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The night it happened, Katsuki unpacked his armor from his body, sat on his dorm bed, and took several deep breaths. He hit the dial button on his phone. His father picked up on the second ring.
“Dad,” he gritted out, the word strange and strangely welcome in his mouth, “I have no idea how you can be so fucking patient when Mom and I are such assholes. I don’t thank you enough for letting me follow my dreams or whatever, not that you could’ve fucking stopped me, but I get now that not everyone’s that lucky. I love you guys. Lookin’ forward to visiting soon.”
There was a long silence.
“I love you too. It’s so important to me that you know that you’ve never been difficult for your mother and I to love and believe in. You’re my whole heart, Katsuki. Never forget that. Also,” his bastard father said, “I saw your fight with Honesty Policy on Facebook so you’re on speakerphone and this is being recorded. Mitsuki, quick, before he hangs up—”
“KATSUKI, TELL MOMMY YOU LOVE HER—”
“You guys are fucking assholes,” Katsuki growled, but thanks to the stupid quirk, his heart wasn’t in it. His finger hovered over the red hangup button without touching down.
It was the safest way to test how deep and wide the effects ran anyway: on the phone with his parents, who never seemed surprised by him. He spent the rest of his night explaining to his parents in guarded but excruciatingly honest detail that, yes, he was fine; yeah, the truth quirk would wear off within the week; yes, he loved them very much; no, he wasn’t dating and he wasn’t gonna make time for that bullshit anyway.
“Fine, but do you like anybody?” his mom asked, with villainy in her voice comparable to any diabolical criminal Katsuki had ever thrown out a plateglass window under the terms of his provisional heroism license.
Luckily, this particular question Katsuki had prepared for the minute Honesty Policy’s quirk was explained to him. Her victims can’t stop telling the truth, said the EMT on-site, their tone neutral as they shone a penlight in Katsuki’s eyes. Great for asking for people’s bank account passwords. You’re in for a tough week before the chemical agent flushes out of your system—but I guess there are a lot of ways to say the same thing, right?
It was that last part that had stuck with him on his way home from the incident site. Communication skills had never ranked highly on Katsuki’s otherwise neverending list of strengths, and while he didn’t think of himself as a secretive person, he was private. If it wasn’t the business of his friends at school, it sure as hell wasn’t his parents’ business; he knew they knew that too. They were needling because they knew better than anyone that Katsuki was always standing outside the door to what he kept in his own head—a diligent bouncer ensuring no one could get in, not even himself.
This question, though, was the final test. The worst and most telling one.
Katsuki swallowed air soundlessly and said, with exquisite and delicate care, “I don’t like anybody.”
He pumped his fist mentally.
It fucking worked. A lot of ways to say the same thing. In other words, technical truth was still truth. Katsuki made a mental note to thank that EMT, if he ever remembered their name. He’d always been a straight shooter; sure, he was talking more, but he didn’t have to tell anybody anything they didn’t already know. The week would pass without incident because Bakugou Katsuki was a genius.
---
The week would not, apparently, pass without incident.
The second he slouched into his seat the next morning, the voice he least wanted to hear for the next five to seven days piped up immediately behind him, a whisper-shout only the two of them could hear: “Kacchan! I saw that video online with Honesty Policy—are you okay?”
There was a time that Deku’s voice would be shaky with nerves when he tried to get Katsuki’s attention. That time was over a year ago. Katsuki was grateful, in some difficult way, to have Deku back as a friend; proud and humbled, in increasingly more difficult ways, to have had him as a battle partner on a dozen dangerous occasions; annoyed, in the most difficult ways, about everything else that had to do with him.
The entire class had renewed their provisional licenses in their second year, but only a handful of them did regular patrols since, well, it was their second year and everything was getting harder. Katsuki’s first kneejerk instinct had been to scorn the evidently lesser ambitions of classmates who couldn’t juggle three hours of coursework a night and fifteen to twenty hours of heroism a week, but he softened quickly when he realized Kaminari and Ashido really were eating shit in trig. He softened even further, furiously and in spite of himself, when Deku started showing up to class as bruised under his eyes as he was everywhere else.
So Katsuki made a fucking production out of cutting his hours at Endeavor’s office, because Deku was only ever willing to settle for as good as Kacchan and Kirishima needed tutoring anyway too. The correlative effect was undeniable: Deku cut his hours the very next week, and Katsuki could go back to having trouble meeting his eyes instead of fixating on the dark shadows beneath them.
Easier, anyway, to look down at his desk. Iida had been right about the scorch marks. The smell really wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m fine, Deku. Didn’t you see me beat her ass?”
“I did ... but I was still really worried about you! I thought about calling but then I heard you come back in last night so I figured it could wait till morning ...”
Fuck, he was so glad Deku didn’t call before he had tested the limits of the quirk. “I didn’t even have to check in at the nurse’s office. Seriously, it was no big deal. Mind your own business.”
“What happens to you is my business.” That take-no-shit tone didn’t match the expression Katsuki had been picturing, but he couldn’t turn around to look. “Kacchan ... you know I was already thinking of changing my patrol schedule—”
The plastic pen snapped in Katsuki’s hand. It would’ve startled him if he wasn’t preoccupied with how the quirk felt when it breached his control: lightning zinged down the back of his neck, inside his throat, sparking out of his stupid mouth. “For the last time, I’m not gonna fucking patrol with you.”
“You haven’t given me a good reason why not,” Deku murmured insistently. The kind of voice you could nest in. “We already work at the same agency, and ... we’re better together. I—keep thinking that, when you go out on your own.”
Sirens started to blare in the back of Katsuki’s mind, red and rotating. His outstretched hand caught in Katsuki’s sleeve, slipped in the bend of his elbow with some unbelievable level of entitlement—
Suddenly, Deku slapped one hand over his mouth and flailed with the other. “Oh, crap, I forgot! The quirk, you seemed really intensely exposed in the video, I bet you don’t want to talk at all right now, I’m so sorry—”
“Yo, Bakugou!” Kaminari sang as he sailed past the doorway. “Heard you got nothing but truth bombs for us today! When’s my birthday?”
“June twenty-ninth,” Katsuki said unthinkingly—and then, more thinkingly, “you damn moron, I’m gonna kill you—”
“All right, settle down, everyone,” the yellow vinyl cocoon lurching up from behind the teacher’s desk said, voice rumbling over the accruing morning chaos. “Sounds like you’re all aware of Bakugou’s condition, owing to his defeat of the criminal Honesty Policy. You’re also all provisionally licensed heroes, so I shouldn’t have to remind you to make ethical considerations when spending time with him before the quirk wears off. We’re moving on now. Pass up the homework.”
---
Aizawa was his number-one hero that day, actually; he was piteously grateful to have been saved from Kaminari’s pestering. And from Deku’s pestering, too close and too intimate. And casual. Like it was something Deku thought about after brushing his teeth and coming to class in the morning, when for Katsuki it was the kind of shit that kept him awake at night, kept him working until his muscles burned and his sweat-matted hair smelled burnt-sweet.
Sure, at face value we’re better together sounded like empirical fact. If patrol was just emergency after emergency, staying awake and alert, then yeah, of fucking course they were better together. More than any other set of two in 2-A, at this point, a matched pair that shouted themselves hoarse on opposing sides of a table but remained unstoppable in crisis and combat.
But patrol was also going to be the rest of their lives. This job was going to be the rest of their lives, and together, to Deku, meant keeping Katsuki’s eyes on his back when he forced himself in the path of danger. In what fucking universe was that better than being alone?
---
Tuesday hit, day two of the chemical quirk lingering in his liver and kidneys. In the USJ surveillance booth, Katsuki hadn’t taken his hand off the intercom talk button once. “Move your feet, dipshits!”
Shoji, stock-still with his many limbs and appendages raised, looked down where the faux cliffside terrain was beginning to slough away, drenched through from the simulated storm. Mud was already giving under his heel—and then it all slopped straight down the incline. Thankfully, Katsuki’s warning let Shoji vault back on his other foot at the last second, landing long yards away on steadier ground, one of his ears twitching in the direction of Mineta’s shrieks as he plummeted down the cliff.
“What’s the point of having so many goddamn ears if you aren’t listening for mudflows?” Katsuki demanded.
To no one in particular, since the cameras were everywhere and distant: “I didn’t have a sense of the instability of the terrain,” Shoji said. “And there’s water in my left ears.”
“Yeah, that happened last time too, dumbass. If you don’t log more hours in the dangerous terrain sims I’m gonna kill you for wasting my time.”
On the feed, Shoji’s largely covered expression shifted first in surprise, then grim understanding. He hopped down the mountain afterwards to fetch Mineta. In the booth, Katsuki reached over to swap the screens and watch.
“Young Bakugou,” All Might chimed in from off to the side. “Do make sure your criticism is constructive.”
All Might had eventually worried himself into the background after Katsuki, outraged by the first dismal rescue simulation wherein Ojiro had been extremely fucking lucky the USJ volcano wasn’t real, co-opted the intercom to scream at his classmates. Aizawa had watched the proceedings with mild interest at first, and then he said, entirely too satisfied, Bakugou’s simulation scores and fieldwork hours are the highest in the class. His analysis will be useful for you. Call it peer review.
Then he sat in the back with All Might and nodded off dangerously close to his shoulder, leaving the other students to watch with varying degrees of fascination as Katsuki, well. Conducted peer review.
In a sense, he’d been prepared for this his entire tenure at UA. At first he’d internalized his observations about his classmates because everyone was a rival lying in wait, and Katsuki played things close to the chest, scrupulously accounting for who was and wasn’t likely to try and shove him off his rightful place at the top.
And then, well. Danger upon danger upon danger. It was important to know each other’s weaknesses in order to cover them, to make sure everyone made it back.
So Asui received a lecture on convection when it was her turn to hit the volcano rescue. Ashido: surface manipulation with her acid, how she could form handholds in most surfaces deep enough for victims to capably climb. And on and on and on, brusque and too blunt but thorough. Under the influence of the quirk, he couldn’t seem to stop talking when he started, all the thoughts he kept pent up spilling their way out. At least this way the words weren’t wasted. Yaoyorozu was even taking notes.
Deku was last today and on his own, but when he descended from the lift and All Might asked if he was ready, Katsuki felt his breath catch in his throat. He shifted where he stood and looked away from the monitors.
“I’m done.”
Yaoyorozu’s pen stopped moving. “Done?” she repeated, puzzled.
“I don’t wanna do this anymore. I’m out.”
“You’re really gonna do everyone but Midoriya?” Kaminari said. “Come on, dude.”
“Fuck off. I hate watching him.”
Katsuki was looking at Kaminari, not the screens, but he hadn’t bothered to take his hand off the button. The words, in all their clipped and horrible sincerity, echoed throughout the facility. Uraraka bristled like a cat rubbed the wrong way; Iida parted the air before him with a jerky chop, the singularity of which confirmed for Katsuki that he had touched a nerve there too. Fucking ... whatever. Katsuki couldn’t control what he said, and he sure as fuck couldn’t control what they heard. He looked sideways again, past the screens, out the window. Green on the nearest lawn.
Aizawa, in his typical mercilessness, was about to press him to do the critique anyway. He could feel their teacher gearing up for it: the slow climb uphill on the coaster, the fight that was sure to follow. But it was All Might’s voice that cut through a tension that Katsuki was doing his best to ignore in the surveillance room, on the grounds where the video feed showed Deku standing just far enough away to be utterly inscrutable. In his own body, where his jaw hurt from clenching.
“Allow me,” All Might said.
His voice was calm as he rose from his seat. Katsuki knew who that was for, and it wasn’t Deku.
---
The next day, All Might asked Katsuki to join him for lunch. They sat in the small breakroom the way they usually did, Katsuki slouched on the couch and unpacking his lunch on the middle table and All Might nursing his simple rice and miso.
In the beginning, he complimented Katsuki’s analytical skills, asked after his other classes. Honestly, though, they’d spent a year and change getting to know each other and Katsuki was always gonna be shit at pleasantries, so Katsuki was frankly appreciative when, less than ten minutes into their lunch, All Might came right out and asked:
“How much longer until the quirk wears off?”
“Couple days.”
All Might made a low, neutral sound in his throat, noncommittal, assenting. “Young Midoriya says things between the two of you have been strained lately ... Some of the other students have come to Aizawa-sensei and me with concerns independently as well.”
Katsuki shrugged, lackadaisical. The way he stabbed his lunch with his chopsticks was decidedly less lackadaisical. “Everyone knows I’ve got this fucking quirk in my head and they keep pushing my buttons.”
The flippancy was forced all the same. He could hear it; he hated it. He took a vengeful bite of his salmon, chewed, swallowed, let the little zip-zap of the quirk’s candidness work its way out.
“Things between Deku and me have always been screwed up.” I’ve always been screwed up about him. “It’s gonna be worse when I can’t be on my best behavior or whatever.”
“There are many ways to be honest and insincere at the same time,” All Might said.
“Yeah, you’re the fucking expert,” Katsuki snapped, venom bubbling out of him like an oil spill. He slapped his hand over his mouth afterward, the first time he’d felt inclined to do so under the influence of the stupid quirk. What the fuck, he thought, his pulse skittering. He—really hadn’t meant to do that. Had never really been able to bring himself to snap directly at All Might, the beloved idol of his youth, the insurmountable wall he’d dedicated his life to climbing—
But that didn’t change the fact that it was his fault, a little bit, that Deku was the way he was. It wasn’t right to think that way but it also stood in Katsuki’s mind as irrefutable fact. And the cat was out of the bag. There was more than one cat in the bag, and Katsuki was shaking them all out; he was talking, through his hand, cats spilling out from between his fingers:
“Sorry, seriously, I’m fucking sorry, but I guess this is happening and it’s happening because I do,” this said through gritted teeth, “trust you,” this with jagged edges, true and real enough to cut himself on, “so I think you know what I fucking mean when I say—sometimes I wish you hadn’t found him.”
All Might inclined his head. “I can’t say I feel the same.”
“Fuck you—sorry.”
All Might lifted a hand. Pish posh. Not like Katsuki had blasphemed against a living god or anything.
“He thinks, but he doesn’t think and then he gets hurt. I hate watching it. I keep thinking he could do better. I keep thinking I should be down there too—fuck.” Katsuki let his chopsticks drop onto his tray. He hadn’t realized he was even still holding them. Both hands, now, itched with the need to blow something up, to punch something to a pulp. “Fuck.”
“But he mentioned that you were the one who refused his offer for a joint patrol.”
“I just said I can’t watch—”
“You wouldn’t simply be watching. You’d be looking after one another.”
He had to shut his eyes whenever he thought of Shigaraki Tomura, otherwise he’d scratch the back of his neck or one of his half-dozen scars; even worse, he would remember the color of Deku’s blood in the dark. “If I fuck it up I might as well be watching,” he said. “It’s happened before.”
“I never thought of you as unsure of your competence.”
“I’m not,” Katsuki muttered, fanning his fingertips over his temple, over an impatience headache that was gaining momentum behind his eyelids. As if with the cage in his throat gone, all that iron came swinging into his head instead. “He just ... he fucks me up. He always has.”
At length, All Might smiled. This one was wide, sunlit, a replacement splash of color on an old and deserving fresco. Wan and forgiving. “Is there someone else you would recommend?”
Katsuki’s eyes slitted open in a glower, but All Might was All Might and had over a long and painful career earned every drop of being a smug piece of shit. That didn’t mean Katsuki had to like it. How they both already knew the answer.
---
On his way back from lunch, Katsuki stormed up the short external stairway to the dorms, blithely ignoring Todoroki en route, who was perched on the outside stair texting in benign solitude. After he slammed the door behind him, he was seized with an unbelievable, unimaginable, and also completely insane impulse; that lightning was in his throat again, lighting up the parts of him that were petty and insecure and echoing with All Might’s question from earlier. He threw the door back open to bark it all out.
“Hey, IcyHot! You like Deku?”
Todoroki didn’t even look up. “Midoriya is one of my best friends.”
“You know what I mean, asshole!”
That made Todoroki look up. His expression was a perfect mix of polite confusion and affable disinterest. Katsuki was reminded, apropos of nothing, of the paint swatches his mom often sorted through for work. Different shades of inoffensive.
“I like Yoarashi,” Todoroki said. “From Shiketsu.”
“You fucking what?”
“I’m not going to repeat myself.”
Which ... reasonable enough. Katsuki stared.
“I do think Midoriya has a nice butt,” Todoroki said at last.
“I was the first one who noticed Deku’s ass,” Katsuki said. “I invented Deku’s ass. Also, if you ever say shit like that again I’m gonna kill you.”
“You asked.” Todoroki returned to his phone. “Good luck.”
Katsuki thought paint swatches again, with grudging respect this time, and went back inside.
---
There was a rotating dinner schedule, limited to those of their classmates who weren’t completely worthless in the kitchen. Katsuki nights were always popular; he kind of regretted that tonight wasn’t one of them since it’d help take his mind off how weird his week was turning out. But when he drifted past the kitchen, his spirits lifted when he saw who was chopping ingredients. “Oh, fuck yeah,” he said, completely unintentionally.
Aoyama turned on one heel, an eyebrow arched in askance, a chef’s hat lilting artistically atop his head. “Bonjour—?”
“What’s cooking?”
“Tonight?” Aoyama darted to one side with a grace that somehow eluded him on the battlefield, gesturing gallantly at his mise en place. “Beef bourguignon!”
“Fuck yeah. Your cooking rules.”
Fuck. He didn’t mean to say that, obviously, the words spilling out without his say-so like so many others had over the course of the week. Worse yet, it seemed to genuinely startle Aoyama, whose long eyelashes fluttered rapidly in a way that somehow communicated confusion. After a moment, he relaxed and said, “High praise from an accomplished chef! Merci. It won’t be ready for some time, but I look forward to hearing what you think.”
Katsuki knew when he was being let off the hook. He nodded gruffly, understanding, and turned back around to head to his room. He could study till the stew was done.
“Ah, Bakugou—?”
There was clear uncertainty in Aoyama’s expression when Katsuki turned back to face him, but no fear, which Katsuki could appreciate distantly.
“I dearly wish to respect your privacy, as I’m sure this week has been very difficult for you. Yet seeing as how our peers have benefited from your insight I, too, couldn’t help but wonder ...”
Katsuki felt his jaw clench, but—dammit. Aoyama had missed the USJ session for a makeup test in another class. Now the guy was making dinner and being really fucking nice to boot. Katsuki rooted around in his brain for what he’d thought during their last training exercise; he remembered, somewhat disconcertingly, the recoil from Aoyama’s ever-strengthening beams. “If your laser keeps increasing in concussive force, you have to work out your abdominals and your lower back so you don’t snap your damn spine in half. Bodyweight shit isn’t gonna cut it.”
Aoyama looked taken aback in a way that Katsuki found grimly satisfying. Then, with equal suddenness, he struck a pose, elegant fingers fanned out just below his eyes.
“Excellent advice. Merci beaucoup!” Aoyama said. “I will take it to heart. Perhaps we should visit the gym together sometime!”
Katsuki shrugged. The whole class knew his workout schedule by now, and Kirishima would never turn anyone away from their burnout extravaganzas in the weight rooms. Besides, Aoyama was weird but—far from the most useless idiot in their class. By now all of them could fight; not all of them could cook.
“So,” he heard himself say, stepping closer again, “beef bourguignon.” He slumped his body sideways, at a lean against the kitchen counter. “Talk me through it.”
Aoyama’s expression stayed the same, but his unblinking eyes brightened even further. His next pose was a flourish of his untied apron over one shoulder, which was all at once stupid, pointless, and completely unsurprising. “My friend, it would be my honor to bestow upon you some culinary secrets of my homeland!”
Like Katsuki had never fucking heard of France before. He took notes anyway and ladled the stew into bowls when they were done.
---
There was an unscheduled but consistent block of time toward the end of the week where Katsuki and his pack of idiots all finished their respective evening workouts or fevered homework sessions and collapsed in the boys’ floor lounge.
This time it was a Thursday, the fourth day of Katsuki’s bizarre week. Katsuki sat hunched over in an armchair with Sero sacked out on the floor by his knee. Sero’s brow was furrowed down at a shogi game on his phone, his concentration studiously subordinate to Katsuki’s backseat driving—which Katsuki would’ve been doing anyway, because he wasn’t half-bad at shogi and Sero had only recently learned the rules.
A few failed games later, Sero finally won against an online stranger. He whooped aloud, letting his phone drop so he could bump elbows with Katsuki behind him. “That was really good, dude! You’d be a great coach.”
From the floor, Ashido’s voice worked its way around a mouthful of bobby pins, which she was applying fastidiously to Kaminari’s hair: “Are there shogi coaches?”
“He’d be a good anything coach. I wouldn’t have said so last year, but man, you killed the peer review stuff at USJ this week too. Really getting that tough love thing down.”
Katsuki’s ears heated. “Thanks,” he grunted nonconsensually.
“Yeah, that surface-shaping trick is way cool!” Ashido said. “I wanna work on it more.”
“Man, I gotta log more sim hours.” Kaminari, ever obliging where girls were involved, was making it a point not to move his neck or head when he spoke. Not that it would’ve mattered. Ashido’s bobby pins kept disappearing in his hair, but the overall shape hadn’t changed at all. “You guys free to knock some out this weekend?”
“Not that I don’t also need to, but man,” Sero said. “On a weekend?”
Of course they were all behind on their hours. Reflex told Katsuki to roll his eyes, communicate without words that it’d serve them right if they got chewed out—hell, he might still do it later. But he also always had this pang of worry whenever his friends alluded to being stressed or behind. The long string of villain attacks that had comprised their first year of school really had fucked with him. Had him on some private bullshit about how heroes needed each other if they wanted to be any good. If they wanted to be less alone.
So Katsuki said, “Fuck yeah. Let’s do it.”
“Bakugou, you’ve gotten enough sim time to repeat a whole year at UA without ever setting foot in USJ again.”
“You guys are my best friends,” Katsuki blurted out, because his mouth was apparently that fucking dumb under the influence of the quirk. For a mortified second, his thoughts raced in search of deflections—but that earnestness kept unfolding in rolling storm clouds in the back of his head, overpowering; recklessly, wildly, it felt dumb, the need to deny that he cared. “If you’re stressed, why the fuck wouldn’t I do something about it?”
“Kacchan,” Kaminari breathed, starstruck, worryingly overcome.
“Cram it,” Katsuki said. His chest was light: it was startlingly easy to be good-humored about this. It never occurred to him before. “You know I’d kill for you idiots. You’d just be on the hook for hiding the body.”
He tensed when Ashido let out a laugh, but it wasn’t directed at him; her focus on Kaminari’s hair hadn’t wavered, so it was just ordinary delight. “Is that all you want? That’s easy! You burn it to a crisp, I melt the ashes.”
“Ashes don’t melt,” Sero pointed out. “That’s why after you cremate somebody you, you know. Get the ashes.”
“Then we’ll skip straight to the melting!”
“This is gangster talk,” Kaminari said gravely, “and if it involves matching leather jackets, I’m in. How do I help?”
“You can scramble the GPS signals on our phones when we do the deed—”
“Aw, man. That sounds like way more work than killing a guy.”
“You guys seriously sound like morons right now,” Katsuki said. He couldn’t manage any heat, though. Just fond relief, purestrain, a little nauseating. No one had laughed. He put his hands on his knees as the group devolved into further murder talk, hefting himself to his feet. “I’m getting some juice.”
“Kacchan, get me one too,” Kaminari said.
“If you ever said that and meant it I would murder you. What flavor?”
Kaminari blanched at the non sequitur but not its contents, glancing at him from his upside-down position on the sofa and then grinning. There was a glimmer in Kaminari’s eyes that threatened to make Katsuki’s hair stand on end—but no, Katsuki was imagining things; Kaminari didn’t—he didn’t know, not like that, not in the way he would’ve needed to. Even if he said shit like, “Orange. Love ya, babe!”
Katsuki flipped him off on his way to the kitchen. He swung open the fridge and fetched two cans of orange juice. There was the sound of someone making their way into the common room at a distance behind him; he turned to see Kirishima coming in from an impromptu afternoon workout, his gym duffel slung over one shoulder, fresh, unserious bruises blooming over one knee.
“You’re late,” Katsuki deadpanned, handing over one of the cans as Kirishima approached. He’d clearly been working hard, and Kaminari could get his own damn juice. “If those idiots know what’s good for them, they’re already done being a pain in my ass.”
Kirishima laughed. “Oh, no, dude. They’re not messing with you, are they?”
“As if they could. If they don’t know what I think by now, they’re dumber than I thought.”
“Well, yeah, we wouldn’t be friends if we didn’t kinda get your deal,” Kirishima said, setting down his duffel. “If any of those guys thought you secretly hated their guts, that was a long time ago. But it’s one thing to know and it’s another thing to be told, right?”
Katsuki stared dully.
“Yaomomo and I talked about it one time. How people are wired different, so, you know. Some people like when you do nice things for them and some people like when you say nice things to them.” Kirishima had this habit of worrying slits into the top of cans with his front teeth when he was thinking with a drink in-hand. He was doing it now, the aluminum clinking and giving readily with every bite. “Obviously we’re your friends ‘cause we’re good with whatever you do however you wanna do it. But depending on who you’re talking to, hearing it probably feels pretty good sometimes too.”
Clinically, scientifically, Katsuki understood. And some deeper part of him knew why words didn’t hold much currency with him: he came up in a household where his parents told him they loved him early and often; in school he was the recipient of constant praise. They hadn’t been wrong to do it, but there was a kind of resilience you built up to that shit over time, especially when the only person whose opinion you gave a shit about was yourself.
Katsuki had an irrevocable association of love with labor instead: it was his dad’s recipes he made for the whole dorm, something of his mom in nagging his flighty friends about their kits when they went out on patrols. Something all his entirely in his training with Deku, in that need to sharpen him like a sword, because Katsuki couldn’t protect him, not all the time, in fact hardly ever—
“What’d you tell ‘em?” Kirishima said.
Katsuki shook himself back to the present. “I told them you guys were my best friends,” he deadpanned. “Then they started talking about how we’d get rid of a body if one of us committed murder.”
“Oh, man. We’d make horrible bad guys.”
“You sure about that?” Katsuki said. The question was gruffer than he intended, but when he was fifteen some pretty good villains had thought Katsuki was villain material. The memory tasted sour.
“Dude, you get pissed when people don’t separate out the burnables in their trash. Now I don’t know many villains personally, but ...”
“Shut up,” Katsuki said.
But he didn’t know any villains personally either. Part of that he owed to Kirishima. He owed a lot of things to Kirishima.
He reached out and dropped a hand onto Kirishima’s shoulder. The least unwilling gesture he’d made all week. It lingered there because the words wouldn’t come.
“Hey,” Katsuki said. He stopped. Tried again, but all he came up with was: “Thanks.”
Kirishima’s rough callused palm lifted to drape over the back of Katsuki’s hand. And rather than saying some pithy shit like I love you too or what are friends for, Kirishima took the same care he always did with Katsuki, dissembling too easily those words to their constituent parts: the agony of the truth quirk, Katsuki’s pride and fear and gratitude. How sometimes he wondered if Kirishima was mistaken about him—Kirishima, who worshipped at the altar of tenacity, who would see Katsuki someday for what he really was, an inferiority complex scraped raw and rash-angry. A bully, and a fucking mess. And not good enough. Never good enough.
“I got you, man,” Kirishima said.
Because he did. Implicitly, and also whenever Katsuki ended up in the grasp of some hell he couldn’t leave alone. A truth that didn’t need to be dragged out from either of them kicking and screaming. Katsuki did smile, then. How could he not.
---
“We’re in pairs again for this sparring session,” Aizawa said.
He began to rattle off names from his list, which was evidently tactically constructed, which meant that Katsuki wasn’t surprised when he was paired with Deku. But he was still pissed. For a guy who made a focused study out of minding his own business, Aizawa sure liked to stir up shit.
After Aizawa called their names, Deku shot Katsuki a troubled sideways look. When Katsuki refused to meet his eyes, his body language turned shuttered. Resigned, he cracked his knuckles and moved to the fighting ground.
“No,” Katsuki said.
The class, which was murmuring to itself periodically and lightheartedly the way twenty kids who knew each other too well might, went silent.
Aizawa’s eyes, when they lifted to Katsuki, were impassive. “No?” he echoed.
“Pair him with someone else.”
The silence continued. Contesting Aizawa’s lesson plan was a losing bet with promises of severe punishment, but Katsuki stared back at him levelly, willed him to understand—
“Fine,” Aizawa said. “Satou and Midoriya to Field C. That’s the last assignment. You know the parameters. Bakugou, come see me.”
An uneasy ripple surged through the kids standing in clusters. Katsuki could feel eyes on the back of his head, on the tense line of his shoulders, but even with a truth quirk lodged in his throat, he couldn’t explain. He followed Aizawa off to one of the side benches and sat down.
Aizawa said, “Will this behavior wear off with the quirk?”
The most sensible of questions. It wasn’t technically Aizawa’s problem if two of his many students hated each other, but class harmony was more than a technical problem: they’d all been through too much together for him not to pay attention to ripples in the water.
Katsuki kicked one foot out in front of the other. “Probably.” The words that came out next shouldn’t have come out at all, but it was happening, like excess voltage in his throat. “I can’t hurt him. Like this. At all.”
Aizawa didn’t say anything, but Katsuki thought he was surprised.
“It’s—fuck. I don’t know. A lot of stuff comes up when I look at him right now. Like if I hit him I won’t stop hitting him.”
“Bakugou,” Aizawa said. In his voice there was a warning, very responsible adult alarm, but the floodgates were open, and Katsuki leaned his head back and kept talking.
“I’m still so fucking mad about last year. The shit he does to himself. It’s all shit he does to me too. We never talked about it, so I don’t fucking know if he knows ...” His hand drifted absently down to one of his many starburst scars, the one that hurt the most when he strained his hip too far. “If we fight right now I’ll probably just. Scream at him or something. I don’t know what’ll happen, all right? I can’t be around him if I don’t know what’ll happen.”
They were quiet together after that. The students, paired, were grappling in the different practice arenas. Katsuki had to fight the urge to step up to one of the arenas and critique.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No need to apologize,” Aizawa said, though there was a touch of professorial approval in it, some my, how you’ve grown bullshit. “Just deal with it privately instead of in front of the class next time.”
That was the problem, though: Katsuki had been dealing with it privately. Ever since that day in the river, so many years ago. He didn’t have a name for that fear until recently. Last year, on the cusp of this great and terrible realization, he’d called it weakness—but even that had been childish sublimation. People weren’t afraid of putting their hands on hot stoves. They just didn’t do it if they valued their hands.
Memories of their first year turned over restlessly from where he usually kept them vaulted and silent, a film reel clicking through memories that utterly liquidated his knees. Don’t come, Deku, when Deku couldn’t hear him over the sound of his own screaming. Deku, airborne and feral and frothing. In those moments, he was more foregone conclusion than person. Collapsed into something stark, sober, final.
Falling in love with a headstone would be more responsible. At least you’d be cutting out the middleman.
“There’s nothing to talk about if there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” Katsuki scrubbed a tired hand over his face. “If you feel about someone that hard, then you’re gonna take it just as hard when you lose ‘em.”
It was an oversimplification, but Aizawa allowed it in measured silence. Katsuki looked back across the concrete arena where Satou was driving Deku into the ground again. Observed, with detached frustration, the itch in his hands, the ever-present desire to intervene.
“I don’t know if it makes sense to look at people and only see what you might lose instead of what you might also gain,” Aizawa said.
It felt like the kind of thing someone would say if they’d thought about it before, but Katsuki didn’t have it in him to give Aizawa the satisfaction of his curiosity. The fact that he didn’t push even accidentally, along with the fact that he hadn’t bolted to one of the fighting rings to dole out unsolicited advice, was further testament to the quirk’s influence steadily ebbing in his neurons.
He was relieved, but, he realized, not as relieved as he thought he’d be. This week had taken a lot out of him, too many sordid truths excavated from too deep in his chest over too short a period of time.
And yet, deep in him, there was that feeling he’d get when an overworked muscle throbbed during recovery. His classmates’ steady absorption of his analysis, which implied a level of trust he never thought he earned or needed to earn. The room where he had told his friends he loved them, the thank you he’d never given Kirishima because he never had to. Talking about cooking with Aoyama in a way he hadn’t with anyone else. Hell, even mouthing off to All Might had felt good, in its own painful way. It was open, which was scary. But it was honest, which was right.
He could’ve lived and died without any of those things happening, and he probably would’ve been fine. He didn’t hate how he felt now, though, toward the end of it. In a way he felt weak. But in a way he felt better too.
His confusion was tiring him out; he felt messy. A boy sitting on a bench next to his teacher, waiting for the world to make sense.
He was distracted, gazing down at his hands, so he nearly jumped a foot off said bench when Aizawa’s hand landed without warning on his head. Aizawa didn’t flinch, though; in fact, when Katsuki turned his head to glare at him, his expression hadn’t moved. Not that it had to. Aizawa didn’t emote often, but he’d always been warm.
Katsuki made a halfhearted enraged sound when Aizawa ruffled his hair anyway, as a nod to his dignity. The contact was quick, not thorough, and then it was over, Aizawa withdrawing his hand as respectfully as he could.
“You’re overthinking it,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be hard. Saying what you mean.”
Instinctively, Katsuki wanted to rail, bitch, complain. But he was right. The week hadn’t been that hard at all.
He looked at Deku again. Deku, sweat-drenched, hurled Satou out of the ring and then met Katsuki’s eyes as if he’d been summoned. There was a flicker of hurt there: Katsuki flipped him off just to turn that hurt into hope. He knew it worked because Deku started smiling, day breaking over his face, and Katsuki didn’t know if it was the quirk or what, but the sight made him want to run and run.
---
The morning the quirk faded, Katsuki hit the snooze button on his alarm and rested his hand over his throat like he could call it back. But the lightning was gone, the static shocks of truth. It was over. He made it.
At least it didn’t feel like some kind of hangover. The threat of shame and embarrassment he might have felt if something like this happened last year didn’t seem that serious now. No secrets spilled, no embarrassing impulses followed. He’d just been honest. And he hadn’t lost anything, repulsed anyone. Everyone had heard every expansion of Katsuki’s truth as it concerned them, and hardly anyone had blinked.
He didn’t know how he felt about that yet. The suspicion of aching, adoring gratitude whispered in the back of his mind, but for now he was grimly content to leave it alone. He wouldn’t know how to express it anyway, not yet. Besides, his friends already knew.
All of them except one. The one person he hadn’t spoken to all week after that first morning he returned to class, because he knew if he started talking he’d never stop. Everyone had gotten the best of him except the only one who was fully entitled to it. The man he’d been this past week would—he would at least apologize. Say something, anything.
Katsuki reached for his phone.
you back from your run?
A few minutes passed, and then:
yes!
already showered too
it’s so nice out Kacchan ヽ( ･∀･)ﾉ
He barely caught the preview of the last text before he was rolling out of bed, shutting his bedroom door behind him and stalking down the hall. It was terribly early, and it was a weekend too, which meant everyone who wasn’t on an obscene early-morning training schedule or didn’t have shit to do was sleeping in. The quiet ambient noise of a gaggle of overworked high schoolers sleeping away the Saturday was a small comfort to Katsuki. He squared up in front of Deku’s door and took a long, slow breath before knocking, twice and hard, the way he always did.
When Deku opened the door, he was, indeed, freshly showered. He smelled like apple shampoo; he had big dumb happy jewels for eyes and a shirt with a fucking cartoon milk carton on it, and oh god, Katsuki knew why he was here now, he was going to say the thing that there were a million ways to say. That was why he couldn’t talk to Deku this week, why he couldn’t look him in the face. Everything he ever said and did to him these days only ever meant one thing, run back and forth through a hundred different translators, but under a forced honesty spell, it was all going to be pared down to a single simple truth. The only truth that mattered to the only person that mattered. It wasn’t now or never as much as it was Katsuki’s entire life, back to front, and Deku—Deku deserved something. Deserved to know.
“Deku,” he said roughly. Don’t overthink it, don’t— “There’s something I want to say to you.”
Deku shot a hand up in a silencing gesture, which made Katsuki rail reflexively. “Listen—”
His teeth rattled when Deku’s other hand slapped hard over his mouth.
“What the fuck,” he tried to shout, muffled—
“Sorry! Sorry. I just—I know how your week has been going, so if this is really important I don’t want you to do it while you’re—” Deku gestured inexplicably at his throat, even though for all his research there was no reason he should’ve known about the tingles, the lightning, the storm that brewed endless static in Katsuki’s chest for years and years and slowly became a monsoon. His eyes were determined, his shoulders straight, but even like this he was so very soft. “I want Kacchan to say it the way Kacchan would say it on his terms.”
“These are my terms,” Katsuki said, after Deku dropped his hands warily. “The quirk wore off. It’s just me, stupid Deku.”
There was no real fire in his tone, only smoke and reluctant warmth. Deku’s eyebrows went up, assessing and then absorbing, but otherwise he didn’t even flinch at the insult. Like he could live and hunt by smoke and warmth.
He probably could, if it was all Katsuki had to give. He’d taken everything Katsuki had ever given him. Piss and vinegar. Turned it, always, to gold.
There was so much to say. A lifetime of shit to say. He thought: That day in the river, I didn’t have the words or the developed brain cells, but that’s when I knew I could love you and that loving you could ruin me. He thought: When I told you to kill yourself, I was a selfish, cruel little turd, I was hitting my limit, I wanted proof you couldn’t be real so of course that day you saved my damn life. He thought: I’ve jerked off thinking about our fight in Ground Beta.
Too many words. They stuck in his throat familiarly, and for a bewildered second Katsuki was certain that the increasingly fearless Bakugou Katsuki of the past week had been a mirage after all. A dream of a shitty kid hit by a shitty quirk.
A laugh peeled from him like a hangnail and surprised him. “This is fucking terrifying.”
Something in his voice or face made something in Deku’s shoulders relent. The other boy stepped closer.
“I’ve been building up to this all fucking week, and now ... fuck. I don’t know.”
Deku started to smile. Crooked and shaky and freckled. He reached up; his hand rested on Katsuki’s forearm. Katsuki shifted in that grip so he could twist their fingers together like when they were kids. Say it, he thought. Say I love you.
When the quirk was in him, he had only just started to forget why he’d been so scared. Now he was looking at the arcane spires of Deku’s scars, the constellations of his freckles, and he knew someday there would be a last time he ever got to see them and he didn’t know who he’d be after that. At least before he didn’t let himself think about it openly; now something in him was loose. He had to fight himself tooth and nail from tethering it again. This was important. The most important thing.
“I want to give you everything.”
He barely recognized the sound of his own voice, haggard as it was, like the words were the same as flinging the wet gauntlet of his heart down between them. The words themselves were pathetic, not even half of what he thought he’d manage when he got out of bed this morning, but in spite of this, Deku was coming closer and closer. He disentangled his fingers from Katsuki’s so he could put both scarred hands on Katsuki’s face.
Katsuki closed his eyes at the touch of thumbs on his cheekbones. When he opened them, Deku was grinning incandescently at him. Like a fucking hero, like the most fearless boy Katsuki had ever known.
“I know,” Deku said.
Katsuki had never allowed himself to be outdone. By Deku or anyone else. Just last week, that truth had been both refuge and shelter, but it had been fragile too, built on rotten foundations.
This was different. It had to be. If his life was going to be meeting Deku at finish line after finish line, then it meant being brave in love too. Even now, Katsuki wasn’t sure he wanted that. But fuck. How he wanted him.
“I want to give you everything too,” Deku said.
He made it sound like a foregone conclusion. Katsuki put their foreheads together, breathing in as he breathed out. He kissed him. It was the honest thing to do.