Chapter Text
Their mission had been long and grueling. the kind of thing they hadn’t been assigned to previously because Mikaro had to take care of his little brother.
It had been rough, at first. Mikaro ditched them after a week because Katsuki had been attacked by a villain and needed support, but Katsuki got back on his feet quickly, and Mikaro was able to return after one raid in his absence. He had missed his brother especially after he was accepted into UA, and would have gone home after the USJ incident if it weren’t for Katsuki’s insistence that he was fine.
The worst had been Katsuki’s kidnapping. It happened while Mikaro and his team were on a long-term hunt-and-destroy kind of mission, and he hadn’t been able to see the pause in Katsuki’s messages, or the multiple calls for comfort and assurance that he had missed in the few days between the kidnapping and Katsuki doing… something… that got him three days of house arrest in the dorms. The second Mikaro was able to check his phone, he’d called Katsuki. Incident report be damned, he was experiencing a near mental breakdown over the sheer number of calls he’d missed.
He almost thought Katsuki had died.
They were now about a week out from their flight home. Most of the reason they hadn’t already left was lingering reports of a look-alike to one of the individuals from their most recent facility raid. Nothing too serious.
Mikaro had noticed Katsuki hadn’t sent any messages yesterday, or the day before that, and was getting nervous. He knew Katsuki could just be injured - possible only minorly - or be on his own mission, but he was still worried. The last he had heard wasn’t very good, and there was no mention of any kind of mission or trip.
Still, Katsuki had asked many times now for Mikaro to “stop hovering”, even if he hadn’t been truly angry. So Mikaro decided he would give it another day before checking the national news stations in Japan.
In the meantime, he decided to continue cleaning his and his friend’s gear. He had started the process after their last mission, as their jackets and weapons had been drenched in enough blood to be dripping onto the hotel room floor. Plus, maintenance was calming in the way many mindless tasks are, even if the only thing that could truly calm him down was assurance that Katsuki was okay.
Night fell, and Arju brought food from a place nearby. As they ate, Mikaro began to worry again.
“Dude?”
“…yeah?” Mikaro responded to Mikin’s concern.
“Do you want us to check the news?”
“…yeah.”
“I’ll check after we finish eating.”
They didn’t let him watch. It made sense, given his reaction to Katsuki being kidnapped. He restrained himself from eavesdropping by returning to gear maintenance.
A while later, Aki came by to give him the news.
“Hey.”
“Hey. What happened?”
“You’ll see.”
Mikaro responded to that with a questioning look.
“Gimme your phone.”
Already anxious just from the cryptic answer, Mikaro asked why.
“Dude. You’ll see. We do not need you crashing out now.”
Mikaro passed his phone to Aki from its place on the counter, and Aki closed the door.
He couldn’t quite hear what Mikin was saying on the phone, but given the hushed tone and unusually fast pace of talking, even for Mikin, he assumed it was bad news. An extension for their mission, or something along those lines. As such, he was very surprised when, after two days of preparing to leave a week later, his friends told him they were headed home now, actually.
He was even more surprised when they went to the military air strip, rather than the civilian airport they had used for their arrival. He became concerned when they were escorted to a long-range jet already on the runway, preparing to taxi. He didn’t know exact figures for any plane’s flight distance, but Egypt was a damn long distance from Japan, and long-range military jets are not typically used by heroes returning home. He was fully expecting the worst when they boarded the plane. He was not expecting Aki to simply pull up a recording and hand back his phone. That meant he didn’t have the words to say what had happened. Or he was scared of Mikaro’s potential reaction. Either way, that was bad.
And so he gave the recording of the newscast from the day after Katsuki’s last message his full attention.
Mikaro soon found out why his friends had chosen to show him the recording. He had no words to describe the fight.
He most definitely did not have words to describe the way it ended.
His little brother.
The boy he had raised.
The little one he had trained.
The explosive little bastard he had taught everything he knew.
Dead.
Torn apart.
On the ground.
Dead.
His heart stopped. He didn’t know if that was literal or figurative. Pain and sadness and utter despair filled his chest and seeped through his bones. He felt like he had died, right alongside Katsuki. There. On the ground. Five days ago.
The broadcast focused on something else. The rest of the fight, maybe. Mikaro wasn’t paying attention. Then:
Katsuki.
From absolutely nowhere.
Blasting out of the sky.
Rejoining the fight.
Like the stubborn brat he is.
That feeling of death didn’t leave Mikaro, not completely. Not yet. Not until he had seen his little brother alive and okay with his own eyes. But he did celebrate when Katsuki won. He could celebrate more when he knew his little brother was okay. He didn’t think Katsuki had fallen over on purpose while trying to do his victory pose.
And he may not be particularly smart, emotionally or otherwise, but he knew dying was not something easily brushed aside. Nor were the physical injuries that had caused it.
Once the plane landed, Mikaro and his friends took the taxi waiting for them to the International Hero Response Office, signed their names to mark their mission complete, handed in the summary report, and left as quickly as they could. Mikaro immediately called for a taxi to Katsuki’s hospital. Arju made him take off his jacket before he got in - which, to be fair, was full of weapons that probably would have terrified any civilian - and hailed a taxi to their shared apartment, with the promise that they would come and join him after they rested.