A/N: bkdk pride week day 4 - love | green
Originally posted June 4th, 2021.
"Hi, Kacchan!"
Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump…
It was the simplest in middle school. Everyone around him was crazy about girls, ogling the nearby girls' school students as they walked home in their skirts and button downs. Meanwhile, Katsuki wondered why all these extras around him were so interested in dating. It wasn't like they were going to marry anyone they met in middle school so what was the point?
Idiots, honestly.
High school was harder. The proximity provided by a co-ed school was more than some of these halfwits could take and suddenly most everyone was interested in dating. They would try it, it would fail after three months, and the whole time the dumbasses were distracted from their school work. A goddamn waste of time, as far as Katsuki was concerned.
He was trying to be a hero. And if being the only person in the room not fretting over who they were going to hold fucking hands with at lunch gave him an edge, he'd take it.
It wasn't just his determination that was doing this to him. Himself aside, the most determined person he knew was damn Deku, and even that nerd was having some kind of flirtation with Round Face. So he just wasn't into people like that. Fine. He barely liked people to begin with.
So why then, years later:
Katsuki was still working under the manicured thumb of Best Jeanist. He thought he'd be solo by now—Hawks had done it. Fucking Endeavor had done it—but the way it was looking, that wouldn't happen until he was twenty-five, and probably no earlier. So he was largely at the mercy of whatever that coiffed head of hair needed from him. And when Jeanist hired on some interns on as sidekicks he shuffled everyone's patrols around.
Including Katsuki's. And who should he see on his first patrol but—
"Hi, Kacchan!"
Katsuki felt his palms begin to sweat, which was goddamn unusual, because he had worked for years to master complete control over the sweat glands in his hands. He looked up to see that stupid old familiar face, barely slimmed since elementary school. The only real difference from childhood was how weatherworn Deku's skin had gotten; he was tanner, more deeply freckled, and crow's feet had just begun to walk their lines across his skin from all that goddamn smiling. It had been months since Katsuki had seen the fucker.
And yet, his heart went: ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump…
It was easy enough to brush the feeling aside. The damn nerd had always had a habit of raising Katsuki's blood pressure. Of course that wouldn't change just because real life had gotten a little busy and they didn't see each other every day like at U.A. In fact, Katsuki would suspect that that would even raise his blood pressure higher, since he was no longer microdosing on the shitnerd's mumbling and big green eyes every day.
Except now he was again.
Suddenly, their patrols overlapped, and not too infrequently a villain would tumble from one of their domains into the other, leading to the two of them fighting as a team. Years of them training One For All together—when exactly had they stopped that? Shouldn't they start again—had left them completely literate in reading each other's moves. They were so good that it was rare a fight ever went on long enough for there to be any property or otherwise collateral damage. Katsuki might have complained about how boring fights were getting, were it not for the fact that at the end of each one, Deku would land next to him, cheeks flushed and say, "Kacchan sugoi!" or some shit. That wasn't so bad.
Or if it was a quiet day, Deku would jog over to Katsuki and chat with him about whatever popped into the damn nerd's head. And despite the peace on those days, the steady heartbeat that his easy walking gait should have been keeping, Katsuki's pulse was racing like it had somewhere to be.
Maybe he was starting to develop a psychosomatic response. Being around Deku meant fighting, meant adrenaline, meant flying through the air and capturing villains quick enough that each of them had jumped in the ratings since all this started months ago.
That must have been it. Because being around Deku had become nothing but ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump.
The realization was a gradual thing. It took a lot of oh, this is what people are talking about and why is this happening now? More still of he's the one I want to talk to whenever Katsuki had a tough shift and he's the one I want to be around as they took up training together again.
That's the tricky thing with realizations. They are a moment where old truths, often buried in unknown places, finally manage to burrow their way from the cold, dank underground to the sunny surface. They breathe their first breaths, and tell you what you should have known a long time ago.
Because it had been long ago, hadn't it? The unidirectional beating of Katsuki's heart hadn't started when their patrols had intersected. He actually didn't remember when it had.
Which wasn't to say it had been forever. It wasn't to say that all those times his loser friends had tried to engage him on this he'd just been too stunted to know. He hadn't been lying to himself his whole life.
No, there'd been a change at some point. He'd just never known what to look for, so between the bright looks, the shared breaths, and the spilt blood, Katsuki had simply missed it. Chalked whatever the feeling was up to frustration, adrenaline, indigestion. Anything but the one thing he was afraid of, because it couldn't be, it just couldn't.
"Hi, Kacchan!"
Ba-dump.
But it was.
"Let's do our best today!"
Ba-dump. Katsuki's eye twitched.
"Kacchan?"
He had to tell him.
Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump…