Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Katsuki wants to move in.”

Izuku paused, stain removing spray held in one hand, sponge held in the other. The t-shirt he happened to be wearing under his hero costume four weeks ago when that villain with the yo-yo Quirk clocked Izuku in the face hard enough to give him a nosebleed was on the laundry table beneath him as he attempted to clean the blood out of it. He was wearing only his boxers and a shirt that had more holes in it than it had material, because Izuku was busy and stressed and he was gone so often that he was pretty sure he hadn’t done laundry in at least four months and he was starting to smell like it.

“What?” he asked, ever the picture of dignity. His glasses slid down his nose when he looked up. The glasses were new, and irritating, but Izuku had been wearing his daily contacts for at least two weeks straight and his eyes were so bloodshot and aggravated that he had no choice but to bust out his wireframes. He could only wear them on his day off, anyway, since hero work and glasses didn’t mix well, so his eyes better enjoy the break while they got it.

“Katsuki wants to move in,” Shouto repeated, but in that quiet way he said things when he wasn’t sure about them.

And he definitely had cause to be uncertain, even if Izuku hated that he did. Izuku had been lucky that his best friend was Shouto and not somebody else. He didn’t think anyone else would have wanted to stay friends, after—

Izuku sat down his spray bottle to interrupt that train of thought, pushing his glasses back up his nose with the back of his wrist. “Here?”

That didn’t sound pleasant, but it was doable. Izuku was gone most of the time anyway—Hiroshima was a long train ride away, and he’d been primarily stationed there for a while now to pick up Miruko’s slack after she’d been forced into an early retirement, so most of the time it was easier to just…find other sleeping arrangements than it was to come all the way back home. Especially when coming back home meant uselessly watching Shouto and Kacchan’s relationship progress, when Izuku could be out in the streets kicking ass instead (including his own, more often than not).

“Together,” Shouto corrected. He sat down the iron and turned towards Izuku to signify this conversation was serious now. Imagine having a work life balance good enough that it leaves you enough time to iron your dress pants, Izuku thought, with a deranged little mental cackle, before he got his extremely frazzled brain back on track enough to finally connect the dots.

Together.

Shouto and Kacchan.

In the same apartment that was not this one, because they were dating, and that’s what dating people inevitably did.

“Oh,” Izuku said.

“The lease is up next month,” Shouto said, folding his arms across his chest. For what it was worth he at least looked sad about it. “I thought it would be as good a time as any to take him up on his offer.”

“You’re going to go live with him, then?” Izuku asked slowly, feeling dumb and stupid about the way his heart still twisted in pain and longing for what he used to have despite it being a year since everything went down.

He was happy for his friends.

“Yeah,” Shouto admitted softly, looking at his feet instead of at Izuku. “Yeah, I’m excited.”

“I’m excited too,” Izuku said, meaning it genuinely. “Wow. Moving in together. That’s a big step, yeah?”

“Technically we’ve lived together before.”

“At the dorms in high school, though.” Izuku forced himself to go back to working on removing the stain from his shirt, but his heart wasn’t in it anymore. “And you weren’t dating back then.”

Shouto hummed. “That’s true. I guess it is a big step.”

“You think it’ll work out?” Izuku asked. He knows it’s a ridiculous question. He’s seen the way they look at each other. He knows what they’ve been through together, growing closer and closer with each passing year as Izuku picked up more and more of the world and put it on his shoulders. Not even Kacchan understands why Izuku does what he does anymore.

Izuku thinks the only person that would understand is a smattering of ash in the wind under his favorite cedar tree.

“I think so,” Shouto said, before adding, “We’ll see how living together goes, first.”

“Don’t burn the place to the ground,” Izuku advised lightly, but his heart wasn’t in that, either.

“No promises.” He made an effort to joke too, but his heart also wasn’t in it.

That seemed about right for them in this last year.

Both of them fell into silence again. Izuku channeled some of his frustration into his brushing technique. Maybe if he scrubbed hard enough he could scrub the blood out of his shirt and the thoughts out of his head at the same time. If only I had been just a week sooner, Izuku thought, as he scrubbed. If only I knew how to keep my mouth shut when I knew I could only make things worse. If only I tried harder, if I was there more, if I didn’t—

“This could be a good thing for you, too, you know,” Shouto said.

The hiss of the iron brought Izuku back to the present, and he nearly leapt out of his skin. “What?”

“Why do you stay here?” Shouto asked. He lifted his pants up to inspect their press, but Izuku knew Shouto, so he recognized it as a way to hide what he really thought. That meant Shouto had some sort of ulterior motive. “You don’t work anywhere near here.”

“I’m an independent hero without a fixed agency and a license to roam! I’ll end up stationed back in this area eventually.”

“You’ve been working in Hiroshima for a year.”

“Nine months!”

“That’s three quarters of a year,” Shouto argued. “Nearly a whole year. Do you really see yourself leaving that city anytime soon?”

…Man, Izuku hated when people used logic on him.

“You’re only staying here because I’m here,” Shouto said, with the easy confidence of someone that knew they were right. “You don’t even live here, other than having your name on the lease and the half the money for the bills coming out of your pocket. You can move closer to where you work. Maybe then you can be less…” Shouto gestured to all of him.

Izuku rubbed his hand down his face, knocking his glasses off in the process because he forgot they were there, and then bent over to pick them up and put them back on. He couldn’t even protest Shouto’s assessment, since it was so obviously true.

And maybe he was right in more ways than one. It wasn’t like Izuku had anything to gain from staying here in an empty apartment hours away from where he worked. And having reminders of everything he’d lost floating around…wasn’t exactly going to help him, either. At least, it wasn’t going to help him where Shouto was concerned.

“You’re right,” Izuku said, as he straightened his glasses. “I’ll look for an apartment in Hiroshima. It’ll be good for me.”

Shouto nodded, just once. “Good.”

Maybe this would finally be enough.

Shouto liked to think that five years and a lot of experience dealing with him had given him insight into how exactly Izuku’s brain worked.

The rules seemed simple, once Shouto had figured them out. If Izuku said he was going to do something, he was going to do it. But also, if Izuku said he was going to do something, he was never in his life going to do it.

The dichotomy was because they were two very different activities.

If the thing Izuku was professing he would do had anything to do with winning, saving, or otherwise being heroic in some way shape or form, he would move mountains to make it happen. He would part the sea, he would climb to the heavens, he would fight until he couldn’t fight anymore, and then he would lift his head and belly crawl to the finish line if that was what he had to do.

On the flipside of things, if Izuku said he was going to do something that involved talking to other people, feelings, or gods forbid actually looking out for himself for once—then it was never going to get done.

It was for this reason that Shouto was in Hiroshima on his day off.

It wasn’t really a day off—it was just a day off from patrol. He’d had a photoshoot earlier in the day, and later in the day he was speaking at an academic panel as a resource for researchers looking into powerful Quirk variants that combined elements of both parents’ Quirks. It was a more common thing than Shouto had realized—he’d been molded and trained to think of himself as one-of-a-kind when he was younger, and even if he wasn’t intentionally self-absorbed, that mindset had stuck with him.

But truthfully, most people had Quirks that combined elements from both parents, just in less distinct ways than Shouto’s own. Katsuki was a good example, even though it had taken Shouto years to notice, since his “two” Quirks were a lot more harmonious than Shouto’s.

And speaking of harmony and Quirks...

“Natsuo!” Shouto shouted into the buzzer for his brother’s apartment complex, as he pressed it yet again. “Let me in!”

Finally, there was noise on the other end of the buzzer, and his brother’s voice sounded, tired and grumbly. “Shouto?”

“Let me in,” Shouto said, by way of greeting.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

There was a sigh, and then the line went silent. A moment later, the door to Natsuo’s apartment complex buzzed as it unlocked itself for Shouto, and he waltzed inside.

Shouto had been to visit his older brother very few times since he’d moved here for graduate school. That was because, one, his brother was in graduate school and therefore didn’t exactly have a lot of free time on his hands and, two, Hiroshima was, frankly, kind of far to travel to on any kind of a regular basis. Shouto suspected this factored into Natsuo’s choice to move here.

Shouto also suspected this factored into Izuku’s choice to work here.

Shouto waited for another minute after he knocked on the door to Natsuo’s physical apartment, and then, finally, it opened. Natsuo stood before him, rubbing sleep out of his eyes with a knuckle and apparently dressed in whatever he could find handy—his sweatpants were stained and his shirt was on backwards and inside out, judging by the tag waving at Shouto from his brother’s throat—and that combined with the smell wafting out of his apartment reminded Shouto of the last time he’d seen his best friend.

“What do you want?” Natsuo asked, yawning.

Shouto checked his watch, then checked it again. “It’s 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. Why do you look like I just rolled you out of bed after a weekend of hard partying?”

“I don’t have classes on Tuesday,” Natsuo said. Then with more feeling, “Wow, okay. You’re just going to invite yourself in, huh? Shouto, are you wearing Gucci?”

“No,” Shouto said, somewhat awkwardly. “It’s, uh, Bakugou.”

Natsuo squinted at him. “Your boyfriend?”

“My boyfriend’s parents,” Shouto corrected, though this didn’t change the fact that he was still wearing a designer suit to his brother’s shitty apartment and they both knew it. “They’re launching a new line, so they asked if I would model the suits for a promotional editorial, so…”

“You’re such a simp,” Natsuo groaned, as he shut the door behind Shouto. “If your boyfriend asked you to put on a Creati cosplay for a flash mob you wouldn’t even hesitate. You’re so gross.”

“I’m gross?” Shouto asked, incredulous, as he nudged a takeout container that looked a few days old out of the way with his shoe. “What about you?”

“Leave me alone,” Natsuo said, shuffling over to his couch and flopping over backwards on it. “I’m going through stuff right now.”

“Natsu-nii,” Shouto said, as gently as he could. He rested his elbows on the back of the couch and then leaned over it, peering at his brother. Natsuo cracked open a single gray eye to look at him. There was a soba noodle in his hair. “Ayame dumped you four weeks ago.”

“And I’m supposed to just get over it?” Natsuo asked. “We were together for four years, Shou. I had a ring.”

Shouto sighed. “You have a noodle in your hair.”

“I still have the ring too,” Natsuo bemoaned, flopping backwards. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Sell it?” Shouto proposed.

“It’s customized. Her name is literally engraved on the band.”

Shouto winced. “Sell it to someone that knows how to buff engravings out of metal.”

Natsuo sighed impressively, and Shouto checked his watch again. He would have to leave here by twelve, maybe twelve-thirty if he wanted to make it to the conference on time, which meant things needed to move along. “Natsu, as much as I would love to see you wallowing in self-pity for the fourth week in a row, that is not why I came here. You don’t have classes today, right?”

Natsuo paled. “Please don’t try to drag me out to clubs and bars and restaurants. My friends tried that already and it didn’t work, and please, I cannot watch my little brother grinding on some faceless hot club guy in a designer suit, it would ruin my entire life—”

“I’m not going to drag you out to clubs or bars or restaurants,” Shouto said, scowling as he grabbed Natsuo’s arm and hauled him to his feet. Or tried to, anyway. “Trust me—I don’t want to see my older brother grinding on some faceless hot club guy either. What I’m going to do is shove you in a shower, and then when you’re done you’re going to tell me what landlords in this area I need to avoid, who will let someone lease on the shortest notice, and whether or not auto-pay for rent is an option.”

Natsuo stared at him, refusing to move from the couch. Damn, why did he have so much muscle mass—Shouto was a pro hero, he should be able to lift his stubborn older brother off of a couch if he wanted to. “Are you moving here?” Natsuo asked. “Wait—Deku already works here. Don’t look at me like that—I don’t live under a rock, and he’s kind of a big deal, anyway. I guess it wouldn’t really be surprising if you and Bakugou just joined him and set up an agency. You three always were kind of inseparable.”

Shouto finally gave up on dragging Natsuo off of the couch with a sigh. “I’m not moving here. I’m moving into a penthouse apartment in Tokyo with my life partner.”

“Oh,” Natsuo said, finally sitting up so he could peer at Shouto. He looked strikingly like their father when he was intense or determined in any way, which was a comparison that Shouto knew Natsuo would hate to hear spoken out loud. “I get what’s going on, now. This is about Deku, not you.”

Shouto considered sitting on the bit of couch that Natsuo’s legs had vacated and then thought better of it. Mitsuki would murder him if he ruined her suit, and he had no idea when that thing had last been cleaned. “I want him to be okay.”

“Which is Shouto for, ‘I finally grew a spine and told my best friend I basically moved out of our shared apartment half a year ago but now I’m trying to be kind and good and make sure he can wipe his own ass anyway.’”

Shouto shot his brother a foul look. “He’s different than he used to be, Natsu.”

“He’s an adult. I was late to class last week because he was stopping an armed robbery downtown with his bare fists and everyone was rubbernecking. He’ll be fine.”

Shouto wasn’t so sure. If Shouto could look at Izuku and confidently say that he was the same person that had stood in front of him five years ago and told him that his fire was his power right before punching Shouto in his gut, Shouto would feel more assured that he could actually give Izuku the space he used to think he needed to work through his issues. But Shouto had given him space. He’d given him four years of space, basically, and Izuku was…

Izuku was worse than he’d ever been, and Shouto was starting to agree with Katsuki. It was time to run some sort of intervention, but it had been going on for so long now…Shouto didn’t even know how to begin.

“He won’t look for an apartment himself,” Shouto said. “But he needs to live closer to where he works. So, I’m finding him one. It’s the least I can do.”

Natsuo sighed, running a hand through his hair. He retrieved the noodle and studied it for several moments too long before he cast it to the side randomly. Years of carefully crafted poker faces put on like masks for Enji every morning meant that Shouto did not grimace in horror at that, but it was close. It was very close. “Okay, whatever. You’re not going to find an apartment anywhere around here, though. The leasing offices kind of keep a schedule with the university, so leases tend to only open up in April, and, as you know, it’s January. Closer to the city might be different, but I won’t be able to help with that since I don’t know anything about landlords or whatever there.”

And it was at that moment that brilliance struck.

“No,” Natsuo said, apparently seeing ‘brilliance’ in Shouto’s eyes. “No, no, no. He is not moving in with me.”

“You’re not struggling to pay rent now that Ayame has moved out, then?” Shouto asked, tilting his head to the side in an intentionally dense way.

“No, nonono,” Natsuo said, shaking his head with each no. “You don’t get to use logic on me and guilt trip me into dealing with your workaholic pro hero friend for you.”

“Of course,” Shouto said, still intentionally dense. “That’s my bad. You wouldn’t be struggling for money, since you’re not being stubborn and insisting you do things your own way instead of accepting financial help from your wealthy estranged father who’s trying to buy his way into your good graces.”

“Shouto,” Natsuo said, standing from the couch now so that he could reach his full height, which was several centimeters taller than Shouto’s full height—Natsuo really had taken after the old man in all the worst ways. “I will end you.”

“Think about it,” Shouto said, refusing to back down even though he was being loomed over. He had more threatening brothers, after all. “Izuku makes a lot of money, you know. I have no idea what your rent is but I’m sure he can afford half of it.”

“Shouto.”

“Natsuo.”

“Shouto.”

“Natsuo.”

“I am not doing it,” Natsuo insisted.

Shouto stared at him. He’d been told it could be unnerving—which he knew was true because Katsuki had denied it very vehemently when Kaminari had said it in the first place—so he worked his stare for every bit of its uneasy energy that he logically could.

“I’m not doing it,” Natsuo said, but less assertive.

Shouto continued to stare.

“Stop it,” Natsuo said. “Stop. It’s not my problem.”

Shouto finally stopped, raising both hands up in surrender, but only because he knew he had already won. A roommate was better than no roommate, and Natsuo knew it. He also knew he wouldn’t exactly be able to find anyone else, since it was January. All Natsuo needed was time to accept it.

“Think about it,” Shouto urged one last time, as he stepped around some more of Natsuo’s trash and saw himself out.

He would have a confirmation text by midnight.

Mentally exhausted, tired of thinking about Quirks, and especially tired of his own Quirk, Shouto stepped out of the academic panel and checked his phone. There was a message from Katsuki reminding him to pick up milk on his way home—true love really was monotony, Shouto thought. The early dating stage of awkward flirting was nice and all, but this was how you knew something was real. There was also a message from Iida, asking him if he’d seen Izuku recently…which he hadn’t. Nothing from Izuku himself. And there. There it was.

Natsuo [8:33 p.m.]:

Alright fine your friend can have the second bedroom

Natsuo [8:39 p.m.]:

You owe me so much shit tho

Shouto smiled, turned off his phone, and counted this as a success.

“How’s your supposed apartment hunt going, shithead?” Kacchan asked, with all the grace of a two-meter-tall beefcake of a man playing in a dollhouse with his daughter.

Shouto suddenly became very interested in their conversation, despite the fact that he was standing across the room and methodically packing up his closet and not actually looking at them.

Kacchan hit Izuku on the head with whatever happened to be in his hand. Thankfully, it was just a pair of Shouto’s socks.

“Ow. What is wrong with you? It’s been fifteen years! Fifteen! Why are you still so mean?”

Kacchan snarled at him. Izuku snarled back.

This probably would have gone on for a while if Shouto didn’t walk over with an armful of shirts and drop them into a box sitting between them. “Just answer the question, Izuku.”

Because Shouto wasn’t Kacchan, Izuku blinked ashamedly and rubbed the back of his head. “Well…”

“Oh, so you’ll actually answer him? What fucking bullshit.”

“Listen, Kacchan, at least he asked like a normal person—”

“He didn’t ask shit! He just made demands!”

“Well, he at least didn’t—”

“Both of you shut up,” Shouto said evenly. “Izuku…?”

“Wow, you’re really invested in this,” Izuku remarked.

“Stop deflecting,” Kacchan said, swinging at Izuku with the socks again.

Izuku dodged. “Alright, alright, fine! No, I haven’t looked for an apartment. I’ve been busy and I couldn’t get off work and—”

“You’re off today,” Kacchan said, folding his arms across his chest. “I don’t see the world ending. So, I find it hard to believe you couldn’t get one other day off, in two weeks, just to tour apartments.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Izuku insisted, lying through his teeth.

“Bullshit,” Kacchan said, leaning forward in a way that usually meant he was gearing up to fight someone.

“Well, good,” Shouto said. “I’m glad you didn’t find an apartment.”

“What?” Izuku asked, blinking up at him.

Kacchan looked up at Shouto too, though his expression was less confused than it was suspicious. “What did you do?”

“I found you an apartment,” Shouto said, turning away to go back to his closet. “Furnished and everything. Complete with a roommate.”

Despite the fact that they were about to kill each other mere seconds prior, Izuku shared a look with Kacchan now, coconspirators with a common enemy once more. “Do you know anything about this?” Izuku asked.

“Fuck no,” Kacchan said, scowling.

“My brother lives in Hiroshima,” Shouto said, spinning back around with another armful of shirts.

Izuku blinked. “You want me to live with your brother?”

At the same time, Kacchan asked, “You want him to live with your brother?”

They looked at each other. They grimaced. They mutually agreed to pretend it had never happened.

“Look,” Shouto said, apparently also pretending it had never happened. “He’s going through a tough time right now. His girlfriend just left him. They were dating for four years,” he added, because Shouto knew what he was doing. The more he pulled on Izuku’s heartstrings, the more likely he was to agree to this even though everyone involved knew it would be horribly, terribly, undeniably awkward. “Natsuo is trying to make ends meet on his own, instead of with Enji’s help. He can’t afford rent alone.”

“Oh, not the reminder that I have more money than I know what to do with,” Izuku whispered.

“One-thousand yen says that’s not all he’s got up his sleeve,” Kacchan whispered back.

“Two-thousand yen that the next thing he says is that Natsuo could use a friend,” Izuku added.

“I’m right here,” Shouto said, rolling his eyes. “But yes. Not to be cliché, but I think he could use a friend. I think you could use a friend too.”

“I mean, I have friends already. I have you guys, at least.”

“You have friends here,” Shouto pointed out. “You don’t have friends in Hiroshima.”

Izuku had to concede that point. He scratched his cheek, then the back of his head, then behind his ear. “I’ve only met your brother, like, three times.”

“Trust me, you have more in common than you might think.”

“I work weird hours…”

“He’s a graduate student. He’s not exactly operating on a normal sleeping schedule either.”

“I don’t want to invade his space…”

“He’s used to living with someone else,” Shouto said, “and he has plenty of space. You won’t be a bother to him. Plus, he really could use your help.”

Izuku fell backwards to the sound of Kacchan’s laughter. Why did Izuku have to be so predictable? Why couldn’t he have just been one of those quiet and mysterious types instead? Maybe then his friends wouldn’t know exactly what to say to him to get him to do whatever they wanted.

“You’re such a fucking pushover,” Kacchan said.

That was rude. Izuku hadn’t even agreed to anything out loud yet.

“When am I supposed to move in with him?”

…But Kacchan wasn’t wrong.

Natsuo’s new roommate arrived on a frosty Tuesday morning in February at the crack of dawn. This more or less meant that they were already starting off their relationship on the wrong foot—Natsuo used to be a morning person, but that was before he went to med school and had to get a job at the local bar to make ends meet, which meant he worked late and got up early—so on the one day he didn’t have a 9 a.m. lab he would rather sleep until either recurring nightmares put him out of bed or he had to get up and go to work, not wake up at seven to let Pro Hero Deku into his apartment.

Which was hard to reconcile in and of itself.

The first time Natsuo met this guy, he was “Shouto’s friend Midoriya.” It was Shouto’s first year at UA, which also meant it was Natsuo’s first year at college, which were dark times, in general. Shouto’s friend Midoriya was short and kind of forgettable, up until he called Shouto “kind” because Shouto was willing to forgive their father—an event and a phrasing that left an impact on Natsuo for a lot of different reasons he couldn’t really put into words.

Logically—because anyone in his position would assume so—Natsuo’s inability to articulate any of those reasons led to Shouto’s friend Midoriya thinking Natsuo didn’t like him, which meant he subsequently tended to avoid him on all of the following occasions Natsuo actually met any of Shouto’s friends. Natsuo was fine with this, because he didn’t really care either way.

But because of the avoidance and the weirdness and the fact that Natsuo barely saw Shouto’s friend Midoriya anyway, it meant that Natsuo, naturally, developed a pretty huge disconnect between “Shouto’s friend Midoriya” and “Pro Hero Deku,” who he saw grinning brilliantly as he saved people on TV. Natsuo missed out on the phase where he was “Shouto’s friend Izuku.” He didn’t miss out on the drama—he still heard all of the tales second or third hand from Fuyumi as she gossiped on lunch dates or on phone calls—so he knew about the whole period of time where feelings were hurt and romantic confessions weren’t reciprocated but friendships miraculously stayed intact—but he didn’t really have an entity to attach to the nebulous, discombobulated drama.

He thought the person on his doorstep with a lot of boxes might be that missing entity, though.

“Sorry I’m so early,” Shouto’s friend Midoriya who was also Pro Hero Deku said. At least he had the decency to apologize for it.

“It’s…fine,” Natsuo said, before opening the door wider in the most awkward way anyone could possibly open a door wider. “Come inside.”

“Thanks,” Shouto’s friend Midoriya who was also Pro Hero Deku said, carrying one of his boxes inside with him.

He was wearing a frumpy, slightly too big hoodie and a pair of cargo pants that were also slightly too big. This fit pretty well with what Natsuo remembered of Shouto’s friend Midoriya—he’d never really seemed to prioritize his appearance in literally any way—but it matched up horribly with what he knew of Pro Hero Deku, who usually slicked his hair back to go fight crime in his skintight spandex and wore immaculately tailored suits in bright colors that shouldn’t work but somehow did to every interview, gala event, or other PR related thing.

“So, this is the living room,” Natsuo said, gesturing to the space they were standing in. There was nothing but a sofa so old the upholstery was peeling up to reveal the wooden frame underneath it, a TV that was sitting on top of the cardboard box it came in, several takeout containers and empty soda cans, and a folding table that was functioning as Natsuo’s desk.

Midoriya took all of this in with a shrewd expression, but kindly did not comment on the mess. “I have a couch, an armchair, and a TV stand,” he said instead. “We can put your, uh, stuff in my storage unit? If you want to swap them out, of course.”

Natsuo looked at his apartment. It was quite the fall from grace—the family mansion he’d grown up in was lavish and wrapped in wealth and had comfortable, if traditional, furnishings. The second mansion Endeavor had built for them was the same—Natsuo had spent the last three years of undergrad living there before he moved here with his girlfriend…and promptly got dumped. He stupidly, pridefully, wanted to tell Midoriya that his (probable) luxury furniture could stay in his storage unit since Natsuo was fine with what he had.

Natsuo scratched the back of his head. “Sure. Yeah. We can just put this stuff on the curb, though. That’s where I found most of it, anyway.”

“…Okay.”

“Okay,” Natsuo agreed, shuffling awkwardly towards the kitchen. “Um…the kitchen. I don’t really have any groceries right now, so…”

Now Midoriya scratched the back of his head. “I also have a table,” he said, in a way that indicated he was doing his best to not step on Natsuo’s pride, which somehow made it both more irritating and less at the same time.

Well. At least he knew this kid was still perfectly capable of confusing the shit out of him by doing things that should not be confusing by nature.

Nope, not a kid, Natsuo corrected himself, as soon as he had the thought. Midoriya was shorter than him but he was definitely broader, and he had a jawline so sharp most models would probably be jealous of it. Most models probably were jealous of it. Actually, did Midoriya count as a model himself? He did do photoshoots for magazines and stuff, which was basically the job description...

Natsuo was too tired for this.

“I’ll stop by the store later, too,” Midoriya added. “If that’s okay with you! I kind of have a diet I need to stick to, so…”

Yeah, Natsuo bet he did. The baggy hoodie and the baggy pants were doing a decent job of masking how bulky he was, but Natsuo didn’t live under a rock and had therefore seen the skintight hero suit, so he wasn’t fooled. “That’s fine. I’ll go to the store later for myself.” That was a lie.

“…Okay.”

“Okay,” Natsuo agreed. He turned abruptly and led Midoriya down the hall. “That’s the bathroom. We just have one, so…I don’t know. When do you usually shower?”

“Um,” Midoriya said, rubbing the back of his head again. “To be honest with you, I’m kind of busy, so, uh…I don’t really have a schedule. I just kind of shower when I get a chance to shower.”

Considering Natsuo was the exact same way, that was either going to be super problematic or work like a dream. “Same here. I work at a bar and I have classes so I tend to shower when I get around to it, so…we’ll see how this goes.”

“It’ll probably be fine,” Midoriya said, with the air of someone that didn’t believe a word of what they were saying.

They observed a moment of extremely awkward silence.

“You can have the right side of the sink for your toiletries,” Natsuo told him.

“Oh, uh, great!” Midoriya said, shooting him a thumbs up. Natsuo couldn’t help but notice the state of his hand—not for the first time—and looked away from it quickly.

“Anyway,” Natsuo said, flicking off the light to the bathroom and stepping out. “That door is your room. That door is mine. Do you care if I sleep while you move in?”

“No, but, uh…” Oh, great, Natsuo thought. He’s about to say he yodels as a hobby or something, isn’t he? “Kacchan agreed to help me move in, so, uh…good luck.”

Natsuo stared for several moments. He’d said ‘Kacchan’ with weight like Natsuo was supposed to know who that was, but Natsuo was drawing a blank. “Who?”

Midoriya’s eyes widened slightly, and then he paled, and then he flushed that pale pink color he always turned whenever he noticed a camera was pointed at him. “Katsuki,” he said. Natsuo still didn’t get it. “Bakugou? Your brother’s…” He gestured nonsensically. “You know?”

“Oh,” Natsuo said. “Oh, Shouto’s boyfriend.”

“Yes. Him.”

Natsuo mulled this over for several moments, wondering if he should just ask. There was a pretty good chance it would bother him forever if he didn’t, so he went for it. “Why did you call him Kacchan?”

Midoriya sighed, rubbing at the lower half of his face in that distinct way that meant facial hair was coming in and it was itchy. “Because… Give me a second, I forgot how difficult it is to explain this to people. Um… It’s because he’s, I don’t know…irritating?”

Natsuo could agree with that assessment, at least. “You call him a cutesy nickname because he’s irritating?”

“Yes,” Midoriya said, pointing at Natsuo like he thought Natsuo was getting it (Natsuo was not getting it). “Like, I’m twenty, right? I’m an adult. I could stop if I wanted to. But then it would just feel wrong, because he’s always been Kacchan. So, if I started calling him something mature like ‘Katsuki’ now it just wouldn’t work, you know?”

Natsuo did not know, but he at least knew enough to not bother asking about it again, which was good enough for him. “Okay. Well, I can sleep through a lot, so I think I’ll be fine. I put your keys in your room already, so you shouldn’t need anything else from me, right?”

It was probably a really dick move on his part to just ditch his roommate on the first day they lived together, but Natsuo couldn’t really bring himself to care that much when he only had three hours of sleep in his system. Judging by the way Midoriya was frowning, slightly, he thought it was a dick move too.

“I’ll be fine,” he said anyway, shooting Natsuo one of those trademark Deku smiles for the first time today. It reminded Natsuo of the other reason (aside from the obvious one, which was generalized awkwardness because of Shouto) he hadn’t wanted this guy to be his roommate. Honestly, if Shouto had proposed any other friend of his move in with Natsuo and pay half of his rent, literally any other friend, he would have jumped at the opportunity—but not Midoriya, for this one specific reason.

Midoriya was actually attractive.

“Great,” Natsuo said to him, and then shut the door to his bedroom in his face.

“I can’t believe he just went to bed,” Kacchan grumbled, as he angrily pushed a shopping cart through the closest grocery store listed on Google. Izuku followed after him, picking items off the shelves and then attempting to place them in the cart before Kacchan got pissed off and started pacing random aisles with it again. “I can’t believe you made us leave so we could be respectful.”

“Well, it’s not really a good idea to start off your lease by pissing off your new roommate,” Izuku said.

“Tell that to the discount Todoroki bastard that decided it was a good idea to just sleep while you moved all your furniture in on your own.”

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Izuku said, crouching to retrieve something from a lower shelf. Kacchan did not wait for him, so Izuku had to choose his item quickly and chase after him to continue the conversation. “I’m strong enough to lift my own furniture. And you were coming to help anyway. Three probably would have been a crowd.”

Kacchan backed up several steps right as Izuku was about to put his stuff in the cart so he could glare angrily at a bottle of hot sauce. Izuku sighed in irritation and readjusted. “It’s fucking rude.”

“Pot calling the kettle black.”

“No, it’s different,” Kacchan said, snagging the bottle of hot sauce and hurling it into the cart with reckless abandon. “I want to be rude. I try to be rude. This tool is on some sort of high horse about ‘not succumbing to his father’s image’ and ‘being better than his past’ and all that righteous bullshit literally nobody wants to listen to, so he deserves ridicule for being an ass.”

Izuku sighed. Truthfully, he was pissed off about it, too, but dwelling on his anger had never resulted in anything good for him in the past. It was easier to let things go. Besides, Natsuo’s behavior was…familiar, at least.

“It’s not different,” Izuku said. “Remember when you wanted to be the best? When you wanted to achieve that on your own strength? When everyone was just an extra or a pebble in your path, or whatever it was you thought about us?”

Kacchan pursed his lips. “It’s still different. I was a kid, not a grown ass adult.”

Izuku sighed. “You were a person going through something. He’s a person going through something. It’s not personal and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’m just the chosen vessel through which he is venting his issues. I’m fine with that. I’m comfortable with it, actually, considering that for whatever reason this is how 90% of my relationships with people generally go.”

“Don’t say it like that, shithead,” Kacchan said, angrily rolling his shopping cart away again. “There are plenty of reasons why people hate you.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“No, you are that bad,” Kacchan said. “You can’t stay in your lane, you can’t be happy unless your nose is stuck firmly in someone else’s business, and you feel the need to go around giving people motivational speeches centered around what their specific insecurities are and let me tell you—all of this shit? It definitely doesn’t make you easy to get along with.”

“Thanks for pointing out all my flaws, as usual,” Izuku said. “Oh, that’s distressing. Normally the generic store brand is less expensive than name brand, not more.”

“Why the fuck is that distressing?”

“Generic store brand tastes better,” Izuku said, with an impressive sigh.

Kacchan wrinkled his nose at him. “Just when I thought I’d found out everything awful about you that I could, too.”

Izuku shot him a glare as he picked up his overpriced generic store brand mayonnaise and put it in the cart. “I could point out all of your flaws too, you know.”

“You already did that once in this conversation,” Kacchan said. “Level with me about something, Deku. Why did you actually agree to move in with Shouto’s brother?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Izuku said, even though he knew exactly what Kacchan was talking about.

Kacchan rolled his eyes so aggressively Izuku was mildly worried they would roll out of his head. “Fuck you,” he informed Izuku emphatically. “I know that you’re not exactly over your crush. Don’t give me that look—you know I don’t give a shit. I’m not so insecure about my relationship that I feel threatened by other people thinking my boyfriend is hot, because he is. You and I both know that the literal worst way to get over a crush is by continuing to tie yourself to that crush in increasingly complicated ways, like living with his fucking family. So, why?”

Izuku looked away. Moments like this he was both grateful he had Kacchan and hated that they were so irreversibly tied to one another. He was like Izuku’s brother. Actually, he pretty much was Izuku’s brother, and that meant that nothing could deter him once he got an idea in his head about something.

“Shouto thinks that I’m made of glass,” Izuku said. He said it to the nutritional label of a jar of miso paste instead of to Kacchan himself, though.

Kacchan sighed. “You’re trying to prove something to him.”

“I’m trying to help him,” Izuku corrected quietly. “I’m disappointed in myself for not realizing this until he said he was moving in with you, but he wants to move on.” Izuku swallowed. “I get that I’m kind of a drag. I do. I’ve let everyone else off the hook already. I should let him go too, right?”

Kacchan leaned heavily against his shopping cart, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Deku…”

“Shouto would worry about me forever if I stayed at our old apartment,” Izuku continued. “This way, he can keep tabs on me for a while. Make sure I’m not about to run off on a suicide mission or work so often I keel over dead from exhaustion. And then, after I’ve stayed with Natsuo for a suitable amount of time, I’ll go somewhere on my own.”

“Shouto is not your problem, Deku,” Kacchan said heavily, sounding more tired than angry for once. “You’re not his either, for that matter.”

“I know, I know,” Izuku said, waving him off. “But besides…Natsuo apparently does need the help, like, really badly. I think his girlfriend took all of his furniture when she moved out and he can’t afford to replace it. And if he can’t afford to replace furniture or buy groceries…he probably needs someone to split rent with him more than he’s letting on.”

“That’s not your problem either, Deku.”

“I know that too,” Izuku said, smiling sadly at the nutritional label of the miso paste in his hand. “But you know how I am. I just like to help.”

“Hey, fucker,” Kacchan said, with all the sentimentality he was able to muster. “Try to help yourself for once, okay?”

“No promises,” Izuku said, setting his miso paste in the cart with all of the other items haphazardly discarded there.

Kacchan sighed, dragging Izuku into a strange one-armed half hug. Forcefully, because Kacchan could only express himself with violence. “I hate you so fucking much.”

“I know,” Izuku said, patting his back in a way that probably presented as more patronizing than comforting to anyone watching this. It was a strangely emotional display for a grocery store, but then again, neither of them had ever been particularly good at hiding what they felt.

“Alright,” Kacchan said, releasing Izuku with a shove. “Let’s buy this shit and then assemble your bedframe so I can go home early. Sleeping beauty has slept for too fucking long.”

“Sounds good,” Izuku said, unable to keep the amusement out of his voice as he followed Kacchan to the cash register.

“Oh, I didn’t expect you to already be home,” Shouto said, as he softly closed the door behind him on his way in.

It took Katsuki a moment to realize Shouto was talking to him, even though there was no one else he could be talking to. “What? Oh. Yeah. The nerd is surprisingly efficient when he wants to be.”

“Efficient is certainly a word for it,” Shouto agreed, with that drop of pain he always hid deep inside of himself whenever Deku was around. That drop was the thread that tied Katsuki to him in the first place—the things they’d started showing to each other when no one else was paying attention. “He’s always been efficient. Great at cutting to the heart of other people’s issues. Fast to respond to their problems. Brutal and swift when he lets everything go.”

“You say that like you’re not the one that just dumped the little shit on your brother.”

Shouto sighed as he slotted himself against Katsuki’s back, warm and sighing contently like a fucking cat. “Natsu will be fine.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“He doesn’t really like Izuku. He doesn’t hate him, but you can tell he’s kind of bothered by him, anyway. He’s the last person that will get attached. And anyway, it’s like I said. Natsu kind of needs someone with him right now so he can get his act together and find his own roommate.”

“You didn’t like Deku at first either, genius.”

“Yeah, but I was hormonal teenager on the cusp of a gay awakening, and that made it easier for him to wiggle into my heart and stay there. Natsu is none of those things. He’s indestructible, like a wall of ice. He’ll just be irritated for a few months as he’s forced to pick up after himself again because he has a roommate, and then he’ll be fine.”

Katsuki thought this was probably some sort of older sibling fallacy. Like how high schoolers always seem really cool when you’re a middle schooler, but permanent, because a younger sibling never actually experienced being an older sibling, and therefore didn’t realize it wasn’t as cool as it seemed.

He didn’t say any of this, though.

“Whatever you’re hoping will happen won’t happen, Icy-Hot,” Katsuki said. “Deku is Deku. You can’t help him.”

“I have to try. I owe him that much.”

Katsuki sighed, leaning back into Shouto’s embrace. The egg he was frying crackled in the oil in the skillet in front of him, and he thought about what Deku had said to him earlier.

Shouto thinks I’m made of glass.

Katsuki couldn’t help but wonder if he thought Deku was made of glass too.

“Get off me,” he said, elbowing Shouto in the ribs. “I have to cook.”

“Mm. No. I like it here.”

“Get off!”

Shouto’s grip tightened around his waist. “Make me,” he said, because he was a shithead and he knew challenging Katsuki was the best way to get what he wanted.

“You know what,” Katsuki said, reaching out to turn off the stove. “I think I will.”

Well. Everything had turned out fine for them the first time around. Maybe Deku deserved a taste of his own meddlesome medicine.

Chapter Text

All Might died in the tail end of Izuku’s second year of school.

It was a medical complication. He had a persistent intestinal problem ever since All for One ripped his guts out eight or so years prior to that. He’d had a lot of surgeries already to make it manageable to the point where life was livable even if it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, since most of the American food he loved was more or less off the table. This was just another surgery, so nobody was particularly worried, including All Might himself.

He died on the table. Not in a dramatic fanfare but in a quiet passing. There was always a risk it would happen. The risk was, honestly, fairly high.

All Might’s will dictated that nearly all of his wealth went to charities. The majority of those charities were for the Quirkless—devoted to helping them find jobs despite discrimination or get themselves out of bad situations if they got in them. One charity was for Quirkless kids in specific, and when Izuku looked it up, their charter said that they were devoted to making the dreams of the youth, all the youth, come true. All Might had never forgotten their conversation on the roof the day they met.

The collection of All Might merchandise that he had was equally divided between one Midoriya Izuku and one Bakugou Katsuki. Kacchan had hung or placed the majority of his in his apartment. Izuku had carefully packed all of his into boxes—along with any other All Might merchandise he had—and placed it all in a rented storage unit that was a bit too big.

Everything else—Might Tower, his estate, the remainder of his wealth, everything—was left to Izuku. And Izuku, too, was the person that picked through his ashes with a pair of chopsticks to collect his bones.

The League of Villains had been thoroughly squashed—all of them either dead or imprisoned. All for One was dead. The Noumu factories had all been disabled, Dr. Garaki was put behind bars, Gigantomachia put to rest. Nothing of All for One’s underground criminal organization remained, and nothing new filled the space it left behind. The country no longer needed a Symbol of Peace. Izuku would never have to find someone to pass One for All on to. The Quirk he had been given when he was fifteen, the Quirk that had been alive and growing since the beginning, was the Quirk he would die with.

Izuku always knew it would happen one day—All Might was only human, and he would not live forever. But knowing it would happen and living through it were two very different things.

So he did what he always did when he was in high school. He internalized everything, and he pushed everyone away and saved people or did homework until he couldn’t even think anymore, and it worked. It was easier to cope with being the sole holder of an empty legacy when he was doing whatever it took to make sure he still felt like he was making a difference.

It was never meant to last forever, and it didn’t.

The stick of dynamite that was Izuku’s mental state had a long fuse. He burned through a lot of his friendships first. He didn’t come to class movie nights or go out with friends for festivals. He no longer participated in class study sessions or even class training sessions, unless they were actually classes. Graduation was the last time he talked to at least ten people he went to school with, that he fought alongside, that he attended classes with.

Those that were either close with him to start with or particularly persistent and extraverted hung on for a few months, maybe a year afterwards. The last time he casually chatted with Kaminari, Ashido, and Kirishima was about six months after he graduated. By the first year, he’d lost Asui, Yaoyorozu, Shinsou, and Uraraka. A year and a half, and he no longer talked to Iida, either.

And then Kacchan and Shouto started dating, and finally Izuku burned.

Izuku had a giant, horrible, offensively intense crush on Shouto ever since he saw him go up in flames during their match in the Sports Festival the first year. He’d never planned to do anything about it—in fact, he was barely even around to do anything about it anyway—but…well. Shouto moving on was a turning point of some kind for him, a shift in his mentality. Probably because it was Kacchan he had moved on with, maybe just because it was time to change. Izuku loved Kacchan like a brother, but neither of them denied that there was a spot of something dark between them. It was something that would always be there—a black island in a sea of white, the seed of jealousy that had been planted in both of their hearts and would never die even if it no longer grew weeds.

So, he frayed, and then he snapped, and then everything went boom.

He tried to confess how he felt to Shouto. With hindsight, it was a kind of stupid thing to do, but he wanted to say it out loud, just once. Nothing came of it, because Izuku had always been terrible at articulating his emotions without using his fists, and maybe, nothing should have come out of it. Kacchan continued to date Shouto. Izuku continued to be friends with Kacchan. Shouto continued to split rent with Izuku. Honestly, that last one might have only happened because it was Shouto’s idea. He’d proposed moving in together in third year and Izuku had agreed, either because he was stupid or Shouto was persistent or maybe both—and Shouto’s thread was the one Izuku could never bring himself to cut.

And so, life carried him here.

Maybe Izuku was finally going to let life carry him further.

All in all, Natsuo actually didn’t see his new roommate all that often.

The name “Midoriya” appeared underneath “Todoroki” on his mailbox. One day he went to class and he came back to find there was a pretty nice looking sofa there instead of the ratty futon he’d picked up from one of his neighbors as they were throwing it out. Neatly folded bills appeared on counters and tables whenever rent was due. A note written in an extremely shaky hand usually accompanied them, detailing exactly how much was there and exactly what it was for.

Natsuo saw him occasionally. Of course, he saw him occasionally—it would be hard to live with someone and not bump into them every once in a while. Midoriya wasn’t rude when he stepped out of the bathroom toweling off his hair and noticed Natsuo had gotten up to get ready for class, or when he stepped inside and saw Natsuo working on an assignment or studying for an exam, or when he buzzed the delivery driver with the takeout Natsuo had ordered in. He wasn’t necessarily friendly, either, though, and the fact that he refused to be either extreme was frustrating because it made it a lot harder to decide how to act around him.

The Pro Hero Deku, on the other hand. Natsuo saw a lot more of him. And heard a lot about him. And generally couldn’t escape his existence no matter where he went or what he did.

“They’re speculating that he moved into the area permanently,” one of the undergrads at the table next to him at the library said to his friend.

“He still hasn’t signed with an agency though, right?”

“Nope. He’s independent.”

“He already worked a lot,” the girl with pink hair said. “I don’t know how anyone can tell there’s been an increase.”

“There’s definitely been an increase,” the first guy said. “I mean, like, I saw Deku this morning. Just up there on the rooftop, doing that ‘dignified superhero with a lot on his mind’ pose as he watched over the city.”

At the dining hall, the person waiting in line in front of him turned to their friend and said, “Deku used to live with Shouto, right?”

“The paparazzi caught that image of Shouto in the grocery store in Dynamight’s area, though, remember? Everyone thinks those two might have moved in together, since Deku is apparently permanent here now.”

“The three of them have always been friendly, so it seems likely!”

When the television in the lounge area of Natsuo’s favorite class building played footage from an hour ago of Deku grinning broadly at the cameras while he held a villain in handcuffs in front of him, Natsuo decided he’d had enough, and left campus altogether. He usually stayed after his class on Wednesdays, since the bar he worked at was close to the school and his apartment was in the other direction, but the extra walking time would be worth it as long as it meant he didn’t have to be eyeballs deep in the city-wide Deku hype for three extra hours.

Natsuo made it home, buzzing himself in and trudging up to his apartment building. He paused outside of the door, music tickling his ears as it trickled under the crack. It wasn’t loud, but it was unusual. Natsuo hadn’t expected Midoriya to be home, since he was out in the streets saving lives at least a few hours ago. More importantly, though, he hadn’t expected to hear music at all. Midoriya basically made no noise when he was home—he was a quiet, wraithlike roommate (which was honestly the perfect kind of roommate). Natsuo had assumed it was because Midoriya was just like that. It hadn’t occurred to him that it was something Midoriya might have been doing for his comfort.

Natsuo unlocked the door as quietly as possible, listening to the song wafting through the portable speaker sitting on one of the end tables in the living room. Judging by the sound of dishes clinking and water running, Midoriya was in the kitchen.

Natsuo listened to the song as he quietly sat down his bag. It was a female singer, accompanied by a soulful piano and a kickass drum track, though drums only came in on the chorus. The lyrics were about not giving up your daydream, about coming home after a long journey, about returning to the people that never wanted to see you go.

For some reason, Natsuo felt like he shouldn’t be listening to this. It was the sound of Midoriya’s soul, laid bare, and it wasn’t meant for anyone else’s ears. But that was ridiculous—Natsuo just happened to be occupying the same space as the song was. This wasn’t any different than hearing a song playing over the radio in a store.

Natsuo rounded the corner into the kitchen, and found Midoriya doing the dishes. His lips were pressed into a sad line, his eyebrows drawn together. If this was the sound of his soul then his soul was something Midoriya would rather not hear, but for whatever reason, he was listening to it anyway.

Natsuo cleared his throat, and Midoriya looked over at him. He looked confused for one moment before he blinked, turned off the sink, and said, “Oh. Hi.”

“Hi,” Natsuo said, for lack of anything more meaningful and impactful being available.

“I thought you had a class right now?” Midoriya asked, his voice lifting softly off of the last word he spoke as he dried his hands off on a towel.

“Oh, no. I’m done with classes for the day. I just usually stay at the school since that’s a shorter walk to the bar than it is from here.”

“I see.”

“What about you? Shouldn’t you be out fighting crime?”

Midoriya gave him a wry look, and then used his recently dried hand to brush his bangs up from his forehead. There was a tiny cut there, held closed with one butterfly stitch. “Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal. It’ll be almost completely healed by tomorrow, in fact, but supposedly continuing to work while I’m visibly injured is bad for my PR, so even the tiny cuts send me home if there’s not an emergency.”

“That seems counterproductive,” Natsuo commented, scratching the back of his neck. “I mean, obviously you shouldn’t push yourself if you’re injured or sick, but that’s, like, the equivalent of scraping your knee when you’re a kid playing in the park.”

“It is what it is,” Midoriya remarked quietly. He turned the faucet on in the process, nearly obscuring what he said with the sound of running water. “The world won’t end if I take the day off, right?”

Natsuo heard the note of strain in his voice, the sort of unnamed frustration that came from having busy hands and nothing to do. He couldn’t help but think of Endeavor—of how he refused to take off work for birthday parties and school plays because he felt like he had to work unless physically incapable of it—and he shoved the thought out of his head. The past never dies, but it’s best to leave it the fuck alone, at least.

The song playing concluded and then looped back to the beginning. Midoriya’s brow furrowed further, but he didn’t turn the music off, just quietly tapped his toes against the floor as he worked. Natsuo stood around for a few more moments before it occurred to him that he was being exceptionally weird for no really good reason.

He hunted around in drawers for a few minutes before he found the one he kept his dish towels in—he wondered if Midoriya had moved them, since surely his memory of where they were wasn’t that bad—and then straightened with his find. He took one of the plates—not his, this was definitely something that came with Midoriya, considering it had a snowman on it—and started drying it.

Midoriya gave him a strange look.

“What?” Natsuo asked, even though he knew what the look was for. Natsuo didn’t interact with Midoriya, and he definitely didn’t help him do chores, or really do chores at all…

Natsuo resisted the urge to wince. If Midoriya was a good roommate, he was certainly a terrible one.

“I’m just surprised you’re helping,” Midoriya said, with a casual shrug. He was clearly on edge, but he handed the next plate he finished washing directly to Natsuo. This one had Santa Claus printed on it.

“What’s with the plates?” Natsuo asked. A moment after he said it, he thought he probably shouldn’t have—Midoriya had never acted like he really wanted to talk to Natsuo before, so he probably didn’t appreciate the chatter.

He was a pro hero, after all. They didn’t tend to be very friendly when cameras weren’t pointed at them.

Midoriya laughed. It was short and breathless, more like a giggle than a laugh, really. He turned off the sink so he could scrub another plate—this one adorned with a reindeer—and said, “They used to be my mom’s.”

“Yeah?” Natsuo asked, for lack of something better to say. He held up the Santa plate, and chibi Santa winked back at him.

“She gave them to me when I was first moving out. Shouto and I agreed to get an apartment together after we graduated, right? Of course, the plan back then was that we would both work in Tokyo, but I… Well, anyway. We were moving out, and I was shopping for things I might need for the apartment with my mom, and when we got to the silverware aisle and I tried to buy something she said, ‘No, I have plates you can take.’ And I said, ‘Mom, I don’t want to take your plates from you.’ And she said, ‘You shouldn’t buy something if you can have it for free!’ And I said, ‘I literally have so much money I will never be able to spend it all, isn’t it kind of my duty as a citizen to put it back in the economy?’ To which she said, with her mom voice, ‘You shouldn’t buy something if you can have it for free, Izuku.’ Which ended the argument before it could start, since, you know, mom voice.”

“I’m guessing these are the plates?” Natsuo asked, showing Santa off to Midoriya too.

He didn’t laugh again, but he did smile—one of those soft, full-face ones that made everyone look ten times prettier than they already were, his eyes crinkling and his cheeks dimpling. “These are the plates. They came with forks, spoons, and knives, too.” He held up a fork to demonstrate, with a giant, gaudy snowflake on top of the handle. “Full American dinner set. Never opened. It was a gift from my dad to her, I think. Please don’t ask why he got them, because I don’t know. She wanted to get rid of them so badly.”

“Are your parents not together…?” Natsuo asked, hoping he wasn’t overstepping some invisible boundary.

Midoriya laughed at that, but in a startled way. “What, you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“I guess that’s my fault for assuming you talk to Shouto,” he said with mirth. “Okay. So. The answer is no. My parents are divorced, because my dad was cheating on my mom with an American woman and she found out about it—he lives in America, by the way—so what happened was—” Midoriya interrupted himself, with a short burst of wild laughter. “Oh, I hate saying this out loud. Okay. What happened was, my mom said—hnng okay. One second, one second. This is my interpretation of events, by the way, because I have to look at this situation with humor because the alternative is wanting to shrivel up and die every time I think about it, you know?”

“I gotta admit, I’m a little sorry I asked if it’s this hard to talk about,” Natsuo said.

“Oh, you’re not sorry yet, trust me.” Midoriya handed him another plate. “Okay, so, what my mom said was, ‘You know what? He shouldn’t be the only one that gets to sleep with hot women.’ And her best friend just so happened to be a hot woman…in an open marriage…I still hate saying this out loud— So my mom did just that—she found herself her own hot woman to be with. Her friend and her friend’s husband, all at once. I think it was just supposed to be a hookup at first, but they live together and go on dates together and do everything together now, so…”

Natsuo sat the reindeer plate in the cabinet with a definitive clink and then closed the door to the cabinet like he wished he could close the door on this recently acquired knowledge. “You’re right. I am sorry I asked. If I had to know anything about my parents’ sex life I would…die, probably.”

“You haven’t even heard the best part yet,” Midoriya said, as he handed Natsuo one of the horrendously gaudy forks to dry. “The friend? She’s Kacchan’s mom. Your brother’s boyfriend, by the way. My childhood friend. Our parents? They’re together.”

Natsuo paused with the drawer they kept their silverware in open. “Bakugou.”

“Yep.”

“Shouto’s boyfriend, Bakugou.”

“Mhm.”

“Your mom, and his parents.”

“Yes.”

“In an open polyamorous relationship with each other.”

“Yeah.”

“…I have no words.”

“That’s okay,” Midoriya said, flicking on the faucet with a particular kind of finesse so he could rinse a mug. “You can just let it sink in.”

This time Natsuo laughed, startled because of both the metaphorical bomb dropped on him and the pun. “You can’t be serious.”

Midoriya smiled before he looked back at the dishes in the sink. “I’m afraid I am. But don’t worry—I’m not clever enough to make puns very often.”

He was…surprisingly easy to talk to. Not nearly as shy as Natsuo remembered him being when he was sixteen and got dragged home to a family dinner with them, and then helped to save Natsuo from the white line villain. Natsuo didn’t mingle with heroes—they weren’t bad people by default, but he had his reasons for not wanting to talk to them anyway. Shouto was the only exception—and his boyfriend, by extension. It was better to leave everything he felt about heroes and their problems in the past where they belonged.

He shouldn’t do it. Even if he was living with Midoriya, he shouldn’t try to befriend him. He shouldn’t.

“What song is this?” Natsuo asked.

Midoriya glanced at him and then away, before shutting off the sink, setting the lash dish on the drying rack, and fetching his own towel. And then finally, he said, “It’s Earphone Jack’s new single.”

“Oh, she’s one of your friends, right?” Natsuo didn’t necessarily like heroes, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of them. Shouto’s graduating class, in particular, was star studded in the eyes of the public.

“No,” Midoriya said. He made no attempt to hide his frown as he said it, or to make his eyes look any less sad than they were. He finished drying his mug and put it up, and then so softly Natsuo almost didn’t hear him, he added, “I don’t have friends.”

He turned away abruptly, drying his hands as he went. He turned off his phone and his speaker, then walked past the kitchen to go to his room, where he paused outside of the door. He smiled cordially, but this one didn’t seem quite real, and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Sure,” Natsuo said, still drying a plate as the door clicked softly shut.

He tried not to think about how familiar the whole interaction felt.

The song was called A Hero’s Heart.

Natsuo found it on his break at work that night, by typing “Earphone Jack” and “new single” into his search bar. And then there it was right on top. It was apparently a huge hit—people were already doing covers and choreographing dances and drawing animatics to go with it. Out of boredom—Natsuo refused to admit that he was legitimately curious—he found himself scrolling through Earphone Jack’s official social media accounts looking for statements about the song.

He had a feeling he knew what the answer was, but he didn’t get confirmation until he happened to a few weeks into the past on her Instagram and found pictures of her recording a new song. Bakugou was with her, for some reason, glaring daggers at the camera as he stuck his tongue out and held a finger to his neck.

The caption said: “working on something for a friend who might need it”

Bakugou’s account was one of the first comments, and he said, “quit being sappy on main” to which Earphone Jack replied “I didn’t even say what friend or why, you asshole! This is minimum sappy tbh.”

Natsuo closed the app and scratched behind his ear, feeling weird and stalkerish. So, the song had most likely been written for Midoriya. Why should he care? Sure, Shouto had not so gracefully thrust rooming with Midoriya on Natsuo, but he wasn’t actually his problem. Natsuo just had to put up with him until he got his own place or whatever, and then try to find a new roommate.

It wasn’t like he cared.

Natsuo reopened the app and typed in a different account name.

Deku’s official Instagram had absolutely no personality. It was a lot of pictures of him. Most of them weren’t even taken by him. Photographs of him taken from galas, professional photoshoots, interviews, and charity events. There were occasional selfies with other celebrities with boring, generic captions from when Deku appeared on their talk shows. There were pictures of him doing hero things in his hero suit. He was windswept and devastatingly handsome in all of them. Natsuo had to scroll through weeks of aesthetic bullshit before he finally found something that actually looked like it was posted by Deku himself and not his PR team.

It was a picture of him, younger, with a man it took Natsuo a moment to recognize as All Might in his small form sitting on his shoulders. They both held up victory signs, like All Might’s old twin banged hairstyle. The caption was simple in a way that was too authentic to be written by anyone other than him.

In all our hearts.

Natsuo scrolled further. If he scrolled back a few more months he found another authentic post. Bakugou was in it, doing the same pose he’d done in the photo with Earphone Jack, though he had the mask of his hero costume pushed up on his forehead. The next one appeared half a year before that, and it was of Shouto, for his birthday. There were three more with Bakugou, and then some more PR stuff, and then that was the beginning of the account.

Nothing. There was basically nothing.

It shouldn’t bother him. His pro hero roommate was allowed to be antisocial if he wanted to be.

But…

There was something about listening to the new song your old friend wrote about you on loop while doing chores alone in your apartment that didn’t seem like the behavior of someone that was happy being alone.

To Izuku’s surprise, he started seeing Natsuo more.

It wasn’t like he never saw him before, since they lived together and that made never seeing each other virtually impossible. The difference was that Izuku saw him more often, now, and they actually had conversations with each other when they ran into each other.

“Metacarpal,” Izuku quietly corrected, as he happened to glance over Natsuo’s shoulder to the sheet he was filling out. “That line—it’s pointing to the metacarpal, not the trapzium.”

Natsuo gave him a weird look, then traced the line carefully to the corresponding bone and sighed. “Good eye. I think I’ve been awake for too long. Why do you know that, though?”

Izuku clenched his right fist in a showy way, grinning brightly to mask the seriousness of the subject matter. “I’ve seen a lot of X-rays of hands. Specifically, my hands. Specifically, this one.”

Natsuo turned slightly in his chair, his expression falling slightly in a way that bespoke concern. Izuku didn’t want to think about what that meant so he looked away instead, setting his laundry basket down so he could start using the couch to fold like he originally planned.

“How do you manage it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Dude. I’m a med student. I don’t even need an X-ray to look at that hand and know it’s super, ultra, fucked. It has to kill you.”

Izuku paused in his folding, considering his hand as he clenched and unclenched his fist. It was so strange…people had asked him about his hand in this specific way, but he’d never considered actually telling them the truth before. For some reason, he was thinking about it now, though. Maybe…it was because Natsuo wasn’t a hero. If Izuku had looked at Iida or Uraraka or Tsuyu—Asui, only her friends called her Tsuyu—and said, “Yeah, my hand hurts like a bitch and some days I want to punch a hole through a wall because it’s so fucking frustrating to not be able to hold a pair of chopsticks,” then…

They would have done everything in their power to accommodate it. They would have taken his shifts and grabbed things out of his hand and offered to take notes for him when he started writing because they saw how much it pained him. He would have been treated like glass, and if more than one person did that, Izuku couldn’t have taken it.

“Midoriya?”

“It bothers me,” Izuku confessed, as he folded a sheet so that he could adamantly refuse eye contact. “It bothers me…in so many ways. I hate looking in old notebooks, because my handwriting used to be neat and small, not a horrible, shaky mess. I hate it every time I can’t close my hand entirely around someone else’s when I’m trying to pull them out of a burning building or from under a piece of rubble. I hate it when I drop my chopsticks in my food and have to play it off like I only did it because I thought something was really funny. It does hurt all the time, you’re not wrong. But…I manage it because I have to. It’s my burden to carry.”

Natsuo was quiet for several moments. “It happened in your fight with Shouto, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. It did.”

“I watched it,” Natsuo said. “On my own. In my dorm room. I dunno why, since it’s not really like I cared.”

“I think you must have cared, if you went through the effort of watching Shouto’s fights anyway.”

Natsuo made a curiously frustrated sound, and Izuku chanced looking at him. His eyebrow was wobbling curiously, his mouth pressed into a thin, frustrated line. “Why did you do it?”

Izuku paused, the shirt he was in the process folding held up still, and tilted his head in confusion. “Well, at the time it was the only way I could use my Quirk at its fullest, so I—”

“No, I meant…you were trying to get Shouto to use Endeavor’s Quirk, right? Why?”

Izuku turned away, finished folding the shirt he was folding, and thought about what he should say. “Endeavor’s Quirk, huh?”

“What?”

“Endeavor had nothing to do with my decision that day,” Izuku said. “You know, everyone always assumed I was acting out of some sort of kindness to others. Endeavor thought I was encouraging Shouto to move on. Shouto thought I was trying to help him unblock his past. All Might thought I’d given up everything to save Shouto. That’s not necessarily wrong, since it was on my mind, but do you know what I was actually thinking?”

Izuku allowed himself a dramatic pause. “I was angry, because all I saw was someone that was trying to win with only half their strength, when there were others there that were giving it everything they had and getting nowhere. The way I saw it, Shouto had no business saving lives when he was half-assing it. That’s how people die. And I was angry at myself, too, because I also couldn’t give it my all to save people.”

Izuku turned, and found Natsuo staring at the carpet with a complicated expression. “Look,” he said, whacking him on the top of his head with a clean sock. Natsuo gave him a look that was both surprised and offended. “That all happened ages ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You permanently injured yourself and you don’t think it matters?”

“I gave it my all to save someone, even if I wasn’t necessarily trying to,” Izuku argued, but not harshly. “That’s all that I ever wanted to do.”

“It’s just a daydream,” Natsuo hissed suddenly. “It’s a good one, it’s a good dream—this world needs heroes, but why ruin yourself when there are other people that can do it? Why does it matter?”

All of a sudden, Izuku could see what the problem was. It was almost funny, in a way, that this would be what ultimately tripped up both Todoroki boys.

“Where are you looking, Natsuo-san?” Izuku asked, feeling himself smiling as he echoed that same phrase from years ago.

“What?”

“I’m the person in front of you,” Izuku continued. “Me. No one else. I made the choice I made. It might have been a stupid one, but I made it anyway, and now I get to be frustrated with the consequences. Besides, now that I’m all grown up and stupid in different ways, I think it’s important that I tasted failure back then. I’m stronger because of it.”

Natsuo sighed, long and heavy, and Izuku went back to folding his laundry. He hadn’t changed Natsuo’s mind, he knew that, but he’d learned with time that sometimes these changes weren’t immediate. That sometimes they shouldn’t be, if they came at all.

“Heat would be good for your hand, since stiff joints are apparently an issue for you. Don’t break your bones again, though.”

“Don’t worry! I’m three years clean. I don’t even have to go to the bone breaking addiction support group anymore.”

Natsuo snorted in surprised laughter, then climbed out of his desk chair and shut his workbook. “I have to get ready for work.”

Izuku knew that, but because he was observant and committed everything he noticed about someone to memory like it was second nature, thanks to years of taking notes on heroes in notebooks. He knew that was kind of creepy, though, so he didn’t say anything. “Thanks for the tip, by the way.”

“Whatever,” he said, slightly grumbly, as he walked back to his room and shut the door.

Inevitably, Izuku broke his arm.

It wasn’t even a Quirk related break, just a regular one. He got thrown into a wall during a fight with someone with a strength Quirk, he landed on his arm wrong, and then got up and finished the fight one handed like it was no big deal, because it was no big deal. Then he was taken to the hospital and put in a cast and told Recovery Girl was out of the country so he had to suck it up and deal with it like a normal person…which meant he wasn’t allowed to work at all for the foreseeable future.

Maybe Natsuo won’t be home, Izuku thought, as he adjusted the sling around his neck on his walk back to their apartment. Izuku’s arm being broken was legitimately not his fault, but there was still something distinctly embarrassing about telling someone he hadn’t broken his bones in three years and then showing up the next day with a broken arm.

Natsuo was standing on the doorstep to their apartment building trying to juggle three bags of groceries and his keys so he could buzz himself in.

Izuku sighed. Well. He might as well get it over with. “Hey, stranger.”

Natsuo jumped then turned, his eyes widening slightly as he noticed Izuku. And then he noticed the arm sling. “What’s that?”

“A cast,” Izuku said. “I thought you would have seen one before, being a med student and all.”

“I know what a cast is.”

“Are you sure? I mean, you did just ask—”

“Midoriya. Why is your arm in a cast?”

“I broke it, obviously,” Izuku said, as he came up the steps after Natsuo. It was very obvious that these apartment steps weren’t meant to hold two extremely buff men side by side, but Izuku decided he was going to force them to anyway.

“Woah, what are you—" Natsuo asked, in a panic, as Izuku used his hips to jostle him aside enough to make room that he could reach the buzzer himself. Once he got the door unlocked, he invaded more of Natsuo’s space so that he could open the door, and then went in himself. He held it open for Natsuo on the other side, but Natsuo just stood there, holding his bags and looking baffled.

“Come on, Natsuo-san,” Izuku said, resting his forehead against the door as he held it open with a foot.

“Have you never heard of personal space?” Natsuo asked, still just standing there holding his bags.

“’Irritating’ is my most prominent personality trait,” Izuku said in response.

Natsuo exhaled slowly, closing his eyes as he did, and then finally walked through the door. “You’re not really irritating.”

“Clearly you don’t know me very well,” Izuku mused, as he followed after him. The back of Natsuo’s shirt said BACK on it, in English, which was the sort of thing Izuku generally appreciated about clothing items. It also fit Natsuo well. Too well. He had really broad shoulders, the kind that made it hard to resist the urge to feel out their width with his—

Woah, brain, Izuku said, pumping the brakes on that particular thought before he slid off the road entirely. No. Bad. We don’t think things like that about our friend’s brother. Or our temporary roommate.

Natsuo glanced over his shoulder at him and then away again, something complicated about his expression. “What happened to your arm, anyway? I thought you said you can control your Quirk now.”

“I can,” Izuku said ruefully. Always the doubt about how well he could control his Quirk, despite winning two Sports Festivals without a single broken bone, despite two years of some of the best case resolution rates and approval ratings of all upstart heroes. “This is a normal bone break. It’ll probably be on the news later.”

“Good,” Natsuo said stiffly. “That’s, uh, that’s good. Not that you have a broken bone, just that you didn’t lose control, or whatever. I know what it’s like.”

“You…know what it’s like?”

“Yeah.” Natsuo blinked at him. “My Quirk is the same as Shouto’s right side, you know? It’s really emotional. Difficult to keep a lid on. Easy to harm yourself or others with. Shouto’s control is only as good as it is because he got Endeavor’s training. Fuyumi and I just got regular Quirk counseling lessons, so we’re not going to blow a gasket or anything, but if I just unleashed it at its full force or whatever it would be…bad. I gave myself pretty minor hypothermia with it once when I was a kid and it freaked me out.”

“Oh,” Izuku said, for lack of something better to say. “I didn’t know it was so powerful.”

Natsuo sighed as he came to a stop in front of their apartment door. Izuku stepped around him, so he could unlock it with his good hand. “There’s a reason that bastard wanted her Quirk in specific.”

Izuku didn’t know what to say to that, so he just quietly opened the door and let them both in.

It wasn’t like it was a surprise that Natsuo had a different attitude and perspective on his past than Shouto did. They had been affected by it in different ways. And honestly, Shouto saw more of their father than Natsuo did. Shouto saw more of his efforts and his strength now, and had also seen less of what Endeavor’s horrible habits had done to the rest of his family family when he was young because he’d been sequestered away from everyone else.

Izuku had come to Hiroshima to avoid his friends. He wondered if Natsuo had come to avoid his family.

“Sorry,” Natsuo said, as he sat his bags on the counter. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Izuku said, shutting the door behind them and locking it. He drifted closer to the bags on the counter, adjusting his sling again. “It’s probably hard to not be able to talk about it with anyone.”

Natsuo rested his elbows heavily on the counter and then rested his chin on his hand. “It’s a little different now that everyone knows.”

“You mean, because of Dabi’s broadcast?”

“Yeah. Before, it was like…on the rare occasions I actually mentioned it, everyone’s response was to go, ‘Oh, but Endeavor is such a great hero!’ Or, that’s what my high school girlfriend said, at least. Now, everyone my age remembers seeing the broadcast, obviously, so now I sometimes get pity instead of denial. The denial is still there from some people, though.”

“So, it’s just two times worse,” Izuku interpreted.

Natsuo snorted. “Yeah. Just two times worse.”

Izuku sensed they were in need of a subject change. “What’s in the bags?”

Natsuo grimaced. “Groceries. I had to use some of your eggs to cook with the other day, so I thought I should replace them, and get other things while I was at it.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s not really fair if I don’t—”

“Natsuo-san. Listen to me when I say this.”

“…What?”

“I inherited a lot of money. A lot of it. Please just let me buy excessive amounts of groceries, at the very least. I know you’re trying to do things your own way and not freeload off of someone else, which is why I don’t pay more than half of rent and utilities. And if you want your own specific groceries you should get those too! But for basic stuff? Please just let me buy them for us both. Please.”

Natsuo was quiet for several long moments, before unearthing a carton of eggs from one of the bags and turning away to the fridge. “That’s fine, I guess. It’s not really charity, since you have to eat too. Don’t start buying other stuff for me, though.”

Izuku held his hand up to indicate he was conceding the point, even though Natsuo wasn’t looking at him. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep my money to myself. I should go see if anyone’s released a new toy line, actually, so I can buy, like, one hundred and donate them to kids in need…”

“What?” Natsuo asked sharply, whirring around. “That’s so excessive. Why would you do that?”

“Two birds, one stone,” Izuku said. He pulled out a chair at their table and sat as he watched Natsuo putting things away. Normally he would have helped, but he only had one functioning arm, there weren’t a lot of groceries, and their kitchen was not really big enough for both of them. “An up and coming hero receives royalties from their merchandise sales, and someone that wouldn’t normally get something they want does.”

Natsuo was strangely silent as he restocked one of the cabinets with instant noodles. “Can I ask you something insensitive?”

Izuku blinked. “I guess…?”

“You do that for your old classmates, right? Buy all of their stuff and then give it to kids?”

“Mostly, yeah,” Izuku admitted. “I’ll do it for other new heroes, though, too. I try to focus on heroes that won’t get a lot of awareness otherwise, but I also know that all the kids love Dynamight, so it’s a bit of a balancing act.”

“I thought you said you weren’t friends with them, though, so why bother caring?”

Izuku paused. “What?”

“It’s the same thing as the song,” Natsuo said. “I can’t figure it out. Either you do care or you don’t. You’re either the kind of person that listens to your old classmate’s new single about you or you’re not.”

“I don’t understand what you’re actually trying to ask me, here.”

“I just…I can’t figure it out,” Natsuo said. “You make no sense to me. You accepted Shouto when he told you, but you also pushed him to forgive Endeavor. You say you don’t have friends, and then you do everything you can to look after them anyway. I don’t understand.”

Izuku mulled this over for several moments. “I don’t know how to explain this.”

“Try,” Natsuo said, closing a cabinet with vengeance. “Please, for the sake of my sanity, try.”

Izuku had never wanted to explain this to someone else before, though they’d asked. He’d never wanted to. He’d never felt like he should.

“Okay,” he said, surprising himself. “It’s like this: everyone has always wanted something different from me. My mom wanted me to grow up and get a respectable desk job somewhere. Kacchan wanted me to be a hero with him. All Might wanted me to be his successor. My homeroom teacher in high school, Aizawa-sensei, wanted me to be less reckless. Shigaraki wanted me to rival him. Shouto wanted me to listen to him, Endeavor wanted me to know he had listened to me. My friends wanted me to support them, and in return, they wanted to support me. And I wanted all of this and none of it at the same time. That’s because I don’t know what I want from myself. So I give, because I want to give. I give everyone everything I have, and then I give them more. And then when they offer me something—when they hold it in their hands and say that it’s for me, that it’s all for me…I find that I don’t feel right taking it. So instead, I go.”

Natsuo stared at the counter for several long moments. “That’s a terrible way to live.”

“I guess that you would know,” Izuku said quietly.

“Excuse me?” Natsuo looked at him sharply.

“I wasn’t standing that far away that day you got attacked,” Izuku said, standing and carefully pushing his chair in. “I know it was years ago and I shouldn’t really care enough to remember it, but I heard what Endeavor said to you, even though I was trying not to eavesdrop. I heard what you said back to him, too. But you were there that day anyway—you came because you were asked to. You visited your mom in the hospital, because you wanted to. You apparently watched Shouto competing in Sports Festivals, too, even though you didn’t know him. And yet here you are, now, miles away from any of them. What do you give to people that you can’t accept when they give it back to you, Natsuo-san?”

He didn’t say anything, but he stared, knuckles white and brow furrowed. He looked like he was close to crying. Izuku could understand.

“Sorry,” Izuku said, waving as he turned away. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s not my business. Have a good night.”

And then he made it to his room, closed the door, and slid down the other side of it until he was sitting on the ground.

He would learn not to push people too far one day. Not today, apparently, but one day.

It had only been one day, and boredom was already killing Izuku.

Natsuo went to class in the morning, and Izuku wandered around the apartment by himself. He awkwardly washed dishes with one arm in double the amount of time it would normally take him to wash dishes. He vacuumed the entire apartment, excluding Natsuo’s room, in double the amount of time it would normally take him to vacuum, since he had to often stop entirely just to pick up the cord, move it, and then vacuum under it. He realized that there was a new line of Tentacole action figures out, and ordered one hundred of them, then put down a charity for children with heteromorphic mutation Quirks as the shipping address. He walked a circle around his tiny living room, then performed several high kicks.

By noon, he was already at the phase of boredom where he was opening random doors and looking inside them. He found a box of condoms under the bathroom sink, and a box of tampons in the back after he dug everything out. He figured both were relics of a past when Natsuo had a girlfriend, and then decided that was a kind of sad thought. He poked the pink loofa hanging in the shower that he’d noticed before, and contemplated if he was going to step on any feelings if he just threw it away, just so he could have something to do.

He decided against it, ultimately, since there was a very slim chance it could be Natsuo’s loofa, and instead set himself to the task of shamelessly wandering around the apartment looking for more evidence of Girlfriend.

He couldn’t remember her name.

He found hand towels with flowers embroidered on them in the closet that seemed too fluffy and feminine to belong to his surly, minimalistic roommate. He also returned to the bathroom, so that he could eye the fluffy pink towels at the bottom of the towel rack suspiciously too. He didn’t think they’d moved since he moved in, so they were probably Girlfriend’s as well. He found a mug on the tallest shelf and all the way in the back that said World’s Best Girlfriend on it. Izuku winced in sympathy when he unearthed it—it both seemed like something Natsuo would buy a girlfriend and also something most girlfriends would pretend to like and then leave behind intentionally when they moved out.

With all traces of Girlfriend discovered and then hidden once more, Izuku sat down forlornly in the middle of the floor. It was, he discovered with great distress, half past noon.

He flipped through channels mindlessly until he couldn’t flip anymore, and then he did another loop around the apartment. He lifted a weight with one arm and then did one-armed pushups and then did squats and then checked Hero News to see if Shouto had accomplished anything that morning.

And then, depressed and out of options, Izuku returned to the one thing he’d been avoiding the most—his phone. He started with the least stressful thing first, and painstakingly typed out a message to his mother saying that yes he had been on the news, no she didn’t need to worry, yes he’d injured his arm, no it wasn’t his Quirk. He switched to Kacchan next, read both messages, and despaired.

Kacchan [7:47 a.m.]:

Saw you got your shit wrecked

Kacchan [7:48 a.m.]:

I know this means you’re free so come to family dinner on Saturday

Izuku sighed, rubbing at the back of his neck as he did, and slowly typed out a “fine” that was misspelled as “fnie” but close enough, and then switched his conversation history to someone else.

Shouto [8:43 p.m.]:

You’ve been quiet for a while.

Shouto [7:48 a.m.]:

I saw the news. How’s the arm?

Izuku [1:23 p.m.]:

It’s fine!

Izuku [1: 23 p.m.]:

It’s not even my fault it got broken this time!

Shouto [1:24 p.m.]:

That’s good to hear.

Well, that was a fast response. Izuku had been hoping he would have caught him at work or something instead, so he didn’t have to actually talk to him.

…That was a terrible thing to think about friends.

His phone dinged.

Shouto [1:24 p.m.]:

How is living with Natsu going?

Well. And if that right there wasn’t exactly why Izuku had been trying to catch him at work in the first place. He scratched his cheek, trying to think of something to say that would ultimately be semi-believable. He definitely couldn’t say he’d gotten in a fight with him just one night ago, when things were finally starting to get better between them.

…Izuku would just not respond. It would be fine. Shouto expected this kind of behavior from him.

That was where safe territory ended as far as his messaging history went, though. There were eight unread texts from Iida. One from Uraraka, even though she hadn’t texted in months. Asui, too, had said something, and Yaoyorozu, probably with her obligatory check in text. She’d never really stopped being their vice representative, even though they weren’t in school anymore. And…Jirou?

Curiosity drove him to open Jirou’s message first, and then he immediately wished he hadn’t.

Jirou [8:45 a.m.]:

I’m recording a track in Hiroshima this week. Meet me for lunch.

Jirou [8:47 a.m.]:

And don’t say you’re too busy, either. I’ve seen the news.

Jirou [8:48 a.m.]:

Time to face the music.

He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. The thing about leaving people behind was that it always made it hard to go back to them.

Izuku shut off his phone, rubbing at his eyes with his fist as he did. Fuck, they were irritating him. He probably needed to ditch his contacts. He’d been wearing them for a month, anyway.

He wasn’t bored enough to compromise his principles.

It was better for everyone if he stayed alone.

For a moment, Natsuo deluded himself into thinking that Midoriya was asleep when he got home. Then he realized he was just in his room, judging by the sad music wafting through the apartment.

It was four in the morning.

Natsuo sighed as he sat his bag down, locked the door, and wandered further into the apartment. He found Midoriya’s door open a crack, and knocked softly before pushing it open further.

Midoriya spun around to look at him. He’d crammed a desk into his room along with his bed and his dresser. Natsuo had never actually seen inside before—Midoriya kept the door closed when he was gone, and when he was inside it, and whenever he left it to haunt other parts of the apartment. It was surprisingly boring for someone that otherwise had so much personality—the comforter was the same shade of blue as Shouto’s hero costume, the desk chair black and plain. There were no medals hung off of the corner of a mirror or decals stuck on desks. There wasn’t even dirty laundry on the floor.

“What are you still doing up?”

Midoriya swiveled in his chair to look at him. There was something different about his face, though Natsuo was struggling to place what it was.

“Sleep eluded me,” Midoriya said, reaching up to adjust his…glasses. That was it, that was what was different—he was wearing glasses. They were slender wireframes, oval in shape and subtle enough that they were easy to miss if you didn’t know they were there. “Welcome home, by the way. I’m surprised you’re not still mad.”

“Mad? Oh. About the…one thing.” Natsuo rubbed the back of his neck, then sighed. “It was sort of…refreshing, actually. I’m not really used to people being that bold when they talk to me about any of that stuff, I guess. I still don’t understand, but, whatever.”

There was a pause that was just long enough to be awkward. “Good,” Midoriya said at the end of it.

“Yeah,” Natsuo agreed.

Another pause that was just long enough to be awkward passed. “Sorry, have you always worn glasses?” Natsuo blurted out, right at the same time Midoriya asked him something he couldn’t hear, since his own voice drowned it out.

“Sorry,” Midoriya said, laughing awkwardly. “You go.”

“No, you go. It wasn’t important, I promise.”

“No, I insist.”

Natsuo sensed this would go on for a while if he didn’t just ask his stupid question, so he sighed, sucked it up, and awkwardly repeated, “Have you always worn glasses, or…?”

Midoriya blinked, clearly taken off guard, and then smiled. “No. Yes? I’m not sure what you mean by always. Like, have I worn glasses the entire time we’ve known each other? No. Have I worn them the entire time I’ve lived here? Yes. Though, actually, the answer to that might still be no since I just had my contacts in the whole time.”

“Aren’t you supposed to take contacts out when you sleep?”

“Yes, you are, in fact, supposed to do that,” Midoriya said, smiling ruefully at himself. “I do not though. Iida would lecture me so much over that if he could see me now.”

“Who’s Iida?”

“Old friend,” Midoriya said, then frowned intensely at his phone.

Another pause that was definitely long enough to be awkward passed. “So,” Natsuo said at the end of it. “Are you going to be up much longer, or…?”

“Oh. No, actually. I’ll probably try to sleep again soon. I should probably try to be considerate of you, anyway, since you have classes in the morning.”

“No,” Natsuo said, leaning against the doorframe. “I don’t have classes on Tuesday.”

Midoriya stiffened. “Tomorrow’s Tuesday?”

“Technically today is.”

“Oh, man,” he said, sounding absolutely, positively, completely, dejected as he flung his head back and spun in a circle. “It’s only been one day.”

Natsuo found himself amused, despite his best efforts. “Stir crazy, huh?”

“That’s a word for it.”

“I get it,” Natsuo said, an idea occurring to him.

As quickly as it came, he shoved it away. Midoriya was neither his friend, nor his responsibility. He didn’t owe him anything. And considering how their conversations usually went, agreeing to spend time with him was definitely a bad idea.

“I’m off tomorrow,” Natsuo found himself saying anyway, despite how he was mentally kicking himself. “It’s a slow time of year, so they don’t need me to work.” Midoriya lifted his head to peer at him curiously, like he sensed where this was going.

Natsuo kicked himself mentally one last time, but still said it anyway.

“We could do something, if you wanted.”

Midoriya blinked again, then tilted his head like he was considering this. “Like what?”

“Whatever,” Natsuo said, shrugging. “What do you usually do for fun?”

“Mm…well. I don’t know, honestly. I don’t get out much.”

“Movies?” Natsuo suggested, pinching his face up at himself. Why was he digging his grave even deeper, honestly? “Arcades? Uh…shopping? Going to—”

“Oh, wait! That’s an idea,” Midoriya said. “Where do you get your clothes from around here?”

“Uh…nowhere. I had them all before I came.”

“Let’s find somewhere,” Midoriya said, spinning his chair side-to-side. “Somewhere that sells weird shit with random words written on it. What do you say?”

He had a twinkle in his eye that seemed dangerous for several reasons.

“…Sure,” Natsuo eventually said.

This was probably a bad idea.

Midoriya was still wearing the glasses the next day, paired with a beanie that hid most of his hair from the public and a large, expensive-looking brown coat. He was somehow managing to look both attractive and plain at the same time, which was a good thing, because it meant people weren’t looking at them or swarming them for autographs. But it was also a bad thing, because, well…

When Midoriya had first moved in, Natsuo remembered thinking about the transitional piece of Midoriya’s personality that was missing from Natsuo’s narrative. The part where he wasn’t a kid but he wasn’t Pro Hero Deku either. For some reason the presence of the glasses made Natsuo feel like he was seeing something else entirely—not just Shouto’s friend or a pro hero on TV, but…Midoriya. Just Midoriya.

It was a ridiculous thought, and the fact that it was ridiculous and Natsuo knew it left him feeling vaguely embarrassed.

“Check this out,” Midoriya said, sounding extremely pleased with himself as he struggled to unearth a shirt from a rack with one arm. “Yeah, yeah, look. You’ll like this one.”

He flipped the shirt around, and Natsuo choked on laughter before slapping a hand over his mouth. He did like it. He didn’t know what to think about the fact that Midoriya apparently knew him well enough to accurately assess that. “What are shoulder mittens?”

“No idea,” Midoriya said brightly. “They only have it in an extra small though. Tragic. Oh, look over there.”

Midoriya pointed at something over his shoulder, and Natsuo turned to look. It was a shelf of mugs. All of them were plain white. All of them said mug shot on them. “I have to buy, like, five of those. Just so when I go over to Kacchan’s place I can take them with me. Because you know Kacchan always breaks out the alcohol when he’s just hanging out with friends eventually, you know? So he can get out his alcohol, and ask if anyone wants a shot, and I can get out one of these mugs and go, ‘What about a mug shot, Kacchan?’ And then I’ll have backup mugs for when he inevitably breaks the first three. By the fourth, he will have accepted it’s his fate, now.”

“What?” Natsuo said, once again fighting the urge to laugh. “What the hell, man? Also, I thought you weren’t clever enough for puns.”

“Maybe I’m more clever than I gave myself credit for being,” Midoriya said, smiling easily at Natsuo. It was a broad smile, confident in its strength, and it made Natsuo’s heart flutter stupidly for no really good reason. “Besides, my idea is brilliant.”

Stop it, Natsuo told his heart. We established he’s attractive a long time ago. It’s time to move on.

“I don’t know if brilliant is the word I’d use,” Natsuo said out loud. “Persistent, maybe. Weird, definitely.”

Midoriya laughed, pressing up against Natsuo’s side briefly so he could look at something else. There was nothing at all weird about the side pressing. It was regular, casual contact. Completely platonic.

Natsuo quickly stepped away from him, because a not-so-quiet part of his brain had started chanting, hug, nice, more, and that was not acceptable. Not with his brother’s friend. Or his temporary roommate. Natsuo’s stupid touched-starved body could be needy on its own time, with people that were actually his friends.

…Not that Natsuo had very many of those.

“I get called weird a lot, believe it or not,” Midoriya said lightly. “Probably because of stuff like this.”

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” Natsuo asked, leaning against a shelf of shirts with strange words printed on the front. These ones were hot pink.

“Definitely an improvement to hunting through our apartment for all traces of Girlfriend.”

Natsuo stiffened. “What?”

“Sorry. I forget your ex’s name. Actually, I don’t know if you want to talk about it or not.”

“It was Ayame,” Natsuo said automatically. “Is Ayame. Her name is still Ayame, even if she’s not my girlfriend anymore. What do you mean by you went hunting through our apartment for traces of her though?”

“I was bored,” Midoriya said. “Really bored. So I just opened random cabinets and stuff, and I found a box of c—tampons. Pretty sure those aren’t yours, so I made a game of it. Are you…okay? I figured it as fine, since it was just—”

“You didn’t go in my room, right?”

“Of course not,” Midoriya said immediately, looking horrified Natsuo would even suggest such a thing. That expression changed to curiosity, though, when Natsuo breathed out a not-so-subtle sigh of relief. “Why? What’s in there?”

“Nothing,” Natsuo said immediately. “I just don’t want you in there.”

This was a lie.

“…Tell me or I’m going to try to guess it,” Midoriya said. “Me trying to guess it will be worse for both of us, I promise, but I physically won’t be able to restrain myself.”

“Dude. Stop being strange.”

Natsuo didn’t know why. He really didn’t know why, but he was actually…enjoying this banter. Even though the end result could only be an embarrassing disaster, he was, for some reason, enjoying it.

“Deflection, that was deflection!”

“Midoriya, come on.”

“Porn?” Midoriya guessed. “Is it porn?”

“Midoriya,” Natsuo hissed, looking around quickly. The shop was just as empty as it had been a second ago. “Do not ask a guy if he has porn in his room in a public place. Who even does that?”

Midoriya laughed good naturedly. “I like how you didn’t deny that you have it, though. But that’s not it, that’s not why you’re embarrassed. Hm…more of your ex’s stuff?”

“I mean, probably.”

“You don’t seem like the sort to go through old stuff very often, now that I think about it.”

Natsuo did his best to ignore the other man, investing his interest in the shop wares instead. “I mean, you don’t really seem like the sort to go through old stuff very often, either.”

“I am, but only because I move a lot and get twitchy when I’m bored. Okay, so you’re obviously not self-conscious about that…oh. Oh. I think I’ve got it.”

Please don’t let him have actually gotten it, Natsuo thought, as he casually took a shirt off the rack and looked at it.

“Deku merchandise?” Midoriya asked in a whisper, leaning closer to Natsuo with one hand curled around his mouth like he was sharing a secret.

His face was too close.

“No,” Natsuo said, suspiciously quickly. Shit.

“Wait, you do, don’t you?” Midoriya asked, looking surprised himself now. “I was just saying—but wait—you actually do have my merchandise?”

“It’s everywhere in this city,” Natsuo defended himself. It was everywhere in general, probably considering Midoriya was ranked Number Seven in the last Japanese Hero Billboard Charts, but that was beside the point. “So what if I happened to end up with some of the stuff at some point?”

“Oh my god,” Midoriya whispered, his face screwed up like he was in pain.

“It’s not like there’s a lot of it,” Natsuo continued. Holy shit, shut up, he pleaded with himself internally. “It’s not like it’s anything more than, like, a shirt.” That’s not suspicious phrasing at all, Natsu. “Definitely not, like, a poster that’s the size of the entire wall or something. Nothing like that.”

“Oh my god,” Midoriya said again, bringing up his hand so he could cover his eyes. Natsuo could see bits of pink cheeks through his fingers still, though. Natsuo thought it was cute, and then he hated that he thought it was cute, and then he discovered he was still fucking talking.

“It’s not like it’s embarrassing either! I don’t have, like, Deku brand underwear or something. Or Deku sheets, like a little kid. For all you know it could just be, like…a cup.” What. “Or a hat! It could just be a hat. Or, like…novelty socks.”

“Natsuo-san.”

“And! It’s not like I actually hate heroes. Heroes are cool. Or, they can be cool, when they’re not…you know. But you’re…alright. You’re good at it. Being heroic and all that…stuff. And to be honest with you, I was always kind of curious to see what you would do once you graduated.” Natsuo settled a hand on the back of his neck, subtly activating his Quirk. This was tipping into the realm of sincerity, and he wasn’t sure how Midoriya would take that, but it also was too late to stop now. “Also, um…you kind of saved all of us, in a way, you know. Back then, when you saved my brother. Even if it was just a side effect of your anger issues, or whatever.”

There were several moments of silence, the skin visible underneath Midoriya’s hand growing redder and redder with each passing moment until finally he parted his fingers enough to reveal his eyes. “Please tell me it’s the cup.”

He smiled like he was teasing Natsuo. He probably was.

Natsuo huffed, dragging a hand down his face, resisting the urge to smile himself. Well. He might as well just admit it, he supposed.

“It’s a poster.”

“Is it really the size of your wall?”

“No, definitely not. It’s a normal size. Somewhat buried in movie posters and band posters. But it’s there,” Natsuo said. He wanted to reach out to Midoriya in some way, some form, so he did, not thinking too hard about it before he flicked him in the forehead. Midoriya yelped, finally dropping the hand he was covering his face with so that he could rub his forehead instead, revealing his fading blush in all its glory. It really was cute.

Tell me now if this is going to be a problem, Natsuo angrily demanded of his body. Because I’m not doing the teenaged bisexual awakening thing again.

His body, of course, didn’t respond.

“Well, I’m honored to be a poster on your wall that’s semi-buried under movie posters and band posters.” Midoriya bowed, oozing cheekiness with every gesture, and then straightened with that twinkle in his eye that Natsuo was beginning to learn was a really bad sign for his mental health. “I can sign it for you if you want. It’ll make it rarer, so when you get mad at me and sell it in a blind rage it’ll be worth more money.”

“No. If I wanted to start a pyramid scheme selling autographed hero merchandise to unsuspecting people I would abuse Shouto for that, not you.”

“How considerate,” Midoriya said, voice light. He glanced at Natsuo, expression once again inscrutable, and then away. “You know, lunch would be good. Thoughts?”

“Sure,” Natsuo agreed. He couldn’t really afford to buy anything from here anyway, so he might as well go if Midoriya wanted to.

“I’ll buy,” Midoriya offered. Natsuo must have made a face, because he immediately started flapping his free arm in a distinctly distressed way. “As a thank you. You could have spent your day off asleep instead of here.”

It didn’t really feel like charity. More like…an offer of friendship. Equivalent exchange. An eye for an eye, sort of thing, from Midoriya’s perspective.

“Alright,” Natsuo said.

Natsuo had only tried dating twice in his life.

The first time—and the worst time—it had been high school. The whole thing had been a bad idea from start to finish. He’d basically accepted a confession from a girl at random, and then dropped the ball on every subsequent part of actually dating. The only reason he wanted to date in the first place was one part because he wanted to rebel against Endeavor—which was stupid, since Endeavor barely cared what Natsuo did anyway—and also because he was trying to deny the existence of his bisexual awakening and actually dating a girl seemed like a good way to do that. He’d taken her on dates, bought her gifts, told her about his past just so he could prove to himself that he wasn’t afraid of Endeavor. He wasn’t afraid of what could happen, if the truth got out.

She called him a liar, accused him of making it all up for attention since Endeavor would never do that, and dumped him on the spot.

Ah, high school. It was a weird time. It was partially Natsuo’s fault—he hadn’t realized she was an Endeavor fan at first. He also hadn’t realized the only reason she wanted to date him in the first place was because she was an Endeavor fan. At the very least, he learned he should probably make his father a talking point early on with people he wanted to date in the future, just to see how they felt about him. And he did just that. Which was why he didn’t date anyone else until he met Ayame.

“I think he’s a great hero,” she said, in a debate class Natsuo had to take for a general credit back in undergrad. “He has the best case resolution rates of everyone in the top ten, even better than All Might…though All Might has been pulling away from heroics somewhat recently, so Endeavor’s numbers still don’t match up to All Might’s at the peak of his career. He seems kind of gruff and unfriendly, though. I don’t think I’d like him if I met him, but I do respect him as a hero.”

It was well-said and bold. More importantly, it was true. Natsuo wasn’t stupid. He knew his father was a phenomenal hero. His father just happened to also be a jackass. Somebody that could see both things at once, that could acknowledge both truths—that was the kind of clear-headedness Natsuo could appreciate.

He still didn’t tell her, though. She found out about his past when Touya—Dabi, that man was not really his older brother—released his broadcast. They’d nearly broken up over it back then, but they hadn’t been dating for very long and Ayame was very understanding. It wasn’t the sort of thing you told people easily.

The only problem was just that Natsuo didn’t tell her anything easily. He didn’t tell her about how frustrated he was with Fuyumi trying to mend things with their father. He didn’t tell her how complicated his mom coming home again was for him, how he felt like shit every time he learned something new about Shouto that he should have known ages ago. He kept it all to himself, every bit, and eventually she had enough.

Natsuo sat his chopsticks down with a clink as it occurred to him.

Years of silence, not even broken by the person Natsuo was ready to propose to, broken in just over a month. One month of living with Midoriya, and he’d already told him, as easy as breathing, how he felt about his past, about his father, about himself. He’d been frustrated with him for being reckless. His soul had gone all goopy and gross when Midoriya smiled at him. He had been more than a little interested the one time he’d seen Midoriya run across the hall with just a towel wrapped around his waist because he forgot to take his clothes to the bathroom with him.

Shit.

This was bad. This was so bad. Natsuo had only been dumped two months ago. He should still be deep in his “get over Ayame” phase, not already developing romantic feelings for who was probably the worst candidate Natsuo could have possibly picked. Midoriya was a hero. He was the only hero Natsuo would probably say he was a “fan” of at that, too. He was also his little brother’s friend. No, it was worse than that—he was the guy that was hopelessly in love with his little brother, based on all the stories Natsuo had heard.

And he was infuriating.

“No,” Natsuo said out loud.

“What?” Midoriya asked, blinking at him.

Oh, no. Now he was being weird, too. “Just…um…I just remembered I have a test tomorrow.”

“Oh! We can head back to the apartment after this, then, so you can have time to study. Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you out all day.”

“You don’t need to apologize. It was my idea,” Natsuo said, pulling out his phone to check the time. “It’s also only two, so it’s hardly ‘all day.’”

He had a text from Fuyumi.

Further investigation revealed it was a text asking if he was free for dinner on Saturday. With Shouto and their mom, too.

Because the only thing worse than realizing he was stupid for Midoriya was realizing this and having dinner with Midoriya’s friend four days later.

Could he get out of it? He didn’t have work and he didn’t have classes, and Fuyumi was the type of person that would ride all the way out to Hiroshima and invade his apartment just to make sure he wasn’t lying to her to get out of dinner. The only option for getting out of it was having plans with friends…

…And Natsuo didn’t actually have friends.

Wait.

“What are you doing on Saturday?” Natsuo asked, before he really thought it through.

“What?” Midoriya asked, nearly dropping his chopsticks in his ramen.

“Like,” Natsuo said, sensing he was digging his own grave in a worse way than he had been before but committing to it now. “I’m off again. And I don’t have classes. And you apparently can’t be trusted when you’re bored, so…”

Midoriya smiled in a tolerant way, though he looked at his ramen to conceal it. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

“Oh, yeah, I know,” Natsuo said. “You can take care of yourself. Just…” Where was he going with this? He should go somewhere with it. Somewhere convincing. “We don’t end up in the apartment at the same time together all that often, you know? So I just thought it would be better to plan something instead of just…sitting around awkwardly.”

Midoriya’s shoulders tightened, just a little bit, and Natsuo kicked himself. That was kind of stupid. No one really wanted to be told they were awkward, right? “Not like that. I don’t think you’re awkward or something. You can be pretty fun, actually? Like today. Today was pretty…uh, not bad. It wasn’t bad.”

Thankfully, Midoriya started laughing before Natsuo could embarrass himself further. It was a quiet laugh, more like a chuckle. It was at odds with Midoriya’s energetic personality, but not at odds with his quieter side—the part of him that wore strange shirts to be funny and listened to songs made by his old friends and donated buttloads of hero merchandise to charities on the regular.

“It’s alright, Natsuo-san. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got a family dinner I have to go to on Saturday, anyway. Kacchan’s orders.” Now, wasn’t that ironic. Of course everyone’s schedules would be dictated by the one person in the family that had a love life. Naturally.

“Well, that works,” Natsuo said, somewhat awkwardly. He would just have to tell Midoriya he had his own family dinner to go to on Saturday a few days later, so it didn’t seem like he was just trying to get out of it, even if he was.

“And for the record,” Midoriya added, clicking his chopsticks together once like he was trying to get Natsuo’s attention with them, “you can be pretty fun, too.”

He smiled, and Natsuo’s soul went goopy again.

Great, he thought. Just great.

Chapter Text

The pain in Izuku’s arm was bad today. He’d had broken bones before, so he knew what it was like—even when set, they still ached while they healed, a dull throb, persistent, and ever-present. It was better whenever he had something to distract himself with, like yesterday, when he went out with Natsuo.

Izuku was still thinking about it, mostly just because he wasn’t actually sure what it meant. Natsuo had offered. It had been his idea. And more importantly, he’d offered twice. Was it pity? Well, probably, considering it was because Izuku was stuck at home.

…Unless Izuku being stuck at home was just an opportunity for him.

Izuku shook his head, hopefully shaking that thought free as well. Natsuo was straight. Probably. And even if he wasn’t straight Izuku could think of literally no reason why he would have meant for that to be a date, since he 1) didn’t seem to like Izuku very much in the first place and 2) probably knew that Izuku had once had a thing for his little brother, which would make things kind of weird for everyone involved.

Maybe Natsuo was just concerned about him? If that was the case, it was just someone else thinking he was made of glass. That didn’t seem right, though, since if it was concern Natsuo probably would have left him at home. He was studying medicine, so he had to know that was the best place for people with broken bones to be.

Man, it was going to bother Izuku forever, wasn’t it?

There was a knock on his door. Izuku sat bolt upright in his bed, feeling more nervous than he had any right to feel. A package had probably just come for him in the mail, or something. That was the only reason Natsuo would willingly talk to him.

“Midoriya?” Natsuo asked, sounding muffled through the door.

“Yeah?”

This was apparently the permission Natsuo needed to open his door. He kept a loose grip on the handle as he leaned against the doorframe. The posture brought a lot of attention to his biceps. His nice, decently sculpted biceps. Natsuo studied him, gray eyes keen but not unkind. “You okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Izuku asked, a bit too quickly.

Natsuo raised his eyebrows. “Because your arm is broken and you were just muttering about something.”

“Oh, was I?” Izuku asked, sounding every bit as panicked as he felt. “You didn’t hear what I said, right?”

“No? Are you sure you’re okay, dude?”

“I’ve never been better,” Izuku said, lying through his teeth. “You should go to class, right?”

“Yeah…” Natsuo frowned. “Do you have a fever? Your face is kind of red.”

“I’m fine!”

“Are you sure? A fever with a broken bone could be—”

“It’s fine! Definitely not a fever.” Izuku hopped off his bed and crossed to where Natsuo was, by the door. He grabbed his wrist and used it to move his hand from the handle of the door to Izuku’s forehead. “See? No fever here. So, get out. Shoo. Go to class and be smart, I’ll be fine.” Izuku grabbed his shoulders, spun him around, and promptly shoved him out of the door.

“Woah, hey, Midoriya—”

“Don’t worry about me, Natsuo-san,” Izuku said. “Go to class. Have a good day.”

He hesitated. “If you’re sure…”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” he said, finally leaving. Izuku shut the door behind him, then spun around with a sigh.

He couldn’t stay here today. He needed to get out somewhere, anywhere, if it was the last thing he did.

Jirou’s hair was short again. This wasn’t necessarily a surprise, considering Izuku had access to both the news and social media, but it was different. The last time he’d seen her in person it had been longer, long enough to keep it in a silky tail or a slender braid. But then again, the last time he’d seen her in person had been six months ago. Izuku hadn’t stayed long then, because he rarely did.

She spun her umbrella on her shoulder as she noticed him, a grin splitting her face. “Well, would you look at that. You actually came.”

“I said I would,” Izuku said, stopping in front of her. “I keep my word, if nothing else.”

They hung in this moment for just a second, before Jirou sighed, an exasperated sound. “I don’t know if I want to hug you or punch you.”

“We have time for both?” Izuku offered.

The next second, Jirou was in his arms. Arm. She was mindful of his cast, and it was slightly challenging to manage with two umbrellas and the rain pouring down. In the end, it was more an abstract representation of a hug instead of an actual embrace—Jirou’s arm was around his waist, her umbrella bumping into his. He rested his chin on the top of her head and called it good enough, since his one free hand was preoccupied holding his umbrella. Around them, the rain fell.

“I’m not going to punch you,” Jirou said. “Your stupidity seems like punishment enough.”

Izuku snorted, closing his eyes as he let the sound of the rain and the presence of a friend wash over him. “I missed you, too, Jirou-chan.”

In the sad part of him he kept hidden from everyone else, he still found that it was true.

Here was a secret:

Kacchan and Shouto were not the only people Izuku failed to cut ties with, when he stood on his feet one day and found that he needed to get up, to go, to get out of there. He’d gotten stuck in one other way, because there was one person, just one, that realized part of what he was doing, even if she didn’t really grasp why.

The difference between Jirou and everyone else was that she stood on the cusp of people he interacted with regularly. Not distant enough to be detached, not close enough to be attached—just perfectly situated in the middle distance of his relationships at the point in his life when everything started going to shit. And he thought that distance made it possible for her to understand, in a way nobody else really could understand.

There was a point in time, about three weeks after All Might’s death. His ashes had been scattered, his spirit set free and Izuku was…fine. He felt fine, surprisingly so. He hadn’t cried in a long time, and he felt at peace, ready to step into the light, ready to live on and carry on.

“I’ll win and be just like Deku-kun.”

Uraraka was asleep when she said it. She’d passed out on the common room couch, face pressed up against the cushions. The words were clear, though, as clear as day, and they landed in Izuku like a single drop of rain on an ocean he didn’t know was there.

Ashido and Kaminari laughed about it, but quietly. They probably teased her about it when she woke up, too, knowing them. And the words continued to echo through Izuku like a gunshot.

I’ll win and be just like Deku-kun.

I’ll win and be just like Deku-kun.

I’ll win and be just like Deku-kun.

What was he to people? Who was he to people? What did he mean to them? How much faith had others placed in him, how much power, how much strength? What did people think of when they thought of him? Was it strength, victory, kindness, power?

Was he…hurting them? By being there?

Once he had the thought he couldn’t shake it.

“I couldn’t have done it without you, Midoriya-chan,” Tsuyu—Asui, only her friends called her Tsuyu—said after a training exercise. It was innocuous, the sort of empty platitude that his classmates often exchanged with each other, but it stuck with Izuku, filling his body with fear and dread. Was it true? Was his presence like a chain, tying them down? Just how much did people rely on him?

Getting help when you needed it was important, but there was a difference between getting help because you needed it and not being able to stand on your own two feet. He remembered what had happened just a few years ago, when All Might fell. Hero society collapsed, everyone panicked as they tried to adjust to a new workload without a “Symbol of Peace” to save the day for them. Was it happening again? Was it happening again and was it Izuku’s fault?

He missed a day at his internship with Endeavor because of a minor cold, but Shouto and Katsuki still went. Shouto came home with a broken wrist, because he’d reflexively gone into one of their combo moves in the middle of a fight and hadn’t had time to adjust when he remembered Izuku wasn’t there to finish it off.

It was his fault.

“It’s not your fault!” Shouto shouted, as he followed Izuku up the stairs to his dorm room. “Izuku, come on, stop being ridiculous! I’m the one that fucked up! You had nothing to do with it!”

Izuku couldn’t even look at him. Recovery Girl had healed him hours ago. There were no visible signs he’d been in a fight at all by now, and still Izuku couldn’t look. It was his fault. It was his fault.

“Izuku!” Shouto shouted, continuing to follow him. “Izuku!”

He’d made it to the second floor. He was almost there, so close to freedom he could feel the sun on his face and the wind in his hair. He had to let Shouto go. Izuku was a chain, tying him down—he would be better off without him at his side. He would be less likely to get hurt, if he knew Izuku wasn’t there to catch him.

“I’m in love with you!”

There were shackles at his ankles, a chain wrapped around his throat. He was almost to freedom, and he found he couldn’t open the door to his floor. He couldn’t get out.

He found that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t the only person tying others down.

“What?” Izuku asked, turning to look at Shouto. His friend. His crush. The person Izuku would have done anything to hear those words from a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month ago.

“I’m in love,” Shouto said, a flight of stairs away from him, his hand poised on the railing, “with you.”

There were chains on him too. He would get injured again. He would fall down again. As long as Izuku was there to pick him up, he would get used to falling, over, and over, and over again. He would still be strong, but at what cost? For how long? Would he die too, because Izuku couldn’t be there? Because Izuku couldn’t be strong?

“Don’t be,” Izuku said, choking on the words as he spoke them. He tore as many of the chains off as he could, but he knew some of them still remained. He tore enough off that he could run, and run he did.

Izuku knew that everything he was doing was kind of stupid. There was strength in relying on others, more strength than there was when you were on your own. He understood that, and yet. And yet.

Izuku was burdened by a legacy that was too heavy for him to carry. He knew that reliability was a good thing, honestly. It should be good to trust and be trusted. But their admiration felt like a weight he couldn’t carry. He was too young. He was too stupid. He wasn’t—

“I’m not strong like you,” he told Endeavor quietly. There were two cups of tea and Izuku’s resignation papers between them. “My shoulders aren’t broad enough to carry them all.”

Endeavor was always quiet in these moments, his eyes piercing but kind and good-intentioned, but this moment exceptionally so. It was in this way that he was most like his middle son, but neither of them would appreciate the sentiment. He was a good man because he was deeply flawed and he knew it. He was a better hero. And with All Might gone…he was all Izuku had.

He sighed. “I know what happened between you and Shouto.”

Izuku felt tears sliding down his cheek and dripping off of his chin. He wiped at them hurriedly, frustrated with himself. “I have to go, Endeavor-san. I’m not strong enough to hold it, so I have to be strong enough to run.”

“There is no shame in needing others,” Endeavor said. “There is no shame in others needing you.”

“I’m not good enough for them,” Izuku said, fists clenched tightly in his pants. “They want to be just like me. They can’t do it without me. They love me. I can’t, Endeavor-san. I can’t be what they want me to be. I’m not you. I’m not strong enough to carry the weight of their sins along with my own, so I have to go. I can’t be what they need, so I have to go.”

Endeavor was quiet for several long moments, contemplating the cup of tea in his hands. “I will accept your resignation.”

Another chain broke. Izuku didn’t feel as relieved as he thought he would have.

“If I could, though, I would like to say one thing to you,” Endeavor said, setting his cup of tea down. “You are not All Might. And you are not me, either.”

Izuku stared, not bothering to stop the tears from flowing now.

“You’re young, now,” Endeavor continued, tilting his head to the side. Now he looked like his youngest son, measuring his words and making sure they were balanced before he said them out loud. “You shouldn’t try to be someone you’re not. You shouldn’t try to carry anything that is too heavy for you to hold, whether that’s your own responsibilities or the feelings of others. One thing at a time, Deku. Learn to live for yourself before you learn to live for others, too.”

Izuku closed his eyes, a few more tears squeezing out with them. “Thank you, Endeavor-san.”

He harumphed, but softly, then poured Izuku another cup of tea. He looked like his daughter as he did, giving and fair. He had changed so much in so little time. He was so much better for the chains that bound him. Izuku couldn’t help but wonder why he couldn’t feel the same way about himself.

“You’re welcome anytime,” Endeavor said, as he handed the refilled cup of tea to Izuku.

“When did you know?” Izuku blurted, as he accepted it. “When did you know that you could change?”

“When I could see what admiration does to a person,” Endeavor said, blue flames reflected in his eyes, “and accept it. When I could see that not all of my endings would be happy, and be alright. When I could feel the strength that someone gave me, and think of it not as charity, but as mine.” He sipped his tea, eyes still cast to the table instead of Izuku. “I hope you can see what I mean one day, or that you can find your own answer. Best of luck in all that you do.”

Best of luck.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kacchan demanded, as he kicked Izuku in the chest. Izuku stumbled backwards several steps before he caught himself, his arms pinwheeling and his heart pumping. “I thought you cared! Why bother with everything you’ve done for him if you were just going to break his heart and run off?”

They were arguing about Shouto. Well, Kacchan was arguing. Izuku was grieving. Kacchan couldn’t see the latter because he was so caught up in the former, though.

“What are you doing?!” Kacchan shrieked. He was doing the startup for Howitzer Impact, so Izuku braced himself, Blackwhip coiling at his side. All Might used to monitor these spars, but he was not there anymore and they were both feeling it in different ways. “What was with the moon eyes? The dumb gay shit you said? Why are you giving up after you’ve won, you damn n—”

Kacchan went flying. Izuku tossed him harder than he meant to, and the added force of his explosions helped to throw him through one of Cementoss’s structures hard enough to knock parts of it over. It effectively ended the argument, and Izuku felt stupid as he unearthed his friend, his rival, his brother in all but blood from the rubble.

“You like Shouto, don’t you?” Izuku asked.

Kacchan slapped his hand away. It was as good as an affirmative. It was like a zippo was flicked open inside of Izuku, a realization sparking and lighting, and he didn’t like any part of it. “Fuck that. What’s wrong with you, Deku? What are you doing? Why are you pushing everyone away?”

Izuku wanted to pick up the chains he’d broken. He wanted to throw them over his shoulders and run a marathon. He wanted to smile like he felt no pain as he held his feelings up for everyone’s inspection, like it didn’t bother him, because it didn’t. It shouldn’t.

Izuku was not All Might.

“Ask him out,” Izuku said, as he sat on the ground in front of Kacchan.

If they had each other, they wouldn’t worry about him. If they could rely on each other they wouldn’t need to rely on him. All the pressure pushing down on him would be lighter, and he would be okay.

“Quit spouting bullshit!” Kacchan yelled. “What’s wrong?”

Izuku didn’t say anything.

“Is this about All Might?” Kacchan asked, finally, like he’d been wanting to all night.

And it was, just a little bit. If All Might were here Izuku could have gone to him with this and he would have lifted some of the weight from Izuku’s shoulders by reminding him of all the ways he was strong. So, it was the truth when Izuku said, “Yes.” But it was also a lie, an intentional misdirection, because if Kacchan thought it was about All Might he would never try to figure out other causes. He could be with Shouto. They could be happy. And they could think Izuku’s weirdness was a storm that would eventually pass, not a largely unrelated problem.

“Deku…” Kacchan said, and in that moment, Izuku found he had accidentally created a different kind of chain.

They let him push them away a lot easier than they used to, when they thought it was because All Might had died. He pushed and he pushed, and they went, letting him have the space they thought he needed to grieve. And it got better, for a while. Yaoyorozu stopped turning to him to strategize first, and started formulating plans on her own. Asui stopped correcting him when he called her “Asui-san,” even if she did frown a lot more for a while. Uraraka stopped trying to ask him on dates, then dated Sero at the end of their second year, and Ashido in their third. Iida was the most persistent of them all, but eventually, he too stopped looking sad when Izuku refused invitation after invitation. Shouto didn’t get injured because he wasn’t there, not again.

They were alright. They were fine without him. He wasn’t going to let any of them down, and finally, he could breathe.

And then when he tried to move, he felt the tug of his new chains keeping him down.

“Move in with me after graduation,” Shouto said one day in their third year, as graduation loomed. The past was the past. Shouto thought Izuku didn’t love him back, so he’d gotten over it like Izuku wanted him to. It was a small miracle he had stayed friends with Izuku at all after what he’d said, and Izuku knew this. He was grateful, even if he didn’t always act like it.

“Move in with you?” Izuku asked.

“It’ll be good for you,” Shouto said, giving him a strange look. “It’ll be good for me, too. I think I would like to continue living with friends.”

Izuku saw it. And he saw the past that had led to this moment, and he hated himself for being so focused on one problem he let another one bloom.

“You’re worried about me,” Izuku realized.

“That’s not what this is. It’s convenient, right? We’ll both be working in Tokyo.”

And he was trapped, because Shouto couldn’t be happy if he was worried. Izuku might have freedom but he had tied others to him in the process.

I’ll fix it, he vowed to himself. I’ll do whatever it takes. I can’t let them worry about me.

“That sounds great,” Izuku said.

He worked until he couldn’t stand anymore, because if he was working it meant he was fine. He followed Shouto doggedly—if he was asked to go out to a bar with Kacchan, he would go out to a bar with Kacchan, just so Shouto didn’t think he was bothered. Other people from his class didn’t talk to him very often, and he usually distanced himself from them when they tried, but Izuku would go to their houses if Shouto asked. He did everything he could think to do, and still it was there. Izuku was beginning to think it would always be there, now, the spark of worry in Shouto’s eyes that could never be snuffed out.

He started dating Kacchan a year after they graduated. With hindsight, they had probably been dating for longer, and this was just when they thought it was okay to tell him, and once he’d had that realization, it had made everything worse, so much worse, because he was in their way.

Izuku couldn’t breathe.

“I was in love with you, too,” Izuku said.

Understand, he begged whatever part of the universe was listening to him. Let him understand.

“What?” Shouto asked, shoulders stiff, eyes hard. He looked nice like this—but then again, he was practically made to stand in snowy weather and look amazing. “You what?”

“I loved you too, back then,” Izuku said. “When you said that to me in second year, it was—”

“That’s what you called me out here to tell me?” Shouto asked. He was angry, very angry. This was not going the way Izuku had expected it to.

“I needed to—”

“We,” Shouto said, his voice like a whip crack, “are at a party. Right now. For Katsuki and I. To celebrate our relationship. And you’re telling me this? That you broke my heart for no reason? Is that what you’re saying? That you broke my heart for no reason, that you walked away, and now—now that I’m finally happy, now that I’m finally over you—you want to, what? Ruin it?”

“This isn’t about me!” Izuku yelled. Anger. He was always so quick to anger. Always so ready to scream, his blood boiling, his rage overflowing. This was the point of his personality that was least like All Might’s, this part that was so unforgiving. “I’m trying to tell you that—”

Shouto hit him. Just once. It was just like that time Iida had hit him at Kamino—a mean right hook to the cheek. Sharp. Brisk. Enough to shut him up and leave a bruise, but not enough to legitimately hurt him.

Izuku held his jaw, staring at Shouto, who stared, in turn, back at him. His chest was heaving like he’d just run a race. “Fuck you,” he told him, and then he went back inside.

Izuku didn’t bother trying to stop him. He sank to his knees in the snow. They were at Yaoyorozu’s house, and he’d done this just outside of the back door. Which was stupid, in hindsight, because there were at least two people also in that house that could eavesdrop just fine through doors.

“I was trying to tell you why,” Izuku said, pleading with someone that wasn’t there anymore. “I was just trying to tell you why.”

There were several moments of quiet, just the snow and him, and then the door to the backyard slid open. Izuku didn’t want to look.

“Midoriya Izuku, ever the heartbreaker, cries alone in front of a snowy backdrop,” Jirou’s voice said, dripping with sarcasm. “He turns to look at the newcomer, and the scene fades out to the dramatic tune of music ripped from a soap opera.”

“Cut it out,” Izuku said, ignoring the tears falling from his eyes. “You don’t get it. Not everything is a joke, Jirou-san.”

“I think I do get it, though,” Jirou said, closing the door behind her. “I heard what you two were saying. That wasn’t a confession, was it?”

“No,” Izuku said, wiping the tears off his cheeks with a sleeve. “No, it was not.”

“And…you hate it, don’t you?” She was standing just behind him now, though he hadn’t looked at her yet and had no plans to. “You hate being needed. You hate being worried over. You hate being the only person people turn to for their bullshit problems, don’t you?”

Izuku looked now, glancing over his shoulder at her. She was backlit from the house, rays of light catching strands of her long purple hair as it blew in the wind even though her face was in shadow. She was already wearing her coat and her boots, dressed for leaving.

Close enough to know him. Far enough away to see.

“I live near here,” she said, shrugging slightly. “I don’t need anything from you. You can stay there for the night if you want. Try again with the peppermint dumbass in the morning.”

Izuku sighed as he stood, dusting snow off his pants. “I don’t think I’ll try having that conversation again anytime soon.”

She took her hands out of her pockets, and Izuku sighed again as he realized she’d grabbed his wallet and keys from inside. That was everything he’d brought with him.

Dressed for leaving.

It had been so long since he’d felt understood, even in a small way. So, so long. And Shouto probably wouldn’t want to see his face anytime soon anyway, so…

“Thanks for this,” he told Jirou.

She smiled, a crooked, sad sort of smile. “Anytime,” she said.  

“Iida asks about you every day,” Jirou reported, as she stabbed the lid of her bubble tea—her choice. “Well, he asks Todoroki about you every day. Ochako is still legitimately mad about everything to do with you, as you probably know.”

Izuku winced sympathetically for himself, as he awkwardly knocked his straw against the table to open the plastic wrap. “Yes, well…I deserve that. Is she happy, though?”

“Yeah, she’s happy. She and Mina are good for each other. Honestly, I’d say it’s kind of a good thing you are how you are. She’s definitely happier than she would have been if she actually succeeded at dating you like she wanted to.”

“That wouldn’t have gone well,” Izuku agreed softly, as he finally freed his straw from its wrapper and stabbed his bubble tea. Uraraka’s admiration had been the heaviest of them all to carry.

“Tsuyu still thinks that you’re upset with her over something,” Jirou continued somberly. “And Yaomomo tried to send you an invitation to her engagement party but the invite came back. Did you move, by the way?”

“Yeah, I moved. I live here now.”

“Really?” Jirou raised her eyebrows. “You mean I could have been crashing at your place this whole time while I stayed here to record?”

“You wouldn’t have liked it,” Izuku said, jostling her towards a booth with his hips. “I have a roommate.”

“Hey!” Jirou said, though she laughed and allowed herself to be jostled. “I at least deserved to know. I can’t believe you got away with giving me the heartbreaker treatment for six months. Also, what? A roommate? Who?”

“Don’t call it the heartbreaker treatment,” Izuku despaired, as they finally took their seats at a corner table where both of them could watch the door. Old habits, he supposed. “That implies your heart was broken, and I know it wasn’t.”

“You think I didn’t notice you trying to direct me away from commenting on the roommate thing, but I noticed,” Jirou said, leaning her elbows on the table. “How are you…doing? With that?”

Izuku adjusted the position of his straw and sipped in hopes of getting another bubble. “It’s not so bad.”

“Really?” Jirou said, raising one eyebrow skeptically. “Are you sure? You and your dependency problem are doing just fine having a roommate around?”

“Surprisingly,” Izuku said, as he sat his bubble tea down, “I’m not bothered by being depended on for being rich. I was worried about it at first too when I accepted the roommate thing, but apparently it’s different. Which makes sense—it’s not like Natsuo will die if I move out.”

“Wait, who? Natsuo?”

“Mhm. Shouto’s older brother. The non-villain one.”

Izuku sipped his tea, amused, as he watched Jirou’s expressions perform acrobatics as she processed this. “Todoroki asked you to live with his brother, didn’t he?” she asked at the end, having arrived at the correct assumption.

Izuku sighed. “Yeah, he did.”

“And you just…agreed to it.”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“Tell him that he’s stupid, he has the wrong idea, and he needs to stop babying you?” Jirou proposed.

Izuku gave her a look. “Historically those conversations don’t go well with him. And I can see why. Besides…I thought this would finally do it, you know? I live with his brother a few months until he can find his own roommate, then move out on my own again. Shouto gets to watch my ‘progress’ since I’ll be living with his family, and then maybe everyone will finally believe me when I say I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine, though,” Jirou argued. “All of this is killing you, I know it is.”

“Not this again.”

“Yes, this again,” Jirou said, surprisingly ferocious. “I know you’re lonely out here. Just—fuck Todoroki. Fuck his problems. He’ll either figure it out or he won’t.”

“I caused all of these problems,” Izuku pointed out. “I should try to fix them, right?”

“I thought you didn’t want people to depend on you for everything.”

“I don’t, but you know what’s worse? People sitting around worrying about me over everything.”

“Then why are you doing this? Why not just be a normal fucking human for once and just explain this to someone so you can come back?”

“This isn’t something that can be explained, Jirou-chan. It’s not—”

“Izuku, shut up for one second.”

Izuku shut up, if only because the use of his given name surprised him. He and Jirou had never switched over to first names, despite six months of hookups and crashing at each other’s places and the occasional date. Mostly, that was because people that were dating or were good friends did the first name thing, and they weren’t really either. More accurately, they were just partners. There when needed and gone when not. Distant enough to not be detached. Not close enough to be attached.

“I’m worried about you,” she said. “I’m really worried about you. You don’t owe me anything, I don’t want you to owe me anything, but what you’re doing isn’t helping anyone. You have to know that, right?”

Well, he could argue that what he was doing was at least helping Natsuo, but Jirou would probably change her mind about punching him if he said that.

“Nothing else I’ve tried has worked,” Izuku said. “I get so—I get so—It’s hard to breathe, Kyouka. I feel like I’m being suffocated. Everyone else wants to know where I’ve been or why I left, and I feel it, like a thousand hands reaching out and grabbing at me. I want to just tell them the truth but I can’t because they don’t get it. And with Shouto, and Kacchan, it’s like…if I can’t even tell them, how can I tell someone else? How?”

“They’ll understand,” Jirou said. “Trust me, they’ll understand, you just have to say it.”

“Saying it doesn’t work,” Izuku argued. “I don’t know how to talk about it. I don’t think anyone else knows how to listen.”

“Have you tried? Not with Todoroki, but with everyone else.”

He slumped forward until his forehead met the table, not dignifying this question with a response, then turned his head until he could look at his bubble tea slowly drip condensation. “You know, though…Shouto is right in one way. I feel…happier than I’ve felt in a while. It’s kind of nice just being here. It’s like a vacation.”

“Does your roommate have something to do with this?” Jirou asked carefully.

Far enough away from heroics to not be attached. Close enough to understand.

“Maybe just a bit,” Izuku said, tilting his head to look at Jirou now. “It’s sort of nice talking to someone that doesn’t think heroes are the best thing since sliced bread. It feels…lighter.”

Jirou studied him, dark eyes intent, and then tilted her head. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“To your apartment. I need to know where you live so I can give your address to Yaomomo so you can be invited to her engagement party.”

He would at least like the invite, even if he didn’t go. Maybe it was horrible of him, since his exile was self-imposed in the first place, but it was comforting to have evidence that they were all doing fine, even without him there. Especially without him there.

“Besides,” Jirou continued, “your cast is offensively blank.”

“What?”

“Look at it!” Jirou said. “Nobody’s signed it or drawn weird doodles all over it while you slept. It looks so sad.”

Izuku looked at his arm, as if assessing his cast’s sadness. It was indeed kind of sad, now that he thought about it. The last time he’d had to wear a cast it had been for only a day in his third year and Kaminari, Ashido, and Sero had drawn random shit on it when he’d fallen asleep on the common room couch.

“That would be nice, actually,” Izuku said, “if only because it means I’ll get Earphone Jack’s autograph.”

Jirou laughed, wide and boisterous, then jiggled her empty cup at him. The ice rattled when she did. “Let’s go, then.”

Izuku and Jirou never told anyone about their relationship, if relationship was the right word for it to start with. They had also never intended to have a relationship in the first place, though. He stayed at her apartment for a night after his failed “confession,” then he stayed for two nights, then on the morning of the third day he asked Jirou why she’d been eavesdropping in the first place.

“I thought we might have something in common,” she said.

“What?”

“Broken hearts.”

“Broken…hearts?”

“Yeah,” she said, glancing away from the TV to give him an amused look. “I like Bakugou. Liked Bakugou. I don’t know.”

“Kacchan?”

“Yeah, him.” Jirou grinned, but there was an edge of pain to it. “Don’t look so surprised. He’s attractive, you know.”

“But he’s also dumb about feelings.”

“I never said I had good taste,” she said.

Izuku laughed despite himself. “Well, I guess you wouldn’t be alone. Shouto likes him too. Obviously.”

“Nobody ever said he had good taste either.”

“Definitely not,” Izuku said, snorting as he took a sip from his soda. “He did like me once, after all.”

Jirou crossed her legs, something about the gesture reading as nervous even though it normally wouldn’t look that way. “When did you know you were over him?”

Izuku paused before he could take another drink, looking at her over the rim of his soda, before he set it aside. “I knew when he told me he loved me, and all I felt were these invisible chains wrapping around me and pulling me down. Maybe he was the right person, but it wasn’t the right time, so I was…okay. I chose what was more important to me at the time, and it wasn’t the kind of thing I could go back on, so I knew it was the end.”

Jirou was silent for several moments, before leaning back on her couch and looking back at the TV. “You have to talk to him eventually, you know.”

“I know.”

And he did.

Shouto was waiting for him when he finally got back to his apartment, which was unfortunate, because Izuku had been trying to avoid him.

“I’ve been texting you,” Shouto said.

“I know.” Izuku had been reading the messages as they came, even though it was a little bit like torture, so he knew what Shouto was going to try to say next. He needed to beat him to the pitch, though, because if he didn’t, he might not ever be able to say this. “Listen, I—”

“I’m sorry I hit you,” Shouto said, at the same time that Izuku started to speak. “That was childish.”

“I’m not upset about that,” Izuku said.

“I shouldn’t have lashed out in the first place,” Shouto said. “You were just voicing your feelings. You have that right.”

Izuku had to jump in, before this derailed. “I was trying to tell you that I was sorry, for—”

“I want to stay friends,” Shouto said, frantically. Frantically for him, anyway, which was still sedate for most people. He was practically drenched in panic from head to toe, now that Izuku knew to look for it. He was worried about Izuku, again. “You’re my first friend. You’re my best friend. Please, I can’t—I don’t want to lose you, Izuku.”

I was trying to tell you that I was sorry for saying that to you that day. I was trying to tell you that it was something I had to do. I was trying to tell you that I was glad you were happy, that I wanted you to stop carrying that moment around with you, that I just wanted you to be free from me, whether that meant I was in your life or not, whatever you chose—

The words slipped through his fingers; his argument gone, like leaves on the wind.

“I’m not going to stop being your friend,” Izuku found himself saying instead. “I’m not leaving unless you want me to.”

“Good,” Shouto said, a heavy, exhausted sound. He hugged Izuku, despite not usually seeking out physical contact with him, clinging to him like his life depended on it.

No, Izuku thought, as he choked on the air he was breathing, as he placed his chin on Shouto’s shoulder. I’m still needed, why am I still needed—

“It doesn’t bother me,” Shouto said, as chains constricted around Izuku’s throat. “You stayed friends with me when I—and I—it doesn’t bother me.”

“Okay,” Izuku said softly, as he patted Shouto on the back. “It’s okay.”

It bothers me, he screamed, but no words came out. I just want to know that you’ll be okay on your own. Shouto, listen—

“I’m sorry,” Shouto said. “I’m sorry about everything.”

“I’m sorry too,” Izuku said.

They were apologizing for different things.

“It didn’t go well?” Jirou guessed, when he reappeared back at her apartment the next day.

“I couldn’t say it,” Izuku said. “He still thinks I was just trying to confess.”

She sighed, opening the door wider to let him in. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Pull back,” Izuku said. “As much as I can pull back.”

“You’re welcome here whenever.”

He took her up on that. He wouldn’t usually take people up on their offers of kindness, especially not since what could only be called his mental breakdown in high school, but he was largely doing better. He felt less needed, and more like he was just existing beside Jirou. It felt less hard to do what he felt like he needed to do when she was there to support him.

Neither of them told anyone else what they were doing.

Izuku didn’t accompany Jirou to social events with the rest of their former class. When they happened to end up at them together anyway they didn’t tend to talk to each other. When Izuku fucked off to Hiroshima Jirou pretended to be surprised with everyone else, and everything was fine.

And then six months ago he felt it. The urge to get up, the urge to go, the sense that he had to leave now or he’d never be able to, and he needed to go for Shouto’s sake.

So he left.

Jirou, unlike the others, actually understood why he did the things he did, so she let him go. She didn’t text him every day to ask how he was doing. She didn’t demand answers or try to run an intervention or tell him he was fucking up, even though she had to want to do all of those things at some point.

She knew he would come back eventually, once he could.

So, the fact that she’d pushed him, the fact that she’d asked him to come to her—

He couldn’t ignore it, even if he could ignore everything from everyone else…so he accepted her request.

“This paint is so dry,” Jirou complained, not for the first time.

“I haven’t used it since high school,” Izuku said, shrugging. “So that makes sense.”

“Why do you keep taking it to new apartments with you if you haven’t used it since high school?”

“Because…I don’t know actually. But it worked out. Oh, hey, watch the carpet—Natsuo would probably be upset if we got wet paint on it.”

“Wet is arguable. Where is he?”

“He’s at campus. Sometimes he comes home between classes and sometimes he doesn’t. He has a shift at the bar he works at about an hour and a half after his class, so a lot of the time, he decides it’s not worth it to come back here.”

“Wow. You’ve really got his schedule memorized, huh?”

“Organization is one of my strong suits,” Izuku said, shrugging.

Jirou frowned at him. “Stop that. I’m bad enough at art, I don’t need to be bad at art with dried up paint and you moving around.”

Izuku bit his lip to hold back his laughter. “Sorry.”

She flicked her paintbrush at him in a disgruntled way, but otherwise didn’t say anything.

Izuku watched her struggling to paint a purple electric guitar on his cast for several more moments, and then finally, he said, “He’s not likely to come back. So, you can tell me whatever it is you wanted to say.”

“Who said I wanted to say anything?”

“You did, by using my broken arm as an opportunity to commandeer my time.”

She snorted, and dipped her paintbrush in the paint to get a new color. “Alright. You moved. Nobody knew where you went, except Todoroki and Bakugou, presumably. I knew that you still worked here, because of the news, but I wasn’t about to ask Todoroki or Bakugou for your whereabouts. So I was worried. I thought that you might have relapsed.”

Izuku sighed. All these chains, all these things he couldn’t escape—

“Maybe they’re like threads instead of chains,” Jirou said, surprising him by coiling her earphone jack around his pinkie. “They still tie you down, and maybe they make it hard for you to move, but you don’t need to break them to leave. And if you need to know someone’s there, they’re just a tug away.”

Natsuo stuck his key in his door, twisting it to unlock the deadbolt. Jirou withdrew her earphone jack, but she didn’t look up from her artistic masterpiece as he stepped inside. Izuku did, though, meeting Natsuo’s gaze as he shut the door and sat his bag down. “Oh,” he said. “We have…company?”

“I know, it’s surprising, right?” Izuku smiled, tilting his head to the side as he looked at Natsuo. Natsuo, in turn, stared at him blankly. “Jirou Kyouka,” Izuku said, after a suitably awkward amount of time had passed. “Todoroki Natsuo.”

“You…are Earphone Jack, aren’t you?” Natsuo asked, finally entering his home in full, albeit awkwardly.

Jirou finally looked up at him. “Yeah. Get over here already.”

“What?” He cast a searching glance towards Izuku, as if looking for some sort of cue. Izuku jerked his chin, since it was best to just go along with whatever Jirou had planned, and Natsuo shuffled over after depositing his keys in the bowl he kept by the door and shucking his shoes.

“What are you doing?” Natsuo asked, as he peered over Jirou’s shoulder at Izuku’s cast.

“My cast was offensively blank, supposedly,” Izuku said.

“It wasn’t supposed, it is offensively blank,” Jirou said. “We’re going to fix that, though, aren’t we, Beeforoki?”

“Beef…oroki…?”

Izuku caught Natsuo’s bewildered expression out of the corner of his eye and looked away quickly so he didn’t laugh. “You better just go with it, Natsuo-san.”

“I guess,” he said, as he settled into watch Jirou adding the finishing touches to her guitar. It looked like a five-year-old had done it, but Izuku wouldn’t have it any other way, honestly. She took a sharpie and signed Earphone Jack in obnoxiously large characters next to it, and then sat back.

“There you go,” she said, tapping the end of her sharpie against his cast. “I always love seeing my name branded on an injured person.”

“As you should,” Izuku agreed. “It’s a sign that you’re doing a great job, as a hero.”

She threw the marker at him, then they both laughed when it bounced off his forehead and landed in Natsuo’s lap. That startled a laugh out of him too, low and easy. It was a little bit like Shouto’s breathy chuckles, but like if that sound had a hot cousin.

Ah, hm. That was a weird thought. That was a really weird thought.

“Hey, Midoriya. Bathroom?”

“Down the hall,” Izuku said, nodding towards the hall in question. “It’s the only door that’s open.”

“Cool,” Jirou said, standing and dusting herself off. She made finger guns at them as she backed away. “You’re up, Beeforoki.”

Natsuo made a pained expression. “That name is so cursed.”

Izuku laughed, just a few short peals. “Well, you’re stuck with it, most likely.” Natsuo sighed dramatically, and Izuku shuffled to face him. Would it be weird to ask him to draw on his cast too…? Or would it be weirder to not address it?

No, they were friends. Sort of. They were friendly, at least.

“Got a second?” Izuku asked, offering his cast to Natsuo. Natsuo blinked at him in surprise. “I understand if you have to get ready for work or something, though! So, don’t feel like you have to do it, but if you want to…”

“You want me to draw on your cast?” Natsuo asked, like he couldn’t believe it.

“We’re friends, right?” Izuku asked, not entirely sure if it was true. “At least, I hope we’re friends, since we live together.”

“No, uh, we are,” Natsuo said, as he popped the cap off of the sharpie. “Friends. I think.”

Izuku laughed, easing some of the tension he felt before. “It’s kind of weird being friends with your brother’s friend, isn’t it?”

Natsuo snorted, gently grabbing Izuku’s casted wrist with one hand and guiding his arm closer. Izuku brushed his wrist with his fingertips, and then spent several seconds trying to pretend like he hadn’t noticed Natsuo’s skin was ice cold to the touch and that was a very intriguing Quirk side effect. He failed ultimately—because that was interesting, since it might potentially mean he might not need as high of a body temperature as an average human to function. And if that was true, he would probably be really sensitive to warm weather.

“It is weird,” Natsuo said. “Especially since I don’t really have other friends, and my brother set this up in the first place. I’m still not sure why he cares, since it’s not like I’ve been putting in a lot of effort to help him with anything.”

Izuku cast a mindful glance towards the hall where the bathroom was. Jirou was Jirou, so there was no way she wasn’t listening in on this conversation. But then again, there was nothing Izuku was going to say that she hadn’t already figured out on her own.

“Shouto is sometimes bad at listening when he’s close to the situation,” Izuku said quietly. “It takes a lot of effort to get through to him—I know that best, after all, after repeatedly breaking my hand to do it. But he’s kind, and that kindness is a curse as much as it’s a blessing. Responsibility weighs heavily on him and probably always has, given his past, but he carries that weight differently now that he’s an adult instead of a teenager. Honestly, maybe he is helping, even if he’s helping for the wrong reasons.”

“You really get people, don’t you?” Natsuo said, in that soft way people that were stung by their own inability to do something spoke when they were pointing out that same quality in others.

“I’m good at understanding people, maybe,” Izuku said. “Pretty bad at actually talking to them, though.”

“You can’t do it all, I guess. At least you know what your limits are.”

“At least,” Izuku agreed, leaning slightly over his arm to watch Natsuo drawing. He was just using the sharpie, not bothering with paint. He swirled the marker around adeptly, and Izuku watched as he finished off the handle to what was clearly becoming a mug with ease. “Oh, you’re good.”

“Thanks.” Natsuo hesitated, clearly debating whether he wanted to say something or not. It was intriguing to Izuku, because he hadn’t really seen it out of Natsuo before—he was usually all or nothing, either he knew he wanted to speak, or he said nothing at all.

“Mom was really into art when I started visiting her in the hospital,” Natsuo said. “She wasn’t…she was less, back then. Most days, Fuyumi and I would go to visit and she wouldn’t talk at all, so we would just sit there in silence for an hour or two while she huddled on the bed and only looked at us from the corner of her eye. She didn’t want to talk about our lives, her life, our past. It was all too recent for her back then. One day, when I went alone—Fuyumi had a meeting—she handed me a crumpled up piece of paper. It was a sketch of a flower she’d made. Just like that, I thought that maybe I should try to draw too. Maybe we could talk that way.”

“Did it work?” Izuku asked, as he watched Natsuo detail out the rim of the mug he was drawing.

“Yeah,” Natsuo said. “It worked. I bought a sketchbook and would spend the week trying to draw stuff in it, and then I would show it to her. I would fill as many pages as I could, just so she could have a lot to flip through. I was so bad at first, but I don’t know. It worked. I would show her the sketchbook, she would show me something she made then threw away, and then eventually talking became easier for her. I wasn’t the only one doing it—Fuyumi was adamantly learning how to make all of the dishes in her recipe book and would bring them with her to the hospital. We were both trying in our own ways.”

“Do you still draw?”

“Sometimes,” Natsuo said. “I don’t have a lot of free time.”

“In that case, I’m honored to be your canvas today,” Izuku said, grinning from cheek to cheek.

“This is a doodle of a mug.”

“A very good doodle of a mug!”

“It still isn’t exactly high art, Midoriya.”

“And I’m still honored!”

“You’re so weird,” Natsuo said, but fondly.

He started writing on the mug he’d drawn, and Izuku laughed, then covered his mouth with his other hand, then continued laughing anyway. Natsuo grinned as he continued writing, then stepped back, his masterpiece complete.

“Mug shot,” Izuku said appreciatively, as Natsuo spun the marker through his fingers before capping it.

“Five of them wasn’t enough,” Natsuo said dryly, giving Izuku a look deadpan enough that it could rival his younger brother’s.

“Thank you,” Izuku said, grinning jubilantly. “You’re right, five wasn’t enough. I’ll cherish this forever.”

“Until you get your cast off, at least.” Natsuo’s expression had shifted, though. There was something intentional about it, like he was thinking very hard about something.

Izuku found he couldn’t look away.

“Well,” Jirou said, and whatever moment he had just been having with Natsuo snapped like a thread. “I better get going. My girlfriend called a little while ago, so I should probably call her back before she starts to worry too much.”

The word ‘girlfriend’ stopped any and all queuing embarrassment Izuku felt in its tracks. “Girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” Jirou said, unable to hide the small, genuine smile that came to her lips as she said it. “She’s blonde. And dumb about feelings. You know who she is actually—Utsushimi Camie?”

“From Shiketsu?”

“That’s the one,” Jirou confirmed.

Jirou had a girlfriend.

“Woah, cool it with the elated puppy look, Midoriya,” Jirou said, laughing as she stepped out of the awning of the hall and into the main room. “I get it. You’re happy for me. Please don’t say anything that’s going to embarrass both of us.”

Izuku reworked what he was about to say in his head as he stood, awkwardly, because being denied movement of one limb always made standing awkward. “I am happy, though. You deserve the best out of life.”

Jirou paused in the middle of pulling on her shoes, glancing back at Natsuo for a second before looking at him. “So do you,” she said.

That was a meaningful look. She thought—she thought him, and Natsuo—

Well, Natsuo was attractive. He was definitely attractive, as all Todorokis were attractive, but Izuku barely even knew him—

That wasn’t true. Izuku did know him. He knew him very well, honestly.

Jirou smirked, immune to all of the internal panicking happening on Izuku’s side of things, and grabbed her umbrella from where she’d left it by the door. “See you, Beeforoki,” she called out.

“Oh, uh, sure. Nice to meet you.”

“Don’t be a stranger, Midoriya,” she added, but softer, as she let herself out of the apartment.

And then she was gone, leaving a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings behind in her wake.

Kyouka used to think of herself as one of the last bastions of sanity amongst her class.

Whatever meddling bug Midoriya had infected them all with she felt like she stayed far away from, even as everyone else fell victim to it. What was other people’s business was their business, and she stayed out of it—she had her own drama to wade through, her own battles to fight, and her own feelings to feel.

And then she caught it anyway, after she’d graduated and grown up and thought herself completely immune to the meddling bug. And to no one’s surprise, she caught it because of Midoriya himself.

She had always been an eavesdropper. She used to try her best to avoid it at any and all opportunities—she plugged her ears and sang to herself when she heard her parents fighting in the other room, she adamantly continued to listen to music on her phone even though she saw her middle school’s lamer version of the Mean Girls casting her furtive glances her way and doing a terrible job of hiding the fact that they were whispering behind their hands.

Then she got to high school and she said to herself, “You know what? Fuck that.”

She was going to hear them talk anyway. She might as well embrace it.

She was curious when she saw Midoriya pulling Todoroki aside that night, one year ago. She knew the other girls thought Midoriya liked him, though they didn’t really dare to say that in front of Ochako. Kyouka wasn’t so sure—people’s hearts fluttered when they were around someone they had a crush on. There were minor changes in how they inflected their voice, shifts in how they stood and how they presented themselves. There were exceptions, of course—Kyouka also hadn’t thought Todoroki liked Bakugou, and clearly she’d been proven wrong—but the usual signs weren’t there with Midoriya. Not for a few years, at least. They’d been there once, definitely, but now when Midoriya talked to Todoroki, he just sounded sad.

He sounded sad a lot, actually.

She didn’t mean to meddle. Whatever was going on with Midoriya, Bakugou, and Todoroki was decidedly not her business. But she meddled anyway, and then she said to herself, “Okay, so I meddled once—it won’t happen again.”

And now here she was, contemplating meddling once more.

Bakugou sat at the drum set, anxiously bouncing the hi hat pedal as they waited for the audio engineer to sort out a technical difficulty with the recording software. Kyouka wasn’t much better, considering she kept strumming through riffs on her bass. It was the musical equivalent of plucking the petals off of a flower one at a time—to tell him, not to tell him, to tell him…

“I saw Midoriya yesterday,” Kyouka said, playing another riff to mask this weighty bomb drop of a statement as something casual instead.

The consistent clink of the hi hat came to an abrupt stop. “You saw Deku? Like, out on the street or some shit?”

“No. I told him I was in Hiroshima and wanted to get lunch, and he accepted.” Half a week late, but whatever.

“And he…agreed to that? Really?”

“Yep,” Kyouka said, trailing her pick along all four strings, open. “He agreed to it.”

“Huh,” Bakugou said. “Why?”

Probably because I make an effort to listen to him instead of just assuming he’s one word away from falling apart, Kyouka thought bitterly.

“I met his roommate,” Kyouka said instead, still playing at being casual.

Bakugou sighed. The drum kit complained as he moved to brush a hand down his face. “It’s not going well, is it?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I told him,” Bakugou said. “I fucking told him. ‘It’s a bad idea to let fucking Deku move in with your brother,’ I said. God fucking damnit—”

“I’d say it’s going fine, actually,” Kyouka interrupted. She could have sworn Bakugou used to be smarter, but maybe that was just her old crush talking. “As long as the plan was to have Todoroki’s brother fall madly in love with him within six months.”

“…Huh?”

Kyouka couldn’t help but smile. She’d realized it less than twenty-four hours ago and still she couldn’t stop grinning like an idiot whenever she thought about it. And she’d scolded Midoriya over his puppy eyes, when, shit, she was so much worse—

Faster heartbeats, a difference in inflection when talking to each other, a difference in subject matter when they were alone. The way Natsuo told him about his mom, the brightness of Midoriya’s laugh over the mug shot thing—Kyouka didn’t understand, but she knew she wasn’t meant to—the probable kiss she’d interrupted. Even before that, there was the moment in the bubble tea place, the quiet happiness on his face, the way he’d called his time here a vacation.

He had become her best friend, even though she’d never meant for him to. She’d wanted to see him be happy for so long she had started to think it was impossible.

“This is bad,” Bakugou said. “This is so fucking bad. I knew something like this would happen, that damn nerd—”

“What? You think it’s bad? Why?”

“Because Deku is an idiot! He’s been pining after Icy-Hot for years, and he always runs off, and he always hurts people, and this is going to be so much worse, since this time it’ll be Shouto’s fucking brother in the blast zone. Oh, shit. Fuck. What if Deku uses him as a rebound? What then?”

You know what, Kyouka thought, with a sense of divine acceptance, I can see why meddling is so appealing to people, actually.

“Midoriya is not pining over Todoroki,” Kyouka said.

“Like hell he’s not—”

“Six months of fairly consistent hookups with him says otherwise.”

Bakugou choked on air. “What?”

See, that expression right there—that was exactly why she kept this a secret for a year.

“Not a single performance issue either,” Kyouka continued, enjoying the horrified look on Bakugou’s face way more than she should. “That boy’s got stamina, you know. He could probably go forever if he wanted to. Oh, and the way he—”

“Holy shit, stop!” Bakugou said, covering his ears like a child. “I did not need to hear any of that, oh my fucking god.”

“Well, then don’t ask for it,” Kyouka sniped, setting her bass on its stand and leaning forward.

“Fuck off,” Bakugou said, tapping his drumstick against one of his toms. “Fuck. Did you really…you know…with Deku?”

“I would say a lot of things just to fuck with you, Bakugou, but making up something like that is not one of them,” Kyouka said, raising her eyebrows. “I can prove it if you really need me to.”

“No, definitely not,” Bakugou said, holding up his hands in surrender too. It was rare for him to back down from something, but she supposed if anything was going to do it, it would be learning details about his childhood friend’s sex life.

And then, as he scrubbed a hand through his hair, the most important question finally occurred to him. “Why wouldn’t I have known?”

“Because you see what you want to see,” Kyouka said, “and you hear what you want to hear. And for the record—Midoriya probably likes Natsuo, too. He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him, you know? He’s been fine for a while, Bakugou. Midoriya isn’t made of glass.”

Bakugou flinched like she’d slapped him, but honestly, that was good.

Him and Todoroki—they’d been doing this for too long. Whether she’d intended for it to shake out this way or not, Midoriya had become her best friend. And if he had a shot at happiness, she wanted to do whatever she could to make it happen. Even if it did mean meddling a little, here and there.

Chapter Text

On Thursday, Kacchan called.

“How’s your living situation?” he asked, as soon as Izuku answered the phone.

“It’s good,” Izuku said, blinking at the abruptness of the question. He performed a lot of shuffling so he could press his phone against his shoulder and pour his tea with his only free hand. “The apartment’s a little on the small side compared to what I’m used to, maybe, but it’s not bad.”

“I meant with the discount half-and-half.”

Amused, Izuku asked, “Would that make Natsuo a quarter-and-quarter?”

“Just answer the question!”

“Alright, fine. Yeah, it’s good. Natsuo is cool. Why the sudden interest, anyway?”

“…Are you sure?”

“Kacchan. There are a lot of things I would say just to fuck with you, but that’s not one of them. Besides, I—”

Kacchan screamed incoherently and hung up.

Izuku set his tea down then pulled his phone away from his ear to make sure he’d actually been hung up on. He had. “What just happened?” he asked empty air.

“You good?” Natsuo asked, pausing as he pulled on his shoes.

“Just a weird phone call,” Izuku said, glancing at Natsuo and then away. Being on bedrest at home was doing terrible things to his mental health, honestly. Or maybe just his hormonal health. It was getting harder and harder to look away from Natsuo’s face.

“Bakugou?”

“Yeah. I thought he might have just been calling about Saturday, but I guess not.”

“Oh. I forgot to tell you. I have to go to a family dinner that day too.”

The memory of Natsuo asking him if he wanted to do something together on Saturday jumped to Izuku’s mind easily, if only because he’d been thinking about it so often recently. Man, something was in his head lately…

“That worked out,” Izuku said, sitting down on the couch backwards and looking at Natsuo over the back cushions. “That was probably intentional, actually.”

“The one person dating in a family always decides everyone else’s schedules,” Natsuo said, rolling his eyes. “Especially when it’s Shouto.”

That caused something else to occur to Izuku. “Wait. Will your father be there?”

“Yeah,” Natsuo said, lifting his bag onto his shoulder in a way that fell just sort of nonchalant.

Izuku frowned. “Will you be alright?”

“It’s not like it’s my first time seeing him since I left,” Natsuo said. “Don’t worry. If I couldn’t deal with him, I wouldn’t go.”

“Does he know that we live together?” Izuku asked.

“Nobody knows but Shouto, I’m pretty sure. Why?”

“No reason,” Izuku said. It wasn’t a reason that Natsuo would want to hear, anyway, considering his relationship with his father.

Izuku paused. He dissected that thought. He backtracked.

“Endeavor seems a little worried about me,” Izuku said instead. He didn’t like being treated like he was made out of glass, so he shouldn’t treat Natsuo like that either. “In that distant, mentor way. I worked for him for a while in high school. He might ask you about me, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Natsuo said, scratching behind his head. “Yeah, that makes sense. What do you want me to tell him, if he asks?”

Well, that was a development. Izuku hadn’t really expected him to want to talk to Endeavor willingly. “Say whatever, I guess.”

Izuku wondered if he would ever have the courage to talk to Endeavor himself. He hadn’t spoken to him—as in had a conversation with him—outside of work since he quit there in high school.

“Alright,” Natsuo said. He did that awkward hovering thing he’d done the last few times he’d left while Izuku was here, like he wanted to say or do something else. Maybe he just wasn’t sure how to say goodbye. “I’ll see you later, then.”

“See you later,” Izuku agreed, watching as he left.

Once Natsuo was gone and the door was shut and locked, Izuku let out an enormous breath of air and slouched down the couch until he was buried completely in the cushions.

“Fuck,” he whispered to himself. “Why is everything so weird?”

The empty apartment didn’t have an answer for him.

Saturday came, as was inevitable, and Izuku found himself standing on the doorstep to the same Bakugou family home he used to frequent as a child. It was big enough to host three adults easily, especially with Kacchan living in his own apartment closer to the city, so there had been no reason for the Bakugous to move when they started dating his mom, too. Considering the apartment he used to live in with his mom was also partially paid for by his father, it was practical in every way for the three of them to just live here.

It was just that it was also weird.

It was weird to return to the home of his childhood friend and see his own baby pictures hanging on the walls. It was also weird to see pictures of his mom hanging on the walls. And weirder still to see pictures of himself and his mom together, since his history as Kacchan’s friend was a suitable explanation for his photographic presence, and his mom’s history as the Bakugous’ friend was a suitable explanation for her photographic presence. Them together was irrefutable evidence that this was no longer just Kacchan’s childhood home—but Izuku’s too.

“Izuku,” Masaru said pleasantly, as he opened the door. “You have a key.”

“Uh…” Izuku said, ever eloquent.

“It was probably easier to knock, though, with that cast, wasn’t it?”

“Definitely,” Izuku agreed, trying not to deflate with relief too obviously at being given an excuse. Truthfully, he just didn’t use the key even though he knew he had it because he wasn’t able to get over how awkward he felt unlocking the door to Kacchan’s family home and walking in like he owned the place.

“Well, come on in,” Masaru said, opening the door wider so that Izuku could do just that.

Once inside, he could make out the tell-tale signs of Kacchan and Mitsuki, already screaming at each other. “Nothing bad,” Masaru said, like he read Izuku’s thoughts. “They’re trying to find the garlic powder.”

Izuku smiled as he removed his shoes. “That has to be the noisiest way to find garlic powder imaginable.”

“You’re telling me,” Masaru said, but fondly.

Izuku slid his feet into the slippers they kept here for him—feeling weird yet again, but also welcomed—as he followed Masaru deeper into the house. He found his mother with Mitsuki and Kacchan, weathering their dispute with ease and patience while she calmly opened cabinets looking for the garlic powder. Both Izuku and Masaru were quiet as they joined, taking up seats at the kitchen table without interrupting the ongoing battle. At this point, seeing how long it took any of them to notice he was there had become a bit of a game.

“Garlic powder,” Inko said, cutting through the yelling with pure calm instead. She pressed the garlic powder into Mitsuki’s hand, then kissed her cheek, effectively shutting her up.

“Deku,” Kacchan said, as he finally noticed Izuku was there.

“Hi.”

“How long have you just been fucking sitting there?”

“Ten thousand years, at least,” Izuku said somberly.

“Izuku!” his mother said, but warm, as she immediately wrapped him in a hug. She was mindful of his broken arm, though. She was used to dealing with his injuries. “It’s so good to see you! How’s your arm?”

“It’s been better,” he said, patting her on the back with his free hand. “It’s been worse, though.”

“Oh, I hope you haven’t been doing anything to aggravate it.”

“It’s been bedrest for me, I promise,” Izuku said, even though he’d technically gone out twice.

“How’s your new apartment?”

“Smaller than my old one, but I sort of like that about it,” Izuku said. “It’s cozy.”

It felt like home.

…Wait, what?

“And your new roommate?” Inko asked, oblivious to his internal panic.

He needed a logical explanation. Logical, logical, logical—

Oh! It probably just felt like home because the apartment he used to live with his mom in felt small. That was it. No need for a crisis.

“Yeah, he’s great,” Izuku said, trying not to feel weird as he said it. Natsuo was great. He didn’t play rock music with the sub-woofer turned all the way up at 3 a.m. He cleaned up after himself. He didn’t complain when Izuku got home at weird hours because he got caught up in an incident at work. Izuku’s attraction and potential maybe crush on him had nothing to do with his roommate qualities.

Nothing at all.

“It’s so strange to me to think that Shouto and Katsuki have finally moved in together,” Masaru said contemplatively.

“It definitely took you long enough to ask, you brat!” Mitsuki added, swatting at Kacchan with a dish towel.

Kacchan dodged it easily. “Oi! Don’t hit me, you old hag!”

“I’ll hit you if I want to hit you, since it took you a whole year to ask your boyfriend to move in with you! What were you dragging your feet for, hah?”

“I wasn’t dragging my feet!”

“Anyway,” Masaru said, as they continued to bicker in the background, “how are you adjusting to not living with Shouto anymore?”

Inko finally released Izuku from her hug so that she could sit next to him, propping her elbow up on the table and her chin up on her hand. “I must admit I’ve been worried about you because of that, Izuku. I know how you feel about Shouto…”

Izuku swallowed down the old frustration. He had no one but himself to blame for everyone thinking he was still madly in love with Shouto. He made no effort to stop the rumor from circulating. He made no effort to explain himself to anyone, after he failed to do so to Shouto twice. In a lot of ways, it was easier to just let them think what they wanted to think and hope everything blew over eventually.

Considering it had been a year, though, he was starting to have doubts about it blowing over.

“I’m enjoying it, honestly,” Izuku said. “I’m happy to see Shouto and Kacchan happy. And having a roommate helps, I think. I’m not used to living on my own.”

Kacchan gave him a weird look from across the kitchen, but didn’t say anything.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Inko said. “You could always move back in with us, though, if you wanted—”

“The bird’s flown the nest, Inko!” Mitsuki interrupted with a mad cackle. “Let him keep flying. He doesn’t want to come back here to roost.”

Both Masaru and Inko laughed at that metaphor, while Izuku grimaced at the table.

This was going to be a long night.

Natsuo’s shoes were by the door when Shouto arrived at his family home. Not the old one, but the new one, rather—the one that his sister and his mom shared, that he frequented, and that Natsuo and Enji only occasionally appeared at. Natsuo used to be here more when he was in undergrad and he lived here, but once he moved out with his girlfriend to go to graduate school, that was that. They rarely saw him, unless they were willing to go to Hiroshima.

Enji, on the other hand, rarely came because he was rarely invited, and sometimes even when he was invited he rarely seemed comfortable enough to attend. Shouto was honestly surprised to see that even one of them had come, but especially that it was Natsuo, considering Enji was due to arrive soon. Assuming he came at all, that was—sometimes, he just stayed away from this place, still determined to atone for his past.

“I’m here,” Shouto called out, as he closed the door behind him and slid off his shoes. His declaration either went unheard or ignored, but he didn’t mind—he could hear the others talking in the other room, even though he couldn’t make out what they were saying, so they were most likely too absorbed with each other to notice him.

It was still so strange to him. It had been years since Endeavor had built this house, years since his mother had been released from this hospital, and still Shouto was so unused to coming home to the sound of conversation and the smell of cooking. He was so used to living in a house that was more a ghost town than anything else, so hearing and seeing signs of life everywhere when he came to visit would never not be a shock.

“Just spill!” Fuyumi said, as Shouto made his way into the room. “I know you have one!”

“I don’t!” Natsuo argued, looking legitimately afraid for his life as Fuyumi shook him back and forth.

“You do!”

“You’re crazy!”

“You’re too happy!”

“Why are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?”

“It’s not a bad thing, there just has to be a reason!”

“What are you talking about?” Shouto asked, as he sat down next to his mom and across from Natsuo. Natsuo grimaced as he met Shouto’s gaze, but as to why, it was a mystery.

“Shouto, Neesan has lost it,” Natsuo said. “I need you to rescue me from this hell.”

“Oh, hush,” Fuyumi said, shaking him for good measure. “I haven’t lost anything.”

“Natsu is no longer sulking, so Fuyumi is under the impression that he has a new girlfriend he’s not telling us about,” Rei supplied, sipping her tea delicately.

“What?” Shouto asked, studying Natsuo with a newfound intensity. “Do you?”

“No,” Natsuo said, but in that suspiciously quick way people told lies.

Fuyumi gave Shouto an appraising look, then turned it on Natsuo. “See, even Shouto thinks you’re lying.”

“I’m not lying! I definitely do not have a girlfriend. I’m not interested in a girl either, before you ask me that.”

Fuyumi’s mouth snapped shut with a click, like that had indeed been what she was about to ask. She made a contemplative face, tilting her head to the side. “What is it then? Why are you fine all of a sudden?”

“Perhaps it’s a boyfriend Natsu has instead of a girlfriend,” Rei proposed, once again sipping her tea with a gleam in her eyes.

Fuyumi’s eyes lit up instantaneously. “Is it? Is that it?”

“Maybe I’m just over Ayame!” Natsuo said, throwing his hands in the air as Fuyumi began to shake him back and forth again. “It’s been months, you know!”

“No one mopes like you, Natsu,” Fuyumi insisted. “You would need more than just time to get over your girlfriend of four years.”

“I feel insulted.”

Shouto assessed his brother. There were no noodles in his hair, he smelled like men’s cologne instead of months old laundry, he looked less like he’d had a frown permanently implanted on his face. Fuyumi and his mom weren’t wrong—Natsuo did look a lot happier than he had last time he’d seen him. And they also weren’t wrong about the fact that it sometimes took miracles to get Natsuo out of his own head, either. It was something of a Todoroki family trait.

“Name some other big life event that could have caused this, then,” Fuyumi said, while insistently poking Natsuo in the cheek.

“Fine! Okay, sure,” he said, knocking her finger away. “I got a roommate. It helped assuage my financial troubles.”

…Wait.

“A roommate?” Fuyumi asked, blinking. “Who?”

“Does it matter who?”

“Natsu, of course it matters! You don’t have friends.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“If you don’t have friends, then that means you probably got a roommate from an ad, or a random person off the street. They could be a murderer, or rob you blind, or—”

“Trust me, my roommate is not going to rob me.”

“You didn’t say they weren’t going to murder you, oh—”

“He’s not going to do that either!”

“He?”

“Perhaps this is the alleged boyfriend,” Rei mused quietly, but Shouto didn’t think anyone but him heard her.

“I’m not dating my roommate, Mom,” Natsuo said. “Will you let that go?”

“What if you want to date your roommate, though?” Fuyumi said. “What if that’s why you offered to let him move in? You’re so closed off, I can’t imagine you would just let anyone move in with you…”

“Yumi, my life is not one of your cheesy romance novels. This isn’t a roommates to lovers trope.”

“You never did say how you met this roommate of yours,” Rei said. “All joking aside, I can’t help but worry. There are plenty of people out there that would try to befriend you just to dig up our family’s past for their own gain. I would hate to see that happen to you, Natsu.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Natsuo said, but softer than he had before. “It’s nothing like that, I promise. Actually…”

Natsuo glanced at Shouto, so Shouto finished the sentence. “His roommate is Izuku. I arranged it. Sort of.”

“Shouto proposed it,” Natsuo said. “I agreed to it though, because I needed the roommate. Midoriya also agreed to it. I presume, anyway?”

“Yes,” Shouto said, even though this was somewhat a convolution of the truth. Izuku had wanted to stay on his own. Living with Natsuo had been a compromise he made because Shouto asked him to make it.

“See?” Natsuo said. “Nothing to worry about. If Number Seven Hero Deku is the kind of guy that murders his unsuspecting roommates, everyone will have a much bigger problem on their hands than my death.”

“Wait,” Fuyumi said, with a weight Shouto didn’t quite understand, “You live with Midoriya?”

Natsuo cast her a disgruntled look. “Don’t start.”

“You live with Midoriya, and you weren’t going to tell me?”

“It wasn’t really important,” Natsuo said. “Plus, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he’s a kind of private guy.”

Shouto blinked in surprise. “You mean you actually talk to him?”

“Why wouldn’t I talk to him?” Natsuo asked, a touch defensively.

Because Izuku refused to answer any of Shouto’s messages about Natsuo. Because there was no way that wasn’t a bad sign, when Izuku was involved. Because they had never really gotten along spectacularly before so it would be a little odd if they were suddenly buddy-buddy now. “It’s just odd,” Shouto said, instead of any of that.

Natsuo wasn’t having it, apparently. “What’s so odd about it?”

He was looking for a fight. Shouto shouldn’t rise to the bait, he shouldn’t, he knew that he shouldn’t—

“Because he refuses to talk about you,” Shouto said evenly.

“So what? He refuses to talk about a lot of shit.”

“Natsuo, language,” Fuyumi said reflexively, and Rei cast her a sad look just as reflexively.

“Maybe,” Shouto allowed, “but it’s still surprising that you talk to him.”

Several moments of tense silence passed, before Rei, voice as gentle as freshly fallen snow, asked, “How is Midoriya doing, Natsuo?”

Shouto found himself bristling reflexively at the fact that she was asking Natsuo and not him before he paused, dissecting the feeling. There was no reason to be jealous of Natsuo for living with Izuku when Shouto was the one that set it up—but was it jealousy that bothered him? Or was it—

“He’s fine,” Natsuo said, all traces of anger gone from his voice. “I think he’s losing it a little bit because of the house arrest thing, but he’s fine.”

“I can imagine,” Fuyumi said, voice fond. “Midoriya has always been a busy body. It probably kills him to not be able to run around the city doing everything he possibly can to help others.”

“I think it’s been good for him, though,” Natsuo said, with a sort of ease Shouto would never have expected. People made confident declarations like that about people they’d been friends with for years, not people they’d basically only known for a few months. “He seems less high-strung than he used to.”

“Thank goodness for that,” Rei said, soft but genuine. “He was working himself to the bone.”

“Nah,” Natsuo said, with that same unexpected confidence. “He seemed to know his limits pretty well, if you look at his records. Deku works a lot of overtime, sure, but he clocks out when he needs to clock out, historically. I think his only problem is that he tries to do everything on his own.”

It wasn’t that Shouto was jealous.

No, it was the implication that someone knew Izuku better than he did that upset him.

“Deku?” a new voice said from the hallway. Rei jumped reflexively, spilling a bit of her tea as she did. “Were you talking about Midoriya?”

Rei scrambled to clean up the tea she’d spilled, Fuyumi immediately jumping in to help, and Enji grimaced. “I apologize,” he said, in a softer tone. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s alright,” Rei said. “You just surprised me, that was all.”

“I can go if it’s not—"

“Stay, Enji, please.” Rei’s voice was quiet but firm, leaving no room for argument or anything else. There were several more moments of tense silence—tense silence was still so common, amongst Shouto’s family—and then Enji shuffled the rest of the way into the room.

“For you,” he said gruffly, as he offered Rei a bouquet of blue rindou flowers. Her face softened as she accepted them, bringing them to her nose to smell them before she sighed.

“They’re beautiful,” she said. “I think I will get them in water right away.”

She left and nobody followed her—she sometimes needed space and time to herself so that she could adjust, still, and they all respected that even if Fuyumi’s hands were twitching like she wanted to help, even if Natsuo kept casting furtive glances toward the kitchen, even if Shouto had to fold his hand into a fist to keep himself from developing frost. Unfortunately, though, this left Shouto alone with his father and two of his three siblings.

It was even more awkward than it had been a moment ago.

Enji sat stiffly at his place at the table, and then cleared his throat. Then he cleared it again, when something caught, which made everything worse, objectively. “You were talking about Midoriya?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” Fuyumi said, shooting a quick glance at Natsuo, who was looking at the table, expression tight.

“He’s my roommate now,” Natsuo said, and everyone else including Shouto turned to stare at him blatantly. He never willingly talked to Enji, not unless he was insulting him or he had to speak because he was directly addressed. This was neither of those things.

“I see,” Enji said, after several moments. “You do live in his city, and now that Shouto has moved in with Bakugou, it would be a sensible arrangement.”

“Yeah,” Natsuo agreed shortly.

Several more moments of awkward silence passed.

Enji cleared his throat again. “I have not seen him at the agency in some time.”

“Why would you see him at the agency?” Shouto asked, raising an eyebrow at his father. “He stopped working for you a long time ago.”

“Ah,” Enji said, and then stared at the table like he was contemplating the meaning of life.

This irritated Shouto for a number of reasons. “What do you mean, ah?”

“Well,” Enji said, and then stared at the table like he was contemplating the meaning of life once more.

“He visited you, didn’t he?” Natsuo guessed, and they all stared at him once more. Natsuo looked away when he noticed their attention, settling his hand on the back of his neck. “He mentioned you might ask about him a few days ago, so I put it together.”

Enji sighed, and cast one last glance towards Shouto before he answered. “Yes. He crashed at my agency’s barracks every once in a while.”

Shouto had not known that.

Shouto had not known that.

“Hold on,” Natsuo said, blinking. “Wouldn’t that have been super out of the way?”

“He stopped once he took the semi-permanent job in Hiroshima,” Enji said, blunt and to the point. “This was when he was primarily doing freelance hero work around the country.”

The point still stood, though, that the Endeavor Agency wouldn’t have been significantly closer to anywhere Izuku was than Izuku’s own apartment would have been, which meant the only reason he would have been staying there was because he was avoiding Shouto.

“Why?” Shouto asked, without really meaning to.

Enji pursed his lips. “I don’t presume to know what precisely was going through his head.”

“You have an idea, though, don’t you?” Shouto accused.

“An idea is not knowing, Shouto.”

“Bullshit.”

“Shouto!” Fuyumi admonished.

“What would you like me to say, Shouto?” Enji asked. “I am not Deku. If you want to argue with someone about his whereabouts, it should be him.”

“Excuse me for not believing someone that quit working for you would want to willingly spend his—”

“Stop!” Natsuo shouted, accompanying the shout by slamming his fist on the table. “You, stop.”

It took Shouto several very long moments to realize that Natsuo was talking to him and not their father. “Me?”

“Is Midoriya your friend or isn’t he?” Natsuo asked, his voice sharper than Shouto had ever heard it directed at him. “Because if he is, you should not finish that sentence.”

“What are you talking about?” Shouto asked cautiously. His Quirk was tingling beneath his skin, freezing him over and burning him up, all of his instincts wired for a fight. It was a struggle to tamp down the urge to use it, to relieve some of the pressure, to go, go, go—

“Your friend is allowed to have shitty taste in mentor figures if he wants to,” Natsuo said. “Leave yourself out of it.”

“Excuse me?” Shouto said, as his blood froze, ice in his veins.

“Not everything is about you, Shouto,” Natsuo continued. “People are allowed to take space away from you if they want to. Your friend is allowed to seek advice from your father if he wants to. So, I say again: Leave. Yourself. Out of it.”

Several long moments of silence passed.

“Natsuo…” Fuyumi started.

Natsuo stood abruptly. “Leave me alone,” he said, and quickly disappeared down an adjacent hall that Shouto knew led to his old room.

Fuyumi half stood, hands fluttering anxiously, like she was ready to chase Natsuo down, but Shouto caught her wrist, as gently as possible, holding her in place.

“He’s changed,” Enji commented, voice thoughtful.

“No,” Rei said softly, from the doorway to the kitchen where she stood, arms folded across her chest. “He just hasn’t shown you who he really is before now.”

Shouto turned to her, feeling ashamed of himself. Arguing with Enji unnecessarily was supposed to be Natsuo’s thing, not his. He was not the breaker of the peace, not normally, and yet today… “How long have you been there?”

Rei hummed. “Long enough to understand.” She gazed after Natsuo for several long moments before moving with a single-minded determination. “I would like to go after him. Fuyumi, I hate to ask, but will you be alright to finish dinner on your own?”

“Oh,” Fuyumi said, blinking in surprise. “Yes, that’s fine!”

Rei was so often the last of them to act in these situations, and yet, she was the one whose feet were moving.

“What do you think has gotten into Natsu?” Fuyumi asked, as she finally sat back down.

Enji snorted in a humorous way—strange, that was strange too, Enji never laughed—and said, “Deku, surely.”

“I suppose,” Fuyumi agreed, smoothing her cheeks with both her hands. “He is a bit of a Todoroki-whisperer, if you think about it…”

“He chooses his words well,” Enji agreed somberly, though he was clearly so confident in his assessment that it cut Shouto like a knife.

Maybe they were right to direct their questions about Izuku to Natsuo. Maybe they were right to declare things about his friend so easily. Maybe they were right to storm off and be upset.

Maybe they were right, and Shouto didn’t know Izuku as well as he used to.

For the second time in his relatively short life, Katsuki was beginning to feel like he had, perhaps, made a miscalculation about Deku based on his preconceived notions of what the nerd was actually thinking. Last time it had happened it hadn’t been resolved until their first year of high school, and Katsuki had hoped it would be the last time, ever, that he would have to go through that, because, frankly—that shit sucked.

But now he looked, really looked, and he saw what he hadn’t let himself see before.

Deku didn’t flinch when Masaru called him “son.” He laughed when Mitsuki offered him an Icy-Hot patch to “remind him of the olden days.” He didn’t pull away from Inko’s hugs.

He didn’t look like someone that was still deeply grieving a hero mentor that had been gone for years. He didn’t look like someone that was still wildly in love with Shouto. He looked…fine. Better than he had looked in fucking years, at least.

“What’s this on your cast?” Inko asked.

“Oh!” Deku said, his face lighting up with excitement. It was pure, unbridled, not chained down by anything else. “I got a hero’s autograph.”

“A hero you know?”

“Yeah. Here.” He removed his sling, showing off his arm. Katsuki drew closer out of curiosity, though he was careful to make sure he wasn’t obvious.

And then he had to make sure he didn’t swear. In familiar, bold writing, the cast said, “Earphone Jack.” It was Jirou’s hand, too, unmistakable for its sharp angles and crisp lines. Beside it was a poorly painted guitar, which also had her fingerprints all over it for how terrible it was. Which meant she really had visited him—Deku had let her visit him, and he normally didn’t even let Four Eyes or Round Face visit him—so everything else she had said was probably true too. And beside her signature and terrible guitar, there was—

“What’s that other one?” Mitsuki asked, leaning over Izuku’s cast.

“Natsuo-san drew that,” Deku said.

Katsuki paused. He listened.

“Mug shot,” Mitsuki read. “Hah. That’s a good one.”

“He must be a really good artist,” Inko commented.

“He really is,” Deku said.

There it was again.

A fond dip of the voice, a softer inflection than normal, accompanying a mention of Natsuo specifically. It was the same way the nerd used to talk about Shouto, happy as long as he was happy, content to just be at his side, working together.

“It’s hard to believe a relative of Shouto’s would be good at art,” Masaru mused, and Mitsuki laughed good naturedly at the expense of Shouto’s nonexistent artistic talent.

“I wouldn’t compare them,” Deku said, all of the softness gone from his voice. He was using his determined voice now, his hero voice, the voice that indicated he was only a few seconds away from physically fighting people.  Katsuki watched even closer, listened even harder. “They lived different lives.”

“Easy, squirt,” Mitsuki said, raising both her hands in surrender. “We know, we know, Shouto’s past is a sensitive topic for you. Sorry, kid. It was just a joke.”

“It’s alright,” Deku said, and he sounded like he meant it. When Katsuki looked closer though, he could see the signs—they had to have been there for months, now, maybe years, and yet he hadn’t seen them before now. Why hadn’t he seen them before now?

Deku looked tired, worn down. The corner of his mouth wobbled like it used to do in Aldera when he wanted to say something but he knew that he shouldn’t. He looked…accepting, like he wanted to change something but he didn’t feel like he could. He hadn’t looked that way in ages, and now that Katsuki thought about it, now that he’d been handed the piece of the puzzle he didn’t know he was missing, it made sense.

Deku hadn’t been defending Shouto a second ago. No, he’d been defending Natsuo, and for whatever reason, he didn’t feel like he could say that.

Or maybe, he didn’t feel like people would believe him if he did.

Because you see what you want to see, and you hear what you want to hear, Jirou’s voice echoed in his ears.

Shouto thinks I’m made of glass, Deku’s voice added, but imploringly, like he was asking Katsuki to understand something that he couldn’t grasp.

“If heroes and roommates can draw on your cast, are mothers permitted to do so as well?” Inko asked.

“Of course,” Deku said, soft around the edges again. Too used to just forgetting and moving on.

He was fine. He was fine, had been fine, who knew how long he’d been fine, and Katsuki hadn’t seen it. When did he become Deku’s protector, anyway? Deku didn’t need protected. He didn’t need coddled, treated with kiddy gloves. He didn’t need anything except the occasional kick in the ass. And yet, Katsuki had been trying to protect him, anyway. For years, probably.

…Come to think of it, Katsuki had never actually asked Deku his side of the story.

There was a knock on his door.

Natsuo turned in surprise—he’d expected Fuyumi might have come after him, but he would have expected her sooner if she had. She wasn’t usually the best about letting the fires cool down before she approached them, and enough time had passed that his fire had definitely cooled down a bit.

Before Natsuo could stand and open the door, it opened on its own, and someone unexpected stepped inside.

“Mom?” Natsuo asked.

“Hello, Natsu,” she said, closing the door behind her. “I hope that you don’t mind the intrusion.”

Even if he had minded the thought of an intrusion a second ago, he found it didn’t bother him in the slightest now. Mostly, he knew that was because it was Rei here instead of Fuyumi, and that Rei rarely acted when she feared upsetting others.

“It’s alright,” he said. A few moments later, the realization fully hit him, and he looked away, once again settling his hand on the back of his neck. “You could hear us arguing from the other room, couldn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, though she folded her hands together almost delicately. “I would actually like to talk about that later, if that is okay.”

“Uh, yeah,” Natsuo said, and then cleared his throat. “Yes, I mean. That’s fine. But why…come here if you don’t want to talk about it?”

“I would like to show you something, first,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

“…Sure,” he said again, wondering why he felt so awkward, why he felt so estranged, why he felt like an imposter standing in his skin talking to his own mother. Even after all this time, he just hadn’t been able to adjust, to forgive himself, to let the past go, to let his cowardice go. Could he really call her his mother, if he wasn’t even able to defend her when it mattered?

“Stop that,” Rei chided gently, as she led Natsuo into the hall. “I can sense you thinking bad things about yourself.”

“Sorry,” Natsuo said, cowed. She hadn’t even been looking at him when she made that assessment. It was impressive she’d been able to know.

Rei paused in front of a door. Natsuo recognized where they were with a jolt—this was her art studio, the one room in the house that had windows facing the sunrise, small, but bright. Nobody but Rei went in here—she left the door closed, and she did not invite them, and nobody pushed her to let them in. They understood her need for privacy. They respected it.

“Some of this,” she said, voice so quiet it was almost a whisper, “might be troubling for you.”

And then she opened the doors and let Natsuo step inside.

The space had been filled with art. Floor to ceiling, every wall held art. Every easel held art, either in progress or drying. Canvases were stacked in twos and threes, sometimes, up against the walls. He shouldn’t be surprised—she’d had this space at her disposal for nearly four years now, and four years could produce a lot of content even from someone that didn’t work very consistently. And a lot of it was them.

A five-year-old, unscarred Shouto peeked at him from behind a door. Fuyumi, beautiful and soft, sat by a window, backlit by the sun, a book in her hand. He saw the stern set of his father’s face, obscured by dark scribbles, and then again, unmarred, but softer and younger. He saw Shouto again, fingers splayed as ice collected between them and beneath him, hero costume on and short hair flying every which way in the breeze created by his Quirk. He saw Fuyumi again, but younger, holding a wide-brimmed hat in tiny fingers. He saw himself, red streaks still in his hair, grinning as he held up a victory sign. He saw himself, older, with white hair, frowning off into the distance, and he saw that same picture, but his hair had been colored red at the sides instead. He saw Touya, young and white-haired, with round cheeks and piercingly blue eyes. He saw Dabi, scarred and burning blue, mouth parted in a scream and brilliantly white hair lifted off his forehead.

“I get it,” Natsuo said, reaching out to touch the closest portrait of Dabi, running his hands along the raised ridges of blue paint defining the fire. “This is why we’re not allowed to see this room.”

“It’s…hard for me, sometimes,” Rei confessed, as she turned away to root through a stack of canvases leaning against the wall, apparently looking for something. “It’s always been easier for me to say how I feel without using words. I don’t know how to explain it to the others, but for me, this is how I write my story. I don’t think anyone else would understand, other than you.”

Other than him, because this was how he decided to communicate with her, too.

“Doesn’t it…hurt?” Natsuo asked, the question tumbling out of him before he could stop it. “Doesn’t it hurt to see everyone on your walls like this?”

“Pain is a part of life,” Rei said, finally turning back around with a canvas in her hands. It was fairly small, especially compared to a lot of the art in the room. “I have learned to live alongside it. It comforts me to recreate my memories—I don’t want to live in the past, but I don’t want to forget, either.” She reached up hesitantly, brushing her fingers through Natsuo’s hair, her touch ghost light as she brushed white strands up to look at the red roots underneath. Natsuo held his breath as she did this, waiting as she brushed his hair to the side and then withdrew, though he wasn’t sure why.

“Mom?” he asked, when she didn’t say anything else.

“It’s a part of you, Natsuo,” she said, very softly. “You don’t have to hide it for my sake. I am not made of glass, not anymore.”

Natsuo let the breath he was holding out, the air in his lungs coming out frosty. “I hate it,” he said, resting a fist on the sliver of wall next to the painting of him with his natural hair. “I hate that I look like him. I hate that I see his face in the mirror alongside mine. I hate it, Mom.”

“Everyone is different,” she said, which didn’t seem like it entirely connected to anything Natsuo had just said, until she continued. “But pain is a part of life. It is important to learn to live alongside it, before it breaks you. I’ve been a terrible mother to you, Natsuo.”

“No, you—”

“I have,” she said sadly. “Regardless of the circumstances, I have been terrible. Yet, you have been a wonderful son. I…wanted to tell you that I understand, Natsu.”

“You…understand?”

“I understand why Shouto upset you tonight,” she said, finally flipping the canvas around. “I don’t think that we, as a family, are very good at understanding you. We’re all so busy with our own problems—all so fixated on finding our own solutions—and it leaves you stranded somewhere in the middle. You don’t agree with forgiveness. You don’t agree with hatred. You’re angry and hurt but you are trying, too, and when we talk to you, we always do so like we’re walking on eggshells, because we do not understand.”

It was a painting of Midoriya.

Natsuo knew what photo Rei had used as a reference, because he remembered when it came out. Low-angle, paparazzi had spotted him sitting on a building eating, with the top half his jumpsuit unzipped and the arms of it tied around his waist. This was because it was a blazingly hot day, and it was an admittedly charming picture—or at least, one of the two pictures were admittedly charming. In the second, Midoriya had noticed the paparazzi and posed with a victory sign, his cheeks still puffed out with food from his lunch break. The first photo, though, was incredibly haunting. Midoriya’s cheekbones were already sharp but they looked sharper because of the angle, hollowing out his cheeks. His eyes, bright, were pointed in the middle distance, something lost about them. His expression was tired but keen.

It was All Might’s birthday.

It was strange, so strange, that of all the ways Rei could have painted him, she chose to do it like this. This moment, this one right here, this was exactly why Natsuo had started paying attention to Deku. He remembered Midoriya from Shouto’s high school days, he knew what he’d done for his brother, but he’d never really…cared. At least not before he saw this picture, and the smile and pose in the next. Not until he saw the weight on Midoriya’s shoulders, the distress in his eyes, the quietude in his loneliness.

It was real. It was true. It was the first time Natsuo really went, Oh. I can see how someone like that would manage to break through to Shouto.

“Shouto gets…stuck, sometimes,” Rei said, as Natsuo continued to contemplate the painting. “He gets an idea and then he can’t let it go. Midoriya is special to all of us, in varying degrees, but I think that it’s fair to say that he’s most special to Shouto. And Shouto…he is easily blinded by the things that he loves.”

Natsuo swallowed. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

“Because,” she said, running her fingers through his hair again, “it’s easy for someone that’s misunderstood in one way to see how another is misunderstood, even if the misunderstanding is different, even if it’s been years since the misunderstanding occurred. Midoriya is not fragile, is he?”

“No. Definitely not.”

“Neither are you,” Rei said, and stood on her tiptoes to press a kiss into the side of his head. “Forgive Shouto if you can. He’s only stubborn, not stupid. He’ll see one day.”

“What?” Natsuo asked, vaguely alarmed. Was she implying—

Rei’s expression melted into a smile, light and teasing. “Natsuo, one does not stare at portraits of another with that expression on their face without something being there. Whatever it is, I encourage it—Shouto will come around one day, when he can see both of you for who you are. And whatever Midoriya means to you now…please don’t push him away. To think,” she reflected softly, running a hand through the long strands of her own hair, “it would be the same man to show two of my sons the way back to themselves.”

Natsuo closed his eyes. It was ridiculous, honestly—he’d only been living with Midoriya for a few months, he shouldn’t really be having life changing experiences because of him, and yet…Natsuo had done art in the first time in nearly a year because of him. He felt warm for the first time in months, because of him. The distance didn’t feel so bad, the space didn’t feel so wide. He was standing here with his mom, and for once, he didn’t feel alone.

“Maybe,” Natsuo said, speaking just as softly as Rei, “we should have introduced him to Touya, too.”

Rei, surprisingly, laughed. She laughed like Shouto, sparingly, and breathless, like laughing took so much of her she couldn’t make any other sound. Natsuo didn’t understand why she was laughing—it wasn’t exactly funny—until he understood all at once as she ran a finger along the scarred line of Touya’s cheek in a painting. “If only,” she said, and she sounded sad.

She laughed because the alternative was crying.

“Hey, Mom,” Natsuo started, but when she turned to look at him, her laughter dying, the words decayed on his tongue.

She read him anyway, though, as easily as breathing, as if there wasn’t a rift between them that was several kilometers wide. Maybe there wasn’t anymore—maybe, just maybe, Natsuo had finally learned how to meet them halfway.

“Show me, sometime,” she said.

“Okay,” Natsuo said.

And he would. He knew he would.

It had been a long time since Izuku had communicated with Kacchan primarily through glares instead of through words.

He’d gotten better at expressing himself over time. He screamed less, talked more. Punched fewer things. Sometimes, like their Ground Beta fight in their first year, there were still fists involved, but only sometimes. And now, it was almost always just a spar meant to burn off steam instead of a one-sided beatdown.

Four years meant that Izuku’s anxiety returned with full force at the sudden presence of angry staring.

Kacchan stabbed a green bean with a fork—the forks were for solidarity, since Izuku couldn’t use chopsticks because of his arm, but they were also, apparently, great for violence—and angrily stared Izuku down. Kacchan cleaned out mugs with a bottle brush more aggressively than he needed to, whilst shooting Izuku increasingly angry glances out of the corner of his eye as he attempted to dry dishes beside him. Granted, that one could have been because of Izuku’s shitty one-armed drying technique rankling Kacchan’s perfectionist senses, but still.

Even the others were noticing. Inko kept giving Izuku meaningful looks like she was trying to ask him if he needed help—which was a ridiculous notion, he’d been fighting his Kacchan battles on his own for as long as he could remember, basically—Mitsuki kept trying to argue Kacchan’s problem out of him, and Masaru had made himself scarce a while ago, sensing a brewing conflict.

The only problem was that Izuku had no idea what it was.

“Come with me,” Kacchan said, and he grabbed a bag of trash, apparently intending to take it outside. It was not a two person job—especially not when one of the people only had one functioning arm anyway—and everyone glanced warily at each other, knowing this. But Izuku followed regardless—if they were going to have this conversation, they might as well have it under the pretense of taking out the trash—and found himself standing outside in the crisp March air with Kacchan.

They didn’t talk as Kacchan lifted the lid of the trash can, or as he chucked the bag inside, or even as he closed the lid again with a sigh. They didn’t talk for several moments after that, and then Kacchan, ever one to get to the point, said, “You said that Shouto thinks you’re made of glass. Is that something that you think about me too?”

And Izuku—

He was shocked. It had been years, now. Sure, he’d been asked if he was alright—he’d been asked if he was okay, if he was handling things fine—but these questions were always from people that already thought they knew the answer and that the answer was that Izuku was not alright, or okay, or handling things fine. Nobody had asked him why he did what he did or what he meant when he said things. Nobody except Jirou asked, anyway, and Izuku had stopped trying to offer the information on his own to anyone else. He had never expected this.

And if there was ever someone it was easy to be honest with, it was Kacchan.

“Maybe something a little tougher than glass, for you,” Izuku said, but quietly. “Something that’s still relatively easy to break, though.”

Kacchan closed his eyes, taking several long moments to compose himself, and then he said, “How long?”

“How long have I thought you were treating me like I’m fragile?”

“No. How long have I been treating you like you’re fragile?”

Izuku had the overwhelming urge to fidget, but with one arm in a cast, there wasn’t a whole lot that he could do. He settled on resting a hand on the back of his head, rubbing at the curls there dejectedly. “Since…All Might died. Though in your defense, I think I probably was fragile back then.”

Kacchan swore. It was a compound word, long and filthy, chained together in a cacophonous masterpiece of anger at its most eloquent. Izuku listened, to the whole string of words, and he understood what was underneath them—Kacchan was not mad at Izuku. He was mad at himself.

“I never asked you,” Kacchan said, at the end of his composition. The tip of his nose and his ears were pink, and the wind was biting. They would have to go in soon. They should go in soon, anyway.

“Never asked me what?”

“I never asked you what your side of the story was,” Kacchan said, finally meeting Izuku’s gaze. “That day that you confessed to Shouto. The party. I never asked you why you did it, or what you said. None of it. I just took Shouto at his word.”

“Oh,” Izuku said, dropping his gaze to his cast so he wouldn’t have to look at him. The curvy silhouette of a woman that he knew was the Bakugou fashion company’s logo had joined his cast, courtesy of Mitsuki, along with a chibi katsudon character from Masaru, several multicolored stars from Inko, and the angry scrawl of Kacchan’s hero signature crammed into all the free space. Only some of this was visible outside of the sling, but Izuku looked anyway, committing it all to memory, feeling the care in the ink and the paint.

“Don’t just say oh like a fucking dweeb,” Kacchan said. “Tell me. Tell me now, even if I’m a year late.”

“Take it easy, Kacchan,” Izuku said, waving his free hand at him placatingly. “Give me a second to think.”

“You and I both know you think best when your fucking mouth is going a million kilometers an hour anyway,” Kacchan said, rolling his eyes.

Izuku snorted, just once, the briefest of laughs. For the first time in a long time, probably, he felt like Kacchan knew him again. Before, he hadn’t even realized how much he missed it.

“Alright, well, for starters,” he said, “everything you heard from Shouto was probably true.”

“Oh—”

“But, it was probably his truth,” Izuku finished.

“Oh.”

“Not long after All Might died, there was this thing that happened. I don’t know if I should really call someone’s sleep talking life changing, but I think, for me, it was at least perspective changing. It was Uraraka-san sleep talking, and what she said was, ‘I’ll win and be just like Deku-kun.’ That’s it. That’s all it was.”

“Pink Cheeks said shit like that all the time, you know,” Kacchan said, but slowly, like he was sensing it was sensitive intel.

“I didn’t know,” Izuku said, looking at his cast again. It was so full, and yet so empty. So many signatures and drawings he could have gotten in another life, if only things had been different. “It was the first time I heard it, and…it scared me, Kacchan.”

“Why the fuck would some random bullshit like that scare you?”

“Because I don’t want people to not be able to stand on their own, Kacchan! People die! All Might died! I’m going to die one day! Have you forgotten how society fell with All Might, how hope disappeared, how Endeavor and the other heroes were left to pick up the pieces of the world and carry it alone? It was already happening again. It was happening, and I couldn’t let it.”

“So, you thought pushing people away was the answer?”

“Wasn’t it, though?” Izuku challenged, raising his eyebrows in haughty defense of himself. “Uravity, the hero, is nothing like Deku, the hero. She works in rescues instead of fighting people in the streets. She lifts rubble with her Quirk and she goes to a bar with her girlfriend every weekend and she’s happy and she’s doing amazing and I have nothing to do with it.”

“Your other friends miss you—”

“And I miss them! But I can’t be their pillar, Kacchan. I can’t hold their burdens as well as my own. I want a society where everything is carried together, and so I needed the space and the slightly out of the way job and less time in the spotlight so that I could be sure that I wasn’t the problem, that I wouldn’t be the reason everything fell apart again, if it did fall apart. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? It wasn’t about everyone else, not really. I needed to see that they would be okay without me for myself.”

Kacchan was silent, so Izuku assumed that he did see, that he was finally getting it.

“And then, you know, Shouto told me he was in love with me. March. Our second year. Right before our last. And I should have been happy but all I could think was that I wasn’t strong enough—I felt these chains around me and I couldn’t carry them—I was only going to hurt Shouto, the more time passed, the more life went on, I was only going to cause him trouble. And that—I never wanted that. Never. So, I turned him down, and when I did…I could breathe.”

“But Shouto couldn’t.”

“Right,” Izuku agreed sadly. “I…didn’t see that either, not back then. I’m sorry, Kacchan.”

Sorry, because hindsight was twenty-twenty, which meant that Izuku knew enough to know that Kacchan was the one that was caught in the middle. That he’d ended up playing both sides for years, that he was helping Shouto get over Izuku while also trying to help Izuku get over…whatever he thought Izuku’s problem was, at the time.

“I didn’t realize I’d made more problems until Shouto asked me if I wanted to move in together after graduation,” Izuku continued. “By then, I felt like I owed it to him for what I had done, so I…tried. I tried so hard. I just wanted him to believe that I was fine. I just wanted him to get on with his life, to not—to not need me anymore. And I think I just made everything worse again.”

Kacchan rubbed a hand down his face. “I thought—”

“What?” Izuku asked, when he cut himself off abruptly.

“I thought that you were doing that,” Kacchan said, swallowing thickly. “You know, following Shouto around, doing whatever he said, because you were still fucking…in love. Despite saying no.”

“You told Shouto,” Izuku guessed, the pieces of the puzzle snapping together in his mind. Shouto’s reaction that night—it was just the slightest bit odd. A touch out of the ordinary for Shouto, as far as reactions went, but if someone else had been egging it on, even unintentionally, it would make sense why he would jump to conclusions so quickly, so intensely.

“Yeah. Yeah, I told him.”

“I get it,” Izuku said, sighing himself. “I get it. You were already dating back then, weren’t you?”

“…Yeah. We were. Basically since graduation. And I was—” Kacchan pursed his lips. “—the tiniest bit insecure. About you. And about him.”

Izuku rubbed a hand down his own face, smoothing out some of the wrinkles there. “No, that’s normal. That’s definitely normal. I don’t know why I thought you wouldn’t be. I was so out of touch, though, so I guess it makes sense to a degree.”

“Then, that night…”

Izuku took a deep breath. “I’d suspected you two were…something for a while. I thought the fact that you were finally telling us, telling me, meant that it was good. We were good. I wasn’t needed anymore, Shouto didn’t think I was fragile…so I tried to explain myself. I was…bad at that, admittedly.”

“What exactly happened?”

“I pulled him outside. I told him we needed to talk, that it was important, that it couldn’t wait. And then I said, ‘I was in love with you back then, too.’ And he hit me, because why wouldn’t he—I’d just pulled him aside, during a party for you two celebrating your relationship, and told him I loved him. Honestly, I probably would have had a similar reaction if our situations were reversed. I never really got a chance to finish explaining myself, though.”

“What were you going to say next?” Kacchan asked. “What was the explanation?”

“Just that it was why I did what I did,” Izuku said, looking away. “That I knew it hurt him. That I was sorry. But that I was doing it for a reason, even if it seems like a stupid one to everyone else, and that I was happy, really happy, genuinely happy, to see you two finally moving on together. Actually, ironically, I was also going to propose that he moved in with you back then, if he wanted to.”

“Fuck,” Kacchan said, then again, “Fuck. It’s been a year, Deku. A year. Why didn’t you even try—”

“Hey,” Izuku said, cutting him off before he could continue. “I did try, thank you. With both of you. It just…didn’t work, so I stopped trying and started hoping for the best.”

Kacchan was quiet for several more moments, and then to himself more than Izuku, he said, “We were seeing what we wanted to see, and hearing what we wanted to hear.” Then, louder, he said, “And your thing with Jirou?”

Izuku blinked several times before he realized the connection. He knew from Jirou’s Instagram that Kacchan occasionally helped her record drums for her songs, which meant he had probably done so this week, which meant she had probably told him about their relationship.

And she always said she wasn’t cut out for meddling, too, Izuku mused.

“Well, that started after the ‘confession’ night,” Izuku said. “A few weeks after.”

“You were…?” Kacchan gestured, like a middle schooler, and Izuku couldn’t stop himself from laughing.

“We were,” he said, through his laughter, the best that he could. “It was pretty casual, though. Really, we were just friends.”

“Friends with benefits.”

“Yes.”

Kacchan’s face cycled through several expressions before it settled on an angry tinted version of acceptance. “I can’t believe I never even realized.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t either, honestly,” Izuku said. “Actually, more importantly, I can’t believe Shouto didn’t realize and tell you. I mean…where did he think I was sleeping?”

Kacchan’s expression dipped a little closer to disappointment. “…Hotels. He thought you were getting hotels.”

There were several moments of thick silence.

“Kacchan,” Izuku said, patting him on the shoulder with his free hand. “I mean this in the best way, but your boyfriend is kind of dumb. I might be the Number Seven hero, but even I wouldn’t have that much luck booking hotels on such short notice so often, unless I was just staying at love hotels…and those are not for sleeping in.”

“I call him my idiot instead of my boyfriend for a reason,” Kacchan said, shoving Izuku’s hand off his shoulder. “Besides, it’s not like you’re not drawn to the sheltered pretty boy type too, considering you’re making moon eyes at his brother.”

It was a good thing Izuku’s cheeks were already pink from the wind, because that certainly would have done it if they weren’t. “Eh?”

“I’m not blind.”

“Six months of me spending most of my free time with Jirou-chan and you not even noticing indicates otherwise,” Izuku quipped.

“You know what I mean anyway, you damn nerd!”

“Yeah, I know, Kacchan.”

Several more moments of silence passed, and then Kacchan sighed. “What are you going to do about it? Are you even capable of being in a relationship with someone?”

“I don’t know,” Izuku said, quietly, somberly. It had been the same thing keeping him up at night, sometimes, ever since he realized he was, at the very least, extremely attracted to Natsuo. Jirou called him a heartbreaker, and he knew it was true, even if he hated it, even if he didn’t understand why anyone was even lining their hearts up to be broken by him. Could he have a relationship? He didn’t know, but he thought…

He didn’t want to break hearts anymore.

He especially didn’t want to break Natsuo’s.

“Hah,” Kacchan said, snorting as he threw an arm around Izuku’s shoulders and dragged him towards the door. Just like that, the tension was broken and they were just themselves again, brothers. “Whatever. I have the best Todoroki anyway.”

“Our love lives shouldn’t be turned into a competition, Kacchan.”

“Don’t care. I’m still the best.”

Izuku sighed, then smiled, looking up at the multiple stories of Kacchan’s family home. His family’s home. “You know what, I’ll let you have this one. I’m more than happy in second place.”

“Less pressure there,” Kacchan agreed.

It was so good to have him back.

“Yeah,” Izuku said. “Less pressure.”

“Oh. You’re back late.”

Natsuo nearly jumped out of his skin. “Shit,” he said, scrambling for the light switch quickly and flicking it on. “What are you doing?”

“Watching the news,” Midoriya said blithely, like he hadn’t just nearly caused Natsuo a heart attack. He turned around in his spot on the couch, only his eyes visible from over the top of the cushion. He looked amused with himself.

“In the dark?” Natsuo asked, raising his eyebrows as he removed his shoes.

“Mhm,” Midoriya confirmed, before his eyes disappeared behind the cushion and he fell silent.

Natsuo, with his curiosity piqued, leaned against the back of the couch to look at Midoriya. He was laying flat on his back on it, taking up the whole couch with the stretch of his body. Midoriya looked away from the television to look up at him, something strangely charged about the look. Whatever he was thinking, it was heavy, and Natsuo suddenly felt like he’d been caught out in the rain without an umbrella.

“You okay…?” he asked.

“Could I…be honest with you about something, Natsuo-san?”

This wasn’t just rain. No, this was a torrential downpour.

“…Yes,” Natsuo said. It was like the equivalent of shucking his jacket in the middle of the downpour, too.

“I’m tired,” Midoriya said, looking back at the TV. “I’m so tired.”

Natsuo blinked. He held out his hands, curiously, as he found the rain had suddenly stopped. “Then…go to bed?”

“Not in that way,” Midoriya said.

And the rainstorm was back.

“In what way, then?” he asked.

Midoriya didn’t answer. He just stared at the TV, a muscle in his jaw jumping as footage of a hostage situation Lizardy had resolved aired.

And whatever Midoriya means to you now…please don’t push him away.

“I had a kind of bad day, too,” Natsuo said. It was strange, so strange, to talk about himself to someone that wasn’t a Todoroki, to someone that didn’t know. “Endeavor did ask about you, though.”

“Ah,” Midoriya said, softly. “I thought that he might.”

“You used to visit him at the agency, didn’t you?” Natsuo asked. “You stayed in the barracks there some nights, instead of at the apartment you shared with Shouto.”

“Yeah,” Midoriya confirmed. “I did.”

“And…with Earphone Jack other times,” Natsuo guessed. Midoriya gave him a curious look, so he shrugged. “You two just seemed really comfortable with each other. That’s all.”

“Yeah, I stayed with her, too,” Midoriya said.

“Could I ask you…why?”

Midoriya fell silent again, his gaze dropping to the TV. It was so quiet Natsuo could barely hear it as it switched to a clip of Gale Force at a mountain rescue. Midoriya reached for the remote, muting the TV unexpectedly, and then sat up. “That’s a long story,” he said, but not unkindly. “I already told it once today.”

Natsuo knew that it probably wouldn’t make sense, not to him, not without the context of what Natsuo heard at dinner today, but he felt like he had to say it anyway, if only so that later in life he could look back and not regret this moment.

“Shouto’s wrong about you.”

Midoriya gave him a surprised look, eyes wide behind his wireframes. “What?”

“Yeah,” Natsuo said, doing his best to not lose his courage. “I think he’s wrong about you. You know, when he asked me to let you move here, he was…I think he thought he had to do everything for you. Like you might keel over dead if you were left unsupervised, or something. But he’s wrong. You’re not fragile. I…don’t think that you’re madly in love with him, either, which is what everyone always says.”

Midoriya looked away, back at the TV, silent and still. For several moments, Natsuo thought that he’d lost him, and that he wasn’t going to respond at all.

“I have a…problem,” Midoriya said, at the end of whatever that moment was. “It’s like—it’s like all of these chains that I feel wrapping around me. The more I feel people need from me, the harder it is for me to breathe. I can’t help but feel like I’m going to let them down, that they’re going to get injured because of me, that they’re going to die because they were waiting on me to think of a plan or to show up and complete a finishing move with them and so...I need time. I need to be able to push someone away, just—just for long enough to see that they’ll be fine. My problem is just…I don’t know how to reintegrate myself into people’s lives once I leave them.”

“Does this have to do with the…All Might Quirk inheriting thing?” Natsuo asked, feeling slightly out of his depth.

Midoriya laughed breathlessly, pushing his glasses up so that he could press his fingertips into his eyes. “Yeah. A little bit.”

“…Do you…feel like that with everyone, or just certain people?”

“Certain people,” he said, glancing at Natsuo from the corner of his eye. “Mostly just the people from my graduating class.”

“I mean, you went through a lot with them, right?” Natsuo said. “You had run ins with the League of Villains regularly.”

“That’s why,” Midoriya whispered. “That’s the problem. I was the one that fought the final battle. We saved each other, over and over, but I was…a leader.”

“Oh,” Natsuo said. People would always admire those that were stronger than them, no matter how they defined that strength. “It’s…pressure. Like whenever a teacher reads off a roster to take attendance, and everyone hears Todoroki, and they’re already looking for me before I even raise my hand or speak, and as soon as they find me there’s no such thing as being anything other than Endeavor’s son, Dabi’s brother, or Shouto’s brother.”

Midoriya nodded. “It’s tiring, carrying expectations around like that.”

“Yeah,” Natsuo agreed.

I’m so tired, Midoriya had said, just a few moments ago.

“Once, in my second year, Shouto got injured. Wrist fracture. Super minor. Recovery Girl had it healed up in a second, maybe two. It happened because he went to do a combo move without me and I wasn’t there. It’s also worth noting that I was in the middle of a pretty intense psychological break, probably.”

“Oh,” Natsuo said, because there wasn’t much someone could say to that.

“So, I panicked. And Shouto saw that I was panicking, so he followed me, telling me that it wasn’t my fault, that he was just dumb, all of the things that normally…reassure a person, you know? And then he said, ‘I’m in love with you.’ Have you…ever heard this before, by chance?”

“No,” Natsuo said, honestly. He hadn’t even known Shouto held a torch for Midoriya once, or that he’d confessed. He’d only heard that Midoriya was the one with feelings. “I haven’t. Shouto told this stuff to Fuyumi or Mom, not me.”

“I said, ‘Don’t be.’ And just like that,” Midoriya said, holding his hand out in front of him, fingers splayed, expression oddly fond, “I was fine.”

“You were fine?”

“I was fine,” Midoriya said, his face lit blue from the light of the TV. “It was the first time in weeks. In months. I felt so free, and for just a second, I thought everything would be fine. They were all going to be so great, and I was going to get to watch it. And maybe, one day, when I felt better, I could have a seat at the table again.”

“I always heard from the others,” Natsuo said carefully, “that it was you that confessed to Shouto.”

“I was in love with him,” Midoriya said, closing his fingers into a fist. “When he said that to me I felt the same. But that was the last time I loved him, at least like that. All I wanted was to see him happy. I couldn’t do that for him, not back then. Not a year ago. Not now.”

Would it be different, for someone else? a traitorous part of Natsuo wanted to ask.

“’If you love someone, set them free’ kind of mentality,” Natsuo said instead.

“Yes,” Midoriya agreed, shooting him a look. It was an odd look, mouth pressed into a thin line, eyes bright, eyebrows drawn together. “Without the second part of the phrase, though.”

Oh, Natsuo thought, as he caught the meaning behind the words. This was the answer to the first thing he’d asked. This was Midoriya’s way of saying that he wasn’t in love with Shouto, that he hadn’t been for four years, that all he wanted was to see his friend happy. He wasn’t carrying the torch—he’d hung it on the wall four years ago and kept walking in the dark.

“Midoriya,” he said, his tongue feeling heavy in his mouth as he asked this, “does it bother you that I…need you? For rent and stuff?”

Midoriya stood, flicking off the TV, and Natsuo straightened reflexively as he turned to look at him. They were almost at eye level with each other. Midoriya was a hair shorter.

“No,” he said, and for some reason, it felt like he was talking about something else. “It’s not like you’d die if I moved out.”

“Where’s the line?” Natsuo asked.

“Where’s your line?” Midoriya asked, surprising him. “Where is it that you start to get uncomfortable with people knowing you?”

Natsuo was shocked into silence. That was the second time in the same day, the second time he’d been called unknowable…

“Izuku,” Midoriya said, with a private smile that indicated he’d never expected Natsuo to answer anyway. “You can call me that if you want. It seems a little unfair to me, anyway, that I use your first name and you don’t use mine. We are roommates, after all.”

It was a test of some sort. If it was a torrential downpour before this was freezing rain, and one misstep could send them both sliding out of control.

“Natsu,” he said. “You can drop the ‘san,’ too.”

“Right,” Midoriya—Izuku—said, glancing at Natsuo in an oddly shy way compared to how forward he’d been a second ago. “I think I will go to bed, actually. Goodnight, Natsu.”

It was a good thing he had already turned away, because Natsuo was certain he probably made a complicated expression at that.

Oh…what was he doing?

Katsuki nearly spilled tea all over himself as his idiot flopped onto him while he sat on the couch.

“You freezer burn bastard—!” Katsuki shouted, but it was good-natured, really.

“Like you care,” Shouto said, as he continued to make himself comfortable, wrapping his arms around Katsuki’s waist and snuggling into his lap. His hair was still damp from his shower earlier, but he closed his eyes contently, not giving a shit that he was making Katsuki wet, as per usual.

He told Shouto what he thought of this, as precisely and as colorfully as possible, as he sat his mug of tea and his book on the end table beside him. Shouto nodded along, but didn’t budge, not even when Katsuki popped the recliner out and settled his hand on the top of Shouto’s head. If he was a lesser man, he might have exploded him—but gently—just to watch him jump at the soft pop-crackle so near his ear, but Katsuki wasn’t a dick.

Not anymore, anyway.

“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” Katsuki asked, as he pinched a damp strand of silky white hair between his thumb and his forefinger, tugging on it lightly.

Shouto had come home in a mood. It wasn’t unusual, necessarily—as long as Endeavor was invited to the family dinner—so Katsuki hadn’t commented on it then, just watched as Shouto stormed off to the bathroom and turned on the shower with a hiss. He wasn’t a mind reader, as much as he wished he was with all these dumbasses in his life, so he knew it was best to let it go until Shouto was ready to tell him.

But then again, the last time he’d thought that about someone, that person had apparently gone at least a year not being able to tell anyone anything about himself.

Shouto sighed impressively. “I got into a fight with Natsu.”

“Natsuo? Not Flame Face?”

“Well. Him too.”

“That’s a pretty shitty two-for-one deal,” Katsuki commented.

Shouto snorted humorlessly. “You’re telling me.”

“What were you fighting about?”

“Izuku.” Shouto said it like he didn’t really want to say it, sullenly and hollow.

“Izuku,” Katsuki repeated, trying his best to not stiffen visibly, since Shouto would definitely notice. “And what about Deku was worth fighting over?”

“Apparently,” Shouto said, equally as sullen, “he used to prefer staying at the old man’s agency to seeing me, his friend.”

Well. Apparently hookups with Jirou hadn’t been the nerd’s only get out of jail free card. 

Katsuki tugged on Shouto’s hair again. “And your brother? What were you fighting with him about, hah?”

“Also Izuku.”

Katsuki warred with himself. To tell Shouto that Deku had the hots for his brother, to not tell Shouto that Deku had the hots for his brother, to tell Shouto that his brother also had the hots for Deku, to not tell Shouto that his brother also had the hots for Deku…

“He told me that not everything is about me,” Shouto said. “He was siding with Enji. Since when does Natsu side with Enji?”

Well. That made Katsuki’s decision for him. Shouto didn’t tend to be very reasonable when he was pissed off, as evidenced by Deku’s forever fucked hand. Ergo, temporary silence it was.

“He has a crush on Izuku,” Shouto continued, but quieter. “I think.”

…Never mind.

“Who, Natsuo?” Katsuki asked.

Damn it, he hated that he was resorting to playing stupid.

“Yes, Natsuo. Who else?”

“Hah,” Katsuki said. “Told ya letting him room with Deku was a bad idea.”

“I thought he was straight.”

“Is anyone really straight, though, is the question,” Katsuki said. “Or are some people just straighter?”

“Quit trying to be funny. You’re terrible at it.”

“Wow. Fuck you, too. My sense of humor is fucking great.”

Shouto huffed out a laugh and turned his head, finally meeting Katsuki’s gaze. “I’m worried, Kats. Izuku is…”

“A heartbreaker?” Katsuki finished with a hearty eyeroll, when Shouto trailed off.

“Yeah,” Shouto agreed, swallowing thickly.

Katsuki brushed his hair back, tucking some of it behind his ear. “Quit crying like a fucking baby, Icy-Hot. Your brother is a grown-ass adult. He can handle himself. It’s probably just a phase or something anyway.”

“I’m not so sure,” Shouto said.

In all honesty…

Katsuki wasn’t so sure either. Not about anything, not anymore.

Chapter Text

“Well, this cast certainly looks well loved,” the doctor commented pleasantly, as he examined Izuku’s arm.

“It was offensively blank, they said,” Izuku informed him.

“I almost feel bad destroying it to get it off. Autographs from Dynamight and Earphone Jack. It would probably be worth a fortune in a few years, especially with the dating rumors.”

“If you want the inside scoop, Sensei,” Izuku said, amused, “you could have just asked. They’re not dating, though.”

“Then they dated in the past,” the doctor said hopefully, as he began freeing Izuku from his cast.

“No, sorry,” Izuku said, laughing as he did. It was still so strange to him, sometimes—being famous, knowing people that were famous, being casually asked for gossip about people that were famous. It was strange, and it definitely had its downsides, but it was nice, too.

“Dang it,” the doctor said. “Do me a favor, Deku, and never tell that to the press. I’ll lose a bet if I do.”

“Is it common practice for people to be betting on our love lives?”

“I don’t know if it’s common,” the doctor said. “But it’s an office activity here. Like sports betting.”

“Any bets on my love life, then?”

“Hate to break it to you, but no. Sorry, but everyone thinks you’re single.”

“I do seem like the type to end up a bachelor forever,” Izuku agreed somberly.

The fact that he was so frightened to let people get close contributed to that impression.

“Don’t tell me you are dating someone,” the doctor said. “So many people would lose so much money if you were.”

“Nah,” Izuku said, flexing his fingers as he was freed from the cast entirely. “I’m single. Your money is safe.”

He was single for now, anyway. The situation with Natsuo was…well, it was something. Right? They’d exchanged first names. They’d talked about feelings. It wasn’t like Izuku wasn’t aware of the looks and the moments, even weeks later, even if they hadn’t talked about it.

“Alright. There we are,” the doctor said. “Your four weeks of bedrest are over. Don’t go back to work just yet, though. Give it a day before you start using your arm heavily again. Capiche?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not running off to the front lines immediately,” Izuku said. “I know my limits, Sensei.”

“That’s the spirit,” the doctor said. “Alright. I’ll get some papers printed off for you and to the front desk for your check out, and you’ll be good to go.”

“Thank you.”

The doctor nodded as he left the room. Izuku stood a moment later, fetching his jacket from the patient chair and checking his phone. It felt good to be free of the cast, at last. It had been a while since he’d been in one for so long.

Shouto still hadn’t responded to Izuku’s last message.

It wasn’t like he was one to judge, really, considering he was terrible at responding to messages on time himself, but still. It wasn’t like Shouto to ignore him, unless he was upset, and Izuku wasn’t sure what he might have done to upset him.

Well. Unless all of Izuku’s avoidances had finally gotten to him, he supposed, and he’d decided it was time Izuku got a taste of his own medicine. He would certainly deserve it, if that was the case.

Maybe Izuku would ask Kacchan about it. He wasn’t avoiding him, at least.

It was boredom that drove him there, ultimately.

He was free of his cast but he couldn’t go to work. He knew from a cursory glance at Hero News that Kacchan was in the middle of a fairly eventful patrol, which was why he wasn’t answering his messages at this particular moment in time. Further glances at Hero News only served to make Izuku restless, so he put his phone in his pocket, grabbed his jacket, and hit the streets.

He knew the area like the back of his hand since he’d memorized the street plan of the city as soon as he moved here to work. However, he hadn’t spent a lot of time actually paying attention to what was there—he was charmed by an arts and crafts store that he normally perched on the roof of without knowing what was inside, laughed knowingly when he realized that one street he had to keep an extra eye on had not just one jewelry shop like he thought but three, wondered if takeout was an option for a new sashimi place with a line out of the door.

And then he found himself in front of a bar, and he wondered if it was the one that Natsuo worked at.

Despite what Kacchan said, Izuku did know where the line between “observational” and “stalkerish” was. So, he knew Natsuo worked at a bar, he knew his schedule, he knew when his classes took place more or less, but he didn’t know where he actually worked. Natsuo had never told him, and Izuku had never asked, since he figured Natsuo was probably not telling him for a reason.

Izuku deliberated. There was no harm in going inside, right? It was unlikely it was the bar he worked at, anyway, and it wasn’t really stalkerish if Izuku just happened across it if it was…right?

Besides, he did have cause for celebration anyway, now that he finally had two fully functioning hands again. Well, mostly fully functioning. His grip strength and mobility weren’t what they used to be when he was fourteen.

Izuku went inside.

He thought this was probably slow for a bar. There were only a few groups seated at tables, and only three people seated at the bar itself. There were several TVs on—some broadcasting the news, others broadcasting sports. Music was on too—loud enough to make conversation slightly difficult, but not so loud as to make it impossible. It was exactly the sort of thing he would expect from a bar not too far away from a college campus, and honestly, he might not have stayed if not for the fact that he noticed a flash of white hair.

He didn’t know if there was some sort of protocol on waiting to be seated, but he decided he didn’t care in this exact moment and invited himself in. Natsuo was elbows deep in doing some sort of bartender magic on a machine sitting on the counter, so he didn’t notice as Izuku approached and pulled out a stool. It was at this point that Izuku lost his nerve, and, not sure of what to say, just watched Natsuo work.

And then Natsuo finished whatever he was doing, closed the lid of his machine, and glanced over at Izuku before practically leaping out of his skin.

"Holy shit," Natsuo said, steadying himself with one hand on the counter and clutching at his chest with his other.

Izuku couldn’t help but feel slightly amused by this. “Normally people only react like that when they see my face if they were committing a heinous crime.”

“You scared the shit out of me, man,” Natsuo said. “How long were you there?”

“I don’t know. A few minutes, probably?”

“Were you not going to say anything?”

“No, I was! I just didn’t know what.”

“Hi, maybe?”

“Okay, then. Hi,” Izuku said, hooking his elbow on the counter so he could rest his chin on his hand.

“…Hi,” Natsuo said back, and then they stared at each other for several seconds.

Izuku broke the silence with laughter, looking back at the other people at the bar just because he couldn’t bear to look at Natsuo anymore. Two of them seemed to be in the midst of pretty intense flirting—wow, people really did meet partners at bars, who would have imagined—and the third was sulking alone.

“It’s like running into your teacher at the grocery store,” Izuku remarked, finally looking back at Natsuo now that he’d composed himself. “Weird, because you’re only used to seeing your teacher teaching, and you forgot they do real life things too.”

Natsuo didn’t quite smile, but he made that almost-there expression that always sent Izuku’s heart rabbiting these days. “Yeah, you’re right. Did you need something?”

“Your most expensive cocktail, probably.”

Natsuo slowly raised his eyebrows as he grabbed a towel off of his shoulder and wiped off his hands. He was wearing a button up with the sleeves rolled up, and Izuku was having a hard time not looking at it for too-long intervals for several reasons. Mostly, it was because he wasn’t used to seeing Natsuo in anything other than t-shirts. But more importantly, it was because it made his arms and chest look really nice.

“Okay. That wasn’t really what I meant, but you good, there?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Izuku asked, blinking at him.

“Because you just walked into a bar and essentially ordered alcohol poisoning in a glass…?”

Izuku got it, and then he laughed. “First of all, don’t worry about my metabolism. It can take just about anything. Second, I’m more interested in monetary value instead of actual flavor or alcohol content, because if I spend more, I can justifiably tip more. And third, it’s a celebratory drink, not a crisis drink.”

“Celebratory…?”

Izuku raised both hands, then wiggled his fingers at Natsuo. “Ta-da. Two hands.”

Natsuo stared at him for a second and then looked away, clapping a hand over the back of his neck as he smiled bashfully. “Man, that’s embarrassing. I can’t believe I didn’t even notice you weren’t wearing the cast.”

“I don’t blame you for missing it. I mean, I am sitting. At a bar. It was hidden.”

“True enough,” Natsuo said, not quite smiling at him again. He turned away to fetch a glass, a shaker, and several bottles, and then began mixing. Izuku watched in quiet fascination—there was something inherently showy about mixology, but for some reason, he got the feeling Natsuo was showing off for him. It was in the way he held his shoulders, the almost shy avoidance of eye contact, the way he tilted his chin down slightly and left it there.

At the very least, it assuaged Izuku’s fears about Natsuo not wanting him to know where he worked.

“Here’s a question for the hero,” Natsuo said, setting a martini glass in front of him.

“Uh,” Izuku said, his mind blanking out slightly at the blatantly flirtatious tone. “Yes?”

“How much trouble would I be in for a little public Quirk usage?”

“Hm,” Izuku said pretending to consider it. “I guess I could let it slide, just this once.”

Natsuo smiled then, just slightly, as he held his palm over the martini glass. Izuku lowered his head to the table and watched two ice cubes form in the glass, just as fascinated by the appearance of a Quirk as he had always been, even if this was one he’d technically already seen a lot of before. Natsuo’s control wasn’t quite what Shouto’s was—nor should it be—but he still had a sort of precision and refinement to what he did. He’d clearly made ice cubes before, at the very least.

He splashed whatever was in his shaker into the glass while Izuku watched, and then gently pushed the drink towards him as he sat up. "Umetini,” Natsuo said, stepping back. “The most expensive thing on the menu.”

Izuku clapped, though quietly, and slowly, before leaning on the counter again. This put him decidedly in Natsuo’s space, though Natsuo didn’t back away. “Great work,” Izuku told him.

“I do what I can,” Natsuo said, leaning on the counter himself. There was not a lot of room between them now. It wasn’t kissing distance, not quite, but it was one stretch away from being kissing distance, and Izuku felt his breath catch slightly at the realization.

“I thought martinis typically weren’t served with ice, though,” Izuku blurted out, because if they just kept looking at each other like that, he might become the Heartbreaker again.

Stop it, Izuku scolded himself. Don’t play with people’s feelings. Especially don’t play with Natsuo’s feelings.

“They aren’t,” Natsuo said, shrugging just a touch, the gesture endearingly embarrassed. “I just thought you would appreciate it.”

“What? Me? Why?”

Natsuo looked away. This read like embarrassment too, but a quiet form of it—even quieter than Shouto’s sideways glances and his meaningless cheek scratches. “You like Quirks, right?”

Izuku did indeed like Quirks, but he hadn’t expected Natsuo to know that he liked Quirks, unless… “Shouto told you that?”

“Nah, you mentioned it in an interview once.”

“Hey, could we get another round over here?” one half of the couple asked, gesturing at Natsuo.

“Sure,” he said, departing from Izuku’s section of the bar to go mix their drinks.

He watches my interviews, Izuku thought, as soon as he could breathe. And then, more forcefully, Don’t panic; he watches my interviews.

He was panicking anyway. His interviews were terrible. Literally the worst representation of himself out there. Honestly, he barely remembered what he said in half of them because any questions not about other Quirks or heroes were answered in a blind panic and anything about other Quirks or other heroes was answered in long rambling rants that his die hard fans devoted hours of their lives to trying to dissect on the internet.

And Natsuo watched those.

“I hate being famous,” Izuku whispered to himself, as he took a sip of his drink.

He also checked to see if Shouto had responded. He had not.

“What are you frowning at your phone for?” Natsuo asked, reappearing at Izuku’s side of the bar. Izuku looked up, rescanning his surroundings—the couple were back to being absorbed in each other, the guy sulking at the other end was still sulking at the other end. It apparently was a really slow night for the bar, considering the bartender had time to essentially just slack off with him.

Well. It wasn’t like Izuku was complaining, anyway.

“I’m being given a taste of my own medicine, I think,” Izuku said, turning his phone around so Natsuo could read his messaging history. He scrolled up, presumably looking at the chain of two-word responses going back three weeks, and the most recent message from Izuku, which had been neglected for three days.

Natsuo scowled as he passed Izuku’s phone back to him. “He’s being a child. It’s not your problem.”

“I mean,” Izuku said, blinking, “if I upset him, I want to know what I did at least, so I can try to fix it?”

“You didn’t upset him. He upset himself.”

“Hang on.” Izuku tucked his phone back into his pocket, invested in this conversation now. “Is this about the family dinners we went to?”

“Probably, considering it started three weeks ago,” Natsuo said, his scowl deepening.

“Well…what happened?” Izuku asked.

“Um.”

“He fought with Endeavor about something?” Izuku guessed.

“Uh…”

Izuku winced. “Endeavor and you?”

“Hm,” Natsuo said, gesturing pointedly like Iida so often did, like he was struggling to come up with the right words to say.

“You got into a fight about me,” Izuku surmised, with a sigh.

“Three-way fight,” Natsuo said. “It was complicated. I told him he was being selfish.”

“Why did you guys fight about me in the first place?” Izuku asked. He felt as though his existence should be fairly negligible to most of the Todorokis. Certainly not worth sparking conflict over. But—oh. Oh. That was why Natsuo had asked about Shouto that night when he got home.

Did that mean…Natsuo had tried to defend him?

Izuku took a very quick sip of his umetini and tried to dislodge that thought. He knew nothing about what they’d even talked about. He definitely shouldn’t be jumping to any conclusions about what Natsuo may or may not have done.

“Well, he thinks—shit.”

Natsuo was looking at a point behind Izuku’s head.

“Shit?” Izuku repeated, curious, as he turned to look where Natsuo was looking.

It was a girl with a mouse mutation Quirk, and a guy with vibrantly orange hair. They were hanging off of each other in a way that branded them as a couple instantaneously. And not just any couple—a new one. Probably. And he also had no idea why they were significant to Natsuo.

“Who—”

“That’s Ayame,” Natsuo hissed, like this held meaning for Izuku, who just blinked at him once. “My ex.”

“Oh,” Izuku said, looking back at the pair and then back at Natsuo. “And she’s bringing her new guy to the bar you work at. That’s…pretty cold.”

“In her defense, I didn’t used to work Tuesdays. I picked up the shift after we broke up. Maybe she won’t notice me,” Natsuo said, and then he stiffened. “Oh no. She noticed me. We made eye contact.”

“Try to take deep breaths,” Izuku said, not entirely sure why he was defaulting to his ‘hero helping someone panicking in a crisis’ lines but defaulting to them anyway. “Everything is going to be alright.”

“She’s walking over here,” Natsuo said, sounding very much like a person in a crisis.

“Try and relax for me,” Izuku said. His automatic responses were apparently still being triggered. “It’ll be over soon. You’ll be safe soon.”

“Izuku.”

Izuku’s heart forgot how to do its job for a solid three seconds.

“What?” he said, when blood was circulating through his veins again.

“Pretend like you’re dating me,” Natsuo said, placing both hands flat on the counter between them and looking directly at Izuku with an extremely determined expression. “Please.”

Izuku was stupid and foolish and almost agreed instantaneously at that look on his face, and then he remembered that this was a terrible idea for a lot of reasons. He only listed one of them for Natsuo, though.

“Natsu. I’m famous. If she recognizes me—”

Natsuo groaned, folding himself against the counter. “No, you’re right. It’s a bad idea. This is terrible, though. She’s bringing her boyfriend here and I’m working on my only day off from classes, this is so pathetic.”

Just like that, Izuku knew no reasons why this was a bad idea. His heartstrings had been successfully pulled. For better or for worse—for worse, probably—he was in helping mode now, and he was going to do whatever it took to make Natsuo’s life easier.

Kacchan will be so disappointed in me if he ever hears about this, Izuku thought.

“Natsu?” Ayame, presumably, said at Izuku’s elbow. He turned to look at her and her carrot top boyfriend. Neither of them looked particularly malicious.

“Wait, is this your ex?” Boyfriend asked.

So far, Izuku had gone completely undetected. He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

“Oh, yes, actually,” Ayame said, her ears twitching. “Kenji, this is Natsu. Natsu, this is my boyfriend, Kenji.”

“Nice to meet you,” Natsuo said, sounding awkward and stiff for every second of it.

“What are you doing working today?” Ayame asked, equally as awkward. “I thought it was your day off.”

“Oh, uh…” Natsuo said, clearly floundering.

“He got called in,” Izuku offered.

All three of them turned to look at him.

He could be charming. He had to believe in himself, if nothing else. He sat through three years of PR courses. And two summers of remedial PR courses. He was the Number Seven Hero. He was, somehow, a heartbreaker, of at least two hearts. There had to be something about him that was good at this sort of thing.

“It,” Izuku said robotically, “was. A shame. Because. Uh. Plans. We had them. Yes.”

Natsuo’s eyes widened. “Izuku—”

Three years of PR courses. Two years of remedial PR courses.

Natsuo needed him, so today was going to be the day. It was going to be it. Izuku was going to pretend like he was a boyfriend and he was going to be good at it if it was the last thing he did. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been able to conquer his fear of public speaking at any point in the past, because there was no time like the present.

“Wait, I feel like I know you from somewhere,” Boyfriend said.

“I have one of those faces,” Izuku said, pushing his glasses up his nose. Thank goodness he was wearing them, honestly—they basically made him unrecognizable to the public for some reason. “Anyway. I’m sure you’re wondering who I am.”

“Uh…” Boyfriend said.

“…Sure?” Ayame said.

“Great,” Izuku said, snapping at them. “Yes. Good. You definitely should be wondering who I am. Because. It is very important. Very.”

What was he saying—

“Boyfriend!”

They were already staring at him, but somehow the staring intensified.

“That’s who I am,” Izuku continued, but lamer. “I am the boyfriend. His boyfriend.”

If it weren’t for the soul sucking pop music blaring overhead, it probably would have been quiet enough to hear a pin drop.

And then Natsuo laughed. He really laughed, with his entire body, happy and bright. It was a rare sound—Izuku had been living with him long enough to know that it was definitely a rare sound—and Izuku couldn’t help but stare at him as his eyes crinkled and his cheeks dimpled and he had to grip the counter to support himself.

“That was terrible,” Natsuo said, between laughs.

It pulled laughter out of Izuku too, spilling out of him in quiet peals. “Come on, give me a break.”

“You do public speaking for a living.”

“Uh…” Boyfriend said, before Izuku could refute that public speaking was only a very small part of what he did for a living.

“Who is this, Natsu?” Ayame asked, looking between them with wide eyes.

Natsuo glanced at Izuku. He didn’t nod, because nodding would be too obvious, but Izuku did his best to convey his permission anyway. He would go along with it, even if pretending to date never worked out well. His only experience was the time he and Kacchan pretended to be a couple to get discount tickets to an All Might movie on Valentine’s Day in their third year, granted, but that had ended with Kacchan fighting the press and getting temporarily suspended from his internship. So, Izuku felt saying it generally didn’t end well was fair.

“My…boyfriend,” Natsuo said. “Like he said.”

“Oh,” Ayame said, glancing between them. “Um.”

“I should probably go, though,” Izuku said. He produced way more money than he needed to actually pay for the drink from his billfold and set it beside the half-drunk umetini. “I’m being a nuisance while he’s at work, anyway. It was nice to meet you.”

“Izu, wait.”

Izu.

“Y-yeah?” Izuku asked, attempting to be casual as he turned back to look at Natsuo.

“When do you go back to work? Tomorrow?”

“Day after!” Izuku responded cheerily. “I’ll be on call tomorrow though, in case there’s a crisis.”

Natsuo pursed his lips slightly in displeasure. “Watch yourself, then.”

“Sure,” Izuku said, suddenly becoming aware of their audience again. Ayame’s expression looked disbelieving, brows raised and eyes still wide. Her boyfriend was more sullen, but still suspicious, with his eyes narrowed and his lips turned down into a frown. Shit. They probably weren’t selling the couple thing. More accurately, Izuku probably wasn’t selling the couple thing.

Izuku tried to remind himself that it wasn’t a big deal if they didn’t really believe him. He would likely never see either of them again. Natsuo probably wouldn’t ever see either of them again either, which meant it didn’t matter, right? Right.

Nope. It still mattered to his anxiety, apparently.

Izuku tried not to think too hard about it as he grasped Natsuo’s wrist, tugging him closer to the bar. Don’t think too hard about it, Izuku reminded himself, as he leaned over the bar himself and pressed his lips, feather light, to Natsuo’s cheek. It was extremely chaste as far as kisses went, and it was over quickly.

Izuku pulled away, not brave enough to look at anyone that had just witnessed that, and tried not to walk away too quickly. He waved over his shoulder, still not brave enough to look at anyone, but he heard the first part of Ayame’s, “Oh, wow—” before music and distance swallowed the rest of what she said.

Izuku covered his cheeks with his hands. Was he blushing? He was pretty sure he was blushing.

“That was so stupid,” Izuku whispered to himself, as soon as he was free from the concussive noise of the bar. He was supposed to be keeping his distance. He was supposed to be avoiding playing with Natsuo’s feelings, not kissing him on the cheek (temporary fake dating agreement aside).

Was he really playing, though, if somehow, miraculously, incredibly…he maybe wanted the same thing Natsuo wanted, too?

Having had a few months to grow accustomed to some of the finer nuances of Izuku’s habits, Natsuo was not surprised to find that he was awake when he made it back to the apartment in the wee hours of the morning. Izuku’s sleeping problems coincided directly with his mood and the amount of stress he was under. Normally, he slept fine. On days where he had particularly embarrassing interviews with a journalist, made a minor mistake in the middle of a fight, or was particularly bothered by something in his normal life, he was awake.

The surprise was that he was sitting at the kitchen table, clearly waiting for him.

“Hey,” Natsuo said, cleverly, as he valiantly ignored the way his stupid heart got weirdly excited.

Izuku looked up so quickly he may have potentially given himself whiplash, his eyes sharp. There was a mug in front of him, but whatever contents it held had most likely gone cold long ago. “Natsu,” he said, breathless, and that bypassed his heart in favor of going somewhere else entirely.

He needed to get it together.

“So,” Natsuo said, valiantly ignoring his stupid body. “I—”

“I’m sorry,” Izuku said, before he could get it out. “I took things too far, and I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry if I made things hard on you, or difficult, or anything like that—”

“Izuku, hey. Relax.” Natsuo raised his hands and gestured placatingly, sensing his roommate was most likely on the cusp of a nervous breakdown of some kind. “It’s fine. Really. It was just a kiss on the cheek. There are some countries where it’s customary to greet strangers like that. It’s not a big deal.”

“Okay,” Izuku said, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. This was another one of his habits Natsuo had acquainted himself with—he tended to take time to compose himself before he spoke, so long as he wasn’t angry.

Oh, wow, Ayame’s voice said in his memories, ringing through his ears like it had been since Izuku left the bar. I’m glad. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so happy.

“Sorry for…shortening your name,” Natsuo said. “It seemed to freak you out a bit.”

Izuku opened his eyes, but only so that he could look away. His hands twitched like he was resisting the urge to hide his face behind them. The tips of his ears were pink. “It’s okay. That just…it surprised me. That’s all.”

Natsuo was happy. Probably for one of the first times in his life, he was…just glad to be around. To be here. Not even dating Izuku, but just existing alongside him—it made him happier than it should. He felt understood, and yet he somehow wasn’t afraid of that.

Natsuo was tired of dancing around it, whatever it was. Whatever it could be.

“Izu—”

Shouto would be upset.

The words died on Natsuo’s tongue before they were even born.

“Yeah?” Izuku asked hesitantly, his expression tight, his eyes fixed firmly on Natsuo’s face. It was strange, honestly, how quickly and proficiently he could go from relatively soft to looking like he was prepared to snap someone like a twig. It was a trait he shared with Ayame, actually. Maybe Natsuo had a type.

He swallowed. “We good?”

Izuku’s edges softened again, whatever strange thing that had possessed him fluttering away like a feather on the wind. “Yeah,” he said, and his voice was a lament. “We’re good.”

“Um. Great.” Awkwardly, Natsuo finally finished removing his shoes. “Goodnight, then. Early morning, and all that.”

“Goodnight,” Izuku agreed softly, and Natsuo beat a hasty retreat to his room.

Izuku awoke, head groggy, to the sound of the call button to his apartment being rang. It was early in the morning, and he hadn’t been expecting anyone, but it was possible it was a delivery person or something. For Natsuo, since he hadn’t ordered anything recently. Though they usually paged the front desk to be let in instead of individual units.

“Hi,” Izuku said sleepily, as he pressed the button to talk.

“Midoriya!”

Well. That was certainly unexpected.

“Fuyumi-san?” Izuku asked, not sure if he’d placed the voice right in his sleep-addled brain state.

“Yes! Could you let me in?”

“Natsu isn’t here,” Izuku said.

“I know.”

…Well. That was definitely not a good sign. Unless she was just dropping something off for him, he supposed.

He reinforced that thought as he buzzed her in. She was just dropping something off for Natsuo. She wasn’t here to talk to him specifically. He was not about to be interrogated about his proficiency with breaking Todoroki hearts. He was fine, it was fine, everything was fine. He was going to take the time it took her to walk up to the apartment to change into something more presentable than All Might pajama pants and a shirt that said sexy shirt on it, anyway, though.

Fuyumi knocked as Izuku reemerged from his room, wearing the first pair of jeans he grabbed, a shirt that said flannel shirt on it instead, and a hoodie, which he pulled on as he opened the door.

“Hi!” Fuyumi said, cheerfully, as she made her way inside. She placed a stack of food in storable containers in his arms as she walked in, then continued to struggle to pull several awkwardly shaped bags through after her. Izuku blinked at all of this, and then continued to blink as she propped her awkwardly shaped bags up against the wall and closed the door, before taking off her shoes.

“Hi,” Izuku finally remembered to say.

“It’s so good to see you, Midoriya-kun!” Fuyumi said, hugging him despite the mountain of containers he was holding. Before he had a chance to react to that, though, she’d taken them and made her way to the kitchen, as comfortable as if she lived here instead of Natsuo. “Oh, this place is looking so much better. I guess that’s your influence, though!”

“Oh, um, thank you,” Izuku said, trying (and failing) to not be awkward as he followed her into the kitchen. “You brought food?”

“Mhm!” she confirmed, opening the fridge. She laughed in surprise. “Oh, wow! There’s actually stuff in here. Anyway, though, I made cupcakes for an event at work the other day, and I guess I just really overestimated how many I needed. I brought the leftovers here, because, well, Natsuo would probably appreciate them.”

“You brought three containers worth of cupcakes?” Izuku questioned, as she moved stuff to fit them in the fridge.

“Well, I brought two containers of cupcakes,” she said. “Six for you and six for him. The last one is some miso soup I made yesterday, but I thought you might appreciate that too, especially with your broken arm. Though I guess I didn’t need to, since that seems better now, too! I bet you’re enjoying being free of your cast.”

“I am, yeah,” Izuku said, relaxing slightly now that his worst fears had been assuaged. It was just Fuyumi. Fuyumi was one of the nicest people he knew, anyway, and she’d only come so that she could deliver food and whatever was in the oddly shaped bags. There was no need to worry about an interrogation at all. “But thank you anyway! That was really nice of you! I feel bad for not getting you anything in return!”

“No need,” she said, closing the fridge and smiling at him, warm and bright. Her smile was a lot like Natsuo’s, when Natsuo did smile, wide and cheerful. It was the kind of smile that dragged one onto everyone else’s faces, too. “Oh! I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

“I normally wear contacts,” Izuku said. “These are just for when my eyes can’t take having lenses in them anymore.”

Fuyumi laughed. “I could never wear contacts myself. They always irritated me so much. Natsu and Shouto are lucky they don’t need them—they really get in the way sometimes, you know?”

“You’re telling me,” Izuku mused. Fuyumi had taken off her coat and slung it over a chair, so he assumed she was staying for a while and sat himself. And then he realized how odd this was, and he put his guard back up. It wouldn’t do to show weakness in front of the enemy, though, so he propped his chin on his hand as casually as possible and looked at Fuyumi as she took the seat she slung her coat over. “So, do you have anything else on the agenda for today?”

Great. Perfect execution. He nailed that.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Just a few errands.”

Errands might have prevented her coming two hours from now when Natsuo would actually be home, but they wouldn’t have encouraged her to take off her coat and stay a while.

“Are you going to stay here until Natsu gets back?” he asked.

“Natsu, huh?” Fuyumi said, lacing her fingers together and then propping her chin on them innocently as she smiled at him. “Not Natsuo-san?”

…As it turned out, he was not at spectacular at casual interrogation as he thought.

“Uh,” he said. “He’s my roommate, you know! It’s not weird to be close with roommates.”

Nice save, Izuku congratulated himself.

Fuyumi raised her eyebrows. “Midoriya-kun.”

“Yes?” Izuku squeaked, fearing for his life.

“I don’t think you would be the type to fault someone for being nosy, right?”

“Um…” As probably the nosiest person he knew, he definitely couldn’t fault other people for being nosy, but this felt like a trap. “No…?”

“When I told my mom that I was going to run some cupcakes and soup over to Natsu’s today, she said, ‘Oh, I have something for him, could you take it with you when you go?’ Which is not odd in and of itself, of course, especially since she asks me to send art over here for him pretty often.”

“Is that what’s in those bags?” Izuku asked, immediately turning to look at aforementioned bags.

Fuyumi hummed in agreement, and belatedly, Izuku realized he was in the middle of a trap. “Do you want to see? I already looked, of course—hence the question about not faulting people for being nosy.”

Izuku, who was also nosy, wanted nothing more than to look in those bags and see what hid there. But Izuku knew that he was in a trap and that his nosiness was being intentionally appealed to, so he refused to succumb to temptation. “No,” he said, still sounding somewhat like it pained him to admit it.

It was apparently a rhetorical question though, because Fuyumi stood and crossed to the bags she brought in with intention anyway.

Don’t look, Izuku told himself sternly. No matter how much you want to. Don’t look.

Fuyumi emerged from the bags with two canvases in hand, showing them off to Izuku with a smug smile.

Don’t look, he told himself.

Like a fool, he looked anyway.

He was looking at himself. He recognized the reference for one of the paintings—it had been All Might’s birthday, last year, and some paparazzi had noticed him sitting on top of a building eating lunch. A moment later Izuku noticed the guy with the camera and posed, but both the before picture and the after picture had become fairly popular fairly quickly. Rei had painted the before, though, where the sunlight hit his face as he stared into the distance, the top half of his costume unzipped to combat the heat. She’d been nice enough not to include the sweat stains on his undershirt in her rendering, though.

The other painting was Natsuo, looking upwards, the smile on his face notably sad as a shadow fell across him. It was equally as beautiful as the painting of Izuku—maybe more beautiful, but only because he wasn’t looking at himself—and subtle enough that Izuku didn’t get it until Fuyumi dropped the painting of Natsuo down to the right corner of the painting of himself, and he realized the lighting, background style, and perspective made it look like they were looking at each other.

Izuku’s face was very warm.

“They’re great, aren’t they?” Fuyumi asked, while smiling innocently at him.

Izuku swallowed. “Rei-san made those?”

Fuyumi hummed in agreement. “And specifically requested they got sent over to Natsuo!”

“Of course,” Izuku said, staring at the paintings. It was like that time he accidentally stumbled across Deku/Dynamight Rule 34 ship art and had felt so cursed, anatomical inaccuracies aside, that he couldn’t look Kacchan in the eyes for three months. No, that was a harsh comparison, actually, since these paintings were both beautiful and innocent, but the discomfort was the same. Probably because these were made by Natsuo’s mom. “Um. Why?”

“That’s a great question,” Fuyumi said, finally lowering the paintings and ending some portion of Izuku’s suffering. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you,” Fuyumi said, laughing slightly. It wasn’t an unkind laugh, though, just sort of a…big sisterly one. “Where do you stand here?”

Izuku stared, not sure how to respond. “What…do you mean?”

“Well, Natsu…” she trailed off, then sighed. “I never know what Natsu is thinking these days. But I think he likes you, because of how he acts about you. If you like him…”

“Woah,” Izuku said, holding up his hands like he was trying to deescalate a hostage situation while being held at gunpoint. “I feel like we might have just jumped several hurdles all at once in this conversation and that’s kind of freaking me out. Plus, I woke up less than an hour ago and I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about feelings, and—”

“Sorry!” Fuyumi said, now panicking in the face of his panicking. “I’m sorry! You’re right, I definitely went too fast. I just get so… Oh, I don’t know. I just want to see everyone happy, you know?”

Izuku did know. Fuyumi had been this way as long as he’d known her—she’d been supportive, interactive, so fixated on having a family that she took it upon herself to make sure everyone was as happy as they could be, no matter how heavy the burden was. She was strong in a way that Izuku always envied, because it was the same way he always struggled to be strong himself.

And that made it very hard to answer her right now.

“Fuyumi-san,” he said, looking at the table so he could avoid looking at her. “I’m not that person.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice softer than it had been before.

Izuku took a long, slow inhale through his nose. “I’m not the kind of person that can make other people happy. So, you shouldn’t place your hopes on me. That’s all.”

Fuyumi was silent for several long moments, before he heard her shift and move. She sat the canvases down on the dining table, and then sat down in the chair next to his. “Is this because of Shouto?” she asked. It was a Todoroki way to ask a question, Izuku thought—getting most of the way to the answer on their own, and then taking a left turn into something that didn’t quite fit.

“It’s because of me,” Izuku corrected her. “It’s how I am. Shouto doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

She gazed at him for several long moments, before tilting her head to the side. “So, you do like Natsu, don’t you?”

Izuku sighed. “You’re very persistent.”

She winced. “Sorry…”

“Alright,” he said, scrubbing a hand down his face. A bit of stubble had grown on his jaw overnight, and it distracted him, but only for a moment. “I don’t want to lie to you, so…yeah. I guess that I do. But it’s still just…not a good idea. I can’t speak to Natsu’s feelings, because I don’t know what they are—” But he wasn’t stupid, at least, and if he didn’t suspect something was there already, Natsu’s family showing up to question him about his intentions would definitely have tipped him off. “—but you probably shouldn’t encourage it. That’s all.”

Fuyumi was silent, as people tended to be when they were given something difficult to digest, before she finally spoke. “I guess I’m just not really getting it.”

He wished he could explain it better, but all of the words he never knew how to say queued up on his tongue and then stayed there. He couldn’t tell her that he was terrified of people being over-reliant on him, that he was more of a runner than a fighter. He couldn’t say that the thought of Natsuo liking him romantically both thrilled and terrified him, that the stillness in his bones surprised him and also made him feel like it would only be a matter of time before he felt the urge to run, even if it wasn’t there now. He couldn’t tell her that he wanted to be happy but he didn’t want to hurt anyone else, that he knew himself about as well as a stranger on the street knew him and that meant he never knew when he was really okay or not.

If he was a star forming in the night sky then the particulates gathering to make him were ones of dread and unbearable hope, and with one wrong move, they could explode and set everything ablaze.

He couldn’t tell her, so he didn’t.

“Oh,” Fuyumi said, apparently taking his silence as some sort of answer anyway. Maybe it was—words could only go so far when it came to communicating, sometimes. He felt a cold hand on his shoulder, gentle and kind, and then an arm, and before he knew it, he was wrapped in a half-embrace. “Don’t be afraid, Midoriya-kun. It’s only love. It’s not anything special.”

Izuku laughed wetly, not sure when he started tearing up but wiping tears out of his eyes with crooked fingers before they could fall anyway. “Love. That’s a strong word.”

“No, it’s not,” Fuyumi said. “It’s a feeling we all experience. Even if not a lot of people like to voice it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not still there. It’s an emotion, and because it’s an emotion, we never run out of it. Obviously, there are nuances…you don’t love a mother the same way you love a brother, but still. It’s not supposed to be scary, Midoriya-kun. It’s not supposed to be special.”

“But I—” Izuku cut himself off, before continuing anyway, his brain to mouth filter just as poor as it had always been. “I’m bad at it. I always have been.”

“Let me tell you a secret,” Fuyumi said, pulling away from him. “All of us are. It’s something we all have to learn and improve on, just like how we all have to learn how to process our anger, or how to express our grief. Like I said—it’s just an emotion. It’s not about your base skill, it’s about your potential for growth.”

“You sound like my old homeroom teacher,” Izuku blurted, before he thought better of it.

Fuyumi laughed. “Well…I am a teacher you know.”

“I guess that’s true,” Izuku said.

She studied him for several long moments, her expression kind, before she stood, picking up the canvases from the table. “I won’t pester you about it anymore, I promise. But if it’s alright with you, I would like to wait for Natsu to get back.”

“That’s fine by me,” Izuku said, meaning it. “You’re welcome here any time as far as I’m concerned.”

“If that’s the case,” she said, straightening from where she’d repacked the canvases. “I have an idea, if you’ve got some free time.”

Well, he was on call technically, but he was off and had nothing better to do, so…

“What is it?”

Not for the first time, Natsuo was surprised to hear voices through the door to his apartment when he got home. He thought for a moment that it might be Earphone Jack—Jirou—again, but ruled it out relatively quickly. It didn’t sound like her, and for some reason, Natsuo couldn’t shake the feeling that her last meeting with Izuku might have been some sort of goodbye.

He shrugged, deciding it was best to probably just go in and find out, and shouldered open the door. “Mail,” he warned, as he was already walking in. “Mail for you. Looks like something important.”

He heard laughter—eerily familiar but strangely difficult to place—and the sound of a sink being turned on and then turned off again as he removed his shoes one handed. By the time he’d gotten the left one off, Izuku had appeared in the entryway, drying his hands off with a dish towel.

“Hi,” Izuku said, smiling as he flipped his dish towel over his shoulder.

Natsuo looked away quickly, holding out the mail he’d collected. Izuku took it with a hum, flipping through the envelopes while Natsuo removed his right shoe with a much greater proficiency than he had removed the left one.

“Oh,” Izuku said, after a moment. “I know what this is.”

“The thick one, right?” Natsuo asked, as he straightened.

“Mhm,” Izuku said, flipping it around so Natsuo could see it again, even though he’d already seen it once. “That’s from Yaoyorozu-san.”

“The, uh…girl, right? With the black hair?” She’d visited the house a few times with friends to see Shouto, back when they all still lived in a house together.

“Yes. You could have just asked if it was Creati, though, you know.”

Natsuo shrugged, feeling slightly self-conscious. “I…try to keep it separate. Hero identities and civilian ones. If I can, anyway.”

Izuku lifted his gaze from the envelope, something oddly piercing about his eyes as he looked over the top of his wireframes at Natsuo. He ruined the effect a moment later by pushing his glasses up with the back of his wrist, however. “Yaoyorozu-san got engaged, actually. This is an invite to the party.”

“Engaged, really? I would have expected that to be in the news.”

“She’s not marrying another hero, and they’re intentionally trying to keep it on the quiet side. Laws have changed since the old days, of course, but there are still a lot of people that aren’t…the friendliest about certain couples. Actually, I think the relationship is really sweet—I’m not entirely sure when they started getting along or when they started dating—or when they got engaged—but I think they’re probably good for each other.”

“When’s the party?” Natsuo asked.

Izuku hummed, passing the rest of the mail back to him, and slid one knobby-knuckled finger under the top of the envelope to pop it open. He stepped closer to Natsuo as he wrestled it out and flipped it around. Natsuo was greeted with a collage of two extremely beautiful women doing cutesy couple things together at a photoshoot—and a picture of the woman with long, pink dreads and startlingly lime eyes holding a blow torch and grinning at the camera that didn’t seem like it belonged with the rest—and words printed in an elegant font in the middle.

“Hatsume Mei,” Natsuo read. “That sounds familiar.”

“She’s the CEO of Hatsume Industries,” Izuku explained. “A support company.”

“Ah, okay,” Natsuo said, eyeing the photo with the blowtorch suspiciously. It, at the very least, made slightly more sense than it did before. He reached over Izuku, tapping on the invitation, and said, “September 15^th.”

“That’s Yaoyorozu’s birthday.”

“They’re having an engagement party on her birthday?”

“It looks like it,” Izuku said, with no small amount of amusement.

“Also…that’s like, five months away.”

“Most of their friends are heroes,” Izuku said. “Not all of them will be able to get that specific day off, but it gives everyone plenty of time to try and find shift coverage or get a few hours off to pop in if they want.”

“Are you going to pop in?” Natsuo asked, shifting his gaze from the invitation to the side of Izuku’s face. He knew this was a weighty question, even if he didn’t know all the details, and Izuku’s expression reflected it.

The unmistakable sound of a camera shuttering reminded Natsuo suddenly and violently that they were not, in fact, alone. He realized too late that he was standing suspiciously close to Izuku for someone that was not romantically interested in their roommate and took a quick step backwards. It was too quick of a step backwards, considering he stepped on his recently removed shoe, tripping himself. Natsuo went down hard, landing firmly on his ass, and then from there decided to flop onto his back entirely because looking at the ceiling was preferable to looking at either person in the apartment with him.

“Natsu!” two voices shouted at once.

Natsuo lifted his head sharply, glaring as he realized the person in his apartment was, in fact, his sister. His sister that now had photographic evidence of his crush, probably. “Fuyumi!”

“Hi,” she said, smiling innocently.

“What are you doing here?!”

“I was bringing you something,” she said, like it was perfectly normal for her to bring him something when he wasn’t even home and she knew that.

“Are you okay?” Izuku asked, hovering over him in a way that indicated he wanted to help really badly but wasn’t sure if it was the best course of action. Natsuo waved him off, still glaring at Fuyumi.

“That picture. Delete it.”

“What picture?”

“Don’t play dumb! I heard the camera sound!”

“Oh, no, you’re hearing things! Should I take you to the hearing doctor?”

“Fuyumi.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Delete the picture, Fuyumi.”

“Alright, alright!” she said, taking her phone back out of her pocket and unlocking it. “I’ll delete it, geez.”

“Thank you,” Natsuo said stiffly, finally accepting the hand up Izuku offered him.

The camera shutter sounded again.

“Oh, no,” Izuku whispered, so softly Natsuo was probably the only one that heard him.

“That’s it,” Natsuo said, throwing off his bookbag with a vengeance. “I hope for your sake you wore your running shoes today.”

“Natsu!” Fuyumi scolded him. “And I made you food, too!”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m in my villain arc now.”

Fuyumi had the gall to laugh at that.

Natsuo started forward, having every intention of freezing her phone in a block of ice. Fuyumi finally sensed his murderous intent, since she let out a squeak and ran for the kitchen. Before Natsuo could get very far, though, he felt arms around his waist, holding him back even as he tried to barrel forward. For a second, he was too distracted to register who the arms belonged too, and then once he did, he was just panicked.

“Izuku—” he started, feeling very, very not in control of his emotions.

“No!” Izuku shouted. “No sibling murder in my house! No noise complaints, either!”

“You’re being pretty noisy yourself right now, you know.”

“Doesn’t matter!”

Natsuo stopped trying to walk forward. Izuku kept trying to hold him back.

It didn’t go well.

For the second time in the last ten minutes, Natsuo toppled backwards, landing on top of his roommate in a sprawl of limbs and weird feelings and very hot faces.

Natsuo didn’t even have the energy to move, even as he heard the third camera shutter that day. He just slowly lifted his head to glare at Fuyumi—a glare greatly reduced by the fact that he was still sprawled half on top of Izuku and half on the cold hard floor—and then glared harder when she chuckled.

“Come on, you two,” she said. “Lunch is ready.”

Natsuo sighed, decided it was best for everyone if he just let this go, and rolled off of Izuku so that he could stand. He dusted himself off, then looked down, noting the furious red of Izuku’s cheeks and the hand he held adamantly over his eyes. His embarrassment was strangely endearing, if only because it reflected what Natsuo felt on the inside, and he sighed as he finally let himself think it.

He liked this guy. A hero. A weirdo. A nerd. His brother’s friend. His roommate. He liked him. He liked him a lot. And they would have to talk about it, just…not now.

Natsuo snagged his hand, pulling him to his feet just like he had done for Natsuo earlier. Izuku yelped in surprise at first before cooperating, dropping the hand he’d been using to hide his eyes in the process, which made it even harder to look at him. Natsuo let go of his hand quickly once he was upright, but a moment too late. His fingers still prickled with curiosity at the thought of what it would be like to keep holding on instead of letting go.

Izuku took a deep breath, seemingly pulling himself back together. “Fuyumi-san says you’ll like this,” he said, as he straightened his glasses and then led the way out of the hall. “I was helping her make it, though, so if it’s terrible, I’m probably the one to blame.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Natsuo said, as he followed Izuku to the table, adamantly pretending like nothing had happened. “It always is when Fuyumi cooks.”

Looking at them now, Fuyumi couldn’t help but think she’d been ridiculous before.

She’d been worried about Natsuo since their family dinner together all those weeks ago. More specifically, she’d been worried about Natsuo because of his crush—not that she didn’t love Midoriya, because she did. He was practically a part of the family, just the same as Bakugou was, but he was different, too. Harder to get a read on, even harder to know what he was thinking or feeling about any particular thing.

Midoriya lived in a world alone, ever since high school. Her father could visit him there sometimes, she thought, but none of the rest of them—his family and theirs—could. She might have a really good idea about what his past thoughts about Shouto were, but his current ones…she didn’t know.

So, she didn’t want Natsuo to get caught in something that would hurt him, especially not so soon after his heart had been broken. But it had been ridiculous to worry, because…

Midoriya sat across from her at their four-person table, Natsuo to his left. They prodded each other occasionally, in that way that boys did, but everything about it was friendly. They got along with each other just fine. They weren’t thinking about other people when they were looking at each other, and that was all either of them needed, she thought.

Fuyumi clasped her hands together, her chopsticks trapped between them, and Natsuo looked over at her.

“You okay, Neesan?”

“Just fine,” Fuyumi responded, meaning it when she smiled. “Thank you both for having me today. I know it wasn’t planned, but it was nice to see you.”

She knew she had a tendency to be pushy, but she wanted to give this thing between them time. They might know how they felt about each other but they clearly didn’t know what they wanted to do about it yet, and she would give them the time they needed to figure it out.

And also very carefully not bring any of this up to Shouto.

“You’re welcome any time, Fuyumi-san!” Midoriya said brightly, smiling brilliantly at her.

“Not any time,” Natsuo corrected. “Prior waning is appreciated, you know.”

“Any time with prior warning, then,” Midoriya said humorously, glancing at Natsuo in a way her brother didn’t notice but that Fuyumi could never forget.

“Alright, alright, I get it,” she said. “No more surprise visits! I’ll give you at least an hour’s notice I’m dropping in next time.”

Next time, she wanted to see Natsuo’s face herself when she showed him whatever art Rei made for him, anyway.

All in all, Izuku’s first day back on the job had been going pretty well. An elderly woman had offered him candy when he helped her up the stairs to a museum entrance. He refused the candy, of course, but afterwards she patted him on his previously broken arm and said, “Glad to have you back, dearie,” which was…nice. Homely. Like he belonged.

He’d saved someone trapped in a car after an accident by pulling the door off of their vehicle. He’d saved an actor from what appeared to be a martial arts movie when he miscalculated the jump between roofs. He signed an autograph for a kid who was crying tears of joy when he saw Izuku out on the streets—which was a strangely nostalgic part of working as a professional hero that Izuku never quite got used to—and posed for a photo with a guy that was wearing a Deku shirt. So, all in all, it had been going well. It was a nice, calm morning.

“Crap, you’re back from medical leave?” a robber asked, as he made it out of a store with a wad of cash and made eye contact with Izuku. Izuku had been about to go inside, following a call he got from the police about a single suspect—but he supposed he’d been spared the trouble.

“I wasn’t going to be on medical leave forever, you know,” Izuku said, tilting his head. “And even if I was, robbery is a bad idea regardless of the hero that happens to be on duty.”   

“I don’t have time for this!” the villain growled. The next moment, he’d thrown the skateboard deck (minus the wheels) he’d been carrying in his left hand down, hopped on it, and hovered himself away at high speeds.

A telekinetic Quirk, then. Probably similar to Yanagi’s Poltergeist, which allowed her to both float objects and move them. She didn’t tend to use her Quirk like this villain was using his, but he remembered Monoma using it exactly like this in several of their training exercises back in high school. Which was good, since it gave him a frame of reference for what this Quirk could do. He didn’t know everything about it, though, which meant that he still needed to be careful.

Izuku gave chase quickly. The villain didn’t worry about knocking people out of his way to get to where he wanted to go. This was a handicap that applied only to Izuku, who had to be careful about where he stepped so as not to run into civilians. He warned them as he ran, shouting for them to get out of the way and dodging them when they didn’t, but this combined with the fact that he couldn’t risk using more than 50% of One for All’s total strength in a street chase with a crowd gave the villain the tiniest advantage.

At least for now. Based on the time of day and the part of the city they were in, though, there would be a lull in foot traffic the closer the suspect got to the university—

The university.

The same university that Natsuo attended.

Izuku ran a little faster.

Natsuo walked out of his organic chemistry course, exhausted from both the class he had just taken and the looming prospect of the homework he would have to do later. He felt ready to take a nap for several hours but knew he couldn’t because he had work later.

Campus was fairly dead right now, as it usually was—this particular class let out fifteen minutes before most of the other classes in the scheduling block because it started in the middle of the previous block—but Natsuo didn’t mind. It meant it was a faster walk home than it normally was, since he wasn’t also dodging freshmen on skateboards they didn’t know how to ride or playing Russian roulette with the influx of cars leaving the commuter student parking lots that weren’t always great at watching for pedestrians.

It also meant that he heard the whistle of something large and flat moving quickly through the air and knew to duck much sooner than he would have if campus had been crowded that day instead. Natsuo took the guy standing next to him with him when he ducked, subsequently saving both of their lives when a young man with dark clothing and a Quirked up skateboard went sailing over their heads.

“Shit!” the guy shouted, as he crash-landed in the spot Natsuo and his classmate had been standing in a moment ago, the red light surrounding his skateboard deck going out. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

“Hey, man, you okay?” the guy standing next to Natsuo asked, taking a step forward as if to help him.

At that moment, Natsuo noticed something gleaming and black laying on the ground where it fell out of the hoverboarder’s pocket. He grabbed the other guy’s arm quickly, pulling him back again. “No, don’t get close to him! He has a—”

Before Natsuo could finish that sentence, the guy had grabbed his gun and spun around, pointing it directly at Natsuo. Natsuo checked out, just a little, as it became difficult to hear through the cotton it felt like was stuffed into his ears. He could hear the screaming and crying in the background, and process what it meant on some level, but the vast majority of his brain was now very absorbed in the gun barrel he was staring down.

Natsuo slowly put his hands up. “Don’t shoot, man. Please.”

The man wasn’t paying attention to Natsuo, though, which made this situation much, much worse. “Shit. I need this money. Shit. He wasn’t supposed to be back yet, damn it! It would have been fine if he wasn’t there!”

Was he talking about…Izuku?

“What do you want?” Natsuo asked, still staring down the barrel of the gun. “Money? I can give you money if that’s it.” It would make paying his half of rent a bitch later, but at least he would still be alive to pay it.

“I don’t want your money!” he yelled. “I just gotta get away, man! I can’t outrun him! I can’t hide! He’ll leave me alone if I take someone, though. Yeah, he’ll leave me a—”

“St. Louis…” a voice above Natsuo yelled, and Natsuo almost passed out with relief right then and there, even before Izuku finished. “SMASH!”

The villain was given no time to react between the shout and the action—one second he was pointing a gun at Natsuo, and the next he had been kicked halfway across campus. The gun was wrapped up in writhing black tendrils, staticky and jittery, safely contained. If the villain was still conscious after taking that hit, he didn’t move again, and Natsuo slowly sank to his knees.

For someone that was neither a hero nor a villain, he had encounters with villains way more often than he should.

Natsuo could hear relieved shouts all around him. Some people were shouting Deku’s name, and others were just shouting. He could hear crying and the sound of sirens, maybe Izuku saying something in response to the crowd, but all of it was lost to him, just like everything was. Natsuo himself was lost—buried in his adrenaline and his fear—up until…

“Natsu,” a voice, familiar, said near him.

Natsuo grasped it, using it as a line to pull himself back to awareness. He found his vision filled with green, warm and gentle, the color of life. A moment later he felt a forehead on his, a bit of hair smashed between their skin, coarse and thick and keeping Natsuo tied to this moment.

“You okay, Natsu?” Izuku asked.

“Fine,” Natsu managed. Now that he was aware he could feel all the eyes on him—on them—on what they were doing. “People can see—”

“My PR team has it handled,” Izuku said. “Don’t worry.”

Natsuo felt hands on his shoulders, and just like that, he found he didn’t care. The people standing around him could take a hundred pictures if they wanted. Hell, they could even take a thousand. They could talk about the time he hugged Deku after a villain attack for the rest of his life if they wanted to—he just needed this one thing from the world, just once. And after that, he knew better than to ask it for any more favors.

Natsuo settled his arms around Izuku’s waist, not minding the bits of gear poking him in weird places, dropped his forehead onto Izuku’s shoulder, and just…stayed there. Izuku made a soft noise—maybe it was surprised, maybe it was something else—and shifted, raising one shoulder slightly, shifting an arm so it laid horizontally over Natsuo’s back. Natsuo wasn’t sure of why he did it, but he didn’t really care, either.

“Glad I made it in time,” Izuku said, his voice near Natsuo’s ear.

“I was fine,” Natsuo said, even though he clearly was not fine even now. “Not my first time being held hostage by a villain, you know.”

“I know,” Izuku whispered. “Natsu. I have to go. The police are here; they’ll want statements. Are you going to be okay?”

“Just fine,” Natsuo said, pulling away from him now that he had his moment. “Yeah. You can go.”

“Alright,” Izuku said, standing up, one hand lingering on Natsuo’s shoulder as he did. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Okay,” Natsuo agreed, watching Izuku walk away with a heavy heart.

It had been Izuku that initiated their more-than platonic hug thing. But it had been Natsuo that continued it, that clung to him so tightly, and Natsuo could still feel the phantom imprint of his forehead pressed against his.

It shouldn’t mean anything. A hug was just a hug, at the end of the day, and Natsuo should know better than to want. He was never the winner. He was the least special of all of his siblings, overshadowed by Touya’s memory, Fuyumi’s strength, and Shouto’s talent. He should know better than to want by now. He should know better, and yet…

That moment where it was simple, where he knew how he felt and he knew Izuku felt the same too, he wanted that. He wanted it over and over and over again, if he could have it. If Izuku was willing to give it.

Which meant, he needed to tell him.

The picture was released to the media before Izuku’s patrol officially ended. Izuku’s PR team had been working hard since the incident to make sure it wasn’t an ordeal—the only picture that got out was the one taken in the middle of their hug, where Izuku had lifted his shoulder to hide Natsuo’s face from the view of the cameras he saw and covered the letters on his shirt that read ‘BACK.’ Natsuo’s hair looked faintly green from the glow of One for All instead of white, and honestly, if Izuku didn’t know it was Natsuo in the photo already he probably wouldn’t have recognized him looking at it later. Additionally, Natsuo’s name wasn’t released to the public.

The headline, amusingly, read, “Pro Hero Deku Comforts Civilian After a Difficult Rescue.”

What a way to take the gay out of it, Izuku thought, with a mental pat on the back for his PR team. Just throw in some anxiety and everything is perfectly platonic and heterosexual once more.

And some people thought heteronormativity never did them any favors. It didn’t do anyone a lot of favors, granted, but it at least made it easier to keep a relationship secret if you were stupid enough to go around hugging people in full hero regalia.

…He owed his PR team very fat end of the year bonuses this year, just for dealing with this for him. Or maybe just for dealing with him, in general.

Izuku lifted from the roof he’d momentarily perched on, gliding through the air with the assistance of Float before landing on the next rooftop, his phone safely secured in one of the pockets of his belt. He leapt again, landing gently on the next building, and continued to move through the city as the sun set.

His shift had ended hours ago. Technically speaking, he was working overtime now.

In some ways, it was cowardly to not go home and face Natsuo. In other ways, Izuku thought that maybe it was a little bit merciful, though—he didn’t know what he wanted to do, and trying to cram a discussion of this nature into the little bit of time Natsuo had before he had to go to work seemed unfair to both of them.

There still wasn’t any reason to still be out on the streets, though. Natsuo would have gone into work an hour and a half ago, and the city was quiet anyway.

But he just…he didn’t know what to do.

It had been a long time since Izuku had felt his chains, but he could feel them on his shoulders once more. They pressed down on him, tight but strangely comfortable, too. It was like some part of him had missed the feeling of being needed, despite everything he’d done to get away from it.

Really, maybe this was just the first time in a long time he’d felt high stakes saving someone. The country was in a time of peace. All for One and the League of Villains, everything and everyone associated with them, they had all been rendered inert years ago. No equally big threats arose to take their place. That pressure that broke him in high school—that feeling that if he got too close to his friends they wouldn’t be able to save themselves—it had no reason to be there anymore, and bizarrely, strangely, he missed what it felt like to fight for the things he wanted, with his whole life. His whole body. His whole soul.   

Natsuo had almost died today, and if he had, it would have been entirely Izuku’s fault. 

It was a completely random coincidence. The villain could have ended up pointing the gun at any civilian. The fact that he’d chosen Natsuo was pure chance; it had nothing to do with Natsuo’s connection to him.

Izuku shook his head, jumping to another rooftop, his feet soft as he landed. He was trying to talk himself into it. What was he doing? Even if he was emotionally stable, he still wouldn’t be in a good position to date someone, let alone Natsuo, Shouto’s brother. Izuku was still in the middle of a relationship drama with Shouto that had been going on for years, for goodness sake, and Natsuo was the worst person to drag into that mess.

And yet…

Could he really stand to keep running and hiding, though? He’d ripped his heart out once so that he could be free. He didn’t want to do it again. He didn’t think that he could.

Maybe…

Maybe it was time to try to be brave instead. He was never going to know if he could do something or not if he never tried…right?

Izuku took a deep breath, and turned towards his own apartment building, gliding through the air before landing on the street in front of it. He let himself in quietly, mindful of the extra bulk of his uniform and very careful to avoid any miscellaneous college students wandering home from classes or parties or whatever it was college students did. He didn’t think that anyone in his apartment complex knew he was Pro Hero Deku yet, and honestly, he wanted to keep it that way.

Times like these made it easy to see why All Might had just lived out in the country somewhere. Just a couple of One for All powered hops away from Might Tower, secluded enough that he could have peace of mind as well as privacy.

Sometimes, Izuku wondered what it would be like to live there himself.

Izuku made it to his apartment and unlocked the door without a hitch, completely unnoticed by any of the other residents. He found a dark apartment waiting for him—which was to be expected, since Natsuo was at work—but he sighed quietly anyway. Waiting around in an empty apartment was going to be agonizing—even more agonizing than having this discussion—but it was for the best. Izuku knew that it was.

The lights suddenly flared to life.

Izuku lifted his gaze, slowly, to meet Natsuo’s. He stood in the doorway, one hand still over the light switch, wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing earlier but with a plain gray hoodie thrown on over his shirt. He looked the tiniest bit disheveled, with wide eyes and a few strands of hair sticking up in odd places.

“Hi,” Izuku said.

Natsuo exhaled, very slowly, just a tiny bit of frosty vapor leaving on his breath. It was something Izuku had seen Shouto do time and time again—in the middle of fights, after them, when he was particularly frustrated with something—and seeing it now in this context startled him. Because of this, he expected Natsuo to sound angry, but instead he only sounded relieved. “You came back.”

“I—” Izuku started, before cutting himself off. “I live here.”

Natsuo sat down on the step to the hall, covering his eyes with his hand. “You… I just expected you to run. Especially when you didn’t come back at your usual time. That’s all.”

Izuku breathed out heavily himself now, slowly reaching up to unclasp his cape. Yellow, just as it had been in high school, to honor Gran Torino; though, this cape was in far better shape than the one he’d first worn had been in. He hooked it over an arm, and then removed his mask and hood, and then finally his belt. All of these things and his gloves he left sitting on top of the dining table in a jumble of brightly colored hero gear while Natsuo watched silently through the gaps in his fingers. When he was done and the vast majority of his pokey bits had been removed, Izuku crossed to sit next to Natsuo on the step to their hall, their knees and shoulders touching despite there being a different kind of distance between them.

“I don’t blame you for thinking that,” Izuku said, picking at the hem of his leg guards. “I’m not the greatest at confronting these things. You probably know enough from the…thing…with Shouto to know that.”

“I heard the rumors,” Natsuo said. “But I also know I was only hearing Shouto’s side of things. I put more credibility in your version of events. The bit that you told me, anyway.”

“I wasn’t trying to run from you,” Izuku insisted softly. “I knew you had to work tonight. I didn’t want to…distract you from that. I’m sorry.”

Natsuo took another deep breath. “I believe you.”

He didn’t say anything else, so Izuku continued to fiddle with the hem of his leg guards for a while before mustering up the courage to speak. “So. Why aren’t you at work?”

“Called off,” Natsuo grunted. “I’m not really in a state to be doing customer service, you know?”

“Oh,” Izuku said with a wince, as he violently wished he’d just come home sooner instead of being stupid. “Sorry. I didn’t know…”

“It’s fine, Izuku,” Natsuo said, with a slight edge to his voice. “Don’t apologize. You don’t owe me anything. You could have stayed gone for three weeks if you wanted to. It would have hurt, sure, but—”

He stopped suddenly, and Izuku raised his eyebrows, feeling distinctly warm. “But…?”

“But,” Natsuo said, finally dropping the hand from his eyes to look at Izuku, “I remember what you said. About needing space from people sometimes. And I get it, I really do. I think I’m similar, in a way. I don’t want to push you.”

“Oh,” Izuku whispered, feeling…known.

He looked inside himself, he really looked, and he found that he didn’t have the urge to run.

“Hey,” Natsuo said, leaning close enough that he could put his forehead against Izuku’s, a mimicry of the same thing Izuku had done to him earlier. “I don’t want to dance around it anymore. I want to be more with you, Izuku. More than just roommates. I want you to stay here. I want to go back to that kitschy shop with you. I want to try that new sashimi place that opened with you. I want to get to know you better. I don’t want to settle so that the rest of my family can be happy anymore. If hearing this makes you want to go, then I understand that too, but if you want to stay…then I want to stay with you.”

Izuku met his gaze, feeling like he was going cross-eyed due to the proximity, and then reached out so he could cup Natsuo’s jaw and the back of his head, fingers buried in spiky strands of white that were somehow both soft and coarse at the same time. Izuku decided that none of it mattered. Not Shouto, not his terrible dating history, nothing. The only person standing in the way of Izuku’s happiness was Izuku himself, and he was tired of it.

“I have something to confess to you,” Izuku whispered. “I am really, really bad at dating.”

Natsuo laughed, breathless and more than a little helpless. “I have something to confess too, then. I am also really, really bad at dating.”

Izuku joined him in laughter, quiet and breathless, both of their shoulders shaking. He could feel the too-fast thump of his heart in his chest as their laughter died and Natsuo leaned in—and he was already very leaned in to start with. “We probably shouldn’t tell Shouto,” Izuku murmured, in the few moments they had before their lips met.

“Probably not,” Natsuo agreed, but distractedly. Any further things Izuku might have said were swallowed completely by Natsuo’s lips, rough and cold, as he pressed them gently against Izuku’s.

Izuku dropped his hands, finding purchase in the collar of Natsuo’s hoodie, and he found for the first time in a long time that he felt completely happy.

Chapter Text

“It was smart to cover up my shirt,” Natsuo commented, as he lounged against the counter next to Izuku, his phone in his hand. “And to turn on your Quirk so my hair looked green in the lighting. I would have thought they would have been able to get rid of everything, though? As in, like, not even let the picture get out. ”

“Letting it out was my idea, actually,” Izuku admitted sheepishly, as he turned his pan to check that he hadn’t burnt the egg he was frying. He was an alright cook all around, but he still had his moments. Usually when he was distracted.

Like when his boyfriend-roommate was standing next to him wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boxers. Not an uncommon morning outfit for Natsuo, and not an outfit that would have been a problem for Izuku a day ago, but now that they were dating (or something), he had permission to thirst, so to speak.

And thirst he did.

“Really?” Natsuo asked, wrinkling his nose slightly as he thought. “Why?”

“Something I learned in my PR classes back in high school,” Izuku said, as he forced himself to look at the breakfast he was attempting to cook instead of the way Natsuo’s laugh lines crinkled when he did that with his nose. “It’s controlling the narrative, you know? It will always be more suspicious if you just don’t acknowledge it at all. A thing happened, several people saw the thing, so it will always be harder to convince people that they didn’t see the thing at all than it will be to convince them of what exactly the thing is. So, when I called up my PR manager I said, ‘strike everything but that one where the person I’m hugging has no defining features and tell the people something to make it seem like a random circumstance instead of a romantic one.’ To which she responded, ‘Where is this incredible knack for publicity when you’re hiding behind couches in your interviews?’”

Natsuo gave him a look, flat and humorless. Izuku was beginning to think of it as a trademark Todoroki look, at this rate.

“Don’t give me that,” Izuku said, rolling his eyes in a joking way. “I’m great at public relations until it comes to talking to a crowd. Then I hide behind couches.”

“Do you actually hide behind couches, though?”

“I’ve been known to do so once or twice,” Izuku said, lying through his teeth. He did it almost every single time he did an interview with a talk show host. At this rate, he didn’t even know why he bothered doing scheduled appearances anymore, but it wasn’t like he could avoid it either. “They always edit that portion of the interview—where I’m the same shade as a tomato and hiding behind a couch while a live studio audience and a host laugh at something weird I said—out of the final product though.”

“A shame,” Natsuo said, a smirk pulling up one corner of his mouth. “It’s probably kind of cute.”

Izuku looked at him, his egg completely forgotten, as he slowly felt his face warm up more and more. Natsuo, in turn seemed to grow pinker and pinker himself as they made eye contact, until both of them were stuck staring awkwardly at each other as their cheeks glowed with blushes a lovesick high schooler would be proud of.

“Ah!” Natsuo shouted at the end of it, throwing a wadded up paper towel at Izuku’s face. “Why are you doing that?”

Izuku yelled in an unnecessarily dramatic way as the paper towel hit him. “Don’t throw things at me! Also, doing what?”

“Blushing!”

“You were blushing too!”

“Only because you were!” Natsuo shouted, throwing another piece of paper towel at him, though this one he tore off and wadded up himself before launching it.

“Don’t waste our paper towel!” Izuku cried, as he seized Natsuo’s wrist as he started to tear off another sheet.

“I’ll quit wasting our paper towel when you quit being weird!”

At that, Izuku laughed breathlessly, his hand still clasped around Natsuo’s wrist. Natsuo joined in a moment later with lilting peals. It seemed laughing was the only thing they could do, really. “I think it’s going to be a little weird for a while no matter what we do,” Izuku whispered, once he had enough breath to do so.

“We are doing things a little backwards,” Natsuo agreed, his voice still airy. “Normally, you try dating before you move in together.”

“You also normally wear pants when hanging out at least up to the first date,” Izuku added, with a pointed glance downwards.

Natsuo glanced with him, his eyebrows coming together in confusion as he seemed to realize he was not wearing anything other than a pair of boxers on his lower half himself. Then, he began to color with embarrassment again as he realized what this meant. “Noted,” he said, and then thicker: “I’ll go put on pants.”

“Please,” Izuku said, in a pained voice as he released Natsuo’s wrist.

Natsuo padded away in shame, and Izuku watched him go for only a moment before he forced himself to remember that he had a task and that he needed to get back to it.

Izuku was in the process of removing the egg from its pan, face finally a normal color again instead of cherry red, when Natsuo finally reappeared. He’d apparently opted for fully dressing himself for the day, since he also had on a different shirt, socks, cologne, and enough nervous energy that he could make a chihuahua seem calm.

“Everything okay?” Izuku asked, feeling very spooked by the nervous energy. As most people probably would in his situation, considering new relationships were often both very nice and very fickle, and it was entirely possible Natsuo had changed his mind about their situation in the span of time it took him to change his shirt.

“Yeah, just…” Natsuo trailed off. “We should do it, right?”

Izuku nearly dropped a hot pan on his foot.

“A first date,” Natsuo clarified. “We should do a first date. That’s what I meant. Nothing else, I promise. Words are just, uh…they sure are words.”

Honestly, it was kind of relieving to know that Izuku wasn’t the only one that was a little freaked out by everything that was going on. He took a deep breath, calmly transferred his egg to the waiting sandwich components, and carefully set the pan down before he finally turned to look at Natsuo. “Yes. We should definitely go on a first date.”

“And probably talk more about…uh, this. Negotiations, I guess?”

“Terms and conditions?” Izuku asked with amusement.

“The fine print stuff,” Natsuo agreed. “Like…I definitely don’t want to tell Shouto any time soon, but we need to tell him eventually, right? So, we should probably talk about those things now before we get into it.”

“And also what happens with rent if things don’t work out,” Izuku said, before he thought it through.

Natsuo flinched slightly. “That too.”

“Sorry,” Izuku said immediately. “I wasn’t saying I don’t want it to work out, but—”

“No, you’re right. It’s a good thing to talk about. I’ve been in that situation before, as you know. I don’t want to be in it again.”

“I can promise you I won’t run out on you unexpectedly at least,” Izuku said. “Even if we don’t work out, I’m willing to stay until you find someone to live with you. I’m…pretty good at making myself scarce, anyway.”

Natsuo sighed, then pulled out a chair at the table. After a moment of deliberation, Izuku discarded his plans for his American breakfast sandwich in his mind and joined him there. It was a serious discussion, and food could wait.

“I don’t really want you to do that, though,” Natsuo said. “Make yourself scarce, I mean.”

Izuku lifted his shoulder in a little half shrug. “I would be fine.”

“But I know you’ve lived by crashing at random agencies and on random couches in the past,” Natsuo said. “I don’t want you to have to go back to living like that, because it seems really unfair. Maybe I should—”

“Natsu. You lived here first. You go to school here,” Izuku broke in gently, before Natsuo could finish that sentence. He considered for another moment—a consideration that concluded with him acknowledging that relationships were about trust and communication, even if he only knew that theoretically and not practically. And that trust and communication had to start somewhere. “I own property anyway.”

“What?”

“I have an estate,” Izuku said very carefully. “In the country. It would be a bit of a commute, but…I’m also a freelance hero. I can technically work anywhere I want to work—I’m not contractually obligated to stay in Hiroshima if I would rather work elsewhere. I was only supposed to be filling in until a more permanent replacement could be found anyway.”

“Why…” Natsuo started, before apparently deciding it was a rude question and not following through with it.

Izuku raised both of his hands in surrender. “I know that it’s a little…odd. Who would want to live in shitty apartments and have roommates when they could go enjoy homeownership in a quiet part of town instead, right?”

“Well, you said it.”

Izuku laughed, short and sweet. “Well, you were thinking it. It’s a good question, anyway. And to answer it, it’s All Might’s house. His former house. He left it—and a gigantic chunk of his wealth—all to me. Honestly, I have more money than I’ll ever know what to do with, considering I also make a lot of money. I donate most of it, but there’s a point where you just have so much that you can donate it to charities by the thousands and then have it all back again in a month or two…and that’s sort of where I am. Plus, I grew up in an apartment with just my mom, so I feel more at home in tiny spaces that I occupy with other people than I do living in a giant house full of someone else’s memories all alone.”

“Why not sell it, then?”

“It feels wrong,” Izuku said, as he traced a bit of the wood grain on their table. “I think people would want to live in it just because it used to be All Might’s house, but it’s not All Might that lived there. Just a man. A very private man. Besides, I already converted Might Tower to a museum to honor his legend and his legacy…I feel like he deserves to have something that remains a tribute to who he was as an ordinary person.”

“That’s really thoughtful,” Natsuo said after a moment. “You’re really thoughtful. And now that I think about it, it’s…yeah. Yeah, if the old man died I wouldn’t want people moving into his old house just because they’re Endeavor fans. That’s family history. I know our family business was blown wide open for the public to see and scrutinize, but that—that should stay.”

“Untouched,” Izuku agreed. “Cared for by people that best understand what it is, as long as people are alive to remember All Might’s face and name. One day I might sell it, but not when the history is new.”

“That’s good,” Natsuo said, nodding. “I…can’t believe I’m so surprised you’re a considerate person every time you do something considerate, and yet here I am. I mean, you’re literally a hero, you know?”

Izuku resisted the urge to hide under the table, and instead focused on not blushing up a storm instead. “Well, in your defense you don’t exactly have the best experience with heroes.”

“I guess that I don’t,” Natsuo agreed. He seemed to ponder this for a moment before he sighed, looking at Izuku again. “We didn’t talk about Shouto yet.”

“Right,” Izuku said with a wince. “To be honest with you, Shouto is complicated for a lot of reasons. He’s…I mean, a lot of the time, he kind of needs a kick to accept something. If you try to let him come to the conclusion he needs to on his own, he probably never will. But at the same time, I…don’t really see it going well if we just went up to him and said we were together right now, or even a month from now.”

“Is it possible,” Natsuo began slowly, folding his fingers together like this wasn’t a topic he really knew how to broach but was trying his best to anyway, “that Shouto still likes you, romantically? I’m not accusing him of…emotional cheating, or whatever. I’m just wondering if there’s some part of him that never really got closure with you.”

Izuku shifted in his seat, rubbing his thumb along that same wood grain again. “I have no idea what Shouto thinks about anything these days, to tell you the truth. It’s an aspect of his life that I haven’t really been involved in for a long time.”

“Right,” Natsuo said after a moment. “It would be weird to talk about your romantic life with someone that you think has a crush on you, or whatever.”

“Kacchan could probably answer that, though,” Izuku said, after a moment of thought. “Kacchan could probably answer a lot of our questions, actually.”

“But we would have to tell him that we’re together to ask them,” Natsuo pointed out.

“Kacchan can keep a secret,” Izuku said hesitantly. “He was the first person to know about my Quirk being what it is.”

“You would be asking him to keep a secret from his partner though,” Natsuo countered. “Kind of tough to do sometimes. Also kind of cruel to ask.”

“He wouldn’t have to keep it forever,” Izuku said, with a thoughtful hum. “We could always just put the situation with Shouto off until we are more sure. And then, if we’re sure but we’re not sure about how Shouto will react, we can tell Kacchan first and assess how Shouto might respond through him. And then tell Shouto not long after that, regardless of what Kacchan says.”

Natsuo scratched behind his ear. “I think that sounds fine. What about…other people?”

“We should probably tell people roughly around the same time,” Izuku said. “As in, it would probably be kind of disastrous to tell our moms—our moms and other parental figures, I should say—about it and then not mention it to Kacchan and Fuyumi for three more months. The longer we ask people to not talk about it with other people the more likely they are to accidentally slip up, and then everyone that doesn’t know will feel jaded about not knowing sooner.”

“No, I agree with that,” Natsuo said. “I’m good with that. Uh…”

“We should talk,” Izuku said carefully, “about what I do for a living.”

Natsuo sighed. “Right.”

“There’s always a chance that I’ll be grievously injured or killed in the line of duty,” Izuku continued awkwardly. “And there will be a lot of times where I’m not allowed to talk to you about the cases that I’m working on at all, even if they’re bothering me. Also, I work a lot and exist in a state of being permanently on call, so I might not be around a lot. I’m not exactly an expert, but I know that can take a toll on relationships.”

“And I’m working towards being a general practice doctor, so I might not have a lot of free time either once I start working.”

“So, there’s a very good chance we might not even see each other half the time,” Izuku surmised.  

“We’ll have to plan vacation times months in advance and hope nobody drops a mountain on anyone else while we’re away or something,” Natsuo said somberly.

Izuku laughed, despite it not really being a joke, and scrubbed both of his hands through his hair. “This is a mess already, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Natsuo agreed, with a laugh of his own. He sat back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling, and slowly smiled. It was a beautiful expression, clouds parting to reveal the sun, hopeful and complete. It reminded Izuku of the way All Might’s smile used to make him feel, just a little bit, but this was different. This was simpler. “My life has always been messy, so I’m used to it. We’ll figure it out.”

“We’ll start by figuring out our first date,” Izuku said.

“Oh, yeah. I had a thought for that.” Natsuo sat back up, lacing his fingers together before he set them on the table. “Would you possibly be able to appear on campus around one? Out of hero costume, though.”

“I can try,” Izuku said. “I don’t want to make a promise though, because…well, if someone is robbing a gas station at one I have to be there, you know?”

“That’s fine,” Natsuo said, scratching his cheek and looking away. “You can just text me if you get held up or something. And if you do, we can do it another day, yeah?”

Izuku knew that it was one thing for Natsuo to say it was okay if he skipped out on dates and another thing entirely to actually experience him doing it, but he felt relieved anyway. He knew that it wasn’t easy for heroes to date anyone but that it was exceptionally difficult for heroes to date civilians—it was hard to ask someone to put others first over and over again and expect the relationship to be fine—but then again, Natsuo had grown up in this world. He knew what to expect.

Izuku couldn’t help but feel like maybe, just a little bit, he deserved better than what he had always known, though.

“I’ll try to be there,” Izuku said instead. “Civvies only, this time. Where am I going, though?”

“I’ll text you the address,” Natsuo said. “Where we’re actually going is a surprise, though.”

Izuku hummed. Historically, surprises and him didn’t get along the greatest—it required a level of trust that he was somewhat unwilling to give most people—but in this case, he couldn’t help but feel excited. Jirou was right—Izuku was never going to be happy if he didn’t try to change first, and change started in the small ways.

“I’ll look forward to it, then.”

Despite the fact that he’d promised to text if he ran into complications, Natsuo was still surprised to see Izuku when he stepped outside of his class and found him waiting there. It was probably some complex form of a fear of abandonment rearing its head, but still, he’d seemed so convinced he probably wouldn’t be able to make it earlier.

“Hey,” Izuku said, as he spotted Natsuo. All of the other students parted without so much as a spare glance in Izuku’s direction—a fact Natsuo was grateful for, considering his roommate turned boyfriend was famous—which made it easy for Natsuo to stop in front of him.

True to his promise, Izuku had arrived in civilian clothes. He was wearing a baseball hat that his hair was fighting against, a t-shirt that was labelled as a bed sheet, and shorts that appeared to be at least one size too big. It wasn’t exactly the world’s nicest first date attire, but Natsuo found he couldn’t really bring himself to care.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Natsuo said, shuffling the strap of the bag on his shoulder awkwardly. “I thought you weren’t going to be able to come.”

“Lunch break,” Izuku said, lifting his shoulders up to his ears in a way that Natsuo was starting to learn meant that he was extremely unsure of himself. “I…normally eat quickly while watching over the city, so this is a change.”

“How long do you have before you have to go back?”

“About forty-five minutes,” Izuku said, checking his watch. “Sudden onset crime notwithstanding.”

Forty-five minutes was plenty of time.

“Okay,” Natsuo said, taking a deep breath. “Cool. Come with me—you’re going to love this.”

“Oh! Okay.” Izuku fell into step with him quickly as Natsuo led him deeper into his campus. He shuffled around several times, putting his hands in his pockets and then removing them so he could fold them across his chest before putting them in his pockets again.

Natsuo was glad he wasn’t the only one that didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He wasn’t sure he had the courage to take one of Izuku’s either, though.

He wished he did.

“Sorry I don’t have a lot of time,” Izuku said. “I know it probably really sucks for you, since things are already not going well and it’s already the first date. I—I’m not going to say that.”

“What were you going to say?” Natsuo asked, tilting his head at Izuku.

“Nothing!”

“Just say it, Izuku. You’re not going to hurt my feelings.”

“Just…” Izuku sighed, crossing his arms across his chest again. “I was going to say that I would understand if you already wanted to call things off, but it was a stupid thing to say.”

“That is a pretty stupid thing to think.”

“I know! That’s why I wasn’t going to—”

“Izu,” Natsuo interrupted, but gently. “I wasn’t done.”

Izuku paused, and Natsuo paused with him even though it was obstructing foot traffic. “No?”

“No. Listen. I knew what I was getting into, yeah? I know better than most people that heroes are busy. So, I definitely wasn’t going to call anything off because you only have forty-five minutes, because you made forty-five minutes for me and that’s what matters. However, if you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed by it, then we can…do something. Go slower. Call it off. Whatever you want to do, we can do it.”

“No, I—” Izuku cut himself off, taking a deep breath. “I’m fine. I don’t want to do any of that. I’m just nervous, nothing else.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay then.” Natsuo took a deep breath, and then finally offered Izuku his hand. Izuku looked at it for a moment, eyes wide, before he smiled hesitantly. It was unfair that he could look so good, even wearing a hat that didn’t really fit and an outfit that looked like it shouldn’t have left the house, but he did look good. Izuku lined his palm up with Natsuo’s, and then after a moment of trial and error—either his hand was in worse shape than Natsuo thought originally or he was extremely nervous—Izuku slotted his fingers between Natsuo’s and gave his hand an experimental squeeze.

Natsuo was too overwhelmed by first date jitters to actually look Izuku in the eyes, so he promptly turned away and started once again leading them to their destination. “I have a feeling you’re going to love this place, by the way.”

“You said that this morning, too,” Izuku pointed out, with a contemplative hum. “What is it?”

“I can’t tell you yet,” Natsuo said, casting a grin over his shoulder at Izuku. “I can tell you that it’s a new place, though. It used to be a chain restaurant, and then the university took it out to put something else in. It’s been under construction for the last few months, but it opened back up a few weeks ago. I came out of curiosity and then immediately thought about you.”

“I can’t think of many stores that would cause someone to think of me,” Izuku said, with a half laugh. “Unless it’s a hero merchandise store, a restaurant that only sells katsudon, or a clothing store that sells shirts with weird words written on them.”

“It’s kind of one of those things,” Natsuo said, intentionally cryptic.

“Oh? Now I’m intrigued. I can’t believe you would tell me that and then not tell me where we’re going…”

“Suffer,” Natsuo told him flatly.

Izuku laughed. “Wow! At least you’re honest about where we stand with each other.”

“I sure am.”

“I’ll get you back, you know,” Izuku said. “I’ll plan a surprise date and then you can suffer.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Natsuo said, before bringing them to a halt outside of their destination. “And we’re here, by the way.”

“Oh,” Izuku breathed, as he looked up at the store sign. “It’s the partnership project that Kacchan, Yaoyorozu, and Iida were working on.”

“You know about it?” Natsuo asked, blinking at him.

“I knew it was in the works, but I didn’t know they’d started opening stores,” Izuku said, now turning his attention to the chalkboard sign out front.

“I didn’t know that they were behind it,” Natsuo said, “but I guess I should have. They sell hero themed drinks and desserts here, and then—”

“Half of the proceeds go towards a cause that particular hero supports,” Izuku finished, still staring at the chalkboard sign out front with a few menu items listed on it.

“Yeah,” Natsuo said, his nervousness increasing exponentially now. “And I thought of you because you do this stuff a lot. Donations, charity work, all of that. And you also like hero merchandise. You, uh—I don’t know if you remember, actually—but when we first met, like, five years ago…you had an All Might scarf on.”

“I do remember,” Izuku said, finally looking at Natsuo, though his expression was still impossible to decipher. “I’m surprised that you remember.”

“It was an unusual place to wear All Might merchandise,” Natsuo said, in his defense. “Considering you were at his long-time rival’s house.”

Izuku blinked, then laughed. “Oh, yeah. I forgot I used to be that spiteful.”

“Spiteful?”

“Yeah! It was a choice, right? Like, there’s no reason I couldn’t have worn a different scarf to work at Endeavor’s Agency, since I had more than one, but I remember waking up that morning and thinking ‘this would be funny,’ and wearing it. I liked that Endeavor was trying to change and make an effort back then, but I didn’t necessarily like him. It was kind of how I felt about Kacchan for a while, too, but it all worked itself out eventually.”

“I think I might like you even more now that I know that,” Natsuo said.

Izuku blushed, then reached up to grab his hat and pull it low over his face. “Of course you would.”

Natsuo laughed. “Well? What do you think? Did I do good?”

“You did great,” Izuku said. “I’ve wanted to go to these since I first heard they were doing this, anyway. So, thanks. For bringing me.”

“You should save your thanks for after we order,” Natsuo said. “It might taste terrible.”

Izuku laughed, before glancing away shyly. “I doubt it. Come on, though, let’s go in! Did you see that Iida is the special today?”

“I did,” Natsuo said, after a quick glance at the chalkboard sign and a moment to read the name ‘Ingenium’ written on it.

“I think it’ll be hard to choose,” Izuku said. “Iida’s donations go towards a foundation that helps disabled heroes, but if I ordered for Iida I would feel bad because I didn’t order for everyone else…and all of these support such great causes so it’s hard to choose…”

“You could pick by flavor?” Natsuo proposed, as he grabbed the door.

“Hm…”

Natsuo sighed. “You could buy more than one thing?”

“Oh! You’re right, I should definitely buy more than one thing. And your thing, too.”

“Wait,” Natsuo said, as he followed Izuku inside. “I’m the one that picked the date venue. I should pay for both of our things.”

“Overruled,” Izuku said, while shooting him a cheeky grin. “In the least patronizing way possible, one of us is a millionaire and one of us is not, so I refuse to let you buy food when we go out together.”

“Izuku—”

“I’m not saying you can never use your own money,” Izuku said immediately, “but I am saying, that until you at least make more money, I want to look out for you.”

“I don’t want to be reliant on you, though.”

“You’re not reliant on me! You’re not going to die if I don’t buy you a milkshake that looks like your brother’s head.”

“I’m offended that you think I would order anything modeled after my brother,” Natsuo said.

Izuku laughed. “It was just an example. But still. Let me? Please?”

Natsuo wanted to relent, he really did, but—

“I’m buying yours this time,” he insisted. “And if that bothers you, you’ll just have to buy next time.”

“Next time?” Izuku echoed, his face once again coloring a bit.

“Next time,” Natsuo agreed.

Izuku looked at him, and then at the menu, and then back at him, as if assessing him. Or maybe, Izuku was assessing himself. “Okay. Just this once.”

The real reason Natsuo didn’t want to let him pay this time was because he remembered Izuku talking about being terrified of dependency once, after those strangely enlightening family dinners they went to. It was a hunch, but Natsuo didn’t want Izuku to put himself in a position where he didn’t feel like they were equal—even if he was already buying most of the food for the house as his roommate—because then he might withdraw. Natsuo worked himself to death at school and a part time job for a reason, and it was for this—the small things.

They made it up to the counter, where Izuku flapped for a solid minute before ultimately ordering an Earphone Jack—which was really just a kind of plum juice mixed with tea—and then the cashier shifted her attention to Natsuo. “And you?”

“Deku,” Natsuo said. Partially, because he legitimately enjoyed the flavor of matcha. Mostly because he wanted to see the expression Izuku made when he got it.

It was worth it.

“So,” Izuku said, as they claimed a table in the back, the drinks Natsuo had paid for between them. “What do I taste like?”

“Matcha,” Natsuo answered, before boldly tipping the drink towards him. “Do you want to try yourself?”

Izuku stared at him for several long moments before finally laughing, but he couldn’t hide the little bit of pink dusting his cheeks. “Innuendos on the first date? You’re really trying to market yourself as a family friendly boyfriend type, aren’t you?”

He grabbed the cup with a sort of confidence that he’d been lacking up until that point, though, sipped from it without breaking eye contact, and then set the cup back down as he swallowed.

Natsuo had made mistakes.

“I do taste like matcha,” Izuku confirmed, placing his elbows on the table and leaning forward. “It’s not very inventive, is it? Just because I’m green it doesn’t mean all of my flavors should be green things.”

“Color-coding seems to be a common theme at this place,” Natsuo said, as he accepted his drink back. He tried to neither stare at the opening in the lid or think about the fact that Izuku’s lips had been there a moment ago. Ultimately, he failed.

This was a little bit ridiculous, honestly. It wasn’t even like they’d never kissed before this point—they’d literally done so last night. And yet, there was something mystifying about the indirect kiss anyway.

“Very true,” Izuku said. “It could be worse. At least I like matcha. Jirou-chan would never be able to taste her own drink since she doesn’t like the flavor of plums.”

And with that, Natsuo was reminded of something he’d been thinking about. Not in a bad way—he’d met Jirou and seen her interacting with Izuku, so he knew that they weren’t exactly romantically interested in each other right now. But also, he’d met Jirou and seen her interacting with Izuku, and he’d noticed…something. He wasn’t entirely sure what.

“Did you date Jirou once?” Natsuo’s mouth asked, without his brain giving it permission yet.

Izuku blinked, before tilting his head. “In a manner of speaking, I guess. It wasn’t really anything so formal, though. Why?”

“I just…was sort of wondering, I guess,” Natsuo said. “You know about my ex. The only ex that matters, I mean. And you two had kind of a…vibe, I guess?”

“Ah,” Izuku said, looking down at his drink. “Yeah. Um. Okay, so, this is going to sound kind of horrible, but secret relationships are kind of a trend with me.”

“You are a hero,” Natsuo said consideringly. “I can imagine you wouldn’t want paparazzi following you around trying to get pictures of you whenever you go on a date with your significant other.”

Izuku shook his head, then paused. “Well, yes, but not secret in that way. Secret as in, I don’t tell even friends and family…about my relationships.”

“So you and Jirou were like…you and I?”

“Also no,” Izuku said, scratching his cheek. “Jirou-chan and I weren’t actually dating, just…eh…”

Natsuo suddenly put two and two together, and felt bad for dragging it out of him. “Friends with benefits.”

“Yeah,” Izuku confirmed. “More emphasis on ‘friends’ than ‘benefits,’ though, because it was sort of just an…activity. That happened sometimes. Like how some people occasionally will play board games with their friend when they hang out, or go to the park, or grab a coffee—”

“Those are terrible examples, but I get what you mean,” Natsuo said.

“But it’s over! So, you don’t need to worry. I’m not going to, like…run off, or be unfaithful, or uh…”

Natsuo raised his hands, waving both of them to stop Izuku from continuing. “Trust me, that’s not why I was asking. Past relationships are past, right? I don’t mind that you’re still friends with your sort of ex. Mostly, I was just curious about your life.”

“Oh,” Izuku said, his mouth holding the shape after his voice stopped saying it. “Do you really want to know…? I mean, it’s…sort of a long story. It has a lot to do with your brother, too.”

Always back to Shouto.

“What about him?”

“I’m curious,” Izuku said, fiddling with the rim of his coffee cup, “if you ever heard anything about me confessing to him.”

“Uh.” Natsuo scraped through his memory banks. He knew he knew a version of this from Fuyumi, but it had been a long time since he’d thought about it. “Something about a party.”

“It was a party for Katsuki and Shouto,” Izuku said, “because they’d finally announced they were together. Yaoyorozu hosted it, because the rest of us live in apartments or tiny houses with our parents. I pulled him aside to tell him I was happy for him, but, uh…that didn’t go well. Anyway. Jirou overheard the fight, and then she offered to let me stay at her place for a few nights if I wanted to, since, obviously, I was living with Shouto at the time.”

“And you hooked up then?” Natsuo asked, vaguely surprised.

“Not right then,” Izuku said quickly. “It was, uh, basically the next week, though.”

“That’s…a really fast turnaround.”

He smiled, but ruefully. “I wouldn’t say so. Not if you’re talking about me, anyway, since I hadn’t actually had a crush on Shouto since I was in high school at that point. And this was a year ago, so.”

“I was referring more to the situation broadly instead of feelings. Like, it was a fast turnaround between major life events.”

“Oh. Yeah, in that case, yeah.”

“But don’t tell me Jirou had a crush on him too?”

“Not Shouto,” Izuku said, with a sigh. “Kacchan.”

“Oh,” Natsuo said, and then, “ Oh, her comment about dumb blonds makes so much more sense now.”

Izuku laughed softly, which was a strangely enchanting sound for a café packed with college students. “She has a type.”

“You are neither blond nor dumb though.”

Izuku shook one finger side to side humorously. “The rebound never matches the type, Natsu. Aren’t you a college student? Shouldn’t you know the laws of horn?”

“I’m pretending you didn’t just say that to me,” Natsuo said, but he was stifling his own laughter. “Also, you just called yourself a rebound. Positively.”

Izuku shrugged. “Consent is a thing we were practicing. If I was upset about being a rebound I could have said no. I was fine with it, anyway, and that was a point of time in my life where I kind of just needed someone to go through it with. And that’s what she needed too, I think.”

“So, what happened, then? Why’d it stop?”

Izuku was quiet for several moments, staring at his plum-flavored drink, named after the girl he was talking about. “We weren’t in love and we weren’t ever going to be, but we were starting to settle anyway. I could see a future where the labels would change over time—how long until we started introducing each other to other people by calling the other our partner? How long until we eventually called it dating? How long until we told our families, our friends, maybe even our fans? We were comfortable, so we were going to stay comfortable even if it wasn’t very plus ultra of us. But I didn’t know how to tell her I wanted her to have a chance at something real instead of something comfortable, so I…”

“Left,” Natsuo guessed, because he was starting to understand a core facet of who Izuku was.

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “I should have told her what I was thinking.”

“She seemed to know, anyway,” Natsuo said. “Isn’t that why she told you she has a girlfriend now?”

“That’s exactly why,” Izuku said. “And I’m glad. I did the right thing, even if I didn’t do it the right way.”

“I used to do the same thing,” Natsuo confessed quietly. “Communicate by leaving. That’s why I moved into the dorms for undergraduate school. Why I moved across the country for grad school. There’s never…I’ve never seen a way to tell Fuyumi that I can’t be the brother she wants me to be. That I’m never going to be comfortable having family dinners with our father, though I’ll still do it for her. That I’m never going to be able to understand what Shouto’s thinking or what he’s doing. I don’t have the words to explain myself, so I just do what I need to do and no one else ever sees my thought process.”

Izuku huffed out softly in a way that would usually indicate tears were on the way. “At least we speak the same language.”

“I think I’d like to unlearn how to speak it,” Natsuo mused. “Try doing things the hard way for once instead.”

“We’ll unlearn it together,” Izuku said, kicking him gently under the table. “Or we’ll die trying.”

“Sounds good,” Natsuo agreed weakly.

The rest of their forty-five minutes passed with conversation that was a lot less heavy.

They settled.

To Izuku’s surprise, they settled. After the first date was over with, their relationship was comfortable. This was, largely, because they were already roommates. Their routines stayed the same, though with more moments of togetherness in their in between moments. A kiss in the morning instead of an awkward goodbye. A hug after a long day. A night spent asleep in a bed that didn’t belong to one of them after they passed out during a late night movie marathon.

They settled, and as they settled, Izuku did too.

He found, in all the tiny, impossible ways, that he did not want to run. Not even a little bit. Not one week in, or two. Not when June came and went, not when Natsuo finished his classes, not when he flopped down on top of Izuku while he was sitting on the couch after his last final of the term and grumbled until Izuku set his book on the end table and stroked his fingers through his hair.

Izuku hummed, pinching a strand of Natsuo’s hair between his scarred fingers. “It’s…red? Naturally?”

Natsuo grunted in agreement. “Only on the sides. Streaks of red, just like Fuyumi’s.”

“Do you dye it?” Izuku asked.

“I used to,” Natsuo said.

And in the small ways, Izuku thought that Natsuo was settling too.

Izuku ceased carding his fingers through Natsuo’s hair, but he left his hand poised on his head. “Why did you stop?”

Natsuo turned his head until he was looking up at Izuku, gray eyes crinkled slightly by exhaustion, but deep with some unknown emotion. “You,” Natsuo said.

When Izuku moved in here, Natsuo would have never answered a question so personal.

“Me?” Izuku asked, though he felt his lips curling up slightly into a smile. “What did I do to inspire a change like this?”

“Nothing, really.” Natsuo shifted, rolling all the way around so that he was stretched out on his back. He folded his hands over his stomach, and on the other end of the couch, his feet hung off the edge. “You’re just…incredible, in a way. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that’s as willing to do things for others as you. So, I just thought…maybe I could do that too. Maybe I could finally stop living in the past. I don’t have to forgive, but I can move on, like Fuyumi, Shouto, and my mom want to. I can do that for them. I should do that for them.” He tilted his chin up a bit, his smile turning a touch mischievous. “And not buying the root touchup every month will save money, so…”

Izuku laughed, resuming his ministrations. “I like it,” he told Natsuo, as he ran his fingers through his hair. “I mean, it’s a little awkward now, but I like where it’s going.”

“Thanks,” Natsuo said dryly.

Izuku tugged on a strand of Natsuo’s hair—not hard enough to hurt him, but hard enough to get his attention. Natsuo slid his eyes over to him, humming curiously. “I took tomorrow off,” Izuku announced quietly.

Natsuo raised an eyebrow at him. “What a coincidence. So did I.”

“I know,” Izuku said, unable to stop the grin spreading across his face. “Perfect time for Date Number Two, right?”

Natsuo sat up, turning to face Izuku. “I thought you said that you were worried about being recognized and that paparazzi would publish pictures of us in tabloids and ruin the secret dating thing, though.”

“That’s why we’ll have our date at the crack of dawn,” Izuku proposed, while holding a finger straight up into the air. Natsuo gave him a look. “Come on. You’re going to love it. And we can come home and take a nap afterwards or something too.”

Natsuo made a face, then crashed back into Izuku’s lap. “Let’s take a nap now if we have to get up before dawn.”

“Does that mean you’re in?” Izuku asked, poking him in the cheek.

“Like I’d say no.”

Izuku smiled.

They had settled, and it didn’t feel at all like a bad thing.

Natsuo could not help but be intrigued as he was led through the streets of what was essentially a suburb at four in the morning. But he knew better than to ask again—Izuku was being tight-lipped and mysterious, and when Izuku was tight-lipped and mysterious, there was no such thing as getting answers out of him.

“We’re almost there,” Izuku said anyway, like he had read Natsuo’s thoughts.

“Where is there?” Natsuo asked.

He earned himself a sly look over the shoulder, but not much else. Not even a full minute later, Izuku stopped abruptly on a completely random street, causing Natsuo to jerk to a stop beside him by virtue of holding his hand.

“This is it,” Izuku whispered.

Natsuo looked around to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. “Our second date is to a sidewalk with nothing on it.”

“No, no,” Izuku said, disentangling his hand from Natsuo’s. “This is just the first stop. The final destination is much better. Stay right there.”

“Okay…?”

Izuku jogged forward, then turned around a corner. Natsuo stood there, on his own and wondering what he was supposed to do, before Izuku popped back around the corner at Quirk enhanced speeds, stopping right in front of him with his hand held out.

Natsuo took a deep breath and clutched his chest, trying to convince his heart to stop beating so fast. “Why?” he demanded of his energetic boyfriend, who laughed at him mercilessly.

“This is it,” Izuku said, spreading his arms wide as he turned slowly in a circle. “Where you’re standing now is where I stood when All Might offered me his Quirk.”

Natsuo let go of his shirt, suddenly feeling very differently about this date than he had when he left. He hadn’t been expecting depth. The fact that it was here now wasn’t a bad thing, definitely not. It was just—

It meant Izuku was more serious about them than Natsuo thought he was when they left this morning.

And that…was not as scary to think about as it used to be.

“I feel like it’s a little unfair, you know,” Izuku said, taking several steps back so he could lace his fingers with Natsuo’s. He studied their joined hands carefully, his expression complicated. “I know a lot of your deepest and darkest secrets, because I knew Shouto before you. But the big things about me—all the things that make me who I am—you don’t really know what they are, do you?”

“I know some things,” Natsuo said. “Via osmosis.”

Izuku laughed. “Well, I want you to know more than what you got out of osmosis. I think.”

“In that case—why did All Might offer you his Quirk here on a suburban side street?”

“I met him earlier that day in an underpass,” Izuku said, releasing one of Natsuo’s hands to better lead him on the rest of their journey. “I was attacked by a villain—he was made of slime—and All Might saved me. I asked him if someone could be a hero even if they didn’t have a Quirk, and he said no. It was a desperate time for me back then.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen. Fourteen when he offered it, fifteen when I inherited it. Sixteen when it transferred to me fully. But the villain that attacked me escaped while I was asking All Might my question and went after another civilian. Kacchan, actually, which is important because of the Explosion Quirk. He started setting off explosions in the street to try and escape, and that combined with the villain’s Quirk made it hard for other heroes to step in. But I saw Kacchan’s eyes, and I realized I couldn’t standby when he needed help, so I rushed in. And impressed All Might enough to offer me a Quirk, apparently. But by the time he finished with the media and villain detainment, I was already heading home, so he offered it here.”

“Does that mean you used to live in one of these houses?” Natsuo asked.

Izuku laughed. “No, but that’s stop Number Two.”

“I’ll look forward to it, then,” Natsuo said.

Their second stop ended up being a line of apartment buildings not far from there, towering over the streets below. “We can’t go inside, obviously, but this is where I grew up,” Izuku said. “I lived in one of the upper story rooms with my mom. I told you a bit about this before, but my dad was a bit of a deadbeat. I mean, he worked and made a lot of money, but it was overseas. I got a present sent over every year for my birthday and bimonthly phone calls, but he wasn’t really around. I didn’t mind, though—it was nice with just the two of us, even if it was a bit lonely at times. I loved it here.”

“It’s a shame I couldn’t see it when you lived there,” Natsuo said.

Izuku hummed. “It’s alright. I’ll take you to dinner at the Bakugous sometime. It’s basically the same thing, but in a different location where more people scream more often.”

Natsuo’s heart skipped a beat. “Dinner with the parents? Already?”

“Well, we probably shouldn’t do it right now,” Izuku said. “I think Shouto might still be an obstacle. But one day…?”

Natsuo used their joined hands to pull him to a stop. “We don’t have to rush this,” he said, while making careful eye contact with Izuku. “You don’t have to push yourself to dating milestones faster for my sake, or anything like that.”

Izuku squeezed his hand. “Trust me, I’m not doing anything I don’t want to be. I’m perfectly capable of being cagey forever. Or at least until someone else notices and does something about it. Of course, though, if you don’t want to do dinner with the family in a month or two, we don’t have to. It’s about both of us, right?”

“No,” Natsuo said. “I would love to go to dinner at the Bakugous with you in a month or two. But you have to come to dinner at the Todorokis in return.”

“Nothing I haven’t done before,” Izuku said, with a coy little smile. He raised their joined hands, brushing a brief kiss against the back of Natsuo’s knuckles. “Come on. Let’s get to the final spot before the sun rises.”

Natsuo swallowed as Izuku led them away, though he moved, thankfully, at a much slower pace than he had been before. They were silent as they walked, moving through the streets. It was strangely peaceful—Natsuo saw one person out walking a dog in their pajamas, though that person paid them no mind. Another, a teenager getting off the nightshift, bumped past them at a traffic light, though their music was turned up too loud for the rest of the world to matter.

It was a part of the morning that Natsuo usually wasn’t awake for. On nights he tended the bar, he usually fell asleep around four. On days he had morning classes, he didn’t usually wake up until seven. These three hours, though, the in between hours—they were unexpectedly nice to experience.

“Maybe we should have all of our dates at the crack of dawn,” Natsuo said, only half joking.

“Maybe we should,” Izuku agreed, the corner of his mouth lifting up into a smirk. “If you’re not afraid of heights, I have a great idea for our third date.”

“Oh?” Natsuo asked, raising a brow at him. “Gonna carry me to the top of a building like I’m the love interest in a superhero comic?”

“Well, I was going to have you take the stairs, actually,” Izuku said, making an exaggerated face at Natsuo like he was legitimately offended that Natsuo would suggest he would do something so cheesy.

Natsuo laughed. “Wow. Alright. No Lois Lane moment for me, I get it, I get—wait.”

Izuku bit his lip as if to prevent himself from smiling, though it didn’t work. “We’re almost there, yeah.”

“Are we by the ocean right now?” he asked. “Did you grow up by a beach?”

“Well, saying I grew up by a beach is honestly a bold way to put it when it’s only been a beach for the last five years or so, but…” They rounded the corner, and Natsuo found himself staring at a vast expanse of sand, water in the distance sparkling as the first rays of light from dawn hit it. “Welcome to Dagobah.”

“No way,” Natsuo breathed, already stepping out on the sand. “I can’t believe you lived by a beach. I’m so jealous.”

“Hold the jealousy for the end of the story,” Izuku said, catching Natsuo’s hand and dragging him down towards the water.

“Alright, alright,” Natsuo said, with an exaggerated sigh. “Go on then and tell me what’s so special about this particular beach.”

“When I was growing up, this place was covered in trash.” Izuku gestured to a completely empty expanse of sand, and then another one. “There was a mountain of trash so high right there that when I started cleaning the beach up, I had no idea how to remove it without knocking it all over. All Might used to sit on top of it to laugh at me while I tried to lift stuff I definitely wasn’t ready for yet. That right there was a whole car when I got here. I saved it for close to last, but by the end, if I put the gear in neutral, I could pull it out by tying a rope around it and hauling the whole thing through the sand.”

“That’s a super strength Quirk for you,” Natsuo said lightly.

“Oh, I didn’t have a Quirk,” Izuku said, casting him an amused look. “Not yet, anyway.”

Natsuo stared for several minutes. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am serious! This was the training I had to do in order to build my body up for One for All. Clean this whole beach in ten months, so I would have enough muscle mass before the entrance exam that the Quirk wouldn’t blow my arms off.” He let go of Natsuo’s hand, spreading his arms wide as he collapsed against the ground in a puff of sand. Natsuo laughed as he waved sand away from is face with a hand, though it settled quickly.

“I think you probably needed to clean the beach for a few more months,” Natsuo said, as his laughter died down. “Considering the state of your arm.”

“Nah,” Izuku said, sitting up and shaking sand out of his hair like a dog would shake water. “That was a different issue. I would have been fine using, like, five percent of my total power when I first got One for All. I just didn’t know how to use anything less than one-hundred percent up until…the Sports Festival. The Sports Festival my first year, I mean, where I fought your brother.”

“Why did you keep breaking your hand when you fought Shouto, then, if you already had it figured out?” Natsuo asked.

Izuku rubbed the back of his head, perhaps out of nervousness, perhaps because he was trying to remove more sand. “Well, for one thing, my ability to use five percent was kind of spotty and unreliable back then. And for another thing…five percent wouldn’t have been enough to beat Shouto, and I had to at least put in a good fight to convince him to use his fire.”

Natsuo hummed, feeling like the conversation was getting slightly off track. Today wasn’t about Shouto, even if his brother was an irrefutably important part of Izuku’s past. “So, what was it like training with All Might in those first ten months?”

Hopefully not anything like what Shouto’s training with Endeavor had been like when he was a kid.

“It was hard, but rewarding,” Izuku said, glancing out over the water with a fond look. “It was kind of incredible, you know? Here was this hero, this man, that I’d looked up to my whole life, and he was willing to help me. I went into a frenzy trying to impress him. I did so much I was barely sleeping between all the working out, training, and studying. The best part, though, was getting to see this every morning.”

Natsuo sat down behind Izuku, even though that risked getting sand in his jeans that he would never get out. He wrapped his arms around Izuku’s waist and Izuku leaned back against him until they were both sitting and facing the water, Natsuo watching the sunrise over Izuku’s shoulder. Neither of them said anything for several moments, just observing. It was one of those moments that seemed impossible to forget, beautiful and soft, rose tinted with nostalgia even as it was happening.

“Do you miss All Might?” Natsuo murmured, when the sun had risen most of the way, blinding on the water.

“All the time,” Izuku said, still looking at the water. “But maybe it’s a good thing. If it weren’t for that—that pain—I’d almost think everything that had happened was a dream.”

Natsuo could understand that feeling. There were nights when he woke up and saw blue fire reflected on the back of his eyelids, moments that had decreased over the years but not lessened. There were times when he woke up feeling disoriented, not sure if it was real that Dabi was his older brother or if it was all just a desperate dream. Other times, where he thought it didn’t matter anyway; Dabi was Touya only in blood, and the brother Natsuo had known died a long time ago.

He didn’t know how to say any of this, though, or maybe he just didn’t want to say it. So, instead, he pressed a kiss onto one of the freckles on Izuku’s cheek, and went back to resting his chin on his shoulder. They watched the rest of the sunrise together, ear pressed against ear, cheek pressed against cheek. Outside of their bubble, the city slowly woke up.

“We have to go soon,” Izuku murmured.

Natsuo knew, but he wanted to enjoy the moment while he still could. Some part of him, a large part of him, wished that he could sit here and hold Izuku forever. Not in this world, but one where their families and the paparazzi didn’t exist. Where they could just be themselves for as long as they wanted to be, where they could have the privacy they wanted and the time they wanted too, instead of one or the other.

He didn’t know how to say this, though, or maybe he knew and was just the tiniest bit afraid of how deep his feelings went. So, he said something else instead.

“Let’s come back sometime,” he murmured, “when we have longer to stay.”

They were close enough that Natsuo heard it when Izuku swallowed thickly, and then, soft as the sand they sat on, said, “I’d like that.”

Shouto looked up from his phone as Katsuki got back from his patrol and crashed into the desk next to Shouto’s. The crashing was neither a side effect of exhaustion nor tiredness, but rather, one of excitement. He was bouncing in his chair slightly, as if trying to work off the bit of excess energy that came from a good fight finished too early.

Shouto clicked his phone off and tucked it away into a zipped pocket. He attempted to tuck his thoughts about the phone away with it, but mostly didn’t succeed as he turned towards Katsuki. “Good patrol?” he asked.

“It sure fucking was,” Katsuki said. The question proved to be all the permission he needed to go on a very detailed retelling of all the events that had occurred. Shouto listened to the account of the kids that had gotten autographs, the old lady that had almost been bulldozed by a truck, the villain with the gigantification Quirk and the villain with the bat wings, a very good free lunch at a curry place, and the successful stopping of a purse snatcher.

For someone that complained about how much Izuku rambled, Katsuki sure could give him a run for his money when he was into it.

Shouto frowned as Katsuki finally came up for air. “Do you know how we both happen to have Tuesday off next week?” he asked, before Katsuki could launch into another rambling story. Not that Shouto would mind listening to another—he had actually always liked how Katsuki tended to fill silence with words when Shouto could come up with so few—but he had something he actually had to say for once.

Katsuki grunted, not minding the interruption one bit. “Yeah. Been meaning to ask you, actually, if you wanted to do something?”

Shouto grimaced involuntarily, and Katsuki raised an eyebrow at him.

“I wanted to apologize to my brother, actually,” Shouto said. “I know we don’t both get days off at the same time often, so I just…feel kind of bad. For wanting to use it for something that isn’t us.”

Katsuki blinked. “Nah, it’s cool. It’s a good use of our time. Plus,” he added, with a wicked grin, “he might not be free anyway.”

“Nice try,” Shouto said, throwing a pen at him. “He’ll be free, though. I already asked Fuyumi what his schedule was like.”

“Why Fuyumi and not Natsuo?”

“So that he can’t lie to me when I ask him,” Shouto said, drumming his fingers on his leg. “Natsuo is better at avoiding people when he wants to than anyone else I know.”

“Even Deku?”

Shouto frowned. “Except for him.”

Katsuki snorted, rustling through his desk in search of a blank incident report sheet to fill out. “Well, ask your brother to come by for dinner or something. He likes sashimi, right? I found a new recipe for that kind of shit I want to try out anyway.”

“Let’s go to him,” Shouto said, a bit too quickly.

Katsuki gave him a look, the weird way Shouto proposed a change of location not slipping his notice. “…Why?”

Shouto forced himself to calm down and not sound suspicious. “It’s a better gesture of remorse, isn’t it? I haven’t really talked to him in two months now, since that last family dinner thing. It seems kind of rude to drag him across country so I can apologize.”

Katsuki hummed. “And this has nothing to do with his possible crush on the nerd that you’ve been so up in arms about the last few weeks?”

“Izuku won’t even be there,” Shouto said, with a half shrug.

“How do you know?”

“His team up availability is closed down that day. And the rest of that week.” Shouto said. It was true, anyway—Shouto had checked to see where Izuku would be basically immediately after he had the idea to visit. And unless Izuku had been possessed by someone that wasn’t a die-hard workaholic, then a whole week of having his team up availability locked could only mean he’d accepted an out-of-town mission and not taken a vacation.

And truthfully, it was better for Shouto’s plan if he didn’t see Izuku there anyway.

Katsuki shrugged, apparently won over. “Whatever. To the shitty apartment we go, I guess. Make sure you pack your Hazmat suit; you’ll probably need it.”

“Ha,” Shouto deadpanned.

Well. The first step had gone according to plan, at least.