Chapter 5: First Night, Lights Out
The room had a bed, a desk, a window set high enough that you had to stand on the chair to see out of it properly. Nothing else. No posters, no pins, no tray table with pudding cups lined up on it like small accusations.
Intake had taken ninety minutes. A woman with soft shoes and a clipboard had asked Kirishima questions in a voice kept level like a tray of liquids, and he had answered all of them, out loud, in complete sentences, which had felt like a kind of miracle until Bakugo pointed out on the walk to the room that he'd answered questions all week when it was Denki's paperwork. Then it had felt like something else.
Visiting hours ended at eight. Bakugo had stood up from the one chair the room owned and stood there a second too long, like a man told to leave a post, and Kirishima had said, "Go. Sleep. You look like the chair looks." And Bakugo had gone, at the door turning and saying "Nine tomorrow" like a threat, and the door had clicked shut behind him, and now the room was just a room.
Moonlight came through the high window in a slanted bar. It fell across the desk and stopped. Kirishima lay on the bed with the gray sweatsuit still on and his hands folded on his chest, and the silence had a texture to it. Not hospital silence, which hummed with monitors. Not dorm silence, which had seventeen people behind seventeen doors breathing and arguing over whose turn it was for laundry. This silence was empty. It had room in it for everything he'd been not saying.
The ceiling had one hairline crack, running corner to corner. He counted the wall seams instead. Four walls, twelve seams, the radiator's tick every nine seconds. He'd spent six days learning how to fill hours with nothing and the skill traveled with him.
Nine o'clock, maybe. The radiator ticked.
There was no camera, the intake woman had said. There was a door that locked from the outside, which she had not said and he had understood anyway. There was a call button and a schedule taped inside the wardrobe door. Breakfast at seven-thirty. Group at ten. Group at three. Visiting hours ended at eight.
Bakugo had held his hand in the van and the whole ride and never once looked down at it, and Kirishima had thought about that the entire trip. The way you hold something you're afraid to look at.
He sat up. The mattress creaked. In the moonlight his hands were pale shapes on his knees, and the dark crescents under the nails were still there, six days of scrubbing unable to reach them, and he looked at them because looking at them was easier than thinking what he was thinking.
He'd said yes without saying it. In the hospital room, gripping Bakugo's wrist, softening the hardening down to skin on purpose. That was a yes. Anybody would read it as a yes. Bakugo had read it as a yes, because he'd promised to visit and to be there when they cleared him, and promises were the shape his yes had taken.
But the room had held a dying week. It had held Denki's name and a teacher at the door and the word psychiatric and six days of a boy watching a wall. Nothing in that room was a normal circumstance. Bakugo had said it himself, half his own accusation: you don't drop that kind of thing on somebody in the middle of a war. And then he'd dropped it, because the war was the reason, and Kirishima had taken it because the war was the reason, and neither of them had checked whether it would still stand on flat ground.
The radiator ticked. Outside, somewhere past the window, a car went by and its lights swept the ceiling and left.
His phone was on the desk, charged, returned with the rest of his things at intake. One message from Bakugo at 21:04, because of course there was. Nine tomorrow. Eat the breakfast. I'll know if you don't, they have paperwork here.
Kirishima looked at it a long time.
Then he picked up the phone and called the only number he had the strength for, and it rang twice before it was cut off mid-ring, answered fast, like it had been on a table face-up next to a bed.
"You're supposed to be sleeping," Bakugo said.
"Probably." Kirishima's voice was still rusty. It came out low and honest in the dark room. "Are you home?"
"Dorms. Where else."
The radiator ticked. He made himself say the next part before the courage changed its mind.
"I need to say something and I need you to not answer until I'm done."
A pause. Then, flat: "Fine."
"You told me. In the hospital. And I took it, and I wanted it, and I'm not taking it back." His thumb found the seam of the sweatsuit and pressed along it. "But that room was, everything in that room was the worst week of both our lives. You said it yourself. You had a plan for saying it right, and the plan died, and you said it anyway because I was getting in a van. And I said yes because you were there and Denki wasn't, and I don't," his voice caught, and he waited it out, alone in the moonlight, "I don't want this built on that. I want it. That's the whole problem. I want it so bad I can't trust it in here."
Kirishima breathed. Somewhere down the line, Bakugo was breathing too, and saying nothing, holding to the rule.
"So I'm saying yes. Yes. I want to answer you properly. But I need you to say it again sometime when nobody's dead. When there's no van and no facility and no reason except the actual reason." He stopped, and then, because a voice in the back of his head that sounded like Aizawa told him to give the man a door: "Can you do that?"
The silence on the line went on long enough that he checked the call was still live. The seconds counter climbed. Ten seconds. Fifteen.
"You're asking me to do the scariest thing I've ever done twice," Bakugo said finally, and his voice was not flat at all anymore. "In a building where I can't even punch anything."
"Yeah."
"And I can't just say it now and get it over with."
"No. Because now I'd always wonder."
A sound came down the line then, short and rough, halfway to a laugh and halfway to something with more damage in it. "You're unbelievable. Six days of nothing and now you've got rules."
"I learned from a guy who talks to walls."
Another silence, but a different one. Warmer. Kirishima could picture him, he realized. Dorm room, sitting on the edge of the bed, hand probably running through that blond hair, glaring at the floor like the floor had challenged him.
"Friday," Bakugo said. "They do day passes here, right? Aizawa's setting up the Shinso visit. I'll come for that, and after, we find somewhere that's not a hospital and not a van and not a room where either of us was bleeding, and I'll say it again. Proper. No crisis attached." A pause, and then, quieter, the sentence dragged out of him like a splinter: "And if I chicken out, you're allowed to call me a coward in person. To my face. That's the deal."
"Deal."
"Now sleep. I mean it about the breakfast. They show me the paperwork."
"I know you mean it." Kirishima lay back down. The moonlight had moved a hand's width across the desk since he'd picked up the phone. "Bakugo."
"What."
"Thank you for answering the phone at ring two."
Another of those rough half-sounds. "Yeah, well. Don't make it a habit, calling me at night. I sleep like a normal person."
"You don't sleep like a normal person at all."
"Nine tomorrow." The call ended. Kirishima put the phone on the mattress beside his hand, and the radiator ticked, and the room was still empty, but the emptiness had shifted, the way a room shifts when a window gets opened somewhere in it, and he lay in the moonlight and found, for the first time in six days, that he was waiting for morning instead of just surviving through it.
Morning came with a knock at seven-fifty, ten minutes early, and Bakugo standing in the corridor with a paper bag and the expression of a man who had slept four hours and would deny it under oath.
"Breakfast. From outside. The stuff they serve here is a war crime."
"You've never eaten it."
"I read the menu. That's worse."
He came every day. Nine o'clock, sharp, sometimes ten past if the trains were bad, and Kirishima learned the shape of the visits the way he'd learned the wall seams. Tuesdays Bakugo talked about class and didn't mention the empty desk. Wednesdays he brought homework Kirishima couldn't concentrate on and sat through the not concentrating without comment. Thursdays he ran out of things to say and they just sat, and the sitting was somehow the worst and the best both.
The others came too. Mina on the third day, pink hair dull, sitting on the edge of the chair with her knees together like a visitor at a funeral, and crying within four minutes, and apologizing for crying, and Kirishima reaching out with his good arm to say it was fine, it was fine, and meaning it, and both of them knowing it wasn't. She talked about Denki anyway. That was the thing nobody else did. She told the story about the training camp prank, the one with the fire alarm, and she laughed in the middle of it and then pressed her hand over her mouth like she'd broken something.
"He'd want the story told wrong," she said. "He told everything wrong. That was his whole style."
Sero came with a bag of tapes and a laptop and an inability to sit still. He filled the silences like spackle, cheerful in a way that had cracks running through it, and stayed ninety minutes, and at the door his voice went thin. "You're doing the work, right? The actual work? Because I keep thinking about the rebar, man, I keep thinking if the patrol order had been different," and Kirishima said, "Then it would've been me," and Sero stared at him, and neither of them found that comforting, and Sero left.
Jiro came once, quietly, and didn't talk about Denki at all. She talked about music, about a bassline she couldn't get right, and Kirishima understood it was a rope she was throwing him, something to hold that wasn't grief, and he grabbed it and asked questions about frequencies for an hour. At the end she said, "You sound more like yourself," and left before he could answer.
It was hard. Every visit was hard. Mina cried and Sero performed and Jiro tiptoed and Bakugo glared, and Kirishima did the work in between, the group sessions and the worksheets and the nights lying under the radiator's tick learning how to let a thought arrive and not follow it down. He ate the breakfast. There was paperwork.
On the eighth day, Bakugo came in wrong.
Kirishima saw it before the door closed. The jaw set tighter than usual, the eyes doing that sweep thing he did in unfamiliar rooms, the paper bag held like it might need throwing.
"What happened?"
"Nothing. Eat." Bakugo dropped the bag on the desk and took the chair and did not lean back in it, which was itself an answer.
"Bakugo."
"Kaminari's room. Shinso." The words came out like items on a report, flat, spaced. "He tried to kill himself. Tuesday night."
The radiator ticked. Kirishima's hands stopped on the wrapper he'd been opening.
"He's alive," Bakugo said. "Rope failed. Somebody found him in time. He's in a hospital in the city, under observation. Nobody's saying which one because, apparently, his dad asked for it to be quiet."
"That's why Aizawa," Kirishima started, and Bakugo nodded once.
"Gone since Wednesday. Principal Nezo’s covering the class. Midoriya heard it from Kendo, who heard it from Mon-shitty, so take the details with a fistful of salt, but the part about the rope came from two sources."
Kirishima looked at his hands. The dark crescents under the nails had finally faded, two weeks of scrubbing and time doing what scrubbing couldn't, and now he wished them back, some proof of how long the bad news had been arriving in his life.
"He was in Denki's room." His voice came out strange to him. Low, even. "We were in the van talking about how to help him. Aizawa said he'd arrange a day pass. Both of us, Friday, we were supposed to sit with him so he wasn't alone in that room." He looked up. "That was two days before."
"You didn't know."
"We didn't know. Nobody knew." The sentence sat there, and he heard himself testing it, turning it over the way his therapist had taught him to turn over the other one. Denki couldn't have known either. Hitoshi couldn't have known either. "Was he even let out of the room since? Did anyone check on him? Or was he just, the door's shut and everyone's being polite about it,"
"Stop." Bakugo's voice was quiet, which was the dangerous register. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"Building the case against yourself. I've watched you do it for two weeks. You're fast at it now."
Kirishima breathed. The radiator ticked four times before he spoke again. "I'm allowed to be angry that nobody checked."
"You are. Just aim it at the right people." Bakugo leaned forward, elbows on knees, and for a moment the old ferocity was back in his face, aimed outward for once. "Aizawa should've sent someone. The class should've rotated shifts on that door like I did on yours. That's not on you, that's on all of us being so wrecked we forgot grief doesn't wait its turn."
"He heard a version of Denki's last words that was a lie. A kind lie. And then he was alone with it in that room."
"Hey." Bakugo's voice cut across it, sharp, and then softened into something Kirishima had heard maybe three times in two years. "He's alive. Focus there. The rest of it we fix. You and me and whoever we have to bully."
Kirishima nodded. His eyes were wet and he let them be. "I want to write him a letter. When they tell me where he is."
"You'll write it. I'll deliver it."
"And Aizawa? When he comes back?"
Bakugo looked at the window, high and moonless in the morning light, and something in his face closed a little.
"I don't think we see Aizawa for a long while," he said. "A man like that, when his kid almost dies, he doesn't come back until he's sure he's got something to offer. Could be weeks." He stood, and picked up the paper bag, and put it in Kirishima's hands properly, the way he'd learned to. "So eat. And Friday, day pass or not, we're writing that letter."
Kirishima opened the bag. Two rice balls, still warm. He looked up.
"Friday. You remember what Friday is for, right? You didn't forget."
Bakugo's ears went red. "I don't forget things."
"Good." Kirishima smiled, small and real, the first one in weeks, and it cost him something and was worth the price. "Then it's a date."