Chapter Text
Izuku wakes up to a familiar white ceiling and Katsuki glaring down at him with a pair of murder eyes. He gulps, wetting his dry lips and feels that his imminent demise is close at hand despite only escaping death’s grip previously. “Oh hi, Kacchan,” he says warily, pulling himself up into a sitting position on the hospital bed.
His bones creak and everything aches, but he’s alive. Painfully so, but alive nonetheless.
“Hi my fucking ass,” Katsuki snaps from his seat next to the bed, but Izuku can see his left knuckles are white from gripping the bar of Izuku’s bed too tightly.
“My mother?” he asks, looking around and is surprised to see that she isn’t here. He remembers waking up in this same room three times already in the last month with his mother’s concern face hovering above him and felt the sharp edge of guilt cut into his heart every time. He’d apologized for making her worry but he still ends back up here anyway.
“I wasn’t going to let her cry over your dumbass again,” Katsuki says because he’s kind and Izuku is a terrible son.
“Thank you, Kacchan,” Izuku says, smiling softly. “And I’m sorry.”
Katsuki clicks his tongue in annoyance. “Sorry isn’t going to cut it if you keep doing the same shit over and over again.”
Izuku’s smile falls off. “I, I’m trying my best here,” he says, looking down at his lap helplessly.
Katsuki runs a hand over his hair. “I’m so fucking tired of this,” he says, frustration clear in his voice. “You told me we’re partners and that we’re in this together, yet why am I always the one being left behind and picking up your broken body, huh? Something got to change because I can’t fucking keep doing this.”
Izuku’s eyes jerk up and his heart is in his throat. If Katsuki says he’ll give up on them, then, then—“Kacchan, don’t—I’ll do better, I promise!” he begs. “I’ll be more careful from now on, so don’t quit on me yet!”
“You always fucking say that but you know what your real problem is?” Katsuki spits out, and his emotion wrung raw because of Izuku. “It isn’t that you don’t fucking think, but you think too much and you get overwhelmed with it so you just charge right in to shut out all the noise in your head at risk of yourself and everybody around you.”
Izuku swallows, wrapping his bandaged arms around his waist. “What I should I do then, Kacchan?” he asks quietly. “How do I fix this?"
Katsuki eyes are dark and full of intent. “Don’t think, let me do it for you,” he says, as though it’s simple as that and maybe it is. “From now on, I’m the one who is going make the hard decisions for you and you’re going to fucking listen.”
Izuku turns Katsuki’s statement over and over in his head, considering the words carefully, and that’s perhaps the problem right there. “Okay, Kacchan,” he says cautiously. “I’m handing the reins over to you then.”
Izuku thinks he should be scare, that he had fought for control all his life, to choose his own path and walk it without letting anyone dictate his choices, so the thought of relinquishing any sort of control should be the hardest thing for him to do, but he wonders why it is suddenly so much easier to breathe.
Maybe, it’s because he has been chasing after Katsuki so long since they were children that this just feels like another step in their relationship. He’d always go wherever Katsuki leads and this is just another part of it.