Chapter Text
Chapter one
An affair.
The word sounded so dirty and Katsuki just lets his head drop into his hands.
There had been a time, towards the beginning when he first started his affair that the guilt ate away at him. There had been moments when he would wake up and wonder what would happen if Kirishima found out. Would there be a huge fight full of screaming and crying? Would he get tossed out of the house? Would he come home and his family would just be gone?
Eiji had to know. It had been nearly ten years since he began digging this hole. They had stopped therapy around three years ago but Eiji had insisted that it was because they were in a better place now.
Katsuki wasn’t so sure he believed him. The marriage had been going slightly better but all it felt like was a chore. The entire thing an act that he had to continue doing because he fucked up. He was in this position because of karma. He deserved it for being such a little shit as a kid.
‘How the fuck did I end up here?’ he thought to himself as the television continued to showcase multiple images of him with Izuku.
The blonde haired, perky reporter continued to dish out the details they had been collecting for the past year on Ground Zero’s apparent martial affair.
Their pups were at a sleepover. ‘Once this sinks in to Eiji, there is going to be screaming and shouting and I have to deal with it now.’ He thinks to himself but once the segment ends there is nothing.
He had not expected the quiet resignation. The silence that fell between them felt like ice but at the same time it felt inevitable.
“We need to make some calls.”
Katsuki thinks that this response was the worst. It makes something that feels a lot like guilt settle in his belly and he resists the urge to tear his hair out. Its too fucking late to be feeling guilty towards Eiji. He never expected his husband had willingly gone along with his lies because he didn’t want this exact situation to happen.
Katsuki wondered when Kirishima realized that their marriage was over. He didn’t cry or scream. He just moved on to handle the crisis like it didn’t even matter. It took Katsuki a moment for it to sink that it really didn’t matter anymore. Izuku mattered more.
He had been expecting a fight. He had not expected the quiet acceptance. He felt relieved that it had been quiet acceptance. The guilt and shame he felt towards someone he once called his best friend had been ruthlessly tramped down.
What followed had been a cluster fuck. The affair had been career destroying. His pups didn’t understand what their sire had done but they knew he had hurt their dam. Kirishima’s family rallied around them while he dealt with the public outrage.
He had been given the option of public apologies or early retirement and he had chosen retirement. Katsuki was 35 years old. He had already been the number 1 hero. All his life he wanted to be the next All Might, no one ever told him how lonely that life had been.
Izuku had been going through his own divorce after everything that happened. Izuku had been the poster child for the ‘perfect omega’ ever since he married into the Todoroki family.
Todoroki Izuku had been a house omega. He spent all his time around his pups. His pups were teenagers now who had their own lives. He loved them but they didn’t need him. They weren’t little kids clinging to him for love and affection. His daughters were omegas who went to an expensive boarding school.
They came home during summer and winter vacations but they rarely spent much time with their dam. His husband worked in business and the Todoroki empire was huge. It took a lot of work and all Izuku was left to do was wander around a big empty mansion. It was depressing.
There had been a witch hunt on them. They had destroyed two marriages. The picture-perfect Todoroki family and the number 1 pro-hero scandal of the century.
Izuku never had much luck in making friends once he married. Everyone had believed that Touya had married beneath his status. Izuku was a quirkless omega who came from an average middle-class family. His affair had been just another slap in the face of everything the Alpha had done for him.
Kirishima had gotten the support from their ex-classmates. Many of the heroes he once worked with stepped in to support him. Katsuki had become the most hated Alpha in Japan for a little while.
It was everywhere.
The press had been brutal. Their images had been completely torn to shreds. Any friends that they did have abandoned them. Their families were enraged, their pups kept away, Katsuki’s career was over. The affair cost them everything except each other. It was the very height of their selfishness.
They only had themselves to blame. When the affair began, they knew that if anyone ever found out this would be the outcome. They had gone on with this affair knowing exactly what was going to happen if they had gotten caught.
The longer the affair continued they knew that they were running out of time. It would have been safer to end the affair but they couldn’t. Since they refused to end the affair it became just a matter of time before they were caught.
It took about six months for both their divorces to settle. Katsuki had used up nearly all his savings paying off lawyers, buying out his hero contract and settling the divorce. He sold the house and Eiji had moved the pups into his parents home. He used what little was left to buy a beach cottage in the middle of no-where.
Izuku’s divorce had left him with nothing.
He had signed a prenup before he got married and having an affair meant that he walked out with nothing but the clothes on his back. Touya had even gotten his parental rights terminated. It was in the contract. If the couple got divorced because the omega was cheating then his parental rights would be terminated.
‘Was it worth it?’ they thought as they looked at each other and maybe the worst thing, the most selfish thing was that they both answered, ‘Yes. For you I’d give up everything, every time just to spend another moment with you.’
It was here that the villain had found him. Katsuki couldn’t remember the assholes name. He had been a D-class villain that got lucky.
All For One may have been dead but the man had been alive for over 150 years. He had many doctors and scientists doing all sorts of research into quirks for him. The asshole had managed to create something called a fire crystal.
He was able to seal some sort of fiery energy in the crystals. No one was sure what the crystals were made up of but after studying the remains it seemed like the crystal was made up of genetic material. It was possibly a quirk but no one was sure.
The crystals exploded when it came into contact with heat energy. The explosions were terrifying enough to wipe out whole city blocks with just a finger length piece of crystal.
The villain had found an old lab by accident and took three crystals. He used two to create mass panic and hid the last one before Ground Zero took him down. Eventually he got out and went looking for revenge. The fact that Ground Zero had fallen from grace didn’t even cross his mind. It just made it easier to kill him.
Katsuki and Izuku were living together in the beach cottage when the villain attacked. There was an explosion and he woke up here. Lost and confused, in his middle school?
He looked around the empty classroom and caught sight of his reflection in the window. He was a brat again. The same brat that had bullied his ex-best friend until he presented as omega in their first year of middle school. He then disappeared off the face of the planet.
For a while he didn’t care. Then towards the end of his middle school career, it finally sunk in that he was probably never going to see Izuku again and he felt regret. He wasn’t sure exactly what he regretted at the time but he felt something.
He went home and put everything that reminded him of the green haired boy away. By the time he started in UA, it was an unspoken rule to never mention Izuku. He just didn’t know what to feel or how to deal with the nerd so he buried him. For a while he pretended like he never existed thinking it would make all his complicated feelings go away.
When news of their affair broke out someone eventually went digging into their background and found out that they had known each other as children.
The part that no one knew about was that when Kirishima finally noticed something was wrong in the marriage, Katsuki saw Izuku again and realized that he wanted to apologize. After so many years of ignoring, avoiding and pretending that nothing happened he realized that he wanted to make amends.
He had not intended on starting an affair.
Once the news station had plastered all their proof of his affair across every television screen in the country it was the first thing he told Kirishima.
“I didn’t plan this. I didn’t meet him with the intention of starting an affair. I never meant to do this.”
Kirishima asked him, “Are you even sorry?”
Katsuki wasn’t. They had been married for fifteen years. They had been together for almost twenty. Katsuki’s affair started just before the birth of his second pup. Katsuki had actually been planning on asking for some time apart when Eiji told him he was pregnant for the first time.
The affair had been going on for almost 10 years by the time the news had broken out. He was only faithful for the first 5 years of his marriage. He had long since moved past his feelings towards the marriage that had failed because Kirishima wasn’t the person he truly wanted.
Katsuki didn’t apologize. He walked out to go deal with the clusterfuck that was happening at the agency. Kirishima knew that he wasn’t sorry. Kirishima had found out about his affair years ago.
Eiji had fallen in love with Katsuki back when they were in their first year at UA. He didn’t know when it happened or how it happened. He just remembered admiring the Alpha and wanting to be his friend. Katsuki had been driven, determined and so full of passion and life. Eiji had been drawn to him like a moth to a flame.
Katsuki had asked to court him during their first year as rookies. They had been dancing around it since their third year at UA and he finally offered a courting gift. He retired from hero work after the birth of his first pup. The second pup had followed within 2 years of the birth of the first pup.
He thought everything was going well. He thought that they were happy.
Until one day he noticed a lingering scent on his Alpha that he didn’t recognize. He ignored it.
Katsuki started texting more. He ignored it because Kats had always been very private.
There had been times when Katsuki would say he was working but he knew that hadn’t been working. He still spoke to many of the pro-heroes who worked with his husband. He ignored it because he thought that Katsuki just wanted some time to himself.
They had been going to couples therapy and Kats always struggled with his temper. He thought that Kats said he was going to work but was just taking some time to himself to get his head on straight. He knew that sometimes Kats would go see a therapist if he thought his anger was getting out of control.
He knew that he valued some time to himself. Quiet time. Eiji himself would send his pups to his parents some afternoons when Kats was working late just to have a couple hours of quiet. To be able to hear himself think. So that when he spoke to his husband he knew what he was trying to tell him.
He thought that they were both working hard on themselves so that they could fix their marriage.
That all came crashing down when he caught sight of his husband with another omega. It seemed innocent. They were meeting out in the open at a private, expensive restaurant.
The omega in question was the sister-in-law to Shoto Todoroki who he was Kats friend. He thought it was just a lunch probably something to do with the agency but Eiji knew there was something else happening.
He knew it in the way that his husband looked at the omega. He had never seen his husband look at anyone like that in their entire lives. There was a softness in his eyes that he had never seen. Not towards him or even their pups. He had never seen Katsuki look at anyone like that.
Like the omega in front of him was everything.
Kirishima went straight home and hacked directly into his husbands cell-phone. He used to be a pro-hero too. He had a few tricks up his own sleeve. He had to know. He had seen something and he just knew that he was right and he needed proof.
He had read their numerous messages. Their longing for each other. The ‘I love you’ messages that fell from his husbands lips as easy as breathing. He knew that his Alpha wished a different omega wore his mating mark. It killed a piece of his heart.
When the affair came to light, many of his questions about the affair had been answered. He always wondered how they met and why Katsuki seemed so weak for this omega. Weak in ways he had never been towards him. Childhood friends.
‘What a fucking joke.’ He thought to himself. Then again if anything were truly a joke then it would be the farce of his marriage and Kirishima had been the fucking punch line.
Knowing that Katsuki didn’t go out with the intention of having an affair didn’t change a damn thing. He wasn’t stupid. Katsuki wasn’t sorry he had an affair. He was sorry that he chose the wrong omega to have a family with because all the Alpha ever wanted was a pup with blonde hair and green eyes.
Katsuki intended on apologizing to Izuku for being an utter asshole. Izuku had forgiven him almost immediately. They had honestly just been rebuilding their friendship at first.
Katsuki felt like he owed Izuku more than just an apology and wanted to do better by him. He wanted to be his friend like he should have been all those years ago but Izuku had always been everything.
Before they had gotten their quirks and his inferiority complex had developed Midoriya Izuku had been his whole world. All his life the boy had felt like everything he ever wanted. When he developed a quirk and Deku didn’t, he was confused.
Katsuki had the strength of a hero.
Deku had the heart of a hero.
He had this innate goodness that Katsuki never had.
Izuku was kind.
Katsuki was cruel.
Izuku looked and sounded like a hero, something Katsuki desperately wanted to be because he knew that he wasn’t. Katsuki was his mothers son. Kindness didn’t come easy to them. They were short tempered, prone to violence and his worries always came out as screaming and shouting because he didn’t know how to be kind.
He just wasn’t wired like that.
Izuku cried all the damn time but it was never weakness. He knew how to talk to people. How to befriend people, calm them down and get them to like him. People didn’t like Katsuki.
They feared him.
When they first met he didn’t mean to keep it a secret from Kirishima. There had been no reason not tell his husband that he met up with an old friend. But they weren’t friends. Katsuki had been a bully and Izuku had been the only one who stood up to him.
The reason why he never told him about Izuku is because he was ashamed. Kirishima often reminded him of Izuku with his kindness and friendliness. He never took his words personally and trusted his actions. He had helped him be a better person and a better friend.
He didn’t want Kirishima to know how bad he had been in the past. He didn’t want to explain what Izuku had meant to him and how as a pre-teen with his head up his ass, had treated Izuku like he was worthless.
When he met Izuku again, he wanted to make sure that they were friends again. He wanted to earn the green haired boys forgiveness before introducing him to his mate. He also didn’t want Izuku to see his marriage crumbling. He just wanted to put the past to rest before doing anything else.
However Izuku and Katsuki could never lie to each other. Whenever they got along the two of them were two halves of a whole. They knew when something was wrong. Even now, after all this time Izuku just knew him.
There had been a time when Katsuki thought that Izuku was looking down on him.
Izuku had seen him. Their whole life Izuku had seen every single part of Katsuki, the good and the bad and he loved him anyway. Katsuki couldn’t understand why someone who was so much better than him would ever love someone like him.
Izuku deserved so much better than him but he wanted him. All he ever wanted was Katsuki to stay by his side and Katsuki never believed him.
It felt like a lie. Izuku had to know how much better than him he was. All that he said and did couldn’t be real. In middle school, he couldn’t believe that all his praise had been the truth. He couldn’t believe that Izuku had truly seen him the way he said he did but it was.
Izuku looked at him, saw the nastiest parts of him and loved him anyway.
Bakugo had tried very hard to hide his nastiness from Kirishima. He had blunted his rough edges and showed him a better version of himself. The version that he wanted Izuku to see but it was too late.
After a couple of months of friendly lunches and talking they really did repair their relationship. Katsuki wasn’t going to tell him that he was in couples therapy and he didn’t see it helping.
Somewhere along the way whatever it was that held the two of them together had frayed and he didn’t know what to do about it.
Izuku had confessed that he never loved Touya. His father had arranged for him to marry the alpha once he presented as omega. The man ran the Todoroki family business while his younger brother followed his father as a hero.
Touya was four years older than Izuku. When he presented at 14, he was sent to live in the Todoroki family manor for 2 years to get to know his intended alpha. They mated when he was 16 and Touya was 20. The Alpha thought he was in love but Izuku was sure that he didn’t.
When he first met Touya he felt like he owed it to everyone to do as they said. Being a quirkless omega in this day and age basically stacked the deck against him. He could have fought to be a hero as a quirkless beta or Alpha but an omega? Omega’s were still fighting for fair treatment even before the appearance of quirks.
There were laws that protected them but it was still hard to be an omega. You still faced discrimination. His parents could deal with him wanting to fight for a better life as quirkless but not as a quirkless omega. That was just asking for trouble.
Izuku was not unaware of how hard it was to raise him. His parents loved him but his dreams made it so much harder on them. His insistence throughout his childhood to be a hero had placed them in a very awkward position. If they didn’t support him then he would have been hurt and bitter but there was no realistic way to support him either.
Touya had been kind. He had created this beautiful cage for him to live in and sometimes Izuku wanted to scream. His dreams of being a hero like All Might had truly died when he presented. There were omega heroes. It wasn’t impossible but a quirkless omega?
Izuku himself couldn’t help but laugh at that thought. It was hard enough to be an omega hero. Omegas had a harder time picking up muscle and were not generally aggressive. Omega heroes worked twice as hard to be taken seriously. No one was ever going to take a quirkless omega seriously.
Once he presented his mother immediately took him to America to be with his father. His parents had managed a long distance relationship for years. They were supposed to join his father aboard once his quirk manifested but it never did. They stayed in Japan because his mother felt more comfortable here.
She knew the school, teachers, the parents, the neighborhood. It felt safer to raise her son with people that knew and recognized her rather than go all the way to a new country. She knew Izuku was being bullied but rather the devil you know than the one you don’t.
Once they left he was immediately put into home schooling. His mother knew about the bullying he faced from the children he grew up with she wasn’t going to take any more chances especially since they were getting older.
His father decided to put him in omega only clubs. His father came home with hundreds of pamphlets for classes that were only open for omegas to take. It ranged from flower arranging, gardening, dancing, singing, swimming, volleyball, tennis, archery and a whole bunch of other things.
They hoped if he did things with other omegas he would make friends. The home schooling was supposed to protect him from bullies, not isolate him. He ended up meeting Touya after one of the classes and the Alpha thought that he could save him somehow.
Touya saw him as someone weak, that he needed to protect. Izuku was never more than just a mother and mate to him. He expected those things to be all that he could ever be. He immediately pushed for a courting and his parents had been so happy. He couldn’t say no.
There was a small part of him that resented his husband for thinking that was all he would be capable of doing with his life. He wanted to matter, to do something important but Touya saw him as too delicate to do anything.
Touya had given him a better life than his parents could have. Izuku couldn’t just pretend that hero society didn’t have the problems that it did. He couldn’t pretend to be a naïve kid and that the power of friendship would save everyone.
The Todoroki family had shown him how toxic hero society could become. The pressure the heroes were under to keep society afloat. He realized that while All Might was out there putting out fires and punching the bad guys there was no one out there looking out for the little guys.
Who helped the orphans from the fires?
Who helped the broken, hurt heroes?
Who helped the quirkless?
Izuku had so many ideas that Touya didn’t even bother to listen too. There had been a different way he could have helped people but his mate just didn’t want him to do it because it would be too much work for a delicate omega to do.
There had been respect and care in his marriage but never love. Izuku could never love someone who thought he wasn’t capable of being more than his gender or status as quirkless. He loved his pups. He would die for them but they had their own lives which included their sire more than their dam.
If Izuku had never met Katsuki again he could have lived his entire life as Touya’s omega and been content. Its just that life didn’t go that way.
Katsuki had always been the most amazing thing he ever had.
Bakugo Katsuki was everything he wished for in every single one of his dreams and that Alpha thought he, quirkless omega Deku, was better than him.
Meeting again, getting an apology, mending their friendship had been things that he only ever dreamed about. He never believed that Katsuki would ever have any romantic feelings for him.
But he did.
There had been so much guilt after the first time they had sex. They had avoided each other, tried to forget about it but they couldn’t undo what had already been done.
When they met again it was everything fell into place as it all fell apart. Katsuki realized exactly where he belonged and he couldn’t stay there because he had tried so hard to fit someone else in the places where Izuku fit perfectly.
He was supposed to be working on making his marriage work but all Katsuki could do was think that he had chosen the wrong omega. He had chosen Kirishima because he reminded him of Izuku. Katsuki had fit Eiji into the parts of his life where Izuku belonged and ignored the parts when it didn’t feel right.
Eventually though, he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why he wasn’t happy but after meeting Izuku again he figured it out. He had been tired of chasing after the ghost of Izuku that he could sometimes see in Eiji. After all this time he couldn’t just pretend like Eiji was perfect. He wasn’t Izuku. He just reminded him of Izuku.
After a few months of guilt came the resentment and eventually the grudging acceptance that this was his life now. He had completely and utterly fucked up. Maybe if he had given therapy a real try back when he needed it this wouldn’t have happened.
He wouldn’t have married someone that only vaguely reminded him of Izuku. He wouldn’t have two daughters that were nothing like him in looks and personality. They both took after their dams side of the family and they had his personality.
Katsuki couldn’t help but go back to his memories of the tiny green haired Deku who toddled after him. He couldn’t help but wish for a pup with blonde hair and green eyes with a pout on their lips.
The same pout that the 3 year old Izuku used to get whenever Katsuki had to go home and Izuku really didn’t want him to leave.
He wished that he had bitten Izuku the day he presented but he hadn’t known. He had never smelled Izuku’s scent before he bonded. When they met again as adults both their scents had changed to a mixture of theirs and their mate.
Izuku had started his heat during gym class. Katsuki had every class except gym with him. The teacher noticed the scent, took him to the nurse who called his mom and she took him home. Once his heat was over, his mom already had the house packed and tickets booked. He was in America the day after his first heat.
“Bakugo Katsuki!”
He stopped glaring at his reflection in the window and turned to look at his teacher. She was saying something but he honestly just couldn’t follow her. He didn’t understand what the hell was happening but he needed to find Izuku. That was all that mattered.
He tore out of the classroom without a word. The teacher was still yelling his name as he took deep breaths trying to find Izuku’s scent but he couldn’t find it. He couldn’t remember the date or the time or anything but he could find him. He stopped for a moment before he barely picked up the scent of pine.
Katsuki took off in the direction of the scent and burst into the changing room. Izuku was there, standing in front of him just as tiny as he was in his memories. Short curly green hair, gym shorts and freckles. He was holding a shirt in his hands but he seemed dazed when Katsuki plastered himself to his back and the omega melted.
“Kacchan? What happened?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. Need you.”
He pressed his nose to Izuku’s neck and took in the scent of the pre-heat pheromones he was giving off. Katsuki released his scent and Izuku immediately bloomed for his Alpha. Before any of the teachers could stop them, he covered Izuku in his jacket, grabbed his bag and high tailed it out of the school.
Izuku got them into his apartment. His mom worked odd hours. She wouldn’t be home for longer than Katsuki’s parents. He threw Kacchan out of his room while he made a nest and the Alpha immediately prepped food. There was a voice in his head telling him to stop but he couldn’t do it.
All he wished for, for years was the ability to redo this moment in his life. ‘Right person, right time.’ He thought to himself. He was going to do it right this time. He was going to make the choice he should have made the first time around. He entered the omegas room and his rut hit him like a freight train.