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Dust and rubble. That’s all Katsuki leaves. Broken windows and shattered steps, cracked asphalt and crumbled concrete, it’s all dust and rubble in the wake of winning.
If the price of victory is decimation, then it’s better that he be the one to pay it. It’s expected of him, really—to leave something, someone, in shambles every time he takes to the field. Even if it gets him in trouble sometimes, he revels in a little display of power, and despite how loud the Hero Commission complains, he knows they do too.
So if he’s goaded into overkill, it can’t always be his fault that the buildings around him are so fragile. Who makes a highrise that doesn’t have earthquake-ready foundations? It’s shoddy workmanship and a tragic lack of quirk-related foresight. It can’t be his fault the overgrown office tower came down tonight, because it came down on top of him.
There are much easier ways to die than dust and rubble.
He chokes on it like any other mortal. Like any other man stone crushes his ribs and makes meal of his leg and presses him relentlessly into the rebar-studded ground as though it could punch him through to his grave. It might—with how hard it is to breathe and how much blood is seeping from beneath him, it might very well be possible.
Katsuki cranes his head, looking for the sky. It’s strange how human beings innately know which way is up, even pushed into the dirt and dark; it’s the only way they can’t go, and they still want to find it. He doesn’t find it, though. There’s just vaulted concrete and warped metal twisted like some cathedral’s decorative ceiling, empty and fearful.
He wants to laugh. He almost does—tenses his chest and braces for it—but that only causes painful spasms that choke it out into a cough. The building’s thick walls came down in chunks, one of which crushes into his right side and definitely broke bones, another that rests so cleanly where his left leg should be that perhaps it was never there at all.
Katsuki lets his head fall back, flat to the floor of the collapsed price of victory. The stone is cold and rough, scraping at his scalp and elbows as he tries to move even a little. A thick piece of rebar groans when he grabs it, but stays resolutely still; it is not a comfort, but it grounds Katsuki from the fog gathering at the edges of his eyes.
His earpiece crackles, high and terrible. The distorted ghost of his patrol partner speaks frantically, nonsensically, broken into unrecognizable snatches of language. It’s almost a song. Something metallic and discordant that cannot be danced to or sung along with, yet everyone already knows the words.
Where are you? Are you hurt? Are you there? Can you hear me?
Katsuki grits his teeth and brings his hand to his ear, then to his dusty shoulder, smacking at the communication controls until the song cuts off into a sharp, crisp ringtone. He still holds the rebar with his other hand, grip tightening the longer his ear rings and rings and rings.
Click.
“Kacchan! Is your patrol over already?”
All of Katsuki’s limbs—the ones he can still feel, at least—go lax. Fingers curled around the rebar are gentle now, slung loose like the sleep-heavy morning touch of don’t go yet. His bones groan and grind as stone settles deeper onto him, his lungs feel small and strained.
“Hey, Deku,” he says, dust clogging his throat to some rasp he barely recognizes. His lip, cracked and bloody, twitches into a smile. “Yeah. It’s over.”
“Oh, that’s nice! They hardly ever let us off early. You must’ve done a really good job!” There’s whirring and clinking in the background, the sounds of a kitchen alive with activity. It’s Deku’s turn to cook dinner and Katsuki was already prepared to order a pizza, but it sounds like he’s actually trying—it sounds like effort and domesticity and Katsuki’s chest seizes. “Hey, if you’ve got extra time, can you stop by that grocery on the way home and pick up some more green onions? I just used the last of them.”
“Don’t think they’re on sale right now,” Katsuki replies, eyes slipping closed. He pictures the grocery store, fluorescents a beacon in the night through their wide, poster-plastered windows. He thinks of the soft mist over the lined up vegetables, cold around his ankles, the quiet simplicity of a cart’s squeaky wheel and crooked, scarred fingers drawing smiley faces on the fogged-over freezer doors. “I can go without. You don’t like them, anyway.”
“Not usually, sure, but I found this recipe the other night that actually sounds really good. I’ll brave the green onions knowing you’ll finish it if I don’t like it, you know? They never go to waste.” The deep plasticky pop of the refrigerator’s seal echoes in Katsuki’s ear. “I’m telling you, you’re really gonna like this one. Maybe you’ll finally admit I’ve gotten better at cooking!”
Katsuki smiles, brows pinched against the fresh agony crawling out from his stomach. “You could burn water.”
“That was one time! And it wasn’t burnt, it just... boiled away.” Deku huffs, shutting the fridge loudly. There’s a moment of quiet and Katsuki takes it to breathe, shoving air into lungs that refuse to fill to try and stave off the glimmering black spots at the corners of his vision.
“It all boils away,” he mutters. He tries to think of what life would be like without Deku in it and conjures only a blank expanse, sterile and devoid. He wonders if that’s how it’ll feel for Deku when Katsuki dies. Will it be empty of meaning without him around, or will Deku find someone else? Strangely, Katsuki hopes both happen—that Deku does move on eventually, but that colors are never quite as bright. Selfish, even in death.
He can see so clearly in his mind when Deku folds his arms and leans back against the counter, staring a hole through the floorboards. “Did something happen on patrol? Not just to let you off early, but you sound weird. You didn’t get hurt, did you?”
Katsuki does laugh then, an abrasive, shifting thing that tapers out into a silent scream. He can’t move, can’t even feel his feet, can’t believe that he’s dying in the aftermath of his own victory and all he wants to hear is what Deku’s making for dinner.
“I’m fine,” he says, voice too soft, too shaky. “Tell me what you did today.”
“Kacchan,” Deku says, a sigh swirled into his words. “What happened?”
“Tell me,” Katsuki insists.
Deku’s quiet, weighing his options, debating with himself. “Okay, but you’ll tell me what’s wrong when you get home, right?”
Katsuki’s heart crumples. “When I walk green onions through the door.”
“Hm.” The soft scrape of a chair, pulled out from under the dining table. The creak of Deku settling into it, his elbows on the old, dark wood. Katsuki can picture the squish of his freckled cheek against the phone and wants to cry.
“I slept in, mostly,” Deku starts. It’s rare they get to do that, and Katsuki’s wild heart soars at the thought of Deku relaxed in slumber like he never is awake. “Then I did some laundry. I watched TV while I folded clothes—they’re running a marathon of Silver Age All-Might movies this weekend, if you wanna catch our favorites. We can make a date night of it.”
“Date night in our PJs,” Katsuki croaks, a smile pulling hard at his busted lips and aching jaw. “With popcorn, and Twizzlers, and we can build a blanket fort like old times.”
Deku gasps excitedly. “Really? Oh man, that sounds like so much fun—now the week is gonna drag forever!”
“Eh, it won’t be that long. Only a couple days, and it’s not like—not like I’m goin’ anywhere, heh.” Katsuki blinks away the tears that well up and tries to ignore the metal screech of something warping somewhere behind him. This pocket of rubble isn’t going to last very long. “Hey, do you remember when, uh—when we were kids, and I left for that week-long summer camp, and you threw a fit in the yard?”
“Oh yeah! Pretty clearly actually. My mom never let me live it down. She thought it was so cute, the couple of us sobbing when you’d just be back in a week. Nevermind the scene we caused.” A little pause, another shift of stone. “Why?”
“I didn’t cry,” Katsuki says. He stares blindly up through shudders of dust and bending beams and swears he sees the sky, melting into the sunset that always seems to chase him home. “I remember you howling like your head came off, but I didn’t cry. Had to—I dunno, look tough. Wanted you to think I’d be strong about it, or something.”
“According to your mother, the second me and my mom drove away, you were a mess.”
“Well, yeah. Couldn’t cry in front of you, Deku. You were supposed to think it was okay. I told you, didn’t I, that it would be okay.”
“Yeah, and it was. Because we were like five and the camp was a week long and you came back with brand new stories to tell me. What’s this about, Kacchan? What happened on patrol?”
“Nothing, Deku, don’t worry about it. It’s gonna be okay.” Blood soaks into his glove where he presses it to his side with a hiss, grabbing the rebar again in a thick red handprint. “I’m not gonna cry,” he rasps, vision edged with hard black lines, “because it’s gonna be okay.”
“Bakugou Katsuki—”
“No, no, that’s not right, don’t be mad,” Katsuki turns to his shoulder with the comms, shoves his cheek against it as tightly as possible. “It’s okay, Deku. I just wanted to hear about your day. Nothing’s wrong, so I’ll be home soon.”
Harried, horrible silence from the other end of the line. Katsuki can’t stand it—bubbles of panic keep him talking to stop from choking. “If you go through my stuff, for some reason, ever, and you go to my second drawer in the bedroom, under the socks, there’s a—a stupid little thing I’ve been meaning to give you, in a box—”
A soft cacophony of voices. Deku’s sharp inhale. Katsuki fades out a little more.
“I think about kids sometimes,” he says dreamily, voice fuzzed out like his vision. A door slams. “A little monster, maybe two. With their sticky hands and constant questions and, I dunno, maybe they’d have dark curls or green eyes or freckles or whatever. A couple of tiny yous, that’d be—weird, right? I think about that. Sometimes. And it’s not that weird.”
“Keep talking, Kacchan,” Deku demands, and Katsuki hasn’t been able to refuse him anything since high school. There’s a high whistling noise in his ears, canned through the comm system, and he can’t quite place what it is. It doesn’t sound like their apartment’s usual rattling gargoyle of an air conditioner. “Kacchan? Are you still there? Talk to me.”
“I try not to think about getting old,” Katsuki continues, eyes slipping half-lidded without his permission. “But can’t always make my brain shut up. So I think about it. And I think about you getting old, wrinkly and stooped and all those curls gone grey. We’d be retired Heroes, what a ridiculous idea. Always gonna be Heroes, right, Deku? Don’t think we know how to do anything else.”
“You’re right, we don’t.” Deku laughs, watery and weak beneath the whistling. Every couple seconds there’s a loud smack, like a foot put through a wall. “But we will get old, won’t we? Retire somewhere in the mountains and go on hikes everyday, right?”
“Heh, ha, you know me,” Katsuki grunts, amusement dizzy through his tone. His head lolls back, too relaxed as his lungs start cramping. “Know me so well, Deku. Like nobody else.”
“C’mon, Kacchan, keep talking. What about, uh, what about beating me for Number One, huh? You still have to win it back after the last poll.”
Katsuki opens his eyes a little wider, muscles tensing as they flare with pure concentrated effort to stay awake. Then he slumps again. Fresh blood seeps across his collarbone, mixed with a saltwater sting he won’t call tears. “Me, you, tied for top spot, always have been, always will be. Loses the sparkle after you’ve won it a dozen times. Just want you to keep doing better.”
“Can’t do better if you’re not there. Stay awake, okay? I’m almost there. Hey, hey—what’re you gonna get from the grocery store?”
Katsuki blinks too slowly, vision clouded to nothing but dust and glimmering tears. His breath is short and thin, pain reduced to nothing but red lines where his soul is still tethered to his body. He hovers an inch out of it, trying to focus. “Huh. Hm. Groceries?”
“For dinner, do you remember it? I asked you for something specific, something you like and I don’t. What are you gonna get from the grocery store?”
“Oh.” Katsuki smiles weakly, nose filling with the phantom smells of sizzling vegetables and spiced meat. “Green onions. Because you love me.”
A massive cracking noise splits the building and his head, the pounding ache of air deprivation finally claiming more than he can fight against. The dust and rubble tighten, lighten, then another huge sound that shakes Katsuki to his crushed core. The building must be coming down again, more stone dropping hard and merciless to the earth below, uncaring of the life leaking out beneath it.
Dust and rubble. Katsuki closes his eyes.
“Love you too,” he tells the communicator.
A final deafening boom, and sunset light shatters in.
—
When Katsuki wakes up, he recognizes the hospital ceiling immediately, patterned in fluorescents and oddly floral swirls.
He’s littered in bandages, more gauze than limb really, but he does a quick count—all four limbs are accounted for. His chest is bound so tightly that moving isn’t an option, even as he desperately wants to stretch his arms. He can wiggle his toes though! That’s fun.
Deku is passed out on the vinyl sofa by the window, backlit by a brilliant sunrise under the edge of the drawn shades. He snores—softly, but he does. Katsuki can’t do more than fumble for the bed’s remote and wince at the mechanical whirring until he’s relatively upright, the better to stare at Deku and commit his features to memory, again.
Someone wrote the date on the whiteboard in the corner. It’s been quite a few days—that’s unsurprising after all the damage Katsuki took. Even the best healing quirks take a toll. How long has Deku been asleep in the room with him? If he had to guess, the entire time, but judging from the bulging backpack squatting in a nearby chair he’s gone home at least once.
A soft knock. His nurse is all quiet smiles with the vital cart and pills, explaining in whispers what he’s hooked up to and how long he’ll have to stay that way. It’s routine for Ground Zero. Heroes are no strangers to hospitals or their extended stays.
He nods to Deku. “How long’s he been here?”
“Ever since you were admitted. Once we put you in a room, he refused to leave.” The nurse shakes her head fondly. “He’s been out for most of the night, so I’m sure he’ll be fine if you want to wake him up. He’s been talking about you nonstop, showing off the ri—well, you know.”
“I don’t,” Katsuki says, but she’s already shut the door behind her.
It fills his sore chest with something strange and fluttery, thinking about Deku muscling his way into the room and firmly staying put. It might be love—most of his feelings end up being love when it comes to Deku—but Katsuki shakes his head, forcing the whole thing to be some light, relieved kind of annoyance.
Deku snores particularly loudly, and Katsuki flings his pillow at him.
“Have you showered at all in the last week?” He scowls as Deku blinks awake, blearily clutching the scratchy hospital pillow and readjusting to reality. “You can’t stay here if you’re gonna stink the room up.”
“Kacchan,” Deku breathes, sitting up so quickly he scoots the sofa over an inch. “You’re awake! I’m—I mean you—h-how do you feel?”
“Itchy.” Katsuki scratches at the gauze wrapping his side pointedly, expression carefully schooled into general displeasure. But it softens against his will anyway, his tone melting into something far too caring. “Don’t know how I got here. Last thing I remember is the rubble shifting again.”
“Yeah, I—I saw on TV,” Deku starts, fumbling with his fingers. “The building collapsed—they said you were in there, with that villain you’d been fighting. All anybody knew was that you’d gotten cuffs on him and were on your way out when the damage got to be too much.” He shakes his head, curls bouncing in knots that haven’t seen a brush in days. “I’m fast, y’know, so I ran. Leapt, really, and just kind of... punched my way in? It’s kind of a blur for me too.”
“Faster than any ambulance,” Katsuki says, smiling lopsidedly as he considers Deku’s ratty old hoodie and socks with holes. He thinks that might’ve been what he was wearing the morning before he left for that patrol. “Seriously, have you showered? Been home at all?”
“Yeah, of course! W-well, once or twice, at least. For essentials. There’s a shower here!” Deku rubs his wrist sheepishly, avoiding making eye contact, and Katsuki’s gaze catches on a glint of silver.
“Are you—” he feels his face heat an embarrassing shade of red, “—did you find the—”
“You remember telling me where it was?” Deku smiles, a little teary but mostly teasing. He stands, comes close enough to press a gentle, careful kiss to Katsuki’s cheek, who sputters indignantly. He laughs, and Katsuki’s never heard a sound he liked more. “I can’t believe it took a collapsing building and a near-death experience to get you to propose.”
“I didn’t yet,” Katsuki growls, shoving Deku back, who just laughs again. “Fucker, you weren’t supposed to go find it on your own if I’m still alive.”
“Too bad, I guess. No take-backs.” Deku wiggles his fingers to make the diamond set in the silver band flash. “I saved your life, you know! You could say thank you.”
Katsuki sneers deeply. “Every dinner I cook from now until the end of time will include green onions.”
“Aw, that’s just cruel!” Deku kisses him again, one hand cupping his cheek as though he’s a precious thing, breakable as porcelain and infinitely more valuable. “I’m really happy you’re okay, Kacchan. Even if you’re gonna make me eat the world’s worst vegetable forever.”
“You’ll eat it and you’ll like it,” Katsuki snorts, grabbing his hand and thumbing over the skin-warmed metal. It looks good. Like it belongs there.
“Only because I love you,” Deku says.
Katsuki looks away, a tempered smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“Love you too.”