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Katsuki speaks enough of the merpeople’s language to know what Shouto is saying (most of the time).
Shouto also speaks comprehensible Japanese.
He picked it up on nights spent in Katsuki’s childhood bedroom, with his hand gently wrapping around Katsuki’s throat, feeling the vibrations, and then asking to kiss him in order to copy the shape of his mouth. Katsuki made him promise to never fucking do that with anyone else who teaches him Japanese, for his own good, and Shouto agreed—confused as to why but eager to please.
Then they kissed, and kissed and kissed until Shouto could sound out Ka-tsu-ki.
Katsuki’s still not sure if all the making out actually helped Shouto learn human vocal sounds and Japanese—apparently the merpeople call language learning ‘trading tongues,’ but it didn’t hurt. And it felt damn good, obviously.
Even before Shouto learned though, before he could say it in human words, Katsuki could always recognize when his boyfriend was sulking.
There’s a routine.
Shouto usually heads down to the community pool and sits by the edge so his legs dangle in the water. With his legs pressed together, he kicks them back and forth to self-soothe, similar to the vigorous back-and-forth movement his red-and-white spotted tail does when he changes form.
He’ll have his head tucked back against his chest, and just like you can tell a cat’s mood from the shape and position of their ears, Katsuki will be able to tell exactly what shade of disgruntled or sad Shouto’s feeling from the back of his head alone.
This time he seems more regretful than anything else, and Katsuki hopes it isn’t because he chose to stay with Katsuki for the summer instead of swimming North with the rest of his people. Katsuki was ready to see him off that day out on the dock, and he didn’t ask this dumbass to come swimming back towards him instead of into the sunset.
Katsuki joins him at the pool’s edge now and pulls his loose cargo pants up to the knees so he can put his legs in the water too. Unlike Shouto, he isn’t a fan of getting wet.
Shouto turns to him, and speaks in his slightly distorted Japanese. “Oh. Why are you down here?”
“You weren’t at school, dumbass,” Katsuki says, careful not to give away the extent of his concern—Shouto’s more empathetic than he might seem from his blank-seeming face, he reads Katsuki’s moods too easily. “Had to make sure you were doing okay or whatever, so I came.”
Ever since Shouto washed up around here, on the shore of the beach he and Deku like to frequent, Katsuki’s been more or less in charge of making sure he doesn’t get up to trouble. That was eight months ago now.
Now Shouto can walk on his two legs in full-human form without shaking like a newborn colt. He lives with Katsuki’s family, in a spare bedroom, though he sleeps in Katsuki’s bed more often than not.
“That’s still every day?” Shouto asks, alarmed.
His voice tends to sound like sandpaper after even a few words. The sexy kind of rough—though admittedly, as his boyfriend Katsuki has some bias—and not like nails on a chalkboard. It’s also about a half-octave lower than most people tend to speak normally. It’s not like that’s his fault either. His vocal cords were never meant to make these sounds, they were meant for speaking underwater.
“Yeah, we have to go to school every single day,” Katsuki says, and he’s not even surprised Shouto forgot again, apparently life underwater doesn’t have many rules except try chewing on everything you can get your mouth on and try not to get killed—merpeople can eat almost anything, and that’s how they’ve survived all these years with pollution and rising water levels.
It’s also why Katsuki woke up one day and had to stop Shouto from eating an extension cord.
“That seems very restrictive,” Shouto notes unhappily.
Privately, Katsuki kind of agrees, but he has to set a good example, damn it, Shouto learns most things about being human from him. “School matters. You don’t wanna have a bunch of idiots running around making decisions, do you?”
“No,” Shouto shakes his head vehemently, not a fan. “No idiots. No running.”
“Yeah. Then everyone’s got to go to fucking school. Besides, if you go, you’ll see me,” Katsuki says, and he’s new to flirting, really, so he doesn’t know if knocking his legs against Shouto’s in the water will translate to anything.
Shouto thinks it does though, because he knocks his legs back against Katsuki’s.
Maybe it means something to Shouto, or maybe he just wants to return the gesture the way he did when Katsuki first reached out to hold his hand. They don’t do that underwater—they link tails—except Katsuki doesn’t fucking have a tail or fins, and Shouto takes his rituals seriously, so they make do with linking fingers. Shouto has an abnormal amount of control over his own body temperature—probably an adaptation to the way temperatures fluctuate drastically with elevation underwater—so his hands are sometimes cold, sometimes warm.
Either is fine with Katsuki.
“You could stop going to school too. Then we can see each other even more,” Shouto says, and Katsuki suppresses the urge to shove him in the water—because he would love that, wouldn’t he?
He’d pull Katsuki under.
“Stop it,” he says, instead. “We’re gonna go to school. End of story. I’ll walk with you every day if I have to.”
“Oh?” Shouto asks, interested—and of course, he sees it as a reward.
Stupid fish. “Yeah. Won’t have you arrested for being a truant.”
Shouto nods very seriously, which is what he does whenever someone uses a word he doesn’t recognize. Katsuki wonders if it was ‘arrest’ or ‘truant.’ Or both.
“You seemed kinda down, before,” Katsuki says, remembering why he even came down here. “Spill. I mean, tell me.”
Shouto sighs, and Katsuki waits for him to find the words. It’s fucking hard thinking in one language and speaking in another, so he never pushes him—he’s only proud. Effort means everything.
“There are some things I want to do with you,” Shouto says after a moment of quiet. “I haven’t done them with you and that makes me unhappy.”
“Huh?” Katsuki says, taken aback. “I-I told you I’m not ready to have sex yet. I know you’re horny but I thought you said you were okay with that.”
“Not relations,” Shouto clarifies.
Oh. Now it’s a bit embarrassing that Katsuki brought that up. When it wasn’t even what Shouto was saying? He feels like an idiot.
Luckily, Katsuki’s boyfriend is immune to embarrassment—has been proven as such many times—and he continues to explain what he really meant, undeterred.
“I want to court you, the way my people do.”
The melodic lilt to his words is almost romantic. Distracting, and then Katsuki hears the words. “I mean, as long as it’s not, wait—what the hell does that even mean?”
Courting—what the fuck?
These past few weeks he’s let Shouto guide his head underwater in a bathtub to listen to exactly what merspeech sounds like the way it’s supposed to be heard. He’s taken him to the school’s pool after hours, to let him transform in full and splish-splash to his heart’s content while he and Deku keep a watch to make sure no one else is around.
He can take almost anything Shouto throws at him. As long as he doesn’t have to eat something humans can’t really digest, or anything that’ll leave him in any way publicly exposed. He’s ready.
Just fucking confused is all.
“I want to give you rich presents, boons of the sea,” Shouto explains, even though that doesn’t paint even a little bit of a clearer picture.
What the hell is a boon of the sea? What makes something a ‘rich’ present? He’s gotta be careful here, or Shouto might go and accidentally rob some fancy department store.
“Huh. Is that it?” Katsuki asks, trying to find out how elaborate this stuff is before he dives into the nitty gritty.
Shouto turns to him, and now he looks shy for some reason, which he never does—shameless menace. His cheeks are all pink, and the illusion magic that masks his real merman skin is fading a bit around the ears, revealing tiny, iridescent scales in patches around the neck and jaw barely hidden by white, silky hair that reaches his shoulders.
“I want to take you underwater, to the deepest depths and exchange promises to you. Then...come up to the surface and feel you gill-to-gill and fin-to-fin,” Shouto gently strokes his fingers against the spot on Katsuki’s neck where gills should be, and his hands are cold enough to give Katsuki goosebumps all along his arms.
The gill-to-gill and fin-to-fin thing is supposed to be intimate. Shouto told him before, once. He babbles a lot when they cuddle in bed.
Rubbing gills and tailfins against each other is like merpeople foreplay, apparently. Two merpeople can even slot their gills together, briefly, like a kiss. All these parts that Katsuki doesn’t have, since he’s a human—and once again he feels like shit, wondering if he’s the reason Shouto’s missing out on something.
Because Shouto chose him. And he really can't do it.
“Look, I don't have fins or gills and I don’t know how deep underwater I can go with you without–you know–dying, but we can—we can approximate. Is that good?”
Shouto nods. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Katsuki doesn’t want to bring down the mood with his stupid insecurity, so he doesn’t tell him.
As for the rich presents, he can see why Shouto kind of has a problem there. His people give each other treasures they dig up themselves, pearls from oysters and gems and shiny things from shipwrecks. Shouto’s a fucking magpie even on land, stealing shiny bottle caps and pretty pieces of broken glass to stash in his room at home.
He just can’t get the same level of quality here because he’s got no savings.
In his defense, he’s only been on land for less than a year.
“Here,” Katsuki says, reaching into his pocket and taking out his wallet. “If you wanna get me something you can use my credit card. Take Deku with you, he’ll make sure you don’t spend a fuckton at once.”
“Midoriya,” Shouto nods, and he inspects the card carefully.
“Listen to me, don’t do anything crazy, okay?” he sighs. “Humans give presents too, but it’s not like…it’s not a spending contest.”
“I thought everything was a contest? Winning matters,” Shouto says, and Katsuki knows him well enough to know he’s poking fun. “To you.”
“Shut up,” Katsuki says, and gives him a hard splash of water, knowing that he’ll be next, and he’ll go home soaked.
Whatever. He hates getting wet, but with Shouto water is practically a love language.
*
Shouto isn’t really familiar with human bartering systems.
He isn’t sure how the magic card works. Midoriya keeps telling him it doesn’t have an exact value, even though it can be used for trading. He also says when they use it, they don’t actually have to exchange it, which is weird. Normal barter rules don’t work like that.
But this is credit. A new concept for him, Katsuki will be proud of him if he remembers, so he’ll definitely remember it.
It doesn’t matter what value the magic card has though, because nothing in this store is good enough for Katsuki. None of it looks like it came from the ocean either, but overlanders aren’t very good at ocean exploration yet, Katsuki can barely hold his breath under water and he and Midoriya both swim worse than merman babies. No wonder they don’t have any treasures here.
Nothing as beautiful as Katsuki.
“I want to find something as lovely as Katsuki,” he reminds Midoriya, tugging on his sleeve.
“I know, I know you do—I just, Kacchan told me not to let you spend more than twelve thousand yen, so. This is the best we can do, okay?” Midoriya pulls him along to a display. “What about these?”
These pearls are obviously fake. They don’t have any luster.
“We can’t get real pearls?” he asks Midoriya.
It would be a travesty without real pearls.
Thankfully, Midoriya seems to know everything. He’s also one of the few people, other than Katsuki, who seems to have patience for Shouto and his questions. He’s known Shouto’s Katsuki since before their adult tailfins grew in—in merman terms—and Shouto approves. Midoriya is an excellent friend even if he’s terrible at swimming.
“We-we can’t really afford real pearls, Todoroki-kun,” Midoriya explains. “Sorry. Nice jewelry is really really expensive.”
Shouto unfastens one of the mother-of-pearl plated bands he wears under his shirt, on his upper arm, then pulls it out and shows it to him. “Is this expensive?”
“Holy shit. I mean, yeah. This would be, this would be super expensive if you sold it. Where did you even get this?”
“I’m a prince. All merman princes wear this,” Shouto explains.
“You’re a prince? You never told me you were a prince. Is it a constitutional monarchy? Do you rule over just the one sea area around Japan or all of them—like the entire Pacific Ocean? The Pacific Ocean’s really big. Are you gonna be king one day, or-”
“Midoriya. Focus,” Shouto reminds him. “We need to buy something for Katsuki. Can we sell this to get…credit?”
“Not credit. We could pawn it to get money, then you could probably get anything you want for Kacchan,” Midoriya strokes his chin. “Oh my god he’s gonna kill me for letting you do this. But that’s okay! Wait, this doesn’t have sentimental value to you does it?”
“No. Just a mark of royalty,” Shouto assures.
Midoriya looks at him, as if they’re making a pact. “Okay let’s go then. Let’s do it.”
*
“Tell me what he bought me,” Katsuki demands, for probably the fourth time tonight.
It’s not like Deku and Shouto have the monopoly on being annoying.
“I can’t!” Deku says. “That’s against the courtship rules. He told me.”
“It’s also probably against the rules to buy whatever boons of the fucking sea he got at Jewelry Mart and not from some cave at the bottom of the ocean. Fucking tell me,” Katsuki pokes him in the ribs.
He wants to know. He needs to know. Nobody knows this, except maybe Shouto—who loves giving him gifts—but Katsuki likes getting gifts. He likes the way Shouto gives them. It used to be his secret shame, since he always gets on Deku for being such a stuff gremlin, with all of his superhero merch, but Katsuki likes getting presents too.
He likes someone picking something out just for him, with him in mind. It’s good stuff. Shouto does it with a kind of single-minded devotion that makes Katsuki all tingly from head to toe.
“Ow, Kacchan,” Deku rubs the spot Kacchan just poked, frowning. “And just for that I’m not even going to give you a hint. You’ll just have to wait.”
Fuck. Was it Katsuki’s influence that gave him this vindictive streak?
“I won’t tell him you told me.”
“He would know,” Deku insists. “I think he can read minds.”
“You’re such a dork, he can’t read minds,” Katsuki says, while he wonders if Shouto actually can, thinking about his pensive, thoughtful gaze—nah. “If he could, you wouldn’t have had to spend thirty minutes telling him what a pumpkin spice latte was.”
“Kacchan, all of the concepts involved in that drink are foreign to him. Pumpkins, spices, milk, not to mention the concept of even liking coffee—and how it makes people stay awake longer. Did you know he doesn’t have to sleep for three whole days if he doesn’t want to?”
Katsuki does know that, he’s woken up several times to Shouto’s curious, mismatched stare. It’s not that creepy after a while.
“Yeah, yeah he’s a regular insomniac. Fuck you and your hint. I thought our whole thing was that you have to tell me everything.”
“It goes both ways, Kacchan. You didn’t tell me he was a prince,” Deku points out. “And…since he’s courting you and all does that mean you’re gonna be a prince one day—did you even know that he was?”
“Of course I knew,” Katsuki scoffs. “He doesn’t like to talk about the prince part. It’s isolating. But he talks about his underwater kingdom all the time.”
All the fucking time.
There’s this castle, Shouto keeps saying he wants to take Katsuki to it. The pressure that far under water would kill him, so there’s that. But all the crayon on paper drawings and construction paper models make it look like a place worth visiting. Shouto doesn’t know all the right descriptive words yet, but he’s pretty decent at crafting and scribbling.
He did eat a crayon or two before Katsuki told him off, but that’s just a part of living life with him.
“And I’m not gonna be a prince. We’re seventeen for fucks sake, it’s not like he's proposing.”
Yet, Katsuki’s mind supplies, and he shushes it.
Deku, as usual, lives to contradict him. “It kinda sounds like his culture’s version of that. Maybe you should check?”
Oh. Shit.
Maybe this is something like that in Shouto’s fishy little mind. Katsuki needs to talk to him.
*
He finds him on completely dry land this time. In the school library, with a stack of cookbooks, since mer-brains are apparently hard-wired towards eating.
Katsuki goes straight for it. “Look, can I talk to you about something?”
They need to clear the air about this courtship thing. Because next to the courtship thing is the Katuski-isn’t-ready-to-marry-anybody thing.
“Always,” Shouto says.
“You’re not…you aren't proposing to me, right?”
“Proposing?” Shouto tilts his head to the side, and Katsuki’s drawn to the silver dangling trident earring he wears in only one ear—which he privately admits to finding really fucking sexy.
“I mean, are you trying to marry me?” Katsuki asks. “That’s what humans mean when they talk about proposing.”
Shouto still seems confused. “Marriage?”
“It’s–it’s–” how the hell can Katsuki even explain, well. “When two humans want to be together for the rest of their lives, they do that. They get married.”
Katsuki watches him think on it for a second.
Then he reaches out and caresses Katsuki’s cheek. “We do that. After a few years of successful courtship there’s a feast underwater. My people celebrate for days. It's called joining.”
“Joining,” Katsuki repeats, holding his breath because he always gets a little flustered when they’re standing alone together and Shouto is touching him.
“If you like our courtship,” Shouto says, shy again. “You can be joined to me, then no one in the seven seas can take us apart or take you away from me.”
“Oh,” Katsuki says, and he supposes that answers his question.
Courting is more like dating. And that’s nothing to worry about. Then that joining thing is like marriage.
Wait. “What happens when two merpeople…join?”
If it involves tails or fins, Katsuki won’t ever be able to do it. This is what his life has come to, he’s so in love with Shouto, he has to check if he’ll be able to functionally merpeople-marry him.
“Nothing. It’s…” Shouto fishes around in his mind for the word. “Symbolic.”
Perfect. Katsuki’s secretly kind of ecstatic.
He leans up on his toes and kisses his hot merman boyfriend. “We’re good then. No sweat. Keep doing what we’re doing.”
Before Shouto can ask what no sweat means, Katsuki pushes him back against a bookshelf and continues kissing him.
Shouto responds back enthusiastically, shifting his books to one hand and licking hungrily into Katsuki’s mouth, his other hand coming up to touch Katsuki’s neck and then up to cup his face. “I hope you know, I don't want to do merman things because I want to be with a merman. I only want to be with you, Katsuki. Do them with you.”
Oh.
He flushes, it feels like someone’s lifted a weight off his chest.
All this merpeople stuff is for them.
Because of and not despite the fact that Shouto chose someone like him.
*
The night of the ‘gifting’ as Shouto calls it, they’re by the pool again. They snuck in overnight, and Katsuki desperately hopes no one finds them. Because it’s gonna be hard to explain why he’s in the pool with a merperson, and also submerged in the water with him.
Deku’s on lookout duty. He normally sticks around to play in the water too, with his dorky green swim trunks. This whole Shouto’s-a-merperson secret has brought Katsuki closer to Deku than he’s been in a while, and it helps that Shouto really fucking likes the nerd. Adores him.
Today feels more private though, so Deku brought his switch to play video games and is sitting in the locker room waiting for Katsuki to come get him when they’re through with this. It’s just him and Shouto here, and with the one light they brought to put by the pool bouncing off it and making everything look all blue and glowy—it almost feels like they really have gone leagues underwater, somewhere else.
Shouto makes him close his eyes and turn around, then he clasps what must be some sort of necklace on Katsuki’s neck. He can feel the round beads, and he immediately thinks of pearls, tempted to open his eyes and check if he’s right.
But he’s a good boyfriend, and waits until Shouto says “open” oh-so-proud.
“Thank you,” Katsuki says first, because he wasn’t raised in a barn.
Then he gets a good look. “Are these-these aren’t…”
They’re beautiful and round and perfect, and they definitely won’t fit with any of his other clothes, and he probably looks ridiculous, but he doesn’t not like them. They’re iridescent and they catch the light, they almost remind Katsuki of the places Shouto’s skin has scales.
And Shouto chose them specifically for him.
They’re real though, they’ve gotta be real, and he’s gonna fucking kill Deku. “How the fuck did you get them?”
“I sold something of mine,” Shouto explains. “It was worth it. You look...divine.”
The thing with having taught him Japanese out of a book of phrases was that Shouto uses really pretty-sounding words sometimes. Heavy ones. Instead of saying ‘you look good’ he’ll say shit like ‘divine.’ That’s the way Katsuki rationalizes it, because he knows the other option—that Shouto chooses the more romantic language for Katsuki on purpose, might actually be too much for him to think about, overwhelming in a way that he can’t readily process yet because the way he thinks about himself doesn’t match. He’s working on it.
“Okay, I’m wearing your gift of the sea, what do you wanna do now?” Katsuki asks, anxious to get on with the next part, because at least there he’s got a role and all that careful, easy attention will still be on him, but he’ll have things to say.
They’re not vows. This isn’t a fucking wedding. But Katsuki practiced things to say in merspeak.
He can’t see underwater like Shouto can, and the water kind of bothers his eyes, so he bought goggles for this. He can’t talk underwater like Shouto can, so he’ll say his piece with them partially submerged, and then Shouto will say something back.
That was the plan.
“Now we go home,” Shouto says, and he strips off his shirt, letting Katsuki’s eyes wander to his chest, his carved abs.
He’s toned from all the swimming, and he’s bizarrely active even on land. He says ‘home’ when he means the water, like the two words are interchangeable, where water either literally means home to him, or figuratively. It’s another one of those things that Katsuki wonders if all merpeople would do, or if Shouto is just special like that.
Katsuki takes his own shirt off too, the pants he was wearing over his swim trunks, shivering as Shouto takes his hand and they approach the edge of the pool. Katsuki puts on the goggles, feeling kind of exposed in goggles, shorts, and a fucking pearl necklace at the school pool on a Thursday night, but this is important to Shouto so he can suck it up. It’s okay.
Shouto jumps in the water and doesn’t change form right away, waiting for Katsuki to hold his nose and join him, treading water rapidly with his legs.
Katsuki jumps in with both feet and makes a bigger splash than Shouto did—being elegant on entry must be another genetic gift.
The water’s freezing, but Katsuki’s no coward. He treads water too as soon as he resurfaces, his eyes meeting Shouto’s slightly over the water's surface, taking a giant breath. The pearls feel heavy on his neck. This whole thing would have seemed ridiculous to him months ago, but he likes seeing Shouto in his element and being allowed to join him there.
He thought he’d feel like more of an idiot, actually, holding hands with Shouto while treading water, for no goddamn reason except approximating his cultural customs and trying not to feel like a shithead for existing and taking away Shouto’s chance to find another merperson to date.
It’s not stupid though, when his hands find Shouto’s under the water. He goes from freezing to tolerating the water temperature in an instant, because Shouto’s warm. The water around him is warm. And when they touch it feels like the warm water cocoons around Katsuki too, like magic, protecting him.
Katsuki still isn’t sure exactly what kind of magic Shouto can and can’t do. He can’t read minds, that’s more or less confirmed. He can use small illusions to mask some of his more obvious merpeople features, the shiny, scaly skin around his neck and ears. He can transform, giving himself legs on land and a tail and fins in the water. He can even heal a little, when he presses his lips on Katsuki’s paper cuts and bruises from martial arts training they fade.
“You first,” Shouto says.
“Okay, fine. I guess, you’re really fucking weird, and I don’t know how you talk me into half the shit that we do, including this. You’re smart though, and you…you get me,” Katsuki says, squeezing onto Shouto’s hands tighter for that last part. “Was that-you know, that good?”
Shouto doesn’t answer, just pulls them closer together into a kiss. It’s so wet, with both of their hair drenched and dripping, water droplets and the taste of chlorine enters Katsuki’s mouth as he kisses back. It feels intimate because of the way they’re both just wearing swim trunks, and Shouto’s going to have to take his off before he transforms—which always makes Katsuki feel a certain kind of way.
Shouto’s beautiful and ethereal, and Katsuki thinks he’s really fucking sexy too, he doesn’t know how he got so lucky. Can’t believe he’s the one that gets to wear this bastard’s stupid love necklace.
“My turn,” Shouto says, pulling away and slipping his swim trunks off.
Katsuki doesn’t look, not that he could have seen much because the transformation happens right away. The mechanics are hard to follow because of the brief, bright glow that surrounds the whole thing, but Katsuki imagines his legs must lock together and get covered in scales that go all the way to the waist. He could pick out that red and white spotted pattern anywhere.
“Ready?” Shouto asks, and Katsuki takes another super-deep breath before nodding to mean yes.
Then Shouto takes them both to the bottom of the pool, and Katsuki understands Shouto’s voice the way it was meant to be heard. Still deep, but more clear, more him.
They’re still holding hands.
“I think you’re beautiful, Katsuki, not just your face, but in the way you work hard to improve yourself, and take care of the people that are important to you. You can be grumpy and blunt, but you always make time for me and I know you don’t let many people get close to you, so I feel lucky to be one of them. I love you how strong you are, and I want to be with you and only you, always.”
It’s a whole lot to hear I love you with his head full of oxygen on dry land, it’s even more to hear it when he’s got seconds of breath left and he’s fully submerged with an otherworldly creature, more human than mythical being in Katsuki’s eyes, holding him.
Katsuki squeezes Shouto’s hands back tighter, and he doesn’t know what’s happening until Shouto leans forward, and brushes their necks together, and he feels the ridges of gills on Shouto’s neck, the press of scales against his skin. Gill-to-gill.
Then Shouto brushes the fins of his tail against Katsuki’s bare legs. Fin-to-fin.
He didn’t know it would feel different under the water, and when they come up to the surface and he takes rapid breaths, the feeling lingers. Shouto’s touch.
“I love you too,” Katsuki says, pushing his goggles up over his hair and pushing back his bangs.
He’s still catching his breath. But he has to make sure Shouto knows. He’s overwhelmed by how much he feels it. With what Shouto said.
He pulls himself up onto the ledge and Shouto swims over and stares up at him.
He runs his hands through Shouto’s wet hair. “Love you so much. Thank you for doing all this with me...even though I’m a human.”
“You are, but...you’re like water to me," Shouto says, and Katsuki understands.