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A knight could give his prince everything.
His sword. His years. The strength of his shield arm and the whole of his waking loyalty. His body, thrown between his liege and the blade. His life, if the day asked for it, and no one would call the giving anything but honor.
Everything but the one thing. That was the shape of the law neither of them had ever said out loud, never acknowledged. Saying it would have made it a wall between them you could see & it was easier to live inside a wall you pretended was only air.
Izuku had spent nine years learning the exact dimensions of the room that law allowed him. He knew the limits the way he knew the old sword-scar on Katsuki's forearm, the way he knew the sound of Katsuki's step in a corridor before the man came into sight. He had built a life in that room and called it enough. It had been enough, right up until the morning they came to dress him for someone else's wedding. His own.
He had hated Katsuki first. That part was true, and he held onto it, some mornings, because it was simpler than the rest.
They had met as boys, in the lower training yard, before Izuku understood that a crown was a thing you carried and not a thing you were. Katsuki was common-born and furious about it, a smith's son with a sword arm that the masters had noticed before he was twelve. He had looked at the soft green-eyed prince who wept when the practice blades drew blood and decided, out loud, in front of everyone, that Izuku was a waste of good armor.
Izuku had chased him for years after that. He would not, later, be able to explain the chasing to anyone, least of all himself. Katsuki was cruel and gifted and burning with something that had no outlet a smith's son was permitted. Izuku, who had everything and had earned none of it, could not stop watching him earn it all the hard way. His knighthood at seventeen, youngest in three generations. The border campaigns. The scar on the forearm, taken turning a blade meant for a captain Katsuki didn't even like.
And then, by an irony Izuku had long since stopped finding funny, the crown had sworn its most gifted young knight to the protection of its most disappointing prince, and the two boys who had hated each other in a training yard were bound together by an oath and a schedule and a door that connected the prince's chambers to the guard's.
That was the first year. They fought. Constantly. About everything.
Izuku loved the fighting before he understood it was love.
The turn had a date, though he'd never told anyone.
The eleventh of December, the year Izuku was nineteen. A skirmish in the eastern passes that should have been nothing, a bandit clearing, and it had gone wrong the way small things go wrong—fast and stupid. Izuku had taken a spear low in the side and gone down in the snow and thought, with a strange floating calm, oh, so this is it, this is where.
He had woken three days later in a border keep with his side stitched and burning and Katsuki asleep in a chair beside the cot, filthy, still in his half-armor. One hand was fisted in the blanket at Izuku's hip as though he'd fallen asleep in the middle of holding on.
Katsuki had woken the instant Izuku stirred. He had not let go of the blanket. He had looked at Izuku with his whole face undone, unguarded, a thing Izuku had never once seen and would spend the rest of his life trying to see again. He'd said, in a voice ruined from disuse or from shouting, Izuku never learned which:
"You don't get to fucking do that. You hear me. You don't get to."
And Izuku, half in fever, unwise, had almost said the thing that had been building in him since that training yard, "Kacchan," and reached up. Katsuki had caught his hand halfway and pressed it back down against the cot, hard, and held it there. When he shut his eyes he said nothing at all.
That was the closest either of them came to even gracing the subject, for years. A hand pressed back down. A word swallowed. The two of them in a border keep learning the weight of what they were not going to do.
They never spoke of it. But Katsuki did not sleep in the guard's chamber after that, not really; he slept in the chair by the prince's bed on the bad nights; the campaign nights, the nights the old spear-scar ached and Izuku couldn't hide it. Izuku learned to time his aching. A room that had been built by law grew smaller and warmer and more unbearable every single year, and neither of them ever crossed the last of it. A prince belonged to the realm and a knight belonged to the prince and there was no arithmetic in the world by which they belonged to each other.
Here is what Izuku had, in nine years, hoarded like a miser:
The weight of Katsuki's hand steadying his shoulder before a council he dreaded. Katsuki's voice at his back in every fight, cursing, furious, keeping him alive. The way Katsuki tasted his food first out of duty and then, once, licked honey off his own thumb and caught Izuku watching and went still. Going-still had lasted three full seconds before either of them looked away. A hundred near-misses. A thousand disciplines. The size of a love conducted entirely in the space between two people who have agreed, without ever agreeing, never to close it.
He had Katsuki's loyalty, which was total, and which he understood by now was only the visible half of something too large to keep at court.
He did not have the word. Love. Neither of them did. They had built their edifice without it, brick by brick, and the not-saying it had become its own kind of vow. Some how more binding than the one Katsuki had sworn to the crown, because the crown's vow could at least be spoken.
Love is a duty they were both sworn by and could not partake in.
He had thought, in his worst and most honest hours, that they might go their whole lives like this. A prince and his knight. Legendary, eventually. The stuff of the ballads that got the story wrong. He had thought that might be enough, the quiet hours, the disciplines, the honey off a thumb, a lifetime of almost.
He had not accounted for the marriage.
The letter came in March, sealed in the pale wax of the western kingdom, and Izuku knew what it was before he broke it. This letter was a fever before it takes you.
The west had grain and a standing army and a coastline the realm had bled for two generations trying to secure by force. It had also a young sovereign, newly crowned, who wanted peace as badly as Izuku's own ailing father did. They had proposed the oldest instrument of peace there was: a marriage. A binding of houses. A prince of the east and the sovereign of the west, and between them, an end to a war that had eaten both their childhoods.
Izuku read the letter three times. Then he went to the window and looked out at the yard where he had first been told he was a waste of good armor, and he understood, with the floating calm of the spear in the snow, that this was where he would really die.
He could have refused. That was the cruelty of it, something he would turn over for the rest of his life. He could have refused, and the war would have gone on, and the villages on the border would have kept burning, and the boys in them would have kept dying in the snow the way he had almost died in the snow. Izuku would have kept his room and his quietness and his lifetime of almost, and bought it with other people's sons.
He was not built to make that trade. Katsuki had known it about him before he knew it about himself: that Izuku would always, always, throw himself between the spear and someone else. Katsuki had called it weakness then. It was the truest thing about him and it was going to cost him the only thing he had ever wanted for himself, and he was going to pay it, because the alternative was letting someone else pay in blood, and he could not.
He sent the acceptance the same day. He did not let his hand shake until after the courier had gone.
Katsuki found out the way the whole court found out; from a herald, in a hall, in front of everyone. That was Izuku's cowardice and he owned it. He could not have said it to Katsuki's face and survived it, so he let a stranger say it. He watched from the dais as the words reached his knight across the crowded hall.
Katsuki's face did not change. That was the discipline of nine years. To anyone watching, the prince's sworn sword received the news of the royal betrothal as a knight should, with a still face and a bowed head and a hand that came to rest on the pommel of his sword. To anyone watching, nothing happened.
Izuku was not anyone. Izuku saw his knuckles whiten on the pommel. Izuku saw the single muscle in his jaw tighten minutely. Izuku saw, for the length of one heartbeat, the edifice they had built brick by wordless brick take the blow full in the chest, and hold. Katsuki would always hold, that was the horror and the glory of him, he would stand in the wreckage of himself and not fall down while a single person was watching.
Their eyes met across the hall. It lasted a second, maybe less.
Then Katsuki bowed to his prince, correct and deep and perfect, and Izuku could not look at him a second longer. The herald went on speaking, and the war ended, and both of them stood exactly where the law had put them and did not move.
The night before the wedding, Katsuki came through the connecting door without knocking.
He had never done that. In nine years he had never once come through that door without the courtesy that kept them both alive. It was the knock, the announced entry, that maintained the fiction of a guard attending a prince. He came through it now in the dark wearing a plain shirt. No armor. Izuku was awake—had been awake—and was sitting on the edge of his bed in a room full of the trunks packed for a journey west he would make as a married man. When he looked up Katsuki stood in the doorway with the last of their almosts coming apart in his hands.
"Kacchan."
"Don't." Katsuki's voice was low and wrecked. "Don't do—if you say it right now I'll leave. If you say it like an order I'll leave and I won't come back through this door, I swear it. So don't."
Izuku did not say anything. Izuku had spent nine years saying everything right and he was done. He was so tired. He had one night before he belonged to another kingdom and he was not going to spend it being correct.
"Come here," he said. Not an order. A plea, naked, the first fully bare thing he'd let Katsuki hear in nine years. "Please. Just once. Come here."
Katsuki crossed the room.
Izuku had imagined it. He would not have admitted to it under torture, but he had, in the dark, built versions of this, and every version had been gentle. Slow. A tenderness they'd earned.
It was not gentle. There was no time for gentle. There was one night and a lifetime pressing against both ends of it, and when Katsuki's mouth finally found his it was with a desperation that had nine years of dammed water behind it. Izuku made a sound into the kiss that he had never made in his life. A sound like something breaking that had needed to break for a very long time.
He didn't think he would ever make it again, after tonight.
"I've got you," Katsuki said, against his mouth, his jaw, the line of his throat. His hands were everywhere, rough and certain and shaking, the swordsman's hands Izuku knew the scars of by heart, mapping him now with a greed that answered Izuku's own. "I've—damn you, I've got you, I've always—"
It was right there. Izuku felt it, the shape of it in Katsuki's mouth against his skin, the word they'd never said, rising up finally in the one dark where it might have been safe.
Katsuki bit it back. Izuku felt him do it. Felt the word swallowed the way his own name had been swallowed in that border keep years ago. He understood, with a grief that ran alongside the wanting and never once diluted it: they were not going to say it. Even here. Even now. Because to say it out loud the night before his wedding would be to make it a real thing lost instead of a real thing merely never had, and neither of them could survive the difference. So they would give each other everything their bodies could carry and leave the word love where it had always lived, unspoken, holding up a life neither of them got to keep.
Izuku pulled him down. He got Katsuki's shirt off, and his own, and then there was skin, warm and scarred and shaking. He pressed his open mouth to the old sword-scar on the forearm and Katsuki made a broken sound and dragged him up by the jaw and kissed him like he was trying to leave something behind that would last.
They were not quiet. There was no one in the world Izuku cared about waking. Let the court hear. Let the whole kingdom hear its disappointing prince come apart in the hands of his knight the night before he was sold for grain and a coastline. He had given them everything else. He would keep this one loud stolen night and speak of it to no one and carry it west like a coal in his chest for the rest of his life.
Katsuki took him apart slowly once the first desperation burned down, as though he'd realized the same thing Izuku had—this was the only copy. There would be no second draft to fix what they rushed. He learned Izuku by hand and mouth in the dark, unhurried now, reverent in a way Katsuki had never been devout about anything. His mouth pressed to the spear-scar low on Izuku's side the way Izuku had pressed his to the sword-scar. An apology, a confession, a claiming of the map of the one body he'd kept alive for nine years and never once been allowed to touch.
"Look at me," Katsuki said, when he finally moved over him, into him, the two of them fitted together at last in the dark. His voice was gone entirely, just breath and gravel. "Izuku. Look at me. I want—I need you to be looking at me."
Izuku looked at him. He held Katsuki's ruined unguarded face in both hands and did not look away, not once, not through any of it. He understood he was being given the thing from the border keep, the open unprotected truth of the man he loved, offered up freely in the one dark where it cost nothing but everything. He looked at Katsuki and Katsuki looked at him and their bodies said the word over and over in a language that left no evidence. When Izuku broke it was with his gaze locked on Katsuki's and Katsuki's name in his mouth, and when Katsuki followed him a breath later it was silent, his face pressed into Izuku's throat.
They lay tangled in the dark and did not speak. Speaking was the last discipline and the only one they had left, and if they broke it there would be nothing between them and the morning at all.
The candle guttered.
"There's something I have to tell you," Katsuki said, at last, into Izuku's hair, so low it was almost only breath. "Not tonight. I can't—not tonight. But there's a thing, and when I tell you, you're going to—" He stopped. His arm tightened. "Just remember I couldn't tonight. Whatever you think of me after. Remember I had one night and I didn't want to spend it on the thing that ends it."
Izuku did not understand. He was too full of grief and the fading warmth to press it. He thought, with the arrogance of a man who believed he'd already lost everything there was to lose, that there was nothing Katsuki could tell him that would matter more than this. He would learn otherwise. But that was for later, for another dark, for a story told from the other side of this bed.
"Then don't tell me," Izuku murmured. "Not tonight. Tonight I don't want anything that ends it either."
Katsuki held him until the sky in the window went gray, and then he got up, and dressed in the dark. He stood for a moment at the connecting door with his hand flat against the wood.
He didn't say goodbye. Neither of them did. They had never said the truth out loud and they were not going to start with that one.
The door closed. Izuku lay in the cooling place where his knight had been and watched the gray in the window turn to the gold of his wedding day. He did not weep, because he had a duty to look serene. The past nine years were spent learning how to look like nothing was happening while everything was.
They dressed him in white and silver.
His attendants were gentle and efficient and had no idea. They combed the tangles from his hair, tangles his knight had put there, and fastened the silver clasps and pinned the short ceremonial cloak. They told him he looked like something out of a story, and Izuku thanked them. When he looked at himself in the tall glass, he saw a prince who was about to keep a promise to eleven villages he would never meet, at the price of the promise he'd made to no one out loud.
The sovereign of the west was waiting in the great hall. Izuku had met them twice now, in the careful weeks of arrangements, and this was the harshness he had not been able to armor against: they were kind. Perfectly, uncomplicatedly kind. Young and grave and a little frightened, same as him, handed the same instrument of peace and choosing, same as him, to be brave about it for the sake of their villages. They had a quiet laugh and honest eyes and they had said to Izuku, in their second meeting, with a candor that had nearly undone him, I know neither of us chose this. I hope we can be, at least, a kindness to each other. I would like to try.
Izuku had said he would like to try too. He meant it. That was the part with no villain in it, a fact he could not rage against because there was nothing to be angry at: he was going to marry a good person who deserved a whole heart. He was going to give them a house with someone else's name scribbled on all the walls. They had done nothing wrong, nothing at all, but be handed the same impossible duty and try to meet it with grace.
There was no one to blame. There was only the war, ended. Only the grain. Only the boys who would not die in the snow now. Only duty, which Izuku had chosen with both eyes open, because he could not bear to let anyone else die for nothing.
He walked to his wedding with a straight face. He had learned it from the best.
The great hall was full of the two kingdoms.
Banners east and west. The priest in the vestments of both faiths, stitched together for the occasion, a symbol of the joining. His father, ashen and proud in the great chair, too ill to stand for long. His mother, smiling. The lords and the ladies and the envoys, the whole entourage of two realms come to watch peace made flesh. Music. Light through the high windows in long gold bars. The kind sovereign of the west at the altar in their own white and silver, waiting, brave-faced, trying.
And along the walls, at the intervals precision required, the royal guard. Still as statuary.
Izuku did not let himself look for him. He had promised himself that, in the gray dawn, the one promise he intended to keep this morning: that he would not spend his walk to the altar searching the walls for his knight like a lovesick fool. He would give the sovereign of the west the dignity of his attention. It was the least, the very least, he owed a good person he was about to fail in the one way that couldn't be fixed.
He kept the promise almost to the altar.
He kept it through the long walk, and the music, and the priest's opening words in two tongues. He kept it through the taking of hands, the sovereign's palm cool and steady in his, both of them trembling. He kept it through the blessing and the binding-cord laid across their joined wrists.
He broke it on the vow.
The priest spoke the words for him to repeat. They were old words that ended wars and joined houses and made two strangers into one. Izuku opened his mouth to say them, the first vow of his life, spoken aloud, in front of two kingdoms, to a kind person he would spend his life failing gently. In the half-second before the words came, some animal part of him that had no discipline left betrayed him utterly, and his eyes went, of their own will, to the wall.
To the place along the eastern wall where his knight stood in the armor of the royal guard, still as all the rest, watching his prince be married with a face schooled to nothing.
Their eyes met. It lasted a second. It was the same second from the training yard and the border keep and the crowded hall, the same second nine years long. It held everything they had never said and the one loud dark night they'd stolen and the word that neither of them had spoken even then, even with nothing left to lose.
In that second, Izuku would spend lifetimes.
And Izuku, looking at Katsuki, looking at the one person on earth to whom he had given everything but words, opened his mouth in front of two kingdoms and began to say, out loud, to someone else;
"I, Izuku, of the house of the east," he said, and his voice did not shake, because he had learned from the best how to sound like his heart was in his chest instead of at the wall, "take you—"