Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was raining the first time he saw heaven.

That night it fell in sheets, making a muddy well of the grave Bakugou dug at the tree’s base and precariously softening the soil under his feet. He watched the rain dot the dead man’s face, pooling like condensation in the corpse’s open eyes. With a grunt of annoyance Bakugou shook wet hair from his face and buried the man beneath another layer of wet soil sludge. His fingers shook against the shovel’s handle, slipping over water and blood. Perhaps it would have been better to just dump him in the river somewhere. If he had, he’d be home by now, at least.

Once you did it for long enough, you got somewhat used to burying strangers. What he did know about the man was sparse, and only what his victims beyond the grave had had the strength to tell. He’d been the owner of an automobile and airship factory at the edge of the city, recruiting more rose-eyed workers from the slums the second the last batch gave their lives to the machinery. He was the sort whose absence would be noticed, certainly, but he was not the sort who would be missed.

Something in Bakugou’s chest spasmed then and he inhaled sharply, half-stumbling. He tilted forward towards the grave, bracing himself for the fall, the cold, the squelch. Instead, he hovered. A hand gripped the back of his shirt, holding him in suspension.

A voice spoke behind him, low and even, singing if it were speech. “I appreciate the effort to make my job easy for me, but I need to talk to you before I bury you.”

Bakugou brushed the stranger’s hand away and whirled, pistol raised, though he couldn’t immediately see who stood there. It was a blur of light first, bright enough to dazzle Bakugou’s eyes, and then he blinked and blinked and he was sure he was looking at a god. The man stood tall, svelte, white blouse and slacks hanging from him like light itself. Every part of him seemed sculpted, silky hair split red and white, his mismatched eyes cold, but not cruel. Two white wings arced from his shoulders.

“Bakugou Katsuki?” said the angel.

Bakugou spat on the ground, not lowering his pistol. “Who’s asking?”

“Will it comfort you to know the name of your judge?”

Bakugou scoffed. “I’m the one holding the gun, remember?”

The angel stared down the gun’s barrel for a moment before his eyes flicked back up to Bakugou’s. “Todoroki, then. If it matters.”

“You’ve come to kill me,” Bakugou observed. “Sorry, but you’ll have to reschedule. I’m not done here yet.”

“According to Heaven, you are,” said Todoroki. “Even if your clairvoyance is better than most, it’s not a human’s place to decide a soul’s path or deliver judgment. We’ve let this go on for far too long.”

Bakugou laughed at that, slowly circling Todoroki like a cat on the prowl, his finger steady against the trigger. “So I should just leave it up to creatures like you. We should let the murderers keep roaming around and let the earth get crowded with souls who can’t rest. That’s what you suggest?”

Todoroki inclined his head, his eyes watchful. “You have blood on your hands too.”

Bakugou smiled, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. “And I’ll pay my price when it’s time. But like I said, I’m not done yet.”

He saw the angel’s mouth quirk up into what was almost a grin, and in a flash of movement Todoroki had sent the pistol whirling into the night. Bakugou cursed, turning his head in search of it, and then he was on the ground. The cold earth licked at his back, but above him was fire, Todoroki’s fingers dancing like flames around his throat.

Bakugou searched the angel’s face; it was like examining the white-hot surface of a star. “Is this the part where you ask me for my last words?”

“I would if there was another soul here to hear them.”

“He will,” Bakugou said, with a great exhale that caved in his chest. “Izuku will, because you’ll tell him. Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t keep my promise.”

Something flickered across the angel’s face: confusion, maybe, and something else that was wildly human somehow, like sorrow. “Izuku…?”

Bakugou seized up then, his body racked by a harsh cough, pain radiating from his heart outwards. He rolled onto his side—barely registering that Todoroki had released him. Stars danced across his vision. When he put a hand to his mouth, it came away smeared with red and rainwater.

Bakugou struggled up to his elbows and fell again, his heart sludge in his chest.

“I see,” said Todoroki, and Bakugou looked at him, the water caught in his eyelashes turning the angel to nothing more than a bright blur. “You’re already paying your price.”

He disappeared, a lone feather drifting to the damp earth in his place. 

———

Bakugou’s tiny room above the post office was freezing, as usual.

He had barely shouldered inside when the hanging ceiling lamp flickered once, twice, and went steady, illuminating the fretful ghost who stood anxiously vibrating by the dining table like a small kicked dog. Like most ghosts Bakugou had come across, he looked almost the same as he had the day he died: the same shirt buttoned politely to the top, same overlong slacks that melted around his shoes, same pocket watch dangling from the pocket of his vest. If not for the wisps of transparency at his fingertips and his uncanny ability to interact with things without touching them, Bakugou could almost pretend he wasn’t being perpetually haunted.

Izuku asked him, “Are you hurt?”

“No.” Bakugou shut the door like he was picking a fight with it. He passed through Izuku on his way to the kitchenette, ignoring the shudder as he did. 

“You’re lying,” Izuku said from behind him.

“I’m not lying. I’m walking, aren’t I?” Bakugou said, crouching in search of his coffee pot. Whenever he closed his eyes the white planes of the angel’s face accosted him. Sleep was something he couldn’t afford. 

Izuku’s voice came from beside him now, an echo Bakugou heard half inside his head. “Did the factory owner do that? Those marks on your neck?”

Bakugou’s hand came up to his throat, tracing the bumps of burned skin, tracing the shape of Todoroki’s fingers. His breath leaving his mouth in a white puff, he started, “Listen. Izuku—”

“They found you,” he interrupted, floating up onto the counter, a movement that resembled a jump but required none of the actual physics of jumping. “I knew they would. Angels are ruled by their traditions, Kacchan. Their duty. They’re not going to take kindly to someone getting in the middle of that.”

Though he wished he didn’t, he sensed a plea in the ghost’s voice, something ugly and altogether desperate. Bakugou set the coffee pot down with a virulent clang, but didn’t turn around, his shoulders hunched over the counter. “If they’re so dutiful,” he said, his voice low, “why are you still here?”

A sigh, but not a breath. Never a breath. “Kacchan.”

“If they want me out of their hair, they can do their job and get rid of the bastard who murdered you,” Bakugou snapped. “But oh, yeah. They won’t. And as long as that’s the case I’ll have to take care of it my fucking self.”

It was silent for long enough that if it weren’t for the subarctic temperature of the air Bakugou could pretend Izuku had left, vanished into whatever limbo space existed between here and the place he couldn’t reach. Instead Izuku said, slowly, “It doesn’t make a difference, does it? If the angels don’t take care of you, the curse will.”

Bakugou laughed at that, a harsh cough of a sound. “Exactly,” he said, splaying a hand over his heart, where every beat clinked like the thud of a hammer against metal. “So the least they can do is give a poor soul some more time, right?”

“What do we do if they’re not out there, Kacchan?” Izuku said, leaning closer, so Bakugou’s skin prickled with ice. “If…if we’re wrong about all of this, and you took on this debt for nothing?”

The coffee was boiling now, the room warm and muggy with earth-scented steam. Bakugou said, “Pray.”

———

Izuku.

Twelve hours after he left the tin heart human in the graveyard, Todoroki traded his white robes for a tweed waistcoat and slacks, hid his wings, and did his best to powder the holy glow from his face. Being human wasn’t so difficult, really; it was an old garment his body still recognized, no matter how long it hung unused in the recesses of his closet. 

The receptionist at the police station was new, wide-eyed and frenetic as a deer. As he greeted Todoroki, he spoke with a confidence that was clearly at least half inauthentic. “How can I help you?”

Todoroki had to raise his voice to be heard over the ceaseless hubbub of the station: ringing bells and murmuring voices and the hiss-clunk of reports and paperwork whisking through the labyrinthine pneumatic tubes. “Pardon me if this is too straightforward,” he began, “but does this area have a high homicide rate?”

The receptionist blinked, adjusting his cap. “Not always,” he answered after a moment, “but as of late, yes, it has been on the rise. The circumstances are often strange, the evidence convoluted. Listen sir, if you’re here for journalistic reasons, I need to see some sort of documentation—”

Todoroki cleared his throat, peering closely into the employee’s eyes. “Is there a report here on the murder of someone named Izuku?”

It passed quickly, over in a second, but that single flicker of recognition was all Todoroki needed.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the receptionist. “I really can’t give out classified information like this.”

“Take me to where you keep your reports,” said Todoroki, his gaze intense, a blank sheen licking over the receptionist’s eyes as he watched. “Heaven will smile upon you.”

———

The darkness in the concert hall was the thick, corporeal kind, scented with starch and smoke, interrupted here and there by the flickering amber light of the hallway sconces. Bakugou lounged beneath one of them, close enough to hear the swell of the symphonic strings rising in the theater, far enough to nurse the cocktail in his hand in peace. The past was vague now, made obscure and nebulous by years’ worth of blood and alcohol-soaked nights, but whenever he came here, a picture of Izuku still lingered in the back of his mind. 

The first time, Izuku had an extra ticket and a bribe for Bakugou’s company that included a drink and a meal at the best tavern in town. These happier memories are less colorful now. Mostly when Bakugou thought of Izuku, he remembered the sound of him hitting the ground. Mid-sentence silence. Wet thunk, scent of metal. Still warm, but not moving.

Leaving his glass in the hands of an attendant, Bakugou pulled a cigar from his pocket as the symphony rose in a dramatic crescendo. He’d wasted enough time here, remembering, pretending. Time he didn’t have.

He was standing beneath the grand arches of the concert hall’s front doors, half inside the dappled gold entranceway and half out in the ink of night, when the angel asked him, “Need a light?”

Bakugou’s hand flew to his belt before remembering he was unarmed; this was the last place, after all, he would want to shed blood. Todoroki traced his gaze, something like amusement crossing his face. “You’re not in any danger,” said the angel, and hovered his fingers near the cigar until fire sparked and crumpled the end of it. “Even if I had come to finish what I started, you really think I’d do it in such a public place?”

Bakugou scoffed, taking a long drag from the cigar and blowing the smoke into Todoroki’s face. “I don’t pretend to understand a thing about your kind.”

Todoroki blinked, unbothered. Something about him was different, Bakugou thought, like a dazzling light fitted with a new fixture. While he still bled light into the air around him, it was muffled now, the suit he wore well-fitted but mundane, accompanied by an overall hesitance that hadn’t been there before. “What is this?” Todoroki asked, angling his ear toward the hall interior. “Tchaikovsky? You don’t strike me as the sort.”

“I wasn’t,” Bakugou said.

He wondered if Todoroki was going to ask, but his face suggested he already knew plenty.

“Is there something I can do for you, then?” Bakugou said, not too pleasantly. “If you’ve decided to spare my life after all.”

“It’s a shame what happened to him,” Todoroki said, leaning back against the door jamb. Gold shimmered across half of his face like a spotlit marble statue, and Bakugou hated how he could look nowhere else. “Broad daylight, wasn’t it? A shard of metal straight through his heart. He was gone before you even realized.”

Bakugou swallowed and said nothing.

“It’s not even classified as a homicide. A freak accident, they said. But that’s only because we didn’t yet understand the weaponry.”

Bakugou looked up. “What the fuck is your point?”

He inspected the angel’s face for malice, for deception, even pity, but he found none. Todoroki looked at him earnestly, as if laying all his cards bare. “You want justice for him. I want to properly deliver judgment for a sin that’s gone ignored. We can help each other.”

Bakugou scoffed. “Hardly a day ago you were set on squeezing the fucking life from my veins. I don’t imagine whoever you work for would be pleased to see you collaborating with the target you were supposed to neutralize.”

Around them, the symphony began to rise again, notes broad and shivering with vibrato like a pressure chamber destined to burst. Todoroki stepped forward, his long fingers trailing up the length of Bakugou’s waistcoat, stopping right where his heart chugged slowly along inside his chest. “There is only one ending here,” Todoroki said. “Either the curse takes you or I do, but I get what I want regardless. It’s up to you whether you want to keep your promise or not.”

Bakugou tossed his cigar at the ground, watching it roll out towards the street, leaving a trail of ash in its wake. He grabbed the angel’s hand, a shock of cold between his fingers. “The weaponry,” he snapped. “Explain it to me.”

“I can’t do that,” Todoroki said, stepping back, his fingers slipping from Bakugou’s. “But I know someone who can.”

“Who?” Bakugou demanded. “Where are they?”

He gave him a knowing look. “I’m afraid she’s not quite anywhere,” Todoroki said. “As of three months ago, she’s dead.”

———

Smoke billowed from the factories miles above their heads like streaks of black paint dragged through the indigo. It was a weekend; the city was lively, jaunty music spilling out from the street side bars, couples clinging to each other and staggering drunkenly over the cobblestones. Todoroki was endlessly fascinated by the myriad ways humans chose to entertain themselves. He couldn’t imagine how consuming poison that dulled your thought processes could possibly be fun.

His latest human companion walked beside him, his face contorted in a scowl, which Todoroki had noticed it usually was.

The angel cleared his throat. “How exactly does it work?”

Bakugou turned his head, spitting into a nearby gutter. “How does what work?”

Todoroki dodged a drunk woman stumbling out of the bar in front of him and dusted off his lapels. “Humans who can see the spiritual world are rare. Humans who can interact with it are even rarer than that. So I guess I’m asking if there’s a system to it. Do the ghosts simply reveal themselves to you? Only at night? Only if you perform some ritual first? Tell me.”

Though his voice was steady, Bakugou’s shoulders were tense, forming a harsh flat line. “I wish there was a fucking system. I saw my first ghost when I was four—some kid who drowned in a river. Ever since then they popped up everywhere. Eventually I learned to ignore them so no one would think I’m crazy. Until—”

A ragged exhale escaped him, and he stopped talking.

“The professor,” Todoroki said, stopping at the mouth of a narrow alleyway.

Bakugou paused, searching the angel’s face and looking away again. “It wasn’t supposed to be him,” he said, the words a low growl. “I don’t get it. Izuku, he’s—he’s all the fucking good in the world. If Death should have taken anyone, it should have been me.”

Todoroki sensed a question, an accusation, hanging on the edge of Bakugou’s words—a fervent desire to blame anything, anyone, if only for a moment of comfort. He touched Bakugou’s shoulder. “Humans do things that confound even the divine sometimes. Death may have mourned him, too.”

Bakugou stared at him, his face for that second open and bare. His eyes slid to Todoroki’s fingers, and he shook them off, turning to cast a suspicious glance down the alley. “So you’ve decided to get rid of me after all?”

“Not quite,” he said, and gestured into the darkness. “I did some research of my own before I came to find you. Turns out there was one witness to Professor Midoriya’s death that day besides yourself. A woman the police files called Toga Kimiko.”

The ghost shuddered into view, the temperature in the alley dipping at least ten degrees. She was young, blond hair wound into two twin buns, the ends of which were still stained with blood. “It’s Himiko. ”

“I know,” Todoroki said. “I remembered seeing your name recently in our records of those who’ve passed on. Perhaps if the police had gotten it right, the professor’s case wouldn’t have gone cold.”

Bakugou looked between the two of them without an ounce of understanding on his face. “What the hell’s going on here? Who is this chick?”

Toga’s eyes flashed with a vehement and dangerous interest. “He can see me?”

“Obviously I can fucking see you. I’m looking at you, am I not?”

“Oh my gosh. That means you’re crazy, doesn’t it? That means you’re like, clinically insane!”

Bakugou gritted his teeth, and Todoroki saw the gears of his anger churn and churn and all of a sudden, stop.

Inwardly, Todoroki smiled.

“Your wound,” Bakugou said slowly, his eyes fixed on the bloody center in the woman’s chest. “That’s the same…that’s the same as Izuku’s.”

“Now you’re on track,” said Todoroki. He leaned back against the alley wall, before all the questions of what may have touched it before him won over and he straightened up again. “Toga was a person of interest in Midoriya’s case, but because of the misspelling and general police incompetence, no one tracked her down. Three months following Midoriya’s death, she’s dead, and no one notices.”

“But you didn’t move on,” Bakugou said slowly, his brows knitted. “Someone murdered you to keep you quiet.”

“Which begs the question,” Todoroki said, his eyes shifting from Bakugou to Toga. “Just what do you know?”

Toga blinked at them, her eyes wide and guileless before they narrowed on Bakugou. “You…I think I’ve heard of you. You’re the freak that goes around handling the dead’s unfinished business, aren’t you?”

Bakugou’s expression sunk into a glower. “Something like that.”

Toga regarded Todoroki warily. “I thought the angels didn’t like you.”

“We have an arrangement,” Todoroki explained.

Something about the word ignited something in the young ghost; Todoroki saw the proverbial light bulb turn on behind her wild eyes. “You were right. It wasn’t a freak accident; the professor guy was murdered. I’ll tell you how it happened on one condition.”

Bakugou’s hand tiptoed up to his chest, exhaustion sinking his eyes into his skull. Before Toga could explain, he said, “Deal. Give me a name and twenty-four hours, and it’s done.”

Toga smiled, all teeth, and the alley’s temperature plummeted again. Cold and unforgiving as the arctic. 

“It was designed to look like magic,” she began. “But really, it’s just science.”

Chapter Text

“If this is the direction your profession normally takes you, it’s a wonder you haven’t yet become a ghost yourself.”

Bakugou gritted his teeth, pretending not to notice the swaying distance between himself and the ground. Atop the warehouse, the wind snapped at his clothes, nipping at the bare skin on the back of his neck. Toga’s words had stirred up memories of a day he would sooner cast from existence. In the back of his head, he was catching Izuku as he fell to the ground, watching whatever it was that gave eyes life drain out of them. Needless to say, he was already in a foul mood, and the angel certainly wasn’t helping.

“Unless you noticed another fucking entrance, this is all we have,” Bakugou snapped. After a moment, he glanced at him over his shoulder. “Can’t you fly, anyway?”

Todoroki was still regarding the edge of the warehouse roof with a measured caution. “Doesn’t mean I’m fond of heights. Plenty of people know how to swim and still fear the open sea.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s the same thing, but I’ll allow it,” Bakugou said, and with another inhale to prepare himself he crouched and hefted himself over the ledge, dangling by his fingertips. Grunting, sweat beading upon his brow, he swung once, twice and in through the warehouse’s window, rolling and sending up a cloud of dust.

He picked himself up slowly, trying to move as quietly as possible. If Toga’s tip was right, this abandoned mill was once an outpost of one of the most infamous black market arms dealers in the city, though they’d since moved elsewhere. Amongst the boarded windows, dusty work desks, and the plethora of mystery moving crates, it’d be the perfect spot for a killer to hide in plain sight.

The floorboards creaked; Bakugou whipped around as Todoroki floated in through the window, his feet kissing the half rotted beams. “Magnets,” he said, wings folding back into his skin. He drifted towards a work desk lining the far wall, dragging his finger through the dust. His eyes narrowed as if he’d found something of interest, but the expression was gone just as soon as it was there. “A simple technological concept, all things considered. One I would have never expected to be so deadly.”

A strange note rose in Todoroki’s voice whose meaning Bakugou couldn’t place. “We don’t have time for this,” he said, joining him at the work desk, meaning to pull him away. “If she’s not up here, she’s probably down…”

His eyes lowered, moonlight glinting along the sharpened edge of a dark metal blade. He picked it up; it could almost have been a stone, made smooth by years at the base of a river, but it glinted like danger.

“This is it,” he said. “This is what killed him?”

“And Toga, most likely.”

“Plant a smaller, ingestible magnet in the body. Plant this thing somewhere near the victim,” Bakugou exhaled, repeating what Toga had told them. “The rest—”

“Is magic,” said Todoroki, and with a worrisome glance at Bakugou he plucked the small weapon from his hands and set it down again. “Humans do come up with the most ingenious ways of harming each other. I’ll give you that.”

Bakugou turned then, forgetting and violently remembering again just how close they stood. The angel’s heat warmed the air between them like the sun’s corona. “Humans this, humans that. You claim to know them so well,” Bakugou said, his voice low, a whisper trembling on the verge of something more. “Tell me. Does that come from observation, or experience?”

It was a split second, but Bakugou caught it anyway—the moment Todoroki’s expression slipped.

Then it rose again, bright with alarm. “Bakugou! Behind you!”

The air whistled by his ear as he dodged the swing of a knife. The attacker swung again and Bakugou ducked, kicking out his leg. The hooded assailant crashed to the ground with a yelp, knife bouncing from their hands. Grunting, Bakugou snatched it, bringing the knife to the attacker’s throat and throwing back their hood.

The woman struggled, her face contorted into a grimace, reddish hair stuck to her forehead with sweat.

“Hatsume, isn’t it?” Bakugou said, tightening his grip on the knife.

“What are you?” she asked, her eyes looking frantically between Bakugou and Todoroki. “Police?”

To his surprise, a genuine laugh left Bakugou’s lips. “Worse.”

She spat in his face.

Bakugou grimaced and dragged his sleeve along his cheek, digging the knife in further. “I’m Bakugou Katsuki,” he said, and watched Hatsume’s eyes flash with recognition. “You murdered Toga Himiko. So you already know why I’m here.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” said Hatsume through gritted teeth.

Todoroki sighed. “There’s always a choice.”

“Why’d you kill her?” Bakugou demanded. “What do you know about Midoriya Izuku?”

“It was Toga’s fault,” Hatsume said. “He wasn’t supposed to die like that. Not in front of so many people, not that way, but she botched the assignment. Someone had to take responsibility. He said so himself.”

“He—?” Bakugou’s mind was a museum of questions. “Who’s he? Tell me!”

“Bakugou,” Todoroki said, his voice gentler than before, and when Bakugou looked closely he noticed the white foam pouring from the woman’s mouth, her eyes rolling back in her head. A hidden cyanide tooth.

Bakugou dropped the knife as Hatsume gurgled and writhed and finally went still. He crawled away from her on all fours, then collapsed, coughing, his heart stuttering in his chest, body on fire and freezing at once.

“Bakugou.” Todoroki’s voice, swimming somewhere above him. A hand touched the back of his neck, stroked through his hair. “Bakugou, come on. Stay with me. Stay. ”

Bakugou rolled over, gasping. His vision was an explosion of tiny stars, Todoroki’s face a prism of light, a refracted version of itself—beautiful and dangerous at once. “Home,” he wheezed, as his heartbeat slowed, one metal tink after the other. “Please—just take me… take me home.”

———

Sleep was another concept foreign to Todoroki. To him, it was an obscure and eldritch ritual, a miniature transformation. The very energy around Bakugou shifted when he closed his eyes and his breathing slowed, like a song that had changed its tempo. He found himself scrutinizing the tiny fold of skin between Bakugou’s brows. It took all his strength not to press it with his thumb, to touch the way a human would touch.

Bakugou’s bedroom was dark and sparsely decorated, the space of someone who clearly had little time for comfort. Small wire-frame bed. Dresser with half the knobs missing. A clothing rack, everything dark and frayed at the edges. Todoroki turned his head, considering the old guitar leaned in the corner, wondering when last anyone had strummed its strings.

“You’re feeling sorry for me,” Bakugou said, drawing Todoroki’s attention back to him. His eyes were heavy-lidded, pupils wide within a thin rim of crimson. “I can sense it.”

“If it helps,” Todoroki said, the hint of a smile at his mouth, “I’m not sure I’m capable of that anymore.”

Bakugou dragged his gaze away, studying the ceiling. The fan turned and turned in the glass surface of his eyes. He said, “Anymore?”

Todoroki waited until he was sure the words would come out steady. “I’m not sure why my past is important to what we’re doing here.”

“You seem to know plenty about mine. My future, too,” Bakugou said, and he sat up, ignoring Todoroki’s protests. “Admit it. You say you took on this case for the sake of convenience, but that’s not true, is it? You were human once. You just hate seeing another human suffer.”

It was beyond the sallow hue of his face, the way Bakugou’s body trembled in its effort to keep itself upright. Some people were just made to suffer, and he had a feeling Bakugou was one of them. “I couldn’t be an angel if that were true, Bakugou.”

He groaned. “Can you just—”

“But you’re right. Angels are born, but sometimes they’re made, and unmade,” Todoroki said, before he could give himself a reason not to. “I was alive once. Does that answer your question?”

He didn’t look as satisfied as the angel had expected. Instead, something crossed his face that was almost like grief, or its early predecessor. “What are you now?”

Todoroki considered it. “Not alive. Not dead either. I suppose I exist, and that’s enough.”

He hesitated, then reached out, his fingers dancing over Bakugou’s chest before laying themselves flat. The pulse beneath his skin was slow—more a metallic tap than a pulse at all, a half-devoured heart straining to keep itself pumping.

“Bakugou,” Todoroki exhaled, a warning.

Bakugou rested his hand over the angel’s, but didn’t move it. He stayed, lingering close to him, his nose nudging his. “I have a feeling,” he admitted, his voice low. “I have a feeling I already know.”

“Do you want me to tell you?”

Bakugou nodded, his forehead against Todoroki’s.

“The next one will be your last.”

Bakugou laughed, though that too was a sparse, half-devoured sound. “Then I guess I’d better make it count.”

The words echoed in the space between them, daring them to test it.

The room’s temperature sank, and Todoroki backed away, one hand in his pocket, gripping and releasing the object inside it. “He’s been lingering for some time, fretting over you,” Todoroki said, the chair squeaking as he eased off of it and towards the window. “Maybe you two should talk.”

Bakugou looked at him, then to the ghost hanging on the doorframe. When he looked back to Todoroki, he was already gone.

———

Dawn tiptoed through Bakugou’s window and turned the edges of Izuku’s existence to pixie dust: glittering, insubstantial, unreal. Bakugou asked him, “How long were you there?”

Izuku sat cross-legged on the floor, a pout on his face that was trying very hard not to be a pout. “ Long enough,” he said. “The next time will be your last. Does that mean what I think it means?”

“You know, I am really sick and tired of having this conversation with you. Also, just sick and tired in general, so if you could let me sleep?”

A theatrical sigh. “If you’d just take this seriously for once—”

“I am, Izuku. Why do you think I’ve been working this hard? Why do you think I promised—”

“I didn’t fucking ask!” 

Bakugou flinched. Neither spoke. The silence sat heavy, setting the floorboards creaking.

“I—” Izuku sank his head into his hands and came back up again a moment later, his hair utterly untouched. “I didn’t ask you to do this for me. Like everything else, you just decided you would, even if it would destroy you. And then I try to tell you that’s not what I want and you just—and you don’t listen. Have you any idea what it’s been like this whole time, watching you waste away and not being able to do a thing about it? Kacchan, do you—do you even care that you’re torturing me?”

The words burrowed into him, carving savagely through his flesh. “Don’t do that,” he snapped. “That’s not…that’s not fair. I’m doing this for you, okay? I’m doing this because I’m the only one who can.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to,” Izuku insisted. “What use is it, saving the dead? Especially if it costs you your life?”

Bakugou tore back his blanket, jolting to his feet. The blood vacuumed from his brain, his chest throbbing as his balance faltered. Izuku yelped and rushed for him, but Bakugou fell through his outstretched hands, hitting the ground on his knees.

For a moment he stayed there, panting, his head hung as he didn’t want to see the look on Izuku’s face. He spoke slowly, catching his breath. “Izuku, please,” he said. “I’ve long since passed the point where I could turn back and you know that. Besides, we almost have him. It was a magnet that killed you. Some unpatented weapon these underground arms dealers were working on. If I can just—”

Izuku appeared in front of him like a cloud of mist. “A magnet?”

Bakugou sat up, slowly, still clutching his chest. “Yes, some sort of magnet rig thing or whatever the fuck. Whoever it was must have slipped one of them into your food or a drink. Then the sharper magnet just did what magnets do best—it met its pair.”

Izuku squeezed his eyes shut. “There was an engineering student who came to me with an idea like that. He thought magnets could be the next innovation in self defense and warfare, and it was brilliant, but I was sure it would never be approved. I told him it was best to find another project for the time being.”

“His name,” Bakugou demanded, his breath catching. “Tell me his fucking name, Izuku.”

“T-Touya, I think,” he managed. “Todoroki Touya.”

The strange note in his voice the moment he laid eyes on the magnet. The hurried way he’d left the moment Bakugou was conscious again.

“That holy bastard,” Bakugou snapped, struggling to his feet again, half-stumbling into his dresser and catching himself against the wall. “Izuku! You’re coming with me.”

“What?” said the ghost. “Where?”

“We’re hunting an angel,” Bakugou answered, grabbing his gun. “And we’re finding him before he does something stupid.”

———

Sitting outside the city like a stained glass sentinel was an old church, empty now save for when souls needed it most—the day they arrived, the day they joined together, the day they left again. By the time Todoroki reached it, the sky was the vibrant red-orange of a sugary cocktail, dripping early morning sunlight onto the overgrown cobblestones and into Todoroki’s eyes. He hesitated at the front steps. There was a possibility the one he was looking for wasn’t here. In general, human vitality was a glaringly obvious thing, but some souls were harder to trace than others.

His hand quivered, his fingers still remembering the failing beat of Bakugou’s cursed heart. No one else, he thought as the church doors groaned open. After this, no one else has to die.

The leaden doors fell shut, sending the smell of old wood and candle wax into the air and clothing Todoroki in shadow. He craned his head back, examining the painted faces of the saints, the sunlit mosaics turning the floor to a dazzling kaleidoscopic illusion. Todoroki slipped the magnet from his pocket, rubbing his thumb over it. The memories were vague, more and more of them falling away into some unreachable realm everyday, but there were some he could never forget. The smell of his eldest brother’s room, for one. Cool metal, the smoky singe of his fire tools. The very air within those four walls had crackled with magnetic force.

Todoroki traced the two initials carved into the back of the magnet—perfect identical Ts. He tossed it between the pews and it clinked and clinked and stopped. “Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?” he said, the saints tossing his voice back at him. “Did you think I wouldn’t find you?”

As Todoroki watched, the darkness behind the altar moved, split itself in two. The new half was his brother, his hair darker, his stance more wary, but every other brilliant and terrible ounce the exact same.

“On the contrary, I hoped you would,” said Touya, his smile reaching nowhere near his eyes. “Isn’t this a touching reunion, Shouto?”

“You had him killed,” said Todoroki, staying where he was at the church’s front dais. “The professor. I had an inkling when I first heard of the weaponry, but when I found that with Hatsume”—he gestured at the magnet sitting abandoned in the center of the aisle—“I was almost positive.”

“Great. Now we’re both aware.” Touya stepped closer, leaving the altar and stooping to pick up the magnet on his way across the floor. “Do you want to know something? After you died, Fuyumi told me she saw you lingering around the house once. I thought at first the grief had driven her insane. She was the one who found you, after all. She’s hardly slept since.”

A sharp exhale left Todoroki’s chest without his volition, and he looked away. He hadn’t known. There was no way to have known. The moments after his head had struck the bottom stair were a big blank space. He had been Todoroki Shouto, alive. He had been Todoroki Shouto, dead. Then he was someone else.

“But she wasn’t lying, was she?” A hand touched Todoroki’s face, and when he turned his head he met his brother’s wild blue gaze, dancing like a flame. “You left this place for something better and you couldn’t even bother to visit for more than a second.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Todoroki snapped, smacking his hand away, though the action confused him. He wanted to be close to him and to be as far as possible, all at the same time. “The only reason you can see me now is probably because…”

Touya’s eyes flashed with understanding. He backed up, one step, two steps, until his back struck the pews.

“Would you believe me if I said it was because I wanted to protect you?” he said. “Or at least become the sort of person who could have?”

Todoroki swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Yes,” he answered, and rolled his shoulders as his wings burst forth from his back. His voice was already heavy with mourning. “Convince me anyway.”

———

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

The succulent in Midoriya’s office was dying.

This perplexed him; Kacchan had gifted him the plant for the sole reason that all things considered they were extremely difficult to kill, so “even a scatterbrained fool” like him could care for it. For a while, he’d thought he was proving him right. The spiky potted plant sat on his windowsill next to an ink vial and a stack of miscellaneous notes, and as spring had warmed the air, a tiny red flower had poked its timid head up along the plant’s rubbery side. Now, Midoriya thumbed the wrinkled petals and watched them fall dry and crumpled against the sill, the succulent’s leaves pale and splotchy with some unnamed blight. No matter how much he watered it, it wouldn’t revive: a martyr launching himself headfirst into the afterlife.

A knock made Midoriya jolt. He straightened his tie and adjusted his sport coat before he turned, hollering, “Come in.”

The door opened, admitting one of his students and a brief hubbub of polite voices, typewriter clicking, and shrill telephone chimes. It was the end of the spring term and the university was spiraling itself into a listless ergomania—Midoriya included. “Todoroki!” he said, with a frantic glance towards the planner sitting on his desk. “I wasn’t expecting to see you this afternoon. I figured you’re all busy studying for finals right now.”

He loitered on the threshold like a wary animal, his head ducked to avoid hitting it on the doorframe. “Touya is fine, Professor,” he reminded gently. “And yes, this was an impulse visit. I wanted to see if you’d had a chance to look over my prototype yet?”

Midoriya adjusted his tie once more, just for something to do with his hands. It squeezed his neck, snug as a threat. “Of course,” he said, his voice measured. He gestured at one of the cushioned chairs across from his desk. “Have a seat.”

The key to any conversation with Todoroki Touya, Midoriya had learned, was to pretend you knew nothing. There were years and years worth of rage and grief and everything else ugly and raw simmering behind his eyes, constantly on the cusp of pressurizing, igniting, immolating itself and everything around it. Brilliance and madness fed each other in a volatile symbiosis. If Midoriya didn’t understand that before, he knew it now.

“It’s an amazing prototype,” Midoriya said once he’d settled across from him. Touya sat forward a little, his shoulders hunched, hanging on every word. “I’m impressed. It seems like a simple model, but I can sense the magnitude of detail that went into it. Can I ask what inspired you?”

The ember in his eyes flickered. He answered after a moment, “I’m not like you, Professor. I started school, I stopped, I started again. I didn’t know what I really wanted from the start, but now I do. We all…we all have a right to feel safe in our own homes. I want to make a world where no one has to be defenseless anymore.”

Midoriya sensed Touya probing at something, an edge of anger around his voice—a specific, self-contained anger. Even if he believed it was warranted, it still scared him.

“I can’t send it ahead,” Midoriya said.

Touya straightened like a startled cat, his voice thin with hurt. “What?”

“There are still some safety concerns I think need to be addressed to lessen the weapon’s potential for collateral harm,” Midoriya explained, gesturing with open hands. “Not to mention the ethical and political implications of all this. Touya, it’s—it’s brilliant, and I can tell this is personal for you. That’s good. Hang on to that. But it’s just too soon for me to stand behind it.”

“You don’t understand,” Touya said, the edge to his voice deepening. “No one else will even look at it. No one else will look at me. All of them”—he tossed a hand towards the hall, as if to implicate the entire department— “think I’m just some lost cause who’s going to quit again the moment my father says so. My father, who—”

“I don’t think that, Touya,” Midoriya said. “I just think we need more time.”

Touya opened his mouth and shut it again, and all at once the agitation was gone, a storm-shaken sea gone eerily still.

He got to his feet, looming over Midoriya’s desk, mop of white hair half obscuring his eyes. “I am already out of time,” he said. “My family—we are already out of time.”

Midoriya blinked. “I don’t understand.”

Touya was already at the door, tossing it wide. He told him, “You will,” and it sounded like a promise.

The office shook when he slammed the door. The ailing succulent trembled on the precipice of the sill and crashed to the floor: dark soil, shattered porcelain, a throng of suspended roots.

———

When he was done, Touya sat down in the center of the chapel’s aisle. The stained glass kaleidoscope painted his face in every color.

Breathing had not been important to Todoroki for some time now, but suddenly it felt like the air in his chest was too thin. He told him, “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I did.” Touya reclined until he was lying supine. “Not just for you. For Fuyumi, for Natsu, for Mom. For peace of mind.”

Todoroki could barely stifle the start of a laugh on his breath. “You always were an idealist.”

“Is that a nice way of calling me crazy?”

“Maybe.”

“I had plans for our father, you know,” Touya said, his gaze tracing Todoroki as he got closer. Finally, he shut his eyes. “The only thing I regret is I won’t get to see them come to fruition.”

Todoroki knelt, his fingers clawed over Touya’s chest. His brother’s pulse was calm, amiable. Already at rest.

He said, “I’ll say hello to him in hell for you.”

Then he plunged his hand into Touya’s ribs.

———

He found him.

Midoriya phased through the church’s doors and found him first, really, and Bakugou heard the strangled, almost inhuman squawk the ghost emitted at whatever he saw. It was too late. He knew it was too late. He entered anyway.

Blood stained the chapel floors, the overwhelming smell of it almost bringing Bakugou to his knees. He saw the double arch of Todoroki’s wings first, soaking up blood from the marble, white feathers tinged red. When Todoroki turned to look at him, Bakugou saw the body at his feet. The dead eyes. The gaping hole in the corpse’s chest.

It wasn’t an option anymore. Bakugou sank to his knees.

“Katsuki,” Todoroki said, staggering over to him. He kneeled, taking Bakugou’s face in his hands, still stained and sticky with his brother’s blood. “Please don’t look at me like that. I didn’t have a choice.”

He leaned into his touch without knowing or bothering to know why. “There’s always a choice.”

“You can live now,” Todoroki said, kissing away tears Bakugou hadn’t noticed had fallen, his lips petal soft against Bakugou’s feverish skin. “It’s over. You kept your promise.”

Bakugou grimaced, pulling away just far enough to grab Todoroki’s wrist. His fingers slipped; he grabbed him again, firmer. “What about you?”

It was a question he already knew the answer to, and Todoroki gave him a mournful look, well aware of that. “I’ve done something Heaven doesn’t allow its angels to do,” he said, “and I’ll have to pay that price.”

The last word was swallowed in a stifled grunt of pain; Todoroki winced, and as Bakugou reached for him he felt the dry crunch of the angel’s feathers, dying and crumbling away like dust between his fingers.

He drew his hand back. Stared at him. Tried to understand. “Why?” he said. “You—you fucking idiot. Why go this far?”

Todoroki’s eyes glanced at something, someone over Bakugou’s shoulder and then back to him. “I could say it was my job,” he said. “I could say it was for you. You decide which one you’ll listen to.”

Bakugou squeezed his eyes shut, wanting, at least for a moment, for his eyes to open and to reveal to him that this was all some fucked up dream. “I—Shouto—”

Todoroki kissed him, a tender and timid thing, one bloodied hand cradling his face, the other knotted in his shirt, bringing him closer. Heat emanated from the fallen angel’s body, but his skin was ice, and for a senseless moment Bakugou drank him in, his hands on either side of his neck—numbed by him, electrified by him.

Todoroki released him and turned his head to cough, hitting the ground on his elbows. His wings were little more than a sparse chassis now, the feathers charred and blackened, falling around him as ash. 

Bakugou leaned over him, mopping sweat from Todoroki’s brow. “I guess both of us are cursed now, aren’t we?”

Todoroki coughed again and sank his head onto Bakugou’s lap. “It’s better than being alone.”

———

The day outside tilted onwards, the sky cloudless and the air unseasonably warm. The three of them tiptoed out through the chapel’s back entrance and to the quiet sea of gravestones, resting under the watchful gaze of a sprawling oak tree.

Bakugou helped Todoroki onto a bench, careful not to brush the swollen scars where his wings had once been. He knelt in front of him, moving his two-toned hair from his face. “I’ll be back,” he said. “You’ve done enough. Rest here.”

As he stood, he kissed his forehead, slow, lingering. Then he joined the green-haired ghost at the base of the great oak.

“Does it feel different?” Bakugou asked, just for something, anything to say. “I mean, different than it did before?”

Izuku thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “Lighter.”

“Are you ready?”

“To leave my best friend behind?” Izuku said, and glanced sideways at him, his smile enough to sustain its own universe. “No. I don’t think so.”

Bakugou scuffed the side of a tree root with his toe. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Yeah, right,” Izuku scoffed. His gaze shifted for a moment towards Todoroki, before it returned to Bakugou. “I’ll worry less, maybe. But I don’t think I’ll ever not worry. It’s sort of my thing.”

Bakugou smirked. “That’s shockingly self aware for you.”

“I know, right? You could learn a thing or two.”

Bakugou wished he could punch him. Instead, he said, on the edge of a chuckle, “Fuck you.”

Izuku laughed, then turned to face him. The oak tree cast no shadows across the ghost’s face; the grass didn’t bend beneath his feet. He didn’t belong to this world anymore, and Bakugou knew that. That didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

“I should go,” Izuku said, with a shaky exhale. “Just—promise me you won’t follow. Not for a long, long time.”

He wanted to say, Don’t tell me what to do. Instead, he splayed a hand over his heart, listening to the dull but persistent beat of it. He promised him, “I’ll do my best.”

Izuku was fading, disappearing into whatever realm was next. His mouth formed the words “Thank you,” but Bakugou heard no voice—just the air, just the wind, just space.

He stayed under the oak tree for a while, long enough for the sun to move and poke at him through the tree’s branches. At last he turned and found Todoroki still there, waiting for him.