Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

dying is the easy part; living is the trick.

- atticus

Time drips by like syrup from a bottle, sickly sweet and languid. He’s awake, but he isn’t, dimly aware of his own surrounding as if he’s hearing the echo of them through a thousand layers of fabric. When he was younger, Kariage told him that it took the average person seven minutes to fall asleep, but it took that same average person ten to fifteen minutes to wake back up. It's been years, but Katsuki still remembers that, remembers everything that Kariage told him, those useless little facts he spouted off that stuck with you for the rest of your life: sleep was a pit of quicksand, harder to get out of than it was to get in. Like jumping from a roof, like falling in love - it dragged you down, down, down, trying to make sure that you couldn’t escape no matter how hard you struggled.

Kariage, Katsuki thinks, but the thought of him doesn’t prompt sadness. It feels like a waste, to miss him, to miss anything. 

He can hear voices, now, faint and tinny in his ringing ears. His ears hurt, his head hurts, everything fucking hurts. Even now, he can get no peace.

Someone says, “Keep him down,” and he can’t tell if he’s dreaming or not. He doesn’t know what’s real and can only assume that everything around him is fake.

The air smells like ozone, smells like how it felt to have a hand around his throat, to feel his eyes sliding shut and his thoughts going blurry and he just wants it to fucking stop. “Tomura,” somebody else says, and he recognizes this voice, too. He can’t remember how. “This is hurting him. Look, his heart rate is -”

His fingers are tingling, his skin feels tight. He’s so dizzy that he feels like he may fall upward off of whatever it is that he’s laying on. It's like when he was a kid, just after he manifested his Quirk, when he passed out on the way home from school and didn’t wake up for two hours even after the nurses in the hospital stabbed him with needles and dripped sugar water into his veins. The doctor had said, patiently, nitroglycerin, and Katsuki’s mother had cut him off, had said, eyes flashing as they glanced over her son, poison. There was something bitter in those eyes, something dark and twisted that made him feel so, so small. Like a fucking snake.

There’s a sharp intake of breath, then nothing but silence for a long, long moment.

And then Shigaraki’s voice says, heavy and resigned, “Keep him down, Kurogiri.”

The tingling spreads up his arms and across his chest, and Bakugou Katsuki drifts away once more.

—

The moment that Shigaraki walks into the room, Dabi asks, “How is he?” and he thinks that they both know who he’s talking about. The bastard doesn’t even respond, just gives him an appraising glance before stalking into the shitty little bathroom connected to this shitty little room in this shitty little motel, and Dabi huffs a breath, shoving himself off of the bed and following after him. “Well?” he asks, refusing to let this go. “How is he, asshole?”

Shigaraki gives a noncommittal hum, not looking at him again as he squeezes toothpaste out onto his toothbrush. “He’s still sedated,” he finally responds, frowning at himself in the mirror before turning on the tap.

Dabi points out, “That could hurt him.”

“So could dragging him by the back of his neck, but we’re not talking about that, are we?” Shigaraki’s words are muffled around his toothbrush, but his meaning is clear: Dabi has no room to talk, not when he was as complicit in the kid’s capture as Shigaraki himself. “Besides, he’s dangerous, and we needed a way to transport him safely without him waking up and killing us or something. I didn’t have a choice.”

With that, he looks away, and Dabi’s blood boils. “No choice?” he asks, disbelieving. “No choice? There’s always a choice, you bastard! I helped you because I thought that he’d actually join us, but he made it clear in the first five minutes that he didn’t want to. There’s not a villanous bone in his body, so I don’t know why you’re insisting on dragging him around.”

“I think you should remember who’s in charge around here,” Shigaraki says, voice cold, and then doesn’t give Dabi a chance to respond before he barrels on, “And he’s useful, which is something you’d be able to figure out if you actually thought about shit before you said it. He’ll break eventually. Everything does.”

Useful, Shigaraki had said, as if the kid was nothing more than a tool, something unthinking and unfeeling, able to be used up and tossed to the side once it broke beyond repair. “He’s a fucking person, Shigaraki.”

For a long moment, there was nothing but the sound of Shigaraki brushing his teeth, spitting into the sink, then rinsing off his brush. After he puts it back into its cup on the counter, he repeats, “He’s useful,” like he’s trying to drive the point home.

Dabi says, “He’s a kid.”

Shigaraki sighs and shakes his head, brushing past Dabi on his way out of the bathroom. “Dabi,” he says, sounding like he’s a teacher talking to a particularly slow student, “he can’t be both.”  

—

Katsuki wakes up with a ragged gasp of air, muscles tensing painfully as he struggles to sit up but finds himself unable to, pinned down by the tightness of his chest and the thick straps keeping him tied to the bed. 

When he pries his bleary eyes open, he wants to ask, Where am I? He wants to ask, Why am I here? Most of all, he wants to ask, What are you doing to me?

All he manages is a choked wheeze.

There’d been a voice beside him, quiet and murmuring as if the person had been talking to themself, but it pauses at the sound, and then there’s a hand on his forehead like they’re checking his temperature. The touch is warm, and he’s so cold, and he leans into it as much as he can, eyes fluttering shut as sleep starts to reclaim him.

The hand doesn’t leave, but it's moving, now, carding fingers through his hair. “Hey,” the voice says, louder than before, and he recognizes it, he does, but he can’t remember from where. He can’t remember anything. “You’re going to be alright, okay? You’re going to be fine.”

Katsuki mumbles thoughtlessly in response, letting the voice drag him down into a deep, dreamless sleep.

—

The motel smells like dust and mold and clothes left in the washer for too long, and Tomura wrinkles his nose as he steps back into the lobby, having just gotten off the phone with Kurogiri. It's a seedy place, the kind where people didn’t ask questions as long as you had money, and he curses the fact that there were no elevators as he hauls himself up the stairs for what seems like the millionth time. There’s a junkie twitching on the second landing, and Tomura carefully side-steps him before continuing on his way.

The room he’s staying in is on the third floor, and the hallway doesn’t have any lights, making the entire place look like a freeze-frame from a horror movie. Tomura sighs as he smells what is very obviously weed seeping out from underneath the door next to his own. He’s never been able to understand how people actually liked that stuff, since the smell of it alone was enough to put him off, but, then again, maybe he’s just lived a sheltered life.

He pushes his key into the lock and twists it around, wiggling it until his door graciously decided to open for him. He walks in and shuts it behind him, then takes his shoes off, startling only slightly when he sees Dabi sitting on the foot of his bed, clearly waiting for him.

“Welcome home, asshole,” Dabi says.

Tomura rolls his eyes, glancing over the rest of the room as if it’d somehow managed to change since the last time he was in here. But, no - the place still stinks of mildew, the cheap curtains still flutter limply in the wind, and the small kitchenette in the corner still looks as pathetic as ever: a hot plate and a sink that had been full of drug paraphernalia when they’d come in the first time.

Tomura heads towards the bathroom, trying the door only to find that it's locked. He pauses, listening, and hears the faint sound of running water coming from the other side.

“Toga’s taking a shower,” Dabi offers. “Wouldn’t listen when I told her to take it in her own room.”

“That little shit,” Tomura responds, and Dabi laughs. Tomura glares at him, says, “Not funny.”

Dabi stops laughing and sighs instead, amusement dying in the face of the tiredness that leaks into his voice when he asks, “Do you even have a plan, Shigaraki?”

“Shut up,” Tomura snaps, which doesn’t answer the question in the slightest but he’s just a bit irritated by Dabi’s insistence on doubting his competency. He does have a plan. Actually, it's more like Kurogiri has a plan - and Tomura admittedly hadn’t been listening as much as he should’ve been as it was explained to him - but, still, it's a plan. He’s not just making this shit up as he goes. “Ask Kurogiri.”

“Ask Kurogiri,” Dabi mocks in what is probably supposed to be an imitation of Tomura’s voice. Like everything else about him, it's cheap. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, hot-shot, but we’ve been in this stinking hovel for, like, three days straight. That’s a great way to get caught. And are you still drugging that kid, because he looked like shit when I went in to check on him, and what the fuck do you think you’re doing? He looks like shit, you bastard. Are you even feeding him? I don’t -”
“Shut up,” Tomura repeats, voice so sharp that Dabi actually listens for once, closing his mouth and glaring at him with venomous eyes. “The kid is fucking fine, Dabi. If you don’t like what you see, then just stop looking. Do you think I want to hurt him? Of course I don’t. But we’re in too deep to back out now, I’m in too deep to back out now, so, please. Shut up.”

Dabi doesn’t say anything for a long moment, just stares at him, and then sighs again. “You haven’t been sleeping,” he observes, and Tomura decides to take it as the olive branch he hopes that it is, because he’s too tired to fight right now.

“I haven’t,” he confirms, his headache attacking him with a vengeance that makes him want to lay down and close his eyes and pretend that he doesn’t have any responsibilities, that he’s a little kid again and the worst thing that has ever happened to him is a scraped knee he got while trying to figure out how to ride a fucking bike.

Dabi watches him for a moment more, then stands up. “I’ll go get us some food,” he says, walking forward, then pauses with his hand on the doorknob. “Get some sleep.”

“I will,” Tomura says, and Dabi only shakes his head and leaves, like he knows that he’s lying.

—

When Katsuki wakes up, he’s tired. That’s nothing new, because he’s always tired, but what is new are the shivers wracking through his body so hard that it hurts, and there’s a migraine drilling itself into the back of his skull, and he doesn’t know where he is, other than that he’s in Hell and he’s trying his best to live through it.

He’s so cold. He’s so cold, but when he swallows he swears that he can feel the phantom grip of a hand around his throat, can smell the singed flesh and feel it burning. He’s burning, but it brings him no warmth, and he’s so fucking cold.

Time loses all meaning, but it's not as if it had that much to begin with. He opens his eyes, and he is a child again, and his biggest concern is what he was going to play after-school with his friends. He opens his eyes, and everything is dark, and everything is quiet, the only sound being the unsteady rasp of his own breathing and the thready beep-beep-beep of machines in the back of the truck.

When he tries to sit up, he finds that he can’t, and some distant part of him remembers that this what happened the last time he tried, too, which means that nothing has changed, but, somehow, it just manages to feel like an additional cruelty.

He opens his eyes, and there is someone standing over him, dark and looming like Death itself. It's a girl, and he knows that he’s seen her before. It's her eyes, he thinks. He knows those eyes.

She says something that he can’t quite hear and he responds by asking, “Am I dead?”

“No,” the girl says, and her teeth flash knife-sharp in a bright smile. “You’re not.”

Katsuki closes his eyes.

—

Shouta nearly falls out of bed in his rush to get to the bathroom, and he can’t help but feel like the only good thing that has happened to him in the month since everything went to shit is that he manages to get to the bathroom before he starts retching. He holds onto the toilet, bleary-eyed and sick to his stomach, and seriously regrets his decision to eat dinner.

In his dream, he’d been talking to Shigaraki over the dead body of his student. He had asked, voice thin with muted horror, What have you done?

You’re the one who allowed him to be chained up, Shigaraki had said, calm and even a bit defensive, as if he truly believed that his actions were justified, that he hadn’t done anything wrong. This is your fault.

The last time he saw him, Bakugou was loud and brash and sixteen years old, and now he will always be loud and brash and sixteen years old, never aging, frozen in time and in Shouta’s memory. He will have no more birthdays, will make no more friends, will never live his dreams out to their fullest potential. 

Because he’s dead. Because he’s dead, and it's Shouta’s fault.

He closes his eyes, thinks of the chains that invited a monster to steal a child, and wonders if he is a monster himself.

—

His mind is filled with voiceless faces and faceless voices, moving mouths telling him that he was dead, that he’s always been dead, that his body is just now catching up, and he notices how hungry he is. More coherent than he’s been in a while, he feels the bumps and jolts of a road beneath him and realizes that he’s being driven somewhere, and he’s so fucking hungry that he feels as if he’s been gutted, like he’s hollow inside. 

He’s never going home, is he?

No, he thinks, answering his own question, and curls in on himself as much as he can. I’m not.

Nobody is looking for him, not anymore. He wonders, briefly, if anybody even ever was.

—

Her voice tinny from the other side of the phone, Toga asks, “How do you make a stray dog loyal to you?”

This is in response to Tomura’s question, which was, How do you make somebody break? He pauses, trying to think of an answer, then says, “It depends.” He pauses, considering, then asks, “Who is a stray dog loyal to?”

Toga laughs, and Tomura can almost see her grin, giddy and bright and glinting. “A stray dog,” she says, “is loyal to anybody who feeds it.”

—

Alone and kept in the dark, Katsuki cries.

Chapter Text

if you killed me, would you make it good? would you make it holy?

He’s dizzy when he wakes up, an ache settled into his bones like a lead blanket draped over his body, pinning him down even without the restraints. 

“Good morning,” a voice says, and Katsuki doesn’t have the energy to open his eyes and check if it actually is morning, so he just decides to trust them on that. “You don’t have to suffer like this, Bakugou.”

A jolt of panic races through him as he realizes who it is that’s speaking to him. 

“All you have to do is say yes.”

And it's almost tempting to do that, to give in, but… no. He can’t do that. He’s not a villain. It takes all his strength to shake his head in a weak protest, but he does it regardless, because maybe if he refuses enough Shigaraki will give up on him and let him go back to sleep.

“Why don’t you just give in, Bakugou?”

No. He can’t.

Shigaraki continues talking, but at some point Katsuki starts to drift once more, caught in the haze of hunger and drugs pumping through his system. Shigaraki’s voice warps and distorts in his ears, twisting in on itself like elastic, and then suddenly he’s Aizawa-sensei, ordering, “Bakugou, say it.”

Katsuki mumbles, “No.”

“Bakugou.”

“Sensei,” Katsuki shoots back, but there’s no heat in his voice. He’s too tired for that. “Leave me alone.”

“Why don’t you just say it, Bakugou?” his teacher asks, and he sounds disappointed by Katsuki’s refusal, and… he almost sounds disgusted, and Katsuki’s entire chest aches. “Say it, and this will all end. I promise. Don’t you trust me?”

“I do,” Katsuki says, the words yanked out of his mouth without his permission, leaving him blank-minded and weak. “But I’m - I’m going to be a hero -”

“No,” Aizawa-sensei says, “you’re not.” And now he sounds like he’s smiling, cold and cruel. “Stop pretending that you’re good enough for that. You don’t deserve to be a hero.”

The words hit him like a blow, and Katsuki flinches under the onslaught of them, prying his eyes open but only managing to make out a smear of color through the blurriness of his vision. He starts, “Sensei -”

“This, though?” Aizawa-sensei continues, and how long has he been thinking like this? How long has he hated him? “This is what you deserve. You’re not a hero, Bakugou.” He laughs, then says, low and scathing, “Stupid little boy, you’re not even a person.”

Tears burn in Katsuki’s eyes and he hurriedly shuts them, breaths shallow as the words slice into his skin, leaving stinging wounds behind. He’s not going to fucking cry, not again.

But he wants to.

God, he wants to.

In his dreams, his friends hug him long and hard before stabbing him in the back, and he’s grateful that he’s alone again when he wakes up because this time he can’t stop the tears from pouring down his face.

Is he even really awake? Is he even really alive? He feels dead, a gaping chasm where his stomach used to be and pain thrumming through his veins in time to the beat of his heart.

I’m losing my mind, he thinks, and would laugh at the thought if he could find the energy to do so.

The air smells like ammonia and blood, chemically metallic, and his eyes snap open when somebody carefully tilts his head back as something drips down his neck. He takes a sharp breath when he sees Dabi standing above him, eyebrows furrowed in concentration, and the villain looks down at him, sounding almost surprised to see that he’s awake as he says, “Oh.”

“What,” Katsuki rasps, “are you doing?”

“Dying your hair,” Dabi says, as if the answer should’ve been obvious. When Katsuki makes a wordless sound of protest, he sighs, says, “Yeah, I know that it sucks, kid, but we’re in Tokyo now and I have to listen to Shigaraki if I want a place to sleep. I don’t like this, either.”

“Tokyo,” Katsuki echoes, feeling numb. He should file that information away, but what’s the point? Nobody is going to save him. Nobody cares enough to do that.

Dabi continues talking, and Katsuki closes his eyes once more, forcing himself back down into a restless sleep.

He is five years old, and Deku is holding out a hand to him, features cut out by the sunshine and the sky is so blue, so clear and untainted in Katsuki’s memories, that it makes his heart scream out inside of his chest. Deku asks, “Kaachan, are you okay?” but then Katsuki blinks and Deku had been replaced by Shigaraki.

Shigaraki is also holding out a hand, and he’s smiling like a predator, and Katsuki feels like prey, like he’s going to get his throat ripped out with sharp teeth if he doesn’t protect himself.

“Join me, Bakugou,” Shigaraki says.

Deku asks, Kaachan, are you okay?, and, no, he isn’t fucking okay.

“Join me,” Shigaraki says, still smiling like a wolf that’s spotted blood, and Katsuki wants to cry. “It's not as if you have any other choice.”

When he wakes up, it's to the feeling of somebody touching him. To the feeling of somebody holding him, actually, carrying him like he’s a child that’s fallen asleep on the couch. His head hurts so badly that it feels like it's splitting in half, and he’s in so much pain that it's like his bones are made of razors, sharp-edged and cutting him open from the inside-out.

“Go back to sleep,” says a voice, and he can feel the vibrations of it through the chest of the person that’s carrying him. “I need to check your temperature to be sure that I’m correct, but I think that you have a fever.”

“I’m fine,” Katsuki manages to say, the words barely even a whisper, but he’s cold and hot at the same time and the jolt of footsteps is making him feel sick to his stomach.

“Of course, this may just be a side-effect of not eating,” the voice muses, and Katsuki lets out a thin groan at the reminder, blinking open his eyes only to shut them a moment later at the dizzying effect of the world moving by. “I’ll have to do some research. I can’t quite recall ever being in a situation like this before. It's an entirely new experience.”

I don’t fucking care, Katsuki wants to say, but the words get caught in his throat and the only thing he manages is a strangled cough that sends pain wracking through his body.

“Please bear with me while I learn how to care for you in this condition,” the voice says, and it's not like Katsuki has any other choice, so he simply nods his head in weak agreement. “Thank you,” the person says. “Now -” there’s the ding! of an elevator “- please go back to sleep.”

And so he does.

Something warm and coppery floods over his tongue and it takes him longer than it should to realize that it's his blood, pouring into his mouth as his teeth sink deep into his own arm, and he’s so fucking hungry that he doesn’t even feel the pain as he bites down again and again and again -

He wakes up screaming.

Somebody is hovering over him, and they must be saying something, he can hear their voice but can’t make out any individual words. His head feels like it's been stuffed with cotton and his ears are ringing, tongue dry as he runs it across his cracking lips. He manages, “I -” and then falls silent, vision blurry and shimmering at the edges.

“Shh,” somebody soothes. “Just go back to sleep, Bakugou.”

“I’m hot,” Katsuki says, and the words scrape at his throat. He tastes blood and doesn’t know if it's real or fake but it makes him gag all the same, tears stinging his eyes as he slams them shut. “I’m hot.”

“Bakugou,” the person standing over him says. “You’re shivering.”

Oh.

Before he can think of anything to respond with, there’s the faint, unmistakable sound of a door opening. From far away, somebody asks, “What’s going on?”

Katsuki recognizes that voice, and it's like being dumped in ice water. “No,” he says, voice trembling with desperation. “No, no, no no no no -”

Again, closer, “What’s going on?” Then, “Kurogiri, what are you doing? Why the Hell did you bring him inside? Do you want him to be recognized?”

A hand closes around Katsuki’s wrist, and he reacts instinctively, trying to yank away and trying even harder when the grip just tightens in response, gloved fingers bruising on his arm. 

“Let me go,” Katsuki says, hating the plea that edges his voice but finding that he’s helpless to stop it. “Let me go, let me go, let me go -” He can’t breathe. “Let me go, stop, I - I - don’t touch me, don’t you dare fucking touch me -”

He can’t breathe.

“Tomura, you’re not helping,” says the person that Shigaraki called Kurogiri, and now Katsuki remembers him. “Please step aside.”

“Get him out of here,” Shigaraki hisses, and the adrenaline rush must’ve kicked the fever back into action because Katsuki’s heart is pounding so hard that he feels physically sick, and he keeps trying to yank his arm away but Shigaraki’s grip doesn’t so much as budge. 

“He’s ill, Tomura,” Kurogiri says, as patient as he was with Katsuki, if not moreso. “He needs treatment.”

“I don’t care,” Shigaraki snaps, voice harsh, and that’s the last thing that Katsuki hears before he passes the fuck out.

Kariage is smoking again, the lit cigarette throwing off more heat than it should, boiling the air and making Katsuki feel as if he’s standing in the hottest pits of Hell.

Katsuki says, “Put that shit out,” and Kariage just laughs and laughs and laughs.

He lights another cigarette, holding it out in a silent offering, and Katsuki can’t do anything but watch as his own hand reaches out to take it.

Voices murmur overhead. He can’t open his eyes, everything is too bright and close whenever he tries and so he just keeps them closed and tries to focus on the conversation happening above him.

Somebody says, “I don’t know where this fever came from, he wasn’t like this yesterday.”

A hand lands on his forehead and he’s too weak to flinch away, just manages a barely-there mumble of protest. A second voice says, “He’s getting worse. He’s burning up.” Then, “Shigaraki, he needs treatment. He could die.”

Would that be so bad? He’s already in Hell, it couldn’t get any hotter than this.

A third voice says, not as angry as the second voice but no less insistent, “I agree with Dabi, Tomura. We don’t have the necessary skills to treat this sort of thing on our own, and I know that you’re aware of that.”

“He could die,” the second voice repeats. “He could fucking die, is that what you want? Are you trying to get rid of him?”

The first voice snaps, “Shut up!” and sounds so pissed that the other two actually listen, falling silent. A huff, then, “We can’t take him to the hospital. He’ll be recognized, even if we check him in under a different name.”

Flatly, the second voice says, “You’re going to let him suffer through this,” and it's not a question. “Even if it means that he’ll die.”

“We don’t have any other choice,” the first voice responds, low as if they don’t want anybody else to overhear. “Look, if he manages to pull through, great. But, if he doesn’t…”

Katsuki tunes out the rest of the conversation, losing himself to the raging fever gnawing through his skin.

He is back home, finally, but he’s a child and his father is kneeling before him and he can hear Deku crying somewhere far away and knows that he has done something wrong. 

His father’s hands reach out, hold onto his shaking fists, gentle in the face of Katsuki’s raw, unfiltered anger. “You’re bigger than he is, Katsuki,” he says. “You’re stronger. You have to have more self-control.”

Katsuki tries to defend himself, starts, “But he -” and his father shushes him, not unkindly.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, but it does. It does. “You let yourself get upset, and you hurt him. You’re not supposed to hurt the people that you love, Katsuki.”

But Mom hurts me, Katsuki wants to say. And you’re hurting me right now, in a different way. Do you not love me? Does anybody love me?

But he bites his tongue, takes an unsteady breath and drops his eyes to the ground. “Fine,” he says, because he knows that that’s what his father wants to hear. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s my boy,” his father says, and ruffles his hair, and Katsuki’s heart festers red and raw and angry.

He is burning.

He dreams of death, of floating high above his body and watching the people scurry around below, and it's comforting in the worst of ways.

Katsuki wakes up with a thermometer in his mouth. It tastes like powdered plastic and something fake, and he makes a muffled sound of disgruntlement to express exactly how unhappy he is about this situation. When the thermometer beeps and gets taken out, he says, “I’m not sick.” Then, because nobody else could possibly be attempting to care for him against his will, “Dad, I’m not fucking sick.”

“... Pardon?”

At that, Katsuki cracks his eyes open with a groan, scanning them around until they land shakily on the person standing at his bedside, catching on the outline of a suit and his blood runs cold underneath his heated skin because that -

That hadn’t been his father’s voice.

In the span of a single second, his vision clears, and he heaves himself up in the bed, ignoring his rolling stomach as he whips his head around, looking at the walls of the hotel room, the stains on the ceiling, and there’s a torn poster on the wall, and - and Kurogiri is beside him, still holding the thermometer and somehow managing to look puzzled despite the distinct lack of facial features other than those glowing yellow eyes.

He tries to scramble off the bed but finds that he can’t, that his wrists are tethered to the frame by lengths of cord, but he only yanks even harder, probably rubbing his skin bloody but he can’t bring himself to care. 

“Stop that,” Kurogiri says, putting the thermometer down on the wobbly nightstand and reaching forward. “You’re hurting yourself.”

At the sight of those hands coming towards him, Katsuki opens his mouth and is screaming before he can stop himself, and he catches some words mixed in there - shit like please and don’t hurt me and don’t touch me, things that he doesn’t have the presence of mind to be embarassed about right now - but he’s mostly just making noise, yanking uselessly at his restraints even after Kurogiri takes the hint and backs away.

“Bakugou,” he says. “Please calm down.”

Katsuki shakes his head wildly, teary-eyed. “Let me go,” he pleads, and a sob rips out of him before he can help it. It's like a dam being broken, and then he’s sobbing in huge, relentless heaves, chest aching with the force of them. “P-please, let me go, please, please, I wanna go home, I -”

The door slams open and he jumps, shoving himself back against the headboard as Dabi rushes into the room. “I heard screaming,” he says. “What -” His eyes land on Katsuki, and his face flickers through several different expressions before settling on a cold, hard anger as he turns to look at Kurogiri. “What the fuck did you do to him?”

“I did nothing,” Kurogiri responds, apparently having recovered from his shock and now back to being cool and calm and collected. “He accidently called me his father, realized his mistake, and panicked. The fever is confusing him and making him irrational.”

Dabi looks at Katsuki and demands, “Is that true?” to which Katsuki only cries harder, unable to do anything else. Irritation darts across Dabi’s face, and then he looks back at Kurogiri and says, “He needs to go to the hospital.”

“I’m aware.”

Dabi gestures broadly at Katsuki and snaps, “Then take him!”

“With all due respect,” Kurogiri says, as polite as ever, “I do not take orders from you.”

Dabi visibly grits his teeth, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides as he stares at Kurogiri. After a long, long moment, he turns to Katsuki, muttering, “I’ll do it myself, then,” as he stalks towards the bed. “Fucking useless bastard.”

“Do not attempt to take the boy out of this room,” Kurogiri says, watching the proceedings with narrowed eyes. “I’ll be forced to stop you.”

“Oh, scary,” Dabi mocks, and then his eyes soften when he reaches for Katsuki’s wrist and he cringes back in response. “I’m not gonna hurt you, kid. I’m trying to help.”

Warningly, Kurogiri says, “Dabi.”

“Piss off,” Dabi responds, not even looking at him, instead watching Katsuki’s face like he’s gauging his expression. Slowly, he reaches forward again, and it takes a concentrated effort on Katsuki’s part to hold himself still as the villain’s fingers burn through the cord in less than a second. He holds his breath as Dabi does the same to his other wrist, then rubs at his newly-freed arms, smearing blood along his skin. “There we go,” Dabi says, soft, like he’s trying to calm a scared animal. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

Katsuki gives a short nod, because it is better, not being rendered completely helpless. He stares at Dabi for a long moment, processing, and then darts a panicked glance towards Kurogiri.

Dabi straightens up, following Katsuki’s gaze. “I’m going to take him to the hospital,” he says, voice leaving no room for argument, “and you’re not going to stop me.”

Kurogiri’s form flickers. “Dabi…”

“He’s sick,” Dabi points out. “He could die. Look at him, he’s delirious. And this is my only chance, because Shigaraki is on a call with Toga and Twice, so he’s busy, and - fuck, Kurogiri, you can’t look at him and say that you don’t want to help him. He doesn’t deserve any of this shit.”

Kurogiri seems to somehow take a deep breath, looking towards the door before returning his eyes to Dabi, and Katsuki can see the moment he gives up, gives in. “I cannot stop Tomura from coming after you once he finds out,” he warns, but steps out of the pathway to the door all the same. “Leave quickly. I will say that I was busy at the time and was unable to notice when you took the boy.”

Dabi closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them and says, “Thank you.” He holds his hand out to Katsuki, says, “C’mon, kid. Let’s get out of here.”

Katsuki swallows, looks between Dabi and Kurogiri, searching for some sign that this is a trick. Finding none, he blows out a shaky breath, reaches out, and takes Dabi’s hand.

“Okay.”

—

If any random civilian happens to witness Pro Hero Eraserhead lose his dinner into some random potted plant on a random rooftop in East Musutafu, well. Nobody’s perfect.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he mutters in-between heaves, tears leaking involuntarily down his face. “This is ridiculous.” This is ridiculous, and it's also a panic attack, but he knows how to handle those perfectly well, thank you very much. That’s practically his job description.

He is not handling this very well at all.

He throws up until there’s nothing left in his stomach, then sits down heavily, burying his face in his hands. “Pull yourself together, Eraserhead,” he tells himself, and pretends that he’s talking to a student, that maybe it's a rookie hero and they’ve got blood on their hands for the first time and are freaking the fuck out about it. “Breathe.”

Just a few seconds after he’s managed to get his breathing under control, his phone starts to ring. He curses as he fumbles it out of his pocket, fond annoyance rushing through him at the sight of Hizashi’s number lighting up the screen, and accepts the call. He says, “This better be important, Hizashi,” and prides himself on the fact that his voice doesn’t shake.

“Shouta!” Hizashi’s own voice is loud and sharp and Shouto flinches a bit at the sound of it. “I’ve been trying to call you and it kept sending me to voicemail, what the fuck, Shouta?”

Shouta winces, pulling his phone away from his ear to look over his call history, and, yeah, there are more than a fair amount of missed calls from his best friend. “Sorry about that,” he says, and the apology is genuine. “I put it on do not disturb for patrol and just turned it back on a couple of minutes ago, and -”

“You sound like shit,” Hizashi observes, and Shouta’s mouth snaps shut. “Is something wrong?” There’s a slight pause, no more than a second of silence, but a second is a very long time for someone like Yamada Hizashi. And then Hizashi is asking, frantic, “Are you okay? Do I need to pick you up? Where are you? Give me your location, are you hurt, what -”

“I’m fine,” Shouta assures him, and smiles a bit at his friend’s obvious concern. “Why’d you call me?”

There’s another pause, longer this time, and then Hizashi sighs. “There was a car accident,” he says, and Shouta raises an eyebrow because, okay, that explained literally nothing at all, “on the freeway between Tokyo and Musutafu. And…” He hesitates, like he’s unsure if he should continue, and then rushes out, “It was a hit-and-run, and there was only one car on the scene when the police got there. There was blood in the backseat and the door was broken and there was blood on the concerete, too, like someone had gotten dragged out, and the person who was driving was -” he takes a deep breath, as if bracing himself, then finishes with a single word, a name, “- Dabi.”

“Dabi,” Shouta echoes, feeling like he’s the one who has gotten hit by a car. Blood in the backseat, on the concrete, a broken door… he doesn’t want to get his hopes up, especially considering the blood, but… 

Carefully, he asks, “What are you trying to say, Hizashi?”

“Bakugou,” Hizashi responds, and it sounds like the name has been wrenched out of him, leaving an open wound in its place. “He might be alive, Shouta.”

Breathe, Shouta tells himself. Breathe.

“That’s not possible,” he says, and feels like a fucking asshole as he does it. “The amount of blood that was at the bar… nobody could’ve survived losing that much.”

“The blood in the backseat was fresh,” Hizashi says, holding onto this notion like a dog with its teeth clamped around something it shouldn’t have. “And it was his blood, Shouta.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Shouta says, insistent. “It's not logical, Hizashi. This has got to be some kind of trick. If he really was in the car when it crashed, where did he go? Who took him? Why?” Hizashi doesn’t answer, and guilt is heavy in Shouta’s chest, eating at him from the inside-out. “Look, was Dabi injured?”

“Yes,” Hizashi says, short and sharp, and, great. Now he’s upset, too. 

“How badly?”

There’s the sound of rustling paper, and then Hizashi sucks in a sharp breath. Shouta has the sneaking suspicion that his friend is looking over the accident report and crime scene photos even as they speak. “Pretty badly,” he says, sounding almost sickened. “He’s gonna have a limp for the rest of his life, that’s for sure.”

“Has he been questioned yet?” Shouta asks, looking out at Musutafu’s skyline, glancing up at its starless sky. 

What an ugly city, he thinks. I’d die for it.

“No, not yet,” Hizashi answers. “He was unconsiouss by the time the police got there, and didn’t wake up at all during the ambulance ride. He died in there, apparently, but they managed to bring him back, thank God. He got finished with surgery about a couple hours ago, but he’s in a medically-induced coma right now until he’s stable.”

“Right,” Shouta says, because of course the one person able to shed some light on this situation is drugged to Hell and back. “That’s great.” He sighs, scanning his eyes once more across the rooftops stretching out around him before saying, “Well, call me back if anything changes. I have to finish patrol.”

With that, he hangs up, shoving his phone back into his pocket. “Well, Eraserhead,” he tells himself, “don’t get your hopes up.”

That, as always, is the one thing that he can’t afford.

Chapter Text

we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.

- haruki murakami

“Tomura. Explain yourself.”

“No explanation, sir,” Tomura says, because that’s the only thing that one can say when they’ve fucked up irrevocably. He stares down at his lap, knowing that Sensei’s injuries are preventing him from glaring but still able to feel the disappointment radiating off his teacher, even through the protection of his computer screen. “But you have to understand -”

“You completely disregarded my orders to keep the boy in Musutafu,” Sensei says, cutting him off with a waspish snap in his voice that makes Tomura wince. “You forced the boy’s compliance using methods that could be detrimental to his health. And, worst of all, you allowed one of your subordinates to defect with the boy in tow. I don’t need to understand anything, Shigaraki Tomura, but I think that you do. When I tell you to do something, I damn well expect you to do it, is that clear?” Without waiting for an answer, his attention shifts to Kurogiri, anger so potent that it's tangible. “And you, Kurogiri, I hope that you have a good explanation as to what you were doing while this was happening.”

“Sir.” Tomura can’t remember a time that Kurogiri ever spoke to Sensei with anything but the utmost respect. “At the time of Dabi’s departure, I was handling other matters -”

“Such as what?”

God, Tomura thinks, flicking a glance toward Sensei. Would it kill him to let someone finish a sentence? Is he doing it just to be an ass? Knowing him, probably.

“- such as corresponding with our contacts in Musutafu regarding our alliance with Overhaul, as per your instructions,” Kurogiri finishes, as smooth as ever.

For a long moment, there is silence, and Tomura holds his breath.

Sensei says, “Do not fail again, Tomura.”

And the screen goes black.

—

Right as Shouta is about to knock, Tsukauchi has to go ahead and say, “They’re both in there,” and Shouta freezes, fist still raised, and turns to look at him.

“Well, I sure fucking hope so,” he says.

Tsukauchi narrows his eyes at him, and yeah, maybe Shouta should simmer it down a bit, but it's five in the morning and he’s honestly not in that great of a mood, so he glares right back, crossing his arms as he waits for Tsukauchi to speak. 

Tsukauchi says, now sounding slightly irritated, “They both took time off of work to attend this meeting, so make sure you tell them that you appreciate it -”

“Right.”

“- and assure them that we’re doing everything possible to bring their son home safely -”

“Yep.”

“- and -”

“Got it,” Shouta says.

Tsukauchi stops, now looking significantly more annoyed. “Eraserhead,” he says. “Quit being a jackass. If you act like this when you’re in there, things are probably going to go to shit. Bakugou got his temper from somewhere, right?”

“Mhm,” Shouta hums, and in his mind’s eye he sees Bakugou hauling Todoroki up by his collar, shaking him and demanding that he get the fuck up and do it right, Goddamnit!, but Todoroki was already passed out and couldn’t hear anything, much less the desperation in his opponent’s voice, and the crowd had been roaring, had been baying for blood, and Shouta had dimly heard Hizashi whisper, What the Hell is she doing?, and it was rare to hear Hizashi whisper and so Shouta had followed his gaze, and by the time he saw what was happening it was too late to stop it, and Bakugou was already sprawled out on the ground like a murder scene with Nemuri standing above him, and that had been at the Sports Festival, and that had been more than a month ago.

“We’re going to find him,” Tsukauchi says. “He’s out there somewhere, Shouta. We’re going to find him.”

“Of course,” Shouta responds, as agreeable as ever, and in his mind’s eye it starts to happen all over again, except this time Shouta stops Nemuri before she can knock Bakugou out, and none of this was happening at all.

From the start, it's apparently clear that Bakugou’s mother is the one who plans to be in control of this conversation - she sits on the couch, opposite of the chair that Shouta himself is sitting in, and asks, “Have you been doing well?”

No, Shouta wants to say, but what he actually says is, “Yes.” He subtly glances over at Tsukauchi, who is engaged in a quiet conversation with Bakugou’s father, then asks, “Have you?"

He doesn’t know what answer he’d been expecting, but it isn’t the answer he gets. “Of course,” Bakugou Mitsuki says, eyebrows raised in a way that says she thought that he should’ve already known that. “I’ve been doing very well, Aizawa-sensei. It's a bit quiet around here, but…” She gives a delicate shrug, a bright smile. “I’ve had more than enough time to get used to it, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose that’s true,” Shouta says, not really sure of what response he should give to something like that. Is Mitsuki holding herself together to save face, or does she genuinely not care about her son being missing - being presumed dead, actually - beyond the fact that the house was suddenly, painfully quiet?

Mitsuki clears her throat, breaking him out of his thoughts. “So,” she says, and gives him that damn smile again, “how is Izuku doing in his classes?”

And Shouta doesn’t know how to respond to that, either, and so he says, “What?”

“Izuku?” Mitsuki repeats. “Midoriya Izuku? Kinda short and nerdy-looking, greenish hair?”

“I - he -” Shouta stops, takes a deep breath and time to gather his thoughts, and then he speaks, “Midoriya is doing well. He’s been a bit withdrawn lately and if far less talkative than usual. He misses Bakugou.” Then, trying to steer the conversation back on track, “Speaking of Bakugou -”

“That brat,” Mitsuki says, and now she sounds tired. “Always getting himself in trouble.”

Shouta gives a noncommittal hum, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with her statement, then says, “We have reason to believe that he’s alive.”

“Well, of course he is,” Mitsuki says, not sounding surprised in the slightest, and Shouta’s eyes narrow. “He’s my kid. I’d know if he were dead.”

But, if Shouta is remembering things correctly, Mitsuki was one of the first people to call off the search. Masaru had tried to get her to change her mind, but Mitsuki had blocked any and all attempts, stating that it was stupid to waste so much money on looking for a dead body.

Mitsuki continues, “When we get him back, I hope he hasn’t been harmed. He used to be a model when he was younger, you know, and we’ll probably need to do a few photoshoots so that the public regains a positive image of him.” A pause, then, “Of course, this is the time that I’m supposed to ask you how you know that he’s alive.”

That’s Shouta’s cue to speak, but there are a million questions flooding his mind and he fears that they’ll all spill over if he opens his mouth, so he remains silent for several moments, wrangling himself back into order before he says, “A few days ago, there was a car accident, in which one of the villains that took your son was recovered. He’s been in a coma for the past couple of days, but then he had to be sedated again because of extreme distress caused by your son's absence, who he had apparently been attempting to bring back to Musutafu.”

“You’re trusting the word of somebody that kidnapped my son,” Mitsuki summarizes.

The moment she says that word - kidnapped - something aches in Shouta’s chest, because it's just a reminder of how badly he has failed as both a hero and a teacher. Fucking Christ, Bakugou got kidnapped on his watch. The full weight of it hits him like a ton of bricks, even harder than it had during that first press conference, in which he had to explain to the public that all search efforts were being called off. 

It's not my choice, he’d wanted to say then, as reporters screamed questions at him and cameras flashed all around. If it were my choice, we would keep looking, even if all we did find was a dead body. We would keep looking until we got some kind of answer.

But it wasn’t his choice. Nothing is, anymore.

When he doesn’t respond, Mitsuki continues, “What are the chances of him being found alive? Do you have anything to go off of other than the word of a villain? If he’s been alive this entire time, why didn’t we find him when we looked? This doesn’t make any sense, Aizawa-sensei.”

“You just said that you knew he wasn’t dead,” Shouta points out. “How did you know that?”

Mitsuki smiles at him, but it's thin and cold, like a brittle sheet of ice stretching out over a pond. Like she’s telling an inside joke, she says, “Call it a mother’s intuition,” and suddenly the atmosphere is unbearably suffocating, and Shouta can’t take it anymore.

He stands up and says, “Thank you for your time,” and Mitsuki doesn’t respond beyond that smile still on her face.

Shouta gets the fuck out of there while he still has the chance.

Back when Shouta’s hero career first started, he’d been called in to deal with a suspected suicide. It’d been reported by a friend, who, when the girl didn’t answer when they knocked, forced the apartment door open and came across the bathroom, where bloodied water was leaking out from underneath the door. Panicked, they’d called the police, who in turn called Shouta, and the girl was dead by the time he got there. She was young and pretty and almost looked like she was sleeping, but her wrists were slit open with deep, vertical lines, far past the point of being a cry for help. They were more like a scream of goodbye, and Shouta had felt like screaming, too.

The girl had been alone. She had lived alone and she had died alone, in a bathtub overflowing with her own blood, and everything had been red. There was red in the water and on the edge of the box cutter and spreading across the floor, and all of it was his fault. If he had just gotten there quicker -

But he hadn’t. He hadn’t, and now somebody was dead.

And now it's all happening again, the same situation in a different context, and he doesn’t know how the fuck he’s going to find Bakugou. If he’s going to find Bakugou. Maybe he wasn’t dead before, but what if he’s dead now? What if the League decided that he was far more trouble than he was worth and threw him out? Would they ever find the body? Would there even be a body?

Shouta takes a deep breath and reaches up, intent on rubbing the exhaustion out of his eyes.

His fingers come back wet.

—

“Tomura.”

He doesn’t answer.

A sigh, then more insistent, “Tomura.”

“What?” Tomura asks, voice muffled from where he’s laying down on the bed with his face buried in the pillow. He lifts his head slightly so that his voice is audible and snaps, “What do you want?”

Kurogiri sighs again, and Tomura wonders, not for the first time, how the man manages to put up with him. “Somebody is calling you, Tomura,” he says, as if that weren’t fucking obvious. 

“No shit, Sherlock,” Tomura responds, voice dry, but the sarcasm - like most things - is lost on Kurogiri. “Don’t answer it if it's Sensei.”

“It is not him,” Kurogiri says, and sounds like he’d be frowning if he could. “It's Toga.”

Tomura rolls over with a groan, staring up at the ceiling as he holds out an expectant hand. “Give it to me,” he says, and his phone is set down in his palm a moment later. He glares at the screen - which is, in fact, lit up with Toga’s name - and then reluctantly accepts the call.

“Shiggy!” Toga’s voice bursts out, and Tomura rolls his eye at the stupid nickname even as Toga starts to chatter in his ear, talking about everything from how nice it was to be back in Musutafu to the horrible weather they were getting over there, it was so cold, and was it as cold in Tokyo? 

When she pauses to take a breath, Tomura asks, “What do you want?”

“Ah, well…” There are voices murmuring in the background, the sound of a car driving down a road, the honk of a horn. “How are things going over there?”

Tomura replies, “Absolutely horribly.”

“Great!” Toga says, and Tomura scowls at her enthusiastic response. “I bet it's about Bakugou, isn’t it?” Without waiting for an answer, she continues, sounding giddy, “Because you’ll never guess who me and Twice found.”

And then she tells him.

Tomura straightens up on the bed so fast that he gets dizzy, finally having a reason to smile as he hangs up the phone, looking at Kurogiri, who is as unreadable as always. “Kurogiri?”

“Sir?”

“Find us another hotel.” His smile widens into a full-out grin, more relieved than anything, because he doesn’t have to get ripped into Sensei for a second time. “The kid’s coming back, and he’s never going to leave again.”

Chapter Text

even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

- edgar allan poe, “the masque of the red death”

“Один, два,” Katsuki whispers, almost against his will. Those words he was choking on earlier, he can remember that much, see it - a bed and a man and a raging fever, eating him from the inside-out, making it hard to breathe. 

Like now. 

Right now. 

It's hard to fucking breathe. And God, if he doesn’t want Auntie Inko right now, somebody, because he can feel the bumps in the road and the bone-cracking wrench of the brakes and fuck, he wants to go back to sleep. He’s not tired, but he wants to sleep, because anything would be better than this waiting, always, for more pain. More humiliation. More fear.

The car stops.

“One, two,” Katsuki tries. 

His heart is about to jackhammer out of his chest. 

His wrist hurts. He thinks that it's broken, or fractured, at least - something bigger than a sprain. Like that time when he was a kid, when his dad was drunk and his mom was drunker and Katsuki hadn’t done anything wrong, not really, he’d just stayed up a little past his bedtime because he wanted his project to be perfect, wanted to make his parents proud to have such a hard-working son. 

But that explanation had died on his lips in perfect harmony to the sickening crunch of his mother’s boot coming down on his arm. 

And he’d screamed, of course he’d screamed, no words, just mindless shrieks of agony that tugged his father into the living room who in turn tugged his wife off of Katsuki, and they’d been speaking, words and sentences and fragments like, Mitsuki, you’re drunk and he’s a brat and the neighbors will hear, and then his father was helping him up off the ground and he’d asked, Kit-Kat, are you okay?  

And Katsuki hadn’t answered. 

He’d just - bolted, had run as fast as he could and crammed himself beneath his bed, back up against the dusty wall, breathing hard and fast and waiting waiting waiting for someone to drag him out, for more pain -

Footsteps approaching, the sound of shoes on gravel. Katsuki’s heart is running fast enough to get a speeding ticket. “One, two,” he says, again, even though it didn’t work the first or the second or the hundredth time, he needs something to hold onto, because in a second light will stream in and he will know nothing but the pain that his life has been for the past three fucking months. “One, two, easy. Three, four - fuck.” He can hear voices now, and he knows that he should be listening. He should be gathering information. He should stop waiting for someone to come and save him, but fuck.

All of his life, summed up in that one simple word. 

Fuck.

There’s the sound of metal on metal, and Katsuki braces himself. 

And slowly, so slowly, the trunk door swings open.

Shigaraki Tomura smiles down at him, eyes alight with a manic kind of energy, his teeth glinting like fangs. And he says -

Of all fucking things, he says -

“Welcome home.”

Anger flares up in his chest, like alcohol, like adrenaline, hot and addicting and disorienting and dangerous, and God, he wishes -

He should wait until the anger dies down. He should bite his tongue. He should swaddle it in calm, bury it, and put a gravestone up. He should pretend that it's dead. He’s a liability like this, when he doesn’t even have control of his own fucking emotions - if this was a couple months ago, his hands would be smoking like a fucking housefire. But this isn’t a couple months ago.

And he’s fucking pissed.

Kasuki forces himself to sit up, hissing in pain as he puts pressure on the arm with the broken wrist. He sits cross-legged on the bed, glares at Shigaraki, who just tilts his head, that smile gone, his eyes half-lidded in a bored kind of way, like he’s a kid sick at home and Katsuki’s the only show that’s on TV right now, a show that you don’t want to watch but you do anyway because there’s nothing else to do, and -

Fuck it.

Fuck him.

The sneer comes automatically, as instinctive as a flinch. “Home? This dump? Please.” He doesn’t know where he is, but he does know that the fucking Leauge of Villains doesn’t have enough money for damn lotion, much less a decent hotel. “My friend has a classier place than this, which is saying a lot, because he has to wear a fuckin’ bulletproof vest when he takes a walk around the old barrio. This is not my fucking home, you are not my fucking friend, and I am not a fucking villain!”

He ends the last part in a shout, voice ringing clear, but Shigaraki’s expression doesn’t change in the slightest. He just sighs, like this is a waste of time. Like Katsuki’s a waste of time. He says, “Your wrist. Does it hurt?”

“No,” Katsuki snaps. Which is a lie. A big fat lie. It fucking hurts, has been hurting ever since the - what? Car accident? He holds his arm closer to his chest. “It’s just - no. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Bakugou.” He hates it when people say his name like that, like they actually care, like they actually give a shit about what’s going on in his head. “Bakugou.”

“Fuck off,” Katsuki grits out. 

Shigaraki opens his mouth, like he’s about to say something, but his jaw clicks shut as the door opens and someone walks into the room, pauses, and looks around, like he’s just arrived at a party but he doesn’t know who’s birthday it is. His eyes find Katsuki, slide over his body, and settle on his face with a reptile’s flat regard.

“Bakugou Katsuki,” he says. “A pleasure to meet you.”

His voice is flat as the surface of a frozen lake, and Katsuki shudders - not because of the ice, but because of his eyes, those fucking eyes -

They’re burning gold.

When he speaks, Shigaraki’s voice is carefully neutral. “Overhaul, how did you get in here? I locked the door.”

“Have you forgotten my Quirk already, Shigaraki?” Beneath the black cloth mask he’s wearing, Katsuki can see the fabric mold and shift in the shape of a smile. A sneer. “I can get into any room I want. Now,” he looks at Katsuki, the full weight of his gaze settling on him once again, as heavy as a yoke on his shoulders and as strangling as the hangman’s noose. “Your wrist. Is it broken?”

“What if it is? I don’t see how you can help.” 

The man - Overhaul - steps forward. “Shigaraki.” His voice is smooth and languid, honey dripping from a spoon, dripping down and down and down and down and down. Katsuki is drowning. He can’t move. 

Overhaul continues, “You might want to step out for this part. It can get… bloody.”

And, as Shigaraki leaves, as Overhaul keeps approaching, as Katsuki stays there, frozen, as he watches -

The gloves come off.

There are about seventy-five trillion cells in the human body. That’s a rough estimate, as most things tend to be, but, still. Katsuki likes to keep track of these kinds of things, likes to count: toothpicks and needles and buttons, seconds and minutes and days. It helps to calm him down. Brings him comfort, the definite facts of life - numbers make sense, biology is quantifiable, and two fingers on your throat can measure the beat of your heart. Usually, that is. Right now, his own is running way too fast to count.

There are about seventy-five trillion cells in the human body, and, right now, it feels like every single one of them is being torn apart.

That’s not to say that Katsuki’s a stranger to pain. Pain’s an old friend. It's always been there. Waiting. Watching.

Always.

If you asked Katsuki what his first memory was, he’d give you a stock answer, one of many: the day he got his Quirk, the day he lost his first tooth, the day he met Kariage or Deku or Yasu - he’d give you an answer, but it’d be the wrong one. It’d be a lie. Because his first memory? His first real memory?

His first real memory is of Auntie Inko. 

Protecting him. He’s two, maybe three, chubby-limbed and wide-eyed, and is trying to explain to her that his stuffed bunny’s name is Bunny, but not bunny in Japanese, bunny in Russian.  

“Bunny,” he said, in Japanese, his voice thick with dissatisfaction. He tried to clarify, “Bunny. In Mommy.”

“In Mommy?” Auntie Inko asked, tilting her head. Deku was taking a nap in Katsuki’s bed, so it was just the two of them, with Katsuki’s mother sitting on the couch and working on something. 

“In Mommy,” Katsuki repeated, then groaned. He threw the bunny down in Auntie Inko’s lap and scrambled towards the stairs, called out over his shoulder for her to, “Stay!” as he clambered up the steps, clumsy in that light-hearted, innocent way that only toddlers can be, and went into his room, tip-toeing, so that he didn’t wake up Deku. He looked funny when he was asleep. He was quiet, for once. 

Katsuki rummaged around in his room for a little bit, searching, and finally found his book where it's supposed to be - on the bookshelf - which was, naturally, the last place that he checked. 

He tip-toed out of his room. “Sleep tight, ’Zuku,” he said as he softly closed the door. “Sweet dreams.” And then he bounded back down the stairs, quiet voice abandoned as he yelled out, “Auntie Inko! Look -”

He tripped over his mother’s charger with a sharp yelp of surprise and watched in horror as the laptop clattered to the floor. His mother was on her feet in an instant.

“You little shit!” She grabbed her computer, eyes going wide at the damage, the cracks spider-webbed across the now-dark screen, the shattered glass, and Katsuki backpedaled away as she made her way towards him. “Are you fucking kidding me, Katsuki?” He flinched instinctively when she grabbed his shoulders and then shook him so hard that his head snapped back and forth, back and forth, like a balloon on a stick. “That thing cost more than your fucking inheritance, you’re lucky I don’t -”

And then a hand planted on her chest and shoved her back, and Auntie Inko smoothly stepped between the two of them, cradling Katsuki to her side, eyes narrowed at her best friend since elementary school. 

“The fuck -” Katuski’s mother sputtered, looking so confused that it took all of Katsuki’s willpower to not run to her. She looked hurt, almost. Katsuki’s shoulders ached. 

Auntie Inko held him impossibly closer. “Katsuki’s three, but he’s still at risk for Shaken Baby Syndrome,” she said in a dull, flat tone. “Symptoms include brain bruising, swelling, bleeding, damage. Death. You do that again, and I’m calling the police.”

It sounded like a threat.

Katsuki’s mother shook her head, shell-shocked. “He - he fucking broke my laptop!”

“I repeat,” and Auntie Inko sounded pissed, now, “if you do that again, I am calling the police.”

A sob burst from Katsuki’s mouth before he could stop it - if Auntie Inko called the police, then they’d take his mom away, put handcuffs on her, and his dad was in Paris, and he’d have no one to stay with, and he’d be all alone in this big, empty house that no one lives in, not really, and he doesn’t want to be alone. He buried his face in the leg of Auntie Inko’s jeans, his breaths hitching, frantic. “’M sorry,” he whispered, stealing a peek at his mother. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

Biting her lip, his mother staggered back, then shook her head and spun around. She stomped up the stairs without another word. There was the crash of a door slamming shut, and Katsuki and Auntie Inko were left in the living room, standing alone.

In one shaking hand, Auntie Inko was still holding Bunny. Katsuki sniffled, wiped at his cheeks roughly, and pointed at it, then at his book. The book. A kid’s book, with a toxic-orange cover, printed boldly with the words, Russian Words for Animals: A Childrens’ Guide. His mom gave it to him when he was little.

Breathing a bit unsteadily, Katsuki said, “Кролик. Name is Krolik.”

That is his first memory. Three years old and making a mess of things, his then-best-friend’s mother stepping in to save him from a punishment - it stuck with him, somehow, for some reason. The unexpectedness of it. Her flat voice. The handprints on his shoulders for a week afterwards, his mother’s soulless eyes flaring down on him like an act of God, like a solar eclipse, blocking out everything but the promise of pain and the words that he could read off of her lips even that young, that small, his sobs the sobs a child makes when he’s trying not to be found, to be hurt -

He screams.

Walking home from school, tired after training, Kirishima’s footsteps a steady beat beside him. Painted in the light of the dying sun, Kirishima asks, “Do you think anyone would miss me? If I disappeared?”

Thing is, Katsuki doesn’t even have to think about it. “Yes.” He says it without hesitation, snapshots of his life flashing through his mind - the way Ashido smiled at Kirishima, the easy banter between him and Kaminari. “The way your friends look at you - our friends -” Here, he fumbles. He’s never been the best with words. His hands clench and unclench at his sides, desperately grasping for some kind of explanation, something that will make sense -

“They love you,” he says simply.

Kirishima smiles. “Thanks,” he says. “You’re a good friend, Bakugou.”

“I am?” Soft as an exhale, as a dying breath.

“Yeah. You are.” His smile turns sad, turns bitter, like the fractured glass of a shattered mirror, a piece of art torn to shreds. “But you have to wake up now.”

“I -”

“You have to wake up.”

“But -”

“Wake. Up!” The words are shouted right by his ear, in a voice that is distinctly not Kirishima’s, and Katsuki bolts upright with a muffled shriek. He presses his back against the wall, staring wide-eyed at the girl standing at his bedside, a girl with blond hair and sharp teeth and cruel, glinting eyes, and -

“Toga.”

Her name falls like a stone.

She smiles at him, like she hasn’t just fucking screamed him into the land of the living. “Good morning! Or - afternoon, actually.”

Katsuki looks around the room, trying to steady his breathing, pretending that there isn’t a literal fucking murderer a few feet away from him, looking at him with that hungry smile, like she wants to eat him, really, truly, eat him - “How long,” he starts, and then clears his throat. His voice is raspy. “How long was I asleep?”

“About an hour, give or take - you were screaming for a long time. You were so loud. Did it really hurt that much? What did it feel like?” She hurls the questions at him like machine-gun fire, like Deku on steroids. “Do you even remember what happened?”

Red. Black. Gold. Pain and pain and pain.

Katsuki’s fingers twitch. “Bits and pieces,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “Fill me in.”

“Well, Shigaraki wanted a demonstration of Overhaul’s Quirk, and you had a broken wrist.” She smiles. “Serendipity.”

Right. So that’s why Shigaraki was asking all those questions.

Fuck him, Katsuki thinks bitterly. And fuck this. This entire situation. Being dragged around and for what? He’s made it pretty damn obvious that he’s not interested. Do they want him hurt? They’ve already done that. Do they want him dead? He wishes that they would hurry the fuck up. 

“Toga.” When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “You’re wasting time. Both mine and yours. You do know that, right?”

In response, Toga smiles.

His wrist still hurts.

Shigaraki brings him food. Shitty food, probably came straight from a gas station, cheap stuff that he wouldn’t be caught dead eating if he weren’t so fucking hungry. When Shigaraki hands it to him, Katsuki raises his eyebrow. “What, not gonna starve me anymore?”

“Oh, trust me. You need to eat.”

Somehow, that isn’t reassuring in the slightest.

Ashido. She smiles at him when she catches him looking, a sly little curve of her lips that asks, Can I help you? as she pulls her boots on in preparation for yet another training exercise. Team-based, of course. Katsuki’s not good at working in teams and, when he says that, Ashido sidles up next to him like it's the most natural thing in the world. It feels like it. Natural, that is.

“I can show you a thing or two about teamwork,” she says into his ear, voice thick with innuendo, and Katsuki can’t help but smile. She’s always like this, flirty, bold, but she’s also just about the sweetest person he has ever met. 

He plays along, presses his fingers to her waist. “Oh?” he says, like he’s genuinely curious, and from the way Ashido smirks he can tell that he’s being a little too heavy on the truthful act. “Can you, now? You think you can handle me?”

“Hmph. One hand tied behind my back.”

So close, now, so close. He can feel her breaths on his cheek. “You’re not the one who should be taking the handicap,” he says, voice as close to a purr as he can get it, then has to stifle a snort of amusement because he sounds ridiculous, even to his own ears. Ashido takes one look at his face, at the way he’s trying not to laugh, and like the little shit she is, she starts to laugh, long and hard and so contagious that Katsuki can’t help but throw in the towel and join her. She leans against him, her face buried in his shoulder, her entire body shaking because she’s laughing so hard.

When she stops, it takes him a moment to realize that she’s not laughing anymore.

She’s crying.

She’s shaking still, yes, but that’s because she’s sobbing, and she has her arms wrapped around him so tight that he can hardly breathe, her fingers in his hair and clawing in between his shoulder blades like she’s afraid to let go, and she is, she is, and she says -

“P’ease.” Voice slurry with tears and snot. “I miss you. We all miss you, please - come home.”

I’m trying, Katsuki wants to say, but the words never make it past his lips.

He wakes up with tear tracks down his face.

When Katsuki was five, he won first place in his age group in karate. He remembers it, the trophy in his hands, bouncing on his toes in beat to the loud pop music still blaring over the speakers - he’d roundhouse kicked the other kid right off the mat! He couldn’t wait to see his dad smile at him.

He’d perked up when he’d caught a glimpse of Auntie Inko in the crowd. She was probably coming to pick up Deku, who did karate just like Katsuki but was no good at it at all, because he was such a crybaby. He didn’t even get third place. And Katsuki got first. He hesitated for just a moment before skidding over the floor to Auntie Inko, grinning up at her and showing off his trophy. “Look, Auntie!” And then he looked around. “Where’s my dad?”

Auntie Inko smiled down at him, but there was something off about it - it was too shaky, too weak. “Katsuki, dear,” she said, and Katsuki stiffened. Nothing good ever came from a sentence that started like that. “Your father, um, he couldn’t make it.”

Time stilled. There had been a hollow pit in his stomach, sucking up every bit of hope and happiness and light, and the trophy in his hands didn’t really look all that shiny anymore. Even though it was gold. Even though he’d been the best.

Auntie Inko crouched in front of him, her hands resting on his shaking shoulders. “Look, he really wanted to come, really! But then someone called from work and -” She cut herself off before she could say the truth, that Katsuki’s parents cared more about their jobs than their only son. “But I was watching the whole time, sweetie.” Her voice is gentle. He hates it. He hates it. “You were great! Why don’t you, me, and Izuku go and get some ice cream to celebrate?”

Deku.

Katsuki lifted his head and looked around with blurry eyes, eyes that narrowed when they landed on the green-haired menace himself. Fucking Deku. He didn’t even have to try to make his mom love him, she just did, and why? Deku was useless. Didn’t even have a Quirk. When Katsuki spoke, it was in a snarl. “No.”  

He tore away from Auntie Inko, threw the trophy down, and stomped away. And, even now, he can remember that day. The disappointment. That black, bottomless pit of grief, leeching everything warm from his bones and curling his hands into fists. The anger. God, the fucking anger. Bloody knuckles and bloody teeth and bloody noses, brown-blue eyes and busted lips, the metal taste of victory - real victory. The kind that didn’t have a trophy. Blood. Blood.

Why is he thinking about blood?

A sudden flash of memory: he’s a kid, gangly limbs and cigarette smoke and Kariage, and Yasu is laughing at him because he doesn’t like scary movies, and Katsuki is trying to explain that he doesn’t have a problem with the movies themselves, that he just hates seeing all the blood and gore -

Someone brushes their fingers almost tenderly through his hair. Despite himself, he leans into the touch. His hair dyed black, you can’t even see the blood on their hand staining it darker and darker and darker. 

“What are you thinking about, Bakugou?” He knows that voice. His eyes fly open. Toga. “Who said you could leave?”

And then her hand tightens in his hair and she yanks, and then all he knows is the gag in his mouth and the knife in his arm and the gaping, hollow spaces where his fingers used to be.

Overhaul’s hands and the gloves and the pain and the -

“Do you think we’ve made the right choice?”

He talks to Kaminari on the rooftop of Yuuei, wind whipping around them. Both pairs of shoes, off. On the ledge. Kaminari looks smaller like this, knees bunched up to his chest, looks more like a human being. It's easy to forget what you are, when you’re training to be a hero.

Katsuki takes a long, deep breath. “What are you talking about?”

“Our Quirks.” Kaminari flexes his fingers. Sparks fly. “They’re so - violent. Do you think that, maybe, we weren’t meant to be heroes at all?”

Katsuki shrugs, a little bit helpless. “I don’t know,” he says, then says it again. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it, hadn’t thought about it -” He can barely hear himself, his voice is so soft. “Until I met you.”

Kaminari smiles at him, bright and wide and fucking electric. “Eh, doesn’t matter anyway.” And then he shrugs, like that’ll solve everything, like that’ll solve anything. “Come back soon, man. I need a training buddy.”

The next time Katsuki sees Toga, he can’t help himself. He starts to cry, loud and high and hysterical, jagged sobs even though there aren’t even scars where she chopped his fingers off, where she sliced him open, there aren’t scars and maybe he imagined it, maybe he’s going crazy, but he can’t stop fucking crying. Even if it wasn’t real, it had hurt. It hurt so much. The thought of her being near him, ever again, makes him want to die. 

She freezes in the doorway, eyebrows raised, like she doesn’t know why he’s reacting this way. Like she doesn’t know that she’s the reason. The - the jagged edges, the bone - she takes a step forward, into the blood-stained room they said was his, filthy hotel room, unclean, filthy - blood, everywhere, his mouth his teeth his hands he’s losing his fucking mind -

“Bakugou?”

Through his tears, half-choked screams, “Fuck off.” His hands ache. His entire body aches. The pain is so pervasive that it feels like he’s never been without it. “You did this to me, you - you chopped off my fucking fingers, like carrots -” He gags. That’s a mental image he could’ve done without. “You’re insane, Toga. Stay away from me.”

Toga sighs, shakes her head. “I was just following orders, y’know.” She crosses the room in a few strides and slams something down on the nightstand by the bed, a bowl he hadn’t noticed that she’d been holding. “Here. Dinner.”

And then she leaves.

Katsuki counts to five, then wipes his face on the sleeve of the sweatshirt someone had put on him when he was asleep. He inches towards the bowl. Rice. And it doesn’t look like it's drugged or anything - how the fuck can one drug rice? - but -

Hands shaking, Katsuki curls up in the far left corner of the mattress, the only place not crusted with blood, his blood. 

And he doesn’t eat.

“Katsuki,” Sero says, and his voice is very, very calm. He kneels down beside him, his eyes burning bright, inhumanly so, but Katsuki can’t look away. “Katsuki, you can end this, you know.”

He’s in so much pain that he can barely think, much less talk. “Not a villain,” he manages, and blood trickles down his chin. “Not -”

Sero laughs, loud and long, and it's not a nice laugh. It's cold. Cruel. “Oh, you’re a killer, Katsuki,” he says, and his voice is practically a croon. “You just haven’t killed anybody yet, that’s all.”

Auntie Inko. Think of Auntie Inko.

But he can’t.

Lost in the pain, Katsuki can’t even remember her face.

Jirou. Rockstar Jirou. Sarcastic, pain-in-the-ass Jirou.

Dead, dead, dead. Body on the floor. In front of him. Melting, sinking, dissolving into the concrete and what has he done? Blood on his hands. Blood on the knife. Blood everywhere. He needs to -

“Jirou?” He can’t even recognize his own fucking voice, isn’t that pathetic? “J-Jirou? Hey, I didn’t… didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” He reaches forward, brushes her hair from her face. “Didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry.”

Blood and blood and pain and pain and pain, there’s always pain, always, punishment and sin and retribution, cleansing fire, it burns -

By the time Toga gets to his fingers again, Katsuki’s voice is too hoarse to even scream.

Chapter Text

the universe, she is a bitch.

- norman maclean

The man with short hair ducks into Dabi’s line of vision. “Hey, Dabi. Remember me?”

He stares blankly.

The doctor, hovering at his bedside, says, “Some memory loss is common, Detective Tsukauchi.” Then, to Dabi, “Take your time. Relax.”

“Can you tell me,” Detective Tsukauchi asks, “what you were doing with Bakugou in the back seat of your car?”

“Is he okay?”

“No, Dabi, he isn’t. By the time we arrived at the scene, there was nothing but fresh blood back there, and we only know that he’s alive because you said so yourself last time you woke up. By now, he could be hurt -”

“What?” Dabi tries to sit up, jerking against the restraints on his wrists.

“Dying.”

“No -”

“Dead.”

Dabi shakes his head so hard that his neck hurts, yanking his arms, pulling at the leather belts, the sheet covering him kicking up. 

“Stay calm, Dabi,” the doctor says. “I told you, Detective, it's too soon.”

His body starts to spasm and the men blur as they try to hold him down. The doctor yells, “Nurse!” and then, to the detective, “You have to go, sir.” His voice spiraling away, bright and then distorted and then -

He is sixteen years old. He is sixteen years old and camping out in the woods, his small space of cleared dirt that he half-drags, half-carries the woman to, this woman old enough to be a grandmother, this woman who was slumped against the wall of an alleyway in the dead of winter, barely breathing, whose joints creaked as she took his hand and stood up, lured by the promise of, it's nothing much, but I have a fire.

Between the time it takes for him the get firewood and go back to his makeshift campsite, the old lady is dead. She’s slumped down on the ground, lips blue with cold, and it's horrible but Dabi’s first thought is, what am I gonna do with the body?

His second thought is, fuck.

The sticks he’d gathered tumble from his arms, and it's only then that he realizes that he’s been saying the same word, no, over and over and over in a monotonous drone like a helpless neurotic high on Thorazine. No, no, no, no.  

Sixteen years old, and this is his first dead body. 

He crouches next to the old woman, hands shaking in a way that has nothing to do with the biting cold. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t even know what your name is, but I’m really sorry. But I don’t know how I could have helped you, anyways, you’re too old to travel and I have to keep moving, y’know - I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking kid, you were -”

- fucked from the start is how he’d meant to finish, but the words dry up in his throat as he hears the snap of a branch behind him. Footsteps. Part of him wants to run towards them, wants to explain what happened, but the other part of him is telling him to get as far away as he can. What if they think that he killed her? He’s a lot of things, but he’s no murderer.

Another snap. 

Voices, coming close.

Dabi runs. 

He runs and runs and runs and doesn’t look back, runs past memories of helping Fuyumi with her math homework and carrying Natsuo upstairs because he fell asleep on the couch again and telling Shouto to stop touching his stuff, puts his head down and sprints away from his father’s rare praise and his mother’s voice, he runs until the world is black at the edges. He closes his eyes. When he opens them, he is in the back of an ambulance. He’s passed out in the back of an ambulance but he is watching himself the way one would watch a movie, and here’s something no one thought to tell him: he goes into V-tach when they are cutting off his pants, revealing a leg that looks as raw and chewed as hamburger meat, and here come the paddles, here comes the goo, and one of the paramedics is wearing a gold crucifix around her neck that brushes his nose as she leans over what is essentially a dead body, and, holy fuck! He died in the ambulance! Why did no one tell him that he died in the fucking ambulance?

“Clear!” shouts the other paramedic, and then they whack him with the juice and his body jumps, a great big POW! that lights up his nerves like a fucking Christmas tree. 

The first paramedic, the one with the necklace, looks down at her console and shakes her head. “Ah, man, no. Flatline. Hit him again.” And when the other guy does, the film jumps, click , and Dabi is four years old.

He doesn’t know where he is. He was holding his father’s hand and walking down the sidewalk, on the way to pick up some groceries for dinner, but then someone screamed and his father cursed and left him alone, all alone, while he went off to be a hero.

If you’re ever lost, stay where you are. That’s something that everybody knows, something that his mother taught to him.

Okay, Dabi thinks, and sits down in the nearest alleyway. I’ll wait right here.

And he does, for what seems like a long time, he sits down in that alleyway and he bites his thumb and he waits for his father to stop being a hero so that they can go get dinner, so that they can go home to where it's warm and safe and there are glow stars on his ceiling, his mother sitting on the edge of his bed with her big round belly that he stares at as she reads him his bedtime story. He’s getting too old for bedtime stories, but he knows that they’ll stop once the baby comes, because babies need a lot of attention, and he wants to spend all the time with his mother that he can, while he still can, before he has a little brother or sister to play with. He hopes that it's a girl. In all the books he listens to, the girls always have awesome big brothers that tease them and play with them and protect them from all the bullies and -

“Oh my God, you’re adorable.”

Dabi shrieks and shoves himself back against the wall, eyes wide - he’d been so lost in thought that he hadn’t even realized that there was someone in front of him. It's a girl, older than him but younger than his mother, crouched down and grinning. She smells funny, like the bleach they keep under the kitchen sink at home. She tilts her head and smiles even more, even wider, her teeth sharp and her hair going down on either side of her face, a pale red-gold that he thinks liquid fire would look like. “Hi, sweetheart,” she coos. “Are you lost?”

She reaches for his face. He scowls and swats her hand. “I’m not lost.” His voice comes out in a huff. He wants to go home. “I’m waiting.”

“Waiting for who?”

Here, he hesitates. He whispers, “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” and curls his knees up to his chest.

The girl frowns, but it's a big, pouty frown, the kind that his mother gives him when he manages to escape from her hugs. “Well,” she says, and sticks out her hand. “I’m Sana.”

“... Touya.” But the second that he goes to shake her hand, her fingers are locked around his wrist in an iron grip, and he’s being dragged down the alleyway before he can even process what’s happening. Once the shock wears off, he kicks and screams and thrashes until she mutters out, “Son of a bitch,” and stuffs something into his mouth. A wad of fabric, dry on his tongue, so dry that it won’t fall out no matter how hard he shakes his head. 

“Shut up,” Sana hisses, but Dabi keeps wailing through the gag as his legs drag against the concrete, ripping off skin and leaving him bloody. 

Distantly, he hears someone call out, “Touya?” Then, sharper, “Touya!”

Sana says, “Damnit,” and breaks into a run, yanking Dabi along behind her. He digs in his heels and tries to resist, and she just whips around and slaps him so hard across the face that something bitter starts to drip from his nose and into his mouth, soaking into the fabric, making his throat clench.

“TOUYA!”

“Dad!” he tries to scream, “Daddy!” but no sound comes out. His eyes are hot and blurry and he knows that he’s about to start crying, really crying, the kind with a stuffy nose and everything. He tugs at Sana’s grip and she raises her hand to hit him again and -

All the noise has faded to a dull roar, a drumbeat in his ears.

Todoroki Touya bursts into flames.

Click.

“Shh,” Dabi whispers to his little sister, hugging her close to him. “Don’t let him see you.”

Downstairs, the front door slams shut.

Their father is home.

Click.

He is in the living room, and Shouto is in his arms. He’s walking back and forth and back and forth and bouncing Shouto on his shoulder, but the baby won’t stop crying, and he doesn’t know what to do because his mother is upstairs, she has a headache, and Shouto won’t stop crying and crying and crying and God, it's an awful kind of crying, the kind that rattles in your skull and makes your mouth dry.

His father, on the couch.

His father, getting drunk.

“Shut that kid up, Touya,” he demands now, tilting his head back to get the last dregs of a bottle before reaching for a new one, a full one.

Dabi pats Shouto on the back, jiggling him up and down the way his mother said you did when babies got colic. “Shh, shh,” he whispers, but his little brother keeps on whining.

His father grimaces, as if disgusted by the sight of his oldest and youngest son before him. “I told you, Touya,” he says, voice soft and deadly. “I’m not going to warn you again.”

Dabi hugs the baby tighter, his eyes burning with frustration. Why did his mother have to choose tonight of all nights to get a headache? She couldn’t have gotten one yesterday, when his father stayed late at his agency and only came home in the early hours of the morning? Dabi could hear his stomping footsteps all the way down the hall as he pretended to be asleep. Could hear his parents’ door opening and closing. Could feel Natsuo curling in tighter next to him, shivering, always shivering, breaths coming out in icy puffs as he snuggled closer to the warmth radiating from Dabi’s skin. Four years old, not yet in control of his Quirk. A failure in their father’s eyes.

Shouto gurgles into the side of Dabi’s neck. He sighs in relief and risks a glance towards his father, who seems not to have noticed that Shouto has quieted down. He doesn’t look like he’s noticing anything, really, one hand tight around his bottle as he stares at something in the distance, something that only he can see. It was a rough day at work, Dabi saw the news - some jaded businessman, recently fired, set a bomb in the underground parking lot of his former workplace and sent the entire thing tumbling down like a house of cards. He doesn’t know the rest, because his mother turned the TV off when she noticed that he was watching, but he’s pretty sure that a lot of people died.

He imagines getting that kind of news. That your mother or father or sister or brother is dead, that they’re never coming back, all because of one selfish person driven mad with vengeance. 

He doesn’t realize that he’s hugging Shouto too tightly until he starts to cry again. Panicked, Dabi loosens his grip, but it's too late, his father is already slamming his bottle down on the coffee table and roaring, “TOUYA! I WARNED YOU!”

Dabi takes one look at his father’s face and sprints towards the stairs, skids around the corner, and goes as fast as he can up the steps, Shouto jerking up and down in his arms, still crying, crying. That awful crying. God, it's horrible. His father, raging drunk, stomps after him, reaching for him, and there’s a very scary moment where his fingers actually brush against Dabi’s collar. As he nears the landing, Fuyumi, eight years old and fearless, pokes her head out of her room to investigate the noise, the yelling. Dabi meets her eyes, pleading, and she pulls Shouto from his arms just as their father catches up to him.

Backed against the wall, Dabi looks at Fuyumi and mouths -

Go.

Click.

Dabi, standing over Natsuo’s crib, a pillow in his hands. Eight years old and covered in bruises, head to toe, an almost artistic patchwork of black and blue and healing yellow, hair cut short and shoulders shaking, he stares down at his new little brother.

“Hi, baby,” he says. “This is how we say welcome home.”

And he puts the pillow over his face.

Click.

He and Natsuo, they’re playing a video game. Something about monsters, something about heroes. And death. Blood. 

“Dad could go to jail, you know,” Natsuo says, casually conversational. They’re in his room, sitting with their backs against the bed as their characters work on-screen to bring the mega-boss down once and for all. Dabi’s pretty sure that they’ve beaten this level before. He’s pretty sure that it isn’t that much of a big deal. “Y’know, for the way he treats you.”

Dabi glances at his brother out of the corner of his eye, then looks back at the screen, makes his fighter do a totally kick-ass flip. “I know,” he says, no inflection or tone. His mouth is suddenly desert-dry, bone-dry, and he licks his lips. It doesn’t help. He says again, “I know.”

“You should tell someone,” Natsuo says, and now his eyes are far too furious for it to be simple frustration at taking so long to beat a video game level.

“I tried to kill you,” Dabi says. His voice is monotone, distant, like he’s speaking down a subway tunnel. On-screen, his fighter leaps on top of a monster and stabs his sword right through its head. His stomach churns. “When you were a little baby.”

Natsuo says, “Oh.”

Their characters are cheering, now, high-fiving, because they’ve won. They’ve won, and Dabi watches as little tables pop into existence above their heads to tally up the points. He puts his controller down. Doesn’t say anything else, just watches the points tally up, and up, and up, like a body count, up, up, up -

Natsuo’s controller flies across the room and slams into the wall. He stands up, hands in his hair. “This is so fucked up!” he says, shouts, furious. “This is so fucked up!”

Dabi blinks. “What’s wrong with you?”

Natsuo takes a deep breath, lets it out in a huff of air. He meets Dabi’s eyes for a split second. Looks away, and shakes his head. When he speaks, his voice is as cold as their mother’s Quirk, as the blood that flows in his veins. “Why the Hell didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?”

The film -

Red and blue flashing lights, that glint of gold -

- jumps.

The paramedic, the one with the crucifix - Hail Mary, full of grace - she hits him again.

The screen goes black.

Kariage has always been a good swimmer. His apartment complex has a pool down by the laundry room, and that’s always the first place that Katsuki looks for him - Kariage, barefoot, hair stiff and stuck up with the chemicals in the water. Stinking of chlorine. Always in the same navy blue swim trunks with white cat silhouettes checkered onto them, always stinking of chlorine - it makes Katsuki livid. In their rare arguments, Katsuki always ends up saying something along the lines of, “You should carry yourself with more class.”

Kariage, smirking, “Look around.” His neighborhood’s most recent claim to fame happened when the police department busted a meth lab in the basement of a home daycare. “I’m not sure where you think all this class is supposed to come from.”

Today, it's a hot summer afternoon, and they are sitting by the pool. Kariage, smoking. Always smoking. 

“Disgusting habit,” Katsuki says. “Got a spare?”

Kariage, he’s wearing a jacket over his swim trunks, and he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a dented pack of cigarettes. Offers Katsuki one, lights it off the end of his own. Katsuki says, “That’s the only reason you’re wearing that jacket, huh?”

 Nodding, blowing out smoke, staring up into the sky. Into the sun. Katsuki, “You’re gonna make yourself blind, doing that.” Then, thoughtfully, “God, you’re a fucking dork.”

“Takes one to know one.” He blows his smoke right into Katsuki’s face.

“Bastard.”

Kariage grins at him, that obnoxious, shit-eating grin, and shoves him into the water, and that’s when Katsuki wakes up. He opens his eyes, gasping for breath as he claws at the sides of the bathtub, trying to pull himself upright. A hand grabs his arm and yanks him into a sitting position, his clothes clinging to his body, heavy and wet and fucking soaked and the water is so cold. He can’t stop coughing, but each jerk makes his chest flare red-hot with pain, and it's a weird contrast, the freezing shower and the burn of a broken rib, making him so dizzy that he has to put his head between his knees to avoid throwing up. Water drips off his nose, his eyelashes, and all he can think is, I almost died. Then, I did die. Gasping for breath, shivering, shaking so hard that he thinks he might fall apart at his seams. So cold that he’s seeing double.

The shower cuts off as suddenly as it started, leaving Katsuki sitting on the floor of the bathtub, huddled into himself and trying to remember how to breathe, it hurts to breathe, but he’s breathing harder. He can feel tears tracking down the sides of his face. There’s a sigh from above him and then the sound of receding footsteps, he’s shaking, shaking, shaking and crying so hard that he has to press his hands to his mouth to muffle the sobs. His fingers, chopped off and reattached, burn with phantom pain. He feels her before he sees her, the air dropping impossibly colder - Toga’s presence is a black hole, sucking the warmth out of everything and everyone until there’s nothing left but blood and bones and nightmares. 

Katsuki whispers, “You killed me.” He lifts his head and meets her eyes, those cold and gleaming eyes, his voice trembling and cracking and breaking, “You killed me.”

Lots of plastic bracelets jangling on her wrists, Toga inspects her nails - painted a bright, lurid red - and sits down on the closed toilet seat. “By accident,” she says, as if that makes it any better. “You just wouldn’t stop screaming. It was getting irritating. You know how like, when a baby cries? It just cries and cries and doesn’t stop? That’s how you were, but screaming, and…” She shrugs, frowning slightly. “My bad.”

Katsuki stares at her, eyes wide, chest soaked in gasoline and every quick, sharp breath a match lit against his rib. He tries to speak, but no sound comes out. He swallows, tries again, “What is wrong with you?”

She smiles, a sickly, fickle thing, the cat that ate the canary, but otherwise doesn’t answer. Katsuki shakes his head, speechless. Why is she doing this? Why does she like doing this? So many questions for this human girl with demon eyes. Why? Why couldn’t she just let him die? Before he can ask any of them, though, a voice from the doorway says, “Here, I brought you some clothes.” A pause. “And a towel.”

Katsuki turns, wincing at the pain. A man is standing there, tall and dressed normally except for his face, which is covered in some weird black-and-white mask, one that stretches over his entire head. Recognition flares in Katsuki’s mind - he saw him at the camp, all those days and weeks and months ago. Right now, though, he doesn’t look that much like a kidnapper. He looks like an awkward kind of butler, a towel draped over one arm and a bundle of clothes in his hands, his face turned towards Toga like he’s having some kind of silent conversation with her, and maybe he is, because Toga is staring just as intently back at him, eyes narrowed. 

After what seems like forever, the man shakes his head, sighs. “Toga, you’re not supposed to be in here.”

“No one told me that.” Crossing her arms over her chest, glaring like a sullen teenager. Katsuki half expects her to say, You’re not the boss of me.  

He can’t see the mask guy’s face, but he has the vague impression that he’s raising his eyebrows. “I was there,” mask guy says, slowly and carefully, like he’s talking to a toddler, “when Shigaraki told you to clean up.”

“Why?” Katsuki asks, the question out before he can stop himself. 

The mask guy tilts his head. “Because we’re moving,” he says, a note of confusion in his voice, like he thought that this was common knowledge. Like he’s forgotten that Katsuki has spent the last few months drugged out of his fucking mind. “The heroes know that you’re alive.”

Katsuki sucks in a sharp breath. “What?”

Toga says, “It’s all Dabi’s fault.” Scowling, “If I had been there, you never would’ve gotten away.”

“So it wasn’t a dream, then. Dabi did try to save me?”

“Save you?” she laughs, her eyes boring into his, as cold and harsh as hospital lights. “More like he was just trying to keep you to himself. If we hadn’t intercepted the car, who knows what he would’ve done to you.”

He doesn’t believe that. He can’t believe that. The memories of Dabi saying, it's alright and it's going to be okay - there was no ulterior motive to them, he’s sure. Dabi, risking his life to bring him home, and - 

The thought strikes him so hard and fast that it takes his breath away. He grabs the rim of the bathtub, eyes burning. “Is he…” He can’t breathe. It's like every gasp of air is getting stuck in his throat, making it hard to swallow, a lump that won’t go away. “Is he okay?”

Toga leans closer, forearms braced on her knees, her smile mocking. Cruel. “And what if he isn’t?” she asks, voice whisper-soft. “What if he’s dead, all because of you?”

Katsuki shakes his head.

“All that blood,” Toga says, and that’s not a smile anymore, it's a sneer. “He was screaming so loud, Katsuki, so loud - you got off with just a broken wrist, but him? Oh, he was so covered in blood that you couldn’t even see his skin. Just his eyes, his teeth. His bones.”

Katsuki, he doesn’t even realize that he’s screaming until the guy with the mask grabs Toga and all but throws her out the door, slams it shut behind her, locks it. Katsuki’s throat, scraped raw, he’s screaming and screaming and screaming so hard that the sound echoes off the walls, bounces back, mocking and horrible and God, he screams and screams and he’s crying, too, and the mask guy is in front of him now, is saying something, voice a murmur that’s all but lost in the haze of pain and tears and Dabi, he dyed his hair and tried to save him and if he’s dead then it's all his fault, all his fucking fault, the hero with blood on his hands, he wouldn’t be a hero at all. The guy in the mask grabs his shoulders and Katsuki screams harder, kicks and flails and his chest hurts, his chest feels like it's being flayed apart, but he can’t stop, can’t stop moving and fighting to get away. He screams and cries and something drips down from his nose and over his lips, hot and metallic, and when he puts his hand to it his fingers come back glistening red and it's too much, too much, there's blood on his hands and on his face and everywhere, Dabi, covered in blood, screaming so loud, and the heroes know that he’s alive but -

And that’s the thought that stops him. 

He freezes, chest heaving up and down and up and down, shaking with cold and pain and the knowledge that - that - 

His voice is ragged, shot through with leftover hiccuping sobs. “He’s not really dead, is he?” He stares up at the mask guy, hands clutching his side, his jagged-bone ribs. He runs his tongue across his lips, tastes blood, and shakes and shakes and shakes. “Dabi? How would they know that I’m alive if he’s not alive?”

The guy with the mask shakes his head and rocks back on his heels. Katsuki has the distinct impression that he’s rolling his eyes. “That’s what I was trying to tell you.” He picks the towel up from the floor and drops it over Katsuki’s head, Katsuki flinching at the momentary loss of vision before gradually untensing when all the guy does is rub it over his hair, drying him off. 

He reaches a hand up, pushes the towel back from his eyes. Squints. “How do they know that I’m alive, anyways? Did he tell them?”

“Oh, yeah.” The mask guy looks around, spots the hand towel hanging on the wall by the sink, and snatches it down. “Here. For your nose. Anyways, first thing he said when he woke up was, Bakugou. He’s worried about you, kid.”

Katsuki’s eyes narrow. “How do you know that?”

Ignoring the question, “He woke up for real today, you know that? That detective guy, Tsu-something, went in and asked him about you, made him so upset that the doctor had to sedate him.”

Katsuki, pulling back. Eyes narrowed. “There’s a spy?”

“Informant. There’s a difference. That’s why we have to move, since Dabi could lead them back to this place. Have to be long gone by the time that happens, y’know?”

A knock on the door, then a voice. Shigaraki. “Twice, get your ass out here.”

“That’s your name?” Katsuki asks, eyebrows raised. “Twice? Who picked that out?”

The man stands, stretches his arms above his head. Katsuki can hear his joints popping. “I did, you little shit,” but there’s a trace of a smile in his voice. Then, to Shigaraki, “Give me a second!” He looks back down at Katsuki. “Your nose, it's stopped bleeding?”

“I guess.”

He holds out a hand. “Give me the towel, I have to toss it.”

“Like, throw it away?” Katsuki asks, head tilted as he gives the bloodied towel to Twice. “Why?”

Taking it, pulling it, ripping it in two. “We need to get rid of the evidence.”

And Katsuki’s stomach sinks. 

Whatever reprieve he got by joking around with Twice is gone, and the cold weight of his situation settles into his bones with such viciousness that it's hard to think. He’s not at a friend’s house. He’s not safe. He just died. He just died. All the banter in the world won’t change the fact that he’s held captive by a group of known murderers. It's like, by talking to someone who actually seemed to see him as a human being, he’d been acting out character in a play, had been living a dream. But now the real world comes flooding back, as cold and uncaring as one of Toga’s knives.

When he speaks, his voice is a whisper. “Oh,” he says, staring down at his hands, the blood crusting in his nails. “Right.”

Twice looks down at him, and Katsuki can see the creases in the mask where his eyebrows are scrunched together. “You okay?”

He doesn’t answer.

After a brief, hesitant silence, Twice shrugs. “Okay.” The bloody scraps of fabric balled up in his hand. “Make sure to see Overhaul about your ribs.”

And then he leaves, closing the door behind him. Katsuki stares at it for a long moment, and the only sound in the bathroom is the ragged jerk of his breathing and the drip-drip-drip of the shower head leaking water. 

He’s alone.

His chest aches in a way that has nothing to do with his broken ribs. He wraps his arms around his knees, buries his face in them, cutting off the outside world with the curtain the towel has made. It's a soft towel, orange edged in green, way too high-quality to have been provided by this shitty hotel. Orange and green, his favorite colors. He wonders if it was intentional, that it was given to him, orange and green and red spots of blood. He remembers designing his hero outfit, late at night in the living room of his house, sitting on the carpet and falling asleep over his sketchpad. His father had come downstairs to get some water, had asked him why he was still awake. Katsuki, ten years old and grinning, had shown off his drawing, basking in the praise that his father, his fashion-designer father, had given him. His father, who was probably exhausted. His father, who sat down beside him and gave him pointers, who stayed right there until they both fell asleep in the living room, on the floor, dreaming until morning.

His eyes burn.

He stands up, carefully steps out of the bathtub, and runs a hand through his still-damp hair. A flash of movement catches his eye. He turns. He’s there, in the mirror, pale-skinned and shaking, hair sticking up in wet spikes that are longer and darker than he remembers them being, and the hair dye, the fucking dye, that’s right, Dabi dyed his hair. He remembers leaning back over the sink, the smell of ammonia, Dabi telling him to stay still, that they were in Tokyo, so far away from home. 

He stares at his reflection.

The boy in the mirror, blank-eyed and hopeless, stares back.

“You look like shit,” is the first thing Shigaraki says to him when he finally staggers out of the bathroom. That’s his cue to say something pithy, something acerbic. He doesn’t. He just shoots him a tired glare, tightens his grip on the towel, and walks over to the bed. Shigaraki says, “Don’t touch anything.”

Katsuki shoots back, “Why not?”

“Because you’ll leave fingerprints, dumbass.”

Katsuki’s jaw clenches. “And why, exactly, should I give a shit? Why the Hell would I help you get rid of the evidence that I was here?” He shakes his head, crosses his arms. “Why the fuck would I help you at all?”

Shigaraki stares at him, then puts the knife he’d been cleaning on the edge of his shirt down on the nightstand. His eyes are nothing like Toga’s - hers are bright, but his are dull, flat. Behind that flatness, though, that deadness, there’s a weird kind of light to them - crazy light, Katsuki thinks, and his mouth goes dry. Shigaraki takes a slow step forward, then another. “You’ll help me,” he says, “because I know how to break every bone in your body, in the most painful way possible. You’ll help me, because I know exactly who your closest friends are at that little school of yours.”

That old anger, hot and familiar, roars in Katsuki’s ears. “Joke’s on you,” he spits out, standing up straight despite the way it makes his ribs scream in pain. He’s as tall as Shigaraki like this, and he might not be at his best right now, but he’s his mother’s son and he knows damn well how to play a crowd. Or, in this case, a villain. “I don’t have any fucking friends.”

Shigaraki raises an eyebrow. “No? What about Kirishima, and that girl with the pink hair? What about Midoriya? They don’t mean anything to you?”

He forces his eyes to remain impassive, his mouth to curl, fetid and sour, into a sneer. This is a persona that he’s used to, the I-don’t-give-a-shit act that got him all through middle school, through the worst years of his life. “Those damn extras?” he asks, shoving his voice lower, deeper, putting a bite into the words that he doesn’t really feel. “Shitty Hair? Raccoon Eyes? And fuckin’ Deku? Oh, please.” Hating this, hating himself, “those bastards aren’t worth shit. You’d be doing me a favor if you got rid of them, they’re fucking clingy as Hell.”

“Wow.” Shigaraki cants his head, the gesture oddly bird-like. “What about the ones from Aldera?” Katsuki flinches slightly, barely even noticeable, but he knows that Shigaraki sees it because he starts to smile, all those shiny white teeth where there should be dripping-poison fangs. “I know about them, too, Bakugou.”

Fists balled so tight that his nails are digging into his palms, breaking skin, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Dehisa Yasushi,” Shigaraki says. “Agei Ashikari. And little baby Kanji.” He smiles. “How am I doing so far?”

Katsuki’s face is expressionless.

Shigaraki continues, “Kanji goes to Hibiya Primary School. She walks home three days of the week with her older brother, Ashikari, or Kariage for short. Tuesdays and Thursdays, she goes home with a little girl from her class, eats supper, and is picked up at six o’clock by Kariage on his way home from work. They live in a low-income district in West Musutafu and are fairly poor, but that doesn’t stop Kariage from training to be a Pro Hero. He’s a bad influence on you, always smoking, but you two have been best friends for years, haven’t you?” He pauses. “Oh, and he’s not religious, but he’s spent every day of the past few months praying for your safe return.”

It feels like someone has scooped out all his organs and filled the hollow space with ice water. He feels gutted. “You,” he says, and his voice is a weak, trembling thing. He swallows, shakes his head, clutches onto the orange-green towel like it's a security blanket. “You don’t have it in you.”

Shigaraki smiles at him that long, thin plastic smile, and Katsuki realizes the he was right. Shigaraki is fucking crazy. Not just eccentric, but crazy, and not the raving kind of crazy. The aware kind of crazy. The kind of crazy where morals no longer align with ego. 

Faster then Katsuki can react, Shigaraki moves. He shoves Katsuki back, sending him stumbling into the edge of the bed, making him fall, and before Katsuki can put his hands down on the sheets to push himself up, Shigaraki has them pinned above his head. Oh. Fingerprints. Right. Shigaraki leans in close, crowding him down against the sheets, he’s close, so close, spit shining off his teeth. “Oh, Kit-Kat,” he says, practically a croon, and the nickname - how the fuck did he learn about that nickname? - hooks at Katsuki’s throat, punches the air from his lungs. “You have no fucking idea what I have in me.”

Katsuki stares up at him, eyes wide and burning with tears. He says, “You sick fucking bastard,” and his voice cracks.

The smile melts from Shigaraki’s face, so fast that it’d be funny if it weren’t so fucking terrifying. He lets go of Katsuki’s wrists, hauls him to his feet by the collar of his shirt, and then takes a step back, looks at him. Looks at Katsuki, who is breathing hard and heavy and rough, hands shaking, entire body shaking, his mind racing, racing, as he imagines how Kariage would look, all covered in blood. Kariage, the boy with that gap between his two front teeth and that scar across his nose, Kariage, who loved so freely and openly that it took his breath away, Kariage, Agei Ashikari, dead. Those eyes, dull. Standing there, Katsuki is struck by a memory so clear that his heart cries out inside him: twelve-year-old Kariage, messy-haired and stinking of cigarette smoke, crouched down in front of Kanji, who is trying to put her sneaker on backwards. Let me fix that, baby, Kariage says, and Kanji, staring up at her big brother with a wide-eyed perplexity that one couldn’t help but love, replies, Fix what?

Let me fix that, baby.

Fix what? like she doesn’t see what the problem is.

His knees give out. He sinks to the floor, staring wide-eyed at the carpet. 

Let me fix that, baby. 

Fix what?  

He lifts his head and glares at Shigaraki. In a voice completely devoid of any emotion at all, he says, “Damn you.”

Shigaraki crosses his arms, waiting.

Waiting.

Katsuki closes his eyes, opens them, takes a deep breath. Swallows roughly. Finally, he stands up, meets Shigaraki’s gaze steadily. “If I… comply,” he starts, stops, takes another deep breath, so deep that he feels all empty inside. “If I comply,” he repeats, “You won’t hurt them?”

“Correct.”

Quieter, “Get a witness.”

The briefest of smiles, the barest curl of his lips, like he finds this whole situation to be vaugely amusing. “Maybe if you ask nicely.”

Katsuki’s voice is as cold as ice. “I said, get a witness.”

“Are you still pretending to have the upper hand?”

“Get me a fucking witness, Shigaraki.”

The smile widens. “No.”

Katsuki punches him, then ducks under his arm and grabs the knife from the nightstand, the one that Shigaraki had been cleaning, the one that he had neglected to put away, and is pointing it at the villain before he can stop to think about what he’s doing. Shigaraki presses a hand to his face, stares at the blood that comes away from his split lip. He looks at Katsuki. His eyes are as cold and cruel as a snake’s. He says, “Put the knife down.”

Rage boiling in the pit of his stomach, “No.”

“If you kill me,” Shigaraki says, “you won’t even make it outside. Do you know how much blood is in a human body? You’ll be covered in it. The others will know what you’ve done, and they’ll snap your neck the moment you set foot in the hallway.”

“I know.” And he does. So he switches hands, turns the handle, and places the cold metal of the blade against his own throat, unwavering as he watches Shigaraki watch him.

Shigaraki’s lips twitch, that damned smirk. “You wouldn’t.”

In response, Katsuki presses down. The knife bites into his skin, and a thin trickle of blood drips down his throat, but he doesn’t flinch. As long as he has a weapon, he does have the upper hand. They want him alive. He can use that. 

Shigaraki looks signifigantly less smug. Not worried, not yet, but more like he’s starting to wish that he had kept Katsuki drugged, after all. He tends to have that effect on people. Shigaraki says, “Fine. I’ll call Toga in. She can be your Goddamned witness.”

Katsuki shakes his head, pushes the blade a little deeper. “Not her.”

“Why not?”

He snorts, fixes Shigaraki with a blank, unimpressed stare. “Because she’s a fucking psycho, that’s why.” A pause. “Get the mask guy in here.”

“Fucking Hell - fine. Fine.” Shigaraki strides towards the door and throws it open, sticks his head out into the hallway, and snaps, “Twice, come help me with something.”

A sigh, and then Twice comes into the room. He’s changed his clothes, presumably because the other ones had the blood from Katsuki’s nosebleed on it. He looks at Katsuki, crosses his arms, asks, “The Hell are you doing?” He says, “Shigaraki, what’d you do to him.”

Katsuki, bruised and bleeding, blood crusted around his upper lip and dripping down the line of his neck, dressed in too-big gym shorts and a baggy sweater that stinks of cigarettes and booze, no socks, no shoes, eyes red-rimmed but unwavering, hands deathly still as he holds a knife to his own throat, this is the Bakugou Katsuki that looks Twice in the eye and says, in a voice so cold that you’d think it belonged to Overhaul himself, “Stop pretending to be my friend.” He shifts his gaze to Shigaraki. “Say it.”

Shigaraki gives him a look of pure, unadulterated hatred. “As long as you comply, Bakugou Katsuki, I will refrain from harming your friends from middle school.”

“And Kanji.”

A sigh. “And Kanji.”

“And my friends at Yuuei.”

“What about Midoriya?”

Katsuki’s fingers are white-knuckled on the handle of the knife. He thinks of himself as a kid, promising Deku that he’d let him be a sidekick when he became a hero. He thinks about the Quirkless diagnosis. He thinks about that hand reaching out, the Kaachan, are you okay? He thinks about all of this, and then he has to stop thinking about it because it's making his throat tight. He wants to scream at Deku, How could you? but his lips have been stitched shut by lie after lie after lie. “If he’s doing what I think he’s doing,” Katsuki says, eyes blank as he forces away memories of his childhood, “then I don’t give a shit about what happens to him.” 

That’s a lie, of course. Most things are. Shigaraki tilts his head to the side. “You interest me, Bakugou,” he says, and there’s a note of truthfulness to his voice.

“I’m honored,” Katsuki says drily. “Go on, then. Your promise.”

“If you’re not going to extend your protection to Midoriya, then I think I’ve covered everything. You can drop the knife now.” Then, to Twice, “Go make sure that everything is packed.”

Twice nods and turns to leave, and Katsuki’s eyes go wide. “Wait!” he says, glancing between him and Shigaraki. “My parents. You can’t hurt them. Or Auntie Inko.”

Shigaraki squints. “Auntie… Inko.”

“Midoriya Inko,” Katsuki says carefully. “Deku’s mom.”

“You’re very strange child, Bakugou Katsuki.” Shigaraki shrugs. “Fine. I won’t hurt your parents or your Auntie Inko. Not that I would, anyways. It's not like they know anything.”

Katsuki blows out a deep breath. “Okay,” he says. “Good.”

He drops the knife.

Even before it hits the ground, Shigaraki is lunging for him. Katsuki braces himself for impact, and there it comes, that blow ricocheting pain from the base of his neck to the top of his skull. His knees give out and he lets them, lets his body crumple to the floor. Shigaraki is over him, clamping a hand over his mouth and his nose. There are easier ways to do this, of course, but Katsuki knows that the bastard wants him to suffer.

His eyes track Twice as he walks out of the room, shuts the door, and then they snap back to Shigaraki when he says, almost gently, “You know, kid, sometimes you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

I get that a lot, Katsuki wants to say, but he can’t speak and his throat burns as he automatically tries to suck in more air, but he can’t, and his lungs ache in beat to the frantic thud of his heart. He tries to relax, to make it easier, but he can’t fight his body’s base instinct to live. 

Let me fix that, baby.

Fix what?

He closes his eyes and lets the world fade to black.

“I have a question.”

The nurse, not looking at him, “What is it?”

“Why did no one tell me,” Dabi asks, staring up at the ceiling, “that I died in the fucking ambulance?”

Chapter Text

“But I didn’t do anything!” 

Midoriya’s voice was so loud that Shouta could hear it from all the way down the fucking hall, which meant the kid was pissed enough to be yelling, which meant that Shouta should probably pick up his pace. He jerked the door open. “I’m on my lunch break,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Behind his desk, Nedzu sighed, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but here. “Aizawa, please,” he started, but was cut off when Midoriya stood up. His hands were curled in fists at his sides. “I didn’t do anything!” he repeated. “Oh my God, I keep saying it over and over and nobody is listening! What the fuck?”

Shouta frowned at his student, then at Nedzu. What the fuck indeed, he thought. “Sir, what’s going on?”

Nedzu sighed. “Well, Midoriya -”

“He’s lying!” Midoriya snapped, and Shouta didn't think that he’d ever seen him so - well, so angry, in all the months he’d been teaching him. He watched as the kid tore a shaking hand through his hair and wheeled on Nedzu, shoulders heaving like he was about to rage or cry or both, watched as he said, “Tell him, Nedzu! Tell him! I didn’t do a damn thing wrong and you know it!”

“Well, according to eyewitnesses -”

Midoriya had been damn near screaming by then. They could probably hear him all the way in fucking America. “This isn’t fair! This isn’t - fuck you, I don’t have a famous parent and so you’re assuming that I’m to blame!”

Shouta glanced between the two of them, eyebrows raised. “Well… what happened?”

Nedzu grimaced. “Midoriya and Todoroki had a disagreement -”

“OH, IT WAS MORE THAN THAT!” Midoriya exploded, a veritable powder keg, and he’d been hissing and spitting like a stray alley cat that’s been kicked too many times. “He -”

“- which lead to a physical altercation,” Nedzu continues, ever-calm, and it was almost funny - comical, the contrast between him and Shouta’s student. “Todoroki was brought down to Recovery Girl for treatment, while Midoriya was brought here to give his account as to what happened.”

“Oh.” That sounded like your regular schoolboy fight. “Why am I here, then?”

And Nedzu had beamed at him, actually fucking beamed, and Shouta regretted coming up to this damn office. He regretted himself. “Well,” Nedzu said, pleasant as anything as he slid out from his chair, “it is my lunch break, you know.”

And that’s how Shouta ended up here. Here being stuck in his boss’s office with a kid who’s half-feral and looks to be five seconds away from ripping Shouta’s throat out with his teeth. He’s whirling around the room, kicking the walls, the chairs, anything he can reach. Generally being a menace. Shouta is sitting in Nedzu’s fancy-ass rolling chair, waiting for the kid to tire himself out. Which he does, eventually. He slumps down in the seat he’d been in when Shouta had first walked in, puts his head in his hands, breathing long and deep and hard. His shoulders shake.

After a few minutes, Shouta says, “So, if Nedzu is to be trusted, you beat Todoroki up. Speaking of, what the fuck?”

Midoriya looks at him, and there’s something closed off about his face, something like a mask. It's subtle, but it's there. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, like he isn’t sitting in the fucking principal’s office with bloody knuckles, like he hasn’t put no less than three dents in the drywall.

“Midoriya, you put Todoroki in the infirmary.”

“Oh.” He looks vaguely uncomfortable. “That.”

“Yeah, that.” Midoriya doesn’t respond, and Shouta decides that he should probably play nice for once in his Goddamn life. “Look, Midoriya, I’m not mad or anything. I’m trying to help. What happened?” When the kid stays quiet, Shouta presses on. “Did something happen? You need to talk to me, bud.”

Midoriya huffs, crosses his arms. He’s got a bruise around his throat. “Nothing happened,” he snaps. “I’m fine, Sensei.”

Shouta gives him a blank, unimpressed stare. “People who are fine don’t just go around beating up the sons of one of the top heroes, Midoriya.” Midoriya closes his mouth with an audible click! and Shouta curses himself and his bloodline. The kid’s clammed back up again. Nice going, Eraserhead. “Okay, okay. So you’re fine,” he says, waiting for his student to nod before continuing, “Which means that there has to be a reason. What’d Todoroki do?”

“... Nothing?” Midoriya tries. Pathetically.

Still, Shouta says, “Nice try.” And then he says, “But you’re not the type to deck someone just because the sun rose in the sky, and we’ve established that nothing is wrong, so… what’d he do?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it, Aizawa-sensei.”

And that should be the end of it, it should, but Shouta really is a stubborn bitch with a chronic, debilitating inability to pay attention to boundaries, and so he barrels on. “What, did he talk shit about you or something?”

“No.”

“Uraraka? Your friends?”

“No.”

“Your mom?”

“Could you just -”

“Midoriya, I am trying to help you -”

“HE SAID THAT KAACHAN IS PROBABLY DEAD!”

The outburst stops Shouta in his tracks, and not just because that’s the angriest he’s ever heard Midoriya sound, ever. “What?”

“He said that Kaachan was dead, okay?” Midoriya seethes, hissing the words out between his teeth. 

Several very confusing emotions roar through Shouta all at once, and the one his brain finally decides to settle on is anger. It's the most familiar, and Midoriya’s pissed, too, so why not? His voice is harsh and waspish. “You got into a fight with Todoroki because he stated a fact?” And that’s not the truth, not the whole one, but he can’t say otherwise. “Seriously, Midoriya? That’s the reason I have to file a fucking accident report?”

“Not a fact,” Midoriya mutters, like he still can’t see what the problem is, like he doesn’t know that there even is a problem. 

Shouta meets his glare with his own, suddenly thanking God that he’s a student and he’d probably get fired for strangling a student to death. “None of this makes any sense, Midoriya.”

“He’s not dead, okay?” The kid huffs, belligerent. “See, I knew that you wouldn’t care. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you!”

“That’s worse, actually. You do get how that’s worse, right?”

Midoriya just huff again and rolls his eyes, which is the wrong response for a number of reasons, but before he can tear into the kid for it, the door opens and some girl that Shouta vaguely remembers seeing in the hallway pokes her head into the room, smiling with brace-lined teeth. “Aizawa-sensei?”

Never a moment of fucking peace. Shouta scowls at her. “What.”

“Yamada-sensei is looking -”

“SHOUTA!” Hizashi yells, his voice about a hundred decibels too loud for the office that they are currently, y’know, fucking trapped in. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, what the Hell? You -” He cuts himself off, stops short in the doorway at the sight of Midoriya sitting, sullen, in the chair. “Oh, wow.” He glances up at Shouta. “Is, uh… is Midoriya okay?”

“Midoriya is sitting right here, Sensei,” the kid says, voice dry as Shouta’s fucking pool of patience. 

Shouta scowls at him, then looks back at Hizashi. “What’d you need?”

His best friend’s smile is a little apologetic. “You… were supposed to be at the police station an hour ago, Shouta.”

Shouta blinks. “What?”

“For the -” His eyes flicker to Midoriya. “The thing.”

Oh, shit. The thing. “Fuck,” he mutters, runs a hand through his hair. “I - Nedzu isn’t back, though, and I don’t want to send Midoriya back to class so he can start another fight -” biting the word off as if he himself has never gotten into a fight before “- so…”

“Ah, Hell,” Hizashi says, which just about explains Shouta’s entire existence thus far. “Just - bring him along.”

“But -”
“Look, Shouta, we have to leave, now. I’ve been looking for you for an hour.”

“Why didn’t you just call me?”

“Because your fuckin’ phone is always off!” Hizashi snaps, angrier than Shouta has seen him in a while. “So just take the kid with you! Handcuff him, for all I care, but we need to go!”

And, with that, he storms out of the office.

Shouta sighs, long and deep. He looks at Midoriya. The kid stares steadily back at him.

Fuck it, Shouta thinks. Fucking fuck it.

“You ready for a field trip?”

“Sorry,” Hizashi grits out once they’re halfway to the police station, his hands knuckle-white on the steering wheel. 

Shouta blinks. “For what?”

And his confusion must show on his face, because Hizashi gives a rather dramatic sigh and pins him with a glare that asks Shouta if there’s anything going on inside of his head at all. “For snapping at you like that,” he huffs, like the answer was obvious. “I was just frustrated and shit, but still. Shouldn’t have done that. Sorry.”

Shouta glances into the backseat, where Midoriya is huddled up by the door, staring out of the window. He looks back at Hizashi and raises an eyebrow. “You’re being awfully nice.”

That pulls a smile out of him. “I’m always nice, you bastard.” Shouta snorts, and Hizashi gasps, like Shouta’s disbelief is a personal affront to everything he holds dear, like his stupid gravity-defying hair and his dumb leather jackets. “Excuse you, who’s the one who brought you flowers every day in the hospital when that wacko villain made papier-mâché out of your ribcage?”

“You visited me twice in the hospital. And you never brought flowers.”

“I sent texts.”

“You sent porn.”

Hizashi snarls and slams the horn at a particularly slow driver. “Well, who needs fuckin’ flowers, anyway!”

And, despite everything, Shouta laughs.

When they pull into the parking lot and go inside, the first thing Tsukauchi says is, “Why’s the kid here?”

Shouta sighs. “Because he’s a menace,” he explains.

“I am,” Midoriya agrees, then looks around with the wide-eyed curiosity of a toddler being taken to the park for the first time. “But why am I here, anyway?”

Hizashi says, “You’re not here to do anything. You’re going to sit in one of those chairs over there and not move an inch until we come back out, got it?” He stabs his fingers towards one of the old, cracked-cushioned chairs across from the front desk. 

Midoriya is silent for no longer than half a second, but Shouta knows that he’s plotting something. “’Kay,” the kid says, like it's all the same to him, and wanders towards a chair. Plops down. Hands in his lap, looking like the very fucking picture of a golden child. “Have fun.”

As Shouta walks away, he can feel Midoriya’s eyes on his back.

He shivers.

Shouta has always hated interrogations. The deer-in-headlights stare of the suspect, the mind games, the knowledge that to slip up would spell destruction for the entire investigation - it's like walking on the edge of the knife, knowing that to fall either way would be to ruin everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Aizawa Shouta, balancing.

“How do I look?” Hizashi asks. Shouta scans him over. Black slacks, a crisp white dress shirt, tie perfectly knotted at the collar.

Shouta says, “Sleazy,” and revels in the disgusted glare Hizashi shoots him in response. “You look fine, Hizashi. Very professional.”

“Oh. Thanks.” He blows out a deep breath, sighs, shakes his head - all nervous habits that Shouta himself has picked up throughout the years. “It’s just - interrogations, am I right? Stuffy and fuckin’ boring.”

“At least you don’t have to play the bad cop.”

“Oh, trust me, you don’t want me to play the bad cop.” Hizashi grins. “That poor kid would fuckin’ wet himself.”

The door opens.

Shouta says, “Speak of the devil.”

And Dabi walks in.

—

“How are you feeling today?” Hizashi asks, leaning forward on the table as if he actually cares about the kid’s response. Watching him, Shouta thinks, Going with the good cop first, then.

Dabi shrugs.

Hizashi raises his eyebrows. “Can’t really do anything with shrugs,” he says.

“Mmph.” Dabi doesn’t look at either of them. “Tired. They’re weaning me off my pain meds, said they didn’t want me to get addicted or some shit.”

“Oh, so your injuries still hurt?” Hizashi asks. When Dabi shrugs again, he asks other questions, harmless ones, which the kid mostly answers in mutters and whispers. He keeps looking around the room with wide eyes, as if there are ghosts trying to get his attention. After a few minutes of this, Hizashi says, “Bakugou Katsuki.” He says, “Do you remember him?”

Dabi doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even shrug. Shouta jolts as Hizashi nudges his thigh - that’s his cue to play his part. He slams his hands down on the table and says, “Hey! Hey, you need to talk to us, understand?”

Dabi glares at him. “I don’t want to,” he mumbles. “Don’t want to talk about the kid.”

“Why not?” Hizashi asks pleasantly, and slides a picture of Bakugou across the desk. It's his ID photo, the one taken at the beginning of the school year, and something about it makes Shouta feel like he’s about to throw up. Again. “He’s a pretty powerful kid. You can talk about him, it's alright.”

Dabi’s eyes flick to the picture. Then flick away.

Shouta slams a different picture down on the table and asks belligerently, “How about this one?” It's a crime-scene photo, a shot of the car accident they pried Dabi himself from. “You wanna talk about this one?”

Dabi swallows hard and shakes his head, back and forth and back and forth, like he can make the picture disappear if he just tries hard enough. The accident had been pretty bad, even Shouta has to admit that - the car had been twisted, mangled, and even in the picture you can see that the entire wreck is glistening with blood. “Don’t show me that. I didn’t want that.”

I didn’t want that.

Hizashi’s voice is calmer than Shouta feels, and it's gentle when he asks, “Why didn’t you want that? You mean you didn’t want to wreck the car?”

Shouta snarls. “Or maybe you did. Maybe you wanted to die in the accident so that you wouldn’t have to face the consequences of kidnapping a child.”

Dabi shakes his head violently, eyes wide. “Stop it,” he says, voice hardly louder than a whisper. “Stop talking to me.”

“We’re just talking,” Hizashi says soothingly. “It's just talk.”

Anger flares in Dabi’s face, hot and sudden. “If you talk to me, I have to talk to you, and I don’t want to talk to you!” he yells, and for a second Shouta thinks that he’s going to snap, that he’s going to lash out. But then he calms in the blink of an eye and slumps back down in his chair, picking at the skin around his fingernails. 

Hizashi and Shouta share a glance. Hizashi nods. He takes over. “Why don’t you want to talk to us, Dabi?” he asks, scooting his chair closer, voice pitched low and comforting - he does everything but take the kid’s damn hand in his own. “Are you afraid of what you might tell us?”

Dabi shrugs.

“I’ve heard a lot of things, Dabi.” Addressing him by his name. Familiar. Comforting. “I’ve heard a lot. I can handle it. I can handle anything you tell me. This is a safe space. I know you have something to tell me. This is the place. This is the time.”

“Please stop asking,” Dabi whispers. His voice shakes.

“Why? Because you’ll tell me?”

Another shrug.

“You’ll tell me, won’t you, Dabi? You’ll tell me, and you’ll tell me the truth, because I know you wouldn’t lie to me.”

“I don’t lie,” Dabi agrees.

“That’s good,” Hizashi says amiably, like he’s praising a small child for writing their name correctly on their homework. “Because you know what would happen if you lied, right? If you said something that wasn’t true?”

Dabi seems to contemplate it for a moment. He’s still picking at his fingernails, at his skin. The staples on his face glint in the low light. Finally, he nods. “I know what will happen,” he says in a low, barely audible voice. “I’ll go to jail.” Then, more strongly, “I’ll go to jail.”

“Yeah, you will go to jail. If you don’t tell us the truth.”

“It's time to open up,” Shouta says, sliding the two pictures closer to Dabi. “It's time to tell us.”

Dabi sighs. “Yeah. I know.” He clears his throat and points at the pictures. “I did it. I took him.”

“You took him,” Hizashi echoes, voice controlled and soft. “Just that once, at the training camp?”

For a moment, it seems as if Dabi can’t understand the question - his face flashes confusion, then anger, then goes blank as stone. And then, finally, he shakes his head.

“Was he in the car with you when it crashed?” Shouta asks. Flat. No tone or inflection, no judgment, no excitement.

“I was trying to save him,” Dabi says. Pauses. And then, as if gathering steam, as if helpless to stop himself: “And I know where he is.”

Shouta bursts out of the interrogation room, all but vibrating with excitement. He catches sight of Tsukauchi and makes a beeline for him. “Did you hear that? Were you there? Did you hear that?” He’s shaking. He doesn’t really know if it's from joy or a massive overload of adrenaline.

“Yeah,” Tsukauchi says, and Shouta surprises even himself by pulling the detective into a massive bear hug that nearly sends both of them toppling to the floor. 

And then Tsukauchi has to go and ruin everything by saying, “But…”

Shouta tenses. Pulls away. “But?”

“There’s a problem.”

Cold prickles up Shouta’s spine. “What happened.” The earlier excitement is gone from his voice, leaving it cold and empty and so flat that Tsukauchi winces. The detective opens his mouth to say something, but Midoriya beats him to it, his voice coming from behind Shouta.

Midoriya says, “Dabi, huh? That’s interesting.”

Fuck.

Shouta spins around and stares at his student, stares at this little deviant, dressed in a slightly-too-big police blazer. “You motherfucker,” he says.

Midoriya grins. “One of the advantages of having a plain face,” he says, shrugs, like he hasn’t just impersonated a police officer to sneak into a private interrogation. Like he hasn’t just ruined Shouta’s good mood. “I can get anywhere I want.”

“You motherfucker,” Shouta says again.

It's all he can think of to say.

Chapter Text

There’s no tracking time in a place like this. The overhead lights never flicker or dim, and his eyes drift shut at random intervals, his head nodding and his chin dropping towards his chest in the rare moments before clarity floods back in and he snaps back to reality, so tense that he aches all over as his breath hitches in his throat.

He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here.

The only thing he knows, with any certainty at all, is that he wants to go home.

His throat aches, the only thing that keeps him grounded as silence rings in his ears and his chest moves up and down, up and down, and he lives. He feels like he shouldn’t be alive, at this point. He feels like he should’ve died by now. But he hasn’t, and so he’s here, and he’s alive.

“Fuckin’ rude,” he says out loud, talking to himself like a crazy person. Like he’s gone insane or something. That concept brings a smile to face, pulling at his cracked lips until he tastes blood on his tongue, and he suddenly feels so thirsty that he thinks it’s all that he has ever been. “Those losers probably just don’t know what to do now that they’ve got me where they want.”

He tilts his head against the wall he has his back pressed to, staring up at the blank white ceiling and blinding himself on the hot flare of fluorescent lights, and lets out an exhausted laugh. It echoes like a gunshot, prickling down his spine with nothing but the sound of it, and he can’t help it: he laughs again, louder, and then again and again until there are tears in his eyes. His vision blurs, nothing but the plain white expanse of white stretching on and on forever before him.

He starts to cry.
It's hopeless and it's pitiful, but he can’t claim to have ever been anything else. He barely remembers what his life was like before all of this. He barely remembers what it felt like to smile in a way that wasn’t mocking, how to laugh in a way that didn’t end in even more pain. The cut on his throat stings and the bruises on his neck ache and he thinks that death would be better than this. 

What’s the point?, he wonders. What’s the point of any of this?

He closes his eyes.

He falls asleep, at some point. He falls asleep, and, when he wakes up, there’s a plate of food in front of him.

It's hot and tempting and just the sight of it makes his mouth water, but he swallows hard and forces himself to look away, asking out loud, “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

No response.

“How do I know that this isn’t drugged?” Katsuki continues, and has the twisting realization that he is so, so hungry. “I’m not stupid, asshole. I’m not eating this.”

No response.

Katsuki spits out, “Fuck you.”

No response.

Suddenly furious, Katsuki lurches to his feet and kicks the plate as hard as he can, sending it flying across the room. The food spins in all different directions, landing on the floor with a sickeningly wet splat!, while the plate itself hits the wall and shatters into pieces, jagged shards of ceramic that catch the light as they burst from the point of impact like the shrapnel of a bomb.

Katsuki stares at the destruction, breathing hard, and then slowly sinks back to the ground. He brings his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them. He puts his head down.

He has the fleeting thought that he’s going insane, and then wonders, vaguely, if he already has.

He dreams of faces. He dreams of his family. They stand before him and smile, but they’re nothing but reflections in a pond, and they disappear when he reaches out to touch them.

Their mouths move, but he can’t hear them. He can’t hear anything.

His tears drip into the water, sending ripples across the surface, dissolving the images of the people that he loves. 

He wakes up.

A plastic plate, the kind you’d give to a child, with a cup of water beside it. A note written in scratchy handwriting that he doesn’t recognize. An aching sense of loss in his chest, eating away at him from the inside-out and leaving him hollow. The hunger in his stomach is a dull roar, clouding his thoughts as he stares down at the food before him, and he gives a weak shake of his head.

He stands up and moves away, stumbles into the corner and collapses into it, presses his back against the wall as he says, “No.” He says, still staring at the food, “I’m not eating that.”

He’s met with nothing but silence, cold and unforgiving.

Something inside of him begins to break.

When he was younger, Katsuki liked to operate on the mistaken belief that he was invincible. That he was the strongest. That, no matter what, he would come out on top.

But he was wrong. He knows that now. 

He wants to say that. He wants to say that he’s learned his lesson, that he knows, that he’s ready to be let out now. That he’d even be willing to apologize for being so fucking stupid for thinking that he was anything other than weak. Weak and useless and easily broken. 

He knows. He knows, he knows, he knows.

There’s no food when he wakes up. There’s no water. There’s not even a note. 

I’m sorry, he wants to say, but the words are stuck in his aching throat, itching with healing bruises. He doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t want to think about what it means that he’s been here long enough for his injuries to start healing. I’m sorry.

He manages to say it, “I’m sorry,” and it comes out no louder than a whisper. 

And it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, nothing changes.

The lights glare down on him, threading their burn into his veins until it’s all that he feels, all that he has ever known. Katsuki closes his eyes, but he doesn’t sleep. He can’t even do that anymore.

Nobody comes.