Chapter Text
There was nothing in this world that could calm Katsuki’s mind the way flying over the city at sunrise could. A few short blasts and his body was hurtling across the horizon past a dozen apartment buildings, hero towers, and corporate complexes. In the wee hours before the early morning workers crawled out of their beds and the night shift had just gone to sleep, Katsuki found peace.
He’d probably get in trouble if anyone found out. He wasn’t on duty, and at this hour there were no emergency calls. Even as a pro-hero, he wasn’t supposed to be using his quirk in public while off duty. He had a license to do so, but the Commission didn’t like people making messes around the city. They got a bit testy after the country fell into a war five years ago. So they’d probably give him a talking-to if they found out. Oh well.
Five years ago, Kamino, the prefecture Katsuki was currently soaring over, had been reduced to a pile of rubble by two giants. But people rebuild. Windows and walls can be restructured, cement could be poured over the cracks. People heal.
At least, that’s what Katsuki had been told.
Everyone was supposed to heal. When wars end and cities rebuild, people heal.
Katsuki didn’t heal, though. Not like they expected. The wounds scarred over and the monsters were put back in their closets. The nightmare was over. The heroes had saved the day, and Katsuki’s life to boot. Or so they thought. Edgeshot gave his life in order to save Katsuki’s - only for it all to fall apart.
It would have happened anyway, they said. Katsuki’s body was born without a resistance to the very substance he produced; nitroglycerin. The long-term exposure caused a deficit in the enzymes that prevent tissue breakdown, the body’s natural defense against cell decay. When they discovered it two years ago, the doctors gave him five years before his heart gave out.
Last week, they put him on the transplant list.
Of course - Katsuki couldn’t be a pro-hero with a heart transplant. They barely allowed him back in the field after the war with a patchwork aorta.
Today was his last day of work. He’d told no one but Miruko, his boss. His parents didn’t know. He was an adult, after all, they didn’t need to know. There was a press conference in an hour. Katsuki would be announcing his retirement. Most of the news outlets thought he was announcing an engagement. Miruko with her big ears, and a bigger mouth. Katsuki was thankful for it this time. That’s why he was out here, floating through the sky, trying to find his peace. He needed to find peace before he went in front of all those cameras and excited faces and crushed them to dust with his bare fists.
The trek across the city landed him on the roof of Miruko’s hero agency just before he needed to clock in. The rabbit-eared woman reclined herself against the rooftop entrance. She sighed when he landed with a light thud on the roof. Her ears twitched. She was listening to his heartbeat. Not many people knew she could do it, and it only worked if it was quiet or there were only a few people around. Ever since he told her the truth, that he was retiring, she paid an inordinate amount of time listening to his heart.
Did she think she’d hear the last beat?
“Ready, kiddo?”
Katsuki grunted. “Ready for a fucking heart attack.”
“Not funny.”
“Not in the funny mood, Cottontail.”
“Yeah.” She threw an arm around his shoulders. They both walked down the stairs together. “Me either. But you did choose this.”
“I didn’t choose retirement at twenty-two.” Katsuki grumbled.
“What would you have preferred? Dying on that battlefield?”
“Honestly…some days I wish I had. I mean, come on, Bunny. They gave me five fucking years and I only get two? What kind of fucked up deal is that? Edgeshot fucking died to stitch my damn heart back together - and then I go and evolve my damn quirk and make everything worse.”
Miruko sighed. “You’re on the transplant list. You’ll get your happy average lifespan, Blasty.”
Katsuki didn’t answer her. Then again, he didn’t need to. They’d had this exact argument at least fifteen times in less than a week since he’d been put on the list and the Commission officially put him on notice. They went in circles, over and over. Miruko respected his choices. She didn’t tell him to fight, or to hold on and be some hopeful idiot. Katsuki didn’t need to be hopeful and dumb.
He needed fucking peace and quiet.
The front doors of the agency opened with a roar of crowds, the snapping of a thousand camera flashes, and seven dozen press members asking questions all at once. The first of which was why he wasn’t wearing his hero suit. Instead, he was wearing the agency gear; a hoodie that matched Miruko’s agency colors with the logo over the left breast, and some tight fitted leggings tucked into his usual combat boots. He didn’t look ready for a fight, he was ready for a gym workout, or a day on the couch.
Miruko stood off to the side, behind him by the door. They’d scheduled this press conference before any of the other heroes or sidekicks at their agency started working. They didn’t have a night shift in their agency. So it was just Katsuki, his boss, and the press.
“Ground Zero!”
One of the reporters up front called out with their hand up. Several more started calling out, waiting to be picked. Katsuki didn’t give them a chance. He raised a hand, palm out. There was silence in an instant, but not because he’d asked for it - because he’d asked for it calmly.
“Good morning.” Katsuki sighed. “I’m sorry to disappoint you all, this won’t be an announcement of anything exciting like an engagement. Today will be a very…different kind of announcement. I’ll be taking a few questions at the end, but I’d ask that you all try to keep from bombarding me.”
The cameras still flashed every few seconds. They had to get their good pictures, right? Katsuki had never been this calm. They probably thought this was revolutionary. It was…revolutionary. A nod from Miruko pushed him onwards.
“Today, I am announcing my formal retirement.” He put his hand up again in a jerky motion to prevent any questions. He knew they’d ask. They didn’t need to. “Unfortunately, my health requires my attention. As you all know, my heart was gravely wounded during the war. I don’t need to say it, but I thank Edgeshot everyday for his sacrifice to save my life.” Slow, deep breaths. “I trust the public will respect my privacy. I don’t wish to discuss anything further at this time. I’m willing to take a few non-invasive questions.”
To his complete surprise, the room stayed silent. The reporters didn’t seem to know what to do with a calm, reserved Ground Zero. They stared at him, through camera lenses and over their microphones. Katsuki sighed. If they weren’t going to ask any questions, then he wouldn’t answer any. But of course, he turned too fast off the podium. Katsuki’s head spun, his heart unable to keep up with his motion. Miruki was at his side in a second, steadying him.
“Ground Zero!” “Ground Zero!” The reporters finally snapped out of their trance. They shouted questions at him, most of which were far too invasive for his liking. The noise was only making his head pound worse. Every single question dug into his skin like needles. Miruki’s robotic hand on his arm felt like ice burning through him.
“Enough!” The podium exploded. He did not mean to activate his quirk. Only a few of the newer reporters flinched. Most of them, the seasoned ones, were accustomed to Katsuki’s uncontrolled explosive rage. “That’s enough.” The crowds obeyed. “Edgeshot’s sacrifice wasn’t enough. Stitching my heart back together on the battlefield just…wasn’t enough.”
That wasn’t the whole story, obviously. But they didn’t need to know everything. Sadly, this would stir up a whole can of worms in the hero world. This news would start a chain of events he couldn’t stop. The press conference would be released on the seven o’clock news. All of his friends and family would see it when they got up to make their breakfast. That podium wasn’t the only thing he’d be exploding in his life.
“Come on.” Miruko ushered him inside and locked the doors on the reporters who tried to storm in after them for a better scoop, or more answers. “What can I do?”
“I just need to sit down.”
The phone in his pocket was already going ballistic. Buzzing and dinging like its damn life depended on it. Katsuki knew better than to look at it. He was sure Mina and Izuku would be fighting for the top spot in the ‘who could get answers first’ game. Though he didn’t expect Mina to show up at his doorstep. Izuku on the other hand…
The back door of the agency burst open hard enough to put a hole in the wall from the door handle. There was no arch of lightning, no flash of dark green and black, just the natural strength of a usually calm man blowing the lid off his confusion and anger. Katsuki sighed. Miruko’s ears were focused on Katsuki. She didn’t seem to care about Izuku marching towards them with an unusually clipped pace.
“Do you want to explain why the fuck I just woke up to you formally retiring on national television when you didn’t even have the decency to tell me first? And please, don’t mistake this for selfishness - I thought we agreed - no more secrets. We lay there, dying, on that blood soaked battlefield, and swore to each other we would never keep secrets from each other again.” Izuku took a shaky breath. “Please, Kacchan, tell me what’s going on.”
Miruko cleared her throat and gave Katsuki a firm shoulder pat. “I’ll leave you to it. Call me if you need anything.”
Katsuki slowly stood up. Izuku steadied him when he wobbled. Using his quirk was only making things worse. His heart was thudding away in his ears, skipping beats every so often, struggling to keep up with him. Once he was stable on his feet, he gestured to one of the nearby conference rooms so they could talk privately. Izuku gave him the dignity to walk on his own, even if he hovered close while they walked into the room and locked the door.
“I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Kaccha-”
“Shut up. Let me talk, I’m exhausted and I’m only saying this once.” Izuku nodded and silently sat himself at the oversized conference table next to Katsuki. “I didn’t tell anyone, not even my parents. Hell, Miruko didn’t know until the Commission put me on notice.” Izuku opened his mouth but Katsuki shot him a glare to keep him silent. “Last week - my doctors put me on the transplant list. My heart is giving out. I Edgeshot’s work would have lasted a bit longer…had I not…also evolved my quirk during the war. The nitroglycerin in my blood…it’s killing me, and not slowly.”
Izuku’s face scrunched up and his eyes searched the table. He did this every time he processed data, or tried to parse out a solution to a problem. There was nothing here he could fix, so he was likely trying to re-read Katsuki’s hero analysis notebook from memory. Katsuki knew he had notes about nitroglycerin as a chemical in that notebook. Eventually, it clicked.
“Long-term exposure to Nitroglycerin has been linked to the death of the ALDH2 enzyme…the enzyme that protects against cellular decay and tissue damage.” Izuku snapped his eyes up. “You can’t heal. You…you literally can’t heal without quirks anymore.”
Katsuki nodded. He turned his hand over. His palm was still red from where his quirk had activated and exploded the podium outside, and his earlier flight to work. Little spot burns had begun to blister along the upper ridge of his palm and around the heel. A couple had already cracked with blood.
“Kacchan.” Izuku’s clicked his tongue. “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we…damnit.” He grabbed the wall mounted first aid kit and started tending to the blonde’s wounds. Katsuki didn’t fight it.
“I know. I’m sorry. You’re right. We swore we wouldn’t keep secrets anymore.” After all, One For All had been the biggest secret of their lives, and it led to a lot of problems during the war. “But you were so happy when you got hired at UA, and you’ve been spending so much time with Pink Cheeks. I couldn’t ruin that, Izuku. I couldn’t blast a hole in your life like every other fucking day of our lives. I couldn’t.”
“Yeah, and what do you think this is?” Izuku snapped. Katsuki winced. “Sorry.” He spread burn cream over Katsuki’s palm and wrapped it before going on. “Look…I’m not happy, not like you think. I love my job, don’t get me wrong, but my dream was to be a pro-hero.”
“You saved the world, Nerd. I don’t think you could be more heroic than that.”
“Yeah…and now I’m quirkless again. Yes, I love teaching, and I had always planned to teach after retiring. But I didn’t plan to retire until I was Aizawa’s age.”
Katsuki took his hand back as the nerd sat back down and put his head in his hands. Katsuki rubbed his bandaged palm. The agency began coming to life around their little bubble of quiet. A few bodies walked past the conference room, but no one tried to disturb them just yet. Miruko had texted Katsuki, he could see her note pop up on his phone on the table, but for now, it wasn’t anything important. He also just didn’t want anyone seeing him online, so he flipped his phone over and ignored it. It was Izuku who broke the silence again.
“So what’s the plan, then?”
Katsuki shrugged. “Depends if I can get a transplant or not. I could be dead next week for all I know.”
“Don’t you fucking dare joke about this, Kacchan. I’m serious.”
“So am I. Look, I get it, you’re traumatized over my battlefield death, we all are. But I don’t have time to beat around the damn bush here. I don’t have the energy to become a teacher, I can’t do the damn job I have now, and I have to stay healthy enough to receive a transplant in a body that physically can’t heal itself. Can we skip over the weather talk and just get to the point?” Izuku scoffed. “We’re retired, we’re wounded, we’re fucked up. I am in an active state of dying.”
Izuku’s fists balled up in his hair. Droplets of tears splattered on the table but his arm blocked Katsuki’s view of the nerd’s face. He’d always been a crybaby, but after the war, Katsuki hadn’t even once seen him cry - not for five years, not until today.
“I was supposed to protect you…everyone. It was my job, my duty as the ninth holder. I failed, Kacchan. I fucking failed and you died .”
“You gotta get out of that mentality, Izuku, how many times-
“I know! Fuck, do you think I’m not aware of how fucked up it was for All Might to put all that on a child’s shoulders? I’m far from stupid, Katsuki. I know I shouldn’t think of myself as some symbol of peace, but what else can I be? Certainly not a hero worth remembering. Midnight and Crust got fucking statues , and in five years, none of our friends have ever once asked me if I’m okay with losing my damn quirk - they just assume since I was quirkless for fourteen years, I was just fine with going back to being forgotten.”
Katsuki stared at the ground. This was not the first time they’d had this talk, or argument, or whatever the hell it was. Katsuki tried, at least once a month, to get Izuku out of his head, to make him shake that self-sacrificial mentality. For a while, he thought it had worked. Izuku appeared happier, he’d even started going out to social events and was spending more time with their former classmates. He thought Izuku was doing better. They argued less and talked more about hero stats and events like when they were kids.
Apparently, Izuku was a better liar than Katsuki believed him capable of being.
Katsuki found himself staring out the window at the early morning sun, still rising over the city skyline. Nothing in the world felt as freeing as the way the sun warmed his face. For a split second, he thought about throwing everything away, and getting on a train and not getting off until he was far enough away that no one knew his name or his face.
“So…now what?” Izuku finally rasped out.
“Run away with me?”
“Huh?”
“I don’t want to die here, Nerd.”
“You’re not going-”
“I’m not going to die here, Izuku. I will not die in some congested city where I can’t even watch the sun rise and set properly unless I’m five hundred feet in the air. So - run away with me. I want to go somewhere else, anywhere else, and I don’t want to do it with anyone but you.”
Izuku slowly wiped the tears from his face. He stared out the window, similar to Katsuki, for just a moment before he began to nod. The nerd worked up the strength to speak through the emotions still choking him and sucked in a deep breath.
“Okay. Yeah, let’s go.”
“Yeah?”
Izuku nodded bigger. “Yes.”
~ 2 Weeks Later ~
Katsuki reclined himself on his beach chair while the cool hiss of oxygen pumped into his nose from the mobile oxygen pump sitting on a beach towel next to him on the sand. Izuku collapsed onto the chair next to him with a spray of salt water from his curly green hair. The nerd shifted their beach umbrella to block out the harshest part of the midday sun beating down on them and took Katsuki’s hand as he settled in.
Their parents were out getting lunch from some fancy restaurant and promised to bring them something to eat shortly. They’d left Japan just over a week ago, after Izuku and Katsuki both sorted out their lives and said goodbyes to their friends. Katsuki’s parents had a southern French villa that could easily house eight people comfortably due to their success in the fashion industry - so they all moved to the southern French countryside.
Katsuki wanted to enjoy his life. He wanted to be a pro-hero, but the need for a peace he hadn’t had since before the war overpowered that dream, or maybe it became his new dream.
“How are you feeling?” Izuku asked.
Children ran by their beach chairs, sand flying all around them. The nerd caught a beach ball that came bouncing towards them and tossed it back to the kid. He lifted his sunglasses as he looked back at Katsuki for a response.
“Not worse than yesterday, but tired. You ask me everyday, Nerd. It’s always the same. What about you? Still having nightmares?”
“Uhm…not as often as a couple years ago. Actually, it’s been a lot better since we got here.”
“Good.” Katsuki took his nerd’s hand back and squeezed it. “You hear from any of the Extras today?”
“They miss us, they send their love and confusion. They wanna know when we’re coming back.”
“When are you going to tell them I’m not coming back?”
“When I send them funeral invitations.”
“Yeah?” Katsuki scoffed. “You gonna invite all of Japan to the funeral of the war hero?”
“Absolutely. They’re gonna get up there, one by one, and talk about how brave you were, how humble and level-headed their honorable soldier was.”
Katsuki threw his head back and laughed, which only led to a coughing fit. Izuku slapped his back a few times and laughed right along with him. They joked about Katsuki’s coming death almost every day. After their move, Katsuki told his family he didn’t want to take a transplant from someone else, someone who deserved to live a long life.
Of course, Izuku, and his parents, argued that Katsuki deserved that, too. But Katsuki had lived his dreams. He’d achieved more than most people do in their whole lives, by eighteen. He was tired, and he didn’t want to worry about his health for the next forty years, living a life on a slew of medications and the risk of organ rejection. He was choosing to live the time he had left, with the people closest to him, in a peaceful French beach town.
“You know I love you, right, Izuku?”
“Well, you did die for me once already.”
“Yeah.. but you know I love you…right?”
Izuku wiggled into his beach chair, laying down a bit further and turning his sunglasses back to the umbrella and sky above them. Katsuki did the same, not worrying about a response. It came, eventually, in the same way it came every day for the last week when Katsuki brought up his feelings.
“If you make it to tomorrow, I’ll tell you I love you back.”
Katsuki smirked to himself. He knew, before he fell asleep tonight, there would be a quiet whisper in his ear telling him he was loved. But Izuku had a hard time admitting it out loud - probably because he was guarding himself for the coming pain. He was protecting his heart from the grief he was already suffering.
Katsuki’s heart might be failing, but Izuku’s was a heavy burden in his chest.
