Chapter Text
“Shit!”
The three constants of Todoroki Shouto’s life: nothing ever goes to plan, someone is always trying to kill you or your loved ones, and Bakugou Katsuki shouting curse words is a reassuring occurrence, because it means one of the people you trust most in the world is around to have your back.
“Duck!” Shouto calls, and Katsuki sticks his middle finger up at him.
“Fuck off, I was already gonna!” he shouts, before launching into a somersault, rolling beneath some swinging blades. Mid-roll, he sticks out one of his hands and aims a low blast at the legs of some half-scorpion creature; he uses the other hand to stabilise himself, springing up from a palm into a battle stance – hands open, eyes alight, grin absolutely feral.
“Over here, you ugly bastards!” Katsuki yells, attracting the attention of every creature in the vicinity. Then he sets off a blast for good measure.
It doesn’t matter how many times Shouto sees him like this, ready to stand his ground and do battle with anything that comes his way: every time, it hits him all over again. Not a big thing, not something too immense to swallow around, just a little -- twinge. A tiny spark in his chest, a little joy tugging at the edge of his lips. Admiration, or respect, or just that endless warmth that comes with familiarity so keen that your bones ache with it.
It never gets old. Shouto will never tire of seeing him like this.
He shoots a stream of ice at one of the scaly creatures climbing up behind Katsuki, and then a jet of fire at the one after that, and so on, and so forth, and it’s endless, it’s endless, Shouto just wants to get to Katsuki, to fight alongside him--
“Oi, Half ‘n’ Half, get out of here!” Katsuki orders.
Shouto can hear him, but he can’t see him anymore. Instead, all he can see is a horde of the creatures -- a writhing mass of bodies -- too-many weapons and too-many limbs and too-many powers that Shouto doesn’t know, Shouto can’t even begin to understand, because they’re nothing like quirks he knows of, nothing like metahumans --
These aren’t mutants, aren’t even anything like the most intense believers from the mutant uprising from when they were nineteen, the ones who shot themselves up with accelerant and became something else --
No, this is nothing that recognisable.
Shouto has never particularly believed in monsters, except for those that possessed human faces, human hands, human hearts.
But he doesn’t have any other word for what these creatures could be.
And now they’re all over Katsuki.
“Katsuki!” Shouto calls out, desperation breaking his voice in two places. He wishes Izuku were here, or Kirishima. Tenya -- Momo -- Kaminari -- anyone.
But it’s just the two of them, and Shouto’s never had the world’s greatest track record at reaching Bakugou Katsuki in time.
“I told you to get out of here!” comes the muffled, furious voice that Shouto misses so much.
“I’m not leaving you,” Shouto says stubbornly, flinging a whip of flame at one of the creatures that avoided his latest blast of ice.
But the world is shaking, too much to be just the rumbling of battle, and Katsuki’s laugh is a little sardonic as it rings through the air.
“I think that’s your cue,” he yells, and then --
Shouto is out of time.
+
“You’re gonna be bothering me until I’m ninety fuckin’ years old,” Bakugou grumbles, and Shouto smiles, shrugs, thinks if you’ll let me.
Bakugou nudges him in the shoulder – a companionable thing, full of warmth and easy familiarity, the kind of comfort each of them have only ever been able to find in the few of them that lived through the worst days of war together – like he knows what he’s thinking.
“Smile for the camera!” Kaminari calls, and then there’s a flash in their eyes.
“Oi—! Come back here, dickhead!” Bakugou yells, and suddenly he’s chasing Kaminari around the room, Izuku sighing good-naturedly and Jirou cackling into Sero’s shoulder as Kaminari pleads with them for assistance, and it’s -- comfortable.
Shouto wants it to last forever.
+
There’s frost on the window.
It’s probably him.
Natsuo’s not usually around at this time, and Fuyumi -- there’s no reason for her to lose control of her quirk like that. Shouto’s not even sure if she can. He’s never seen her use it properly. He thinks when their mother got locked away, she stopped using it. He’s never been sure if it’s because there was nobody to teach her – nobody who cared enough to teach her – or because she couldn’t stand the reminder.
He’ll ask, one day.
Or maybe not.
There are a lot of things he counted on doing one day that have slipped between his fingers, after all.
“Shouto,” and that’s his mother, oh, no, he’s woken his mother, he didn’t mean to do that, “Shouto.”
He looks at her.
She’s twisting her fingers together, but her gaze is steady. Calm, even. She’s weathered this storm before, he supposes.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
He doesn’t have an answer to that. She doesn’t look like she expects one.
“Plus Ultra,” she says softly, turning to face the frosted window. She presses her hand to it, like she knows something Shouto doesn’t. “Sometimes go beyond means where we can’t follow.”
Oh. Shouto swallows. Grief, he realises. That’s what she knows.
That’s the Todoroki family legacy: always too late to save someone.
+
It’s calm for once. The ground is -- not lush, but alive. There’s growth here.
Still, it feels the same. Shouto thinks that no matter how it looks – whether there are people -- things -- trying to kill them – it’s always the same place. He doesn’t know why this is where he ends up every time. He doesn’t want to see Bakugou like this.
But he also wants to see Bakugou so desperately that he’d take anything at all, so maybe that’s not true.
“It’s quiet this time,” Shouto muses. He can feel Bakugou standing near him. He’s close enough to touch. Still, he doesn’t. He never does.
Part of Shouto thinks he’s scared. If he touches Bakugou, and it doesn’t feel like Bakugou – if it feels like it’s missing something – that might shatter this whole ritual, and this is all he has left. He can’t risk it.
Bakugou sighs, and Shouto wishes he had a quirk made for keeping things.
“You’ve got to stop doing this, Icyhot.”
“Mm.”
Another sigh. Exasperated. “I’m serious. It’s not healthy. Promise me you won’t come back.”
Shouto looks at him, committing him to memory: eyes focused, lips twisted, brow knit.
Alive.
He nods. Bakugou smiles at him – that slow, rare thing that blooms across his face. Shouto’s chest aches.
“Again,” he says, and Bakugou isn’t there anymore, there’s just the bustle of machinery around him -- voices murmuring -- someone asking him a question -- but he keeps his eyes closed for a moment longer. Bakugou is gone, he’s awake, but he’s just -- not ready to let go yet.
“Again,” he repeats softly. It’s more a mantra to himself this time – a wish he doesn’t know how to realise. He’s never known how to give himself what he wants.
“Todoroki,” someone says cautiously. He doesn’t think he knows the voice, but he can’t bring himself to care about that. Later, surely, he’ll kick himself a little over it – he’s meant to know better now, to care more; being aloof and disregarding his surroundings was the behaviour of a pre-Izuku Shouto, not pro hero Shouto, not boy-who-survived-wars Shouto – but all he can think about right now is Bakugou.
It’s not a new state of being.
“Todoroki,” someone says, and this time, he does recognise the voice. He glances up on instinct.
A lot of voices he knows belong to people who are hard to look at right now, but Hatsume Mei doesn’t have broken glass in her eyes when she sets them on him.
There’s something in the way she’s eyeing him. It’s not how the others would look at him if they were here. It’s more… calculating, maybe. Like she’s sizing him up.
“The trial is over,” one of the others says quietly, and Shouto feels a sudden, blinding panic. He’d volunteered originally when Hatsume needed people because she said she thought he’d be good for it, and he’d been spinning on his wheels, with nothing else to hold onto. Izuku and Momo had even thought it a good idea back then, because at least then he’d finally sleep.
But now -- now that he knows he can see Bakugou again, if it’s like this, now that he knows what the dreams are like – it’s not just a favour to a kind-of-friend, bonded more by shared experience than shared sentiment. Now it’s something he can’t bear to give up.
Now it’s something that has Izuku and Momo uneasy – he can see it in their eyes, hear it in the edge of Izuku’s voice when he asks if Shouto’s been to the lab again, feel it in the way Momo hugs him a little too tight when she sees him for the first time in a while.
It’s not healthy, Bakugou had said, and Shouto doesn’t know if that’s what he’d actually have said, or just his own brain agreeing with the words he knows Momo and Izuku are biting back, feeding them to him the only way it thinks he’ll listen.
Still, Bakugou always said Shouto’s never listened to him. He doesn’t intend to start now.
But that depends on what Hatsume says next.
“Let’s take a walk,” she says, in what is probably the calmest tone he’s ever heard from her. That’s what three years of UA with Bakugou Katsuki, Hatsume Mei and Monoma Neito will do to you: make you so used to maniacal voices that you’re actively startled when you hear things pitched at a regular volume.
The others murmur, but she ignores them, just beckoning to Shouto.
He detaches the cuff from his arm, careful to avoid the vial of quirkdust as he places it on the bedside table, then follows her.
“They’re right that the trial is over,” Hatsume says without preamble. “We’ve technically met the criteria for what we wanted to examine with this.”
Shouto’s heart stalls. Then: “Technically?”
The grin she gives him is a little more familiar to him, reminiscent of the fifteen year old girl who conned Tenya into being her walking advertisement at their first sports festival.
“I mean,” she says, tone thoughtful even as her eyes are alight with -- Shouto doesn’t even know. He’d say mischief if it were Kaminari or Sero, but on her, it could be just scientific curiosity. “It’s not like we’ve exhausted all the possibilities yet.”
He’s sure she means it. There is scientific value here, at least for her, and she’s interested in pursuing it further, if she can. But it is also a very real kindness she’s offering him, something he’s desperate to hold onto. He doesn’t know how to thank her for that. He doesn’t know if words for it exist.
“Thank you,” Shouto says, quiet and full of feeling. It’s not enough to express what he wants, but he has to try. It’s not like that’s anything new, anyway. The only thing he’s ever felt good at is rage. It’s the crux of who he was at fifteen: if you take away the anger, what if he doesn’t know how to be anyone else?
Everyone always said that Bakugou was angry, but Shouto grew up in a house built to withstand the earthquake tremors of a father’s rage shaking the walls. Bakugou was loud -- explosive -- reactive, like a gun with the safety disengaged, ready to go off at the slightest touch, but.
Anger has a direction, Shouto thinks. Even if it permeates everything you do, presses itself into your every action, fills you up from head to toe. Even then, it’s coming from somewhere. Mostly it’s you.
Bakugou was always loud, and mad, and ready to snarl into Kaminari’s face at the drop of a hat, to push Izuku away every way he knew how, to grin fiercely once Shouto finally gave him the fight he wanted, to have his voice crack in two places – something white-hot and desperate wrecking it – that first time Shouto didn’t, but --
Shouto has never thought of him as angry, not in that way he knows intimately, like ice ripping through you, so cold it feels like it’s burning -- like fire swallowing you, so immense that you can’t feel anything at all -- like the fists of someone bigger than you, with impossible ambitions behind every hit --
No, Shouto has never seen that sort of rage in Bakugou Katsuki.
“That’s what inventing is about,” Hatsume says breezily, as if she hasn’t just given Shouto the only thing he could possibly want. (The only thing he can let himself want, because it’s the closest thing he can have to the impossible.) “Seeing what you can make, what you can do – what’s the point of all this if we can’t use it?”
+
It goes like this: Shimada Yumeji is afraid to sleep, because his dreams are too vivid -- too sharp, and a little too real. Hyper-realistic dreaming is the official diagnosis of his quirk, and the case gets passed from person to person until it lands on Hatsume Mei’s desk. It’s a QHD, she proclaims, some three months before Shouto’s world shifts on its axis for the nth time. Quirk Harnessing Device. From his position lying on the floor, Bakugou scoffs. Never gonna catch on as a name, he informs her, to which she sticks out her tongue and Uraraka kicks him in the thigh. You’ll see, Hatsume says, eyes gleaming as she ignores Bakugou arguing with Uraraka. I’ll make it work.
It goes like this: Bakugou Katsuki goes out in a blaze of glory, like everyone half-suspected he would, moving without flinching as a final sacrificial act, which those who knew him best had always feared would happen, in that terribly quiet part of themselves they never spoke of, tucked away between ribs fourth and fifth. The world keeps turning, except he is out of everyone’s reach, until Hatsume says she has a prototype system and Shouto inhales a shot of her manufactured quirkdust -- as a favour, and maybe just to feel something -- and finds Bakugou when he opens his eyes. Death and burning and Bakugou amidst it all.
It goes like this: Todoroki Shouto stops sleeping, and then he doesn’t, because a dream’s best attempt at a ghost of Bakugou is better than nothing at all.
+
“You promised,” Katsuki snarls, burning and furious and hopelessly, ferociously beautiful. He’s always devastating like this, and Shouto can’t tell if it’s because he misses him desperately, or if it’s always been this way, and Shouto’s just out of practice at swallowing around it.
He doubts Katsuki would be interested in these philosophical musings, however, considering the way he’s stalking over to Shouto, hands clenched into fists.
“I know,” Shouto says, because he doesn’t think an I’m sorry will go over well, not when they’d both be aware that he’s only sorry for lying, not for coming. He’s not even that sorry about lying, not if he gets to see Katsuki, brash and bold and absolutely apopleptic right now. It feels familiar. It feels almost like nothing has changed, getting to infuriate Katsuki and observe all the ways his face shifts, magnificently expressive as always.
Shouto has never considered himself particularly imaginative, but for his mind’s best attempt at Katsuki, he’s pretty impressed.
Or maybe it’s the quirk – as far as Shouto’s aware, for the quirk-haver, everything in the dreams is real. It’s not quite the same for Shouto or any of the others who use the machine, the dust derived from -- Shouto actually doesn’t know, and promptly decides he doesn’t want to -- because they’re just borrowing the echoes of his power, the overflow that he lets out monthly so he can sleep peacefully, but maybe it’s part of it.
Shouto has the fleeting wistful thought of wishing he could touch Katsuki, just in case, just to test the limits of the dream, but he banishes it quickly. He doesn’t know what would be worse: if Katsuki would feel real, or if he wouldn’t. One would shatter this ritual he holds onto desperately, this little solace he comes to find on the nights when he feels loneliest. The other might risk him forgetting how to wake up.
“Don’t ‘I know’ me, you fucking bastard,” Katsuki seethes. “Every fucking--fuck!”
Shouto just waits him out.
“This place, it’s not safe,” Katsuki says, grinding his teeth like he’s explaining the concept of personal space to a particularly affectionate puppy. Shouto would know; he was there. It was an eventful three days. Kaminari had made a cute pet. Jirou had cuddled him so much that Kaminari had complained about feeling bereft when he returned to normal and the habit had stopped. “Stop spacing out!”
“Sorry,” Shouto apologises, meaning it this time.
“Don’t apologise, just fuckin’ listen to me for once!” Katsuki retorts. There’s a desperate note to his voice, and Shouto feels ashamed for a moment. “Look, when I said it’s not healthy--”
“Momo and Izuku have expressed their concerns about my ‘delicate’ psyche,” Shouto interrupts, to which Katsuki shoots him a furious look.
“I am going to strangle you,” Katsuki says, and closes his eyes for a moment, like he’s praying for strength. Then they’re open again. Shouto does not miss the way they glance around furtively, checking for danger -- why, he wonders, does he always dream them in such an awful, inhabitable place, where someone or something is always trying to kill them? Why can he only see Katsuki when suffering is an inevitable side effect? -- before they settle back onto Shouto’s own. There is something serious in his gaze.
“It’s not just about your emotional health, Shouto,” he says, and Shouto’s heart catches fire, the way it always does on the rare occasions Katsuki calls him that. Just like Katsuki was always Bakugou before this -- back when he was real, when he was alive -- Shouto was never Shouto, only Icyhot or Half n Half or bastard or Todoroki or a thousand things other than his own given name.
He hadn’t known, at first, that he had wanted it so much that he would dream it into Katsuki’s mouth. But then Katsuki had said it, and everything in Shouto had felt like a livewire, or a match about to ignite.
“It’s dangerous--like, fucks-up-your-insides-dangerous,” Katsuki continues, and Shouto frowns.
“You’re fine,” he argues stubbornly, and Katsuki gives him a strange look.
“I’m endless,” he says. “It’s not the same thing.”
Shouto doesn’t think Katsuki was this cryptic before throwing himself into a warzone. He wonders, briefly, what particular element of his aforementioned ‘delicate’ psyche inspired this new development.
“I don’t want to go,” Shouto confesses, because if he can’t tell Katsuki, who can he tell? His tone turns stubborn. “I won’t leave you.”
It’s an impossible promise, and they both know it. Shouto has to leave eventually. Shouto will always have to leave.
“You’re impossible,” Katsuki mutters, but he sounds -- a little like Uraraka shaking her head at Izuku and Tenya. Hopeless and helpless and aggravated and fond all at once. “Can you just -- trust me on this one?” He looks at Shouto, eyes imploring.
“I’ve never had a problem with trusting you,” Shouto says, because it’s true. It’s the leaving he objects to. “But it’s like—”
He struggles for a moment. Katsuki lets him. That part’s not new. Nobody ever accused him of patience, but -- it’s like as much as it annoyed him to wait, he’d still wait anyway. Like when it really mattered, it was worth the annoyance.
Shouto misses it suddenly, with a fierce aching that threatens to swallow him whole.
“I’m never fast enough when it counts,” he says at last, “and leaving feels like -- I’m out of time all over again.”
For a second, Katsuki’s expression is inscrutable. Then: “The fuck are you talking about? I’ve seen you save tons of fucking people -- can’t even count the civilians, and all the idiots in our class at least twice each, and—” He pauses, then, a little quieter, he says, “Me.”
But that’s just it, Shouto wants to say, wants to cry out. I wasn’t fast enough, not that first time in the forest, and not the last time there was a you to save.
Shouto looks at Katsuki, soaks him in, and wishes desperately that they could have a conversation for once where he was allowed to pretend Katsuki was actually here.
“Yes,” Shouto says in the end, casting a long look over the barren wastelands around them, over the blood stains and dust. “Clearly, I saved you very effectively.”
Katsuki scowls at him. “Don’t be so self-pitying,” he orders, and Shouto only has a moment to feel offended before he barrels on, “if you didn’t catch me that time, or stick by my side during the uprising, or burn that motherfucker with the blade quirk before he could get me, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things I did after those times, and all those people would have been absolutely fucked.” He glares at Shouto. “You know that. I know you know that.” Katsuki kicks the ground, then looks back up at Shouto. “That’s the deal. We save who we can. Don’t fucking lose sight of the wins.”
“It just doesn’t feel like a win,” Shouto says softly, unbidden, “when you’re not there too.”
It’s honest, too honest, in a way that would normally make him feel like his temperature regulation is out of whack, even when saying it here, in a dream, but he’s tired. He’s so tired, and Katsuki is here and not here at the same time, and Shouto is sick of swallowing down truths because he doesn’t know how to put them into words that make sense out of his own head.
He’s still in his own head, after all. What’s the point?
Katsuki looks -- stricken. Like Shouto has undone something within him. It stirs at something in Shouto, some deep-seated desire to reassure, but then--
“Fuck,” Katsuki says, face draining of colour. “They’re back -- it must be-- fuck, fuck, fuck!”
It doesn’t make sense. Nothing he says ever does, not once it comes to the fight.
“You need to go,” Katsuki says, and Shouto just looks at him.
“No,” he says, and Katsuki swears, so loudly and creatively that Shouto thinks even Aizawa would bat an eye.
“I’m not fucking around, Icyhot,” Katsuki says, in that angry way he only uses when he’s scared.
“I know,” Shouto says. “I’m still not leaving you.” He wants it to be true. He wishes he could make it true.
“You’re a pain in my fucking ass,” Katsuki groans, and then the world explodes into noise around them, and Katsuki is quick to seize one of the creatures and throw them over his shoulder.
In another situation, Shouto would take a moment to admire the view; maybe fight down heat rushing to his cheeks.
In this situation, Katsuki is shoving him down to the ground, and Shouto is so shocked that he can’t even breathe. He can touch me, he thinks, and immediately feels like throwing up, because the aching is so terrible to bear.
“Get the fuck out, Icyhot!” Katsuki shouts. Shouto is still reeling, but his instincts kick in, and he sends ice out in a massive explosion around them, freezing all the ground – and everything to it – for a fifty metre radius. It only lasts a moment before the creatures recover, spitting acid and beating wings and a thousand other little destructions at it, but it’s enough for Katsuki to break free of the grip one of them has on his neck. Enough for Shouto to catch sight of Katsuki’s determined eyes.
“Don’t come back,” he says, sounding unfairly anguished about it. “I don’t want you to see what happens next.”
And then he sets off a blast at the ground beneath Shouto, leaving Shouto scrabbling desperately at the earth, trying to find purchase. In the same instant, a horde of the creatures swarm Katsuki, swallowing him up, and Shouto wakes with his heart thudding out of his chest and screams ringing in his ears. He thinks they were his own.
He puts a hand to his chest, and blinks back the prickling behind his eyes.
That was the worst one for a long while. His heart is still doing its best to rocket out of his ribcage, to jump straight into his fingers, to ask his too-slow hands to catch it.
He sighs, letting his gaze fall on his fingers.
Then he frowns.
Shouto lifts his fingers closer to his face, inspecting them carefully.
Dirt.
There’s dirt beneath his fingernails. Dirt that wasn’t there before.
He blinks, then remembers scrabbling agains thte ground, remembers the moments before Katsuki blasted him away, out of the dream, out of that moment of --
Shouto swallows, then refocuses on the sight before him.
Dirt.
Dirt.
Dirt.
+
“I didn’t know you got that developed,” Shouto says, and Jirou glances over to where he’s looking. She snorts.
“Yeah, Denki kept saying it would be worth a lot one day,” she says, rolling her eyes, but she slides the photo out of the album sleeve gently. Her expression is fond as she gazes down at it.
It’s him and Bakugou, connected at the shoulders. They’re halfway between looking at each other, and looking at the camera: Shouto’s expression is startled, with a hint of amusement at his lips, if you know how to look for it; Bakugou’s lips are still half-quirked, but his eyes are focused on the camera, his eyebrows knit in outrage.
Shouto remembers Kaminari taking this photo, remembers Bakugou chasing Kaminari around the room, remembers the way that moment had been so mundane that it had somehow swung all the way around to irreplaceable. Perhaps they’ve all been through enough together that shouldn’t have been lived through that the smallest moments of living became invaluable.
“It already is,” Shouto says.
Jirou looks at him sidelong, but doesn’t say anything, just nudges him affectionately. She turns back to the album.
Shouto looks at the photo a little longer.
+
Once, when they were seventeen and Shouto was sitting at the table in the common room, brow furrowed deeply as he reread his history of quirk physics notes, trying to make sense of them, Bakugou (he had always been Bakugou then, even in the deepest recesses of Shouto’s mind, Shouto’s heart; Shouto’s never been able to work out if it’s because he didn’t yet want him to be Katsuki, or if he was too afraid to let himself) had noticed. Had tapped on Shouto’s arm, looking tired himself, but gestured for Shouto’s notes once he had his attention.
(He almost always had Shouto’s attention, those days.)
“Look,” Bakugou had said. “It’s like -- scientific theories get accepted when there’s nothing else that can explain an observed phenomenon, all right? Back in first year, when you thought Deku could be All Might’s kid despite the glaring lack of physical resemblance—” here, Shouto had frowned, which Bakugou had ignored, “—it was because you saw the quirk similarities and obviously had no fucking reason to think that a quirk would be inherited beyond, y’know, genetics. So that was your theory, until it wasn’t.”
Shouto remembers that now, with dirt beneath his fingernails.
It’s a dream.
It’s a dream, because Katsuki is alive, and Shouto wakes up, and he’s not there.
It’s a dream, but now Shouto has dirt under his fingernails.
It’s a dream, until it isn’t.
Scientific theories get accepted when there’s no other theory that can explain an observed phenomenon.
You can’t bring anything back from a dream, because a dream isn’t real.
So if you bring something back--
When is a dream not a dream?
+
Shouto has a lot of worst memories.
The first time he realised how small he was, his little fists beating against his father’s chest. The day he got his scar, his mother’s ice burning at sensitive just-seared skin she was so desperately trying to soothe, and the day he realised she wasn’t coming back. In the forest, when he watched Dabi snatch Katsuki away, his fingers closing desperately over nothing. All For One at Kamino Ward, and how his mere presence had paralysed all of them. So much of war, of the ways his family was torn asunder, or stitched back together into something nobody knew how to react to -- Natsuo almost dying, his father falling through the sky, Touya coming back as something else, someone else, burning Shouto, burning everyone--
Katsuki taking the hit for Izuku, falling through the sky, and Shouto desperately reaching out.
He’d been fast enough that time. As terrible as that day had been – and it had been terrible, filled with death and devastation and too many close calls for a teenager’s tender heart – there’s always that tinge of relief there, at least for that moment.
There is no tinge of relief in the newer memories -- in the quiet, aching grief and haunted eyes following the war -- in the carnage of the mutant uprising -- in the days when they stopped pulling their punches, and even then, it still wasn’t enough -- in the days when they weren’t fast enough to save anybody, in Katsuki’s (Bakugou, he was Bakugou then, he was always Bakugou then, he was never Katsuki until--) bitter laugh, bitten out between clenched teeth and chapped lips as a representative from the Quirk Security Council (a rose by any other name, Hawks murmured once, and never stepped foot into that building, no matter what anyone demanded) asked him for a sitrep on a national calamity: Couldn’t do shit, but hey, we’re real fucking good at finding bodies after today. Super fucking heroic.
The worst memory, though – the one that plagues Shouto, the one he never thinks about, the one that he avoids so fiercely that it’s always with him, negative space as a permanent reminder of what he refuses to let be filled – is not even his own.
Back when they’d been desperate for an eleventh hour salvation, they’d all combed over Kirishima’s memories – another of Hatsume’s machines, this one not made to harness a quirk, but just to tap into neural pathways and reconstruct imaging from the brain – in the hopes of spotting something that could help. Anything that could give them half a chance.
Instead, Kaminari had thrown up in the corner of the room, and Izuku had gone that fractured kind of quiet Fuyumi was for half of Shouto’s life – a smile springing to his face when Eri had turned to him, but one that didn’t reach his eyes. His eyes had been so sad. Shouto hadn’t been able to bear looking at them. It had been so long since a face like that had been a permanent part of his landscape. Fuyumi’s had gone from that to something a little more like hope. He didn’t know how to breathe around Izuku’s going in reverse.
Eri was -- that was rougher.
Izuku was always her go-to, but he was like -- a broken window. Open, but all sharp edges right now, too easy to cut yourself by mistake. Kirishima had been there with her and Katsuki, which was maybe -- too much, Shouto thought. There was too much shared guilt, shared grief.
To this day, Shouto sometimes wonders if it should have been Uraraka who found her, or Momo. Toogata, maybe; though that might have been the same issue as Izuku, he thinks, without the sharp edges. Just -- even when Toogata didn’t have his power, he stayed to be Eri’s hero. Perhaps he would be the hardest to face with her fears.
Maybe it should have been Aizawa, or All Might; both loved Katsuki, and both understood sacrifice, and helplessness -- All Might, who lost his power to save him once; Aizawa, who had thrown himself in the line of fire for his students over and over.
But it was Shouto who went to the roof that day, because he had felt the relentless urge to scream, and had gone there to pretend like he might actually do it.
Instead, he had found Eri sitting on the edge where the roof met the night sky, her knees tucked beneath her chin. There had been a brief moment when he’d felt hopelessly unprepared to talk to her, with the unfathomable abyss growing bigger and bigger inside his chest, tugging at the skin, like he could implode with the overwhelming nothingness he felt, but then she had looked up, and he had swallowed. His fear had tasted like the first time fire licked at his skin, and the smell of gasoline, and the way the air crackled the first time he had set Katsuki’s quirk ablaze, and then he had stopped thinking at all.
(Grief, he would reflect later, tasted a lot like all that too. At least this time. Bakugou Katsuki is not the first person Shouto has ever lost, but he is the one Shouto misses the most.
It’s simple, in a way that aches terribly in his chest. Where everything about Katsuki in life had been complicated and infuriating and magnificent, especially when it came to Katsuki-and-Shouto, even if he had not been Katsuki then, only Bakugou, always Bakugou -- where everything about him in life had been complicated, his loss is uncomplicated. It hurts in a way that feels like a sucker punch, like his rib is cracking and he can’t even pay attention to that, because he’s so busy trying to catch his breath.
Waking up from the dreams has always been like being in the middle of a fight, the kind where you can tell you’re losing even as you’re pulling back your fist, carrying through even though it won’t make a difference in the end.
Bakugou Katsuki is gone. That’s all there is to it.)
(Until it isn’t.)
+
“Shouto-san,” Eri says, which always makes Ashido laugh for reasons he doesn’t quite understand but likes anyway, because he likes when his friends are happy.
Shouto doesn’t laugh, and part of him feels like he never will again. Eri bites her lip, and looks at her hands. “Can I tell you a secret?” Her fingers are twisting around themselves, and Shouto has a sudden, unbearable flash of memory to when she was about eight years old, and Bakugou had caught her fingers once when she was doing that. You’ll fuck up your fingers like that, he’d said, ignoring Tenya’s noise of distress from behind the couch. That’s how Deku ended up with those weird twisty scars.
Izuku had squawked. It is not! he had sputtered, but the damage was done, and Eri’s eyes had widened as she looked at Bakugou. It makes me feel better, she had said, sounding worried, and Bakugou’s eyes had – not quite impossibly, because Shouto had seen it before by that point, but it was still a rare thing, fleeting and breathtaking, the kind of thing that had made him ache before he could put words to why – softened. He’d rummaged around in his bag for about thirty seconds before getting abruptly frustrated and whipping out his phone. A minute later, Ashido was pitching a mess of string at them from the table she was sharing with Momo, and Bakugou had caught it with only a furrow of his brows as acknowledgement.
Try this, he’d said, and had arranged the string around Eri’s fingers carefully. It’s a cat’s cradle, he’d said, quirking his lips up at her bemused expression. You can do it with other people too, but if you’re by yourself-- He had shrugged. Look out for your fingers, rugrat. Or else you’ll look like that weirdo when you grow up. He’d jerked his thumb back at Izuku, who had sputtered again, but Eri had giggled a little, and Bakugou had looked pleased in that way he did sometimes, like the world was better than he was willing to let on.
Looking at Eri’s fingers now, Shouto has to blink. Once, twice, three times. Until he can’t see Bakugou’s fingers catching hers anymore.
“Yes,” he says, keenly aware that too much time has passed.
She doesn’t seem to have noticed, though, or maybe she just doesn’t hold it against him.
“I think I could have saved him,” she says, in the quietest tone he’s ever heard, from the quietest child he’s ever known.
Shouto exhales, low and long.
“A long time ago,” he says, “before you ever met him, or me, or Izuku -- a long time ago, someone took him.” He pauses for a moment, then quietly adds, “I wasn’t fast enough to save him, and I watched someone take him from right in front of me.” He swallows. “And before that, he was with me, and someone took him from right with me. I didn’t even notice.”
Eri isn’t looking at her hands anymore. Now her gaze is fixed on him, wide and sad and impossibly familiar.
“He knew what he was doing,” Shouto says, and he knows it’s true, even if it feels like trying to balance a knife in his throat to say the words out loud. “And he would do it again.”
“How do you know?” Eri asks, voice utterly miserable.
“Because,” Shouto says, with some detached part of himself marvelling at the way his voice doesn’t crack, “I’ve seen him do it before.”
+
“Hey, man,” Kirishima greets. “How are you doing?”
Eyeing the way Kirishima’s roots are coming back in, Shouto thinks he should probably be the one asking him that.
“Fine,” Shouto says, which isn’t true, but isn’t as much of a lie as it could be. He’s as fine as he can be in the circumstances, which are Katsuki being dead, but maybe also not-dead, and squaring with such an impossible thing. “You?”
“Can’t complain,” Kirishima says, which strikes Shouto as untrue, but he’s learned, in the years of having friends, that there are some untruths people tell to spare you, and some they tell to spare themselves. He can’t decide what this one is, so he leaves it alone.
“So what’s up?” Kirishima asks thirty minutes and three beers later. They have spent the time talking about everything but what they should – Kaminari shorting out the apartment Kirishima and Jirou share because he thought he saw a ghost but it was actually just Sero, Izuku’s upcoming People’s Choice Award and whether or not he’d let Tenya help him write his speech, Amajiki knocking out Tetsutetsu with a whale’s tail while capturing a villain and being very embarrassed about the whole situation – so Shouto supposes now is as good a time as any to get into it.
“It’s -- ” Shouto pauses. He had almost said Katsuki, but that’s not what he’s meant to be to Shouto, not what he’s meant to say. So he regroups. “Do you remember,” he says, quietly, steadily, already knowing what the answer will be, “that day?”
He says it without emphasis, but it’s immediate obvious in Kirishima’s eyes that he knows what Shouto means. It’s what everyone means when they say it. Collective grief is a bonding experience. They had already had to learn that lesson, so many years ago. It seems unfair that they’ve had so many refresher courses in it since.
“Of course,” Kirishima says, eyes haunted. Shouto feels a pang of regret. That hadn’t been his intention, but it’s hardly a surprising side effect. Kirishima was there, after all, him and Eri. However badly the rest of them took it when they played the memory through Hatsume’s machine, Shouto doesn’t think they could ever feel it burrow as deeply in their bones as those two. Kirishima especially.
“There’s no -- there’s no forgetting something like that, man,” Kirishima says, and he sounds like he’s trying to smile, but it’s strained, and that cracks at something inside Shouto’s ribs.
“I know,” he says quietly. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Kirishima says, and the worst thing is, Shouto thinks he means it. He’d forgive it of Shouto in a heartbeat, either because he knows Shouto never forgets either, or because he trusts Shouto is mentioning it for a reason. Maybe both. “Why are you asking me questions you already know the answer to, though?”
Shouto takes a deep breath. Moment of truth. He prepares himself for Kirishima’s disbelief, maybe even anger. Or -- he tries to prepare himself. Mostly he feels like a livewire of terrified adrenaline and hope he doesn’t know what to do with, barely caged in a paper-thin skin. It’s terrifying, and exhilarating, and maybe he’s going completely insane, but --
He’s wanted this so desperately for so long. He has to try. Who wouldn’t?
“I think he’s alive,” Shouto says, all at once, a little like pulling off a plaster.
Kirishima drops his drink.