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i. inventory
Katsuki has a system.
He has always had a system — for everything, for training splits and patrol routes and the precise angle at which to hold his gauntlet to maximize directional force — so it should not surprise anyone, least of all himself, that he has a system for this.
It's a fairly simple system consisting of a singular bold lined instruction. Do not look.
Or rather, look first, remember, file it away somewhere behind his sternum where it burns low and manageable, and then he does not look again. Not directly, or in ways that would give the cameras or Izuku himself anything to work with.
The system has held for a really long time of whatever this is between them — this thing that started with a some sort of fight on a rooftop at two in the morning and ended with Izuku's hands fisted in Katsuki's shirt and Katsuki's mouth saying fine, fine, come here then like a man surrendering another war but this he'd already lost.
The transition happens the way most important things in your happen, not all at once and not always with ceremony but in increments so small you only understand what changed when you are standing far enough from the beginning to see the whole distance.
One day they are in a recovery hallway, sitting on the floor, Izuku asleep against Katsuki's shoulder with his curls doing their unconscionable thing, and Katsuki is awake in the blue-gray quiet thinking oh, so this is what it is. And then, without any clear delineation, without a single moment that announces itself as the border crossing, they are pro heroes — actual pro heroes, licensed and assigned and responsible for a district of Tokyo that does not know how lucky it is — and Katsuki is standing on a rooftop at seven in the morning watching Izuku Midoriya launch himself off a building with the full force of One For All crackling green-white up his arms, and the thought is the same one, wearing different clothes: oh. So this is what it is. So this is what it keeps being.
It is, specifically, Izuku being extraordinary.
Which he is. Which he keeps being. Which Katsuki has known in the abstract for years and is only now, with the particular clarity that comes from loving someone and watching them work, understanding in the specific.
Here is the specific:
Izuku Midoriya is, objectively, with or qithout a quirk, frighteningly good at this.
It is deeply unfair how good he is.
Katsuki is aware that thinking it is deeply unfair how good he is about his boyfriend while watching said boyfriend work is perhaps not the most romantic internal monologue ever recorded, but he has made his peace with the fact that his romantic internal monologue is never going to sound like a greeting card. It is going to sound like this: like the specific aggravation of caring about someone you cannot beat cleanly yet wish to yet have stopped wanting to, like watching the person you love do the thing they were made for and feeling it in the place behind the sternum where the feelings you cannot name accumulate.
The thing about loving Izuku Midoriya in pro hero life is that there is always more of him to love.
This sounds like it should be a good thing and it is — it absolutely is, Katsuki is not complaining, he is making an observation — but it is also an ongoing logistical challenge for someone who had assumed, perhaps naively, that loving someone was a project with an endpoint, a defined scope, a moment at which you had learned the person sufficiently and the learning stabilized. He had assumed he would reach a point of equilibrium. He had not. Izuku keeps expanding into new dimensions and Katsuki keeps having to expand accordingly, keeps finding new rooms in himself to put the new things he discovers about Izuku, and the rooms keep being there, which is its own kind of revelation, that he contains this much space, that there is no wall.
There is the version of Izuku he already knew: the one who cries at news segments about heroes doing small good things, the one who keeps notes on every person he has ever fought both with and against, the one who apologizes to furniture he walks into. These are the known quantities, the ones Katsuki has had for years, worn smooth in his mind from handling.
Then there are the pro hero additions.
There is the Izuku who takes briefings with a level of attention that makes everyone else in the room look slightly asleep by comparison, who asks questions that reframe the entire situation, who has a memory like a geological record and can produce, from apparently nowhere, a relevant detail from a case file he read fourteen months ago that turns out to be the most important thing anyone says all morning. Katsuki has watched multiple senior heroes look quietly startled by this. Katsuki watches it every time with the expression of someone who is aggressively unsurprised and is only controlling his face by virtue of years of practice.
There is the Izuku who is, against all previous evidence of his social anxiety, genuinely beloved by the public in a way that seems to perplex him on a personal level. Who stops for every child who recognizes him — and they always recognize him, they always spot the green hair and the freckles even under the mask when the mask slips — and crouches down to their level and listens to whatever they need to say with the full force of his attention, which is considerable, which lands like sunlight. Katsuki has stood six feet away and watched seven-year-olds describe their own quirks to Izuku in exhaustive detail and watched Izuku respond with a specific thoughtfulness that is clearly making those children feel, possibly for the first time, that their quirk is interesting, that they are interesting, that the world contains someone who thinks so. He does not say this to Izuku. He cannot say this to Izuku without his voice doing the thing it does. He files it in one of the rooms.
There is the Izuku who, in the field, makes decisions so fast and so correctly that Katsuki — Katsuki, who is fast, who has always been fast, who has operated at a pace that leaves most people behind — occasionally finds himself catching up. Just occasionally. Rarely. Twice, maybe three times, in situations of such compressed emergency that normal calibration breaks down. Twice or three times Izuku has already moved while Katsuki was still moving, has already covered the distance, has already made the call, and Katsuki has arrived a half-second behind thinking: yes. Right. Obviously. Not losing. Not even competition. It's recognition now. The specific recognition of watching someone else's mind work and finding it beautiful.
He has told Izuku none of this. He has communicated it primarily through the medium of showing up and kissing him and working well with him, through the shorthand that has developed between them in the field, the wordless coordination that their agency's director called — in a briefing, in front of everyone, without any apparent awareness of what she was doing to Katsuki's composure — almost unsettling to observe. She had meant it professionally. Katsuki had stood very still and thought about the roof of the agency's building, where he had stood at seven in the morning watching Izuku launch himself off a ledge, and had decided that unsettling was not the word he would use.
Inevitable was the word he would use. Obvious. Long overdue. The only logical conclusion of the data.
He tells Izuku some of it, eventually, in the incremental way that he tells Izuku most things — once again it's not all at once, he hates speeches, so it's distributed across the ordinary moments that pro hero life turns out to be mostly made of, the in-between times that he had not expected to be the texture of loving someone but are.
He tells him some of it on a Tuesday evening in their apartment — their apartment, which is still a fact Katsuki turns over sometimes with careful attention of someone who cannot believe the weight of a thing — when Izuku falls asleep on the couch reading case files, head tipped back, mouth slightly open, one hand still holding a highlighter like he means to use it any moment. Katsuki sits in the armchair across from him and watches him sleep for longer than is strictly sane. The case files are spread across Izuku's chest, rising and falling. The lamp makes his skin warm. He looks so young, like this, in sleep, like the war never touched him — and then Katsuki's eyes find the scar on his shoulder, visible above the neckline of his shirt, the question-mark curve of it, and the war is there too, present and incorporated, part of the same person, and Katsuki loves both of them, the young sleeping face and the scar, with equal and undifferentiated helplessness.
He reaches over and takes the highlighter out of his hand before it rolls onto the floor.
Izuku stirs, doesn't wake. His hand closes on empty air and then relaxes.
Katsuki sets the highlighter on the table and does not move for a moment.
Forever, he thinks. The word arrives completely formed, calm, not a surprise, the kind of thought that has been approaching for a long time and has simply finally arrived. I want this for a very long time. I want the Tuesday evenings with the case files and the mission rooftops and the seven AM launches and every new room that keeps appearing. I want all of it. I want to be the person who knows everything about you and keeps learning.
He has survived a war. He has climbed to the second rank. He has walked through fire and built himself back from it and become, very gradually, someone he would not be embarrassed to be.
He had not known, doing all of that, that the destination was this. A couch. A warm lamp. A person sleeping with their hand open and relaxed and trusting, in a room that belongs to both of them.
He had not known. He cannot believe, sometimes, that he gets to know.
He tells Izuku some of it later that night when Izuku wakes up disoriented from the couch and blinks at him with sleep-thick eyes and says "how long was I out" and Katsuki says "a while" and Izuku says "you should have woken me" and Katsuki says "you needed it" and Izuku looks at him with that look — the one that has too much in it, the one that has become Katsuki's favorite thing to receive and also the thing he is least able to handle at full strength — and Katsuki says, looking somewhere past his left ear:
"You're very good at this. Being a hero. It's— " a pause, a recalibration, a quiet war between what he means and his ability to say it, "— who you are. I watch you work and I think that yeah. I think, obviously. Like there was never any other option."
Silence.
Then Izuku, very softly: "Kacchan."
"Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it—"
"You're making the face."
"What face—"
"The face that does the thing to my—" Katsuki stops. Closes his mouth. Opens it again. "I'm going to make tea."
He stands up. He goes to the kitchen. He makes tea with his back turned and his jaw tight, and from the couch Izuku says, quiet and warm and full of everything, "I watch you too, but you already know. I think the same thing, but you already know."
Katsuki keeps his back turned. He does know. It's the one thing he knew at some point.
His hands are doing the thing — the shaking-adjacent thing, the not-quite-trembling that happens when a feeling is too large for his body and he is trying to keep it contained — and he holds the mug and breathes, and thinks: obviously. Obviously he does. Why is this still surprising. Why does it keep being the size of the sky every time.
"I know," he says. It comes out quiet.
From the couch, the soft sound of Izuku smiling. Katsuki cannot see it from here. He does not need to. He has it memorized.
Later they were on the balcony, both wrapped in the same too-large blanket that Izuku bought because he has no spatial reasoning when it comes to soft furnishings and therefore buys everything three sizes too big, which Katsuki had complained about for two weeks and now considers one of the great good decisions of Izuku's life. The city is doing its nighttime thing below them — all light and motion and the deep background hum of ten million people living — and Izuku is leaning against Katsuki's shoulder in the way he does, with his full weight, trustingly, like Katsuki is a structure that he has assessed and found reliable, and Katsuki has his chin tipped up against the top of Izuku's head and is looking at the city thinking: I want this for so long. I want this until it is not possible to want it anymore and then I want more.
"What are you thinking about," Izuku asks. Sleepy. Curious.
Katsuki does not think about lying anymore. He does not think about deflecting the way he did when they were newly in love. He thinks about the doorframe and the blue-gray hallway and the years of careful avoidance of the thing that was always there, and he thinks: no. Not anymore. You don't get to be a coward about this one.
"You," he says.
A pause.
"Yeah?" Izuku says, and his voice is doing the warm thing, the helpless fond thing.
"Don't make it weird," Katsuki says, automatically.
"I'm not making it weird." Izuku tilts his head up to look at him. Close. Warm. That face. That face, doing all of its things with no apparent concern for what it costs Katsuki. "I'm just — " he pauses, and his eyes are very green in the city light, very bright, impossibly clear, and Katsuki looks back because he has decided, firmly and recently, that he will not look away from this anymore. He has run out of reasons to. "I want this thing for a long time," Izuku says, quietly, which is Katsuki's thought exactly, which is somehow not surprising, which is somehow the most natural sentence anyone has ever said. "Like — a very long time. Is that."
"Yeah," Katsuki says. He doesn't let him finish.
Izuku looks at him.
Katsuki looks back.
"Yeah," he says again, and it means: yes, I know, I want the same thing, obviously I want the same thing, I have wanted it since before I had the word for it, I want Tuesday evenings and mission rooftops and your hand closed around nothing in your sleep, I want every new room, I want the whole impossible expanding architecture of you, I want the question-mark scar and the too-large blanket and the face that does the thing to my chest, I want all of it, all of it, in whatever arrangement the future turns out to make available — I want forever, if forever is an option, and I am aware that I have never been the kind of person anyone would have predicted to say that, and I am saying it anyway, here, tonight, on this balcony, with my chin on your head and the whole city below us like it's showing off.
He doesn't say all of it.
He says yeah, and Izuku had understood every word.
He always had. It's all a part of the system that continues to hold tonight, in the marble lobby of the Hero Gala, while Izuku Midoriya crosses the room toward him in a suit that's — woah.
Black. Slim. Double-breasted, which Katsuki has opinions about architecturally but none at all in practice, because the practice is Izuku's shoulders filling out the lapels like they were sewn directly onto him, like there was some tailor in this world somewhere understood that this man's body is a specific one-of-a-kind and dressed it accordingly. White pocket square. No tie — the top button undone, which is Izuku's one gesture toward informality, his single concession to the fact that he runs hot, that he is always, constitutionally, too much.
Katsuki looks. Files it. Looks away.
"You're wearing the grey one," Izuku says when he reaches him, and his voice has that particular warmth it gets when he's pleased about something, soft at the edges.
"Obviously." Katsuki hands him a glass of something sparkling. "I hope you like it."
"You know I do Kacchan." Izuku takes the glass, and his fingers brush Katsuki's wrist, which is not an accident. It has never been an accident for at least two and a half of the three years. "I just love the grey one."
Katsuki knows why Izuku loves the grey one. The grey one is charcoal, almost black, and it has peaked lapels that Katsuki's tailor spent forty minutes arguing him into, and it fits just like how all his other expensive fabric fits — not tightly, kind of perfectly like it knows where he ends and intends to honor the boundary. He knows why Izuku likes it the same way he knows why he likes the double-breasted black: because there is a pattern to how they dress each other, even from across rooms.
Because they are always, somehow, dressing for each other.
ii. the gala
The event is the usual parade.
Katsuki moves through it on autopilot — champagne, handshakes, the careful calibration of how much of his personality to deploy and in which direction. He is good at this now in a way he was catastrophically bad at it at twenty-two, and he accepts the compliment of his own improvement without sentiment.
He watches Izuku work the room.
This is the other part of the system, the part he would never articulate, he always knows where Izuku is. At first it was surveillance, in the early years of their whirlwind of a relationship it was possession (he's still not a very big fan of Todoroki Shouto and his wandering hands) — but now it's mostly orientation. Katsuki is a compass and Izuku his his north, cutting through the air to illustrate a point, and the jacket shifts across his back with the motion, the fabric breathing.
Katsuki thinks about the way that jacket will come off later.
He has thought about it since Izuku walked in. This is the real system, if he's honest — not don't look but look carefully enough that you can close your eyes and see it gone. The single button at the front. The shrug of the shoulders. The way Izuku always, always does it himself unless Katsuki is there to do it for him because then he just waits in the room, and when Katsuki is there he goes still in a specific way, patient in a way he is not patient about anything else in the world.
Izuku catches his eye from across the room.
Holds it for three seconds — which is one second past casual and two seconds into something else entirely — and then turns back to Uraraka.
Katsuki drinks his champagne.
iii. patience
They make it two hours before Izuku finds him at the edge of the terrace.
The night air is cool. The city is beautiful below them, a hundred thousand lights, and Izuku comes to stand beside him and says nothing for a moment, which Katsuki has learned is its own kind of language.
"Ready?" Izuku asks eventually.
"I've been ready for an hour and a half."
"Liar." But he's smiling. "You were talking to Hawks for forty minutes."
"Business."
"You were laughing."
"He must've said something stupid." Katsuki sets his glass down on the stone railing. "Home, my love?"
They are doing this. They take a car — Izuku's driver, because Katsuki never learned to maintain patience for anything that moves slower than he can — and in the backseat Izuku's knee is pressed against his and neither of them moves away. The city slides past the windows. Izuku's head tips back against the seat, and Katsuki can see the line of his throat illuminated with different colours as cars with headlights on cross them at different angles, above the white of his collar, the single undone button an aperture, an opening.
He maps it with his eyes. Files it away. Patient, he tells himself, which is not a word that has ever come naturally but which he has learned, with Izuku, to mean something different than it used to.
Patient used to mean waiting for something you want.
But now it means wanting slowly, on purpose, because the wanting is also the thing.
iv. threshold
The apartment is theirs together — two places that became one place over eighteen months of slow gravitational collapse, Izuku's books migrating shelf by shelf, Katsuki's kitchen taking over the entire kitchen because Izuku surrendered that territory cheerfully and immediately. It smells like them. It is the specific temperature they both like, which required three weeks of negotiation.
Izuku toes off his shoes in the entryway.
And this — this — is where Katsuki's system breaks entirely and he has long since stopped pretending otherwise.
Because Izuku in socked feet is somehow more than Izuku at the gala. Because the incrementalism of it — shoes, then this, then that, then the next thing — is a kind of narrative that Katsuki has never been able to experience without his whole chest doing something embarrassing. Izuku reaches up to loosen the pocket square, tucks it on the entry table, runs a hand through his hair where the product has started to yield, and Katsuki is watching him the way he loves to watch him, without the buffer of a wine glass or a conversation happening somewhere to the left.
Izuku turns and catches him at it and smiles. His eyes crinkle more now than they did at twenty-two.
He doesn't say anything. He just—
Looks back.
And Katsuki thinks to himself again we have been doing this to each other our entire lives. The looking. The seeing. The particular weight of being known by someone who started knowing you when you were both too young to understand what they were inbetween. Izuku has an inventory of him that goes back twenty years, and Katsuki has one of Izuku, and sometimes he feels the size of it like a physical thing, like something that takes up room.
"Come here," Katsuki says.
v. the button
He starts with the jacket.
This is also a system — his system, not the not-looking one but the one he operates here, in this specific geography — and it begins with the jacket because the jacket is armor and armor comes off first, or at least it should.
Izuku turns for him. Stands with his back to Katsuki, patient in that Izuku kind of way, and Katsuki finds the collar first with his hands, smooths it down over Izuku's shoulders, feels the fabric shift. The jacket is the good wool — soft, not scratchy, the kind that has weight but it's light— and it gives under his palms as he eases it back, down Izuku's arms, off.
He hangs it on the back of the chair by the window.
He has a thing about suits being hung properly. Izuku finds this endearing in a way that Katsuki has examined too closely.
When he turns back, Izuku is already facing him. White shirt. That single open button. The pocket square gone, so it's just the line of his clavicle, barely visible, an edge of geometry.
Katsuki reaches up.
The second button — his to undo now, claimed by proximity and by all the accumulated months of this — gives easily. Izuku is watching his face, not his hands. This is a habit of Izuku's that used to make Katsuki feel exposed and now makes him feel something warmer and harder to categorize, something in the neighborhood of chosen.
"The grey one really is good on you," Izuku says quietly.
"Mhm."
"I love you."
"Mm. Me too."
"Kacchan—hurry."
Katsuki undoes the third button. The shirt falls open another increment, and he can see the scar now, the one that bisects Izuku's sternum slightly to the left, pale and long and three years old. Katsuki was there when he got it. He was the one who—
He flattens his palm over it.
Izuku's breath goes somewhere.
"Hi," Izuku says, very quietly.
"Hi," Katsuki says, which is not a word he uses, generally, except here.
vi. the grey one
Izuku's hands find his lapels.
Not pulling — Izuku rarely pulls, that's not his grammar, his grammar is gathering and holding, reaching and holding on, the way he takes things and keeps them. He gathers the lapels of the grey jacket and pushes it back off Katsuki's shoulders, and Katsuki lets him, which is also a word in the language they have constructed, letting, which for Katsuki has always been the hardest conjugation.
The jacket goes over the same chair.
Izuku looks at him in his dress shirt and vest — because Katsuki wears a vest, because he likes the layering, the structure, likes that there are more things to take off — and his expression does the thing it does, the thing that Katsuki has never successfully described to himself except as Izuku, but concentrated.
"The vest," Izuku says. "I like it."
Izuku's fingers find the buttons. "I like— there's more of you. To get to."
"That's incredibly sappy, my love." he says.
"I know." Izuku undoes the vest, slow, watching his own hands now, and Katsuki watches Izuku watching. The lamplight does something specific to Izuku's eyelashes, to the green of his eyes when he glances up. "I've been thinking about this since the lobby."
"The lobby."
"When you handed me the glass. Your hands."
Katsuki thinks about what to do with this piece of information — files it, as he files everything, in the place behind his sternum, where it joins the rest of the archive — and says nothing, because sometimes the right response is to not speak, to let the weight of a thing settle.
Izuku pushes the vest off his shoulders.
Hangs it on the chair.
vii. an honest inventory
Here is what Katsuki would admit, if there were any court in any jurisdiction that could compel him:
He has been looking at Izuku Midoriya his entire life. The looking predates everything, predates the fall-out and the years of wreckage and the rooftop at two in the morning. It goes back further than he would like and runs deeper than he would prefer and he has spent the better part of two decades trying to figure out what it is, exactly, and the conclusion he has arrived at — the one he arrived at slowly and then with great suddenness, the way you understand a word you've always known in a new way — is that the looking is just how he loves.
That it has always been how he loves.
He learns things by looking at them. He has always been this way — the kid who stared at fire until he understood it, who watched people until he could read them, who turned his own hands over and over until he knew what they could do. He looks at things until they are his, until they are integrated, until the gap between himself and the world narrows to a point.
He has been looking at Izuku for twenty years.
There is no gap.
This is the thing that cracked him open, eventually, on the rooftop, not the obvious things about them, no that much he knew, but the realization that he had already done it. The looking was complete. There was nothing left to learn that would change anything, no revelation that would reorganize the architecture. Izuku was already his in the only sense Katsuki had ever been capable of, and had been for longer than was comfortable to admit.
Fine, he'd said. Come here then.
viii. the slow part
They take their time with the rest of it.
This is Izuku's influence. Left to himself, Katsuki is not particularly slow — he is quick, he is purposeful and efficient, he has never seen the value of deliberate delay. But Izuku has taught him — is still teaching him — the specific pleasure of not yet. The patience that is not really patience but is instead a longer looking, an extended wanting, a full sentence rather than a fragment.
Izuku's shirt comes off last.
Katsuki does the final buttons himself, each one a small specific permission, and folds the shirt over the chair with the rest of it, and then there is just Izuku, lamp-lit and scarred and looking at him with that concentrated expression, and Katsuki runs his hands up the architecture of him—
the scar on his sternum
the old ridge of broken and re-broken knuckles on his left hand
the landscape of him that Katsuki has memorized so many times that it no longer feels like learning, only like returning—
"Kacchan," Izuku says.
The name is a whole sentence. It is always a whole sentence when he says it like this.
"I know," Katsuki says.
He does know.
He knows the way you know certain things you've learnt in childhood that you can't possibly forget. That one and one give two and the way you know the weight of your own hands. Izuku is — Izuku is this. This specific gravity. This specific warmth. This person who has seen every version of Katsuki that has ever existed and has maintained, against all evidence and against Katsuki's own sustained efforts to convince him otherwise, a completely unreasonable faith.
Katsuki pulls him close.
ix. cloth
Later, the suits are draped over the chair in the corner of the bedroom — the grey one and the black one, together, which strikes Katsuki as an image he will not be able to get out of his head for some time.
The formal precision of them. The way they hold their shape even empty. The way they are simply waiting.
Izuku is asleep against his shoulder, one hand spread on Katsuki's chest and he is finally entirely at rest, and Katsuki is looking at the ceiling with the low-burn feeling he gets sometimes in the aftermath of this — not satisfaction exactly, or not only satisfaction, but something more like rightness. The sense of a word properly used.
He thinks about the lobby again. The double-breasted jacket. The single open button. The way Izuku had walked across the room toward him with the particular confidence of someone who knows he is going somewhere he is wanted.
He thinks about the grey one, about Izuku's hands on the lapels.
There's more of you. To get to.
The unbearable sincerity of it. The way Izuku says things like that without any apparent understanding of what they do, without the self-protective irony that any reasonable person would deploy, just — openly, directly, here is the true thing I am thinking. Katsuki has never been able to decide if it's bravery or obliviousness and has eventually concluded it is neither, that it is simply what Izuku is: a person for whom honesty is structural, load-bearing, not a choice but a constitution.
It is, objectively, a devastating quality in a person.
Katsuki shifts slightly. Izuku makes a sound and tightens his hand without waking.
The suits on the chair continue to hold their shape.
x. the system
In the morning, Izuku will make coffee badly and Katsuki will fix it and they will stand in the kitchen in whatever they slept in — which is not much, because Izuku runs hot and because Katsuki has long since stopped pretending that he doesn't want what he wants — and the domesticity of it will be its own undressing, its own slow revelation, the way ordinary mornings with this specific person are somehow always more than they should be by any sensible accounting.
And Katsuki will look at him over the rim of a coffee cup, just look, directly, without the gala buffer, without the system — and Izuku will look back.
And it will be enough.
It has always been enough.
That's what he's figured out, in thriteen years and eighteen months of slow gravitational collapse and all the years before that: it is always, impossibly, more than enough. The looking. The being looked at. The grammar of cloth and patience and permission. The way Izuku says his name like it means something.
The way he let it mean something, finally.
The way he let Izuku in.
Katsuki Bakugo is, at thirty-one, number two hero, half-owner of one apartment, and entirely owned by one person. He has made his peace with this. He has made his peace with this so thoroughly that it no longer feels like peace but like weather, like atmosphere, like the simple fact of what is true.
He has an inventory.
He has been taking it for twenty years.
He is nowhere near finished.
end.