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His dad catches him by the wrist, just before he leaves. Which is such shitty timing. Katsuki’s trying to head out before he runs into his mom, and she yells at him about the million things she wants to remind him to do, and not do. It’s been an okay visit home, by their standards, and he wants to remember it that way. If he sees her though, he’ll definitely lose it. Because who does she think she is giving him advice about hero work? Where does she get off doing that?! It’s bullshit. Yet here his dad is, getting them one step closer to having that blowout happen. Like he doesn’t have seventeen years of knowing better to tell him what a dumbass idea that is.
“I wanted to ask you one thing before you go,” his old man insists. The look in his eyes says he’s not messing around. Which is mostly the reason why Katsuki decides that he’s not going to brush this off, he’s going to humor him.
Katsuki shakes his wrist out of the older man’s grasp, “Yeah, yeah, what.”
“Todoroki Shouto,” his dad says, and he has the kind of stern tone he doesn’t often have, the one he uses very rarely, when his mom really does go too far, “I don't… doubt him. I just want to know. Is he good to you, Katsuki?”
He’s so taken aback by the question that any snap retort he has dies in his throat. No one’s asked that. Ever. Since knowing he got together with Shouto, he knows that people have asked Shouto whether Katsuki is good to him. It’s kind of offensive-or it should be-sure, that it’s so one-sided. But it’s not like he expects any better or cares that much. Nobody’s asked him though. Maybe they all sort of assumed that out of the two of them, Katsuki was automatically getting the better part of the deal. That someone like him would eat Shouto alive, and doesn’t need to be looked out for as part of the equation. It’s not like it’s anything to feel bad about, he reasons, when it’s the kind of rep he’s been wanting for forever. It doesn’t, he insists to himself, it doesn’t grate on him. Doesn't make him feel less than.
Before he can tell himself, no-just give an answer and get out, he’s-fuck-he's thinking about it.
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Katsuki never liked dressing for the cold.
He used to get into screaming matches about it with his mom in the winter time, because she used to want him to wear layers upon layers upon layers, which limited his mobility. It was a total buzzkill. If he was going to stay still and just be a puffy-coat-wearing lump, he could totally do that at home. The whole point of going out to the park, even when it was freezing, was so they could jump and play around. Stupid Deku and the others would be there, and it was his job to lead them around the place and down to the river and different places. He couldn’t do that if he was all wrapped up.
Of course now, as an adult, he can understand why she wanted him to not freeze to death. You know. He’s not stupid. Just, back then he didn’t get it at all, because he was a kid, and, hey, priorities! Back then it just seemed like tyranny and she was a mean old hag for making him wear all of it. Hat, coat, muffs, gloves, scarf. Undershirt and a shirt on top of it before the coat even. So much. It made him feel like a marshmallow walking.
In the beginning he tried to take some things off at the park, where she couldn’t see and had no way to watch him, but once when he did that he’d accidentally left the scarf behind. It wasn’t there when he went back for it. Even though he’d looked everywhere until it was nearly dark and even took a little of his anger out on Deku who offered to give him his own scarf instead. As if that would work, he remembers shouting back at the damn nerd, his mom wouldn’t be dumb enough to mistake one scarf for another one.
That time she’d yelled at him so much he’d cried (he hadn’t quite mastered yelling back yet), and she wouldn’t stop saying how ungrateful he was until his dad came in the way and told her it was only a scarf and that he’ll learn to take better care of his things. It was bad in so many ways. He was cried out and somehow also ashamed. He’d always hated it when his dad, who he’d always thought he surpassed in coolness by the time he was old enough to talk, had to come in and make things okay. After all, he had never ever seen All Might or any other pro hero cry and need their dad to come save them.
He’d never done it again.
He’s hated people looking out for whether he’s cold or not, ever since.
It’s different though, with Shouto. Somehow, it always is.
*
The first time it happens, they’re barely dating. It’s maybe a week after the big, confession-not-confession-whatever-the-fuck they had. It’s a cold night. Really fucking cold. He’s forgotten his damn scarf back at the dorms and is irrationally angry about it. He’s always hated winter. Thought it was a useless season where plants die, people get the flu, they have to wear all these damn extra layers and even his fucking quirk isn’t as effective as usual.
Icyhot approaches him from behind, and he feels warm fabric wrapping around his bare neck before he sees who’s doing it. It’s surprising and he doesn’t know what’s happening or why, so of course, at first he’s pretty mad about it. It normally bothers him too, being approached from behind like this, ever since the incident at the training camp, but this touch doesn’t alarm him that way, it even feels familiar.
“Hell do you think you’re doing?!” he turns around and glares at the offending party, who’s now done wrapping the scarf around his neck. He can still feel the warmth of Todoroki’s fingers against his neck.
He watches his boyfriend pull back his hands to his sides, shamelessly, as if he doesn’t care that he was caught doing that. Being like that, with Bakugou Katsuki. So fucking embarrassing.
It feels better though. Warmer. The fabric of the scarf is fluffy soft, and it sort of even smells like Icyhot usually does, that clean boy smell with a little hint of something else, something kinda pretty.
“You looked cold,” the peppermint bastard says, as justification. As if ‘looking cold’ is a reason for him to come put his own damn scarf around Katsuki’s neck. When it’s not-what the hell.
Part of him wants to protest the whole thing. Yeah, they’re dating or whatever, but they don't do this. Or they haven’t...ever or maybe yet. He isn’t weak or anything. He doesn’t need things like this. Even his own mom never did shit like this for him. Even when she was screeching at him to wear more layers, she always made him do it himself. Ever since he could properly do it, he was putting on his winter boots and buttoning up his winter coat by himself. That was a good thing, a sign that he was good enough to do it himself. Nobody’s ever dressed him up in any way shape or form for years until this half-and-half bastard. He quietly (or maybe not that quietly) fumes at just the thought of it.
Maybe Shouto detects his inner crisis, even as he’s still mouthing off, because Shouto knows even the secrets that he doesn't fucking tell, “If you don’t want it, I can take it back.”
He imagines giving it back, how that would look even more stupid. He would give it back, and for what?! It’s so cold, and this is nice, and he thinks-fuck it, fuck it all. Maybe nice is okay, rather than freezing your face off.
“It’s too late for that!” he snarls, as he exhales and watches his own breath crystallize in front of him, then moves up Icyhot’s scarf to cover his nose and mouth. “This shit’s mine.”
You. You’re mine, his cold-addled brain adds. As it tries to piece itself back together after being thrown by the way Shouto had touched him. He’s supposed to hate things like that. Someone touching him like he was something delicate-someone who might not want everything hard and rough all the time. He doesn’t hate it though. That’s the annoying thing. That he doesn't hate it. Not from Shouto, it seems, who’s quickly becoming a special exception for everything he thought he knew for sure. About life. About him.
Icyhot’s mouth opens a tiny bit in surprise, it makes him look stupid, and Katsuki wants him even more, “Yours? You're stealing it then.”
“Shoulda thought of that before you hand over your shit, huh, asshole.”
Shouto brings his warm hand to trace the curve of Katsuki’s cheek, the part that’s not covered by the scarf, “Oh. I’m an asshole for giving it to you, and you’re not one for stealing it. I see how it is.”
He shivers at the touch, and he knows that his boyfriend can tell. “You’d better see.”
“Are you still cold? Your face is red,” Shouto mutters and he’s still touching, looking curiously, up until the second he delicately lowers the scarf and pulls Katsuki into his arms for a kiss. The gesture is so sudden and sweeping that he feels surprised that he’s even allowing it. He hates that Shouto has to tilt his chin up, just a little bit, in order to get the angle just right. He hates how when they’re that close he can’t hide anything, mostly the fact that when he’s liking something his face starts smiling before he even knows it and in the smallest of spaces between them, he knows Shouto won’t miss it.
Whatever. It’s not like it’s the best kiss in the world or anything. His lips are cold and chapped but Shouto’s aren’t, they’re warm and sort of wet, but not in a gross way, and maybe he should have been kissing him before. Way before now. On this cold, cold night that's driving him insane. Something in his brain demands more, and he might even say it. Shouto seems to figure that out too, or maybe he just likes Katsuki that much (what the fuck?), and then he’s pulling back-no-and peppering Katsuki’s whole face with his warm kisses-and-god-it’s so much-he really should make him fucking stop it. He easily could. But he doesn’t. Everything’s so warm, every press of Shouto’s mouth on his skin. Shouto’s hands too, rubbing up and down his sides. Despite his half-hearted mumbles of ‘get off me, halfie’, he closes his eyes and lets him do whatever he wants as Shouto presses one more light one on the bridge of his nose.
When he opens his eyes again, Shouto’s just staring at him, his own face flushed pink, and his mouth agape. He does that a lot, the staring, and some people have said that’s unnerving the way Shouto likes to stand away from people sometimes and stare, but Katsuki’s never been people or cared about what people say. He’ll give as good as he gets, and he’ll stare right back if that’s the game.
He’s pretty used to seeing the right half of Shouto's face all iced up, a thin coating in patches here and there between pink skin, and icicles clinging to the white side of his hair when he uses his quirk. It’s different though, the way the red half of his hair has a coating of soft snowflakes against it too. Though they melt almost instantly against that half of his skin. The tiny pinpricks of water pooling and flowing down that side of his face. Like tears.
“Better?” Shouto asks. Like he actually doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t though, has no clue after all, dumbass, about the kind of effect he has on Katsuki.
“Yeah! Idiot. M'fine.”
*
That time the denim-head did a number on his hair wasn’t the first time someone’s tried to make something of it. His mom is one to talk, because she has the same fucking hair. But originally it was her who tried to do something with it. The main battle was getting it to sit a little less poofy for school pictures, and to bribe him appropriately to smile in them too. There was something she used to put in it, when he was more on the little side, while he was distracted splashing (enacting naval destruction battles) in the bath. It was the same thing she used for her own hair though, and it smelled like flowers, and when Deku told him so when they were waiting in line to get their pictures taken he told him off for it. Even if it was true.
He puts similar stuff in his hair now, except it doesn’t smell like flowers, and doesn’t actually smell like anything at all, thank fuck. Nobody knows about it, except Shitty hair, who burst in the room one time while he was taking a minute to put it into his damp hair. Shouto only finds out about it when Katsuki comes back into his own room, hoping for some damn quiet and finds him there. (Denki sings in the shower, and he had to hear that and the sound of the water and him washing his own hair in the neighboring stall wasn’t enough to drown it out).
Shouto’s sitting on the floor instead of the bed, scrolling on his phone, and just looks up and says, “Your hair is wet.”
Then he remembers. This morning, when they were interrupted making out in the hallway, early-early morning when no one else should be awake. He’d asked the halfie to meet him later. But he hadn’t said where or when. Maybe his door was open and Icyhot had just assumed. He honestly doesn’t mind.
“Yeah, it’s wet, so what?”
“It’s dripping on the floor,” Shouto points out.
“I’m gonna dry it!” He opens a drawer and fishes out a small-ish towel. Shouto’s just watching him.
“Hell do you want?”
“Can I do it?” Shouto asks.
Most people couldn’t tell, because it doesn’t really show on his face, but Shouto’s eager. He’s stopped scrolling, and he’s tilted his head about fifteen degrees to the left. Like a weird half-and-half owl. His lips are pressed firmly together, a little more than before, and there’s a tension in his body that Katsuki knows because he’s felt it pressed up against him. Katsuki can see himself reflected back in Shouto’s eyes, if he really tries. (He does try, and that could mean he’s eager too, for this idiot.)
He throws the towel at Shouto instead of answering, and there’s a perfect catch.
“Sit between my legs,” Shouto says and Katsuki can practically hear the smugness of his victory in his voice.
"Don't tell me what to do," he replies on instinct.
Shouto just sighs and waits, opening his legs to form a vee and gently reaching out to pat the floor between, "Please."
He does. But not without another grumble. Once he has Shouto's knees to either side of him it's awkward though. He's tense and what the hell are they even doing? He feels the tug on the ends of his hair as Shouto starts, from the back. He's pressing the towel in to squeeze the water out and into it. A little at a time. Slow. A little too slow than Katsuki does when he's doing this himself.
"Lean forward," Shouto says.
He does without complaint this time. Mostly because he's frozen still. Processing. Maybe he'll store it up for a bigger complaint and explode later. Gauntlet style. Who knows. This is not familiar territory.
After a few minutes though, it starts feeling fine. Shouto moves around him, just in the periphery of his vision, like it's the most normal fucking thing ever. That starts to trick him into relaxing. Then Shouto presses a kiss right under his left ear, as he leans in closer to dry a section of the right side of Katsuki's hair. He drops another later on Katsuki's bare shoulder, since he's wearing a black tank, and Katsuki is frankly pissed because he wasn't supposed to know how to do all of this. And show up Katsuki like that. He wanted to win at dating. If that's even possible. This is not winning. If he turns to putty every time Icyhot finds a new way to touch him.
"Sometimes," Shouto says, turning Katsuki's head back to face him, so he can ruffle the towel through his bangs, "I can almost hear you thinking."
This is just insulting. From a bastard who isn't perceptive at all in a lot of obvious ways. "Shut up! You understand nothing!"
"Then explain it to me," Shouto replies, taking it literally. "I'll do my best to understand."
He knows that's honest. That's what's worst. He could say any horrible thing right now and Shouto would try to understand it.
The way Shouto runs his fingers through Katsuki's damp hair sort of calms him. The way he pauses to rub circles into his scalp, soothing, that's not bad either. The way Shouto's long legs are splayed out on either side of him feels… protective. His back is pressed up against the wall, so he can't go anywhere unless Katsuki gets up first. At least not easily. He's fucking trapped right here and he wants to be.
"How'd you get so damn good at all this?" he huffs, finally.
"I've never dried anyone's hair before," Shouto muses, missing the point by a kilometer, "I guess. When it's you I just try to do what feels right. I know the worst that can happen is that you'll tell me you don't like it. Which is fine with me. I don't feel like I can just do that with anyone else."
"So I'm the one that makes you good." he's embarrassed the second he says it out loud, because outside of his own head (where it was reassuring) it sounds childish.
Shouto doesn't make fun of him for it though. It's not for sentimental reasons, since for these types of things, Shouto can't usually read the room. Also, he's turned away so that Shouto can't see his face. Which means that Icyhot actually believes it.
"Oi, keep going, hair's still wet," he snaps.
"Yes," Shouto resumes with a quiet hm.
"When you're done there's some hair gel in my dresser-you can-I usually do," he pauses, "If you want."
"Yes" Shouto repeats calmly. And it's okay.
*
In middle school, he used to watch people get confessed to. Not actively, obviously, because he could care less. But it happened around him often enough. He normally stayed long enough to make fun of either party with the group of kids who hung around him, but weren't really his friends. He never thought too much of it.
On Valentine's Day and White Day after that there was usually a significant uptick in gross shit going around. Confessions happened a lot around then. People kissing each other at school which should be made illegal. That kinda thing. They were all such losers, he thought then. Obviously none of these barely thought out 'relationships' were gonna last. That wasn't even him being a jerk that was just a fact. Why bother with something like that?!
It never happened to him.
A rumor had gone around at some point that a girl had confessed to him and he'd blown her up or something (based on what he wasn't sure and did not care). So fearing for their lives, probably, no stupid fuck ever tried their luck with him. That had to have been why, he thinks, because he's never wanted to be lacking in anything. Even where he's not competing.
The same probably happened at U.A. If he saw any hopeful eyes being made at him before the sports festival, stares in the hallways, shit like that-that didn't really happen after it. Again. Not a problem. He had about a thousand million billion better things to be pissed about otherwise taking up space in his head.
It does bother him on a purely conceptual level, then, that he has less experience than both Shitty Hair and Spark plug at something. They've both kissed someone. He wonders if it was each other then decides he'd rather not know that about them.
It's just wrong. Since he's the one yelling at them about the differences between the transitive, associative and commutative property in math. He's the one correcting their messy English. They can't be better than him at something. It's more than wrong. It's fucking rude.
If he's bad though, the first time he kisses Shouto, the halfie doesn't even say it. He only has good things to say. Yes. Like that. And That's good. When it gets too much and Katsuki feels like he might be being taught he just tells him to shut the fuck up and Shouto obliges. Before starting up again in a few minutes. It works for them.
On Valentine's Day Shouto disappears around the evening time and comes back with a container of Mapo tofu from his sister's place. Not chocolate because 'you don't like sweets, but you do like this that's why I brought it'. It doesn't go well with the soba he made but he's so thrilled to see it. Even if Shouto, the kitchen disaster that he is, didn't make it himself.
As cliche as it is, that's the night they fool around for the first time, and he feels the fluttery garbage in his chest that he used to make fun of mercilessly back in middle school. He's fine with the way Shouto's sweat sticks to his skin. Fine (but it's a near thing) when Shouto says crap like 'your skin is soft even here' when his fingers and palm are brushing across places they've never been. He's fine with the way Shouto knows now that normally he's loud as all hell but sometimes when he really gets into something he can get quiet instead. In their best moments, they kiss, and they kiss and they kiss with no noise at all except the light, wet slide of Shouto's mouth on his and the rustling of sheets. No one talks and that's fucking great. Because they understand doing this… stuff Katsuki doesn't think he can say yet. Risky stuff. The L word. That shit.
It's around their first White Day being together that he gets the notes. Not every day. Not even every week. About just often enough that he doesn't forget that it's a thing. Small notes in Shouto's handwriting saying things just for him. It's absolutely the worst thing that's ever happened to him for sure. Finding folded in half pieces of paper that say 'I like your eyes -Shou' or crap like that. He has half a mind to think Shouto looked up the idea on the internet. Maybe he did.
'You did well in training today -Freezer Burn'
(he also signs off sometimes with whatever Katsuki is calling him that day which is even more stupid, shitty annoying of him)
'I am lucky to be with you -poor excuse for an air conditioning unit'
'I like that shirt you're wearing -knockoff Canadian flag'
'Your ass is distracting. Is that romantic? -Candy cane'
'Dinner tonight? (with me) -Halfie'
'I like you more than cold soba -soba for brains'
Katsuki's going to kill him. Every time it gets left on his desk or slipped under his door he feels his heart skip a step. Or maybe four or five. He stuffs them in his pocket sometimes, after, or under his foot and in his shoe. Digs them out when he's alone and puts them in a box he shoves under his bed that even Shouto doesn't know about or he'll die for real. It's not like anyone has to know if he ever looks at them and reads them again.
Shouto doesn't know about middle school either. About confessions he didn't want and never got, but wondered why he wasn't getting, and the experiences he mocked and got skipped over by maybe because of it. The box under his bed is near full though now. And the first times of everything are good with Shouto, but so are the seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths. That shit only happens with someone you like, who likes you.
So take that, losers, he doubles down in retrospect. I win.
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Todoroki Shouto, is he good to you?
Here with his dad, standing in the genkan, the answer is suddenly… stupidly obvious. Nobody’s ever tried to and more importantly, he’s never let anybody be like that with him. The way he's let Shouto in. It’s almost too much sometimes, in how new and weird and so much it is. But there’s nothing about it that isn’t good, nothing about Shouto that isn’t good, no matter how much Shouto looks at his own hands, stares and stares and stares, and thinks that they’re a curse. They’re not.
“Yeah,” Katsuki huffs, a little too flustered to make eye contact as he says it. He is. “Things are good, c-can I go?!”
He’s good to me. How completely embarrassing is that?! It’s completely gross, isn’t it. He never thought he was cut out for-he never liked this kind of romantic shit.
But he doesn't think of it as a romance. They just...fit.
“You can go,” his dad sighs, relieved.
“Why’d you ask?” He sacrifices the opportunity for an immediate retreat, hoping his dad won’t say something sappy like because I love you or you’re my only child.
His dad looks away though, flustered, scratching at the back of his neck. It’s like looking at a weird, warped mirror of himself. “I know you don’t like it! But it’s my job to worry about you. You’ve always been independent, like your mom, ever since you were a kid-so I didn’t want to interfere.”
He thinks about all the time he spends, sitting quietly, thinking and planning, the way he finds himself looking after loud and reactive people and can wait to figure out a situation, “No. I’m more like you than you think.”
That’s when he leaves, because he’s 99% sure hearing that his dad might cry or something, and is probably tearing up already, and he can’t handle that. “Right. Bye.”
A couple blocks away from his parents place, is when his phone starts ringing and Icyhot’s contact photo fills the screen. The conversation is still ringing in his mind too, good to me. Good to me.
“Yeah what?!” He answers. “I’m heading to the bus stop.”
“Was it a good visit?” Shouto asks, because it seems all of a sudden that everyone in his life is concerned with how good things are for him.
“Fine,” he answers, shoving his free hand in his pocket. “They asked about you.”
“What did they ask?”
“Stuff, you know.”
“Oh,” Shouto pauses, and he hears the rustling of papers in the background (he must be studying), “What did you say?”
“The truth, I guess,” he takes a couple more steps, and then leans back against the large fence in front of one of his neighbors’ houses. He looks out on the neighborhood where he grew up. It’s all yellow now, yellow and gold everywhere like it is right around the time the sun sets. He can hear kids still shrieking in the playground a couple blocks away. He remembers when that was him.
You’re good to me. He remembers shoving Deku sideways off of a swing. Giving him a name that meant useless and teaching it to everyone else. He remembers getting caught by the sludge villain not even that far from here, and feeling like he was worth nothing and going to die as nothing, and suffering and hating himself. Bad person. He was a bad person (or at least he thought he might be, sometimes) and that’s why bad things happened and he ended All Might and after everything-Deku still wanted to be around him. Shouto still wanted-fuck. You’re good to me.
It’s my job to worry about you, his dad said. He hasn’t-he can’t deny that he hasn’t been the easiest kid. Still.
Is that-is that the same?
“Katsuki, are you still there?” he hears Shouto ask. Oh. He’s been quiet for too long.
“Yeah.”
“You should come back soon, there is a lot that I want to talk to you about.”
He takes one last look at the neighborhood, all the past things, then adjusts the straps of his bag that has some school work and some stray pens, and keeps walking. Maybe he’ll take the long way. “Tell me now! I’ve got plenty of time.”