Work Text:
Izuku stares blankly out the balcony.
And wonders about the irony behind feeling empty. Beneath his ribcage a chasm has opened, hiding endless depths of nothingness. But if there’s truly nothing, why does it hurt so much? How could nothing hurt so much?
The world looks a little different without his hero in it. All of a sudden, the earth becomes nothing but a mere shape, a meaningless circle lacking texture and dimension. Once chartreuse where the sun hit their viridian slopes, the mountains lose their colour. Izuku stares at the pine trees bordering the streets below, the expanse of azure sky spanning over the backdrop and thinks,
everything is grey.
Against the monochrome of the world is a single butterfly. It lands on the railing of his balcony, wings a steady gradient of yellow to orange.
If he closes his eyes and imagines, they almost look like the colour of Kacchan’s explosions.
✺
Kacchan is wrapped in bandages but Izuku remembers how he’d looked with perfect clarity: the hollow circle where his ruby iris once was, the laceration that marred his side, mangled flesh and ruptured bone.
Next to him had been the All Might card they’d won as kids, covered in the red of his blood.
The devastation that Izuku feels now is much quieter, a contrast to that day at the battlefield. Everything had been so loud and vivid back then. He remembers the thud of pelting rain as the sky cried down on them, the rap of his fist as it met Shigaraki’s body. The muffled voices of his teachers and other heroes telling him to stop, Deku, please stop.
He wants to laugh at them now and ask, how do I go on? To say, I’ve stopped a long time ago, when Kacchan’s heart stopped too.
Most of all, Izuku remembers the sound of his own scream reverberating across the earth and echoing back at him. It was a sound so foreign to himself it made him realise Kacchan is capable of drawing that from his throat. Only Kacchan.
Izuku sits next to Kacchan’s bed where his motionless body lies and places the flowers he’d brought in the vase.
They’re orange chrysanthemums.
✺
“You’ve lost weight,” says Inko, her warm hands feeling around Izuku’s curves and edges, “you need to eat.”
“I’m sure that’s what you’re here for,” he responds with a placid smile, unloading the mountain of tupperware she’d brought onto plates and bowls that are months unused.
Truth be told, he hasn’t had much of an appetite recently. Scent and taste have been reduced to the smell of rotten flesh, the metallic taste of blood. But he digresses, his mother has come bearing his favourite meal after all, katsudon, and he isn’t about to disappoint her.
The first few bites are tasteless as Izuku simply goes through with the motion of eating. Soon enough, though, he begins to register the savouriness of dashi, the faint sweetness of mirin. With these flavours brings forth a memory from before the war, so sudden that it pours out of him against his will.
“Kacchan tried making me katsudon once. It was after the time I got dragged back to Yuuei. I teased him that it didn’t taste as good as yours,” he says, lips bent into a wobbly smile. “It came pretty close though.”
In a quiet voice, with her hand resting atop Izuku’s shoulder, Inko says, “Katsuki-kun had asked me for the recipe. He said it had to be perfect for when you returned.”
It’s right then that Izuku learns happiness and sadness can juxtapose each other, as saltwater tracks down his cheeks despite the smile that still brackets his mouth. That the warmth of a memory can stand right next to the coldness of absence. That emptiness is shaped like a knife, and cuts like one, too.
He thinks he’s laughing but the noise leaving his mouth sounds more like a sob. Leaning into his mother’s side, he asks, “Why am I like this?” Why do I feel like this?
“Oh honey,” weeps Inko, “sometimes, love and grief are just the same things.”
✺
The same butterfly reappears, perching itself on Izuku’s balcony, still and majestic.
He quickly vanishes into the kitchen and returns with a small dish of sugar water, balancing it precariously against where the railing meets the wall. As if examining its contents, the butterfly flutters above the dish for a few moments before extending its proboscis into the mixture and sipping it.
Izuku’s breath hitches in his throat at the butterfly’s wings, iridescent where they’ve caught the outside sunlight, shifting from tones of canary to butter to tangerine in mere seconds. Orange like fire, like the highlights in Kacchan’s battle costume.
This has to be a sign from the universe. Izuku’s heart is sinking, skin is crawling. He is a million fissures breaking across the surface, a million convulsions proliferating beneath the earth. At the brightest point of sunlight, the butterfly’s wings transform, deepening into the shade of ruby. Izuku looks at it as if he’s looking into Kacchan’s eyes.
“How could you expect me to be a hero?” he asks the butterfly, voice hoarse, desperate, angry.
But he could never be angry at the butterfly, nor at Kacchan. If there’s anyone Izuku is angry at, it’s himself.
For not saving the one person who matters most.
“How could you expect me to be a hero, in a world without you in it?”
✺
In the vase on Kacchan’s bedside table, the flowers are wilting.
And on Kacchan’s patient monitor, the crests and troughs of his heartbeat have flattened into a single line.
Izuku’s whole world collapses and he’s crying so hard he can’t see beyond his tears. Can’t see the doctors and nurses pressing the defibrillator onto Kacchan’s chest, as if electric currents could revive the precise spark in his eyes. Can’t see the tangle of tubes and wires attached to Kacchan’s lifeless body, jumping in tandem with each slam of the defibrillator. Can’t see Shouto freezing up next to him, and Kacchan’s parents absolutely losing it, screaming crying begging, please give him back. Please give my son back.
He’s just a child.
It isn’t until the line on the monitor bends into a wave, until Kacchan’s chest begins its slow, steady rhythm of rise and fall, that Izuku ducks out of the ward. He throws up on an empty stomach and sinks onto the floor, surrounded by his own pool of vomit.
This is worse. So much worse than any hit he’s ever taken. Izuku thinks he could relive Shigaraki’s fingers decaying his epidermis infinite times if it means never having to go through this again.
The door opens and out walks Shouto. He crouches in front of Izuku, cupping his face in his hands. Izuku tries to shake him off because he’s a mess of tears-snot-vomit and it’s repulsive but that only makes Shouto tighten his grip.
“He’s okay now,” says Shouto, “he’s gonna be okay.”
Yes, Izuku wants to say, he knows Kacchan is alive. The machines and world-class doctors make sure of it. But what about what makes Kacchan Kacchan? Is he still there? That cocksure grin, that hearty laugh Izuku had been so fucking lucky to be on the receiving end of. That inferno of passion and defiance swirling in his ruby irises, blinding everyone else to the quiet insecurity belying underneath. What matters if Kacchan’s body is still alive, held up by strings and puppeteers, when Izuku doesn’t have a clue if what’s inside has already disappeared?
If he was too late.
He must have cried the words out because Shouto moves his fingers to jab at Izuku’s chest instead, other hand grasping at his own.
“Here,” he says, gesturing to their hearts underneath his palms, “our memory of him lives here forever. This is something the world can’t take away from us.”
✺
The butterfly’s visits become a routine.
Izuku has even bought a feeder, mounting it onto the ceiling for the butterfly to sip from whenever it gets hungry.
It’s strange, the quiet solace that this butterfly brings. Izuku doesn’t know how to put it into words. It’s as if Kacchan’s energy has morphed and shifted into a winged animal, and people might call him insane for thinking so but Izuku wants to believe it. Wants to believe its swift movements and fire-like appearance are a gift from the universe, even if he doesn’t deserve it.
Izuku reaches his hand out and to his surprise, the butterfly flutters towards him, landing on his finger. Against a sunset sky its wings take on the colour of honey, sweet like the warmth unfurling in his veins as an old memory strikes him again.
“When we were kids, he and I used to go to the forest and catch butterflies together,” says Izuku.
Wistful doesn’t seem quite enough to describe how he feels. There is happiness behind this childhood memory, and also sadness at how it’s a thing of the past.
“He’d make a competition out of it. Of course I’d always lost, because Kacchan is simply better at everything he does.”
When Izuku shuts his eyes, he can still recall tiny feet padding through leafy floors, mini hands coiled around aerial nets, swishing haphazardly at winged kaleidoscopes fluttering about the air. The innocent laughter that rang through the jungle, high and pealing, unaware of the perils that the world would eventually bring.
A confession lies on the tip of his tongue. “It didn’t matter though, because it was never the butterflies I was watching,” he admits.
It was him. I was always watching him.
✺
It’s just another day, the butterfly on his balcony a single drop of colour in this black-and-white world. Izuku is watching it hover above the new pot of marigolds he’d bought when his phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Izuku, this is Masaru here. Katsuki, he- he’s woken up.”
Phone almost slipping from his trembling fingers, Izuku turns around to look at his balcony.
The butterfly is gone.