Chapter Text
You wanted what was less of me.
The rain over Musutafu didn’t fall so much as it drifted, a heavy, gray mist that tasted of ozone and old exhaust. From the vantage of the agency’s top-floor balcony, the city looked like an overgrown circuit board, pulsing with neon blues and emergency-vehicle reds.
Katsuki flicked the ash from his cigarette, watching the ember die before it even hit the wet concrete three stories below. He didn’t smoke often, only when the silence in his own head got too loud, or when the dampness in his joints reminded him exactly how many buildings he’d dropped on himself over the last fifteen years.
He was thirty now. His shoulders were broader, mapped with the pale, jagged topography of lightning scars and shrapnel gouges. The furious, white-hot engine that had driven him through his teens and twenties hadn’t shut off, but it had shifted gears. It was a low, rumbling hum now. Controlled. Economical.
He knew the exact moment the heavy glass door behind him slid open. He didn’t need to turn around; the shift in the air pressure, the specific, stuttering rhythm of boots on stone, and the faint, unmistakable scent of rain-soaked green tea and burnt sugar told him everything.
"They said I’d find you up here," Izuku said.
His voice had dropped an octave since their UA days, carrying the raspy weight of a man who spent his life shouting over collapsing infrastructure, but the nervous, upward tilt at the end of the sentence remained unchanged. It was an old ghost of a habit.
"They talk too much," Katsuki muttered into the collar of his hero jacket. He didn’t turn. He kept his eyes on the horizon, where the neon glare of the shopping district bled into the low-hanging clouds.
Izuku stepped up to the railing, leaving a generous three feet of space between them. A decade ago, that distance would have been a battlefield, an active provocation, a dare to close the gap or widen it. Now, it was just space.
"Great work out there today," Izuku offered gently. He was leaning against the steel rail, his profile silhouetted against the city lights. He looked tired. The freckles on his nose were fading into the permanent tan of an outdoor life, and there were fine, branching lines at the corners of his eyes. "The way you redirected that kinetic blast... I don't think anyone else could have managed that without taking out the structural supports of the bridge."
"It was basic physics," Katsuki said, his voice flat. Not angry. Just factual. "You press the pressure point, the dam breaks where you want it to. It's not rocket science."
"Still." Izuku smiled, a small, private thing directed mostly at his own boots. "It was beautiful."
Katsuki took a slow drag, the orange glow illuminating the sharp lines of his jaw, the faint silver thread of a scar cutting through his left eyebrow. Beautiful. Once, that word out of Izuku’s mouth would have set off a chain reaction in Katsuki’s chest; a volatile mix of defensive fury and a terrifying, desperate hunger that he hadn’t had the vocabulary to understand.
When they were fifteen, Katsuki had tried to choke out something resembling an apology in the rain behind the dorms, his fists shaking with the realization that he was slipping, that the gravity of the boy beside him was pulling him out of his own orbit. Izuku had looked at him with fierce, tear-bright eyes and seen a gauntlet being thrown down. He had raised his fists and promised to fight.
When they were eighteen, standing on the precipice of graduation, Katsuki had stood on a rooftop much like this one and stared at the side of Izuku’s face until his eyes burned, silently begging the idiot to just look back, to see the raw, bleeding thing Katsuki was holding out in the palm of his calloused hand. But Izuku had been staring at the horizon, his mind already years ahead, already carrying the weight of a world that hadn't finished breaking him yet.
By twenty-two, Katsuki had simply stopped trying to say it. The match had gone out. There was no grand tragedy to it, no dramatic betrayal; it was just the slow, inevitable starvation of a fire left in an empty room. You can only offer your heart up as a sacrifice so many times before the altar just becomes a slab of cold stone.
"You're quiet tonight," Izuku said softly.
"I'm always quiet when I'm freezing my balls off, Deku."
"You could go inside."
"So could you."
A silence settled over them, heavy and wet. But it wasn't the tense, vibrating silence of their youth. It was comfortable for Izuku; Katsuki could tell by the way the smaller man relaxed his shoulders, letting the tension of a twelve-hour shift drain out of him. Izuku liked this. He liked the quiet camaraderie. He thought they had finally reached the shore after a lifetime of stormy seas.
"Katsuki."
The use of his given name was the first real tremor in the evening. Izuku rarely used it unless they were entirely alone, and even then, it usually carried the weight of something official. Tonight, it sounded soft. Malleable.
Katsuki finally turned his head.
Izuku was looking at him. Really looking at him. The gray light of the misty city caught the green of his eyes, making them look wide, shimmering, and remarkably clear. There was a flush rising along Izuku’s cheekbones, not the blotchy, high-energy red of anger or embarrassment, but something softer, deeper. A warmth that seemed to come from the inside out.
It was a look Katsuki had spent a decade hallucinating in the dark of his own bedroom. It was the look he would have burned the world down to receive when he was seventeen. It was an invitation, written in the quiet, breathless curve of Izuku’s mouth.
'Oh, the look said, plain as print. It’s you. It was always you, wasn't it?'
Katsuki stared at him, and inside his chest, nothing happened.
The gears didn't grind. The spark didn't catch. There was no sudden rush of blood, no panicked, soaring flight of realization. There was only a profound, hollow stillness. The realization didn't break over him like a wave; it settled like dust.
He still cared for the man in front of him. If a villain stepped onto this roof right now with a gun, Katsuki would put his own body between the bullet and Izuku without a millisecond of hesitation. He would give his life for Number One. That was an objective, immutable truth of his existence. But the fire? The aching, desperate, romantic rot that used to make his hands shake?
It was gone. It had turned to ash years ago, and the wind had long since carried it over the sea.
"I've been thinking a lot lately," Izuku started, his voice dropping into that familiar, earnest register he used when he was uncovering a truth he deemed sacred. He took a half-step closer, his gloved hand resting on the railing, just inches from Katsuki's. "About the past. About how long we've been doing this. Together. And... about what comes next."
He looked up through his lashes, his eyes bright with a vulnerability that was entirely unshielded. It was the face of a man ready to surrender, confident that the person he was surrendering to had been waiting for this exact moment.
"I think I was blind for a really long time, Katsuki," Izuku whispered, a small, self-deprecating laugh escaping his lips. "But I see it now. I see you."
Katsuki looked at the hand on the railing. Then he looked at Izuku’s face; the hopeful, expectant curve of his lips, the soft blush, the absolute certainty in his eyes.
A terrible, heavy pity washed over him. It was a dull ache, not for himself, but for the boy standing in front of him who had arrived at the station long after the train had departed.
How easy it was for Izuku now. Now that the world was safe. Now that they were adults, established, universally beloved, and comfortably settled into their lives. Now that it was safe to love Katsuki Bakugo without it tearing his focus away from the burden of One For All. Now that it was a convenience.
Katsuki had loved him when it was a crime. He had loved him when it was an agony, when it was a distraction, when it threatened to tear Katsuki's own fragile ego into bloody ribbons. He had loved him in the dark, in the dirt, and through the smoke, expecting absolutely nothing in return.
And now, Izuku was offering his heart like a late fee paid after the store had already gone out of business.
Katsuki let out a breath, a pale cloud of white in the damp air. He didn't pull away, but he didn't lean in either. He just stood there, a monument to a past that Izuku was only just beginning to discover.
"You're a dumbass, Deku," Katsuki said, his voice quiet, devoid of its usual bite. It was just tired.
Izuku blinked, the warmth in his face faltering slightly at the tone, a flicker of confusion crossing his features. "Katsuki?"
Katsuki threw the cigarette butt into the rain and turned his back to the horizon, looking toward the warm, brightly lit interior of the agency. "Go inside. You're going to catch a cold."