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Chapter Text

Katsuki wakes up aching, bathed in a cold sweat, and strung up by his wrists like meat in some kind of fucked-up meat freezer. He blinks down at the damp, concrete ground once, then twice, and he grunts, shifting on his shoulders. His bare toes (did they take his fucking socks ?) brush against the ground, but no matter how much he strains, he can’t take any of his weight off his shoulders. 

His heartbeat pounds in his temples and behind his eyes. He grits his teeth and forces his head up off of his chest with more than a little effort (if he’s concussed, whoever did it is going to catch hell, he swears to God, because no way in hell is he missing out on training just because a few shitty villains got the drop on him), and Katsuki catches sight of another hanging figure in his peripherals, drags his eyes toward it, and—

“Fuh- cking Deku ,” he mutters, half slurred and half pissed off. Of course it’s Deku strung up next to him, his stupid hair covering the top half of his face but his slumped posture giving away how passed-out the shitty nerd still is. Deku is stripped down to the t-shirt and leggings he wears under his hero costume; even his compression sleeve is missing, leaving his less familiar scars and more than a few blotchy, fresh-looking bruises on display. Katsuki studies the discolored, waxy skin that criss-crosses the skin on his arms for a long moment before huffing and rolling his eyes. “Time to wake up, nerd,” he says, more for himself than for Deku, before he starts to swing himself side-to-side.

The chains suspending him from the ceiling clink and rub together, the sound impossibly loud in the quiet room. He’s never been so thankful for Vlad-sensei’s brutal upper body training sessions as he is now. Katsuki’s wrists are chained to the ceiling but not bound together, so he pulls himself up by one arm, then by the other until he gets enough sideways momentum to swing at Deku. He grunts at the contact and has to close his eyes as he spins in the other direction. 

As he rights himself, still swaying and now slightly more nauseous, he shoots a glare toward Deku. 

The nerd swings like a ragdoll, his head rolling against his pale bicep, and remains unconscious like a total asshole. His chains jingle, and Katsuki’s chest rumbles with an irritated growl. 

“Wake up, shitty nerd,” he barks, but it does nothing except bounce off the plain walls of the concrete box they’re hanging in. His own voice is abrasive and booming in his ears. It does nothing to coax the nerd awake. 

As Deku rotates toward Katsuki, an achingly slow movement but what else does Katsuki have to do in this featureless room, he catches sight of the dried blood on the far side of the nerd’s face, plastering his hair to his skin in matted, dark patches. It runs over his eye from an unseen gash on his hairline, and it must have been a hard fucking blow because there is blood the whole way down to the collar of Deku’s ripped t-shirt. His eye is swollen shut and purple with a fresh black-eye. 

“Oi,” Katsuki tries, struggling against his chains so they make more noise. Deku’s face twitches. “Yeah, come on. No way in hell I’m fucking entertaining myself here, Deku, so wake up.” Beyond that, Katsuki also needs one of the nerd’s dork analyses to get them the hell out of here. Between the pounding in his head and the chill preventing him from building up enough sweat to do much of anything beyond setting off a few firecrackers, there’s no way he can get both of them out of here. 

Katsuki is smart enough to realize when he’s in over his head, and he knows that Deku is sort of their only hope in getting out of here right now. Damn. 

One of Deku’s eyes, the one not swollen shut and covered in blood, slides open into a narrow slit before dropping closed again.

“Uh-uh. No you don’t.” Katsuki grunts and starts rattling his chains again until Deku lets out a pathetic whine. “Yeah, wake the fuck up. Lazy shit.” 

“Kacchan?” Deku murmurs, slurring worse, even, than Katsuki. 

“Yeah, hey, did you get us fucking kidnapped , nerd?” Deku blinks slowly, rotating slowly still. He jerks with a weak cough, and he either chooses not to answer or his concussed brain lets the question go in one ear and out the other. Either way, Katsuki has to bite back the urge to cuss the shitty nerd out. 

His therapist’s words come back to haunt him: letting your anger get the better of you, is that constructive? Effective? Yeah, well. Fuck that. 

“You did—you got us kidnapped. Fucking figures.” He rolls his eyes as he spins the other way, and Deku slips out of his field of vision. He won’t admit to the panic that sets in at the fact that no matter how much he tries, he can’t see Deku. He swallows convulsively like he might vomit—and he might. Vomit, that is. His stomach rolls. He blames it on the concussion and not on the rolling anxiety that comes with, you know, being kidnapped and strung up like a piece of vulnerable-ass meat. 

From behind him, now: “You fin’lly woke up, Kah-Kacchan.” It’s muffled and almost incoherent, but Katsuki is well versed in Deku-speak, from mumbling to…concussed mumbling. 

“The hell’s that supposed to mean? In case you didn’t notice, I woke up before you. You must be real concussed if you’re this confused.” He huffs, but when he finally rotates around to see Deku again, the nerd is shaking his head and then groaning at the movement.

“Was awake earlier.” 

“And you just…went back to sleep?” Katsuki gapes and narrows his eyes at the figure in front of him. Deku still hasn’t managed to drag his head up, to lift his chin off of his chest, but he makes a vague gesture that looks like a denial. 

“No,” he whispers, not like a secret but like he can’t muster up the energy to talk much louder. “Was awake, ‘n they came in. You—you were asleep. Asleep still.” Katsuki blinks. He goes cold all over at the thought of him just—just what? Hanging here? While some strangers, some villains, came into the room for Deku. 

Oh, damn. He really might throw up. 

“What did—what did they do, Deku?” He feels like he’s talking to a kindergartener or something. For all the bullying and insults, he’s never talked down on the nerd like this. He hates it, but he hates the fact that Deku doesn’t seem to notice it even more. 

“Nothin’ big. Hit me a few times. Asked if they should, if I thought they should wake you up. Said no.” The nerd pauses, and the moment drags on. He sucks in a breath through his teeth, the sound whistling and thin. “Wanted to let you sleep.”

Katsuki lets out a humorless bark of laughter. 

“Wha’s so funny?” Deku squints at him through his one working eye. 

“My hero ,” Katsuki says. “Of course you fuckin’ told them to let me sleep. God.” He scoffs and rolls his eyes, smiling without humor. It’s more of a sneer than a smile. “Did they ask you anything else?”

“Don’ remember,” Deku whispers, sounding ashamed. His voice is wet—more than likely, he’s crying, but Katsuki can’t help the bolt of fear at the thought that it could be blood. Unbidden, the flashing scene of Deku choking on his own blood as Katsuki hangs helpless beside him, forced to listen and watch as Deku flails and suffocates, plays out on the backs of his eyelids like some fucked up HD, 3D movie. He swallows around the bile rising in his throat at the thought. 

“Great,” Katsuki huffs despite himself, his annoyance born more out of fear than anything else. “You got us fucking kidnapped, and you don’t even know what they want from us.” He yanks on his chains, but the metal cuffs dig into his wrists hard enough that he winces, and his shoulders ache like a rotting tooth he keeps poking at. “Fuck. Fuck. Dammit.”

“S’rry, Kacchan.” Deku’s chin lists back toward his chest, his lips moving around breathy, incomprehensible words. Apologies, maybe. Katsuki debates trying to keep the nerd awake, but it seems like a lost cause, considering the fact that he all but passed out mid-word. He hangs limp and bloody next to Katsuki, fingers twitching and purple at the tips from the pressure on his wrists. 

To entertain himself, Katsuki watches Deku’s chest rise and fall steadily. He has long since stopped spinning in lazy circles, but it’s not like there’s much else to look at in this shit  hole. And if the sight of Deku breathing makes him feel a little less like the world is going to fall out from under him, then that’s his fucking business and no one else’s. 

He counts the beats between Deku’s whistling inhales and the labored exhales, memorizing the pattern. 

He ignores the skinny, windowless door on the wall behind him flying open with enough force to bounce off the wall. Katsuki counts under his breath and only stops when his captor grabs a fistful of his hair and tugs his head backward hard enough to have Katsuki grunting in pain. His scalp twinges, and his eyes strain with his effort to keep his eyes on Deku. The nerd doesn’t even twitch. 

“Oi, hey!” his captor shouts, and their whiny-ass voice echoes off the concrete walls. “The asshole’s awake in here.” 

“Hey, fuck you,” Katsuki bites, and he drags his gaze away from Deku and toward the captor, who stands in the very corner of his vision. When he tries to turn his head to get a good look at their ugly mug, they tighten their grip on his hair and laugh at his pained expression. Above him, his chains jingle and chime cheerily. He kicks his legs, but nothing connects. “I ain’t the asshole here, asshole,” he grits.

Outside the door at his back, a pair of footsteps grows louder, and another of his captors (and how many of these assholse are there going to be? While Katsuki is in the mood for a good beat-down, his fingers are growing steadily more numb by the minute, and he’d like to get this whole ordeal over with sooner rather than later) stumbles into the room, breathing heavily. 

“Thank God, man,” they mutter, coming closer. Their footsteps clink like they’re wearing metal shoes, and their voice is tinny. “Thought I hit him too hard when I knocked him out, considering he slept through our first visit.” The sick smile in their voice sends a bolt of disgust down Katsuki’s spine.

A metal woman appears in front of him, grinning despite her robotic eyes. She runs a cold finger down his throat, and he suppresses the urge to jerk away. Instead, he glares at her and bites at her finger when she gets too close to his face. She withdrawals with a tittering laugh at that, and the hand in his hair loosens its hold until he can jerk away. 

A short man—skinnier, practically, than either of Katsuki’s biceps, but he’s got weirdly long limbs—edges around from behind Katsuki to stand next to the robot bitch. His hands nearly drag on the ground as he walks, but his arms retract into his body the moment he comes to stand next to the woman. Katsuki catalogs this; a robot woman and a man with elastic limbs. 

Fuckin’ fabulous. He’s turning into Deku, dork analysis and all. 

Katsuki scowls at the thought but shoots an unthinking look toward his hanging companion. Deku hasn’t been roused by the noise Katsuki and their kidnappers are making, not even a twitch or a murmur. He just hangs, his chin resting on his sternum in a limp way that makes Katsuki’s head hurt to look at. 

“Ah, your friend,” the woman says, and Katsuki whips his attention to her instead, as if that will take the attention away from the unconscious nerd. “He let you sleep through our first visit—wouldn’t you call him…kind-hearted?”

“I’d call it fucking stupid,” Katsuki grunts. 

“Sad you missed out on the fun, are you?” She steps away from Katsuki, toward Deku. His breath catches in his throat as she wraps her metal hand around Deku’s ankle and shakes it. Katsuki tracks the movement with a sharp glare that gives way to surprise—Deku’s ankle is swollen, red and purple, and obviously broken beyond anything Katsuki’s ever seen before. He gives an aborted shout as the bitch digs her fingers into the nerd’s skin and tugs at the appendage with a wide, toothy smile. The chains rattle above them, and Deku wakes with a pained, choked gasp. His eyes are blown wide, and his lips work around silent words (a scream, maybe, if the way his throat strains is any indication). 

Katsuki’s yells fill the space as he kicks and flails. “Let him go you fucking bitch! ” The woman doesn’t release her hold even as Deku makes a weak attempt to tug his foot out of her hold. “I’ll kill you. I fucking will—let me out of here, and then we’ll go, you pussy .” Spit flies from the corners of his mouth, and he’s red from the effort, but every word from his mouth only seems to fuel the woman’s smile. 

Katsuki’s chest heaves, and he jerks his arms but bites his tongue. A moment of silence passes, broken only by Deku’s pained breathing and Katsuki’s heartbeat throbbing in his temples. The woman’s hand slides away from Deku’s foot, but she doesn’t move away from him. 

“You know what else he told us during our first visit?” she purrs. Her voice sounds fake and hollow, like the voice out of that one Class B extra’s voice modifier, and it bounces off the corners and edges of the concrete room. “He told us to leave you alone. Don’t you dare put a finger on—what was the name he used?” She turns to the man. His face breaks into a wide smile under her attention. 

“Kacchan, I think it was,” he answers like a diligent student. He preens when she clicks her tongue and hums appreciatively. 

 “Yeah, he just begged us to leave poor, poor Kacchan alone.” She runs a finger down her cheek and exaggerates a frown. Above her, Deku struggles to lift his head, blinking blearily and swallowing like he’s trying not to throw up all over himself. “And since he asked so nicely,” the bitch continues, “I think we should listen to what he wants.” She gives Katsuki a wicked smile before squeezing Deku’s ankle again. 

This time, the nerd chokes, and bile dribbles from his lips, staining his torn and bloody t-shirt. He coughs on it, whines low in his throat, and curls his fingers into his palms like he can’t work up the energy to struggle beyond that. Tears drip down his pale cheeks. Katsuki grits his teeth hard enough to make his jaw ache. 

“Fuck what he wants,” he bites, pleads, begs. “What about what I want?”

“What do you want?” The woman takes a step toward him, leaving Deku heaving and breathing hard behind her. Katsuki forces himself to look at her instead of at the nerd. 

“I want you to let me down,” he growls, tugging on his chains, “so I can tear you to fucking pieces.” He kicks at her, and she’s moved close enough that he catches her in the jaw. She grunts and stumbles, holding her jaw, as his own foot throbs—she must actually be made of metal or some shit because that fucking hurt more than it should have. The woman glares up at him as she spits a glob of congealed, purplish blood onto the ground at Katsuki’s feet, and he glares right back. 

“Like I said, your friend just asked us so nicely,” she says. The woman straightens and turns on her heel. She makes it to the door before turning over her shoulder to look at the man with the elastic limbs. “I’ll send Umesaka in soon. Make sure he’s ready for her.” 

With that, the woman leaves, and the door closes heavily in her wake. The entire room seems to vibrate with the force of it, and for a moment, the man seems at a loss. He and Katsuki stare at each other before the man grins and shoots out one of his arms to grab Deku by the hair. 

The nerd grunts and grits his teeth. One of his eyes is still swollen shut, but the other squeezes closed and forces out another fat tear as the man suspends him farther above the ground, where Deku’s toes can’t even touch the ground anymore and his stupid hair almost brushes the ceiling. From there, the man lets go, and he cackles as Deku drops like a stone. The chains rattle, and Deku throws back his head as his shoulders strain against the force of his own weight. There’s a sick popping noise, and Deku drops another few inches as his shoulders dislocate. He swings and twitches, making little wounded sounds that Katsuki can barely hear over his own labored breathing. 

“You’ll like Umesaka,” Elasti-Douche says, sounding almost…caring or gentle, as he reaches for Deku again. This time, his fingers wrap around the chains where they’re attached to the nerd’s wrists. “And she’ll have a lot of fun with someone like you.” He pauses in undoing Deku’s restraints to run his hand over his cheekbone, a gesture Katsuki’s seen a million times in the healing bay at school. Recovery Girl will rub her withering fingers over their cheeks before she heals them; seeing it now, from a man who dislocated Deku’s shoulders on purpose, makes Katsuki’s stomach turn. A disgusted shiver runs down his spine and settles as nervous energy in the tips of his fingers and toes. “You have such a strong spirit,” the man continues. “She’ll love breaking it.” 

The chains on Deku’s wrists slither to the ground, leaving Deku to drop the rest of the way to the ground. He lands on his feet but crumples into a heap with a pained sob the moment his weight settles on solid ground. Katsuki kicks his legs and struggles, grunting, as the man rearranges Deku’s limbs so he’s laying on his back, his arms and legs tucked neatly around him. 

The nerd doesn’t fight it. His head rolls against the ground, and his eyes flicker under his eyelids. His lips are parted and bloody; his breath whistles between his teeth in pained, uneven gasps. 

The door opens again as the man twirls a strand of Deku’s sweat-matted hair around one of his fingers. Katsuki is too busy burning holes into the side of Elasti-Douche’s head to get a good look at the newcomer. He half expects it to be the robot bitch coming back from more, but instead of the metallic footsteps, there are small, shuffling ones growing closer. 

“Umesaka,” the man greets. He doesn’t look away from Deku. “Are you sure—”

“Yes, I am sure.” A small woman, shorter than Grape Asshole, comes to stand next to Katsuki. The top of her head barely comes up to his knees. “You can unhand him now, Eizan. Thank you.” 

The man leaves Deku lying in the middle of the floor before shuffling out, leaving Katsuki and Deku at the mercy of some fucking Oompa Loompa munchkin. He could bunt her into space if they’d just let him down. He struggles against his own chains again, kicking his legs and swinging his arms as much as he can, making as much noise as humanly possible. 

Still, Umesaka pays him no mind. She brushes past him and kneels next to Deku, who tries to roll away but can’t seem to work up enough energy to turn onto his side, even. The nerd grunts and jerks one of his shoulders in a futile attempt, but the girl takes his head in her hands and forces him to stay still. 

She lays his head in her lap where her legs are crossed, keeping her hands on either side of his face. Finally, she looks at Katsuki. Her eyes are a deep gray color, and she’s as pale as a sheet of paper, almost translucent. Her white hair hangs over her face in a thick curtain. 

“They call me a monster,” she murmurs, and her fingers twitch where they rest against Deku’s freckled, bruised skin, “and a god.” 

“Who the fuck —”

“Because they are scared of me, Katsuki.” Katsuki can only blink at the mention of his own name, gaping, but his silence or his reaction is enough for her to continue after a beat. “The truth is, they have no idea what I can do.” 

Between the strands of hair, her eyes begin to glow. Her hands clamp more firmly against Deku’s head, his eyes, too, start glow a radioactive shade of green, and the nerd—

The nerd absolutely wails . It’s high-pitched and agonized; Katsuki’s never heard such a sound come from anyone before. It sounds like Deku is being torn to shreds from the inside out. His screams echo endlessly in the concrete room. He arches off the floor, and his feet, even the broken one, slide against the floor, trying to find purchase and failing, and his purple fingers scratch at the floor until his fingernails are bloody and torn from the nail beds. 

Deku doesn’t even pause to breathe, his screams so unceasing and so loud they make Katsuki’s ears ring. He grits his teeth, and tears leak from his eyes. He kicks out weakly, but it’s an aborted, half-assed movement. He can’t even hear the chains jingle above him over the wordless howl. 

As Katsuki is sure either he or Deku will explode if it goes on for another second, the bitch releases her hold on Deku’s head. The moment she does, the nerd goes boneless and limp and terribly, terrifyingly quiet. The sudden silence vibrates in his temples. His chest heaves, but Deku’s breaths are weak and thin despite how long he spent screaming bloody fucking murder. 

“What,” Katsuki gags, “the fuck did you do to him?” He glares at the bitch as she combs her hands through Deku’s sweaty hair. What the fuck is up with these people and touching Deku like they’re his friends? Katsuki wishes they’d fuck off. 

“My Quirk is called Fracture,” she tells him like that explains literally anything. Katsuki growls, the sound rumbling in his chest and the back of his throat. 

“I’ve seen him break his bones and not say a word,” Katsuki argues, “so what the fuck was that, bitch?” 

“I do not touch bones, stupid boy.” Umesaka huffs and rolls her eyes like she’s offended by the idea of fracturing bones. “I touch souls . Spirits.” She strokes her hand over his hair again, even as thin, acidic bile dribbles from Deku’s bloodied lips. There’s more blood on his chin than before; he must have bitten through his lip or his tongue at some point during all of this. 

More than anything, Katsuki wishes he could check Deku over, catalog his injuries. He needs to know what to tell Aizawa-sensei when he gets them out of this mess. 

“And his—his soul was bright. And large. Perhaps the largest I have ever touched. It is weaker now, but not diminished.” She clicks her tongue and shifts so Deku’s head falls off her lap with a dull thunk. It rolls so Katsuki can see the nerd’s tear-streaked face. 

For lack of a better word, Deku looks pathetic. Stained with blood, sweat, vomit, and tears, eyes half-lidded and barely coherent. 

“Of fucking course it’s not diminished, you piece of shit,” Katsuki spits. “It’s fucking Deku .” No way in hell some extra will take Deku out. No way he’ll let his soul be diminished or whatever-the-fuck before he can make All Might proud, before he can be the best or the next Symbol of Peace. 

“Such a rude name you call him,” Soul-Fuck muses. She rocks back on her heels and bites at her lip. 

“Fuck off.” To his surprise, she listens. Umesaka brushes dust off her pants and starts toward the door. Behind him, the door’s hinges squeal, and the door closes again with a click, leaving Katsuki to hang and Deku to recover, if only for a moment. “Bitch,” he mutters under his breath. “Oi, Deku. Talk.” 

A long moment passes, and Katsuki chews on his lip. He needs to make sure Deku isn’t dead down there, but even he feels like an asshole for asking Deku for shit right now, even if that shit is to talk, which is what the nerd does best. Then, Deku shifts, coughs weakly, and Katsuki watches his throat bob and his lips form silent words. 

“Hurts, Kacchan,” he breathes after another minute passes. 

“I know, nerd.” Katsuki’s voice is sickeningly soft, more vulnerable than he’d allow himself anywhere else. A lump grows in the back of his throat; he of all people knows how much Deku hides his pains, and the fact that he admitted to it now, so readily too, pricks at the back of Katsuki’s eyes like little, hot needles. 

“Feels like ‘m dyin’,” Deku continues. Clumsily, he knocks his hand against his sternum as if to identify where the pain is, but the gesture is vague. “All over. Hurts all over.” He makes a low, wounded groan that trails off into a sob. A tear leaks from Deku’s one unswollen eye and drips into his hair with the way he’s half turned in Katsuki’s direction. 

“I know,” he repeats because he doesn’t know what the hell else to say. Deku was always the one who could comfort everyone else’s hurts before everything went to shit. Katsuki, even as a toddler and a kid, never knew how to comfort other crying kids. Stop being so weak , he’d huff in lieu of the sweet words Deku seemed to spew endlessly back then. He tries to remember any of them, but he can’t. He used to tune them out or shove Deku away when he tried to direct them in Katsuki’s direction. 

“Am I dying, Kacchan?” Deku’s voice is small and underlined in some emotion like acceptance. Katsuki’s body rattles with a deep sob at the tone. 

“No, you fucking idiot.” His own voice is wet and unrecognizable. He hates it. He wants to be strong for Deku in case he really is dying—because who fucking knows what that bitch did when she got her grubby little hands on Deku’s soul. It’s not a thought he wants to have, but unbidden images of their rescue plaster themselves on the backs of his eyes. Deku, cold and gone, and Katsuki untouched. He sobs again.

“‘S okay,” Deku murmurs. “You’ll be…” he trails off, losing his breath or his thought, but he catches it again after a second, “you’ll be okay.” 

“No, I fucking won’t,” Katsuki argues. “Why did you tell them not to touch me? We could have—could have split it or some shit. You didn’t have to do this.”

“Wanted…wanted to let you sleep.” Deku chokes on a gasping breath, and Katsuki can only listen as he coughs and splutters. When he finishes, there is a new splatter of blood on him and on the floor beneath his face. 

“Bull shit .” Deku shakes his head and blinks lethargically. 

“Didn’t wanna—couldn’t watch you get hurt,” Deku breathes. Katsuki gives a high-pitched, frustrated yell that cracks in the middle. He squirms in his chains and wishes he could pop off some of his explosions to make himself feel better, but it’s so cold in this cell, and he burnt off most of the sweat left on his palms when he first woke up, and the corners of his mouth are dry and cottony with the need for water. 

“You think I wanted to watch you get hurt?” 

“S’rry, Kacchan,” Deku slurs. He shifts, and a hand lifts toward Katsuki. “‘M sorry. Sorry.” Deku gasps for breath, choking, but his chest stalls, and he keeps muttering his stupid fucking apologies until they’re breathless and incoherent. Katsuki’s muscles seize and tense with panic. 

“Shut up,” he yells. “Shut the fuck up, Deku!” 

“‘M sorry. Kah—Kacchan, I’m sorry.” Deku’s cheeks are losing color, and blood dribbles from the corner of his mouth in a thin rivulet. Katsuki’s face is hot with his own tears as they drip off his chin. “I don’—‘m I gonna die? I’m sorry, Kacchan.” 

“Stop fucking apologizing,” Katsuki pleads. “Please, stop.” 

“I’m—”

Deku cuts himself off with a scream to rival the one when Soul-Fuck had her hands in his soul. He arches off the ground again, feet sliding and hands scrabbling, and his eyes are blown wide as his jaw works around his wails. This time, it sounds more like begging and more apologies than the wordless agony from the first time. 

This time, Katsuki screams along with him: “Let him go, you fucking bitch , I’ll fucking kill you, I will, stop it you’re killing him —” He fights against his chains, straining and yelling and pleading, but it’s all drowned out by Deku’s shrieking. 

What the fuck kind of touch-based Quirk works from a distance like this? He’s never seen anything like it, never heard about another touch-based Quirk working from a distance (except for in Deku’s conspiracy muttering, but never in practice). As far as he knows, there isn’t a Quirk like this on record. 

He and Deku make brief, panicked eye contact before Deku’s screaming picks up in volume and desperation. Deku squeezes his eyes closed and wrenches his head back hard enough to crack it painfully off the concrete floor. His muscles are tense everywhere, a vein bulging on his forehead and another on his neck. 

Green lightning turns the room a sick shade of green for a split second before Black Whip tears at the air. Katsuki hasn’t seen Black Whip get so out of control since it activated, and even then, he’d been too far away. 

Now, he’s in the middle of it all. It shoots past him and recedes in chaotic waves, straightening into all jagged edges before smoothing into wild curls and waves. One of the edges catches him in his exposed side, and he grunts at the feeling of his flesh opening. Warmth drips down his side, his leg, and blood pools in a lazy puddle under his feet.  

Through the haze of Black Whip, he can see Deku tense all over, flickering again with his green lightning, then yellow lightning, then blue, all in rapid succession. His screams are lost under the overwhelming sound of Black Whip, which is something close to what sticking your head out of a moving airplane would sound like. 

Black Whip disappears so suddenly that it makes Katsuki dizzy. In the middle of the room, Deku is now somehow turned away from him, but his shoulders are moving with uneven breaths. He is no longer screaming, and Katsuki takes this as a good sign. 

The nerd shifts with a light groan. He rolls onto his back, stares at the ceiling for a long moment, and sits up. 

“Oi—oi, hey,” Katsuki barks, panicked because a second ago he’d been shrieking like he was dying, and now he was here trying to get vertical, “lay back down, nerd—oh my god. What the fuck.” A moment of silence passes before the nerd turns his head slowly to look at Katsuki. He blinks once. 

“I am Shimura Nana,” Deku says, and it sure as hell doesn’t sound like his voice, too feminine and mature, “seventh user of One For All.”   

Chapter Text

Katsuki gapes at Deku for a long, quiet moment. “How hard did you hit your fucking head, Deku?” Hard enough to be talking crazy, apparently. For a second, Katsuki almost wishes he’d been kidnapped with Shitty Hair or even Dunce Face; it would be much easier than this. Where Deku is involved, everything always gets so fucking complicated. 

“Izuku is gone,” Deku says. 

“Stop talking about yourself in the third person,” Katsuki scoffs. He rolls his eyes, but the motion makes him dizzy, so he closes his eyes and swallows against rising acidic bile. “Makes you sound like an asshole,” he chokes. 

“I am Nana,” Deku repeats. When Katsuki opens his eyes again, the nerd is looking down at his arms like they’re foreign to him; he turns his hands over to look at the backs, then the palms, curling and uncurling his fingers into fists, and running his fingertips lightly over his scarred, bruised forearms. After a moment, he finds his bulging, dislocated shoulders and, without a second thought, relocates them . By himself. And he doesn’t flinch or yell, and Katsuki can only gape at him because what the fuck. 

Maybe this isn’t Deku after all.

“Who the fuck is Nana?” Deku hardly spares him a glance, too busy studying every inch of his own body. His eyes flick toward him, then away, and Katsuki wiggles in the air. His chains rattle, but Deku ignores the noise. 

“I am the seventh holder of One For All.” Deku states this like it’s obvious. His voice is still too gentle, mature, and feminine to sound familiar at all, but he still manages to huff in a distinctly Deku-ish way that says his patience is running out like sand through his fingers. 

“So…you taught All Might?” At this, Deku’s shoulders tense into a hard line, and he pauses in his inspection of himself.

“Toshinori, yes. He was my successor.” Katsuki doesn’t know what the fuck to say to that, and Deku’s tone is suddenly much firmer than he’s ever heard the nerd talk before. Katsuki’s body swings in a small, slow ellipsis as he watches Deku examine his legs, then his face by touch. He pulls at his cheeks and lips, traces the outline of the bridge of his nose. It’s incredibly boring and more vulnerable than he ever wanted to see the nerd. 

It’s kind of wigging him out, mostly because he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on now. It’s all too much too fast—waking up kidnapped and definitely concussed beyond fucking belief, the screaming, Black Whip (and Katsuki is starting to grow woozy and sluggish in the soft, pleasant way he’s morbidly come to associate with mild blood loss), Deku sitting up like he hadn’t been fucking dying literally a minute ago, claiming to be some bitch named Nana, who was saying Deku is gone, and— 

Katsuki goes cold all over. His chest stalls. 

“What the fuck do you mean Iz—Deku’s gone?” he barks, eyes wide and burning. Deku (Nana? What the fuck ) hunches over and presses the knuckle of his index finger to the curve of his bottom lip, furrowing his brows. His eyes flicker from side to side as if searching for something or thinking. Katsuki holds his breath while he waits, and his vision is graying at the edges by the time Deku opens his big, dumb mouth again. 

“Gone was not the right word,” Nana muses. “He is hibernating.” 

“What the fuck? Why? Wake him up—I want Deku back.” He sounds pathetic, all this desperation and pleading, even to his own ears. He hopes to god that Deku really is asleep, hibernating, whatever , so he can’t hear Katsuki. The nerd will definitely say some dumb, soft shit like Aw, Kacchan, you wanted me? or you missed me! Don’t lie, I heard you!

Nana shakes Deku’s head and struggles to stand. She favors his good leg but doesn’t so much as wince at all even as the broken one is jostled. The expression on Deku’s face is flat and painless even as she limps half a step closer to where Katsuki hangs. 

“Izuku is resting somewhere deep on the plane of One For All. Even us vestiges cannot reach him there—not that we want to try. Waking him now…” Nana pauses, and Deku’s jaw works and clenches. “He is dying, Katsuki.”

“I fucking know that,” Katsuki spits. “I watched that other bitch root around in his soul, okay? But it can’t be good for him for you to be walking around on his broken ankle.” He jerks his chin toward the swollen appendage, and Nana glances down at it, taking the rest of Deku’s weight off of the bad leg with a sympathetic wince. 

“I can’t feel his pain,” she tells him in lieu of an apology or an attempt to bring Deku back. 

“I gathered that. Doubt you’d be upright if you could, considering how convinced Deku was that he was going to die.” He and Nana share a narrow-eyed look that looks so strange on Deku’s face. The nerd had never dared to stand off against him like this before, so the expression is unsettling. After a moment, Nana drops her eyes and crosses her arms across her chest. 

“That…was us,” she murmurs. “The vestiges—we were frightened. That girl, the one with the soul-touching Quirk, she brushed against us when she touched Izuku’s soul. But she did not hurt us, did not weaken us the way she weakened him. With his soul weakened, we were able to break through the plane of One For All to speak to him.” 

“So you told him he was fucking dying?” Katsuki scoffs. Nana scowls but doesn’t meet his gaze. “He was out here screaming that he didn’t—” 

“Contact between the current holder and the vestiges only happens in times of great distress. Some of the others sensed Izuku’s fear and pain and panicked. We told him to allow his soul to heal in the plane, otherwise he would die.” She pauses. “I admit, I believe we overreacted. None of his injuries seem entirely dire, and the girl seems to have left us alone for the time being.” 

 Katsuki groans. 

“He was in a great deal of pain,” she argues, even though he hadn’t said anything. “Having your soul touched, squeezed , like he did…most would not have lasted as long as he did. We felt a fraction of this pain, and it was unbearable.” She heaves a shaky breath and clutches at the front of Deku’s ratty, stained t-shirt. 

“So…what? You begged him to tap out and he just did it? I’ve known the nerd practically outta the womb; he wouldn’t fuckin’ listen to that bullshit.” 

“You have to understand, Katsuki,” she tells him, and he bites back the urge to remind her that no, he doesn’t have to understand shit , “we really thought he was dying.” She trails off, but Katsuki only waits for her to continue, staring her down with a hard look. “I don’t know why I’m explaining myself to you—you’re a child. I am…I was an adult.” She squints at him. He presses his lips together and waits. “We forced him into the plane, and I took his place.” 

“So his soul could rest.” 

“Yes.” 

“Because…it’s weak, and he’ll die.” 

“Yes.” Katsuki blows out a heavy breath and rolls his head back on his shoulders so he’s looking at the ceiling. 

“Can you at least get us the fuck out of here without fucking up his body too much?” Nana glances down, again, at Deku’s body. It is bruised, swollen, broken, and blood-stained, sweaty, overworked, and sore in places where she can’t feel it. Katsuki hates to think of all the hurts he can’t see. He doesn’t trust this bitch to take care of the nerd, and he wishes she would just get him down from these stupid chains so he can do it himself. 

He wouldn’t let Deku get fucked up. 

“I believe Hikage would tell me if something was wrong,” she says and nods once as if to confirm it for herself, and Katsuki is far too concussed to even begin to give a single shit about who the fuck Hikage is. Instead, he closes his eyes and blows out a heavy breath. 

“Fine. Then get us the hell out of here. And be careful,” he adds as an afterthought. He watches Nana with narrowed eyes as she…stands there. Another moment passes, in which she does nothing.

“I don’t…really have a plan, kid,” she admits. “Sort of hoping you’d have some ideas to throw out here.” Katsuki blinks. He groans and lets his chin drop onto his chest. 

“Fucking—I’d have rather been kidnapped with fucking Dunce Face. Swear to God.” He curses under his breath and forces himself to calm down. A voice that sounds suspiciously close to the voice of his school-mandated (more like Aizawa-mandated, that bitch) therapist tells him that his anger is not productive here. He drags in a noisy breath through his nose, holds it for five seconds, and still feels like exploding Nana and himself off the face of the planet. “Weren’t you a fucking pro hero?” 

“Yes,” Nana defends, “but it’s been awhile since I’ve had to do any plan-making, kid. Like, longer than you’ve been alive.” Another breath through his nose, which he holds for ten seconds this time, half hoping it might finally tip his scale into unconsciousness. When he keeps his tenuous hold on his temper and his consciousness, he sighs and strains to think. 

Katsuki drags his way through the hazy chaos in his head, but it’s futile. It’s like trudging through a thick bog, and it makes the pounding in his temples almost unbearable. Still, he tries to recall Aizawa’s lesson on strategy for missions; he remembers looking at reports and photographs of plans for decades-old missions (most of which were missions All Might went on and helped to plan, much to the nerd’s pure, nerdy joy), but the pages in his memories are blurred and incomprehensible. At his straining, the lights in the room start to stretch like taffy or—fucking knives that stab at the backs of his eyes until he tears up and clenches his jaw against a wave of nausea .  

Great. With his concussion, he has to rely on a bitch who doesn’t remember how to function to get them the hell out of here. 

“Get me down from here first,” he grunts, squeezing his eyes closed until colors stop dancing on the backs of his eyelids. 

“How?” Katsuki bites back a frustrated scream, more because it will do nothing for his head than anything else. Fuck the voice in the back of his head that sounds like his therapist—it’s not like anything other than his anger is productive right now either. He’s strung up like a dead pig in a butcher shop, and Nana is looking at him through Deku’s eyes, waiting for him to do something, but he can’t even think , and they’re all but waiting for that robot bitch (or, worse, the Soul Fucker) to decide to come back in here. Katsuki’s eyes burn, but he won’t fucking cry. Fuck that, too. 

“Use—I don’t fucking know. Use Black Whip to unlock my wrists.” He kicks his legs and works his clumsy, numb fingers around the chains to draw her attention to where he can feel the lock digging into his skin. It’s all cold, hard edges with a thin keyhole at the bottom. He thumbs at the opening and watches Nana furrow her brow and press her knuckle to her bottom lip in thought. It’s so much like Deku that Katsuki tries to tell himself that this is all some stupid misunderstanding or a prank; it really is Deku behind those eyes, not Nana. They’re not entirely fucked.

Except some deep, buried part of Katsuki knows. He knows it’s not Deku; the breathing pattern is all wrong, he spent long enough memorizing it while the nerd was passed out before, and there’s a flat look to his eye that is so unfamiliar and not-Deku-like that it makes Katsuki cold all over to look at for too long. 

It’s like looking at a stranger, except the stranger has the same face that Katsuki’s been looking at for years now. 

“Black Whip?” she murmurs. The corners of Nana’s lips twitch, and she bursts into laughter. Katsuki sneers. 

“You got a better fucking plan?” he barks, trailing off in a bitten-off groan as his own voice grates on him, and Nana’s sharp guffaws are doing even less for his concussion-induced headache. She doubles over, clutching at the front of Deku’s ratty, ruined t-shirt. 

“I can’t use Black Whip,” she gasps. “That’s—Daigoro would just love that, wouldn’t he?” 

“Shut the fuck up! I don’t care about whoever this Daigoro douchebag is and what he likes, just get me down from here. My fucking shoulders are going numb.” He struggles and kicks, but she only wipes her face of imaginary tears like a total asshole. Her face is broken apart in a wide, entertained grin. It’s all teeth, Deku’s eyes squinting with the force of it. She shakes her head, and the green curls fall over Deku’s sweaty forehead. She brushes them away and sighs. 

“My Quirk is Float, Katsuki,” she tells him, talking slowly as if speaking to a child, and his mind goes blank at the sight of his own name, not that stupid nickname, on Deku’s mouth, but she bowls on. “That means I can’t access the other Quirks of the other users, even if we are now just souls in the plane of One For All.” 

As if to prove her point, Deku’s bare feet leave the ground in a slow ascent. Nana is eye level with Katsuki after a moment, still grinning. 

“You’re saying Deku is stronger than you, then?” he mocks. “You, a pro hero?” She levels him and his goading with an unimpressed stare, the smile dropping into a flat line. 

“One For All is a stockpiling Quirk,” she says, meandering through the air like it’s her own swimming pool, “meaning that, by definition, Izuku is stronger than me. He is stronger than Toshinori—All Might.” She pauses, lets her words simmer in the air between them, before she makes a vague gesture with her hands. “Or, he holds the potential to be. He’s still young.” 

“So why can he use the other…vestiges’ Quirks?” Katsuki narrows his eyes at her as she makes lazy circles around the room. She reclines in the air, looking more comfortable than she should with how beat-up Deku looks. “If you couldn’t and All Might couldn’t.”

She glances at him. “It’s a stockpiling Quirk—and, of course, I don’t have all the answers, but us vestiges talk. Yoichi, the first user, hypothesized that because Toshinori and Izuku have nothing to offer the Quirk in terms of a Quirk Factor, the Quirk adapted. Toshinori was physically strong, but he had no power to add to One For All, nothing to stoke the flames, so to speak. So, One For All stoked its own flames, I guess, and Izuku gained access to every Quirk stored within us.” Katsuki mulls this over, digesting it as well as he can past his splitting headache and the blood loss. Nana must take his silence for something other than it is, though, because she continues after a beat. “One day, he will master the other six Quirks, and he will be the strongest man on Earth—a hero with the power of eight other people. He will be the one to beat All For One.” 

“He will be number one,” Katsuki murmurs, and for the first time in his life, he finds that this isn’t such a big deal. He wouldn’t mind losing to Deku—maybe just this once. Not that he would admit this to anyone, not even Nana. 

She must see it on his face, though, because he finds her smiling softly at him from where she floats a few feet off the ground. He scoffs and turns away. 

“Okay, so…let that Daigoro guy come out—or whoever has Black Whip—and get me out of here.” He thumbs at the keyhole again and tries to run down the Quirks he knows Deku has: Black Whip, Float, Danger Sense, Smokescreen, and some sort of strength augmentation. Their only hope is whoever this Daigoro asshole is. 

“I mean—” Nana goes stiff, so stiff Katsuki thinks she must be holding her breath. Listening. Tension ripples through his body, and he watches Deku’s face as his lips part, his eyes widen, and his brows furrow toward the thick line over the bridge of his nose. Nana swallows hard, Deku’s Adam’s apple bobbing, before she falls out of the air in a heap. She lands in a tangled pile of limp arms and legs with a heavy, painful thump. 

Despite himself, Katsuki shouts, his eyes blown wide and lips working around words muted by shock. 

“Hey, what—”  

Beside him, the door slams open again, bouncing off the wall and revealing Robo-Bitch in all her shitty glory. Katsuki struggles, but it’s weaker than the last time she appeared in the room; when he looks down, there is a concerningly large puddle of blood beneath him, marring the smooth, gray concrete of the room. 

“Hello, boys,” Robo-Bitch sings. She dances into the room, twirling on the ball of her foot. “Having fun yet?” 

“Fuck you,” Katsuki spits, but his attention is stuck on Deku’s limp form. From where Katsuki hangs, he can’t see Deku’s face or if he’s breathing—maybe that Soul-Fucker fucked with him again to make sure he was out before Robo-Bitch made her appearance. Maybe Nana fucked him up with all the floating and, you know, kicking the nerd out of his own body. 

Katsuki knew something was going to fucking go wrong. Still, he strains to get a better look at Deku as Robo-Bitch glides into the room. 

“So crude,” she comments as she toes at Deku’s ribs. The nerd doesn’t react. 

“I’m only polite to good company,” Katsuki says, “and that ain’t you, bitch.” Robo-Bitch kneels next to Deku, skims her fingertips over his wild, mussed hair, and Katsuki clenches his jaw. 

“I heard you two had a hell of a lot of fun with my friend Ume,” she murmurs, and he wishes she’d get her dirty fucking hands off of the nerd. “I could always call her back in—it could be an experiment! I’m not quite sure what would happen to your friend here if she got her hands on him again so soon.” She shoots Katsuki a look over her shoulder, sharp and sly. Katsuki swallows and averts his gaze. 

“What the fuck do you want from us?” 

Robo-Bitch stands, finally leaving Deku alone, and she grins like she’s won. Katsuki has never felt so weak in his life, but—but it got her away from Deku. That’s all that matters. 

“I knew you’d be cooperative.” She stands in front of Katsuki, close enough that he can feel the chill of her metal skin and he has to crane his neck to keep an eye on her. The angle makes his neck ache, and he can’t hear the sounds of her footsteps over the rushing blood in his ears. She runs a hand over the frayed edge of the slice in the side of his shirt, humming. “What’s this?” 

“That fucking asshole—” 

“No, no. It wasn’t one of my friends.” She clicks her tongue and presses one of her fingers into the wound, and blood bubbles out anew. “I told them not to touch a single hair on your head, and I know they wouldn’t disobey me. So, boy, what is this?” 

Katsuki grits his teeth as she digs harder into the cut. He traps his choked-off yell behind his teeth and curses himself for the pained, hot tear that runs down the side of his cheek. 

“It wasn’t—” he chokes, “it wasn’t his fault. ” 

“Whose?” When he doesn’t answer, she makes him scream with the pressure of her thumb on his side. “Answer me, boy.” 

“Deku!” he shouts, wriggling futilely in an attempt to escape her touch. “It was Deku—it wasn’t his fault!” His voice rings in the silence that follows; pain ebbs through his body as she takes away the pressure on the wound. Her hand rests close, though, a threat. “It was that fucking bitch ’s fault.” 

“Oh, she wasn’t even in the room. How could she have possibly hurt you like this?” Blood drips down his leg, off his foot, and into the puddle below. “Do tell.” 

“He thought he was dying. He panicked. It wasn’t his fucking fault.” His voice is slurring around the edges, but he forces it not to shake. 

“I’ve heard Ume’s… skillset isn’t quite pleasant, but I do think that was a tad dramatic on his part.” Katsuki glances over her shoulder at Deku, where he lays with an arm thrown over his face. He tries to imagine him in that moment, the vestiges invading his mind and shouting at him that he was dying , dying so young, and being afraid and in pain, and he thinks: dramatic my fucking ass. 

He draws up a wad of sticky, coppery-tasting blood, and he spits it in Robo-Bitch’s face. 

She recoils with a disgusted noise, but before he can blink or smile victoriously (he is not weak, he can fight back, fuck, he can fight back ), he is sent swinging as she strikes him with a metal arm hard enough that he feels his ribs break. His ears ring with the pain, and he coughs weakly as the room spins around him. 

Or, he spins, and the room stays the same. 

Same fucking difference; either way, it sucks. He gags but nothing comes up, and it hurts like hell. 

Robo-Bitch catches him by the ankle, her grip tight and sharp-edged and biting. He sucks in a small breath, and his ribs protest at that alone, and he blows it out through his nose. 

“What,” he gasps, breathy, and he glares at her with as much heat as he can manage, “the fuck …do you want…from us.” She releases his ankle and lets him swing again. Blood drips from his side in small, splattering droplets like paint off of a pendulum. 

“I want information on UA,” she says, studying her nails. She wipes the blood from the fingers she used to torment him on the side of Deku’s shirt, leaving a rust-colored smear to add to Deku’s impressive collection of stains. “I need to get into your little rat principal’s office.” 

“He’s not…a fucking rat.” Katsuki has to draw in a gasping breath between every few words, and even still, he is left winded. His comebacks lack his usual bite, but he won’t let that stop him.

“See,” Robo-Bitch continues as if he hadn’t spoken, “my little Ume and my little Shima—you met them, aren’t they amazing? Yes, well, your stupid school didn’t quite think so.” 

“The…entrance exam?” He squints at her, unimpressed. 

“Yes. Both did extremely well in the practical exam, the bit with the robots, you know. And still, they were turned away. Do you know why that is?” Katsuki doesn’t have the breath to tell her that they probably bombed the written exam, which was more of a covert psychological evaluation than anything—covert only to those who couldn’t read. 

It ranked students on their own heroic attitudes. Those who scored low were denied from the school. And, really, Katsuki isn’t surprised, considering these two assholes who scored low immediately turned to villainy. 

UA really is the best. 

“Your school is not training the heroes of tomorrow,” Robo-Bitch tells him. “Otherwise, Ume and Shima would be there. They will be the best.” 

“Why you…need into UA…then?” he huffs. She glares at him. “Dumbass,” he adds for good measure. 

She seizes him by the back of the neck and drags him closer to her eye level. His shoulders ache as they are tugged away from his chains, and his fingers go well and truly numb. He grunts. 

“I need to take down your school, and I am going to do it with the information stored in that office. You stupid kids need to see how blind your principal was in rejecting Ume and Shima and—God only knows how many others. Society needs to see how weak the school they worship is. How weak the heroes produced there are.” She grins and releases him, but Katsuki doesn’t have the strength to lift himself into a more comfortable position. Robo-Bitch goes back to standing over Deku’s body. “Look at him. He is one of the best in your class, isn’t he? And here he is—Ume and Shima have reduced him to nothing. He is the dog shit under our boots.”

“Fuck you,” Katsuki spits with enough force that it surprises even him. Robo-Bitch rounds on him again. 

“And you, boy. You won your sports festival, and I’ve got you strung up like a pig. We didn’t have to touch you to beat you. You are weak —weaker, maybe, than your friend over there, even.” She gestures toward Deku. “And you are the so-called best. What does that say about your school?”

“It says that…I am the fucking…best,” he breathes, but it is weak even to his own ears. He wants to say let me down from here and we’ll see who wins then , but he doesn’t have the breath for it, and he knows he would lose anyway. With his Quirk out of commission because of the cold and dehydration, his body disobeying him because of the blood loss and concussion, and his own weakness, he would be no match for any of these assholes. 

He is nothing. He grinds his teeth together and averts his eyes, and Robo-Bitch laughs because she knows. Of course she fucking knows. 

“Fuck…you.” He shifts on his aching arms and ignores her tittering laughter. He blinks, and he stares hard at Deku’s body again. The nerd is shifting—not dead and not too fucked up to move, thank fuck—but Katsuki still can’t see his face. He doesn’t know if it will be Nana or if Deku will be the one smiling up at him when he finally rolls over, and he doesn’t know which would be worse. 

“I’ll get an answer out of you somehow, you’ll see.” Robo-Bitch leans over and grabs a handful of Deku’s hair. She lifts his head off the ground at an uncomfortable angle, one that makes Katsuki wince despite his own aches. “So, tell me, boy, who’s it gonna be? You? Or Him?” She shakes Deku’s head, and the nerd’s eyes slide open. Behind them, there is no pain. There is none of the high-pitched protests he’s come to expect from Deku. 

This is Nana. 

Katsuki swallows. Nana’s stare burns him like Icy Hot’s ice. 

“It’ll be me,” he answers with more confidence than he feels. Inside, he shrivels away like a coward hiding in the corner and asking for his mom. Or for Aizawa, All Might, Deku, fucking Shitty Hair —anyone. “I ain’t fuckin’ weak.” 

Robo-Bitch takes this without contest, and she rewards him with a punch to the gut that has bile dribbling down his chin. He coughs once, but that sends bolts of stabbing pain through his chest, so he forces himself to stop. Instead, Katsuki groans and curses under his breath. The little Katsuki inside begs to be saved. An even smaller internal-Katsuki tells him not to be a little bitch. 

He forces himself to stretch his lips into a smile. 

“That’s all…you got? Seriously, you—” For this, he gets a metal fist to the face. Blood pours down his face from his nose, turning the forced smile bloody. “God, fuck …Dammit.” He drags in a breath through his mouth, but it is dense with cloyingly metallic taste. 

“Tell me how to get into UA.” 

“No fuh—fucking chance.” No fucking chance I’ll tell you—and no fucking chance you’d get in even if I did. “Bitch.” 

Katsuki drags his eyes away from Robo-Bitch’s face, where her mouth is flattened into a thin, enraged line, and he watches Nana as she watches him. She keeps her eyes narrowed to slits, but sometime during Katsuki getting the snot beaten out of him, she propped herself up against the wall opposite where he hangs. 

He’s glad it’s him who’s stuck here in this room instead of Deku. That’s the last thing he can remember thinking before Robo-Bitch makes herself known again, this time with a kick to his side, which sends him careening and his mind reeling.

Above the ringing agony that dances over every inch of him, Katsuki can’t function. He drowns in it, unable to even gasp or grunt.

His silence only angers the woman more and more. She tries yelling her question, hitting harder, saying nothing. He hangs, and he takes it as she forms new bruises over old ones with her metal fists. She never tires. 

The woman lets out a wordless, frustrated yell. She paces the floor in front of Katsuki as he swings, practically limp but mercilessly still conscious. He tracks her movement as thick, coagulated blood drips off his swollen bottom lip. It is sour on his tongue, but spitting it out takes too much energy that he doesn’t have. 

In a rage, Robo-Bitch grabs Deku by the front of the shirt. She pulls his body practically the whole way off the ground, and his head lolls on his shoulders. Through Katsuki’s blurred vision, the nerd looks dead.

Adrenaline races through him at the sight. He drags his chin off his chest and fights against gravity to keep it up. 

“S-security system,” he murmurs, coughs, and lets his head drop. Robo-Bitch whips around to look at him so fast he wonders how she isn’t dizzy. She releases her hold on Deku, and he drops an inch before floating the rest of the way down to settle on the ground like a fucking leaf in the beginning of autumn. 

“What?” Robo-Bitch spits. She grabs Katsuki by his bangs, dragging his head off his chest. His eyes roll in his head, and he blinks sluggishly. His lips work around a reply, but Katsuki is sapped of energy. He wishes he would just fucking pass out already. “What did you say, boy?” 

“Security…system,” he manages. It’s hardly louder than a whisper, more breath than sound, but she lets his head drop again. His chin knocks into his sternum hard enough to hurt, but it’s almost nothing under the throbbing under the surface of his skin on his face and the harsh ache literally everywhere else. 

At least it’s not Deku, he repeats to himself.

“There’s a security system? An electronic one?” Katsuki grunts in agreement, but he has no fucking clue. Even if UA did share the details of its own security with its students, Katsuki can’t think over the cottony feeling of blood loss that is turning less and less pleasantly soft with every passing moment. But UA isn’t that fucking stupid, and Katsuki doesn’t know how this bitch honestly expects to break into the top hero school in the nation. 

Number three in the whole world! a nerdy Deku-like voice adds. 

Still, Robo-Bitch takes this as an answer, and she—

She leaves. She actually fucking leaves; Katsuki could cry with relief. The door closes behind her, and Katsuki is left with a deafening silence and pulsing waves of pain. Aches are making themselves known now that he has no distraction. He closes his eyes and waits for mercy. Mercy in the form of not fucking being conscious anymore. 

“Why did you do that?” Nana murmurs. Katsuki drags open one of his eyes, and there is a look of pure, uncovered concern on Deku’s—Nana’s, this is Nana, not Deku—face that takes him by surprise.
“Do what?” Nana stands from where Robo-Bitch had dropped Deku’s body, brushing off the stained t-shirt and torn leggings. 

“You all but threw yourself in front of her instead of letting her attack me instead.” Katsuki resists the urge to roll his eyes. 

“Had to.” Now, Nana’s expression morphs into anger. Her lips press into a thin line, her brows furrow, and her eyes, so green and familiar, burn with a fire that might as well be straight from hell.   

Now she looks like Deku. Not just Deku’s face, but she looks like Deku . Katsuki takes solace in this and lets his eyes close again. His nose gives a particularly agonizing throb. It won’t be long now, he thinks. And thank God for it. 

“You had to put yourself in danger?” Nana splutters. “I cannot feel pain, Katsuki. I would have been perfectly fine under her attention. A few bruises are nothing to me, but you—I don’t think you realize how much she fucked you up.” 

He wants to say a lot of things, then. He does realize how much Robo-Bitch fucked him up, thank you very much. He can feel every damn bit of how much she fucked him up. And, yes, he had to pick himself over Deku. She might not feel the pain, but Deku will when he comes back. 

“Don’t…regret it,” he breathes before, finally, he passes out. 

Chapter Text

He and Deku had been out doing the public service required of them as hero students when they were kidnapped. With everything that had happened during the year, from the USJ to the training camp incident to the entire fucking war , their yearly requirements had fallen to the wayside until now. 

You’d think UA would turn a blind eye and let them be about it, but Nezu provided class 1-A with a list of opportunities and expected them to continue on as normal. As if nothing ever happened. Some bullshit about preceding classes and Plus Ultra and routines that even Aizawa made snarky comments about. 

Katsuki signed up to pick up trash in their local park. It was either that or tutor some fucking snot-nosed kid, and he’d rather fill ten dumpsters than try to keep his temper in check for a full two-weeks’ worth of tutoring, so trash pick-up it was. 

What he didn’t sign up for was finding Deku in the same park on the same day, trash bag in hand and dorky, excited smile firmly in place. 

“Kacchan!” the nerd greeted, smiling widely. He waved with his free hand, and Katsuki gave him a begrudging nod in return. 

Considering the fact that weeks where the nerd went off to play awol-vigilante were some of the worst weeks of Katsuki’s life, he was trying to be more… becoming. All he got in return from the nerd were confused, odd looks and head tilts. He could be a little more grateful, Katsuki thought, but he bit his tongue.  

“The fuck are you doing here, nerd?” he said instead. He buried his hands in the pockets of his pants. Both he and Deku were dressed in their basic costumes (something about early publicity), though Deku had forgone his metal mouthguard and the tattered yellow cape he’d taken to wearing now that he was back at UA. Katsuki left his gauntlets with Crazy-Eyes in the support department. They weren’t exactly conducive to work like this, and she was tinkering with them despite his protests that they were fucking fine as they were.  

“There was an open spot on the sign-up sheet for this, and I thought—I cleaned up Takoba Beach back with,” he dropped his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, glancing over his shoulder at the empty park, “ All Might , and it helped me get so much stronger! So, I signed up to come clean up trash again, just sort of for old times’ sake, I guess, but this time I’m with Kacchan instead of All Might!”

“Tch.” Katsuki rolled his eyes at the nerd’s rambling. Rumors about someone cleaning Takoba started to circulate toward the end of their last year in middle school; he hadn’t known that was Deku’s doing. That beach was where everyone dumped everything. Once, he went to explore it with those stupid extras he kept around back then, and they’d found an entire car that looked like it had been set on fire. 

The idea of Deku pulling a car across the beach…the nerd really was getting stronger. Not that Katsuki would ever say that to his face. 

“Not sure picking up wrappers is going to do much for you anymore, Deku,” Katsuki commented, smirking and jerking his head toward the litter lining the lake. Deku let out a short, high laugh that sounded so genuine it made Katsuki’s chest ache. 

“No,” he admitted, “probably not, but at least it means I get to hang out with Kacchan for a day!” Before the war, even as their friendship was on the mend, he would’ve sworn and yelled and tried to explode Deku’s face off for saying something embarrassing like that. More out of habit than anything, Katsuki’s chest flared with— something . He pushed it aside and punched Deku in the shoulder. 

It wasn’t as hard as they both knew it could be. Deku’s grin was blinding. 

Katsuki took the trash bag out of his hand and stalked off toward the lake. He felt hot all over, but he blamed it on the beginnings of spring and his naturally-high resting temperature. 

Deku found another trash bag and followed Katsuki, and they worked almost shoulder-to-shoulder as they picked wrappers and empty aluminum cans out of the weeds at the edge of the water. Katsuki muttered under his breath about how disgusting people are, and Deku chuckled at him. He kept a dorky, content smile on his face even as Katsuki’s back began to ache and the evening became cooler and cooler. The days were warm, but without the sun, the wind was biting. 

Deku’s gloves were dirtied and stiff, and he fumbled with his mostly-full trash bag enough that the cold was more than likely starting to make his fucked-up joints ache, and Katsuki finally stood and stretched his hands over his head. His back popped, and he groaned, satisfied and pleasantly sore. 

When he glanced at the nerd, Deku only smiled up at him, still kneeling in the mud at the edge of the lake. The metal knee pads on his costume were caked with mud and bits of grass. Katsuki ignored the way parts of Deku’s costume were still tattered and ruined from his time on his own. Most of it had been replaced; the main body of Deku’s costume had to be trashed because, one, it smelled like shit and, two, it was stained so thoroughly with blood and grime that no one in the class could look at it for too long, let alone try to scrub it clean. 

He opened his mouth to say something—maybe to concede that he had missed Deku, though months had passed since he apologized for real and the nerd collapsed in his arms, and they brought him home, or maybe to tell him that he was glad Deku took the spot to clean with him.

Katsuki realized, strikingly, that he was content. He spent a day he could’ve used for training or for chipping away at his frankly criminally-large pile of homework instead on cleaning up some park because the shitheads in town can’t be bothered to use the trash can, but he was content. He was content because he did it with Deku at his side, and he wanted to explode with his need to say something about that. 

God, he’d have to tell his therapist about this later, wouldn’t he? Because didn’t this count as progress? 

Fucking Deku .  

He opened his mouth to say something, but he didn’t get more than a breath out before Deku’s eyes widened, and he stumbled to stand, dropping his trash bag so that it spilled out all of their progress back into the lake. Katsuki didn’t have the time to question that before something hard hit him in the side of the head. His world tilted, and he fell, limp, into the lake. His vision danced and flashed, and he watched, half-submerged among the trash he and Deku had spent all day picking up, as Deku wrestled with two people-shaped blurs. Katsuki blinked and worked his mouth around every unsaid word he’d wanted to say a second ago, and he tried to drag himself out of the water. 

He fumbled for purchase, finding none in the water, and his eyes drifted away from the fight that, even through his blurred vision he could tell, Deku was swiftly losing. 

Katsuki watched as one of the figures raised a long, thick crowbar over their head before bringing it down onto Deku’s head once, twice, three times, and Katsuki sees his head split open and then the crowbar comes down on his prone form again and—  

* * * *

“Deku,” Katsuki grunts, a bitten-off shout. His chest heaves at the nightmare (the almost-memory, his mind supplies, a nightmare that he could have lived through if these villains had been less merciful), and his ribs creak and protest, and he can’t get in a full breath around his panic and the broken ribs. He draws in another hissing, thin breath through his teeth and lets it out with a keening noise born both of panic and pain. 

Somewhere in the room, there is a shuffling noise like someone standing in a hurry or like mice digging at the walls. He kicks his legs, but the movement makes his body ache like it’s on fucking fire , and he swallows back a scream, squeezing his eyes closed. 

“Katsuki—Katsuki,” a desperate, panicked voice beckons. He doesn’t recognize the voice, it’s not Deku—it’s not fucking Deku, and he doesn’t know who the fuck it is , so he forces his eyes open into slits, and it is Deku, but it’s not, and— “You need to calm down, kid.” Deku’s eyes are blown wide with panic, and Katsuki hiccups. 

“Nn— Deku ,” he pleads. He doesn’t know what he wants the nerd to do or if he can do anything to save Katsuki anymore, but if anyone can, it’s Deku. “P- please .”

“I don’t—Katsuki, you have to breathe.” Deku’s hands flutter by his sides as if he wants so badly to do something but can’t. 

“I can’t ,” he insists. “You—they—” The edges of his vision darken like a flashing vignette on those old movies his dad likes. “They—they—and I—” 

“Katsuki, please,” Deku begs, but Katsuki can’t hear him over the ringing in his ears. 

“I should—should’ve been stronger, D-Deku. I need to be—they—you just…y-you…” Katsuki trails off. He blinks once, sluggishly, and he can’t see anything but a formless shade of black, and he chokes. Distantly, he hears the voice that isn’t Deku’s but has Deku’s face telling him to calm down, but he can’t. He can’t; he’s trapped in his own panic, and he’s dizzy with it and with the lack of oxygen, and Katsuki fades away again.

* * * *

Katsuki wakes the first time to a grunt and a dull thump. Not from him, but from someone else who is somewhere in the room—he hasn’t yet gotten around to opening his eyes or lifting his head or anything more than acknowledging his own sudden consciousness. 

He forces one eye open, and he squints at the scene before him. The douchebag from earlier, the one who had dislocated Deku’s arms, stands over the nerd. His back is to Katsuki, and Katsuki can’t see Deku’s face, only the bottom half of his body where his legs are half-curled toward his torso in a half-assed attempt at the fetal position. 

Elasti-Arms lets out a frustrated yell and drives his foot into Deku’s gut with a grunt. Deku doesn’t make a noise beyond his breath whooshing past his lips. Katsuki swallows, but his throat is so dry he can’t tell the guy to fuck off even if he had the energy to do so; as it is, Katsuki’s grasp on consciousness is fading again. 

The next kick is hard enough to rock Deku’s entire body. He slides on the concrete, but he makes no outward reaction, which is enough to piss off Elasti-Arms more. The asshole tears at his hair, and when he turns to leave, Katsuki sees a thick tear track on his cheek. 

Katsuki’s lips draw into a smirk at the sight—he hopes the asshole cries himself to sleep.

The door slams closed behind him, leaving Deku and Katsuki alone again. Deku’s eyes are closed, and he rests his temple on the cold, rough ground. He has blood on his face and arm from the concrete equivalent of roadrash, but Deku draws in a long, deep breath before opening his eyes and sitting up. 

“Y’alive?” Katsuki slurs. Deku whips around fast enough that he should have whiplash, but he hurries to stand in the same movement. 

“Katsuki,” Deku says, reverent or relieved. 

“‘S Kacchan,” he complains. He would blush at that, but he’s not sure he has the blood to spare for that, honestly. The moment it comes out of his mouth, he remembers that this is not Deku, just Deku’s face and his body. His soul or whatever is resting. This is Nana. 

Despite the blood loss, his face feels hot at this, but Nana brushes it off. 

“You’re awake,” she says. She pats him on the knee, and he narrows his eyes at her. 

“‘N you’re lettin’ Deku get hurt,” he grumbles. “Told you—y’fucking him up. His body.” Nana waves him off, but he shakes his head, insisting, and she averts her eyes with a heaving sigh. 

“Listen, kid, when Izuku wakes up again, he’s going to be a hell of a lot more hurt by seeing you than he will be by me letting him get a little roughed up, all right?” She says it, and her eyes have pity in them. It’s a look he never wanted to see on Deku’s face. 

“Not a little . A lot,” he argues, but even he knows it’s pointless. Nana only stares at him, stubborn in the same way Deku is. They glare at each other for a long moment before Katsuki’s eyes flutter, and he digs his incisor into his lip to keep himself awake for another moment. 

“Tell me about Izuku,” Nana demands. Katsuki blinks at her in a way that he hopes says it’s taking everything in me to stay awake and you want me to fucking talk ? But she doesn’t back down. 

“Why?” Nana’s eyes flicker back and forth as she searches for a reason. 

“I don’t have access to his memories, as a vestige,” she tries, “and I want to know about him before One For All. Before the war and UA—I want to know my host.” Katsuki searches her face, but she gives nothing else away. “He seems like he would’ve been a sweet kid.” 

“Fuck you,” he says in the same breath as, “he’s been a fucking nerd since he was in diapers. Loved All Might. Followed me around like gum’n my shoe.” He huffs on a humorless laugh because they were sweet kids, but he knows what comes next. “‘n I fucked him over.”

“What?” Nana says after he lets a moment of silence pass. He gathers his energy as best as he can. 

“Middle school,” he murmurs like that explains everything. “I was his everythin’, ‘cept for Auntie and All Might, and I beat him to the ground every day. No one did anything to help, either.” 

“He was Quirkless.” Her voice says that this is a revelation. “I saw how they treated Toshinori.” 

“‘S worse now,” Katsuki grunts. “There’s less of ‘em, the Quirkless.” He knows the statistics—about how much of the population is Quirkless compared to what was, and he knows how many of them live to the age Deku is now. He doesn’t bother trying to recite them to her. “We all treated him like shit. ‘M sorry.” 

He reminds himself that he’s apologized. He apologized for real during the war, and Deku accepted it, and they’re friends again. He’s been forgiven, he knows, but—his actions always spoke louder than words, he knows. Deku knew how to brush off his insults and yelling, but he knows there are scars on the nerd’s body that are from him and not from other villains or from him blowing his own body to pieces. 

He hasn’t yet proven that he’s sorry. But he will.

“Don’t be,” Nana tells him, but he is. “Izuku forgave you a long time ago. He’d forgiven you by the time he took the torch of One For All.” 

“I know,” he says, miserable. “He shouldn’t have. I miss—he was a happy kid. He cried a lot, but he was happy. We had dreams and hopes, and we shared them, ‘n I wanted to be a hero with him. Now, he—he went off alone. Where I couldn’t help him. It was months before we heard him laugh again after he came back.” Katsuki remembers that laugh: Dunce Face had said something stupid, and Katsuki was yelling at him, and Deku laughed at them. He’d stopped almost mid-word to gape at Deku where the nerd had draped himself over the kitchen counter to watch them, the circles under his eyes still too dark despite how many months had passed since the war. His eyes were scrunched closed, and he laughed hard and loud, and Dunce Face excused himself to Shitty Hair’s dorm to cry over it. 

“He was trying to protect you, Katsuki. All of you, your class. He wanted what was best for you, and he thought he had to leave to give that to you.” 

“Yeah, well. It fuckin’ sucked,” he huffs. “Fuck off about it.”
“You apologized. He forgave you,” Nana insists. 

“I said fuck off.” He shoots her a glare, and she backs off. “All Might was his favorite ‘til I got my Quirk, and then I was his favorite. ‘til he didn’t get his Quirk. He would’a loved you if you were around when we were brats. He had those notebooks back then, too, but he wrote ‘em all in crayon. Auntie was convinced he was going to be some sort of genius when he was older—and he was. Is. Should’ve been nicer to him. He knows all my weaknesses.” He huffs out another laugh. 

Katsuki knows, also, the statistic about Quirkless villains, and he knows he’d be fucked if not for Deku’s long-standing dream of being a hero.    

  “He knows—he knows me,” Katsuki breathes. “Everything about me. ‘N he sticks around? He laughs at my jokes and smiles at me? But he knows me?”

“Of course he knows you, Katsuki,” Nana says, and he sounds so much like how Auntie talks to Deku that he aches. 

“Of course he fuckin’ does,” he repeats. He’s dizzy and he can’t think of anything else to say other than to repeat this over and over again: he knows me, he knows me, he— 

It is the last thing he has the wherewithal to say for a long, long time. 

* * * *

 Katsuki wakes up in much the same way he woke up the first time: aching, cold, and lost. He grunts, smacks his lips. His mouth tastes like he took a bite out of a cotton t-shirt, then threw up a little, and then tried licking a copper pipe. 

Gross. He smacks his lips again and blinks at the ground below him. Katsuki doesn’t have the energy to lift his head, but the angle he’s hanging at makes his neck ache the whole way down to his hips. Which doesn’t make any fucking sense to him—but most of his aches and pains are confusing right now anyway, so he doesn’t devote much more energy to thinking about it than he already has. 

“Katsuki,” a voice murmurs from somewhere in the room. Behind him, or in front of him, or maybe beside him. It seems to come from everywhere, and the volume of it makes his ears ring. He grunts. “Katsuki, lift your head.” 

“Why?” he garbles. In fact, he whines it like a little bitch—it’s pathetic, but the idea of even trying to lift his head despite the pain it’s causing makes him want to throw up or cry or both. More than likely, it would end up being both.  

“Because I need to make sure you’re not dead yet,” the voice snarks. “Now, come on.” 

“‘M not fuckin’ dead,” he groans as he fights gravity. He keeps his eyes closed as he raises his head because he knows the movement will make him dizzier than he already is, and his rolling stomach is waiting for any excuse to rebel even though these assholes haven’t fed them or given them anything to drink. Katsuki’s already thrown up everything he had in him, and his broken ribs give a pitiful twinge at the idea of dry heaving. “That bitch fucked—” he coughs weakly and drags open an eye, watching Deku heave himself into a standing position. “She fucked me up.” 

Deku steps carefully closer. The side of his face is swollen and bruised, and one of his front teeth is broken when he shoots Katsuki a reassuring smile, leaving a dark space under his top lip. 

“She’s been back a few times since you first passed out,” Deku explains, shrugging. His voice is strong but—off. Katsuki scrambles for the reason why, he knows that he knows why it sounds off, but his own mind is scrambled with pain and confusion. He stares blearily, which the nerd takes as a sign to continue. “You’ve been awake for most of them, but you’re having a hard time remembering them the next time you wake up.” 

“She fuck me up more?” 

“Yes,” Deku says after a brief pause. “She’s beaten you a few more times.” He says it like there’s something Katsuki doesn’t know. He has a bad feeling that a few is more than he’d like to know, though. “This is the first time we’ve gotten to speak before you passed right out again in…a long time. She gets angrier when we don’t give her answers, but that’s okay because help will come around soon, I’m sure.” 

“When did you get so good at talking?” 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Deku splutters, narrowing his eyes. “I’m always good at talking.” 

“You’re—like a hero,” he breathes. “Talking like you’re a hero, ‘n I’m a civilian. Villain attack. The aftermath. Like in the…after.” Katsuki struggles to grasp his coherency, but it slips quickly through his fingers. “When’d you get good at hero-talking, Deku?” 

The nerd gives him a pitying, close-lipped smile. He brushes his fingers over Katsuki’s cheekbone, one of the only places on his body that doesn’t hurt yet, and Katsuki leans into the touch like a fucking cat or something. He can’t help how his eyes flutter shut at the gentle contact. 

“Oh, Katsuki,” he murmurs. The nerd is floating, and he stays steady at Katsuki’s eye level. Usually, Deku bobs and stumbles in the air when he isn’t moving around like some kind of insane, suicide-bombing bird, but here, he is steady and confident in his floating. “I’m not Izuku, remember?” 

Katsuki squints at the nerd, lips moving as he tries to remember, tries to make sense of his words. Deku presses his lips into a thin line, his nose flaring with concern. 

“You’re not…Deku,” he repeats. He works the words over his dry tongue slowly, carefully, like that will make anything come rushing back. He remembers waking up the first time, and Deku was there that time. That was for-real Deku because he said something dumb that pissed Katsuki off—the rage is familiar, just under his skin, so that must have been the nerd. What the nerd said that pissed him off so much evades him, just out of reach, but he moves on, trudging through every shitty thing that’s happened in this hellish place. 

The short bitch, and Deku screaming. His side stings where Black Whip tore into him, but it is no longer pulsing with blood like before. Enough time has passed for it to have mostly scabbed over already. 

“You’re Nana,” Katsuki says. Nana offers him another tight-lipped expression with a half-hearted shrug.

There is more that rushes back: the first beating and then the next one and then more and more and more after that. A never ending flood of his own echoing cries and bones crunching under her care and the robot woman’s demands that he couldn’t answer, which only made him hurt worse. Eventually, she stopped asking him questions and just hit him over and over again. 

He remembers begging at one point. Begging her to stop.

She didn’t. 

“I’m Nana,” she confirms. “Izuku is still resting. It has only been…not long. I think.” She winces, which gives away her uncertainty. In as long as Katsuki can remember of this place, the lights have never so much as flickered. He’s not sure how long he was passed out at the beginning of all of this or how long he’s been fading in and out, but if Nana’s words are anything to go by, they’ve been here for a while. “Well, not long enough for him to heal.” Even the amendment is weak.

“Wanna go home,” he says, hiccuping on a sob. He thinks of the dorms, his own bed. He misses being able to feel his arms and hands, and he misses Deku. 

Nana cups his cheek and wipes at his face, but there are no tears. He leans into the contact, and she lets him do it without commenting on it. 

“I know,” she tells him instead. “I want you to go home, too. I wish I could—” 

“‘M tired,” he interrupts, not caring about how rude it is. He’s never cared about manners before, and for some reason, this doesn’t quite feel like the time to start. Still, he’s never been one to interrupt like that. He doesn’t care; he’s so achingly tired. “‘M tired, and I want to go home .” 

“You’re going to get home, Katsuki.”

“Promise?” he asks, uncharacteristically young. 

“I promise.”

“Nana,” he gasps, chest heaving as he crumbles and cries, “I’m scared.” She strokes his cheek like she’s his mother, but she has Deku’s face and his soft, gentle expression.

For a moment, Katsuki lets himself pretend it’s Deku.

* * * *

Someone is shaking Katsuki awake, and it hurts like fucking hell . He thinks he says as much, but the shaking doesn’t stop. In fact, it gets worse. 

Must be a new way to torture him. Robo-Bitch got bored of beating him to a bloodied, broken pulp already? He’s still got a few bones intact, he thinks—but at this point, he’s staying unconscious through the beatings, waking up halfway through. He won’t make it through many more of them, probably. 

Death would be better than this. He’s starting to accept it. He has no answers, no way to save himself from the next beating; Katsuki is re-evaluating being a hero, really, because if he did have information, he would have given it up by now. Just to make it stop for a few hours. A day, if he got lucky. 

All Might wouldn’t give it up so easily. 

Fuck All Might. Katsuki hurts all over. He’s tired. He wants to go home or die already. 

 The hand on his ankle tightens, and he feels bones grind against each other. Katsuki goes stiff all over, arching his back and screaming, eyes wide but unseeing. 

“Stop, stop, stop! ” he pleads, but he should know by now that it will do nothing to help him. It hasn’t in the past, at least. 

But the hand jerks away as if he’s burned it. His chest heaves (ow, fuck, his ribs are still fucking broken), and he sobs as he goes limp again. 

“Katsuki, you need to stay awake,” Deku hisses. Katsuki shakes his head and begs, pleads. He doesn’t want to stay awake. Let him go. “Yes, stay awake. I—something is going to happen. I can feel it.” 

“D-Danger sense?” he slurs. His eyes are closed, but he feels Deku lingering in front of him, hesitant to move away.   

“What? No. I can’t access the other—it doesn’t matter. You just—I think—” 

The door to their cell flies open with enough force that Katsuki cringes away at the reverberating noise of it hitting the wall. It vibrates through the room, through him , and he opens his eyes in time to see Deku slumped over at his feet, eyes rolled convincingly back in his head, and the robot woman stalking closer. She leaves the door open behind her, which they don’t usually do, he thinks. He can’t remember. 

She brushes past him, which is definitely not how this usually goes, and she grabs Deku by the hair, pulling him the whole way off the floor until his body is arched against hers, his head resting on her collarbone and his feet scrabbling for purchase on the floor. His eyes are open now, but there is no pain in them. His hands start to reach for the woman, but she wraps an arm over his chest, trapping his arms at his sides, and she presses the edge of a knife into the side of his chest, putting another thin hole into the fabric of Deku’s t-shirt. 

Katsuki grunts and jerks his shoulder toward them. 

“Deku,” he whispers, not strong enough to yell. Deku’s eyes are on the door, wide and round with desperation as he tries to put as much distance between his body and the gleaming edge of the knife. “Deku.” Katsuki jerks again. 

“Katsuki,” Deku whispers back, and their eyes meet for a split second before the woman jerks, panicked and frantic like a cornered animal. 

“Izuku,” Katsuki replies, lips trembling. “Let him go. Let him go, please.” The robot woman spares him a moment-long glance before she returns her attention to the doorway. “No, no, no, ” he groans, one long string of denials that grate on the back of his throat. 

Katsuki watches the knife go in like a butter knife into warm butter, and blood blooms around the edges of the hole in the fabric. It’s so red. Katsuki shakes, and he repeats Deku’s name over and over again. He’s gasping, begging, pleading, no longer with the woman but with the world. 

Not Deku. Not Izuku. It wasn’t supposed to be him.

Katsuki watches through tear-blurred vision as Deku jams his elbow into the woman’s gut and throws his head back into her nose in the same, swift movement. She crumples behind him into a heap, and more figures descend upon her. Others drag Deku toward the corner, away from Katsuki. 

The nerd is still fucking standing, the handle of the knife jutting out from his side, but he’s upright. 

“Bakugou,” a familiar voice says in greeting. Aizawa stands in front of him, Edgeshot beside him. But Katsuki is too busy watching the heroes crouch over Deku’s body as the nerd sits up, smiling with his broken tooth and broken face, and—and it’s not fucking Deku, he remembers. 

It’s Nana. 

Deku is resting, and he’s far away from here, and for the first time, Katsuki is glad. He’s so glad that he cries. He sobs, a smile glued to his face, even though his lips are wobbly, and he huffs out a delirious laugh. 

Fucking Deku.

“We are going to lower you down, Bakugou,” Aizawa tells him, but Katsuki couldn’t care less anymore. He registers the room shifting around him, the chains falling away and his arms falling like rocks to his side. The shifting hurts almost as much as Nana shaking him awake had, but Aizawa cradles him close to his chest, and Katsuki cries. 

“Deku is gone,” he whispers, staring up at his teacher’s face. He has more scruff than Katsuki remembers him having, and there are craters under his eyes. He shakes his head. 

“No, Bakugou,” Aizawa murmurs, “Midoriya is alive. He’s right over there, see?” He tilts Katsuki so he can see Deku again. “He’s okay. He’s fine. You’re both—” 

 “It’s not Deku,” Katsuki sobs. His hand wraps around Aizawa’s capture weapon, clutching it hard enough to send sharp bolts of pain up his arm. “It’s not—that’s not Deku.” 

He repeats it over and over again like a record that keeps getting stuck on different parts of a song, and Aizawa strokes a hand through his grimey hair. 

“We’re gonna figure this out,” Aizawa promises, “and you’re going to be okay, kid.” Katsuki nods and nods and keeps nodding, gasping and shaking and hurting all over, but he’s going home. Aizawa wipes at his tears and holds him closer.

“It’s not Deku,” he tells himself. “It’s not Deku. ”

Chapter Text

Apparently, his parents haven’t left his side since Aizawa brought him into UA’s medical ward. 

The old hag is actually crying when he opens his eyes.

“Katsuki, Katsuki,” she sobs, clutching at the front of his hospital gown. Her face is red and splotchy, and Katsuki gapes up at her, blinking. “You made me fucking worry, you brat.” But she drags him into a tight hug, burying her face in his hair, and he swallows hard because he can feel her sobs ricocheting through his body. His hands rise slowly to hug her back, patting at her shoulder until she releases him. 

Fucking bizarre, this is. Almost more bizarre than getting kidnapped and tortured. 

He settles himself back on his hospital bed again, marveling at the lack of pain—but the lingering wooziness and the blank, numb feeling all over his body suggests painkillers instead of a healing kiss to make it all better—and lets his eyes jump from face to face: his dad and the hag clutch at each other next to his bed, Aizawa lingers near his feet with a flat, tired expression on his face, and Recovery Girl perches on the edge of her stool near his head, leaning on her cane with a grim look to match Aizawa’s. 

He rolls his head to look at the next bed over, expecting to see Auntie and All Might and Deku, but the bed is empty and unruffled. Untouched. 

Usually, they would put him and Deku into one room while they were healing after doing something stupid like—like getting themselves kidnapped. But the bed is empty, and Katsuki doesn’t want to think about any of the many things that could mean.  

“Deku?” he rasps, coughing on the end of the name. His hands ball up at his sides, and he strains to sit up in the bed. Next to him, the heart monitor picks up into a rapid beeping noise, and the people in the room shift, exclaiming wordlessly as he struggles to get upright. He keeps his eyes glued to the empty bed. 

“Bakugou—” Aizawa starts.

“Katsuki, lay down—” his dad tries, stepping forward to push him back down onto the bed with two warm, gentle hands on his shoulders. Katsuki shakes his head and meets Masaru’s eyes, frantic. He wraps his hands around his dad’s wrists so tight that it must hurt, but Masaru gives no indication of pain. His expression is one of worry instead of pain. 

“Where’s— Deku ?” he gasps, kicking his legs desperately. “Please, I want—I need Deku.” 

“Bakugou,” Aizawa murmurs again, and Katsuki jerks, zeroing in on his teacher instead. Aizawa keeps head bowed, his hands folded in front of him. Katsuki points an accusatory finger at him, brushing off his father’s hands. 

“Where is he?” 

Aizawa drags his eyes off the floor and meets Katsuki’s gaze. He looks like he’s forcing himself to do it, his eyes tired and guilty and his lips pressed into a firm, thin line. Katsuki hates him for it.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” he admits. Katsuki squints at him, mouth working. Finally, he narrows his eyes and pushes back the folded, pressed edge of the stiff top sheet, and he swings his legs over the edge of the bed. His father reaches for him again, but Katsuki shrugs off his touch with a grunt. 

Bandages are wrapped around every part of his body that is not covered by the gown, and his leg is made heavy by a thick, plain cast, but he doesn’t fucking care, not when Deku is apparently fucking missing. 

“How,” he heaves, glaring at Aizawa, “the fuck did you lose him?” When Aizawa lets the silence stretch for more than a moment, Katsuki continues, gripping the edge of the bed to prepare himself before he forces himself to get vertical again. “He was right fucking there when you rescued me. He got fucking stabbed, and he took down that robot bitch, and you lost him ?” 

Katsuki pushes himself off the bed, the world tilting around him as he takes his first step in as long as it’s been since that day in the park with Deku. The step is halting and takes more out of Katsuki than he’d like to admit, but he shuffles forward until he has to tilt his head back ever so slightly to meet Aizawa’s eyes. 

They share a hard look, their jaws set and expressions blazing, until Katsuki’s legs buckle out from under him. 

His teacher catches him in his capture weapon, the hold tight but not painfully so. It is comforting, almost, except Katsuki still struggles against it, growling and cursing. 

They talk over each other, voices rising in volume until they fill the room: 

“Bakugou—” 

“What the fuck did you—” 

“—the pros are trying to—” 

“—I don’t fucking—” 

“—this situation—” 

“—fuck you!” 

“ Bakugou ,” Aizawa finishes sharply. His capture weapon raises Katsuki off the ground enough that they’re eye level—a few inches at most, but he panics as his feet leave the ground. He strains to keep himself touching the floor, but even those few inches are enough that his toes only graze the tiled floor of the medical ward, and he grits his teeth and closes his eyes, and he’s back in that fucking room, strung up by his numb arms, listening to Deku get beaten to hell, knowing his turn was next. 

His breathing ticks up in speed, his inhales long and his exhales short until his chest feels like it might burst, his lungs might explode inside of him. 

“Let me down,” he gasps, and little, popping explosions smoke in the palms of his hands, a comforting feeling but not comforting enough; he still feels like he might die. “Let me down, let me down.” 

Aizawa lowers him back down, the capture weapon slithering away like a ball of unwinding yarn, leaving Katsuki to kneel on the ground at Aizawa’s feet. He wraps his hand into the fabric of the hospital gown as he catches his breath, dragging in shaky breaths through his teeth and huffing them back out. 

“Are you—” 

“I’m fucking fine.”  

Aizawa kneels to his eye level, crossing his legs and slouching. He keeps his palms facing up and rests his hands on his bent knees. Katsuki glares at him. 

“Are you fucking serious?” he asks, and his voice is hoarse, but he won’t show weakness by asking for water. Still, Recovery Girl sets a glass next to him before she shuffles out the door of his room with a promise to be back later to check over again, and his parents follow hesitantly behind her. The hag gnaws on her bottom lip and watches Katsuki until he can’t see her anymore. 

They leave the door open, and he’s glad for it.

“What do you mean, Bakugou?” Aizawa asks, voice calm and objective. Still, it rumbles through the room. It is familiar, and it is nothing at all like the robot woman’s tinny voice. Despite himself, Katsuki relaxes minutely. He stares down at his own palms where his Quirk crackles and pops and smokes.
“You taught us the lesson about talking to victims,” he mutters, “during the war. You told us to stay on their level, to make ourselves smaller but to keep an open posture. You even told us to keep our voices neutral—victims of villain attacks, people in shock, panicking people, will latch onto any emotion, which won’t always work in our favor as heroes.” Katsuki drags his gaze up until he can look at his teacher’s face from under his brow bone. His face gives nothing away except for vague surprise. “Don’t fucking treat me like I’m a victim.” 

“You—” 

“I’m not. I got kidnapped,” Katsuki insists, “and I got fucked up, but I’m not a fucking victim.” Aizawa says nothing to this; Katsuki knows that Aizawa doesn’t believe him. He doesn’t believe himself yet, but that’s what he told himself after Kamino, and it worked then. 

“Okay,” Aizawa concedes. “Okay.” 

“So, tell me if the nerd is fucking dead or—or what’s happening, okay? And if you lie, I’m going to be really fucking pissed, and I’m going to leave UA,” he continues, rambling and not giving Aizawa a chance to respond, “because you know all those other shitty hero schools would be falling over themselves for a chance to have me, okay? So don’t—don’t lie.” His voice cracks, and he chews on his lip, and Aizawa doesn’t say anything for a long, dragging moment. 

Dramatic asshole. 

“He’s not dead,” he says, finally. A breath rushes out of Katsuki, and he slumps into himself, nodding. “He’s not dead, but we aren’t sure…the person we rescued with you is being detained in another part of the medical ward.”

Katsuki fumbles at that. He blinks once, twice, gaping because what? What the fuck? His mind races with questions, his eyes flickering back and forth over his teacher’s face. He’s not one to joke, and there is no humor on his face now. Only tired resignation.  

“The person you…that was Deku. I was kidnapped with Deku, you rescued Deku with me,” he settles on. He wants to reach up and take Aizawa by the shoulders and shake some sense into him. Desperation tears at the insides of Katsuki’s lungs. “It was fucking Deku.” 

“You’re safe now, Bakugou,” Aizawa tells him like he doesn’t already fucking know that. 

“I want to see him,” he demands. He knocks over the glass of water as he tries to push himself off the ground again, but his arms are weak and shake under his weight. His legs don’t cooperate, and the water soaks the hem of the gown, turning it a dark blue color. “Take me to—I want to see Deku.” 

Sweat beads on his hairline, and it takes more effort than it should to try to stand, and finally, Aizawa takes pity on him or realizes that Katsuki’s stubbornness will outweigh his own energy for this situation, and he once again snakes his capture weapon around Katsuki’s middle. This time, he lifts Katsuki into a standing position, but he keeps both of his feet firmly on the ground. Katsuki grunts, and that’s as much thanks as his teacher is going to get. 

Aizawa forces him into a nearby wheelchair, keeping him there with his capture weapon, but Katsuki wouldn’t struggle anyway; he’s drained, but more than that, he doesn’t want to risk not being able to see Deku. He even allows Aizawa to push him around without so much as a snarky, half-assed comment about being strong enough to do it on his own. 

He ignores the surprised hesitation he receives for his silence. Fuck everyone and fuck everything. Katsuki grumbles insults, complaints, and curse words under his breath, which is what finally sets Aizawa into motion. 

Katsuki’s parents are loitering in the hallway, their heads bowed together as they whisper to each other when he and Aizawa emerge from the room. He can feel their concern radiating off of them in thick, suffocating waves that sort of make him want to cry as he and Aizawa linger in the doorway, and they jerk apart, Masaru smiling tightly in a way that is probably meant to be reassuring but misses the mark. The hag’s expression is the softest Katsuki’s ever seen it; he almost doesn’t recognize her.  

“Going to see Deku,” Katsuki grunts as Aizawa wheels him past. They nod like bobbleheads, and he knows they know better than to protest when it comes to Deku. 

He and Aizawa remain in stoic silence as they pass enough identical closed doors to make Katsuki think that Aizawa is trying to fuck with him. He starts to open his mouth to say something about it when Aizawa stops suddenly enough to almost send Katsuki tumbling to the floor; he is kept in the chair only because of the capture weapon’s firm grip on his torso. 

“What the fuck, old man?” Katsuki barks, straining to turn to shoot him a glare. Aizawa’s eyes are on the window next to them. 

The window is double-paned and tinted dark, and Katsuki can’t see over the edge into the room, but he assumes that this is where they’re keeping the nerd. He levers himself up out of the chair, keeping one hand wrapped around the windowsill for support, even though he trusts Aizawa not to drop him. Probably. 

There are bars on the other side of the window. Thick and metal and not at all subtle. Beyond the bars, there is a bed. In it, Deku lays on his back, his eyes open and staring holes into the ceiling, his face blank and his posture stiff. 

His wrists are cuffed to the bedframe with what look like Quirk-suppressing cuffs. Katsuki growls at the sight and whips around for an explanation. He ignores the way the hallway spins at the too-sudden movement. 

“Why the hell is he chained up like he’s some damn villain?” Aizawa’s eyes flit toward him and back to the window. His shoulders are squared and stiff like he’s ready for a fight or a nap. “Tell me! I told you I’d—” 

“When we rescued you, we didn’t know what kind of condition you would be in. It had been two and a half weeks, and we didn’t know who took you or where they were keeping you or why. It could have been a—worst case scenario, it was another sleeper group of the League. And we were told to operate on the assumption that this was the worst case scenario for the safety of you two and everyone else involved in saving you.” 

“What the fuck does that have anything to do with this?” Katsuki hisses, waving a hand at the window. His fingers brush against the cool glass. Aizawa continues like Katsuki hadn’t even spoken. 

“We had to be cautious, Bakugou, because we don’t…none of us can grasp the power the League holds even after the war. No threat of this level has ever been made against the heroes of Japan before. Against Japan itself.” Aizawa swallows hard. Katsuki is on the side of him where he can see his eye, but the man shifts against his prosthetic leg uncomfortably. “We didn’t want to release these people into society again because we didn’t know who they were. What their Quirks were, what they wanted.” Katsuki bites his tongue, waiting for Aizawa to continue again. “When we rescued you, you were insistent that the person in the cell with you was not Midoriya.” 

Katsuki remembers the euphoric feeling of knowing Deku was safe, far away from the knife lodged in his side. He remembers crying and babbling into Aizawa’s chest. He blinks. 

“That was the new worst case scenario—we were rescuing a person who looked like Midoriya but wasn’t actually him.”

“I was fucking bleeding out,” he seethes, “and you believed me?” 

“It was the only thing you were saying at the time, and it sounded like a warning. We had to be—” 

“Cautious, yeah, I get that.” Katsuki presses a hand against the glass, his palm flat against the smooth surface. “I could’ve been someone else. Did you consider that? I could’ve been another villain like Twice or Toga who was trying to break the heroes apart from the inside. Creating mistrust or whatever the fuck.” Aizawa says nothing to this, so Katsuki continues. “So just because I said something while I was delirious, bleeding out, and concussed, you decided to chain him up and keep him away from everyone? Away from his mom and All Might and—and me ?” 

“Recovery Girl found a wound on your side,” Aizawa says like that helps his argument at all. “The edges of it were torn in a way that suggests Black Whip was involved.” 

“There’s a perfectly fucking good explanation for that,” Katsuki bristles. “And if you ever try to put the blame for that on Deku, I really will fucking leave. Because it wasn’t his fault.” 

Aizawa runs a hand over his face, leaning heavily on the window frame.  

“Kid—” 

“Unwrap me.” He tugs at the bottom of the capture weapon insistently, demanding. Aizawa sighs and allows Katsuki to stand on his own again. He grits his teeth; the longer he’s away from his own room, the more his painkillers are starting to wear off. He can feel every ache that has gone so far untouched by Recovery Girl’s healing kisses. Still, he remains stubborn and inches his way along the wall, past Aizawa, to the door. He wraps one hand around the doorknob and plasters his back against the metal surface, chest heaving from the effort of moving so much. Sweat rolls down the side of his face, and he probably smells ripe as hell. 

“Can you give me an explanation for all of this, then?” Aizawa asks with another long-suffering sigh. 

“There was—a girl,” Katsuki heaves. He pauses to catch his breath, and Aizawa doesn’t push him. “She…she, like, fucked with his soul. Called her Quirk Fracture, I think, but she put her grubby little hands on him, and he was just screaming, and he was—he was so scared.” Katsuki swallows hard and licks his dry lips. “And then she left, and he was screaming more, and then there was Black Whip, and I was bleeding, but he didn’t want to die. He was just shrieking, Aizawa. Louder than I’ve ever heard him.” 

“You don’t—” Aizawa steps forward and reaches for him, but Katsuki brushes his hand away with a shaky breath. 

“And when he opened his eyes, he wasn’t Deku. He was Nana. Or, he was resting, Nana said, and she was in Deku’s body.”

“Nana?” Aizawa works the name over in his head. He comes up with a blank look. 

“All Might’s mentor.” 

“All Might’s mentor,” Aizawa repeats, voice distant and expression vaguely shocked. 

“Yes. The vestiges—when that girl fucked with Deku’s head, she weakened him enough that the vestiges could take over.” Katsuki stumbles through the explanation; he doesn’t fully understand all of it, but he’s not sure Nana does either. 

“The vestiges?” 

“The other users of One For All. Keep up,” Katsuki scoffs, rolling his eyes. He tightens his hold on the doorknob and squeezes his eyes closed. His head is starting to pound. “Nana said—she said Deku is in some sort of fucking soul coma?” 

“A…soul coma.” Aizawa works the phrase over his tongue like he’s testing it out. He drops his shoulders after a moment, burying the bottom half of his face into his capture weapon. “Nothing is ever easy when you problem children are involved, is it?” He sighs again, and Katsuki scoffs. 

“Fuck no. We’re really trying to make your life hell,” he snarks. “Why else would Deku and I bother getting kidnapped?” Aizawa rolls his eyes and buries his hands in his pockets, slouching and watching Deku through the barred window. Everything about him screams his hesitancy. “Did you even bother with trying to, you know, talk to him?” 

Aizawa glances at him with his one good eye, his expression unamused but entirely too telling for Katsuki’s tastes. 

“What the fuck.” 

“Language, Bakugou,” Aizawa mutters, even though he’s been lenient about Katsuki’s foul mouth until now. Katsuki shakes his head, defiant, and he presses his lips together. 

“You locked him up, and you didn’t even try to talk to him? Not even a—a fucking interrogation would’ve worked just fine, she would’ve explained all of it to you. You just took my word for it and cuffed him to a bed?” Katsuki splutters. “If that really was Deku, and you did that to him, do you know what that would fucking do to him?” 

Aizawa says nothing. 

“He trusts you,” Katsuki tells him. “He’s never gotten to do that before. He’s never gotten to trust a teacher, and you would—you would take my word for it? God.” Katsuki lets out a frustrated noise, tugging at his hair with his unoccupied hand hard enough that the roots sting and protest. The pain is grounding, but Aizawa tugs his hand away by the wrist, his touch gentle and calloused. 

“I’m sorry, Bakugou.” Aizawa releases his hold on Katsuki’s wrist and ignores the disgruntled look on the boy’s face. He bows his head. “We were waiting for you to wake up before we questioned him, which is why Recovery Girl hasn’t healed all of your injuries yet—the pros were hoping to get answers sooner rather than later, and with the extent of your injuries, your stamina would’ve been almost entirely used up with one of Recovery Girl’s kisses. We were hoping you would shed some light on the situation to give us some leverage against him if it really wasn’t Midoriya.”  

“Which I did. Just now.” 

“Which you did,” Aizawa confirms with a nod. Katsuki stares him down for another moment, evaluating him. There is nothing that suggests there is anything else, so Katsuki presses on the doorknob, stumbling as the door gives under his weight without the latch keeping it firmly closed. Aizawa doesn’t stop him. 

Katsuki rushes as fast as he can to the side of Deku’s bed—between his broken leg and his returning aches, it’s more of an awkward half-jog-shuffle than anything. He leans over the edge of the bed, his hands gripping Deku’s shoulders probably too tight, but Nana’s eyes shift from the ceiling to his face as he leans over her, and a wide smile breaks over her face. 

The tooth in the front of his mouth is still broken and missing, and the side of Deku’s face is bruised and swollen. It looks like Recovery Girl hasn’t bothered with kissing him better, even though he’s definitely seen her fixing up apprehended villains and criminals before. He glances over his shoulder at where Aizawa lingers in the doorway. 

“Recovery Girl’s kisses weren’t working on him,” he explains, but it’s really no explanation at all. 

“I feel none of the pain,” Nana murmurs. She wraps a hand around the bit of Katsuki’s gown that she can reach with the cuffs keeping her bound to the bed. She’s still smiling at Katsuki. “I’m glad to see you’re okay, kid. Izuku would be devastated if—” 

“I should blow you to fucking pieces right here,” he interrupts, “for pulling that bullshit with his body.” Despite the threat, Nana only smiles, her eyes soft and teary. 

“But you won’t,” she says, overly confident, but Katsuki folds, and he wraps himself around Deku’s body, squeezing him in a tight hug and reveling in the firm heartbeat that he can feel against the palm of his hand where it rests over Deku’s shoulderblade. He holds his breath, though, because Deku’s hair smells like blood and dirt and not like the dorky All Might-themed shampoo he still uses. 

When he pulls away, Aizawa is standing next to him, maybe too close—probably to make sure Katsuki wouldn’t actually blow Deku up. It’s been…at least two and a half weeks since Katsuki last exploded anyone. 

Granted, he spent that time kidnapped by some psycho sons of bitches, but the sentiment is there. 

Katsuki falls back into the uncomfortable chair next to the bed with a heaving sigh. The plastic digs into his back and arms, but now that he’s not standing, he isn’t quite sure he’ll be able to get back up even if he wanted to. 

Aizawa inspects Nana. Under his gaze, Nana shoots Katsuki an unsure, wide-eyed look, uncomfortable under the scrutiny. When Aizawa shifts away, apparently satisfied, she relaxes back into the bed, settling against the pillow. 

“Nana?” Aizawa asks. 

“That’s…me. I’m Nana, seventh user of One For All. Current occupant of this body while my host’s soul heals.” She offers up a half smile which is hesitant, but Aizawa grunts and nods, and she raises her hands as much as the cuffs will allow. “Unlock these?” 

Katsuki tracks Aizawa’s movement as he fumbles with the key and frees Nana from the cuffs. She turns Deku’s hands over, examining them. There are marks where the cuffs dug into the skin, but it’s nothing among his other scars and bruises. 

“You’re sure Recovery Girl tried to fix him?” Katsuki asks. Seeing Deku’s face beat in, his body still bruised all over where there aren’t bandages to match Katsuki’s, makes him a little nauseous. 

“I watched her try, Bakugou,” Aizawa says with a hint of apology in his voice. “Nothing changed.” 

“‘S fine,” he mutters, glancing away. It’s not really fine, but there’s nothing he or Aizawa or anyone can do about it other than stick a few bandaids all over the nerd and call it good. “Anyways, the fuck do you know about those assholes who were keeping us?” he asks, more to change the subject than because he cares to know anything about any of them. He doesn’t give a shit about them—he hopes they rot in jail and then rot all over again in hell. He hopes it hurts, too. 

Aizawa sighs for the millionth fucking time and settles against the foot of Deku’s bed. Nana curls her knees to her chest to give him more space.

“So far, we can’t find any connection with the League or any other villain organization. The group that kidnapped you was just a group of people that happened upon each other and shared similar attitudes and motivations. It happens sometimes, in hero work. We’re lucky there were only three of them and none were properly trained.” 

Katsuki bites back a scoff— lucky. He and Deku are fucked up more than they already were a month ago. The nerd is currently checked out of his body for the foreseeable future, and Katsuki is sore all over and apparently scared of taking his feet off the ground now. Lucky.

“Who the fuck were they, then?” 

“Their leader, Ogawa Shizu, she was the one who you interacted with the most, I assume—” 

“Robo-Bitch?” Katsuki interrupts. Something about putting a name to her face makes him want to hide in a corner and never show his face again. She’s a person, and she still fucking…did all of that to him. 

“Her Quirk is registered as Metallic. She was in Class B a few years ago, but Kan expelled her for misconduct in her second year. He recognized her when we brought her in, and he’s sorry that she did this to you both.” Aizawa pauses, draws in a breath. “We found records of two of Ogawa’s underlings in the school database. Both of them passed the physical portion of the entrance exam with…flying colors, but they failed the written exam. Both were rejected from UA because of this. Their rejection letters said nothing of their written exams, but I—I read their written exams while I was waiting for Bakugou to wake up, and they exhibited concerning apathy about the safe apprehension of villains, priority of civilians, and other ideas that the admissions committee consider important for future heroes. I’m…not surprised that they turned out as villains.”  

“Those were the short bitch and Elasti-Arms, right?” Katsuki confirms. He’s trying to remember his first real conversation with their leader, where she complained about UA and her friends . He had been surprisingly out of it then, or he would have given her much more snark for her stupid fucking idea of breaking into the school. 

“Right. Umesaka Seki and Shima Junzo. They applied to UA five years ago.” 

“That bitch—Ogawa—she said she wanted to get into UA, into Principal Nezu’s office,” Katsuki says. He isn’t sure what all the heroes, what Aizawa knows. Aizawa nods, folding his hands together in his lap.

“Shima informed us of their motivations pretty early on.” Katsuki scoffs and rolls his eyes, not surprised that he was the one who folded so early. 

“They were really terrible villains, weren’t they?” Nana comments, smiling to herself. 

“Oi,” Katsuki barks because they did get the drop on him and Deku, “you couldn’t figure out how to get us out of there, so I don’t want to hear any of that cocky bullshit outta you, y’hear?” 

Nana sits up straighter, defensive, “I haven’t had a place on the physical plane in as long as Toshinori’s been a hero, kid. I would hope you’d give me a little bit longer of a grace period.” Katsuki crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head. 

“Nope. Motherfuckers who need a damn grace period don’t get to be cocky.” 

“Bakugou, please,” Aizawa grumbles, rubbing at his temples. Katsuki rolls his eyes but motions for him to continue. “Their plan was to infiltrate UA and get ahold of old files, ones of current heroes and students that had been expelled and current students, and leak them. Their goal was to expose UA for raising faux-heroes and getting rid of the real heroes because they were too powerful.” Aizawa rubs at his face again, this time along his stubble that is almost a full beard by now. “They seem convinced that this would reduce society’s trust in the heroes we’ve produced, which would mean fewer students would apply here, and we would become obsolete as a hero school, which would make their rejection more acceptable.”

“So…they fucking kidnapped us because they were embarrassed that they didn’t get in here?” Katsuki splutters. Aizawa pauses. 

“Essentially, yeah.” 

“Stupid assholes.” Katsuki slides down in his chair, tucking his chin close to his chest with an expression that definitely isn’t a pout. Villains are so fucking stupid, and he’s going to be the number one hero so he can tell them that to their ugly mugs while he kicks their asses. 

“Listen,” Aizawa starts, “about this whole…soul coma thing—” 

“Izuku is recovering his strength,” Nana tells him, and her voice is genuine. “Slowly, but the rest is benefitting him. It’s a meticulous process, knitting your soul back together after something like that, but my host is…persistent.” 

“Deku’s stubborn as fuck,” Katsuki corrects. 

“He’s stubborn, and he’ll be okay. With a little bit of time.” Nana offers them a gentle smile, which Katsuki watches Aizawa dissect for any sliver of dishonesty. When he finds none, Aizawa nods and relaxes, slouching more firmly into the bed. He nods again, more to himself—convincing himself that Deku will be okay, Katsuki’s sure. He knows because he imagines he’s been wearing a similar expression for the past two weeks, between the beatings and the unconsciousness. 

“Umesaka’s victims are not usually so lucky,” he murmurs, voice thick. “Thank you for keeping my student alive, Nana. I owe you—everything for that.”  

Chapter Text

Nana opens her mouth to respond, her eyes shining, when the door to her room slams open. Recovery Girl stands in the doorway, unassuming in her small, hunched stature but wearing a withering expression that drops the temperature in the room at least six degrees. She stares Aizawa down before moving onto Katsuki. 

He shrinks away from her gaze, tucking his chin closer to his chest and glancing away. Next to him, Aizawa sits stiff and drawn tight like a student about to be reprimanded—in any other situation, he would laugh at the sight, but he’s more scared of Recovery Girl than he is amused by how quickly the tables turned on his teacher. 

She’s a scary old bat, that’s for fucking sure. 

“Explain, Shota,” Recovery Girl demands, her voice deceivingly sweet as she totters into the room. She closes the door behind her with a resounding click that makes Katsuki wince. “Explain how I left you with my patient—my injured patient who I agreed to hold off on healing only for as long as it took for you to get some damn answers out of him so long as you didn’t add to his stress and now he’s here, in the same room as the boy who looks a hell of a lot like one of our students but you were claiming was a villain not—not an hour ago.” She gestures first to Katsuki and the way he is holding himself gingerly as pain, aching and shooting and otherwise, races down his spine and through the rest of his nerves like it’s some fucking competition before she waves at Nana where she sits up in bed, wearing Deku’s face and an inquisitive expression that Deku would never show so openly.

For as much as the nerd feels, he’s always been so quick to hide away anything other than his fucking tears. 

If Katsuki squinted, he could almost pretend it was Deku in the bed, wholly okay and alive, but there is something off in the posture, something distinctly not-Deku, that gives Nana away. It’s in the way she holds the nerd’s shoulders and how she lays his hands in her lap and the way she can sit still without shifting or muttering. He’s not sure the teachers would have picked up on it, but he does. He’s known the nerd since they were in hero-themed diapers; Katsuki is sure that if he went into some soul coma thing and had some other bitch in charge of his body, Deku would know the difference, too. 

The thought makes him nauseous because—what if Deku wouldn’t notice? And Katsuki is just some creep for seeing all the little things in Nana that are so unlike him? No. No, Deku would notice, too, he’s sure of it. 

“Didn’t know you had it in you, old lady,” Katsuki says, mostly because Deku isn’t around to break the thick tension in the air with an apology or a nerdy remark or anything. He wants to glare at Nana for it but refrains. 

It’s not her fault. It’s not her fucking fault, he repeats to himself over and over again, a mantra that sticks like peanut butter to the insides of his cheeks. 

Unfortunately, his remark means that Recovery Girl rounds on him. She hobbles toward him, leaning on her cane as it clicks against the cool, tiled floor of the infirmary room’s floor, and no matter how slowly she moves, there is nowhere he can go to get away from her. His eyes flit around the room for an escape, but he is trapped in the room. The door is closed, and he is trapped in the room, and Deku’s breathing is the only thing he can hear over his own pounding heart, and she’s coming closer and closer, and all he can do is wait for the blow, for his bones to give under the force behind a metal arm, or wait to hear the wet, visceral sounds of Deku getting the fucking snot beat out of him, but he can do nothing but hang here and— 

There are wet lips on his cheek. He draws in a thin, gasping breath at the feeling, eyes blown wide and hands clutching the arm rests on the hospital chair hard enough to have accidentally melted and warped the plastic under his Quirk-warm hands. His chest heaves, and he forces himself to release his hold on the chair, leaving behind finger-shaped indentations in the plastic and a chemical smell like cooked Saran wrap. 

He glances up at the old bitch, swallowing hard, and he tries to ignore the concern in her crow-footed eyes. He looks away, toward his teacher, but that’s a mistake because he wears the exact same expression as Recovery Girl, so he stares a hole into the place where the walls and the ceiling meet and presses himself into the back of the chair until the top of it digs into a notch in his spine—the feeling of it is grounding as the pain recedes like an ebbing storm or like water through a thin hole. He can all but trace Recovery Girl’s Quirk through his body, the bruises, aches, and cuts fading into nothing, leaving a ringing, unfamiliar state of…not being in pain anymore. For the first time in two and a half weeks, there is nothing. 

The result is a strange floating feeling, almost dissociative, as if the pain was the only thing keeping Katsuki bound to his body. He jerks, presses his socked feet into the ground and presses his knees into the metal sides of Deku’s hospital bed, and he lets out a breath as feeling surges back through him.

With it comes an onslaught of Quirk-induced exhaustion on top of his preexisting tiredness, which makes his head loll on his shoulders and his blinks slow. The world turns to slow-moving sludge around him. He swallows hard and forces himself to stay awake. He raises a shaky hand toward Deku’s bed. 

“Heal him,” he requests, and even talking saps him of more energy that he doesn’t have. He drags in a deep breath and holds it, setting his jaw as Recovery Girl, Aizawa, and Nana all shoot him pitying looks.

He hates them all. 

“Come on, old lady,” he rasps, waving his hand in a vague, demanding gesture. “Not gonna…not gonna stay awake much longer. Wanna see you fucking smack one on him before I fall asleep.” He matches her pity with a glare of his own, staying awake out of spite as she leans over the edge of the bed and presses her lips to Deku’s temple. Nana keeps her gaze on Katsuki even as she leans into the touch. She observes him, and he would feel uncomfortable except for the fact that he’s used to Deku’s eyes on him. The nerd’s been nerd-ing out over Katsuki since they came out of the womb. 

Recovery Girl backs away from the bed, head bowed somberly. She places both hands on top of her cane and presses her lips together into a thin line.

And nothing happens. The bruises on Deku’s face and arms don’t go away. His posture is still Nana’s, not Deku’s. Katsuki looks away and nods, his chest filled with static. He nods again and shrugs off Aizawa’s hand when he places it on Katsuki’s shoulder. He stands behind him, a looming figure over Katsuki’s shoulder, but he doesn’t try to touch him again. Aizawa heaves a sigh and tucks his face into the top of his capture weapon. 

Katsuki closes his eyes and slumps down in the uncomfortable chair. The sharp edges of where his fingers warped the plastic of the armrest digs into his elbow, but he doesn’t have the energy to move. His body is heavy, and the floating feeling creeps over him again, but this time it feels closer to falling asleep than it feels like he’s being sucked out of himself through a straw. He settles, his chin tucked close to his chest and his hands folded together over his stomach. 

It’ll hurt like a motherfucker in the morning, he’s sure—or whenever he wakes up because he’s not sure what time it is, and he’s never been so tired in his life, and the last time he was kidnapped, he slept for eighteen hours once he collapsed face-down on his bed at home—but in his sleep-addled mind, there are no other options other than falling asleep here in this chair despite his neck’s protests. 

“Problem Child,” Aizawa rumbles, and it’s white noise like the machine Shitty Hair uses at night that Katuski can sometimes catch muffled noises from through their shared wall. Rain or…fucking whale noises sometimes. Aizawa’s voice lulls him further into sleep’s hold. The man mutters something that Katsuki can’t make out under the blanket of semi-consciousness, but when Katsuki is lifted off his chair, he flails, almost sending a sharp, well-aimed elbow into Aizawa’s nose. 

Katsuki’s panicked, keening noise trails off into a grunt as he’s dropped back into the chair, breathing hard. Aizawa stumbles backward, cursing under his breath.

All things considered, Katsuki thinks his teacher ought to be proud of him for defending himself so quickly even in his compromised state. 

Maybe it’s hypervigilance—maybe it’s a testament to his hero training. Same fucking difference to Katsuki.  

“What,” he seethes, “the fuck , old man?” The pleasantness of falling asleep is slowly receding, again replaced with bone-deep weariness. He’s half-delirious with exhaustion, and Aizawa has the fucking audacity to wake him back up? Fuck everyone and everything. 

“I was saying , Bakugou, that I was going to move you to your dorm room so you could better rest. Seeing as you are healing and all,” Aizawa snarks, “I figured you would be grateful to sleep in your own bed again, rather than in a…destroyed plastic chair.” 

“I’m fine right the fuck here,” Katsuki argues. “Couldn’t be more comfortable, actually. So leave me alone to sleep, kindly.” He sneers, but his heart isn’t in it. He settles back into his chair and pointedly closes his eyes, but the capture weapon is still wrapped cozily around his midsection. It tightens like some fucking snake or something, and Aizawa lifts him out of the chair again, this time making sure to stay a few steps away from Katsuki’s flailing limbs. Katsuki claws at the cloth and makes a high-pitched noise as he cranes to keep an eye on Deku’s hospital bed where Nana is settled back into the pillows, her eyes tracking his movements. “Put me down—put me the fuck down!”  

“I’m taking you to your room, Bakugou,” Aizawa intones. “You’ll only hurt yourself if you sleep in here.” 

“I want—” As Aizawa nears the door, Katsuki’s energy flags. He focuses all of his energy into breathing and pleading, the fight draining out of him like a deflating balloon. “I wanna stay with Deku,” he slurs. “Gotta—I gotta…” He trails off into a groan as his tenuous hold on consciousness slips through his fingers. “I wanna stay here with Deku.” 

Aizawa pauses, and Katsuki lets himself hope. 

Except, he forgot about the old bitch. She hobbles into his line of sight and opens the door, ushering Aizawa (and, by extension, Katsuki) into the hallway. She offers him a tight, wrinkled smile. 

“Routine is good for healing, boy,” Recovery Girl tells him, patting Katsuki on the cheek.

“Please,” he whispers, his voice raspy and desperate. He strains to see Deku’s bed from where he is suspended in the doorway, his toes brushing the floor, but all he can see is a shock of green curls against the sterile white pillow. 

“You’ll only be in the way here while we try to figure out what’s wrong with Midoriya, anyway. You go on and sleep well, dear. We’ll be sure to keep you updated with any changes should they arise, okay?” Her face wobbles as she nods, and she closes the door in his face. 

Katsuki slumps over in the capture weapon’s hold. Aizawa leads him away without a word. 

“She’s right,” he says after a long, stretching moment. “Routine is good. You’ll find it easier to process what happened to you once you reestablish habits from before you and Midoriya were taken.” 

“I’m not going to class until Deku gets better,” Katsuki insists. Then, for good measure: “fuck you.” 

* * * *

Katsuki keeps his head down as he shuffles through the classroom door, which does just about fuck-all. 

“Bakugou!” Shitty Hair crows, pumping a fist into the air, which effectively calls the attention of all eighteen of the other extras to Katsuki’s presence. He scowls at the ground and curls his hands into fists at his sides. “We missed you! And Midoriya!” The fucker is smiling with that pointy-toothed smile, his cheeks red and eyes shining with tears. 

Katsuki takes a step away from him, afraid he might get wrapped up in one of Shitty Hair’s infamous rib-breaking hugs. Instead, he wraps Dunce Face up in his arms and squeezes until the idiot practically turns purple. Katsuki almost feels bad. Almost. 

“Where is Midoriya?” Ears pipes up, and Katsuki scowls harder, this time in her direction. 

“He’s still in the fucking infirmary,” he bites out, and every word stings. 

His class breaks into a barrage of protests and questions, which blur into a hum of noise and only serve to piss Katsuki off more. There might as well be steam coming out of his ears; instead, he pops off a few of his explosions, and the extras quiet at once. 

Round Cheeks pushes her way to the front of the crowd, right into Katsuki’s line of sight. 

“Why is Deku-kun still in the medical ward?” she huffs, arms crossed over her chest, cheeks puffed out, and brows drawn together over the bridge of her nose. “Why are you okay now and he’s not?” 

Katsuki scoffs. “Maybe because we got fucking kidnapped and tortured for three weeks, dumbass. And I’m just stronger than him, so I healed faster. Or something. I don’t fucking care.” 

Something in him shies suddenly away from the idea of telling the class about what’s really wrong with Deku. If Katsuki wasn’t such an asshole, he might think he was trying to save the rest of his class from seeing Deku not acting at all like himself, stuck in his head on some fucking soul plane in a soul coma while he heals. But Katsuki is an asshole, and he doesn’t give a shit about how any of these extras might feel about that. 

It’s more…This whole slew of bullshit would only raise more questions for Deku to answer once he’s better, and that would take away his focus from getting better, and that’s the absolute fucking last thing Katsuki wants. 

“Bakugou, now is not the time for your rivalry!” Glasses insists with a hand-chop. Katsuki rolls his eyes. “Your classmate is hurt!” 

“He’s going to be fine ,” Katsuki bites, and it must be true. Deku has to be okay. There is really no other option, not for Katsuki. He turns on his heel and stomps the rest of the way to his desk, dropping into his chair and tucking his face into his folded arms. His class takes the hint and leaves him the hell alone, which he’s thankful for. In the cave of his arms, he fights to compose himself. 

The door opens, and Aizawa slouches in. While Katsuki used to be the first one in the classroom, he woke up late and decided to come to class. Out of spite or on a whim, maybe, but the thought of sitting in his room or in the empty common room for the day made him want to vomit more than letting that bastard Aizawa win did, so here he fucking is. Tiredness lingers on the edges of his being, and he half wishes he had just laid back down and went back to sleep, but he knows from the last kidnapping incident that less sleep is better for the first few weeks back. 

Nightmares are a bitch. After Kamino, he spent most of his nights curled up with his parents on the couch or in his bed, both of them sandwiched around him to keep him grounded when he inevitably woke up from a new night terror. He doesn’t know how the fuck he’d deal with nightmares in the dorms, and he’s not about to find out. 

He avoided looking at his face this morning, but he can imagine how he looks based off of Aizawa’s surprised glance that his teacher quickly covers with his usual indifference. Katsuki scowls and rests his chin on the fold of his arms, staring out the window at the dreary overcast. He wishes it would rain already. 

No, he wishes the rain would wait. Deku loves the rain. He wants it to be the first thing the nerd sees when he gets better—a good rainstorm. Deku always said something stupid and nerdy about washing the Earth clean and fresh starts, Kacchan! and it’s now alarmingly on the nose. 

Katsuki shakes his head and drags his eyes away from the window. He stares at a spot over Aizawa’s shoulder where the night janitors missed a spot on the chalkboard.    

“Aizawa-sensei! What’s wrong with Midoriya?” Pinky insists as Aizawa opens his mouth to take roll. The man’s mouth closes, and Katsuki doesn’t miss the flicker of his eyes in his direction. 

“If there are any updates on Midoriya’s condition, I will be sure to update all of you,” Aizawa says. “I expect that all of you will give Bakugou and Midoriya the space they need to recover once both of them return to class.” It’s less of a request and more of a demand; all of them hear the thinly-veiled threat of expulsion. Eighteen heads nod like bobble heads around him. Katsuki huffs and rolls his eyes. 

The only one missing from class is Midoriya. Silence rings when Aizawa calls his name, but it’s brief. Aizawa is already marking him absent before he finishes calling for him, and Katsuki chews on the inside of his cheek to keep his composure. Aizawa calls for Grape Head, and he answers, and the class moves on. The day moves on. The Earth keeps turning, somehow.

By the end of the day, his cheek is bitten raw, and he tastes blood. The longer he sits in class, the more acutely aware he is of Deku’s absence—he’s spent the last two and a half weeks memorizing the nerd’s presence, but more than that, he’s been so used to having Deku there always. For his entire life, the nerd has always been there. Now, the seat behind him is empty, and the classroom is deafeningly silent without Deku’s low, steady muttering to fill the spaces between words, and everyone around him might as well be frozen into statues for all of their shifting when Deku never could sit still. Restless energy brims under Katsuki’s skin, making him itchy and hot all over, and his eyes prickle and burn as he resolutely takes notes that will be good enough to keep Deku caught up once he comes back. 

Deku should be in the seat behind him. That’s the whole fucking point. Katsuki blames Robobitch, and he blames that Soul Fucker, and he blames Aizawa and Recovery Girl and Nana and All Might and Deku and himself. 

Katsuki clutches at the sides of his desk and grits his teeth for the entire school day, and when he leaves class, the news is playing on the common room’s television set, the extras gathered around it. They’re all muttering about the new, young hero’s debut, how explosive and impressive it is, and Katsuki takes one look at the backs of their heads, scowls and picks up the remote.

He presses the button to record the broadcast and then turns the TV off. His classmates groan and complain and grapple for the remote, but Katsuki blows it up with a small, hot explosion. 

“We’ll watch it,” he insists, “when Deku comes back. And you can all nerd out about it with him and his fucking notebooks.” 

He drops the smoking, melted remains of the TV remote onto the coffee table and stalks off, locking himself in his room for the night, scowling and angry at himself and more drained than he’s ever been in his life. 

The whole remote drama was partly because he didn’t want Deku to be too behind or feel like he was out of the loop when he came back, but it was also partly because Katsuki needed to blow something the hell up. 

And it’s not even like he can go fight with Deku in one of the gyms to let off steam, either. Fuck . God. 

Katsuki shrugs off his uniform jacket and falls into his bed. His comforter billows out around him, smelling like stale dust and his own sweat. Apparently, no one had thought to clean his room while he was gone. He turns over and stares at the blank wall his bed is pressed against, the featurelessness of it somehow calming. His blinks slow. 

He falls asleep, and it’s like fading out of existence. 

He wakes up with a gasp, unsure, at first, of what woke him. His uniform shirt is wrinkled to hell and cool against his clammy skin, and at first he thinks it might have been a nightmare, but he can’t remember anything beyond falling asleep after classes. It’s dark in his room now, and no light comes from under the door or from behind the curtains covering the windows and the door to his balcony. He must have slept for hours. 

Katsuki sits up, disoriented and stuck in the last bits of sleep. His hair is plastered to his head on one side, and his mouth is dry, and he’s hungry, but something woke him up from his deep, dreamless sleep. His heart pounds in his head and against his ribcage and through the rest of his body. 

There’s a tap on his window. Small, unobtrusive but persistent. Katsuki holds his breath and stares at the curtains like he’ll somehow develop x-ray vision to see through them to whoever is on the other side. He has the terrible thought that this is the nightmare and that his kidnappers—the League or Robo Bitch’s posse—are back for him, and he scrabbles for the door. 

His eyes are wide, and his chest hitches, and Katsuki catches sight of himself in the mirror leaning against his wall. 

He looks like a pathetic fucking coward who’s about to run for help over a bump in the night. He glares at his reflection despite the icy fear running over his muscles, making his movements stiff, and he forces out a shaking breath. 

Katsuki takes one step toward the curtains, then another. He raises a hand, without letting himself think twice, he yanks the curtains open, revealing his moonlit balcony on the other side, and suddenly, he’s face-to-face with—

“Deku?” he splutters, and he unlocks the balcony door, flinging it open and bringing in a gust of cold, spring air that raises goosebumps over his exposed skin. Deku flinches at the sudden movement, hunched over and wide-eyed and still in a fucking hospital gown, covered in bandages and glancing over his shoulder every few seconds like he’s being chased or hunted down. “What the fuck are—”  

Deku pushes past him, knocking Katsuki away as he forces himself into the room. He turns, locks the door, and pulls the curtains tight over the windows in one fluid, practiced movement that leaves Katsuki gaping as he fumbles for his lamp. 

Light floods the room, and Deku might as well hiss at it with how he shrinks away. His skinny shoulders heave with the force of his panicked breathing, and they stand in wordless silence for a long moment. 

“Nana—” 

“I’m not—” Deku shakes his head, burying his hands in the strands as he paces Katsuki’s room like a caged animal. He shakes his head again and tugs at Katsuki’s dresser until it’s pressed against the door, jamming a chair under the doorknob of the closet door and pressing himself against the corner with the best view of the balcony and the rest of the room. Deku makes himself as small as possible and hides his face in his knees. 

Katsuki sits down on his bed, blinking. His mouth moves around more questions than he knows how to ask as he and Deku watch each other. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Katsuki tries, his voice pitched too high. He curls his hands over his knees, further wrinkling his uniform pants. 

“It…wasn’t safe in the infirmary,” Deku murmurs, and his voice is too small and murmuring—not Nana’s and certainly not Deku’s. Katsuki fumbles, his mind going blank. 

“What are you talking about?” he asks instead of saying anything productive. “Of fucking course it’s safe in the infirmary. It’s the…” He comes back to himself, his spine going stiff in a half-second as he tenses. “Who the fuck are you?” 

“I felt it—it wasn’t safe. The body brought me here, so it must be safe here.” Deku shakes his head again, clutching at his hair and curling tighter around himself. 

“…to my room?” Katsuki blinks once and drags a hand over his face before standing and stalking toward Deku’s corner. He looms over the nerd. “I’m gonna ask again—who the fuck are you?” 

“It makes no sense that it brought me here because I like to work alone, so it must have been Nine. It was Nine’s doing, yes, because I would have gone—I would have gone somewhere by myself, where there is no one and no danger. It must have been Nine.” 

“Stop fuckin’ calling him that,” Katsuki growls, and he grabs the front of the hospital gown and drags Deku to eye level to sneer in the nerd’s face. He has to remind himself that it’s Deku’s face, his body, but it’s not him. Even for all the muttering he does, it’s never like this. 

Never so…frightened. 

“His name is fucking D—his name is Izuku, and you better call him that, all right?” He brings Deku closer, and the nerd nods frantically, hands scrabbling uselessly against Katsuki’s wrist. Sweat plasters curls to Deku’s freckled forehead, and he smells like the night air, and— “Did you fucking run here from the medbay?” 

Deku pauses. Nods again, this time slower. Katsuki growls and drops him, and he crumples back into his corner. 

“You vestiges are just going to keep messing up his body if you all keep acting like this. God. Dammit.” Katsuki runs a hand through his hair, growling and cursing to himself as he paces the room. The barricade against his door makes him feel trapped and claustrophobic, but that’s the least of his concerns. “Tell me who you are.” 

“Hikage,” Deku squeaks. He hides the bottom part of his face in his knees again, and all Katsuki can make out are his wide, green eyes that glow in the lamplight. “I was the fourth user of One For All. Shinomori Hikage.” Katsuki nods. Fourth is pretty early—as far as Katsuki knows, Deku’s insights on the second and third users is limited to nothing, and the fourth user was mostly a recluse in terms of heroics. They couldn’t find much on him when they went to research him in old databases. 

“Your Quirk?” 

“Um.” Hikage glances away. Swallows hard. “Danger sense.” 

Katsuki sighs. He wishes he had just stayed asleep. On the bed, his phone lights up with a buzz, illuminating the wall with harsh light. He grunts and snatches the phone out of the mess of his sheets, swiping on the 4 NEW MESSAGES notification. 

shitty hair (03:47) - hey bro!!! wanted to remind u that there is class tmrw actually more like in a few hrs and also tht i am here for u if u need to talk bc i heard u thru our wall lol go to sleep dude!!!! but i am here for u like i said ur best man bro is rt next door yk

shitty hair (03:54) - but also pls be quieter i am trying to sleep over here not all of us go to bed at five pm,,,, 

shitty hair (03:56) - also u might want to buy a new remote and apologize to the class bc denks wanted to watch one of his soaps tonight and couldn;t bc u broke the remote yk. just saying!!! ok goodnight see u in class 

shitty hair (04:01) - glad to have u back. rlly missed u bro

Katsuki sighs and shuts off his phone without responding. He throws it back onto his bed, not caring about where it lands—he should care, he should charge it for tomorrow, probably, but he doesn’t have the energy. He slumps over on his bed and stares at Hikage where he observes Katsuki’s every move from the corner of the room. 

“We need to go to sleep,” he mutters. “You and me. Sleep.” Hikage doesn’t say anything for a moment, rocking where he sits so that Deku’s shoulders knock into the walls like a pendulum. 

“I do not feel my host’s need for sleep.” Katsuki turns this over in his head before closing his eyes and cursing under his breath. 

“You don’t feel tired? Not—not at all? You can’t sleep?” Hikage shakes his head minutely. “ Fucking hell. ” Katsuki considers the idea that this really is a nightmare, but the edges of it are too sharp to be anything less than reality. 

“Physical feelings like that are attached to the soul and his body. We feel nothing like that through One For All. His pain, his tiredness, those belong to Nine.” 

“Izuku,” Katsuki corrects, tired. 

“Izuku,” Hikage tries. He turns the name over in his mouth and nods. “Those belong to Izuku. We will not feel them. In some ways, it is better to be a vestige than it was to be alive.” Hikage snorts a laugh at his own comment, which Katsuki scowls at. This guy is fucking weird; he makes Katsuki miss Nana. 

“Yeah, well. Whatever the fuck— I’m still fucking kicking, and I’m exhausted, so I’m going to sleep. You can…stay here and watch for danger. I don’t care.” And he doesn’t. It should weird him out—it would, any other day—to think that someone is going to sit in the corner of his room and watch him sleep, but he’s already halfway unconscious again. It’s always taken him days to sleep off Recovery Girl’s Quirk.

“Sleep well, Katsuki,” Hikage murmurs, tucking himself into a neat ball as Katsuki rolls over and settles. 

He mutters something like shut the fuck up, thinking of how his sleepovers with Deku used to be so simply when they were kids. Now, there’s soul comas to account for and nightmares, and Katsuki is still in his school uniform while Deku is in a hospital gown. He thinks of how easy everything would be in any other life than this one, and then he falls asleep, Hikage watching diligently from the corner.

Chapter Text

Aizawa is throwing himself at Katsuki’s door hard enough to rattle it on its hinges. Katsuki rolls over onto his chest, propping his chin up on his pillow to glare at the door, and he tries his damndest to work up the energy to curse the man out for waking him up so early because the light that leaks into his room under his curtains indicates that the sun is still bluish, and it’s way too fucking early in the morning for whatever bullshit Aizawa is pulling. 

He feels stale. Like he’s dusty and full of cobwebs. Like a room that hasn’t been aired out in decades, and when he swallows, his throat grates against itself, raw and dry. He runs a hand over himself to take stock, his fingers catching in the buttons of his stiff, wrinkled uniform shirt instead of skirting over the soft cotton of the t-shirt he usually wears to bed—an old skull shirt that has a hole in the armpit and never sees the light of day outside of his dorm room.  

The door rattles again, bends under the man’s weight as he throws himself against the surface, but it doesn’t break. The dorms were meant for extra security for the students, class 1A specifically, it seemed, and UA sure as hell didn’t cut any corners. Katsuki would know; his door has survived no less than three nightmare-fueled, explosion-filled freakouts on his part. Not so much as a mark on them. He remembers glowering at his breakfast as he listened to Deku nerd out about the dorms the first morning they spent here in the dorms, the nerd’s hair ruffled from sleep and his face pink and his pajamas hanging off of him; Katsuki had never seen Deku in such a state before, not since they were little, and at the time, he’d been annoyed, but now he only misses hearing Deku’s rambling. His cracking, pitchy voice that only ever devolved into mumbling that no one else could understand. 

“The walls must be made of reinforced concrete, but somehow the rooms aren’t cold like you’d expect them to be—a heating system, maybe, so they were concerned with our comfort here, too, not just safety, but still. UA was already considered the most secure place in the city, but now, the dorms might be the most secure place in all of Japan ! Those doors have some sort of shock-absorbing material in them, so they might be hollow with springs inside, or it could be a Quirk. I wouldn’t be surprised if UA got some heroes like Rock Lock—not Rock Lock himself because his Quirk doesn’t work on large areas, but wouldn’t it be so cool if it did, and—”

    At that point, Katsuki had slammed his hands down on the table and screamed at Deku to shut the fuck up before stalking off to his room, wondering to himself if the nerd had performed fucking experiments on his room to know all of that about the walls and the doors. Creepy, shitty nerd. Now, he wishes he’d stayed. He’s realizing, now that Deku isn’t around and Katsuki is more and more often left in total silence, how few memories he has of Deku like that one. A lifetime together, and all Katsuki can remember is all the times he’s cut the nerd off or told him to just be quiet, all the times the nerd smiled at him after a rough fight that left him bruised and bloodied. All the times Katsuki left him bruised and bloodied. 

When he gets Deku back, he’ll be sure to listen. Unless the nerd starts getting annoying—then Katsuki will tell him to shut the fuck up again. There’s only so much he can take, really, and he can’t be blamed for that. If no one ever cuts Deku off, he’ll keep going until he suffocates. 

And he doesn’t plan to ever be apart from the nerd for this long again. He won’t have to search through his memories for Deku if the dork is standing right next to him. 

God, the early morning and the lack of sleep is making him god damn sappy. He growls and buries his face into his pillow, trying to ignore the rest of the world beyond his room and go back to sleep, his face and the tips of his ears hot against the cool fabric.  

In the hallway, Aizawa curses under his breath (not far enough under, apparently, because Katsuki can hear it through the door, however muffled it may be) and grunts as there’s a pause in the barrage against his door. 

“Bakugou,” a voice hisses, and it sounds like Aizawa has his forehead pressed against Katsuki’s dorm room door, desperate. “Open the damn door, kid, come on.” Katsuki holds his breath and stares at the door as the doorknob rattles. Still, Katsuki is feeling spiteful and heavy and doesn’t dare move even as Aizawa once again grows tired of trying to turn the locked doorknob and resorts to knocking, severe and panicked, and then again throwing his weight into the solid surface of Katsuki’s door in a futile attempt to break it down. 

Katsuki knows there is a reason Aizawa is so desperate to get in the room, but he doesn’t have the energy to match his panic. Whatever it is out there, he is safer in here on this side of his door, where he doesn’t yet have to face it. Ignorance really is bliss. 

Again, the door strains in its frame, and Aizawa lets out a frustrated yell. Katsuki knows he should get up and let the man in, but his dresser is pressed against the left side of the door, and moving it looks like it will take more energy than he has in him. He’s getting there, but it’s a slow process. He blinks slowly, and his face sinks into his pillow. 

His whole room is in disarray, worse than it’s ever been even after his own freakouts and breakdowns and tantrums. There’s the dresser—all of its knicknacks he kept on the top scattered across his floor in a heap of dried flowers and a picture frame and an All Might plushie, replaced with the weights he stores in his closet for late night, post-curfew and insomnia-ridden training sessions—making barricade against the door that, all together, probably weighs as much as All Might (not Yagi but All Might . Before his injury). The drawers are thrown open randomly, clothes spilling out, and his desk chair is left overturned in front of his closet as if he’d jammed it up under the knob and then knocked it over again. Its legs jut out like a body in the middle of rigor mortis, all stiff, uncomfortable angles. 

Despite all of this, his curtains are pulled almost meticulously over his window and the balcony door, tied together with a tight knot that he wouldn’t know how to replicate even if he had instructions laid out in front of him. 

The shag rug in the middle of his room is matted flat with footsteps that he’s pretty sure aren’t his. The foot-shaped indentations that are layered over each other a hundred times over are too small, and it looks like whoever was in his fucking room did nothing but pace all night, and he’s not a pacer. Katsuki has never been one to let his idle, burning energy fester under his skin, but he prefers to let it out with a whole lot more explosion and cursing and…screaming than an activity like pacing allows for.  

His mind conjures up an image of Deku cowering on his balcony in nothing but a flimsy hospital gown and layers of bandages, all idle energy and hurried glances over his thin shoulder. 

Katsuki sits up so fast he gives himself headrush, and something in his back crackles in uncomfortable protest. 

Deku. Fucking—not Deku . Hikage. It wasn’t safe. The body brought me here, so it must be safe here. 

You can…stay here and watch for danger. I don’t care. 

Sleep well, Katsuki. 

He scans the corners of his room, but they’re empty. Not even a fucking cobweb or dust bunny. Aizawa rams himself into the door again, and Katsuki’s dresser creaks ominously, the weights on top threatening to topple over and put a hole in his floor. He ignores it, instead bending over to check under his bed because that Hikage guy seemed like exactly the sort of creep who would crawl up under Katsuki’s bed while he was fucking sleeping in it. He lifts the bedskirt, almost desperate, but Hikage is not under there and neither is Deku or Nana. 

“Fuck,” Katsuki spits, tugging at his hair until his scalp stings, “dammit, fucking—shitty fucking nerd.” These vestiges are more trouble than they’re fucking worth, and Katsuki wishes he could be pissed at Deku for any of this, but he can’t find it in himself. He’s worried, and that’s sure as hell pissing him off, but it’s not Deku’s fault. 

If only Katsuki could get his hands on that Soul Fucker bitch. She’d regret doing this to Deku, he’d make sure of it, and he’d enjoy every second. This is all her fault, and it’s that Robot Bitch’s fault, and it’s UA’s fault for making them clean up that stupid park instead of telling people to pick up their own damn trash. He blames everyone else. Everyone except for Deku. 

Katsuki stands in the middle of his room and spins in a slow circle like he might find the nerd this way, like he’s somehow hiding in plain sight or right under Katsuki’s nose. Panic bubbles up under Katsuki’s sternum like boiling water, a balloon of feeling that he suffocates on. His closet door is closed, and he knocks the overturned chair away in his haste to throw the door open, and it clatters against the wall loud enough that Aizawa must hear it because he shouts for Katsuki again and attacks the door with renewed fervor. 

Katsuki opens the closet door, and light spills into the shadowed room. His shirts have been torn from their hangers leaving them in heaps and piles on his floor, and in the corner of the closet, Deku is wedged as far into the farthest corner from the door as possible, his head hanging on his neck so his chin rests between his collarbones, and his knees are curled almost to his chest, the hospital gown hanging off of him like damp laundry hung out to dry. His scarred hands lay limp on the ground next to his feet, and his bangs flutter with his even exhales. 

He’s fucking asleep in Katsuki’s closet. Katsuki stands in the doorway, watching like some kind of creep, one hand gripping the frame hard enough that the sharp edges dig into his palm, and his shadow lays across Deku’s sleeping form like a dark blanket. Deku makes a snuffling sound, but he doesn’t move or wake, and Katsuki drops to his knees in front of the nerd. His knees protest the impact, but he ignores the pain in favor of crawling closer until he and Deku take up the whole of the closet floor together, surrounded with Katsuki’s shirts and the nose-clogging, sweet smell of his own sweat mixed with the generic, plain detergent the school supplies for them. 

It’s kind of gross. 

Deku’s legs are covered in bandages, and what skin isn’t covered is mottled with purple-black bruises that haven’t yet begun to yellow around the edges. They’re harsh against the nerd’s tan, freckled skin; Katsuki hasn’t seen him so close in all the time since Deku acquired the bruises, and part of him is glad for it, but the other part hates himself, burning with guilt. He should have saved Deku from all of this. 

Katsuki swallows hard and reaches for Deku’s face. The pads of his fingers skim over the nerd’s jaw, following the line of it as if to reassure himself that Deku is whole and alive, albeit asleep in his fucking closet. 

This is so fucking weird. 

Deku shifts, then, as Katsuki… caresses his face. He groans and lifts his head, eyes fluttering and blinking slowly. He drags in a breath and catches Katsuki’s eye in the dark shadows of the closet; Katsuki hadn’t bothered to turn on the light before he invaded the space, and he’s glad for it only because if he had to face the nerd’s weird ass eye-sparkle at this distance, it might have killed him. 

Because those are the nerd’s eyes, this is the set of his jaw. No one else’s. Katsuki holds his breath. 

“Kacchan?” Deku murmurs, squinting up at him from where he’s wedged into the dark corner of Katsuki’s closet. And his voice—it sounds like him . Not Nana, not Hikage, not like any of the other loser vestiges. Like Deku. 

He releases his straining lungs with a whoosh. 

“D-Deku?” Katsuki breathes, not daring to let himself be hopeful. He drops his hands from the nerd’s jaw and grabs him by his shoulders this time, gripping tightly; if it’s painful, the nerd says nothing. The thin hospital gown folds and yields under Katsuki’s hands. He leans into the touch, reaching up to rest his fingers over the crest of Katsuki’s cheekbone. The touch is light and fluttering, and Katsuki burns at the three points of contact between them. 

“Am I d—” He might be asking if he’s dreaming or if he’s dying, but Katsuki wouldn’t know because he cuts himself off, his face going slack and void of any emotion like a sheet falling over his face. Deku’s jaw falls an inch, leaving Katsuki to stare at his back molars and the dull crown on one of his teeth, and his brows furrow and unfurrow as his expression twitches. He makes a choked off noise in the back of his throat, almost keening but some vague rendition of Katsuki’s name, maybe. He tells himself he’s imagining it—Deku doesn’t know what he’s saying.   

Deku’s scarred, crooked fingers grip Katsuki’s forearms with enough force to ache like hell. The bones in his arms creak and rub together, but he grips Deku back just as hard, desperate, like he can keep whatever’s going to happen at bay for another second. Another minute, and everything would be fine. He holds on, and Deku gapes in his face, his eyes wide and body growing taut under Katsuki’s fingers. He mutters something like a million denials under his breath, but his eyes are far away and not looking at Katsuki. 

The nerd draws in a deep breath that sucks all of the air out of the closet and out of Katsuki’s own lungs, and he doesn’t exhale for a long, dragging moment. He opens and closes his mouth like a fish and holds the breath and holds it, still, as Katsuki’s door explodes out of the frame, knocking over the dresser with a reverberating, teeth-rattling thump as the weights roll across the floor of his dorm room. One of them strikes the opposite wall with enough force to put a sizable dent in the smooth surface, but Katsuki couldn’t care less, not when he can feel Deku unraveling beneath his explosive fingers. Katsuki searches Deku’s face for any remaining trace of the nerd. He can almost see him slipping away again; his expression, despite the lack of panicked screaming and begging, is eerily reminiscent of the first time Deku fell into his soul coma whatever-the-fuck.

“Bakugou!” Aizawa shouts, breathing hard. His footsteps are heavy as he stumbles into the room, and there’s more commotion in the hallway that sounds a hell of a lot like the rest of the class is huddling around his door. 

“Hold on, Deku, come on,” he begs, his fingers tightening on Deku’s shoulders as the nerd’s face turns red and then a sickly shade of purple, spit gathering at the sides of his dry lips. He’s still holding his breath, his diaphragm spasming under his ribs. “Please.” 

A shadow falls over both of them as Aizawa fills up the closet doorway. Katsuki throws a panicked, desperate glance over his shoulder to his teacher, begging him to fix this, to protect them, to save Deku—to save Katsuki because fuck , his chest aches, and he’s so scared. He takes his eyes off the nerd for only a second, but that’s long enough.  

“Kah…ch,” Deku manages before his eyes roll in his head, and all of his limbs grow stiff and taut. Black Whip wraps itself over Deku’s arms, licking at his cheeks and neck like an excitable dog, and Katsuki can only think of his panic the first time this happened, of Black Whip tearing him open like a bleeding pig, and he’s nauseous with rolling panic as his jaw works around silent assurances that he’s not dying, he just needs to hold on, but no sound comes out no matter how hard he tries. 

Deku lets out a low moan before, all at once, the tension drops and Deku’s head bobs as he shakes off the moment like it’s nothing. He glances around the dark closet and knocks Katsuki’s hands away with a flippant gesture before breaking into a wide grin, rolling his shoulders. Whoever is in Deku’s body now stares down at the nerd’s hands, turning them over and curling his fingers into fists over and over again like Nana had that first time in the concrete room. 

White noise buzzes in Katsuki’s ears, and it sounds like rage. It sounds like he could blow up the whole world, that’s how angry he is. He is cold all over, his fingers twitching where they rest against his thighs after Deku’s hand knocked them away (and isn’t that a sickly familiar metaphor for the two of them? Karma, cosmic revenge, fuck , he deserves this), and he swallows hard. He can’t quite look Deku in the face, so he settles for looking just over his shoulder, where the wall is bare and shadowed. His eyes flutter as he blinks too quickly. 

“He was just fucking here ,” he keens, not quite sure who he’s talking to. Himself or the universe or Aizawa or whoever is wearing Deku’s body like a prom dress. Deku feels so much like—like Katsuki is trying to cup water in his hands, but it all evaporates or streams out through his fingers no matter what he tries to do to stop it. “He was here, and he was fine .” 

Katsuki could cry. 

Instead, he lunges forward and wraps his hands around fistful’s of Deku’s hair. It’s greasy from their weeks in captivity and frizzy under his fingers, but he forces himself to hold on. In the doorway, Aizawa shouts wordlessly and moves to intervene, but Deku waves a hand in his direction, and pauses. Katsuki heaves on his own breathing, and Deku’s face is all wide-eyes but no fear or surprise, even as Katsuki holds him at eye level, seething. 

“He was fucking fine,” Katsuki repeats, a stuck record. 

“Maybe,” the vestige agrees, nodding slowly like Katsuki is some sort of imbecile. Fuck these fucking vestiges; Katsuki will kill them. He’ll explode them until there’s nothing left of them. Or, he would if they didn’t have Deku’s fucking face. Katsuki growls low in his throat and shakes Deku’s head with the grip he has on his hair. He’ll turn the vestiges into scrambled eggs. When the expression on his face doesn’t so much as flinch or wince, some of Katsuki’s guilt drains away. More anger comes to fill the empty space in his chest. “I know he was fine for a second, kid.” 

Katsuki lets the words simmer in the space between them. He’s so close to Deku that he shares his oxygen. Any other time, it would be intoxicating to be so close. 

“I’ll fucking kill you! ” he roars, and his palms are hot with an oncoming explosion. He thrusts his hand toward Deku’s face as his fingers glow like the red-hot coals in the bottom of a bonfire or like magma fresh out of a volcano, but he barely gets so far as to cover Deku’s face with his own hand before Black Whip fills every inch and corner and crevice of the closet, knocking the door off its hinges and throwing Aizawa into the opposite wall. Black Whip wraps Katsuki into a strangling hold, slithering over him like a snake smothering its prey. His ribs creak under the pressure, and he gasps for air but doesn’t stop fighting the hold, kicking even as the inky, astral ropes grow tighter and tighter. 

There’s shrill wounded noise coming from somewhere in the closet, and it’s sure as hell not coming out of Deku’s mouth, not with the cocky ass smirk that looks so odd where it’s glued to his face. He levers himself off of the ground with more grace than Katsuki is used to associating with the nerd, brushing off the wrinkled hospital gown as Black Whip dances off of his body like ribbons. 

Aizawa picks himself off the ground next to Katsuki’s unmade bed, cradling his ribs and gripping the edge of his overturned dresser for support. His face is drawn together in a determined expression that Katsuki recognizes from the USJ attack, his eyes dark and brow drawn low, and Katsuki sends him a pleading look at Black Whip tightens around him; he feels close to popping, like his insides might start oozing out of his ears or his nose in a thick paste if the pressure doesn’t let up soon. 

Erase the fucking Quirk! he pleads, but he doesn’t have the air in him to say it out loud. He settles for opening and closing his mouth like a beached fish.  

“Deku-kun!” Round Cheeks cries from Katsuki’s doorway. Her cheeks are flushed with panic, and her eyes are wide, and Katsuki can’t imagine what the fuck is going through her head seeing Deku like this in Katsuki’s closet of all places. Shitty Hair appears beside hers, his skin a few shades too pale and his lips parted in shock. Octopus and Racoon Eyes huddle together in the hallway, and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the class is here too to watch Katsuki get his ass handed to him.

Katsuki grunts and grits his teeth as Black Whip tugs him forward and curls solidly around him as if vying for his attention. It works; any thought Katsuki had to spare for their classmates and teacher are gone in a split second, replaced with Deku and nothing but Deku. 

He has Katsuki wrapped up like a captive, holding him at eye level close enough that their noses brush when Katsuki forces himself to breathe—he can’t get in more than half an inhale around the suffocating embrace of Deku’s Quirk. He has to cross his eyes to keep the nerd in focus, but Deku’s eyes roam over his face, evaluating him or memorizing his features.

All at once, Black Whip disappears, and Katsuki drops into a heap on his closet floor. His laundry does little to cushion the fall, but he’s up again after a split second, and he launches himself at Deku’s face, one palm outstretched again now that the nerd can’t defend himself with his stupid Quirk. 

Instead, Aizawa’s capture weapon catches him in the exact same way that Black Whip had the first time, albeit not even half as tightly. Katsuki lets out a cracking, frustrated scream; all he’d wanted was a good fucking night of sleep, and now he could tear out his hair if only he had the ability to move anything below his fucking shoulders. 

Fuck everything. 

“Fuck you,” he spits in Deku’s face, and isn’t that just so achingly familiar? The irony of it isn’t lost on him. “Who the fuck are you?” 

Deku purses his lips and narrows his eyes, observing Katsuki again as Aizawa pulls him away, leaving a closet's worth of space between them. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough. Katsuki can no longer feel Deku’s breath on the bottom half of his face, can no longer smell the sterile smell of the medical ward on the nerd mixed with his own smell. Katsuki draws in a deep breath to cleanse himself of it, of Deku. 

“I am Daigoro,” Deku greets, his face breaking out in a cocky grin. “Fifth user of One For All—can’t believe that hermit Hikage got a turn out here before I did!” He laughs a weird belly laugh that’s reminiscent of All Might’s laugh, and Katsuki cringes. 

It’s been three weeks of watching other people live in Deku’s body, and it never gets any less weird. God, if anything, it’s only getting more weird the longer this bullshit goes on. At least Nana was bearable; this Daigoro guy kind of sucks, Katsuki thinks.

And his ribs fucking hurt, not that anyone seems to care with how they keep wrapping him up like he’s a Christmas present or some shit. 

“Yeah, Daigoro , and why the fuck are you here?” Katsuki sneers, and it seems to take everyone in the room by surprise. Aizawa’s capture weapon falters, and Daigoro furrows his brow, his lips parting. 

“Bro, you can’t just say that!” Shitty Hair shouts as if this is Deku and not some stranger with a familiar face. They must think the nerd is losing his marbles. 

“Bakugou,” Cheeks admonishes, and he could kill them, but he doesn’t want to take his eyes off Daigoro again.

“Why are you here? ‘Cause Deku was just here, and he seemed awfully fine to me, talking and shit,” he continues. “So, you should just fuck right off to whatever plane you exist on and let us get on with our fucking lives, idiot.” He struggles against the firm pressure of Aizawa’s scarf, but it’s half-hearted at best. He hopes that no one in the room catches the pleading undertone to his gruff demand. “You’re all—you’re all fucking Deku up. He’s supposed to be in the fucking recovery ward recovering , but here he fucking is.” He jerks his chin toward Deku, all knobbly knees and bruises. He’s lost too much weight in the time since they were kidnapped, and it shows now as he stands as tall as he can in the corner of Katsuki’s closet. 

He looks too young despite the unfamiliar, aged shine in his eye. 

“You know nothing, kid,” Daigoro scoffs, crossing his arms over his chest. “Nine’s soul is still structurally weak—you have no idea what that girl did to him. How much she strangled and warped and fractured his soul, and you have no idea how long something like that takes to heal. Certainly not a few weeks. That short visit you two had was dangerous.” He mutters something under his breath about star-crossed lovers and annoying teenagers, and Katsuki flushes, his cheeks hot. He rolls his eyes and shifts against Aizawa’s scarf.
“His soul or—or whatever the fuck has obviously healed enough. He didn’t die. He didn’t explode on the fucking spot. We were fine—he was fine,” Katsuki insists. No one knows Deku better than him, he’s sure, not even Deku himself or the weirdos who live in his head.

Daigoro steps forward, and he’s obviously used to being more intimidating because the nerd is anything but; his expression would be withering if not for his wild hair and freckled cheeks and chipped tooth. 

“Anything could break Nine’s spirit right now, kid. The smallest thing. He is weak.” 

“Nothing can break Deku’s spirit,” Katsuki denies at the same time, talking louder so his voice layers over Daigoro’s. 

“You’d be surprised.” Silence reigns, the small closet heavy with it. Katsuki matches Daigoro’s glare. 

“You think you know him so well?” Katsuki rolls his eyes. “You can’t even say his name—it’s Izuku, by the way, and if you’re gonna wear his face, you’re sure as hell gonna call him by the right name.” He runs his eyes over Daigoro’s wavering form; he sways from foot to foot and shifts uncomfortably like his body is too small. “And you can barely fucking stand up straight.” 

“This vessel is smaller than I’m used to,” he defends, a thin blush dusting Deku’s cheeks, “and I have been in the plane of One For All for nearly four decades by now—it is a steep learning curve to be a physical body again.” 

“How can I expect you, the one who can’t walk in a straight fucking line, to keep Deku safe if he needs it? Huh?” 

“You talk so much of protecting Nine, but you won’t trust us vestiges. We know him best, better than you or Eight or his own mother. We know best how to keep him safe because we were the only ones there for him for so long, protecting him. Not you— us .” Daigoro slams a fist into the wall of Katsuki’s closet and lets the words simmer like hot, burning coals between them. In the hallway, one of their classmates draws in a gasping breath. 

Katsuki swallows hard and finally looks away. 

Daigoro is right. Fuck. Katsuki thinks of the war and the beaten-down, weary look on Deku’s face for months after they brought him back. Had he confided in the vestiges? Had they protected him when Katsuki was too weak to do so? 

“Old man,” Katsuki murmurs without looking at the man, “let me down.” He tugs at the bottom of the capture scarf, the material unyielding.

“Are you going to attack Midoriya?” Katsuki says nothing and scowls to himself. Still, the capture weapon unravels, leaving Katsuki almost dizzy as he stands on his own two feet. “We are going to take Midoriya back to the recovery ward.” Without looking at where the class lingers in the doorway, he continues, “I expect all of you to be sitting in your seats and reading chapter seven of your Ethics in Heroism textbooks when I return. Do not make me expel any of you today—it’s been a rough enough morning.” 

Aizawa sure as hell looks the part of a rough morning. His scarf is looped around his neck, and he tucks the bottom half of his face into it, but his hair is frizzy and unkempt, and he’s in a pair of threadbare UA sweatpants and a cat t-shirt. He looks like he rolled out of bed and came straight to knocking down Katsuki’s bedroom door. 

In the hallway, the whole class groans, and complaints overlap in a jumbled mass of words. Still, his classmates wander off to get ready, leaving Katsuki, Aizawa, and Daigoro alone in Katsuki’s warzone of a dorm room.

Aizawa wraps a hand around Deku’s bicep and tugs him out of the closet. His shoulder brushes Katsuki’s as he passes, but Daigoro doesn’t so much as spare him a second glance, the fucker, and Katsuki is left standing in the middle of his closet in his uniform from yesterday, rumpled with sleep. 

He should go back to sleep.

“Bakugou,” Aizawa beckons, stopping as he aids Daigoro’s uncoordinated limbs over the leg of Katsuki’s dresser, “are you coming?” 

Katsuki nods, and they leave the chaos of his room as it is in favor of starting the long, morning-chilled walk across campus. Katsuki walks behind Aizawa and Daigoro, scuffing the toe of his shoe against the sidewalk and cursing Hikage for forcing Deku to make this journey in the middle of the night, alone and unassisted. His mind conjures up the image of Deku stumbling over his own two feet as he hurried across campus and scaled the fucking Heights Alliance building to his fourth floor balcony. It’s a wonder Hikage didn’t accidentally brain the nerd.

Fuck these vestiges, for real. 

But Daigoro’s words echo in his mind: we know best how to keep him safe because we were the only ones there for him for so long, protecting him. Not you. Katsuki scoffs to himself and stuffs his fists deep into his pockets to avoid blowing the asshole sky-high. 

The medical ward is abandoned when they arrive, the lights on and the door unlocked but strangely devoid of anyone, even Recovery Girl. 

“Recovery Girl came in to check on Midoriya this morning,” Aizawa explains as he opens the door to the room they left Nana in last time Katsuki was in the ward, “but she called an alarm when she couldn’t find him. We thought he’d either been kidnapped again by a sleeper of that group of villains, or he woke up alone and confused and wandered off to find help, so all staff were to be on alert or searching campus for either Midoriya or any suspicious persons.” 

“That’s why you were trying to break down my fucking door?” Katsuki asks. “‘Cause you thought if I was gone too, you’d figure out what happened?” Aizawa pauses and mulls this over before nodding once, a decisive movement that Katsuki can only return with another nod. Aizawa assists Daigoro in getting back into the hospital bed; he has to lift one of the nerd’s skinny ankles when Daigoro gets it caught on the side of the bed frame. 

The sheets are thrown back like Hikage had left in a hurry last night. Thinking back to the state he’d been in on Katsuki’s balcony, that’s probably an understatement. Daigoro settles in the bed, crossing his hands over his middle and sighing. He closes his eyes like he’s going to sleep, and Aizawa leaves him with the promise that Recovery Girl would return as soon as the staff finished their patrol of campus. 

Aizawa closes the door behind himself as he trails Katsuki into the hallway. 

They stand in heavy silence for a moment, Katsuki’s back to his teacher, before he turns on his heel and presses himself into Aizawa’s chest, clutching at his ratty pajama t-shirt, without warning. 

Two hands rise to rest on Katsuki’s shoulder and on the back of his head, holding him in place but not holding him down. The touch is comforting as Katsuki heaves on a warbling sob that takes him by surprise. Big, fat tears soak the fabric of his teacher’s shirt, and his nose is running like a fucking faucet. He sniffles, ugly and forceful enough that his sinuses ache, but Aizawa only holds him tighter. 

He’s cried more times in the past month than probably in his entire life since infancy combined, and he wants it to stop. He hates it; crying makes his face itchy and swollen and too hot, and he is so bone-weary tired of the scooped-out and hollow feeling it always leaves in its wake. 

He scrubs at his face in the scratchy fabric of Aizawa’s t-shirt, uncaring of how vulnerable and terrible this is. 

“I don’t—I don’t know why I’m fucking crying,” Katsuki says, his voice tilting up at the end like it’s a question. It’s muffled in Aizawa’s chest. “I’m so tired and I miss—I miss Deku, and I want him back, but he was—and he was right there, and then he wasn’t, and it’s this asshole.” He sobs, and he’s so out of control that it hurts, and his chest aches. Aizawa pats the back of his head and hums, but he doesn’t say anything. 

Nothing he could’ve said would fix this, and Katsuki is glad that he stays quiet. He thinks he’d explode if he got any empty condolences right now. 

“I miss Deku,” he repeats. Over and over again, and he sinks to his knees in the middle of the medical ward hallway, pulling Aizawa down with him.

Chapter Text

Deku comes back to himself in snatches like blinks or like fasting-moving movie frames. Katsuki is simultaneously there for more of it than he’d like to be and not often enough at all; in the weeks of Deku’s supposed recovery ( supposed because Deku isn’t himself most of the time, even still), he makes himself a ranked list of the vestiges from his least favorite to his favorite.

It kind of sucks, like, major ass if he’s honest. 

* * * *

Katsuki kicks open the 1-A Heights Alliance front door, one hand wrapped achingly tight around the strap of his backpack. He grunts, and silence greets him; he’s the first one back from class because the other extras linger after the last bell while he makes a fucking break for the dorms like someone lit his ass on fire. He wants to get out of his fucking uniform before he escapes to Deku’s bedside in the medical ward again, where no one will bother him until he returns, and his skin itches with the need to be alone—or as alone as he ever is in Deku’s room. After another week of this bullshit (and no new appearances of the nerd, not since that morning in Katsuki’s closet), he’s fallen into somewhat of a comfortable routine. 

For two weeks—almost a month now since the two of them were kidnapped—Katsuki has spent every waking hour of his free time at Deku’s bedside like those pansy-ass fools in the English classical novels Yamada-sensei makes them read. Between his morning workouts and class, he’s in the medical ward. After class, he takes his homework and does it in the plastic seat next to Deku’s bed, the armrest still warped in the shape of his hand from that time Recovery Girl almost sent him into a total meltdown after he woke up the first time. 

He can’t leave Deku alone in that stupid, sterile room, but more than that, he doesn’t want to ( can’t ) miss it when ( if ) the nerd wakes up in his body again, so he sits around in this chair that makes his back ache like hell, and he watches the nerd like a fucking hawk. Maybe it’s creepy, or maybe it’s obsessive, but not even Recovery Girl, the stubborn old bitch, tries to kick him out anymore, not since that first afternoon after the whole closet thing. She knows, by now, to tell him what she’s doing to the nerd and how it’s somehow, hopefully going to fix him, and most of it is medical jargon which goes so far over Katsuki’s head, but it’s noise to fill the space, so he doesn’t care. When she’s not in the room, he mutters unintelligibly under his breath or hums, or whichever vestige who decides to grace Katsuki with their presence rattles on about nothing into the emptiness of the room. 

Dead people are surprisingly chatty. 

He hates it, this new routine. It feels too much like sitting around and doing nothing, which he hates more than anything else, and he’s admittedly a pretty hateful guy.  

He gets halfway to the elevators, brushing past the dark living room and the kitchen, cursing whoever left the blinds closed this morning because the shadows are nothing if not eerie as fuck, and it was probably Dunce Face’s job. He kicks at one of the dining room chairs to burn the edge off of his restless, itching energy, and it clatters against the table and shrieks on the wooden floor, but there is no one in the dorm to complain about the unnecessary noise he’s making.

Except a groan comes from the couch, and Katsuki freezes mid-step, tripping over himself and only narrowly catching himself on the edge of the table. He gapes at the back of the couch, tense all over and preparing for a fight—considering some of the stupid-ass villains they’ve faught this year, he really wouldn’t be so surprised if one of them broke in and took a nap on their couch. 

A head of wild, green curls pops up over the edge of the couch, and Deku stares back at him, squinting against even the dim light of the common room. He rubs a clumsy hand over his face with a wordless mumble.

“Kacchan?” he asks, squinting harder. He rubs his face again like he can’t believe what he’s seeing when, really, it’s Katsuki who should be shocked. And he damn well is shocked—just yesterday, he was slouched over in that stupid, blue-tinted chair while Deku stared at the ceiling, blinking too slowly and not saying a word. Katsuki hadn’t known who, exactly, was residing behind those eyes, but he had spent hours running his eyes over the nerd’s profile in changing light, over the sharp slope of his nose and his thick eyelashes and the gauntness of his stupid, freckled cheeks. He’d spent so long staring at the nerd that he’d had to bullshit his way through his Hero Ethics and English assignments this morning before class. 

And now the nerd was here, peeking over the back of the couch in the common room like it’s the most normal thing in the world. There are dark smudges under his eyes, smeared from the inside corners on either side of his nose to the middle of his pupils. They only make the green of his eyes more apparent, and they make him look sick and dying. 

“Nerd?” Katsuki breathes, still frozen and gripping the edge of the dining table hard enough that his knuckles hurt. It feels like the only thing keeping him from floating away or collapsing to his knees, which would be fucking embarrassing. 

He forces himself to unravel his hold on the table, and he steps away from the kitchen and into the living room, his movements jerky and robotic. Deku’s hand creeps over the edge of the couch cushion, and he ducks his head like he’s shy. 

“Hi, Kacchan,” he murmurs, and Katsuki can hear the smile. 

“Deku,” he chokes out like it’s the only thing he can say. It might be, honestly. “What’re you—” But that comes out too soft, too vulnerable, and he doesn’t want Deku to get the wrong idea, doesn’t want him to think Katsuki got weak or anything in his absence. 

They’re still rivals, always.  

So he clears his throat and tries again, but Deku’s eyes sparkle like he knows what Katsuki is thinking (his fingers twitch against the couch in a way that says rivals, always ). “Fuck’re you doin’ out of bed, nerd?” 

“Recovery Girl gave me a kiss this…I think it was this morning. Was light out, but you weren’t there.” Katsuki flushes bright red at that but doesn’t interrupt as the nerd tucks his face into the cushion and keeps muttering. “She made a comment about—that it was about time I came around so she could heal me. And then she told me to stop taking up her beds, but the medical ward really didn’t seem too busy when I left, but maybe there’s a big training exercise coming up soon, huh, Kacchan? But I left, and I came here, but I must’ve gotten too tired to make it upstairs because—cause next thing I remember, I’m here. On the couch. ‘N you came in and kicked the chair, and I think you were cursing out Kaminari for some reason?” Deku blinks up at him, seemingly unperturbed about Katsuki’s awed silence. 

Katsuki stares at the nerd, lips parted because this exchange is so painfully normal , but it’s not because Katsuki is also so painfully aware . He’s so aware that at any moment, Deku is going to go stiff all over like he’s being tased over and over again, and then it won’t be Deku on the couch, it’ll be some other asshole. Any moment, and he’s wasting the time he does have standing here gaping like an idiot. 

“You—you’re okay, then?” he asks stupidly. The bruises that have been marring Deku’s skin for the past month are all gone—no yellow-green edges, nothing—and his arms are curiously devoid of bandages for the first time since Katsuki himself woke up in the medical ward. He’d almost forgotten what Deku looked like without the ugly reminders of their kidnapping. 

Deku’s expression softens under Katsuki’s intense observation of him, and Katsuki wants to reach out and touch him to make sure this is real, but he keeps his hands firmly by his sides. 

“I’m all right, Kacchan,” Deku murmurs, blinking slowly and grinning. His tooth is still chipped, and it’s the only lasting image of how he’d looked before. “Just—I’m really tired.” He laughs and scratches at the back of his head. “The vestiges are so excited to be, like, alive again that they don’t let my body rest as much as they probably should. And Recovery Girl’s kiss on top of that—I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired in my life.” 

Deku slumps into the couch, but he’s still smiling like there’s anything funny about this. Katsuki doesn’t see the humor, but he lets it be. 

Maybe Katsuki did get weak in Deku’s absence. God. Pansy-ass. 

It’s a split-second decision, but the words tumble off his tongue before he can think about them: “C’mon then, shitty nerd.” He turns on his heel and starts toward the elevator with his hands stuffed deep in his uniform pants pockets, leaving Deku to splutter behind him. 

“Huh? Kacchan! Where are you going?” Katsuki stops after he presses the arrow next to the elevator doors, glancing at Deku over his shoulder. 

“You think you’re gonna get any decent rest on the common room couch, nerd?” 

“I was too tired to get to my dorm,” Deku mutters in a suffering tone, smushing his face between his hands. He slides off the couch and stumbles over his own two feet like a fucking baby deer on his way to meet Katsuki next to the elevator.

“We’re not going to your dorm,” Katsuki answers, avoiding Deku’s imploring gaze. “We’re going to mine.” He catches Deku by the elbow to keep the nerd from taking a nosedive into the living room floor, and the tips of his ears are hot with blush. 

Deku leans into him with a sigh. 

“Kacchan’s worried about me,” he hums, sounding far too satisfied. He’s practically fucking floating next to Katsuki—no, he really is floating. His toes barely leave the ground, and he’s shaky in the air like when he first activated the Quirk, but he definitely activated Float. It doesn’t look like the nerd even realizes he did it. 

“Oi, oi. Feet on the fuckin’ ground, nerd,” Katsuki chastises. “And I’m just trying to make sure you actually get some damn sleep, that’s all.” 

“That’s all, Kacchan?” Deku grins. His face is pale and sweaty like being awake is taking everything out of him, and Katsuki almost feels bad. Almost because he’s also a selfish son of a bitch, and he doesn’t want to stop talking to Deku, not so soon. 

“That it .” But Katsuki’s face is hot, and he tightens his hold on the nerd’s arm as the elevator takes them up to the fourth floor. “Someone’s gotta keep the fuckin’ vestiges in check, Deku.” 

The doors chime and slide open, and Katsuki all but carries Deku into the hallway. The nerd is flagging, and Katsuki grits his teeth. He waits for the feeling of flexing muscles under his hands, but it doesn’t come even as he deposits Deku on his own bed. 

“Y’room’s a mess, Kacchan,” Deku slurs, his eyes barely more than slits as he stares up at Katsuki, squinting up at Katsuki like he never wants to take his eyes off him. Katsuki doesn’t think he’d mind that, really. His hair is splayed out across Katsuki’s dark bedding, and Deku smacks his lips as scoots closer to the wall, leaving room for Katsuki next to him.

“Yeah, and whose fault is that?” Katsuki snarks back while pulling back his sheets and arranging Deku under his comforter. “Not fuckin’ mine.” 

Deku presses the side of his face into Katsuki’s pillow and falls asleep between one breath and the next. Katsuki sits down on the edge of his bed and closes his eyes, listening to Deku’s steady, even breathing. 

The nerd mumbles in his sleep, snuffling and shifting. He settles after a moment, and Katsuki must fall asleep at some point because when he opens his eyes again, it’s not Deku behind those eyes. 

They’re laying face to face, their noses almost touching, and the vestige’s eyes are open wide, watching Katsuki sleep. He jerks back and sits up so fast it makes him dizzy, breathing hard. 

“The fuck’re you?” he slurs, still half-asleep. 

“En. Sixth—” 

“I don’t—I don’t fucking care which user you are,” Katsuki bites, rubbing his hands over his face. He pauses, and silence reigns between him and the vestige, En. He points at the door. “Get out.” 

“Bak—” 

“ Get the fuck out! ” he yells, and he ignores the way Deku’s sleep-warm skin brushes against his as En climbs out of the bed. 

He closes the door with a soft click, and Katsuki curls into the spot of warmth left in his wake, and it smells like Deku.   

* * * *

Katsuki hunches over his desk, his legs crossed on his chair and his pencil tapping at the last question on his Hero Ethics homework. 

State one moral issue caused by Quirks that was exacerbated by the rise of mainstream heroism as a career. 

He chews on his lip and scrapes his nails along the back of his neck in thought. His back and knees are starting to ache from being in this position for so long, but he doesn’t bother shifting. Fuck his joints—he’s got math and Japanese history homework to do after this worksheet, and it seems sort of like more effort than it’s worth. 

Plus, it’s boring as fuck.   

Behind him, the sun sets in his balcony windows, casting lengthening shadows over his shoddily-repaired dorm room. There’s still a dent in the wall where his weight crashed into the plaster, and his dresser wobbles precariously when he closes the drawers too hard. His closet still doesn't have a door on it, and if he walks around without slippers on, little pieces of rubble and chipped paint stick to the soles of his feet, no matter how many times he’s vacuumed, which is annoying as hell. He still hasn’t managed to put all of his shirts back on their hangers. 

He sighs and runs his hand over his hair, racking his brain for any single moral issue, like, ever. At this point, he just wants to be done and collapse face-down on his bed and remain like that until his alarm goes off in the morning. Maybe he’ll suffocate and die in his sleep. 

Because isn’t that the dream? 

He jots down an answer ( Quirk discrimination, fuck this ) and fumbles for his math binder with a grumbled curse under his breath. He’d been distracted during class, thinking about Deku and how he’d need to get caught up again after all of this, just like after the war, and he can only hope he managed to write down the homework for himself. 

He drops his binder when there’s a hesitant tap, tap, tap on the window behind him, a human-shaped shadow imposing itself on the wall in front of Katsuki, a looming figure that he traces the outline of with his eyes. The edges of the shadow are fuzzy, and the person shifts out of direct sunlight before he can identify whoever it is. He freezes, tense all over and wishing he’d had the energy to close his curtains when he got back from class because whoever is on his balcony knows everything about the layout of his room, about Katsuki’s position, and he’s at a severe disadvantage here. 

Katsuki always does better under pressure anyway. He likes a challenge, and he’s nothing if not a winner. He formulates a brief plan in his head— defensive position, identify attacker, go from there —and maybe it’s not a plan Aizawa would be thrilled about if he knew, but it’s the best Katsuki’s got at his disposal right now. 

He grips the edge of his desk and uses it as a push-off point to vault over the back of his chair, landing in a crouched position facing his door, his palms outstretched and all but dripping with his explosive sweat, raised and ready for an all-out brawl. 

Part of him is itching for a good, high-stakes fight. Sparring isn’t the same if it’s not with Deku; everything feels different, everything feels high-stakes with Deku. Without him, without his eyes on Katsuki, hero training feels lackluster and kind of…lame. Katsuki burns with pent up energy buzzing under the first layer of his skin.  

That part simultaneously dies a little and lights itself on fire at the sight of the person on the other side of his balcony door. Katsuki really isn’t sure what he thought he’d see ( Robobitch, that crispy motherfucker from the League, or maybe some new asshole who wants to try their hand at being fucking stupid ), but he gapes at Deku, dropping his defensive stance with few dramatics. He’s crouched so his head brushes the top of the railing outlining Katsuki’s balcony, his eyes wide and flitting about as if looking for some unseen threat, and he taps at the window again with the tip of his index finger even as Katsuki makes eye contact with him. His other hand reaches for the doorknob, but Katsuki knows it’s locked; he’d checked and double checked before he fell asleep last night. 

Deku jiggles the knob, his eyes flicking pointedly between Katsuki and the balcony door, a clear request. Katsuki groans and covers his face with both of his hands, the sound muffled in his palms. 

Fuck this—for real, fuck this and everything about it. 

He sends a torn look to his desk, his abandoned math binder spilling out over his floor under his desk, the papers disjointed and scattered and full of his own chicken scratch. He curses under his breath again, and Deku’s tapping grows more frantic and desperate. 

The nerd peeks over the edge of the balcony railing at the sinking sun, which is barely a sliver over the horizon. The movement is paranoid and so unlike Deku but still somehow so familiar that Katsuki holds his breath and hesitates with his hand over the lock on his balcony door. 

Hikage is one annoying motherfucker. Katsuki doesn’t want to deal with another closet incident, not when he hasn’t recovered from the last one. He looks between his chaotic room and Hikage’s pleading, jittery eyes. His pupils are dilated with fear, and his hands are shaking as he continues to tap his fingertip against the thick glass. 

As far as Katsuki knows, Deku and the vestiges have kept mostly to the nerd’s dorm room; before now, Katsuki hadn’t seen him since he kicked En out of his own room in the middle of the night, and part of him is glad. 

Part of him—the other part misses the nerd’s stupid face or whatever, even if it means interacting with the even stupider vestiges. 

Still, he hasn’t sought Deku out, not after last time. He’d gone to sleep next to Deku and then he’d woken up next to someone else, and it feels like a betrayal—except he can’t figure out if it’s on his own behalf or on Deku’s. 

Fuck this. It’s all so confusing, and he already has a blooming headache from his ethics homework. 

Katsuki stares down at Hikage, and he hates the expression he puts on Deku’s face, so he unlocks the door and opens it a crack, only enough for Katsuki to stick his face out into the cooling dusk air. Hikage tries to bully his way in by throwing one of Deku’s skinny shoulders into the door, but Katsuki has always been bigger than Deku—especially now, when Recovery Girl practically has to bully the vestiges into drinking protein shakes to sustain the nerd’s body. 

Katsuki grunts, but he holds steady, rolling his eyes as Hikage rubs his shoulder, pouting. 

“Don’t suppose you know jack shit about Calculus?” Katsuki snarks. Hikage looks at him from under Deku’s lashes, and Katsuki squints at him. 

It’s an obvious manipulation. The vestiges have found his weak spot (Deku’s face, Deku himself), and they’re exploiting it, he knows. 

The worst part is, it fucking works. 

He opens the door a fraction wider with a put-upon sigh, and Hikage pushes past him into the room. 

“Stay away from my fucking closet!” Katsuki shouts as he catches sight of Hikage eyeing the space. He grabs him by the collar of the shirt he’s wearing—the same one he’d been wearing the last time Katsuki saw Deku wearing days ago—and forces Hikage to look at him. “What do you want this time?”  

“There are eyes all over Nine’s room. It’s not safe—it’s not.” He shakes his head, and Deku’s curls, frizzy and wild, fall over his forehead. 

“Yeah, probably because it’s a fucking All Might shrine.” For once, Katsuki doesn’t blame Hikage for his paranoia. He’s never been able to stand around in Deku’s room for more than a minute without getting creeped the fuck out by all the All Might posters on the walls.  

Still, he shakes Hikage, and he flails awkwardly in Katsuki’s hold. 

“Why do you keep coming here ?” he asks, and Hikage opens his mouth to answer, but Katsuki interrupts him. “No, I don’t give a shit about that—did you—did you scale two fucking floors to get here from Deku’s room?” 

“Um,” Hikage mutters, refusing to meet Katsuki’s eye as he suddenly finds interest in the dent in his wall, and that’s all the answer Katsuki needs. He shakes him again with a growl. 

“Fucking—Use the front door!” He keeps shaking him until Hikage looks vaguely nauseous. “Hallway, elevator, my door! Oh my god!” 

He drops the vestige in a seasick heap in the middle of his floor and steps over him, gathering his math papers up into a neater pile and replacing them in his binder pocket, scowling the entire time.   

He mutters under his breath: idiot, dumbass motherfucker, putting Deku in danger like that, just use the stairs like a normal person. 

God. Since when did he become a fucking vestige-babysitter?  

* * * *

Katsuki is cooking for himself, and it’s dark out. The sun hasn’t risen yet, so the common room is cool and silent beyond his own sizzling pan.  He watches the oil pop angrily, but his arms are so heavy with exhaustion and sore from class (he’s been working himself harder than normal, maybe too hard, because it takes the edge off of his restless energy that seems to revolve around the nerd, and if he gets stronger, maybe Deku will come back sooner, spurred on by his own competitive nature) that he can only stand in the dimness of the oven light and watch his food cook. 

He should stir it. He stares, his head bowed and fingers twitching at his sides. Someone slides out a chair at the closest table behind him, but Katsuki doesn’t turn. There is only one other person who is ever up and vertical this time of day, and lately that’s been because the vestiges don’t sleep. 

Whoever is here to greet him this morning—to ruin his day before it’s even fucking begun—settles into the chair, and he can see it so clearly in his mind’s eye: Deku’s scarred arms crossed in front of him, his chin resting on them as he watches Katsuki’s back through his curtain of thick curls. And he’ll be wearing a threadbare t-shirt that says something stupid and nerdy, and he’ll be warm to the touch despite the chill in the air. 

Katsuki doesn’t turn around. He finally raises his spatula and jabs at his food to keep the edges from burning any more than they already have. He takes another plate out of the cabinet next to his head, feeling Deku’s eyes on him. It lights him up like a fucking torch, and maybe he’s starting to get a little obsessive. 

Chances are, it’s not even Deku sitting at the table. Hikage might have gotten restless as the sun started to rise and found Katsuki’s room empty; he’d thought, at first, that Hikage found solitude from Danger Sense in Katsuki’s room because it was refuge from the prying eyes on Deku’s walls, but now he’s not so sure. The vestige seems to seek Katsuki himself out, the fucking weirdo. 

It’s probably not Daigoro at the table. He never shuts his damn trap, and Nana would have come over and tried to take over Katsuki’s place at the stove. There are others, he knows, that he hasn’t even met yet, but he can’t imagine a reason why they’d come out now, in the middle of the night, to watch Katsuki cook. 

He takes his pan off the burner and divides the food onto the two plates. It steams moisture over his forearms as he adds salt and the other things he knows Deku likes to eat on his food. He turns, finally, but he doesn’t look at the nerd (who is resting his head on the nest of his arms, just like Katsuki imagined) as he sets down the plate with the larger serving in front of him. 

“Eat,” he commands, gruff and unyielding. He’ll shove the food down the vestige’s throat if he has to, but Deku is getting too thin. They’re letting all of the nerd’s hard work go to waste. 

The vestige looks up at him through his hair and his eyelashes, his eyes bright in the shadows of the common room, but he shifts after a moment, lifting himself off the table and picking up the chopsticks Katsuki threw at him. 

“Thanks, Kacchan,” he murmurs, ducking his head in gratitude before digging in. 

Deku eats like Katsuki is about to take the food away from him, and it’s ugly. There’s food on the corner of Deku’s mouth and grease on his chin, and Katsuki gapes at him as his own food cools before him. 

“Hold the fuck— Deku ?” he sputters, and Deku pauses in shoveling food into his face only long enough to glance at him and nod. “How long has it been you?” 

Deku swallows a mouthful of food and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand like a total heathen, “It was always me.” He cocks his head, blinking. “I was just…awake in my room. I don’t think I was asleep before, but then I was awake, you know, and I just couldn’t be in my room anymore because Hikage was so loud , so I came down here. And here you were.” His face breaks into a wide grin like Katsuki being in the common room was the best thing to ever happen to him. “Thank you for the food, Kacchan. It’s good!” 

He stuffs another mouthful of food into his cheeks as if to prove how good it is. 

“I know it’s good, nerd, but you don’t gotta fuckin’ inhale it!” Katsuki gripes, but he looks away and can only hope the dimness of the room hides his blush. “Slow down before you choke and die because I won’t save you if you do.”

“‘Course!” Deku answers, but they both know it’s a bold-faced fucking lie. Katsuki clicks his tongue and finally digs into his own plate. He watches Deku out of the corner of his eye as he eats. 

They both finish before the sun is more than a sliver over the horizon. Katsuki takes their plates to the sink and washes them without a word—usually, he would insist Deku do the dishes since Katsuki cooked, but he forces the nerd back into his seat when he tries to get up. 

“Do they bother you?” Katsuki asks, once again standing with his back to Deku. “The vestiges—can you…what does it feel like?” 

“Usually, it’s like…they’re talking, but it’s on the other side of a door or a wall so I can ignore them pretty easily. But that girl, the one who…she knocked down that wall, and they’re all so loud in my head all the time. And sometimes I close my eyes and open them again, and I don’t remember what I was doing or how I got there, and I can tell time has passed, but I don’t know how much.” Deku runs a hand over his face and leans back in his chair. “And they only sort of get along with each other. Most of them were mentors to the others, but they don’t have to listen to each other anymore—like, Hikage really likes Kacchan, and Danger Sense just…” When Katsuki chances a look over his shoulder, the nerd is blushing, and Deku coughs to cut himself off. “But Daigoro insists he’s just being a weirdo-recluse like he was when he was alive, so they fight. Loudly. And often.” He huffs out a laugh, but it’s almost humorless. “I think they’re all a little tender over the fact that none of them could beat All For One, you know.” 

“Yeah,” Katsuki says, but he doesn’t really understand it at all. He has his head to himself, and he’s never had to fight a generations-old super villain before. He only does it because Deku has to. 

He lets the silence stretch between them. Deku sighs again and rests his forehead on the surface of the table. 

“I think I want to go back to class,” he murmurs, muffled by the angle. “Aizawa-sensei mentioned it to me…and I think it’s a good idea.”  

“Are you sure, Deku?” Katsuki asks, hiding his own hesitance in faux-focus on scrubbing at a clean spot on one of the plates. Deku hums. 

“I don’t want to get too far behind.” 

“Nerd,” Katsuki snorts. “I’ll help you get caught up again anyway.” He rolls his eyes even though Deku can’t see him—he had thought that much was obvious.  

He imagines the future where he’s catching Deku up to speed, and Deku is smiling at him from the other side of the table as they work, and it’s normal because Deku is himself again, for real this time. No bated-breath waiting for someone else to take the reins on his body. 

It’s normal, but it’s cheesy as fuck, and Katsuki’s chest feels tight at the thought of it, so he pushes it right the hell away. The lack of sleep is getting to him, that’s what he blames it on. Fucking Hikage. 

“I want to be in class with everyone again, though,” Deku says, chewing the fingernail on his thumb thoughtfully, “getting better, always. And I trust the vestiges to take good notes for me—they’ve all gotten through heroism before, so high school should be a breeze, right?” 

Yeah, famous fucking last words if you ask Katsuki. 

Daigoro just loves the school day. He sits behind Katsuki most days now, instead of any of the more bearable vestiges (not that there’s many of them), leaning back in Deku’s chair and humming to himself, mostly old stuff that Katsuki has only ever heard his grandparents listen to, the fucking old fart. 

It’s annoying. 

And he never takes any fucking notes, so Katsuki makes sure he takes the best notes of his life for when Deku is around to study them. To hell with the vestiges; Deku will see that Katsuki is infinitely better than them, and Katsuki will be number one as per fucking always. He smirks down at his notebook, but it drops into a scowl when his desk rattles as Daigoro kicks at the leg of his seat. 

“Are you a fucking kid ?” Katsuki hisses, glaring at Daigoro over his shoulder. The sight of him is disconcerting: Deku leaning back in his chair enough that he throws shadows over Grape Perv’s desk, a cocky smirk glued to his freckled cheeks as he chews on the nail of his thumb. His notebook is on the desk, but it’s closed, untouched, and there’s a pen next to it instead of Deku’s usual pencil.

Deku hates using pens in his notebooks—crossing stuff out over and over again drives him nuts. 

Not that this asshole would know or care, not like Katsuki. 

Katsuki turns around in his seat and snatches the pen off the desk—on the slim chance Daigoro decides to prove himself useful for once, he’ll need to use a pencil , dammit—and replaces it with his own pencil. Daigoro snickers into his hand, and Katsuki tightens his hold on the pen enough that the plastic creaks and protests, and he has to force himself to relax with one of the stupid breathing exercises his therapist taught him to keep himself from getting ink all over his perfectly good notes. His rage simmers as he clenches his jaw and refocuses on the lesson. 

For Deku , he tells himself. Focus for Deku. 

But it’s so fucking difficult to keep his mantra going when Daigoro taps him on the shoulder like they’re passing notes in grade school. The only thing they’re missing is a passed note, and if Daigoro tries that, he will be exploded immediately, wearing Deku’s face or not. 

He’s sure the nerd would understand. 

He grits his teeth harder, and his molars ache like hell at the pressure. 

“What do you want?” he hisses under his breath. He’s been trying to avoid Aizawa’s wrath since his breakdown against the man in the medbay hallway, mostly so he doesn’t have to look him in the face ever again. 

“I’ll let you in on a little secret, kid,” Daigoro tells him in a voice that qualifies as a whisper under only the most liberal definition. Glasses shoots them both a scathing look, but Katsuki only sneers in return; it’s not like he wants to be talking to this asshole either. “You’ll never use most of this, not as a hero.”

“I don’t fucking care.” Katsuki scribbles down the example from the board, glancing between the front of the classroom and his notebook like a bobblehead. He’s never taken such diligent, neat notes before in his life, and it’s starting to make his hand cramp. 

“What are you, some kind of nerd?” Daigoro snorts. Katsuki feels the puffs of air on the back of his shoulder, and he has to close his eyes to keep from blowing up. 

“Sure,” he grits out, and his pen bleeds a dark puddle onto his page as he presses down with too much pressure. “Sit the fuck down and focus, asshole. This isn’t about you.” He reaches over his shoulder and shoves at Daigoro’s face until he falls back onto Deku’s seat with an offended huff. 

“I already know this stuff,” Daigoro complains, twirling the pencil Katsuki gave him between two of his fingers. “I don’t need to focus or take notes—I’ll just take the test, and I’ll ace it.” He shrugs, and his cocky expression is what does Katsuki’s temper in. 

He stands up too fast, his chair screeching on the tiled floor and his palms smoking against the surface of his desk. His chest heaves, and the class goes totally silent around him, all of them watching without breathing. A tense moment passes.

“You won’t fucking be here for the test, asshole,” Katsuki insists, spinning on his heel to look Daigoro in the eye. The vestige doesn’t so much as blink twice at Katsuki looming over him, his palms crackling. 

“Sure I will. Nine is still healing, kid.” Daigoro clicks his tongue like Katsuki is nothing more than a stupid kid, and he falls out of his desk when Katsuki finally snaps. He’s on top of Daigoro in an instant, all of his hero training paying off in his speed while Daigoro still struggles to walk straight in Deku’s body. 

He winds up for a punch, his knees on either side of Deku’s ribcage, but one of Ectoplasm’s clones wraps its arms around his own chest and pulls him away before Katsuki can do anything. He bites back a frustrated scream, but he doesn’t fight the hold. 

“Deku fucking trusted you, asshole,” he spits, glaring down at Daigoro where he is prone on the classroom floor. There is so much else he wants to say, but not here, and not to Daigoro, so he slithers out of Ectoplasm’s hold and allows himself to be escorted out of the room and to Nezu’s office. 

Katsuki has tried to attack Daigoro both times he’s ever spoken to him, and somehow, he’s still only third on Katsuki’s list of his least favorite vestiges. It’s just fucking sad. He scowls at the ground and burns up inside with loathing. 

For Daigoro, for everyone. For himself. 

* * * *

Nezu suspends him. House arrest—but not even at the dorms like normal. The rat spouts some bullshit about a new, fresh environment and the gentle healing hold of parents. 

As if the old hag would ever be gentle. Or healing. Or holding. 

They send him home, where he can avoid his parents’ attempts to talk it out with him as well as Shitty Hair’s numerous, numerous texts about it. About how it wasn’t manly to attack Mido in the middle of class like that, as if Katsuki doesn’t already know that.

He sits in his bedroom and seethes, his door locked and his phone muted. 

But on the third day of house arrest, Katsuki’s anger breaks into pieces like a dropped puzzle, and he finds himself laying in his bed, the sheets stale with disuse like his dorm room after he got back, and he stares at his ceiling. His limbs are starfished across the bed, and his chest is heavy with the weight of gravity or maybe something else. He keeps his blinds drawn and his lamp off, and he stews in the quiet darkness. 

He chews his bottom lip until it’s chapped and aching, and his eyes burn. 

The memory of tackling Deku to the ground in the middle of class, his body firm and solid between his knees as he prepared to beat his face in, plays over and over in his mind’s eye like a nightmare, the worst nightmare he’s ever had because waking up makes it worse, somehow. More vivid. He can’t escape it, but Katsuki thinks he must deserve it. 

He knows he deserves it, and he can almost hear Daigoro’s satisfaction, his chortling, victorious laughter. 

Maybe that asshole was right—fuck, Katsuki hates to concede anything to him of all people, but…But he’d attacked Deku without a second thought. He was no better than a scummy fucking villain with his temper, no better than he was a few years ago. Maybe nothing had changed and he would always be a bully, the enemy, everything he no longer wanted to be. 

Maybe it was too late for him, and he would always be the worst thing for Deku. 

Fuck— fuck. Dammit. 

Katsuki clutches at his duvet and drags in a hissing breath through his teeth, closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to see how terrible he is anymore; instead, he sees Deku’s face. Him in middle school, beaten so deep into his shell that it aches for Katsuki to think about ( my fault ), and him now, smiling, and him on the classroom floor. 

Daigoro’s expression hadn’t been surprised. He had expected Katsuki to break, to attack Deku. The asshole had pushed for it, sure, but Katsuki should have been stronger. Better. 

He keeps fucking up. The war—this. 

  we know best how to keep him safe because we were the only ones there for him for so long, protecting him. not you. not you not you notyounotyounotyou.

Katsuki gags and chokes, scrambling for the wastebin next to his desk. He spits up only a mouthful of sour-tasting spit that pools behind his teeth. God—Daigoro was right. Katsuki needed to trust the vestiges to take care of Deku because obviously Katsuki wasn’t good enough. He’d let Deku get kidnapped, let him run away, and he’d bruised and scarred him more than the villains they fought.

What a fucking asshole. Katsuki doesn’t know if he’s insulting Daigoro or himself anymore. He growls and drops his wastebasket before curling up on his side to stare at his wall instead of his ceiling—what was it Nezu said about a change of scenery? 

His wall is covered with pictures, some from when he was a brat and others from his time at UA. There is one of him and Deku and no one else, and it is taped to the center of the wall, where it is cluttered enough to be hidden in case his old hag suddenly feels like cleaning him room (if the layer of dust he’d found on all of his shit when this house arrest started is anything to go by, that is rarely, if ever), but his eyes find the picture like it’s muscle memory. 

The edges of the photograph are soft, and he has to keep a roll of tape in the top drawer of his desk with how often he takes it down to cradle it in his hands. It’s from after the war; Dunce Face got into a phase of taking pictures of everything and everyone all the time, and Katsuki had feigned annoyance at it, but he understood more than he’d admit even if someone put a gun to his head.

He’s forgotten the fine details of some people’s faces already. 

He and Deku are in their hero costumes in the picture, both of them matted with sweat and grime. Katsuki is prone on the ground in the middle of the faux-wreckage of one of the training grounds, and he’d had bruises upon bruises after that training exercise, and Deku is standing over him with a radiant, playful grin.

The nerd reaches one hand down to help him up off the ground.

The picture has the moment frozen in time, the one where Katsuki reaches for his hand without a second thought. He remembers the feeling of Deku’s gloved hand in his own, how he wished their costumes weren’t so damn practical so he could feel Deku’s crooked fingers and rugged scars, but his palm was wide and warm, and his grip was firm. 

Deku helped him off the ground and didn’t think twice about it. Now, Katsuki brushes his thumb over the nerd’s face and his outstretched hand. He chews on his lip in thought, Daigoro’s cocky voice mocking him despite the emptiness of his room. 

“Fuck,” he mutters to himself, and he lets the photograph drop onto his bedroom floor. It stares up at him, and it’s just another thing to mock him for thinking he could be better. He presses his face into his sheets. 

He lays there like that until he can hear the hag and his dad milling about in their kitchen, making dinner together. Pots and pans clang together, and he knows they’re talking about him because he can’t even hear the hag’s abrasive-ass voice through his door. He closes his eyes and curls into a tighter ball and wonders what they could be saying. 

If he could ignore everything about why he’s here and the heavy weight on his chest, it would almost be serene. The Bakugou house is never serene, which is exactly why something has to ruin it.

Usually, that is Katsuki or the hag.

Today, it is a series of loud crashes that send Katsuki’s instincts into overdrive. He sits up in bed, straining his ears and moving slowly out of his bed, trying to assess the threat. His dad yells wordlessly, and the hag drops a plate with a matching yell. Katsuki cracks open his door and sticks his head out, then a hand, palms heating readily. 

Light from the stairwell invades the hallway, and he creeps toward the commotion. If there are villains in his living room, he’s going to kill them and then that stupid fucking rat who thought it was such a good idea to send him home instead of keeping him in the dorms. His parents don’t deserve to get attacked because he couldn’t keep his temper in check. 

Their voices are muffled by the distance, but he can hear their nervous, soothing tones. He moves slowly, avoiding the creaky step and craning to get a good look at what he’s up against. 

He sees his dad first, his eyes wide and cheeks pale with terror. He holds up both of his hands in a placating gesture as he steps toward the living room, leaving the hag next to the stove. She presses herself against the counter, and her hands are shaking where she grips the edge. 

“It’s okay,” his dad tells the intruder, his voice shaking but soft and unobtrusive, and he’s still moving toward whoever is in their fucking house, and he hasn’t seen Katsuki yet with how focused he is on getting into the living room. Katsuki wants to tell him to get the hell away, to leave the intruder to Katsuki because he’s trained in combat, but he doesn’t want to give himself away before he can figure out how to win this. “It’s okay.”

Katsuki presses his chest flat to the stairs, and he finally gets a good look at their living room. 

It’s a mess, the television overturned and the front door hanging open, and it must be raining because there is a trail of water from their front door to the other side of the couch, where Deku is pressing himself against the wall under their family portrait, his chest heaving and Quirk firing on and off like a caged, cornered animal. His hair is plastered to his head, and his eyes move between Katsuki’s parents like he doesn’t recognize them. 

“Izuku,” the hag murmurs, and she steps away from the counter. She must move too fast, though, because the nerd makes a choked, panicked sound, and green lightning illuminates their living room. She flinches back, and Katsuki finally moves. He stumbles the rest of the way down the stairs, caution thrown to hell, and he places himself between his parents and Deku. 

“It’s not him,” Katsuki barks. “Get the fuck—step back.” His voice is high and frantic, and he’d never get away with talking to his parents like this in any other situation, but his dad retreats to the hag’s side without protest. Katsuki turns his back on them and focuses instead on the nerd. “How did you get here, Hikage?” 

“Kah—Kacchan,” Deku sobs, and the fight goes out of his body between one breath and the next. Katsuki’s shoulders drop in surprise as the nerd slides down the wall and curls into himself on the floor. He leaves a wet streak on the paint in his wake, and he’s not even wearing shoes. “I don’t— Kacchan —” 

Katsuki presses his lips together and takes one step toward the nerd. His own breath is caught somewhere in his chest while Deku is hyperventilating, and Katsuki has known him to be a crybaby, but never like this. He’s never seen Deku so inconsolable, not even after the Kamino Ward incident or during the war. 

Katsuki is not gentle, but Deku looks like glass to him right now. 

“Katsuki,” the hag hisses behind him, and Katsuki glances at his parents over his shoulder. Her eyes are wide, almost pleading. “He hasn’t said anything other than your name since he got here— comfort him .” 

Katsuki sets his jaw and nods. He can be gentle. 

He crouches in front of the nerd’s huddled, shuddering form and debates on what to do with his hands. In the end, he places them awkwardly on Deku’s shoulders, ignoring how frail and shaky he feels under his palms. 

“Deku,” he grunts, and he winces, but Deku doesn’t seem to hear it over his own desperate panic. He makes a high keening sound, and his hands rise to tug at his wet hair. “Izuku,” Katsuki tries, and he snags one of Deku’s hands in his. “Hey, hey.” 

Deku lifts his face out of his knees, and his cheeks are blotchy and wet with tears. His hair is plastered to his forehead, and his eyes are more scared than Katsuki’s ever seen him, but he seems to register Katsuki as a non-threat because he shifts onto his knees and clutches at Katsuki’s hands like they’re a lifeline. 

“K-Kacchan,” he sobs, and his fingers tighten around Katsuki’s. “Kacchan, Kacchan .” He says something else, but it’s lost in his quick, brief breaths and his tears. Katsuki shakes his head. 

“I can’t understand you, nerd,” he says, and he’s almost begging, pleading. He hates being so scared, but even more, he hates seeing Deku so worked up. It aches like a rotting tooth in the pit of Katsuki’s stomach. “You have to—come on, breathe with me.” He forces out an exaggerated breath, holding his and Izuku’s hands to his chest despite his own racing heart. 

“Kacchan,” Deku tries again after a long moment of shaking, lengthening breaths together, “I don’t—I don’t know how I got here.” The admission brings another wave of tears, Deku’s chest and shoulders hitching. “I opened my eyes, and—and I was h…and your parents were—were loo-looking at me, and I don’t know how I got here. ” Deku presses his cold, wet face into Katsuki’s chest, over their joined hands.     

Katsuki shushes him and holds him tight enough to be grounding but loose enough that Deku could pull away if he wanted to. 

He doesn’t seem to want to. He burrows into Katsuki like he could merge with him and be safe in Katsuki’s chest cavity. 

As if on autopilot, Katsuki gathers the nerd into his arms and hoists him up, all but cradling him in his arms and hating how light Deku is in his hold, and he turns to look at his parents where they clutch at each other in the kitchen. He doesn’t meet their eye.

“We will be in my room,” he mutters, and he must look awful, the nerd curled into him and the front of his pajamas soaked through with rain water and his own terror evident on his face, because the hag doesn’t even make a snarky comment about keeping his door open. He nods once and stumbles up the stairs. 

He closes his door behind him, but he doesn’t make it any farther into his room before crumbling. Katsuki slides to the floor against his bedroom door, and Deku situates himself with his legs strewn over Katsuki’s lap and his ear pressed to his collarbone. His bony shoulder digs into Katsuki’s ribs, but neither of them complain about how uncomfortable the position is. 

Neither of them say anything for a long time. An eternity, maybe—Katsuki because he knows all too much about his habit of saying exactly the wrong thing, especially to Deku. Deku’s breathing evens out, but it’s too perfect and measured to be sleep, and his nose whistles with congestion.  

“I think,” Deku murmurs after their eternity passes, “I th-think it was one of the other vestiges. Um, the second—or the third. They don’t…they almost never speak t-to me, but I was just—I was in my room, and no one would tell me where you were and why you weren’t in class, but they all got this look when I asked, and then I was standing—I was standing in the middle of your living room, and I was soaking wet all over, and I was just so scared , Kacchan.” Deku chokes on a sob, and when Katsuki looks down at him, he has his eyes closed tight. “I’ve never seen your parents look so f-freaked out.” He’s trying for humor, but it’s too soon. 

“Me neither,” Katsuki mutters. And he should probably say something else like it’s okay or this sort of thing happens when you aren’t the only one living in your head or whatever, but he doesn’t because it’s not okay, and he’s not really sure if this sort of thing is supposed to happen. There isn’t really a precedent here. 

Deku accepts his silence. 

“You should shower,” Katsuki tells him. “I’ll lend you clothes, but you’re going to get sick, and that’s the last fucking thing we need.” He huffs, and Deku shifts against him. “And then you can sleep here, and I’ll make sure none of those fuckers in here,” he taps Deku’s temple with one of his fingers, “tries to get up and run away with your body, all right?” 

“All right, Kacchan.” And the nerd’s voice is so hoarse and tired, but he still drags himself up off of Katsuki’s lap, and he accepts the clothes Katsuki hands to him without a word before turning on his heel for the bathroom.  

Katsuki stops him before he can disappear entirely behind the door, placing one flat palm against the surface before it closes in his face, “Don’t…Deku, just try to stick around. Please,” he adds after a second for good measure. 

And Deku gives him this soft-eyed look that Katsuki can’t stand, one he doesn’t deserve, so he looks away and shoves his hands in his pockets. 

“I won’t go away. I’ll fight them off with your shampoo bottle if I have to.” He offers up a small smile. 

“‘S what a hero’d do, nerd.” Deku closes the door, and Katsuki sits against the wall on the other side of the hallway, listening to him shower like a total creep because he can’t bear to see someone else come out in his clothes. He bites on the meat of his palm to keep himself from crying or freaking out or anything equally unproductive, and Deku doesn’t seem nearly as surprised as he should when he opens the bathroom door and sees Katsuki sitting there in the hallway, his knees drawn to his chest. Katsuki stares up at him without moving, unabashed but palm stinging. 

“Bed time, Kacchan,” Deku murmurs, and he helps Katsuki off the ground and leads him back to his bedroom, closing the door behind them with a click. Deku hesitates, so Katsuki wordlessly urges him toward his bed, where the sheets are rumpled from Katsuki’s time on house arrest, and Katsuki pushes the photograph under his bed with one of his feet, half to hide the fact he’d been in here crying over Deku and half to make sure neither of them step on it. His face is hot, but Deku doesn’t seem to notice as he crawls over Katsuki’s bed and settles in against the wall. 

The bed isn’t big enough for the both of them, but Katsuki crawls in next to him and lays down on his back, reveling in the feeling of the nerd pressed against him from shoulder to ankle. 

* * * *

Katsuki wakes up to a cold spot next to him, and he blows out a big breath and flops onto his back. He stares holes into his ceiling and tells the flat, unyielding surface that he hates the second and third vestiges—he hates them for freaking Deku out like that, for the vulnerable, lost look on his face, for the fact that they never tell him shit , and they might never know who really brought Deku here. He hates them. 

The ceiling, obviously, doesn’t agree or disagree with him on this. 

Katsuki forces himself out of bed; the moment he starts having conversations with himself and the inanimate objects of his bedroom is also the moment where he stops letting himself be a sulky bitch. 

He’ll let the vestiges protect Deku, even though he thinks they’re doing a bang up job of it, and he’ll take a step back. Because Daigoro was right—Katsuki has failed the nerd too many times to think of himself as his savior. 

The space beyond Katsuki’s sheets is cold, so he tugs one of the shirts from his floor over his head and vows to shower today when he catches a whiff of himself. Deku can never know—he can never know how Katsuki moped over him like some fucking heartbroken damsel. He’ll never hear the end of it. Hell, he can almost hear it already: aw, Kacchan, did you miss me? as if it wasn’t fucking obvious.   

Anyone who calls Deku humble is a fucking liar, and they don’t know him like Katsuki does. 

Katsuki opens his door and hears three voices drifting down the hallway from downstairs, and someone is cooking if the smell is anything to go by. He avoids the creaky steps on his way down, but he’s not moving nearly as cautiously as he was last night, no longer searching for the unseen threat that had his parents wide-eyed and scared. 

Deku is sitting in the chair across from Katsuki’s usual seat at their dining table. His back is to the stairs, but even then, Katsuki can tell it’s not Deku—the posture is straight-backed and confident, his shoulders set wide as he laughs and makes small talk with Katsuki’s parents. 

Deku never learned how to talk to Katsuki’s dad, and the hag always scared him too much, but here he is, telling a joke and making them chuckle like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Katsuki gapes at the back of his stupid, curly-haired head. 

“Good morning, Katsuki,” his dad greets, effectively giving him away. He raises his coffee mug in his direction, and Katsuki nods in greeting. “Izuku is telling us about your most recent sparring session with that one friend of yours, ah…red and white hair. Oh, uh.” He snaps his fingers twice, but his dad’s always been terrible with names—that’s where Katsuki gets the nicknaming habit from. 

“It’s Shoto, sweetheart,” the hag says mildly. 

“Gross,” Katsuki groans, collapsing in his chair across from Deku, who is wearing a small, sweet smile. “It’s too early for you to be so fucking lovey-dovey, hag.” 

“Shoto, that’s it. He’s a nice boy.” 

“Anyone who can kick Katsuki’s ass like that is better than nice,” the hag snorts, cackling into her hand. Katsuki 

“Icy Hot’s not my damn friend,” Katsuki barks. “And he didn’t kick my ass, I kicked his.” He glares at Deku from across the table, crossing his arms and searching for any of the vestiges’ tells. It’s not Hikage because he’s kind of a freak, and En has only ever…stared awkwardly at Katsuki. It’s not Two or Three because they’ve proven reclusive as all hell. 

“Now, Katsuki, don’t exaggerate,” Deku tsks, and Katsuki scowls. 

Nana . At least it’s not Daigoro. If it had been him, Katsuki would’ve left him on his ass on their front step, no matter what his parents said about it.

“Katsuki?” his dad comments, glancing between them over the lip of his mug. “What happened to that cute nickname you always used to call him?”

“They were kids, Masaru,” the hag states. “Now look—they’re adults.” She pinches at Katsuki’s cheek, but he jerks away and bares his teeth, a biting threat. Literally. She glares at him and smacks him upside the back of his head. “Well, one of them is an adult.” 

“Fuck you, too,” he replies. 

Over the course of breakfast, it becomes increasingly obvious that his parents are not aware of the whole soul coma thing, or the fact that the person they’re eating with is not the sweet little Izuku they’ve known for Katsuki’s entire life. He’d sort of assumed UA would tell Auntie and she’d talk to his parents about it, and maybe they did, but the hag keeps doting on Nana like she’s not a fully-grown adult in a teenager’s body, and it’s sort of weirding Katsuki out. 

It’s so obvious to him, but apparently, that’s not the case for everyone else. 

He scowls at the remnants of food on his plate and watches Nana beam at his parents, cordial and nowhere near as awkward as the nerd. They talk about the fucking weather , and Nana drinks coffee out of one of their ceramic mugs, but she puts less milk and sugar into it than Deku likes. 

At least she eats, unlike the others. Deku’s shoulders are getting too skinny for Katsuki’s liking; he doesn’t want to have to wait around for the nerd to get stronger again once he’s back in control full-time. 

When his parents start asking Nana about classes and how those are going, Katsuki grits his teeth and stands up, placing both of his hands flat on the table on either side of his plate. 

“I think it’s time I walk Deku back to UA,” he says in a tone that leaves room for little argument from Nana. She narrows her eyes at him, but he narrows his right back, and eventually, she nods and stands. 

“Oi, don’t be an asshole,” the hag demands. “Izuku is welcome to stay for as long as he wants.” 

“I really should be getting back before they start worrying about me in the dorms,” Nana admits, rubbing at the back of her head sheepishly. It’s more than likely too late for that already, but Katsuki thinks they deserve it a little bit—it really can’t be that hard to keep track of the nerd, but somehow, he keeps showing up wherever Katsuki is. 

“Don’t be a stranger, Izuku!” his dad says as Katsuki offers Nana some of his shoes to wear. It’s almost weird to see the nerd in anything other than his red shoes, but it’s better than going barefoot across the city again . 

“Yeah, don’t let Katsuki scare you away,” the hag adds.

“I won’t fucking—” Katsuki blows out a breath and pinches the bridge of his nose to keep from exploding. “We’re going. I’ll be back,” he grumbles, and he urges Nana over the threshold and closes his front door behind them. 

“Good morning, Katsuki,” she greets as if they hadn’t just had an entire meal sitting across from each other. 

“Nana,” he says. 

“Who else?” She grins and starts down the sidewalk, and Katsuki can do nothing but follow after her until he catches up and walks at her side. “I figured you wouldn’t be happy waking up to one of us, so I left you to keep sleeping. Was that wrong?” 

Katsuki scowls at his feet because—no. It wasn’t wrong. He would’ve been in a much worse mood waking up to anyone other than Deku staring back at him. Fucking En.   

 “Your parents are very nice,” she adds, knowing him well enough through Deku’s eyes to see he’s not going to reply. “They care for you a lot.” 

“What would you know?” he spits. 

“I was a mother,” Nana tells him. “I had a son.” Katsuki pulls a face at the words coming out of Deku’s mouth and the wistful, sad look on his face. “Anyway—Daigoro was wrong. About you. I can see your doubt about it, but he was wrong.” Katsuki scoffs. 

“No, he wasn’t. He told the fucking truth, pulled my head right out of my ass.” He shakes his head and drags the heel of his shoe over the concrete sidewalk. “I wasn’t there to protect Deku. I’ve never been able to protect him.” 

“When Izuku left for the war, he was in such emotional distress that we, the vestiges, were brought closer to the surface, like now. So we saw everything through his eyes, and he spoke to us. He feels so much, this boy.” She places a hand over Deku’s chest, where the skull insignia on his borrowed shirt rests, and Nana smiles softly. “He knew you could protect him, but he didn’t believe he could protect you . That’s why he left.” 

“He didn’t believe in me.” Katsuki doesn’t bother correcting it to us. This is Nana, and this is Deku’s face, and he doesn’t care about fronts. 

“He didn’t believe in himself.” 

“I don’t need his protection—I’m a hero. The strongest, the best. I could have…if he didn’t fucking…” He tugs at his hair in frustration. He’d only gone to two of his three school-mandated therapy sessions after the war, and he’d never had the nerve to talk about it with anyone else before now. 

“He’s a hero, too. You could argue he’s several heroes, with all of us existing inside of him.” She gives Katsuki a knowing look before returning her gaze to the city stretched out around them. “Daigoro knows he can protect One For All. We all know we can protect the Quirk because we’ve kept it away from All For One for centuries now.” 

“Fuck One For All,” Katsuki mutters, and Nana barks a laugh. Around them, people jump and stare at them: two high school boys on a school day, both dressed in their pajamas, and one of them is laughing like a crazy person. A moment later, the attention leaves them. 

“Yeah, yeah.” She waves him off. “We can protect the Quirk, but no one can protect Izuku like you can, Katsuki.” 

“You’re just saying that, you damn liar,” he spits, rolling his eyes. He wants to be anywhere other than here, listening to her spew this bullshit. She’s only trying to make him feel better. 

“I’m saying what Izuku seems to believe.” Nana shrugs, nonchalant. “He comes to you to fight, to cry. When you both were kidnapped, he told them to hurt him instead of you because he truly believed you would make a plan to escape, and you would need to be the one in better condition.” 

“Fuck you,” he mutters, but it lacks fire. “Shut up.” 

“Izuku believes in you, Katsuki. As a vestige, I know his deepest feelings and inhibitions, but you still know him better than I ever will. You can protect him, and you have protected him. You make him feel safe—why else do you think Hikage keeps waking you up in the middle of the night?” She laughs again, and Katsuki scowls.

“Can you ask him to stop fucking doing that? It’s annoying, and I’ll explode him to pieces one of these days.” 

“It’s proof,” Nana sings, dancing around on her tiptoes. Katsuki aims a small explosion toward her, but he misses on purpose, and she laughs.  

“Does…do you really think Deku—that I,” he grunts in frustration and waves his hand, unsure of what he’s even trying to say. 

“I’m sure that Daigoro is wrong about you, Katsuki,” she tells him, turning around to look him in the eye. “And I wouldn’t want to leave Izuku in anyone else’s hands when we go back to the plane of One For All.” 

Katsuki nods once, and UA grows in front of them, imposing and stoic. He stares up at it for a long, silent moment; the front gate is on lockdown, so there’s no way in hell they didn’t notice Deku was missing from his dorm room once he didn’t show up for class. He lets out a long, suffering sigh as he texts Aizawa. 

teacher (10:43) - nerds w me

teacher (10:43) - come let us in. damn. 

He and Nana wait in relative silence (she whistles to herself, or hums, but she’s full of the same restless energy that the nerd has always been full of) until the gate flies open, Aizawa standing on the other side with a crazed look on his face. 

“What,” he seethes, jabbing a finger in Nana’s face, “the hell were you thinking, Problem Child?” 

He’s got big, dark craters under his eyes, and Katsuki sort of feels bad for Aizawa. He should’ve texted him last night, but in the midst of Deku’s freak out, it had slipped his mind. Oops. 

“It wasn’t me,” Nana says, batting his finger away. Aizawa seethes harder, his face turning a terrible shade of reddish-purple. His hair is starting to float off his shoulders, but he hasn’t activated his Quirk; he looks exactly like that time Dunce Face shorted out the 1A classroom to get out of a test he hadn’t studied for. “And it wasn’t Izuku, so do not punish him.” 

Aizawa rounds on Katsuki, but he holds up his hands innocently before he can say a word, “Wasn’t my fuckin’ fault. He broke into my house.” 

Aizawa heaves out a breath and pinches at the bridge of his nose, muttering something about retiring early. He seems to collect himself, but he jerks a finger over his shoulder. 

“Go to the dorms,” he tells Nana, “and stay there. I don’t care if you have to single handedly re-kill the other vestiges, but do not let them leave that damn building. No, don’t let them leave the dining room table, even. God knows what they’ll do with him next.” He shakes his head and stops Katsuki when he tries to pass. 

“I’m not even allowed on school grounds?” Katsuki shouts. “Did I get fucking expelled?” 

“No, Bakugou, you didn’t get expelled. None of us blame you for attacking Daigoro—least of all me, and I’m sure Midoriya wouldn’t, either, but Nezu and I observed how the situation was affecting you, and we believed you would better recover from your kidnapping at home, away from the vestiges.”

“This isn’t about me,” Katsuki insists. “I’m—it’s not about me .” 

“Yes, well, you’ll be allowed in class again soon. We wanted to see how Midoriya’s recovery progressed without you, but he seemed even worse during your suspension. Before, he would come out occasionally as himself, but with you gone, the vestiges seemed to be playing tug-of-war with his mind.” Aizawa rubs a hand over his forehead with a sigh. “Nezu wants to put him back into hero training.”

“I—what?” Katsuki stutters, more shocked than he’d like to admit. “The rat wants to put him in training again? Why?” 

“The principal wants to try every avenue for healing Midoriya and expediting the process of getting him back to himself,” Aizawa explains, but even he seems to hate the idea. “His body is healed, so his soul should be healing faster, but we’ve seen little to no progress. Recovery Girl proposed that it’s because his muscles are atrophying, so Nezu suggested we start going about things as if they’re normal again.” 

“Things aren’t normal, though.” Katsuki crosses his arms over his chest with a huff. “The nerd isn’t himself most of the time, not just sometimes, and the vestiges seem to be doing everything they can to kill him. They won’t eat, they won’t let him sleep, and they go gallivanting across the city in the rain, totally barefoot, and then they abandon him in my living room!” His chest heaves, and he’s grown louder over the course of his rant, so he’s yelling now. 

“They want him cleared for training, Bakugou, and I’m running out of arguments to stall. I just wanted to discuss it with you so you weren’t blindsided when he’s at training the next time you’re in class.

“ Who wants him cleared for training?” Katsuki shouts, desperate. “Nezu? Recovery Girl? All Might? ” 

“The vestiges do. They’ve been insisting on it for weeks, and I have rejected their requests, so they went to Nezu. He seems to think it will help not only with healing but with Midoriya’s future training.” Aizawa leans against the wall surrounding the school, crossing his arms and looking exhausted. 

Maybe he’s not such a bad teacher if he’s trying to keep the vestiges from getting the stupid things they want. 

“The vestiges have a better grasp on their Quirks than anyone else. They might provide insight on how to help Midoriya get stronger in the future, and how to master each Quirk in turn. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway, because Nezu signed the papers this morning to put Midoriya and the vestiges back into training classes, and there’s nothing you or I can do to stop it.” 

Katsuki wants to blow something up. These fucking vestiges. He wonders if they even care about Deku, or if they only care about a centuries-old bone that none of them ever got to pick. 

He settles for jamming his hands into his pockets and asking if he can come back to school before Deku goes back to training—call it good behavior. And the fact that the vestiges are fucking obsessed with him. 

* * * *

Yoichi, the first user, is Katsuki’s least least-favorite vestige—he doesn’t have a favorite because they all suck—for the sole reason that he never shows himself. Not to Katsuki, at least. He butts out, and he minds his own business, and that’s more than Katsuki can say for any of the others.

Chapter Text

Katsuki slouches in the armchair, his arms crossed tight over his chest and his knee bobbing. His jaw is clenched hard enough to make his teeth ache, and his usual sneer isn’t working to dissuade the school-issued therapist—the plaque on her door reads Komuro Anda — who is sitting on the couch across from his seat. She leans back against the corner of her stupid fucking couch, one of her legs crossed over the other and her expression relaxed and analytical, as if she knows everything about Katsuki just from his silence. 

He doesn’t believe that, not for a damn second. She’s a fraud, but both Aizawa and the rat told him that he had to take at least three mandated sessions before they’d let him come back to training, just like after the war, and there’s no way in hell he’s going to fall behind more than he already has. So, here he is, glaring at the window and sneaking peeks at his therapist out of the corner of his eye; this is his third (and final, if he has anything to say about it) session, and he hasn’t said much more than I’m only here so they’ll let me go back to class and narrowly biting back insults while she pokes and prods at him with her soft voice. 

The inside of his cheek is bitten raw from the effort, and he thinks he ought to be given some credit for keeping his head on for so long. 

“You know,” Komuro starts, breaking their stretching, peaceful silence that had thus far gone on since he slouched into his usual chair, the one on the left, closer to the door, “part of these mandated sessions, Katsuki, is actually talking about the issues that put you in here.” She tilts her head back as he turns away from the window; the world outside is bright, only a few clouds marring the sky, and he knows on a day like this, there’s no way his class isn’t out at one of the gyms on campus doing hero training. The muscle in Katsuki’s jaw twitches, and pain shoots through his molars, but he only glares at her in response. She uncrosses her legs and leans forward, setting her clipboard down on the cushion next to her, revealing a blank page of lined paper with only his name and the date written on the top line. 

The last two sessions have been the exact same. He opens her office door without knocking, he sits down in his chair, and he watches the hour pass by in the movement of the shadows outside her window. From this bland, cramped office, there isn’t much of a view other than a few of the trees on the front lawn of the school. You’d think a therapist for one of the most traumatized—sorry, one of the best —hero schools in the country would have a better office, but in Katsuki’s opinion, Komuro’s office is really fucking lame . She has knick-knacks on her shelves, framed degrees on her wall, and a digital clock that she makes sure to angle away from him during their sessions. She doesn’t even have blinds that work—the first fifteen minutes of his first session he spent watching Komuro wrestle with them and lose. 

“I could put in a request to delay your return to classes if I don’t think you’re ready for it,” Komuro continues, her eyes fixed on his face. She’s a plain woman, completely unremarkable except for her big ears which stick out too far from her head and the way she never seems to blink. “To be frank, I’m not completely sure that you are ready to go back to classes—you haven’t exactly given me much to work with at all here, and you’ve been through more traumatic experiences in the past year than most people will ever go through in their lifetime. I’m concerned with how you’re handling these events, or, rather, not handling them, it seems.” 

“Tch. I’m fucking dealing with them,” Katsuki bites, but Komuro smirks like she’s won the lottery, and it’s creepy as hell. Katsuki presses himself back into the chair, shifting his weight and resolutely avoiding her gaze. 

“Are you? Because, Katsuki, we’ve sat in this office in silence for almost three hours this week. You’d rather glare at me and just get these sessions over with instead of learning tools to help all of this not feel so…terrible.” She seems to flounder for the right word, and she picks wrong because Katsuki can’t imagine how any of this—everything that’s happened since his enrollment in U.A. but most of all the shit with Deku and the war—could ever stop plaguing him like a chronic case of the worst flu on Earth.  

“And what of it? I can spend my time here however I want—you told me that in my first session.” He lets himself smirk at this, thinking he’s won, that Komuro will let him go back to spending the next forty-five minutes stewing in the quiet. Komuro narrows her eyes at him, pressing her lips together, and he smirks harder.

You’d think he wouldn’t be so naive as to underestimate the therapist who deals with the most traumatized school in the country. 

“That’s true, you’ve got me there, but do you want to know what I think?” She only pauses for a split second, probably because she knows he doesn’t give two shits about what she thinks, but she barrels on. “I think you’re scared. You’re avoiding even thinking about everything that’s happened to you, let alone talking about it, because you’re afraid of the feelings it’ll bring up.” 

“I ain’t scared,” Katsuki growls, his fingers tightening in the grip he has on the sleeve of his t-shirt, his brow furrowed toward the bridge of his nose. “I’m not some kind of—I’m not a pussy.” 

“I never said you were. Dealing with traumatic events is difficult, and I know you think these sessions are a punishment, but everyone here at U.A. wants to help you heal. Talking is the first step.” She reaches again for her clipboard and resumes her position leaning back, relaxed, against the armrest of her shitty, blue couch with its ugly floral pillows. 

“I don’t need help. I’m gonna be the best, and I can do that on my own.” 

“Plenty of pro heroes go to therapy. In fact, most of them do—a hero who knows how to keep himself from burning out is going to go a lot farther and a lot longer than one who doesn’t.” Komuro watches him like he’s the subject of some boring-ass nature documentary, and he shifts in his seat with a scoff without deeming her worthy of a response. “Why did you attack your classmate, Katsuki?” 

The shift in topic takes him by such surprise that his mouth falls open, and all Katsuki can do is blink once, twice, before steeling himself again. He shakes his head and crosses his arms over himself again. He looks away, this time turning away from the window. 

Komuro lets the question settle in the air between them, observing his side profile. Minutes tick by, but the silence is oppressive, now, and Katsuki swallows hard. 

“I think I will put in that recommendation for another delay and more—” 

“It wasn’t Deku,” Katsuki interrupts, curling his hands into his biceps hard enough that his nails dig into his muscle in stinging crescent moons.  “It wasn’t Deku who I attacked.” 

“And Deku is—” 

“Midoriya Izuku. You already know that, I know you know who I attacked,” he sneers. “Aizawa told you everything about the two of us; don’t think I don’t know what’s in my own fucking file. I don’t want to be treated like a clueless fucking kid—I’ll only talk if you knock that shit off.” Komuro holds up her hands in a mock surrender and nods. 

“Okay, okay. I’ll cut the therapist-bullshit.” Katsuki glances away from her face and nods slowly before swallowing again. His hands shake where he has them tucked into himself, and the hour drags by slower than either of the other sessions. “So, you attacked Midoriya—Deku, you called him.” 

“It wasn’t him, I already said that. Maybe I’d talk more if you actually fucking listened to me.” He’s being unfair, and he knows it, but Katsuki won’t apologize, not when he already wants to scream and rip out his hair and explode the stupid fucking clock that Komuro turned away from him when he threw open the door. 

“I’m just trying to understand. You’re not making a lot of sense.” Her pen is poised over the piece of paper that only has his name on it and the date. 

“You can’t, like, tell anyone about anything I say in here, can you? Or I can sue your ass, right?” Katsuki eyes her, wary. Talking about Deku without revealing too much would be like navigating a minefield, except the entire earth would be made out of one big-ass mine in that scenario. He’s navigated a minefield before, and Deku used him as a springboard, so the analogy fits like a pair of pants that are a size too small. A little too well, if you asked Katsuki. 

Komuro nods, quirks a brow. “Everything you say to me in this room stays between us. Unless you’re a danger to yourself or others, in which case I will need to notify someone, but I would refrain from giving out details even if that were the case. You can trust me.” 

When Katsuki says nothing, letting the silence stretch as he tries to delay it another moment, Komuro makes a vague gesture that tells him to get a move on. He drags in a deep, aching breath. 

“Deku isn’t…his Quirk, there are people that live in his head. He calls them the vestiges, and they’re like ghosts, kind of. Not kind of—they’re dead, but their souls or whatever the fuck are attached to Deku’s Quirk, and usually, it’s okay. They talk to him, give him advice or some shit, but he’s still him, but then we got—they took us from the shitty park, while we were cleaning, and it was such a, it was such a nice day.” Katsuki shifts his weight where he sits and blows out a breath. There are goosebumps breaking out over his arms, but he isn’t cold. “When I woke up, he was already roughed up because he’s a fucking idiot, and I hated him for it, but I—he thinks he’s such a terrible hero, but—and then that girl came in and she told us about her Quirk.” Katsuki trails off, chest burning and head bowed toward his lap. 

“What was her Quirk, Katsuki?” 

“She called it Fracture. Deku was screaming, I’ve never heard a sound like that. He was fucking screaming , and then he was Nana.” 

“That’s one of the…ghosts?” Komuro asks, and she hasn’t written any of this shit down because apparently she’s just as fucking useless as Katsuki thought. He nods at his lap and licks his lips. “Is that who you attacked in class?” 

“No. That was Daigoro. He—he wasn’t fucking paying attention in class. He told me—he told me how he would just take the test for Deku, but that test is…Deku has to be back by then, he has to be, and I just got so fucking—I tackled him out of his desk, and I looked down, and it was Deku’s face, but I didn’t even care because it wasn’t him . I-I still wanted to hit him, even after everything because it was in his eyes, that it wasn’t him.” He sees the image of it in the backs of his eyelids, but time and guilt has warped it; Deku’s eyes are full of fear, and Katsuki is burning him up, devouring Deku in his own rage. 

To avoid seeing the scene play out all over again, this time more fucked up than the last, Katsuki keeps his eyes open until they burn, and his vision blurs. He knuckles at where his eyes meet the side of his nose and sniffs hard, but he’s not fucking crying. 

“Have you had issues with this Daigoro before?” 

“Tch. Yeah, he’s a fuckin’ asshole. The little pissant hates me, but that’s fine by me because he can fuck off and die— again for all I care.” Katsuki rolls his eyes and sneers at a spot on the carpet, his palms popping uncontrollably. “He talks too much shit.” 

“What sort of…shit would that be, then?”  Komuro gives him an open, probing look, and Katsuki wants to tell her to fuck off, to butt out, to leave him alone, but her threat echoes in the back of his mind. He won’t get held back. 

And he’s not scared—he’s not scared of anything. 

“He told me I don’t know how to protect Deku, but the vestiges—he told me all this bullshit about how they know how to protect him, but they’re the ones fucking him up, and they’re ruining him. But,” Katsuki cuts himself off, blinking furiously and chewing on the inside of his cheek. 

This is fucking stupid. He doesn’t feel healed at all. 

“But?” Komuro prompts. 

“But—if Daigoro’s right,” Katsuki starts, talking so slow that it’s painful, he has to force the words out and it aches like a rotting tooth that someone is poking with a fucking hammer, “if he’s right, and they can protect him better than I can, and they’re so terrible at it, then— then fucking what ? Why couldn’t I protect him?” Katsuki growls and staggers up off his seat, tugging at his hair. The inside of his mouth tastes like iron. He paces in front of Komuro for a minute before stopping in his tracks and letting out a wordless yell. “I hate—I fucking want Deku back!”

“It’s only natural to miss a friend in a situation like this,” Komuro tells him in that terrible, soft voice of hers, and it only pisses Katsuki off more. 

“Deku and I aren’t friends ,” he spits because the word doesn’t sit right with him. It’s too—it’s not enough, for everything they’ve been through. Katsuki shakes his head and huffs, his chest heaving. 

“You were right, you know. I do have your file, and I’ve reviewed everything in it. I think it would be helpful for you to consider how much of that file revolves around Midoriya, truly. And I’m sure if he were in that seat, and if I read his file, I’d see that just as much of him and his story revolves around you. That sounds like friends to me, Katsuki.” 

She doesn’t fucking get it. Of course she doesn’t—she’s useless, and Katsuki hates her, and he wants to blow up her stupid face and her lame ass office, but he clenches his fists and keeps himself from doing anything stupid.  

“I’m fucking done talking now. Clear me to go back.” 

Komuro stares at him a moment longer before glancing at the clock, and she signs off on his clearance without another word, and he lets the door slam closed behind him on his way out. She doesn’t say anything about the thirteen minutes left in the session. 

* * * *

Katsuki thrusts the slip clearing him for training into Aizawa’s line of sight, all but daring him to dispute it. He did his fucking three hours (almost) of mandated therapy, and he even spilled his guts like a little bitch while he was there, which was more than he ever wanted to do, but here he is. 

Aizawa gingerly takes the slip of paper, offering Katsuki a strange look. “Did you…run here?” Katsuki is sweating under the arms, and his chest heaves even as he places his hands on his knees to catch his breath—god, is everyone at this school fucking stupid? 

“Let me in on this training, sensei,” he says, and he means for it to sound like a demand, but it borders on begging instead. One therapy session spent actually talking and suddenly he’s begging for stuff. Ugh.  

Aizawa levels him with a flat look, glancing between Katsuki’s reddened face and the crumpled slip of paper. 

“Komuro’s office is across campus, Bakugou. And I know you wouldn’t risk unsupervised, unsanctioned Quirk usage so soon after a suspension.” They narrow their eyes at each other. 

“Yeah, I fucking ran here—is that what you want to hear, old man, or are your observational skills failing you? Just let me train with the class, god .” He shakes off the exertion from—yes, from running the entire way across campus, from Komuro’s lame ass office to the observation deck over Ground Gamma, where he knew he’d find Aizawa. He’d scared more than one first-year on his way here, all but pushing them out of the way, but they need the adversity. God knows the first-years this year have had it too easy, and if he can lay them out on their asses by running near them, they’ll never last in the hero course. 

He did everyone a fucking favor by running here, if anything. 

Aizawa stuffs the slip into one of his pockets and tucks his face away in the top of his scarf, turning his eyes toward the big windows that look out over the training grounds. Katsuki sees moving shadows, barely more than colorful blobs against the bleak training ground at this distance. It’s his class, more than likely doing a battle and rescue simulation, and Katsuki grits his teeth, his jaw twinging in irritation. Something under his skin itches with the need to get in there, to burn off the energy that’s been building since he tackled Daigoro to the ground in the middle of class, to get caught up again. Realistically, there’s only so much progress the extras can make over the span of a week, but Katsuki isn’t going to let Icy Hot of all people overtake him in the ranks after graduation all because of a measly week. Katsuki won’t accept any reason to not be number one.

“I think it would be better if we just watched, Bakugou,” Aizawa murmurs, and Katsuki growls under his breath, rolling his eyes. There’s no use arguing, even with how much he wants to, how much he needs to, but if anyone will hear out his case, it’s definitely not Aizawa, so Katsuki steps forward, closer to the big windows without another word. To the side, there are countless TV monitors, all of them offering a closer, clearer view of the training ground. 

Katsuki focuses first on the monitors rather than the viewing window. Ears is crouched in one of the pixelated pictures, her eyes closed and her head bowed as she presses her jack into a wall. Ponytail flits past another camera without sparing it a second glance, her stomach glowing as she creates god-knows-what out of nothing, and Shitty Hair follows almost immediately behind her, obviously on the offense if the determined smile Katsuki catches on his face is any indication. 

Moron. 

But Katsuki can’t help but watch raptly as his classmates fight and duel and defend, and some of the monitors show training dummies left for someone to rescue. He twitches with every attempted blow, his breathing going short with anticipation and his heart pounding against his ribs as if he’s right there in the fray with them.  

He wants to be in there, fuck. 

“If you’re not letting me join because they’ve already started, then that’s fucking—”

“That’s not why, Bakugou,” Aizawa interrupts, and his eyes never leave the window. Katsuki sees strings of tape fly out over the southwest quadrant of the training grounds out of the corner of his eye. “I figured it would do you better to watch after being out for so long, that’s all.” Aizawa shrugs, and Katsuki squints at him. 

“Says the guy who threw us into competition with each other the day we started here.” Aizawa heaves a sigh and finally, finally deems Katsuki worthy of his full attention, dragging his eyes away from the observation deck windows. The bottom half of his face is still hidden from view, tucked away in the folds of his scarf. “I call bullshit, sensei.” 

“Language, Bakugou,” Aizawa sighs, but they both know it’s more of a pretense than anything. Aizawa blows out another breath, this time more resigned. Tired. 

Katsuki’s only been back for all of two minutes—what the hell does he have to be tired about?  

“I could only hold Principal Nezu off for so long,” Aizawa admits after a long stretch of Katsuki holding his ground, his arms crossed over his chest and his expression expectant. No way in hell Aizawa would hold him back from training without some sort of motive, and he’ll be the judge of whether that motive is good enough or if it’s shit. “He’s twisting my arm, and…he threatened to take Midoriya’s training into his own hands if I didn’t include him in today’s exercise, and that is—trust me. Training under Nezu is the worst case scenario.” 

“So…Deku’s here?” Katsuki asks, the insides of his mouth going dry and cottony. It feels like such a stupid question; Deku’s rarely anywhere lately, and they both know it. It aches like a rotting tooth, and he’s pressing his tongue into it until he tastes blood. 

Except he’s never actually had a cavity—he’s above that, too good for something as trivial as bad brushing habits—so he’s not actually sure that’s a good or proper analogy. 

    “Yes.” Aizawa eyes him for another long moment, and his expression is unreadable, or Katsuki is too distracted by the knowledge that somewhere out in the bleak cityscape, Deku (or whoever’s decided to make an appearance today) is jumping around and fighting and probably wearing that stupid, gritted-teeth smile the nerd insists on making his brand. Katsuki’s heart jumps at the thought. “He’s been doing okay lately. Have some faith in him.” 

“It’s not him I don’t trust,” Katsuki grumbles, glancing back through the windows. One of the buildings below him lights up with golden sparks of electricity, and Katsuki presses his lips into a thin line. 

“Have some faith in your classmates, then,” Aizawa amends. 

“It’s not them either,” he scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Deku could take any one of them with an arm tied behind his back—no, both arms tied behind his back, and both of us fuckin’ know it.”  

“The vestiges.” 

“Obviously,” Katsuki bites, but it lacks his usual fire. Aizawa hums in vague agreement. 

“He’ll be okay, Bakugou. You just—” 

“I’ve done enough therapy for today, thanks though,” Katsuki snarks. He turns back to the TV monitors, this time searching for something, someone. He’s grown enough in the past few weeks to admit to himself that he’s looking for Deku now that he knows he’s here, that he might catch a glimpse of him in action or a glimpse of him at all. Anything will do at this point.  

He searches and searches, but he comes up empty. No green lightning, green hair, or stupid freckles on any of the screens. Damn it. He skims through the flickering, pixelated pictures again for good measure. 

“You gonna let me train now or what? Huh?” Katsuki adds without looking away from the screens. From the corner of his eye, he watches Aizawa glance at his watch. 

“All Might and Recovery Girl are on the way by now. Just wait for them to get here before you go, all right?” Katsuki rolls his eyes, but he notably doesn’t complain; he’s itching to get a look at Deku on one of the monitors before he jumps into the exercise. If the strange look Aizawa sends him is any indication, Katsuki’s silence is more telling than he thought. 

Aizawa watches the extras fight it out through the window, his face tucked into his scarf and his hands clasped behind his back. He accepts Katsuki’s silence and says nothing more about Deku or the training or his suspension, and Katsuki is glad for it until the door to the observation deck bursts open. All Might stands on the other side, slouched over and coughing into his fist at his own dramatics, and Recovery Girl shakes her head by his side and thumps him on the back with the heel of her hand. 

“Good morning, Aizawa,” she greets, hobbling past All Might’s decrepit figure and taking her place at Aizawa’s side in front of the windows. 

“Bakugou, my boy,” All Might greets in a hoarse murmur as he wipes blood and spit from the corner of his mouth. He slaps Katsuki on the shoulder and nearly sends him sprawling with his unnatural, surprising strength, but he keeps his feet under him and only stumbles. “Thought you’d be eager to get back into training after getting cleared, but observation is not a bad choice, either!” All Might offers him a wide smile and jerks his head toward the window.

“Aizawa told me to wait for you to show your face,” Katsuki grunts. “Sure took your time, but now—” 

Before Katsuki can continue, there is movement just outside the observation deck, a green blur flitting past closer to the deck than any of the other extras have come so far, and Katsuki’s jaw drops at the sight, his eyes tracking the blur like magnets. He couldn’t look away even if he wanted to. All Might’s hand tightens where it rests on his shoulder. 

Deku seems to freeze mid-air, green lightning bouncing off his skin, and he turns to wave through the window. Cheeky shit. But he catches Katsuki’s eyes through the glass, and it must take him by surprise if the bug-eyed, gaping expression his smile drops into is anything to go by.

“Kacchan!” he mouths—or yells, maybe, but the glass is too thick to let any sound through. Katsuki goes all warm and embarrassingly fluttery inside at the sight of him because this is Deku, surely, and that’s all that matters. 

But the fluttery-warm feeling crumbles to pieces, revealing horror as Deku’s eyes move to the figure behind Katsuki, and his expression shifts again. This time, instead of surprise, his face goes blank and pained in the same way it has so many times since their kidnapping. Katsuki all but watches the fight in Deku’s eyes, one of the vestiges clawing their way to the surface, shoving Deku out of the way like some schoolyard bully, but in the split second of flickering microexpressions, the green lightning flickers and dies out, and gravity takes hold of Deku’s body. 

He plummets out of sight like a bag of boulders, all horrifyingly dead weight, falling through the nearly fifty-feet of open air between the observation windows and the ground below. All Might’s fingers curl into Katsuki’s shoulder like claws, hard enough to hurt, and he’ll more than likely have finger-shaped bruises carved into his skin later tonight, but his ears are ringing and between one blink and the next, Katsuki is blasting his way down the hall, the observation deck door slamming against the wall in his wake. 

By the time Katsuki makes it to Deku’s side, the dust is already settling around him and the crater his body made. 

“Oh god, oh my fucking god,” Katsuki mutters, falling to his knees and ghosting his hands over Deku’s prone, frail form. His hero costume is torn around scrapes, and one of his legs is bent out of shape in a way that has Katsuki swallowing back an acidic nausea. Dust covers the nerd’s skin, hiding his freckles and turning his hair a brackish shade of gray in a garish mockery of how he might look if he lives to see the age of forty. 

Aizawa kneels on the other side of the crater, and Katsuki offers him a wide-eyed look, his lips parted and his knees aching where shattered rocks dig into his uniform pants. 

“Bakugou—” 

All Might reaches them in the same moment, out of breath and heaving and moving faster than Katsuki’s seen him move since the Kamino fight, and as he leans over Deku’s body, the nerd gasps and jerks, his eyes snapping open. Katsuki lets out a wordless yell and falls back on his ass as the nerd lets out a long breath and blinks the dust out of his eyes. 

When Katsuki manages to sit up again, Deku is shifting amid the rubble around him without so much as a wince or a gasp despite the blood matting his hair to the side of his head and the clicking noise that may or may not be coming from the nerd’s bulging shoulder, not to mention his broken leg and whatever else is broken which Katsuki can’t see. 

He’s wearing a small smile, glancing up at All Might, and Katsuki can’t help the vision of Deku, skinny as hell with a big-ass head, in his younger years, his knees scraped up but a smile on his face despite his red-rimmed eyes, muttering Kacchan, so cool!  

Except this time, Deku mutters something that sounds like, “ Toshinori .” 

Katsuki sees red. 

“Nana,” he murmurs, deceptively calm. Deku’s eyes flit toward him, then back toward All Might. Katsuki draws in a long, whistling breath, his palms crackling. “I trusted you. What the fuck—I trusted you!” He explodes, then, but he is too angry to even lunge for Deku and instead lets off two big explosions and clutches at his own head, tugging at his hair. “I trusted you to keep him fucking safe because none of the others would, and you turn around and you almost get him killed becuase you want to fucking talk to All Might ? You can’t fucking take care of him—none of you can—you can’t keep him safe because you don’t care about him, not like I do! I hate you—I’ll kill you! ” His voice is hoarse and too loud in his own ears, and his face is wet. He only notices because the wind blows, and his cheeks are cold and damp, and his vision is blurry. “Just let him back into his body— please . Please, please, please. Fucking—” 

Katsuki drops to his knees again, this time feet away from Deku’s body. He wraps his arms around himself, cradling himself and breathing hard. Deku, All Might, and Aizawa stare at him, and he feels so insane, and it only serves to piss him off more, but he’s too tired to be angry anymore. 

He thinks of Komuro, and he hates her. He hates everyone, probably, even himself, not for the first time since all of this started. 

“Maybe I am fucking selfish for wanting him back, but at least I’m not getting him fucking killed,” he spits, and Recovery Girl finally catches up to them, her cane thumping on the crumbled asphalt, and she pushes Aizawa and All Might to the side, muttering to herself and fumbling to get to the nerd’s side. All the while, Nana stares at Katsuki, her eyes wide and apologetic. Katsuki can’t stand the sight, so he turns away. 

“Bakugou,” she starts, but Katsuki shakes his head.

“Fuck off,” he whispers, but there is no feeling in it. No bite, no fire, nothing. 

“I need to heal Midoriya before we move his body,” Recovery Girl interrupts, “so you’ll need to give him control again. We will need to be quick with this, or he will be in more pain than I will be able to manage for him, okay?” Nana nods, her eyes downcast, and several of the old bitch’s med-bots roll to the edge of the crater, ready to cart Deku’s body away. 

Katsuki doesn’t let himself watch, but his hands tighten on his biceps at the sound of Deku’s agonized groan. He squeezes his eyes closed and doesn’t open them again until Recovery Girl leaves with her bots and Deku on the stretcher between them. 

* * * *

“Yo, Bakubro! We’re gonna go hit up the medbay to see how Midobro is doing.” Shitty Hair pounds his fist against Katsuki’s door again for good measure, as if Katsuki didn’t hear his loud, annoying ass voice the first time. 

“Fuck off ,” Katsuki yells back, trailing it with a set of increasingly threatening explosions. 

“Jeez, okay, man, we get it,” Shitty Hair grumbles, and Katsuki listens as his footsteps recede. Katsuki lays on his bed with an arm tucked under his head and blows out a breath.

None of this should’ve happened. If the nerd hadn’t been so damn selfless, letting Katsuki get off easy when they were both strung up like pigs in that little concrete box of a room—if this could even be considered getting off easy with the amount of heartache it’s caused him—everything would be fine. 

He’s lying to himself; Deku’s not the one Katsuki’s mad at. It’s not his fault, and Katsuki knows it. Deku can’t help but be so self-sacrificing—he’s been like that since forever, or at least since Katsuki started pushing him and everyone else around himself down. So maybe this is Katsuki’s fault, in the end, it’s all just one, big fucked up domino effect. Katsuki made Deku the way that he is, and he threw himself in front of Robo Bitch and her cronies, and now here they are. Deku’s in the medbay for the billionth time, and Katsuki is glaring holes into his ceiling as the sun sets over this shitty ass day. 

Tomorrow will be better. He tries to tell himself that, but he’s not sure if he even believes it. 

Enough time passes (all of it spent stewing on Katsuki’s part) that Shitty Hair returns to his door, this time knocking instead of pounding and standing outside in silence for a long moment. 

“Midoriya’s okay,” he says, finally. “They’re gonna keep him for a while longer to keep an eye on him, you know, but I thought you’d like to know. He’s okay—Recovery Girl said she got most of his injuries in that first kiss, so he’s all good now. Like I said, just thought you’d like to know.” Shitty Hair’s shadow lingers in the crack under Katsuki’s door for another minute before the idiot sighs and retreats into his own room. 

Everyone else gives Katsuki’s door a wide, wide berth, so wide he can’t hear anyone else pass by, not by their footsteps or by their paused conversations. He feels like a haunted house, the sort of local legend that even the dumbest kids steer clear of. 

Or a bomb. That might be the better comparison, considering everything. 

The first set of footsteps he hears, hours after Shitty Hair’s door closed behind him, Katsuki would know anywhere. Soft, hesitant steps coming closer to his door from the direction of the elevator—Katsuki would give the person on the other side shit for using the elevator over the stairs if the image of Deku’s twisted, broken leg wasn’t burnt into the backs of his eyelids. 

He heaves himself off his desolate nest of blankets stacked on his bed with a groan, and he opens the door before the other person can knock. 

It’s Deku, or Deku’s body. Katsuki knew it before he opened the door because he knows Deku better than he knows himself, better than he knows his own Quirk. What’s that bullshit Komuro spewed at him? Their stories are intertwined, or whatever? Katsuki is starting to think that might be true, that might’ve been the only truthful thing Komuro said to him in all of their sessions together. 

“Who the fuck are you now?” Katsuki bites, keeping his voice low to keep all the other extras (Shitty Hair especially) off his ass. Deku gives him a surprised look, his hair wild but clean of dust and rubble, and he blinks twice before stuttering. 

“I’m…Mid—Iz—I’m Deku,” he fumbles, waving his arms in the space between himself and Katsuki’s door and Katsuki. Deku’s wearing a pair of plain, nondescript pajamas, probably from the medbay. They’re not at all Deku’s style, but they’re leagues better than another hospital gown. 

“Mhm,” Katsuki hums. “For how long?”

Deku’s brows draw together over the bridge of his nose. “Is that what this is about?” 

“Fuck’s that supposed to mean, huh?” Katsuki glares at him, squaring his shoulders at the nerd’s vague response. It sounded almost like an insult, somehow. 

“Just let me in, Kacchan.” Deku squares his shoulders right back, working his jaw in that mulishly stubborn way of his. 

“For how long, Deku—answer the damn question.” Katsuki isn’t quite sure why it’s so important that Deku tells him, but there is a desperate edge to his voice, and Deku must recognize it because his eyes soften without caving from his headstrong posture. 

“For now . Isn’t that enough?” And Katsuki doesn’t have anything good enough to argue against that, so he opens his door a little wider, and Deku slips in, brushing against Katsuki’s body on his way past. He is warm and solid, and he smells like antiseptic and scentless shampoo and Recovery Girl’s perfume. 

Katsuki closes the door softly behind him, trapping him and Deku in the confines of his room. Deku, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind. He observes Katsuki’s room like it’s his first time seeing it, even though he’s been in here countless times, but Katsuki doesn’t interrupt, even as Deku runs his fingers over the indentation of Katsuki’s body in his mess of sheets and blankets. 

The nerd sits on the edge of the bed gingerly, fiddling with his own fingers and looking up at Katsuki through his bangs. 

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he accuses, but there’s no animosity in it. Deku says it like it’s fact, and it might as well be. “Or, you’re not yourself around me. You haven’t been, not since…” 

“Can you fuckin’ blame me?” Katsuki huffs. “How can I be the same around you when you aren’t you ?”  

“All I ever wanted when I was here was you, Kacchan,” Deku hisses. There’s a spark in his eye, but he doesn’t get up off of Katsuki’s bed. He stays on the lower ground, slouching into himself, and it pisses Katsuki off. “I just wanted to see you, make sure you were okay. I barely remember anything after that girl started touching me, and suddenly I open my eyes, and you’re gone, and days have passed. Everyone tells me what happened, and they say you’re okay, but I need to see it with my own eyes, but you won’t see me. Even when I see you, it’s like you just look right through me!” Finally, Deku throws his hands up, exasperated. 

“I couldn’t, Deku.” Katsuki clenches his jaw and glances away. 

“Why not ? I needed you.” 

“No, you didn’t,” he insists, and he wishes Deku would understand, would let it go. For the first time, he wishes one of the vestiges would take over so Katsuki could go back to brooding instead of having this conversation. 

“Why couldn’t you see me? Why couldn’t you be around me?” There’s a desperate, teary edge to Deku’s voice that hollows out part of Katsuki’s chest. 

“Because I couldn’t watch you…I couldn’t see you like that anymore, all right? You weren’t you, and it fucking hurt like hell because—because,” Katsuki trails off, unwilling to finish the thought.  

The fight drains out of Deku’s shoulders like sand through his fingers. “I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t fucking apologize, dumbass.” 

“Well I am. I’m sorry. I know it was…hard.” Katsuki lets out a humorless laugh. 

“You can fucking say that again, nerd. It was—one minute, you’d be here, but then you’d go all slack, and you’d jerk, and your eyes…you’d be someone else, and I was the only one who noticed. I hated it. I wanted you back, but the vestiges—god, they—” 

“I could hear them. And you. While I was in there,” Deku interrupts, his voice soft. “They were wrong, Kacchan.” Deku stands, finally, and he crosses the room to stand in front of Katsuki. “Daigoro has a lot of pent up energy, and it wasn’t fair for him to say those things to you. He was wrong, and I don’t blame you for punching him—actually, thanks for punching him. He deserved that.” 

“You didn’t,” Katsuki says, miserable. 

“That doesn’t matter. He deserved it because he was wrong about you. You are the only person who has ever made me feel safe, Kacchan.” Deku says it with all the sincerity in the world, but it makes no sense. Katsuki shakes his head, numb, and Deku grabs him by the sides of his face to keep him still. “Why do you think Hikage always sought you out? Danger Sense is only ever quiet when I’m with you.” Deku smiles, and it’s blinding, but it falls after a second. “I ran away to protect you because I couldn’t lose you. It was dumb—I wasn’t thinking.”

“Fucking obviously,” Katsuki tells him with an eye roll. “I could’ve told you that, dumbass.” 

“You would’ve protected me just fine during the war, Kacchan. You’re amazing like that—I would’ve been safe. But I knew I couldn’t protect you . I was too weak. That’s what I was worried about.” 

Katsuki gapes at him for a long moment, long enough that Deku turns red and averts his eyes. 

Then, Katsuki smacks him up the back of his head with a growl. 

“Ow! Kacchan!” Deku shouts, indignant and rubbing where he got hit.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Katsuki answers. 

“Mean!” Deku takes him by the arms and shakes him like that’ll drive his point home. “We were having a moment! I’m trying to convince you that you’re good at keeping me safe, and you hit me!” 

“Whiny bitch.” Katsuki rolls his eyes, but he catches sight of Deku’s face afterwards, and it makes something in his chest twinge painfully. “Are they going to come back? The vestiges?” 

Deku offers him a look that verges on pitying, but he shakes his head. “Nana agreed to keep them all in check, and they returned to their plane.”

“Fucking— good, ” Katsuki huffs. 

“It probably gets boring being stuck in my head, Kacchan.” Deku pauses. “Nana wanted me to tell you that the job of protecting me and keeping me safe goes back to you. I have to agree with her.” Katsuki isn’t quite sure he agrees, not yet, not after weeks of beating himself up. But he’ll get there, the more he hears it coming from Deku’s mouth with Deku and only Deku behind the eyes. 

“She’s looking down on you, Deku—you can take care of yourself.” 

“The vestiges will be there to save me if I ever need it, then,” Deku acquiesces with a sage nod. 

“Tch. That’s my job. They can fuck right off.” Deku giggles and shakes his head, and he looks so pretty in the dim light of Katsuki’s bedroom.  “My therapist called us friends, and it pissed me off,” he blurts out, and his face goes hot with his blush. Deku’s brows draw together over the bridge of his nose again, and his hands tighten on Katsuki’s biceps. Katsuki can’t look him in the eye. 

“Do you—are we not?” His voice is underlined with hurt, but the shitty nerd is obviously trying to cover it. “Hold on, you have a therapist?”  

“That’s not—” Katsuki shakes his head and presses his lips together into a thin line. “It pissed me off because she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand us—she spouted all this bullshit about how my file, so much of it revolves around you. And our stories, whatever the fuck, they’re, like, intertwined, I guess.” His face is on fire, like if he ignited his hands in the biggest AP shots he possibly could. That’s what his skin feels like, all the way up to the tips of his ears and down the back of his neck. 

“Kacchan…” Deku trails off, but he sounds like he knows. Of course he knows what Katsuki is trying to say—it’s Deku. 

“I think she was right, but it pissed me off that she said we were friends.” Katsuki squeezes his eyes closed; admitting this is too much, but admitting it to Deku’s face…Katsuki might just die on the spot. “And I think—I think—” 

Deku cuts him off, brushing his hands up Katsuki’s biceps to his shoulders to his neck to the sides of his face again, cupping his cheeks, and Katsuki leans into the touch, hot even against his own hot skin. His fingers tighten around Deku’s t-shirt, twitching and nervous. 

“You think?” 

“I think—” 

But Deku cuts him off again, that asshole, this time by pulling Katsuki closer and brushing his lips over Katsuki’s. It barely classifies as a touch, let alone a kiss, but it’s perfect. Katsuki throws caution to the wind and kisses Deku, really kisses him, none of that bitch ass lip-brushing bullshit. Deku’s lips are chapped, and his shirt wrinkles under Katsuki’s hands, but Deku only presses closer, his fingers brushing the edge of Katsuki’s hairline in front of his ears. 

Deku smiles against him, and it’s a good feeling. If Katsuki were dorkier, he might call it wonderful or amazing or any other synonym, but he’s not a dork, not even for this dork who he’s sharing air (and spit) with and who’s looking at him through half-lidded eyes and blushing like a fucking school girl. 

“You think…” Deku prompts again, and Katsuki’s brain is fried because he just kissed the only person who’s ever mattered to him, even when he thought he hated him, and this is the only place he’s ever needed to be.

“I think I want you to kiss me again,” he murmurs without thinking, and shit, maybe he is a fucking dork because what the hell was that? Even Deku laughs at him, his eyes bright and teasing, and Katsuki growls and tries to squirm out of his hold. 

“No, no, Kacchan,” Deku begs, still giggling but keeping his hold on Katsuki even as he scowls. “I’ll kiss you again, c’mere!” 

“No. I don’t want a kiss from you anymore, asshole. Quit fucking laughing at me.” 

“It was cute! I liked kissing Kacchan, too—let me do it again! Please, Kacchan, please!”  Katsuki levels him with an unimpressed look to match Deku’s blinding smile, and he stops struggling. 

Deku kisses him again, and it’s perfect—it’s perfect, and it’s Deku. Only Deku.