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Katsuki wakes for the second time, his body no less numb. He doesn’t have to play catch up, not feeling the same shock of anxiety that waking up with no knowledge of where or when or why gave him the first time. The unfamiliar ceiling blurs into vision and the smell of disinfectant and plastic burns his nostrils.
The hospital bed is hard enough to be compared to rock and there’s an itch in his left arm, an IV dripping fluids straight into his bloodstream. Painkillers, he thinks. Bandages wrap the majority of his limbs. Around his head too, if the dull throbbing at the back of his eyes is anything to go by.
Details are foggy, even more so with his wooly bed-ridden head. Katsuki remembers the mission in vague snippets, fractured photographs; scratchy and underdeveloped. A building, a villain, an earthquake? No. Steel beams and concrete slabs. Dust. Todoroki.
Todoroki had been there too, they had both been hired for the same job. Katsuki’s head throbs painfully and he lifts his hand to feel for himself, as if touch was proven to relieve pressure. Instead his arm screams at him to leave it be. Broken, perhaps.
That same anxiousness worms it’s way back into his chest, heavy. If he is this damaged then how had Todoroki fared?
He remembers the seconds before he had slipped unconscious, Todoroki’s eyes wide on him, his white hair stained red enough to match his left. Katsuki remembers Todoroki scrambling over to reach him before the building fell on their heads.
Katsuki hears his heart rate on the monitor increase sharply as he stares at the roof and wracks his brain for details.
Had he been filled in the first time he had woken up? Was Todoroki in the room then? Was he being treated in the hospital too? Had he even made it? Katsuki tries to talk, to call out for a nurse before he drives himself insane - but nothing escapes, his throat dry from however long he’s been unconscious.
Over the blood in his ears he hears someone loudly slurping from a straw in the doorway.
Moving more his eyes than his head, he sees Todoroki sitting in a wheelchair, dressed in a very loose hospital gown, arm in a sling across his chest, hair down around his shoulders and a bright pink jug of what Katsuki assumes is water in his lap. He drinks from the straw again and the sound is so loud Katsuki wonders if that was what had woken him up in the first place.
The pressure in his chest settles down. Todoroki looks like he has been to hell and back, but he’s alive, and obviously well enough to continue his full time job as Katsuki’s personal annoyance.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Katsuki asks, pretends that he wasn’t just having a minor anxiety attack over the boy’s fate, but his voice comes out crackly. He tries to clear his throat.
“Nurse said I could come in.”
“And you’re watching me sleep?”
“I just got here.” Todoroki balances the jug on his lap, using his good arm to reach down to the wheel. “I can leave.”
“No,” Katsuki says too quickly. “Give me some of that.” He gestures to the water.
Todoroki wheels himself next to the bed, a pitiful sight really, having to adjust his direction with only one working arm to steer. Todoroki passes Katsuki the bright pink jug, and he takes it with a shaky hand, careful not to jostle the IV in his arm. Todoroki hovers close in case he were to drop it and Katsuki tries not to be ungrateful as he suppresses the urge to bat him away.
He sips and does his best not to stare. Todoroki’s neck is being supported by a brace, and the hole in the centre of the plastic reveals deep purple and blue clouds of blotted skin underneath. There’s a cut above his eyebrow that looks deep, Steri-Strips holding the skin together, a large bandage over his previously unscarred cheek.
Somehow he still manages to maintain his pretty-boy aura despite the ugly, too large hospital gown falling over his shoulder, hair tangled and matted at the back as though he’d just woken up. His eyes are kind on Katsuki and it makes him want to crawl out of his own bruised skin.
“How are you?” Katsuki asks dumbly, looking back down to his bandaged hands around the jug.
“Ah, well.” Todoroki smiles sadly. “I can leave bed at least.”
“Your neck?”
“Just a bad sprain.”
“And your leg.”
“Broken.”
“Anything else?”
“Fractured rib, sprained shoulder, large laceration to my left leg, needed stitches, will probably scar badly.”
Katsuki shoots him the most frustrated look he can without turning his head too much. Just because he could get out of bed doesn’t necessarily mean he should . Todoroki has always preferred to ignore professional advice.
“Somehow still not as bad as you,” Todoroki says, taking the jug out of his hands and back into his lap to sip.
“I haven’t been awake long enough to feel it.”
“Do you remember what they told you?”
“Not at all,” Katsuki admits, trying to scour his memory through frantic doctors and lengthy medical terminology.
Todoroki wheels himself over to the end of the bed, pulls out the clipboard and rests it by Katsuki’s feet, reading.
“Mild brain trauma, multiple fractures including clavicle and ribs. Spraining to wrists and shoulder. Substantial skin trauma, lacerations to torso, hands and severe bruising to limbs and chest - internal and external.”
Katsuki is suddenly glad the painkillers have numbed most of it.
“So how are you ?” Todoroki asks, staring at him from the end of the bed, glancing up over the paperwork. Katsuki wonders how much of it he can actually understand.
“Alive, I guess.”
“You fell five floors.”
“Five?”
Todoroki nods the best he can with a neck brace.
“The villain?”
“Crushed, the same as us; he’s handcuffed to a bed somewhere on another floor.”
Katsuki sighs, relieved that they managed not to botch the mission completely.
Todoroki continues, “Irrelevant anyway. You shouldn’t have done what you did.”
“What did I do?” Katsuki asks. His patchy recollection and the head injury diagnosis starting to make sense together.
“Pushed me out of the way,” Todoroki says simply, putting the clipboard back and leaning forward against the bed end with his good arm. Katsuki thinks Todoroki might be frustrated with him, but he’s still not an expert at reading the boy’s blank expressions, even after all this time. “I only fell three,” Todoroki clarifies.
Katsuki leans back and sighs. That did sound like him.
“Are you mad?” he asks, prodding Todoroki’s bandaged cheek gently with his foot under the thin, scratchy blanket. It hurts to move - even his non-injured ankle - but the way Todoroki rests his arm over the top of fabric, against Katsuki’s leg is worth it even if only for the comfort of contact.
“Yes.”
“I’m not apologising.” Katsuki would happily take that fall times ten if it meant Todoroki was less harmed. He wonders if this sudden fondness is artificial, stemming from his drug laced brain and the woozy limbs he doesn’t quite feel he has control over.
“I didn’t expect you to.”
An unspoken rule, an invisible line they’ve never thought, or felt necessary to cross; never the time for it. For kind touches and prolonged contact. Their loose friendship - fucked up kind of semi-relationship - hidden behind walls, late arrivals and early departures. Mutually beneficial and crude.
But they did almost die, Katsuki supposes. A flit with death might warrant some form of physical comfort.
Except Katsuki wants to reach out and detangle the knots from Todoroki’s hair, and it’s not the first time he’s had to suppress an urge so soft either.
***
The days pass extraordinarily slowly.
Recovery Girl visits Katsuki on the third day of his admission, her quirk motivating the breaks and bruises to heal faster than they would naturally. While the fast healing saps just about all remaining strength from his body, it also permits him to leave bed for the first time since arriving.
His room is relatively large - a perk to being one of the city’s higher ranked heroes - and the couch under the large window has been calling him for days.
Todoroki has been using it as his day bed, preferring to spend time in Katsuki’s room than his own. He’s had been given a smaller room, apparently. Without a couch or window to look over trees dusted pink with spring flowers and breeze that made thin curtains ripple gently.
Katsuki hasn’t had the strength to check Todoroki’s room with his own eyes, nor does he really mind the company enough to prove Todoroki wrong. Especially not when the boy spends the majority of their time either quietly reading or napping in the sun.
Katsuki sits in Todoroki’s place this afternoon, looking out over the hospital gardens, the daylight warm against his still tender skin. He’s restless, unhappy being cooped up inside, picking at the skin around his nails, fidgeting. He wants to bounce his leg but his ankle already protested enough the three steps it took to walk from one piece of furniture to the other.
Todoroki hasn’t visited today, and Katsuki would really like to think his unease is from lack of fresh air and not nerves in that regard. Perhaps his Recovery Girl visit went so well they discharged him. His injuries weren’t as severe as Katsuki’s and it would take less time for him to heal.
But Todoroki does visit, as if it is his royal duty to; knocks on Katsuki’s door and lets himself in as usual.
He looks tired today, more so than usual. He’s ditched the wheelchair and instead sports a wooden crutch hiked under one arm and a portable IV hanger, attached to his hand and dripping fluids. Katsuki pulls his legs up for Todoroki to sit, and Todoroki slumps into the cushions like he’d just ran a mile.
He looks even worse up close, his long hair curling around his bruised face. His hospital gown sits high above his knee and large cumbersome remedial boot. Katsuki wonders how bad the break is, how well the stitches under bandages on his thigh would heal, if there would be any feeling in the new scar tissue at all.
“I want to go home,” Todoroki says, low exhausted.
“Bad day?” Katsuki asks, stretching a leg out over his lap carefully. Todoroki rests his good hand over Katsuki’s ankle, closing his eyes, humming in confirmation.
Pain killers then, Katsuki guesses, listening to the medicine bag drip over the silence.
“You should have stayed in bed, dumbass.”
“You make me feel better,” Todoroki replies without beat, sincere and taking Katsuki off guard.
“Don’t say that kind of shit,” Katsuki stumbles, glancing out the window so he doesn’t have to look Todoroki in the eye.
“Why aren’t we dating?” Todoroki continues and Katsuki can feel his stare burning a hole into the side of his face. Katsuki wants to desperately throw his foot off Todoroki’s lap and eject himself from the conversation. He’s too tired to piece together a coherent answer to the question, and to be quite honest, hasn’t given it thought at all.
They’d been like this for months, in this comfortable limbo. Friends with benefits, frantic and heated. Their lives were too busy for anything else, too busy for Katsuki to even think of having Todoroki in lighter ways. There was no time for morning after brunch, for entire weekends in bed. Katsuki’s stomach twists uncomfortably at the thought regardless.
It feels foreign; Todoroki is his to have in the darkness, yellow light seeping from under bedroom doors, hard, rough and desperate. Not in pale grey mornings and not here, under the semi-shade of cherry blossoms with botched bodies and tired minds. Katsuki’s not sure he knows this Todoroki. Not sure he’s allowed to, if he deserves to.
“Are you high?”
Todoroki makes a face at Katsuki’s question, wrinkles up his nose as though he’s only just realising the fact for himself. “Possibly.”
Katsuki sighs.
“Is that something you want?” he asks, hoping Todoroki will forget the conversation tomorrow, so they never have to broach the subject again.
“I don’t know.”
“Then why did you bring it up?”
“I don’t know,” Todoroki repeats, sits himself up and shifts to face Katsuki, giving him his full attention. “I want you to kiss me.”
Katsuki wants to shrivel in on himself and become one with the feathers in the couch cushions. “Will it make you shut up?”
“Are you embarrassed?” Todoroki asks, sliding closer, the hem of his hospital gown riding up around his thighs. Todoroki tries to move his arm, to reach out to Katsuki but it tugs on the IV attached to his hand, almost tipping the hanger before it regains its balance and clatters back on four wheels. Todoroki pouts, looking like he might start tearing up at any second.
“I’m embarrassed for your sober self,” Katsuki replies, a half-truth.
He is embarrassed, he’s mature enough to admit. Katsuki thought he’d be used to Todoroki’s bluntness by now. Not that Todoroki’s straightforwardness had ever landed him on his ass, the opposite in fact. It was always Katsuki left in the dirt, unsure of how to reply to Todoroki’s blatancy, despite his usual snarky knack for manipulating conversation. Left staring up at Todoroki like he’d kicked him out of kindness. Wordless and red.
Katsuki reaches over with his good hand and drags the pole attached to Todoroki closer, dragging it across the floor until Todoroki can successfully reach his arm around Katsuki’s shoulders. He brings his knee up to make room for Todoroki to shuffle between his legs.
Katsuki kisses him as he had been asked. He’s never been one to deny Todoroki. Katsuki lacks that kind of conviction. Todoroki stole it from him, through adept hands and ineloquent promises.
Todoroki kisses sloppily, drunk on morphine. He is hot under Katsuki’s hands, his body trying to heal, to fight off infection. There is no urgency to the kiss, no promise of things to follow, no time constraints no desperation. Katsuki’s violently aware of how different it feels, too sweet, too tender, settling sickly in his gut. He pulls away.
“Satisfied?”
“No,” Todoroki replies honestly, as always.
“Are you ever?” Katsuki sighs, retreating away.
“Yes.” He looks at Katsuki, “That one time in the shower when you—”
Katsuki slaps a hand across Todoroki’s mouth before he can go into the details. The walls are too thin, he knows for a fact. Katsuki’s already minuscule shred of patience worn down to nothing after listening to the old man’s television word for word, on full blast behind the plaster at his head.
Todoroki licks the palm of Katsuki’s hand, like a fucking child and Katsuki retracts it in horror, wiping the spit on his gown disgustedly.
Todoroki laughs and the sound rings in Katsuki’s ears like church bells on a Sunday. Melodic, dancing through his head until he can’t help but smile too. Todoroki rarely laughs. Smirks and small smiles, amused huffs and the like. But nothing to this calibre. Morphine laced, the truest of true.
Bakugou kisses him again despite his previous disinclination. Kisses him so he wouldn’t sit there breathless from something as simple as Todoroki’s sincerity. He runs a hand through red hair and it tangles between his fingers but Todoroki is worming his way into Bakugou’s lap. Katsuki thinks he’s probably about to add a hundred more knots anyway.
“We could do this,” Todoroki says quietly, running a hand up the side of Katsuki’s thigh, under the hem of his gown, the tips of his fingers teasing at the edge of his underwear, sliding under and pressing fingers in firm. “All the time, no restrictions, no appointments, in the mornings, after exhausting days at work.”
“We can do that now,” Katsuki says against Todoroki’s mouth. Wondering if a hospital was the best place for wandering hands, if the door had a lock.
“I want to have you over for dinner.”
“Sure,” Katsuki agrees easily. They’d eaten at Todoroki’s place before. After sex, before Katsuki left for the night. Reheated convenience store meals was the usual.
“As a date,” Todoroki clarifies almost threateningly, at the same time his fingers grip Katsuki through the fabric of his underwear.
Katsuki breathes hard through his nose, his body pulling taught habitually and agitating his tender muscles. He wonders if Todoroki plans to work him into agreement, keeping his hands on him until all knows how to say is yes yes yes.
“Can we put a fucking pin in this conversation?” Katsuki asks, agitated, watching as Todoroki shifts his bad leg out of the way, his gown sliding completely down one shoulder, his legs far enough apart, hem shimmed up enough for Katsuki to see him straining around fabric too.
“Promise to think about it.”
“I doubt you’ll give me much choice.”
Todoroki seems satisfied with that, pulling Katsuki out of his briefs and taking him in hand properly. The cold plastic of the IV drip hitting Katsuki’s thigh reminds him Todoroki has a piece of metal lodged under his skin and probably shouldn’t be moving it as much as he is.
“Is this the best idea?” Katsuki’s body begs him to lay still and let it relax, his fractured collarbone aching all the way down his arm at the smallest movements. If he hurts doing nothing but sitting, kissing, then it is safe to assume Todoroki is too, even if he can’t feel it through the medication.
“Please,” Is all that Todoroki replies with.
“We’re going to hurt ourselves,” Katsuki says, all the while running both injured and uninjured hands up Todoroki’s thighs, sprained wrist be damned. Feeling it mighty unfair that Todoroki sat between his legs with his skin exposed, the entirety of Katsuki’s busted body protesting while his heart begged him forward and his gut burned hot.
“Then we’ll take it slow,” Todoroki replies, removing his hand from between Katsuki’s legs and instead placing it over Katsuki’s wrist, guiding him up, under the gown, over his waist, the ugly white and blue dotted fabric of the gown bunching up around Katsuki’s arms.
There is a dark spot against Todoroki’s underwear and Katsuki wonders about the aphrodisiac properties of morphine. Whether Todoroki’s pupils have blown wide organically or if it is a symptom of the pain relief.
There’s bruises here too, under Katsuki’s hands on Todoroki’s hips, his waist, his stomach. Scrapes scabbed over. Katsuki wants to take the gown off, to bring his lips to Todoroki’s injured skin, to see the extent of the damage with his own eyes. But Katsuki’s shoulder screams when his arm is raised any higher than ninety degrees and the unlockable door is a constant reminder that anyone could walk in; that they really don’t have the time to take it as slow as Todoroki wants.
Katsuki’s avoided this, this whole… stopping to smell the roses, fumbling around before the main event. It’s a slippery slope and one that he’s never intended on falling down. In a way, he feels backed into a corner, taking it slow, or prying himself away altogether.
“Help me take this off,” Todoroki asks, his hand pawing at the latch of his neck brace.
Katsuki frowns at him. “No you fucking idiot, it’s there for a reason.”
“I’ll put it straight back on afterwards.”
“No.”
Todoroki puts on that same pout as earlier, lifting a hand, threatening to use his quirk to ice the brace over and smash the plastic.
“Don’t—,” Katsuki starts, shooting an arm up in an attempt to stop him before he can go through with it, causing his shoulder to spark white hot pain at the sudden movement, searing through his chest and all the way down to his fingers. Katsuki makes a strangled noise and retracts his arm, cradling it against his chest. “You fuck .”
“Sorry,” Todoroki apologises, removing his hand from his own neck and placing it gently on Katsuki’s sore shoulder, cooling it with his quirk, just enough for it to be remedial, to take the edge off. Todoroki kisses Katsuki again before he can complain further.
The pain subsides into a dull throb quickly and Katsuki has a hand under Todoroki’s gown before he can really process it himself, tired of this fucking around, tired of Todoroki and his loose mouth and intoxicated actions.
“Oh,” Todoroki says dumbly when Katsuki takes him in hand, his eyes fluttering closed of their own accord as he melts into the couch. Katsuki brushes the long hair out of Todoroki’s face as it falls into his eyes.
“Knew that would shut you up.”
Todoroki hums blissfully, his cheek resting on the back of the couch. The best kind of medicine. Katsuki wonders what kind of state Todoroki’s head is in, muddled with morphine high, now combined with the pleasure Katsuki is giving.
Katsuki watches - his dick jumping where it’s trapped between the elastic of his underwear and his stomach - as Todoroki’s breath starts to shallow, his hand fisting in the fabric of Katsuki’s gown.
The shadows of the cherry blossom paint silhouettes over them both, swaying in the breeze, a kaleidoscope of pattern softened through the swaying of the curtain. They settle over Todoroki prettily, even as he sits damaged with leg and arm in cast, neck brace somehow unable to deter from the handsomeness of his face.
Especially now, as his face twists and his nose crinkles in that same sweet way it had earlier, the hair at his forehead slightly damp with the warmth of the sun, at the exertion, at the high dose of painkillers, curling against his skin as he turns to hide his face in the couch.
When Todoroki opens his eyes again they’re half-lidded and watery. Too out of it to remove his head from the cushion, Todoroki fumbles between their bodies until he has an unsure hand around Katsuki again, as if he had just remembered where he is and who he is with.
It’s not as good as it could have been, Todoroki’s hand is loose while loopy like this - distracted, not in the right mind. But Todoroki looks at him like he is the only one, like they’re ten light years away from here, in a world of their own and it suddenly doesn’t matter how much his shoulder burns, or how much his unsteady breathing disrupts his broken ribs.
Katsuki’s ears ring and he wonders if anyone has died like this, glad that he’s no longer attached to the heart rate monitor as he’s sure that it would have flatlined. Katsuki decides he wouldn’t mind going out like that at all.
Todoroki groans quietly between them, gasping, hiccuping in small breaths as he comes. The sight alone is enough to boil Katsuki over too, leaning in to crush his mouth against Todoroki’s, desperate to muffle his own noise.
Todoroki wipes his hand on Katsuki’s gown when he has recovered enough. He’s too tired to berate him for it and wipes his own around the same spot, making a mental note to request a new one when the nurse was in for his nightly check-up.
Todoroki closes his eyes and Katsuki enjoys the quiet of the come-down, in the warmth of the sun and painless body, even if it only lasted a few minutes.
Todoroki mumbles, half asleep, “We could make it work.”
***
Todoroki’s internal bleeding reveals itself the following day. When they’re alone again Todoroki lifts up his gown to show him the blotchy, purple bruise over his hips, climbing up to spread over jut of his ribs, stresses that the doctors told him it was a late symptom of the accident and reassures Katsuki - who’s anxiousness is obviously evident - that it had nothing to do with their couch tryst yesterday.
He is without IV drip today, this new symptom not contributing to any further pain, prescribed blood thickeners and another night of admission. Matching Katsuki’s five days.
They’re sitting quietly on the couch again, Todoroki’s remedial boot over Katsuki’s lap. He’s resorted to playing games on his phone, having downloaded a few notoriously bad tower defence ones, their icons indistinguishable from each other. Todoroki has a book spread face down over his stomach, more interested in watching the gardens outside their window.
“Let’s go up to the roof,” Todoroki says out of the blue.
Katsuki scoffs. “You can barely walk, let alone climb stairs.”
“Neither can you.”
“My ankle is fine now, thank you.”
“Good, then you can help me up there.”
Katsuki locks his phone and looks at Todoroki, who is no longer distracted by the happenings downstairs and is looking at Katsuki with resolute seriousness.
“If they find out we’ve left our room…”
“They won’t,” Todoroki promises, tapping a finger against his nose.
“Fine,” Katsuki agrees. “What’s the plan, Houdini?”
As it turns out, Todoroki’s room is almost double the size of Katsuki’s, with a window and cushioned bench stretching the entirety of the far wall. Todoroki simply shrugs when Katsuki grills him. Something about his family having an investment in the hospital, and Endeavour still being at the top of the hero ranking.
Todoroki grabs one half of the crutches that sit against the side of his bed and tucks it under his arm, still hobbling, just not as pitifully.
Todoroki also knows the maze of hospital hallways like the back of his hand. When to turn to avoid staff offices and break rooms. The way to quieter, unused hallways that echo with their irregular footsteps, cold and bleak.
He presses down on the fire escape door handle, and Katsuki’s terrified for a minute they’re going to set off the alarm. But it opens with no restraint and no siren, leading them into the concrete stairwell.
Todoroki takes each step at a time, one hand on the railing and the other white knuckled around the rubber handle of crutch. Katsuki is only a little better off, breaking at every floor to catch his breath, grateful that besides his minor sprained ankle, the use of his legs hadn’t been compromised in the accident.
Todoroki makes it three flights before he caves and asks for Katsuki’s help. He slides an arm around Katuski’s good shoulder and takes the pressure off his leg completely. Katsuki kicks the doorway on the final floor open and the sunlight almost blinds him.
The roof is a field of billowing white sheets, hung over twine and left out to dry in direct sunlight. Todoroki shrugs Katsuki off, walking the rest of the way himself into the middle of the linen field, his hair whipping around his face, gown blowing at his thighs.
The view is, thankfully worth it. The tops of skyscrapers visible between the sheets, afternoon sun bouncing off glass, bathed in pink and orange. A jungle of concrete and steel. Of life outside the hospital.
Katsuki joins him, walking a row of white apart, letting his fingers run over the clean fabric. He looks at Todoroki between a gap in the sheets, in and out of view with the wind in the fabric. He’s tying his hair up with one hand, low on the back of his head, his fringe falling into his face, stray strands dancing around his neck, braceless today.
The fresh air feels good against Katsuki’s skin; he breathes and his ribs don’t hurt.
“My mother was a permanent resident on the eighth floor. I used to come up here a lot,” Todoroki tells him over the wind.
Katsuki imagines a smaller Todoroki, slipping away from family visits, ducking behind desks, sitting on the roof alone and staring out into the future.
“She liked it up here too.” He smiles, glancing at Katsuki before returning to the view. “I taught her all the tricks to escaping, when I was older. We got into trouble for it.”
“As the twig is bent…” Katsuki starts.
“So grows the tree,” Todoroki finishes the saying. “Something like that.” He looks peaceful as he agrees, looking out over the city with endearment. “I brought afternoon tea.”
Katsuki watches, a little shocked as Todoroki pulls a bag of cafeteria cookies out of the gap in his arm sling, wonders how he didn’t hear them crumpling as they climbed the stairs; how he even had the time or energy to make the trip to the ground floor, or who he had to bribe to get them.
They sit against the brick wall next to the stairwell door; the view over the city isn’t as easy to see from the ground, but the sway of the fabric and the steam that rises in white clouds from the laundry chimney is hypnotic enough. Better than sitting by the window in their stuffy room, debating the exact number of leaves on the trees outside.
“Does it scare you?” Todoroki starts, drumming his fingers against the plastic of the boot around his leg. “The idea of being something more?”
Katsuki tenses. He had hoped that Todoroki had forgotten their conversation from yesterday. That they could move on as normal, pick up from where they left off, casual and discrete.
“It scares me,” Todoroki continues when Katsuki doesn’t answer straight away. “I don’t know why.” Todoroki is anxious, Katsuki realises, fidgeting, looking down at the bag of cookies like it is about to give him all the answers. “Maybe you’ll find out something that shatters the illusion, about my family or myself, and there’ll be nothing I can do to stop you from leaving.”
“Do you have anything to hide?” Katsuki asks, his voice sounds wrong, tongue too big for his mouth.
“Nothing you aren’t already aware of.”
Katsuki knows the intricacies to the Todoroki family politics, the history there. He knows Todoroki. He’s had years to learn, has studied him dutifully, whether he intended to or not.
That wasn’t the cause of his hesitance.
“I wonder if… I’m the best person to seek for stability,” Katsuki says, cautiously. “You know me. You can’t actually think that I’d be the best person to go to for comfort, or reliance, or whatever the fuck comes with having something more.”
“You’ve been fine so far.”
“Through what? Sex and a good bowl of soba?”
“Maybe that is all there is to it.”
Katsuki stops at that, at the idea that he’s been making a bigger deal over this than was necessary. Comparing them to others, assuming that’s just how it is when in a relationship, sappy and public and defining.
“Your turn,” Katsuki says, having nothing to retort, passing the torch.
“We’re both too busy with work to focus on anything else.” Todoroki puts forward, leaning his head back against the brick to look up at the clouds, to watch the plumes of steam curl over, up and up until they dissipate in the orange sky.
“Have you not been in my bed at least once a week consistently for the last three months?”
Todoroki hums, quiet as he considers. “Your turn,” he says when he knows there’s nothing more to argue.
“I don’t know if I can give you what you want.”
Katsuki wants the ground to collapse up and swallow him whole, maybe ricochet him through another five floors of concrete.
Forcing himself to engage in such honest conversation has never been easy for him, and he knows he won’t dare come close to having this kind of discussion with anyone else but Todoroki. It’s something he’s practised, willingly or not, his cagey attitude settled the further he moved away from his teens.
“How do you know what that is?”
Katsuki opens his mouth and closes it again. He doesn’t, because Todoroki has never told him, has never asked him for anything more than this. He’s based his entire argument on assumptions and Todoroki is slowly kicking them over one crumbling brick at a time. It won’t be long until he’s left in the dirt again; tough love, perhaps.
“Our friends have the habit of making other people’s private business their own,” Todoroki puts, in the nicest way possible. They are all drawn to gossip, keen eye for lingering hands and too long glances. Experts at prying information. Deku has always been the main culprit, but Mina is no better.
“Fuck ‘em,” Katsuki says simply. “Let them think what they want to. They’ve already come to conclusions about what we are now, who cares? I didn’t think you were one to be bothered by public image.”
“I’m not.”
“Then?”
“Then, I have nothing else to offer you.”
They stay on the roof for a little while longer, subject exhausted, talking idly and about nothing, until the sun sets behind the buildings and the concrete is too cold to sit on with bare legs and thin gowns.
Out of excuses, out of snacks and out of sunlight.
Katsuki helps him back down the stairs, the decline more difficult. They’re both late for their nightly medication and the nurses rush them both off into their seperate rooms the moment they’re back on their designated floor.
Todoroki smiles at him from the doorway to his room down the hall. A small goodnight, a pleased, mischievous look. Perhaps happy that his rooftop solace will continue to be a secret. Only for him and anyone else he deems worthy enough to share it with.
They hadn’t agreed to anything, hadn’t come to any conclusion or set any labels but Katsuki lays in bed on his last night of his admittance, stares at the ugly yellow of the ceiling and wrestles with the principle of it. Even if nothing had to change, the pressure of having it defined sat heavy in his chest, behind his quirk-healed ribs.
Irrational? Possibly. Katsuki wishes this came easier to him, wishes he was as happy-go-lucky as others he knew. Wishes he wasn’t so stunted, so anxious.
He falls asleep to the thought of being in his own space for the first time in a week, looking forward to his own bed, his own house, to recovering the rest of the way to healthy alone and at his own pace.
***
Todoroki gets discharged hours earlier than Katsuki, pokes his head in the door and says goodbye on his way out. He smiles smugly as Katsuki raises his hand and gives him the finger.
He’s not cleared to go home until late afternoon. The doctors taking more blood, more x-rays, more prodding and poking, checking things are healing the way they should be.
He unlocks his apartment after the taxi throws him out to the cold night air, and is greeted by the stale smell of dust and rancid food. No one had been in or out since the accident and the un-emptied kitchen bin is wafting something truly pungent. His plants are crisp and withered without water.
Instead of the relief he believed being home would grant, Katsuki feels only exhaustion. A dull pressure behind his eyes, old aches that he had thought had healed, back to haunt.
He tidies in silence, trying to keep the pressure off his ankle.
It’s quiet and it’s cold and there’s something hollow settling in the pit of his stomach.
Katsuki sits on the corner of his unmade bed when he’s done - doesn’t dare lay back in case he is too sore to get up again - and realises why everything seems so slightly wrong, as though the picture frames and furniture had been shifted an inch to the left. Off in a way he’s only now realising.
He misses Todoroki.
It makes sense, logically. Anyone would miss the presence of someone they’d spent an entire week with, but Katsuki’s frustrated regardless.
He spends a good ten minutes unsuccessfully talking himself out of calling a taxi to the other side of town but knows that he is just going to fight with himself until he eventually caves anyway.
It is only a matter of time and Katsuki so desperately wants to sleep, he wants Todoroki to cool his shoulder with his quirk - a make-shift bag of frozen peas - just as he had that time on the couch. He wants someone to complain to, someone to fill the cold empty space.
The trip time is cut in half this late at night and Katsuki is paying for the taxi and stepping out onto the footpath before he is really ready to. The streetlights flicker over his head as he walks the rest of the block to the set of dingy apartments.
He’s about to knock on apartment number eleven when it flings open before he gets the chance. Todoroki stands in the doorway, checking his coat pockets for the necessities, as if he had been on his way out, his arm free from sling but wooden crutch still lodged under his arm.
“Oh.”
“Heading out?” Katsuki asks dumbly.
“No I…” Todoroki’s mouth turns up as he puts two and two together, holds the door open for Katsuki as tosses his keys back on the hall stand. “It seems I suddenly have no need to.”
Todoroki’s apartment is warm, the small portable heater propped up in the corner of his room only just turned off. It smells of miso and sweet tea. The coziness - the familiarity of it all hits Katsuki solidly in the face before he’s even got his shoes off at the genkan.
“When did you get out?” Todoroki asks, leaning over to turn the heater back on.
“A couple of hours ago,” Katsuki lies, so he doesn’t look as pitiful as he feels.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like fucking shit.”
“Both of us then.”
There’s an exhausted understanding that the thing they both desire most at that very moment is sleep. Too tired for small talk, too tired to fool around. Katsuki strips down to his underwear, climbs under the futon covers and physically feels all the tension in his body seep through the floor.
He grabs Todoroki’s hand before he can fall and hurt himself again, struggling to lower himself to the floor with his bandaged foot. It’s no longer in a boot - Katsuki’s glad he doesn’t have to come into contact with freezing plastic and metal under the covers in the middle of the night - but it’s also not yet fully healed.
Todoroki relieves the pain in his shoulder when they’re comfortable, Katsuki on his back with Todoroki rolled next to him, his hand icy over skin, sinking into his muscles. The weight of him against his side doing favours in and of itself.
Katsuki speaks into the dark of the room, feeling Todoroki’s breath even and slow against his skin, warm and comfortable. Suddenly sure of himself and sure of them and sure of what was to be.
“Let’s make it work.”