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For five days, Kacchan ignores Izuku so loudly and so obviously that he’s on edge every time they’re in the same room. Then, after class, he grabs Izuku’s arm and pulls him into a quiet corridor. Izuku says something like, “what - uh, why-” and Kacchan mutters, “it’ll take five minutes,” as though that makes this prospect less intimidating.
Kacchan lets go of his arm like it’s burned him and paces angrily back and forth. Izuku backs up against a row of lockers, not so much leaning as making sure there’s nothing coming at him from behind.
“Are you okay?” Izuku asks eventually, and Kacchan’s expression darkens.
“I’ve been doing counselling shit,” he says finally. He pauses to give Izuku a scathing - vulnerable? - look before continuing his pacing.
“B-because of what happened at the training camp?”
“No shit.”
“That’s good?” Izuku offers, though he can’t quite make the image marry up in his mind.
Kacchan makes an aggravated sound and spins around to face him. “Look,” he says, for once not staring Izuku down, eyes shifting uncomfortably over the even row of lockers, “it was fucked up of me to push you around when you couldn’t defend yourself.”
Izuku is about to object, because Kacchan hasn’t done anything bad to him lately and there’s no way...no way he can mean…
Kacchan rubs a hand at the back of his neck. “It was wrong, okay? I get that now.”
Finally Kacchan manages to meet his eyes, and Izuku feels like the moment has broken open and spread out and out, dizzying and eternal. “I’m sorry,” Kacchan says.
Izuku feels nothing for several long seconds, then something sharp and overwhelming slices through his guts, so physical that he tries to remember the past few days and weeks of injuries to think what could have caused this.
"Did-did you fucking hear me?" Kacchan demands, but his hands are in his pockets and he's shifting from foot to foot instead of gearing up for a fight. Kacchan never attacks without the proper footwork.
Izuku tries to speak without having any idea what he might say. His temples are throbbing like there's just too much in his head, like he can't keep all of himself inside anymore. "D-" he tries, one hand rising to flutter over his chest.
A shade of alarm cuts into Kacchan's annoyance, seemingly only stoking the fire. "I didn't fucking say all that for my health - jesus, Deku, say something!"
Izuku remembers a game he used to play when he was little, blinking three times slowly and pretending he was activating a quirk to turn back time. Sometimes he'd go back only minutes, imagining something he'd broken standing whole again, some moment he'd done wrong rewritten and waiting for him to be better this time. Other times he'd go back years - he'd sit in a doctors office, swinging his legs, only this time they'd say something different. He'd see a little blonde boy at his play group, and decide to turn the other way to talk to the shy-looking kid sitting in the corner instead.
He tries it now: one blink, two, three. Still there, facing down Kacchan and the impossible thing he'd said.
"Don't-" he says finally, voice so quiet that Kacchan has to stop tapping his foot to try and make out the words. "Don't ever say that again."
Izuku doesn't let himself take in the look on Kacchan's face as he turns away. He takes one step, and somehow moving that little bit is enough to spark him back into action. He leaves the corridor in a sprint, familiar explosions echoing after him.
In class the next day, Kacchan grunts in irritation when he sees Izuku, but otherwise makes no comment - for him, that’s practically a non-reaction. It gives Izuku hope that maybe he can...not ignore the problem, but let things rest for a while until he figures out why he’s reacting so strangely. Why the worst thing Kacchan can say to him - Kacchan, who used to tell him he was worthless and seem genuinely joyful each time - is that he’s sorry.
This continues until afternoon hero training, when Aizawa puts them in pairs to spar as a warm-up. His classmates slowly break off from the group as Aizawa calls their names, heading for the next available gym mat, but when Aizawa calls, “Bakugou - with Midoriya,” Kacchan moves and Izuku doesn’t.
Izuku waits until everyone has a pair, and heads quietly over to Aizawa.
“You fucking lost, Deku?” Kacchan calls from behind him, and Izuku winces but doesn’t look back.
“Mr Aizawa?” Izuku says hesitantly. Aizawa scans him and waits. “I’d like another partner. Or to sit out the exercise.” In the awful silence after these words, Izuku bows very slightly. “Whichever you prefer.”
Aizawa stares him down. Izuku doesn’t know if he’d lose or gain points for actually meeting his eyes, but he can’t do it anyway. In that moment it’s like all the progress he’s made has vanished, and they’re back to the first day of classes; Izuku being measured and knowing he’s just on the verge of being found insufficient, hovering on and on in the moment before his inadequacy is put into words.
When he finally speaks, Aizawa’s voice is calm but icy. “I don’t assign partners based on your social life.”
“I know,” Izuku says meekly. “But I won’t work with him. Not today.”
He says ‘won’t,’ but deep down something is yelling ‘can’t.’ He doesn’t know how to stand across from Kacchan right now, sparring like everything is normal, like they haven’t played these roles a thousand times in a thousand different humiliating variations. Little things he hadn’t even thought of in months are playing across his vision; Kacchan used to take his lunch and grind it into the dirt. Kacchan used to shove him into other kids on the stairs, to get Izuku in trouble and hurt him all at once. Kacchan used to do this every day, and now he’s sorry and Izuku is supposed to look at him and know that and keep breathing-
Izuku blinks and realised he zoned out for a second. He finally looks at Aizawa and sees him level a calculating look from him to Kacchan.
“That’s what I fucking get, huh?” Kacchan calls, and the few members of the class who weren’t already watching Izuku and Aizawa stop and look over. Kacchan yelling is nothing new, but there’s something dangerous in his voice today. He makes a wordless, rageful noise, then Izuku hears heavy footsteps and a door slamming as Kacchan storms out of the gym.
Silence reigns for a few uncomfortable seconds. Izuku can’t look at anyone.
“I guess he forgot something?” Ashido jokes, but with an undercurrent of nerves.
“The ability to keep his temper,” Todoroki murmurs.
“Did I tell you to stop?” Aizawa says, and the class gets back to sparring with a few hasty apologies.
Aizawa turns back to Izuku and lets out a long, weary sigh. “Work with Iida and Kaminari,” he says at last, rubbing at his forehead. “Switch out every few minutes.”
Then he follows Kacchan’s path and exits the gym.
Izuku takes a deep breath and heads over to Iida and Kaminari’s mat, quietly relaying Aizawa’s instructions and praying neither of them will ask the kind of questions that are guaranteed to make him burst into tears.
“If you don’t mind, Midoriya, Kaminari and I will go first?” Iida says. “I look forward to hearing your thoughts on our technique!”
“Sure,” Izuku replies with a small smile, grateful for the out and for the excuse to stand beside the mat for a few minutes, watching Iida and Kaminari exchange blows. Distantly, he realises that he knows what it was he was feeling yesterday in that hallway, the feeling that had seemed too heavy and large to belong to him, the feeling that had made him walk up to Aizawa and say what he’d said. It was anger. Anger still so real and physical and alive, like carrying the weight of a whole other person, that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t recognised it before.
Aizawa hadn’t actually told him to stay behind after class (Aizawa had returned about 15 minutes later - Bakugou hadn’t come back at all), but when Izuku does he leads him to his office without a word and gestures for him to sit down.
“Is there anything you want to tell me about what happened today?”
Izuku hesitates. The honest answer is no; there’s nothing he wants to share with a teacher, about anything, on any occasion. But he’s aware that he crossed a line today - that for once, he was the one letting a problem that should be personal spread out into class - and he wants to say something to mitigate it, to show Aizawa that he hasn’t actually lost his mind and started disobeying authority figures for fun. But also, maybe he has, because he doesn’t have the words for why he refused to work with Kacchan today. He didn’t know he was going to do it until he did, and even now, when he should be calmer, he thinks about the reality where he tried to force himself to carry on like normal and some deep, vital thing inside him burns.
“How about I tell you my understanding of the situation?” Aizawa cuts in, expressionless. Izuku honestly isn’t sure if he was muttering or just staring into space, but he nods, embarrassed.
“You and Bakugou attended the same schools before UA. His recent experiences at Kamino have changed his perspective on that time, and he’s made some attempt to make amends. Instead of improving matters, this has made you unwilling to work with him, at least for the time being.”
It all sounds so manageable, laid out like that. “Yeah, that’s what happened.”
Aizawa hums. “There are 18 other students for you to partner with,” he adds a moment later. “And your personal relationships aren’t my business - I don’t order my students to be friends.”
Izuku shifts in his seat, knowing he wouldn’t be here if that was the whole story. “But?” he asks hesitantly.
“But it is my job to care for the wellbeing of my students. It’s my job to ask whether in an emergency situation, you two could work together productively. Whether the history at work here going to lead to an incident during or outside of class. Whether this is going to hinder your development and training.”
Izuku wants to say no, but he can’t quite manage it. A flare of anger shoots through his chest again, like a warning. “I’m really not trying to cause trouble,” he says at last, quiet and meek.
“I know,” Aizawa says. “I’m concerned precisely because I don’t think you’d make a request like the one you made today frivolously. And because Bakugou’s account of what exactly he was apologising to you for was troublingly vague.”
Even the word, apologising, makes something in him shift. There’s a shard of jealousy in among the anger, because why now? Why does Kacchan get to have this, be this, too? Izuku had loved him because he was a force of nature, moving towards his goal the way water cuts through stone. Now he was something even better, something flexible, something capable of compassion. Where was that compassion when Izuku needed it so badly?
“I...I don’t really want to talk about it.” Izuku shifts uncomfortably. “It’s just...I’m angry.” Izuku pauses to look at Aizawa, feeling the absurdity of it, how little it must come through in his timid voice and hunched posture. He half expects Aizawa to laugh or disagree, but he just waits - the most emotion Izuku can pick out is curiosity, maybe even an attempt at being welcoming. “I thought I wasn’t. I thought I was okay with how things are. But now that it’s better, now that he’s better, I feel worse. It doesn’t make any sense and I don’t know how to...carry it all around.”
He gestures a little helplessly. He wonders how many students have come into Aizawa’s office and tried to tell him about their feelings - Aizawa, who rarely expressed emotions outside the spectrum of ‘irritated’ and ‘tired.’ Maybe he can set some sort of record: the first UA student to be expelled for uncomfortable emotional disclosures.
“You’re feeling something you can’t make sense of,” Aizawa says at last, voice determinedly neutral. “Why not consult an expert?”
Izuku frowns in puzzlement. “Who’s an expert in feelings?”
Aizawa gives him a blank look. “Someone you talk to when emotions are too volatile to sort through on your own. Someone who helps you understand the effect of your past experiences on your current mental state.”
Izuku’s frown deepens as he begins to understand. “You’re talking about therapy.”
Aizawa shrugs, the tiniest hint of amusement crossing his face at Izuku’s obvious distaste. “It’s an option. A logical one, in my opinion. There’s the school’s guidance counsellor or any number of external counsellors to choose from.”
Izuku pictures a room with an educated, perceptive adult staring him down, reading his flaws, reading his reactions, creating an environment where he might say anything. He thinks about being a person who needs therapy and it feels...constricting. Like it closes down paths ahead of him instead of opening them up.
“There are, of course, other options,” Aizawa adds. “Do your own research - you’re never the first person to experience something, and people have a habit of writing these things down. Look into healthy ways to channel and express what you’re feeling. Confide in people who care about you - you seem to have no shortage of those.”
Izuku almost smiles. The possibility of telling his friends about any of this feels distant and foreign, but to have the option to begin with - to have friends he could tell things to who would probably listen - he won’t ever take that for granted. “I kind of thought you’d just tell me to...get over it. Push it down, focus on training.”
When Izuku looks up, he expects to find Aizawa angry or at least stern, but instead he’s tilting his head, assessing. “Focus and dedication have never been your problem,” he says in an even, measured voice. He frowns in thought for a moment, something like irritation crossing his face at last. “As long as you’re alive, you’re going to have emotional reactions. You can’t turn that off, no matter how much you might want to.”
“Really?” Izuku asks, and he means it to be a kind of joke but there’s something raw and earnest in his voice. “There’s no way?”
Aizawa sighs, but his eyes seem knowing. Sympathetic, almost. “They’re like weeds. Tend to them often and they won’t present much of a problem. Let them run wild and things get out of control.”
Izuku falls quiet for a moment. Some part of him thinks this is almost scarier than being laughed out of the room - to be told that this really matters. That the things shifting and breaking like waves in his chest might actually be worth paying attention to. “I thought you’d tell me to forgive him.”
“You don’t owe that to anyone. You’re not obligated to be his friend.”
Izuku can imagine saying that to someone else in his place, but here it just feels wrong in a way he struggles to pinpoint. “But...he changed. He did something good. And I pushed him away.”
Aizawa mulls this over for a moment. “He changed without your friendship. By that logic, he can keep going without it too.”
That...Izuku hadn’t thought of it that way. But it can’t...the end of this idea can’t be that he’s done with Kacchan, can it? Izuku doesn’t know if there can be any world where that’s true. He doesn’t know if he’d want it if there was.
Aizawa seems to read his hesitance and continues: “If you forgive someone because you feel obligated to, that forgiveness isn’t worth anything. And you aren’t doing Bakugou any favours if you don’t let him learn what it’s like to face up to his mistakes - every hero needs to learn that it’s much easier to damage something than to repair it.”
Izuku thinks about that, about damage, and a wave of exhaustion washes over him, a day of hard things and hard thoughts catching up. Is damage what’s happened here? To him, to his friendship with Kacchan. Is this new bright rage just an old wound throwing out new complications?
He shakes away the thoughts for now, remembering the present, remembering how far off course things have gone from the norm. “I really am sorry about today,” Izuku says. “I know this isn’t your problem.”
“Yes, it is. You are fundamentally my problem for the next two and a half years.”
Izuku winces, but if he didn’t know better, he’d say Aizawa’s demeanour is something like fond.
Aizawa sinks back into his chair. “Besides, Midoriya: you had a problem and you told an adult about it before it escalated to the point of bodily harm. This is what we want you to do all the time.”
Izuku frowns in thought. Really, this is what people were talking about as the alternative to trying to deal with things on his own? He’d pictured a lot of things, but not a quiet room where someone tried to help him sort through things, but he still stayed in control. He hadn’t pictured kindness. Maybe therapy would be like that too, he thinks, and tucks the thought away for later. When things are less raw.
The following day, Saturday, Izuku gets up early and leaves the dorms, trying not to think of it as fleeing. He wanders campus, finding himself instinctively following the path of All Might’s usual jogging route. Confide in people who care about you, Aizawa had said, and while Izuku would hesitate to say it out loud to anyone, he thinks All Might fits that category. All Might is, at the very least, invested in his future, and Izuku doesn’t know what kind of future he’ll have if he’s going to be incapacitated by rage at random intervals.
Even though he'd been half waiting for him, Izuku still jumps when All Might calls out a greeting, slowing down to walk by his side.
“What’s on your mind, kid? You’re twitchier than usual.”
Izuku shrugs as he tries to think where to start. “I was just wondering...you must get angry, right? I mean, I’ve seen you angry, like at the USJ, and it was a lot even from the outside but I suppose there wasn’t time in that kind of situation to stop and process-”
“I don’t know if I’m following your train of thought here,” All Might interrupts, but his manner is gentle and patient. Izuku still isn’t sure if he trusts that appearance of patience, remembering All Might crouched on a rooftop talking about how his smile had been covering terror for years.
He wishes he could send out a signal, constantly, to tell anyone he’s talking with that if he’s doing it wrong, they can just tell him to cut it out. They can just leave, if they don’t want to bother with him. Because saying it out loud just prompted most people to think you were asking for reassurance, and then if you don’t know whether they’re humouring you it’s impossible to know if they’re humouring you about whether or not they’re humouring you and - damn it, now he was distracted by another round of muttering and he still hadn’t said what he wanted to say.
“I just wanted to know,” Izuku says. “How do you deal with anger?”
All Might gives him a curious look, seemingly weighing his answer before speaking. “Well, I used to spend most of my life fighting. Then it’s easy, most of the time - you just channel it, focus on what’s right in front of you.”
“But now you can’t,” Izuku says, and then winces because it sounds so much harsher out in the open like that. “But - but you must still get angry, sometimes,” he stammers, knowing that stopping to apologise will just get him caught in a cycle and he’ll never finish asking what he needs to know. “So what do you do now?”
Light always seemed to land on All Might a little differently to the rest of his surroundings - Izuku suspected it was all those years of seeing the same footage of him over and over making it strange to see him in person, like hearing a slightly different version of your favourite song - and in that moment the shadows seem to draw tighter around him. Just for a second Izuku can see the feeling he had earlier so clearly spelt out in the lines of his hero’s face; that sense of internal pressure, that your body was too small to carry and border all this rage. Then he smiles and he’s just All Might again. Just Yagi, as he’s suggested a couple of times that Izuku could call him, if he wants.
“Everyone gets angry, young Midoriya,” he says. “And no, I can’t fight anymore, but I can run. I can train. I can focus on training you.”
Izuku feels happy and small all at once. “And that’s enough?”
He nudges Izuku’s shoulder with his knuckles, and it makes Izuku realise how his whole posture is hunched down, protective, ashamed. He straightens his shoulders and gives his mentor a small smile.
“You’re more than enough, kid.”
Izuku basks in the strange warmth of the words for several long moments before he notices All Might eyeing him curiously. “Why do you ask, anyway? I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen you angry.”
Izuku shrugs. “I guess that’s why. I’m not used to it, so I don’t really know how to deal with it. I don’t know how to make it stop.”
All Might gives a slightly hollow smile.
“What?” Izuku asks.
“Sometimes I forget how similar we are,” All Might says, though his expression seems far away for a moment. “I think I’ve said almost exactly that before: how do I make this feeling go away?”
“Did you ever figure it out?” Izuku asks. It’s already a little better, walking in the morning sun, saying his thoughts to someone kind and listening.
“Yes and no,” All Might replies. “Someone pretty smart told me if you can’t figure out how to get rid of something, you have to figure out how to live with it. And that a feeling is just another kind of information you can use.”
“Information,” Izuku mutters. “Information about what?”
“Depends on the feeling. Fear can tell you you’re in danger, you need to move, need to change something…” All Might says. “What do you think your anger’s telling you?”
Izuku casts his attention inwards, and the rage in his chest shifts and flares, silent and unhelpful. He tries to remember other times he felt anger: watching Kacchan pick on other kids comes immediately to mind. That anger, it told him to move too. To move in between something dangerous and something endangered. To stop something that was wrong. This is wrong, anger says.
Because sometimes, Izuku was tired and scared and just wanted to go home, and a little tiny part of him wanted to look away and keep walking and forget whatever Kacchan was doing, forget whoever he was doing it to.
But people always matter. It matters when they’re hurt. That’s when he’d needed anger to remind him. This matters. This is wrong. Move.
But Kacchan apologising wasn’t wrong, Izuku thinks. But it would be wrong to let that be the end of it. The thought makes him ache all new again, like he’s five years old and losing his best friend right then, right there, but that doesn’t make it feel any less true. This matters. This is wrong. Move.
“That I can’t forget yet,” Izuku says softly. “That I can’t...do the thing I think I should.” He feels a spark of resolve, and looks up at his mentor’s curious face. “I have to go back to the dorms now - thank you!”
When he gets within sight of the dorms again, there’s a figure hunched on the steps, glaring at the horizon. Kacchan stands up as soon as he catches sight of Izuku, as though even sitting is an unacceptable weakness. Kacchan, I am so tired and so wrong, all the time, Izuku wants to say. What could it even mean to be flawless in Izuku’s eyes?
“Hi, Kacchan,” Izuku says.
”I am asking you,” Kacchan says, enunciating carefully, seeming like this restraint is causing him physical pain. “To tell me what your problem is.” He waits a beat. “I was shitty to you for years and you just took it. Now I do something decent and what, you can’t be in the same room as me?”
“I can be in the same room as you.”
Kacchan doesn’t dignify that with a response beyond an impatient gesture.
Izuku had been planning to go and find Kacchan even if he hadn’t been waiting, but he’s still not sure how to phrase what he wants to say. In the end, he tries to view it in the third person, remembering how much less fraught things seemed in Aizawa’s summary of the situation: his recent experiences at Kamino changed his perspective. Kacchan’s apology changed Izuku’s too.
It woke him up to possibility, to a shadow-Kacchan who learned what it was to be helpless in time for it to help Izuku, who learned and learned and learned for years. To a shadow-Izuku who had no quirk, no purpose, but a life all the same. A life lived out loud, one where he made himself real by speaking to people who liked him, instead of living with all his thoughts jittering and jangling inside his mind like unspooled thread, until he had to spill them onto notebooks just to get some relief.
Kacchan apologising made necessary pain pointless, and that mattered. Izuku could suffer through anything for the right purpose.
“Before UA...I got through all that because I got used to the idea that things couldn’t be any other way,” Izuku manages at last, staring determinedly at the floor. “But...if you can change. If you can apologise.” He looks up at Kacchan, whose expression is fixed in a brittle glare, like someone who knows they’d have such a long way to fall if it broke. “Then none of it had to happen,” Izuku continues, voice trembling only slightly. “You could have just stopped.”
Kacchan shifts his stance while Izuku blinks back tears. Even now, he wants to soften his words, add an apology, but the rage roiling in his gut won’t let him. Each thing he wants to say to mollify his long-ago-lost friend feels like it would require cutting off another piece of himself. Izuku thought he understood pain, thought he was used to it, but every so often the prospect of it roared up so loud and so vital, reminding him that pain meant something in his body was breaking, and you can only break so many times before there isn’t enough healthy tissue to keep hauling yourself around. It’s easier to damage something than repair it.
So Izuku stands and aches and doesn’t apologise, while Kacchan visibly suppresses his first, second and third reaction to Izuku’s words.
“I didn’t think that shit ever got to you,” he says finally. He sounds angry with them both in equal measure, angry with the whole world. Until recently, Izuku had no idea how that felt. “You were always so…” He shakes his head, paces away from him before spinning back around. “Can’t you just - fucking, hit me or yell or talk shit about me to everyone in class.” His hands crackle with power as he discharges small, controlled blasts. “Then we can just be...I don’t know, classmates, rivals, what the fuck ever.”
Again, Izuku can feel his whole being leaning toward the world where he says yes, where he sees an olive branch from Kacchan, a chance to be on something like good terms again, and jumps at it. Just one more push, a voice inside him says, one more concession, one more piece cut away. “No,” he says, so quiet that for a second he wonders if he’s spoken at all. “I’ll - I’ll work with you in class,” he says, louder this time.
He meets Kacchan’s eyes and they both wait, disbelieving, for him to offer something more. Izuku wants that friendship he remembers so badly, but it's a memory he's relived so many times that it's muddled into disconnected flashes and sensations, a memory of a memory. Izuku remembers staring at his ceiling unable to sleep because he was so excited for the morning, so excited to ask Kacchan about everything he'd been thinking about, so worried that he'd forget and then he’d never get to hear what Kacchan thought about that one tiny thing. He remembers two friends walking side by side, and the feeling that they could go anywhere, do anything. The children they were then would barely come up to their knees now.
Kacchan breathes in sharply, like he’s been struck. “Fine,” he murmurs. He hesitates just a little, waiting once more for Izuku to pick up his part of their script, to welcome him back. Izuku doesn’t know how to feel about finally having made Kacchan hesitate. He breathes in deep while Kacchan turns on his heel and storms back into the dorms.
I could still take it back, Izuku thinks. I could still forgive him.
This matters, the rising anger says back. This is wrong. Move.
Stand up for yourself, naive people used to say to Izuku, and he could never understand how they could think making himself a worse thing, crying out even louder for help he might never get and hasn’t ever felt that he deserved, would help anything at all. Now, he’s learned standing up for himself as an unhappy compromise; something you do because it would burn too much to do anything else.
Okay, he thinks, hand resting against his ribs, too small to encompass the width and breadth of the feeling. Okay, I’ve lived with worse than this.