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Hitoshi meant to stay out of the way and barely be noticed, but with so many lights beamed at him at once, he found himself anything but.
He’s used to late nights, so when they offered to let him crash on their couch for a few weeks (months?), he made sure to let them know that he would be awake, but they wouldn’t know he was here.
And he expected that to be the case because that’s how it’s always been, but should have known that they were never going to be the kind of people to let it.
Bakugou has nightmares. He doesn’t talk about it much, but sometimes he wakes up choking, a sound that had Hitoshi jumping to his feet the first time he heard it, but Kirishima, who was with him at the time, followed him out of the room with a supportive hand on his back like he’d seen it a thousand times before.
Hitoshi has those dreams too, the putrid syrup in his lungs begging to crawl inside him and take him away, replace him. The same memory haunts him, and so the second time Bakugou woke, Hitoshi made him the same tea he uses to wash it down. They didn’t talk about it. They were the only people who never had to.
Midoriya hurts. He doesn’t say so, but sometimes he paces to the kitchen, back to the bathroom, and then he pretends to go to his room, only to double back and do it all over again, his hands on his joints and scars like if he presses them in the right order, they’ll finally leave him alone.
One night he saw Hitoshi and laughed like he was embarrassed to be seen, but Hitoshi didn’t find it funny at all. He spent the night working his thumbs into his calves while a movie played with the volume low exactly like how Aizawa taught him after his first week of training kicked his ass. He asked if the others would get mad at him for touching him, and Midoriya smiled as he shook his head no.
That should have been a sign.
Kirishima worries himself sick, especially when the others aren’t there. He paces too but with an arm over his stomach while his other hand holds his phone with an iron grip just waiting for the bad news to come. It’s like he thinks if he’s not there to save them, if something happens to one of them, it’s his fault. He saved Hitoshi once, and Hitoshi doesn’t even know if he remembers.
He can’t tell him it’ll be okay when they’re always one wrong fight away from never coming home, but it’s easier to pass the hours with a controller in your hand, and Kirishima is easy to play with. Sometimes it’s Call of Duty, and sometimes it’s Mario Kart, but he’s the only person Hitoshi’s ever met who doesn’t get pissed when he loses. His pre-order list grows.
And Todoroki cries his fucking heart out. He never does it in the bedrooms because he doesn’t want the others to hear him, and Hitoshi can understand why. They worry enough about him that he wouldn’t want to make it worse. Sometimes he just says I’m so sorry over and over again in broken sobs, and Hitoshi wasn’t sure who he was sorry to until a birthday came, and ah. The birthdays are the hardest.
The nights that Todoroki leaves his room, Hitoshi pretends to be asleep. He holds his eyes closed and keeps his fingers locked together beneath the blanket to hold himself still because the sound of the quiet sobs are somehow more painful to him than being stabbed. He gives him the peace he needs, and he doesn’t dare make it worse.
Bakugou makes him dinner at 2 in the morning sometimes, which is insane because he should be sleeping, but he walks into the apartment as quietly as possible so he doesn’t wake them to the smell of fried pork and the best curry he’s ever had, which Bakugou makes him eat until he can barely move with his arms folded gruffly across his chest.
Sometimes if their schedules don’t line up, it’s saved for him in the refrigerator with a warning that if it’s still there in the morning, he’s dead meat. It’s strange and a little abrasive, but it’s kind of his first experience with having home cooked meals and it’s always food he likes.
Midoriya is really into movie nights. Sometimes Hitoshi expects to be left alone, but then he finds himself wedged between two of them on the couch for a few hours, the order constantly rotating. At first he thought well, this is their house, so they should use the couch when they want to, but at some point he realized they were doing it for him, to bring him into their circle without dragging him directly.
He didn’t know this was something he needed, but it kind of gives him an idea of what all of those sleepovers he was never invited to must have been like, early mornings and junk food included. He knows it’s coming because Midoriya always asks him what snacks he wants in the most unsubtle ways possible. It’s usually prawn chips.
Kirishima listens to him for hours. Hitoshi hasn’t ever been the kind of person to hold a conversation, and with his job, sometimes it hurts too much to speak by the time he gets home, but sometimes he can’t seem to shut up. He doesn’t mean to. A switch goes off, and he ends up spewing out every thought in his head, and Kirishima just takes it all without making a big deal about it.
He tells Hitoshi he thinks he’s manly, which is just Kirishima’s version of awesome, Hitoshi learned in school, but he doesn’t overhype him when he doesn’t need to be, and on the other end of that, when Hitoshi fucks up, he doesn’t let him wallow in it or blow him off either. He could probably use his own pep talks sometimes, but Hitoshi doesn’t mind listening to them in his place. Maybe it still helps.
Todoroki doesn’t make him talk when he doesn’t want to. He tries, he really does, but sometimes Hitoshi doesn’t want to keep up with the energy of the room, especially when something goes wrong on the job, but there’s something about Todoroki that makes the others back off whenever Hitoshi needs it.
And Todoroki is okay with the silence. Sometimes the others get scared by it and try to fill it with idle chatter or kind words, but Todoroki doesn’t care if all Hitoshi wants to do is put his head on his lap and shut his brain off. It’s a good leg. The cold side feels nice on his cheek.
At some point they stopped letting him sleep on the couch. He isn’t sure when it happened exactly or if it was actually on purpose, but one night he fell asleep in a bed between Kirishima and Midoriya in a weird sunshine to sunshine crossfire, and for the first time in his life, he got a full nine hours.
Todoroki and Bakugou are a little easier to sleep between, when he does sleep between anyone, but if he’s on the edge of the bed, Midoriya’s quirk has a way of making sure he never falls off.
Some nights he comes home— home —and walks through the door as quietly as possible, showers off the funk of a mission, and plops down on whichever bed calls to him, just to be dragged into a welcoming tangle of limbs.
And some nights he comes back to Bakugou in the kitchen with Todoroki at the table, his face privately swollen in a familiar way, while Kirishima is on the couch with the controller in his hands with his phone on his lap, and Midoriya holds his knees to his chest and pretends he isn’t dying.
And Hitoshi does his rounds with the supportive pet on the back of Todoroki’s head, to Bakugou’s meal he’ll eat as soon as he changes out of his costume, to letting Kirishima see he made it in one piece, to the bag of nighttime painkillers dropped into Midoriya’s lap so maybe he can get some relief.
He doesn’t know when he stopped looking for a place to live, only that he can’t remember the last time he thought about it, and it’s so surreal sometimes that he catches himself wondering if he’ll wake up face down on the couch exactly one year ago when his things were in a backpack and not split between Todoroki and Kirishima’s dressers.
He’s home now.
And no one wants him to leave.
He doesn’t want to leave them either.