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I.
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.”
He doesn’t talk about it.
In the morning, Denki says thank you. He hugs Katsuki, arms loose and light and all Katsuki thinks is like feathers (nothing like Denki) and he’s too bewildered to snap his jaws and shove him off like usual.
Denki says thank you and he smiles—makes himself smile—eyelids puffed up and round, and he leaves, and he doesn’t talk about it.
And since he doesn’t talk about it, they don’t talk about it.
In class, Katsuki peeks at him, looks at him, tries not to watch him and watches him, spies his neck where his collar is pulled up high and his hair is brushing soft against slivers of flesh, pulling taut when he turns or stretches or bows his head. Katsuki still sees the bruises. He will never stop seeing them.
In his head, there’s a laundry list of everything that could go wrong; every breathless side effect Katsuki knows of. He cycles through them, over and again, watching Denki and trying to convince himself not to watch him.
(Hoarse voice, coughing, painful swallowing, drooling, nausea, pain.
Lost voice, trouble breathing, blurred vision, headaches, vomiting, pain.
Hyperventilation, weakness, hearing impairment, memory loss, dizziness, pain.
Hallucinations, brain injury, blood clots, post-traumatic stress, incontinence, pain.
Bleeding inside, swelling, ruptured vessels—
Pulmonary edema, vomit in the lungs—
Stroke, cardiac arrest—
Dying, dying, dying, dying, dying.)
The bruises aren’t normal. Nothing is normal. How long was he held under, flailing for oxygen, flopping desperate as a fish? Katsuki pictures, unwillingly, bright cherry red skin, eyes bulging, mouth gaping and skin purpling, fingernails trying and failing to be claws. Was his quirk somehow deactivated?
Does Denki even know the danger he’s still in?
His eyes are glassy and unfocused and his posture is low and hunched, but no matter where he looks, Katsuki can’t read pain or fear or ache into his expression. He looks, maybe, blank. Maybe empty. Maybe just tired. He turns, meets Katsuki’s gaze so briefly (his right eye is spotted with red at the corner, Katsuki didn’t notice before, blood like a splash of diluted paint bursting across off-white), gestures to the front of the room with his thumb and then looks away again.
Stop staring at me, already, will you?
Something in Katsuki’s stomach shifts, sinking low. His face feels warm and his eyes feel hot.
For once, Katsuki does as he’s told.
II.
“You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.”
He wonders how Denki is going to make it through training (worries, he worries and can’t stop), but for one moment Denki is there picking listlessly at his lunch, and the next, Katsuki blinks, and he’s gone.
And if life were moving on as normal, he would be bitter and obnoxious about it. But life isn’t moving normally. It’s sideways, lateral, backwards, flipped upside down and tilting slowly upright again, bent and warped and inside out. Every breath he takes tastes like salt.
So, when Denki’s absence is noted, and their friends brace themselves in their typical way for Katsuki to rant and rave in his typical way, he doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t even look up from his food, hardly touched—has he always been such a hypocrite?—and doesn’t respond to the theatrical sighs of relief his silence is met with.
He’s never done worse at training in his life, and has probably never cared less. He doesn’t meet Izuku’s meaningful gaze when he’s lain out on his ass beneath him during hand-to-hand, and he doesn’t do anything but stare at All Might when he’s chastised for his lack of focus (mistakes, he keeps making mistakes, so out of character, Katsuki, what’s going on with you today?)
There’s a pit in his stomach, one that started out last night the size of a cherry’s and has ballooned, now, to a peach. Some faraway rational side of his brain knows that he should be acting normal, like himself, like nothing’s wrong. Like Denki is doing.
(And he does it so well, so well, too well.)
But Katsuki can’t listen to it. He can only stare blankly, mind repeating visions on a loop of things he’s never witnessed, images he’s never seen, and it makes gravity feel too heavy for him to care about performing the part of himself.
He can’t be anything other than the pit in his stomach.
III.
“People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.”
He is afraid, mostly, of a stroke. Of cardiac arrest. Something sudden and unexpected, something without a warning, something catching him while he’s alone and has nobody there to save him. That’s why Katsuki rushes through getting changed, brushes past his classmates and friends, and today he chooses to be thankful for his reputation as a firecracker with a non-existent fuse—the reputation that keeps most people at arms-length.
(It’s never worked on Denki, though.
Denki sees right through it, and he isn’t easy and sweet and kind-hearted about it like Eijirou, or laid-back and goofy and mellow like Hanta and Mina.
There is so much Katsuki could get away with if it weren’t for him.
Maybe he’ll keep that in mind the next time he wants to call him dumb for failing a test.)
Katsuki expects Denki to be hiding, locked away in his bedroom, rolled up in his comforter with the lights turned off. He doesn’t expect to find him sitting, thin blanket around his shoulders, cross-legged on the common room sofa and staring at the TV. Nothing plays on the screen. The only thing there is a faded reflection of himself sunken into dark gray.
When voices filter into the room and the TV flickers to life, so does Denki. Just like that.
There’s a knot in Katsuki’s chest, winding tight as he claims the spot right beside Denki before anyone else can. He feels like he’s breathing around rocks because I can’t say anything in front of the others, I can’t warn him, I can’t save him here, I need to do something.
In his head, he sees Denki, slumped over and slack-jawed, pale-skinned and still and dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.
Outside of it, Denki’s head falls onto Katsuki’s shoulder, warm and weighty and alive and real. His breath skates over the back of Katsuki’s hand on a sigh, and he can feel the expansion of his body as he inhales again, alive. Still alive.
Someday, maybe, Katsuki will take the time to think about the honesty of this day. The bitter and terrified truth he hasn’t even tried to ward off. The fear tightening every inch of his body while Denki, right there, breathes into his shoulder. The unimpeded fact that his life matters to Katsuki beyond his obligation as a hero to try and save everyone he can.
For now, he sits still without a word of complaint for Denki’s head on his shoulder, and when—after what feels like ages—the volume of the TV and the chatter finally rises high enough to obscure his own voice, he turns towards Denki’s ear and murmurs.
“You need to go to Recovery Girl.”
Denki offers no response for a moment. Then, the unmistakable feeling of a slow, shaking head. No. No. No. I’m not doing that. No.
It’s that, for some reason, that makes Katsuki’s vision blur up wetly, tears indignant and furious and helpless and desperate. He fights, hard, to blink them away, to breathe steadily.
He said he would fix it.
He said it would be taken care of.
(Idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot.)
Minutes later, another crescendo of excitable noise, and Katsuki’s chest feels like bursting when he speaks again, quiet and fast.
“You don’t have to tell her shit. I’ll kill her if she pushes. You need to go, Sparky.”
He swallows. There’s a lump in his throat and his stomach is heavy with nausea, his eyes still burning even as he holds the tears at bay.
“…Please.”
Denki is still. He is still, and breathing, and the volume in the room slowly sinks back to normal. He is warm and weighty and alive.
When enough time has passed that Katsuki believes Denki is ignoring him, that his no is final and that’s that, Denki lifts his head from Katsuki’s shoulder. They look at one another, eyes meeting, and though he doesn’t nod or speak, there is a resigned agreement in Denki’s face. A withdrawn plea.
His hands are curled tightly in the fabric of the blanket around him. He trembles, only visible because Katsuki is watching so closely, his skin pallid, a blackened bruise peeking from the lopsided edge of his collar.
And, oh, oh.
There it is.
There’s that pain.
IV.
“The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”