Chapter Text
Katsuki drove with the side of his wrist pressed against the steering wheel hard enough to blanch the skin pale around his scars. Sodium orange streetlight leaked across the bonnet in intermittent flashes, revealing a city that looked less rebuilt and more taxidermied, propped upright by money and denial.
The rain had started thirty minutes ago as a granular mist and matured into something heavier since then, something glandular and cold. Thick enough that every passing vehicle dragged wakes through the flooded roads, the tyres producing a persistent hiss.
His chest hurt again.
A submerged pain lodged beneath his sternum where his body had once ceased being reliable, where organs had ruptured and blood had occupied spaces blood was never intended to occupy.
“Fucking disgusting,” he muttered to nobody.
Outside the windscreen, illuminated towers climbed into the low cloud cover with all the warmth of intravenous equipment, blinking aircraft lights and glass facades and gigantic digital advertisements. Entire neighbourhoods with rebuilt train stations and untouched memorial plaques standing side by side like someone had grafted a new jaw onto a corpse without bothering to clean the blood from it first.
Every hero from their generation carried it somewhere obvious if you watched closely enough; in the slight delay before entering crowded spaces, in the way conversations occasionally lost momentum when a distant bang sounded too authentic, in the compulsive headcounts during meetings. Everyone unconsciously verifying who had returned alive from missions despite the war ending years ago. Layer after layer of calcified instinct accumulating around the nervous system until the person underneath became difficult to locate.
Katsuki suspected there wasn’t much underneath anymore.
A motorcycle screamed past his car and for an instant his body surged hot with combat reflex before cognition caught up, adrenaline sluicing through him with such chemical violence his fingertips sparked reflexively against the steering wheel. Tiny explosions crackled against leather, and immediately the inside of the vehicle filled with the smell of smoke and nitroglycerin sweat and burnt fabric. A smell so deeply married to his adolescence that it bypassed memory altogether and lodged directly in the spinal cord.
He exhaled slowly through his teeth.
Just traffic.
Just another fucking night.
Civilian language didn’t adequately cover it. People loved discussing PTSD in abstract therapeutic vocabulary because abstraction deodorised it, turned it into something educational and tragic instead of what it actually was. Which was your own nervous system behaving like a feral animal trapped inside your ribcage, clawing itself bloody against every stimulus while you stood in supermarkets dissociating because somebody dropped a glass bottle three aisles over.
The rejection shouldn’t have mattered this much.
Katsuki had accepted years ago that whatever existed between himself and Izuku had metastasised far beyond ordinary friendship in his head. But the sheer disproportion of it, the embarrassing enormity of the wound despite both of them being adults now, licensed heroes with media training – God.
He’d asked him to join his agency. And Izuku – stupid fucking Izuku with those impossible green eyes that still retained softness despite everything they had witnessed – had looked genuinely apologetic when he refused. Rubbing the back of his neck while explaining that he wanted to remain independent a little longer, that he did not want to be tied down yet.
Tied down.
The wipers moved back and forth with hypnotic regularity, smearing neon into long wet incisions across the glass, and Katsuki found himself staring too long at pedestrians beneath umbrellas.
Obsession was too flimsy a word for it.
Obsession sounded tidy, the sort of thing discussed in documentaries about stalkers while sombre piano music played underneath. This felt older. Like hunger evolving sentience. His therapist once called it ‘trauma-linked emotional dependency’ and Katsuki spent the remainder of the session imagining in graphic detail what her skull would sound like against the wall behind her diploma frame. He never went back.
His phone vibrated in the cupholder.
Kirishima.
Katsuki ignored it.
A second notification arrived immediately after.
‘Is Midoriya okay?’
Then another.
‘You both seem off lately.’
Katsuki snorted quietly through his nose. Lately. As if there had been a specific point where weirdness began instead of a gradual neurological landslide occurring over several years. The truth was that he no longer trusted himself around Izuku for extended periods of time, which would have been easier to stomach if the distrust originated from anger. Anger Katsuki understood intimately, but this was something infinitely more humiliating; a kind of catastrophic tenderness so intense it occasionally circled back around into violence.
Watching Izuku laugh with Uraraka during agency meetings made Katsuki feel as though somebody had reached into his thoracic cavity and begun squeezing organs experimentally just to observe what failed first. Watching her touch him was worse. A hand on his arm. Fingers brushing his shoulder. Tiny, harmless gestures. And immediately something inside Katsuki would rear upright, all instinct and possession and ugly starving emotion.
Mine.
He hated himself for it with such intensity it became almost erotic. He had done something awful. Not impulsive awful, not the ordinary destructive stupidity people expected from him, but something patient and frighteningly easy once he committed to it fully. The simplicity of that terrified him far more than the act itself.
The road narrowed gradually until it ceased resembling infrastructure and became instead a long infected seam cut through the countryside. Cracked asphalt dissolving beneath layers of moss and rain rot while skeletal branches knitted together overhead densely enough to intercept most of the moonlight.
Katsuki drove deeper into the dark with the headlights carving two jaundiced tunnels through the trees, illuminating trunks silvered by rain and undergrowth. Everything glistening with that peculiar organic shine wet forests possessed at night. He killed the engine eventually beside a rusted guardrail half consumed by ivy. The dashboard clock glowed pale green against his knuckles.
11:43 PM.
His jaw hurt. Everything hurt lately. There was a pressure building beneath his skin that no amount of sleep or alcohol or training managed to relieve. He remembered reading somewhere that human beings could acclimate to almost any repeated stimulus eventually, even pain.
Bullshit.
His phone buzzed again, and this time he switched it off entirely. Then he laughed under his breath, because that was almost funny, wasn’t it? A grown man sitting alone in a parked car in the middle of nowhere, switching off his phone like a teenager avoiding responsibility while another grown man lay bound in the boot behind him?
“Fucking unreal,” he muttered.
The words fogged briefly against the cold interior air. For several seconds he considered driving back. A bureaucratic objection raised too late into catastrophe to matter. He could still undo this, technically. He could untie him, apologise, endure the horror on Izuku’s face, endure prison if necessary, endure the destruction of whatever thing still existed between them.
Except Katsuki already knew, with the hideous certainty reserved for actual fucking lunatics, that the moment he saw Izuku walk away from him again something inside his skull would split permanently.
He opened the car door.
Cold air flooded in immediately, carrying petrichor and wet bark and decomposing leaves, the smell rich enough to taste at the back of his throat. Katsuki stepped out onto gravel softened by rain while the forest pressed close around the roadside in damp black walls. He shut the door harder than necessary, and the sound cracked through the woods with abruptness before being swallowed whole by distance.
For a moment he simply stood there with rain collecting in the pale strands of his hair, shoulders rigid beneath his dark jacket, staring at the rear of the vehicle. Then he walked towards the boot. Each step felt strangely detached from consequence, his body moving with muscle memory while his brain tried unsuccessfully to moralise the situation into coherence.
Kidnapping.
Abduction.
This was different.
It had to be.
Didn’t it?
Katsuki stopped at the back of the car and pressed the heel of his hand briefly against his eyes hard enough to produce bursts of colour behind his eyelids.
“You just need him to fucking listen,” he said quietly to himself.
The rain answered by intensifying.
He opened the boot.
Izuku lay curled awkwardly on his side inside the cramped darkness, wrists bound in front of him with thick restraints Katsuki had checked six separate times before the drive. A black cloth gag disappeared between his teeth while rain spattered curls clung damply across his forehead and temples.
His eyes were open. Wide awake and staring directly at Katsuki with an expression so violently betrayed that for a second Katsuki genuinely thought he might vomit. Confusion. Hurt. Disbelief. The sick bewilderment of somebody looking at a person they trusted and finding a stranger wearing their face. Izuku made a muffled sound against the gag, immediate and strained, trying to sit up inside the confined space before his shoulder struck the side of the boot with a dull impact.
“Careful, idiot.”
The words emerged automatically, almost gentle. That made everything infinitely more grotesque. Izuku stared at him, and Katsuki stared back. God, he looked exhausted. There were faint shadows beneath his eyes even now, even after all these years, the permanent residue of someone who had spent too much of his life trying to save things with his bare hands. Katsuki suddenly became overwhelmed by the absurdly intimate familiarity of him – the freckles, the scars, the way his brows drew together when confused – all details Katsuki had memorised so thoroughly.
“I know,” Katsuki said after a long silence, voice low beneath the rain. “I know this is fucked.”
Izuku’s breathing had quickened visibly now, chest rising hard against the restraints, and Katsuki noticed with a detached horror that even terrified, even furious, Izuku still looked at him with a little trust. That nearly ruined him on the spot. Katsuki dragged a hand down his face slowly, and Izuku made another muffled noise, sharper this time.
“I know,” Katsuki snapped immediately. “I know.”
The forest seemed to lean closer around them. Water dripped steadily from the edge of the boot onto the gravel below. Katsuki looked away briefly into the trees – maintaining eye contact too long became unbearable under that expression, under the visible incomprehension written across Izuku’s face.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said finally, quieter now. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d know.”
True.
Hideously true.
And they both knew it.
Katsuki’s chest tightened violently. He remembered grabbing Izuku’s hand during the war. And he remembered thinking, with absolute animal certainty, that nobody would ever love him more than this. Then afterwards came the unbearable drift away from each other, adulthood and agencies and schedules and Uraraka and distance and polite fucking smiles.
“I just need you to understand,” he said, almost to himself now. “You keep acting like this is normal. Like we can go back to normal after everything.”
Izuku’s eyes did not leave his face. Standing there over the open boot with Izuku bound inside it, looking at the only person he had ever loved with enough intensity to become dangerous, Katsuki realised that some part of him still believed he could fix this if he explained himself correctly enough. Which was probably the most insane thing about him.