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The dream always starts the same way.
Kacchan is on the ground, and Izuku is too far away, and no matter how fast he runs the distance doesn't close. He can see the dust settling, the crater, the shape of a hand that isn't moving. He's screaming a name that comes out silent. Every single time, right as he reaches him, Kacchan's eyes are already empty.
Izuku wakes up like he's breaking the surface of water — gasping, sheets tangled around his legs, heart slamming so hard it hurts. For a second he doesn't know where he is. Then the dark shapes of his dorm room resolve around him, and he's just a boy again, alone, shaking.
He doesn't remember deciding to get up. He just finds himself in the hallway, feet cold against the floor, standing outside a door three rooms down. His hand is already raised before he lets himself think about how insane this is.
He knocks. Twice. Quiet.
There's a long pause. Then shuffling, a muttered curse, and the door cracks open to reveal Bakugou squinting into the hallway light, hair somehow still spiky even flattened from sleep.
"The hell, Deku." His voice is rough with sleep, not yet sharp. "It's—" he glances at nothing, like he's trying to locate a clock that isn't there. "It's the middle of the night."
Izuku opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. He's aware, distantly, of how he must look — red-eyed, breathing too fast, arms wrapped around himself like he's holding something in.
Whatever Bakugou sees in his face, it kills whatever he was about to say next. His expression doesn't go soft, exactly — it's not in his vocabulary — but something in it shifts, goes quiet and focused, the same way it does right before a fight when he stops posturing and starts paying attention.
"...Right," he says, mostly to himself. He steps back and holds the door open wider. "Get in before you let all the cold air in, idiot."
Izuku blinks. "I didn't even—"
"You're standing there with that face on. I know what the face means." Bakugou is already walking back toward the bed, dropping onto the edge of it and shoving the blanket aside to make room like this is a completely unremarkable thing to be doing at three in the morning. "Are you coming in or are you gonna stand in my doorway being weird all night."
Izuku comes in.
He hovers for a second, awkward, until Bakugou grabs his wrist — not gently, but not rough either, just efficient — and hauls him down onto the mattress. They lie there in the dark, a careful foot of space between them, both staring at the ceiling like it has something useful written on it.
"You gonna tell me what it was about," Bakugou says. It's not really a question.
"...You know what it's about."
A pause. "Yeah."
Neither of them says anything else for a while. Izuku listens to Bakugou breathe — slow, even, alive — and feels his own pulse start to come down from wherever it had climbed to. It's such a stupid, small thing, lying stiffly on top of someone else's blanket, not touching, barely talking. It shouldn't help as much as it does.
"I'm not gonna die on you again," Bakugou mutters eventually, like he's annoyed at having to say it. "So you can knock it off with the funeral face."
"You say that like it's up to you."
"It is up to me. I decide what happens to me. That's the whole point." A beat. Quieter: "...I decided already. So shut up and go to sleep."
It's such a Kacchan thing to say — stubborn, absolute, allergic to comfort phrased as comfort — that Izuku almost laughs. Almost. What comes out instead is something smaller and more fragile, but it loosens something in his chest anyway.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," Bakugou echoes, gruffer, like he's embarrassed it worked.
Izuku doesn't remember falling asleep. He just remembers that for the first time in weeks, there's no dream at all.
It's almost two weeks in when it happens the other way around.
Izuku wakes up for no reason he can name — no nightmare of his own, just a sudden, sharp awareness that the rhythm beside him has changed. It takes a second to place it: Bakugou's breathing, too fast, too shallow, catching every third breath like something's blocking it. The room is dark and unfamiliar in the particular way three a.m. makes even familiar things strange, and it takes Izuku's eyes a moment to adjust enough to see him properly.
What he sees makes his stomach drop.
Bakugou's face is slack in a way it never is awake, but wrong — pulled tight at the brow, jaw working like he's grinding down on something. His hands are fisted so hard in the sheets that Izuku can hear the fabric straining, knuckles pale even in the dark. A thin sheen of sweat at his hairline. And underneath it all, so quiet Izuku almost misses it, a sound that isn't quite a word — more like the shape a word leaves behind after it's been swallowed.
"Kacchan." He doesn't touch him yet — some instinct tells him not to, not while he's still under. "Hey. Kacchan, you're okay."
No response. The sound comes again, smaller.
Izuku hesitates for exactly one second before he does something he's never done before — he reaches out and takes Bakugou's fisted hand in both of his, carefully, like it might go off. He doesn't try to pry the fingers open. He just presses it flat against his own chest, over his heartbeat, and holds it there.
"Feel that?" he says, low and steady. "That's real. That's now. I'm right here."
It takes a moment — three seconds, five, an eternity — but something in Bakugou's face starts to give. His eyes snap open, wild and unseeing for a horrible stretch where Izuku isn't sure he's actually awake yet at all. Then his gaze finds Izuku's face, finds the hand pressed to his chest, and something in him seems to slot back into place.
He yanks his hand back like it's been burned. "The hell are you doing."
"You weren't breathing right." Izuku doesn't flinch at the sharpness — he's learned by now it's armor going up, not a real threat. "I didn't know what else to do."
"I don't need—" Bakugou stops. Presses the heel of his hand against his eyes for a second, hard, like he can push the whole thing back down that way. When he drops it, his voice comes out smaller than Izuku's ever heard it. "It wasn't the explosion this time. It wasn't even a fight. I was just — standing there, and everyone was talking to me, and then nobody was, and I couldn't figure out why nobody was answering, and then I looked down and—"
He doesn't finish it. He doesn't have to.
"That's not what happened," Izuku says quietly. "You know that's not what happened."
"I know what happened. Doesn't mean my brain got the memo." A humorless breath, more air than sound. "It's not even the dying part that gets me anymore. It's the part where I go and everyone just — keeps talking. Keeps moving. Like I didn't matter enough to notice."
Izuku's chest aches at that in a way he wasn't braced for — because he knows exactly what that fear is wearing underneath, and it isn't really about dying at all.
"I noticed," he says. "I'd notice. I'd never stop noticing." He shifts closer, not touching yet, giving Bakugou room to close the distance himself if he wants it. "You're not background noise, Kacchan. You never have been. Not to me."
Bakugou doesn't answer right away. But after a moment his shoulder comes to rest against Izuku's, deliberate, a decision rather than an accident, and his breathing starts to slow — not perfectly, not all at once, but enough.
"...This doesn't leave the room," he mutters eventually.
"Nothing ever does."
"I mean it, Deku."
"I know." A pause, careful. "For what it's worth — you don't have to earn being noticed. You already are. That's not a thing you can lose."
Bakugou makes a sound that's almost a laugh and almost isn't. "Go to sleep before I change my mind about letting you stay."
But his hand finds Izuku's under the blanket first — brief, wordless, gone again in seconds — before he does.
They start talking more, after that. Not every night — some nights are still silent, still just proximity and breathing and the quiet fact of not being alone — but enough that Izuku starts to learn the shape of things Bakugou would never say in daylight.
He learns that Bakugou remembers dying, or close enough to it — not in dramatic flashes, just a specific, mundane detail that won't leave him: the sound of his own name being shouted, over and over, getting further away instead of closer, like he was the one leaving everyone else behind instead of the other way around.
"I kept thinking about all of you," Bakugou says one night, flat, staring at the ceiling. "Which is stupid. I should've been thinking about winning. But I just kept thinking, if I go, who's gonna—" He stops. Doesn't finish it.
"Who's gonna what?"
"Nothing. Forget it."
Izuku doesn't push. He's learned that much, too — that some sentences need three or four attempts across three or four nights before Bakugou lets himself finish them, and that trying to rush it just makes the door slam shut faster.
In exchange, Izuku gives him the things he's never said to anyone else either — how the guilt doesn't stay in one place, how it moves. Some nights it's Kacchan's hand not moving. Other nights it's faces he couldn't save, civilians whose names he never learned, a stretch of rubble he keeps almost-remembering wrong. How the power that was supposed to make him capable of protecting people instead feels, some nights, like proof of every person it wasn't fast enough to reach.
"You didn't fail anybody," Bakugou says, rough, after one of these. It's not gentle. Bakugou doesn't do gentle. But it's certain, the way he says things he's already decided are true. "You hear me? You didn't."
"You don't know that."
"I don't need to know it. I've watched you run yourself into the ground trying. That's not what failing looks like." A pause. "I'd know. I'm real familiar with what it looks like when somebody actually screws up and doesn't care."
Izuku turns his head. In the dark, Bakugou's profile is set and stubborn, refusing to look back at him, like admitting he means it costs something he doesn't want to pay in front of witnesses.
"Thanks, Kacchan."
"Don't make it weird."
"Too late."
For the first time in a long time, Izuku falls asleep smiling.
Nobody decides it, exactly. It just accumulates.
First it's Izuku's phone charger, left plugged in by the bed because he kept forgetting it in his own room. Then a hoodie, because it got cold one night and Bakugou threw one at him without comment rather than watch him shiver. Then his notebooks start migrating over — analysis pages half-finished on Bakugou's desk because that's where Izuku happened to be sitting when the thought struck him — and then, somehow, a second toothbrush shows up in the bathroom that nobody remembers buying.
Uraraka is the one who says something first, cornering Izuku in the common room with the particular gleam of someone who has been waiting for permission to ask.
"So are you, like. Living there now?"
"What? No. I mean — I still have my room."
"Deku. Your room hasn't been slept in in three weeks. Kirishima told me."
"That's — I sleep places sometimes—"
"You sleep in Bakugou's bed, is what Kirishima told me."
Izuku turns a color that doesn't have an official name. Across the room, at a table he definitely was not eavesdropping from, Bakugou's ears have gone suspiciously red too, though he's glaring at his food like it personally wronged him.
"It's not — it's not like that," Izuku manages. "We just. We both weren't sleeping great. And it helped. And then it just — kept helping."
Uraraka's expression softens into something that isn't teasing anymore. "I'm not making fun of you, Deku. I think it's good. Genuinely." She glances toward Bakugou's table, toward the exact degree of aggressive nonchalance he's radiating. "I think it's good for both of you."
Later, when Izuku brings it up — hovering in the doorway with his own blanket under one arm, the last piece of furniture from his old room to make the crossing — Bakugou doesn't look up from where he's sprawled across the bed, already leaving him room.
"Took you long enough," he says. "Half your crap's already in here anyway. Might as well stop pretending you've got somewhere else to be."
Izuku sets the blanket down at the foot of the bed. It's not a confession. It's not a question either, not anymore — hasn't been for a while now, if he's honest. It's just a fact, quiet and solid as anything: some nights are still bad. But he doesn't have to survive them alone, and neither does Kacchan, and somewhere in all those 3am conversations, that stopped being something either of them had to ask for.
It just became where they live.
He's summoned to the staff room on a Tuesday, which is never a good sign. Bakugou's already there when Izuku arrives, arms crossed, radiating the specific defensiveness of someone who has decided to be angry preemptively just in case it's warranted.
Aizawa doesn't look up from the stack of papers he's grading. "Sit."
They sit.
"Room checks flagged an anomaly," he says, still not looking up, voice as flat as ever. "Midoriya's bed hasn't been used in a month. Bakugou's room shows two sets of everything. I'm going to save us all some time and not make you explain the part where I already know what's going on."
Izuku opens his mouth to apologize, or explain, or possibly combust from embarrassment. Aizawa cuts him off before he can commit to any of them.
"I'm not here about a rule violation." He finally sets his pen down, looks at them properly, and there's something in his tired eyes that isn't the exasperation Izuku braced for. "I'm here because I want to know if you’re safe and if its helping.””
The question catches both of them off guard. Bakugou's arms uncross slightly.
"...Yeah," Izuku says, quiet. "It is."
"Good." Aizawa says it simply, like that settles the matter entirely. "Then I don't care what the housing form says. Half this school survived something no seventeen-year-old should have had to. If what gets you both through the night is knowing someone's a few feet away, I'm not going to be the idiot who makes you stop for the sake of a chore chart."
Bakugou, apparently unable to let a moment of genuine kindness pass without deflecting it, mutters, "Didn't ask for your permission, old man."
"Didn't say you needed it." Aizawa is already picking his pen back up, conversation apparently concluded in his mind. "I'm telling you so you stop sneaking down the hall at one in the morning like a pair of raccoons. Use the connecting door on the east side if it bothers you that much. It's not locked."
Izuku blinks. "There's a connecting door?"
"There's a connecting door." A pause, dry as ever. "Talk to your recovery girl liaison if the nightmares get worse instead of better. That's not optional, that part. Everything else—" he waves a hand, already done with the conversation, already back to grading. "Figure it out. You usually do."
They're most of the way back down the hall before Bakugou breaks the silence.
"...A connecting door."
"A connecting door," Izuku echoes, faintly hysterical. "This entire time."
"I'm gonna kill Present Mic for not telling us the dorms had those."
"Kacchan, I don't think that's really the takeaway here—"
"It's exactly the takeaway."
It starts, as most disasters in the dorms do, with Denki saying something he immediately regrets and Uraraka deciding the appropriate response is a full mandatory movie night to "reset the vibes," which is how nineteen teenagers end up crammed into the common room on a Friday night with too many blankets and not enough floor space.
"Okay but seriously," Kirishima says, mouth full of popcorn, sprawled across Sero's lap like this is a completely normal way to exist, "who's picking the movie, because if it's another Todoroki documentary about ice formations I will personally—"
"It was one time," Todoroki says, with the wounded dignity of a man who has clearly not let it go either.
"It was educational," Iida says loyally, adjusting his glasses.
"Nobody asked you, Iida."
"I am simply saying—"
The argument dissolves into good-natured chaos, blankets get redistributed, someone's elbow ends up in someone else's ribs, and in the middle of it all Izuku finds himself wedged onto the couch between Uraraka and Bakugou, who has his arms crossed and an expression that says he's only tolerating this because leaving would require effort.
"You could sit somewhere else, you know," Izuku says, amused, when Bakugou huffs at Kirishima for the third time in two minutes.
"And listen to Shitty Hair review every movie like he's never seen one before? Pass."
"You could go back to your room."
Bakugou gives him a look that says exactly what he thinks of that suggestion, and doesn't move an inch.
Halfway through the movie — nobody quite agreed on which one, it got vetoed and re-vetoed four times before Jirou just picked one at random — Izuku catches Uraraka watching him with a soft, knowing sort of smile. He raises an eyebrow. She just shakes her head, mouths nothing, and steals a handful of his popcorn instead.
By the time the credits roll, half of Class 1-A is asleep in some configuration or another — Kaminari using Sero as a pillow, Tsuyu curled up with a blanket stolen from an uncomplaining Todoroki who was leaning his whole body on Shinso, Ashido and Hagakure still whisper-arguing about the ending like it personally offended them. It's loud and messy and entirely too crowded, and Izuku wouldn't trade it for anything.
Beside him, Bakugou has gone very quiet, which usually means one of two things. Izuku glances over to find him asleep too, head tipped back against the couch, for once completely unguarded.
Izuku doesn't wake him. He just settles back into the noise and the warmth and the ridiculous overcrowded comfort of all of it, and lets himself have this too — proof that healing doesn't only happen at 3am in a quiet room. Sometimes it happens exactly like this: loud, chaotic, surrounded by people who never stopped showing up.
Sunday mornings in the dorms have developed their own set of unofficial rules, none of which were ever formally agreed upon and all of which everyone follows anyway. Rule one: nobody trains before ten. Rule two: whoever wakes up first is legally obligated to start the pancakes. Rule three: Sato's in charge of anything involving an oven, no exceptions, not after The Incident.
This particular Sunday, Izuku wakes up first, which means he's the one standing in the kitchen in one of Bakugou's old UA hoodies — the sleeves swallow his hands entirely, he's given up rolling them — squinting at a recipe on his phone while Kirishima heckles him from the table.
"You're gonna burn them again."
"I am not going to burn them again."
"You burned them last time."
"That was ONE time, Kirishima—"
"Bro, it was three times."
By the time Bakugou wanders in, hair doing something even more chaotic than usual, half of Class 1-A has assembled around the kitchen island in various states of pajama-clad disarray, and the pancake situation has devolved into a full cooking competition nobody asked for, complete with Iida acting as an entirely unnecessary but deeply committed judge.
"There's a system, Kirishima, you can't just add more chocolate chips mid-competition—"
"Says who?!"
Bakugou takes one look at the chaos, one look at Izuku standing in the middle of it wearing his hoodie and holding a spatula like a weapon, and makes the executive decision to steal the nearest mug of coffee and sit down without commenting on any of it.
"You're not gonna help?" Izuku asks, mock-offended, sliding a plate his way anyway.
"Absolutely not. I'm watching. This is the best entertainment I've had all week."
"Rude."
"Accurate."
Izuku bumps his shoulder against Bakugou's on his way past to referee Ashido and Sero's increasingly unhinged pancake shapes, and Bakugou lets him, doesn't even pretend to be annoyed about it, just keeps drinking his coffee like the whole ridiculous, too-loud, flour-dusted morning is exactly where he means to be.
Not every night is about nightmares anymore. That's the part that sneaks up on Izuku sometimes — how many nights now are just nights, unremarkable ones, the kind where nothing needs fixing at all.
Tonight is one of those. Rain against the window, exam prep scattered across the bed between them, Bakugou scowling at a support-gear textbook like it personally challenged him to a fight.
"You've been on the same page for ten minutes," Izuku says, not looking up from his own notes.
"It's a stupid page."
"It's thermal regulation in exosuits. You explained it to me last week better than the book does."
"...Yeah, well. The book's still stupid." But he says it without heat, and a minute later he's copied down the diagram Izuku sketched from memory without being asked.
They work in silence for a while, the good kind — comfortable, unhurried, punctuated by the scratch of pencils and the rain outside. At some point Izuku's foot ends up hooked over Bakugou's ankle under the blanket, entirely unplanned, and neither of them mentions it or moves it.
"Hey," Bakugou says eventually, not looking up from his notes.
"Mm?"
"You slept fine last night. And the night before that."
Izuku blinks, surprised he's kept count. "...Yeah. I guess I did."
"Just saying." A pause, gruffer than it needs to be, like admitting the next part costs him something. "It's good. That it's — getting better. For both of us."
"Yeah," Izuku says softly, something warm unfurling in his chest that has nothing to do with the rain or the blankets or any of it. "It really is."
Bakugou grunts, embarrassed by his own sincerity, and goes back to his textbook. But he doesn't move his ankle either.
They were in their third year .
Izuku still has nightmares sometimes. So does Bakugou. They're rarer now, and shorter, and neither of them handles them alone — some habits, it turns out, are worth keeping for life, not just for recovery.
Tonight isn't about a nightmare, though. Tonight is just late, the city lights orange through the window, the two of them on the couch after a long patrol shift, Bakugou's arm slung along the back of the cushions behind Izuku's shoulders the way it's ended up most nights for longer than either of them has acknowledged out loud.
"I've been thinking," Izuku says, and something in his voice makes Bakugou actually turn to look at him.
"That's never good."
"I'm serious." Izuku huffs, but there's no real annoyance in it — just nerves, the kind that have been building for longer than tonight. "I've been thinking about how long we've been doing this. Sharing a room. Falling asleep on the same couch. Being each other's — I don't even know what to call it anymore. Best friend feels too small."
Bakugou goes very still. "Deku—"
"I love you." It comes out plainer than he practiced it, all the careful speeches he'd built up over the past week collapsing into three words the second it actually mattered. "Not just — not the way I have for years now, as my best friend. More than that. I have for a while. I just didn't know how to say it without everything changing."
The silence that follows is the longest of Izuku's life.
Then Bakugou huffs out a breath that's almost a laugh, disbelieving, and drags a hand down his face. "You absolute idiot," he mutters, but it's fond, wrecked, nothing like an insult at all. "Do you know how long I've been waiting for you to catch up?"
"...What?"
"I've loved you since we were fourteen, Deku. I just wasn't about to be the one to say it first and watch you overthink it into the ground." He shakes his head, but he's reaching for Izuku's hand as he says it, lacing their fingers together like it's the easiest thing he's ever done. "Took you long enough."
"You could've said something—"
"So could you."
"That's fair."
Izuku's laughing, a little disbelieving himself, when Bakugou leans in and kisses him — unhurried, certain, none of the urgency of a first kiss and all of the quiet inevitability of something five years in the making. It tastes like the coffee from earlier and feels, absurdly, like coming home to a room he's already lived in for years.
When they finally break apart, foreheads still resting together, Bakugou's the one who speaks first, low and a little rough.
"Guess this means the couch and the bed is officially ours now. Both of us. No more pretending it's just where I let you crash."
Izuku laughs again, soft and full, and kisses him once more just because he can.
"It always was, Kacchan."
"Yeah." A small, real smile — rare, and entirely for him. "Yeah, I guess it was."
Years later
By the time UA's autumn term starts, Izuku has been Mr. Midoriya to a room full of nervous first-years for three years running, and he still isn't used to how much he loves it.
He'd expected to miss the field — the adrenaline, the immediacy of being the one on scene. What he hadn't expected was this: a classroom of kids who remind him so much of himself at fifteen that it aches sometimes, watching them flinch at their own quirks, watching them slowly stop flinching. Aizawa had warned him it would ruin him for anything else. Aizawa, infuriatingly, had been right.
"You've got that look again," Bakugou says, dropping onto the couch beside him still half in his hero costume, the No. 2 rank pin catching the lamp light. He smells like smoke and ozone, the particular scent of a long patrol day. "The one where you're thinking about your brats instead of me."
"I can multitask." Izuku doesn't look up from the essay he's grading — a first-year's analysis of quirk ethics, earnest and a little too long, exactly the kind of overwriting he used to do himself. "One of them wrote four pages when I asked for one. I don't know whether to be proud or concerned."
"Definitely proud. That's a you problem you're passing down." Bakugou tips his head back against the cushions, eyes closing. "Mirio called today. Wants me on the joint op next week. Apparently the number one hero can't handle a villain cell without borrowing his number two." Said with all the exasperation of a man who is, in fact, thrilled to be needed.
"You love it."
"I tolerate it."
"You love it, Kacchan."
"...Shut up." No heat behind it at all anymore — hasn't been in years. He cracks one eye open. "How was the actual job. Not the paperwork. The kids."
Izuku's whole face changes, the way it always does when he talks about them. "Good. Really good, actually. Kid in my morning class finally got her emitter-type under control today — she's been so scared of it since she started, and today she just. Did it. Like it was nothing." He shakes his head, something soft and proud in his voice. "I forget sometimes that this is what I wanted. Not instead of being a hero. As well as it."
"You are a hero, idiot. Just a different kind now." Bakugou says it simply, like it isn't the kind of thing that used to take him five attempts across five different nights to say out loud. Some things about them have changed completely. Some things — the plainspoken way he says true things once he's decided they're true — never did.
Izuku sets the essays aside, finally, and shifts to lean into him, tucking himself against Bakugou's side the way he used to fit against a narrow dorm mattress a decade ago, except there's nothing careful about the distance between them anymore. Bakugou's arm comes around him automatically, like muscle memory, like it's the most natural gesture in the world because at this point, it is.
"Ten years," Izuku says quietly, mostly to himself. "Since the war. Since any of this started."
"You getting sentimental on me, Deku?"
"Maybe a little."
Bakugou huffs, but he presses a kiss to the top of Izuku's head anyway — unthinking, easy, the kind of gesture that would have flustered both of them into silence once and now barely registers as anything but habit. "Good," he mutters. "Somebody should be. God knows I'm not gonna do it."
"You just did."
"Don't ruin it."
Izuku laughs, warm and unguarded, and tilts his face up to kiss him properly — slow, familiar, no nerves left in it at all, just the quiet certainty of two people who found their way to each other the long way around and never once regretted the route. Outside, the city hums on toward evening. Inside, for two people who once measured survival in nights that ended without nightmares, this — ordinary, settled, entirely theirs — is what all of it was for.