Chapter Text
The apartment settled after noon with the kind of quiet Katsuki only let himself enjoy once the morning had been handled.
Warm air moved in through the balcony door, bringing the city with it in pieces. Traffic dragged below in long, steady pulls. Someone’s laundry vent turned lazily from the building across the alley. A dog barked once, sharp with purpose, then lost interest before anything came of it.
The curtain lifted away from the window frame and brushed back against the wall, soft enough that he kept noticing it against his will.
Years ago, all that extra noise would have crawled under his skin. Open doors meant air shifting wrong against the back of his neck, sounds leaking in from places he could not see, the outside world pressing too close to the space he had already checked and claimed as his own.
Now the breeze moved through the living room like something alive but harmless, carrying the static hum of other people’s afternoons with it. Life moved past his windows without needing anything from him, and for once, that made the quiet inside feel deeper instead of disturbed.
The morning had been full in the ordinary weekend way, the kind of busy that did not hit hard until it was over and his body realized it had been moving for hours.
Gear drop-off first, because one of his bracers had taken a bad hit two nights ago and needed support techs poking around inside it before he trusted it on patrol again.
Groceries after that, heavier than planned because the fridge had started looking like a place where condiments went to die. He had hauled everything up in one trip out of principle, put rice on without thinking, folded half the laundry before remembering the other half still sat in the machine, and cleaned the kitchen with more force than the counters deserved.
None of it was difficult. That was what made the exhaustion irritating.
It was regular life. Errands. Food. Laundry. Gear. The kind of things that filled a weekend when no villain was actively trying to bring a building down. Still, by the time he got home, changed his shirt, and dropped onto the couch, the evening waiting on the other side of the day already made his patience feel thin.
Socializing.
The word alone deserved to be blasted through a wall. Katsuki still blamed himself for agreeing to it in the first place. He could have refused. Actually, he had refused worse for less. But Uraraka had wanted to go, and she had talked about it for days in that hopeful way with her big brown eyes sparkling with excitement to meet with the group after weeks apart.
So now he had plans.
A shout from the television brought his attention to the old action movie that played low on his wall. It was the kind of nonsense movie he kept on as background noise while he went about his day.
Katsuki stretched out with one arm hooked behind his head, socked foot braced against the cushion, the remote loose near his hip. On-screen, a group of idiots moved down a hallway in a formation so sloppy it made his jaw tighten before he meant to react. One kept his weapon angled too high. Another looked over his shoulder at the exact moment someone should have been watching the left corner.
Katsuki’s mouth curled. “Dead in three seconds.”
The movie punished them badly and almost on time.
He snorted, settling deeper into the couch as afternoon light spread across the floorboards and caught on the edge of a folded blanket thrown over the armchair. The apartment smelled like lukewarm coffee, curry from the lunch he’d just finished, and clean detergent from the laundry he still needed to switch over.
Heat lingered under his skin in the way it always did after too much movement, even when he had barely used his quirk. Some part of him stayed ready long after there was nothing left to fight, waiting for a threat, a problem, a reason to get back up.
His phone started vibrating against the coffee table.
The buzzing stopped, then started again, nudging the phone against the wood in a small, irritating scrape.
“Tch.” Katsuki dragged a hand down his face before reaching for it.
Kirishima’s name lit the screen.
Kirishima: Don’t pretend you forgot tonight.
Katsuki stared at the message until the screen began to dim.
Right.
Food, drinks, and whatever else they had come up with to do as a group now that everyone’s schedules had turned into a wreck of patrol rotations, interviews, agency work, night shifts, and injuries nobody mentioned until the bandages were already gone.
Mina had started the whole thing two weeks ago by announcing that if they waited for a day when everyone was free, they would all be dead before Kaminari managed to pick a restaurant.
The phone buzzed again before he could put it down.
Mina: We know you’re reading these.
Mina: Look what I found!
An image loaded slowly, first as a blur of warm common room light, then Kaminari’s face too close to the camera with both chopsticks shoved up his nose and his eyes crossed like an idiot. Kirishima was behind him, laughing so hard his whole body had folded forward. Jirou looked seconds away from rolling her eyes to the back of her head. Sero had one hand lifted mid-gesture, mouth open around whatever dumb comment had probably made the picture happen in the first place.
Katsuki almost closed it.
Then the back of the room came into focus, and his thumb stopped.
Uraraka was there.
Third year, probably. He could tell by the length of her hair and the way she had started tying it back during long training days. She was laughing at something outside the frame with lifted shoulders and bright cheeks, one hand half-raised like she had meant to cover her mouth before the laugh escaped too fast to catch.
Then a familiar head of spiked blonde hair came into view.
There was a careful inch between their sleeves. Nothing obvious. Nothing anyone sensible would have pointed out back then unless they wanted to get their face burned off. His arms were crossed, his mouth set in the kind of scowl that had followed him through most of high school, aimed somewhere past the camera.
His expression gave nothing away.
The rest of him, however, was less disciplined.
His body had been turned toward her, so slight it could have passed as accidental. One boot sat a little behind hers, his weight placed where he could shift if someone stumbled too close from the crowded side. His shoulder cut the noise of the room away from her without touching her at all, making a small, stubborn pocket of space around her laughter.
He had no memory of deciding or forcing himself to stand like that.
That was always a thing that made his chest feel strange.
His younger self looked irritated in the picture, all sharp edges and crossed arms, but his body had already learned to arrange itself near her. He had been making room before he knew he wanted to keep any.
Katsuki let the phone rest against his stomach, screen still glowing.
The movie moved on without him. A punch landed with a cheap, hollow sound effect. Wind breathed through the living room again, lifting the curtain, and the warm hush of the apartment thinned under the pull of another place entirely.
His mind drifted to familiar stadium heat and shouting crowds.
The glare of the arena floor. The dry scrape of his boots over concrete. The heavy pulse in his palms as sweat gathered beneath his gloves and the crowd leaned forward above them, thousands of voices hungry for a match they had already misunderstood. Across from him, Uraraka set her feet.
She looked nervous, and that was where everyone stopped looking properly.
Her fear sat right on the surface, visible in the tightness around her mouth, in the small flex of her fingers, in the breath that rose too high before she forced it down again. The crowd softened around her because of it. Poor girl. Sweet girl. Brave girl. Their sympathy moved through the stands before the first strike, thick enough that Katsuki felt it crawl over his skin.
They were insulting her with pity and smiling while they did it.
Uraraka lifted her chin, and his attention caught there.
Sure, the fear was present, but she allowed it to be present. Then she looked straight at him and lunged the second the match started.
The first charge told him she was serious. The second told him she was planning past the pain. By the third, the crowd had started to fade around the edges of his focus. Katsuki tracked the rhythm of her steps, the timing of her dodges, the quick corrections she made when a blast landed close enough to shove heat across her face. She came at him like she knew a straight fight would crush her, which meant every obvious move had something hidden under it.
He liked that more than he should have.
She moved through smoke with her teeth clenched and her eyes still working. His blast tore up the ground between them, and she used the wake of it to shift left, hand skimming broken concrete as she passed. The touch was quick. Too quick for most people to catch from the stands. Even Katsuki had not realized what she was doing in time, each brush of her fingers so light it almost looked like desperation if someone was stupid enough to underestimate her.
His mouth pulled back from his teeth.
He made sure not to give her an opening, but he damn sure made her need to take it. That was the only kind of respect he knew how to offer then, rough and honest and shaped like resistance. She took it relentlessly anyway. Blast after blast, fall after fall, her body absorbing the punishment while her real attack gathered above them in silence.
By the time the shadow dropped across the arena, the whole stadium had changed around her.
Stone hung overhead in a broken, impossible sky. Dust turned gold in the sunlight. Uraraka stood below it with one arm lifted, knees close to giving out, face pale from the strain and eyes fierce enough to cut through every soft thing the crowd had tried to make of her.
At last, they understood.
Katsuki felt the answer move through him before he had words for it.
Good.
It hit clean and hard, bright with something sharper than excitement. Good, because she had made every idiot in those stands choke on what they thought they knew. Good, because she had taken his counterattacks seriously and built around it instead of begging it to become gentler. Good, because she was scared and shaking and still dangerous, and Katsuki had always understood that fear meant nothing if someone moved through it anyway.
He blasted through her plan because that was the match.
He watched her fall because she had forced him to look.
When Midnight called it, the crowd came roaring back. Noise filled his ears. Heat curled off his palms. Katsuki stayed where he was, eyes fixed on the place where Uraraka had gone down. Someone shouted from the stands with disgust in their voice, angry at him for fighting her like an opponent instead of protecting her from the consequences of entering the ring.
His jaw tightened until his teeth ached.
She would have hated that more than the bruises.
Later, through the washed-out brightness of the infirmary hall, he saw her again.
He had not gone looking. At least, that was the version he kept, and it held together as long as he did not press too hard on why he had taken the longer route back. The corridor smelled like disinfectant and floor polish, the festival noise muffled beyond concrete walls. Recovery Girl’s door had been left open a crack, enough for Katsuki to catch the edge of Uraraka sitting inside with a towel around her shoulders, cheeks still too pale, eyes lowered to her hands.
She looked exhausted.
She also looked furious with herself.
Her fingers curled into the fabric of her pants, then loosened. Her shoulders rose with a careful breath. Someone said something from inside the room, too quiet for Katsuki to catch, and Uraraka nodded once without lifting her head.
She was already somewhere else in her head, taking the match apart piece by piece, measuring what had failed, what had almost worked, what she would do better next time.
Katsuki should have continued walking immediately after that.
Instead, he stood there with the hallway lights humming overhead and understood, with an irritation that settled deep, that she had not needed the crowd’s pity for a single second.
She had needed the fight to matter.
That should have been enough to satisfy her as a worthy opponent and move on. It did not work that way. Something about her stayed caught behind his ribs, raw and difficult to name, the first piece of a shape he would not understand for years. Uraraka had seen his refusal to go easy on her for what it was, even if she never said it out loud. She had not asked him to soften the blow so the world could feel better about watching her take it.
She had met him honestly and head-on.
For Katsuki at fifteen, that was more dangerous than kindness.
The phone buzzed against his stomach and pulled him back into the apartment.
The ceiling came into focus first, then the low sound of the movie, then the curtain moving in the balcony breeze. His hand had tightened around the phone without him noticing. On-screen, Mina had added a string of heart emojis beneath the old photo, followed by a zoomed-in crop of him and Uraraka standing near each other in the back of the room.
He stared at it.
The younger version of him looked pissed off and unaware, angled toward Uraraka’s laughter like his body had picked a direction and forgotten to ask permission.
Katsuki locked the phone and set it face down on the cushion beside him.
The memory refused to end cleanly. Sports Festival bled into training fields, dorm noise, combat drills, and the slow, inconvenient fact of Uraraka getting harder to ignore because she never stayed where people tried to place her.
She got stronger without turning every gain into a performance.
Some people wanted every improvement witnessed. They trained loud, complained louder, looked around after every clean hit to make sure someone had seen it.
Uraraka worked until her hands shook, wiped her mouth when nausea hit, and asked for another round as naturally as requesting seconds at dinner. She hated being treated like a liability. She hated being fussed over when her quirk dragged her body sideways. If someone softened a drill for her, she smiled in a way that meant trouble and made them regret it.
Katsuki learned that early on.
He learned other things too, against his better judgment.
The half-step she took before activating her quirk, as if her body braced for the betrayal of weight before she stole it from something else. The little inhale through her nose when she pushed too far. The way her left shoulder dipped before she pivoted under an attack instead of floating clear. The exact point where her smile stopped reassuring people and started lying to them.
He told himself he had memorized these things about her because it was tactical. It was an easier explanation since it had clean edges.
A smart fighter tracked the field. He knew how people moved, where they hesitated, what openings they favored when panic pressed them. He noticed what mattered in a fight and discarded the rest before it could crowd his head.
Uraraka made the rest stay.
He did not remember everyone with that same irritating precision. He did not carry the pitch of Yaoyorozu’s breath before fatigue set in, or the exact way Sero’s fingers flexed when tape burn started bothering him, or which side of Kaminari’s grin meant he was about to do something suicidal and call it his ultimate move. Those details came and went as needed.
With her, they gathered.
They changed the way he moved around her long before his thoughts caught up.
Then in second year during a combat drill behind Gym Gamma, the rain had turned the training ground slick and mean. It was the kind of cold, persistent rain that made his palms itch and his temper rise.
Todoroki stood ahead of him with ice crawling low across the concrete. Somewhere to Katsuki’s right, Uraraka handled two opponents near the scaffolding with mud splashed on her suit and that stubborn set to her mouth that meant she was closer to overdoing it than she wanted to let on.
Katsuki had his back to her when the support beam shifted.
The sound cut through the rain wrong. Metal dragged against metal somewhere high on the scaffolding, followed by the wet skid of Uraraka’s boot losing traction behind him. Her breath caught, sharp and swallowed down before it could become a shout, and his body answered before thought had time to get in the way.
His palm hit the ground.
The blast cracked through the wet concrete at an angle, hard enough to kick recoil up his arm and shove force across the training yard.
Recoil snapped through his arm and knocked the falling beam off-course, sending it crashing into the mud beside her instead of across her shoulder.
By the time he looked, she was on one knee, hair plastered to her cheek, eyes wide on the dent in the ground where the beam had landed.
Then her gaze found him through the rain.
Water ran down his jaw, hot smoke curling from his palm despite the cold. The recoil still lived in his shoulder. So did the instinct that had sent him moving before he had decided what it meant.
He could feel it sitting there between them, too quick and too honest, and because he was sixteen and stupid with every feeling that did not come shaped like anger, he shoved teeth into it before it could look like care.
“Oi! Watch your footing, Round Face!”
Her shock sparked into fury so fast it almost made him grin. Her answer snapped back across the rain and whatever she yelled was lost under Todoroki’s ice breaking apart between them.
Ten minutes later, she launched a floating chunk of concrete at him with enough force to make Todoroki pause.
Katsuki blasted it apart and laughed before he could stop himself.
After that, whenever rain hit the training grounds, he dried the worst patches of concrete with small, irritated blasts when no one was looking too closely. Not everywhere. Just the places where her boots would slip if she came in low from the left, the angles she favored when she needed momentum and refused to admit the ground had turned against her.
She never thanked him for it, because thanking him would have meant admitting she noticed.
But the next time rain slicked the training ground, she took the dry line without looking down.
Katsuki pretended not to see that.
Trust did not arrive as some clean, shining thing between them either.
It gathered in ugly weather and bad landings, in insults thrown over shoulders, in the grudging relief of looking up and finding the other exactly where they needed to be.
Katsuki learned the shape of her movement because his body kept finding reasons to remember it. Uraraka learned his because she was too sharp to miss what he gave away, even when he buried it under orders and irritation.
His right wrist turned outward before a wide blast, and she was already ducking by the time heat crossed the space above her.
Her fingers spread toward debris, and he broke it apart before she had to waste strength touching every piece.
His voice cut off mid-curse when a situation turned bad enough to make his chest tighten, and she rushed closer instead of away.
She stopped looking surprised when he covered her blind spots.
He stopped pretending he did it by accident.
By the time anyone else started joking about them being in sync, Katsuki already knew the truth and hated how much he wanted to keep it. He wanted her on his left during rescues because she knew how to use the space he carved open. He wanted her behind him in tight corridors because she could make rubble useless before it trapped civilians. He wanted her above him when the ground got crowded because she saw angles most people missed from below.
Wanting her as a teammate was easy to excuse.
Wanting her safe could be buried under tactical language if he kept his voice sharp enough.
Wanting her dignity protected was where it got harder, because that came with heat under his skin every time someone softened around her in that stupid, smiling way people did when they mistook care for doubt.
Wanting her attention, though, was the worst of all. That one had no clean use in battle, with no strategy he could hide behind, no reason to make his skin tighten when her laugh landed near his shoulder in the common room.
Then the world kept breaking open, and Uraraka became one of the only people who did not make him feel trapped inside his own survival.
The air in the apartment had cooled while he sat there in his memories.
Katsuki meant to move, already mid-motion with his shoulders gathering and knee shifting against the couch cushion like he could stand and shake the old tightness out through motion. He paused, the memories and warmth against his chest settled more firmly against him, and his breath left through his nose in a slow, controlled line.
Fine. He could stay where he was a little longer.
The movie credits rolled across the television, music swelling like it had earned something from him. His coffee remained untouched on the side table.
His phone buzzed again.
Katsuki looked down.
Kirishima: You still alive?
He typed back before he could think better of it.
Unfortunately.
The reply came fast.
Kirishima: Great. Don’t try to get out of this! Be ready by six.
Six gave him enough time to shower, switch the laundry, and decide whether Mina had lied about the restaurant having decent food. It also gave him too much time to stay pinned in the cooling afternoon with the old photo waiting in the group chat, Uraraka laughing close enough to his younger self he he had turned toward it without realizing.
Katsuki’s thumb hovered over the screen.
He could almost hear her voice from years ago, carrying from a rooftop over a crowd that had forgotten heroes were allowed to need saving too. Rain in the air. Deku below them, wrecked by the weight of everyone else’s hope. Uraraka standing above it all with her hands shaking and her voice refusing to break.
That was where the next piece of memory had lodged itself too deep to remove.
And that one had hurt.