Work Text:
Midoriya Izuku was a sleepwalker.
It wasn’t something he liked to broadcast – it was a bit embarrassing after all, so why go out of his way to divulge something like that when it wasn’t necessary?
When they moved into the dorms, he did consider bringing the matter up, but decided to wait until things calmed down a bit to figure out the best way to approach it.
Unfortunately…fate doesn’t look kindly on such procrastination.
A couple days after moving in, Kirishima saw Midoriya wandering down into the common room in the middle of the night.
“You also have trouble sleeping in a new place, huh?” Kirishima asked, taking a chug of his water bottle. “Even though they gave us a lot of freedom in planning our spaces, it still feels a bit different to be away from home like this.”
“I have to find Kacchan,” Midoriya said.
“What? I think he’s sleeping right now.”
Kirishima put the water bottle on the counter and walked a bit closer. There was something odd about Midoriya. His eyes were unfocused and he didn’t seem very steady on his feet. Almost like he was in a trance of some kind. Had he been hit by a Quirk? Where and when?
“Midoriya…”
Midoriya walked right past him, ignoring Kirishima’s presence entirely. He was still muttering something about ‘Kacchan’, but the words kept slurring together, incoherent.
“Hey, we saved him, remember? Bakugou’s here, in the dorms.”
Midoriya had been most heavily affected by the whole kidnapping incident, and now he was decidedly acting oddly. Kirishima shouldn’t let him out of his sight-
Suddenly Midoriya was almost at the genkan, clearly with the intention of leaving the dorm.
“Whoa whoa whoa, wait up! What’s going on with you?”
Kirishima grabbed Midoriya’s shoulder to stop him, but had to let go immediately when green lightning crackled beneath his palm. It disappeared as soon as it had manifested and Kirishima had managed to harden his hand in time, but it still put him on his guard. Midoriya, on the other hand, lost his balance and fumbled blindly for something to hold on to. The chair he had grabbed clattered loudly on the floor as the boy joined it, landing on his behind.
“Uh…you good?” Kirishima tested the waters, but didn’t try to get closer.
Midoriya didn’t react immediately, blinking a couple times before gasping and looking around like he was seeing the room for the first time in his life.
“Kirishima-kun, what’s… oh no.”
A scarred hand crept up Midoriya’s neck and into his hair, grasping at the messy curls tightly as his face grew red.
“Is everything okay? We heard some noise…”
Tokoyami and Aoyama emerged from the stairwell, and Jirou was following close behind. Her sharp ears had probably picked up on the sounds even from the third floor.
“Well…”
“Everything’s fine!”
Midoriya jumped on his feet, still beet red but with a smile on his lips. He bent to pick up the chair he had taken down with him.
“I just wasn’t paying attention and fell! Kirishima-kun tried to warn me. Sorry for waking you, we’re all good! You’re okay too, aren’t you, Kirishima-kun?”
While his words were meant to sound reassuring, he was speaking a bit too fast and his pitch was a bit too feverish to be very convincing.
“Uh…yeah, no problems here. But are you sure that-”
“Oh it’s so late! Better head back to bed,” Midoriya speed-walked past his classmates and towards the stairs.
“You guys should go to sleep too! Goodnight! Sorry again!”
The four remaining students didn’t say anything for a while after Midoriya had scurried up the stairs. Then Jirou broke the silence.
“I’m not the only one who didn’t buy that, right?”
“So…yeah. I walk in my sleep sometimes,” Izuku confessed the next morning. A handful of students were gathered in the common room, mostly those who had woken up during the commotion during the night.
“But Kiri said you had your eyes open and everything!” Kaminari protested.
“Well that’s how it works ,” Jirou cut in before Izuku managed to answer. “Did you think people walk around with their eyes closed like in cartoons?”
“Man, I don’t know! I’ve never actually seen it happen.”
“Kyouka-chan is right,” Asui said. “All of my siblings, myself included, used to sleepwalk as kids. It can be unnerving to witness for the first time, but it’s not all that uncommon.”
‘As kids’ being the keyword, Izuku thought and suppressed a wince. He’d really been holding on to hope that he had left the habit behind him when he entered UA.
“A-anyway,” he flashed a small smile, “you don’t really need to worry about it. Usually I just wander around a little and might put some things in the wrong place, but that’s about it. You don’t need to try to do anything special.”
“Midoriya, you were gonna walk right out the door last night,” Kirishima said. “You were talking about- I don’t know where you would have gone.”
This was admittedly a surprise to Izuku, but he decided to keep calm.
“I still wouldn’t be able to get out of campus, the security system here is good. I’m sorry for worrying everyone, but it’s really okay.” He got up from his chair.
“Like Asu- Tsuyu-chan said, it’s not a big deal. Right?”
Izuku hoped that was the last time he needed to address the topic in a while.
Katsuki remembered the first time he had seen Izuku walking in his sleep.
It was a bit before his Quirk appeared. Izuku had been spending the night at the Bakugous while his mother had gone to take care of her own ailing father in a different prefecture. Everything had gone like you would expect a kids’ sleepover to go, until Katsuki woke up to the sounds of someone moving in his room. He opened his eyes and saw that Izuku was standing in the open doorway, looking a bit lost.
“Izuku?” Katsuki rubbed his eyes blearily. “You need to pee?”
Izuku didn’t show any signs of having heard Katsuki – he simply wandered out of the room and into the hallway. Katsuki looked at the empty doorway for a few moments before clicking his tongue in annoyance and throwing his blanket aside.
He found Izuku in the hall, barefoot and clutching the hem of his All Might pyjamas with one hand.
“What’s up? Did you forget where the bathroom is?” No reply.
Katsuki wasn’t a kid that took kindly to being ignored. When he saw Izuku take a hesitant step towards the staircase that led downstairs, his minuscule patience ran out and he moved to grab the other boy’s hand.
“No silly, upstairs bathroom . Gimme your-”
The moment Katsuki’s hand wrapped around Izuku’s wrist, Izuku recoiled from the touch and yanked his hand away. Trying to regain his balance, his foot slipped over the edge and Izuku tumbled down the stairs.
Katsuki couldn’t do anything but stare, unable to process what had even happened. The noise was followed by a few long, long seconds of silence – and then the sound of Izuku wailing like a banshee.
Mitsuki and Masaru appeared in the hallway, the former running down the stairs as the latter turned on the overhead light.
“Oh my goodness…”
“What happened?”
“Katsuki, did you push him!?”
“I did NOT!”
“Masaru, the emergency number!”
“It’s already ringing!”
Luckily, Izuku had managed to fall in that relaxed style that only children and drunks (and sleep-drunk children) were so good at – the doctors didn’t find anything broken and even his concussion proved to be very mild. Izuku couldn’t remember anything about the whole affair except being startled and kind of disoriented throughout, not comprehending why Katsuki’s parents woke him up repeatedly for the rest of the night.
The whole thing did leave an impression on Katsuki, though. He firmly avoided interacting with Izuku in any way when he witnessed him walking around at night, though unable to stop himself from being aware of the other’s movements.
Once during a class trip in middle school, Katsuki himself was on his way back from a nightly toilet trip when he ran into Izuku at the entrance of the boys’ room. All biting words died on his tongue when Izuku looked straight at him – no, through him – with empty eyes before turning the other way without any indication he had even noticed Katsuki.
Katsuki saw him wandering in the direction of the girls’ room, and his fingers twitched momentarily before he pulled his hands into fists and returned to his futon just before the screams from the girls’ room woke up the entire class.
That was the last time he heard of any incidents concerning Izuku’s odd habit until Kirishima brought it up during Katsuki and Izuku’s house arrest period.
“So, Midoriya was sleepwalking the other night and-”
“What, STILL?!”
Katsuki regretted his response immediately when he saw Kirishima’s face light up a little in understanding.
“So you did know he does that.”
“Like I could not know,” Katsuki huffed, trying to bring his focus back on counting his lifts. The reason why he had come to the other’s room in the first place was to burn some energy since he couldn’t go out and train properly.
“Do you know any good methods to deal with it then? I kind of got a bit panicked there and grabbed him when it looked like he was going to go outside…”
Katsuki’s dumbbell hit the floor unexpectedly, but the sounds that echoed in his mind were that of a body hitting every third step on its way down.
“Whoa, you okay Bakugou?”
Waving off Kirishima’s concern, Katsuki urged him to continue his earlier point.
“Well…I kind of looked into it, just in case it ever happened again.” Kirishima rubbed the back of his neck. “Turns out touching him out of the blue really wasn’t the best idea. You’re meant to…more like reassure the person and guide them back to bed.”
Katsuki stared at Kirishima for a moment before catching himself and picking the dumbbell up again.
“Sometimes you’re smarter than you look, Shitty hair.”
So there were actual guidelines for dealing with that. Huh.
It was unbelievably obvious in hindsight, but Katsuki hadn’t ever really considered it.
In the end, seasons changed and the need to test this newfound knowledge didn’t become apparent. When Izuku did eventually disappear, it was a conscious decision he made while wide awake – sleeping people generally didn’t take their mentor with them or write a bunch of personalised goodbye letters to their classmates before making themselves scarce.
It wasn’t until summer had rolled around again, society clawing its way back from the brink of collapse, that Katsuki woke up to an eerie feeling that something was…off.
He turned on the bedside light, but nothing about his room was out of the ordinary. He glanced out the window, checked his phone for the time (2:38am) and then slipped out of bed and into the corridor.
The dorms were quiet, motion-detecting lights blinking on and causing Katsuki to squint as he walked down the stairs. Approaching the lowest floor, he saw that the lights were already on.
Izuku was roaming around the kitchen island, opening random cupboards and taking out pots and pans that he collected on the counter. He had also taken out a bottle of mugicha and put a dish rag over it. He kept muttering to himself and Katsuki could only catch a bit here and there.
‘Birthday party’. ‘Hurry’. ‘Everyone’.
‘What if…no one comes?’
In reality, there wasn’t a shred of doubt that all of their class, not to mention many, many others, would come to the party meant to celebrate Izuku’s birthday about twelve hours later. The fridge was full of food that the class had helped prepare, and decorations were already all over the common room. It was at no stage kept a secret from the main character of the occasion.
But that wasn’t the world that Izuku was living in, right now. He was inhabiting a different version of himself, probably stemming from his younger years, anxiously preparing for guests that may not even bother to show up.
Katsuki’s musings came to a standstill when he noticed a big knife on the counter, just behind the tea. Right. As someone who had full awareness of the situation, he had a responsibility to make sure this went as smoothly as possible.
“I-zuku.”
Katsuki’s voice broke a little (from disuse! Not because he was nervous!) but still had the desired effect. Izuku stopped stacking the pans and turned to look in the direction of Katsuki’s voice. Good. He probably wouldn’t actually recognise Katsuki, but getting a reaction at all was already more than Katsuki had expected.
“Izuku, I got it. It’s okay. C’mere,” he tried, briefly waving his arm like he was calling a dog until he realised what it looked like and returned his hand to his side. He felt unbelievably stupid doing this. If anyone saw, they would be dead meat.
Izuku was standing still, swaying very lightly on his feet as he stared in Katsuki’s general direction. His eyes did look pretty unsettling when they were blank like that.
“Come here, Izuku. Everything’s fine. The party is ready. I got it.”
He didn’t want to introduce too complicated concepts in the one-sided conversation since Izuku may not even be aware of what he was being told. Frustratingly, Izuku showed no signs of coming closer, although Katsuki’s words seemed to hold his attention somewhat.
Suddenly, Katsuki got an idea – something that would have the best chance of getting through to Izuku even in his somnambulist state.
“I need your help with something.”
That did seem to do the trick. Izuku let out a little exhale and took a hesitant step towards Katsuki.
“Yeah, that’s it. Come on over here, help me out.”
It was slow and nerve-wracking work, but he eventually managed to get Izuku into the elevator (no way he was risking stairs) and to the nerd’s own room. At one point, he had very carefully pressed a hand against Izuku’s back, making sure to wipe excess sweat in his pant leg beforehand, and helped to guide Izuku in the right direction. Happily the other had simply followed his lead, not reacting at all to the contact.
When they made it to Izuku’s room, Katsuki urged him to go back to bed. When Izuku was finally under the covers, eyes closed instead of that empty stare, Katsuki told him:
“I need you to stay put right there, you get it? Stay here.”
Izuku let out a sound that could maybe be considered affirmative, and tension bled out of Katsuki’s shoulders with a deep sigh.
Well, almost. He knew he wouldn’t be able to just go to his own room and sleep soundly after this, imagining the nerd jumping out of bed again at any given moment.
It was past 3am and Katsuki needed his beauty sleep or the world would suffer in the morning. He had no brain bandwidth left, so he just went for the simplest solution: climbing into the bed with Izuku. It was perfect – Izuku was sandwiched between the wall and Katsuki’s body, so he wouldn’t be able to sneak out unnoticed, Katsuki got a chance at a decent rest, and all disasters were avoided.
Oh, one more thing.
“Happy birthday, Izuku,” Katsuki muttered to the other’s ear before giving in to sleep.
Heh. First .