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Katsuki doesn’t think twice when he sees the tail end of Deku, in hot pursuit of the jewelry thief, disappear down an alleyway and vault up to the roof of the train station. Never one to be outdone, and reluctant to let Deku out of his sight after what happened during their last run in with the League, Katsuki follows.
He lands with a clank on the tin roof. It’s cold and icy, as to be expected for the end of December, but the grip of Katsuki’s combat boots hold tight. At first he was excited to intern with Mirko, but that was before he realized she was insane. Now, he and Deku are playing mall cop over the holidays, to “build resolve” or some shit because “criminals don’t take vacation.” Not that Katsuki cares—the only people who give a shit about Christmas are mushy couples who’ve been infected by rom-coms from overseas—but it would be nice to be able to move out of the dorms so he could at least spend the New Years holidays at home. Being stuck alone with Deku at the dorms doesn’t help, either; they’ve defaulted to making and eating dinner together for a lack of, well... anyone else, and the entire thing is weird as shit. Katsuki wanted Deku to intern at the same agency so he could keep an eye on the self-sacrificial fucker, not so they could hang out and forget what it was like to have ever not been friends.
Not far ahead, Katsuki can see the narrowing distance between Deku and the perp. So far, Katsuki has the thief pegged as someone with a minor speed or strength enhancement, judging by how she’s managed to stay ahead for this long, and how quickly she managed to clear 10 feet and lead them all up to the roof to begin with.
But then Katsuki sees a shadow of something leave that woman, stretching towards Deku, and his blood runs cold. The blasts from his hands bring him there in an instant to take the hit.
Katsuki’s mid tumble with the thief when he realizes, whatever he saw extending from the necklace-snatchers hands wasn’t some quirk activation spike, or even razors—the fucker, apparently, could throw chains. More or less completely harmless, even if they had managed to restrain Katsuki’s hands for the time being. He also realizes that he didn’t power his blast right, he didn’t take into account the ice—now he and the thief were sailing over the side of the fucking roof, and Katsuki, even with his lightning fast reflexes, couldn’t do a damn thing to slow the descent.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Kacchan gripes, digging his fingers into the meat of his thigh, the thigh connected to the leg that is currently broken. Really, it’s kind of gnarly to look at, with the shin bone all fucked up. “This is what you go through every time you break a shitty bone?”
“Well, not quite,” Izuku says, trying to push down his own anxiety, the swell of protectiveness and violence he feels at the sight of Kacchan in so much pain. “I pretty much shatter my bones, though since I’ve gotten stronger they’ve become cleaner breaks. Yours looks like—” At the murderous look Kacchan shoots his way, Izuku quickly switches tracks. “Anyways, finger bones aren’t quite that bad.”
“Jesus christ,” Kacchan says again.
When Kacchan landed—cushioning the fall of the woman they’d both been chasing—he’d landed wrong. The woman’s quirk, Chain Strike, used chains to extend her lips, but these chains could not be detached; this meant that the restraints that left Kacchan unable to walk also kept the thief there with him. Slapping a pair of cuffs on her was almost an afterthought, with how preoccupied Izuku was with Kacchan’s leg.
At first, Kacchan tried to get up on his own, but when he moved to stand, his left side couldn’t support the weight. At first, Kacchan said there wasn’t anything to worry about—his leg felt ‘tingly’, like he’d twisted something—but now that the adrenaline was wearing off, the telltale bone-deep ache of a fracture made itself known.
Between the ten foot drop and the angle Kacchan hit the ground, Izuku wanted to tear his own hair out for not being quick enough, for not catching them. More than that, Kacchan had leapt between him and a villain yet again.
“Don’t worry, Kacchan,” Izuku says. “Mirko’s probably done with the other one by now. I pinged her, so they’re gonna be by soon, and someone’s going to set your leg any minute now.”
“Mirko?” The thief, sat cross legged with her hands cuffed behind her back, yelps. “Shit, I didn’t know you guys were with her.”
Izuku’s head snaps in her direction, the softness on his face changing in an instant to one full of threat. “I wasn’t talking to you,” Izuku says, voice suddenly made of ice and an octave deeper.
The thief, wisely, decides to shut the fuck up.
“Fuck,” Kacchan breathes. “I need a fucking distraction.”
“Uhh—” all at once, Izuku’s brain is goo. Distraction? What in the world could they talk about that would distract Kacchan from the pain of a broken limb? And why is the only thing Izuku can think about Kacchan’s lips? That’s bad and not good. No matter how distracting a surprise-kiss would be, Izuku really needs to get his head out of the gutter.
Normally when Izuku shatters his bones, he just breathes through it. Normally, there’s enough adrenaline to keep it bearable, and thoughts of OFA, of legacy, of saving, of winning at all costs, race through his mind until paramedics show up. It helps that usually the life of a child is directly at stake—Eri, Kota. The longest he’d gone without getting his broken bones set again was when the League attacked the forest training camp and took Kacchan, but Izuku’s single-minded obsession with getting back what was his numbed him through all of that physical pain. After that, it was his thumb during the first day of classes, when Aizawa hadn’t let him go to Recovery Girl until later, but Izuku had been thinking mostly of Kacchan then, too.
“Tell me what it feels like to break your shitty finger bones,” Kacchan rasps out,
“Oh, really? Uh—” Izuku’s mouth starts before the engine of his mind can catch up. “They sort of snap. But it doesn’t hurt too bad, and you still have a pretty decent range of motion for about—ten minutes, after. It’s the swelling and bruising that really hurts, but, if it swells enough, then the whole thing goes numb—”
“Ugh, stop,” Kacchan says. “You’re filling my head with fucked up shit.”
“Really?” Izuku asks, equal parts dumb and unable to believe Kacchan is that squeamish. “Like what?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, dumbass.”
“Well, you can’t be mad at me,” Izuku says. “You’re the one who asked.”
“You’re so fucking annoying, always doing stupid shit,” Kacchan says. “You know that, right?”
“Maybe.” At the very least their bickering seems to work as a decent diversion, the thrill of an argument bringing color back to Kacchan’s cheeks. “But I also didn’t overshoot my way clear across a roof.”
“Fuck you,” Kacchan spits. “It was icy.”
“And?”
“I wouldn’t have done that if you weren’t—”
“Doing my job?” Izuku smiles, soft, with a playful tilt to his head.
“Trying to do everything on your own!” Kacchan shoots back. Izuku’s smile suddenly drops, realizing that Kacchan is dead serious. “I know you’re not this fucking stupid.”
“I don’t know what you want from me, Kacchan,” Izuku says, exasperated but calm to Kacchan’s spitfire. “We practice these kinds of pursuits all the time. I wasn’t taking any unnecessary risks.”
“You did,” Kacchan insists. “Did you even know what her quirk was before you got that close?”
“You didn’t either.” Izuku represses an eyeroll. “We don’t need to know everything about a situation before involving ourselves. That’s what heroes have to do. It’s the job, Kacchan—I was doing my job.”
“That’s not what I—” Kacchan starts, indignant.
“And it isn’t the first time you’ve done something like this, either.” Izuku refuses to let his words get steamrolled over. “You keep getting in the way of me and targets. It’s been almost a year, Kacchan, and still—”
“If you keep acting like an asshole, Shigaraki will get his hands on you and—” OFA, Izuku knows, are the next words about to come out of his mouth.
Izuku pushes an insistent hand on Kacchan’s shoulder, his eyes sliding up to the thief, not a few feet away and stuck trying to pretend she can’t hear them squabble. Kacchan’s eyes track the motion and he immediately falls silent; a shadow falls across his eyes.
“Sorry,” Kacchan says, almost robotically. The word is a newer addition to his vocabulary, falling freer from his lips ever since he’d apologized for the less savory, second half of their childhood. “I wasn’t thinking. Prob’ly the pain.”
“It’s fine, Kacchan,” Izuku says. “Don’t worry about it.”
Kacchan doesn’t reply. He doesn’t ask for more distractions, or go back to verbally berating Izuku. He doesn’t even cuss out the thief, like Izuku was sure he’d do at least once by now.
Both of them go quiet after that. A few minutes later, Mirko shows up, police in tow.
“You know,” Deku says, leading Katsuki into the elevator. “This is probably one of the best times to break something. I mean, if you have to sit around and wait for your leg to heal, being between terms means you don’t have to miss any class exercises!”
Katsuki almost wished it were Mr. Aizawa stuck helping him back into the dorms—especially after today, Katsuki had had more than enough of Deku in his face, Deku questioning him, Deku arguing and pressing buttons that shouldn’t be pressed. It felt—too close, earlier. Like Deku made him snap and reveal something too close to the chest, but aside from the secret of OFA, Katsuki couldn’t think of what that ‘something’ was.
On any other day, Katsuki wouldn’t be so loathe to sling his arm over the green shithead’s shoulders and use him as a crutch—they were friends now, after all, and while Katsuki hates being reliant on people, he’s learned how to rely on his friends over the years. It still stung, like salt in an open cut or a jostle to a broken leg, that he hadn’t had much choice in the matter. The actual crutches the hospital had left him with weren’t adjusted right to his height—too short to be of any real use—and they were supposed to be temporary anyways, only meant to last until he received a healing kiss from Recovery Girl.
Now, it doesn’t look like that will be happening any time soon; he’d have to go back in later to get them properly adjusted to his height and put up with even more proximity between him and the reason he fell off the roof in the first place.
“Shut up,” Katsuki groans as the doors close behind them. “If it were during the term, Recovery Girl would be here and I wouldn’t need any of this.” Katsuki shakes the plastic bag in his hand, filled with painkillers and instructions for his cast, for emphasis.
Turns out that right after everyone leaves for the holidays is the worst time to fuck up and break a leg. Mr. Aizawa was still at the UA campus since he’d been asked to live in the dorms year-round to keep an eye on his students, but there was little he could do to help. Eri, of course, was with him, but Katsuki was not anxious to be a little girl’s test subject. He remembers when he was her age, when the power of his explosions had outpaced his control: he could hardly keep himself from blowing his room to smithereens, so why trust her not to rewind him to nothing? Aizawa had understood the judgement, and Eri was just slightly relieved to not have to deal with a strange, short-fused teenage boy.
Unfortunately, with Recovery Girl gone for the next few weeks, and healing quirks being rare and reserved for life saving procedures, Katsuki was left with no other option than to wait it out with a cast, a few painkillers, and the help of Deku. Deku being the perfect height for this kind of work was Katsuki’s only consolation in a massively shitty situation.
“Okay,” Deku says, “Then think about it this way: being between terms means that Kirishima and Kaminari won’t ask you how you broke your leg.”
“Badger me, you mean.”
“Exactly,” Deku says with an impish little smile that looks almost too right on his face.
Before Katsuki can scoff and look away, the elevator doors slide open again, and they’re back to hobbling, this time out to Katsuki’s door.
“Okay,” Katsuki says, before shaking the bag in his hands. “Take this so I can get my keycard.”
Deku ignores him completely and props him against the wall instead. He shoves the crutches into Katsuki’s free arm while he looks through Katsuki’s doctor-prescribed bag of drugs for his room card.
“Where is it?” Deku asks when he, predictably, doesn’t find it.
“Like fuck I’m telling you,” Katsuki says. “Just do what I say so I can open it.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“If I let you open it, you’re going to slam the door in my face and lock it behind you the first chance you get.”
“What?” Katsuki starts. “I wasn’t—”
“—and don’t act like that wasn’t your plan to start.”
“So?” Katsuki lets out a frustrated groan. “The fuck else would I need help for after that?”
“I mean, if you want to pass out with your costume still on, be my guest—”
“I don’t need help getting changed, Deku—”
“Have you ever worn a cast before?” Deku has the gall to roll his fucking doe eyes. “Keys.” He says—demands—with an outstretched hand..
“My hands are fucking full, dumbass,” Katsuki says, shoving the crutches back at Deku. He at least has the good grace to look embarrassed, and thank fuck for that, pushy-confident Deku was on track to make Katsuki lose it. He fishes the keycard out of his front zippered pocket and holds it out to Deku, full of sass. “Open.”
Deku sticks his tongue out, mockingly, and grabs the card from his hands—and Katsuki is reminded very violently that they’ve never had a give-and-take quite as easy as this.
Even when they were brats, attached at the hip, it never felt like he could be childish, like Deku could be childish right back; Katsuki was a leader, a god among preschoolers even before his quirk manifested, and even if Deku was a favorite, maybe even his best friend, the nerd would still burst into tears over the tiniest disagreements. And the big disagreements where neither of them would budge—disagreements about social status and who Katsuki could beat into the dirt (the correct answer: no one)—destroyed the friendship altogether.
Then Deku scoops him back up, and he’s caught between the warmth radiating from Deku and the ache spreading out from his leg to his chest. He can’t decide if he should feel lucky, but he can’t help but ask himself why they hadn’t gotten to this point sooner. If All Might never gave Deku his quirk, would they have ever repaired their relationship? Would Deku be safer? Would his hands bend better, would he wince less when he thought no one was looking?
“You okay?” Deku asks as he helps him sit on the edge of his bed. “You got all—dark, all of a sudden. Are you in pain?”
“Huh?” Katsuki startles, now taking in his surroundings. He hopes that Deku doesn’t comment on the band posters, or, worse, the All Might ones. Is it weird that Deku hadn’t really been inside of his room until today? Katsuki shakes his head. “No.”
“Okay.” Deku doesn’t look like he quite believes him. Instead of arguing, though, he makes his way to the dresser and Katsuki can see the little hamster in his brain working away, wheel spinning. “So you’ll want something with elastic, since it’s easiest to get over the cast—”
“Bottom left drawer,” Katsuki sighs.
“Unless that’s not what you normally sleep in? The cast is uncomfortable enough as is—”
“Bottom left drawer!” Katsuki groans. “Sweatpants are fine, nerd.”
“Okay!” Deku finally seems to hear him, and if he’s surprised that Katsuki owns several pairs of identical black sweats, he doesn’t say anything about it. When he turns back around, his idiot face is screwed up in determination. Just when Katsuki thinks Home-Health-Aide-Deku will make an appearance, the edges of his stutter ruin the illusion. “S-so if you start to slide out of your, er, costume pants, I’ll help you the rest of the way and then we can get—” Deku looks, dumbly, at the sweatpants in his hand, and stridently avoids eye contact. “—these on.”
Katsuki represses yet another frustrated groan and starts to unbutton his pants, willing the heat in his cheeks to go the hell away. He follows Deku’s lead and proceeds to look anywhere but at the other person in the room, but finds the dead silence is worse than anything else about the situation. “As if this is any different than the locker room,” he grumbles.
“I mean,” Deku starts, coming to stand at his side. “It kind of is.” As Katsuki manages to get the tough canvas of his pants to his knees, they start to catch around the cast. Katsuki has half a mind to rip—or burn—them clean off, which is exactly why Deku swoops in to help slide them up, over, and finally, past his ankles. “Different, I mean,” he finishes lamely.
“What,” Katsuki says, now holding out his feet so Deku can start to thread his legs into the pant legs of the sweats. If taking his pants off to an audience of Deku was embarrassing, the reverse is about a dozen times worse. “Because I’m an invalid now?”
“No,” Deku looks like he’s trying not to huff out a laugh as he helps Katsuki to stand upright on his one good leg. Vertically, it’s much easier to slip the elastic past his cast and up to his hips. “You know that’s not it.”
“I know,” Katsuki sighs, uncharacteristically defeated, and pushes himself from Deku’s side to fall back down to his bed. “Pass me a shirt and then you can go. Top left.”
Deku hums in reply before tossing a plain white tee his way. “Is it the fatigue, then?” He asks suddenly. “Fractures can be exhausting.”
“No,” Katsuki rolls his eyes. By all means, he should be ready to drop, but he has a feeling he won’t be sleeping at all tonight and he can’t even blame his leg for that. He unzips the front of his winter costume and starts to slide it from his shoulders. “I’m not tired.”
“Then was it something I said? I’m not mad at you for getting hurt, if that’s the impression I gave,” Deku says, stepping in close and taking it upon himself to sit next to Katsuki on the bed, as if he were invited. “I mean, I guess I am kind of upset—worried—that you keep doing this, but—”
“Keep doing this,” Katsuki parrots biterly, flinging the top of his winter costume in the general direction of his hamper. “I don’t keep doing anything. Maybe, instead of worrying, just be thankful it’s my leg broken and not yours.”
“Kacchan,” Deku says, insistent. “I’d never be thankful for something like that.”
“I just don’t see what you’re so pissed about,” Katsuki barrels on, tearing off his tank top and tossing it like his other clothes. Knowing Deku, upset really is code for pissed. “Next time I’ll be more careful about ‘icy conditions’—does that make you happy?”
“Kacchan,” Deku says again. “Are you telling me you don’t see the pattern? The Magnetic-skin villain? The one with a Cushion quirk?” Leave it to the nerd to remember resolved incidents and captures by the quirks involved.
“What?”
“Everytime a villain, or—or—a target, or something—gets close to retaliating, and I’m in the line of fire, you throw strategy out the window. And I get that you might be worried, but it’s been seven months—”
“Deku,” Katsuki says, voice full of warning.
“Kacchan,” Deku says, voice full of—something. “I need to know what’s going on. Because if we can’t figure this out, then—”
“What?” Katsuki asks. “Then what?”
“Then I’m not sure we’ll be good as hero partners.”
Katsuki’s skin goes cold; then the back of his throat, uncomfortable and prickly; his stomach, his chest, feel like the floor has disappeared beneath them—which was something he didn’t know could even happen.
Katsuki looks away, to the door of his room, wishing he could just get up and leave, but as soon as he turns his head, Deku’s hand, hot, lands on his bare shoulder.
“Kacchan, look at me.”
When Katsuki doesn’t, Deku’s hand skates up his neck and cups the soft part of his jaw. Deku doesn’t pull, exactly, but a gentle pressure forces Katsuki to look his way.
He’s sure that Deku can feel his pulse hammering away beneath his fingers.
“Kacchan, we need to talk about this,” Deku says. “I need you to know that I’m not going to be reckless like I was then. And if that’s not what’s bothering you, then please tell me.”
“Fine.” Katsuki, finally, sucks in a breath. He means to push Deku’s hand off of his face, but then Deku brushes his thumb across the peak of Katsuki’s cheek bone; it’s a barely-there, probably unconscious movement, but some wiring between his brain and the functioning of his arms absolutely short circuits. Instead of cussing him out, or referring, vaguely, to the night-terrors he’s been having, an entirely different set of words tumble out of his mouth instead. “Earlier, when you talked about breaking your fingers, I thought that if someone took you—” and tortured you— “that you’d hold out for days, weeks. And—” Katsuki breathes again. “And I know that I was the one who encouraged your fucking word vomit, but I hate that the thought even crossed my mind, because it could actually happen—” Shigaraki’s single-minded want of OFA never leaves the back of Katsuki’s mind. “And I don’t want that to happen because I—” And it’s more than promises to All Might, or the need to make up for all of the thoughtless, cruel shit he’s done in the past. It’s—it’s—”I can’t lose you.”
It can’t really be described. And that’s why Deku scares the shit out of him so much.
“Kacchan,” Deku breathes his name—again—and having Deku hold his face and say his name and look at him like that is too much. He doesn’t know when they’d drifted so close, but he can feel Deku’s breath against his lips and Katsuki’s feels like he’s burning, stealthy tears tracking down his face like lava. Deku does that thing again, this time with both thumbs brushing either side of his face. “Shh, don’t cry.”
“Wh—” Katsuki starts, his mind slow and confused. And he must have leaned forward, because Deku meets him halfway and fuck, Deku’s lips are soft and Katsuki thinks he’s melting. The kiss Deku presses to his lips shushes him, and lowers the volume on his brain to a quiet buzz.
When he pulls back, Katsuki feels more than a little unmoored. His eyes blink open, slow and a little lost, to Deku looking right back at him. The hands cupping his face haven’t left, either.
“I’m not going to let that happen,” Deku says, dead serious. “I know my limits, now. I know what’s at stake.” Deku’s hands do leave, now, to curl around where Katsuki has balled up Deku’s shirt in his fists. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Okay,” Katsuki says finally. “I believe you.”
“Good.” And Deku’s smile is so sweet, Katsuki thinks he’s going to develop a metabolic disorder.
Instead of yelling at him to stop looking like that, Katsuki just tugs.
“What?” Deku asks, and Katsuki can’t see the little hamster in there anymore. Absolutely no wheels are turning in his head—fucking idiot.
“Come back,” He says, leaning back and tugging at Deku’s shirt again.
Deku falls forward, elbows caging either side of Katsuki to keep from falling on him entirely. He blushes a pretty pink, and what Katsuki’s asking for—the fact that they’ve kissed, full stop—seems to catch up to him.
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that for,” Deku laughs into Katsuki’s throat before pressing more kisses onto Katsuki’s mouth. Katsuki rises to meet every one, basketball shorts smooth under his fingers as his hands find purchase on either side of Deku’s hips.
Just as Katsuki thinks, briefly, to deepen the kiss, Deku’s tongue, warm and wet, teases at his lips. And Katsuki groans—in pain.
“Oh shit,” Deku pulls away so quick Katsuki might think he was the one stung by the shift in position. “Your leg.”
“Fuck my leg,” Katsuki groans.
“Sorry, Kacchan,” Deku says, sympathetic, before hopping off. “Maybe we—put a pin in this until your leg’s better.”
“Fuck you,” Katsuki says.
“Sorry, Kacchan,” Deku says again, this time decidedly unsympathetic and hiding a grin. And then, like the shithead he is, says, with a shitty little upturn to his voice, “Maybe later?”
The pillow Katuski aims at his face later goes under his cast, to keep his leg elevated and reduce swelling.
Later that night, with Kacchan curled into his side, Izuku looks at the frost ringing the edges of Kacchan’s window. He knows Kacchan isn’t asleep, based on the relative quickness of his breaths, even though its surely past midnight. Neither of them have been able to drift off, really. For Izuku, it’s because he wants to catalogue everything about what it’s like to have Kacchan in his arms, to remember everything about the evening; for Kacchan, he’s sure it’s because of the pain.
“It does suck that this happened today, though,” Izuku says, finally. “I mean your leg. No one should have to spend Christmas Eve in the hospital, getting fitted for a cast.”
He feels Kacchan scoff against his arm. “No one gives a shit about Christmas except for couples, Deku.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s true.” At that, a smile spreads across his face, slow and syrupy sweet. He casts his eyes down to the top of Kacchan’s head, nestled against his chest. “Merry Christmas, Kacchan.”
“...Merry Christmas, dumbass.”