Never Meant To

by V_K_T

Summary:

Seabright Bay is too small to breathe in, and Izuku Midoriya swore he’d never come back. But his mother is sick, so he does — the town, the ocean, and the boy who made it hell all waiting where he left them. Katsuki Bakugou isn’t the golden prodigy anymore, he’s a sun-bleached apology in a surf shop, a storm he never learned to name.

What started at thirteen with salt, a kiss and a cruelty never stopped pulling. Years of silence calcified into hate, regret, and a want neither of them knows how to survive. Now they keep colliding: in doorways and bars, on sandbars and sidewalks, caught between who they were and who they’re terrified to be. Izuku is done drowning. Bakugou is done pretending the tide isn’t his fault.

This is about the love you survive, the apologies that come too late, and the kind of forgiveness that feels like standing in the break and choosing to stay.

 

“Because the truth was, loving Bakugou had never been the problem. It was surviving it.”

 

“You don’t get to call this unfinished, you hear me? You ended it the second you made me wish I was someone else.”

Chapter 1: Prologue I: The One You Drown For

Notes:

Hi, friends. Thank you for being here.

Some of you might be coming from Fly for Me or Blades & Bruises, and some of you are brand-new — just taking a chance on two idiots with too much history and far too many feelings. Wherever you’re from: welcome. I love FFM and B&B with my whole chest, but Never Meant To did something different to me. This story pressed on places I thought had scarred over. It made me cry (more than once), laugh in odd little pockets of tenderness, and left that ache you carry for days because a book won’t let go. If you feel any of that while you read, then we’re already holding the same thread.

This one’s an emotional ride — salt and sting and softness. It’s small town and big feelings. It’s water and weather and the ways people learn to breathe again. Please know going in: the angst is heavy, the past is messy, and the path to light is something we fight for on purpose. I promise I’m reaching for it with both hands.

Never Meant To is about love and forgiveness, grief and anger, regret and self-hate. It’s about the ways we hurt each other, and the harder ways we learn to heal. Writing it has been my most complicated journey yet. I wrote Bakugou with a spine full of regret, and Izuku with wounds that are still raw and furious (he’s soft, yes, but softness can cut when it’s been asked to survive too much) and somehow, through that storm, they keep reaching. For each other, yes. But more than that: for themselves. Because love doesn’t only mean finding someone, it means finding your way back to yourself and learning to carry both truths at once.

What this story learns:

• forgiveness isn’t a straight line, it’s a jagged, looping climb
• healing doesn’t start when pain ends, but when you sit inside it and stay
• the love that shapes you can also break you — and sometimes both at once
• you may have many loves, but only one love of your life

It asks hard questions: Can I forgive without erasing what happened? Can I be loved where I don’t yet love myself? Can the thing that formed me be the thing that almost destroyed me, and still be worth saving?

This story contains sharp language, emotional intimacy, explicit sexual content, and the kind of slow-then-sudden closeness that can terrify and save you in the same breath. It believes in second chances that must be earned, not gifted. It believes that sometimes the bravest thing is staying long enough to listen to the part of you that still wants.

I’m not sugarcoating. This fic will hurt. It will pull teeth. But it will also try to give you something worth holding at the end.

Content guidance (so you can take care of yourself while reading): grief/parental illness, internalized homophobia/shame, complicated family dynamics, anger and arguments, emotional vulnerability. There’s tenderness, too, humor where it sneaks in, friends who won’t let go, and a stubborn, persistent hope. Please mind the tags, take breaks when you need them, and bring tissues. (Truly. Plural.)

Logistics: I won’t give a final chapter count yet — it may still shift in editing. As soon as I have a firm number, I’ll add it. Just know this: there is an ending, and I’ll get us there. I’m aiming for weekly updates, but I reserve the right to adjust if needed — no promises set in stone, only the promise that I’ll keep steering this story home.

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One thing I need to get off my chest:
A very special thank you to my beta (tripwork) — who first walked into this project as an editor and somehow stayed as one of the brightest, most important people in my life. What began as notes in the margins became late-night messages, laughter across time zones, and a friendship I never expected but now can’t imagine being without. You’re more than brilliant eyes on a page, you’re a steady hand, a voice that steadies mine, and the best kind of friend — even from continents apart.

I wouldn’t have made it to shore without you. For that alone, Never Meant To will always carry your fingerprints alongside mine.

---

Okay — that’s enough of me spilling my heart. I don’t think I can capture what I’m feeling in this exact moment any better than this. So I’m going to leave you to it. I hope it hurts where it should, holds you where it can, and reminds you that light is still possible — even here. Even when it’s hard.

See you in the end notes, my lovelies.

Vibes while you read:
🎧 Spotify playlist
📌 Pinterest board

Prologue I: The One You Drown For

 

“And keep my eyes above the waves. 

When oceans rise. 

My soul will rest in your embrace. 

For I am Yours and You are mine.”

Oceans (Where My Feet Fail) — Brett Blondell

 

 

 

You can love many people in a lifetime.

 

Some loves arrive like good weather. They move through your days without clatter, laying themselves down like sunlight across a kitchen table. They are the easy habits — two mugs on the same hook, a hand finding yours without thinking, the comfort of a shared silence that doesn’t demand explanation. They steady you. They soften your edges. If you are lucky, they teach you the kindness of staying.

 

And then there’s the other kind.

 

The kind that doesn’t ask permission. The kind that slams into shore, all surge and drag, and leaves the beach a different shape than before. The kind that gets under your ribs and rewires the room where your heart lives, rearranging furniture you thought was nailed to the floor. It makes a battlefield of your chest. It moves like weather you cannot predict — blue sky one minute, sirens in the distance the next. 

 

It is not gentle. It is not safe. It is not reasonable.

 

It hurts. Not because it is cruel by nature, but because it is vast. Because it refuses to be contained by the small stories you told yourself about what you’d settle for. It blurs borders — between want and need, between devotion and fury, between the person you were and the person you become when their name is in your mouth. It is flame and flood at once: burning from the inside while the tide rises around your throat, daring you to admit how badly you want to breathe.

 

Most people meet many loves. Almost no one meets this one.

 

But if you do, you will know.

 

Because something in you goes quiet the instant you see them. Not the world — no, the world gets louder: keys, laughter, a door closing, the weather — everything heightens around the stillness they make in you. Your pulse learns a new language in a single afternoon. The air tastes like the moment just before a storm breaks.

 

This love is a singular geography. A map that only exists once, even if you spend years pretending you can navigate by other stars. You can try to outrun it. You can cross continents, switch cities, switch names, switch the way you sign your letters. You can fill your days with good things and better people and a calendar so crowded there’s no space left for ghosts. You can build a life that looks solid from the outside — neat corners, clean lines, proof that you did not drown.

 

Some people call it a curse — to carry one person the way a coastline carries the memory of waves. They are not wrong. Curses are only miracles wearing the wrong name.

 

Because here is the quiet, ugly truth: you can love other people well. You can love them fiercely. You can choose them and mean it, lay foundations, paint the walls, call it home. You can grow beside them and be changed by their kindness. You can build a life that deserves to last.

 

And still, there is the one who owns the weather in you.

 

Some loves are meant to last. Some loves are meant to mend.

 

And some loves are meant to remake you — sweep through the house of you and leave it changed, even if all the furniture ends up back in its old place. You can call it ruin if you want. You can call it fate if you need to. You can call it a mistake you refuse to repeat.

 

But when you are honest, when the room is dark and the water is loud and there is no one there to hear you edit yourself, you will call it by its real name.

 

The one you drown for.

 

You will not love anyone the way you love them.

 

And maybe, you were never meant to.

Notes:

Note: I’m uploading Prologue 1 and 2 together since they’re rather short. Don’t worry — the regular chapters that follow are much longer.

Chapter 2: Prologue II: Salt In The Wound

Notes:

Hello again, and welcome to Seabright Bay!

We’re diving straight into the second prologue for a bit more context — since the first one may have felt a little confusing (though I hope you still enjoyed it. God, I’m so proud of that one, lol).

I’ve added some aesthetic for you this time: a glimpse of the small town and the playground that will hold so much of this story.

Enjoy, and I promise — starting with Chapter 1, the usual longer chapters are coming your way. Think of these two prologues as the little appetisers before the main course.

Lots of love,
V_K_T

Prologue II: Salt In The Wound

 

“There's no doubt in my mind that if you could, then you would try

Crack my ribcage open and pull my heart right through.”

Swimming Pool — The Front Bottoms

 

 

 

 

Seabright Bay.

 

A small town carved into the coast, where the sky bleeds gold more often than gray. Narrow streets chalked with salt and sand. Gulls on the power lines like notes on a staff. The sea is only a few blocks away, but the smell of it lives everywhere — worked into the pavement, the classrooms, the frayed edges of textbooks that still cough up grains when you flip to the back. 

 

Seven thousand people on paper. Fewer, somehow, when you count the ones who matter.

 

For Izuku Midoriya, it’s both home and hell.

 

The first place he ever knew. The place that won’t let go. The glass-sided box he can see out of but cannot quite escape, worn by the same tide that keeps polishing what’s already broken.

 

His personal cage.

 

And at the center of that undertow stands the boy who makes it worse.

 

Katsuki Bakugou.

 

Captain of Seabright High’s swim team. Local surf legend. Too smart for his own good and too beautiful to be fair. He walks into a room and the room tips toward him, people slide into his orbit like it’s gravity and not a choice. He’s also the boy who made Izuku’s life smaller starting at thirteen and never stopped.

 

It’s become a routine. A pastime. A game with one rule: don’t make it easy on the nerd.

 

His name tastes like salt and blood in Izuku’s mouth. Chlorine sting in his lungs, sunburn that never fades. It runs hot through his veins, tangled up with hate and humiliation and a stubborn, uglier thread he can’t cut clean.

 

Because for as much as he hates Bakugou — and God, he hates him — Izuku still can’t stop watching.

 

Just like now.

 

Hallway between second and third period. The air tastes like sanitizer and salt. A line of blue-and-white hoodies clusters by the trophy case, laughter moves through them like wind moving through grass. Izuku feels the shift before it happens — pressure in the room, the way a pool goes quiet just before the starter horn. He keeps his eyes forward. He knows better. 

 

He knows Bakugou is a creature of habit.

 

He still looks.

 

A second too long. A small, stupid second.

 

A foot hooks his ankle. The floor rushes up. Skin scrapes, heat blooms in his palms and knees. His notebook skids across the linoleum, pages slapping open, flipping like a deck in a dealer’s hands. His pen wobbles away and taps to a stop against the toe of a sneaker.

 

Laughter breaks over him in small waves — snorts, a whistle, that thin-edged chorus that says this is just another joke he’s not invited to get. Heat gathers behind his eyes. He keeps his head down.

 

Don’t react. Don’t feed it. Don’t make it worse.

 

Bakugou’s friends are all there in the blur — arms slung over shoulders, girls leaning in. Faces he knows from PE, from practice, from the beach. Monoma’s smirk flashes in the corner of his vision. Another guy — dark hair tied back with a headband — hovers nearby, not laughing, not helping. Yosetsu, Izuku thinks, distantly.

 

Then a voice cuts through, softer but sharp enough to be heard.

 

"Can you knock it off, man?"

 

Red hair comes into view. Kirishima.

 

Izuku’s fingers are still reaching for his notebook when a pen appears in his line of sight — the runaway one, held out in a square, open palm. Izuku looks up. Kirishima’s face is all apology that doesn’t quite know where to land.

 

“You good?” he asks, quiet, like kindness might spook.

 

Behind him, Bakugou scoffs. He’s leaned back against the lockers now, bored already, hands sunk in the pocket of his Seabright High Swim Team hoodie like he didn’t set the whole thing in motion. 

 

"Tch. Stop collecting losers, shitty hair. You have a knack for stray cats."

 

Izuku stares between them, throat tight. There’s nothing to say that would matter. He knows the rhythm of this dance too well to pretend it ends here.

 

Bakugou’s gaze finds him again, the lazy cruelty of someone who never has to try. His mouth cuts into a grin.

 

"Stop looking at me like you wanna kiss me, freak."

 

The laughter this time hits bone. A whistle, a chorus of ohhhhs. Monoma’s voice climbs over the rest, delighted.

 

“Bakugou,” Kirishima warns, low. He doesn’t move away, though. He stays between them like a hand closing a door.

 

Izuku swallows the heat clawing up his throat, clamps his teeth on the hurt before it can show. He stacks the last paper, grips the notebook too tight, and stands. He doesn’t trust his voice. He doesn’t trust the shaking in his knees. He doesn’t trust himself not to do something he can’t take back.

 

He leaves. Not a run — he won’t give them that — but faster than a walk, head down, shoulders tight. Slurs follow him down the corridor, aimed with the awful accuracy of practice. 

 

He doesn’t turn to catch the faces they come from. He doesn’t need to. He knows the voices by heart.

 

The corner saves him. He presses his back to cool cinderblock and tips his head against it, eyes closed until the sting burns itself out. He counts his breath. One. Two. Three. Don’t break. Not here.

 

Two more years. That’s the contract he makes with himself. 

 

Two more years of hallways and beaches and small-town collisions. Two years of pretending the hurt is simple. Long enough to get out. Far enough to breathe different air.

 

He tells himself he’ll cut Bakugou out the second he leaves — dig out whatever’s left and leave it bleeding in the sand. He tells himself the ache is only anger, only habit, only the body remembering the first person it learned to fear.

 

But even now, even with humiliation buzzing under his skin, the truth sits where it always has, quiet and stubborn: for all the ways he hates Bakugou — and he does — something else coils beside it. Unwanted. Unkillable. The part of him that has never stopped watching. The part that heard “Stop looking at me like you wanna kiss me” and, for a blink, imagined answering.

 

The thought makes him sick. He breathes through it until the floor steadies.

 

Then he tucks the pen behind his ear, stacks his notebook against his chest, and pushes off the wall. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t give them more story than they already have.

 

He turns the corner and disappears into the noise of Seabright High, carrying the same weight he started the day with and a new bruise blooming under his sleeve. 

 

Two years, he tells himself again.

 

Two years, and then the tide won’t reach him anymore.