Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

i.

A boy born with fire in his palms learns early that power comes with a price. Bakugou Katsuki is told he’s brilliant before he learns the meaning of humility, called gifted before he understands effort. Adults say you’ll be the number one hero someday the same way others say you’ll burn out early. He believes both.

His mother tells him to keep his temper. His father tells him to be kind. Neither lesson sticks.
He is ten and already too proud to look down, too terrified to look sideways, and too stupid to look up.

The only one who does is a green-haired idiot with bruised knees and a heart too big for his body, who looks at him like he hung the damn sun. Katsuki hates him for it, for that blinding trust, for believing someone like him could ever fall.

But he does.

The explosion isn’t sudden—it’s slow, years of heat building until everything gives. The world tilts and the boy who never knew fear learns it in the shape of Midoriya Izuku's face.

And when he’s on his knees in the rubble years later, palms trembling, chest heaving, realizing this idiot saved him again, he wants to scream.
Instead, he says nothing.
He never was good at apologies.

A hero never really sees peace. Theirs is the job of stepping into chaos so others don’t have to. They are duty bound to survive, to stand up again after the dust clears and the buildings crumble, to make sure the next generation knows how to stand too. There is no glory in bleeding for a world that forgets your name after the broadcast ends, but there is pride to be found in still standing. Katsuki learned that lesson before he could even control his quirk without burning his palms raw. Enrolling in U.A. was the natural path to take before beginning his training as a pro. Understanding what it means to save people, to fight villains, to fight with others—it’s all part of the job. But learning to fight for someone was never in the handbook. He thought strength meant crushing everyone else. He thought being number one meant being alone.

He met Deku again and everything went to hell. Deku who smiled too easily and cried too much. Deku who said stupid things like “I can still move” with half his body broken. Deku who had always looked at him like he was something brilliant and terrible at once. Katsuki told himself he hated that look, but he never stopped chasing it. He watched as Deku broke himself over and over to save people who would never even know his name. He saw him stand in front of villains like a shield that never asked to be forged. He wanted to scream. He wanted to shake him until he stopped. But when he saw Deku on the brink—eyes dull, body trembling from exhaustion—he learned what it really meant to be a hero.

There are no songs for the ones who stay behind. No one writes about the ones who hold the line while the world praises the one who flies. Katsuki was not meant to be a support. He was meant to win. But when he’s standing beside Deku, shoulder to shoulder, he realizes winning means something else now. It means making sure Deku lives to see another day. It means keeping him from becoming a martyr. It means sharing the weight.

No one ever told him that being a hero would mean forgiving himself for all the things he said, for all the times he was too proud to help. No one told him that Deku would forgive him first, that Deku— Izuku would forgive him before he even apologised. He watches Deku stumble through recovery, trains with him until they’re both bleeding again, shouts at him for pushing too far, and then pushes just as far himself. He learns what it means to live with someone who carries the world and still finds space for him in it.

He sees All Might’s legacy fade and understands it was never about power, it was about the hands that held the torch. He sees Deku become something terrifying and beautiful and still the same idiot who trips over his own feet. He holds that close.

No one ever told him that winning needn’t always feel like standing on top of something. He’d spent his whole life chasing the idea of being number one, the best, the strongest, the one everyone looked up to and no one could touch. He thought that was what victory meant. But there’s a cold winter morning, quiet, stupidly quiet, where he wakes up and the sun’s barely through the blinds, and there’s a weight pressed against his shoulder, warm, breathing steady. Deku’s hair’s a mess, his face half buried in Katsuki’s arm, muttering nonsense even in sleep. Katsuki blinks, listens, feels his chest rise and fall, and it hits him somewhere deep, something small and final—he’s won.

He’s won because they’re both here. Because they survived. Because the kid who used to cry behind him and run ahead of him and never stop looking back is finally still. Because Katsuki doesn’t need to prove anything anymore. The world doesn’t have to see it. There doesn’t have to be a scoreboard or a crowd. Just this breathing, just waking up next to him, just knowing they made it through everything that should’ve killed them both.

No one told him that sometimes winning looks like this. That it would feel like peace. No one told him that someday he’d stop chasing the title and realize that when he woke up next to Midoriya Izuku, Bakugou Katsuki had already won.

ii.

Midoriya Izuku grows up believing in heroes the way people believe in gods. Blindly, absolutely. When they tell him he can’t be one, he cries until he makes himself sick, then gets up again because there’s nothing else to do. 

When All Might smiles at him, he thinks this is what it feels like to be chosen. It feels like sunlight breaking through clouds that have never lifted, like every part of him that was always reaching finally finds something to hold on to. It feels like standing at the edge of something vast and being told, for the first time, that he belongs there. When All Might says you can be a hero, it builds a home inside him. He will spend the rest of his life trying not to lose it.

It feels like his ribs finally stop being a cage, like there’s light spilling into every place that used to ache. It feels like all the years of being small and scared were only leading here, to this moment, to a hand reaching out for him and saying yes, you. It’s warmth and relief and something like faith — that maybe he was right all along to want something impossible. When All Might smiles, he feels like the world might finally see him.

When Kacchan looked away, he thinks this is what it feels like to be left behind.

Years pass and the space between them becomes something like gravity—too heavy to fight, too natural to escape. They punch each other, bleed together, break bones, break hearts, and rebuild. Over and over.

Izuku doesn’t realize when admiration turns into devotion, or when devotion turns into something worse—something quieter, something that hurts even when it’s good. He learns to live with it like a scar.

And one day, when he reaches out in the dark and feels Kachhan’s hand still shaking but not pulling away, he thinks this is enough.
It isn’t, but it will have to be.

But when Kachhan gripped his shoulder after a mission, knuckles scraped and eyes tired, and mutters, Thank God you're okay, Izuku takes that as the blessing of every god he’s ever believed in.

For a second, it feels like being chosen all over again.

iii.

Katsuki stops thinking about rankings the day Izuku stops breathing on the field. The world narrows down to the sound of a heartbeat that might not start again, and for the first time, winning doesn’t mean victory—it means survival. He holds on until he hears it again. He learns that victory can be quiet, that it can happen in hospital rooms and unspoken glances. He learns that peace is not a medal, not a number, not a crowd chanting his name. It’s waking up to find Izuku alive beside him. It’s knowing he doesn’t have to fight alone anymore.

The world still calls them heroes. Katsuki doesn’t correct them. He’s learned to live with the word’s weight, its sweetness, its wrongness. There is no glory in saving the world. No glory in bleeding for it.

Years later, when the papers call them partners, neither bothers to correct it.
When the tabloids say the wonder duo saved the city again, they don’t say how they fought the whole night before.

They don’t say how Katsuki still wakes up sweating, nightmares full of screaming and ash, or how Izuku still calls his mother twice a week just to remind himself he’s alive.

They don’t say how love looks in this world: small, quiet, built from burnt hands and broken bones.

iv.

A hero never sees peace. That’s something Uraraka learns before she ever steps into the dorms of U.A. It’s not in the textbooks, not in All Might’s smile. It’s in the way her mother’s hands shake when she counts coins. It’s in the way her father hides his sighs. It’s in the quiet, exhausted eyes of recovery girls and the bruises hidden under uniforms. She wants to be a hero because she wants to make things easier, lighter —because gravity has always been her enemy, pressing down on her family, pressing down on everyone she loves. So she tells herself: if she can just rise high enough, maybe she can take the weight off them too.

She met Midoriya Izuku when she was fifteen years old. 

Deku was ridiculous, first of all. Always muttering, always analyzing, always throwing himself at the world like it owes him something. She’s never met anyone who believes so hard in things that hurt him. Watching him train is like watching someone drown on purpose. It’s terrifying. It’s mesmerizing. It makes her feel small and alive at the same time. And then there’s Bakugou. Loud, furious, always sparking, always chasing Deku even when he pretends he’s not. They are both impossible in different ways. Sometimes she thinks they were born from the same explosion, one made of fury, the other made of faith.

Her mother told her that hero work was dangerous, that she’d lose parts of herself along the way. Uraraka thought she meant broken bones, and bloody limbs. She didn’t know it would be like this. Watching Deku limp out of training, blood on his knuckles, trembling from adrenaline and guilt. Watching Bakugou hide exhaustion behind rage until it breaks his voice. Watching both of them bleed and still walk back into the fire.

She loves them both, in ways that aren’t romantic, not exactly. It’s something more complicated. She loves Deku’s sincerity, the way he tries and fails and tries again. She loves Bakugou’s stubborn heart, the way his anger sometimes looks like protection. They are magnets, pulling each other together and apart, and she’s somewhere between them, steady, trying to keep them from destroying themselves or each other.

During the war, she learns that heroism isn’t shining, it isn’t fame. It’s long nights, screams, and the sound of rubble settling after a building falls. It’s Deku not coming back for weeks and her pretending not to notice the ache that follows. It’s Bakugou’s cracked ribs and the quiet “he’s alive” that feels like a prayer.

There is no glory here. There’s only exhaustion, the kind that sinks into your bones. And still, she stays. She holds her friends’ victories in her heart like small fragile things. She listens when Deku talks about saving everyone. She watches Bakugou learn how to say sorry without breaking himself apart. She learns to breathe again.

No one told her that there’s no peace in being a hero. No one told her how brave she’d have to be just to keep watching. No one told her that the front line is nothing but blood, dust, and the stubborn will to keep living, for each other, if not for glory.

And when she sees them —Deku grinning through the pain, Bakugou glaring even as he steadies him— she thinks of how unfair it is.

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