Katsuki spied through the door suspiciously. Police officers in Tokyo had to watch their backs sometimes, especially the heavy combat specialists. On one occasion an old nemesis had tracked him to his apartment and proceeded to utterly trash the place before Katsuki got back from work. He'd had to move. It had been very irritating...

The woman standing in his hallway, rapping on his door, looked about his age, no obvious quirk... long hair, cut like she wanted to hide away beneath its shelter and keep the whole world at bay. She knocked again.

Katsuki sighed. If she were going to attack him and wreck his apartment, it didn't much matter whether he opened the door, did it? Might as well get it over with.

"Hello," she chewed on her lip nervously. "Are you... uh, Bakugou Katsuki?"

"That would be me," he agreed. Scars littered her hands and face... subtle ones, but plenty of them. A vet of the civil war? "And you are?"

"Arashiro Haruka," she looked away, as if he might recognize her name and hold it against her. Katsuki hadn't the slightest idea who she might be, but the way she hid her eyes... ex-PLF, probably, and ashamed of it. What could she possibly want with him? "I... um... can we talk?"

"You gonna' try to hurt me?" he asked flatly, scrutinizing her face to judge her reaction. Shocked. Affronted. She was either a world-class actor or she meant him no harm. "I'll take that as a no. We can go downstairs to a cafe, or you can come inside. Your choice." This wasn't the first time somebody had come to his door looking for off the books help.

"I'd like to come in, please," she rubbed her arm nervously. Lots of nervous ticks, this one. Not that he was one to talk... "I don't want to... it shouldn't be talked about in public."

"Alright, then," Katsuki kept a close eye on her as he invited her in, as shoes were politely exchanged, as she took the offered seat on an armchair.

He didn't offer her a drink. She was probably too nervous to accept tea even if he provided it. "I wanted to find out who he was," she blurted suddenly, zero context. Well. This was going to be interesting. "For ten years, I was so mad, ten years I never thought about him, or I pretended I didn't," there was a flash of longing in her eyes, like the look Kirishima wore when his friend's thoughts turned to Ashido Mina--their classmate forever young and always lingering in the shadows of conversations. "Then... well, sometime in that decade I think I finally realized he was right and I was wrong. About everything," she mumbled these last words into her draping sleeves.

"Look, Arashiro... I have no damn idea what you're talking about. If I'm supposed to--"

"No. No, it's so hard to start it, just out of the blue, even after everything..." Katsuki waited as she took several deep breaths, trying to put her mind together. "I was in the PLF."

"I figured."

"What? How?"

"You're not hard to read."

She winced. "He read me like a book too..."

"Arashiro," Katsuki sighed, because this completely out of context rambling was getting ridiculous.

"My best friend in PLF, we did basic together, went to the Citadel together," an ex-Citadel guard? Wow, that was something. "He told us his name was Mihara Izuho." Mihara... Izuho... No way. Katsuki's mind was drawing connections where there were none to be had, a side effect of too many days in a stuffy office watching Yaoyorozu pin pictures onto bulletin boards and map out criminal conspiracies with meter after meter of string. "He was a spy. I didn't find out until after he released some of the nomu at the Citadel... dozens of people died, including one of our squadmates and I confronted him--he had a quirk that could seal people into glass globes. After I caught him, he did that to me... I used to say he didn't have the balls to kill me."

"No way," Katsuki breathed. Could she be playing him somehow? How many people on the planet could possibly know about Izuku's acquired quirk? Couldn't be more than maybe twenty...

"I woke up in the shattered husk of the Citadel basement. Shigaraki was dead. Everybody was saying Destro had been there, like, the original one... that he'd killed Shigaraki. Everyone said Mihara disappeared after the fight, crushed by the ceiling probably. Good riddance, I said, even though I didn't mean it. He couldn't kill me... and I..."

She wiped a tear away. Katsuki watched her, slightly slack jawed, petrified by what he knew was coming. "He haunts me. I think about him all the time, wondering... and I decided I had to know. I had to know who he was, who my best friend really was, why he did what he did, why he had to die in the end... I went digging," she admitted, "and eventually I found somebody who'd once gotten drunk with a changeling called False Flag right after the war. She said that there was an agent called Fossa spying on the Citadel and that he died in the end."

How many times had Katsuki toasted Izuku in a bar, guilt and sorrow pressing down on him like a smothering blanket? It was no surprirse that Flag, Izuku's mentor and friend and... apparently the closest thing he must have had to a handler in the hell of the Citadel... would toast him, too. "Why would she never tell me though?" Katsuki hissed, although he could think of many reasons why Flag would keep her peace. If Izuku had somehow survived the raid on Angband, gone on to spy on the PLF, and then died months later as the war came to an end, well, for one thing the whole screwed up affair might still be classified. Or perhaps the story of Izuku's true death was so overwhelmingly depressing that those in the know had unanimously decided to leave Katsuki's best friend buried outside Angband rather than exhuming him before his friends and family only to crush him beneath the Citadel's rubble.

The phrase about sleeping dogs applied to the dead as well.

"Midoriya Izuku," Katsuki cut in. "That was his name."

"You did know him then?" she asked in a tiny voice. "Fossa?"

Katsuki sighed. "You know what? I wasn't going to offer you tea or anything 'cause you seemed too nervous, but I've changed my mind. I'm too sober for this."

"It's not good to depend on alcohol, my therapist says..."

"I don't depend on it, but I do like it to take the edge off. All things in moderation," Katsuki told her, padding to the kitchen and fishing around for a bottle of amber liquid and two shot glasses. "Here." Despite her initial hesitance, Arashiro accepted easily.

Every time he thought he was over this he learned quickly enough that there was still some new direction to twist the knife. Katsuki grimaced as the empty pain lanced through his chest. He didn't owe Arashiro anything. He could kick her out the door and perhaps she expected him to. They'd once been mortal enemies battling for dominion of the country, after all, but no, he wouldn't do that. The war was well and truly over, both in Japan and in Katsuki's heart. Two shots in silence later, Katsuki finally dredged up some explanation for... another of Izuku's old companions. "The nerd and I were childhood friends. Classmates at UA in the hero program, back when that was a thing. I was gonna' be frontline. He was going the undercover route."

"Yeah, I figured that last bit..." she whispered, shaking her head. "He put on faces like we put on shirts. He passed lie detectors, just straight up declared his innocence or loyalty and they... they couldn't tell he was faking it. I just... who was he really?"

It hurt just to speak his name, and yet not speaking his name... letting Izuku fade from memory... that was much worse. Arashio had searched for years to find Katsuki, to find answers to these gaping blank spaces in her past, and there was plenty she might offer him in return. "Well, there's a hole with no bottom. He was a massive All Might fan when we were kids, always wanted to be All Might... he was born quirkless you know," Arashiro's eyes widened. "He got his quirk from All For One, non-consensually. That story's too long to go into now, not that I really know much of it. I'm pretty sure False Flag knows exactly how that happened, but she's not saying. Anyway, he was a sweetheart." Arashiro raised an eyebrow. "A total sweetheart until... until that thing with All For One happened. We were in middle school, and he was never the same again. He was still a sweetheart but sometimes I'd look in his eyes and see a stone cold killer lurking there."

"I know what you mean," Arashiro replied. "How could he be such a sweet guy and so unflinchingly cruel? I know how well he could fake things and yet, looking back, I think he really did love me, really cared about all of us. He was our friend and our betrayer. That must have... I can't imagine how much that must have hurt. There were things that happened, things I had to see, that I look back and it makes me dizzy it's so sick, and it must have been so much worse for him..."

"I was told he died at the beginning of the war," Katsuki cut in, "and it was my fault."

"Your...?"

"I screwed something up at Gunga Mountain. I don't--even now I don't want to talk about it, not here," not to somebody he barely knew. "But Izuku was supposedly killed in the PLF raid of the Angband prison complex. That was what they said, even after the war, and they must have known, but maybe it was better that I thought he died there, that I didn't have to think of him spending his last few months hiding in the PLF, having to do all that horrible shit that spies get into."

"I'm glad he didn't die at Angband," Arashiro said after a moment of reflection. "I'm glad I knew him. I think he saved me in the end. The things he said to me... they've stuck with me all these years. Made me think."

Izuku's habit of thinking too much was contagious. Every conversation you had with him, you spent ten times the effort of the talking thinking over what had been said, trying to understand. "Nerd was good at that, after the thing with All For One, anyway, an old soul, had these pointed little barbs that got under your skin... I think about him all the time, and, yeah, it still hurts."

Arashiro sipped her third shot, gazing at her distorted reflection in the tiny glass. "I think I might have been in love with him."

"Oh."

"I didn't realize at the time. He certainly didn't know, and probably didn't care for me like that, but..."

"Fantasies about how things could have gone, how it might have been for them, always get away from us, don't they? In our heads, all our dead friends have gone on to become the happiest, wealthiest, most successful people on earth."

Arashiro laughed sadly. "They're running for office."

"They're running companies."

"They're driving supercars."

"And flying planes."

"They've all won the lottery and got private boats and are sailing all over the world breaking sports records or winning Nobel Prizes or whatever."

"Toast to that." They did. Arashiro stared at her empty glass, turning it around and around in her hands.

"I didn't really expect you to let me in," she said at last, "let alone really talk to me."

"I'm a bit lonely these days maybe," Katsuki sighed. "Never stopped missing him, or the others... but especially 'Zuku. He was special. World's worse off without him."

"I miss him, too. I know I didn't know him that long--"

"Tell me about him," Katsuki demanded. "How it was in the PLF, not the bad--there must be some good things, right?" He didn't want to hear about his friend suffering. He wanted only the fantasies, the hidden jewels in the long night.

A tiny smile inched across Arashiro's face. "Yeah, good things. There were... Yeah. I can do that. If you'll do the same."

"Fair's fair. 'Course I will."

It was the good kind of pain, the pain of remembering beautiful times that would not come again. For all that it hurt to visit the memories, he would not trade them for a world of painkillers.