Chapter Text
Eijirou is not a morning person. He isn’t a morning person when Riot jumps up on the bed and he wakes up with wet slobbers or a well-meant paw to the face, he isn’t a morning person when Mina decides to let herself in and straight out yells at Eijirou until he wakes up.
He definitely is not a morning person when he wakes up in a room that isn’t even his.
Now, Eijirou is only ever up to 96% sure of the legitimacy of anything that happens to him, but in this particular case he is maybe even 97% sure that he went to sleep in his own bed. He’s just as sure that he went to sleep wearing that obnoxiously green hoodie that Denki gave him for his birthday, and not a shirt he had never seen with the logo of a band he had never heard of.
Maybe this is all a very elaborate prank, he thinks as he chances yet another look around the entirely unfamiliar room. Maybe he has to call Mina and as soon as he does that, his best friend will walk through the door and yell “Surprise!” and explain to him how exactly she pulled this off, like some kind of cliché supervillain.
Maybe Mina is already standing outside that door, waiting for him to do something.
“Mina?”, he tries carefully. His voice sounds strange, stranger even than it usually does right after he wakes up, but that is about his least concern right now. He hasn’t gotten an answer.
With a sigh he looks for his phone on the bedside table, where he usually keeps it in his own room, and is less surprised than probably warranted to not see his slightly battered Android charging there, but a sleek matte black iPhone. This is a very elaborate prank, Eijirou thinks. Mina really outdid herself.
When he goes to unplug the phone, the screen lights up, showing him not only the time (he should start getting ready for school soon, his tardy record doesn’t leave any room to focus on pranks, really) but also a picture of two people he has never seen in his life (no surprises there, by now).
The one who had seemingly taken the picture, a girl around his age with chin-length brown hair, is grinning and has her arm wound around the shoulders of a boy, his hair an ashy blond colour and his red eyes looking off to the side in what seems like a fond eye roll.
Cute, Eijirou thinks to himself, before he remembers the issue at hand and goes to unlock the phone with his usual passcode. (Mina’s birthday, she changed all of Eijirou’s passcodes to it as a prank far less elaborate than this about 2 years ago and he never bothered to change them back.)
The phone buzzes and stays locked.
Eijirou tries again, typing slower this time and making sure it’s the right numbers... another buzz, the same lockscreen looking up at him.
The time on the display reads 8:03 AM and under normal circumstances he’d really need to leave for school right about now. Although he plays with the thought to let this count as anything but normal circumstances, the mental image of his teacher’s wrath gets him moving.
After another quick look around the room he changes into a pair of jeans and a hoodie he finds discarded on a chair and grabs a backpack that he guesses holds his school materials. He prays to the heavens that Mina remembered to pack Eijirou’s sociology homework somewhere in his prank-planning frenzy — it’s due today and Mr. Aizawa has given him far too many passes already.
Opening the bedroom door, he finds himself in the hallways of what seems to be a moderately sized apartment. It’s modern and sleek, but in a very subtle way it feels lived in. There’s some used dishes on a sideboard over there, a pair of men’s running shoes strewn a few feet further down, and by what Eijirou believes to be the front door he can see some scribbles on post it notes on the dark wood of the frame.
Briefly, he wonders how Mina convinced someone to lend their apartment for this prank. There’s no way she could have arranged all of this, no matter how detail-loving she usually is.
There doesn’t seem to be anyone else here, Eijirou realizes. When he gets up in the mornings he can usually hear his grandmother humming from her bedroom or the kitchen before she leaves for the small grocery store she runs, or trying to reason with the dog, but the hallway here stays completely silent as he steps outside.
“Hello?”, he tries. He’s been up for a while now, but his voice still sounds weird, deeper somehow, a little raspy. He doesn’t think that’s how puberty works. That part of puberty should have been long over. Maybe he’s getting sick?
There’s no answer, and another look at the cursed phone screen tells him he really needs to get going. He can already hear Mr. Aizawa’s exasperated sigh as he bursts into yet another class too late.
As he hurries along the hallway to what he identified as the front door before, he wonders if this place is any farther away from school than his own. Maybe if he makes a run for it he can be there on time? Then again, he wouldn't put it past Mina to let him wake up in an apartment halfway across town, he reasons with himself as he toes on a pair of expensive-looking sneakers. His eyes roam the hallway for his keys on instinct, even though he probably won’t need keys for this stranger’s apartment after he’s talked to Mina at school. Again, he asks himself how exactly she pulled this off, it seems sheer impossible —
Eijirou’s eyes drift over a mirror that takes up a big part of the wall right next to the front door. Only it’s not his eyes he’s staring into in the reflection.
There’s a shock of blonde hair, wild with sleep and decidedly not his. There’s a slant to red eyes and edges and angles to a face that are entirely unfamiliar to him as he touches them and sees the reflection do the same. He feels caught up in an echoing disconnect from reality when his fingers run through a strand of pale hair, strikingly unsaturated when compared to his usual firetruck-red.
There’s no doubt that while the reflection is not his, it is definitely him, and everything feels vivid and real, muted and dream-like at the same time.
He realises, faintly, that the face isn’t one he’s never seen before. It is the boy on the lockscreen, smiling unsuspectingly up at him as he takes it back out now, just to check, even though he’s 100% sure.
This is a dream, Eijirou decides. Somehow his subconscious has had enough of his usual dreams, all confusing colours and fairytale-like occurrences, and has thrown him into this shockingly realistic one, complete with people and places he has never seen in his life. Distantly, he remembers Mina telling him about lucid dreaming, and he wishes he had listened more closely then. He kind of really wants this dream to be over.
In a bout of desperation, he tries pinching himself several times. The pain is fascinatingly real, he finds, but it doesn’t do anything, and he doesn’t wake up. The red mark it leaves on his — this boy’s — forearm looks like it’s going to bruise.
“Well, what am I supposed to do now?”, he exclaims out loud to no one in particular.
He gets out the phone again, useless still without the right passcode. He could try calling the police.
Maybe in dreams, especially weird ones like this, there is some kind of dream-police, and they could tell him what to do.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he faintly hears Mina calling him an idiot, and he discards the thought. Before he puts the useless device back into his jeans’ pockets, he glances at the time again.
He, this boy, his dream self, whatever it is, they will all collectively run way too late for class.
On one hand, none of this is real and he doesn’t really have anything to lose by just not going to dream-school.
On the other hand, he has just as much dream-anxiety as he has real anxiety, and the thought of skipping alone stresses him out so much that he thinks it shouldn’t physically be possible for him to sleep through it — yet here he is, still in the same hallway, still in the same dream.
Without another moment of hesitation, he is out of the door and down the stairs, and he doesn’t check for a key again. Maybe he’ll call a dream-locksmith later.
The next thought Eijirou has, is when he is standing outside of the apartment building and realizes that he has no idea where to go from there. He wonders how his subconscious can come up with entire cities he’s never been to, entirely by itself. Maybe it has something to do with lucid dreaming. He makes a mental note to ask Mina about it later, before readjusting the straps of a backpack that isn’t his on shoulders that aren’t his, and setting off in a random direction.
He doesn’t even get to take two steps when a car honks directly next to him.
“Katsuki!”, a voice follows, just as piercing as the honk that preceded it. “What the hell are you doing?”
Maybe the useless phone isn’t as useless as he thought, Eijirou realizes when a girl leans out of the driver’s side window and he recognizes her as the one from the lockscreen and that, yes, she is looking directly at him.
And he hasn’t reacted yet.
“Dude, move!”, the girl calls again, gesturing to the passenger seat. “You’re lucky I’m also running late, otherwise Miss Kayama would have had your head.”
She seems stressed, and kind of annoyed and it’s pretty scary, so Eijirou decides that it would probably be best for his dream-health to just do as she says. The girl starts the car before he can even properly close the door.
It’s silent for a few seconds, until she throws him a glance. “Thanks, Ochako, she suddenly speaks up in a high pitched voice. “You saved my ass, Ochako, I owe you one. You’re such a great friend, Ochako.” Then her voice drops again. “Oh, no problem Katsuki, that’s what best friends do, you’re welcome.”
“Uh… thanks?,” Eijirou replies, several beats too late. His voice still sounds weird to him, and he guesses that it’s probably because it’s not his voice. It’s Katsuki’s. Whoever that is.
The girl, Ochako, he guesses, looks at him a little funny. “What’s up with you? Didn’t get much sleep?”
For a second, Eijirou considers telling her the truth, just to find out how his dream would deal with the fourth-wall-break, but he decides against it. He can’t quite say why either, it just seems like a ridiculous thing to explain.
“Yeah”, he nods. “Yeah I uh, I went to sleep really late.”
“Dumbass”, Ochako chides, but there’s a kind of fond smile on her face.
They pull into a parking lot then. “There we are, right on time. You can thank me by buying me a smoothie later.” Ochako throws him an exaggerated wink before she starts getting out of the car.
Eijirou follows her a bit slower, taking in the school and its surroundings. Nothing he’s ever seen before, of course not. Not even one face he passes as he follows Ochako towards the entrance seems familiar in the slightest, and it makes him feel queasy for some reason.
He shakes his head to snap himself out of it. It is freaky, yes, but nothing can actually happen to him. If anything did happen to him, it would probably just wake him up, and that isn’t a bad thing, really. He wills his anxiety back down and focusses back on what Ochako is chatting on about.
“...So at some point during first period I really need to copy Tsu’s homework”, she says with finality.
That reminds Eijirou once again about how he knows nothing. “Hey”, he speaks up as they approach the lockers. “What do I have first period?”
As soon as he says it, he regrets it. It’s a really stupid thing to say. Katsuki probably knows what he has first period.
Ochako stops in her tracks and turns around to narrow her eyes at him, but Eijirou can’t really take back the words now. And he really needs to find out where to go after this, anyways. So he just blinks back at her, until she drops the inquisitive glare with another eyeroll.
“You’re hilarious”, she huffs, not sounding amused in the slightest. Then with an exaggerated kind of sincerity, she continues: “Your first class is Health, in that classroom right over there. Every class after that is with me, your best friend! And this”, she makes a grand gesture, ”Is your locker! And over there is our parental unit approaching.” Another gesture directs Eijirou’s attention to a tall boy with dark hair hurrying along the hallway.
“His name is Ten-ya”, Ochako continues, taking the boy's face into her hands as soon as he is in a grabbing distance and pulling it down and closer towards Eijirou.
“What are you doing?”, Tenya asks. His voice comes out muffled since his cheeks are squished between Ochako’s hands, his glasses threaten to fall off.
“Katsuki didn’t sleep last night and now his brain is dead and he forgot every important thing about his life”, she explains, letting go of his face.
Eijirou knows that Ochako is being sarcastic, and entirely too dramatic for that matter, but he can’t help but feel thankful for it. It would have probably been awkward for “Katsuki” if he’d forgotten his best friends. He also can’t help but feel like Mina would love Ochako, and Denki would probably be scared of her.
The boy seemingly regains his bearings then, after Ochako stops manhandling him down to her height, and looks at Eijirou with an amused glint in his blue eyes.
“I’m an important thing about your life?”, he asks.
“No”, Ochako answers before Eijirou can react, but she’s smiling. “What you are is late to your Biology class, so hurry along now. See you at lunch!” And she shoves him in the direction of a corridor opening up to their left.
“And would you look at that!”, she exclaims then. “Here comes the love of your life!” She throws a suggestive look at him, but it freezes at the confusion that is probably evident on Eijirou’s face. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, you know I’m just teasing. Hey, Deku!” For the last part she turns away from Eijirou again, and towards a boy and — Oh.
“Hi”, the boy greets, and with his voice, Eijirou feels like he hears angels sing. He doesn’t think that a choir of angels is worth singing for a being so serene, so ethereal as the boy standing in front of him in this dingy school hallway, just as he thinks the backdrop of faded red lockers should probably be melting away faced with such beauty — A voice in his head tells him to cut out the gay shit. It sounds suspiciously like Mina.
“Hey!”, Eijirou gives back, his voice sounding kind of strained. “Wait, uh– What was your name?”
As soon as the boy’s (beautiful, perfect) face scrunches up in confusion, reality crashes back over Eijirou. Or something as close as he can get to reality, being in a hyper-realistic dream and all.
Katsuki probably knows who this boy is. He should have just listened to Ochako when she greeted him, he chides himself internally, as a bewildered smile makes its way onto the boy’s delicate features. Eijirou thinks that if he ever saw this boy genuinely laugh, he would probably die on the spot. He also thinks that he’d be okay with these beautiful sea-green eyes being the last thing he sees.
He can’t think more about it, because Ochako hits him on the back of the head. “You think you’re a comedian today, don’t-cha?”
Eijirou is saved from having to come up with an answer, when another boy, with impressively shiny blond hair butts in from their left: “Izuku, did you do the Econ homework? I was going to ask Tsu, but I reckon Ochako’s gonna copy hers…”
Izuku, Eijirou repeats mentally.
Ochako waves a hand in front of his face. “You coming? Class starts in about 2 seconds.” As if on cue, the bell rings and shakes Eijirou out of his daze.
Maybe he can get used to this dream after all.
“What the fuck”, Katsuki says, for the 24th time since he opened his eyes. Just as the first 23 times, it doesn’t help his situation in any way — he still doesn’t know where he is, he still doesn’t know what to do, there’s still a labrador sitting in front of him that he has never seen in his life. Katsuki doesn’t even like dogs.
Again, he tries to gather his thoughts and explain this with logic. He might be dreaming, but then again the dog jumped on him about 10 minutes ago and that hurt like a bitch, so probably not. He might just be forgetting some crucial details from the night before — maybe Ochako dared him to get drunk again and somehow, he ended up here.
Whatever it was, he is sure that Ochako has something to do with it.
“What the fuck”, he says again, but it’s beginning to lose the fire behind it. Maybe he should just get up, try to find out where he is, call Ochako, call his dad and apologise for not being home on a school night. Maybe —
Hurried steps sound outside of the door, and his thoughts are interrupted by it flying open with a loud bang.
“You’re awake!”, the girl in the doorway exclaims, and it kind of sounds like an accusation. Katsuki doesn’t know what she is accusing him of, or who she is for that matter, but he doesn’t get to ask more than that because she is talking again.
“I’ve been standing outside for ten whole minutes, waiting for you. I let myself in by the way, your lock is way too easy to pick you should really let someone check on that”, she rambles while walking over to the bed, patting the dog on the head on the way and promptly sitting down on Katsuki’s legs.
“Ow! What the fuck–” Katsuki starts, but the girl interrupts him.
“That’s right! What the fuck! Were you planning to leave me hanging out there the entire morning? I know we both don’t like Aizawa’s Tuesday classes but we still gotta visit them, you know?” She ruffles a hand through her wild pink curls, before she stills. “You’re going to class today right? Why are you still in bed? Are you alright? Are you sick? Are you contagious?”
After that, she actually pauses and looks at Katsuki with wide expectant eyes.
Katsuki doesn’t remember most of the questions he was just asked, so he replies with another question instead, one that seems very warranted to him right now.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The girl blinks at him for a few seconds. Then, without a word, still blinking, she slowly raises a hand to Katsuki’s forehead and rests it against it. Another few silent seconds pass in which the two of them just stare at each other, until she leans closer and says, much quieter than before: “You don’t have a fever but you seem dead serious so something has to be wrong with you.”
Katsuki just looks at her some more, still entirely unimpressed.
“Does it hurt anywhere?”, she asks, her hand leaving Katsuki’s forehead but only to roam the rest of his face, probably in search of anything that could be wrong.
“Well, my legs, for starters”, Katsuki grumbles, leaning away from the unwelcome touch. “Because you’re sitting on them.”
“Oh, right”, she nods, shifting so she’s no longer cutting off the blood circulation to Katsuki’s feet. “No but really, Eiji, what’s up? Do you wanna stay home? Do you want me to call your grandma in the shop? Do you need a cup of tea?”
“What did you just call me?”
“...Your name?”
“I don’t know what that was, but that was not my name.”
Slowly, he can see the girl get annoyed. Which is rich, considering she just broke into this house that she had referred to as Katsuki’s, had sat down on top of him, bombarded him with questions, called him a name that wasn’t his own — Really, Katsuki should be the one getting annoyed.
“Baby. We really don’t have time for this, you know how Aizawa gets. You know how Hanta gets, he’s probably already panicking!”, she huffs out.
“And who the hell is Hanta?”, Katsuki throws back, his voice rising a tad bit.
All he gets in reply is a handful of very judgemental blinks. “Okay”, the girl sighs, getting up from the bed, and Katsuki hopes that she’ll maybe just stop being confusing and leave, but she continues: “I don’t know what the hell you’re on, but next time: share. I’m gonna be in the kitchen, stealing one or seventeen of your grandma’s cookies and also making you lunch, and in the meantime you’re gonna get dressed. We’re running really late and on this particular day I don’t feel like making Hanta die from a heart attack. Sound like a plan?”
She doesn’t actually wait for a reply, just pats Katsuki’s head once in a very patronising manner. “Alright, see you in five.”
And then she saunters out of the room, the dog following her with quite frankly excessive amounts of tail-wagging. A few seconds later, Katsuki can hear cluttering from the kitchen.
“You better be getting out of bed!”
Katsuki suppresses the urge to yell back a creative combination of curses. He has no idea what’s going on still, but his nerves simply don’t allow for him to argue more. It’s decidedly too early for this much negative karma, Yuuga would say, and he needs a clear head and at least two cups of coffee to deal with this. The weird bitch currently making lunch for him doesn’t seem like she’ll be of help any time soon. Maybe whoever “Hanta” is will realize something is off. Someone here has to realize that they have never seen Katsuki before.
With a deep sigh, he finally stands up, roaming around the room for a few minutes to look for clothes to change into that aren’t superhero-themed pyjamas and horridly unfashionable. After a quick look at the clothes he finds around the room, he decides that he has to lower his standards. This is a very clear sign that something is very wrong. No way would any of these shirts actually be in Katsuki’s own possession, not even in a prank orchestrated by Ochako (she wouldn’t do him like this) or a dream (he still hasn’t fully ruled out the possibility) or some kind of alternate dimension.
He settles for the first shirt without an animal print he finds , a plain red one , and jeans. It’s boring, but definitely preferable to everything else. With a final hopeful look around the room to find literally anything — a clue to where he was, actually nice clothes — his eyes land on a beanie on the ground. The weird girl made it very clear that they’re in a hurry, so he probably won’t have any time to tame the bird’s nest that his hair is on a good day, so he picks it up.
As he steps into the hallway, his eyes zoom in on what looks like a bathroom, further down the hall. He passes the kitchen on the way there, an over-the-top “It lives!” from the weirdo going entirely ignored.
Katsuki steps into the bathroom, in front of the mirror, looks up and —
“What the actual fuck.”
“You okay?”, the girl steps into the open door. “You know, your outfit doesn’t look as terrible as usual. And you never curse this much, and... is that a beanie? Are yu not doing your hair? Eijirou, I’m actually kinda worried. Sure you don’t wanna stay home?”
Katsuki doesn’t react to any of her questions, as he stares at his reflection — No, not his reflection, but whoever’s it is. His hair is an obnoxious shade of red, much longer than Katsuki’s. His eyes are red, but that’s where the similarities end. Slowly, he brings up a single finger and traces a scar above his eye, and the boy in the reflection follows his movements.
This is really happening.
The girl is still looking at him, her dark eyes huge and imploring, eyebrows raised in question, and Katsuki’s first instinct is that he absolutely can not tell anyone about what’s going on, because it’s downright insane. He doesn’t want to deal with people thinking he’s got a screw loose, both because it would be annoying and because it’s not true. There must be a logical explanation for this, Katsuki just has to find it. And until then, he has to play along.
“Uhm”, he starts. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.” And after a short pause he adds: “Bro.”
Someone who has at least ten different shirts with the same superhero logo on them is someone who calls their friends ‘bro’, as a genderneutral term, right?
“...Alright”, the girl allows and Katsuki cheers internally. Fuck, yeah. “If you say so, but–”
She is cut off by the loud ringing of a phone. “Oh damn, that’s Hanta. I’m putting this on speaker and blaming you for everything, quick, think of an excuse. Hi, Hanta!”
“Mina, where are you?! I can’t wait here much longer, and Mr. Aizawa will literally publically execute us.”
“I’m at Eijirou’s house, he overslept and is possibly dying”, the girl, Mina apparently, Katsuki thinks with a bout of satisfaction at knowing at least that, replies cheerily.
“Did you say dying?” Hanta sounds alarmed, and before Mina can relay how Katsuki had nearly blown his cover, he cuts him off.
“I’m fine, don’t worry, dude! We’ll hurry!”
“But-” Hanta starts, when Mina quickly calls: “Yeah, we’ll hurry!” Before ending the call.
“Oh, he’s gonna give us an earful”, she laughs. “We really should be going now, though.”
And without another word, she pulls Katsuki along, out of this house that isn’t his and into a day in the life of whoever’s body he stole over night.
***
“Oh, you’re on time this morning, I see”, Ochako clicks her tongue as Katsuki drops into the passenger seat of her car the next morning.
“I’m always on time”, he gives back absentmindedly, checking his bag for a chapstick.
“Yesterday you weren’t. You were late and weird.”
As Ochako starts the car and gets them on the road, Katsuki halts in his movements to slowly look up at her.
When he woke up in his own bed this morning, feeling entirely normal like nothing had happened at all, he decided to just let the previous day fall under the rug. The entire day he had pretended to be someone else, had rolled with the punches, and done a pretty damn good job if he said so himself, but he hasn’t found even one logical explanation for it all. And maybe there isn’t one.
Maybe it was just a weird trick of his psyche. Maybe some switch in his brain malfunctioned and suddenly Ochako had become a 17-year-old theatre kid (Mina had practiced lines on him all throughout lunch) and Deku had become an slightly taller and lankier dweeb (Katsuki swears he saw Hanta editing his own SoundCloud profile while he was trying to tune out Mina) and Tenya had become a much less annoying because ten times as cool version of himself (Kyoka had distracted him for a considerable part of lunch by talking about a band she found online, but Katsuki hadn’t been able to feel thankful in the slightest).
And maybe Katsuki was too fed up with thinking about it this morning and just hadn't done it.
But now it seems like he can’t get around it. “What do you mean I was weird?”, he asks, apprehensive.
“Oh, don’t act like you forgot this too, it’s really getting old”, Ochako huffs. “You’re whole confused who am I and what is going on running gag was cute for like two seconds, you can drop it now.”
“Okay, sorry”, Katsuki makes sure that he does indeed not sound sorry, before he dives right back into brooding.
Apparently, letting yesterday fall under the rug isn’t an option, because apparently, it really happened. But what happened?
Did his brain make him see what he saw when it hadn’t actually been happening — Some weird kind of simulation? But how would something like that even work?
Did he really occupy another body, lived a day of a life belonging to a real person? And had that person been here in his stead? Faintly, he thinks that he remembers watching a movie about that. Surely, it wouldn’t happen in real life.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Yesterday didn’t feel like anything that would happen in real life.
“...Hey. Are you even listening to me?”, Ochako says, louder than whatever she was going on about before and ultimately snapping Katsuki out of his existential inner monologue.
“Of course”, he shoots back. It’s clearly a lie, so Ochako rolls her eyes, and repeats: “I was saying, whatever that was yesterday, if that’s your idea of making Deku notice your big fat crush on him, you better think of a new one. That was just weird, buddy.”
“I don’t have a crush on Deku”, is his first reaction. Ochako is already rolling her eyes once again, before he even starts saying it. They’ve had this conversation a lot of times, and yet she won’t stop bringing it up.
As an afterthought, Katsuki adds: “And what about what I did yesterday was weird?”
He makes sure to make it sound defensive, rather than a genuine question. Ochako’s confrontational attitude will assure him an answer, but she won’t understand that he doesn’t actually know what he did the day before.
As predicted, Ochako takes a deep resigned breath and starts to recount.
“Well, for starters, that whole star-struck look in your eyes whenever Deku was around. Literally, dude, we get it. He’s pretty. But you’ve seen him every day of your life since you were like three years old and that was just too much Also, you asked him for his name? Was that supposed to be some kind of pick-up line? Because it sucked, and you should never do it again.” She laughs then. “And then you actually called him Izuku! What was that about!?”
They pull into the student’s parking lot, but when they’re parked, Ochako doesn’t make any move to get out of the car, and Katsuki can’t help but feel thankful. A weird feeling has twisted up in his stomach at her words, at the realisation that his second theory seems to be true — someone had been in his body while he struggled to get by in theirs. It’s like a weird feeling of intrusion, mixed with all the questions and uncertainty he still has. It’s scary.
Ochako reaches out to lay a hand on his arm. “Listen Katsuki, I know it’s been a while since you started harbouring this crush, and I know you don’t wanna talk to me about it because you say it’s ’not true’, but I’m your best friend and I’m still gonna give you advice. Just talk to him. You know how he is, nothing bad is going to happen.” She pats his arm placatingly. “And whatever you were trying to do yesterday, don’t do it again. It really wasn’t subtle, and not in the good kind. Shouto picked up on it, and he has no clue about romance.”
“Shouto has a boyfriend”, Katsuki corrects her, but it comes out weaker than intended. He really hates when Ochako starts talking to him about this, all serious and with good intentions and like she knows what he’s feeling better than he does. He wishes she would just accept what he has told her time and time again, but right now he has bigger problems to deal with than his non-existent crush on Deku.
Right now, he has to find out what is happening with his life and how to stop it, because the prospect of a stranger inhabiting his body again, is even more terrifying than his best friend trying to be therapist and matchmaker at once.
That night, in a bout of insomnia and overthinking he gets out a sharpie and sprawls on his arm: Who the fuck are you, and what is happening?