Chapter 3: The Days He Doesn't Leave
The chair had stopped being a chair on the third day. It was a post now, a duty, and Katsuki Bakugo sat it like one, boots planted, arms crossed, the window light crawling slowly across the linoleum toward his feet.
Six days. Six days of Eijiro Kirishima staring at the same stretch of wall, and Bakugo talking into it like a man reading weather reports to a stone.
He peeled the foil off a pudding cup and set it on the tray table with the other four. The fruit cup from yesterday had gone syrupy and sad beside it. The rice ball from this morning sat untouched in its wrapper, already sweating.
"You gonna eat anything today, or do I gotta write it on the wall where you can see it," he said.
Nothing. The monitors ticked. Kirishima's eyes tracked from the wall to nothing, the same nothing as always, and his stitched shoulder rose and fell under the gown in slow, even breaths. Alive. Present in the way furniture is present.
Bakugo leaned back and let his head rest against the wall.
"Sero came by yesterday. I threw him out after five minutes, but he talked the whole time, so you probably got the gist through the door." He picked at the edge of his gauntlet, the one piece of his suit he hadn't handed back yet. "Mina's off her feet. Jiro's doing what Jiro does, which is being quiet in the wrong way. The whole stupid class is a mess and you're in here watching paint dry."
The wall did not answer.
He talked anyway. He told Kirishima about the report he'd filed, about how the field commander had put Denki's name on the casualty list at 19:00 like it was just paperwork. He told him about the phone call to Denki's mother, how her voice had gone thin and strange when he said her son was a hero, how she'd thanked him, which had been the worst part of the whole week. He told him things he had never told anyone, in a flat, low voice, because a silent room made a good vault.
"You know I sat outside your door the first night for two hours. Before they gave me the chair. Nurse thought I was security." He snorted. "I wish. I'd have been better at it than the actual security."
Outside, a helicopter passed, and both of them, the talking one and the silent one, went rigid until the sound faded. Bakugo's hands had come up off his knees without him deciding to. He put them back down slowly.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
The door opened at four, the way it had every day, with a soft click and the smell of antiseptic following it in. Aizawa looked worse than the last time. The stubble had gone a day past neglect into surrender, and his capture weapon hung loose around his neck like something he'd forgotten to take off.
Bakugo stood. Old habit now, reporting posture without a word of report.
"How is he?" Aizawa asked.
"Same. Eats if I put it in his hand. Sleeps if I turn the lights off. Otherwise nothing." Bakugo kept his voice level. "Doctor came at noon. Another doctor came at one. I didn't like either of them."
Aizawa crossed to the bed. He stood over Kirishima for a long moment, and whatever he saw in that stare made something in his tired face settle, the way a man settles a debt he'd hoped not to owe.
"Eijiro," he said. "I need to tell you something, and Katsuki's going to hear it too, because I'm not going behind his back."
Bakugo's jaw tightened.
"The hospital's observation period ends tomorrow. Medically, you're fine. Your shoulder's clean, there's no concussion, nothing to keep you for." Aizawa paused, and the pause was the worst thing he'd done all week. "There's a facility. Not a hospital. A residential care unit, quiet place, good doctors, they specialize in what you're carrying right now. The recommendation is that you be transferred there. Today, if possible."
Bakugo heard the word behind all the other words.
"Facility," he said.
"Psychiatric," Aizawa said, evenly, because he wasn't going to lie to either of them.
The air pressure in the room changed. Bakugo's palms were facing up at his sides before he knew he'd turned them, and there was a low crackle in the sweat on his skin, a sound like a struck match deciding.
"Say that again," he said.
"Katsuki."
"You want to ship him off. Six days. Six days and you want to put him in a van with strangers and lock him in with a bunch of," his voice climbed, cracked, climbed again, "he's not broken, he's grieving, everybody in that class is grieving, you gonna collect them all in a van too?"
"I'm going to do what keeps him alive," Aizawa said. "That's the whole job. That's the only part of the job I care about this week."
"It's not happening." Bakugo stepped between the bed and the door, ridiculous, seventeen kinds of stupid, one boy in a gown behind him and a teacher in front of him, and he planted himself anyway. "You're not taking him anywhere."
"Bakugo." Aizawa's voice didn't rise. It never rose. "Look at him. Really look at him."
Bakugo looked. It was the first time in six days that he'd made himself do it properly, not glancing, not managing, but looking. The red hair had gone dull and unwashed. The jaw that was always set, always grinning, always ready to take the hit, had gone slack. There was blood still under the fingernails, dark crescents that six days of hospital soap hadn't reached. The eyes were open and pointed at the wall and there was nobody behind them.
And then there was somebody behind them.
It was small, the movement. A shift of the pupils, wall to Bakugo to Aizawa to the floor. A swallow that moved the whole thin throat. Bakugo's crackle died in his palms without a sound.
"Denki asked me if he did good."
The voice came out wrecked. Six days of rust on it, low and grinding, barely shaped. Aizawa went very still. Bakugo did not breathe at all.
"I couldn't answer him. I said yes but I don't, I wasn't there, I don't know, and he died not knowing." Kirishima's hands found the blanket and gripped it, hardening quirk flickering across his knuckles and fading, flickering and fading, like a badly wired lamp. "Eight minutes. I held him for eight minutes and I couldn't answer one question."
"Kirishima," Bakugo started.
"He took the hit because I was busy. I was twenty meters away being a shield for nobody." The quirk climbed his forearms this time, jagged, involuntary, and he stared at it like it belonged to someone else. "I'm not fine. You're right. Both of you are right."
Aizawa nodded slowly, and reached for the phone by the bed, and Bakugo's hand shot out and closed around his wrist.
Kirishima's eyes came up off the floor for the first time in six days and found Bakugo's face, and held it.
"Let go of my wrist, Bakugo."
"Call the school. Call someone else. Not this." Bakugo's grip didn't loosen. His knuckles had gone white around the bone of Aizawa's forearm, and the older man, to his credit, didn't pull away. He just waited.
"He'll go," Aizawa said quietly. "It's not up to either of us."
"You don't know that."
"Katsuki."
It was Kirishima who spoke again, and the room went still around the sound of it, the way a room goes still around a second gunshot. He was sitting up an inch, no more, his shoulder dragging against the pillow.
"He's right." The words came out slow, each one hauled up like something with weight. "You've been sitting in that chair all week telling me the truth because nobody else would. So here's me telling it back. I look at the wall because there's nothing in this room. I eat because you put it in my hand. I'm not doing anything, Bakugo. I'm just not doing anything, and that's what they fix."
"That's not," Bakugo stopped. Started again. "That's not how it works. You don't fix grief in a building with fences."
"They don't have fences."
"They have locks. Same thing with better lighting."
Kirishima almost smiled. It was terrible, the almost of it, a muscle moving in a face that had forgotten how. "You visited me every day and you still don't know what the place is called."
Bakugo's mouth opened and closed. Because he didn't. He'd spent six days defending the room and the boy in it, and he had never once asked what came next, because asking would have meant admitting that something was coming.
Aizawa lifted the phone, gently, out of Bakugo's grip, and dialed one number, then held the receiver but did not speak into it. A courtesy. A held breath.
"I'll go today," Kirishima said. "If I go today I don't have to eat the pudding."
Bakugo laughed. It came out of him broken, one short ugly sound, and he pressed the back of his hand to his mouth to kill it, and it wouldn't die, and for a second he thought it might turn into something worse, so he turned it into anger instead, which was the only currency he'd ever been fluent in.
"You're unbelievable. You know that? You sat there for six days making me talk to a wall, and now you're going to be brave about a care facility. Now. After everything."
"There's no good time."
"There's," and his voice went, actually went, the way it had gone in the corridor with Midoriya, a hairline crack running through the middle of a word. He turned his back on Aizawa. He stepped closer to the bed, close enough that his knees touched the frame, close enough that Kirishima had to look up at him from the pillow, and Bakugo had never in his life stood where someone had to look up at him, and he did it now without noticing.
"Six days I've been sitting here," he said. Low. The crackle in his palms was gone. His hands were shaking instead, which was worse. "And I kept telling myself I'd say it when you were better. That's the plan. That was always the plan. Get the license, go pro, put some distance between us and the whole rest of the class, and then say it, because you don't drop that kind of thing on somebody who's still in the middle of a war."
Kirishima's quirk flickered once across his knuckles and faded. He didn't speak.
"And then Denki died, and I thought, well, there it is. Proof. You wait and you wait and the world takes the moment while you're waiting, so the moment's gone, and all you get to do is the duty part. Chair. Door. Pudding cups." He swallowed. His throat worked around the choker at it. "I'm done doing the duty part."
"Bakugo," Kirishima said, hoarse, "what are you."
"I'm in love with you." It came out flat and fast, like a controlled detonation, all the power of it packed into the smallest possible space. "Two years. Two years I've been in love with you, and I told no one, and I had a plan, and the plan is ash, so here it is, no license, no distance, no right time. In a hospital room, with pudding cups on the tray, six days after your best friend died in your arms. That's where I'm saying it. Because you're about to get in a van, and I am not letting you drive off thinking the only person in the world who's invested in you is a doctor with a prescription pad."
The room held its air. The monitors ticked. Aizawa, by the door, had lowered the receiver to the cradle without dialing, and did not move, and did not leave, and did not matter.
Kirishima's eyes were wet. Not crying, not the way Mina had cried or the way Jiro had, just wet, the way things are wet when they've been dry too long and something finally reaches them.
"You picked today," he said.
"There's no good time," Bakugo said. "You taught me that two minutes ago."
A sound came out of Kirishima then, small and awful and real, half a laugh and half the first honest sob of the week, and his hand came up off the blanket and closed around Bakugo's wrist, the same place Bakugo had held Aizawa, the same grip, white-knuckled, and his hardening came up to meet Bakugo's skin and then, deliberately, with visible effort, softened. Just skin. Just a hand.
"Don't wait for me," Kirishima said. "Don't you dare put this in a box and sit on it for a month."
"I don't sit on things. It's literally what I'm worst at."
"Then say what happens next. Say it out loud."
Bakugo looked at the hand on his wrist. He looked at the dull red hair and the blood under the nails and the eyes that had somebody behind them now, finally, somebody looking back.
"Next is I visit. Every day, like here. And when they clear you, you come home, and you don't get a choice about whether I'm there." His voice cracked clean through on the last word and he let it. "That's next."
Kirishima nodded. Once. Then he turned his face toward Aizawa, and his voice came out steadier than it had any right to be.
"Call them. I'll go today." His hand stayed on Bakugo's wrist. "He rides in the van."