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Izuku woke up, at least… he thought he did.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
He was fairly certain that waking up was something reserved for the living, and, unless the afterlife had developed a rather questionable sense of humour, Izuku Midoriya was fairly certain he no longer belonged among them.
He stared at the sky.
It was blue.
That was the first thing he noticed, which seemed horribly unfair, all things considered. The sky was blue, the clouds were white, and the sunlight spilled across the city in great, golden ribbons, illuminating windows and rooftops and the tops of trees that swayed gently in the morning breeze. Somewhere below him, a car horn sounded. Somewhere farther away, a dog barked. The city was waking up, slowly and indifferently, preparing itself for another ordinary day.
Another ordinary day.
Izuku swallowed.
Or, well, he thought he swallowed.
Something about the movement felt wrong, as though his body had merely agreed to the suggestion of swallowing without actually bothering to do it. He couldn't quite explain it. Everything felt a little distant, a little muffled, like he was experiencing the world through a window that had been shut for so long that he'd forgotten what the air outside smelled like.
He blinked.
The sky remained.
He turned his head, looking for something familiar, something that might explain why he was lying on a rooftop in the middle of the morning with absolutely no recollection of how he had gotten there.
And then he remembered.
Oh.
Oh, no.
The memories returned in fragments at first, little pieces of the afternoon that had seemed perfectly ordinary until they weren't. The alleyway. The sludge villain. All Might's enormous hand wrapped around him as the greatest hero in the world carried him away from danger. The impossible, ridiculous, wonderful realization that All Might had actually been there, that Izuku had actually met him, that the hero he'd admired since childhood had spoken to him as though he were a real person rather than another Quirkless kid with an embarrassing dream.
And then the rooftop.
The conversation.
The question he'd spent fourteen years gathering the courage to ask.
Can someone without a Quirk become a hero?
He remembered the way he'd looked at All Might, holding his breath as he waited for an answer, because there had to be an answer, didn't there? There had to be some exception, some loophole, some tiny little possibility that would allow him to keep the future he'd spent his entire childhood imagining.
He remembered the smile All Might had given him.
He remembered the gentleness in his voice.
He remembered how carefully the greatest hero in the world had explained that wanting something very badly didn't mean it was possible.
And he remembered being left alone.
The rooftop had seemed enormous after All Might departed, the open sky stretching above him without a single comforting thing to hold on to. Izuku remembered standing there, staring at the place where the hero had disappeared, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to come back, waiting for the universe to correct what had to be some terrible misunderstanding.
He had waited until there was nothing left to wait for.
And afterward, he had made a decision that he could never take back.
His breath caught.
Except he wasn't breathing.
Izuku went still.
For a moment, he couldn't even remember what he'd been thinking about. His thoughts had scattered like birds startled from a tree, leaving him with nothing but a growing, inexplicable sense of dread.
He wasn't breathing.
He looked down at his chest.
Nothing.
He pressed a hand against it, waiting for the familiar rise and fall, for the steady reassurance of his own existence. He watched the fabric of his school uniform, expecting it to shift with his next breath.
It didn't.
He tried to inhale.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, more desperately, but there was no air entering his lungs, no tightening in his chest, no awful sensation of being unable to draw a breath. There was simply nothing at all, as though his body had forgotten that breathing was something it was supposed to do.
"No," he whispered.
His voice sounded normal.
That was almost worse.
He raised a trembling hand to his throat, searching for a pulse, and then moved his fingers to his wrist, pressing down the way he'd been taught during a first-aid lesson at school.
He waited.
Nothing.
He tried again.
Nothing.
"No, no, no, no."
He was doing it wrong.
He had to be doing it wrong.
Perhaps he was dreaming. Perhaps the entire afternoon had been some elaborate nightmare, and he was going to wake up in his bed with his mother knocking gently on the door, asking him if he wanted eggs for breakfast. Perhaps he'd fallen asleep somewhere, and this was simply what happened when an overworked fourteen-year-old with a very active imagination and a tendency to overanalyse absolutely everything dreamed about things he couldn't understand.
That had to be it.
Because the alternative—
Izuku stopped thinking.
He couldn't think about the alternative.
He pressed his fingers against his wrist again.
He waited.
And waited.
And waited.
There was no heartbeat.
He knew what that meant.
He had known what that meant since he was little, since he'd watched enough hero documentaries and medical dramas to understand that a body without a heartbeat wasn't supposed to be sitting upright on a rooftop, staring at its own hands.
He knew.
He just didn't want to.
Because if he was right, if the terrible, impossible conclusion taking shape in his mind was true, then—
Oh.
He was dead.
Izuku stared at his hands.
They were perfectly ordinary hands. Small, pale, a little rough around the knuckles, with short fingernails and faint marks from years of childhood accidents. The hands of a boy who had spent countless afternoons filling notebooks with observations about heroes. The hands of a boy who had once believed that if he wrote down enough information, studied enough Quirks, learned enough about the people he admired, he might eventually find a way to stand among them.
The hands of a boy who had never stopped reaching for something he had been told he could never have.
He turned them over, examining his palms as though the answers might be written there.
He looked so normal.
He felt so normal.
Well, not normal, exactly. There was something missing, a strange emptiness beneath everything, like a word on the tip of his tongue that he would never quite remember. But he still looked like Izuku Midoriya. His green hair was still a mess. His freckles were still scattered across his cheeks. His school uniform was still rumpled from the day he'd had.
He looked like a boy who ought to be going home.
He looked like a boy who ought to have a mother waiting for him.
He looked like a boy who ought to have had a future.
Instead, he was sitting on a rooftop, trying to convince himself that he wasn't dead.
A laugh escaped him.
It was small and shaky and horribly inappropriate, and he immediately wanted to take it back. He covered his mouth, staring at the city beyond the rooftop wall, and the laugh dissolved into something that sounded dangerously close to crying.
"Mom," he whispered.
The word hurt.
He hadn't thought about his mother yet. Not properly. He'd been so busy trying to understand what had happened to him that he'd managed to push aside the one person who would be waiting for him at home.
His mother.
His sweet, wonderful mother, who always asked about his day even when he insisted there was nothing interesting to tell. His mother, who kept old drawings on the refrigerator long after he'd grown embarrassed of them. His mother, who had cried when the doctor told them he was Quirkless and had spent the rest of her life trying to make up for a world that had already taught her son to apologise for existing.
His mother, who had hugged him after All Might left.
No.
That hadn't happened.
She hadn't even been there.
She didn't know.
She didn't know that her son had stood on a rooftop and decided that he couldn't bear the life waiting for him. She didn't know that he wasn't coming home. She didn't know that somewhere in the city, her little boy had become something that no amount of love could bring back.
She was probably at home.
Perhaps she'd made lunch. Perhaps she'd sent him a message asking when he'd be back. Perhaps she was sitting at the kitchen table, worrying about him because he'd been out for so long.
Perhaps she was going to call him.
Izuku looked down at his hands again.
He wanted to go home.
The thought arrived with such force that it nearly knocked him over.
He wanted to go home. He wanted to open the front door and hear his mother call his name. He wanted to kick off his shoes and shuffle into the kitchen, where the smell of something warm would fill the apartment. He wanted to sit at the table and listen to her tell him about something she'd seen on television. He wanted to complain about school. He wanted to tell her about All Might.
He wanted to tell her everything.
He wanted to tell her that All Might had been kind, even if his answer had hurt. He wanted to tell her that he had finally asked the question that had haunted him his entire life. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry, that he hadn't known what to do with the answer, that he'd been so frightened of the future that he had failed to see how much of it was still waiting for him.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her.
He wanted to tell her that he hadn't meant to leave her alone.
But there was no one to hear him.
And that was when Izuku finally understood.
Not all at once, not in some grand, dramatic revelation, but slowly, through a hundred tiny details that his mind had been desperately trying to ignore.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't feel his heartbeat.
He couldn't feel the wind against his skin, even though he could see it tugging at his hair.
And when he reached toward the concrete beneath him, his fingers passed through it.
Izuku stared at his hand as it disappeared into the rooftop.
Then he pulled it back, scrambling away from the spot as though the ground itself had betrayed him.
He tried again.
His hand passed through the concrete.
He tried the metal railing.
The same thing happened.
He tried to touch the door leading into the building, but his fingers slipped through the handle without moving it even an inch.
He couldn't touch anything.
He couldn't hold anything.
He couldn't even wipe the tears from his face, because when he cried, they vanished before they could fall.
Izuku sank to his knees.
Or perhaps he simply thought about kneeling, and the world obligingly placed him there.
He didn't know anymore.
He didn't know how any of this worked.
He didn't know what he was.
He only knew that he was dead, and that somewhere, in a little apartment across the city, his mother was going to find out.
He pressed both hands over his mouth.
A sob escaped him anyway.
For the first time since waking, Izuku wished he could close his eyes and never open them again.
But he had already done that once, hadn't he?
And it hadn't made anything better.
So he stayed where he was, trembling beneath a perfectly blue sky, while the city carried on below him as though nothing had happened.
Eventually, he forced himself to stand.
He couldn't remain on the rooftop forever.
He didn't know what happened to ghosts who stayed in one place. He didn't know whether he was supposed to go somewhere, whether there was some destination waiting for him, whether the afterlife had rules and instructions and a helpful little pamphlet explaining what to do when you discovered that you were no longer among the living.
He didn't know anything.
But he couldn't bear to remain here, in the place where his life had ended, staring at the same sky that had watched him make the decision he could never undo.
He wanted to see something else.
Anything else.
So Izuku walked toward the door.
Or tried to.
His first attempt ended with him passing straight through it and stumbling into the stairwell beyond. He froze, stared at the door behind him, then looked down at his hands.
"Right," he murmured. "Ghost."
The word sounded ridiculous.
He was a ghost.
Izuku Midoriya, fourteen years old, Quirkless, aspiring hero, professional overthinker, owner of approximately thirteen notebooks full of information about people who would never know his name, had somehow become a ghost.
If he'd written this in one of his notebooks, he'd have spent hours trying to figure out what kind of Quirk could cause such a phenomenon.
The thought almost made him smile.
Almost.
He descended the stairs, though he wasn't entirely certain he was walking. Sometimes his feet touched the steps; sometimes he seemed to drift over them without any effort at all. He passed through a landing door, then another, and finally found himself outside.
The city greeted him with the same indifference as the sky.
People hurried past with shopping bags and briefcases. Cars crawled through intersections. A pair of children ran along the pavement, laughing about something that Izuku couldn't hear. Somewhere nearby, a shopkeeper was arranging a display in a window, carefully straightening the little objects until they sat exactly where he wanted them.
Life continued.
Izuku watched it with a strange, hollow feeling in his chest.
He had always thought of the world as something he needed to earn his place in. He'd thought that if he worked hard enough, studied long enough, proved himself worthy enough, eventually someone would look at him and see a hero.
But the world had never been waiting for him to prove anything.
It had simply been there.
Full of ordinary mornings and unremarkable afternoons, of strangers who would never know his name and people who might one day become important to him. Full of things he hadn't experienced yet because he was fourteen and there was still so much he hadn't had the chance to learn.
He had mistaken his life as it was for his life as it would always be.
And now he was going to have to watch the world move forward without him.
Izuku lowered his head.
He didn't know where to go, so he wandered.
He followed the streets without any particular destination, drifting past shops and apartment buildings, past a little park where an old man sat feeding pigeons, past a schoolyard where children shouted over the sound of a bouncing basketball.
He saw a woman helping her little boy tie his shoelaces.
He saw a young couple arguing over which train to take.
He saw a hero standing outside a convenience store, smiling for a photograph with a little girl who could barely have been five years old.
Izuku watched them all.
He watched them because he had nothing else to do.
He watched them because the world was still beautiful, and he didn't know what to do with that knowledge now that he could no longer be part of it.
And he watched them because, somewhere beneath the shock and the fear and the terrible, unrelenting grief, he was still a boy who loved people.
He still noticed things.
He still wanted to help.
When he passed a man struggling to carry a heavy box, he instinctively stepped forward.
"Here, let me—"
His hands passed through the cardboard.
The box remained exactly where it was.
The man adjusted his grip and carried on without noticing him.
Izuku stared after him.
Of course.
Of course he couldn't help.
He was dead.
He could stand in the middle of a busy street and scream until his voice gave out, and nobody would turn around. He could reach for someone who was falling and his hands would pass through them. He could stand in front of a speeding car and try to warn the driver, and the world would carry on as though he were nothing more than a patch of sunlight on the pavement.
He had spent his entire life wanting to save people.
Now he couldn't even make them hear him.
Izuku swallowed against the ache in his throat and continued walking.
He didn't know how much time passed. The sunlight shifted slowly across the buildings, and the streets grew busier as the afternoon approached. Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed and faded into the city's endless noise.
Then he heard shouting.
At first, he barely noticed it. There was always shouting somewhere in the city, particularly in a world where Quirks existed and villains occasionally decided that ordinary people were convenient targets for their frustrations.
But then someone screamed.
And Izuku stopped.
He knew that scream.
Not the voice itself, necessarily, but the sound of genuine terror beneath it. The sort of fear that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, that made his mind abandon every other thought and focus on one simple, urgent question.
Is someone hurt?
He turned toward the noise.
A crowd had gathered farther down the street, people pushing against one another as they tried to see what was happening. Some were running away. Others stood frozen, phones raised, watching the commotion from a distance.
And in the middle of it all—
Izuku's heart would have stopped.
It would have stopped if it hadn't already been gone.
"Kacchan?"
He didn't remember moving.
One moment he was standing at the edge of the pavement, and the next he was pushing through the crowd, desperately trying to reach the centre of the commotion.
He passed through people without touching them, stumbling as his feet seemed to carry him faster than he could think.
And then he saw him.
Katsuki Bakugou.
His childhood friend.
His bully.
The boy who had once held his hand while they climbed trees together, who had laughed with him over silly cartoons, who had eventually grown into someone Izuku no longer knew how to approach without feeling as though he had done something wrong.
Katsuki was trapped.
The sludge villain had him wrapped in a mass of dark, suffocating sludge, its shapeless body engulfing him as he struggled to free himself. His hands flailed uselessly, explosions sparking from his palms in desperate bursts that did little to dislodge the creature.
His eyes were wide.
His mouth opened.
Izuku couldn't hear what he was saying over the chaos, but he could see the fear in his face.
And suddenly, all the complicated things Izuku felt about Katsuki became terribly, painfully insignificant.
Because Katsuki was in danger.
And Izuku knew that fear.
He knew what it was to feel helpless, to stand in front of something too big and too frightening and realise that you had no idea how to make it stop.
He knew what it was to want someone to help you.
So he ran.
"Kacchan!"
He threw himself toward the villain, reaching for Katsuki's arm.
His hands passed straight through the sludge.
Izuku stumbled, spinning around in disbelief.
"No—wait! Wait, I can—"
He tried again.
His fingers slipped through the dark mass as though it were nothing more than smoke. He grabbed for Katsuki's wrist, for his sleeve, for anything he could reach, but there was nothing to hold on to.
He couldn't touch him.
He couldn't pull him free.
He couldn't even make Katsuki look at him.
"KACCHAN!"
Izuku screamed until his throat hurt, until the sound of his own voice became a horrible, distant thing.
Nobody heard him.
The heroes were gathering around the scene now, shouting instructions and trying to find a way to separate Katsuki from the villain without hurting him. The crowd surged backward as the sludge creature lashed out, and someone grabbed a child by the shoulders, pulling them away from the danger.
Izuku barely noticed any of it.
All he could see was Katsuki.
Katsuki, who was struggling so desperately that his entire body shook with the effort.
Katsuki, who had always seemed so invincible.
Katsuki, who had never been afraid to tell Izuku that he was weak, that he was useless, that he should stop pretending he could become a hero.
Katsuki, who was fourteen years old.
Katsuki, who was supposed to have years left.
The thought struck Izuku with such terrible force that he nearly forgot how to move.
He's going to die.
He didn't know how he knew.
Perhaps it was the way Katsuki's movements were becoming less frantic, or the way the heroes were beginning to shout over one another, or the awful realisation that nobody seemed to know what to do.
Perhaps it was simply the fact that Izuku had already seen this kind of helplessness once today.
Perhaps he was just frightened.
But the certainty settled over him all the same.
He's going to die.
"No," Izuku whispered.
He lunged forward again.
His hands passed through the sludge.
"No, no, no, come on, please—"
He tried to grab the villain's body, to shove it away, to do anything that might give Katsuki a chance to breathe.
Nothing worked.
He was a ghost.
He was a ghost, and he couldn't touch anything, and the boy he'd spent his entire life chasing was going to die right in front of him.
The world seemed to narrow around that single, unbearable truth.
Izuku had always imagined that if he were ever given the chance to save someone, he would know what to do. He had studied heroes for years, memorised their Quirks and their techniques, analysed their battles and written down everything he could learn from them.
He had imagined himself running toward danger.
He had imagined himself reaching out a hand.
He had imagined himself making a difference.
Instead, he was standing in the middle of a crowd, screaming at people who couldn't hear him, watching someone die while his hands passed harmlessly through the world.
And he couldn't even cry properly.
"Kacchan, please!"
The words tore out of him.
He didn't care that Katsuki had hurt him. He didn't care about the insults, the notebooks, the years of being told that he would never be enough.
He wanted him to live.
That was all.
He wanted Katsuki to go home to Mitsuki and Masaru. He wanted him to return to school the next morning and complain about his classmates. He wanted him to keep chasing his impossible, magnificent dream of becoming the greatest hero in the world.
He wanted Katsuki to have the chance to grow up.
He wanted him to have the chance to become someone different from the angry boy who had spent so many years hurting him.
He wanted him to have a future.
Because whatever Izuku had believed about his own future, whatever terrible conclusions he had reached on that rooftop, Katsuki had never been supposed to lose his.
And Izuku couldn't save him.
He couldn't save anyone.
The heroes finally managed to pull the sludge villain away from Katsuki.
For one impossible moment, Izuku thought that perhaps it was over.
He watched Katsuki fall free of the creature, watched the heroes rush forward, watched the crowd erupt into a chaotic mixture of relief and frightened shouting.
"Kacchan!"
Izuku rushed toward him.
Katsuki lay motionless on the pavement.
Izuku dropped beside him.
"No."
The word was barely audible.
He stared at Katsuki's face, waiting for him to move, waiting for his eyes to open, waiting for him to sit up and yell at everyone to stop staring at him.
Katsuki had to get up.
He always got up.
He was Katsuki Bakugou. He was the boy who had never let anyone see him struggle, who turned every failure into another reason to work harder, who walked through the world as though it had already promised him everything he wanted.
He couldn't be lying there like this.
He couldn't.
Izuku reached for him.
His hands passed through Katsuki's shoulders.
He tried again, desperately, as though the rules might have changed, as though the world might take pity on him for once.
Nothing.
"Kacchan?"
His voice broke.
"Kacchan, get up."
The heroes were kneeling beside Katsuki now. Their voices had changed. The urgency was still there, but beneath it lay something Izuku recognised with a horrible, sinking certainty.
They were trying to help him.
They were trying so hard.
But something had gone terribly wrong.
Izuku watched their faces.
He watched the way one of them shook their head, the way another lowered their eyes, the way the crowd fell into a silence so complete that even the traffic seemed to disappear.
And then someone said it.
He didn't hear the entire sentence.
He didn't need to.
Katsuki was gone.
Izuku stared at him.
For a moment, the words meant absolutely nothing. They were just sounds, just a collection of syllables that his mind couldn't make sense of. He looked at Katsuki's face, waiting for it to change, waiting for the familiar scowl to return, waiting for him to open his eyes and shout at everyone to get out of his way.
Nothing happened.
"Oh."
Izuku blinked.
"Oh, no."
He looked around at the heroes, at the crowd, at the people who were beginning to cry.
Then he looked back at Katsuki.
"Oh my God."
His voice was shaking.
"Oh my God, Kacchan."
He shuffled closer, although there was no reason to. He couldn't touch him. He couldn't help him. He couldn't do anything except look at the boy who had once been his entire world and try to understand how the universe had managed to take both of them away in the same afternoon.
"Oh my God, you died."
The words came out in a rush.
"You died. You actually—Kacchan, you—"
He couldn't finish.
His mind seemed to have stopped functioning altogether, leaving him with nothing but a series of increasingly frantic thoughts that crashed into one another without making sense.
Oh my God.
Kacchan is dead.
I'm dead.
We're both dead.
We're both dead.
We're both—
"No, no, no, no, no."
Izuku pressed his hands against his mouth, staring at Katsuki's face.
He couldn't understand it.
He couldn't understand how something like this could happen. How two boys who had been laughing together in a playground only a few years ago could end up like this, one lying motionless on the pavement and the other kneeling beside him, unable to even touch his shoulder.
He couldn't understand why the world had allowed it.
He couldn't understand why nobody was doing anything.
He couldn't understand why Katsuki wasn't getting up.
He couldn't understand why, after spending his entire life wanting to become a hero, he'd been given the one chance to help someone and found himself completely incapable of doing so.
He had died believing there was nothing left for him.
And now Katsuki was dead, too.
The irony was so horrible that Izuku couldn't even begin to process it.
He stared at the boy beside him, at the familiar blond hair and the freckles he had never paid much attention to, at the face he had known for almost as long as he could remember.
He wanted to say something.
He wanted to tell Katsuki that he was sorry.
He wanted to tell him that he hadn't meant for things to end this way, that he hadn't known, that he had been so frightened and so lost that he hadn't understood how much he still had to live for.
He wanted to tell him that he hoped, wherever Katsuki was going, he would find something kinder than the world they'd left behind.
But he couldn't make the words come.
All he could do was stare.
And then—
"Um."
The voice was so quiet that Izuku almost didn't recognise it.
He froze.
Slowly, very slowly, he turned his head.
Katsuki was looking at him.
Not at the heroes. Not at the crowd. Not at the body lying on the pavement.
At him.
Katsuki was standing a few feet away, staring at Izuku with wide, bewildered red eyes. His outline was faint around the edges, almost transparent in the afternoon sunlight, and he looked as though he'd been dropped into the middle of a conversation without anyone bothering to explain what was happening.
He looked confused.
He looked frightened.
And he looked so much like Katsuki that Izuku's heart would have broken all over again if he'd still had one.
"Deku?" Katsuki asked.
Izuku stared.
Katsuki glanced over his shoulder, following the direction of his own gaze toward the pavement, where the heroes were still gathered around his body.
Then he looked back at Izuku.
Then at the body.
Then back at Izuku again.
His expression changed.
"What the hell is going on?"
Izuku's mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
Katsuki took a hesitant step backward, his eyes narrowing as he looked Izuku up and down. He seemed to notice, perhaps for the first time, that there was something wrong with him, something that didn't quite belong in the world around them.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
Izuku made a strangled noise.
"Kacchan."
"What?"
"You're—"
He stopped.
Katsuki's expression grew more alarmed.
"I'm what?"
Izuku looked at the body.
Then at Katsuki.
Then back at the body.
"Oh my God," he whispered.
Katsuki stared at him.
"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God."
"Deku, what the hell are you talking about?"
"You're dead!"
The words burst out of Izuku before he could stop them.
Katsuki recoiled.
"What?!"
"You're dead!" Izuku repeated, pointing helplessly at the pavement. "You're right there! That's you! That's your body! Kacchan, you're dead, and I'm dead, and I don't know what's happening, and I can't touch anything, and nobody can hear me, and—"
He broke off, his thoughts tumbling over one another too quickly to make sense.
Katsuki stared at him.
Then he looked down at his own hands.
They were trembling.
"…What?"
Izuku gave a hysterical little laugh.
"I don't know!"
"Then why are you yelling at me?!"
"BECAUSE YOU'RE DEAD!"
"STOP SAYING THAT!"
"BUT YOU ARE!"
Katsuki looked as though he wanted to argue, to tell Izuku that he was being an idiot, that he was imagining things, that there was absolutely no way he could possibly be dead because he was Katsuki Bakugou and Katsuki Bakugou didn't just—
He stopped.
His gaze drifted toward the pavement again.
The body was still there.
His body.
Katsuki stared at it for a long, terrible moment.
Then he looked back at Izuku, and for the first time since they'd known each other, Izuku saw something in his expression that he had never been able to put a name to.
Not anger.
Not contempt.
Not the sharp, cutting disdain that Katsuki had perfected over the years.
Fear.
Katsuki looked frightened.
He looked fourteen.
He looked like a boy who had been told that he was going to become the greatest hero in the world and had believed it so completely that he'd never once considered what might happen if he didn't get the chance.
"Oh," Katsuki whispered.
Izuku's face crumpled.
"Yeah."
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Around them, the world continued its awful, ordinary business. The heroes moved Katsuki's body. Someone in the crowd was crying. A police officer tried to clear the pavement, speaking gently to the people who had gathered to watch.
Neither boy paid any attention.
Katsuki looked at his hands again, turning them over as though he expected to find some explanation written across his palms.
Then he looked at Izuku.
"You're dead, too?"
Izuku swallowed.
"I think so."
Katsuki's eyes widened.
"What do you mean, you think so?"
"I don't know! I woke up on the roof, and I couldn't breathe, and I couldn't feel my heartbeat, and then I tried to open a door and my hand went straight through it, and—"
"Wait." Katsuki stared at him. "The roof?"
Izuku fell silent.
For the first time since seeing Katsuki's body, he remembered where he had been before he arrived here.
He remembered All Might leaving.
He remembered the silence.
He remembered the choice he'd made afterward.
His gaze dropped.
"Yeah," he whispered. "The roof."
Katsuki watched him, his expression changing as he tried to make sense of the answer.
"What happened?"
Izuku shook his head.
"I don't want to talk about it."
Katsuki opened his mouth, probably to demand an explanation, because demanding explanations was something he had always been very good at.
But then he looked at Izuku properly.
He looked at the way his shoulders were hunched, at the way his hands trembled even though he couldn't feel them, at the expression on his face that seemed to belong to someone much older than fourteen and much younger than the person he had spent his life pretending to be.
And for once, Katsuki didn't shout.
He didn't tell Izuku to stop being pathetic.
He didn't call him a useless Deku.
He simply stood there, confused and frightened and utterly lost, with the ghost of the boy he'd spent years pushing away standing in front of him.
Neither of them knew what to do.
Neither of them knew where they were supposed to go.
Neither of them knew what happened next.
They were just two boys who had died far too young, standing in the middle of a world that had already begun to move on without them.
And for the first time in their lives, neither of them had any idea how to keep going.
Katsuki glanced once more at the place where his body had been.
Then he looked at Izuku.
His voice, when it came, was barely more than a whisper.
"Deku?"
Izuku looked up.
Katsuki hesitated.
Then, with an uncertainty Izuku had never heard from him before, he asked the only question he could think of.
"…What do we do now?"
Izuku stared at him.
He wanted to say that he didn't know.
He wanted to say that he was sorry.
He wanted to say that he was scared, that he didn't want to be dead, that he didn't want Katsuki to be dead, that he wanted his mother, that he wanted to go home, that he wanted to wake up and discover that the entire afternoon had been nothing more than a terrible nightmare.
Instead, he looked at Katsuki Bakugou, at the boy who had once promised to become the greatest hero in the world, and whispered the only thing he could think of.
"I don't know, Kacchan."
And for once, Katsuki had no answer either.
For a little while, neither of them moved.
The city continued around them, indifferent to the fact that two of its children had somehow slipped out of the world without leaving so much as a shadow behind. Cars passed through the intersection, their headlights washing over the pavement in pale streaks of white. Somewhere, a bicycle bell rang. A woman hurried past with a paper bag tucked beneath her arm, speaking into her phone about something that sounded terribly important, and Izuku watched her go with the peculiar, hollow feeling of someone standing outside a window, looking into a house where the lights were on and dinner was being served.
He wondered whether his mother had noticed he was gone yet.
The thought came so suddenly that he almost turned around.
Of course she had. It was late, wasn't it? Had it been late? He couldn't remember how long he'd been wandering, and the sky above the buildings had darkened to a deep, bruised blue that made the city lights look brighter than they ought to have. His mother would have finished work by now. She would have come home to an empty apartment, called his name, and checked his room when he didn't answer. Perhaps she'd assumed he was out studying. Perhaps she'd sent him a message, one of those little messages he sometimes forgot to answer because he was busy writing notes in the margins of his notebooks, and now she was wondering why he hadn't replied.
Perhaps she was worried.
Perhaps she was already—
No.
Izuku swallowed, alhtough there was nothing in his throat to swallow, and looked away from the street.
Beside him, Katsuki was staring at his own hands.
He had been doing that for several minutes, turning them over as if he expected to find some explanation written into his palms. Every so often, his fingers curled into fists, and every time they did, he seemed surprised by the absence of the familiar little crackle that ought to have accompanied the movement. He had tried producing an explosion three times since appearing beside Izuku, each attempt accompanied by an increasingly vicious string of curses. The first had produced nothing. The second had produced nothing. The third had ended with Katsuki kicking a rubbish bin and discovering, with an expression of profound personal betrayal, that his foot had passed straight through it.
Izuku had made the mistake of laughing.
He had stopped when Katsuki turned to look at him, but the damage had already been done.
"Not a fucking word," Katsuki had warned.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking about it."
"You can't possibly know what I'm thinking."
"I know that stupid face."
And somehow, impossibly, they were back here, standing on a street corner in Musutafu, arguing like they had done a thousand times before, except that there was no heartbeat beneath either of their chests and no one around them knew enough to care.
Katsuki looked up from his hands. "Where are we going?"
Izuku blinked. "What?"
"You heard me, nerd. Where are we going?"
"I don't know."
"Then why are we standing here?"
"Because you asked me to stop following you!"
"And you actually listened?" Katsuki threw his hands into the air. "God, you're even more useless dead."
The words landed between them with a weight neither boy had anticipated.
Katsuki's expression changed first. It was subtle, almost imperceptible, a brief tightening around his mouth as he seemed to hear his own words for the first time. Izuku looked down at the pavement. There was a little crack in the concrete beside his shoe, with a thin line of grass growing through it, stubborn and green despite the dirt packed around its roots.
"I'm sorry," Katsuki muttered.
Izuku looked up so quickly that, had his body still been alive, he might have hurt his neck.
"What?"
Katsuki's face immediately twisted into an expression of disgust. "Don't make me repeat myself."
"No, I just—"
"I said I'm sorry, okay?"
Izuku stared at him.
Katsuki stared back, growing more uncomfortable by the second. He looked as though he'd rather fight every villain in Japan with his bare hands than stand beneath the scrutiny of Izuku Midoriya's enormous, bewildered green eyes.
"Jesus Christ," he grumbled. "You look like you've never heard anyone apologize before."
It was such a ridiculous thing to say that Izuku almost smiled.
Almost.
Instead, he found himself wondering when Katsuki had last apologized to him while they were alive. He searched his memories, trying to find an instance that wasn't a half-hearted excuse delivered through clenched teeth or a sarcastic remark that only resembled remorse if he squinted hard enough. He couldn't find one. That didn't mean there had never been one, of course. His memories were not perfect, and grief had a way of rearranging them into something crueler than the truth.
Still, he couldn't remember.
And now Katsuki was standing in front of him, dead, with his hands shoved into his pockets and his shoulders hunched as though he were bracing himself against a cold that neither of them could feel, apologizing for a careless insult because he'd noticed it had hurt.
Izuku had imagined a great many things over the years. He'd imagined becoming a hero, imagined standing beside All Might, imagined the day he might finally prove that being born without a Quirk hadn't meant he was born without worth. He had imagined, too, what it would be like if Katsuki ever looked at him and saw something other than the boy he had spent so long trying to leave behind.
He had never imagined this.
"It's okay," Izuku said quietly.
Katsuki's eyes narrowed. "Don't say that if it isn't."
The answer caught him off guard.
For a moment, Izuku could only look at him, at the boy who had once told him to stop reaching for something that wasn't meant for him, the boy who had made the word Deku feel like a verdict rather than a nickname. He thought of all the times he'd swallowed his hurt because admitting to it had seemed more embarrassing than enduring it. He thought of how easy it had been to convince himself that Katsuki's cruelty was simply another thing he had to learn to live with, like his Quirklessness, like the pitying looks, like the quiet understanding that certain dreams belonged to other people.
"It's not," he admitted at last. "Not really."
Katsuki went still.
Izuku immediately wished he could take the words back, not because they were untrue, but because he didn't know what to do with the expression that crossed Katsuki's face. It wasn't anger. It wasn't even the familiar, defensive irritation he had come to expect. It was something smaller, something that looked almost like shame before Katsuki buried it beneath a scowl.
"Yeah," Katsuki said after a while. His gaze dropped to the pavement. "I figured."
The silence that followed was different from the ones they'd shared before. It wasn't a weapon either of them could use against the other, nor was it a contest to see who would become uncomfortable enough to speak first. It was simply silence, with all the awkwardness of two people who had finally said something true and now had no idea what was supposed to happen afterward.
Eventually, Katsuki kicked at the ground.
"Come on."
Izuku blinked. "Where?"
"Somewhere else. This street's pissing me off."
"You don't even know where we're going."
"Neither do you, so shut up and walk."
And because Izuku had no better plan, because the alternative was standing alone on a street corner where the world kept passing him by, he followed.
For the first few minutes, Katsuki walked too quickly. It was a habit, Izuku realized, one he had seen countless times in the hallways of Aldera, where Katsuki seemed to move through the world as though he were perpetually late for something important. His stride was long and impatient, his shoulders squared, his head held high even when there was no one around to impress. Izuku had spent years trying to keep up with him as a child, shortening his own steps into hurried little half-runs whenever Katsuki got too far ahead.
Tonight, he didn't run.
He let the distance between them grow until Katsuki noticed.
"What are you doing back there?"
"Walking."
"You're walking like a fucking pensioner."
"I don't think ghosts can get tired, Kacchan."
"Then what's your excuse?"
Izuku opened his mouth, considered several possible answers, and finally settled on, "Maybe I'm just enjoying the scenery."
Katsuki looked at him as though he had personally offended the entire concept of scenery.
"The scenery?"
"Yes."
"We're in the middle of a fucking residential district."
"Some people like residential districts."
"Name one."
Izuku glanced at him. "You."
Katsuki stopped walking.
It was so sudden that Izuku nearly continued without him, only realizing a second later that the footsteps beside him had disappeared. He turned back to find Katsuki staring at him with an expression caught somewhere between disbelief and outrage.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"You always liked walking around our neighborhood when we were little," Izuku explained, beginning to feel as though he had made a terrible mistake. "You used to race me to the park, and you liked climbing the hill behind the playground because you could see the whole street from the top. And when we were younger, before—"
He stopped.
Before everything changed.
Before Katsuki became someone he was afraid of disappointing. Before their friendship became something Izuku could only look back on, turning it over in his hands like a broken toy he had never learned how to fix. Before the word Kacchan became something he could only say in his head, because saying it aloud meant risking the familiar, sharp reminder that the boy he remembered no longer existed.
Katsuki was still watching him.
"You remember that?"
Izuku's mouth parted. "Of course I remember that."
"That was years ago."
"I know."
"How the hell do you even remember something that stupid?"
Izuku didn't know how to answer. How could he explain that he remembered almost everything about the boy he had grown up beside? That his mind had kept a thousand little pieces of Katsuki tucked away, even after the person himself had become someone he struggled to recognize? He remembered the exact shade of the afternoon sky on the day Katsuki had first shown him his Quirk. He remembered the way Katsuki had grinned when he won their first race, all bright teeth and triumphant laughter, before turning around and demanding they do it again because he'd barely been trying. He remembered the small, fierce boy who had once reached for his hand without thinking, who had once waited for him at the bottom of the playground slide, who had once been his best friend.
He remembered loving him, in the simple, uncomplicated way children loved the people who made their worlds feel bigger.
"I don't know," Izuku said, and tried to smile. "I guess I just remember things about you."
Katsuki looked away.
For once, he didn't have a cruel remark ready.
They continued walking, more slowly this time.
The convenience store on the corner was still open, its windows bright with fluorescent light. A man in a rumpled business suit stood outside, searching his pockets for his keys while balancing a plastic bag in the crook of his arm. Inside, a cashier was arranging a display of rice balls, and a little girl in a yellow coat had pressed both hands against the glass of the refrigerated dessert case, pleading with her father for something covered in strawberries.
Izuku stopped to watch her.
He wasn't sure why. Perhaps it was because the ordinary nature of the scene made his chest ache in a way he couldn't quite understand. Nothing about the little girl was remarkable. She had a crooked ponytail and a small scab on one knee, and she was speaking with the fierce conviction of someone who believed that if she could only find the right argument, the universe would eventually be persuaded to give her what she wanted.
Her father crouched beside her, listening with exaggerated seriousness.
"Are you absolutely certain you need this one?"
"Yes!"
"Not the chocolate one?"
"No, Papa, the strawberry one!"
"Hmm. That's a difficult decision."
The little girl groaned, throwing her head back in dramatic despair, and her father laughed so hard that he had to cover his mouth.
Izuku smiled before he realized he was doing it.
He could almost feel the ghost of a memory beneath his skin: his mother holding his hand outside a bakery, telling him he could have one pastry if he promised not to spoil his dinner. He remembered choosing the biggest one and then, after taking two bites, offering her the rest because it had turned out to be much too sweet. He remembered her laughing, brushing crumbs from his cheeks, and telling him that he had always been generous with the things he loved.
He wondered if she still remembered that day.
He wondered how many memories she would have to hold on to now that there would be no more of them.
"Deku?"
Izuku startled.
Katsuki stood a few steps away, watching him with an expression that had lost some of its usual sharpness.
"What?"
"You stopped."
"Oh." Izuku glanced back at the store. "Sorry."
Katsuki followed his gaze to the little girl, who had apparently won her argument and was now hopping excitedly beside the refrigerator while her father paid.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Katsuki said, "You always did that."
"Did what?"
"Stopped for everything." He shoved his hands into his pockets. "A stray cat. A stupid flower growing out of the sidewalk. Some old guy struggling with his shopping bags. You'd just wander off in the middle of whatever you were doing because something caught your attention."
Izuku looked at him in surprise. "You noticed that?"
"Hard not to notice when you kept making me wait."
The words were delivered with the usual gruff irritation, but there was something else underneath them, a faint, almost unwilling warmth that Izuku hadn't heard in Katsuki's voice for a very long time.
He remembered the old man with the shopping bags. They had been six, perhaps seven, walking home from the park when they'd spotted someone struggling to lift two heavy grocery bags onto the seat of a bus. Izuku had immediately hurried over to help, leaving Katsuki standing on the pavement with a scowl on his face and a half-eaten ice cream cone melting in his hand.
Katsuki had complained about it for the entire walk home.
Then, the next afternoon, he'd taken Izuku's hand and dragged him toward the bus stop because he'd seen the same old man struggling with his bags again.
He hadn't said why.
He'd simply helped.
Izuku had forgotten about that, or perhaps he'd buried it beneath all the memories that hurt too much to touch. Now, standing outside a convenience store as a ghost, he found himself wondering how many little kindnesses had disappeared from his understanding of Katsuki simply because it had become easier to believe that there were none.
"You weren't always mean to me," Izuku said.
Katsuki's expression hardened so quickly that Izuku almost wished he hadn't spoken.
"No," Katsuki replied after a moment. "I wasn't."
There was no excuse in his voice. No attempt to pretend that the years between their childhood and the present had been a misunderatanding, or that Izuku had somehow imagined the things that had hurt him. Katsuki stared at the pavement, his jaw clenched so tightly that the muscles stood out beneath his skin.
"I don't know when I started being like that," he admitted. "Or maybe I do, and I just don't want to say it."
Izuku waited.
Katsuki exhaled, a useless habit now, and looked toward the street. "You kept looking at me like I was the greatest person in the world, even after I started treating you like shit. And I—" He stopped, frustrated by the words before they could properly form. "I don't know. I hated it. I hated that you kept looking at me like that."
"Why?"
"Because you made it seem like I was supposed to be someone better than I was."
Izuku had never heard Katsuki say anything like that before.
The boy beside him was looking at the windows of the convenience store, but Izuku could tell he wasn't really seeing them. His hands were buried so deeply in his pockets that his shoulders had begun to rise, and the familiar scowl had settled over his face like armor.
"I thought if you stopped looking at me like that," Katsuki continued, his voice growing quieter, "then I wouldn't have to think about it. About whether I was actually the person you thought I was."
The confession was not a justification. It didn't erase the hurt, and it didn't transform their past into something gentler than it had been. But it was the first time Katsuki had offered Izuku a piece of himself without trying to turn it into a weapon.
Izuku looked at him for a long time.
"I didn't think you were perfect, Kacchan."
Katsuki gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "Could've fooled me."
"I thought you were amazing." Izuku's voice trembled slightly, though he couldn't tell whether it was sadness or the strange, unfamiliar relief of finally being allowed to say something true. "There's a difference."
Katsuki didn't answer.
"I knew you got angry. I knew you could be mean, and I knew you didn't always think about how other people felt. I wasn't stupid." Izuku paused, searching for words that had spent years waiting somewhere behind his teeth. "But when we were little, you made everything seem possible. You were so sure you could do anything, and I wanted to believe that if I stayed beside you long enough, maybe some of that courage would rub off on me."
He looked down at his hands.
"I think I kept waiting for the boy I remembered to come back."
The words seemed to settle into the space between them, fragile and impossibly heavy.
Katsuki's face had gone pale beneath the streetlights. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Whatever response he'd prepared, whatever instinctive defense he might once have reached for, seemed to have deserted him entirely.
Finally, he said, "I'm sorry."
This time, Izuku didn't ask him to repeat it.
He didn't tell him it was okay, either.
He simply nodded, accepting the apology for what it was: not a repair, not a promise that the past no longer mattered, but a beginning.
Katsuki seemed to understand.
"Come on," he muttered, turning away from the store. "Before you start crying or something."
"I'm not crying."
"Good."
"I don't think ghosts can cry."
Katsuki glanced over his shoulder. "Then what the hell is your face doing?"
Izuku laughed.
It came out unexpectedly, a small, startled sound that seemed to surprise them both. Katsuki stared at him for a second, then looked away with a strange expression, his mouth twitching as though it had almost remembered how to smile.
"You're still annoying," he said.
"So are you, Kacchan."
"Watch it, nerd."
And they walked on.
They found the hill by accident.
Or perhaps Katsuki found it, and Izuku simply followed him there, as he had done so many times when they were children. It was tucked behind a row of houses at the edge of a small park, its grass silvered by the streetlights and damp with evening dew. A narrow path wound up its side, disappearing between two trees before opening onto a little clearing at the top.
From there, Musutafu spread out beneath them.
The city was beautiful at night. Izuku had always thought so, though he had rarely stopped long enough to appreciate it. Windows shone in uneven patterns across the apartment buildings, some bright with television light, others dark behind drawn curtains. The roads curved between them like ribbons, carrying the endless movement of people who had places to be and people waiting for them to arrive. Farther away, the tallest buildings glittered against the sky, their reflections scattered across the windows of neighboring towers.
Somewhere in that sprawling city was his home.
Somewhere in that sprawling city was Katsuki's.
Somewhere, there were two mothers who had no idea where their sons were, two bedrooms that would remain untouched for a little while longer, two futures that had been imagined so often they had almost begun to feel inevitable.
Izuku sat in the grass.
Katsuki remained standing for a moment, looking out over the city with his hands resting against his hips. Then, with a disgruntled sigh, he lowered himself onto the ground beside him.
"I used to come here when I was little," Izuku said.
"I know."
Izuku turned toward him. "You do?"
Katsuki frowned at the horizon. "You dragged me here all the time."
"I did not!"
"You absolutely did. You'd get all excited about some stupid cloud formation or a bird's nest, and suddenly we were climbing a hill because you wanted to look at something."
Izuku's cheeks warmed with a familiar embarrassment. "I liked looking at things."
"Yeah, no shit."
"I still do."
Katsuki glanced at him, and for a brief moment, the expression on his face was so unexpectedly soft that Izuku almost forgot how to breathe, although he supposed breathing was no longer something he needed to remember.
"Yeah," Katsuki said. "I guess you do."
The conversation drifted after that. They talked about the park, about the time Katsuki had fallen out of a tree and insisted he had meant to do it, about the summer Izuku had tried to build a makeshift hero costume out of cardboard and tape. Katsuki remembered more of these things than Izuku expected. He remembered the names Izuku had given his imaginary hero teams, the ridiculous diagrams he'd drawn in his notebooks, the way he'd always run ahead whenever he thought he had discovered something new.
Izuku, in turn, remembered Katsuki's first explosion, how he'd stared at his own palms with a wonder so complete that he'd seemed to forget the rest of the world existed. He remembered the way Katsuki had looked at him afterward, eyes bright with excitement, eager to show his best friend what he could do.
They had been so little then.
Neither of them had understood how much a person could change without ever quite becoming someone else.
"Do you remember when we used to say we'd go to U.A. together?" Izuku asked.
Katsuki went quiet.
"Yeah."
"I really thought we would."
Katsuki pulled a blade of grass between his fingers. It passed through them, of course, and he stared at the empty space where it had been.
"Yeah," he said again. "I know."
For a while, they watched the city.
Then Katsuki spoke, so quietly that Izuku almost missed it.
"Did you really think you could become a hero?"
Izuku's smile disappeared.
He could have lied. He could have given Katsuki the answer he might once have wanted to hear, something cheerful and uncomplicated about never giving up on your dreams. But there was no point in pretending now. They had both died before they could become the people they'd spent their lives trying to be, and whatever future might have waited for them was no longer something either could reach by sheer force of will.
"Yes," Izuku said. "I really did."
Katsuki nodded, his eyes fixed on the lights below.
"Even after everyone told you that you couldn't?"
"Even then."
"Even after I told you?"
Izuku's heart would have broken, had it still been there to break.
"Especially after you told me."
Katsuki turned to him sharply.
Izuku immediately regretted the words, but not because they were untrue. He had spent so many years allowing Katsuki's opinion to become the measure of his own worth that admitting it aloud felt like exposing a wound he had never properly learned to treat.
"I wanted you to be wrong," he explained. "I wanted to prove that you were wrong about me. And I wanted you to be proud of me, too, which is probably stupid, considering—"
"Don't."
Izuku stopped.
Katsuki was staring at him, his expression unreadable.
"Don't call yourself stupid for that."
The words were so unexpected that Izuku could only blink.
Katsuki looked away, his jaw working as though he were trying to force something down. "You wanted your friend to be proud of you. That's not stupid."
The word friend lingered in the air.
Neither of them acknowledged it.
After a moment, Izuku lowered his gaze to the grass between his shoes. "I don't think I knew how to stop wanting that."
Katsuki didn't answer immediately.
When he did, his voice was rougher than before.
"I should've been better to you."
It was a simple sentence. No grand declaration, no desperate insistence that Izuku forgive him, no attempt to bargain his way out of the years he'd spent hurting someone who had once trusted him with the whole of his small, hopeful heart.
Just an acknowledgment.
"I know," Izuku whispered.
Katsuki swallowed. "I'm sorry."
"I know that, too."
And because Izuku was still Izuku, becouse he had never quite learned how to let someone sit alone with their regret when he could offer them even the smallest kindness, he added, "I don't hate you, Kacchan."
Katsuki's head snapped toward him.
"I never said you did."
"You looked like you thought I did."
"Well, I don't care what you think."
"Okay."
"Stop saying okay!"
Izuku smiled, but the expression didn't quite hold. "I'm just trying to tell you that I don't hate you."
Katsuki looked at him for a long time.
Then, slowly, his shoulders lowered.
"Yeah," he said. "Well. I don't hate you either, nerd."
It was an absurdly small thing to say, considering everything that had happened between them. It was not a declaration of love, or friendship, or forgiveness. It did not make them children again, sitting beneath a summer sky with scraped knees and endless afternoons ahead of them.
But it was honest.
For tonight, perhaps, that was enough.
They stayed on the hill until the city began to grow quieter.
Izuku talked more than he meant to. He told Katsuki about the notebooks he'd filled with hero analysis, about the way he'd used to watch interviews with All Might until he could recite entire sections from memory. He talked about the things he had wanted to do, the places he had wanted to see, the ridiculous little dreams he'd collected over the years as though he might someday find the courage to reach for all of them at once.
Katsuki listened.
He interrupted occasionally to tell Izuku that one of his theories was wrong, or that a particular hero's fighting style was overrated, or that he'd always known Izuku would end up obsessing over something as pointless as the angle of a pro hero's elbow. He made fun of him, and Izuku made fun of him back, and gradually the conversation began to feel less like two dead boys trying to make sense of an impossible situation and more like something they might have shared on an ordinary afternoon.
Eventually, Katsuki asked, "What would you have done?"
Izuku looked over. "What?"
"If you could've been a hero. If everything had worked out the way you wanted." Katsuki picked at the grass again, though his fingers passed through it. "What would've been the first thing you'd do?"
Izuku considered the question.
He could have said he would have saved a thousand people. He could have described the sort of hero he had always imagined becoming, someone who smiled through the pain and reached for people even when the world told him they were beyond saving. He could have said he'd have fought villains, rescued civilians, and stood beside All Might with the kind of pride that would have made every difficult year feel worthwhile.
Instead, he said, "I think I'd go home."
Katsuki looked at him.
"To my mom," Izuku explained. "I'd tell her I got into U.A. I'd tell her I was going to become a hero, and I'd tell her she didn't have to worry about me anymore."
His voice faltered.
"I think I'd want to see her face when I told her."
The city lights blurred before him.
He hadn't expected that. He hadn't expected to miss something as ordinary as the thought of going home, or to discover that beneath all the dreams he'd carried for years, beneath the ambition and the desperate need to prove that he could be something more than what the world had decided he was, there was a little boy who had simply wanted to make his mother proud.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her.
He wanted to apologize for every time he'd forgotten to call, every time he'd left his shoes in the hallway, every time he'd come home late and found her waiting with dinner gone cold because she'd wanted to eat with him. He wanted to tell her about the day he'd spent with All Might, about the way his hands had shaken, about the strange, impossible hope that had briefly made the future seem real.
He wanted to tell her that he had tried.
That he had tried so hard.
That there had been moments when he couldn't see a way forward, when the weight of everything he'd been told about himself had become too much to carry, and that he hadn't known how to ask anyone to help him carry it.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her.
He wanted to tell her that he was sorry.
He wanted—
"I wanted to be a hero," Izuku whispered.
Katsuki went still beside him.
"I know."
"No, I mean..." Izuku pressed his hands together in his lap. "I really wanted it. I know everyone says that, but I thought about it every day. I thought about it when I woke up, and when I went to sleep, and when I was supposed to be paying attention in class. I used to imagine what it would feel like to save someone, to have someone look at me and know that I could help them."
He laughed once, a small, broken sound.
"I think I just wanted to be useful. I wanted there to be something I could do that mattered."
Katsuki's face had changed. The familiar arrogance had fallen away, leaving him looking younger than Izuku had seen him in years, almost like the boy who used to drag him up this very hill to show him the world from above.
"You mattered," Katsuki said.
Izuku stopped speaking.
Katsuki seemed startled by his own words. He looked down, then away, then back at Izuku, his expression twisting into something frustrated and helpless.
"You mattered before any of that hero shit," he continued. "You mattered when we were kids. You mattered when you were filling those stupid notebooks, and when you were following me around, and when you were—"
He stopped, his voice catching on something he couldn't seem to force himself past.
Izuku stared at him.
Katsuki's hands had curled into fists.
"I should've told you that," he said.
The words came out so quietly that Izuku almost didn't hear them.
"I should've told you that you didn't have to become something amazing just to deserve to be here."
For a long time, Izuku couldn't answer.
He had imagined hearing something like that for so many years that, somewhere along the way, he'd stopped allowing himself to imagine it at all. He had spent so long trying to become someone worthy of being seen that the idea of being worthy simply because he existed felt like a language he had never learned to speak.
Now Katsuki was sitting beside him, telling him the very thing he had needed to hear when he was alive.
It was too late.
The thought arrived without mercy, and Izuku lowered his head as the full weight of it settled over him.
It was too late to go home.
Too late to tell his mother about U.A., or to stand in front of her with an acceptance letter clutched between his hands. Too late to become a hero, to make mistakes, to grow older, to discover that the world was larger than the small, cruel corners of it he had known as a child. Too late to find out what sort of person he might have become if someone had told him, often enough and loudly enough, that he was allowed to exist without earning the right.
He had spent his life waiting for the world to tell him he could begin.
And now there was no beginning left to wait for.
"I wish you had told me that sooner," he whispered.
Katsuki closed his eyes.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
Neither of them moved for a long time.
Eventually, Katsuki shifted closer, not quite touching him, but near enough that their shoulders almost lined up. It was a clumsy gesture, the sort of comfort offered by someone who had never learned how to give it, and Izuku understood that it was all Katsuki knew how to do.
So he let him.
They sat together while the last of the night settled over the city, two boys who had run out of time before they had learned what to do with it.
The sky began to lighten at the edges.
It happened so gradually that Izuku didn't notice at first. The black above the rooftops softened into deep blue, and the windows of the tallest buildings caught the earliest traces of morning. Somewhere in the distance, a train rumbled along its tracks. A bird called from the branches of a tree below the hill, its small, bright voice startlingly alive in the quiet.
Izuku watched the horizon.
He had always liked mornings. There was something about them that made the world seem full of possibilities, even when the day ahead promised nothing particularly remarkable. He liked the pale gold light spilling across his bedroom floor, the smell of rice cooking in the kitchen, the sound of his mother humming while she prepared breakfast. He liked the thought that, no matter how badly the previous day had gone, there would be another one waiting when he opened his eyes.
He wondered whether he would ever see another sunrise.
Beside him, Katsuki drew his knees up and rested his forearms against them.
"So," he said.
Izuku glanced at him. "So?"
"What the hell do we do now?"
It was a reasonable question, all things considered.
Izuku looked out over the city, at the roads beginning to fill with the first cars of the morning, at the apartment buildings where people were waking up and stretching and complaining about their alarms. Somewhere below them, a shopkeeper was unlocking a door. Somewhere, a child was being hurried into a school uniform. Somewhere, a mother was calling her son to breakfast, still believing that he would answer.
"I don't know," Izuku admitted.
Katsuki made a frustrated sound. "Great. Fantastic. Dead, and we're still fucking useless."
Izuku let out a quiet laugh.
Katsuki glanced at him. "What?"
"Nothing."
"You're doing that thing again."
"What thing?"
"Where you laugh at something that isn't funny."
"I thought you were funny."
"Well, stop."
Izuku smiled, looking back toward the horizon.
For a little while, they said nothing.
Then Katsuki shifted his weight and got to his feet. He brushed at the back of his trousers out of habit, although the grass had left no mark on him, and looked down at Izuku with the impatient expression of someone who had already decided what they were doing next.
"Come on, Deku."
Izuku stared at him.
For a moment, the old hurt stirred instinctively, rising from somewhere deep inside him before he could stop it. The name had followed him through so much of his life that it had become difficult to hear it without remembering everything that had come with it: the laughter, the sneers, the certainty that he was less than everyone else, the small, humiliating hope that one day Katsuki might say it and mean something different.
But Katsuki wasn't sneering.
He wasn't laughing, or looking down at him as though he were something beneath his notice. He was simply standing there, one hand held out in a gesture so familiar that it hurt.
And for the first time, Izuku wondered whether the name might someday become something else.
Not because the past had disappeared. Not because the pain had been worth it. But because perhaps a thing could change without the hurt that came before it having to be forgotten.
"Where are we going?" Izuku asked.
Katsuki shrugged. "Dunno."
"Then why are you telling me to come on?"
"Because I'm not wandering around this shitty city alone."
The answer was so very Katsuki that Izuku couldn't help smiling.
"You could just ask me to come with you."
"I just did, dumbass."
"No, you told me to come on."
"Are you seriously going to argue with me about the wording?"
"Maybe."
Katsuki rolled his eyes, but he didn't turn away.
He waited.
And there it was, Izuku thought, that tiny, ordinary thing he had wanted for so long without ever knowing how to ask for it. Not a declaration, not a grand apology, not even the promise that everything would be different from now on.
Just Katsuki, standing in the morning light, waiting for him to catch up.
Izuku rose to his feet.
"Okay, Kacchan."
They started down the hill together.
For the first few steps, they walked in silence, their shadows absent from the path beneath them. Then Katsuki began complaining about how slow Izuku was, and Izuku pointed out that Katsuki had been the one to stop every thirty seconds to stare at his hands, and somehow they were arguing again, their voices mingling with the growing sounds of the waking city.
They had no idea where they were going.
They had no idea what would happen when they got there.
They had no idea whether the world had anything left for them, or whether they were destined to spend eternity wandering through streets that would never remember their names.
But when Katsuki turned the corner, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Izuku was still following.
And when Izuku slowed to look at a small flower growing through a crack in the pavement, Katsuki stopped, muttered something about him being a hopeless idiot, and waited until he was ready to move again.
Neither of them mentioned it.
Neither of them needed to.
For the first time in years, Izuku followed Katsuki without wondering whether he was allowed to.
And for the first time in years, Katsuki waited for him.