There are things in this world that burn so long and so bright that people forget they were ever anything other than fire. They forget the wick. They forget the pale column of quiet wax beneath. They look at the light and think: that is the whole of it, that is all there is. They warm their hands at the blaze and never once consider what is being consumed to keep them comfortable.

Katsuki Bakugou had been burning for thirty-eight years.

He stood in the corridor of Might Memorial Hall — named for a man he had long since surpassed in raw explosive force, though never, perhaps, in the holy patience that the Symbol of Peace had carried in the architecture of his smile (that one was Izuku) — and he listened to the noise on the other side of the stage door. It was a sound he knew in his chest the way one knows a heartbeat: layered and vast, the roar of a crowd that had gathered for some kind of a performance some kind of a reckoning. Forty thousand people had filled that auditorium. Another six hundred million watched on screens across the world.

They had come to hear Dynamight recieve an award for bravery. Perhaps also, to hear him talk.

He pressed one hand flat to the cool steel of the door. His knuckles — scarred and  asymmetric for a long time now, beautiful in the way that old tools are beautiful, worn to their purpose — did not tremble. They never trembled. That, at least, had never changed in him.

What had changed was this: he was tired.

It was the tiredness of a man who has run too far or slept too little. The tiredness like the ordinary exhaustion that sleep cures and coffee forestalls. The tiredness of a candle that has burned down so close to its own base that the flame licks, at last, at the plate beneath — that particular, irreducible fatigue that is less a condition of the body than a confession of the soul. He had given so much heat for so long that he could feel, with a clarity that almost amused him, the precise outline of what he had left.

The door opened.

His manager — a sharp old woman named Hoshino who had handled his public affairs for eleven years and who loved him, he was certain, in the strange and professional way that one loves a very demanding and occasionally explosive piece of infrastructure — leaned her head through.

"They're ready," she said.

"Yeah," said Bakugou.

He straightened his collar. It was black, simple, without insignia. He had asked that there be no insignia tonight. No orange. No blast motif. Just a regular man in a good suit with very good posture, walking out onto a stage.

The roar, when he stepped into the light, hit him like a physical thing.

Of candles burning down. Of what a flame looks like in its final minutes: not smaller, no of course not smaller, but somehow more concentrated, more itself, casting a light that is all the more golden for being almost gone.

He stepped up to the microphone holding the award behind his back now.

The crowd quieted with an almost supernatural swiftness, as crowds often do when their know something important is going take place.

"I'm not going to make a speech," he said. His voice was exactly as it had always been — low, certain, with the particular texture of a man who has never once doubted the weight his words carry. "I hate speeches. You all know that."

There was laughter. Warm and  immediate.

"I'm retiring," he said. And then, because he was Bakugou Katsuki and had never in his life softened an edge that didn't need softening: "Effective immediately. As of tonight, there is no more Dynamight."

He did not bother thanking anybody for the award.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing he had ever heard.

The press conference afterward was, by any objective measure, a masterwork of controlled chaos. Sixty journalists in a room built for thirty? forty? Their questions overlapping like waves, each one trying to be the one whose inquiry would crack him open and reveal — what? Some wound beneath the composure? Some hidden devastation? They did not understand that a man can retire the way a river changes course: not because the water is gone, but because the water has simply found a new direction.

He sat at the long table with a glass of water he did not drink and answered their questions with the patience of a man who has finally, in the very last act, decided to be patient.

"Dynamight — is this about the injury last spring?"

"No."

"Are you in talks with the Hero Public Safety Commission about a new role?"

"No."

"What will you do now?"

He paused. It was a genuine pause — the kind that comes not from uncertainty but from the recognition that a true answer deserves the space to breathe.

"Live," he said. "I'm going to live."

A journalist in the third row — young, earnest, the kind who still believed that questions could contain revelations — raised her hand and, when he nodded at her, asked in a voice that was trying very hard not to shake: "Dynamight — after twenty years — who are you, if not Dynamight?"

And there it was. The question that all the other questions had been secretly asking. The one that the whole industry of hero journalism had circled for two decades without ever quite landing on directly.

Bakugou looked at her for a long moment. The room was absolutely quiet. Even the cameras seemed to hold their breath.

Then something shifted in his face — not a smile, not really, but the precursor to a smile, the slight adjustment that happened in his features before warmth arrived, like the subsurface tremor before the quake. His eyes, which had always been extraordinary — red as the inside of a fire, red as the first morning light hitting glass — went briefly, unmistakably soft.

"I've been Dynamight for a long time," he said. His voice was the same. It was always the same. And yet something beneath it had changed frequencies entirely. "I've been Dynamight since I was fifteen years old. I've been Dynamight even in my sleep. On my birthday and at funerals and in the hospital and while I was eating breakfast and some emergency called me." He paused. "I think—"

He stopped and the room waited.

He tried again, and this time the words came out with the rough, unhurried quality of something that has been a long time in the forming, like a stone that has spent forty years being shaped by a river before someone picks it up and finally sees what it is.

"I think," he said, "I think I want to be Bakugou Katsuki again." 

"And who is Bakugou Katsuki, sir?"

He smiled now, looking over in direction of the doors where he knew Izuku awaited.

"A  husband, a father and just a man who gets to be at home ever present in the lives of the ones I love."

The silence that answered him was a different kind than the one in the auditorium. This one was tender. This one was the silence of sixty people suddenly, simultaneously understanding something they had not known they were about to understand.

He picked up his glass of water, drank from it at last, set it down, and stood.

"We're done," he said, because he was still, in the end, himself. "This is the last of me. Thank you."

Thank you. For the first time in his professional career, he thanked the people in the room. And he walked out of the room while the cameras were still running and the journalists were still writing and the world was only beginning to understand what it had just witnessed: a man reaching into the very heart of the fire he had built around himself for twenty years, and choosing, with extraordinary deliberation, to step out of it.

The clip, predictably, destroyed every metric the internet had for measuring the spread of human feeling. By midnight it had been viewed five hundred million times. By morning it had spawned a thousand essays and a hundred opinion columns and an incalculable number of people sitting quietly in their kitchens, in the dark, thinking about the things they had named themselves, and whether those names still fit.

Midoriya Izuku watched it from their living room couch after putting their daughter to bed.

He had seen it live, of course — he had been in the fourth row of that auditorium, in a plain seat with no special designation, wearing a baseball cap, and sunglasses, smiling with tears in his eyes within thirty seconds of Katsuki opening his mouth. He cried the way he cried everything, generously and without apology, as though grief and love and pride were all the same current moving through him, and there was no shame in being moved by a current.

But now he watched it again, at midnight, in the blue-lit quiet of their home, because some things need to be witnessed more than once before the full weight of them settles.

I think I want to be Bakugou Katsuki again. A husband, a father, and just a man who gets to be home, ever present in lives of the ones I love.

On the screen, Katsuki's face did not change. It never changed in public. But Izuku had spent fifteen years learning to read the tectonic language of that face — the particular set of his jaw that meant I am feeling something I will not tell you about until later, the slight drop of his chin that meant I am choosing this word carefully, and — rarest of all, most precious of all — the microsecond of naked openness that moved through his eyes when he said something true.

It had been there. A whole world, compressed into a fraction of a second.

Just a man who gets to be home, ever present in the lives of the ones I love.

Izuku closed the laptop.

He sat in the dark and pressed his scarred hands together — his hands that had been broken and rebuilt so many times they were more scar than original, his hands that had held Katsuki's face and caught Katsuki's fists and pulled Katsuki back from a hundred different ledges of self-destruction across the course of a marriage that was nothing like what either of them had imagined love would look like, and everything like what it actually was — and he breathed.

He heard the key in the lock and smiled.

Katsuki Bakugou had, over the course of his career, entered many thousands of rooms. He had entered them through windows and rooftops and walls he had made himself, trailing smoke and light. He had entered them at speed, at angle, at altitude. He had entered them in triumph and in crisis and in the small, undignified ways that real work always eventually demands.

He had never, in all of that, managed to figure out how to enter a room where Izuku was waiting without feeling something enormous happen in his chest.

It was dark. The lamp by the couch was off. Izuku sat in the ambient glow from the street outside, which filtered through their curtains in thin stripes, and he was looking at Katsuki with an expression that Katsuki had spent years looking at and still could not name — something between reverence and grief and the particular, sunlit tenderness that had no word in any language he knew.

Katsuki closed the door behind him.

He set his keys on the hook — the one Izuku had installed crookedly four years ago, that Katsuki had threatened to replace every week and then hadn't, because he had quietly decided that the crookedness was exactly right — and he stood in the hallway in his good suit and his unknotted tie and the silence stretched between them, warm as candlelight.

"Hey Kacchan," said Izuku.

"Hey baby," said Katsuki. "Is the brat asleep already?"

"Yes. She tried waiting up for you, but she passed out ten minutes after dinner."

A pause. The kind of pause that two people who know each other very deeply can have without it being emptiness — the kind that is, in fact, quite full of things being understood without being spoken.

"I was watching your thing," Izuku said.

"I figured." Katsuki moved into the room, loosening his tie the rest of the way, pulling it off and dropping it over the back of the chair he always dropped things on, the chair that Izuku periodically cleared with an expression of martyred patience. "You're a sap."

"A husband, a father," Izuku said. "Just a man who gets to be home ever present in the lives of the ones he loves. With six hundred million people watching, you said—"

"Idiot, have you memorised it?"

"Of course I—" Izuku's voice did something complicated, the way his voice sometimes did when he was trying to contain something too large for the container of his composure. "I love you Kacchan."

"I love you too Izuku" Katsuki said, simply. As though it were the simplest thing in the world. As though fifteen years of complicated, combustible, extraordinary marriage had been leading, always, to the plain declarative fact of it. "A husband; that's what I am, Izuku. That's—" He paused. He sat down on the couch beside his husband, close enough that their arms touched, and he looked at his hands. "That's what I wanted to say. I wanted to say it where everyone could hear."

Izuku sniffled.

"Don't," Katsuki said, preemptively.

"I'm not—"

"You're about to cry."

"I already cried," Izuku said, with extraordinary dignity for a man whose voice was absolutely doing the thing it did before more crying happened. "In the fourth row. A lot."

"I know. I could see you. You were terrible at being inconspicuous."

"I was wearing a hat."

"And glasses. You were wearing a hat and glasses and crying into your sleeve and the hat and the glasses did nothing." Katsuki turned to look at him then, and the room contracted around the fact of their proximity — Izuku's face in the half-dark, the way the streetlight caught the wet brightness of his eyes, the way he was already, helplessly, smiling through whatever was threatening to spill. "You big idiot," Katsuki said, and it came out the way it always came out when it meant something else entirely, when it meant you are the thing I am most grateful for, when it meant I have loved you since we were small and stupid and running toward each other's fires, when it meant everything that he had never been built to say in the language of ordinary men.

Izuku laughed.

And then Izuku turned and Katsuki met him halfway and they were kissing in the dark of their living room, which smelled of Izuku's tea and Katsuki's sweat and the ordinary, irreplaceable scent of a life shared.

There is a quality that long love develops which brief love does not have access to: a fluency. A shared vocabulary of touch that requires no translation. Katsuki knew this the way he knew the weight and pitch and timing of his own explosions — not consciously, not with thought, but with the whole instrument of his body. He knew the exact angle at which Izuku tilted his chin. He knew the particular way Izuku's hands moved when they found his face — like reaching , like arriving, the way hands arrive at something they have been meaning to return to.

Izuku's palms were warm against his jaw. They were always warm. Even his scars were warm. Katsuki had memorized every ridge and valley of those scars the way a blind man memorizes a beloved face: slowly and completely, with the understanding that the knowledge was a gift being given to him.

He kissed his husband with the particular attention of a man who has decided to stop being in a hurry. There was no urgency in it tonight — no desperation, none of the fierce and hungry quality that had characterized the earlier years, when they had kissed like two people who hadn't yet fully believed the other would stay. This was different. This was the kissing of people who have stayed. Who have chosen, again and again, through all the ordinary and extraordinary difficulties of a real life together, to stay — and who find in that choosing a sweetness that is richer, deeper, more textured than the sweetness of first things.

Izuku pulled back just far enough to breathe. His forehead rested against Katsuki's. In the dark, his eyes were very bright.

"Are you okay?" he asked, the way he always asked — not as a question about the surface of things but as an inquiry into the deeper country, the interior weather.

"Yeah," Katsuki said. He thought about it properly, the way he'd been learning, over years and with great reluctance and ultimately with a surprising degree of willingness, to actually think about things properly before answering. "Yeah. I think I actually am."

"You seemed—" Izuku hesitated. His thumb moved along Katsuki's cheekbone, the slow and idle movement of a man who has simply arrived somewhere and sees no reason to leave. "You seemed lighter. At the press conference. You seemed lighter than I've seen you in a long time."

"Lighter," Katsuki repeated. He tasted the word. "Yeah. Yeah, that's—" He exhaled. "It's like putting something down. Something I'd been carrying so long I forgot I was carrying it. It was just part of my arms, you know? Part of what my arms felt like. And then you put it down and your arms feel—"

"Strange," Izuku said quietly.

"Strange," Katsuki agreed. "But good. Strange-good."

"Kacchan." Izuku said his name with the same weight he always said it — like a word that meant something beyond itself. Like a word that had accrued, over years of use between them, a whole civilization of meaning. "I'm proud of you."

Katsuki smiled. This was always the one that got him — not the declarations of love, not the grand gestures, both of which he had grown accustomed to and could receive with something approaching grace. It was the pride. The simple, unqualified, unhierarchical pride. Izuku said it the way you say something true, without inflection, without the need for it to mean anything other than exactly what it said, and every time he said it Katsuki felt it land in some structural part of himself and do something to the architecture there.

"Shut up," he said.

"No," said Izuku, pleasantly.

And then Katsuki was kissing him again, because it was easier than arguing and also because he wanted to, because he had always wanted to, because this was the one appetite that had never burned down — not in fifteen years of their marriage or the twenty-four of their relationship, not in the ordinary grind of shared finances and scheduling conflicts and the specific, intimate irritations of two people sharing a small space, not in any of it. It had only deepened. The want had only grown more itself, the way a piece of music grows more itself when played by musicians who have been playing it together for years and have finally stopped thinking about the notes and started simply being inside the sound.

He pressed Izuku back gently against the arm of the couch and felt Izuku's hands move into his hair — careful and familiar and so purely Izuku that Katsuki could have identified them in the dark with no other information — and somewhere in the city outside their window the world was still processing the news, the feeds were still running, the headlines were still being written.

DYNAMIGHT RETIRES.

THE END OF AN ERA.

WHAT COMES NEXT? ARE WE TO EXPECT HERO DEKU'S RETIREMENT NEXT?

CAN THE WORLD HANDLE IT?

In here, in the dark, in the warmth, the only question was where Izuku wanted to go for breakfast tomorrow. And whether they had the kind of tea he liked. What their daughter wanted for lunch. And whether this was — the couch, the quiet, the unhurried evening, the man beneath his hands — whether this was what people meant when they talked about peace.

He thought it might be.

He thought, with a clarity that surprised him with its simplicity, that it was.

"Your hair is so messy," Izuku said, some time later. They were lying together on the couch in a configuration that should not have worked and did, perfectly, the way only things that have been practiced into ease can work. Izuku's head was on Katsuki's chest. Katsuki's chin rested on the top of Izuku's head. Outside, the city hummed.

"So is yours shut up," Katsuki said. He was most of the way to sleep. His voice had gone low and slow, the way it went when the guard came down — that last, involuntary softening that happened only here, only in this room, only with this specific person who had earned it over fifteen years of patience and stubbornness and the extraordinary, specific love of someone who had always, always, known exactly who Katsuki was beneath the name he'd given himself.

"Yes but I don't have the spike thing," Izuku said. "You have the spikes." He reached up, sleepily, and touched one of them. "They're very dramatic."

"My hair is always dramatic."

"Mm." A pause. The sound of breathing. The city. The dark. "Hey, Kacchan."

"What."

"I'm glad you're going to be home now."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "I've been here."

"I know," Izuku said. "But now all of you is going to be here." He turned slightly, enough to press a kiss to the side of Katsuki's throat — unhurried, gentle, the kind of kiss that is not a beginning but a punctuation. "That's different. That's — I'm glad of it. I've wanted — I've wanted all of you here for a long time."

Katsuki stared at the ceiling. The shadows shifted. The city breathed.

"Yeah," he said, at last. "Me too."

The world did not take it quietly, of course. It never did.

The heroes came first — as they always did in the beginning of any great change in the profession, when the loss of a pillar sent the whole structure shuddering and reassessing its weight. Uraraka sent flowers and a card that made Izuku cry in the kitchen. Kirishima called seven times in the first forty-eight hours and was gently informed, by Katsuki himself, that the seventh call was the last one he would receive for a week, which Kirishima received with good-natured devastation. Todoroki came in person, which was less alarming than it should have been, and sat in their kitchen and drank tea with the composed and marble-pale expression of a man who is not going to say that he is sad, absolutely not, that is not what is happening here, and stayed for three hours.

The public grieved the way publics always grieve the retirement of a hero: loudly, briefly, and with a sincerity that was not insincere just because it was also somewhat theatrical. Vigils happened in cities. Fan sites updated for the last time and pinned their final posts. Opinion columnists wrote seventeen thousand words about legacy, impact, the changing face of heroism in the modern era.

None of it touched him. He read none of it. He was too busy sleeping in past seven for the first time in twenty years, and making Izuku's coffee the way Izuku liked it — too sweet, embarrassingly sweet, Katsuki made it with an expression of dignified martyrdom every time — and learning, in the unhurried way of someone who is finally allowing himself to learn, what it felt like to simply be a man in a house with another man who loved him.

It felt, he decided, on the fourth morning, when the light came through the kitchen window at that particular angle that made Izuku's curls look like a halo and made the whole room smell like warmth, like toast and green tea and sunlight on wood — it felt like the first breath after a very long time underwater.

It felt like surfacing.

It felt like his own name in his own mouth.

And perhaps it was. Perhaps that was the precise and simple truth of it.

Three weeks after the retirement, Izuku found a candle.

It was in the back of the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, behind the extra towels and the collection of half-empty products that neither of them had ever quite managed to finish — the detritus of a life shared, which accumulates in bathroom cabinets the way sediment accumulates at the bottom of a river: slowly, completely, without anyone deciding it should. The candle was old. White, or it had been once — now the colour of old piano keys, of aged wax, of things that have been waiting in the dark for a long time. It was more than halfway melted. Someone, at some point, had burned it most of the way down and then stopped. It retained its shape — vaguely cylindrical, recognizably a candle — but the wax had slipped and slid and resettled over time, giving it a quality that was simultaneously diminished and, in its diminishment, somehow more particular. More itself. Like something that had been through something and come out the other side.

"Hey," Izuku called. "Did you know we had a candle back here?"

Katsuki appeared in the doorway, towel over one shoulder, a cup of coffee in each hand. He looked at the candle. Something moved through his expression, the way weather moves through an open field.

"My mom gave us that," he said. "When we moved in. She said every house needs a candle for emergencies." He paused. "We used it. During the blackout. Remember?"

Izuku did remember. It had been the second year of their marriage. There'd been a grid failure in the wake of a major villain incident — one of those structural failures that followed big battles the way shadows follow light — and the whole block had gone dark for six hours. They had sat on the bathroom floor, he and Katsuki, because the bathroom had no windows and they hadn't wanted to risk the light being seen, and they had talked. Talked and talked, in the way that darkness facilitates and daylight sometimes makes harder — talked about the things they were afraid of and the things they wanted and the ways in which the life they were trying to build together was both harder and stranger and more wonderful than they had known how to anticipate.

The candle had burned between them on the tile floor. They had fallen asleep there, in the dark, with the small flame going.

When Izuku had woken in the early hours, the power restored, the bathroom bright, the candle had been burning still — lower, considerably lower, half the height it had started — and Katsuki had been asleep against the bathtub with his head tipped back, and Izuku had looked at him in the doubled light of the lamp and the flame and thought, with a force that was close to overwhelming: I want this. I want all of this. I want this man and this life and even the difficulty of it and all the years of it that I cannot see yet. I want them. I choose them.

He had blown the candle out to save it.

And then they had moved, eventually, to the new apartment (because Izuku was somewhat a hoarder), and the candle had come with them, tucked into a box, and had found its way to the back of the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, where it had been waiting — as things wait when they are keeping a promise they've been given — for whatever came next.

"We should light it," Izuku said.

Katsuki was quiet for a moment. He held out a coffee cup and Izuku took it and they stood in the bathroom doorway together, looking at the half-melted, old, specific candle.

"Yeah," said Katsuki. "Okay."

They lit it in the living room, on the coffee table, because the kitchen was too bright and the bedroom felt too pointed and the living room was where they always ended up — the room that had gathered the most of their particular life together, that smelled the most of them, that bore in its worn corners and its too-full bookshelves and its crooked key hook the most evidence of their specific, irreplaceable occupancy.

Katsuki lit it without a match. He brought his thumb and forefinger together and made — not an explosion, not remotely an explosion, the tiniest imaginable application of his quirk — a small, controlled, very precise spark.

A jeweler's flame.

The kind of restraint he'd spent years learning. The kind that had always been possible in him, that had always been there beneath the detonations, waiting to be chosen.

The wick caught. and the flame steadied.

It was small and warm and gold. It cast a circle of light that reached them both. It made the room feel held.

They sat together on the couch — no particular drama to it, no ceremony, just the ordinary miracle of two people sitting down together in a room they have made theirs — and they looked at the candle burning.

"It might not have much left," Izuku said.

"Maybe," Katsuki said. "Or maybe it's got more than we think." He tilted his head slightly, the way he did when he was considering something. "Wax is—" He stopped. Tried again. "It's not gone, what's burned. It just changed. It went into the air. It made light. It wasn't wasted."

Izuku looked at him. The candle light moved in his eyes.

"Kacchan," he said, very softly.

"Yeah baby?" said Katsuki.

"I'm so—"

"Uh oh."

"Shut up."

"You're going to say something."

"I was going to say," Izuku said, "that I love you. That's all. That's the whole sentence."

And Katsuki — who had been many things, who had been loud and difficult and blazing and relentless, who had been Dynamight for twenty years and a hero for twenty-three, who had fought at altitudes and at sea level and in burning buildings and in empty air, who had won things and lost things and built things from the wreckage of things he had broken, who had learned, slowly and with great effort and some considerable internal resistance, to receive love as well as he was capable of giving it — looked at his husband in the candle light, looked at the man who had known him when he was four and furious and so terrified of being ordinary that he'd decided instead to be incandescent, and he said:

"Yeah," he said. "I know my love." And then, because some things bear saying even when they are known: "Me too. For a long time. Forever. Me too."

Izuku moved into him with the ease of long practice, of long love — tucked himself under Katsuki's arm, laid his head against the steady warmth of his chest, and they sat in the light of the half-melted candle and listened to the city and breathed.

The candle burned.

Not forever — nothing burns forever, and the candle had already given a great deal of itself to the dark. But it burned with a fullness that had nothing to do with its height. It burned with the complete and generous attention of something that has finally been allowed to be what it is: not a symbol, or a function, or the object around which other things are organized. Just a small warm light in a room where two people are sitting together, which is, when you consider it, one of the oldest and most irreplaceable things a light can do.

Outside, the world went on making its noise — the city and the headlines and the hero rankings and the endless, restless machinery of a civilization that was always burning through something in order to keep itself lit.

In here, in the quiet, Bakugou Katsuki pressed a kiss to the top of his husband's head. Izuku made a small sound and held on tighter. The candle flame moved — caught by some imperceptible current in the air, tilting briefly, recovering, steadying — and cast two shadows on the wall behind them.

Long and quiet.

Indistinguishable, almost, from a single shadow.

Almost — but not quite. Never quite. Because they were, after everything, two separate people who had chosen each other, which is different from and more than the same person twice. They were Katsuki and Izuku. They were the boy who had been born burning and the boy who had decided to reach into the fire anyway, and they had made of that impossible meeting something that neither of them could have made alone.

The candle burned.

And burned.

And when it finally guttered — much later, after they had fallen asleep there, against each other, the way they had once fallen asleep on a bathroom floor with a different version of the same flame — it went out gently. The way good fires do when they have given all they have. Without flair. Without regret. The smoke curled upward, thin and pale, and was gone. And the room was dark, and warm, and full of the scent of extinguished wax and the sound of two people breathing, and the street light came through the curtains in thin golden stripes and fell across them both like a benediction.

The flame was out.

But the warmth — the warmth lasted.

The warmth, as it always does, lasted.

They bought a new candle the next day. A white one, clean and whole, with no history in it yet. Izuku put it in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, because habits are the bones of a life together and you do not discard them lightly. He put it there for emergencies. He put it there because every house needs a candle.

Katsuki stood in the doorway and watched him do it and said nothing, because some things do not require commentary. Some things you simply watch happen, and you let them be good, and you do not try to make them mean more than they mean, because they mean enough already.

The old candle — burned down to its very last fraction of an inch, to the absolute irreducible end of itself — Izuku kept on the windowsill in the living room. As a shrine. As a memorial. And as a reminder: of a blackout and a bathroom floor, of a retirement and a press conference, of a name said into a microphone in front of six hundred million people with no inflection and no apology and all the weight of a man choosing what he wanted to be.

Some mornings, the light hit it just right, and it glowed — the remaining wax, the old and creamy yellow of it — as though the warmth it had once produced had stayed inside the material of itself, had never quite fully left. As though burning was not a process of subtraction but of something else entirely.

As though the candle, having given everything, had become something it could not have been when it was whole.

Katsuki never commented on this either. 

He was a lot like the wax on the windowsill. After everything, he'd thought when he was young and foolish, after having achieved everything he had ever wanted his whole life, he had thought there would be nothing else left for him. But he was wrong. He was now something he couldn't possibly have been as Dynamight.

He didn't say this out loud.

But sometimes, in the mornings, he stood in front of it for a moment with his coffee, and something moved through his face, and then he turned and went to find his husband, and whatever he had been thinking he seemed to have decided to carry it differently — lightly, the way you carry things that you have finally understood.

Three years later, their daughter, having woken up with a strong desire to clean the whole house (she had taken after their mothers because neither Katsuki nor Izuku liked cleaning) would scrape it off and it would go in the bin.

Three years later, Pro Hero Deku, Sympol of Hope will retire and the world will mourn it's loss.

But Katsuki and Izuku would remain.

Forever at peace.

Their love, forever burning.