Archive of Our Own

There is a particular tenderness in the act of folding down the corner of a page. It is, above all else, an act of faith — the quiet promise one makes to oneself that this, this passage, this paragraph, this particular arrangement of words in this particular slant of afternoon light, is worth the preservation of a physical mark. The reader bends the white corner down with the pad of their thumb, and what they are really saying is: I will come back to you. Do not let me forget you.

Some people are made entirely of dog-eared pages. You can see it in the way they move through the world — the accumulation of it, the thickness of their living, each remembered moment folded into the next until the spine of them is bloated and warm and absolutely incapable of lying flat on any surface. They are people who cannot be set down easily. They refuse to be shelved.

Izuku Midoriya was always that kind of person. Even before he had any reason to be.

The morning of his retirement was an unremarkable one, as unremarkable mornings so often are the most devastating. The sky above Musutafu was the particular pale grey of old paper and the streets below the apartment window were already loud with the particular orchestral racket of a city that does not know how to hold its breath for anyone, not even its own favourite son.

Izuku stood at the bathroom mirror for a very long time.

This was not unusual. He had always been the sort of man who stared at mirrors not out of vanity obviously but out of a kind of bewildered accounting, as though each time he looked he expected to catch the reflection lagging slightly behind, still showing some earlier version of himself — the small one, the round-cheeked one, the one with the wide green eyes and the notebook held against his chest like a shield. The boy who used to stand in front of mirrors and look for proof that he was real.

Behind him, in the bedroom, he could hear Katsuki still asleep. The sound of it — the slow, deep rhythm of that breathing, the singular quiet of a man who had always burned so loudly choosing, in sleep, to be peaceful — was the most beloved sound in Izuku's entire encyclopedia of beloved sounds, and he stood in the bathroom doorway for a moment with his coffee and simply listened to it. Simply held it. Simply let himself be held by it in return.

Today, he thought. Today is the last day.

And then, because he was Izuku Midoriya and he had never in his life been able to let a significant thought remain unexamined: The last day of what, exactly? The work? Or the self who did the work? And is there truly a difference, or is that simply the lie we tell ourselves to make the leaving bearable?

Katsuki's voice came from the bedroom, rough with sleep and entirely devoid of preamble, as it had always been: "Stop standing in the doorway thinking so loudly. You're waking me up."

Izuku smiled. The smile was involuntary, helpless, the kind of smile a person produces not because they have decided to be happy but because happiness simply arrives in them, unannounced and enormous, like a warm front moving through. Twenty-five years of marriage and Katsuki could still hear him thinking.

"Go back to sleep Kacchan," Izuku said softly. "I'll wake you before I leave."

A long pause. Then: "Come back to bed first."

"Kacchan—"

"I know what day it is, baby." The voice was quieter now. Very gentle, almost too much— Katsuki Bakugou was not a man built for gentleness in the conventional sense — but he was half asleep. So he was gentle in the way he only ever was with Izuku, in the private architecture of their mornings, in the rooms of their life that no camera had ever entered. "Come back to bed for ten minutes. The world can wait ten minutes for you."

Izuku set down his coffee mug. He went back to bed.

If you were to open the book of Izuku Midoriya's life — and it would be a substantial volume, the kind that requires both hands and causes the lap to ache with its weight — you would find, throughout its pages, an extraordinary number of dog-eared corners. The book would not lie flat. It would resist all attempts at closure. The folded pages would accumulate like sediment, thickening the spine, until you understood that this was not a story that intended to be finished but rather one that intended, at every possible turn, to be returned to.

Here are some of those pages, in no particular order of importance, because love and memory do not observe chronology:

The first Hero Analysis for the Future notebook was purchased by Inko Midoriya on a Tuesday in October, when Izuku was four years old and had just watched All Might rescue a bus full of civilians on the television and had cried, helplessly, for twenty minutes — not at all out of fear, but out of something he did not yet have the vocabulary for, something that lived in the very center of his chest like a burning stone.

She had seen his face while he cried. She had understood, in the wordless way that mothers sometimes understand things, that what she was witnessing was not distress but vocation. She had gone out and bought the notebook.

He filled it in three weeks. He filled the next one in two. By the time he was six he had seven of them, their spines cracked, their pages dense with his small determined handwriting and his careful illustrations and the margin notes that tumbled over one another in their urgency to get everything down, to lose nothing, to keep everything.

Even then. Even at four years old, with his Quirk undeclared and no reason yet to believe that it would never come — even then, Izuku Midoriya was a person who dog-eared pages. Who refused to let things go unremarked.

There is a rooftop at Aldera Junior High that still exists, technically — the school was not demolished, only repurposed — but which has existed, in parallel, as a kind of permanent interior location in Izuku Midoriya's memory for thirty-three years, as vivid and present as any room he has ever occupied. He returns to it still, sometimes, in the loose geography of half-sleep.

He does not return to it with pain anymore. He wants to be clear about that, to himself if to no one else. The pain of it is long since metabolised, converted in the patient laboratory of years into something more complex and less brutal — into understanding, perhaps, or at the very least into the beginning of understanding, which is all anyone can really ask of their wounds.

What he returns to is not the cruelty of the words. What he returns to — what he has always, quietly, returned to — is the face.

Katsuki's face, flushed and furious and bright with something that was not, Izuku now understands, the straightforward contempt it presented itself as. Contempt does not look like that. Contempt is cold, indifferent, easily sustained. What lived in Katsuki Bakugou's face on that rooftop was neither cold nor indifferent. Izuku had never taken Kacchan's spite seriously; it was impossible to. He knew the boy he had grown up with, and he will not confuse it with the boy Kacchan had grown into. He did not yet know what it all meant.

Katsuki had been terrified of him. Katsuki, who won everything and feared nothing, had looked at quirkless, soft, endlessly notebooks-and-notes Izuku Midoriya and experienced something in his chest that he would not be able to name for another four years, and in the absence of a name had reached, as frightened boys with not a very loving family so often do, for cruelty. For distance. For the particular violence of words deployed precisely where they would do the most damage, because to be the one holding the knife is, in the short term, somewhat preferable to understanding that you are the one who is afraid.

Izuku dog-eared this page not for the wound, but for the discovery he made later — the way the rooftop's story did not end on that afternoon but merely paused there, a chapter that appeared to conclude and did not. A villain arc with a resolution buried thirty years downstream.

He ate garbage for ten months.

Let that stand in the record without embellishment or apology: Izuku Midoriya, the future Number One Hero, spent ten months consuming a controlled and meticulous diet of garbage — not metaphorical garbage, or the garbage of mediocrity or self-doubt, but literal, physical garbage from a literal, physical beach, relocated from that beach to his own body via the mechanism of labour, which was itself an act of extraordinary faith in a man he had met once and whose word he had chosen, without reservation, to believe.

This is the page he dog-ears not for All Might's promise, or for the beach revealed pristine and shining after ten months of work, not even for the moment the power entered him like a lightning bolt and tried to turn him inside out. He dog-ears it for the morning of the last day, when he arrived at the beach at dawn and stood for a moment looking at what remained — very little, the work almost complete — and felt, for the first time in his living memory, like someone who was going to make it.

Not a hero yet. Not even close. But someone for whom the future was not a closed door but a room he had not yet entered, with light coming from under the threshold.

He was fifteen years old. He had spent his entire conscious life being told that he was nothing. And he stood on a clean beach in the first light of morning and thought, for the first time: I disagree.

They had been dancing around it for six years by then, which was, objectively, an extraordinary amount of time to spend in close proximity to another person's mouth and not arrive at any conclusions about it.

But then, both of them had been occupied — with school, with licensing, with internships, with the grinding beautiful exhausting work of becoming who they were going to be — and the thing between them had been a patient thing, accustomed to waiting. It had been waiting, after all, since Izuku was four years old.

The night it happened was a Thursday in late April. A storm had come in from the east with the particular operatic excess of early spring storms, all ambition and percussion, and had caught them both on the roof of the agency where Katsuki had just started his first official position as a licensed hero. They had been arguing, as they were always arguing, about something that was ostensibly the argument they were having but was actually — as arguments between them had always been — a conversation about something else entirely, conducted at high volume and with significant theatrical commitment from at least one party.

The lightning came. The thunder followed approximately three seconds behind it, which meant the strike was close, which meant the air was briefly electric and sharp and the rain increased its commentary from persistent to absolute, and Katsuki had turned to say something cutting and found Izuku's face closer than expected, and the argument stopped with the abruptness of a sentence interrupted mid-word.

The silence was enormous.

Izuku said, very quietly, "Hey Kacchan."

He did not say anything after that, because Katsuki's hand came up and gripped the front of his jacket — not pulling him close, not pushing him away, just kind of holding, just kind of anchoring, just kind of confirming that this was real and that both of them were in it — and Katsuki's forehead came down against his own, and they stood like that for a moment with the rain destroying them and the lightning happening in the middle distance and the city glittering below them indifferent to their catastrophe.

"Tell me to stop," Katsuki said, roughly, against his cheek.

"Never," Izuku smiled, breathless and absolutely certain that he simply could not.

And then the kiss. Which was nothing like Izuku had expected — not that he had allowed himself to expect anything, having spent considerable effort over the years constructing various internal prohibitions against exactly this kind of hoping — and also exactly like he had expected, because it was Kacchan, and Kacchan had always been a person who could not do anything halfway, who attacked the world with his full attention and his full force, and kissing, it transpired, was no exception to this.

Afterward, shaking slightly, soaked entirely through, Izuku laughed — a small helpless sound — and Katsuki's hand was still in the front of his jacket and the rain was still coming down and somewhere below them a city was being gloriously and uselessly unaware of the fact that something irreversible had just occurred on a rooftop in its midst.

"I've been in love with you since we were four years old," Katsuki said. Not loudly. The loudness was not required; they were very close. "And I hated it. I hated you for it." A pause, long and ragged at the edges. "You deserve better than this. I'm sorry."

It was not a small apology. It was the apology of a man who had spent six years — perhaps more, perhaps the better part of a decade and a half — building up to it, and it was accordingly enormous and a little terrible in its honesty and entirely, entirely worth the wait.

Izuku reached up and covered Katsuki's hand with his own. "I know," he said simply. Because he did know. Had always, in some compass-needle part of himself, known. "I know but."

They stayed on the roof for another hour. The storm passed. The city dried out beneath them, glittering and renewed. Neither of them spoke very much. There was not very much that needed to be said, and they were both wise enough, by then, to know the difference between silence that is absence and silence that is fullness.

Here Izuku folds the corner of the page very gently, the way you handle a thing that is at once entirely yours and larger than yourself.

It was not their first night as lovers in the technical sense — that had come some weeks after the rooftop, after a period of circling and recalibration that both of them required and neither was willing to rush, because some things earn their time and this was one of them. But it was the first night that felt fully chosen, fully deliberate, fully arrived at rather than fallen into — which is an important distinction, the difference between a thing that simply occurs and a thing that is decided upon, slowly and with care, together.

Izuku remembers Katsuki's hands, primarily.

Katsuki's hands all over him and the extraordinary contradiction of those hands — scarred and strong and capable of tremendous violence, callused in the particular way of someone who has fought for everything they have — being, in this context, so careful.

So specifically, intentionally careful. As though Katsuki had decided that this was going to be a thing he did correctly, and had brought to the task the same absolute concentration he brought to everything he cared about.

“Oi,” Katsuki had muttered against his throat, voice low and rough like sand under boots. “Stop thinking so loud, Izuku.”

But Izuku couldn’t. Not when Katsuki’s hot mouth followed the path of his hands, teeth grazing the hollow beneath his collarbone before soothing it with a slow, hot and wet drag of tongue.

Not when those same scarred fingers wrapped around Izuku’s wrist, pinning it gently to the mattress above his head— to restrain them from shaking, to hold.

To keep him steady while Katsuki rocked against him, bare scarred skin on bare scarred skin, the heavy line of his cock sliding alongside Izuku’s in a slick, unhurried pace.

The contradiction was devastating.

Katsuki, who could level buildings with a flick of his wrist, moved like he had all the time in the world.

He kissed Izuku like he was memorizing the shape of his gasps—deep, filthy kisses that tasted like smoke and mint and something so so tender. His free hand slipped between them, palm rough and hot as it curled around both their lengths, stroking with his eyes closed. Thumb sweeping over the head of Izuku’s cock, Kacchan's fingers were spreading the bead of wetness there, pressing just firm enough to pull a broken sound from Izuku’s throat.

Izuku arched into his lover's touch, hips stuttering, chasing the heat of Katsuki’s palm. He felt split open by the gentleness alone. Every slow drag of those callused fingers, every careful twist of Katsuki’s wrist, every time Katsuki paused to kiss the inside of his elbow, the sharp jut of his hipbone, the trembling plane of his stomach—it undid him more thoroughly than any violence ever could. 

Oh how nobody got to see this side of his Kacchan.

“Easy love,” Katsuki whispered, lips brushing Izuku’s ear. “I’ve got you. Gonna do this right.”

Izuku came first, untouched except for the relentless grind of Kacchan's hips and the tight heat of his body, spilling between them with a cry that Katsuki swallowed in a messy greedy kiss. Katsuki followed soon after, hips stuttering, burying himself deep as he shuddered through it, murmuring Izuku’s name like a prayer and a curse all at once.

Afterward, those same dangerous hands gentled even more so. They carded through sweat-damp green curls, traced the line of Izuku’s spine, wiped away the tears clinging to his lashes. Katsuki pulled him close, chest to chest, and held him like he was something worth protecting with every violent, careful inch of himself.

Izuku pressed his face into the scarred skin of Katsuki’s shoulder and let himself be held.

Because Katsuki had decided this—them—was something he would do correctly.

And Katsuki did not know how to be halfway about anything.

Izuku had always known this. It had never, until now, occurred to him to be grateful for it.

Afterward — the long quiet afterward, the room soft with the low gold of the lamp they had not bothered to switch off — Katsuki had said, looking at the ceiling with the particular expression he wore when he was being honest and finding it inconvenient: "Please don't break my heart."

"Not even if you break mine," Izuku promised.

"I will never. Never again."

"That's a big promsie."

A pause. Then: "Do you not believe me?"

"I believe you Kacchan."

"I'm going to be the best at this."

Izuku turned his head. Katsuki was still looking at the ceiling, jaw set, expression of absolute competitive intent fully operational. As though being good at love were a league table he intended to top. As though tenderness were simply another category in which he refused to be surpassed.

Izuku started laughing. He laughed until his eyes watered and Katsuki threatened, with great dignity, to throw him out of his own apartment. He laughed and he thought: yes. Yes, I will fold down this page. Yes, I will come back to this.

Neither of them proposed, exactly. Or rather: both of them proposed, simultaneously, in a conversation that was ostensibly about lease renewal.

Katsuki had been examining the paperwork for his apartment with the focused dissatisfaction of a man who has found an error in someone else's logic, and he looked up and said, "What are you thinking about now?"

"This doesn't make sense."

"What doesn't?"

"Kacchan's here every night anyway. You pay half the utilities. Your clothes and books and gear are in five of the eight rooms. Your plants are dying my plants." A pause. "We should just get married."

Katsuki looked at him for a long moment across the kitchen table.

"I was going to ask you this weekend," Katsuki said. "I had a whole plan."

Izuku stared at him in shock. "You had a plan."

"I had a reservation. And a speech."

The expression that crossed Katsuki Bakugou's face in that moment was one that very few people had ever seen — something between exasperation and helpless, bewildered affection and the specific expression of a man who has just realised that the person he loves is, unfathomably, as much of a disaster as he is, and somehow this makes everything better. "A whole speech stupid Izuku," he repeated.

"With bullet points?"

"With bullet points. I learnt from the best."

Izuku put his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. The shaking resolved, after a moment, into laughter — real laughter, the rare and undisguised kind, the kind that he only produced in private and only for Izuku, the laughter that had no audience and required none. "Cancel the reservation," he said, into his hands. "This is the proposal. We're doing it now."

"Okay," Katsuki said, smiling so hard his face hurt.

"Okay. Yes."

"Yes to what? I haven't asked yet stupid Izuku."

"Yes to all of it. Whatever you were going to ask."

Katsuki looked up. His eyes were bright. "Marry me, then."

"Obviously," Izuku said.

The venue held forty thousand people and turned away ten thousand more. This was, the press noted, entirely in keeping with the man himself — the world had always had more feeling for Deku than it quite knew what to do with, a surplus of love that had accumulated over twenty-five years of watching him, this singular and improbable person, refuse to give up under any circumstance whatsoever.

He came out to silence, which surprised everyone, because there had been forty thousand people in the room and silence is not something forty thousand people produce easily.

But they produced it for him.

The silence rose as he walked to the podium, the way silence rises when something genuinely sacred is occurring, and it held itself around him as he set his hands on either side of the microphone and looked out at the collected weight of the world's attention and simply, quietly, breathed.

In the front row, Katsuki Bakugou sat with his arms folded and his jaw set and his eyes very bright and fixed on the man at the podium with an expression that could only be read correctly by someone who knew what to look for — and there were very few people in the world, in the end, who truly knew what to look for in Katsuki Bakugou's face.

Inko Midoriya was there, sixty-eight years old and weeping already, both hands pressed to her mouth. Ochaco Uraraka, Shouto Todoroki, Tenya Iida — the old cohort, the ones who had been at the beginning and had stayed for all of it. They all had that look of people who are trying very hard to keep it together and are aware that they are not entirely succeeding.

Izuku looked out at all of them. His throat worked and he smiled. He was going to give a speech for his retirement, of course he was. Kacchan hadn't though. Kacchan had stepped onto the podium and said, 'As of tonight, there is no more Dynamight.' and that was that.

To be fair, he had said more in a press interview later that day, telling millions of people that he wanted to just be a husband now. He had even thanked the journalists sitting there, a thing he never did in his entire professional career and ended with a 'This is the last of me,' and had since never appeared on any press interview.

Izuku leaned forward into the microphone and he said, in a voice that carried perfectly to every corner of the room and every corner of the world beyond it, into every broadcast, every recording, every living room and schoolroom and break room where people had gathered to watch the end of something that had been enormous:

"I've been trying to figure out what to say today for about three months. My husband will tell you that I have seventeen drafts and that they get progressively more embarrassing, and he would be correct, and I'm not going to use any of them."

A ripple of laughter through the crowd. Katsuki, in the front row, uncrossed his arms and pressed his fist briefly to his mouth. Whether this was to conceal a smile or its opposite was, perhaps, impossible to say. Possibly both.

"I want to talk about dog-eared pages."

"When I was a child I used to fold down the corners of pages in books despite my mom who always had a great deal to say about defacing books. But I wasn't trying to deface them, I was afraid, I think, of losing my place. I was afraid that if I walked away from something that mattered, I would not be able to find my way back to it. That it would close behind me like water."

"I have been thinking, these past few months, about the pages I would dog-ear in my own life. About the places I would mark, the corners I would fold down, the highlighted passages I would want to find my way back to."

"And I keep coming back to one I didn't expect."

"I used to hate being the quirkless kid."

"I'm sure that surprises nobody. I imagine it would have been quite surprising if I hadn't. I was four years old when the doctor told us. I spent eleven years — eleven — carrying that information around like a stone in my chest, and I spent most of those eleven years being told, in various ways, by various people, that the stone was the truth of me. That the absence was what I was. That I should sit down, accept the limitations of my particular universe, and find some other dream to have."

The room went completely silent. Not the expectant silence of before, but a different kind — the silence of forty thousand people arriving, simultaneously, at the same place inside themselves.

"I had pages and pages of my life that I wanted to rip out and throw away. But I was wrong."

"Here is what I know now, standing here, twenty-five years into a career that was supposed to be impossible for a boy like that: Looking back now — was that boy so bad?"

"I don't think he was. I think he was actually — I think he was quite something, that boy. I think the world was wrong about him, and I think he was right not to believe the world, and I think the dreaming was never the problem. I think the dreaming was always, exactly, the point."

"I want to be him again."

He smiles at the crowd and the cameras flash trying to capture the last winning smile of the Symbol of Hope.

"So right now, I want every one of you to go back into your own story and dream again. Find those dog-eared pages — the ones you bent because the moment mattered too much, The failures. The rejections. The nights you cried alone. The mornings you woke up still believing anyway. Dog-ear them with pride. Keep them. Love them. Because those creases are the map that shows exactly how far you’ve come.

And when the storms come — and they will come — I want you to remember the words of Louisa May Alcott from Little Women,

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”

So never give up. I’m begging you — never give up.

Even when your hands are shaking. Even when the waves are taller than you ever imagined. Even when the voice in your head sounds exactly like all the people who once told you that you couldn’t.

You keep sailing."

He set the mic back onto the stand and folded his hands behind his back.

"This chapter of my life — twenty-five years, the chapter where I got to be a hero, where I stood where I said I would stand when I was fourteen years old and the world was busy telling me it was impossible — this chapter will be dog-eared forever. I will come back to it always. I could not close it if I tried. As of tonight, there is no more Deku. But there will forever be, a symbol of hope."

It was a nod to greatest symbol of victory he had ever known in his life. It was a nod to his husband's retirement words.

He stepped back from the microphone. The silence held for four or five seconds longer than anyone had expected — long enough to feel deliberate, long enough to feel like something being decided upon collectively — and then it broke, and what replaced it was not simply applause but something closer to a sound the human body makes when it has received too much feeling and requires some form of expression or else it will come apart entirely.

In the front row, Katsuki Bakugou was on his feet. He was on his feet with the rest of them and his jaw was set and his eyes were very bright and he was not, absolutely was not, crying — except that he was, a little, at the outer corners, the way people cry when they are trying very hard not to and the effort is insufficient to the magnitude of the occasion.

He was looking at the man at the podium with an expression that Izuku had first seen on a rooftop in the rain when they were twenty-one years old and had been noting it ever since: the expression of someone who has been, against all expectations including his own, completely and utterly overcome.

I see you, Izuku thought, looking back at him across the room and across the noise and across the weight of four thousand people's feeling. I have always seen you. I will always see you.

The private room backstage held only the people who had always known him before the costume, before the name, before the number.

His mother, who was still weeping and had given up being embarrassed about it. Ochaco, who had her arms around him and was saying his name repeatedly in a slightly unhinged way.

Iida, who was very formally composed except that he had clearly been crying for some time and was simply hoping no one would mention it.

Todoroki, who stood at a slight remove with an expression of warm devastation and said nothing, because Todoroki had always understood that presence was its own language.

And Kacchan of course, who waited until the others had cycled through their orbits and then came and stood in front of him without saying anything for a moment — just looking at him, with that long evaluating look that Izuku had come to understand, over twenty-five years, meant that Katsuki was composing himself. Was choosing his words. Was refusing, with great dignity and no particular success, to let his face do what it wanted to do.

"The speech was good," Katsuki said finally. His voice was carefully even. "You didn't use the bullet points."

"I went off-script."

"I noticed." A pause. Something moved across his face. "It was wonderful."

"Yeah."

"People who were like how I was—" He stopped. The old scar of it was there in his jaw, in the way he held himself. Thirty-three years and it was still there, still tender. "Needed to hear that."

"Kacchan." Izuku reached up and put his hand against Katsuki's face. The gesture was reflexive, proprietary, the gesture of someone who has touched this face ten thousand times and intends to continue doing so indefinitely. "The boy I want to be again — I want to be him partly because of you. Because of what we became. Because the story didn't end on the rooftop." He paused. "It never really began there either, if I'm being honest. It began before that. It began when we were four."

Katsuki's hand came up and covered his. Pressed it more firmly against his cheek. He turned his face slightly into the palm, the way he only did in private, the way that still, after twenty-five years, made Izuku's chest do something helpless and enormous.

"You're retired," Katsuki said, after a moment.

"Yes."

"What do you want to do?"

Izuku thought about it. Genuinely considered the question, the way he always genuinely considered questions, from the position of someone who knew that questions deserved that. "I want to go home," he said. "I want to sit on the couch. I want to read something — maybe the new one I've been saving. I want tea. I want—" he smiled, "I want you to argue with me about the television, and then fall asleep arguing, and wake up with your feet on my lap."

Katsuki looked at him for a long moment with an expression that was entirely illegible to anyone who had not spent the better part of their life learning to read it. Then: "That's it? Twenty-five years. That's what you want?"

"That," Izuku said, "is everything."

And because his mother was there, Kacchan leaned forward and whispered something so utterly dirty in his ear that Izuku's cheeks burned as he pushed his husband of more than two decades away in embrassment.

Katsuki laughed, looking delighted.