Archive of Our Own

The last time Katsuki Bakugou saw Izuku Midoriya alive, was when they were both children, standing beneath a sky so blue that it seemed impossible for anything terrible to happen beneath it.

It was late summer, the kind of afternoon when the heat lingered long after the sun had begun its descent, turning the pavement warm beneath their shoes and filling the air with the distant sounds of cicadas. Katsuki had scraped his knee climbing the old tree behind their houses, and Izuku, who had been following him around all afternoon despite being told approximately seventeen times to stop, was crouched in the dirt with a little first-aid kit he had stolen from his mother's bathroom.

"Hold still, Kacchan. You're going to make it worse if you keep moving."

"I'm not moving, idiot."

"You're literally moving right now."

"Because you're poking me with that stupid thing!"

"It's a cotton swab!"

"Then stop stabbing me with it!"

Izuku had laughed at that, a bright, breathless sound that Katsuki had pretended to hate, even as he sat still long enough for the other boy to clean the scrape. They were five years old, perhaps six, and their world was still small enough to fit between their houses, the playground at the end of the street, and the stretch of pavement they raced down every afternoon. Their arguments were enormous things at the time, capable of ruining entire afternoons, but they never lasted very long. Izuku always came back. Katsuki always let him.

That was how it had always worked.

Even after Katsuki's quirk manifested, even after the adults began looking at him with that particular brightness in their eyes, even after he discovered that people smiled at him differently when they learned what he could do, Izuku had kept showing up. He followed Katsuki to the playground and watched him practice making sparks in his palms. He listened to every explanation about becoming the greatest hero in Japan, and whenever Katsuki ran out of things to say, he filled the silence with questions.

He had an irritating habit of believing in Katsuki as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

Katsuki had never known what to do with that kind of faith. He had certainly never asked for it.

"You're going to be the strongest hero ever," Izuku announced that afternoon, pressing a colourful plaster over Katsuki's knee with the solemn concentration of a doctor performing life-saving surgery. "And I'm going to be there when you do it."

Katsuki scoffed. "Obviously. Somebody's got to watch me win."

"Maybe I'll be a hero, too."

The words were spoken so casually that Katsuki almost didn't hear them.

He looked down at Izuku, at the green curls falling into his eyes and the freckles scattered over his cheeks, at the hopeful expression he wore whenever he talked about heroes. For a moment, Katsuki felt something unfamiliar and uncomfortable settle beneath his ribs. It wasn't quite anger. It was something closer to fear, although he wouldn't have recognized it as such if someone had held a dictionary open in front of him and pointed to the word.

Izuku was quirkless.

Everybody knew what that meant, even if the adults tried to soften it when they spoke to him. It meant there were things he couldn't do, doors that would close before he reached them, dreams that other children would be encouraged to pursue while his were treated as something that needed to be gently corrected. Katsuki knew this. He had heard people talk about it. He had even repeated some of the things they said, because he was young and cruel in the particular way children could be when they mistook the world's expectations for their own wisdom.

"You can't be a hero, Deku."

Izuku's smile faltered, but he looked down at the plaster as though he could somehow smooth the words away along with its wrinkles.

"I know," he said eventually. "I just thought—"

"Then don't be stupid."

Katsuki stood before Izuku could finish. He was embarrassed by the way his chest had tightened, by the sudden need to make the conversation disappear before it could become something he didn't understand. He brushed the dirt from his shorts and started toward the gate, already certain Izuku would follow him.

But that afternoon, Izuku remained sitting beneath the tree.

Katsuki glanced over his shoulder once. Izuku was looking at his hands, turning them over as though he were searching for something that had been there a moment ago. Katsuki nearly went back. The thought came and went so quickly that he barely noticed it, swallowed by the impatience of a child who believed there would always be another afternoon.

"Whatever," he called instead. "I'm going home. Don't follow me."

He expected Izuku to call after him. He expected the familiar sound of footsteps catching up, the beginning of another argument, the inevitable question about whether they could play again tomorrow.

He expected, as he had every other day of his life, that Izuku would come back.

The following morning, he didn't.

At first, nobody was particularly worried. Izuku had a habit of disappearing into his notebooks and forgetting the world existed around him, and his mother assumed he had gone out early. Mitsuki thought perhaps he was at a neighbour's house. Katsuki, annoyed that his usual shadow had failed to appear, went looking for him himself, checking the playground, the little park, and the convenience store where Izuku sometimes bought sweets with the coins his mother gave him.

He found no trace of him.

By lunchtime, the adults had begun making phone calls. By evening, there were police officers at the Midoriya house, their shoes leaving faint marks on the floor while they asked questions that nobody seemed able to answer. Katsuki watched from the doorway as Izuku's mother stood in the middle of her living room, holding one of her son's notebooks against her chest with both hands.

She kept saying his name.

She said it when the police asked when she had last seen him. She said it when they asked whether he had ever run away before. She said it when someone suggested that perhaps he had gone somewhere with a friend, and she said it again when the first night passed without any news.

Katsuki had never heard an adult sound so frightened.

He wanted to tell her that Izuku would come back. It was obvious, wasn't it? Izuku was always coming back. He would probably turn up tomorrow with a ridiculous explanation, apologizing for worrying everyone, and Katsuki would call him an idiot and demand to know where he had been.

But the next morning came, and Izuku was still missing.

Then another morning arrived.

And another.

The police searched. Volunteers distributed photographs. Neighbours walked the streets calling his name, and his mother continued answering every telephone call as though the person on the other end might finally be the one who knew where her son was. Katsuki listened to the adults lower their voices whenever he entered the room. He watched them exchange looks when they thought he wasn't paying attention.

He hated those looks most of all.

They were the looks people wore when they had begun to consider a possibility they didn't want to say aloud.

One evening, several weeks after Izuku disappeared, Katsuki went to the Midoriya house and found Inko sitting at the kitchen table. There was a mug of tea in front of her that had gone cold, and beside it lay a little stack of papers covered in Izuku's handwriting. She looked older than she had the last time Katsuki had seen her, although he couldn't have explained why. Perhaps grief was something that made people look as though they had been awake for too many nights in a row.

"Mrs. Midoriya," he said.

She looked up quickly, and for one terrible moment, hope transformed her face.

"Katsuki? Have you heard something?"

He had nothing to give her.

The hope disappeared slowly, leaving something that made him wish he had never come.

"No," he admitted. "I just wanted to know if—"

He stopped. He had no idea what he wanted to know. Whether Izuku was coming back? Whether the police were still looking? Whether somebody had finally discovered that there had been a mistake, that Izuku had never really vanished, that the world was still the kind of place where children came home when their mothers called them?

Inko reached across the table and took his hand.

"We're going to find him," she told him, although her voice trembled around the words. "The police are still looking, and we're going to keep looking, too. Izuku is a good boy. He wouldn't leave without telling me. He wouldn't."

Katsuki nodded because he didn't trust himself to speak.

When he went home that night, he lay awake beneath his blankets and stared at the ceiling, listening to the ordinary sounds of his house. His mother moved around the kitchen downstairs. A television played somewhere in the neighbourhood. A car passed outside, its headlights briefly illuminating his bedroom wall.

Somewhere beyond all of it, the world continued to exist without Izuku Midoriya.

Katsuki decided he hated it.

He was going to find him.

He didn't know how. He didn't know where to begin, or what he would do if he discovered something terrible, or whether the adults would let him help when they insisted that he was too young to understand. But he knew, with the fierce and unshakable certainty of a child who had never before been asked to imagine a life without his best friend, that he would not stop looking.

He would find Izuku.

And when he did, Katsuki would make him explain why he had taken so long to come home.

Years passed.

At first, Katsuki searched in the ways a child could. He memorized the telephone number the police had given his mother, watched the local news for missing-person reports, and kept a crumpled photograph of Izuku tucked into the back of a drawer where nobody else would find it. He asked questions whenever he could get away with it, and every time he heard about an unidentified child or a person found somewhere they shouldn't have been, he went quiet and listened.

Eventually, the world began to move on around him.

The missing-person posters faded beneath the weather. Neighbours stopped bringing food to the Midoriya house. Conversations that had once revolved around the search began to turn toward school, work, and the ordinary concerns of people whose lives had not been interrupted by the disappearance of someone they loved. Even the adults who cared about Izuku learned to speak about him without looking as though they might break.

Katsuki never learned how to do that.

He learned how to throw a punch. He learned how to use his quirk with increasing precision, how to turn raw power into something controlled, how to take criticism from instructors without immediately telling them what he thought of their opinions. He grew taller, louder, and more difficult to approach, and the world began to look at him the way it had always promised it would: as someone destined for greatness.

He became very good at being the person everyone expected him to be.

But he never stopped looking.

When he was thirteen, he began checking online missing-person databases himself. When he was fourteen, he learned how to search old news archives, following the names of organizations mentioned in articles about trafficking and organized crime. Most of the information led nowhere. Some of it was outdated, and some of it was little more than rumour, but he read it all anyway, taking notes in a battered notebook that became increasingly full of crossed-out names and dead ends.

His parents knew. His mother sometimes found him at the kitchen table long after midnight, surrounded by papers and photographs, and would quietly place a plate of food beside him without asking how the search was going. His father tried to tell him that he needed to sleep, that he couldn't spend his entire life chasing something he might never find.

Katsuki always gave the same answer.

"He's out there."

He didn't say it because he knew. He said it because the alternative was something he couldn't bear to consider.

Sometimes, when he was tired enough, he remembered the little boy who had sat beneath the tree with a first-aid kit and a pocket full of colourful plasters. He remembered Izuku's ridiculous notebooks, his endless questoins, the way he would look up at Katsuki as though every word that came out of his mouth was worth remembering. He remembered the last conversation they had, and the way he had walked away without looking back.

There were nights when he wished he could return to that afternoon and do something differently. Not because he believed a kinder sentence would have prevented Izuku's disappearance; even as he grew older, he understood that whatever had happened to his friend had been far beyond the reach of a child's words. But he wished he had listened when Izuku tried to tell him about his dream. He wished he had allowed him to finish his sentence. He wished the last thing he had given his best friend hadn't been another reason to believe that he was unwanted.

The guilt followed him quietly, without ever becoming something he knew how to explain.

By sixteen, Katsuki had become a promising hero student, and his teachers had begun discussing work-study placements with the sort of seriousness that made his classmates sit a little straighter in their chairs. He wanted to become the greatest hero in Japan, a goal he had pursued for as long as he could remember, and he intended to choose an agency that would actually teach him something useful rather than waste his time praising his potential.

Sir Nighteye's agency was an unexpected option.

Nighteye was demanding, meticulous, and known for his analytical approach to hero work. He valued information as much as strength, and he had little patience for students who believed that a powerful quirk could compensate for poor judgment. Katsuki found him irritating within the first five minutes of their initial meeting.

He also found him difficult to dismiss.

"You have considerable potential," Nighteye told him during their first discussion, looking over the application materials with an expression that suggested potential was a mildly disappointing substitute for competence. "However, your approach to hero work is overly dependent on immediate action. You see a problem and move to eliminate it. Sometimes that is appropriate. Sometimes it creates three additional problems that someone else must resolve."

"Then I'll get better at figuring out which is which."

"An admirably simple answer. Unfortunately, becoming a professional hero requires more than confidence that you will improve."

Katsuki leaned back in his chair, unimpressed. "You want me to learn to think before I blow something up. I get it."

"I want you to understand that the people you rescue are not obstacles standing between you and victory. They are the reason victory matters."

For once, Katsuki didn't have an immediate response.

He thought about Izuku, although he didn't know why the conversation had brought him to mind. Perhaps because, somewhere along the way, his search had become entangled with the kind of hero he wanted to be. He had once imagined that finding Izuku would be the greatest thing he could accomplish, although he had never admitted it aloud. He wanted to be powerful enough to find people who had disappeared, to protect those who had no way of protecting themselves, to make sure nobody else had to sit in a kitchen and listen to an adult explain that there was still no news.

He wanted to become someone who could bring people home.

"I'll learn," he said finally.

Nighteye studied him for another moment before closing the folder.

"Good. Because if you accept this work study, you will be expected to participate in an ongoing investigation involving the Shie Hassaikai. It is not a simple patrol assignment. You will be working alongside professionals, and you will follow instructions."

Katsuki's attention sharpened.

The Shie Hassaikai was a name he had encountered before, buried in the kind of reports he had spent years reading. An organized crime group with a history of violence, a network that extended further than the public understood, and a reputation for keeping its affairs carefully hidden from the authorities. 

He accepted the placement.

The investigation consumed the next several weeks.

Katsuki learned to read reports without skimming the parts that seemed boring, to recognize when a witness was leaving something out, and to understand that the absence of evidence was not the same as evidence that nothing had happened. Nighteye made him repeat exercises until he could identify the details he had overlooked the first time, and whenever Katsuki complained that the process was taking too long, his mentor reminded him that impatience had never rescued anyone.

Katsuki hated that particular lesson.

He hated it because he knew Nighteye was right.

The closer the heroes came to the Hassaikai, the more disturbing the details became. There were rumours of people being held against their will, of illegal experiments, of transactions that took place far from the public eye. There were names in the reports that had no corresponding records, people who seemed to have fallen out of the world without leaving enough behind for anyone to notice.

Katsuki began reading every one of those names.

He told himself it was part of the investigation. Nighteye had instructed him to pay attention to the victims, to understand that the work was not simply about apprehending criminals, and Katsuki was determined to prove that he could follow directions. If someone had been taken by the Hassaikai, then perhaps the information they found would help locate them. If somebody had gone missing, then perhaps the right question, asked of the right person, might finally lead to an answer.

He didn't tell Nighteye about Izuku.

It wasn't that he was ashamed of the search. He had long since stopped caring what other people thought about his refusal to give up. It was simply difficult to explain how a boy who had disappeared a decade earlier could still occupy so much space in his life, how the possibility of finding him had become something he carried into every room, every investigation, every conversation about the people who needed saving.

Besides, he had no reason to believe the Hassaikai had anything to do with Izuku.

He had no evidence. No names. No dates that lined up neatly enough to mean anything.

He had only a missing boy and the stubborn certainty that somewhere, somehow, the world still owed him an answer.

Then the raid was scheduled.

Katsuki spent the morning checking his equipment twice, listening to instructions he had already memorized, and pretending not to notice the way his fingers kept tapping against his thigh. The professionals were calm in the particular way people became calm when they had decided that fear was a distraction they could not afford. Nighteye reviewed the plan with the team, his voice measured as he explained where each group would enter, how they would secure the building, and what they were expected to do if the situation changed.

Katsuki listened.

He understood the risks. He understood that people could be hurt, that the operation could become unpredictable, and that the Hassaikai were not going to surrender simply because the heroes had finally found the door. He had spent enough time training to know what violence looked like when it stopped being an exercise.

He was ready.

He was also sixteen, and beneath the confidence he wore like armour, he was still a boy who had spent ten years wondering where his best friend had gone.

When the signal came, he moved with the others.

The first minutes of the raid dissolved into noise and motion. Walls shuddered beneath the force of quirks, voices rang through the corridors, and the carefully planned operation became a series of rapidly changing problems that demanded Katsuki's attention before he could finish thinking about them. He followed orders, protected his assigned teammates, and used his explosions to clear obstacles without bringing the building down around them. Every instinct told him to charge ahead, but he forced himself to keep track of the people beside him.

He was getting better at being a hero.

He wished, absurdly, that Izuku could have seen it.

The thought came to him while he was moving through a corridor thick with dust, and he shoved it aside before it could distract him. There would be time to think later. Right now, there were people to protect, criminals to apprehend, and an operation to finish.

He kept moving.

Izuku had learned to measure time by the sounds of the building.

There were footsteps that meant food was coming, footsteps that meant someone had been sent to fetch him, and footsteps that made him stop whatever he was doing and listen until they had passed. He knew which doors opened with a scrape and which closed with a heavy metallic sound. He knew the difference between the guards who were bored enough to ignore him and the ones who looked at him as though he were an inconvenience they had been waiting for an excuse to remove.

He had learned these things because he had been a child when the Hassaikai took him, and children who wanted to survive learned to pay attention.

He didn't remember every detail of the day he disappeared. Some memories had blurred with time, worn down by repetition until they no longer seemed like things that had happened to him so much as fragments of a story he had once heard. He remembered the sunlight on the pavement. He remembered the sound of a car door. He remembered being frightened and trying to convince himself that the adults around him would understand there had been a mistake.

He remembered asking for his mother.

He remembered nobody answering.

At first, he had believed someone would come for him. His mother would notice he was missing, the police would find him, and Katsuki would be furious that he had vanished without telling him where he was going. He had imagined the reunion so often that it became a kind of private ritual, something he returned to when the hours grew too long and the world around him began to feel impossibly small.

He would go home.

His mother would cry. Katsuki would shout at him. Someone would make him a cup of tea, and the ordinary sounds of the neighbourhood would return, and he would be able to sit in his own room with the door open and hear his mother moving around the kitchen downstairs.

But the days passed, and nobody came.

Izuku grew older in a place that did not care what he wanted to become. His quirklessness, which had once been the most important thing other people knew about him, became only one more reason they believed his life was worth less than their convenience. He learned to keep his head down. He learned which questions were safe to ask and which ones were better left unspoken. He learned that surviving sometimes meant saving his strength for a day when he might finally have the chance to use it.

He never stopped thinking about the outside world.

He thought about rain on the pavement, about the smell of fresh bread from the bakery near his old house, about the way his mother used to call him when dinner was ready. He thought about heroes, too, although he had become careful about allowing himself to dream of them. The stories he had loved as a child belonged to a life that seemed increasingly distant, and he had learned that hope could hurt when there was nowhere for it to go.

Then he met Eri.

She was so small that, at first, Izuku had mistaken her for a much younger child. She had white hair, frightened red eyes, and a habit of watching every movement around her as though she were trying to predict what might happen before it did. The first time he spoke to her, she flinched so violently that he immediately stepped back.

"I'm sorry," he said, holding his hands where she could see them. "I didn't mean to scare you."

She didn't answer.

"That's okay. You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to." He sat down a little distance away, leaving enough space between them that she wouldn't feel cornered. "My name's Izuku. You can call me that, or you don't have to call me anything. Whatever makes you comfortable."

She stared at him for a long time.

Then, so quietly he almost missed it, she asked, "Are you going to hurt me?"

Izuku felt something inside him twist.

"No," he said, and because he had spent years learning how little a promise could mean when it came from the wrong person, he added, "I won't hurt you. And if someone comes in here and you get scared, you can sit beside me if you want. You don't have to talk. We can just sit together."

Eri looked at him as though she had never heard anyone offer her something so simple.

For a while, she didn't move. Izuku didn't ask her to. He talked about inconsequential things instead, telling her about the weather beyond the walls, the different kinds of clouds he used to see as a child, and the ridiculous arguments he and his childhood friend had over which heroes were the strongest. He told her about a little tree near his old home, about a boy with ash-blond hair who could never admit when he was wrong, and about the time they had tried to build a fort that collapsed because neither of them had thought to make the walls sturdy.

He hadn't spoken about those memories in years.

Eri listened without interrupting.

Eventually, she moved closer.

After that, she began seeking him out whenever she could. She sat beside him during the quietest parts of the day, asked him questions in a voice that grew a little stronger each time he answered, and sometimes reached for his sleeve when the people around them became too loud. Izuku learned to recognize the difference between the frightened silence she wore when she was expecting something terrible and the peaceful silence that came when she was simply tired.

He began saving the gentlest stories for her.

He told her about the sky, about the changing seasons, about the world outside the building that continued to turn even when neither of them could see it. He described the taste of strawberry sweets and the sound of rain against a bedroom window. He told her that there were places where children could run through parks without being afraid, and people who would hold their hands when they crossed the street.

"Do you think we could go there?" Eri asked one day.

Izuku looked at her.

She was sitting beside him, her knees tucked beneath her chin, and there was a fragile hope in her expression that reminded him painfully of the boy he had once been.

"Yes," he said.

He wanted to tell her that he didn't know how. He wanted to explain that the people who held them here were cruel, that promises had a way of becoming dangerous when you made them to someone who had never been allowed to choose their own future. But Eri was looking at him as though she needed to believe that there was somewhere else, and Izuku could not bring himself to take that from her.

"I think we can," he said again, more softly. "I don't know when, but I think we'll get out of here."

"Together?"

"Together."

She reached for his hand.

Izuku let her hold it, and for a little while, the room felt less like a place where they had been kept and more like somewhere they were simply waiting for the next part of their lives to begin.

He didn't know that the heroes were already on their way.

He didn't know that the boy he had spent years remembering had grown into a young man who was still looking for him.

And he certainly didn't know that the next time he heard explosions echo through the building, his childhood would come rushing back to him in the shape of a voice he had thought he might never hear again.

The first explosion shook dust from the ceiling.

Izuku had been sitting beside Eri when the sound reached them, and for a moment neither of them moved. They had heard violence before. They had heard shouting, doors slamming, and the distant sounds of people being punished for reasons they would never be allowed to understand. But this was different. The entire building seemed to shudder around them, and somewhere beyond the walls, voices were rising in a confusion that Izuku had never heard before.

Eri reached for his hand. "Izuku?"

He was already standing. "Stay close to me, okay?"

"What's happening?"

"I don't know yet." He squeezed her hand, trying to make his voice sound calmer than he felt. "But I think someone might have come to help us."

He didn't know why he said it. Perhaps it was the sound of the explosions, or the shouting that seemed to be moving closer rather than fading into the distance. Perhaps it was simply that, after so many years of being taught that nobody was coming, some stubborn part of him had refused to stop listening for the sound of rescue.

He had imagined this moment before. More times than he could count, he had pictured a door opening and a hero standing on the other side, offering him a hand and telling him that it was allright, that he could come home now. Sometimes, in those imagined reunions, he was still a child, small enough for his mother to pick him up and hold him against her chest. Other times, he was older, and the hero had to explain that a great deal of time had passed, that the world had changed while he was gone, and that he would have to learn how to live in it again.

In every version, he went home.

He had never imagined what it would feel like to hear the fighting approach and realize that he might finally be allowed to leave.

Another crash sounded somewhere beyond the corridor. Eri flinched, and Izuku drew her closer, putting himself between her and the door.

"Listen to me," he said, crouching so that he could look her in the eyes. "Whatever happens, I want you to stay behind me until we know it's safe. If someone comes in, don't run off by yourself, all right? Stay where I can see you."

"But what about you?"

The question was so immediate, so full of concern for him that Izuku almost smiled.

"I'll be right here."

"You promise?"

For a moment, he couldn't speak.

He thought of all the promises he had made over the years, the ones he had whispered to himself in the dark when the days seemed endless and the thought of going home was the only thing that kept him moving. He thought of the little boy who had once sat beneath a tree with a first-aid kit and a head full of dreams, of a childhood that had ended before he had understood how precious it was, of a mother who had probably spent years waiting for a knock at the door that never came.

He thought of Katsuki.

He wondered whether his childhood friend still remembered him. Whether the memory had faded into something distant and uncomfortable, whether Katsuki had grown up and become the hero he had always promised he would be, whether he ever thought about the boy who had followed him everywhere.

Then he looked at Eri and brushed a stray lock of white hair away from her face.

"I promise," he said.

The door opened.

For one bewildering second, Izuku thought the people who had kept them here had come to move them somewhere else. He had learned not to trust sudden changes, not to believe that noise meant freedom or that a door opening meant somebody was going to help. He tightened his grip on Eri's hand and stepped back, trying to put as much distance between her and the doorway as the small room allowed.

Then he saw the hero costume.

"Police!" someone shouted from the corridor. "Keep your hands where we can see them!"

The man who had entered was not one of the guards Izuku recognized. He was wearing a helmet and carrying equipment Izuku had only ever seen on television, and behind him, the corridor was full of movement: people in hero costumes, officers securing the area, and the unmistakable signs of a fight that was spreading through the building.

For the first time in years, Izuku didn't know what to do.

The hero looked at him, then at Eri, and something in his expression changed.

"Are you two injured?"

Izuku opened his mouth.

No sound came out.

Eri pressed herself against his side, her fingers tightening around his hand, and he suddenly understood that he couldn't afford to freeze. Whatever happened to him, whatever questions the heroes asked, whatever the outside world had become while he was gone, Eri needed someone who would help her through the door.

"She's a child," he managed. "Please. You have to get her out of here."

"We're going to," the hero assured him. "Both of you. Come with me, and stay close."

Both of you.

The words struck him with such unexpected force that he nearly stumbled.

He followed the hero into the corridor, holding Eri's hand, and for a few seconds he allowed himself to believe that the impossible had happened. He was going home. Maybe not today, perhaps not immediately, but the door had opened, and someone had finally come to take him away from the place that had swallowed his childhood.

He was going home.

Then an explosion sounded further down the corridor, and a familiar voice cut through the chaos.

"GET OUT OF THE WAY!"

Izuku stopped.

The hero escorting them called something about moving forward, but Izuku barely heard him. He knew that voice. He knew its sharpness, its impatient rhythm, the way it seemed to arrive in a room before the person speaking had even stepped through the door.

He had spent years trying not to forget it.

Another burst of light flashed at the far end of the corridor, illuminating the dust hanging in the air. A figure moved through it, blond hair bright against the grey walls, palms crackling with explosive force.

Izuku stared.

The boy he remembered had been small enough to fit beside him beneath the branches of their favourite tree. He had worn shorts with scraped knees and shirts that never stayed clean for long, and his hands had been small, even when he had shown off his quirk with the pride of someone who had discovered he could make the world answer him.

The person at the end of the corridor was taller. Broader through the shoulders. His face had lost the softness of childhood, and the anger Izuku remembered had sharpened into something more controlled, more deliberate. He wore a hero costume and moved with the confidence of someone who knew precisely what he was capable of.

But it was Katsuki.

It was Kacchan.

Izuku's fingers went numb around Eri's hand.

For years, he had imagined seeing him again. He had imagined running to him, imagined apologizing for disappearing, imagined asking whether his mother was all right and whether the old tree still stood behind their houses. He had imagined Katsuki being furious, and he had imagined him being relieved, and he had imagined a thousand different conversations in which the years between them became something they could finally understand.

He had never imagined standing at the end of a corridor while Katsuki fought a battle he didn't know how to explain.

Katsuki turned.

His gaze passed over the people in front of him, searching for threats, for movement, for anything that might demand his attention. Then it reached Izuku.

He stopped so abruptly that the hero behind him nearly collided with his back.

For one suspended second, neither of them moved.

Izuku could see the recognition happen. It was there in the sudden stillness of Katsuki's body, in the way his eyes widened and his mouth parted as though he had forgotten what he had been about to say. He watched Katsuki's expression change from concentration to disbelief, and beneath that, something so raw and unguarded that Izuku barely recognized it.

"Kacchan?" he whispered.

The name was small, almost swallowed by the noise around them.

Katsuki stared at him.

Then, in a voice that sounded nothing like the one he had been using to shout orders, he said, "Deku?"

Izuku's eyes burned.

He wanted to run to him. He wanted to cross the corridor and throw his arms around him, to tell him that he was sorry, that he hadn't meant to disappear, that he had tried to come home and had never stopped wanting to. He wanted to ask a hundred questions and hear a hundred answers, to discover whether Katsuki still hated being called by his childhood nickname, whether he had become the greatest hero in Japan, whether he remembered the little promises they had made beneath the summer sky.

But he couldn't move.

Neither could Katsuki.

There were too many years between them, too many things neither of them understood, and the chaos of the raid pressed in around them as though the world itself were impatient with their reunion.

Katsuki took one step forward.

"Where the hell—"

A shout rang out from behind him. Someone called his name, warning him about an approaching threat, and the spell broke as abruptly as it had begun.

Katsuki looked over his shoulder, swore, and turned back to Izuku with an expression of such furious disbelief that, under different circumstances, Izuku might have laughed.

"Don't move!" Katsuki shouted. "You hear me? Don't you fucking move!"

Izuku almost smiled.

It was the most Katsuki thing he could possibly have said, and for one absurd moment, it felt as though no time had passed at all. He could almost see the little boy who used to race him to the playground, who had insisted that he was going to become the greatest hero in the world, who had never once considered that their friendship might end.

"I won't!" Izuku called back.

"Good! Because we're talking after this!"

After this.

The words settled inside Izuku's chest like something warm.

He nodded, and Katsuki turned away to continue fighting, trusting that Izuku would still be there when the battle was over.

Izuku watched him disappear into the smoke.

He wanted to call after him. He wanted to tell him that he had missed him, that he had thought about him so often that sometimes the memory of his voice had been the only thing that made the outside world feel real. He wanted to ask whether his mother was still alive, whether she had waited, whether anyone had ever told her what had happened.

Instead, he looked down at Eri.

She was staring at him, her eyes wide.

"Who was that?"

Izuku swallowed.

"My best friend," he said.

The words sounded strange after so many years of keeping them to himself. They were familiar and unfamiliar at once, belonging to a life that had been taken from him and somehow returned in the space of a single glance.

Eri looked toward the corridor where Katsuki had disappeared.

"Is he going to help us?"

Izuku thought about the boy who had always run ahead of him, the one who had been certain that he could conquer anything if he simply tried hard enough. He thought about the hero Katsuki had become, about the years he had spent imagining him growing up, and about the promise he had made to himself that one day he would see him again.

"Yes," he said, and this time he believed it. "I think he is."

They kept moving.

The corridor split ahead of them, and the hero escorting them turned toward a route that had been secured by the police. Eri stayed close to Izuku, her small hand wrapped around his fingers, and he followed the hero toward the sound of approaching voices.

He looked back once.

He couldn't see Katsuki anymore.

But he could still hear him.

And for the first time in years, Izuku had something to look forward to that belonged to the real world, something beyond the stories he told Eri to help her sleep, beyond the memories he had carried like photographs that had begun to fade at the edges.

He had found Katsuki.

Katsuki had found him.

They were going to talk after this.

Izuku held on to that thought as the fighting continued around them, as the building shook beneath the force of the heroes' advance, as the years that had separated them seemed to gather in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Katsuki had never been so angry in his life.

It was an inconvenient feeling to have in the middle of a raid, especially one in which every second mattered, but it had settled beneath his skin with such force that he could barely concentrate on anything else. He had spent ten years searching for Izuku Midoriya. Ten years of asking questions, chasing rumours, reading reports, and telling himself that the next lead might be the one that finally brought him home.

And now Izuku had appeared in front of him in the middle of a criminal compound, looking older and thinner than Katsuki remembered, with a frightened little girl holding his hand and the same freckles scattered over his cheeks.

He was alive.

He was alive, and Katsuki had barely managed to say three words to him.

"Damn it!"

He sent an opponent stumbling backward with a controlled blast, then immediately turned to help a teammate who had been cornered near a damaged doorway. His body knew what to do even when his mind kept returning to the corridor, replaying the moment Izuku had turned at the sound of his voice.

He had recognized him.

Of course he had. Katsuki would have recognized that face in a crowd of thousands, in the middle of a storm, in a city he had never visited. He could have been fifty years old and Izuku could have been standing at the other end of the world, and Katsuki would still have known him.

He had spent too long remembering.

"Bakugou!" someone shouted.

"I'm fine!"

"That wasn't what I asked!"

"Then ask better questions!"

He moved before the argument could continue, using an explosion to propel himself past a collapsing section of wall. Somewhere behind him, a professional hero shouted an instruction he barely registered, and he forced himself to focus on the mission, on the people who needed him, on the fact that Izuku was somewhere in the building and that the best way to reach him was to finish the damn fight.

He would talk to him afterward.

The thought became a refrain, repeating itself with every turn of the corridor, every exchange with an opponent, every moment in which he caught sight of green hair in the distance and lost it again behind the movement of other people.

Afterward, he would ask where Izuku had been.

Afterward, he would find out what had happened.

Afterward, he would tell him that he had looked for him, that he had never stopped, that he had spent years refusing to accept the possibility that his best friend might never come back. He would ask whether Izuku remembered the tree, the playground, the afternoons they had spent talking about heroes. He would demand to know why he hadn't come home, and then, when the question finally caught up with the truth of what it meant, he would apologize for every time he had made Izuku feel small.

He would tell him that he was sorry.

He would tell him that he was glad he was alive.

He would tell him that they could figure everything else out later.

For now, all he needed was to finish the raid and find him again.

It was a simple plan.

It was a plan Katsuki believed in so completely that he never once considered the possibility that the future he was counting on might not exist.

The corridor ahead opened into a wider chamber where several members of the Hassaikai were attempting to retreat. Katsuki moved to intercept them, coordinating with the other heroes as the fight spilled into the adjoining rooms. The building was full of dust, and the noise of the battle made it difficult to distinguish one shout from another. He caught fragments of instructions, the crackle of quirks, the sound of boots pounding against concrete.

Then he heard someone scream.

He turned his head.

It was only the corner of his vision at first: a flash of green, the pale shape of a small child, a man moving too quickly through the chaos. Katsuki's mind registered the pieces separately before it understood what they meant. Izuku was there. Eri was there. The man was raising his weapon.

Katsuki moved.

He didn't think. He didn't weigh the distance or calculate the angle or consider whether he could reach them in time. He simply launched himself forward, palms igniting as he shouted Izuku's name.

But he was too far away.

The man reached Izuku before Katsuki did.

Izuku saw him coming. Katsuki knew that because he saw Izuku turn, saw him push Eri behind him with one arm, saw the terrible instant in which he understood what was about to happen and chose, without hesitation, to put himself between the child and the danger.

The attack was over almost as quickly as it began.

Katsuki saw Izuku stagger.

He saw Eri stumble backward, her face twisting in confusion, and he saw Izuku reach toward her as though even then, with the world falling apart around him, his first instinct was to make sure she was all right.

Then Izuku fell.

For one impossible second, Katsuki's mind refused to understand what he was seeing. The world narrowed to the shape of his childhood best friend crumpling to the floor, to the sudden absence of movement where there had been movement a moment before, to the way the green of Izuku's hair looked impossibly bright against the grey concrete.

Katsuki stopped breathing.

He had seen people hurt before. He had watched heroes fall in training, seen villains brought down in the middle of fights, witnessed the consequences of violence often enough to understand that it was not always clean or predictable. He knew what it meant when someone was injured. He knew what it meant when a fight went wrong.

But this was Izuku.

This was the boy who had sat beneath a tree with a first-aid kit, who had followed Katsuki home, who had once looked at him with complete certainty and told him that he was going to be the greatest hero in the world.

This was the boy he had spent ten years searching for.

And someone had murdered him in front of him.

"No."

The word left Katsuki's mouth before he knew he had spoken.

He ran.

He heard someone shout his name. He heard the battle continuing around him, the sounds of other heroes closing in on the man who had attacked Izuku, but none of it mattered. He crossed the distance between them with his heart hammering so violently that he could feel each beat in his throat, and when he reached Izuku, he dropped to his knees so hard that pain shot through them.

"Deku?"

Izuku didn't answer.

Katsuki reached for him, his hands hovering for one terrible moment because he didn't know where to touch him, didn't know how to make this into something he could fix. He had spent his life believing that if he were strong enough, fast enough, good enough, he could reach the people who needed him.

He had never been taught what to do when he arrived too late.

"Deku." His voice cracked around the name. He swallowed and tried again, louder this time, as though Izuku might simply be too far away to hear him. "Hey. Hey, look at me."

Nothing.

Katsuki shook his head.

"No. No, you don't get to do this. You hear me? You don't get to—"

He stopped because the words had nowhere to go.

Izuku's eyes were closed. His face had gone terribly still, and the expression he had worn in the corridor— the startled disbelief, the fragile hope, the beginning of a smile that Katsuki hadn't had time to understand —was gone.

Katsuki stared at him.

He had imagined finding Izuku so many times that he had never thought to prepare himself for the possibility that finding him might not be enough. He had pictured the questions he would ask, the anger he would feel, the relief that would follow when he finally knew where his best friend had been all those years.

He had never imagined kneeling beside him in a ruined corridor, trying to convince himself that the world had made a mistake.

"Come on," he whispered. "Come on, Deku. Get up."

His hands trembled.

He pressed them against the floor beside Izuku, then pulled them back, as though he could somehow undo the last few seconds by refusing to accept what they had become. He looked around for a medic, for a hero with the right equipment, for anyone who could tell him that there was still something to be done.

Someone was shouting for medical assistance.

Someone else was calling for the area to be secured.

A hero knelt beside him, speaking in a voice Katsuki couldn't understand, and he barely registered the hand that touched his shoulder.

"Bakugou. We need you to move."

Katsuki looked up at him.

"Get a medic."

"We have one coming."

"Then get another one!"

The hero's expression changed.

Katsuki hated that expression. He had seen it on Inko Midoriya's face when she sat at her kitchen table with a cold mug of tea. He had seen it on the faces of police officers who lowered their voices when they thought he wasn't listening. He had seen it in the eyes of adults who were trying to explain something they wished they didn't have to say.

He knew what it meant.

He refused to accept it.

"He's alive," Katsuki said.

The words sounded strange even to him, as though he were repeating something he had heard from someone else. He looked back at Izuku, searching for any sign that would prove him right, any movement that would turn the moment into a terrible misunderstanding.

"He has to be."

Nobody answered.

And in the silence that followed, Katsuki understood that there were some things his strength could not change, some distances that could not be crossed no matter how fast he ran, some people he could search for his entire life and still fail to bring home.

He bent over Izuku, his shoulders shaking once before he forced them still.

"I found you," he whispered. It was the only thing he could think to say. "I found you, Deku."

The raid ended.

Katsuki knew that because people kept telling him so, because the corridors slowly emptied of fighting, because the shouting faded into the more subdued sounds of medical teams and officers documenting what had happened. He knew it because someone took the weapon from the man who had killed Izuku, because the surviving members of the Hassaikai were being restrained, because the operation that had occupied weeks of planning and years of investigation was finally being declared a success.

The heroes had won.

Kai Chisaki was dead.

Katsuki had never hated the word success more.

He sat beside Izuku until someone gently asked him to move. He didn't remember standing. He didn't remember walking away, although he must have, because the next thing he knew he was sitting against a wall several metres from where Izuku lay, staring at his own hands as though he had never seen them before.

They were the same hands he had used to make explosions, to fight villains, to protect people who couldn't protect themselves. They were the hands he had once shown Izuku with such pride, demanding that he watch as little sparks danced between his fingers.

He remembered Izuku's expression that day.

He remembered how carefully he had watched, how excited he had been, how he had asked a hundred questions about the way Katsuki's quirk worked. He remembered being annoyed by the questions and answering them anyway, because some small part of him had always liked the way Izuku looked at him when he talked about heroes.

He had wanted Izuku to be there when he became the greatest hero in Japan.

He had never realized how much of that dream had depended on the assumption that Izuku would still be alive to see it.

"Katsuki."

Nighteye's voice reached him from somewhere nearby.

Katsuki didn't look up.

For a moment, Nighteye said nothing. He had always been a man who seemed to understand the value of silence, who knew that words could become meaningless when they were offered simply because someone felt obliged to fill the space between two people. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than Katsuki had ever heard it.

"I'm sorry."

Katsuki laughed.

It was a horrible sound, short and brittle, and it frightened him enough that he immediately stopped. He dragged a hand over his face and stared at the floor, ashamed of something he couldn't name.

"Don't," he said.

Nighteye remained beside him.

"Katsuki—"

"Don't tell me you're sorry."

The words came out sharper than he intended, but he couldn't bring himself to take them back. He was sixteen years old, and he had just watched his best friend die after spending a decade searching for him. He didn't want sympathy. He didn't want anyone to tell him that the outcome had been beyond his control, that he had done everything he could, that sometimes even heroes couldn't save everyone.

He knew those things.

He had learned them in training, in lectures, in the countless stories of people who had died while someone else was trying to reach them. He understood the logic of it. He understood that the world was complicated and that no amount of determination could guarantee a happy ending.

But understanding something and being able to live with it were different things.

"I told him we'd talk after this," Katsuki said.

Nighteye's expression tightened.

"He heard me. He nodded, and I told him we'd talk after the raid." Katsuki stared at the wall, his voice growing quieter with every word. "I told him not to move, like an idiot. I told him we had things to talk about."

He swallowed.

"I was going to ask him where he'd been."

There were so many things he had wanted to ask. The question had seemed so simple when he first imagined it, the most obvious place to begin after years of uncertainty. Where had Izuku gone? Who had taken him? What had happened to him? Had he been afraid? Had he ever believed that someone would come for him?

Katsuki had spent years collecting questions without realizing that he had been building a conversation that might never happen.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

"I didn't even get to ask him."

Nighteye sat beside him without speaking, and for the first time since the raid had begun, Katsuki allowed himself to stop trying to hold everything together. He didn't break down in a way that would have made sense to someone watching him from a distance. There was no great, dramatic outburst, no sudden collapse that could turn the grief into something other people knew how to respond to.

He simply sat there, shoulders hunched, unable to make himself look at the place where Izuku had been, while the world continued moving around him.

Eventually, a small voice interrupted the silence.

"Kacchan?"

Katsuki lifted his head.

Eri stood a short distance away, accompanied by a hero who seemed uncertain whether he should allow her to approach. She looked even smaller now that the fighting had stopped, her white hair dishevelled and her face pale with exhaustion. Her eyes moved between Katsuki and the corridor behind him, searching for someone who wasn't there.

Katsuki knew that expression.

He had seen it in the mirror during the first months after Izuku disappeared, when he still believed that every knock at the door might be the one that brought his friend home.

Eri took a hesitant step forward.

"Where's Izuku?"

Katsuki couldn't answer.

She looked over his shoulder, as though he might be hiding him, as though the boy who had promised to stay with her might simply have gone somewhere she couldn't see.

"Is he coming back?"

The question was so small that it seemed to take all the air from the room.

Katsuki looked at her and saw a child who had already learned far too much about fear, a child who had finally found someone she trusted and had believed that, if she held on to him tightly enough, perhaps the world would stop taking things away from her.

He thought about Izuku's hand wrapped around hers in the corridor.

He thought about the way Izuku had placed himself between her and the danger without even hesitating.

He thought about the promise he had made to her, the one he had kept believing in even when the world had given him every reason not to.

Katsuki crouched in front of Eri.

"No," he said.

It was the first honest answer he had managed to give anyone since the raid ended.

Eri stared at him.

For a moment, she seemed not to understand. Her expression remained caught somewhere between confusion and expectation, as though she were waiting for him to explain that there had been a mistake, that Izuku had gone to another room, that he would return once the heroes had finished their work.

Then her face crumpled.

"But he promised."

Katsuki closed his eyes.

"I know."

"He said we were going to be okay."

"I know."

"Then why—"

Her voice broke, and Katsuki had to look away for a moment because he didn't know how to answer a question that had no answer a child should ever have to hear.

He wanted to tell her that Izuku had meant it. That he had wanted her to be safe, that he had done everything he could to protect her, that the promise hadn't been a lie simply because the world had failed to let him keep it. He wanted to tell her that Izuku had been brave and kind and stubborn, that he had talked about the outside world as though it were still full of beautiful things worth seeing, and that he had never stopped believing she deserved to experience them.

But Eri didn't need a description of the person she had lost.

She needed him.

Katsuki held out his arms, awkwardly, uncertain whether she would come to him. For a second, she remained still. Then she stepped forward and pressed herself against his chest, her small hands gripping the fabric of his costume as though she were afraid that if she let go, he might disappear, too.

He wrapped his arms around her.

Eri began to cry.

Katsuki stared over her shoulder at the empty corridor, his jaw clenched so tightly that it hurt. He had no idea how to comfort her. He had never been particularly good at comforting anyone, and he had spent most of his life believing that the best way to help someone was to solve whatever problem had made them unhappy.

There was no solution here.

There was only a little girl who had lost the person she trusted, and a boy who had finally found his best friend only to discover that he couldn't keep him.

"I'm sorry," Katsuki whispered.

He didn't know whether he was speaking to Eri, to Izuku, or to the little boy he had been before he understood how easily an ordinary day could become the last time you ever saw someone.

No one answered.

The following days passed in fragments.

There were questions from the police, reports that needed to be filed, and meetings with people who spoke carefully about the operation and the lives that had been lost. Katsuki answered what he could. He described the corridor, the man who had attacked Izuku, and the moments leading up to the murder, forcing himself to remember details he wished he could forget. He gave the investigators everything he had seen, because Izuku deserved for the truth to be known, and because there was nothing else left for Katsuki to give him.

He learned more about Izuku from those reports than he had learned during their brief reunion.

He learned that Izuku had been taken as a child, that his disappearance had been connected to the Hassaikai's activities, and that he had spent years inside their compound. He learned that he had been held against his will, that he had survived by keeping his head down and doing what he could to avoid drawing attention to himself, and that, despite everything, he had somehow found the strength to care for a frightened little girl who needed someone to make the world feel less frightening.

He learned that Izuku had been kind.

It was a ridiculous thing to discover about someone he had known his entire childhood, and yet it hurt to read it in a report, written in the detached language of people who had never sat beside Izuku beneath a tree, never listened to him talk about heroes until the sun went down, never watched him offer his last sweet to someone who looked sad.

Katsuki already knew Izuku was kind.

He had always known.

The world had simply given him ten years to forget how much that kindness mattered, and now he was being forced to remember it all at once.

He visited Inko Midoriya three days after the raid.

He had rehearsed what he was going to say on the way there, although every version of the conversation had fallen apart before he reached her door. He couldn't tell her that he was sorry, because he knew there was nothing he could say that would make up for what she had lost. He couldn't tell her that he had found Izuku, because the words sounded cruel when they were followed by the truth. And he couldn't tell her that he had failed, because he had spent years trying to find him and had finally succeeded, and somehow that felt both like the greatest thing he had ever done and the most terrible failure he could imagine.

Inko opened the door.

For a moment, she simply stared at him.

Katsuki had grown considerably since the last time she had seen him. He was taller now, broad-shouldered, wearing the uniform of a hero student, with an expression that had hardened over the years into something people often mistook for confidence. But when Inko looked at him, he felt six years old again, standing in her kitchen with no answers to give her.

"Katsuki?" she whispered.

He tried to speak.

Nothing came out.

Her hand rose to her mouth.

"Oh," she said.

It was a tiny sound, barely more than a breath, but Katsuki understood it. He watched the knowledge settle over her face, watched the hope disappear in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and wished with everything he had that he could take it back.

"I'm sorry," he managed.

Inko shook her head, as though she were trying to refuse the words before they could become real.

"No."

"I found him."

Her eyes filled with tears.

"I found him, Mrs. Midoriya. He was—" Katsuki stopped, unable to finish the sentence. He swallowed hard and tried again. "He was alive. He was there, and I saw him, and I talked to him. I told him we'd talk after the raid."

Inko's fingers tightened around the edge of the door.

"He remembered me," Katsuki whispered. "He called me Kacchan."

That was what broke her.

She covered her face with both hands, and the sound that came from her was so full of grief that Katsuki felt it like a physical blow. He stood helplessly on the doorstep, unable to look away, while the woman who had spent ten years waiting for her son to come home finally learned that he had been found.

And that he was never coming back.

Inko pulled him inside.

She held him the way she might have held him when he was a little boy, one hand pressed to the back of his head, the other gripping his shoulder as she cried into his hair. Katsuki stood stiffly at first, his hands hanging uselessly at his sides, because he had never learned what to do when someone offered him comfort he didn't believe he deserved.

Then he began to cry.

It wasn't graceful. It wasn't quiet. Years of grief, guilt, and unanswered questions seemed to rise inside him all at once, and he found himself clutching the back of Inko's cardigan as though he were the child he had been when Izuku disappeared, as though she were the only person in the world who could understand what it meant to lose him.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, the words breaking apart in his throat. "I'm sorry. I found him, and I couldn't—"

Inko held him tighter.

"You found him," she whispered. "You found my boy."

Katsuki shook his head against her shoulder.

"I couldn't bring him home."

For a long time, neither of them said anything else.

There were no words that could make the loss smaller. No explanation that could turn the years of searching into something that made sense. There was only the terrible truth that Izuku had been alive somewhere in the world while the people who loved him searched for him, and that when they finally found him, they had been given so little time to be together.

Eventually, Inko led Katsuki to the living room.

The house looked almost exactly as he remembered it. There were photographs on the shelves, familiar furniture, a little ceramic bowl on the table where Izuku used to leave his coins. The world had continued to exist in this place, preserving the shape of a life that had been interrupted so abruptly that Katsuki could almost imagine Izuku coming down the stairs, complaining about something inconsequential, asking whether there was anything to eat.

Inko followed his gaze.

"I kept his room," she said quietly. "I know people told me I should change things, that I needed to move forward, but I couldn't. I thought that if he came home, he'd want everything to be where he left it."

Katsuki looked down.

"He would have."

Inko pressed a hand against her mouth again.

"Did he talk about me?"

Katsuki closed his eyes.

He remembered the corridor, the frightened little girl, the way Izuku had looked at him with tears shining in his eyes. He remembered the brief moment in which they had recognized each other, and the way Katsuki had been forced to turn away before he could ask a single question.

"I didn't get to ask him much," he admitted. "There wasn't time. He was protecting a little girl, and the raid was still happening, and I thought—" He stopped, swallowing the words that had become unbearable. "I thought we'd have time afterward."

Inko reached for his hand.

"Of course you did."

"He didn't get to tell me anything."

"I know."

"I don't even know what happened to him."

Inko's eyes filled again, but she squeezed his fingers.

"Then we'll find out," she said. "We'll find out what we can, and we'll remember him properly. He was my son, Katsuki. Whatever happened to him, whatever those people did, they don't get to decide what his life meant."

Katsuki looked at her.

For the first time since the raid, he felt something shift inside him. Not relief, not exactly, and certainly not peace, but the faintest understanding that the search had not been meaningless simply because it had ended in grief.

He had found Izuku.

He had learned where he had been, and he had seen the person he had become. He had seen the way he cared for Eri, the way he had protected her without hesitation, and the way he had looked at Katsuki when he heard his name.

Izuku had remembered him.

Whatever else the world had taken, it hadn't taken that.

Katsuki held on to the thought because he didn't know what else to do.

Eri asked about Izuku every day.

Sometimes she asked the same question several times in a row, as though she were trying to find a different answer hidden inside it. Sometimes she said his name and waited for someone to tell her where he was. Sometimes she asked whether she had done something wrong, whether Izuku would have come back if she had stayed closer to him, whether the people who had hurt him had been angry with her.

The adults tried to explain that none of it had been her fault.

Katsuki told her the same thing whenever he could.

"He didn't die because of you," he said one afternoon, sitting beside her in the quiet room where the heroes had arranged for her to stay while the authorities worked out what would happen next. "You didn't do anything wrong. You understand that, right?"

Eri stared at her hands.

"But I was there."

"I know."

"He was helping me."

"I know."

"If I hadn't—"

"Stop." Katsuki caught himself, softened his voice, and tried again. "Listen to me, Eri. Izuku chose to help you because he cared about you. He didn't do it because you made him, and he didn't get hurt because you asked him to stay with you. He wanted you to be safe. That's what he was doing."

Eri's eyes filled with tears. "Then why isn't he here?"

Katsuki looked away.

He had asked himself the same question so many times that it no longer felt like a question. It was simply the shape of the world now, an absence that followed him into every room and waited for him whenever he stopped moving.

"I don't know," he admitted.

Eri leaned against his side.

For a while, they sat together without speaking. Katsuki wasn't good at this. He didn't know how to make the world gentle for a child who had already learned to expect cruelty, and he couldn't promise that nothing bad would ever happen to her again. He couldn't even promise that he would always know what to say when she cried.

But he could sit beside her.

He could listen when she talked about Izuku, when she described the stories he had told her and the way he had made her feel safe. He could learn the small details that Katsuki had never had the chance to discover during their brief reunion: that Izuku liked to draw little pictures when he was bored, that he could make up stories about almost anything, that he sometimes talked so much when he was excited that he forgot to eat.

He could listen to Eri tell him about the person Izuku had been while Katsuki was searching for him.

And, in doing so, he could learn to know his best friend again.

"He told me about you," Eri said one day.

Katsuki turned toward her. "About me?"

She nodded. "He said you were his best friend when you were little. He said you were really loud, and you liked explosions, and you wanted to be the greatest hero."

Katsuki looked down at his hands. "Sounds like him."

"He said you were going to be a good hero."

The words struck him harder than he expected.

For years, Katsuki had imagined what he would tell Izuku when they finally met again. He had pictured bragging about his training, explaining his plans for the future, proving that he had become everything he had once promised to be. He had imagined Izuku listening with that familiar, bright-eyed attention, asking questions until Katsuki got annoyed and told him to shut up.

He had never considered that Izuku might have spent those same years imagining him, too.

"What else did he say?" Katsuki asked.

Eri thought for a moment.

"He said he missed you."

Katsuki stopped breathing.

She looked up at him, uncertain whether she had done something wrong.

"He didn't talk about it very much," she added. "But sometimes, when he was telling me stories, he would talk about a boy who used to play with him. He said the boy was really good at everything, and he was going to become a hero, and he was always running ahead."

Katsuki pressed his lips together.

"He said he thought the boy would find him someday."

The room seemed to grow very quiet.

Katsuki stared at Eri, unable to speak, because he could suddenly see the years between them from the other side. He had spent a decade searching for Izuku, convinced that he was the only one who had refused to let the past go. He had imagined Izuku as someone trapped in a terrible place, someone who had endured things Katsuki couldn't understand, someone who might not even remember the boy he had been.

He had never imagined that Izuku had been searching, too.

Not physically, perhaps. Not through police reports or missing-person databases or the streets of a city that had long since stopped looking for him. But in his own way, through the stories he told a frightened little girl, through the memories he had kept alive in a place where memories were all he had, Izuku had been waiting for the boy who had promised to become a hero.

Katsuki covered his face with one hand.

He had found him.

He had finally found him.

And Izuku had been waiting for him, too.

"I'm sorry," Katsuki whispered.

Eri looked up at him. "Why?"

He shook his head, unable to explain.

How could he tell her that he was sorry for all the years they had lost, for every afternoon that had passed without Izuku, for every time he had remembered their childhood and wondered whether his friend had forgotten him? How could he explain that he was sorry for the last conversation they had, for the things he had said when they were children, for the fact that he had finally found Izuku and had spent their only moments together shouting instructions across a battlefield?

He was sorry for everything.

And none of it could bring him back.

Eri leaned against him again, and Katsuki wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

They stayed that way until the light outside the window began to fade.

The first time Katsuki returned to the Midoriya house after the funeral, he stood outside the door for nearly ten minutes before he could make himself knock.

He had attended the service in his formal uniform, standing beside Inko with his hands clenched at his sides while people spoke about the boy who had been taken from them. There had been photographs, flowers, and stories from people who had known Izuku in different parts of his life. Some spoke about the child who had loved heroes. Others spoke about the young man who had protected Eri, who had endured years of captivity and somehow retained the ability to be kind.

Katsuki had listened to all of it.

He had learned things he wished he had been there to see. He had learned that Izuku had drawn pictures on scraps of paper whenever he could get his hands on them, that he had kept track of the weather by watching the small patch of sky visible through a high window, and that he had sometimes described the outside world to Eri as though he were trying to remember it well enough for both of them.

He had learned that Izuku had never stopped wanting to go home.

The knowledge had settled into Katsuki slowly, leaving him with a grief that was quieter than the first terrible shock of the raid but somehow more difficult to bear. The funeral had made the loss real in a way he had not been prepared for. There had been a place where Izuku's name was written, a photograph of his face, and flowers that people had brought because they wanted to honour a person they could no longer speak to.

There had been a world in which everyone else knew he was gone.

Katsuki still found himself expecting to see him.

He expected to hear his voice when someone mentioned a hero he would have liked. He expected to find himself looking for green hair in a crowd, and sometimes he forgot, for a few brief seconds, that the search was over. He would see something ridiculous in a shop window or hear a child laughing in the street and think that he needed to tell Izuku about it.

Then the memory would return.

It always returned.

When Inko finally opened the door, she looked at him with the same exhausted kindness she had shown him as a child.

"Come in, Katsuki."

He followed her into the house.

For a while, they sat in the living room and talked about ordinary things. Inko asked about his work study, and Katsuki answered as best he could. She told him that the police had provided more information about Izuku's disappearance, that there were still questions the investigation might never answer, and that she had decided to keep some of the belongings recovered from the Hassaikai because they were the only things her son had brought back from the years he had lost.

Eventually, she looked toward the staircase.

"Would you like to see his room?"

Katsuki nodded.

He had been there before, years ago, but the memory was vague. He remembered a desk covered in notebooks, a shelf full of hero figurines, and a window that looked out over the little garden behind the house. He remembered Izuku sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, talking so quickly that he sometimes stumbled over his own words.

He had never thought that one day he would have to visit that room without him.

Inko opened the door.

Everything was still where it had been when Izuku disappeared. The desk stood beneath the window, the shelves were lined with books and hero memorabilia, and the bed was made with a blanket that had faded slightly over the years. There were drawings pinned to the wall, some of them crooked, and a little stack of notebooks sat beside the lamp.

Katsuki stepped inside.

For a moment, he couldn't move.

He had spent ten years searching for Izuku, imagining all the places he might have been, all the things that might have happened to him, all the different versions of the person he could have become. He had thought that finding him would finally give him the chance to know what had happened to the boy who disappeared.

Instead, he was standing in a room preserved in the shape of a childhood that had ended without warning.

He approached the desk.

There were notebooks stacked beside the lamp, their covers worn at the edges, and a little box filled with pencils that had been sharpened down to almost nothing. On the top of the desk sat a photograph of two children standing beneath a tree, one with ash-blond hair and an expression of exaggerated triumph, the other with green curls and a smile that seemed too big for his face.

Katsuki picked it up.

He remembered the day the photograph had been taken. Their mothers had insisted on it after the two of them had spent an entire afternoon arguing over who could climb the tree the fastest. Katsuki had won, naturally, and had spent the next hour reminding Izuku of that fact until Izuku threatened to stop talking to him forever.

He had lasted approximately eleven minutes.

Katsuki traced the edge of the photograph with his thumb.

"He kept this?" he asked.

Inko nodded.

"He kept everything. I found old drawings, too. Pictures of heroes, little notes he'd written, even a list of things he wanted to do when he grew up." She paused, her voice softening. "You were on the list."

Katsuki looked up.

"What?"

Inko smiled through her tears.

"He wanted to see you become a hero. He wanted to see the ocean. He wanted to eat strawberry cake from that little bakery near the station. He wanted to travel, and learn things, and have a home of his own someday." She looked around the room. "He had so many things he wanted to do."

Katsuki stared at the photograph.

He had always thought of Izuku's disappearance as a single terrible event, something that had happened one morning and had divided their lives into before and after. But standing in that room, looking at the objects Izuku had left behind, he understood that the loss had been so much larger than the moment he vanished.

There had been years of ordinary life that Izuku had never been allowed to have.

There had been mornings he should have woken up in this room, afternoons he should have spent talking to his mother, and evenings he should have wasted playing video games or arguing with Katsuki about something neither of them would remember the next day. There had been a future in which he might have gone to school, made friends, discovered what he wanted to become, and grown into a person who didn't have to measure every day by the sounds of footsteps outside a locked door.

There had been a life.

And someone had stolen it from him.

Katsuki set the photograph down carefully.

He didn't know how long he stood there before Inko spoke again.

"He remembered you," she said. "Even after all that time, he remembered you."

Katsuki lowered his head.

"I should've found him sooner."

Inko stepped closer.

"You were a child."

"I should've—"

"You were a child, Katsuki."

Her voice was gentle, but there was a firmness in it that made him stop.

"You looked for him. You never stopped looking for him. You were a little boy who didn't understand why his friend had disappeared, and you grew up carrying that fear with you. You did everything you could with what you knew." She reached for his hand. "You didn't take him away from me. You didn't put him in that place. And you didn't make the person who hurt him do what they did."

Katsuki stared at their joined hands.

He wanted to believe her.

He wanted to believe that the years of searching had meant something, that he had done what he could, that the boy he had been had not somehow failed the friend he loved. But grief was an unkind thing, and it had a habit of turning every memory into a question that could never be answered.

What if he had looked somewhere else?

What if he had found the right report, asked the right question, followed the right lead?

What if he had reached Izuku ten years earlier?

He knew there was no point in asking. He knew that the past was not a place he could return to, that there was no way to know what might have happened if a single detail had been different.

But he asked anyway, silently, because he couldn't help it.

Inko squeezed his hand.

"I wish things had been different, too."

Katsuki closed his eyes.

For a long time, they stood together in Izuku's room, surrounded by the small, ordinary things he had left behind. The afternoon light moved slowly across the floor, touching the desk and the shelves and the photograph of two children who had believed they would always have time.

Eventually, Katsuki picked up the photograph again.

He held it carefully, as though the paper itself might break beneath the weight of everything he had lost.

"I'll remember him," he said.

Inko's eyes filled with tears.

"I know you will."

Katsuki looked at the boy in the photograph, at the wide smile and the freckles and the bright, hopeful expression he had spent years trying to find again.

"I'll remember all of it."

He meant it.

He would remember the little boy who had followed him everywhere, the friend who had believed in him before the rest of the world had decided he was worth believing in, the person who had survived things Katsuki could barely imagine and still found the strength to care for someone else.

He would remember the way Izuku had looked at him in the corridor, the way he had said Kacchan, and the promise they had made without understanding how little time they had left.

He would remember that Izuku had been alive, that he had been there, that he had found him.

And he would remember that, for one brief moment, they had both believed there would be an after.

Months later, Katsuki found himself walking past the old tree behind their houses.

He hadn't planned to go there. He had been visiting Inko and had taken the longer route home, following streets he hadn't walked in years. The neighbourhood had changed in small ways. A shop had closed, a new building had gone up near the station, and the playground at the end of the street had been repainted. The world had continued to grow around the spaces where Izuku had once existed, filling them with new people and new memories.

The tree was still there.

It stood at the edge of the little patch of grass behind the houses, its branches spreading wide above the ground where two children had once spent entire afternoons arguing about heroes. The bark was rough beneath Katsuki's fingertips when he reached out to touch it, and the leaves stirred overhead in the late-afternoon breeze.

He stood there for a long time.

He remembered the day Izuku had cleaned the scrape on his knee. He remembered the colourful plaster, the way Izuku had laughed when Katsuki complained, and the promise he had made about becoming the greatest hero in the world.

He remembered the conversation that followed.

Maybe I'll be a hero, too.

You can't be a hero, Deku.

He had been six years old. He had not understood the weight of what he was saying, or the way a few careless words could settle into another person's heart and remain there long after the person who spoke them had forgotten. He had not understood how many things he would one day wish he had said differently.

He wished he could go back.

Not to change the course of the world, because he knew that the kidnapping had been beyond his control, that nothing he could have done as a child would necessarily have prevented the terrible years that followed. He wished he could return simply to be kinder. To listen when Izuku spoke. To let him finish his sentences. To tell him that he was allowed to dream, that being quirkless didn't make him less worthy of a future, that the world was large enough for both of them to become the people they wanted to be.

He wished he had told him that he mattered.

He had thought there would be time to say all of it when they met again.

Katsuki lowered himself onto the grass beneath the tree, resting his back against the trunk. The afternoon was warm, and the breeze carried the faint smell of rain from somewhere beyond the neighbourhood. Children were playing in the distance, their voices rising and falling as they chased each other across the playground.

For a moment, he could almost hear Izuku beside him.

He could almost imagine the questions he would ask, the way he would lean forward when he became excited, the familiar sound of his voice filling the quiet. He could picture them sitting beneath the branches as they had when they were children, talking about heroes and the future, arguing over something meaningless and promising to settle it the next day.

The memory was so clear that it hurt.

Katsuki looked toward the gate.

For years, he had been the one looking back, searching for the green-haired boy who always seemed to be a few steps behind him. He had searched in crowds, in records, in every place he could think to look. He had followed every lead and refused to let the world convince him that the boy he loved had simply vanished into nothing.

He had found him.

He had finally found him.

And now, even when he turned his head, there was no one standing behind him.

Katsuki bowed his head.

"I found you, Deku," he whispered.

The words disappeared into the quiet afternoon.

"I really did."

He sat beneath the tree until the sun began to sink, watching the shadows stretch across the grass and listening to the sounds of a neighbourhood that had never stopped moving. He thought about the future Izuku had wanted, the things he had never been allowed to do, and the ordinary days that should have belonged to him.

He thought about Eri, who was slowly learning that she could trust the people around her, and about the stories she still told him when she remembered something Izuku had said. He thought about Inko, who was learning to live in a house that would never again be filled with her son's voice. He thought about the little boy in the photograph, the one who had believed that the world would always give him another chance to make things right.

And he thought about the promise he had made in the corridor.

We're talking after this.

Katsuki had meant it.

He had meant every word.

For years, he had searched for the boy who never came home, convinced that finding him would be the beginning of everything they had lost. He had imagined the arguments, the apologies, the awkward conversations that would follow. He had imagined Izuku sitting beside him beneath the old tree, laughing at something stupid, telling him about the years they had missed and listening while Katsuki told him about the life he had lived in his absence.

He had imagined a thousand ordinary days.

He had never imagined that he would have to spend the rest of his life remembering a reunion that had barely lasted a minute.

The wind moved through the branches overhead, scattering a few leaves across the grass.

Katsuki closed his eyes.

For the first time in years, he allowed himself to remember Izuku not as the missing boy he had searched for, not as the person he had found too late, but simply as his best friend.

The boy who had cleaned the scrape on his knee.

The boy who had believed in him.

The boy who had followed him home.

And the boy who, for one brief moment in a ruined corridor, had looked at him and remembered exactly who he was.

Katsuki had spent half his life searching for Izuku Midoriya.

He had found him at last.

He just hadn't been given enough time to bring him home.