Katsuki could be as selfish as he wanted when it came to Deku, and the boy had never complained. He could dump all his foolish, sticky emotions into a heap in front of him, and Deku would painstakingly untangle them, make sense of them in a way Katsuki had never learned how. He always offered his fucking hand, no matter how many times Katsuki had slapped it away.
And Katsuki realized how much of a shithead it made him, but he needed it. He needed Deku, like breathing, something you didn’t realize was so intrinsic to your existence until it was gone. And what the fuck, it was always Deku. Because of course it was, it always had been, ever since they were kids.
“I miss him too, you know,” and there it was, Half-and-Half couldn’t ever keep his fucking mouth shut, could he? Katsuki shot forward and grabbed a fistful of the other man’s shirt.
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” he spat.
“I don’t have to. You wear it like a shadow, Katsuki. A part of you is gone. Midoriya took it with him. I understand.”
A bitter, hateful part of Katsuki made him snap, “You couldn’t-”
“But I do. It feels like I’m walking around with half of my chest caved in.” Simple, so simple the way he said it, but it struck Katsuki to the core. This knowledge, this near-confession that Todoroki had whispered. Because of course, because it was Deku.
In all the years that Deku had been gone, Todoroki had never once complained. He’d locked it all tightly inside himself, closed it all off and played the part of the steadfast comfort to all of Deku’s friends. The stupid bastard had held Glasses when he cried, commiserated with Pink Cheeks over drinks, he’d paid special attention to Frogger when she had quieter days, he’d even been doing it for Katsuki.
Was this another instance of Katsuki being selfish? Of him taking and taking and ignoring what someone else needed in return? Had he missed the signs or had Todoroki refused to show them? He didn’t know, but Katsuki knew he had fucked up somewhere along the road. Weak.
He was a shitty person, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know when he was doing it. And dammit, he’d been trying to do better. He thought he had been, until Deku went and fucked it all up. Three years, and Katsuki was still fucked.
Todoroki had taken hold of the fist in his shirt, holding it so tightly that his knuckles turned white, clinging to the hand like it was the only thing keeping him upright. His impenetrable gaze revealed nothing, but he wouldn’t let go of Katsuki. Like he was a lifeline.
They were both so fucked.
Chests heaving with emotion, something neither of them have been taught how to handle correctly, they stood in silence. The precipice of truth was looming ahead, and neither were ready to hurl themselves off of it, and yet, they pushed and shoved each other closer to the edge. They were both too stubborn to go first, years of bottling it all up and swirling their complex emotions together until they were muddled and messy.
Hand shaking in the other man’s bruising grip, a sick mirror of the night before, Katsuki took a leap. “Why Deku? When did we decide that fuck had so much power over us?” Shit, why did he always feel like this?
Todoroki let out the breath he was holding, maybe had been holding for since Deku had left. He said, implication clear as day, “I don’t think it was a decision.”
“Tch.” Statement of the fucking year.
“And I think we both know why. Because it’s him.” Because stupid fucking Deku only ever wanted to help people, to save them, he’d been through hell and back and still managed to smile. Because he went fucking nuts when someone he cared about was in danger, because he never knew when to stop, never knew his limits and just blew right past them. Because he rose higher and higher and surpassed everyone, surpassed Katsuki, and never stopped trying to be better. His goddamn stupid big heart.
It made Katsuki feel sick to his stomach, Deku’s heart.
It fucking scared him.
“This doesn’t change anything,” he said sharply, his nerves rubbed raw from all this goddamn talking.
“No.” Half-and-Half met his eyes, looking exhausted and determined as fuck, a glimpse in the mirror of Katsuki’s mangled emotions. His hand tightened in Todoroki’s shirt.
“So. Let’s find his goddamn co-conspirator, and get that idiot back.”