Work Text:
The bed arrives on Friday as planned, but it takes a while to actually make it into Katsuki’s apartment. Both of them have busy schedules, but the weight of an entire bed frame and base had been split across four large boxes of various awkward sizes and dimensions. So as much as Katsuki would like to say he can handle it, none of this had really been intended for single-person lifting. So because he’s responsible—can’t go breaking his back for something dumb like this when he’s got a duty to the people now—he has to wait for Todoroki’s workaholic ass to finish his last shift and get home early like he’d promised.
The issue of the bed had been long and contentious. Since Todoroki had grown up living in a traditional Japanese house, he has no problems with simply getting by using futons on the floor. But Katsuki has standards. The floor is uncomfortable, and neither of them has the time to clean as much as they should, so it would really make him feel a lot better to have an actual, modern bed. Todoroki had made the mistake of calling it ‘an unnecessary waste of space.’ The argument had only gotten worse from there.
In the end, things had worked out in Katsuki’s favor. Evidently.
So here he is, the favored one, shivering outside against a railing on a cold evening when he could be enjoying his Friday night off. He slips his phone out of his pocket and wakes it up briefly to check it. No new messages. Katsuki’s displeased huff is visible in the inconstant beams of their apartment complex’s shitty light fixtures. Turning the screen off, he shoves it back into his pocket and settles in to wait.
Because that’s all he does anymore: wait for his boyfriend to show up for dinner, wait for him to call or text to indicate he’s still alive, wait for him in the small pockets of time when their schedules manage to overlap.
Well, someone has to watch their shit so no one will make off with it. Since Todoroki’s busy saving the world as it were, it’s up to Katsuki to pick up the fucking slack.
It’s another five or fifteen minutes of staring up into the sky, watching his breath condense against the darkening night, before Katsuki hears footsteps trudging through the thin snow. They slow as they get closer, so Katsuki doesn’t look until they stop in front of him. He’s cold and a little miserable, so he takes that extra long second before tilting his head back down.
“Hey... Sorry, I’m late.”
Todoroki at least has the good grace to look apologetic. Mostly he looks tired, which is what happens when you pick up 12-hour shifts four out of seven days. Katsuki’s still annoyed, but he does check him over first.
“I’m fine,” Todoroki says helpfully, which seems true enough by observation, then steps in closer and reaches a hand out toward him.
Katsuki sidesteps it because he realizes right then that he’s not just annoyed, he’s pissed. Made him wait half an hour out here in this shitty weather when they’d agreed on this time a week in advance. He’s sick of this happening all the time.
The hurt look that flashes across Todoroki’s face is an immediate wash of guilt. It blanks out immediately, but that brief second had done the trick. Motherfucker—
“You didn’t check your surroundings, idiot,” Katsuki says. “It’s like you want to give the media a reason to follow us everywhere. ”
“Oh.” Todoroki half-turns to look back toward the street he came down, and Katsuki takes the opportunity to pull him around while he’s distracted and shove him back into the railing. It clangs loudly, shocking in the quiet.
“...Ow,” says Todoroki, but he’s paying attention now, eyes wide and focused on Katsuki crowding his space. So Katsuki leans in, takes him by the jaw, and kisses him dirty because he’s angry and it always catches Todoroki off guard. I still hate you, but welcome back. Todoroki’s warm despite the weather; his lips are warm, his breath is warm, he’s alive. Must be nice having such perfectly regulated temperature all the time.
“You made me wait out here in the freezing cold,” Katsuki mutters against his mouth when he’s done. “You shit. Make it up to me.”
Todoroki is looking a little punch-drunk up close now, and there’s a telltale flush in his face that is only partially due to the cold. The look Katsuki had seen before is miles gone. Good.
And then Todoroki grabs him by the face with both hands and draws him back in. His left hand, the warm one, slips under his ear and around to cradle the base of Katsuki’s skull, a steadying heat that sends a shudder down his spine. One of the biggest surprises early on in their relationship had been how unnaturally good Todoroki is at kissing. He gives as good as he takes and does it with such single-minded focus. Mindless destruction or absolute delight.
Katsuki’s head is spinning a little by the time he remembers that they actually have work to do tonight. It still takes a moment for him to grasp Todoroki’s hands and pull them away so Katsuki can get his bearings back. The night air feels like a slap in the face; the sudden temperature change is so stark. Their breaths come out misty between them. Katsuki almost has to squint to see Todoroki’s expression.
“Is that better?” Todoroki asks with just a bare hint of breathlessness. He’s not smiling (and if he were, Katsuki might actually punch him), but there’s a subtle push to his tone that Katsuki suspects is smugness.
“Was that supposed to count as some kind of fucking apology,” Katsuki grumbles, coughing to mask his own lack of breath. “But I’ll think about it.” He lets go of one of Todoroki’s hands, but keeps hold of the other as he leads them over to the array of long boxes leaning against the railing a little ways down. Katsuki had only moved them far enough to stay clear of any melting snow. “Well, there it is.”
Todoroki stares for a minute, then nods as he notes, “This is why you needed me here to help.”
“Yeah, ‘cause I ain’t snapping my back over this. Too awkward to carry anyways.”
“That makes sense.”
Katsuki squeezes Todoroki’s hand before letting go and walks around to the largest box. Their eyes meet over it—Katsuki pulls the top end of the box towards himself and Todoroki adjusts automatically to follow him, shifting his grip to the bottom end until they have it lengthwise. The thing would have been unwieldy for one person, but is manageable with two.
“Can we stack the smaller boxes on top of this one?” asks Todoroki, eyeing the whole array. There are two other boxes for the bed frame, then the single box containing what Katsuki presumes is the mattress base. One of the other boxes is even longer than the one they’re hefting, but not quite as wide. Just thinking about how they’ll have to maneuver all of these through their doorway makes Katsuki’s head throb.
“We sure can try,” Katsuki replies, glaring down at all the boxes. If looks could kill or at least threaten the universe into going his way for once...
In the end, it still takes two trips. The whole point of this had been to keep their shit from getting stolen, so they move everything behind the stairs, where they can’t be seen from the street. Then they team-lift two of the heaviest boxes up to the 2nd floor, down to their hallway, and through their open apartment door, all with copious amounts of swearing involved on Katsuki’s end. They head back for the remaining two afterward, which are light enough for them to handle one each.
By the time they finally get everything through the door, the cold air is starting to feel uncomfortable on the sweat Katsuki’s worked up. Everything is in a pile at the entrance to their living room. He shoves the door closed with more force than necessary, then sets about removing his coat and boots.
“Fucking finally.” His temper had cooled some earlier, but his mood has taken a dip again.
It’s nice and warm inside their apartment, but that’s only because Katsuki had left the heat on, thinking that it wouldn’t take quite this long to bring in some boxes once the help arrived. The hour or so of time when no one was in the apartment won’t amount to much on their electricity bill, but it’s the thought that it was preventable waste that pisses him off. As well as whose fault that is, which he’s trying not to focus on.
Todoroki bolts their door and checks the locks properly before leaning over to undo the straps on his own boots. He's still wearing his Hero outfit underneath his jacket, the strap of his sling pack pulled tight across his chest over the extra bulk of the costume. What a dork.
“You couldn’t have changed at your agency like any normal Hero?” Katsuki snipes. He’s stepped out of his boots and switched to indoor slippers by then.
“... Couldn’t,” says Todoroki. The noticeable pause before he’d replied makes a whole lot more sense once he continues, “I was already going to be late by then, so if I’d showered and changed, I would have been even later than I was.”
Katsuki shoves his boots into the corner by the door to dry on the mat and pulls the closet open, snatching up a hanger for his coat.
“Um... There was this attempted robbery on my return route,” Todoroki continues, a measured sort of carefulness in his tone as Katsuki unwinds the scarf from around his neck and hangs that up with the coat. “I was the one closest to the scene. Then there was the police report, they needed me to—”
“Todoroki.”
“—file the incident and talk to... Ah. I forgot.” Todoroki falls silent for a beat. “Sorry.”
Katsuki grunts some approximation of an acknowledgement. They’ve talked before about how the last thing he needs to hear when he’s pissed off is excuses. It just riles him up more in the moment. Better to let him cool off first.
Todoroki moves to place his own boots next to Katsuki’s and comes to wait his turn for the closet. Since he’s there already, Katsuki reaches for another empty hanger and shoves it over his shoulder at Todoroki. So there, no one can say Katsuki isn’t trying.
“You’re still angry,” Todoroki observes, like it’s not exceedingly obvious.
“Yeah, no shit, so watch it,” Katsuki growls, just as Todoroki, with no self-preservation whatsoever, leans in close enough to bump shoulders with him and pulls the hanger out of Katsuki’s hand. “What did I just say!?”
“Stop being angry,“ says Todoroki, taking his jacket, lighter than Katsuki’s because he has his handy quirk to help with warmth, and carefully fitting it around the hanger. He hangs it up next to Katsuki’s coat. “You’ll get wrinkles.”
“I’m twenty-four, not forty—“
“You’ll get them right—“ Todoroki sticks a hand into Katsuki’s face, using his index finger to poke the area between Katsuki’s eyebrows, where there is indeed a knit of wrinkles. “—here.”
There’s a pause, during which Katsuki struggles between feeling babied and feeling absurdly charmed despite himself. His wires are getting crossed probably; they don’t spend enough time together these days, so maybe Katsuki’s getting a little crazy.
Todoroki has been watching his face. There’s nothing threatening in the look, just an open, curious appraisal.
“Do you want me to apologize again?” he asks. “Will that help?”
“What.” Katsuki’s thrown for a second. “No? If you’re just saying that because—”
Todoroki pushes the closet door closed, and the motion brings him to face Katsuki fully. There’s something in his neutral expression that makes Katsuki equal parts wary and also aware. Still, Katsuki nearly balks when he tries to sidestep and unexpectedly meets Todoroki’s arm, propped easily against the wall by Katsuki’s shoulder. When had that gotten there?
“Or maybe you want me to make it up to you some more?” Todoroki continues, without batting an eye.
Katsuki’s stupid heart rate picks up just a little bit. He swears Todoroki can sense it somehow because he tilts his head to the side, like he doesn’t realize how effective that look is, and takes a step closer, subtracting the distance between them by half. It’s distracting enough that Katsuki nearly forgets that he’s supposed to be annoyed.
“You—” The first word comes out hoarse, fuck. Katsuki clears his throat and starts again, summoning as much of his residual anger as he can. “You do realize that was a shit excuse of an apology, right?”
“I just asked if you wanted me to try again,” Todoroki points out mildly. “And I don’t recall you complaining before.”
He’s held resolutely still since he stepped in and he won’t move unless Katsuki says the word, whether to close the distance or to give him his space. It’s a quiet, stunning reminder that at this moment, regardless of all the mess in their lives, Katsuki is still capable of commanding Todoroki’s attention. All of his attention. The knowledge of that, the idea of it—it’s doing things to some hollow in his chest, to someplace low in his gut.
“Besides,you came onto me, remember?” Todoroki says, dropping into that lower pitch, the quiet insistent one that spells trouble for Katsuki’s impulse control.
The attention runs both ways. Katsuki splutters indignantly for a bit, in lieu of a coherent response.
“So... is that a no?” Todoroki asks, all in one breath, the syllables running together into one lazy, low tone.
Katsuki has a feeling that his ears might be burning red. He hesitates maybe a moment too long, because Todoroki starts to close in again.
And is stopped short with an unceremonious hand to the face.
“Mmf.”
Even the hum of sound against Katsuki’s palm sets off sensations, fires off associations. There’s a flash of sensory memory from earlier in the snow, tangled up in one another, when Katsuki had earned a similar sound from Todoroki’s throat.
“We have work to do, yeah?” Katsuki rasps, as much to convince himself as anything else. He uses this moment to slide out of Todoroki’s attack zone and clear his head a little. None of their friends believe him when he complains that Todoroki is the one in their relationship who needs to learn how to behave himself.
He hears Todoroki huff out a breath beside him.
“Don’t laugh, moron!” Katsuki grouses. Todoroki promptly does just that, less discreetly, and Katsuki hates how such a tiny thing can wind him with all the impact of a small truck. He grabs ahold of Todoroki’s sleeve and tugs to get him moving. But also, because he can’t resist wanting the contact, chasing the heat. “Fucking move these boxes for me!”
He catches a glimpse of the small smile on Todoroki’s face, and his sour mood dispels a little more, just like that. The drive-by kiss Todoroki leaves on his ear definitely doesn’t help either. God.
It’s easy enough to push the stack of boxes past the kitchen area, into their bare living room, and then into the bedroom. The mattress is leaning against one of the walls already, awaiting the bed frame. Katsuki takes the bed base and props it up against the far corner with the mattress, out of the way.
“Go eat first and bathe or whatever,” Katsuki says off-hand to Todoroki once everything is in place. “I got this for now.”
Todoroki forgoes responding for touching brief fingers to Katsuki’s shoulder as he passes by on his way out to the living room. It’s nothing, just a brush of contact; it really shouldn’t give Katsuki as much pause as it does. He manages to keep from turning to watch Todoroki leave the room like some moonstruck idiot at least.
He fails sometime later though, when Todoroki comes back in for a change of clothes before heading to the bath.
But by the time Todoroki’s finished doing his thing, Katsuki has managed to pull his concentration together. He’s knee-deep in the instruction manual, wood veneer planks, the contents of their toolkit, and various supplies scattered around him. A space has been cleared where they agreed the bed should go. There’s already a headboard propped up and Katsuki is working on the connection points where the frame will attach.
“I need another one of these boards,” Katsuki tells Todoroki, then looks up. “You better have dried your hair before coming in here.”
Todoroki is still a little rosy from the bath. He’s in relaxed clothes for the night, just some sweatpants and a worn-in shirt. There’s a towel around his neck and his hair looks damp.
“It’s dry enough. Did you want to check?” He joins Katsuki on the floor and leans his head over for inspection.
Katsuki doesn’t really need to, but he takes the excuse to slide his hand into Todoroki’s two-toned hair. Then he musses it up, just to hear Todoroki make that quiet, familiar noise of complaint.
“Yeah, yeah, just don’t drip water all over my wooden bed frame and we’re good,” he says, not quite able to keep the smirk off his face as he watches Todoroki grumble and pull the towel from around his neck to run over his hair again.
“It’s not even solid wood.”
“Shut it. The board. This one, the one with the holes on this end. Should be in that box over there. Not that box, the other.”
It’s slow, steady work from that point on.
Slow, steady work going slowly, but surely, downhill.
The process is unexpectedly confusing for a brand that touts itself for its easy assembly. The manual tries to be clear, but sometimes the diagrams are just ambiguous and confusing. The lines that match screws and pegs to the right holes aren’t always immediately clear. After the third consecutive time that Todoroki makes the same mistake, Katsuki’s tone starts getting snappy.
There are several different types of boards in the combined package, with some that look very similar. Eventually, after enough grief, they decide to pull everything out of their respective boxes and spread them out on the floor. The lack of space makes it a pain to maneuver around the room, which only serves as an additional stress point.
There are a few disagreements about which is the right part to use. Sometimes, they arrive at the right answer; sometimes, dismantling has to happen. Neither outcomes do anything to improve the worsening atmosphere.
“I fucking told you it was this screw we had to use, not that one! It’s not long enough, so how the fuck would it even hold these pieces together, huh!?”
“So I made a mistake. You don’t have to make such a huge deal out of it. We can always take it apart.”
Katsuki’s temper is back on the rise; even Todoroki’s patience is running thin. His words are getting more and more clipped. Katsuki is trying not to read attitude into them, but that’s getting harder by the minute.
It doesn’t help that Todoroki’s long work shift is catching up to him. Katsuki can see it in his pinched expression and the way he stalls out every once in a while before he can refocus on the task at hand. It pisses him off.
“Just go take a nap on the couch or something! Before you do something stupid like hammer your fingers!”
“I’m fine,” Todoroki replies. There’s a stubborn set to his jaw. “We agreed to work on this together, so I’ll be fine.”
The way he says it makes it sound like he’s putting up with it all for Katsuki’s sake.
“I’m not forcing you to do shit!” Katsuki snaps. He tosses the L-shaped bit of metal provided with the packaging and snatches up an actual screwdriver to do the job for him without threatening his patience.
“I never said that,” Todoroki sighs. “We agreed on this last week.”
“I get that you’re not thrilled about this bed, so you don’t need to push yourself for my sake.“
“Well it’s our bed now. Since I’m going to be sleeping in it, it makes sense for me to help put it together.” Todoroki pauses and rolls the set of screws he has in his palm. It takes him a couple seconds longer than it should to check if they match the diagrams in the manual. “Hand me the other screwdriver. Please.”
Katsuki fumes, but looks around for the correct tool and passes it into Todoroki’s waiting grasp.
There’s a break in conversation while they finish up this section of the frame and stand to carry it over to where the headboard is leaning against the wall. Right away, there are issues with aligning the connection points. They end up having to individually shift some of the wooden connectors enough that they can be shoved into their corresponding sockets. The side panel that makes up the length of the bed frame is heavier than it looks. And there’s still the other side panel to attach in the same manner. Katsuki curses eloquently the entire time, while Todoroki remains stonily silent.
“Wait a fucking second.” Katsuki stops and snatches the manual up, squinting. Yeah, he thought so. “You weren’t supposed to attach these two panels together until afterwards, dumbass! No fucking wonder we’re having trouble connecting everything! Look at this!”
He shoves the manual at Todoroki, only just barely aware that paper is highly flammable and that he’s holding it in the palm of his hand. Todoroki gives this resigned sigh, blinks and holds it for two seconds, then rescues the manual from Katsuki’s hand. He stares fixedly at it for absolutely longer than necessary.
“Yeah,” Todoroki agrees, a low, matter-of-fact sort of admission. As if this isn’t a problem. “I suppose I misunderstood the directions.”
“You suppose you misunderstood the—” Aside from sheer frustration, there’s another reason that Katsuki is getting this upset, he’s sure of it. Fuck if he can tell right now though. “I told you to fucking go to sleep already!”
The look Todoroki levels at him then could be weary resignation, could be a glare. “Katsuki. You told me you needed my help with this. I can manage—”
“Not if you’re gonna be next to useless,” Katsuki snarls.
It’s definitely a glare. “That’s not fair and you know it.”
“It’s not my fucking problem if you’re not awake enough to work on this. I’m the one who has to handle your mistakes. That’s on you! So take some goddamn responsibility!”
“I am trying,” Todoroki says, wrenching a screw out to start again. “You make it sound like I’m doing this on purpose.”
“You might as well be,” Katsuki sneers. Ah yes, he remembers now. There was this detail that had bothered him as soon as Todoroki had mentioned it. He’d forgotten about it in his distraction, but now it’s coming back. “You were fucking late even though you knew we’d set a time, didn’t even fucking text me—”
“I was focusing on getting back—” Todoroki tries to interject.
“You could have left that SOS call for someone else in the area, but no, Hero Shouto needs the extra fucking credit—”
The corner of Todoroki’s mouth tugs; Katsuki could swear he’d almost scored a grimace there. It’s an ugly sort of victory, the kind achieved by wrestling someone down into the dirt with you. But Todoroki’s always been difficult to rile up, the type to stay frustratingly unaffected while everything around him goes to shit. It makes Katsuki want to rip him to shreds sometimes to see whether it’s even possible to make Todoroki feel the same things he does.
“That’s enough,” Todoroki says, absolutely frigid. He says it like he has any authority to talk over Katsuki, like he expects to have any command over him. But Todoroki really does hold sway over him, doesn’t he?
Perhaps that is why he’d first gotten caught up in Todoroki, looking for a fight or a fuck. And Todoroki, for some reason, had maybe just decided to humor him one day. Maybe it’s never been balanced between them. Todoroki with his silent superiority and Katsuki with his wildfire temper—maybe they’ve always been a terrible match-up like that.
“Wait no, I should be grateful you’re even here for this,” Katsuki says, snide and vicious. It occurs to him then that he’s been wrestling with this particular, rising hurt for a long time. So it feels perfect, cathartically justified—like the thud of an arrow piercing the delicate space between two ribs, or a bullet rupturing the perfect center of a forehead. The same, grim satisfaction.
“I get it. Your career is the main show and all this here is just the bit on the side. I wonder what you’d do if you didn’t need me to make all this convenient for you.”
Todoroki stands abruptly. Katsuki can’t see his face because it’s turned away, but he’d seen the expression a split second before. He doesn’t get a chance to react before Todoroki turns to leave the room without so much as a word.
“Hey!” Katsuki yells after him. “What the fuck!?”
A brief, outraged few seconds later, he gets up to storm after him.
Todoroki hasn’t gone far. He’s standing in the dark of their living room with his back to Katsuki. From the set of his shoulders, Katsuki has a fairly good idea why he’d left the room when he did. The urge to keep pushing rears its head, but then slouches a little.
“Hit a nerve?” Katsuki settles on asking. It’s as close to mild as he can get.
“...Yes,” hisses Todoroki. His hands are clenched into fists. “I don’t understand why you always have to make it a fight.”
And Katsuki should be feeling a tremor of satisfaction at the admission, but it’s as if the previous moment in the room had used up most of the vitriol he thought he’d had. Now he just feels fucking heavy.
“So you’re not a fucking factor in all this, is that it?” Katsuki says, bitterly exhausted by everything.
“I never said that! It’s just that we have a limited amount of time together—”
“That’s not my damn fault, is it!?”
“—so I just want to spend it well, but every time, you make it—”
“You can’t have an argument with only one person, you fuck!”
“Fine!” And when Todoroki whips around, whatever Katsuki had been prepared to shoot back dies in his mouth. “We end up fighting about something stupid every time! But you’re the one who starts it!”
Todoroki is seething. He’s always exhausted these days, and it shows most obviously as the shadows around his eyes, the blank gaze he tends to adopt as soon as it hits afterwork hours. But right now, there’s a withering, caged sort of fire in his eyes. The breath catches in Katsuki’s throat again when he tries to come up with something to say. But Todoroki beats him to the punch.
“Why did you ask to move in together,” Todoroki grits out; there’s a tightly controlled tremor in his voice, “if it was going to be like this?”
The last part hits a note that drops Katsuki’s heart into his stomach. Shit, it sounds like he might cry.
He remembers that the last two days have been six-to-six’s without even counting overtime, that their weekend had been a cold war that had ended only because they’d gotten tired of being two masses of broiling energy trying to avoid collision in the same, tiny space. He remembers that the week before had been the last heated argument about the bed, like a final denial that there is something to fix, something to mend, or even something to look forward to. That the week before that, they’d nearly ended it. Again.
They catch their breaths in the dark and find that they’re inexplicably in some dreaded, familiar place again—reeling at the edge of a chasm they take pains to forget is there.
Todoroki takes a rattling breath, squeezes his eyes closed, and Katsuki wants to die.
“What are you saying?” Katsuki manages to choke out. “Do you want to—” Give up? End things? Leave?
The silence afterwards is cocked and loaded.
But Todoroki gives a tight shake of his head, the click of the safety going back on. The wave of relief that comes is staggeringly immense. But then comes the numbing douse of realization—it’s not over yet.
“I’m sorry for not being here enough,” Todoroki says, whisper-quiet. He still sounds on the brink of either violence or vulnerability. “But you know why I have to work so many hours. You know why, so why are you—“
That’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair that he gets to pull fucking heartstrings all the time.
“I told you we could work something out!” and Katsuki’s voice is rising despite everything, desperate to locate the problem and cut it out, cut it out at the heart, “You’re the one fucking martyring himself for his shitstain of a father—!”
“That’s not what it is, and you know it! I told you—“
“Yeah, you’ve gone on about some ‘honor and pride’ bullshit to me! You don’t want to owe him shit, so you’re working yourself to the bone instead to pay back the amount you borrowed. Like that makes any sense! But I’ve said before, you don’t fucking need to do all that yourself—”
“Your parents have helped me enough,” Todoroki replies, on-cue, from the same old script. “I can pay for my half just fine, now that we’ve found this place.”
“You can, but you don’t need—” Katsuki cuts himself off because there’s no point to this. These are all words they’ve used before, heard before, said before. This isn’t the first time, nor even the second time they’ve gotten all up in arms about it.
His parents want to help them, so it’s not solely Todoroki. Katsuki doesn’t mind footing a higher portion of the living costs, even though he understands why Todoroki won’t fucking accept that, and it’s aggravating that he does. No, there’s no way Todoroki will lower the amount he sends to his mother every month, but there’s no reason why it should only have to come from him when they’re together—she knows they’re together and gave them her damned blessings even.
They’re supposed to be a fucking unit, aren’t they?
“Of course I know all that!” Katsuki gusts out in an angry breath. There are always too many things to unpack. It gets dizzying to keep track of them all in the swirl of emotion. So he focuses on just the one, the biggest unnecessary reason for all this. “But explain this one thing, just one fucking thing. Why can’t you get that your old man doesn’t deserve anything!? Just take his goddamn money like it’s the least he owes you for the shit he’s pulled. He doesn’t deserve your time!”
Todoroki’s eyes flash. He opens his mouth, maybe to defend his stupid choices again, maybe to yell back finally so Katsuki isn’t always the one yelling to fill the space. But Katsuki isn’t done yet. Some thoughts grow and grow in the dark, in empty apartments, in the hours between sleeping and waking, in the cycling and recycling of arguments.
“Your asshole dad deserves more of your time than I do, is that it!? Is that what you think!?”
The moment the words leave his mouth, Katsuki regrets them: first, for the way they start just as furious as he’d wanted, but end so plaintive that it stings; and second, for the stricken expression that freezes on Todoroki’s face.
The abrupt silence is deafening.
“I— I didn’t mean to—“
Watching Todoroki struggle to put his emotions into words has always been painful for Katsuki. He used to think that Todoroki just doesn’t feel very much, but that turned out to be wrong. While Katsuki has come far enough to acknowledge that he’s allergic to dealing with feelings, Todoroki’s problem is that he seems to have missed some critical point in growing up when one should’ve learned that emotions are supposed to be expressed, not packaged away and discarded as superfluous. He has to learn all over again how to feel things, and it’s such a damned shame. It’s such a damned shame that someone had forced Todoroki to cut aside parts of himself and hide them away until he’d forgotten where they were.
Katsuki’s fingers shake, so he clenches them into a fist. He feels the rawness from the scrape of ugly words in his throat. Todoroki is getting visibly distraught. He’s looking past Katsuki instead of focusing directly on him, and he’s holding himself ramrod straight, with his hands motionless by his sides.
“... Fuck!” Katsuki envisions putting all of his anger and frustration into that one word, says it again. “Fuck!” Todoroki shuts up immediately. Katsuki sees him flinch, though he aborts the movement as quickly as it starts, damn him.
He takes in a slow, deep breath, leans his head back with a hand over his eyes to fully open his throat so nothing can catch in it—no words, no jagged breaths, no fucking tears. It feels like a repeat of earlier, in the snow, when Katsuki tilts his chin back down to see Todoroki before him.
This time, Katsuki is the one to step forward and reach a hand out toward him. Todoroki tenses, but doesn’t make a move, so Katsuki’s hand lands on Todoroki’s shoulder and feels tight muscles under his palm.
“Hey,” he says lowly, shaking Todoroki a little. “Snap out of it.”
Todoroki hasn’t moved, but he still isn’t looking at Katsuki, gaze focused deadly on some point beside Katsuki’s head. So Katsuki takes his other hand, passes it over Todoroki’s jawline, under his ear, and grasps the back of his neck, base of the skull, fingers tangling in his hair. It’s getting long; pretty soon he’ll be able to tie it up maybe.
He pulls Todoroki closer, enough that they breathe the same air and Katsuki can lean their foreheads together.
“Shouto,” he says into the space between their mouths. And that’s what does it—Katsuki feels the shiver of reaction through Todoroki’s shoulders, and they both inhale at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” says Todoroki after a while, his eyes closed, “for making you wait for me all the time.”
“Shut up, I get it. Stop apologizing already.”
And they stay like that for a while—a pocket of time in which they exist and the connection hurts. But it’s clearly there, just the two of them and the line between them, untangled for once.
Eventually, someone moves.
They remember that it’s getting late and they won’t have a bed or even space on the floor to unroll a futon if they don’t finish building. They come apart with a sigh.
Katsuki rubs at his neck, turning away, and he doesn’t immediately look at Todoroki. There’s something mildly embarrassing about all this now.
“C’mon,” he says, off to the side. It comes out gruffer than he’d expected.
There’s a shock of warmth against Katsuki’s back as Todoroki responds by coming up behind him, arms wrapped around his waist, forehead a sweet weight on the back of Katsuki’s neck.
“... You’re heavy.”
Todoroki doesn’t answer, just inhales slow like he does when he’s grounding himself. Katsuki feels it catch and release. He should probably say something.
“Hey, earlier. I didn’t mean what I—” No, that’s wrong. “—I mean. Fuck. I’m sorry. About before.”
It still feels wrong, but Todoroki sighs against him and the arms around Katsuki’s waist tighten.
“Say something, you shit,” Katsuki says. He wraps his fingers around one of Todoroki’s wrists and runs his thumb along the prominent jut of bone there. “This is a rare fucking occurrence. Who knows when you’ll hear that again.”
Todoroki huffs a laugh and it flutters down the back of Katsuki’s shirt. He lifts his head and rests his chin over Katsuki’s shoulder. Katsuki doesn’t even have to think about it—they lean their heads together like puzzle pieces.
“Thanks,” Todoroki murmurs, warm and tired, by his ear. “I think I deserved it though.”
Katsuki takes hold of Todoroki’s other wrist and frees himself, turning his head to look Todoroki in the eye when he tells him, “No, you didn’t.”
Todoroki just slow-blinks back at him, baffled. God. But Katsuki doesn’t want to devote any more time to this. It’s getting late. So he tugs the arm he still has in his grasp, and Todoroki follows. They pause a moment before the threshold of the bedroom, like returning back to the site of destruction. Then, they step over together.
“Hey, why don’t you…” Katsuki pauses. He doesn’t want to incite another argument. “Here, take care of the instruction manual and read it off for me.”
Todoroki doesn’t object. He takes the manual and settles in close enough that Katsuki could still reach out and touch him if he needs to.
Things go better from then on.
Todoroki helps out with anything that needs to be hefted, and passes along the right materials for the most part, so long as Katsuki points them out first. With Todoroki concentrating solely on deciphering the instruction manual, there’s not only less chance of a building error, but there is also less that his tired brain has to manage. Even so, by the time Katsuki finally stabilizes the frame, Todoroki has been quiet in his corner of the floor for a while.
It feels good to finish something and have it go right. The frame looks nice in their room, completes it. Now there are just the last few things.
“Oi.” Katsuki looks and sees Todoroki seated cross-legged on the floor, nodding off into his lap. The instruction manual is open to the penultimate page, but Katsuki’s been past that step for a good fifteen minutes already. “Todoroki.”
He considers pushing Todoroki over to wake him—it’d be funny, and that’s what he gets for dozing off while Katsuki toils by himself—but no. He sinks down into a crouch instead, placing them on the same level, and then reaches out to just shake him awake probably, but something stops his hand just short of touching. He’s frozen there, an ache in his chest.
This is stupid. He’s so fucking stupid.
He forces past the clench of his heart and tilts himself forward. It feels like a shame to wake him and break the moment, but that’s a terrible position to fall asleep in and they’re almost done. It’d be better to sleep on a real bed.
Katsuki puts his mouth by Todoroki’s ear and wants to say a lot of things—things that start with ‘I’ and end with ‘you,’ and the middles are unknown variables, used for defining the space between two people.
“Shouto. C’mon, wake up,” Katsuki says instead. There’s something wrong with his voice today; everything he’s been saying has been coming out soaked in the wrong emotion.
Todoroki stirs, sits up slowly, and the vulnerable back of his neck is covered again. He blinks up through his tousled fringe at Katsuki and makes a sleepy sound in the back of his throat, soft. He looks like he’s about to apologize again, probably for falling asleep.
Katsuki wants to destroy him.
He slips his fingers up into Todoroki’s fringe, grasps the strands tight, and tugs a little. He can see the way Todoroki’s eyes scrunch up slightly from the pull, the scar tissue around his left eye pulling tighter. Todoroki lets out this defenseless sigh of breath, disoriented from being woken up, but lets it happen. Lets it happen and just fixes on Katsuki with hazy, questioning eyes, chin tilted up, throat bared, and the line of his jaw stark in the light.
The hand in Todoroki’s hair loosens and slides farther back until there is nothing blocking his features, pretty and well-formed, burn scar be damned. His forehead, the smooth curve of his brow, the damaged skin going up into his hairline. Katsuki doesn’t imagine many people have seen these parts of Todoroki, innocuous as it seems.
“You’re not allowed to sleep yet, slacker,” Katsuki says in almost a whisper, his mouth dry all of a sudden. “We’re almost done. Just the mattress and the sheets.”
He finishes dragging his hand through Todoroki’s hair, and it has enough gentle force in it that it pushes Todoroki back until he has to catch himself on his hands. Katsuki uncurls from his crouch with the same motion. But Todoroki still manages to catch hold of his fingers as he’s retracting his hand.
“Katsuki… ?”
The inflections in Todoroki’s tone say that even in his sleepy, half-assed state, his senses had caught a whiff of whatever small storm had laid waste in the confines of Katsuki’s rib cage right then.
“Mattress. I wanna sleep sometime,” Katsuki cuts in. He turns away, and after a brief pause, he hears Todoroki climb to his feet to assist.
The mattress is not particularly heavy at all, just unwieldy, an easier time with two people. Todoroki does make a bid for coordination and handles his side of the thing without stumbling too much. They get the thing onto the bed frame and aligned with the mattress base.
“Now sheets. Before you collapse on it or I’ll have your head, asshole.”
“… Yes, fine.”
The sheets are new, freshly laundered. They’d been in the dryer, waiting for this moment. Katsuki goes to fetch them because he doesn’t trust Todoroki to do anything without supervision in his current state. He comes back and he throws half of the load at Todoroki, mostly to keep him on his toes. First the mattress pad, then the sheet. They haven’t gotten a duvet specifically for the bed, so they pull out the biggest ones they have for the futons and layer them on top.
“Now can I… ?” Todoroki begins to ask and trails off. He’s starting to sway on his feet by this point, each blink a second long before his body recalls that he’s supposedly upright and awake.
Katsuki walks around from his side of the bed, making as if to pass by Todoroki. But when Todoroki sidesteps to let him by, Katsuki catches him around the waist before he can react, doesn’t even need to use much force to tip him over into bed. Todoroki lands, a startled, inelegant sprawl of limbs and ruffled hair.
“Go to sleep,” Katsuki tells him. “Don’t wait up for me. I’m gonna take a shower or something before I sleep—”
“Oh…” says Todoroki. Katsuki looks back at Todoroki in time to see him roll over and flop onto his back, spread-eagled across the covers, staring up at their ceiling. “This is actually really nice,” he concludes after a full two seconds. He sounds so awed and appreciative, Katsuki has to force the glow of warmth down.
‘You don’t have to be so stupidly happy about it’ rises to the top, followed by ‘I told you so,’ but Katsuki discards those.
“Idiot,” he says emphatically instead. “Good night.” He reaches up, clicks the ceiling light into the dimmest setting, and grabs a towel before heading to the bathroom.
Katsuki doesn’t think much while going through the motions of his nightly routine. He’s good at that, at reducing his thoughts to physical processes and motor reflexes, simple things that can be easily solved. It’s been a trying day; some things can be left for daylight to handle.
He ends up soaking in the tub a little, to cast off some of the tension, to kill enough time so that Todoroki might be dead asleep by the time Katsuki’s done. They can end the day on some interaction that isn’t terrible at least. He tries to keep his mind carefully blank and partially succeeds.
When Katsuki gets back to the room, his hair already blow-dried (because he’s not going to be an asshole bed partner or chance catching a cold), walking on quiet bare feet with a towel wrapped around his waist because he’d forgotten to bring a change of clothes with him, the light is still on. For a moment, Katsuki thinks Todoroki had passed out before remembering to turn it off, but he’s proven wrong when Todoroki stirs at the sound of Katsuki sliding the closet door open.
Annoying. It would have been easier if Todoroki had just been asleep.
“Todoroki, you stubborn fuck, what part of ‘go to sleep’ did you not understand?” says Katsuki, at half-volume because it’s late. “Why the hell are you still awake?”
He drops the towel to get dressed. They’re past the point of self-consciousness in each other’s company; it’s been three years. He steps into his boxers, then pulls on a long-sleeved shirt. He’d turned down the thermostat a little on his way back to the room. Todoroki may be a natural heater, but he clings too much in his sleep.
“You took your time,” Todoroki replies after a moment, shockingly coherent. “I napped while I waited for you.” When Katsuki turns to the bed to see that Todoroki is at least under the covers now, looking out at Katsuki from somewhere in a pile of pillows. He’s appropriated all of them onto his side of the bed in the time it took Katsuki to wash up. Katsuki has to rescue his pillow out of Todoroki’s arms.
“Didn’t have to, but sure, whatever, weirdo.” He fluffs the pillow a bit, waits for it to retain more of its original shape, then drops it into place. Some of his ill-temper shows through the smack of the pillow impacting the mattress, the loudest sound since Katsuki re-entered the room.
Todoroki just peers up at him and wordlessly shifts so there’s more room on Katsuki’s side, then flips the covers up for Katsuki to get in. There’s no sense in doing anything other than accepting the invitation really, so Katsuki grunts and complies. He slips in and discovers that Todoroki’s shitty standards are actually alright for once. The bed is a solid support under his back, different from the spartan firmness of the floor.
“It’s nice, right?” Todoroki says. “I didn’t expect it.” The whites of his eyes look gray in the dim light. Katsuki should look away, so he does, scoffing as he turns his back to Todoroki.
“‘Course you didn’t,” he can’t help saying though. He wouldn’t pass up a chance to claim something over Todoroki for anything. “That’s why I have the best ideas.”
Todoroki doesn’t dispute that. Normally, he would. He’s either too tired for their usual bantering or he’s going easy on Katsuki for some misguided reason.
Instead, Todoroki sits up and Katsuki is curious enough despite himself to turn his head to watch. Todoroki reaches down to the floor and comes up with his work mobile. They should remember to get nightstands next time, so their phones don’t have to charge on the floor next to wall sockets.
“Morning patrol tomorrow, huh,” Katsuki states rather than asks. He has Todoroki’s schedule memorized, doesn’t even need the phone alarms to wake him up as a reminder.
Todoroki still has the thing in hand, having roused himself enough to blink blearily at the screen. He types out a message, then drops his head back into the pillow with an exhausted sigh.
“Fuck it,” comes Todoroki’s response, muffled by the pillow. “They can call in someone else. I have enough vacation hours accumulated.” He tosses his phone off the bed without looking and Katsuki is alarmed for a moment until he hears the thing land with a cushioned, muffled thump. Todoroki’s habit of leaving discarded clothing lying around in small piles is convenient for exactly this one instance and nothing else.
Todoroki so rarely curses or does purposely stupid shit like throw his work phone around. It startles Katsuki into a bark of laughter that dissolves into slightly manic chuckles. They sound a little too broken, too relieved to Katsuki’s ears, if the way Todoroki shifts closer and carefully winds his arms around him says anything.
The laughter dies down eventually and leaves a pang in his chest that he’s unsure how to name. He’s a cauldron of broiling things today, a general mess. Some of it has settled now, but not all of it.
Todoroki has his head nuzzled close beside Katsuki’s. Now he ducks it into Katsuki’s shoulder.
“I asked for the entire weekend off actually,” he tells him, his words already slowing down, slurring too much even for being muffled into Katsuki’s shirt. “We can do something tomorrow if you’d like.” Like what other couples do on the weekends, he means. “Mm, or we can just stay in.”
“Oi, you don’t even know whether I’ve got duty tomorrow,” Katsuki says, despite the burn in his chest.
“But you don’t,” Todoroki responds. “You’ve had Saturdays off for… a month? Since the quarter started. Unless… unless your schedule’s changed?”
Some tense coil in Katsuki’s chest relaxes, one he hadn’t even known he had. The next breath he takes is easier. But the one after that is a little harder, a little rougher on his throat. He curls a little tighter on himself, can’t help the instinct.
“Are you okay?” Todoroki whispers into his neck. Katsuki can feel the brush of eyelashes on the skin there.
It takes a couple more breaths before Katsuki can unstick his tongue from his mouth enough to say anything.
“Don’t you apologize again. I swear I’ll whack you.” Accusingly, defensively.
“I wasn’t going to. I promise.” Softly, reassuringly.
In an angry surge of movement, Katsuki breaks out of Todoroki’s hold and sits up. He reaches overhead to turn the light off completely, dousing the room in darkness, and flops back down, making himself comfortable on his side again, facing away from the center as usual. Todoroki resettles and moves close enough to align himself at Katsuki’s back, not touching this time. But still close enough that Katsuki can feel the heat radiating from his body.
“I love you,” Todoroki says, without preamble.
It hurts. This phrase that has never fallen from Katsuki’s mouth, but that he’s heard in Todoroki’s voice so many times before while Katsuki could do nothing but accept, bewildered.
“I know,” Katsuki chokes out like his life depends on it, for lack of anything better to offer, and that hurts, too.
There’s the warm brush of a hand on his back, then it retreats to give him peace. Finally.
Nothing else is said after that and Katsuki is grateful for it. Their breaths slow and the house sleeps.
But Katsuki stays defiantly awake and measures his inhales and exhales until he can be sure Todoroki won’t be woken up by any sudden movements. He waits until he’s alone in his consciousness.
Todoroki had gotten his schedule right: Katsuki doesn’t have duty tomorrow, but that means they’ll wake up together, they’ll have breakfast together, they’ll have the rest of the day together. Today is over, but he can’t be sure it won’t bleed over into tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. And after the weekend, there’s still the next week, turning into next month, then the rest of the year and beyond.
There’s such a long stretch of time before them to weather through.
He can’t be sure this bed, cheap as it was for the kind of insubstantial lifestyle they lead, will create some permanence or some incentive, enough to last them for—how long? How long until the next time they fight and it isn’t their usual verbal jousting, nor their backwards brand of affection, nor some fucked-up overture to angry sex—but some ugly, pitiful thing crawling out of Katsuki’s chest to land in Todoroki’s lap?
Here is why Katsuki can’t say the words back. That thing from Katsuki’s chest—there’s no way it can be called that.
The first time Todoroki had said it to him, a year and a half into this thing, had been maybe a couple months after they finally stopped denying that this was a relationship. Katsuki’s first reaction had been rage. When it’d become apparent that Katsuki had no intention of responding, they’d gotten into a fight about it, maybe several fights. They’re more aware now of the thorns stuck in their sides, drawing pinpricks of blood, tiny cuts that add up in little hurts to form great patches that ache and ache, but what good does knowing about them do when Katsuki hasn’t figured out how to make them go away?
He’s tired—of thinking, of feeling, of hurting, of cycling these same tracks by rote. That chasm yawns and he forgets to blink sometimes, catches himself considering the fall.
But Todoroki loves him. He loves him, he loves him, and that’s some kind of miracle really, with the amount of shit they’ve waded through to get here. Enough of one that Katsuki mouths the words back sometimes, tries them on for size, and thinks that maybe whatever he’s feeling can be called the same thing. Maybe one day, it’ll feel right to him to call it by name.
The backs of his eyes burn in the dark.
When he closes them finally, it’s a relief.