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Kacchan is lying supine on the floor of the basketball court. The class presses in around him. A buzz weaves through the crowd, building the longer Kacchan is still.
“Back, give me some room here,” Mr. Hamada nudges aside a few stragglers, the school nurse at his heels. The students shuffle and part.
“I, I didn’t mean to,” Doi—the tall boy with a Quirk that can harden anything he touches—whimpers. “It was an accident, I wasn’t aiming for him, I swear!”
The emergency services are called. Doi starts crying and muttering about jail and innocence and legal rights.
Izuku’s fingers are numb and tingling as he watches Kacchan get carried away on a stretcher. He thinks, any moment now, Kacchan’s eyes will snap open and he’ll start another one of his tirades about victory and how he’s going to be Number One. He doesn’t; the EMTs exchange a few words and turn a corner. A hush falls over the class.
“He’ll be alright,” says Mr. Hamada unconvincingly. He claps his hands. Several people jump. “We still have twenty-five minutes left; let’s get back to work.”
“Right temporal lobe lesion,” the nurse says when Izuku comes to visit. “Retrograde amnesia; disturbance of visual and auditory input selection; loss of inhibition of speech.”
Izuku doesn’t understand the meaning of half of these terms. He pulls out his phone and takes a few minutes to bite his thumbnail and type each one into the search engine.
Izuku taps a knuckle against the door labeled 345. “It’s me,” he says, then remembers retrograde amnesia and goes to add his name, but hesitates and considers whether Kacchan will recognize ‘Deku’ better. Kacchan beats him to it and says—
“Izuku.”
Izuku holds his breath. The handle is cool against his sweaty palm.
He slowly pokes his head into the room, and the first thing he catches is that Kacchan lacks his perpetual scowl.
Then Kacchan smiles at him, and Izuku turns back around and shuts the door.
“Sorry about that,” Izuku says once he’s finished freaking out and washed his face in the hospital bathroom three times. “I just… got a little nervou—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kacchan interrupts, then purses his lips. His wheat blond hair sticks to one side of his head and explodes out the other. “I can’t really, uh… the doctor said my—”
“Inhibition of speech, I know.”
Kacchan’s mouth slides into a grin. Izuku goes red.
Kacchan barks a laugh. “‘You get bonked on the head too, huh?” he teases—teases!
Izuku fumbles. He tries for a smile but his lips tremble. If his eyes get any wider, they’re going to fall out of his head and roll off. He doesn’t know if that would be better than watching the soft slope of Kacchan’s shoulders and the easy arch to his eyebrows.
Izuku can’t count how many times he’s imagined this: a moment where Izuku and Kacchan exist in each other’s space without sparks or sneers or fumes. He didn’t count on the falling. The shifting of something fundamental to the universe—as if someone reached across and angled the floor a few degrees above zero so that Izuku has to rethink every step.
Izuku clenches the fingers of his right hand rhythmically. “So, um. How much do you— you remember—”
“Nothing. Well, I remember you, if that’s what you’re asking. And Mom and Dad, and Tsubasa, Kariage, Tesaki, and everyone at school. Kindergarten. Ms. Imai and Mr. Yamaguchi. But nothing about what happened, really.”
Izuku blinks. Frowns. “That’s about ten years missing, they didn’t—?”
“Oh, check this out!” Kacchan turns his palms up and pops a few explosions. They wash his face in an orange glow. He looks delighted, the same way he did that day his Quirk manifested and all the kids and teachers ooh-ed and aah-ed and told him he was going to be an amazing hero. “Wicked, right?”
“Y-yeah.”
“I’m gonna be the Number One Hero,” Kacchan declares, and for the first time his face twists into something Izuku is familiar with. It sends a little rush of relief down Izuku’s chest.
“I know,” he says. The smile comes easy, this time.
“Though I guess you already know.” Kacchan drops his hands, then scratches at the bandage around his head. “Hey, what’s your Quirk?”
And all at once, it slots into place. Kacchan doesn’t know. He doesn’t know.
Izuku should probably tell him, but he finds himself clinging to the few moments he spent in this room, light and easy as they were. How likely is it that Kacchan would drop Izuku’s Quirk into a conversation with someone else?
Izuku rubs his hot palms on his pants. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how Kacchan would act, because he doesn’t know Kacchan anymore.
He presses his tongue against his teeth. “I don’t have one,” he braves.
Kacchan’s smile slips, and his brows furrow. There it is.
Izuku kicks his toe at the squeaky floor. He tries not to hold his breath.
“… That sucks.”
Izuku grabs the door handle. He realizes he is still standing in the doorway. The hallway behind him bustles with nurses and patients and waiting families. “Yeah…”
Kacchan sniffs. “I kind of feel like something sweet, but the doctor said keeping my glucose stable is good or something. To prevent secondary insults, I don’t know. Do you wanna get something from the machine?”
“Oh, uh, sure,” Izuku says unsurely.
Kacchan stands up, and he doesn’t wobble. Naturally. Izuku, meanwhile, spends an awkward moment dithering between stepping aside for Kacchan or passing into the hall first.
Kacchan’s mouth twitches, a twinkle in his eye. Izuku blushes again, wondering if it was he who received the head injury of the century.
Izuku walks side-by-side with Kacchan, and Kacchan doesn’t try to outpace him, doesn’t sneer, doesn’t scoff or make a jab or get angry. Izuku must have turned to check a dozen times. He stops when Kacchan dryly tells him that his Quirk might be owl-related after all.
Kacchan’s pace is languid. He still moves with the same swagger; but without the slouch and the pinched face, Izuku suspects someone somewhere else just woke up with an urge to call people extras and display a rage that makes volcanoes ashamed to erupt. The effect of some obscure Quirk, maybe.
After Izuku pays for the blueberry muffin Kacchan pointed to, Kacchan carefully crouches to reach his hand through the slot, the other one braced on the glass of the vending machine. That’s probably going to smudge.
Kacchan rises back up, slow and balanced as a surfer. He says, “Thank you,” and Izuku’s brain bluescreens.
“Stop,” Izuku says.
Kacchan stops. The muffin wrapper crinkles in his hand. “What?”
“Stop. Don’t do that.”
Kacchan’s nose wrinkles. “What?” He says again. “You mean the muffin? I won’t die, you know. The doctor already took out the ICP and glucose monitors a—”
“No, I meant…” Izuku tastes the air, acerbic with floor cleaner and disinfectant, as it brushes against the edges of his nasal cavity, his trachea. He glimpses the crimson of Kacchan’s glazed eyes and sees nothing barbed or jagged or biting. “… Never mind. Sorry— I don’t know what came over me.”
Kacchan nods like this makes any sense. He’s probably just being polite about Izuku’s blunder, though that doesn’t fit right in Izuku’s head.
Nothing is fitting right in Izuku’s head. He read once that the image retinas recieve is initially upside-down because of the curvature of the lens. The brain rights the image. Izuku thinks his brain didn’t right anything. Or maybe the world has been upside-down, and Izuku’s brain is still trying to find the right side up.
Kacchan squeezes the clear wrapping. It pops open.
Izuku startles, even though he watched Kacchan’s fingers, saw what was coming.
And that’s it, isn’t it? That’s all it comes down to. Kacchan’s fingers. Kacchan’s face, Kacchan’s movements—the sounds he starts in the world around him, the unrest he brings. The shaking of the walls, of Izuku’s hands, his chest. Locked knees, sweating palms, skittering thoughts. That’s what he does.
Then he forgot it all, and he woke up and it was still for the first time in thousands of afternoons.
Izuku inhales and counts to nine. Kacchan devours the muffin and Izuku stares at the shape of a hand smeared on the glass in front of him.
He thinks, any moment now, his eyes will snap open and it will all have been another one of his bitterly sweet dreams.
A few days after Kacchan is discharged from the hospital, he invites Izuku to grab a bite at ‘this nice place Mom told me about. It sells cheesecakes in tall glasses.’
Izuku clutches at his phone and hesitates, wondering if Kacchan is going to pull a mean prank or stand him up, but the silence on the other end ultimately makes that decision for him.
The café is dunked in amber. The smell of fresh pastries curls through flowers and vines that crisscross high and low on the walls, clinging to shelves stacked with rusty antiques and winding around wires of sunken ceiling fixtures. Cracked pots line the floors and wedge into corners. Izuku sidesteps a few and stumbles over a few more before he spots Kacchan’s haloed hair—evenly porcupine-bristly again—among gardenias and daffodils.
About a minute after he sets down on the worn cushions, Izuku suspects this was a mistake; he could barely handle Kacchan with a muffin, and now Kacchan is sitting across from him and animatedly debating which cheesecake flavor to try first.
The doctor cleared him for sweets. Not that it would’ve stopped him if she hadn’t.
“—among the top twenty fruits in antioxidant capacity and are a good source of manganese and potassium. You know, you should see if they’re hiring,” Kacchan interrupts his own spiel—it was about the benefits of strawberries. Izuku does not remember Kacchan ever knowing this much about strawberries.
When Kacchan only looks at him, sly, Izuku cautiously says, “Why?”
Kacchan’s smile creeps up, his eyes gleaming like he’s been waiting his whole life to land this joke. “You’d fit right in with the plants.”
Izuku bites his tongue. It doesn’t stop the hysterical giggle that rises up his throat.
Kacchan’s grin unfurls, and the waiter finds them both doubled over and gasping.
“Maybe they’ll pay you extra. You’ll become the café mascot.” Kacchan’s teeth glint in the moonlight.
Izuku rolls his eyes. He kicks a bottle cap across the street. “It was only funny the first time.”
Kacchan squints at him—a blazing, fleeting orange under the passing streetlight. “Then why are you smiling now?”
Izuku huffs and shoves at Kacchan’s shoulder. “Because you’re ridiculous.”
“Bush. No, a tree. They’ll decorate you for Christmas.” Kacchan’s shoulders shake; the corners of his mouth quiver.
Izuku lobs his bag at him. Kacchan defends with his arms and peals of laughter drift in the air. Their shoes scuff against the asphalt. They almost kiss the pavement a couple times, but Kacchan’s quick reflexes save them.
Izuku’s belly hurts and his cheeks are sore. He skates along the feeling, dizzy with it.
“How come you still remember that?” Izuku asks when they’ve caught their breaths and fallen back into step with each other.
“Hm?”
“Movements. Just now. We almost fell, but you—” Izuku gestures vaguely in the air.
Kacchan lifts his chin. “Retrograde amnesia doesn’t affect muscle memory. You should’ve seen the look on Dad’s face when I unlocked my phone.”
“Huh. That’s convenient.”
“Yeah. I should probably thank Doi, y’know,” Kacchan clicks his tongue and mimes shooting a ball, “for aiming just right.”
Izuku snorts. “He’s terrible. He was aiming for me. I was halfway across the court.”
Kacchan’s smile wanes. “Seriously? They said it was a Quirk accident. What an asshole.”
Izuku stops walking. He’s got stones in his shoes, and one in his throat.
He shouldn’t have said that. He doesn’t know why he said that.
Kacchan pulls his hands out of his pockets. His face is open, honest. “Izuku?”
Izuku jolts. This is only the second time Kacchan has called him by his name since they were five years old. But Kacchan doesn’t know that, does he? Somewhere between the strawberries and the laughter, Izuku forgot, too.
“Don’t call me that,” Izuku blurts. He is a wax figurine, a hyperrealistic sculpture that is real until you touch it. And his chest thunders. His airways clog with fog.
Kacchan is finally scowling, but it doesn’t look the same. His eyes are wide, shoulders climbing. He’s almost pouting.
“Well why not? You call me—”
“Kacchan. You used to call me something else.”
Kacchan’s shoulders loosen. “Oh, what, like ‘Izuchan?’” He nudges Izuku with his elbow, gentle, gentle.
“No. Like ‘Deku.’”
Kacchan opens his mouth. The silence between them stretches endless.
Izuku squeezes his bag with stiff fingers. The metro station is still ten minutes away.
Kacchan’s throat bobs. “What, like—like a joke?”
Izuku shakes his head, then keeps shaking it. “Like you bully me. Like you burn my notebooks and hide my things. And call me horrible names.”
Kacchan’s hands flex. “Is this a joke? Huh? ‘Cause it’s not funny. You’re not funny.”
“Screw you. It’s not a joke.” Izuku is frigid to the bone and on fire all at once. He thinks he could melt right through the street and below, permafrost and lithosphere and mantle, and freeze the core of the Earth.
Their heavy breaths break into the night. Izuku watches the motes drift under the streetlight and wishes he could touch them.
Kacchan takes a step back, then another. “Fuck you,” he spits.
Then he’s spinning around and he’s going, going, going, gone.
In his bed, Izuku hides under the All Might blankets and cries—big, heaving sobs—until all the air runs out and he has to open a little pocket to breathe.
He thinks about the many nights he’s spent this way, and nothing has changed at all.
Kacchan can’t just forget that. Kacchan can’t forget when Izuku has to live with it for the rest of his life.
The brush of Kacchan’s skin against his lingers. Izuku scrubs at his arms till they’re white, then red, then yellow. Tomorrow they’ll dawn blue.
Izuku falls asleep thinking about laughter-aches and stitches and bubbling and soaring.
Izuku steps into class the Monday after that, and Kacchan’s feet are on his desk. He’s looking down his nose at the girl a seat over.
Izuku hooks one ankle behind another and plummets.
“The hell are you looking at, Deku?” Kacchan snarls when Izuku gapes up at him from the ground.
Izuku says nothing. He feels a tension in his cheeks and a collapsing in his chest.
Kacchan glowers at him, through him, for three yawning heartbeats. Izuku is skewered and out of breath. His brain gives a long creak and a start—and there, before him, the serrated edges of Kacchan’s shape come into sharp view. Izuku didn’t think it was possible to miss a certain type of burning.
Then Kacchan juts his chin, flares his nostrils, and curls his lip. “That’s right. Stay down there where you belong.”
There is a scattering of hoots and cackles. Izuku realizes that he is grinning.