Chapter 16: Morning After
The peace was a living thing. It sat in Katsuki’s chest, warm and heavy, as the first grey light seeped around the edges of Izuku’s blinds. He was awake, had been for a while, his body trained to early hours, but he hadn’t moved. Izuku was a solid, warm weight against him, one arm flung across Katsuki’s ribs, his face smushed into the pillow. His breathing was deep and even, a slow tide in the quiet room.
Katsuki looked at him. Really looked. Without the filter of competition, or anger, or even lust. The freckles across Izuku’s nose and cheeks were darker in sleep. A small scar, thin and white, curved over his eyebrow. His lips were slightly parted. Vulnerable. Open.
His own hand, resting on the sheets, lifted almost of its own accord. He hovered, then let his fingertips graze the constellation of freckles on Izuku’s bare shoulder. The touch was so light it shouldn’t have been felt. But Izuku stirred, a faint sigh escaping him, and nuzzled deeper into the pillow. Katsuki froze, his breath catching. The reverence in that simple touch scared him more than any villain ever had. It felt like a confession he hadn’t agreed to make.
He carefully extracted himself, sliding out from under Izuku’s arm. The cool air of the room hit his skin, a shock after the shared warmth. He pulled on his jeans from the floor and padded barefoot into the living room. The minimalist space felt different. It wasn’t just his. Izuku’s sneakers were by the door, his notebook on the coffee table, a half-drunk glass of water from the night before on the counter. Evidence.
Katsuki made coffee, the ritual mechanical and calming. The gurgle of the machine, the rich, bitter smell. He leaned against the counter, staring at the city waking up outside his window. The peace was still there, but it had edges now. It asked questions.
He heard the soft shuffle of feet. Izuku appeared in the doorway, hair an impressive disaster, wearing Katsuki’s old UA sweatshirt. It was too big on him, the sleeves swallowing his hands. He blinked, sleepy and soft.
“You’re up,” Izuku mumbled, voice gravelly with sleep.
“No shit.” Katsuki poured a second mug, sliding it across the counter. “You look like a homeless hedgehog.”
Izuku smiled, a small, private thing, and took the mug. He wrapped his hands around it, inhaling the steam. “Thanks.” He took a sip, watching Katsuki over the rim. “You didn’t have to leave. The bed.”
Katsuki shrugged, looking back out the window. “Was getting hot.”
Silence settled, but it was the comfortable kind from the day before. It lasted about thirty seconds.
“Yesterday was… nice,” Izuku said, the words tentative.
“‘Nice’,” Katsuki echoed, the word tasting bland. “We bought groceries and walked. It was normal.”
“Yeah.” Izuku put his mug down. “It was. And it was nice. You were… you were really…” He trailed off, searching.
“What?” Katsuki turned, a defensive edge creeping into his tone. “I was what?”
“Just you. But not… on guard.” Izuku met his eyes. “It was good to see.”
Katsuki felt exposed. He’d let a facade drop, and Izuku had not only noticed, he’d cataloged it. He’d liked it. The warmth in Katsuki’s chest twisted into something sharper. “Don’t get used to it. It was a day off. Low stress. Doesn’t mean anything.”
The words came out harsher than he intended. Izuku’s face didn’t fall, but it did still. The soft morning light in his eyes dimmed a fraction. “Right. The ‘in-between’. Just blowing off steam.”
“Exactly.” Katsuki nodded, too forcefully. He grabbed his mug and took a burning gulp, needing the pain to ground him.
“So last night,” Izuku continued, his voice carefully neutral. “In the shower. All that stuff you said. ‘Mine’. ‘Washing them off you’. That was just… steam, too?”
The air left the room. Katsuki set his mug down with a sharp clack. “It was in the moment. You know what it’s like. Don’t read a fucking novel into it.”
“I’m not.” Izuku’s voice was quiet, but it had a core of steel now. The hero, not the sleepy boy. “I’m just asking for the rules, Kacchan. Because they keep changing. One minute it’s just physical. The next you’re making me breakfast and holding doors and looking at me like…” He shook his head, cutting himself off. “I need to know what game we’re playing.”
“There’s no game!” Katsuki snapped, pushing off the counter. The peace was shattered, and he was the one who’d smashed it. It was safer this way. Familiar. “It’s simple. We do this until we don’t want to anymore. No feelings. No strings. That was the deal.”
“And if the deal doesn’t work anymore?” Izuku asked, his green eyes steady on him.
“It works fine.”
“Does it?” Izuku took a step forward. The borrowed sweatshirt made him look younger, but his gaze was ancient. “You told me to come with you yesterday. In the shower. You asked. You never ask. You demand. That was different.”
Katsuki’s heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He felt cornered. He could smell the faint scent of his own cologne on Izuku’s skin, mixed with sleep. It was disorienting. “I was caught up. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything!” Izuku’s control cracked, his voice rising. “It means this isn’t just some fucked-up competition for you either! Why can’t you just admit it?”
“Because I don’t know what ‘it’ is!” The shout tore out of him, raw and honest. He ran a hand through his hair, gripping it. “I don’t do this. I don’t… feel this. It’s messy. It’s a liability. You look at me with those big fucking eyes and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!”
The admission hung between them, panting and ugly. Izuku stared at him, his anger melting into something closer to pity. Katsuki hated it.
“You’re not ‘supposed’ to do anything,” Izuku said, softer. “You just… feel it. And then you figure it out. Together.”
“Together.” Katsuki laughed, a short, bitter sound. “That’s your answer for everything. Team-ups. Alliances. It’s not that simple.”
“It could be.”
“It’s not!” He was yelling again, but it was frayed, desperate. “What happens when we fuck it up, huh? When I say something I can’t take back, or you realize I’m not worth the effort? We have to work together. We have a city that relies on us not being a goddamn soap opera. This…” He gestured wildly between them. “This ‘in-between’ is the only safe place for it. Outside of that, we’re rivals. Partners. Nothing more.”
Izuku was silent for a long moment. He picked up his coffee mug, looked into its depths, and put it down again. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Katsuki echoed, suspicious.
“Okay. The ‘in-between’ stays.” Izuku nodded, as if convincing himself. “But Kacchan? You can’t put feelings in a box and label it. They leak. They spilled out all over yesterday. And they’re spilling out right now. You can call it whatever you want. But you’re terrified. And not of me.” He finally looked up, his expression heartbreakingly gentle. “You’re terrified of wanting this to be real.”
Katsuki had no answer. No explosion. No retort. The truth was a silent detonation, leaving him hollowed out and still.
His phone buzzed violently on the counter, saving him. The agency ringtone. He snatched it up. “What.”
Kirishima’s voice, uncharacteristically tense, filled the line. “Bakugou. You and Deku need to get to Tartarus containment annex. Now. It’s about the interrogation of that psychopath from last week’s raid. The one who could warp memories. He’s talking. And he’s naming names.”
Katsuki’s blood went cold. The villain, ‘Mnemosyne’, had been a slippery, philosophical freak who claimed he could ‘edit’ a hero’s greatest triumphs into their worst failures. He’d been almost gleeful during his capture. “What names?”
Kirishima’s pause was heavy. “Yours. And Deku’s. He says he’s already planted something. A ‘seed’. Says it’ll bloom when you’re most vulnerable.” Another beat. “The security feed from your building’s lobby… it’s been glitching. For days. The techs think it’s a coincidence. I don’t.”
Katsuki’s eyes locked with Izuku’s across the room. The fragile domesticity of moments ago was gone, replaced by the cold, familiar grip of a looming fight. The most vulnerable. Was it the shower? The bed? This morning’s quiet confession?
“We’re on our way,” Katsuki growled, and ended the call. He looked at Izuku, already shedding the softness, his mind clicking into tactical mode. The fear in his gut was no longer about feelings. It was something darker, more familiar.
“Trouble?” Izuku asked, his body already tensing for action.
“The usual,” Katsuki said, his voice flat. The ‘in-between’ was officially over. The world was crashing back in, and it might have brought a weapon designed specifically for the cracks they’d just started to show. “Suit up. We’ve got work to do.”
The walk to the agency garage was conducted in a silence that felt like a third person between them. Katsuki’s boots hit the concrete with sharp, deliberate clicks, a stark contrast to Izuku’s softer, quicker steps just behind his right shoulder. The morning air, crisp and promising just minutes ago, now tasted of exhaust and impending rain.
Katsuki could feel the weight of Izuku’s unanswered question hanging in the air, but a colder, more immediate anger was boiling up to replace it. By the time he slammed his palm on the biometric scanner of his black sports car, the sleek door hissing upward, his jaw ached from clenching.
“Get in,” he said, not looking at Izuku.
The engine roared to life, a deep, predatory growl that vibrated through the leather seats. He pulled out of the garage and into the mid-morning traffic, his movements precise and aggressive. He changed lanes without signaling, his eyes fixed ahead.
“Are you going to tell me what Kirishima said, or am I just along for the ride?” Izuku asked, his voice carefully measured. He was buckling his seatbelt, his gaze scanning the streets with a professional alertness that had fully replaced the softness from the apartment.
“That freak from the docks. Mnemosyne.” Katsuki’s words were clipped, bitten off. “The one who made that sidekick think he’d drowned his own partner.”
“I remember. Quirk: sensory and memory implantation. He’s in max-security.”
“He’s talking now. Singing, according to Shitty Hair.” Katsuki’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He cut off a delivery truck, earning a blaring horn. “Says he planted a ‘seed’. A trigger. In us.”
Izuku absorbed this, his analytical mind visibly switching gears. “A specific memory? A command?”
“Dunno. He’s being poetic about it. Said it’ll ‘bloom when we’re most vulnerable and happiest’.” Katsuki spat the last word out like it was poison. The memory of Izuku’s sleepy face, of his own traitorously gentle fingers on freckled skin, flashed behind his eyes. “Your building’s lobby feed has been glitching. Kirishima thinks it’s not a coincidence.”
“Most vulnerable and happiest,” Izuku repeated, quieter. He looked out the window, the city blurring past. “That’s… horribly specific.”
“That’s what’s pissing me off!” Katsuki exploded, his fist connecting with the steering wheel. The car swerved slightly before he brutally corrected it. “Why does it have to be that? Huh? Why can’t a villain just try to blow us up during a fight like a normal goddamn person?”
His voice was raw, stripped of its usual controlled fury. This was something hotter and more personal. “Why does he get to point at a… at a good day and say ‘that, right there, that’s the weak spot’? Like it’s a flaw. Like being happy is a fucking systemic vulnerability I forgot to armor!”
The car fell silent except for the engine’s growl. Izuku stared at him, understanding dawning. This wasn’t just anger at the villain. This was outrage at the violation. Their private space, the fragile, unnamed thing between them, had been scouted, targeted, and weaponized before they’d even decided what it was.
“It’s not a flaw, Kacchan,” Izuku said finally, his own voice tight.
“It is if he can use it!” Katsuki shot back. “And everyone at that annex is gonna know it. They’ll look at the reports, they’ll see the glitched footage timestamped to when you were in my apartment, and they’ll all get that same stupid look on their faces. The ‘oh, is Dynamight actually capable of a human emotion?’ look. I’m sick of it.”
He downshifted, whipping the car onto the expressway ramp toward the city’s secure district. The speedometer climbed. “He didn’t target us during the raid. He didn’t target us after a hard win. He waited. He picked the moment we’d be soft. And the fact that he knew to wait, that he could even identify that moment… that means he was watching. He saw us.”
The implication settled over them, cold and claustrophobic. Their ‘in-between’ hadn’t been private at all. It had been a stage.
“So we find the trigger,” Izuku said, his green eyes hardening. The hero, Deku, was fully present now, pushing past the personal hurt. “We find his ‘seed’ and we rip it out. Before it blooms.”
“Damn right we do,” Katsuki muttered. But the irritation was a live wire under his skin. The villain’s plan reduced everything—the argument, the tenderness, the terrifying confusion—to a tactical weakness. It framed their happiness as a prelude to disaster.
It made the peace of the morning feel like a setup.
He saw the austere, grey concrete of the Tartarus annex ahead, a fortress against the city’s skyline. Kirishima’s broad form was visible at the secure entrance, his face uncharacteristically grim. The work was here, immediate and dangerous.
But as Katsuki slammed the car into park, the real fight felt internal. The villain hadn’t just planted a seed in their minds. He’d planted a new, ugly doubt in the space between them, and Katsuki had no idea how to defuse it.
He’d planted a new, ugly doubt in the space between them, and Katsuki had no idea how to defuse it. The car door slammed behind him, the sound like a gunshot in the quiet secure lot. He was already moving, a storm cloud in human form, toward the imposing steel door where Kirishima stood.
Izuku fell into step beside him, a study in contrast. Where Katsuki’s stride was all jagged, pounding purpose, Izuku’s was quick but measured, his eyes scanning the annex’s facade for details, for threats. The serene calm from the day before was gone, evaporated under the glare of this new threat.
Kirishima’s face was set in hard lines. “They’re waiting in interrogation observation.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Katsuki bit out, not breaking stride as Kirishima keyed them through the first security door. The air inside was cool, sterile, smelling of antiseptic and ozone.
“Aizawa-sensei. A couple of the Tartarus psych eval team.” Kirishima glanced at Katsuki’s profile, at the tic in his clenched jaw. “They’ve been reviewing the footage from the raid and his cell. It’s… weird, man.”
“Weird how?” Izuku asked.
“You’ll see.”
They moved down a hallway of polished grey floors and muted walls. Katsuki’s boots were loud. The space between reaction and action, he chanted in his head, a mantra his therapist had drilled into him. His palms itched, tiny sparks popping without his consent in his clenched fists. He forced his fingers to uncurl.
Aizawa stood in the observation room, a dark silhouette against the bright one-way glass. On the other side, Mnemosyne sat at a bare table, humming. He was a slight man with watery eyes and a pleasant smile that didn’t reach them.
“He’s been like that for an hour,” Aizawa said without turning, his voice gravelly with fatigue. “Unresponsive to direct questions. Then he suddenly offers up that he’s ‘gifted’ you both something. A ‘paradox seed’.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Katsuki snarled, stepping up to the glass. He wanted to smash through it.
“The best translation the quirk analysts have,” Aizawa sighed, finally looking at them, his gaze lingering on the tension in Katsuki’s shoulders, “is that he’s implanted a sensory-memory trigger. Not a command. More like a… personalized landmine.”
Izuku moved closer to the glass, his analytical mind overriding his disgust. “Triggered by what? Happiness? That’s what he said.”
“By a peak positive affective state,” corrected one of the psych team, a woman with a tablet. “Bliss, profound contentment, a deep sense of safety. The moment your guard is most thoroughly down. He claims it will then overwrite that moment with its catastrophic opposite.”
The room felt suddenly airless. Katsuki’s eyes locked on the villain’s humming form. A deep sense of safety. The shower. The morning. The peace he’d just started to taste. This freak hadn’t just been watching; he’d been categorizing.
“He can’t do that remotely,” Izuku stated, but it sounded like a question. “His quirk requires physical contact or extreme proximity with a vector. Like the water vapor at the docks.”
“Correct.” Aizawa’s gaze was sharp. “Which means he either touched you during the raid without you knowing, or he had a vector. Something that got close to you both, recently.”
Kirishima shifted. “The lobby footage. The glitches weren’t random. They’re localized to specific thirty-second windows, over the past four days. Always when one of you was entering or leaving Deku’s building.”
“A delivery,” Izuku whispered, his face paling. “There was a new concierge. He insisted I sign for a parcel last Tuesday. Said it was a fan gift, but it was just an empty box. He… bumped my hand. And he was there when Kacchan came over yesterday evening, fiddling with a broken panel.”
Katsuki remembered a guy in a uniform cap, head down, mumbling about a thermostat malfunction. He’d brushed past him. Physical contact.
“They pulled the employment records,” Kirishima said, his voice low. “They’re fake. The guy’s gone.”
A cold, meticulous fury settled in Katsuki’s bones. This wasn’t a battlefield ambush. It was a tailored surgical strike. They’d been profiled and penetrated. The space between reaction and action. He breathed in through his nose, the air burning.
“What’s the overwrite?” Katsuki’s voice was dangerously quiet. “What’s the ‘catastrophic opposite’?”
The psych evaluator exchanged a look with Aizawa. “We don’t know. It’s personal. It would be drawn from your own deepest fears, woven into the memory of that happy moment. The brain does the work itself. He just plants the catalyst.”
The horrific intimacy of it was paralyzing. This villain wasn’t trying to break their bones; he was trying to break the very moments that made them feel human. To turn their private peace into a factory for their own private hells.
“We need to find that fake concierge,” Izuku said, turning from the glass, his fists balled. “He’s the vector. He has to have a record, a pattern.”
“Working on it,” Kirishima nodded. “But it’s a needle in a haystack. He could be anyone now.”
Katsuki stared at Mnemosyne, who had begun to draw spirals in the condensation on his table. A raw, violent need to obliterate him warred with a deeper, more chilling understanding. Beating him to a pulp here would solve nothing. It would just get Katsuki benched. I’m already on thin ice.
“I don’t think I should be the one to talk to him,” Katsuki said, the words scraping out. Everyone looked at him. His teeth were gritted, his breathing a heavy, controlled rhythm. His face was scrunched in its usual scowl, but his eyes were calculating, cold. “I’m so close to getting my license fully back with full permissions. I can’t mess that up now. He wants a reaction. He wants the explosion.”
Izuku watched him, seeing the immense effort of restraint. The mantra was winning, barely.
Aizawa gave a slow, approving nod. “Smart. He’s a manipulator. Your anger is just another data point for him.” He turned to Izuku. “You’re the better play. You get more answers with questions than with threats.”
Izuku took a steadying breath, his gaze hardening into that unnervingly focused look he got before a difficult negotiation. “Okay. What’s the play?”
“Get him to describe his art,” the psych woman offered. “He sees this as art. Ask about the… the composition.”
Katsuki watched as Izuku straightened his jacket, a mask of calm determination settling over his features. He was walking calmly into a psychological warzone. The urge to stop him, to put himself between Izuku and that smiling thing behind the glass, was a physical ache. But the greater urge was to win. To not give the villain a single thing he wanted.
The space between reaction and action. Katsuki held the line. He gave Izuke the slightest, sharpest nod.
Izuku moved toward the interrogation room door, his hand steady on the handle. As he stepped through, Katsuki’s mantra dissolved into one silent, fervent command aimed at his back: Don’t give him anything. Don't let him see you.