Chapter 2: The Announcement
The bed was too soft. That was the first thought Kirishima had, if it could be called a thought. Hospital mattresses were soft so bodies wouldn't develop pressure sores, the nurse had explained, and some distant part of him had filed that away like a student taking notes. Bodies needed care. Bodies needed turning every few hours. Bodies were things that still had to be kept alive.
His shoulder had been cleaned, sewn, dressed. A nurse with gentle hands had cut the ruined suit off him and he hadn't resisted, hadn't helped, had just sat where she put him. The antiseptic stung. He remembered noticing that it stung and being surprised, as if pain was something that happened to other people now.
The room smelled of floor cleaner and nothing else. The late sun came through the blinds in flat stripes and lay across the blanket without warming anything. Somewhere down the corridor a cart rattled, and someone laughed, short and tired, and the sound stopped as if it knew it shouldn't be here.
He had not spoken since the transport. He knew that the way you know the score of a game you stopped watching. A doctor had asked him questions, one after another, checking his pupils, his reflexes, his memory. What's your name. What's the date. What happened today. He had answered the first two. The third one he had looked at until the doctor stopped asking.
His hands lay on the blanket, palms up. They were clean now. Under the nails there was still a dark line the nurses had missed, and he stared at it for a long time, because as long as it was there, the blood was still there, and as long as the blood was there, Denki was still somewhere in the world.
The door had a small window. Once, a face appeared in it, one of his classmates, he couldn't say which through the frosted glass, and a knuckle tapped twice against it. Kirishima didn't turn his head. The face stayed a moment and then went away, and the shape of it stayed on the glass like breath.
On the other side of that door, Bakugo stood with his back against the wall and his arms folded and his jaw set so hard it ached.
He had been there for two hours. Before that, the report to the incident commander, short and clean, exactly the way he'd told Kirishima to give his own and couldn't. Before that, the call he'd made so nobody else would have to. He had said the name once, into the phone, and the voice on the other end had gone silent, and he had hung up before the silence could become something he had to respond to.
A nurse came down the corridor with a tray. She slowed when she saw him.
"You should sit, honey. You've been standing there since your shift ended."
"I'm fine."
"Your friend isn't going anywhere. Neither are you, but you could at least not fall over in my hallway."
He didn't move. She set the tray on the window ledge beside the door and left, and Bakugo looked at the tray, at the little covered cup of soup going cold, and thought, in a flat exhausted corner of his mind, that Kirishima hadn't eaten anything and wouldn't, and that somebody had to eat, and that the body kept going regardless, that was the whole horror of it, the body just kept going.
Aizawa arrived at eight, in a fresh capture weapon and the same tired eyes. He came up the corridor without hurry, saw Bakugo, and stopped a meter away.
"How is he?"
"Alive. Stitched. Hasn't said a word." Bakugo's eyes stayed on the door. "They want to keep him overnight. Observation."
"Good." Aizawa glanced at the window in the door. "The class is assembled in the family room downstairs. They've heard rumors. Three different versions of them." He paused. "Someone has to tell them the truth before the news does. It should be someone who was there."
"You were there."
"I have to speak to the Kaminaris at the morgue in twenty minutes." Aizawa's voice was even, but there was something worn at the edges of it. "I can't be in two rooms. It's better coming from a student anyway. They'll believe a student."
"They'll believe me and then they'll hate me for saying it."
"They won't." Aizawa looked at him for a moment longer. "You don't have to volunteer. But I'm asking."
Bakugo pushed off the wall. His shoulder cracked; he'd been standing in one position so long his body had started to lock. He looked at the door one more time. Through the little window, Kirishima sat exactly as he'd sat two hours ago, palms up on the blanket, staring at the wall as if the wall were going to explain itself.
"Don't let anyone in here," Bakugo said. "He's not ready to be looked at."
He followed Aizawa to the elevator and rode down in silence, and in the mirrored wall of the elevator he saw himself for the first time since the sector. Dust in his hair. Blood on his gauntlet, dried brown, Denki's blood, and he didn't scrub at it, because there was nowhere he could put it where it would mean something different.
The family room was a long space with couches nobody was sitting on. The whole class was there. Sero stood against the wall with his arms hanging. Jiro sat on the arm of a chair with her knees drawn up. Mina was on her feet the moment the door opened, and her face when she saw him alone, without Kirishima, without Denki, started to fall before he said anything at all.
"Where's Denki?" Mina's voice cracked on the name. "Katsuki, where is he? People are saying he got hurt, people are saying he got out okay, which one is it?"
"He's at the morgue."
The words went into the room like something thrown. Sero's hand found the wall behind him. Jiro didn't move at all, and somehow that was worse.
"The van took him at eighteen forty-two. He took a rebar spike through the torso in the east sector. The medics worked on him." Bakugo's voice came out level and brutal, each sentence a fact with nothing hung on it, because if he hung anything on it the whole thing would come down. "There was nothing to work on. He was dead before they arrived. Kirishima was with him the whole time. He held on for eight minutes for the evac and he didn't make it."
"That's not..." Mina shook her head, slow, like a machine failing to start. "Denki's the one who always comes back. He shorted out his brain twice last year and he came back the same afternoon, he always comes back, you're wrong, you have to check, someone has to check."
"They checked." Bakugo's fists were tight at his sides. "Twice."
"Why are you standing there like it's a mission report?" Her voice rose and broke. "He was our friend. He was our friend, Katsuki, say it like it's real!"
The word hit him in the mouth before he could brace for it.
"He was my friend too," Bakugo said, and that was where his voice cracked, one jagged hairline break across the word, gone the next second, and the whole room heard it and would remember it for years. "Which is why I'm telling you instead of lying to you."
Silence took the room. Somewhere in it, Jiro made a sound into her knees that wasn't a word. Mina folded, and Sero caught her. Ashido's crying was loud and Sero's was silent and Bakugo stood in the middle of both and did not look at any of them, because looking at them would have made it true twice.
The clock above the door read 20:16 and Bakugo watched the second hand go around once, twice, because watching it was easier than watching them. Nobody asked him anything else. Sero had slid down the wall to the floor at some point, and Jiro's earphone jacks had coiled shut against her head like something wounded, and Mina's crying had gone quieter and that was worse than the loud part had been.
The door opened behind him. He knew the footsteps before he turned.
Aizawa crossed the room in four strides and stopped close, voice low, pitched under the sound of Ashido's sobbing. "I'm sorry. I had no right to put that on you, and I knew it when I asked. You shouldn't have had to carry that in there."
"It's done." Bakugo's voice came out thin. He cleared his throat and it didn't help. "Somebody had to say it straight."
"You said it straight." Aizawa's eyes went over the blood on the gauntlet, the dust, the rigid set of his shoulders. "Go sit down. That's not a request, it's an order from your teacher. You've been on your feet since the sector."
Bakugo didn't answer. Something in him had started to come apart, slow, like a seam under load, and he could feel the room's grief pressing on it from every side. Mina turned her face toward him, lips parted around another question, and he couldn't. He could not stand in front of one more person who needed something from him tonight.
He shoved past Aizawa's shoulder. Hard enough that the man rocked half a step.
The corridor was bright and empty and he made it maybe ten meters before the door closed behind him and cut off the sound of the room. Then the sound came through it anyway. Mina's voice first, high and broken, screaming his name after him, screaming Denki's name, and Sero shouting something he couldn't make out, and Jiro, Jiro's voice rising over all of it in a wail that had no words in it at all.
The sound followed him down the hall. It got into his ears and lodged there and his legs stopped working about the same moment his lungs did.
There was an alcove with a vending machine and a plastic bench, and he made it as far as the machine before his knees hit the floor. His palms caught him on the tile. He stayed there, on his hands and knees under the fluorescent hum, and the noise that came out of him was nothing like crying, it was low and torn and he clamped his jaw around it and it came through anyway, once, twice, his whole body shaking with the effort of keeping it small.
The blood on his gauntlet was right there in front of his eyes. Denki's blood, dried brown, going nowhere. His fist drew back to hit the tile and he stopped it an inch off the floor and held it there, trembling, because breaking his hands wouldn't fix anything and he'd learned tonight what it cost to be too late.
Someone sat down on the bench. He hadn't heard footsteps, which meant the footsteps had been careful, which meant he already knew.
"Kacchan."
"Go away."
Izuku didn't go away. He stayed on the bench above him, and after a moment he slid down to the floor too, folding his knees up beside Bakugo's, close without touching. He'd been crying already; his eyes were raw and his voice was wrecked, and he didn't try to hide it.
"I heard from the door," Izuku said. "I didn't go in. I couldn't." He swallowed. "Is it true? Please. Is it true?"
Bakugo's fist finally came down on the tile. Once. The slap of it echoed off the vending machine glass, loud in the corridor, and nothing broke except the skin over two knuckles.
"He trusted us to get there in time." His voice was gravel. He didn't look up. "I was two blocks north. Two blocks. I heard Kirishima screaming through the comm dead zone and I ran and I was still eight minutes too slow."
"You got there."
"I got there to watch." The words came faster now, pushed out through his teeth. "Kirishima held him. Kirishima talked to him the whole eight minutes and I wrapped his wounds and he died anyway with his hand on my gauntlet asking if he did good, and I told him he was a good friend, and he died, and I checked the pulse twice because I was hoping. Hoping. Me."
Izuku's breath went ragged. When he spoke it was barely above a whisper. "You were with him. At the end. He wasn't alone, Kacchan. That's not nothing. That's everything, to someone like him."
"He wanted to be a hero everyone could rely on." Bakugo's head hung. The fluorescent light caught the streaks of dust in his hair. "He was. He cleared civilians out before the wall came down. Aizawa told his parents that an hour ago and I wasn't there because I was up one floor watching a wall."
From the family room, muffled now by distance and two sets of doors, the sound of the class came through again. Softer. Still there. Mina's voice had worn itself down to something like chanting, the same phrase over and over, and Bakugo realized with a dull jolt that it was Denki's name.
Izuku heard it too. His hand moved across the floor, slow, deliberate, and came to rest on Bakugo's forearm. Light. Barely there. The kind of touch you could shake off without effort.
Bakugo looked at it. Looked at the small scarred fingers on his sleeve. Every instinct he had said to throw it off, and his shoulder actually started the motion, and then stopped, and settled.
"His mom's at the morgue right now." His voice was almost nothing. "Aizawa's telling her the same thing I told them. And I'm sitting on a floor."
"You told them the truth so they wouldn't get it from the news." Izuku's thumb pressed down, just slightly, a real grip now. "That was the hardest job in that room and you did it. So sit on the floor for a minute. I'll sit with you."
The vending machine hummed. Somewhere down the corridor, an elevator chimed and nobody got out of it. Bakugo's breathing was coming back in pieces, uneven, ugly, but coming back, and he didn't move his arm out from under Izuku's hand.
"If you tell anyone about this," he said, "I'll kill you."
"I know." Izuku wiped his face with his free hand and left it there, over his own eyes. "Kacchan. What do we do about Kirishima?"
Bakugo pushed himself up off the floor. His legs held. He stood there a moment, fists loose at his sides for the first time all night, looking back down the corridor toward the family room, then toward the elevator that went up one floor to a door with a small window in it.
"He's alone up there. Sitting in the dark not talking to anyone." Bakugo turned toward the elevator and pressed the call button with a bleeding knuckle. "Nobody gets left alone tonight. That's the rule now."
Izuku didn't press the elevator button with him. He stayed on the floor, so Bakugo turned back, scowling at that, and after a second he sat down again on the bench instead. His legs decided it for him. The tile was cold through his suit and he let it be cold.
The vending machine light flickered once. Rows of drinks glowed behind the glass, bright colors in neat lines, and he stared at them because they asked nothing from him. His breathing slowed by degrees. In through the nose. Out through the teeth. Izuku sat beside him and looked at the floor and let the silence stay a silence.
The chanting from the family room had faded, or the doors had swallowed it. Just the hum now. Bakugo's knuckles had stopped bleeding and left a dark smear on his knee that he didn't wipe off. There didn't seem to be a point to wiping anything off anymore tonight.
"You're looking at me like I'm about to break," he said finally.
"I'm looking at the floor."
"Liar."
"Yeah." Izuku's voice was hoarse. "A little."
Bakugo huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. His head tipped back against the wall between the machine and the bench, and the ceiling tiles up close had a water stain shaped like nothing, and he looked at that too. His hands uncurled on his knees. That was new. They had been fists since eighteen forty-two and he noticed them opening the way you notice a cramp releasing.
He could feel Izuku not asking. It sat there between them, patient, annoying, the way Izuku had always been patient at exactly the wrong moments and exactly the right ones. Two blocks north. He'd run two blocks and it hadn't been enough, and this kid had once run into a building falling on himself for people he owed nothing to. The kid was still here. Hadn't left when told. Hadn't touched more than the one hand on his arm, which he could still feel, a point of pressure like a pulse.
"You did good tonight," Izuku said quietly. "Telling them."
"Shut up."
"Okay."
"Stop agreeing with me. It's creepy."
"Okay," Izuku said again, and there was something almost like a smile in the wreckage of his voice, and Bakugo didn't look at it because looking would have made him return it.
They sat. A minute. Two. The machine finished a cycle with a click and settled. Bakugo found that his jaw had unclenched somewhere without his permission, and his chest had a hole in it, Denki-shaped, and around the hole everything was quiet for the first time since the wall.
"I've got something I haven't told anybody," he said.
Izuku turned his head. Bakugo kept his eyes on the water stain.
"It's not about today." His throat worked. "It's older than today. Say anything about it and I'll never speak to you again, so."
"I won't."
"I know. That's the problem with you. You actually keep things."
He breathed. Once. Twice. The words didn't come out on the first try. They came out on the third, low, almost not there, aimed at the vending machine like it was the only thing safe to confess to.
"I like him. Kirishima."
Izuku went very still beside him. Bakugo watched a droplet of condensation start down the glass of the machine and followed it all the way to the bottom tray.
"Not the way you like a rival. Not the way you like a guy in your class." His voice stayed flat, careful, each word placed like a foot on a rotten beam. "I like him. Two years. Maybe longer than two years, if I'm honest, and I hate being honest this bad."
"Why haven't you..."
"I was going to." The sentence cut itself off. He dragged a hand down his face, over the dust and the dried blood and all of it. "After the licenses. When we were pros, when it wouldn't be some stupid school thing that fell apart. I had it timed out. Like a moron. Like it was a mission with a window."
The droplet had reached the bottom. He watched another one start.
"Tonight he sat in a blood puddle holding our dead friend and he wouldn't let go, and I told him to be manly about the last part, and I looked at his face and I thought, he's never going to look at anything the same way again, and neither am I, and I still couldn't say it. Couldn't even think it straight until I was on this floor."
Izuku was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, it was slow and unsteady, the way he talked when he was actually thinking instead of just being kind.
"You think you need to fix it."
"I think I need to fix him." Bakugo's voice cracked on the second word and he let it, this once, since there was nobody left to hide it from except the soda machine. "He's up there staring at a wall like the wall killed him instead. I stood outside his door for two hours and I had nothing. Nothing to say. Me. You know how that feels?"
"Yeah," Izuku said. "I do."
"He was the shield. That's what he calls himself, that's what he believes, and it didn't hold. That belief is cracked straight down the middle and I can't punch a belief back together." His hands opened and closed once on his knees. "I know how to win fights. I don't know how to sit in a room with somebody who's lost the one that mattered and make it survivable. I don't know how to fix this, Izuku. Any of it. Him, me, the thing I never said. I don't know where any of it goes from here."
"You don't fix grief." Izuku's hand came back to his forearm, the same grip, firmer now. "You don't fix him either. You just don't leave. You said it yourself, that's the rule now."
Bakugo looked at the hand. At the scarred fingers. He had spent his whole life measuring himself against this kid and tonight the kid was the only thing in the building holding level, and he would take that to his grave without one word of thanks, and Izuku would somehow know anyway, because that was the worst thing about him.
"Stay here," Bakugo said, and stood.
"Where are you going?"
"Up. He's mine to look after too." He pressed the call button with the bleeding knuckle again. "And don't follow. One of us has to tell the extras where I went before Mina breaks the doors down."
The elevator chimed. The doors opened on an empty bright car, and he stepped in, and through the gap before they closed he saw Izuku still on the floor, nodding once, keeping the rule.