Chapter Text
ZERO
Katsuki Bakugou
There is a line between a man’s angles and a woman’s curves. His name is Akio Todoroki.
“Katsuki?”
His voice is smooth. It glides over my skin, leaving slick over the shape of my lips from where his words kiss mine. “Yes?” I sound so different from him, it’s a wonder how we’re of the same species– no, that’s not right. We are not of the same species. He’s porcelain dusted pink and red, studded with rainclouds for eyes, and cursed with a curtain of blood down his snowy back. I’m… me. Rough knuckled and crooked nosed, broad shouldered with a body that I sculpted for myself, loud mouthed in a way my mother pretends not to approve of. I’m so painfully me and he’s—
A cold hand slides down my bare chest, rattling the silver chain on it. “You’re zoning out,” he tells me, as if it’s going to make it any easier to focus on one thing when his entirety is so beyond anything this world could possibly conjure. Yet, here he is. In the flesh.
“Mm.” That’s all I can give him before chasing his mouth again. Again, and again, and again, until he’s mine and I’m his and we can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
Akio lets out a small sound of surprise and I swallow it down.
His waist is soft in my hands, his flesh tender where I sink my thumbs into his sides.
Three years ago, I met a man who looked like sin and spoke like God. Now, he’s here– just a man, but so much more, wrapped up in my arms, throned on my lap, on our worn couch with its stupid brown leather and the small nick in the back that we never bothered patching up. It sits there like a testament to how precious this moment is. How precious every fucking moment is, every time Akio looks at me and smiles, every time I leave the house and come back to see him asleep on the sofa or making tea or scrubbing his hands free of clay dust so he can hug me without feeling like a ‘neanderthal’. Because the alternative is–
“Katsuki–” Akio’s mouth is a contrast to the rest of him– warm and supplicant– but it has its moments of defiance too. Like right now, when his teeth are clashing against mine as he pulls back and I don’t let him. “Katsuki, stop– what is wrong with you? You keep zoning out, it’s fucking annoying.”
Is it?
I lean back against the couch, letting some of the air conditioned air pass between us and carry away the heat that had been so completely consuming just moments ago. God, he looks wrecked. And angry. He looks wrecked and angry.
His kiss-swollen lips are curved in obvious disapproval, and his hands keep twisting the hem of my sweatpants. He’s not trying to take them off, I realise once his shoulders drop just enough that I notice they were up against his ears.
I love him. He scares me.
“Are you,” Akio forces the hesitation down his slender throat and I track the swell of his Adam’s apple, “are you thinking about yesterday?”
Yesterday.
Arguably one of the worst days of my life, and I’m a damn pro hero.
“No.” I lie, it’s all I do some days. Days when my boyfriend can’t get out of bed to shower, and days when I hear the gut-wrenching ping of Akio’s emergency caller tone in my earpiece at work, and days when he’s lacing his fingers through mine with a softness that borders on clinical. “It’s okay now. You’re okay.”
The lamplight casts steady shadows over the sharp slope of his nose. Akio narrows those pretty eyes and tilts his head down. The motion makes his pin-straight red hair shift over his narrow shoulder.
“Are you sure?” He asks.
“Yeah,” I murmur. Anything louder feels sacrilegious.
“Katsuki, I–”
“Akio. Stop talking.”
His brows push together to create the telling crease between them. He’s still not looking at me. “You should process–”
“No,” I interrupt. “Just shut up and kiss me, yeah?”
He doesn’t seem convinced. Akio rarely shows mercy; it’s one of the traits I love about him, but right now, after having stared into the glassiness of my eyes and the flush on my cheeks, he’s decided to go easy on me.
The living room shrinks back down to the golden glow on his skin as he sucks in a sharp breath and pokes at the inside of his cheek with his tongue. And then his hands, slender and slightly calloused from years of working with clay and marble and anything with a frequency that his quirk can resonate with to shape it into brilliant artwork, come up to my face, and I feel the pads of his fingertips lodge themselves behind my ear and on my cheekbones.
“Ask nicely,” he whispers. Fucking hell.
“Please.”
“Please, what?
“Akio—“ He’s going to make me lose my mind. “Please, fucking kiss me.”
And he does. He does, he does, he does. He kisses me like he’s starving, like I’m the last trace of sustenance for a man on death row, like he’ll spiral out of sanity again if he pulls back. He kisses me until the concept of yesterday is too far to conjure, until I’m dragging him closer on my lap, so we can keep pretending that everything is okay.
It is. It has to be.