Chapter Text
Katsuki woke up in the middle of nowhere with the taste of copper in his mouth and a sharp sting behind his eyes.
The sky above was too bright, the ground too soft. Slimes sang in the distance, their strange calls bouncing off cliffs he could barely locate in his haze. He blinked slowly, trying to catalog the sensations: pressure behind his eyes, the dull ache in his spine, the burn in his lungs. He sat up, and the world tilted sideways. His arms ached. His head buzzed like someone had left the comms unit on with the volume turned low.
A man sat a few feet away, tall frame. Dark hair. Red eyes cracked at the edges. He sat cross-legged beside a steaming kettle balanced on a makeshift fire pit. The scent of honey, mint, and something darker—something metallic—drifted through the air.
"You made it through," the man said, voice low and easy. Too easy. "That was the hard part."
Katsuki didn’t answer. His mouth felt dry. His tongue, heavy.
He watched the flames dance under the kettle until his mind caught up to his body. A name floated up, thick with recognition and dread.
"Kirishima," he said slowly. "What did you do to me?"
Kirishima smiled like it was an old joke. "Saved you. You were breaking. I stopped it."
The ranch sat on the edge of the Indigo Quarry cliffs, where the sea crashed far below and the phosphor slimes never needed a net. It was beautiful. The safehouse he assumed he was staying in was nestled between the jagged cliffs and the sea, half-buried in rock and shielded by thick vines. From the outside, it looked abandoned. Inside, it was anything but.
Clean, quiet, curated.
Purple plorts littered the ceiling entrapped in the overgrown vines that are too stubborn to remove.
His gear—tactical vest, old boots, goggles—was cleaned and folded with military precision at the end of a freshly made bed. The cupboards were stocked with his preferred rations. There was even an old cassette player sitting on the shelf, already loaded with a familiar song. One he didn’t remember sharing with anyone.
He'd been sent to kill Kirishima. That part he remembered. A contract tied to a long string of hits, one target too slippery to stay still. A mistake somewhere along the way—a moment of hesitation, a whisper too well-placed—and the mission had turned inside out.
Now he couldn't tell where the orders ended and the obedience began.
At night, he lay in bed and couldn’t move. Kirishima’s voice filled the space behind his eyes. "You don’t want to leave. You’re safer here. You’re yourself here." he whispered.
Mind control wasn’t always dramatic. No shackles, no glowing eyes. Sometimes it wore the face of someone who made your tea just the way you liked it. Who wrapped their manipulation in care and silk. Who made captivity feel like safety.
He wasn’t chained.
But he might as well have been.
Every time he tried to leave, his body locked up. Like gravity increased in the wrong direction. Like something inside him snapped taut. And always, always—Kirishima was there, holding a teacup, voice too gentle.
“It’s not safe out there,” Kirishima said once.
“It’s not safe in here,” Katsuki snapped back.
He found a tally mark carved under the table one morning. Then another, behind the mirror. He didn’t remember making them.
He started carving new ones—every day he remembered who he was. Every day he didn’t let the voice win. He found loose brown plorts with long black stripes, easy to hide, and easy to not get caught with as he scratched away at the walls. Desperate to find a way out– to remember who he is.
The days blurred. Katsuki scraped tally marks into the underside of the table with a plort shard. He talked to the slimes when Kirishima wasn’t watching. The ones just small enough to crawl through the cracks. The ones he hid under the bed. The terrified blue one with a pink blush that he used every drop of water he could find to save. He named it blue.
He listened to the strange old radio he found beneath a panel under the bed.
The same song looped again and again:
“…so if all my love is really gone… and I’m just dust to be buried on…”
He didn’t cry.
But he stopped sleeping through the night.
Meanwhile, across the Range, Hitoshi had begun to search.
He’d known something was wrong when Katsuki didn’t report in. When weeks turned to months. When the trail went cold and Kirishima disappeared.
He followed every whisper. Dug through abandoned terminals, bribed smugglers, hacked location data until finally—he reached the Far Far Range.
He asked around quietly. Took up temporary contracts. Spoke to Bea. Then Mochi.
And then one day, they pointed to the edge of the property and said, “He came from that direction. Collapsed right there.”
Hitoshi looked at the field and whispered, "Hold on."
Katsuki' first escape had been a fluke. The second, intentional.
He kept Kirishima’s words in his head, not as truth but as warnings. They helped him survive.
When he finally left, he left everything behind except a bag. He struggled, but he made it work. At 2 in the morning he made a makeshift container and urged Blue to get inside. It was a tight fit but she smiled nonetheless. Honey hopped in after, he managed to cram food and Katsukis favorite tea without anyone noticing.
He nearly died getting away.
But he made it. For them. For himself. He met Bea by accident.
He’d finally gotten far enough to collapse outside her greenhouse, half-starved, soaked in sweat, shaking.
She didn’t ask questions.
Just offered him a cup of heart radish soup and wrapped a warm blanket around his shoulders.
“You’re from Quarry Point, aren’t you?” she asked gently. “People talk.”
“I’m not his,” Katsuki muttered.
“I didn’t say you were.”
He woke up in a room full of quiet. Bea's ranch smelled like tomatoes and warm dust and sunlight. No silence pressing against his skull. No command behind his thoughts.
Just life.
Bea took him in. Mochi kept him grounded.
The three of them became… something.
Bea taught him how to tend the slime pens again, how to garden, how to let his hands find calm in the dirt. She helped him make a pond for Blue, and showed him how to bring in and care for new slimes. He found a golden one that was terrified, he took him in just as he had the others, he lived in the house, happy, content.
Mochi taught him how to repair old drones and break into data-locked terminals when the market glitched. She taught him how to use her quicksilver farm, even giving him a discount for his work.
And between the two of them, he started sleeping again.
Somewhere in all that, Bea and Mochi started dancing around each other too.
It was subtle. A shoulder bump here. A glance that lasted just a breath longer than necessary. The way Mochi rolled her eyes at Bea’s dumb jokes, even as she smiled behind her hand.
Katsuki caught it, eventually.
“You two gonna kiss or should I get the honey slimes to do it for you?”
Bea flushed. “Katsuki!”
Mochi blinked. “Okay, ew.”
Then she smirked.
“…but maybe.”
They didn’t ask what Kirishima had done.
Not in detail.
They didn’t need to.
Katsuki remembered the key things—words spoken like triggers, tea laced with buzz wax, affection turned into control. He remembered trying to leave, and his legs locking like someone else owned them.
“You’re not broken,” Bea said once, as they planted mint mangos side by side.
“You’re not a victim,” Mochi added, watching him test a new radio frequency.
“You’re you,” Bea finished softly.
And he believed them.
The last time he saw Kirishima, he was standing on the edge of the cliffs.
Katsuki didn’t threaten him. Didn’t scream. He just stood there in silence, the sea roaring far below.
“You’ll regret leaving,” Kirishima said.
“I already regret staying,” Katsuki replied.
A long pause.
“I loved you,” Kirishima said.
Katsuki shook his head. “You loved the idea of me. The version that didn’t fight back.”
Then he turned and left. This time, his legs obeyed him.
The return to Bea’s ranch was quieter. No grand speeches. No questions. Just warm food, and three hammocks strung side by side under the stars. He sat on the porch that night, the old cassette player in his lap. He hit play.
A soft voice sang:
“…I’ve been looking for someone to carry all this love…”
Bea settled beside him, Mochi close on her other side. No one said anything.
The stars were too beautiful to interrupt.
And one day, Hitoshi found him. Desperate. When he couldn't find him he ran back to the helpful rancher's home, bag filled with gold plorts and tears in his eyes.
“Please. Please, you have to help me find him. He’s-” He breathes shakily. “I can't live without him” He held the bag like an offering, covered in dirt and moss, but Bea didn't take them. She stared for a second, a warm smile plastered on her face.
Katsuki was in the garden, tending to the mint mango trees, his hands dirty and steady. When he turned and saw him—really saw him—he froze. Bea pointed to the garden where he stood, sunset falling over the cliffs. He was glowing. One slime attached to his shoulder with a faint smile, and another resting in his watering tin.
“You came,” Katsuki breathed.
Hitoshi didn’t smile. Not yet. He just stepped forward and said, “I wasn’t going to stop.” He dropped the bag at the door
They didn’t hug.
But later, in the quiet of the night, Katsuki sat beside him on the porch.
“Still hear his voice sometimes,” the blonde admitted. “Still wake up thinking I’m not free.”
“You are,” Hitoshi said gently. “And I’ll keep reminding you. As long as you want me to.”
Katsuki looked at him.
“I’m scared of being loved for the wrong reasons,” he said.
“I’m not Kirishima,” Hitoshi said softly.
“I know.”
“I don’t want a version of you. I want you.”
Katsuki didn’t answer right away.
But he didn’t pull away when Hitoshi reached for his hand.
Some nights, the dreams still came. But now when they did, he woke to a warm presence beside him. Not silk, not poison in tea—just a steady heartbeat. Just Hitoshi’s hand in his.
They talked long into the night. About the jobs they’d done. The people they couldn’t save. The lives they wanted to live now.
Hitoshi built him a workbench under the stars.
Katsuki carved another tally—not of survival, but of freedom.
They kissed once, quietly, beneath the phosphor tree when the sky was full of meteor trails. It was nothing like the control and intensity of before. It was careful. Chosen.
And when Hitoshi whispered, “I love you,” it didn’t feel like a trap.
Katsuki breathed in deep.
And answered, “I know. This time, I believe it.”
Later, Katsuki dozed in the hammock, Bea and Mochi curled up together nearby. He caught them holding hands in their sleep, fingers tangled, breathing in sync.
He smiled for real—for the first time in months.
Healing didn’t happen overnight.
But out on the Far, Far Range, with Bea’s steady heart and Mochi’s razor-sharp wit, he learned how to live again. No brainwashing. No illusions.
Just real people. Real slimes. Real sunrises.
Real love.
Chapter 2: the aftermath
Chapter Text
The porch light clicked on automatically as the sun dipped behind the Indigo Quarry cliffs, washing the range in soft lavender hues. The air buzzed with the low hum of distant drones and the sleepy chirps of slimes curling up in their pens.
Katsuki sat alone on the front steps, fingers wrapped around a chipped mug that read "Hands Off My Plorts."
He didn’t mind the quiet anymore.
Bea stepped out, her hair loose from its usual tie, casting shadows across her face. She sat beside him without a word, tucking a blanket over both their shoulders. A second later, the door creaked open again.
Mochi appeared, holding three mugs of cider. “I swear, if I find another puddle slime in the greenhouse tank—”
“Is Blue causing issues again? I swear to god she said she was only bringing one friend over and suddenly there's 40 of em.” Katsuki laughed.
Bea cut her off with a sleepy smile. “Come sit. No puddle slimes tonight.”
Mochi sighed dramatically and sat. “That’s what you said last time. Then one turned up in my shower.”
Katsuki snorted. “Probably smarter than you.”
Mochi smacked his arm. “You wish.”
They settled into silence, shoulder to shoulder, warm despite the breeze. The stars above were sharp and bright, constellations Katsuki hadn’t known a year ago now as familiar as old scars.
“You ever think we’d end up here?” Bea asked quietly.
“Not even once,” Katsuki murmured.
Mochi leaned back, gazing upward. “I used to think peace was boring. Now I hoard it like a rare plort.”
Katsuki chuckled. “You still hoard actual rare plorts, too.”
“Old habits die hard.”
They sat like that until the sky turned navy and the fire slimes glowed like distant lanterns in the valley.
The next morning brought chaos, as usual.
Mochi burst into the kitchen, covered in soot and half-melted snow. “Bea! The snowball machine backfired!”
Bea blinked. “We don’t have a snowball machine.”
“Well we do now, and it hates me.”
Katsuki, still half-asleep at the counter, sipped his coffee. “That's because you tried to power it with boom plorts, didn’t you?”
“…Maybe.”
Bea groaned. “I leave you two alone for one morning—”
“Technically, I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You never do.”
“I’m glad we all agree,” Mochi said, stealing Bea’s toast with a triumphant grin.
Later that week, Bea caught Katsuki staring at the garden again.
He was kneeling by the phase lemon tree, fingers buried in the dirt, his brow creased.
“You okay?” she asked, kneeling beside him.
He didn’t look up right away. Then: “I still think about it. The safehouse. Kirishima. The way I lost myself.”
Bea didn’t rush to answer.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “But you’re not lost anymore.”
He looked at her then. Really looked.
“I wouldn’t be here without you.”
“You would’ve found your way,” she said. “Eventually.”
He didn’t argue. But he reached over and squeezed her hand.
She squeezed back.
One evening, Katsuki walked in to find Bea and Mochi tangled on the couch, asleep under a heap of blankets and a very smug tabby slime.
He hesitated in the doorway.
Mochi stirred. “You gonna stand there like a dope or join us?”
He stepped over, carefully sliding into the crook of the couch’s bend.
Bea, still half-asleep, reached for his arm.
And Katsuki let her. He rested easy despite knowing Hitoshi was off to bring life to the world, he hopes he brings back more phase slimes, they understand Katsuki.
That winter, a storm rolled over the Far Far Range—colder than any they'd had in years.
They stayed indoors for three straight days, playing cards, arguing over recipes, and building an ill-advised snow fort inside the main barn.
On the third night, as thunder rolled over the cliffs, Katsuki found himself curled on a pile of sleeping bags between them.
“You’re warm,” Mochi mumbled.
“You’re clingy,” Katsuki replied.
Bea laughed softly in the dark. “Both of you hush. We made it through worse. This storm’s nothing.”
But Katsuki knew what she meant.
They had made it through worse. And they’d done it together.
Outside, the storm howled, Inside, the porchlight flickered once.
Then glowed steadily on.
(Previous comment deleted.)
Kkelly3398 on Chapter 1 Thu 03 Jul 2025 10:24AM UTC
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