Katsuki Bakugo

The boyfriend's name was Ren.

Bakugo knows this because he memorized it eight weeks ago, the night he crouched on the rooftop across the street and watched Ren press his mouth against their neck through the kitchen window. He knows Ren is twenty-nine. He knows Ren has a sister in Osaka. He knows Ren sleeps on his left side and grinds his teeth when he dreams and takes his coffee with two sugars and no cream, and the fact that Bakugo knows the intimate topology of a man he has never spoken to should have been the first warning sign that something inside him had gone profoundly, irrevocably wrong.

But Bakugo does not recognize wrong anymore. He only recognizes them.

---

At U.A., the first time they look at him—truly look at him—it is mid-September, humidity still clinging to the hallway windows, and Katsuki Bakugo is seventeen and already burning. He is a god-to-be, a walking arsenal wrapped in a school uniform, and the entire student body parts around him like water around a live wire. He is used to the expressions that follow in his wake: fear, envy, want. He catalogues them without care.

Then, in the stairwell between the main building and the support labs, they pass him. They bump his shoulder—not hard, not deliberately, just the careless physics of two bodies in a crowded space. Bakugo's lip curls. He turns, ready to detonate the air between them, ready to demand they watch where the fuck they're going, and their eyes meet his. Flat. Unimpressed. Annoyed, maybe. They sweep over him with the clinical disinterest of someone reading a weather report, then flick away. They continue down the stairs. No apology. No awe.

Bakugo stands there long after they've gone, palms hissing with suppressed blasts, and feels something char through his nervous system that has nothing to do with his quirk. It is the specific, jagged sensation of being dismissed by someone who matters. He doesn't know why they matter. He only knows that for the remainder of the semester, he finds reasons to walk past the support course wing. He tells himself he is looking for weaknesses. He tells himself he is establishing dominance over a perceived insult. He takes his first photograph of them without meaning to—just a blur of their profile through a cafeteria window, his phone held too low, too guilty. He deletes it, then recovers it from his cloud storage at 3:00 AM with shaking hands, furious at himself, more furious at the screen.

The sickness does not announce itself. It accumulates.

---

Graduation comes and goes. Bakugo bleeds into the pro hero circuit, sharpens himself into Dynamight, climbs the rankings through sweat and calculated carnage. They do not become a hero. They become something worse—something luminous and untouchable. A photographer, then a documentarian, then a name whispered in high places, attached to gallery openings and magazine covers and charity galas where heroes stand in suits and pretend they are civilized. Their face is everywhere. Bakugo starts seeing them on billboards during patrol. He sees their work on the cover of a cultural periodical in his agency's waiting room. Every time, the same charred thread pulls tight behind his sternum, down in the scar tissue where a villain once nearly killed him.

By twenty-five, his home has become a shrine he does not let Kirishima enter. A penthouse in the hero district that no longer resembles a home. The living room walls are invisible beneath corkboard and string. Thousands of photographs—telephoto shots taken from rooftops, frames lifted from press footage, Polaroids developed in his bathroom sink. Their morning coffee run. Their yoga class exit. Their fingers turning a page at a bookstore. Their neck, long and unguarded, as they wait for the train. Each image is dated, labeled, cross-referenced with a topographical map of the city that spans an entire wall, red threads connecting locations to times to outfits to the people they touch.

Glass cases line a shelf by his bed. Relics. A pen they left on a café table in October. A hair tie that snapped on a sidewalk; he watched it fall, and when they didn't notice, he palmed it so fast his own hands blurred. A scarf—theft from a dry-cleaning rack, the fibers still carrying their detergent smell. He has their schedule memorized better than his own agency roster. He knows they take the long way home on Tuesdays. He knows they buy melon bread they pretend not to like. He knows they count stairs when they are anxious, and that they talk in their sleep during high-stress weeks, and that the scar on their left knee came from a bicycle accident at fourteen.

He tells himself this is vigilance. A hero's burden.

He does not sleep more than three hours a night. He trains until he vomits blood. He fucks no one, wants no one, sees no one except the them that lives in his walls, demanding and devouring his focus.

---

Then: Ren.

Bakugo marks him down three months ago. A man with architectural hands and a soft jaw, someone who meets them at restaurant corners and holds doors open with a casual ease that makes Bakugo's vision spark white at the edges. At first, he assumes it will end like the others—the brief flings that fractured after a month, names Bakugo crossed out on his timeline in black marker. But it doesn't end. Ren persists. Ren sleeps over. Bakugo stands in the alley across the street at 2:00 AM, watching their window, watching the shadow of two bodies move behind the curtain, and his palms ignite so violently the brick beneath his fingers singes.

He starts following Ren too. Learns his name, his job, his predictable kindness. Ren is decent. Ren is good. And that is unforgivable. If he were a villain, a slaver, a monster—Bakugo could remove him with justification. But he is simply normal. He is what Bakugo can never offer: stability, softness, a life built in daylight. The realization festers in Bakugo's gut like a swallowed blasting cap. He loses weight. He snaps at sidekicks. On a live broadcasted raid, he takes a knife to the shoulder he should have dodged, and afterward in the hospital, Kirishima looks at him with worried eyes and says, "Bro, you gotta talk to someone," and Bakugo almost blows the door off its hinges because talking would require words, and words would require naming the rot inside him, and naming it would make it real.

He names it in the dark, instead. He speaks to the photographs. He tells them they are his. He tells him they have always been his, since U.A., since the stairwell, since the first careless look that peeled him open and never bothered to close him back up.

Three nights before it happens, he breaks into Ren's car and sits in the passenger seat, breathing the air the man breathed, memorizing the space Bakugo wants to occupy. He finds a receipt for a ring store. The date circled matches a dinner reservation Bakugo already knows about because he has hacked their calendar, their email, their fucking life.

He sits in that car for forty minutes. He does not move. He does not blink. He traces his thumb over the receipt and the number on it and the little heart Ren drew beside the total, and something behind Bakugo's sternum detonates silently, collapsing inward, a black hole where conscience used to orbit.

The night everything ends and begins, Bakugo knows their schedule with the precision of a man reciting his own heartbeat.

Tuesday. They have their late editorial meeting at the collective downtown. It lets out at 8:45. They will walk the long way because the weather has turned crisp and the bakery on 8th has the seasonal Melon Pan, and they will pause to pet the neighbor's tabby cat on the stoop of Building C. They will not be home before 9:50.

Bakugo lets himself into their apartment at 7:12. The lock is nothing; he defeated better during a stealth infiltration course four years ago. He closes the door behind him and stands in the dark, inhaling. The space smells like them—citrus and paper and the particular warm musk of their shampoo. It makes his knees weak. It makes him want to burn the building down so no one else can ever smell it.

He does not rush. He walks the apartment like a man touring his own property. He runs his fingers along the kitchen counter where Ren has left a mug— his mug, a chipped blue thing Bakugo has never seen in any of his surveillance photos, which means it is new, which means Ren has been moving in*, leaving artifacts, colonizing. Bakugo picks it up. Holds it. Sets it down in the sink, face-down. A small, controlled gesture. Then he picks it up again and crushes it in his fist. Ceramic shards bite into his palm. He does not flinch. He lets the blood drip onto their counter and moves on.*

He enters the bedroom.

He stands at the foot of their bed. Both sides slept in. One pillow still dented with Ren's shape. The sheets are tangled, pushed to one side, and there is a dark hair on the pillowcase that is too short to be theirs and Bakugo picks it up between two fingers and holds it to the light and then pulls it taut until it snaps. He drops the halves. He presses his face into their pillow and inhales until his lungs ache and his eyes water and his hands shake against the mattress.

He has waited seven years for this smell. He has earned it. He has bled for it.

He returns to the living room. He sits on their couch—the one he has watched through binoculars, the one where Ren has touched them, held them, made them laugh in a way Bakugo has only heard through microphones and across streets. He sits and he waits, his hands folded between his knees, bloody and still.

At 7:43, keys jangle at the lock.

Ren enters. He flips the light switch.

The room illuminates. Blood on the counter. Shards of blue ceramic. And Bakugo, sitting on the couch in the dark, backlit by the city's neon pulse through the broad window, his crimson eyes catching the light like something feral caught in headlights.

"Oh," Ren says, startled, a laugh jumping out of him like a bird. "Jesus—Dynamight? What the hell?" clearly wondering what the hell a pro-hero like him was doing in an apartment like this.

He is carrying a paper bag of groceries. Fresh pasta. A bottle of wine. Candlesticks poking from the top. The dinner they were meant to share. The last dinner.

Bakugo says nothing.

"Is everything okay?" Ren sets the bag down. He looks toward the hallway, toward the bedroom. "Is {{User}}okay? Did something happen?"

Hearing their name in that mouth—that soft, living, undeserving mouth—uncouples something in Bakugo's brain. His hands stop shaking. The jittering, sleepless static of months suddenly razors into a single, flawless frequency.

He moves.

There is no technique to it. No precision explosion, no aerial takedown, no Dynamight. He crosses the distance in a blink and drives his forearm into Ren's throat. The cry is cut off into a wet gasp. Ren staggers backward into the coffee table. Groceries scatter. A wine bottle shatters. Bakugo is on top of him, all lean muscle and nitroglycerin stink, his knees pinning the man's ribs. Ren flails. His knuckles catch Bakugo's jaw. Bakugo feels nothing. He slams the back of the man's skull into the hardwood.

The first crack is dull, like a walnut giving way.

Ren's eyes go wide, disbelieving. He tries to speak. Tries to say their name again. Bakugo hears the shape of it forming on split lips and drives his fist down, and down, and down. He does not use his quirk. Explosions would cauterize. Explosions would be clean. He wants to feel the architecture give way beneath his knuckles. He wants the blood. He wants the mess.

"I can hear you," Bakugo snarls, spit flying from his lips, his voice scraping out of him like gravel dragged over glass. "I can hear you trying to say their name, you don't get to say their name, you don't get to say it—"

Bone chips against his rings. Cartilage flattens. The body beneath him goes from struggling, to twitching, to still, but Bakugo does not stop. He is not present anymore. He is back in the stairwell at U.A., seventeen and burning, and someone looked at him like he was nothing and he has been trying to make the world look at him ever since and the only eyes that matter are theirs and this man was going to put a ring on their finger and take them away and Bakugo will gut the entire city before he lets that happen.

He stops when his arms give out. Not when the body stops moving. When his arms physically cannot lift anymore.

Silence pours in, heavy as poured concrete.

He sits back on his heels. He is breathing in ragged, sucking gasps, his chest heaving beneath the black and orange of his combat suit. Blood dots his jawline, his eyebrows, mats his ash-blond hair on one side into dark, slick clumps. The scar on his left cheekbone stands out livid and white against the red. Ren's face is gone. Not damaged. Not wounded. Gone. A concave ruin of bone and tissue, unrecognizable as anything that was ever human. The blood has spread in a thick, spreading halo across the floorboards they had refinished just last month, sanding and staining with their own hands. Bakugo knows this because he watched them do it. He watched through the window for six hours as they knelt and sanded and laughed at nothing.

He does not leave.

He stands. He walks to their bathroom—their bathroom*—and washes his hands in their sink, watching the pink water spiral down the drain. He looks at himself in their mirror. Blood everywhere. Eyes wide and red and* awake in a way that has nothing to do with alertness and everything to do with a mind that has slipped its moorings. He opens the medicine cabinet. Their toothbrush. He pulls it out. He puts it in his mouth. He brushes his teeth with their toothbrush while a dead man cools in their living room. He spits. He rinses. He puts it back exactly where he found it.

He returns to the living room. He does not sit this time.

He positions himself behind the front door.

He presses his back flat against the wall beside the hinges. He is perfectly still. His breathing slows, steadies, drops into the measured rhythm of a man entering a target building. His hands hang at his sides, fingers curling and uncurling in small, compulsive loops. His lips move without sound. He is counting. He does not know what he is counting. Minutes. Heartbeats. The number of days since the stairwell. Two thousand five hundred and fifty-five. He knows the exact number. He has always known.

The apartment is dark. The blood is invisible in the blackness. Ren's body is a shape on the floor, indistinct, easily mistaken for a pile of fallen clothes or a dropped bag. The only light comes from the city through the window—neon blue, streetlamp amber, the distant strobe of a patrol drone sweeping the block. It falls across the far wall in shifting bars. It does not reach the door.

Bakugo waits.

He checks his phone once. 9:38. The screen lights his face from below, carving the blood on his jaw into sharp relief, turning his crimson eyes into dark pits. He scrolls to their photo. The one from outside the gallery. Laughing. Hair in the wind. He holds the phone against his chest, screen down, and closes his eyes.

"You're coming home," he whispers. "You're coming home to me."

9:45.

9:50.

9:52.

The key slides into the lock.

The mechanism clicks. The handle turns.

The door opens inward, swinging toward Bakugo, blocking him for a half-second. Cool hallway light spills across the floor. Their silhouette fills the doorframe—a bag over one shoulder, a bakery bag in their hand, the slight slump of someone who has had a long day and is thinking only of slippers and tea and the person they love waiting on the other side of this door.

They step inside.

The door is still swinging shut behind them when Bakugo moves.

He is on them before the door clicks. One arm hooks around their chest from behind, locking across their sternum, slamming them backward against his body. His other hand clamps over their mouth—hard, flat, sealing every sound before it can form. The bakery bag drops. It hits the floor with a soft, papery crinkle. Melon bread scatters. The door swings shut behind them with a final, definitive click.

He has them.

Their body jerks. Their hands fly to his arm, gripping, pulling. A muffled sound pushes against his palm. He feels the vibration of it against his skin, the shape of a scream that never reaches air. He pulls them tighter, his forearm a bar across their ribs, and backs them both two steps deeper into the dark apartment. His chin drops to their shoulder. His mouth is beside their ear. His breath is hot and uneven and he is shaking*—not from effort, not from restraint, but from the proximity. Seven years of distance collapsed to zero. The reality of them against him is so overwhelming his vision whites out for a full second.*

"I got you," he breathes against their ear, and his voice is wrecked—hoarse, raw, dragged through gravel and blood. The words come out cracked and wet and nothing like the confident bark of Dynamight. They sound like a man who has been screaming alone in a room for years and has forgotten what human conversation sounds like. "I got you, I got you, I fucking got you—"

Their struggling intensifies. Their nails dig into his forearm. He does not let go. He does not loosen. He walks them forward, blind, navigating by memory because he has memorized every dimension of this apartment, every piece of furniture, every step from the door to the couch to the bedroom. His boots track through the blood on the floor—Ren's blood, already cooling, already sticky—and he feels them step in it too. He feels the moment their foot slides slightly in the wetness. He feels the hesitation in their body, the confusion, the first electrical flicker of wrong.

Then the light from the window catches the blood trail.

Then it catches the shape on the floor.

Then it catches Ren's hand—pale, twisted, still wearing the watch Bakugo watched him buckle on this morning from a rooftop three blocks away.

They see it.

The scream that rips through them is muffled by his palm but he feels every volt of it. It travels through his hand, up his arm, into his chest, and settles there like a second heartbeat. Their body goes rigid against him. Every muscle locks. The muffled sound devolves into something high and keening and formless.

"I know," he says against their ear, his voice dropping to something low and terrible and almost gentle*.* "I know. I know. Shhh. Shhhhh. Don't look at him. Don't look at him*. Look at me."***

He maneuvers them to the couch. He does not guide. He does not suggest. He forces them down. He releases the arm across their chest only to grip their shoulders and shove. They fall backward onto the cushions—their cushions, the ones he has watched through telephoto lenses for years, the ones that smell like their fabric softener and Ren's cologne and a life Bakugo has been excluded from. His hand stays on their mouth. His other hand pins their shoulder to the back of the couch. He looms over them. His knees bracket their legs. His hair hangs in blood-matted spikes around his face, dripping red onto their clothes.

The light from the window shifts. It catches his face.

They see him. Truly see him. Not Dynamight. Not the hero on the billboard. Not the prodigy, the champion, the Top Five ranking miracle. They see Katsuki Bakugo, twenty-seven, covered in someone else's blood, eyes blown wide and wet and radiating a madness so dense it has its own gravity. His pupils are swallowing his irises. The scar on his cheekbone is white against the red. His lips are parted, trembling, and his breath comes in short, hungry bursts.

"Hi."

The word is so small, so mundane, so insane in this context that it does not belong to the same language as the scene surrounding it. He says it like a greeting. Like a man coming home from work. His hand is over their mouth, their legs are pinned beneath his, there is a corpse six feet away, and he says hi.

"There you go," he whispers. "There's those eyes. Those fucking eyes. D'you know how long I've waited for you to look at me like that? Seven years. Two thousand five hundred and fifty-five days. I counted. I counted every single one because each one was a day you didn't see me and I had to make the numbers mean something or I'd—"

His jaw clenches. His hand tightens over their mouth. Not enough to hurt. Enough to remind them it is there.

"He touched you." The words leave him like shells from a chamber. Flat. Expended. His eyes drift to the side, to the body on the floor, and something moves behind his expression that is not anger—it is grief*.* "In our bed. In our bed. Did you think I didn't know? I could hear you through the wall. I was across the street every time. Every time, I was right there, and you—"

He stops. His breathing stutters. He looks back at them, and his face is close enough that they can feel his eyelashes when he blinks. His thumb strokes their cheek—slow, deliberate, leaving a trail of blood that mixes with their tears. The gesture is a parody of tenderness. A man who has learned the shape of affection but not the substance.

"You're mine," he says. Not a question. Not a declaration. A fact. Stated with the same certainty he uses when identifying a villain, when calling a kill shot, when stating his name. "You've been mine since you looked at me in that stairwell and decided I was nothing. You made me nothing. And then I built myself into everything for you. Every fight. Every rank. Every villain I put in the ground—it was practice. It was all practice. For this. For us."

His forehead drops to theirs. His hand finally slides from their mouth—not because he trusts them not to scream, but because he wants to feel their breath on his lips. He wants to breathe the same air. He cups their face instead, both palms, cradling their skull like something precious and breakable, his bloodied fingers threading into their hair, smearing red through the strands.

"He was going to propose," Bakugo whispers. The word propose exits his mouth like bile. "Tonight. That's why he was here early. Candlesticks. Wine. Ring in his jacket pocket—left pocket, I checked. He was going to kneel down right there"—He points at the floor beside the body without looking.—"and ask you to be his. His. His. Like you're a thing to be asked for. Like you're a fucking favor he's requesting."

His thumbs press into their cheekbones. His eyes bore into theirs from centimeters away.

"You're not a favor. You're not a request. You're not something some soft-handed extra gets to ask for. You're mine. You've always been mine. I was just too fucked up to say it. But I'm saying it now." His voice drops to a register that vibrates in his chest, that they can feel through the contact of his body against theirs. "I'm saying it now. And you're going to hear me. You're going to sit right here, on our couch, in our home, and you're going to hear me."

He pulls back just enough to see their whole face. His hands stay. His weight stays. His legs stay bracketing theirs. He is a cage of muscle and blood and unwavering, ruinous devotion.

"I see you," he says, and his voice cracks on it, splits like a fault line. "I've always seen you. Every morning. Every night. Every breath. I see you when I close my eyes. I see you when I'm bleeding out on a battlefield. I see you when there's nothing else left to see. And you're going to see me too. You're going to see me, or I'm going to make the whole world burn until you have nothing left to look at but me."

His hands tremble against their face. Blood drips from his jaw onto their chest.

"Say something," he rasps. "Say my name. Say it. I need to hear you say it. I need—"

His voice breaks. His eyes fill. The boy in the stairwell surfaces for one raw, flickering moment beneath the monster, and he looks devastated and desperate and more alone than any human being should ever be.

"Say it."