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“Deku,” Katsuki growls from his desk, attention only half-on the game he’s getting slaughtered in. The rest of his focus is on the nerd beside him — the nerd that’s breaking his concentration. He’s not even in the fucking video they’re recording, can he not be quiet for thirty goddamn minutes?
Either he’s being ignored or the nerd didn’t hear him, and Katsuki growls again under his breath. The mic might or might not pick it up. Deku’s sitting next to him, attention entirely on the phone in his hands, and he’s muttering a mile a fucking minute like he always is. It’s annoying.
“DEKU,” Katsuki says louder this time, and takes his hand off the mouse to slam his palm on the closest thing to empty space on the fucker’s messy desk. This, the mic definitely picks up.
“Wah, Kacchan!!” Deku finally looks up at him, hands dropping into his lap with his phone. Across the room, Kaminari starts laughing at something, and Katsuki’s face hardens. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” Katsuki bitches, fully giving up on the game to roll away from the desk and put his foot on Deku’s own chair. He gives it a hard push, spinning the dork away from him. “Your gibberish mumbling is what’s wrong!”
There’s a sound behind him, of someone else rolling their chair away, and then Kirishima laughing under his breath. Playing it up for the phone camera he can sense being turned on him, Katsuki keeps going on reflex.
“Blah blah blah, all the fucking time,” he mocks, grinning as he gets up and advances. Deku has covered his head with his arms and is cowering, but he’s also giggling up a fucking storm. Katsuki snatches the phone off the desk where it’d been tossed in a panic, pitching it hard at the couch across the room. There’s a case on it — it won’t break. Probably.
“Kacchan, my phone,” Deku squeals, halfway to intelligible again, and Katsuki mimics him again. Kirishima is laughing behind him, and he raises his leg to kick the nerd’s chair into spinning again.
Except it must catch on something — this room is fucking trashed, all the time — and the chair tips from the force of it.
Deku hits the floor unceremoniously, screaming in alarm on the way down, and when the dust settles he’s covered in a pile of old video game cases from the bookshelf behind him.
He groans when he sits up, whining lowly, and Katsuki laughs as a few straggling games continue to fall, leaving him in a puddle of an ever-growing mess. Deku reaches up to touch the back of his head, like he has a boo-boo, and Katsuki laughs until Deku’s hand comes back into vision. His fingers are bloody.
Everything shifts, then. Yamada is out of his seat immediately and across the hall, shouting for a first aid kit. Why don’t they keep one in this office, again? Something crashes across the room, but Katsuki can’t look away from Deku’s bloody fingers to see what it is.
“Are you alright?” Kirishima asks from beside him, kneeling with a crunch in the carpet (right, that’s why there’s not a first aid kit in here, who knows what would happen to it, this place is a nightmare) and reaching for Deku.
The nerd is trying really hard to smile as if nothing’s wrong, but his face is wobbly. “Yeah, I— I’m fine,” he lies. Katsuki watches him do it.
“Dude, are you ok?” Kaminari shouts from across the bank of desks, knocking shit all over the place as they come around to the other side of the room. Yamada comes back trailing Yaoyorozu, then, the door coming open and the panic level rising again, like Katsuki’s blood pressure. He feels frozen, watching Kirishima get in there, helping Deku to his feet and out of the mess, across the room to the couch so Ponytail can doctor him up. He’s still stuck in ‘bully Deku’ mode, trying to shift back to his normal self except he’s jammed up, hardly able to breathe. Barely able to turn his head and watch the proceedings.
“I’m okay, really, guys,” Deku says, accepting an antiseptic swabbing but not much else. “Everybody knows head wounds bleed a lot. Momo said it’s not even a big cut! Just a little scratch,” he’s insisting, taking the gauze pad that is handed to him and applying it to the back of his own head. He always was scrappy, anyway, wasn’t he? Like a walking assortment of bruises and skinned palms.
Eventually, Yaoyorozu shuts the first aid kit with a final air. Deku is left on the couch to his own devices, still holding that gauze pad to his head, and Katsuki lets out something like a breath. Kirishima pats him once on the shoulder before heading back to his own desk — god knows what the mics picked up from that entire ordeal — and Kaminari goes back to where they’d trashed their and Yamada’s side of the office in their hurry to get involved.
No one speaks to Katsuki. No one says ‘hey, you were probably a little too rough.’ He’s an adult, anyway, no one has to tell him that. But he’s thinking it, and he feels sick. It’s the first time blood’s been drawn in this room — well, the first time someone has injured someone else and drawn blood. There’s too many weapons and too much broken glass littered around for there to be zero injuries.
But this is the first time someone has drawn blood on someone else, and it was him and Deku. Of course it was him and Deku.
Katsuki closes his eyes for what feels like half a second and, when he opens them, Deku has — left the room. The door is swinging shut, still, even, closing with a click. He sucks in a big breath, lets it out slow, and finally feels like something other than a statue of himself. The others are talking — Yaoyorozu is back, kit-free and talking about taking a break, talking about pushing the recording for the video to next week sometime. He doesn’t voice his opinion, though — not like he cares, recording is recording. Katsuki just drops to his knees and begins to clean up the mess. His mess.
Kirishima almost joins him, looming in the light briefly a few minutes after he’s started, after the chair is upright again and pushed under the desk out of the way. Katsuki has to ignore the styrofoam cups and half-empty water bottles, the mail packaging and the figurines, or he’ll go insane before he finishes. But when that shadow appears, casting darkness over where he was fitting games together in alphabetical order in his hands, he looks up to see who it is. And whatever Kirishima sees on his face has him putting his hands up in surrender, saying something — something something lunch, maybe, but there’s still a faint white noise in Katsuki’s brain that has him just shaking his head. If it’s a call to lunch he’s not hungry. And if it’s not, he doesn’t want to talk anyway.
The office is empty when he comes up for air. Maybe they really did go to lunch. He tosses the broken shelf into the trash can — Deku’s hard head had cracked it from the edge inwards, and that edge is probably what cut him. Under other circumstances, it’d be funny.
He’s thinking, briefly, about cleaning the office some more — there’s a buzzing in his hands and arms, in his brain between his ears, that begs for him to do something — when he hears a more literal buzzing. When he follows the sound — it keeps happening, endless or on repeat — he finds that it’s Deku’s fucking phone, wedged in the couch from where Katsuki had pitched it.
The screen lights up — Deku has about five million texts from Uraraka, but she’s also a quad-texter on a normal day. Rolling his eyes, Katsuki pockets the phone and finally leaves the room.
There’s no way Deku left the campus without his phone, so he must be kicking around somewhere. But finding him is going to be the real chore — Stage 5 is huge, and there are a thousand places he could be hiding from Katsuki.
And he would be hiding from Katsuki, wouldn’t he? After he genuinely hurt him?
God, he shouldn’t be this shaken up over a minor injury like this. Katsuki knows better. He walked in on Kirishima trying to bust his forehead through an IKEA end table once several months ago and they both came in the next day with bruised fucking foreheads to show for their efforts. Shouto chucked an uncalled moon ball once and it caught Yamada in the throat. So why is this so fucking bad?
Katsuki stomps all over Stage 5 looking for Deku. He’s not eating lunch with the others, he’s not in the props area, or with animation. In fact, it’s only when he’s coming back from the bungalow — hoping he’d maybe find the nerd tattling to Aizawa for the incident, if nothing else, even though maybe that’s uncharitable of him, because Deku has always taken knocks like a fish to water, fuck, whatever — it’s only as he’s going back to the main building that he finally finds Deku.
The nerd is sitting on the ground, outside, under what could be called a shade tree if someone were feeling very generous. Good trees are hard to come by around here, and it’s hot as dicks anyway outside.
He’s staring at the sky, big green eyes turned up at the pitiful clouds, and so when Katsuki’s steps hit the grass and he’s within speaking distance, Deku jumps like he’s been shocked. Or just surprised.
“Oh, Kacchan!” He blinks a couple of times — all that staring at the bright-ass sky can’t be good for his vision — and then smiles big and wide. Like nothing’s wrong. “What are you doing out here? Didn’t everybody go to lunch?”
It’s so easy to want to slip back into his on-camera persona. Like this, the real Deku is so genuine that it makes him want to tear things up, wants to blow things to pieces if he could. But, fuck. Katsuki is more than just the person he is for show, no matter what the community thinks of him.
He stops in front of Deku directly, blocking that bright fucking sun. Those big stupid green eyes blink at him again. Deku’s still smiling, but it’s less face-splitting, starting to fall.
“Kacchan?” he asks, folds his legs up in front of him. “What’s wrong?”
There’s not a good answer to that. Instead, he digs in his pocket and pulls out Deku’s phone, holding it out like — like a phone. Not like a peace offering or anything else.
“Thing kept fuckin’ goin’ off, was driving me crazy,” he complains, crossing his arms when his hands are free again. Deku’s holding his phone like it’s the holy grail or something, and that stupid bright smile is back when he looks back up at him.
“Kacchan really is the best,” he says, folding his hands together over it, just — sitting there. Like he’s comfortable.
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” he grumbles. The back of his neck prickles with heat, but he’s also standing directly in the sun. That’s all it is.
“Are you going to go meet the others now?” Deku asks, apropos of nothing, and Katsuki reflexively checks the time. Lunch is probably mostly picked over, and he doesn’t want to deal with the others outside of a content setting right now. He can already hear Kaminari’s voice in his head, questioning.
“Tch,” he huffs, looks away. “I’m not hungry.”
“Well... If you want to, you can sit with me, Kacchan! It’s nice outside today.”
It’s nice outside today? “It’s seven million fucking degrees, are you kidding me,” he bitches, but his neck is hot again and he gives the fuck up. The shade of the tree isn’t quite as pathetic from the trunk of it, and he bumps up against Deku’s shoulder in an attempt to stay out of the blazing sun.
For a long moment, they sit in silence. Frankly, Katsuki didn’t really think Deku had it in him. In his periphery, he sees the nerd frying his eyeballs again, staring at the clouds or grackles or some stupid shit. Katsuki’s eyes are on more reasonable sights: his shoes, the scrabbled grass, the cars driving by on the distant highway.
Then Deku sighs, and bumps his shoulder into Katsuki’s with something that might be intentional, and that silence is killed. Brutally.
“Kacchan is so nice to sit with me even though it’s hot,” he murmurs, but Katsuki is actually too accustomed to nerd-speak to miss it. He wishes he still had that excuse, but there’s a distant part of his brain laughing at him, telling him he’s lying to himself. Maybe he is.
“Thought you said it was ‘nice outside,’” Katsuki complains, but his heart isn’t in it. In the sun, adrenaline finally gone, he’s just this side of wrung-out. He’s self-aware enough to know that.
“You know what I mean,” Deku says, turning his phone over and over again in his hands. Katsuki’s eyes stick on that action. Looking other places doesn’t seem wise. Seem safe, maybe, more accurately.
“Look...” Katsuki starts, and he crosses his arms over his chest. He doesn’t know what, exactly, he wants to say. Does he apologize and open that can of worms? Does he brush the whole thing off and go inside?
“I think you were more upset about my scratch than I was, you know,” Deku says when Katsuki doesn’t continue, and Katsuki grits his teeth over whatever reflexive bullshit wants to fall out of his mouth. “It’s stopped bleeding, you know? Here, look.” Deku moves, turns his back to Katsuki. Puts his hand into his own hair and pulls it out of the way until Katsuki can see the clotted over, scabbing line of the injury. It really is something minor.
But he can’t ignore the dried-up blood in Deku’s roots, either.
“I hurt you,” he finally says. He doesn’t touch Deku’s head, even though his fingers are itching to. Why? He’s injured, it’s not something that will wipe away.
“It was an accident, Kacchan,” Deku insists, and when he turns back to face him he really goes all in, folded knees brushing Katsuki’s thigh. “It’s okay.”
“You nearly cracked that shelf in half,” Katsuki says, but it’s not the humorous statement it might have been under other circumstances. If things were different. “Should be counting yourself lucky that none of those fucking trophies or — where even is that fucking bowling ball, anyway, that thing would have crushed you —“
“Kacchan,” Deku interrupts, and now Katsuki doesn’t have a choice except to look at his face. His big stupid eyes and his sprinkled fucking freckles. He doesn’t look mad, and he doesn’t even really look upset. Katsuki is familiar enough with upset-Deku face. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I promise.”
Katsuki grunts and crosses his arms a little tighter, forces himself to stare out at the highway again. “Sure.”
“What’ll it take to convince you, Kacchan? I mean it, I’m really fine,” Deku insists. He’s starting to sound pouty, now, and Katsuki absolutely will not look at that. “Do you want to kiss it better?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely not, you idiot, do I look like I want your blood in my mouth?” The bastard is pouting, lip pushed out and everything, and he breaks into laughter when Katsuki glares at him. “Fuck you,” he bites.
“I’m only teasing, Kacchan!” Deku insists, covering his face with his hands. He’s still laughing, halfway to sprawling across the ground. Idiot.
“I’ll show you teasing—“ Katsuki threatens, but is cut off by a sharp alarm from Deku’s phone, still in his stupid lap.
“Oh! We’re going to be late for the next recording!”
“As if,” Katsuki huffs, and gets to his feet. Deku is silencing the alarm, tucking his phone away, taking his sweet fucking time, and Katsuki thrusts out a hand. “Come on, nerd, I’m not bein’ late because of you.”
Deku takes his open hand with a grin, lets Katsuki heave his dead weight to his feet. “Race?” he has the nerve to ask, to tease, and — it’s on, like nothing ever happened.
(They show up for the recording slot five minutes late and soaked in sweat, but Yamada just sighs and shakes his head at them. Katsuki keeps his hands and feet to himself for the rest of the day.)