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Shouto slides along a towering ice bridge, crouched low with one hand outstretched to summon more as he goes. Beside him Izuku flies through the air, propelled by dark black ropes, looking at ease despite the circumstances. The sun cuts through the gaps between buildings, bringing out the highlights in his hair, almost making him glow.
He lets out a loud, hooting laugh, the kind that bubbles up from one’s chest without any prompting. Shouto feels a grin settle onto his face, feels his shoulders start to release a tension he hadn’t realized they’d been holding.
“I’ve missed this,” Izuku yells, his voice crackling on the comm.
“I can tell,” says Shouto, letting out a laugh of his own.
“It’s been — hey, look out! Duck! Shouto!”
He turns his head just in time to see the balcony barreling towards him, the sun shining on the metal railing.
He pivots, but he’s too close, with too much momentum — he goes low, and still clips the top of his head on the underside. He slides, dizzy, out the other side, and turns sharply toward the street below.
Something wraps around him, jerking him to a stop; he shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the ringing in his ears. He sets down gently on solid ground, and the arms retreat, leaving him unsure which way is up and which is down, down, down —
“I’ve got you,” Izuku says, underwater and distant. Shouto’s stomach flips and turns. He leans against Izuku. Sirens race past them, disappearing around the block. Shouto heaves.
Izuku says something else, but it’s so hard to focus, so hard to hear anything over his heart pounding against his skull. They start moving, and the sirens grow louder, louder, until Shouto has to squeeze his eyes shut in hopes that it might block out the noise.
Some amount of time passes, indeterminate and unreal. They make it to an ambulance, or maybe an ambulance makes it to them. Someone presses an ice pack to his forehead and he must force himself not to flinch away from the cold.
They ask him to keep his eyes open. He tries to trace the path of a finger as it darts across his field of vision, fuzzy at the edges. They load him into the ambulance, then, and try to ask him questions he can’t quite puzzle out the answers to.
Izuku rides with him, chattering at his side the whole way. Shouto is thankful for the distraction, but cannot for the life of him think of something interesting to say back. His mind is caught elsewhere, stuck in an endless loop.
“—probably just a concussion,” the EMT is saying, more to Izuku than Shouto. Actually, entirely to Izuku; Shouto has been holding his head in one hand and a blue plastic barf bag in the other for the past several minutes.
“But it could be something more serious,” Izuku says, finishing her train of thought. Shouto squeezes his eyes shut. The whole world seems to be bobbing up and down, tilting left and right, spinning at odd angles. He feels a firm hand squeeze his shoulder, and tries to keep his mouth firmly shut.
The words blend back into background noise, and at the same time seem to get louder; it becomes incomprehensible but it’s all he can hear besides the quick drum of his heart in his ears. It threatens to burst from his skull, pressing on the edges of his temple, blurring all sensation and yet turning it up to eleven.
He focuses on the hand, the warmth of it, the shape of it against him. He tries to weed out everything else, piece by piece, until it is just him and his heartbeat and the hand.
He breathes. Slow, deliberate. In and out. The world tilts on its axis, but he reaches up, grabbing the hand; fingers spread to make room for him, and he thinks he hears, distantly, someone speaking in low hushed tones, soothing, soothing.
Shouto breathes in. Izuku squeezes his fingers where they are interlocked. Shouto breathes out.
When he comes to, many hundreds of cycles later, he’s already in a hospital bed. His head spins; he glances at Izuku, unsure how long it’s been since they left the ambulance.
“You with me?” he asks, brows knit tight with concern. Shouto nods and immediately has to squeeze his eyes shut to deal with the waves of nausea.
“This is awful,” says Shouto, feeling off-balance even as he lies still.
Izuku squeezes Shouto’s hand again and he finds himself letting out a bitter, airy laugh.
“How soon can they fix this?” he asks, suddenly missing Recovery Girl’s healing quirk more than anything.
“They’re not sure,” Izuku admits. “You’re at the front of the line for the MRI. They want to rule out bleeding, swelling, that kind of thing.”
“I hate this, I hate this, I hate this,” Shouto chants under his breath, bringing up a hand to shield his eyes from the light that bleeds through his eyelids. His other hand is still wrapped around Izuku’s — his cheeks are red hot, he finds, though he doubts he can blame this on his quirk.
“How did this happen, anyway?” Izuku asks, as if sensing Shouto’s train of thought. He feels his cheeks burn even hotter. “Did your comm break?”
“No,” he says. “I… I got distracted.”
“Oh,” says Izuku. Shouto can hear the gears turning in his brain. “By what?”
He doesn’t answer. Can’t. It’s far too embarrassing.
“There was… something distracting,” he says eloquently. Next to him he hears Izuku suppress a snort of laughter. “It was very distracting,” he reiterates.
“I don’t know,” Izuku says. “I was the only one near you; you’d think if it was that distracting, I might… have… seen it…”
Shouto blinks his eyes open. Izuku is staring at him, realization blossoming.
“Wait,” Shouto says, but Izuku’s eyes are already widening. “It’s — it’s not like you think.”
“Did I distract you?” he asks, just above a whisper, mouth twisted in an open frown. “Oh, shit, Shouto —”
“Okay, so it’s really not like you think,” he says. He swallows.
“What happened, then?”
His instinct is to just say it. He’s always been a blunt person, but not necessarily an open one, so it is strange to have to fight such an instinct, to consciously keep his secrets in the shadows.
But his will is weak, now, he finds. His head is pounding, his stomach doing flips.
“You… were in a sunbeam,” Shouto says, pressing his eyes closed again. The words spill out even as he tries to hold them in; he can feel the heat spreading across his neck and even to the tips of his ears. “And you looked… very nice.”
Izuku is silent. Shouto can only hope his expression is — not unpleasant.
“So it was my fault,” he says, slowly, but far less guiltily. “Kind of.”
The world is starting to spin again, slowly, steadily, nauseatingly. He swallows. “Don’t blame yourself.”
“I won’t,” Izuku says, still speaking slowly as if trying to wrap his head around something. Or maybe it just sounds slow to Shouto, whose heart is again beating a billion times a minute. He opens his eyes again, staring Izuku down.
“I’m sorry,” he manages, “if I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
Izuku’s eyes go wide. “What? No. I’m the one who should be sorry, I basically gave you a concussion.”
Shouto raises an eyebrow. “By being too pretty?”
Now it’s Izuku’s turn to go red. “Well. Um.”
“You’ve been pretty for as long as I’ve known you,” says Shouto, casting his gaze downward. He wants to reach up and slap a hand over his mouth, but he can’t. He doesn’t. “I should know not to stare at you when I’m moving that fast.”
His head pounds. This is horrible. This is — why is he saying all this? It’s fine. Everything is fine. He can just blame the concussion, he tells himself. He doesn’t have to —
So quickly that he almost misses it, Izuku bends down and presses a kiss to Shouto’s forehead. Shouto forgets how to breathe. His mind is suddenly, beautifully blank.
He blinks. Slowly, he stares at Izuku, tilting his head up; he feels his mouth hanging open, but he cannot remember how to speak. Even if he did, what on earth would he say right now?
Izuku is redder than red. His free hand is pushed against his cheek, as if he himself cannot believe what he just did.
Is Shouto hallucinating? He stares, unblinking, a warmth spreading through him. Oh, of course, he probably has a brain bleed. He probably is hallucinating, completely and totally lost in his own little world.
“You can stare at me all you like,” Izuku stammers out, his hand still pressed to Shouto’s shoulder. “Just, maybe listen the next time I tell you to duck?”
Maybe, he thinks, he wouldn’t mind hallucinating a little longer.