Archive of Our Own

Izuku’s hair was being swept by the wind. Towards the left.

He was staring out into the sunset, gazing at it as though it was nothing but a sinking. He almost looked at it like it was just an empty void dripping down, which was baffling given that today was a uniquely beautiful day. The clouds above them were full and swirling, painted in warm pinks and soft oranges, in colors that probably hadn’t even existed until this very moment–but it didn’t matter. Izuku could have been staring at paint drying on a wall, and Katsuki figured it probably would’ve been all the same to him.

With an elbow perched up against his knee, his other leg left to hang over the edge of the roof that he had placed himself on, Izuku just stared at the scene in a distracted, dull sort of way. Katsuki didn’t know how long Izuku had been up here for, or how long he’d been gazing, but that was how he had found him when he made his way up to the rooftop of this random classroom building.

It had been a bit of a damn hassle trying to find him—what was it, forty flights of stairs traversed in total? But there was no one to feign over-exaggerated annoyance to, and deep down he had to admit that he didn’t really mind all that much. 

Izuku had been quick to get lost in the crowd, and had disappeared after the last bell had rung instead of finding Katsuki to take the train home together like they usually did. Katsuki had decided that there was no way in hell he was going to let Izuku get away with that without at least telling him fuck you followed by a let’s go home already, nerd.

Katsuki supposed Izuku did that often, though–the disappearing. He’d go off by himself to some random corner of campus, or just off into his own head. Maybe that was why Katsuki chose to go looking for him, to find out just exactly where he ran off to. To see where he went to hide.

On his second guess, Katsuki had found him: alone on the rooftop, watching quietly as the light sank into the nothing. 

Katsuki had called out to him, asking why the hell he was up here. It had taken a second for Izuku to respond, but when he did, all he gave was just a slight tilt of his head that was most likely meant to be a shrug. He kept his somber eyes glued forward, not saying anything else, and that was that. 

Whether it was an invitation or not didn’t matter. Katsuki decided to take a seat alongside Izuku, if just to see how much further he could follow him to wherever he was trying to go.

That had led them to here: sitting on a rooftop for about 15 minutes now, not saying a word. They had a good view of the forest below them that seemingly would never end, so Katsuki supposed he was fine with waiting. Another five minutes, he told himself, then I’ll tell him it’s time to go.

Izuku’s hair was being swept left by the evening breeze, leaving his expression quietly exposed. If Katsuki looked hard enough he could decipher it: it looked kind of lost. All blurry and reaching. A common thing for him, these days.

The odd, long lasting silence was broken when Izuku’s mouth suddenly opened—hesitantly, like it was unsure of itself. Over the sound of the breeze, softly, he said:

“Do you ever…wonder…”

He didn’t continue, but Katsuki was fine to wait in the silence he left. If he thought about it, maybe the reason why the scene in front of them seemed bland to Izuku was because his eyes were too… crowded. Like the whole entire world had managed to shove its way into his head, leaving no room for him to just sit and say the sunset looked beautiful today.

You know, simple, easy shit like that.

His lips were still left open in that lost kind of wonder, the kind that kept you floating aimlessly. And it took a while, but finally he continued, saying in that softly unconscious tone, “Do you ever wonder…what it would have been like? If I never got One for All?”

Katsuki blinked at the question. Izuku was something of a philosopher now, it seemed. A ponderer–he walked through the world in a daze like he was sifting through the what ifs.

Katsuki wasn’t one for what ifs, because what happened was what happened and that was that. No use for any damn pondering. Immediately, he wanted to cut this streamline short and tell Izuku that there was no use in answering this stupid ass question, because it wouldn’t change a thing.

But the way Izuku stared out into that setting void, like he wanted it to take him along with it when it left, tugged at a weak part of Katsuki. He found himself indulging in the sentiment.

“I guess, once or twice, maybe,” Katsuki said slowly. “Not much now, though.”

Silence. The wind just blew past the shells of their ears. It made Katsuki cold; he didn’t know how it made Izuku feel.

“I wonder sometimes,” Izuku said quietly, still staring out at the empty view. “How things would be.”

Katsuki was good at keeping calm under pressure–and he felt the pressure now. An urgency to run away from this topic and probably this ledge and even this campus, too, if he was being honest. But he stayed right where he was, because he could see how things were heading, and if he was going to do anything, he was going to play this smart.

“Well, I know how it would have gone,” Katsuki said to him seriously. “I could tell you how it would go.”

Izuku titled his head a bit, furrowing his brow slightly and looking at the sunset like it was the one stubborn problem he didn’t know how to solve. The problem that haunted. Then he gave his answer.

“Tell me,” he said in a wispy tone.

Katsuki worked his jaw, readjusting where he was sitting. Who knows if he should have said it, who knows. 

Katsuki said, “For one thing, I’d probably be dead. You’d b–”

Izuku was pulled out of his slumber in a blink. His head snapped to the right, brows pinched upwards, eyes wide and burning in shock. “What,” he breathed out. “Kacchan, why would you s—”

“That sludge bastard,” Katsuki continued despite Izuku’s smoke and flames, “would have taken me out some way or another. If you didn’t get One for All, then that just means no one would’ve stepped in to stop him, right?”

Checkmate. Izuku faltered in his fumes. His mouth opened and closed, his eyes taking a frustrated shape. “I…” he tried, looking downwards in thought.

A pause.

 “I change the rules.”

“You can’t change the ru–”

“I change the rules,” Izuku repeated, more firmly this time. He looked back up, eyes determined. “I ran to you. All Might saw and saved you. But he didn’t give me One for All.”

He said, a bit fainter this time, “What happens next?”

Katsuki bit the inside of his cheek. He didn’t like this game. Shouldn’t have answered in the first place, but it was too late to back out now. He was never a quitter.

He exhaled in a short puff through his nose, begrudgingly turning back towards the bleeding orange sky. “I would have spent the summer preparing for the U.A. entrance exams,” he continued. “I would have applied, and I would have gotten in. And you…”

Would Izuku have tried, too? He wanted to say yes, but it was so long ago. Memory was failing him, and he wasn’t sure of a lot of things anymore.

“You would have…too.”

It sounded weak to his own ears. Izuku huffed out a hollow-sounding laugh at this, bringing up his other knee to wrap both arms around them, resting his chin on the bone. “No,” he said easily, as light as a breeze, “I wouldn’t have.”

Katsuki turned to him. “No?” he asked with a raised brow.

Izuku just shook his head. He had a smile that was fighting to carve itself on his skin, but gravity was just strong enough to make sure it didn’t get too far. In bittersweetness, he said, “I met All Might before the sludge villain got to you. I don’t think I ever told you that, though. I asked him if I could be a hero without a quirk, and he told me no. Then he left.” 

Izuku’s lip quirked to the side like a glitch trying to soothe. “I decided to give up on all that then. I don’t think I would have pushed anymore on trying to become a hero after that.”

It was weird how Katsuki’s heart started to hurt all the way up to his throat. Started as an aching pang in his chest, then melted into a thin burning the further up it got. 

He worked his jaw, contemplating, before saying, “All Might’s an asshole.”

Izuku smiled for real this time, albeit in a very tired, fond sort of way. “You don’t mean that,” he huffed out.

“I mean it,” Katsuki said firmly. 

A pause.

“Don’t tell him I said it though.”

Another laugh escaped Izuku’s weary, bittersweet mouth. He shook his head, before sighing and asking lightly, “Alright. What next?”

What next–that was the question. So open ended. What happens when Izuku doesn't get into U.A? How do you make a world that doesn’t exist? 

He pursed his lips, brows furrowed pensively as he thought about it. Katsuki supposed there was one sort of an answer he could give.

You invert it. Up becomes down, antonyms become truths. The sunset that Katsuki was keeping an eye on becomes a sunrise. A world defined by what isn’t.

“Then,” Katsuki continued, having decided, “I would’ve stepped foot into U.A. as an asshole. Would have graduated only slightly less of one.”

A second of contemplation. “That’s…not true,” Izuku said slowly. “You would have made all the friends you have now. You would have changed for them.”

A ray of the sunset flashed in his eyes, and for a moment he couldn’t see shit. Maybe that’s why his sentimental mouth had chosen to say, “Doesn’t matter if I changed for them if you weren’t included in that.” 

You know, blindness and all that. Sight affects your brain. That’s…the reason why.

Izuku went absolutely silent beside him. He always got like this, on the rare occasion when Katsuki would blurt out some stupid, corny stuff like that. And in turn, it always made Katsuki feel like a damn idiot.

No. Brave. Be brave. 

“I just mean…” Katsuki tried, rubbing at the wrist of his right hand. “At the core of all my…asshole-ness…is you. How I treated you. I would have been too much of a coward to reach out to you if you hadn’t come to U.A, so…yeah maybe I would have changed. But maybe that wouldn’t have mattered.”

Silence.

Katsuki finally glanced over to Izuku. He still looked lost.

 “I think,” he finally said in that small, confused voice, chin still resting on his knees, “it would have mattered, Kacchan.”

Katsuki just shrugged. “Agree to disagree,” he said.

Izuku furrowed his brow and worked his jaw, but he relented easily enough. 

“Fine,” Izuku huffed. “And then?”

“Well to backtrack,” Katsuki said, leaning to rest his palms behind him, “I’d be competing against myself all throughout highschool, and it would have gotten boring. No one would be interesting enough to try and keep up with, so I would have made myself look like a real dick during training.”

Izuku shook his head exasperatedly from beside him, but Katsuki just continued. “All Might…would have chosen some stuck up ass extra to be his successor. The old man would still be trying to hide his weird sort of double identity and the damn hole in his stomach like an idiot.”

Something more thoughtful and quiet washed over him. The dangers of what-ifs. The power they held.

“Shoto would still be all moody and broody,” Katsuki mused. “He’d still be refusing to use his left, never reaching his full potential. Glasses would probably be more stuck up than he is now, like how he was before. Roundface wouldn’t be all,” he made a vague gesture with his hand, “determined. Inspired? Or maybe she would, I don’t know.”

Katsuki reached for more, for all the marks Izuku had left on all the people he had ever met.

“That one kid,” he said. “From training camp. He’d still be a brat. The kid from Nabu Island would have been targeted for his quirk like before, and I don’t know if we would have been there.”

Another short-lived glance at Izuku showed that he was taking in Katsuki’s words attentively now. He was round-eyed and shut-lipped. He was taken by the tale.

And Katsuki knew when to push an advantage.

“And Eri,” he said quietly, “You wouldn’t have been able to help her. Maybe no one would have.”

Izuku’s throat worked furiously. He kept his eyes locked into the bright, bleeding sky before him. If Katsuki looked hard enough, maybe he could see them shining, overwhelmed.

“We’d have missed a shitty dancer in the school festival,” he continued, reminiscing on what wasn’t. “Some extra would’ve been sitting behind me in class for three years. Aizawa-sensei probably would have expelled us like he said he would. Then he would have told us that it was just a fucked up prank of his. Ears would have never…what was it? Something about note taking, I know you helped her with that once. A lot of shit would be different.”

“And as for you, nerd,” Katsuki said with a tilt of his head. Izuku didn’t look over at him, but that was okay. “You would’ve graduated from some random highschool. Maybe you would have gotten a part-job at some random store. Probably the grocery near your house–the one we would walk to during summer to get those spicy candies I liked. You would’ve gone to university, but only half your heart would be in it. You’d do okay, maybe not the best. You’d go to class, go home. Go to work, go home. And then life would just go on like that.”

“Dull,” Katsuki said simply. “Not as interesting as it is right now.”

Izuku exhaled through his nose like something in him hurt. It was obvious that he was frowning, and that the lines ran deep. For a few seconds he said nothing, just tapped his pointer finger sharply on his arm. 

“You skipped a bunch of stuff, you know,” Izuku said thickly.

A sigh.

Katsuki said, “Yeah, I know.”

“You didn’t say what would have happened to Aizawa-sensei’s eye. You didn’t say that he never would have lost it.”

A pause. 

“Well, maybe he still would ha–”

“You didn’t say that he would have kept his quirk, and his leg, and his eye. That Jirou-san never would have lost her earphone jack or that Uraraka-san never would have gotten stabbed. That none of our classmates would have been left with all the scars they have now if I hadn’t been there to drag you all into my mess.”

“You don’t know tha–”

“You didn’t,” Izuku continued shakily, jaw wavering. “You didn’t say anything about…about your arm. Or about your heart. You didn’t say that…that you never would have…”

Izuku took a trembling breath, shaking his head. “You didn’t say anything about that, Kacchan,” he said tightly.

“Because there’s no point in thinking about that,” Katsuki stressed, tone maybe just a bit too harsh. “I could come up with all the what ifs in the world, Izuku, and it wouldn’t matter. It…” he sighed, throwing his hands exasperatedly in the air. “It wouldn’t matter! It wouldn’t change anything, and sometimes it’s okay that things aren’t different. I mean look at me–I’m fine now, aren’t I? There's no point in trying to ask ‘what if’ about any of that. And I’m…I’m tryin' to show you that…that for all the bad shit that happened, there’s sti–”

“You didn’t say anything about what I did,” Izuku said abruptly. 

It went quiet.

He said it like it took a lot out of him to try and actually do it. His eyes and voice tried to be hard, but they were both just dripping in regret, and in the milliseconds after, he looked at Katsuki like he was trying to brace for an impact. Jaw clenched closed, expression almost wincing.

Katsuki didn’t know what impact he was waiting for, and just furrowed his brows in confusion. “What did you do?” he asked.

Izuku’s brows furrowed in wary confusion, too. “You know,” he insisted.

Katsuki just shook his head slowly, utterly lost.

At this, Izuku’s expression became pulled from every end. He opened and closed his mouth, his eyes pleading to be understood. Reaching desperately for a way for the words to be said without actually having to say them at all.

“You know,” Izuku whispered, like that was as loud as he could afford to be. “You know how it all ended. With,” he swallowed thickly, gaze averting, “with him.”

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds, and–

Katsuki’s face fell in slow realization. 

His mouth opened in the shape of some word, but his voice wasn’t working, so for a second he was just stuck with a frozen, processing look on his face.

He blinked again, and again. Izuku’s expression got even more terrified.

“Is that,” Katsuki managed to say, “what this is all about then? Sh–”

His throat caught on the name. It felt ominous; Katsuki felt like he would summon his ghost if he said it. And if his intuition was right, Izuku would probably combust on the spot hearing it.

“Him?” Katsuki settled for, studying Izuku carefully. 

Izuku’s face pinched inwards, jaw clenched so tight that it looked painful, eyes rounded in wariness. He didn’t answer. 

It was answer enough.

It was silent, and Katsuki couldn’t tell if it was because of Izuku's lack of words or his own. But no one said a thing, and for a moment, they both had come to some silent, unspoken understanding. They went back to where they started: sun-gazing.

Izuku was watching the sun fall down slowly now, with something heavy in his eyes. He inhaled something even heavier than that, and when he exhaled, it didn’t sound like any of the things that something had brought him had left.

“I think…” he said, the daze returning to the shape of his mouth and the shade of his cloudy, jade eyes. “I think I was the wrong person, Kacchan. I don’t…think I should have gotten One for All.”

The words sounded so terribly wrong that desperation and panic were immediate to hit. Suddenly his mouth became a thing of its own, overtaking the silence that was. 

“Your mom and my mom wouldn’t have become friends again,” Katsuki said abruptly. “The old hag is always laughing on the phone because she’s talking with her. All Might wouldn’t have learned how to take a damn break, so he’d have really been left a shriveled fuckin’ carrot by now. You wouldn’t have made all the friends you have now, the people who actually give a shit about you. And to top it all off: the person who would’ve taken your place as All Might’s successor would’ve kicked the fuckin’ bucket before they could even make it to twenty, since their body wouldn’t have been able to hold as many quirks as you can, you shitty, annoying ass–”

“Y-You’re not,” Izuku strained, snapping his head to the right. His eyes were wide and burning. “You’re not being fair right now, Kacchan.”

“I’m not tryin’ to be,” Katsuki said sharply. “After all this bullshit that I’ve been letting you get away with saying, I don’t think I should be.”

Izuku shook his head, brows furrowed. “We have to be fair about this. We have to, because the way everything ended,” he said, looking down as though he were reminiscing over all the haunting memories, “was… wrong.”

Katsuki raised his brows. “Wrong?” he asked incredulously. “The hell do you mean wrong–this was always going to be a shitshow whether we liked it or not. You really think there’s a right way this could have all gone down?”

“Yes,” Izuku breathed out, looking back up. “I-I should have saved him.”

Silence. 

Confessions were always heavy hitters. 

“I…”

And so he faltered. Something in Izuku started to fall and slip down, like the paint on the wall, like the sun into the nothing. Down, down, down.

“I should have saved him,” he said thickly, shoulders drooping with the weight of those words.

Slipping and falling, settling right down into something. Katsuki just stared at him for a second, because Izuku was becoming a sunset of his own. 

What even was a damn sunset, though? Was it the light that was created, or was it the fact that it was sinking that made it?

And saved him. What did it mean to be saved? What did it mean to fail at something like that? If things weren’t so cut clean and pristine, how did someone go about answering that kind of question?

Was that why Izuku looked so lost all the time?

He never really thought about it–if Katsuki himself had felt avenged by Shigaraki’s death. Did it feel like victory? Did it just feel like another dark smudge that had painted the whole memory of that spring as horrible? His feelings seemed inconsequential compared to Izuku’s on this matter, but…was there an answer to this kind of question?

Katsuki worked his jaw, turning to stare straight ahead. The sun was halfway gone already. This was all too complicated. 

And yet–

“Yeah,” Katsuki said regrettably. “You should have.”

He knew what was coming, and he braced for the impact. Izuku huffed shakily like he was about to cry, so Katsuki said, “And All Might should have been the one to end it before it all got to you. Same for the user before him, and the user before her, and over and over again, Izuku.”

From the corner of his eye he could see that Izuku, painted in a soft orange glow, had a palm pushed up to his eye, his head turned sharply away. Katsuki didn’t reach a hand out, because to put it honestly: he was never quite sure of what the right thing to do was in moments like these.

So he just continued. He became a ponderer of his own. “Maybe Principle Nezu shouldn’t have let us follow the pros onto the field in the first place,” he said, contemplative gaze kept forwards. “Maybe your mom and my parents should have pulled us out of U.A. before shit had the chance to get too real. Maybe your dumb dad shouldn’t have fucked off to who knows where, or maybe things should have changed a hundred years ago so that we didn’t have to deal with this mess now.”

Katsuki bit the inside of his cheek. The sky was so red and beautiful, and Izuku was still saying nothing. It all just coaxed the words out of him.

“And it’s not the same,” he said quietly. “Not even close, but…I should have been better to you.”

Izuku’s face was turned away determinedly, and shoulders were shuddering every so slightly now with each breath he took. Katsuki couldn’t get himself to really look over at him. Felt like too much.

“I…”

He huffed, studying the way the sun fell slowly, the way the light kept reaching despite all that. “I told myself…that I don’t give a shit about what ifs. But…” he said, getting lost in a daze of his own, “That’s not true. There’s one thing I wonder about now.”

He exhaled shakily. “Sometimes,” Katsuki said, heart pounding in his throat. He swallowed thickly. “Sometimes I wonder…what would it have been like. If I had never treated you so badly. How things would’ve been.”

He said, “I-I think it would have been good.”

The sun was disappearing below the horizon, light slowly disappearing along with it.

“And I regret it,” Katsuki breathed out. “Everyday, I do. I’ll probably regret it for my whole life, and then some.” 

But Katsuki’s sunsets were never about sinking or escaping–it just meant a new day was coming. With the daze pulled out of him, he turned. “And I’m sure that every day… you regret what you did, too.”

Izuku’s head was turned sharply away, yet still he nodded. He nodded and nodded and nodded until finally a small sound finally escaped him, but he was quick to crumple into himself, broken face hidden in the labyrinth of his limbs.

This time, Katsuki knew what he wanted to do. He shifted to his knees and moved to grab Izuku firmly by the shoulders. Izuku just sniffled and shook and cried, refusing to look up.

“And I can’t take that back,” Katsuki told him ardently, leaning in close enough to be heard, “even though every day I wake up wishing I could. It’s permanent. And…I can’t tell you the answer to yours, because it sure as hell isn’t the same, but for me…I know it’s gonna hurt. Maybe it’ll feel that way forever, and maybe…maybe that just means I care.”

Katsuki sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t fuckin’ know. I don’t know, okay, but what I’m trying to say is…I hold it. I let it hurt, and I try to let it change me for the better. And I don’t know if it’s working but…I hope it does. I try.”

“You tried,” he said, shaking the already trembling shoulders of Izuku. “You hear me? Lesser people would have settled on taking him out in an instant, but you tried.”

Izuku lifted his head, his face a wet, shining mess. “But,” he tried, shaking his head in refusal. “But if I had–”

“Stop. No more what ifs,” Katsuki stressed. “You’re gonna get tired of this, Izuku.”

Izuku’s expression just got all confused, so Katsuki’s tone just got even more imploring. “You’re gonna get tired of the maybes. Sooner or later you’re gonna figure out that it’s too much to dwell on in the way that you’re doing right now. And this isn’t me telling you that you can’t feel bad about…what you did, or that you have to pretend like it never happened. But I’m just saying that…you have to learn how to live with it somehow. And I’m sorry you have to deal with this, because you’ve already had to deal with enough shit in your life, but…you can’t keep going like this. You can’t… live your life if you're too stuck trying to change the shit you can’t take back.”

Izuku’s eyes were wide and shining, still desperate for an answer. “I don’t know how to live with something like this, Kacchan,” he got out, whole body shivering like the breeze had finally reached his bones. “I don’t know how.”

He shook his head, like this it was too much in its entirety to fathom. “I-I’m always thinking about the things that went wrong. It feels like,” he sighed painfully, looking off to the side. “It feels like everything went wrong. And sometimes I think that maybe it was because…I did everything wrong. I-I ran off on my own, I got there too late. I couldn’t convince him, o-or figure out another way to…”

His breath hitched; his expression oscillated between too many emotions. “Do you think that’s what happened?” he asked, voice breaking. “D-Did I do it all wrong?”

Katsuki’s gaze faltered. He thought about it. Tried to recall the decisions that were made, the things that could have been done.

He came to one half-assed sounding conclusion. But it’s what he felt to be true.

“I don’t think there’s…right or wrong when it comes to this shit, anymore,” Katsuki said weakly. “Life is just what happens. You got the quirk. You used it. You lost it. Between then and now, you…you only did what you could with what you had. Now you’re here, and I’m here, and our whole class is here. Still here.”

He opened and closed his mouth, because everything felt so oddly unsure. “I can’t…give you an answer or…tell you what went wrong and why,” Katsuki said. “I can’t tell you that shit happens for a reason, either. If that’s what you’ve been looking for these past few years, if that's why you look like you’ve been sleeping this whole time instead of living, then…” he sighed, “you can stop.”

It felt like a horrible thing to say, but still he said it. “You’re not going to make sense of things. You won’t find what you’re looking for, Izuku.”

The whole of him looked worn down by hard-hitting dread, like he wanted to shake his head at Katsuki and say no, that can’t be true. But unfortunately for him, there was hardly any daze left for him to hide himself behind. No haze either. The only thing left in Izuku’s green, regrettable eyes was clarity. A troubled, conflicted clarity, albeit.

Still, he gave it one last push.

“And if I stop looking for an answer,” Izuku said wearily. “If I,” he made a vague, tired gesture with his hands, “learn to live with all of this. H-How do I make up for everything? How will I know when I’ve finally done that?”

Katsuki’s expression faltered. 

He reflected over the time and the moments, the proof of change that he held in his hands. The slivers of them he knew to be true. But deep down, the uncertainty was still there. 

“I don’t…know.”

He said slowly, “I don’t know if…I’ve gotten to that part yet. To tell you how it goes.”

Recognition flashed in Izuku’s eyes, but just as he was about to object, Katsuki interjected quickly, swatting that away.

“You think too lowly of yourself, though, you know,” he said, looking off to the side. “It’s not like you wanted to finish things like that. Shit just got…desperate.”

Thankfully for Katsuki, Izuku allowed the conversation to be veered away. Unluckily for himself, however, the penance just seeped right back into his bones. “Doesn’t mean that I don’t feel guilty about it,” he said with a frown. “Doesn’t mean that I’m not…guilty.”

Guilty and weary—Izuku’s expression was riddled with all that and more. When he wiped a heavy hand down his face, it didn’t seem to wash away. 

There was no other way he could turn, nowhere left to hide from that fading orange light that told them it was time to begin again.

So quietly, regrettably, reluctantly, he said, “Tell me.”

“Tell me what happens next. Tell me how it goes.”

He said it like he already knew what was coming, though. Katsuki knew, too.

“You learn to live with it,” Katsuki said, words resolute with some room left for sympathy. “You go and do something better because of it. And someday, somehow, it gets easier. You just have to start moving forward. Even just a little bit.

Silently, Izuku looked off to the side and sighed. It was a battle, the way his expression turned left and right like the thought of having to move on burned him right through. But when he took another breath, it was obvious how it’d go.

“Okay,” Izuku finally relented, face pinched like it hurt to say it.

Katsuki studied Izuku. The guilt had made its home in his eyes, the remorse in his jaw. None of this felt like total victory. It didn’t feel like everything had been washed away, but still Katsuki nodded. “Okay,” he said firmly.

There’d be more sunsets, and more rooftops. More words and more silence. As Katsuki returned to where he had been before, he made a silent promise to find a way to be there for all of that.

The sky was more purple now, with only faint traces of red peeking out from the horizon. They both just stared at the sight–Izuku, who was worn out, and Katsuki, who was rolling a lot of shit over and sideways in his head.

He was lucky enough to say that he’d made some progress moving past all of this; he knew Izuku hadn’t, but he didn’t know that he was still this stuck in it. The carpet was rolling back, leaving them at the very edges of it again. They’d have to start and roll it out all over again. This felt like a new beginning, one of the hundreds they’ve already had, probably only one of the thousands they will have at this point.

Katsuki almost wished that this one day, this one evening, this one night, would be the cure to everything. He almost wished it would be that easy, but he knew that wishful thinking like that would be pointless. Today the sun had just set into a new dawn. Just another day.

“It’s been three years, Izuku,” Katsuki said, breaking the silence, feet swinging idly over the ledge. “I didn’t buy the bullshit that you were over all this yet, but…you seemed pretty set on making it seem so.” He looked over at Izuku, who was still pensively studying the horizon. “How come you’ve never brought it up with anyone?” 

He wrung his fingers in his hands, gaze shifting to look down at them. “I don’t know,” Izuku said slowly with a slight shrug. “Never really…felt like it, I guess.” 

Katsuki just huffed, shaking his head incredulously at this. 

“I’m serious, okay,” Izuku insisted. “It never came up. Today just turned out to be…easier. To do that.“ 

He worried his lip in thought, gaze shifting off to the side.

“And plus…” he said, turning a little more to the left so that his expression was hidden. “I don’t really know how to say all this…to anyone else.”

A pause.

“Oh,” Katsuki said.

Izuku was quiet and fidgeting with the cuff of his sleeve. Katsuki just swallowed thickly.

“Well,“ he said. ”I got…two ears. And my hearing isn’t gone yet, so…”

Silence.

Then Izuku burst out in breathless laughter, buckling over and covering his face with his hand.

“What?” Katsuki demanded. Izuku just laughed harder. 

Katsuki fumed, ears burning. “Y-You get what I mean, okay!”

Izuku shook his head, turning to him with a cheesy smile, eyes crinkling fondly. “It’s okay,” he said. “I like how you can’t just say ‘I’ll be around if you need’ like a normal person, Kacchan.”

“Oh—fuck you,” Katsuki grounded out, shoving Izuku’s shoulder as he fought his own smile. Izuku just chuckled again. When he returned to gazing at the cooling hues of the sky, Katsuki was glad to see that there was no haze in the way he watched. He was simply present.

Katsuki gave the view one last glance before turning back, and just as he was about to open his mouth to say it was probably time to head home, Izuku spoke again.

He said, contemplative and quiet, “There’s another thing you forgot to say, actually.”

Katsuki furrowed his brow in wary confusion. “And what’s that?” he asked slowly.

It looked like Izuku had to work up the courage to get the words out, for some reason. He inhaled through his nose, looked up at the part of the sky that was already dark, then exhaled. 

“If I never got One for All,” Izuku finally said carefully, “then… I never would have known what it feels like to fly.”

Katsuki blinked. Izuku was just staring up at the approaching night; Katsuki was just staring at him.

He wanted to smile. Maybe he was smiling. 

“Yeah,” Katsuki agreed. “That’s true. Guess we can add it to the list.”

And Izuku got bolder. “I dream about it sometimes,” he continued, a look in his eyes like he was pulled back into the tale. “That I’m still flying. That I still have One for All.”

He looked over at Katsuki. “I have a lot of dreams about that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The stars would be peaking out from above them anytime soon. It was late and it was cold and it was about time they went home already, but Katsuki didn’t say anything about leaving.

Instead, he said to Izuku simply, “Tell me about them.”