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The hospital never actually went dark. That was the thing nobody warned Izuku about. He'd imagined recovery as something quiet, dim, a place where the world finally stopped screaming long enough for a person to put themselves back together. Instead there was always a light somewhere — the green glow of a monitor down the hall, the buzzing strip above the nurses' station, the thin yellow line under a door that never quite closed all the way.
He lay in his bed on the fourth floor, staring at a ceiling tile with a water stain shaped like nothing in particular, and counted his own heartbeat because counting was the only thing that made it slow down.
One. Two. Three.
Somewhere in his memory, on a loop he couldn't shut off, Shigaraki's hand was closing around empty air, and Bakugo's chest was very still, and Izuku's own voice was breaking apart on his name.
Kacchan. Kacchan, hey. Hey, look at me. Kacchan—
He hadn't been able to hear a heartbeat that day. He hadn't needed to hear one now to remember exactly what its absence sounded like.
Izuku sat up so fast the IV line pulled taut against the back of his hand, a small sting he barely registered. His cast was gone — had been gone two weeks — but muscle memory still made him move like he was fragile, like everything might come apart if he wasn't careful. Everything already had.
He didn't decide to leave the room. His body just did it, the way it had learned to do things during the war, before thought could get in the way and ruin the momentum.
The hallway was empty except for a nurse's cart parked outside room 412, three doors down from his own. Izuku knew, because he'd memorized it the way he memorized everything now — every exit, every gap in the routine, every hour the night nurse took her fifteen-minute break by the vending machines on the second floor. It wasn't hard to be quiet. He'd spent a year learning how to move through danger without being seen. A hospital corridor at two in the morning was nothing.
Room 415 was dark except for the soft blue wash of a monitor.
Izuku stopped in the doorway the way he had every night for the past five nights, and looked at the shape of Bakugo Katsuki breathing.
Just breathing. In. Out. The rise and fall of a chest that had, for a handful of seconds Izuku would never stop replaying, not risen or fallen at all.
"You gonna stand there creepin' all night, or are you gonna sit down."
The voice was low, rough with sleep that clearly hadn't come yet, not annoyed so much as tired in the bone-deep way that had nothing to do with the hour.
Izuku's throat worked. "I didn't want to wake you."
"You didn't. Can't sleep." A pause, and in the dark Izuku could just make out Bakugo's eyes, open, fixed on the ceiling same as Izuku's had been. "Same as you, I'm guessing, since this is the fifth night in a row you've hovered in my doorway like some kind of sad ghost."
"You knew?"
"'Course I knew, idiot. Your footsteps sound like you're defusing a bomb. Now sit down before a nurse catches you standing there looking like you're about to have a breakdown."
Izuku crossed the room and lowered himself into the chair beside the bed .
For a while neither of them said anything. That was fine. That was, Izuku had discovered, one of the strange gifts of these five nights — that silence with Kacchan didn't feel like the silence everywhere else did. Everywhere else, silence had teeth. It filled up with faces. Here, it was just quiet.
"Nightmare?" Bakugo asked eventually, still looking at the ceiling.
"Yeah."
"Same one?"
Izuku didn't answer right away. He didn't have to.
Bakugo already knew which one — there was only one nightmare that mattered right now, the one where Izuku's hands were pressed against a wound that wouldn't stop and a heart monitor somewhere down the hall of his memory went flat and stayed flat for four seconds that had lasted four hundred years.
"You didn't die," Izuku finally said. It came out smaller than he meant it to. "I know that. I know that. You're right there. But I keep — every time I close my eyes I'm back there and you're not breathing and I couldn't—" His voice cracked in half. "I couldn't do anything."
"You did plenty."
"Not enough."
Something shifted in the dark — the sound of Bakugo turning his head against the pillow to actually look at him.
"Izuku."
"I'm fine," Izuku said, too fast, the old reflex kicking in even now, even here, even after everything.
"You're not," Bakugo said. Not cruel. Just true. "Neither am I. Sit there if you're gonna sit there, but don't lie to me in my own damn hospital room, that's the one thing I got left that's mine."
Izuku laughed — a wet, cracked thing that wasn't really a laugh at all — and put his face in his hands.
Bakugo didn't say anything else at first. But after a moment Izuku felt a hand land, heavy and a little awkward, on the crown of his head — not quite a pat, not quite a ruffle, just weight, just there, like Bakugo wasn't sure what to do with the gesture once he'd already started it but wasn't going to take it back either. It stayed until Izuku's shoulders stopped shaking.
"C'mere," Bakugo muttered eventually, gruff, shifting over on the mattress with visible effort, wincing at the pull of stitches he wasn't supposed to move like that. "Chair's clearly not doing it for you."
Izuku hesitated only a second before he climbed up beside him, careful of the IV lines and the bandages, curling into the narrow space Bakugo had made like it was the only safe place left in the building , which, to him, it was. One hand found Bakugo's wrist, right over the pulse point, right where he could feel, over and over, stupidly, obsessively, that it was still there. Bakugo let him. More than that — he turned his hand over, halfway through the night, so their fingers were loosely tangled instead, like even asleep some part of him had decided Izuku shouldn't have to work that hard to reassure himself.
Neither of them mentioned it in the morning, when a nurse found them both crowded onto one narrow hospital bed and gently woke Izuku before shift change. But the next night, Izuku found the extra blanket already folded at the foot of Bakugo's bed, and the space beside him left open.
It took nine more nights before either of them said the things underneath the things.
By then it had become a ritual with no name. Izuku would wait for the hallway to empty, cross the distance between 411 and 415, and Bakugo would already be awake, waiting, like sleep was something that had stopped trusting either of them and they'd mutually agreed to stop chasing it until closer to dawn.
Some nights they didn't talk at all — just sat shoulder to shoulder against the headboard, or Izuku's head tipped onto Bakugo's shoulder while Bakugo pretended to be annoyed about it and never once moved away.
That ninth night, it rained. Izuku hated the rain now, though he hadn't told anyone that, hadn't even fully admitted it to himself until he was lying in the dark listening to it hit the window and realizing his hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Rain had been falling the night Midnight didn't get up. Rain had slicked the ruined street where Izuku had screamed himself hoarse trying to reach for people who were already gone.
When he slipped into 415, Bakugo took one look at him and didn't ask if he was okay. He just lifted the blanket on the empty side of the bed — a small, wordless invitation — and Izuku climbed in without hesitation this time, tucking himself against Bakugo's side, an arm looping loosely around him, holding on the way you hold onto something in an earthquake.
For a long time that was all. Rain on glass. Two heartbeats, close enough to feel each other's.
"I keep thinking about Tenko," Izuku said finally, so quiet it was almost lost under the rain.
Bakugo didn't flinch at the name the way most people did — the way even Izuku's own mother sometimes did, like it was something that might cut them if they said it wrong. Bakugo just tightened his arm around him a fraction and waited.
"I told him I'd save him. Not — not out loud, not really, but I promised myself. I decided a long time ago that I was going to be the one who reached him before it was too late, that I could be the thing that changed how his story ended, and I—" Izuku's hand fisted in the fabric of Bakugo's hospital shirt. "I got there and it was already too late and I don't even know if what I saw in those last few seconds was really him or just — just static, just whatever was left, and I'll never know, I'll never actually know if any part of it reached him. And Midnight is dead because she was buying time so kids could get out, and Toga — Ochako still can't sleep at night thinking about her, and so many people aren't here anymore, and I keep doing the math on it, Kacchan. I keep doing the math like there's a version where I move faster, where I make a different choice three moves back, where everyone lives. And there isn't one. I've run it a hundred times and there isn't one where everyone lives, and I don't know how to carry that and also keep — keep functioning, like a person, like someone who deserves to be sitting here instead of—"
"Instead of what," Bakugo said, very evenly, when Izuku couldn't finish it.
Izuku's silence answered for him.
"Hey." Bakugo's hand came up, cupping the back of Izuku's head, tipping it up so he had no choice but to meet his eyes. "Look at me, Deku."
He did. In the dim light, Bakugo's face was drawn tight, jaw set in the way it got right before he said something he didn't want to say.
"You didn't put a hole through my chest. Shigaraki's whole miserable life wasn't yours to fix by yourself just because you decided somewhere in that big dumb head of yours that it was. You think I don't run my own math? You think I haven't laid here every night doing the exact same thing — how I should've seen it coming, how I let my guard down for half a second and half a second was all it took, how everyone almost watched me die because I wasn't fast enough, wasn't strong enough, after everything, after all of it—" His voice broke, actually broke, something Izuku had heard maybe twice in his life. "I heard you, you know. Not the whole time. But some of it. I heard you screaming my name like the world was ending, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it, I couldn't even open my eyes, and that's the part that keeps me up. Not that I almost died. That you almost had to watch it happen and there wasn't one single thing I could do to make that easier for you."
Izuku stared at him. "You were the one dying and you were worried about me?"
"Yeah, well." Bakugo looked away first, toward the rain-streaked window, but his thumb moved, absent and unconscious, back and forth against the nape of Izuku's neck where his hand still rested. "Welcome to how it feels. Now you know what it's like to sit on this side of it."
The rain kept falling. Neither of them spoke for a long time. Izuku let himself be held that way, forehead nearly against Bakugo's collarbone, and for once didn't try to make himself smaller or apologize for taking up the space.
"It should've been enough," Izuku whispered eventually. "Everything we did. It should have been enough to save everyone. Why wasn't it enough?"
"Because there's no version of a war where it's enough," Bakugo said, quieter now, most of the fire gone out of it, leaving something rawer underneath. "You're not the only one who didn't get the ending they wanted, Deku. None of us did. That's not — that's not a math problem you solve. It's just what's left. And you don't get to decide you don't deserve to be here just 'cause other people aren't. That's not honoring them. That's just you finding a new way to punish yourself, and I'm not gonna sit here and watch you do that to yourself instead of a villain doing it to you. I didn't survive just so you could finish the job on your own damn conscience."
Izuku made a sound that wasn't quite a sob and wasn't quite a laugh, something in between, something that had been trying to claw its way out of his chest for eleven days. He turned his face into Bakugo's shoulder and just breathed there for a while, and Bakugo let him, one hand splayed flat and steady between his shoulder blades.
"When did you get so good at this," he managed, muffled. "You used to just tell me to shut up and get stronger."
"I'm still telling you to get stronger," Bakugo said. "Just a different kind, this time. And you taught me that."
Izuku had fallen half-asleep tucked against his side, head on Bakugo’s chest, when he felt Bakugo's hand close around his wrist. Not gentle. Bakugo didn't really do gentle. But careful, in the specific way that meant something, the grip a fraction tighter than it needed to be, like he needed to feel that Izuku's pulse was there under his fingers as much as Izuku needed to feel his.
"I was cold," Bakugo said, into the dark, no preamble at all.
Izuku blinked awake. "What?"
"When it happened. Before everything went black. I remember being cold, and I remember thinking that was stupid, because there was fire everywhere, there was fire right there, and I still felt cold, and then I thought—" He stopped. Started again. "I thought about my mom and dad. And then I thought about you. In that order, which pissed me off, honestly, 'cause I always figured if I was gonna go out I'd at least go out thinking about something useful, some unfinished move, something. Instead it was just their faces, and then yours, and then nothing."
Izuku didn't move. Didn't breathe, almost.
"I've never told anyone that," Bakugo said. "Figured I wouldn't have to. Figured it'd just be a fact that died with me, and that would've been fine, except it didn't die with me, I'm still here, and now I gotta walk around with the fact that some part of my brain decided you were worth thinking about on the way out. So there it is. That's yours now too. Do whatever you want with it."
Izuku's eyes burned. He pushed himself up on one elbow so he could actually look at him. "Kacchan—"
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not going to make it weird."
"You're already making it weird, I can hear it in your voice, you're doing the thing where you get all—"
Izuku didn't let him finish. He just leaned in and wrapped both arms around him, fully, carefully — mindful of the healing scar under the hospital shirt, mindful of everything — and held on like he hadn't quite let himself do yet, not all the way, not with his whole body.
Bakugo went rigid for exactly one second, like his instincts hadn't caught up to what was happening, and then one arm came up around Izuku's back, hand fisting loosely in the fabric of his shirt, and he exhaled like something in his chest had been waiting eleven days to unclench.
"I almost lost you," Izuku said into his shoulder, and this time it came out steady, stripped of everything but the truth of it. "Not almost like a close call. Almost like I had to decide, for about four seconds, what the rest of my life was going to look like without you in it. And I couldn't. I couldn't, Kacchan. Every plan I've ever made for what happens after all this — every single one — you're standing there for it. I don't know how to be the hero I want to be in a world where you're not also becoming the hero you want to be, right next to me, being insufferable about it the whole way.”
Bakugo's hand tightened in his shirt. His forehead dropped, just for a moment, against the top of Izuku's head.
"Yeah," he said finally, rough. "I know."
It wasn't much. It didn't need to be. Some things only need two words if they're the right two words, said by the right person, at three in the morning, with rain long since stopped and a heart monitor beeping steady and unbothered in the background like it hadn't been the most important sound in the world eleven days ago.
They stayed like that a long time, tangled together in a hospital bed too narrow for two people, neither one willing to be the first to let go.
"I'm still scared," Izuku admitted eventually, barely audible, face still pressed against him.
"Yeah, well, I'm still pissed off," Bakugo said, and pressed a rough, brief press of his knuckles against the back of Izuku's head, somewhere between a noogie and something almost tender. "Guess we're both stuck being whatever we are for a while."
"Together, though."
A beat. Then, grudging, almost gentle in a way that would've seemed impossible to Izuku a year ago: "Yeah. Together."
By the fourth week, the two of them being inseparable had simply become a fact.
"You two are unbelievable," Uraraka said one afternoon, dropping into the visitor's chair with a bag of mikan and the particular look she got when she'd caught them doing something she found unbearably soft. Iida had come too, notebook already out, and even he had stopped pretending to write anything down, just watching with something suspiciously fond around his eyes.
What she'd walked in on: Izuku sitting cross-legged at the foot of Bakugo's bed, working through a hand-strength exercise with a little rubber ring, while Bakugo — supposedly resting — had an arm slung loosely over Izuku's shoulders from behind, chin practically hooked over the top of his head, muttering corrections about his form that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with him just wanting an excuse to be closer.
"What," Bakugo said, not moving.
"Nothing," Uraraka said, delighted. "Nothing at all."
"You're one to talk," Bakugo shot back. "You cried for twenty minutes the other day 'cause Deku brought you the wrong flavor of pudding."
"That is completely different and you know it—"
Izuku laughed and leaned back into Bakugo's chest without thinking about it, the way he'd started doing without noticing he was doing it. Bakugo didn't complain. He just resettled his arm and kept correcting his grip.
Later, once Uraraka and Iida had gone, physical therapy called Izuku down two floors for his afternoon session — the one that always left his legs and arms shaking and unreliable afterward, still relearning how to hold his own weight after everything. He made it out of the therapy room and about ten steps down the hallway before his knee buckled without warning.
He didn't hit the floor. An arm hooked under his before he'd even finished the thought of falling.
"I told you to page me for this one," Bakugo said, already crouching, already turning his back. "Get on."
"Kacchan, I can walk and you should be resting "
"You're wobbling like a newborn deer, get on, I'm not asking twice."
Izuku climbed onto his back with the particular, absurd, aching familiarity of it — of being carried by Katsuki Bakugo, except this time there was no scorn in it, no impatience dressed up as contempt, just Bakugo's hands hooked firm and sure under his knees, just his voice, low, muttering something that might have been a complaint about Izuku being heavier than he looked and might have been him quietly checking, you good? not gonna throw up on me, are you?
"This is different from last time," Izuku murmured against his shoulder, cheek resting there, arms looped loose around his neck.
"Yeah, well." Bakugo adjusted his grip, started walking. "Turns out I like you better this way. Sue me."
Izuku smiled into the fabric of his shirt and didn't say anything else, just let himself be carried the rest of the way, forehead tipped against the back of Bakugo's neck, feeling the steady thud of his pulse under his lips where his mouth rested near his shoulder and for once that fact didn't come wrapped in grief. It just felt like something to be grateful for. Simple as that.
That evening, back in 415, Izuku fell asleep sitting up mid-sentence, head lolling toward Bakugo's shoulder. Bakugo didn't wake him. He just carefully maneuvered them both down flat, tucked the blanket up over Izuku's shoulder, and — after checking twice that no one was in the doorway — pressed his mouth briefly to the crown of his messy hair, the way you'd bless something you were scared of losing, before settling in beside him.
"Idiot," he muttered, fond, to no one. "Nearly gave me a heart attack and you don't even remember it."
Izuku, half-asleep, made a small contented sound and burrowed closer, and Bakugo, red-eared and grateful and finally, finally tired enough to actually sleep, let him.
By the sixth week, the arrangement had stopped being a secret anyone bothered pretending not to notice.
The night nurse — a woman named Fujita who'd been doing this long enough to have seen every kind of grief the job could offer — had stopped even glancing twice when she found Izuku's bed empty at midnight and both boys asleep in 415 by one, tangled together on a mattress meant for one person, Izuku curled on top of the blanket with his arms wound firmly and protectively around Bakugo, Bakugo's own hand resting, unconscious and possessive, over Izuku's forearm like even asleep some part of him refused to stop keeping watch.
"You know I could report this," she told them once, not unkindly, adjusting an IV line while Izuku startled awake blinking at her over the edge of the mattress.
"You're not gonna, though," Bakugo said, not even opening his eyes.
"No," she agreed. "I'm not." She'd seen enough of the kind of nightmares that made teenagers sneak down hospital hallways in the middle of the night. She recognized this for what it was. Not mischief. Triage.
This morning, sunlight was doing something it hadn't managed in weeks — actually making it all the way through the blinds, gold and warm across the floor, catching dust in the air like something almost peaceful.
Izuku woke slower than usual, without the jolt, without the half-second of not knowing where or when he was. He woke to the sound of Bakugo already awake beside him, quiet, one hand idly carding through Izuku's unruly hair like he'd been doing it a while and hadn't noticed himself starting.
"You didn't wake up screaming," Bakugo observed. Not a question. An accounting. His hand didn't stop moving.
"Neither did you."
"Don't get used to it."
But Izuku smiled anyway, turning his face further into the pillow, into the warmth, into the steady rhythm of Bakugo's fingers in his hair, because it was the first morning in longer than he could count where the first thing in his chest wasn't grief. There was still grief.
There would be, he suspected, for a very long time — for Tenko, for Midnight, for Himiko, for everyone he couldn’t save. That didn't go away because one morning was easier than the ones before it. He'd stopped expecting it to.
But there was also this: a boy beside him who had, against every possible outcome, kept breathing. Who thought about him in the dark when the world almost ended. Who carried him down hallways now instead of shoving him down them. Who pressed foreheads against the top of his head at night thinking he was asleep, and ruffled his hair in the morning thinking no one could see, and was still here to shove a tray of hospital food at Izuku's chest and snap "eat, idiot, you look like a corpse" in a tone that somehow, impossibly, sounded like love.
"Hey," Izuku said, catching the hand in his hair and just holding it there, lacing their fingers loosely together instead.
"What."
"I'm glad you're here."
Bakugo was quiet for a second. Outside, somewhere down the hall, a cart rattled past, and a bird had found its way to the windowsill, and the world kept doing the ordinary, stubborn thing it did, which was continuing.
"Yeah," Bakugo said finally, gruff, looking anywhere but at him, ears faintly red, though he didn't pull his hand away. "Me too." He tugged Izuku half onto his chest instead, arm settling heavy and sure around him, chin dropping to rest against his hair. "Now shut up and let me have five more minutes before doctor comes in here and lectures both our asses for skipping physical therapy again."
Izuku laughed — a real one, small but real — and let himself be held, listening to a heartbeat that had almost stopped and hadn't, that kept going, steady and stubborn and there, under his ear.
Neither of them said anything else about it. They didn't have to. Some things, once said in the dark, don't need saying again in the light. They just need to be lived in — held onto, carried, curled around — morning after morning, for as long as it takes.