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The walls are a familiar white. He squeezes down on the phantom of a hand in his. Then the fear takes hold.
Fire along his veins, stuttering drum in his ears, the tightening of a wire. This is familiar, too.
He sits up, a name on his exhale and limbs scrabbling over white, white sheets, searching for that other hand, that other voice, and Kacchan’s ruby red eyes snap open and zero in on Izuku.
“Ah, you’re okay.”
Kacchan stays still long enough for Izuku to think that maybe he isn’t, and the embers begin to spark, and then Kacchan shoves an elbow underneath him and sits up. The grunt that pushes past his lips isn’t pained—but full up with the same kind of stuffiness stirring in Izuku’s chest. A bird chirps outside. Izuku slides backwards on the bed until his back is to Kacchan, and watches the clouds sail. The air is clear, and the edges don’t deepen, or blacken, or close in.
Something hopeful and brittle climbs Izuku’s face. He turns. Sheets rustle.
“Do you think…?”
“Maybe, nerd.”
“It’s so bright.”
Kacchan nods once, stiff. Izuku’s fingers twitch. Reaching across the gap between their beds, Kacchan clasps Izuku’s wrist, thumb pressing in. Izuku tugs back until he can fit his hand into Kacchan’s. The quiet is long and the stillness soft. Recovery Girl’s office is neat as ever.
They’re ready when the door handle twists, feet planted and every muscle rippling with tension.
The door swings open and it’s not something shapeless that fills the doorway, but the form of Aizawa-sensei.
They edge closer together, back towards the window with the singing birds.
“Good, you’re up,” it says with Aizawa-sensei’s mouth, in Aizawa-sensei’s cadence. “The villain has been apprehended. Recovery Girl already cleared you, you can join your classmates tomorrow.”
Aizawa-sensei’s eyes regard them with a sharpness wholly distinct from the worn-out cloak he wears. “What’s wrong?” it says.
Kacchan doesn’t lose his temper, like Izuku wants to.
“Bakugō. Midoriya.” Aizawa’s form sighs. His nose is red and chafing. When he slips his right hand from the pocket of his pants, a crumpled tissue sits tucked in his palm.
Kacchan twists his hand out from under Izuku’s, and the force of it pulls Izuku out of orbit.
“You’re out. It’s over,” Aizawa-sensei says.
Katsuki marches out of Recovery Girl’s office, past classrooms and out of the building, and headlong into the thicket. Something sick swirls in his belly and sparks all along his skin. One foot in front of the other, and he’s running, and he’s on fire, and he’s gasping and wide-eyed and slicing through the air. The air slicing through him. He spreads his arms wide, and slams them into UA’s outer wall.
His shoulders ache. The oxygen rips up and down his throat. When the smoke clears—the blinding, blessed smoke—the soot shoots up beyond the canopy, bursting outward like stars.
Katsuki pants, and he grins, and he laughs. Mostly, he just makes noise.
And no one hears him, because there is no one there. Deku is back between white walls, or on the way to his room, or kicking the shit out of another wall all the way on the other side of campus.
These strong, strong walls that won’t give to anyone. Not that they need them. Not that they aren’t strong enough, the both of them, to shatter anything like glass.
When Katsuki walks into class, he finds that the night hasn’t smoothed away the crease between Deku’s brows.
He stomps over, kicks his bag under the desk, and slumps into his seat. Slowly, the rest of the class trickles in, stifling yawns behind sluggish hands. Katsuki grumbles and kicks up his feet.
“Man, you look like shit.”
“Shh—dude!”
He twists around to put Sparky in his place and finds both him and Kirishima scrutinizing Deku’s rumpled uniform and lopsided hair. He’s forgone the tie entirely, and the splotches under his eyes seem to get darker the longer Katsuki stares.
There’s a notebook sitting open in front of him. Katsuki reads the title upside down—Quirk Analysis.
“Good morning, Kaminari, Kirishima.” His voice somehow startles Katsuki. It’s crisp, and he can hear every inflection; he knows these are the first sounds to pass his teeth, before he’s cleared his throat of yesterday’s remains.
Sparky pitches forward and squints like the secrets of the universe are written across Deku’s eyelashes. “Dude, did you even sleep last night?”
“I did,” Deku says, because he’s a liar.
Katsuki’s scoff compels three heads to swivel toward him in uncanny synchrony. Freaky.
“You too, Bakugō, you look like roadkill picked up off the side of the road.”
Katsuki is already at his throat, shirt collar between his hands, by the time Kirishima hooks two arms under his and hauls him off Sparky’s stupid face.
“C’mon, bro. You just got out of Recovery Girl’s office.”
“Huh?! If you have something to say, say it to my face!”
“No, I’m—”
“Kacchan…”
His palms itch and spasm. Katsuki sparks a few explosions, and watches the smoke curl.
“C’mon, man! It’s too early for this.”
Katsuki pops off a few more. The orange blaze eclipses the classroom and every damn extra in it. There’s a fist in his chest and a long-familiar stretch across his face.
“Fuck. There he is.” Sparky takes two clumsy steps back and sprawls over his desk, cheek squished against wood. “Ughhhh and we were actually worried about him.”
“Don’t you look down on me, drooly,” Katsuki spits, but his pride is only half on the slight. The other half is busy tracing the tremor to scarred hands, and Deku’s matching grin.
Deku won’t stop trying to drill holes into Katsuki’s skull. The moment Katsuki makes to face those green irises, they flit away, and though he knows what it is they’re filled with, he keeps looking to catch the glint of something else. Something that’s never there.
Katsuki trudges onward and ignores the twang of rope, rubber, wire, an anchor, pulling taut in his chest. Thrumming, fraying. He’s been shaky. Cranky. Too often, things slip from between his hands. He adjusts his grip too late, or overcorrects for a weight that isn’t there. Once, during a blissful lapse in Yamada-sensei’s grating enthusiasm—over verb tenses, of all things—the pen rolled off Katsuki’s desk and clattered onto the tiles. It was seamless; the spin slight and the plastic scraping. In the silence of the classroom, both he and Deku stopped breathing. After that, their stationery routinely made it to the ground.
Still, behind him it looms. Katsuki taps his foot, shifts in his seat. Aizawa is talking about hero ethics. His mouth moves and Katsuki understands the words, but they slip through like water. He turns around and gets a front row seat to Deku’s frown. He’s chewing at the end of his pencil, the eraser crumbling under his incisors.
The bell rings. Aizawa shuts his eyes and looks to be falling asleep where he stands. No one gives him a second glance; he’s motionless through the flurry of rustling books and screeching chairs, wherein half the class scrambles to be first in line at the cafeteria. Katsuki tries to remember what special dish Lunch Rush is serving today, and why it has Kirishima snatching his sleeve and throwing them both headlong into the flood.
Then—bodies press, elbows jab, voices clamor. Katsuki damn near bites a few heads clean off. There’s a million breaths against his neck and half as many shoulders ramming into his, and they stir and they stir and Katsuki wonders where Deku is, in all this. Did Four Eyes and Uraraka drag him off too? Does he remember what for? Is he crammed between wave after wave, shifting and changing too?
They spill out into the cafeteria, shoes squeaking across glazed ceramic, and the salty-sweet tang of tare-katsu seeps into every pore. It’s delicious—Lunch Rush’s sauce is famous beyond UA’s walls, but the storm of cutlery and conversation overtakes Katsuki’s tentative appetite.
“Come on,” Sparky stumbles out from the crush, whining at the compact rows packed against the serving counter—a web of limbs and hungry mouths. “Lunch will be over by the time we make it to the front.”
“Aw, man. Well, my ma’s soup curry is just as good.”
Sparky levels him with a look. “No, it’s not.”
Grinning, Kirishima pulls a bright red bento from his bag. He’s always stacking garish-looking containers in the fridge after he visits home. “To me, it is.”
“Ugh.”
They find seats by the towering windows. Katsuki drops onto the chair, faces the clean plastic of the table and realizes that, through navigating the storm in his head, he forgot to pack today’s lunch. Sparky splays his arms over the table and slumps forward like his strings were cut, letting out intermittent moans of misery. Kirishima pokes his cheek with the back of a metal spoon.
“If it’s not Lunch Rush’s tare-katsu, I don’t want it.”
“We have P.E. last period.”
“Let me die.”
“Well that’s not very manly.”
“No, see, I’m choosing to die out of loyalty for a noble cause—it’s the definition of manly.”
Kirishima puts two fingers to his chin and pretends to think about it. “That seems reasonable. What about you, Bakugō? Following the manly path too?”
Katsuki eyes the glint of proffered metal, the sun-warm orange of a mother’s love. Neither—it’s neither. When his parents called, it was the rat of a principal first, then Aizawa-sensei, then Katsuki. By then, there was nothing more to say. Kirishima presses the spoon into the palm of his hand. A strip of chicken is stuck to his cheek.
The cafeteria buzzes. Sparky gazes longingly at warm bowls cradled between eager hands, under slurping lips, and kicks his legs under the table. Katsuki dips the spoon into russet soup, catching a potato. It bleeds its way down his throat; the potato is soft between his molars. He swallows once, twice.
Fuck.
“Good?” Under the light of the sun, scar bunched and crinkles at the corners of his eyes, Kirishima shines with an ease that Katsuki’s always lacked.
Sparky groans melodramatically. Katsuki bites into another spoonful, teeth clicking over metal.
Katsuki sails the halls, stuffs empty hands in his pockets and swings his elbows out, and feels a little bit like a kid. He swaggers and watches himself puts one shoe in front of the other. Leans back, then hunches forward, then looks to either side. The last of the students stick to the fringes of the hall. Katsuki can run, or slow down or take his time, or do anything at all. His lungs pull the air in like gravity. He takes his hands out of his pockets and swings them a little. Feels ridiculous, a little.
The way to the dorms isn’t very long, but Katsuki looks to the open expanse and the stretch of grass, the endless heat, until he stands under it and it swallows him whole. He glares into the sun. Puts his fingers up and imagines it winking out.
He wonders where Deku is. If he’s in his room, sulking, or in the gym, beating up some punching bag, or locked in a stall, gasping for breath, grasping for something and not finding it where it’s meant to be.
All the extras have been extra annoying. It’s routine at this point—one of them gets caught up in the quirk of some D-lister who could definitely be doing something less pathetic with their life, they knock some heads, discount villain goes in the slammer, and it’s back to business. There’s no reason for the idiots to be breathing down his back and slipping him glances from behind math worksheets and bowls of cereal.
He trudges back to the dorms. The common room is bright with rowdy idiots, laughter bouncing off the walls, videogames pinging and snacks dripping down elbows. Wrappers litter the coffee table; some spill onto the floor.
Katsuki finds himself scanning for a tuft of green among the scattering of heads.
“Heyyy, Bakugō!” It’s Raccoon Eyes, controller in one hand and a sweating ice pop in the other. “Wanna see if you can dethrone the Mario Kart king?”
Sparky dangles off the armrest, belly down, hands laced behind his head. “Dude, give it up, you can’t beat a guy with six hands.”
Raccoon Eyes twists around from her cross-legged position on the floor. “He only uses two of them to play.”
“Doesn’t make a difference.”
Katsuki sighs through his nose and kicks his shoes aside, making for the kitchen.
“How,” Elbows says, “does it not make a difference? He’s using the same number of hands as the rest of us.”
Raccoon Eyes points her popsicle in agreement. A purple glob drops onto the carpet.
“Well, yeah,” says Sparky, planting his hands on the ground and flipping into a wobbly handstand, “but he has the skill level of a guy with six hands.”
Katsuki rummages through the fridge. On the other side of the common room, there is a shattering, followed by the sharp screech of Merde! and a low croak of Ribbit.
“That makes no sense. He still only uses two hands.”
“Just ask him,” Tokoyami says. He’s sipping fruit juice through a curly straw.
“Oh, that’s it, Maman is going to kill me. Adieu pour toujours, mes ami, it’s been a pleasure serving alongside you.”
Sparky overbalances and drops to the ground, limbs askew and puffing out a disagreement. “But it does! If you’ve ever seen Naruto—” his hands stretch out and form an incomprehensible gesture “—like, when he releases his shadow clones, he gets all of their knowledge, right?”
“Shōji never ‘releases’ his hands.”
“Yes he does. They turn into, like, those little knobs.”
“It’s okay, Aoyama, Midoriya punched through the microwave once, and he only got a week of afternoon detention.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t the arm stay an arm?”
“Just ask him,” Tokoyami repeats, hopelessly.
“Are you actually telling me knowledge is stored in the arms?”
“No!” Raccoon eyes gives her popsicle a thoughtful lick. “Maybe?”
“Wait, it was Midoriya?!”
“You’re all idiots,” Katsuki says, and slams the fridge shut.
He wakes up in his bed with a drum in his chest, reaching for something, someone.
In the night’s silence, his breath is audible. Too fast, uneven; he’ll wear himself out quickly. When he rolls over, the bed dips under him in a way that is fundamentally wrong.
11:14 P.M. There’s a knock against wood, erratic. Katsuki hovers by long enough to hear something. Something damp that cuts out and starts up again, a flickering hum.
Stomach dropping, heart hammering, Katsuki is wholly sure that he’s an idiot. He was wrong, they were both wrong. Aizawa lied—that thing lied. And of course it did. And of course Deku isn’t here. Of course he’s not here, and it got to him, it got to him first and—
Katsuki twists the handle. Deku is standing in his doorway and shaking like a wet chihuahua.
Katsuki stares, slack-jawed, for six long seconds.
“Shit, um, Kacchan,” Deku warbles, and Katsuki clenches his teeth, his fists, and swallows back the sour taste stuck to the roof of his mouth.
“Fucking— fine, damn Deku.”
Deku tip toes, then stumbles past him and, from the sound of it, knocks about five things over. Katsuki sighs and shuts the door. In the dim light, Deku crouches and makes an extremely mediocre attempt at picking up a notebook, a few pens, and Katsuki’s Silver Age All Might figurine. He makes a sorry sight, drowned in a washed out red-yellow-blue sweatshirt, sniffling and smeared with tears.
“Give me that.” Katsuki snatches the shit from him and dumps it back onto the desk. Deku watched the pens roll with a strange sort of fixedness. There’s a sheen to his eyes that has ice crystallizing at the tips of his fingers, crackling and crawling. When it looks like he won’t pick himself up off the floor, Katsuki grabs him by the elbow and shuffles him toward the desk chair. For a moment, the weight of him pulls Katsuki back to a worse place.
“Kacchan,” Deku mumbles. “Can I please— please, can I. Kacchan—” He heaves a breath and it leaves him wet and terrible.
Fuck. Fuck.
The dinner in Katsuki’s stomach curdles, and instead of any of the words that have been swirling inside the cracking wire cage of his chest, what comes out of his mouth is: “Pull yourself together, you’re acting pathetic.”
Deku’s entire body stutters. “Sorry— sorry.”
In the center of the room, empty-handed and dry-mouthed and a chest-full of thorns that claw up his throat and stick through his teeth, Katsuki stands stiff as a pillar. This endless push and pull between them—between them and a nightmare, a dream, a ripping apart—the weight of it threatens to crack him right down the middle.
Deku swipes a hand across his face, smearing snot and tears.
“Look, it’s,” Katsuki gnashes his teeth, “you can stay here, I’m going to get something to drink.”
He hauls open the door, and immediately breathes easier.
He takes the stairs two at a time, teetering on the edge of speeding up and slowing down, pictures tumbling down head over heel and landing in a crumpled heap at the bottom. Wraps his knuckles around the railing. At this hour, there’s a quality to the air that feels impossible in the morning, with twenty rough teenagers kicking off the walls and crashing into each other with a zeal that only befalls people who have seen just enough to grow a jittery sort of bravery, and not enough that it festers into a trembling awareness. A revelation, a foresight, a forewarning. A confession in the darkness of an empty kitchen, glass mugs held steady between trembling fingers, unsteady wrists held against the edges of the world.
He opens the fridge first, like something new will materialize since he saw it last. Eyeing the contents with distaste, he sticks his hand between Sparky’s energy drinks (which, honestly, should be banned from campus) and Raccoon Eyes’s fruit snacks (which are almost always molded in factories and never picked off of green branches). Once he catches sight of a block of blue-black cheese near the back, he declares it a lost cause and moves over to rifle through the cabinets, bringing up nothing but stale cereal and two overripe bananas. He thinks about Deku, nose dripping with tears, trembling in that desk chair. Peering wide-eyed at Katsuki’s pens like they’re going to jump up and bite him.
Tea. You can’t go wrong with tea. He dunks two chamomile bags into steaming mugs and beelines out of the kitchen’s desolate chill. Despite his death grip, the tea jitters. Slow and steady up the steps, bare feet whispering. Something like dread settles in his throat. He stands at the foot of the door and glares at his shadow. Kicking it open would bring forth Kirishima’s relentlessness, so he bunches his legs and squats to set a mug down. His shadow shrinks along with him, the edges sharp and symmetrical. Unbroken. It crouches there, painted against forest green, and looks back.
Katsuki picks the mug back up, ignores the wetness beneath his fingers, and kicks the door shut. Deku’s forehead is in his hands, elbows on the desk and ringed eyes seeing past the walls and the pens. Past Katsuki.
“Thank you,” he mumbles, watching the mug trail smudges along the wood. At least he’s stopped crying.
Katsuki huffs and perches at the edge of his bed, body a long twist of nothing, stretched thin between two extinctions. He takes a sip. He forgot to add sugar.
“Sorry,” Deku whispers. His voice crackles like a radio with a bad signal, and the thorns in Katsuki’s chest twist.
“Shut up, nerd.” He bounces his leg. Picks at the sheets. Sips some more. It’s bitter, but the warmth weighs him down. He watches Deku spin the chair to and fro, to and fro, and the curtains ruffle in the midnight breeze and the moonlight plays along their socked feet.
“Kacchan,” Deku says, after a while. Head down, curls a snarled, frizzy mess. He whispers, like a secret, “I don’t think the quirk wore off.”
His toes push against the ground and twist the chair one more time. Then he stills.
It’s nothing new. A thought that’s been scraping at the back of Katsuki’s head, one he’s been running from long enough to see it for what it is—a speck on the horizon, beyond all the dust and the wreckage. Something easy, a shield, an excuse. Something hollow, because Aizawa-sensei wouldn’t have let it past him.
The tea returns his gaze ill-shaped and fragile, breaking up with the twitch of a finger. There’s a rhythm to it. A flickering.
Just then, Deku’s chin dips, and the mug sags in his hands; Katsuki springs up and grabs at it just as a trickle of tea slips over the edge. Their fingers brush, and Deku’s head shoots up. He’s gasping. It tears into the hush and leaves it gaping. Fault lines tremble down Katsuki’s resolve.
“Shit, okay. C’mon, nerd.”
He plants the cooling mug on the desk and drags him by the All Might-patterned arms of his sweatshirt. “You can sleep here today, I don’t care.”
The crease between his brows deepens, but Deku droops on top of the sheets and sinks into the mattress. Curls brushing the wall, feet hanging off the edge. Katsuki huffs. He watches the rise and fall of Deku’s chest for a moment, then toes off his socks and slumps down on the other side of the bed. He falls asleep staring at Deku’s crusty ass face.
The walls are a gentle shade of pink. Along them, shadows flit. Cut shapes, geometric angles. Their rhythm is undeniable, fierce and untamed. They’re winged and free.
Pink sours into yellow. Then, the sun hunches its great back over the horizon, and the heat bleeds into Katsuki until he’s glazed over and sticky with it.
The ebb and flow of breath presses against his back, wedging the warmth flush against his shoulder blades. It takes a moment, but once the echo of his breaths cleaves through the cobwebs clinging to the half-awake edges of his mind, he grows acutely aware of the proximity of another body. Of Deku’s body, Deku’s breaths, Deku’s back against his.
Katsuki’s fingers find their way into the sheets. Heart in his throat, fluttering, he drags in one more breath, then shoves his arm under him and peels himself away.
In a blink, a chill rakes up his back. He strips off his shirt and tosses it into the hamper, then steps under the shower’s spray.
It pelts his skin—corrodes the shape of what’s left. The faucet squeaks. Katsuki throws a towel over his head and doesn’t look in the mirror. The door falls open to the hollow margins of his room.
It follows him around like the smell before rain.
He goes back to class and tries to fit equations and theorems in his head, stuffed between Kacchan and the fog and the shadow of a thousand shapes, a thousand voices.
He sits between his friends and accepts their food and their words and their kindness. He looks for Kacchan with his eyes. Lately, he doesn’t dare do more. He’ll find him already looking back, sometimes. As soon as their eyes lock, something ugly pokes its fingers through the spaces between Izuku’s ribs, and he’ll fall back to watching his shoes, or his bowl of rice, or the pen that sits listless in his hand.
The next time he scrapes aside enough claggy terror to squint through, the great expanse of Kacchan’s back will meet him there. The thing locked inside Izuku’s ribcage sits restless.
He accepts the slip of paper Aizawa-sensei passes him after the bell rings, veering away from Hound Dog’s office and letting the stream of students pour him out onto the warm grass. The sun clips a corner off his vision. Distantly, familiar voices arise from the hubbub to poke at Izuku’s ears, but his feet continue their forward march.
They carry him across the knolls, past the dorms and around the school. Backpack dumped by the door, Izuku scans his student ID and steps into Gym Beta.
The air conditioning blows through his hair; Kacchan’s breaths catch in the silence.
Izuku’s steps echo and dissolve into the high, high ceilings. He knows Kacchan’s eyes are drilling holes into the side of his head, but Izuku is too much of a coward to seek out that burning red. Instead he wraps up his hands and reaches for a punching bag. After a wordless moment, Kacchan goes back to blasting a training doll to pieces.
The rhythm of leather against sore knuckles and the bursting of flame against scorched steel brews a numbness that drapes over Izuku and smothers his senses. It takes him entirely too long to notice the creep of ferocity that overtakes Kacchan and blows sheets of metal clean apart. The punching bag creaks. His arm stings. When he skims his fingers over it, they come back smeared with red.
“Shit,” Kacchan says. “Shit.”
“It’s okay,” says Izuku.
“Shut the fuck up, Deku.”
Izuku blinks, and Kacchan is nose to nose with him, breath hot against his cheek and his arm in a rigid clamp. Izuku jerks, but Kacchan is like a dog with a bone.
“Kacchan, it’s fine—”
Kacchan’s face does a complicated thing.
“It’s over. We’re out,” Izuku voices.
“I know that.”
He breathes in and out. Izuku watched Kacchan’s back twitch as he pushed past Aizawa-sensei and slipped away as soon as a line had been drawn.—firm leaving Aizawa-sensei’s mouth, but flimsy and unraveling into stray threads as soon as Izuku tugged at it.
He shifts his weight, presses down against the ground, feels it press back against him. Kacchan’s fingers adjust their grip. Then they’re marching back out under the warmth, leaving their things behind. Izuku follows the twist of Kacchan’s fingers, thumb against his pulse, as they stalk past a legion of teenagers and through the echoing halls.
At the foot of Recovery Girl’s office, Izuku tugs his hand upward to thread his fingers through Kacchan’s trembling ones, and Kacchan pulls him back down.
“Idiot,” he hisses. Voice thick. Wet. Cracking down the middle. “It’s over.”
“I know that,” Izuku says.
“Idiot,” repeats Kacchan, and the lump in Izuku’s throat threatens to drown him.
They stare at the pristine paint of Recovery Girl’s door and wait for the other to knock. Down their arms, the blood drips.
In the middle of an awkward conversation with a fumbling All Might, smile stretched around words like ‘mental wellbeing’ and ‘support’, the sirens sound.
He’s not unfamiliar with the crescendo that rises to meet it, but he is not familiar with the lightning shocks of terror that tear up his spine and rip the oxygen from him. Katsuki’s feet are moving by the time his head catches up with his heart, All Might’s words chasing after him, the breath tearing down his throat, eyes raking up and down the halls, and where is he? Where is he? There weren't this many people before.
The color drains out from under his feet. Green, grey, black. He shoves past abstractions and looks for the one thing that could possibly be real in this godforsaken place.
The next breath hooks its claws into his lungs and drags up something with it, strangled and half-drowned. “Deku!”
Shoulders shove past him. Sirens sing in his ears. Shrieks in all shades, terrorized and hysterical and delighted and lost. He spins in circles in the middle of a swarm and he counts heads of hair and none are the right shade of clover green.
“Please! Please stay calm, everyone! Stay where you are!”
“Deku! Deku, can you hear me?!”
“Listen to me! You’re safe where you are, UA will take the appropriate measures to ensure it!”
A weight barrels into his shoulder. Ground tilting under his feet, Katsuki tumbles with the next shove and goes down. Pavement digs, rough, into his face and the elbows he tries to put under him. A storm of shoes and the panic of a hundred people, and Deku isn’t here
“Please, listen!”
Pain blooms hot across his belly, down his back—he holds his arms up over his head and calls. Deku, Deku, Deku.
The asphalt scratches his cheek and the dirt digs under his fingernails. The sirens scream, and Deku isn’t here.
An elbow beneath him. He pushes up against the ground and scrapes the horizon for a familiar color. It’s nothing new—Deku always disappears; he blazes past, blazes out, falls through—
A crack fractures his vision to shards of glass. From the outside in, darkness unfurls.
He’s missing something. In his belly, an unyielding pulse hollows out his guts and chases the air from his lungs. A heat trails up his skin and dribbles into his hair. He’s on fire, but the sluggish kind. A crawling magma. A slow, slow smolder. A decomposing of hide and flesh and marrow.
Mostly, he’s missing something.
When he opens his eyes it’s to a bleakly familiar ceiling.
“Oh, thank God.”
Katsuki shoves away the hand at his elbow. “Where’s Deku?” he says.
The man in front of him would be plain-looking, if not for the bright yellow spots along his cheeks. When he opens his mouth, a blue tongue peeks through. “Uh, I’m not sure who that is, but all the students are supposed to be in shelters already, so you don’t have to worry.”
Scoffing, Katsuki shoves at the ground and ignores the way blue tongue guy’s freckles begin to swirl like constellations.
“Whoah, whoah, hold on, spiky—”
“Listen. He has green hair. Curly. Freckles. Big, weepy eyes. You seen him?”
Blue tongue guy purses his lips. “No, but he’s likely in one of the other shelters. You gotta— hold on!”
Katsuki presses a hand against his eyebrow, where the throb is deepest, and the other to his aching belly. The first step nearly bends him in half.
“Shut up,” Katsuki hisses, panting.
“Dude. You got trampled,” the guy says. He looks halfway done with Katsuki already. “If I hadn’t seen you—” Then, under his breath, “I swear, this school needs emergency drills.”
The common room is busy and packed with agitated bodies. They fidget and chatter on and on, and Katsuki wants to scream at them all to shut up the fuck up. His guts ache.
“He alright?” a girl with iridescent eyes butts in.
“Uh, no.”
“I need to find someone.” Katsuki glares at her, at them both, and it must embody his intentions because blue tongue guy throws up his hands and says, “Fine. Alright, fine. I’ll help you look, but just so you don’t bash your brains against a coffee table and die.”
Katsuki snarls. Shadows shift oddly. The girl turns a head full of way too much glitter back to her group of friends, and, after a hushed back-and-forth, they all get to their feet and crowd around.
“Do you have a picture?” rainbow eyes says.
Katsuki counts his breaths. Tightens the arm across his stomach. Thinks for a moment. “I think I left my phone.”
“Okay. Description?”
“Green hair. Curly. Freckles. Big, weepy eyes,” Katsuki recites.
“Alright, let’s spread out. Each of us can take a building.”
Rainbow’s friends step out the front door, and Katsuki freezes. Outside, gunmetal grey walls loom.
Katsuki finds that he’s in the second years’ dormitory block, and the students volunteering to look for Deku belong to class 2-C. According to the message mass forwarded to the student body, after the attack on the USJ, the rat had the entire campus partitioned and turned into emergency underground shelters. Seeing the metal ceiling was jarring enough—grand as it is, locked tight and gathering gloom—but learning they could move, that the floor could drop out at any minute, pull him further away, set Katsuki’s every nerve on edge. Deku could be anywhere; he could be long gone by now. On the other side of the country, or lying dead by the walls that gave in.
“Slow down, or we’re both eating shit.”
The layout of the building is the same, so navigation isn’t the issue. The issue is that Katsuki’s mottled black and blue, hissing and spitting and cursing the universe. Blue guy’s shoulder is braced under his, lanky legs fumbling to match Katsuki step to jerking step.
Twice, they’ve had to stop so Katsuki could throw up in some corner. He grunts, spits, wipes his mouth with the back of a hand. Glares with prejudice when blue tongue guy spells out what Katsuki’s been thinking for the better part of their clumsy trek up to the third floor.
“Y’know, this would go a lot faster if you just sat down and let me look.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay, man, I’m just saying. If you really wanna find this guy…”
Blue guy shifts his grip. The toe of Katsuki’s shoe catches on the second to last step, and he goes sprawling across the landing, knees and shoulders knocking against the cement.
Hands, dark and speckled, find their way across his aching edges. “Fuck, shit, are you okay?”
“Don’t touch me,” Katsuki rasps, dizzy, breathless. “Go. Go! I said fuck off!”
“Fuck, I’m sorry, okay? We, we’ll find your friend, okay?”
Katsuki rolls his shoulders and gasps at the sting. Under his trembling fingers, the ground remains hard and cold. “Not my friend.”
“Wh— Fine, fine, not your friend. We’ll find him. And if we don’t, he’s safe in one of the other shelters. He’s safe.”
He’s not. Blue guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know how this works. Deku always, always slips through. Even when Katsuki’s looking, even when he’s mapping out his borders and searing them into the backs of his eyelids, the ground shifts. The darkness swarms toward the light.
They don’t find him.
Katsuki does, after. After the walls come down and the teachers count them all one by one, he finds him in the walk between a warehouse and Gym Beta, chin trembling and completely fine, except for the cut on his arm that they’d bandaged together with scraps from Katsuki’s closet.
Deku shuffles a step toward him, and Katsuki can’t do it. He can’t touch him, can’t cry, can't hold him or leave him. How stupid was he, to rip away from the only thing keeping them alive?
“Kacchan, are you okay?”
Katsuki punches him.
All along his back—sparks.
The breath leaves him like a breeze. The birds sing. Izuku watches Kacchan’s face gleam with a glow he hasn’t seen since—since.
The twin throb that pulses along his jaw and inside his chest draws open the bars of a cage; what springs forth has been shoved down and pinned for too long. Izuku grits his teeth and lunges at Kacchan.
They grapple and roll, asphalt scratching at their skin. Izuku throws a punch, another, until Kacchan grabs at his wrists. Izuku’s fingers contort. He pulls and yanks—at Kacchan’s clothes, his hair, his skin—his breath heavy with noise that erupts from a well deep inside him.
Kacchan brings his knees to his chest, and Izuku sees it before it happens. The air is punched out of him with a kick. He tumbles. Lands on his back. The skin of his arms and legs stings and bites fiercely.
Izuku rolls over. His cheek presses to the ground. He watches sideways as Kacchan hisses, straightening. His shoes scuff, legs tinged with blues and arms red raw. He sweeps a thumb along a scratch on his cheek and tuts when it comes back bloody.
Izuku inhales, and Kacchan’s on top of him. Their breaths mingle in the space between. Kacchan’s fiery eyes pull him in, push him out, and Izuku thrashes, leaning this way and that, punches Kacchan in the place he saw him hold, skin and breath and mouth on fire. Blood drips onto his cheek.
Kacchan stops breathing; Izuku feels it against him. He catches warm, warm shoulders to slow their fall. Pebbles push into his palms. When they settle, the both of them are flat on their backs and heaving. Swirling heavens, clouds scraping by. The sun dips below the horizon. Red sweetens into purple.
Along his knuckles, a brush.