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They move in together in September, when the leaves are still green but the summer heat is beginning to wither away into a feeble chill. He likes this time of year best: the clothes, the colors, the red scarf that Katsuki digs out the second he feels the reaching tendrils of winter. He doesn’t care much for the cold, he never has. Still, Izuku loves the fall, loves the way that he starts to think in shades of yellow, orange, and red.
Their new apartment is on the second floor, and he can see a small corner of the park from their bedroom window. They only have one set of sheets between the two of them and a thick duvet from Izuku’s old apartment.
His mother texts him frequently, typically asking questions about the apartment and Kachaan. He mentions once that Katsuki’s been working extra late and his mom calls to say that maybe it’s time to start dating, get back out there. You shouldn’t be alone. He answers her text from the circle of Katsuki’s arms, the other man breathing deeply into the nape of his neck. Maybe, he tells her.
“There’s a nice girl who moved next door, Izuku. I think you would really like her.” His mother says on the phone the next time she calls him. He hums in response; he considers that safer than telling her the truth. The truth is that, to his mother, any girl is a nice girl as long as she’s not a nice boy.
When he was sixteen he had told his mom that he liked boys in the same way that he liked girls. He was prepared for shouting and crying, he was even prepared for disgust, but all he got was a carefully blank stare.
“Are you sure this isn’t just you trying to tell me that you’re gay?”
No, he had wanted to say, no, I’m not gay and I’m not confused, but his vision had started to quiver, and his fingernails drew blood on the palms of his hands as he pressed his fists into the mattress.
“No, I-“ He began, “No, I’ve felt like this for a long time.”
She looked at him like he was the punchline to an unsaid joke, like she knew better, “If you’re gay, then you’re gay, Izuku.”
And he wasn’t. He wasn’t just gay. Earth took another ten turns around the sun and that did not change.
College was kind to him. He made friends in the city that he still kept in touch with and he learned more than just what was taught in class. College taught him how to grocery shop for himself and how to make doctor's appointments.
College gave him acceptance and kinship, and a freedom of expression that he didn’t even know he was missing. College gave him liberation. College gave him Bakugou Katsuki, standing idly by the gas station coffee machine or propped up against a bookshelf in the library.
Contrary to his mother’s beliefs, Izuku really had dated quite a lot in his first two years of university. There was a whole slew of very casual dates with men and women alike, from all different places and all different walks of life. Most of them were nice, some of them were terrible, and very few of them stuck around very long. He had always been a little too him for anybody’s liking, a little too “Wait-“, and not enough “Let’s go.”
But Katsuki was different. He was all corners and angles and steel walls, but the thing about walls is that they are necessary for a proper foundation. He was the weight on the other side of the scale and the leftwards tilt to Izuku’s right. He was the balance and the validation that Izuku had been missing. Bakugou Katsuki, with his warm calloused palms and his tendency to curse in front of children, thawed something that Izuku didn’t realize was frozen.
“That old bat in 204 gave me the crazy eyes again. Don’t be surprised if I fall down a flight of stairs or something.”
Izuku huffed and rolled his eyes, “I think that’s just her face, she’s perfectly nice, you drama queen.”
Katsuki pointed a spatula at him threateningly, coming across less than menacing in the yellow apron that Denki had gotten them as a joke last Christmas, “That’s because she likes you.”
Izuku gave him a cheeky grin and leaned back against the counter, “Everybody likes me.”
“I don’t like you.” Despite his words, Katsuki leaned forwards and brushed their lips together, sliding his free hand around Izuku’s waist, his rough palms catching on the soft material of his T-shirt.
Katsuki, for someone with such a rough exterior, was surprisingly reliant on soft gestures of physical affection and much less opposed to PDA than Izuku would have ever thought. Then again, he wasn’t exactly incredible with words, and he was much less apt to profess his undying love out loud. He communicated his affections with intertwined fingers on the train, a kiss to the brow, a protective arm around his waist while they stood in line at the grocery store.
Izuku didn’t really need passionate confessions and sappy words of affirmation because Katsuki traveled an extra 20 minutes every few weeks to get Izuku’s favorite bottle of wine and he never forgot about date night. Life, as he was learning, was full of simple intimacies.
Katsuki Bakugou was a man of few words, but many, many gestures.
When Izuku was 7, he only knew his father as a placeholder. He wasn’t physically present, but he was there in the pictures and the money he would send overseas every month. He was present in the wobbly gleam of his mother’s eyes and the addresses on those thick, yellow envelopes.
“Your fathers got a very hard job, baby. He’s sorry he couldn’t make it.” Izuku’s mom looked sad, the kind of sad that sunk down deep under your skin and took root in your spine. She was the kind of sad that made it hard to get up in the morning and hard to make dinner at night. Izuku never wanted her to be sad.
So he tried not to cry when his father didn’t show up on his birthday to visit them as he had promised. Because his mom was sad, and that was hard enough.
But for a mere second he wondered, if his father was so sorry, why couldn’t he say it himself.
Hisashi Midoriya missed four more birthdays before he finally came back home. Izuku’s mother cleaned the house three different times and rearranged the furniture. She smiled in a way that made Izuku’s chest feel tighter than usual.
His father was more normal looking in real life than he was in Izuku’s imagination, but by the look on his mother’s face, his dad might as well have been a superhero in their kitchen. This made Izuku happy to see him. Even when his father insisted on taking his food to the living room to eat it alone. Even when his new job in the city demanded more and more of his time. Even when Hasashi Midoriya spent about as much time with his son as he did when he was overseas. Because his mom thought his dad was a superhero, and that was good enough for him.
Izuku was now 16, and his father wasn’t a mean man. He wasn’t a drunk and he didn’t hit things. He didn’t yell very often and he still made sure they had a roof over their heads, but that was about it. Izuku’s father wasn’t a bad man, no, but that didn’t mean he was a good father.
He supposed that was just the way some people were. His father wasn’t the nurturing type and if he had to guess he would say that Hasashi Midoriya had never really aimed to be a family man. Izuku couldn’t blame him for this, he figured that this was just the way it was. He was grateful to have a place to sleep and warm meals after school, and maybe that was all his relationship with his father was destined for: the essentials and the bare minimum.
“How are your grades?” Short, necessary, to the point.
Izuku smiled tightly, “Good. I’m struggling in history… a little bit.”
His father looked up, “As long as you’re passing.”
Izuku nodded. He was right. It was fine as long as he was passing but Izuku was never the type to be okay with just passing. Izuku wanted to be exceptional, despite himself. His mother often worried about his well-being like this. She thought that perhaps he put too much pressure on himself.
“He’s too young to be so stressed.” She had voiced to his father one night.
“Izuku’s a normal boy. He’ll be fine.”
Izuku, from his place hidden in the shadow of the staircase, wasn’t sure why that hurt to hear.
Izuku was 18, and his father was exceptionally late to his graduation ceremony. His mother was there on time, but she was so frazzled waiting for his father that Izuku was sure that she had forgotten to take pictures. Izuku smiled regardless. Izuku was a normal boy with a normal ceremony. He was not at the top of his class. Franky, he would have shown up late too.
Izuku was 19, and he met an enigma of a man with a loud mouth and a sharp tongue.
Bakugou Katsuki tripped him while he walked past and poked fun at his clothes, but he casually remembered Izuku’s class schedule and he religiously showed up ten minutes early.
He looked at Izuku like he was the single most frustrating thing on the planet, like an itch he couldn’t scratch or a puzzle with no edge pieces.
Katsuki was his best friend. Katsuki liked to cook and he always made Izuku his taste-tester. Katsuki put extra dryer sheets in with his clothes because he liked the smell. Katsuki walked Izuku home when they studied late and swore up and down that it was just because he liked the exercise. Katsuki begrudgingly carried tissues in his pocket because Izuku always cried at the movies.
“Jesus fuck, Deku. You wrote this?”
Izuku was studying literature in college, even though his parents had said that science majors made more money. He wrung his hands together and eyed the laptop screen in Katsuki’s lap. It had seemed like a good idea to ask him to proofread his latest creative writing assignment but now it just felt like disastrously poor judgment. The prompt had been “intimacy”. Nothing more and nothing less, and it was the most difficult assignment he ever had.
“Yeah,” He responded, and his voice didn’t break but he felt like it was going to.
There was an expression on his face that Izuku couldn’t quite piece together at the time.
Katsuki’s eyes narrowed to slits, “This is fucking fantastic, why do you look like I’m about to shoot your puppy.”
Hysterical laughter almost bubbled out of his mouth, but he tamped it down and swallowed hard. He felt his eyes start to burn, “Thank you.”
“You’ve got a weird outlook on love, Deku. Here I was thinking you were a romantic.”
“I think it’s just different for everyone.” Izuku was nervous now, picking anxiously at the hem of his T-shirt and shrugging in fake nonchalance, “Doesn’t mean I feel any less.” He wanted to say that the paper wasn’t about love, but what was intimacy born from if not love?
Katsuki was standing now, looking at him with yet another unreadable expression, “What do you know about love?” It wasn’t accusatory or combative. Just a question. An honest one. The hardest kind. Izuku knew the answer, and so did Katsuki.
“I’m learning.” He breathed.
Closer. Closer. The ticking of the clock on the wall and the noise of the street faded into the background and all Izuku could hear was the beating of his own heart, “From who?” Katsuki asked, chest to chest, nearly nose to nose, and eye to eye.
Izuku was 19 when he met a man who didn’t let him down for a change.
“You.”