Chapter Text
The gauntlet came apart clean in his hands, each piece coming free in the order he'd taught his fingers years ago, and Katsuki laid them out on the bench in a row.
He did this every morning now. The gear didn't need it. He had built it to last so that nothing between the trigger and the burn could fail him without his say-so. He rebuilt it because the war had taught him that the only hands he trusted with his life were his own, and because the small ritual of it, the solvent smell, the give of a screw backing out, the cold weight of a component he had made himself, was one of the few things that helped him focus and come back quiet.
Everything about him had gone quiet, after the war. People kept waiting for him to be loud again, pressing at his silence to check if it still hurt. It didn't, particularly. He had found out what he sounded like at the bottom of the worst thing that would ever happen to him, and it wasn't loud at all. It was a low, flat, terrible calm, and it had stayed steady. He was a year older and he no longer needed anyone to hear him not being afraid. He simply wasn't, most days. Or he was, and he had stopped paying attention to the difference.
His mother said he'd gotten easier to be around, which she meant as a kindness but had sat in him like a splinter, because easier was a word that meant he had been hard to deal with. He didn't argue. He knew it was true.
There were a lot of things he didn't argue about now, and he'd noticed that not arguing frightened people more than the shouting ever had. Let them be frightened. He was tired in a place sleep didn't reach, and he had learned to be tired quietly, and that was most of what growing up had turned out to be.
He wiped the residue off the firing sleeve, holding it to the window light, and checked the bore. Autumn had come in overnight. The campus outside had that scrubbed, provisional look UA wore now, half of it rebuilt in the years since LSJ and the war, the new stone a shade too pale against the old. The whole place looked like Frankenstein's monster, all stitches and patches of flesh healed over one another and puckering at the seams. He liked it better this way.
There was a memory he kept at arm's length most days, and it chose this moment of clarity to resurface: a shallow pond behind the elementary school, wet knees, a hand held out to a boy in the water and pulled back before their fingers could touch. He had been six. He could not, at seventeen, remember what he'd been thinking at six, but he could remember with total clarity the small cruel arithmetic of it, that being the one to offer help meant being the one who might need it, and that he would rather drown than be caught needing anything. He had spent a decade proving it. He was still, he suspected, proving it, one gauntlet at a time, alone on a bench at seven in the morning because the only hands he trusted were his own.
He shut the memory away. He was good at that. It was arguably the only thing that hadn't changed since he was fifteen.
There was a briefing at nine. Third years got support assignments for the term. He was not going to take one—he never took one, but attendance wasn't optional and he'd stopped fighting the fights that didn't really matter. He reassembled the gauntlet, seated the last pin with his thumb, and felt the small satisfaction of doing something exactly right.
He was exactly on time. He was always exactly on time now, never early. That surprised people too.
The support faculty ran the briefing out of the third year's ground-floor workshop, a big room with rolling doors and a ceiling high enough to test small ordnance. By the time Katsuki got there it smelled of ozone and cutting oil and the scorch of someone across the room who did not respect a fume hood. Third-year 1-A had colonized the near benches. Kirishima lifted two fingers at him without looking up from whatever Kaminari was showing him on a tablet. Katsuki took the stool at the end, where the light was worst and nobody would try to sit beside him, folded his arms, and waited to be bored.
"No, but listen," Kaminari was saying, low but pitched to be overheard. He thought he was being interesting, the idiot. "In the western circuit. Three months ago it's all over the boards out there, right, this guy in like a crazy suit bro, shows up on scenes he's got no business being on, and it's like he already knows how it ends. Like he knew something was going to happen. Sero, back me up, man."
"I'm not backing you up, you always do the voice."
"He does a voice," Kirishima confirmed, fond.
"There's no voice." Kaminari did, unmistakably, a whiny voice. "They started calling him Augur. Because he like, foretells. He'll see a hostage setup from the street and just, boom, walk you through the next four minutes before they happen. And he's right, he's always right dude, and then he's gone before anybody gets a name or nothin'!" He sat back, pleased with his story. "Anyway. He moved."
"He moved," Sero said flatly, his eyes sliding boredly over to Kirishima's.
"The sightings shifted east over the last couple weeks. Somebody clipped him two prefectures over from us." Kaminari shrugged, already losing interest now that the telling was done, a rumor set down once it had been carried far enough. "Probably nothing. Guys like that, half of it's made up anyways."
Katsuki wasn't listening, particularly. Kaminari's voice was an ambient noise—filed somewhere under not my problem. His brain held onto it anyways because it kept everything now, without asking him. East. Fine. The city had its ghosts. He had stopped being impressed by people who could see clearly; he'd met the ones who couldn't act on it, and clarity without the stomach to use it was just a nicer word for fuckin' standing there.
Power Loader clanged the metal rolling door for attention. The room settled. And Nedzu came in.
That was the first thing wrong with all this. Nedzu did not attend support briefings. Nedzu attended things that mattered to Nedzu, and they tended to cost everyone something, even if not at the time. He crossed to the front with his small unhurried gait, hopped onto a stool set out at exactly his height. This had all been arranged, which meant this had been arranged by him. He folded his paws, and beamed at them all as though they were a problem he had already solved and was being polite enough not to mention.
"Good morning," he said. "I'll keep it short today. Most of your assignments are on the board and they are, I'm afraid, exactly as sensible as you feared." A ripple of tired laughter. "I wanted to introduce one addition to the support department in person, because he has come to us from some distance, and because I would consider it a personal kindness if you made the transition an easy one." His eyes went bright and general and rested, Katsuki would think later, on no one, which was its own way of resting on him. "He transfers to us from Shiketsu. Please."
A person came in through the side door, and Katsuki's body knew before he did.
It was the stillness. Near human but almost not. It got in under Katsuki's ribs before his brain caught up and started identifying the other things wrong with this situation. His face Katsuki could have argued with. It was older now, his jaw filled in, his freckles smattered across his nose and cheeks, less constellation and more paint splatter. His curls were less a wild mess and more of the stylistic control they'd come to associate with Shiketsu. It was something you would know only if you were looking for it.
Katsuki had spent a long time training himself not to look. At this moment, that training failed him completely.
It was the stillness, he knew, that set him off. He could identify it in the animal part of himself. He had known this kid before either of them could read or write. And he knew this was the exact stillness that used to mean he is about to try to be brave, and now that bravery was standing in a body that had learned, somewhere, to hold it like a held breath, indefinitely, without cost.
His eyes moved once around the room, unhurried, taking stock, and Katsuki felt each of the looks land and lift, land and lift, and understood with a cold drop that he was being read. He wasn't being looked at, he was being read.
When his eyes reached Katsuki, they stopped. And did nothing.
That was the second wrong thing, and it was so much worse than the first.
"This is Midoriya Izuku," Nedzu said. "He'll be with support. He's very good."
He's very good. From Nedzu that was not a compliment; it was a receipt. Nedzu did not steal students out of rival schools for very good. Poaching from Shiketsu was a small act of war between institutions. The principals would write each other careful letters about it, and the mouse had committed this offense in the open, folded the evidence into a support course, and come to stand beside it and smile. Whatever Izuku was, he was worth a war. Katsuki filed that away too, with everything else—the rumors, the stillness, green eyes examining the hero course—in the drawer that would not stay shut later.
Izuku bowed, shallow and perfect, a small slight smile gracing the corner of his mouth. "Thank you. I'm glad to be here." His voice had changed, dropped and evened out, but the change wasn't all age. It was practice. Every word came out already finished, sanded, nothing to read into or think twice about. There was nothing to hold on to. He didn't fidget. He didn't scan for a friendly face. He stood in front of a room of strangers who would spend the next eight months forming opinions of him, and he was, unlike he would've been in the past, fine.
Katsuki hated it instantly and completely and did not yet know if hate was the best name for it.
Izuku took a seat when the other support students filtered in. His back was straight. He never once strayed his eyes from the board.
The briefing went on. Names were read off and paired up with active hero students under assignment. Denki got Hatsume and made the expected noise of despair. Katsuki heard none of it. He was doing what he'd become best at since the war; watching, and what he watched now was this: a person he had known when they were both too young to survive each other, who had gone away broken in a manner Katsuki had never let himself fully accept or receive, and who had come back now of all fucking times, and was standing there, and not looking at him. Izuku wasn't avoiding him, which would have been its own confession. He was, precisely, not making an exception for him. Treating him like furniture. Like everyone other stranger in the goddamn room.
It should have been nothing. They were nothing to each other now; that was the unspoken arrangement, the thing Katsuki had built for himself out of silence and distance, alone and to spec. He had years of practice being nothing to this person from across a country. He had not accounted for what it would do to be nothing to him from across a room.