Chapter 4: The Question in the Van
The van's suspension was bad. Every seam in the road came up through the floor and into the bench seat, and Bakugo felt each one in his teeth. He had taken the seat beside Kirishima without discussion, the way he'd taken the chair, the way he'd taken the door. There was a strip of gray vinyl between them and Kirishima's hand had crossed it at the hospital steps and had not come back.
His fingers were still closed around Bakugo's wrist. Deliberately soft. Bakugo could feel his own pulse against that grip, fast and traitorous, and he kept his eyes on the window because looking down at it would have ended him.
The city went by in pieces. Scaffolding, a shuttered convenience store, a intersection with a traffic light stuck on amber. Somewhere behind them a siren ran for three seconds and cut out, and Kirishima's fingers tightened, and Bakugo pretended not to notice, and noticed everything.
Aizawa rode up front beside the driver, or half rode, half stood, one shoulder braced against the partition because he'd never in his life sat all the way down in a vehicle. His capture weapon was looped through his fist. He had been silent since the hospital bay doors, and it was not his usual silence, the efficient kind, the kind that meant he was working. This one had weight in it. It sat in the van like cargo.
Bakugo had catalogued it for twenty minutes before he let himself name it. The old man was wrecked. Not the tired wreck of the hospital room, stubble and sagging shoulders. Something rawer. Twice he had started to speak and stopped, jaw working, and both times he'd turned his face toward the partition as if checking on something behind it.
Denki's mother lived in Musutafu. Aizawa had gone to her in person. Bakugo knew that. Kirishima did not.
The van took a left and the light swung across the bench, catching the dark crescents under Kirishima's nails, still there, still untouched by anything the hospital had tried. His gown had been exchanged for a plain gray sweatsuit someone from the facility's intake had brought. It made him look smaller. It made him look like a person being moved rather than a person going somewhere.
"I keep thinking about Shinso."
Bakugo's head turned. Six days of nothing and now this, said into the middle of the van, low and even, the first full sentence Kirishima had volunteered to anyone but him.
Aizawa's shoulder came off the partition. "Hitoshi."
"How is he?" Kirishima's thumb moved once across Bakugo's wrist, absent, like checking a rail was still there. "He knew Denki. They did the joint training exercise together. Denki talked about him after, said he was the only guy who'd ever told him his quirk wasn't the dumb part of him."
In the front seat, Aizawa's hand closed on the loop of his capture weapon. Hard. Bakugo watched the knuckles go pale in the rearview's edge.
"He's not doing good," Aizawa said.
Not fine. Not managing. Bakugo waited for the usual amendment, the teacher's reflex, he'll pull through, give him time, and it didn't come. Aizawa looked at the road ahead of him like it owed him something.
"Not at all. He hasn't come home since the announcement. Hizashi called me Thursday. He's been staying at the dorms, in Kaminari's room." A breath through the nose, controlled, professional, failing halfway. "Housekeeping tried to service it Tuesday. He told them the room was spoken for."
The van hit a seam and everyone in it felt it.
"Why his room," Bakugo said. It came out flatter than he'd meant, but he didn't fix it, because asking softer wasn't going to make the answer better.
"Because it still smells like him." Aizawa said it the way he'd said psychiatric in the hospital room. No varnish. "Because Hitoshi thinks if he keeps the door shut long enough the room will keep. Like bread. Like something that can go stale if you let the air at it."
Kirishima's grip tightened. Bakugo felt the tendons shift in his own wrist, felt the small tremor running up through Kirishima's hand into his own arm, the one Kirishima probably thought he was hiding.
"I talked to him for ten minutes on Thursday," Aizawa went on, and now his voice had a fray in it, fine as wire. "Through the door. He wouldn't open it. He asked me if it was true that Kaminari's last words were about the training exercise. Somebody in the class told him that. Jiro, I think, or one of the others repeating it wrong." He stopped. The van turned again and the light crossed his face and Bakugo saw what six days of Denki's death had done under the stubble and the dry eyes. "It wasn't true. His last words were to you two. But I let Hitoshi believe it, because believing it was the only thing that let him eat that night."
Nobody spoke. The driver's eyes stayed forward, professionally elsewhere, but his hands had gone still on the wheel at a red light and stayed there one beat past green.
"I'm his teacher," Aizawa said, quieter, mostly to the windshield. "I keep telling myself that's the job. Keep them alive, keep them moving. And I've got one boy in a van to a care facility and another one sleeping on a dead kid's floor, and I can only be in one of those rooms."
Kirishima's hand loosened on Bakugo's wrist. Then, slowly, it changed. Not letting go. Reaching. His fingers slid down and found the spaces between Bakugo's and laced in, knuckle to knuckle, and held, and Bakugo's whole arm went hot from the wrist up.
"Hitoshi came to the hospital," Kirishima said. "Thursday night. Nobody told me. I found out from a nurse today, when she did the discharge paperwork. He sat in the lobby for an hour and left." He turned his head, and his eyes had something behind them now, and the something was working, grinding. "I was staring at the wall an hour away from somebody who needed a wall talked to."
Aizawa's jaw moved. "You couldn't have known."
"Denki couldn't have known either." Kirishima said it simply, like arithmetic, and Bakugo heard the sentence land in the front of the van like a dropped tool. "That's the whole thing, isn't it. That's what all of us keep finding out."
The light ahead turned red and the van slowed. Aizawa sat down, finally, fully, into the seat, like something in him had used up its standing ration. In the mirror his eyes found Kirishima's, then Bakugo's hand around Kirishima's hand, and he didn't pretend not to see it.
"I'll take you to see him," Aizawa said. "When they clear you for a day pass. Both of you. He shouldn't be alone in that room, and he won't hear it from me."