Chapter Text
The party was loud enough that Izuku could stop thinking, which was exactly why he’d come.
He had not particularly wanted to go. He’d been tired in the specific bone-deep way of someone who had run too many missions too close together, and the apartment had been warm, and Kacchan had been there — which was, honestly, reason enough to stay anywhere. That was the thing about Kacchan. After nineteen years, he still had this effect that Izuku had never fully gotten used to and suspected he never would. The way he moved through a room was like he already owned it. The way his eyes found Izuku first when he walked back in, without looking, without effort, the way a river finds the ocean. It made something in Izuku’s chest do something embarrassing even now. Even still. Twenty-three years old, and he still got that stupid flutter when Kacchan looked at him a certain way.
Which was — good. That was good. That was what you wanted, probably. To still feel it after nineteen years. To still feel it like something new, like something chosen.
He had been thinking about that word a lot lately. Chosen.
“You’re going to stand in the corner and nurse one stupid fucking drink and think too damn loud and then come home and tell me it was fuckin fine,” Kacchan had said, already putting on his patrol clothes, reading Izuku with the accuracy he always had. “Go anyway. You need to see people.”
“You could come,” Izuku had said.
Kacchan gave him the look. The one that meant we both know that’s not what this is about. Then he crossed the apartment — three steps, certain, direct — and took Izuku’s face in both hands and kissed him once. Brief and firm. No preamble. The way Kacchan kissed him when he wasn’t making a point about it, when it was just — true. Just the obvious thing.
He pulled back. Looked at him for a second.
“This shirt looks good on you, nerd,” he said. Like it was simply a fact he was noting.
And then he was gone — night shift, 6:30 patrol run, Kacchan who never once in his life did anything halfway — and Izuku stood in their apartment with the warmth of those hands still on his face and felt, as he often felt lately, something that sat just underneath the love. Not instead of it. Alongside it. Something small and restless and difficult to name.
He had everything. He knew that. He had the person he’d wanted since before wanting was a concept he understood, the life they’d built in the years since UA, the apartment with two specially made mugs and Kacchan’s running shoes by the door — he had all of it, and it was real, and he loved it.
And sometimes — not often, just sometimes — he looked at all of it and felt the restlessness anyway. Like a note just slightly out of tune. Like something that didn’t have a name yet, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to give it one, so instead of naming it, he went to the party.
“Have fun”, Kacchan texted on his drive over. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Izuku smiled at the phone like an idiot. He’d been doing that for nineteen years. Some things didn’t change.
He stood with a drink he’d stopped tasting two drinks ago, surrounded by people he’d saved the world alongside, and tried to stop thinking.
The thought arrived around midnight, the way bad thoughts always did — not announced, not invited, just present. already there when you looked up.
You’ve only ever been his – so how do you know it's right?
He set it down. He was good at that. He’d been practicing for over a year, since sometime before his twenty-second birthday, when he’d stood outside a convenience store watching a couple argue on the pavement and felt — not jealousy, not exactly — something more like a wondering. The kind you weren’t supposed to have. What would it have been like, he’d thought, not to have always just been together. To have looked at someone across a room and felt the ground shift. To have had to decide. How would it have felt to know you’re meant to be with someone – because you chose them.
That was the thing. He had never decided. Kacchan had always just been — there. The given. The answer before Izuku had finished forming the question. Since they were four years old, holding hands at street corners. Since they were ten, Izuku had written a note because it felt strange not to formalize the thing they’d apparently already been doing for years. Since they were sixteen and Kacchan had said I love you, as if it was the biggest thing in the world, and Izuku had understood that it was, that everything Kacchan gave him was the biggest offering Kacchan could give, and that he gave it anyway.
He loved Kacchan. That had never been in question. He loved him the way he’d loved him since before he had language for it — completely, in the way of things that were simply true, the way the sky was simply there.
But lately, there was this restlessness. This low hum of something underneath the love, not threatening it exactly, just — present. The question he kept refusing to look at directly: what would it have felt like to choose this? To choose him, to choose us. Not to have it be gravity, not to have it be obvious from the age of four. To have stood at a crossroads, to have looked at every door, and to have walked through his.
He didn’t know what he would have done with the answer even if he had one. He didn’t know what the question was really asking. He just knew it sat in him like something with no exit point, something he couldn’t think through and couldn’t put down and had never — not once — said out loud to anyone.
Not to Kacchan. Not to his mother. Not in the dark with nobody listening, so, again – instead of simply naming it, sharing it, allowing it the space to be answered – he just grabbed another drink.
• • •
The party was at Ochako’s apartment. That was the first thing. That mattered, later, in the re-accounting of how it happened — the fact that it was her space, that she knew where everything was, that she moved through the rooms with the ease of someone at home while everyone else was a guest.
She found him around 12:30 at the edge of the crowd, pulling up beside him with her own drink and a laugh already in her voice before she’d said anything — warm, easy, genuinely glad to see him.
“You’re doing that thing,” she said.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you look like you’re at the party but you’re actually somewhere else entirely.”
Izuku thought about that. “I’m here.”
She raised an eyebrow and didn’t push it, which was another thing about Ochako — she knew when not to push. They stood together and talked about nothing important, and he was glad for the company, glad for someone to stand next to who wasn’t asking him to be anything in particular.
He didn’t notice the first things until they had already happened. Her hand on his arm when she laughed — brief, instinctive, the kind of touch that meant nothing on its own. The way they’d drifted slightly away from the main group without deciding to. He was on his fourth drink by then, maybe his fifth, and the thought from midnight was still sitting in him unresolved, and the restlessness was still there, that low, unnamed hum, and the apartment was warm, and she was laughing at something he’d said, and her hand was still on his arm, and he was —
He was not thinking about Kacchan. That was the thing… for the first time in hours, he was not thinking about Kacchan, not about the question, not about choosing or destined to be or knowing, and the relief of it was so immediate and so physical that he leaned into it without examining why.
The party thinned out around 2 am. People collecting their coats, calling their rides, and saying their goodbyes. Izuku found his jacket — thought he found his jacket — and said goodnight to people and was almost to the door when Ochako appeared beside him.
“That’s mine,” she said, nodding at what he was holding.
He looked down. Same color, different jacket. He’d grabbed hers off the pile without looking.
“Sorry —” He laughed, a little. Handed it back. Went to find his own in the diminished pile by the door, and the last of the guests were leaving, and Ochako was leaning against the doorframe watching him with the quiet, easy warmth she’d always had around him and —
He found his jacket. He put it on. He should have just fucking left, but – he didn’t.
He didn’t leave because she was looking at him in a way that was different from how she usually looked at him, and he understood it. Some part of him that was drunk and restless and had spent more than the last year carrying a question he couldn’t answer understood it and did not look away. She crossed the space between them and kissed him – or he kissed her. He was never able to reconstruct, afterward, who had moved first, and it didn’t matter, because he kissed her back — that was the part that mattered, that was the part he had to own — and her hands were in his jacket, and he followed her back inside.
He remembered it in pieces, after. Not clearly — the drinks, the hazziness, and the late hour, and the thing he was refusing to think about had blurred the edges of it. Her mouth against his. The light in her bedroom turning off. Her hands on his shoulders and his hands pulling at her hips – and the specific terrible clarity of understanding, somewhere in the middle of it, that he had crossed a line he could not uncross. His heart going too fast, but not the right kind of fast — not the way it went when Kacchan touched him, not that specific total body warmth, not the thing he knew. This was something hollow. Something that felt like motion without direction, like asking a question and getting an answer that didn’t fit the question at all. His hips and her hips and his face buried in brown hair instead of blonde and his eyes squeezed closed because red wasn’t looking back into them, and some still-sober part of him watching from somewhere outside his own body begging: this isn’t it. This isn’t what you were looking for. Stop, you fucking idiot – stop. This isn’t anything like what you already have.
He knew. He knew in real time, with a clarity that cut straight through the alcohol. He knew it wasn’t right. He knew it wasn’t what he wanted. He knew, with a certainty that arrived like something cold dropping through the center of him, that the answer to the question he’d been too afraid to look at directly was already back in an apartment ten miles away, asleep on the left side of the bed with the window cracked three inches.
The answer had always been Kacchan. It had always only ever been Kacchan. He understood that now, in this room, in the worst possible way to understand it — not as something warm and destined and known but as something he could feel the absence of. The exact shape of what he’d left behind to come here.
I need to stop. I need to go. I need to go home.
But he didn’t - he didn’t go, and then he was asleep.
Not a choice. Just his body, finally and badly timed, giving out — pulling him under before he could make himself move. Leaving him there in the wrong room while Kacchan slept in their apartment, smelling of cinnamon rolls and love, not knowing. Waiting for morning the way he always waited. Patient, certain, no reason to think anything had changed.
Izuku had left him alone with that the whole night.
That was the last thing he knew before sleep took him — small and clear and terrible:
He doesn’t know yet. And I am here. And I can’t even make myself go home.
He would spend a long time afterwards trying to explain it to himself. He never found an explanation that felt sufficient, because there wasn’t one. There was only a bad decision made by someone who should have known better, and the particular cruelty that it was irreversible from the second it was made.
• • •
Age 4:
Kacchan had always grabbed his hand crossing the street before either of them understood why. Before Izuku had even thought to reach — Kacchan’s hand was just there, small and warm and certain, and Kacchan was already looking both ways because Kacchan is amazing and had decided this was his job and intended to do it how All Might would - the very very best.
“Kacchan, I can cross by myself —”
“You weren’t looking.”
“I was looking —”
“You were looking at that bug. You weren’t looking at the road.” Said with absolute authority, “I’ll hold your hand. Stop talking, Deku.”
Izuku had stopped talking. He’d let Kacchan hold his hand across every street for the next three years before either of them thought to question it.
He asked him once, much later — sixteen, seventeen, somewhere in the middle of everything — if he remembered doing that. Kacchan had looked at him like the question was stupid.
“Obviously”, he said. “You were never looking where you were going. Someone had to”
He’d said it like it was nothing. Like it had always just been his job and he’d simply done it and that was the whole of it.
Izuku had thought about that for a long time afterward. The way Kacchan had decided, at four years old, without being asked, that Izuku was something worth watching out for. Worth reaching for. Worth holding on to.
He had never once had to decide that himself. It had always just been true.
• • •
Mina — 6:01 a.m.
She had a key to Ochako’s apartment because they had morning patrol together, and Ochako was constitutionally incapable of being ready on time. Mina let herself in every Monday, started the coffee, and yelled down the hall. It had worked for two years without incident.
So, she let herself in and would not be doing that ever again.
The hallway was quiet. The bedroom door at the end of the hall was open — not all the way, not closed, just open the way it got left when someone came home late and didn’t bother. She walked toward it without thinking, that was just the way she always went.
She stopped in the doorway and didn’t make a sound. She just — stopped.
Ochako was on her side, facing away, no top, the sheet pulled to her waist, and there — on the other side of the bed, one bare leg out from under the sheet, the unmistakable breadth of a shoulder that was not Ochako’s, the green of familiar hair against the pillow — was Izuku fucking Midoriya.
Mina stood in the doorway for a moment that had no specific length. Long enough for her brain to catch up to what her eyes were telling it. Long enough to be sure, because she needed to be sure before she did anything with this, she needed to be completely certain, and she was. She was certain.
She turned around and walked back out of the apartment very quietly and closed the front door behind her without a sound.
She stood on the landing outside, put her back against the house wall, looked at the sky, and breathed.
She thought about Katsuki. She thought about his face specifically — the way he moved his jaw when he was trying to hold something in, the way his shoulders set when he was afraid, the way his eyes went very still when something had burrowed in him that he wasn’t going to let show. She had been his friend for over six years. She knew that face. She thought about what it was going to look like in about twenty minutes, and something in her chest did something she didn’t have a word for.
She called Kirishima.
He picked up on the second ring. She didn’t say hello. She said: “Eiji. I need you to listen to me.”
Silence while she told him. The kind of cold silence of someone receiving something they were hoping not to receive, ever, that was here now - staring them in the face. When she finished he was quiet for a moment and then:
“I have to call Bakubro, don’t I?”
“Yes”
“I don’t want to, Mina.”
“I know.”
“Mina —”
“I know, Eiji. Just — I’ll give it a few minutes before I go back in. Give him a few minutes.”
“Yeah,” Kirishima said. Quietly. “Okay.”
She hung up. She didn’t go back inside.
She sat down on the top step of the landing instead. Still in her patrol gear, the morning coming in cold around her, and she sat there and thought about three things at once.
She thought about Katsuki, one of her best friends, who was getting that phone call right now, alone wherever he was, and what he was going to do with it when nobody was watching.
She thought about Ochako, who was her friend, who she was going to have to figure out how to hold this about and didn’t know how yet.
She thought about Izuku Midoriya, who she had also called her friend for years, and how something in that had just permanently shifted, and she couldn’t feel bad about the shifting because she had just seen what she had seen.
She sat there for fifteen minutes. Long enough for Katsuki to hear it. Long enough for it to be real before she added anything else to the morning.
Her phone went off, a text from Eiji, “He knows,” and that was all she needed to know.
She sat for another five minutes, and then she stood up, went back inside, walked down the hall, and this time she didn’t bother being quiet about it. She pushed the bedroom door all the way open. She stood in the doorway and looked at both of them and waited until she was sure her voice was going to come out the way she wanted it to.
Flat. Precise. Not a question.
“Izuku Midoriya.”
• • •
Katsuki — 5:30 a.m.
He woke at 5:30 the way he always woke — not gradually, just suddenly awake, the alarm unnecessary but set anyway. He reached over automatically. The other side of the bed was empty and cold, which meant Izuku had not come home, which meant he was still at the party or on someone’s couch somewhere, which was fine. Izuku was a grown man and a pro hero. He did not need to be collected.
He picked up his phone. 5:31 am. Nothing from Izuku, which meant he was probably still asleep wherever he’d ended up. He typed with one thumb, still half-horizontal:
“ Baby, check in when you’re up. Wanna know you’re safe, idiot.”
Sent. He put the phone down. Got up. Running clothes. Shoes. Out the door by 5:45, the way he always was.
He ran for forty minutes. He came back. He was barely through the door, still in his running clothes, when his phone rang.
Kirishima. Which was not unusual on its own — Kirishima called at odd hours, had been doing it since they were fifteen, some people were texters, and some people were callers, and Kirishima had always been a caller. But something in Katsuki registered the time before he picked up. Kirishima didn’t call before 8 unless something was wrong.
He picked up.
“Kats.”
Just that. Just his name, in a voice that was doing something careful. And Katsuki felt it immediately — the fearful shift in his chest that meant something had happened, maybe someone was hurt, there had to be a situation. His mind went where it always went first: Izuku. The job. A mission. An accident.
“Kirishima. What’s wrong?”
“Kats — Mina. She saw something.”
“Is Izuku okay?” Flat. Immediate. Already reaching for his hero gear in his head, already calculating the quickest route to wherever Izuku was.
“He’s — yeah. He’s fine, he’s not —”
“Then why the fuck are you calling me at six in the —”
“Katsuki.”
He stopped. Kirishima never used his full name. In all these years, Kirishima had called him Kats, Bakugo, and Dude, and Bakubro and every other thing, and had used his full name exactly twice, both times when something was serious enough to require it. Katsuki stood in his kitchen with the dish towel in his hands and felt something cold move through him that had nothing to do with the morning air.
“What?”
“Mina — she’s at Ochako’s. They have patrol. She let herself in.” A pause. The careful kind. The kind where someone was choosing words. “She saw something.”
“Saw what?” His voice came out even. He didn’t know how.
“Izuku.” Another pause. “He’s in bed with Ochako.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“No,” Katsuki said. Not angry. Just — certain. “He was drunk. He probably just crashed there. He wouldn’t —”
“Kats.”
“He got too drunk, and he slept on her couch or something, that’s —”
“Kats. Mina said —” Kirishima stopped. Started again. “They’re in her bed. They were — she said they weren’t dressed.”
Silence.
“No,” Katsuki said again. Quieter this time. “He wouldn’t.”
“I know.” Kirishima’s voice was wrecked. Just slightly. Just enough. “I know that’s — I know, but Mina — you know Mina. You know she wouldn’t call me with this unless she was — she would never do that to you, she would never —”
“She’s sure.” Not a question. Flat. Final.
A deep exhale on the other end of the line. The pained exhale of someone who wished they were calling about literally anything else.
“Yeah, Kats.” Quietly. “She’s sure.”
Katsuki stood in the kitchen. The coffee was still brewing. He could hear it — the small domestic sound of it, the gurgling, the smell of it filling the apartment.
“Okay,” he whispered.
“Kats —”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to —”
“Kirishima.” Even. Certain. “I’m fine. Thank you for calling me.”
He hung up.
He stood in the kitchen for a moment. Then he walked to the counter and looked at the coffee.
Two custom-made mugs. It was automatic. Nineteen years of loving someone, and it was just automatic — the kettle, the coffee, two mugs, set Izuku’s on the back-left burner because he always forgot about it, and it needed to stay warm. He did it without thinking. Didn’t need to think about it. A cup for Izuku was just always the given.
He put the phone face down on the counter.
He picked up his coffee, and he drank it standing at the window, looking out at the street below, where it was still early enough to be quiet, the city not yet asking anything of anyone in it. He drank the whole cup. He rinsed it. He dried it with the dish towel that lived on the oven handle — the one Izuku had bought because Katsuki kept using paper towels — and he set it back in the cabinet.
He picked up Izuku’s mug and held it in both hands.
The ceramic was warm against his palms. It was the green one — the stupid chipped green one that Izuku had brought when he moved in, that Inko had pressed on him at the door of her home with both hands and a look on her face that meant: I want you to have something of home with you. Izuku had put it in the cabinet and never moved it. It had a chip on the handle from the time Katsuki had knocked it off the counter, reaching for the dish soap, and had spent twenty minutes apologizing, which for Katsuki was roughly the equivalent of a lesser man lying face-down on the floor for a week.
Izuku had said, “It’s just a mug, Kacchan”.
It was not just a mug.
Katsuki stood in his kitchen in the early morning holding it, and something moved through him that had no name and no edges — not simply anger, he kept waiting for the anger to take over because anger was the thing he knew how to use, anger was familiar and operational and anger would have been fine, he could have worked with anger. This was not anger. This was something that started in his chest and radiated outward and had no single target and nothing to push against, and and that was the worst part of it, that there was nothing to fight, nowhere to put this, just the phone face-down on the counter and a warm green mug and the low burner he had set without thinking because Izuku was always coming home.
He made a sound. A short choking sound, and felt his chest burn – actually burn.
His jaw locked down immediately after, throat tight, and he stood there with his eyes burning and his hands wrapped around the mug and his whole body doing something he had not given it any fucking permission to do, something that he had not done since he was a child, since before he had built the version of himself that could hold things without spilling them, and the kitchen was silent and the city was still asleep and there was no one to see this, no one to manage his face for, and so it came out of him whether he wanted it to or not — bullshit
He pressed the mug against his mouth, trying to memorize the way it touched Izuku’s lips – for the last time. This was it.
He stood there with his eyes closed and the ceramic against his lips and his shoulders shaking, and he did not make another sound, not yet - not now. He did not let himself. He gave himself that one and that was all, and he held the rest of it in his chest where it burned, and he breathed through his nose slowly, once, twice, until his shoulders stopped.
The coffee had gone cold against his face.
He walked to the sink. He turned on the tap. He watched the coffee go down the drain, watched the last of it swirl and disappear, and then he rinsed the mug, dried it with the dish towel, he put it back in the cabinet beside his own. Side by side, the way they always were. He closed the cabinet door.
He stood at the counter with both hands braced on the edge of it and his head down, he looked at the drain where the coffee had gone, and he recognized what had just happened. The end of nineteen years. Like it was nothing. Like it was coffee, down the drain – cold and useless.
I’ve loved you since you were four years old. Fucking four years old. The thought invaded his brain.
He stood there until he was sure. Then, he pulled the dish towel off the oven, went to the bedroom, and packed a bag.
Not everything. Three days' worth, four at most. His charger. His personal laptop — not the work one, the one with everything on it. The good watch from the nightstand, the one he didn’t wear on missions, it had been a gift from his father. The photograph from the dresser, small and undramatic, the two of them from childhood, Katsuki pushing Izuku on the swing. A small old lighter at the bottom of the sock drawer that had belonged to his grandfather, who had told him that he reminded him of the fire inside that lighter, and went everywhere he went when he wasn’t planning to come back the same day - his hands finding everything important.
Age 10: The note had been written on three pieces of paper, front and back, because stupid Deku had apparently needed to draft several versions of this shit before landing on the one that said simply: I like you the most of anyone I know. I think we should be together- together. You don’t have to if you don’t want, but I wanted to say it.
Katsuki had called him a complete and total idiot. He’d said that they’d basically already been together for six years, and Deku was just finally catching up. He’d taken the note with him when he left, shoved it in his pocket, and he hadn’t mentioned it again.
He still had it. Izuku didn’t know that. Katsuki kept it in a box in the back of his closet for thirteen years. He never told Izuku.
Some things you keep because they’re yours. Because someone handed you something that was only ever meant for you, and you don’t let go of those things even when you’re twenty-three, and someone has burned the ground out from under you. You keep it. You just put it somewhere you don’t have to look at it again.
• • •
Izuku — 6:03 a.m.
He heard his name.
That was the first thing. Not an alarm, not a sound from outside, not the slow surfacing of a normal morning. His name, said in a voice he recognized, in a tone he had never heard that voice use before — flat and precise and absolutely without warmth — and he was awake before he had finished processing it.
Izuku Midoriya.
He opened his eyes. Mina was standing in the doorway in her patrol gear. She was looking at him with an expression he had no framework for because he had never done anything that warranted it before. Anger - but also, the thing that had moved through anger and come out the other side into a kind of cold and terrible clarity – disappointment.
He understood everything in the space of one breath.
“Oh God,” he mumbled, looking around, “Oh - Oh God”
Not just I did something terrible. The sequence arrived whole and complete: Mina was here. Mina had a key. Mina had seen. Mina had been standing in this hallway for however long it took her to decide what to do about what she’d seen. And she had decided. He could see the decision in her face — not what it was exactly, but that it had been made, that it was already in motion, that something was already happening ten miles away that he could not stop.
His stomach dropped completely out from under him.
He sat up. Ochako stirred beside him. He could not look at her. He could not look at Mina. He looked at the floor and found his clothes and dressed with hands that weren’t working properly while Mina stood in the doorway and said nothing else, and the silence between them was enormous and specific and nothing that either of them could fix by talking.
He picked up his phone on the way out.
There was a text from Kacchan. Sent at 5:31 am.
“Baby, check in when you're up. Wanna know you're safe, idiot.”
He stood in Ochako's hallway and read it. Read it again. The full weight of it arrived slowly, the way cold water rises — the complete ordinary trust of it, the specific Kacchan way of saying I love you without saying it, the fact that it had been sitting on his phone since 5:31 in the morning while he was asleep in the wrong room next to the wrong person. He stood there with yesterday's clothes on his body and the phone in both hands, and something cracked open in his chest that he understood, even then, was never going to close again.
He looked up. Mina was watching him from the bedroom doorway. Her face had not changed.
He left without saying anything to Mina. He did not say anything to Ochako. He walked out the front door and into the morning air and called Kacchan seven times on the way home. The line rang and rang. Each time Kacchan’s voice said leave a message, and each time Izuku opened his mouth, and nothing came out, and each unanswered call confirmed something he was already starting to understand in the lowest, most animal part of himself.
Kacchan always answered. In nineteen years, Kacchan had always answered.
He wasn't answering because he already knew. Whatever Mina had set in motion before she walked back into that bedroom, it had already arrived. The phone rang into nothing because Kacchan was somewhere with the phone in his hand, watching it ring, and choosing not to pick up — which was so much worse than him not having it, so much worse than any version of the morning where he didn't know yet.
He knew. He already knew. And he was already deciding what to do about it.
By the seventh call, Izuku stopped trying.
• • •
He heard it before he saw anything — the specific sound of drawers. The soft, deliberate slide of them, one after another, the particular rhythm of someone moving through a room with a purpose and not wasting motion. He followed it to the bedroom doorway and stopped.
Kacchan was at the dresser. Already dressed — real clothes, not the ones you wore around the apartment on a Sunday morning, but the ones you wore when you had somewhere to be. His go-bag from under the bed was open on the mattress. He was folding a shirt.
He glanced up when Izuku appeared in the doorway, only to look back down and keep folding.
Izuku stood there and made himself look at what was actually in front of him, the way you made yourself look at something terrible because not looking did not make it less true. The top of the dresser where Kacchan’s watch usually sat — the one he wore every day, the one Izuku had given him for their third anniversary — still there. Sitting on the wood exactly where it always sat, not packed, not taken. Left. The nightstand on Kacchan’s side was cleared to the wood. And the corner of the dresser, where the photograph had lived since the day they moved in — tucked on the wall in its small frame, the two of them as children, Kacchan pushing him on the swing — gone. The nail still in the wall. The pale square where it had hung.
He had left the watch. Izuku understood that without being able to say how — the watch was Izuku's love for him, and Kacchan was leaving Izuku's love behind. He had taken the photograph. That one was his.
Izuku's hands went cold. The shaking started somewhere in the center of him and moved outward without his permission.
"Kacchan —"
His voice broke on the first syllable. He stopped. The word sat there between them, already too soft for what the room had become.
Kacchan set the folded shirt in the bag. Reached back into the drawer without looking at him.
Izuku stood in the doorway and watched him pack and felt the particular horror of watching something happen that you couldn't stop, the way you watched something fall, and your hands were too far away. He made himself step into the room. Made himself say something.
"I need you to let me explain —"
"Kirishima called, Mina called him." Flat. Not cruel. Just the sound of someone stating a fact they wished wasn't one. "I know what happened."
"You don't —" Izuku stopped. Tried again. "You know what happened, but you don't know why, and I need you to know why, I need you to hear it, please —"
Kacchan pulled out a pair of jeans. Folded them once. Reached for the bag.
Izuku crossed the room and took them out of his hands.
He went completely still.
The stillness was worse than anything. Izuku had spent his entire life learning this person — knew his loud and his quiet, his anger and his patience, every version of every silence he carried. This stillness was new. Entirely new. Made for this morning and nothing else.
Kacchan looked at him. Just looked, for one long breath.
Then he reached out, took the jeans back, and folded them again. Stepped between Izuku and the bag without a word — not a shove, not an explosion, just his body placed deliberately in the space where Izuku's hands had been. The message was clear and absolute.
Don't.
Izuku stepped back. His throat was closing. "It wasn't about her," he said. "I need you to know that. It wasn't — Ochako isn't — that's not what this was."
Kacchan’s hands slowed on the bag. Just slightly. Just enough that Izuku could see it.
"Then what was it?" Still not looking at him. His voice had gone somewhere very careful.
"I —" Izuku pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Dropped them. Made himself say it because he owed Kacchan the truth, even if the truth was the worst possible thing he could hand him right now. "I've been — for a while, over a year, I've been — we've always just been, you know? Since we were four. It was never a question, it was never a choice, it was just — you were just always there, and I was always there, and we were always —" He stopped. Started again. "I didn't know if I had ever actually chosen this. I didn't know if I'd ever had the chance to — to look at everything, everyone, and decide! I didn’t know if this was– and it has been sitting in me, and I couldn't look at it directly, and I never said it out loud, and last night I was drunk, and the question was right there and I — I made the worst decision of my life trying to answer something I should have just talked to you about —"
He heard himself. He heard exactly how it sounded. He watched Kacchan’s hands stop moving entirely and understood, with a sickness that went all the way down into his blood, that he had just taken something bad and made it catastrophic.
"You were confused." Kacchan’s voice was very quiet now. Quiet in a way that had nothing to do with calm. "About us."
"I know how that sounds —"
"About us."
He turned around.
And that was the thing that did it— that was the thing that broke Izuku open before another word was said — the way Kacchan looked at him. Not with the explosiveness Izuku had been bracing for the entire walk home, the one he had almost been hoping for. This was something that had swallowed Kacchan’s anger whole. Grief and betrayal and something so raw it barely had a name — the full body devastation of someone who had just been handed information they never in their life expected to need.
Kacchan had not known. He had walked into this room thinking it was a terrible mistake, a drunk night, something awful but maybe containable. And Izuku had just told him it was something else entirely. Something that had been living in him for over a year, quiet and unspoken and unshared, and Kacchan had not known about any of it.
Izuku's throat sealed shut.
"It's not — I love you, I have always —"
"You love me," Kacchan laughed, shallow, "That's not —" He stopped. His jaw was working. "That's not what you just said."
"Kacchan —"
"You said you didn't know if you chose this. That you didn’t know if it was right." Each word placed down separately, carefully, like something being handled with extreme caution. "You said for over a fucking year,” he stopped again, blinking slowly “You just said…you needed to find out… if we…"
Izuku couldn't speak.
Kacchan looked at him for a long moment. Something moved through his face — not anger, not even just the betrayal or grief, not anymore, something quieter and far more final. He looked at Izuku the way you looked at something you had always understood and were only now realizing you had understood alone.
Kacchan reached into the top dresser and took out a small blue box. Izuku didn't know what it was — registered it vaguely, some part of his mind noting it without understanding it — and watched Kacchan hold it for exactly one second before he set it inside his bag and zipped the pocket closed. His face didn't change. Izuku would not understand what he had just watched for a very long time, and when he finally did, the understanding would be the cruelest thing that had ever happened to him.
Kacchan picked up the laptop. Tucked it under his arm.
"I have loved you," he said, "since I was four years old."
His voice went somewhere on four — just that word, just for a second, the level fracturing in a way he caught immediately and locked back down. But it was there. Izuku heard it. It lodged somewhere in his chest and stayed.
"I have never once looked at my life with you and wondered if there was something else. Never questioned whether you were right. Never looked at you and thought about what I might be missing, what could be better, who was made more for me, what doors I hadn't opened, whether what we had was worth what it took to build." A breath. Slow. Deliberate. "Not once. Not for a single day in nineteen years."
The silence after that had weight. Had edges. Izuku stood inside it and felt the full shape of what had been said, and could not find a single word that fit inside it.
"You did." Kacchan's voice was very quiet now. Quieter than anything. "You needed to know the answer to your question – and now you do."
There was nothing to say.
He knew there was nothing. He could feel it — the complete absence of any sentence that could exist inside that silence and mean anything at all. Kacchan had named the exact true thing, and it was irreducible. Izuku could not argue with it. Could not soften it. Could not find any version of it that wasn't right.
He had been curious enough. That was the whole ugly truth of it. One night, one question he had never even admitted to himself, he was carrying — and this was the cost. This was what it had taken from both of them.
He zipped the bag. He walked to the kitchen, and Izuku followed because there was no other direction left.
Kacchan stopped near the door. Reached into his jacket pocket — the one that had always held their key, that Izuku had watched him reach into on a thousand ordinary mornings without ever thinking about it — and his hand closed around it. He held it for a moment. Just held it, his fist closed, his eyes down.
Then he held it out toward Izuku.
"No." The word came out before Izuku could stop it. Barely sound. Barely anything. "No — no —"
Katsuki's hand stayed out. Still. Patient. The key sitting in his open palm.
"Izuku."
His name. Not Deku — not the nickname that had lived in Kacchan’s mouth for nineteen years, the one that had started as a wound and been turned over so many times it came out meaning the opposite, meaning mine and I see you, and I love you, and forever a hundred things that had no other words. Just — Izuku. His given name, used now with the specific weight of someone establishing distance.
Izuku was crying. He hadn't decided to or even actually realized it — his face was just doing it, the way it always did things without his permission when Kacchan was involved. He shook his head. "No — please — no —"
Kacchan looked at him for one long moment. Then he turned and set the key on the table by the door. Flat. Careful. The way you put something down when you were releasing it, for the last time, and wanted to do it right.
He picked up his bag and turned back towards the door. Then he stopped and turned around — looked at Izuku one more time, all the way across the kitchen. The full weight of it — the grief and the anger and the nineteen years and the thing Izuku had just done to both of them — and Izuku did not look away, because he owed him that. He owed Kacchan every second of this.
Then Kacchan turned and began to open the door. Izuku followed him, like his entire world was about to walk out that door -- because it was.
"Kacchan — wait!! " His voice cracked wide open. "Wait, please — please don't — please —"
Kacchan stopped with one hand on the door, his back to Izuku, and he didn't turn around.
Something moved through him — Izuku could see it in the set of his shoulders, the slight drop of his head, the way his hand closed once around the door handle and then released. Something crossed his face that Izuku couldn't see from here but could feel, because he had spent nineteen years learning to feel this person from every distance. Whatever it was lasted one breath. One second where something in Kacchan’s body tried to make a different choice, tried to turn around, tried to close the distance the way it had been closing the distance their whole lives without being asked.
Then his shoulders came back up. His spine straightened. He was level again and closed again.
"Don't call me that." Quiet. Not cruel. Just the sound of someone who had held everything else and could not hold that one thing. His own name, in Izuku's mouth. Not now. "Don't."
He opened the door.
He stepped through it.
He pulled it closed behind him with both hands, carefully, knowing this meant closing it for the final time. The end of it.
The latch clicked.
That was the sound. That small, mechanical, utterly ordinary sound — and Izuku stood in the apartment and felt the full shape of what had just happened and did not move. Nineteen years. Nineteen years of this person's hands and voice and footsteps, the way he breathed when he slept, the way he said Izuku's name in the dark, the way his body felt under Izuku’s hands, his home — and the last sound was a latch clicking. Not the door against the frame. Not the specific percussion of Katsuki Bakugo ending things the way he ended everything, loud and definitive and entirely himself. Just a careful, quiet sound. A door closed by someone who had decided, even now, even through all of this, to be careful.
Izuku stood in the apartment for a very long time.
Long enough that the light changed. Long enough that his legs stopped shaking and started going numb. Long enough that he became aware, slowly, of the things that were still there.
He reached for the dish towel on the oven handle automatically — and his hand found nothing. Just the handle. He stood there for a moment with his hand in the air and looked at the empty bar and could not account for it, could not make it make sense, filed it away without understanding it, and moved on because there was too much else to hold.
Katsuki's dark hoodie draped over the arm of the couch — the soft one, the one that had stopped being exclusively his sometime around year three and had become a thing they both just wore. Still there like he'd just taken it off. Like he was coming back.
He wasn't coming back.
The key on the side table. Flat. Careful. Placed the way you placed something you were done carrying.
Izuku walked further into the kitchen. Opened the cabinet above the coffee maker.
Both mugs. Clean, dried, put away side by side the way they always were — his green one with the chipped handle that Katsuki had superglued twice and complained about both times, and Katsuki's plain dark orange one beside it. He had washed them both. Had dried them and put them back together before he packed the things he couldn't lose.
He had left his mug.
Izuku stood there and looked at them — the set still complete on the shelf, both of them side by side, even though one half of the set had just walked out the door — and understood that it was deliberate. All of it was deliberate. Katsuki had moved through this apartment and made a series of small, precise decisions about what belonged to him alone and what belonged to the life they had built, and he had left the life here. Intact. For Izuku to stand inside without him.
He took down the green mug. Held it in both hands, the ceramic cool and solid.
Then he sat down on the kitchen floor.
Back against the cabinet, knees pulled up, the mug between both palms. The apartment held all its silence around him. He didn't cry anymore, he had moved through the loudest part of a storm — through it and out into something quieter and more permanent. Something with no bottom.
He thought about a text sent at 5:31 in the morning. Wanna know you're safe.
He thought about a shirt that looked good. The casual, factual way it had been said. And then a kiss, and then the door, and then nineteen years of them had only hours left in it, and neither of them had known.
And if that kiss had been the last one. If that brief, ordinary, no-preamble kiss — the kind Katsuki gave him when it was just true, just the obvious thing, not a moment at all — had been the last one he would ever get. He wished he had known. He wished he could go back to that doorway and hold onto it. Kiss him longer. Kiss him like he understood what it was worth. Kiss him forever and still not have it be enough.
He thought about the name Katsuki had just taken back.
I had it. The thought arrived whole and sat in the center of him like a stone. I had the whole thing. I had it in my hands every single day, and I never understood what I was holding until it was already gone.
• • •
Age sixteen: The first time Kacchan said I love you it was mid-argument about something neither of them could remember afterward. He had snapped it like a weapon, like he was furious at himself for having to use it, “ because I love you, you stupid fucking idiot, that's why it matters!”
He'd stood there afterward, ears red, eyes wide, and mouth ajar, looking like he'd accidentally handed something over before he fully meant to, waiting for Izuku to do something catastrophic with it.
Izuku just cried – of course, he had cried. He had been waiting to hear it for twelve years, and it came out of nowhere in the middle of a fight about their goals on hero work, and it was the most Kacchan thing that had ever happened to him in his entire life.
Kacchan had called him pathetic but adorable and pulled him in by the back of the neck and held him there until he stopped. His hand at the back of Izuku's head, thumb at the base of his skull, holding him like something that mattered — the specific way Kacchan held the things that mattered to him, completely, without half-measures, without ever announcing it.
Izuku had thought, pressed into his shoulder with his face wet and completely undignified: I would burn the whole world down before I let this slip away.
He had not known, at sixteen, how easy it was to let things slip away. How one night could be enough. How you could hold something for nineteen years and put it down without meaning to, and the ground would simply shift, and it would be gone.
He had believed, at sixteen, that he was the kind of person who didn't let important things slip away.
He had been wrong.
• • •
Katsuki - 8:14am
He pulled the door closed with both hands.
He stood in the hallway for one second.
From outside the apartment, he heard it — the sound of Izuku's wrecked sob leave his throat. Katsuki knew the sound. He had spent nineteen years in proximity to this person's body, and he knew every sound it made, and he knew that one, and he stood in the hallway with his bag on his shoulder and his hand still flat against the door and felt his feet try to move.
They tried before the rest of him had decided anything. That was how it had always worked with Izuku — his body moved first, closed the distance first, crossed whatever space existed between them before his brain had finished forming the thought. Nineteen years of that. Nineteen years of his body knowing where Izuku was and moving toward it without being asked.
For the first time in his life, he didn't let them.
He stood there until the wanting to go back in had moved through him and passed. Until he was certain his hand was not going to push that door open again. Then he walked to the elevator, pressed the button, and stood with his eyes on the wall while he waited.
On the way down, he pulled out his phone. Hotel listings. Something with a kitchen, quick availability, and nothing too far. He scrolled, picked one, and confirmed the booking without reading the description. The room would be small. He had chosen it partly for that — not too big. If it were too big, he would feel the empty space in it, and he was not ready to feel that yet.
The elevator doors opened. He crossed the lobby. Pushed through the door to the parking structure, got in his car, put the bag on the passenger seat, and set both hands on the wheel.
He sat there.
He did not start the car. He sat in the gray morning quiet of the parking structure with his hands on the wheel and kept his breathing even and did not let himself think about the photograph in the bag or the mug on the shelf or the way Izuku's face had looked when he set that key on the table. Not yet. He was very good, had always been very good, at deciding what he was and wasn't going to think about and when.
His phone went off. Kirishima: I'm here. Whenever you need me. Something shifted dangerously in his chest. He moved on. Mina: I'm so sorry, Kat. I'm so sorry I had to be the one. Tell me what you need. He held that one for a moment — Mina had not had a good morning either. He would have to remember that.
A third notification. Ochako's name on the screen.
I'm so sorry, Katsuki. I don't know how the hell this happened. I am so, so, so sorry.
He looked at it for a long time.
He texted Kirishima and Mina together: Need help moving out in about a week. “Gotta find a place first. You in?” The responses came back in under a minute. “Always, no question.” “Already there, just say when.” He read them both and put the phone down, looked at the concrete wall of the parking structure, and sat with it.
He put the phone face down on the passenger seat and sat for the two hours needed between now and when he could get into his hotel room.
He was not going to come undone somewhere people could see him. He never had. It wasn't only about pride — it was something simpler and more fundamental: what was happening inside him right now was his. It belonged to him. He was not going to put it somewhere public.
Two hours. Hands on the wheel. Breathing even. The bag beside him. The parking structure was gray and quiet around him, the distant sounds of a city going about its morning, knowing nothing, caring nothing, while Katsuki sat in a parking garage basement and held everything together by sheer force of will because it was the only thing he knew how to do.
At 10 am, he started the car and drove to the hotel.
The woman at the front desk talked too much. He stood at the counter while she went through check-in and told him about the amenities and the restaurant on the second floor, and he answered everything she said with single words and felt the thing in his chest pressing hard against his ribs and kept his face level. She said something about the view. He said thank you. She handed him the key card and started in on something else, and he said thank you again, shorter this time, cutting across it, and hated himself for the half-second it showed on her face before he picked up his bag and turned toward the elevators.
The room was 714. He found it. Slide the key card in.
The door swung open.
Small room with ugly ass beige walls. The welcoming silence of a space that had been occupied by no one and smelled like no one and had no reason to know anything about the last nineteen years of his life. Katsuki stepped inside, the door swung shut behind him, and the latch clicked.
He stood in the room for exactly one second.
And then his legs gave out.
Not a fall. A decision his body made without consulting him — his knees simply hitting the floor, the bag dropping from his hand, and then he was on the carpet of a hotel room he had booked two hours ago because he needed somewhere to be that wasn't their apartment, and every single thing he had held together — in that bedroom, in that kitchen, in the elevator, in the parking structure, at that front desk — came down on him all at once.
He pulled his knees to his chest. Wrapped his arms around them.
And he cried.
He cried harder than he had ever cried in his life. Harder than he had known his body was capable of. Great heaving shakes he couldn't control and didn't try to, because there was no one here, because he had made absolutely sure there was no one here, because this was the thing he had been carrying since 6 in the morning and he had held it through all of it and now he was alone on the floor of a room that meant nothing and he could finally, finally let it out.
This man. This man he had loved since they were four years old. Since before he had any language for what love was or cost or asked of you. Since they were small, Izuku had looked at him across a school yard like Katsuki was something he’d spend his life running toward, and Katsuki had not had the words yet, but he had known. He, it seemed, was the only one who had always known. That was the thing tearing him apart from the inside — that he had never once in his life woken up beside this person and wondered. Never stood beside him and thought about what else there might be. Never looked at the life they were building and questioned the ground beneath it. He had known the answer since before he understood the question existed.
Izuku had not known.
Izuku had been carrying a question about them — about them, about whether what they had was real, whether it was chosen, whether it was worth it — for over a year. Quietly. Alone. And he had never said a word. Had never brought it to Katsuki, never trusted him with it, never once in all that time looked at him and said I'm struggling with something, I need to tell you something — and Katsuki had slept beside him, made love to him, made his coffee and kept it warm, had sent him to that stupid fucking party and sent him texts at 5:31 in the morning and had not known. Had not known there was anything to know.
He alone had been certain.
He cried until his body stopped making sounds and kept going in silence. Lying on his side with his chest heaving, face wrecked. He cried for the future he had planned in his head down to the details — the moment, the words, the look on Izuku's face. He cried for nineteen years of never once doubting, and what it meant that he had been alone in that. He cried for the version of this morning that should have existed, and a future that he had been moving toward without knowing it was already gone.
The crying got softer. Got further apart. His body running itself out the way bodies did, some animal part of him simply reaching empty. He sat in the quiet for a long time after. Breathing ragged. The carpet was rough under his face. The room held its impersonal silence around him without apology.
At some point, the exhaustion became something he couldn't hold off anymore. His body was making a decision the way it had been making decisions for him all morning. He felt it coming, and he didn't have the energy to fight it.
He turned over onto his other side on the floor, pulled his knees back up, closed his eyes, and he slept.