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Deku’s absence splits the air the way a wound splits skin. It festers like an infection. Oozes and reeks, clings to his gums and nostrils with a fetid rot that will not abate. He wakes up and it is the first thing he notices; it is unavoidable and unignorable. Even at night, when he pretends to sleep, the reality does not relinquish its claws around his throat. Deku isn’t here anymore. Deku left. Katsuki’s body made the ultimate choice and he fucking abandoned him in the aftermath.
The absolute worst part is how nice everybody is about it.
Round Face gives him this stupid, wet-eyed look that makes him want to rip her head off. Stupid fucking Shitty Hair won’t stop blowing up his phone with “hang out” requests when he’d rather be getting some damn rest. And Eye Bags…
It’s just dumb. All of it. Deku is gone and life is rendered senseless and everybody knows it.
The conclusion he comes to is this: The choice his body made for him was idiotic. And he cannot ever allow it to happen again.
He dreams about it. Not every night, but he does dream.
It’s not memory. Not really. It’s too garbled to hold a narrative shape. What he sees, though, every night (no, not every night, it isn’t every) is Deku’s face. Deku’s eyes.
Green.
No point in describing them beyond that.
Best Jeanist doesn’t answer his calls.
“Kacchan!” A worried cry. A pink tongue. Wet eyes. The cold, damp stick of his clothes to his body. “Are you okay?”
It’s not a memory. He fills in too many gaps for it to be a memory. The words change too often for it to be a memory. The shape stays consistent, though, a solid mass in the soup of his idiotic dreams. Same hair. Same eyes. The same expression, every time.
The same fucking hand, smacked away.
Over and over. Wound and unwound from the same rotted wound.
He tries to destroy the letter. Tries to blow it up. Tries to drown it. Tries to bury it so far under the earth that it’ll finally die.
He tears it apart.
It’s not hard to put the pieces together. The hospital, Deku’s dumbass stupid piece of shit of a letter, All Might. Fuck, everyone involved in this shit show is so fucking stupid. Fish that can’t see the Goddamn water.
It’s enough to drive him crazy. To think he’s crazy. But he isn’t. He’s starting to see Deku very clearly, now. A whole host of miserable truths he’s had to face while laid out in that damn hospital bed, agonized by his body’s own idiotic, thoughtless drive. The rest of them can’t see it because they’re in the thick of it, cheering Deku on in his moronic self-destruction quest.
Not Katsuki. He’s outside of it all. He’s always been outside of it all.
The thing about Deku being gone is that he isn’t really gone. He’s still out there in the world, cracking villain skulls and getting haunted by shitty ghosts that make his body light up like a schizophrenic fireworks show.
Deku has adults in his corner. Katsuki’s classmates say that like it’s some comfort to know that there are plenty of pros who have no compunctions about Deku killing himself. Seems like the whole world is more than happy to stand by and watch, actually. And sure, why not? Deku’s the bone breaker, after all. He chose to walk down the path of busting his body like an overstuffed grape over and over until he’s splattered all over the pavement.
That’s what Deku chose. He chose to save people at the cost of everything to himself. Fuck him, right? The people matter more. Saving matters more. Damn martyr. Fucking hero. That’s what Deku, at his core, is.
The thought doesn’t comfort Katsuki. Maybe he’s past comfort, though.
Deku’s eyes. Green. Wide. Terrified. Betrayed. The fucker had the audacity, after everything, to look like that. Damn hypocrite.
What did the letter say?
Bullshit. Just a bunch of bullshit.
Seriously, it was just— Such bullshit.
Round Face talks to him like they share something. It pisses him off beyond anything else. It might even piss him off more than Deku does. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, first of all. He doesn’t need any damn pity, either.
Besides, Round Face has always been incredibly obvious about her insipid, childish crush for dumbass Deku, something that has so clearly been reciprocated since day fucking one. So whatever the fuck she has going on—grief or worry or longing or who the fuck knows—can’t put up a mirror to the nothing that Katsuki has. Because he doesn’t have shit with Deku.
Always that dream. Always the color slopping off the sky. Always Deku’s bared teeth. The animal cry of his throat, a violent thing. Always his own body falling through the air.
He’d had to do it. He’d had to do it or Deku was going to die.
That’s what pisses him off the most, maybe.
Idiot move. Stupid. Fucking idiot. Moron. Self-preservation should always be paramount. Anything less is suicide. This isn’t school shit; this is a war. This is real life. When the body moves before the mind, they both will die.
Deku has always been stupid.
Green eyes. What used to be an open book he couldn’t read became a hollowed, empty tome. Intense and vacant.
(Is that, too, death?)
“Going after Deku is suicide,” he says, staring up at the sky. Round Face lies on her back beside him. The clouds obscure the stars. If it weren’t for the clouds, the light pollution would cover them still. It’s hard to feel distant from what you cannot see and yet somehow Katsuki stores the separation in his bones.
“He’s out there,” she replies, plaintive, and he thinks for the millionth time that she really doesn’t fucking get it at all.
None of Deku’s idiot friends get it. They never have. Maybe their brains are as busted as his.
No. That would take a lot more head trauma.
“All these big shot heroes think he’s fine,” he says, but his heart isn’t really in the argument anymore.
“You know he’s not,” Round Face replies.
The sky is so far away.
She sits up in his peripheral. “You know he’s not.”
What’s new? part of him wants to reply. You don’t know shit about Deku, another part wants to snarl. You don’t know the first damn thing about Deku. None of you get it; none of you get him. He drives me fucking crazy, I—
“Yeah,” he replies, voice hoarser than he’d like.
In his dreams, Deku dies. This pisses him off. “Pisses him off” is an understatement; it infuriates him. Because every time, it’s so fucking unnecessary. Over and over, a thousand snapshots that are based on real life. Maybe that’s what makes him especially angry—how close to death Deku has repeatedly brushed without a care. As though it meant nothing. As though his own life were forfeit from the start.
Stop! he barks, trying to grab him, but Deku is always just out of reach. He grasps at him, but he can never seem to make contact. Just Katsuki’s hand, aching in the air, permanently empty.
And Deku’s guileless eyes, looking back at him without any idea why he’s crying.
Katsuki grew up blessed. Wealthy family, good genes. A powerful quirk, a keen mind, a beautiful face. He had every advantage in the world. He was the boy with everything going for him.
Everything except the pebble that kept tripping him up.
Could he be blamed? Green. Big fucking eyes. That fucking hand.
A phantasm more than a memory, now. A concept that haunts him, even still.
Chasing after him with a yammering, irritating little voice. Kacchan! Kacchan’s the coolest! Kacchan’s the best! Kacchan, I don’t like how you act like a bully, sometimes! Kacchan, you’re better than that! Kacchan, do you need help? Kacchan, are you okay? Kacchan, Kacchan…!
It occurs to him that maybe he was not very nice to Deku, growing up.
He is no stranger to effort or struggle, but he is a stranger to pain. This is jarring to recognize. Pain blindsides him with its hanging presence. Pain is so ultimately distracting in ways he never could have anticipated.
The hole in his shoulder pulses, longing to be filled. His body is agonizingly slow at knitting itself back together. It cries out with a hungry mouth, teeth sharp, at all hours. He wakes up and it is the first thing he notices; it is unavoidable and…
Whatever. Just…fucking…whatever. It is what it is, but what it is is something shaped exactly like itself. Unquantifiable, despite how frequently they ask him to quantify it. On a scale from one to ten…
This is how it goes: He gets up in the morning: pain. He showers: pain. He changes: pain. He eats: pain. Constant, unebbing, endless. Like a bur attached to his skin, it clings. It forces his thoughts to stutter and halt every time it demands attention for itself.
And it leads him to the same question, over and over.
In his dreams, he fights. Each punch crushes the bones in his own hand. The bones in his wrist, the bones in his forearm, his elbow, all the way up to his shoulder. Crumpling like a car colliding with a wall.
Yet still, he must persist. This is the only way he can fight; this is the only way he can hold any value. It is the only way he can stand to live. So he hurts, hurts so sharply that his brain squeals in alarm, and he pushes past it, forces the mind to be a thinking thing, rises above the agony, ducks out of the way of a punch, forces his broken body to press itself into the writhing form of its attacker.
Bakugou Kacchan’s face snarls back at him, lit by green lightning.
Is this how it is for you? How do you live like this? How can you stand to be so selfless that it wraps back around again and you’re the most selfish bastard on the planet? How can you stand to be pushed away again and again and stand back up, press on forward, broken arms, broken legs, everything in your body screaming at you to just stop , holy shit please, just stop , you’re gonna die, you’re gonna kill me—
The truth is stupid. The truth doesn’t care about what he wants. The truth doesn’t give a shit about what’s convenient or fair or catastrophically embarrassing.
The truth is this: his hand has been empty for over a decade.
“Endeavor’s an alumn… We just need to be a little pushy.” Round Face doesn’t smile. Doesn’t put up any of those stupid little faces she used to. Full-focus, eyes on Katsuki. This is the face he remembers from the Sports Festival.
Round Face is a girl who got into this fancy school because she wanted to make money. She eats every piece of food anyone puts in front of her. Her arms are thicker than when they started their school year, body surer in its posture. Resolute. Strong.
Katsuki has never noticed girls, not really. He’s too busy focusing on his goals, on bettering himself, on the stupid pebble that won’t stop getting kicked around by his shoes.
He notices Round Face, though. There’s more to her than just Deku, more than just a lovesick girl with a crush.
Part of him wonders why he ever thought there wasn’t more than that. He finds his thoughts tangled and irritated by the inquiry. Of course there’s more to her than Deku. Who the hell would be that wrapped up in that fucking nerd?
He doesn’t like the answer very much.
The truth can take a dive off a roof.
No. Not like—
Fuck off. Seriously.
Deku’s eyes. Deku’s hair. Deku’s cheeks. Deku’s freckles. Deku’s wide mouth. Deku’s straight teeth. Deku’s throat, Deku’s shoulders, Deku’s arms, Deku’s hands.
His fucking hands.
Green. He doesn’t need any other adjectives.
There’s an anger in Katsuki’s breast, white-hot and unwilling to die. He knows better than to allow it to extinguish. It warms him. He knows, instinctively, that it is the thing that keeps him alive.
And he’d risked it all without understanding why.
Deku’s horrified face is stamped into his brain, pressed deep into the core of his chest. It threatens to douse the fire. It threatens to make his body do something very, very stupid again.
Please, he says in his dreams, too broken down to be angry anymore. Only desperation left. Only the empty ache of his palms. Please, Izuku. Please, just stop.
He was a cute kid. Fat cheeks and short limbs, big eyes and a perpetually wobbling lower lip.
He was cute. Really fucking cute, actually, and that fucking sucks shit to recognize in retrospect. His lilting warble, like a baby bird. Kacchan! Kacchan! The cry of a native species, beautiful and haunting, on the brink of extinction.
It is endangered for a reason. It will not stop flying into the blast zone, begging to help.
“You don’t know the first thing about Deku,” he says because—horrifically—it’s true. Standing in a room with all these people who have cheered and laughed with Deku for the past year and Katsuki is still the closest person to him.
Endeavor turns, face somber. He’s seen what Katsuki knew to expect. The pebble that won’t stop bouncing underfoot. The hand that never stops breaking.
“The damned nerd is batshit. He’ll always say he’s fine. Say it’s not a big deal. You stick him with All Might, you get two morons of the same kind.” His fists curl at his sides, his skin simultaneously too large and too small for his bones. “It’s just the way he is. He’s not gonna stop.”
Endeavor doesn’t move.
Katsuki swallows. He swallows down more than spit. He knows the path Deku walks. He knows where chasing it leads.
There is something in him that wants him to die. It is a tender thing, small, big-eyed, reaching for him in the river.
Every self-preserving instinct in him has resisted it, all these years.
In his dreams, he holds Izuku. He holds his hands, his elbows, his throat, his face. Holds him. The shape of his skin has never really been a stranger, but it’s also never truly been a friend. The soft body of a little boy, the tight scar tissue of a teenager. The pebble’s eyes have never once changed over the years. Always looking at him with the same unwavering, wet gaze. Always green.
I never understood you, he confesses.
A softness as innate as it is foreign, as freeing to sink into as it is fatal. Izuku’s palm is rough under his. It spells the end of his story as he always knew it would.
But maybe I’m getting there.