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Izuku still hasn't figured out how he managed it, but somehow Mr. Aizawa convinced (or coerced or maybe blackmailed) Kacchan into guest-teaching Thursday afternoon's 1A heroics class, which is, as far as Izuku knows, the first time in six years that Kacchan's stepped foot onto UA's campus, so frankly, the world could be ending tomorrow and Izuku would still make time between kissing his mom goodbye and crying over the fact that he'd never get to read the sequel to his current favorite novel, A Game of Shadows, (which is coming out in twenty-two days!) in order to sneak into the viewing booth of Training Ground Beta. It's five minutes into the class, and Kacchan is pacing across the biggest viewing screen like a drill sergeant surveying new recruits, his red eyes glittering and his lips pulled into a sneer. Nearby, a few of the smaller screens are focused on various students' faces, and even though Koko looks starstruck and Genma and Sousuke look cowed, 1A's trio of troublemakers — best friends since elementary school, hero names: Reverb, Glimmer and Facette — look like they're all plotting ways to stab Kacchan's eyeballs out. The three of them have a fairly obvious grudge against pro hero Dynamight.

Izuku's been doing this teaching thing for a couple years now, so he knows how he'd respond to most anything that the kids could think to throw at him; what he doesn't know — in fact, can't even fathom to guess — is how Kacchan will react to their various stunts and dramas. Izuku's claiming that his presence is for research purposes, and if Mr. Aizawa wants to keep throwing him this look out of the corner of his eye, like he's trying to tell Izuku, "I can see right through you, buddy," then he's free to do so, but Izuku's just gonna clutch his pencil more tightly and scribble more quickly across the pages of his notebook.

It's not an act, anyway: Izuku might be here in large part for the pleasure of watching Kacchan (still one of his favorite pastimes), but he's also curious to see how the kids themselves react to Kacchan on the battlefield. Kacchan's always been good at sussing out people's weaknesses (both intentionally and accidentally, courtesy of his abrasive personality), so Izuku's sure as heck not gonna miss this chance to learn new things about his students' tics and triggers. And if the 1A Trouble Trio manage to actually pull the rug out from under Kacchan's boots, then Izuku wants a front-row seat to the show.

He hopes that nothing irreparable gets damaged or destroyed in the process, but that's probably a hope doomed to failure considering that Kacchan is involved. Kacchan is the master at fine-tuned control, but you can't ever get away from the fundamental fact of his quirk: he blows stuff up. He likes blowing stuff up.

On screen, Kacchan explains the exercise of today's class to the students: a basic game of capture the flag, except Kacchan's gonna be weaving his way through the mêlée as an unaffiliated loose cannon, and the goal is not only to capture the other team's flag but also to prevent Kacchan from tagging people out. When he says that last part, he grins at the class, baring his white teeth in a way that reminds Izuku of his neighbor Mrs. Yamaguchi's terrible little chihuahua. She carries the thing in her arms everywhere, and whenever she passes by somebody in the apartment's hallways, the dog peels its lips back, revealing its long rows of sharp teeth, and glares into the stranger's soul with its beady black eyes. Sometimes it starts shaking and growling, like it can't contain its volcanic rage in such a tiny body. Kacchan, at least, has bright eyes instead of beady, but the demonic red of them doesn't exactly inspire any more faith than Brown Sugar's — not when they're framed by the stark black of his bandit mask; not when his shoulders are wide and his arms are threaded with dense muscle and his knuckles are scarred from punching so many things throughout his life; not when he wears that expression. Grinning. He looks psychotic. Izuku looks at him on screen and feels his pencil go still on the page of his notebook. After a few seconds, he realizes that he's holding his breath. He feels his cheeks start to heat up. He refuses to look over to see if Mr. Aizawa is giving him a Look.

It's a welcome relief when the first buzzer sounds and the students split into two groups, based on the colors of belts that they picked up at the beginning of class. Red versus blue, ten students on each team. They've got five minutes to huddle and strategize before the game starts.

While Izuku listens to the students chatter and twitter in frantic voices over the comms, he watches Kacchan sneak off into a bunker in the training grounds. He's wearing his stealth suit: it's sleeker than his regular costume, with streamlined gauntlets and a tighter fit. The pure black of the outfit is broken only by a few flowing lines of red; they cross his chest to form Dynamight's signature red X.

Once, a long time ago, Izuku had a matching outfit, with green stripes instead of red.

For one lovely, mad moment, Izuku fantasizes about slipping into it and sneaking into the game — a foil that not even Kacchan can predict, sowing more chaos in what already promises to be a chaotic game. He imagines Kacchan's face when he catches sight of him; he imagines the thrill of a fight, countering Kacchan's explosions with a burst of speed and lightning —

His hand spasms around his pencil, and he has to clench it to keep himself from lurching out of his chair.

"Who do you think will win?" Izuku asks Mr. Aizawa in order to distract himself. The man is standing in front of the wall of screens, his eye flickering back and forth between all of them. His mouth is set in a frown.

He taps idly at a key, not hard enough to press it, just enough to make a ticking noise. It sounds like there's a clock in the room. "Bakugou," Mr. Aizawa finally says, and Izuku wants to laugh.

"Yeah," he says instead, looking down at his notebook. Duh.

****

Half an hour into the game, Izuku thinks that he understands now how his mom must have felt when she watched him fight Shigaraki on national TV all those years ago: it's like watching a tsunami gathering force in the Pacific Ocean while you're stuck standing there landlocked, totally helpless to stop its progress. You look at everyone who's out on the beach and you just pray that they make it out in time to escape landfall.

Except, in this case, there's kind of a limit to your sympathy because it's the beachgoers themselves who summoned the tsunami by doing dumb things to piss off the ocean gods.

Mr. Aizawa looks like he's this close to expelling all of them.

This year's 1A class has had a peculiar problem: a number of the students already knew each other when they entered UA, so at the beginning of the year, there wasn't hardly any mixing and matching of friend groups. Everybody already had their little cliques, and despite Izuku's best efforts (every time he announces a group project, the entire class groans because they know it's gonna be assigned groups and they're not gonna like them), they haven't really built any bridges between any of them.

Even now, three months into the school year, there's no cohesion between the teams. The blue team, which has Darknet as a member, was able through her quirk to set up a private comm line between them all within the first few minutes, but better communication doesn't really amount to much help when your plan goes to hell within the first five minutes and then, before you can form a new strategy, you realize that you're all getting systematically picked off by a determined pro hero. After that, it's chaos: everyone panics and scatters, becoming too focused on saving their own tushes to help a quailing teammate. At the thirty minute mark, the only reason the game is still on is because a single member of the blue team — Black Mantis — has managed to escape getting tagged out by Kacchan.

The red team has managed to keep more of its members in play, but that's not really a point in their favor; they're still gonna fail this assignment so much harder than the others — because while the blue team failed because they panicked, the red team is failing because they're actively trying to sabotage each other. Not all of the wounds the students have received are accidental.

To Izuku's left, Mr. Aizawa presses the call button on the keyboard and leans toward the microphone to say, "Nurse Hachiya-Reed, your presence is required on Training Ground Beta at the South side field." That's where all the students who've been tagged out are gathering. There's at least one broken nose, one second-degree burn, and a couple of concussions.

"Roger that," she says in crisp English. The line clicks off.

Mr. Aizawa pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs into his eye sockets, like there's a headache building inside his tearducts.

Izuku understands the feeling. He's keeping a list of everything that the red team's doing wrong and it's a doozy. He taps his pen down the line of bullet points:

- The Trouble Trio immediately took over command of the group and didn't ask for any input from another member — in fact, they brushed off any voice of dissent, even when that voice pointed out a legitimate concern.

- Their plan is obviously driven not by a desire to do good, or even to win the game, but by a goal of getting revenge. Mostly on Kacchan, it seems. There's no other way to explain the huge friggin' crystal palace that they created in which to house their flag. When you're trying to protect a precious item, you don't advertise its location with a huge flashing neon sign — unless you want your opponent to find you.

- The rest of the group was so angry at the Trouble Trio that they either: ran toward Kacchan in order to immediately get tagged out; found a nice corner of the training grounds to sit down and have a picnic; or else started attacking the crystal palace while screaming about how the Trouble Trio are complete a-holes.

By the time that Kacchan tags out the last of the screaming students, the situation in Training Ground Beta is thus: the Trouble Trio are hunkered down on the top floor of their crystal palace; Black Mantis is sneaking into the palace in order to (presumably) steal the flag that the trio have completely forgotten about (in which case Izuku's willing to bet that Black Mantis is the only student who's going to be getting a passing grade); and Kacchan is blasting his way through the palace's front door.

Or — Kacchan is trying to blast his way through the front door. The problem is that Facette knows he's there and she's working her quirk on him, so all of his explosions are freezing and falling off of his gauntlets in starburst clumps of crystals that shatter when they hit the ground.

"What the fuck," Kacchan mutters as he squints at the shards that are skidding around under his boots. Izuku can't help but wriggle in his seat in anticipation. His chair squeaks and Mr. Aizawa shoots him an amused glance.

Facette's is such a cool quirk: she can solidify light into crystallized matter. Even more impressive is the fact that she and Glimmer found each other so young, because their quirks are practically made to work in tandem: Glimmer can bend light in order to create mirages, and with Facette by her side solidifying those mirages, the two of them can create elaborate scenes out of almost nothing, trapping or tricking people into questioning what's real. Reverb also fits quite well into the tight-knit trio: his hums carry enough force to vibrate all of the objects around him, and with a mouth piece that hones and amplifies his voice, he can shatter glass.

Combine the three of them, and you get an incredible offensive machine: Glimmer throws prisms of light that Facette turns into solid projectiles, and Reverb shatters them like bombs over the heads of their opponents. If they don't flunk themselves out of school, they're going to become an amazing team of heroes one day.

That day is definitely still a long ways away, though.

For one thing, Izuku's pretty sure they have no idea that Black Mantis is in their castle; they're too focused on Kacchan to pay attention to anything else. Poor Facette has to be nearing her limit of quirk usage: between maintaining the physical form of the crystal palace and preventing Kacchan from using his quirk, her brown face has flushed into a deep maroon and sweat is streaming down her cheeks. Izuku's guessing that the only reason she hasn't yet keeled over is because Glimmer's sitting next to her, feeding her a continuous supply of rock salt from a pouch in her belt.

As Kacchan steps carefully through the cavernous rooms of the palace, the trio drop chandeliers and stalagtites from the ceilings. Sometimes Reverb shatters them right over Kacchan's head, but other times he lets them crash to the floor.

"Okay, this is startin' to feel fuckin' personal," Kacchan mutters when he comes up out of a roll, having just avoided the fifth crashing stalagtite. Izuku's not sure what his plan is; if he can't use his quirk, then all that he's doing is walking into the nest of a cobra. Maybe he's banking on the fact that he can still physically overpower the Trouble Trio, no quirk necessary? Or maybe he's just trying to tax them until they pass out from quirk exhaustion.

Whatever his plan is, when he finally reaches the fifth-floor room that the students are hunkered down in, he grins. "There you are," he says, stepping into the kind of predatory prowl that always makes Izuku's heart beat a little more quickly.

Before Kacchan can say anything else, Reverb throws one arm out, pointing at Kacchan like an attorney in a triumphant indictment. "Pro hero Dynamight!" Reverb yells. "You've been allowed to walk scot-free for far too long!"

Kacchan pauses in the middle of a step and wrinkles his nose. "Hah—?" he says.

"You go around acting like you own the world and everyone else's just dirt beneath your feet! Well, no more!" proclaims Reverb in a more than passable impression of Iida, back when he was still tying himself up in knots about being Class 1A's ultra-responsible class president.

"Okay, look —" starts Kacchan, looking like a man who just realized that his enemy is young enough to think Santa Claus is real, but before he can say anything else, Reverb gestures to Glimmer and Facette where they're kneeling behind him — a sharp flick of his fingers —, and then the room is just — full of daggers of light, and all of them are whistling straight for Kacchan.

"Fuck!" shouts Kacchan as he ducks and rolls, spinning through the salvo with impressive grace. Explosions bloom out of his gauntlets, but they all crystallizes before they can do any damage; they fall around him like a dropped garland of dry-iced roses.

"Seriously!" Kacchan shouts, his deep voice barely audible over the cacophony of shattering crystals. "What is your beef? You punks don't know me!"

"Who doesn't know goddamn pro hero Dynamight!" Reverb yells back. "You're in the papers all the time!"

"Across Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and —" pants Facette.

"There's nowhere to turn that hasn't been contaminated by your ugly face!" finishes Reverb.

Glimmer bursts out, "And everyone pretends like ooooh, Dynamight, you're so great, but you're just — a big huge bully!" At the word "bully," an indescribable expression spasms across Kacchan's face. Izuku feels his heart squeeze in his chest. Glimmer's yells begin to edge towards sobs when she says, "I hate it! You shouldn't be able to just — strut around like a peacock, saying douchey things left and right! — Just 'cause people are afraid you might blow them up! People like you — people like jerkface Kisuke — you're all just —"

"Bullies, bullies!" coughs Facette. She's kneeling next to Glimmer now, barely able to hold herself up. Oh man, she's really not looking good.

"Shut the fuck up!" Kacchan yells back and throws himself away from another barrage. Izuku winces; their accusations must be getting under his skin.

"This one's for Mr. Sparkles!" Reverb cries, and it's so out of the blue that it makes Kacchan's feet stutter on the landing of an otherwise smooth leap. He squints at Reverb and says, "The fuck's that?" and then has to throw himself to the ground when a crystal stalagtite falls from the ceiling and explodes in the exact place where his head was a moment ago.

"My fucking god —" says Kacchan when he rolls back to a stand, "you all need to chill the fuck out —" but then Reverb jams his mouth piece in and the next hum is so loud that the entire crystal palace begins to resonate in a sharp, high-pitched ring, and the noise grows louder and louder until it's a deafening squeal, and Izuku has to jam fingers into his ears —

And then, all at once, there's an explosion of light and noise, and the whole castle shatters into a million pieces.

"Kacchan —!" Izuku yelps, jerking towards the screens.

The pieces rain down across Training Ground Beta, glittering and sparkling in the afternoon sunlight.

Sparkles. Mr. Sparkles. Izuku knows who Mr. Sparkles and jerkface Kisuke are. Izuku knows why the Trouble Trio hate Kacchan.

During the first week of school, he assigned an essay to class 1A about why they wanted to become heroes, and all three of the Trouble Trio wrote about a single incident that traumatized them: when they were in elementary school, the three of them played with a unicorn toy called Mr. Sparkles that they all loved and doted on (according to them, it had magical healing powers), trading it over the weekends in an elaborate scheme of joint custody. But then one day at the beginning of middle school, a bully cornered them after class and proceeded to rip Mr. Sparkles apart thread by thread, cotton tuft by cotton tuft, all the while pronouncing to his snickering friends all of the ways that the three of them were pathetic girly babies who were doomed to failure.

To be honest, Izuku read their essays with a creeping sense of unease because their stories hit a bit too close to home: trade out Mr. Sparkles for a notebook and Izuku finds himself right back in middle school, cringing at the laughter of all his classmates. The difference, of course, is that the trio never saw any glimmer of good in their bully; instead, they took all of the hurts that he gave them and chewed on them until they festered into open wounds of deep-seated hatred. "I want to be a hero," wrote Facette, "so that I can punch all the bullies like that asshat Kisuke until they can't talk or walk anymore or ever hurt anyone else. Let them rot in jail."

A red flag, maybe.

But that's the point of UA, isn't it? To teach students that being a hero isn't about hurting those who do wrong; it's about helping people — full-stop. Izuku doesn't want to fail any of the kids by dismissing or expelling them; by telling them what they can or can't become, the way that Tomura or Himiko were condemned as monsters when they were children and thus doomed to that fate. And Kacchan himself is gold-minted proof that there's always time to learn how to change.

No matter how rough his demeanor remains (and who would want it to change when it's so much of what makes Kacchan Kacchan?), Kacchan has grown to be a hero of the first order. Kacchan, the face of victory. Kacchan, who's blasting through the dissolving debris on screen, his firepower restored. He weaves through the raining shards of light to catch the kids as they fall: Reverb and Glimmer, Facette and Black Mantis (who, Izuku notes, is clutching the red flag in one pincer). The only good thing about the whole ordeal is that Facette lost her concentration as soon as Reverb shattered the palace, so the debris instantaneously shifted from solid crystal back to ethereal light; there's hardly a cut to be found on anyone.

As Kacchan blasts through the air with his load of teenagers — slung across his back and held in his arms like potato sacks, and boy howdy does Kacchan look pissed about it —, Izuku and Mr. Aizawa both scramble out of the viewing booth. (Izuku grabs his trusty messenger bag on his way out, stuffing his notebook into it.) They run pell-mell through the training grounds toward the gathering of students near the open field on the South side. Nurse Hachiya-Reed looks up when she hears their quick footsteps. At the sight of them, she huffs and rolls her eyes before turning back to Two-Fin; he's a bit wobbly on his feet, and she's talking him through a concussion test.

When Kacchan arrives, he rips the children off of him and shoves all of them at Nurse Hachiya-Reed, who tsks and tosses them a handful of the peppery hard candies that her quirk produces. She tells them to sit down and wait their turn.

Meanwhile, Kacchan snarls and strides to a position in front of all of the students. They cringe at the sight of him. His fury is incandescent: steam curls up off of his neck and his red eyes seem to glow like hot coals in the afternoon light.

"Are you all fucking insane?" Kacchan yells, and even the students who began the class glaring at him now sit huddled on the ground, as miserable as drowned cats, refusing to make eye contact with him or Mr. Aizawa or even Nurse Hachiya-Reed. "You get assigned an exercise in teamwork, and you all leave each other out to hang — or else actively try to commit fucking murder!"

It's a sign of how pissed Mr. Aizawa is that he doesn't reprimand Kacchan for his language.

"You're here to learn how to be heroes!" Kacchan continues, little pops of explosions bursting out of his gauntlets. "This was the most pathetic example of heroics I've ever seen!"

Izuku winces at the harsh words, but they seem to light a fire under a couple of the students' butts, because Glimmer snorts and mutters, "Since when does pro hero Dynamight preach about teamwork?"

Kacchan, because he is Kacchan, sneers back, "Since when do you know jack fucking shit about me?"

The funny thing is that they really must know very little about Dynamight, to be making this kind of accusation (or any of the other ones back in the crystal palace), because Kacchan works with other heroes all the time; it's an inescapable aspect of the job. You need only rifle through a week's worth of newspapers to come across multiple headlines proclaiming things like, "Dynamight and Red Riot Dismantle Tokyo Crime Syndicate," or "Uravity, Shouto and Dynamight Prevent Nuclear Meltdown." Kacchan might be a jerk about some of the colleagues he thinks poorly of (and whenever he gives a quote disparaging someone, news media and social media definitely love to run with it for as long as possible), and he might still frequently tell reporters that he's "here to be the fucking best" because macho bravado is a cornerstone of his personality, but the thing about Bakugou Katsuki is that he never lies, he's almost never wrong, and he's always learning how to be better — both as a human being and as a hero.

Izuku is about to step forward and say something to this effect when Kacchan suddenly growls and shakes his head like a dog trying to shake off a fly. Then he stops. He sighs. And when he looks back up, he's not Dynamight; he's Kacchan: the boy who bowed to Izuku and apologized to him in the rain; the boy who sobbed in the hospital when he found out that Izuku had lost his powers during his fight with All For One.

Izuku feels his heartbeat quicken.

"Okay, listen up, all of you, because this is the most important thing that I'll ever tell you and I'm only gonna say it once," he says, and all of the students glance up at the unexpected change in his tone of voice. Kacchan watches them back, looking them in the eye one-by-one as he says, "You — are — not — doin' — this — alone. You better fuckin' hope you never have to do this alone, because when the day comes that you get backed into a corner with a team of villains bearing down on you, you're gonna want friends who swoop in at the last minute to save your sorry ass. Being the best isn't about everyone else being shittier than you. It's about them being such amazing bastards that they push you to do better, too. And it doesn't matter if you secretly think they're assholes the rest of the time; when you've got a job to do, you fuckin' do it, no matter what dumb fuckin' drama is goin' on behind the scenes."

He pauses to glance at Mr. Aizawa, and that's when he notices Izuku standing nearby. Kacchan freezes and his eyes startle wide. Cinders fling out from his head like the flare of a halo, there and gone again in the next instant. Whatever else he was gonna say to the kids hangs on the tip of his tongue, refusing to drop.

It's only with Kacchan looking at him like that that Izuku realizes he's crying. Not out of sadness, no. It's out of pride. Look! Look at Kacchan! Izuku thinks, and it feels like someone popped a ramune inside of him and the thoughts are fizzing up out of his stomach, through his heart, and into his brain in effervescent joy. Look how amazing he's become! he thinks. He beams the widest smile that he can manage at Kacchan, and he hopes it doesn't look deranged in combination with his tears.

God, it's been a long six years with only the occasional encounter with Kacchan. He tracks his career through the TV, newspapers and social media, of course, but in person, he's mostly only run into him at their annual Class A gathering; maybe Uraraka's birthday party a couple times, and an event at Todoroki's agency, too. When Izuku tentatively asked Kirishima about Kacchan at the last gathering, the redhead shook his shaggy hair and told him, "Dude's a machine; you know, just work work work all the time. Like, you know how he gets when he's got a goal, and ever since graduation, it's just — one goal." He looked down at Izuku, unusually serious, and repeated, "One goal." Izuku wanted to reply, "But Kacchan's already number eight; he shouldn't run himself ragged or he'll never get to number one," but it had felt a bit impolitic to say that to Red Riot's face (he's ranked seventeenth right now), so he bit his tongue and sipped his Sapporo instead; and he tried not to worry about Kacchan.

He should have known better than to worry. Kacchan will always be amazing.

The tears and joy must be doing something funny with his sight, because it looks like Kacchan's cheeks go a bit pink — but before Izuku can scrub at his face to clear his vision, Kacchan turns back to the kids with a jerk of his body, and his wide-eyed look disappears behind the closed doors of a glare. All of the students sit up straighter when he looks at them, even the Trouble Trio, which is something Izuku's probably gonna laugh about later. From haters to respecters within the span of one class.

"So you gotta figure your shit out, capisce?" Kacchan barks out. "Whatever beef you have with me — I don't give a fuck; you come at me whenever, and I'll throw down with you — but you don't throw your teammates under the bus to fuckin' do it. And if you do come at me, just remember that I'm still gonna be on the scene when you punks graduate and start working at an agency, so you better be ready to face the consequences of any shit you start — not just today, but years from now, too. And that's true for everyone you pick fights with. People have long fuckin' memories."

Mr. Aizawa lopes over to stand next to Kacchan. "Don't pick fights, or I'll expel you," he tells his students, and somehow he manages to convey just as much forebidding power with a single eye as he used to be able to do with two. Izuku still has vivid memories of cringing under the sharp edges of his disappointment — as a first year, second year and third year — so he understands why the entire class flinches at his words. Kacchan looks like he's having flashbacks, too, if the spasm of alarm that flashed across his face is anything to go by.

When Mr. Aizawa dismisses them back to the locker rooms, the Trouble Trio are the first to scramble to their feet. "Not you," Mr. Aizawa says, his voice like steel, his arms crossed over his chest. "You three — come here. I need to talk to you." He tells Nurse Hachiya-Reed, "I'll send them to your office when I'm done."

The way the trio's shoulders droop and their feet drag, you'd think they were being pulled to their execution. Mr. Aizawa isn't going to expel them today (Izuku's, like, 99% sure), but they probably don't know that. Somehow Mr. Aizawa maintains a general reputation throughout the UA student population as a hardass even though his heart is almost as soft as Izuku's.

Kacchan snorts as he watches them, but then he turns to look at Izuku — and once again his expression just … changes. The clouds peel away, the sun comes out, and Izuku can't breathe. He scrubs at his face with the sleeves of his jacket, and maybe it's to clean off the snot and tears but mostly it's so that he has friction to blame if his face is bright red.

"Hey," Kacchan says, voice low, when he strides over to him and comes to a halt a couple feet away, his hands shoved into the pockets of his low-slung black fatigues. He looks cool and casual and not at all like he just spent an hour blasting through a training exercise.

"Kacchan! Hi!" Izuku says, smiling what is probably a pathetically watery smile at him. He grips the strap of his messenger bag so that he doesn't start fidgeting. "You were great today!"

Kacchan snorts. "That was horse shit," he says. "Jesus fucking Christ. You put up with that crap every day?" He runs a hand through his hair, then scrubs it down his face, smearing a line of black grease paint down his left cheek.

Izuku laughs. "Oh, they're not any worse than we were." He's pretty sure no one can be worse than he and Kacchan were during the first semester of their first year at UA, back when he kept blowing up the bones in his arms and legs every other week and Kacchan was still lashing out at everybody around him. (The Kacchan of today only looks like Mrs. Yamaguchi's chihuahua when he grins, but the Kacchan of middle school was Brown Sugar all the time, every single day. Brown Sugar: that's what she named the little beast, and whenever it starts growling, she pats it on its head and mutters, "Calm down, Brown Sugar, good lord. Ain't no need for that kind of talk," but Brown Sugar never listens to her. Izuku's started carrying a little baggie of doggy treats in his messenger bag, just in case he happens to pass Mrs. Yamaguchi and Brown Sugar on his way home from work. So far, he's managed to coerce Brown Sugar into taking only one treat — a quick snap of teeth a little too close to his fingers for comfort —, but the dog never once stopped growling or glaring at him, not even as it gobbled down the bribe. Eventually Izuku's gonna crack the hard shell of that awful little creature, and it's going to be glorious.)

Kacchan harrumphs and mutters, "Never fucking tried to kill anyone," but he scuffs the toe of one boot like a chastised schoolboy, so he probably secretly agrees.

Someday Izuku might be able to look at Kacchan and not find every single thing that he does charming, but today is not that day.

"Hey," Kacchan blurts a moment later, kicking his heel back into the ground in a spray of loose dirt and holding it there, "you doin' anything after this?"

Izuku blinks. "Am I …? Um, well," he says, twisting his hands around the strap of his bag, "I've got a bunch of essays to grade and I was maybe thinking of watching that new NHK documentary on the evolution of quirks — did you see, they got Mr. Yamada to narrate it! — and —"

"Wanna come over?"

"I — huh?" Izuku says smartly. This is not part of their script. Not that they've had much of a script these past six years, ever since they graduated from UA, but even when they were seniors and Kacchan had mellowed out enough to admit that he liked hanging out with Izuku, them hanging out had always been predicated on study-buddy arrangements. Kacchan didn't hang out just to hang out; he hung out to get stuff done. As Kirishima said, it's always just — work work work.

Kacchan looks down at his feet and scratches the back of his head. "Like, come over. Eat dinner with me. I'll make tonkatsu. You still love that shit, right?"

"I!" Izuku exclaims, because his heart just did something alarming inside his chest. "I would —! But, I mean, Kacchan's always so busy with hero work, and I wouldn't want to, I don't know, take you away from important —"

"It's done," Kacchan says, and now he's staring straight at Izuku, his eyes intense. When did the two of them step so close to each other? Izuku can feel Kacchan's body heat radiating through his jacket and button-down. "The project — the thing that's been keeping me so busy for so fucking long — it's done now and it's just waiting on final approval, so —" Kacchan cuts himself off. "I've got time now. Come over. I'll drive."

Izuku can't help it: his cheeks, traitors that they are, burn bright red, and his window of plausible deniability from the earlier face-scrubbing has probably closed. "Well —!" he exclaims, but Kacchan's just looking at him with steady, sure eyes, and the days when the other boy might have turned around and yelled, Psych!, like any gesture of kindness was all a big joke at Izuku's expense, are long gone. He forces himself to let go of the strap of his messenger bag. "Okay, yes, I'd love to, Kacchan!"

Kacchan smiles, and for one brief supernova of a moment, his hand drops to Izuku's hip; his palm feels like a red-hot brand burning through Izuku's clothes and sinking into his skin, and —

To their right, Izuku hears a quiet "Oh my god." When he turns to look, he sees the Trouble Trio standing where Mr. Aizawa left them a few moments ago after he finished lecturing them, and their eyes are darting back and forth between him and Kacchan. Out of the corner of his eye, Izuku sees Kacchan's face drop into a glower and his mouth open to spit out something that will undoubtedly be excruciatingly rude, so Izuku quickly jumps in with an "Oh, do you three still need something?"

"No!" Reverb yelps, wide eyes trained on Kacchan. "Nope, nope! We're good!" He turns to Glimmer and Facette, and the three of them exchange a Look with each other.

Before Izuku can say anything else, they throw themselves into a run. Within the span of a couple blinks, they're on the opposite side of the field — even Facette, even though she stumbles over a couple of the field's tussocks and all of the lines of her body are still drooping in exhaustion. Whenever she falters, both Glimmer and Reverb throw out their hands to catch her. Even if they bombed today's teamwork exercise, the trio are definitely still doing good on the physical training side of things. And that instinct to catch someone who's falling — they just need to remember how to reach their hand out to everyone.

Izuku frowns at their dwindling silhouettes. "Shoot, I forgot — I was gonna assign them all an essay about what they did wrong today." Writing down what you're feeling always helps you straighten yourself out, and if Izuku has to force the practice on his students to get them to self-reflect, then that's what he's gonna do. He says, "Maybe I'll —" and he starts to pitch after them, but Kacchan snaps a hand around Izuku's arm, holding him still. His grip is like a vise.

"Fuck that. Aizawa can deal with them; it's his fucking class." He doesn't let go of Izuku. "Come on. Tonkatsu, Izuku." He rattles Izuku's arm a little bit.

Kacchan calling him "Izuku" is his achilles' heel; even now, nearly nine years after Kacchan started doing it, Izuku feels his shoulders drop in shock at the sound of his name out of Kacchan's mouth. Kacchan could get him to agree to do a lot of things if he just called him "Izuku" when he asked.

On their way out, they pause in the main building's teacher lounge so that Kacchan can use its locker rooms to shower and switch out of his hero costume into his civilian clothes. Izuku sits perched on the blue plaid couch in the main lounge while he waits, his notebook spread open in his lap but not a single word of his scribbles registering in his brain. Instead he thinks — about happiness. About what happiness means.

If you'd asked him if he was happy at any point throughout these past five years, while he studied for his degree and then settled into teaching at UA, he'd have nodded a fervent yes, of course! There's always something interesting happening every day at school, and if his bones ache before a storm hits, then that pain isn't a burden; it's a useful tool that means he's never caught out in the rain without an umbrella. Maybe he catches himself thinking sometimes, "What if, what if —" about Shigaraki and One-for-All; about some parallel universe where he can still drift up into the clouds whenever he wants, catching lightning in the palms of his hands; where the name "Deku" rolls off of newscasters' tongues side-by-side with the name "Dynamight." But whenever he feels himself sinking into those boggy thoughts, he can always bury his attention in the neverending stacks of homework that are waiting to be graded, or he can snap open one of his notebooks and brainstorm new ways to train his students, or he can go to the small gym in the basement of his apartment complex and strain against the weights until his thoughts have been sweated out of his body, or he can text Uraraka or Todoroki in order to gossip with them about the latest ex-Class A news.

It isn't a sad life; it's leaps and bounds better than anything he could have imagined for himself at age 13. He has a job that always pulls him out of his bed with a determined "Yosh!"; he finds himself laughing most days at the antics of his students; he has enough money to pay his bills and to treat himself every now and then to limited-edition merch scavenged off of eBay. (All Might is still his favorite, of course, but more and more, it's the new Shouto and Dynamight and Uravity stuff that he throws his money at.)

But —

(Don't tell his mom—)

He's maybe, perhaps, kind of, a little bit lonely. In the relentless rhythm of his everyday routine, he never has anyone to wait for — no one who needs to finish a shower so that the two of them can go somewhere together. He never comes home to find the lights on, and dinner cooking on the stove in a waft of shoyu, kombu-dashi and mirin, and a voice replying to his tadaima! with a gruff okaeri. He never has anyone to pull him into a hug at the end of a long day, when the students have fallen into sullen and unforgiving funks, the way teenagers are wont to do, and they've taken it out on the nearest soft target, which is always inevitably Izuku's heart.

Izuku's hip bone still tingles where Kacchan touched him.

To be at Kacchan's side, to be able to watch his every flicker of emotion, to touch Kacchan and be touched by him, that's …

Happiness is happiness, but there's a difference between contentment and joy.

The shower stops. Izuku listens to the shuffling quiet of moving clothes. Kacchan mutters something, but it's too quiet for Izuku to make out the words: just the sand of his gritty baritone sifting through Izuku's ears.

When Kacchan steps out of the locker rooms, Izuku snaps his notebook closed and whips his head around to look at him. He's wearing dark acid-wash jeans, a black t-shirt emblazoned with the AC/DC logo, and a black leather jacket. There's a gym bag slung over one of his shoulders. The grease paint has been scrubbed from his face, but traces of it still linger around Kacchan's eyes, so it looks like he's wearing eyeliner. It's a devastatingly good look.

"C'mon," Kacchan says and strides past Izuku. His boots are the same ones from his costume, steel-toed and thick-soled; they thud on the floor with each step. When he reaches the doorway, his footsteps pause, and he turns to look at Izuku over his shoulder. To make sure that he's following.

Another thing that Izuku could never have imagined for himself at age 13: that someone would wait for him; that Kacchan would wait for him. If contentment is a low cottony hum that buoys you throughout the day, then joy is the bright flare of the sun as it peaks through the drifting clouds, reminding you between rainshowers what it means to be warm.

Izuku shoves his notebook into his messenger bag and scrambles after him, his own dress shoes clicking on the linoleum floor in a quick tap-tap-tap.

***

When Kacchan said, "I'll drive," Izuku thought of a car: something sleek, black and powerful, and worth more than everything Izuku has every owned, combined. It turns out that he was correct in his adjectives but wrong in his choice of noun: it's not a car but a motorcycle. Of course it is.

Izuku shifts from foot to foot, biting his lip, as he watches Kacchan flip up the back seat, under which sits a storage compartment, and pull out a second helmet. The first one — Kacchan's helmet, pure black except for a single red stripe streaked across its sides — had been left hanging off of the handlebar of the parked bike. Izuku wonders if there's a bomb implanted in it that would have gone off if anyone had tried to steal it; or maybe Kacchan's just that confident that no one would dare try to steal something that Dynamight owns. He'd probably track them down and blast them to high hell and back, no bomb necessary since he's the bomb.

The second helmet is pure black except for a few green stripes that wrap around it. Kacchan tosses it to him, then stuffs his duffel bag into the now empty compartment. Izuku studies the helmet that he's been given. He thinks to himself, "It could be a coincidence." Red and green are a common combination in sets of things, being, as they are, lovely complimentary colors that are used in traffic lights across the globe and also in all the metaphors that people use that are based off of traffic lights. Green light: go! Red light: stop! Danger, danger!

But the motorcycle is a two-seater: a Honda Gold Wing.

Kacchan's breath caught and his cheeks went pink when he saw Izuku. That wasn't his imagination, was it?

"You give rides to people often?" Izuku asks.

"Fuck no," Kacchan says, pulling his helmet on and swinging one long leg over the driver's seat. "No one's allowed to touch my fucking bike."

"Ah," Izuku says, tapping his fingers against the plastic of the helmet. He looks down at the green stripes — then up at Kacchan where he's straddling the bike, an impatient hand propped on one hip — then back down at the helmet. "I'll have to touch it to sit on it, you know."

Kacchan rolls his eyes. "Get on, you nerd," he says. He pulls the visor of his helmet down over his eyes and turns the motorcycle on; the machine coughs once and then purrs to life, its engine surprisingly quiet. Izuku might have guessed that Kacchan would love the ostentatious roar of a tricked-out motorcycle, but then again, Kacchan has always had surprisingly curmudgeonly tastes in everything except his punkish affectation.

The back seat is raised a couple of inches higher than the driver's, so when Izuku hops awkwardly into it, he finds himself at the perfect height to rest his chin on Kacchan's shoulder, if he leaned forward a little bit. Izuku feels his cheeks burn and he leans backward instead, flapping his hands around because he doesn't know where to put them. (Kacchan didn't quite manage to break through the six foot mark the way that Todoroki and Kirishima did, but he still grew significantly taller than Izuku did — because Izuku didn't grow hardly at all. Once during their senior year at UA, he mumbled a complaint about his stockiness within hearing range of Recovery Girl, and the old lady just turned around to squint at him. In an exasperated tone of voice, she told him, "Boyo, you blew up most of the bones in your body multiple times. You better hope to god you never hit a growth spurt because your bones might not be able to take that kind of stretch. Could make them as weak as twigs." She pretended to snap her walking cane in two. Izuku stepped out of the nurse's office that day with wide eyes and a new appreciation for his shortness.)

Kacchan revs the engine once, then turns to talk to Izuku over his shoulder.

"Here's the deal: lean into turns, don't go jerkin' around or nothing, and — goddammit, Izuku — hold onto me," he tells him, his voice a yell in order to compensate for the muffling of his helmet. He reaches back to grab Izuku's thigh and jerks him forward, pulling him flush against Kacchan's back. Izuku is so stunned that his arms automatically come up to curl around his torso. His brain fizzes with static. Kacchan smells like burnt sugar and smoky musk.

He opens his mouth to choke out what will probably be the mortifying noise of a dying animal, but Kacchan throws the bike into gear before he can: from zero to thirty mph in a few seconds flat, and the noise in his throat turns into a scream because Izuku is pretty sure he's going to die today.

Well, he supposes, there are worse ways to die. He still really wishes his impending death would wait at least twenty-two days so that he can read A Game of Shadows's sequel (goddammit), but all things considered, if he has to go, he'd rather end life as a splatter whose guts are intertwined with Kacchan's. It would only be appropriate: after all, one of the thickest threads that holds the story of his life together is his love for Kacchan. His identity as quirkless has changed over the years (and there's a seismic difference between never had a quirk and used to have a quirk), but his love for Kacchan never so much as flinched. Even during the difficult years of middle school, he always spent his long walks home alone wiping tears from his eyes and wishing with his whole heart, Please, god, just let Kacchan like me back, please, please.

Whatever he's lost through the years, he would trade it away again if it was the price to pay to have a Kacchan who buys a two-seater motorcycle and hands him the other helmet.

Izuku squeezes Kacchan tightly around the middle, pinching his knees against his thighs. He thinks, I don't want to let go. Please don't make me let go again. He squeezes harder and harder, and presses his face into Kacchan's shoulder.

At the next stop light, when the bike's engine is idling and Kacchan has a leg braced on the ground, he reaches back and squeezes Izuku's knee to get his attention, then he starts tapping his hand. Izuku realizes too late that it's morse code. When Kacchan repeats the message, the gentle taps turn into hard slaps: "R-U-O-K?" he asks. Even when he's talking with his hands, he doesn't like to repeat himself.

Izuku nods, then feels like an idiot when he realizes that Kacchan can't see him. He grabs Kacchan's hand off of his thigh, weaves their fingers together, and squeezes as hard as he can.

Kacchan squeezes back once, like he gets what Izuku's trying to say, and then he pulls his hand away to grab the handlebars in anticipation of the changing traffic lights.

Kacchan twists the throttle as he clamps down on the brakes, and the motorcycle growls and shudders underneath them; Izuku can feel the power of the machine vibrating in his bones, and he understands the appeal of it now, because there's something heady about being in control of so much speed and horsepower; it reminds him, a little bit, of what it used to feel like when he activated Full Cowling and tongues of electricity licked up all around him, lifting up the hair on the nape of his neck. Oh — he hadn't realized that he'd forgotten the feeling.

Goosebumps break out across his arms. And then — Izuku couldn't tell you exactly why, just that it feels like something heavy was weighing down on him and he never noticed its presence until suddenly it lifted off of him — he starts laughing.

The light turns green.

Kacchan releases the brakes, and with a kick of the engine, they take off flying.